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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 12
THE TYRANNY OF THE CLERICAL GESTAPO
CATHOLICS THE MOST PRIEST-RIDDEN OF ALL PEOPLE
by Joseph McCabe
HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
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CHAPTER
I Poisoning the Mind of the Young ..................... 1
II The Priest Rules the Family ......................... 8
III The Priestly Censors of Morals ...................... 16
IV The Shame of the Confessional ....................... 22
V Catholic Action a Clerical Maneuver ................. 27
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Chapter I
POISONING THE MIND OF THE YOUNG
In the preceding booklet I showed that the structure of the
Church of Rome is such that an alliance with Fascist powers is its
inevitable attitude. It is an institution that survives from the
Feudal Age and, since it is not now permitted to exercise the
physical tyranny over men which it still claim's, it must, whenever
wealth and privilege are threatened, associate with any forces
which disown the democratic restraints of our age and by violence
and bloodshed suppress the critics of privilege and seek an
extension of their wealth and power. Historically it always did
this; and nearly all who are not Catholics, and very many
Catholic's, now see that this is in our time the meaning of the
diplomatic activity of the Vatican during the last ten years, the
shameless applauding of bestiality by the high priests of Germany
and Italy, the treason of the priests of Austria, Fiance, Spain,
Portugal, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia, and the support of
isolationism in the British Empire until 1939 and in the United
States until 1941, and in South America today.
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THE TYRANNY OF THE CLERICAL GESTAPO
But how do the half-million agents of the Black International
contrive to win the support for such a policy of tens of millions
of men and women half of whom professed to be free Citizens of
democratic lands until the Papal-Fascist paralysis began to creep
over them and a very large part still live in such countries and
swear loyalty to their ideals? I have shown and will further show
in the fifth booklet of this series, that Catholic priests and
writers change their political philosophy with startling rapidity
when their country turns Fascist. In country after country in which
but a few years ago they talked about the principles of freedom and
democracy with all the gush that is so familiar on clerical lips in
America -- in Germany and Italy, in Franco Spain and Salazar
Portugal, in Vichy France and Belgium, Czecho-Slovakia and Austria
-- they now find those principles as demoded as drawers or corsets,
even "poisonous" and inconsistent with the authoritarian state
which the Pope urges upon all good Catholics. They have not yet
reached the stage in America and Britain. Will they do so? And if
not how can the Black International use the vast sums it extracts
from the people to help on a regime of tyranny and exploitation?
First let us get a clear idea of the body of subscribing
members of the Church. How many Catholic's there are in the world
it is less easy to say than to ascertain the number of bacteria in
a cubic inch of soil. Comparing the figures given even by Catholics
is an ironic pastime. They are meticulously "accurate" down to the
last unit, yet they differ from each other by tens of millions;
which surely afford's some excuse even for a hardened skeptic like
myself. I consult the new Encyclopedia Americana, which has an odor
of sanctity as well as of scholarship, and learn, in an article by
a member of the editorial board (and apparently a Catholic) that
the number of Catholics in the world is 294583000. That sounds
admirably precise and moderate compared with the 350000000 or
even 398277000 (British Catholic Directory) which other Catholic
writers claim, but study how the figure is made up. In Europe, says
the writer, there are 183760000; and he then analyzes this into
35000000 in France (where optimistic Catholics do not claim more
than 10000000), 20000000 in Spain (where, when there were free
elections, the people so long overruled the Church that it had to
take to the long knife), 26000000 in Austria (where the total
population is only 7000000), 13000000 in Hungary (where the
population is about 9000000 and the Catholics are about half),
and so on.
It is a greater miracle than the Immaculate Conception. But
Catholics absorb miracles as babies absorb milk. A distinguished
Catholic journalist D. Gwynn (Pius XI, 1932) quotes with approval
the agstirqnec of Macaulay that "there were certainly not fewer
than 150000000" in 1840. The population of most countries has
trebled since then, where not greatly affected by the birth control
of these wicked skeptics, yet Gwynn thinks that the growth of these
150000000 into 350000000 (his figure) in a century, and with
fertility joyous and unrestrained, "must astonish all inquirers."
And this writer, who is an expert on France, knows that the total
figure of Catholics he gives includes 30000000 Frenchmen and
proves in his special work on the subject (The Catholic Reaction in
France, 1924) that there cannot even be 10000000.
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THE TYRANNY OF THE CLERICAL GESTAPO
Similarly in regard to the number of Catholics in America,
which concerns us most. The Encyclopedia Americana gives 50000000
for North America, of whom 20000000 are in the United States. As
there are only about 4000000 Catholics in Canada and the whole
population of Mexico (which the Vatican does not regard as very
orthodox) is only 16000000, the arithmetic again transcends my
profane intelligence. But when I turn to the Census of Religion,
taken (that is to say, supplied by the clergy) in 1936 and
published as the official record in 1940, I learn that Roman
Catholics in the United States number only 19914957; and you
really must trust a figure that is so definite even to the last
unit. The official compiler reflects on the remarkable growth since
1926 (18605003 -- not a baby or a village idiot left out, you
notice). But an unconsecrated calculation seems to yield that in
that decade the general population of America, in spite of a
tremendous traffic in contraceptive's rose by more than 8 percent
while the Catholics, who abhor those diabolical devices, increased
by less than 7 percent.
I should love to linger in this pious and stimulating field of
the statistics published by the Black International but we have
sterner business to approach, and I have written much elsewhere on
the subject. I have concluded, after many weary days spent in
analyzing the results of months of research, that the number of
genuine Catholics in the world is between 150000000 and
200000000, and it seems generous to use for practical purpose the
round figure of 190000000. It will be understood that I do not
include here the new compulsory Catholics of Italy, France,
Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, etc. If an American Catholic is
proud of them, and insists on including them let him do so; but is
it too much to ask that he state also, at least to himself, that
they have "returned to the Church" only while every priest is ready
to denounce rebel's to the firing squad or the torturer?
But our figure invites further consideration. It includes
about 50000000 illiterate American Indians. Add the illiterates
of the Philippines (7000000), and the French, Belgian, and
Portuguese colonies, a large percentage of the peasants of Spain,
Portugal, Poland, Slovakia, etc., and you see that more than a
third of the grand Catholic total are folk whom we need not
consider here. It is no mystery how the priests keep them servile.
It is hardly more mysterious how they keep their despotic hold on
further tens of millions: the peasants of Spain, Portugal, Poland
and Italy who are called literate because they mastered their A B
C's and the dense masses of descendants of these who fester in the
poorer quarters of our cities and industrial towns. The domination
of these also by priests requires no profound explanation; and
quite a large number at the other end of the social scale are very
easy victims of clerical bossing of a subtler sort. Of the
remaining half of this grand total of 180000000 more than one-
third are children.
We will discuss in the next book the whole question of
ignorance or culture, and varieties of culture, in the Roman
Church, but it is well to get clearly in mind here that when the
Catholic writer boasts of his 300000000 or 350000000, "Subjects
of the Pope," or when a statesman thinks that this gross figure
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THE TYRANNY OF THE CLERICAL GESTAPO
compels him to speak with profound respect of the Pope and his
Church, the suggestion is nonsensical. We shall further see that
the stuff imposed upon pupils in Catholic secondary schools and
colleges as "science" and "history" is a gorgeous tissue of untruth
that differs from the reality almost as much as a Theosophist's
view of ancient Egypt differs from that of an Egyptologist, so that
even in their case we are not greatly puzzled. However, let us
take the matter broadly. Leaving out of account the babes and
sucklings and the poor folk who either never open a book or could
not read one, how does the Church of Rome ensure the submissiveness
to a body of generally ignorant priests of some millions of men and
women in modern civilization?
The first part of the answer is the Catholic school. Cardinal
Hayes, who had an astounding success in talking rank nonsense with
the utmost gravity, once said, referring to American preeminence in
education: "It is the Catholic contribution which has enabled the
United States to take the world's leadership in this field." Horace
Mann was, I suppose, a Roman Catholic, not a skeptic as the
Dictionary of American Biography represents him. . . . But, no one
will expect me to argue on that point. The Catholic hierarchy in
America never professed to have any other aim in collecting vast
sums -- they spent $23000000 on new schools in 1927 -- for the
erection of schools of their own than "the good of the Church," the
safeguarding of the faith (the docility to the clerical Gestapo) of
their people. They care nothing whatever about the general cultural
level of a country. They just whip up the laity to a fanatical zeal
for having schools of their own. Catholic ladies have told me,
defiantly, in England, where a question about the treatment -- that
is to say, the amount of subsidy they will vote out of public funds
-- of Catholic schools is prepared by the clergy and sternly
pressed upon candidates for election, that they would not for a
moment hesitate to vote for a candidate who promised to favor their
schools no matter what his views were on national or local policy.
Once the question of the Catholic school was raised by the priests
at an election they ignored every other issue.
The zeal of the priests to whip up this fanaticism suggests at
once in what the Catholic differs from the national school. In most
parts of America today where there are large bodies of Catholics
the national school dare not permit a teacher or a class-book to
say a word that Catholics resent. Educational experts have shown
that in Boston and Chicago the Catholic clergy, acting through
their lay dupes, control education in this respect in the national
as well as their own schools. Even from third or fourth-rate towns
mothers have written me that the teachers of their children in the
national schools were so subject to Catholic influence that they
used real Catholic language. Possibly this partly explains why in
the United States Catholic schools, of all grades, have a less
proportion of pupils to the general membership of the Church than
in other countries. There are not many more than 2000000 pupils
in Catholic elementary schools, and if you multiply this by five,
the usual ratio of such pupils to total membership in Catholic
quarters, it would give America only 10000000 Catholics. One of
the drives of the hierarchy in recent years has been to spread
Catholics or Catholicism over the more thinly-populated regions so
as to get everywhere sufficient to claim a school or to eviscerate
the teaching in the local national school.
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THE TYRANNY OF THE CLERICAL GESTAPO
It is, of course, chiefly in regard to history, science, and
general knowledge classes (with reference to current events and
institutions) that the priests are so keen to, "protect" the child,
but even more important than this, the Church says, is "the
Catholic atmosphere." Every school is a church. Statues of Mary and
the more popular saints, painted in all the colors of the rainbow,
and Catholic colored pictures crowd the walls and window-ledges.
