A week into the new year saw the horrible death of 12 people, most of whom worked at the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo; a police officer was among the dead. The weekly publication is known for its coarse content and vulgar cartoons. Muslim terrorists, upset with depictions of Muhammad, were responsible for the carnage.

Bill Donohue quickly became part of the story when he issued a news release saying that Muslims had a right to be angry, though they were wrong to react with violence. “Killing in response to insult, no matter how gross,” he said, ” must be unequivocally condemned.” He made several similar statements over the course of two weeks, but many in the media focused exclusively on his comment that Muslims were justified in their anger.

Donohue called the paper’s publisher, Stephane Charbonnier, a “narcissist” who “didn’t understand the role he played in his tragic death.” The Catholic League president drew attention to Charbonnier’s comment, “Muhammad isn’t sacred to me”; the French journalist dropped that line  as justification for his obscene depictions. “Muhammad isn’t sacred to me, either,” said Donohue, “but it would never occur to me to deliberately insult Muslims by trashing him.”

Non-violent offenses, Donohue stressed, must be met with a non-violent response. This was uncontroversial, but what many criticized Donohue for was his insistence that Muslims were unnecessarily provoked. He was simply asking all parties to the controversy to exercise restraint: the cartoonists should not intentionally offend Muslim sensibilities and Muslims should not overreact by taking up arms.

After being pounded by many pundits and talk-show hosts on radio and TV for his comments, Donohue found welcome relief in statements made by Pope Francis. “You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith.” The Holy Father insisted that “We cannot make a toy out of the religion of others. These people provoke and then [something can happen]. In freedom of expression there are limits.”

If this wasn’t vindication enough, the pope, after denouncing the violence, quipped that if his friend, Dr. Alberto Gasparri, the organizer of papal trips, were “to use a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch. It’s normal.” This effectively closed the debate on Donohue: the pope had taken his side.

There is much more to this story; it is recounted in the pages that follow. In his “President’s Desk” piece, Donohue discusses some behind the scenes issues that are attendant to this issue. While the Catholic League emerged on top, an awful lot of shots were fired at us, and some were utterly irresponsible.

President Obama offended Catholics at this year’s National Prayer Breakfast. “Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place,” he said, “remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

Bill Donohue said, “Obama’s ignorance is astounding and his comparison is pernicious,” adding that it was done to “deflect guilt from Muslim madmen.”

The Crusades, Donohue pointed out, were a defensive Christian reaction against Muslim barbarians of the Middle Ages. He quoted Princeton scholar and Islamic expert Bernard Lewis: “The Crusade was a delayed response to the jihad, the holy war for Islam, and its purpose was to recover by war what had been lost by war—to free the holy places of Christendom and open them once again, without impediment, to Christian pilgrimage.”

Regarding the other fable, the Inquisition, the Catholic Church had almost nothing to do with it. Secular authorities saw heresy as treason; anyone who questioned royal authority, or who challenged the idea that kingship was God-given, was guilty of a capital offense. It was they—not the Church—who burned the heretics.

According to St. Louis University professor Thomas Madden, “All the Crusades met the criteria of just wars.” Donohue questioned, “How many ISIS atrocities, Mr. President, have met the criteria of just wars? The ones where they buried people alive, stoned children, raped women, and crucified men?” He called on Obama to apologize.

William A. Donohue

To say 2015 got off to a fast start would be an understatement: it seemed that all I did was grant one interview after another, running from one TV studio to another. It was tiring, but also fun. There were, however, a number of things that happened that were not so humorous; dishonesty was commonplace.

Let’s start with the cartoons. I was astounded to hear commentators, either hosts or guests, maintain that the cartoons were merely an irreverent mode of expression and that religion was fair game for criticism. They were either ignorant or lying.

No one, save extremists, thinks that religion should be off-limits to critical analysis. That is not what these cartoons were about. They were about insulting people—sticking it in their face. And many of them were not so innocent. Some were so obscene, so disgusting and nauseating, that no respectable TV show or newspaper would ever show them.

