ANTI-CATHOLIC DRAGONS BREATHED FIRE IN 1987
ANNUAL CATHOLIC LEAGUE ROUNDUP
ANTI-CATHOLIC DRAGONS BREATHED FIRE IN 1987
from
Catholic League Newsletter
December 1987 - vol. 14, no. 12
Catholic League for Religious and Civil
Rights
1100 West Wells St.
Milwaukee, WI 53233
Annual Dues: $20
Reprinted on CIN with permission
Last year at this time there was little
doubt that the
coming year would
bring another wave of anti-Catholicism.
The only question
was which of the many forms of bigotry
would emerge from
the shadows and take center stage.
Eleven
months after the
new year began, the answer was clear. The
theme for 1987
was "The Return of the Deputy Myth."
On January 11, nationally-syndicated
columnist George
Will appeared as
a guest on the ABC television news show,
"This Week
with David Brinkley." The
discussion turned to
Cardinal
O'Connor's controversial visit to Israel.
Commenting on the
Vatican's lack of diplomatic relations
with that nation,
Will accused the Catholic Church of
"residual
anti-Semitism" and described its behavior during
the Holocaust as
"contemptible."
A few days before, 53 Jewish organizations
had issued
statements
criticizing Cardinal O'Connor. To their
credit,
the editors of
The New York Times defended the cardinal, but
in the next
breath defamed one of the Church's greatest
modern
popes. In a January 14 editorial, they
wrote: "Pius
XII was
shamefully silent about Nazi Germany's crime against
Jews and
non-Jews."
The
charge that Pius XII was "silent" was first raised
in a work of
fiction--Rolf Hochhuth's 1963 play, "The
Deputy." It is especially ironic that the Times should
give
credence to this
slander, since its editors wrote in 1942
that Pope Pius
XII was "about the only leader left on the
Continent of
Europe who dares to raise his voice at all ...
against
Hitlerism."
While ABC was providing a forum for the
Deputy Myth, CBS
was busy
attacking the religious life. On January
19, the
CBS Evening News
"reported" the sensational story that a
Benedictine monk
was not allowed to return to his order
because he had
AIDS. As it turned out, the
"monk" was in
fact merely a
candidate for admission to a Benedictine abbey
and left of his
own accord. The network refused to
correct
the misleading
story.
Then, on January 28--in the middle of
National Catholic
Vocations
Week--CBS aired "Broken Vows," a made-for-TV movie
about a priest
who became romantically involved with a woman
and abandoned the
priesthood. When the Catholic League
protested, CBS
added insult to injury by falsely claiming
that Father
Joseph Battaglia, an official of the Archdiocese
of Los Angeles,
had approved the script. Battaglia
exposed
the CBS cover-up
at a press conference set up by the League.
After returning to "bigotry as
usual" during the month
of February, the
news media raised its anti-Catholicism to
fever pitch in
March, when the Vatican released its
"Instruction"
on artificial methods of procreation. The
document
questioned such practices as artificial
insemination, in
vitro fertilization and surrogate
motherhood. Dozens of viciously anti-Catholic cartoons,
editorials and
columns--along with slanted "news" coverage--
appeared in
newspapers across the country.
The Church was accused of standing in the
way of
progress, denying
the value of modern science and imposing
its medieval
morality on the American people. Even
more
offensive than
such outrageous claims was a blasphemous
suggestion made
by several cartoonists. They implied
that
the virginal
conception of Christ in the womb of the Blessed
Mother was an
"unnatural" method of procreation that the
Vatican would
have condemned.
Similarly, Garry Trudeau's popular cartoon
strip
"Doonesbury,"
included a gratuitous assault on Catholic
belief. One panel announced that district sales
managers
for the "Dr.
Whoopee" condom company would "train at the
respected
Institute of Immaculate Contraception."
The
obvious allusion
is to the Catholic doctrine that Mary was
conceived without
sin.
As indicated above, the Deputy Myth seems
to have been
chosen as the
anti-Catholic theme of the year. On
the cover
of its April 22
issue, the Jehovah's Witness magazine AWAKE!
showed a Catholic
bishop shaking hands with Hitler. Both
the cover and the
lead story strongly implied that the
Catholic Church
collaborated with the Nazi movement and its
persecution of
the Jews.
A week later, Pope John Paul II beatified
Edith Stein, a
Carmelite nun and
convert from Judaism who was murdered by
the Nazis at
Auschwitz. Amazingly, several
commentators in
the secular press
twisted this event into proof of the
Church's
anti-Semitism. The beatification of
Edith Stein,
wrote Lawrence
Lowenthal in the Middlesex News, "is simply
an affront to
Jewish sensibilities" and recalls Pope Pius
XII's
"tragic silence" during the Holocaust.
The real fireworks on the Holocaust issue,
however,
began on June 17
when the Vatican announced a meeting
between the Pope
and Kurt Waldheim. The former Secretary-
General of the
United Nations had been elected President of
Austria despite
persistent, but unproven, accusations by
international
Jewish organizations that he was involved in
Nazi war crimes.
For three months after the announcement,
the news media
hammered away at
the "controversial" meeting.
Jewish
leaders were
given practically unlimited coverage to voice
their criticism
of John Paul II for meeting with Waldheim,
while Catholics were
seldom allowed to say a word in his
defense. Not only was the current pope accused of
"insensitivity
to the Holocaust," but few commentators could
resist dredging
up the myth about Pius XII.
According to the anti-papal sentiments
stirred up by the
Waldheim affair,
were various protests against his September
visit to the
United States. Although
arch-conservative
fundamentalists
have little in common with militant
homosexuals,
rabid feminists and secular humanists, they all
agreed that no
one's life or liberty was safe as long as the
Bishop of Rome
was on American soil.
Meanwhile, the media's "angle" on
the papal visit was
that the Pope had
come to heal a "deeply divided" Church.
Reports, polls
and interviews repeated ad nauseam the
blatant fiction
that every other priest, nun and layman in
the Church is in
open rebellion against its authority. If
genuine rebels
were so common, why did the same half-dozen
faces appear so
frequently on all three networks?
Of course, the examples cited above are
only the tip of
the iceberg. Throughout 1987, there has been--as
Archbishop
John Quinn of San
Francisco put it "a proliferation of
plays, movies,
television and radio programs as well as
newspaper
articles and cartoons all over the country which
do indeed
ridicule priests, nuns, bishops, the pope,
Catholic beliefs
and practices."
In addition, professional anti-Catholics
like Jack Chick
and Tony Alamo
continue to distribute their hate-filled
propaganda. Televangelist Jimmy Swaggert still broadcasts
his poisonous
lies, distortions and half-truths about the
Catholic
Church. And the ACLU will once again do
its best
to keep Christ
out of Christmas.
Let us brace ourselves for another year.
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