THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

E. MICHAEL JONES

edited by John Beaumont

Fidelity Press

206 Marquette Avenue

South Bend, Indiana 46617

www.culturewars.com

Cover image used under license from Shutterstock.com

Copyright, 2016, Fidelity Press

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

CHAPTER ONE: The Church and the Enlightenment

CHAPTER TWO: The Church and the Second Vatican Council

CHAPTER THREE: Wilhelm Reich, Theoretician of the Sexual Revolution

CHAPTER FOUR: Sensitivity Training and Sexual Engineering

CHAPTER FIVE: The Battle for the Media

CHAPTER SIX: The Birth Control Battle

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Gate Opens from Within

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Church and the New Americanism

CHAPTER NINE: Where Now in the Church?

About the Author

FOREWORD

In 1976 a lawyer by the name of Leo Pfeffer came to Philadelphia and gave a talk in which he boasted that the Enlightenment, or what he called secular humanism, had triumphed in its culture war with the Catholic Church, its main opponent. What is more, Pfeffer was correct in his opinion. The culture of America had changed radically by this time. The only question that remained was whether the victory would be a permanent one or not. Well, we Catholics know the answer to that question, don’t we? We live in a guaranteed Church, one that is vouched for by almighty God, his Incarnate Son, and the Holy Spirit. But we do know also that there will be great trials that we shall have to face, just as our forebears in the Faith had to do. These may be long-standing and cause many to be lost to the same Faith. But God is in charge and it is certain that his holy Church will win through in the course of time.

Dr. E. Michael Jones has been in the forefront of the ongoing debate concerning the culture wars between the Church and the Enlightenment, and in this book he tells the story relating to this as it happened over approximately the last sixty years, drawing some important conclusions. He begins by analyzing the fundamental nature of that secular humanism that has become so powerful during this period. Pfeffer’s account is undoubtedly the most accurate. Pfeffer goes so far as to name names and has no hesitation in doing so. After all he played a leading role in the relevant litigation that brought about these changes. And from the time of his growing up he developed a hatred for the Catholic Church and determined to act against it in every way he could.

The book also outlines the earlier culture wars, known of course as the Kulturkampf, which took place in Germany in the late nineteenth century. This gives us an opportunity to compare the effect of different social structures on different societies and gives us a focus through which to examine the contemporary case.

The battle in America was fought over three areas: schools and education; obscenity, in particular in respect of movies; and (most important of all) the family and sexuality, focusing particularly on contraception and abortion.

One of the most significant characters was John Cardinal Krol, one time Archbishop of Philadelphia, who occupied several positions of great significance in respect of the subject of this book. Dr. Jones is the biographer of Cardinal Krol and so has had access to a considerable amount of documentation relating to these topics.

The general introduction contained in chapter one concludes with an examination of the significance of the law and the courts in the context of the events covered, and the different legal theories of Natural Law and Legal Positivism espoused by the respective sides to the conflict.

Chapter two of the book looks at certain matters stemming from the Second Vatican Council, which took place from 1962 to 1965. It notes the highpoint of Catholic influence. It then reviews the state of the Church at the time of the death of Pope Pius XII and the desire for a Council argued for even, contrary to the mythology that has grown up, by so-called conservative Cardinals such as Cardinal Ottaviani, head of the Holy Office, and Cardinal Ruffini. It then shows how the preparatory documents drafted before the Council were based on a true recognition of the problems facing the Church. These documents were to be rejected by the Council Fathers. However, as Dr. Jones has shown on several occasions, the documents finally promulgated by the Council must be accepted as they come within the authority of the Church. Of course, they must be accepted in the light of Tradition, and this is very different from the frequently made statements by liberal progressives supporting a so-called “spirit of Vatican II,” which in many cases was far away from the intentions of the Council Fathers themselves.

Chapters three and four examine the main sources of the attempted subversion of the Church at this time and later. Chapter three deals with Wilhelm Reich. Reich was a Jewish Freudian Communist who was one of the leading theorists of the New Left’s use of sexual revolution as a form of covert political and social control. His main opponent was the Catholic Church. Reich discovered early on a fundamental point that became the constant theme of his writings. This was that debating the existence of God with a seminarian got nowhere in terms of the revolution. However, if, to use his example, the seminarian became involved in sexual activity, then the idea of God would evaporate from his mind. That was the theory of sexual revolution, articulated by Reich during the 1930s and promoted by his American disciples during the ‘50s and ‘60s. The revolutionary praxis was also based on psychology, applied psychology of the Rogerian sort. Chapter four deals with this. Carl Rogers was the man who destroyed the Immaculate Heart nuns of Los Angeles by using psychology as the validator of appetite. Another subversive influence, also taken up in chapter four, was Abraham Maslow who did similar work, with similar consequences, at other religious orders. Being taken in by Reich, Rogers, and Maslow, the Catholic Church went a long way towards abandoning traditional sexual discipline in its religious orders because the dominant culture of control through appetite said that it would improve religious life. Instead, the release of moral control destroyed religious life, which has led some to think that the destruction was intentional. Chapter four goes on to deal with a particularly notable example of this, the case of Fr. Eugene Kennedy.

Chapter five deals with the battles that the Church had to fight with the various media authorities, notably Hollywood. It tells the story of the saga of the Hollywood Production Code and the Legion of Decency, through which the Catholic Church worked to protect the faithful, and people generally, from obscene movies turned out by the media agencies. Sadly, after several years of relative success, the Church finally lost this battle with the forces of secularism.

These opponents of the Catholic Church were not Catholics themselves. However, Dr. Jones has shown in numerous books and articles the existence of a fifth column within the Church itself. Much of this involves the University of Notre Dame and its president for many years, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh. The book deals with this in chapters six and seven. The key moves of the dissidents were a) the removal of the university from the oversight of the Catholic Church and the placing of it under the direction of a lay board of trustees; b) the attempts of Fr. Hesburgh, in collaboration with the Rockefellers, to bring the Church’s teaching on birth control into line with the new sexual consensus the Rockefellers were forging; and c) the Land o’ Lakes meeting which ratified Hesburgh’s alienation of Church property followed, in a matter of weeks, by the bishops’ caving in on the case of Charles Curran at Catholic University, a case also involving sexual standards. Because of Dr. Jones’ particular knowledge of the situation at the University of Notre Dame, the book examines in some detail the collapse of Catholic standards there. Chapter six outlines the campaign run there by the Rockefellers and Planned Parenthood, aided and abetted by Fr. Hesburgh, to subvert the Church’s teaching on contraception. Chapter seven takes the case of the late Fr. Richard McBrien as representative of the several theological dissidents at this time, and looks at his malign influence. This is followed by an account of the notorious Land o’ Lakes statement, another production of Fr. Hesburgh.

The essence is the question of political control in respect of moral and in particular sexual issues, and it is characterized by Dr. Jones in the following trenchant statement:

In general, this takeover meant that the Catholic Church was henceforth to adopt the sexual moral standards of the dominant culture. That meant condoning contraception and abortion. It also meant condoning homosexuality, especially at seminaries. In general, the message was quite simple. It was say yes to appetite. And that meant, sooner or later, pedophilia because there was no way to limit the chain reaction saying yes to appetite put in motion once it got started. So if Carl Rogers was ultimately responsible for the lesbianism which destroyed the Immaculate Heart Order, he, as the symbol for the new permissive psychology, was responsible for homosexual behavior with children as well. The essence of Kulturkampf is to obscure this fact by blaming the victim, which is to say the Catholic Church which was so avid to implement the commands of the culture of control through appetite.

Chapter eight takes up what has become in recent years an important theme which has some analogies with the past. The heresy of Americanism was condemned by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae. However, shades of this mentality have arisen in recent years and may be characterized as the new Americanism. Its essence is an attempt to reconcile the Church and modernity by seeing America as some sort of ideal state. This is, of course, completely contrary to Catholic teaching and doomed to failure.

Finally, in chapter nine, the book considers the question “Where now in the Church?” Dr. Jones considers first what are not the proper responses to the present crisis in the Church. Under this heading he places both liberalism and the form of traditionalism represented by the Society of St. Pius X. He also castigates the way that dialogue with other bodies has taken the place of unity within the Church. He argues that the policy of dialogue is fruitless, illustrating this by reference to several examples, most notably the Catholic-Jewish dialogue. He goes on to say that the idea of religious liberty, with its inevitable political “horse-trading”, has been equally destructive as dialogue. The effect of all of this is easy to see. Dr. Jones expresses it as follows:

The Church finds herself defenseless against her enemies, largely because Church leaders have convinced themselves that they don’t have any enemies anymore in the age of interreligious dialogue. The enemies of all mankind whom St. Paul talks about in his epistle to the Thessalonians have been miraculously turned into “elder brothers” in an act of wishful thinking that becomes more determined in the face of every Jewish-led assault on the Church. The most recent example of this came in October when the synod of bishops invited a rabbi to address that august body for the first time in history. The rabbi promptly took this historical moment as an opportunity to harangue the bishops for being insufficiently zealous in their support of Israel. At a press conference after his speech, the same rabbi used the forum which the bishops had provided him to attack the memory of Pope Pius XII. By now this sort of “dialogue” has become depressingly familiar. So familiar that one has to wonder just what the bishops were thinking when they extended the invitation. Weren’t they paying attention during the “celebrations” of the 40th anniversary of Nostra Aetate a few years back when the chief rabbi of Israel, Yona Metzger, laid the responsibility for the Holocaust at the feet of the Catholic Church and its “2000-year history of anti-Semitism?”

Dr. Jones is clear that men of the Church have failed in a number of areas, in not preaching the gospel and in their pastoral approach to certain issues, most notably sexual matters. He also sees clearly the threat that has come from the Church’s traditional enemies, expressed by St. Augustine to be “heretics, Jews and heathens,” and the Church’s constant foe, modernity. But, for a person to react to this by leaving the Church in disgust, as some have done, is no solution. As Dr. Jones expresses it, “to jump ship means instant death” and in reality the solution is laid out before us, in the form of the story of Our Lord calming the storm, as recounted to us in St. Mark’s Gospel. Dr. Jones shows how the problems in the Church today are not merely the result of the machinations of our enemies. Sadly, in addition, as he expresses it, “the Church, of her own volition, has adopted the categories of its oppressors in the name of dialogue” when in reality “unity in the Church is not some optional feature” but “goes to the very heart of Christ’s conception of the Church.” What is needed is a strong faith on the part of individuals and a return to true evangelization by the Church.

A friend of mine once said that while several writers expressed accurately specific aspects of the encounter between the Church and modernity, what marked the work of E. Michael Jones was that he saw clearer than anyone else the big picture, the overall theme encompassing particular actions and events. For that reason primarily, in addition to his detailed analysis of the specifics, this book should be required reading for Catholics today.

John Beaumont

Leeds, England

St. Hilary of Poitiers

January 13, 2016

CHAPTER ONE

The Church and the Enlightenment

Leo Pfeffer Declares Victory

In October 1976, as part of Philadelphia’s celebration of the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, a law professor by the name of Leo Pfeffer presented a paper to the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. The title of the talk gives some indication that Pfeffer had come to Philadelphia to gloat. It was called “Issues that Divide: The Triumph of Secular Humanism,” and it provided a catalogue of the revolutionary changes that had transformed American culture during the prior fifteen years. During that period, America had quite simply revised its culture. If America were a computer, one could say that the default settings had been changed. At the beginning of the seventh decade of the twentieth century, the culture of the country was based on a pan-Protestant reading of Christianity whose assumptions favored, in imperfect form albeit, a rough approximation of the moral law. By the end of the decade, the default settings had been changed in favor of a culture that was individualistic, rationalistic, and hedonistic, especially in matters sexual. It was not just that people’s behavior had changed; those changes had been inscribed both in the culture and in the Constitution, or at least how it was interpreted, in the rules that governed people’s lives, and Leo Pfeffer was one of the main agents of that change.

Who Was Leo Pfeffer?

But who was Leo Pfeffer, and why was he so disposed to view the events of those fifteen years with such satisfaction? At the time of his talk in Philadelphia, Pfeffer was professor of constitutional law and chairman of the Department of Political Science at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York. The credentials seemed hardly distinguished. In a profession where prestige exists in inverse proportion to the amount of time an academic spends in the classroom, Professor Pfeffer had what seemed to be a distinctly unglamorous joint appointment in an undistinguished state school.

A look at the awards he had garnered, however, gives a better indication of his accomplishments and the changes he was instrumental in bringing about. Born in Hungary on Christmas Day in 1910, Pfeffer arrived in the United States at the age of two, was naturalized a citizen in 1917, and married in 1937. At the time of his speech in Philadelphia in 1976, Pfeffer had received awards from Americans [formerly Protestants and Other Americans] United for the Separation of Church and State, the Minnesota Jewish Community Council, the New York Unitarian Universalist Church, the Brooklyn Civil Liberties Union, the Horace Mann League, the Unitarian-Universalist Association, the American Jewish Congress, and the Committee for Public Education and Religious Liberty.

At the time of his talk he was Special Counsel to the American Jewish Congress, as well as counsel for the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, and a member of the advisory committee on the National Project for Film and the Humanities. He would later receive an award from the American Jewish Congress in 1980 and the Humanist of the Year Award in 1988. Pfeffer’s biography reads like a road map of the revolutionary changes that had swept through American society. If Pfeffer had come to talk about the “triumph of secular humanism,” he was well-qualified. He had been intimately involved in virtually all of the battles that had brought about that triumph. Beginning with the Schempp v. Abington decision in the early ‘60s and ending with the Lemon v. Kurtzman decision in 1970, Pfeffer was the architect of the legal strategy which removed the last vestiges of Protestant culture from the public schools and denied government funding to Catholic schools. If his listeners wanted a description of how the triumph came about, Pfeffer could give a first-hand account.

The fact that he was in Philadelphia for the talk was significant, too. The nation’s bicentennial celebration had just taken place in that city. It had been a lackluster affair, in many ways the perfect mirror of a country still staggering under the changes that Pfeffer had wrought, but also a country still under the shadow of the Watergate scandal and not too sure that it was in the mood to celebrate anything. One of the terms that Pfeffer used synonymously with secular humanism was deism, which allowed Pfeffer to situate his revolutionary changes in the context of the country’s founding. The Founding Fathers, according to a view Pfeffer propounded throughout his later career, were secular humanists who deliberately excluded mention of God from the Constitution.

It was an attempt to read a political philosophy back into history that excluded a lot of material. Washington’s farewell address comes most immediately to mind. “Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity,” opined the father of our country, “Religion and morality are indispensable supports... Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

If Pfeffer was going to situate the beginnings of his revolution in the Philadelphia of two hundred years earlier, his was going to be a selective reading of history. But there were other reasons why his appearance in Philadelphia to announce the “triumph of secular humanism” was significant. With the candor of a victor who had nothing more to fear from his opponents, Pfeffer was never vague about whom he had been fighting all those years.

The Church and the Cultural Revolution

The term cultural revolution has become a shibboleth dividing the political tribes in the United States. The conservatives define it vaguely, oftentimes so vaguely that it comes across as an effect without a cause. The liberals, because they were the victors in the struggle, claim, for tactical purposes perhaps, that the term itself is a figment of the conservatives’ perfervid and overheated imagination. Conservatives, the liberals seem to say, just failed to get their point of view across effectively in any of the institutions which really count in this country, and now, like sore losers, they are claiming to be the victims of some shadowy conspiracy which they can’t even describe cogently.

Pfeffer, however, takes a different tack. Not only does he claim victory in a struggle which his fellow humanists are embarrassed to admit existed, he also names names. Pfeffer tells us all exactly who the enemy was in the, from his perspective at least, successfully concluded cultural wars in the United States. Not for Pfeffer the shadowy opponent behind the scenes. Not for Pfeffer vague accusations against groups defined vaguely as “the Establishment.” Not for Pfeffer the straw man heroics of fellow revolutionary and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who in his 1969 polemic Points of Rebellion announced:

We must realize that today’s Establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.

No, Pfeffer was more specific and more frank than Douglas and his liberal epigoni. For Pfeffer, the enemy was, quite simply, the Catholic Church. In a memoir which appeared a year before his talk in Philadelphia (published with mordant irony in the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal), Pfeffer went to some length to explain his animus against the Catholic Church. “I did not like it,” Pfeffer wrote,

because it was monolithic and authoritarian and big and frighteningly powerful. I was repelled by the idea that any human being could claim infallibility in any area, much less in the universe of faith and morals, and repelled even more by the arrogance of condemning to eternal damnation those who did not believe it.

The Church which Pfeffer grew up hating (if that is not too strong a word) was the Church he got to know as a Jewish immigrant in New York City. During the time Pfeffer was growing up and getting started in the legal profession, the Catholic Church was, in his opinion, “one if not the single most powerful political force in the nation.” It was a time, when, to use his own words,

Pius XI and Pius XII reigned over the Catholic world and Cardinal Spellman ruled in the United States. It was the pre-John XXIII-Vatican II era, and it was during this period that my feelings towards the Catholic Church were formed.

In the Commonweal memoir, Pfeffer refers to his daughter’s threat when she didn’t get her way to “marry a Catholic army officer from Alabama,” because that particular configuration of Catholicism, the military, and the South embodied all that Pfeffer did not like about America. At another point Pfeffer talked about the impression Catholic schools made on him as a young man:

I often saw children lined up in separate classes as they marched in. All the children were white; each group was monosexual; all the boys wore dark blue trousers and white shirts, all the girls dark blue jumpers and white blouses; all the teachers were white and wore the same nuns’ habits.

Once Pfeffer gets started, the reasons for his animus against the Catholic Church pour forth in an increasingly frank as well as an increasingly hostile litany of offenses against the liberal Weltanschauung. Pfeffer did not like the fact that the Church opposed the Equal Rights Amendment; he is annoyed that “among the children outside the parochial school on the way to my office there are only a sprinkling of black faces”; he does not like the fact that the Vatican still defends papal infallibility and Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical banning the use of contraceptives; he even opposes the practice of having first confession before first communion. (“I know it’s none of my business,” he adds as if realizing that his animus is getting out of control even by his own standards, “but you asked didn’t you?”). Pfeffer dislikes the Church because of its size and because of its unity and because of its internal coherence and because of its universality. He dislikes it, in other words, because of its claim to be “Catholic.” Pfeffer dislikes the Catholic Church because it is big and because it is “monolithic,” because with “monolithity,” he tells us, “goes authoritarianism.”

Pfeffer has nothing against religion per se; he only opposes “monolithic,” “authoritarian” religions, i.e., religions with enough clout to have a say in how the culture gets organized. But even that is misstating the case somewhat. As James Hitchcock has noted, neither Pfeffer nor the liberal media objected in 1973 when the Supreme Court established as the law of the land a policy on abortion virtually identical with the position of the United Methodist Church; nor did the fact that Justice Blackmun, the author of the opinion, was himself a Methodist cause them much concern (Hitchcock, Years of Crisis: Collected Essays, 1970-1983 [1985]). The reason is most probably because the media by and large agreed wholeheartedly with the decision. When it comes to the separation of church and state, some religions are more equal than others, and some are clearly more threatening than others as well, and in Pfeffer’s view Catholicism stood alone in this regard.

One major difference between the Catholic Church and all other churches and synagogues, according to Pfeffer, was its unity; another was its authority. No other denomination was as threatening to the view of the world Pfeffer held because no other denomination made the same magnitude of belief claims on its adherents. “The difference,” according to Pfeffer,

is that the hassidim of one rabbi need not accept ... the infallibility of other rabbis, and the overwhelming majority of Jews, who are not hassidim and in fact not Orthodox, deny the infallibility of any rabbi, and this without fear of excommunication or loss of salvation. Therein lay the basic difference between the Catholic Church and Orthodox Judaism or fundamentalist Protestantism; in the latter instances, orthodoxy was just one of many voices reflecting the faith; in the former there were no alternatives.

If the Catholic Church had been willing to declare fornication and abortion the eighth and ninth sacraments respectively, it seems doubtful that the liberals would have been upset by her authoritarianism. The fact remains, however, that she wasn’t and therein lies the real reason for the animus of the liberals and the casus belli in our Kulturkampf. During the entire post-World War II period in the United States, the Catholic Church opposed the main article of faith of secular humanism, namely, sexual liberation. Beginning with the creation of the Legion of Decency in 1933 and culminating in the opposition to Roe v. Wade forty years later, the Catholic Church consistently picked up the banner of sexual morality which the mainstream Protestant denominations had let fall. The one great thaw in the liberal animus toward the Church came in the early ‘60s during the Second Vatican Council when it looked as if the Church might reach a modus vivendi with modernity by legitimatizing the use of contraceptives. That dream was laid to rest in 1968 when Pope Paul VI slammed the door shut on the conditio sine qua non of cooperation with the liberal regime. When Humanae Vitae hit the streets, the liberals broke off relations and turned instead to a combination of open hostility and fomenting rebellion within the ranks. The lull in the fighting in the liberals’ ongoing Kulturkampf with the Catholic Church ended abruptly in 1968. Thereafter, the hostilities were out in the open again.

Pfeffer’s animus toward the Church never changed, but it did abate somewhat, primarily because the Church’s influence in society diminished, and because the confusion in its own ranks increased — in no small measure because of Pfeffer’s activities. “What do I think about the Church today?” Pfeffer asked rhetorically in the mid ‘70s,

In short, I still do not like it, but I do not like it less than I did not like during that period, and the reason is that, while it is still what it was before, it is considerably less so, if you can make out what I mean.

We can without too much difficulty make out what Pfeffer means. The only good Church was a confused Church. The more it approached the divided and tentative condition of Judaism and the Protestant denominations, the more Pfeffer liked it. If the Church was less powerful in 1976 than it had been under Pope Pius XII and Cardinal Spellman, Leo Pfeffer was in no small way responsible for that diminution of power and influence.

So what was this “triumph of secular humanism”? It was simply one side declaring victory in a cultural revolution which had begun in the early ‘60s. But even the term cultural revolution has the air of fait accompli. If the revolution had not been successful, it is doubtful that anyone would have called it a revolution. Only successful revolutions earn the name. So, to take a step back even further, what Pfeffer was describing was the successful (from his point of view) completion of a struggle for the control of the instruments of culture, for the determination of the society’s default settings when it came to certain issues dear to the secular humanist heart. From the perspective of a struggle that has not yet been concluded, perhaps the best description of what happened in this country then would be the German word Kulturkampf. What we witnessed during those years was a struggle for the control of the instruments of culture which was remarkably similar to the struggle in Germany ninety years before. What we witnessed in the ‘60s in the United States was America’s Kulturkampf.

The Old and the New Culture Wars

The similarities between what happened in Germany in the 1870s and in the United States in the 1960s are more than merely semantic. Both the German and the American Kulturkampf involved a conflict between the Enlightenment and the Catholic Church. Leo Pfeffer is quite candid, not only about his animosity toward the Catholic Church, but also about seeing himself as a latter day Deist, i.e., a secular humanist who traces his heritage back to the tradition of the philosophes and the French Revolution. In both Germany in the 1870s and in the United States in the 1960s, the struggle for control of the culture began with the question of whose values controlled the elementary schools. In both instances, the Catholics found themselves facing the opposition of both liberals and conservatives. In Germany, the heirs of the failed revolutions of 1848 united with Prussian Junkers under what was a nominally Protestant, but actually liberal, agenda legitimatized as “free and independent science” (die freien Wissenschaften). The unification of Germany in 1870 brought the German Catholic populations of the Rhineland and Bavaria into union with Protestant Prussia under Prussia’s cultural and political hegemony. Kulturkampf was the Prussians’ attempt to unify the culture in their own favor, according to their rules. The new culture was to take its tone from the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, which were by turns German, Protestant, and “scientific.” When the Catholics, whose culture was simply not as powerful, demurred at accepting the unity of religion, language, and education, which both the liberals and Prussian conservatives felt was necessary for the political unity of the newly-founded German nation, they were perceived as an alien element in the new empire which had to be either assimilated or exterminated.

Interestingly enough, Germany found itself in a similar situation after the reunification of 1989. The predominantly Catholic Bundesrepublik, founded after World War II, suddenly with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Communist regime in the East found itself absorbed into a country that was predominantly secular and socialist and at least nominally Protestant. (The Soviets sequestered the traditionally Protestant sections of Germany when they created the now defunct German Democratic Republic.)

In a speech in Bremen in January 1993, Eduard Reuter, CEO of Daimler-Benz, re-opened the issue of Kulturkampf by wondering if there was a place for Catholics in the newly unified Germany. “Under conditions such as these,” opined Reuter, referring to the new confessional configuration in Germany after the reunification of 1989,

it appears to me that the time has come to think this question rigorously to its logical conclusion. The question, of course, is whether a new German republic is at all possible if it includes the traditional enemies of the Reich, namely, the [traditionally Catholic] populations of the Rhineland, and Bavaria and even the Poles. Or isn’t it really the case that the Catholic states ever since the founding of the Federal Republic have always been a divisive element, one that has especially attempted to undermine the independent status of this proud Hanseatic city? (Offerten Zeitung, Nr. 4 / April 1993).

Since one of the main issues dividing Germany was the issue of abortion, it seemed that history was repeating itself. Just as the American Kulturkampf of the 1960s was a continuation of what was launched in Prussia in the 1870s, so, too, the neo-post-1989 Kulturkampf in Germany seemed to possess uncanny similarities with what had happened in America twenty-some years earlier. In both instances, Protestantism was used as a stalking horse for what was essentially a secular humanist agenda.

Just as the Prussian Junkers aligned themselves with the liberal, humanist heirs of the Enlightenment in Germany in the 1870s, so too in the United States in the ‘60s, there was a similar alliance between the old line anti-Catholicism of groups like Protestants and Others United for the Separation of Church and State with liberal, humanist, and, oftentimes, liberal Jewish organizations and the various left-wing acolytes of sexual liberation. In some instances, as with the Episcopalian Church in Pennsylvania and the American Friends Service Committee headquartered in Philadelphia, the line between the old and the new anti-Catholicism begin to blur. When the mainline denominations became advocates of contraception, the etiolated nativism of the 1840s was given a new infusion of vitality through the advocacy of sexual liberation.

One of the best thumbnail sketches of the liberal/conservative alliance which Catholics faced in the American Kulturkampf of the 1960s was the alliance between Hugo Black and William O. Douglas on the Supreme Court. Black made a name for himself in Alabama defending a member of the Ku Klux Klan who murdered a Catholic priest. Supreme Court Justice Black’s son once wrote a memoir in which he claimed that “the Ku Klux Klan and Daddy, so far as I could tell, only had one thing in common. He suspected the Catholic Church. He used to read all of Paul Blanshard’s books exposing power abuse in the Catholic Church.” Fellow jurist William O. Douglas was a practitioner of sexual liberation as well as an absolutist when it came to the right to purvey smut. Black along with Douglas provided the rationale on the Warren and early Burger courts for engineering the change in American culture from one consonant with a pan-Protestant reading of Christianity to the secular humanist culture we have today. If the two groups — conservative Protestants and liberal humanists — seemed at odds with each other, each was able to overlook their differences in opposing Catholicism. As James Hitchcock noted in Years of Crisis,

Anti-Catholicism, as exemplified in Justice Douglas’s 1973 Lemon opinion, brings together strange bedfellows indeed — conservative Protestants and liberal humanists who are ordinarily anathema to one another.

In each instance, the animus against the Catholic Church on the part of the mainline Protestant denominations arose in large measure because the Catholics were now defending standards that the Protestants themselves had erected and then abandoned. There was a lull in the hostilities coinciding with the convoking of the Vatican Council in the early ‘60s, but it was more a lull of anticipation than anything else. The liberals wanted to see if the Catholic Church was going to abandon the teachings which were most repugnant to modern sensibilities. When it became obvious that they were not, the hostilities renewed with increased vigor.

The reaction following Vatican II brings us to another similarity between Germany and the United States. Both the German Kulturkampf of the 1870s and the American one of the 1960s were spawned by an ecumenical council. The reactions were, however, initially quite different. The German liberals were quite outraged by Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors and the doctrine of infallibility, and they turned that outrage on their German Catholic compatriots. If someone could believe such things, his patriotism was in question. His status as a German was in doubt. He was quite simply under the suspicion of subverting the regime. The effect of Vatican I on German Catholics was, however, quite the opposite. After languishing as cultural second-class citizens, German Catholics were suddenly re-infused with a new sense of identity and purpose that was bound to make itself felt in the newly unified country, a country whose unification was to take place under the unspoken aegis of German philosophy, German science, and Prussian Protestantism.

The Kulturkampf in the United States during the 1960s followed on the heels of a council as well, in this case Vatican II. But its trajectory was different. Unlike the Syllabus of Errors, Vatican II sought to be as irenic as possible in its approach to modernity. So irenic was the council, in fact, that a large segment of the Catholic population felt that its mission was to convert the Church to the categories of modernity. When it became obvious that the Church was not going to modernize to the satisfaction of the liberals, the American Kulturkampf began in earnest. Humanae Vitae was the opening shot, Roe v. Wade the liberals’ major counteroffensive. The irenic approach of Vatican II to the modern world gave the liberals within the Catholic Church their major opening, and it also provided the secular humanists with a major foothold in weakening the Church’s opposition to its agenda.

Which brings us to one of the major differences between the Kulturkampf in 1870 and the one in 1960. In Prussia, Bismarck tried to divide the Church, but in vain. In America, the secular humanists were much more successful in finding a fifth column within the Church to do their bidding. Bismarck’s attack on the Catholic Church in Ermland was a frontal assault. He expelled the Jesuits and other religious from Germany (Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland, is about one such group of nuns seeking refuge in England). When he attempted to force the bishop of Ermland, a Catholic enclave in eastern Prussia (now Poland), to accept an Old Catholic as a religion teacher in the Braunsberg Gymnasium, the Catholics held firm. As a result of Catholic unity in face of frontal assault, the Kulturkampf of 1870 was a much more violent fever which, as a result, passed much more quickly.

In America, the assault was much subtler. The carrot of government funding, publishing contracts, foundation money, and pro bono legal services was proffered more readily than the stick of government regulation. As a result, the cultural revolutionaries in America in the 1960s found a fifth column within the Church willing to aid and abet their plans. By subsidizing an obviously schismatic group like the Old Catholics, Bismarck guaranteed Catholic solidarity. There was no Prussian Charles Curran, no Prussian Theodore Hesburgh. The story of the cultural revolution in America in the 1960s is the story of the Catholic Church at war on two fronts. There was the enemy outside the gates, people like Pfeffer and the Rockefellers, and there were the collaborators within, who were often taking the money of the cultural revolutionaries to undermine the Church’s position. Pfeffer, it should be remembered, published the memoir of his campaign against the Church in a Catholic magazine. He also included in the same article a group of Catholics he found congenial to his cause. “I voted for John Kennedy in 1960,” Pfeffer tells the Commonweal readership, and then goes on to give a list of liberal Catholics he could also conceive of voting for in the future. They would include “Robert Drinan, Justice William Brennan, Eugene McCarthy, Senator Phillip and/or Jane Hart, Dorothy Day, Theodore Hesburgh, and almost any member of the editorial board of Commonweal, although,” he adds with a wry touch, “I would not necessarily want my daughter to marry them.”

When Bismarck declared war on the Catholic Church in Germany 1870, “the German Catholics,” according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “so long eliminated from the political and economic and educational life of their nation, rallied to the defense of the faith against liberalism.” When Leo Pfeffer declared victory over the Catholic Church in the United States in 1976, he could publish his memoir in a Catholic magazine. Vatican II was an occasion for liberal apostasy. Perhaps because it was a much more blatantly sexual revolution than the German one, the American Catholic liberals went over to the other side in the revolution body and soul — for the most part, body first.

The Battle Areas

Which brings us to the various theaters of combat in the cultural war. Pfeffer delineates three major areas of contestation. First, as in the Kulturkampf in Germany, there was the battle over the schools. As counsel for the American Jewish Congress, Pfeffer was the architect of a two pronged campaign which sought first to root out the last vestiges of Protestant culture from the public schools and secondly to deny funding to non-public schools, the great majority of which were Catholic. Pfeffer was the successful litigant in the Schempp and Engel cases in the early ‘60s which prohibited prayer in the public schools, and he was the equally successful litigant in Lemon v. Kurtzman which denied public funding to parochial schools in 1970.

The second area of contestation he mentions is obscenity in general and film in particular. As one of the signs of Cardinal Spellman’s inordinate influence over American culture, Pfeffer mentions the fact that the Roberto Rosellini film The Miracle was declared blasphemous in the state of New York in the early ‘50s. In 1952, the New York State blasphemy law was struck down by the Supreme Court in the case of Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson. Twenty-one years later, to give just one indication of the revolutionary changes in mores, two of the top grossing films of 1973 were Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones. By the 1980s, the United States was saddled with a pornography industry whose gross receipts ranged anywhere from $8 to $10 billion a year. Because of the decisions of the Supreme Court, this industry was essentially beyond the reach of the law.

In 1957, in the Roth case, the Supreme Court got into the pornography business by applying the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech to anti-obscenity laws. In 1964, in the Jacobellis case, the Court opined that it couldn’t define obscenity and gave us in lieu of definition the famous dictum, “I know it when I see it.” Thereafter, viewing pornography became a regular feature of working on the Supreme Court with randy law clerks viewing pornographic films and crying out at particularly outrageous moments, “I know it when I see it” (cf. Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court [1979]). “The Supreme Court decisions,” according to Pfeffer, “did not cause the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s; it is closer to the truth to say that they reflected it. They did, however, accord it constitutional sanction and thereby contributed to its acceptability.”

The final area of cultural revolution delineated by Pfeffer had to do with whose idea of the family would dominate. The major issue in the ‘60s was contraception, but that was soon replaced by abortion in the ‘70s. In the early ‘60s, to give some indication of the magnitude of the change which took place later, it was illegal in many places in the United States to sell contraceptives. By the end of that decade the government was not only not prohibiting the sale of contraceptives; it was distributing them itself. The two instances are not only indications of the situation before and after the revolution; they are causally related as well. The law had to go because the revolutionaries wanted government to get into the contraceptive business. According to Pfeffer,

the anti-contraception laws had to be removed from the books because their presence made it impossible for the state to encourage contraception, something it now increasingly deems necessary to do. The middle income and the affluent, married and unmarried, use contraceptives; the poor have babies. When the poor, often racial minorities, are on the welfare rolls, taxpaying Americans rebel and expect the state to do something about it.

