UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Jul. 05, 2012
By An NCR Editorial
When a reporter recently asked Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore what groups and individuals were funding the U.S. bishops’ religious liberty campaign — including their vaunted Fortnight for Freedom campaign, which many see as a thinly veiled campaign against President Barack Obama — he acted as if the question were a personal affront.
Lori, who heads up the bishops’ religious liberty effort, has gone to great lengths to argue that the campaign is not partisan, that it is not intended to bring down a president and that it is in service of far more high-minded ideals than election-year politicking.
All of that may be correct, but the question, not an affront, stands: Who’s paying for this extravaganza? …
The fact of the matter is that Supreme Knight Carl Anderson took up residence in one of the most extreme corners of the Republican Party, as a legislative aide to North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, during the 1970s and 1980s. He spent 1983-87 in various capacities in the Reagan White House. It is logical, then, to presume that conservative Republican views still inform his political outlook. It is a presumption with contemporary evidence. In a recent issue of the organization’s magazine, Columbia, Anderson showed a taste for rather imprudent hyperbole when he compared the situation in the United States today to the virulent and bloody anti-Catholic period of the Cristero War in Mexico. That the comparison is absurd is not the important point. That the U.S. bishops would align themselves so closely with such absurdity is the deeper concern.
The Knights, of course, can hire whomever the organization wishes. They can print in their magazine whatever they’d like. They can do with their money whatever they wish. They spend a great deal of it on charitable work, and they spread quite a bit of it around to aid bishops (Lori, who is the Knights’ supreme chaplain, one year received more than $250,000 while he was bishop of Bridgeport, Conn.) and millions have been sent to the Vatican.
The organization is not bashful at all about announcing such donations. The Knights should be as forthcoming about what kind of support they’re giving the bishops’ campaign. For in this case, they are well beyond the bounds of their membership and those whose insurance premiums fill the organization’s coffers. They are helping to make a public case.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.