Donald Trump's campaign has opened up a new front on the war against Hillary Clinton, trying to organize Roman Catholics into a snap political militia after a leaked email chain showed a top Clinton aide denigrating their faith.

The Republican presidential nominee told an overflow crowd in central Florida on Wednesday about a leaked email that shows 'members of the Clinton team viciously attacking Catholics and evangelicals.'

Religious bigotry, he said, 'won't be tolerated by the voters. Tell you what: Anybody of religion, I really think you have to vote for Donald Trump, to be honest with you.'

Clinton, he said, 'did a big number on Catholics. A horrible number on Catholics. She did a horrible number on evangelicals, through her people.'

TROUBLE IN CLINTONLAND: Hillary's communications director Jennifer Palmieri participated in an email chain about 'backwards' Catholics and said Republicans join that denomination because 'their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals'

WARPATH: Donald Trump clobbered the Clinton campaign and predicted that religious bigotry 'won't be tolerated by the voters'

NOT BUYING IT: Palmieri said en route to a Clinton rally in Colorado (pictured) that she didn't 'recognize' the email – and suggested that the Russian government may have fabricated it

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a high-profile Roman Catholic Trump booster who warmed up the afternoon crowd, said Clinton 'and the people around her don't much like Catholics or evangelicals.'

'If you're a Catholic or evangelical, you are stupid, according to her staff and the people around her.'

Giuliani said Clinton 'doesn't really care about the rights of' religious Americans. 'You know that because she never defends them.'

The WikiLeaks website published the email on Tuesday, showing Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri sniping that conservatives in the Catholic Church 'think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals.'

Palmieri was responding to John Halpin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank founded by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Halpin mocked a New Yorker article that explored publishing billionaire Rupert Murdoch's decision to raise his children as Catholics.

'Friggin' Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus,' Halpin complained. '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.'

The exchange was among messages hacked from Podesta's email account.

ON OFFENSE: Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told a Trump rally in Florida that 'if you're a Catholic ... you are stupid, according to her staff and the people around her'

PUSHBACK: Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway (left) shamed Palmieri in a conference call while Newt Gingrich (right) said, 'Now we know what Hillary meant by "deplorable" – it was people of faith'

Aboard Clinton's campaign aircraft on Wednesday, Palmieri blamed the leak on the Russian government.

'I'm a Catholic. I don't recognize that email that we saw,' she protested, without denying that she wrote it.

'This whole effort is led by the Russians. The Russians orchestrated this hack. ... We're not going to do any more to comment or aid their efforts.'

In a conference call held after Trump's first Florida rally of the day, his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said that for 30 years, Hillary Clinton has ben openly hostile to issues fundamental to practicing Catholics.

Clinton, she said, supports government funding for abortions including 'sex-selective abortion,' and has supported the Obama administration's medical-insurance lawsuit against the Little Sisters of the Poor.

'Now her staff is caught calling Catholics "backwards," in emails,' Conway said, drawing a line of connection with an earlier email leak that showed Demorcatic National Committee staff 'looking to besmirch and diminish Bernie Sanders based on his religious faith.'

'Everyone involved should be ashamed,' she said.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, leading off a parade of Catholic Trump-boosters, told reporters on the call that he considered an attack on his denomination to be an 'assault' on all Christians.

'Now we know what Hillary meant by "deplorable",' he said, referring to a now-infamous epithet Clinton invoked for Trump's base during a September fundraiser.

'It was people of faith,' he said.

SHE'S WHAT? Palmieri is herself a Catholic. So is John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman whose emails were hacked

Gingrich, who led the 1994 Republican 'revolution' that reclaimed the House of Representatives after four decades in the minority, blasted Clinton for employing a 'bigoted, anti-Catholic, anti-religion staff.'

He called Palmieri an example of 'the kind of folks Hillary is going to look to, to help pick Supreme Court justices.'

The result, Gingrich warned, 'would be a pattern that would literally limit religious freedom in America.'

'These arrogant, left-wing atheists and separatists have no sympathy for Catholics,' he said.

Jim Nicholsons, a former Veterans Affairs secretary who also served as America's ambassador to the Vatican, said the anti-Catholic email left him 'greatly offended and disappointed.'

'It sort of left me gasping to hear them say these things in such a callous, disdainful way about me, about my family, about 75 million Americans.'

'This should be a wake-up call to clergy,' he said.

MESSAGING: Former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican Jim Nicholson (left) said the Palmieri email 'should be a wake-up call to clergy,' while Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Mike Kelly said the Clintons' inner circle 'are bad people leading us down a bad lane'

'DISHONEST MEDIA': Donald Trump said in Florida that 'the press doesn't want to report' on the anti-Catholic email because 'that could be election-changing'

Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Mike Kelly said the Clinton camp's hostility to the First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty extends to other faiths.

'This attack on Catholics isn't limited just to Catholics,' he said. 'It's evangelicals. It's people of faith. It's Christians. It's on Jews.'

'These are bad people leading us down a bad lane,' he declared.

Like Nicholson, he predicted a backlash from Catholic voters who will 'call their bishops, call their faith-based leaders, get them stirred up.'

Matt Schlapp, a Republican strategist who participates in Trump's Catholic Advisory Group, criticized the Clinton campaign's 'breathtaking anti-Cathoic bigotry.'

'Now we know who the real bigots are,' he said.

'Hillary Clinton likes to tell us she likes to "go high," but this is an example – she and her campaign are lower than a snake's belly.'

ALL HANDS ON DECK: 'Now we know who the real bigots are,' said GOP strategist Matt Schlapp, while former Washington Archdiocese communications secretary Angela Flood jabbed: 'You find out what people really think when they don't think anyone's watching'

Angela Flood, a Catholic Trump advisor who has served as communications secretary for the Archdiocese of Washington, said the Clinton email leaks provide a rare candid look at what her inside circle believes.

'You find out what people really think when they don't think anyone's watching,' Flood said.

The half-hour conference call included questions from only four news outlets: DailyMail.com, The Blaze, FoxNews.com and the Catholic cable TV network EWTN.

'If Mr. Trump had said something negative about Catholic voters, every reporter in America would have been dialing their cell phones to dance on our graves on a Clinton call,' a Trump campaign aide said afterward.

Trump himself suggested in a second Wednesday rally that a double-standard would help protect his Democratic opponent.