Prayers and hymns open and close the day, and specific lessons on
the faith are given or the children march to the church to hear
them. Holidays may be given in honor of distinguished
ecclesiastical visitors or important Church events. Mass must be
heard on the Church's "holy days" and children of seven and over
are conducted to the church periodically to confess their "sins."
From the age of five to sixteen or seventeen -- it is just the same
in the secondary school and the "academy" for girls -- the hypnotic
influence continues. Catholic books of the most mendacious
character are given as prizes. Semi-magical talisman's (blessed
medals, little pictures, scapulars, Agnus Deis or tiny wax lambs
enclosed in cloths, etc.) must be bought and worn next the skin
night and day. A Catholic adult goes to church once a week: a
Catholic child spends half the day in it every day. And the theme
of the myriad influences that seep into the child's mind all the
time is "Our Holy Faith:" our unique, incomparably superior,
exclusive, god-given creed.
Why should one call this poisoning the mind? Isn't it a
scheme, devised and perfected by thousand's of educators of the
young before Pestalozzi and Froebel were born, for forming the
character of the child or training it in habits of decency, self-
restraint, truthfulness, and regard for others? When you read a
non-Catholic writer who says that sort of thing inquire if he has
ever taken the least trouble to ascertain whether the Catholic
children who have spent nine or ten years in this atmosphere are in
fact any better than any body of children who have been reared in
a purely, or almost purely, secular school-atmosphere. I wager that
you will find that these "liberal" writers have never even glanced
at the question. They could discover with very little trouble that
in any of the blacker areas of our cities -- the areas in which
chronic poverty and ignorance have created a tradition of unsocial
conduct -- the Catholics are not a bit less drunken, violent, and
prone to vice and crime than their neighbors. They could learn
authoritatively that Catholic's have a higher percentage in the
jails and brothels than they have in the general population. They
can learn the facts about social behavior in Ireland or any
predominantly Catholic country. They know that in our class or
social environment Catholics are not superior to others in sound
qualities. of character.
The Catholic primary school which I attended 60 to 70 years
ago was in a poor industrial suburb of a large city. I often go
back to it to observe the very great progress it has made in
cleanliness, sobriety, restraint, public decency, and all important
social qualities. It was very foul in my boyhood, and I knew all
its vices and crimes. Catholic workers as a body behaved like
others all round me, and what a boy did not see he did not fail to
learn from others. Vividly do I remember how, when the master left
us in the higher forms for a half-hour, the older boys from the
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THE TYRANNY OF THE CLERICAL GESTAPO
poorest and least restrained quarters told us, joyously, every bit
of foulness they had picked up, while Mary and the Saints looked
down at us from the walls, and how behavior out of school was such
as one would expect.
The real function of the school was to make loyal Catholics of
us, to din into our ears until it was ineffaceable impressed that
our religion was not a religion like that of the Protestant
schoolboys, but the truth from God that could tolerate no
comparison. A favorite sport was for the whole body of us to
"Scuttle" (stone) the pupils of some Protestant school and chant
some doggerel like "Prodidog, Prodidog, go to hell, while all the
Catholics ring the bell"; and the priests and teachers never
preached to us on that. They would today, of course; Catholics must
show that they are good neighbors; but beneath all the smiles and
recognitions that "there is good in all religions" you see the same
arrogance and intolerance. Catholics are unique. All the world
belongs to us, and will come back to us when the work of the devil,
which began at the Reformation, is finally undone. The parallel
with Nazism is again perfect; and the aim is the same -- the power
and wealth of the Leaderg and the Gestapo. The whole purpose of
this ceaseless droning about the uniqueness of our Holy Church and
Holy Faith and Holy Mother and Holy everything down to the water
for chasing devils is to make and keep Catholics submissive. So
they can be raised, almost without explanation, to a blind fury
against Russia or Mexico, can be turned into howling mobs to
prevent their neighbors from seeing films which the priests do not
like, can be fooled for years about the real meaning of the policy
in which they are induced to cooperate.
If this blind devotion, with its inevitable submissiveness to
authority, be not thought poisonous enough, remember that it is in
large part secured by a monstrous and mischievous untruth. Belief
in hell and devils belongs to a stage of human development that is
not consistent with modern ideals. Probably the majority of priests
do not believe in them today. But they are as essential to the
Catholic school and journalism as a heroine is to a novel. They are
essential, not for moral purposes -- this flimsy scaffolding of
character is one of the chief reasons why the Catholic training
breaks down in post-school years -- but as an instrument of moral
terrorism and to protect the myth of the holiness and uniqueness of
the Church. The Church, the child gradually learns, has so many
"enemies" (critics) just because it is so holy and precious. The
devil, who is picturesquely represented to every child as a sort of
super-Nazi with a devouring thirst to bring more and more million's
of souls into his overcrowded and insanitary domain, is at the back
of all this opposition to the Church. The good Catholic must not
even listen to what his agents say, most particularly when they
assume the disguise of honest and decent men. For "sins of the
flesh" the Catholic can get pardon at any time and escape hell by
confessing but to leave the Church, to read or hear anything that
might cause one to leave the Church, is the most terrible sin of
all because one obviously cuts oneself off from the tribunals of
forgiveness and the "channels of grace" (sacraments). So from the
age of seven the children are made to sing, lustily, hymn's with
lines such as "hell is raging for my soul" and "earth and hell
unite, and swear in lasting bonds to bind us."
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THE TYRANNY OF THE CLERICAL GESTAPO
It would take a whole book to analyze adequately the
comprehensive poison of this "Catholic atmosphere." A psychologist
would find it a fascinating study in social psychology but of
course, no psychologist in America dare publish a book on it. I
will give in the next book some weird evidence, which has just
reached me, of the ripe results of it in Catholic countries, but I
must here be content with a bare outline of this first part of the
mechanism of the clerical Gestapo for making and keeping the people
blindly submissive and zealous for "the good of the Church."
It is hardly necessary to add that the lessons are carefully
arranged to suit the atmosphere. The Bible is rarely seen -- in my
youth few Catholics ever saw a Bible -- but there are lessons, on
Fundamentalist lines on "biblical history" as a gradual preparation
of the world for the coming of Christ and his instructions (mainly
secret) to found the wonderful Church. Science is fearfully
mutilated. Colleges can have admirable chemical and physical
laboratories because inorganic science is quite harmless, and
botany is fairly safe. The mutilation begins with geology and
paleontology. They are today manuals of evolution, so you can
imagine what the Catholic version of them looks like. General
biology and physiology must be adulterated so as sustain the myth
of a "vital principle," and Catholic psychology is as far removed
from science as the Civil War is from modern politics. Prehistoric
archeology, the science of prehistoric man, is, when any notice at
all is taken of it, a sheer caricature.
But history is the great field of the poisoner. A very
familiar jibe speaks of liars, damned liars, and statistics. It is
a clumsy absurdity as regards statistics but a neat classification
if you change the word to "Catholic historians." I need not here
examine the manuals used in Catholic schools. In my various works
I have nailed many thousand Catholics to the counter and shown that
even the Catholic Encyclopedia, the flower of American Romanist
scholarship, is full of them. You can therefore gather what kind of
stuff they impose upon their own children in their own schools and
colleges.
I repeat that it is not merely mendacious but poisonous. When
a Jesuit can say in what all American Catholics consider to be the
cream of their scholarship (the Encyclopedia) that all branches of
the Church recognized the supremacy of the Pope in the first four
centuries, which is the exact opposite of the truth, you know what
to expect. The version of history, from the alleged and mythical
years of Peter in Rome to the exploits of the present Pope, that is
imposed upon Catholics, beginning in the elementary school, is the
richest tissue of brazen lies that I know. And, which one need not
tear one's hair because children are taught as history those lives
of saints and martyrs which Catholic authorities denounce as
forgeries, the story as a whole is profoundly mischievous and
antisocial. Its one aim is like the purpose of all the rest, to
keep Catholics so submissive to their caste of consecrated guides
that they will swallow every statement or instruction without
serious inquiry into its justice or injustice.
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THE TYRANNY OF THE CLERICAL GESTAPO
Chapter II
THE PRIEST RULES THE FAMILY
It would be a mistake to imagine the troops of Catholic boys
and girls who issue from the primary or the secondary school every
year as just as solidly enthusiastic for their Holy Faith as a
troop of boys or girls issuing from an Adolf Hitler School in
Germany. I take it that the conditions are much the same in urban
America as in urban Britain, and in the latter there is plenty of
Catholic evidence that boys desert the Church in very large numbers
during the three or four years after leaving school. At Catholic
conferences of teachers and priests it has been stated that in
British cities 30 to <data type="percent" unit="%">60%</data> (in different localities) of the
boys abandon the Church. This can surprise only those folk who
lazily admit, as most do, the Catholic boast of "marvelous
numerical progress", in Britain and America. In neither country are
they making any numerical progress. I have shown over and over
again, and have in the last chapter pointed out that the latest
Census figures confirm this, that the Catholic body, in spite of
its higher birth rate, does not increase as much as the general
body of the population. It is a pity there is no American who can
force this truth into the official mind at Washington.
The transfer of the Catholic children from the artificial
atmosphere of the school to the secular life is something like
transplanting hot house seedlings to the open air in a late spring.
There would, in fact, be a still larger number of casualties if it
were not for the fact that the boy has already spent two hours on
the street or outside the school for every hour he has spent in its
theatrically insincere atmosphere. He has already learned that
there is considerable doubt about these picturesque devils who are
raging for his little soul and about the holiness of his priests
and popes. The girl who passes from the nuns' academy to a city
store or workshop finds that the section of her anatomy which the
good sisters told her, with bated, breath and downcast eyes, is the
Temple of the Holy Ghost now learns that that is not the general
view. Of course they have been prepared for this by warnings that
"the world" is like "the flesh" and the devil, a deadly enemy of
the good Catholic. Somehow the world, when the child enters it,
does, not quite resemble the villain of an old-time melodrama. The
hold of the Gestapo begins to slip.
The priest prepares for this by his grip on the family.
