The notorious anti-Catholic play, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, is scheduled to be performed at Middlesex County College December 7-10. Because the college receives state funding, Catholic League president William Donohue wrote to New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman asking her to respond to this outrage. His letter of November 22 was also addressed to Dr. John Bakum, president of Middlesex County College and to Mr. Jerome Katcher, the chairman of the Board of Trustees at Middlesex: Terence Kenny, the president of the North-Central New Jersey Chapter of the Catholic League and Bishop Edward T. Hughes, Bishop of Metuchen, also received copies of the letter.
Neither Governor Whitman nor Middlesex County College officials have done anything about this matter.
William Donohue offered the following comment on this incident:
When Sister Mary Ignatius appeared in New York in the early 1980s, it drew fire from the Anti-Defamation League, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the American Jewish Committee, the Catholic League and many others. Play critics from Clive Barnes to Frank Rich dubbed it anti-Catholic, as well they should have: It is perhaps the most anti-Catholic play ever produced.
“If it is wrong to use government monies to promote religion, it should be equally wrong to use government monies to bash religion. And if it is right to promote the values of tolerance and diversity on government-funded campuses, it should be objectionable for such campuses to trash Roman Catholicism. By remaining mute. Middlesex County College officials have sanctioned the play.
“Even worse is Gov. Whitman. In the summer of 1994, she issued a public statement condemning a boardwalk vendor for selling anti-gay T-Shirts while saying nothing about vile anti-Catholicism on the state funded campus of William Paterson College. More recently, Gov. Whitman failed to respond to another incident of Catholic bashing, namely the production of Nine, a play that portrays a nun transformed into a ‘voluptuous whore’: Gov. Whitman is the Honorary Chairman of the Paper Mill Playhouse Board of Trustees (where Nine was performed) and offered no reply when I asked her to do so on September 22.
“Gov. Whitman owes Catholics in New Jersey an explanation for her silence in the wake of taxpayer-funded assaults on Roman Catholicism.”
