Catholic League president William Donohue commented today on how Terri Schiavo and Jeff Weise are emblematic of our culture of death:

“The pending death of Terri Schiavo, coupled with the Minnesota massacre, are emblematic of our culture of death.

“In Terri’s case, an innocent person is being intentionally starved to death because lawmakers have decided to honor the words of her discredited, morally delinquent husband, preferring to err on the side of death.  In the Minnesota tragedy, nine innocent persons—plus their killer—are dead because school teachers, administrators and counselors decided not to honor the telltale signs that were right before their eyes.  In both cases, insouciance and passivity produced deadly consequences.

“Terri’s fate did not land on the laps of Florida lawmakers overnight.  They have had years to address antiquated case law on the subject of euthanasia, but they’ve been too busy contemplating the hidden meaning of hanging chads to do so.  Moreover, one would have thought that following the Elian debacle, these lawmakers might have taken the time to reconsider the wisdom of family law in all its aspects.  But instead they did what they do best—they procrastinated.

“Jeff Weise went to school wearing eye makeup and a black trench coat.  He wore combat boots, had chains on his pants and sported black spiky hair.  He wrote stories about zombies, drew pictures of people with bullet holes in their heads, and depicted himself with monster’s teeth.  The self-described loner frequently posted messages on the Internet site of www.nazi.org, and no doubt believed what the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party had to say.  Not only does the site flatly reject Christianity and Judaism, it expressly says, ‘We reject morality in all its forms as unnatural.’

“So there you have it.  Legislative lassitude, combined with an increasingly amoral culture, has left death in its wake.”

By Rabbi Daniel Lapin

Surely it is now time to analyze the vitriolic loathing demonstrated by various Jewish groups and their leaders toward Mel Gibson over the past six months. This analysis might help forestall some similar ill-conceived and ill-fated future misadventure on the part of self-anointed Jewish leadership. At the very least it might advance human understanding of destructive group pathologies.

As the whole world knows by now, Mel Gibson, his movie, his father, his church and anything else even remotely associated with Mr. Gibson have been smeared as anti-Semitic. From the immoderate assaults, you might have thought that the target was a thug with a lengthy rap sheet for murdering Jews while yelling “Heil Hitler.” From the intensity of the rhetoric you would have thought that from his youth, Gibson had been hurling bricks through synagogue windows. Yet until “The Passion,” he was a highly regarded and successful entertainer who went about his business largely ignored by the Jewish community, so why now do they hate him so?

Even assuming for the moment that Jewish organizations had a legitimate beef with “The Passion,” which assumption I have refuted in earlier columns, they should have hated the movie rather than its creator. After all, Judaism originated the calming idea of hating the sin rather than the sinner. Yet from the pages of the New York Times to Jewish organizational press releases and from rabbinic rantings to synagogue sermons the personal hatred for Mel has been palpable.

The key insight, vital to understanding their hatred, is this: just because an organization has either the word “Jewish” or else some Hebrew word in its title does not mean that its guiding principles emanate from the document that has been the constitution of the Jewish people for 3,500 years—the Torah. Every organization has a set of guiding principles which defines its purpose and unifies its membership. However the guiding principles are often not what they appear to be. This departure from founding principles is not unique to Jewish organizations but is found throughout our culture. For instance, almost none of the eighteen hundred chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) supported the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court in spite of the undeniable fact that Justice Thomas was, and remains a “colored person.”

Were the NAACP truly to be guided by the principle of advancing the interests of colored people, it would always do so even if it occasionally disagreed with the positions of the colored people it supported. For instance, back in 2000, when the NAACP filed an Amicus brief on behalf of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, it surely was not endorsing the killing of law enforcement officers as a form of political expression. The NAACP was simply doing what it claims it was formed to do, support people of color. In reality of course, as their failure to defend Clarence Thomas reveals, the causes adopted by the NAACP share something far more profound than the skin color of their protagonists. They share a uniform commitment to the doctrines of secularism. In non-political terms one could say that the NAACP seems to be guided by the principles of secular fundamentalism. Secular fundamentalism is the belief system which buttresses the creed of political and economic liberalism just as the Biblically-based beliefs of Judaism and Christianity buttress the creed of political and economic conservatism. It was its adherence to the guiding principles of secular fundamentalism which compelled the NAACP to obstruct the rise to greatness of a religious conservative, even if he did happen to be a colored person.