In addition to describing the areas of contestation in America’s Kulturkampf, Pfeffer also describes his view of the contending parties. On the one hand, there were the Catholics,

who hope for an America in which, if not all will be Catholics, all will adhere to Catholic values: no divorce, no contraception, no abortion, no obscene books or pictures, no homosexuality, everybody worshipping God in his own way, government solicitous of and helpful to religion, and children and adults equally obedient to their parents and lawful authority (Pfeffer, God, Caesar, and the Constitution [1975]).

Arrayed on the other side of the front lines of the cultural war are “liberal Protestants, liberal Jews, and deists [i.e., secular humanists]” who

seek a different America: one in which individuals enjoy maximum freedom of thought and expression, contraception is used and encouraged to control population and avoid the birth of babies that are unwanted or cannot adequately be cared for, women’s right to control their own bodies is recognized and respected, the sexual practices of adults, whether of the same or of different sexes, are of no concern to anyone but themselves, governmental institutions avoid manifestations of religiosity, public schools are free of sectarianism, and citizens are not forced to fight in a war they deem immoral or in any war (ibid).

As can be gathered from Pfeffer’s description of the two sides in the cultural war, the major issue was sexuality. If there was a residual anti-Catholic feeling in the United States as evidenced in the Blaine Amendments (Mr. Blaine coined the phrase “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” as a description of the Democratic Party), it was quickly subsumed into (or re-energized by) the secular humanists’ determination to liberate American mores from what they perceived to be the shackles of Christian morals. What often presented itself as a theoretical discussion of issues of state — the separation of church and state, let us say, as one example — turned out upon closer inspection to be an attempt to put the legitimatizing aura of law around behavior that had hitherto been deemed immoral.

James Hitchcock cites the case of Paul Blanshard, whose influence on Chief Justice Hugo Black has already been noted, as illustrative:

Although his anti-Catholic attacks were always cast in terms of true Americanism and concern for separation of church and state, Blanshard reveals in his autobiography, Personal and Controversial, that he was an “utterly typical example of the sexual revolution of the 1920s” and that he was first stirred to write about the Catholic Church when he chanced upon a book about Catholic sexual morality (Years of Crisis).

The concern about the separation of church and state evinced by thinkers like Pfeffer and Blanshard shows itself upon closer examination to be a fear that the Catholic schools might prosper, and that specter inspires fear among the secular humanists because of the sexual consequences they see resulting from it. Parochial schools have a significant impact on the culture, and from that impact there is at least the possibility that a society would come into being in which, as Pfeffer said, there would be “no divorce, no contraception, no abortion, no obscene books or pictures, no homosexuality, everybody worshipping God in his own way, government solicitous of and helpful to religion, and children and adults equally obedient to their parents and lawful authority.” What the liberals feared in short was a society in which social mores were congruent with the moral law, specifically the moral law regulating sexual behavior. What the liberals sought to bring about in their cultural war was the minimization of the effect the Catholic Church could have over the culture, the exclusion of Catholics from the forum of ideas, the marginalization of the Catholic contribution to the moral tone of society, and the substitution of secular humanism for the social laws and regulations the Protestants had for all practical purposes erected and abandoned.

This is what Kulturkampf meant in America in the 1960s, and this was why Leo Pfeffer came to Philadelphia in 1976 on the two-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to claim victory in the cultural wars and proclaim the triumph of secular humanism.

The Role of John Cardinal Krol

But Pfeffer’s appearance in Philadelphia to proclaim the triumph of his worldview was significant for another reason as well. If Pfeffer had his attitudes toward the Church formed under the reign of Cardinal Spellman of New York, it was John Cardinal Krol, the Archbishop of Philadelphia, who more often than not proved to be his actual opponent in the cultural wars. If Pfeffer was at war with the Catholic Church and its teachings and its influence in general during the 1960s and early ‘70s, he was more often than not at war with John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia in particular. The most obvious instance was Lemon v. Kurtzman. Krol was the architect of public aid to non-public schools in the state of Pennsylvania, and Pfeffer defeated him in the Lemon case before the Supreme Court in 1970.

But the opposition was broader and more radical than that one case would indicate. In addition to being the architect behind the bill aiding parochial schools struck down in Lemon v. Kurtzman, Krol was head of the episcopal commission for the Legion of Decency when Hollywood decided to challenge the Legion’s influence over the culture and overthrow the Production Code in 1965. Krol was also a major opponent on both the state and the national level to government-funded birth control, and in the summer of 1966 fought the state of Pennsylvania to a stand-still by getting that year’s budget appropriations bill held up in committee until the state welfare department agreed not to bring up contraception to its clients. Finally, Krol was instrumental in dealing with the liberalism’s fifth column within the Church as well. He was the episcopal strategist in Charles Curran’s tenure battle at Catholic University, the prelude to the open rebellion of the dissenters which broke out when Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae.

Just as Pfeffer could bask in the glow of victory, so Krol could mull over the lessons of defeat in a cultural battle in which the country seemed bent on committing social suicide in the name of liberation from the moral law. In a memoir of his own, delivered also in Philadelphia seven years after Pfeffer’s “Triumph of Secular Humanism” speech, Krol acknowledged Pfeffer as both opponent and victor in the cultural warfare of the preceding twenty-five years. He even cited Pfeffer’s Philadelphia speech as the basis for his argument. “Leo Pfeffer,” Krol stated on the occasion of the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast on April 19, 1983, candidly admits that

secular humanism has won out as the permanent cure for religious divisiveness. He has used the First Amendment to drive all theistic religion into a closet and to establish his own “religion” of secular humanism as the prevailing ethic of American society and American public schools.

If Krol and Pfeffer agree that secular humanism was the victor in America’s cultural wars, Krol was of the opinion that the victory was a pyrrhic one at best. The main loser in the successful campaign the secularists waged has been, not the Church, as Pfeffer might have said, but the social fabric in the United States in general and in Philadelphia in particular. The main result of what Pfeffer set out to achieve has been spiritual impoverishment — in Krol’s words, “the depletion of the religious and moral capital of our nation.” As the moral law sanctioned by religion was driven from the public sphere, Philadelphia in particular and the country at large became a more dangerous place. According to Krol, “the progressive decline in morality” led to a “corresponding increase in crime and corruption.”

Between 1960 and 1970, while the population increased 13 per-cent, crimes increased 176 percent in the nation and 128 percent in Philadelphia. In 1980, 67 Philadelphia police were detailed to senior and junior high schools... In 1981 in the 260 public school buildings, there were 316 assaults on teachers and 368 on students ... 12 rapes and 244 cases of weapons possession... The decline in morality and the increase in crime and corruption is all too obvious today.

After naming Pfeffer as its advocate, Krol indicted secular humanism as the cause of the precipitous decline in social well-being. “These affirmations,” said Krol, citing the secular humanist manifestos of 1933 and 1973,

sweep away all decalogues, rules, and regulations. They deny God’s existence and hence the inalienable rights which man derives from God. They deny objective truth and the difference between right and wrong. They accept as the ultimate criterion, human experience, human need, and human desire. They open the gate not to healthy individualism, but to an uninhibited and frightful egoism and ruthless selfishness... These affirmations are not basically different from the underlying principles of Atheistic Communism and Nazism... The legal situation of the Church-State question is today bogged down in conceptual confusion and contradictions. The Courts seem unable to distinguish between “church” and “religion”; between institutions of religion and the dynamics of religion as such in society.

The two speeches were not unlike the parable of the seven blind Hindus and the elephant, except that in this instance we are talking about the body politic and not pachyderms. That two such men should have such diametrically opposed views of the good of society is in many ways even more remarkable considering the similarities of their background. Born within three months of each other, both Pfeffer and Krol came from Eastern Europe at a time when Eastern Europeans were denied access to the decision-making institutions of American culture. Krol was born in Cleveland, but was taken back to Poland in 1912, the same year that Leo Pfeffer arrived in New York. John Joseph Krol’s father once told him that, if it had been economically possible to have raised his family in Poland, he never would never have come to the United States. The older Krol tried to return unsuccessfully two years after his son John was born, but had to return to Cleveland again to seek work. Leo Pfeffer came from Hungary, which is where Krol’s father first went to seek work during the early years of this century.

In addition to both being immigrants from Eastern Europe, both Krol and Pfeffer were trained in the law. Pfeffer made a name for himself as a civil lawyer with groups bent on bringing about the secularization of American culture. Krol’s rise out of the working class Polish neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, to a position where he was sought after by presidents and popes for his advice and expertise took place within the Catholic Church, at first as a priest and finally as a prelate, but — intellectually at least — as a canon lawyer. Both Krol and Pfeffer were trained in the law, and it would be in the courts of law, primarily the Supreme Court, that the final battles of the cultural revolution would be decided.

The Influence of the Law and the Courts

Americans, perhaps because of the absence of traditions in a land carved out of the wilderness, have always accorded the law an unusual amount of respect. In retrospect, when one considers the magnitude of changes that were wrought in such a brief time, it seems impossible to understand without understanding the influence that law had in this particular culture. The respect for law was so great that the majority of Americans allowed it to overrule their respect for democracy, as one democratically enacted bill after another was overturned by a Supreme Court which had arrogated to itself the position of unelected legislature. Pfeffer tacitly acknowledges the anti-democratic stance of the courts during the cultural revolution, but since he sympathizes so clearly with the results there is little of the zeal in his defense of the constitutional separation of the branches of government as there is in his defense of the separation of church and state. In explaining why the Supreme Court had to get involved in overturning a statute banning the sale of contraceptive duly enacted by the chosen representatives of the state of Connecticut, Pfeffer proffered the following explanation:

Why did it take a more activist approach to anti-contraception laws? The answer may lie in the fact that the justices recognized the need to get the laws off the books to enable the States to take affirmative action toward encouraging and assisting birth control, or at the very least not to prevent private groups from doing so; but they also realized that as a matter of political reality the States were not going to repeal the laws, as the twice-unsuccessful effort in Connecticut evidenced (God, Caesar, and the Constitution).

The strategy of using the courts, in other words, was necessary to circumvent the democratic process. All of the talk about procedure is essentially a subterfuge which is necessary to rationalize results. Since we all know what we want, namely, contraceptives, and, of course, what contraceptives stand for, namely, sexual liberation, and since we all know that the achievement of this end, was, given the social climate of the country in 1960, democratically impossible, we will allow the courts to overrule democracy in the name of social progress:

In this respect the nine judges on the Supreme Court, being immune to political reprisal since they serve for life, may be performing a significant though quite controversial function; they may be compelling the people to accept what the judges think is good for them, but which they would not accept from elected legislators (ibid).

The cultural revolutionaries realized that to get their way they had to circumvent the democratic process, and they realized as well that the only institution which could trump democracy in this culture was the law and the exaggerated respect for it that was peculiar to this country’s intellectual history. Krol’s rise to a prominence as a canon lawyer in the Catholic Church took place when, as Pfeffer put it, “Catholicism took over the mission first launched by Protestantism” (Commonweal article). In the vacuum created by the effacement of mainstream Protestantism as the guarantor of the social order in this country, Krol and Pfeffer found themselves locked in a battle over whose interpretation of the law would permeate the culture. It was a Kulturkampf in just about every sense of the word, and the place of religion as the guarantor of public morality was the main bone of contention.

According to Pfeffer,

Religious groups, avowedly or not, seek to translate their own particular hierarchy of values into categorical imperatives for the community at large, including that part outside their own respective folds. Since government and law are highly effective means for translating particular values into universal rules of conduct, each competing religious group will seek to prevail upon government to accept its values as the best (“The Triumph of Secular Humanism”).

One of the unintended ironies of Pfeffer’s account is the fact that in arguing for the separation of church and state what he effected was the establishment of a religion of secular humanism. Given Pfeffer’s essentially Nietzschean world view, the body politic is made up of groups which attempt to impose their will on the body politic as a whole. His use of the terminology of the separation of church and state was nothing more than a clever attempt to insure that, in the battle for the public mind and morals, those who were open about their religious affiliations were to be disqualified before they got out of the starting gate. According to Pfeffer’s view, someone invariably imposed his views on the majority. This was only wrong when the imposer happened to espouse or represent a religion.

Natural Law and Legal Positivism

Krol’s view of the relation between law and society was radically different from Pfeffer’s. Because of his training as a canon lawyer, but also because of his familiarity with the Catholic tradition of natural law, Krol began to view the direction the Supreme Court was taking with alarm as early as the early ‘50s when he was still auxiliary bishop in Cleveland, Ohio. Instead of simplifying the just adjudication of disputes, American legal praxis was becoming progressively more complex and confused because the Supreme Court in particular was, in Krol’s view, taking leave of elementary principles of jurisprudence. The law had ceased to be an effective agent in adjudicating disputes because it had taken leave of its foundation in the moral order, an order established by God. The chief villain, according to Krol, was Oliver Wendell Holmes, who propounded a view of the law that has subsequently become known as legal positivism.

According to Krol, Holmes

dismissed the idea of Natural Law Principles as a product of mere wishful thinking. He rejected all traditional moral concepts as a set of emotional prejudices. He considered physical force as the essence of all law. He admitted no absolute rights ... and denied the existence of absolute truth. He maintained that Might is Right.

With the foregoing formulation, the liberal judiciary found itself in a deep metaphysical bind. The liberal judiciary did not believe in truth or in the positive law as based on the moral law, which was in its turn based on the law of God. In short, it did not believe in anything identified with the natural law. The law was, quite simply, what the jurists said it was, and that law was imposed by force on the populace as a whole. At least, this is what they believed theoretically. In praxis, the liberals found themselves hamstrung by their very theory. If the law was not an instantiation or approximation of moral justice, then it was simply the imposition of a set of views on an unwilling recipient. And if this was the case, by what right did they impose the law? In order to preserve liberalism the justices have to back off in enforcing the law, which is precisely what the Warren court did. Oliver Wendell Holmes may have felt no qualms in implementing the rule of might makes right, but his successors, perhaps influenced by how that theory had worked itself out in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, lacked the stomach for its consistent implementation in the United States, even if they could come up with a rationale for consistent implementation.

The result, of course, was social chaos, which is precisely what Krol saw in 1983 as the result of Pfeffer’s revolution. According to Krol,

Government has the responsibility of articulating a public morality for the common good of society and for the happiness and security of its citizens. If government does not encourage the teaching of virtue and morality, it gives by default free reign to vice.

In formulating his position this way, Krol was entering a debate which had been taking place in this country since before the inception of the Republic. “Is not the law sufficient to protect itself?” Judge Marmaduke Temple exclaims in James Fenimore Cooper’s initial volume of the Leatherstocking tales, The Pioneers (1823). The answer, then as now, is no. The laws of the land can only function in a broader context which includes the moral law. It is a lesson which this country has had to learn the hard way. It is a lesson which John Cardinal Krol attempted to teach it. It is a lesson which the cultural revolutionaries of the ‘60s refused to learn, and one they refused to allow to be taught in the cultural institutions which fell under their hegemony.

“If our traditional Judaeo-Christian morality declines,” Krol wrote,

and — God forbid — should go into eclipse, we will witness not only a spiraling crime rate — now in evidence — but also, either increasing social and political chaos or an emergence of government morality by legislation. But morality cannot be secured by laws, and virtue cannot be coerced — not even in a totalitarian police state.

If the liberals were the doctors of the ‘60s, then the country in general was their patient. They had come up with a new cure for all of the ills of society, one which solved virtually every social problem by redefining it out of existence. In the name of freedom of the individual to do what he wanted without regarding the exigencies of the moral law and the social consequences of disregarding that law, anarchy was loosed on the land. If liberalism was the medicine, then the patient sickened and died. The liberals got virtually everything they wanted in terms of the programs they wanted enacted; they got virtually nothing they expected in terms of outcome.

CHAPTER TWO

The Church and the Second Vatican Council

The High Water Mark of Catholic Power

On July 4, 1962, a crowd of 100,000 people, many of them Catholic, gathered at Independence Hall in Philadelphia to hear an Independence Day address from the first Catholic president of the United States. On the podium with John F. Kennedy were David Lawrence, governor of Pennsylvania, who also happened to be a Catholic, and James H. J. Tate, mayor of Philadelphia, who was a Catholic as well. Archbishop John Joseph Krol gave the invocation. Virtually all of the men on the podium were, in addition to being Catholic, newly arrived on the political scene. Kennedy and Lawrence had been elected in 1960; Tate and Krol had both taken their respective offices in 1961. For a Catholic audience most of whom could still remember the Klan marches of 1928 in protest against the presidential campaign of Al Smith, it must have been a remarkable sight. For an audience of Philadelphia Catholics whose history included the anti-Catholic nativist riots of 1844, it must have seemed more remarkable still. It must have seemed as if a new age of acceptance for Catholics had finally dawned. The long night of anti-Catholic bigotry which had characterized this country since well before its beginning in 1776 had finally come to an end. Catholics were finally accepted as full partners in the republic. Catholics had come of age and were now in a position to make their contribution to the common good of the country. The scene at Independence Hall, Philadelphia on July 4, 1962 was in many ways the high water mark of Catholic power in this country.

There was also the demographic issue. As early as 1949, in his attack on the Catholic Church, American Freedom and Catholic Power, Paul Blanshard referred to “the Catholic problem.” What troubled Blanshard most about America’s Catholics was their unwillingness to use contraceptives. As a result, demographic increase was leading to political power and, as Blanshard mentioned in his book, Bertrand Russell’s greatest fear was coming true. America was becoming a Catholic country, and America’s Catholics were doing it “by the numbers.”

With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the euphoria was remarkably short-lived, just as we can see that the conditions for acceptance were less than congenial to Catholic interests. To begin with, there was the fact that President Kennedy’s Catholicism was more ethnic than moral, as subsequent biography has shown. Beyond that, the closer Kennedy got to the levers of power the more he proved willing to divest himself of his Catholic identity. The closer President Kennedy got to a policy-making position, the greater became his willingness to promise that his Catholicism would have no influence on his policies. During the 1960 campaign, Kennedy had to promise to a group of Protestant ministers assembled in Houston that his Catholicism would in no way influence his behavior as president. It is difficult to imagine the member of any other denomination in the United States being required to make such humiliating assurances, but Catholicism had always been a special case.

The hiatus in anti-Catholic feeling in the early ‘60s had other causes as well. Less than four months away loomed the opening of the Second Vatican Council. What was the Council supposed to accomplish? From the Church’s point of view it was to reorganize the Church and make it more effective in dealing with the challenges which modernity posed, specifically the challenges to family life which the culture of liberalism and its increasingly invasive media promulgated. From the outside, however, this was not clear, primarily because the Church was never able to compete with the media’s version of what it was supposed to be. From the outside, it often looked as if the Council had been convoked for the exact opposite purpose; namely, to conform the Church to the superior achievements of the modern age. This was due in large measure to the press the Council got, which was in large measure the result of the efforts of young Catholics who had imbibed the intoxicating atmosphere of the Kennedy age and wanted to use the opportunity of interpreting the Council as a vehicle for upward mobility.

“At the highest position of the Church,” wrote Michael Novak as a fairly representative instance of this class,

down through the majority of the Council of Bishops, the idea of reform had taken hold. The chief point for reform was in the area of liberty... How could the Church of Christ ever have lost liberty? But it had. The wave of enthusiasm and relief that swept the Church and the world were because of the return of liberty, and at the return of Catholics into the midst of the human race, out of their defensive isolation.

Traditionally hostile American culture was warming in its feelings toward Catholicism for a number of reasons, but foremost was the anticipation that the Church might cease being so aggressively the Church. This was, in fact, ever the condition of acceptance for Catholics in American culture and would continue to be thereafter. If Catholics chose not to impose their views, then they were perfectly acceptable. Imposing their views came to mean exercising the right that other groups took for granted in the republic, but that was just part of the double standard that Catholics had to face and, in many instances, had come to accept. Now, if, as seemed to be the case at the dawn of the Council, the Church itself was willing to endorse the separate peace that so many Catholics had already made, then the basis for cooperation was more or less limitless. Hence the “era of good feeling” which characterized the early ‘60s. For James Hitchcock, the era of Pope John XXIII and John F. Kennedy was an “unusual and temporary parenthesis in the history of anti-Catholicism” (Years of Crisis) that had pervaded the United States since before its founding. Just how temporary it was would probably prove to be a surprise to many assembled at Independence Hall that day had they been able to look a few years into the future.

Leading up to the Council

In 1958, there was a sense of storm just over the horizon. A deceptive calm had fallen over the Church. Then Pope Pius XII died, and a new era dawned. In attempting to explain why he supported the letter of Vatican II if not the spirit unleashed in its wake in the Church, the then Cardinal Ratzinger described the Council as,

perhaps, the first council in history to be convoked, not under the pressure of pressing problems or crises, but in a moment of seeming tranquility with respect to ecclesial life... Then came the cultural revolutions and the social convulsions that the Fathers in no way could have foreseen but which have shown how their answers — at the time anticipatory — were those that were needed in the future... The crises erupted later, not only within the Church but in the whole society. Could it not be said ... that the Church, at all events, would have had to confront those cultural revolutions but that, without the Council, her structure would have been more rigid and the damages could have possibly been even more grave? (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger with Vittorio Messori, The Ratzinger Report [1985])

It was a rhetorical question the Church was still answering thirty years after the fact. The fact is that the Council unleashed forces in the Church which no one could have anticipated at the time. But as the foregoing analysis has, I think, shown, those forces were gathering on the horizon without regard to what the Church thought of them and would have fallen on the Church whether she had opened her windows or not.

In the fall of 1958, in the conclave immediately following the death of Pius XII, when it became apparent that Angelo Roncalli would be the next pope, Cardinals Ottaviani and Ruffini went to his room and suggested in the strongest terms possible that he call an ecumenical council. In many instances, the Catholic Church would become a battlefield over which liberals fought conservatives for control of the Church in the period following the close of the Second Vatican Council. Like the battle over the Constitution that was fought in the judicial system and the Supreme Court of the United States, it was a battle between competing interpretations. However, there is one thing both Catholic liberals and conservatives had in common, and that was a common view of the Council. When two opposing groups who otherwise disagree on just about everything agree on something, that idea generally becomes firmly embedded in the conventional wisdom. This is precisely the case about the calling of the Council. Both liberals and conservatives agree that Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, or Holy Office at the time, opposed the Council: conservatives applaud the fact; liberals bemoan it; but both accept it as true.

Giving the conservative formulation of the position, Fr. Gommer de Pauw, founder of the Catholic Traditionalist Movement and one of the early opponents of liberalization following the Council, writes

Since Rome itself has lifted the veil of secrecy from such matters, it can now be said that there would have been no Second Vatican Council and church history would have taken a completely different direction, if, upon the death of Pius XII in 1958, the conclave of cardinals had elected Ottaviani to become Pope Pius XIII, as it ever so nearly did before one Angelo Roncalli finally received the necessary votes that made him Pope John XXIII. And I venture to add that from that day on I, among many, started wondering what percentage in the outcome of papal elections is attributable to the Holy Ghost, and what percentage is the result of politics (Sounds of Truth and Tradition [1979]).

Taking the same position but from a diametrically opposed point of view, Xavier Rynne, the pseudonym for Passionist Fr. Francis X. Murphy, claims that a “self-perpetuating clique in the Curia ... had thus far successfully resisted all but the most innocuous changes dictated by the exigencies of modern life... To these men the announcement of the new Council came as a severe shock.” Lest anyone not get his drift, Rynne spells out his morality play of good and evil at the Council in explicit terms. “The leading figure in the group of intransigents — or “prophets of doom,” to use the pope’s phrase — was Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani” (Vatican Council II [1968]). When Pope John XXIII used the phrase “prophets of doom” in the speech announcing the opening of the Council, Rynne directs the reader’s attention to Cardinal Ottaviani as the principal suspect: “As the listeners heard these words,” Rynne writes, “their attention focussed irresistibly on the face of Cardinal Ottaviani.”

Paul Johnson, in his book Pope John XXIII (1974), makes a much more convincing case that Pope John XXIII was referring to Cardinal Pizzardo with the “prophets of doom” reference. Beyond that, one wonders how Rynne was privy to the consciousness of so many listeners, but beyond that one can hardly deny that his account of the Council has long since settled into the conventional wisdom. The only problem with the account is that it is wrong. Ottaviani not only did not oppose the Council, he was instrumental in getting it called. Just why he should be cast as the villain is obvious, at least from the point of view of the liberals’ misrepresentation of the Council. The liberals wanted to portray Vatican II as the Church converting to modernity when in fact the opposite was the case: the Council involved the Church responding to the challenge of modernity. In order to appropriate the Council the liberals had to expropriate the man who called it; hence their need to make Ottaviani the villain, when in fact the calling of the Council was his idea. The thesis that conservatives like Ottaviani opposed the Council leads to quandaries for both the liberals and the conservatives. According to the conservative view, everything was fine. There was no reason to call the Council. It was an act of either supererogation or self-immolation but in either case an effect without a cause. This of course plays nicely into the hands of liberals who can then claim that the conservatives were so myopic they didn’t see the obvious need to modernize.

The fact is that the Council was neither a work of supererogation nor an attempt to convert the Church to the ideology of modernity. All of the evidence of the time indicates it was an attempt to help the Church face a threat just over the horizon but one palpable enough to those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

“It must not be forgotten,” writes Ottaviani’s successor, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “that my predecessor in the Holy Office, Cardinal Ottaviani, also supported the project of an ecumenical council. After Pope John XXIII had announced its convocation, the Roman Curia worked together with the most distinguished representatives of the world episcopate in the preparation of those schemata which were then rejected by the Council fathers as too theoretical, too textbook-like and insufficiently pastoral. Pope John had not reckoned on the possibility of a rejection but was expecting a quick and frictionless balloting on these projects which he had approvingly read” (The Ratzinger Report).

Fr. Robert Bonnot, who interviewed Ottaviani in the late ‘70s just before his death, corroborates Ratzinger’s view by stating emphatically “Cardinals Ottaviani and Ruffini had recommended a council to Cardinal Roncalli during the conclave” (Pope John XXIII [1979]).

They visited Roncalli’s cell on Monday evening (October 26, 1958) with the awareness that he was going to be elected pope. One of their aims was to suggest that it would be a “fine thing” (bella cosa) to call an ecumenical council in order to combat the many errors circulating in both Church and world. Evidence that Pope John thought about calling a council long before January is abundant. On October 29, John told Cardinal Feltin of Paris, “I shall summon a council.” On October 30, his secretary heard him comment “for the first time in a conversation on the necessity of celebrating an ecumenical council.” On November 2, Pope John had several audiences, including one with Ruffini and the idea of a council came up again.

Once the role of the undeniably conservative Cardinal Ottaviani in calling the Council becomes clear a number of contentious issues are resolved. First of all, the Council was not the Church’s belated conversion to modernity as the liberals would like to portray it. Secondly, it was not an act of self-destructive supererogation as the conservatives would like to portray it. The Church was in serious trouble in 1958, a fact recognized by people like Ottaviani. The dictum “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” might hold true here but not in the way the conservatives think it should apply. There was something broke, and the Church needed to take time to fix it. The Council was convoked for basically two reasons: internal decay and external threat. The documents of the preparatory commissions called by John XXIII, some of which were written under Cardinal Ottaviani’s direction, give ample evidence that the Church had reached a state approaching internal paralysis during the last years of Pope Pius XII and that this was not the best posture for confronting the liberal revolution in morals which was beginning to sweep through the West. Even in Italy, which as late as 1950 had been a predominantly agricultural country, the media, most especially television and film, were ushering society in a direction that deep-thinking prelates like Ottaviani found profoundly disturbing and inimical to social well-being and the salvation of souls.

“Television,” writes René Latourelle in his book on the Council, Vatican II: Assessment and Perspectives (1987), “acted as a multiplying factor in a process of transformation that was in itself dramatic... The day has gone in which people listened to the Church when it gave instructions in the economic, political, and social fields.” The Church of 1958 found itself “on the defensive, immobile in the face of a rapidly changing world,” a situation that was in large measure due to the personality of Pope Pius XII, of whom Cardinal Tardini states, he “did not want collaborators but simply executors.” “During his papacy,” Tardini continues,

direct personal contact between the Supreme Pontiff and the bishops of the various dioceses was considerably reduced... Thus the Roman curia suffered a certain stagnation, rather like the situation in the body when some irregularity in the circulation of blood sets in. We old people stayed on, standing in the way and preventing fresher and more robust forces than our own from moving forward...

Instead of finding themselves within a Church intimately involved in facing the challenges of modernity, the Church’s own officials found a disconcerting immobility at the center of the Church’s affairs. However, what the Church lacked in vitality it made up in discipline. One Jesuit describes his perplexity at the myriad senseless rules that dominated Church life at the time. Anyone who challenged the rules was told the parable of the dry stick, referring to the anecdote of the monk who watered a dry stick after being ordered to do so by his superior as part of his duties as the monastery’s gardener. The task made no sense, but the monk persisted out of sheer blind obedience and was in the end rewarded when God made the dry stick blossom into a lush plant.

By 1958, the principle of the dry stick had been made to cover a multitude of sins, and the people who were expected to give the Church this sort of blind devotion were becoming increasingly skeptical, especially in light of the liberal ideologies sweeping through the West at the time, ideologies which seemed so reasonable, enlightened and humane by comparison.

During his long reign as pope, Pius XII increasingly concentrated the administrative powers of the Church into his own hands. When the position of Secretary of State fell vacant, he filled the position himself. With help of telephone and radio, Pius XII became in many ways the ecclesial equivalent of the totalitarian leaders of his time, micro-managing the Church into a position of paralysis that only increased as his physical powers began to fail him with advancing age. The situation became acute during the ‘50s, when oftentimes ordinaries of major dioceses would come to Rome only to cool their heels in some antechamber and to go home without seeing the Pope. Celso Cardinal Constantini, chancellor of the Holy Roman Church, characterized the government of the Church in the last days of Pius XII as “Byzantine and weird.” Paul Johnson in his biography of Pope John XXIII concurred:

The tragedy of Pius’s decline is that the stifling and unseemly atmosphere of his court began to affect the church as a whole. Decisions were delayed, or taken in secret, often behind the backs of responsible officials. There was a widening chasm between the papal apartments, where all power ultimately resided, and the Curia itself. In many respects, they operated as two separate governments, sometimes in conflict. Though Pius took all the decisions in some spheres, down to the smallest details, in others the Curia was given free rein, and worked on, in its own bureaucratic manner, stifling initiative and strengthening its grip on the routines of the church everywhere. Bishops and cardinals throughout the world, responsible for vast congregations, faced with problems of great urgency, found that they could not obtain access to the pope when they visited Rome, and were forced to make their own separate deals with Curia officials. There was a feeling, during these years, that the church was almost entirely stagnant, a great machine running down for lack of vital controlling force. Pius had always seen the Church as a beleaguered citadel: at the end of his life it became one, in more than a notional sense, but a citadel crumbling from within, manned by a garrison without officers, and with commander increasingly divorced from reality. Pius, wrote Guiselle Dalla Torre, former editor of the official Vatican paper, L’Osservatore Romano, “separated himself from direct contact with life, though not, unfortunately, from people who abused his confidence.” His own interests became increasingly pietistic and credulous. He was obsessed by the prophecies of the Fatima-miracle children, by the prodigies worked by the Bavarian girl Theresa Neumannn, and by his own mystical visions and dreams, some of which were leaked to the press. Some prelates feared he might suddenly announce a new and controversial dogma: there were rumors, for instance, that he planned to declare the Virgin Mary to be the co-redemptress, and thus plunge the church into mariolatry. In his old age, the great organization he controlled seemed to have lost any semblance of intellectual virility, any sense of pastoral mission, any desire to come to grips with the problems of the real world, and to be settling into a childish, devotional dotage. The church appeared to be dying with him.

In the fall of 1958 the Church was in a perilous condition and virtually all of the cardinals who arrived in Rome to elect Pius XII’s successor felt that something needed to be done. The task was twofold: first, restructure the Church from the de facto monarchy it had become under Pius XII to an institution where the authority would be more broad-based and, therefore, more effective in dealing with the local situation. This meant a rehabilitation of the role of bishop so that, secondly, the Church could meet the challenges of secularism head on.

L’Osservatore Romano announced the most momentous Catholic event for the 20th century in its January 26-7, 1959 issue. There were no blazing headlines, just a brief announcement that, in order to meet the errors of the time and its excessive materialism, the pope intended to hold a synod of the Roman clergy, to call an ecumenical council of the universal Church, and to modernize canon law; the Council was also to be “an invitation to the separated communities to search for that unity towards which so many souls aspire.” Cardinal Ottaviani concurred on both the internal and the external goals, and the best demonstration that he felt the Church was facing an external threat can be gleaned from the preparatory documents written under his direction.

In a preparatory schema issued on May 7, 1962 entitled “The Esteem of Virginity and Chastity,” Ottaviani said quite bluntly that sexual issues were “the most acute and discussed moral problems of our day.” They were eternally crucial because “the Church has always shown that she considers conjugal life as the ordinary way of sanctification for the majority of the human race.” However, that plan was in danger of being thwarted by the combination of sexual permissiveness and the newly-created media of communication which were constantly attempting to inject this same sexual permissiveness into their programming. “Modern life,” Ottaviani continued, giving his assessment of the post-war period,

without doubt, multiplies invitations to evil by such distractions as beauty contests, spectacles, billboards, songs, illustrated magazines, beaches, places of vacation, promiscuity, and certain forms of sport. This is why the Church never ceases to recall to each one the principles of prudence, conscience, and responsibility, the rights and duties of liberty, and the obligation of vigilance and precaution on the part of parents, educators and civil authorities. This is also why the church points out as dangerous and condemns as erroneous all theories that are then translated into practice concerning the cult of movie stars, naturalism, the so-called sexual education, pan-sexualism, and certain injurious aspects of psychoanalysis... It also studied those errors which are directly harmful to marriage, e.g., divorce, or indirectly, Malthusianism, and artificial insemination.

