Beginning in the spring, and ending over the summer, the Catholic League was able to persuade Random House to make substantive revisions to its Fodor’s Travel Guides. Deleted were several objectionable references to Catholicism, remarks that should never have appeared in reference books.

As far back as 2000, we received complaints about the Fodor series. At that time, the book on Italy featured a joke about Mary and Jesus and, more important, described the Catholic Church as “in apparent decline and no longer obsessed with political power.” Bad as these remarks were, they were mild as compared to what has been published since.

What started things rolling this time was a complaint we received from a Long Island priest about the Fodor’s Mexico 2007 travel guide; the book contained a disparaging remark about St. Juan Diego and the Catholic Church. Sensing that there might be additional problems, we decided to launch an investigation of the Fodor series.

What we found were wholly inappropriate comments made about Catholicism in the books on Ireland, Italy, France and Portugal, as well as Mexico. The remarks were snide, tendentious and sometimes historically inaccurate. Then we investigated how Fodor’s treats other religions. But in the travel guides on Israel and Thailand, for example, we could find no objectionable statements about Jewish synagogues, Buddhist temples, etc.

Tim Jarrell, the vice president and publisher of Fodor’s Travel Publications, responded to us by saying he would authorize an investigation of our complaint. When we didn’t hear back, we pressed him again, and this time he came through.

Jarrell acknowledged the veracity of our complaints. His response was very professional: there was none of the “if you were offended” kind of nonsense. Instead, he offered a straightforward account, detailing the kinds of changes he deemed appropriate. To see what we objected to, and how he handled it, see “Fodor’s Agrees To Changes.”

While we are very pleased with Random House, it just goes to show the ubiquity and invidiousness of anti-Catholicism these days. We have come to expect anti-Catholicism in Hollywood, the media, the arts and the academy, but when travel guides in the publishing world become infested with Catholic bashing, it proves what we’re up against.

In any event, now that our objections have been addressed, there is no reason for Catholics not to buy the Fodor’s publications. We trust that an important lesson has been learned and that we will not have to revisit this problem again.

As expected, Amnesty Inter-national, the group that monitors human rights around the world, approved an abortion-rights policy at its biennial conference in Mexico City; the policy was first adopted this past spring.

Responding to criticism from the Vatican, as well as from American bishops, Amnesty issued a news release on June 14 saying that it does not promote abortion as a “universal right” and “remains silent on the rights and wrongs of abortion.” More recently, Kate Gilmore, Amnesty’s deputy secretary-general, criticized the Church’s opposition, holding that “our purpose invokes the law and the state, not God.”

We branded this response as “simply dishonest,” pointing out that abortion is a human rights issue, not a religious one.

In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, wherein it said, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” In 1959, the same body issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and in the Preamble of Resolution 1386, it said, “Whereas the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth….” (Our emphasis.) And in 1989, the same entity proclaimed that “every child has the inherent right to life.”

In short, Amnesty International has betrayed its mission by violating the most fundamental right of all—the right to be born. We urge Catholics to withdraw their support of this phony organization.

William A. Donohue

In New York City schools, it is legal to ban the display of a Christian nativity scene while permitting depictions of the Islamic crescent and stars. There are no vouchers or tuition-tax credits for Catholic parents who elect to send their children to parochial schools, but a taxpayer-funded Arabic school has opened in Brooklyn. And the disparity is not confined to New York, or to elementary schools: it’s a nationwide phenomenon, and it’s happening in grades K-college.

The Khalil Gibran International Academy is New York’s first Arabic-themed school; it will serve grades six through twelve, beginning with grade six this year. Named after the Lebanese Christ-ian poet, the school is expected to immerse the students in the Arabic language and culture, without teaching religion. But already there are serious problems.

The woman chosen to run the school, Debbie Almontaser, was pressured to resign in August due to her initial response to a terrorist T-shirt that was being hawked by some of her friends. The T-shirt, which read, “Intifada NYC,” was a call to Muslim violence against New York City. When asked what she thought about the shirt, Almontaser played a lawyerly game by instructing New Yorkers that the word “intifada” originally meant a “shaking off” of oppression. But she knew very well that the current meaning is an inflammatory call to arms, which is why she had to apologize after the public uproar. Days later she quit.

