If there really is a vast, anti-Catholic herd of Know-Nothing journalists out there hoping to discredit the Catholic church in the eyes of believer and unbeliever alike, they may want to make large and repeated donations to a non-profit organization called the Catholic League. Through its president and spokesman, a voluble, camera-happy fellow named William Donohue, the organization is becoming an indispensable asset to their cause.
The Catholic League’s website describes its mission like so: “When slanderous assaults are made against the Catholic Church, the Catholic League hits the newspapers, television, and radio talk shows defending the right of the Church to promote its teachings…”
The important word here is hits. Donohue’s responses to what he takes to be an anti-Catholic slander are not gossamer creations spun from subtlety and nuance. Where some might bring a stiletto, he brings a howitzer. As a result, people who already agree with him adore him, and people disinclined to agree are confirmed in their belief that he’s a blowhard. And those of us who used to be in the middle are being shoved toward the latter.
Let’s consider Donohue’s response to the Pennsylvania grand jury’s report on sex abuse and its cover up in the local dioceses. When it exploded last week, Donohue was quick to issue a report of his own. He gave it the grandiose and self-congratulatory title “Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report Debunked.” As always, from the first sentence of the first paragraph, Donohue’s technique is: Dukes Up!
“Unlike most commentators and reporters, I have read most of the Pennsylvania grand jury report,” he writes. This is what the philosophers call an “argument from authority,” with a special twist: the authority Donohue cites is his own. While all you bedwetters were getting your panties in a twist, old Bill D was stayin’ up late doin’ his homework.
Donohue, under the myth-fact format, goes on to offer a word salad of misdirection, overstatement, special pleading, and distinctions without a difference—exactly the kind of sleight of hand he finds in the grand jury report.
For example, you have heard that it was said, “The priests were found guilty of preying on youngsters.”
But Donohue says unto you: “No one was found guilty of anything.”
You have heard that it was said, “All of the accused are priests.”
But Donohue says unto you: It is “wrong to say that all of the accused are priests. In fact, some were brothers, some were deacons, and some were seminarians.”
You have heard that it was said, “The priests ‘raped’ their victims.”
But Donohue says unto you: “This is an obscene lie. Most of the alleged victims were not raped: they were groped or otherwise abused, but not penetrated, which is what the word ‘rape’ means.”
You have heard that it was said, “The abusive priests were pedophiles.”
But Donohue says unto you: “This is the greatest lie of them all.” Earlier studies of priestly sex abuse have shown that, church-wide, “81 percent of the victims were male, 78 percent of whom were postpubescent.”
It’s interesting to note that this is a line of defense raised last year by the noted Catholic theologian Milo Yiannopoulos. (He wears a cross in public, you know.) When he was accused of advocating pedophilia in an interview, Yiannopoulos responded in horror. He would never approve of pedophilia, he said. No, what he was approving was hebephilia, which is sex between postpubescents and adults.
Such are the fine distinctions upon which 21st century conservatism rests.
After he released it last week, Donohue’s debunking was ridiculed or, worse, ignored. So he doubled down. It’s what he does.
He issued a press release with the delirious title, “Delirious Reactions to Church Abuse.” It may be his crowning achievement, an example of evasion and nonsequitur they could teach in law schools.
“While some Catholics are spinning out of control over cases of sexual abuse committed by the dead and laicized, MTV will present the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award to Jennifer Lopez…”
But you don’t see “Catholic purists” getting delirious over that! And Asia Argento, for crying out loud. Les Moonves!
And more: “It’s back to school time, and that means more kids will be sexually molested,” Donohue writes with eerie playfulness. “Fortunately for the public school teachers, they will be protected by their union chiefs.” From predation in the sacristy to the power of the teachers unions. The mind of the ideologue moves in mysterious ways.
It’s all too bad, maybe even tragic. For lazy or ill-motivated reporters, following a strategy of “on the one hand, on the other hand,” a bag o’ wind like Donohue offers a readymade reason not to dig deeper into the subjects that make him delirious. You’ve got the grand jury report on one side—sober, detailed, piled high with factual claims—and, on the other side, a red-faced maniac trying to distinguish between forced fellatio and rape. Donohue lets them think they’re being balanced.
With Donohue around, there’s no need to give a lot of space to the Pittsburgh diocese’s respectful and measured response to the grand jury report. We can ignore, for example, the grand jury report’s use of oddly tendentious phrasing, calling confidential personnel files a “secret archive,” for instance. Editors will be less likely to reprint charts like the one the Pittsburgh archdiocese provides on page 10 of its response. It shows the steep decline in reported incidents of abuse in the last three decades; virtually none since 2002. Mitigating facts – such as that canon law requires a diocese to pay a priest even if he’s serving time for an appalling crime – get lost in the roar of Donohue’s abuse.
Which is why, if you’ll forgive the expression, he’s a godsend to anti-Catholic activists and reporters. An aspiring Catholic myself, I will not aid their cause by telling them where to send their donations. The website might be helpful: www.catholicleague.org.
