Uncensored written remarks by former employees of John Edwards

Warning: This is an uncensored selection of the vile anti-Christian writings of John Edwards’s staffers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan. The remarks contained at this link are graphic, vulgar and obscene.

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Twilight of the Scandal

by Kiera McCaffrey

(Catalyst 12/2006)

The Catholic League would never defend the indefensible. That is why we praised the media for putting the spotlight on the Church’s sex-abuse scandal in 2002. Without journalists breaking the story, the Church may have been slower to clean house and a greater number of adolescents may have been harmed. Similarly, we have never criticized those victims of abuse who file legitimate lawsuits against the church, or lay groups that truly are focused on helping the reform process. Nevertheless, recent events have forced us to reconsider our earlier assessment.

It is obvious to us that there is a growing problem of late with trial lawyers, advocacy groups, certain segments of the media and even lawmakers seeing the sex abuse scandal not as a problem that has largely been corrected, but as an unending supplier of money, ratings and attention. Moreover, individuals from these various fields are joining forces, not to protect young people—if that were the goal, calls for reform would begin with the public schools—but to bludgeon the Catholic Church.

Ideally, victims’ groups provide an atmosphere of support for those who were molested as minors and suggest ways in which the Church can ensure the safety of others. However, two elements, bitterness and lust for power, have corrupted many of these groups, which have taken up a new agenda of stripping the Church and her priests of the same rights enjoyed by the rest of America.

The bitterness comes from a projection of the acts of a few onto the entire Church. The lust for power comes not from problems within the Church, but from reforms made subsequently. When the scandal first came to light, the media looked to victims’ groups for commentary and background information. Now, at the twilight of the scandal, when abuse cases have declined, the media have less cause to seek out the spokesmen of such groups. Accustomed to the limelight, these organizations are finding it harder to stay in the public eye without becoming increasingly extremist in their endeavors. They often turn to allies for help with such work.

The ethics behind victims’ groups accepting donations from lawyers who represent group members in the wake of traumatic events are questionable. Some advocates for abuse victims realize this and act accordingly. Survivors First, a Boston-based group created in the aftermath of the scandal, has a policy that it will not “accept money from anti-gay groups, anti-Catholic groups or plaintiff lawyers.” However, as Forbesmagazine’s Daniel Lyons first made clear in 2003, such scruples are not shared by other organizations.

For instance, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) touts itself as “the nation’s largest, oldest and most active support group for women and men wounded by religious authority figures…an independent and confidential organization with no connections with the church or church officials.” Notice this statement says absolutely nothing about SNAP’s connections to trial lawyers.

David Clohessy, SNAP’s national director, admitted this year that approximately 18% of the group’s $500,000 to $600,000 budget comes from lawyers’ donations. Jeffrey Anderson, notorious for his outrageously broad-sweeping suits against the Church (e.g., filing suit against the Vatican and every single U.S. bishop), is one of those hefty donors. Anderson has made tens of millions of dollars from lawsuits against the Church. And each time he takes a cut from a settlement he negotiates or trial he wins (attorneys may receive between 25% and 40% of the money awarded in each ruling), he is in a better position to write the big checks to his friends at SNAP. And SNAP, of course, is often on hand to support him in his legal efforts.

One way for attorneys and victims’ groups to open the Church to more suits is to ask judges to demand the Church turn over personnel files. Digging through these confidential documents, they may discover or claim to discover new incidents of crimes or cover-up. However, it is not only through the courts that they can ensure the Church is more vulnerable to lawsuits; changes in legislation can make it possible to file suit for abuses that allegedly happened many years ago. And a whole slew of folks are working to see that such changes in fact come about.

SNAP spends 10% of its annual budget to promote legislation the group deems in its interest. Just this October, SNAP joined the newly-formed Foundation to Abolish Sex Abuse in urging the Pennsylvania legislature to pass a bill which would give those alleging they were sexually abused before the age of consent until their fiftieth birthdays to file charges. (Current law allows individuals to file suit only until their thirtieth birthdays.) The group has petitioned for similar changes in statute of limitation laws in many other states.

Voice of the Faithful is another organization that targets clergy at frequent occasions. Formed in 2002, the group purports to seek a “Spirit-driven dialogue toward a stronger Catholic Church.” However, as is evident from an amicus brief the group filed with SNAP in a case in Maine, Voice’s idea of a stronger Catholic Church evidently means one where the Church is forced to turn over files on deceased priests who have had molestation claims made against them. Besides stripping rights away from priests, Voice has been criticized for advancing ideas that go against Church teaching. Though the group’s spokesman, John Moynihan, has stated they are “neutral” on the issues of abortion, homosexuality and the all-male priesthood—troubling enough for a supposedly Catholic flock—Voice meetings and literature have played host to speakers and articles espousing heterodox views time and again.

