Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio recently announced the appointment of 60 New York leaders to his transition committee. He instructed them to “identify women and men from every part of our city and walk of life” that want a better New York. He lied. Also lying was Transition Co-Chair Jennifer Jones Austin, who said that committee members “come from every slice of civic life—business and labor, science and the arts, clergy….” (Donohue’s italic.)
In fact, there are two ministers, two rabbis and one imam on the transition committee. There are no Catholic priests. Catholics make up 52.5 percent of New York, yet they have no clergy representation. This is not an oversight: every attempt was made to include persons from virtually every sector of New York. This was clearly done by design. Looks like de Blasio’s politics of inclusion has its limits.
To make matters worse, de Blasio showed his contempt for Catholics by naming to his transition committee the man who insulted them in 1998 with the “Sensation” exhibit, Arnold L. Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. That exhibit featured a portrait of Our Blessed Mother with elephant dung and pornographic cut outs on it. Donohue led a demonstration against it.
If de Blasio ever gets around to appointing a Catholic priest to his transition team, we hope he doesn’t take the advice of Darren Walker, a member of the committee. Walker is president of the Ford Foundation, the most generous donor to the most anti-Catholic and pro-abortion organization in the nation, Catholics for Choice.
The Catholic League contacted every Catholic parish in all five boroughs about de Blasio’s decision to shut out priests. De Blasio has only just begun, yet he has managed to insult a majority of New Yorkers.
