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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 **** ****
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 15
THE CHURCH DEFIES MODERN LIFE
ONE SOUND CATHOLIC BOAST - WE NEVER CHANGE
by Joseph
HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
**** ****
CHAPTER I The Hell-Ethic and Modern Psychology ........... 1
II Orimitive Superstitions About Sex ........ 7
III Saints and Other Holy Men ......... 13
IV Why Priests Do Not Marry .......... 19
V Melodrama About the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.. 24
**** ****
Chapter I
THE HELL-ETHIC AND MODERN PSYCHOLOGY
It is not long since we were all laughing at a crazy film
titled "
No other equal stretch of human history has seen such revolutionary changes as the last 600 years. From the cross-bow to the machine-gun and the aerial torpedo: from the galleon to the latest battleship with 16-inch guns: from daubs on the wall, lit by
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tallow-candles, to superb talking picture's in technicolor: from villages to cities of 8,000,000 folk with 50-story buildings: from crabbed manuscripts to princely free libraries and news flashed from continent to continent in the time it takes you to cross a street. ... But the richest and most powerful Church in America still gathers folk, in dazzling New York or nerve-racking Chicago or aristocratic Washington, to hear the preacher tell about the legions of devils that hunger for their souls and the vast lakes of fire underground into which they may slip at any moment.
Come, Mr.
Naturally a preacher in one of those city-churches to which
the artists and literary men, who lend their names to the Church,
go, knows which dogmas to emphasize and which to keep in the
shadow, but let him or one of his artistic followers put in print
that Rome has abandoned the doctrines of hell and out he will go on
his neck. During my final years in the Church, in the last decade
of the last century, we took great pride in the fact that one
fairly well known British scientist, Prof. St. George Mivart, was
"one of us." When I quit the Church he sought me and, for his own
intellectual credit, be said, told me how he despised the most
fundamental dogmas and promised me that he would speak out. He
opened with an article in which he rejected the dogma of hell. And
he was at once excommunicated and was driven to death by the fury
of the Black International that erupted; though my professor of
theology, Father D.
If any one of those few professors of science who today call themselves Catholics dared similarly to repudiate the belief in an eternal hell in a published writing he would have the same experience. I have just been reading an American Catholic work, 'A Call to Catholic Action,' in which a score of priest's who are at
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the head of the modern movement in the Church give two volumes of
up-to-date advice to the laity, especially to those who are urging
their faith upon the notice of America. What is their bugle-call?
Or what is the fight to which they call the laity? They tell us
that it is primarily "a fight against Satan, the world, and the
flesh." That takes you back inexorably to the drowsy atmosphere of
that little 14th-century church in the heart of rural Britain. Nay,
if you know social history, it takes you back to the dark-skinned
curly-locked folk in long woolen tunics who confessed their sin's
to the priests and sought to dodge the innumerable devils in the
courtyard round the pyramid-temple of
I wish a few folk at Hollywood would read some of the essays
or sermons in this 'Call to Catholic Action.' They are cursing --
and half America curses with them -- the servility which they have
to show to a Catholic censor: a gentleman who acts in the interest
of his Church but assures them that it is only because "the public
does not really want this kind of thing, you know." Yet here are
the leaders of Catholic Action warning their followers that the
American movies are the chief agency of the devil. Here is a
celibate (we hope) monk with the sound American name of Father
As matters stand at present even the most, shielded, the best of homes, can hardly expect to escape the contaminating ting even into the innermost recesses of the family sanctuary, influence of the moral contagion that surrounds them. By means of the press and radio, the movie-hall and the dance-hall, the lecture-room, and platform, our communities are being infested with a poison of immorality that is gradually penetrating all.
Of all these devices of Satan the movies, he says, are "the worst offenders," and there has been "a growing stench for the past several decades" from them. The monk seems to have been more fortunate in his choice of pictures than I have been, for it is a very long time since I saw films that correspond to his description of, presumably, what he saw.
This particular campaign of the Black International inspires many reflections, and I will enlarge on two of them in this chapter. The first is that many will ask me whether the clergy and spinsters of other Churches are not in this respect as bad as the clergy-spinsters of the Church of Rome. On the face of it, yes, and we must not forget this. But there are material differences. The Baptists claim to number 8,000,000, the Catholics 20,000,000. The Baptists are thickest in Texas, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Alabama, and Virginia: the Catholics in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Illinois, and New Jersey, half the total body being in these five states. Baptists may bully authorities in Dayton but not in Boston, Chicago, New York, Detroit, Washington, Baltimore, and San Francisco.
