Bill Donohue comments on a lawsuit brought by two Muslims from Long Island against the owners of the Empire State Building:

Last July, Fahad and Amina Tirmizi and their two children went to the observation deck on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, dressed in traditional Muslim garb, and took a moment to recite the evening prayers in a spot away from other visitors. Two security guards confronted them and forced them to leave, saying they had no right to pray there. The lawyer for the Muslims, Phil Hines, has now sued the owners, Malkin Properties, and others, for this incident. We stand with Hines and his clients.

On August 26, 2010, I led a rally of over 3,000 people in the street across from the Empire State Building to protest Anthony Malkin’s (the principal owner) refusal to light the towers blue and white on the 100th anniversary of Mother Teresa’s birthday. He had no problem honoring the anniversary of the Communist Chinese government, even though Mao and his minions murdered 77 million innocent men, women, and children, but he could not stomach any recognition of Mother Teresa. Now he is bullying Muslims.

Muslims who pray in public, including in public accommodations, are simply exercising their constitutional rights. In play are two First Amendment rights: freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

We hope that Hines investigates the extent to which security guards are expected to censor religious speech. We wish him, and this innocent Muslim couple, well.

Bill Donohue explains the Guinness boycott:

Yesterday, I announced a boycott of Guinness, Heineken, and Sam Adams: the first two brewers pulled out of sponsoring the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City; the latter withdrew from the Boston parade. Prudence dictates that we concentrate our efforts on just one: we’ve settled on Guinness.

Bostonians are best suited to boycotting Sam Adams—the effort is already under way—and those who favor Heineken will hopefully send its executives a message as well. We have chosen Guinness (owned by Diageo) for two reasons: (a) when multiple targets are selected for a boycott, the effectiveness of the effort is diluted, and (b) Guinness is the biggest and most prominent of the three brewers.

Over the course of the next few days, we will have a mass mailing to Catholic organizations, and Irish groups, asking them to join us in boycotting Guinness. Once fair-minded persons know that this entire controversy is contrived—no gays and lesbians have ever been banned from marching in any St. Patrick’s Day parade—they will no longer buy Guinness, or ask the company to sponsor one of their events.

The corporate officers at Guinness who think they can get away with this in-your-face gesture are sadly mistaken. The demographics are working against them: Young people are drawn to craft beers; it’s older Americans, heavily Irish Catholic, who buy Guinness, and they are also the most likely to draw a line in the sand when angered.

This Guinness insult has more to do with anti-Catholicism than with anti-Irish sentiment. Gay activists, and their tony heterosexual buddies, don’t have a beef with the Irish—they seek to punish Catholics for holding to traditional moral beliefs. It’s the religious element to these parades, not the ethnic factor, that is motivating Guinness to act like a corporate bully.

Contact Alix Dunn, Director of External Communications, Diageo North America: Alix.Dunn@diageo.com

Bill Donohue is calling for a boycott of Guinness, Heineken, and Sam Adams:

Diageo, the parent company of Guinness, and Heineken, have pulled their sponsorship of New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade; the Boston Beer Company, maker of Sam Adams, has withdrawn its sponsorship of Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade.

None of these companies believe in diversity. No gay person has ever been barred from marching in any St. Patrick’s Day parade, anymore than the parade bans pro-life Catholics or vegetarian Catholics; they simply cannot march under their own banner. The parade has one cause: honoring St. Patrick. Those who disagree do not have to march—that’s what diversity is all about.

The parade is quintessentially Catholic, beginning with a Mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It is this Catholic element that angers those who are engaged in a bullying campaign against the St. Patrick’s Day parades. The bullies also have nothing but contempt for the constitutional rights of Irish Catholics.

In 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 9-0 decision that the First Amendment guarantees the right of private parade organizers to determine its own rules for marching. It is this liberty that the makers of Guinness, Heineken, and Sam Adams want to squash.

I have had my last Guinness and Sam Adams. Heineken was always slop, so there is no sacrifice there. I urge Catholics, and all those who believe in tolerance, diversity, and the First Amendment, to join with me in boycotting these brews.

