Censorship: offending Catholics - what's the Catholic League got against 'Priest,' 'Nothing Sacred,' and now Terrence McNally's new play, 'Corpus Christi'?

What's the Catholic League got against Priest, Nothing Sacred, and now Terrence McNally's new play, Corpus Christi?

When Manhattan Theatre Club's top brass announced on May 28 that they would proceed with production of Terrence McNally's new play, Corpus Christi, artists as well as gay men and lesbians breathed a sigh of relief. Just a week earlier the theater had opted to cancel McNally's new work--which tells the story of a gay Christlike figure and his disciples, reportedly with sex offstage--citing anonymous telephone threats to bum down the theater, kill the staff, and "exterminate" McNally. The cancellation ignited a different firestorm, however. Within 24 hours the theater was engulfed by protests from New York's famously eloquent theatrical circles, who accused the theater of running scared and censoring an artist in the face of right-wing extremists. Result: The show would go on.

While Manhattan Theatre Club administrators called their decision a victory for artistic freedom, the fact that Corpus Christi will now be performed is a setback for a different organization: the New York City-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. The league's president, William A. Donohue, who campaigned against Corpus Christi for being "offensive to Catholics and all Christians," stated in a May 28 press release, "There is something terribly perverse going on in the artistic community. The need to offend Catholics is so deep and so sick that it can only be described as pathological.... What is perhaps most disturbing about this campaign to attack Catholics is the cowardly attempt to hide this bigotry under the covers of artistic expression."

The Catholic League grabbed national headlines with its 1995 attack on the gay-themed film Priest. Even more publicity surrounded the league's campaign against another drama about a. Catholic priest, ABC's now-defunct Nothing Sacred.

The league gets noticed partly because of its inflammatory prose. Witness its May 22 press release, which threatened that if any theater company decided to produce Corpus Christi, "it had better not be thin-skinned; we'll wage a war that no one will forget." This kind of language led to speculation that the league had helped to stir an air of violence around McNally's play.

Claiming to be a nationwide Catholic civil rights organization set up to defend individual Catholics and the church against discrimination and defamation, the league insists that they have no link to the threats of violence made against the theater and McNally.

"We've existed for 25 years and have never been remotely connected to violence or threats of violence," says Rick Hinshaw, the league's communications director. "It's our feeling that to try to link us to something like that would be like trying to link Martin Luther King to the Black Panthers."

The league's Web site (www.catholicleague.org) provides more insight into the group's fire and brimstone. Media alerts urge members to protest everything from the image of the Virgin Mary on Dolce & Gabbana apparel to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's film Antisemitism, in which Adolf Hitler is identified as Catholic and quoted as saying, "The difference between the church and me is that I am finishing the job."

The site also boasts an interview with Donohue, a former consultant to the Bush administration who took control of the league in 1993. Since then, membership has reportedly soared from 11,000 to 350,000. Donohue, who did not return phone calls for this story, attributes this rise to the league's "uncharacteristically aggressive" activism.

But some Catholic leaders believe that the league does more harm than good. I have so little respect for the Catholic League," says Eddie Siebert, a creative consultant for Nothing Sacred who helped coordinate a group of Catholic leaders in support of the program "[The league is] a very small group and not spokespeople for the Catholic Church." Still, says Siebert, the league has its defenders. "Donohue takes a very right-wing, black-and-white approach to things, and some people like that. It's very safe, but we don't always live in the black and white."