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And this broad difference in psychology between Fundamentalist
and Catholic hellism, as we may call it, entails a very
considerable difference between the rival clerical bodies.
Skepticism amongst preachers of hell in Georgia and Alabama is
uncommon, but it is so widespread in the Papist Black International
that one may seriously doubt if one preacher in three really
believes in hell and the devil or honestly shudders at the thought
of the world and the flesh. Certainly the overwhelming majority of
the Fundamentalist preachers of hell believe that the New Testament
is the Word of God, and the
It puzzles folk when I say that relatively few Catholics fear
hell, but if you reflect on the general geniality, if not gaiety,
of a Catholic district or country (Eire, etc.) you realize that
this must be true. The Catholic system is based upon an escapist
psychology. Like the priests of ancient Egypt, who taught the
people that the journey to the garden of Osiris after death was
beset by monstrous perils and hordes of demons but they could sell
you charms for post-mortem use which defeated the devils, Catholic
priests neutralize the effect which their grim doctrine ought to
have upon the emotions by assuring the people that they have the
power to save even the most hardened sinner from the penalty. Most
Egyptologists believe that the common folk of Egypt -- nine-tenths
of the nation -- were not promised immortality, which had hitherto
been reserved for kings and nobles, until about B.C. 1400. No one
professes to find any change in the light morals of the Egyptian
workers and middle class when this idea that they had a risky
chance of an eternal bliss was extended to them, and the late Prof.
It is much the same in Catholic theology. For a hundred years
or more the first Christian communities were very solemn little
groups of folk who really thought a lot about sin and hell. Then
the Roman
Yet, since death does not always wait for you to summon a priest to absolve you, hell remained rather a tough proposition in the mind of many, and was a stumbling block to the cultured; and, above all, it was not as profitable as one could wish. The priests
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therefore took up a theory of a few rationalizing theologians: the theory of purgatory. These theologians, who were heretics while they lived, felt that there must be two furnaces in the cosmic basement: one for the more terrible sinners, such as the man who thrashed a priest he found with his wife or the man who died without asking the priest's ministrations, and one for lighter offenders and those who had substantially liquidated the debt by confession. One was eternal and in the other you burned only for a time. How could you be sure of a ticket for Furnace No. 2 instead of No. 1? Practically every Catholic believes that he is booked at least for this. Here the clergy opened a vein of gold in the hard rock of dogma. Absolution got you clear of "the fire that is never extinguished," and they invented a dozen ways of evading or very considerably reducing your stay in "the flames of Purgatory." And nearly all of them -- indulgences, alms, relies, pilgrimages, etc. -- cost money.
That is the big difference between the Catholic hell-scheme and the Protestant. I have nothing to do here with the question whether one is more reasonable, or less nauseous, than the other. I am concerned only with the psychological question of influence on behavior and with the enormous power which the Catholic scheme gives to the clergy. The latter point is obvious. One of the many features -- besides chronic war, pestilence, poor and monotonous food for nine-tenths of the people, ruthless exploitation by the nobles, etc. -- which made life in the Age of Faith so "jolly," as the late G.K. Chesterton used to say, was that now and again, when a king refused to heed the crack of the ecclesiastical whip, the Pope would put an interdict on the kingdom. Living under Nazi or Jap invaders today is pleasant in comparison. The whole scheme of salvation was suspended. The Pope locked up the keys of purgatory as well as heaven in his safe, leaving the gates of hell wide open.
However, we are here more interested in the psychological aspect. Those finer-natured non-Catholic writers who give so much pleasure to the clergy explain Catholic life, in the Middle Ages or today, on Catholic theory. It must have been happy and virtuous. It is so much easier, as well as more conducive to good will, to explain life in that way. Unfortunately I, being cursed with a Materialist, and Atheist creed, have to make laborious research into facts and tell the truth; which is that life in the Middle Ages was generally foul, is generally foul in Catholic countries today, and in the Catholic section of American life is painfully rich in criminals.
