Offenses against Catholicism tend to emanate from activist organizations, the artistic community, commercial establishments, government and the media. Here’s a sample drawn from each quarter.

In 1997, Oregon was home to one of the most unashamedly anti-Catholic campaigns in recent history. The battle over assisted suicide raged in Oregon with a fury, bringing the anti-Catholic bigots out of the closet in mass. It was not good enough to challenge the Catholic Church’s position on the subject, no, the pro-assisted suicide crowd tried to intimidate the Church by questioning its right to speak. When groups like Don’t Let Them Shove Their Religion Down Your Throat Committee surface, it’s clear that more than honest disagreement is at stake.

Non-profit organizations are given a tax exempt status because they serve the public good. Occasionally, however, some non-profits, especially those that are activist organizations, do things that violate this trust. Such was the case in 1997 when the American Jewish Congress sought to censor Catholic League material from a conference on, of all things, prejudice.

In the spring of 1997, a Long Island group called the Bi-County Conference for Educators held a conference on “Reducing Prejudice: A Matter of Education.” It was principally sponsored by the American Jewish Congress Center for Prejudice Reduction and the Suffolk Association for Jewish Educational Services. The Catholic League sought admission to the event but was rejected because the sponsors were allegedly taken aback by the offensive illustrations contained in our annual report.

Amidst the lying that the American Jewish Congress engaged in was a clear bias against the Catholic League. When pressed, the AJCongress admitted that the league’s materials were too pro-life and too pro-voucher to be included (no objections were raised against those organizations that distributed anti-voucher material). They also took offense that we recorded as an example of anti-Catholicism a protest by a Jewish patient in a Catholic hospital demanding that a crucifix be removed from his room (no other organization had its material scrutinized in such a manner). In short, the organizers of a conference on prejudice proved to be guilty of the very crime they claimed to counter.

It is a sad commentary on the artistic community that offenses against Catholicism continue to mount. Never, absolutely never, have we seen one prominent artist, from any part of the country, condemn his fellow artists for bashing Catholics. It would be unthinkable that artists would idly sit back while some mad member of their community lashed out at gays. Catholics, however, are a different story.

When we learned that a suburban Pittsburgh town was hosting an obscene play targeting Catholics, we protested. Fortunately, we also got the person who operates the playhouse to pull the most offensive parts from the play.

The play, “Once a Catholic,” was allegedly about the awkwardness that Catholic schoolgirls felt in the 1950s as they discovered their sexuality. But it also included discussions of young men engaging in anal sex and sex with camels, comments on the pope having sex with prostitutes and remarks about the practice of Mary’s husband, Joseph, who it was said liked to stir his tea with his penis. These parts, and more, were dropped after we objected (the woman who operated the playhouse was afraid of getting any more bad publicity).

Attacks on Our Blessed Mother are not uncommon in the art world. Last year’s worst exhibition of this sort was the Gober display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Robert Gober had a need to express himself by showing a phallic culvert pipe piercing Mary, the purpose of which, he boasted, was to deprive “the Virgin Mary of the womb from which Christ was born.” It was defended by the museum’s director, the New York Times and the National Catholic Reporter.

Like most Americans these days, Catholics are generally treated fairly on the job, thus requiring little assistance from the league. But problems still occur, the worst of which occurred at the Silvergate Retirement Residence in the San Diego area.

On Ash Wednesday, a young Catholic Hispanic woman went to work at Silvergate only to be told that she had to remove her ashes from her forehead. When she balked, her supervisor forcibly removed the ashes with a dirty dish towel. Once the Catholic League discovered what happened, we immediately went into action. Thanks to Carl Horst of our San Diego chapter, the offender was disciplined, an apology was granted and workshops on bias against Catholics were instituted for all Silvergate employees.

The teaching profession is no stranger to anti-Catholicism. Indeed, it may even be the worst offender. This is especially true of higher education; Catholic bashing takes place on our nation’s campuses with an alacrity that is shocking.

We simply couldn’t keep up with all the complaints we’d get if we advertised in student newspapers for students to alert us to anti-Catholic remarks made in the classroom. Professors who bash Catholics always take refuge under the banner of free speech. Yes, we know all about their rights and make no moves to stop them. But we have just as much a right to exercise our freedom of speech by expressing our moral outrage at what is being said. The real “censors,” if the truth (another heresy on campus) be told, are those who want to silence the Catholic League from confronting them.

To give one example of Catholic bashing that was shown on TV, consider what happened before the game, and during half-time, of the Stanford-Notre Dame football game. Played in Palo Alto, the Stanford band parodied the Irish famine and staged a mock confrontation between a Catholic cardinal and the devil; the Irish were called “stinking drunks.” Had it been Native Americans who were targeted, it is doubtful the slam would have been allowed. The league was pleased, however, that our request for a formal apology from the school, as well as sanctions against the students, was honored by Stanford president Gerhard Casper.

Bigotry that stems from government is particularly odious. In this regard, the year 1997 saw the league unusually active in defending the rights of Catholic prison inmates. For example, the league was called upon to assist inmates who requested a dietary schedule that respected their religious rights: a number of correctional institutions throughout the nation continue to ill-serve Catholic inmates during the Lenten season. With our assistance, these abuses were usually remedied rather quickly.

Catholic inmates also got our help when they asked for equivalent religious services afforded inmates of other faiths. Sometimes the question was whether a correctional institution would hire a Catholic DRE to tend to Catholic prisoners. Whatever the issue, the league’s central concern was that discrimination against Catholic inmates did not go unchecked.

The year 1997 was also the year that many members in Congress sought to fight Christian persecution abroad. The Catholic League eagerly supported these measures, most especially the Specter-Wolf bill. We also joined forces with other organizations in objecting to the Most Favored Nation status accorded China: the human rights record in China is so bad (particularly with regard to the treatment of the Catholic clergy) as to make a privileged trade status scandalous.

This annual report lists more offenses committed by the media than any other source in society. What we objected to covered everything from gratuitous asides made on sit-coms to vile, anti-Catholic attacks made by comedians. But if we had to choose the most offensive, blatantly anti-Catholic statement of the year, it would be the edition of Al Goldstein’s Screw magazine that depicted Mother Teresa in an extremely vulgar and obscene way: an illustration of her made it look like she was having intercourse with a man portrayed as Jesus; a picture of her face was superimposed on the naked body of a woman who sat with her legs spread; and a cartoon of Mother Teresa showed her sitting on a toilet. This isn’t just bigotry—it’s Satanism.

Far from being anything like that was the ABC show, “Nothing Sacred.” Though not anti-Catholic in the usual sense of the term, the show was offensive enough to merit serious attention.

Our objections centered on the manipulative use of the TV medium to promote the scurrilous idea that dissident Catholics are better Catholics than loyal Catholics. Never has TV offered a more politically-correct picture of a priest and never have we seen a more contrived and utterly depressing series about Catholicism. Throughout the series every attempt was made to relegate the teachings of the Magisterium to the bin of opinion while elevating discordant voices in the Church to that of the Gospel.

It was the Catholic League’s unmasking of the ideological purpose of the show that angered our critics. We objected, in no uncertain terms, to a show that depicted dissident Catholics as caring and compassionate, painting traditional Catholics as cold-hearted and authoritarian. Bishops, of course, were uniformly treated with disdain. They have to be: they are upholding Church teachings, many of which, we learn, are downright cruel and oppressive.

Once started, the propaganda machine that Disney/ABC created could not be shut down. The show had ratings that were so bad that only a few programs on TV fared worse, the difference being that the other failed shows were axed while “Nothing Sacred” survived. This Disney/ABC policy of preferential treatment—subsidizing loser shows that carry trendy political messages—was done to try and best the Catholic League. However, the reality was that the league’s protest resulted in a surge in membership while the show floundered, leaving behind a trail of ill-will, abandoned advertisers and unsigned syndicated contracts.

In 1996, a Sony CD called O Come All Ye Faithful was produced by the group Rock for Choice. All the proceeds from the Christmas CD were earmarked for pro-abortion causes. In early 1997, the Catholic League, as well as many other notable Catholic and Protestant organizations, objected to the album as an unjustifiable abuse of our sacred holiday. The response from Sony was of the “sorry-if-you-were-offended-but” type statement. We decided, then, to up the ante.

Instead of simply requesting Sony to retire the CD, we told them exactly what would happen if they did not cooperate. Just before Thanksgiving, on the eve of the Christmas shopping spree, we would place an op-ed page ad in the New York Timescalling for a boycott of all Sony products. This would be a multidenominational effort, as well as a protest that would be joined by the pro-life community. We would arrange a press conference in front of Sony headquarters and generally pepper the company with bad publicity. Shortly after getting our letter, Sony dropped the album.

There is little question that progress is being made fighting against anti-Catholicism. Never before have we seen faster and more comprehensive responses to our concerns. Indeed, the term Catholic bashing, which we take great pride in mainstreaming into the American lexicon, is now as well-received by the media and the public as any other label. It must also be said that we can never be sure just how successful we have become: much of what we do is preventative medicine and we have no way of measuring the number of Catholic bashing incidents that might have surfaced were it not for our presence.

Still, there is much work to be done. Few institutions are mocked and ridiculed more than the Roman Catholic Church. Moreover, there is no shortage of the number of Christian bookstores that continue to carry anti-Catholic tracts, and there is no religion that has earned the enmity of secularists more than Catholicism. As long as there is a need to combat anti-Catholicism, there will be a need for the Catholic League.

Contrary to what our critics say, what we are doing is quintessentially American—we are flexing our First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and freedom of religion in a manner that is pure apple pie. So it does not matter that over the past year we have been called every name in the book. What matters is that we are resolute in our convictions and determined in our efforts. Most important, we will not be dissuaded by those whose professed allegiance to the First Amendment never seems to include us.

William A. Donohue, Ph.D.
President 

January

Edison, NJ – More than 20 Jewish families in Edison and neighboring towns received anonymous mailings of “Smokescreens,” a notorious anti-Catholic book from Chick Publications which claims that the Vatican financed Hitler’s extermination of Jews. Chick Publications is the publishing arm of anti-Catholic activist Jack Chick. “This mail is clearly motivated by bias, hatred, ignorance and a desire to distribute misinformation,” said Shai Goldstein, director of the New Jersey office of B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League. Edison police labeled the mailings an anti-Catholic bias crime.

Spring

Detroit, MI – The Fund for Animals, protesting the fact that some priests in Michigan hunt deer, dressed up as priests and nuns to mock Catholics as they left Church. There were no reports of similar protests against Protestant ministers or Jewish rabbis, suggesting that either only Catholic clergy hunt deer or—more likely—that only Catholic clergy are the targets of religious bigotry from The Fund for Animals.

April

Marshfield, WI – The Freedom from Religion Foundation, an anti-religion activist organization, filed suit to have a statue of Jesus removed from a city park where it has stood since 1959, when it was donated to the city by the Knights of Columbus. Even though the site of the statue had been purchased from the city of Marshfield by a private organization, the Freedom From Religion Foundation sued both the city and the private group, the Henry Praschak Memorial Fund. In December, a federal judge rejected the lawsuit and allowed the statue to remain.

April

Republic, MO – The logo of Republic, Missouri, has a fish on it, which to the ACLU is a constitutional crisis. Labeling the fish “a secret sign of Christianity,” these anti-religion activists sued the town to have it removed.

April 10

Washington, DC – Catholics for Contraception, the latest project of Frances Kissling’s Catholics for a Free Choice, ran an ad in the National Catholic Reporter blaming the Catholic bishops’ “concerted assault on family planning” for the high rate of abortions worldwide. Kissling’s term is code for opposition to killing unborn babies. Her misappropriation of the Catholic label to create fissures within the Catholic community is a staple in her arsenal against Catholicism.

May

Stow, OH – Depositions were taken in a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking to have a cross and Bible removed from the city seal. While city officials contended that the images helped to depict the historical background of Stow, the ACLU argued that they were divisive, and brought to the surface anti-Semitic and anti-religious attitudes.

Summer

Montgomery, AL – An article in Intelligence Report, published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, blamed abortion-related violence in part on “Catholic Apocalypticism.” One “strain” of this “version of Catholicism” was said to derive “from what the Catholic Church calls the miracle at Fatima. Some believers ‘consider abortion to be an affront to God’s laws and perhaps a sign that the apocalypse is near,’’’ the article stated, quoting a man it identified as “an expert on the Radical Right.” “There is evidence,” the article claimed—without citing any—”that John Salvi,” who had killed two abortion clinic workers in Boston, “may have been influenced by Fatimist literature of this sort.” The “sort” of literature on Fatima which allegedly encouraged abortion clinic violence was also never specifically cited or described. Instead, the article went on to accuse a Catholic priest, Father Norman Weslin, of advocating “a religious war” (the article’s words, not Father Weslin’s), because he identified Satan as the chief obstacle to his pro-life efforts.

September

Boston, MA – The American Jewish Congress, acting through its New England chapter, asked the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to remove the abbreviation A.D. – for anno Domini, or year of our Lord—from court papers.

October 18

San Francisco, CA – The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of drag queens who dress as Catholic nuns, held a “wig drive” to benefit the American Cancer Society (ACS). While giving their usual anti-Catholic performance—parading in full habit and mocking Catholic nuns—they collected over $1,300 and 100 wigs for women who have suffered hair loss as a result of cancer treatments. Responding to a letter of protest from the league, Patricia Fells, CEO of the American Cancer Society’s California division, said that the ACS does “not judge our donors based upon their religious beliefs or sexual preferences.” This distorted the league’s objection, which was based not on the “religious beliefs or sexual preferences” of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, but on their bigoted mockery of the religious beliefs of Catholics.

October 25

Great Neck, NY – Planned Parenthood of Nassau County joined a coalition of groups warning that educational vouchers are “an experiment that promises to richly reward extremist special interests.” Those words, Planned Parenthood of Nassau’s coordinator of public affairs told the league, expressed the coalition’s concern that “the Catholic Church and the Christian Coalition” would use vouchers “to infiltrate the public schools.”

