By the time you read this, the rally on behalf of Mother Teresa will be over, but it is not likely that people will stop talking about it for some time.

The Catholic League staff spent a large part of the summer planning this event, and we are ever so happy with the strong backing we have received. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Hindus and Muslims were invited to speak at the August 26 rally, reflecting the wide base of support for our effort. No one can believe that Anthony Malkin, the owner of the Empire State Building, would want to deny a simple honor to Mother Teresa. All we asked him to do was to flick the switch and light the towers blue and white on the 100th anniversary of her birthday.

This is more than a rally—it is a cultural marker. The press from the Houston Chronicleto the Hindustan Times gave coverage to our Mother Teresa campaign because they knew what it represented: a statement made by Catholics that they will not be pushed around by the cultural elite. Important as Mother Teresa is to our rally, it transcends her: this is about the place of Roman Catholics in American society in the new millennium.  The decision to deny Mother Teresa her due has had the effect of uniting the Catholic League with persons whom we have never dealt with before, bonding us with them in a way that is heartening. It is also something that sets the stage for future coalitions, and all because one rich, angry man decided to dig in his heels and say no to Mother Teresa. In this regard, the rabid support we received from the Albanian community—they are so proud of their saintly daughter—has been especially endearing.

Liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, people of all faiths and none at all, expressed their support for our campaign. We heard from athletes and coaches, from comedians and celebrities, as well as from cardinals, bishops (several from India), priests, brothers, nuns and the laity. Such a cross-section of Americans would be hard to duplicate. This is what real diversity looks like: persons of every race, ethnicity, religion and class standing together as one against injustice.

We are struck by the degree of unsolicited support. From Belfast to Bombay, municipal and office buildings promised to light up blue and white, as well as places like the Peace Bridge that joins Buffalo and Fort Erie, Ontario.

The next issue of Catalyst will feature stories and pictures about this historic rally. This is a one-time event, but its effect on the culture will hopefully endure.

Attorney William McMurry, who sued the Holy See for being complicit in the sexual abuse of his three clients, called it quits in August. He acknowledged that “Virtually every child who was abused and will come forward as an adult has come forward and sued a bishop and collected money, and once that happens, it’s over.” That’s right—once they got their check, they cashed out.

What collapsed in August was the heart and soul of McMurry’s interest: his attempt to put Pope Benedict XVI on trial. It was his objective to prove culpability on the part of the Holy See for what goes on in Kentucky. He also sought to show that priests don’t work for their local parish, community or diocese, maintaining that they line up single file taking their cues from the pope.

There was one other reason why McMurry quit: he couldn’t find any more alleged victims. But it was not for lack of trying. He admits he searched in vain for months looking to find any man who may have been groped. “No one who has not sued a bishop is in a position to help us despite our best efforts over the past several months,” McMurry said.

McMurry confesses that he spent 8,000 hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to find any man who may have settled out of court. It did not matter how trivial the offense, how many decades ago it occurred, or how old the alleged victim was, all that mattered was that the offender had to be a priest.

While there are similar suits pending, this is one gig that is up.

The conventional wisdom maintains there is a pedophilia crisis in the Catholic Church. Popular as this position is, it is empirically wrong: the data show it has been a homosexual crisis all along. The evidence is not ambiguous, though there is a reluctance to let the data drive the conclusion. But that is a function of politics, not scholarship.

Alfred Kinsey was the first to identify a correlation between homosexuality and the sexual abuse of minors. In 1948, he found that 37 percent of all male homosexuals admitted to having sex with children under 17 years old. More recently, in organs such as the Archives of Sexual Behavior, the Journal of Sex Research, the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, and Pediatrics, it has been established that homosexuals are disproportionately represented among child molesters.

Correlation is not causation; it is an association. So to say that there is a correlation between homosexual orientation and the sexual abuse of minors is not to say that being a homosexual makes one a molester. On the other hand, it makes no sense to pretend that there is no relationship between homosexuality and the sexual abuse of minors.

Think of it this way. We know there is a correlation between being Irish and being an alcoholic, but that doesn’t mean all Irishmen are, or will become, alcoholics. But it does mean they have a special problem in this area.

