In the finale of the HBO show, “The Newsroom,” which aired December 14, there was an exchange between Will McAvoy, the anchor/news director (played by Jeff Daniels), and Charlie Skinner, the network president (played by Sam Waterston). They managed to drop Bill Donohue’s name.

The subject of discussion was Pope Benedict XVI. Skinner took McAvoy to task for going soft on the pope for his alleged easy treatment of predatory priests. He challenged McAvoy, wanting to know why he wasn’t tougher. Here is what followed:

Skinner: That’s inexplicable to me.

McAvoy: Bill Donohue

Skinner: Yeah, you don’t want the Catholic League mad at you.

McAvoy: Nobody does.

Bill replied as follows: “If the story is true, we don’t get mad at those who report on bad news about the Catholic Church. We just get mad when we’re cherry picked or when the bad news is embellished. Or when we’re gratuitously bashed by talking heads. Sort of like what often appears on the network news, broadcast prime time shows, late night talk shows, cable talk shows, newspapers, radio, movies, the Internet….”

Donohue wished HBO executives “Merry Christmas.” While he is not convinced that they have turned the page, he appreciates the fact that they know we mean business.

It only took a couple of days for Walmart to buckle. Under pressure by the Catholic League to pull three indefensible Catholic Halloween costumes, the megastore did just that. Had it not been for those who receive our email news releases, and who let Walmart know of their displeasure, there would have been no victory.

A few days before Halloween, Walmart, in deference to plus-size women, decided to pull a line of “Fat Girl Costumes.” That inspired us to see how the store treated Catholics. Here is a list of the Catholic costumes made available by Walmart:

Jesus; Joseph; Mary; Virgin Mary; Monk; Cardinal; Priest; Nun; Saint; Joan of Arc; Pope; Angel; Adult Confessional; Adam and Eve; Catholic School; School Girl (the last two feature “Sexy Miss Prep School Girl” costumes).

Most of these costumes, we determined, were not in bad taste. There were three, however, that crossed the line: “Scary Mary Adult Halloween Costume” came with a mask of Our Blessed Mother showing blood dripping from her eyes; “Adult Evil Religious Nun Scary Men’s Halloween Costume” showed a nun in habit wearing a mask with a skeleton’s face; and, “Adult Confessional Costume” featured a priest with a mock confessional unit over his head extending to his waist (his face was shown in the middle of the confessional box).

Not wanting to be hypersensitive, we asked Walmart to pull the three offensive costumes, not registering an objection about the others. At first, we got nowhere. But we persisted, making the case that Walmart had no problem pulling the “Fat Girl” wear, or apologizing to women who were offended. We also noted that the few Jewish costumes were inoffensive, and there were no Muslim outfits.

On Halloween, we received notice that Walmart was going to pull the three costumes in question, though by the weekend it had yet to do so. When we returned to work on November 3, they were gone. It is safe to say they will not be reordered for next Halloween.

Here is what Walmart said about the offensive Catholic outfits: “This never should have been on our site. It is unacceptable, and we apologize. We have removed it and ensure this never happens again.”

We don’t know exactly what triggered Walmart to do the right thing, but we have reason to believe they took notice of what Bill Donohue said to the public: “With the busiest shopping days of the year upon us, we hope Catholics look elsewhere this Christmas season.”

This is the second time in ten years we have battled Walmart, winning both times.

The politically correct police are always out in force during the Christmas season, and this year they made an early splash in Marshfield, Massachusetts and Montgomery County, Maryland.

In Marshfield, the School Committee decided it would not listen to its constituency: it voted 3-2 against changing “Holiday Break” back to “Christmas Break.” Though hundreds protested, the elites said that the phrase “Christmas Break” was too “archaic” for the 21st century.

Almost everyone in Montgomery County, Maryland likes it when religious holidays for Christians and Jews are recognized as such in their schools. But after Muslims complained that their religious holidays were not being observed, the School Board voted to punish everyone equally: all mention of religious holidays were deleted. Even the Muslims protested that this was not their intention.