October 26

Westchester, NY – Polly Rothstein, president of the Westchester Coalition for Legal Abortion, blamed John Cardinal O’Connor of New York for the killing of Buffalo abortionist Dr. Barnett Slepian. Accusing pro-life religious leaders of “spewing hate,” Rothstein said that although he did not pull the trigger, “Cardinal O’Connor is accountable for these religious followers who do pull the trigger.”

November

Little Rock, AK – A private citizen voluntarily excluded a nativity scene from a holiday display he was donating to the city, after the American Civil Liberties Union expressed concern. Although the display included other Christian and Jewish religious symbols, and was to be placed in a city park, where courts have upheld religious displays as free expression, Jennings Osborne said he “didn’t want the city to waste any money defending a lawsuit over the Nativity scene.” An ACLU spokeswoman suggested that since there are people of many different faiths in Arkansas, no religious displays should be permitted on government-owned property. In her comment to the Associated Press, however, it was only the Christian symbols that she singled out for criticism: “The Nativity scene and the church are clearly religious, Christian symbols, and the city should not be in the business of promoting religion.”

November 8

New York, NY – A group calling itself “Shalom International” targeted the Vatican, Pope John Paul II, Pope Pius XII and Polish primate Cardinal Josef Glemp during a demonstration in front of the Polish Consulate protesting the placement of crosses at the site of the Auschwitz death camp. Michael Preisler, a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz who tried to speak to the group, said later that he had underestimated its anti-Catholic sentiments. “They were angry at me,” reported Preisler, co-chair of the Polish American Congress Holocaust Documentation Committee. “That’s because they didn’t want to hear that Christians also suffered in Auschwitz.”

November 9 – 13

Chicago, IL – At its annual convention, the National Council of Churches began consideration of a proposal that would put it on record against voucher programs or tuition tax credits that would secure parental choice in education. The proposal explicitly declares that “public monies should be used only for public schools” and that “public education should have the full and conscientious support of Christians and Christian churches.” The resolution justifies itself by suggesting that supporters of parental choice are really part of a sinister conspiracy out to undermine public schools: “Public education has been under attack for two decades by persons representing religious, cultural, and economic views which offer little or no support for public schooling.”

November 30

Somerset, MA – A U.S. District Court judge ruled that Somerset’s 1997 holiday display was unconstitutional because it included a creche—and thereby promoted a particular religion. So the city decided to balance this year’s display by adding a Santa Claus and a menorah. That didn’t satisfy Gil Amancio, regional director of American Atheists, Inc., who had brought the original suit. After consulting with the ACLU, he concluded that not only does Santa Claus promote Christianity, because it is a depiction of St. Nicholas, but so do the menorah and a Happy Hanukkah sign—because Christianity uses the Torah as its Old Testament. The American Jewish Congress echoed Amancio’s sentiment that having no religious displays would be preferable to an inclusive, pluralistic display. The AJC accused Somerset officials of adding a menorah “not for the purpose of celebratory inclusion, but to add protective coloration to a Christian display that might otherwise be impermissible.” In the end, a crèche was erected.

December

Port St. Lucie, FL – The leader of Atheists of Florida, suggesting that religious expression should be confined to “the privacy of…homes or houses of worship,” protested the display of a menorah and creche on city-owned property. The American Civil Liberties Union predictably joined in the protest and threatened a lawsuit to have the religious display removed. City officials, however, insisted that the display, at a community center, complied with court decisions which have held that religious expression is protected in those public spaces made available for free expression of ideas by private citizens. City Councilman Glenn Magrane noted that Atheists of Florida “should feel represented because if they don’t believe in anything and they don’t have anything displayed, they’re represented.”

December 8

Little Rock, AK – The leader of the Arkansas American Civil Liberties Union criticized Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee for suggesting that spiritual themes should be included in public yuletide displays. Gov. Huckabee, in a speech that was warmly applauded by more than 1,000 delegates to the Arkansas Farm Bureau’s annual convention, made clear that it would be wrong for government to promote a particular religion. “But it is not improper, not even by a little bit, to simply recognize that the origin and the nature of the day itself is related to a spiritual theme,” he said of the Christmas holiday. Arkansas ACLU executive director Rita Sklar, not content to disagree with Huckabee, accused him of not recognizing or accepting “the value of the First Amendment of the Constitution.” As to the governor’s willingness to place a menorah at the state capitol to commemorate Hanukkah, Sklar, herself Jewish, arbitrarily declared that Jews wouldn’t want that.

December 9

St. Ann, MO – Following a challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union, a federal judge ended St. Ann’s 50 year tradition of displaying a nativity scene on the front lawn of City Hall. While succeeding in having the creche removed, the ACLU’s concerns about government endorsement of religion did not extend to challenging the presence of a menorah in a City Hall window. That Jewish religious symbol, ACLU lawyer Denise Lieberman reasoned, was constitutionally innocuous—and so it was allowed to remain on display.

December 15

Albuquerque, NM – The American Civil Liberties Union once again teamed with American Atheists, Inc. in an attempt to block display of a nativity scene on public property. This time the target was the Eddy County, New Mexico courthouse, which featured a creche as part of a larger, non-sectarian Christmas panorama which included a thirty foot Christmas tree. The ACLU threatened to sue to overturn the unanimous vote of the five member County Commission to maintain the nativity scene, which has been on display at the courthouse for the past twenty years.

Winter

Hawaii – The off-Broadway show Tony and Tina’s Weddingventured to Hawaii to tell the tale of an Italian American wedding that features a pregnant bride on drugs and foul language. The wedding ceremony is a mock rendition that includes a crude characterization of nuns and priests. It also defames Catholicism.

January-February

Louisville, KY – “Sacred Hearts III” was a show which used Catholic symbols as part of its critique of the culture. As described in a positive review in the Courier-Journal, one of the works, “Peg O’ My Heart,” features a cross piercing an anatomically-correct heart. It then “bleeds” into a wine glass. Another one of artist Iris Adler’s works is a “Heart”: it is shaped like a candy box and features thorns and a crown of candelabra lights.

February 19 – March 29

New York, NY – Gunnin’ for Jesus, a play presented by the St. Bocephus Productions at the John Houseman Studio Theater in New York City, was billed as a “tasteless” show that portrays a gay alcoholic priest, Father Sullivan. He was “banished to a Nashville parish where he must raise money or face excommunication.” The portrayal of Father Sullivan was replete with obscenities.

March 20

Huntington, NY – A Planned Parenthood benefit, the International Women’s Film and Video Festival, was held by the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, NY. The promotional material for the films established that they were about “the blatant attempt by a well-financed fanatic Christian Right minority and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church under the guidance of the Pope in Rome to dictate the rights of American women.”

Spring

New York, NY – French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj brought his ballet “Annunciation,” to New York. It features an erotic lesbian encounter between a female version of St. Gabriel and the Blessed Mother.

Spring

The Tom of Finland Foundation distributed materials promoting Mistress April’s “Archangel Michael” that included pictures of a tree top sculpture which “flaunts his human (large erect penis).”

April 26 – June 7

Buffalo, NY – Big Orbit Gallery featured Jackie Felix’s “Blue Mary” series of paintings. Described by the Buffalo News art critic Richard Huntington as a “radical revision of the Annunciation story,” it is in fact patently offensive. The angel Gabriel is “variously tough guy, biker, smooth talker and sexual aggressor,” who in one depiction “pushes his face into that of Mary’s like an overeager date at the high school prom.” Mary, pictured “nude or in a G-string,” is portrayed as unwilling “to relinquish her sexuality” and other life choices, rejecting “with an aggressive gesture” Gabriel’s entreaty that she give birth to the Son of God.

May

Washington, DC – Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” the infamous photo of a crucifix submerged in urine, was featured as part of a “Mythic Image” art show at the David Adamson Gallery.

May

Cranberry, PA – The play “Once a Catholic,” ostensibly about the sexual awkwardness of 1950s Catholic schoolgirls, contained many offensive discussions, covering such topics as anal sex, bestiality, the Pope having sex with prostitutes and with his own daughter, and St. Joseph allegedly stirring his tea with his penis. At the league’s insistence, every offensive part of the script was removed.

May 29 – June 15

Waterbury, CT – Seven Angels Theatre hosted the play “Dare Not Speak Its Name” written by Kelly Masterson of New York. The play is about a priest, a boy and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. On its cover, the Hartford Courant (June 9) quoted two Protestant ministers and a woman, who is a director of Religious Education for a local parish, praising the play as “thoughtful” and “fair.” It was nominated for the Connecticut Critics Circle’s best play of the year, despite record-low turnout for any production at this theater.

June

Chicago, IL – Among her portrayals in “She’s Funny That Way,” running at the Artemisia Gallery in Chicago, actress Lori Nix was dressed in a crimson nun’s habit as she prayerfully clutched a huge black dildo.

July

Baltimore, MD – The Maryland Stage Company, a professional troupe composed of faculty and alumni of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, offered a production of the 17^th century French playwright Moliere’s “Tartuffe,” depicting some perverse behavior by the title character, a Catholic monk. In one scene, according to a review in the Northeast Booster, Tartuffe “crawls through a cloud of incense wearing a crown of thorns and begging his fellow monks to whip him harder.” The monk “is soon inspecting the cleavage” of his host’s wife, and “caressing her thighs along with his rosary.”

August 4 – September 7

Phoenix, AZ – The Sun Cities Museum of Art featured an exhibit by Katherine Wells, an atheist, that took aim at Our Blessed Mother and Our Lady of Guadalupe. Mary, adorned in an American flag, is resting on a cross and clutching a can of Budweiser, surrounded by rays of light cut from the peeled labels of beer bottles. High caliber bullets are used as a border around various religious icons.

September

New York, NY – “Vote Jesus,” billed as “Nate Eppler’s irreverent look at the dude we know as Jesus, from his first prophet audition to his last supper at the karaoke bar,” is performed at Studio Theater.

September

San Francisco – “My Cathedral,” an art exhibit by Alex Donis on display at the Galeria de la Raza, featured paintings of revered Catholic figures locked in passionate kisses with persons of the same sex—Pope John Paul II with Mahatma Gandhi, Mary Magdalene with Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Mother Teresa with Madonna. While the artist of course offered some deeper meaning for each painting, the shock value of these offensive portrayals of Catholic figures in homoerotic encounters was surely not lost on Mr. Donis.

September

Chicago, IL – Artist Hulbert Waldroup was so offended by religious intolerance between Jews and Moslems that he just had to vilify…Christianity! Officials of an art show at the James R. Thompson Center, a state government building, removed Waldroup’s “The Devil’s Palace,” described by AP as “a painting of Jesus and the devil sitting at a table laden with a bowl of eyeballs, a severed leg roast garnished with pineapple and ear kabobs.” The painting was inspired, the artist said, when he went to Israel two years ago and was scandalized by the “hatred…violence and bloodshed” he witnessed there, “all in the name of religion.”

September – December

Los Angeles, CA – The Museum of Contemporary Art hosted an exhibit by a self-described ex-Catholic gay man which defiled the Virgin Mary. After sculpting our Blessed Mother in clay, Robert Gober “pierced his Virgin Mary with a phallic culvert pipe,” according to the promotional literature for the work. This was supposed to evoke the Immaculate Conception as well as the miraculous conception of Christ, while at the same time “depriv(ing) the Virgin Mary of the womb from which Christ was born.”

Fall

Santa Maria, CA – The play “Agnes of God,” based on the anti-Catholic movie of the same name, was scheduled as part of the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts (PCPA) Winterspring season for 1997-98.

October 9

The Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Dario Fo, the Italian playwright who is most known for his attacks on the Roman Catholic Church. His most famous work, “Mistero Buffo” (“Comic Mystery”), was branded by the Vatican in 1977 as the “most blasphemous show in the history of television.”

October 31

New York, NY – Artist Barbara Kruger made an attempt to mimic Andres Serrano by creating a sculpture of Jesus Christ and an inebriated Santa Claus leaning against a large sarcophagus. While Jesus clutches a cross, Santa holds a dollar sign and a little girl who looks like JonBenet Ramsey. The exhibition was put on display on Halloween at the Mary Boone Gallery. Art critic Hilton Kramer said of Kruger’s work, “People no longer have any understanding of what blasphemy means.”

December

New York, NY – A painting hanging in the display window of the Art Students League depicted a crucified Santa Claus hanging from a cross. While artist Robert Cenedella contended that the work was intended to protest the commercialization of Christmas, the league objected to the exploitation of a sacred Catholic symbol, the crucifix, to make the artist’s point. When the league suggested that he might have made the same point by putting Santa in a noose, Mr. Cenedella noted that that would have been offensive to African Americans, as it would conjure up images of lynching. Yet he had no qualms about offending Catholics! The league asked only that the painting be moved inside the Art Students League, where its meaning could be pondered by serious art patrons without needlessly offending passersby. Joanne Kuebler, executive director of the Art Students League, never responded to the league’s request.

Winter

New York, NY – A note card, “Out of the Garden,” produced and distributed by Creatrix Cards, featured an image of the Virgin Mary juxtaposed on the nude body of a woman.

January 28

Omaha, NE – An employee of One Star Long Distance attempted to defend the Catholic Church to a very loud employee who was ridiculing Catholics, claiming “you Catholics think you know everything, you just want to brainwash people.” The Catholic-basher was issued a warning and the Catholic was fired.

February

Long Island, NY – An employee of the German-owned company, Lufthansa, was refused promotion and eventually fired because he refused to join the Freemasons. The employee was a Roman Catholic who sued the company on grounds of religious discrimination and other charges.

February

New York, NY – A store called Mod World sold candles which were irreverent. One was called “Our Lady@www.com.” On the candle was an image of Mary holding a mouse as if she were going to use a computer.

February 12

San Diego, CA – A young woman went to work at the Silvergate Retirement Residence on Ash Wednesday and was told to remove the ashes from her forehead. When she refused, her supervisor forcibly wiped the ashes from her forehead with a dishcloth. The league’s complaint resulted in the firing of the offender.

