A group of alumni, students, parents, and faculty of Georgetown University have sent a letter to Cardinal Donald Wuerl asking him to remove the label “Catholic” from the school based on the school’s embrace of secularism. William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist and Georgetown alum, is among the signatories. The petition he headed up shows non-compliance with Catholic doctrine for the university, and asks for remedies “including, if made necessary, the removal or suspension of top-ranked Georgetown’s right to call itself Catholic and Jesuit in its fundraising and representations to applicants.”

The Cardinal Newman Society, which prepared a 120-page dossier showing Georgetown’s scandals, sent that dossier to Wuerl as well.

Blatty stated, “Ignoring the magnitude of what is at stake in losing a major university like Georgetown to the well-organized efforts that are fundamentally anti-Catholic, some well-meaning friends or earnest Jesuit might want to point to the liturgies, the chaplains, the Knights of Columbus chapter, and so on. Georgetown administrators wish to assure us that they speak to the Archbishop and visit Rome regularly. We know the litany all too well. It describes a Potemkin village.”