Call to Action Turns Twenty: From Bicentennial Celebration to
Excommunication
by F. Michael Jones
On March 19, 1996, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of the diocese of
Lincoln, Nebraska issued a piece of "Extrasynodal Legislation"
which was published three days later in the diocesan newspaper
announcing that "all Catholics in and of the Diocese of Lincoln
are forbidden to be members" in a list of organizations which
included: "Planned Parenthood, the Society of St. Pius X (Lefebvre
Group), Hemlock Society, St. Michael the Archangel Chapel,
Freemasons, Job's Daughters, DeMolay, Eastern Star, Rainbow Girls,
Catholics for a Free Choice," and, last, but not least, "Call to
Action, and Call to Action Nebraska."
"Membership in these organizations or groups," Catholics from the
Lincoln diocese were told, "is always perilous to the Catholic
Faith and most often is totally incompatible with the Catholic
Faith." As a result,
Any Catholics in and of the Diocese of Lincoln who attain
or retain membership in any of the above listed organizations or
groups after April 15, 1996 are, by that very fact (ipso facto
latae sententiae), under interdict, and are absolutely forbidden
to receive Holy Communion. Contumacious persistence in such
membership for one month following the interdict on the part of
any such Catholics will, by that very fact (<ipso facto-latae
sententiae>), cause them to be excommunicated. Absolution from
these ecclesial censures is "reserved to the Bishop."
Thus began what was the biggest ecclesial furor of 1996 and,
arguably, of the as yet unfinished decade. It wasn't the first
time a bishop had threatened people with excommunication in
America-a group in Louisiana faced the same sort of threat because
of their advocacy of segregation-but it was the first time an
American bishop had done something like this since the Second
Vatican Council. And in some quarters it was portrayed as a
violation of the council. It wasn't, of course, as Bishop
Bruskewitz's supporting documentation showed. Not everyone was
making this claim, of course. The St. Michael the Archangel Chapel
of the Society of St. Pius X applauded the bishop's action but
felt somehow that they were the victims of mistaken identity, that
they were unjustly associated with groups that deserved to be
excommunicated. The Freemasons, as far as I can tell, remained
largely silent throughout, as did the Rainbow Girls and Job's
Daughters, who, like their namesake, were probably accustomed to
suffer in silence.
The uproar surrounding the interdict focused almost exclusively on
one organization, namely Call to Action. This was probably the
case for a number of reasons. To begin with, the organization was
a Chicago-based group that took its name from a conference called
into being by the American bishops themselves. History provided a
neat sense of both closure and irony here. The organization which
took its name from the conference organized by the American
bishops to celebrate this nation's Bicentennial ended up being
singled out by one American bishop 20 years later as both perilous
to and incompatible with the Catholic Faith. How then did history
come full circle like that?
The inclusion of Call to Action in the list of forbidden
organization was significant for a number of reasons. It wasn't
just one more anti-Catholic organization, like the Masons, it was
an organization that was anti-Catholic while claiming to be
Catholic. In this regard, it was like Catholics for a Free Choice,
but it was also different in its way, because it was composed of
actual people and not just a front for money from pharmaceutical
firms. Call to Action had become the institutionalized organ of
dissent in the United States, and in order to understand dissent
and especially why it continued so long unmolested by this
country's bishops, we would do well to understand Call to Action,
especially as it now celebrates its 20th anniversary. But to
understand dissent we also have to understand the Cultural
Revolution which begot it. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that
every institution was the lengthened shadow of one man. This is
true of Call to Action as well, although we might have to modify
Emerson's dictum to include more than one man and a few women as
well. Dissent in the Catholic Church grew out of the Cultural
revolution, as the continuity of dissent and cultural revolution
in the lives of Call to Action's <dramatis personae>, makes clear.
The Cultural Revolution's main goal was the destabilization of the
Catholic Church, because the Catholics were the main obstacle to
universal acceptance of sexual liberation, particularly the
widespread dissemination of the contraceptive. The agents of this
destabilization would be the Catholic clergy; the means, sexual
passion.
To begin with, the actions culminating in the Call to Action
conference began two years before the conference took place in
Detroit from October 20 to 24, 1976. The bishops were interested
in participating in a celebration of the nation's bicentennial,
but, as those of you who were around in 1974 remember, the nation
was not in much of a mood for celebration. Watergate, the
impeachment of President Nixon, and the ongoing, never-ending war
in Vietnam occupied the nation's mind for the two years leading up
to the celebration. While this sort of fare filled the evening
news and occupied the nation, perhaps by way of indirection, the
cultural revolution, which had begun in the mid-'60s, was busy
consolidating its gains in less visible ways.
The cultural revolution was a struggle between the Enlightenment
and the Catholic Church. This is not the standard explanation of
the '60s, most of which are proposed as a form of mystification by
the winning side in that struggle, but it is the most accurate.
