Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments as follows:
Last Friday on the Washington Post blog, “On Faith,” English atheist Richard Dawkins said the Catholic Church was “surely up there among the leaders” as “the greatest force for evil in the world.” He labeled the Eucharist a “cannibal feast,” adding that “possession of testicles is an essential qualification to perform the rite.” He also blamed the Church for sending missionaries “out to tell deliberate lies to AIDS-weakened Africans” regarding condoms. The Church’s outreach to Anglicans, he said, makes it “a common pimp,” noting that those who convert “will be joining an institution where buggering altar boys pervades the culture.”
On Saturday, a Los Angeles Times editorial said that “church leaders, including popes, have changed their thinking over the years about everything from usury to the culpability of Jews for the Crucifixion….” It concluded, “You don’t have to be Catholic (or Anglican) to realize that society as a whole would be better off if the church’s views of women and gays underwent a similar evolution.”
On Sunday, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recalled that when she was in grade school, “Nuns were second-class citizens then and–40 years after feminism utterly changed America—they still are.” She called Pope Benedict XVI the “uber-conservative pope,” a.k.a. “God’s Rottweiler,” who was once “a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth.” She also accused the Church of enabling “rampant pedophilia.”
On Monday, James Carroll in the Boston Globe called the outreach to Anglicans “a cruel assault,” “an insult to loyal Catholic liberals” and “a slap at women and homosexuals.” He characterized the outreach as a “preemptive exploitation of Anglican distress.”
These deranged comments—all voiced in America’s premier newspapers—demonstrate that anti-Catholicism is the most virulent expression of bigotry in the U.S. It also shows why these newspapers, quite unlike the Catholic Church, are dying. As for the writers, they need to go to church. Either that or check into an asylum.
