Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on recent attacks on Catholics in North America and England:
There hasn’t been a wave of virulent anti-Catholicism in the West like what we are currently witnessing in at least a hundred years.
In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan in the U.S. was on the march against Catholics, trying to force them to send their children to public schools. Al Smith ran for president but was roundly condemned because of his Catholicism.
In Europe, especially in Germany, anti-Catholicism got really nasty. Hitler emerged as a Nazi leader in the 1920s, at a time of moral collapse and anti-Catholicism. When he took over in the next decade, he promised to “crush [the Catholic Church] like a toad.”
Catholics in the West are not facing groups like the Klan or the Nazis today, but they are being monitored and persecuted for their faith by government bodies. That this is going on in what are called democracies is mind-boggling.
Here are some examples that emerged in just the last few days!
In the U.S., the FBI is now investigating some orthodox Catholics, citing the far-left, and scandal ridden, Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as its source. In an important whistle-blowing article published by Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI special agent, the Richmond Field Office of the FBI recently released a report on “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics,” or what they call RTCs.
The report says there is a difference between RTCs and “traditionalist Catholics.” The former are labeled extremist anti-Jewish and anti-gay bigots who reject Vatican II and who adhere to white supremacist ideology; the latter prefer the Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teachings.
The document lists as RTCs a few groups which I am familiar with, and while they are certainly not associations the Catholic League identifies with, they are not violent-prone entities. Some of these people may be kooky, but they are not exactly Antifa, about which the FBI has done little. So why the probe?
The SPLC may call them “hate groups,” but that means nothing: it calls the Family Research Council and the Ruth Institute hate groups, which is a scurrilous lie. Tony Perkins, who runs the former group, and Jennifer Roback Morse, who runs the latter, are both outstanding social conservatives. They are anything but hateful.
As Seraphin notes, “The FBI is forbidden from opening cases or publishing products based solely on First Amendment-protected activities.” Why then the war on RTCs? What’s next? A war on Catholics who are orthodox and who summarily reject the morally debased society that militant secularists have created?
Make no mistake, we are not done with this FBI story.
In Canada, a 16-year-old student who attends a Catholic high school was arrested this week for publicly stating that there are only two sexes and that male students should not use the women’s restrooms. The student, Josh Alexander, attends St. Joseph’s Catholic High School in Renfrew, Ontario, and his principal took the side of the police in punishing him for mouthing Catholic teachings on sexuality.
“I said there were only two genders and you were born either a male of a female and that got me into trouble,” Alexander said. “And then I said that gender doesn’t trump biology.” The principal of the school suspended him, saying he was not allowed back until he renounced his views, all of which are based on Catholic teachings. It is not the student who should be ousted—it’s the principal.
In Wolverhampton, England, Fr. Sean Gough was arrested for praying outside an abortion clinic. He was holding a sign, “Praying For Freedom Of Speech.” This was considered “intimidation” and therefore unlawful. “I pray wherever I go, inside my head, for the people around me. How can it be a crime for a priest to pray?”
Fr. Gough correctly identified the problem: Agents of the state want to get “inside” his head. Thought control was never so vicious in the West, rivaling anything Mao Zedong did in China, if not in the same volume.
The West is decaying, and it is happening at lightning speed. We have no other choice than to expose these fascists and defeat them.