Efforts to toy with Christmas took a different course when Dillard’s, a department store chain, decided to pull a sign in the little girl’s department that read, “Dear Santa: This year please give me a big fat bank account and a slim body. Please don’t mix those two up like you did last year. Thanks.”

We can’t help note that while efforts to neuter Christmas are ongoing here, in Communist Cuba they recently approved the construction of the first Catholic Church to be built in 55 years; it being funded by Cubans from Tampa, Florida.

In the next edition of Catalyst we will report on the latest attempts to sanitize Santa.

Dissident lay Catholics in Southwest Florida, along with some priests, have declared war on Bishop Frank Dewane. He is the Bishop of Venice and is by all accounts a loyal son of the Church. Which is why they are out to get him.

Dewane is drawing the ire of Catholic malcontents, and ex-Catholics, because of his orthodoxy. His critics are largely drawn from the ranks of the elderly, and are overrepresented by ex-priests and ex-nuns. They are being aided and abetted by the media. This occasioned a strong response from us: we took on Fox 4 TV, which covers Fort Myers, Cape Coral, and Naples.

The war on Bishop Dewane started in January when ten priests wrote a letter to the Apostolic Nuncio accusing the bishop of governing by “intimidation, the use of fear, shaming, bullying and other non-Christian behaviors.” The letter was made public in May when it was sent to the media, and unfolded in an unseemly manner this fall.

The accusing priests refuse to come forward and let the accused know of their identity. In fact, they never sent Dewane a copy of their letter (he learned of it through the media). To make matters worse, these cowardly priests did not provide a scintilla of evidence: no specific examples of Dewane’s alleged “non-Christian” behavior were offered.

Dewane subsequently released a statement saying that the priests’ letter “lacks all credibility.” Furthermore, he said that the accusations are “sweeping generalities and are simply false or unfounded.” The statement concluded, “With the general nature of the unfounded complaints in the letter that was released, one has to wonder who is being bullied by whom?”

To answer the charges in the letter, Bishop Dewane convened a meeting of all the priests in the diocese. Most priests said that their complaining colleagues should have met with the bishop and handled this matter internally. That’s what real men do.

Not surprisingly, Call to Action and Voice of the Faithful, two wholly discredited groups, piled on. In a state of utter desperation, they reached out to Pope Francis, asking him to enter the fray. Their letter to him was replete with unsubstantiated accusations, and loaded with vitriol.

We contacted every parish in the diocese rebutting the charges against Bishop Dewane. Bill Donohue also wrote a detailed letter to Fox 4 TV challenging their professionalism. The station offered a lengthy reply. While it was unconvincing, it was far less partisan than its reporting. We trust they got the message.

As recent issues of Catalyst have disclosed, it is open season on the bishops. Unless they are defended by lay Catholics, the battles will never end.

The Supreme Court of Wisconsin recently responded to the 2011 grievance filed by the Catholic League against attorney Rebekah M. Nett. We asked that she be investigated for making stridently anti-Catholic remarks against United States Bankruptcy Judge Nancy Dreher, and others. We are happy to report that she has lost her license for a year.

The formal complaint we lodged cited the following:

   •  Nett filed a memo written by her client, Naomi Isaacson, which said, “Across the country the court systems and particularly the Bankruptcy Court in Minnesota are composed of a bunch of ignoramus, bigoted Catholic beasts that carry the sword of the church.”

   •  The memo called U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Nancy Dreher “a Catholic Knight Witch Hunter.” [Note: Dreher is not Catholic.]

   •  The memo called one bankruptcy trustee “a priest’s boy,” and another a “Jesuitess.”

   •  For her part, Nett called Dreher and other court personnel “dirty Catholics,” adding that “Catholic deeds throughout the [sic] history have been bloody and murderous.”

Ed  Koch, the former mayor of New York City, must be looking down on us with a smile. He strongly supported our case against Nett. We are delighted that Ms. Nett’s Wisconsin law license has been suspended for a period of one year.

The Catholic League, which has marched in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade for 20 years, will not do so in 2015.

Prior to the announcement that a gay group would march under its own banner in the 2015 parade, Bill Donohue was consulted by parade organizers about their plans. He told them that he could only support this decision if there were a formal revision in the parade’s rules governing marching units, and that is exactly what he said in his first public statement.

