With early voting underway and Election Day approaching, the head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego Thursday reminded pastors and priests that while they are obligated to share how their faith’s teachings are relevant to public policy, they shouldn’t get entangled in partisan politics.

Bishop Robert McElroy sent the message to 100 parishes in the diocese and all the priests not affiliated with parishes after the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Old Town issued bulletins that included partisan messages, including one that that claimed Satan was working through Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

“Let me stress again that while we have a moral role to play in explaining how Catholic teaching relates to certain public policy issues, we must not and will not endorse specific candidates, use parish media or bulletins to favor candidates or parties through veiled language about selectively chosen issues, or engage in partisan political activity of any kind,” McElroy wrote.


All political material distributed by parishes must be approved by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the California Catholic Conference or the diocese’s Office of Social Ministry, he said.

McElroy noted that his warning came after The San Diego Union-Tribune published a front-page article about the controversial content in the church newsletters.

Legal experts said the parish’s statements likely violated IRS regulations that prohibit tax-exempt organizations like churches from making political statements in support or against a candidate for public office.

On Oct. 16 a flier was inserted into the historic church’s bulletin that listed five public policy issues that are “intrinsically evil” and conflict with Catholic teachings. Democrats support all five, while Republicans back none, it said.


“Based on the above, it is a mortal sin to vote Democrat,” the flier stated. “If your bishop, priest, deacon or other parishioners tell you to do so, you must walk away from them. Your immortal soul and your salvation are at stake-and so are theirs.”

The diocese said the flier was inserted into the bulletin without the pastor’s knowledge, and that its contents do not reflect Catholic teachings. It is not a mortal sin to support Democrats, and voters should use their faith-informed conscience when picking a candidate, the diocese said.

On Oct. 30, another message appeared in an article that ran in Immaculate Conception’s actual bulletin. Using an out-of-context line from a 2015 Clinton speech, the newsletter said that the Democratic nominee was influenced by Satan via Saul Alinsky, the trailblazing community organizer.

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“The devil does this through the tactics outlined by Saul Alinsky with the outcome as Hillary Clinton has stated, ‘And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed’, to draw us away from God’s teachings regarding the sanctity of life to those of the world and its prince.”

Clinton, speaking at the Women in the World Summit in 2015, was actually talking about eliminating roadblocks that make it difficult for girls to go to school, women to attend college, prevent the enforcement of domestic violence laws, and access to reproductive and maternal healthcare.

The article also included ten “sins” that have “enslaved” American society through the support of politicians, judges and voters. Some of the threats were longstanding issues the Catholic church has opposed, like abortion, gay marriage, and embryonic stem cell research.

But the article also spoke against admitting immigrants whose religions aim to “eradicate every believe except of their own prophet and god, and to impose this on America,” adding to the public debt by assisting immigrants while “paying Americans to sit home and not work,” and for “regulating the right to bear arms for free citizens in a nation where criminals and terrorists will always have weapons and where government is now in opposition to its citizens.”


The diocese said it welcomes immigrants, and that matters of the national debt or Second Amendment aren’t issues the church gets involved in.

Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church in Old Town (Joshua Stewart/Union-Tribune )

A review of several of the diocese parish’s bulletins posted online shows that most have mentioned the upcoming election, but they emphasize the importance of taking the election seriously, thinking like a Catholic in the voting booth, and requests to pray for politicians and civility. They less frequently mention candidates and political parties by name.

On Tuesday, a week before the election and a day before news about the bulletins, McElroy delivered an address at the University of San Diego where he emphasized the importance for bishops to be passionate about their faith and the implications of public policy, but that they must not be partisan.


“I speak to you tonight as a bishop who is part of a long tradition in Catholic episcopal leadership in the United States which holds that both the Church and society are best served when bishops refrain from publicly endorsing or favoring, either directly or indirectly, specific candidates in partisan elections,” he said.

And he said that voting as a Catholic isn’t so much an evaluation of one or several policy issues, but a spiritual and moral process.

He spoke about the need for political solutions that end abortions, eliminate hunger, prevent violent conflict, stop right-to-die laws, halt global climate change and environmental destruction, eliminate the drug trade, and end partisan impasses that prevent immigration reform.

“It requires, in a very real sense, the development of ‘a Catholic political imagination’ which sees the connections between poverty and the disintegration of families; war and the global refugee crisis; the economic burdens of the aging and legalized physician-assisted suicide,” he said.


But McElroy said there is an urgent need to address the dismal state of American politics.

“The sickness in the political soul of our nation will only be healed if society undertakes a massive regeneration of the political ties which unite us as a people and begin to see these ties as more important for us as a society than the partisan divisions which rend us apart,” he said.

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