The Catholic email scandal is no scandal
by Michael Sean Winters | Oct. 14, 2016
When Wikileaks announced it had damaging documents that would harm the candidacy of Hillary Clinton – “change the whole complexion of the race,” predicted longtime GOP operative and longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone – I was worried, but not overmuch. I hoped that most people knew Julian Assange, who runs Wikileaks, was an anarchist and would consider the source. Then, I remembered that Trump had managed to secure the nomination of a major party from “most people” in the GOP, and I grew worried. I should not have been.
The supposed “bigotry” towards the Catholic Church exposed in the emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, released by Wikileaks last week, is nothing of the sort, despite the best attempts of some to make it so. This whole controversy is simply an effort, a stupid effort, to stop Clinton’s ascent to the White House. I say stupid because crying “wolf” is never a smart political or cultural strategy and, besides, anyone who is genuinely concerned about bigotry could not possibly be supporting Trump. This is about Republican operatives who hold the portfolio for Catholic outreach doing their part to ingratiate themselves with Trump.
There were several comments in the emails that caused a stir. One was from a non-Catholic who thought there needed to be a “revolution” within the Catholic Church. Podesta responds by mentioning the creation of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United. Those organizations were founded in the wake of the 2004 election during which prominent bishops like the Archbishop of St. Louis at the time, now Cardinal Ray Burke, said he would not permit Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry to receive communion in his archdiocese and Archbishop Charles Chaput, then of Denver and now in Philadelphia, hurled frequent criticisms at the Massachusetts senator with not much in the way of objection to President George W. Bush or his war. Neither group ever extended its influence beyond the Beltway, which is always the key to long-term success within the Beltway, but the effort to create these organizations flowed from a concern by many Catholics that our Church had been turned into an arm of the Republican National Committee. Many, including myself, felt that this conflation of Catholicism with Republicanism was bad for the nation’s politics and really, really bad for the Catholic Church.
So, what is the problem? I thought we lay Catholics were supposed to bring our Catholic faith into the public square? The problem is that there are some in the Church, clerics and laity, who thought they owned the Church and certainly they ambitioned to be the only voice of the Catholic Church in the public and political arena. Bishops like Burke, Chaput, Naumann, and Aquila may state their case with different points of emphasis but they aim at the same result: To be a good Catholic in America today means voting for Republicans. (See NCR’s editorial posted this morning.)
https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/distinctly-catholic/catholic-email-scandal-no-scandal
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