The evidence is unmistakable: 81 percent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse were male, the majority of whom were postpubescent. Since 100 percent of the victimizers were male, this scandal mostly involved homosexuality, not pedophilia. Yet the cultural elites refuse to deal with reality, and have indeed waged an unprecedented cover-up.

Two items in the September 7 New York Times were relevant. One was a review of a mime performance called, “America LoveSexDeath,” that makes mention of one of the acts, “The Priest and the Altar Boy.” From another source, it was reported that this act “depicts a priest undressing a child clearly meant to be five or six and leaves little of the ensuing activity to the imagination.” It is a sure bet that not one artist in the nation would ever do a performance based on the typical case, namely one in which a gay priest hit on a postpubsescent male.

The Times also ran a piece by Ian Fisher covering Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to Austria. Fisher wrote that among many Austrian Catholics, there is “lingering anger over pedophilia scandals.” (Our emphasis.) But the sexual abuse scandal has been a homosexual one all along; anyone who reads the data knows this to be true.

Lying about the sexual abuse scandal in the priesthood is commonplace. The lying continues primarily because the elites do not want to bash gays, which is fair enough. They just want to bash priests, which is not.

New York senator and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was asked last month about Catholic hospitals that do not wish to provide women with emergency contraception, which in some cases can act as an abortifacient.  According to the Associated Press, Senator Clinton replied that “conscience clauses” are appropriate in some situations, but “if there is a justifiable reason for some professional not to offer services, then wherever that professional works, there has to be immediate offering of services.”

In other words, Senator Clinton said she would support certain individuals following their consciences and religious dictates, but not any institution as a whole. So Catholic hospitals would be required to violate Catholic teaching and belief.

Thus did the senator try to play to both sides; she ultimately failed to support those hospitals run by religious institutions that seek to operate within the guidelines of their respective religious faiths.

Send in the straightjackets—Newsweek has cracked up. Of all the stories in the entire world to cover, Newsweek’s website flagged as its “Top Story” on September 13 an insane piece about a woman (complete with photo) who thinks she is an ordained Catholic priest. They found this “woman priest” in Missouri, though had Newsweek reporter Karen Springen walked into the nearest asylum, she would have found some people who think they’re the pope.

Springen’s discovery was Jessica Rowley. Jessica thinks she’s a Catholic priest because some crackpot group said they ordained her. Springen, whose contempt for the Catholic Church is rivaled only by her ignorance of it, not only made snide comments about the Church’s rules governing ordination, she implied that the Catholic Church thinks “it’s a sin to be gay” and excludes divorced people. Springen’s delusional discovery, of course, is pro-abortion and pro-homosexuality—just the kind of person who would make a great addition to Newsweek.

There are so many denominations that would welcome Jessica, but the fact that she has rejected all of them indicates how little regard she has for them. This says volumes about the prestige these trendy religious communities have, even among alienated dissidents. So Jessica would rather play make-believe, pretending she’s a Catholic priest. By Halloween, she’ll no doubt become a bishop.

If “I think, therefore I am” was good enough for Descartes, Newsweek reasoned, then “I think I’m a Catholic priest, therefore I am” was good enough for Jessica. And for Newsweek as well.

The next time someone tells us that we shouldn’t worry about Kathy Griffin and all the other anti-Catholic bigots—”we have a war going on,” they thunder!—we’ll be sure to tell them what passes as the “Top Story” at Newsweek.

Managers of a student newspaper at the University of Virginia, the Cavalier Daily, forced a staff cartoonist, Grant Woolard, to resign last month. This action stemmed from a drawing done by  Woolard. According to the Washington Post, the cartoon depicted “nine darkened figures with bald, enlarged heads, dressed only in loincloths, fighting each other over a tree branch, pillow, chair, boot and stool. The caption for the melee: ‘Ethiopian Food Fight.'”

Minority groups on campus, under the leadership of the local NAACP, showed up at the offices of the Cavalier Daily, demanding that Woolard be ousted. The minority groups were quickly obliged. The paper’s editor-in-chief explained, “The instant the public raised a question about it, we realized it was a mistake.”  In addition, the Post reported that a debate raged on campus over whether the paper’s managing board of editors should have submitted their resignations as well.

The Cavalier Daily’s editors wasted no time in acting on this issue. However, when the Catholic League objected to anti-Christian cartoons that the paper published in September 2006 (one of which was also drawn by Woolard), the editors did not show the same haste. They initially refused to apologize (though they had previously apologized for a cartoon that upset gays) and stood by the cartoons, dubbing them acceptable satire. Eventually, the cartoons were removed from the paper’s website and a statement of regret was posted. But Woolard was not ousted.

It is telling that the management of the Cavalier Daily is sensitive to the concerns of blacks and gays at the University of Virginia, but not to the concerns of Christians. It seems that while racism and gay-bashing are treated seriously on the campus, religious bigotry is not seen as such a problem.

