The summer no sooner began when the Catholic League learned that two anti-Catholic lectures were scheduled to take place at Pierce Community College in Los Angeles. The lectures, given as part of the Encore/Oasis continuing education program, were titled “The Sex Lives of the Popes” and “Crime and Immorality in the Catholic Church.” Both lectures were cancelled following our vigorous protest.

The lectures scheduled for August 5 and 12 were to be given by Charlotte Poe. Ms. Poe has no academic credentials and was described in the school’s catalog as a “Freethinker,” a group hostile to religion in general and Catholicism in particular. William Donohue wrote to the sponsors of the Encore/Oasis program regarding these lectures.

In his letter, Donohue said that the first lecture was based on a book by Nigel Cawthorne; he has been described as a journalist who appears to specialize in the sensational. The second lecture was based on a book by Emmett McLoughlin, a former Catholic priest who has made a name for himself denouncing the Catholic Church.

Donohue asked the sponsors to take note of the fact that all the other scheduled lectures in the program were to be presented by qualified academics, none of whom was slated to attack other religions. He cited as an example, “Introduction to Islam,” a lecture taught by a professor of theology at Boston College. He then zeroed in on the heart of the matter:

“I would like to know your thoughts on this subject. Would you defend, as a matter of academic freedom, a lecture entitled ‘Sex Lives of Prominent Rabbis’ taught by someone with no academic credentials and who belonged to an anti-Semitic organization? Similarly, would you defend a lecture on ‘Crime and Immorality in Islam—from Muhammad to 9-11’ taught by someone with no academic credentials and who belonged to an anti-Muslim organization?”

The sponsors of the Encore/Oasis series, which included both private and public sources, got the message, apologized and cancelled the lectures.

The reason Donohue never asked for the lectures to be withdrawn is because he didn’t want to give the anti-Catholic bigots an opportunity to brand us as censors. What he did instead was to inform the sponsors that they had nearly a month to respond before he notified “the media across the U.S. about this issue.” It worked.

No date in American history is known by its month and date in numerical form except 9-11; the closest rival is the Fourth of July. No war is known by its date of origin; the War of 1812 expresses a year but lacks the specificity and timeless nature of 9-11. And that is how it should be—9-11 is nothing if not unique.

Catholic League members will recall that last October’s edition of Catalyst gave a personal account of what happened. Our staff watched the Twin Towers collapse right in front of us and some saw the second plane hit its mark.

For those who lost a loved one in New York, Pennsylvania or Washington, D.C., September 11 will live as their day of infamy. They are certainly in the prayers of the Catholic League.

The men and women who died in the World Trade Center came from nations all over the world. But the rescuers came from the U.S.A. What is often noticed, but never mentioned (at least in public), is that the lion’s share of these courageous persons were Roman Catholic (the obituaries and TV news reports made this evident).

We called several top officials at the NYPD and the FDNY to ascertain what percentage of those who lost their lives on 9-11 was Catholic. The answer: between 85 and 90 percent.

Unlike some others in our society, we are not looking for a special memorial for our group. But we cannot let this moment pass without giving due recognition to the heroic role that Catholics played in this tragic event.

William A. Donohue

Before the horror of September 11 a year ago, only those branded intolerant would dare use the word evil to describe evil. Now every airhead from the Hamptons to Hollywood uses it. What’s going on?

Fear did it. It was fear that led the nonjudgmental types to rediscover the meaning of evil. Prior to 9-11, the last time the high priests of tolerance invoked this word was to describe pro-life activists. Now the word rolls off everyone’s lips. This, of course, carries its own risks: the power of the word eviscerates when overused. That being said, it remains true that the bigger problem is the continuing triumph of moral relativism; this is especially the case on college campuses.

The National Association of Scholars (on whose board of directors I serve) recently released the results of a survey on the ethical lessons that colleges are teaching. The most salient finding was that three-fourths of college seniors report being taught that right and wrong depend “on differences in individual values and cultural diversity.” Only a quarter of the students reported that their professors adhered to the more traditional understanding of morality, namely, that there are uniform standards of right and wrong.

This is hardly surprising. For the last four decades, our cultural elites have been teaching that to be educated is to be open-minded, and to be open-minded is to believe in the moral equality of all cultures and civilizations. According to this secular catechism, the only persons who deviate from this verity are bigots. Ergo, students think it’s a badge of enlightenment not to condemn cannibalism, slavery, torture and genocide. Who are we to judge other cultures by our yardstick?