The courts are responsible for emboldening these militants. For example, last year the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a decision by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in favor of a California public school that allows Islamic education.

In that decision, the judges said it was not unconstitutional to require seventh-grade students to wear Muslim garb, adopt Muslim names, memorize verses from the Quran, pray to Allah, give up something for a day, simulate fasting during the month of Ramadan and play “jihad games.” It is sickening to note that these same judges said it was unconstitutional for public school students to say the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.

What is worse is what the students are being taught—not only in these schools, but in all schools. In 2003, the American Textbook Council issued a report on the coverage of Islam in seven widely used world history textbooks used in grades seven through twelve. What it found was shocking.

“Textbooks make no distinction between sharia [Islamic] and Western law,” the report said, “and they pretend that women are making great strides in the Islamic world, when all the evidence indicates otherwise.” The report flatly said that “Social studies textbooks ignore the global ambitions of militant Islam. They fail to explain that Muslim terrorists seek to destroy the United States and Israel. They omit geopolitical goals that include theocracy and world domination by religion.”

To show how mainstreamed this propaganda is consider Scholastic publications; they are used in many schools. In the Teacher’s edition of Junior Scholastic magazine last year, a recommended resource listed “Ten Things to Know About Islam.” One of the things listed was, “Is Islam Intolerant of Other Religions?” To which students learned that “theologically and historically Islam has a long record of tolerance.” They also learned that “Muslims did not try to impose their religion on others or force them to convert.” However, “No such tolerance existed in Christendom….”

All of this is a lie, and the authors, publishers, principals and teachers know it. If they don’t know it, they should be fired for incompetence.

Why is this happening? Because of multiculturalism, as well as the reality of something more sinister—fear.

According to the theology of multiculturalism, anything associated with the U.S. or Europe is considered suspect at best and fatally flawed at worst. Moreover, anything associated with the non-Christian nations is something we must respect, if not revere. Pope Benedict XVI rightly labels this pathology self-hatred.

Fear is the other factor. When the media refused to reprint the innocent depictions of Muhammad that appeared in the Danish cartoons last year, they said it was because they did not want to offend Muslims unnecessarily. Only the Boston Phoenix told the truth: the publisher was afraid Muslims might kill someone on his staff.

Earlier this year, we raised serious questions about public monies being spent on footbaths for Muslim students at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. The rationale for the footbaths is that it is unsanitary for these students to wash their feet in sinks. Agreed. Which is why I recommended that someone introduce them to shower stalls.

The public sector is obliged to accommodate religion, but it is not obliged—indeed it is wrong—to sponsor it. What we need is equal treatment, and this includes the way religions are treated in textbooks, not just in law.

Every now and then I read a book that makes me want to stand up and cheer. The latest entry is Who Really Cares by Arthur C. Brooks, professor of public administration at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. We’ve become e-mail “pen pals,” and I’m happy to say that Arthur is Roman Catholic.

Brooks has put together one of the most incredible indictments of the finger-pointing left-wing secular elites in recent memory. The same people who never stop lecturing the rest of us on our alleged greed, we learn, turn out to be the stingiest of them all. Others may have said this before, but no one has presented the data like Brooks. His evidence is overwhelming.

Who Really Cares pairs nicely with Paul Johnson’s 1988 best-seller, Intellectuals, and Peter Schweizer’s more recent book, Do As I Say (Not As I Do). Johnson detailed the unbelievable hypocrisy of some of the West’s greatest minds, from Marx and Rousseau to Sartre and Lillian Hellman; Schweizer did the same with today’s celebrities, from Michael Moore and Hillary Clinton to Barbara Streisand and Edward Kennedy.

Unlike the Johnson and Schweizer contributions, Brooks doesn’t focus on the big names—he makes comparisons based on demographic groups—but his rendering is similar: the reader walks away feeling a genuine contempt for the duplicity and arrogance of the lecturing class. And what will be of most interest to the readers ofCatalyst, Brooks makes plain the wholly unearned reputation that secular liberals have in caring for the poor. They may have mastered the rhetoric of caring, but it is religious conservatives who are the champions of actually doing something to help the dispossessed.

