The media, Catholic and Jewish critics, and a slew of sources from Germany, teamed up to attack Pope Benedict XVI in a most unruly way over the Holocaust-denying remarks of one bishop who belongs to the St. Pius X Society. The Catholic League responded quickly to the most outrageous remarks.

When it was announced that the pope was seeking reconciliation with the St. Pius X Society, it was immediately reported that the pope had welcomed back a Holocaust-denying bishop. This was nonsense.

We moved without delay to put the facts on the table. The pope lifted the excommunication that had been imposed in 1988 on four bishops from the St. Pius X Society. One of them, Richard Williamson, entertains loopy and wholly discredited views on the Holocaust. It is important to note, we said, that none has been fully reinstated in the Catholic Church, and they may never be. What the pope did was the first step toward full communion. As the New York Times correctly reported, this was “a step toward the men’s full restoration to the church, but their status has yet to be determined.” (Our emphasis.)

The pope spoke clearly about the issue: “I hope my gesture is followed by the hoped-for commitment on their part to take the further steps necessary to realize full communion with the Church, thus witnessing true fidelity, and true recognition of the magisterium and the authority of the pope and of the Second Vatican Council.”

None of the media distortions of this issue excuses those in the Jewish community who lashed out at the pope. They should know better. As we said to the media, “Is their commitment to good relations with Catholics so thin that it can wither because of something like this? We certainly hope not.”

Nearly 50 Catholic Democratic congressmen implored the pope to “publicly state your unequivocal position on this matter so that it is clear where the Church stands.” How ironic that most of these very same Catholics fail to speak with clarity about what the Church teaches on abortion. Most are pro-abortion.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the D.A. from Regensburg, Germany, Catholic theologians and the German media took the occasion to lecture the pope about the Holocaust. Talk about hubris. The pope was forcibly conscripted at a young age to join a Nazi group and saw his family suffer economically because he refused to attend Hitler Youth meetings.

All in all, the grandstanding that took place was over the top.

Father Richard John Neuhaus died on January 8 of cancer. The founder of the immensely influential magazine, First Things, and the author of many books, he was a true public intellectual. When he died, Bill Donohue was quoted as saying, “He was a brilliant and devoted son of the Church who will be sorely missed. Indeed, he is irreplaceable.” Both Donohue and vice president Bernadette Brady attended the funeral Mass.

It was John Cardinal O’Connor who ordained Neuhaus in 1991, the year after the former Lutheran pastor became a Catholic. Neuhaus made his mark not only in New York, but in the U.S. and beyond. He was well regarded in Rome, and was a personal friend of the pope.

Neuhaus was part theologian, part philosopher and part social scientist. His range and erudition were prodigious, and his homilies were inspiring. It was his musings in the back end of First Things that stood out: His commentary was insightful and often provocative. He was certainly not afraid of taking on the big issues. Nor was he afraid of taking on the powerful, both within and outside the Catholic Church.

Neuhaus was also a good friend of the Catholic League. He wrote supportively of our mission and our strategies, and he never underestimated the menace of anti-Catholicism. In 2007, he spoke at the Communion Breakfast of the Long Island Chapter of the Catholic League.

The Catholic Church is poorer without him. But the good news is that his writings will continue to influence generations to come.

On December 18, Pope Benedict XVI told 11 new ambassadors to the Vatican that economic development and financial policies must be based on firm ethical grounds. This was not a throw-away statement: the pope has long understood that at the root of contemporary political, economic and social problems is a cultural collapse. Western civilization, to be exact, has abandoned its Christian heritage; it has thus lost its moral bearings.

The financial crisis that has enveloped the U.S., and much of the developed world, is an expression of the rot found in Western civilization. To wit: a preoccupation with the rights and appetites of individuals. Quite frankly, our monistic fixation on satisfying every individual want—sexual as well as materialistic—has been achieved at the expense of civility and community. It is a recipe for disaster.

Greed is a sin. It is not just a problem. Though it has always been a property of mankind, there are times in the course of human history when it is culturally celebrated. We live in such a time. When well-educated men and women go to work every day with the single goal of borrowing more money to make more money—and are lavishly rewarded for doing so—there is something seriously wrong on Main Street, and not just on Wall Street.

