O’Reilly - Ignorance or Intellectual Sloppiness

Catholic League president Bill Donohue issued the following statement today on Bill O’Reilly’s remarks about the Vatican that he made last night on his Fox News show:

“Bill O’Reilly cannot blame his ignorance of all things Catholic on his high school because Chaminade, located in Mineola, Long Island, is the flagship Catholic school in the New York metropolitan area. So it must be his intellectual sloppiness. For example, last night he said that ‘the Vatican is calling the proposed fence on the southern border inhuman’; a picture of the pope was shown on the screen.

“O’Reilly is wrong—the Vatican has said no such thing. As a matter of fact, Pope Benedict XVI never once mentioned the fence in his recent annual World Day for Migrants and Refugees message. Neither did Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Travelers; he spoke at a press conference about this issue yesterday. The person who made the remark at the press conference was Cardinal Renato Martino, temporary president of the migrants council.