I say that Catholics are the most priest-ridden of all people but
it will not be forgotten that the power of the priest differs
enormously in different places: in Quebec and in Ohio, in rural
Mexico or Brazil and in New York City, with every shade of
difference between those two extremes. No one who knows the "really
Catholic country" (even Eire) will question that the people are far
more priest-ridden, more bullied and intimidated by the clergy,
than people are in rural Protestant areas, to say nothing of people
under Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto, Taoist, Moslem, or Jewish
authorities. The Jews and Moslem have no priests, in the ordinary
sense, and the priests of the Asiatic nations do little more than
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THE TYRANNY OF THE CLERICAL GESTAPO
perform ceremonies. Yet, although the priest in America has not yet
the despotic power his colleague has in Quebec or Portugal -- he
expects to have it someday -- I am inclined to say that even in
America Catholics are amongst the most priest-ridden of people.
The clergy dominate the family as they do the school. It is
the priest's duty to visit every home in his parish once in
(usually) three months. Naturally he shirks unattractive homes and
spends more time in those where the company is jovial and the
bottle travels freely. He generally has a little directory or note-
book with particulars about each. I do not suggest that Catholic
married women are more pliant than others but it will occur to most
people that the visit of the priest in the afternoon, when the
husband is at his job and the children are in school, comes pretty
close to G.B. Shaw's explanation of the popularity of marriage: it
combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
There is, of course, a good deal of misconduct, for the priest of
amorous disposition can learn on which day the "help" is away, but,
whatever else happens, the priest takes this opportunity to inquire
about the loyalty of the husband and the children who have left
school. An unsatisfactory report will bring him in the evening to
see them.
In order to appreciate the priest's peculiar control over the
family one must understand the power which the Church claims and
exercises over marriage. From the 4th Century it fought for 700
years to get this power, and the laity successfully resisted until
the bloody-minded "saintly" Popes Gregory VII and Innocent III
perfected the Roman scheme of priestcraft, and the "great"
Schoolmen proved to demonstration that this scheme, a transparent
clerical fabrication of comparatively recent date, was established
by Christ. How the priests won this power just when gaiety and
skepticism were increasing in Europe must be read elsewhere.
Briefly the Church brought matrimony under its iron authority by
making it a sacrament, an indissoluble contract, a ceremony
essentially requiring the presence of a priest. It discovered
"impediments," some of which were subject to removal by
dispensation (to the great profit of the Vatican) and some,
theoretically, not. This not only led to a prodigious traffic in
dispensations, which still continues in large part as I explained
in the last book, but it gave the archbishops and Popes a very
important authority over the lives of nobles, princes, and monarchs
in the matter of their marriage's.
Three cases which have been fully discussed by American
critics like Boyd-Barrett, Marshall, and Selde's and may here be
recalled briefly, will illustrate this tyranny. The late Count
(then Mr.) Marconi married the Hon. Beatrice O'Brien in a
Protestant church in London -- "she was a Protestant and he an
apostate" -- in 1905. They had three children but separated in 1918
and were divorced in 1924. The Church very generously concedes that
it does not claim authority over non-Catholic marriages, but it
also claims that one who has been baptized a Catholic, as Marconi
had been, remains subject to it. In any case Marconi wanted to
marry the Catholic Countess Bizzi-Scala, and he applied to Cardinal
Bourne in London for a declaration that his marriage was null and
void from the start: in other words, that he had never been married
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THE TYRANNY OF THE CLERICAL GESTAPO
to Beatrice O'Brieri -- though the Church, with great charity and
ingenuity, declares that the children of these sham marriages are
legitimate. The canonists at Rome fastened upon the fact, or the
allegation -- you know what evidence is worth in divorce suits --
that Marconi and his bride had agreed before marriage that if it
proved unhappy they would seek a divorce. Therefore there was no
real marriage, said the learned priests of London, pocketing their
fees. But Beatrice did not altogether like the idea that her
children were only saved from being bastards by the sophistry of
priests and she appealed to the Rota tribunal at Rome. Marconi was
now rich and he "paid the expenses" of the trial. He got his decree
of nullity, married his countess, and was in high favor at the
Vatican until he died in 1937.
In the second famous case Consuelo Vanderbilt, who had married
the Duke of Marlborough in 1895, left him in 1905 (after bearing
two sons) and got a divorce, applied to these learned and ingenious
Catholic authorities in London to ease her conscience by declaring
the marriage null from the start. You see, she now wanted to marry
the Catholic Count Balsan. The London authorities had to share so
promising a case with the Roman Rota, and the decree of nullity was
granted. She had, she swore, married against her will and because
her mother said that she would die of heart-disease unless Consuelo
married the Duke. No internal consent, said Rome, so no marriage.
Consult the authors I have named if you want to read the testimony
of these aristocratic folk in detail and learn how the Vatican
authorities proved to the hilt, when a storm arose, that they were
absolutely compelled to declare the marriage null and money had
nothing to do with it. What interests me is the Church of Rome here
claims a power that is not only greater than but antagonistic to
that of the State. What, you probably ask, would be the social
situation if every girl who thought her husband a beast could go to
a court and get it to declare that she was not married to him
because "I didn't want to marry him -- mother made me," or "he,
said he would let me get a divorce if I wasn't happy"? But, don't
be too nervous. First, She would get no alimony. Secondly, Rome
does not deal with a hundred cases a year and says that half of
them are "free." We already know something about Rome's "free"
services. The certificate may be free, but the frame may cost a
mighty lot of dollars.
A third case confirms us in these cynical reflection's. Miss
Anna Gould -- how the names in these cases do smell of money --
married the Marquis de Castellane in 1895, went through the usual
routine until they quarreled, divorced him in 1906 and married the
Duke de Sagan. He was a Catholic, but with true French chivalry he
deserted the Church for his loved (and wealthy) Anna. The elegant
Castellane, being a Catholic, felt himself out in the cold and
applied to Rome for a nullity-decree so that he could marry again.
Anna had, he said, spoken about divorce before their marriage. The
cardinals of the Rota rejected his application, accepted it on
appeal, then rejected it again. Castellane appealed to the Pope,
who referred the matter to a committee of cardinals, and they
declared the marriage invalid. To be quite sure on so sacred a
point the Pope enlarged the committee, and it declared the marriage
valid. Don't imagine that a count, a marquis, or a millionaire
always gets this previous decree. But you might care to ask me
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whether all the marquis's money had gone or whether American
dollars were weighed against his thin French francs. I regret that
the finances of these spiritual transactions are kept in a decent
secrecy.
A fourth case differently illustrates this beneficent power of
the Church to tie and untie indissoluble marriages. A few years ago
a Catholic American actress fell in love with a married producer.
He got a divorce from his Jewess wife but the austere Church will
no more allow a marriage to a divorced person than it will grant a
divorce. The man however became a Catholic and married his Catholic
actress. Now, there's a pretty conundrum: so pretty that when I
published the facts in London two years ago one of the chief
writers on one of the chief Catholic papers howled that here I
displayed either my gross ignorance of Catholic matters or . . .
The rest was silence. They delicately refrain from calling me a
liar -- in print.
But it is simple, and this Catholic journalist would have
learned a little about her own religion if she had read the article
"Pauline Privilege" in her Catholic Encyclopedia. Paul -- remember,
in mitigation, that he did not know that marriage is a sacrament
and indissoluble -- advised lady-members of the little group called
Churches that when one was married to a pagan who was contemptuous
of his faith she was free, after gently expostulating with him in
vain, to leave him and marry a Christian. Those learned theologians
of the Middle Ages who made a stalwart defense of the whole scheme
of priestcraft and are now pressed upon us by Catholic apologists
as modern-minded thinkers, worked out that this was quite
consistent with marriage being a sacrament and indissoluble, and it
is part of the law of the Church today. In the case I have given
above we have a simple application of it. The gentleman becomes a
Catholic, doubtless after profound meditation on the beauty of the
faith and not because priests had told him about the Pauline
Privilege. To meet American civil law he has already divorced his
wife, but in the eyes of the Church he is still married. All that
he had to do however is to ask his late wife, whose answer you can
imagine if you know the riper Yiddish, if she cares to become a
Catholic or to live with him without ever making any reflections on
his religious adventures. Even from this, however, Rome claims
(clause 1211 of the new Canon Law) that it can grant a
dispensation, and, the lady being already divorced, it was probably
not done. The emancipated partner is then free without any further
fuss to marry a good member of the Church.
Other aspects of Catholic law and practice illustrate this
power of the clerical Gestapo, even to the extent of flouting the
civil law, in a matter which is generally regarded as the supreme
personal concern in the life of a man or woman. Although this
control of marriage is so obviously priest-manufactured that the
laity, as I said, defeated for many centuries every attempt to
obtain its legislation about marriage fills one of the longer
sections of the new Code of Canon Law, and from the elaborate
nature of the clauses you will understand that very large and
profitable body of the appeals to the Roman Congregations which I
described. Probably the most lucrative dogmas (to the Italian
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caucus) in the Whole Roman scheme are the sacramental nature of
marriage and the doctrine of purgatory (through indulgences), and
both are transparent medieval fabrications in so far as they are
dogmas.
Notoriously the Church goes beyond any civil law in assigning
the degrees of relationship within which it is forbidden to marry.
In the Middle Ages they stretched so far that in a small town or
village everybody was related to everybody, and it was a golden age
of dispensations; or it would have been if folk had taken their
religion seriously in the Middle Ages. The new Canon Law says that
Catholics must not marry (without a Roman license) if they are
related by blood within three degrees, by marriage, within two
degrees, or by spiritual relationship (god parents in baptism). So
it is no longer possible for canonists to say, as they did in the
Middle Age's, that a marriage from which a rich person wants to
escape, never was a marriage because (as in the case of "Saint"
Louis and the very un-saintly Queen Eleanor) the man is related to
the woman through some incident they have succeeded in discovering
in the lives of their great-great-grandparents, or through an act
of fornication, which in that age might be taken for granted
between their fifth cousins or other remote relatives. But the
field is still rich in possibilities; note carefully that marriages
which are valid in civil law are not valid in Church law and vice
versa.