After the Boston Globe broke the story on priestly sexual abuse in 2002, the American bishops established an independent panel to study this issue. When the National Review Board released its findings in 2004, noted Washington attorney Robert S. Bennett, who headed the study, said, “There are no doubt many outstanding priests of a homosexual orientation who live chaste, celibate lives, but any evaluation of the causes and context of the current crisis must be cognizant of the fact that more than 80 percent of the abuse at issue was of a homosexual nature.”

Furthermore, the panel explicitly said that “we must call attention to the homosexual behavior that characterized the vast majority of the cases of abuse observed in recent decades.”

 One of those who served on the National Review Board, Dr. Paul McHugh, is former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins. He is on record saying, “This behavior was homosexual predation on American Catholic youth, yet it’s not being discussed.” More recently, the New York Times ran a story on Leslie Lothstein, another psychologist who has treated abusive priests. He concluded that “only a small minority were true pedophiles.”

Roderick MacLeish Jr. was the Boston lawyer who pressed the case against the Archdiocese of Boston; he examined all the files on this subject. As reported by Michael Paulson in the Boston Globe, MacLeish  concluded that “90 percent of the nearly 400 sexual abuse victims he has represented are boys, and three quarters of them are post-pubescent.” Once again, the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia.

Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons is a psychiatrist who has spent years treating sexually abusive priests. “Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that there is no link between celibacy and pedophilia,” he said earlier this year. Instead, they have found a “relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia.” Fitzgibbons goes further, saying, “Every priest whom I treated who was involved with children sexually had previously been involved in adult homosexual relationships.” Notice he didn’t saysome priests.

Need more proof? When the John Jay College of Criminal Justice released its findings, the Boston Globe, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its investigation, commented that “more than three-quarters of the victims were post pubescent, meaning the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia.” So if the definitive study, which covered the years 1950-2002, concludes that pedophilia was never the issue, why does elite opinion insist that there is a “pedophilia crisis” in the Catholic Church?

If most of the damage was done by gay priests, it raises the question whether there would have been a scandal at all had homosexuals been barred from the priesthood. While the conclusion—no gays, no scandal—is simplistic, it nonetheless reveals more than it conceals. It is too simplistic because it does not take into account the fact that in the 1970s (at the height of the scandal), America was in the throes of a sexual revolution, one which touched every institution in society, including the Catholic Church; no matter what the composition of the priesthood, some problems were on the horizon given the cultural turbulence of this period.

Having said as much, it should be obvious that if eight in ten of the molesters had never been allowed to become priests, the scandal as we know it would have been avoided.

Is this a plea to bar homosexuals from the priesthood? No. There are many good homosexual priests, and most have served the Church well. What the Vatican has done is to screen carefully for sexually active homosexuals, without imposing an absolute ban. That makes sense, and it is one reason why this problem is abating.

Bill Donohue

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) established a fine code on academic freedom in 1940. The freedom of professors to express their views must be respected, it insisted, and this certainly applied to religious speech. Its directive to college administrators was plain: “Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.”

It is not a matter of debate that Kenneth J. Howell has never been informed by administrators at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that he may not discuss what the Roman Catholic Church teaches about natural law and how it applies to homosexuality. Yet that was the reason this adjunct professor of religious studies was fired: His superiors objected to this teaching, and so they decided to punish the messenger. A clearer violation of academic freedom would be hard to find.

Besides academic freedom, there are the First Amendment protections afforded freedom of speech (the university is a state institution, so the Constitution is operative) and freedom of religion. Viewpoint discrimination, which is what happened in this instance, is taken very seriously by the courts. One might have thought that with all the legal rights stacked heavily in Mr. Howell’s corner, even disrespecting and censorial administrators would have decided not to pursue this case. Prudence, obviously, is not a virtue they possess. But don’t they have any lawyers on staff?

If Mr. Howell were forcing students to accept Catholic natural law teachings as the only acceptable response to the issue of homosexuality, that would be one thing. However, when he is fired for explaining this teaching in an e-mail to a student, the infraction of academic freedom and his constitutional rights is even more disturbing.

Whether the Church is right about any of its teachings should matter as much as whether the teachings of Judaism, Islam and other world religions are right. To wit: It should not matter. Marxism is taught regularly on college campuses, and often in a manner that more closely resembles indoctrination than instruction. Yet few complain. So why is it that religious teachings are treated differently?

