In October, a batch of emails released by Wikileaks implicated Hillary Clinton in a serious anti-Catholic campaign conducted by her top aides. Bill Donohue seized on this issue, taking advantage of many national media opportunities.

Two related stories surfaced: the one from 2011 involves Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director; the one from 2012 involves her campaign chairman, John Podesta. The latter is the more serious of the two.

Palmieri was engaged in an email exchange with a left-wing activist, John Halpin, over the decision by two prominent media executives to raise their children Catholic. They spoke with derision about News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson.

Palmieri ridiculed the men for choosing Catholicism, saying, “Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.” Halpin went further: “Friggin’ Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus. It’s 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.” Podesta was part of this email chain and never disagreed.

Worse was Podesta’s exchange with Sandy Newman, a Jewish left-wing friend. Newman asked Podesta for advice on how best to “plant the seeds of the revolution” [within the Catholic Church]. Podesta boasted that he was on it. He admitted to creating two groups to sabotage the Church: Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United.

Both of these entities are front-groups, dummy Catholic organizations designed to sow division in the Church. They are funded by George Soros, the atheist self-hating Jewish billionaire. Catholics United was the force behind an IRS probe of the Catholic League in 2008.

When the Palmieri Catholic-bashing story hit, Donohue said Clinton needed to employ sanctions against her and Podesta, though he stressed that she was not responsible. When the Podesta “revolution” story broke, he called for Podesta to be fired. When she refused, he said, “Hillary is now the issue.”

As it turns out, Podesta was just doing Hillary’s bidding. Last year, speaking about abortion, she said, “political will and deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed.” (Our emphasis.) Thus, Podesta’s phony Catholic groups simply accomplished her goal: they made the pro-abortion agenda a cause that Catholics could legitimately rally to, securing the goal of a “revolution” within.

By attempting to crash the Catholic Church, these Clinton operatives crossed ethical boundaries.

Father Philip Eichner has resigned as chairman of the board of the Catholic League. A new chairman will be chosen shortly.

Fr. Eichner held this position since 1992 and was largely responsible for hiring Bill Donohue the next year as president and CEO. Donohue worked closely with him, and offered the following statement regarding his resignation.

“When I took over in 1993, the league had several financial and organizational problems. I had the good fortune of relying on Fr. Eichner for counsel on many issues. His advice proved to be unfailingly accurate.

“He knew how to run an organization: he had commanded Chaminade High School, the most prestigious Catholic secondary school in the New York metropolitan area, and he also founded—against all odds—Kellenberg Memorial High School. He remains president of Kellenberg.

“To the public, I am the face of the Catholic League. But to those who know the organization, Fr. Eichner has been its guiding hand. When conflicts arose, he never shied away, offering his usual wise perspective.

“To cite one example, in 1999-2000, when some evangelicals in Washington sought to block the appointment of the first priest to become House Chaplain, Fr. Eichner encouraged me not to fold. It led to some ugly exchanges with the opposition, but in the end justice was done and the priest got the job.

“Fr. Eichner served with distinction and it has been my good fortune to have worked with him.”

William A. Donohue

In every society throughout history, young men have been the most violent, risk-taking, promiscuous, and reckless segment of society. If men have been the most morally destitute, women have been, or at least are expected to be, the most temperate. But that hasn’t been true for some time, and now it is clear that women have at least caught up to men: their moral descent is incontestable.

About a decade ago, several young black women came back from visiting Africa only to report how discouraged they were. The men treated them as sluts.

When these gals asked the guys why they were being treated as tramps, the young men said they took their cues from BET (Black Entertainment Television). The guys reported that their image of young black American women was taken from TV: what they were accustomed to seeing is girls gyrating and grinding to music, acting in a lewd fashion. So they acted accordingly. The girls were horrified.

The same could be said about white girls. The way they are depicted on MTV (Music Television) is the same way they are portrayed on BET. What is surprising is why anyone should be surprised when young men treat young women the way they are baited to treat them.

