The Catholic League is seeking a disclaimer from the director of “The Da Vinci Code,” Ron Howard, that would inform the audience that what they are about to see is based on fiction, not fact. An open letter to Howard making this request was published in the March 6 New York Times (see p. 13).

What necessitated this move is the duplicity of Dan Brown, the author of the book upon which the movie is based. At times, Brown has said the book is fiction, but at other times he has said it is factual. For example, on June 9, 2003, “Today” show host Matt Lauer asked Brown, “How much of this [the book] is based on reality in terms of things that actually occurred?” To which Brown said, “Absolutely all of it.”

It was Brown’s dishonesty that motivated Bill Donohue to write to Howard last year asking him to put a disclaimer at the beginning of the film noting that it is fiction; the letter was dated March 18, 2005. Because Howard chose not to answer, preferring instead to speak to reporters who then relayed to Donohue what he said for a comment, Donohue decided to write an open letter to him in the New York Times.

It’s not just Brown’s remark to Matt Lauer and others that is disturbing; the book opens with three “facts,” none of which is true. And to top it off, John Calley, one of the movie’s co-producers, has admitted that the film is “conservatively anti-Catholic.”

As Donohue has said on TV, there is not a single producer in Hollywood who would boast that he is associated with a movie that is anti-Semitic, racist or homophobic. But when it comes to Catholics, a different rule applies. Hence, our vigorous response.

Sony, the company that is releasing the movie, and director Ron Howard, have both inserted disclaimers into their films in the past. Sony issued one in “The Merchant of Venice,” and Howard allowed one in “A Beautiful Mind,” so it is not persuasive to say they are averse to disclaimers.

We are happy that the Da Vinci Outreach, a national initiative to expose “the anti-Catholic lies” in the movie, has formally endorsed the league’s request for a disclaimer. We expect others will join this campaign.

Recent attempts to smear Chicago Archbishop Francis Cardinal George and Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Cardinal Mahony were met with a strong response from the Catholic League.

Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea, a psychologist who addressed the bishops in 2002, recently sent Cardinal George a letter saying he might be considered “an accessory to soul murder” because he didn’t act quickly enough to remove an accused priest, the Rev. Daniel McCormack, from ministry.

What Frawley-O’Dea didn’t say is that the police and local prosecutors found no credible allegations against the priest. Nor did she mention that the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services investigated Father McCormack but never notified the archdiocese that it was doing so. And even after it concluded that he may be guilty, it still said nothing! Besides, Cardinal George apologized for not acting quicker.

Cardinal Mahony recently made some controversial remarks about pending immigration legislation, and it was this subject that led KABC talk show host Doug McIntyre to call Cardinal Roger M. Mahony a “molester”: he said the “M stands for molester.” We branded the smear libelous.

We concluded our news release by saying, “There is nothing bigoted about criticizing any priest, including the pope. But what Frawley-O’Dea and McIntyre have done isn’t criticism—it’s hate speech.”

William A. Donohue

When Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code was originally published, we ignored it. We did so because we are generally dismissive of novels. But things began to change when we learned that Brown was selling his work as an authentic historical account.

In October 2003, ABC-TV invited the Catholic League to send a staff member to view a rough cut of an upcoming ABC News special, “Jesus, Mary, and Da Vinci.” Joseph de Feo, now an editor at the Capital Research Center in Washington (Terry Scanlon’s gain, our loss), represented the league. He was upset to learn that though Brown saw his book as fiction, he also declared himself to be “a believer” in the book’s plot.

The ABC special was disconcerting on several levels. Indeed, as de Feo wrote in the December 2003 Catalyst, “The program suggested that there is something sinister about ‘orthodoxy,’ and its often-ominous tone was better suited to a program on the Trilateral Commission and the New World Order than to a program on a major world religion.” But it was the program’s “inconsistent use of evidence” that caught de Feo’s eye. This tactic, employed by Brown himself, ultimately triggered a Catholic League response.

One of the books Brown read when writing his novel was Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Baigent and Leigh now say that Brown did more than consult their book—they say he lifted what they call the “central architecture” of their thesis. Indeed, they sued Brown (Lincoln was not party to the suit) for plagiarism and the case wound up in a London court.

