Catholic Nuns Take On Dark Money In Politics With Nationwide Bus Tour

[Judi Lynn]

Catholic Nuns Take On Dark Money In Politics With Nationwide Bus Tour
by Jack Jenkins Posted on September 18, 2014 at 2:14 pm Updated: September 18, 2014 at 3:14 pm


[font sizw=1]
Vice President Joe Biden greets supporters with Sister Simone Campbell, left, during the kickoff
of the Nuns on the Bus tour, Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2014, at the Statehouse in Des Moines, Iowa.

CREDIT: AP [/font]

A group of Catholic nuns gathered outside the Capitol in Des Moines, Iowa on Wednesday to kick off a nationwide “We the People. We the Voters” bus tour, seeking to use their moral weight to highlight the evils of “dark money” in politics and encourage disenfranchised people to register to vote and show up on election day.


The nuns, who stood before an assembled crowd of hundreds, were joined by Vice President Joseph Biden, a Roman Catholic, and led by Sister Simone Campbell, a Catholic nun and Executive Director of NETWORK, a Catholic social justice lobby. Campbell and the Vice President both spoke briefly to the crowd, with Campbell citing the pitfalls of money in politics and Biden singing the praises of the nuns’ activism.

“I know no group of people who bring a greater sense of justice and passion to what they do,” Biden said of the nuns, according to the New York Times.

After their initial stop in Iowa, Campbell and NETWORK plan to hold 75 more events in 36 cities over the next five weeks, most of which will focus on voter registration and voter mobilization. The effort, Campbell told ThinkProgress, is about empowering poor and disenfranchised voters — people whose voices often go unheard amid the flood of wealthy political action groups that are exacting ever-growing influence over American politics. These organizations are aided in part by the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. FEC, which loosened restrictions that had long prohibited corporations from spending large sums money to impact elections. Campbell and her fellow nuns argue that the influence of big money in politics drowns out the concerns of regular Americans.

More:
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2014/09/18/3569186/nuns-on-a-bus-dark-money-kochs/

[shenmue]

1. Go nuns!

[DreamGypsy]

2. There are some Catholics I admire and whose world views I respect...

...some others, not so much. From the article:

(Sister Simone) Campbell insists that the new bus tour is bigger than Catholicism. The dangers of money in politics, she argues, should be understood by all Americans, not just Catholics or other people of faith.

“I do this because of faith, but we don’t all have to do it because of that,” Campbell said. “We do it because of the Constitution.”

as opposed to:

But as the influence of NETWORK and Campbell has grown, so too has criticism of their actions — primarily from within the Catholic church. Nuns are actually more popular than bishops or priests in the United States, and their activism played a key role in helping pass the Affordable Care Act in 2010, which the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops publicly opposed. But their advocacy has rubbed many in the Catholic hierarchy the wrong way: Campbell and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), a group that represents most U.S. sisters, were put under investigation by the Vatican in 2012 for supposedly spending to much time on social justice work and not enough time defending church doctrine on abortion and homosexuality. There was some hope that Pope Francis would call off the inquiry when he ascended to the papacy last year, but he reaffirmed the investigation in April 2013.

Someone should point out to Pope Frank that previous inquisitions didn't work all that well as PR events for his church.