Bill Donohue

Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith is the author of Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America. Of course, the demise of religion has long been predicted, yet it never seems to die.

Survey data back this up. It is true that Americans are less religious today than they have been in the past, but there are pockets of optimism, making claims of its demise fatuous.

Smith tells us that Christianity, in particular, is less attractive today because it is not in sync with modern culture. Yet a new Pew Research Center survey shows that after a “prolonged period of religious decline,” conditions have stabilized, and this is certainly true of Christianity. More encouraging is the finding that “today’s youngest adults are more religious than today’s second-youngest adults.”

Washington Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein had this to say about the Pew survey. “Even as fewer and fewer young people consider themselves religious, a small percentage of young adults are practicing their faiths with unusual avidity.” Those in their early 20s who are drawn to the faith have been noticed by other pollsters, as well as religious observers.

The Barna Group, a Christian research organization, recently found that “Gen Z-ers [those born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s] who go to church are more frequent attendees than churchgoers from older generations. Twenty-four percent of Gen Z-ers go to church every week (a slightly higher rate than for millennials and Gen X-ers).”

Over the summer, hundreds of thousands of young people from all over the world attended the Jubilee of Youth event in Rome. According to Colm Flynn, an Irish radio and TV host, “When someone told me it was going to be like the Catholic version of Woodstock, I laughed. But as soon as I got there, I thought: OK, now I get it!”

New York City priest, Father Joseph Teller, celebrates Mass on Sunday nights to a crowded audience of young people in Greenwich Village. He  notes that the number of converts has tripled in the past year. The same thing is happening at St. Vincent Ferrer on the upper east side. The Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral is also witnessing a surge. “We’re out of space and exploring adding more masses,” says Father Daniel Ray.

What’s going on? The spiritual emptiness of the dominant culture is clearly a factor, and it’s widespread. Silicon Valley is bursting with young people looking for meaning in a world enveloped by “God-like” artificial intelligence. They are looking for answers that AI cannot provide.

Catholic commentator Michael Knowles is so encouraged by these new developments that he jokes, “everyone is becoming Catholic.” Father Mike Schmitz, a prominent priest who works with young people, says there has been “a resurgence in people asking the question, ‘How do we become Catholic?’”

Religion ebbs and flows, just like most elements in the culture, which is why sounding the death bells is always premature. Thank God for that.

Bill Donohue

Chubb Insurance is the largest publicly traded property and casualty insurance company in the world, valued at approximately $115 billion. “We stand behind the promises we make to conceive, craft and deliver exceptional insurance coverage and service, and to pay our claims fairly and quickly.” That’s how it describes its organizational culture.

Anyone who knows anything about the way it has handled clergy abuse claims against the New York Archdiocese knows this is patently false. Quite frankly, it is a master of delaying, denying and defending its services, and this is hardly confined to Catholics. More about Chubb in a moment. First, this issue must be looked at in context.

The clergy sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church took place largely between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s. It occurred for reasons I detailed in my book, The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes. Because of a law in New York State that allows the accused to file a lawsuit, regardless of how long ago the alleged abuse took place, claims against the archdiocese have mounted over the years.

This has now come to a head. On December 8, the New York Archdiocese announced it was raising at least $300 million to negotiate settlements that would benefit some 1,300 people who contend that they were abused as minors. To pay for this, the archdiocese reduced its operating budget by 10 percent, fired staff, and sold “significant real estate assets,” including its headquarters at 1011 First Avenue. The building was sold last year for more than $100 million.

The alleged cases date back to World War II. No other organization, secular or religious, has been subjected to anything like this, the most egregious example being the New York City public schools, where the sexual abuse of minors is ongoing. This is not a coincidence. There are ideological and financial motives for going after the Catholic Church.

One of the lawyers suing the archdiocese today is Jeffrey Anderson. He once admitted that his goal was “suing the [expletive]” out of the Catholic Church. In fact, he has made hundreds of millions of dollars doing exactly that.