On September 15, Fox’s “MADtv” kicked off its 13th season by featuring a series of some of the show’s past comedy skits. The new season opener, hosted by raunchy talk-show star Jerry Springer, was the first of a four-part “Best of MADtv” series.
Included in the program’s trip down memory lane was one of several past skits by “MADtv” that lampooned the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic priesthood.

While many people would expect a program like “MADtv” to cause offense on a frequent basis, a look at the show’s history reveals little along the lines of derogatory treatment of certain demographic groups.

We did research on “MADtv” and could find nothing in the way of complaints about the show from blacks, Hispanics, Jews, gays, or Muslims. One has to go back to 2000 for a sole complaint from an Asian-American advocacy group; in 2003 there was one complaint from postal workers regarding a “going postal” parody on the show.

It’s the same tired old story—in the popular culture, most groups are off-limits when it comes to causing deliberate and habitual offense. But Catholic priests are fair game, and there are repeat offenders in the entertainment world—such as the folks at “MADtv”—who have a hard time giving it up.

Manhattan Mini Storage, owned by Edison Properties, placed a billboard on Manhattan’s West Side Highway in August that showed a large wire hanger with the inscription, “Your closet space is shrinking as fast as her right to choose.”

New Yorkers have become accustomed to Manhattan Mini Storage posting billboards that bash the Bush Administration, but by making the leap from partisan politics to crude cultural commentary, the company stepped on dangerous turf. Why a storage company saw the need to advertise its support for abortion was a story all of its own, but by seeking to depict the pro-life community—which is primarily Catholic and Protestant—as oppressive, Manhattan Mini Storage crossed a line.

Those who like this billboard would no doubt be aghast at the sight of a billboard that featured a bloody baby who survived a botched abortion. They would be even more incensed if the picture were accompanied by the remark, “This is what happens when abortion fails.”

Manhattan Mini Storage was not only guilty of crudeness, but of cowardice. To wit: Why didn’t it have the guts to identify the object of her “shrinking” choice?

We are pleased to report that in a poll of New Yorkers, three of four were on our side. And judging from the feedback we got commenting on our media appearances, it is clear that we got the best of them.

Donald J. Dietrich, Human Rights and the Catholic Tradition. Transaction Publishers: To order, call (888) 999-6778.

Hardly anyone disagrees today about how bad Hitler and the Nazi regime were for the world. Besides unleashing World War II, Hitler had plans to exterminate entire peoples—plans which he proceeded to carry out before the eyes of a too-long unbelieving world in his Holocaust against the Jews and others considered subhuman, and which surely did mark some kind of evil low point even amidst all of the other violence and horrors that characterized the unhappy 20th century.

Nazism was especially bad for the Germans themselves. They lived under it longer than anyone else and suffered greatly from it, even though as a people they also furnished the principal means by which Hitler was able to inflict it upon the rest of the world for a time. German Catholics, in particular, were placed in the unenviable position of living under a government run by elements who only later finally came to be seen as criminals and madmen. While these criminals and madmen were in power, however, they constituted for German Catholics “the governing authorities” to whom St. Paul teaches Christians must be “subject,” since “there is no authority except from God and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom 13:1). The Church has generally interpreted this teaching to mean that good Christians must normally obey the duly constituted “powers that be” where they live—but obviously not to the point of falling into sin themselves.

Thus, living under the Nazi regime did constitute a genuine moral dilemma for Catholics and for the Church. This was especially true at first, when it was not always as easy for people living at the time to see the evil of the regime as it is for us today looking back. As the regime’s evils unfolded, many of them could be interpreted, at least for a while, as mere aberrations or excesses. If the Western powers themselves went on for years trying to “do business with Hitler,” it is at least understandable that Christians living under the regime should perhaps have tried to do the same more extensively and for a longer period of time than we would consider to be wise or even moral today.

So while resisting pretty much from the outset some obvious evils—such as the Nazi takeover of the media, education, youth activities, and the like—the Church did also try to accommodate the regime in other ways. For example, the concordat which Pope Pius XI concluded with the Nazi regime in 1933—it was signed by the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who would later become Pope Pius XII—is much criticized today, but nevertheless provided the legal basis for the Church to try to deal with the regime at all.

Donald J. Dietrich is a professor of theology at Boston College and a specialist in German Catholic history. He has written other books, notably on the subject of why some Catholics in Germany supported and others opposed the police state. In Human Rights and the Catholic Tradition, he focuses on the experience of German Catholics as they attempted, in the light of their faith, to deal with the barbarism of the Nazi era and the problems and conflicts brought about by Nazism and the Second World War.

One of the author’s basic premises is the incompatibility of Catholic moral teaching with Nazism. Hence, as the true nature of the regime became clearer, both the Church and individual Catholics generally became more opposed to it and more inclined to mount various forms of resistance to it (although the penalties for resistance of any kind could sometimes be drastic!). But these developments were neither automatic nor particularly rapid. As Dietrich notes, “until it was too late, most Germans…did not realize that the Nazis wanted something totally revolutionary.”

