‘Catholic Art’ Museum Scam Exposed

THE VILLAGE VOICE, June 12—After 10 years of fund raising, and over $6 million in donations, the only “Catholic art” at the National Museum of Catholic Art and History is a collection of nun dolls, the New York daily reported.

Museum director Christina Cox spent museum funds on beach vacations, antiques, clothing and jewelry.

The Archdiocese of New York opposed Cox's hire. The Vatican Museum refused to meet with her. Msgr. James Murray, who ran Catholic Charities for the archdiocese, sent her an angry letter asking where the money went.

But the museum got financial support from Ed Malloy, the head of New York's largest private-sector union and chair of the museum board, and City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, reported the paper.

Modesty Is Modern

AMERICAN FAMILY ASSOCIATION JOURNAL, June—Modesty makes women strong, author Wendy Shalit told Hillsdale College students in a speech reprinted in the journal of the American Family Association.

Modesty is as old as Isaac and Rebecca, and as new as the students who flooded Shalit with letters agreeing with her Reader's Digest article protesting colleges with “coed” bathrooms.

Shalit discussed the recently-discovered hormone oxytocin, which helps mothers bond with their infants—but is also released during sexual intimacy, making it physically impossible for a woman to willingly have sex without some level of emotional bonding. “Modesty protected this natural emotional vulnerability,” Shalit said.

Vietnamese Priest Charges Refugee With Torture

LOS ANGELES TIMES, June 12—The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service is investigating charges that Vietnamese refugee Thi Dinh Bui beat an inmate to death, the Los Angeles daily reported.

Father Le Huu Nguyen was a prisoner at a “re-education” camp near Hanoi after the Communist victory. Father Nguyen said Bui killed a prisoner and beat many more. Another prisoner confirmed Father Nguyen's account.

If an immigration judge finds Bui guilty, he may lose his refugee status and be deported, but since Vietnam does not accept expatriates convicted of crimes abroad his fate is uncertain.

'60s Birmingham Bomber Wanted to Target Catholics

THE NATION, June 11—Racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism were closely linked in the mind of the bomber who killed four black girls at a Birmingham Baptist church in 1963, according to a book reviewed by The Nation.

Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, by Diane McWhorter, found that Thomas Blanton Jr., convicted in early May of 2001 of the murder of the four girls, originally “focused his violent hatred on Catholics, like the Klan of the 1920s,” The Nation wrote.

In 1963 he said he wanted to bomb a Catholic church. Eventually he settled on a black church, where he killed the girls in an attack that galvanized the civil rights movement.