The winning side invariably uses terms like "liberation" when it
describes the terms of the struggles of the '60s. The real
struggle was something else. Right around the time of the Call to
Action Conference, which is to say in the fall of 1976, Pfeffer
travelled to Philadelphia to give a speech entitled, a bit
immodestly but not inaccurately, "The Triumph of Secular
Humanism." Or, in a term he used as its synonym, the triumph of
"Enlightenment" values in America. Pfeffer saw the cinema as part
of that revolution. In this Pfeffer was not alone; Edward Bernays,
Sigmund Freud's nephew and an heir to the Illuminist tradition of
controlling people without their knowledge, wrote at the end of
Propaganda:
The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious
carrier of propaganda in the world today. It is a great
distributor for ideas and opinions.... The motion picture can
standardize the ideas and habits of a nation. Because pictures are
made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize. and even
exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new
ideas and opinions. The motion picture avails itself only of ideas
and facts which are In vogue. As the newspaper seeks to purvey
news, it seeks to purvey entertainment (p. 156).
By the early '60s, Bernays' program for "invisible government"
through control of the instruments of culture had become part of
the common intellectual patrimony of a number of Jewish
organizations, who put the information to use in a campaign to
remove prayer from public schools. Later, the same tools were used
by Hollywood in its war on the Production Code and the Legion of
Decency in their battle over who was to control the film industry.
The crucial issue at the dawn of the '60s was nudity on the
screen. Hollywood was feeling financially threatened by TV on the
one hand, which was stealing its family audience, and the new skin
magazines, like <Playboy>, which got founded in the wake of the
Kinsey reports and the perfection of glossy color photography and
were testing the borders of pornography in wake of the <Roth>
decision of the Supreme Court. In many ways, it was the Weimar
battle over <Kulturbolschewismus> all over again, except that this
time there was no effective conservative reaction. The Catholics
tried, in their way, to play this role, but were hindered by
Jewish dominance in the media of communication and division in
their own ranks following the Second Vatican Council. (For a
detailed account of this struggle, cf. again <John Cardinal Krol
and the Cultural Revolution.>)
Leo Pfeffer described the contending sides in this cultural
struggle this way: "American Jewry. . . partly too because many
Jews, far more proportionately than the other faiths, are
commercially and professionally involved in the cinema and
publishing, has been overwhelmingly antipathetic to the crusade
for morality and censorship in the arts and literature" which, by
mid-century, had been taken over by Irish Catholics. Because the
mainline Protestant denominations had abdicated their role as
moral arbiters in matters sexual by the '60s and the Evangelicals
were not yet a significant political force, the battle over the
Hollywood Production Code came down to an essentially Jewish-
Catholic struggle, a fact noted by Pfeffer in his speech on the
triumph of secular humanism:
After World war I, 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.
After a number of unsuccessful attempts with vehicles like Billy
Wilder's <Kiss Me, Stupid>, released in 1964, Hollywood finally
succeeded in breaking the code in 1965 with the release of the Eli
Landau film <The Pawnbroker>. During the course of the film, a
woman playing a black prostitute opened her blouse and exposed her
breasts to the camera, breaking, as a result, Section Seven,
subsection two, of the Motion Picture Production Code and one of
Hollywood's last remaining taboos. I have told the story of the
breaking of the code elsewhere, primarily from the perspective of
the Legion of Decency, which saw The Pawnbroker, not as the
harbinger of serious cinematic art but, rather, something that, in
the Legion's Msgr. Thomas Little's words, would "open the flood
gates to a host of unscrupulous operators to make a quick buck."
The next seven years of cinema were to prove Msgr. Little and the
Legion right, as a trickle of bare breasts eventually became a
flood of on screen nudity, culminating in 1973 with the release of
<Deep Throat> and the <Devil in Miss Jones>, two porno epics which
made it into the list of the industry's ten top grossing films for
that year.
The summer of '65 saw, as a result, two great victories for the
forces of "liberation," which were immediately transmuted into
instruments of social control. The film industry was now able to
use nudity to draw people into its theaters, and the government
could now use the contraceptive as a solution to social problems.
The first led to the exponential growth of the pornography
industry, which redefined the universe of sexual expectations in a
way that would prove devastating to women; the second eventuated
in the destruction of the concept of the family wage and the
emigration of women from the home into the workforce, where, over
a 30-year period, the male as provider would be replaced by both
husband and wife earning what the husband alone earned before.
Behind both examples of "liberation" loomed the specter of
control, a fact which was true in a broader sense as well, because
the result of both "liberalizations" was a sexually destabilized
society, where more and more people succumbed half-unwittingly to
the financial exploitation of their passions, and became, as a
result, sexual and financial helots. Reason, as the classical
tradition pointed out, provides the only point of stability in any
social order. The more people that the Enlightenment could
persuade to exchange a life based on reason for a life based on
passion, the more people the "invisible rulers" could control
through the Illuminist science of advertising and its adjuncts. Of
course, part of the fallout from any sexual liberation is social
chaos based primarily on family disruption, and so, once again, in
the wake of the '60s' cultural revolution, horror began to make
its appearance as a significant popular genre.
