The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights
| The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights
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The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights is a self-appointed extreme-right advocacy group that fights against what it sells to the public as discrimination of Catholics in American society. We shall see in a moment that the League's idea of discrimination includes any criticism of the Catholic Church and its antics, be it humorous puns in tv shows or serious criticsm in newspapers or books, in short, dissent in any form, and that the League's favourite response to dissent is intimidation, censorship and ad-hominem attacks. The League is lead by William Donohue (Ph.D. in Sociology from NYU, 1980), a former Heritage Foundation Scholar who made himself a name as the author of several books against the ACLU. The League's board of advisors reads like a who-is-who of far-right opinion makers, including such notorious personalities as Brent Bozell III, Linda Chavez, Alan Keyes and Kate O’Beirne. Donohue, director of the league since 1993, makes regular appearances on Foxnews and other media outlets where he expresses his personality to the fullest: a vicious bully whose favourite rhetorical techniques are screaming, interrupting and insinuating that his opponents are communists. His demeanor is representative of the ideological orientation of the Catholic League and the traditional modus operandi of the Catholic Orthodoxy in general: We are right and everyone else is wrong, and whoever disagrees with us must be silenced, by whatever means available. To show that Donohue's attitude is indeed catholic in the most traditional sense, a short excursion into history is in order. Popes have always - until the 1950s! - claimed that "the truth" (Catholic teaching) has every right, while "error" (any dissenting view) has no rights whatsoever. For millions of "witches", "heretics" and "heathens", this ideology became a murderous reality. Giordano Bruno was burned alive for disagreeing with official church teachings, and Galilei only narrowly escaped that fate. When the star of human freedom and self-determination finally began to rise in the 18th century, the Catholic church was indignant. It rejected the demands of the French revolution, such as freedom of the press, freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, as abominations, and it remained firmly commited to what it saw as the only legitimate form of government - the monarchy. In a belated response, it made the infallibility of the pope when speaking "ex cathedra" - a dogma. That the church had not given up on theocracy, and was just waiting for the arc of history to bend towards injustice again, is apparent from a statement pope Leo XIII made in 1888: "Although in the extraordinary condition of these times the church usually acquiesces [says nothing about] in certain modern freedoms. She does so not because she prefers them in themselves but because she judges it expedient to permit them until, in better days, she can assert her own liberty." Early in the 20th century, the Catholic Church still considered democracy an offense against the God-given order (monarchy) and subsequently aligned itself with the facist regimes in Spain, Croatia, Germany and Italy. The Vatican's infatuation with facism came to an abrupt end in May 1945, when it became apparent that further support of facism would be inexpedient and a tactical commitment to democracy was now required. Today, when pope John Paul II speaks of "freedom", all he means is the political freedom of peoples, not individual freedom. Individual freedom for the Catholic Church is for individuals to abide willingly by its moral teachings. True individual freedom, such as the freedom to have a different religion than Christianity, or none, or the freedom over your own body and your own sexuality, is rejected by the Catholic Church as an "abuse" of freedom. This Orwellian idea of freedom has its own codeword: authentic freedom. Pope John Paul II himself summarized this principle on his visit to the US in 1993, admonishing the crowd that "Freedom does not consist in doing whatever we choose, but in having the right to choose to do what we ought." Armed with this background knowledge, we can decode what the Catholic League really means when it demands "Religious and Civil Rights": the special right for conservative Catholicism and the Church hierarchy to be exempt from public criticism, no matter how small. Any criticism of the Catholic Church and its bloody history is "anti-catholic bigotry", period. The League should thus rename itself into the "Fascist League Against The First Amendment", which would be a much more accurate name. The League pursues its goal of silencing the critics of catholicism with a ferocity, spitefulness and, deplorably, success that is unusual even by right-wing standards. Journalists, cartoonists or politicians who dare to publicly criticize church policies (such as the Catholic hierarchy's pathological attitudes towards sex or its disapproval of birth control, to name only two), are relentlessly hounded, harrassed and publicly humiliated. As a result, mainstream media coverage of the Catholic church in the USA has degenerated to little more than cheerleading. While mainstream news magazines in Europe run frequent features on the historic crimes of the Catholic church, its irresponsible social policies today and its byzantine internal power struggles, the American mainstream media dare not tread this forbidden territory. Realizing that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure, Donohue's emphasis is on intimidation. Months before the pope's visit to the US in 1994, Donohue put the media on notice that criticism would not be tolerated. The League circled a "Petition In Defense Of Pope John Paul II", complete with a postage-paid envelope. The full text of