Let’s face it: religious teachings are not really the issue this time. Nor, for that matter, is Roman Catholicism per se. No one at the University of Illinois will ever be disciplined, much less fired, for discussing the social justice teachings of papal encyclicals and their call for economic justice. Yet when it comes to challenging the conventional wisdom on homosexuality, that’s a different story altogether. Indeed, it would not matter if the source of such a perspective were purely secular. What matters is that such speech can never be tolerated.

What happened to Mr. Howell may not be typical of the way conservative speech is treated on campus, but it is nonetheless true that in almost all instances when academic speech is violated, conservatives are the victims of speech codes and related punitive measures. The dirty little secret on college campuses—and there are few exceptions—is that diversity of thought is the one expression of diversity that is taboo.

Quite frankly, diversity of speech when it comes to matters sexual is the least tolerated on campus, whether it be challenging the prevailing wisdom on nature-based explanations for gender inequality, same-sex marriage or homosexuality. When the source of such views is religious, the case for censorship is secured. And no religion offends the dons of diversity more than Catholicism.

Those who think this an exaggeration need to ask themselves how many times they can remember when a left-wing speaker was denied the right to express himself on campus. Leftists are almost never shouted down, hissed at or otherwise censored, and everyone knows it; it’s always conservatives who are the victims of such tactics. Want hard evidence? Try reading The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses by University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors and civil libertarian attorney Harvey A. Silverglate.

From all accounts, Ken Howell is a well-liked and admired professor. What happened to him is a travesty of the first order. Even those who strongly disagree with his views have an obligation to respect his right to express them. That’s what the AAUP sought to do 70 years ago, and that’s what the University of Illinois should do today. It should pivot and drop its case against this innocent man.

This piece was featured in the July 20 edition of the Washington Times. See the following articles to see how this issue was resolved: CATHOLIC PROFESSOR WINS JOB BACK and CAMPUSES SPONSOR GAY THOUGHT CONTROL

Recently, an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois, Ken Howell, has been on a roller coaster ride regarding his employment at the school. Howell, who teaches courses on Catholicism, was fired for explaining in an e-mail that homosexuality violates Catholic natural law teachings. A few weeks later, after being hung out to dry by various organizations and media outlets, the University extended an invitation back to him saying that he could teach this fall.

When we first heard of this story, we said that the University of Illinois should be sued, and that we would make sure that Professor Howell had everything he needed to successfully challenge the school. When we contacted Professor Howell, he informed us that he was working with the Alliance Defense Fund in fighting the school. We knew that he was in good hands.

That he was fired for expressing his religious viewpoint, we said, was an unacceptable reason that will not stand up in court. Codes of academic freedom were written expressly to combat abuses like this, and that is why this case had to be taken seriously.

It is not up to faculty chairs or deans to sit in judgment on the moral propriety of any religious orientation. Moreover, viewpoint discrimination is not tolerable, especially in higher education. Thus, the University of Illinois had gotten itself into a jam.

A few weeks after he was fired, Professor Howell was informed by the University of Illinois that he could return this fall to teach courses on Catholicism. However, instead of being paid by the Diocese of Peoria, as his original set up was, the University would pay his salary.

The University of Illinois made the right decision to reverse the earlier ruling that stripped Ken Howell of his adjunct position. Regarding the termination of the arrangement with the Diocese of Peoria, a plausible case can be made that it was time to reassess this relationship. But this issue was not entirely over.

As of our press date, a faculty committee had yet to rule on whether Professor Howell’s academic freedom had been violated. More important, at least in the long run, is the matter of religious freedom.

To be specific, what right does an institution of higher education have in encroaching on the religious beliefs of administrators, faculty and students? This is especially relevant today given the tendency on many college campuses to pressure Christians into adopting a radical secular mindset on homosexuality.

Notwithstanding our reservations, this was good news coming from the University of Illinois, and it was even better news for people of faith, especially Catholics. We are glad we offered our assistance to Professor Howell; we certainly wish him all the best.

The most amazing part of this story is that we are still fighting battles like this in 2010. No professor should have to tip-toe when discussing religion in a college classroom.

It has been a busy summer for academics seeking to silence dissent on campus. Ken Howell, an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois, was accused of “hate speech” for teaching what the Catholic Church believes about homosexuality; he was fired but was eventually invited back for the fall.