Take the story in this issue about Cosmopolitan and Glamour, two champions of abortion. One woman explains why she hates her newborn child, and the other explains why she lied to the father of their child about his paternity. The former “hated, hated, hated” her new status of motherhood, and the latter—who used to hate men—says she doesn’t want a husband around to raise their child.

The narcissism of these women is emblematic of the cultural descent of women. One speaks pointedly about how she “had a kid,” and how she hates being the “mother to an infant.” Her language is important: she did not have a baby, and she is not the mother of her child: she had a “kid” and she tends to “an infant.” Babysitters have been known to express more affection.

The other gal not only lied to the father of her child—she told him he wasn’t the father—she insisted she was going to do this by myself. As she put it, “I don’t need anyone, thanks.” Whether her child needed a father was irrelevant.

The woman who hates being a mother said she feels “trapped,” complaining that her life is “basically a middle-class prison.” How reminiscent of Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique: she whined that women who lived in suburbia were housed in a “comfortable concentration camp.”

Then we have Ms. Autonomy, the one who doesn’t need anyone. She confesses that she was so bored sitting in a hotel room in Ireland that she decided to find a man in a pub. She bedded the first guy she met (she must have been raised in suburbia), and bingo—she got pregnant. “In the heat of the moment,” she explains, “condoms were discussed but never used, and although I took a morning-after pill, it didn’t work.” But I bet she aced sex ed.

If the authors of these sorry tales are sick, what does that say about their readers? Narcissists attract: the appetite these readers have for self-indulgence is insatiable, and the supply of writers willing to feed them is equally unlimited. But are they happy?

Trying to find happiness while going solo is a fool’s errand: it never works. Indeed, falling back on yourself is the road to hell, not happiness.

Virtually every study shows that those who have the strongest bonds—with God, their spouse, their children, and others—are the happiest and the healthiest. Those who have no one are the most miserable and the least healthy. Sadly, after all the progress women have made politically and economically, they are going backwards on the happiness scale.

Two University of Pennsyl-vania professors, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, examined men’s and women’s health and happiness over thirty-five years and found that “measures of women’s well-being have fallen both absolutely and relatively to that of men.”

Unfortunately, the role models available to young women today do not embody the characteristics that allow for happiness. A case in point is Amy Schumer.

The number three best selling non-fiction book this fall has been Amy Schumer’s The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo. She is known for her egomania, sexual exploits, and foul mouth—she wins every race to the bottom. Who likes her? Glamour says its readers “love” Amy. It can safely be said that she personifies the moral descent of young women better than anyone.

We are not left with a pretty sight. Many young women today are emotionally spent, living on empty. Some live in a “middle-class prison,” thoroughly “bored” with life. Others hate their children, as well as the men they use. Most important, all of them hate themselves.

Looks like the “comfortable concentration camp” still exists, at least for some women. Only this time, they are all alone.

Russell Shaw

Russell Shaw, Catholics in America (Ignatius Press, 2016)

Who says Catholics don’t have a presence in today’s American politics to match the presence they once had? It all depends on which Catholics—and what version of Catholicism—you have in mind.

As their vice-presidential candidate for 2016 the Democrats offered us Tim Kaine, a Catholic senator from Virginia who says his faith is his guide. But Kaine votes pro-choice on abortion, and he told the Human Rights Campaign that the Church would come around on gay marriage. As their VP pick the Republicans tapped social conservative Indiana Governor Mike Pence. A cradle Catholic, Pence now worships in an evangelical megachurch where services feature colored lights and bands.

The Catholic roots of both featured prominently in media coverage of the campaign.

As if that weren’t enough, in August sitting vice president Joe Biden, a pro-choice Catholic Democrat who spearheaded the Obama administration’s shift to all-out support for gay marriage, officiated at a same-sex wedding in his official residence. This was apparently more than the hierarchy could take. Three bishops, including Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, president of the bishops’ conference, released a statement calling Biden’s action a scandal.

