Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York

The following is an excerpt from an address given by Timothy Cardinal Dolan before the Metropolitan Club in New York City on April 8.

You have patiently sat through my past conversations with you as I have spoken of all the good the Catholic Church has done—our schools, charities, services for the homeless and hungry, welcome of refugees, healthcare efforts, our cathedral, advocacy for kids, babies—born and pre-born—the poor, families, our elders.

So, as I’ve discussed with you before the good we’ve done, honesty moves me to talk about the bad: the sexual abuse of minors by clergy.

Can I begin with the obvious? I mourn the grave damage that many victims—we count over 300 brave victims who have come forward—and their families have endured.

I repent for the sins and crimes of the priests—almost all of whom are deceased, and those living permanently removed from ministry—who have abused, and for my predecessors in the past who did not always act with the rigor justice requires in removing these perpetrators.

It has brought about not only deep wounds in the survivors and their families, but has seriously hurt our faithful people, and our loyal priests—the towering majority of whom have led virtuous, faithful lives—and has damaged the credibility of the Church in the wider community.

Lent, this season of repentance, provides me a fitting opportunity to renew the contrition we feel. There can be no excuses.

In the past, Church leaders did not always see what was uncomfortable to see, nor listen to voices of victims, parents, brave virtuous priests, sisters, and sensitive lay people that yearned to be heard about dangerous clerics.

In the past, some offending priests were at times transferred to yet another parish, or left in their assignment, only to tragically reoffend.

Back then, law enforcement officials were not always informed of the crime for which an offender should have been arrested.

Back then, there were rarely any background checks or safe environment training.

Back then, I am also afraid to admit, we were not always as open and up front as we should have been with our people.

In the past, the Catholic Church was not the example of the vigilant, professional approach prioritizing the safety of young people at all costs that we should have been.

For me to say this in front of you causes me sorrow and shame, just as it does on occasions when I meet with victims and their families, as I often do.

This expression of shame and sorrow is appropriate as we commence the penance and intense prayer of Holy Week beginning this Sunday, Palm Sunday.

Our elder brothers and sisters in the faith, our Jewish neighbors, will also then observe Passover, and their belief reminds us convincingly that God can indeed rescue us from darkness, sin, and death, as He indeed did save the Hebrews in Egypt. God can guide us to renewal, reform, a new land.

I told you before how things were done back then. What about now?

Only three instances of substantiated sexual abuse have been alleged to have occurred in the archdiocese since 2002. John Jay College of Criminal Justice, at the request of the bishops, conducted a comprehensive independent study of clergy abuse in the United States, and found that the annual number of incidents of sexual abuse by priests peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then declined sharply after 1985.

One incident is way too many, but the sharp drop in the past three decades reflects changes in attitudes and policies that were terribly slow to come, but are now firmly in place.

In June 2002, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, usually called The Dallas Charter, which affirms the Church’s commitment to sustain and strengthen a safe environment for children and youth.

Under Cardinal John O’Connor and Cardinal Edward Egan, my predecessors, our diocese had already enacted a number of protective measures. The Charter was the starting point for all that followed. It set out a series of practical and pastoral steps to which the archdiocese remains deeply committed.

Now, whenever the archdiocese receives an allegation of abuse—and as I have said the vast majority of current complaints relate to conduct that occurred over 30 years ago or more—it is referred automatically to the appropriate District Attorney. We have memoranda of understanding in place with the District Attorneys in each of the ten counties in the archdiocese, and they have our commitment to full cooperation.

Now, when we receive an allegation of abuse, the victim is immediately offered counseling by a professional of the victim’s choosing. The counseling is at the archdiocese’s expense, as it should be, and for as long as the victim feels it is needed.

Now, if a District Attorney’s Office determines that the allegation is credible, but that it cannot bring a criminal charge because the conduct is time barred, which is almost always the case, it turns the matter back to the archdiocese, and we contract an independent investigation from an outside forensic agency made up of mostly former FBI agents. A criminal conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt; protecting children does not. While this independent investigation is going on, the priest steps aside and his parish is notified.

Now, after this independent investigation is concluded, that data is presented to a Review Board to determine if the allegation is more likely than not true. The board is comprised of a majority of lay people—judges, lawyers, a psychologist, parents, teachers—and a priest and a nun.

Now, if the Board determines that the complaint is substantiated as more likely true, I accept their recommendation and remove the priest from active ministry, and his current and former parishes are notified. If the allegation is found not to be substantiated, the priest is returned to ministry.

Let me read you a part of the letter that I send to parishioners when we receive an allegation, regarding their priest, which the DA has deemed credible:

“I write to share some unpleasant news concerning [your priest]. Although you will undoubtedly find this news disturbing, as do I, I know you would prefer to hear it from me directly…[T]he archdiocese was informed that an allegation of sexual abuse of a minor was made against [your priest] and the district attorney has deemed it credible.

“The archdiocese will now follow its policy and protocols which includes having an independent investigation and referral to the Review Board…[Your priest] has denied the allegation, but will step aside while the matter is investigated. Might I request your prayers for the person who brought this allegation, and for [your priest]. We will keep you posted.”

Similar letters then go to members of past parishes where the accused priest has been assigned. We ask other victims to come forward.

Writing such a letter is not easy. Not writing it would be far worse. Permit me one more example of our current practices.

Now, the archdiocese has a Safe Environment Program that requires training for anyone who works with children, including clergy, employees and volunteers. Now, we require background checks that must be renewed every six years.

All of what I have said so far involves our handling of abuse complaints, and reflects our commitment to diligence and honesty. But the Church also has an obligation to make amends to victims of past abuse, and we are committed to doing that as well.

Three years ago, the archdiocese created an Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program (IRCP) to assess claims of past abuse and give compensation to those who were abused. Since then a number of other dioceses have followed our lead and created their own compensation programs.

The IRCP is led by Kenneth Feinberg and Camille Biros, who administered the compensation funds for the victims of September 11, and those of the Boston Marathon bombing, and who are recognized experts in the field.

To date, the IRCP has awarded $60 million in compensation to 314 victims. That number is heart-breaking, but the fact that there is an effective, autonomous procedure in place to hear complaints and provide some resolution is an important step toward healing, as victims have testified. We continue to invite people to come forward.

You should also know that this past September I asked Barbara Jones, a widely respected former federal judge, to review all of our policies, look into our practices, and make recommendations for their improvement. I want her to let us know whether or not we are indeed keeping the promises we have made. There is always room for improvement.

Before I close today, I want to say a few words about the Child Victims Act which the New York Legislature passed and the governor signed into law on February 14, 2019. Most significantly, the act extends the statute of limitations in criminal and civil cases so that victims of child abuse can seek justice.

In his State of the State Address, Governor Cuomo suggested that the “opposition of the Catholic Church” had been an impediment to the law’s passage—that the Church was somehow indifferent to abuse. Maybe it was good theatre, but it was less than accurate, and hardly fair.

To be sure, in the past, the Church had publicly supported robust reform in the laws on the abuse of minors, but had expressed concerns about one part of the act repealing the statute of limitations retroactively, but we were hardly alone in that caution.

Before the Governor spoke, however, we had publicly dropped our opposition. We had asked only that the so-called “public loophole”—a loophole that denied victims abused at public institutions, where abuse is regularly documented, equal access to the courts—be closed.

Sexual abuse is not limited to one institution, and while legislation should include the Church, we should not be singled out. The legislation that was enacted this year covers all organizations, private and public, religious and secular. It therefore had our support.

Jesus taught that the kingdom of God belongs to the children. For years, the Church was at times sadly less than strict in protecting those young people. No more. Children need safe places to grow, to learn, to play baseball, to thrive, to pray, to prepare for life.

As Dr. Paul McHugh, of Johns Hopkins University, a leading expert in the abuse of the young, has stated “Children are today very safe in the Catholic Church.”

A wise historian said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. I will not forget.

I thank you for inviting me to speak today, and very much appreciate your attention to my remarks.

A Blessed Holy Week and Passover!

Ralph Cipriano

With the Catholic Church under legal assault by prosecutors in 14 states, the case of a former Philadelphia altar boy dubbed “Billy Doe” serves as a cautionary tale that not every priest accused of sex abuse is automatically guilty.

The case also shows that crusading prosecutors don’t always play by the rules. And that no matter what the true facts in a sex abuse case are, it won’t matter to a biased news media.

Billy Doe, whose real name is Danny Gallagher, came forward at age 23 in 2011 to claim that back when he was 10 and 11 years old, he was repeatedly raped by two priests and a parochial school teacher. A couple of juries convicted all three attackers and sent them to jail. Also convicted was Msgr. William J. Lynn, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s former secretary for clergy. He became the first Catholic administrator in the country to be jailed in the clergy sex scandals, not for touching a child, but for endangering a child’s welfare by failing to protect the altar boy from a priest who was a known abuser.

In a civil settlement, the church subsequently paid Gallagher $5 million.

There was only one problem—Gallagher, a former drug addict, heroin dealer, habitual liar, third-rate conman and thief, made the whole story up. And all four men who went to jail—including a priest who died there—were innocent.

How do we know? On my blog, bigtrial.net, and for Newsweek and the National Catholic Reporter, I spent the past six years documenting all the holes in Gallagher’s outrageous and constantly changing tales of abuse.

I will now have to relate some graphic details to explain what a liar Gallagher is. And how irresponsible it was for former Philadelphia District Attorney Rufus Seth Williams to have put Gallagher on the witness stand as his star witness at two criminal trials in the D.A.’s self-described “historic” prosecution of the Church.
When he first came forward to tell two social workers for the archdiocese his accusations of abuse, Danny Gallagher claimed that:

• Father Charles Engelhardt attacked him in the sacristy after an early morning Mass, locked all the doors and then proceeded to pound away at the boy for five hours of brutal anal sex. Afterwards, Gallagher claimed the priest threatened to kill him if he told anybody about it.
• Father Edward V. Avery “punched him in the head,” and knocked him unconscious. When he woke up in a storage closet at the church, Gallagher claimed he was naked and tied up with altar sashes. Gallagher further claimed that Avery anally raped him so brutally that he bled for a week. And that the priest forced the boy to suck blood off the priest’s penis.
• Bernard Shero, Gallagher’s homeroom teacher, allegedly punched Gallagher in the face and strangled him with a seat belt before he allegedly raped the boy in the back seat of the teacher’s car. Afterwards, the teacher supposedly threatened to make the boy’s life a “living hell” if he told anybody.

But when Gallagher retold his story of abuse to the police and the grand jury, every detail I just mentioned–the anal rapes, the punches, the threats, the claims about being tied up naked with altar sashes, strangled with a seatbelt, and forced to suck blood off of a priest’s penis—all those graphic details were dropped from his story.

Instead, Gallagher spun a completely new fable about being forced by his attackers to view pornography and perform strip teases to music, and then engage in oral sex and mutual masturbation. In the civil courts, when Gallagher was confronted with all of the glaring contradictions in his conflicting tales of abuse, he responded by saying he couldn’t remember more than 130 times.

If this wasn’t enough evidence that Gallagher wasn’t credible, in 2017, Joe Walsh, the retired lead detective in the case, came forward to file a startling, 12-page affidavit. In the affidavit, Walsh stated that while questioning Gallagher pre-trial, he repeatedly came to the conclusion that the star witness was a liar, and that none of the alleged rapes ever really happened.

