(Many comments on my recent diary indicated that some Daily Kos readers aren’t aware of the negative impact the Catholic Church has in this country or the role of the Vatican, so this diary is kind of a “primer.”)
Earlier this year, a media campaign by Catholic bishops resulted in two Congressional hearings, legislation introduced in the House with 190 cosponsors and the Senate with 29, a lawsuit by seven state attorneys general and the support of three of the four GOP presidential candidates, over the Affordable Care Act’s mandate of health insurance coverage for contraceptives.
Failing legislative means, 43 dioceses and other Catholic organization filed suit in May in federal court to eliminate the coverage even after President Obama acceded to their demands that all religious affiliated employers, in addition to the already existing exemption for churches, would not have to pay for such coverage.
I am hard-pressed to think of another lobbying group – much less a religion – with more clout in the cause of the plutocracy. This is not about birth control, as even the bishops are now telling us, or even health insurance. The U.S. Catholic episcopate applies their money and influence to stopping Democratic successes and electing Republicans by means of a carefully conceived set of “issues” intended to energize conservative Christians into political activism. In return, they receive financial support from the 1% and obeisance – feigned or otherwise – from Republican politicians.
For example, when Democrats were fighting for passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Congressman Bart Stupak and other anti-abortion Democrats tried to work with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to add an amendment which would satisfy the Church’s objections over what was claimed to be an expansion of abortion coverage, even though the legislation did no such thing. President Obama issued an executive order confirming that no federal money would support abortion.
As is happening today, the bishops’ attacks against the president only intensified.
Stupak later admitted, “…people tried to use abortion as a tool to stop health-care reform, even after protections were added.”
The Catholic Church’s power derives from its superior organization, tax benefits and secrecy.
In addition to the USCCB working at the national level, almost every state has a Catholic Conference which lobbies for the Church on statewide issues such same-sex marriage, access to safe and legal abortion, tax-payer funding for their schools where the next generation of plutocrats are being trained - i.e. the usual Republican get-out-the-vote strategy. And Republican state legislators in gratitude try to stop any bill which would level the legal-playing-field for victims of sexual abuse against their tormenters.
Moreover there are almost 200 (arch)diocesan offices, over 17,000 parishes, thousands of educational facilities, all manner of media, charities and anti-abortion/anti-gay groups for the laity, each controlled by a bishop and capable of responding to every political call-to-arms. All that is required for most of these organizations to receive a religious exemption by the IRS is that it be listed in the bishop-controlled Official Catholic Directory as is the infamous Bill Donohue’s Catholic League sponsored by New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan.
(Note: the current persecution of religious women – nuns - is based on the fact that many orders are financially and administratively separate from the dioceses and therefore are not under direct control by a bishop. The issue is voluntary obedience.)
As a religious organization, the Church can provide complete confidentiality for foreign and domestic donors, no restrictions on the amounts which can be donated, a tax deduction on contributions and no accountability or oversight as to how their tax exempt money gets spent.
There’s little to be gained by dissident Catholics withholding money from the weekly collection. According to Gallup, non-Latino Catholics give Romney the edge 55-38 percent so the current majority clearly supports the bishops’ agenda. In addition, oftentimes less than 25 percent of a bishops’ income comes from the pews, anyway. Most comes from large donors and some from investments.
The bishops held their Fortnight of Freedom rallies across the U.S. this past month, attended by thousands, to convince Americans that, although the prelates failed to disapprove when 28 states – some since the 1990s - already require insurers to provide coverage for contraceptives, this is really about “religious liberty” and not presidential election-year politics. The rallies were aimed specifically at portraying Obama not only as anti-religion, but also that “he started the fight” when the Department of Health and Human Services issued its mandate on January 20, 2012.
Not so.
This year’s Religious Right campaign has been planned since they lost the 2008 election. Something in addition to abortion and same-sex marriage was needed to revitalize the message. The “Manhattan Declaration” was signed by over 150 Christian leaders and released in November 2009. In addition to the usual “pro-life” and “pro-marriage” rhetoric, the document declares that the signers “affirm religious liberty.”
