Anti-Catholicism in literature and media

Some examples are the anti-Catholic stereotypes that filled Gothic fiction of Anglican England, the films of Luis Buñuel who took issue with the Church in Spain, the humor of some US television pundits like Rosie O'Donnell, and the rhetoric of some fundamentalist preachers.

Lustful priests, cruel abbesses, immured nuns, and sadistic inquisitors appear in such works as The Italian by Ann Radcliffe, The Monk by Matthew Lewis, Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin and The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe.

Reed's book was soon followed by another bestselling fraudulent exposé, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel-Dieu Nunnery (1836) in which Maria Monk claimed that the convent served as a harem for Catholic priests, and that any resulting children were murdered after baptism.

Maria Monk's story exhibits the genre-defining elements of a young and innocent woman trapped in a remote, old, and gloomily picturesque estate; she learns the dark secrets of the place; after harrowing adventures she escapes.

Bronte explores the culture clash between the heroine's English Protestantism and the Catholicism of the environment at her school in 'Villette' (aka Brussels) before magisterially pronouncing "God is not with Rome.

"[7] In a chapter of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov called The Grand Inquisitor, the Catholic Church convicts a returned-from-Heaven Jesus Christ of heresy and is portrayed as a servant of Satan.

[8] Dan Brown's best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code depicts the Catholic Church as determined to hide the truth about Mary Magdalene.

An article in an April 2004 issue of National Catholic Register maintains that "The Da Vinci Code claims that Catholicism is a big, bloody, woman-hating lie created out of pagan cloth by the manipulative Emperor of Rome".

[15] "It is as if producers, directors, playwrights and filmmakers feel obliged to establish their intellectual bona fides by trumpeting their differences with the institution that holds them in such thrall.

Rosie O'Donnell has been accused of serial anti-Catholicism and labeled a bigot by Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

"[citation needed] On The View, Rosie O'Donnell has regularly joked about communion rituals alongside co-host Joy Behar's drunk priest comments.

On 19 April 2007 the all-woman panel on The View discussed the Supreme Court of the United States ruling on the Gonzales v. Carhart decision upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.

Hislop's and Chiniquy's nineteenth century polemics and Avro Manhattan's work form part of the basis of a series of tracts by the noted modern anti-Catholic and comic book evangelist Jack Chick who also accuses the papacy of supporting Communism, of using the Jesuits to incite revolutions, and of masterminding the Holocaust.

According to Chick, the Catholic Church is the "Whore of Babylon" referred to in the Book of Revelation, and will bring about a Satanic New World Order before it is destroyed by Jesus Christ.

[18] Daniel Goldhagen has been accused of attacking Pope Pius XII in a book filled with factual errors[19] The Catholic church has been a target for satire and humour, from the time of the Reformation to the present day.

[28][29] Many feminists and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender activists criticize the Catholic Church for its policies on issues relating to sexuality, contraception, and abortion.

disrupted a Sunday Mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan to protest the Church's position on homosexuality, abortion, safer sex education, and the use of condoms.

Philip Jenkins, an Episcopalian and Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State University, published the 1996 book Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis in which he argues that the Catholic Church is being unfairly singled out by secular media which fail to highlight similar sexual scandals in other religious groups, such as the Anglican Communion, various Protestant churches, and the Jewish and Islamic communities.

He also notes that the term "pedophile priests," widely used in the media, implies a distinctly higher rate of child molesters within the Catholic priesthood when in reality the incidence is lower than in most other segments of society".