Brooks is nothing if not honest. He approached the subject of charitable giving through the lens of his graduate-school years, i.e., he took it as axiomatic that because secular liberals expressed greater interest in the poor, they were necessarily more generous. But as he learned, the data do not support this conclusion. Hence, he changed his mind. The “hence” should not be read flippantly: it is a rare scholar, in my experience, who allows the evidence to affect his conclusions; most are so ideologically driven that they do not let the evidence get in the way of their conclusions.

There are several myths that Brooks explodes in his book. One of them is that the American people are a selfish lot who turn their backs on the poor. Not true. “Private American giving could more than finance the entire annual gross domestic product (GDP) of Sweden, Norway, and Den-mark,” Brooks writes. And contrary to what many people believe, charitable giving cannot be explained by tax breaks afforded by the IRS. Only 20 percent of those who give to charities do so because of a tax deduction; 80 percent give because “those who have more should give to those who have less.”

Charitable giving, as Brooks informs, should not be measured simply by writing checks. Using available data, he calculates time, as well as money. More than half of all Americans, for instance, volunteer their time to help some cause. Others, often the same people as it turns out, give blood; others may baby-sit for a neighbor. And so forth. Interestingly, those who give also appear to be more tolerant and maintain less prejudices that those who do not.

It is commonplace in the halls of academia to assume that conservatives are greedy and liberals are caring. But, in fact, it is conservatives who are by far the most generous—not only with their money, but with their time. It is not as though they are richer: as Brooks shows, “liberal families earn on average 6 percent more per year than conservative families, and conservative families [give] more than liberal families within every income class, from poor to middle class to rich.” Similarly, Republicans give more than Democrats.

Why is the conventional wisdom wrong? Because liberals get brownie points for talking about the poor more than conservatives, even if their idea of “helping” the indigent is through government transfers. Quite frankly, they love to play Robin Hood with other people’s money, having never found an income redistribution scheme they couldn’t endorse. But as Brooks correctly notes, “Government spending is not charity.” (His italics.) The data also allow him to conclude that “People who think the government should redistribute income are less likely to donate to charity than people who don’t think so.”

All of this reminds me of Marx and Rousseau: Marx, the father of socialism, fathered a child out of wedlock (he impregnated his maid) and never gave his child a dime; Rousseau, another radical egalitarian, fathered five illegitimate kids and walked away from his responsibilities (though this didn’t stop him from writing a book on child rearing). For a modern day example of Brooks’ point, consider the Clergy Leadership Network founded by Rev. Brenda Bartella Peterson.

For Peterson, “paying taxes is a way of loving thy neighbor,” and for her clergy organization, slashing taxes is “inevitably an appeal to our greed, not to our generosity or compassion.” In other words, those who want to keep the money they’ve earned and spend it the way they choose (often on others) are the greedy ones. Those who want the government to pick the pockets of the rich are the altruists. They actually believe this!

The conventional wisdom is also wrong with regards to the generosity of the faithful vs. the faithless. It is a staple of liberal thought that secularists are more charitable than churchgoers, but the evidence shows just the opposite. “Religious people are far more charitable than nonreligious people,” writes Brooks. Indeed, he says that “In years of research, I have never found a measurable way in which secularists are more charitable than religious people.”

What Brooks found was that the faithful are more charitable across the board. “Religious people are more charitable in every measurable nonreligious way—including secular donations, informal giving, and even acts of kindness and honesty—than secularists.” They give more blood and are 57 percent more likely to give to the homeless than secularists. What is really astounding is that in the aftermath of 9/11, “People who never attended church were 11 percentage points less likely than regular churchgoers to give to a 9/11 cause (56 to 67 percent).”

