The following exchange occurred on October 8: Dear Mr. Donohue: You might have been busy with your news release of October 1 and did not have a chance to keep up with Laura Holson's coverage of the shooting in Oregon. She began filing from Oregon last Friday. So while our editors discussed your complaint when it [...]
What do Ann Coulter and the Westboro Baptist Church have in common? Both are obscene anti-Catholics. Indeed, they are the worst of Pope Francis' vile critics to emerge during his visit to the United States. Coulter recently tweeted that the Catholic Church was "largely built by pedophiles." This is the kind of comment we might expect [...]
A recent story in the Los Angeles Times on immigration and the Catholic Church said that Bill Donohue and the Catholic League were opposed to immigration reform. This is not true, we said. (In fact, we don't know anyone who doesn't want some reforms.) After doing some fact-checking, the paper corrected the story in a later [...]
Last May, Pope Francis spoke about allegations that the bishop of Osorno, Chile, Juan Barros, was complicit in a crime of priestly sexual abuse. The bishop, who was installed in March, has come under fire for covering up the abuses of Father Fernando Karadima. The priest was found guilty by the Vatican in 2011; the following [...]
Here is what Chris Harper-Mercer said to his victims just before he killed them in Oregon: "Are you Christian?" After they stood up he said, "Good, because you're Christian, you are going to see God in just about one second." He then shot them. Another eyewitness said that after he asked if they were Christian, "then [...]
An exchange between President Barack Obama and author Marilynne Robinson was published in the November 5 edition of the New York Review of Books. The subject was Christianity. Here is a question that President Obama asked Robinson: "How do you reconcile the idea of faith being really important to you and you caring a lot about [...]
Calling religious freedom "one of America's most precious possessions," Pope Francis pointedly embraced the efforts of American Catholics, led by their bishops, to defend religious freedom against government encroachment. The Holy Father spoke following President Obama's welcoming address at the White House. The president, while detailing the horrific persecution of Christians and others in various parts [...]
As he welcomed Pope Francis to the White House, President Barack Obama spoke eloquently about the Catholic Church's contributions to America and the world. He praised Pope Francis' "profound moral example" and thanked him for the "great gift of hope." Yet as the president spoke about religious liberty and the dignity of the human person, there [...]
In a wide-ranging speech before the United Nations General Assembly, Pope Francis' central message was fraternity: the obligations that men and women have to each other, and to the environment. Interestingly, he did not call for all nations in the international community to have an equal voice; rather, he emphasized equity, or fairness. Moreover, instead of [...]
Everywhere Pope Francis went, religious liberty was his most consistent theme. He opened his trip by addressing religious liberty at the White House, arguing that we are called "to preserve and defend that freedom from everything that would threaten or compromise it." If there were any doubt about what he meant, it was removed altogether when [...]