In their several ways, politicians like Kaine, Pence, and Biden illustrate the   impact of cultural assimilation on Catholic religious identity that I analyze in my book Catholics in America (Ignatius Press). The thesis, which I first discussed in an earlier volume called American Church, is simple: assimilation—Americanization, it’s commonly called—contributes to undermining the Catholic identity of a large number of American Catholics, to the point that the very future of the Church in the United States is threatened.

Of the trio mentioned, Pence is the wild card. Kaine’s and Biden’s differences with the Church involve repudiating some of its teachings. But Pence appears to have repudiated the Church by simply walking away from it. Switching religions, as Pence has done, is itself a common American practice. The Catholic Church is particularly vulnerable, losing many more members yearly in this way than it gains by conversions.

Catholics in America contains profiles of fifteen prominent individuals—from Archbishop John Carroll to author Flannery O’Connor—whose lives in various ways shed light on the central question in the assimilation debate: is it possible to be a good American and a good Catholic? Answers range from the testy no of cantankerous Orestes Brownson, the leading American Catholic public intellectual of the nineteenth century, to the heartfelt yes of Brownson’s old friend, Father Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulist Fathers.

Others profiled include such figures as Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore, de facto primate of the American hierarchy who for four decades steered the course of Catholic assimilation with a firm but diplomatic hand, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, premier Catholic televangelist during the religious boom of the 1950s, Dorothy Day, countercultural, controversial co-founder of the Catholic Worker, who is now being considered for canonization, and Father John Courtney Murray, S.J.,  the leading Catholic theological apologist for the American church-state arrangement.

The book looks at two Catholic politicians: Al Smith and John F. Kennedy. The stark contrast between their approaches to the relationship between faith and politics  speaks volumes about assimilation.

Born in 1873 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Smith was a proud New Yorker and practicing Catholic who rose from humble beginnings to become a four-term governor of New York and a candidate for the White House. When he sought the Democratic party’s vice-presidential nomination in 1924, Franklin Roosevelt called him “the Happy Warrior.” Four years later the Democrats chose him to head the ticket.

With the nation in 1928 at the peak of an economic boom (soon to end with a stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression), it’s doubtful any Democrat could have been elected president that year. But Smith didn’t just lose, he lost badly, with 40.77% of the popular votes and 87 electoral votes to GOP candidate Herbert Hoover’s 58.2% and 444 electoral votes. Traditionally Democratic states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida all went Republican. Many votes were cast against Smith, the New York Times concluded, “because he was a Catholic.”

That was hardly a surprise. The Ku Klux Klan, re-founded in 1915, was a significant force in those days, aiming its vitriol at Blacks, Jews, and Catholics. A senator from Alabama, Thomas Heflin by name, earned a measure of fame denouncing “the Roman hierarchy and the political machine.” And the venerable Atlantic Monthly weighed in with an open letter by a New York lawyer named Charles Marshall questioning Smith’s commitment as a Catholic to religious liberty and his views on education issues. Smith responded vigorously, but it was clear early on that his religion would be an issue if he ran in 1928.

And so it was. An avalanche of anti-Catholic animus greeted his candidacy. Declaring that with Smith in the race “Rome has reached one of its long-sought goals,” a Protestant magazine spoke for many when it pronounced “the mere mention of a Roman Catholic as President” to be cause for alarm. “Rome has not changed…Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” the editorial proclaimed.

Incensed by the attacks, Smith responded in a speech on September 20 in Oklahoma City. His passionate, blunt rebuttal elicited genuine concern for his safety.

After citing his scandal-free record in public life, Smith turned to his religion and the opposition he was encountering on account of it.