March

Nashville, TN – A coffeehouse, Bongo Java, mocked Mother Teresa by selling a cinnamon bun which resembles her. Called the NunBun, it was being sold over the Internet via Global Pastry Management. It also sold related products with her image, including T-shirts, bookmarks, and coffee mugs. After a protest by the league, and then Mother Teresa herself, this line of products was discontinued.

March

The Cader Company’s “That’s Funny” calendar included an offensive message for Easter Monday. It read: “The Vatican came down with a new ruling: No surrogate mothers. It’s a good thing they didn’t make this rule before Jesus was born.” The quote was attributed to comedienne Elayne Boosler.

March

Park City, UT – Nutraceutical Corporation, a health food establishment, ran ads that used a full color photograph of the sanctuary of the old Cathedral in Montreal, Quebec. Above the photo was the headline, “This is about as close as we get to going to mass.” The ad closed with the statement, “And…you can always have faith in us.”

March 10

AmFAR (American Foundation for Aids Research) embarked on an ad campaign proclaiming, “Prayer won’t cure AIDS – Research will.” After a protest by the league, AmFAR president Jerome J. Radwin pulled the offending ad.

Spring

Royal Oak, MI – During Lent, Noir Leather subjected the public to a window display showing a crucified Christ next to a sign proclaiming “Religion is a Drug,” and accompanied by a devil clad in priestly vestments and holding a syringe. Behind Jesus, in large letters, was the word “LIES,” and the floor was littered with holy cards, pages torn from a bible, religious statues, rosary beads, and human skulls.

Spring

FOR COUNSEL: The Catalog for Lawyers offered a candle labeled “Our Lady of Perpetual Litigation” that featured a caricature of a woman in a business suit with a halo around her head, standing on a pile of paper.

May

Wayne, PA – John Harvard’s Brew House, one of a chain of bar/restaurants, featured as part of its decor interior stained glass windows with Catholic images (bishops’ crosiers, priests’ vestments, etc.) juxtaposed with the heads of various secular heroes (i.e., Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy). While acknowledging the apparent lack of intent to offend, the league protested the “disrespectful attitude towards religion in general and Catholicism in particular” conveyed by the display.

May 9

Chicago, IL – A new nightclub, Convent, featured bartenders dressed as priests and waitresses as Catholic schoolgirls; a mirrored crucifix in a “Hell Room”; and drinks with such names as Holy Water and Confessionals. “Catholics should be outraged by the Convent, as should people of all faiths,” declared the Chicago Sun-Times.

May 19

San Francisco, CA – A San Francisco-based legal support software company, Legal Summation, acceded to the league’s request that it change its logo, which had resembled the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Legal Summation was most understanding of our concerns.

June

A catalog called the Lighter Side advertised a T-shirt showing Christ at the Last Supper, arms outstretched and looking at the apostles, saying “Separate checks, please.” The league objected to making light of this holy event, and the producer of the catalog, the Johnson Smith Company, responded positively by removing the T-shirt from the catalog.

June 15

Following complaints from the league, Cinnabon, a national chain of stores which sells cinnamon buns, withdrew ads that had featured a stern-looking nun in habit, brandishing a ruler, with rosary beads draped around her neck.

Fall

The infamous nineteenth century anti-Catholic book, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, was being carried in the Barnes and Noble catalog. Monk’s story, long discredited as a hoax, claimed first hand knowledge of a secret tunnel used by priests and monks to sneak into a convent for sex with the nuns who, after subsequently giving birth, would baptize their babies and then smother them to death. After hearing from the league, Barnes and Noble promised that the book would no longer appear in its catalog.

Fall

North Wales, PA – “Funny Side Up,” a mail/phone order catalog whose products include numerous off-color and vulgar items, advertises a “nun fishing lure” and a “You Know You’re Catholic” book billed as “a guaranteed laugh fest for the faithful and the fallen.” A look through the catalog turned up no similar “laugh fests” for those of other faiths.

Fall

Seattle, WA – Archie McPhee, which bills itself as “Oufitters of Popular Culture,” included in its “Collector’s Edition Catalog” a number of items which caricatured Catholic nuns, some quite offensively. For example, there was a windup doll, “Nunzilla,” billed as “Terrifying, but in a good way.” “Say your prayers,” the ad instructs. “No one is safe from the wrath of ‘Nunzilla.’ This windup sparking sister trudges straight out of a Catholic school student’s nightmares like a determined disciplinary force, with green eyes ablaze and sparks flying from her mouth. Wearing the traditional black and white habit with a yellow cross and clutching a Bible in one hand and a ruler in the other, this holy terror will have you owning up to transgressions from as far back as birth.” Other items included the “Fighting Nun Punching Puppet,” wearing boxing gloves and headlined, “Punch you. Bless you. Punch you. Bless you”; and “Sing it, sister,” a rubber hand puppet that “can also act as an insulating glove while working with toxic chemicals or lepers.”

September 23

New York, NY – The woman’s apparel company, Kenar, ran an ad in the New York Times showing a handsome priest leering at a sensuous-looking woman as they dined together.

November

American Science & Surplus catalog advertised “Maggie in a Habit, AKA ‘The Fighting Nun,’ a nun puppet in full habit” wearing boxing gloves and the face of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The ad explained that the puppet is “mounted on a stick which you can hold in your hand (dare we say under her habit?),” and that it would be particularly appealing to the “recovering Catholic.”

November

Promoting its e-mail phone, Uniden America Corporation began running an ad in newspapers throughout the country that featured a stern-looking nun, brandishing the ever-present ruler as she glared menacingly from the page. The league wrote to Uniden demanding that they pull the ad, and asking whether they would indulge in similarly negative stereotyping of other religious faiths or of various ethnic or racial groups.

December

The same stern-faced, menacing nun turned up in ad for Dow Jones Newswires, over the caption: “You always knew you were in trouble if you didn’t have your facts right.”

December

Forest Hills, NY – In thanksgiving for the divine help he believes he received in caring for a mother with Alzheimer’s and a sister with Down Syndrome, Robert Cospito turned his living room into a chapel dedicated to St. Jude and St. Francis. His devotion almost cost him his homeowners insurance policy. Travelers Insurance, after having an adjuster visit Mr. Cospito’s home to settle a claim for a leaky toilet, informed him that his policy was to be canceled—two days before Christmas, no less—because his home was actually a church. After New York Times reporter David Gonzalez alerted us to the story, the league contacted Travelers, and in short order they reversed their decision. “(League president William) Donohue told them I wasn’t a church,” Mr. Cospito told a local newspaper. “I then got a call from the insurance company and they reinstated my insurance and also sent me an apology.”

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Winter

Central Florida – A professor at the Continuing Education Department of the University of Central Florida used e-mail to send “humorous” statements to her students and others. Among the offensive comments were: “When Jesus broke the bread at the Last Supper he said, ‘Take this all of you and eat it, for this is my body….’ He did not say, ‘Eat me.’” Another comment was: “The Virgin Mary is not referred to as the ‘Mary with the Cherry.’” After a complaint lodged by the league, the professor apologized to her students after meeting with her superiors.

Winter

Illinois – An exhibition displayed at the Krannert Art Museum of the University of Illinois showcased a work called “Dans La Zibeline Du Zob.” The art consisted of ten large wall hangings that depicted the interior of three European cathedrals. Hanging from the nails in the center of each drawing were eight red glass vaginas and two red glass holy water fonts with crosses on them. Three had an additional vagina hanging from nails in what appeared to be drawings of side chapels. The female artist said that her work was a statement about the oppression of women in the Catholic Church. The exhibition received funding from the Illinois Arts Council.

Winter

Greenwich Village, NY – Catholic School Girls Rule, a play about an all-girls Catholic school in the Midwest, was performed at a public school. Described in its promotional material as “excavating the bonny surface of parochial life,” the one-woman show featured attacks on nuns and saints, with much obscene language.

February

Platteville, WI – University of Wisconsin-Platteville campus minister Pamela Strakeljahn wrote a piece in the Wisconsin State Journal that raised serious questions about her ability to counsel Catholic students. She blasted the Vatican for its teachings and its alleged callousness, maintaining that if Jesus were here today he would reject the Church’s teachings.

February

The educational journal, Phi Delta Kappan, featured an article by Alfie Kohn called “How Not to Teach Values: A Critical Look at Character Education.” In his piece, Kohn red-flagged the religious affiliation of Catholic contributors to this subject, contending that “it is entirely relevant that, in the shadows of their writings, there lurks the assumption that only religion can serve as the foundation of good character.”

February 7

Box Elder, South Dakota– Students from Douglas High School performed the notoriously anti-Catholic play, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, at the Johnson Fine Arts Center of Northern State University.

February – March

The league objected to the publishing of a vicious anti-Catholic letter in the Christian Home Educators Association’s The Parent Educator.

March

University Park, PA – A female Penn State student’s contribution to an art exhibition explicitly attacked Catholicism. Entitled “Twenty-Five Years of Virginity,” her creation of a five-by-five matrix of colored panties with a cross stitched on the crotch was displayed at the Zoeller Gallery of the School of Visual Arts. What made it so disturbing was that her work was part of a juried exhibition under the Director of Visual Arts. It was also the second time in recent months that the same student openly attacked Catholicism. Previously, she created a huge blood vagina and placed a statue of the Blessed Virgin in it. The league’s protest was picked up by students, alumni and politicians.

Spring

San Diego, CA – Escondido Union High School District altered its school year calendar to exclude Good Friday from the scheduled holiday list. This meant that attendance was mandatory unless a parent submitted a written request for an excused absence.

Spring

Harrisburg, PA – Dr. Paul Hurley, president of Harrisburg Area Community College, defended an art exhibit at the college featuring an image of the Immaculate Heart of Mary superimposed on a nude female body. Dr. Hurley told the league that the display was representative of the “inclusive environment” that exists on his campus.

March 17 – April 18

Moraga, CA – St. Mary’s College opened an art exhibit by Lee Roy Champagne at the campus Hearst Art Gallery. The show included a rendition of the Virgin Mary as a life-size, tattooed Barbie doll giving birth to an Elvis doll while singing Madonna hits. Visitors were invited to kneel in front of the neon-lighted shrine, activating soundtracks of “Like a Virgin” and “Material Girl.”

March 24 – March 28

Danville, CA – Throughout Holy Week, culminating on Good Friday, a teacher at Monte Vista High School used his senior English class to show the notorious Martin Scorcese film, “The Last Temptation of Christ.” One student, who was offended by the “explicit violence, nudity, vulgar language, sex scenes,” and especially by the movie’s “betrayal of Jesus and the Jesus story,” reported that when she expressed her objections to the teacher, his response was “to defend himself, mock me, raise his voice and attempt to belittle me.”

March 29

Pittsburgh, PA – Community College of Allegheny instructor Donna Perkins enlisted a theatrical troupe of students and friends to stage an irreverent, avant-garde parody of the Passion to invitation-only audiences throughout downtown Pittsburgh on Holy Thursday.

March 31

Queens, NY – Queens College (City University of New York) student publication Quadincluded a “Dear Jesus, Real Advice from the Son of God” column. The answers included remarks like “you’ll need a winter jacket to pay for your lifetime excessive masturbation,” and “You’re lucky I don’t come down there and smack your balls off for my sake.” The editor apologized for publishing the column. However, school president Dr. Allen Lee Sessoms commented, “That’s not deliberate stuff. That was meant as something that was kind of fun…they’ve got to be more sensitive and not shout about something that’s really innocent.”

April 1 – April 11

Queens, NY – La Guardia High School art department authorized the distribution of fliers that depicted an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, eyes looking toward Heaven and outstretched hands raised in prayer. Above the picture, read: “Look at the Size of that Thing.” The picture was part of a contribution from one of the senior class students that included a redrawn picture of the Sacred Heart with a clown’s nose, a Good Year tire for a halo and other Christian symbols mixed in. Alongside was a sketch of a man with “HEBRO” written across his head and “evil Jew” scripted above the figure. An arrow was pointed at him by a man holding a large penis. The man comments “Jesus I gots a present fo’ yo’ preachy ass!!” Other objectionable exhibitions featured the following:

• a poster of a female in a skirt with legs apart and the caption, “Catholic School Girls: do anything for candy! put up just the right amount of fight! Hear their confessions!”
• a picture of the Last Supper substituting PEZ dispensers for the apostles and Jesus Christ.
• an assortment of sketches with lewd remarks and mutations of body parts.

May

Levittown, NY – Two students at Jonas E. Salk Middle School wore T-shirts which said “American By Birth—Anti-Christ By Choice.”

May

New Caney, TX – Two students at New Caney High School were prohibited from wearing rosary beads in school, with teachers instructed to send the boys to the principal’s office if they were caught wearing the beads outside their shirts. “The actual wearing of rosary beads around the neck is identified as gang apparel,” said New Caney High School principal Toby York. The Rutherford Institute intervened to provide legal representation for the students, and in October a federal district court ordered the school to permit the boys to wear their rosary beads.

May 7 – May 10

Wheeling, WV – Bethany College, a Disciples of Christ institution located near Wheeling, hosted the play Agnes of God, based on the notoriously anti-Catholic movie by the same name. The completed work, a senior project of a female student in the department of fine arts, was filed in the college library archives.

May 31 – June 1

Santa Cruz, CA – “Sisters of the Visitation,” a comic opera containing anti-clerical humor, was to be performed at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as the culmination of a month-long celebration of the school’s inauguration of a new chancellor. First written at the time of the French Revolution, the opera involved a reckless young man and his servant, both of whom sneak into a convent dressed as a priest and a nun in order to stop a young woman from receiving her final vows. The “priest” and the “nun” are involved in secret trysts. It was billed as a show which would poke “gentle fun at the formality of religious orders,” while providing “revelations about secret goings-on within the convent.”

The league simply asked incoming chancellor Dr. M.R.C. Greenwood to reschedule the opera for a less prominent time during the academic year. When Dr. Greenwood rejected that request, contending that “any anti-clerical humor would clearly be seen in its dated context,” the league took its case to the press. Noting that many groups—women of color, Jews, gays, Native Americans, Indonesians, Japanese, Chinese, Mexicans and Filipinos—were to be the subject of reverential tributes during the inaugural ceremonies, league president William Donohue wondered why the college didn’t also “schedule a few outdated stabs” at these groups.