In the 1980s, I gave a lecture at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh to a class of Ph.D. students. After my talk I was approached by two male students, both of whom were Jewish. They berated me—in a manifestly self-righteous way—for having very strong convictions. I instantly plead guilty to their charge. I then asked them quite directly if they believed that all cultures and civilizations were of equal moral worth. They expressed surprise that anyone would disagree with this observation. But then I wiped the smirk off their faces.

To make sure I understood what they were saying, I offered an example of their position. In this country we put pizza into ovens, I remarked, and in Nazi Germany they put Jews into ovens. In other words, it’s just a matter of different strokes for different folks.

I thought they were going to have a stroke. Stuttering and stammering, they hastened to say that no, that was not what they meant. But, of course, they were wrong. The example I gave followed logically from what they maintained: if there is no way to rank order cultures, it all comes down to different strokes for different folks. I advised them to consider what happens when first principles are abandoned altogether.

Moral relativism is not only an intellectually bankrupt idea, its real-life consequences can be deadly. Consider a more recent example.

On July 18, late at night, the Senate passed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (President Bush signed the bill on August 5). The Democrats insisted on a voice vote so there would be no record of their decision. The bill, considered highly controversial by some Democrats, allows doctors to treat children who survive an abortion. That’s right. It has long been legal in this country to allow a baby that survives an abortion to die on an operating table while doctors and nurses do nothing. Other forms of infanticide, such as partial-birth abortion, persist: it is still legal to stick a scissors into an infant’s head when he’s 80 percent born. This way there’s little chance he won’t be dead on arrival (puncturing the skull allows the baby’s head to collapse so he can get through the birth canal more easily).

On August 2, the New York Times ran a front-page story titled “Eggs of Endangered Turtles Fall Prey to Florida Dealers.” A new underground market has arisen in Florida: the sale of sea turtle eggs (some people like to eat them like oysters). These are federally protected turtles and it is a misdemeanor to sell their eggs. It so happens that when the turtles lay their eggs in the predawn hours, poachers move in to steal them. Those who sell the eggs can get one year in jail and a $50,000 fine. Those who actually steal the eggs are guilty of a felony and can be sent up the river for years.

Now if only we treated unborn babies the way we treat unborn turtles. The fact that we tolerate this kind of evil shows that the tragic events of 9-11 have not awakened us from our moral slumber. Not until our society comes to accept what the Catholic Church teaches—that there are moral absolutes and that all life is sacred—will we turn the corner.

By Joseph A. Varacalli, Ph.D.

Today, institutions of higher education are major generators of socially dominant ideas, images, and fashions. As sociologists might say, they are major “agents of socialization.” Empirically speaking, public higher education is almost exclusively—at least in the humanities and social sciences—an agent for the promotion of politically left-wing secular thought.

It should come as little surprise that any philosophy or worldview like Catholicism that qualifies or limits an uncontested understanding of individualism—that, in essence, concurs with John Paul II’s claim in Veritatis Splendor that any legitimate exercise of freedom must be oriented to objective truth and sound morality—is going to be subject to prejudice and discrimination within a public higher educational system characterized by a secular monopoly. That no other institution in contemporary American society is subject to the same degree of sustained hostility and rejection as is the case with the Catholic Church can actually be viewed as a sort of backhanded compliment.

Some of the anti-Catholic prejudice and discrimination encountered on the public college campus will be blatant and obvious and others will be less so. All students will be subject, from time to time, to some sort of anti-Catholic bigotry on a campus-wide basis, much of it of a crude and shameless nature. Perusing through the annual Reports on Anti-Catholicism published by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights makes this perfectly clear. The annual reports are replete with examples that, through various campus venues, blaspheme, mock, denigrate, and distort all aspects of the Catholic faith: plays (e.g. “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You,” “Corpus Christi”); art exhibits; student newspaper editorials, stories, cartoons; radio programming; and college-wide lectures, forums, and conferences.

