Catholic League President Bill Donohue on Friday seemed to miss Pope Francis' recent call to make the Catholic Church a "home for all" and insisted that "molesting priests were gay" instead of being pedophiles.
On Thursday, America magazine published a lengthy interview where the pope said that the church had become “obsessed” abortion, contraception and same sex marriage.
The pope called on Catholics to make the church a "home for all."
"We have to find a new balance," he said, adding, "otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel."
But only a day later, the message seemed to be lost on Donohue, who has a history of insisting that priests who molested children were gay and did not molest their victims.
"When men have sex with adolescent men, it's called homosexuality. It is not pedophilia," Donohue told CNN's Chris Cuomo on Friday. "Less than 5 percent of the priests involved in molestation are pedophiles. I will never stop telling the truth. And the pope never said we should either. I am against gay bashing."
"You just heard what the pope said," Cuomo noted. "Why wouldn't you move past this parsing rhetoric and try to be about what your church is supposed to be about?"
"As far as I'm concerned, the Catholic Church didn't handle this right," Donohue explained. "I would have put these guys in in the slammer a long time ago. Instead, they think they can reform them. They sent them off to the psychiatrist."
"But it is the discussion of homosexuality and the blame of them as somehow predatory that is what your pope is telling you not to say," Cuomo pointed out. "Who says the molesters were gay?"
"I'll say it again, most of the molesting priests were gay, and most gay priests are not molesters," Donohue said. "If a man has sex with a man what would you call that?"
The Catholic League president then moved on to attacking Jews for Hollywood movies that portray Catholicism in a bad light.
"Is it the Vietnamese who are making movies in Hollywood? Is it the Puerto Ricans who own Hollywood?" he asked. "Do you know that the Jewish Forward in its editorial said the exact same thing that I did?"
"I'm talking about secular Jews, who run the Hollywood studios, who make anti-Catholic movies!" Donohue exclaimed. "What is so absurd that?"
"The absurdity is that you are blaming it on a faith and a culture," Cuomo observed.