Chubb is also compromised. It simply wants to cash its checks and move on. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, isn’t fooled. Here is what he said on October 1, 2024.

“It has always been our wish to expeditiously settle all meritorious claims. However, Chubb, for decades our primary insurance company, even though we have paid over $2 billion in premium by today’s standards, is now attempting to evade their legal and moral contractual obligation to settle covered claims which would bring peace and healing to victim-survivors.”

Chubb is still reneging on its responsibilities. It says the archdiocese’s policy covers accidents, “but does not provide compensation for knowingly allowing a pattern of abuse to persist for many years.” This is a sanitized way of saying what it has previously said with greater bluntness.

Chubb has said that it is not obligated to settle claims against the archdiocese because the abuse of victims was “expected or intended.” This is an outrageous lie. Indeed, it intentionally maligns Cardinal Dolan’s predecessors, effectively saying that people like Cardinal John O’Connor deliberately intended to harm children. That would make them evil.

What is truly evil is what Chubb is alleging.

I worked with Cardinal O’Connor for many years. He was one of the greatest priests I ever met. Not only was he kind and responsible, he reached out to his staff, lay and clergy alike, who were going through a rough patch, offering the services they needed. He never willfully sought to hurt anyone, and this certainly included children. To imply otherwise is a vicious smear on his character.

Chubb’s position is morally indefensible and legally spurious. It is not only feeding anti-Catholicism, it is making mince meat out of its purported interest in standing by its promises. It is just as preposterous to argue that it is “delivering exceptional insurance coverage and service,” paying its claims “fairly and quickly.” Just the opposite is true.

It is one thing for an insurance company to balk on its financial commitments; it is quite another when it imputes vile motives to its carriers, and this is doubly true when it is aimed at the Catholic Church. Its credibility is shot.

Contact Michael Tomaso, Chubb Media Relations, North America: michael.tomaso@chubb.com

Bill Donohue

Alex Vitale and I have some things in common: we both have doctorates in sociology, have taught courses on criminology, and have written extensively on the subject. But that’s where the similarities end: I like cops and he hates them.

This wouldn’t mean much if he never left his Brooklyn College classroom. But now that he has joined the transition team of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani—he is in charge of public safety issues—he deserves a closer look.

Vitale is the author of The End of Policing, and a study guide that accompanies his book. The latter offers a summary of each chapter, complete with advice to instructors on how to discuss the subject matter  with students. It is the basis of my analysis of his work.

In Chapter 1, we learn that “racial profiling is still endemic.” He sees that as a problem. That’s funny—this was never an issue for Rev. Jesse Jackson. “There is nothing more painful for me at this stage of my life than to walk down a street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

What Jackson understood intuitively is borne out in the statistics. In 2021, black New Yorkers were 24 percent of the population, but they made up 65 percent of those murdered in 2020 and 74 percent of the shooting victims. Just as important, the typical victimizer was also black.

Chapter 2 informs the reader that “police do not prevent crime.” But if he were right, then NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch would not have been able to drive down the crime rate. She did it by deploying more police to high crime areas. Of course, he wants to defund the police, as does Mamdani. They even want to abolish the prisons.

The problem for them is that blacks want nothing to do with their anarchic ideas. In 2020, when the “defund the police” movement was surging, 79 percent of blacks nationwide who said they had had an interaction with the police in the past year said they wanted the police to spend the same amount of time—or more time—in their neighborhood.

Cops don’t belong in the schools. That’s what we learn in Chapter 3. He calls their presence “damaging.” Yet a study published two years ago by the University of Albany found that police in the schools reduced fights and threats by 30 percent and increased detection of firearms by 150 percent. He also says that the money saved by moving cops out of the schools “could be given to schools directly to build a better academic program.” If he were sincere, he would endorse charter schools and school choice initiatives, but he doesn’t.

