The ABC News headline read, “Gay Catholic School Teacher Fired for Wedding Plans.” Well, not really: he was fired for breaking a contract that he voluntarily signed. Michael Griffin, who taught at a Pennsylvania Catholic school, said his principal did not care that he was gay, but when he publicly announced his “wedding” plans, he made a conscious decision to flout his contract. So he was canned. Does ABC allow its staff to violate their contracts with impunity?

The USA Today headline read, “Catholic Women Ordained Priest and Deacons in Kentucky.” Well, not really: the old gals were simply playing the game of pretend—dressing up like priests and pretending they were ordained in the Catholic Church. Some in the asylum think they are the pope. Will USA Today do a story on them as well?

The Dayton Daily News headline read, “Ex-Dayton Priest Faces Prosecution.” Well, not really: turns out that the “priest,” Annamalai Annamalai, is a “self-described Hindu high priest.” Readers were intentionally invited to believe he was a Catholic priest. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was more accurate: it called him a guru.

The CNN headline read, “Catholic College Police Officer Kills Student After Off-Campus Traffic Stop.” Has anyone ever seen a headline that reads, “Jewish College Police Officer Kills Student After Off-Campus Traffic Stop”? Yet CNN used the same words, “Catholic College Police Officer,” in its headline on both December 9 and December 10. But would CNN ever run a story titled, “Catholic College Police Officer Saves Student Lives”?

The hostility exhibited by the media to Catholicism has no rival. Every day there is something new. And they wonder why their credibility with the public is at historic lows.

A recent edition of “Chelsea Lately” on E! was particularly vicious.

The pretext to the vulgar comments made by Chelsea Handler, and guests Dan Levy and Josh Wolf, was the news that Pope Francis was once a bouncer, and rumors that he sneaks out at night to feed the poor.

Handler: “It’s a very popey thing to do, to help the homeless; I mean that’s kinda what he should be sneaking out and doing. It’s not like he can go to a glory hole [a hole in the stall in the men’s room in public places used by homosexuals for anonymous oral sex], I mean he could. I’m not making fun of Catholics. I’m thinking that he’s so liberal – he’s right around the corner from taking confession through a glory hole. That’s how advanced he is.”

Levy: “Catholics can’t win, because the only thing more embarrassing than being a child molester is being a bouncer at a [the familiar homosexual voice inflection is used] club.”

Wolf: “I was a doorman for a while which means—and all doormen are the same—which means at some point in time before he was pope this dude got a BJ [oral sex] in a bathroom from a girl wearing a tiara.”

It’s interesting that Handler felt compelled to say that her obscene remarks about the pope were not done to make “fun of Catholics.” Does she think Pope Francis is Jewish? Levy is also wrong to suggest that priestly sexual misconduct was done by pedophiles—almost all the guilty were homosexuals. But if the name of the game is to trash the pope, who cares about facts?

Now that Pope Francis has set up a commission to study priestly sexual abuse, Bill Donohue urged reporters to get their facts straight:

Myth: Children have been the main victims of priestly sexual abuse.

Fact: Since more than 95 percent of all the victims of priestly sexual abuse, as reported by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, are not prepubescent, that means that adolescents have been the primary victims.

Myth: Pedophile priests have been the problem.

Fact: Homosexual priests have been the problem. Proof: 81 percent of the victims have been male, and more than 95 percent have been postpubescent. When males have sex with postpubescent males, it is called homosexuality.

Myth: The problem is on-going.

Fact: The homosexual scandal took place mostly between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s. In the last ten years, the average number of credible accusations made against 40,000 priests is in the single digits.

Myth: The Church’s repressive teachings on sexuality are the problem.

Fact: It was liberals outside the Church who pushed for the sexual revolution, and it was liberals in the Church who abetted the revolution in the seminaries. Moreover, it was liberals who promoted therapy as the way to deal with molesters, instead of using punitive measures.

Myth: The Church has done nothing about the problem.

Fact: Pope Benedict XVI made it more difficult for active homosexual priests to enter the priesthood, thus getting directly to the source of the problem. Also, steps have been taken in every diocese to ensure that anyone who works for the Church must participate in a training program aimed at curtailing the abuse of minors.

From midnight to 1:00 a.m., December 7, Comedy Central aired a one-hour special, “Chris D’Elia: White Male: Black Comic”; it was part of a two-hour performance recorded previously (the show was released on CD and DVD on December 10 by Comedy Central Records).

