Blog Against Theocracy & Wingnuts & Progressive Faith Movement Posted by Oaktown Girl, 08 Apr 2007 05:07 am

“Give Me Their Names!”

By Frank L. Cocozzelli

“Give me their names!” Demanded Bill Donohue, honcho of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights, when the artist Cosimo Cavallaro stated during a TV interview that two priests wanted to display his statue, Chocolate Jesus.

The confrontation took place during a recent edition of Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN. While Cavallaro remained dignified, Donohue was bombastic: “You’re lucky I’m not as mean [as the Taliban], because you might lose more than your head” he declared, displaying his usual Un-Christian scowl..

Donohue, if nothing else, is consistent, having once said, that bringing back the Inquisition “… is awfully tempting.”

But Cavallaro was wise to Donohue. He stood his ground — and refused to name names. He defended his right to express his beliefs according to his own conscience, free of coercion and called the Catholic League president the bully that he truly is.

It seems that Donohue and his Catholic League cannot handle the supposition that a Catholic artist would express his ideal of Jesus in a manner very different from his own. Why? Because Cavallaro had the nerve to cast Jesus in chocolate, crucified in the nude (as the Romans actually carried out such executions). Another Bill Donohue dust-up that is designed more to create anger and hatred for the freedom of expression rather than to further an ethic of self-discipline, charity and tolerance that signifies Catholicism at its finest, just as its Founder meant it to be. The self-styled Grand Inquisitor, once again, failing to see the forest for the trees.

“Give me their names. ”

These are chilling words that have echoed throughout history. It is the demand of agents of authoritarianism. Embedded within its use is the pernicious offer of “perhaps I’ll go easier on you if you give me someone more important for me to destroy.”

In our own recent American experience Senator Joe McCarthy demanded the same of witnesses who appeared before his Senate Committee on Government Operations that he chaired; as did members of the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). We know what happened to some of those whose names were given; blacklisting, bankruptcy, family break-up and even suicide. Names were demanded for the purpose of instilling fear and stifling dissent.

We can easily imagine what Bill Donohue would do with the names of those two priests. Being the bully that is, he would most likely give their names over to Church hierarchy-perhaps Cardinal Egan or even to my own faith’s version of HUAC, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in Rome. In case you didn’t know, the CDF’s former name was The Office of the Inquisition and was headed by the former Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

If Cavallaro had given the names of two priests, Donohue would have made their lives hell. After all, that is what bullies drunk on power do to others less powerful. Sadly, Donohue has more and more friends in the Vatican who think like him; men who will stifle anything that threatens their narrow interpretation of faith.

The truth is that their Catholicism lacks confidence. They fear new ideas and different forms of expression. And because of its own self-constricting nature, their Catholicism demands the need to control the freedom of thought that exists within the surrounding secular society. What the Catholic League and its ultra-orthodox Pharisees offer is not spiritual hope, but a faith of anxiety. It is an aspiration of the church and state as one acting as the gatekeeper to salvation but attained at the cost of both government and Catholicism defiled.

In order to carry out his increasingly theocratic agenda, Donohue cynically uses his faith as a prop to undermine liberalism. He abandons coolly reasoned discussion in favor a hysterically exaggerated accusations of anti-Catholicism; a technique designed to push the emotional buttons of faction-all while often ignoring real expressions of anti-Catholic bigotry of his fellow Religious Right provocateurs.

But as history has shown, the inflexible often become the victims of their own set ways. Such religion crumbles from its own inability to foster agreement and cooperation. Corruption is often hidden in the name of the image of sanctity. As we have witnessed, reasoned dissent naturally arises. Perhaps we will even soon see the Catholic will be the Joseph N. Welch to Donohue’s Joe McCarthy. Welsh, a hero of American democracy stood up to McCarthy–who was also demanding names– saying in the infamous Senate Army-McCarthy hearings:

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

We now have the example of an artist standing-up to the bully on national television. I hope it will give others the nerve to do the same.

Oh, and if Donohue fails to get Cosimo Cavallaro to give up the names of the priests who wanted to display his Chocolate Jesus, don’t feel sorry for him–he can always wage his culture war on those candy companies that sell chocolate crosses around this time of the year.

Frank L. Cocozzelli is a director with the Institute for Progressive Christianity and writes a weekly column at Talk to Action concerning both Liberalism and the Catholic Right. This article originally appeared Talk to Action.

bat_-poster_dominionism.jpg

Thanks to Liz for this graphic.

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Responses to ““Give Me Their Names!””