Again, almost nobody in NOW, the National Organization of Women, supported radio personality Laura Schlessinger while her media career was being destroyed by homosexual activists. Now Schlessinger is undeniably a woman, so clearly NOW’s guiding principles are not to support all women but to support only certain women. Had NOW been about all women, it would have supported Schlessinger, pointing out perhaps that although they do not endorse all her views, since she is a woman under attack the organization supports her just as it was formed to do. After all, in 2001, NOW had no compunction supporting Houston child murderer, Andrea Yates, who cold bloodedly drowned her five tiny children. As Deborah Bell, president of the Texas chapter of NOW put it, “One of our feminist beliefs is to be there for other women.” “Other women” obviously doesn’t include Laura Schlessinger. An honest explanation is that NOW seeks to advance secular fundamentalism, and since Dr. Laura preaches religious conservatism NOW, in remaining true to its guiding principles, had no option but to oppose her.

Similarly, many Jewish organizations and even many individuals of Jewish ethnicity who possess the title “rabbi” are not guided by the principles Judaism found in the Torah. Instead, like the NAACP and NOW, they are guided chiefly by the principles of secular fundamentalism. Nothing else can explain their dogmatic and ideological commitment to causes such as homosexuality and abortion, both of which are unequivocally opposed by the Torah-based guiding principles of Judaism. How revealing it was last November, when one such Jewish organization saw fit to publicly applaud the Massachusetts Supreme Court on their ruling in favor of homosexual marriage. In choosing between courageously defending Judaism’s unequivocal opposition to homosexual marriage and obsequious obeisance to the doctrines of secular fundamentalism, this “Jewish” organization made its choice and in so doing, proved my point. Paradoxically, these so-called Jewish organizations are virulent secularists because of belief—the belief that religion poisons the world and that we would all be better off living in an eternal utopia of secular democracy.

In their belief system, serious Christianity, which they recognize to have founded western civilization, must be confined to the home, synagogue, and church. It must never be allowed to influence our culture or our political law-making apparatus. In their belief system, religion, when practiced by professional religionists like priests, pastors, and rabbis, is acceptable because these professionals, doing what they are expected to do, are unlikely to influence significantly the public perception of faith as a refuge for the uneducated, the unsuccessful, and the miserable. However, religion when practiced seriously by influential public figures such as presidents and movie producers is totally unacceptable because it might lead to upsetting the current religious-secular cultural balance.

Thus President Bush also merits hatred. Here is Whoopi Goldberg musing in the pages of the New York Times, “Wait a minute, is this man leading this country as an American or is he leading the country as a Christian?” Just try to imagine the outcry from the Jewish groups I describe herein were Mel Gibson to have asked during the 2000 presidential elections, “Will Joe Lieberman lead this country as an American or would he lead this country as a Jew?”

Once Mel Gibson revealed himself to be, like the President, a person of serious religious faith the gloves came off. Mel Gibson has done a major favor for serious faith, both Jewish and Christian, in America. He has made it ‘cool’ to be religious, but in so doing he has unleashed the hatred of secular America against himself personally, against his work, and against his family. God bless him.

Radio talk show host Rabbi Daniel Lapin is president of Toward Tradition, which is dedicated to bridging the divide between Christians and Jews by applying ancient solutions to modern problems in areas of family, faith, and fortune. This article was originally posted on April 8, 2004, on the organization’s website, www.towardtradition.org.

When school voucher programs are instituted, it stimulates public schools to improve. That, at least, is what the Florida experience shows.

In Florida, if a school receives two failing grades in a four-year period, its students can elect to go elsewhere. Performance is measured by standardized tests, and students who choose to use a voucher can attend either a private or public school. The result, a new study concludes, is that the forced competition has had the effect of improving poorly performing public schools.

The study, available online at www.educationnext.org, was conducted by Manhattan Institute researchers Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters. The peer-review study was independently affirmed by Cornell researcher Rajashri Chanrararti.

What the researchers found was that those public schools that had failed twice within a four-year period, or once within a three-year period, quickly made significant improvement. On the other hand, those public schools that were previously threatened by voucher competition (because they had failed once), but were no longer threatened (because four years had expired since their first failure), posted a decline in academic performance.