Regarding many humanities and social science classrooms, students may well encounter many outrageously false and slanderous historical claims made against the Church and the Catholic population. They may hear the claims that Pope Pius XII conspired with the Nazis to murder Jews; that Christopher Columbus was primarily responsible for the genocide of native American Indian groups; that ethnic working-class Catholic “hard-hats” are naturally bigots and racists; that the Bishops of Catholic America want to “impose their (male) morality” on women denying them their alleged “right” to abort children within the womb; and that “homophobic” orthodox Catholics are responsible for the deaths of those AIDS victims who contracted the disease engaging in homosexual activity.

Students may very well encounter the argument that a Catholic-inspired Western civilization is a generator of cultural death. There is also the likelihood of important Catholic (and Christian and other religious) thinkers being under-represented, not represented or distorted in much of the literature that students are expected to master. Reference here can be made to the important content analysis of school textbooks conducted by New York University psychologist Paul Vitz. Even when the official educational philosophy of a public college is supposedly inclusive “multiculturalism,” there is an excellent chance that there will be no distinctively Catholic contribution to the curriculum due to, variously, the alleged implications of the “separation of church and state,” ignorance of the Catholic intellectual and moral contribution, or simply, outright bigotry. (In many Catholic colleges, the “new” Catholic studies programs intended to keep Catholicism alive on campus will very possibly be staffed by the same type of progressive Catholic scholars who were responsible for the internal secularization of the college in the first place).

There are many ways by which the Catholic tradition contributes to the legitimate calling of the academy. For one thing, the universal thrust of the Catholic sensibility breeds within its faithful adherents a sense of obligation to pursue the truth courageously in a non-politically correct manner and to be fair-minded and even-handed to the student body and others in one’s dealing in the academic community, regardless of philosophical commitment. Secondly, Catholic scholarship serves as an important corrective to overly narrow and specialized research and teaching, advocating what might be termed a “realistic interdisciplinary” approach encouraging honest intellectual exchanges between and among the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities (including, prominently, philosophy), and theology.

Thirdly, this correction to over-specialization also entails a movement toward a hierarchal integration which restores philosophy to its proper “command post” position in the scholarly enterprise. Fourthly, in “spanning the ages,” Catholicism’s memory brings with it the insights of many cultures and historical ages and, as such, helps one to escape the “tyranny of the present” and, conversely, to appreciate the fact that tradition can be dynamic and relevant to the modern age. Fifthly and finally, Catholic social thought brings to the academic plate a host of important natural law concepts (e.g. subsidiarity, solidarity, personalism, the universal purpose of goods) and philosophical anthropological claims regarding the inherent nature, freedom, and responsibility of human beings as social creatures.

It is precisely because it is vitally important for American civilization that Catholics bring the insights of their intellectual and moral heritage to the public square, that I established a Center for Catholic Studies at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York system of higher education (NCC is the largest community college in the nation). Culturally, for one thing, the official educational philosophy of the College had been for some time that of multiculturalism. Structurally, this had led to the creation of academic programs, in varying degrees of comprehensiveness and complexity, in African-American studies, wo-men’s studies, Jewish studies, Italian American studies, and Latino studies, to name the most prominent examples.

There were some college trustees who I believed (correctly) would be receptive to my proposal. I was also a tenured, full professor, with all the security and freedom that such a status entails, and also with a long list of publications and other accomplishments in the areas of Catholic studies and the sociology of religion. I believed that there would be some professors, non-Catholics included, in the college with the courage and integrity to support the idea and assist its implementation. Again, this was a useful assumption. I had at least one strong supporter on the State-wide S.U.N.Y. Board of Trustees. Another secular university, the University of Illinois at Chicago, was also starting up a Catholic studies program, making my proposal a tad less “startling.”

Despite grumbling from some faculty and some initial ambivalence from key administrators (in fairness, understandable, given the radicalness of my proposal vis-à-vis the reigning norms of the secular academy), the NCC Center for Catholic Studies was established during the Fall, 2000 semester with myself appointed as Director. The previous summer was spent in fruitful meetings with the Academic Vice-President in which it was agreed that the purpose of the Center was academic and intellectual and concerned with demonstrating how the tradition of Catholic social thought could contribute to the scholarly activities of the college, including debates concerning public and social policy. Conversely put, it was agreed that the Center was not intended to be an agent for evangelization and its focus was not to be catechetical in nature. Furthermore, it was agreed that, while the College would selectively subsidize the Center’s activities, the intent was that the Center would come close to financial self-sufficiency.