To contact Guinness, email: press.office@diageo.com
To contact Heineken, email: pressoffice@heineken.com
To contact Sam Adams, email: jessica.paar@bostonbeer.com

Bill Donohue comments on Rep. Nancy Pelosi:

Yesterday, Rep. John Boehner extended an invitation to Pope Francis to speak before a joint session of the Congress. Joining with him was Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

On March 27, Rep. Pelosi will receive Planned Parenthood’s highest honor, The Margaret Sanger Award. Pelosi supports abortion-on-demand, and Planned Parenthood is responsible for killing more unborn babies than any other institution in the nation. It is also profoundly anti-Catholic.

In her statement inviting the pope to speak to the Congress, Pelosi commended him for serving as “a champion of the less fortunate.” She is correct. Here is what the pope said about “the less fortunate” in his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium: “Among the vulnerable for whom the church wishes to care with particular love and concern are unborn children, the most defenseless and innocent among us….It is not ‘progressive’ to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life.”

A recent Gospel quoted Jesus as saying that “No one can serve two masters.” Accordingly, Pelosi should either refuse to accept the Planned Parenthood award or withdraw her invitation to Pope Francis.

Contact Pelosi’s Communications Director, Drew Hammill: drew.hammill@mail.house.gov

Bill Donohue comments on the latest left-wing attack on the pope:

BishopAccountability.org purports to be an abuse watchdog, but in reality its only real agenda is to discredit the Catholic Church. Its latest stab at Pope Francis brings further discredit to its reputation. Indeed, as will be demonstrated, its report on the pope is pure McCarthyism.

Yesterday, it published a report on Pope Francis’ record with priests accused of abuse in Argentina when he was Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio. The report accuses Bergoglio of not having addressed abusive priests during his tenure as Auxiliary and Archbishop of Buenos Aires (1992-1998 Auxiliary; 1998-2013 Archbishop) or as president of the Argentine Bishops Conference (2005-2011).

The report is so seriously flawed that even a high school dropout could shoot holes in it. To read our analysis of it, click here. The heads of every diocese in the U.S. are being sent a copy of our analysis, along with a statement about our previous research on BishopAccountability.org.

Bill Donohue comments on the decision by the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office not to file charges against St. Paul and Minneapolis Archbishop John Nienstedt; he was accused in December of “inappropriately touching” a young man in 2009:

On December 18, I issued a news release saying the following:

“Archbishop Nienstedt has been the subject of a non-stop crusade orchestrated by ex-Catholics, and Catholics in rebellion against the Church, simply because he stands for everything they are not: he is a loyal son of the Catholic Church.

“Now—out of the blue—comes an unidentified male who claims he was touched on his buttocks in 2009 by the archbishop while posing for a group photo. Nienstedt denies the charge, adding that he has never inappropriately touched anyone. Moreover, he has not been told the identity of his accuser.”

The police identified and interviewed everyone who was in the photograph when the archbishop allegedly touched the boy’s buttocks. No one at the Confirmation ceremony reported seeing anything like this happening. The photo shows Nienstedt standing behind the boy, one step up, meaning that he would have had to bend down to touch the boy’s behind. To top things off, the photo shows Nienstedt with one hand on his crozier and the other on the boy’s left shoulder. The police asked if anyone recalled a touching episode meant as a joke, or saw any touching between people, or remembered if someone was startled during the photo session. The answer to all three was unanimous: No.

What happened to Archbishop Nienstedt was not a mistake. It reflects a deeper problem: We are living in a culture of hate—hatred of all matters Catholic—led by those whose goal it is to take down a bishop. Every bishop is a potential target, but none more than those who are seen as being inimical to the “progressive” agenda.

Today, Newsmax published Bill Donohue’s article on the St. Patrick’s Day parade controversy. To read it, click here.

Bill Donohue comments on a segment from the first of a new 13-episode Fox series, “Cosmos,” which aired on March 9:

The propagandists involved in this show, represented most conspicuously by Seth MacFarlane, told viewers last night that “the Roman Catholic Church maintained a system of courts known as the Inquisition and its sole purpose was to investigate and torment anyone who dared voice views that differed from theirs. And it wasn’t long before [Giordano] Bruno fell into the clutches of the thought police.”