Walsh stated that while questioning Gallagher, the detective caught the former altar boy in one lie after another. According to Walsh, Gallagher finally admitted that with the social workers he “just made up stuff and told them anything.”

None of the facts about Walsh’s pre-trial grilling of Gallagher, however, were ever revealed to defense lawyers.

The retired detective also stated in his affidavit that during his investigation, he repeatedly told the lead prosecutor, former Assistant District Attorney Mariana Sorensen, that all the witnesses he interviewed, including members of Gallagher’s own family, and all the evidence he gathered, contradicted Gallagher’s cockamamie tales of abuse. Sorensen, however, stubbornly kept saying that she believed Gallagher. And when Walsh persisted, according to the detective, Sorensen replied, “You’re killing my case.”

In a subsequent bombshell, it was discovered that the prosecution hid more evidence from the defense and repeatedly lied about it. In 2010, when the D.A.’s office first interviewed Gallagher, former ADA Sorensen took seven pages of notes. And then she buried them. Over the years, Sorensen and two other prosecutors stood up in three different courtrooms, in front of three different judges, and stated that the notes didn’t exist.

But earlier this year, seven pages of Sorensen’s typewritten notes mysteriously reappeared. We also know that the prosecution also hid seven pages of notes taken by Church social workers that showed that when he first came forward, Gallagher wasn’t interested in pressing charges against anybody; he just wanted to find a lawyer so he could get paid.

Meanwhile, an appeals court overturned Msgr. Lynn’s conviction after he had served 33 months of his 36-month sentence, plus 18 months of house arrest. But despite Lynn’s jail time previously served, Gallagher’s complete lack of credibility, and Detective Walsh’s testimony about prosecutorial misconduct, a new Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner, has decided he will retry the case next year.

And what about the media, which trumpeted the arrests, indictments and convictions of the three priests and former schoolteacher? How has the media covered all the bombshells that showed the prosecution of the Church was a sham?

By stonewalling, and willfully ignoring it.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, which in the past seven years has printed 64 news articles and editorials on the Billy Doe case, always presenting him as a legitimate victim of sex abuse, never outed Gallagher, or told readers that he was a fraud.

And then there’s Rolling Stone. Remember Sabrina Rubin Erderly, the reporter who fabricated a story about an alleged gang rape by seven men at a frat house at the University of Virginia by relying on the false accusations of a woman named “Jackie?”

Before she got conned by Jackie, Erderly was fooled by Billy. In 2011, Erderly wrote “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex-Crime Files,” which accepted as gospel Billy Doe’s fraudulent tales of abuse. The reporter also hid that when she wrote the story she had an undisclosed conflict of interest – her husband was an assistant Philadelphia district attorney who worked for the D.A. that was prosecuting Billy’s alleged attackers.

Rolling Stone, which retracted the UVA rape story, has never retracted or even corrected Erderly’s fake story about the Church, which is still posted online.

How’s that for a fair and responsible media?

So this summer, when Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro announced the results of his secret grand jury investigation into sex abuse in six Pennsylvania dioceses, I wasn’t surprised that the media covered ancient accusations of abuse as though it had all just happened yesterday.

The Inquirer, which never got around to telling its readers that Billy Doe was a fraud, ran the grand jury story on its front page, cranking out a total of seven news stories and a column that blasted the Church.

Now we all know that the Catholic Church for decades was guilty of committing horrendous crimes against children, and also guilty of covering it up. But that doesn’t mean the media should suspend its judgment when it comes to holding prosecutors accountable.

When I read that grand jury report, it was like a tour through an ecclesiastic graveyard. Of 250 accused predator priests, at least 117 were dead. Another 13 priests born before 1940 had the dates of their deaths listed as unknown.

The oldest priest who was allegedly a predator was born in 1869, four years after the Civil War ended. Another alleged predator priest had been dead since 1950.

The alleged crimes detailed in the report were from as far back as the 1940s; one alleged victim was 83.

The grand jury report came with plenty of lurid charges. Such as the allegation that in 1969, Father Gregory Flohr had allegedly used a rope to tie up an altar boy in the confessional before sodomizing him with a crucifix.

Father Flohr could not be reached for comment; he’s been dead for 14 years.

But none of this mattered to the media; the Shapiro grand jury report that should have run on the History Channel made headlines nationally and internationally. It also inspired prosecutors in 14 states, as well as in the District of Columbia, to announce plans to launch their own investigations of the Catholic Church.

And why not? The Church is a sitting duck. Under ancient Vatican rules, each diocese is required to keep written records of all accusations against priests, whether they’re true or false. All an ambitious prosecutor needs for a fresh set of headlines and a room full of reporters at his next press conference is a judge willing to grant a subpoena to open the so-called secret archive files, just like Shapiro did.

Whether any of the lurid allegations a prosecutor makes will be subject to due process—and only a couple of Shapiro’s thousands of alleged crimes fell within the statute of limitations—doesn’t seem to matter.

So the next time you hear a prosecutor making shocking allegations against the Church, remember the Billy Doe story. And the corrupt D.A. in Philadelphia who used a fraudulent witness to stage a modern-day witch hunt.

These days, former Philly D.A. Rufus Seth Williams wears an orange jumpsuit. He’s sitting in a federal prison after pleading guilty in 2017 to a federal corruption case where he admitted to a crime wave that included taking bribes, misusing campaign contributions, and stealing from his own mother.

But Williams has never been prosecuted for the worst crimes he ever committed, namely what he did in the Billy Doe case to a blind lady named Justice.

Four men—three priests and a schoolteacher—were sent to jail on false charges. And one of those men, Father Engelhardt, who needed a heart operation, died in prison.

The priest spent his last hours handcuffed to a hospital bed, and in a dying declaration, still professing his innocence.

Ralph Cipriano is a muckraking reporter who has written for the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. His blog posts on the trashing of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia by prosecutors and reporters can be found on the website “Big Trial.”

Bill Donohue

Buffalo Bishop Richard J. Malone was the subject of a recent edition of “60 Minutes.” But there was more to this story than what the CBS show aired. None of the parties to this story came to the table with their hands clean.

Bishop Malone has admitted making bad decisions, but he maintains that his overall record is defensible. The “60 Minutes” segment detailed some of those bad decisions. For example, giving Father Arthur Smith, a known homosexual predator, a clean slate, and then assigning him to the post of cruise ship chaplain was indefensible.

Some priests have come forward with complaints against Bishop Malone. But one of them, Father Bob Zilliox, who was critical on TV, tempered his remarks subsequently. He should have been more careful when he granted the interview. This is especially true when dealing with shows like “60 Minutes.”

The “60 Minutes” episode focused heavily on the claims made by Bishop Malone’s former executive assistant, Siobhan O’Connor; she worked for him for three years. The 35-year-old quit her job on August 10, but not before anonymously turning over to WKBW-TV copies of files she obtained. The ABC-affiliate ran a three-part series on her and the church documents, and that, in turn, led CBS to interview O’Connor.

Did O’Connor ever apprise Bishop Malone of her concerns? Yes, she spoke to him in March. He said he was handling these matters. Did she do anything further, in the five months before she quit? She wrote an opinion column in the Buffalo News in May, stating her sympathy for the victims of abuse, but she never said a word about any wrongdoing by the bishop or anyone else in the diocese. “60 Minutes” did not ask her to explain herself.

O’Connor has moved quickly from the inquiring assistant to the courageous activist. According to CBS News, she wants a “cleansing” of the Church, saying that “full financial bankruptcy” is preferable to what she witnessed. That is quite a statement given her limited experience working with priests and bishops.

Interestingly, on November 13, when the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops assembled in Baltimore for their fall meeting, she spoke at a rally organized by anti-Church zealots.

It appears O’Connor is fast learning the ropes of how to “cleanse” the Church. Most of those who work for the Catholic Church have never heard of Mitchell Garabedian, but somehow O’Connor has. He is a Boston attorney with a long-standing hatred of the Catholic Church—he does not hide his animus. He was at her side at a press conference on October 30 in Buffalo, saying he was prepared to defend her, if necessary.

Garabedian and I locked horns in 2011 when a Boston priest, Father Charles Murphy, died. As I said at the time, Murphy died “a broken man.” The man who broke him was Garabedian.

In 2006, Garabedian sued Father Murphy for inappropriately touching a minor 25 years earlier; on the eve of the trial, the woman dropped her suit. In 2010, he sued the priest again, this time for allegedly fondling a man 40 years earlier. The accuser was deep in debt and his credibility was questioned even by his own family!

When Father Murphy died, Brian McGrory of the Boston Globe called what Garabedian did to him “a disgrace.” I called Garabedian at the time to see if he had any regrets about pressing charges against Father Murphy, and he immediately went into a rage, screaming like a madman. I asked him to calm down, but he continued to go ballistic, making sweeping condemnations of all priests. This is the kind of lawyer that the former executive assistant managed to find.

The media involved come across even worse. On October 30, Bishop Malone released an email that O’Connor sent to employees at the diocese the day before she quit. In it, she commended the bishop for his great work, saying “it has been a privilege to work by your side as you shepherd our diocese.” She specifically singled out his holiness, as well as his “Sheen-like eloquence” (a reference to one of the Church’s towering American figures, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen).

O’Connor closed her letter thanking Bishop Malone for “all the opportunities I’ve had and lessons I’ve learned while working for you and with you.”

Remember, she had already leaked damaging information to the press about Malone. Did she lie about the bishop in her praiseworthy remarks, or is she simply a duplicitous activist?

When Bishop Malone released O’Connor’s letter, the Associated Press, the most powerful wire service in the nation, took the occasion to make him the bad guy. In a short news story, it said, “Bishop Blasts Whistleblower Who Copied Sex Misconduct Files.” Malone did nothing of the kind: He made public her letter, noting how contradictory it was. AP intentionally misled readers, trying to exculpate O’Connor.

CBS, and “60 Minutes” in particular, also deserve to be criticized. It has had its share of accused molesters working in the most important jobs in the company—Charlie Rose, Jeff Fager, and Les Moonves—yet it never has time to turn its “60 Minutes” cameras on them. In August, Brian Steinberg, writing for Variety, said, “The allegations are worthy of an investigation by ’60 Minutes’—if only they weren’t about the news division that produces the show.”

Dozens of women have accused Rose, the CBS anchor and pundit, of sexual misconduct—he allegedly likes to expose himself—dating back to 1986. According to a Washington Post blog story, “Rumors about Rose’s behavior have circulated for years.”

One of Rose’s assistants, Kyle Godfrey-Ryan, “recalled at least a dozen instances where Rose walked nude in front of her while she worked in one of his New York City homes.” He also made sexually charged phone calls to the then-21-year-old late at night or in the early morning.

Did she report it? Yes, she told Yvette Vega, Rose’s long-time executive producer. “She [Vega] would just shrug and just say, ‘That’s just Charlie being Charlie.'” To show what a class act Rose was, when he found out that Godfrey-Ryan told a mutual friend about his behavior, he fired her.

Before he became chairman of CBS News in 2011, Fager was the executive producer of “60 Minutes.” He then took over the reins at “60 Minutes” again in 2015. He has been accused by six women of sexual misconduct, especially when he was drunk. Fager is also accused of covering up for his sexually compromised workplace buddies who reported to him.

Moonves was CBS chief executive for 20 years; it ended in September when he stepped down amidst serious sexual misconduct allegations. He has also been accused of promoting several men known for their sexual misconduct. This may sound familiar: CBS quietly paid settlements to the women who complained.