Another group, Healing Alliance (formerly known as Linkup), turned to Jeffrey Anderson to educate them about effective lobbying techniques. Those gathered at the 2003 annual meeting of the victims’ support group were instructed by the lawyer-turned-showman that teddy bears are the key to influencing elected officials. He told them that, should an advocate call on a legislator who is not in his office, the advocate only needs to leave one of the stuffed toys with a staffer in order to turn a missed opportunity into a successful appeal: “You tell them it represents the innocence of a child—the innocence that’s been stolen—and I guarantee they’ll remember you.”

But when it comes to changing public policy, Anderson isn’t content to give a few pointers and then leave the driving to the advocates. He and Larry Drivon, another attorney specializing in claims against the Church, helped draft a bill in California that opened a one-year window during which the statute of limitations for bringing civil suits on sex-abuses cases was abolished.

Colorado Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald later based her own legislation, which would have opened a two-year window and would have permitted civil actions to be brought against those who are “deceased or incapacitated,” on Anderson and Drivon’s work. Helping Fitz-Gerald draft this legislation was another attorney, Marci Hamilton. Hamilton, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York, was referred to Fitz-Gerald by SNAP; she works for the group as an expert on behalf of victims and is a strident critic of the Catholic Church.

Victims’ groups have lobbied for similar legislation in other states as well. Despite the fact that witnesses die and memories fade, there is a continued push to do away with the safeguards built into our laws. It is not only statute of limitation laws that are targeted by legislators; several states have considered bills that would mandate priests to report cases of molestation learned in the confessional. Though none has become law, the fact that legislators, lawyers and advocacy groups have even advanced the idea is testament to their hostility toward the Church.

If Catholic officials even speak up about such matters, they make themselves vulnerable to a volley of criticism. The Colorado Catholic Conference learned this when it argued that the Fitz-Gerald bill should apply uniformly to all institutions, including public schools. Despite the fact that it was opposition from public schools that sunk the bill, Catholics bore the brunt of the blame. Favoring soundbite over substance, state Senator Ron Teck whined that “the phrase ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ was being ignored [by the Church] for the sake of secular society and benefit.'”

People like Teck know that such trite clichés have a certain appeal, much like Anderson’s teddy bear shtick. Not only do they sway the folks at home, but for the newsmen, they make great copy. And the media are always hungry for a story about abuse in the Church: no sooner had the scandal broke when the papers showed their own interest in getting a look at confidential clergy personnel files. Papers such as theBoston Globe, the New York Times, the Hartford Courant and the Washington Postappealed to judges to release confidential documents related to civil lawsuits against the Church.

Catholic leaders have seriously undertaken the good work of protecting minors in recent years (for which the bishops have received little credit). When the media, lawyers, lawmakers and advocacy groups are able to look past the desire to punish the Church—which is increasingly hard to do as they become more and more dependent on it for their livelihoods—they can help with that good work as they have in the past.

Instead, the reputations of these victims’ advocates are seriously tarnished. Since they are entangled with trial lawyers out to make a buck or advance positions inconsistent with Catholic teaching, groups like SNAP and Voice of the Faithful can only be viewed with suspicion. When politicians turn to money-hungry attorneys to craft the laws, it’s hard to trust that they’re really looking out for the best interests of their constituents. And when the media cares as much about filing news-making lawsuits as reporting the news, there are few places for people to learn the straight facts.

The Catholic Church has cleaned up its act. Many others need to follow suit.

Pius XII and Yad Vashem

by Sister Margherita Marchione, Ph.D.

(Catalyst 10/2006)

Sister Margherita Marchione is the author of several books on Pope Pius XII, the latest being Crusade of Charity: Pius XII And POW’s 1939-1945.

Below the portrait of Pope Pius XII in the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem, there is a statement which is contrary to the truth and is unjust. It must be repudiated. I contacted the director of Yad Vashem and asked him to consider the efforts of the Pope who helped save hundreds of thousands of Jews and other victims of the Nazis. But will Yad Vashem at least correct the errors beneath his photo?

The statement includes:

“Pius XII’s reaction toward the killing of Jews during the period of the Holocaust is controversial. In 1933, as the Vatican Secretary of State, in order to maintain the rights of the Church in Germany, he signed a Concordat with the Nazi regime even at the price of recognizing the racist Nazi regime. When he was elected Pope in 1939, he put aside an encyclical against racism and anti-Semitism prepared by his predecessor.”

● Pius XII wrote his own encyclical, “Summi Pontificatus,” which did deal with racism.

“Although reports about the assassination of Jews reached the Vatican, the Pope did not protest either by speaking out or in writing.”

● This is not true. Whenever Pius XII spoke out, there was immediate retaliation by the Nazis. There were more than 60 protests!

