The Catholic League has launched an aggressive campaign to stop Vanity Fair from what it considers Catholic bashing.
In a full-page ad in yesterday’s New York Times, the 350,000-member group blamed Conde Nast’s entertainment mag for a decades’ worth of anti-Catholicism.
“Conde Nast Has A Problem With Catholicism,” read the headline on the ad, which cost the league $34,000.
The often-up-in-arms group detailed three instances the magazine was out of line: in 1990, when Vanity Fair painted John Cardinal O’Connor as an authoritarian “dinosaur” indifferent to suffering, “even to children with AIDS”; in 1995, when the magazine profiled Mother Teresa as a “hypocritical cynic who curried favor with fat cats and tyrants”; and, most recently, when Vanity Fair portrayed Pope Pius XII in an article in the October issue as an “anti-Semite who helped Hitler come to power.”
William Donahue, president of the nation’s largest Catholic civil-rights organization – which has protested everything from the now-infamous “dung” exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art to the “girl power” message and lifestyle of the “Spice Girls” – said his group was not going to “put their heads in the sand, which is the typical Catholic approach.”
He said his group will fight Conde Nast the only way he can: with words.
“I’m not interested in any dialogue with Graydon Carter or with Conde Nast,” said Donahue. “I just want them to knock it off. And as we continue this campaign, I think we will shame them. Nobody wants public embarrassment.” But top brass at Vanity Fair – never known to shy away from scandal – are not embarrassed and are standing firm.
“Any claim that Vanity Fair has an anti-Catholic bias is untrue,” Carter said in a written statement. “Vanity Fair encompasses a broad and diverse range of topics and opinions, some of which are contradictory. On any given story there are going to be people who are in agreement and those who are not.”