RED CROSS APOLOGIZES FOR BAN ON RELIGIOUS SPEECH

      On March 11, the Catholic League went on a tear against the American Red Cross. Four hours later we got what we wanted: a reversal of its newly minted policy banning religious speech at its functions and a much-deserved apology.
      The pressure we put on the American Red Cross was enormous. We asked over 100 organizations to drop their support for the Red Cross because of the decision by the national headquarters to support one of its California chapters in prohibiting the singing of “God Bless America” and “America the Beautiful” at a Red Cross luncheon.
      The problem began when the Red Cross Orange County Chapter in Santa Ana, California, banned students from Orange County High School of the Arts from singing the two patriotic songs at its March 10 event.
      The American Red Cross issued a news release stating its support for censoring the students. It exclaimed its “sensitivity to religious diversity” by noting its “preference for a music program that would be inclusive and not offend different populations participating in this particular event.” We branded this a gag rule.
      William Donohue told the media that the reason he was calling for drastic action was the decision of the national headquarters to back the California chapter. He criticized the organization for adopting “the platform of political correctness by censoring the free speech of young men and women who want to honor God and country.”
      The campaign against the Red Cross had begun. We faxed our friends letters asking them “to send the Red Cross an unmistakable message by refusing to donate one more dime to the organization.” Our request was sent to our allies in virtually every faith community. Donohue said, “The time to put an end to this anti-religious madness is now.”
      It didn’t take long before the Red Cross got the message. It quickly issued an apology saying it had made a “mistake.” We accepted the apology but rejected the notion that a “mistake” had been made. Indeed we said it was “intellectually dishonest” not to admit that it was “a calculated decision to punish religious speech.”
      We ended by wondering whether the organization would soon change its name. “Any group that has ‘Cross’ in its name is clearly being insensitive to religious diversity,” we concluded.



SPITZER BACKS OFF

In the last edition of Catalyst, we reported on the efforts of New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to try to close down crisis pregnancy centers throughout the state. On March 1, he announced that he had withdrawn his subpoenas.

Spitzer, who works closely with NARAL and other pro-abortion groups, targeted the abortion alternative centers for allegedly practicing medicine without a license, false advertising and the like. It smelled of a witch hunt from the beginning.

Evidently, Spitzer didn’t count on the strong grassroots reaction he triggered. Pro-life groups became energized in a way no one predicted. Because the men and women working in the centers were largely Catholic, the Catholic League got involved.

William Donohue wrote a letter to everyone in the New York State Legislature asking them to put pressure on Spitzer. If laws have been broken, Donohue said, then Spitzer should get on with his prosecution. But if this is not the case, then he should drop his crusade.

The Catholic League worked cooperatively with James Manning, John Margand and Ellen Gavin. They, and many others, had the courage to lead the fight. We are happy that so many members wrote letters to Spitzer expressing their concerns. The message got through.

This is an election year and that certainly was not lost on Spitzer. His friends at NARAL lost this battle big. It is our hope that attorney generals in other states were watching.




OF PRIESTS AND PEDERASTY

William A. Donohue

Every priest, religious and Catholic lay person I admire is furious with the extent of the pederasty problem in the clergy and the way it’s been handled. Indeed, if someone claims to be a good Catholic and isn’t outraged, I’d begin to wonder. It always hurts more when those whom we trust let us down.

Having said this, I hasten to add that it is not the job of the Catholic League to involve itself in the internal affairs of the Church. Our role is to fight wrongdoing against individual Catholics and the institutional Church. It is not our job to fight wrongdoing by the Church.

The chief reason for this is simple. We have no authority to either speak for the Church or to act as its mediator. We are a lay Catholic organization that knows its place: we defend against defamation and discrimination. It is not our place to assert ourselves into the body politic of the institutional Church anymore than it is the job of the ADL to inject itself into the affairs of organized Judaism. Our mandate is that of a civil rights organization, no more and no less.

There is much blame to go around. Too many clergymen and counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists, failed us. But behavior doesn’t occur in a vacuum and that is why social factors must be considered.