“In December of 1942, he did not participate in the condemnation by members of the Allies regarding the killing of Jews. Even when the Jews were being deported from Rome to Auschwitz, the Pope did not intervene.”

● The Pope did indeed intervene. After that first day, the SS were ordered to stop the deportation of the Jews in Rome.

“He maintained a neutral position except toward the end of the war when he appealed on behalf of the government of Hungary and of Slovakia. His silence and the absence of directives obliged the clergy in Europe to decide independently how they should behave toward the persecuted Jews.”

● This is not true. Members of the Church were ordered to protect all refugees and Jews.

Pius XII’s sanctity has been recorded. There are many volumes of depositions for his beatification. He was a humble person who did not want his accomplishments and many good works revealed. Respecting his wishes, Sister Pascalina Lehnert—his housekeeper—implemented the Pope’s charitable works and served him faithfully from 1923-1958.

In her deposition, Sister Pascalina clearly stated that Pius XII did not issue a formal condemnation of Nazism because the German and Austrian bishops feared increased retaliation and dissuaded him from making additional protests that would undoubtedly irritate Hitler. And there was retaliation. During the persecution against Catholics, the Nazis not only destroyed churches and closed schools, but also arrested priests and Catholic leaders who were sent to concentration camps. All the protests of the Holy See were reported in a volume published in Germany in 1965.

Michael Tagliacozzo, a Jewish historian responsible for Beth Lohame Haghettaot Center in Italy, praised Pope Pius XII’s wartime efforts. He recently provided the following information from Hashavua, the magazine of “Beth Alpha”:

● Maurizio Zarfati, a resident in Acco, Hativath Golani St., wrote December 7, 1994, that he was saved with his parents, brother and sister in the monastery of the Augustinian Oblates of Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori in via Garibaldi. To permit men to enter, the Holy Father exempted them from rules of cloister. The Sisters gave up their rooms and moved to restricted quarters. … There were 103 Jews in that convent.

● Soldier Eliyahu Lubisky, a member of the “Kibuz Beth Alpha,” wrote on August 4, 1944, in the weekly Hashavua, that “he found more than 10,000 Jews in Rome. The refugees praised the Vatican for their help. Priests endangered their lives to save the Jews.”

In general, while begging for help, the Jews who were in contact with Pope Pius XII insisted that he avoid any public action. Sister Pascalina wrote: “The Pope not only opened the doors of the Vatican to protect the persecuted, but he encouraged convents and monasteries to offer hospitality. The Vatican provided provisions for these people. He ordered me to spend his inheritance and personal funds to provide for those who wished to leave Italy and go to Canada, Brazil, or elsewhere. Note that $800 was needed for each person who emigrated. Many times the Pope would ask me to deliver to Jewish families a sealed envelope containing $1,000 or more.”

In 1944, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Anton Zolli, gave an interview to the American Hebrew (July 14, 1944). Rabbi Zolli, who had been hidden in the Vatican during the German occupation of Rome, told the paper, “The Vatican has always helped the Jews and the Jews are very grateful for the charitable work of the Vatican, all done without distinction of race.”

In his book Antisemitismo, Rabbi Zolli would later write: “World Jewry owes a great debt of gratitude to Pius XII for his repeated and pressing appeals for justice on behalf of the Jews and, when these did not prevail, for his strong protests against evil laws and procedures…. No hero in all of history was more militant, more fought against, none more heroic than Pius XII in pursuing the work of true charity!… and this on behalf of all the suffering children of God.”

It is well known that Zolli converted to Catholicism after the war, taking as his baptismal name the pope’s, Eugenio. As Zolli would write in his memoirs: “The Holy Father sent by hand a letter to the bishops instructing them to lift the enclosure from convents and monasteries, so that they could become refuges for the Jews. I know of a convent where the Sisters slept in the basement, giving up their beds to Jewish refugees.”

Pope Pius XII made abundantly clear his judgment of the German aggression. In its front-page caption, the New York Times announced: “Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism; Urges Restoring of Poland.” The paper printed the entire text of Pius XII’s encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, on pages 8 and 9. It was a powerful attack on totalitarianism and racism. Pius XII condemned racism not only by publicly defending his Jewish brethren and explicitly using the word “Jew,” but did so by quoting Saint Paul (Col. 3:10-11).

During his first year as pope, he created a special department for Jews in the German section of the Vatican Information Office. According to the Canadian Jewish Chronicleand other Jewish publications, some 36,877 papers were processed on behalf of Jewish refugees. In view of the plight of the Jewish people of Europe, resolutions were adopted at the January 1939 meeting of the Jewish Congress in Geneva. Dr. Nahum Goldmann, chairman, stated: “We record the Jewish people’s deep appreciation of the stand taken by the Vatican against the advance of resurgent paganism which challenges all traditional values of religion as well as inalienable human rights upon which alone enduring civilization can be found.”