Brooks drives his point home by comparing the charitable giving of San Franciscans to South Dakotans. Families in both groups give away about $1,300 a year, but because the former make 78 percent more money than the latter, “The average South Dakotan family gives away 75 percent more of its household income each year than the average family in San Francisco.” There’s a reason for this disparity: “Fifty percent of South Dakotans attend their houses of worship every week, versus 14 percent of San Franciscans. On the other hand, 49 percent of San Franciscans never attend church, but the statistic drops to 10 percent for South Dakotans.”

Could it be that those who are religious earn more than secularists, thus accounting for the discrepancy in giving? Not at all. Brooks details that “an average secularist nongiver earns 16 percent more money each year than a religious giver.” (His emphasis.) Yet secular liberals “are 19 percent points less likely to give each year than religious conservatives, and 9 percent less likely than the population in general.”

Family life is also an important explanatory variable. Married people give more than single people; they are also happier. And happiness is “strongly associated with high levels of giving.” To top it off, “American conservatives consistently report higher levels of subjective well-being than liberals.” These factors are all related. “Conservatives tend to enjoy more traditional, religious, and stable families than liberals,” says Brooks, and “these types of families bring ongoing happiness for most people.”

Brooks concludes that “religion, skepticism about the government in economic life, strong families, and personal entrepreneurism” are the four most important qualities that account for charitable giving. Because the poor actually are the most generous of all socio-economic classes—they give proportionately more than the middle class or the upper class—Brooks recommends that their charitable giving be given a tax break even if they don’t itemize. This makes eminently good sense.

As I said at the beginning, it is the non-stop lecturing we get from the educated talking heads in the classroom and in the media about the compassion they have for the poor—unlike those religious conservative types—that galls me most of all. Their idea of helping the poor comes down to higher taxes and soup kitchens, neither of which extracts a whole lot from them.

In the 1970s, I taught in an inner-city Catholic elementary school in Spanish Harlem during the day and went to New York University at night for my Ph.D. in sociology. In one class, after listening to hippie students blaming Exxon for the low achievement of inner-city students (I still haven’t figured that one out), I commended them for their interest in servicing the poor and then asked if they wanted to spare some time on a weekend tutoring my black and Puerto Rican students. No one spoke.

There is more than hypocrisy involved. These hand-wringing leftists are quick to condemn the pro-life community for its alleged fixation on the unborn, yet it is the faithful who are more generous to the poor than the faithless. Yet all Castro has to do is don his fatigues and talk compassionately about the oppressed—all the while grinding his boots into their faces—and he is a saint in their eyes.

Ronald Reagan once defined a conservative as someone who sees someone drowning from a pier, throws him a rope, but intentionally throws one that is a bit short, thus making the needy one work a bit before he’s rescued. A liberal, by contrast, throws a rope that is plenty long enough, and when the needy one picks up his end, the liberal drops his and then goes off to help someone else.

Reagan would have loved Brooks’ book. You most certainly will.

The Catholic League is pleased that Random House has agreed to make changes to the following entries (in italics) in its Fodor’s guidebooks.  The alterations to be made, as detailed by Fodor’s vice president and publisher Timothy Jarrell, are also outlined here:

From Mexico 2007:

Outside the Antigua Basílica stands a statue of Juan Diego, who became the first indigenous saint in the Americas with his canonization in summer 2002.  (This canonization was widely seen as a shrewd political move on the part of the Catholic church as it tries to retain its position, particularly among Mexico’s indigenous population.)

Jarrell:  “We have removed the phrase ‘a shrewd political move’ which implies—without counterargument—that the church acted for political motives instead of moral and religious ones.”

From Exploring Ireland (6th Edition):

The position of women in the republic is much affected by the power of the Catholic Church, and Pope John Paul II’s reaffirmation of its doctrines on contraception, abortion and divorce.  Ireland ranks last among the world’s developed countries with access to birth control (though the impact of AIDS has had a sharper effect than decades of religious dogma), and until 1996 was alone in Europe in having no civil divorce.  A booming economy and child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church have pushed the South further towards the liberalism of mainland Europe.

Jarrell:  “We agree that the paragraph implying that the position of women in Ireland has been negatively affected by the Catholic Church is simplistic, one-sided, and debatable.  Obviously, millions of women in Ireland believe otherwise.  We will reword that section for the next edition.”

