An array of persons not affiliated with the Archdiocese of San Francisco have joined some parishioners to wage war on Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone. At issue is a proposed contract for teachers at the four archdiocesan high schools. It seeks to assure fidelity to Church teachings.

Dissident Catholic organizations such as Call to Action, Dignity, and Catholics for Choice were among the first to condemn the archbishop. All three reject Church teachings, especially on sexual issues, and have been criticized by many bishops; the latter has been condemned twice by the bishops’ conference.

Showing nothing but contempt for the First Amendment, lawmakers from Sacramento and San Francisco injected themselves into the dispute. The internal affairs of the archdiocese is none of their business. The media, led by the San Francisco Chronicle, predictably took the side of Cordileone’s critics.

Joining the fray is Sam Singer, the self-described “half Catholic, half Jewish” public relations giant who has been accused of having a problem with the truth. He falsely claimed that Cordileone was going to “purge gay, lesbian and pro-choice teachers.” He also called on Pope Francis to have him removed.

Catholics also worked against the archbishop. The University of San Francisco, a Jesuit-run school, hosted a forum for those opposed to Cordileone. Speaking at the event was the former head of the archdiocese’s Catholic Charities and a lawyer from a radical pro-abortion group. The National Catholic Reporter allowed San Francisco’s elected city attorney space to criticize the archbishop. Their input led many staff and teachers to protest the faculty handbook.

The Catholic League is proud to stand up to these activists (see pp. 4-7) and defend Archbishop Cordileone. This well-orchestrated attack would never have gotten off the ground had it not been for those who are wholly unaffiliated with the archdiocese. As such, it represents one of the most brazen attempts by Catholic dissidents and Catholic haters to manipulate public opinion against the Catholic Church.

Some of the accusations that have been made are so totally untrue that those making them either did not read the relevant documents or decided to ignore their plain wording. Demagoguery abounds. Make no mistake about it, this is a despicable campaign launched against a loyal son of the Church, Archbishop Cordileone.

It is particularly galling to read statements made by lawmakers bragging how San Francisco is known all over the world for its tolerance. It is nothing of the sort. To wit: the Catholic League, represented by the Thomas More Law Center, once sued the city for its religious hostility to Catholics.

This fight isn’t over. Bet on it.

In 2013, Rebecca Randles, an attorney who works with supreme Catholic-suing lawyer Jeffrey Anderson, sued Bill Donohue and the Catholic League for allegedly libeling a man who had made accusations against a priest in 2011. There was nothing libelous about anything Donohue said, and in January 2015 the suit was dismissed on all counts.

When a Missouri man made allegations against a priest who allegedly molested him and three other altar boys in the early 1980s, Donohue investigated the accuser and found that he had been implicated in a murder. While another man was convicted, it was public record that the priest accuser had “motive to commit the murder and the opportunity to do so.”

Donohue took the information from court records—he did not make it up. Moreover, two of the three altar boys were dead, and the one living man said that none of the abuse ever occurred.

The man who sued Donohue and the Catholic League was riding high when he hired Randles: he had just won a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese. But Randles proved no match for Erin Mersino, who represented the Catholic League; she works at the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The judge dismissed the case mostly on technicalities—the defamation suit was time barred by New York’s statute of limitations (almost two years had elapsed before the suit was filed)—and on other matters.

Thus, attempts to intimidate us failed.

William A. Donohue

This article, which has been slightly revised, was published in the February edition of Legatus magazine.

If there was one strain of political thought that was evident in the elections last November, it was libertarianism. Essentially, it maintains that the good society is best served by having a minimal role for government.

Is libertarianism a good thing? When it comes to taming the federal government’s appetite in regulating markets, it is. But when it comes to moral issues, that is a different story. Take doctor-assisted suicide.

Libertarians support doctor-assisted suicide. The government, they argue, has no business telling people they don’t have the right to terminate their own lives. Sounds seductively attractive at first glance: Whose rights are interfered with if someone elects to kill himself? It’s a consensual act, so why should there be any laws against it?

