The New York Times recently reported that a majority of Catholics (it did not cite the percentage, either in the article or on the New York Times/CBS Poll website) “are at odds with the [Catholic] church’s official stance [on the Obama mandate].” We found these results a bit puzzling. A recent survey by the Pew Research [...]
Let’s contemplate a scenario: assume that the federal government tries to censor the New York Times, and that critics of the newspaper take it to task for complaining that their “free speech” rights have been violated. The Times would be justly angered at the suggestion that their First Amendment right to free speech was being discussed [...]
In February, President Barack Obama launched his “African Americans for Obama” campaign. What was of particular interest to us was the accompanying video that was cut to help promote it. In the video, President Obama explicitly called on African Americans to go “to your faith community” in order to get the word out about his campaign [...]
Never has there been a more vicious, hate-filled anti-Catholic advertisement in a prominent American newspaper than the one found in the March 9 New York Times by Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). The demonization of Catholicism was palpable. The pretext of the ad was the Catholic Church’s opposition to the Health and Human Services mandate forcing [...]
During a recent GOP debate, Newt Gingrich charged that in the last presidential campaign the elite media never asked “why Barack Obama voted in favor of legalizing infanticide.” Gingrich wasn’t off by much—Obama was rarely asked about it, and never was he pressed on this issue. Even now, the media cover-up that Gingrich alleged is patently [...]
Recently, Rep. Michael Grimm’s request that the Empire State Building shine red in honor of the elevation of New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan to Cardinal was denied. The decision was predictable. The problem with Cardinal Dolan is that he is not a mass murderer. If he were, he may have been honored the way Mao Zedong [...]
The Obama administration will not extend a religious exemption to Catholic non-profits who don’t want their insurance carrier to provide for abortion-inducing drugs, but it has decided to grant a religious exemption to an Indian tribe so they can kill bald eagles. The Northern Arapaho Tribe threatened to sue the government for violating its religious liberties [...]
Some of the critics of Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have recently gone well beyond Catholic bashing. On the blog site of the New York Review of Books, Garry Wills called Santorum a modern-day Torquemada, a man who “equates contraception with the guillotine.” On examiner.com, Michael Hughes compared Santorum to the Taliban, arguing he wants “a [...]
Readers of Catalyst know that we have long felt that Father Gordon MacRae has been treated unjustly. In 1994, he was sentenced to prison for up to 67 years for allegedly molesting a minor. His case garnered national attention when Dorothy Rabinowitz raised serious questions about MacRae’s guilt in a pair of articles in the Wall [...]
We recently got a tip from a friend that when he was searching for a book on Amazon.com, The Priest of the Fathers, many patently obscene books turned up as well. Moreover, just typing in “priests” and “Catholic priests” yielded similar results; the words “priests and fathers” triggered even more highly obscene results. We wrote to [...]