Just recently, it was reported that more than 250 women who work at CBS have spoken to investigators. Some, however, refuse to talk because they don’t trust the company.

Not only will CBS not authorize “60 Minutes” to disclose the depth of its own sexual abuse scandal, it has the nerve to claim that all priests are engaged in a cover-up. The “60 Minutes” producer of the O’Connor segment, Guy Campanile, told CBS News that “the church is made of people, but the ones in charge are priests [evidently they are not people] and priests are so good at keeping secrets.”

Would that include New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who outed Theodore McCarrick? It wasn’t the media which did that. Moreover, just recently Dolan made public some accusations against one of his auxiliary bishops, stemming from alleged offenses that occurred decades ago. Does CBS—or any media outlet in the nation—have a program like the New York archdiocese that outs suspected abusers? Why not?

NBC is just as phony. Its Buffalo affiliate, WGRZ-TV, has unveiled a petition asking the public to pressure the Buffalo diocese to publicly release the full list of accused priests. If it were serious about the issue of sexual abuse—and not “getting the Church”—it would begin by pressing NBC to make public a list of all those employees who have been accused of sexual misconduct.

After all, Matt Lauer is hardly the only NBC employee to have been accused of being a predator. Last year, Variety wrote the following. “Lauer’s conduct was not a secret among other employees at ‘Today,’ numerous sources say. At least one of the anchors would gossip about stories she had heard, spreading them among the staff. ‘Management sucks there,’ says a former reporter….They protected the s*** out of Matt Lauer.”

Addie Zinone, who worked for Lauer, and media critic Ken Auletta, confirm that many others knew something was wrong. Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” had this to say about Lauer. “The whole theme was that he does the show and then he has sex with people, with employees. So this was whispered behind closed doors? No, it was shouted from the mountaintops and everybody laughed about it.” Including, evidently, Scarborough, who never said a public word about it.

Jessica Steyers, who worked at NBC Sports, has spoken out about the constant harassment by coworkers, and the nonchalant reaction by executives. Karin Roland, a feminist who has examined NBC, says “this happens as the result of a culture and a pattern of protecting stars and making them untouchable.”

It is striking to read the accounts of those in the media who try desperately to exonerate their colleagues. Take Mr. “60 Minutes” himself, Jeff Fager. He said that “it is wrong that our culture can be falsely defined by a few people with an axe to grind who are using an important movement as a weapon to get even, and not the hundreds of women and men that have thrived, both personally and professionally.”

He is probably right about that. There are accusers who have an axe to grind. We know that some of the women at the Fox News Network who brought charges against men in senior positions never said a word about the offenses when they allegedly happened—they opened their mouths when it was opportunistic for them to do so.

The same could be said about some of those who wait decades to bring charges against priests—usually when there is big money available—but no one in the media is going to look into that issue. Even bringing it up is considered unfair. Most important, it is a lot more than “hundreds of women and men that have thrived” in the Catholic Church—there are literally millions of young boys and girls who have done so—but no one in New York or Hollywood has the guts to highlight the successes.

Most of the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church occurred in the last century, primarily between 1965 and 1985. But when it comes to sexual abuse in Hollywood and in the media, it is as bad today as it ever was. Lucky for them there is little interest in outing the dregs among them. They’d rather focus on accused priests from a half-century ago.

The following is an excerpt from an August 19, 2018 homily given at the
Church of St. Raphael in Crystal, Minnesota by Fr. Robert Altier.

In the last couple of weeks, we have heard some pretty unfortunate things. A cardinal of the Church who abused children and young men, and now in Pennsylvania the grand jury report 301 priests violated more than a thousand children. And on top of that we have the episcopal cover-up, the word episcopal means bishops, so the cover-up by the bishops. And, it’s not just simply a cover-up, it’s an agenda.

If you’ve listened carefully, since 2002 when all this broke, the bishops keep on coming back to the same point, pedophilia, it’s pedophilia, it’s pedophilia, it’s pedophilia. No, it’s not.

In fact, the John Jay Institute, the group that the bishops themselves hired to look at what was going on, came back and said this is a homosexual problem. 86.6% (if I recall correctly) of all of the abuse cases were on post-pubescent males, and the bishops told them “no you go back, and you rewrite it and you say that it isn’t a homosexual problem.” So, they came back and said well 86.6% of this is all about post-pubescent males, but it’s not a homosexual problem; like really?

Now we need to make an important distinction, there are some very, very good people who struggle with a homosexual orientation. All of us struggle with different things, that doesn’t mean that we’re a bad person just because we have certain weaknesses. And the Church recognizes that that orientation is not evil, it is the activity which is evil. And so, for these men who want to live a good life and who are trying to fight against those temptations and the struggles, this is a cross. And it is a huge cross that they have to carry. In fact, you can think how much God loves these people if he allows them to carry a cross that is that big; it’s huge.

Now we need, as again we look at our own selves, we can say alright there are some for instance who struggle with alcohol or people who struggle with pornography, whatever. If they’re really trying to fight against those temptations these are good people with a weakness.

That’s different for instance from the drug dealer, or from the guy who is making pornography, or the guy who is trafficking the women or something; those people are pigs. The guy who is struggling and trying to live a good life is a good person with a weakness. And that is the distinction that we need to keep in mind.

And so, the Church is very clear that even for men with a deep-seated homosexual tendency, that they are not to go to the seminary. That’s not because the Church is being discriminatory or hates these people, but rather because the same principle if you look at it and say: would you take somebody who is struggling with an alcohol addiction to a bar? It’s a point of temptation. We don’t allow men into women’s convents because it’s not going to be long before somebody’s going to be having problems. And that’s what the Church is looking at to say this is not good.

Go back to when I was in college seminary. I was having a conversation with another seminarian, in the midst of the conversation he looked at me and said would you ever consider taking a shower in the women’s locker room? I said certainly not. He said well why not? I said well the temptations and the problems…and he said you’re right, now you know what I have to go through when I go into a men’s locker room. I thought oh my goodness…yuck. This is why the Church says even for these good men who are struggling and trying to overcome this, we don’t want to put them in a point of temptation.

So those are not the people that we are having a problem with. The people that we are having a problem with come from two different groups and understand there is an intentional and malicious infiltration of the Church for the purpose of destroying her from within. This is what you need to understand.

When I was in the seminary, it was one of the worst seminaries in the nation. 1983 is when our seminary was at its absolute worst; I started in ’85. It was getting slightly better. But these people were so arrogant.

I should point out when I was in the seminary if you were not homosexual or a radical feminist you were in big trouble. One of the professors actually was arrogant enough to stand up in front of the class and say “Martin Luther had the right idea, but he did it the wrong way – he left the Church. You can’t change the Church from the outside you can only change it from the inside, so we’re not leaving.”

So, these are people with an agenda. And what are the two groups? The two groups are: number one, a group of predatory homosexuals. They started their infiltration of the Church in 1924. You want to look it up?

There is a book called The Homosexual Network written in 1982, so this is 20 years before all of this stuff hit. A man named Enrique Rueda looked at all of this, studied all of their own publications (they were publishing every year the number of seminarians, priests and bishops they had), he traced it back to when they started, it began in 1924. And then five years later, in 1929, the communists began their infiltration of the priesthood and the two groups did exactly the same thing.

You want to read about the communist one? There is a woman by the name of Bella Dodd who was a deep-seated communist who got out of communism and converted to the Faith.

She testified before Congress in 1953 and in that testimony she said that “we got the instructions from Kremlin in 1929 as to what we were to do,” and she said “we were to take the best and the brightest, the guys who were smart enough to live a double life, good looking guys who were sociable so that they would be noticed by their bishop, and they would get promoted, they would become vocation directors, they would become bishops, they would become rectors of seminaries, they would have influential positions” and she said “we were successful beyond our wildest imagination.”

Dodd admitted, “I am personally responsible for more than 1,200 seminarians, priests and bishops.” And in 1953 mind you, again, now they started in 1929, in 1953 she said: “we already have four cardinals in the Vatican.” That was 1953, it’s way worse today.

You can also read a book that was written in 1932, Toward Soviet America, by William Foster. He ran for the president of the United States in 1924, 1928 and 1932 for the Communist Party USA. In his book, he said “we aren’t being able to get to the Americans because of three things, their morality, their family and their patriotism.” And he said: “so the way that we are going to attack these three things is through homosexuality and radical feminism.” They have been extraordinarily successful.

So, what are we dealing with? We are dealing with a group of predatory homosexuals who became priests not to serve the Church but to destroy her from within. In this, they are at every level.

There is an article that just came out from the National Catholic Register in which six priests from the Newark diocese were interviewed and they spoke about the homosexual network in their diocese. It’s in all of them, not just in Newark. They cover up for one another, they share their victims with one another, they do all kinds of horrible things.

And people ask, why don’t the good priests speak up? I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, he looked at me and he said: “I’ve known about this for 50 years and you’ve known about it for 40 years.” Yep, it’s about time it’s coming out.

So why didn’t somebody speak up? Number one if I would have stood here even a couple of years ago would you have believed what I am telling you? Number two, who were we supposed to go to? It was at every single level all the way to the top. You wanted to be ordained a priest, you couldn’t say a word. And even as a priest you can’t.

Again, these priests that were interviewed in the Catholic Register were interviewed only because of anonymity. It required anonymity because they were afraid of what was going to happen to them if the bishops and the people at the chancery found out who it was that spoke. These people have that much power. And so, we need to realize that.

So, again just to tell you a quick story about how bad things were. When I was in the seminary, they would put up their communist propaganda, I would rip it down and every time I would do that there would be an announcement “Whoever is taking the notices off the bulletin board…” When I would put up a notice that says we were going to pray the Rosary, that would get torn down immediately and there was never anything said.

Now having said that, thankfully the seminary today is way, way better than it was. These young guys are not having to deal with this trash, but that was the climate at the time.

You now understand why all that we get is fluff and stuff instead of good homilies? You understand why there are problems in the world that aren’t being addressed? That’s what it is about. Where is the doctrinal integrity? Where is the moral teaching? Someone that is not living it is not going to teach it.

Now there are, after this grand jury report came out a few days ago from Pennsylvania, there are several more states already talking about doing their own grand jury investigation. It will probably go all over the place, so I say that to simply say there is going to be more in the news coming up.

And as sad as this is we have to recognize that it is actually something very good. It is the purification of the Church and that is going to lead ultimately to her crucifixion. Not many are going to remain faithful, unfortunately. But when we look at it and say: “well if this is what is going on in the Church what are we supposed to do?” We are supposed to look at Jesus and say exactly what St. Peter said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Jesus founded one Church and that one Church is the only institution in the world for the salvation of souls. It was founded for that purpose and it will remain to the end of the world for that purpose.

I have spoken with a number of people in the last week or two about what’s going on, prayerful, holy people and they have all concurred on the same point—Our Lady’s work has finally begun. Praise God!

Bill Donohue

Unlike most commentators and reporters, I have read most of the Pennsylvania grand jury report. The purpose of this statement is to debunk many of the myths, and indeed lies, that mar the report and/or interpretations of it.

Myth: Over 300 priests were found guilty of preying on youngsters in Pennsylvania.

Fact: No one was found guilty of anything. Yet that didn’t stop CBS from saying “300 ‘predator priests’ abused more than 1,000 children over a period of 70 years.” These are all accusations, most of which were never verified by either the grand jury or the dioceses.