So let’s stop with the nonsense: these were not Mel Brooks-type satirists who poke fun at everyone—they were vile pornographers disguised as cartoonists. Moreover, they harbored a special hatred of Muslims and Christians, especially Catholics. To wit: an anti-Semite was fired from Charlie Hebdo just before the shootings. No one has ever been fired for being anti-Muslim or anti-Catholic.

According to the New York Times, Stephane Charbonnier, the publisher who was killed, “was a staunch left-wing activist, raised in a family of communists.” His goal, he said, was to make Islam irrelevant. Indeed, he bragged that he would not quit “until Islam is just as banal as Catholicism.” Given his motivation, it was not surprising to learn that the co-founder of the publication, Henri Roussel, blamed Charbonnier for “dragging the team” to their deaths by relentlessly provoking Muslims.

The media, of course, were quick to bash me for saying that Muslims had a right to be angry, yet they did not have the courage to show the offensive cartoons. My position is that all of the non-obscene cartoons should be shown, but that it would be wrong to flag the truly disgusting ones.

No media outlet was more unfair than USA Today. It contacted me asking if I would write an opposing viewpoint essay defending blasphemy laws in the Middle East. Of course, I refused. No matter, they ran an excerpt of one of my press releases, without permission, listing it as representative of support for blasphemy laws. This is yellow journalism, par excellence.

I was struck by the number of conservatives who were highly critical of my position. Some simply hate Muslims with such a passion that there is no cartoon so despicable they cannot justify. Others are driven by a desire for unfettered free speech.

I make my living because of free speech, too, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t well-established limits to it. The list of expressions that are not protected by law include: obscenity, libel, slander, harassing phone calls, incitement to riot, “fighting words,” copyright infringement, false advertising, misrepresenting one’s credentials, treason, bribery, etc.

Freedom of speech was intended by the Founders as a means to an end. The end is the good society. They understood that if the good society is to be achieved, political discourse was a must: we have to be free to agree and disagree about what constitutes the good society. They did not mean free speech to cover obscenities. Interestingly, in more than one case, those who disagreed with me on the air agreed with me off the air.

I am no stranger to exercises of free speech, having led several demonstrations in the street against anti-Catholic artistic exhibitions. When I was asked by some Catholics to sue Indiana University-Purdue University because it was set to stage a bigoted play, I demurred saying that censorship was not the right remedy. That is why I had the school’s chancellor distribute copies of my statement against the play to the attendees.

Even if we grant cartoonists, and others, the legal right to insult our religion, no one has a moral right to do so. I’ve been saying this for decades, but only recently has it become controversial. Why this simple proposition has to be explained is not a good sign.

When Pope Francis took my side, saying what I had said almost verbatim for two weeks, I was obviously delighted. I was particularly happy to inform radio talk-show conservative Hugh Hewitt: he berated me for my stance early on, saying no bishop or cardinal would ever take my side. Well, Mr. Blewitt, I said, the Bishop of Rome did.

Anyone who saw the video of the pope joking with his friend, saying he would punch him if he cursed his mother, knows it was done in jest. Yes, he was making a serious point: when we intentionally provoke people, don’t act shocked when they respond with vigor. When he feigned a punch, everyone laughed, as they should have.

One of the problems with political correctness is its humorlessness. Some people need to take a deep breath and get a life. I am proud to stand with Pope Francis.

Bill Donohue

We all want to be healthy, happy, and make it to heaven; even atheists who do not believe in heaven would prefer they enter the pearly gates if   given only two choices. Who are the most likely, and the least likely, to achieve the Three H’s of health, happiness, and heaven is the subject of my new book.

The real challenge, I found, is not deciding who these people are—the data on the first two H’s are uncontested (and there is little disagreement on the attributes that make us likely candidates for heaven)—the difficult part was explaining why some have a decided advantage over others. From scouring the evidence, it became clear that the Three B’s—beliefs, bonds, and boundaries—were the key to achieving the Three H’s.

Well-being is a term that describes our physical and mental health, our degree of happiness, and overall life evaluation. Those who have the highest well-being are the most religious; those who score the lowest are the least religious. This is not debatable. As for heaven, while only God knows for sure who will make the cut, it is entirely reasonable to maintain that those who are charitable and altruistic stand the best chance of being rewarded in the afterlife. We know from many studies that religious Americans are the most likely to engage in charitable giving and altruistic endeavors; agnostics and atheists are the least likely.