Pius did more than protest. He immediately issued directives to all convents and monasteries to open their doors to protect Jews and other refugees. Some 80 percent of Italian Jews would survive the war, a much higher percentage than in many other nations. Refugees, mostly women and children, were even housed in the papal apartments at Castelgandolfo, where 28 children were born during the spring of 1944. Over 12,000 people found refuge in this papal villa. Day and night, Vatican trucks bearing the yellow and white flag brought food and other necessities to Castelgandolfo. After the war, as an expression of their gratitude, these refugees placed a memorial tablet “To Pope Pius XII, the Angelic Shepherd…” in the tower of the papal palace.

Tibor Baransky, a board member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council and a Yad Vashem honoree, recalls that “Papal Nuncios helped the Jews. They got the orders straight from the Pope.” He recounted that, while working at the age of 22 as a special representative of Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio in Hungary, he heard from Jewish leaders who asked the pope not to raise a public outcry over the Nazi atrocities—since it would likely only increase their ferocity. (The Nazis had solidified their power in the early 1930s, and ferocious retaliation had been the typical response to every other Vatican protest.)

Working with Rotta—Pius XII’s personal emissary in Hungary—Baransky carried blank documents, forged protective passes, and faked baptismal certificates to save as many Jewish lives as possible; when Nazis and their local sympathizers ignored these documents, Rotta sent Baransky to retrieve them.

In July 1944, the American Jewish Committee and other Jewish organizations organized a rally in Manhattan, New York, to protest the deportation of Hungarian Jews. In his discourse, Judge Joseph Proskauer, president of the American Jewish Committee, said: “We have seen how great was the work of the Holy Father in saving the Jews in Italy. We also learned from various sources that this great Pope has tried to help and save the lives of Jews in Hungary.”

The anti-papal polemics of ex-seminarians like Garry Wills [Papal Sin], and John Cornwell [Hitler’s Pope], of ex-priests like James Carroll [Constantine’s Sword], and other lapsed or angry liberal Catholics exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today.

Recently, John Cornwell conceded that he was wrong to have ascribed evil motives to Pius XII and now finds it “impossible to judge” him. Indeed, those who have slandered him contradict the words of Holocaust survivors, the founders of Israel, and the contemporary record of the New York Times. In short, Pius XII deserves to be honored, not castigated, at Yad Vashem.

Education Myths

by Jay P. Greene

(Catalyst, 9/2006)

The following article is an excerpt from a longer piece that appeared in the July/August edition of The American Enterprise (the flagship publication of the American Enterprise Institute) titled, “Education Myths” (Greene has published a book by that name).

Greene, who runs the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has written widely on the subject of school reform. Armed with persuasive evidence, Greene contends that there are many myths afloat about what ails education in the U.S. There is a “money myth,” a “teacher pay myth,” a “class size myth,” a “certification myth,” a “rich-school myth” and an “ineffective school voucher myth”; the latter two myths touch on Catholic schools and therefore were selected for publication in Catalyst.

Bill Donohue highly recommends Greene’s book, Education Myths, and would like to thank both Jay Greene and The American Enterprise for giving us permission to reprint the following article.

The rich-school myth

A popular myth says that private schools do better than public schools only because they have more money, recruit high-performing students, and expel low-performing students. The conventional wisdom is captured in one Michigan newspaper’s warning that “a voucher system would force penniless public schools to shut down while channeling more and more money into wealthy private schools.”

There is no question that, on average, students in private schools demonstrate significantly greater achievement. For example, on the eighth-grade reading portion of the NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] test, 53 percent of private school students perform at or above the level defined as “proficient,” compared to only 30 percent of public school students. In eighth-grade math, only 27 percent of public-school students perform at the “proficient” level, compared to 43 percent of private-school students. Interestingly, twice as many private-school eighth graders go on to earn a bachelor’s degree as their public-school counterparts, in percentage terms.

However: it simply isn’t true that public schools are penniless while private schools are wealthy. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the average private school charged $4,689 per student in tuition for the 1999-2000 school year. That same year, the average public school spent $8,032 per pupil. Among Catholic schools (which educate 49 percent of all private-school students), the average tuition was only $3,236. The vast majority of private-school students actually have less than half as much funding behind them as public-school students.

Some point out that private schools don’t always provide all the services that public schools do: transportation, special ed classes, lunch, counseling. But in an analysis comparing public-school and Catholic-school costs in New York, D.C., Dayton, and San Antonio, researchers found that excluding all of these services plus administration costs from the public-school ledger still left public schools with significantly more resources than Catholic schools. Besides, if public schools provide additional services, then those services should contribute to their students’ educational outcomes. All spending is ultimately relevant to the question of a school’s cost-effectiveness.