When I first read this, I was puzzled. How could Baigent and Leigh, whose 1982 book was on the non-fiction list, sue a novelist? Isn’t that what novelists do, offer a fictional story of some chapter in history? There was a bigger problem, too, because Baigent and Leigh had the audacity to write that Christ survived the crucifixion and eventually married Mary Magdalene; the Catholic Church, according to this tale, suppressed the truth from being told. So my question was: How could these authors maintain that their book was non-fiction when there is absolutely no evidence to back up their fabulous claims?

As it turned out, the lawyers for Baigent and Leigh maintained that their clients’ book is not “a historical account of facts and it does not purport to be such.” So what is it? “Historical conjecture,” they said. See how cute this is? Because Baigent and Leigh now hold that their book is not a historical volume, they are free to sue Brown for an infringement of copyright. In short, they’re all living in fantasy land, and they’re all plainly dishonest.

Brown, and the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, are emblematic of a deceitful genre of writers, producers and directors. For example, in the 1970s, Alex Haley gave usRoots, a book which purported to be an accurate account of slavery; it became the basis of an enormously popular television series. Not only was Haley sued for plagiarism by white and black authors—and forced to settle out of court—he admitted taking considerable liberties in weaving his tale: When pressed to provide historical evidence for his book, Haley replied that it was “faction”—part fact and part fiction.

Oliver Stone’s “JFK” was a conspiracy theory about the Kennedy assassination made for the big screen. What made it particularly despicable was the release of study guides for classroom use; they were funded by Warner Brothers and distributed to 13,000 high school and college history teachers.

Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad,” a movie about slave traders and the early American judicial system, was the subject of a lawsuit for plagiarism. After Spielberg won that round, he was blasted by historians for ripping off the public: his studio sent study guides to 18,000 college and 2,000 high school educators. The movie was criticized for being nothing more than propaganda, and the study guides were denounced for being exploitative.
We don’t expect there will be any study guides to accompany Ron Howard’s adaptation of Brown’s hoax, but that hardly resolves the problem. On the movie’s website, there is a clip with a voice-over saying, “We are in the middle of a war. One that has been going on forever. To protect a secret so powerful that if revealed it would devastate the very foundations of mankind.” It ends with a foreboding remark about this being “the biggest cover up in human history.”

Speaking for the Vatican, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a friend of Pope John Paul II, last year labeled the book “anti-Catholic.” John Calley, the film’s co-producer, last year branded the movie “conservatively anti-Catholic.” Is it any wonder why the Catholic League isn’t taking this lying down?

By Eugene J. Fisher

Patrick J. Gallo, editor, Pius XII, the Holocaust and the Revisionists: Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2006. 218 pages. PB. NP.

Sister Margherita Marchione, Crusade of Charity: Pius XII and POW’s (1939-1945). New York: Paulist Press, 2006. 284 pages.

Ronald J. Rychlak, Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church saved Half a Million Jews from the Nazis. Dallas: Spence Publishing Co., 2005. 378 pages.

These three books, together with David G. Dalin’s The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis (reviewed in the September 2005 issue ofCatalyst), absolutely decimate the attacks on the reputation of Pope Pius XII made in the spate of books by James Carroll, John Cornwell, Daniel Goldhagen, David Kertzer, Michael Phayer, Gary Wills and Susan Zucotti. They meticulously re-examine the charges against Pius, charges which sadly have become deeply embedded in the very grain of our culture.

David Dalin is a rabbi, while Ronald Rychlak, Margherita Marchione, and Patrick Gallo are Catholic. This is of some significance since much has been made of the fact that the anti-Pius attackers are either Jews (Kertzer, Goldhagen, Zucotti) or Catholics. Protestants, in the main, have stayed out of the papal fray, having their own ambiguous history during the Holocaust with which to deal. The motivation of Jewish critics of the pope is complex. Historian Yosef Haim Yerushalmi put his finger on the nub of it in his response to Rosemary Radford Reuther in a 1974 conference when he noted that over the centuries when the Jews were in extremis they could look to the papacy for relief from attacks by secular powers, and usually received it. Thus, the inability of the Holy See to influence Nazism’s genocide in the 20th century was profoundly shocking to Jews. Yerushalmi, however, goes on to note the relative weakness of the papacy in modern times in secular affairs, and to distinguish between medieval Christian anti-Jewishness and modern, racial, genocidal anti-Semitism, though noting, as have Pope John Paul II and then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, that the former was, in Yerushalmi’s words, a “necessary cause” for explaining the latter, though not a “sufficient cause,” being only one of a number of factors involved.