In Chapter 4, Vitale argues that the reason why the police don’t work effectively with mentally ill offenders is because they are “trained to view every scenario as a potentially deadly one.” Thank God for that. Only someone hopelessly naïve would confront a suspected violent offender—mentally acute or disabled—with a relaxed attitude.

Chapter 5 tells instructors that the police don’t work well with the homeless because of  “a lack of compassion.” Really? I see cops interact with the homeless every day in New York—my office is across the street from Penn Station—and I have never once seen a cop mishandle, or be rude to, the homeless.

Vitale shows his compassion by endorsing “drop-in centers and emergency shelters” for the homeless, but even here he fails the test. Showing his radically secular stripes, he insists the caregivers must be “nonreligious.” In other words, he wants to discriminate against the clergy.

The next two chapters are on prostitution and drugs, respectively. Naturally, he wants to decriminalize both. Vitale needs to visit Jackson Heights, a Queens neighborhood that has been overrun by street prostitution, drugs, robberies, and muggings, and tell the residents that their quality of life is peachy keen.

In Chapter 8, we learn that “gang suppression” is the problem, not gangs themselves. So how do we deal with gangs? Vitale promotes “restorative justice.” This is a “nonpunitive” measure that in practice means having social workers talk to the thugs.

Chapter 9 targets “border patrolling.” He wants it to end. His entire focus is on the “rights” of those who have crashed our borders and have committed unspeakable crimes. He needs to meet with the surviving crime victims of illegal aliens.

Chapter 10 contends that “The threat of potential violence or destruction of property is not a sufficient excuse” for police violating the First Amendment rights of “protesters.” He cites what happened in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. What he did not say is that these “protesters” went on a violent rampage after a robbery suspect got into an altercation with the police—he assaulted a cop, reached for his gun, resisted arrest, and was then killed after charging the officer.

Vitale ends his study guide by saying, “the single largest threat to American democracy today is policing.” He did not say irresponsible policing—he said all policing.

It is a sure bet that if the Mamdani-Vitale approach to crime is implemented, it will prove to be the “single largest threat” to the safety of New Yorkers.

Bill Donohue

The Institute for Family Studies recently published the results of a survey on “The Decline in Marriage and Childbearing Among Progressives.” It found that conservative men and women are more likely to view marriage and the family as positive goods than liberals are. It is therefore not surprising to learn that “a majority of conservative young adults ages 25-35 have married and become parents, whereas only a minority of liberal young adults have done likewise.”

This divide has real-life consequences for the wellbeing of young people, both men and women.

A study by this organization published earlier this year found that liberal women are not only less likely to marry, they are less likely to be churchgoers. This matters because these same women are much more likely to be unhappy, largely a function of their loneliness.

Gallup recently released a survey on youth and loneliness and found that young men who experience the highest levels of loneliness are the most likely to say that political violence is sometimes acceptable. Social disconnection can be deadly.

What these findings suggest is what sociologists have long known: we are social animals, meant to connect to each other through marriage, the family, and religion. They are not only at the heart of creating strong social bonds, they are at the heart of happiness and a general sense of wellbeing. Indeed, similar data show a relation with physical health.

In the first study cited, we also learn that the decline in childbearing is “most prominent among liberal parents and in liberal states.” Moreover, families are leaving blue states [dominated by Democrats] for red states [Republican strongholds]. As a result, they are also depleting the number of electoral college votes in blue states and increasing them in red states. So these social factors have political consequences.

There are many reasons for these outcomes. Those who are heavy users of social media tend to be socially disconnected, and the same is true of those addicted to video games. Those who are college educated are more likely to have a dim view of marriage and the family, and are therefore more likely to be single. Those who have no religious affiliation—often the same people—are also the most likely to experience loneliness.

It is in the interest of individuals, and society, to create a social soil where strong bonds can be formed. Unfortunately, radical individualism, which is endemic, prevents us from achieving this goal.

It behooves those who shape public policy to create incentives for marriage, childbearing and churchgoing. Liberals will complain that these factors are likely to lead to a more favorable environment for conservatives. Guilty as charged. But given that the milieu that favors liberals is detrimental to their wellbeing, and to the rest of us, it makes no sense to listen to them.