 The ignorance is appalling. “The Catholic Church as an institution had almost nothing to do with [the Inquisition],” writes Dayton historian Thomas Madden. “One of the most enduring myths of the Inquisition,” he says, “is that it was a tool of oppression imposed on unwilling Europeans by a power-hungry Church. Nothing could be more wrong.” Because the Inquisition brought order and justice where there was none, it actually “saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.” (His emphasis.)

As for Bruno, he was a renegade monk who dabbled in astronomy; he was not a scientist. There is much dispute about what really happened to him. As sociologist Rodney Strong puts it, he got into trouble not for his “scientific” views, but because of his “heretical theology involving the existence of an infinite number of worlds—a work based entirely on imagination and speculation.”

In short, MacFarlane, who is no stranger to the Catholic League, has once again shown his true colors.

Contact Gaude Lydia Paez, Senior VP for Corporate Communications at Fox: Gaude.Paez@fox.com

Bill Donohue comments as follows:

On the website of the liberal Catholic outlet, Commonweal, Mollie Wilson O’Reilly accuses Pope Francis of ignoring the problem of priestly sexual abuse. According to her, “he [the pope] has said and done little about the scandal itself,” maintaining that “things haven’t been fixed.” Similarly, Father Thomas P. Doyle says the pope “has done almost nothing” about this issue,” calling one of the pontiff’s efforts “so meaningless it is almost comical.” An editorial in the National Catholic Reporter also expresses its chagrin with the pope on this issue, imploring him “to meet with victims of clergy sex abuse.”

Here are some fast facts. We know from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice that 81 percent of the sexual abuse of minors was the result of male-on-male sex, and that less than 5 percent involved pedophilia. In other words, the Church witnessed a homosexual scandal.

Perhaps these people haven’t noticed but the scandal largely ended over a quarter century ago in the U.S., and has witnessed a marked decline in other nations. The data show that most of the abuse occurred between 1965 and 1985. In the last six years, a grand total of 7.0 credible accusations have been made against 40,000 priests. In short, there is little left for the pope to “fix.”

It is particularly galling for liberal Catholics to admonish the pope on this issue when their hero remains former priest Anthony Kosnik. His book, Human Sexuality, suspended all moral judgment on homosexuality, sodomy, and bestiality, and was taught to seminarians in the 1970s. It was commissioned by liberals at the Catholic Theological Society of America and was given a first-place award by the liberal Catholic Press Association. Subsequently, it was condemned by the bishops, but to this day it is celebrated by the National Catholic Reporter.

The call for the pope to meet with victims is a cruel ploy: these liberals have a vested ideological interest in keeping the scandal alive. Why? So they can press for their “reforms.”

Bill Donohue comments on how the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), and BishopAccountability.org, are reacting to Pope Francis as he nears his first anniversary, which is one week from today:

Almost everyone loves Pope Francis, but not among his admirers are SNAP and BishopAccountability.org, two of the most hate-filled activist outlets in the nation.

SNAP condemns the pope for doing “nothing—literally nothing—that protects a single child, exposes a single predator or prevents a single cover up.” Not a single example, anywhere in the world, was cited, of the pope’s alleged delinquency.

Terence McKiernan of BishopAccountability.org condemns the pope for his “tired and defensive rhetoric,” saying the pope’s rigorous, and wholly justified, account of the Catholic Church’s reaction to sexual abuse is “breathtaking.” He cites one bishop, Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph, “who was convicted in 2012 of failing to report suspected child abuse,” as an example of the pope’s alleged intransigence.

What McKiernan did not tell the Associated Press is that the case did not involve child sexual abuse: no child was ever abused, or touched, by a disturbed priest, Shawn Ratigan. Nor did the case involve child porn: it involved crotch-shot pictures of children (one showed a girl’s genitals, determined by the police to be of a “non-sexual” nature).

The short of it is that the review board was contacted, the authorities were notified, and an independent investigation was ordered (the Graves Report). It was later discovered that more disturbing photos were found on Ratigan’s computer, and Bishop Finn was found guilty of one misdemeanor for failing to report suspected child abuse. Had Finn elected to do nothing, no one would have known about Ratigan, because there was no complainant. This is why the pope has not acted against Finn—what happened is a far cry from what McKiernan is saying.