Families from the archdiocese of Chicago are furious after learning that their emails and voicemails concerning mask mandates were intentionally being ignored.
Since early July, many of the members of the archdiocese have called and emailed the Cardinal and his team, using studies, articles and the like in their push to make masks optional in the archdiocese, having originally formed a Facebook group to do so.
The members, however, were met with mostly silence, other than the occasional email reply thanking them for their inquiries. While other archdioceses in the area made masks optional in their respective areas, Chicago’s stayed silent, until eventually sending an email saying that it was waiting to decide.
In the meantime, Illinois' Democrat Gov. J.B. Pritzker held a press conference announcing mask mandates for all schools, after which Chicago’s archdiocese announced that it had to follow Pritzker’s orders and mandate masks. Members then flooded the inboxes of the Cardinal and his team with phone calls and emails asking why, as private schools, they needed to follow the state, and requested a meeting to sort out their differences.
However, last week, one of the members was added accidentally to an internal email in the archdiocese’s office, after the member emailed saying that she was withholding donations and to request a meeting. The email was from one of the archdiocese team members responsible for making rules for the schools, and it told the Cardinal that “[W]e have not been responding to these emails and voicemails requesting meetings…[T]his is rather typical of the conflating of multiple issues. I advise and I think Greg R [presumably Greg A. Richmond, who was appointed superintendent of schools last month] agrees to continue to not respond because of the volume of these.”
The families of the archdiocese were furious, and since they do not have a typical school board or elect the officials who run their schools, there is not much of a way to hold the officials accountable. Some people of the archdiocese team have connections to the Pritzker administration, one member claimed.
The Archdiocese did not immediately respond to several phone messages and emails from Newsmax requesting comment on the matter.