Bill Donohue

As 2025 comes to a close, it is sad to note that Christians are being persecuted in many countries, the extent of which is deeply troubling. There are two faces to this crisis: some of it is violent in nature; some of it is more invidious. All of it is being done by extremists: religious fanatics and secular fanatics.

No one saw this being played out in detail better than Pope Benedict XVI. Faith and reason are critical components to the good society, he counseled, but when either is taken to extremes, it bears ugly fruit. He properly saw Muslim fanaticism as the greatest threat stemming from those whose faith perspective became unhinged from reason; he saw European secular fanaticism as the greatest threat emanating from those whose embrace of reason became unhinged from faith.

The data make it clear that Benedict got it just right.

Recently, rapper Nicki Minaj stunned a United Nations audience when she blasted the elites for failing to defend religious liberty. “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria,” she said. She is right, and much of it is due to the Islamist extremist group, Boko Haram. This is the same woman whose vile anti-Catholic performance at the 2012 Grammy Awards led me to unload on her. So if it is obvious to her that there is a crisis in Nigeria, it should be a top priority for the prestigious world body to tackle.

Pope Leo XIV is correct to note that Muslims are also being slaughtered in Nigeria. But according to the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, of the 30,000 civilians killed in a four-year period, roughly 6,000 were Muslims and 17,000 were Christians. At least 7,000 Christians have been killed in 2025—an average of 35 a day—and 19,000 churches have been destroyed. It is radical Muslims in the north who are killing Christians in the southern part of the nation, the lion’s share of whom are Catholics.

The other face of Christian persecution is taking place in Europe. We are witnessing what Pope Francis called “polite persecution.” Typically, it is “disguised as culture, disguised as modernity, disguised as progress.” It centers on thought control. “God made us free,” he said, “but this kind of persecution takes away freedom.” It is the devil, he said, who is the sponsor of “polite persecution.”

What Francis observed is happening in Europe.

The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe (OIDAC Europe) recently released a report noting more than 2,200 anti-Christian hate crimes throughout Europe in 2024. France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and Austria have the worst record. The crimes run the gamut from killings and arson to conscience violations and parental rights abuses.

Who’s committing these offenses? Radical Muslims lead the way, followed by radical left-wing ideologues. No demographic group is more wary of exercising their religious rights than Catholic priests. This is due in no small way to left-wing media portrayals of them. In fact, in the OIDAC survey, 90 percent of respondents said they perceive a consistent media bias against Catholic priests and bishops. Regrettably, 81 percent of priests said they did not report anti-Catholic incidents to the authorities.

It is not radical Muslims who are stocking the command centers in Europe. No, it is radical secularists. To be exact, it is the political and cultural elites who are drunk on secular extremism, and it is they who are the masters of “polite persecution.” Here are some examples.

• In France, a Catholic media outlet was fined for reporting that abortion was a “cause of death”
• In Scotland, a Christian midwifery student was suspended from her school after she shared her conscientious objection to abortion in a private Facebook forum
• Scotland has become so extreme that it is warning Christians about restrictions in their homes. If their pro-life activities can be seen or heard from outside, they risk violating the law
• In England, an army veteran was found guilty for silently praying within a designated “buffer zone,” 50 meters from an abortion clinic. He did not speak or engage with anyone
• In Spain, over 20 persons have faced prosecution since 2022 for peacefully praying near abortion clinics
• In Spain, a Christian father who took his child to church, over the objections of the child’s secular mother, was told to stop. He was also told he had no right to read the Bible to his child
• In the Netherlands, Christians have been detained for peacefully distributing pro-life literature outside abortion clinics
• In Finland, a court convicted an elderly Christian couple of “assault” after they prayed with a man about his struggles with sexuality
• In Germany, a crucifix was removed from a state secondary school because he was declared “compulsory, recurring, and unavoidable”
• In Italy, the town mayor of Manduria banned all “on-foot” funeral processions, including traditional funeral bands

These are examples of “soft totalitarianism.” It differs from the classic “hard totalitarianism” of Hitler, Stalin and Mao—who murdered tens of millions of their own people—by concentrating more on thought control.