When I was at The Heritage Foundation in the late 1980s, I wrote a book called The New Freedom: Individualism and Collectivism in the Social Lives of Americans. It was an attempt to understand how a new idea of freedom took root in the U.S. and how it influenced behavior. The new freedom, reflective of the social upheavals of the 1960s, held that liberty could be measured by the absence of constraints. Philosophically, the idea was not new, but in terms of the American experience, it certainly was. To say this conception of freedom has become a societal nightmare would be an understatement.

The Catholic Church’s teachings on freedom remain profoundly hostile to this irresponsible interpretation of liberty. The Church teaches that liberty means the right of individuals to do what they ought to do. The dominant culture, following the dictates of the new freedom, teaches that liberty means the right of individuals to do what they want to do. Hence, the culture war.

While the Church did not change its teachings, the new freedom nonetheless made its way into the seminaries and beyond. A more relaxed, non-judgmental, attitude took hold. An Oprah-like emphasis on “feelings” took priority over reason. Sexual experimentation was considered harmless, even worthwhile. Punishing wrongdoing was medieval; it was better to treat the individual than to punish him. From the remedial education of students to the rehabilitation of prisoners, every malady could be fixed. Even pederasty.

It would have been surprising had the Church not succumbed, at least to some extent. After all, even traditional institutions like the Church and the military are affected by the prevailing cultural winds. So when radical individualism and moral relativism took hold outside the Church, it was only a matter of time before some of these cultural currents made their way inside. The net result has been a decline in community, civility, and the most elementary standards of courtesy and common decency. To call this freedom is to make despotism attractive.

No society can tolerate full-blown ideas of sexual emancipation without paying a high price. Just consider the radical agenda of the children’s rights movement and the extremist demands of sexual engineers.

In the 1970s, John Holt was a well-respected educator who taught at Harvard. Richard Farson was an influential psychologist and author. Both argued that children should be given equal rights to adults—in every instance—including the right to live alone, decide whether to attend school, vote and have sex.

Extremists in the gay community promoted suicide. They demanded that the bathhouses remain open even when it was clear that they were the proximate institutional cause of AIDS. Moreover, they demanded that they have free reign to experiment with the most dangerous objects and sex practices. And some wanted the boys. Many heterosexuals, it needs to be said, also proved to be reckless.

There is a direct line between these radical ideas of freedom and priest pederasty. Once the lid was taken off, and once those in authority lost their will, all hell broke loose. As we have sadly learned, the liberation of the id is lethal. We want it all—no social constraints and no social consequences. The whole idea of the new freedom is built on a lie.

The greatest damage of all has been to the tens of thousands of good American priests who labor everyday to do God’s work. But they will prevail. The Church has taken a lot of hard knocks in history and some of the wounds have been self-inflicted. Yet it always rebounds and often comes backs stronger than ever.




TRIUMPH: AN ANSWER TO CATHOLIC REVISIONISTS

By Russell Shaw

In the last several years the culture war against the Catholic Church has been extended to a new battleground—the writing of history. It is not the first time this has happened, since it has long been known that he who gets to tell the story of the past his way can reasonably hope to shape the future. Think of the “Black Legend” concocted against colonial Spain. Still, it would be hard to think of any previous era that witnessed a more concentrated attack on Catholicism in the pages of newly penned historical or pseudo-historical works than this one has.

It is a notable feature of this assault on the Church that some of its leading figures are themselves Catholics. Among these are John Cornwell (Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, Viking, 1999), Garry Wills (Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, Doubleday, 2000), James Carroll (Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, Houghton Mifflin, 2001), Thomas Cahill (Pope John XXIII, Viking, 2002), and others. Quotations suggest the flavor of their historiography. Wills, dismissing the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, says it implies that the Virgin Mary’s “very flesh was…like kryptonite, unable to die.” Cahill, raging against Pope St. Pius X for his campaign against Modernism, tosses off the line, “He may have been clinically paranoid.” Say one thing for these Catholic writers, they’ve got class.