Mixed marriages are another interesting field. I have recently
been consulted on two cases in England. M has married N (a
Catholic) on a strict agreement of honor between themselves that no
religion shall be imposed upon children of the marriage, who shall
choose their philosophy of life when they grow up. There is one
child, now in her early teen's, and the wife repudiates the
promise, at the priest's order, and she and her relatives choke the
girl with proselytism. In the second case a man wants to marry a
Catholic girl, and she has assured him that there is no law of the
Church that all children of a mixed marriage shall be baptized and
reared in the Catholic Church.
I am not concerned with whether these girls lied on their own
account or were directed by the priest to lie -- I beg his pardon,
to make a "mental reservation." Both are equally possible. But the
law of the Church is clear. Not only is a dispensation required for
a mixed marriage but it will be granted only on four conditions
(clause 1061). There must be a serious reason: the non-Catholic
must promise never to say anything to disturb the Catholic's faith
and must agree to the Catholic baptism and education of all
children: the priest must be morally certain that the promise will
be kept: and he must have the promise in writing. The next clause
(1062) says that the Catholic party (who gets a promise that his or
her faith shall never be interfered with) must solemnly promise to
take every opportunity to interfere with the creed of ("convert")
the non-Catholic. Clause 1070 enacts that such a marriage is
invalid unless the Catholic has got a dispensation, so that the
promises cannot be evaded by concealing the marriage from the
Church.
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Another provision which flouts civil law and has led to a vast
amount of social trouble is that a Catholic (a baptized person,
whether he or she has left the Church or not) does not enter into
a valid marriage unless it is performed by a priest (1904). This
was enacted by the Council of Trent so as to prevent Catholics
secretly slipping from the power of the priest. When Catholics
multiplied in Protestant countries, some of which bitterly resented
such interference, Rome often suspended it, but in 1908 it was
declared to be in force in all countries. You see one consequence
of it. The millions in America who were baptized in the Church and
later left it and married like other citizens are to their Catholic
friends, not married, and their children are bastards.
There is a similar defiance of civil law in the enactment that
a couple who had committed adultery before marriage, or ex-nuns and
priests who had once taken a vow of celibacy are not validly
married. On the other hand, this very peculiar code of law about
marriage, which is supposed to have raised civilization in this
respect to a higher level, again drastically flouts civil law by
Saying (1104) that a priest can for "a very serious reason"
celebrate a marriage without witnesses and conceal it from the
civic authorities by entering it in a "secret register," and that
such a marriage is perfectly valid. Further, Church Law says that
youth's can validly marry at the age of 16 and girls at the age of
14 (which in Britain is two years below the legal age of consent).
And in fine this Code of the Church that never makes a moral
mistake lays great stress on that need of "internal consent" which,
as I showed in the above cases, opens a wide field for perjury and
contempt of the civil law. Some of the American judges who tell
their fellow-citizens how the Roman Church "does good" and
strengthens American civilization would not exactly be embarrassed
if married folk applied to them for divorce on the simple ground
that they were prepared to swear that they "did not really consent"
when they said "I do." They would order them out of court.
I am not in this book concerned with the defiance of civil law
and authority which is implied, if not flouted, in these clauses,
and the defiance of our modern ethic of sex-relations we will
consider in a later book. For the moment it is enough that here we
have an invasion of the most personal concerns of men and women
which really beats the Gestapo. Concerned as the Nazis are about
copulation and children, they are content with one drastic law-
forbidding copulation with Jews -- and leave the rest to the
influence of their "ideals." What will occur to any reader, even if
he is entirely ignorant of the history of these matters or does not
know that the laws were framed in an age of intense priestcraft, is
that they so obviously mean power and wealth to the clergy. To say
that they have an important moral or social significance is
preposterous. Some of the laws are plainly created for the profit
of selling dispensations from them, and all are designed to extend
and emphasize the power of the Black International over the laity.
The Fuhrer has framed them: the Gauleiter and the Gestapo see to
the observance of them.
I have said little about divorce, though the Church's refusal
to recognize the validity of it is clearly a monstrous invasion of
the civic rights of a man or woman. It is as useless to talk about
Christian duty as about the sanctity of marriage and social
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interests. Until the 11th Century the Church recognized more
grounds of divorce than the majority of states do today. The Greek
and most of the Protestant Churches, who know just as much about
Christian duty but less about priestcraft, recognize divorce. And
the Roman Church at once, when it suppressed divorce as part of its
comprehensive assertion of power over the laity, permitted an
extraordinary development of those nullity-decrees which I
illustrated in the foregoing cases. Catholics who had money were as
free to change partners as folk are in most of the states of the
American Union today. That is no reckless statement. The highest
authority on France in the beautiful 13th Century, Prof. Luchaire,
often claimed to be a Catholic and certainly not anti-Catholic,
says that women of the noble class "had a minimum of three or four
(successive) husbands." I have fully dealt with that elsewhere and
must not be tempted to enlarge upon it here.
The law against birth-control is an even more audacious, more
purely clerical, and more recent invasion of the rights of the
individual and the family. The motive for that sacred fury of
priests and bishops against the use of contraceptives which causes
them to hound women like Margaret Sanger, get Catholic mobs to
break up meetings, and make insolent attacks on medical or civic
authorities who favor the establishment of clinics has in reality
nothing to do with either morals or religion. It is an occasion for
asserting and thereby increasing their power in the community, and
it is one way of impressing more deeply on their own people the
prohibition of birth-control. It keeps up the fiction that it is
"filthy."
There are few points on which the claim of the Black
International is as plainly based on their own material interest as
it is here. There is nothing in traditional Catholic theology that
makes birth control sinful. The question did not arise until the
19th Century when the birth rate began to gain on the death rate
and when the extensive use of crude contraceptive's began in
France. It then became apparent to the clergy that if non-Catholics
checked their natural increase by the use of preventives and
Catholics could be intimidated from using these by a threat of
eternal punishment the Church might hope in this way to cover to
some extent its large numerical losses. A Catholic mother told me
that her priest had frankly said this at one of their "mother's
meetings." It is, at all events, not only the true but the obvious
inspiration of the clerical opposition to birth control; and it is
one of the grossest pieces of Gestapo tyranny over the family and
the individual. It is one of the points on which the Pope most
naturally allied himself with Germany, Italy and Japan. They wanted
as many potential soldiers as possible: the Church wanted as many
contributing members as possible. Neither cared the toss of a coin
about the other reasons.
It is here frankly ridiculous to ask us to pay serious
attention to the solemn statements of grounds for the opposition
which Catholics are now invited to insert even in our
Encyclopedias. To quote the "divine command" to "increase and
multiply" from a piece of ancient Jewish fiction is an insult to
our intelligence; especially on the part of priests and nuns who
pretend to be superior to the rest of us precisely by ignoring the
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command and regarding the mechanism of multiplication as even more
repulsive than defecation. But the usual argument that God's will
and purpose in the organs of generation is defied, is not much
better. This also is stultified by the doctrine of the Church that
priests, monks, and nun's, who are presumably equipped with those
organs, are much dearer to God just because they forswear the use
of them. But the argument is in itself absurd. It was used against
the use of anesthetics in difficult childbirth. It is answered by
the Catholic's own defense of celibacy: that provided a sufficient
number of people marry and couple to maintain the population the
"divine purpose" is met.
In any case, now that medicine and surgery are increasingly
reducing the death rate an unrestrained birth rate is a growing
evil. When Hitler and Mussolini and the Japanese government forbade
Malthusian propaganda and whipped up the birth rate explicitly as
a preparation for war, were they cooperating with the divine
purpose? Is a great war, which checks the growth of the population,
part of that purpose? Are bacteria and fatal diseases?
Overpopulation is, notoriously, an outstanding cause of poverty,
suffering, unemployment, even war. But overpopulation would be
grave in our own time if it were not for the general use of
contraceptives and in the future it would reach heights which these
opponents of birth control on social grounds never dare consider.
Without birth control or immigration (which is ceasing) the
population of the United States would be 500000000 in the year
2000, 4000000000 in 2110. . . . Need I continue.
The Catholic clerical attitude is a piece of blatant
hypocrisy. Its real purpose is to strengthen the power of the
clergy and multiply those who support them. Its ostensible grounds
are so flimsy that Catholic men and women are in this respect
defying their priests to such an extent that the matter is now
openly discussed in Catholic literature. For their more comfortable
and better educated people they have had to say that it is
permissible to restrict births by refusing to have intercourse
except in the wife's sterile period, but they cheat even these
because the Ogino-Kraus theory of sterility which they follow is --
and the clerical leaders must know it -- rejected by the great
majority of medical authorities. Most of us would like to
characterize their interference in such matters in even stronger
language, because at the best it is based upon a view of sexual
intercourse at which the modern world smiles, but we must be
content to point out that we have here a tyranny over a man's life
which goes far beyond the claims and practices of the Gestapo.
A final illustration of the tyranny over the family is the
childish ceremony of "churching" or Purification. When a child is
born it is rushed to church at the earliest date the doctor permits
for "baptism." This is Supposed by those who take a "broad view" of
the Roman Church to be just a registration of the newcomer in the
ranks of the faithful. It is, of course, nothing of the kind. It is
part of the scheme of clerical control and is based upon a priest-
made superstition that seems to any properly educated person
revolting. The idea of it is that all men are born with the
sentence of eternal punishment, or at least of eternal exclusion
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from heaven, hanging over them (original sin) because a legendary
Adam broke into a legendary orchard ages ago. That pink morsel of
flesh is, on Catholic teaching, to suffer, privately, forever for
Adam's sin if it died before it is put through the weird rites
known as baptism!
Most people think that the tyranny and absurdity -- one would
almost say obscenity -- end there but they do not. Because ages ago
in the dawn of Hebrew civilization, when savage superstitions still
lingered in the tribes, the priests laid it down (Leviticus, XII:2)
that a woman was "unclean" after bearing a child -- for seven days
if it was a boy and fourteen if it was a girl -- and must go to the
priest to be purified, priests get the Catholic women of Boston,
New York, and Chicago to act upon the same childish superstition
today. It is voluntary, but the priests urge it upon every "good"
Catholic mother. Polite non-Catholics say that it is just a pretty
symbolical ceremony. As usual, they decline to look up the facts.
