Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, views the world through the prism of his Catholic biases. He is quick to brand perceived criticisms of the Church and its values as anti-Catholic.
Donohue's concerns over the years have been pretty diverse. He got upset about the use of the word "Holidays" on White House Christmas cards. He is on record saying that the abuse of children by Catholic priests was "a homosexual scandal, not a pedophilia scandal". He famously said "Hollywood likes anal sex"... claimed that Senator John Kerry "never found an abortion he couldn't justify" and rails at something he calls the "gay death style".
Donohue's latest target is the movie directed by Ron Howard, Angels and Demons. He says that those involved in making the movie "do not hide their animus against all things Catholic."
In a Daily News column Donohue accuses the "tag team" of Dan Brown and Ron Howard of "smearing the Catholic Church with fabulously bogus tales."
On HuffingtonPost, Ron Howard defends himself and Angels & Demons against some of Donohue's erroneous, and one has to say rather paranoid views of a movie he has not yet seen.
Ron Howard:
I guess Mr. Donohue and I do have one thing in common: we both like to create fictional tales, as he has done with his silly and mean-spirited work of propaganda.
Mr. Donohue's op-ed and booklet also suggest that we paint the Church as "anti-reason." There is plenty of debate over what the Church did or didn't do with Galileo, but I for one do recognize that the Church did much throughout the ages to encourage and preserve education, the arts and the sciences.
Had Mr. Donohue and his allies waited to see Angels & Demons before criticizing it, they would have seen references to struggles within the Church between faith and science, but they would also have seen clear signs of support for the pursuit of science at the highest levels of the Vatican. Indeed, one of the first scenes of the movie depicts a scientist at the high-tech CERN laboratory...and he is a priest.
Once again Donohue has demonstrated skewed judgment in his rush to cast the first stone.
On the plus side, advance negative press coming from Bill Donohue can only help Angel & Demons at the box-office. As a commentator on the HuffingtonPost thread put it - "Pissing off Donohue is one of the simple pleasures... if a movie ticket will do it, I'll take TWO."
True to form Donohue hit back at Howard's comments with a press release that includes the following:
Howard must be delusional if he thinks Vatican officials are going to like his propaganda -- they denied him the right to film on their grounds. Moreover, we know from a Canadian priest who hung out with Howard's crew last summer in Rome (dressed in civilian clothes) just how much they hate Catholicism. It's time to stop the lies and come clean.
Link here for Ron Howard's article on HuffPo.