Eventually the preparatory documents would be rejected by the Council fathers, something that undoubtedly caused Cardinal Ottaviani some consternation. However, the rejection was caused more by the approach of the documents, and the approach the Council wanted to take to modernity, rather than their content. Ratzinger describes the rejection of the preparatory documents as “a certain discomforting feeling that the whole enterprise might come to nothing more than mere rubber-stamping of decisions already made... The preparatory commission had undoubtedly worked hard, but their diligence was somewhat distressing.” At issue was a new approach to a hostile world. The majority of the assembled bishops had decided the hard line of Pius IX and the Syllabus of Errors simply did not work. Instead of condemnation, they preferred dialogue. Ratzinger speaks of how “the anti-Modernistic neurosis ... had again and again crippled the Church since the turn of the century” and how with the convoking of the Council the posture of rigid defiance “here seemed to be approaching a cure.”

“The real question behind the discussion,” Ratzinger wrote,

could be put this way: Was the intellectual position of “anti-Modernism” — the old policy of exclusiveness, condemnation and defense leading to an almost neurotic denial of all that was new — to be continued? Or would the Church, after it had taken all the necessary precautions to protect the faith turn over a new leaf and move on into a new and positive encounter with its own origins, with its brothers and with the world of today? Since a clear majority of the fathers opted for the second alternative we may even speak of the Council as a new beginning. We may also say that with this decision there was a major advance over Vatican Council I (Theological Highlights of Vatican II [1966]).

Whether the Council fathers made the right decision is open to debate. In light of the cultural revolution which followed the Council, the Council documents seem oftentimes naively irenic. “The Church has nothing to fear from the modern world,” is how the situation was described in Gaudium et Spes. Well, in a sense it doesn’t, but in a sense it does. And in retrospect the forthrightness of the preparatory documents oftentimes seems a welcome relief from the oftentimes naive optimism of the early ‘60s. “The moral order,” Cardinal Ottaviani wrote in one of the preparatory documents,

has the task, not only of leading man to his true end, but of defending him against all doctrines and practices that would enslave him to the minds, modes and passions that are contrary to the dignity of his intellect... In particular the moral order defends the immutable principles of Christian modesty and chastity. We know the energies spent at the present time by the world of fashion, movies and the press in order to shake the foundations of Christian morality in this regard, as if the Sixth Commandment should be considered outmoded and free rein should be given to all passions, even those against nature. The Council will have something to say concerning this subject. It will clarify and eventually condemn all the attempts to revive paganism and all the trends that in the abuse of psychoanalysis tend to justify even those things which are directly contrary to the moral order.

Cardinal Ottaviani’s concern about the sexualization of Catholic culture fell on deaf ears in 1962, largely as a result of the campaign which the Germans under the then Fr. Joseph Ratzinger and Cardinal Frings waged against the preliminary documents.

In the end, the Council condemned virtually nothing, and did not have a whole lot to say about the Sixth Commandment in particular either. The irony of course is that the Church was accused of being obsessed with such matters at precisely the time when the obsessions were all on the other side. The Church was opening its windows to the world at the same time that the world was opening itself to a bad case of sexual obsession.

CHAPTER THREE

Wilhelm Reich, Theoretician of the Sexual Revolution

Sexual Subversion of Children and Catholic Clergy

Wilhelm Reich created the term “Sexual Revolution;” he also combined psychoanalysis and Marxism to create a weapon that was specifically targeted against the Catholic Church, and even more specifically one which promoted the sexual corruption of the clergy as the best way of reducing the Church’s political power.

Reich was a Jew from Galicia, the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who was both a Freudian and a Marxist. Nine years after his death, he became the hero of the ‘68 revolution in Paris. Two years later he was featured on the cover of the New York Times magazine.

Before his mind rotted out with syphilis and he was convicted and sent to Lewisburg Prison on trumped up Food and Drug Administration charges, Wilhelm Reich was a leading theorist of the New Left’s use of sexual revolution. By the time Reich had been rediscovered by the New Left in 1969, he had been dead for ten years, but that fact was irrelevant, because the Reich the cultural revolutionaries were interested in promoting had stopped writing in 1933 anyway. On January 4, 1971, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote a review of the new Farrar Straus edition of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which announced in effect that the Reich revival had begun in earnest. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt proclaimed, “the Austrian sexologist and inventor of the so-called orgone energy accumulator, has made a comeback.” Reich, according to the review, was the father of youth culture, the sexual revolution, and the feminist movement. Kate Millett’s book Sexual Politics was written under his influence. Beyond that, Reich was better at reconciling Freud and Marx than Marcuse, especially by expounding his “credo that sexual man was man liberated from his need for authority, religion, and marriage.” Reich, in other words, “makes considerable sense,” at least to someone sympathetic to the goal of sexual liberation. Lehmann-Haupt was, in fact, so enamored of Reich’s vision of sexual liberation he was even willing to take a second look at his theory of orgone energy. “Perhaps it’s time to reconsider all of Wilhelm Reich,” he concluded.

Four months later, on April 18, 1971, the New York Times returned to Reich, this time devoting a feature length article in its Sunday magazine to his thought. In “Wilhelm Reich: The Psychiatrist as Revolutionary,” David Elkind described student communards in Berlin pelting the police with soft-bound copies of Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Was it compassion or frugality that kept them from using hardbound copies?). Reich “was being resurrected everywhere in Europe as a hero/saint to students demanding social reform,” and “many American young people” were “now discovering that Reich is very much their kind of Revolutionary too.” This was the case because his message was more appealing to the American Left, who felt that they could bring down the state by sexual license without the sublimation urged by Freud or the political revolution urged by Marx.

Reich was a proponent of both child sexuality and the sexual subversion of the clergy. After years of trying in vain to debate the existence of God and getting nowhere in persuading people to become atheistic communists, Reich noticed a simple fact. If you changed the sexual behavior of idealistic young Catholics, in particular seminarians, in the direction of sexual liberation, including especially masturbation, then the idea of God simply evaporated from their minds and they defected from the Catholic Church, and the way to sexual revolution was clear. The key to bringing about revolution was changing sexual behavior, something he noticed in a communist girl whose behavior he discusses in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. The girl was in the habit of masturbating. When a woman brought up the idea of divine punishment she stopped masturbating. The opposite was also true, leading Reich to conclude that prayer and masturbation were mutually exclusive activities.

“The compulsion to pray,” Reich writes, “disappeared when she was made aware of the origin of her fear; this awareness made it possible for her to masturbate again without feelings of guilt. As improbable as the incident may appear, it is pregnant with meaning for sex economy. It shows how the mystical contagion of our youth could be prevented.”

The revolution which could bring about the overthrow of the political power of the Catholic Church was based, not on debate, but behavior: “We do not discuss the existence or nonexistence of God — we merely eliminate the sexual repressions and dissolve the infantile ties to the parents.”

In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich praised “the genuine sociologist who will reckon psychoanalysis’ comprehension of childhood sexuality as a highly significant revolutionary act.” He goes on to say that the Catholic Church is the main enemy of revolutionary liberation:

With the restriction and suppression of sexuality, the nature of human feeling changes; a sex-negating religion comes into being and gradually develops its own sex-political organization, the church with all its predecessors, the aim of which is nothing other than the eradication of man’s sexual desires and consequently of what little happiness there is on earth.

According to Reich: “Sexual inhibition prevents the average adolescent from thinking and feeling in a rational way.” Religion, according to Reich, is nothing more than inhibited sexuality:

Clinical experience shows incontestably that religious sentiments result from inhibited sexuality, that the source of mystical excitation is to be sought in inhibited excitation. The inescapable conclusion of that clear sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life must foredoom every form of mysticism; that, in other words, natural sexuality is the arch enemy of mystical religion. By carrying on an anti-sexual fight wherever it can, making it the core of its dogmas and putting it in the foreground of its mass propaganda, the church only attests to the correctness of this interpretation.

At another point Reich claims that: “If one succeeds in getting rid of the childhood fear of masturbation and as a result thereof genitality demands gratification, then intellectual insight and sexual gratification are wont to prevail.”

The first step to revolution is the promotion of child sexuality because “Sexual consciousness and mystical sentiments cannot coexist.” Any revolutionary who regards sexuality as a “private matter” is guilty of a “grave error” because

political reaction ... always rides on two tracks at the same time: on that of economic policies and that of “moral renewal.” Until now, the freedom movement has traveled on one track only. What is needed, therefore, is to master the sexual question on a social scale, to transform the shadowy side of personal life into social mental hygiene, to make the sexual question a part of the total campaign, instead of confining oneself to the question of population politics.

Sexual revolution is, to use Reich’s term, “social dynamite,” but it cannot work its destructive havoc if the revolutionaries are afraid of getting involved in child sexuality, or as Reich puts it: “if this work is to be carried out by revolutionaries who vie with the church in the asseveration and advocacy of moralistic mysticism, who view the answering of the sexual question as being beneath the ‘dignity of revolutionary ideology,’ who dismiss childhood masturbation as a ‘bourgeois invention,’” it won’t work.

In other words the true revolutionary must be willing to promote the sexualization of children. The revolutionary, according to Reich, must “awaken ... a desire in modern youth, a desire for a new philosophy and for scientific knowledge about the fight for sexual health, sexual consciousness, and freedom... It is the youth that matters! And they — this much is certain — are no longer accessible to a sex-negating ideology on a mass scale. This is our strong point.”

Reich’s emphasis on the promotion of sexual activity is too pervasive to be ignored:

In the main, revolutionary work with children can only be sex-economic work. Overcome your astonishment and listen patiently. Why is it that children in the pre-pubertal stage can be directed by sexual education in the best and easiest way?

This powerful weapon was never put to use in Germany. And it was those in charge of child organizations who offered the strongest resistance to the proposal that the usual individual treatment of sex education be turned into sex education on a mass scale.

If we could once succeed in engaging the sexual interests of children and adolescents on a mass scale, then reactionary contamination would be faced with a tremendous counterforce — and political reaction would be powerless.

...the mechanism that makes masses of people incapable of freedom is the social suppression of genital sexuality in small children, adolescents, and adults.

In order to bring about revolution, the true revolutionary, according to Reich, must promote sex with children. He must also promote the sexualization of the Catholic clergy because the Catholic Church is the main obstacle to the revolutionary take-over of society.

The case of clerics is especially difficult, for a convincing continuation of their profession, whose physical consequences they have felt on their own body, has become impossible. The only course open to many of them is to replace their priesthood with religious research or teaching.

Taken together Reich’s promotion of child sexuality and the sexualization of the Catholic clergy became the blueprint for the subversion of the Catholic Church. This campaign began in the wake of the Second Vatican Council but it reached its culmination in the priest abuse crisis of the first decade of the 21st century. Reich’s theories were put into practice during the sexual revolution of the ‘60s, but it would take decades before their full effect would be felt.

Putting the Theories into Practice

The Left put Reich’s theories into practice during the ‘60s. In an article which appeared in the Austrian magazine Die Aula in February 2001, a translation of which was reprinted in English in Culture Wars in May of that year, Hans Fingeller explained how the sexual revolutionaries “used children as experimental guinea pigs in the sensitive area of sexual development”:

Wilhelm Reich, a wacko follower of Sigmund Freud, proposed certain theses on how one might “liberate” the sexuality of children, which the “Spontis” and APO [Ausserparliamentarische Opposition] revolutionaries used as an excuse to carry out certain experiments with children... As a result of absorbing Reich’s theories, the ‘68 generation began experimenting on their own children, who were now being raised not in public or religious schools, but rather in “alternative day care centers” in which zealous comrades attempted to create out of this ‘human material” the “New Man” not by any biological process but by the deliberate application of Marxist ideology to the classroom.

In his book Linke Lebensluegen: eine Ueberfaellige Rechnung [Left-Wing Lies About Life: a Long-Overdue Reckoning] Klaus Rainer Roehl, who was then husband of RAF terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, goes into some detail about the child-rearing practices in Kommune 2, which specialized in raising children according to the Gospel of Wilhelm Reich.

The first goal of this “education” was to replace the attachment of the child to his parents with a relationship to a “relationship person” and as a result inhibit the formation of “the authoritarian family fixation.” These activities included pedophilic contact between adults and five year old girls, the details of which I will spare you. You can read the full account in the May 2001 issue of Culture Wars.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit later became a member of the European Parliament and the head of the Green Party in France, but during the ‘60s he was a teacher in one of these daycare centers. After his Comrade-in-Arms Joschka Fischer was named foreign minister of Germany, Cohn-Bendit granted an interview with ZDF, the second German TV channel, in which he was asked whether he was ever employed in one of the daycare centers.

“Yes, of course, of course,” he replied.

The ZDF reporter then asked him if he published the following text about his experiences there: “it often happened to me that the children would unzip my fly and begin to fondle me.”

At that point the eloquent European Parliamentarian had the look of a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.

After lots of hemming and hawing. Cohn-Bendit said that he wouldn’t recommend now what he recommended then because we know a lot more about child abuse.

Then, contradicting what he had written, Cohn-Bendit swore: “I never had anything to do with children.”

The ZDF reporter remained unconvinced: “It sounds so autobiographical. The descriptions are so personal, as if you had had sex with children.”

Cohn-Bendit replied, “Yeah, but that is not true. That is not true. The same thing goes for the parents... I’m not mad if people accuse me of that because it was no secret. I was only thinking that you have to look at it in the context of this time and this period. We’re talking about ‘68. That was then...”

Unlike the Catholic Church, which has apologized for the priests who have engaged in sexual activity with children, the Left in general and the Green Party specifically have never “sought ways to repair the damage that they have done to the children of that generation, who were treated like guinea pigs by being subjected to the abstruse ideas of the madman Wilhelm Reich.”

Klaus Rainer Roehl writes: “lt’s in this particular area [the sexualization of children] that his movement has the most to answer for. These evil or stupid deeds have created the biggest aftershock for the movement. It was here that it did its most damage.”

Writing around the same time as Hans Pingeller, Herbert Rauter claims that Cohn-Bendit’s experiences were “No isolated incident.” In fact in 1985 the Green Party, the political home of both Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer, advocated the elimination of laws criminalizing sexual relations with children, claiming “they prevent the free development of the personality.”

At the beginning of 1985, the Greens proposed legislation which would decriminalize the seduction of girls under sixteen years of age as well as homosexual contact with children and teenagers. Their reason? “The threat of punishment inhibits children from discovering their true sexual orientation.”

At their state convention in Luedenscheid in March 1985, the Greens of Nordrhein-Westfalen demanded that “nonviolent sexual activity” between children and adults never be considered as a reason for criminal prosecution. This sort of activity, to the contrary, “must be liberated from all restrictions which this society has placed on it.” The fact that this resolution was approved by a majority of those in attendance attests to the fact that they considered sexual relations between children and adults as a form of “social oppression, which places those who are interested in engaging in non-violent sex with children in the danger of having their entire lives destroyed from one day to the next if it were to become known that they had relations which all of us consider pleasant, productive, development-enhancing, in short, positive for both parties involved... Therefore, we demand that all criminal sanctions against such sexual activity be removed.”

In 1985 the Greens in Baden-Wuerttemberg attempted to weaken the criminal sanctions against this form of sexual activity. Consensual sex between adults and children should not be punished. Also in 1985, in their political platform (Auszuege aus dem Wahlprogram der Alternative Liste Berlin), the Greens claimed that “It is inhuman to approve sexual activity only for a certain age group and under certain conditions. If young people express the wish to have sex with people of the same age or with older people outside of the family, either because their homosexuality is not accepted by their parents or because they have pedophilic tendencies or for whatever reason, they must be afforded the possibility of acting on these desires.”

Let’s sum up. Christopher Hitchens, who has written a book extolling the virtues of atheism and another attacking Mother Teresa, planned to arrest Pope Benedict XVI when he arrived in England in September 2010, but no one has planned to arrest Daniel Cohn-Bendit any time soon. The Church has never condoned this sort of activity in any way, shape or form, much less in the way that the Green Party has, but no one is suing the Green Party for the sexual molestation that took place in the daycare centers of the ‘60s.

It turns out that, as stated earlier, the Vatican II Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, was off the mark when it claimed that the Church had nothing to fear from the modern world. Modernity has always been the enemy of the Church and it remains so today.

But worse than the machinations of her enemies, the Church has adopted the categories of its oppressors in the name of dialogue and as a result blinded itself to what was really going on during this crucial period of Church history. As a result, the Church is still trying to figure out what happened during the ‘60s.

A Case Study: The Priest Crisis

Let us take the priest crisis and use that as a case study, looking specifically at the situation in Ireland, the subject of pastoral letter by Pope Benedict XVI. In that letter addressed to the Church in Ireland and dated March 19, 2010, Pope Benedict claimed that in order to recover from the wound which a number of Irish priests had inflicted on the young people entrusted to their care

the Church in Ireland must first acknowledge before the Lord and before others the serious sins committed against defenseless children. Such an acknowledgement, accompanied by sincere sorrow for the damage caused to these victims and their families, must lead to a concerted effort to ensure the protection of children from similar crimes in the future.

The pope based his letter largely on the findings of the Murphy Report, which had been published on November 26, 2009 and found that “child abuse by clerics was widespread throughout the period under review.”

More crucial to a correct understanding of the Irish sexual abuse crisis, and similar events in other countries, is an understanding of the “period under review.” Most of the cases of abuse which the Church is now confronting took place in a period whose epicenter was roughly thirty or forty years ago. In order to understand the crisis then, we need to understand what Germans call the Zeitgeist, or the spirit of the times, the times being largely the ‘70s, when roughly ten years after the Second Vatican Council ended the Church was in the throes of its implementation.

Pope Benedict adverted to this time period in his letter:

Significant too was the tendency during this period, also on the part of priests and religious, to adopt ways of thinking and assessing secular realities without sufficient reference to the Gospel. The program of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council was sometimes misinterpreted and indeed, in the light of the profound social changes that were taking place, it was far from easy to know how best to implement it.

One of the main characteristics of this period, according to Pope Benedict, was

a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations. It is in this overall context that we must try to understand the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse, which has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of the faith and the loss of respect for the Church and her teachings.

The Murphy Report makes clear that the Church did not apply the remedies which Canon Law provides in the case of sexual abuse. Instead the diocese of Dublin set aside the penal process of canon law in favor of a purely “pastoral” approach which was, in the Commission’s view, “wholly ineffective as a means of controlling clerical child sexual abuse.” During the course of its investigations, the Commission learned that “In the mid-1970s there was no public, professional or Government perception either in Ireland or internationally that child sexual abuse constituted a societal problem or was a major risk to children.”

As one commentator put it:

The pages of the Murphy Report are littered with instances of carelessness, incompetence and moral cowardice. Over the past fifteen to twenty years they have been flailing about, trying to get to grips with a seemingly intractable problem. Far too often their response has been, at best, inadequate. A line from the Report which rings particularly true refers to a priest who had the impression of Archbishop Connell that he “came across as someone who really cared for the victim but had not “got a clue” about how to go about dealing with the reality of the problem.” Many of the other Bishops give a similar impression.

Pope Benedict was unsparing in his criticism of the priests who betrayed the trust of those whom they were called to serve and the bishops who were derelict in exercising proper oversight, but Paragraph 4 of his pastoral letter indicates that other forces were at work as well.

In recent decades the Church in your country has had to confront new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society. Fast-paced social change has occurred, often adversely affecting people’s traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values. All too often, the sacramental and devotional practices that sustain faith and enable it to grow, such as frequent confession, daily prayer and annual retreats were neglected. Only by examining carefully the many elements that gave rise to the present crisis can a clear-sighted diagnosis of its causes be undertaken and effective remedies be found.

Commenting on Pope Benedict’s letter in a symposium at Chiesa.com, Sandro Magister claimed that “Benedict XVI has given the Catholics of Ireland an order never before given by a pope of the modern era to an entire national Church... He told them not only to bring the guilty before the canonical and civil courts, but to put themselves collectively in a state of penance and purification ... in a public form, before the eyes of all, even the most implacable and mocking adversaries,” but the point of the article was, once again, the Zeitgeist. As the title of Magister’s article in La Repubblica indicated, “Genesis of Crime: the Revolution of the 1960s,” the cause of this crime was the sexual revolution of the ‘60s, an event which was a true revolution and which brought about the sexualization of traditional Catholic cultures, which brought with it the sexualization of the clergy as well.

Taking part in the same symposium, Angelo Cardinal Bagnasco saw “strategies of generalized discredit” behind the news reports as well as more than a little hypocrisy. The media who were calling for the pope’s resignation were the same media which had spent decades undermining sexual morality:

In reality, we must all question ourselves, without any more alibis, about a culture that in our time reigns pampered and uncontested, and tends progressively to fray the connective tissue of society as a whole, perhaps even mocking those who try to resist and to oppose it: the attitude, that is, of those who cultivate absolute autonomy from the criteria of moral judgment and convey as good and alluring behaviors that are designed according to individual desires and even unbridled instincts. But the exaggeration of sexuality disconnected from its anthropological significance, all-encompassing hedonism, and a relativism that does not admit limits or exceptions, do great harm because they are specious and sometimes so pervasive as to escape notice.

Cardinal Ruini called the crisis in Ireland “part of a strategy that has been underway for centuries” and went on to claim that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had “elaborated” this strategy “with his flair for detail.”

According to Nietzsche, the decisive attack on Christianity cannot be brought on the level of truth, but on that of Christian ethics, which he saw as the enemy of the joy of living. And so I would like to ask those who decry scandals of pedophilia mostly when they involve the Catholic Church, perhaps bringing into question priestly celibacy: would it not be more honest and realistic to recognize that certainly these and other deviations related to sexuality accompany the entire history of the human race, but also that in our time these deviations are further stimulated by the much ballyhooed ‘sexual liberation.’

When the exaltation of sexuality pervades every part of life and when autonomy from any moral criterion is claimed for the sexual instinct, it becomes difficult to explain that certain abuses are absolutely to be condemned. In reality, human sexuality from the start is not simply instinctual, it is not the same as that of the other animals. It is, like all of man, a sexuality ‘mixed’ with reason and morality, which can be lived humanly, and truly bring happiness, only if it is lived this way.

Once again the key to understanding the abuse crisis is understanding “the period under review,” which is to say the aftermath of the sexual revolution of the ‘60s. Professor of sociology Massimo Introvigne, president of CESNUR, the Center for the Studies on New Religion, claimed that the attack on the Church began in earnest during “what the English and the Americans call ‘the ‘60s,’ and the Italians, concentrating on the emblematic year of 1968 [call] ‘il Sessantotto.’” This era, according to Professor Introvigne, “increasingly appears as a time of profound disturbances of customs, with crucial and lasting effects on religion.”

Benedict XVI in his letter showed that he was aware of the fact that there was in the 1960s an authentic revolution — no less important than the Protestant Reformation or the French Revolution — that was “fast-paced” and dealt a tremendous blow to “traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values.”

In the Catholic Church there was not a sufficient awareness of the scope of this revolution. In this climate, certainly not all priests who were insufficiently formed or infected by the climate following the ‘60s and not even a significant percentage of them, became pedophiles. But the study of the revolution of the 1960s and of 1968 is crucial to understanding what happened afterward, including pedophilia. And to finding real remedies. If this revolution, unlike those before it, is moral and spiritual and touches the interiority of man, it is only from the restoration of morality, of the spiritual life, and of comprehensive truth about the human person that the remedies can ultimately come.

What this and similar commentary makes clear is that talking about the ‘60s and understanding the ‘60s are two different things. What all of the critiques have in common is an inadequate understanding of what happened in the ‘60s and, more importantly, what happened in the aftermath of the sexual revolution, a period which coincided with the implementation of the Second Vatican Council.

Cardinal Ruini mentioned Nietzsche, who was certainly a villain, but if his Eminence was interested in talking about a campaign of revolution, of “a strategy that has been underway for centuries,” and sexualization of the culture for political purposes, he would have done better to begin with the Marquis de Sade.

Similarly, Professor Invigne claims

that a single factor cannot explain a revolution of this magnitude. The economic boom and feminism play a part, but also more strictly cultural aspects both outside the churches and Christian communities (the encounter between psychoanalysis and Marxism) and inside them (the ‘new theologies’).

But he doesn’t mention Wilhelm Reich, the man who created the term “Sexual Revolution” and who also combined psychoanalysis and Marxism to create a weapon specifically targeted against the Catholic Church, and even more specifically promoted the sexual corruption of the clergy as the best way of reducing the Church’s political power.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sensitivity Training and Sexual Engineering

Carl Rogers and the IHM Nuns

During the summer of 1966, at the end of the Second Vatican Council and the beginning of the sexual revolution, the world seemed alive to new sexual possibilities, especially for Catholic nuns and priests, many of whom confidently expected that the Catholic Church’s discipline on celibacy was about to be lifted. Joining them in a chorus of mute anticipation were the Catholic laity, who were just as confident in their expectation that the ban on artificial birth control would be lifted. Pope Paul VI had appointed a layman-staffed advisory board and it was assumed — correctly, it turns out — that they would vote to overturn the Church’s long-standing ban on contraception, which had been reaffirmed as recently as thirty years before in Pius XI’s encyclical Casti Connubii. Because of Pope John XXIII, President John F. Kennedy, and the Vatican Council, Catholics had become the focus of so much media attention that they failed to see distortions in the mirror which the media, dominated by alumni of the OSS and other psychological warfare operations, held up to their collective face. They failed to understand how seriously malformed their opinions were becoming at the hands of people like Xavier Rhynne and Michael Novak and other media enthusiasts who felt to a man that the long reign of anti-Catholic bigotry in the United States had come to an end and that all the Church needed to do to create its own happy ending was join hands with the liberal Zeitgeist, as reported in places like Time and the New Yorker, drop a few medieval sexual prohibitions, and walk off into the sunset.

In keeping with the spirit of that age, during the summer of 1966, the Immaculate Heart nuns of Los Angeles, California, invited a New York psychiatrist to their retreat house in Montecito to conduct an encounter workshop, a session of truth-telling and ice-breaking group exercises that broke down social inhibition, fostered an illusory sense of intimacy, and opened the way for the engineering of consent through small group peer pressure. The nuns liked encounter groups so much that a year later the psychologist Carl Rogers and his associates began something they called the Education Innovation Project with the entire order and all of the schools it ran for the archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Rogers had become famous in 1961 with the publication of his book On Becoming a Person. He along with Abraham Maslow, whose book Toward a Psychology of Being came out in 1962, had become the two leading proponents of what came to be known as humanistic or third force psychology. The third force referred to a therapy that was based on both Freud and J. B. Watson but was more “client centered.” In Rogerian therapy, the client solved his own problems with minimal interference from his therapist guide, who gave little more than non-committal answers as a way of guiding the patient to truths that the client knew but chose not to see. Another name for this therapy was non-directive counselling. A creation of the early 1940s, it had been proposed, according to the formulation of Rogers’ assistant W. R. Coulson, “as a humane replacement for behaviorism in the laboratory and Freudian psychoanalysis in the clinic.”

In 1965 Carl Rogers began circulating a paper entitled “The Process of the Basic Encounter Group” to some religious orders in the Los Angeles area. The Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary found his ideas intriguing. This should not be surprising because the California-based IHM nuns had already established the reputation of being “innovative.” In the early ‘60s, Sister Aloyse, the order’s superior, had brought in the Dutch psychologist-priest Adrian van Kaam for retreat exercises during which “all community rules were suspended.” The results this sort of innovation were predictable. After allowing the psychologists in, the nuns became aware of “how dictatorial superiors were and in turn how dependent, submissive and helpless nuns were when it came to working with the outside world.” By the spring of 1965, James Francis Cardinal McIntyre, archbishop of the archdiocese of Los Angeles, had become upset at the large number of Immaculate Heart nuns who had asked to be dispensed from their vows. Large, as time would show, was a relative term. Soon the number of nuns asking to be laicized would turn into a flood, and the sensitivity training which Carl Rogers would unleash on the order under the auspices of the Education Innovation Project would play a major role in their leaving. By the time the experiment was over, the order would cease to exist, leaving subsequent generations to puzzle over an incident which had become a classic instance of renewal gone wrong in the aftermath of Vatican II.

With the benefit of hindsight, anyone who read Rogers’s paper should have been aware of this possibility from the beginning. In a version of that paper which appeared in the July 1969 issue of Psychology Today, entitled “Community: The Group Comes of Age,” Rogers explained that in mixed intensive workshops positive and warm, loving feelings frequently develop between members of the encounter group and, naturally enough, these feelings sometimes occur between men and women. Inevitably, some of these feelings have a sexual component and this can be a matter of great concern to the participants and ... a profound threat to their spouses. Or to their religious vows, Rogers might have added.

Around the time that Rogers was circulating “Involvement in the Basic Encounter,” a draft of a paper published two years later as “The Process of the Basic Encounter Group” among the Immaculate Heart nuns in 1965, the Vatican Council came to a close. A close reading of the pertinent documents shows they reaffirmed Catholic tradition. But at that time close readings had been eschewed in favor of readings in keeping with the spirit of Vatican II, which seemed eager to second whatever the secular Zeitgeist was proposing. On September 2, 1966, Pope Paul VI implemented the earlier conciliar decree on religious life, Perfectae Caritatis, by issuing a Motu Proprio in which he urged all religious “to examine and renew their way of life and towards that end to engage in wide-ranging experimentation.” The pope added the following caveat: “provided that the purpose, nature and character of the institute are safeguarded.” In keeping with the spirit of the times, the caveat was all but universally ignored. In fact, those most eager to experiment were those also most likely to ignore it. The IHM sisters were among the first to respond, and within six weeks, the pontiff’s letter had been circulated among the 560 members of the community. A number of commissions were appointed to study carefully all aspects of their religious commitment.

Two Case Studies: Jean Cordova and Sister Mary Benjamin

Jean Cordova had decided to become an Immaculate Heart nun. Cordova graduated from high school in the spring of 1966, and on a sunny September 6, 1966 she and four of her nine brothers and sisters drove up to the novitiate in Santa Barbara where she was to begin her life as a nun.

On January 1, 1967, Jean Cordova was called into the mother superior’s office and told that she and her fellow novices were being sent to live in the “real world,” which in this instance meant a building surrounded by chain-link fence and barbed wire in downtown Los Angeles near skid row, where Cordova would lie awake at night watching the pulsing red light on top of Los Angeles city hall and wonder what had happened to her and the convent she had chosen in lieu of this “real world.” Cordova arrived at the novitiate expecting something different from what she eventually got. Her bitterness at what amounted to bait and switch tactics (even if perpetrated inadvertently) was still palpable twenty years later.

They promised me monastic robes, glorious Latin liturgy, the protection of the three sacred vows, the peace of saints in a quiet cell, the sisterhood of a holy family. But I entered religious life the year John XXIII [sic] was taking it apart: 1966. The fathers of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church were sitting at the Vatican Council destroying in the name of CHANGE, my dreams. Delete Latin ritual. Dump the habit. Damn holy obedience. Send nuns and priests out into the REAL world. If I had wanted the real world, I’d have stayed in it.

As part of her entry into the real world, Cordova was enrolled at Immaculate Heart College, the flagship school of the order, where she was subjected to the Education Innovation Project first-hand through sensitivity training and second-hand through the teachers who had also taken the sensitivity training.

In their enthusiasm for Rogers’s encounter groups, the older sisters seem to have missed the fact that students like Jean Cordova found the whole experience more troubling than exhilarating. “A lot of times,” wrote one of Cordova’s fellow students, “I’ve heard that faculty felt they were being forced ... to say things they didn’t want to say; I myself feel very uncomfortable about being shut in with people who break down and say things I feel I shouldn’t have heard. I think it creates a kind of embarrassment, which would seem to be a hindrance in relationships rather than a help. Still I do feel that I’ve gained a lot of insight into other peoples’ behavior.” Another student was even more troubled. “I felt at a loss today in that encounter group: very naked, as though everyone knows too much about me.”

Before long, many of the nuns started to feel naked as well, mainly because as a result of the loosening of controls in the order in the name of California-style openness, they were taking off their clothes and having sex with other nuns. Instead of doing a close reading of Rogers’s paper on groups, especially the passage about how encounter groups often led to “feelings which have a sexual component” and acting according to procedures consonant with the vow of chastity, the Immaculate Heart nuns, in the name of openness and innovation, decided that they had to learn the same lesson about human passion in the expensive school of experience. In the name of openness, religious asceticism vanished from convent life. Cordova stopped going to Mass at 6:30 in the morning because nuns weren’t “required” to go to Mass anymore. As religious practice evaporated from their lives, the nuns turned to each other for support. Particular friendships flourished, and in the atmosphere of the times, some of these friendships inevitably turned sexual. This, of course, meant that life in the convent became both mean-spirited and chaotic. During the spring of 1967, Cordova noticed that many of the nuns weren’t going to Mass anymore. This meant the beginning of

lots of particular friendships, a whole sub-culture of in-group and out-group, who they were and how they did it and how you could just lie your way out of anything. To a lonely postulant in a miserable friendless world, it was an absurd outrage. I fell out of love with Jesus and the IHMs, who betrayed and mocked my innocence... I was sinking in the quagmire of broken dreams... All I have ever wanted to be was a nun. Now I was, and it was hell.

Jean Cordova found that she couldn’t talk to her parents about changes, probably because her parents were as bewildered by the unprecedented sequence of events as she was. “Mom was a sheltered, upper class convent raised Irish Catholic from Queens, Long Island, who probably first read about birth control in the LA Times between her ninth and tenth kid.” In the bewildering atmosphere of the up-dated chaotic convent, where the nuns were told to be open to their feelings in the encounter groups they were attending, Cordova found solace in sexual contact with one of the other nuns. Both embittered and sexualized by her experience in the convent, Cordova converted to lesbian activism with the same fervor which she offered to the pre-conciliar Church.

I harnessed my anger into love for gays as an oppressed people. My bitterness demands the straight world to move over and accept our rights. I have learned that my anger takes me where others are afraid to go and that outrage is good in the eyes of whatever Higher Power gives us righteous, if misguided, anger to protect us.