This is so for the reasons we have already mentioned, but also
because the control of the human person that "population control"
allows is far more intimate and, therefore, far more complete than
any previous form of political domination. Michael Schooyans makes
the point that even "Marx's proletariat still had their children
as their only riches.... On the other hand, the contemporary
problem forces the individual into the most precarious situation,
since it deprives him of all control over <his own concrete
future>, over a real future for his offspring: a kind of
<alienation> heretofore unknown" (p. 36).
The result of "birth control" is not only more radical than the
slavery of classical antiquity, but the means to that end are
different as well. Instead of forcing people to act for the ends
of those in power, the "invisible rulers" now induce the ruled to
do so by getting them to act according to the rulers' unspoken
sexual guidelines, because, in controlling the agency responsible
for the transmission of life, the controllers control human life
at its source and, therefore, most crucial point. "This kind of
domination," according to Schooyans,
is, at once, more cunning, more pernicious and more fatal
in its effects. It is not at all new, but it has grown in an
unprecedented way because of two decisive factors. On the one
hand, it has benefitted from the use of the most sophisticated
techniques of propaganda and indoctrination. On the other hand,
its effectiveness is assured by the media's guarantee of
publicity.... For contemporary totalitarianism the question is no
longer one of exercising physical coercion; henceforth, it is a
matter of destroying the Ego in what is most profoundly personal
in me. This is why contemporary totalitarianism has intellectual
life as its target. It pummels the masses, but the intellectuals
it reeducates by filtering, directing, and dealing in information.
It inculcates a portable ideology, for ideology can encroach upon
intelligence and disarm its critical ability, imprisoning it in a
"gulag of the spirit." Bit by bit, intellectuals are ensnared by
manipulators of knowledge who are in the pay of the party, the
race, the army, the powerful. Science is fostered to the degree
that it delivers new technologies that can be integrated into a
global strategy for domination (p. 55-6).
As always, the instrument of control is passion: "Man, under the
guise of being liberated and excited by the possibility of
maximizing individual pleasure, disregards the stakes and
consequences of sexuality." By taking control of pleasure at its
source in sexuality, the neo-Illuminists simultaneously take
control of human life, which has the same source, and, as an added
bonus, the controllers also dominate the human conscience, by
manipulating its guilt as a way of defending the actions that
enslaved the person in the first place. Liberal politics becomes
then first, the incitation to sexual vice, then the colonization
of the procreative powers that are indissoluably associated with
sexuality, and finally, the political mobilization of the guilt
which flows from the misuse of procreative power in an all-
encompassing system that gives new meaning to the term
totalitarian. Schooyans is one of the few people who sees the full
ramifications of this biocratic revolution:
We are at the dawn of a total war beyond the limits of
anything we have known, and the horizon is already aflame with it.
The present war is truly total in the sense that, by means of
power over life, it aims at control over human beings in what is
most inalienable; their existence, their personal capacity for
making judgements, and decisions, and their responsibility before
their conscience. The present war simultaneously involves each of
these aspects as the stakes, the means, and the goal (p. 59).
This is what <Kulturkampf> meant in America in the 1960s, and this
was why Leo Pfeffer came to Philadelphia in 1976, on the 200th
anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, to claim victory
in the cultural wars and to proclaim the triumph of secular
humanism. Divide and conquer was the strategy which the
Enlightenment, under the direction of people like Leo Pfeffer,
used against the Christians in this country, and the social order
of the republic was the first casualty of this campaign.
The cultural revolution was essentially a struggle between the
Enlightenment and the Catholic Church, over whose values would
become the default settings of American culture. In many respects,
the cultural revolution was a replay of the same struggle that had
taken place following the unification of Germany in 1870. Many
Germans were Catholic; Bismarck, however, felt that they should
all behave like Protestant Prussians, and the Kulturkampf of the
1870s was his attempt to unify German cultural under the banner of
the Enlightenment. The difference between Germany in the 1870s and
America in the 1960s has largely to do with the Catholics. In
Germany, Bismarck found essentially no Catholics willing to
collaborate with his campaign against the Catholic Church and so
was forced to expell the nuns and priests who refused to go along
and put Old Catholics, who had just broken with the Church over
Vatican I and the doctrine of Infallibility, in the positions they
had vacated in places like the Braunsberg Gymnasium.
In America in the 1960s, things were different. In America, the
cultural revolutionaries found a pool of willing collaborators. In
America, they found Father Ted Hesburgh and the University of
Notre Dame. In early 1961, Cass Canfield of both John D.
