Catholics did it again. According to the Pew Center, 52 percent of Catholics recently voted for Barack Obama. However, looking into the voting statistics a little deeper shows a stark contrast in the voting habits of Catholics. Following the Catholic bishops’ shepherding, more than 60 percent of white Catholics voted for Mitt Romney while 75 percent of Hispanic Catholics (nearly 6.8 million) voted for Obama. Those Catholic Hispanics voted for Obama in spite of their religious leaders’ positions. Obama won by 3.3 million votes. It was the Hispanic Catholic vote that returned Obama to power.

The Hispanic Catholic vote happened in spite of an immensely intense campaign by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops urging their people to understand the faith and moral implications of voting against the unborn, of voting against the sanctity of marriage and of voting against religious freedom. Obviously, Hispanic Catholics do not get it. When it comes to deciding what is more important, “free stuff” or religious morality, they overwhelmingly voted for “free stuff”!

The Catholic Church has rightly sued the federal government to keep it from infringing on religious freedom by forcing the church to provide insurance coverage for contraception and abortion. It is highly probable that Obama will appoint one or two new Supreme Court justices in the next four years. They will not be moderate constitutional judges. They will be like his last appointees. Maybe they won’t even have any actual experience on a bench.

It is time for the Catholic church to reconsider the way it communicates with its Hispanic followers and the way it supports illegal immigrants. Whatever they are doing now is not working. It seems to me ironic that the misguided efforts of the church to aid Hispanic illegal immigrants for decades may have doomed the fate of this great nation as well as its own fate in the courts.

Charles J. Maley
Northport