Just as lack of money cannot be blamed for poor outcomes in public schools, neither can differences in selectivity be held responsible. Surprising as it may be, most private schools are not very selective. A study of the nation’s Catholic schools concluded that the typical institution accepted 88 percent of the students who applied. Other research in D.C., Dayton, and New York private schools found that only 1 percent of parents reported their children were denied admission because of a failed admissions test. Moreover, the academic and demographic backgrounds of students who use vouchers to attend private school across the country are very similar to those who don’t.

Private schools don’t significantly alter their student populations by expelling low-achieving or troublesome students, either. One study found that “Catholic high schools dismiss fewer than two students per year” on average. While it is true that every student is officially entitled to a publicly funded education, students in public schools are regularly expelled. According to the U.S. Department of Education, roughly 1 percent of all public school students are expelled in a year, and an additional 0.6 percent are segregated into specialized academies. That’s more than in Catholic and other private schools. Moreover, public schools actually contract out 1.3 percent of their disabled students to private schools.

In any case, numerous studies have compared what happens when students with identical backgrounds attend private versus public schools. And consistently, in study after study, the matched peers who remain in public schools do less well than children who shift to private schools. Higher student achievement is clearly attributable to some difference in the way private schools instruct—and not to more money, or simple exclusion of difficult students.

The myth of ineffective school vouchers

When reporting on school vouchers—programs that give parents money they can use to send their children to private schools—the media almost always describe research on vouchers’ effects as inconclusive. The New York Times, for instance, responded to a Supreme Court decision approving vouchers by declaring: “All this is happening without a clear answer to the fundamental question of whether school choice has improved American education. The debate… remains heated, defined more by conflicting studies than by real conclusions.”

In reality, though, the research on vouchers isn’t mixed or inconclusive at all. High quality research shows consistently that vouchers have positive effects for students who receive them. The only place where results are mixed is in regard to the magnitude of vouchers’ benefits.

There have been eight random-assignment studies of school voucher programs, and in seven of them, the benefits for voucher recipients were statistically significant. In Milwaukee, for example, a study I conducted with two researchers from Harvard found that students awarded vouchers to attend private schools outperformed a matched control group of students in Milwaukee public schools. After four years, the voucher students had reading scores six percentile points above the control group, and standardized math results 11 percentile points higher. All of the students in this study (which is mirrored by other research) were low-income and Hispanic or African American.

In a study of a different program based in Charlotte, North Carolina, I found that recipients of privately funded vouchers outperformed peers who did not receive a voucher by six percentile points after one year. All of the students studied were from low-income households. In New York City, a privately funded school choice program has been the subject of many careful studies. One found that African-American voucher recipients outperformed the control group by 9 percentile points after three years in the program. Another analysis found a difference of 5 percentile points in math. A similar program in Washington, D.C. resulted in African-American students outperforming peers without vouchers by 9 percentile points after two years.

Every one of the voucher programs studied resulted in enthusiastic support from parents as well. And all this was achieved in private schools that expend a mere fraction of the amount spent per student in public schools. The most generously funded of the five voucher programs studied, the Milwaukee program, provides students with only 60 percent of the $10,112 spent per pupil in that city’s public schools. The privately funded voucher programs spend less than half what public schools spend per pupil. Better performances, happier parents, for about half the cost: if similar results were produced for a method of fighting cancer, academics and reporters would be elated.

Spread the truth

Over the past 30 years, many of our education policies have been based on beliefs that clear-eyed research has recently shown to be false. Virtually every area of school functioning has been distorted by entrenched myths. Disentangling popular misconceptions from our education system—and establishing fresh policies based on facts that are supported by hard evidence—will be the work of at least a generation.

That work will be especially difficult because powerful interest groups with reasons to protect and extend the prevailing mythology will oppose any rethinking. But with time, and diligent effort by truth-tellers, reality and reason have triumphed over mythology in many other fields. There is no reason they can’t prevail in schoolhouses as well.

Jay P. Greene, Education Myths: What Special-Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools and Why it Isn’t So. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. 280 pages.

Patrick M. Garry: Wrestling with God: The Courts’ Tortuous Treatment of Religion

by William Donohue

(Catalyst, 7/2006)

Every now and then, I read a book I wish I had written. Such a book is Patrick M. Garry’s Wrestling with God: The Courts’ Tortuous Treatment of Religion. For those interested in how the courts have twisted the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty into an unseemly mess, this is the book to buy. Garry offers a masterful account of the attenuation of religious liberty by a series of inconsistent and poorly reasoned decisions.

We have come a long way from the time when religious liberty was robustly celebrated by the framers of the Constitution to the point where singing “Silent Night” at a public school Holiday or Winter concert (formerly known as the Christmas concert) is likely to trigger a lawsuit. What this has to do with the First Amendment is something only those bent on rewriting history are prepared to argue.

