Editor’s Note: The original version of this column omitted the attribution to a press release of Oct. 6, 2017 from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. It also provided an innacurate description of the 1995 film Priest, confusing it with the unrelated 2011 film of the same name. The Register regrets the omission and the error.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me nine times, shame on me.
What would you say if someone had financed and encouraged nine films bashing Jews or Muslims or women?
Racism, bigotry, misogyny are words that come to mind.
On March 24, 2015, at a Simon Wiesenthal Center awards dinner at which Christoph Waltz awarded Weinstein the organization’s Humanitarian Award, he rightfully condemned anti-Semitism in his acceptance speech, as reported by Bill Donohue of the Catholic League:
We're gonna have to get as organized as the Mafia. We just can't take it anymore. We just can't take these things. There's gotta be a way to fight back.
However, Weinstein’s desire for “peace, love and understanding” didn’t extend to Catholics and the Catholic Church. So, while the polecat Weinstein abused women, he donated money to women’s causes because of his “undying respect” for them. And, throughout his best efforts at luring women to his casting couch, Weinstein was financing films that attacked and denigrated the Catholic Church, including such priceless cinematic gems as:
- Priest (1995), a film that centers around homosexuality, celibacy and the priesthood.
- The Butcher Boy (1998) is about a young boy who is molested by a priest in a reform school and is fascinated by delusional fantasies about a foul-mouthed Virgin Mary played by everyone’s favorite bigot, Sinéad O'Connor. Birds of a feather flock together.
- Dogma (1999), a confusing pastiche of Catholic beliefs, pagan myths and atheist Black Legend slapped together about the end of the world in which a descendant of Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph who works in an abortion clinic.
- 40 Days and 40 Nights (2002) ridicules Catholics who remain celibate for Lent treating sacrifice and abstention as if it was feat of strength rather than a spiritual offering to God.
- The Magdalene Sisters (2002) depicted lies about Irish nuns falsely portraying them as abusive toward young wayward women they had “enslaved” in their laundries. In reality, the Irish secular government, dumped these women with the nuns as their families had already disowned them. The nuns gave them food, board and spiritual guidance and showed them love saving these young women from having to prostitute themselves.
- Bad Santa (2003) depicted a mall Santa who was a vulgar, drunken, suicidal, chain-smoking, sex-addicted thief. Some have drawn parallels between this mockery of this children’s icon and Weinstein himself.
- Sin City (2005) which depicted a Catholic bishop who aides and abets a serial murderer and engages in cannibalism.
- Black Christmas (2006) is a tiresome slasher film replete with gratuitous sex and foul language. Both Harvey and his brother Bob were remarkably hands-on with this film.
- Philomena (2013) was another set of lies reminiscent of the Black Legend that insisted that “evil” nuns had kidnapped a woman’s child. Actually, Philomena Lee abandoned her out-of-wedlock son when she was a teenager. It was the actions of the nuns, who often run orphanages around the world and throughout the past two millennia, who gave the child to an American couple who adopted him. Weinstein lobbied the Academy in the hope of getting an Oscar for Philomena. Thankfully, he failed.
Thus, Harvey has produced a number of films attacking the Catholic Church, but he has actively given a pass to Islamic terrorism. Weinstein always aims for safe targets with his films―people who can’t or won’t fight back.
Weinstein had no problem with hatred and bigotry―he simply didn’t want it directed toward him. How very common. In some strange climes, it’s remarkably fashionable. Both anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism should be condemned, without exception. Bigots, however, often condemn one while eagerly engaging in the other.
But hatred has no species―there are certainly degrees of hatred but there are no types of hatred. Allowing hatred to rule your heart and, worse, to financially profit from it, is inherently evil. And we all know what happens when one gives oneself love to evil.
Hatred begets hatred. Forgiveness facilitates love. This is the reason Christ asks us to forgive our enemies and why, assuredly, those who don’t forgive cannot find rest in Heaven. Instead, they go elsewhere where their hatred is better appreciated.
Weinstein can serve us all as a modern cautionary tale. Scriptures warns us that, “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” (Deuteronomy 30:19)