As hard as it is to believe, the Catholic Church willingly funded at least some of Barack Obama’s community organizing training in his early days. A new book reveals that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) paid a young Barack Obama’s airfare to a training program on community organizing given by the Industrial Areas Foundation—an organization founded by leftist radical Saul Alinsky.
CCHD, no stranger to controversy, has been the focus of an ongoing effort to reform it because of egregious, wrong-headed spending exactly like this. As Father Val Peter pointed out last year,
There is another part of the story of the [CCHD’s] origins that is often left out of official narratives. It centers in opaque respects around Saul Alinsky, who developed community organizing in a way that met the spirit of the age: strident, threatening, and prone to shakedown. Thoroughly anti-authoritarian, he ostensibly promised to show priests and laity how to follow the call of Vatican II. His pitch: “With your (Catholic) money and my ideas, we can go a long way.”
Alinsky’s credentials looked impressive to many new, earnest “social justice Catholics.” Cardinal Stritch gave Alinsky $30,000 a year for three years to study Chicago’s racially troubled neighborhoods.
In his expose, Father Peter explained that CCHD channeled its funds to organizations engaged in “systemic change.” In its own words, CCHD sought to expose “the root causes of poverty in America through promotion and support of community controlled, self-help organizations and through transformative education.” If that sounds familiar to you, recall Obama’s mantra of 2008: “hope and change.”
With this background and a whole lot more, Phyllis Schlafly and expert journalist George Neumayr set about writing the new book entitled, No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom. The Blaze quotes from the book: “In the 1980s, the Catholic archdiocese of Chicago contributed to the training of Obama in the very Alinskyite radicalism that would culminate in such anti-religious measures as the HHS mandate. In fact, in the course of writing this book, we met a source who once had access to copies of documents from the archives of the Chicago archdiocese. This source supplied us with never-before-published copies of invoices, checks, and letters that confirm the Church’s support for the man who would one day seek to destroy its religious freedom.”
According to the Daily Caller,
Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly told a group of reporters at the Heritage Foundation Tuesday that President Barack Obama believes that loyalty to government trumps even loyalty to God.
She cited the mandates set forth by the Affordable Care Act and the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy as two examples of where she said the president has put government ahead of the institution of religion.
“He seems to want to get rid of religion in any public place—a public school, or a public institution—and to keep it behind the four walls of your own church,” Schlafly said.
Co-author George Neumayr recalled the 2008 Obama comment at a San Francisco fundraiser about some small-town residents in Pennsylvania: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Neumayr opined that this comment is not dissimilar from the opinion of the communist philosophy’s founder, Karl Marx, who said that, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom affirms what we have been saying for quite some time about Obama’s disdain for religion, and reiterated on the day America lost a little more freedom—August 1, 2012.
Paul E. Rondeau, ALL’s executive director, stated: “The president’s HHS mandate redefines and marginalizes religious freedom in favor of government ideology. History tragically teaches us that if our government can abolish one constitutional right, then all constitutional rights are put in jeopardy. This path sets a dangerous and foolish precedent that First Amendment rights such as freedom of speech, association, freedom of the press, and the rights to assemble and petition the government may be just as easily curtailed in the future.”
God help us all!