Julea Ward, a Christian student at Eastern Michigan University, was told that she could only continue graduate studies in school counseling if she changed her beliefs on homosexuality and agreed to attend “diversity sensitivity training.”

Jen Keeton, a Christian student, was told by officials at Augusta State University that she could continue her graduate work in student counseling only if she changed her thoughts on homosexuality and agreed to enroll in a “sensitivity” program.

The case of Howell was complicated because his salary was paid for by the Diocese of Peoria, but the fact is that it was his teachings on homosexuality that triggered a review of this long-standing arrangement. Eventually the University of Illinois came to its senses and offered him his job back.

The case of Ward was complicated by her refusal to counsel homosexuals. But the fact is that had she agreed to counsel gays in a manner consistent with her beliefs, she would have been victimized for doing so anyway.

The case of Keeton isn’t complicated by anything—she is simply being victimized for her thoughts.

Bad as these attempts to censor religious freedom are, even worse are the proposed remedies. “Diversity sensitivity” and “remediation programs” smack of thought control. Totalitarian in nature, they have no legitimate role to play in American society, much less on college campuses.

Keeton was told that as a part of her “remediation,” she should go to a “gay pride parade.” Unlike the Irish, Italian, German, Puerto Rican, Polish, West Indian, Black and Jewish parades, the gays have a hard time keeping their pants on. We said kudos to the Alliance Defense Fund for accepting all three cases.

Recently there has been a lot of news about author Anne Rice’s decision to quit Christianity while still professing a belief in Christ.

Anne Rice started as a believing Catholic; then she quit the Church; then she rejoined the Church; now she has quit again. All of this is as amusing as it is sad, and would be of no interest to the Catholic League save for her parting shots at Catholicism.

Rice claimed that the “last straw” for her was when the American bishops opposed homosexual marriage. She offered, “I didn’t anticipate in the beginning that U.S. Catholic Bishops were going to come out against same-sex marriage.” Did she actually think they would be silent on one of the most contentious moral issues of our day? Or did she think that they were silently cheering for gay marriage all along?

She also said, “I refuse to be anti-gay,” thereby separating herself from all those awful Catholic bigots. But when she was asked two years ago on ABC-TV whether the Catholic Church condemns her gay son to hell, she said, “I don’t think anybody in my church would say that. I think our view is far more compassionate.”

In an August interview on the “Joy Behar Show,” Rice said, “I myself am anti-abortion.” It didn’t take long before the pro-abortion and anti-Catholic Behar snapped, “You would deny other women the choice to have an abortion?” To which Rice said, “I would not deny them the choice.” Yet in the same breath she added, “I do think it’s the taking of a human life.”

When asked by ABC-TV’s “Nightline” about our criticism of her, Rice did not defend herself; rather she simply stated that she was “familiar with Bill Donohue and the Catholic League.”

Rice came back to the Catholic Church in the 1990s, but only recently did she learn that the bishops are not fond of gays marrying. She said in 2008 that Catholicism is not anti-gay, but in 2010 it was so anti-gay she had to quit. She is pro-life, knows abortion kills, but sides with the agenda of Planned Parenthood. She wants Christ without the Christianity.

This is more than an odyssey—it’s a tragedy.

Recently, Jay Leno has been on a tear bashing the Catholic Church on the “Tonight Show.” What began in April ran right through the summer and on July 7, Leno said: “Oh, and a Catholic priest in Connecticut has been charged with stealing $1.3 million in church money and using the money for male escorts. Of course, his parish is very upset about this—except the altar boys. They’re going, huh, dodged a bullet on that one. Yeah, he spent $1.3 million on male escorts and, of course, the other priests were very confused. They said: ‘Why buy the escort when the altar boys are free?’”

He followed this up a few days later saying, “It was so hot I saw a priest stop at a kids’ lemonade stand—just got lemonade.” His shot at priests was the fifth and last in a string of jokes related to the hot weather, and it was the only one the audience shrugged off with “oohs.” There is a reason for this: it was the only joke which was mean-spirited and damning of a collectivity.

Many years ago, Leno called our office to apologize for insulting Catholics. We accepted his apology and told him why he had crossed the line. At that time, he was making fun of the Eucharist. He got the point, and the conversation ended amicably. But it is obvious that the man is insincere.

This was the seventh and eighth time this year Leno has targeted all priests as child molesters. His previous bigoted outbursts occurred on April 5, April 6, April 21, April 28, May 10, and May 14.