From France 2007:

The main point of interest in the region is the Abbaye de La Celle, a 12th-century Benedictine Abbey that served as a convent until the 17th century, when it was closed because its young nuns had begun to run wild and were known less for their chastity than “the color of their petticoats and the name of their lover.”

Jarrell:  “Although it has been popularly reported that the monastery at Abbaye de La Celle was closed because its inhabitants possessed loose morals, we have not been able to independently confirm this.  Therefore, we have dropped the reference. (If you have documentation showing why the monastery closed, we would be happy to add an explanation for the closure to the hotel description.)”

Thousands flock to Lourdes annually, many in quest of a miraculous cure for sickness or disability.  A religious pilgrimage is one thing, but a sightseeing expedition has other requirements.  The famous churches and grotto and the area around them are woefully lacking in beauty.  Off-season, acres of empty parking lots echo.  Shops are shuttered, restaurants closed.  In season a mob jostles to see the grotto behind a forest of votive candles.  Some pundits might say that Lourdes ingeniously combines the worst of both worlds.

Jarrell:  “We have dropped language labeling the faithful as a ‘mob.’ We have also dropped the last line stating that Lourdes ‘ingeniously combines the worst of both worlds.'”

From Portugal (7th Edition):

In a 1930 Pastoral Letter, the Bishop of Leiria declared the apparitions worthy of belief, thus approving the “Cult of Fatima.”

Jarrell:  “We have removed the phrase ‘Cult of Fatima.'”

We thank our supporters who told us about the Fodor’s problem.  Should you find similar problems in other books, please contact us.

On August 7, CNN did a report on the opening of “Gay Street” in Rome, a section frequented by homosexuals.  The network’s Rome bureau chief, Alessio Vinci, concluded his report this way:

“In a country where practically everyone is Catholic, the words of the pope still carry some weight.  And although the Vatican did not comment on the opening of Gay Street, the pope’s position is well-known: on numerous occasions, he reaffirmed that gays in the Catholic Church are not welcome.”

It was nice to know the pope still carries “some weight” in a nation where nearly everyone was baptized in his church.  What came as a surprise, however, was the news that the pope has a “position” on homosexuality: all along we thought that he merely accepted what the Catholic Church has always taught about the subject. And, of course, what the Church teaches is that homosexuals are, in fact, welcome. What is not welcome is homosexuality.  Neither, for that matter, is adultery, though that hasn’t stopped the Church from welcoming heterosexuals.

All of this may be confusing to the average reporter, but we have higher expectations for CNN’s Rome bureau chief. Surely there must be some Catholics there he can repair to for advice.

An e-mail was circulated in late July among evangelicals in Iowa asking them not to split the Christian vote between former Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and Kansas Senator Sam Brownback; they were urged to vote for Huckabee, an evangelical, over Brownback, a Roman Catholic.

The letter stemmed from Walnut Creek Community Church in Windsor Heights. It said that unlike President George W. Bush, and his father, both of whom had to learn “how to speak to evangelicals,” Governor Huckabee is “one of us.”

The missive continued as follows: “I know Senator Brownback converted to Roman Catholicism in 2002. Frankly, as a recovering Catholic myself, that is all I need to know about his discernment when compared to the Governor’s. I don’t know if this fact is widely known among evangelicals who are supporting Brownback.”

Bill Donohue addressed this issue in a July 31 news release:

“Discernment. Evangelicals have it, and Catholics do not. But are those evangelicals who ex-press themselves this way capable of discerning the difference between persuasiveness and abrasiveness? Do they really think all Catholics are rote-minded robots who let the Vatican do their thinking for them? We thought we’d gotten beyond such nonsense, but apparently some stereotypes are proving hardier than others.

“Like Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee is a man of character, and as such he would never choose to be associated with such bigotry. The blame for this incident lies squarely with Rev. Tim Rude, pastor of the church. Unfortunately for him, he has now compounded his problem by saying that he did not intend his e-mail to be made public, and that in any event, ‘All I was trying to say is that Protestants should vote for Protestants.’ Great. But now that his gig is up—everyone knows about his stealth campaign against Brownback—the time has come for Rev. Rude (what a great name!) to fess up and apologize. He might also take this opportunity to explain his lack of confidence in the ability of Protestants to discern whom they should vote for in the election.”

