Catholic Action League Commends South Boston Veterans for Resisting Pressure from Mayor

The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts today commended the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council — the sponsors of Boston’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade — for resisting pressure from Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh to include a homosexual group affiliated with MassEquality in this year’s parade.

A previous attempt by a Massachusetts Superior Court Judge to force the inclusion of a homosexual organization resulted in a 9 to 0 U. S. Supreme Court decision in 1995 affirming the right of the veterans to control the content of their own parade.

The Catholic Action League called Mayor Walsh’s intervention “an attempt to impose a radically discordant message, entirely inappropriate to the celebration of Boston’s principal patron saint.”

Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle commented: “Saint Patrick was a Catholic archbishop and is a Catholic saint. How do you honor a Catholic saint by providing a platform to those who express pride in rejecting Catholic morality? And who castigate that morality as bigotry, hatred and homophobia?”

“The feast of Saint Patrick commemorates the bishop and confessor through whom an entire people, in one lifetime, were converted from paganism to the Catholic and Apostolic Faith. Mayor Walsh’s efforts, if successful, would destroy the traditional character of the parade, empty it of its original meaning, and reduce it to a secular community festival, devoid of any religious significance.”

“Catholics should be able to celebrate in peace the feast day of their patron saint without the unwarranted intrusion of an alien, and implicitly anti-Catholic, propaganda exercise, by a sexual advocacy group seeking to exploit the event for their own ideological purposes. Mayor Walsh’s advice ought to be rejected.”

The predecessor organization of the Catholic Action League provided legal support to the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council in Hurley v. Irish American GLIB Association.