Friend,
On April 30, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 200-page report detailing a pattern of anti-Christian bias inside the federal government during the Biden administration.
CatholicVote has spent years exposing the weaponization of federal power against faithful Catholics. We have filed FOIA requests. We have demanded answers. We have warned that the government was not merely disagreeing with Christians in public policy debates, but increasingly treating Christian conviction as something suspicious, dangerous, and punishable.
What the report reveals should chill every Catholic in America.
Take just this example: according to internal Justice Department communications, Joseph Cooney and Molly Gaston, two former DOJ prosecutors, exchanged messages about nuns seen in a photograph from the January 6 rally.
“I would like to take a special assignment of finding and prosecuting them,” Gaston wrote.
Cooney replied: “I’m with you,” and added, “Although I’d like to prosecute any nun who still wears the head habit.”
The response?
“Hahaha.”
Read that again. These were government lawyers, using government devices, talking about Catholic religious women as targets in the same language used by fringe activists on social media.
Both were fired shortly after President Trump's second inauguration. Today, they are legal partners at Gaston & Cooney PLLC and Cooney is running for Congress in Virginia.
I personally cannot read those words as an abstraction. Before I became president of CatholicVote, I spent years in the habit, discerning life as a religious sister.
Under the Obama administration, our congregation talked seriously about what it would mean to go to jail for our beliefs.
But the punishment the government threatened was more devious than jail: the fine for refusing to violate our conscience was $100 per day, per employee. To put it in perspective, corporations that provided no insurance at all faced fines of about $3,000 per employee, per year — penalties that have only increased over time.
For them, it was a greater “crime” to uphold our conscience by refusing to fund contraception than to withhold the insurance altogether.
For us, the threat was the bankruptcy of campuses, buildings, and ministries. The places where sisters taught, served, prayed, and cared for souls.
In many ways, it was a threat worse than jail: forcing a choice between obedience to Jesus Christ and His Church and the survival of our ministry. But for the courts, it was a conundrum that would make Henry VIII proud. It made no difference whether Catholics capitulated and hailed Henry over Rome or stood firm for the truth. England’s monasteries were dissolved either way. So it is today. If Catholics violated their consciences, the surrender on contraception was a fait accompli. If Catholics refused, their apostolates were bankrupted. Either way, our beliefs were targeted for removal from the public square.
And bitterly, tragically, this hostility toward the faith only got worse under the administration of the second Catholic president in American history.
As Catholics, we are commanded to love, forgive, and pray for our enemies; and we will.
But love does not require amnesia. We must not forget.
We remember the parents investigated, the pro-life citizens prosecuted, the Catholic churches surveilled, the sisters threatened, and the faithful Americans treated as enemies because they refused to bow before the idols of the age.
And the fight is not over.
Right now, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne—women who operate Rosary Hill Home in New York for poor, terminally ill cancer patients—are suing the state over a gender-identity mandate that would force them to violate Catholic teaching and conscience.
Once again, the mandate has little to do with serving a group: who among the dying or the octogenarians in nursing homes is clamoring for gender-identity recognition?
It is personal to the sisters. It was personal to me. And it should be personal to every American who still believes that the government has no right to punish citizens for living the truth of their faith and selflessly serving others.
CatholicVote will continue this fight.
The first step is simple: it must become politically impossible to target nuns. It must be impossible to win office while treating the Catholic faith as a problem to be managed by the state.
As always, I ask you to pray for our country.
But also, get ready to make your voice heard—especially as we approach the midterm elections.
Because this fight is not going away. And neither are we.
Go forward bravely,
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