Other IHM nuns had similar experiences. Sister Mary Benjamin, like Jean Cordova, was driven to the IHM novitiate by her large Catholic family, who piled out of the station wagon “like a baseball team” when they arrived there in 1962. Like Jean Cordova, Sister Mary Benjamin was enrolled as a student at Immaculate Heart College, where four years later, during the summer of 1966, she was “introduced to sensitivity training, the order’s first venture into the human potential movement.” In her encounter group, Sister Mary met Eva, “a heavy, dark-skinned women with deep brown eyes and black hair.” Given the spirit of the times, the alchemy of this relationship was just as predictable as that which seduced Jean Cordova: “The order no longer prohibited particular friendships,” Sister Mary recounted matter of factly, “so the contact turned sexual.” Sister Mary sought counsel from a priest, but apparently he had been infected by the spirit of the times as well and “refused to pass judgment on my actions. He said it was up to me to decide if they were right or wrong. He opened a door, and I walked through, realizing I was on my own.” When Sister Mary told Eva that she was “worried that I had a terrible crush on her,” Eva responded by saying, “Great! Enjoy it!”

Sister Mary’s relationship with Eva turned out to be less than enjoyable, however. After the friendship became sexualized, a painful breakup ensued, which in turn precipitated a break with the Catholic Church. Sister Mary, like most lesbians, was then cast adrift on a sea of transient relationships, and one relationship which proved just as transient was her relationship with the Catholic Church. “In loving Eva,” she wrote, “I was growing in a direction at odds with convent goals of obedience and service to the Church. I began to make decisions, not out of guilt, but according to the voice of my intuition and the wisdom of my body. I began to see the Church more objectively. It was run men, not God. My allegiance to the Church was no longer fate but choice.”

Actually, if Sister Mary had been reading Wilhelm Reich, she would have realized that once she started acting on her illicit sexual impulses, her break with the Church was more fate than choice. Once she began acting out her lesbian impulses, her break with the Church was inevitable. Because she was subsequently dragooned into feminism, Sister Mary simply lacked the intellectual categories to understand what had happened to her. Everything was now a question of “liberation” from oppression, and since the culture she embraced had hundreds of years of experience in portraying convent life as a form of oppression, it is not surprising that she would see matters that way too. If there were sinister forces at work in precipitating Sister Mary’s departure from the convent and the Catholic faith, the lesbianism which replaced her Catholicism as the religious center of her life precluded any clear understanding of them. The categories of lesbian politics took control of her mind and precluded any other explanation of what had happened to her.

The Work of Abraham Maslow

Four years before Carl Rogers began introducing sensitivity training to the Immaculate Heart nuns in Los Angeles, Abraham Maslow was doing similar work on another group of nuns at the other end of the country. On April 17, 1962 Maslow gave a lecture to a group of nuns at Sacred Heart College in Massachusetts. Afterwards he noted in his diary that his talk had been very “successful,” but he found this fact troubling. “They shouldn’t applaud me,” he continued, “they should attack. If they were fully aware of what I was doing, they would [attack].” And why should they have attacked him?

Maslow was aware that encounter groups were toxic for Catholics in general and especially toxic for Catholic religious. Anyone who promoted encounter groups among Catholics was promoting ipso facto their demise as Catholics, even if he did so in the name of liberation and with that as his intent. For the liberal Jew or Protestant, the nun was the textbook case of someone in need of “liberation” and in the context of Catholic religious life and the vows upon which it was based, liberation could only mean annihilation. On February 25, 1967, Maslow wrote in his diary, “Maybe morons need rules, dogmas, ceremonies, etc.” He then made a note to order a book entitled Life Among the Lowbrows for the Brandeis library. He may have ordered it because the author of that book noted in it that “feeble-minded clients behaved much better and felt better being Catholic and following all the rules.” Since the nuns weren’t feebleminded, this meant that bringing “self-actualization” to the nuns meant destroying their commitment to their vows and the Catholic Church. Perhaps this is why Maslow felt they shouldn’t have applauded his talk in 1962. Maslow had spent time at the National Training Laboratories’ headquarters in Bethel, Maine, where encounter groups, with the help of subsidies from the Office of Naval Research, had been created; he knew that they were funded as a form psychological warfare, and he had an inkling of the effect they would have on nuns, but it was up to his colleague Carl Rogers to do the actual experiment.

“I guess what I’m trying to say here,” Maslow wrote in his journal in 1965, the same year that Carl Rogers began circulating his paper on the psychology of small group encounter among the IHM nuns and around the same time that the nuns started to leave the convent,

is that these interpersonal therapeutic growth-fostering relationships of all kinds which rest on intimacy, on honesty, on self-disclosure, on becoming sensitively aware of one’s self — and thereby of responsibility for feeding back one’s impression of others, etc. — that these are profoundly revolutionary devices, in the strict sense of the word — that is, of shifting the whole direction of a society in a more preferred direction. As a matter of fact, it might be revolutionary in another sense if something like this were done very widely. I think the whole culture would change within a decade and everything in it.

What was true for the culture was a fortiori true of religious orders in the Catholic Church. The whole culture did change, as a matter of fact, after implementation of encounter groups became widespread, but nowhere was the change as dramatic as in the Catholic Church, where it literally destroyed the orders which experimented with it. After making contact with their inner selves, the nuns all wanted to leave their orders and have sex, although not always in that order. “A sign of this potency,” Rogers’s assistant W. R. Coulson wrote some thirty years later,

was the conversions that followed Rogers’ workshops. A Catholic priest took part in a five-day workshop in the 1960s, then left the priesthood to study psychology with Rogers, who had been his group facilitator. It happened repeatedly. Of the workshop that converted him, the priest wrote that he began somewhat skeptically, but “by Wednesday ... something new and intriguing and intoxicating as well as frightening has become real all around me... [It] seemed like a beautiful birth to a new existence... I had not known how unaware I was of my deepest feelings nor how valuable they might be to other people... Never in my life before that group experience had I experienced ‘me’ so intensely.”

The priest may not have noticed it, but both Maslow and Rogers were involved in the sexual engineering of behavior. Catholic religious, who were expected to lead ascetic lives While at the same time being told that love was the reason for their asceticism, were now experiencing the “love” they had always talked about in previously abstract and rarefied terms, and they were for the most part unhinged by the experience. The effectiveness of the encounter group was based on the deliberate violation of the sexual inhibitions which made everyday life possible. When the inhibitions dropped, the emotion which flooded in to fill the vacuum seemed a lot like the love which Christians were supposed to practice on their neighbors, when in point of fact it was more akin to unfettered libido, which could now be used by the facilitator as the energy which brought about the social engineering they desired.

The Introduction to a 2006 Linacre Institute book by Patrick Guinan, After Asceticism: Sex, Prayer and Deviant Priests, described the devastating effects that the systematic implementation of these revolutionary techniques would have on religious life in the United States. What we’re talking about here is the wholesale abandonment of ascetical practice among the clergy:

What changed between the first and second halves of the twentieth century were not the management policies on sex abuse and secrecy at all costs — these remained a constant throughout — nor do we have evidence to show that the personality features of seminarians or priests changed in any fundamental way that would account for the nature and the magnitude of the crisis — in its early stages at least ... the core change over the course of the twentieth century was one of purpose or allegiance — leaving behind ascetical discipline, having disdain for religious tradition, and adopting the therapeutic mentality, a popular belief that fulfillment of the human person springs from emotional desire in a quest for self-definition, or self-actualization, without regard to an objective philosophical, religious or moral truth. Further, the therapeutic mentality views sin as a social concern and discourages loyalty to religious authority; it is profoundly anti-ascetical.

Allegiance to the therapeutic mentality has dislodged ascetical habits and manners, and it now holds sway over the attitudes of clergy, just as it strengthened its materialist grip on western societies for nearly a century. Mental health experts and educators, as the main purveyors of the therapeutic mentality, know little of the spiritual life and are ignorant of ascetical discipline. Nevertheless, in the name of science, and as the prime representatives of the educated elite, they advocated a liberalization of sexual standards before the sexual scandal in the Church, and then attempted to advise the bishops and to treat problem priests as the crisis took form. Bishops, who have oversight of the parish priests and seminaries, and who have been at the center of the crisis management, do not speak much, if at all, about ascetical discipline. Priests give few indications that they know or care about ascetical discipline. But most clergy seemed well versed in language of the therapeutic mentality. Predictably, when the storm surge in pagan sexuality began to overwhelm the natural defenses of the clergy in the 1950s and 1960s, those without the spiritual anchor of ascetical discipline were set adrift — perpetrators as well as their managers. As the initial storm surge receded, a spawn of the therapeutic mentality remained in the tidal pools.

Fr. Eugene Kennedy and the Sexual Corruption of the American Clergy

The man who introduced these ideas into the Church and therefore the man most responsible for the sexual corruption of the American clergy was the psychologist and former Maryknoll priest Eugene Kennedy. In 1972 then Father Kennedy was commissioned by the United States Catholic bishops do a survey of American priests. Kennedy was a disciple of Erik Erikson, a/k/a, Erik Salomonsen, Erik Homburger, a Jewish psychiatrist who, like Wilhelm Reich, was deeply influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud. Central to the thinking of both men was the idea that sexual repression was psychologically damaging, a theory totally at odds with the Catholic tradition of a celibate clergy.

In addition to Freud’s theory of sexual repression, Kennedy also imported Erikson’s theory of ego development, according to which each person went through eight developmental stages:

1) the first year of life, 2) through the second year, 3) from age three to six, 4) from age of six to puberty, 5) adolescence, 6) early adulthood, 7) young and middle adulthood, and 8) later adulthood. Each stage had to be successfully worked through for normal development. Stage six required sexual intimacy and expression.

According to the teaching of the Catholic Church, “Chastity is an aspect of temperance which inclines a person to deliberately forego sexual relations for ascetical purposes.” According to Freud and Erickson, any such renunciation in the name of religion, which both men considered a dangerous illusion, “would be abnormal and possibly pathologic.”

When Kennedy’s survey came out in book form as The Catholic Priest in the United States: Psychological Investigations (1972), the results were a foregone conclusion, given the premises with which he began his study. Of the 271 priests surveyed, Kennedy found that only 19 (or 7 percent) could be termed psychologically “developed.” The overwhelming majority of American priests were “not developed,” because they had not engaged in sexual activity.

The standard against which the priests were judged was Erickson’s development scale. Because the majority of priests were underdeveloped, they remained in Stage Six or the early adult stage, because in order to get beyond Stage Six, the priests would have to engage in “sexual intimacy.”

Guinan claims that Kennedy’s study contributed to the sexual abuse crisis by giving the impression that celibacy was nothing more than repression, and that repression was unhealthy:

If repression is portrayed as psychologically unhealthy, it can be argued that Kennedy’s Psychological Investigations and its flawed psychology gave support and justification to beliefs that resulted in the sex abuse of minors. Erickson’s insistence that sexual intimacy was essential to successfully traverse developmental stage six, justified sexual acting out in general, but it also justified sexual activity with predominantly male minors, who because of their proximity were the targets of abusive priests.

Guinan goes on to blame Kennedy for the current priest scandals:

When Psychological Investigations was published in 1972, it relied on Erickson’s and Freud’s materialist psychology, which posited unrestrained sexual behavior as inevitable and healthy. Seminary formation programs as well as individual priests accepted Kennedy uncritically and in an effort to move beyond Stage Six and become normal through sexual intimacy began acting out sexually. Since priests, many of whom were homosexually inclined, had ready access to adolescent males, this vulnerable group of victims was disproportionately targeted. While some abusers were implicated in serial rapes many involved only isolated cases. Nonetheless most involved coercion and all were breaches of both the sixth and ninth commandments as well as the vow of chastity. The scandal, now involving hundreds of cases, has resulted in significant damage to efforts at evangelization in the United States, to say nothing of the staggering financial losses.

In 1976 the revolution that Reich had predicted as resulting from the sexualization of the clergy came out into the open. The inaugural event was a celebration of the bicentennial of America known as the Call to Action Conference. The revolution was led by the sexualized clergy. Call to Action was the Catholic equivalent of the tennis court oaths. The Revolution was now out in the open. The vector of revolutionary transmission was the Church’s educational system.

Two of the participants at the Call to Action conference were Dr. & Mrs. John Krejci. In 1996 both Dr. & Mrs. Krejci were excommunicated by Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz, ordinary of the diocese for Lincoln, Nebraska, for belonging to an anti-Catholic organization, namely Call to Action. During the 1960s Professor John Krejci was Fr. John Krejci, a priest who was working on his doctorate in theology and Mrs. Krejci was a nun by the name of Jean Gettelfinger. Mr. & Mrs. Krejci met at Notre Dame. Like many who attended that university, Fr. Krejci and Sr. Gettelfinger got married, and when they did they left their respective religious orders.

The real problem lay with the clergy who felt no reason to leave because they were homosexual. Once the heterosexuals ran off and got married, the Church was left with a serious homosexual problem. Germain Grisez says most “abuse” consists in seduction by homosexual priests:

The bishops and those who speak for them should acknowledge honestly that most clerical sex crimes that have come to light have been seductions of adolescents and young men by homosexual priests. Because Jesus entrusts bishops to oversee the pastoral care of souls, those bishops who failed to do all that they could and should have done to prevent or limit a priest’s crimes ought to ponder very carefully the moral and spiritual nature and gravity of their own omissions and actions. Having done that, those bishops should re-examine their consciences, repent any sins they previously overlooked, and begin to do what they can and should do by way of restitution (“Assessing Responsibility for the Scandal,” bishopaccountability.org, April 2002).

The Church was then denied the ability to solve its homosexual problem because the dominant culture that was leveling the accusations refused to admit that homosexuality was a problem at all, much less the problem that was tearing the Church apart. The issue is complicated by the hypocrisy and double standards of the institutions that were acting as judge, jury and executioner in the sex abuse scandals. Throughout the period, the media continued making contradictory demands on the Church. On the one hand, the media, especially during the ‘70s, were claiming that we should all act on our sexual impulses whether they are congruent with the moral law or not. Thirty years later, the same institutions were claiming that certain people should be punished for doing what they were told to do.

The media were claiming that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, ignoring the fact that 80 percent of the offenses which have been actually proven involve homosexual behavior between clergy and victims over the age of puberty. Because the campaign against the Church coincided in time with a campaign by the same group of people to legitimize homosexuality, the Church was denied any effective way of defending itself against the sexual fifth column which had established itself in the Church in the wake of the implementation of Vatican II.

The Boston Pedophilia Case and The Vagina Monologues

When it came to media concern about sex scandals in the Church, it was increasingly difficult to separate the arsonists from the fire department. As the late Tom Herron wrote in Culture Wars:

Father Shanley of Boston used to be the toast of the award winning Boston Globe back in the early ‘70s when he was a long-haired street priest who worked with young people, spoke against Catholic moral teachings and was a known early founder of NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association). Thirty years later, the same newspaper, the Boston Globe, was instrumental in bringing him back from retirement in California to face trial and imprisonment in Massachusetts.

Pedophilia plays a crucial role in this system of control through appetite. It is the sexual sin which excuses all other sexual sins. “I may be bad,” says the homosexual propagandist in his more candid secret moments, “but I’m not a pedophile.” The woman who has had an abortion is urged on by the culture to say the same thing. Pedophilia’s significance derives from the fact that it involves children. And its effect can be noted in the hysteria involving child molestation at daycare centers. Daycare is just the tip of the guilt iceberg which involves children and sex, it goes down through that to contraception and beyond that all the way to abortion. Those who feel guilt with regard to children because they have either neglected or killed them, and those who feel guilt because of their sexual sins, can find consolation in the fact that they are, at least, not pedophiles. When the Catholic Church, the only institution in the world which maintains the complete set of sexual standards, can be implicated in this sin, those same people feel even better. The major reminder of sexual dereliction has been exposed as hypocritical. They, meaning priests, are all perverts, they are no better than we are, etc. etc. In other words, I feel better already.

That is the psychological basis of the Boston pedophile media assault, which turned out to be a classic instance of Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church. Demonization was followed by calls for reform by “concerned Catholics” like Andrew Sullivan and William F. Buckley and Anna Quindlen, who all predictably called for measures that were tantamount to pouring gasoline on the fire, by, in other words, lowering the moral standards even further. When the Vatican in response to the pedophile crisis said that homosexuals should not be ordained as priests, the Boston Globe criticized it for being homophobic and intolerant. “People with these inclinations just cannot be ordained,” said Joaquin Navarro-Valls in an interview in the New York Times. The fact that this statement unleashed a storm of protests exposes the hidden agenda behind all of the indignation against homosexual pedophilia.

David Clohessy of St. Louis, national director of the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests, called the Vatican reply, “a narrow, misguided statement.” In other words, it’s okay for priests to engage in homosexual behavior if the object of their affections is over the age of consent. If this were to occur with a young man the day before his eighteenth birthday, it would be a capital offense. Does anyone take this double standard seriously? The answer is yes, the people who do are those orchestrating the campaign against the Catholic Church. The nature of this Kulturkampf becomes apparent by way of comparison. When Michael Jackson was accused of pedophilia, did anyone call for sweeping changes in the music industry? Did William F. Buckley write columns calling for the president of Sony to resign?

The same campaign is still going on. The fire department is still rushing to the scene to pour gasoline on the fire. Just one example is the way The Vagina Monologues got performed at Notre Dame University. The Vagina Monologues, as those who have read the articles on it in Culture Wars know, is agitprop for lesbianism and masturbation. It also features a graphic description of the lesbian seduction of a minor, which is excused precisely because a lesbian is doing the molesting. Did the moral fire department, the designated Catholics, Sullivan et al, object to the performance of The Vagina Monologues at Notre Dame or Holy Cross or Georgetown? No, they did not. In fact they defend the very incitation to passion that leads people with weird appetites to say yes to them by appealing to academic freedom and all of the other clichés used to break down moral standards. Then when someone acts out what he has seen, the media organize a lynch mob and demand more changes that will punish the victims, and more sexual liberation, more saying yes to appetite, to insure that new victims will appear in due time to legitimate their next campaign against the defenders of moral order. The fire department is run by arsonists.

Notre Dame University defended the performance of the play precisely on the grounds of academic freedom; the bishop did nothing to contradict this undermining of morals, and in fact, in a scenario which has by now become familiar, those who attempted to defend the moral standard got punished. When Joe Scheidler, the prolife activist and Notre Dame alumnus, came down from Chicago to protest the performance of The Vagina Monologues, the university called the police and threatened to arrest him.

The Boston pedophilia case was, in other words, a classic instance of media driven Kulturkampf. But that does not let the Church off the hook. The Church is culpable precisely because it has provided such feckless and ineffective resistance to the dominant culture of control through appetite. It is culpable because it has been positively avid to implement the directives of the arsonists on the fire department.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Battle for the Media

The Early Days

The story began in the 1880s. Revolutionary fervor in Russia culminated in the 1881 assassination of the Czar. That, in turn, led to the pogroms of the 1880s, and the pogroms, in turn, led to massive Jewish migration to America. Roughly two million Jews left Russia and emigrated to the United States. No other group of immigrants would have a comparable impact on American culture. Frozen out of established industries, the Jews took up trades no one else was interested in like scrap metal and furs or new technologies that the WASP ruling class hadn’t had time to control. One of those technologies was the moving picture, and in it, Jewish revolutionaries would find the prime example of the “mass situation” which Wilhelm Reich, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, said was necessary to destabilize morals. Hollywood became the fulfillment of Reich’s dream: mass situation leading to the corruption of morals and therefore, more sophisticated control.

When the Jews began to arrive, America was Protestant. By the end of the 20th century America had become Jewish, even if Jews made up less than two percent of the total population of the United States.

By the 1920s, America’s Protestant majority realized that the Jews had brought along with them the bad habits that had caused conflict in Russia. As in Russia, Jewish involvement in alcohol production was a big issue. Henry Ford articulated nativist Protestant concerns in his four volume set of pamphlets, The International Jew (1920-1922), blaming Jews for making “nigger gin,” cheap and often toxic liquor whose “labels bore lascivious suggestions and were decorated with highly indecent portraiture of white women,” which “spurred certain Negroes on to ... nameless crime.”

In America cultural warfare over obscenity began in earnest during the 1920s, when the motion picture began to have more and more impact on American cultural mores. The first to take up the cry against Hollywood were the Protestant nativists in general and cultural icons like Henry Ford in particular. Ford saw the issue in ethnic terms. Hollywood, he claimed in The International Jew “was a Jewish enterprise from the start.” The Jews had stolen Thomas Edison’s invention of the movie projector and were using it to corrupt the morals of the American people.

In his book Bookleggers and Smuthounds: the Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 (1999), Professor Jay Gertzmann of the University of Pennsylvania, corroborates Ford’s claim:

The ethnic flavor of erotica distribution still exists, although, except for extreme right-wing hate groups, critics of sexual explicitness do not exploit it. The main distributors of erotica are Jewish. In The International Jew, Henry Ford complained about the takeover of Broadway theater. But the Jews, he continued, never had “to drive the Gentiles out of” the film industry, “because the Gentiles never had a chance to get in it.” In 1924, Ford claimed that “the motion picture influence of the United States, of the whole world, is exclusively under the control, moral and financial, of the Jewish manipulation of the public mind.”

In addition to the obvious issue of increasing nudity and sexual innuendo on the screen during the pre-Code 1920s, Hollywood subjected “Christian clergymen ... to all sorts of misrepresentation, from the comic to the criminal.” The purpose of this misrepresentation, which Ford saw as “distinctly Jewish,” was to “to break down as far as possible all respectful or considerate thought about the clergy.” Interestingly, especially in light of later developments, it was the Catholic clergy, who, according to Ford, “very soon made themselves felt in opposition to this abuse of their priestly dignity.” As a result, Ford writes, “the Jew climbed down” and “you now never see a priest made light of on the screen. But the Protestant clergyman is still the elongated, sniveling, bilious hypocrite of anti-Christian caricatures.”

Joseph I. Breen, a public relations executive and the first man in charge of the Hollywood Production Code, saw the battle over the sexualization of American culture in essentially ethnic terms as well. “Ninety-five percent of these folks,” he wrote describing the Hollywood moguls of the 1930s, “are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the earth... These Jews seem to think of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence. The vilest kind of sin is a common indulgence hereabouts, and the men and the women who engage in this sort of business are the men and women who decide what the film fare of the nation is supposed to be” (Mark A. Vieira, Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood [1999]).

Breen saw the sexualization issue in ethnic terms because that is how everyone else saw it too, including the Jews. Leo Pfeffer, whose major role in the modern Kulturkampf has been explored earlier, noted the same ethnic divide over the sexualization of the culture in one of his memoirs. “After World War I,” he wrote, “Irish-oriented American Catholicism began taking over leadership in anti-obscenity militancy. Catholic organizations such as the National Office for Decent Literature and the national Legion of Decency ... became the nations’ most militant and effective defender of morals and censorship.” As a result, America’s Catholics came into cultural conflict with the Jews who promoted the sexualization of American culture. “American Jewry,” according to Pfeffer, supported that sexualization “because many Jews, far more proportionately than the other faiths, are commercially and professionally involved in the cinema and publishing.” As a result, Jews have “been overwhelmingly antipathetic to the crusade for morality and censorship in the arts and literature.”

Echoing Henry Ford’s concerns, many legislatures in the 1920s threatened to implement government censorship of the movies. In 1929, Hollywood went deeply into debt to finance its transition to talking pictures. After the stock market crash, the studios were pressed to cut costs and simultaneously increase their box office receipts when ticket sales were dropping and normal sources of money had dried up as a result.

In order to service their debt at a time of decreasing income, Hollywood turned increasingly to sex and obscenity as an inexpensive way to get people into the theaters, producing films featuring the suggestive Mae West, but in doing this they incurred the ire of the Catholic Church, which was to assume the role of censor that the Protestant denominations no longer wanted.

The Production Code

In August 1933, Joseph Breen, who had established contacts with American bishops during the Eucharistic Congress of 1924, invited A. H. Giannini, the Catholic banker who headed Bank of America, Hollywood’s most significant source of credit, to a meeting with motion picture producers. During that meeting, Giannini informed Hollywood producers he would no longer fund films “prostituting the youth of America.” One year later, Dennis Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia announced a boycott of that city’s movie theaters, most of which were owned by Warner Brothers.

As a result of the Philadelphia boycott, Warner Brothers was losing $175,000 a week at the height of the Depression. Joseph Breen attended a meeting of Hollywood moguls called to discuss the Philadelphia boycott, after which he reported that the normally pugnacious Harry Warner was “standing at the top of the table shedding tears the size of horse turds and pleading for someone to get him off the hook. And well he should, for you could fire a cannon down the center aisle of any theater in Philadelphia without danger of hitting anyone! And there was Barney Balaban (of Paramount Theaters), watching him in terror wondering if he was going to be next in Chicago.”

Joseph Breen, the man who described Harry Warner’s plight and ran the Production Code office for the next 20 years, was a Catholic with no illusions about the Hollywood elite:

They are simple a rotten bunch of vile people with no respect for anything beyond the making of money... Here [in Hollywood] we have Paganism rampant and its most virulent form. Drunkenness and debauchery are commonplace. Sexual perversion is rampant ... any number of our directors and stars are perverts... The Jews seem to think of nothing but moneymaking and sexual indulgence. The vilest kind of sin is a common indulgence hereabouts and the men and women who engage in this sort of business are the men and women who decide what the film fare of the nation is to be. They and they alone make the decision. Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are probably the scum of the earth.

The outcry against Hollywood’s subversion of morals was so great that federal, state, and local legislation was proposed as an antidote. To head off this legislation, the Jews who ran Hollywood in 1934 entered into a voluntary agreement known as the Production Code, with the Legion of Decency and its threat of boycotts if Hollywood reneged as the enforcer. The Production Code insured that for the next thirty-one years people like Joseph Breen kept nudity, blasphemy, obscenity, and foul language out of Hollywood films. No theater would show unapproved films, and no film got approved without the tacit approval of Catholics like Joseph Breen.

Henry Ford admired Catholic resistance to Jewish Hollywood, even before the imposition of the Code. Unlike Protestant clergymen, who, as seen earlier, were regularly ridiculed in Hollywood films, “The Catholic clergy very soon made themselves felt in opposition to this abuse of their priestly dignity, and as a result of their vigorous resentment, the Jew climbed down.”

Ford felt that the movies were the rehearsal for revolution in America. The Jews were using the screen as part of their “traditional campaign of subversion.” The movie screen also served “as a rehearsal stage for scenes of anti-social menace... Successful revolution must have a rehearsal. It can be done better in the motion picture than anywhere else: this is the ‘visual education’ such as even the lowest brow can understand.”

The Hollywood Production Code specified among other things that:

1. No picture should lower the moral standards of those who see it.

2. Law, natural or divine, must not be belittled, ridiculed, nor must a sentiment be created against it.

3. As far as possible, life should not be misrepresented, at least not in such a way as to place in the mind of youth false values on life.

As administered by Joseph Breen, the Code was never had an exclusively Catholic character. It always took into account both the mores of the country as Breen found them and the interests of Hollywood. Breen, the Catholic, for example, forbade the Sign of the Cross in Gone With the Wind because it would offend English viewers. Had he been simply in Hollywood to represent the interests of the Catholic bishops of the United States at large, Breen’s job would have been much simpler. As it was, the Code was in essence one Catholic’s attempt to preserve the mores of the country, no matter how contradictory they happened to appear to him.

The Church in the unenviable position of protecting taboos which were not of its own making at a time when the originators of those taboos, namely, the mainline Protestant denominations, no longer believed in them. As a result the Code tried to adapt to the times, and proved itself remarkably flexible, but its flexibility was intimately tied to the flexibility of the Legion of Decency, which provided the teeth for the Code’s enforcement. Gradually, a tendency developed on the part of Catholic intellectuals in the early 1960s to undermine what the Code and the Legion stood for. The Production Code was erected on the foundation of the moral law, to insure that the films that got produced remained within its purview. However, the Code started to be re-defined to take into account supposed artistic values. The Legion adopted a new course, subordinating moral to cultural and artistic considerations, contending that any theme whatsoever, including sexual perversion, could provide subject matter of acceptable motion pictures provided that such subjects were treated in “good taste”.

Much of the bitterness in Hollywood over the Code took on the language of culture wars as waged by the courts. Even though the Legion was a private organization and the Code was a purely voluntary arrangement, the Catholics were accused of something akin to violating the separation of church and state. By the very fact that it existed and had been so successful, the Legion of Decency was guilty of imposing its views, according to those who wanted nudity in films. It was a charge normally reserved for religious groups who are successful at what they do.

Much of the resentment had a religious undercurrent. The people who ran Hollywood were Jewish; the people who ran the Code were Catholic. As the Jews became more and more liberal, and as liberalism defined itself more and more as defiance of traditional morality, the conflict became more and more difficult to avoid. Even so, however, there was more than a little humor involved at times. A common tactic used by intended Production Code breakers was to argue “It’s part of life,” to which Joseph Breen used to reply by saying that the bowel movement he had every day was part of life too, but no one was proposing to make a movie out of it!

Breaking the Production Code

In December 1964 the Legion of Decency under the chairmanship of Archbishop Krol issued a report condemning what he termed “moral brinkmanship.” The film industry had sent one movie containing nudity after another to the people of the Production Code in what was to become a full frontal assault on the Legion’s influence over Hollywood and the hegemony of the Production Code established by the Legion’s clout. The bishops were in the middle of a battle that had been virtually constant since the end of World War II, but which had intensified as a result of recent Supreme Court decisions, for example Roth v U.S. (1957) and Jacobellis v Ohio (1964). Beginning with the late ‘50s the Supreme Court took it upon itself, in Krol’s words, to “provide obscenity with a high wall of constitutional protection.” In the words of Leo Pfeffer, “the net effect of these decisions ... was to accord constitutional protection to almost anything short of the hardest of hard-core pornography” (God, Caesar, and the Constitution [1975]).

Also, there was a growing unwillingness on Hollywood’s part to adhere to standards which it deemed morally unrealistic and, not coincidentally, financially less remunerative. In April 1964 the bishops denounced “a laxity in standards displayed during the last six months, instigated by powerful factions in Hollywood” as well as the attempt “to attract an audience by directly stimulating base emotional responses of an erotic or violent nature.” They also deplored a “growing tendency to challenge the Judaeo-Christian vision of man.”

The cutting edge trend was, of course, sexuality. Hollywood was bent on introducing nudity into the first-run, big budget films that eventually trickled down to the neighborhood theaters, and 1964 was the year the war on the Code’s restrictions began in earnest.

Both the Legion of Decency and the Hollywood Production Code were anachronisms, but since they were voluntary, they were beyond the reach of the law and therefore beyond the reach of the Supreme Court’s ability to manipulate the law. The Legion could no more force Hollywood to edit its films than it could order the police to arrest those who attended those films. But the Legion could urge Catholics not to attend those films, which is precisely what it did in increasingly specific terms following the establishment of the Code and the Legion. The key to the Legion’s power was, as Leo Pfeffer might have said, the “monolithity” of the Catholic Church. The thought of fifty million people (or any significant percentage of that figure) not going to see a particular movie (and this figure doesn’t take into account the significant influence the Legion’s ratings had among the Protestant rank and file) was enough to bring even the most hard-boiled producer into the editing room. But with the advent of Vatican II, the “monolithity” of the Church was called into question more and more.

Actually the Council was in many ways analogous to the Supreme Court decisions. The Council did not mandate dissent, but it provided an occasion for the forces which had been up until that time kept in check to break loose and oppose one another. Once they broke loose, the illusion of Catholic unity disappeared, and once that disappeared, the Church lost its clout with Hollywood, and Hollywood, emboldened by the green light from the Supreme Court and the general desire on the part of the American public in the period following World War II to disconnect the pleasures of sex from the responsibilities of marriage, decided to make its move.

The revolution finally arrived in 1965, when Hollywood launched another attack on the Code with the release of The Pawnbroker. During the film a woman playing a black prostitute opened her blouse and exposed her breasts to the camera, breaking, as a result, section 7, sub-section 2 of the Motion Picture Production Code and one of Hollywood’s last remaining taboos. As was the case less than a year earlier with the release of the sex farce Kiss Me Stupid! (1964), the Production Code approved the film and the Legion condemned it. However, because of the nature of the film, The Pawnbroker would prove to be a much more serious challenge to the Code and the Legion than Dean Martin leering at Kim Novak, the main characters in Kiss Me Stupid!

One reason the challenge was so serious was the serious artistic intent of the film. The Pawnbroker was not Dean Martin telling dirty jokes. It was an account of a Holocaust survivor whose memories of his dead wife are reawakened by the sight of the prostitute’s bare breasts. The breasts, in other words, served a function in the plot. They were artistically justified breasts — the Legion’s worst nightmare. Because the Legion had only one category for condemned films, the Catholics were put in the unenviable position of lumping The Pawnbroker in the same category with Kiss Me Stupid! They were also put in the position of criticizing a film that had an immediate connection with an important event in recent Jewish history. They were obviously throwing out the art baby with the nudity bath.

At the crucial moment when the revolution broke out, the Catholic bishops lost their nerve on a number of fronts. Following Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court decision legalizing the sale of contraceptives, the Catholic bishops stopped contesting birth control in the public sphere; at around the same time they stopped contesting Hollywood use of nudity and obscenity as weapons in the culture wars.

They did this largely because of their misunderstanding of the Decree on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, one of the key documents of the Second Vatican Council, which ended in the annus mirabilis of 1965. Relying on John Courtney Murray’s notes to the Abbott edition of the Council’s documents, the Catholic bishops accepted the Americanist understanding of the separation of church and state, relegating the Catholic Church to the status of one sect among many.

The Catholic Church lost the culture wars in 1965 when it failed to block pornography. Within seven years, hard-core pornographic films like Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) were shown in first run theaters, and Jewish power over the culture increased accordingly. As a result of the mainstreaming of films like Deep Throat, pornography became a weapon in America’s psychological warfare arsenal. Pornography was used to topple the communist government which had taken over Portugal in the wake of Salazar’s death in 1974. It was used as a crucial part of the American invasion of Panama in December 1989. It was used by the Israelis during their occupation of Gaza in 2002. Iraq was flooded with pornography after the American invasion of 2003, and it was used as a weapon in Iran.