It is obvious from the Florida case that the worst fear of the public school industry—a mass exodus of students to private schools—has not materialized. What has happened is that competition has worked to everyone’s benefit.

By Rabbi Daniel Lapin

Never has a film aroused such hostile passion so long prior to its release as has Mel Gibson’s “Passion.” Many American Jews are alarmed by reports of what they view as potentially anti-Semitic content in this movie about the death of Jesus, which is due to be released during 2004. Clearly the crucifixion of Jesus is a sensitive topic, but prominent Christians who previewed it—including good friends like James Dobson and Michael Novak, who have always demonstrated acute sensitivity to Jewish concerns—see it as a religiously inspiring movie and refute charges that it is anti-Semitic. While most Jews are wisely waiting to see the film before responding, others are either prematurely condemning a movie they have yet to see or violating the confidentiality agreements they signed with Icon Productions.

As an Orthodox rabbi with a wary eye on Jewish history which has an ominous habit of repeating itself, I fear that these protests, well intentioned though some may be, are a mistake. I believe those who publicly protest Mel Gibson’s film lack moral legitimacy. What is more, I believe their actions are not only wrong but even recklessly ill-advised and shockingly imprudent.

For an explanation of why I believe that those Jews protesting “Passion” lack moral legitimacy we must take ourselves back in time to the fall of 1999. That was when Arnold Lehman, the Jewish director of the Brooklyn Museum, presented a show called “Sensation.” It featured, from the collection of British Jew Charles Saatchi, several works which debased Catholicism, including Chris Ofili’s dung-bedecked “Madonna.”

You may wonder why I highlight the Jewish ethnicity of the players in the Brooklyn Museum saga. My reason for doing so is that everyone else recognized that they were Jewish, and there is merit in us knowing how we ourselves appear in the eyes of those among whom we live. This is especially true on those sad occasions when we violate what ancient Jewish wisdom commends as the practice of Kiddush HaShem, which is to say, conducting our public affairs in a way best calculated to bring credit upon us as a group. Maintaining warm relations with our non-Jewish friends is a traditional Jewish imperative and the raison d’etre of the organization I serve, Toward Tradition.

Almost every Christian organization angrily denounced the vile bigotry sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum. Especially prominent was William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, a good friend who has always stood firmly with Jews in the fight against genuine anti-Semitism, yet now, in his fight against anti-Catholicism, he appealed to Jewish organizations in vain. Almost every Christian denomination helped vigorously protest the assault that the Brooklyn Museum carried out against the Catholic faith in such graphically abhorrent ways. Even Mayor Rudolph Giuliani expressed his outrage by trying to withhold money from the museum. Where was the Jewish expression of solidarity against such ugliness?

Only a small group of Orthodox Jews joined their fellow Americans in protest at this literal defilement of Christianity with elephant feces. And were other Jews silent? No, unfortunately not. In actuality a small but disproportionately vocal number of them were defending the Brooklyn Museum and its director in the name of artistic freedom.

You may also remember Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Then too almost every Christian denomination protested Universal’s release of a movie so slanderous that had it been made about Moses, or say, Martin Luther King Jr., it would have provoked howls of anger from the entire country. As it was, Christians were left to defend their faith quite alone other than for one solitary courageous Jew, Dennis Prager. Most Americans knew that Universal was run by Lew Wasserman. Most Americans also knew Lew’s ethnicity. Perhaps many now wonder why Mel Gibson is not entitled to the same artistic freedom we accorded Lew Wasserman?

When the Weinstein brothers, through their Miramax films (named after their parents, Mira and Max Weinstein), distributed “Priest” in 1994, Catholics were again left to protest this unflattering depiction of their faith alone while many Jewish organizations proclaimed the primacy of artistic freedom. Surely Jewish organizations would carry just a little more moral authority if they routinely protested all attacks on faith, not only those troubling to Judaism.

Oddly enough, Jewish organizations did find one movie so offensive as to warrant protest. It was Disney’s “Aladdin” that was considered, by Jews, to be needlessly offensive to Arabs!