the petition read as follows: We the undersigned call on the media to act responsibly when Pope John Paul II comes to New York this October. It is not acting responsibly to give a high profile to the voices of dissident and alienated Catholics. It is not acting responsibly to focus almost exclusively on those issues of Catholic teaching that are in tension with the values of the culture; worse, it is wrong to lecture the Church on getting into line. It is not acting responsibly to neglect coverage of the good work that Catholics and the Catholic Church have done in servicing the least among us. It is not acting responsibly to continue to deride and disparage Catholic teachings in news reports, Op-Eds and cartoons. And it is not acting responsibly to deny that anti-Catholic sentiment is a force in our society. In short, if respect for diversity is truly a value that those in the media embrace, then respect for the diversity that Catholicism offers should be readily apparent. Translation: We the undersigned threaten dire consequences if Pope John Paul II's visit to New York this October is portrayed as anything other than triumphant by the news media. We demand that no coverage whatsoever be given to dissident or alienated Catholics, or to any other facts that show that the Vatican is completely out of touch with reality. We demand that the Catholic Church be portrayed exclusively as a humanitarian organization, and no mention be made of the fact that the worldview promoted by the Vatican through humanitarian aid is centuries out of date and a danger to the survival of the human species. And even though we are using our considerable power to bully you into compliance, please portray us as the helpless victims of anti-catholic bigotry. In short, we expect the media to toe the Vatican's party line, or else. It worked: the media's coverage of the papal visit was tame and entirely without substance. "It is not acting responsibly to give a high profile to the voices of dissident and alienated Catholics" is probably the most revealing part of the statement. Is it not the declared mission of the Catholic League to fight for the freedom of speech of Catholics, even alienated ones? Apparently not. The League's mission is to shield the Church hierarchy from criticism, including and in particular criticism from its own flock. Donohue admited as much when he stated in 1994 that it is the conviction of the Catholic League that an attack on the Church is an attack on Catholics. It has to be, because the American legal tradition protects first and foremost individuals, not organizations. Donohue and his minions are aware of that, so they have to dress up their defense of the Catholic hierarchy as a defense of catholic people. The irony is that in the process of defending the Catholic hierarchy, the League does more Catholic bashing than it is allegedly preventing, because many critics of the catholic church are catholics themselves. Some recent examples of League censorship campaigns follow. One can find many more in in the archive of the League's press releases, which would be more aptly named "William Donohue's Daily Rants", as these press releases consist almost in their entirety of commentary by William Donohue, without exception. In 1999, the League successfully lobbied Fox to censor the Jan. 31, 1999 "Super Bowl" episode of the Simpsons by removing a piece that makes fun of Super-Bowl ads and only peripherally of the Catholic Church. Compared to how the show has made fun of religion in general, the Super Bowl joke was positively benign, and should not have given offense. Unless, of course, one was William Donohue, whose sole job consists of being offended. In May 2001, the Catholic League blasted Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne for hosting the play "Corpus Christi", charging the school with "Christian Bashing". Contrast that with the League's mission statement: Motivated by the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment, the Catholic League works to safeguard both the religious freedom rights and the free speech rights of Catholics whenever and wherever they are threatened. A reward of $100 is offered to anyone who can explain how a play that no one is forced to see could possibly threaten the free speech and the exercise of religion of Catholics, or anyone for that matter.
"First of all, I want to point out that I have not seen the movie Priest, nor will I go see it. Therefore, I am going to comment on what I do know about the movie. The source of my editorial will be based on an interview between Fr. Benedict Groeschel CFP, Mother Angelica, and Dr. William Donohue President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Dr. Donohue is the only person who did see the movie. " In the fantasy world of conservative catholicism, gay priests or priests who live in quasi-marital relationships don't exist, and any assertion to the contrary must therefore by definition be defamation of the highest order. That the Catholic League felt the need to mount a boycot campaign against Miramax's parent company, Disney, demonstrates that the League is really nothing but a continuation of the Holy Roman Inquisition, a mean, vindictive guardian of ideological purity that seeks to silence dissent with the tenets of ultra-conservative catholicism. Probably the most offensive feature of the League is its arrogant presumption to represent all Catholics, each and every one of them. Donohue's hard-line brand of catholicsm, with its implacable vindictiveness and unrelenting intolerance, represents only a minority of Catholics, and his organization is not officially endorsed by the Catholic hierarchy, but Donohue's smug pretension of speaking on behalf of all Catholics seems to make up for it. The media treat him as a legitimate representative of Catholicism, and afford his press releases far more prominence than they deserve.
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