“NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw” 5/4/00

WILLIAM DONOHUE: (on John Cardinal O’Connor) Here is a man who gave us a moral compass, who gave us some understanding, who grounded our religion, not only in the teachings of the Church, but in common sense.

 MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” 5/4/00

 WILLIAM DONOHUE: (on John Cardinal O’Connor) Well, he was a man of tremendous courage, for one thing; a man of great intellect, a man who was also a humanitarian and a person who certainly defied many of our cultural and political winds.  And to be specific, this is a man who was not interested in kind of having a Dick Morris or a Gallup poll to find out what was politically correct on the radar screen.  He offended people on the left, he offended people on the right.  He never offended God, because he was a man of peace, he was a man of love, and anybody who got a chance to know him knew he had a tremendous sense of humor; a man of eternal optimism and, beyond anything else, as far as I’m concerned, a man who didn’t just engage in empty rhetoric.

William A. Donohue

It was Sunday, October 3, 1993, and I had been on the job for just three months.  That afternoon, I went for a walk in mid-town Manhattan and stumbled upon a street fair.   The hot sausage was great and so was the beer.  Then I heard some music coming from 5th Avenue, so I walked up the block to see what was going on.   It was the Polish American parade, a great event.

I was standing on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral when I spotted Joe Zwilling, the archdiocesan spokesman.  I asked him if he was the one who wrote the column for Cardinal O’Connor in the current edition of Catholic New York; he said no, the cardinal wrote it.  I was taken aback because I had never met the cardinal and the article was about a victory we had just scored against the Metropolitan Transit Authority: we pressured the MTA to remove a blasphemous poster from the sides of city buses.  And the cardinal loved it.

Joe asked if I wanted to meet him.   “Now”?  After all, I was wearing bermuda shorts and a T-shirt.   Joe insisted it was okay.  I was then escorted down the steps of the cathedral to meet him.  He was greeting leaders of the various parade units as they passed by when Joe told him I was there.  He walked away from the parade, greeted me kindly and offered his sincere congratulations on the MTA victory.  I was stunned.

The next time I met the cardinal it was on a Friday in December at about 5:00 p.m.  After a brief exchange, he asked what he could do for me.  “Nothing,” I said.  He turned to his attorney, Eileen White, and said that he could count on two hands the number of times this had happened to him in the past ten years as New York’s archbishop.   After about ten minutes of conversation, he asked again what he could do for me.  “Your Eminence, as I said before—nothing.  I’ve come here to inherit your problems.”  Then, in an incredulous voice, he said, “You want to inherit my problems”?

Maybe that’s why we got along so well.  I just couldn’t bear the thought of asking him for some special favor.  It must also be said that he never once tried to use his leverage to get me to do anything.  But he did go out of his way for me: he moved the Catholic League’s office to the top floor, adjacent to his suite.  More important, when he learned we needed more space and were planning to move out of the building, he offered a slice of his own office just to keep us in the Catholic Center.  (Because we’re at the breaking point again, we may have to move out soon.)

Anyone who knew Cardinal O’Connor came to appreciate his kindness, his intellect and his great sense of humor.   That is why it pains me to read the drivel that his critics put forward.  “He kicked gay people out of a parish and threatened excommunication for public leaders who backed abortion.”  This is the kind of nonsense that the New York Times sought fit to print.  That it was said by a high school student at one of New York’s top Catholic schools, Regis, is all the more troubling.  One wonders what else is being taught at Regis these days.

Here’s what an AP reporter had to say: “Sometimes O’Connor put his foot in his mouth.  He once compared aborted fetuses to victims of the Holocaust, and characterized the Holocaust as Judaism’s ‘gift’ to the world.”  Well, lady, the killing of a million and a half innocent babies each year is a Holocaust, and no one owns a monopoly on that word.

And, yes, the Holocaust was a gift that Judaism gave us.  If reporters took as much time trying to understand what O’Connor called the Church’s “theology of suffering” as they do trying to understand the customs of aborigines off the coast of South America, they wouldn’t make such stupid charges.

