New book: Chicago archdiocese, with CCHD approval, paid for Obama’s 1986 IAF training

July 24, 2012

In 1986, Barack Obama, then a community organizer in Chicago, attended training offered by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) with funds provided by the Archdiocese of Chicago, according to putative archdiocesan archival documents given to Phyllis Schlafly and George Neumayr and printed in their new book, No Higher Power.

The Campaign for Human Development, now known as the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, is the US bishops’ controversial anti-poverty program; the IAF is a community-organizing network founded by Saul Alinsky.

“In the 1980s, the Catholic archdiocese of Chicago contributed to the training of Obama in the very Alinskyite radicalism that would culminate in such anti-religious measures as the HHS mandate,” write Schlafly and Neumayr. “In fact, in the course of writing this book, we met a source who once had access to copies of documents from the archives of the Chicago archdiocese. This source supplied us with never-before-published copies of invoices, checks, and letters that confirm the Church’s support for the man who would one day seek to destroy its religious freedom.”

According to the documents, Obama in May 1986 sought reimbursement from the Chicago office of the Campaign for Human Development for a plane ticket to IAF training. The following month, he was reimbursed with a check from the “Catholic Bishop of Chicago,” the name of the corporation sole under which the archdiocese operates.

 

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Further information:

• New book’s ironic claim: Catholic Church paid to send Obama to an Alinsky-founded group’s community organizing training (see the documents) (TheBlaze)