Why has this been happening? A simple desire to fill in unexplored gaps in the history of the Church, admit mistakes, and correct failings would commendable. That is the intention underlying Pope John Paul II’s program of “purification of memory,” which has included such welcome steps as setting the record straight on the mishandling of the Galileo case and on the Holy Office’s condemnation of a number of propositions attributed to the innovative religious founder and theologian Antonio Rosmini-Serbati (1797-1855) but now acknowledged not to be his. Honesty like this regarding embarrassments out of the past is praiseworthy and constructive.

But the new revisionists have more in view than setting the record straight. In fact, they have an agenda. It is to reinterpret the record in line with their own progressive ideology, defame historical figures whom they dislike, and use the resulting caricature of the Church of the past as a club against the Church of the present in order to pave the way for the Church of the future. Cornwell candidly predicts a “cataclysmic schism” in the near future between Catholic traditionalists seeking to uphold a Church modeled on the “pyramidal” model associated with Pius XII and progressives like himself who seek to promote the ascendancy of a decentralized, pluralistic, democratized model of the Church. In this struggle books like his—and Wills’s and Carroll’s and Cahill’s—are meant to play an important part. To take just one example: When a writer like Cahill assails Pius X on the subject of Modernism, it is because he thinks Modernism’s relativizing, psychologizing religious vision is correct and hopes it will prevail.

Against this background it is a distinct relief to turn to H.W. Crocker’s new one-volume popular history of Catholicism Triumph (Prima Publishing, 2001). The book’s subtitle says it all: “The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church.” Along with being history, this is an unabashed love song to Catholicism, written by a Catholic convert author who has worked as a journalist, speechwriter, and book editor.

To get the feel of it, compare Crocker’s version of certain historical events with their treatment by the Catholic revisionists.

Here is Cahill on the Cathars (Albigensians), the bizarre, body-hating sect of Manichean origin which provoked a bloody military struggle in southern France in the thirteenth century: “The Albigensians held austere beliefs not unlike those of the Franciscans.” And here is Crocker: “The Albigensians were a sort of Pro-Death League, opposed to marriage, children, and pregnancy (a calamity for which abortion was recommended); and if one could not follow a Pauline path of celibacy, the next best thing was fornication that did not perpetuate the species.” Cahill is talking nonsense, while Crocker, despite the somewhat breezy style, has got it right.

Here is Wills on Blessed Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors: “Though the Pope thought of each stage of this campaign [the definition of the Immaculate Conception, the Syllabus, Vatican Council I] as dealing out punishment to the diabolical schemes of modernity, the Syllabus was nearly a knockout blow delivered to himself. He was lucky that some took it as a joke…” Here is Crocker: “[Pius IX’s] most memorable contribution was The Syllabus of Errors (1864), which targeted liberalism—and its spin-offs communism and socialism—in a list of eighty mistaken ideas….The Syllabus of Errors is a consistent attack on the power of the state and on the idea, which is explicitly condemned, that might makes right. In the context of twentieth-century politics, these are the striking passages.” Wills is mouthing the politically correct progressive line, a tired cliche by now; Crocker has something new and interesting to say.

Note that Blessed Pius IX is a favorite whipping-boy for the revisionists. His unpardonable sin from their point of view was his outstanding success in the religious sphere (though certainly not the political). “His religious achievements were enormous,” Crocker writes; he did more than anyone else to create the doctrinally, devotionally, and structurally strong Catholic system of modern times that flourished up to the 1960s and that the progressives now seek to destroy.

Triumph is not a perfect book. The style, though certainly readable, now and then is a mite too breezy. In its eagerness to present the Church in a good light, moreover, the book leaves out some important elements of the story: e.g., the “Donation of Constantine,” a forged document, probably of the fifth century, which supposedly showed Constantine bestowing entitlements on Pope Sylvester and which played an important part in the endless pope-emperor, church-state wrangles of the Middle Ages. We still lack an entirely adequate replacement for Philip Hughes’s A Popular History of the Catholic Church (Macmillan, 1953). In this regard, it should be noted that Crocker’s aim in part is to provide an alternative to Thomas Bokenkotter’s widely circulated A Concise History of the Catholic Church (Image Books, 1990), which Crocker describes as “focused on liberal Catholicism.”