Two years later and having withstood a challenge made by a “separation of Church and state” group to the Chancellor of the State University of New York, the NCC Center for Catholic Studies is doing better than most, including myself, could have reasonably expected. As of June, 2002, the Center had raised over $22,000, spending approximately half that amount to pay for a host of academic activities open to all, and most of which are free of any charge, taking place on the campus. The Center has sponsored two major conferences, both attracting an audience in excess of two hundred participants.

Another major accomplishment was the sponsoring of a debate on school choice that attracted a group of well over one hundred and that has been frequently aired on the public access educational channel of the local Cable Vision television network. The Center has also offered a Friday afternoon seminar on “Aspects of Catholic Social Thought;” a “Club Hour” series of lectures geared specifically to the student body; a series of non-credit Continuing Education courses and lectures (the only Center activities requiring a fee, and a modest one at that); two rounds of interviews on a radio program that I host, “The Catholic Alternative” which is aired on the college radio station as well as a series of evening lectures.

I have no sure sense of what the future will hold for the NCC Center for Catholic Studies. So much depends on events and developments outside of my control—in the College, surrounding community, in the Church and society-at-large, and with my family obligations and other personal issues and concerns. What I do know is that the Center’s activities—humble as they surely have been to date—have served Nassau Community College, the student body, and the outside community well. Perhaps ultimately the greatest legacy will be that the very existence of the Center inspires other Catholic scholars in public colleges and universities to start their own Catholic studies centers and programs where, perhaps, they can do even more extensive good for academia and society.

Dr. Joseph Varacalli is Director of the Center for Catholic Studies and Professor of Sociology at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York and the author of, most recently, Bright Promise, Failed Community: Catholics and the American Public Order, published by Lexington Books.

On the home page of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) website, democrats.org, there is a link to organizations of interest. Until late July, the “Catholic” heading listed only one group, Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC). But when syndicated columnist Mark Shields mentioned this as his “Outrage of the Week” on the CNN show “The Capital Gang,” the DNC added another Catholic source to its “Catholic” listing: catholic-USA.com. We jumped on this “solution” immediately.

On July 31, William Donohue wrote to DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe imploring him to “act quickly and decisively by removing Catholics for a Free Choice from the DNC’s links of interest organizations.” The very fact that this group was the only Catholic listing on its website until recently suggests that the DNC believes its Catholic base is led by Frances Kissling.

That the DNC added a legitimate Catholic website to its listing only complicated things for Mr. McAuliffe: if CFFC were an authentic Catholic group, it would have been named in the umbrella Catholic site, catholic-USA.com (i.e., there are scores of bona-fide Catholic groups posted there, including the Catholic League). Ergo, the DNC knows CFFC is bogus yet continues to provide cover for it.

Our position, as explained to the media, is as follows: “It is flatly wrong to tag CFFC as merely a ‘pro-choice’ group of ex-Catholics. Kissling has openly admitted that it is her goal to ‘overthrow’ the Catholic Church. That is why she works so hard to subvert the Church by attempting to get the Holy See kicked out of the U.N. Twice the U.S. bishops have condemned CFFC as a fraud, yet the DNC amazingly gives legitimacy to this anti-Catholic front group.”

When no response from McAuliffe was forthcoming, and when we were continually stonewalled by DNC operatives, Donohue wrote to every Democrat in the House and Senate asking for assistance. His request? For them to persuade the DNC to drop Catholics for a Free Choice from its website.

On August 6, Donohue issued the following news release to media outlets across the nation:

“The Democrats are playing with fire. As I said in my letter, the Catholic League previously fought then-Governor George W. Bush on his appearance at Bob Jones University and we also fought the Republicans on the House Chaplain issue. I went on the ‘Today’ show to accept Gov. Bush’s apology and, as everyone knows, we prevailed in the House Chaplain controversy by seeing to it that a Catholic priest was finally appointed to the post. Now I am telling the Democrats that ‘I pledge to you that I will do nothing less than fight the DNC just as hard over the listing of Catholics for a Free Choice.’

“There are dozens of abortion-rights organizations in the nation. Because the Catholic League is not a pro-life group, per se (we are certainly pro-life in our convictions), it would not make sense to fight Democrats or Republicans on this subject. But the issue here is anti-Catholicism and that falls smack in the bull’s-eye of the Catholic League’s mission.