Now I do have one possible explanation for why one might consider it more important to protest “Passion.” It is this: in Europe, anti-Semitic slander frequently resulted in Catholic mobs killing Jews. Our hyper-sensitivity has a long and painful background of real tragedy. In any event, Jewish moral prestige would stand taller if we were conspicuous in protesting movies that defame any religion. Furthermore, opponents of “Passion” argue that this movie might cause a backlash against the Jewish community. Yet when so-called art really does encourage violence, for Jewish spokesmen, artistic freedom seems to trump all other concerns. Here is what I mean.

During the nineties, record companies run by well known executives including Michael Fuchs, Gerald Levin, and David Geffen produced obscene records by artists like Geto Boys and Ice-T that advocated killing policemen and raping and murdering women. During that decade of shockingly hateful music that incited violence, our Jewish organizations only protested Michael Jackson’s song “They Don’t Care About Us” and the rap group Public Enemy’s single “Swindler’s Lust,” claiming that these songs were anti-Semitic. It is ignoble to ignore the wrongs done to others while loudly deploring those done to us.

In truth however, even though Catholics did kill Jews in Europe, I do not believe that the often sad history of Jews in Europe is relevant now. Why not? Because in Europe, Catholic church officials wielded a rapacious combination of ecclesiastical and political power with which they frequently incited illiterate mobs to acts of anti-Jewish violence. In America, no clergyman secures political power along with his ordination certificate, and in America, if there are illiterate and dangerous thugs, Christianity is a cure not the cause. In America, few Jews have ever been murdered, mugged, robbed, or raped by Christians returning home from church on Sunday morning. America is history’s most philo-Semitic country, providing the most hospitable home for Jews in the past 2,000 years. Suggesting equivalency between American Christians today and those of European history is to be offensive and ungrateful.

Quite frankly, if it is appropriate to blame today’s American Christians for the sins of past Europeans, why isn’t it okay to blame today’s Jews for things that our ancestors may have done? Clearly both are wrong, and doing so harms our relationships with one of the few groups still friendly toward us today. Jewish groups that fracture friendship between Christians and Jews are performing no valuable service to American Jews.

These protests against “Passion” are not only morally indefensible, but they are also stupid, for three reasons. The first reason is that that they are unlikely to change the outcome of the film. Mr. Gibson is an artist and a Catholic of deep faith of which this movie is an expression. Does anyone really believe that Gibson is likely to yield to threats from Jewish organizations?

The second and more important reason I consider these protests to be ill-advised: While Jews are telling Gibson that his movie contradicts historical records about who really killed Jesus, Vatican Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos has this to say: “Mel Gibson not only closely follows the narrative of the Gospels, giving the viewer a new appreciation for those Biblical passages, but his artistic choices also make the film faithful to the meaning of the Gospels, as understood by the Church.”
Do we really want to open up the Pandora’s Box of suggesting that any faith may demand the removal of material that it finds offensive from the doctrines of any other faith? Do we really want to return to those dark times when Catholic authorities attempted to strip from the Talmud those passages that they found offensive?

Finally, I believe the attacks on Mel Gibson are a mistake because while they may be in the interests of Jewish organizations who raise money with the specter of anti-Semitism … they are most decidedly not in the interests of most American Jews who go about their daily lives in comfortable harmony with their Christian fellow citizens. You see, many Christians see all this as attacks not just on Mel Gibson alone or as mere critiques of a movie, but—with some justification, in my view—they see them as attacks against all Christians.

Right now, the most serious peril threatening Jews, and indeed perhaps all of Western civilization, is Islamic fundamentalism. In this titanic 21st century struggle that links Washington, D.C., with Jerusalem, our only steadfast allies have been Christians. In particular, those Christians who most ardently defend Israel and most reliably denounce anti-Semitism, happen to be those Christians most fervently committed to their faith. Jewish interests are best served by fostering friendship with Christians rather than cynically eroding them. Rejecting flagrant anti-Christianism on the part of Jews claiming to be acting on our behalf would be our wisest course as a community. Doing so would have one other advantage: it would also be doing the right thing.

Radio talk show host Rabbi Daniel Lapin is president of Toward Tradition, which is dedicated to bridging the divide between Christians and Jews by applying ancient solutions to modern problems in areas of family, faith, and fortune. The complete article is also posted on the organization’s website, www.towardtradition.org.

