Exorcise Georgetown: Oscar-Winning Screenwriter Calls for Making His Alma Mater Catholic Again

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CNSnews:

(CNSNews.com) - Novelist and filmmaker William Peter Blatty, who won an Academy Award for the screenplay he based on his own novel, The Exorcist, is leading a movement to formally petition the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. and, if necessary, the Vatican, to act under the authority of church law to discipline Georgetown University for violating the norms the church expects from institutions of higher learning that call themselves Catholic.

This movement is asking the church to consider taking actions against Georgetown that could include declaring “that Georgetown University is no longer entitled to call itself a Catholic or Jesuit university.”

But the movement's highest aim is to begin a process that ends by reclaiming Georgetown as a university that is truly Catholic in that it teaches and exemplifies the true teachings of the church to which it professes to belong.

"The goal is simple," Blatty said in an interview with the Cardinal Newman Society. "It is to do as John Paul exhorted us to do: to preserve for the Church the highest places of culture."

Georgetown’s website currently says it “is the oldest Catholic and Jesuit institute of higher learning in the United States.”

The movement Blatty is leading was ultimately triggered by Georgetown’s decision to invite Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to speak at the graduation ceremony for the university’s Public Policy Institute. The ceremony was held this morning.