We should not be surprised that a lack of ethics abounds in American society. All ethical commitments are expressions of the interests and well being of others. Our society is so self-absorbed that it undercuts the ability to sustain a truly moral order. And when ethics are weighed, they are typically of the situational variety. In other words, the idea that there are absolutes, some principles which apply to all human conduct, is considered taboo. We can thank the much heralded Sixties for this mess.

It was in the 1960s when radical individualism triumphed in our culture. From drug use to sexual experimentation, from the nihilism found in music, art, the theater, movies and television, our culture has been on a binge for decades. To think that this promotion of greed wouldn’t affect ethical standards on the job is as astonishing a thought as it is revealing of our hubris. We just don’t get it.

Why are we surprised that legions of financiers put their own interests above the interests of their clients? Why are we surprised that we were lied to by some of the “best and brightest”? Why are we surprised when unscrupulous lenders extend irresponsible loans to equally culpable borrowers? Why are we surprised when unethical banks offer endless credit card deals to equally unethical individuals, all of whom think they can roll over their debt until they die?

Well, folks, the gig is up. We will be paying for this indulgence for decades. Those who look to Washington to fix this debacle are living in fantasy land. If people appointed to high office don’t pay their own taxes, how careful can we expect them to be with our money? If others constantly consort with single-minded lobbyists, how can we expect them to look out for our interests?

When almost half of a so-called stimulus package is slated to go to federal, state and municipal workers, and much of the rest goes to wasteful pork spending, it is impossible for real economic recovery to take place. When CEOs who are on welfare from the taxpayers still demand a bonus, and think they are entitled to paid business/vacations in Las Vegas, it is another sign that we’ve learned nothing.

There is so much blame to go around that it makes no sense to finger just one segment of our society. That’s what happens when cultural toxins are embedded in our institutions—no one escapes their effect. Even those among us who have acted with discretion and restraint must pay the price of the moral recklessness that millions of others have exercised. It is so sick and so out of control that it will take a religious revival of the most serious kind to turn things around. But there’s the rub: our mania for rejecting any kind of “Thou Shalt Not” ethic stands in the way of reform.

It’s too bad the whole country isn’t observing Lent. Can you imagine what the reaction would be if it was suggested that everyone practice self-denial for six weeks? There would be an uproar! And that’s because we are so used to a culture which prizes self-gratification that the very idea of sacrifice is regarded as absurd, if not obscene. We want it all, and we want it now. In other words, we have become a society of brats.

The American tendency to think that there is a quick fix, and our collective superstition that education can solve every problem, also stands in the way of reform. It’s time we took a good look at ourselves and our society and began to understand that constraint and discipline are not the enemies of happiness and progress. Indeed, they are its foundation. In other words, when we clean up Main Street, the clean up on Wall Street will follow.

(A shorter version of this article was published in The Bulletin, a Philadelphia newspaper.)

William A. Donohue

On January 23, President Barack Obama rescinded the Mexico City Policy that barred federal funds from being used to promote or perform abortions overseas. He was immediately congratulated by every pro-abortion organization in the nation.

The next day he won their plaudits again when he said that “It is time that we end the politicization of this issue. In the coming weeks, my Administration will initiate a fresh conversation on family planning, working to find areas of common ground to best meet the needs of women and families at home and around the world.” He ended by saying that “I look forward to working with Congress to restore U.S. financial support for the U.N. Population Fund.”

In other words, Obama intends to accomplish his goal of ending the politicization of abortion by spending federal dollars to support a pro-abortion agency of the U.N., namely the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). This begs the question: If President George W. Bush was guilty of politicizing abortion by cutting off federal aid to UNFPA—this is exactly what the pro-abortion industry accused Bush of doing—then why is Obama not similarly guilty for reinstating the funds? Apparently, only those opposed to abortion are guilty of politicizing the issue; those in favor of it bring people together.

UNFPA claims that it is not pro-abortion. It says that it merely supports “reproductive rights,” by which it means “the right to decide the number, timing and spacing of children,” etc. It does not rule out any means to accomplish this end. Which means it has absolutely no problem with abortion. More than that, it works tirelessly to work with pro-abortion groups to limit births, and nowhere is it more active than in poor, non-white nations around the world.