Rockefeller's Population Council and Planned Parenthood listened
to a Notre Dame professor by the name of John O'Brien talk about
the Catholic position on birth control on a TV program hosted by
Eric Sevareid and he thought he detected an openness to change.
Change, of course, was in the air then. Even the most rabid
antiCatholic bigot had heard that the Vatican Council was getting
started and had heard that change was imminent. He might also have
heard that there was talk of change in the Church's teaching on
contraception brought about mainly by the invention of a new birth
control device, the pill, which seemed not to impede the sexual
act in the way that previous mechanical devices did.
Not someone to let an opportunity of historical magnitude pass,
Canfield wrote to O'Brien and invited him to a conference on
religious views on birth control sponsored by Planned Parenthood
in New York City. He got a letter back from George Shuster, then
assistant to Father Hesburgh at Notre Dame, which made a counter-
proposal. Cardinal Spellman, Shuster opined, would never allow
O'Brien to attend such a conference in New York, but that didn't
mean that such a meeting shouldn't take place. Why not have a
meeting at Notre Dame? In fact, might not the Population Council
be interested in funding such a meeting? Canfield could hardly
believe his eyes when he got the letter, as his comments to
Rockefeller and the other members of the Population Council make
clear.
What followed from the original contact was an agreement to fund a
series of "secret" (their word) conferences, at the end of which
the Catholic theologians participating would agree to issue "a
paper." As the negotiations proceeded, the outcome of the paper
was pretty much a foregone conclusion. "He who pays the piper
calls the tune" could serve as the motto of the Rockefeller
foundations in particular and all the foundations in general in
the period following World War II, when they consolidated their
power over American universities. Catholic universities, under
people like Father Hesburgh, were no exception to this rule.
The whole push to legitimitize the contraceptive, orchestrated by
John D. Rockefeller, 3rd and others, had one major obstacle to
universal success and acceptance, and that obstacle was the
Catholic Church. The secret conferences at Notre Dame, beginning
in 1962, were the Population Council's attempt to neutralize its
greatest opponent in this battle. By 1965, their efforts were
beginning to bear fruit. In April of that year, the Notre Dame
scholars issued a statement announcing that they no longer found
the Church's teaching on contraception "persuasive." They did
this, of course, without telling anyone who had funded the
conferences leading to this conclusion or that openness to
arriving at this conclusion was the <sine qua non> of being
invited in the first place.
Then, two months later, the Supreme Court, in <Griswold v.
Connecticut>, struck down the statute making the sale of
contraceptives illegal. During the summer of 1965, a lawyer from
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania watched in disbelief as the scenario I am
describing to you now began to unroll before his eyes. William
Bentley Ball, chief counsel for the Pennsylvania Catholic
Conference, focused his attention on one event in particular, the
Gruening hearings, chaired by Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska
and a friend of Margaret Sanger, listening to one witness after
another testify that it was now time for the government to get
into the contraception business.
"Where was the Catholic Church?" Ball kept wondering both to
himself and to Archbishop John Krol of Philadelphia. To be more
specific, why hadn't the bishops' own organization in Washington
had anything to say against the stacked deck that the Gruening
hearings had become? What Ball didn't know at the time is that the
same forces that had stacked the deck in the Gruening hearings
were also busy undermining the Church's opposition to
contraception. Ball didn't know about the secret meetings at Notre
Dame and the effect they were having on key figures in the
National Catholic Welfare Conference, who should have been
fighting the government's involvement in promoting contraception
but weren't, often because they were participants in the Notre
Dame conferences.
During the summer of 1965, Rockefeller even took the extraordinary
step of having his friend Ted Hesburgh get him an audience with
Pope Paul VI, during which Rockefeller volunteered to write the
encyclical that eventually came to be known as Humanae Vitae. It
was a scene worthy of Henry James. The rich American, with his new
invention, the IUD, telling the pope that he was in a position to
solve the world's problems if he would just go along. I have an
idea of what Pope Paul VI was thinking during his conversation
with Mr. Rockefeller. When I was growing up, people used to ask
me, "If you're so damned smart, why aren't you rich?" So, I like
to imagine the pope saying, in his mind, to Mr. Rockefeller, "If
you're so damned rich, why aren't you smart."
Needless to say, the pope didn't take Mr. Rockefeller up on his
offer. But the U.S. Government did, and, in spite of the protests
of Mr. Ball and Archbishops Krol and O'Boyle, the government was
in the contraceptive business by the fall of 1965. In fact, the
so-called War on Poverty became a war on black fertility as
Planned Parenthood moved into the ghetto and the Great Society
became a front for pushing contraceptives as part of the eugenic
final solution to our race problem. Title X now spends hundreds of
millions dollars of taxpayer money promoting the use of
contraception. AID spends even more promoting the use of
contraception and sterilization as part of our foreign policy
abroad.