The report, and CBS, are also wrong to say that all of the accused are priests. In fact, some were brothers, some were deacons, and some were seminarians.

How many of the 300 were probably guilty? Maybe half. My reasoning? The 2004 report by the John Jay College for Criminal Justice found that 4 percent of priests nationwide had a credible accusation made against them between 1950-2002. That is the figure everyone quotes. But the report also notes that roughly half that number were substantiated. If that is a reliable measure, the 300 figure drops to around 150.

During the seven decades under investigation by the grand jury, there were over 5,000 priests serving in Pennsylvania (this includes two dioceses not covered in the report). Therefore, the percent of priests who had an accusation made against them is quite small, offering a much different picture than what the media afford. And remember, most of these accusations were never substantiated.

Importantly, in almost all cases, the accused named in the report was never afforded the right to rebut the charges. That is because the report was investigative, not evidentiary, though the report’s summary suggests that it is authoritative. It manifestly is not.

The report covers accusations extending back to World War II. Almost all the accused are either dead or have been thrown out of the priesthood. For example, in the Diocese of Harrisburg, 71 persons are named: 42 are dead and four are missing. Most of those who are still alive are no longer in ministry.

There are some cases that are so old that they are unbelievable. Consider the case of Father Joseph M. Ganter. Born in 1892, he was accused in 2008 by an 80-year-old man of abusing him in the 1930s. Obviously, nothing came of it. But the priest was accustomed to such charges.

In 1945, at the request of Father Ganter, a Justice of the Peace interviewed three teenage males who had made accusations against him. Not only did they give conflicting stories, the three admitted that they were never abused by Ganter. But don’t look to the media to highlight this case, or others like it.

Myth: The report was warranted because of the on-going crisis in the Catholic Church.

Fact: There is no on-going crisis—it’s a total myth. In fact, there is no institution, private or public, that has less of a problem with the sexual abuse of minors today than the Catholic Church. How do I know?

Over the past two years, .005 percent of the Catholic clergy have had a credible accusation made against them. No one knows exactly what the figure is for other institutions, but if there were a grand jury investigation of the sexual abuse of minors in the public schools, people’s heads would explode—it would make the Catholic Church’s problems look like Little League. But no district attorney or attorney general has the guts to probe the public schools.

To single out the Catholic Church—without ever investigating any other institution—is akin to doing an investigation of crime in low-income minority neighborhoods while allowing white-collar crimes committed in the suburbs to go scot-free, and then concluding that non-whites are criminally prone. That would be a scam. So is cherry picking the Catholic Church.

Myth: The grand jury report was initiated to make the guilty pay.

Fact: False. It has nothing to do with punishing the guilty. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh “Salacious” Shapiro admitted on August 14 that “Almost every instance of child abuse (the grand jury) found was too old to be prosecuted.” He’s right. But he knew that from the get-go, so why did he pursue this dead end?

Why did he waste millions of taxpayer dollars in pursuit of alleged offenders when he knew he couldn’t do anything about it? Because he, and his predecessor, Kathleen Kane (who is now awaiting prison for lying under oath and misusing her Attorney General’s office) wanted to shame the Catholic Church.

Kane and Shapiro have never sought to shame imams, ministers, or rabbis—they just want to shame priests. Nor will they conduct a probe of psychologists, psychiatrists, camp counselors, coaches, guidance counselors, or any other segment of society where adults routinely interact with minors.

Shapiro, and those like him, are delighted with all the salacious details in the report. When it comes to non-priests, news reports on sexual misconduct typically note that a sexual offense has occurred, but readers are spared the graphic accounts. Not when it comes to priests—they love to get as explicit as they can.

It’s not just Shapiro who is interested in appealing to the prurient interest of the public. The lead story in the August 15 edition of the New York Times is another case in point: on the front page there is a photo of a handwritten note by a young male who describes how and where a priest allegedly touched him. Yet when accusations surface against the likes of Harvey Weinstein, all that is noted is the nature of the offense.

Myth: Shapiro is seeking to right these wrongs by pushing for legislation that would suspend the statute of limitations for sexual crimes against minors, allowing old cases to be prosecuted.

Fact: This is one of the most bald-face lies of them all. Neither Shapiro, nor Pennsylvania lawmaker Mark Rozzi, who is proposing such legislation, has ever included the public schools in these proposed bills—they only apply to private [read: Catholic] institutions.

In most states, public school students have 90 days to report an offense. That’s it. Which means it is too late for a student raped by a public school teacher to file suit if the crime occurred this year at the start of the baseball season. Public institutions are governed under the corrupt doctrine of sovereign immunity, and few politicians have the courage to challenge it.

In the few instances where states have included the public schools in such legislation, guess who goes bonkers? The public school establishment. The teachers’ unions, school superintendents, principals—they all scream how utterly unfair it is to roll back the clock and try to determine if the accused is guilty of an offense that took place decades ago. They are right to do so; lucky for them they are rarely called to action.

The reason we have statutes of limitation is because many witnesses are either dead or their memories have faded. The public school industry understands the importance of this due process measure, and rightfully protests when it is in jeopardy. So why is it that when bishops make the exact same argument, they are condemned for obstructing justice? The hypocrisy is nauseating.

Myth: The priests “raped” their victims.

Shapiro said that “Church officials routinely and purposely described the abuse as horseplay and wrestling and inappropriate contact. It was none of those things.” He said it was “rape.” Similarly, the New York Times quoted from the report saying that Church officials used such terms as “horseplay” and “inappropriate contact” as part of their “playbook for concealing the truth.”

Fact: This is an obscene lie. Most of the alleged victims were not raped: they were groped or otherwise abused, but not penetrated, which is what the word “rape” means. This is not a defense—it is meant to set the record straight and debunk the worst case scenarios attributed to the offenders.

Furthermore, Church officials were not following a “playbook” for using terms such as “inappropriate contact”—they were following the lexicon established by the John Jay professors.

Examples of non-rape sexual abuse found in the John Jay report include “touching under the victim’s clothes” (the most common act alleged); “sexual talk”; “shown pornography”; “touch over cleric’s clothes”; “cleric disrobed”; “victim disrobed”; “photos of victims”; “sexual games”; and “hugging and kissing.” These are the kinds of acts recorded in the grand jury report as well, and as bad as they are, they do not constitute “rape.”

As for the accusation that Church officials described sexual misconduct as “horseplay,” one would think that there would be dozens of examples in the report where officials described what happened as nothing more than “horseplay,” especially if it is part of the Church’s “playbook.”

Here’s the truth: In over 1300 pages, the word “horseplay” appears once! To top it off, it was used to describe the behavior of a seminarian, not a priest.

Myth: The abusive priests were pedophiles.

Fact: This is the greatest lie of them all, repeated non-stop by the media, and late-night talk TV hosts.

There have been two scandals related to the sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church. Scandal I involves the enabling bishops who covered it up. Scandal II involves the media cover-up of the role played by gay molesters.

Let me repeat what I have often said. Most gay priests are not molesters, but most of the molesters have been gay. Not to admit this—and this includes many bishops who are still living in a state of denial about it—means the problem will continue. Indeed, there are reports today about seminaries in Boston and Honduras that are disturbing.

How do I know that most of the problem is gay-driven? The data are indisputable.

The John Jay study found that 81 percent of the victims were male, 78 percent of whom were postpubescent. Now if 100 percent of the victimizers are male, and most of the victims are postpubescent males, that is a problem called homosexuality. There is no getting around it.

How many were pedophiles? Less than five percent. That is what the John Jay study found. Studies done in subsequent years—I have read them all—report approximately the same ratio. It’s been a homosexual scandal all along.

It won’t help to say that the John Jay report did not conclude that homosexuals committed most of the offenses, even though their own data undercut their interpretation. The professors played the self-identity game: they said that many of the men who had sex with adolescent males did not identify as gay. So what?

If a straight priest who abused a teenage girl said he thinks of himself as gay, would the researchers list him as such? Self-identification that does not square with the truth is a lie. I recently spoke to a person in the media about this. I told him that I consider myself to be a Chinese dwarf—even though it is obvious that I am a big Irishman—and asked if he would describe me that way in his story. He got my point.

Shapiro fed the myth about this being a “pedophile” scandal when he said the victims were “little boys and girls.” This is a lie. Anyone who actually reads the report knows it is a lie. Most were postpubescent. This doesn’t make the molestation okay—the guilty should be imprisoned—but it is wrong to give the impression that we are talking about 5-year-olds when more typically they were 15-year-olds.

The New York Times, which has been covering up for homosexuals for decades, found it convenient to highlight the minority of cases where females were allegedly abused. So did many in the media who take their talking points from the Times.

The Times is so dishonest that it mentions a “sadomasochistic clerical pedophile ring in Pittsburgh that photographed boys they had posed to look like Jesus Christ, then gave them gold crosses to show they had been groomed.” The section of the report that discusses this alleged offense cites Father Gregory Zirwas as the ringleader.

Every person whom he groped was a teenager, meaning this was a homosexual ring. But, of course, the unsuspecting reader doesn’t know this to be the case.

In short, this is a ruse: the Times wants the reader to believe that this is a pedophile problem, and that females are as much at risk as males, thus discounting homosexuality. This is patently untrue, but it feeds the lie that this is not a homosexual scandal. It also allows people like Anthea Butler, who calls God a “white racist,” to say, “The Catholic Church is a pedophile ring.”

Myth: Bishops who sent abusive priests back into ministry did so out of total disregard for the well-being of the victims.

Fact: This lie is perpetuated by the grand jury report when it ridicules bishops for having priests “evaluated” at “church-run psychiatric centers.” The fact is that in the period when most of the abuse occurred—the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s—almost all persons in authority who dealt with sexual offenses, in any institution, relied on the expertise of those in the behavioral sciences.

Quite frankly, it was a time when therapists oversold their level of competence, and many continue to do so. There were very few psychologists or psychiatrists at the time who didn’t overrate their ability to “fix” offenders. It was they whom the bishops relied upon for advice. Yet the media rarely hold them accountable for misleading Church lawyers and the bishops.

Myth: Cardinal Donald Wuerl is so guilty that he needs to resign.

Fact: This accusation, made by a CBS reporter, as well as others, is based on pure ignorance, if not malice. Shapiro played the same game when he lamented how “Bishop Wuerl” became “Cardinal Wuerl” after he allegedly “mishandl[ed] abuse claims.” This is a scurrilous statement.

No bishop or cardinal in the nation has had a more consistent and courageous record than Donald Wuerl in addressing priestly sexual abuse. Moreover, the grand jury report—even in areas that are incomplete and unflattering—does nothing to dispute this observation.

Why do I call Wuerl “consistent and courageous”? Because of Wuerl’s refusal to back down to the Vatican when it ordered him to reinstate a priest he had removed from ministry; this occurred in the early 1990s when Wuerl was the Bishop of Pittsburgh. The Vatican reconsidered and agreed with his assessment.

Who, in or out of the Catholic Church, has ever defied his superiors, risking his position within the company or institution, over such matters? Wuerl did. Who in Hollywood or in the media has?

The people now attacking Wuerl are doing so for one reason: as the Archbishop of Washington, he is the biggest fish the critics have to fry.

