Miami Courant

The leader of one of the nation's largest Catholic activist organizations said Wednesday that Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski should retract his attack on on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and distance himself and the church from the political operatives who orchestrated it.

Brian Burch, President and Founder of Catholic Vote, headquartered in Madison, Wisc., said Archbishop Wenski's misquoting of DeSantis is "indisputable and needs to be publicly corrected."

"Given it has been confirmed as false and misleading, Archbishop Wenski should retract this attack on Gov. DeSantis," Burch said. "It's indisputable that Gov. DeSantis did not say what Archbishop Wenski claims he did; it needs to be publicly corrected"

"It is a shame that these political groups sought to exploit such an important voice in our Church this way," he said. "I know the Archbishop and his work; he wouldn't consciously repeat such falsehoods unless someone misled him to believe it was true."

At a press conference Tuesday held by a pro-illegal immigration American Business Immigration Council (ABIC), Archbishop Wenski claimed that DeSantis called immigrant children "disgusting," when a recording of the governor's comments shows he actually said that "mass trafficking" of immigrant children is disgusting. 

At an an event last week at the Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, honoring the 14,000 children covertly evacuated from Communist Cuba to the United States from 1960-62 as part of Operation Pedro Pan, DeSantis slammed pro-illegal immigration activists who equate the two. 

“I just think there's a lot of bad analogies that get made in modern political discourse. But to equate what's going on with the Southern border with mass trafficking of humans, illegal entry, drugs, all this other stuff with operation Pedro Pan, quite frankly, is disgusting. It's wrong. It is not even close to the same thing," DeSantis said.

Cuban parents sent their children to the U.S. as part of Operation Pedro Pan to prevent Communist Dictator Fidel Castro from seizing them and placing them in Communist indoctrination camps, terminating their parental rights. 

The program to care for the children was managed by the Catholic Welfare Bureau in Miami, now Catholic Charities, which once vehemently opposed Communism, an ideology that rejects the idea of God. 

Catholic Vote, "a layperson-led effort of Americans who fully support the teachings of the Catholic Church. We are not funded or administered by the Catholic Bishops, and 100% of our funding comes from our members." It reportedly has more than 500,000 members.