But what does all this have to do with Call to Action? On March 6,
1996, Bishop Bruskewitz received a letter on Call to Action
Nebraska stationery announcing the formation of Call to Action
Nebraska, "an affiliate of the national Call to Action
organization." It was this letter that was the proximate cause of
Bishop Bruskewitz's by now famous action. One co-signer of the
letter was a John Krejci, a professor of sociology at Wesleyan
University in Lincoln.
Thirty years earlier, Professor John Krejci was Father John
Krejci, a priest on leave of absence while completing his
doctorate in the sociology department at the University of Notre
Dame. Krejci eventually received his Ph.D. in May of 1974, writing
his dissertation on "Leadership and Change in Two Mexican
Villages."
What interests us here are the changes that took place along the
way. The matrix of change is just as significant and, in many
ways, the first step in understanding the changes that took place
in the individual lives that make up Call to Action as an
organization. From a demographic point of view, Call to Action has
a very specific profile: it is essentially an organization of
clerics, ex-clerics, and people who make a living working for the
Church (DREs, etc.), for the most part in their sixties
(especially the former two groupings), who have adopted the sexual
values, and oftentimes mores, of the dominant culture. Notre Dame
had a crucial role to play in the formation of this group during
the decade from the mid-'60s to the time of the actual Call to
Action Conference in October of 1976.
To begin with, Notre Dame, in the mid-'60s, was a crucial part of
two very different worlds. Dissent was as yet an unknown
phenomenon and would not come out in the open until the summer of
1968, when Charles Curran organized the protest against <Humanae
Vitae>. One year earlier, in the wake of Curran's successful
tenure battle at Catholic University, Father Hesburgh engineered
his Land o' Lakes statement, whereby he and a number of other
presidents of Catholic universities, effectively alienated a large
amount of Church property, namely those colleges and universities,
from Church control. But no one seemed to know that was the
effective meaning of Land 'o Lakes at the time.
As a result, religious orders continued to send their nuns,
priests, and brothers to an institution that was no longer a
Church institution and had, in fact, shifted its allegiance to the
major foundations of this country, in a bid to get first their
money and next federal funding, the sequel to foundation money as
the government got more and more into the education business.
During the summers of the late '60s, literally thousands of nuns,
as well as other religious would converge on the campus of the
University of Notre Dame, ostensibly to continue their education,
but also to imbibe the Zeitgeist in an especially undiluted form.
As we have come to understand, the Zeitgeist at Notre Dame was
heavily into sexual liberation for a number of reasons. To begin
with, there was the effect the pill was having on the culture at
large, and then there was the effect the pill was having on Notre
Dame in particular. Donald Barrett was a professor of sociology at
Notre Dame at the time. He was also on the papal birth control
commission as well. So much was publicly known at the time. Not so
public was the fact that he had been a participant at the
Rockefeller conferences and, as a result, had applied to the
Population Council for a grant to study contraceptive use. He
eventually received around half a million dollars from the Ford
Foundation while still deliberating on the papal birth control
commission over the liceity of contraception. In any other venue,
this would have been known as conflict of interest. In the
Catholic Church in America, it was known as independent thinking
and newfound maturity. William D'Antonio, head of the sociology
department during the late '60s, was becoming well known as a
result of his name appearing on Planned Parenthood ads condemning
the pope.
One of the thousands of nuns who came to Notre Dame in the '60s
was a lady by the name of Jean Gettelfinger. Like Father Krejci,
she came to get her graduate degree in sociology as well. Unlike
him, she never finished. Instead of getting a degree, she got a
husband, and that husband was Father John Krejci. Jean
Gettelfinger was one of the many nuns who left their narrow
convent rooms in the '60s with the university, specifically the
Catholic University, which was supposed to be contributing to
their formation, as the enabling device for leaving.
One observer of the Notre Dame scene during the '60s said that
this phenomenon was not uncommon; nor, we might add, was it
particularly hard to understand. The general sense among religious
that things were changing received powerful reinforcement at Notre
Dame, primarily because the Notre Dame faculty and administration
were one of the prime engines of change.
Add to that the fact that we are not talking about abstract forces
of history but rather something as intimate as libido and its
mobilization as part of the cultural revolution and we can get
some sense of the ferment at Notre Dame during the late '60s. Nuns
and priests could be seen strolling hand in hand around the lakes.
There was much talk of a "third way," somewhere between marriage
and celibacy, partaking of the best aspects of both, no doubt,
like having your cake and eating it too. The impossible dream of a
married clergy, of contraceptive sex, and most of the other ideas
that make up the Call to Action agenda, got hatched like a new
bacillus in the hothouse atmosphere of the Notre Dame summer
school and similar academic institutes across the country, and
since the growth of this impossible idea was congenial to the
cultural revolutionaries' goals, it was fostered by their
institutions.