Here’s one more nugget. Shapiro proved how dishonest he is when he refused to excise a baseless charge against Wuerl. There is a handwritten note in the report attributed to Wuerl about his alleged “circle of secrecy” involving a priest who was returned to ministry. But it is not Wuerl’s handwriting. More important, Wuerl’s legal counsel informed Shapiro that “the handwriting does not belong to then-Bishop Wuerl,” but nothing was done to correct the record. So they intentionally misled the public.

Conclusion

The guilty should pay, and the innocent should not. This is a pedestrian axiom that is being trashed today when it comes to assessing priestly misconduct, something the Pennsylvania grand jury report has contributed to mightily.

No amount of compassion for those who have been violated by priests should ever be done at the expense of telling the truth, no matter how unpopular it may sound. To do otherwise is cowardly, shameful, and unjust.

What is driving the current mania over this issue is not hard to figure out. I am a sociologist who has been dealing with this issue for a long time, having published articles about it in books and international journals.

Here is what’s going on. There are many vicious critics of the Catholic Church who would like to weaken its moral authority, and will seize on any problem it has to discredit its voice. Why? They hate its teachings on sexuality, marriage, and the family.

These very same people delight in promoting a libertine culture, one which ironically was the very milieu that enticed some very sick priests and their seminarian supervisors to act out in the first place.

There is nothing wrong with Catholic teachings on this subject: If priests had followed their vows, and not their id, we would not have this problem. Those who refuse to use the brakes God gave them, straight or gay, should be shown the gate or never admitted in the first place.

Bill Donohue

Four researchers with Ph.D.s have published an article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine titled, “Association of Religiosity With Sexual Minority Suicide Ideation and Attempt.” It seeks to determine the effects of religion on suicidal ideas and attempts at suicide.

The data were culled from a larger study, one taken in 2011 by the University of Texas at Austin’s Research Consortium; it collected data on over 21,000 college students aged 18-30.

Consistent with other studies, this one concluded that lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and those who are questioning their sexual identity, have a higher rate of suicidal ideas and attempts at suicide than heterosexuals. But it breaks with most other studies on an important point: it asserts that gays who take their religion seriously are more likely to have suicidal thoughts, and are more likely to attempt suicide, than those who are not religious.

Most studies show an inverse relationship between how religious a person is and the likelihood of being suicidal. In one of the most impressive research undertakings to date, cited by the authors, it was found that “adults who attended religious worship at least once a month had lower odds of attempting suicide over the next 10 years compared with those who did not attend, and individuals who sought spiritual comfort had lower odds of suicide ideation for 10 years compared to people who were not spiritual.”

Similarly, in Austria, a noted study found that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals “with a religious affiliation had lower odds of attempting suicide than LGB adults who were not affiliated, and those who felt a greater sense of belongingness to their religious organization were less likely to endorse suicide ideation.”

Even more important, “LGB individuals who left their religion to resolve the conflict between their sexual orientation and religious affiliation had greater odds of attempting suicide than those with unresolved conflict.”

Unfortunately, the authors fail to probe how seriously this undercuts the popular notion that once a gay person “liberates” himself from religious strictures, he will be at peace with himself. Just the opposite appears to be true, at least from this study. Falling back on oneself, especially during times of adversity, can be stressful, if not dangerous.

The most controversial finding by the four university researchers, as already indicated, reveals that gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and questioning individuals “do not experience the benefits of religiosity’s protective association against suicide ideation and attempt.”

From this conclusion, the researchers contend that faith-based organizations “may not be appropriate for LGBQ individuals in distress, especially when religion may be a contributing element in distress for LGBQ individuals.” But their data, as the authors readily concede, are contradicted by other studies (in Austria those who left their religion experienced worse problems). It is thus quite a leap to conclude that faith-based organizations do more harm than good.

The undercurrent of bias that is evident in this study is affirmed when the researchers maintain that “two of the world’s most common religions, Christianity and Islam, largely condemn homosexuality as a sin,” and are therefore a large part of the problem.

Astonishingly, they do not cite Judaism, which was the first world religion to condemn homosexuality, and from which Christianity and Islam drew upon copiously in crafting their teachings on marriage and the family.

More bias can be detected by considering a remark made by John R. Blosnich, one of the four authors. He spoke to the Huffington Post about the problem facing religious-minded gays, commenting, “It can be very scary to be caught in a space where your religion tells you that you are a ‘sinner’ just for being who you are.”

He should identify which religion he is talking about. It is certainly not true of Catholicism: homosexuals are regarded as children of God, the same way heterosexuals are. Why this needs to be said at all is troubling as this teaching is not new. But to those who want to put a negative tag on Christianity, it makes sense to distort the truth.

If a heterosexual commits adultery, he is no more condemned for being straight than a homosexual who practices homosexuality is for being gay. It is the behavior—adultery and homosexuality—that counts as a sin, not sexual orientation.

One of the findings that the researchers uncovered deserves more attention than they allow. They found that “questioning individuals had the highest prevalence of recent suicide ideation (16.4%) and bisexual students had the highest prevalence of lifetime attempts (20.3%).”

The authors do not speculate why this is so. But if there is one thing that those who question their sexual identity have in common with bisexuals—and this is not true of gay men and lesbians—it is their tentative status. Who are they?

Living with this kind of indeterminacy may explain their desperate condition. It may also suggest that programs that encourage young people to experiment—to find out whether they are straight or gay—may actually be creating a kind of sexual dissonance that is harmful to their wellbeing. Regrettably, this is currently going on in some schools, the effect of which is to promote a serious identity crisis.

Those who question their sexual identity deserve our compassion, as well as our assistance. What they don’t need is further experimentation. The fact that so many young people are caught up in this quandary today is a tribute to the postmodernist belief that denies the existence of nature.

Fatuously, they hold that all human behavior is a social construction. This is not only unscientific—it is an ideological contention—it leads to many wrongheaded policies. It is also the driving force behind the problems incurred by boys who think they are girls, and vice versa.

Of course, the central problem remains, and it is independent of religious practice and affiliation: Why are gays more suicidal than heterosexuals? There are plausible explanations, none of which comport with the ideological leanings of the authors of this study.

Is there a link between promiscuity and suicide, and are gays more promiscuous than heterosexuals? The answer to both questions is an unqualified yes.

In a 2004 article published in the same journal as the study by the four authors, it found that girls who are sexually active are almost three times more likely to attempt suicide than girls who abstain. For boys, those who are sexually active are eight times more likely to attempt suicide. A more recent study published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology established a strong correlation between casual sex and depression among teenagers.

According to practicing psychotherapist Zev Ballen, “The correlation between sexual promiscuity, depression, and suicide is very clear. Multitudes of people are attempting to fill up with sex—this breeds guilt, self-hatred, emptiness and shame.” Yet one strains to find researchers and educators who are willing to admit that promiscuity is a gateway to self-destructive behaviors.

The problem of promiscuity in the gay community is particularly acute. In a brutally honest article last year in the Huffington Post, journalist Michael Hobbes wrote that “Gay people are now, depending on the study, between 2 and 10 times more likely than straight people to take their own lives. We’re twice as likely to have a major depressive episode.” It is for reasons such as this that gay activist Larry Kramer once said there is no such thing as a gay lifestyle—it’s a deathstyle.

“In a survey of gay men who recently arrived in New York City,” Hobbes says, “three-quarters suffered from anxiety or depression, abused drugs or alcohol or were having risky sex—or some combination of the three.” (His italics.) Which begs the question: Why are most gay men who move to New York City unable to live a normal life? Heterosexuals seem to have little problem making the adjustment. Hobbes provides an answer, and it is one that needs to be taken seriously.

Hobbes maintains that “Despite all the talk of our ‘chosen families,’ gay men have fewer close friends than straight people or gay women.” This speaks volumes about the lonely lifestyle that so many gay men experience, calling into serious question their ability to form long-lasting bonds.

Consider what one young man, Adam, cited by Hobbes, said about his coming out. “I went to West Hollywood because I thought that’s where my people were. But it was really horrifying. It’s made by gay adults, and it’s not welcoming for gay kids. You go from your mom’s house to a gay club where a lot of people are on drugs and it’s like, this is my community? It’s like a f***ing jungle.”

Adam has touched on something real: real communities don’t act this way. What he is describing is a constellation of fully atomized individuals, not a community where social bonds thrive. This matter needs to be studied more fully, but for political reasons it will not be.

How can it be that at a time of growing acceptance of gay rights so many gays are unhappy? The conventional wisdom, one widely shared by the media and in the schools, is that the legalization of gay marriage, and its acceptance by the public, would lead to an overall increase in the wellbeing of gays. It may sound plausible, but there is no evidence to support this outcome.

Indeed, as Hobbes shows, “In the Netherlands, where gay marriage has been legal since 2001, gay men remain three times more likely to suffer from a mood disorder than straight men, and 10 times more likely to engage in ‘suicidal self-harm.'” It’s no different in Sweden, the sexual Shangri-La of elites. The Swedes have had civil unions since 1965, and gay marriage since 2009, but “men married to men have triple the suicide rate of men married to women.”

Were gays better off in the closet than out? As Hobbes points out, “A study published in 2015 found that rates of anxiety and depression were higher in men who had recently come out than in men who were still closeted.” This is not a brief to force gays back into the closet, but it is a wake-up call to those who think that the decline in stigma redounds to better psychological health for gays.

It must be stressed that promiscuity, while endemic among gay men in more recent times, was not always so. Kinsey found that homosexuals were less promiscuous than heterosexuals. Even as late as 1960, researchers were finding that homosexuals were relatively sexually inactive. But once the sexual revolution hit stride in the 1960s, sexual experimentation increased among men and women, straight and gay. So did STDs.

It is promiscuity that is the biggest threat to those who practice it, not social stigma or religious strictures. But many elites in the health profession and higher education are in a state of denial over this verity, and those who know better are too often intimidated from speaking the truth. Until this changes, there will be little or no progress in reversing the experience of many gay men.

Bill Donohue

A recent editorial in the New York Times posited a conflict between religion and healthcare, abortion being the main focus. “Freedom of religion is essential—and so is access to health care,” it says. It should have stopped there.

Instead, the editorial said that “Current law tries to accommodate both, but the far right has stirred unfounded fears that religion (and Christianity in particular) is under assault, and that people of faith are in danger of being forced to do things they find morally objectionable.”

The far-right has stirred unfounded fears that Christianity is under assault? First of all, the term “far-right” is usually employed to describe the Klan or some assembly of racists or terrorists. Second, one does not have to be a Brownshirt to know that organizations such as the ACLU—which the Times favorably cites—have given Christians, especially Catholics, lots to fear. Importantly, their concerns are grounded in reason, not emotion. Here’s the proof.

A recently published report, “Bearing Faith: The Limits of Catholic Health Care for Women of Color,” is the most anti-Catholic document assessing Catholic healthcare ever published. The authors want to effectively shut down Catholic hospitals, unless, of course, they stop being Catholic. The report is the work of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project, a unit of Columbia Law School. It draws on data supplied by MergerWatch.

MergerWatch is a child of Planned Parenthood. In the 1990s, MergerWatch was a project of the Education Fund of Family Planning Advocates of New York State. Family Planning Advocates is the lobbying arm of Planned Parenthood. MergerWatch frequently teams up with such groups as the ACLU, Catholics for Choice, NARAL, and other foes of the Catholic Church.

The report goes beyond the usual criticisms of Catholic hospitals made by the pro-abortion industry: It plays the race card, trying to paint Catholic hospitals as racist.

