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A screed attacking numerous Church teachings, published as an Op-ed article in the New York Daily News earlier this month, has drawn critical reviews from officials of the Archdiocese of New York and the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights.
The opinion piece, published Aug. 4, was written by J.T. Barbarese, who was identified as an English professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In the article, he takes to task a whole host of Catholic teachings and practices, bouncing from one to the next in a catalogue that reads more like a stream of consciousness rant than a reasoned argument.
Some areas he brings up for consideration, through the personal lens of his birth family, were abortion and contraception, a paragraph later lazily conflating “these dogmas” with “churchmen who live on the dime of the Vatican.”
Later, Barbarese careens over to the present constitution of the Supreme Court, with six Catholic justices.
“Ask yourself, if you haven’t already, how you would feel if there were six Jews, six Muslims or, for that matter, six Druids in the ruling majority?”
Responding to the article in an unpublished letter to the editor sent to the Daily News, Joseph Zwilling, director of communications for the archdiocese, called Barbarese’s op-ed piece “little more than hate speech, full of misinformation and outright falsehoods.”
Zwilling writes, “He falsely claims that the Catholic Church ‘confidently declare(s)’ that people like his parents are in Hell, when, in fact, the Church NEVER claims that anyone is in Hell, instead pointing to God’s love and infinite mercy.”
“A piece this vile has no place in the Daily News,” he said.
Catholic League president Bill Donohue, commenting on the article in a news release, explained, “The New York Times has published many essays that are highly critical of the Catholic Church, but it doesn’t allow writers to simply vent, spouting the kind of vitriol we would expect from an angry adolescent.”
Barbarese’s complaints about the Church, Donohue explains, include “its teachings on contraception, natural family planning, abortion, priestly celibacy, women priests, etc. He opposes the tax-exempt status of the Church and says we have too many Catholics on the Supreme Court.”