The working of the hell-ethic explains this. Modern psychology is precisely a study of conduct or behavior and in one branch it examines the motive as shaping forces of conduct. They are all lodged in the organism from without. You must, it is true, make some allowance for hereditary bodily equipment. Some females have richer glands of a certain kind in their ovaries and pituitaries. just as they may have better stomachs or stronger hearts than others, and these are destined by nature to be our scarlet sinners. The Vestal Virgin type, on the other hand. ... But I will leave that to a later chapter. The point is that Catholic conduct is shaped by environmental influences just like any other, and this persistent influence of the hell-and-devil motif from infancy
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onward, in school and church and Catholic literature, is morbid.
The hell-ethic never did produce nice types of character. "Saints"
are not people who were so very, very good because they feared
hell. And nowadays it is worse education than ever. The boy or girl
has been taught for year's to take it mighty seriously, and then he
or she goes to see "
Let no one be tempted to conclude from all this that the Catholic Church today does not really require the same belief in hell and the devil as a colored preacher in Georgia does. Make no mistake about it. The Church insists on it as an Article of Faith -- a doctrine automatically endorsed by every man who calls himself a Catholic -- as it did in the days of Torquemada. Look up the article on it in the most authoritative exposition of Catholic teaching, the 'Catholic Encyclopedia.' The article "Hell" is written by a Dutch Jesuit -- did no American priest care to have the honor? -- and is meticulously accurate.
Hell as a place of eternal torment is, he says, a fundamental
Catholic doctrine. It is "a definite place, but where it is we do
not know." The learned professor agrees with "theologians
generally" that it is "really within the earth." This preposterous
rubbish was written and printed in the most costly enterprise of
the American Church in the year 1910 when physicists had come to
fairly definite conclusions about the colossal concentration of
metal in the center of the earth. However, I hasten to add, in case
you are thinking of becoming a Catholic, that the Church does not
dogmatically say where hell is, merely that it is a place, not a
state or a figure of speech. So far, says the Jesuit in this
princely publication of the American Church, the doctrine of hell,
leaving out for the moment the question of its eternity and apart,
of course, from these disreputable Atheists, "has never yet [19101
met any opposition worthy of mention." Yes, I assure you I cleaned
my glasses specially to read it again.
This dogma, that men are punished in some place after death, can, says our authoritative guide, "be demonstrated by the light of pure reason." You will have to read the lengthy proofs yourself. I am a man of delicate stomach. That the punishment is eternal is an obligatory dogma, but this also can be defended by pure reason, or by Catholic logic, which is the only perfect logic in the modern world. But that the instrument of torture is material fire is not an Article of Faith. It is merely the teaching of "the greater number of theologians." It is also the conviction of the writer of
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the article, and since he was selected by the editor of the work as more authoritative than any American priest could be, it is the version of Catholic doctrine recommended to America by this most costly enterprise of the hierarchy. The great and so modern Thomas Aquinas showed long ago, the Jesuit reminds us, that the Catholic need not feel any difficulty at all about how a material fire can burn pure (disembodied) spirits. With God all things are possible. ... No, I am not being flippant, That is the, argument. But the Church, you may be relieved to know, has never dogmatically declared that the form of torture is fire. Those choice bits of the missionary preacher on hell are just illustrations of what "the greater numbers of theologians" teach.
I still remember one such gem; and it is not a reminiscence of
boyhood. but part of an address to the monks of my monastery -- I
was then about 26 and a professor -- delivered with great solemnity
by the learned Fr. David
Chapter II
PRIMITIVE SUPERSTITION ABOUT SEX
I am devoting a later book in this series to a candid examination of what the Catholic, under priestly hypnotism, calls "our Holy Faith" and believes to be so unique and beautiful a body of doctrine that his Church is fully entitled to boast of being "intolerant" and to claim the right to burn apostates. I had, however, to glance at this exquisite specimen of the Holy Faith as a basis for the present booklet. Let me complete it by glancing at another doctrine, and we will better understand the Church's attitude to the world.
The escape from this unpleasant region in the center of the
globe is technically called "salvation" and the failure to escape
it "damnation"; and from the respect with which the latter word is
always breathed by your neighbors you will gather how the horrid
possibility weighs upon the mind of the race. Now it is a very
trite expression of Catholic literature that the Church is "the Ark
of Salvation" -- an allusion, of course, to the ancient Sumerian
folk-story of the Ut-Napishtim and the
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is often discussed whether Catholics hold that "outside the Church there is no salvation." I am not going to be dragged aside on every page to discuss the beauty or, as you prefer, the puerility of these doctrines. We are concerned here with the power they give to the Black International and their influence in the general Catholic attitude.
In the Calvert Handbook which, you will remember, is sponsored
by Dr.
