This was delivered at the Recognition Luncheon for Catherine Fahringer sponsored by the Foundation in San Antonio on July 3, 1994.
Catherine Fahringer first came to my attention late in the summer of 1987, shortly before the Pope’s expected visit to nine American cities, including San Antonio. It was a Saturday afternoon and I was working on a deadline for Freethought Today when the phone rang, and this friendly, vital voice on the other end volunteered to try to get airtime in San Antonio for Dan Barker’s “Stay-Away Pope Polka” protest song. And this person was in a hurry to get the tapes and do something–most unusual! At the end of the conversation, I mentioned our upcoming convention in St. Louis. There was a long pause, and I wondered if I had said the wrong thing; perhaps she didn’t travel or wasn’t interested.
But there she was in St. Louis, with an irreverent memento of the Pope’s visit as a present. And the rest, as they say, is history.
But let me recount some of our history together. I have gone through bound volumes of Freethought Today from the time Catherine first started appearing in them, and enjoyed getting reacquainted with all of her ideas and activism, and think you will, too. Her first letter printed in Freethought Today recounted how she was wearing her “Friendly Neighborhood Atheist” T-shirt everywhere in San Antonio–the bank, car repair, hospital, gas station, car wash, nursing home, grocery store, print shop and post office! Her only complaint was that she was often covering up the message when she had to hold things, and couldn’t we add our name, address and phone number on the back?
Now that’s an activist!
Catherine took it upon herself personally to attempt to buy a little airtime for a TV commercial the Foundation had produced, which was being censored around the nation. She had already gotten airtime for our film “Second Look At Religion” on cable TV, which led to her new career producing the cable show “Freethought Forum,” which has been running now for about six years on cable access in San Antonio, and which has won local cable awards. Her tenacious attempts to get the commercial on the local networks resulted in coverage of the censorship in the San Antonio newspapers, free airing of the message on a cable TV show, and later the audio of the commercial run periodically as a PSA over KSYM.
She wrote up her exploits for our newspaper, and ended with this encouragement:
“If we hang in with sweet determination, we will probably end up as a respectable segment of society. And wouldn’t that be loverly?”
Within a half a year, she had organized the San Antonio chapter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation–single-handedly recruiting most of our San Antonio area members, was organizing the cable show, had attracted newspaper coverage for the chapter, and was pursuing her complaint with the FCC over censorship.
In pondering the censorship of freethought views, Catherine wrote:
“There is nothing of a secular nature to feed the starving mind. When I speak of ‘secular’ food for the brain, I am not talking about a documentary on whooping cranes. I am talking about that which makes us so happy to find an organization such as the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and to contact and bond with people who are emotional about ideas.”
A palm-blessing gets front-page coverage for two days in San Antonio, she noted, but if freethought is mentioned, it is as something simply to deride. Catherine has certainly changed that situation in the San Antonio media.
In 1988, Catherine launched her career as San Antonio’s state/church supersleuth, investigating a grant of $15,000 of city funds to a Catholic Youth Organization. Finding out about and complaining about state/church violations is no simple task. Catherine wrote and talked to every possible official, all of whom passed the buck, toured the Catholic property with her husband, and she and three recruits addressed the very indifferent city council on this matter, as well as the Board of Case Revue. Catherine leaves no stone unturned in her quest to defend the Establishment Clause.
In 1989 she joined the Executive Council of the Foundation, its governing board, taking over the thankless role of Secretary, and also arranged freethought functions for our national staff in San Antonio, including radio, TV, a banquet dinner, a freethought concert and a “guest sermon” at the Unitarians for Dan of our staff. She had set up a debate for Dan with two ministers, each of whom cancelled at the last minute, including an Anglican priest who had vowed to prove “there is no such thing as an atheist!” But it was the Anglican who was a no-show, and there was favorable coverage for freethought about this cancelled debate in the newspapers.
In January 1990, she and Dan reunited to appear on the “Sally Jessy Raphael” show where Catherine made her memorable comment about the “big spook in the sky” idea of a god. If you saw the show you may recall that Sally Jessy Raphael opened the show by saying there were some guests the audience might find “surprising, shocking, or even disgusting,” right before she introduced Catherine! It was a hard show, since she, Dan and another Foundation member, Nancy Harris, who had all left various religions, were pitted against three former atheists who were now religious, including Bill Murray (yuck). Catherine was able to debunk the inevitable “There are no atheists in foxholes” myth by recounting that when she was threatened with murder by a break-in intruder with a gun here in San Antonio, she never once considered appealing to a supernatural deity.