Then there was the editorial in the New York Times the day after he died.  It was noted that the cardinal “passionately opposed abortion, birth control, homosexuality, the ordination of women and even baseball on Good Friday.”  Yet “he balanced them with a plea for those in need, even when the needy were at odds with his strong Catholic message.”  In the eyes of the Times, these positions are irreconcilable and in need of “balancing.”  They just don’t get it.

And leave it to Jimmy Breslin, a New York has-been if there ever was one.  The day after the burial the saloon journalist screamed how anti-woman the Church is.  Now it might matter a little if he still had Catholic credentials.

In fairness to the media, almost all the reporting was respectful, and this was particularly true of television.  I was certainly grateful for the many opportunities afforded to me to discuss the cardinal’s legacy.

Cardinal O’Connor was the de facto leader of the Catholic Church in America.  The response from Hispanics and Jews, in particular, demonstrate how widely he was loved.   That he loved the Catholic League is beyond dispute, and that we loved him is also indisputable.  May he rest in peace.

For nearly 20 years after World War II, Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) was honored by the world for his actions in saving countless Jewish lives in the face of the Nazi Holocaust. His death on October 9, 1958 brought a moment of silence from Leonard Bernstein while he conducted at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Golda Meir, future Israeli Prime Minister and then Israeli representative to the United Nations, spoke on the floor of the General Assembly: “During the ten years of Nazi terror, when our people went through the horrors of martyrdom, the Pope raised his voice to condemn the persecutors and commiserate with the victims.”

Among the Jewish organizations in the United States alone that praised Pope Pius XII at the time of his death for saving Jewish lives during the horror of the Nazi Holocaust were the World Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, the Synagogue Council of America, the Rabbinical Council of America, the American Jewish Congress, the New York Board of Rabbis, the American Jewish Committee, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the American Jewish Committee, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the National Conference of Christians and Jews and the National Council of Jewish Women.

Yet, four decades after the death of Pius XII he is condemned for his “shameful silence” in the face of the Holocaust. He is commonly accused not only of silence, but even complicity in the Holocaust. He is called “Hitler’s Pope.”  When critics are reminded of the universal praise he received from Jewish organizations in life and death, such praise is dismissed as merely “political” statements, as if those Jews who had lived through the Holocaust would insult the memory of the millions killed for some ephemeral political gain.

When Pope John Paul II issued his historic apology for mistakes and errors in Christian history, he was savaged by pundits and news reports for his “silence” in regard to the alleged “silence” of Pope Pius XII. Lance Morrow in Time magazine, referred to the Church’s “terrible inaction and silence in the face of the Holocaust” and described any defense of Pius or the Church as “moral pettifogging.” He made such statements without bothering to substantiate them because the charges are simply accepted as “fact” and any disagreement becomes on a par with those who deny the reality of the Holocaust itself.

The historical reality of the pontificate of Pius XII has nearly been lost in the face of the strident campaign against him. Anti-Catholicism thrives on invented history that becomes part of the accepted cultural corpus. Conventional historical wisdom is more often the creation of propaganda than fact. Contemporary Catholics are witnessing the creation of a myth in regard to Pius XII, a propaganda campaign as relentless as any created by 19th century anti-Catholic apologists.

The view of Pius XII as Nazi collaborator did not begin as a case study of historical revisionism. It did not even begin within historical studies themselves or from available historical documentation, including transcripts of the Nuremberg trials, or government records made public. The myth of Pius XII began in earnest in 1963 in a drama created for the stage by Rolf Hochhuth, an otherwise obscure German playwright born in 1931.

Hochhuth was part of a post-World War II trend in theatre called “Documentary Theatre” or “Theatre of Fact.” The trend grew out of an American form of theatre popularized during the Depression. The point was to adapt social issues to theatrical presentation by utilizing documentation. The documentation was more important than artistic presentation and provided the script for the play. It was seen in more recent times with Vietnam War morality plays that excerpted from the Pentagon Papers, or presentations where the dialogue was directly culled from the White House tapes of Richard Nixon.