We must all hold as certain that ignorance of the true religion when it is invincible, excuses from all fault in the sight of the Lord.
Marvelous. In plain English, if any person never heard of the
Catholic Church or its teaching the Lord will not damn him for not
being a Catholic. The writer's ingenious twist of this into a
statement that it covers Protestants who know the Church well and
loathe it need not be examined. Turn to the more authoritative
Catholic Encyclopedia, and you will find that the spokesman
selected to tell America what the Church really holds, not an
anonymous journalist but the Rev. Prof.
If by conceding a convenient right of option or a falsely understood freedom of faith she [the Church] were to leave everyone at liberty to accept or reject her dogmas, her constitution, and her sacraments, as the existing differences of religions compel the modern State to do, she would not only fail in her divine mission but would end her life in voluntary suicide. As the true God can tolerate no strange gods, the true Church of Christ can tolerate no strange Churches beside herself. ... A strictly logical consequence of this incontestably fundamental idea is the ecclesiastical dogma, that outside the Church there is no salvation ... this proposition is necessarily and indissolubly connected with the above-mentioned principle of the exclusive legitimacy of truth and with the whole ethical commandment of love for the truth (XIV, 766).
Then are all the rest of the world apart from the 180,000,000 Catholics damned? Bless you, the Church does not say anything so horrid; he adds, you see, the Church does not damn anybody. That is God's business. How is that for logic?
It is this kind of logic that gives the Black International all its arrogance and intolerance and the faithful their weird belief that their faith is uniquely holy and beautiful. It is this that explains their melodramatic defiance of the modern world. I
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am, you will remember, in this second series of booklets explaining that the Church of Rome is, contrary to what its apologists commonly say in America, of such a nature that it inevitably grasped at the invitation to ally itself with Germany, Italy, and Japan. Some very ingenious pages, in the style of your literary oracles, could be written on the psychological affinity of the Black International and the Axis. Men who, in the name of the Almighty, preach weekly that he and they calmly contemplate about a million mortals a week passing into the eternal fires (or other torments) would not worry as much as the rest of us if their high aims had to be attained by a little temporary suffering like that of the British in Singapore or the Poles in Warsaw. However I am not a literary man and prefer to tell the truth, which is that heaven knows how few of the priests really believe in hell.
And in this it defies the modern world as flatly as it defies modern thought and sentiment with its crude medieval dogmas. It does not talk much about the devil except in the Catholic school and church. Outsiders are apt to be so rude as to laugh. But the world and the flesh! My word, we are a wicked lot. Some of the sermons in that 'Call to Catholic Action' from which I quoted make me feel quite uncomfortable. I roam in thought over this metropolis of 8,000,000 folk which I know pretty intimately, since I have lived and wandered in all sorts of odd corners of it for 60 years, and I feel that I must be more myopic than I thought. I have not seen a drunken man or a fight (such as you see daily in Catholic Eire) for years and have very rarely seen any approach to the indecency that was a joke on the streets in the Ages of Faith.
To be brief and practical, behind all this sulfurated hydrogen emitted by the clergy is their professional preoccupation with sex. We shall see presently why I say "professional" and how incongruous it is in a body of religious ministers which is, taking one country with another, the most "immoral" in the world. Let us first consider it in itself: which is not as easy as at first sight you might imagine.
The priests exhort their followers to marry early and beget as
many children as they possibly can. No holds barred. In America
they have to say this holds good even if you (if not a Catholic)
got your license from a civic official instead of a priest. In
Scotland it applies if two young folk have married without priest
or registrar. They dare not say in America that it does not apply
if men or women were divorced and married again. What if it was a
Reno divorce? A Yucatan divorce? The dividing line wavers and grows
thin. Yet if you are the wrong side of that line you get poured
upon you the dregs of the moralist's dictionary. He thinks public
corruption regrettable and the exploitation of the helpless poor
just too bad; but a sex-act on the wrong side of the line is foul,
obscene, swinish, loathsome, revolting, etc., etc. The novelist who
speaks lightly of it has a mind like a sewer, a cesspool, or a sty.