Let’s examine these propositions. Bribery is consensual but we wisely have laws against it. Why? Because the person making the bribe is given an unfair advantage over others, so it really doesn’t matter if the person making the bribe, as well as his happy recipient, like the transaction. Society matters. Now it is true that society does not have rights—only individuals do—but society surely has interests. Among them are justice and the general welfare of the people, as outlined in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution.

It is true that no one’s rights are being interfered with if someone chooses to kill himself. It is also true that no one’s rights are interfered with if two men choose to duel to the death in public. Why not allow them to kill themselves—the winner must kill his challenger in order to collect his booty—at Madison Square Garden and show it on pay-for-view TV?

Does anyone believe that the coarsening of our culture that such an exhibition would yield would be of no consequence? If human life is nothing more than a commodity to be disposed of any way we choose, would we not be going down a dangerous road? The history of the twentieth century, especially in Germany, suggests we would be.

The problem with the libertarian position is that it sees individual rights as dispositive of all societal interests. But there is more to the good society than rights. How people treat each other, and themselves, matters. Moreover, rights are not an end: they are a means. They are a means to liberty. The exercise of rights that intentionally results in the death of a human being is not advancing the cause of liberty; rather, it represents its perversion.

There are other problems with doctor-assisted suicide, namely the doctor. Doctors are trained to save lives, not end them. When we change their mission, in such a deadly fashion, we change who they are. Once they become mere instruments, their profession is no longer the same. How do we know this? Look what has happened in nations where doctor-assisted suicide is legal.

Euthanasia has a familiar history. It always starts with putting down the terminally ill, and it never stops there. Doctor-assisted suicide started with the dying in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Quebec, but within no time expanded to include many others. In this country, at least 70 percent of Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s patients were not dying, and some weren’t even ill. So-called mercy killing is not a slippery slope—it’s a sheet of ice.

It is a myth that some of the sick are suffering so badly that nothing can be done to stop it. Quite frankly, because of advances in medicine, those days are over. The  picture of the screaming patient writhing in pain is more than a canard—it is a cruel demagogic ploy promoted by those who have a vested ideological or financial interest in the budding euthanasia industry.

The merchants of death are not fixated on the elderly. They have targeted kids: the cause of infanticide is quite popular in some academic circles. Indeed, it is being seriously argued by Nobel Prize winners and Ivy League professors that parents should have the right to have their infants killed by a doctor. And how about those who, while physically healthy, are hopelessly depressed? Is their life really worth living?

The leading pro-death organization in America is Compassion and Choices, formerly known as the Hemlock Society. According to Wesley Smith, the nation’s most astute expert on this subject, this ill-named group “has even published a booklet about suicide by starvation for those who are not terminally ill.”

Robert Buchanan is a neurosurgeon at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as a psychiatrist. In his experience dealing with suicidal patients, every one of them who “had a failed suicide attempt would wake up from trying to kill themselves and say, ‘I’m glad that didn’t happen. I’m glad to be alive.'” Why should we affirm a law, then, that would deny the despondent a second chance?

If we are truly interested in achieving the good society, we need to ask ourselves how the adoption of policies that accelerate the death of innocent human beings facilitates that end.

The following letter was sent by Bill Donohue to Sacramento lawmakers on February 24:

Assemblyman Roger Hernández

Chairman, Assembly Labor and Employment Committee

1020 N Street, Room 155

Sacramento, CA 95814

Assemblyman Mark Stone

Chairman, Assembly Judiciary Committee

1020 N Street, Room 104

Sacramento, CA 95814

Dear Assemblymen Hernández and Stone:

On February 23, Assemblyman Phil Ting and Assemblyman Kevin Mullin asked the Assembly Labor and Employment Committee and the Assembly Judiciary Committee to launch an investigation of the proposed high school contracts for teachers in the San Francisco Archdiocese. The request is not only illicit, it is based on faulty information.