There are examples of “soft totalitarianism” in the United States, as well, but on this score, the Europeans win first prize.

Bill Donohue

Today, the Catholic League erected a life-size nativity scene in Central Park. It is located on 59th St. and 5th Avenue, at the Grand Army Plaza, across from the Plaza Hotel. We received a permit from the New York City Parks Department, as we have for decades.

We display our manger scene to let New Yorkers, and tourists, know that the Christmas season begins with Jesus—all the other celebrations that accompany Christmas are important, but they mean nothing without acknowledging the historical truth of the birth of the Prince of Peace.

We hope that New Yorkers, and those visiting New York City this Christmas season, will stop by and see the Catholic League’s nativity scene in Central Park. It will be up through January 4, 2026.

Portland, Oregon is home to one of the most secular cities in the nation, so it is not surprising that it is also one of the most anti-Christian. This year it is having a hard time knowing how to handle Christmas.

To read Bill Donohue’s letter to Portland Mayor Keith Wilson, click here.

Contact: Mayor@portlandoregon.gov

Bill Donohue

Next month we will celebrate the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Imagine having a Ku Klux Klan play being held in your home town a couple of days before? The script mocks, insults and offends African American sensibilities. Let’s up the ante: blacks have to pay for it—it’s being held in a taxpayer-funded theater.

Would it be allowed? Should it be? At the very least, should the authorities tell those who are running this event they are not welcome to use city-owned property to bash African Americans?

This is not scheduled to happen, and hopefully it never will. But there is a bigoted portrayal that mocks, insults and offends Christian sensibilities being allowed in Pensacola and St. Petersburg. And they are slated to be held in city-owned venues, the Saenger Theatre in Pensacola and the Mahaffey Theater in St. Petersburg (Hard Rock Live in Orlando is also hosting this event, but it is privately owned).

Fortunately, Florida has a responsible Attorney General, James Uthmeier. On November 7 he wrote to Pensacola City Council members, objecting to the hosting of “A Drag Queen Christmas” being performed on December 23 at a theater that Christians are paying for (he is not pursuing the performance held the day before in St. Petersburg, but we are). He wants the City Council to cancel it.

We know what this anti-Christian show is all about. It’s been performed many times in Florida.

Some of the depictions include a man in drag holding a Bible draped with a rosary, and others feature demonic fare. In the 2022 Broward County show, men paraded around nude in front of children. In the same year in Orlando, a state agency recorded “acts of sexual content, simulated sexual activity, and lewd, vulgar and indecent displays.”

In March 2023, the most detailed news story on what happened in Orlando the previous Christmas was published in the Miami Herald. I wrote a piece about it on March 22, 2023. Here’s a sample (the quotes are from the reporters, not me).

• The performance featured “shimmying, bare-chested men who wouldn’t have been out of place at a Madonna concert”
• It showed a male actor, Jimbo the Clown, “giving birth to a log of bologna and throwing slices to the crowd.” The scene was described by state agents, who had it on video, as a “graphic depiction…of childbirth and/or abortion”
• There was a display of “an image of a finger penetrating a wreath”
• The performance included lyrics to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” that said, “You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen/Vomit the Stupid and Dildo and Dicks-in/But do you recall the most famous reindeer of all?/Screwdolph the Red-Nipped Reindeer had a very shiny bust”

Children as young as six were in attendance. This year the show is for those 18 and older.

It must be emphasized that the Saenger Theatre and the Mahaffey Theater are not public forums. A public forum is a place like a park which is open to virtually everyone—often used by artists, musicians, and other entertainers. Nativity scenes can be erected in such places.

These two venues are owned by the municipality and are therefore subject to greater legal scrutiny.