The motivation of Catholic critics of Pius is perhaps more subtle, though here again Yerushalmi shed light on it in 1974. While he acknowledges Reuther’s “sincere and profound involvement in the fate of the Jews,” he worries that for her it appears to be “part of a larger problem—that of the church itself,” in which “she places the dawn of a new attitude toward the Jews within the context of an obvious hope for a total regeneration of the church.” He goes on to note that “historically, reformist movements within the church have often been accompanied by an even more virulent anti-Semitism,” citing the Cluniac reform, Martin Luther (who advocated the destruction of synagogues and the expulsion of Jews) and Calvin’s Geneva, where Jews were forbidden to reside, though maintaining a legal right of residence and freedom to worship in Rome. The defenders of Pius, I believe, are quite accurate in noting similarly that for the authors of the anti-Pius books, the critique of the Church of the 1940’s is in fact a part of a larger, contemporary reformist agenda, which raises quite legitimate questions about their academic objectivity. Indeed, in the case of Reuther, the fact that she had used Jewish suffering to further her own agenda became patently clear only a few years later when she published a book rejecting the very existence of the Jewish state and declaring the Palestinians to be the true “Jews” of the time, thus placing Israel and real Jews into the category of “Nazis.”

The books reviewed here are for obvious reasons reactive in nature. As Joseph Bottum notes in the epilogue to the Gallo volume, we still await “a non-reactive account of Pius’ life and times, a book driven not by a reviewer’s instinct to answer charges but by the biographer’s impulse to tell an accurate story.” He adds, I believe wisely, that “before that can be done well, the archives of Pius XII’s pontificate will probably have to be fully catalogued and opened.”

Rychlak’s book, in a sense, comes closest to that goal, narrating Pius’ life within the context of his times. His estimate that the Church, through its nunciatures (which handed out false baptismal certificates by the tens of thousands to members of “the family of Jesus”) and through its monasteries and convents, rectories and other institutions saved some 500,000 Jews, is actually on the moderate side, with estimates ranging up to 800,000. Dalin, the rabbi, and Marchione agree with Rychlak that Pius in fact meets the criteria for a “Righteous Gentile” as defined by Yad va Shem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust museum, which Pope John Paul II visited so reverently and penitentially during his pilgrimage there in the Millennium Year. Gallo’s book is composed of essays, half of which were written by himself, half by such internationally prominent scholars as Matteo Napolitano of Italy and Juno Levai of Hungary. Half of the essays are new for this book, half published in journals before inclusion here. Readers will be treated to the trenchant wit of Justus George Lawler and the inexorable marshalling of evidence of Ronald Rychlak. George Sim Johnson takes on the myths surrounding Pius XI’s “hidden encyclical,” which like a Brooklyn egg cream was in fact neither “hidden” nor an “enclyclical” (since never promulgated, it remained simply a draft). Bottum himself in his essays fills in the gaps, such as the Ardeatine Massacre, and, as noted, comments incisively on the controversy as a whole.

Each volume, in its own way, attempts as well to explain why the attacks on Pius’ reputation were made. Dalin, not without reason, calls it a phenomenon of the culture wars of our time, in which the “left wing,” secular media latched on to the discrediting of Pius as part of its not-so-subtle attempt to discredit not just Catholicism, but religious faith in general. Gallo notes the continuity between the current charges against Pius and those made by the Soviet Union in its Cold War propaganda against the West, again with Pius as a symbolic target for a larger agenda. It is true that the current attackers have come from what would be called “the Left” and the defenders from “the Right.” It may be that to adjudicate this issue, like those surrounding Pius himself as Bottum indicates, we will have to await a time when all the documentation is out and the war itself a bit more distant in time and emotions.

Dalin and Rychlak are both critical of the work of the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission, launched with great hope by the Holy See and the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations in December 1999, which I was asked by Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy, then President of the Pontifical Commission of Religious Relations with the Jews, to coordinate on the Catholic side. I would like to state that Professor Michael Marrus, on the Jewish side, and all three Catholic scholars acted with integrity and professionalism throughout what turned out to be for us all a grueling ordeal.

I believe those who read the actual statement of the group will come away with a more positive view of what the group accomplished than its critics present. The statement praises the objectivity and thoroughness of the Actes et Documents du Saint-Siege relatifs a la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, a 12 volume set of documents put together by four Jesuit scholars from the massive materials in the Holy See’s “Secret Archives” for the period of WWII. The statement also praises the four papers produced by the group analyzing particular volumes, and the group’s correspondence with its sponsors.