Leonard Levy is one of the nation’s leading students of the First Amendment. It is his view that the First Amendment does not offer much latitude to the public expression of religion. But as Garry points out, even a strict separationist like Levy never thought that the expression “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance would ever be challenged in the courts. Levy made that prediction in 1994, only a decade before the Supreme Court considered such a case.

The First Amendment begins, “Congress shall pass no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Regarding the “establishment” provision, we know from the author of this amendment, James Madison, that those words were penned to prohibit the Congress from establishing a national church and to prohibit the federal government from showing favoritism of one religion over another; what the states decided was to be their business. As for the reference to “free exercise,” it was meant to insulate religion from the reach of the state. As we now know, this is hardly the way most judges view the First Amendment today.

Under the current view, Garry instructs, “the exercise and establishment clauses [are] seen as being ‘at war with each other,’ with the exercise clause conferring benefits on religion and the establishment clause imposing burdens.” He wryly notes that “It was as if the framers had intended the two clauses to cancel each other out, producing a kind of zero-sum result with regard to religion.” He adds that “such an approach makes no textual sense, because the exercise clause is essentially being nullified by the establishment clause.” In other words, such reasoning has resulted in a form of judicial jujitsu.

Garry is correct to say that “there is no constitutional basis for interpreting the establishment clause as contradictory to the exercise clause,” and that is why he sees them forming “a single, unified religion clause that seeks exclusively to protect religious liberty.” He aptly quotes Michael Paulson to the effect that the establishment clause “prohibits the use of the coercive power of the state to prescribe religious exercise, while the exercise clause prohibits the use of government compulsion to proscribe religious exercise.”

No matter, today’s rendering of the First Amendment pays no attention to what the framers wanted. Instead, much attention is given to the alleged “wall” that separates church and state. But prior to the Everson decision in 1947, there was no talk about this proverbial wall. Such talk became commonplace only after Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black (a former Ku Klux Klan member who hated Catholicism) lifted the metaphor from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 and inserted it into his 1947 decision. For the record, Jefferson penned his famous “wall” statement to convey his belief that the relationship between the federal government and religion should remain distant: the states, he reasoned, were best suited to deal with matters religious, and that is why as a Virginia legislator and governor he thought it proper for his state to endorse days of fasting and thanksgiving.

Once Black prevailed in his “wall of separation” opinion, it led the courts to become increasingly hostile to religious liberty. This hostility was given a new shot in the arm in the high court’s 1971 Lemon v. Kurtzman ruling. This decision held that for a statute to pass constitutional muster, it must have a secular purpose, must not advance or inhibit religion and must not foster “excessive government entanglement with religion.” Easier said than done.

In the wake of raising the bar so high, towns were told they could not have a nativity scene displayed on public property without displaying baby Jesus with a reindeer. Similarly, the parents of children who had been receiving remedial education from public school teachers in a parochial school—for two decades without a single complaint—were suddenly informed that this practice violated the U.S. Constitution. Even candy canes with religious messages had to be confiscated lest some high priest of tolerance objects.

To make matters worse, not only have the courts chopped the religious liberty clause in two—assigning a subordinate position to the free exercise provision—they have assigned a subordinate position to religious speech vis-à-vis secular speech. For example, the courts typically grant constitutional protection to obscene speech—including obscenities that target religion—but they quickly become censorial when it comes to religious speech. So absurd has this condition become that the student who spews vulgarities at a high school commencement address has a much better chance of proceeding with impunity than the student who invokes the name of Jesus. Indeed, a student who curses Jesus has a better chance of escaping the wrath of school officials than the student who quotes Jesus.

“Textually,” Garry writes, “the Constitution provides greater protection for religious practices than for any secular-belief-related activities.” In fact, he contends, not only is religious speech afforded protection via the free exercise provision, it receives further immunity via the free speech clause of the First Amendment. It is precisely because Garry is so right about this that it is positively maddening to read court decisions that allow the establishment provision to trump religious speech. Such revisionism has created more than a legal nightmare—its tentacles have been felt in the nucleus of our culture: the public expression of religion has atrophied under the weight of judicial activism.

The way it works now, in order to get the courts to regulate secular speech, a direct cause and effect must be shown. For instance, the courts must be persuaded that if a particularly inflammatory exercise of speech occurs, then a particularly dangerous condition is almost certain to follow. Notwithstanding this caveat, the courts have allowed Nazis to march in a Jewish suburb, thus demonstrating the near absolute status it grants secular speech. But when it comes to religious speech—such as a nativity scene erected in the public square—all it takes for the courts to get involved is the outcry of someone who claims to be offended. This explains why many defense attorneys now argue that the religious expression they are defending is not a matter of free exercise, it is a matter of free speech.

