Channeling Mel Gibson: Bill Donohue's War Against All Things Non-Catholic Is Heating Up ...Against Jews.

Maybe he was drunk at the time.

"Jews Had Better Not Make Enemies Of Their Catholic Friends Since They Have So Few Of Them"

One pope shedding tears at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem did nothing to eradicate anti-Semitism in staunch pro-Catholic circles: the latest exchange of emails between Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League and Philadelphia Rabbi Arthur Waskow indicate an animosity worthy of Mel Gibson.


Called "The Rottweiler's Rottweiler" (in reference to his defense of Benedict XVI and his own problems due to scandal and cover-ups), Donohue seems to goad people and groups into a fight. In fact, Donohue is such a staunch defender of the Catholic Church, he has turned offense into an art form: he has taken on progressive Catholic nuns ("totally lost their moorings"), the pay-away-the-lay controversy ("a severance package"), President Obama ( “He is now taking the culture war to the boiling point and he will pay.”) and gay marriage ("I want the law to discriminate against all alternative lifestyles, against gays and unions.").

Now he has taken on Jews as enemies of Catholicism.

It all started when Waskow, criticized the Vatican in a HuffPost op-ed piece for "attacking the religious freedom of millions of American women and the religious freedom of American nuns" on the matter of contraception. A rough email exchange ensued, with the indignant Donohue stating that "Jews had better not make enemies of their Catholic friends since they have so few of them." He then attributed the statement to former New York mayor Ed Koch. 

Koch has denied saying anything of the sort.

"Waskow is a man full of hate," he said, calling Waskow's op-ed "the kind of thing I'd expect from Bill Maher, not from a rabbi."

The exchange brought about a bit of irony as well: Donohue portrayed the recent Orthodox scandal of child abuse as an "epidemic" that Waskow (a Reformed rabbi) should take care of by "following the Catholic Church's reforms in dealing with clerical abuse." Rabbi Waskow obviously restrained himself from correcting Donohue on generalization of rabbis and - most notably - any comeback about cover-ups and pay-offs, the latter being a subject which Donohue has yet to fully address.

The odd connection to Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic sentiments comes in Donohue's defense of the Gibson's movie, "The Passion of the Christ":

[wikipedia] Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? And I‘m not afraid to say it. That's why they hate this movie. It's about Jesus Christ, and it's about truth. It's about the Messiah.

NUNS ON THE BUS gets the Donohue treatment.

Waskow's defense of American nuns brought out the animosity Donohue has displayed for socially progressive nuns, such as the current Nuns On The Bus event touring the country. In an aptly titled Daily Kos article Catholic League to Progressive Catholics: don't let the door hit you on the way out, Armando succinctly points out that Donohue thinks that disagreeable Catholics should simply leave the church - and that includes nuns:

“Do we have more than a handful of nuns who have totally lost their moorings?” Donohue mused. “Oh, yeah.”

The problem is that the number of nuns has shrunk considerably in the last decade (now down to a mere 60,000 in the U.S.) and if the trend continues, there won't be anyone left to pay homage and subservience to the likes of Bill Donohue anyway.

With his uneducated and inappropriate statements, Donohue continually shoots himself in the foot, but he doesn't care, because he has always relied on the support of the Vatican: Sedevacantist* Mel Gibson mirrors Benedict more than even Benedict is willing to admit.

And God knows, the current pope has never been truly anti-Semitic.

Right.