Soros: Angel for Catholic Academics

A Washington Post story about Catholic professors challenging Rep. John Boehner’s Catholic faith with an open letter to the House Speaker ignores the role of one of the key signers in a George Soros-funded group.

 

The letter to Boehner says, “Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress.” Ignoring the Catholic tradition of subsidiarity, or decentralized government, and voluntarism, the letter claims Boehner’s votes against expansion of the federal welfare state are anti-Catholic.

 

Letter signer Stephen F. Schneck of the Catholic University of America (CUA) is a board member of the Soros-funded Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG). Because of the significant funding the group has received from Soros, an atheist, CACG has been called a “fake Catholic” group designed to undermine official Catholic teaching on abortion and homosexuality and promote Obama Administration Big Government policies. The former CACG executive director, Alexia Kelley, now works for the Obama Administration.

 

A major financial backer of the ACLU, Soros supports such causes as drug legalization, the rights of “sex workers” and felons, euthanasia, radical feminism, abortion rights, and homosexual rights.

 

In addition to helping organize the protest against Boehner, Schneck recently hosted two socialists on the CUA campus at a one-sided forum on how and why the Catholic Church should be promoting liberal and pro-union social policies.

 

The focus of the anti-Boehner article by Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein is the letter that she notes was “organized by faculty at Catholic University, the national university of the Catholic Church in Northeast Washington.” She adds, “Of the nearly 80 signers, about 30 are from Catholic University, including faculty from the schools of law, nursing, history and theology, among others.”

 

What this means, of course, is that CUA has become a hotbed of liberal social activism designed to benefit the national Democratic Party.

 

Nevertheless, Boehner has been invited to speak at the CUA Annual Commencement Ceremony on May 14 on the east steps of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

 

“Catholic faculty question Boehner’s record on poor before commencement address” is the Post headline. “John Boehner Draws Catholic Criticism for Record on the Poor‎” is how ABC News covered it. Fox News ran with, “Catholic Professors Slam Boehner Over GOP Budget Cuts.”

 

Not surprisingly, the anti-Boehner letter was quickly picked up by Think Progress, a blog associated with the Soros-funded Center for American Progress.

 

Hiding behind the mantle of being an academic and a professor, Schneck, director of CUA’s Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies (IPR), makes no secret of his anti-conservative views on many social issues. He was the host of a recent CUA event featuring socialist John Sweeney, former President of the AFL-CIO, who argued that Jesus Christ was pro-union.

 

Another speaker at Schneck’s conference, attended by representatives of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, was Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, a vice-chair of Democratic Socialists of America who offered his mentor, socialist Michael Harrington, a Catholic-turned-atheist, as an example for others to follow. Meyerson told me that he received a good reception from the Catholic audience, which included several priests. “I think Michael’s religious impulses infused his secular beliefs,” he claimed, “and that even when he found himself no longer able to believe in God, he nonetheless carried a kind of religious moral charge to his entire life.”

 

White House official Alexia Kelley, whose official title is Director of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), was also a speaker at the CUA forum organized by Schneck. At HHS she works with the notoriously pro-abortion Catholic HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

 

Kelley, when she ran Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, was a participant in a news conference to complain that Catholics in favor of “the Catholic social tradition” of social justice have not gotten as much press coverage as conservative religious activists. The news conference was timed to coincide with the release of a report, “Left Behind,” issued by the Soros-funded Media Matters organization.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.