Soon to be former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton campaign staffers took part in a 2011 email chain attacking News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thompson for raising his kids Catholic.

“Ken Auletta’s latest piece on Murdoch in the New Yorker starts off with the aside that both Murdoch and Robert Thompson, managing editor of the WSJ, are raising their kids Catholic,” John Halpin, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, wrote in a 2011 email to John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri, according to hacked emails published by WikiLeaks.

“Friggin’ Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus,” Halpin wrote. “Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) from the SC and think tanks to the media and social groups.”

“It’s an amazing bastardization of the faith,” he wrote. “They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.”

Lobbyist and longtime Clinton ally, Podesta, founded CAP in 2003, and served as its president and CEO until he left to join the Obama administration in 2014. Palmieri was the president of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and is now the Clinton campaign’s communications director.

Halpin was referring to a 2011 article by New Yorker magazine writer Ken Auletta entitled “Murdoch’s Best Friend.” The article opens with a reference to a Hello! Magazine story on Murdoch having his daughters baptized in Jordan.

Australian-born Murdoch runs News Corp, the company that owns Fox News. Apparently, CAP staff thought it was odd Murdoch was raising his kids Catholic.

“I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion,” Palmieri responded to Halpin. “Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.”

“Excellent point,” Palmieri added. “They can throw around ‘Thomistic’ thought and ‘subsidiarity’ and sound sophisticated because no one knows what the hell they’re talking about.”

This story has been updated to reflect that Murdoch is raising his kids Catholic. Murdoch, himself, has not converted to Catholicism.

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