On December 10, the CBS show, “60 Minutes,” did a segment on the merger of Catholic hospitals with secular healthcare institutions. The focus of the piece was the unavailability of contraceptive services and abortions at these facilities. Morley Safer conducted interviews with several persons, including Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC). Kissling was quoted as saying, “It’s not like the old days. Doctors are no longer gods. Now we have bishops who are gods.”
Catholic League president William Donohue commented as follows:
“For many years now, ‘60 Minutes’ has worked hard to discredit the Roman Catholic Church. But rarely has it shown its anti-Catholic bias more than in its piece on ‘God, Women and Medicine.’ By drawing on perhaps the most notorious anti-Catholic bigot in the nation, Frances Kissling, ’60 Minutes’ exposed its true colors.
“‘I spent twenty years looking for a government that I could overthrow without being thrown in jail,’ Kissling once said. ‘I finally found one in the Catholic church’ [sic]. Moreover, her anti-Catholicism is so blatant that on two occasions the bishops have expressly denounced Catholics for a Free Choice for fraudulently posing as a Catholic group. And this is the ‘expert’ that Morley Safer repairs to for commentary. It is on the order of asking those blacks who voted for George Wallace what they think about civil rights and then airing their self-hating views as representative of African American thought. The only difference being that Kissling is getting paid around a quarter of a million dollars by the Ford Foundation and their ilk for the doing the bidding of Catholic-bashing elites.
“We will ask our members, and all those who are opposed to bigotry, to write to the producer of ‘60 Minutes,’ Don Hewitt, stating their objections to this remarkable segment.”
