Chaput Criticizes Clinton Campaign for “Anti-Catholic” Emails

Archbishop Charles Chaput. Photo | Jeff Fusco

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput has criticized Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign for what he called “anti-Catholic” emails released in a yet another WikiLeaks hack.

One controversial email exchange occurred between John Halpin, a senior fellow at Democratic think tank Center for American Progress, and Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri.

Halpin wrote that “many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic,” calling them an “amazing bastardization of the faith.” He also wrote that some conservatives “must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.”

The Clinton campaign has faced backlash from both conservatives and Catholics – Chaput among them. In his weekly column, Chaput asks the Clinton campaign “to repudiate the content of these ugly WikiLeaks emails” after he attempts to squash any rumblings of a progressive “revolution” among Catholics – or, per a hacked email from Sandy Newman,, president of Voices for Progress, “a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship.”

Does that sound like a good idea to Chaput? Nope. In his column, he criticizes two men he met from social justice group Catholics United who “hoped my brother bishops and I would resist identifying the Church with single-issue and partisan (read: abortion) politics.”

His account of the meeting with the men:

It was an interesting experience. Both men were obvious flacks for the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party — creatures of a political machine, not men of the Church; less concerned with Catholic teaching than with its influence. And presumably (for them) bishops were dumb enough to be used as tools, or at least prevented from helping the other side. Yet these two young men not only equaled but surpassed their Republican cousins in the talents of servile partisan hustling. Thanks to their work, and activists like them, American Catholics helped to elect an administration that has been the most stubbornly unfriendly to religious believers, institutions, concerns and liberty in generations.

I never saw either young man again. The cultural damage done by the current White House has – apparently — made courting America’s bishops unnecessary.

Read Chaput’s full column here.

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