As intended by the Founders, the First Amendment insulates religious institutions from state encroachment. At a minimum this means that employment contracts, entered into voluntarily by teachers at religious schools, are, with rare exception, not the business of the state. That the courts, especially the U.S. Supreme Court, have repeatedly validated this fundamental constitutional right is incontestable.

While the constitutional issues at stake trump all other concerns, it is worth noting several other matters attendant to this request.

The basis of the request for a probe stems from a letter that eight members of the California legislature (noted below) sent to San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone on February 17. It contains much misinformation.

The letter asks Archbishop Cordileone to “withdraw new conditions for employment” at the high schools. It is too bad the lawmakers didn’t read the Media Advisory issued by the Archdiocese on February 3rd.

There are three new clauses to the contracts, but the contents do not represent a break with previous strictures. “At the outset,” said Archbishop Cordileone, “I wish to state clearly and emphatically that the intention underlying this document is not to target for dismissal from our schools any teachers, singly or collectively, nor does it introduce anything essentially new into the contract or the faculty handbook.” Indeed, the handbook and contract clauses, as explained by Superintendent Maureen Huntington, merely clarify existing expectations for Catholic teachers.

If the lawmakers disagree with this interpretation, then they should be precise: let them identify the new expectations for these teachers in the proposed contract.

In his letter of February 19 to the eight lawmakers, Archbishop Cordileone mentions that the legislators were making decisions based on erroneous information. He explicitly mentioned “the falsehood that the morality clauses apply to the teachers’ private life.” In their letter of February 17, these lawmakers claim that the contract affects the “professional, public, and private lives of every school employee” (my italic).

This statement is flatly wrong: the contract does not apply to the private lives of teachers. This is not open to interpretation. On February 4, the archdiocese released a statement on Church teachings and practices in the high schools. It stipulates that teachers “must refrain from public support of any cause or issue that is explicitly or implicitly contrary to that which the Catholic Church holds to be true….” It says nothing about the private lives of  teachers—it is speaking to the issue of publicly advocating causes that are in direct opposition to Church teachings.

A helpful Q&A statement on the contract proposals was also issued on February 4. Not only does it say that there is no “oath” being required of teachers, it even goes so far as to say that if teachers cannot assent to the teachings of the Catholic Church, “then they should at least avoid publicly undermining the lessons taught at the school of their employment.”

At this point, I must ask every state legislator: If you had in your employ a person who publicly opposed your positions on law and public policy, what would you do? The answer is obvious. Why, then, should the Catholic Church be held to a different standard? Just like you, those who work for the Catholic Church are not expected to tolerate mutiny.

The Q&A does not shy from stating what is explicitly expected, and it has nothing to do with policing a teacher’s private life. “What the new contract language seeks to do is point out that teachers in a Catholic school—regardless of their personal beliefs—have a professional obligation not to act publicly to ‘contradict, undermine or deny’ the religious message that the school exists to proclaim and which they are hired to advance. From the Archdiocesan viewpoint, this would mean public and active behavior that by its nature contradicts the school’s message.”

So, please, let’s stop with accusations that the Archdiocese of San Francisco is interested in monitoring the private lives of its teachers.

In their letter of February 17 to Archbishop Cordileone, and in their letter of February 23 to you, the eight lawmakers charge that the archdiocese is seeking to reclassify all teachers as “ministers” so as to avoid state scrutiny in matters of employment.

In the Q&A that was issued February 4, this issue is dealt with directly. To begin with, there are plenty of lay ministries in the Catholic Church, many of whom do not have specialized training. This has been true for ages. More important, consider what the high court has said. “The Supreme Court (see EEOC v. Hosanna-Tabor) has defined a minister as one to whom a church gives a leadership role in, and the primary duty of, helping the church spread its message and carry out its mission.”

