Shut up, he said
Editorials
I n keeping with Commonweal's usual schedule, only one issue is published each month during J u l y and August. The next issue w i l l be dated J u l y I 7. SHUT UP, HE SAID sustained and serious...
...we are not a persecuted minority...
...If true, it is a Jesus that Christians of all sorts will find offensive...
...William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, has become unrelenting in chasing down the running dogs of anti-Catholicism...
...Now we have been reminded of what too easily slips from memory...
...I believe in putting on a lot of pressure...
...Catholics are the largest religious group in America...
...I believe in whipping up public sentiment to isolate the offender...
...This is troubling, not the least because it is corrosive of a sense of pride and of belonging, especially among the young...
...the two are inextricably linked, at least in Nexus...
...According to newspaper reports, "Joshua," the play's main character, is a contemporary Jesus-like figure said to have sex with his disciples (off-stage...
...And then there are the sanctions, now imposed by the United States...
...People who would never make a disparaging remark about a minority group or religion don't hesitate when it comes to Catholics...
...The economic sanctions should be employed as leverage in bringing both countries to settle their political conflicts and to agree to forgo deployment or further testing...
...In a remarkably instructive study of "cooperative threat reduction," Leon Sigal shows how this was negotiated (Disarming Strangers, Princeton University Press, 1998...
...That too earns Donohue's wrath...
...India and Pakistan have done themselves no good, but they have done the rest of the world a great favor in reawakening the dormant fear of nuclear war...
...he is as much in the business of shutting up his fellow Catholics as of shouting down non-Catholics...
...In 1994, North Korea negotiated a freeze of nuclear-weapons development...
...We forget that some nations, South Africa, for example, have given up possession of nuclear weapons, and that others have forgone their development...
...Both need aid and investments...
...For India, it is Pakistani insurgency in Kashmir and border conflicts with China...
...neither can sustain a prolonged economic siege...
...Donohue has his fans, those who think that rhetorically hitting people over the head is the way to fight anti-Catholic bigotry...
...The next issue w i l l be dated J u l y I 7. SHUT UP, HE SAID sustained and serious international attention should work to resolve those conflicts...
...We think his bullying tactics...
...Anti-Catholicism is said to have become the last respectable form of bigotry...
...Last fall his attacks on "Nothing Sacred," the TV series about the comings and goings at an urban Catholic parish, helped to attract admirers while discouraging advertisers...
...And indeed, who among us has not heard or read some demeaning comment about one or another aspect of Catholicism...
...and his boisterous self-promotion do more to reinforce anti-Catholic stereotypes than to remedy them...
...Then he created a media blitz so that the play is now never mentioned without the League's objections appended...
...clearly not the Jesus of faith, tradition, or history...
...He fits right in...
...Yet he laments how "even now the [U.S.] foreign policy establishment resists drawing appropriate lessons from the success of diplomatic give-and-take: that it is possible to reverse a state's decision to 'go nuclear,' that inducements work, that cooperation is far less costly than coercion, and that the international norm against nuclear-arming facilitates cooperation, not only among those trying to prevent proliferation but also by the would-be proliferator...
...Donohue called for changes in the plot and urged donors to withhold funds from the Manhattan Theater Club...
...The show managed to convey a sense of the sacramental and incarnational, and its characters resembled real people in a real parish, but it wasn't Donohue's idea of Catholicism...
...We are not among them...
...Many think something ought to be done...
...Well, someone is doing something...
...He sank his teeth in and didn't let go until the show was two-months dead...
...I believe in moral suasion," he told a New York Times columnist...
...Indeed, so secure do we seem to be that we conduct our own disagreements in public...
...Donohue's tactics, more swagger than suasion, have put him on the talk-show circuit where the decibel level is always set on shrill...
...And they need not...
...We think Catholics can be more discriminating in the fight against discrimination: more suasion, less swagger...
...This is not impossible...
...for Pakistan, it is the loss of Kashmir and East Pakistan...
...Commonweal 6 June 19,1998...
...Sanctions can be a blunt instrument, but the other four nuclear powers should join in some form of economic isolation of India and Pakistan...
...Donohue is on the attack once more against a yet-to-beproduced play, Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi...
...In the United States, especially, we seem to have forgotten that it is we who brought this terrible scourge into the world, and it is we who must bear the greatest burden for containing it...
...his crude analogies, especially to anti-Semitic and anti-black stereotypes...
...But next fall, it will attract critics and an audience, thanks to Donohue's hyperventilating, eager to see what McNally's "Joshua" is really all about...
Vol. 125 • June 1998 • No. 12
