COLUMN LEFT : Unchallenged, the Censors Will Prevail : People are too intimidated by charges of ‘anti-Catholicism.’

I grew up with Catholic censorship. As a boy in Ireland in the 1950s, I couldn’t avoid it. Any book on Rome’s “Index” of prohibited reading material certainly never found its way into any store or library available to us down on the south coast. Go to the movies and there would be brutal jump-cuts where the scissors of the censor, guided by the Catholic hierarchy in Dublin, had sliced out offensive material. Lips seeking out lips up on the screen in Horgan’s Cinema would suddenly recoil, the intervening frames of sinful contact sliced away by the dictates of Rome.

Writers of this era like the immensely talented John McGahern, whose work displeased the hierarchs, faced dismissal from their teaching jobs, which meant economic exile from Ireland.

So when Cardinal Roger Mahony, furious at public television station KCET’s refusal to pull a documentary about the Catholic Church’s response to AIDS, effectively attempted to choke off the station’s funding, I wasn’t too surprised.

As Catholics the world over are well aware, the church does have a tradition of trying to stifle debate, as in the recent silencing of liberation theologians like Leonardo Boff in Latin America and the disciplining of nuns who challenge the privileged position of men in the church.

Church regulation will penetrate further into civil and political life unless--as happened in Ireland from the 1960s on--it is challenged by determined opposition. But people are too easily intimidated by charges of “anti-Catholicism,” which are most often entirely beside the point, as usually are charges that criticism of Israeli government policy is anti-Semitic.

The same goes for challenges to similar intrusions by other religious groups, such as the fundamentalists mustered in the self-styled “Moral Majority.”

Speaking as someone born out of wedlock, unbaptized and an unbeliever, I say that members of civil society should be less nervous in their criticisms when divines like Mahoney overstep the line.

When the militant AIDS activists of ACT UP conducted their protest during Mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, I thought it was a dumb idea. Much of what Cardinal John O’Connor says is imbecilic, but that’s no reason to cause offense to a bunch of Catholics on their knees or lining up to take communion.

But is such offense-giving a reason to seek to censor a documentary about the protest, to try to choke off KCET’s funding, to say that we should now hold KCET “morally and possibly legally responsible for every future act of terrorism against churches, temples and synagogues,” which is what Mahony announced?

These are the words of a man so consumed with vindictive hubris that he has ceased to think about what he is saying. And anyone who followed his dealings with the gravediggers at Catholic cemeteries in his archdiocese will know that Mahony is a very vindictive cardinal. He refused to accept a pro-union vote by the gravediggers (about 100 out of 130 had signed union representation cards) in an election held under the auspices of the California Mediation Service. Mahony has suggested that there might have been intimidation, and that the signatures might have been collected under questionable circumstances. Finally, he fired three leaders of the union drive for “conduct . . . inconsistent with the work and mission of the sacred ministry.”

Mahony’s role in the stance of the U.S. Catholic hierarchy toward the prevention of AIDS has been similarly disgusting. In a position paper in 1987, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, under the “tolerance option,” allowed church agencies to cooperate with the U.S. surgeon general in the dissemination of information about safe sex.

Mahony censored the version issued in Los Angeles. He forthwith became the U.S. point man in the Vatican’s counterattack. As the person in charge of drafting the revised position of the bishops’ conference, issued in November, 1989, he was a prime force in closing off the tolerance option, denouncing safe sex as “a lie and a fraud.”

The safety of “safe sex” may indeed be open to question, but this posture of the conference was tantamount to condemning an unknown but probably large number of young people to death. As the Rev. Albert Ogle, Episcopal representative on the Interfaith AIDS Council of Southern California, said, “The (Catholic) Church is killing young people and this is not a pro-life stance.”

Mahony’s crushing of a few labor organizers did not provoke much uproar. But it’s something else to try to kill off a public TV station (and make no mistake, that’s what the cardinal was squaring up to do). Maybe this overweening prelate is himself provoking substantive opposition of the sort that was so sadly lacking in the Ireland of my youth.