For the past several years, wayward priests have been fodder for his material; miscreant rabbis and imams never seem to get mentioned. Occasionally, he sticks to the culprit, but most of the time he indicts all priests.

Jay Leno’s jokes painting all priests as child abusers is not comedy. It is bigotry. He has crossed the line too many times.

In a recent editorial the New York Times said, “The attacks of Sept. 11 were not a religious event. They were mass murder.”

The New York Times was half right: the attacks of 9/11 were mass murder, but to say they were not a religious event is delusional. What were they? Celebrations of separation of church and state?

The FBI possesses a letter written by 9/11 ringleader, Mohamed Atta, telling his fellow terrorists what to do on that fateful day. Here is what he instructed them to do the night before the attacks:

  • “When you board the P or place your foot, before you enter [the plane] recite the prayers and remember: It is a raid for the sake of Allah. Recite the prayer. As you take the seat, recite the prayer. Mention Allah a lot.”

 • “When you strike, shout Allah is great because this shout strikes terror in the hearts of the infidels.”

 • “Seconds before the target, your last words should be there is no God but Allah. Muhammed is his messenger.”

Atta’s words are not ambiguous: the attack on the U.S. was done in the name of Islam. Islam is a religion. Ergo, the 9/11 mass murders were a religious event.

For three consecutive days in July, the high-profile media outlets of the New York Times and Time magazine showed their collective brazenness by bashing the Catholic Church on its policy regarding women’s ordination.

On July 17, the Church was the subject of a critical editorial in the Times, the following day, columnist Maureen Dowd joined in on the attack. Both pieces were in response to the new set of norms that the Vatican released that touched on, among other things, priestly sexual abuse and the ordination of women. Although the norms were divided into 31 articles, both the Times and Dowd focused on these two issues.

They need to get a few things straight: the issue of women’s ordination in the Catholic Church should be treated the same way that the Times treats the Orthodox Jewish strictures against eating pork and the Muslim practice of barring sex during the day while Ramadan is being observed—with silence. The Times never criticizes Orthodox Jews and Muslims for segregating the sexes in many settings, so why not stop bashing Catholicism’s proscription of women clergy?

By contrast, it is perfectly acceptable to take issue with any religion’s positions on public policy matters, but the house rules of all religions need to be respected (save for those few instances where innocent life may be threatened). Not to do so is to show contempt for diversity. And that is exactly what the Times did: it used its secular yardstick to measure the doctrinal prerogatives of the Church.

After two days of the Times’ unfair criticisms, an article by Tim Padgett appeared on the website of Time magazine. Padgett declared himself Catholic, but upon further reading, one would wonder why he would belong to a voluntary organization that he described as having a “malicious” and “misogynous declaration” that is evidence of its “increasingly spiteful rhetoric of bigotry”? Why would he want to stay in a Church that is “represented by a bunch of homophobes wearing miters”? Is he a phony or a masochist? Either way, he was surely not being intellectually honest with himself.

When asked about the Padgett article, Bill Donohue responded: “Today’s Catholic dissidents resort to bombast and vitriol, using a sledgehammer to get their point across. And they wonder why no one is listening.”

It was evident that most of the media wasn’t listening—or paying attention—to a story that the Associated Press ran about a German female bishop, Maria Jepsen, who was forced to resign amidst accusations that she was involved in a cover-up of a Protestant priest who reportedly abused as many as 20 children in the 1980s. She initially said that she became aware of these cases in March of this year, but then it was disclosed by the German magazine Der Spiegel that she knew of them in 1999.

Maria Jepsen is not just any Lutheran cleric: in 1992, she became the world’s first female Protestant bishop. The real story here, however, was not Jepsen—but it was the media blackout of this story.

We tracked this story for over a week to see how many newspapers picked up the AP article; the grand total was nine. By the way, of those articles, the longest piece was 211 words. The New York Times, which is obsessed with priestly sexual abuse in the Church, wouldn’t touch this story.

Why the media blackout? First, the media have no interest in discrediting mainline Protestant clerics, most of whom share elite secular opinions on matters sexual: the mainline religions are champions of abortion rights and are not known to fight gay marriage. Second, the cultural elites like to blame men for sexual abuse; women, we are told, would never act the way male clerics do.