The ritual enjoins that the woman must remain, as a sort of sinner,
"at the door of the church" until the priest's magic has "purified"
her, and then leads her into the church. He has made an honest
woman of her. Photographs of the ceremony in the 20th Century ought
to be preserved amongst those records of contemporary life which
are stored in some places for the future sociologist.
Chapter III
THE PRIESTLY CENSORS OF MORALS
These points do not tell the whole story of that tyranny over
the family which the priest exercises, largely through his
afternoon visitations. He wants to know if parents and children
have joined the various societies and fraternities, suited to every
age and both sexes, which are organized for the purpose of carrying
his school-control over later years, We return to these in the last
chapter. He inquires if any fail to attend the church every Sunday,
what they read, what shows and dances they attend, whether the
children who have left school have fallen into "bad company," and
so on. Whether he is really concerned about their morals or no
depends upon the character of the priest, which is generally
doubtful, but every priest is very keen on keeping them in the
Church. Where the Catholic body is strong and includes a number of
Catholic employers the priest has a very persuasive argument for
loyalty. I have known a priest in a British town of medium size to
walk into a shop in which a Catholic had a score of employees and
order him to dismiss non-Catholics and hire Catholics recommended
by himself, or order a woman who kept a small store, to cancel her
purchase's from non-Catholic sources and deal with Catholics. But
here we are mainly concerned with that form of tyranny which the
priest calls concern about the morals of Catholics.
Here the "unprejudiced" non-Catholic -- it is remarkable how
often a writer whose circulation can be injured or promoted by the
clergy or a politician with an eye on the Catholic vote -- becomes
ironical. Do we, he asks, first deny that the Church "does good"
and then quarrel with it for attempting to do good by a paternal
vigilance over the morals of the community? Or do we deny that
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moral culture has anything to do with the welfare and progress of
a civilization? I must defer to a later book the reply to the
second question, in which we must discriminate, but we may remind
these "liberal" folk of one or two matters that concern the answer
to the first, which he regards as so easy.
One point is that the concern of the Black International about
conduct is far less than its concern about loyalty and is largely
hypocritical. Ever since the early part of the Middle Ages the
Church has insisted on its dual guardianship of faith and morals,
yet I have abundantly shown in my historical works that, while it
adopted murderous methods of guarding the faith of the people it
was so really unconcerned about their morals that the period when
the power of priests and Popes was supreme (the 11th to the 16th
Century) was the most immoral in the history of normal
civilization. I do not here take the word morals to refer chiefly
to sexual morals. I say that there was more fiendish cruelty, more
ghastly injustice to the poorer nine-tenth's of the community, more
contempt of the idea of honor and good faith, than in any other 400
years of history apart from the Dark Ages. But the verdict is
particularly sound if you make the Christian sex-code one of the
chief points of your ethical scheme of conduct; and this state of
things -- see my large History of Morals -- lasted well into the
19th Century and lingered longer in Catholic than in non-Catholic
countries.
To express surprise or incredulity at this statement is to
confess that one has never made a serious study of it. At its best
the Catholic code is false to the realities of life and largely
based upon superstitions about sex that the candid mind at once
rejects. Further, it is framed in a doctrinal system on the level
of the crude boogie-will-get-you-if-you-are-naughty of the nursery.
The moment the Catholic goes out into life, either on leaving the
school or (in the case of the Irish), by emigration to a better
educated country, the framework begins to yield to the acid in the
new atmosphere. Thirdly the Church has frustrated its moral
efforts, as far as we can respect these, by making it easy for the
people to escape what it calls "the consequences of sin" (the
confessional, indulgences, etc.). And fourthly the clergy
themselves have throughout the Catholic countries shown, and in
Catholic countries continue to show, a monumental example of
vicious conduct: lying, intolerance, cruelty, greed, and disloyalty
to their vows. I have fully developed these points elsewhere and
need only summarily recall them. The fourth point applies less in
our age, since the clergy are compelled by public opinion to mind
their own conduct, but they still apply.
But is not the zeal of the priests for good morals in our time
something new and of valuable service to the community? Is it not
on this ground that they unite with other Churches -- with "good
people everywhere," in a current phrase -- and so promote the
interests of the state that Washington is bound to treat them with
respect? Are they not now so really resentful of vicious conduct
that they go out beyond the Catholic family and parish and have a
deep influence on the morals of the whole community?
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In discussing these matters we are up against a large problem
-- the question which moral code or which clauses of it are
socially important -- that must be deferred to the sixth book of
this series, where we will boldly challenge the whole ideal of the
Church. But we can make a provisional reply. It is that the priest
certainly wants to control the morals of the entire community. He
does not merely forbid his own people to go to see a film in which
his Church finds immorality but he brings heavy pressure to bear on
film companies and fires his Knights of Columbus and Dames of the
Holy Grail to intimidate exhibitors so that even non-Catholics
shall not see them. His Church brings the same pressure to bear on
authors, publishers, and booksellers to prevent them from supplying
the general non-Catholic public. He threatens civic authorities
with the Catholic vote unless they send the police to stamp down on
these "filthy" and "swinish" discussions (which he has never beard)
on birth control. Of all that there is so little question that I do
not think it necessary to give here proofs of Catholic
interference. Seldes and other writers give plenty of evidence, but
in point of fact Catholics boast of what thy do in this field, and
I do not suppose there is an American who has not heard of Breen
and the Catholic spiritual guides of the pious colony of artists at
Hollywood or of the campaign against birth control.
What is more important is to understand why they assert this
moral censorship. A distinguished British social writer, the late
John A. Hobson, being pressed to defend the puritanical code which
(from force of environment) he upheld though he was a skeptic and
generally addressed himself to skeptics, replied that he placed it
on an aesthetic basis. Logically that is unassailable. A man has as
much right to prefer a certain type of character as a certain type
of female figure; though, naturally, this gives him no right to
quarrel with a neighbor's different taste. But this theory at once
removes the question of chastity from the field of sociology. The
stability of civilization does not depend upon tastes but upon hard
facts, and it is now generally agreed by men who do not allow
priests to dictate their opinions that whether, for instance, an
actress in a film or on a stage has too narrow a diaper or how many
young folks decline to wait until they are married are not issues
of any serious social significance. The priest, of course, raises
a vague suggestion that civilization crumbles if we permit are to
raise the temperature a degree or two and mumbles about ancient
Greece and Rome (which were really more virtuous even in this
respect than his Beautiful 13th Century), but most of us have got
beyond those fairy-tales of Catholic history.
Why then is the Black International in America so frothy with
sacred fury about morals? Mainly because it gives them an important
place in public life and furnishes a nice-sounding excuse to the
politicians and other's who find it profitable to give them
prestige and influence or dangerous to refuse them. The priests
help to guard the foundations of the state, the American home and
family. And so on. Many of these politicians, civic authorities,
editors, etc., who smile beside the priests on public platforms may
even believe what they say because none of them know the facts,
about morals in past ages or the genuine sociological position of
morals. You might as well expect them to make deep economic study
to ascertain the truth when bankers and industrialists assure them
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that unrestricted competition is the second chief foundation of the
state or to inquire, when they are told that something is un-
American, whether America is really better off without it. Anyhow,
statesmen, bankers, editors, judges, and employer's just take the
word of the Church that it is doing a most important work and pass
on the good news to the public. The priest goes back to his people
and says: you see whit a splendid position we have won for the once
despised Church in America. And his brewers take out their wallets
and brewers' widows open their checkbooks.
But you do not need to study either history or sociology, and
these people know it. Sex-morals have so little to do with social
welfare that the American civilization, which is the second
greatest (after Russia) in the world is also the most advanced
sexually. It tries to shut out an idealist like Bertrand Russell
for moral turpitude and then has to have a Catholic League of
Decency and other whole armies of amateurs helping the police to
prevent artists and showmen from giving the American people what
they decidedly want. One of these censors would be the first to
paint a terrible picture of the license that would ensue in novels,
magazines. theaters, films, and cabarets if you just left the
purveying to the familiar law of supply and demand. I find American
novels at a decent literary level better than British and much
better than French or German, and at least two-thirds, if not four-
fifths, of them reflect an attitude to sex in the middle-class
readers that is far from puritanical, in spite of such censorship
as there is. The sale of sexological literature confirms this.
On the other hand the American civilization has some grave
defects which are not found in the Russian. Notoriously there is an
abnormal amount of corruption in business, politics (local and
federal), and juridical and penal circles. There is too high a
proportion of serious crime, too much suffering of the poor and
helpless, too much wanton extravagance of the rich. But do you hear
(he Catholic Church thundering against these evils? Or do you hear
bankers and statesmen applauding it for some crusade against them?
Never. The G-Men made more impression in a year on the real moral
evils which injure civilization than the Church made in a
generation. Tammany, which has been one of the cess-pools of
America for a century has always been, and is, tied up with the
Church. Do not talk to me about Coughlin. Half his followers are
not Catholics, and it is just because he gets some millions of
Americans to respect a priest, and therefore in a vague way the
Church to which he belongs, that the authorities permit for the
present the blatant and -- as has repeatedly been shown --
insincere ravings of the mountebank. Just where he does represent
the Church and violates Justice and decency (in his anti-Semitism
and libeling of Communists) he is neither moral nor a promoter of
the real interests of America.
For the last few years the sacred fury of the priests has
expended itself in a crusade against Russians and Communism. I
might add the pitiless campaign of lying about democratic Spain as,
although the Catholic laity were divided, the clergy were almost
wholly on the side of the rebel who has murdered thousands in cold
blood and is torturing tens of thousands. But examine the ferocious
attacks on Communism in which the clergy generally carried the
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THE TYRANNY OF THE CLERICAL GESTAPO
laity with them. To call this a moral crusade is a mockery. The
attempts to justify it by repeating discredited libels from the
London Times were exposed repeatedly yet this had not the least
influence in restraining the Catholic onslaught. Apart from these
bogus outrages the attack was not moral but immoral. A man has as
much right on decent principles and under American law to try to
persuade others that all the means of production ought to be a
national possession and all commodities and services equally shared
as he has to argue for the New Deal or universal conscription -- to
say nothing of a right to poison the minds of children and delude
adults with false statements.