Shortly after Donohue’s news release went out, Rev. Rude issued an apology in which he admitted that his references to Catholicism were “careless.”  He explained, “I support Governor Huckabee first and Senator Brownback as a close second” and that “in no way do I think a Catholic would not make a great president.”  It was telling that Rev. Rude was at first questioning Brownback’s discernment as a Catholic convert, but then in a space of mere hours was making Brownback his second choice (out of more than a dozen candidates) for president.

On August 3, ThinkFilm released “The Ten,” a movie composed of 10 different vignettes depicting characters breaking each of the Ten Commandments.   The Catholic League’s own Kiera McCaffrey watched the film and found it to be absolutely asinine.  The skits, all absurd comedy, are a mix of the vulgar, the scatological and the blasphemous.

Amidst characters like a woman who has sex with a wooden ventriloquist’s dummy and prisoners who sodomize each other is a virginal librarian who travels to Mexico and begins an erotic affair with a carpenter named Jesus.  The name is no coincidence.  The man she is having sex with is Jesus Christ.  He’s supposed to be bringing about Armageddon, but finds it too much of a hassle, so he chooses to bed the American visitor instead.  During sex, she screams his name (thus breaking the second commandment).  Years later, when she is married to another, she has flashbacks of her affair whenever her husband leads the family in saying grace at the dinner table.

Another skit, related to keeping the Sabbath holy, has grown men lying to their wives about being sick on Sunday mornings.  Instead of going to church, they take the opportunity to sit around naked together.  To them, this is a better way of getting in touch with God’s creation than attending services.

“The Ten” did not open in many theaters, and has not made very much money.  What we found troubling, however, are the reactions of the critics to this offensive and thoroughly uninteresting film.  Various reviewers were amused by puerile comedy; a quick sampling shows they were not concerned by the anti-Christian content:

Variety declared, “Only Christians with a very liberal sense of humor are likely to enjoy ‘The Ten.’ Even lay viewers will need to be tolerant of gags as envelope-pushing as anything in ‘Borat.'”  The online magazine Slant admitted, “‘The Ten’ is, I guess, sacrilegious in the strictest sense of the term….” And Roger Ebert heartily approved, noting, “‘The Ten’ is comprised of 10 blasphemous and hysterical stories that put the insanity back in Christianity.”

The web site NotComing.com declared, “‘The Ten’ is cohesive in the irreverence of its scenarios (in my favorite, Jesus Christ—Justin Theroux as a disheveled, overly hirsute carpenter….)”  Another online page, EfilmCritic.com, said of the filmmakers, “They’re almost gleeful in their crudity; grinning ever-wider as they seem to ask the audience just who this bit of blasphemy is hurting.” Critic Emanuel Levy described the film as “Comprised of ten blasphemous vignettes, each inspired by one of the Biblical Commandments, [it] goes out of its way to be irreverent and hilarious….”

The Associated Press and the Philadelphia Inquirer both noted the Jesus sex scenes;   Independent Critics.com proclaims the sketch containing them to be the funniest, noting as an aside,  “By the way, did I mention that conservative Christians may find this film offensive?”  FilmStew.com raved, “‘The Ten’ is as sacrilegious as 1979’s The Life of Brian….”

In a culture where tolerance is touted as the supreme virtue, when it comes to Christianity, the media elites only show tolerance to those who misappropriate Christian beliefs and imagery for their own tawdry ends. We rarely see this happen with any other religions.  As Bill Donohue said to the media on August 1, “If Hollywood were to substitute Muhammad for Jesus, it is a sure bet that many of these same critics wouldn’t find the humor in it. Moreover, we’d all be watching the fallout that such a movie would engender on the evening news.”

During a five-week stretch in June and July, the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” ridiculed priests six times and the pope once; all of the priest jokes were sexual in nature and painted priests as molesters.