While the data on religious Americans is not confined to Catholicism, the evidence is particularly persuasive for Catholics. That is why I say there is a Catholic advantage vis-à-vis secularists: the degree to which we possess the beliefs, cherish the bonds, and respect the boundaries of right and wrong is significant. Indeed, we embody the Three B’s as well as any religious community; this gives us a big leg up in achieving the Three H’s.

To make my argument, I selected practicing Catholics, priests, nuns (especially cloistered sisters), and saints as representative of the Catholic model. I chose Hollywood celebrities and intellectuals to represent the secular model. On the face of it, these two secular groups have little in common, but what unites them is their agnosticism and atheism: the former have no time for God, and the latter think they are smarter than God. On the whole, both suffer from poor physical and mental health, are largely unhappy, and are not exactly charitable or altruistic.

The first of the Three B’s, beliefs, is an important variable explaining our physical and mental health. Patients who pray for relief of a specific medical condition usually find that their prayers have been answered. Indeed, frequent prayer is clearly related to physical and emotional well-being.

Intercessory prayer, or absent prayer, also yields important results. When people are asked to pray for a specific person, whom they do not know, but who is suffering from an illness, and the prayer recipient has no knowledge that this is happening, such patients improve better than those patients with the same condition but who did not have anyone praying for them. These “double blind” studies have been replicated many times.

The second B, bonds, is another advantage Catholics have. The word religion is derived from the Latin, religare, which means “to bind together.” The opportunities that parish life provides in establishing bonds—retreats, parties, organized pastoral and political events—are plentiful. Moreover, these relationships are a great resource in time of need.

What do agnostics and atheists have to fall back on? For many of them, their beliefs are self-centered and their bonds are fragmented. It is not without consequence that celebrities are known for their narcissism and intellectuals are famous for their egotism. Unfortunately, their radical individualism does not serve them well in achieving a stable and healthy existence, never mind attaining happiness.

Boundaries, the third B, are a critical element in determining our physical and mental health. Those who do not respect the need to use the brakes that God gave us are precisely the ones most likely to engage in risky behaviors; on this score, celebrities and intellectuals have no rival. By contrast, those who do not see constraint as a liability—cloistered nuns come quickly to mind—are among the healthiest and happiest people on earth.

Dr. Jeff Levin talks about an “epidemiology of love,” or what he says is our capacity to love God. Those who possess this attribute exercise greater self-mastery, and a greater sense of self-efficacy. They suffer less from depression and physical disabilities. In fact, the association of religion with physical health is so strong that those who are the most religious are also the least likely to suffer from cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure, hypertension, asthma, back pain, tuberculosis, and other maladies. Moreover, in terms of mental health, the more religious the person is, the better his mental condition.

The “Nun Study,” a research project that studied 678 Catholic nuns aged 75-102 in 1991, found that ten years later 295 were still alive, ranging in age from 85 and older. They lived longer than women outside the convent, and were considerably happier. Cloistered nuns, the evidence shows, live on average eight years longer than other women.

Alcohol and drug use, promiscuity, and crime, are all inversely related to religiosity: the more religious a person is, the less likely he is to indulge in these behaviors. The obverse is also true: secular-minded persons, such as celebrities and intellectuals, are the most likely to partake in these destructive acts. That’s because religious Americans are more likely to exercise self-restraint, and the folks in Tinseltown and in higher education are more likely to be self-indulgent.

Our mental health is often a function of our connectedness, our ability to establish meaningful bonds. Loneliness, depression, and suicide are the sad results of an inability to connect. Barbra Streisand’s famous refrain, “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” didn’t quite nail it. All of us need people—those of us who have people are the luckiest in the world.

Cloistered nuns, unlike celebrities, enjoy two benefits that their swinging counterparts do not have: they are strongly connected to each other and to God. This explains why they are healthier and happier than most of us. It is not the alcohol-using, drug-addicted, bed-hopping narcissists who are at peace with themselves. Just read the obituary pages.