Once the league’s statement prompted the local media to become involved, the play was amended to remove the most offensive parts. The league was pleased, but still insisted that the production never should have been launched. This episode provided a textbook example of the double standard which commands nothing but reverential treatment for many racial, ethnic and religious groups, while Catholics are fair game for scorn and ridicule.

June – July

Kids Discover, an educational magazine for children, in its issue on “Kings and Queens” described the Inquisition as “a 13^th century campaign” in which “Catholics slaughtered Muslims, Jews and Protestants. Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain led the bloodbath in the 15^th century,” the article continues, concluding that “The Inquisition lasted into the early 19^th century.”

August

Medford, MA – Tufts University had scheduled to have the play “Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?” performed during Freshman Orientation. Reverend Scotty McClennan, a Unitarian minister, alerted the league to this play, which mocks the Sacrament of Reconciliation and promotes a negative stereotype of nuns and priests. After the league contacted the Dean of Students, the play was rescheduled for September 2, after orientation. The Orientation Committee, which had originally agreed to sponsor the play, voted not to do so, and also published a letter in the student newspaper at the time the play was performed, explaining its objections. Tufts President John DiBiaggio, in a letter to the league, promised to use the controversy “to help our students better understand the issue of bigotry.”

Fall

Binghamton, NY – The Binghamton University student newspaper, Pipedream, ran a fictional ad for a “Vatican” malt liquor, showing what was supposed to be the Pope holding a bottle of malt liquor, and declaring, “Jesus Christ! That’s good Goddamn liquor.”

October

Hillsborough, NJ – The Hillsborough Board of Education instituted a ban on class parties for Halloween, Christmas, Hanukkah, and Valentine’s Day, because, board members said, such celebrations excluded children from other cultures. Only after the action drew national attention and an outpouring of strong protests from parents did the board reverse itself—and then, only with the requirement that such parties be followed by lessons about different secular and religious holidays, and that alternative parties be provided for children from other cultural backgrounds. One parent put the obsession with political correctness in its proper perspective: “All we want is a party, a cupcake and a drink, that’s it,” she told a local newspaper.

October 4

Stanford, CA – The Stanford University band, prior to a game against Notre Dame and during half-time of the game, parodied the Irish famine, labeled the Irish “stinking drunks,” and staged a mock confrontation between a Catholic cardinal and the devil. Following a strong protest from the league, Stanford president Gerhard Casper wrote back extending his own apology, and reporting that the band had apologized publicly. He said that the Athletic Department, which also apologized, was revamping its procedure for reviewing band scripts, and has barred the band from field shows for the next three Stanford-Notre Dame games.

November

Mahopac, NY – In an early start to the annual Keep Christ Out of Christmas campaign of the politically correct, Boy Scouts in the Mahopac school district were told that they could not sell holiday wreaths at their annual fund-raiser—even though the wreath is not a religious symbol, and even though Christmas tree ornaments were sold at the school’s own official fundraising drive. That was permissible, you see, because Hanukkah gifts were also sold at the school fund-raiser, but not at the Boy Scouts event.

November

Cherryvale, KS – “Beware the Sister Clarisa Effect” was the theme of an article handed out to teachers at the Cherryvale public elementary school. Seeking to caution teachers against using punishment as “a substitute for discipline,” the article, fromPrincipal magazine, resorted to the tired and bigoted stereotype of the brutal Catholic nun, “with her long black habit and beads rustling” as she descended on students “like a black blizzard.” After a complaint from a Catholic substitute teacher, the principal apologized to her and to other Catholic teachers in the school for distributing the offensive article.

November 11

Roanoke, VA – Students at Hollins College tossed a picture of Pope John Paul II into a bonfire at a school rally, apparently identifying the Holy Father as one of the “symbols of oppression” they were encouraged to burn. “Had the students any guts,” league president William Donohue wrote to the editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which reported the event, “they would have thrown in a picture of those professors and administrators who orchestrated this circus, abused their academic rights, manipulated the student body and made a public display of their fascism.”

November 25

College Station, TX – A Texas A&M student leader, during the school’s annual Bonfire rally, told an extremely offensive joke about Catholic nuns involved in perverted sexual activity.

November – December

Haverford, PA – Haverford College’s student web page featured “Sister, Sister. Nun Central: Your Online Source for Nun Fun,” a seemingly endless array of highly offensive material about Catholic nuns. Among the contents:

• “Ask Sister Rossetta: Advice Straight from the Bible,” which, as could be expected, is actually advice straight from an anti-Catholic bigot, who uses it to mock Church teaching on birth control and sexuality.
• “Priest and nun jokes”
• “A naughty collection of nun jokes”
• “Nuns: Wanton Objects of Desire,” a purported survey of male sexual attraction to nuns.
• “The Nun Game,” in which participants are awarded points for such encounters as seeing a nun “on (a) broom”; witnessing a nun “drunk,” “kissing a priest,” or “committing a felony”; “being the victim of a Nun attack,” or “seeing an attack of a band of wild Nuns” or “a Nun hungrily attacking a wild animal and devouring it raw.”

December

Albuquerque, NM – Despite agreeing to numerous changes to water down its Christmas theme, a public school choir director found himself suspended with pay when his holiday concert was deemed insufficiently ecumenical. Choir director Frank Rotolo had agreed to remove certain Christmas carols from the program: “O, Holy Night,” “Hush, Hear the Angels Sing,” and, ironically, “Jesus is the Reason for the Season”—and to change the event’s name from “A Christmas Concert” to “A Winter Concert.” That was not enough for the principal of Highland High School, who suspended him. Mr. Rotolo, represented by the American Center for Law and Justice, was reportedly considering a lawsuit against the school.

February 7

South Dakota – Douglas High School’s performance of the notoriously anti-Catholic play, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, was nominated for a state-sponsored award, and selected for entry into the State One-Act Play Festival, sponsored by the South Dakota High School Activities Association. The league questioned the propriety of the state funding—and perhaps honoring—the performance of a play which the Anti-Defamation League, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the American Jewish Committee, and scores of Catholic groups have all labeled anti-Catholic.

February 12

New York, NY – The Department of Correction served only meat dishes on Ash Wednesday for the second year in a row, violating the religious rights of Catholic inmates. When it happened last year, assurances were given that it would not recur. Muslim and Jewish prisoners’ dietary requirements are apparently accommodated. After Catholic Charities intervened, meatless meals were served for the remainder of Lent.

February 23

Goshen, NY – A campaign flier mocked a Catholic running for the Board of Trustees. It showed Deputy Mayor Robert V. Jones’ head on the body of a monk with a cross leaning on him marked “Jones.” The headline was “Vote for Change.” It was a flier promoting another candidate.

May 13

Bronx, NY – Two New York City Police officers in the Bronx denied the right of a dying Catholic to access a priest in order to receive the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. Two priests were present and both were stopped by police.

Summer

California – The league received complaints from Catholic inmates in two California prisons that their freedom to practice their religion was being impaired. At Chuckawalla Valley State Prison (CVSP) in Blythe, Calif., an inmate wrote that there was no full time Catholic chaplain, a lack of access to Catholic reading material, and that when there was a priest available, inmates were not always allowed to attend Mass. In contrast, Protestant inmates had both a full time chaplain and reading material. Two inmates at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego charged that Catholics were being denied access to Mass (with preferential treatment being given to Protestant services) and that their rosaries and religious pictures were often desecrated and destroyed by prison officers. Also, non-meat meals were not available during Lenten season. Following intervention by the league, CVSP added a Catholic chaplain who will arrange for priests to say Mass and lead Bible studies. An official at the Donovan facility scheduled a meeting with the two inmates who had complained. The league continues to monitor the situation there.

June 25

Providence, RI – A Rhode Island State Senator compared Catholics to Nazis, as she and several of her colleagues savaged the Church for its support of a state ban on partial-birth abortions. Sen. Karen Nygaard (D-Portsmouth) accused pro-life Catholics of employing the Nazis’ “Big Lie” strategy in flooding the state legislature with phone calls supporting the ban. She added that like the Nazis, the Church was attempting to impose its religious standards on all Rhode Islanders.

Fall

Fort Gordon, GA – In a budgetary move, the Fort Gordon army base announced plans to eliminate the office of Director of Catholic Religious Education, which would have negatively impacted the 300 students and adults who take part in CCD and RCIA programs at the base. Despite the fact that the Protestant DRE, the head Chaplain’s secretary and the non-appropriated funds manager were all more expensive to operate than the Catholic directorship, they were not slated for elimination. In fact the Protestant DRE was to be put in charge of the Catholic program. After receiving a letter of complaint from the league, Colonel Mark Breinholt, Installation Staff Chaplain, announced that the Catholic DRE position would not be eliminated.

Fall

Cape May, NJ – An inmate at the Cape May County Correctional Center contacted the league alleging that Mass was being denied to those incarcerated in protective custody. After learning that Protestants in protective custody were not being denied religious services, the league asked for equal treatment. The matter was resolved when the correctional center worked out a schedule with Our Lady of Angels Church in Cape May and the Legion of Mary to provide for weekly Mass.

December

Washington, DC – Civilization, a magazine published by the Library of Congress, contained an art review by Fernanda Eberstadt which described the Blessed Virgin Mary as “a 14-year-old Judean hillbilly,” and Jesus as “the worm in her belly.”

December

Jersey City, NJ – Contradicting several previous Supreme Court rulings, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Jersey ordered the Jersey City government to remove a menorah and a nativity scene from the lawn in front of City Hall. Mayor Brett Schundler, noting that Jersey City commemorates a wide diversity of religious celebrations, including the Hindu New Year, insisted that the Hanukkah/Christmas display complied with previous Supreme Court rulings in that the religious symbols were balanced with secular displays, including a Santa Claus figure, a sled and a snowman. Mayor Schundler announced the formation of the Jersey City Religious Liberty Defense Fund, to underwrite an appeal of the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

MOVIES

Winter

The movie “Touch” told the story of a man who was a Christ-like figure for the 1990s. He is capable of performing miracles, but is uninterested in spreading the gospel. He enjoys spending time with a female companion. The usual nutty Catholics were showcased, willing to kill for a return of the Latin Mass.

Spring

“The movie ‘The Saint’ contains one of the most vicious calumnies of Catholicism to tarnish the silver screen,” according to Boston Herald columnist Don Feder. “‘The Saint’ joins a long and ignominious line of anti-Catholic cinema, including 1996’s ‘Primal Fear,’ in which sex abuse plays a prominent role.”

Feder was complaining of the movie’s opening scene which contained gratuitous shots at Catholicism.

June

While dismissing the movie “Bliss” as a silly look at a married couple’s sexual hang-ups, Chicago Tribune reviewer John Petrakis noted the gratuitous use of the names Joseph and Maria for the title characters. In case the allusion to the nativity was in doubt, the very “hands-on” sex guru to whom Maria turns for therapy is named Baltazar – the name of one of the three wise men.

June

In the movie “Face/Off,” a terrorist disguises himself as a Catholic cardinal, “dances like a stripper while wearing a priest’s garb, then gropes a choirgirl,” according to a June 27 review in the New York Times.

October

New York, NY – The movie “Lilies,” which won Canada’s 1996 Academy Award for best picture, was being shown at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan. The film features an aging bishop who, barricaded inside a confessional in a Quebec prison, is forced to watch an elaborate re-creation of a homosexual episode from his youth. The film is replete with murder, nudity, and men dressed as women.

MUSIC

February 6

Marilyn Manson’s shock-rock group hit the charts with “Anti-Christ Superstar.” The group’s concert in Lubbock, Texas was picketed by Christians opposed to the violence and satanic overtones.

July 7

Following a sustained effort by the league, Sony announced that O Come All Ye Faithful, the Christmas album designed to fund the pro-abortion message of its performers, Rock for Choice, would not be re-released. Efforts by the league, as well as by several distinguished Catholic and Protestant leaders, to have this CD removed from the market had previously failed to move Sony. However on June 13, league president William Donohue sent a letter to Sony president Thomas Mottola, outlining plans for a Christmas season boycott of all Sony products if this album were not retired. Donohue made clear that the league’s objection was not to the existence of Rock for Choice, nor to its being funded by the pro-abortion Feminist Majority, but rather to the insensitive exploitation of Christmas as a vehicle for pro-abortion fund-raising. In his July 7 response, Mr. Mottola wrote that the album had “run its course,” and that neither it nor any similar album would be released for Christmas 1997.

November 10

New York, NY – Musician Ozzy Osbourne exploited the Cross in an ad in Newsdaypublicizing his new release and a related personal appearance at Virgin Megastore in Times Square.

NEWSPAPERS

January 17

Washington, DC – Conservative columnist Armstrong Williams wrote an article on Dr. Martin Luther King, saying, “King knew of the continuing legacy of xenophobia and ignorance that led to the enslavement of Africans simply because they were labeled ‘infidels’ by the Catholic Church.” The league registered a complaint against Williams, setting the historical record straight

January 24

In Ann Landers’ column, she printed a letter sent to her containing “Biblical Answers Hilarious.” Among the quips she found amusing enough to share with her readers was: “Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption.”

February

Philadelphia, PA – Columnist Melissa Dribben of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s newly discovered Jewish ancestry. The article contained a comment about how Jewish children are often taunted by “parochial schoolkids” and are told that they will “go to hell because you guys killed Christ.” League president William Donohue objected to this sweeping generalization and had his letter published in the newspaper.

February 5

Gannett Newspapers printed a story on Satanic rituals that featured dead and mutilated animals. It made an oblique and entirely uncalled-for comment that the fields where they were taking place were near a Catholic retreat house; the retreat house was in fact a quarter-mile away.

February 16

Indianapolis, IN – The Indianapolis Star ran a three part series on sexual misconduct among priests in the Lafayette Diocese. Although there were no current cases at the time of the report, the paper managed to add sensationalism to what should have been an unbiased report. The first sentence read: “In the heart of Indiana lies a Roman Catholic diocese tainted by priestly sins, dark secrets of lust and betrayal that have wounded scores of victims.” The series contained numerous graphic headlines, and tawdry details.