The D’Elia special featured a 13-minute segment that treated viewers to one of the most offensive anti-Christian attacks ever to be shown on TV; it made a deliberate effort to offend Catholics. Here’s a sample:

Speaking of Jesus, D’Elia said, “No way—he died for us so that we could all live? Awesome. He hung himself on the cross for that many days….”

Speaking of Catholic churches, D’Elia said, “There’s people on the stain glass windows with thorns around their head, they’re bleeding from the thorns, crying out of their eyeballs, their clothes are all ripped….”

Speaking of the Eucharist, D’Elia said, “They make you eat a guy’s body and you don’t even think about it. You’re just lining up—’I got to eat a guy’s body, yeah I got to eat a guy’s body man’….If this isn’t creepy enough, there’s a guy down there, you can drink his blood….”

The corporate hubris of Viacom, the parent company of Comedy Central, is astonishing. It brags on its website how they “develop original, authentic content for distinct audiences including the Millennial Generation, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, LGBT viewers, the American heartland and more.” If they had any guts, they would tell their shareholders that America’s heartland doesn’t include the nearly 80 percent of Americans who are Christian. But cowardice stops them from acting on their bigotry.

Recently, the Archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis decided to temporarily step down. Archbishop John Nienstedt has been the subject of a non-stop crusade orchestrated by ex-Catholics, and Catholics in rebellion against the Church, simply because he stands for everything they are not: he is a loyal son of the Catholic Church.

A couple of weeks ago—out of the blue—came an unidentified male who claimed he was touched on his buttocks in 2009 by the archbishop while posing for a group photo. Nienstedt denied the charge, adding that he has never inappropriately touched anyone. Moreover, he has not been told the identity of his accuser.

Archbishop Nienstedt would not be subjected to this kind of treatment if he were the darling of Church dissidents. We’ve been tracking attacks on bishops for some time, and too often we have seen a concerted effort on the part of activists, both inside and outside the Church, to tar a bishop. What they hate more than anything else are the Church’s teachings on sexuality; they are the ones who are obsessed with sex, not the rank-and-file.

There is no other leader, religious or secular, who would step down pending an investigation because some guy said he was touched on his behind four years ago in a group photo. It’s time the bishops revised their “zero tolerance” policy. Too often, it means zero justice for the accused, thus undermining the legal principle of innocent until proven guilty.

 The bishops ought to follow suit and junk this policy before it becomes the weapon of choice against them.

The Obama administration’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See to the American Embassy in Italy is pure politics.

There are principled reasons why some might say that the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See should be moved, such as safety concerns and economic issues. Had these positions been made by an administration that is Catholic-friendly, we could proceed with an honest debate. But this is not the case: the Obama administration’s key involvement with the Catholic community has been to burden it with the Health and Human Services mandate.

In terms of the safety issue, this is the administration that stood by and did nothing about the fatalities at the American facility in Benghazi—and to this day refuses to provide a full account. It therefore strains credulity to believe that safety is their real interest. Moreover, no administration in American history has been more fiscally reckless than the Obama administration, making it risible to suggest that all of a sudden they have discovered austerity.

Former U.S. Ambassadors to the Holy See, James Nicholson, Mary Ann Glendon, Thomas Melady, Francis Rooney and Raymond Flynn are right to sound the alarms; the net effect of this move is to diminish the prestige of the Holy See. Flynn is also right to see bias involved.

A few weeks ago, NewsBusters ran a story on an MSNBC segment with Thomas Roberts regarding abortion. This occasioned Bill Donohue to write the following letter to MSNBC soon after:

Ms. Kathy Kelly-Brown
Senior Vice President
Communications
NBCUniversal News Group
MSNBC
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, New York 10112

Dear Ms. Kelly-Brown:

If MSNBC wants to invite someone from Catholics for Choice to discuss abortion, that’s fine. But truth in advertising standards demand that the spokesperson not be identified as representing the position of the Catholic Church. That is exactly what happened on November 19 when Thomas Roberts introduced Sara Hutchinson, a spokesperson for Catholics for Choice. After MSNBC contributor and abortion-rights advocate Irin Carmon expressed her position on the Albuquerque, New Mexico proposed law banning abortions after 20 weeks, Roberts said, “Okay, so let’s talk to the Church side.”