No one knows what a fraud UNFPA is better than Steve Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute. A good Catholic, Mosher says that despite this U.N. agency’s alleged concern for “safe” abortions, it is “just a euphemism for legal abortion.” Indeed, he argues that “The United Nations Population Fund would like to see abortion legalized worldwide, including in the 114 countries where there are significant restrictions on abortion, and it works to that end.” He emphasizes that “this is an organization that is devoted to aborting and sterilizing and contracepting as many women as possible.”

One way UNFPA accomplishes its goals is to manipulate public opinion by selling the idea that it works well with some segments of the Catholic community. More accurately, it works well with a few stray dissidents, and it works very well with anti-Catholic front groups.

Thoraya Obaid, the executive director of UNFPA, has admitted that “The Catholic Church can only discuss abstinence, but we have some relationships with a few priests who will refer women for other family planning options. This is what I have done in Latin America.” In Brazil, for example, the pro-abortion group works with “certain progressive branches” of the Catholic Church.

The so-called progressive Catholics that UNFPA teams up with are none other than the Catholic bashers at Catholics for Choice (previously Catholics for a Free Choice). Frances Kissling, who was president of the letterhead group for decades, was the darling of UNFPA during Dr. Nafis Sadik’s reign as its executive director. Sadik said it all when she explained that “I was very happy to find in Frances Kissling an ally who not only shared my passion for sexual and reproductive health and rights but had a passion of her own, for her church and its mission.” Kissling once admitted that it was her mission to “overthrow the Catholic Church.”

No wonder the pro-abortion enthusiasts at UNFPA loved Kissling—she bailed them out when they were in hot water with the U.S. State Department for cooperating with the Communist Chinese government’s “one child” policy.

Following a 2002 State Department investigation of UNFPA’s ties to China’s pro-abortion policies, Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote, “I determined that UNFPA’s support of, and involvement in, China’s population-planning activities allowed the Chinese government to implement more effectively its program of coercive abortion.” It was for reasons like these that the Bush administration denied U.S. funding of UNFPA, monies that Obama wants to reinstate.

Kissling’s role in whitewashing China’s monstrous anti-human rights policies was to give it a clean bill of health when she and other “religious leaders” visited China in 2003. “We believe that UNFPA has been unequivocally committed to providing informed and voluntary family planning,” she offered.

Predictably, Kissling was dutifully congratulated by Sadik’s successor, Ms. Obaid: “I am extremely grateful that the religious leaders who visited China have affirmed that UNFPA is promoting voluntary choice in the Chinese family planning program and is not involved in any way with coercive practices.” Perhaps she doesn’t think that having the government track the menstrual cycle of women isn’t coercive, or the practice of ordering them to have an abortion.

One scholar who wasn’t fooled by this was the late Julian Simon, a professor of population economics at the University of Maryland. Here is how he described what was going on in China: “Its ‘family planning’ one-child policy is pure coercion. It includes forcing IUDs into the wombs of 100 million women against their will; mandatory X-rays every three months to insure that the IUDs have not been removed, causing who knows what genetic damage; coercion to abort if women get pregnant anyway, and economic punishment if couples evade the abortionist.”

Beijing’s one-child policy began in 1979, with support from UNFPA: it gave China $50 million over the first five years of the program. According to Mosher, the policy led to widespread female infanticide, something which was once practiced in poor areas of China. “But when the one-child policy came into effect we began to see in the wealthy areas of China,” he says, “what had never been done before in history—the killing of little girls.”

This imbalance, in turn, led to a massive wave of human trafficking: in 2005, an estimated 800,000 people—80 percent of whom were women—were being trafficked from across China’s borders. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 million girls are now said to be missing from the Chinese population. And yet UNFPA—which is heavily staffed by former Planned Parenthood workers—has never objected to any of this.

UNFPA concentrates heavily in places like Vietnam, Nigeria and Peru, promoting policies similar to those in China. When the genocidal maniac from Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, wanted to tame his people, he invited UNFPA to help reduce the population of Kosovo; Milosevic said Kosovar women were “baby machines” that needed to be stopped. UNFPA did not disappoint him—it responded with a huge contraception and abortion campaign.

It is one thing for UNFPA to act irresponsibly, quite another to tap American taxpayers for money to support its agenda. Moreover, UNFPA gets a boat-load of cash from the establishment. For instance, John D. Rockefeller III, the nation’s foremost population control guru, was responsible for getting UNFPA off the ground in 1969. And today it is lavishly funded by the likes of Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates and Wall Street tycoon Warren Buffett (he is also a generous contributor to Catholics for Choice). Yet Obama says this isn’t enough, even in a recession.