Hochhuth, however, created a more traditional theatrical presentation without any documentary basis when it came to Pius XII. Though claiming to be part of the “Theatre of Fact,” his presentation against Pius did not have the documentary sources for this style of drama. Turgid in length, in 1963’s Der Stellvertreter (The Representative or The Deputy) Hochhuth charged that Pius XII maintained an icy, cynical and uncaring silence during the Holocaust. More interested in Vatican investments than human lives, Pius was presented as a cigarette-smoking dandy with Nazi leanings. (Hochhuth also authored a play charging Winston Churchill with complicity in a murder. No one paid much attention to that effort.)

The Deputy, even to Pius’ most strenuous detractors, is readily dismissed. Even as vicious a critic of Pius XII as John Cornwell in Hitler’s Pope describes Der Stellvertreteras “historical fiction based on scant documentation…(T)he characterization of Pacelli (Pius XII) as a money-grubbing hypocrite is so wide of the mark as to be ludicrous. Importantly, however, Hocchuth’s play offends the most basic criteria of documentary: that such stories and portrayals are valid only if they are demonstrably true.”

Yet The Deputy, despite its evident flaws, prejudices and lack of historicity, laid the foundation for the charges against Pius XII, five years after his death. There was fertile ground. Pius XII was hated by certain schools of post World War II historians for the anti-Stalinist, anti-Communist agenda of both his pontificate, and the Catholic Church in general. In the heady atmosphere of leftist academic circles, particularly in Italy in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the charge against Pius was that while he was not necessarily pro-Nazi during the war, but that he feared Communism more than Hitler. For the most part, this was based on the pope’s opposition to the Allied demand for unconditional German surrender. He believed such a demand would only continue the horror of the war and increase the killing. That stand was later interpreted as a desire on the pontiff’s part to maintain a strong Germany as a bulwark against communism. Hochhuth’s charge of papal “silence” fit that revisionist theory.

The theory, of course, was as much fiction as Hochhuth’s play. There was no documentary evidence to even suggest such a papal strategy. But it became popular,   particularly among historians with Marxist sympathies in the 1960s. Even this theory, however, did not extend to an accusation that the Pope “collaborated” in the Holocaust, nor to any charge that the Church did anything other than save hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives. However, it did provide a mercenary rationale of “politics over people” in response to the Holocaust and applied such barbarous reasoning to the pope.

The Deputy, therefore, took on far greater importance than it deserved. Instead of Pius being seen as a careful and concerned pontiff working with every means available to rescue European Jews, an image was created of a political schemer who would sacrifice lives to stop the spread of Communism. The Deputy was merely the mouthpiece for an ideological interpretation of history that helped create the myth of a “silent” Pius XII doing nothing in the face of Nazi slaughter.

There was also strong resonance within the Jewish community at the time The Deputyappeared. The Jewish world had experienced a virtual re-living of the Holocaust in the trial of Adolf Eichmann.  A key figure in the Nazi Final Solution, Eichmann had been captured in Argentina in 1960, tried in Israel in 1961 and executed in 1962.  For many young Jews, Eichmann’s trial was the first definitive exposure to the horror that the Nazis had implemented. At the same time, Israel was threatened on all sides by the unified Arab states. War would erupt in a very short time. The Deputy resonated with an Israel that was surrounded by enemies and would be fighting for its ultimate survival.

Despite the fact, therefore, of a two-decades-old acknowledgment of papal support and assistance to the Jews during the War, Hochhuth’s unfounded charges took on all the aspects of revelation. In a column after Pope John Paul II’s apology, Uri Dormi of Jerusalem described the impact: “The Deputy appeared in Hebrew and broke the news about another silence, that of Pope Pius XII about the Holocaust. The wartime Pope, who on Christmas Eve 1941 was praised in a New York Times editorial as ‘the only ruler left on the continent of Europe who dares to raise his voice at all,’ was exposed by the young, daring dramatist.”

It seems ludicrous that a pope praised for his actions throughout the war – and by all leading Jewish organizations throughout his life – could be discredited based on nothing more than a theatrical invention. Yet, that is what took place and has taken place since. A combination of political and social events early in the 1960s, biased historical revisionism, and an exercise in theatrical rhetoric, created the myth of the uncaring pontiff in contradiction to the clear historical record. The myth thrives because people want to believe it rather than because it is believable.