To be specific, Donohue asked them to pledge that a pro-life Catholic group would also be permitted. He was told that a formal change in the rules had been approved and that a pro-life group would march. But then he was told that the list of marching units was set and that no pro-life group would march in next year’s parade. That is why he pulled the Catholic League contingent.

It is important to note that the head of the parade committee, John Dunleavy, is not responsible for this debacle. Donohue said, “John is a great man who has run the parade with distinction for two decades. Unfortunately, he was himself taken advantage of by those who made decisions that should have been his preserve.”

For the past two decades Donohue has been the parade’s most vocal defender of its rules. Repeatedly, he has said that gays have no more been banned from marching than pro-life Catholics have: members of both groups can march with other units; they simply can’t march under their own banner. Why? Because the parade is not about gays or abortion, or anything other than St. Patrick.

Donohue got out in front of attempts to pit him against Timothy Cardinal Dolan, the Grand Marshal of the 2015 parade. “The suggestion that I am at odds with the New York Archbishop is not only false it is despicable,” he said. “Cardinal Dolan has no more rabid supporter than Bill Donohue, and nothing that has transpired recently changes anything.”

Donohue’s reasons for withdrawing from the parade have nothing to do with Cardinal Dolan or with gays. It has to do with being told one thing while they did another. To top things off, they decided to include a gay group that is neither Catholic nor Irish while stiffing pro-life Catholics. As Donohue told the media, “This is as stunning as it is indefensible.”

The goal of some New York Irishmen who are actively involved in this issue is to secularize what is an ethnic-religious event. They want it to be an Irish celebration shorn from its religious heritage.

To read a more complete account, click here.

California Governor Jerry Brown and his administration recently caved into requests from pro-abortion groups and reversed an earlier decision that allowed Santa Clara and Loyola Marymount universities to exclude coverage for “elective” abortions in their previously approved health insurance plans. Both schools are now being told to include coverage for all abortions.

“Abortion is a basic health care service” said the health department’s director, Michelle Rouillard. She said the exemptions violated a 1975 state law that required health plans to cover all services that were “medically necessary.” She did not say why electing to kill children in utero was “medically necessary.”

As part of the exemption both schools had already agreed to cover abortions when they were needed to save the life of the mother, or prevent serious health damage. Loyola Marymount even allowed employees to pay extra if they wished to have “elective” abortions included in their health insurance plans as well. But this was not enough to satisfy abortion-rights zealots.

Catholic universities have a right and a duty to uphold the tenets of their faith in everything they do. Paying for abortions is in direct conflict with the teachings of the Catholic Church. We can thank the Obama team for broaching this issue.

Not only is this decision morally obscene, it violates the religious liberties of Catholic institutions. The universities should now sue on First Amendment grounds. Perhaps a judge can educate the Brown administration on the need to keep church and state separate.

The Middle East is coming apart as murderous Muslim madmen move from nation to nation killing everyone who does not accept their twisted beliefs. Christians, Jews, Kurds, the Yezidi—even Muslims who differ with them—are being slaughtered. Children are being beheaded, crucifixions are rampant, and monasteries are being ransacked, all in the name of Islam.

In the middle of August, Bill Donohue spoke at length with cnsnews.com about the situation. “President Obama over the weekend made a comment that we don’t want winners and we don’t want the vanquished. But that’s just plain silly. You can’t have two winners in war. You can’t have two winners in baseball. As far as I am concerned, you either have the forces of freedom or you have the forces of death. The Muslim jihadists are the forces of death.”

Referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Donohue said, “ISIS is not like any other force that we’ve seen. If in fact they quit al Qaeda because al Qaeda was considered too wimpy, then you’re dealing with people who cannot be stopped by dialogue and diplomacy. So they have to be met with force.”

The Holy See’s Permanent Observer to the United Nations in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, referenced the U.N. Charter, saying, “there might be occasions in the life and in the relations between states when dialogue, negotiations, fail and large numbers of people find themselves at risk: at risk of genocide, at risk of having their fundamental, their basic human rights violated.”