There is nothing “Catholic” about Catholics for Choice, and everyone knows it. Would MSNBC allow someone from Jews for Jesus to speak for Jews? If you want to present two pro-abortion sides as part of your discussion, that is your business. But please refrain from lying to your viewers about “the Church side.”

The Advocate, an influential gay publication, has named Pope Francis “Person of the Year.” It reached its conclusion by citing the pope’s remark, “If someone is gay and seeks the Lord with good will, who am I to judge?” This comment is directly consistent with the Church’s teachings on the subject. “They [homosexuals] must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity,” is what the Catholic Catechism says.

The Catechism also says that Scripture “presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity.” The pope, when he was the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, spoke against gay marriage, saying such an arrangement threatens the “survival of the family,” causing children to be “discriminated” against. He even said that gay marriage was the work of the devil: such proposals are not “a mere legislative project (this is only the instrument) but a ‘movement’ of the father of lies.”

The gay community is bent on conflating sexual orientation with sexuality. This is false. There is nothing in Catholic doctrine that condemns homosexuals any more than it condemns heterosexuals: it condemns such acts as fornication, homosexuality, and adultery.

The Advocate also lists “9 Catholics Who Need to Listen to the Pope.” Actually, most are organizations or communities. Three individuals are listed: Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Bishop Thomas Tobin, and Bill Donohue. It takes exception to Donohue’s statement, that “[L]ess than 5 percent of priests involved in molestation are pedophiles.” Donohue took that fact from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice study on the subject. To its credit, The Advocate quoted Donohue as saying, “[I] am against gay bashing.”

Recently, the media promoted the idea that the pope may appoint women cardinals. Here is what the pope said a few weeks ago. “Women in the Church must be valued, not clericalized. Whoever thinks of women as cardinals suffers a bit from clericalism.” Predictably, the media were dead silent on the pope’s rejection of women cardinals. The spin was pure politics.

Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio recently announced the appointment of 60 New York leaders to his transition committee. He instructed them to “identify women and men from every part of our city and walk of life” that want a better New York. He lied. Also lying was Transition Co-Chair Jennifer Jones Austin, who said that committee members “come from every slice of civic life—business and labor, science and the arts, clergy….” (Donohue’s italic.)

In fact, there are two ministers, two rabbis and one imam on the transition committee. There are no Catholic priests. Catholics make up 52.5 percent of New York, yet they have no clergy representation. This is not an oversight: every attempt was made to include persons from virtually every sector of New York. This was clearly done by design. Looks like de Blasio’s politics of inclusion has its limits.

To make matters worse, de Blasio showed his contempt for Catholics by naming to his transition committee the man who insulted them in 1998 with the “Sensation” exhibit, Arnold L. Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. That exhibit featured a portrait of Our Blessed Mother with elephant dung and pornographic cut outs on it. Donohue led a demonstration against it.

If de Blasio ever gets around to appointing a Catholic priest to his transition team, we hope he doesn’t take the advice of Darren Walker, a member of the committee. Walker is president of the Ford Foundation, the most generous donor to the most anti-Catholic and pro-abortion organization in the nation, Catholics for Choice.

The Catholic League contacted every Catholic parish in all five boroughs about de Blasio’s decision to shut out priests. De Blasio has only just begun, yet he has managed to insult a majority of New Yorkers.

John Garvey, the brilliant and courageous president of the Catholic University of America, went under fire for accepting a generous grant from the Charles Koch Foundation. He wisely stood his ground. The real story here was not the money being given to Catholic University by successful entrepreneurs; it was the source of the money being given to those who initiated the attack. To wit: Faith in Public Life spearheaded this highly politicized assault, and it is funded by left-wing zealot George Soros.

Faith in Public Life has long been lavishly greased by Soros’ Open Society Institute; it receives hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. This is hardly a secret—it is public record. Faithful America has also worked with Faith in Public Life in this effort to smear Catholic University; it is known for its sharp condemnations of Catholic leaders such as Timothy Cardinal Dolan and Francis Cardinal George. Faithful America is sponsored by—you guessed it—Faith in Public Life.

George Soros is an atheist billionaire who is no friend of the Catholic community. In fact, he funds causes that the Catholic Church works hard to oppose: abortion, euthanasia, drug legalization, and many other radical initiatives.

Those who signed the letter against Catholic University of America are the ones who need to explain why they would align themselves with the likes of George Soros. And if they like what he funds, they should have the guts to say so.