Contrary to what the lawmakers assert, the archdiocese is not promiscuously expanding the definition of a minister. “Not all employees of the Catholic Church are ‘ministers,’ but in a Catholic School, all teachers are ministers of our faith.”

I speak from experience. I spent 20 years teaching in Catholic schools, ranging from the second grade through graduate school, and it most certainly was the clear expectation of parents who paid tuition for their children in elementary and secondary schools that they were being taught by men and women who were strong in the faith (I taught at an elementary school in Spanish Harlem in the 1970s, and later at a college in Pittsburgh). If that didn’t matter, the Puerto Rican and African-American parents would have saved their money and sent their children to a public school.

The Archdiocese of San Francisco is not even demanding that its teachers are strong in the faith, though that is surely the desired outcome. It is simply asking teachers not to publicly challenge the teachings of the Church. To put it differently, it is not interested in facilitating institutional suicide.

As chairmen of two important committees, please understand the chilling effect that these eight lawmakers are having on the affairs of the archdiocese. Catholic schools have a mission, and while not everyone agrees with it, many do; they expect that their leaders can pursue it without fear of intimidation or punitive sanctions.

It must also be asked if these lawmakers are raising similar concerns with the leaders of other faith communities? Christian schools, yeshivas, and Islamic schools exist in San Francisco and other parts of California.

Are any of their teacher contracts being scrutinized? If so, which schools are they? If not, why are the high schools in the Archdiocese of San Francisco being targeted for investigation?

It cannot go unmentioned that the primary driving force behind this request for a probe is the issue of sexuality. That these lawmakers disagree with the Catholic Church’s sexual ethics is hardly news, and that is their right. But no lawmaker has a right to impose sexual ethics of a secular nature on religious schools, including Catholic ones.

Finally, are we to believe that if a Catholic teacher were to publicly espouse racist views that these same lawmakers would not object? Indeed, would they not demand that he be fired? And would not Archbishop Cordileone make sure he was fired?

This is significant: racism, like abortion, is officially labeled as “intrinsically evil” by the Catholic Catechism. In other words, those who publicly promote abortion or racism have no legitimate role to play as Catholic ministers. Even those who do not agree that both of these issues should be seen as evil  should at least respect the right of the Catholic Church to teach otherwise.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

William A. Donohue, Ph.D.

President

cc:  Members of the Assembly Labor and Employment Committee

      Members of the Assembly Judiciary Committee

Hon. Phil Ting                               Hon. Kevin Mullin

Assemblyman, 19th District        Assemblyman, 22nd District

Hon. Richard Gordon                  Hon. Mark Leno

Assemblyman, 24th District       Senator, 11th District

Hon. David Chiu                           Hon. Jerry Hill

Assemblyman, 17th District        Senator, 13th District

Hon. Marc Levine                        Hon. Mark McGuire

Assemblyman, 10th District       Senator, 2nd District

The following letter was sent by Bill Donohue to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on March 4:

Supervisor Mark Farrell

Board of Supervisors

City Hall

San Francisco, CA 94102-4689

Dear Supervisor Farrell:

Yesterday, the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution, introduced by you, on the rights of teachers and administrators who work for the Archdiocese of San Francisco. It contains several errors of fact. More important, it contains lies.

The biggest lie is found in paragraph three. “WHEREAS, the City of San Francisco also respects the autonomy of the Archdiocese of San Francisco….” It is a lie because most of what follows proves that you and your colleagues have nothing but contempt for the autonomy of the archdiocese. As such, your palpable hostility to the doctrinal prerogatives of the archdiocese has grave First Amendment implications.

It is not the business of the state to police the internal affairs of any religious institution. Were a clergyman to lecture the Board of Supervisors on what its employment policies ought to be, it would be greeted with howls of protest citing separation of church and state. The establishment provision of the First Amendment cuts both ways.