So, at some point, Father Krejci and Sister Gettelfinger left the
religious life and got married. We have heard this story so many
times, it hardly seems surprising anymore. In order to understand
Call to Action, however, we need to understand both their story
and all of its ramifications and the fact that the story didn't
stop there either. It never does. To begin with, many priests and
nuns became intimate and did not leave to get married. This group,
combined with those that did leave, gradually coalesced into a
group that began to lobby in an increasingly insistent way for
change in the Church's discipline regarding both sexuality and the
religious life, and more often than not both taken together.
It's not hard to see the attractions both had separately. As
religious in the most affluent country the world has ever known,
priests and nuns got to live the vow of poverty in what was, at
best, a deeply attenuated, symbolic form. Some indication of the
rigor of religious life at Notre Dame can be seen in the fact that
many married couples with families came there for vacations during
the summer to swim in the lakes and play golf. Did married couples
with children head off into the desert south of Alexandria for a
few weeks of R & R in the second and third centuries? I don't
think so. A rigorous life teaching school for nine months,
followed by the Sybaris of the Notre Dame summer school must have
been quite a change. That change, coupled with the fact that
everything else was changing, must have made this group of
religious think that anything was possible. And if the inevitable
was going to happen anyway, why not act on it in advance? Then
when the Church didn't change, disappointment turned to anger, and
anger to a determination to force the change that should have
happened but never did. It must have seemed so tantalizingly close
back then-the best of both worlds! The life of a religious, free
of material cares, plus the sexual fulfillment of the married
state. Third way indeed! It was, as the Germans say, a chance to
slaughter the cow and milk it too.
By the time John Krejci received his Ph.D., which was also the
time when the first consultations for the 1976 Call to Action
conference began, this philosophy of the "third way," which is
another way of saying dissent, which is another way of describing
the beachhead the cultural revolution had made in the Catholic
Church, had made deep inroads among the nation's religious, and
the vector of transmission was largely the Church's educational
system, the summer programs at Notre Dame transposed across the
country. The Call to Action conference in 1976 was, in many ways,
the sign that this group had come out in the open and wanted to
run the Church according to its own lights.
"Us Catholics have spoken," wrote Mark Winarski in the <National
Catholic Reporter>, the newspaper that represented the interests
of the Third Way clerics most faithfully. The idea of a
"democratic" consultation was used to disguise the special
pleading of the dissenters, who wanted, in effect, the best of
both worlds: the resources of the Catholic Church and sexual
liberation. So the Reporter's slant on the first Call to Action
conference was that "Catholics" had spoken. The people of God had
spoken and, <mirabile dictu>, they wanted the same things the
subscribers to the NCR wanted, namely:
ordination of women, married priests, remarried divorced
Catholics spared excommunication, determination of conscience on
birth control, a national arbitration board to control the
bishops, [and] civil rights for gays.
In other words, the agenda of the third way, the agenda, not
coincidentally, of Leo Pfeffer and the cultural revolution as well
as a way to weaken the revolutionaries' main enemy, the Catholic
Church. In addition thereto, those assembled in the name of the
Church in Detroit, in 1976, demanded that "The NCCB and Catholic
publishers should expunge all sexist language and imagery from
official church publications after January 1978." Beyond that,
they demanded that "The NCCB and every diocese should undertake an
affirmative action program." Under "Personhood," the conference
affirmed, among other things, that Communion should be given in
the hand, in keeping with the dignity of the human person, that
the Church should endorse the ERA as well as its political
opposite pole, namely, a constitutional amendment to protect fetal
life. And, last, but not least, under the heading "Humankind,"
they demanded that "Third world peoples should be invited to this
country to raise the consciences of our people."
I'm sure the people of the third world were honored by the
invitation, but before long, as the proposals became longer and
more politically charged, many observers began to wonder just how
representative this body was of American Catholics at large, and,
if it was not, just whose interests, then, were these delegates
representing? As even the unfailingly sympathetic Thomas Stahel
wrote for <America>, "Who were the people who passed all these
proposals?"
Many bishops were equally curious. As if to provide an answer,
John Cardinal Krol was overheard saying that the meeting had been
taken over by "rebels." Bishop Kenneth Povish of Lansing,
Michigan, compared the gathering to the 1972 Democratic convention
which nominated Sen. George McGovern. "I remember my father,"
Bishop Povish said, "a Democratic voter all his life, asking
afterwards, 'who was representing me at the (deleted)
convention.'" Even the normally sympathetic Archbishop Joseph
Bernardin disavowed the results of the conference, "the result was
haste and a determination to formulate recommendations on complex
matters without adequate reflection, discussion, and consideration
of different points of view." Beyond that, "special interest
groups advocating particular causes seemed to play a
disproportionate role." Then, in typical fashion, Bernardin
disavowed his disavowal two days later, issuing a statement to NC
News Service saying he "did not repudiate" the conference.
