ROME — Two George Soros-funded leftist pressure groups — Faith in Public Life and Faithful America — have launched a petition drive protesting San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s decision to bar Nancy Pelosi from receiving Holy Communion because of her aggressive abortion advocacy.
“A holy sacrament should never be weaponized for political ends or to fight the culture wars,” the letter accompanying the petition declares, adopting arguments famously articulated by then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick in 2004.
“Your reckless action defies the pastoral guidance of Pope Francis and will only further divide our churches at a time of intense partisan polarization,” the letter states.
Faith in Public Life is a pro-abortion political lobbying group, whose CEO, the Rev. Jennifer Butler, slammed the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade as “immoral” and “an outrageous violation of the dignity of all people.”
Last fall, the two groups launched a similar petition drive against Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, accusing him of “denigrating social justice movements.”
Archbishop José H. Gomez visits inmates at Men’s Central Jail after holding Christmas Mass in a jail chapel on December 25, 2019, in Los Angeles, California. (Mario Tama/Getty)
“The archbishop also derided what he called ‘wokeness’ and ‘identity politics,’” the letter lamented; it went on to assert the need to “awaken our national conscience to the epidemic of police brutality and systemic racism.”
In a searing response to the petition, Catholic League president Bill Donohue noted that Faith in Public Life and Faithful America “have both received funding from George Soros, the atheist billionaire who has long been at war with the Catholic Church.”
“The former is a front group for left-wing zealots seeking to create havoc in the Church; the latter is run by a rogue Episcopalian priest who sticks his nose into the Church’s affairs,” Donohue added.
In 2016, leaked documents from Soros’s Open Society Policy Center revealed enormous donations to Faith in Public Life, calculated to advance Soros’s political agenda by deemphasizing abortion and religious freedom while championing liberal “social justice” causes in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
Father Robert Sirico, a Catholic priest and founder of the Michigan-based Acton Institute, declared at the time that the leaked documents revealed Soros’ “crass political intention to manipulate church leaders.”
Soros considers Catholic Church leadership “as mere useful idiots to be manipulated to further [his] own political and, frankly, secularist agenda,” Father Sirico said at the time.
Faith in Public Life accepted Soros’s monies despite his self-proclaimed atheism, promotion of abortion on demand, and overt statism. The leaked documents explicitly asserted that the donations formed part of Soros’s “long-term project of shifting the priorities of the U.S. Catholic church.”
A portion of the Soros gift in 2016 was spent promoting John Gehring, a former assistant media director at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, as a commentator to national media outlets.
Gehring is the former communications director at Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, a group created by John Podesta, former campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton, to plant the seeds of “revolution” in the Catholic church. The plot to subvert the Catholic church from the inside was revealed by WikiLeaks in 2012, when it published a series of Podesta’s emails.
Earlier last year, Faith in Public Life and Faithful America again teamed up to demand the removal of Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, as chair of the U.S. bishops’ pro-life committee after Naumann said President Joe Biden should stop professing to be a “devout” Catholic.
Both groups have repeatedly downplayed the moral evil of abortion while advocating for LGBT issues and the Democratic Party.
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