Almost every world religion in history, in both Eastern and Western civilization, has found homosexual behavior to be sinful. Yet you single out the Catholic Church for holding to this teaching—which we learned from Judaism—thus showing your discriminatory colors. Will you now seek to monitor the handbook of teachers used by ministers, rabbis, and imams in their schools?

It is flatly wrong to assert that provisions in the proposed faculty handbook raise “serious concerns about how they would impact a teacher’s personal life” and the life of their students. As the archdiocese has repeatedly said, the personal lives of teachers is not its concern.

It is also flatly wrong to say that “San Francisco is known around the world as a place of inclusion, tolerance, and acceptance for individuals and their life choices, regardless of religion, sex, sexual orientation, or beliefs….” False. Your resolution is proof to the contrary: you seek to shove your secular values down the throat of the archdiocese.

Further proof that your self-congratulatory statement is wrong can be found by reviewing past court decisions against the Board of Supervisors.  In 2006, the Catholic League, represented by the Thomas More Law Center, sued the Board of Supervisors for passing an anti-Catholic resolution: the Board accused the Vatican of promoting “hateful” teachings and for “meddling” in its affairs. What was the “meddling”? The Church holds to a different position on the issue of gay adoptions.

The Ninth Circuit rejected the lawsuit but not without controversy. Of the six judges who addressed the question of government hostility to religion, they split 3-3. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the Board’s alleged tolerance for religion. Now you and your colleagues have just added to this discredited legacy.

Your resolution, though mostly flawed, is correct on one important matter. You correctly say that the new handbook maintains that faculty “must refrain from public support of any cause or issue that is explicitly or implicitly contrary to that which the Catholic Church holds to be true….” How remarkable! Would you keep on staff those who publicly oppose your positions? Do you see how foolish this makes you look?

Finally, you and I both know that your bigoted resolution has no legal teeth. I would add that it has no moral teeth as well.

Like it or not, no newspaper in the United States has more influence on our nation’s elites than the New York Times. And no one has consistently challenged its editorial positions with greater authority than Rev. Msgr. Daniel S. Hamilton. Fortunately, this Long Island priest has collected more than 300 of his letters-to-the-editor, many of which were printed in the Times, and had them republished in a new book, Jousting With The New York Times 1961-2014: Worldviews in Radical Conflict.

The following is a selection of his letters, some of which have been excerpted. They were chosen by Bill Donohue, his former altar boy.

October 7, 1964
On Ecumenism

Your otherwise clear-sighted editorial of Oct. 7 “On Ecumenism,” dealing with the aggiornamento within the Roman Catholic Church, contains one serious error: “Before Pope John was elected in 1958 it would have been fanciful to think of the Roman Catholic Church recognizing the possibility of merit or salvation outside the Catholic fold…”

On the contrary, The Catholic Church has consistently taught the possibility of merit and salvation for those outside its visible unity – namely, for non-Catholic Christians and for those of other religions.  Indeed it is and has been Catholic teaching that God gives sufficient graces to all men to be saved. Basic to Catholic teaching has been the recognition that countless millions have belonged by at least desire and longing to the salvation community which is the church, although in good faith they neither recognized it as such not therefore entered its visible unity.

Ironically, the Catholic position on this universality of God’s salvific will (as the subject is called in dogmatic theology has been much more liberal than the classical protestant position.  Most recent and most startling in a long series of statements (through many centuries) by the teaching church was the excommunication, in 1949, of a priest who taught the doctrine you wrongly assume to have been characteristic of the Catholic Church before 1958.

April 17, 1978
Of tuition, taxes and equal justice for all

Your April 14 editorial “Tuition Credits Fail Every Time” rejects such credits because, first, they include help for the very wealthy, who don’t need it. This obligation, more theoretical, you admit, than practical, can easily be overcome by putting an income eligibility ceiling on tuition-paying parents.  Congress can take a look at this program as often as it likes.