Tomasi got very specific: “In this case, when every other means has been attempted, article 42 of the Charter of the United Nations becomes possible justification for not only imposing sanctions of economic nature on the state or the group or the region that violates the basic human rights of people, but also the use of force. All the force that is necessary to stop this evil and this tragedy.”

The Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue also weighed in with a list of specific atrocities committed by the terrorists. It called upon all religious leaders, “especially Muslims” to step up and use whatever pressure they had to end the violence.

It is important that the Islamic State barbarians not simply be contained, but defeated. We are dealing with a roving band of 15,000 militants; the likes of which the world has not seen since Pol Pot’s “killing fields” in the 1970s.

 It is up to President Obama and our western allies to put an end to this genocide.

Over the summer we learned that the Library of Congress had scheduled a presentation titled, “The Book and the Reformation,” sponsored by the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

We certainly did not object to an event on the Reformation, but what caught our eye was the way the Library of Congress flagged it. The flyer it disseminated was clearly anti-Catholic: There was a drawing of the pope as Satan, with the inscription, “Ego sum Papa,” or, “I am the Pope.”

We issued a news release asking those on our email list to contact the communications director at the Library. The first reaction was defensive and sophomoric. We received a phone call from the chief of the Rare Books Division saying he has been “inundated” with criticism by people who are upset with a “600-year-old image” that he says is not anti-Catholic. He failed to say why a drawing of the pope as Satan might not be seen as offensive. Bill Donohue commented, “If I were to draw a picture of his loved ones depicting them as Satan, perhaps a light bulb would go off in his head. Perhaps.”

The second reaction was more mature: the bigoted depiction of the pope as Satan was deleted. This was a quick victory.

Mr. Rare Books who called our office ended his conversation by asking, “Is the Catholic League connected to Bill Donohue?” When he found out the answer, he said, “That explains a lot.” Donohue replied, “And it explains a lot about him that he had to be told how to do his job.”

Bill Donohue

Mass hysteria has gripped Ireland, England, and the United States over reports that nearly 800 bodies of children have been found in a mass grave outside a former home run by nuns in Tuam, near Galway. The Catholic Church has been hammered incessantly, and shrill cries of maltreatment abound. Fresh off the heels of horror stories about the Magdalene Laundries, and the torment of Philomena Lee (as recorded in the film, “Philomena”), the public is reeling from the latest report of abuse at the hands of cruel nuns.

None of this is true. There is no mass grave. Women were not abused by nuns in the Magdalene Laundries. And Philomena’s son was never taken from her and then sold to the highest bidder. The evidence that the public has been hosed is overwhelming. Truths, half-truths, and flat-out lies are driving all three stories. That’s a bad stew, the result of which is to whip up anti-Catholic sentiment. This is no accident.

Regarding the latest hoax, many reporters and pundits have charged that the “mass grave” story is “Ireland’s Holocaust.” The Nazi analogy belittles what happened to Jews under Hitler, and dishonors Irish nuns. The nuns never put kids into ovens; they did not starve them to death; and they did not torture anyone. Even if the most glaringly dishonest stories about children who died in Irish homes were true, they would not come close to approaching the monstrous atrocities that Jews endured under the Nazis. To make such a comparison is obscene.

It is true that 796 children died in the Tuam home between 1925 and 1961, and their whereabouts is uncertain. But that hardly merits the fantastic leap that wicked nuns dumped them in a septic tank, treating them as if they were raw sewage. There is not a scintilla of evidence to back up this scurrilous accusation. Yet in May and June, this propaganda was disseminated on both sides of the Atlantic, treated as if it were an accurate account.

What is perhaps most striking about this story is the extent to which much of the mainstream media has had to walk back its inflammatory stories. The Associated Press even apologized in June for distorting the record. But the damage has been done: once again, the Catholic Church in Ireland has been unfairly blamed for persecuting innocent women and children.

Anti-Catholicism in Ireland, England, and the United States is fueling the “mass grave” hysteria. It’s a sick appetite, and there is no shortage of irresponsible persons feeding it.

Click here for more.