Those pictures in which you see the dainty, fascinating, glamorous
ladies of Hollywood, who seem to bring a current of fresh air into
your jaded mind once or twice a week, really (Father
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And it is not a question of a snare subtly set here and there
by the invisible devils. Modern American literature and art are one
comprehensive conspiracy to bring upon a poor Catholic girl the
fate that is worse than death. In this 'Call to Catholic Action'
one writer who is styled "His Excellency the Most Rev. Joseph
Schrembs" -- he must be very important but I do not know why --
says apropos of films, that the Church found itself "confronted
with a gigantic industry that was disseminating the doctrines of
pagan morality." He hints that he and others marshalled the pure
maids of his Church in a Legion of Decency and they used their box-
office power to change all that, but on another page of the same
book Fr.
By the way, I had overlooked this precious piece of Catholic
literature when (in No. 13) I described the cultural poverty of the
Church in America. The Jesuit Daly here admits and explains it. He
says that "the cultured world is not a fertile ground for Catholic
seed," and the reason is "its immorality." That is not ingenious.
It's tripe. Whatever you think of the morals of cultured folk the
reason why Catholicism, with its hell and devils, stinks in their
nostrils is because they are cultured. However, the next writer in
this important Catholic book relieves the gloom. There has been a
great Catholic literary revival in the last ten years. As its
greatest writers he names C. Dawson, C. Hollis, Fr. Darcy, Fr. R.
What occurs to one at once on reading these interminable
Catholic dirges is that the Church does really seem to be up
against the world. If American art and literature are so
demoralizing although this wealthy and powerful clerical
organization has been fighting them for more than ten years, what
would they be if there had not been this check on them? Do they or
do they not reflect American life and sentiment? But let us be
serious. Artists give America what it wants -- what the
overwhelming majority of people want. Suspend your
In other words, it is a tyranny of a small minority, for even the great majority of Catholics would still, if they were not bullied, flock to the cinema if it were just left to ordinary police-regulation and the recognized civil law. And it is self- interested tyranny. As I write, Laval is announced to have taken over power in France from the senile Petain, the man who pledged his honor that he would never surrender, and he gathers a group of traitors to France about him. The Press froths with indignation and vituperation of Laval in particular. But no paper ever mentions that Laval is a fanatical supporter of the Church and the whole malodorous group of traitors are Catholics. None of our foreign correspondents notices that the Black International, which is so portentously serious about the stretch of leg an actress may show on the screen, has from the start discreetly protected and is even very silent about this poisonous swamp of corruption and real
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foulness in France. It would not pay the Church to attack a foulness that brings suffering upon tens of millions and seems to all free men diabolical; but it does pay to attack leg-shows and strip-teasers.
However, I am always for the kindly and charitable view when it is possible, so let us suppose that the whole Black International in America is profoundly sincere when it says that it finds the sight of that charming little actress -- -- in her undies on the screen a far more terrible thing than the treachery of Vichy, the shooting of "hostages," or the systematic raping of women everywhere by Japanese soldiers and officers. Surely it would follow only that the clergy must have a moral standard that defies modern civilization. You may even cut out the comparison and regard in itself this professed horror of bare legs and jokes about sex. It is, as the Catholic language about the world and the flesh implies, a defiance of our age, an insult alike to our intelligence and our social idealism. It is, when it is sincere, just as much an outcome of ignorance as is a child's fear of a dragon-fly or an old colored woman's fear of "haunts."
There are two main roots of the anti-sex attitude, and both
thrive only on ignorance. The Catholic is, like the Protestant,
bound to appeal to the bible, but the modern mind wants to know how
it got into the bible. It is a fundamental idea of the
In any case this dark view of sex was widely spread in the
ancient world before it appeared in the early Christian documents.
Many of my readers will know that I have in earlier works (History
of Morals, etc.) made extensive research into the development of
the feeling and shown that, as is not disputed, it was embodied in
religion's in ancient Egypt (Serapeans, Isisites, etc.), Syria and
Judaea (Essenians, Therapeuts), Babylonia (Esmun, Ishtar), Persia
(Zarathustra), Asia Minor (
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first appeared amongst the Persian and cognate tribes on the hills
overlooking Mesopotamia, and the influence of this
We need not, therefore, go further back and ask what superstitions of life below the level of civilization -- for instance, the idea, not uncommon at this level, that there is something "unclean" as taboo about a woman on account of her menstruation, etc. -- were gathered up in the Persian theory. It is enough that the entire world of theologians, philosophers and moralists as well as ordinary folks now rejects this notion that an evil spirit created the flesh. And we certainly need not examine the way in which the early Fathers, maintaining against the Persian heretics that God had created all things, interpreted an old Babylonian story which the Jews had inserted in Geneses to mean that God had made even the flesh pure (in some mysterious sense) and put a curse on sex only when "man ate the forbidden fruit!"