Objecting that such credits will hurt public schools, however, reveals your persistent failure to recognize that parents are gravely hurt by a system of double taxation which effectively denies their natural and constitutional right to choose nonpublic, often religious oriented, schools for their children. Such parents, moreover, want no “subsidy,” only a just share in the taxes they have already paid for education.

Both public and nonpublic schools serve the common good in this community. For more than a century, Federal and state governments have done just about everything possible to discourage parents from choosing nonpublic schools. These schools have significantly declined over the past decade.

May 20, 1981
What must human life do to prove personhood?

Those who question whether the new human life is a person imply that the fetus, or “little one,” must be able to do something to qualify as a person.  Is he producing heartbeats or brain waves (about three to four weeks)? Is he responding to sensory stimuli (about six weeks)? Or growing hair on his head (about 16 weeks)? Or able to live outside the womb (about 28 weeks and constantly decreasing)? Or is an even longer period – does baby talk and socialize adequately? – needed to qualify for the dignity of personhood?

Clearly, speculators invoke a variety of contradictory biological, philosophical, psychological and sociological criteria to answer their question.

What reason is there, however, for denying the little one the dignity of personhood right from his or her beginning, from conception? Nobody can offer any compelling reason. Despite agreement that the conceptus is a new, unique member of the human species, the problem seems to be that the little one is so small and helpless.

Those who want to deny personhood to the new human life, not those who affirm it, are the ones who invoke a host of unverifiable and debatable opinions about personhood.

April 2, 1993
Where is the equal humaneness in all this?

A New York physician specializing in abortion recently botched a late-term abortion in which he cut off the arm of the unborn child who was born the very next day.  Had the doctor killed the unborn child, he arguably could have escaped, despite the late-term factor, criminal charges.  But he failed to kill and now suffers a penalty only because the unborn child survived.  In his defense the doctor maintains that the day he cut off the fetus’s arm, she was not a person; only the next day, when she was born did it become a person. He did no harm to any person.

Please, where is the equal fairness, the equal humaneness in all this? Persons of whatever religious affiliation or none who identify abortion as the direct and illegitimate taking of an innocent life urge no “theology” on the law or on the citizenry.  They urge the indisputable evidence of bio-medical science. Religious beliefs constitute no part of this evidence.

January 21, 2001
Research that kills.  Yes? No?

Embryonic stem cell research advocates can’t understand why opponents reject such experimentation even though it might (stress might) result in cures for various debilitating diseases. The answer is twofold.

First, you may not do evil that good will come of it.  In procuring human embryo stem cells, the embryo is destroyed. And what’s so bad about that?

Bio-genetics testifies with certainty that the human embryo is a new member of the human species containing all that is necessary, given the proper nurturing environment, to grow through all stages of human development.  What? You mean this little cluster of cells is a human being? Yes, a human being in the very first stages of his or her development.  Who would wish to have been destroyed, killed, when he or she was an embryo?

Secondly, adult stem cell research, which involves no destruction of the human embryo, shows great promise. We should concentrate on methods of cure that cause no harm, that do not kill.  A human being should never be used as a means to an end.

June 17, 2005
Exactly what happened

The bottom line on Terry Schiavo: Terry was severely brain-injured, not recoverable, but certainly not dying. The pathologist’s report designates the cause of her death as “marked dehydration,” What caused this? The withdrawal of her gastric feeding tube. Why was it removed? Her husband said Terry said (years ago) she wouldn’t want to live this way.  You conclude she was “allowed to die.” In reality, she was forced to die. The direct cause of death was the removal of her gastric feeding tube.  What severely disabled but not dying person so nourished will be next?

August 9, 2010
Nature is the heart of the matter

Nature universally disqualifies same-sex persons from engaging in the generative act. No question of discrimination arises; in fact that charge is a red herring. Nature has made men and women sexually different, not the same. Marriage is, indeed, a fundamental right – if one qualifies. A father cannot marry his daughter or a mother her son. Brother and sister cannot marry. A seven year old male and female cannot marry. Same-sex persons even more radically do not qualify; they cannot in nature be the subject of a right to marry one another.