  1. on 08 Apr 2007 at 9:07 am 1. jimmiraybob said …

    “Give me their names!” A not too subtle threat to silence the apostate rabble.

    When I saw the exchange, this is the phrase that stood out to me and made the hair on the back of my neck rise. My first thought was a scene out of any movie about the mob. Envision Donohue as the enforcer. The scene: a Chitown warehouse, “Give me their names!” Then a finger is removed by two sub-goons. And again, “Are you ready to give names now?” Whack, a kneecap meets a baseball bat. Finally, the hapless victim gives up names and Donohue commands, “Take him around back, you know what to do.”

    Rinse, lather and repeat until unquestioned feality to the Boss is established. Not every wavering sub-boss or upstart has to be snuffed, just enough to scare the hell out of every other potential rival. Nothing like the use of coersive force and the threat of such to ensure that the idea of power sharing doesn’t catch on.

    My second thoughts went to the the Spanish inquisition, the Gestapo and Stalin (by necessity, a much abrieviated list and, in MHO, not a violation of Godwin’s Law).

  2. on 08 Apr 2007 at 9:19 am 2. spyder said …

    Reminds me of this gem, found on what perhaps is the very finest SanFran rock-era album ever made:

    What are their names
    And on what streets do they live
    I’d like to ride right over
    This afternoon and give
    Them a piece of my mind

    I wonder who they are
    The men who really run this land
    And I wonder why they run it
    With such a thoughtless hand

    What are their names
    And on what streets do they live
    I’d like to ride right over
    This afternoon and give
    Them a piece of my mind
    About peace for mankind
    Peace is not an awful lot to ask

  3. on 08 Apr 2007 at 10:40 am 3. spyder said …

    “…when suddenly Archie’s voice BLARED through my TV. From a nearby room I heard Archie Bunker spewing his typical stuff about Catholicism just like he used to do.

    But wait a minute! How could this be?! Carroll O’Connor had passed away. There was no Archie Bunker!

    I ran to the TV and on my screen was the apoplectic clone of Archie Bunker, berating a significantly calmer man. Written below the crimson-faced clone were the words, “William Donohue, President of the Catholic League.”

    Holy Heavenly Satellite Airwaves!!! Archie Bunker has come back to life!!

    Only this time, the superficial meanness, the artificial hostility, and feigned arrogance had morphed from mock to REAL. William Donohue, the defender of Catholicism, is the Archie Bunker of the new millennium. And fittingly so. With humanity at its most challenged, and compassion falling short, one should expect the new Archie Bunker to sacrifice his warm heart for a colder more venomous version.”

    from Linda Milazzo, a Los Angeles based writer, educator and activist.

  4. on 08 Apr 2007 at 11:08 am 4. Frank L. Cocozzelli said …

    Great comments everyone, but I want you all to realize Donohue’s bottom line.

    He is all about stirring up raw emotions that erode a great Enlightenment, and hence, American trait: cool, calculated reason. It is no accident that these passions are then aimed at breaking down the separation of church and state. The separation was one of the breakwaters our Founders gave us to make the American Republic (unlike the first French Republic of 1791) so sturdy. It guards againt ruinous factions–such as the Religious Right.

    A prerequisite for domestic tranquility that the pre-liberal Enlightentment thinkers fully understood (Hobbes, for example) was how religious emotions can be manipulated to result in civil strife. Donohue either understands this and is therefore targeting restrained passion, or worse, he is so reckless that he fails to comprehend the danger of his actions.

    If the Donohues of the word succeed in destroying the proper balance of reason and emotion that has sustained our form of government, then we may well then be on the road to sectarian discord.

  5. on 08 Apr 2007 at 11:30 am 5. jimmiraybob said …

    Yes, Archie Bunker - that’s what seemed so familiar.

  6. on 08 Apr 2007 at 1:22 pm 6. The Constructivist said …

    Which is why the WAAGNFNP should support selling off America’s nukes to the highest bidders–imagine all the haters bankrupting themselves just to own a nuke and then not being able to pull the trigger because they couldn’t agree on who deserves it, or learning to cooperate with other nuke owners to finally bring about the glorious GNF. Praise Astaroth!

  7. on 08 Apr 2007 at 2:44 pm 7. JP Stormcrow said …

    Thanks for the post Frank. It is always instructive to connect up the behavior of these current day demagogues to their historical antecendents. (And in this case I was pretty ignorant of those threads.)

    I am often struck by how the consensus view (and particularly the media consensus view) is that these ranters like Donahue are some kind of quaint entertainment, just a sideshow - nothing serious in this enlightened age.