Like the well-known elephant in the living room, there is one issue—or, perhaps, cluster of issues—standing head and shoulders above the rest in the recent writing of revisionist histories of Catholicism. It is the role of Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church in regard to the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. The Catholic revisionists invariably talk about it—Cornwell and Carroll produced entire books on the subject—and lately they have been joined by Jewish writers.

Surely the most egregious of the latter up to now is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who in the January 21 issue of The New Republic devoted a long review-article (well over half the magazine) to accusing the Pope and the Church of anti-Semitism. He is author of a book published by Knopf called Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust and of a forthcoming volume with the ominous title A Moral Reckoning: The Catholic Church During the Holocaust and Today. It should be a pip.

Goldhagen is not simply angry but over the edge. Anti-Semitism among European Catholics and other Christians deserves serious study, but invective is no help. In one casual aside—a comparatively mild one at that—the author calls the Catholic Church “a self-proclaimed authoritarian institution, seeking ever more to clamp down on its members.” Elsewhere he dismisses the New Testament account of Jesus’ death as fiction. (Jews had no hand in it, you see.) If a Catholic writer attacked Judaism as Goldhagen attacks Catholicism, he would correctly be called an anti-Semite; if Goldhagen attacks the Catholic Church this way, what does that make him (and The New Republic too)?

To say Pius XII was anti-Semitic is a laughable charge, and the evidence offered for it is correspondingly laughable. From the end of World War II until years after his death in 1958, Jews universally praised him as a friend who worked hard to help Jews during the war. The campaign against him began in 1963 with Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy. Its caricature of a venal pope bore no relation to fact, but the campaign has continued ever since, with Cornwell’s dishonest volume of 1999 marking a new escalation. Now the floodgates are open. The boldness of this project is astonishing. The ultimate target of these critics, it now is clear, is not what some Catholics did in the past but what Catholics believe in the present. The only way for Catholics to appease them would be to abandon the faith.

Crocker calls the attack on Pope Pius and the Church a “backhanded compliment.” No one asks why Protestants or Anglicans or the Orthodox did not do more to help Jews; rather, as he points out, echoing Arnold Toynbee, in such world crises “only one Christian voice and one Christian institution” really count—the voice of the pope, the institution called “the Church.” Triumph may not be a history book for the ages, but here and now it is something almost as good: a book of uncommon decency and much common sense.

Russell Shaw is a writer and journalist in Washington, D.C. His latest book is Ministry or Apostolate: What Should the Catholic Laity Be Doing? (Our Sunday Visitor, 2002).




GAINESVILLE COLLEGE REMOVES OFFENSIVE ART AFTER PROTEST

The Catholic League began its protest of an art exhibit at a Gainesville college on February 28. On March 12, we declared victory.

It was on February 28 that we learned of an art exhibit at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, Florida; it began on February 8 and was to run through March 29. The school decided to host an exhibit by Pat Payne, “A Look at Violence in Religious and Sexual Imagery,” that depicted the following:

Jesus being sodomized

Jesus with pierced genitalia

Jesus being masturbated by a woman

After William Donohue watched a video of the WCJB-TV (Gainesville) news story on the art, he blasted the school in a news release.

“This is the Lenten treat that Santa Fe Community College has chosen to present to Christians,” Donohue said. He then explained that he would take his complaint to the president of the college, the school’s trustees and those members of the Florida state legislature whose duty it is to oversee education funding. “We are asking that they use the maximum degree of powers vested in them to deal with hate speech,” Donohue said.

Leslie Lambert, chairperson of the Creative Arts and Humanities Department, defended the art saying, “If it causes people to stop and think, and to confirm their own value system or to reevaluate their value system, then I am pleased as an educator.” Donohue responded saying that “if she wants people to stop and think, then why doesn’t she substitute Martin Luther King for Jesus and then explain to African American students that this isn’t hate speech—it’s just about getting people to think. Or maybe she could donate a portrait of her own mother being sodomized. That would work.”