Everyone experiences tough times, but we Catholics have a major advantage over secularists: we have the example of Jesus. His death, the greatest expression of love the world has ever known, was followed by his Resurrection, the greatest victory the world has ever known. This explains why we are an optimistic people: Catholicism understands suffering, but it remains confident that joy comes in its wake.

In particular, Catholics learn how to “offer it up.” When going through a tough patch, we are able to unite our sufferings with Christ. This is the essence of redemptive suffering. For instance, the number of saints who endured great suffering are legion, but in the end they all knew the beauty and joy of being with the Lord. Sadly, the idea of redemptive suffering is wholly unknown to agnostics and atheists. In times of trial, they are left to themselves, having nowhere to turn.

No segment of society has a monopoly on happiness, but the data conclusively show that the happiest are also the most religious; the least likely to be happy are their secular opposites. It is not money that buys happiness—it is living a faithful life. Those who attend church regularly also feel freer than secularists, and feeling free is tied to happiness. The happiest professional group are priests: more than anything else, celebrating the Eucharist accounts for their inner peace.

Among the least happy are celebrities and intellectuals. Alcoholism, drug use, multiple partners, multiple divorces, loneliness, depression, and mental illness are not stereotypes born of exaggeration: these qualities are a staple among the Hollywood crowd and intellectuals. Their self-absorption and self-destructive tendencies account for their misery, to say nothing of what they do to others.

To take one example, the number of intellectuals who have abandoned their children, and have seriously mistreated those closest to them, is shocking. That they typically wrote endlessly about championing the needy, while neglecting their own, is one of the most telling commentaries about them.

At the other extreme are the saints. While their lives are a veritable road map to heaven, they were not always virtuous; many lived lives of debauchery. But when they embraced Jesus they became a model of love. Who do the atheists have to emulate? The saints gave of themselves willingly, and tirelessly. Mother Teresa said that if love is real, it must cost us. That is not something the self-centered understand.

Surveys show that the most generous Americans are the most religious, and that the least generous are the least religious. If you are looking to see charitableness in action, go to Utah or Alabama; don’t waste your time visiting New England. Does this mean that conservatives are much more generous than liberals? Yes, the data show exactly that.

Frederick Ozanam personified charitableness. He was the founder of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. When his atheist debating associates challenged him on what he was doing personally for the poor, he answered the challenge by enlisting his friends to dedicate their lives to one-on-one personal care for the needy. This is the essence of the Catholic notion of self-giving.

Altruism is not easy to measure, but those who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust have properly been chosen as exemplars. The evidence shows that it wasn’t the self-absorbed who put their lives on the line—they were the least likely—it was those who had a clear sense of right and wrong, and duty to others. Catholics were prominently among them.

Secular intellectuals are split on the idea of heaven: some scoff at it altogether while others hold that heaven on earth can be achieved. Their efforts to establish utopia, however, have all ended in bloodshed.

Beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the intellectual architect of the French Revolution, the quest for the “new man”—human beings who are not self-interested—has yielded nothing but genocide. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were all visionaries who sought to create the “new man,” thus ushering in a utopian wonderland; similarly, Hitler thought he could reinstitute a new sense of community and rescue Western civilization.

All of these secular maniacs rejected original sin. That was their fatal flaw. They saw human nature as malleable, akin to putty: it could be shaped and reshaped at their will. So they thought. Heaven exists, but only in the afterlife.

All things considered, there really is a Catholic advantage. Exercising the Three B’s—beliefs, bonds, and boundaries—is the surest way to achieve the Three H’s of health, happiness, and heaven. But they cannot be “adopted.” That’s because the Three H’s are a residual, the natural byproduct of living the life of a faithful Catholic. To say it pays sweet dividends cannot be argued, even by agnostics and atheists.

Killing in response to insult, no matter how gross, must be unequivocally condemned. That is why the killing of 12 people at the Paris office of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo cannot be tolerated. But neither should we tolerate the kind of intolerance that provoked this violent reaction.

Those who work at this newspaper have a long and disgusting record of going way beyond the mere lampooning of public figures, and this is especially true of their depictions of religious figures. For example, they have shown nuns masturbating and popes wearing condoms. They have also shown Muhammad in pornographic poses.

