The proof of the war being waged by the Democratic Party on people of faith or, as President Obama once put it, “less than loving Christians”, is found in the latest batch of emails released by Wikileaks. The party that rails against Islamophobia and preaches tolerance toward Muslims is revealed to have an unremitting hostility towards and disdain for Catholics, evangelicals, and any who worship a God other than government:

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri and Center for American Progress fellow John Halpin mocked conservative Catholicism as an "amazing bastardization of the faith" in new emails released by WikiLeaks.

In the fresh batch of emails released as part of a reported cache of "Podesta emails," with the subject line "Conservative Catholicism," Halpin also mocks News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson for being Catholic.

"Ken Auletta's latest piece on Murdoch in the New Yorker starts off with the aside that both Murdoch and Robert Thompson, managing editor of the WSJ, are raising their kids Catholic. Friggin' Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus," Halpin wrote in a 2011 missive to Podesta and Palmieri.

"Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) from the SC and think tanks to the media and social groups. It's an amazing bastardization of the faith. They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy," he added.

Palmieri, who MRCTV reports was also with the Center for American Progress at the time, added in the email chain that she believes Murdoch, Thomson, and many other conservatives are Catholic because they think it's "the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion."

"Their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals," she added.

Halpin thought Palmieri made an "excellent point."

"Excellent point. They can throw around 'Thomistic' thought and 'subsidiarity' and sound sophisticated because no one knows what the hell they're talking about," he wrote.

These emails were exchanged between Hillary Clinton confidantes in 2011 and the run-up to the 2012 elections and came during the Obama administration’s fight to impose ObamaCare’s mandates on contraceptives and abortion on the Catholic Church and its institutions. They reflect an animus towards the religious liberty and freedom of conscience guaranteed by the First Amendment that would manifest itself in legal action against family-owned businesses like Hobby Lobby and religious groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor.

It would be bad enough if Democrats merely objected to the positions of the Catholic Church and sought to force compliance with the dictates of government, but emails reveal the Democrats and members of Team Clinton actually sought to subvert the Catholic Church and dilute its opposition by creating Catholic front groups to fundamentally transform, to coin a phrase, the Catholic Church from within:

A newly leaked email shows Hillary Clinton’s current campaign chairman John Podesta and a Left-wing activist casually discussing fomenting “revolution” in the Catholic Church.

“There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic Church,” Sandy Newman, president and founder of the progressive nonprofit Voices for Progress, writes to Podesta in an email titled “opening for a Catholic Spring? just musing.”…

“We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up,” Podesta writes….

Imagine if Republicans had said something similar about Islam and Muslims. But such hostility towards faith and religion is reserved for those who President Obama called the “bitter clingers” in his 2008 campaign for the White House. The struggle between religious liberty and government suppression through ObamaCare was the subject of a 2012 Investor’s Business Daily editorial on the VP debate between Catholics Joe Biden and Paul Ryan:

As we noted in our post-debate analysis, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) were not amused with Joe Biden's other great debate lie -- that ObamaCare doesn't threaten religious liberty or the ability of churches, particularly the Catholic Church, to put their faith in action.

On Oct. 12, the USCCB denounced the VP's deceptive comments, noting that the so-called HHS exemption is a farce that unconstitutionally defines what a religious institution is and what government will allow it to do.

That exemption, the USCCB states, "does not extend to 'Catholic social services, Georgetown hospital, Mercy hospital, any hospital' (as Biden claimed), or any other religious charity that offers its services to all, regardless of the faith of those served."

In other words, Joe Biden, a Catholic himself, lied.

As Paul Ryan, also a Catholic, put it to Biden, the Obama administration was "infringing upon our first freedom, the freedom of religion, by infringing on Catholic charities, Catholic churches, Catholic hospitals." …

As Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, recently said on "Fox News Sunday," they object to what they consider the unprecedented attempt by the Obama administration to define what a church and religious institution is -- the notion that you're a church if the government, in Soviet fashion, says you're a church.

"Embedded in the mandate is a radically new definition of what constitutes a religious community, what constitutes religious ministry," Cardinal Wuerl said. "Brand new, never before applied at the federal level. That's what we're arguing about."

Liberal Catholic candidates for public office such as Democratic nominee for vice president Tim Kaine often proclaim their Catholic identity to curry favor with this constituency, but when it comes to practicing the doctrines of their faith often are what are called “cafeteria Catholics”. They pick and chooses from what they might call the “Ten Suggestions”, particularly when it comes to a woman’s “right to choose”.

Unfortunately for Tim Kaine and fellow cafeteria devotees, there is no right to choose on what are called “doctrines of the church”, even if he seems to think so. On the issue of same-sex marriage, Kaine said in a recent speech to the 20th National Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C. that he thought the Catholic Church would soon follow his lead on this issue:

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine, a practicing Catholic, on Saturday described his evolution on same-sex marriage and predicted that his church would change its views as well.

“My full, complete, unconditional support for marriage equality is at odds with the current doctrine of the church that I still attend,” Kaine said at a dinner celebrating gay rights. “But I think that’s going to change, too.”  

Representatives the Catholic Church responded by saying, er, we don’t think so, suggesting this “practicing Catholic” needs a little more practice:

In a Facebook post titled “VP Pick, Tim Kaine, a Catholic?” Bishop Thomas J. Tobin of Providence noted that Kaine “has been widely identified as a Roman Catholic” while at the same time “he publicly supports ‘freedom of choice’ for abortion, same-sex marriage, gay adoptions, and the ordination of women as priests.”

“All of these positions are clearly contrary to well-established Catholic teachings; all of them have been opposed by Pope Francis as well,” Tobin wrote, dashing the left’s spurious claim that Kaine is some kind of “Pope Francis Catholic.”

“Senator Kaine has said, ‘My faith is central to everything I do.’ But apparently, and unfortunately, his faith isn’t central to his public, political life,” Bishop Tobin concluded.

Similarly, in a recent column, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput also took issue with Kaine, as well as with the sitting Vice President, Joe Biden, the two most visible Catholics in American politics.

These two “prominent Catholics,” the Archbishop said, “both seem to publicly ignore or invent the content of their Catholic faith as they go along.”

Many in the Catholic hierarchy were not amused, reminding Kaine that Catholic Church doctrine on the issues of gay marriage and abortion are etched in the same stone as Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai.

Again, opposition to Catholic positions is bad enough for Catholics in power and other government officials. But Democrats and their party have declared war on the Catholic Church, seeking to forever neuter it as a guarantor of religious conscience and liberty.

The Catholic Church and its evangelical cousins are institutional roadblocks to the elimination of religious liberty in this country. As Podesta writes, the Catholic Church must be subverted from within to become a church in name only subservient to government edict. It is to render unto Caesar not only what is Caesar’s, but everything else as well. The Catholic Church must be destroyed.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.