Great strides had been made in Catholic-Jewish relations during the papacy of John Paul II.  Yet the myth of the silence of Pius XII has helped to entrench anti-Catholicism within elements of the Jewish community, while creating in certain Catholic circles resentment that can only be harmful.  Leaving this myth unanswered can only do great damage to what should be a deep relationship between Catholics and Jews, generated in part by the heroism of Pope Pius XII in saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

That a woman has a right to do what she wants with her own body is a mantra that feminists have been uttering for the past three decades.  One would think, then, that if a man were to mutilate a woman’s body that feminists everywhere would rush to her side.  And if the man were also a doctor, the outcry, we would expect, would be all the more shrill.  Now try telling that to Liana Gedz and Joy Schepis.

Last fall, Liana Gedz gave birth to her daughter by Caesarean section in a New York hospital.  Her doctor, Allan Zarkin, carved his initials in her abdomen after the delivery.  “Dr. Zorro,” as he became known, could have gotten 25 years in prison for his behavior, but instead he was promised no time in behind bars.

On April 25, a woman assistant district attorney, Martha Bashford, agreed that a five-year probation was sufficient because a) he is a first-time offender and b) he suffers from a “frontal lobe disorder” that renders him disoriented at times.   A woman Supreme Court Justice, Renee White, also agreed that this was fair.  No feminists protested.

On April 14, Dr. Stephen Pack attacked a New York nurse plunging a syringe once into her buttocks and five times into her thigh.  The woman, who was pregnant, was stabbed with a hypodermic needle containing methotrexate, an abortion-inducing drug.  The doctor, who is married, was angry that Joy Schepis said she was pregnant and wanted to keep the baby; he was romantically involved with her.  During the attack, the doctor screamed, “I am going to give you an abortion.”

The baby is still alive and charges are still pending against Dr. Pack.  No feminists protested.

Looking for an explanation why the feminist community has gone mute over these two acts of butchery?  Consider woman’s rights attorney Gloria Allred.  She was interviewed on May 9 by TV talk show host Bill O’Reilly on the subject of abortion.  When O’Reilly labeled her “pro-abortion,” she took exception saying that “Well, I’m actually pro-choice.”  Then O’Reilly pressed her by saying, “Wouldn’t it be better if there were never an abortion?”  To which she replied, “Not necessarily.”  Which is why it is not accurate to say that she is pro-choice: she is pro-abortion.

Allred is cited here as a way of getting a window on the thinking of contemporary feminists.  Abortion is precious to them.  It is not just a right—it is an entitlement of the first order.  It is not a want, it is a desire.

That’s why feminists shut their mouths when doctors violate the bodily integrity of pregnant women and mothers who have just given birth.  To call attention to these crimes is to call attention to two lives, and that is a risk not worth taking, even if it means standing in silence while innocent women get mutilated by male physicians and female lawyers and judges give them a pass.

Ask anyone in the ACLU what he thinks of book banning and out pours a stream of invective targeted at Hitlerians.  Ironically, the ACLU is no stranger to book banning, having previously sought to ban the book Sex Respect from the schools in Wisconsin (the book teaches abstinence, ergo, the book must go—the ACLU thinks this represents a religious perspective).  Now it’s trying to ban another book, Of Pandas and People, on the grounds that it advances a creationist theory of mankind.

The ACLU’s latest effort at book banning is occurring in Kanawha County, West Virginia; it comes on the heels of similar efforts in Burlington, Washington and Louisville, Ohio.  What upsets the free speech militants is the free speech of those teachers who want to use the book in their classroom.

Of Pandas and People promotes the “intelligent design” theory of the origins of the universe.  In essence, it says that the sheer complexity of life defies the science of chance.  While it is not a religion book, it does support the creationist account found in the Bible and this is what angers the ACLU.  Anything that might contravene the theory of evolution must automatically be censored, say the guardians of the First Amendment.  Appeals to academic freedom are enough to sanction the most vile and obscene art work attacking Catholicism, but they carry no weight when it comes to gagging the speech of those with a religiously-informed perspective.

This is the same ACLU which defends as freedom of speech Nazis marching in Jewish neighborhoods, mud wrestling, dwarf tossing and child pornography.  Teaching that the scientific paradigm cannot adequately account for the origins of life, however, is not something that a free society can risk.  Guess we all have our hot buttons.

