More than anyone else these days, Steve Allen is leading the fight to clean up TV. Allen, the famous comedian and accomplished jazz piano player, has had it with the whole entertainment industry, and he is doing something about it. He’s become the spokesman for the Parents Television Council, a group that is seeking to nudge Hollywood the right way. If... [Read more...]
GLAAD BARES ALL
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) announced in January the nominees for its 10th Anniversary Media Awards. If you guessed that the anti-Catholic play, “Corpus Christi,” was nominated for Outstanding New York Theater Production for Broadway and Off-Broadway, you were right. If you guessed that the anti-Catholic play,... [Read more...]
MORE “RED FLAGS”
Catholic League members know that one of our pet-peeves is the selective identification of Catholic miscreants in the press. Here are some more gratuitous comments, all designed to wave red flags at readers. Four Northwestern football players are implicated in a point-shaving scandal. An article about this appears in the Chicago Sun-Times; it is noted... [Read more...]
THE NATION SHOWS ITS CLASS
The Nation, the weekly radical magazine, recently showed its class with a story on Catholic hospitals; the class-conscious publication proved that however middle-class its writers may be, its workmanship is decidedly low-class. On the cover of the January 25 edition was a popular illustration of Madonna and Child. The title of the piece was vintage Nation fare:... [Read more...]
NO TO HORMEL—AGAIN
We thought we wouldn’t hear of James Hormel again, but we were wrong. Last year, the league opposed his nomination as U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg because he refused to dissociate himself from his earlier embrace of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a west coast anti-Catholic group. We were delighted when his nomination failed to go anywhere in... [Read more...]
PAPAL VISIT: WINNERS—MEDIA; LOSERS–DISSENTERS
Media treatment of the pope’s visit to St. Louis was overwhelmingly fair. Indeed, so few problems were spotted by the Catholic League, or brought to our attention, that it can safely be said that never before has Pope John Paul II been treated so fairly by journalists and broadcasters alike. There were, however, some interesting things that happened... [Read more...]
POPE TO BLAME FOR BAPTIST WOES
We sometimes have a hard time believing what we read. For instance, would you believe that the pope has now been blamed for the fact that many Baptist churches won’t allow a woman to preach? That’s exactly what Barbara Reynolds said in a recent syndicated column. Here’s a sample of what was printed in the Tribune-Review, a Pittsburgh-area newspaper. Reynolds... [Read more...]
PRO-CATHOLIC OR ANTI-CATHOLIC?
In September, 1998, Eliot Spitzer, then a candidate for New York State Attorney General, held a press conference in front of a Catholic hospital in Buffalo to protest a decision by Independent Health that would exclude the area’s Catholic hospitals from its coverage. Standing in front of Mercy Hospital, Spitzer said that “To simply exclude the... [Read more...]
SETON HALL DEFENDED
The Seton Hall University administration did the right thing by nixing a proposal to give New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman an award; her enthusiasm for abortion-rights, including partial birth, makes her unsuitable for recognition on any Catholic campus. But no sooner had school officials acted responsibly when the chorus of busy-body critics began. The New... [Read more...]
“THE SIMPSONS” OFFENDS AGAIN
In the last edition of Catalyst, we ran a story on an episode of the Fox animated TV show, “The Simpsons,” that raised our eyebrows. Our objection centered on an exchange between the character, Bart, and his mom. On the November 22 show, Bart said to his mother, “I’m starving. Mom, can we go Catholic so we can get Communion wafers... [Read more...]