February 25

Arizona – In a column printed in The Arizona Daily Star, Allie Light discussed doctors’ attitudes toward patients, saying they were patronizing. The last paragraph, which was only tangentially related to the topic, stated: “People were once put to death by the church for owning books, priests believing that only they should know how to read. Today, apparently, some doctors are descended from those priests.”

February 26 – March 4

New York, NY – New York Press published an article by Larissa Phillips, a diatribe on how much she hates the Catholic Church.

March 22

Miami, FL – The Miami Herald published an Eternal Gospel SDA ad that was replete with attacks on the Pope and Catholicism in general. Publisher Dave Lawrence agreed not to accept these ads in the same format again.

March 25

New York, NY – Eastside Resident, a local New York residential publication, printed an article entitled “Sweet Jesus” comparing “bunnies” to “Jesus” and proclaiming, “Easter…Candy, sex and salvation all in the same holiday.” The article went on to insinuate “Since Jews benefit from the plethora of Easter candy…there is some fear of resentment and retaliation from Christians.”

March 27

Palo Alto, CA – The Palo Alto Daily News published an ad for a local restaurant, “Beppo,” that asked, “What did you give up for Lent?” The ad included a picture of two priests smoking pot.

March 30

Hartford, CT – Hartford Courant columnist Barbara Roessner published an article on Easter Sunday that expressed her agnosticism and her disbelief in Christ’s resurrection. The league asked the newspaper whether it would publish an article on Yom Kippur stating how silly was the whole idea of a Day of Atonement.

April 5

Seattle, WA – Seattle Post Intelligencer columnist Katherine Bourdonnay derided the Christian celebration of Easter, charging that those who do so do not care whom they offend. The Pope, celibacy, the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, the belief in heaven—all were made the object of derision.

May

New York, NY – Reporting on a murder in Central Park, New York newspapers and the Associated Press highlighted the “ex-altar boy” status of one of the teen-age suspects, and also reported that the other suspect was a former student at a Jesuit-run school. The two suspects current enrollment in elite, non-sectarian private schools did not make the headlines, as did the “ex-altar boy” fact in the Daily News and New York Post.

May 18

Salem, OR – The Statesmen Journal, in a front page story on a Hispanic girl about to receive her First Holy Communion, criticized the Church for promoting “a culture of selflessness and devotion.” Such a culture, you see, “discourages individual striving” in some children.

June

Santa Barbara, CA – The Santa Barbara News-Press carried a column by 20 year-old college student Ray di Bartolomeo deriding a Catholic priest celebrating Mass as “a fake” who “reminded me of `Humpty Dumpty.’” People in the congregation, he added, were “robots” and “brainwashed zombies.”

June 2

New York, NY – A photo of a sexual threesome—a man, his wife and his girlfriend—which photographer James Hamilton took for the New York Observer, included in the background a large, prominently displayed picture of the Madonna; even though none of three people featured in the picture and accompanying story were Catholic. The photo and story also ran May 29 in the New York Daily News.

June 18 – 24

New York, NY – In the Eastside Resident, columnist Texas A. Panek boasted about his “Christian-bashing humor, something I’ve indulged in quite a bit in past columns.”

Summer

Washington, DC – The Eternal Gospel SDA Church twice took a full page ad in theWashington Times attacking the Catholic Church. Much of the ad, which featured a picture of a smiling Pope John Paul II with a smiling President Clinton, was given over to rebutting Sunday as the Sabbath, and labeling the Catholic Church the “Mother of Harlots.”

July 3

Mattituck, NY – Suffolk Times managing editor Tim Kelly, a self described “fallen Catholic” writing about his son’s Confirmation Day in the Episcopal Church, mocked the Catholic Church for its “endless rules” and went on to declare that “sinful feelings are hard to escape when you’re raised a Catholic.”

July 20

Seattle, WA – The Seattle Times published a snide commentary by Cynthia Hartwig that discussed the antics of an ex-priest to make the larger point that priests are abnormal.

August

Sacramento, CA – A cartoon showing the Pope accepting a cross of “Nazi Gold,” and saying “Bless You, My Son,” to the Nazi officer presenting it, ran in the Valley Mirror.

August 5

Mt. Vernon, IL – A mainstream newspaper, the Mt. Vernon Register News, published, as a paid advertisement, a standard anti-Catholic tract from Chick Publications entitled “The Pope’s Steamroller Grinds on in Northern Ireland.”

August 21

Los Angeles, CA – The New Times newspaper highlighted its story on the death of a subway worker with a full cover depiction of a subway worker crucified on a cross of railroad tracks. Tidings, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, castigated the New Times for using irreverence and blasphemy in a “cheap” and “clumsy swing at publicity.”

August 29

Skokie, IL – A cartoon in the Jewish Star depicted the Pope’s upcoming visit to Cuba as designed to service American greed. On the Pope’s robe is inscribed “American Tourists to Cuba,” and Fidel Castro is saying to the Pope, “Stay with me three more days, and I’ll throw in a free car rental.”

August 30

Las Vegas, NV – Comedian Denis Leary promised to rail against the Catholic Church in his upcoming “Lock-N-Load” comedy tour. He then gave a preview to the Las Vegas Review Journal, declaring his intent to start a “church for lapsed Catholics” whose members will “have sex with consenting adults instead of altar boys.”

September

A reporter for the Associated Press (AP), in a story about the tragic gang-rape of a 16 year old girl in Mexico City, wrote that the crime was “an extreme one even in a heavily Roman Catholic and male-dominated society.” After the league objected, AP conceded that our complaint was legitimate.

September 10

Richmond, VA – In an interview in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Episcopal brother Manny Andrade, a gay man who ministers to people with AIDS, took a slap at the Church and its teachings in recalling his decision to leave the Catholic Church. “It was the politics of Roman Catholicism that made me crazy,” he said. “The lunacy that we’re going to make priests be celibate. The lunacy that women can’t be priests. The thought that we want you and your money—we just don’t want you [gay persons] to live in a loving, monogamous relationship.” From an article of more than 70 column inches on Mr. Andrade’s ministry to AIDS victims, this was the only quote which the Times-Dispatch saw fit to pull out and highlight.

September 19

Baltimore, MD – Although it merited only a minor mention in the story, and was not cited by anyone as having been related to the crime, the Baltimore Sun headlined the fact that a 15 year-old alleged murderer was a former altar boy.

Fall

Providence, RI – An article on how parents can help children deal with crises involving a sibling addressed the issue of abuse this way: “If a 9-year old is abused by a priest, for instance, when a younger sibling reaches that age, he might refuse to go to school, fearful of authority figures.” There was no mention of other potential abusers among authority figures, such as teachers, sports coaches, scout leaders, or even ministers or rabbis. Only the priest is singled out as a potential abuser of children. The article, reprinted in the Providence Journal, was taken from the Boston Globe.

October 1

Carbondale, PA – An ad in the Carbondale News savaged Catholic beliefs as “gross heresies,” “detestable teachings,” and “abominable lies”; charged Catholics with “cannibalism”; and declared Catholic souls “damned to everlasting perdition.” To make matters worse, the ad was written and paid for by Tom Flannery, a staff member of theCarbondale News whose responsibilities include reporting on local Catholic Church events.

October 14

Los Angeles, CA – A humor column by Anne Beatts in the Los Angeles Times, poking fun at Pope John Paul II’s outreach to youth, went over the line when Ms. Beatts derided the Church as “never slow to spot a merchandising opportunity.”

October 15

Martinsburg, WV – Maura and James Brackett, writing in the Journal newspaper in opposition to Catholic schools, delivered an anti-Catholic diatribe replete with false and malicious charges. They accused Catholic schools of sacrificing educational excellence in favor of indoctrination. They charged, without evidence, that the “Catholic hierarchy” in Chicago had “tried to cover up” the beating of a black student in order to protect his white assailants. They falsely accused the league of “threats…against members of the media who report the truth” about the “many cases of sexual molestation” which they attributed, without documentation, to Catholic schools. They wrote that letters to government officials from Catholic school students protesting abortion were “the result of a concerted effort by the Vatican to affect policy in this country.” And they declared it “blatant child abuse” for Catholic schools to teach children that abortion is wrong.

October 19

St. Louis, MO – Among the 12 teens featured in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article on teen attitudes toward sex were three identified as Catholic school students—and all three voiced attitudes in contradiction to Church teaching. Although the Post-Dispatchnoted that “dozens of teens” had been interviewed, the article would lead us to believe that no Catholic school student said a word in support of Catholic teaching.

October 23

Hartford, CT – “Pope Taps Accused Priest for Assembly,” screamed a headline in theHartford Courant. The accompanying article excoriated the Holy Father for inviting Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder and head of the Legionaries of Christ, to the Nov.-Dec. Synod for America, because Father Maciel has been accused of sexual misconduct. It is not until the 15^th paragraph of the article, once the case against him has been firmly established, that we read of Father Maciel’s denial of the allegations.

November

Palm Beach, FL – Palm Beach Post religion writer Steve Gushee, in a column which Cox News Service distributed for publication elsewhere as well, used the proposed return to meatless Fridays as an opportunity to trash Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and virtually everything about the Church prior to Vatican II.

“Roman Catholics have had too much fun for the last 30 years,” Gushee began. “So American Catholic bishops think it may be time to return to the good old days of micromanaging Catholic piety.” Those days, he informed readers, were characterized by “knuckle knocking nuns,” “an inordinate sense of sinfulness,” an “almost neurotic sorrow that Jesus died—and a complete denial of the Gospel.”

Gushee was just getting warmed up. Cardinal Law, “the kind of religious conservative who thinks the Spanish Inquisition was enlightened evangelism,” is “more comfortable with the images of the past that emphasize suffering, guilt and sorrow,” in Gushee’s view, than with calling Christians to “joy, thanksgiving and the service of others.” It is “bizarre,” he continued, for the Cardinal to suggest “that eating fish on Fridays will also help Catholics take a stand against abortion, euthanasia, war, violence and drugs. The call to return to Friday as a penitential day is to beat the grim drum of medieval Christianity. Some churchmen just can’t get accustomed to the freedom and joy their faith proclaims.”

If only the U.S. Bishops had been blessed with the same theological insights as this Palm Beach religion writer.

November 9

Jacksonville, FL – “What makes a human kill?” Why, his rosary beads, obviously, or at least the Catholic religion which they symbolize. That was the message implicit in theFlorida Times-Union’s use, under the headline, “What makes a human kill?” of a photograph of a death row inmate prominently displaying a set of rosary beads which he is wearing around his neck. Nowhere in the story or photo caption is there any explanation of the relevance of the rosary beads to the story. By contrast, in the Dallas Morning News where this story originated, the caption clearly and movingly provided the context of the photograph, explaining that the rosary beads being worn by Darrel Hill on Arkansas’ death row had previously been “worn by friends on the row who were executed.” The two papers’ contrasting treatment of the photograph provided—at the expense of Catholic belief and practice—a textbook example of the difference between professional journalism and tabloid journalism.

November 10

Trenton, NJ – The Times of Trenton ran an editorial page cartoon on sexual scandal in the military which trivialized the sacrament of Penance.

November 12

Miami, FL – Reuters News Service, reporting about a Miami prostitute whose legal defense was that she was just a nymphomaniac, gratuitously included the irrelevant fact that the woman was “a former Catholic high school student.”

November 18

New York, NY – The New York Times lauded the blasphemous Gober art exhibit depicting the Blessed Mother “pierced…with a phallic culver pipe,” which the artist said was designed to deprive “the Virgin Mary of the womb from which Christ was born.” “A Madonna and Drain Pipe Radiate an Earthly Spirituality,” gushed a Timesheadline under a color photo of the offensive work. The accompanying article, by Roberta Smith, condescendingly dismissed objections to the work, declaring it “profoundly experiential and even interactive, a journey that must be traveled before an informed opinion can be arrived at.”

December

Charleston, SC – Two articles in the Post and Courier highlighted a media double standard when it comes to offending the sensibilities of Catholics. On Dec. 7, in an article on a white policeman accused in the death of a black motorist, the word “blacks” is substituted in parentheses for what was apparently a racial slur uttered by the police officer. Three days later, in an article on a couple who had been robbed twice in the same day, the husband is quoted as saying, “We’re as nervous as pregnant nuns at morning Mass.” No effort was made by the paper to change or delete this offensive slur of Catholics.

December 4

Duluth, MN – The Duluth News-Tribune ran an editorial cartoon which mocked the proposal by the Pro-Life Secretariat of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops that Catholics abstain from meat on Fridays in reparation for the culture of death. The cartoon shows a well-dressed couple in a restaurant, with the woman saying to the waiter: “And to do penance for the culture of death, I’ll have the meatless Friday special…crab-stuffed crepes with lobster saffron sauce.”

December 7

New Bern, NC – An ad in the Sun Journal newspaper took direct aim at the Catholic Church. Signed by a George Wetherington, the ad featured a bishop’s miter and the headline, “Blasphemy?” When Jesus rose from the dead, the ad declared, “he alone became the forgiver of sins. If any man claims to forgive these sins on earth,” the ad continued in a clear reference to the sacrament of Penance, “isn’t he claiming to be the same Jesus that died, rose and went back to Heaven?” The papacy was also a target: “When a man takes on the title Holy Father, is he not claiming equality with the Most High God?”

December 13

Portland, OR – The Oregonian, in a column devoted to “yule-tide bloopers” reportedly uttered by children, decided to headline the one which was most blatantly offensive: that “Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption.”

December 17

Pleasantville, NJ – Reporting on the sentencing of a man convicted of sexually assaulting a five year old boy, The Press, a local newspaper, headlined the offender as a “Former janitor at St. Raymond’s” Regional Catholic School. Nowhere in the story could the reader learn that the assault had occurred after the offender had left St. Raymond’s, where he worked only briefly; nor that the incident was in no way related to St. Raymond’s. In a letter-to-the-editor, league president William Donohue wondered whether the offender’s past employment would have been headlined had he worked for The Press, rather than for a Catholic school.