The Obama supporters are trying to cast this issue as a matter of human rights. They’re right about that, but only in a perverse way. Women’s rights are at stake, but it is not their right to family planning that is being jeopardized, it’s their right to be free from government agents seeking to police their private behavior. It’s also their right to be free from punitive policies that victimize them for wanting to expand their family. And it’s the right of children to be born—a right UNFPA never addresses.

No one can improve on what Pope Benedict XVI said on December 8, 2008: “Poverty is often considered a consequence of demographic change. For this reason, there are international campaigns afoot to reduce birthrates, sometimes using methods that respect neither the dignity of the woman, nor the right of parents to choose responsibly how many children to have; graver still, these methods often fail to respect even the right to life. The extermination of millions of unborn children, in the name of the fight against poverty, actually constitutes the destruction of the poorest of human beings.”

The pope’s indictment applies perfectly to UNFPA. In the name of women’s rights, it undercuts women. In the name of eradicating poverty, it eradicates the poor. If this wasn’t bad enough, those who support UNFPA often seek to malign Catholicism.

In the mid-1990s, speaking of the Catholic Church, Professor Julian Simon wrote that it is “up against a deep-rooted anti-Catholicism that is triggered by the population issue and distorts the thinking of even the clearest-minded people.” This was quite a statement, especially coming from a Jew. By the way, not long before he passed away, Simon called me to say how much he appreciated the work of the Catholic League. He said that while he did not want to become a member, he wanted to make a $100 donation. We could certainly use his insights, and his courage, today.

Since Simon wrote those words, nothing has changed. What fires the population crowd is hatred of Catholicism. They hate the Church’s teachings on sexual ethics, preferring a full-blown liberationist agenda where everything goes. They also want to limit the number and type of persons who make their way to the U.S., having grave reservations about the influx of Catholic Latinos.

The pro-abortion forces have been galvanized the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Clinton administration. This does not bode well: If the Freedom of Choice Act that threatens Catholic doctors and hospitals ever makes its way through the Congress, Obama has pledged to sign it. Meanwhile, we can expect to see more executive orders that restrict abortion overturned, and more abortion-happy judges appointed to the federal bench.

It is all so sick. At the same time that the world’s most dangerous terrorists are being bestowed with new rights, innocent children are losing the few they once had. Thus has human rights been stood on its head.

By: Rabbi Irwin Kula

Rabbi Kula is president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. Bill Donohue regards Irwin as a thoughtful and courageous activist, and a good friend.

The official Jewish response to Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to reach out to the St. Pius X Society and to revoke the excommunication (though not yet determining the status) of four bishops says a great deal about the psycho-social state of American Jewish leadership or at least the leadership that claims to speak for American Jews.

The admittedly unnerving if not hurtful Holocaust denying views of one of those bishops, British born Richard Williamson, an obscure, irrelevant, cranky old man, offered on Swedish television, evoked the wrath of many Jewish organizations. This will have “serious implications for Catholic-Jewish relations” and there will be a “political cost for the Vatican” they threatened. And from Israel, the Chief Rabbinate in Israel, one of the most corrupt religious establishments in Western democracies, entered the fray calling into doubt the pope’s impending visit to Israel.

As an eighth generation rabbi and someone who lost much family in the Holocaust, it could just be me, but this official Jewish response seems outrageously over the top. Do millions of American Jews sufficiently care that the pope revoked the excommunication of this unheard of bishop such that major Jewish organizations should devote so much energy and attention to this and turn it into a cause célèbre worthy of front page attention? And is this the way we speak to each other after decades of successful interfaith work on improving our relationship?

How is it that the view of some cranky bishop who has no power evokes calls of a crisis in Catholic – Jewish relations despite the revolutionary changes in Church teachings regarding Jews since Vatican II? Where is the “proportionality,” where is the giving the benefit of the doubt—a central religious and spiritual imperative—in response to something that is admittedly upsetting but in the scheme of things is less than trivial especially given this pope’s historic visit to Auschwitz in which he unambiguously recognized the evil perpetrated upon Jews in the Holocaust and in his way “repented” for any contribution distorted Church teachings made to create the ground for such evil to erupt.