The Catholics, befuddled by mistaken notions of renewal, dropped the ball, and the whole country suffered as a result. Hollywood got what it wanted, but one small group profited at the expense of the common good. Archbishop John Krol was proven right in a very short period of time. The bare breasts in The Pawnbroker were the first drop in what was soon to become a flood of pornography flowing out of the nation’s movie theaters and into the minds of the nation’s populace, causing untold misery.

In December 1983, Linda Marchiano (a/k/a, Lovelace) testified before the Meese Pornography Commission about her life as the star of the pornography hit of 1973, Deep Throat. Her testimony was a tale of sexual sadism and beatings and an escape from a world which nearly killed her. Untold still is the story of how her actions on the screen affected the people who paid money to see her. It remains untold because the cultural revolutionaries have thwarted most attempts to tell it. “We find it difficult to understand,” the Meese Commission concluded after listening to the testimony of Linda Marchiano and many others, “how much of the material we have seen can be considered to be even remotely related to an exchange of views in the marketplace of ideas, to an attempt to articulate a point of view, to an attempt to persuade or to an attempt seriously to convey through literary or artistic means a different vision of humanity or the world.” At bottom, the Meese Commission concluded, “the predominant use of such material is as a masturbatory aid.”

Once the Catholics lost their nerve in the war over the sexualization of culture, once they backed away from holding Hollywood to the basic rudiments of sexual decency, it was inevitable that the instruments of culture they failed to control would be used against them in all out cultural warfare. The sexualization of the Catholic clergy dates from this period.

There are no truces in cultural warfare. The law of cultural life is either occupy your own cultural territory or have it occupied by alien forces. “The truth of the matter was that I did not like the Catholic Church,” Leo Pfeffer admitted in his memoirs (“The ‘Catholic’ Catholic Problem,” Commonweal, August 1975). Leo Pfeffer was not just talking about personal animus; he was talking about an animus shared by his employer, the American Jewish Committee, as well as by Hollywood’s motion picture and television industries. The latter group was described by Stephen Steinlight as “the Jewish industry, par excellence” (“The Jewish Stake in America’s Changing Demography,” Center for Immigration Studies, October 2001). Even toward the end of his life, after proclaiming the triumph of secular humanism over the Catholic Church in the speech in Philadelphia in 1976, Pfeffer was concerned about Catholic activism on the abortion issue because “the partial success which it has so far achieved may encourage further Catholic intervention in the political arena and bring back the days when the Roman Catholic Church was a powerful force in the American political system.”

In human history there are only two alternatives. There is the City of God, which is based on love of God and denial of self. And there is the City of Man which is based on love of self and denial of God.

The alternative to sexual revolution is understanding what St. Augustine said 1600 years ago. The alternative to a world where men have as many masters as they have vices is a world of small religious-based ethnic communities of the sort St. Benedict envisioned when the Roman Empire collapsed.

America was once based on this principle. It was called the United States because political power was delegated to the states who then delegated it to the local community, which had the police power to make virtue easy and vice difficult.

We need to go back to being the Republic envisioned by the Founding Fathers, not another failed empire like Rome. And this is so for a simple reason. There will always be control. The only question is whether it is going to be self-control or external control for the benefit of the controllers. John Adams, one of America’s Founding Fathers said, “we have no constitution that functions in the absence of a moral people.” Edmund Burke, his contemporary, saw the alternatives clearly at the very beginning of this diabolic 200-year long experiment in libido dominandi. “Society,” he wrote,

cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

CHAPTER SIX

The Birth Control Battle

Catholics and the Enlightenment

Let us go back again to the early ‘60s, specifically to that scene in Philadelphia in 1962, in front of Independence Hall, celebrating the 4th of July, attended by a Catholic President, a Catholic Governor, and a Catholic mayor. I have described this as the high water mark of Catholic power in this country. And one of the main reasons that Catholics had this much power, as we did, was because we were having children. We were having a lot of children. The baby boom. I am a product of the baby boom. It was largely a Catholic phenomenon. And we didn’t even think about it. But other people did. There were people known as demographers, people who study population. And these people became aware of what was going on. They saw the handwriting on the wall. And the handwriting on the wall was basically that the Catholics were going to take over. Bertrand Russell once said that his biggest fear was that America would become a Catholic country. Well, the people who knew this were very influential. These were the people who ran the culture.

And so, as we have seen, you have a conflict between two groups, the Catholics and the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, of course, being this group of people who believed in what we would call secular humanism. And one of the non-negotiable demands of secular humanism is sexual liberation. Now, maybe you think this is incidental to what these people believe. It’s not. It goes to the heart of what they believe. We are talking about two groups that will never be able to make peace with each other, because their world views are completely and diametrically opposed. On the one hand, you have people who subordinate their desires to the truth. This is what Catholics are supposed to do. On the other hand, you have a group of people who subordinate truth to their desires. They want a world where their desires are the law. And that’s the world that we live in, because we lost the cultural revolution. We lost the battle of the ‘60s. Leo Pfeffer was right. It was a battle between the Catholic Church and the Enlightenment over who was going to determine the future of this country, and we lost. You know why we lost? What their secret weapon was? The weapon that would destroy the political power of the Catholics? It was the contraceptive. And that’s what these people were interested in.

The Rockefellers and the Population Council

Now, let me get to the specifics. I keep saying “these people.” I keep sounding like a conspiracy theorist, and, yes, it is a conspiracy. But, let me be specific about the people we are talking about, the Rockefeller Foundation. John D. Rockefeller III in the early ‘50s created an institution called the Population Council. The main goal of the Population Council was to create a world where everyone was going to use the contraceptive. And do you know why he wanted everyone to use the contraceptive? Because he was a great humanitarian, right? Wrong. Because he belonged to a class of people where everyone used the contraceptive voluntarily. I’m talking about the mainstream Protestant denominations in this country. At some point during the early part of the twentieth century this group of people started limiting the size of their families.

You may have heard of the Lambeth Conferences in England. The Anglican Church has conferences every ten years at which they talk about the issues that concern them. In their 1908 conference they issued a statement on contraception in which they expressed grave concern over the fact “that there is a widespread prevalence amongst our peoples of the practice of resorting to artificial means for the avoidance or prevention of childbearing.” The assembled delegates appealed “to the members of our own Churches to exert the whole force of their Christian character in condemnation of them.” Finally, the conference adopted resolution #41 which “earnestly calls upon all Christian people to discountenance the use of all artificial means of restriction as demoralizing to character and hostile to national welfare.”

By 1930, the Anglicans had evidently undergone a change of heart. At the Lambeth conference of that year, the Anglicans decided that artificial means of restricting births were no longer “demoralizing to character and hostile to national welfare.” In fact, they now claimed in resolution #15, that “where there is a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood,” the couple could choose whatever method it desired; even artificial methods could be used “provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles.” Then as if to cover all bases, the conference went on to express “its strong condemnation of the use of any methods of contraception-birth control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.”

By 1958, the Anglicans were claiming that contraception was “a right and an important fact in Christian family life,” provided of course that “such ways are mutually acceptable to husband and wife in Christian conscience and secure from the corruptions of sensuality and selfishness.”

Now, there’s one thing that happens when a group of people starts using contraceptives. They stop having children. And then something else happens. They start wondering about the people who do not use contraceptives. And they start realizing that those people continue to have children, and if they are smart they will realize what the demographers know, and that is that the larger population, the growing population, will take over a country from a decreasing population, and there is nothing you can do about it. If you think of England, for example, a country which conquered the world in many ways because it had a growing population. There were other reasons, but they had a growing population. The whole expansion of Europe throughout the world was the result of a growing population. At one point there were Englishmen in Jamaica and Nigeria and Pakistan and India. If you’ve been to England lately, you will realize that now Jamaicans and Nigerians and Pakistanis and Indians are in England! That’s the way it works. It’s chemistry. In biology we talk about osmosis, a higher concentration going to a lower concentration. There’s nothing you can do about it. And so the people who stopped having children started to wonder about the people who were still having children. And in this country there were two groups who were still having children, the blacks and the Catholics. And these people who saw the handwriting on the wall, they realized “if we don’t do something now, they’re going to take over.”

By the 1960s, the mainline Protestant churches had reached the conclusion that not using contraception was immoral. In late 1962, Richard M. Fagley, Executive Secretary of the Commission of Churches on International Affairs in New York City, described what he saw as “the emerging Protestant consensus regarding the concept of responsible parenthood within the doctrine of marriage.” According to this consensus, “motives, rather than means, form the primary moral issue.” The couple can use whatever method it chooses as long as the motive is not selfishness, etc, etc. Fagley gives no indication of how to assess motives in his presentation. He does claim, however, that the consensus found “no inherent distinction between periodic continence or the use of contraceptives.” He mentions the story of Onan, “the one biblical mention of an act with contraceptive intent,” but finds the story ultimately “rather ambiguous.” His reading of the history of the Protestant reformers on the issue takes a similar tack. They “did not re-examine the generally pro-fertility teaching on parenthood” most probably because of “the under-populated state of northwestern Europe at the time.” As it that weren’t reason enough to retard progressive views on contraception, “the emergence of the new Protestant consensus was long delayed by the expansion of Europe through the Industrial Revolution and immigration to the Americas and later by Puritanism and Victorian prudery. Its growth has been primarily a development of this century.”

If all this sounds like special pleading, it might be helpful to elucidate the context of the document. Fagley is writing to Frank Notestein, who at the time was head of the Population Council, a tax-exempt foundation created by John D. Rockefeller III in 1952, when he became disenchanted with the reticence of his brothers in funding controversial issues like sexuality and population control. “Its goal” according to the Population Council’s description of itself, “has been to bring about a reduction in the number of births that occur in the world.” The fact that the Rockefeller Foundation had funded Kinsey’s sex surveys throughout the ‘40s and early ‘50s give some indication of what John D. Rockefeller III construed as reticence. His father had subsidized Margaret Sanger and her Birth Control League as well, prompting one critic to say that the Rockefellers were to abortion and contraception in America what the Krupp family was to munitions in Germany. After converting to the religion of population control at the age of twenty-eight and after doing some research on the topic, John D. Rockefeller III became convinced that population control was the source of all of the world’s problems. Rockefeller, according to his biographers,

never could explain exactly why he had developed such a strong interest in the population field long before it came into vogue or was generally recognized as an area of concern. He had seen the negative effects of too much population growth in his visit to China in 1929. He had chosen population as the subject for a reading course he took at Princeton, where he studied the works of Malthus and others. He had served on the board of an organization his father had created, the Bureau of Social Hygiene, which had supported a number of projects related to the population field, including aid to the clinics of the intrepid birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger.

In fact, it was Junior’s decision to terminate the Bureau that led his oldest son to volunteer to make the population field a major focus of his interest and to do what he could to carry on the work. In a letter to his father in 1934, he expressed concern that the support of population studies and projects would not be picked up by any of the other Rockefeller organizations, including the foundation, because of “the element of propaganda and controversy which so often is attached to endeavors in birth control.” JDR wrote: “I have come pretty definitely to the conclusion that [birth control] is the field in which I will be interested, for the present at least, to concentrate my own giving, as I feel it is so fundamental and underlying” (Harr and Johnson, The Rockefeller Conscience [1991]).

To state the case more precisely, population control including contraception and abortion was the conditio sine qua non of solving problems like hunger and development in the Third World. John D. Rockefeller III spent much of the late 1940s and early ‘50s travelling around the Far East at the behest of John Foster Dulles, so much so that his travels earned him the name Mr. Asia at the New Yorker. His travels there only reconfirmed what he had concluded in his late twenties as a student at Princeton. Population was the problem.

The Population Council considered the development of the IUD as one of its crowning achievements. Later to be driven off the market in the United States as a result of product liability lawsuits, the IUD, even more so than Pill, which the Population Council also had a hand in developing, was Rockefeller’s equivalent of the Holy Grail and the philosopher’s stone all in one little piece of coiled plastic. Unlike the Pill, the IUD could be inserted and forgotten — unless, of course, it caused internal hemorrhaging and severe abdominal pain, which it oftentimes did. Because the element of choice was not played out on a daily basis as it was with pill, the IUD was the favored vehicle for population control at the Population Council. If population was the disease, then the IUD was the cure. While in Taiwan visiting a small provincial town where the Population Council was experimenting with the IUD, Rockefeller looked at the mass of people there and said, “‘Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it?’ Then he turned and headed off for his next meeting” (Horowitz and Collier, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty [1976]).

Fagley sent his paper to Notestein with a note adding that “any criticism or counsel would be welcome.” The paper, as may be surmised from its content, was not really intended for Protestants; it was intended to explain Protestants to outsiders, in this instance Catholics. Fagley sent his paper to Notestein for approval because he was intending to present it at a conference at the University of Notre Dame on population which was sponsored by a grant from the Population Council. As a final point in describing the Protestant Consensus in favor of contraception, Fagley added that “in the Protestant consensus abortion is strongly condemned as a method of family limitation, since it involves the destruction of human life.” Time would show the Protestant consensus flexible on this issue as well, primarily as a result of Rockefeller money going to the Methodist-sponsored Religious Coalition on Abortion Rights. But Notestein raised no objection at the time, probably because he felt the opposition to abortion would sit well with the Catholics convening at Notre Dame.

Rockefeller’s interest in the Catholic Church awakened in the early ‘60s, primarily because, as a result of the defection of the mainline Protestants on sexual issues, Catholics were the main obstacle to the policies Rockefeller wanted implemented. Rockefeller was also intrigued by news about the impending Vatican Council. Rockefeller’s biographers, Harr and Johnson, mention that “the papacy of John XXIII, who was elevated in 1958, seemed to promise a liberalizing of Roman Catholic doctrine” on precisely this issue. During the early ‘60s it had become virtually a foregone conclusion among liberal Catholics that the Church would change its teaching on birth control. If so, John D. Rockefeller III was willing to do whatever he could to help that process along.

The Notre Dame Link

But the attraction was mutual. At the same time as the Rockefeller interests were looking for an opening in the Catholic Church’s opposition to eugenic sexuality and the approach of the modern world in the sexual arena, certain Catholics were looking for more acceptance from the Protestant consensus, and that meant acceptance by the people who ran the foundations. René Wormser complained that Catholics were frozen out of social science research as a result of the conscious policy of the foundations. As of 1957, Wormser could claim,

there are thirty million Catholics in this country, who maintain scores of universities and colleges. Their institutions do not figure among the favored of the foundation complex, nor are academicians connected with them likely to receive research grants from the complex. Perhaps there is a good reason for this discrimination. If so, I cannot guess what it might be. True, Catholic institutions were included among the institutional donees to which the Ford Foundation recently donated a huge aggregate of money, a step which deserved the most enthusiastic approval of the general public. But when it comes to special, individual grants, to find a Catholic institution as a donee is a rarity indeed (Foundations: Their Power and Influence [1958]).

During the late ‘50s, Fr. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., president of the University of Notre Dame, had been concerned about this lack of support from the foundations as Wormser was. Fr. Hesburgh was willing to do whatever it took to get that support and, according to one source, went to the foundations, who told him that to qualify for money he would have to remove certain faculty members. Hesburgh proved amenable and as a result not only started to get grant money but also was appointed a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1961. He would later become its chairman during the years when Rockefeller money was heavily involved in abortion advocacy, an advocacy which culminated in the overturning of the country’s abortion laws in 1973.

By the early ‘60s, Catholics like Hesburgh and the eugenic foundations felt that they had something to gain by collaborating. What the Catholics like Hesburgh wanted was obvious. They wanted money. They wanted an entrée to the interlocking world of foundation respectability, where grantsmanship was in many respects an all-or-nothing proposition. Because the foundations were, in effect, a conspiracy of interlocking directorates serving a common ethnic interest, once a university got money from one, it was in the position of getting from all, and as the ‘60s progressed and the government expanded its role in funding higher education, foundation acceptance meant access to the newly-burgeoning federal aid as well as an indication that Catholics had achieved a certain level of intellectual respectability, which the Catholic universities like Notre Dame evidently felt they lacked. Finally, in the early ‘70s, the arrangement was codified into law when the Supreme Court decided in Lemon v. Kurtzman that it was unconstitutional to give government money to Catholic grade schools, but, as ratified in the Tilton decisions, acceptable to give it to Catholic universities.

What the foundations wanted was just as specific. They wanted the Catholic Church to drop its opposition to contraception, and people like John D. Rockefeller III felt that Fr. Hesburgh could play a crucial role in accomplishing that.

The history of the first Notre Dame conference on population goes a long way toward indicating what it is the foundations, specifically Rockefeller’s Population Council, wanted from amenable Catholics like the people at Notre Dame. On October 10, 1962, one day before the opening of the Second Vatican Council, Rockefeller’s Population Council, “following discussions among leading Catholic authorities, representatives of Planned Parenthood, and the officers of the Population Council” granted $5,000 to the University of Notre Dame to host a “two-day meeting in December which would bring together representatives of different religious and other points of view to discuss problems of population growth, with particular interest in exploring areas of possible convergences in approaching these problems.”

The conference would not take place until early 1963, but the groundwork preparing for it took place throughout the summer of 1962. The initial impetus for the conference came not from Hesburgh but from a CBS documentary “Birth Control and the Law,” which aired on May 10, 1962. One of the participants was Fr. John A. O’Brien, C.S.C., a Notre Dame theologian who had caught the eye of the pro-contraceptive crowd when an article of his entitled “Let’s Take Birth Control Out of Politics” had appeared in the November 10, 1961 issue of Look magazine. The CBS documentary was widely denounced in the Catholic press as pro-contraceptive propaganda. Fr. John B. Sheehan criticized Moderator Eric Severeid’s fawning attitude toward Planned Parenthood and called the documentary “an extended commercial for that organization.”

Fr. John C. Knott, family life director of the National Catholic Welfare Conference in Washington, claimed that “CBS gave evidence of having become a public relations medium for a particular philosophy of life with an oversimplified solution to human problems” and went on to wonder why CBS didn’t allow Catholics equal time. Evidently he missed the contribution of Fr. O’Brien, or perhaps he didn’t feel that Fr. O’Brien’s suggestion that a group of Catholic and Protestant experts should get together to “try to iron out the problem” qualified as the Catholic position.

Other people, however, were impressed with Fr. O’Brien’s position. On July 6, 1962, Cass Canfield, Chairman of Planned Parenthood Foundation of America and a board member of the Population Council, wrote to Fr. O’Brien to tell him he had been following his writings on birth control for years and how impressed he had been with what O’Brien had to say on the recent CBS telecast “Birth Control and the Law.” In the interest of fostering “dialogue” in this area among religious groups, Canfield invited O’Brien to take part in a “small discussion — primarily of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergymen” at a New York hotel on the morning of October 25 “to discuss fertility regulation in the context of responsible parenthood and population growth.” In closing, Canfield added a few “very general questions” which might be discussed at the meeting, such as “what is the general thinking from various viewpoints on the ‘population problem”‘ and “what are the opportunities — among religious groups themselves, and between religious groups and the Planned Parenthood Federation — for cooperative thought and action on these vital matters.”

On July 24, Canfield received a response, not from Fr. O’Brien, but from George Shuster, personal assistant to Fr. Hesburgh at Notre Dame, informing him that O’Brien’s attendance at the Planned Parenthood conference was out of the question. “It is impossible, as matters stand now,” Shuster wrote

for Catholic priests and laymen who follow directives (and this is the kind you doubtless want) to attend a meeting sponsored by Planned Parenthood. The time is not yet ripe for that. Those invited would have to secure permission from the New York Chancery Office to attend, and there would seem no possibility that the answer would be affirmative.

Shuster’s objections, however, upon closer inspection, revolved more around form than substance. Instead of the New York meeting, Shuster proposed holding virtually the same meeting at Notre Dame, implying that the name Notre Dame would somehow purge the meeting of disagreeable associations as well as helping Catholics eager to collaborate on birth control to evade the watchful eye of Cardinal Spellman.

“This arrangement,” according to Shuster,

would enable prominent Catholics to attend without difficulty, for any problem involving participation in a meeting sponsored by Planned Parenthood would have been removed. The University has arranged and is currently doing so in a series of meetings in various fields at which important problems are being discussed on a basis of parity between Catholics and others.

In a letter to John D. Rockefeller III on July 31, Canfield can hardly contain himself, calling Shuster’s response “the answer to a maiden’s prayer.” Canfield was no maiden, and he probably didn’t pray much either, but an opening of some significance in influencing the Church’s sexual morality had finally been found with the Catholics, the last roadblock to universal acceptance of contraception. During the ‘50s the Population Council had had contact with a Jesuit from Baltimore by the name of William J. Gibbons, who requested funding for a “New York Professional Sodality” from the Population Council which would attempt to study the problem of overpopulation as essentially a moral problem. The Population Council was underwhelmed by the proposal. Frederic Osborn in a memo to Dudley Kirk opined that “it is hard to see how there could be much serious exchange of ideas on such premises,” especially since Father Gibbons was proposing that each meeting start with a pledge “to respect the right of each parent to participate in the creation of life.” If this was what the Catholics had in mind, then the Population Council wasn’t interested. What Shuster was proposing at Notre Dame, however, was a whole new ball game, and Canfield urged Rockefeller to fund it, claiming that it “should serve a very useful purpose.”

Frank Notestein, who was in on the discussion, seemed to concur with Canfield and listed a number of potential positive outcomes as resulting from it. To begin with, the Population Council and the pro-contraception Protestants who were invited could exert pressure

of the supportive sort on the liberal Catholics attending, to strengthen in the Church those elements which recognize a) the need for tolerance of non-Catholic views, b) the desirability for restraint on the part of Catholics seeking legal restrictions that prevent non-Catholics from following their own moral views, and c) the need for greater attention to parental responsibility in Catholic teaching.

Beyond that, the conference would provide “an opportunity for the Catholics to educate non-Catholics in their position, particularly with a view to letting us see, in sophisticated form, the almost immutable constraints faced by the Church in certain parts of its position and the operations which are amenable to change.”

Notestein felt that it was unrealistic to feel that a conference of this sort could get the Church to change its teaching on birth control but it could help

to strengthen that element in the Church with which we have many common aspirations and a minimum of differences. [With this in mind,] it would be pointless to publish the results of the conference because that would incur the wrath of episcopal authorities and harden the positions into two immutable fronts. The only influence the pro-contraceptive party can have is on those influential Catholics who attend the meeting.

With this in mind, Notestein adds, “it is also important, on these premises, that we select for attendance not representative Catholics but Catholics who represent the position nearest our own. This is the group whose influence we would be endeavoring to enlarge.” The Population Council would fund the Notre Dame meeting, in other words, on the condition that only “liberal” Catholics, i.e., those willing to work for a change in the Church’s position on birth control, be invited. Notestein even suggests “leaving out people such as Father Zimmerman,” evidently referring to Fr. Anthony Zimmerman, S.V.D., a noted opponent of population control. In another letter to John D. Rockefeller III on August 2, Notestein reiterated his opposition to inviting “representative Catholics.” The only people to be invited were Catholics “who represent the position nearest our own.”

Personally I would like to re-emphasize my opinion that an endeavor be made to have this group include only the liberal-minded Catholics. We will get simply nowhere if right-wing groups are involved. These conversations should be between the people on both sides who have minimum differences of opinion.

Throughout the negotiations for the conference, there is no indication that either Shuster, who conducted the correspondence, or Hesburgh, whose approval is noted throughout, objected in any way to the Population Council’s dictating to Notre Dame the type of Catholic Notre Dame was allowed to invite to its conference. Evidently Notestein’s specification that only liberal Catholics should be invited was not construed as an offense against Hesburgh’s principle of “true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself,” the principle he enunciated in his Land o’ Lakes statement in 1967 when he alienated the University of Notre Dame from the Catholic Church by placing it under a lay board of trustees. When it came to the demands of the Population Council, Hesburgh’s truculence evaporated and was replaced by the most supine amenability. Notestein obviously feels that Fr. Hesburgh is precisely one of their kind of Catholic and nominates him as chairman of the conference in place of John D. Rockefeller III, whose connection with contraception and population control might prove too controversial. “My guess,” Notestein wrote referring to Hesburgh, “is that he would be effective in blocking long-winded arguments in theology, which are useless once the positions are understood. No one is going to make converts at the theological level.”

Rockefeller was evidently persuaded by Notestein’s arguments. In a letter to Cass Canfield on August 6, Rockefeller characterized Shuster’s proposal as “an encouraging next step in an important and sensitive area.” He is also persuaded by Notestein’s suggestion “that the individuals who might attend be selected from those who have liberal views; otherwise it would be difficult for the meetings to be very constructive.”

By early August, the Notre Dame Conference was pretty much a done deal, at least in the higher echelons of the Population Council. By September 1962, the Population Council was dictating not only who was to be invited but what books were to be displayed and discussed (A Citizen’s Perspective on Population by J. D. Rockefeller and Does Overpopulation Mean Poverty by Joseph Jones) as well as the questions to be asked and, without too much stretching of the imagination, the conclusions they were to arrive at as well. Hesburgh’s abject acceptance of Rockefeller’s terms gives some indication that academic freedom was essentially a pretext which would allow Notre Dame to get foundation money. In one of his memoirs, Hesburgh talked about defending American theologian John Courtney Murray against Cardinal Ottaviani. In many ways, the example was paradigmatic in Hesburgh’s mind. Academic freedom meant protecting Catholics against the influence of Rome. It meant supine acceptance of whatever schemes the eugenic regime proposed, whether it was the contraceptive or affirmative action, which Hesburgh supported in the Bakke case in the 1970s. In 1962, as the final plans were being made for the Notre Dame Conference, Hesburgh offered no objections to stipulations from the Population Council on whom might attend their contraceptive conference. Hesburgh offered no objections to the fact that they dictated what materials were to be displayed, who was to be invited (and not invited), or what would be discussed. “Conferees,” Canfield wrote in his memo, “Some random suggestions about the Notre Dame Conference,” “should discuss the question of whether the adherents of any faith have a right to try and influence legislation, except as individuals expressing their own views.”

It didn’t take a genius to figure out the right answer to a question phrased in that tendentious manner. Catholics of the liberal sort were to proclaim publicly that their opposition to contraception was “personal” and that they wouldn’t dream of imposing their views on others, and most certainly they would not try to influence legislation. The fact of the matter is that at this point Rockefeller did not feel he could get the Church to change its teaching on contraception — at a later date, as we shall see, he would be of another opinion on the matter. He did feel though that the Population Council might persuade liberal Catholics to persuade their less enlightened co-religionists that they as Catholics had no business trying to influence legislation concerning contraception in the United States. Planned Parenthood had already targeted the Connecticut contraception statute for overturning, as a prelude, Leo Pfeffer would say, for state-subsidized contraception aimed at primarily Negro welfare recipients. The main obstacle in the implementation of this design was the opposition of the Catholic Church.

Canfield kept hammering home the point that when it came to contraception, reasonable Catholics — i.e., the kind who wanted money from the Rockefellers — were supposed to keep their opinions to themselves. This was the purpose of the conference, and by accepting the Population Council’s money on its terms, Hesburgh showed that he acquiesced in the arrangement. The conferees were to understand that if “a religious group, as such, should try and influence legislation, [that] would bring up the question of tolerance.” The reason, according to Canfield, the Population Council was putting up the money was in the “hope that the liberal views of certain Catholics will gain greater currency within the Church and that practical considerations in connection with limiting population (as well as biological research, partly or wholly sponsored by Catholics) will lead them to become less and less restrictive as to methods.” To which view, neither Hesburgh nor Shuster expressed any objection.

Fred Jaffe, associate director of information and education at Planned Parenthood, took part in the memo dialogue and came to much the same conclusions. The conference should “focus on objectives rather than methods.” This would pare the differences down to size and also, although Jaffe doesn’t state this explicitly, make the Church seem unreasonable by its insistence that certain methods are illicit. The Population Council, on the other hand, could give the impression of being open to them all. Jaffe concluded by submitting his list of acceptable Catholics. These would include the already mentioned Fr. Gibbons, S.J., Fr. Joseph Gremillion of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, who would have a long association with Notre Dame, Fr. Hesburgh, and Fr. Walter Imbiorski of the Cana Conference in Chicago, who would eventually run off and get married and die without a Catholic funeral.

On October 29, Shuster again wrote to Canfield discussing publicity and indicating that he was involved in not a little duplicity. He requested that no advance publicity be given to the conference lest the wrong people get wind of it, including perhaps the local bishop. In the same letter, however, he indicates that in the hope of “indirect benefits” he has invited “one or two editors of key Catholic periodicals.” This echoes what Shuster said to Canfield in August when he claimed that “we are walking upon relatively difficult terrain and a measure of caution, in the hope of better things to follow is indicated.” Shuster was not so much interested in keeping the symposium secret as he was in managing the way the information came out. Publicity would only be harmful if the wrong people showed up beforehand. Notestein in a note written after the conference hopes that “there were no unfortunate leaks so far as publicity is concerned,” and Shuster assures him that “there were no leaks, thank heavens.”

“Hope of better things to follow” from Shuster and Hesburgh’s point of view meant more money from more foundations for more conferences undermining the Church’s position on contraception. On June 5, 1963, Shuster submitted a proposal asking for funding for virtually the same conference to the Ford Foundation. The conference was “to achieve a consensus which would first serve as a firm and clear basis for dialogue, and second point out areas for future study and discussion,” which is pretty much what the first one had done. However, this time Shuster sweetens the pot by adding that “the objective is to prepare a final statement and distribute it widely.” The statement would, it was understood, be Catholic academe calling for a change in the Church’s teaching, something that would most probably not change the teaching but which would prove embarrassing to the Church nonetheless, especially if it were promoted by the media. “I am not going to stress further the obvious importance of this effort,” Shuster wrote to Oscar Harkavy, head of the Ford Foundation. “The interest of Cardinal Meyer [Shuster’s emphasis] — which is the only part of this letter which is at present confidential — suffices to indicate that these deliberations may find an echo far beyond the confines of the United States.”

The Rockefeller crowd got the proposal passed on to them directly from Harkavy (something which indicates just how closely the interlock between the foundations was). Harkavy was in effect asking the people at the Population Council whether he should fund Notre Dame’s grant or not, and the Population Council seemed less than enthused by the prospect of another conference at Notre Dame, much less a whole series of conferences. The Population Council had gone to bed with Notre Dame, and in the morning decided that it didn’t respect her anymore. The Ford Foundation would eventually sponsor a series of conferences during which the Catholics assembled at Notre Dame denounced in increasingly strident terms the Church’s position opposing contraception. But the contempt in which the Population Council held Notre Dame is evident in the tone of their memos. Dudley Kirk, after suggesting that they might “sponsor this and play it further by ear” goes on to wonder “whether to feel flattered or otherwise at being the only heretic proposed for inclusion in the first conference.” Which prompts Marshall C. Balfour to add, “Hooray for the heretic: the cards are surely stacked against him! That is, unless, the way is being prepared for Pope Paul to change the rules of the game.”

The wing of the Catholic Church whose conferences were sponsored by Rockefeller money was clearly planning for such an eventuality. Since most of the players were old and ostensibly celibate, there is no reason to believe that they were hoping to benefit directly from a change. But a change in the Church’s teaching would mean that they as Catholic academics would be acceptable to the foundation powerbrokers and acceptable members of the Protestant consensus, the WASP ethnos in America, as well. They would be considered Americans in full standing, which has always been the aspiration of a certain kind of Catholic in this country. With people like Fr. Hesburgh calling the shots for Catholics in the United States, the pope could unpack his bag for good this time. Changing the Church’s teaching on contraception would also show that Hesburgh and company had considerable clout among their co-religionists. If they could deliver the vote on contraception, they might be valuable for wringing other concessions from the Church further down the line — in case the Protestant consensus did a 180 degree turn on abortion, for example. Perhaps this is why people like Shuster and Hesburgh pursued the idea of the contraception conferences with such avidity throughout the mid-60s.

Their dedication in pursuing foundation money and the foundations’ interest in changing the teaching of the Church on contraception shows how outgunned the bishops were in opposing the forces arrayed against them. First of all, the bishops were unaware of what was taking place behind their backs. Beyond that, in addition to running their dioceses and the educational establishments in them, the bishops — almost at the very moment the negotiations between Notre Dame and the Population Council were being concluded — were being drawn into what would be a three-year commitment to the Vatican Council. The bishops were left to deal with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution which would sweep through virtually every institution in the West during the ‘60s, and the upheaval of the Church which ensued when the Cultural (and Social) Revolution entered it following the Council. When the Church opened its windows, the Cultural Revolution blew in. This amounted to a series of events from which any other institution would have suffered a mortal blow. It is quite simply a miracle that the Church survived any one of them.

Other Links

The Population Council was working behind the scenes in other areas too. Through the Notre Dame Conference, Notre Dame sociologist Donald Barrett made contact with the Population Council, to whom he applied for a grant. The Population Council, in another instance of interlock, forwarded the application to the Ford Foundation which granted Barrett $500,000 in the mid-’60s. The story becomes more complicated when Barrett, with Hesburgh’s help, got appointed to Pope Paul VI’s birth control commission. Now someone who was receiving money from the foundation establishment at the very time it was trying to change American laws and Catholic teaching on contraception was voting on the commission Paul VI had established to decide whether the Church should change its position on that topic. It was a flagrant conflict of interest, but no one seems to have noticed. The same can be said of Pat and Patti Crowley, head of the Catholic Family Movement. The Crowleys had also been appointed to the birth-control commission because of their connection to Notre Dame while at the same time getting money from the Rockefellers to undermine the Church’s teaching on contraception. According to Robert McClory, their biographer, just as the Church was about to issue Humanae Vitae, “the Crowleys, with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation [my emphasis], made plans for an international forum on the Christian Family in the World to be held in Italy during the summer of ‘68” (Robert McClory, Turning Point [1995]).

