In an article titled Diles que voten ("Tell Them to Vote) published in a recent edition of El Pregonero, the official Spanish-language newspaper of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., staff writer Miguel Vivanco goes well beyond just paying obligatory lip-service to the illegal immigration cause which he and the ultra-liberal wing of the American “Catholic” world push incessantly.
What causes alarm bells to go off is that Vivanco not only limits his reporting on get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts to Hillary Clinton partisans, but he gives the impression that their amnesty agenda is the defining issue in the election and that it should lead El Pregonero readers to vote for Hillary Clinton.
“Everyone knows their (Hispanics’) votes are key to getting to the White House,” Vivanco writes. “But in the middle of it is a well-known demand: approval of an immigration reform that removes from the shadows 11 million undocumented immigrants,” he states.
In a straightforward analysis of the disturbing development, Catholic blogger Janet Baker writes; “Completely lacking in this article is any mention of (Clinton’s) promotion of baby-murder. Bear in mind this is an official publication of the Archdiocese of Washington.”
Baker added; “I've been told that there may be other articles within the publication that also serve to drum up support for Hillary. In a publication that ostensibly serves the Catholic Church, this is completely unacceptable. Like their English-speaking counterparts at the Catholic Standard, they will be held to scrutiny by Catholic bloggers.”
I agree wholeheartedly with Baker that we should hold any Catholic publication accountable for not only endorsing political candidates who are in complete conflict with Catholic beliefs and morals; but also for their ongoing manipulation of their readership who in the case of El Pregonero, are not politically savvy and will take whatever the Church, or some of its liberal wing nuts, say or print.
As I shared Baker’s blog post on other social media, I was alerted by a friend who lives in the Diocese of Joliet in Illinois that the notorious Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a parish I have personally protested before, is actually handing out election materials on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
This is a source of great frustration for me because I see my Hispanic brothers and sisters being continually duped by the liberal diocesan social justice bureaucrats. Which is made worse by weak clergy and parish staffers who are easily manipulated and pushed around by bullies from community organizations like Action Now, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and of course the Democratic Party itself.
Don’t think I am “picking on” any specific diocese or parish, because these are only two of many, many examples of the rampant abuse of Catholic institutions and parishes nationwide as platforms for radical socialist political activity.
These political operatives need to be fumigated like cockroaches out of any and every corner of the Catholic Church. Diocesan offices housing these infiltrators who abuse the Church’s platform and resources for political gain must also be exorcised of these very same demons.
What is even more frustrating is that no matter how much we may try to expose this kind of political malfeasance, the powers-that-be only try to tepidly placate us with a stupid or officious display as an official exercise of authority.
What the Archbishop of Washington, Donald Cardinal Wuerl, is permitting with blatant, radical left-wing articles in publications like El Pregonero, is the exercise in the soft bigotry of low-expectations. Articles like Vivanco’s spoon-feed the readership with what apparently he and his pals believe is all that matters to Hispanic people.
When I wrote for the Chicago Tribune’s ‘Hoy’ newspaper for six years, I used to bring up topics which many readers let me know they had never heard or read about before in the Spanish-language media. They often would email me and thank me for writing about the dangers of public school sex-ed programs, or about how Planned Parenthood was pushing abortion, contraception and homosexuality to their sons and daughters.
The country’s Hispanic population deserves better. If the D.C. chancery refuses to do its job, I suppose it's up to us laity to take up their slack and combat grave errors such as these that continue to flow from supposedly Catholic publications.