How does it manage to do this? It claims that African American women are more likely to go to a Catholic hospital than white women, and because Catholic teachings proscribe killing in the womb, this means that African American women are more subject to abortion restrictions. Of course, no one is forced to go to a Catholic hospital, and everyone knows, or should know, that abortion is not sanctioned by the Catholic Church.

The authors are so desperate in their attempt to brand the Catholic Church as a racist institution that they include a statement about slavemasters who raped black women. So what does this have to do with the Church? Nothing. Even the authors do not attempt to pin this on the Church, but the fact that it is included in a report on Catholic healthcare makes it clear what they want readers to believe.

Unfair as this part of the report is, what is really driving the authors is an animus against Catholic teachings on life. To be specific, they cite the “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services” that was issued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Their major objection? The Church’s teachings on abortion. They know, however, that in order to accomplish their goal, they must throw the kitchen sink at the Church, hoping something sticks.

Most Americans, including those who are not Catholic, have no problem with Catholic hospitals, but this doesn’t stop the authors from trying to portray this as a myth. They claim that Catholic hospitals “provide disproportionately less charity care than do public hospitals and other religious non-profit hospitals.”

The evidence the authors use to make this charge is from a report by the ACLU and MergerWatch in 2013. It found that public hospitals serve more Medicaid patients than Catholic hospitals do. So what? Why is this surprising?

Public hospitals are not likely to be located in wealthy neighborhoods: they are more likely to be in areas where the indigent live. More important, as even the report notes, Catholic hospitals have a better record of serving the poor than either secular non-profits or for-profit hospitals (the margin of difference between Catholic hospitals and religious non-profits is statistically insignificant).

The authors are so worked up over trying to stick it to Catholic hospitals that they even find fault with Catholic hospitals that don’t have Catholic names. For example, they find it objectionable that there are Catholic hospitals known as Affinity and AMITA. Again so what? As if every Catholic institution should have a name like St. John’s. By this logic, the founders of Stonehill College can be accused of trickery for not acknowledging its Catholic identity.

Also, it does not help the authors to cite a recent study showing that “37% of patients whose regular hospital was Catholic were unaware of its religious affiliation.” If the care were substandard, they wouldn’t be coming back.

Toward the end of the report, the authors critically cite several laws that protect the autonomy of religious healthcare institutions. This underscores my point: It shows that their real problem is the First Amendment. If they had it their way, the free exercise of religion provision would be excised. This is a serious charge—it demands serious evidence. Fortunately, the authors supply it.

Their first recommendation says it all: “Reform laws and policies that allow health care providers to refuse service on the basis of religious or conscience objections.” They could not be more clear—do away with all exemptions for religious hospitals. In short, force Catholic hospitals to be thoroughly secularized, thus neutering their Catholic identity. In short, this means making Catholic hospitals illegal. It would be like telling Jewish restaurants they can no longer serve kosher food, but they can stay in business if they want.

This is what the Catholic haters want. Alas, there is one saving grace: at least now no one can pretend that their goal is not to shut down Catholic hospitals.

And if anyone doubts the anti-Catholic animus behind this report, they need only take a look at the foundations that funded it.

Begin with the Ford Foundation, the most anti-Catholic foundation in the United States.

• The Ford Foundation has been the single largest donor in the United States to one of the nation’s most virulently anti-Catholic organizations, Catholics for a Free Choice (now Catholics for Choice). This “organization” (it has no members) has twice been condemned by the U.S. bishops’ conference as a fraud—there is nothing Catholic about it. Rabidly pro-abortion, its agenda—to champion child abuse in the womb—is anything but Catholic.
• The Ford Foundation has also funded Link TV, which on Feb. 3, 2009 featured a three and a half minute video, “Divine Food,” that mocked Catholicism and portrayed a priest abusing the Eucharist.
• In 2011, the Ford Foundation sponsored an anti-Catholic exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, “Hide/Seek.” Included in the exhibit was a video that the Catholic League had previously protested when it was shown at the Smithsonian. The video, which featured large ants running across the body of Jesus on the Cross, was pulled from the Smithsonian after we protested.
• Another recipient of Ford Foundation largesse is the Faith and Reproductive Justice Leadership Institute of the Center for American Progress (CAP). CAP claims to “affirm the sacredness of conscience…as a foundation of religious liberty.” Yet in 2013 Sally Steenland, director of CAP’s Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative, cheered when Catholic conscience rights were nixed by the HHS mandate requiring Catholic health care providers to pay for abortion-inducing drugs.

Then there is the Arcus Foundation, founded in 2000 by billionaire heir Jon Stryker. Arcus has been quite generous to dissident Catholic activists opposed to Church teaching on issues like abortion and homosexuality.

• In 2014 Arcus kicked in $250,000 to the coffers of Catholics for Choice, for the purpose of “challenging religious opposition to LGBTQ rights and sexual and reproductive health and rights.” It followed that up with $125,000 in 2016 to help Catholics for Choice “to oppose discriminatory religious exemptions”—in other words, to work against the religious freedom of the Catholic Church to defend unborn life and traditional marriage.
• Arcus has been a regular contributor to DignityUSA: $200,000 in 2010, $200,000 in 2014, and $250,000 in 2016. Dignity says it is a Catholic gay group, but it openly rejects Church teachings on sexuality and is properly regarded as a dissident, if not anti-Catholic, group. This was underscored when they welcomed radical gay activist and virulent anti-Catholic bigot Dan Savage as keynote speaker at their 2015 annual convention in Seattle.
• In 2017 Arcus gave a grant of $35,000 to New Ways Ministry, “to connect the work of pro-LGBT Catholic organizations in every region of the world.” Founded in 1977 as a “gay Catholic” entity, New Ways Ministry has been repeatedly rebuked by Catholic bishops and the Vatican. In 2010, Francis Cardinal George, Archbishop of Chicago and president of the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, stated that “New Ways Ministry has no approval or recognition from the Catholic Church and they cannot speak on behalf of the Catholic faithful in the United States.” He cited the group’s continued denial of Church teachings as the reason for his injunction.

Besides funding efforts to foment dissent within the Catholic Church, Arcus has also lavished large sums of money on efforts to attack religious freedom.

• In February 2015, Catholic News Agency (CNA) reported that “the Ford Foundation and the Arcus Foundation have committed over $3 million in combined spending to target religious exemptions and other protections for religious freedom.”
• Since that report, CNA found in November 2017, Arcus had “given an additional $2.8 million in grants earmarked for projects aimed at restricting legal protections for religious freedom, especially religious and conscience exemptions in state and federal law.”
• Among the recipients of these anti-religious liberty grants were the ACLU, which has a long history of anti-Catholic bias, and the Center for American Progress, founded by John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager. In the Wikileaks documents revelations, Podesta was exposed as having plotted to foment a “revolution” within the Catholic Church, designed to bring it in line with left wing ideology.

Bill Donohue

“Jerry Springer: The Opera” debuted in 2002 at the Edinburgh Festival, and then moved to London’s west end in 2003. After two years, it began a U.K. tour, which lasted another year. Then it was scheduled to run in New York in 2005.

When I learned that the opera was coming to New York, I issued a news release on March 1, 2005, “‘Jerry Springer’ Better Stay in Britain.” I detailed why by citing the following three media sources.

• The opera “contains up to 8,000 profanities and features tap-dancers dressed as Ku Klux Klan members and a showdown between Satan and a diaper-wearing Jesus.” Amidst songs like “Chick with a D…” and “Eat Excrete,” the show portrays “the Messiah as a fat, diapered man who sings he’s ‘a little bit gay.'” (MSNBC News, 1-7-05)
• The show features a “semi-naked ‘gay’ Jesus who is being fondled by a disheveled Eve, as the Devil looks gleefully on with an inebriated Adam.” Also, “the Virgin Mary turns up to talk about her trials as the mother of a wayward saviour, and blitz of four-letter words.” The show ends with Springer telling Jesus to “grow up for Christ’s sake and put some f—ing clothes on.” (Sunday Telegraph, 1-9-05)
• “Surely no more blasphemous, vulgar or salacious piece of musical theatre than Jerry Springer—the Opera has graced the London stage in modern times.” (Evening Standard, 4-30-03)

I labeled the show “Satanic” and pledged to arrange a “massive protest” if it comes to New York. But it didn’t: the show was cancelled.

The opera did make it to New York’s Carnegie Hall for two nights at the end of January in 2008. I pressured Carnegie Hall’s sponsors to register a complaint, and succeeded in getting Bank of America to do so. In fact, it told Carnegie Hall’s officers that it wanted the public to know that its patrons had nothing to do with the show.

By that time I had seen the DVD version of the musical. Besides the non-stop obscenities, and trashing of Christianity—it really has it out for Catholicism—the most disturbing aspect of the show is its celebration of moral nihilism. At the end of the show, the actors scream, “Nothing is wrong and nothing is right.” They add, “there are no absolutes of good and evil.”

At the time, I said, “This is exactly what the Nazis said in their defense in Nuremberg.”

The following script summary, from beginning to end, demonstrates just how morally debased this show is.