We see [the struggle for religious liberty] in the use of antidiscrimination statutes to force religious institutions, businesses, and service providers of various sorts to comply with activities they judge to be deeply immoral....
We view [restrictions on the free exercise of religion] as an ominous development, the overweening authority of the state.
The Declaration was co-written by Professor Robert P. George, a Catholic who the
New York Times called “this country’s
most influential conservative Christian thinker.”
Leading up to the 2000 campaign, it was surveys conducted George which made the connection between frequency of church attendance and support for the GOP. The Catholic Task Force, an assembly of the wealthy and influential, therefore, advised the Bush campaign how to target devout Catholics. Gov. Bush had photo ops with prelates, visited churches and talked about the “sanctity of life” although he had the worst record for executions of any U.S. governor. His “Catholic outreach” campaign focused on the heavily-Catholic swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois. Later, Florida, New Jersey and Louisiana were added. Although Vice President Al Gore won both the general Catholic vote by 3 percent and the popular vote, Bush victories in Ohio and Louisiana pushed the electoral-college count close enough that victory hinged on the outcome in Florida. The three Catholic Supreme Court justices (Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas) voted with the majority in Gore v. Bush.
Five days after his inauguration, Bush met with the papal nuncio (ambassador) to the U.S., the then president of the USCCB and several other hierarchs in the D.C. residence of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to finalize plans for the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives as the vehicle to pump federal dollars into religious organizations, still the most egregious breach in this nation’s history of separation of church and state.
Unfortunately, Obama has only changed the name to Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships and kept the program. In the latest year for available figures, $3.5 billion of your taxes went to support just the national organizations of the USCCB in 2010, not counting how much went to their state and local agencies.
In the 2004 presidential campaign, the bishops vilified John Kerry for his support of legal abortion even though Bush had already made war of aggression under false pretenses, renditions and torture the American way. It was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) who instructed the members of the USCCB to withhold communion from Kerry. The “wafer watch” by the media each time Kerry went to Mass became one of the more bizarre episodes of any campaign.
Nevertheless, in September 2004, the Vatican awarded its highest honor available to a lay person to UN General Assembly President Julian Hunte who, previously as a senator in St. Lucia, had cast the deciding vote legalizing abortionin his island nation. Hunte was given a papal knighthood for submitting the UN resolution expanding the range and prerogatives of the Holy See (a “permanent observer”) similar to those of member nations.
Bush won the 2004 Catholic vote 52 - 47 percent. The AP reported “Kerry’s failure to capture a majority of Roman Catholics…gave President Bush an important advantage.”
Neither Pope Benedict’s accolades for the “pro-life” war criminal Bush at the White House during his 2008 U.S. trip, nor the bishops’ constant accusation that Obama was the greatest “pro-abortion” candidate in history, were enough to score a win for the Republican candidate, John McCain, that year.
That “leaders from a variety of faith backgrounds, politicians and educators” met in late May 2012 to stand with the bishops in “battle against the trampling of religious liberties in the public sphere” signifies that the Catholic Church still leads and directs the Religious Right. And that only the pope can appoint or dismiss a bishop – not to mention Ratzinger’s specific direction in the 2004 presidential campaign – points to Rome as the headquarters.
The Holy See (the juridical and diplomatic name of the Vatican) is magnificently suited to lead the Church of the Corporatocacy. It is a lawless sovereign nation, declared by Geoffrey Robertson, a United Nations judge and veteran British human rights lawyer, to be a “rogue state” because, although written and codified, the law is only applied or not according to the pontiff’s wishes. A group of victims of sex abuse and a human rights organization have filed a petition with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, charging Pope Benedict and three other Vatican officials with the “systematic and widespread practice of enabling, concealing and tolerating ongoing rape and other forms of sexual violence by clerics across the globe,” based upon 22,000 pages of evidence from other governmental investigations and grand juries.
In addition, the Vatican has an “offshore” financial institution not subject to any regulation save the pope’s. Susan Pittman of the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement spoke to Reuters in March after the Holy See was placed on their watch list of problematic countries for the first time. "With the large volumes of international currency that goes through the Holy See, it is a system that makes it vulnerable as a potential money-laundering center," she said.