While some Muslims today object to any depiction of the Prophet, others do not. Moreover, visual representations of him are not proscribed by the Koran. What unites Muslims in their anger against Charlie Hebdo is the vulgar manner in which Muhammad has been portrayed. What they object to is being intentionally insulted over the course of many years. On this aspect, Bill Donohue is in total agreement with them.

Stephane Charbonnier, the paper’s publisher, was killed in the slaughter a few weeks ago. It is too bad that he didn’t understand the role he played in his tragic death. In 2012, when asked why he insulted Muslims, he said, “Muhammad isn’t sacred to me.” Had he not been so narcissistic, he may still be alive. Muhammad isn’t sacred to Donohue, either, but it would never occur to him to deliberately insult Muslims by trashing Muhammad.

Anti-Catholic artists in this country have provoked Donohue to hold many demonstrations, but never has he counseled violence. This, however, does not empty the issue. Madison was right when he said, “Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power.”

Being misrepresented is commonplace for public figures. Sometimes it reflects an honest misreading; other times it is a willful distortion. Bill Donohue doesn’t have the time to address all of these instances, but he hardly ran from his position.

Donohue’s position is this: the murderers are fully responsible for what they did and should be treated with the full force of the law. Nothing justified the killing of these people. But this was not the whole of this issue.

The cartoonists, and all those associated with Charlie Hebdo, are no champions of freedom. Quite the opposite: their obscene portrayal of religious figures—so shocking that not a single TV station or mainstream newspaper would show them—represents an abuse of freedom.

Freedom of speech is not an end—it is a means to an end. For Americans, the end is nicely spelled out in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: the goal is to “form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

No fair-minded reading of the Preamble suggests that it was written to facilitate the right to intentionally and persistently insult people of faith with scatological commentary. Moreover, the purpose of free speech is political discourse: it exists to protect the right of men and women to agree and disagree about the makings of the good society.

Let’s forget about legalities. As Bill Donohue has said countless times, everyone has a legal right to insult his religion (or the religion of others), but no one has a moral right to do so. Can we please have this conversation, along with what to do about Muslim barbarians who kill because they are offended?

In an ideal world, Muslims who interpret the Koran to justify violence would convert to Catholicism, and artists who think they have an absolute right to insult people of faith would follow suit. If both did, we would have peace and civility.

Catholicism teaches that it is immoral to intentionally kill innocent persons, beginning with life in the womb. It is not a pacifistic religion—it believes in just wars—though it naturally inclines towards non-violence. It most certainly does not counsel violence as a right remedy to insolent behavior. Muslims who say it is morally justified to kill obscene artists, citing the Koran as their impetus, would do us all a favor if they converted to Catholicism.

Catholicism teaches that freedom is the right to do what you ought to do. As such, it is always tied to duty, and to individual responsibility. Once that understanding breaks down—as it has in the West—trouble follows. Unfortunately, many artists interpret their rights as a solo exercise, disconnected from duty or responsibility. But autonomy can never be a sturdy guide to morality: it devolves into relativism and to a wholesale disrespect for the rights of others. Narcissistic artists who associate obscenity with creativity would do us all a favor if they converted to Catholicism.

The central problem with Muslim extremists and irresponsible artists is that neither embodies the virtue of restraint. If they did, they would not act as the barbarians and libertines that they are. Catholicism is the answer.

On January 7, the Washington Post ran an article by Ishaan Tharoor criticizing Bill Donohue for drawing attention to the irresponsibility of the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo. He took Donohue to task for not taking a more expansive view of free speech. In his online post, two cartoons from the French weekly were reprinted: one was anti-Muslim and the other was anti-Catholic. They were hardly the worst that Charlie Hebdo has penned, but they offered a glimmer of what the publication has given.

The next day Tharoor’s article ran again, but this time there were no cartoons. There was an explanatory statement at the end of his article. “Editors note: An earlier version of this article included images offensive to various religious groups that did not meet the Post’s standards, and should not have been published. They have been removed.”