“This could be a long Fall for the Democrats if they decide to string this one out. We are prepared to spend considerable resources informing the public of what the DNC considers its Catholic base to be. Mark Shields is right: it is both insensitive and ignorant of the DNC to associate itself with Catholics for a Free Choice.”

This fight is not over. We are prepared to give the DNC free advertisement, making sure that every Catholic knows how fond the Dems are of Frances Kissling.

Last year when we learned that an anti-Catholic billboard had been posted along Interstate 5 in southern Oregon, we decided to target the sign’s owners instead of the person who penned it. “The Pope is the Anti-Christ” is what the sign said.

Our first step was to ask the company, Outdoor Media Dimen-sions, to remove the offensive sign. When a spokesman defended it on freedom of speech grounds, we said, okay, we would like to post a sign along the highway as well. He asked what it would say and our reply was, “Outdoor Media Dimensions Sponsors Anti-Catholicism.” Suffice it to say he got our point.

Because there was a contract between the company and the author of the sign, we agreed to drop our protest if the contract was not renewed. It wasn’t. Though the sign we objected to was not taken down immediately, it has since been removed; it has been replaced with an obscure passage from Scripture.

Sometimes the best way to win is simply to turn the tables on our adversaries and call their bluff.

No one realistically believed that the sex abuse scandal which has rocked the Catholic Church would be resolved in Dallas. The charter that was produced is a workable document but much remains on the table. It is vitally important that during this mending process we do not allow emotions to dictate outcomes.

The media may sometimes give the impression that almost every other priest is a molester. Yet since the beginning of the year, 0.4 percent of priests nationwide have been removed from their duties pending further investigation. The media tend to cite raw numbers—200 priests have been removed!—but it is useful to put this number into perspective. With 46,000 priests, it comes to 0.4 percent.

Not surprisingly, the rush to judgment also has been accompanied by a rush to greed. Claims are being filed for the most spurious of reasons and a new crop of lawyers has popped up out of nowhere. As reported in USA Today, “the scandal is creating a new legal niche for lawyers who once worked tort and personal liability suits. These new cases are expected to become a fixture in the civil courts for years.”

When a reporter from USA Today asked William Donohue to comment on what was happening, he obliged by saying, “There’s a certain piling on in these cases, and we’ve already seen a number of suspect suits being dropped.” Donohue continued by remarking, “People like myself are angered at the lack of leadership in the Church but it shouldn’t be sucker-punched by every Tom, Dick and Harry who thinks there are deep pockets to be found around the block.”

While there has been endless chatter about the problem of sex abuse, precious little has been said about the role that homosexuality plays in all of this. We know for certain that the vast majority of these cases involve man-on-man sex, not man-on-boy sex. This is homosexuality, not pedophilia. To ignore this is to contribute to the problem.

Many deceitful reasons have been put forth trying to deflect attention from discussing homosexuality. We’ve been told, for instance, that priests seek out young men because they have more access to them than girls. This is a lie. Altar servers—as distinct from altar boys—have been with us for years and yet we hear very little about priests molesting girls or young women. Another problem with the “easy access” argument is that it assumes that an adult man will seek out someone to molest—male or female—because that’s the way he’s programmed. Talk about sexist!

We wish Governor Frank Keating well as he commands the oversight panel on the bishops’ performance. He has had to pare back some of his earlier remarks and has since come under fire from some bishops. But Keating is a bright and determined person who can be trusted to be fair. As William Donohue told the Christian Science Monitor on August 1, “The panel doesn’t have the teeth to remove bishops, but it has a big magnifying glass, and Keating will be the central whistleblower in the Catholic Church.”

In the aftermath of the Dallas meeting of U.S. bishops, there has been a mad rush on the part of lawmakers to treat clergy the same way non-clergy are treated in cases involving the sexual molestation of minors. Some oddities have appeared, and it is worth noting who the players are.

Over the summer there were two different but related, stories on priestly sexual misconduct printed on the same day in the New York Times and Newsday. The reports raised serious questions regarding the way this problem is being handled by the Church, and the way New York lawmakers are dealing with it.

In the Times, we learned that a bill that would add the word “clergy” to a list of professionals required by law to report cases of suspected child abuse has run into unexpected difficulty. It was not Catholics who were throwing up roadblocks, it was the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and Family Planning Advocates (the lobbying arm of abortion-rights organizations like Planned Parenthood).