The Susan B. Anthony List is the nation’s number one organization dedicated to putting pro-life candidates in office. And it has been enormously successful in recent years.

A not-for-profit 501(c) (3) organization with almost 80,000 members, the Susan B. Anthony List was founded in 1992 in response to an overwhelming pro-abortion presence in Congress. Started by a group of concerned women of various political affiliations, it was and continues to be their belief that the strong pro-abortion contingent in Washington does not accurately reflect the convictions of most American women. Named after the famous 19th century feminist (who opposed abortion as degrading to women), the Susan B. Anthony List’s main goal is to help elect more pro-life women to Congress.

They have accomplished this mainly through education of women voters, pro-life legislation lobbying and successful campaign training of staff of political candidates. The Susan B. Anthony List also financially contributes to candidates through the help of its members and supporters. Just this past year each endorsed candidate received an average of $15,000.

The Susan B. Anthony List’s feats are many. In 1998, their efforts guaranteed eight pro-life incumbents’ return to Congress. In 2000, there were nine new pro-life members of Congress. And in 2002, the SBA List won 22 out of 32 races. The number of pro-life women in Congress leaped from 7 to 12—a 71% increase.

A large part of their recent success is due to the 2002 Pilot program. This mail and telephone campaign targeted “casual” women voters who voted in the 2000 Presidential election but not in the non-presidential elections of 1998. The 2002 Pilot “Get Out The Vote” program was created in response to the Emily’s List campaign of 2000. Emily’s List, the largest pro-abortion group involved in the 2000 elections, managed to turn out eight million pro-abortion votes and defeat three pro-life Senators.

The 2002 Pilot program energized “casual” women voters by getting them to identify “their” issue. One issue they targeted was parental consent. “Casual” women voters were sent an eye-catching postcard featuring a young woman with tattoos up her arms. It stated: “A child can’t get a real tattoo without your consent…But she can have an abortion!” Another stunning mailer concentrated on the unborn victims issue. It said “Not just a horrible crime…Two Horrible Crimes.” The cover featured a chalk outline of the victim as used in crime scenes, and then following, a second chalk outline in the form of a baby inside the larger outline of the victim. The 2002 Pilot program focused their campaign on three key election states and as a result, all three SBA List candidates won.

The SBA List also educates countless Americans through their nationwide radio campaign. Their “One-Minute Commentary” Public Service Announcements are aired on 826 Christian and secular radio stations throughout the United States.

During a visit to the SBA List website one can email their Member of Congress and instantly become involved in the pro-life battle.

The Susan B. Anthony List
1800 Diagonal Road, Suite 285
Alexandria, VA 22314
Telephone (703) 683-5558
www.sba-list.org

Catholic League president William Donohue has nothing but good things to say about the organization: “The fight against the culture of death must be fought on several fronts. One of the most important fronts is the Congress. The Susan B. Anthony List has done more than any organization in the nation to help secure the victory of pro-life candidates. It is a group that deserves the support of all Catholics.”

By Kenneth D. Whitehead

When a scholarly journal, The Political Science Reviewer, asked me to do an in-depth review-article on the major books that have recently come out about the Pope Pius XII controversy, I was at first not too eager to get involved. The Pius XII controversy seems to go on and on, with no resolution in sight. The anti-Pius authors, in particular, seem to pay little attention to the facts that have been brought forward concerning the true role of the wartime pontiff; they keep going back to the same old accusations against the pope, regardless of whether they have been answered or not: Pope Pius XII did not do enough to help the Jews during the Holocaust, they say, even though Adolf Hitler had made it clear that he intended to exterminate the Jews (along with some other victims, it needs to be added!). In particular, according to them, Pius XII failed to “speak out” forcefully to denounce the evil and criminal plans of Hitler and the Nazis (as if merely “speaking out” could have deterred Hitler!).