December 19

Santa Barbara, CA – Accompanying the “CD Philes” column in the Santa Barbara News-Press was a picture of a music artist with crucifixes dangling from both lenses of his sunglasses. The photo was gratuitous, and the paper showed poor taste in printing it.

December 19

Los Angeles, CA – Reporting on a Los Angeles police officer and a bank branch supervisor who were both accused as bank robbery accomplices, Los Angeles Timesstaff writers Matt Lait and Eric Lichtblau made a point of noting that the bank supervisor, Errolyn Romero, was “a Mount St. Mary’s College graduate.” No mention was made of the educational background of her alleged accomplice, Police Officer David Mack.

December 23

Asbury Park, NJ – An editorial in the Dec. 23 Asbury Park Press was headlined “No grants for churches”; a more accurate version would have read, “No grants for Catholic churches,” reflecting the editorial’s highly selective indignation over church restorations funded by the New Jersey Historic Trust Fund. Citing the New Jersey state constitution’s prohibition on the use of state government funds for building or repairing churches, the editorial took issue with a $283,000 award from the Historic Trust to St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Morris County. Fair enough—although denying grants for historical preservation to a structure solely because of its religious nature would seem to represent a government bias against religion, which surely is also unconstitutional. More significantly, readers would never have known from this editorial that St. Mary’s was only one of nine churches that received a grant for historical preservation—and the only Catholic church. Was it mere coincidence that the Asbury Park Press singled out only the Catholic grant recipient, while having absolutely nothing to say against the grants to the other eight churches? The league thought not, and wrote the newspaper to express our outrage at its transparent bigotry and deceit.

December 27

Columbus, OH – Newsday columnist Robert Reno, in an op ed column on health care which appeared in the Columbus Dispatch, took a swipe at “Catholic dioceses,” listing them among the health care entities who “will discover new, more imaginative ways to eat their share of the pie that is baked when we have the bad fortune to get sick.” The crack suggested that the Church’s long tradition of caring for the sick is motivated by greed. In a letter to the Columbus Dispatch, the league called on Reno to apologize to the Catholic community.

PERIODICALS

1997

Antarctic Press’s “Warrior Nuns” comic strip, created by Ben Dunn, features scantily clad, sexy nuns brandishing guns.

Winter

Comic Lea DeLaria explained in Rolling Stone why she was such a flashy comedian. “Twelve years of Catholic school. I was a naughty little girl and I thought if I could make that nun laugh, she wouldn’t hit me with that ruler. I owe it all to nuns that I’m a comic and a lesbian.”

January 16

Midway City, CA – An article written in the Summer Edition of The American Cocker Magazine excoriated the Catholic Church by saying that its teaching on contraception was based on the desire to breed more Catholics for the purpose of making money. The editor of the magazine, Michael Allen, responded to league president William Donohue’s query about why a bigoted article about the Church would be in a magazine about dogs. Without apology, Ms. Allen defended the article.

February

Conservative scholar Irwin Stelzer, director of regulatory policy studies at American Enterprise Institute, contributed an essay to a symposium in Commentary, which was a response to a symposium in First Things. Stelzer wrote that Jewish neoconservatives should have known better than to “pitch an intellectual tent broad enough” to include “many Catholics brought up in a tradition that does not welcome dissent from its revealed truths.” He added that Jewish intellectuals “should not expect to be partners in a governing theocracy” with Catholics. He did not indicate which Catholics he meant.

April

Boston, MA – Boston Magazine printed a story about a retired priest accused of pedophilia. The story was not objectionable, but the headline was. It read, “Department of Immaculate Molestation.”

April 14

Media Week published an ad for America’s Health Network that displayed an elderly nun, Sister Mary Elizabeth, with a heading that read, “Don’t do that you’ll go blind.” Below the message was the comment “Everybody thinks they’re a doctor. Fortunately, on America’s Health Network, everybody really is.” The league objected to the stereotypical depiction of Catholic women who devote their lives to God’s work.

April – May

MAD magazine, in its April and May editions, portrayed Catholic priests as child-molesting homosexuals, stating in the May issue that virtually all priests are homosexuals and therefore would not be offended by a movie like “Priest.”

May

Emmaus, PA – In the May issue of Men’s Health, David Courtwright questioned the thesis of a book which alleged that young men who are left alone in large groups tend to be violence-prone. However, Mr. Courtwright scoffed in a parenthetical aside that such a theory “does seem to explain Catholic boys’ schools and the Dallas Cowboys.”

June

Yahoo magazine published an article on the “Gay Connection” that listed a number of web sites of interest to the gay and lesbian community. It stated that America OnLine’s Forum OnQ “is the largest information provider…to the largest concentration of gay folks anywhere, if you don’t count the Catholic priesthood.”

July

Texas – “Satan is a woman, the Pope is her puppet, and the world will end in three years,” blared the full front page of the July Texas Monthly. Inside, the article to which the cover refers says absolutely nothing about the Pope or the Catholic Church.

July – August

An article on the history of the martini is not where one would expect to find an offensive reference to the virginity of Mary. Yet that is precisely what occurred in the July/August issue of American Heritage, where Max Rudin, publisher of the Library of America, related the advice of filmmaker Luis Bunuel: “At a certain period in America it was said that the making of a dry martini should resemble the Immaculate Conception, for, as St. Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative power of the Holy Ghost pierced the Virgin’s hymen ‘like a ray of sunlight through a window – leaving it unbroken.’”

September

An article in the September Esquire on Dallas Cowboy Michael Irvin was accompanied by an offensive cartoon showing Irvin hanging from a cross with two scantily clad women in sexually suggestive poses next to him.

October 6

In what can only be described as purely Satanic, Screw magazine, published by Al Goldstein, ran pictures depicting Mother Teresa in hard core pornographic poses. One photo shows a naked man having intercourse with her. He has a beard, has blood emanating from his side, and is wearing a crucifix and a crown of thorns, with a halo over his head. There is also a picture of Mother Teresa’s face superimposed on the naked body of a woman who has her legs spread. And there is a cartoon of Mother Teresa sitting on a toilet.

October – November

New York, NY – The premier issue of a new magazine, Notorious, featured an article by Sean Bosker that described his experience of “going to confession” at four New York-area Catholic Churches. Having invaded the sanctity of the confessional to stage these mock confessions, Bosker detailed what it was like for him to confess various sins—all sexual in nature, of course—and then receive “penance” for his transgressions. A non-Catholic himself, he used the article to instruct other non-Catholics on how to engage in a mock confession, and advised readers to “Remember that priests are probably as grateful for some discussion of T and A in the afternoon as anyone.”

November – December

Mother Jones magazine featured many articles on religion, almost all of which treated various religions reverently. The lone exception was Catholicism. In a piece by Cheryl Reed, priests and nuns were made out to be sexually promiscuous persons. The point of the article was an assault on celibacy, using anecdotal material to make wild generalizations about the clergy.

November – December

Dallas, TX – The Door, which bills itself as “The World’s Pretty Much Only Religious Satire Magazine,” caricatured a group of bishops by putting clown noses on them, and captioning the photograph “A Thousand Words,” as in the adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

RADIO

Winter

Big Rapids, MI – WYBR/Y-102, an FM station, ran an ad to promote the “Mike and Brian” morning show. It featured the pair dressed as nuns, wearing a habit, and folding their hands in a prayer-like manner. Their eyes were lifted upward to an inscription above the picture which read, “Make Them Your Morning Habit.”

January – February

Pittsburgh, PA – WTAE talk show host Lynn Cullen talked for several hours about a local controversy concerning the lengths of skirts worn by some Catholic school girls. Instead of merely discussing the issue, she used the topic to degrade Catholic educational and other institutions.

February 12

Los Angeles, CA – A talk show host on KFI radio bashed Catholic priests on Ash Wednesday by making sweeping generalizations and ridiculing the vows of poverty and chastity that priests take.

February 12

Syndicated talk show host Howard Stern used the occasion of Ash Wednesday to do a skit that mocked Catholicism. He performed a mock blessing using cigar ashes on his program.

February 12

Saginaw, MI – Radio station WSAM talk show host Ted Maddox suggested that the local Catholic bishops should give out “triscuits” in place of the Communion Host.

February 20

Philadelphia, PA – In a parody of Catholicism, WIP Sports Radio made offensive comments regarding the Stations of the Cross, Jesus’ falling the third time, Our Blessed Mother (“Our Lady of Liberals”) and Mary Magdalene (she serviced many men).

February 26

Dallas, TX – A KRLD radio talk show host, Rick Roberts, made offensive remarks about Catholicism and encouraged those who called in to do the same.

February 26

Boston, MA – WRKO Radio’s Whitley and Clapproot Show aired a segment on priest pedophiles insinuating that all Catholic priests are afflicted with this disorder.

February 27

Colorado Springs, CO – KVOR’s talk show host Jim Emery made vulgar comments on the recent Vatican statement on divorce and marriage. He also criticized the Pope, stating, “This guy, this Pope, who won’t get laid, is telling his priests who he won’t let get laid that they should counsel people on sexual matters.”

March 16

Howard Stern claimed himself to be “greater than Jesus Christ” while background sound effects simulated nails being hammered.

April

Birmingham, AL – WDJC radio’s “Christian-Jew Hour” aired a program that launched a bigoted attack on the Catholic Church and its teachings.

April 20

Picayune, MI – Brother James McCraney of the Sones Missionary Baptist Church spewed inflammatory and bigoted remarks on his radio talk show, “The Bible Truth Show.” He questioned why Catholics should accept any teachings from “a man who calls himself Father but dresses like a mama.” He criticized Catholic author John O’Brien, claiming he “knows about as much about God as my pet poodle.” Brother McCraney called priests “liars from Hell” and “serpents in the pulpit” for consecrating the Eucharist. He cited Transubstantiation as an “ungodly” doctrine and concluded that the Catholic Church is “the mother of all harlots” and “the source of all untruth.”

April 25

Philipsburg, PA – During what he later described as a satirical reporting of a Vatican statement on homosexuality, Nick English of radio station WUBZ-FM commented that Catholic priests had been promoting homosexuality for years—just ask their altar boys. When a local Catholic pastor asked parishioners to respond to the station, Mr. English, without apologizing for his remark, accused the pastor of trying to “cause the economic downfall” of the station, and put “37 people out of work.”

May 8

Philadelphia, PA – A discussion of annulments on a WWDB radio show turned into a free-for-all attack on the Catholic Church, with hosts encouraging embittered Catholics to call and vent their anger at the Church.

May 11

The syndicated radio show featuring host Don Imus included a parody by Andy Rooney blasting the Pope and Church teachings on annulment, calling it “Vatican mumbo-jumbo.” To his credit, Mr. Imus commented, “That was unfortunate!” at the conclusion of the skit. The parody was not replayed.

May 29

Lansing, MI – WVIC-FM radio aired a discussion about Catholics doing “some weird things” while praising what they termed “recovering Catholics.”

June

Cincinnati, OH – WSAI Radio defended its airing of an attack on the Catholic Church by a preacher, Brother Stair. Station Manager Peter Zolnowski told the league that Brother Stair was “not anti-Catholic”; but that Michael Kain, Grand Knight-Elect of the Glenmary Knights of Columbus who had complained about the broadcast, had just “happened to tune in on a night when (Brother Stair) was on his Catholic-bashing soapbox.”

June 6

Radio talk show host Hank Hanegraaf, president of the Christian Research Institute, branded Roman Catholics as “dangerous” and “divisive” and accused the Catholic Church of “militating against orthodox Christianity.”

June 16

Philadelphia, PA – WWDB-FM show co-host Susan Bray told an anti-Catholic joke about President Clinton engaging in sexual intercourse with the Blessed Virgin Mary in Heaven. She later apologized after objections were raised by the league’s Greater Philadelphia/South Jersey chapter.

July

Exercise guru Susan Powter used her syndicated radio show to deliver an extended and bigoted tirade against the Catholic Church. Among the lowlights:

• The Catholic Church is “soaked in blood,” having “murdered millions,” skinned people alive, raped and pillaged, and destroyed indigenous cultures.
• It is “common” for priests to molest children.
• She has slept with a Catholic priest, and “the truth of the matter is many people have had sex with priests and nuns.”
• “It’s adultery in the Catholic Church to enjoy sex.”
• She was thrown out of the Vatican for wearing a short skirt and a halter top, and because “I asked a priest about idolatry because there were all those dead embalmed priests there in glass coffins.”

Powter mocked “old pope whatever his name is,” wondering if he “is really alive. I think they took him off the mantle, they took him from the taxidermist.” She asked how one walks into a Catholic Church without vomiting. And she prefaced her remarks by saying she was “raised in the Dominican Catholic convent in Sydney, Australia, so I can say anything I want about the Catholic Church.”

July 5

The Weekend Edition of National Public Radio (NPR), which is taxpayer-funded, featured a segment with musical satirist Tom Lehrer singing “The Vatican Rag,” which ridicules the Eucharist, the doctrine of Transubstantiation, and other Catholic teachings. Host Scott Simon praised Lehrer.

July 9

A segment of the nationally syndicated “Imus in the Morning” show mocked Catholic monks.

August

San Diego, CA – “Lash Wednesday,” a Catholic-bashing radio spot, drew thousands of protesting post cards in an effort mobilized by Carl Horst, president of the league’s San Diego chapter. “Lash Wednesday,” part of the “Dave, Shelly and Chainsaw” radio show, regularly features callers “confessing” all kinds of sins of the flesh. When one caller referred to a friend’s “rumpus room,” Shelly and Chainsaw replied, “The Reverend has a rumpus room and his favorite decoration is altar boys.”

October 7

Portland, OR – Talk show host Lars Larsen of KXL Radio charged repeatedly that the Catholic Church’s involvement in the campaign to defeat assisted suicide represented “a foreign government” interfering in an Oregon election.

December 4

Howard Stern continued his tasteless assault on Catholic sensibilities with a lesbian Christmas carol that mocked God and the Pope.

December 8

New York, NY – A WOR radio promo for its “Dr. Joy Brown Show” featured a caller lamenting that her husband, “a former Catholic priest,” would not allow her to perform oral sex on him. In a telephone conversation, Program Director David Bernstein agreed that the promo was offensive, and assured the league that it had already been pulled and would not run again.