A Meeting with Pope Paul VI

Perhaps emboldened by this string of stunning success, Rockefeller decided to take his struggle for contraception a step further. He decided to confront the enemy in his own lair. With the help of Fr. Hesburgh, Rockefeller arranged an audience with Pope Paul VI, who was mulling over the issue of birth control and, it was hoped according to the Enlightenment view of history, might prove to be even more liberal than John XXIII, who was as different from his predecessor as day was from night. Hesburgh, who is described as “decidedly liberal in his own views on population although he would not go as far as JDR on some aspects,” (Hart and Johnson, The Rockefeller Century [1988]), was only too happy to oblige. After being briefed by a number of Jesuit professors from Georgetown University on “the complexities of the Catholic Church that curtailed the freedom of any Pope,” Rockefeller met with Pope Paul VI for forty-five minutes in mid-July of 1965.

Within minutes of his meeting with the pope, Rockefeller was reproaching himself out loud for not having expressed his case forcefully enough. In an attempt to calm him down, Msgr. Paul Marcinkus, later head of the Vatican bank, suggested that Rockefeller write the pope a letter expressing any points which might not have been made during the meeting. A day later on July 16, 1965, Rockefeller duly sent off his letter on “the importance of the population problem ... and the role that the Church might assume in its solution.”

The incident reads like a chapter out of an unpublished Henry James novel. The earnest Protestant American, with his two newly invented contraceptives and a boundless faith that technology and progress will solve all of the world’s ills, confronts the head of the old world’s seminal institution, an Italian gentleman by the name of Montini. “There is no problem more important facing mankind today,” Mr. Rockefeller informed the pope earnestly. If the pope failed to heed Mr. Rockefeller’s advice “we will face disaster of an unprecedented magnitude.”

Mr. Rockefeller then explained his invention to the pope, calling the IUD “a breakthrough of truly major proportions, making available a method which is safe, effective, inexpensive and feasible under the most difficult living conditions. Experience with its use to date indicates that it will prove highly acceptable to great masses of people everywhere.” The IUD was driven off the market in the United States within a matter of years as a result of product liability lawsuits. Those who claim that the Church missed a historic opportunity by issuing Humanae Vitae would do well to ponder the consequences for papal credibility, much less infallibility, if Paul VI had taken Mr. Rockefeller’s advice and endorsed the IUD as a means of Catholic-approved birth control. When it came to giving advice, Rockefeller was used to the undivided attention of religious leaders, who seemed to benefit financially in direct proportion to how avidly they implemented his agenda through the agencies of their denomination. The Quakers, whose idea of missionary work included installing IUDs in Mexican women, are a good example. It was perhaps the accommodating nature of the mainline Protestants which led Rockefeller to dispense with niceties and get blunt with the pope and point out to His Holiness what might happen if the pope failed to see things Rockefeller’s way. “As I see it,” Rockefeller wrote to the pope,

if the Church does not supply this leadership, there will be two consequences: one, the present accelerating pace toward population stabilization will proceed, country by country, without over-all guidance or direction, particularly on the moral side: on the other, if I may speak perfectly frankly, the Church will be bypassed on an issue of fundamental importance to its people and to the well-being of all mankind. The flooding tide cannot be stopped or even slowed, but it can be guided. Because I believe so keenly in the importance of the role which your church has to play in our troubled world of today, I am deeply concerned to see a situation developing which in the long run, it seems to me, inevitably will be harmful to the Church’ s position around the world.

One wonders what was going through the pope’s mind as he read these lines. Was he supposed to feel a sense of gratitude at being saved, along with his Church, from being swept aside by the flooding tide of progress and history? Or was it something more like the Italian version of “If you’re so damn rich, why aren’t you smart?” Either way, the pope passed on Rockefeller’s suggestion. But many liberal Catholics in the United States were willing to accommodate Rockefeller’s wishes, especially if the institutions they ran might benefit from the largesse of Rockefeller funding or that of other foundations. Fr. Hesburgh, who arranged the meeting between Rockefeller and the pope, is a good case in point.

In his letter to the pope, Rockefeller wanted to know if it were possible “to shift the focus of this concern from the method itself to the uses to which the method will be put. Would it be feasible to state that the Church will leave to the discretion of the individual family its choice as to the method it will use to determine the number of its children provided the method is not harmful to the user and provided it does not interfere with the meaning and importance of sexual union in marriage?” This, of course, was the position the Population Council took as the condition for sponsoring its conference on population at Notre Dame. Fr. Hesburgh had proved to be as amenable on this point at the pope would later prove intractable. (Mr. Rockefeller’s visit had other consequences. It convinced the pope that his main enemy lay now to the west and not to the east and brought about the end of the anti-Communist crusade and the beginning of the Vatican’s Ostpolitik. On June 26, 1966, less than a year after the pope’s meeting with John D. Rockefeller III, Agostino Casaroli, the generally acknowledged architect of the Vatican s Ostpolitik, flew to Belgrade and signed an agreement normalizing relations between the Vatican and Yugoslavia.)

Since sex was simply an instrument — something like a knife — according to the Rockefeller view of things, “could not the full weight and prestige of the Church be brought to bear on prescribing the circumstances under which the chosen method will be used? ... To express the above more concisely, what I am suggesting is that specific methods be regarded as merely instruments, like knives, whose use is morally good or bad depending on the intentions of those who employ them.” It was the sort of consequentialism Fr. Charles Curran would advocate roughly two years later in a book published by the University of Notre Dame Press. The pope was, however, not buying. The Catholic Church did not buy the view implicitly in 1968 with the issuance of Humanae Vitae, and it still did not buy it twenty-five years later, this time explicitly, with the issuance of Veritatis Splendor. Of course, the Catholic universities and theologians bought into the Rockefeller view at around the same time that Fr. Hesburgh arranged Rockefeller’s meeting with the pope. They made their break with the Church explicit when Hesburgh issued his Land o’ Lakes statement in the summer of 1967.

Rockefeller added that dissemination of contraceptives would diminish recourse to abortion, implying that he opposed the practice, when in fact he was already involved in funding abortion advocacy in the United States. What he was proposing as his contribution to the pope’s birth-control encyclical would later come to be known as consequentialism, the notion that the good or evil of any action is ontologically free of its essence and solely determined by the intentions of the moral agent and the consequences which flowed from the act. This would become a prominent feature of Catholic dissent as the decade progressed. It would be the cornerstone of the position of Charles Curran, the man who would mount the most effective protest against Humanae Vitae in the United States, and it could be picked up at any number of conferences sponsored by foundation money in the United States. Rockefeller didn’t succeed with the pope, but his arguments were heard with increasing frequency coming from the mouths of Catholic theology professors.

The Notre Dame Statement on Birth Control

In October of 1965 the series of conferences on contraception at Notre Dame which began under the aegis of the Population Council in 1962 and whose continued funding was provided by the Ford Foundation, finally emerged from the secrecy under which they were held with the issuance of what George Shuster had promised Rockefeller three years earlier, namely, a statement by Catholic academics contesting the Church’s position on birth control. In October 1965, Religious News Service announced the publication of a “remarkable statement on birth control prepared this Spring by thirty-seven American scholars, the very existence of which was not revealed” until seven months after it had been written. Catholic scholars, at least thirty-seven of them, were now on record in calling the Church’s position on contraception “unconvincing.” The statement had been delivered personally by Fr. Hesburgh to the Rev. Henri De Riedmatten, secretary of the papal commission on birth control. The story broke in the Paris edition of the New York Times, in an article written by John Cogley which included the text Hesburgh carried to the birth-control commission.

Not surprisingly the Notre Dame statement, which was hammered out from March 17 to March 21, 1965, claimed that “the crisis of world population” was the main reason that the Church’s teaching had become “unconvincing.” The statement listed a number of propositions endorsed by the members of the conference, specifically:

- The members of the conference, respectful of the authority of the Church, are convinced that the norms established in the past are not definitive but remain open for further development (Point # 2).

- The members of the conference do not find convincing the arguments from reason customarily adduced to support the conventional position. These arguments do not manifest an adequate appreciation of the findings of physiology, psychology, sociology, and demography, nor do they reveal a sufficient grasp of the complexity and the inherent value of sexuality in human life (Point #3).

- The majority of the members were of the opinion that there is dependable evidence that contraception is not intrinsically immoral and that therefore there are certain circumstances in which it may be permitted or indeed even recommended (Point #5).

- The members were persuaded that in matters of public policy in a morally pluralistic society, Catholics while rendering witness to their beliefs need not for reasons of private morality oppose governmental programs of assistance in family limitation, provided that the consciences of all citizens are respected (Point #7).

The last point was especially important. It was one of the suggestions laid down by the Population Council as a condition for funding the 1962 Notre Dame conference. Now, mirabile dictu, it appeared as if a group of “responsible” Catholic scholars had arrived at the same conclusion all by themselves, simply by pondering the exigencies of Catholic theology. With all of the crucial links in terms of funding and personnel tucked invisible behind the scenes, the fact that the same ideas kept cropping up in such seemingly unrelated places was simply ascribed to the fact that great minds always traveled in the same circles. As we shall see, the notion that Catholics should not oppose government funding of contraceptives would soon rear its head again before the summer of ‘65 was out.

The ideas which came out of the ‘65 conference were, of course, not the sole property of Rockefeller and the Population Council. By the summer of ‘65 a consensus of a number of interested parties was emerging. One of the signers of the Notre Dame statement, for example, was a Notre Dame graduate and trustee, Thomas P. Carney. Carney was at the time of the conference vice-president in charge of research and development for C. D. Searle Company of Chicago, a major pharmaceutical house involved in marketing the birth-control pill. When the deliberations of the Notre Dame conference on birth control became public, one person who was particularly outraged at Notre Dame’s duplicity was a lawyer from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania by the name of William Bentley Ball. Ball was also legal counsel for the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, and it was in this capacity that he wrote to Archbishop John Krol, head of the conference, and ordinary of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Claiming that the conference at Notre Dame “does not make my task any easier,” Ball related the experience of a Catholic physician who attended the conference “and was sickened by what he heard” which “involved a unified attack on the position which Your Excellencies have taken, even to the point of referring to me in a prepared paper.”

“The conference,” Ball continued, “was chaired by a Notre Dame graduate named Carney, who is vice president of Searle, perhaps the leading manufacturer of contraceptives in the USA.”

When it came to the discussion of birth control at Notre Dame, the field was hardly level, nor were the observers disinterested. In addition to academics eager for grants, pharmaceutical companies like Searle had representatives at the conference to insure a favorable outcome. Notre Dame seems to have been happy with the collaboration. In 1967, Thomas Carney, who graduated from Notre Dame thirty years earlier with a degree in chemistry, was appointed to the board of trustees; in 1969 he was given an honorary degree; in May of 1971 he was awarded the Edward Frederick Sorin Award, the highest award granted by the Notre Dame Alumni Association.

The Gruening Hearings

One indication that the efforts of Rockefeller and the Population Council were having their effect was the fact that the government was starting to get involved on their side of the issue. President Johnson’s endorsement of population control in the 1965 State of the Union message was followed six months later in June of 1965 with Griswold v. Connecticut. Throughout the summer of 1965, Sen. Ernest Gruening of Alaska chaired a Senate committee which held hearings on what was coming to be termed the “population explosion.” The hearings were orchestrated with two major effects in mind: first of all, the populace was to have the dangers of overpopulation impressed on it in the direst terms possible, and secondly, there was to be virtual unanimity among those addressing the Gruening committee. The fact that there were no dissenting voices was to give the impression that a consensus of the best and the brightest already existed and that the only thing left for the Senate to do was to put the recommendations of the population-control solons into action.

The predictions were nothing if not dire. The teeming masses were portrayed as an imminent disaster, something on the level of nuclear war; how we were all going to starve to death in a matter of years and how the United States had to become involved immediately to stop this impending catastrophe. “Deluge” was a term frequently heard. Senator Gruening himself opined that “[I]f our population growth does not stabilize, we may reasonably assume that we will lose the freedoms, privileges, and good life we enjoy today.” Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania, bringer of New Deal politics to Philadelphia, whose second wife was on the board of Planned Parenthood of Philadelphia, was by the mid-’60s a tireless proselytizer for government-funded contraceptives. “In my opinion,” said Senator Clark before the Gruening hearings, “with the exception of the problem of war and peace, this is the most critical matter which confronts our country today.”

Robert C. Cook, president of the Population Reference Bureau, told the Gruening hearings that “the point of demographic no return” was “not far in the future.” For the uninitiated, the point of demographic no return was “that moment when mushrooming population growth makes disintegration and despair unavoidable.” General William H. Draper, Jr. vice chairman of Planned Parenthood - World Population, told the committee that he conceived of population as a “bomb” which must be defused “so that mankind does not multiply itself into oblivion.”

“Like cancer cells multiplying in the human body,” Draper continued, changing his metaphor but not the pathological condition it hoped to portray, “it will, unless slowed down, destroy our present day civilization just as surely as would a nuclear conflict.”

Not surprisingly, John D. Rockefeller III, chairman of the board of the Population Council, testified also. Just as unsurprisingly, Rockefeller told the Senator from Alaska that “no problem is more urgently important to the well-being of mankind than the limitation of population growth. As a threat to our future, it is often compared with nuclear warfare.”

The Entry of William Ball

On the evening of August 10, William Bentley Ball, legal counsel for the Pennsylvania Catholic Council, a Navy veteran of World War II, and a lawyer from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the state’s capital, watched the NBC evening news in a state of disbelief, listening to Stuart Udall, formerly of the Department of the Interior, and Alan Guttmacher of Planned Parenthood announce that the hearings were proceeding smoothly and that so far no opposition had surfaced. That, of course, was precisely the point of orchestrating the hearings so that only the pro-population-control side got heard. But Ball, who was responsible for representing the Church in the State of Pennsylvania, was wondering if the people at the National Catholic Welfare Conference in Washington hadn’t fallen asleep at the switch. Was it really true that the Catholics were planning to sit this one out?, Ball wondered. A few phone calls indicated that this was precisely the case, and he was taking the time to register his alarm with Archbishop Krol, his boss.

Ball wrote Krol a letter during the summer, and I’ll summarize it in one sentence that did appear in this letter: “Where is the Catholic Church?” He was referring specifically to the hearings. Everybody, but everybody, was showing up at these hearings and they were all singing the same tune: “We’re all going to die! We’re all going to starve to death!” One person after another and Bill Ball is thinking, “Where is the Catholic Church? Why isn’t the Catholic Church coming forth and saying ‘this is ridiculous.’”

During the time in which the NCWC did nothing, ostensibly “awaiting further indications from Rome,” the Gruening hearings spent the entire summer giving the impression that the case in favor of government-funded contraception was virtually unanimous. As the summer passed day by day with no response from the Catholics, Ball could hardly contain his amazement.

“I cannot believe,” Ball told Krol, “that after fifty years of preaching against birth control, the bishops of the USA have handed Planned Parenthood a total triumph... Yet that is the fact. There is little point in protesting the use of state funds for birth control by the Pennsylvania Department of Health when national Catholic policy has sanctioned such use.”

Ball testified before the Gruening Committee on August 24, but it was clear that he felt demoralized from the lack of support from the NCWC in Washington. Ball’s testimony was a powerful indictment of government-sponsored birth-control plans as detrimental to the citizens’ freedoms and covertly eugenic as well. Hamstrung by both the Vatican’s prohibition on the one hand and an increasingly prohibitive notion of the separation of church and state proposed by the secularists on the other, Ball did a brilliant job of portraying government-sponsored birth control as a threat to civil freedoms. Ball’s argument was based on Supreme Court cases. From Griswold he established the right to privacy and from the Engel and Schempp cases, he talked about the freedom from government coercion when religious issues were concerned. If the Supreme Court could argue that prayer or Bible reading in school was intrinsically coercive to those who did not share the Judeo-Christian view and, therefore, an impermissible infringement on the separation of church and state, then a social worker probing his client’s views on sexuality and procreation could hardly be construed as less invasive or less of a breach of that separation. This was true of anyone on welfare, according to Ball, but it was especially true of Catholics on welfare, or in any other capacity affected by a public entity.

According to Ball’s testimony, “the main features of the bill pose serious dangers to civil liberty while offering no genuine prospect of relieving the problems of poverty, crowding and disease which they purport to solve.” Beyond that, birth-control programs were necessarily coercive, as that term was defined in the recent school prayer decisions. This was so because the main target group in birth-control programs had always been the poor. Telling a person he is free to reject the proffered birth control is not ameliorated by adding that he is free to refuse. The very fact that the government, which is the source of the person’s livelihood, is offering the services means that the government feels that the contraceptive is a good thing, and by extension that the welfare recipient would do well to accept. It is by its nature coercive. For the Catholic, the state is intruding into a sphere around which it just erected a very high wall of separation.

If the Court were sincere in its concern over the separation of church and state, it doubtless would have accepted Ball’s argument. With the benefit of hindsight, however, it is difficult to see sincerity. The doctrine of privacy, invoked by Justice Douglas in 1965, was used seven years later to justify the decriminalization of abortion, but it was not used to stop the government’s ever-deepening involvement in funding contraceptives. The lesson seems plain enough in retrospect. Privacy meant the protection of sexual liberation against the threats posed to it by organized religion. Eventually, the doctrine of privacy would be invoked to protect two homosexuals caught in flagrante delicto in an automobile parked on a street in Albany, New York. The doctrine of privacy was used to strike down that state’s law prohibiting sodomy. It was just one more example of how the terms the secular state used to widen the acceptance of sexual liberation could never be used at face value to threaten that liberation.

One could fault Ball for naiveté, but that would invite undue cynicism, especially in light of the evidence of the time. In 1965 it was not apparent that Justice Douglas was not sincere when he referred to marriage as something sacred and private in Griswold. Ball was simply using the language available to him as a lawyer, in a country that ostensibly placed great regard in the notion of rule by law.

Ball also mentioned the fact that in recent times both the courts and the legislatures had simultaneously broadened the definition of social welfare and narrowed the power of government over individuals. Common to both was a “concern for the weaker members of society ... most recently this concern has been more emphatically extended to the criminally accused, the alien, the Negro and the poor.” Gruening’s bill was calling for something which went contrary to both trends. “S. 1676,” according to Ball, “is, plainly and simply, a bill for the establishing of a domestic and international birth control program and for the creating of permanent federal governmental organs for the carrying out of the same.” Ball complained that not only would such an entity be of its nature intrusive and coercive, he went on to say that the onus of its intent would fall on the Negro.

“The note of racial eugenicism,” Ball continued, “is inescapable in the proposal of S. 1676... In this hour of the painful emergence of our Negro brothers into the American society, surely this consideration should be weighted in the balance with the assumed but unproved benefits of S. 1676’s birth control proposal.” Ball concluded by saying the whole bill reflected the psychology of “the White Man’s Burden” and should be rejected.

On the Sunday (August 29, 1965) immediately following Ball’s testimony at the Gruening hearings, Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle delivered a sermon on “Birth Control and Public Policy” at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington. The sermon got widespread coverage in the press, and its influence was felt in Washington. The Church in the person of Archbishop O’Boyle was taking a stand on the poverty program and the attempt by the government to deal with the plight of the poor in general and the Negro poor in particular through eugenic means. The sermon was a clear attempt on O’Boyle’s part to draw a line in the sand, and the line had to do with the situation of birth-control programs into the budget of the War on Poverty.

“In the United States,” O’Boyle began, “progress in the field of racial and social justice has been nothing short of phenomenal.” O’Boyle’s sermon was intended to put Washington on notice that no matter how phenomenal, no matter how “holy” a cause the civil rights movement had become, the Catholic Church was not going to tolerate it as a front for advancing public acceptance of birth control.

Implicit in O’Boyle’s challenge was a rebuke of the accommodationist polices of the NCWC. “Committees of the Congress and other public bodies,” O’Boyle said, “hearing no official expression to the contrary, have assumed that ‘silence gives consent’ and have initiated programs intruding on the private lives of citizens — programs in which, to put it bluntly, the government has no business.” In addition to breaking with the policies of the NCWC, O’Boyle called into question the notion of population “explosion,” conceding at the very most that “there may well be at this moment areas of relative overpopulation in certain parts of this country — the so-called Negro ghettos of some of our northern cities, for example.” Even if this were the case on a widespread basis, O’Boyle made it clear that birth control, especially in programs sponsored by the government, was not going to alleviate social problems.

“A program of such dubious benefit is clearly outweighed by its negative side, which involves a threat to the American family, specifically as a result of the gradual intrusion of government into the private lives of its citizens.” Taking his cue from Ball, O’Boyle cited Supreme Court cases to bolster his arguments. Justice Brandeis’s “right to be left alone” was given modern application in Griswold v. Connecticut: “Now,” concluded O’Boyle, “if the government is enjoined by this decision from forbidding the practice of birth control, it logically follows that it is likewise forbidden to promote it.” O’Boyle then went on to attack the Gruening bill specifically, if not by name.

In spite of these unmistakable constitutional roadblocks, a bill is now before the Senate sub-committee on Foreign Aid expenditures that would formally and directly involve the federal government in birth prevention programs, including the dissemination of information and materials at public expense... In a number of cities, there have been attempts to link promotion of birth control with the new antipoverty program, on the theory that, as one senator put it “the poor are more likely than any other group to have large families.”

‘That,” O’Boyle thundered from the pulpit, “is not the government’s business. The choice of how many children a couple should have is the sole, personal responsibility of the spouses. It is not less their responsibility if they happen to be poor.”

The line in the sand was clear. The Church would support the civil rights movement’s War on Poverty and the concomitant expansion of the welfare state only if that expansion remained within the bounds of the moral law. Once that line was crossed, the government could expect opposition from the Catholics. This, of course, is precisely what the secularists had feared all along. Rockefeller and his minions at the Population Council were only interested in Catholics who were willing to relegate their moral beliefs to the realm of personal predilection. This had been the sine qua non for funding the contraception conferences at Notre Dame. It was also at the heart of the NCWC’s strategy.

O’Boyle was, in effect, arguing for an honest interpretation of the separation of church and state, and on sexual matters this is precisely what the Church would never get because, in virtually all important aspects, the separation of church and state was nothing more than a pretext for the establishment of the secular agenda as the law of the land, and sexual liberation as a front for eugenic control was, as time would show with increasing clarity, one of the secularists’ non-negotiable demands.

“For a government agent,” O’Boyle stated, “to inquire respecting details of their sexual life, or in any way to suggest to them practices respecting sex which may do violence to their religious beliefs, is a clear violation of the sacred right of privacy which the Supreme Court held to be inviolate.” O’Boyle was arguing, in other words, that it was inconsistent to ban prayer as a violation of religious beliefs but at the same time promote contraception. This was, of course, true, but this self-contradiction lay at the heart of the secular agenda.

“In great issues of this kind,” O’Boyle continued,

where opinion is sharply divided the first and most important consideration in searching for a solution is the preservation of the God-given right of conscience. Catholics, for example, have no right to impose their own moral code upon the rest of the country by civil legislation. By the same reasoning, they are obliged in conscience to oppose any regulation which would elevate to the status of public policy a philosophy or practice which violates rights of privacy or liberty of conscience. The citizen’s freedom cuts both ways... In situations, like this, involving serious moral issues in which people strive to form a right conscience, the role of government is clear — strict neutrality... The moment the government presumes to ‘give advice’ in this delicate area, it opens to influencing the free decision of its citizens. And from influence it only a short step to coercion.

Unfortunately, Archbishop O’Boyle, like all the bishops, was fighting a war on two fronts. In addition to warning the government away from funding birth-control programs, he had to admonish the Catholics to adhere to the Church’s position. “A Catholic,” O’Boyle claimed, turning to the second front, “accepts voluntarily, by the very fact of his membership, the official teaching of the Church in matters of faith and morals. And, my dear good people, the Church’s teaching with regard to contraception has been both clear and consistent.” As an indication that that teaching was not going to change, O’Boyle quoted the statement of Pope Paul VI that “we do not have a sufficient reason to regard the norms given by Pope Pius XII in this matter as surpassed and therefore not binding.”

“If next week,” O’Boyle asked in concluding his homily,

you were asked to sacrifice one of your children to ease the “population explosion,’ which one would you choose? ... Surely in the glorious history of this great nation, we have found better guides to the Great Society than the four horsemen of artificial birth control, abortion, sterilization and euthanasia... This is the philosophy of defeatism and despair.

According to Ball, the bishops had a historic opportunity in the fall of 1965. But largely as a result of the foot-dragging of the NCWC legal staff, the winter months passed and the Church has “taken an historic non-step.” By May of 1966, Ball felt that “many will look back with horror upon what can only be described as an historic default.” Especially galling was the fact that the NCWC was fleeing from a very beatable opponent, from “a legion of kapok dragons,” as he put it in a letter to Krol. If the Church were able to present the case that government birth control created a threat to the right of privacy, Ball felt that a large segment of public opinion might be won over. But Ball found himself more often than not engaged in a one-man campaign, while the NCWC was claiming that it was absurd to fear government’s involvement in the birth-control issue. This faction, Ball complained, was so fearful of “imposing Catholic morality” on others, that they were opening the door to abortion, sterilization, and racial eugenics — all in the name of making peace with the liberal social agenda. Disbelief is the characteristic emotion of Ball’s increasingly exasperated correspondence with Krol. “This whole question of government birth control has become to me a thing like death,” he writes. “You look at it and you can’t believe it’s so.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Gate Opens from Within

Portrait of a Dissembler: Fr. Richard McBrien

In the 1960s Fr. Charles Curran was the Maginot Line of dissent in this country. Like Hans Kueng before him, he took a fixed position and stayed with it to the end. Neither Curran nor Kueng were willing to make any doctrinal concessions before the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Their position was that they were right and the Church was wrong, and they were willing to stand by that fixed position until the end, until the Church had no other option but to declare them no longer Catholic theologians.

Fr. Curran was only willing to compromise when it came to deciding how he was to be employed at Catholic University. He was willing to accept the compromise worked out by Cardinal Bernardin, whereby he would continue teaching moral theology but not courses having to do with sexuality — courses he hadn’t taught for years. When it came to the possible moral licitness of sodomy, abortion, contraception and other issues, he remained as intransigent as Martin Luther had on other issues. “Hier stehe ich, ich kann nichts anders” could have been Curran’s motto, except that the professor from Catholic U was more interested in sodomy than justification. Once he took a stand for the licitness of sodomy — under certain nuanced circumstances, of course — Cardinal Ratzinger’s job was made easy.

That’s what made the Curran affair such a neat, clear-cut case. Curran admitted, in effect, that what he was preaching was not the teaching of the Church. Once he did that he became a stationary target; once he had become the Maginot Line of dissent, he was easily outmaneuvered. His mistake, if you want to look at it that way, was that he defined his position too clearly. He had, in effect, learned nothing from the guerilla wars of the 20th century and nothing from the guerilla warfare that has been going on in the Church since the end of the Second Vatican Council. In a sense, he was made obsolete by the very forces he had helped set into motion.

But let’s for one moment suppose he had taken a different course. Suppose he had expressed a willingness to change his writings in future editions with even more nuanced clarifications that would seemingly remove anything objectionable from the point of view of Catholic morality. Suppose, to take this line of speculation one step further, that he had been smart enough to do this early on so that he had never gotten into a conflict with someone as clever and intractable as Cardinal Ratzinger. Suppose he had instead maneuvered himself into a position where he was being investigated by the American bishops instead of the Vatican. Since American bishops can never do anything on their own, he would have been investigated by a committee appointed by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, and since committees invariably produce documents that reflect the lowest common denominator of thought on a given issue, it is conceivable that...

Rather than speculate any further about what might have happened to Fr. Curran, it would be better to focus on a similar case that actually did happen. The case I’m referring to dealt with the late Fr. Richard McBrien. On July 5, 1985, the Committee on Doctrine of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement on Fr. McBrien’s book Catholicism. The study had begun in 1981 and had included numerous sessions with the priest himself and “other theologians whom either he or [the bishops] have chosen.” The report characterized the whole process as “a positive effort at exercising what we believe to be a model of cooperative ecclesial concern for the integrity of the faith, the pastoral needs of people and the scholarly reputation of the author.” The committee went on to add that “Fr. McBrien has cooperated fully. He has already made a number of clarifications in the Study Edition and has expressed his readiness to make still farther changes as needed” [my emphasis]. The committee called attention to changes that had been made in the Study Edition while expressing the “hope that subsequent editions will incorporate the clarifications necessary to remove any remaining ambiguities in the expression of Catholic teaching.”

In a passage that would become relevant to the Curran case less than a year later, the committee took pains to reassert the competence of the Magisterium, even in areas where doctrine had not been solemnly proclaimed. The committee then went on to state explicitly the following points — points, we are told, “with which Fr. McBrien agrees”:

In addition to those doctrines which have been taught by the Magisterium of the Church in the extraordinary way of infallible definition, the ordinary teaching of the Pope and the bishops in union with him preserves many revealed truths which have never been solemnly defined but which, nevertheless, are infallibly true and definable. These are truths with cannot be rejected or neglected without injury to the integrity of the Catholic faith, because they are either explicitly contained in Holy Scripture or, although only implicit in Sacred Scripture, they have been taught universally and continuously, are professed in the liturgy, and are believed and witnessed by the faithful as divinely revealed. In the area of moral doctrine, some have called attention to a theoretical possibility of error in some Church teaching. The Church does indeed enjoy infallibility in its ordinary and universal teaching (Lumen Gentium 25; Canon 749 [1983 Code]). But even when a teaching may not be infallibly proposed, it enjoys moral certainty; and, consequently, has a normative role in the formation of Christian conscience. The moral instruction of the faithful should carefully and effectively explain the authoritative nature of Church teaching and the reasons for this teaching. This instruction should not leave the teaching defenseless before objections which otherwise may receive greater plausibility because of their conformity to secular attitudes.

In his final response to Fr. Curran’s claim that he was only dissenting from “non-infallible teaching,” Cardinal Ratzinger would take virtually the same position. “Your basic assertion,” Ratzinger wrote in a letter dated July 25, 1986, and addressed to Fr. Curran,

has been that since your positions are convincing to you and diverge only from the “non-infallible” teaching of the Church, they constitute “responsible” dissent and should therefore be allowed by the Church. In this regard, the following considerations seem to be in order.

First of all, one must remember the teaching of the Second Vatican Council which clearly does not confine the infallible magisterium purely to matters of faith nor to solemn definition. Lumen Gentium 25 states: “When, however, they [the bishops], even though spread throughout the world, but still maintaining the bond of communion between themselves and with the successor of Peter, and authentically teaching on matters of faith or morals, are in agreement that a particular position ought to be held as definitive, then they are teaching the doctrine of Christ in an infallible manner.” Besides this, the Church does not build its life upon its infallible magisterium alone but on the teaching of its authentic, ordinary magisterium as well.

Less than one year before the Curran affair was to make headlines, McBrien was on record in the statement of the Committee on Doctrine of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops as accepting Cardinal Ratzinger’s position. However, once the case came before the public eye, McBrien took exactly the opposite position. In an article in the Observer, the Notre Dame student newspaper, McBrien said the Vatican “Overplayed its hand.” “McBrien also said,” the article continues, “that none of Curran’s dissenting positions, including disagreement with the Church on artificial birth control, involve ‘infallible’ Church teaching and are therefore open to dissent.”

In one of his weekly columns which appeared on April 25, 1986, entitled “Catholicism à la carte has ever-changing menu,” Fr. McBrien criticized “right-wing practicing Catholics” and “left-wing former Catholics” because “both believe that there is a definable, clear-cut set of rules by which all Catholics must live.” To both of these groups of extremists he offered the alternative of “Catholicism à la carte,” practiced by “liberal-to-moderate Catholics” who decide which of the Church’s rules they intend to follow. McBrien mockingly demanded a copy of the set of rules, the breaking of which makes one a selective Catholic:

But what exactly are these rules? A partial list will not suffice. We need the complete list. If breaking only one rule makes one a selective Catholic, then we have to know every rule. Otherwise, we might be deceived into thinking that someone is really a “good Catholic” because they keep twenty three rules we all agree upon, when, in fact, they are breaking some other rules were not taking into account. So the order of business is to locate the set of rules. Where is it? What rules does it actually contain?

In his interview with Vittorio Messori, published as The Ratzinger Report (1985), Cardinal Ratzinger mentioned this type of legalism as typical of what he called “bourgeois” Christianity. When commitment to the faith dies, all that is left is the burden of “rules” and the role of the compassionate theologian is to get people out from underneath this burden. “In a world like the West,” Ratzinger says, “where money and wealth are the measure of all things and where the model of the free market imposes its implacable laws on every aspect of life, authentic Catholic ethics now appears to many like an alien body from times long past, as a kind of meteorite which is in opposition, not only to the concrete habits of life, but also to the way of thinking underlying them. Economic liberalism creates its exact counterpart, permissivism, on the moral plane.” Accordingly, “it becomes difficult, if not altogether impossible, to present Catholic morality as reasonable. It is too distant from what is considered to be obvious, as normal by the majority of persons, conditioned by the dominant culture with which not a few ‘Catholic’ moralists have aligned themselves as influential supporters.”

As if determined to fulfill Cardinal Ratzinger’s prophecies, Fr. McBrien used metaphors for the Church that reveal his ecclesiology as simply a valiant form of consumerism:

Liberal-to-moderate Catholics who don’t order the “complete dinner” are also accused of being less than fully respectful toward the waiters (read: the bishops), the head chef (read: the Pope), and even the founding owner (read: the Lord himself). They don’t always accept the recommendation of the waiter and they sometimes even send the meal back to the kitchen. And yet they will lavish praise on the head chef when he serves something they like, and they leave big tips for the waiter when that happens.

But the crucial issue is not that Fr. McBrien equated membership in the Church with ordering a meal at a restaurant: it is whether he accepts Lumen Gentium 25. The answer, it would seem, is that it depends on who is asking the question. When Fr. McBrien was under investigation by the bishops, he accepted it; when he was cleared and was no longer under investigation, he did not.

Actually his position was even more “nuanced” than that. In an interview, I once asked him about this discrepancy in his public utterances.

