Clinton campaign aide rips Catholics in leaked emails
Hillary Clinton's campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri bashed conservative Catholics and evangelicals in a 2011 email exchange with the Center for American Progress (CAP) president John Halpin.
The exchange, which had the subject line "Conservative Catholics," was released by Wikileaks as part of a batch of hacked emails from Clinton's campaign chairperson John Podesta.
The thread began with Halpin mocking News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson for wanting to raise their children as Catholics.
Halpin went on to complain that there are many Catholics in the conservative movement and said that it was "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," he wrote.
"I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals," Palmieri replied.
"They can throw around 'Thomistic' thought and 'subsidiarity' and sound sophisticated because no one knows what the hell they're talking about," Halpin wrote back.
Podesta was included in the email exchange but he did not reply to Halpin's comments.
Joseph Cella, founder of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, said the emails represented "the open anti-Catholic bigotry of her senior advisers, who attack the deeply held beliefs and theology of Catholics."
Cella urged Clinton and her campaign team to apologize to all Catholics.
Clinton spokesperson Brian Fallon described the issue as a "faux controversy" on Twitter and pointed out that Palmieri herself is Catholic.
In an email to Time, Clinton spokesperson Glen Caplin criticized Wikileaks for the hacking and said that the website is advancing the political agenda of Russian President Vladimir Putin to help elect Donald Trump. Caplin added that the hacking is now being investigated by the FBI.
In another leaked email, Podesta assured a liberal activist that groups like Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United had been created to promote a more progressive approach to Catholicism.