How could the bishops own people take over the conference and turn
it into the ecclesial equivalent of the tennis court oaths
preceding the French Revolution? The question misstates the issue.
The conference was so easily manipulated because the clergy were
the manipulators. As in Germany in the 16th century, the clerics
were the revolutionaries. By introducing sexual activity into the
religious life, the cultural revolutionaries introduced a state of
permanent revolution into the Catholic Church. Call to Action was
the institutionalization of that fact.
At this juncture, I'd like to make two points:
1) the cultural revolution was a demographic attack on the
Catholic Church, waged by people who studied demographics as their
life's work. These people realized that if birth rates continued
as they had in the '50s and '60s, the United States would become a
Catholic country, in terms of sheer numbers, which would then have
its effect on the culture, as the election of John F. Kennedy had
already shown.
2) the method of control used by the cultural revolutionaries was
the arousal, manipulation, and management of sexual passion.
Celibate clergy, as history has shown, were not immune to this
politically motivated seduction. They were, from the
revolutionaries' point of view, the most important group that
needed to be brought under control in order to influence Catholics
at large and to weaken the influence of the Church over the
culture.
The example of 16th Century Germany and the Lutheran revolt is
apropos. Luther spent much of his time writing to various priests
and clerics, urging them to marry and thereby break the solemn
vows they had made. His motives in urging marriage on apostate
nuns and priests were clear. Once that spiritual transaction had
been accomplished, the apostate priest was firmly in the Lutheran
camp, a fact that Luther exploited for is maximal political
effect. Libido, culminating in broken vows, was the engine that
pulled the Reformation train. It was a uniquely effective way of
organizing ex-clergy in opposition to the Church. Once they had
made two contradictory sets of solemn vows, there was no way out.
The marriage vows were, of course, invalid; however, in the
natural order of things, especially after children arrived, they
seemed every bit as compelling. "Within me," one unhappy priest,
who succumbed to the trap, writes to a brother who is still a
monk, "a constant conflict rages. I often resolve to mend my
course, but when I get home and wife and children come to meet me,
my love for them asserts itself more mightily than my love for
God, and to overcome myself becomes impossible for me."
The same psychological dynamic applies today; in fact, it fairly
leaps off the page as the distinguishing characteristic of Call to
Action. We have, in Call to Action, the same psychological dynamic
described in Joseph Conrad's novel <Lord Jim>. The priests who
jumped ship in the '60s found, to their surprise and dismay, that
the ship did not sink, and now it is they, out there treading
water by themselves, who are in danger of going down. What to do
in a situation like this? There are two alternatives. The first is
the historically more familiar. It is the path chosen by Call to
Action: organize, agitate for change of the rules, commiserate
with people in a similar predicament, bitch and moan, loin Call to
Action.
The genius of this revolution lay in its use of sexual passion as
a means of social control. By breaking their vow of chastity,
religious became committed to sexual liberation, to the social
program of the cultural revolution, and, as a result, to changing
the Catholic Church from within. The sexualized religious became a
permanent revolutionary cadre determined to make the Church
conform its laws to their behavior, and, since the cultural
revolutionaries controlled the religious by manipulating their
passions, this meant that the Church would have to conform its
teaching to their program for total social control.
Last year's keynote speaker at the Call to Action conference was
Anthony Padovano. Like Professor Krejci, Padovano used to be a
priest; in fact, he now heads an organization of ex-priests known
as Corpus. Like most of his membership, Father Padovano can't
forget he was a priest, perhaps because he still is a priest.
Instead of the best of both worlds, however, he now has the worst.
He has a family to support, which is tough enough, but he is also
plagued by memories of the way it was in the '60s, when he was a
sought after speaker, explicating the changing Church to large
enthusiastic audiences of religious and religiously interested
laymen also eager for change across the country. More than the
memories of the time when he was somebody, when times were flush,
when the sky was the limit, one gets the sense that Padovano is
plagued by the sense that those vows that he took as a priest have
left their indelible mark. As I said before, there are two ways
out of this intolerable situation. The way Padovano and Call to
Action have chosen is activism, organizing a group of people in
the same predicament, because misery loves company, and, most of
all, bad theology, lots of self-serving, theological
rationalization.
For those unfamiliar with its tenets and practice, scripture
scholarship does not distinguish itself by its intellectual rigor.
For the most part, even more than "free verse," it is the
quintessential intellectual version of tennis without a net. In a
recent article in the NCR, ("Is it just possible that Jesus was
married," by Anthony T. Padovano), Padovano shows that he has
learned the discipline well. To begin with, there is the tentative
nature of the title, followed by dubious premises, for example,
his apodictic reference to Mark as the first gospel, a standard
assertion of <Kulturkampf> and Enlightenment since the time of
Bismarck. Before long, we get a sense that there is a method to
all this madness, and the method has a lot to do with Padovano's
discomfort at his present state of life.