Whenever You apply a genuine moral test to the work of the
clergy they fail, yet the country grants them an amazing power in
the only respect claimed to be moral but certainly not moral in the
social sense and challenged by some of the best writers in America
and probably at least half the educated class. It is the familiar
Roman story. Claim that you are rendering a service to civilization
by preventing people from seeing a film like The Birth of a Baby or
by getting censors at Hollywood who will cut out a bit of saucy
dialogue (at which the entire audience would break into laughter)
or order the alteration of a bath-room scene, and then when a
writer seriously challenges the utility of the work and the moral
standard of the censors get his book suppressed.
Indeed in the matter of films the so-called moral censorship
is in large part a pretext for preventing a disturbance of Catholic
propaganda and has been so used in notorious cases. Anyone who has
seen or read G.B. Shaw's Saint Joan knows that, in his usual
defiant way (certainly not for profit) he was attacking
freethinkers and playing to the Catholic gallery. His Inquisition
scene, for instance, was a concession to Catholics at the dire cost
of historical truth. Yet the Catholic censors cracked their whips
and threatened an all-American boycott because it did not represent
as they wanted the official sanctity of Joan. It was much the same
with The Informer, which showed the real combination of cruelty and
piety in the priest-ridden Irish, and with Blockade which exposed
the lies which the priests were telling about the Spanish people.
It is, however, the principle, the fact that the religious
leaders of about 15000000 Americans are allowed to control the
entertainment of the entire population, that matters. It is all the
more exasperating to any man who remembers that in the Catholic
lands of Southern Europe the most licentious spectacles were
permitted by priests (who then did represent the entire community).
In the pious Middle Ages pageants and parodies of the Mass were
permitted in the churches and cathedrals which would make a
Catholic Boston lady faint, and orgies followed on the streets
which, if they were now perpetrated in private, would rouse Irish
policemen to break in with axes and mercilessly beat the audience.
If you can read French, and if there is a copy of it in America,
try to see M. du Tilliot's Memoires pour servir a I'histoire de la
Fete des Foax (1741). The Catholic author, who devoted years to his
inquiry, gives a richly documented account of monstrous scenes that
the clergy permitted (and often took part in) in the cathedrals and
churches of France (and Spain, Germany, etc.) wild orgies on the
streets on "holy" days all through the Ages of Faith. On some of
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the illustrations he gives, from banners that had headed
processions on these days, we see men performing in the public
street acts which one of the most distinguished French writers, V.
Marguerite, was expelled from the Academy, at the insistence of the
clergy, twenty years ago for attributing in a novel (La garconne)
as secret practices to a few morbid men and women of the richer
class! Until quite recent times -- for all I know it may still be
true -- spectacles were exhibited semi-publicly -- you had merely
to charge for admission to the room and exclude children -- which
would not have been tolerated in ancient Rome. I often saw myself
when I lived in the South of France, 40 years ago, the poster at
the door announcing such shows as La mademoiselle et l' ane. That
means "The young lady and the donkey," and that is all I dare tell
you about it. In those days the French priests were pale with
indignation because a few morbid folk in Paris were said
(questionably) to attend Black Masses, in great secrecy, but
hundreds of thousands nightly paid to see these really public
shows.
Here is one more -- I could give scores -- illustration of
this hypocritical delicacy about sex. Until 1878 castrated soprano
singers were used instead of females in many churches (and operas)
of Italy and even in the Papal choir at Rome. This was as notorious
a fact as the venality of Papal officials and was noticed in nearly
every book of travel of visitors. I have met old men who have
lunched and discussed with these eunuchs in Rome. The Encyclopedia
Britannica (article "Eunuchs") continued until the latest edition
to say that these emasculated men "driven long ago from the stage
by public opinion remained the musical glory and the moral shame of
the Papal choir till the accession of Pope Leo XIII." The recent
edition was revised by Catholics, and not only is the reference to
the churches suppressed, but it is audaciously stated that Leo XIII
simply found the custom in vogue in the opera. Clerical writers,
having thus suppressed the most accessible and weighty evidence,
have already begun -- I have had proof in the last few weeks -- to
say that this story is another libel of the Holy Church! But apart
from the unexpurgated earlier editions of the Britannica it is
stated as an ordinary musical fact in Grove's standard Dictionary
of Music ("Soprani") and all the older dictionaries and books on
church-life in Rome. Every Pope, every nun, in Rome knew that the
castrati ("the castrated," as they were commonly called) or soprani
in the Papal and other church choirs were men who had been, for
church purposes, treated as men used to treat each other in the
wildest of the Wild West. Now the Black International wants to
dictate to America on the ground that its Church has an age-old
tradition of extreme delicacy in regard to sex! The claim is even
more preposterous than the shoddy version of history which
attributes the fall of Rome, etc., to sexual freedom. The real aim
is the same as in the furious campaign against Spaniards and
Bolsheviks, the alliance with the Fascist scum of the modern world
the sycophancy to the rich -- care for the power and wealth of the
Black International.
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Chapter IV
THE SHAME OF THE CONFESSIONAL
In discussing this catholic censorship of art and
entertainment I have inevitably moved beyond the priest's tyranny
over his own people and considered the outrageous interference of
the Catholic hierarchy with the freedom and tastes of the general
population. If any doubt still lingers in the mind of the reader
about the truth of my statement that the real aim of this is simply
to increase the power and prestige of the Church let him reflect
that the clerical Gestapo has in this respect a power to control
its own subjects which is far greater than the power of other
ministers of religion. A priest may tell you that in claiming a
national censorship his Church merely wants to remove "temptation"
from the eyes of its followers. That again is a hollow claim. Its
real plea is that it is rendering a Service to American
civilization and must therefore be respected as a valuable national
institution. In the domestic sphere the Church boasts that it
enables folk to "resist temptation" far more effectively than any
other Church does. The chief reference here is to its doctrine of
mortal sin and the confessional, and it is an important part of the
tyranny of the spiritual Gestapo.
Catholic teaching, stamped upon the mind from childhood onward
by myriads of sermons, books, hymns, services, etc., is that some
sins are venial (pardonable or lighter) and some mortal (or
punished with eternal torment unless they are confessed to a priest
and absolution received). Reading books or seeing pictures or shows
that in any degree stir the sexual feelings is declared very
emphatically by the Church to be one of these mortal sins. One
should understand clearly how unique the position of the Catholic
is. He believes that after reading even a passage of a book that
criticizes the faith or the clergy or seeing a film that gives him
a sexual feeling, he is under sentence of eternal damnation and if
he dies suddenly -- a street accident, bombing, heart-failure, etc.
before he has confessed this to a priest he will infallibly and
with no hope whatever of escaping it suffer terrible torture for
all eternity.
It is well also to understand the position of the Catholic
friend who smiles and tells you that he does not take this
literally. If he does not he rejects the teaching of the Church on
a point which it makes as vital to the creed as the divinity of
Christ or the atonement: more Vital, indeed, since the power of the
priests is based to a far greater extent on the doctrine of hell.
In rejecting or ignoring this dogma a Catholic necessarily rejects
the basic dogma of the teaching authority of the Church and opens
the door wide to general skepticism. He cannot honestly repeat the
simplest form of the Catholic creed and, if he is a writer, he dare
not even remotely hint at his position. is he a Catholic? Please
yourself, but you will have little difficulty in realizing that
this peculiar attitude toward one of the most fundamental dogmas of
the Church is very uncommon in the Catholic body. From the Church
angle the man who says this is in worse plight than the crook or
the fornicator. If he does not act on the belief which he
professes, to reject and confess his sins at least once a year he,
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in Catholic theology, may still be a member of the "body" of the
Church but not of its "soul." In plain English he is only a nominal
Catholic and keeps his position for social or other reasons. Any
Catholic who tells you that he is free to question or reject thins
fundamental doctrine lies. He certainly knows better.
It is through the further doctrines of confession and
indulgences that the Church makes this dogma one of the most
profitable in its theology and the chief source of its despotic
power. People who indolently, or from an amiable ignorance of the
subject, say that the Catholic Church is much the same as any other
are very far astray. The Protestant bows to the commands of the
Lord and what he believes to be doctrines in the New Testament.
Even the Church of England and the Protestant Episcopal Church of
America lay it down in the 39 Articles that the Christian need not
listen to any command or doctrine that is not found in the
Scriptures. But the Roman Church imposes as a binding dogma --
binding under the usual penalty of hell -- that "Commandments of
the Church" are on the same footing as the Ten Commandments. They
put on the same level as an act of grave injustice the failure of
a Catholic to attend Mass on Sunday morning, to abstain from meat
on Friday, or to neglect confession at Easter. The penalty is the
same for murder, adultery, or defrauding the widow or orphan --
hell.
A pleasant thought, isn't it, that some 10000000 adult
American's believe this. Hell and the devil have dominated their
minds from the time when they were in the infant-school. Naturally
there are millions of Protestants who are in the same condition,
but (in no Protestant Church do the authorities say that it is hell
to transgress their commands), in none is a man prevented by
priestly inquisition and periodical confession from taking a more
liberal view. The Church of Rome can deal out sentence of hell and
annul the sentence of hell when it pleases.
That is the chief root of the strange tyranny I have so far
described. A Catholic apologist would resent the word tyranny. His
people, he would say voluntarily submit to the priest who dictates
what they shall read or not-read, what shows they shall see or not
see, whom and in what conditions they shall marry, and so on. Does
he mean that they like it? Oh. no: but they hold a creed that
reconciles them to the system. And the fundamental article of that
creed is that the Church take's the place of Christ and can condemn
a child of eight years to hell or acquit a man who is as encrusted
with sins as an old ship is with barnacles. It may all sound very
flatulent to you, but you will never understand Catholic life and
action unless you know it.