Marchione’s Crusade of Charity is drawn largely from documents contained in Actes et Documents. It is her fourth book, all published by Paulist Press, on Pius XII. Whereas the first three were reactions to Pius’ critics in general, this one centers on the massive efforts made by the Holy See during the Second World War to respond to enquiries about Prisoners of War, and family members in general, including Jewish family members who were among the missing. It shows a Holy See deeply involved in what was at the time among the most humanitarian of missions: helping people, whether Catholics, Jews or Protestants, to discover the fate of their loved ones. Page after page is touched with moving testimony to love at its most basic, and to the huge efforts of the relatively small and understaffed Vatican to cope with the thousands of requests coming to it in the midst of a world gone insane. Whatever one thinks of the Pius Wars, this is a book to read. It is a book which gives us models to emulate in one’s own life.

Underlying the specific issue of Pope Pius, of course, is the deeper issue of the relationship between traditional Christian teaching on Jews and Judaism and the mindset not only of the perpetrators but also of the bystanders of Europe during the Holocaust. For whatever the ultimate, and hopefully dispassionate historical judgment of the actions of one pope, we Catholics, as Pope John Paul II reminded us time and again, must come to grips with that history, repent its sins, and do what needs to be done to ensure that it will never happen again. A proper framing of this deeper issue can be found in

Catholic Teaching on the Shoah: Implementing the Holy See’s “We Remember”

 (USCCB Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Relations, 2001).

Eugene J. Fisher is the Associate Director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Washington, DC.

(This is a revised and greatly expanded version of a review that first appeared in Catholic News Service.)

In the last edition of Catalyst, we reported that Colorado lawmakers were considering three bills that would lift the statutes of limitation for child sexual abuse lawsuits as they apply to Catholic priests. The three Colorado bishops, led by Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput, fought these measures, as did the Catholic League. Bill Donohue wrote to all members of the Colorado legislature saying the bills were discriminatory. Fortunately, there’s been a breakthrough.

On March 14, House Bill 1088 passed by one vote in the Colorado Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill, if approved by the Senate, would remove the statute of limitations for criminal lawsuits, but would not affect civil lawsuits. Importantly, it would cover both private and public entities. These amendments won the endorsement of the state’s three bishops.

The real story here is the willingness of the Colorado legislature to give public school employees, and every other segment of the population that works with minors, a pass. Were it not for Archbishop Chaput and others, the lawmakers would have succeeded in crafting a law that would impact only priests. Just as interesting is the reaction of the Colorado education establishment to the revised laws that blanket all entities, including the public schools.

Archbishop Chaput said from the beginning that he had no problem with any law that fairly covered everyone (and neither did the Catholic League). When word got out that Chaput was serious, and lawmakers were rethinking the bills so that they would have uniform application, the teachers unions and their sister organizations took a deep breath. For example, the Colorado Association of School Boards and the Colorado Association of School Executives said they were “studying” the bills (apparently they’re still studying them since no one has heard from them since) while the Colorado Education Association (CEA) brazenly spoke out against them. As we told the press, what started as a Catholic-bashing crusade “opened Pandora’s box for Colorado’s teachers,” putting them in a “lose-lose situation.”

Truth to tell, the CEA has quite a record dealing with child abusers. In 1997 it spent a small fortune trying to intimidate the parents of children who brought suit against an alleged child molester: the CEA launched a libel suit. According to one media account, the CEA pursued the accusers “as if they were all conspirators in a right-wing plot to overthrow the public education system rather than concerned, fearful parents….”

Rep. Terrance Carroll did the CEA’s bidding. On February 13, he said that amending the bills to include the public schools was just a ruse—he didn’t think the bishops would support any bill that would lift the statute of limitations, even if all entities were covered. Indeed, he said he was ready to “call the Catholic Church’s bluff.” But when the bishops endorsed these revised bills, Carroll exploded the very next day saying their stance “thoroughly disgusts me.” As we said in a news release, “looks like he lost” in his bid to call the Catholic Church’s bluff.

Another issue that came to light recently was the political machinations of those out to get the Catholic Church. Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald, whose bill would have targeted only the Catholic Church, was working with Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). This group, which has become increasingly unreasonable and hostile to any attempt by Church officials to practice self-defense, put Fitz-Gerald in touch with Yeshiva University law professor Marci Hamilton, a relentless critic of the Catholic Church who represented alleged victims in California. Just connecting the dots is enough to make one dirty.

