

Catholics protest Georgetown after the university invited HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to commencement this year. (Breitbart)

Peter Blatty, author of best-seller The Exorcist, has filed a canon lawsuit against Georgetown University and is urging alumni to withhold donations after HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was asked to deliver the commencement address this year.

LifeSite News reported:

One of the best-loved tourist attractions on the Georgetown University campus is the staircase from the 1973 film “The Exorcist,” based on the 1971 novel of the same name by author William Peter Blatty. The book and movie, set in and around the Jesuit school’s campus, portray the fictional exorcism of a demon from a young girl by a troubled Catholic priest and his mentor. It has long been considered a classic Catholic film.

Now Blatty, a 1950 graduate of Georgetown, has filed a canon lawsuit against his alma mater demanding the school either adhere to its Catholic identity, or be stripped of its Church affiliation. He is calling on alumni to withhold donations to the school for a period of one year while the administration decides whether to bring the institution into compliance or formally renounce its Catholic roots.

Blatty’s petition was filed on behalf of 1200 Georgetown alumni, parents, students, faculty and other concerned Catholics, accusing the school of failing to comply with Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the 1990 Apostolic Constitution for Catholic Universities that demands church-affiliated institutions of higher learning promote and defend Church doctrine…

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…Blatty said that while he has been increasingly disturbed over the past 20 years by Georgetown’s dissidence, the scandal that pushed him to file the lawsuit was the school’s refusal to back down in the face of Catholic outrage over the invitation of pro-abortion Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to be a featured commencement speaker at the School of Public Policy.