In the 1984 Supreme Court case, Lynch v. Donnelly, it was ruled that a Nativity scene could be part of the annual Christmas display in a park owned by a nonprofit organization, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. What it said has bearing on what is going on in these two Florida cities. “The Constitution does not require complete separation of church and state; it affirmatively mandates accommodation, not merely tolerance, of all religions, and forbids hostility toward any.”

If the Constitution forbids hostility toward any religion, it is hard to see why a theater, owned by the city and paid for by Christians, can host a show that explicitly exhibits hostility to Christians by trashing one of their most sacred holidays. To put it differently, if it is wrong for the City of Pensacola and the City of St. Petersburg to promote religion, how can it be permissible for them to disparage religion?

Legalities aside, what these LGBT activists are doing is not only obscene, it is a frontal assault on Christian sensibilities at Christmastime, not altogether different from a Klan attack on African Americans as they prepare to honor Martin Luther King Jr.

We are contacting the Florida governor, the mayors of Pensacola and St. Petersburg, the Pensacola City Council, the St. Petersburg City Council, houses of worship in both cities, Catholic dioceses throughout the state, the Florida Catholic Conference, and local and state media. We are also contacting Catholic League members nationwide to intervene.

What do we want? Ideally, the show’s producers should cancel it. But if that is not the case, then the least the City Council in both cities can do is to tell those who are running this event to move it to a facility that is not owned by the taxpayers. Anti-Christian bigotry is offensive enough without making its victims fund it.

Contact Mayor D.C. Reeves of Pensacola: mayor@cityofpensacola.com

Contact Mayor Kenneth Walsh of St. Petersburg: mayor@stpete.org

Bill Donohue highly recommends this article by Stetson University Professor Christopher J. Ferguson, Ph.D. To read more by him, check out his Substack.

It’s the season for Thanksgiving and we can look forward to some members of our glitterati giving thanks by dumping on the holiday itself. We are told that the holiday celebrates genocide and news articles repeat the myth that the first Thanksgiving celebrated a massacre of Native Americans. Most Americans ignore these dreary takes on Thanksgiving, but it’s important to understand from where they originate. Particularly as these newer, bleak takes on Thanksgiving both distort history and contribute to societal discord without helping Native Americans.

Promoted by magazine editor Sarah Hale, the modern Thanksgiving holiday was created by President Lincoln in 1863. The intent was for a day of reconciliation and togetherness during the Civil War. But the day also became associated with a 1621 feast between British Pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe celebrating their new alliance against other Native American tribes. Though postmodern takes on Thanksgiving emphasize how European colonists would come to violently dominate the Native Americans, this peace treaty would actually last 50 years—rather impressive for any two disparate cultural groups in close contact for any point and place in human history.

As such, Thanksgiving represents our opportunity to recognize the good in our own lives and in the world. Even the focus on the Wampanoag and Pilgrims acknowledges an ideal, despite a long history of human awfulness, we can sometimes see past it to our common humanity. Why do some, particularly on the political far left, reject such a vision?

In short, our minds struggle with complexity, and offered a social situation in which criticizing traditional social customs is rewarded, some people will take it. In my latest book, Catastrophe: The Psychology of How Good People Make Bad Situations Worse, I discuss how emotion and cognitive errors lead us to believe things that aren’t true and make bad decisions based on such false beliefs. Several apply to the case of Thanksgiving.

First, we tend to divide people into ingroups (good) and outgroups (bad). Indeed, this seems impossible to escape, even as our society becomes unprecedently less racist and sexist, we simply turn to political polarization. Historically, narratives of colonization tended to focus on Manifest Destiny, with Native Americans either invisible or savage bad guys. More recently we’ve inverted this creating a Noble Savage mythology in which Native Americans were pure, innocent, egalitarian, peaceful, and more, even though little evidence supports much of this.

