Dario Fo’s Catholic-bashing play, The Pope and the Witch, will soon be performed at the University of Minnesota.

President Robert Bruininks has allowed a panel to be formed to discuss the play — in response to demands by Catholics for such a forum in which to express their views. However, no Catholics have been invited to participate in the discussion.

Steven Rosenstone, dean of the campus’s College of Liberal Arts, does not view the play as an attack on the Catholic faith. As the Catholic League retorts, “Perhaps he thinks it’s an attack on Islam, save for the fact that Muslims don’t have a pope.”

UM’s double standard is glaring: Free speech for those who trash Catholicism and the suppression of speech by Catholics.