Something is off-kilter here. Is it possible that the leadership of Jewish defense agencies, people with the best of motivation who have historically done critical work in fighting anti-Semitism, have become so possessed by their roles as monitors of anti-Semitism, so haunted by unresolved fears, guilt, and even shame regarding the Holocaust, and perhaps so unconsciously driven by how these issues literally keep their institutions afloat, that they have become incapable of distinguishing between a bishop’s ridiculous, loopy, discredited views about the Holocaust and a Church from the Pope down which has clearly and repeatedly recognized the evil done to Jews in the Holocaust and called for that evil to never be forgotten?

Perhaps, this called for a little understanding of what it must be like to actually run a 1.2 billion person spiritual community (one with which I disagree on many issues) and to be trying to create some sense of unity from right to left, from extreme liberalism to extreme traditionalism. How about cutting a pope, who we know, along with the previous pope, is probably amongst the most historically sensitive popes to the issues of anti-Semitism, Holocaust, and the relationship to Judaism and Jews, a little slack, given how he is trying to heal his own community. And is it possible that the pope’s desire/hope/need to reintegrate the Church (he has also reached out to Liberal theologian Hans Kung) may be of more importance both to the Church and actually to religion on this planet than whether we Jews are upset about the lifting of excommunication of one irrelevant bishop?

Would we Jews like to be judged by the crankiest, most outlandish, hurtful, and stupid thing any rabbi in the world said about Catholics or Christians? We Jews are no longer organized to excommunicate and a rabbi can’t be defrocked the way the Church does with its clergy but surely there are individual rabbis who say things so abhorrent about the “other” that though we still call the person rabbi we would not want to be taken to task for doing so.

Finally, when the pope as well as key Vatican officials said within a day that Williamson’s views are “absolutely indefensible,” where was a little humility in response? Wouldn’t it have been interesting, yet alone ethically compelling, for those who initially lashed out to have acknowledged that perhaps they did overreact and that they do know that the Church and specifically this pope are very sensitive to these issues? But that we ask the pope and church hierarchy to please understand that, whether fully justified or not, we are still very very raw and very vulnerable regarding the Holocaust and so we are sorry if we did overreact and we are deeply grateful for the pope’s unambiguous reiteration of that which we do know is his view and is contemporary Catholic teachings.

Rabbi Irwin Kula’s article triggered a hate-filled reaction. Here is a sample. All comments appear in their original form.

“Your article is MOST curious. You, being a ‘man of the cloth’ of the Jewish religion (8th generation rabbi, no less), and having personally lost family members to the Holocaust, should, of ALL people, be expected to be at least a LITTLE empathetic towards the similar feelings of others.”

“Instead of preaching down at others YOU ‘think’ are overreacting, since you DON’T understand the Roman Catholic community as much as you think you do, why don’t you stick to promoting tolerance in a less INSULTING, DEROGATORY, and snotty little attitude that certainly does not fit your position, nor your heritage.”

“Nothing of what you say, btw, justifies the ongoing racism against and persecution of Jews by Christians. NOTHING.”

“The root of the problem is the trial of Jesus.  Historically it did not happen. Jesus got a bit carried away at the Jewish temple. The Roman soldiers reacted in their moral fashion in dealing with agitators, they summarily crucified him.  No questions asked and definitely no trial.”

“I AM NOT GOING TO DISCUSS THIS WITH YOU UNTIL YOU DISCOVER SOMETHING ABOUT THE GAY PEOPLE PERSECUTED AND KILLED DURING THE HOLOCAUST. YOU WERE GIVEN AN EXTENSIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY.”

“I’m a pagan. I have nothing to ‘confess’ about either. If I weren’t Pagan, I wouldn’t have been going up against serious odds to get Christians off Jewish kids all my life, and being thanked for it by occasional grudging not mentioning how ‘unclean’ I am supposed to be.”

“Will the Anti-Defamation League step up to the moral plate when the Vatican goes on another one of it’s rants about homosexuals or feminists?”

“The VATiCAN should be defrocked or Abolished or Not Recognised by the ‘NEW-[Apocalyptic]United Nations’!”

“Jesus was Jewish, yes, but he was not the son of any god.  He was apparently the illegitimate son (mamzer as per Professor Bruce Chilton) of Joseph and Mary. He trained under The Baptizer and made a good sermon although he was not literate. He got a bit carried away in the Jewish Temple, got arrested and summarily crucified by Roman troops who were ordered to deal with agitators quickly and without a trial.”

