Perhaps there is a deeper reason why members of the USCCB might be enthusiastic for Kamala Harris. George Neumayr at The American Spectator is on the case:
One might have thought Harris, whose anti-Catholic instincts led her as a senator to harass a Trump judicial nominee for nothing more than membership in the Knights of Columbus, would have enjoyed prosecuting the Church for sexual abuse. But she didn’t.
Schweizer thinks her hands-off approach was due to the political debts she owed powerful Catholics in the Bay Area for helping her win the district attorney’s seat in San Francisco. Her predecessor and opponent in that race, Vincent Hallinan, had been pursuing abuse cases against the Church. Catholics afraid of his investigations backed Kamala Harris in the race:
The records that Hallinan had in his possession touched on well-connected institutions at the heart of California’s power structure. St. Ignatius College Preparatory School, in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, counted California governor Jerry Brown and the powerful Getty family as alumni. The school faced enormous vulnerabilities because of abuse problems there. Based on documents later released by the Jesuits who ran St. Ignatius, in the nearly sixty-year span from 1923 to 1982, in forty-three of those years the school employed at least one priest on the faculty who was later accused of abuse.
Hallinan’s investigation threatened to bring dozens of additional cases to light.
The Catholic archdiocese in San Francisco had reason to be extremely nervous:
According to San Francisco election financial disclosures, high-dollar donations to Harris’s campaign began to roll in from those connected to the Catholic Church institutional hierarchy. Harris had no particular ties to the Catholic Church or Catholic organizations, but the money still came in large, unprecedented sums.
Harris received money from Church fixer Joseph Russoniello and the law firm Cooley Godward, where he served as partner. Harris tapped Russoniello for her advisory board. “Another law firm,” writes Schweizer, “Bingham McCutcheon, which handled legal matters for the archdiocese concerning Catholic Charities, donated $2,825, the maximum allowed.” Arguedas, Cassman & Headley, which was representing a priest in an abuse case at the time, also donated $4,550 to Harris. “The lawyer in the case, Cristina Arguedas, also served on Kamala Harris’s advisory council,” Schweizer writes.
Go here to read the rest. The one thing Catholics have learned painfully over the past few decades is that when it comes to the inner machinations of the Church, it is impossible to be too cynical. We will see how strongly Pope Francis tilts to Biden-Harris as the campaign proceeds.
All I’ve heard for three years is that it’s wrong for Catholic priests to be involved in such political events. Was that wrong? Is this wrong? We need a playbook here.
Dave, those are silly questions. You know there are two sets of rules….
For some reason, this article is illegible. The text runs on behind the ads on the right. I’ve tried Microsoft Edge and Chrome and it’s the same in both. There was no problem with the other articles.
I attended St. Ignatius 1971-1975 and had some great Jesuit teachers, but it was clear that more than a few of the younger ones had “tendencies” and my sophomore English teacher was the now-notorious Jerry Lindner. So I would not be surprised if such documents exist; yet I would trust Hallinan as little as I trust Harris. The man was viciously anti-Catholic, while Harris seems merely opportunistic on that point.
John, there’s only one set of ruled here. It’s just that the hierarchy doesn’t attempt to enforce those rules against somebody like Fr. Martin –because he wouldn’t listen anyway.
I am particularly interested in this article, but unable to read it, as the ads cover the right-hand margin. Sorry. Please tweak to make legible if possible! Thank you.