• The studio audience for a taping of the Jerry Springer show sings about what they want to see on the show. Some hope for bare breasts, some for lesbians or bisexual dwarfs, some for a “chick with a d***.”
• The character of the “Warm-Up Man” gets the crowd excited before the Jerry Springer-character comes out. He sings to the crowd that Jerry is “bigger than Dave Letterman, bigger than Bob Hope. And give or take a few million, bigger than the f***ing pope.”
• A cast of losers sing about their problems. These are all vulgar and graphic. For instance, there is a “chick with a d***,” and a guy who wants to be his girlfriend’s “baby.” By this he means that he wants to wear a diaper and have her treat him like an infant, as this will get him aroused.
• The chorus sings that people all have different interests, explaining the sexual deviants on the show. One line is, “For some, morning Mass, for others, hairy a**.”
• More deviants are brought out. In one scene, a stripper’s mother, wearing a large crucifix, confronts her daughter. The mother informs her daughter that she wishes she died at birth.
• The KKK is introduced. Klansmen dance around in front of a burning cross, and a man in a diaper tries to shoot one of them, but misses and hits Jerry instead.
• Jerry learns he has gone to Hell. The “Warm-Up Man” from his show, it turns out, is actually Satan. The viewers see pictures of naked men descending into Hell.
• Satan wants Jerry to host a conflict resolution show for heaven and hell. Satan is angry with God for casting him out of heaven, and hopes to be an angel again; he wants an apology from Jesus. Satan gives Jerry cue cards to read for the show, and he reluctantly agrees to be the host.
• There is a set, and a sign reading, “Jerry Springer Show—in Hell.” A disclaimer is shown that reads in part, “It may not be suitable for viewers without a strong grasp of Judea-Christian mythology.”
• Jerry reads one of Satan’s cue cards to introduce the next guest. Jerry balks at first, but then introduces the guest as “The hypocrite son of the fascist tyrant on high, Jesus of Nazareth.”
• Jesus appears (he is the same actor who played the man interested in dressing up as a baby). Jesus is fat, effeminate, and wearing a loincloth. Jesus tells Satan to sit down on his a**.
• Satan breaks into song, singing about Jesus: “So he turned the water into wine, oooh! So he walked across the freaking seas, oooh! So you got yourself crucified. Here’s a little biscuit from me.” Satan holds up an off-white biscuit that resembles the Eucharist.
• Jesus then grabs the biscuit from Satan and holds it above his head before throwing it down, singing, “I am Jesus, son of man, son of Mary, son of God. So do not, do not, do not f*** with me. I do not want your biscuit. I want your love and your respect, for I am love and I love all mankind.”
• The chorus then sings, “Jesus is gay, Jesus is gay.”
• Jesus yells at the choir, telling the singers to stop, but then admits, “Actually, I am a bit gay.”
• Jerry reads aloud one of the cards. He says, “You call yourself Jesus, but you are not worthy of the name.” Then Jerry looks up from the card and asks, “Who wrote this s***?”
• At this point, Adam and Eve come out as the next guests. Adam is singing to Eve, “put your f***ing clothes on, you stupid b****.” Eve responds, “Talk to the a**!”
• Jerry tries to resolve a conflict between Adam, Eve and others. Eve sings to Jesus that she shouldn’t have been cast out of the garden for one simple mistake. Jesus responds that Eve had her chance, and she blew it.
• Eve reaches under Jesus’ loincloth and fondles his genitals. Jesus sings that he was crucified and Eve didn’t even care. Eve and Jesus continue arguing and eventually come to physical blows.
• Jerry tells Jesus he has to apologize for hitting Eve, but Jesus refuses. Satan then sings that Jesus should get over the crucifixion, “and give us all a f***ing break.”
• When Jerry suggests to Satan that it may be impossible for him to get Jesus to apologize for casting Satan out of heaven, Satan and the choir sing out a warning, indicating that if Jerry doesn’t succeed, he will be “f***ed up the a** with barbed wire.”
• Jerry announces that it is time to bring in the next guest, “the teenage mother of Jesus, Mary.”
• The choir sings, “Raped by an angel, raped by an angel, raped by an angel, raped by God!”
• Our Blessed Mother enters. She is angry and pointing at Jesus. She sings a song to him asking things such as, “Where were you when I was getting old? Where were you when the children cried?”
• Satan sings back, “Jesus wasn’t there. He didn’t care.”
• Jerry tells Satan that there is no way of resolving all these conflicts short of a miracle. At this point, God descends onto the stage. He is a fat man in a white suit.
• God sings that it isn’t easy being God, as everyone makes bad choices, blaming God for all their problems. God invites Jerry up to Heaven to “sit in heaven beside me, hold my hand and guide me.” Jerry gratefully accepts, but Satan and God then get into a fight over him. Jerry is put in a cage and is going to descend into a pit of fire. He then gives a speech to convince everyone to keep him away from hell. He steals lines from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
• Jerry ends with his own words: You’re never going to agree on everything. And what’s so bad about that? Satan, you’re never going to get your apologies … Jesus, grow up for Christ’s sake and put some f***ing clothes on. Haven’t you people heard of yin and yang? Love and hate? Attraction and repulsion? It’s the human condition we’re talking about here. Energy is pure delight. Nothing is wrong and nothing is right. And everything that lives is holy. And in conclusion, f*** you. F*** you all.
• All the action on the stage stops, and images of angels are projected onto the stage. The angels have the curves and breasts of females, along with male genitalia. The chorus starts to sing Jerry’s words: “Energy is pure delight. Nothing is wrong and nothing is right.”
• Everyone is pleased with what Jerry said, and he is free to go. One of the perverts from the show, Baby Jane (she also got her sexual kicks from acting like a baby) lets him out of the cage. Jerry tells her that he wants to stay in hell because he likes it there.
• Baby Jane repeatedly sings “Jerry Eleison” (a spin from the Greek Kyrie Eleison, or “Lord have mercy”). Jerry finds himself back on earth, dying from the gunshot wound. The crowd watches him die, asking if he has any final thoughts.
• Jerry pontificates, “I’ve learned that there are no absolutes of good and evil. We all live in a glorious state of flux….For better or for worse, history defines us by what we do and what we choose not to do. Hopefully, what will survive is love. So until next time, take care of yourselves.”
• Jerry then dies, and the chorus sings a closing song with the frequently repeated line, “3 nipple closet f***er, what the f***.” The chorus comes out all dressed as Jerry, singing about how it’s not easy to be Jerry Springer.

The show’s message—”nothing is wrong and nothing is right” and there are “no absolutes of good and evil”—is brought to life on stage.

Good and evil trade places (Jesus is a gay fascist who must apologize to Satan); nature-based differences between the sexes are blurred (women are depicted with male genitalia); terrorists are portrayed as friendly (tap dancing Klansmen); and Christianity is defamed (the Mass and the Eucharist are trashed, the crucifixion is ridiculed, and the Virgin Mary was raped by an angel).

To say the theme is demonic is hardly an exaggeration.

Bill Donohue

Those waging war on the monuments—public celebrations of prominent Americans—assume that history is replete with good guys and bad guys; the good guys are those who stood up to injustice and the bad guys are responsible for it. The assumption is baseless. More typically, the good guys have had their fair share of flaws, too.

Take the issue of slavery. It is easy to cheer the abolitionists today: after all, it takes no courage to champion their cause. Monuments in their honor, therefore, seem well deserved. But are they? What if we found out that most of them were bigots? What then? Should we scrub the public square free of all American heroes?

The unpleasant fact is that almost all of those who sought the abolition of slavery were bigots—they were virulently anti-Catholic. What they said and did to Catholics was shameful. So what now? Should we take a sledgehammer to their statues as well?

Most Americans think that the anti-Catholicism of the 19th century was the product of uneducated nativists. But the truth is that the biggest anti-Catholic bigots were also the most liberal, and most educated, segment of the population. It was they who set the cultural tone against Catholics.

In his masterful book, Catholicism and American Freedom, Notre Dame historian John T. McGreevy offers plenty of evidence to back up his charge that those who supported abolition typically saw Catholicism and slavery as one in the same: both were seen as despotic systems. Indeed, the first abolitionist martyr, Elijah Lovejoy, “spent much of 1835 warning of the Catholic menace.”

Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister, believed that “slavery was a papist product.” Fond of calling the Catholic Church the “Mother of Abominations,” his rhetoric was matched by legions of anti-slavery and anti-Catholic ministers.

For instance, New School Calvinists spoke about the Catholic Church as the “Whore of Babylon” and the pope as “the Antichrist.” Many said that Catholicism was not a religion at all: it was a usurpation of Christianity, the work of the “masterpiece of Satan” headed by the “man of perdition.” This is why ministers such as George Bourne claimed that the Episcopal Church was “the sole true Church of God.”

According to historian John d’Entremont, Moncure Conway was “the most thoroughgoing white male radical” of the pre-Civil War period. Known as “Monc” or “Monk,” the Unitarian minister hated Catholicism as much as he did slavery, holding a special animus for the Jesuits. He even called up his followers to “Be warned and armed!” No wonder University of North Carolina historian Peter Walker concluded that his hate-filled campaign came “close to calling for a jihad against Catholics.”

If there was one family of abolitionists which worked tirelessly to bash Catholics it was the Beechers. Headed by Lyman Beecher, he was joined by sons Edward and Henry Ward, and his daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (it was not by happenstance that in the novel Uncle Tom steers Catholic Eva away from the shackles of Catholicism, delivering her to the Methodists).

Lyman proved to be the reliable patriarch, teaching his children and his followers about “the most powerful secret organization that ever existed,” namely, the Catholic Church. He made that accusation, and many others like it, in his 1835 book, A Plea for the West. He argued that this “evil” institution “holds now in darkness and bondage nearly half the civilized world,” relegating Catholics to “debasement and slavery.”

What was Beecher afraid of? Fear that Rome will affect American elections, and fear that Protestants might fall under the Catholic spell. He, and many like him, were also terrified of being captured by Catholics. He was especially worried that Protestant children might succumb to the rich teachings and traditions offered to them as students.

To those who say that “the Catholics do not interfere with the religion of their protestant pupils,” Beecher answered, “They cannot help interfering with the religion of their pupils.” It’s in their blood.

He gives the nuns a backhanded compliment saying they are so effective in their work that they always outclass Protestant teachers. But the praise is qualified: he blames them for “underbidding us in the cheapness of education,” drawing unsuspecting Protestants into their ranks. Worse, “Catholic Europe is throwing swarm on swarm upon our shores.”

Edward Beecher proved that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Like his dad, he taught that “Romanism is the enemy of mankind.” His 1855 book, The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, maintains that the Catholic Church is a “stupendous fraud,” one that is “devised by Satan” to subjugate the faithful.

Led by the pope, who “claims supremacy over all earthly governments,” the Catholic Church developed many “peculiar doctrines,” among them being “transubstantiation, purgatory, saint and image worship, and the whole system of sacramental regeneration and sanctification.”

If there are two Catholic teachings that most upset these anti-slavery and anti-Catholic ministers it was the discipline of celibacy and the sacrament of reconciliation; both were seen as modes of social control. Celibacy, Beecher says, “cuts off the clergy from all ties of family or home, and leaves them to the full power of the great centres at Rome.” Similarly, “to fix the despotism on the people, the confessional is used.”

There is another link between celibacy and the confessional: sex.

Referring to celibate priests as “these unhappy men,” Beecher depicts them as “condemned through life to control impulses which God has implanted in their breasts,” rendering a situation wherein they are “not allowed to retire from temptation and call off their minds from forbidden thoughts, but are deliberately, remorselessly, and constantly thrust into the very centre of the fiery furnaces.”

How does Rome manage to pull this off? “This is done by requiring them to hear the confession of all their flock, in which, of course, are included those of females of all ages, and on all the points that are involved in a thorough confession.” In doing so, the Church has outdone Satan. Beecher argues that “satanic ingenuity could not devise a system better adapted to corrupt and debase the clerical body as a mass.”

He is nothing if not melodramatic. “The great law of the compulsory celibacy of the clergy,” Beecher writes, “together with the established practice of appointing unmarried ecclesiastics to examine females in the confessional on all points on which the polluted mind can form a conception, is as perfect a system for debauching the clergy as Satan could devise.”

It is because of these endless stories of licentiousness—made famous in The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (a bestselling tale of lies about sex between priests and nuns published in 1836)—that noted historian Richard Hofstadter once described anti-Catholicism as “the pornography of the Puritans.”

The Beechers reached a wide audience, making anti-Catholicism respectable. The famous abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, echoed their work, speaking of the need to unseat the tyrannical pope. “The overthrow of the despotic power of the Pope…removes the most formidable barrier which has ever been erected against free thought, free speech, free inquiry, and popular institutions.”

Frederick Douglass, a former slave and a leading abolitionist, was also known for his anti-Catholic diatribes. In his weekly publication, the Douglass Papers, he often spoke of “the prevalence and power of the Christian Church and religion at Rome and of the strange things that are believed and practiced there in the way of religious rites and ceremonies.”

Douglass showed sympathy for the plight of the Irish at the hands of the English, but he nonetheless blamed the victim: it was the religious bigotry of Irish Catholics that was responsible for their plight. They may have had some things in common with blacks, he said, but in the end they were pawns of “Romanism,” that nefarious force that brought “ignorance, cunning, and crimes” to Ireland.

Other liberals of the day who hated Catholics were the suffragettes. Jane Swisshelm played an integral role at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848; it was foundational to women’s rights. But she was no fan of the Church. She saw Catholicism and slavery as one and the same, casting priest and slaveholder as equals.