“I can think of no greater disaster to the country than to have the voters…divide upon religious lines,” he said. “Our forefathers, in their wisdom, wrote into the Constitution of the United States that no religious test shall ever be applied for public office.” And that was “not a mere form of words,” the candidate added, but “the most vital principle that ever was given to any people.”

“I attack those who seek to undermine it,” Smith concluded fervently, “not only because I am a good Christian, but because I am a good American and a product of America and of American institutions. Everything I am, and everything I hope to be, I owe to those institutions.” A few weeks later he suffered overwhelming defeat in an election in which bigotry had played a major role.

Practically speaking, that was the end of Smith’s political career. He died in 1944. But he had accomplished a great deal. Not the least of his achievements was to help pave the way for another Catholic politician: John F. Kennedy.

Born in 1917, Kennedy was Smith’s antithesis in many ways. Smith’s family was poor, Kennedy’s family very wealthy. Smith was a self-educated man of the people, Kennedy a Harvard-educated elitist (but with no significant education in Catholicism). Smith was a faithful husband, Kennedy a womanizer. Smith was a devout Catholic, while Kennedy’s Catholicism was at best superficial.

After seeking but failing to gain the Democratic nomination for vice president in 1956, Kennedy and his advisers began weighing a run for the presidency in 1960. They knew from the start that his religion would be a problem.

Well before the issue came up in an actual campaign, Kennedy sought to deal with it in a Look magazine interview with prominent journalist Fletcher Knebel. Summing up, Knebel said of the senator from Massachusetts, “His theme is that religion is personal, politics are public, and the twain need never meet and conflict.” Reactions in the Catholic press were not enthusiastic. “To relegate your conscience to your ‘private life’ is not only unrealistic, but dangerous as well,” remarked Catholic weekly magazine Ave Maria.

But the religious issue wouldn’t go away. Soon after Kennedy was nominated for president, 150 prominent Protestant leaders headed by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, author of the bestselling self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking, issued a statement calling the Catholic Church a “political organization” and questioning  Kennedy’s ability to “withstand the determined efforts of the hierarchy to work its will in American political life.”

Kennedy reacted quickly in an address delivered on September 12, 1960 in Houston to an audience of Protestant ministers. The speech remains a turning-point—not just for the Kennedy candidacy but, as later events have shown, for Catholic participation in American political life.

In a key passage, he said: “Whatever issue may come before me as president—on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject—I will make my decision…in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.” Here was the sort of separation of faith from public life that the Second Vatican Council five years later would  call “one of the gravest errors of our time.”

Instead of that, Vatican II  (in its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World) declared that people of faith should be “proud of the opportunity to carry out their earthly activity in such a way as to integrate human, domestic, professional, scientific and technical enterprises with religious values.”

Kennedy squeaked by the GOP’s Richard Nixon in November,  losing 6.5% of the votes of Protestant Democrats and independents together with a hefty 17.2% of the Southern vote because of his religion, but compensated by getting 80% of the votes of Catholics. His short, dramatic presidency came to a tragic close by assassination on November 22, 1963.

The Kennedy profile in Catholics in America concludes this way:

“Many Catholic politicians have followed the path marked out by JFK in Houston. Catholic officeholders and candidates who lend support to causes like legalized abortion and same-sex marriage are in effect following his lead.

“Now as then, however, the issue isn’t taking orders from the pope and the bishops—something those supposedly power-hungry ecclesiastics neither expect nor want—but how to apply moral principles grounded in faith to real-world politics. John Kennedy’s innovative and influential approach lay in giving assurances that he wouldn’t even try. We are still living with the consequences.”

The politics of 2016 and the fresh evidence it has supplied of cultural assimilation operative in the world of politics vividly illustrate the truth of that.

Russell Shaw is former Secretary for Public Affairs of the U.S. Catholic bishops conference and former information director of the Knights of Columbus. The most recent of his twenty-one books is Catholics in America (Ignatius Press). He is also a member of the board of advisors for the Catholic League.