Of course, able people have not failed to come forward to defend the reputation of the wartime pope, often citing the abundant testimony of wartime Jewish leaders which demonstrate that Pius XII was one of the best friends the European Jews had. This is hardly the view of the average person today, however, owing to the incessant negative publicity about the wartime pope. And the defenders of Pius XII have never quite been able to make their case effectively or attract as much attention as his accusers. The latter enjoy the prestige of having their books published by mainstream New York publishing houses and by university presses—which then promptly get major attention from such publications as Time or Newsweek or the New York Times Book Review—while the latter, the pro-Pius authors, have to turn to small religious publishing houses if they expect their books to see the light of day at all. Nor are the pro-Pius books found on the shelves of public libraries or in bookstores as readily as the anti-Pius books are. The odds have thus regularly been against the defenders of Pius XII ever getting a full and fair hearing to make their case.

Thinking about this, I decided that I should take a serious look at both the recent anti-Pius and pro-Pius books, and try to reach some conclusions about which of them make the stronger case. The academic and professional political scientists who read The Political Science Reviewer were surely not committed to any particular viewpoint on the issue, I thought, and were probably honestly interested in what the true facts of the case might be. The whole thing was worth a try. So I decided to plow through the ten major Pius XII books, pro and con, published over the past four years, and to try to provide a serious, scholarly account of just what the continuing Pius XII controversy was all about; what was being said about it on both sides; why the controversy keeps going on and on; and how, in my opinion, the whole question should ultimately be judged.

The results of my efforts became a long review-article of more than 100 pages bearing the title, “The Pope Pius XII Controversy.” It was published in the 2002 issue (Volume XXXI) of The Political Science Reviewer, and will now also be available on the website of the Catholic League for those interested in going into this subject in more detail.

The ten books I read included: Pius XII and the Second World War by Fr. Pierre Blet, S.J.; Hitler’s Pope by John Cornwell; The Popes Against the Jews by David Kertzer;Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace by Sr. Margherita Marchione; The Defamation of Pius XII by Ralph McInerny; The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 by Michael Phayer; Hitler, the War, and the Pope by Ronald J. Rychlak; Pius XII and the Holocaust by José M. Sánchez; Papal Sin by Garry Wills; and Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust by Susan Zucotti.

Regardless of how they try to bill themselves as more or less scholarly works, five of these books are nevertheless frankly anti-Pius (Cornwell, Kertzer, Phayer, Wills, and Zucotti); four of them are just as frankly pro-Pius (Blet, Marchione, McInerny, and Rychlak); and only one of them attempts—not, however, with completely satisfactory results—to be neutral and above the fray (Sánchez). It was a chore to read through all of them, but now that I have done so, I can speak pretty confidently about what we are dealing with in this particular controversy. We are dealing with what one of the authors, Ralph McInerny, in his title, calls the defamation of Pius XII. Those who so doggedly continue to go after a Roman pontiff more than forty years after his death—and long after all of the essential facts of the case have been put on the record, and do not prove the case against him—are driven by an ideology that really has little to do with the real wartime record of Pius XII, and a great deal to do with discrediting both the man and the Catholic Church he led. Some of the pro-Pius authors understand this. Obviously, I cannot prove it completely here in this short summary, though; readers are referred to the complete review-article on the Catholic League’s website; but what I can say is that the anti-Catholic bias in the anti-Pius books approaches the pathological.

Some of the anti-Pius books, such as those of Michael Phayer and Susan Zucotti, appear to be very serious and scholarly; they are heavily footnoted and they carefully cite various sources; in this respect, they do not immediately seem to resemble the books of disaffected Catholics such as John Cornwell and Garry Wills, which are little better than vulgar polemics. In the end, though, I was obliged to conclude that all of the anti-Pius books are defective in one especially serious, if not fatal, respect: namely, they all rest upon an indefensible view of how the writing of history should be done. Before they get down to any historical facts at all, they start out with the firm premise or presupposition that Pope Pius XII simply should have “spoken out” against Hitler. Even in the wartime conditions that prevailed, they think he should have loudly denounced the Holocaust that was taking place in Nazi-occupied Europe. They rarely credit or even mention all that the Vatican did do to help wartime victims; nor do they recognize any special conditions or constraints that Pius XII might have been under—for example, that the Vatican was surrounded throughout the greater part of the war by hostile Fascist and Nazi regimes able to occupy the pope’s tiny enclave in a matter of hours, as they more than once threatened to do.