Anti-Catholic legislation was passed 145 years ago in Massachusetts to stop state aid from ever reaching parochial schools; other states passed similar laws at the time and have yet to rescind them.  It was the infamous Know-Nothing Party that proposed this legislation in 1855.  It’s still on the books today (in the form of an amendment to the state constitution), which is why voucher programs stand no chance of winning in the commonwealth, unless the bigoted amendment is stricken by the courts.  So far, no luck.

Back in the 1850s, when members of the Know Nothing party were asked by the authorities who they were, they replied that they knew nothing.  This at least made them more honest than their contemporaries; now the anti-school choice crowd pretends to know something about constitutional law.  Not that they’re ignorant altogether: what they do know is how to demagogue the public.  So it is that people actually believe that if the amendment were tossed, the public schools would come tumbling down (that this is happening through a process of natural erosion seems not to have been noticed).

In May, a proposal to use state funds for parochial schools lost in both houses of the Massachusetts legislature.  But the fighting continues with more appeals to the courts.   We are delighted that the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is fighting the good fight for justice.

 In a time when Southern states are downgrading the significance of the confederate flag, it is ironic that one of the most “progressive” states in the union refuses to junk the bigoted-driven language found in its own constitution.  What this means is that those won’t tolerate allegedly racist symbols in other states are perfectly willing to tolerate anti-Catholic traditions in their own.  That they do this in shameless fashion is positively Clintonesque.

It used to be that Irish newspapers respected the Catholic religion.  But no more.   It has been evident for some time now that the cultural winds that engulfed this country in the 1960s are blowing wildly in the land of St. Patrick.  Worse, many of the Irish who have emigrated here display an antipathy to their religion that is scandalous.   Consider theIrish Voice, an ethnic newspaper of notoriety.

Mike Farragher recently wrote a piece that managed to mock the Church’s teachings and sacraments while explaining his interfaith family.  He boasted that he did not have a crucifix at his wedding because he did not want to offend the Jewish attendees.  He also said that at the wedding ceremony he did not want images of Jesus “suffering and dying all over the place.”

Farragher’s contempt for the sacrament of matrimony began at the pre-Cana classes that he and his fiancee attended.  He confesses to lying to the priest when asked if the children would be raised Catholic: “We did what any other rational being would do…[we] lied through our teeth so that he’d sign whatever diocesan release forms that were needed for the papal green light.”

In an attempt at humor, Farragher said that the Catholic Church needs “drive-thru windows” so that Catholics with children can “receive McSacraments.”  Which is about as funny as a rubber crutch.

The Irish in Ireland, it is said, have come to tolerate yesterdays immoralities with aplomb.  It is not hard to understand why.  Far too many Irishmen have divorced themselves from their religion, making possible—if not inevitable—a sick tolerance of those who are intolerant of Catholicism.   But it is one thing to rap Catholicism in Ireland, quite another to do so in the U.S.  Which is why we let the Irish Voice have it.

On the May 2 edition of “Larry King Live,” several guests from various religions discussed the subject of homosexuality and religion.  The Catholic representative was Father Richard Rasi.  He was introduced by Larry King as a “gay defrocked priest.”

Father Rasi insisted he was still a priest in good standing, did not dispute the gay characterization and said that he works with a gay Catholic group, Dignity; he never mentioned that Dignity is not recognized by the Catholic Church.  He then proceeded to misrepresent Catholic teaching on the subject.

We checked the Official Catholic Directory to find out where Father Rasi was stationed.  He’s not in the book.  We then called the Larry King show for the name of the producer, but were told that no name would be released.   So William Donohue wrote the following letter.

May 3, 2000

Producer
Larry King Live Show
1 CNN Center
P.O. Box 105366
Atlanta, GA 30374-0166

Dear Producer:

Last night Father Richard Rasi was featured in a panel discussion on homosexuality and religion.  Larry King introduced him as a gay defrocked priest.  Father Rasi said he represents the Catholic gay group, Dignity, and proceeded to state what he claimed was Catholic teaching on the subject of homosexuality.