When Macy’s fired store detective Javier Chavez for his convictions, not his deeds—he believes men should use the men’s room—it displayed an intolerance that is characteristic of totalitarian rulers. Quite simply, thought control is un-American.

Our public relations campaign against the corporate giant has triggered an avalanche of complaints against Macy’s. The official response by the department store is dishonest: Macy’s has decided to stonewall its customers. Here is a selection from its form-letter reply.

“We do not condone or tolerate discrimination of any kind. Although our bathrooms may be located in an area of the store primarily trafficked by either men or women, our bathrooms are gender neutral. As such, we do our best to ensure that all customers have equal access to the bathrooms. In this situation, if a customer does not feel comfortable, an associate can be located to remedy the situation.”

Macy’s answer is disingenuous. It not only condones discrimination, it terminates Catholic employees who merely disagree with its bathroom policy.

Silly comments about putting bathrooms in places “primarily trafficked by either men or women”—does it have an area for giraffes?—only skirts the issue.

Moreover, most people understand “gender neutral” bathrooms to mean unisex ones. That is not what customers are complaining about: they don’t want men trying on dresses in the women’s dressing rooms, and they don’t want to use a stall with a man sitting, or standing, in the one next to them. That this needs to be explained speaks volumes about the geniuses who run Macy’s.

Macy’s is being dishonest when it says that if the customer is not comfortable with its bathroom policy, it will be remedied. Nonsense.  Chavez responded to a complaint by a woman and her daughter that a man was in the women’s room, and his remedy—which was satisfactory to them—was to have the man use the men’s room. Macy’s “remedy” is to force women and young girls to get over it!

In December 2013, Halim Sharif, a club promoter from Mount Vernon, N.Y. filed suit against Macy’s, saying he was singled out and detained after buying a $2,400 Louis Vuitton bag. The store’s alarm went off as he exited, he said, but it also went off as a half-dozen white customers exited, and they were not stopped. He used his cell phone to record audio and video of the April 19, 2013 incident.

A Macy’s spokeswoman, promising that Mr. Sharif’s allegation would be thoroughly investigated, stated that “Macy’s has a zero tolerance for discrimination of any kind.”

Really? That’s not what we have found, as we have documented case after case where Macy’s has been accused—and often acknowledged wrongdoing or been liable—in its treatment of veterans, police officers, racial minorities, people with disabilities, elderly widows, pregnant women or members of faith groups—including, of course, a Catholic man fired for his beliefs.

A recent editorial in the New York Times, “Victims of Priests’ Abuse Face a Choice,” must be challenged on several counts. Its principal focus is the new initiative by the Archdiocese of New York, the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program. This program is designed to deal fairly with claims of clergy sexual abuse.

The editorial said “the program is confidential.” It is important to emphasize that if someone requests confidentiality, the archdiocese will respect it, but it is also true that under the provisions of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, it has no authority to require it. Of course, the archdiocese is not going to publicize information on these matters on its website, but that is not the same as requiring claimants to sign a confidentiality agreement. That will not happen.

The editorial is unhappy with the provision that claimants are given only a few months to file. Naturally, the Times wants no deadline. Should they be given years? Decades? Is this its idea of justice?

The editorial falsely referred to “pedophile priests” as the problem: 8 in 10 cases involve homosexual priests and less than 5 percent involve pedophilia. The gay cover-up is a constant feature with the Times.

The editorial slights the sincerity of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, saying he is launching this program to avoid bigger problems if the Child Victims Act is passed in Albany; it faults him for working against the bill. It also argues that when he directed the Milwaukee Archdiocese “he tried to shield millions of dollars of church assets from abuse survivors,” and is  doing the same now in New York.

The Child Victims Act was not written to protect most minors from being molested. If it were, it would apply to the public schools. But it didn’t—the fix was in. Would the New York Times support a bill to lift the statute of limitations on the sexual abuse of minors if it excluded Catholic schools?