If the pope by “speaking out” had called upon Catholics in Nazi-occupied Europe to try to oppose Hitler’s juggernaut, anyone responding to such a call would have incurred instant arrest, deportation to a concentration camp, and probable swift execution in the conditions that prevailed under the Nazis. While the Church does canonize martyrs, she does not call upon Catholics to court certain martyrdom. None of this registers with the anti-Pius writers, however; they still write simply on the basis of what they think the pope should have done. But to write history on this basis is not to write history in the true sense at all. History is the record of what did happen, not what somebody thinks should have happened. Good history hopefully includes the historian’s educated judgment of how and why things happened as they did. Still the historian has to stick to what did happen, not what he thinks should have happened.

All of the anti-Pius books fail this simple test; and hence not one of them is history in the true sense but rather is special pleading for a pre-established point of view.

The pro-Pius books, on the other hand, do all try to establish and honestly explain what did happen. My conclusion is that you can rely on the accounts that the various defenders of Pius XII provide. The true fact is that Catholics can be proud of the wartime record of Pope Pius XII. In particular, as I remark in my long review-article, in the light of the case made in detail by Ronald J. Rychlak in his Hitler, the War, and the Pope, “the case against Pius XII set forth by the anti-Pius writers is simply untenable.”

In view of the importance of the subject—and of the fact that the Pius XII controversy does just seem to go on and on—I am pleased that the Catholic League is willing to reproduce my complete review-article on its website. Go to www.catholicleague.org to get the complete story about how the various pro-Pius and anti-Pius authors have treated the Pius XII controversy. Then go to the books themselves. It is vital to be properly informed about this continuing controversy in which the Catholic Church herself is being attacked in the person of her great wartime pontiff.

Kenneth D. Whitehead is a former Assistant Secretary of Education. He is the author, most recently, of One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic: The Early Church Was the Catholic Church (Ignatius Press, 2000). He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

The Internet portal, Yahoo!, displays a bias against Catholics that it refuses to correct.  When the word “Catholic” is typed in to the search engine site, the second of the Category Matches has a listing called “Christian History > Catholic Inquisition.”  By clicking on that category, the listings of “Torture” and “Witch Hunts” appear.  But when the words “Protestant,” “Judaism,” or “Islam” are typed in, no negative episodes associated with these religions are listed.  No other Internet portal shows an anti-Catholic bias.

Just as disturbing, when “Catholicism” is typed in, the first listing under Web Site Matches is “The Case Against Catholicism.”  It consists mainly of the work of “Joseph McCabe’s Rationalist Encyclopedia.”  More accurately, it consists of some of the most remarkably twisted interpretations of the history of the Catholic Church ever produced.  The second listing is called “Gay and Lesbian Catholicism”: it is loaded with criticism of the Church’s teachings on sexuality.  Interestingly, the official Vatican website, “The Holy See,” is listed fourth.

Catholic League president William Donohue addressed this issue today:

“On November 2, I wrote a letter to Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel stating my objections to his portal’s bias against Catholicism.  He has chosen not to respond and that is why I am making this matter public. Indeed, since my letter was written, things have only gotten worse: the ‘Joseph McCabe’ contribution to anti-Catholicism was entered after November 2.

“Nothing I have objected to is outside the control of Yahoo!  If they wanted to correct this situation they could easily do so.  Evidently, they do not care if they offend Catholics.  But maybe they’ll change their tune once they are avalanched with complaints.  We will begin by posting our complaint on our website, www.catholicleague.org, and will ask people to write to Mr. Semel.  We will also publish Mr. Semel’s address in the next issue of our monthly journal, Catalyst.”

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights is proud to announce the launching of its web site (www.catholicleague.org).

Eileen Sepp, the league’s Director of Media Technology, has constructed a web site that has an extensive list of Catholic League resources. Browsers can find selections from the current issue of Catalyst, the league’s journal, as well as the complete text of previous issues for 1997. The league’s Annual Report on Anti-Catholicism (1994-1996) is also available. Current news includes a copy of all recent news releases issued by the league.

There is an opportunity for new members to join the league and there is a list of books and videos that may be purchased. Also available is a feedback section which allows interested parties to report incidents of anti-Catholicism.

The Catholic League is providing a web site that will be continually updated, thus giving users a reason to return to it over and over again. It is our hope that reporters and researchers will find the league’s web site to be a valuable source of information on the nature and prevalence of anti-Catholicism.