December 9

Tampa, FL – The same joke told by Susan Bray on WWDB radio, Philadelphia, in June, about President Clinton having sex with the Virgin Mary in heaven, was told by Mark Larson on WFLA radio in Tampa. The league protested, first by telephone and then by a letter to the station manager, demanding that WFLA follow Ms. Bray’s example and apologize on-air.

December 23

Detroit, MI – Dave Barber, filling in for a regular talk show host on WXYT Radio, used the show as an extended anti-Catholic diatribe, ripping Catholic schools, referring to “pedophile priests” and labeling priests “drunks,” and deploring the Vatican’s “millions of dollars in collected art.” A league member who called in to object was dismissed by Barber as a “goose-stepping Catholic,” and cut off the air; while callers who happily participated in Barber’s Catholic-bashing were given ample time to vent.

TELEVISION

1997

NBC’s Saturday Night Live regularly features a Catholic schoolgirl character, complete with headband, freaky glasses and a plaid skirt “hiked to the heavens” according toEntertainment Weekly. The girl often exposes her underwear, and says such things as, “Sometimes when I get nervous I touch my boobs…”

On Nov. 22, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani took part in this offensive skit, which that night featured a second Catholic schoolgirl giggling about tongue kissing and getting hickeys from her boyfriend.

January

Comedy Central aired Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a 1979 film mocking the life of Jesus. Roundly condemned for its blasphemous and vulgar content when it was originally released, the movie portrays Jesus as a fool, who, among other things, has sex. Mary is played by a man and uses foul language. It is indicated that Jesus was the product of a rape. The Crucifixion is shown as a big finale, complete with joyful singing.

January 6

Chicago Hope, a CBS program, showed a young boy lying in a hospital bed clutching rosary beads. The doctor held them before dropping them in a waste basket, saying that they were not helpful. The doctor also said that the boy had received religious objects from a strange priest.

February 7

Tonight Show (NBC) host Jay Leno joked about a Catholic Church having “all you can eat Communion.” A day earlier he referred to a Catholic school as “Our Lady of the Evening.” Leno subsequently apologized to league president William Donohue.

February 10

Actor LeVar Burton, appearing on the ABC program Politically Incorrect, said, “I can say with conviction that the Roman Catholic Church is evil.” In an attempt to clarify, Burton said that he meant what was evil were the sisters he was exposed to in elementary school. Later he called league president William Donohue and said that he meant that religion had caused great harm in the history of the world. He ended his discussion with Donohue by apologizing for his comments.

February 21

Washington, DC – On the WJLA news broadcast, during a story on an abortion clinic bombing, the anchorwoman mentioned gratuitously that the clinic was “down the street from a Catholic church.” The fact that the clinic was across the street from a palm reader’s shop was not mentioned.

February 23 & 25

CBS aired a mini-series called Night Sins which showed a priest passionately kissing a woman in church and a crazed deacon assaulting the priest, and then committing suicide. The deacon also harbored the body of his wife and misled many altar boys. He was portrayed as being an evil disciplinarian who was “obsessed” with Catholicism. Actress Valerie Bertinelli generalized about the clergy by saying that it “seems like they all have a secret life, hiding their sins.”

February 26

On The 700 Club, Pat Robertson laughed as he and co-host Terry Meeuwsen disparaged the Catholic Church’s position on divorce and remarriage. Robertson commented that “the Holy Father may believe in miracles” and that the Pope “was involved in Angelic visitations that are not necessarily valid.” He also said in a condescending tone, “Maybe somebody will buy into that theory.”

March 15

Saturday Night Live presented a parody of the Crusades entitled, “Nude Crusades.” A woman actor mocked the Eucharist when she said “This is my body, now show me yours.”

March 18

The ABC show, The Practice, undermined the significance of the seal of confession by depicting a priest on a witness stand outlining the detailed confession of a man who murdered his girlfriend.

March 23

On the NBC show, Third Rock from the Sun, John Lithgow announced that he was “so whipped that I feel like a Catholic school boy who just got his knuckles bashed in by the nun that he’s dating.”

April

NBC’s Law & Order used one of its main characters to portray growing up “Catholic” as a classic example of child abuse. He claimed that his ten years at Our Lady Queen of Angels made him a skeptic about religion. He cited as examples nuns who walked around the classroom with rulers and his mother’s habit of holding her rosary beads in one hand while severely beating him with the other.

April

ABC’s Nightline covered the tragedy of Heaven’s Gate in a special on religious cults. In the introduction, pictures of the Vatican were included. Lawyer Ron Kuby stated that there was no difference between believing that a space ship was coming to save the cult members and a belief in the Immaculate Conception.

April 5

Saturday Night Live did a satirical newscast on a school’s banning the artwork of one of its students because the work depicted “a rat sucking the breast of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

April 13

On NBC’s Meet the Press, Louis Farrakhan blamed the Catholic Church for slavery and all Catholics for the conduct of a few Catholic thugs.

April 16

Long Island, NY – Long Island Cablevision’s show “Touch Base” included in its skits a commercial for “KHRIST KRISPIES” which ridiculed Christ, the Blessed Mother, the Rosary and Holy Water.

April 30

Houston, TX – CBS affiliate Channel 11, KHOU-TV, broadcast a special news series on “wicca,” otherwise known as “witchcraft.” The participants were portrayed as “good witches” and this religion was effectively proselytized while burning religious candles of Jesus and Mary.

May

NBC reported on the murder of Stefanie Rabinowitz in Philadelphia by her husband, Craig Rabinowitz. It was noted that Mr. Rabinowitz had been involved with a stripper known as “Summer” who was a graduate of Hallahan Catholic High School. It was not mentioned that the murder suspect was Jewish.

May 27

New York, NY – Comedian Jackie Mason taped a show in which he made a series of jokes targeting priests as pedophiles. He ridiculed Catholics throughout the monologue.

May 30

NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries, narrated by Robert Stack, commented during a feature on James “Whitey” Bulger (the “Don of South Boston”) that “Numerous Irish-Catholic families produce one priest, one gangster, one cop, one murderous thug.”

June 1

Comedy Showcase comedienne Cathy Ladman considered the following to be comic: “My best friend is Lutheran and she told me when Jesus was born, the Three Wise Men visited him and they brought as gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh. Myrrh? To a baby shower? I guess Mary was very polite about it—myrrh—how lovely. You can never have enough—myrrh. Couldn’t they have brought something we need—like a cradle? Jesus Christ! Hey, that’s what I’ll name him—it’s much better than Jeff!” She

added that “Then Joseph and Mary would throw parties. Who’s coming? The Wise Men! They always bring bad gifts. I hope they follow the wrong star and get lost. Bad mood—bad mood! Of course I’m in a bad mood. I haven’t had sex—EVER!”

June 9

Fox Network’s Mad TV mocked Mother Teresa’s ministry in India in a skit, “Mother of Mercy.”

Mother Teresa was portrayed in a bikini while nursing a baby.

June 20

Burbank, CA – In a KNBC news story of a gruesome murder, reporter Kelly Lang made a point to identify one of the two suspects as a former altar boy. The religious background of the other suspect was not mentioned.

July

After reading promos heralding a new TV series about an irreverent priest who doubts the existence of God, the league began urging members to express their concerns about Disney/ABC’s “Nothing Sacred.”

League president William Donohue, after previewing the pilot episode on July 24, declared it to be “worse than expected.” The league’s main objections to the show have been that it promotes the most positive stereotype of Catholics who dissent from Church teachings while fostering the most negative stereotype of those who remain loyal to the Church; and that it deliberately denigrates the official teachings of the Church by unfavorably contrasting them to the trendy positions of dissenting Catholics.

In a July 21 letter to the league, Capuchin Franciscan Father Gregory Coiro, director of media relations for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, rebuked the producer of “Nothing Sacred” for implying that Father Coiro’s review of the pilot episode signified Church approval of the show. In fact, Father Coiro wrote, “the pilot’s script contained a number of inaccuracies concerning Catholic belief and practice in addition to numerous instances of erroneous, offensive, insulting and objectionable dialogue.” He praised the league for “telling the truth about ‘Nothing Sacred’ in the face of its executive producer’s attempts to deceive the public.”

July 16

MTV’s “The Real World” kicked off its sixth season with an attack on Catholicism. Featuring a group of strangers who come to work and live together, the show identifies the religion of only the two Catholic characters. The Church is described as threatening, “dogmatic Christianity,” and as “really bad for women.” The Catholic woman is accused of trying to bring her values into the bedroom, and she is targeted for corruption by the others.

July 27

On CBS 60 Minutes, the writer of the music for The Song of Bernadette ridiculed the story of Bernadette, drawing laughs from host Morley Safer.

July 30

On an A & E Network “American Justice” segment entitled “Mob Hit Men,” backdrops showing a statue of the Blessed Mother and two churches were included, with no evident contextual relationship to the subject matter of the show.

August

The league launched a petition drive calling on Disney chairman Michael Eisner to withdraw “Nothing Sacred” from Disney/ABC’s fall lineup. On August 8, in a letter accepting President Clinton’s invitation to the White House to attend an address by the President on religious liberty, league president William Donohue called on President Clinton to also speak out against “the exploitative and highly politicized depiction of Catholic priests in ‘Nothing Sacred.’” On August 15 President Clinton responded, writing that he shared the league’s “concern regarding negative or irresponsible portrayals that send our children the wrong message.” Unfortunately, the President’s letter did not address the league’s central concern about “Nothing Sacred,” which has to do with its ideological agenda rather than with negative messages toward children.

August

TV Guide reported that “Oz,” an HBO show set in prison, is not only “a show about hate”; it also “mocks God,” and grossly denigrates Catholic belief in the Eucharist as cannibalism. A killer who had slain and eaten his own mother praises Catholic teaching that the Eucharist is the body of Christ. “How can I not get behind a religion like that?” he asks.

August

A & E Mystery Movie, “A Touch of Frost,” featured two priests—a retired priest with a drinking problem and a young priest who breaks the seal of the confessional, and who later disparages the Church’s commitment to priestly celibacy.

August 1

An advertisement on Nickelodeon for an upcoming MTV program, Apartment 3F, mocked the crucifixion, with a comedian on stage referring to the “great abs” of Christ on the Cross.

August 5

During a CBS-TV movie, “Breach of Faith, Family of Cops II,” a policewoman investigating the murder of a priest in church related to a colleague how she used to be a Catholic but no longer agrees with Church teaching. The comment bore no relation to the story line of the show.

August 15

Tacoma, WA – On the Feast of the Assumption, KBTC, a PBS affiliate, aired a trilogy of programs— “Goddess Remembered,” “The Burning Times,” and “Full Circle”—which promoted paganism, witchcraft, goddess worship and earth worship, while denigrating religion in general and Catholicism in particular. Among the offensive material was a dismissal of the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe as goddess worship.

August 27

Bill Maher, host of ABC-TV’s “Politically Incorrect,” had a fun evening leading his guests in a mocking harangue of the Catholic Church—making cruel jokes about the age and health of Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa, belittling Church teachings, and charging the Church with “2000 years of corrupt bureaucracy.”

September

“Nothing Sacred” debuted Sept. 18 with a pilot episode that featured the main character, Father Ray, doubting the existence of God; declaring that he would no longer hear sexual sins in confession, as he “wasn’t ordained to be a sexual traffic cop”; advising a young woman to follow her conscience in deciding whether to have an abortion; and making clear, in a discussion with a diocesan official, that he disagrees with the Church’s teaching against abortion. In an overwhelming response to the petition drive launched by the league in August, a half-million signatures were collected and delivered to Disney chairman Michael Eisner, protesting “Nothing Sacred.” On Sept. 8 the league ran an ad in Advertising Age, advising companies to avoid sponsoring “Nothing Sacred,” and promising to mobilize the league’s 350,000 members, as well as other groups, in a boycott of advertisers who continued to sponsor the show. By month’s end, 24 organizations—including, as promised, Protestant, Jewish and Muslim, as well as Catholic groups—had signed on to the league’s campaign to boycott sponsors; and American Isuzu Motors had become the first sponsor to withdraw its advertising from the show.

September 1

On Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” the Blessed Mother was shown as a “Where’s Waldo” character concerning apparitions.

September 2

On CBS-TV’s “Late Show With David Letterman,” “Dave’s Top Ten” featured “Good Things About Performing a Concert for the Pope,” which made fun of a number of Catholic teachings and practices.

September 8

On CBS “This Morning,” Reverend Donald Reeves, an Anglican priest, criticized the late Mother Teresa

as a “very canny peasant,” and a “bossy boots,” who cared more about charity than social justice. He added that she had “espoused a former Roman Catholicism which, at least in Europe, and I think in parts of America, people are trying to get rid of.”

September 13

Disney-owned ABC, in a glaring exception to the generally respectful coverage of Mother Teresa’s funeral, allowed Christopher Hitchens to lambaste the late champion of the poor for her alleged “false humility” and “rabid fundamentalism.” Hitchens, a writer for Vanity Fair, has a notorious history of Catholic-bashing, and is the author of an undocumented, hate-filled book against Mother Teresa. Particularly offensive was ABC anchor Peter Jennings allowing Hitchens to continue his diatribe during the Consecration of the Host at Mother Teresa’s funeral.

September 13

ABC-TV’s “America’s Funniest Commercials” showed two nuns re-attaching a penis to a statue of a boy, then one nun returning to the statue later to turn the penis upward.

September 26

Whoopi Goldberg, on ABC’s “20/20,” harshly and unfairly accused Pope John Paul II of rejecting gays and young people, saying the Pope “infuriates” her. League president William Donohue, given an opportunity to preview the interview on NBC’s “Extra,” refuted Goldberg’s charges. He noted the Pope’s overwhelming popularity among young people, and pointed out that the Pope’s upholding of Church teaching against homosexual behavior no more represents a rejection of gays than his upholding of Church teaching against fornication and adultery represents a rejection of heterosexuals. Goldberg, upon hearing Donohue’s comments, called the league personally, asking to speak with him. When he was unavailable, she had a personal letter delivered to him, along with a copy of her book—which Donohue subsequently read, and described as “pure filth, the kind of screed that one might expect from an immature adolescent boy, not from an adult professional woman.”