That’s nature and the natural moral law, which the civil law flouts at society’s peril. There lies the heart of the matter.

January 28, 2013
Balderdash too much to take

Frank Bruni’s op-ed article (1/27) seems to adopt historian and author Garry Wills as his personal theologian and guide for his ultra-acerbic and, in part, woefully misinformed column of Jan. 27.

Well known as an intellectual and author, now somewhat disaffected Catholic, Wills presents himself as a practicing Catholic but has long distanced himself from key teachings of the Church and maintains a Catholic identity only on his own terms. Academics and journalists seeking comment on the Church should avoid consulting only such Catholics. Fully committed Catholics should be the first source for such information and comment.

October 7, 2014
A columnist free to dump 

Frank Bruni’s column for the Times’ Sunday Review section mentions his previous columns in which he slanders, assaults and condemns the Catholic Church for the Church’s biblical teachings on sexual morality, concerning which no response, including my own, was admitted to print. Now, he has added a fourth column, no less gratuitous, insulting and misinformed than the previous three.

I have a suggestion for you.  If you wish to maintain journalistic fairness, that you invite a Catholic journalist also competent in Church teaching and concerned for fairness and courage and give him/her the same space to respond to Frank Bruni.

If no one is invited or admitted, prepare to join the chorus of the already large company of those who are convinced that you can’t get a fair hand from the editorial management of The Times. For a candidate I recommend William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. His competence in this field is well known and widely appreciated.

For information on how to order this book, click here. 

During the February 21 episode of Comedy Central’s show, “Kevin Hart Presents: Keith Robinson Back of the Bus Funny,” comedian Keith Robinson introduced his tirade by stating how easily offended people have become these days to what others say.

“Even criminals have the nerve to be sensitive about what the hell you say to them. Pedophiles don’t want to be called pedophiles. They want to be called priests.”

The audience responded with nervous laughter. “That was a delicious joke. I don’t give a damn about what nobody say [his illiteracy], that was a delicious joke.”

Robinson then attacked someone who didn’t clap, wondering “What the hell is your problem?” He then asked, “Are you Catholic, sir? Did a priest ever get to you? Put some baby oil on your feet so you couldn’t run in the marble hall?”

We don’t keep track of how many times comedians featured on Comedy Central attack rabbis or imams, but we doubt it happens often. Jews are respected, Muslims are feared, and Catholics are hated—not just on Comedy Central, but in the entertainment industry in general.

A few weeks later, Comedy Central was at it again when a game show contest on “@Midnight” featured Neal Brennan responding to a question by host Chris Hardwick about confession. “Forgive me father for I have sinned, I went to Catholic school growing up. While I was never molested, I did f*** a few priests.” Not surprisingly, he won the contest. Here’s why.

On the premier of his own show, which aired January 19, 2014, Brennan commented that he went to Catholic school for 12 years. “No, I didn’t get molested, I f***** a few priests, but I didn’t get molested.”

Are the creative talents in such short supply at Comedy Central that the writers have to go back to the sewer to deliver another assault on priests?

In his 2006 address at Regensburg University, Pope Benedict XVI described how Islam was perceived as “evil and inhuman” by a 14th-century Christian emperor who was under siege by Muslims. The central point of the pope’s address was to call attention to what happens when faith is uncoupled from reason, and vice versa.

As if to prove his point about faith being severed from reason, Muslims who disagreed with the pope’s remarks shot a nun to death, firebombed churches, and took to the streets calling upon fellow Muslims to “slit their [Christians’] throats.” In a recent op-ed written by Garry Wills that was published by the Washington Post, Wills blamed the pope, not the barbarians. “When Pope Benedict XVI tried at the University of Regensburg in 2006 to open a dialogue with Muslims, he did it so clumsily that riots and killings resulted.”

