 Roseann "Rosie" O'Donnell (born March 21, 1962) is an American television host, stand-up comedian, actress, singer and author. She has also been a magazine editor and continues to be a celebrity blogger, LGBT rights activist, television producer and collaborative partner in the LGBT family vacation company R Family Vacations. Raised Roman Catholic, O'Donnell lost her mother to cancer as a pre-teen and has consistently stressed values of protecting children and supporting families throughout her career. O'Donnell started her comedy career while still a teenager and her big break was on the talent show Star Search when she was twenty years old. A TV sitcom and a series of movies introduced her to a larger national audience and in 1996 she started hosting The Rosie O'Donnell Show which won multiple Emmy awards.
Accusations of anti-CatholicismO'Donnell has been accused of serial anti-Catholicism and labeled a bigot by Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, for what he claimed "relentless and profoundly ignorant attacks on the Catholic Church and its teachings." On the 24 February 2003 episode of Phil Donahue's talk show O'Donnell referred to the "pedophile scandal" in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston resulting in $157 million awarded to 983 claimants, stating "I hope the Catholic Church gets sued until the end of time. Maybe, you know, we can melt down some of the gold toilets in the Pope’s Vatican and pay off some of the lawsuits because, the whole tenet of living a Christ-like life, has been lost in Catholicism." (Pedophile, as in this instance, is commonly misused to describe all sexual offenders of children.) On The View O'Donnell joked about communion rituals alongside co-host Behar's drunk priest comments. On 2 October 2006 she compared the Republican Party cover-up of the Mark Foley scandal to the cover-up of child sexual abuse by Catholic Church officials who actively concealed perpetrators by moving them from parish to parish as detailed in Amy Berg's award-winning film about the abuse within the Catholic Church.O'Donnell said "the most interesting thing about Deliver Us from Evil (is) that the person who was in charge of investigating all the allegations of pedophilia in the Catholic Church from the 1980s until just recently was guess who? The current Pope."Although Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) was the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from November 1981 to April 2005, responsibility to investigate sexual abuse of minors by priests only started in 2001 and he has denounced the abuse. | Train up a child in the way he should go, And when
he is old he will not depart from it.Proverbs 22:6 |
Rosie O'Donnell |