October

The outpouring of opposition to “Nothing Sacred” snowballed on all fronts. The league’s petition drive to Disney chairman Michael Eisner reached 750,000 signatures. Eight more groups joined the league’s campaign to boycott the show’s sponsors, bringing the number of supporting organizations to 32. And by the end of October, 20 advertisers had announced their decision to withdraw as sponsors of the show. Disney/ABC, in an unprecedented effort to save a floundering show, responded on Oct. 23 with full page ads in every major newspaper in the nation, quoting four priests who liked the show. Actor Kevin Anderson (Father Ray) also took to the airwaves, pleading in television ads for the public to watch the show and make up their own minds whether it was “controversial,” “blasphemous,” or the “best new drama on TV.” Unfortunately for him, many Americans had already reached such a determination, as “Nothing Sacred” continued, week after week, to languish at or near the bottom of the television ratings.

October 8

Richard Jeni’s “The Good Catholic Boy” on HBO ended with a string of blasphemous statements against Roman Catholicism.

October 14

In an episode of the new CBS show, “Michael Hayes,” a Catholic priest, after being video-taped hearing the confession of a man involved in a terrorist plot, violated his priestly duties by testifying for the prosecution. The show, clearly based on the 1996 real-life video-taping of a confession by an Oregon district attorney, concluded that justice is best served by having a priest violate the seal of the confessional; thereby promoting the idea that religion should bow to the power of government whenever there is a conflict between Church and state. The show also portrayed the Church hierarchy—in the person of the Archbishop of New York—as being concerned solely with its own parochial interests.

October 18

HBO’s Comedy Showcase included a spoof of Catholic upbringing, mocking the Mass and the Eucharist.

October 26

“The Devil’s Child,” a television movie on ABC, featured a crazy Catholic mother who gives her daughter to Satan. There were also several snide references to Catholic girls and Catholic education.

November

As the league’s petition drive against “Nothing Sacred” soared to over a million signatures, and the list of advertisers withdrawing their sponsorship climbed to 27, media supporters of the show turned their sights on the league. The New York Times, among others, pigeon-holed the league as “a conservative group”; the Chicago Tribune went even further, labeling the league “a fairly extreme group.” The National Catholic Reporter, the New York Observer and Commonweal all focused their commentary on league president William Donohue, apparently seeking to make him, rather than the agenda of “Nothing Sacred,” the issue. To top it off, Father Andrew Greeley, never one to let an inconvenient fact stand in the way of a good tirade, accused the league of being so obsessed with “Nothing Sacred” that “it seems not to have noticed the horror at Stanford.” In fact it was Father Greeley who seemed not to have noticed that—long before he wrote this piece—the league had gotten Stanford to apologize for its band’s ridicule of Irish-Catholics during half-time of the Oct. 4 Notre Dame-Stanford football game.

Meanwhile, ABC ordered nine more episodes of “Nothing Sacred,” completing its full season slate of 22—despite the fact that a number of shows with higher ratings, such as “Time Cop” and “Over the Top,” had been canceled. Indeed, the network did not order additional episodes of the comedy “You Wish,” which had averaged a 7.1 rating for Sept.-Oct., compared to a 4.7 average for “Nothing Sacred.”

This unwavering commitment to “Nothing Sacred,” despite failing ratings and a dearth of sponsors, only served to underscore the league’s contention that the show’s real purpose is as a vehicle for promoting an ideological agenda. Actor Kevin Anderson acknowledged as much: “I wouldn’t go so far as to say the show will change society or culture or anything like that,” he told the Los Angeles Daily News. “But I do think, within the Catholic Church, it has nudged the rock a few more inches.” And that, after all is said and done, is what it is all about.

November

Comedian Denis Leary was true to his word. His “Lock-N-Load” show aired throughout November on HBO, and was just as offensive and blasphemous as he had promised in his August Las Vegas Review Journal interview—if not more so. Performing on a set gratuitously designed to look like a Catholic Church, complete with religious statues, Leary entertained his audience with an endless string of profanities, and concluded with a savage attack on Catholic priests, bishops, and Pope John Paul II. Among the titles listed on the CD version is a three minute routine which he calls “F**K the Pope.”

November

On CNBC Charles Grodin, reporting on the poverty of a run-down section of Los Angeles, announced with disgust that the Catholics of Los Angeles were going to build a $50 million cathedral in the midst of all that poverty. No mention, apparently, of all the resources the Church devotes to helping the needy.

December

Seven more companies withdrew their advertising from “Nothing Sacred,” bringing to 34 the number of sponsors who renounced the show. With ratings continuing to sag, ABC—still refusing to give up on the program— announced that beginning in January it would be moved permanently from Thursday to Saturday nights. Supporters of the show continued to scapegoat the league, with Gail Lumet Buckley of Americamagazine labeling league president William Donohue a “Grand Inquisitor” who “sows class war, as well as religious war.”

December 6

Saturday Night Live was at it yet again, with a spoof by host Nathan Lane of Sister Wendy. Lane, while portraying the art critic nun, had his hands on the genitals of a statue.

December 10

Ted Turner, discussing the environment and population control with Sam Donaldson on ABC’s “Prime Time Live,” tried to link Catholic teaching on birth control to past toleration of slavery. After Turner advised people to “still have lots of sex but use birth control,” Donaldson responded, “Well there’s the Catholic Church [that] doesn’t believe in that.” “Well, I…that, uh, goes back a long way,” Turner replied with his usual eloquence, “but it’s time to, uh, change our attitudes about things. We’ve done that with a lot…I mean, the Catholic Church allowed slavery over a hundred years ago, but now that’s been done away with.” Of course, up until a little over a hundred years ago, slavery had been universally accepted, and the Catholic Church had historically tried to ameliorate its harshness, when not calling for outright abolition. That the Church failed to do so forcefully in the United States in the 19^th century was due at least in part to this nation’s ostracizing of Catholics as outsiders, in the same way that Turner’s gratuitous comments ostracize Catholics.

December 13

More Saturday Night Live:: This week’s insult to Catholics was a parody of Pope John Paul II reading in Latin, without knowing “what he was talking about.”

January

A wrestling tag team, known as the “Flying Nuns,” disbanded after the league protested their mocking of Catholicism. The team, part of the World Wrestling Federation, performed as “Sister Angelica” and “Mother Smucker,” complete with habit. The men participated in jokes during their bout, including comments about their facial hair and sexuality. They folded their hands in prayer and bowed to add to the farce.

January 11 & 20

Queens, NY – Almost 130 headstones were overturned at Calvary Cemetery. Police investigated it as a bias crime. Previously, on Christmas Eve, over 400 headstones were overturned along with statues, including one of Mary. In still another incident, more headstones were knocked over and a mausoleum window smashed with a sledgehammer.

January 25

New Orleans, LA – A parade, the Krewe du Vieux, billed as a controversial alternative to Mardi Gras, featured marchers dressed as nuns with exposed plastic breasts.

March 28 – March 30

USA Volleyball scheduled its Junior Olympic trials on Easter weekend without accommodating Catholic participants who wanted to attend Good Friday services and Easter Sunday Mass. After the league protested, such accommodations were arranged.

April

A vile, hate-filled response to the league’s direct mail survey included lewd pictures of Christ, obscene descriptions and satanic symbols, and graphic sketches of enlarged genitalia. Answers to some of the questions contained the following comments:

• “Genocide is great!”
• “Catholics aren’t shit on enough.”
• “I like it when they show priest F—g altar boys.”
• “ALL CATHOLICS GO TO HELL. HA. HA.”
• “The Catholic Church should be treated with utmost disrespect.”
• “Catholicism should be scourged from the face of the earth.”
• “Pope John Paul is the Anti-Christ.”
• “I insist that you purge my name and address from your evil files. P.S. F___ You.”
• “How funny that my name ended up on your list to fight Catholic bashing! Must be someone’s idea of a joke! I happen to love cartoons, cards, jokes and satires on the Church. It’s far better for me to laugh AT the Church…than build up anger about it.”
• “Just thinking about the Catholic Church makes me angry! So on your Survey, you can chalk me up to being anti-Catholic.”
• “In my opinion, the Catholic Church deserves the criticism it gets—and in fact should get more.”
• “I’m glad it [Hollywood] doesn’t offer a respectful picture of the Catholic Church.”

May

A hand-out provided by the Mennonite’s “Star of Hope” took the following jabs at the Catholic Church:

• “A church system that forbids to marry…and supplants the priesthood of Christ is false from its foundations.”
• “You should get out of that church, lest by association you share in its punishment…”
• “It is worth noting whether a church disciplines sin promptly and consistently, or only when necessary as a publicity measure.”

May

San Antonio, TX – The league viewed and protested a video produced and distributed by John Hagee Ministries, which cited certain “historical facts” designed to link the Catholic Church with Hitler’s program of genocide in Germany. In its apparent attempt to drive a wedge between Catholics and Jews, the video, Southern Steps: Jerusalem and Bible Prophecy, ignored statements by various Jewish leaders citing the Catholic Church for its efforts to save Jews from the Nazis during World War II.

May 15

Miami, FL – A statue of the Virgin Mary was beheaded and its face smashed with a metal object outside St. Philomena Church in the Little Havana section of Miami. The mostly Nicaraguan parishioners decried this “sacrilege,” which the pastor, Father Timothy Hopkins, labeled a “hate crime.” Noting that this was the second incident in several months, Father Hopkins suggested that it was part of a wave of Catholic-bashing—perhaps attributable to a local TV station run by Protestants which smashes Catholic statues on the air and encourages viewers to do the same. The league contributed $500 toward the purchase of a new statue.

August 4 – August 5

Staten Island, NY – Vandals did upwards of $15,000 in damage to Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church in West Brighton, smashing statues, breaking the church sign in two, tearing up flowers and shrubs and shattering the glass doors of the parish school. A day later, a Bay Terrace synagogue was defaced with graffiti, including a swastika and a disparaging remark about Jesus Christ. These acts of vandalism followed by one month an assault on Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church in South Beach, Staten Island, where shrubs were torn up, graffiti scrawled on the parish school, and windows of the school and rectory shot at with a pellet gun.

Fall

Puyallup, WA – Earth’s Final Warning, a publication put out by a group calling itself “Heralds of Truth,” is a 16 page diatribe against the papacy and the Catholic Church, linking the Church to paganism, to Satan, to “the mark of the beast,” and to the New World Order.

December

Medford, OR – A billboard posted on Interstate 5 declared, “It is Written: The POPE is the ANTI-CHRIST. Proof? Write Box 34, Talent, OR.” While the sponsors of the message were apparently unwilling to identify themselves on the billboard, the league wrote requesting the promised “proof.”

December 22

New York, NY – The league ran an ad on the op ed page of the New York Times, quoting from the Times’ Christmas day editorials of 1942 and 1943 which praised Pope Pius XII as “a lonely voice” crying out “squarely against Hitlerism.” Negative reaction to the ad ranged form the respectful, to the angry, to outright hate mail. Some of the more hysterical and defamatory examples:

• “Bullsh*t,” one anonymous correspondent scrawled over the Timesquotations. “Nazi bastard,” he or she added next to the illustration of Pope Pius; and, for good measure, “F**k you!” was written across that illustration.
• “Your revisionism is obscene,” another writer scrawled at the top of a copy of a letter he had sent to Pope John Paul II. “Pius XII supported a Catholic Hitler all the way.” The writer’s letter to the Pope accused the Church of defaming and desecrating “the memory of all the Jews murdered in ‘Christ’s name’ with support of the Church,” and charged the Vatican with a “role in supporting a Catholic Hitler in the biggest theft, and genocide to wipe out a race of people, and then for the Church to take in $millions (sic) stolen while giving safe haven to those who committed the mass murder of 7 million Jews…”
• “Your New York Times ad is a pathetic excuse at trying to vindicate the almighty church…What dastardly political machinations really go on behind closed doors at the Vatican?…The modern-day Roman Catholic Church ought to start helping humanity instead of manipulating society and hoarding the money. Pass the collection plate, mail out those contribution envelopes…”
• “This is garbage! Pure self-serving weasel-word garbage…You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
• “Your ad is an outrageous distortion, fully worthy of Dr. Goebbels!”
• “The Vatican aided and abetted the Nazis.”
• “The Holocaust was in many respects organically evolved from policies and practices established by the Church during much of its history.”
• “The Church does not condemn evil, but is its partner.”
• “Pious (sic) XII was a cowardly self aggrandizing pretender, and a disgrace to the world Catholic organizations…It would appear that Christian collective guilt, and that of organized Catholicism specifically, is so deep as to demand a re-write of history.”
• “Who are you trying to fool? The ‘Church’ has crucified the Jewish people for centuries. Hitler exploited mass anti-Semitism fostered by the Church’s blood libel…The blood of 6,000,000 Jews will be upon the Church and will surely evoke divine retribution.”
• “Pope Pius 12^th was the most anti-Semitic pope who ever lived.”

December 25

West Cameron Township, PA – A statue of the Blessed Mother which stood outside Our Lady of Angels Friary was smashed to pieces early Christmas morning, in what Brother Benedict, who operates the friary, said was the latest in an ongoing series of anti-Catholic incidents. Brother Benedict, the last remaining member of his order living at the friary, said he had gotten used to harassment and insults from a particular group of neighbors during his 12 years there. Over the years he and other brothers who have lived there have been the targets of slurs, he said, and he even received a death threat. He had previously attached plexiglass to the wooden case holding the statue of the Virgin Mary, to protect it from bottles and other objects which had been tossed at it over the years. On Christmas morning, however, the vandals toppled the wooden case, broke through the plexiglass and smashed the statue, severing its head. Considering the previous anti-Catholic incidents, and the fact that the vandalism took place while he was away from the friary attending midnight Mass, Brother Benedict said he believes it was premeditated, and not just a random act. This latest incident had him “seriously considering closing the friary and joining another group of brothers or priests in some other place,” he said.