    A non-religious example that always irked me was the coverage of the “Brooks Brother” riot in the 2000 recount. The name itself just screamed harmless frat prank - move along - nothing to see here. As if gangs of “middle class” white men had never engaged in any harmful behavior within the living memory of mankind. It really is another unwarranted example of American exceptionalism, particularly in the religious examples.

  8. on 08 Apr 2007 at 4:26 pm 8. Frank L. Cocozzelli said …

    Jimmyraybob–Yeah, I agree that Donohue evokes Archie, but let’s do more than that. Let’s use the bomastic one’s tactics against him. Expose him for the neocon shill that he is. Compare him with real Catholic voices such as Monsignor John A. Ryan who developed the minimum and living wage as well as defending FDR against a similar goon, Fr. Charles Coughlin. Reading Ryan’s treatise on distributive justive stregnthened my liberalism (Ryan was also a life-long member of the ACLU).

    Realize this: these Institute on Religion and Democracy folks (a group that includes quite a few Opus Dei-linked characters) are trying to silence the more liberall voices in the Church (Jesuits, Paulists, Bendictine nuns), just as they are trying to evicerate the Social Gospel message of the mainstream Protestant churches.

    It is all about a group of atheistic and theocratic neocons (how’s that for odd bedfellows?) who are trying to infiltrate religion and use it for very secular, but reactionary purposes. Just read Irving Kristol’s book, Neoconservatism, the Auotbiography of an Idea. Kristol tells you their game plan in full detail. Not only does he want to manipulate the thoughts pf good religious folks, but he is also more than willing to silence his own fellow athiests who simply want to openly believe what they see as the truth, without fear of an “orthodox” society.

    Once you know what they’re all about, they can be beaten by their very words and hypocrisy.

    PS: Good comments JP Stormcrow!

  9. on 08 Apr 2007 at 5:06 pm 9. christian h. said …

    Frank makes an important point - we should ask why a disgusting slug like Bill Donohue is presented as the face of Catholicism in the media. It’s not like they couldn’t find other catholic voices. When was the last time a Pax Christi spokesperson was on television? I doubt it’s some kind of conscious conspiracy, but the effect is to move the catholic church to the right, first in its public perception, but following that also in its actual make-up.
    In this way, liberal and left-wing (like Pax Christi, think liberation theology) catholicism is brought under a double onslaught from the reactionary hierarchy and fringe right-wing lay organizations.

  10. on 08 Apr 2007 at 5:35 pm 10. The Constructivist said …

    Well, now, neither my brother nor I is in any way religious, and we both married out of Judaism, so to speak — he into a Polish Catholic family. His wife was an English major and worked for a decade or more before marrying him; now they have four kids. Will have to sound them out on internal Catholic politics one of these days. Thanks for giving me some ideas, Frank.

  11. on 08 Apr 2007 at 5:37 pm 11. Frank L. Cocozzelli said …

    Christian H., to a very large extent it is about a news media that is less about supplying accurate information than about splashy stories and splashy guests, i.e., ratings. And in that regard, Donohue–in all his vulgarity (and reinforcing the stereotype of ethnic Catholics being uncouth anti-intellectuals)–fits their bill perfectly.

    In the days of Edward R. Murrow or even of Howard K. Smith, Edward Neuman and Walter Cronkite, the mainstream news rooms wouldn’t even dream of holding out a Donohue as a serious spokesperson. Sadly, in the age of Chris Matthews and Maureen Dowd, all that has changed. Now, someone like a Pax Christi representative who actually would use verifiable facts and speak of personal responsibility towards others isn’t as appealing to many oof these cable show producers. It is the ultimate triumph of style over substance.

    One thing that would help is the reimplementaion of the Fairness Doctrine. But it ultimately comes down to this: If you want a more responsible press, you’ve got to demand it. Complain when CNN or MSNBC interviews a Donohue instead of a Sister Joan Chittister for a Catholic point of view. Tell these shows how he fails to measure up to Christian standards and what a blowhard he truly is.

    Just then, perhaps they’ll listen and things will get better.

  12. on 08 Apr 2007 at 5:39 pm 12. Frank L. Cocozzelli said …

    Anytime, Constructivist.

  13. on 08 Apr 2007 at 5:53 pm 13. spyder said …

    Once you know what they’re all about, they can be beaten by their very words and hypocrisy.