“Do you agree with Lumen Gentium 25? Catholics must display a ‘loyal submission of the will and intellect’ to ‘the authentic teaching authority of the Roman pontiff even when he does not speak ex cathedra.’”

“Sure,” Fr. McBrien responded.

“Well, isn’t that the heart of what the Curran case is all about? You said at a certain point that none of Curran’s dissenting positions, including disagreeing with the Church on artificial birth control, involve infallible Church teaching and therefore are open to dissent.”

“Right.”

“Well, doesn’t that contradict Lumen Gentium 25?

“That text,” answered Fr. McBrien, “is not talking about theologians. That is a technical text, and as a matter of fact the history of that text, of article 25, is an indication that they wanted to repeat something from Humani Generis, which said that once the pope had spoken there can be no further discussion. And they deliberately did not include that in the final text, so you have to understand the history of that text. That’s the whole point that I’ve made in these interviews. The role of a theologian is not the same as the role of a regular member of the Church.”

If Fr. McBrien was trying to make that point in his interviews, there is no indication he attempted to make it while under investigation by the bishops’ committee on doctrine. In fact, one theologian on the committee characterized him as “very conciliatory and very compromising, willing to work with the committee.” When I informed that theologian of the discrepancy between McBrien’s current position on “the religious respect of intellect and will” called for by both Lumen Gentium 25 and Canon 752, and the position he took before the bishops’ committee, he came up with a very simple explanation: “It sounds like double dealing to me,” he said.

Just what type of person Fr. McBrien is he himself makes clear in the book Journeys: The Impact of Personal Experience on Religious Thought (1975), an anthology of autobiographies edited by Gregory Baum that could serve as the Who’s Who of dissent in this country. Placed next to the ravings of Rosemary Radford Ruether (“I felt I was on more sympathetic terms with the Ba’al worshippers. I knew that Ba’al was a real god, the revelation of the mystery of life, the expression of the depths of Being which had broken though into the lives of people and gave them a key to the mystery of death and rebirth... On the other hand Yahweh had deplorably violent ways, and a lot of evil had been done in the name of Christ... As for the defects of Ba’al, were they more spectacular than the defects of the biblical God or messiah, or perhaps less so?”), Fr. McBrien’s little memoir seems tame by comparison, but it is no less revealing, even if the main thing it reveals is that the priest from Hartford wanted to draw a veil over his intentions. “Nobody likes to be found out,” he wrote, quoting Erik Erikson, and much of the ire in this otherwise unexceptional memoir is directed at those who blew his cover. After a description of how smoothly his career was going, McBrien described the troubles he had when he was found out in the early ‘70s, when, as he put it, “my more strictly ecclesiastical connections began to fray at the edges”:

Two events in March of 1972 may have done more to effect this change than any other factors. First, I keynoted the annual convention of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils in Denver. I was pilloried on the front page of The Wanderer for my assorted heresies, and worse. The conservative-to-reactionary wing of the Catholic Church was alerted to my presence in a dramatically new way. From that point on, I was regularly flogged in their journals and papers. And their assorted pressures, no doubt, have deterred several dioceses and religious communities from inviting me to lecture. Lawyers call this a “chilling effect.”

The second event was my signing of an international theological statement, drafted principally by Hans Kueng, on the present state of reform in the Catholic Church. I thought it to be an essentially positive and constructive document... But it was perceived very differently by extreme conservatives, and even some moderates.

Shortly after Hans Kueng had his canonical mandate to teach theology withdrawn by the Vatican, McBrien invited him to Notre Dame and welcomed him there as a “fellow Catholic theologian.” Yet, for all these expressions of solidarity, the effectiveness of McBrien’s strategy depended on his ability to distance himself from people like Kueng and Rosemary Radford Ruether while pursuing their goals from a safe distance in the rear. An essential part of his strategy was to create the impression that he was middle-of-the-road. The really effective revolutionary would be careful never to move beyond or even close to anything that smacked of extremism, until there were enough extremists to comfortably populate the middle of the road, then he could adjust his position accordingly — another notch to the left, but always safely behind the vanguard. His genius would consist in making yesterday’s preposterous demands seem like today’s moderation.

In a speech to the Women in the Church conference in Washington in October 1986, McBrien did just that. He began his speech, as he so often did, by describing what he saw as the two extremes in the women and the Church issue. On the one hand we have the Womanchurch separatists, and on the other hand we have the Vatican, even though he went on to add that “the opponents of sexual equality in the Church are not in the hierarchy or the clergy alone.” Fr. McBrien never actually came out and advocated the ordination of women. He allowed the audience to infer that from his leading rhetorical questions: “Are women excluded from significant ministries in the Church?” he roared, and the easily-manipulated feminists roared back in the affirmative. More importantly, he gave the impression that the ordination of women was now a middle-of-the-road position.

He was also a man who learned how to deal with the various constituencies in the Church in the manner of an effective politician. At a press conference following his speech on women in the Church, he said of abortion: “it would be a lot easier for me to go around beating up on homosexuals and woman having abortions, because I can’t follow those rules anyway. I’m not a homosexual, and I’m certainly not a woman.” When speaking one-on-one, however, to a reporter from the National Catholic Register, a paper he considered as representing “the Catholic traditionalists of our day” (Journeys), he took a stricter view of the matter: “Abortion is a very serious sin. It’s an attack upon innocent life. In other words, I agree with the bishops and their whole approach to life issues.” In his speech to the feminists a few moments before, however, he took a slightly different view of episcopal authority. He criticized lay Catholics who “never explain why the bishops have any particular competence in matters of sexual ethics [sustained laughter and applause], especially in matters pertaining to marriage and homosexuality, for example.” [More laughter from the appreciative crowd].

It should come as no surprise to find that Fr. McBrien was concerned about the state of affairs in Catholic academe because, given the way things went, he moved from being in the middle of the road to being on the front lines. It was a change mirrored in McBrien’s own utterances. At the beginning of the Curran affair he and the other anonymous theologians were talking as if their pressure, coupled with the help of some American bishops, might bring about compromise. When hopes for that were dashed by Ratzinger’s obdurateness, a new tack began to emerge in his columns. Now he was basically conceding Catholic U to the enemy camp. In his speech in Washington on October 16, 1986 he referred to it as “what was then known as the Catholic University of America” to sustained laughter and applause from the feminist audience. In a column which appeared on September 11, 1986, he described the aftermath of Curran’s removal in August. “By then,” he wrote, “the Catholic theological community in the United States had already discounted the outcome, much like [sic] Wall Street discounts a negative event weeks or months before it actually occurs.”

McBrien’s new strategy was to emphasize the fact that Catholic U was a pontifica1ly-chartered university and to claim that similar Vatican actions would have no effect at Catholic universities like Notre Dame, where Fr. McBrien taught. In an article in the Notre Dame student newspaper dated October 8, 1986, we read:

The recent Vatican removal of a Catholic University theologian’s teaching post would be “legally impossible” at Notre Dame, according to Fr. Richard McBrien, chairman of the theology department. McBrien said a move like the ban against Fr. Charles Curran’s teaching at Catholic University, Washington, D.C., could not be repeated here because Notre Dame is independently owned and operated under a lay board of trustees and subject to state law and rules of accreditation.

Citing Catholic University’s lone status as a Vatican chartered American university, McBrien said Curran’s removal was partly motivated by his “vulnerability” to Vatican control. “If (Curran) were at Notre Dame, they couldn’t have gotten at him,” said McBrien. “They could have condemned him, they could have censored [sic] him, but he’d still be teaching.”

“Well, you’re saying in effect, then, that Notre Dame is not under the control of the Vatican,” I said in an interview with Fr. McBrien a few days after his statement appeared in the student newspaper.

“That’s correct,” he answered. “It’s not under their control, and we’re talking now in technical terms. It’s not under the control of the Vatican in the same way that Catholic University in Washington is.”

“When did this separation from Rome’s authority take place?”

“I don’t really know. Fr. Hesburgh, I think, made reference to it yesterday.”

In his final address to the faculty on October 13, 1986, Fr. Hesburgh gave a long history of the university in which he noted that “In 1967, by official action of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, the perpetual succession [granted by the Indiana State Legislature] was decreed to include a majority of laymen and laywomen as Trustees of the University, this action duly recorded by the Secretary of State of Indiana,” at which point he departed from his prepared text and added, “it was approved by the Vatican by special decree. They may someday regret that.” His aside was greeted by general laughter from the assembled faculty members.

When I pressed him for an explicit formulation of the break from Roman authority, McBrien changed his position.

“It never took place,” he said of the split. “The University of Notre Dame was never under Rome.”

“Is it a Catholic university?”

“Yeah,” McBrien responded, “but you can’t make the assumption that the only way you can make a Catholic university is to have a Vatican charter.”

The assumption, however, was solely in McBrien’s mind and not that of his questioner. Canon 808 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law states explicitly, “no university may bear the title or name Catholic university without the consent of the competent ecclesiastical authority.” The canon immediately preceding that one, Canon 807, states unequivocally that “the Church has the right to erect and to supervise [my emphasis] universities which contribute to a higher level of human culture, to a fuller advancement of the human person and also to the fulfillment of the Church’s teaching office.”

All of this is said, it should be noted, under the chapter heading “Catholic Universities and Other Institutes of Higher Studies;” the norms specifically covering “Ecclesiastical Universities and Faculties,” institutions like Catholic University, are enumerated in the following chapter.

The Land o’ Lakes Statement

Shortly after beginning his pontificate, as his first official document, Pope John Paul II issued a statement on Catholic higher education known as Sapientia Christiana. The primacy of the document in his pontificate gives some indication of the importance the pope attached to it. In the intervening years much has happened, much of it beyond the ken of those who were around in 1978 when Karol Wojtyla became pope. For the first time in anyone’s memory an attempt was made on the pope’s life; the worldwide communist conspiracy headquartered in the Soviet Union collapsed, rearranging the political landscape one had become accustomed to for almost the entire breadth of the 20th century. But some things just don’t change, and the state of Catholic higher education is one of them. On January 30, 1999, Revs. J. Donald Monan, S.J. of Boston College and Edward A. Malloy, C.S.C. of Notre Dame University announced that they had rejected the latest attempt by the Vatican and the American bishops to bring Catholic universities in line with the Code of Canon Law pursuant to Ex Corde Ecclesiae, which the Vatican had issued in 1990. By taking this action Malloy and Monan and the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities put Rome on notice that it was still 1978. The pontificate of John Paul II may have brought down the Soviet empire, but it had yet to reach first base in dealing with the Church’s colleges and universities, which seemed determined to persist in their resistance to Church norms. During the summer of 1995, at a meeting of the heads of those colleges at the University of Notre Dame, the impasse was clear. The presidents stepped to the microphone one by one and asked Cardinal Pio Laghi to change the requirement whereby bishops would certify whether theologians who taught at Catholic colleges were in fact Catholic. Which meant changing the 1983 Code of Canon Law, which meant doing something beyond Cardinal Laghi’s power. Hence, the impasse.

The history of this conflict goes back to 1967 when Fr. Hesburgh, then president of the University of Notre Dame, placed the university under a lay board of trustees, effectively removing it from Church control. The manifesto which justified this transfer of property out of Church control was known as the Land o’ Lakes Statement and it specified, among other things, that “the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.” Twenty-five years after that fact, I asked Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia, the man responsible for the revision of the Code of Canon Law, how he understood Land o’ Lakes, and Krol replied that it was “alienation of Church property.” Fr. Hesburgh, in the opinion of Cardinal Krol, had stolen Notre Dame from the Church.

I have already pointed out the ironies involved in the Land o’ Lakes statement. At the same time that Fr. Hesburgh was objecting to the imposition of external authority “of whatever kind, lay or clerical,” he was groveling at the feet of the Rockefellers for their money and would grovel further when foundation money became federal money at the end of the ‘60s. Fr. Hesburgh didn’t object to “external authority” when the Population Council specified who could be invited to the secret conferences it sponsored on contraception at Notre Dame during the mid-’60s, nor did he object when the Population Council specified what they were allowed to talk about either. Neither Hesburgh nor his assistant George Shuster raised a peep of protest when the Population Council specified which books were to be placed on the tables or when the Rockefeller interests specified that Catholics of a conservative stripe were not to be invited to the conference. Outside authority meant one thing and one thing only, it meant Rome’s concern that Notre Dame was teaching the Catholic faith. This concern did not apply to the Rockefeller interests, who were avidly working to undermine the Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception and using Notre Dame as a tool to do the undermining.

There has been a running battle between Rome and Notre Dame ever since the Land o’ Lakes statement in 1967. In 1972, Rome finally got around to responding to Land o’ Lakes statement by issuing its own statement, “The Catholic University in the Modern World,” which affirmed that “to perform its teaching and research functions effectively, a Catholic university must have true autonomy and academic freedom” without explaining just what “true autonomy and academic freedom” meant and how Rome’s definition might differ from that of Fr. Hesburgh.

In 1976, when the revision of the Code of Canon Law was underway, discussion about the nature of freedom and autonomy was subsumed into the debate over the education canons in the Code, specifically canons 810 and 812, which specified respectively that professors must exhibit “probity of life” and that theologians must obtain a mandate from the bishop. In 1976 the NCEA issued a document on “Relations of American Catholic Colleges and Universities with the Church,” which attempted to bridge the gap, giving, of course, priority to autonomy over affiliation. The U.S. bishops did much the same thing in 1980 in their pastoral letter on Catholic Higher Education and the Pastoral Mission of the Church.

All of these documents and a lot of personal lobbying, however, did not prevent the promulgation of the New Code of Canon Law in 1983, a code which retained the canons which were disputed by the Americans. As an example of the lobbying just previous to the adoption of the Code, Fr. Hesburgh flew to Rome a number of times. In one particularly bizarre incident, Hesburgh accosted John Cardinal Krol on the Via Conciliazione and told him to drop the education canons from the Code. The canons, needless to say, did not get dropped and, as a result, negotiations reached an impasse. The Code is the rock on which all subsequent compromises floundered. The college and university presidents would not back down from insisting on institutional autonomy while at the same time calling themselves Catholic as they defined the term, and the Vatican would not, in fact, could not, budge on its points because they had been written into the law of the Church.

In 1985 Rome issued its “Schema on Higher Education,” the first draft of the document which Pope John Paul II would issue on August 15, 1990 under the name Ex Corde Ecclesia, prompting Fr. Hesburgh to take a page from Bernard Shaw, who claimed that a Catholic university was a contradiction in terms, and say, “The terrible dilemma is that the best Catholic universities are being asked to choose between being real universities and being really Catholic, When in fact they are already both.” Or neither, perhaps. On November 29, 1993 the presidents of the fourteen largest Catholic universities issued a letter in which they announced that:

these institutions with their traditions of freedom and institutional autonomy, with limited assistance from the State and without juridical control of the local bishops have won for themselves a distinguished place among peer institutions in educating students with the deepened understanding and practice of their Catholic faith.

Their apodictic statement contradicted the experience of Catholic parents who sent their children to Catholic colleges at great financial sacrifice oftentimes only to watch their children lose the Catholic faith by the time of graduation.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Church and the New Americanism

America as the Model of the Modern State

In an address to the Curia on December 22, 2005 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of end of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Benedict XVI claimed that “the Council had to find a new definition of the relationship between the Church and the modern age.”

According to Pope Benedict,

this relationship started out difficultly with the Galileo trial. It broke completely, when Kant defined “religion within pure reason” and when, in the radical phase of the French Revolution, an image of the state and of man was spread that practically intended to crowd out the Church and faith. The clash of the Church’s faith with a radical liberalism and also with natural sciences that claimed to embrace, with its knowledge, the totality of reality to its outmost borders, stubbornly setting itself to make the “hypothesis of God” superfluous, had provoked in the 19th century under Pius IX, on the part of the Church, a harsh and radical condemnation of this spirit of the modern age. Thus, there were apparently no grounds for any positive and fruitful agreement, and drastic were also the refusals on the part of those who felt they were the representatives of the modern age.

Pope Benedict said that the example of the United States of America was the key that allowed Vatican II to reconcile the Church and modernity. At the time that the Vatican Council was convened, Pope Benedict continued:

It was becoming clear that the American Revolution had offered a model of the modern state that was different from that theorized by the radical tendencies that had emerged from the second phase of the French Revolution.

America became the tacit model upon which Dignitatis Humanae, the Vatican document on religious freedom, was based. Unmentioned in Pope Benedict’s talk was the connection between this idea of America as the “model of the [benign] modern state” and the writings of Fr. John Courtney Murray.

Henry Luce, the CIA, and Father Murray

As of 1960 it looked as if America had made the successful transition from a Puritan/Enlightenment regime run by Protestants to one run by Catholics. As we have seen, on July 4, 1962, the year the Council opened, those who attended the Independence Day celebration in Philadelphia could listen to speeches from a Catholic mayor, a Catholic governor and a Catholic president, after an invocation by John Cardinal Krol, one of the Vatican Council’s chief administrators.

It looked as if Paul Blanshard’s nightmare had become a reality — America had become a Catholic country. But looks can be deceiving. Fr. John Courtney Murray landed on the cover of Time magazine just as the Council was opening because he was a protégé of Henry Luce, who, as head of Time/Life, had close links to the CIA and was, in effect, Propaganda Minister for the American Empire, then known as the “free world.”

In 1953 the CIA launched its doctrinal warfare program against the Catholic Church. The program was created by a Georgetown University professor, Edward Lily, but its main implementers were Henry Luce, publisher and founder of Time magazine, John Courtney Murray, the Jesuit who advised Luce on Catholic matters, and C.D. Jackson, the CIA agent who was the CIA’s liaison with the Time/Life publishing empire.

Jackson realized they needed a basic narrative to guide events, so throughout the 1950s he and Luce had used the pages of Time to produce that narrative. They had cast Murray as the suffering servant, a progressive victim of the backward-looking and traditionalist Roman Curia, led by Cardinal Ottaviani. Anyone who defended Ottaviani, such as Msgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton and Fr. Francis J. Connell, both of whom taught at the Catholic University of America, were ignored or portrayed as hard-headed and backward thinking. Time portrayed John XXIII as an essentially Americanist Pope. Jackson and Luce created the expectation that big changes were coming from the Catholic Church.

Luce had arranged to have his wife, the famous Catholic convert and protégé of Bishop Fulton Sheen, Claire Boothe Luce, become ambassador to Italy in the ‘50s so that he could keep tabs on the Church in what was turning out to be a crucial battlefield with Communism. Neither Henry, who never converted, nor his wife, were happy with the Church as an ally in the crusade against Communism. The operating system for the American Empire was known as Capitalism, and Catholics (especially Italian Catholics) were notoriously squishy went it came to supporting Capitalism. Amintore Fanfani, one of the pillars of the pro-American Christian Democratic Party in the ‘50s, had even claimed in the ‘30s that Catholicism and Capitalism were incompatible in Protestantism, Catholicism and Capitalism (1935), which he wrote in the wake of the stock market crash and the publication of the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, the Church’s attempt to deal with the economic crisis.

Beginning in 1963, Murray, Luce, and Jackson used the CIA’s doctrinal warfare program to disrupt the Second Vatican Council and turn it into what Pope Benedict XVI would later call “the Council of the Media.” Church documents, no matter what they actually said, were transformed by being refracted through the lens of Time magazine articles. Murray continued this psychological warfare campaign by writing the notes to the Abbott edition translation of Dignitatis Humanae. Those notes gave the impression that the Catholic Church now accepted the American version of religious liberty and the separation of church and state.

With the help of Fr. Murray, who had become intoxicated by his proximity to power and the LSD he took with Claire, Luce and the CIA set out to engage in the social engineering of the Catholic Church via their meddling in the Vatican Council. Ex-Jesuit seminarian Robert Blair Kaiser got hired as Time’s Vatican II correspondent, and Time confected a council of its own making. In his role as Time magazine’s Vatican II correspondent, Kaiser came in contact with Malachi Martin, still another Jesuit, who was working in the pay of the B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee to influence the outcome of the Council. The stories of Kaiser and Martin have been told in my The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World History (2008). The Murray story is dealt with in detail in David Wemhoff’s John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition: How the CIA’s Doctrinal Warfare Program Changed the Catholic Church (2015). Taken together these two accounts contextualize the spirit of the Council, which went on to haunt the Catholic Church for the rest of the century.

John Courtney Murray and Religious Freedom

The Church has failed consistently because for the past fifty years she has been intellectually crippled by a set of bad ideas that insures failure. The main bad idea at the heart of this problem is religious freedom. The architect of that bad idea was John Courtney Murray.

Everyone knew that John Courtney Murray had something to do with the re-definition of the Catholic position on religious freedom. Everyone knew that he wrote the notes for the Abbott edition of Dignitatis Humanae, notes that fundamentally distorted the meaning of that document. Murray’s notes emphasized the value of the First Amendment and immunity from coercion. His comments omitted the passages from Dignitatis Humanae that Msgr. Fenton, editor of the American Ecclesiastical Review, believed saved the document from heresy, namely, that the Declaration “leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.” He also left out of his commentaries any mention of the place of the divine law in the conscience of a Catholic and in the conscience of men. Faithful to his American handlers, Murray’s comments gestured towards Soviet Communism as the only true threat to the liberty advanced by the American Proposition.

What no one knew until the publication of David Wemhoff’s book is the extent of Murray’s collaboration with Henry Luce, Time/Life, and the CIA in crippling the Catholic Church by imposing on it a false understanding of religious liberty.

By 1967 — the year Henry Luce died — Murray’s deliberately distorted interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae had become the norm among American bishops. In describing the English aristocracy who were bent on looting Church property in the 16th century, R. H. Tawney wrote that they “had their teeth in the carcass and weren’t going to be whipped off by a sermon” (Religion and the Rise of Capitalism [1926]). The cabal of CEOs and their homosexual lackeys now have their teeth in the carcass of the American republic, and they aren’t “going to be whipped off by a sermon” on religious liberty.

The American bishops and anyone else who thinks that marriage should be between a man and a woman need to know the source of the bad idea that has crippled the Church for the past fifty years. The source of that bad idea is John Courtney Murray, S.J., who confected his distorted notion of religious liberty in collaboration with Henry Luce, head of the Time/Life empire, and the CIA’s doctrinal warfare program. David Wemhoff’s book gives a detailed explanation of how Henry Luce coordinated efforts of the CIA, the Time/Life empire, and John Courtney Murray with his allies at the highest levels of the Catholic Church, to change the doctrine of the Catholic Church on the relationship between church and state. This struggle began in earnest in 1948 and reached its culmination at the Second Vatican Council with the promulgation of the document, Dignitatis Humanae, known as the Declaration on Religious Liberty. Catholic doctrine did not change. Defeated at the Council, the Americanists used their media power to win the battle over who got to interpret the Council with disastrous consequences for both the Church and the world. As Robert Blair Kaiser, Time’s Rome correspondent during the Second Vatican Council put it: “Time took sides. Time reporters were reporters as well as participant-observers to influence the schemas [of Vatican II]... Murray was a mystery man... Murray was a member of a conspiracy.”

In 1967 the New York Times revealed the long-established links between the Luce empire and the CIA. It revealed the CIA’s involvement in creating cultural and religious front organizations to advance American foreign policy. These front groups at times masqueraded as representing the voices of concerned citizens. Luce and Murray were prime movers in the American doctrinal warfare program meant to make the Catholic Church more docile to the needs of the American Empire. With Murray as the salesman, Luce was able to create the publicity campaign that would make the claim that the “American proposition is quite congenial to the Catholic reality” (Wemhoff).

Murray’s distortion of Dignitatis Humanae was even more devastating for Europe, where many nations had granted the Catholic Church special status as the established religion. In 1975 Franco died. After his death the CIA’s doctrinal warfare program, based on Murray’s interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae, was used to destroy the moral and social order in Spain.

Because the majority within the Church and the Catholic intelligentsia had naively adopted the essentials of the American Proposition, Spain was ultimately defenseless against the cultural onslaught that occurred once economic liberalism in the form of the Harvard Business model and its philosophical corollaries invaded the culture. The Catholics in Spain failed to understand the consequences of embracing Murray’s libertarianism, and the kind of plutocratic control that went along with it. They failed to realize, for example, that Murray’s understanding of modern man was very much conditioned by his own conversations with the Luces and Gerald Heard, a group of oligarchic representatives who themselves held to an evolutionary and drug-induced understanding of human consciousness. They failed to see that embracing the libertarian philosophy for the economic and political order eventually led to accepting libertarianism with respect to the entire social order. Scriptures teach us that part of life is the war against the passions, and libertarianism rejects that war.

Msgr. Fenton and Fr. Connell had predicted that any Catholic society that embraced the American Proposition would soon find the Church disappearing in that society, because the teaching on religious freedom was a portal through which American agents could enter the Church and the state to subvert the social order, and to make that nation more susceptible to the oligarchs waiting to take it over. That society, Msgr. Fenton thought, would find itself incapable of defending the moral order in the area of marriage, let alone a host of other areas of social life. Everything would become subject to the will of the oligarchs, dependent on how they wanted to exert their influence.

Spain is a classic instance of what happens when a Catholic country accepts the American Proposition disguised as Dignitatis Humanae. In November, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI traveled to a Spain that had legalized homosexual marriage, introduced fast-track divorce, and made abortion legal and available. In what was formerly a Catholic country, only 13 percent of the faithful attended Mass weekly while 56 percent never attended Mass. The Pope was treated to a “kiss in” by more than 100 homosexuals in Barcelona. As the commentators noted, this was quite a change from the Franco era, which ended 35 years earlier. Social collapse was accompanied by economic collapse with unemployment consistently remaining over 25 percent. As if that weren’t bad enough, the Spanish embrace of American economic libertarianism had done little to improve the inequalities in Spain, which have grown larger in recent years.

This change took place in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and can be seen best in the constitution that Spain adopted in 1975 after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. As David Wemhoff puts it, the Spanish foreign minister personally delivered a letter from Franco to Pope Paul VI complaining of the liberalization (i.e., Americanization) of the clergy and the negative impact it was having on Spain. The plea had no effect. Instead, the Spanish hierarchy issued a document that favored democratic pluralism. A group of priests and laity formed a group called Christians for Socialism. Bishop Antonio Anoveros of Bilbao officially excommunicated a policeman who beat an activist priest. Detained priests caused a prison riot in Zamora that resulted in destruction of furniture and fixtures while garnering ecclesiastical support around the country. “It was conceptually extremely difficult for the leaders of the Spanish regime in their old age to grasp that the Church no longer thought in such traditional terms, and the very last years of their lives were to this extent a time of bewilderment.” Without the support of the Church, Franco’s regime could not reproduce itself, and the state he saved during the 1930s would not live on much beyond his death. In his farewell message broadcast to the nation shortly before his death in November 1975, Francisco Franco exhorted his fellow Spaniards: “when the hour comes for me to surrender my life before the Most High and appear before His implacable judgment, I pray that God may receive me graciously in His presence, for I sought always to live and die as a Catholic… Do not forget that the enemies of Spain and of Christian civilization are alert.”

The new Spanish constitution abandoned the confessional state:

The Cortes Generales in Plenary Meetings of the Congress of Deputies and the Senate ratified the new Spanish Constitution on October 31, 1978. The people of Spain ratified the Constitution in a referendum on December 7, 1978, and King Juan Carlos I sanctioned the Spanish Constitution on December 27 of that same year. The new constitution was a byproduct of Vatican II, guaranteeing among other things that “There shall be no State religion. The public authorities shall take the religious beliefs of Spanish society into account and shall consequently maintain appropriate cooperation with the Catholic Church and the other confessions.” Spain adopted a Constitution based on the American view of Church and State relations, with a heavy dose of American style religious liberty. Liberalism, or the American ideology, became the basis of the Constitution which elevated the primacy of the individual. The Divine Positive Law of Christ would be taken “into account” but would not be the basis of Spanish law.

The image of America as the benign Enlightenment state was a powerful illusion crafted by John Courtney Murray in collaboration with the Luce empire and the CIA, and this illusion gave young periti like Joseph Ratzinger the hope that the Church could find a modus vivendi with modernity.

Vatican II was a legitimate exercise of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. For three years the world’s bishops pored over proposals prepared by both saints and subverters and hammered out documents which did not contradict the Catholic faith. The Holy Spirit saw to that. What the Holy Spirit did not condone was the de facto adoption by the Church of the notion that America was the ideal state. This alliance began after World War II and was known as the anti-Communist Crusade. It suffered a momentary divorce when Paul VI initiated his version of Ostpolitik and sent Fr. Draganovic back to Zagreb. Then the estranged lovers reunited more passionately when Karol Wojtyla became pope and the anti-Communist crusade entered into its final most successful phase during his pontificate.

Because of role which Time magazine played in interpreting Vatican II, especially the Decree on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), the Catholic Church became inextricably wedded to a political agenda. It was an American political agenda because America was the paradigm upon which Dignitatis Humanae was based. This is essentially what George Weigel meant when he said that Pope Benedict XVI was trying to preserve modernity. Modernity for both men meant Dignitatis Humanae, and Dignitatis Humanae means ultimately America is the paradigmatic state. So according to the cunning of history, the Church involved itself in support of one particular regime (namely, the benign Enlightenment state known as America) in the name of extricating itself from the historical entanglements of the past, where it identified with another particular regime (the ancien régime in France, the Roman Empire, the Jewish ethnos, etc.). As the French say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

Nineteen sixty-five, the year in which the Second Vatican Council ended, was also the year in which the Catholic Church abandoned the traditional teaching on the relationship between church and state. Instead of claiming, as Pope Leo XIII had, that the Church was to the state what the soul was to the body, the Church now accepted the American separation of church and state as something, not just to be tolerated, but something good in itself.

The results of this decision have been disastrous for both the Church and the world. The Catholic Church has lost every battle in the culture wars for fifty years now. Beginning with the collapse of the Legion of Decency and the Griswold v. Connecticut decision decriminalizing the sale of contraceptives, the Church has suffered one defeat after another, culminating in the recent Obergefell decision striking down every law which specified that marriage had to be between a man and a woman.

It’s not as if the Church hasn’t tried. The Manhattan Declaration is a good case in point. Launched in September 2009 at the Metropolitan Club to much media fanfare, the Manhattan Declaration was the brainchild of Princeton Professor Robert George, in collaboration with “conservative evangelicals like the born-again Watergate felon Chuck Colson,” Metropolitan Jonah, the primate of the Orthodox Church in America, and “more than half a dozen of this country’s most influential Roman Catholic bishops, including Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, Archbishop John Myers of Newark, and Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia..., [who] drafted a 4,700 word manifesto that promised resistance to the point of civil disobedience against any legislation that might implicate their churches or charities in abortion, embryo-destructive research or same-sex marriage.”

At a Washington press conference two months after the launching of the manifesto, Professor George stepped aside to let Justin Cardinal Rigali of Philadelphia make the case for the natural law opposition to gay marriage by claiming that marriage entailed a “conjugal union of man and woman, ordained by God from the creation, and historically understood by believers and non-believers alike, to be the most basic institution in society.” Six years after making this declaration, the Supreme Court approved the very thing that the Manhattan Declaration and Cardinal Rigali disputed when it approved gay marriage.

With hindsight, it’s not difficult to understand why this happened because immediately after denouncing gay marriage, Cardinal Rigali endorsed “religious liberty, which is grounded in the character of God, the example of Christ, and the inherent freedom and dignity of human beings created in the divine image,” without any understanding of the fact that the concept of religious liberty was created by the CIA precisely to marginalize his authority as a bishop of the Catholic Church, which speaks infallibly on matters of faith and morals. It may be true that the three pillars of the Manhattan Declaration rest on “principles that can be known and honored by men and women of good will even apart from revelation” and that “they are principles of right reason and natural law,” but only the Church has the authority to interpret the divine law infallibly. By becoming one of thousands of signatories to an interdenominational manifesto, Rigali diluted that authority, played right into the hands of the Founding Fathers, who promoted the proliferation of sects to divide and dilute Christianity, and doomed their initiative against gay marriage to ultimate failure.

Benedict XVI and Modernity

In his December 2005 address to the Curia, Pope Benedict singled out three questions that the Church needed to answer if she wanted to achieve rapprochement with the modern world:

First and foremost, it was necessary to define in a new way the relationship between faith and modern science; this regarded, however, not only natural sciences, but also historical sciences because, in a certain school, the historical-critical method claimed for itself the final words on the interpretation of the Bible and, demanding full exclusiveness for its understanding of Sacred Scriptures, it opposed, on important points, the interpretation that the faith of the Church had elaborated.

Rapprochement in this instance meant that the Church could still oppose things like in vitro fertilization, which is to say technical applications that contradicted the moral law, but it left science’s bogus “science” uncontested, as when in his interview with Peter Seewald, Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times (2010), Ratzinger swallows the unproven HIV-causes-AIDS hypothesis hook, line and sinker, and tries to base Church policy on bad science and what amounted to a black operation that picked up where the failed population control programs of the ‘70s left off.

“Secondly,” Pope Benedict continued

it was necessary to define in a new way the relationship between the Church and the modern state, which made room to citizens of various religions and ideologies, acting impartially towards these religions and simply taking on the responsibility for the orderly and tolerant coexistence between citizens and for their freedom to exercise their religion.

Rapprochement in this instance meant an uncritical acceptance of America as the paradigmatic good Enlightenment state, and all the embarrassment that was caused when America finally went rogue after the fall of Communism and draped the mantle of evil empire around its own shoulders.

To this, thirdly, was connected in a more general way the problem of religious tolerance — a question that called for a new definition of the relationship between Christian faith and religion in the world. In particular, in the face of the recent crimes of the National-Socialist regime and, in general, in a retrospective look on a long and difficult history, it was necessary to evaluate and define in a new way the relationship between the Church and the faith of Israel.

Rapprochement in the area of Catholic-Jewish relations created an insurmountable discontinuity, which Pope Benedict, even in light of the hostile reception he received on his trip to Israel, refused to acknowledge. Catholic-Jewish relations have taken on an aura of total make believe as it becomes increasingly clear that good relations with the Jews can only be purchased at the price of not proclaiming the Gospel.

