“The most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic.”
This remark is contained in a hacked email exchange between current Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri and John Halpin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP)
Halpin described the conservative Catholic position as a “an amazing bastardization of the faith.”
“They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy,” Halpin wrote.
CAP is a Democratic think tank with close ties to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House.
Palmieri, who was at CAP at the time, responded that Catholicism “is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.”
Republican politicians were quick to respond to the revelation.
“The Clinton campaign, when in private, expresses breathtaking anti-Catholic bigotry,”said American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp.
House Speaker Paul Ryan who has distanced himself from the Trump campaign, called the emails “staggering.”
Ryan, who is Catholic, released a statement Wednesday saying: “If anything, these statements reveal the Clinton campaign’s hostile attitude toward people of faith in general. …”
“All Americans of faith should take a long, hard look at this and decide if these are the values we want to be represented in our next president.”
The Clinton campaign has noted that Russian hackers have been known to fake information, but the campaign has not pointed to a specific example of a hacked email being altered.
CAP released a statement that did not authenticate the email exchange, but said Halpin, a Catholic, “has spent his career advocating and fighting for the common good and improving the lives of all Americans as a key tenet of his Catholic faith.”
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