So the chief reason why
The rottenness of these roots of the old anti-sex attitude is now so widely recognized that the non-Christian moralists of the 19th Century, who dreaded the argument of the apologist that they could not sustain the virtue of chastity, fell back upon "the moral sense" or a man's intuition of natural law. Many moralists are still in this stage, and "the common moral sense of mankind" is a pleasant mouthful for the political orator and the editorial writer. Modern psychology is a science with many conflicting schools but in none of them is a "moral sense" included in our mental equipment, and all but a few lingering mystics reject the very idea of intuition. All men's ideas and attitudes are built-in, and most professors of the science of ethics today explain moral ideas on these lines. The only moral law is a law or ideal of conduct based upon the requirements of social welfare and progress, and therefore most of the things which the Catholic preacher denounces as supremely immoral do not come under the moral law at all.
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I have had here to confine myself to two or three paragraphs
on a vast subject on which I have written volumes, but it will
give a sufficient idea of the ground on which we stand when we say
that this Catholic rhetoric about the world and the flesh is an
appeal to the ignorant, an insolent libel, a chorus of dervishes
which might be amusing if political interests did not give them so
much power. Greater freedom in thinking and speaking about sex
means a new strength, not a new weakness. We have done with the
amiable hypocrisies of our predecessors, whose shows blushed one
night over the fate that is worse than death and the tragedy of Our
The very fact that the new attitude is so general -- that in
the words of these preachers (which I quoted), the contamination is
universal -- shows that most men and women, who in earlier
generations transgressed a law which they recognized, now
consciously perceive that there is no such law. The general public
know nothing, of course, of the wide research and close reasoning
on which the new ethic is based; just as the majority of church-
folk know nothing of the logic and reasoning by which priests make
ethical and theological mountains out of the
Chapter III
SAINTS AND OTHER HOLY MEN
I have in various works expressed the opinion that a time will
come when the Black International will abandon their campaign
against the world of the flesh and discover that their medieval
Church gave the world a splendid lead in what D'
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If, as we are all convinced, Russia win's this titanic
struggle and is not defrauded by Britain and America of the
legitimate fruit of victory, the chief voice in the settlement of
Europe, the Church of Rome may find itself compelled to make some
remarkable adjustments in its struggle to retain its wealth and
power. At the moment it hopes, as I have explained in earlier
number's, to maintain its position, the improved position as
compared with what it was from 1920 to 1930, even if the Axis-
Vatican combination is defeated. The whole weight of the Church
will be thrown into the demand that President
If, on the other hand, the realistic Russian spirit is consulted in the settlement, and France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Hungary, etc., are allowed to deal with their traitors and Churches, the Black International will confront the gravest crisis in its history. It has, in its struggle for survival, changed many times in the last 30 years, but only superficially or by purely local adaptations to different conditions. While from 1900 to 1914 the American bishops and priests were, as part of their forward movement, boisterously assuring the public that the Church was broad-minded and tolerant and a good neighbor to other Churches, Rome itself three times (as I told) officially published, in Latin, its medieval Canon Law with all its superbly intolerant and truculent claims. When, from 1920 to 1940, these American priests and bishops were putting forward their extraordinary proofs of the Church's affinity with the modern ideals of freedom and democracy the Vatican was working on the anti-democratic line which culminated in its alliance with the Axis powers. The Church had not changed a single principle. It still boasted that, while all other Churches shed old dogmas and gave new liberties, it was still Immutable Rome.
That it must sooner or later change or perish will be doubted only by a man who despairs of the issue of the present conflict and imagines that the world may be returning to a new Dark Age, but it will seem to many quixotic to suggest that it might drop its furious campaign against the world, the flesh, and the devil. We must remember that the first dogmas to be jettisoned by a Church in time of danger are those which most affront the moral sentiment, and it is humorous to reflect that while the doctrine of hell did not disturb the minds of even educated persons during the long ages of faith it is highly repugnant in this age which the preachers describe as almost devoid of moral sense. Less than 100 years ago that doctrine was just as vital in the teaching of the Church of England and its American offshoot as it now is in the Church of Rome. Today it is at the most optional and was very clearly recommended for rejection at the Lambeth Conference; and there was no exodus from the Church. And if it be said that it is a long step
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from rejecting belief in hell and the devil to rejecting the sexual taboo, consider what happened at the Conference of the American Protestant Episcopal Church in 1922, the speeches at which are published in a volume with the title 'The Influence of the Church on Modem Problems.'