After the pope’s Regensburg address, he was praised by many prominent Catholics, Jews, and Muslims: Cardinal Avery Dulles lauded the pope for “laying out the principles of tolerance”; Reuel Marc Gerecht commended the pope for offering “a welcome change from the pabulum that passes as ‘interfaith’ dialogue”; and Irshad Manji said the pope’s speech did not warrant an apology to the “hypocrites” who blasted him. But according to Wills, they are all wrong. More than that, the bloodshed that followed the pope’s comments was his doing.

Wills claims to be an authority on Catholicism. Yet he is an ardent champion of abortion and gay rights. More important, he rejects the teaching authority of the Church if exercised without lay involvement and agreement; the Church’s teachings on papal infallibility; the ordained priesthood; the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist; apostolic succession; and the Immaculate Conception and Assumption. He also calls the Church “a victimizer with Satan.”

It is through this filthy lens that Wills sees Catholicism, thus allowing him to make patently foolish statements about Pope Benedict.

Janet Maslin has been reviewing movies and books for the New York Times for several decades, and up until now she has faithfully toed the newspaper’s line on abortion.

In her 2009 review of The Snakehead by Patrick Radden Keefe, a book about Chinese immigrants smuggled into the U.S., Maslin referred to the book’s commentary on China’s one-child policy as nothing more than “propaganda-ready stories of forced abortions and sterilizations conducted there”; she noted, with derision, that these accounts became “attractive to America’s religious right.”

Recently Maslin slipped. In her review of Frog, a novel by Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan, she discussed China’s one-child policy by noting how an abortionist sought “to trap a very pregnant woman before she can give birth. A fetus in the womb is still fair game for her. But if it can manage to be born, it becomes a Chinese citizen, and she has no right to take its life anymore.”

The “it,” of course, is a baby boy or girl. But let’s not be picky: Maslin’s admission that once the baby is born, the abortionist “has no right to take its life anymore” is a frank acknowledgement that life begins in the womb.

Maslin won’t lose her job over this—it was obviously a Freudian slip. No matter, it reveals, once again, that even the most ardent pro-abortion proponents are given to inadvertent bursts of honesty.

Unlike the rest of the New York media, which treated Cardinal Edward M. Egan with respect, the New York Times took advantage of the late New York Archbishop’s passing to write a statement that read more like an editorial than an obituary.

The Times wasted no time telling its readers what it thought of the late archbishop. In the first sentence of its 2800-word obituary, it labeled Cardinal Egan a “stern defender of Roman Catholic orthodoxy.” Not just an ordinary defender of the Church’s teachings, but a “stern” one. Even without the adjective, the phrase makes us wonder whether the Times expects any archbishop not to defend the Church’s orthodoxy. Don’t those who write editorials for the Times defend the newspaper’s orthodoxy, sternly or otherwise?

The reason the Times mentioned Egan’s orthodoxy is because it finds many Church teachings disagreeable. Which ones? It said Egan “delivered stentorian lessons from the pulpit on abortion, contraception, homosexuality, priestly celibacy and other matters.” With the exception of women priests, there really aren’t any “other matters” as the Times sees it; that list just about sums up the entire corpus of Church teachings. Similarly, it said Egan “walked the line of church doctrine against winds of change.” Meaning he didn’t adopt the Times’ secular values.

Right on course, the obit spoke about “pedophile priests” and clergy “accused of molesting children.” In fact, less than 5 percent of the molesters were pedophiles and almost 80 percent of the victims were postpubescent. This was a homosexual scandal—not a pedophile one.

Egan was also accused of “calling the police to oust protesters from a church.” He sure did: they camped out in the church and refused to leave. Question: Does the Times allow squatters to take over its offices?

The obit also noted that “Cardinal Egan distrusted the news media and rarely gave interviews.” Actually, he didn’t distrust all the media, just those outlets that can’t separate their politics from their coverage.