There is little question that anti-Catholicism has increased markedly in recent times, and if there is any serious doubt I invite anyone to stop by my New York office to avail himself or herself of the evidence.

It must be noted that the way anti-Catholicism manifests itself today bears little resemblance to past patterns of bigotry. The nativistic impulses that once characterized immigration policy, and the fantastic charges of dual loyalty to nation and papacy, have certainly not disappeared, but they have subsided.

What is different about today’s strain of anti-Catholicism is that it derives almost entirely from the well-educated strata of society and is directed at both church teachings and traditional Catholics.

In addition, we have a new phenomenon, that of the “self-hating Catholic” – 1960’s generation-types who were raised Catholic but have long stopped practicing (an important minority are still attending to the sacraments).

Their defining mark is their deep-seated hatred about anything Catholic. What accounts for the new wave of anti-Catholicism is the content and constancy of church teachings on morality; the “progressives” want to force a modernist agenda on the ever-resisting church.

Topping the list of contemporary examples of Catholic-bashing has been the Nazi-like tactics of gay militants. In Boston, gay activists have thrown condoms at those attending the installation of a new bishop. In Washington, Queer Nation disrupted a Mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. St. Patrick’s Cathedral was the site of gays who interrupted Mass and spit the Communion wafer on the floor. And just recently another gay and lesbian group held a demonstration during Mass at a church in Brooklyn.

If this had happened in a synagogue, the media would have gone ballistic. That they didn’t is testimony to their politics.

The media’s reaction to the recent papal visit to Denver was rife with bias. Every splinter group that could be found, including Catholics for a Free Choice (which has no membership), was given a degree of visibility and credibility that was grossly disproportionate to its following among the rank-and-file.

The mindless polls, all of which failed to discriminate between practicing Catholics and Phil Donahue-type Catholics, added more fuel to the fires of discontent. The goal was clearly to accentuate the negative and thereby marginalize the influence of the Catholic Church on society.

TV and radio shows this fall have been replete with snide references to priest as pedophiles. Would the media generalize from the few to the collective if the subject were the deviant practices of blacks or Hispanics? Obviously not, which begs the question: Why is there a double standard?

It’s not just the media that is at fault. How many realize, for example, that the prevailing climate of political correctness on college campuses means that being pro-life is greeted with disdain and discrimination by faculty and administrators? We even have public officials who are anti-Catholic.

Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the surgeon general, succeeded in being confirmed despite statements that evinced an animus against Catholics. In New York, councilperson Ronnie Eldridge recently said that mayoral hopeful Rudy Giuliani should be considered “suspect” because he once attended Catholic schools.

Imagine saying that a Jew should be considered suspect because he attended a yeshiva.

In short, in this day and age of the much-vaunted multicultural mantra of respect for diversity, there is precious little respect for Catholics. It’s about time Catholics not only recognized this abuse, but did something about it.

This commentary on contemporary anti-Catholicism was prepared for Catholic News Service and published in numerous diocesan weeklies across the country. 

Have you ever noticed how much blasphemy tends to track obscenity? Consider the following observations.

As the bus from La Guardia airport came to a stop in front of Grand Central Station, I noticed a vendor selling newspapers and magazines. Prominently displayed on the side of a vending booth there must have been at least a dozen magazine covers on display, and every one of them featured pictures of naked men or women.

When I went to claim my luggage, I noticed a huge ad alongside the bus. It showed a picture of the pop star Madonna on one side and a picture of Our Lady with baby Jesus on the other. In between was a statement that read “The Difference Between You and Your Parents.” The ad was sponsored by VH-1, a second MTV music video channel.

It would be easy to shrug this off as just another commentary on how depraved New York has become. Unfortunately, there’s a lot more to it than that. Those who are responsible for this condition have a very wide reach. For example, the new fall TV season is replete with offensive sitcom fare, making it virtually impossible to ignore. The premier of “Daddy Dearest” on Fox Network featured a segment where one of the main characters exclaimed “There goes my sex life. I might as well become a priest or something…” To which Don Rickles said, “That’s not a bad idea, from what I hear they are getting a lot of action lately. “

On KFI radio in Los Angeles, promotional spots for Tammy Bruce’s program asked parents if they would prefer to entrust their children to the care of Catholic priests or Michael Jackson. A similar statement, one that implied how sexually active priests are these days, was recently aired on the “John Larroquette Show.” It seems that generalizing from the few to the many – normally a taboo among the deep thinkers – is no longer in bad taste, not, at least, when it comes to Catholic priests.

The common thread linking these arguably disparate events together is a pervasive contempt for elementary standards of decency and a profound disrespect for Catholicism. To be sure, obscenity and bigotry are not new. But what is new is the extent to which the nation’s elites take pride in their relentless assault on the moral order.

The Madonna poster is not simply the product of an exploitative TV station. It is the product of government. It was the City of New York that allowed this ad to be posted on buses and public phone booths throughout the city. Would the government have allowed an ad juxtaposing a dying AIDS patient with a gay athlete, allowing for the inscription “The Difference Between Today’s Gays and the Gays of a Generation Ago”? No, at that point the relativism of today’s progressives would quickly come to a halt. That would offend their values. The Madonna poster obviously does not.

Similarly, the TV and radio shows that promote the idea that all priests lead an irresponsible sex life would never be tolerated if the subject were gays. Don’texpect the reckless producers of these shows ever to portray homosexuals as a sexually deviant group. That would offend their val- ues. But unfairly portraying priests does not.

It’s actually worse than this. The same elites in the media who generalize from a few deviant priests to all clergy feel compelled to distort the truth about homosexuals. For example, in the HBO movie, “And the Band Played On,” a decision was made to excise from the script almost all references to the behavioral peculiarities that gave rise to the AIDS epidemic in the first place. This was a calculated act of intellectual dishonesty. Why? Because in the book “And the Band Played On,” author Randy Shilts details quite vividly how AIDS came to pass. But to tell the truth would offend gays, hence the decision to censor.

What’s at work is more than a double standard: there is a concerted effort to redefine the meaning of vice and virtue. The increasing prevalence of blasphemy and obscenity are designed to facilitate this objective and that is why they tend to track each other. There’s no conspiracy at work here (conspiracies have an element of latency that this effort lacks) but there is a well-defined attempt to trash the existing moral order.

Historically, those societies that have undergone a cultural inversion have not fared well, not even for the architects of destruction. Indeed the record shows that the more extreme the revolution, the greater the chance that the revolution will devour the revolutionaries. That’s something our cultural elite would do well to ponder the next time they seek to engineer their nihilism.

– William A. Donohue