    This for me is too optimistic an assumption. We are living in some very intense times, and as such the “powers that be” are quite literally staking out their territories, aka fiefdoms, of the planet’s geo-regions and resources. For examples, group such as the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE) and the Political Economic Research Center (PERC) are advocating for their clients to be able to purchase the US National Forests, National Parks, and Bureau of Land Management lands. This isn’t a charitable effort to “protect the land in perpetuity,” but rather a considerable push to privatize the US, so that the neo-feudal lords of capital can have their hands on control of water, mineral, and food production resources. You can’t blame them, given an objectivist libertarian perspective, for using their wealth and power to seek safety and security in a world of increasing critical global climate change problems. Why would the Catholics be any different, or the robber barons of evangelical and fundamentalist corporate religious institutions.

  14. on 09 Apr 2007 at 6:51 am 14. Frank L. Cocozzelli said …

    Well Spyder…

    I am an optimist because to be otherwise invites failure.

    Keep this in mind: the other side has money and for at least right now, the Executive branch, but we still have the numbers. More importantly, unlike either Hobbesian conservatives or Straussian neoconservatives, most Americans are truly good people. That is why refining our message to reach what Arthur M. Schelinger defined as “the vital center” is so important.

    Forget the Right’s base and speak to the center. Let’s reestablish the fact that Liberal values are Mainstream American values–reasonable self-interest, tempered by fairness, equity and justice, along with a healthy prohibition against self-exemption based solely upon privilege. These are the core values of Liberalism as well as the narrative we must use.

    And in a further reply to Christian H., another resource for you is Media Matters for America.

    When Chris Matthews or the mainstream press starts passing off GOP spin as accepted facts, they will show you how and where to complain. It is a great resource that all Liberals should strongly support.

  15. on 09 Apr 2007 at 11:23 am 15. spyder said …

    Give me your name, young lady. You are under arrest!!

    (CBS) NEW YORK In this day and age where young students are frequently charged for serious school offenses such as possessing weapons, dealing drugs, or assaulting other students on school property, one Brooklyn teen’s arrest may come as a surprise. A 13-year-old girl was handcuffed and placed under arrest in front of her classmates in Dyker Heights after she wrote “Okay” on her desk.

    The “suspect,” Chelsea Fraser, says she’s sorry for scribbling the word on her desk, but both she and her mother are shocked at the punishment.

    “I’m appalled, because here we have rapists, murderers, and you’re taking a 13-year-old kid? Wasting valuable manpower to arrest a child who wrote on a desk?” Fraser’s mother Diana Silva told CBS 2.

    Police confirm that that’s exactly what’s written on her arrest record and for the crime, she’s been charged with criminal mischief and the making of graffiti. Fraser says the day she marked her desk, she was wrongly grouped together with troublemakers who had plastered stickers all over the classroom.

    Not saying that someone who is so deeply offended by a child writing “Okay” on a desk holds deeply religious views, but……?

  16. on 09 Apr 2007 at 1:10 pm 16. spyder said …

    I couldn’t have asked for all this news that highlights our coercive institutionalization of children so we can mine their minds. And talk about demanding the names: “But she was 6,” I said.

    When 6-year-old Desre’e Watson threw a tantrum in her kindergarten class a couple of weeks ago she could not have known that the full force of the law would be brought down on her and that she would be carted off by the police as a felon.

    But that’s what happened in this small, backward city in central Florida. According to the authorities, there were no other options.

    “The student became violent,” said Frank Mercurio, the no-nonsense chief of the Avon Park police. “She was yelling, screaming — just being uncontrollable. Defiant.”

    “But she was 6,” I said.

    The chief’s reply came faster than a speeding bullet: “Do you think this is the first 6-year-old we’ve arrested?”

    The child’s tantrum occurred on the morning of March 28 at the Avon Elementary School. According to the police report, “Watson was upset and crying and wailing and would not leave the classroom to let them study, causing a disruption of the normal class activities.”

  17. on 09 Apr 2007 at 1:53 pm 17. christian h. said …

    spyder, I saw those stories, too - and there are more and more of them. This, to me, seems to be a far more pervasive problem than the oft-hyped “child abductions” (disclaimer: it is likely that the use of state security against unruly children is also still quite rare and only seems pervasive due to media saturation; although the use of armed guards in “problem schools” is apparently routine, and that’s the first step in the criminalization - and, in parallel, “disorderization” - of “mis”behavior).
    Then again, hyping the dangers children are in can also serve the goal to guilt-trip parents into increased control of their children. Somehow, one is given the impression that giving children any degree of freedom is bad parenting.

  18. on 11 Apr 2007 at 11:26 am 18. Sven DiMilo said …

    “what perhaps is the very finest SanFran rock-era album ever made:”

    if only I could remember the name of that record…