dubois.jpgThe Obama camp’s National Director of Religious Affairs, Joshua DuBois (pictured), has just contacted God-o-Meter with a response to the Catholic League’s attack on its National Catholic Advisory Committee:

Throughout his career, Senator Obama has reached out to people of faith to talk about how we can lift up the ‘least of these’ in our nation and our world. We hope that [Catholic League president] Mr. [Bill] Donahue will focus on what we can accomplish as people of faith and as a nation by coming working together to address the challenges we face rather than making political attacks that divide us further.

It’s also worth noting that the Catholic League’s Donohue seems to be the only prominent Catholic activist who’s gone so far as to publicly attack Obama’s Catholic team as being insufficiently Catholic. Conservative Catholic activist Deal Hudson, former Catholic outreach chair for the Republican National Committee (and guest blogger this week on Casting Stones, Beliefnet’s group political blog) has offered qualified praise for Obama’s Catholic team on his site Inside Catholic:

Whatever kind of advice Obama receives, however, his campaign has put together a list of respected Catholic lay and religious leaders. These are people who collectively encompass the entire network of middle-to- left Catholic institutions and their leadership. They can give the Obama Catholic outreach tremendous heft and credibility in the eyes of elites, especially the media. These are individuals who, regardless of their politics and theology, can make inroads into the Catholic vote….
Several members have strong and recent ties to centers of power in the Catholic Church. Sharon Daly has been described as one of the highest-ranking lay women leaders in the Church, and was for many years vice-president for social policy at Catholic Charities USA. Ron Cruz, listed now as a consultant, was, only last year, director of the USCCB’s Secretariat of Hispanic Affairs.


5

More from Beliefnet and our partners