Now how about them apples? If this isn’t bad enough, consider that as recently as December the art critic at the newspaper, Philip Kennicott, bemoaned the fact that an exhibition of Catholic art at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, “Picturing Mary,” did not include his favorite—the portrait by Chris Ofili of Our Blessed Mother that was adorned with pictures of anuses and vaginas, as well as elephant dung. Kennicott called it “perhaps the most famous image of Mary painted in the last quarter century.” That it wasn’t included made this guy angry.

So this is what passes as ethics at the Washington Post: it is not only okay to offend Catholics, it is a blow to freedom of speech not to include scatological portraits of the Virgin Mary in Catholic exhibitions. As for anti-Muslim depictions, that’s a different story—they don’t meet the newspaper’s standards. Which is why in 2010 it decided not to run an inoffensive cartoon by Wiley Miller simply because the “Non Sequitur” cartoon printed the line “Where’s Muhammad?” at the bottom!!!

Bill Donohue asks artists not to intentionally insult people of faith and in the mind of some this means he favors blasphemy laws. For example, he was invited by Kelsey Rupp of the editorial board of USA Today to write an “opposing view” on blasphemy laws in the Middle East: the paper would oppose the laws and he was expected to support them. This is the way some clueless liberals—who are joined these days by clueless conservatives—think.

A January 8 editorial in the New York Times said Charlie Hebdo “has been an equal-opportunity offender: Muslims, Jews and Christians,” as well as others, have been trashed. It said that the editorial director, who was killed, believed that “free expression was nothing without the right to offend.” In a news article from January 13, it quoted a cartoonist at the French weekly saying, “The only thing that is sacred is free expression.”

Fact: Charlie Hebdo fired a cartoonist for publishing an article deemed anti-Semitic in 2008. No one has been fired for offending Catholics or Muslims. More important, the notion that “the right to offend” should be celebrated—instead of condemned—tells us much about the adolescent streak in both papers (yes, it should be legal to offend, but it is still immoral). Moreover, if the only thing that is sacred is the right to offend, then absolutely nothing has been learned. That such twisted thinking is commonplace is scary.

The ironies never end. In the January 13 edition of the New York Times there was an editorial cheering the firing of  Atlanta’s fire chief because he gave his colleagues a book he wrote that has passages condemning homosexuality. An investigation revealed that he never treated gays disrespectfully. The Times accused him of “foist[ing]” his religious views on others. So when someone is handed a book, he is having the author’s views “foisted” upon him, meriting possible termination. Donohue said “possible” because the content of the book matters to the Times, even though the courts have decided that limitations on speech must be content neutral. Free speech anyone?

When the Danish cartoons were published a decade ago, the media refused to show them. With the exception of the Boston Phoenix, which cited safety concerns, the others either gave no reason or feigned interest in not offending people of faith. But if they really believed in freedom of speech, the cartoons would have been shown.

Why? Because none was offensive: the cartoons never descended to the gutter as some of the more recent Charlie Hebdo ones have. Yes, some Muslims object to any portrayal of Muhammad, but many others do not.  Moreover, the Koran does not proscribe such imagery. Ergo, these inoffensive cartoons should have been shown.

What about the Charlie Hebdo cartoons? Some are irreverent without being obscene, so there is no reason not to show them. But in the name of decency, the toilet-speech cartoons should not be shown. To do so would be to intentionally insult not only Muslims, but all those who prefer not to have their sensibilities assaulted with pornographic images.

Reasonable people can disagree as to where we should draw the line; unreasonable people say no line should be drawn. That there are as many unreasonable conservatives as there are unreasonable liberals cannot be denied. Some liberals are so enthralled with the “sacredness” of speech that they have completely lost their moral bearings. Some conservatives hate Muslims so much that no portrayal of Muhammad can be filthy enough to satisfy them.

Bill Donohue admires Jeff Zucker at CNN for having the honesty to say that he wouldn’t show the cartoons because he didn’t want to endanger his employees. Donohue does not admire Dean Baquet at the New York Times for saying his reason for opting out was because the cartoons constitute “gratuitous insult.” After all, it was his newspaper that printed the offensive dung-on-the-Virgin Mary image (complete with vaginas and anuses) on February 8, 2006, the day after an editorial explained that it wouldn’t publish the Danish cartoons!