William A. Donohue A few years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a brilliant article explaining how our society was "defining deviancy down." What he observed was the disturbing tendency to approve of behavior that previously had been labeled deviant. He was right in his assessment, but he didn’t adequately address its root causes. Over the past [...]
William A. Donohue After President Clinton took Communion at a South African Roman Catholic church, a well-known journalist, himself not a Catholic, defended the president by saying that what he did was an example of ecumenism. He further held that the Catholic Church should be more inclusive, maintaining that it made good sense to welcome people [...]
William A. Donohue On a recent television show that I was on, one of the other guests remarked that Catholicism risked becoming obsolete because its message wasn’t relevant enough to today’s Catholics. I thought this was a strange comment, especially coming from a Catholic university professor. The good news is that she’s wrong. Those [...]
William A. Donohue On April 16, the Catholic League will celebrate its 25th anniversary with a dinner at The Plaza in New York City (see p. 7 for the details). There is much to celebrate, as well as much to focus on down the road. Were it not for Virgil C. Blum, S.J., there would be no [...]
There are many genres of anti-Catholicism, the most well-known of which are discriminatory practices against individual Catholics and bigoted assaults on the institutional Church. Both forms continue to exist, but the contemporary strain of Catholic bashing that is most common, if less visible, is best understood as a manifestation of cultural politics. Culture is an expression [...]
William A. Donohue Dialogue has become more than a buzz word, it’s become a mantra. Just invoking the word makes some feel good, if not altogether righteous. Like a kid on dope, we expect that uttering the "D" word will relieve us of pain and sorrow. Until we sober up, of course. Then it starts all [...]
William A. Donohue Catholics are not a monolithic entity and it is therefore not surprising that the Catholic reaction to "Nothing Sacred" has been anything but uniform. On the one hand, we have bishops, priests, nuns, religious and lay persons who have signed our petition against Disney and are incensed about the show. On the other [...]
William A. Donohue Perhaps the most aggravating aspect of "Nothing Sacred" is the audacity of the executive producers, David Manson and Richard Kramer, to admit that it is their purpose to create "dialogue" among Catholics about the teachings of their church. Who ever asked—or appointed—these two men, both of whom are Jewish and both of whom [...]
William A. Donohue The Catholic League is dubbed "pathetic" by Father Andrew Greeley and is called "semiparanoid" and "un-American" by David Carlin of Commonweal, a journal of liberal Catholic opinion. Both claim to be exercised about anti-Catholicism and yet neither has a good word to say about the one organization that has done more to combat it [...]
by William A. Donohue It is more than just a pet peeve of mine to encounter gratuitous slams against Catholicism. To be sure, what I’m going to describe is hardly the worst of what crosses my desk, but it is the kind of stuff that gets my goat. The recent movie, The Saint, has virtually nothing to [...]