As someone who has been a guest many times in the past with Larry, I am outraged that this man was chosen to represent my religion.  There is no listing of Father Rasi in theOfficial Catholic Directory.  Furthermore, why was a self-described gay priest, introduced as being defrocked, chosen to represent Catholicism?  And Dignity, you should know, is not an approved Catholic gay group—Courage is.  Yet instead of having someone from Courage on (like Father Harvey), you chose instead someone who misrepresented Catholic teaching on this subject to millions.

As president of the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization, I would like an explanation for this decision.  Our members have been calling us left and right and they also need an explanation.

Sincerely,

William A. Donohue
President

Not having heard from the producer, we suggest that you write a letter.  This should never had happened—not even once.

The one exception to the respectful coverage of the death of John Cardinal O’Connor came from CNN.  One hour before the funeral Mass on May 8,  CNN interviewed three notables about the cardinal’s life.   Former New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato praised the cardinal for his work, drawing special attention to Cardinal O’Connor’s concern for the poor.  But viewers were introduced to Ann Northrup and Kelli Conlin.

Northrup is a radical lesbian activist who hates the Catholic Church.  She has fought, unsuccessfully, to have gays march under their own banner in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and was one of the fascists who broke into St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1989 disrupting Mass.  Conlin is a radical pro-abortion activist who also hates the Church, though she is more discreet in her pronouncements.

Northrup had this to say about Cardinal O’Connor: “He was a bigot, and he was very aggressive about promoting bigotry.”  Translated this means that the cardinal was opposed to sodomy.

Conlin offered these remarks: “He was not willing to open his heart and his mind to understanding that those of us who held differing views who were Catholics, who were pro-choice, believed what we did because of our faith, and not in spite of it.”  Translated this means that the cardinal was opposed to child abuse in the womb.

CNN gave these two hate-filled women a platform not because they felt the need to “balance” the interviews, but because they like gay and abortion rights.  Proof: balance could have been achieved by finding some racist or anti-Semite who disagreed with the cardinal’s outreach to African Americans and Jews.  But that’s not the kind of message CNN wants broadcast.   What they like are comments which rip the cardinal for disagreeing with their politics.

Ted Turner, need we remind you, owns the cable network.  And you know what he’s like.

From April 26 to May 21, the Irondale Ensemble Project performed the anti-Catholic play, “The Pope and The Witch,” at the Theater for the New City in New York’s East Village.

Written by the 1997 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Dario Fo, the play has been characterized by Newsday as involving “a heroin-addicted, paranoid Pope called John Paul II, along with scheming priests, bumbling nuns and monks, corrupt cops and other assorted worthies from Fo’s stable of demons.”  Similarly, the Albany Times-Union has said that the play is a “sharp satire about the present pontiff,” one that portrays the Holy Father in a “sacrilegious manner.”  The pope, for example, is depicted as advocating birth control and the legalization of drugs.

The Catholic League released the following comment to the press about the play:

“Dario Fo is a Stalinist and an anti-Catholic bigot, thus making him indistinguishable from many in the crowd he runs with.   Also lacking in distinction is the fact that the Irondale Ensemble Project, as well as the Theater for the New City Foundation, receives federal funds via the National Endowment for the Arts; no anti-Catholic troupe that we are aware of has ever been turned down for its Catholic bashing.

“Those who think that the Catholic League’s criticisms are arguably biased should do themselves a favor and tap into the Irondale Ensemble Project’s website at www.irondale.org and check out the Special Vatican Issue, Volume 3, No. 1, Spring 2000.  After reading ‘The Pope and The Witch’ statement, no one will dispute our conclusion.

“We are writing to every member of congress who serves on the Appropriations Committee requesting that all future federal funding of the Irondale Ensemble Project and the Theater for the New City Foundation be stopped.  It is one thing for Catholics to put up with bigotry, quite another to force them to subsidize it.”

As a result of our letter, the congressional liaison for the NEA called our office in an attempt to defend the institution.   He said that no money was going directly from the NEA for this particular play.  We let him know that we weren’t persuaded: money is fungible and nowhere is this more true than in Washington.  We were happy to hear, however, that our letter had created “quite a stir” in the nation’s capital.