American Spectator: The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet find themselves in a La La Land scandal.
It was reported recently that a couple of nuns out in Southern California had ripped off the Catholic school where they worked for many years to the tune of at least $500,000. They spent the money on gambling sprees to Las Vegas, among other pursuits. The habit-less sisters, who were henned up together in a Torrance townhouse inside a gated community (the neighbors, according to the Los Angeles Times, wondered how they afforded their matching Volvos), hail from the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet — a “social justice” religious order, naturally.
But even richer than that, it is the order that played an important role in Obama’s Alinskyite education. It was at Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles, a college founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, that Obama went for a ten-day seminar in the 1980s to learn Saul Alinsky’s rules for radicals. As reported in No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom, the Gay Mafia socialist from Chicago, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, paid for Obama’s trip out to Mount St. Mary’s College for that event.
The left-wing nuns in the order had long maintained a chapter for the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a group of socialist agitators that Saul Alinsky established with the help of Chicago priests who would later honor Obama at Notre Dame. The sisters were happy to let Alinskyite activists use their campus in the summer to train the next generation of subversives.
According to Obama’s latest biographer, David Garrow, those ten days at Mount St. Mary’s, where Obama rubbed shoulders with radical priests and nuns, proved seminal in Obama’s political education:
Mount St. Mary’s College was IAF’s long-standing long-standing summer location, with trainees arriving on a Tuesday afternoon. Wednesday was devoted to two basic staples of IAF teaching: “World As Is/World As Should Be ‘Power’ Session” and “Power and Self-Interest.”… Obama was already familiar with Alinsky’s major themes and principles…. Ed Chambers [a former seminarian], Alinsky’s lead inheritor, had articulated them in a small 1978 volume titled Organizing for Family and Congregation. Alinsky’s best-known principle was that “power tends to come in two forms: organized people and organized money.” But Alinsky had never fully grasped a second point that was now emphasized by Kellman, Galluzzo, and Chambers: “one of the largest reservoirs of untapped power is the institution of the parish and congregation,” because “they have the people, the values, and the money.”
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