UNITED STATES
The Open Tabernacle: Here Comes Everybody
Posted on May 21, 2017 by Betty Clermont
“There’s an expectation that the relationship between President Trump and Pope Francis will be difficult to establish [but] that is not the case at all,” Louis Bono, temporary charge d’affaires in the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See, said. When the pope and Trump meet on May 24, “They’ll have the opportunity to speak frankly if there are any areas of differences, but more so, to focus on those areas where we do have common ground and to identify how we can work together further,” Bono said.
In a White House Rose Garden ceremony on May 4, Trump decried the “attacks against the Little Sisters of the Poor” before signing his executive order on “religious freedom.” He invited the sisters present to stand beside him and shook the hands of two of them. Trump congratulated them and told the sisters that they “sort of just won a lawsuit.” He added, “I want you to know, your long ordeal will soon be over,” referring to their lawsuit against Obamacare that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
After Trump’s announcement, Sister Constance Veit, a spokesperson for the religious community, “summed up her hopes for what lies ahead with a football analogy. ‘We’re on the one-yard line, first down. We just have to get it over the goal line,’” she said.
Pope Francis met with the Little Sisters of the Poor while in the U.S. in support of their lawsuit. The year before, the pope granted a private audience to Hobby Lobby’s Green family, asking them “how their Supreme Court fight against President Obama’s contraception mandate was progressing.” …
“MY CARDINALS”
During the primaries, the USCCB video, “The Right to Religious Freedom,” showed a clip of Hillary Clinton while a voice-over intoned that “the government is stopping us from practicing our faith.”
When Wikileaks released the “hacked Democratic National Committee data from Russian intelligence” on Oct. 11, Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails were included. His correspondence relating to the Catholic Church was seized upon by the U.S. bishops, although it was several years old and had nothing to do with Clinton or any political campaign.
In short, the bishops’ attacks against Clinton and Podesta were hyperbolic, dishonest and highly partisan, including those made by the prelate of Wall Street, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, and Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz, the elected president of the USCCB.
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