These groups were upset that the law might require reporting cases of statutory rape and might force rape-crisis counselors to break their confidentiality agreements. Donna Lieberman, the director of the NYCLU, said the original intent of the bill was not intended to cover all instances of child abuse.

Newsday reported that half the priests on Long Island who have had their faculties removed have never been found guilty of anything; allegations alone were deemed enough.

We told the media the following: “It is ironic that the civil libertarians and their pro-abortion allies are worried that zero tolerance might create difficulties for young girls impregnated by their older boyfriends. But they have no problem holding the Catholic Church responsible for sexual abuse committed by priests. Even worse, some dioceses are now overreacting by taking punitive measures against priests who are assumed innocent until proven guilty. It is about time everyone got on the same page.”

The French playwright Jean Genet penned “Saintete” in the 1950s and over the summer it made its way to New York as “Elle.” The play opened at an off-Broadway site for a short stint in July. “Elle” thrashes the papacy in particular and Catholicism in general.

William Donohue’s thoughts on the play were considered so jazzy that they were excerpted on “Page Six,” the celebrity page of the New York Post. Here is what he had to say:

“Jean Genet was a direct descendant of the Marquis de Sade. Which is to say he was a pedophile, homosexual, sado-masochist, pervert and prostitute. He was also a convicted felon. When not engaging in buggery, he was known to practice burglary. He also wrote plays and had sex with Sartre. This made him a hero in literary quarters. His latest admirer is Ben Brantley of the New York Times.

“Brantley calls the play ‘richly theatrical entertainment.’ His colleagues at the New York Post and the Daily News, Donald Lyons and Robert Dominguez, respectively, were not impressed. But Brantley was. What he likes about the play is that it is ‘an impeccably vulgar production’ that will force the ‘blasphemy police [to] bring out their brass knuckles.’

“Brantley’s half right. It is true that the Catholic League is the blasphemy police (he didn’t say we were but we know what he was thinking) and it is also true that we possess brass knuckles. But he’s wrong in assuming we will use them on this occasion. That’s because the play is not ‘impeccably vulgar’—it is merely vulgar.

“In short, when vulgar plays that attack Catholicism are deeply flawed productions—as is the case in ‘Elle’—we do not reach for our weaponry. Not even when the author of the play is a pedophile, homosexual, sado-masochist, pervert, prostitute and thief. Those may be truly stellar qualifications in the literary world, but they are not persuasive enough to clear the bar at the Catholic League. We have higher standards. We have to: We answer to a higher source.”

Toronto police estimated that 800,000 young people turned out in the rain to see Pope John Paul II when he visited in July. It was the largest gathering of people in the history of Canada. Though nothing spoiled the events of World Youth Day, the lunatic fringe mounted a protest. We are delighted that the media liked our news release on this subject and gave it a good airing. It is reprinted here for your enjoyment.

“In addition to the hundreds of thousands of young people assembled in Toronto to enthusiastically greet the Holy Father, a motley crew of malcontents has slumbered their way there as well. Consider the following.

“Joanna Manning, a former nun still reeling over her inability to become a priest, is the spokesman for Challenge the Church, a group (which comprises non-Catholics) that is organizing Alternative World Youth Day. Manning likes condoms. So much so that she and her fellow condomaniacs have already tried to distribute 10,000 condoms to the kids attending World Youth Day. That they didn’t succeed is unimportant: what matters is that they still refuse to distribute condoms with warning labels on them (‘The Surgeon General warns that the holes in condoms are larger than the HIV virus’ would be appropriate).

“Rosemary Ganley is in Toronto as well. Her intellectual insights into World Youth Day are profound, opining on everything from the ‘authoritarian’ nature of the Vatican to the merits of abortion. She is the leader of the Coalition of Concerned Canadian Catholics. It is not a source of comfort to her that only 100 Canadians have joined her outfit.

“Tonight Mary Rammerman says Mass. Or at least she will pretend to say Mass. She hails from Rochester, NY. In the 1990s, she partook in many make-believe Masses while dressed in priestly garments giving communion. The priest who allowed this was charged with schism and then ‘fired.’ But Mary believed then, as she believes now, that she’s a priest. Why she hasn’t become a bishop remains a mystery.

“Finally, the anti-globalization nuts are on hand. They’re angry—angry at the globe. It’s too big. So is the Vatican. ‘I’m angry therefore I am,’ is their signature. It should be quite a show in Toronto.”