“Believe it, Rabbi. Just scroll down. Catholics are not the best friends of Jews. Take it from an insider.”

“According to Rabbi Irwin Kula Williamson is an ‘an obscure, irrelevant, cranky old man’ and he goes on to say ‘with no power’…Well… Rabbi Irwin Kula please carefully note this fact: so was Hitler, backed by Pope Pious XII. And in this case – as with Hitler – It is the Pope himself who is giving this obscure, irrelevant, cranky old man all the power – and relevance – he needs.  This is precisely the point. Rabbi Irwin Kula, regrettably, missed it completely.”

“The German Shepard is rounding up his stray sheep, and with some urgency.”

“this Pope’s historic visit to Auschwitz in which he unambiguously recognized the evil perpetrated upon Jews in the Holocaust and in his way “repented” for any contribution distorted Church teachings made to create the ground for such evil to erupt.
“One visit to a camp is repentance for centuries of persecution (which directly led, aided or overlooked) by the Catholic Church?  This one visit by one pope – without any distinct acknowledgment of what exactly he is repenting for – or acknowledging any Nazi/catholic church collusion – this is what you call repentance?”

“Rabbi Kula misses the point. It is not the mere rantings of a single crackpot that are at concern here, but a pattern of dismissiveness by the current Pontiff, including his reintroduction of the Prayer to Convert the Jews into the Catholic Mass.
“Rabbi Kula seems to ignore the rising tide of anti-semitism and anti-Jewish violence in the United States, Europe, and Turkey. Reinstating a an avowed anti-semite into a position of significant authority in the Catholic Church sends a powerful message of disrespect, if not hatred to our people. Wake up Rabbi.”

“If I were Jewish this Pope would scare me out of my mind.”

“The new Pope is by far more sectarian than the previous. His own views on the Holocaust are hardly more encouraging than outright Holocaust deniers. His denial that Christian sectarianism was a major factor in the Holocaust makes it hard to believe that he takes the dangers of his increased sectarianism seriously.”

“This is time to be afraid, very very afraid.”

On February 5, the Obama administration said that its newly designed Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will decide on a case by case basis whether a funding request violates the Constitution. Joshua DuBois, who will head this initiative, said, “People on both sides are going to be a little uncomfortable with that.” At issue are the hiring rights of religious social service organizations that receive federal funding.

During his bid for the presidency, President Obama said that religious organizations that receive federal monies should not have the right to determine who works for them. But with this announcement, the president decided to play it safe and tiptoe in the middle.

Sending requests on a case by case basis to lawyers to examine the constitutional questions is a ruse: We already know what the law says. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, in Section 702 (a), specifically allows an exemption for religious organizations in hiring. The legislators who passed this historic act knew that for the government to deny religious organizations that receive public monies the right to determine who should service its constituents would effectively neuter them. This position is as true now as it was then.

On the same day, the administration announced that the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will expand its domain by working with the National Security Council “to foster interfaith dialogue with leaders and scholars around the world.” Bunk.

We asked what in the world does servicing the poor and promoting responsible fatherhood—two of the four priorities outlined by DuBois—have to do with having the National Security Council sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a chat? This is just another way to gut faith-based initiatives.

We need a test case that will force the Obama administration to walk on one side of the street.

On February 3, Link TV featured a three and a half minute video that mocks Catholicism. The media outlet is available as a basic service in more than 31 million homes that receive direct broadcast satellite TV.

The video, “Divine Food,” opens with a priest waking up to a rumbling noise that shakes the religious symbols and statues in his room. He proceeds to a Catholic church where he discovers several wafers near a cup (the implication is that they are consecrated Hosts). In a disrespectful manner, he chews on them vigorously and then admonishes the statues that are “looking at him.” He falls asleep in the church and when awakened he is asked to say Mass, which he refuses to do. The priest then makes large wafers out of dough and gives the pancake-like substance (which he calls the “Body of Christ”) to confused parishioners at Communion. The video ends when the priest drops the remaining “Hosts” into a dirty aquarium.