During the last big Vatican financial scandal in the early 1980s, at least a dozen Italians were either “suicided” or gunned down, including those with insider information but considered untrustworthy, or others investigating the criminals who the Vatican wished to protect. After being ousted from his position as president of the Vatican Bank this past May, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, is still in fear for his life.
That is why incriminating documents have been “leaked” this past year anonymously. In his recently published book, His Holiness: The Secret Papers of Pope Benedict XVI, author Gianluigi Nuzzi quotes one of his “deepthroats” in the book:
The information emerging in the newspapers and the official discourse within the Holy See was so different, the hypocrisy reigned supreme, and the scandals were multiplying. I’m not talking only about the pedophilia and murder cases like the killing of the Swiss Guard and the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, but about money laundering, corruption, and threats.
Nuzzi’s previous book,
Vatican SpA (Vatican Inc.) which documents bribes, frauds and money laundering, was published
after the 2003 death of Msgr. Renato Dardozzi, an IOR (the official acronym of the Vatican Bank) employee who smuggled papers out of the bank for a number of years and then gave Nuzzi his entire “archive.”
Journalists who specialize in covering the Catholic Church both in Rome and the U.S. gain access to prelates only by providing a sanitized and slanted version of events and combining lots sycophancy with the actual news. There is, however, a secondary tier of writers with years of experience studying and reporting on Church affairs who are able to put two and two together and read between the lines to produce reliable reports on whom I and others rely.
So now, patient readers, we get to the good news. The whole damn Religious Right is crumbling. As goes the Vatican, so go the U.S. episcopate and their fellow travelers. The Rev. Dr. King told us the arch of history bends towards justice and so it does.
The USCCB ended their semiannual conference in Atlanta last month with a discussion on the need for better PR. So maybe they have noticed the increasing number of opinions in the media this past year telling them that the aiders and abettors of the torture of hundreds of thousands of children are hardly qualified to moralize about anything. The bishops’ solution to turn their propaganda over to lay persons won’t help much because their egos and love of the spotlight will keep them buried in self-inflicted hypocrisy.
Der Spiegal has just published two back-to-back articles noting the internal strife and power struggles going on inside the Vatican over this year's scandal. Some plutocratic “puppetmasters” must be awfully worried because the pope has just hired an American Fox News reporter to “manage” their news department as well as appointing other Americans to important posts, including Jeffrey Lena, the attorney who has been successful in getting all suits brought against the Holy See in U.S. federal courts (a RICO suit, three sex abuse cases and Croatian holocaust survivors’ demand that their stolen gold and valuables be returned by the Vatican Bank) dismissed on the basis of the Vatican’s sovereign immunity. Republican operative and Grand Knight of the Knights of Columbus Carl Anderson has also risen in importance by being the IOR board member chosen to make the character-assassinating press release regarding Gotti Tedeschi’s removal and given a role in choosing his successor.
Finally, I usually end my diaries with a note that I am the author of The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America. I was accused by one commenter of posting diaries merely to sell books. The vast majority of published authors would attest to the fact that I am not making any money three years after a book was released.
Rather, we older Daily Kos readers remember a time, and some “youngsters” may have read about it, when political campaigns were about domestic issues and foreign affairs and not “moral values;” when Catholic bishops supported labor unions, civil rights and were anti-war. So I direct any readers who want to know how and why the Religious Right was created by the 1% we used to call neoconservatives to the source of this information.
In fact, it was the shock of reading how Catholic bishops supported the murderous Bush over Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign which led me to begin researching how such a thing was possible. I knew that Americans should understand the threat that the Catholic Church posed to United States. Now that the danger seems to be dissipating, there’s not much left for me to write about except to chronicle its downfall along the way and try to do it with as little schadenfreude as possible.
Sun Jul 08, 2012 at 2:49 AM PT: I made an error and I appreciate the "catch." In fact, "America’s Catholic voters are evenly divided between President Obama and Republican nominee-in-waiting Mitt Romney, according to Gallup Poll findings." What I should have written was that the majority of Catholics favored by the bishops - i.e. white, wealthier as a group than Latinos - also favored Romney.