Barack Obama won a majority of the Catholic vote both in 2008 and 2012. Hillary Clinton, according to pollsters, is poised to do the same. She is leading Trump among Catholic voters by over twenty points. In an age of secularism and a secularized Catholic Church, Democrats have never found it easier to con Catholics. The more they promise to persecute them, the more they can count on their vote.

Trump says that he will lift Obama’s contraceptive mandate; she promises to enforce it. Trump says that he will appoint justices who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade; she promises to protect it. Trump says that he won’t force taxpayers to pay for abortions; she promises to ensure that they do. She is implacably opposed to every tenet of the natural moral law. Yet it appears that Catholics stand ready to vote for her.

At the convention, Hillary engineered the most extreme platform ever. Her representatives wrote into it a proposal to undo the Hyde Amendment: “We will continue to oppose — and seek to overturn — federal and state laws and policies that impede a woman’s access to abortion, including by repealing the Hyde Amendment.” “Access” is Hillary’s euphemism for forcing Americans to pay for abortion. If she wins, she will work to turn Obama’s contraceptive mandate into an abortion mandate. Her Catholic running mate, Tim Kaine, who symbolizes the secularization of the Catholic Church in America, has said that he is determined to get “comfortable” with Hillary’s position on the Hyde Amendment.

Meanwhile, the bishops say little to nothing. If Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine, and Joe Biden concelebrated a gay wedding, they still wouldn’t denounce them by name. (Joe Biden is now officiating at gay weddings and they still give him Communion.)

The socialist bishops, led by Chicago’s Archbishop Blase Cupich, are busy running interference for Hillary. And even the supposedly Republican-friendly ones like Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia act as if the election is a wash. Referring to Hillary and Trump, he said “both have astonishing flaws” and “neither is clearly better than the other.” If Hillary wins and it becomes open season for lawsuits against Catholic institutions under her judges, will he feel the same? Is neither “better than the other” when one candidate promises to extinguish religious freedom and the other candidate promises to protect it?

“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square,” said the late Chicago Cardinal Francis George. A Hillary presidency will bring that day closer, although one wonders if enough faith will exist in the episcopate to produce dissidents and martyrs. Many of the bishops are spineless secularists, which explains their ambivalence. They never objected to Obama’s contraceptive mandate because they don’t object to contraception. America, a Jesuit magazine which is now reveling in the relativistic pontificate of Francis, editorialized in favor of Obama’s mandate. Notre Dame conferred an honorary degree upon Obama not in spite of his opposition to the Church’s teachings but because of it. The former Santa Fe archbishop, Michael Sheehan, said that the “majority” of bishops didn’t object to the honor granted Obama.

Hillary and Kaine are presenting themselves as the ticket for “Pope Francis Catholics.” According to America, Hillary’s faith is “hidden” but fervent. It is clear that the magazine locates this deeply buried faith not in any support for the Ten Commandments, the Bible, or Judeo-Christian civilization but in her support for left-wing politics unconvincingly labeled “Christian.” Her “God-talk” never seems to involve God. The article talks about the “Methodist” influences on her, but those figures don’t support Christian morality or theology. We’re told that she was influenced by a pastor who supports gay marriage and a youth minister who introduced her to “different religions” than Christianity. We’re also told that “in the 1960s, Mrs. Clinton was a subscriber to motive, a now-defunct magazine published by the Methodist Student Movement” — a publication that “was largely anti-war, pro-worker and anti-nuclear weapon, publishing essays by Methodist thinkers and activists, as well as other Christians, including Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O., and Sister Mary Corita Kent, a one-time Catholic sister active in the 1960s peace movement and known for creating colorful pop art.”

Like Obama, Hillary learned from Saul Alinsky that the Church was infiltrated with enough leftists to cooperate in its own destruction. Should she win the Catholic vote by double digits, Alinsky’s devilish dream will have been realized.