Undermining the church? Or being it?

Some fairly rough stuff in the John Podesta email hack from Clintonites Jennifer Palmieri and John Halpin. While I don’t think they’re 100 percent wrong (or right) on the substance, the (private) tone they take toward conservative converts to Catholicism sure is condescending.

Less convincing is the anger over Podesta’s own comments on the notion of a “Catholic Spring.” Voices for Progress founder Sandy Newman emailed Podesta about the idea in 2011:

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…. I don’t qualify to be involved and I have not thought at all about how one would “plant the seeds of the revolution,” or who would plant them.