This is quite a stew: bigoted lawmakers, self-interested teachers unions, professional victims’ groups and vindictive law professors. What all of them have in common is a hostile attitude towards the Catholic Church masked as an interest in child welfare. It’s time to call a spade a spade.

The March Catalyst contained a story about a New Hampshire bill that would have mandated Catholic priests to reveal to state authorities information learned about child sexual abuse in the confessional. Subsequently, by a vote of 208-111 it was sent to interim study for the next year.

Bill Donohue wrote to every New Hampshire lawmaker who sits on the Children and Family Law Committee asking that they reject this initiative. He argued there was no evidence that this bill would have any impact on child sexual abuse, and that in any case it was clearly unconstitutional.

The bill’s sponsor, Mary Stuart Gile, would be ill-advised to bring the bill back next year. We’ve beaten her twice (in 2003 and 2006), and we pledge to confront her in 2007 if she tries again.

The Connecticut legislature’s Public Health Committee is considering a bill that would require all hospitals in the state, including four Roman Catholic ones, to provide emergency contraception to rape victims. The Connecticut Catholic Conference asked for a religious exemption for Catholic hospitals, and it was seconded by the Catholic League.

William Donohue wrote the following letter on March 2 to members of the Public Health Committee asking them to accede to the Catholic Conference’s request:

Dear Connecticut Lawmaker:

Requiring Roman Catholic hospitals to abide by state strictures on the distribution of emergency contraception ineluctably violates both the religious liberty provision of the First Amendment and the establishment provision, and that is why I am urging you to reject such an appeal.

A Catholic institution cannot be considered Catholic if it is mandated to yield its religious prerogatives to the state. It is only just that the time-honored exemption afforded religious institutions in matters like this be affirmed. Not to do so sets up a judicial battle that will drain the resources of both sides, the likely outcome of which will be to respect the First Amendment right of Catholic hospitals to maintain their autonomy.

Finally, there is no evidence that the current practice of having Catholic hospitals make referrals to other hospitals isn’t working. In other words, on the basis of legal, religious, moral and practical grounds, the case to provide an exemption to Catholic hospitals is decisive.

On March 6, Connecticut’s state victim advocate, James Papillo, told the state legislature’s Public Health Committee that it was anti-Catholic to force Catholic hospitals to give rape victims emergency contraception. The next day, Lt. Gov. Kevin Sullivan called for Papillo to resign: he accused Papillo, a Catholic deacon, of abusing his office. Papillo refused to do so.

We wasted no time weighing in on Papillo’s side. Here is our news release on this subject:

“Lt. Gov. Sullivan is overreaching. If he doesn’t like James Papillo’s position, so be it. But who is he to tell an appointed official to resign simply because of a partisan squabble? Sullivan’s outburst shows contempt for freedom of speech and the democratic process. Does he really think that appointed officials need to clear their remarks with him before they speak? Sullivan could benefit from a course in Civics 101.

“Papillo is correct to say that ‘What’s being proposed here is a solution in search of a problem.’ As he instructs, the four Catholic hospitals in Connecticut routinely refer rape victims to other hospitals if they think the woman is pregnant and wants emergency contraception. ‘Victims are not being denied services,’ Papillo rightly observes.
“Perhaps Sullivan is unaware of the fact that an innocent unborn child who is at risk—at risk of having his or her life intentionally terminated—is precisely the kind of person that a state’s victim advocate should defend. Looks like he needs a course in Bio 101 as well.”

Anti-Catholic attacks like this are frequently being launched by Catholics themselves. That doesn’t make them any less objectionable. Indeed, such outbursts are all the more offensive coming as they are from those who profess to be Catholic.

If Catholic hospitals have to stop being Catholic in order to survive, they should close.

On March 14, the Boston Globe ran an editorial criticizing Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney for endorsing a bill that would allow Catholic Charities to continue providing adoption services without servicing gay couples. In a related development, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom said he would not attend the installation ceremony of former San Francisco Archbishop William Levada as a cardinal because of the Vatican’s opposition to gay adoptions.