About that time Catherine got letters published in the very same week in both TIME and “60 Minutes.” One freethinker can make a big difference!
You’ll remember the Gulf War broke out that year. We published a moving tribute to peace by Catherine, recounting how her military father had died on a prison ship during World War II, a victim of friendly fire, after surviving the Bataan Death March and three years in a Japanese prison camp. She wrote, “Fighting for peace is oxymoronic. We need to plan for peace, and live for peace and teach peace.”
March 1990 became a banner month for San Antonio and the Foundation, when Catherine got a “Freedom From Religion” banner displayed over a major San Antonio intersection to protest 27 Catholic banners on city lampposts. I don’t need to tell you how much work and persistence this coup took Catherine. It resulted in Craig Phelon’s cover story in the San Antonio Express-News Magazine, “Portrait of An Atheist,” which is a wonderful piece of journalism and was nominated for a Pulitzer. It captured Catherine’s personality and the importance of freethought ideas and state/church separation. Imagine the impact on a quarter million households to see Catherine’s sunny face on the cover. Catherine not only put freethought on the map in this part of Texas, but put a new face on atheists.
I hope Catherine won’t mind my telling you that she did cry once over a state/church entanglement, and we felt like crying with her. In the summer of ’91, the city put that “ungodly” looking Catholic sculpture of a chalice, communion wafer, and disembodied praying hands at a city island on the river, supposedly to commemorate the first Catholic mass 300 years ago. (How’s that for having a secular purpose?) It looked like an attorney had been found and the Foundation would help to fund a lawsuit. Through no fault of Catherine’s or the Foundation’s that lawsuit was dropped, but Catherine did have a chance to testify at a preliminary hearing, most memorably. Unfortunately, the grillwork remains. If Catherine couldn’t get rid of it, probably no person can . . . but the encouraging news is that San Antonio heat and humidity may solve the problem, since it seems to be decaying rapidly!
Catherine then took on as a personal crusade the unconstitutional imposition of forcing citizens to attend a place of worship by voting in churches. In one protest on polling day, after 13 years of enduring this violation, Catherine put on her “Friendly Neighborhood Atheist” shirt with about a dozen unsubtle buttons, clutched a copy of Freethought Today with a front-page article against voting in churches–you get the idea–and went to vote at her local neighborhood Catholic parish. She has pursued this problem tenaciously. As Catherine wrote in the last issue of Freethought Today, “Those of you who vote in churches without protest are aiding the enemies of democracy.”
In early 1992 Catherine made arrangements to host the national convention of the Foundation at the Menger Hotel in San Antonio. Major, major surgery struck that June. I have to mention that the weekend before her emergency surgery she wrote a memorable letter to the editor against what she called the Virgin Mary-itis striking her fair city at that time. Posting it was the last thing she attended to before surgery. The letter was printed while she was in the hospital.
Now, that’s an activist!
Despite her recuperation, she kept active. Her stupendous welcome to convention-goers that December was a banner reading “Welcome Freedom From Religion Foundation,” huge, red–you couldn’t miss it–on the intersection of Broadway and 4th. We have never had such a warm and public welcome. I don’t believe in God but I do believe in the power of Catherine!
Her coup for 1993 was the placement of a plaque honoring state/church separation at the San Antonio city hall. This was a fitting way to balance the insult to citizens by the city’s acceptance of the Catholic grillwork.
She and Freethought Forum paid for the beautifully framed calligraphy, quoting Thomas Jefferson:
“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”
This is a message that should be hanging at every city hall. To our knowledge, Catherine’s has been the only such gesture.
This highlights only some of her activism. Catherine provides invaluable eyes and ears to the Foundation office. We are grateful for her warm encouragement and personal friendship. Those of you from this area will admire Catherine’s many published letters to the editor, clever, pithy, often eloquent, just as we admire her many unpublished letters to officials and media, raising consciousness over state/church separation and freethought. She has had some amazing correspondence, by the way, including notable dialog recently with Hugh Downs.
Her unique personality has made Catherine so very effective in her educational endeavors. She is always there, “hanging in with sweet determination,” “bonding with people who are emotional about ideas,” to use her own words, practicing what she preaches, using every means at her disposal to prevent Christian rightwingers from usurping our country and its Constitution, making a difference in one of this country’s largest cities, and making friends for freethought wherever she goes.
Annie Laurie Gaylor is editor of Freethought Today.