This doctrine of hell and its annex, purgatory, is turned into
a source of power and wealth chiefly by the further doctrines of
penance and indulgences. A mortal sin -- for instance, when you
kiss a girl too ardently even for a few seconds -- incurs sentence
of hell instantaneously by an automatic spiritual machinery. All
sorts of things are mortal sins and, though, you may find it
incredible, Catholics believe that the majority of themselves walk
the streets, cheerfully, under the dire sentence. The curse holds
until the act -- in case they have forgotten this fateful act, as
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they commonly do, they run over a charming and exhaustive list of
sins (in their prayer-books) before confessing -- is confessed to
a priest and he gives absolution. Theologians, who are really not
quite as obtuse as the gentle lady saint who in a vision saw
Catholics falling every minute "like snowflakes" into hell have
thought out the mitigation that when one is going to die without
the possibility of seeing a priest an act of sorrow will do the
trick. I doubt if many Catholic's know that piece. The only sure
way to escape the sentence is to confess. The obligation is to do
this. once a year, but fraternity rules and custom generally
prescribe once a month.
Many would like to ask one psychological question about the
mind of a Catholic. Gladys for instance, goes to confession on
February 28 and is not due again until March 31. But she has a date
on March 7 (or 17th especially) and . . . Does she go about in fear
and trembling in the meantime? Not in the least. You must work it
out for yourself but be sure of one thing: Catholics really believe
all this stuff. Nervousness about it is unusual. A priest in a poor
quarter of London told me this experience. I believe it has become
"a story" since I wrote it 45 years ago, but it's true. He was
assisting an Irish laborer, of lurid life, in his last hour and
found the man terribly afraid. When he explained how merciful God
is the man murmured: "It's not 'im, it's the other b<div>.
Once the "soul" has gone to hell it is all over. Almost the
one thing which the Pope "cannot do is to get a soul out of hell.
It sounds remarkable but the Catholic way of salvation is almost
fool-proof, and Catholics rarely think about going to hell.
Confession to a priest means that you glance back, in quarter of an
hour or so of preparation, over the month (or year) with the aid of
your list of sins and then tell him which you committed and how
often in each case. One priest I knew used to tell of a bright boy
who, with admirable succinctness, reeled off his load speedily as:
"Thirty b-s, 25 p-s, and 40 d-s. It is not necessary to tell venial
sins, and better-behaved children are often puzzled. A sharp little
girl, of inquiring mind, once accused herself to me -- the reader
probably knows that I was a father-confessor for years -- of
adultery. But of tales of the confessional there would be no end.
See my Twelve Years in a Monastery.
Another essential difference of Catholicism is that the priest
does not assure the penitent "that God forgives him" or her. He
says, and means "I absolve thee." It was part of the power-policy
of the Church to shape the institution (or sacrament) of penance on
those lines. Confession. to a priest is, of course, an old
religious practice. It was as familiar in ancient Babylonia as it
is in a Catholic country, though the priest did not release from a
sentence of hell, in which no Babylonian believed. Their idea was
that for sin the great God Marduk let the devils have a go at a
man, and it was relief from the tooth-aches, head-aches, belly-
aches, etc., consequent upon sin that he sought. Confession to a
priest was as common in ancient as in modern Mexico.
But all that must be read elsewhere. The Catholic theory is
that after the priest's magic formula and wave of the hand the
devil retires, baffled, and all that the Catholic has to look
forward to its purgatory. Catholics may assure you that it is one
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of the beauties of their creed that it avoids the stark and inhuman
alternative of hell or heaven for eternity. It says that lighter
sins or those who have escaped hell by confessing must suffer or be
"purified" for a time in purgatory. It is not now essential to
believe that the torture is by fire, though the learned (and very
modern) Thomas Aquinas proved to the hilt that souls could feel
torture by fire, and since it is a spiritual state, there is no
question of time. But the Church finds it hopeless to impress the
dogma without this material terminology. A popular hymn exhorts
Catholics to "Pray for the Holy Souls that burn, This hour amidst
the cleansing flames," and the indulgences which they "win" or buy
speak of shortening the purgatorial punishment by 30 days or 100
days, or abolishing it altogether.
In short, this purgatory and indulgence business, however
beautiful and humane you may think it, has been the most profitable
religious doctrine that was invented. We need not go back to the
Middle Ages, when indulgences were sold as literally as cigars are,
or think of the sale of them by the millions a year in Spanish
Catholic lands -- no doubt Franco has restored it -- until recent
years. In discussing the Church's finances I said that a Catholic
pays for every Mass that each of the 250000 priests says every
day, and the aim is usually an indulgence. I described the enormous
traffic in medals, small pictures, relies, scapulars (little
pictures on cloth strung over the shoulders and worn next the
skin), etc. The normal aim of all this is to secure indulgences.
But the subject is too large to be treated here.
What concerns us more is that the doctrine of hell, of a
barbarously conceived penalty for a sin from which the priest must
absolve a man, is obviously the main source of the power of the
clerical Gestapo. Let us admit that the Roman Church did not invent
the dogma of hell, as it did that of purgatory, and that priests do
not now receive money for absolution, though they assuredly did
this in the Middle Ages. But as a source of power over the laity it
is a doctrine of unrivalled value. The Church could not have any
hope of putting its own commandments in regard to church-
attendance, fasting, marriage, divorce, birth-control, reading
critical literature, etc., on the same footing as the Decalogue if
it had not first lodged the belief in eternal punishment and in its
own right to declare when and how this punishment was incurred In
the mind of the laity.
Confession is obviously and essentially based upon the dogma.
Unless one appreciates this the spectacle of 10000000 Americans
whispering periodically to a priest how many times they Swore or
lied, how many times they just thought that a girl was desirable --
hell drops in with the first thought -- or handled themselves,
seems grotesque. The "liberal" view, that Catholics esteem the
practice because it eases their consciences and gets them spiritual
guidance, is preposterous nonsense. Most Catholics detest the need
of it and, as a rule, hurry through it mechanically. But only the
small minority who are Catholics in name only, for social or
business reasons, shirk it. One of the first questions the visiting
priest asks the mother at Easter time is whether all members of the
family have "been to their Easter duties." The minimum obligation
is confession and communion once a year "and that at Easter or
there abouts." The priest keeps a tally.
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And the most intriguing feature of the whole business is that
this "sacrament of penance" with its dire obligation to confess to
a priest at least once a year is one of the most obviously priest-
made dogmas in the whole weird structure of Catholic teaching and
discipline. The Christian Church, one of many ascetic developments
of the Greek-Roman world, did assuredly start with a lively concern
about sins. The end of the world and general judgment -- idea which
had been borrowed from the Persians -- were believed to be near at
hand. The practice arose, therefore, of compelling members who had
strayed to confess their sins, generally in the sense of expressing
sorrow for sins which were known to the others, before admitting
them to the mystic supper. Doubtless the "overseer" (bishop) or
presiding "elder" (priest) recited some sort of formula of
absolution. In the 2nd Century, as the idea of priesthood
developed, it was claimed that the clergy could forgive sins, and
a clause in support of this was worked into the New Testament
(Matthew XVI, 19). The next step in the fabrication of the priest's
power was to declare that forgiveness could be obtained only
through the priest's absolution and the laity must be compelled to
ask for it periodically. This was so clearly an ecclesiastical move
that even the people of the Dark Age resisted it, as they resisted
the priestly control of marriage, and there was no law of
compulsory confession until the year 1215, when the truculent and
despotic Innocent III had completed the fabric of ecclesiastical
power.
It is too large a subject for discussion here, and we are
concerned only to point out how this rounds off the power of the
priest over the laity and gives him an authority and right of
inquisition that the Nazi Gestapo might envy. But one further point
must be noticed briefly.
Protestant writers insist that the confessional is actually a
corrupting institution while non-Catholic apologists for
Catholicism claim -- they never examine facts -- that it must be an
effective moral agency. In a careful analysis of my experience as
a confessor and of discussions with others I have shown (in my
Twelve Years in a Monastery) that the Protestant contention is, if
certain excesses are struck out, correct to a very wide extent. It
is true that there is no misconduct in the confessional, in which
priest and penitent are separated by a wooden partition, and of
wire grille, but assignations can be made, and the priest often
hears confessions in places where there is no separation. I have
known a priest who systematically got young women to pretend
illness, go to bed, and send for him to come and hear their
confessions. It is rare. More common is the demoralizing effect on
girls and certain types of women of the intimate sexual talk that
is not merely permitted but required by the priest. He cannot pass
a vague self-accusation of a girl that she has been "immodest" (as
the nuns teach her to say) or indecent. He must ask. Does she mean
a solitary act and how far did it go? Was it with another girl or
with a man, and just how far did that go? Was the man married or a
priest? Was it with a dog (not uncommon with certain types) and how
far did that go? If she that she saw a film or read a book he has
to know if the bad thoughts culminated in the usual way, and so on.
Since most priests are normally "fleshy" and the woman is
stimulated by the sort of sacred license the occasion permits her,
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any man can guess what the emotional development is likely to be.
The cinema from which the priest is so eager to banish temptation
for the sake of his Catholic girls, rarely reaches the temperature
that the confessional so often does.
Chapter V
CATHOLIC ACTION A CLERICAL MANEUVER
Writers who find it more convenient to make reflections on the
Church of Rome without making a close study of its history and life
-- it is much easier to pay it compliments in this way --
generously describe it as a vast body of 300000000 or
350000000, men and women who are devotedly attached to a
"venerable creed" and are therefore bound to have a priesthood and
hierarchy for organizational purposes and to preserve the necessary
discipline. We have seen, or I have shown in a score of works, that
this view is as false as the theory of a Seventh Day Adventist that
the strata of the earth's crust are heaps of rubbish left by the
great Deluge, There are not 50000000 lay men and women in the
Catholic world who are old enough and sufficiently educated to be
described as deliberately subscribing to a creed. The vast majority
of the 180000000 Catholics are children, illiterates, or semi-
literates; and most of the remainder are duped by a mendacious
literature and fooled by a dogma which prevents them from reading
exposures of its untruth.