We told the media that the response by the Boston Globe was “perhaps the most anti-Catholic editorial we’ve seen in years by any major American newspaper.” The editorial lectured Romney that he is “governor, not a Catholic bishop.” Worse, after citing John F. Kennedy’s remarks on separation of church and state, the editorial accused Romney, a Mormon, of “accepting instructions on public policy from the pope.”

Newsom, and the entire Board of Supervisors in San Francisco, previously refused to attend a Mass for Pope John Paul II that was presided over by Archbishop Levada, so it came as no surprise that Newsom would refuse to travel to Rome for Levada’s installation. He did so citing as “corrosive and divisive” the Vatican’s opposition to gay adoption.

“It’s open season on the Catholic Church,” we declared. “The bullies need to be beaten back and branded as the bigots that they are.”

On March 3, Bill Donohue wrote to every member of the New York State Assembly asking them to censure one of their colleagues, Adele Cohen. The request was occasioned by Cohen’s treatment of Catholics when they met to discuss tuition tax credits. Donohue explains as follows:

“On February 14, when eighth-grade students from St. Patrick’s School in Bay Ridge met with Cohen, they were treated to a lecture on how women should not be stay-at-home moms. Her dismissive treatment of the students grew worse when she met the pastor and principal of St. Bernadette’s in Dyker Heights: Cohen literally shut the door in their faces. What occasioned her insolence was a comment made by the principal, Sister Joan DiRienzo, that Cohen’s refusal to even meet with the group from St. Bernadette’s would be remembered in November. According to Sister Joan, ‘In the very brief time we had with Ms. Cohen, asking to be heard, she made a derogatory comment to me personally. She was not only rude, but also sarcastic.’

“Sensing that she had offended Catholics, Cohen tried to spin the issue by writing a letter to Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio claiming she was victimized by the Catholics who met with her. But even in this instance, she couldn’t hide her contempt for Catholicism: ‘It makes me wonder what kind of education the Church is providing in its schools.’

“Now if a group of Orthodox Jewish clergy, parents and children met with a Catholic lawmaker about the need for school vouchers and were subjected to an ideological harangue about the merits of stay-at-home moms, had a door slammed in their faces and were treated with insolence, what would happen? Add to this a scenario where the lawmaker writes a prominent rabbi complaining about the way he was treated and ends with a snide comment about the kind of education being afforded in neighborhood yeshivas. Wouldn’t that person be labeled a bigot? And wouldn’t that be considered grounds for censure?

“The disgraceful behavior of Assemblywoman Adele Cohen makes her unfit for public office. A vote to censure her needs to be taken.”

We have no realistic hope of getting Albany lawmakers to turn on one of their own, but no public person wants bad publicity. Besides, it is rumored that Cohen wants to become a judge. This won’t help her chances.

On February 21, Bill Donohue e-mailed Colin McNickle, the editorial page editor of thePittsburgh Tribune Review, requesting permission to reprint an article by Don Collins of February 10, and a reply by Bob Lockwood of February 14 (when McNickle asked for more information about the Catholic League, Donohue directed him to our website and mentioned that Lockwood was a member of the board of directors of the Catholic League). The two columns, Donohue said, would appear in the April edition of our monthly journal, Catalyst. Then came his reply: “Permission denied.”

Donohue’s news release on this subject was as follows:

“Permission denied? Why? Because Lockwood ripped apart Collins’ anti-Catholic rant? (Collins is on the board of FAIR, an anti-immigrant and notoriously anti-Catholic group.) Here are some examples of what Collins wrote: U.S. policy is being shaped by ‘Rome and these bishops’; ‘We now have five male Catholic justices on the U.S. Supreme Court,’ thus creating an unseemly ‘concentration of power’; ‘Samuel Alito has been confirmed and installed, and this behind-the-scenes plan [of the Catholic Church] should get much of the credit’; the bishops are ‘infiltrating and manipulating the American democratic process at national, state and local levels’; and the bishops have ‘taken over the Republican Party.’ Has anyone told Howard Dean?

“McNickle did not like it when Lockwood said he should be ‘ashamed’ of himself for publishing the Collins piece, and said so on February 19. Indeed, the man who denied me permission to reprint the Collins article had the nerve to say that he would never be ashamed to print ‘points of view contrary to the conventional wisdom,’ because to do so would mean ‘the beginning of the end of a robust free press.’

“We now know what makes the Tribune Review jumpy—Catholicism and free speech. Unfortunately for them, I have a big mouth, and they can’t censor that.”

Contact McNickle at cmcnickle@tribweb.com