There is something absurd going on when a crucifix drowned in a jar of urine can be hung from a Christmas tree in the rotunda of a state capitol building, but a crucifix that is reverentially displayed can be prohibited (this hasn’t happened yet, but it will). What this represents is nothing short of a bastardization of the intent of the framers: just as the left likes to play fast and loose with Scripture, the left likes to play fast and loose with the Constitution. Fidelity to the original text means nothing to ideologues bent on winning at all costs.

There are some legal scholars who find solace in recent court decisions that seek to skirt the Lemon rule by promoting a principle of neutrality: the government, so goes the argument, should remain neutral in cases involving religious expression. But Garry is not among them. Although he welcomes neutrality as a change from the hostility towards religion found in Lemon, he makes it clear that the framers never intended to “place religion and nonreligion on the same level.”

The evidence that Garry marshals to support his argument about the intent of the framers is irrefutable. Despite attempts by secular supremacists to impose a rigidly secular vision of the common good on the rest of us, and their enfeebled attempts to distort history, nothing can change the words of the framers. They understood the critical connection between religion and freedom and it was their expressed view that self-government could not take root in a society without a strong religious—read Christian—foundation. From the beliefs, practices and public statements of the framers, to their insistence on ordered liberty, the men who launched our nation always gave due deference to the indispensable role that religion plays in society.

It is truly one of the great tragedies of our law schools that students are taught virtually nothing about the religious and moral underpinnings of our society. Indoctrinated in formalisms, they think that rules and procedures are the heart and soul of a free society. The founders would have regarded such a conception of liberty as impoverished, so totally myopic as to render it useless.

For freedom to prosper, civil liberties must be respected, but there is more to freedom than individual rights: a degree of civility and a sense of community must also prevail. Religious liberty helps to provide the latter, and without it all the rights in the world matter little in the end.

“The only way to preserve religious liberty and uphold the spirit of the First Amendment,” Garry informs, “is for the courts to articulate an enduring and consistent theory of the religion clauses.” To do this, however, requires an intellectual assault on the postmodernist game of rewriting history. Garry has made his contribution, and for that we can all be grateful.

Patrick M. Garry: Wrestling with God: The Courts’ Tortuous Treatment of Religion

By William A. Donohue

“I spent twenty years looking for a government that I could overthrow without being thrown in jail. I finally found one in the Catholic church.” That is how Frances Kissling, the president of Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC), explained her mission to a reporter from the magazine, Mother Jones. As the record shows, her rhetoric is anything but empty.

One way that Kissling works to attack the Catholic Church is to challenge

the status of the Holy See at the United Nations. The Holy See is a sovereign state and has maintained a diplomatic corps since at least the 15^th century. Kissling is determined to try to convince the 170 countries around the world that exchange diplomats with the Holy See that it is unworthy of such recognition. To that end, she has orchestrated a “See Change” campaign to strip the Vatican of its permanent observer status at the U.N.

“Vatican representatives have misrepresented, distorted and lied about what women want.” This is the language that Kissling chose to characterize the Holy See at the outset of the Fourth U.N. Conference on Women in Beijing. Following the precedent she set in Cairo, Kissling sought to remove the Vatican delegation from the Beijing Conference. She failed in that attempt but not in her quest to condemn the pope and the entire Catholic Church.

CFFC is often described as the nation’s largest Catholic pro-choice organization. This is twice wrong: it is not Catholic and it is not an organization. It has been openly denounced by both the Vatican and the U.S. bishops as being a fraud, and it has no members. Funded almost entirely by pro-choice foundations, CFFC is not only an oxymoron, it is the establishment’s most persistently anti-Catholic letterhead.

CFFC was founded in 1973, setting up shop in the headquarters of New York’s Planned Parenthood office building. Once Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, CFFC joined with the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, moving decisively to counter efforts for a Human Life Amendment. Its first president, Father Joseph O’Rourke, was expelled from the Jesuits in 1974; he served as CFFC president until 1979. Kissling took over in 1982 and has been responsible for shaping the anti-Catholic agenda of CFFC more than anyone else.

Kissling has long thrived on direct confrontation with the Vatican. In October 1984, CFFC ran an ad in the New York Times titled “Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion.” The ad, which was designed and placed through Planned Parenthood, maintained that there were differing “legitimate Catholic positions” on abortion. Such reasoning has become a staple of CFFC thought and informs its approach to Catholicism in general. For Kissling, there can never be enough dissent from the Catholic Church.

The credibility of CFFC hangs on its alleged Catholicity. The media court CFFC because it allegedly offers a contrasting voice within the Catholic community on the subject of abortion. Now no one doubts that there are some Catholics (approximately one-third) who differ with the Catholic Church’s position on abortion. The question, however, is to what extent can CFFC be considered a Catholic group? Deny it the status of a Catholic organization and CFFC collapses to simply another player in the pro-abortion lobby.

