It's Advent, and one of the annual routines of the season has appeared: the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights' president William Donohue is out in public, generating embarrassment for the Faith by his complaints over trivialities.
The League's press releases for the past 30 days show a lot of activity. Some of is spot-on right, but some of it's just wrongheaded:
November 9: Some dolt in Wal-Mart's customer service department sent out his personal insulting opinions to a Christian customer. CL demanded that the company "[withdraw] its insane statement regarding the origins of Christmas", and called for a boycott.
My take: Wal-Mart, for all its faults, is a company that knows its middle-American customer base, and anybody who actually thinks that the guy's statement was really Wal-Mart's statement is deluded. This looks like a case of rash accusation by Donohue.
November 22: Mr. Donohue takes a public college in Florida to task for allegedly banning Christmas music from a December concert. The media story that triggered his complaint was in error, and Donohue had to apologize.
My take: Here there are two mistakes: (1) acting on a media report without confirming it, and (2) failing to indicate in his own press release that his complaint was based on a media report and not on any information directly reported to CL. Mistake #1 is an injustice to the college, and mistake #2 is an injustice to the Catholic faithful who support him and join in his publicity campaigns.
December 1: This time Donohue takes on Lands' End for avoiding the word "Christmas" in its catalog. Once he got a statement from customer-service defending it, he took to the warpath.
My take: Are we starting to see a pattern here? Take a little grievance against some company's P.C. approach in its advertising, and complain to customer service. Sometimes you'll get back a stupid or even offensive reply from a low-level staffer, and if you're a publicity hound, you can take that as a golden opportunity to raise holy heck about it. In the end, the top level of the company will issue a statement disavowing the foolishness of the temp who wrote the offensive reply, and you can declare victory.
Now, if you were to ask me (and I know you didn't, but bear with me) the sensible, constructive thing to do would be to take these grievances straight to the top level of the organization and give the company the chance to set things right.
Seven of Donohue's 20 press releases from 11/9 to 12/9 were about these overblown complaints. That's over one-third, a performance bad enough to hurt his credibility the other two-thirds of the time. Checking his facts and going to the top to solve problems means he'd have less face time on Hannity's show, but I think the image of the Church is not improved by a would-be defender's misplaced complaints and accusations.
Will forcing mainstream culture to say 'Christmas' really signal that the Christian faith has made any advances? I doubt it. Arguing over 'Christmas' with people who care little about the Christian religion is pointless, and maybe even harmful.
You make some good points. Have you presented them to Mr. Donahue?
You may have some good points, but who else was doing the work Donohue was and is doing somewhat effectively while our culture was (and still is) becoming more and more a secular wasteland???
I think the organization did quite a bit of good work under Fr. Blum's leadership, but after his death the organization shifted its emphasis from legal work and local-chapter activism to publicity at the national level, in effect becoming a rather different organization. In my state, the CL chapter disaffiliated over the change in direction.
I like William Donohue. He's willing to take a public stand. I'd like to see more fact checking on his part for sure, but I'd rather see what he's doing than all of the "finessing" that most of the Catholic bureaucracy in the U.S. specialize in. God bless him.
+J.M.J+
I generally agree with what Mr. Donohue is doing, though I agree he does go overboard on occasion. I also fear that that may hurt his credibility.
A number of years back he took a certain newspaper to task over a report about priests dying of AIDS. This was before we all knew what we know now about the Situation. Now I woner if perhaps the newspaper was not too far off-base?
In Jesu et Maria,
Sometimes Mr Donohue does go a little over the top, but I tend to excuse him because, like him, I've experienced the same frustration he obviously feels over the deafening silence from Church officials, and Catholics in general, who should be speaking out more, but don't. The voice crying in the wilderness tends to get louder when nobody is responding. That's why people often charge the anti-abortion people with being 'strident'. Here in Canada, nobody listened to them, and now a child in the womb can be killed up to the moment a woman goes into labour. Sometimes I feel like doing a little Donohue rant myself over that particular tragedy. But you're right. You have to choose your issues carefully.