Anonymous #fundie washingtonpost.com

SAN DIEGO — The Sunday bulletin of San Diego’s Immaculate Conception Catholic Church on Oct. 16 wasn’t very different from all the others.

Seven pages. A welcome to newcomers. A Mass schedule.

But there, between the prayers of healing for the ill and the deployed and a reminder about a parent-child chastity luncheon for ages 11 and up, was an extra flier.

On it was printed a memo, written in Spanish and English, and titled, in part, “How to vote like a Catholic.”

“It is a mortal sin to vote Democrat . . . immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell,” the flier said, as reported by the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The flier listed five political topics that will guarantee damnation for anyone who endorses them, the newspaper reported.

What are those mortal issues? Abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, human cloning and embryonic stem-cell research.

Warnings from the church, which is in Old Town, the city’s historic district, escalated Oct. 30.

The message that day specifically mentioned Hillary Clinton, linking her to the famed late community organizer Saul David Alinsky, whom it described as a tool of “Satan” and “the devil.”

The Alinsky-Hillary Clinton-Satan connection (as a student at Wellesley, she wrote a thesis on Alinsky, who had a following of young activists in the 1960s and ’70s) is an old conservative rap on Clinton, most recently resurrected by Ben Carson at the Republican National Convention.

That Sunday’s bulletin, which was printed on page 3 and not inserted as a flier, listed 10 key issues through which elected officials “impose sin upon us.”

On that expanded list: accepting immigrants whose “religious values are to eradicate every belief except those of their own prophet and god,” supporting immigrants monetarily while the national debt grows, “playing policeman for the world” and supporting gun control.

A spokesman for the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego told the Union-Tribune that the pastor didn’t approve the initial flier.

“For all I know someone thought that they were doing a service” by inserting the message into the bulletin, diocese spokesman Kevin Eckery said. “The pastor said it was not something he had reviewed or approved.”

Eckery said the messages in the flier and bulletin were wrong.

“It’s not a mortal sin to vote for Democrats, number one. And number two, the church doesn’t take positions on this, and we’re not going to.”

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