The following statement is typical of the way CFFC distorts Catholic teaching: “The bishops won’t tell you, but CFFC will: There is an authentic prochoice Catholic position.” It was due to misrepresentations like this one that on November 4, 1993, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) released a statement stating, “many people, including Catholics, may be led to believe that it [CFFC] is an authentic Catholic organization. It is not. It has no affiliation, formal or otherwise, with the Catholic Church.” The bishops added that CFFC “is associated with the pro-abortion lobby in Washington, D.C.” and “attracts public attention by its denunciations of basic principles of Catholic morality and teaching….” And in May 2000, the president of the NCCB, Bishop Joseph Fiorenza, denounced the group for its rejection and distortion of the Church’s teachings on life issues.

Despite what the bishops have said, Kissling continues to appropriate the Catholic label in descriptions of both herself and CFFC. It is true that at one time she spent six months in a convent. But it is also true that her procurement of abortions, done illegally overseas in abortion clinics that she founded, is enough to merit her excommunication from the Catholic Church.

Kissling herself does not dispute the fact that her identification with Catholicism is based on her own definition of what it means to be a Catholic. “When I say I came back to the Church, I never came back on the old terms…. I came back to the Church as a social change agent; I came back to woman-church.” Admitting that she is “not talking about coming back to Sunday Mass, confession,” and the like, Kissling asserts that the hierarchy of the Church “doesn’t deserve our respect.”

Perhaps the most severe blow to the reputation of CFFC came on April 21, 1995. That was the day the National Catholic Reporter printed a letter by Marjorie Reiley Maguire blasting the reputation of CFFC. Maguire, an attorney who is divorced from the ex-Jesuit and Marquette theology professor, Dan Maguire, was for years a prominent CFFC activist. Indeed, she and her radical husband were once the CFFC’s poster couple. But like many others who came of age in the sixties, Maguire began to have second thoughts. Included in her intellectual migration were second thoughts about CFFC and Catholicism.

In her letter, Maguire branded CFFC as “an anti-woman organization” whose agenda is “the promotion of abortion, the defense of every abortion decision as a good, moral choice and the related agenda of persuading society to cast off any moral constraints about sexual behavior.” She explains that it is not the Catholic Church that is “hung up on sex.” Rather it is liberals who are obsessed with sex. Questioning the right of CFFC to call itself Catholic, Maguire said, “When I was involved with CFFC, I was never aware that any of its leaders attended Mass. Furthermore, various conversations and experiences convinced me they did not.”

In spite of all this, the media continue to portray CFFC as a Catholic organization in good standing. Yet even a perusal of CFFC’s literature should be enough to convince anyone that CFFC has no love for the Catholic Church or for any organization that proudly defends the Church. Its 1994 publication, “A New Rite: Conservative Catholic Organizations and their Allies,” lists as “the enemy” groups that range from the National Catholic Conference of Bishops to the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

At the top of the “enemies list” for CFFC is Pope John Paul II. At the time of the Cairo Conference on Population and Development, Kissling wrote, “If there is a devil in Cairo, it can only be released by the pope’s obstructionist meddling.” In similar fashion, Kissling stokes the fires of anti-Catholicism by charging that “The Vatican cannot be allowed to set policy for the whole world,” as if the delegation from the Holy See was doing something untoward by simply stating its position as a duly elected member of the United Nations.

Indeed, it is not below Kissling to assert that base appetites motivate the Vatican. For example, the Vatican’s opposition to abortion-on-demand is not seen as a moral position. Rather its stance “is about money and power, not about spirituality.”

Sometimes Kissling resorts to spin, as she did after the papal encyclical, Evangelium Vitae. In this teaching letter, Pope John Paul II decried drugs, war, international arms trade, environmental destruction, overuse of the death penalty, infanticide and experimentation on human embryos, calling them “the culture of death.” Kissling’s response was remarkable: “What he calls the ‘culture of death’ is really human freedom, being able to make choices based on conscience.” This not only distorts the message of the Holy Father, it shows a hubris that is disconcerting.

CFFC, of course, contends that it is a Catholic abortion rights organization having nothing to do with anti-Catholicism. Yet even its most eloquent spokespersons can’t explain why its board members continue to show up on TV shows that deal with issues that have nothing to do with abortion, but have everything to do with discrediting the Catholic Church. Or take, for example, bigoted comments made about people like the late John Cardinal O’Connor. Kissling once said of the New York Archbishop that he is “the kind of man who, if the church still had the power to burn people at the stake, would be right there lighting a fire.”

In word and deed, Catholics for a Free Choice is anti-Catholic. That is why it does not deserve to be given a platform of legitimacy by any respectable organization.

This first appeared as a guest column in the October 10, 2002 issue of The Daily Catholic (vol. 13, no. 113), www.dailycatholic.org