Many Massachusetts Catholics are fuming about a campaign by a small klatch of Republican sympathizers who succeeded in compelling Archbishop Sean O'Malley into withdrawing his attendance from an annual fundraising event for the local Catholic Charities. Groups calling themselves "Faithful Voice" and the "Catholic Action League of Massachusetts" had challenged Archbishop O'Malley to boycott the December 9 event as a rebuke to Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, who is the invited keynote speaker.
An article last Sunday in the Boston Globe outlined a campaign by Carol McKinley and Faithful Voice, described as "an antiabortion group," to not only castigate Mayor Menino and Archbishop O'Malley, but also to defund Catholic Charities of Massachusetts. Ms. McKinley is quoted as advocating "boycotts of the charity well beyond the benefit dinner, hoping to reduce donations by at least $100,000 in the next six months."
To our knowledge, Ms. McKinley's group has no track record as an anti-abortion group. They were founded in 2002 as an effort to sabotage "Voice of the Faithful," a group advocating greater involvement of the laity in Church governance, and have been largely inactive for the past two years. Their website is a hodgepodge of mostly anti-homosexual diatribes with an emphasis on writings from people like Barbara Kralis, an extreme partisan who has written extensively in praise of President Bush and who, in a column linked on the website, labeled the Democrats as "the official abortion and sodomite party."
The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts is a 10-year-old group focused on opposing gay marriage, sponsored by the Knights of Columbus in Massachusetts. It ostensibly functions "to combat anti-Catholic bigotry and to protect the religious freedom rights of the Catholic community in Massachusetts," according to its website. Attacking Catholic politicians should be antithetical to their function as advocates for Catholics in public life.
Joseph Doyle is the Executive Director of the Catholic Action League, a one-man political osterizer that has provoked some amusement among its detractors by virtue of its ironic acronym ("CALM"). Mr. Doyle's previous position was as Operations Director for the Catholic League in New York, a Heritage Foundation-affiliated attack dog organization that patently violated its 501(c)3 status by broadcasting 14 press releases last year condemning John Kerry in the Presidential race. Going after Mayor Menino in the same way, despite all his good works, is apparently another page out of the same Republican Catholic Outreach national playbook.
Nowhere on the websites of Faithful Voice or the Catholic Action League is there so much as a word of support for the Bishops' strong stances in opposition to the death penalty or the war in Iraq. So these groups are highly selective observers of Catholic morality. The fact that they envision a longer campaign to sabotage Catholic Charities' financial viability indicates to us that they are perfectly willing to burn down the house in order to redecorate it.
Mayor Menino has never advocated the performance of more abortions in Massachusetts, and he has never advocated legal measures to compel any religious congregation to perform gay marriages. He has worked tirelessly for the wellbeing of the poor in Boston, a cooperative effort with Catholic Charities that constitutes the most extensive and effective effort on behalf of those who are less fortunate among us. This advocacy for the poor would seem to be at the heart of the Christian message, and we will continue to combat efforts by Republicans to narrow the Catholic agenda to grappling with gay marriage and embracing the empty Republican slogans regarding abortion.