This video first aired last summer, right after a professor from the University of Minnesota intentionally desecrated the Eucharist. At first we thought this was just another loony attack, but then we found out that Link TV is funded by foundations that support anti-Catholicism. To wit: the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Wallace Global Fund and George Soros’ Open Society Institute all fund Link TV, and all are generous contributors to Catholics for Choice, a notoriously anti-Catholic front group. Worse, of the three co-producers of the video, one of them—ITVS—is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a public entity. So here we have the urbane bigots in the foundation world, and a taxpayer-funded organization, underwriting anti-Catholicism.

Within 24 hours Link TV removed the offensive video; the channel attributed the removal to the numerous complaints that it received from Catholic League supporters.

Charles Darwin was born 200 years ago in February, and from the noise coming from some quarters, one would believe that he was an atheist. Nonsense. To be sure, he was a self-described agnostic, but he had no use for militant atheists.

Consider what he said to Edward Aveling in 1881, a dogmatic atheist: “Why should you be so aggressive? Is anything gained by trying to force these new ideas upon the mass of mankind?”

Also, Darwin and the Catholic Church were of the same mind in one very important matter: “It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist.”

The next time some sage feeds you propaganda about Darwin, tell him to explain these two quotes.

On January 23, President Barack Obama overturned restrictions on funding abortions overseas. The Mexico City Policy, which denied federal funding of private organizations that perform and promote abortions, was rescinded by an executive order.

Here we have a black president taking money from the taxpayers in a time of economic crisis and giving it to organizations—many of which are anti-Catholic—so they can spend it on killing non-white babies in Third World nations. And Obama is known as a progressive.

Obama has said repeatedly that he is not pro-abortion, and some Catholics salivating for a job in his administration believe him. Yet, in office for only a few days, one of the first things he decided to do was fund abortion. That would be on par with someone who said he was in favor of gun control and then provided funds to the National Rifle Association. Indeed, no one spends money to support that which he really abhors. We said that it’s time for the pro-abortion crowd to simply say that whatever reservations they may have about abortion (and some have none at all), they are outweighed by their overall support for it.

Obama’s executive order came only days after the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops made public a letter it sent to Obama asking him to retain the Mexico City Policy.

It soon became clear that Obama’s decision to overturn the Mexico City Policy was unpopular among the American people. The results of a Gallup poll taken in early February asked the American people how they viewed some of the president’s early decisions: his lowest support was on the issue of funding abortion. Three out of four Americans agreed with him on four of the issues asked about, and two-thirds supported him on another; there were two issues he failed to receive majority approval (the closing of Gitmo and abortion funding).

Only 35 percent of Americans polled said they agreed with President Obama on the following issue: “Allowing U.S. funding for overseas family planning organizations that provide abortions.”

After we found out about this poll, we contacted all members of the 111th Congress notifying them that the American people do not want their money spent paying for someone’s abortion.

This issue has drastic consequences given the fact that not only did Obama overturn the Mexico City Policy and he’s promised to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, the most sweeping and radical abortion-rights legislation ever written, but also because Obama promised to restore U.S. funding of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), a pro-abortion agency.

On January 24, Obama said, “I look forward to working with Congress to restore U.S. financial support for the U.N. Population Fund.” He pledged to do this “in the coming weeks,” maintaining that, “It is time that we end the politicization of this [abortion] issue.”

UNFPA claims that it is not a pro-abortion organization, rather it states that it merely supports “reproductive rights.” This isn’t exactly true. Starting in 1979, in the first five years of China’s draconian one-child policy, UNFPA gave the program $50 million. To accomplish this goal over the years, which is still ongoing, IUDs have been forced into the wombs of hundreds of millions of women against their will. Indeed, no coercive method is considered taboo, including forced abortion. It was for reasons like these that in 2002 the U.S. State Department blasted China for its affront to human rights. Indeed, Secretary Colin Powell backed the Bush administration’s denial of funds to UNFPA.

The one-child policy has abetted female infanticide, so much so that there has been a massive decrease in the female population—there are now an estimated 350 million girls missing from China. Other non-white areas of the world where UNFPA concentrates its efforts include Vietnam, Nigeria and Peru. But it can be multicultural: When the genocidal maniac from Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, wanted to tame his people, he invited UNFPA to help reduce the population of Kosovo; he wasn’t unhappy with the results, nor, of course, the means.

Obama’s ironies are endless. He wants to bankroll UNFPA and fund abortion overseas, all while claiming that he is not pro-abortion. Hopefully he and the rest of Congress will listen to the American people and spend less time catering to the extremists at Planned Parenthood and NARAL.