We are told, for example, that
It is instructive to realize that this sexless marriage is
developed as doctrine in the same period when married priests are
being warned by church officials to keep their marriages sexless.
we must not miss this constant transferral from doctrine to
discipline, from teaching about the virginity of Mary and the
celibacy of Christ to insistence on the same for clerics, monks,
hermits and nuns.
In warning us to be wary of the transfer from doctrine to
discipline, what Padovano is really proposing is a transfer from
discipline to doctrine; specifically the "discipline" of his own
life as a married priest is now to be read backwards into the
gospels to produce a Jesus who was both married and had children;
in other words, someone just like Anthony T. Padovano. All of this
is hung on some pretty thin scriptural hooks. For example, "In 1
timothy 4:13 we read that the prohibition of marriage is a demonic
doctrine." And then, of course, there is the testimony of Martin
Luther, who, since he is in essentially the same position as
Anthony Padovano as a married priest, writes things he finds
appealing, things like: "Next to God's word, there is no more
precious treasure than holy matrimony."
But finally, we get to the main event, namely, the Gospels, where
Padovano lets fly with his hermeneutical heavy artillery, to wit:
Why is the wife of Jesus, if he indeed married, not
mentioned in the New Testament? Or his children? . . . If Jesus
married, who was his wife?. . . We do not know.... Magdalene has
been named at times throughout Christian history.... The second
century noncanonical Gospel of Philip states that Madgalen was the
wife of Jesus, as well as the fact that Jesus was conceived in the
normal manner. [Which is probably why it remains noncanonical].
"I am merely noting this," Padovano concludes, "not claiming it.
.. None of this is conclusive; all of it is instructive." It
certainly is, but instructive more of the anguished state of
Padovano's soul than it is of the alleged family Jesus fathered or
his "wife."
So much for proving that Jesus was married. Now we move on to
proving that Jesus had children, in similar fashion: "Did Jesus
have children?" Padovano asks. "We do not know.... We do know
that, if he did, they were not prominent in the New Testament
Church. ... One would think, however, that if Jesus is fully
human, then his humanity would generate human children."
This leads Padovano to conclude that "A married priest may, in the
final analysis redeem sex from some of the negativity associated
with it in the Catholic community." Or, if not redemptive for the
Catholic community, perhaps for Father Padovano. He ends his
article with a long peroration on the plight of the married
priest, or, more accurately perhaps, the plight of the woman
married to him:
Is it not a pity that we live in a church where we are
taught to reject married priests and their ministry and to punish
the women who have become the mothers of their sons and daughters?
Is it not more the pity that we are told Christ is pleased with
this policy?
Is it not a pity that the widows of married priests must
fear even to the end that their husbands will not be blessed and
buried with honor by this church?
Is it not a pity that the wives of married priests must
proceed cautiously in this church, never celebrated for who they
are, no matter how many children they bear, no matter how much
they love even those who wound them, no matter how good they are?
It is a pity, father. But the answer to this dilemma is not
conforming Church discipline to those who have turned their lives
into an insoluble predicament by professing two sets of mutually
contradictory vows. That is the solution proposed by Call to
Action, the one they have been proposing for the past 20 years,
representing the Catholics who jumped ship at the urging of the
Cultural Revolution, only to ascertain on the next morning that
the ship didn't go down after all.
As an alternative to the Call to Action vision, I would propose
my, as yet, unspecified second alternative-the alternative
proposed, not coincidentally, by Bishop Bruskewitz. On April 11,
1996, Call to Action representative James McShane met with the
bishop to argue his case. By his own admission, he didn't get very
far. In a memo written after the meeting, McShane described a man,
in his words,
sensitive to his obligation to God to make an accounting
for his stewardship of the Lincoln Diocese. He cannot permit any
ambiguity that will lead any of his flock into peril. He believes
that his action in creating this legislation will redound to his
eternal credit at the final accounting. Such confidence can be
intimidating, especially to a layman who has been excommunicated,
lest someone else be confused.
When McShane complained about the severity of the punishment,
Bishop Bruskewitz brushed his concerns aside by claiming that its
"force could easily be lifted with obedience and repentance."
It was at that moment that Bishop Bruskewitz came up with the
alternative to the Call to Action agenda that has been troubling
the Church for the past 20 years.
"Obedience," he said, "is always possible, and it brings peace."
E. Michael Jones is the editor of Culture Wars.
This article was taken from the December 1996 issue of "Culture
Wars". Subscription price in U.S. is $35 per year; $45 per year
outside the U.S. Address subscription requests to "Culture Wars"
Magazine, 206 Marquette Ave., South Bend, IN 46617.
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