Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, accompanied by traveling press secretary Nick Merrill, left, and director of communications Jennifer Palmieri, right, listens to a question from a member of the media as her campaign plane prepares to take off at Westchester County Airport in Westchester, N.Y., Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2016, to head to Tampa for a rally in Tampa.
"They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy," he said.
Palmieri replied, writing, "Catholicism is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals."
Another 2011 email sent to current Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta from the head of a progressive group called for a "Catholic Spring," adapting the pro-democracy "Arab Spring" in the Middle East.
"There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle-ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic Church," Voices for Progress President Sandy Newman wrote.