Donohue also criticized the faculty for not condemning the art. He said they would only complain if someone were caught smoking while viewing the exhibit.

On the same day as our news release, Patrick Scully, the league’s director of communications, led off the evening news on WCJB-TV by blasting the exhibit, the school and Leslie Lambert. In the same news clip was the school’s president, Dr. Jackson Sasser, and Professor Lambert. The best Sasser could do was to say that a warning sign had been posted outside the exhibit and that a faculty member was assigned to the area. Lambert repeated her observation that the art was designed to make people think. She did not explain why some might be given to vomiting instead.

On March 12 it was all over but the shouting. Feeling the pressure, Santa Fe Community College announced that it had moved the offensive artwork from a public exhibit to a professor’s office. “It’s great news to learn that this obscene and blasphemous artwork has been dumped in some professor’s office,” said Donohue.

In the Catholic League’s news release on the subject, Donohue said it was outrageous that a publicly-funded college had decided to profane the sacred. He then said that “The best way to resolve problems like these in the future is to deny anyone a Ph.D. unless he or she has worked in a blue collar job for at least two years.” Donohue personally recommended “shoveling coal,” though he was open to waiting on tables and tending bar. “This would not only provide a reality check for aspiring intellectuals,” he offered, “it would actually give them a chance to meet the proletariat whom they are so fond of writing about.”

The president of the college, Dr. Jackson Sasser, said that as a man of faith he would not want to see the exhibit. We think this is too weak. Surely he could have expressed his condemnation of the exhibit at a college function. You can write to him at Office of the President, Santa Fe Community College, 3000 NW 83rd Street, Gainesville, FL 32606.

 




RASH OF CARTOONS ON PEDOPHILIA

News reports on the problem of priests engaged in the sexual molestation of youngsters led to a rash of cartoons lampooning the Church. Clearly the most objectionable ones were those that portrayed all priests as predators.

Newspapers which ran such cartoons included the New York Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dayton Daily News, South Bend Tribune, North Country Times (Escondido, California), Arizona Republic and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Some say that when the Church blunders it is fair game for cartoonists. We wouldn’t quarrel with this if there were a level playing field. For example, we don’t remember a rash of cartoons lampooning all homosexuals in the 1980s even though many gays pressed to keep the bathhouses open after it became known that such places facilitated the transmission of AIDS. That would have been great fodder for cartoonists. Yet they demurred.

Printed below is one of the most highly political cartoons we’ve seen recently. It lumps all priests as child molesters and puts a positive spin on homosexual adoption. Steve Benson of the Arizona Republic is responsible for this one; both the cartoonist and the newspaper frequently lash out at the Catholic Church.




NEW YORK TIMES PULLS CARTOON MOCKING 9-11 WIDOWS THEN POSTS CARTOON MOCKING CATHOLIC PRIESTS

On March 5, the New York Times pulled a cartoon by Ted Rall that mocks widows of the 9-11 terror attack for being greedy. The cartoon was fed to the website of the New York Times by Universal Press Syndicate and was taken down when widows complained. Christine Mohan, the newspaper’s spokeswoman, said the “subject matter was inappropriate.”

Yet on March 6, the Times features a cartoon by Glenn McCoy on its website that mocks Catholic priests for being sinners. The Universal Press Syndicate cartoon shows a woman in the confessional saying to the priest, “You Go First”; this is an obvious reference to news reports on priest pedophilia. Moreover, on March 5, the same day the Rall cartoon was pulled, the Times posted a cartoon by DeOre of Universal Press Syndicate that also mocked sinful priests in the confessional. And on January 20, the Times published in its newspaper a particularly vicious cartoon by Don Wright of Tribune Media Service that depicted the Catholic Church as being against abortion but accepting of pedophilia.