By contrast, modern narratives paint Europeans as racist, genocide perpetrators, the bad guys in our own story. In reality, neither Europeans nor Native Americans were inherently good or bad. Europeans simply enacted historical patterns of violent migration common to all human (and primate) groups throughout history, including Native Americans. Had Native Americans invented gunpowder and transatlantic boats first, the process would have been reversed. Research indicates we tend to equate victimhood with superior morality. Instead, we should recognize all human groups are capable of evil, and there’s no moral contest to win. By understanding this we can focus on how to improve the behavior of cultural groups.

Misunderstanding is aided along by confirmation bias, a process in which we give credence to evidence that supports our prior beliefs and ignore or disparage that which conflicts with our beliefs. Thus, progressives tend to obsess over the bad behavior of colonists (which certainly existed), while ignoring that of Native Americans. By contrast, Native American virtues are celebrated whereas European virtues are waved off.

Of course, these beliefs are maintained in a social atmosphere where anti-American and anti-European attitudes are celebrated as a mark of intellectual achievement on the far left. Dissent from such narrow and prejudiced views is punished via ostracism, ridicule, and shame.

That the Wampanoag and Pilgrims managed to maintain a peace treaty for generations is a remarkable historical achievement. Yet 50 years of peace is collapsed in progressive narratives about Thanksgiving and genocide. Of course, we should remain cognizant of the larger context, but Thanksgiving does not stand athwart this.

If progressives wished the general U.S. population to reduce their sympathy toward Native Americans, I couldn’t think of a better way than to shame Americans for celebrating a beloved holiday. Hammering wedges between groups increases ethnic discord. Instead, finding commonalities and shared interests as the Wampanoag and Pilgrims once did is the best way forward. Celebrating the ideals highlighted by Thanksgiving and the positive power of both Native American and non-Native American cultures can foster intergroup cooperation.

Let us all come together, Native American and non-Native American and raise a toast to our shared potential. However, we have failed to achieve it in the past, the future still offers us promise. Just as the holiday offered reconciliation between North and South in 1863, perhaps it can bridge divides between Native and non-Native Americans today.

Bill Donohue

The German Bishops’ conference has issued a document to be implemented in Catholic schools that rejects the Church’s teachings on sexuality. Gone is the teaching that there are but two sexes, male and female. The bishops, with three exceptions, teach that there is a “diversity of sexual identities.” Not only that, they falsely claim it is a “fact,” rooted in science.

Should teachers address a boy named Sam, who now claims he is a girl named Sue, as Sam or Sue? The bishops say teachers should use language that reflects “the diversity of sexual identities,” allowing students to make their own judgments. So the right answer is “Sue.”

This division in the Catholic Church is taking place at a time when Pope Leo XIV is embarking on his first international trip, the purpose of which is a call for unity in the Christian world. He has his hands full.

Leo has already affirmed Church teachings on sexuality, saying the family is founded on the “stable union between a man and a woman.” When he was the bishop of Peru he spoke against the idea that there is a “diversity of sexual identities,” which is what gender ideology holds to be true.

“The idea of promoting gender ideology is confusing because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist. God created man and woman, and the attempts to confuse ideas about nature will only harm families and people.”

This is consistent with what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches. “God created man in his own image…male and female he created them.”

Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, was even more blunt. He once referred to gender ideology as “demonic.” In his 2016 exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, he wrote, “We cannot separate the masculine and the feminine from God’s work of creation,” saying the “biological elements” are “impossible to ignore.”

In 2019, the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education issued an authoritative document, “Male and Female: He Created Them.” It said that gender ideology “denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.”

In 2024, the Vatican Declaration on Human Dignity, Dignitas Infinita, underscored Church teachings on this subject. It said gender ideology “is extremely dangerous since it cancels differences in its claim to make everyone equal.” Similarly, this ideology “intends to deny the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference.”

It is not the job of the Catholic League to tell the Catholic hierarchy what they should do. But it is our job to keep Catholics up-to-date on what is going on in the Catholic Church, and this is especially true at a time when the Holy Father is calling for unity.