From a sociological viewpoint the Church of Rome is an
economic corporation of some quarter of a million priests, high and
low. It differs from the ordinary economic corporation in the fact
that the 100000000 more or less adult lay members are not
shareholders but, as in the propagandist societies, just
subscribing members. And it differs from these propagandist or
idealist bodies and societies very profoundly in the fact that it
holds, and has for centuries proceeded on, the principle that these
subscribing members must be held together by violence as well as
deceit: that they cannot leave it when they profess to believe its
creed no longer but remain subject to it and may be coerced by any
kind of suffering (privation, jail, torture, even death) when the
Church finds it feasible to inflict. Ten years ago you might have
boggled at this conception of the Church of Rome. Very many
Socialists and Communists did, saying that it was a harmless old
wreck and serious people gave all their attention to politico-
economic matter's. Now, in their tens of millions, in penury or a
miserable mental slavery, in jail or in mourning for their dead,
they lie like withered swathes of corn across the planet from
Brazil to Italy.
preserve this structure the Church of Rome had not only to
lodge certain childish basic dogmas in the minds of the subscribing
members and guard them from the contamination of truth but to draw
a magic line between clergy and laity. It invented the sacrament of
Holy Orders. It erected a sanctuary rail in the chapel. The priests
were officially "holy men," special proteges of the Holy Ghost,
separated from ordinary folk by sacred vows, rights, privileges,
and powers. They talked to you from a pulpit as if you were
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children and ordered you to do this and that as if you were slaves.
If you laid a hand on one -- if you came home unexpectedly and
caught him, let us say, at your special bottle -- it was the
terrible crime of sacrilege. They could not be taken to a common
court of law or asked to pay taxes. To ask them to show annual
balance-sheets would be an outrage. Your business was to pay and be
meek.
The laity were always apt to be restive under this system. In
the earlier part of the Middle Ages the Romans themselves fought
the Popes off and on for two centuries for the right to govern
themselves. Everywhere, as I said, they resisted priestly attempts
to control marriage or impose such laws as compulsory confession.
Princes and nobles defied the clergy hundreds of times, but by the
terrors of excommunication and interdict the clergy worked on the
illiterate masses and won. By the 19th Century these terrors were
as vapid as those of the haunted house or the comet, and the
historic disintegration of the old Church began. The success of
science in mastering disease and death led to a rapid increase of
population, but even this could not be made to conceal the fact
that the Church was losing about a million members a decade. Slowly
and reluctantly the clergy had to turn to new methods, and one of
these, particularly during the last 20 years, is what is called
Catholic Action. Some call it Catholicism with a punch, others a
cooperation of laity and clergy. It is a combination of the two.
The laity began to take action long before the late Pope
organized this new movement or tendency. The fight of the German
Catholics against Bismarck was mainly conducted by the laity. The
militant Christian Socialism of that county and Austria was
Catholic Action. France had several powerful lay movements in the
19th Century, and a Papal Delegate was sent to America to curb the
laity long before Pope Leo XIII, in 1899, gave a public and severe
snub to the American bishops for their innovations. However, it is
usually said, the Catholic laity won the right of personality, and
in Catholic Action they march side by side with the priests, no
longer mere contributors but militant and largely self-governing
bodies.
Not quite. Catholic Action does not mean either that the
priests were forced to make concessions or that their tyranny is
less. To a larger extent it was not a new movement but a
coordination of developments due to the requirements of modern
life. The multiplication of schools and in so many countries the
exclusion of nuns and religious brothers from them caused the
appearance of a vast army of Catholic teachers, and, since the
Catholic school is, as I said, really a chapel, these men and women
formed a kind of "Third Estate," a body more or less intermediate
between the clergy and the laity. The development of Catholic
journalism created another large body of active workers in the
cause of the Church. Already the Church made considerable use of
Catholic journalists in the employment of the ordinary press, of
teachers in non-Catholic schools or education departments, of local
politicians, of civil servants in all branches of the national
administration, and so on. Lay Catholicism already was militant.
Even ordinary folk, especially women, could be wound up to make it
a very spirited fight in the few weeks before an election when
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there was question of granting larger subsidies to Catholic
schools. Some day the question of the taxation of Church property
will be raised and you will see high-pressure Catholic Action
during election-campaigns. Most of the women would sell America to
Japan if concentration on "the danger to the Church" were to imply
this.
The present movement is an extension and organization of all
this. All sorts of existing elements were brought together. In
America the Catholic young men's National Union goes back to 1875,
and the monstrous Catholic Welfare Conference, the National Council
of Catholic Men, the National Council of Catholic Women, the
Knights of Columbus (800000 strong), etc., go back 20 or more
years. Now we have organizations of Catholic Nurses, Teachers,
Actors, Writers, Sociologists, youth, and all sorts of oddments:
Holy Name Societies, Dames of the Grail, the Sword of the Spirit.
the Knights of America, etc. etc., All with horn-rimmed secretaries
and organizers, some with elaborate staffs in Washington or Radio
Hours; and back of all a vast network of newspapers and the
billion-dollar treasury of the Church. It is estimated that more
than 5000000 zealous adults, apart from the clergy, are organized
for Catholic Action in America and greatly fancy themselves as
soldiers of the Church.
I had almost described them as the Shock Troops of the great
campaign to Make America Catholic, but overt action is not their
usual line. Quiet, stealthy, conspiratorial action best suits the
situation. A city must find itself in the grip of the Church before
it perceives the white fingers closing round it. The Knights of
Columbus are quite ready to crack skulls at a Birth Control
Conference or a public meeting to tell the truth about Spain or
Russia, but they are just as ready to conspire with Wall Street to
bring on a war to annex Mexico or for a peaceful penetration of
Canada. During a tour of that Dominion I learned that they had
secretly initiated the Premier of Quebec to their ranks.
Journalists (on non-Catholic papers), civil servants, librarians,
councilors on library or education committees, etc., quietly
consult the interests of the Church. A London daily was pained to
discover that an important member of its staff altered cables in
favor of the Church before publication. Another has a sub-editor
who controls the correspondence columns in the same interest. The
zealous 5000000 fill America with such intrigue. It is publicly
stated by American writers that Farley used the influence of his
genial personality to prevent Roosevelt from lifting the rather
disgraceful Spanish Embargo; but I should doubt if the more elegant
dames of the movement go as far as the aristocratic French lady
who, notoriously, seduced Radical statesmen in the preparation of
the shame of France and triumph of its Church.
So the tail comes to wag the dog. Catholics in America are
about one-tenth of the whole community -- somewhere in this series
of books I will provide the material for a reasonable judgment on
that point -- yet they have such power that the average American
imagines they must be about one-fourth. They are just, as a body,
the shrunken remainder of the vast body of descendants of the
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
29
THE TYRANNY OF THE CLERICAL GESTAPO
Irish, Italian, Polish, German, Czech, French, and other immigrants
of the last 100 years. And they set up in business at Washington
and insist that the President in his decisions shall ask them for
the Catholic view of the matter!
In other countries except Britain, where Catholic Action is
much the same as in America but more subterranean and less
effective, Catholic Action is generally Fascist. In Germany Hitler
has killed it very dead. In France, Belgium, Holland, Austria, and
Czecho-Slovakia it worked zealously for the triumph of the Nazi-
Papal plot. In Spain and Portugal, and now in Belgium and France,
it is entirely Fascist or Vichy, which is the same thing. A
correspondent just gets a letter through to me from a Portuguese
town and says that Catholic Action and Fascism are identical, hold
their meetings in the churches, and get anybody who criticizes them
sent to jail or penal colonies. Seldes describes the ghastly
medieval tortures that are used on such critic's today in the jails
of Portugal, under fanatical Catholic Salazar, who gets nothing but
compliments in the American-British democratic press.
That, in the light of the "great" encyclical (Quadragesimo
Anno.) of the late (assisted by the present) Pope, is the appointed
final phase of Catholic Action. The Catholic young men boast that
the priests, instead of exercising a tyranny over them, now welcome
them as co-workers, are fooled. The bishops ultimately control the
policy of every branch. The Gestapo preside at every meeting of the
plotters. When Catholic Action in France some years before the war
became a powerful royalist-Fascist movement on lines in harmony
with Vatican policy, the Pope scattered it by condemning its
leader's. This was part of a deal of the Vatican with the French
government. When Catholic Action in Italy took the form of a
Catholic democratic movement and became strong enough to stand up
to the Fascists (often physically), the Pope obliged Mussolini by
driving its priest-leader, Sturzo, into oblivion and paralyzing the
movement. German Catholics complain that the Pope betrayed Catholic
Action in their country to Hitler. Make no mistake about it. The
priest rules Catholic Action. The American zealots ought to have
realized it when they were taught to respect Japan as the Pope's
ally, when they were lashed to fury against democratic Spain and
Soviet Russia, when they found themselves rubbing shoulders at
their fervid demonstrations with Germans and Italians who have been
branded as conspirator's and Irish and French who are not much
better.
But in a later book on the Church and democracy we will
consider this antithesis of democratic pretensions and real aims in
American Catholicism. Catholics are the most priest-ridden of all
peoples of the civilized world: American Catholics are the most
priest-ridden in America. They take orders from their clerical
Gestapo as no other religious bodies do. The priests dictate their
schooling, reading, entertainment, courtship, marriage, diet on
certain days, and every aspect of their lives that can be brought
under the broad heading of morals. It is not submission to
dictation, they say, but compliance with a creed of the truth of
which we are convinced. Who gave you the creed? The Gestapo. Have
you thoroughly and critically examined it? No, the Gestapo forbid.
Why not test the word of your Gestapo by reading a few critics in
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
30
THE TYRANNY OF THE CLERICAL GESTAPO
defiance of them? We might lose our faith, and that would be
terrible. Why? The Gestapo says so. This reminds us of the story of
the man who, confronted with a difficulty, got under himself and
carried himself across!
<div> <div>
Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
The Bank of Wisdom is a collection of the most thoughtful,
scholarly and factual books. These computer books are reprints of
suppressed books and will cover American and world history; the
Biographies and writings of famous persons, and especially of our
nations Founding Fathers. They will include philosophy and
religion. all these subjects, and more, will be made available to
the public in electronic form, easily copied and distributed, so
that America can again become what its Founders intended --
The Free Market-Place of Ideas.
<div> <div>
The Bank of Wisdom is always looking for more of these old,
hidden, suppressed and forgotten books that contain needed facts
and information for today. If you have such books please contact
us, we need to give them back to America.
<div> <div>
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
31
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