By now it should be obvious that America was the answer to all of the above questions. It was even more obvious that Germany (and virtually every other European country, except Poland, which would play a significant role later) had been discredited in one way or another. Germany and Italy, to list the two most obvious examples, had succumbed to fascism, as had Catholic Spain. France had been conquered in a matter of weeks, leading to a demoralization which found expression in post-war existentialism. England, the traditional enemy of all things Catholic, was exhausted. Catholic Austria had been dismembered after World War I, and the remnants of its former empire were now (as was Austria itself until the mid-’50s) behind the Iron Curtain. Russia, of course, which had been taken over by Jewish Bolshevism in 1917, had by the time of the Council entered into the Communist equivalent of its dotage. In fact, America, and America alone, was the only possible common denominator between the three areas Pope Benedict indicated. Benedict said as much when he wrote: “By adopting a decree on religious freedom, the Second Vatican Council recognized and made its own an essential principle of the modern state.” By “modern state,” of course, Benedict meant America.

As a result, the Church under the leadership of John Paul II and Benedict XVI adopted a pro-American political agenda, which has wrought and continues to wreak untold havoc with the Catholic faith. In his Vatican II anniversary address, Pope Benedict understated the case wildly when he stated that “It is clear that in all these sectors, which together are one problem, some discontinuities would emerge.” It is precisely this political agenda with all of its discontinuities in tow, which, time and time again, rears its ugly head in Light of the World.

As a tacit admission that the project of Vatican II, namely, reconciling the Church and modernity, has failed, Benedict wrote:

those who expected that with this fundamental “Yes” to the modern age, all tensions would melt away, and that this “opening up to the world” would render everything harmonious, underestimated the inner tensions and contradictions of the modern age...

What he should have said is that he and John Paul II and the rest of their generation in the Church underestimated the radical gulf separating the revolutionary movement known as modernity from the Logos of the Catholic faith, and that their underestimation was based on a misrepresentation of America confected by John Courtney Murray, Time/Life and the CIA.

The Church has had this political albatross around its neck for going on fifty years now. And Benedict showed no indication of understanding how he and his generation of Churchmen got hornswoggled by a black operation. Nor did he see how the political model of reconciliation with modernity that he and his generation of Churchmen adopted, the one which informs Light of the World, was doomed to failure because 1) it was based on a false understanding of America; 2) because it was based on a false understanding of modernity; and 3) because it was, no matter what John Courtney Murray said, incompatible with the Catholic faith.

In the interest of brevity, let’s just deal with assertion #2. Modernity may have seemed American when the Council was convened, but it was predominantly (at least in its 20th century phase) Jewish, as Yuri Slezkine demonstrates in his book The Jewish Century (2004). Ultimately, the two alternatives became a false dichotomy as Jews, with the passing of the WASP ruling class, took over American cultural life. By the mid-’70s the takeover was complete. “The Modern Age is the Jewish Age,” according to Slezkine, “and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century.” Modernity, according to Slezkine, “is about ... dismantling social estates for the benefit of individuals, nuclear families and book-reading tribes (nations).” Modernity “is about everyone becoming Jewish.” During this era, “Churches became more like synagogues.” Capitalism showed that “there was a peculiar kinship between Jews and the Modern Age, that the Jews, in some very important sense, were the Modern Age.”

The Enlightenment, of course, was the vehicle that brought about the rise of modernity and with it the increasing hegemony of Jews over Western culture:

As the Marquis d’Argens wrote to Frederick the Great on behalf of Moses Mendelssohn, “A philosopher who is a bad Catholic begs a philosopher who is a bad Protestant to grant the privilege [of residence in Berlin] to a philosopher who is a bad Jew.” To be bad in the eyes of God was a good thing because God either did not exist or could not always tell bad from good. For the Jews, the first such corners of neutrality and equality were Masonic lodges, whose members were to adhere “to that religion in which all men agree, leaving their practical opinions to themselves.” When it appeared as if the only religion left was the one in which everyone agreed some practical opinions became “public opinion,” and Jews became important — and very public — opinion makers and opinion traders.

Because of his understanding of America and Vatican II, Pope Benedict XVI was incapable of seeing this Jewish revolutionary takeover of European culture as a bad thing. As result, the people who share his pro-American, pro-modern political world view have to look for scapegoats, and they invariably find them in Islam.

CHAPTER NINE

Where Now in the Church?

What is Not the Proper Response: Liberals and “Traditionalists”

The traditionalists and the liberals continue to attack each other and are also very critical of Rome. The negotiations between the Vatican and the Society of St. Pius X continue, but there is no sign of any firm agreement. Several misgivings about a resolution of the issues between the two sides were expressed in an article written by Eberhard Schockenhoff, professor of moral theology at the University of Freiburg, which appeared in the April 2010 issue of the German Jesuit magazine Stimmen der Zeit. In it Schockenhoff claimed “that the real disagreement between the Church of Rome and the Lefebvrists does not concern the Mass in Latin, but the teaching of Vatican II, especially on ecclesiology and on freedom of conscience and religion.” Schockenhoff fears that the readmission of the SSPX will doom his interpretation of Vatican II and all of the projects of the past forty-some years which have been based on it. Schockenhoff fears that “exegetical manipulation of the conciliar texts” will allow both Rome and the SSPX to marginalize the true meaning of the Council by misrepresenting what Schockenhoff considers genuine reforms as post-conciliar misunderstandings and aborted experiments. This would allow an “anti-modern protest movement based on pre-conciliar Catholicism” to be smuggled into the Church. It would also mark the end (although Schockenhoff doesn’t say this) of the hegemony of the German professors, whose interpretation has been dominant but fading since the end of the Council. The influence of the German professors faded even more, paradoxically, during the papacy of Benedict XVI (the quintessential German professor). Schockenhoff compares the negotiations with the SSPX to “a hermeneutic tightrope walk, which attempts to square the circle.” He also compares it to “playing with fire.” The issue is interpretation: Whose interpretation of the Council is going to prevail? Put another way, readmitting the SSPX would mean the end of the hegemony of the German professors’ interpretation of the Council, which the German professors like to portray as “the will of the majority of the Council fathers”:

By proposing an official interpretation, another meaning gets imposed on central conciliar texts other than the meaning which the will of the majority of the Council fathers intended. What’s at stake here is the direction of the future path of the Church, a direction which the Council chose when it decided to open itself up to the modern world, when it chose ecumenical solidarity with the orthodox and reformation churches as well as dialogue with the Jews and other world religions.

The main person responsible for wanting to “square the circle,” i.e., make the Council documents compatible with both modernity and tradition was, in Schockenhoff’s view, Pope Benedict XVI. The commentator Sandro Magister, however, states that “in explaining how to interpret the Council correctly, Benedict XVI shows how it did in fact introduce new developments with respect to the past, but always in continuity with ‘the deepest patrimony of the Church.’ And, he claims, as an example of this interplay between newness and continuity, Pope Benedict illustrates precisely the conciliar ideas on freedom of religion: the main point of division between the Church and the Lefebvrists.”

In the speech referred to earlier Pope Benedict tried to explain the Zeitgeist which was regnant when the Council was in session. As we have seen, he referred to the task of finding a new relationship between the Church and the modern age and the problems involved in this.

Thus, both sides began to progressively open up to each other. In the period between the two world wars and even more after the second world war, Catholic statesmen had shown that a modern lay state can exist, which nevertheless is not neutral with respect to values, but lives tapping into the great ethical fonts of Christianity. Catholic social doctrine, as it developed, had become an important model between radical liberalism and the Marxist theory of the state.

As a result of this opening to the modern world, discontinuities began to emerge. Catholics began condemning things that the Saints of previous eras considered praiseworthy. Similarly, things that the Council considered praiseworthy — things like Schockenhoff’s “dialogue with the Jews” — would have been condemned as pernicious by Church Fathers like St. John Chrysostom. Before long the discontinuities became too big and too important to ignore, or as Pope Benedict put it:

It is clear that in all these sectors, which together are one problem, some discontinuities would emerge. Although this may not have been fully appreciated at first, the discontinuities that did emerge — notwithstanding distinct concrete historical situations and their needs — did prevent continuity at the level of principles.

The Church now finds herself in the process of reconciling those discontinuities, and it is this process of re-establishing continuity with tradition which Schockenhoff sees as a betrayal of the meaning of the Council. The SSPX, on the other hand, sees the process of reconciliation as a betrayal of Church doctrine, and it is at precisely this impasse that the negotiations with the SSPX stand.

Pope Benedict believed that the Council succeeded at being both new and connected with the past:

By defining in a new way the relationship between the faith of the Church and some essential elements of modern thinking, the Second Vatican Council revised and even corrected some past decisions. But in an apparent discontinuity it has instead preserved and reinforced its intimate nature and true identity. The Church is One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic both before and after the Council, throughout time. It “presses forward amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God,” announcing the cross and death of the Lord until he comes (cf. Lumen Gentium, 8).

Yet those who expected that with this fundamental “Yes” to the modern age, all tensions would melt away, and that this “opening up to the world” would render everything harmonious, underestimated the inner tensions and contradictions of the modern age; they underestimated the internal tensions and the dangerous fragility of human nature, which have threatened man’s journey throughout all historical periods and configurations. Given man’s new power over himself and over matter, these dangers have not disappeared; instead, they have acquired a new dimension. We can clearly illustrate this by looking at current history.

At this point an uncanny similarity emerges between the SSPX and the liberals who want to keep them out of the Church. Both the SSPX and Professor Schockenhoff are arguing that their interpretation of Vatican II should be taken as normative. Both the SSPX and Professor Schockenhoff (for different reasons) would claim that Pope Benedict was “attempting to square the circle,” by thinking that modernity and Church tradition were reconcilable. Both the SSPX and Professor Schockenhoff have made a particular interpretation of a particular council the litmus test for membership in the Church. Neither the SSPX nor Professor Schockenhoff seems capable of entertaining the idea that the Church had embarked upon projects in the wake of the Council which were based in some sense or other on Council documents but which went way beyond what the Council documents authorized. “Gespräch mit dem Judentum” or dialogue with the Jews is one example cited by Schockenhoff which has led to an almost total discontinuity with the past, something the American bishops discovered when they had to revise their catechism. Should the Church perdure in this particular implementation of the Council? Or should she admit that this and other projects which the Council spawned, unlike the documents themselves, are nothing more than failed experiments based on an inadequate understanding of what was really happening during the revolutionary ‘60s? Is the Church committed to repudiating the Gospel in the name of dialogue? One would hope not, but the question needs to be contextualized before it can be answered. If we identify the Council with “Gespräch mit dem Judentum,” as Professor Schockenhoff does, then the answer is far from clear. Schockenhoff might go so far as to endorse post-conciliar aberrations like the claim that “the Mosaic covenant is eternally valid,” a claim both made and repudiated by the American bishops, but would Pope Benedict have gone that far? Probably not. But Benedict’s track record on continuity in this regard was far from clear. He seemed unaware that dialogue with the Jews, as currently practiced, entails repudiating the Gospel, and that proclaiming the Gospel is antithetical to dialogue with the Jews. As things stand, the issue is far from resolved, and the only thing that unites both the German professors and the SSPX seems to be their belief that Pope Benedict was determined to square the circle.

The SSPX has been claiming for over twenty years that the issue is one of doctrine, specifically doctrinal issues concerning Vatican II, and in the wake of the excommunications, they had persuaded Rome to engage in dialogue under those auspices, but it was clear that this dialogue would go nowhere. This is not surprising because doctrine was never the heart of the matter. In fact, by allowing the dialogue on doctrine to proceed, Rome had undermined its own position. The real issue is schism, not doctrine. Heresy is a sin against doctrine, and in the negotiations which followed the lifting of the excommunications, the SSPX was engaged in an attempt to turn the tables on Rome and convince them that they were guilty of heresy. Before entering into dialogue with the SSPX, Rome would have done better to watch SSPX Bishop Fellay’s interview on YouTube. In it, Fellay gets to the heart of the matter when he says, “The Church has cancer. We don’t want to embrace the Church because then we’ll get cancer too.” There are a number of things one might say about such a statement. First, cancer is not contagious. Secondly, this image — the Church has cancer — can be found nowhere in the tradition of the Church, not in the Gospels, not in the Acts of the Apostles, not in the Epistles and not in the writing of the Church Fathers. The reason is simple enough: it does not and cannot correspond to reality.

If anyone had any doubts about the SSPX being in schism, this interview should have laid them to rest. As St. Augustine pointed out in both his treatises on Baptism and on the Donatists, schism has nothing to do with doctrine. Schism is a sin against charity. It involves breaking communion out of fear of contamination — which is precisely how Bishop Fellay framed the issue in his YouTube interview. The SSPX broke communion with the Church when Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops, including Fellay. Refusal of communion out of fear of contamination is, as anyone who has read St. Augustine knows, the classic expression of schism, but evidently no one in Rome noticed this when they began their negotiations with the SSPX because instead of dealing with the issue, Rome embarked upon the theological equivalent of Mission Impossible, which is to say a theological discussion of the documents of Vatican with a group of people who were using doctrine as a pretext to avoid talking about their own lack of charity.

What Rome overlooked was the psychological need of the SSPX to divert the negotiations into a discussion of doctrine. That need is based more on guilt than anything in the documents of Vatican ll. The SSPX committed a sin against charity when Archbishop Lefebvre, claiming that a state of emergency existed in the Church, broke communion by consecrating the four bishops. Their justification for breaking communion is ultimately irrelevant because the Church is always to some extent in a state of emergency because the Church is always at the mercy of the venal and wicked men who rise to positions of power in it because such men always rise to positions of power in human institutions, but no state of emergency (real or imagined) ever justifies breaking communion.

Unity and Dialogue

What conclusions are we to draw from all this? The answer is that the Catholic mind has become the captive of two bad ideas, stemming from two failed experiments launched in the wake of Vatican II, namely a) dialogue in place of unity, and b) religious liberty. The main conclusion is that unity is better than dialogue. When the Catholic Church was strong and unified, she had a positive effect on American culture, as for example, when the Catholics of Philadelphia boycotted Warner Brothers theaters in the 1930s and forced Hollywood Jews to accept the Production Code and ban nudity and obscenity from their films. Or when in 1934 Msgr. John Ryan stood up to Margaret Sanger and the Rockefeller interests and defeated their plan for government-funded birth control. Once the Church chose dialogue over unity, she lost whatever power she had to influence the culture and earned only the contempt of her enemies in return.

Unity in the Church is not some optional feature, like white wall tires on a car. It goes to the very heart of Christ’s conception of the Church and it goes to the very heart of the woes that have been inflicted on the world since the cataclysmic violation of that unity which followed from the events of the Reformation period and later attacks on the Faith up to the present day.

Unity with your friends and fellow-believers, in other words, is better than dialogue with your enemies. If we ever needed proof of that, we have almost fifty years of experience with the failed experiment known as Catholic-Jewish dialogue. In the years following Vatican II, dialogue became the main vehicle for bringing the Catholic mind under Jewish control. Dialogue has also become a synonym for subversion of Church teaching. After years of dialogue, the USCC, under the direction of Cardinal Keeler of Baltimore, issued a joint Catholic-Jewish statement on “Covenant and Mission” which affirmed that Jews could be saved without accepting Christ as their savior. In May 2009 the same bishops had to issue a “clarification” which repudiated their own statement. It turns out that, upon reflection, the bishops concluded that the Mosaic covenant was no longer “eternally valid,” and Jews did have to convert if they wanted to be saved. The bishops’ volte face on the Jews is one indication that after forty years the Jewish control of the Catholic mind is beginning to fade. Over the past few years we have seen a change of historic magnitude.

Other people have noticed the same thing. Having watched with amazement as House Democrats acceded to the U.S. Catholic bishops’ demand that abortion funding be removed from their health care bill, Pat Buchanan was forced to wonder, “Is the Church Militant back?” (Creators.com, 2009). When the Church is united and acts on her own, unfettered by self-imposed political constraints, good things happen.

The Stupak amendment, the bishops’ successful attempt to get abortion funding stripped from the Obama Administration’s health care bill is an example of the bishops acting in a unified manner with a resolve which they never had during the birth control battles of the ‘60s and which they could not have mustered if they were working under Republican-controlled restraints in concert with other Christian denominations. It was Catholic Democrats in the House who cast the decisive vote against abortion. Working in concert with Jews against abortion is unthinkable.

Religious Liberty

As we have seen earlier, some have tried to drag religious liberty into the discussion, but it’s clear that Catholic doctrine is going to suffer from the inevitable political horse-trading that this involves. Instead of asserting the historical truth that the Church has never repudiated her right to coerce the baptized, including recalcitrant politicians, some conservatives came out in favor of civil disobedience, based on the historically false claim that, “Through the centuries, Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required.” The Church counseled patience and suffering and in extreme cases of manifest injustice the overthrow of wicked regimes, but it never condoned “civil disobedience.” The source of this claim lies neither in Scripture nor Tradition.

Rather than accept a hollow and specious religious freedom and the dubious privilege of going to jail, the bishops would do better to claim that the Church has never believed in being bound by non-coercion when it comes to the baptized. Strengthened by that principle they should concentrate on restoring the unity of all believers, including Catholic politicians, who would then act more like Congressman Stupak than the late Senator Kennedy. Dialogue does nothing but weaken this resolve. The net result is dialogue with “Catholic” universities like Notre Dame — another fruit of Vatican II and another colossal waste of time.

What is true of abortion is also true of the re-admission of the Anglicans. After almost five hundred years of schism and almost fifty years of fruitless palaver, Pope Benedict XVI re-admitted Anglicans disgusted with feminist bishops and openly homosexual clergy without a word of dialogue. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who found out about the merger when the rest of the world did, was the last one to know.

The idea of “religious liberty” has been equally destructive as dialogue. In the four-page letter he wrote to the American bishops on March 2, 2012, Cardinal Timothy Dolan mentioned the phrase “religious freedom” no less than fifteen times. After citing the words of Pope Benedict XVI, Dolan claimed that “Bishop Stephen Blaire and Bishop William Lori, with so many others, have admirably kept us focused on this one priority of protecting religious freedom. We have made it clear in no uncertain terms to the government that we are not at peace with this invasive attempt to curtail the religious freedom we cherish as Catholics and Americans. We did not ask for this fight, but we will not run from it.”

After reading this, I’m tempted to ask should “protecting religious freedom” be our “one priority”? Or should ending abortion be our priority? Or should evangelization be our priority? Or should we work for the conversion of our enemies? To what extent does the acceptance of religious freedom cripple the Catholic Church in carrying out its mission of evangelization?

As the result of a debate between Professor Thomas Pink and Fr. Martin Rhonheimer, which took place in vivo at the Culture and Ethics conference at Notre Dame in 2015, there are essentially three positions on Dignitatis Humanae: 1) it constituted a break with traditional Church teaching, and that is good because “reform” was needed, the position of Fr. Rhonheimer, interpreting the speech delivered in 2005 by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, 2) Dignitatis Humanae constituted a break with tradition, and that is bad, the position of Archbishop Lefebvre and the SSPX, and 3) Dignitatis Humanae, properly understood, constitutes no break with tradition, which is Professor Pink’s position. Pink, however, claims that in order to maintain doctrinal continuity the Church must affirm the right of the Church to coerce the faithful, something that Cardinal Ratzinger sidestepped and that the first group is reluctant to affirm. As a result, the Dignitatis Humanae debate which has taken place between Rhonheimer and Pink became a discussion of coercion. Rhonheimer struggles mightily to frame a coherent position, but ultimately fails because he wants to have his cake and eat it too. At certain points, he boldly states, in effect, “Yes, there was discontinuity,” but he then quickly empties the term of its theological consequences by redefining discontinuity as “reform,” which, by its very nature, is a form of continuity. But, as with the related term “Reformation,” the term “reform” can be used to cover up what is in fact hugely destructive. Any attempt to “defend the existence of an uninterrupted continuity between pre- and post-conciliar doctrine ... is unfounded. In the Pope’s address there is no such opposition... Rather, as he explained, ‘In contrast with the hermeneutic of discontinuity is a hermeneutic of reform...’ And in what lies the ‘nature of a true reform’? According to the Holy Father, true reform is found ‘in the interplay, on different levels, between continuity and discontinuity.’”

To say that there must be both continuity and rupture is a contradiction. Pink responded by saying that the contradiction is real and cannot be papered over by reference to a self-contradictory “hermeneutic of reform”:

In the nineteenth century, in encyclicals from Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos in 1832 to Leo XIII’s Libertas in 1888, the Catholic Church taught that the state should not only recognize Catholic Christianity as the true religion, but should use its coercive power to restrict the public practice of, and proselytization by, false religions — including Protestantism. Yet in its declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council declared that the state should not use coercion to restrict religion — not even on behalf of the true faith. Such coercion would be a violation of people’s right to religious liberty. This looks like a clear change in Catholic doctrine. The Church once endorsed state coercion on behalf of religious truth, and now she denounces such coercion as immoral.

Pink then goes on to pose the question which Rhonheimer was at pains to dismiss: “If doctrinal change is possible on religious liberty, why not on matters like sexual morality and marriage?” But once the issue of coercion gets resolved, the continuity/discontinuity issue disappears because:

Those who believe that Dignitatis Humanae did change Catholic teaching see in the declaration a new vision of the dignity of the human person. The human person possesses a natural right not to be subject to any form of religious coercion. This is a right against coercion by any authority, whether state or Church, save where such coercion is required to protect just public order. This teaching, though new, is based on the traditional doctrine of the essential metaphysical freedom of the act of faith, which always ruled out the use of coercion as a means of evangelization. On this reading, the Church used the traditional doctrine about faith to support a new, hitherto denied doctrine of a comprehensive right to religious liberty. With Vatican II, the Church’s opposition to modern liberalism, central to nineteenth-century Ultramontanism, was finally ended through a decisive change in doctrine.

But this interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae as a revision not just of policy but of doctrine is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. The declaration is not a statement about religious liberty in general but about a specifically civil liberty: religious liberty in relation to the state and other civil institutions. It does not oppose religious coercion in general, but coercion by the state. The state is forbidden to coerce in matters of religion, not because such coercion is illicit for any authority whatsoever, but because such coercion lies beyond the state’s particular competence (emphasis added).

And that was certainly not because the Catholic Church opposed religious coercion as such. Rather, religious coercion might be legitimate, but only on the authority of the Church. The Church was the only body with the right to coerce on behalf of religious truth: to issue directives, and to back those directives up by the threat of punishments. The state could act only as the Church’s agent. It had no authority of its own in this matter.

We can now see how Dignitatis Humanae does not change doctrine after all. Religious coercion by the state is now morally wrong, and a violation of people’s rights, not because religious coercion by any authority is wrong, but because the Church no longer authorizes it. The Church is now refusing to license the state to act as her coercive agent, and it is from that policy change, and not from any change in underlying doctrine, that the wrongfulness of religious coercion by the state follows. …

In short: the teaching of Vatican II on religious freedom does not imply a new dogmatic orientation, but it does take on a new orientation for the Church’s social doctrine — specifically, a correction of its teaching on the mission and function of the state. The Council gave the same immutable principles a new application in a new historical setting. There is no timeless dogmatic Catholic doctrine on the state — nor can there be — with the exception of those principles that are rooted in the apostolic Tradition and Sacred Scripture. The idea of a “Catholic state” as the secular arm of the Church falls outside these principles, which in fact suggest a separation between the political and religious spheres.

There is a church at the top of Mount Adams in Cincinnati as well as two angels holding a banner which reads in German, “Heilige Marie, bete fuer die Bekehrung dieses Landes.” “Holy Mary, pray for the conversion of this country.” Did these German Catholics get it wrong when they commissioned that artist to do that mural?

(I examine the ongoing debate between Fr. Rhonheimer and Professor Thomas Pink in more detail in the article “The Zombie State and its Enablers,” in Culture Wars, January 2016, p.18.)

Dialogue and the Jews

Dialogue has weakened the resolve of Catholics, but all of this good will has led to no concessions on the part of the Jewish-controlled press. If anything, that press has become more virulently anti-Catholic in response to what they perceive as Catholic weakness. Even the bishops, the main apologists for the failed experiment known as Catholic-Jewish dialogue, have started to take notice. Archbishop Timothy Dolan tried to explain the Catholic/Jewish double standard in an op-ed piece he sent to the New York Times, which the Times refused to publish. When it comes to sexual abuse, the Catholic Church is subjected to a “scurrilous ... diatribe” by Maureen Dowd “that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish or African-American” faith, but when the New York Times “exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuses in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish Community ... forty cases of such abuses in this tiny community last year alone,” wrote the archbishop, “the district attorney swept the scandal under the rug, and the Times held up the carpet.” In the article referred to above, Pat Buchanan went on to mention Catholic/Jewish relations as one of the main areas of change in American life:

The Vatican has reaffirmed that Catholics in interfaith dialogues have a moral right if not a duty to convert Jews, and reaffirmed the doctrine that Christ’s covenant with his church canceled out and supersedes the Old Testament covenant with the Jews. When Abe Foxman, screech owl of the Anti-Defamation League, railed that this marks a Catholic return to such “odious concepts as ‘supersessionism,’” he was politely ignored.

The American bishops’ repudiation of Cardinal Keeler’s “Reflections on Covenant and Mission” marks more than just a stunning reversal of fifty years of bad theology. That repudiation had global political implications as well, implications which became clear when the Jerusalem Post ran an article on “why Israel is losing the PR war.” According to the Jerusalem Post, the main reason for the precipitous drop in Israel’s approval rating (from 70 to 40 percent) was the “resurgence of replacement theology,” their term for supersessionism, i.e., the traditional Catholic teaching that the Jews have been superseded, and that the Church is the New Israel.

As some indication that great minds run in the same circles, I submit Abe Foxman’s outraged response to the bishops’ clarification of the Keeler statement. Abe Foxman and I agree that dialogue and evangelization are mutually exclusive alternatives. Since the bishops have been commanded by the Gospels to go and baptize all nations, they have no choice but to abandon dialogue because, as Foxman pointed out, it’s the antithesis of proselytism.

Both the ADL and Culture Wars have concluded that Catholic/Jewish dialogue has failed, and Catholics are finally awakening to the fact that this dialogue has failed because the Jews have used it from the beginning as a cover for their hidden agenda of control. As some indication of what those motives are, all of the major Jewish organizations recently signed a friend of the court brief demanding that the Obama administration allow the Catholic Church no exemptions of conscience when it comes to hiring homosexuals.

Actions speak louder than words. In spite of all the dialogue, there was no collaboration in the area of religious freedom and freedom of conscience when it came to the health bill and the concerns it raised for Catholics. Beyond that, the intent behind Jewish support of the homosexual agenda became crystal clear: use “tolerance” to create a homosexual fifth column within the Catholic Church, one which, because of the nature of its sexual activities, can be used to create a whole new series of lawsuits. With Elder Brothers like this, who needs enemies?

Abe Foxman was outraged by what he considered a volte face on dialogue, but the simple fact remained: whenever the bishops engaged in dialogue with the Jews, they repudiated the Gospel. Conversely, whenever they acted on their own and reaffirmed the Gospel, they invariably outraged the Jews. This leads me to refine my previous statement: the Church can proclaim the Gospel or she can have good relations with the Jews, but dialogue, which is to say both at the same time, is impossible.

Why is that? Well, anyone who has read the Gospel of St. John or the Acts of the Apostles or St. Paul’s Epistle to the Thessalonians should know the answer. It’s because the Jews rejected Christ, and in rejecting Christ they rejected Logos, and in rejecting Logos, they became, as St. Paul put it, “enemies of the entire human race.” Dialogue, in other words, is not possible without Logos. This rejection of logos in general and the Logos made flesh is now the core of Jewish identity, and it will remain so until they reject their rejection and accept Christ as their savior. Michael Medved recently said the same thing. In a symposium which appeared in the September 2009 issue of the American Jewish Committee’s publication, Commentary, on Norman Podhoretz’s book, Why are Jews Liberals? (2009), he wrote that “For most American Jews, the core of their Jewish identity isn’t solidarity with Israel; it’s rejection of Christianity.”

Michael Medved has articulated the fundamental Jewish idea. As Richard Weaver told us, in his 1948 philosophical book of that title, “Ideas have consequences,” and one of the consequences of the fundamental Jewish idea is blasphemy. Over forty years of dialogue led America’s Catholic bishops into a denial of the Gospel, but it didn’t put a stop to Jewish blasphemy. At the same time that the American bishops were trying to placate Abe Foxman, Larry David was urinating on a picture of Jesus Christ during a segment of the HBO sitcom “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” When David’s Catholic secretary uses the bathroom after him, she mistakes David’s urine for Jesus’s tears and claims that the picture is weeping. This blatant instance of Jewish blasphemy brought forth fundraising letters from fire-breathing defenders of the faith, who demanded that Catholics “take action” and send in a contribution, but they couldn’t quite bring themselves to say that Larry David was a Jew, and that the Jewish penchant for blasphemy goes back to the central Jewish document, the Talmud, and that all of this behavior has to do with, as Michael Medved put it, the “rejection of Christianity,” which lies at the core of Jewish identity.

No one, it seems, is allowed to connect the dots. Catholics can’t connect the dots for a very simple reason; connecting the dots leaves one open to the charge of anti-Semitism. Following the appearance of my article on Deborah Lipstadt and Holocaust Denial (“Deborah Lipstadt at Notre Dame: Holocaust Denial and Thought Control,” Culture Wars, May 2009), the ADL put me on their most wanted list. This means that I have moved out of the realm of “dynamic silence.” Since the ADL has been getting the magazine for years now (They are, in fact, our most faithful readers. We never have to send them a second renewal notice.), I can only assume that something must have happened recently to bump up my status. What happened is very simple: Culture Wars has broken the lock which has kept the Catholic mind under Jewish control for the past forty years. The ADL now realizes that the Church is heading in the other direction on all of the issues the Jews consider important. After forty years of unprecedented advances in subversion and covert warfare, the Jews are finally starting to lose their control over the Catholic mind.

Dialogue is a failed experiment. It had no roots in tradition. In just about every instance it involved the bishops in compromising the Gospel. In fact, the main requirement for dialogue is a willingness to suppress some Catholic truth of importance to the person engaged in dialogue. There was always an aura of make-believe surrounding the Church’s dialogue with the world which began in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. The main element of make believe had to do with wishing away the Church’s enemies. It turns out that the Church’s enemies did not disappear after all. Instead, they used their feigned status as our friends to gain unprecedented hegemony over the Church they never gave up trying to destroy.

The Church Fathers were wiser than their successors in this regard. They understood, as Augustine said, that “Heretics, Jews and Heathens have made a unity against Unity” (Sermons on Selected Lessons of the New Testament). History is another word for the story of this alliance and its war against the Church. In spite of the illusions generated by the Second Vatican Council, nothing has changed. As A. E. Houseman wrote about sobering up after a drinking binge,

The world, it was the old world yet,

I was I, my things were wet,…

As we sober up from the intoxication generated by the failed experiments of the ‘60s, we are left with certain fundamental truths. The most fundamental is that there can be no dialogue without Logos. The only antidote to rejection of Logos is rejection of that rejection, otherwise known as conversion. Since dialogue has made conversion impossible, it is time to dispense with dialogue and return to the tradition that promoted evangelization and conversion as the antidote to the world’s ills because unity with fellow believers is more important than the ability to chatter on endlessly with our enemies.

What is the Proper Response?

Yes, the Church was derelict in not preaching the Gospel, especially on sexual matters. Yes, the Church chose therapy over the penal sanctions required by canon law. Yes, the Church is being punished for following the advice of the psychologists. Yes, the current scandals are being orchestrated by the Church’s traditional enemies, Protestants and Jews, in order to destroy traditional cultures and make the world safe for Capitalism and the universal rule of Mammon. But what is the proper response?

If the cancer image used by Bishop Fellay is faulty, anti-traditional and unscriptural, what image does correspond to the situation of the Church in our time? The answer is the story in Mark 4:35-41, the story of Jesus calming the storm:

It began to blow a gale, and the waves were breaking into the boat so that it was almost swamped. But [Jesus] was in the stern, his head on the cushion, asleep. They woke him and said to him, “Master, do you not care? We are going down!” And he woke up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Quiet now! Be calm!” And the wind dropped and all was calm again. Then he said to them, “Why are you so frightened? How is it that you have no faith?” They were filled with awe and said to one another, “Who can this be? Even the wind and the sea obey him.”

The Church Fathers are unanimous in saying that the boat is the Church and that the boat is going to be tossed about by storms, which is to say, campaigns orchestrated to destroy the Church.

St. Hilary of Poitiers writes that Christ “bids us to be within the Church, and to be in peril until such time as returning in His splendor He shall give salvation to all the people... Meanwhile the disciples are tossed by the wind and the waves; struggling against all the storms of this world, raised by the opposition of the unclean spirit” (De Trinitate).

St. Augustine tells us to “Think of the boat as the Church, and the stormy sea as this world... For when any of a wicked will and of great power, proclaims a persecution against the Church, then it is that a mighty wave rises against the boat of Christ” (Sermon 63). We are to remain in that storm-tossed boat until, “when the night is nearly ended, He shall come, in the end of the world, when the night of iniquity is past, to judge the quick and the dead” (ibid).

When Christ finally does come, according to St. Hilary, he will

find His Church wearied, and tossed by the spirit of the Anti-Christ, and by the troubles of this world. And because by long experience of Anti-Christ they will be troubled at every novelty of trial, they shall have fear even at the approach of the Lord, suspecting deceitful appearances. But the good Lord banishes their fear saying, It is I; and by proof of His presence takes away their dread of impending shipwreck (De Trinitate).

From the perspective of the faithful who have to endure these storms, it always seems as if Jesus is asleep, which is to say, unconcerned with their plight. This is, of course, not the case. God is always with his Church, even when it appears that he is not. Jumping ship means instant death. Because God can calm any storm, the real issue is not the magnitude of the storm, but rather as Jesus points out, the magnitude of our faith.

About the Author

E. Michael Jones is the editor of Culture Wars magazine and the author of numerous books and e-books. You may contact him at jones@culturewars.com.