Below is a copy of the ad that we placed on the op-ed page of the New York Times on October 11.

Pope Francis recently drew a familiar distinction between those individuals who were struggling with their sex identity and those who were pushing a radical agenda. He embraced the former while strongly denouncing the latter.

The pope’s words are subject to translation discrepancies, thus accounting for the following inconsistencies:

• “Today there is a global war out to destroy marriage. Not with weapons but with ideas…we have to defend ourselves from ideological colonization.”
• Gender theory represents a “global war against the family.”
• Gender theory has caused a “world war against marriage,” an example of “ideological colonization.”
• There is a “nasty” tendency in schools to “indoctrinate” children, teaching that gender can be chosen and changed.
• “It is one thing if a person has this tendency and also changes his sex. It’s another thing to teach this in school to change mentalities. This is what I call ‘ideological colonization.'”
• Teaching gender theory is “the great enemy of marriage.”
• Teaching gender theory “is against natural things.”

For teaching Catholic doctrine, Pope Francis was immediately condemned by New Ways Ministry, a renegade dissident group. It implored the pope to “abandon his reliance upon so-called ‘gender theory’ and ‘ideological colonization.'” It also accused the Holy Father of distorting reality. “Throwing about terms such as ‘gender theory’ and ‘ideological colonization’ is a red herring,” it said.

New Ways Ministry was founded in 1977 as a “gay Catholic” entity. By 1984, Archbishop James Hickey of Washington denied it official authorization or approval; the founders, Sr. Jeannine Gramick and Father Robert Nugent, were forbidden to carry out their agenda in the archdiocese.

In 1999, the Vatican took aim at New Ways Ministry. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, citing deliberate deviations from Catholic teachings on sexuality, permanently prohibited Gramick and Nugent from pastoral work with homosexuals.

In 2010, Francis Cardinal George, Archbishop of Chicago and president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, stated that “New Ways Ministry has no approval or recognition from the Catholic Church and they cannot speak on behalf of the Catholic faithful in the United States.” He cited the group’s continued denial of Church teachings as the reason for his injunction.

Pope Francis is to be commended for his courage in deconstructing gender theory. In particular, he is to be applauded for challenging those who seek to indoctrinate children with its pernicious agenda.

Yahoo News sought to manipulate public opinion by promoting the false notion that Pope Francis is at war with Donald Trump. In doing so, it is playing games with Catholics.

Recently, on the homepage of Yahoo there was a news story titled, “Trump Goes to War with the Pope”; it featured a picture of Donald Trump at a podium. The first sentence read, “The pontiff suggests that Trump is not a Christian.”

There was no news here, save for Yahoo’s deceitfulness. The story was taken from a piece posted by Politico on February 18. Not only that, as Bill Donohue pointed out before, both the pope and Trump were misrepresented by the media last winter.

What makes this “news” story so outrageous is not simply the attempt to create a faux controversy between the pope and Trump, it represents a pattern of corruption on the part of Yahoo. This is at least the third time it has recently run the Politico story from February on its homepage. It did so again on October 1. Prior to that it, the story appeared in the same spot on August 27.

On August 29, after correcting the record about the pope and Trump, Donohue said the following:

“The Politico piece that was posted on August 27 on the front page of Yahoo was marked August 25, but when I clicked on the entire story, I found it was the Politico article from February 18.

“Why did Yahoo mislead its readers? How could a mistake of this gravity be made? After all, many people only read the headlines, and in this case they were given the wrong message. If it wasn’t a mistake, then there is something seriously wrong going on. Either way, Yahoo owes us an explanation.”

After Yahoo ran the same story on October 1, the Catholic League contacted two editors asking for an explanation. No reply was forthcoming. Then  they struck again.

As Bill Donohue said, many Internet users only read the headline news, so by recycling this story, which was seriously flawed to begin with, Yahoo News is acting irresponsibly.