A more well known suffragette, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, spoke out against “Popery,” warning the nation that Catholics posed a threat to the advancement of individual rights. If they ever succeeded in their ambitions, she said, it would be the “death-knell of American liberties.” Other suffragettes issued admonitions about the “idolatrous perversions of the Romanish faith,” saying that wherever it prevailed, “progress and freedom” lose.

Leading the liberal brigade against Catholics were intellectuals such as Edgar Allan Poe, Melville, and Samuel F. B. Morse. Giving voice to the most scurrilous accusations against them were the New York Times, the New York Observer, Harper and Brother, Harper’s Weekly, and the Nation. The New York Times said that Catholicism and slavery were “incompatible with the spirit of the age [and] liberty and civilization,” both worthy of destruction.

According to one source, as recounted by professor Jenny Franchot, a partial count of anti-Catholic publications between 1800 and 1860 “shows some 25 newspapers, 13 magazines, 210 books, 40 fictional pieces, 41 histories, and scores of giftbooks, almanacs, and pamphlets dedicated to the anti-Catholic cause.” Ivy League institutions such as Harvard and Yale were also home to anti-Catholics.

The idea that Catholicism was analogous to slavery even touched learned men such as John Adams. In 1821, he asked Jefferson whether “a free Government [can] possibly exist with a Roman Catholic Religion.” The same sentiment was prevalent throughout Europe. Indeed, all of the 1848 revolutions were showcases of anti-Catholicism.

The real-life effects of this relentless intellectual assault on Catholicism were felt in the streets: churches and convents were burnt to the ground in many cities, provoking New York Bishop John “Dagger” Hughes to implore the faithful to take up arms in defense. Non-violent repercussions were felt in the schools and on the job.

If there was one famous American who opposed both slavery and anti-Catholicism, it was Lincoln. He said that if the nativists got their way, the Constitution would have to be changed to read, “All men are created equal, with the exception of blacks, foreigners and Catholics.”

Those engaged in the monument wars have no interest in taking down the statues of anti-Catholics. Neither should we. But for different reasons: they don’t give a hoot about anti-Catholicism, and would, if anything, celebrate the antics of these bigots. We should oppose the removal of the monuments because it smacks of historical revisionism, and because it feeds the cause of uprooting our heritage.

Don’t be fooled. The crusade to tear down the monuments has nothing to do with the truth. It is driven by politics. Those at the forefront of this movement are not guided by justice—they are driven by hate.

Bill Donohue

Those waging war on the monuments—public celebrations of prominent Americans—assume that history is replete with good guys and bad guys; the good guys are those who stood up to injustice and the bad guys are responsible for it. The assumption is baseless. More typically, the good guys have had their fair share of flaws, too.

Take the issue of slavery. It is easy to cheer the abolitionists today: after all, it takes no courage to champion their cause. Monuments in their honor, therefore, seem well deserved. But are they? What if we found out that most of them were bigots? What then? Should we scrub the public square free of all American heroes?

The unpleasant fact is that almost all of those who sought the abolition of slavery were bigots—they were virulently anti-Catholic. What they said and did to Catholics was shameful. So what now? Should we take a sledgehammer to their statues as well?

Most Americans think that the anti-Catholicism of the 19th century was the product of uneducated nativists. But the truth is that the biggest anti-Catholic bigots were also the most liberal, and most educated, segment of the population. It was they who set the cultural tone against Catholics.

In his masterful book, Catholicism and American Freedom, Notre Dame historian John T. McGreevy offers plenty of evidence to back up his charge that those who supported abolition typically saw Catholicism and slavery as one in the same: both were seen as despotic systems. Indeed, the first abolitionist martyr, Elijah Lovejoy, “spent much of 1835 warning of the Catholic menace.”

Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister, believed that “slavery was a papist product.” Fond of calling the Catholic Church the “Mother of Abominations,” his rhetoric was matched by legions of anti-slavery and anti-Catholic ministers.

For instance, New School Calvinists spoke about the Catholic Church as the “Whore of Babylon” and the pope as “the Antichrist.” Many said that Catholicism was not a religion at all: it was a usurpation of Christianity, the work of the “masterpiece of Satan” headed by the “man of perdition.” This is why ministers such as George Bourne claimed that the Episcopal Church was “the sole true Church of God.”

According to historian John d’Entremont, Moncure Conway was “the most thoroughgoing white male radical” of the pre-Civil War period. Known as “Monc” or “Monk,” the Unitarian minister hated Catholicism as much as he did slavery, holding a special animus for the Jesuits. He even called up his followers to “Be warned and armed!” No wonder University of North Carolina historian Peter Walker concluded that his hate-filled campaign came “close to calling for a jihad against Catholics.”

If there was one family of abolitionists which worked tirelessly to bash Catholics it was the Beechers. Headed by Lyman Beecher, he was joined by sons Edward and Henry Ward, and his daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (it was not by happenstance that in the novel Uncle Tom steers Catholic Eva away from the shackles of Catholicism, delivering her to the Methodists).

Lyman proved to be the reliable patriarch, teaching his children and his followers about “the most powerful secret organization that ever existed,” namely, the Catholic Church. He made that accusation, and many others like it, in his 1835 book, A Plea for the West. He argued that this “evil” institution “holds now in darkness and bondage nearly half the civilized world,” relegating Catholics to “debasement and slavery.”

What was Beecher afraid of? Fear that Rome will affect American elections, and fear that Protestants might fall under the Catholic spell. He, and many like him, were also terrified of being captured by Catholics. He was especially worried that Protestant children might succumb to the rich teachings and traditions offered to them as students.

To those who say that “the Catholics do not interfere with the religion of their protestant pupils,” Beecher answered, “They cannot help interfering with the religion of their pupils.” It’s in their blood.

He gives the nuns a backhanded compliment saying they are so effective in their work that they always outclass Protestant teachers. But the praise is qualified: he blames them for “underbidding us in the cheapness of education,” drawing unsuspecting Protestants into their ranks. Worse, “Catholic Europe is throwing swarm on swarm upon our shores.”

Edward Beecher proved that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Like his dad, he taught that “Romanism is the enemy of mankind.” His 1855 book, The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, maintains that the Catholic Church is a “stupendous fraud,” one that is “devised by Satan” to subjugate the faithful.

Led by the pope, who “claims supremacy over all earthly governments,” the Catholic Church developed many “peculiar doctrines,” among them being “transubstantiation, purgatory, saint and image worship, and the whole system of sacramental regeneration and sanctification.”

If there are two Catholic teachings that most upset these anti-slavery and anti-Catholic ministers it was the discipline of celibacy and the sacrament of reconciliation; both were seen as modes of social control. Celibacy, Beecher says, “cuts off the clergy from all ties of family or home, and leaves them to the full power of the great centres at Rome.” Similarly, “to fix the despotism on the people, the confessional is used.”

There is another link between celibacy and the confessional: sex.

Referring to celibate priests as “these unhappy men,” Beecher depicts them as “condemned through life to control impulses which God has implanted in their breasts,” rendering a situation wherein they are “not allowed to retire from temptation and call off their minds from forbidden thoughts, but are deliberately, remorselessly, and constantly thrust into the very centre of the fiery furnaces.”

How does Rome manage to pull this off? “This is done by requiring them to hear the confession of all their flock, in which, of course, are included those of females of all ages, and on all the points that are involved in a thorough confession.” In doing so, the Church has outdone Satan. Beecher argues that “satanic ingenuity could not devise a system better adapted to corrupt and debase the clerical body as a mass.”

He is nothing if not melodramatic. “The great law of the compulsory celibacy of the clergy,” Beecher writes, “together with the established practice of appointing unmarried ecclesiastics to examine females in the confessional on all points on which the polluted mind can form a conception, is as perfect a system for debauching the clergy as Satan could devise.”

It is because of these endless stories of licentiousness—made famous in The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (a bestselling tale of lies about sex between priests and nuns published in 1836)—that noted historian Richard Hofstadter once described anti-Catholicism as “the pornography of the Puritans.”

The Beechers reached a wide audience, making anti-Catholicism respectable. The famous abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, echoed their work, speaking of the need to unseat the tyrannical pope. “The overthrow of the despotic power of the Pope…removes the most formidable barrier which has ever been erected against free thought, free speech, free inquiry, and popular institutions.”

Frederick Douglass, a former slave and a leading abolitionist, was also known for his anti-Catholic diatribes. In his weekly publication, the Douglass Papers, he often spoke of “the prevalence and power of the Christian Church and religion at Rome and of the strange things that are believed and practiced there in the way of religious rites and ceremonies.”

Douglass showed sympathy for the plight of the Irish at the hands of the English, but he nonetheless blamed the victim: it was the religious bigotry of Irish Catholics that was responsible for their plight. They may have had some things in common with blacks, he said, but in the end they were pawns of “Romanism,” that nefarious force that brought “ignorance, cunning, and crimes” to Ireland.

Other liberals of the day who hated Catholics were the suffragettes. Jane Swisshelm played an integral role at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848; it was foundational to women’s rights. But she was no fan of the Church. She saw Catholicism and slavery as one and the same, casting priest and slaveholder as equals.

A more well known suffragette, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, spoke out against “Popery,” warning the nation that Catholics posed a threat to the advancement of individual rights. If they ever succeeded in their ambitions, she said, it would be the “death-knell of American liberties.” Other suffragettes issued admonitions about the “idolatrous perversions of the Romanish faith,” saying that wherever it prevailed, “progress and freedom” lose.

Leading the liberal brigade against Catholics were intellectuals such as Edgar Allan Poe, Melville, and Samuel F. B. Morse. Giving voice to the most scurrilous accusations against them were the New York Times, the New York Observer, Harper and Brother, Harper’s Weekly, and the Nation. The New York Times said that Catholicism and slavery were “incompatible with the spirit of the age [and] liberty and civilization,” both worthy of destruction.

According to one source, as recounted by professor Jenny Franchot, a partial count of anti-Catholic publications between 1800 and 1860 “shows some 25 newspapers, 13 magazines, 210 books, 40 fictional pieces, 41 histories, and scores of giftbooks, almanacs, and pamphlets dedicated to the anti-Catholic cause.” Ivy League institutions such as Harvard and Yale were also home to anti-Catholics.

The idea that Catholicism was analogous to slavery even touched learned men such as John Adams. In 1821, he asked Jefferson whether “a free Government [can] possibly exist with a Roman Catholic Religion.” The same sentiment was prevalent throughout Europe. Indeed, all of the 1848 revolutions were showcases of anti-Catholicism.

The real-life effects of this relentless intellectual assault on Catholicism were felt in the streets: churches and convents were burnt to the ground in many cities, provoking New York Bishop John “Dagger” Hughes to implore the faithful to take up arms in defense. Non-violent repercussions were felt in the schools and on the job.

If there was one famous American who opposed both slavery and anti-Catholicism, it was Lincoln. He said that if the nativists got their way, the Constitution would have to be changed to read, “All men are created equal, with the exception of blacks, foreigners and Catholics.”

Those engaged in the monument wars have no interest in taking down the statues of anti-Catholics. Neither should we. But for different reasons: they don’t give a hoot about anti-Catholicism, and would, if anything, celebrate the antics of these bigots. We should oppose the removal of the monuments because it smacks of historical revisionism, and because it feeds the cause of uprooting our heritage.

Don’t be fooled. The crusade to tear down the monuments has nothing to do with the truth. It is driven by politics. Those at the forefront of this movement are not guided by justice—they are driven by hate.