Dear IRS Commissioner Shulman:

This is to request that you investigate Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Catholic Church, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Knights of Columbus for apparent violations of 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations, which by law may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of their activities and may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.

We have read the Special Rules Limiting IRS Authority to Audit a Church and believe that the Catholic Church and its associated theocratic entities violate statutes in a way constistent with IRS protocol for initiating an investigation.

The Catholic Church and Cardinal Dolan have declared war against the candidacy of President Barack Obama.

Cardinal Francis George of Chicago sent two threatening letters to the president, protesting his support for the rights of LGBT Americans, before Dolan on September 20, 2011 sent Obama a threatening letter, in which he said that if Obama continued to support LGBT Americans’ rights, he would “precipitate a national conflict between Church and State of enormous proportions.” Dolan’s threatening letter was publicly posted on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops website and linked to Dolan’s blog.

Subsequently, on November 8, 2011, Dolan had a meeting with President Obama, and afterwards told the bishops that he was happy with the meeting. Dolan’s direct threatening and lobbying of the president appears to have resulted in Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announcing that she was rejecting a recommendation from the Food and Drug Administration to make emergency contraception more broadly available without a prescription. That is to say, Catholic dogma and Dolan’s politicking prevented all American women from having easy access to emergency contraception.

Nonetheless, whenever Dolan and the Church are displeased that the requirements of their government contracts are not strictly in alignment with Catholic dogma, they screech that their “religious liberties” are being violated. Among the religious liberties which they seek to exercise is that of discriminating against LGBT Americans and women generally.

Where the Church has not been able to keep Catholic Americans in line with Church dogma, the Church seeks to impose its theology and shocking little shabby values on the society through legislation and political lobbying. Dolan successfully fought proposed legislation in Wisconsin that would have lifted the statute of limitations for prosecution of child rape. Shortly thereafter, he was made President of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and promoted to New York, where he fiercely fights against proposed legislation that would lift the statute of limitations on child rape. (After the arrest of Father Jaime Duenas in the Bronx, Dolan on his blog trashed Duenas’s alleged 16-year-old female alleged victim). A story in Philadelphia magazine about the Church child rape scandals in the Philadelphia Archdiocese — (the indictment had included names of at least 37 priests who can not be prosecuted because of the statute of limitations) –reported that the Church achieves its successes in fighting the lifting of the statute of limitations in part by having its insurers threaten elected officials.

The Catholic Bishops have called for two weeks of protests of President Obama and his policies between June 21 and July 4, 2012. Republican strategists have been widely quoted in the media in support of those actions, and expressing confidence that it will help them for the 2012 elections.

The Church in every state very actively criticizes President Obama’s every LGBT initiative, naming him while condemning him, in ways that very evidently are negative endorsements of his candidacy, forbidden under 501(c)(3)-related law.

Note that the Catholic Bishops have placed full-page ads denouncing the president’s policies, in such publications as The New York Times and The Washington Post.

To fight against the requirements of their government contracts, and as part of their open political war against President Obama, the Catholic Bishops created a new lobbying body called the Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty. Chaired by Bridgeport, Connecticut Bishop William Lori, that lobbying business includes a lawyer and a lobbyist, substantially devoted to promulgating anti-LGBT hate speech and to lobbying against the rights of LGBTers generally and of women generally. In that regard, it must be noted that Cardinal Bernard Law, who fled Boston for Rome as a result of the Church’s shocking child rape scandals in Boston, led a recent crackdown against American nuns, in which the nuns were lambasted and threatened for doing too much to help the poor and not enough to fight against LGBT rights and the rights of non-nun American women. As many nuns reside within the Church, the male crackdown on them might be thought of as a form of domestic violence.

The Church’s Ad Hoc Committee is an addition to the bishops’ existing powerful and finely tuned lobbying machine in Washington. And, the bishops work in tandem with the Knights of Columbus, also a tax-exempt organization, and an advisor to the Ad Hoc Committee. In 2009, the Knights’ budget was $1.7 billion.

Whereas the tax-exempt Catholic Church does not want to fulfill certain terms of its government contracts, it is now suing the government, so as to keep its government contracts yet be able to discriminate against people it doesn’t like and/or who don’t follow Catholic dogma. The tax-paying victims of the Church’s discrimination, and anti-LGBT and anti-woman’s-rights lobbying, are forced against their wills to pay for the Church to lobby against their rights, to impose religious dogma on U.S. civil law, and to wage war against the U.S. President, thumbing their noses and blowing gleeful Bronx cheers at the 501(c)(3) prohibitions against extensive lobbying and candidate endorsements.

The Catholic Church in America is, in essence, an arm of the Republican Party.

Dolan’s open war against the candidacy of President Obama is seconded by his corporation’s head, the Pope in the Vatican, which is a foreign country. On January 7, 2012, five former U.S. Ambassadors to the Holy See endorsed Romney for President, in a single letter. That endorsement very obviously was discussed with and approved by the Pope and Dolan. The letter evidences theological contempt for the rights of LGBT-Americans and for the rights of women generally. The political thrust of that letter (i.e., anti-Obama, pro-Romney) is now being carried out all across the United States by various corporate leaders of the Catholic Church, its associated theocratic entities and its proxies.

Go Here to Sign Petition