We sent the following news release to all major media outlets across the country alerting them to the inconsistencies in the “newspaper of record”:

“This provides a good window into the mind of the New York Times and what we see isn’t pretty. It’s okay to malign the nearly 50,000 priests in the United States because some are pedophiles but it is not okay to malign widows of the 9-11 horror because some are alleged to be greedy. In our estimation, both subject matters are in appropriate.

“The reason for the disparate treatment is not hard to discern. The New York Timesdoesn’t want to offend women but doesn’t mind offending priests. Why? It’s a matter of political instincts. For the Times, women’s rights are inextricably tied to abortion rights. Indeed, it has never found an abortion it hasn’t approved of but has yet to find a Church teaching on sexual ethics it has approved of. It’s really not that hard to figure out. Just read the New York Times on a daily basis.”




MASSACHUSETTS ATTORNEY GENERAL SEEKS TO TEAR DOWN CHURCH-STATE WALL

Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly has announced an ambitious plan to deal with the problem of child molestation by priests in the Boston Archdiocese. He proposes to involve his office in the recruitment, selection, training and monitoring of priests.

We did not hold back in denouncing Reilly’s plan. Here is what we told the media:

“On February 13, John Roberts of the Massachusetts ACLU was quoted as saying that the climate that has been created over the problems in the Boston Archdiocese reminds him of ‘the old McCarthy era.’ We now know who the new Joe McCarthy is—Attorney General Thomas Reilly. In fact, Reilly is worse than McCarthy. McCarthy was best known for his ‘guilt by association’ tactics. Reilly takes ‘guilt by association’ to new heights by assuming that any young Catholic man interested in pursuing the priesthood must subject himself to the scrutiny of the state.

“The Catholic League has thus far stayed out of this controversy because it is not our job to police the Church. We are here to defend individual Catholics and the institutional Church against defamation and discrimination. In short, we know our place. It’s too bad Attorney General Reilly doesn’t know his. But if he pursues his power grab he’ll quickly learn what it is: some judge will put him in his place. That’s after Reilly is introduced to the First Amendment.”




SUPREME COURT HEARS LANDMARK VOUCHER CASE; CATHOLIC LEAGUE AMICUS BRIEF GETS A HEARING

On February 20, the U.S. Supreme Court heared oral arguments in Zelman v. Doris Simmons-Harris, the case that involves the Cleveland voucher program. The Catholic League has filed an amicus curiae brief supporting the constitutionality of the program. The day before the hearing we explained to media why our interest in this issue is so strong:

“In the mid-1990s, a federal court orders the state of Ohio to take over the failed Cleveland schools, citing ‘emergency conditions.’ A voucher program is instituted giving parents up to $2,250 to send their children to a school of their choice. Most of them choose Catholic schools. And this leads the ‘friends of the poor’ to sue: they claim this amounts to a violation of the principle of church and state. But everyone knows that it wasn’t the state of Ohio that chose to send the voucher kids to Catholic schools. Their parents did. No matter, the public school establishment will have none of it. They literally cringe from competition.

“The Catholic League’s friend-of-the-court brief, written by University of Notre Dame Law School professor Gerard Bradley and Princeton University professor Robert P. George, challenges previous court characterizations of Catholic schools as being ‘pervasively sectarian.’ They maintain that the term is loaded with prejudice and has led to decisions that discriminate against Catholic schools based upon a caricature.

“The federal courts have a long and undistinguished record of discriminating against Catholic schools. The high court is now presented with a case that addresses past inequities and therefore carries landmark opportunities. It is our hope that the judges seize the moment and reach a decision that provides fresh chances for our nation’s minorities.”




CLARIFICATION

In the January/February Catalyst, several examples of anti-Catholicism on the sly were mentioned in an article by that name. One of the listings was a critical statement on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that deserves clarification.

The newspaper had reported that a nightclub, Chapel of Blues Club, was formerly a Catholic church. We questioned the tone of the article and wondered why the reporter never mentioned that it was more recently a warehouse and before that an Episcopalian church. We have since learned that the newspaper incorrectly reported that the building was once a Catholic church, making moot our criticism