The following is a Catholic Action League of Massachusetts news update…
On August 14th, a grotesquely hypocritical, unscrupulously deceitful and insidiously misleading full page ad appeared in the A section of the Boston Sunday Globe.
The ad was sponsored by Americans United for Separation of Church and State–one the two most vicious anti-Catholic hate groups in American history—the other being the Ku Klux Klan.
The ad proclaims the determination of the organization—the brazenness here is astonishing—to fight against anti-Catholic bigotry!
The ad is headlined by a sympathetic photo of a purportedly Catholic mother, with the somewhat improbable name of Aimee Maddonna, and her two small children. According to the narrative, she was the victim of discrimination in employment by an Evangelical ministry’s foster care program, because of her Catholic religion.
By its own admission, Americans United wants the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to penalize religious foster care programs—by denying them funding—when they give preference to their own adherents.
What is actually behind all of this is that Americans United is trying to eviscerate the ministerial exception, the doctrine in American constitutional law which exempts religious organizations from state and federal anti-discrimination statutes, laws which could force religious institutions to hire persons opposed to their beliefs.
One of the chief beneficiaries of the ministerial exception is the Catholic community, with its vast array of schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, charities and fraternal organizations.
Opposition to the ministerial exception is led by homosexual groups, abetted by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.
If the exception is weakened or destroyed, Catholic institutions would be forced to hire self identified, sexually active, and civilly “married” homosexuals and lesbians. Catholic schools would be compelled to employ open homosexuals as teachers, coaches, administrators and guidance counselors.
That would destroy Catholic education in America, which is the real goal of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and has been for the last seventy four years.
Organized in 1948 as Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, its origins were found in Scottish Rite Freemasonry.
The catalyst for its formation was the proposal of President Harry Truman to establish diplomatic relations with the Holy See, a proposal which the group helped to defeat. A year later, it denounced Catholicism as “more dangerous …than Communism.”
POAU opposed the licensing of Catholic television stations at Jesuit universities, claiming that the Society of Jesus was an “alien organization.”
In 1958, POAU demanded that American cardinals be stripped of their citizenship for voting in a foreign election—the conclave which elected Pope John XXIII.
In one of its more hysterical outbursts, it called upon the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate alleged Vatican espionage in the United States.
Its multi-generational obsession has been to stop state aid to Catholic schools. The behind the scenes influence of Americans United was a key factor in the failure of multiple Republican administrations, including that of Ronald Reagan, to fulfill campaign promises to promote parental choice in education.
Boston’s Richard Cardinal Cushing called them “a refined form of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle made the following comment: “Americans United seems to believe that Catholics in this country suffer from amnesia. We don’t.”
“The shameless dishonesty of its ad in the Boston Globe confirms, that for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, contempt for Catholics is its enduring lodestar.”
Photo by Ryan Godfrey, CC BY-NC 2.0.