· June 18: Robin Williams gets into an extended diatribe about priests as pedophiles

· June 20: Leno cracks a joke about priests as pedophiles

· June 21: Leno makes a joke about a drunken pedophile priest

· July 12: Leno ridicules the pope for restating Catholic doctrine on salvation

· July 18: Leno portrays all priests as pedophiles

· July 23: Leno jokes about priests using the Harry Potter books as “bait” to lure kids

· July 23: Leno talks about a priest who pays to see a male stripper at a gay nightclub and jokes that the priest was cheating on his altar boy

Hypocritical priests make for good script, but in Jay Leno’s mind, priests apparently have a monopoly on hypocrisy. This suggests that either he is clueless about other forms of hypocrisy, or there is a strong animus against Catholicism at work.  If it’s the former, the Catholic League can help—we track lots of hypocrites, many of whom live in Leno’s Hollywood backyard. If it’s the latter, we suggest he knock it off.

The San Diego Minutemen, an anti-illegal immigrant group not affiliated with either the Minute-man Project or the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, chose to target St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Fallbrook, California.  Some of the Minutemen’s protests were accompanied by anti-Catholic bigotry.

Father Edward “Bud” Kaicher, pastor of the suburban San Diego parish, extended a helping hand to day workers seeking employment in the area; for this, the San Diego Minutemen displayed the priest in effigy as Satan.  Worse, this right-wing brigade harassed Catholics going to church, used bullhorns to spout their invective, uttered patently anti-Catholic remarks at parishioners, and even stooped so low as to intimidate little kids on the day of their First Communion.

Showing how incredibly de-based and uncivil they are, the San Diego Minutemen even sought to paint all priests as pedophiles and pledged to continue their incivility all summer long. To top it off, these xenophobes are illiterate. “With all the pediphelia [sic] problems going on in the church,” a posting on the group’s Internet site said, “it makes no sense to have 50 loitering men watching little children playing on the playground each morning.”

There are legitimate ways to protest, but the tactics used by the San Diego Minutemen were anything but. By succumbing to anti-Catholic bigotry and harassment, the Minutemen discredited their cause and lost all moral grounds upon which to make their appeal.

On July 10, the day after the Catholic League blew the whistle on the Minutmen’s anti-Catholic bigotry, the group accused us of creating “hatred amongst Cath-olics nationwide against Amer-icans standing up for what’s right and legal.” It also accused the illegal immigrants of increasing “crime and disease in our communities,” and said that the “corrupt Catholic church” was committing “outrageous crimes and deeds.”

Regardless of whether one is sympathetic or not to the plight of illegal immigrants—and/or the grievances of legal immigrants—there was one issue that all fair-minded persons should have been able to agree upon: there was no role for bigotry in this dispute.  All the Catholic League did was ask for all parties to this dispute to exercise civility. Unfortunately, some of our critics unleashed their own hate-filled screeds. Herewith is a sample of the invective that reached our office:

· “I’d be putting a mine field on the border—warn them of course and then do it.”

· “You compound your embarrassing blindness by attacking the messengers of these facts with petty name calling, and even go so far as to call for a ‘Catholic Jihad’ against those who are concerned about the impact that these very real issues will have….”

· “I don’t understand how the Catholic League can support a church that is harboring felons.”

· “I am also very angry that you’re issuing your news releases in Spanish! Why does the Catholic League need to explain itself to these people?”

· “South America and Mexico are pushing on my country and as an American citizen…It is against the law for churches to help day labor services because of the separation of church and state.”

· “By this sweeping and arrogant elitist attack on the people who oppose the illegal invasion of our country from the south, you are putting yourself in the same league with the overwhelming leftist, gay-friendly, California Amchurch hierarchy which hopes to replenish its dwindling flocks with illegal Mexicans.”

· “I also wanted to register my total shock and annoyance at your first-time ever, as far as I’m aware, use of Spanish as if it were incumbent on Catholics to explain to Mexicans in America in their language various situations as opposed to them learning, understanding and speaking English.”

This kind of nativism is unacceptable.  It cannot be stressed too strongly, however, that the Catholic League does not condone illegal immigration and supports laws to enforce our borders.