The incompatibility between the Catholic faith and the Nazi regime was real. Dietrich examines and documents how Catholic moral teaching came to be applied to what was actually going on in Germany. His main focus is not on what the Church or the Catholic bishops were doing or reacting to, but rather on what Catholics themselves were doing and reacting to. In particular, he covers in some detail how various Catholic theologians and thinkers gradually came to see, and hence to condemn, the evils being perpetrated by the Nazis.

Not only did these thinkers and theologians finally reject the tenets of the regime. In the course of the Nazi era, they succeeded in developing a new personal and existential theology of the human person—emphasizing the dignity of the human person—which became one of the pillars of the official teaching adopted on this subject by the Second Vatican Council. This new approach proved essential in enabling the Church to participate as a full partner in the debates and discussions concerning democracy and human rights that took place after World War II. Both the vocabulary and the concepts of this new theology were largely developed by German theologians in reaction to the brutality of the Nazis.  Some of these same German theologians also proved to be very influential at Vatican II.

The major achievement and importance of this book, in fact, lies in Dietrich’s survey and analysis of the thinking of a number of major Catholic thinkers and writers who developed this new theology in reaction to Nazism. They include such still well known figures as Karl Adam and Romano Guardini, or, in the next generation, the Jesuits Gustav Gundlach and Karl Rahner as well as the latter’s student, Johannes B. Metz. The degree to which some of these writers at first thought they were obliged to come to some kind of accommodation with Nazism was a surprise to this reviewer—although, of course, that stance did not endure.

The author also includes chapters on Nazi terror, sometime Catholic ambivalence towards the Third Reich (especially at first), the scope of Christian resistance, and resistance in the daily life of German Catholics. Dietrich is not uncritical of the overall Catholic record. He does not think the Church opposed Nazism as vigorously as she should have; this was because she continued to seek “institutional survival” instead. “Nazi ideology was critiqued by the Church when it affected the institution…but accepted when it focused on nationalistic patriotism.”

“Since the churches sought institutional survival,” he further generalizes, “meaningful resistance did not spring from Christian churches but from their members’ attempts to uphold their faith.” He includes an interesting chapter on how average German Catholics in practice often did act on their Catholic and Christian principles, contrary to what the Nazi regime was urging.

Dietrich is especially critical of what he sees as the inadequacy of the general Catholic reaction to Nazi anti-Semitism and aggression against the Jews in particular. He thinks Catholics and the Church tended to see and condemn only “pagan racism,” and hence did not always take the full measure of the evil of the virulent and indeed lethal brand of anti-Semitism which, in the hands of Hitler’s minions, led to Auschwitz and the Holocaust against the Jews.

Though he is critical, however, Dietrich’s book is in no way an attack on Catholics or on the Church in the way that has become familiar in the anti-Pius XII books which have continued to appear; the authors of these books accuse the wartime pope as well as German Catholics of being sympathizers and even collaborators with the Hitler regime. On the contrary, Dietrich himself documents many instances of Catholic resistance even as he also judges that the Catholic resistance could have been stronger. Nevertheless, his own focus is so narrow in this book that he scarcely touches upon the Pius XII question at all, even though this would seem to be almost inescapably related to his own chosen subject matter. The period of German Catholic history with which he is concerned is exactly contemporaneous with the period during which the pope and the Church in Germany have been accused by a veritable legion of critics of having been “silent” in the face of Nazi persecution, if not actually enabling of it.

Not only is all this scarcely mentioned or even referred to, but Dietrich actually includes references to such anti-Pius authors as Susan Zuccotti, Michael Phayer, David Kertzer, and even Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, as if the biased, inaccurate, and agenda-driven “scholarship” of these writers merited serious consideration. Meanwhile he seems totally unaware of the considerable and formidable body of work produced by Catholics over the past decade in defense of the unjustly slandered wartime pope. This is a serious deficiency, considering the author’s subject matter.

Again with his narrow focus, Dietrich also seems oblivious to the fact that another Holocaust is currently going on before our very eyes in the current war on the unborn being waged by means of legalized abortion. He correctly draws the conclusion from the Nazi period that “dehumanization…does seem to be the crucial component needed for sanctioned murder.” Yet he also refers at one point to what he calls “the pro-choice culture of today” as if this were a wholly neutral fact and not another case of “state-sanctioned murder.” Yet the great value of this book lies in how it brings out the way German theologians grew in their understanding of the evil being done around them and reacted creatively. Should we not be doing the same in the face of the Holocaust that confronts us?

Kenneth D. Whitehead is a member of the Board of Directors of the Catholic League. His survey of the recent books on the Pope Pius XII controversy can be found on the League’s website: www.catholicleague.org.