The problem set for the first sitting was: "What are our young
people seeking in their apparent revolt from the moral standards of
an earlier day?" The word "apparent" may seem very ecclesiastical,
though the first two speakers supported it. The third and last was
a clergyman of some distinction who certainly knew Christian youth,
and he must have made their hair stand on end. Morals means
customs, he said cheerfully, and the moral code is to a large
extent conventional or customary. The young see this and want "a
rationale of morals"; and, he added, they are "having considerable
difficulty in finding one." There is a legitimate "new ethic," and
in the light of it "ours is for the most part an irreligious but
moral generation." The Church in educating them had made too much
fuss about their bodies, and we must "revaluate our moral
standards." For this, he said, we find encouragement in the
Thus (pp. 22-28) spoke the much respected President of St.
Stephen's College, Dr. B.I. Bell. No earthquake followed, as far as
I can discover Bell was not decapitated or sent to a concentration-
camp. The bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church turned instead
upon my old friend W. Montgomery
Which reminds me of a fact that will amuse most of my readers.
All those learned books which
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attempted to explain to me though he relied on me in his fight for
ten years,
In other words, it is not only in its largely hypocritical
stress on sexual purity but in its general standard of character
that the Church defies modern thought and life. This is inevitable.
The requirements of the Black International are ruinous to the kind
of character, the straight, realistic, uncompromising character,
that the modern world esteems and requires. I suppose that Michael
He tell's As a fact the story of
On the other hand take Laval. In the last few days I have read a score of British and American characterizations of this repulsive adventurer. All agree that apart from the worst of The German and Italian leaders, he is the most sordid type of man thrown up to the surface in this churning up of the mud of European life, but not a single one of the writers mentions that he is a Catholic and in good odor at the Vatican. No one recalls as I did in No. 7 (First Series, p. 26), that on June 9, 1935, Laval, wearing the decoration
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of the Papal Order of Pius IX, visited the pole in the Vatican,
bearing rich presents, and presented his daughter, to whom, as a
good Catholic, the Pope gave a gold and coral rosary. To the
Vatican he was the most esteemed Catholic in France, and he became
a cordial friend of the present Pope. The Papal newspaper, the
I cannot ascertain the opinions of every man in this bunch of
Vichy traitors to civilization who have fouled the honor of France
but in the days when the Allies still had a pathetic trust that
they would resist
It is a mockery to find the Church of Rome boasting of its
richness in "saints" when, at a time of supreme need of character
and virility, it pushes into positions of power only muddle-headed
weaklings like
Where, moreover, Catholics do make strained efforts to rise,
toward the level of these "saints" they generally succeed in
contracting the vices -- hard intolerance and pious
unscrupulousness -- of the fanatical saints rather than the virtues
of the more human. They are apt to be sour, cruel, unjust,
slanderous, and convinced that the end, if it is the good of the
Church, justifies the means. They lose the sense of citizenship
whenever the clergy urge them to use their voting power in the
interest of the Church.
The medieval character of their ethics gives them a rigidity of mind that very largely unfits them for that censorship of other people's lives which they always claim. Take their matter of chastity, celibate or married, which they almost make identical with "morals." I referred on an earlier page to the importance of the sex hormones, the secretions of sex and some other ductless glands, which differ in different individuals just as the secretions of the liver or the pancreas do and cause the varieties which we call "strong passions" or "coldness" and every stage between the two extremes. But no Catholic moralist ever takes this elementary truth of physiology into account. Then have a wooden theory that everybody has a "free will," and the nymphomaniac is just a "vile woman" who will not control her passions while the spinster or nun who shrinks from men because she has none or a very feeble amount of the sexual hormones in her veins is a very superior or virtuous woman. It is, the Catholic thinks, cynical, materialistic, degrading to say such things. Scientific works which prove and explain them ought to be suppressed.
If it were not for the suffocating influence which the Black
International has won over the press, literature, radio, schools,
etc., what they call the "world" would laugh in their faces. They
belong, like our astrologers and palmists, to the Middle Ages; at
least their theories do, for there was far more sexual freedom in
practice in the Middle Ages than there is today. How long the world
will tolerate these dervishes dictating the dresses of girls on the
stage or screen -- and probably sneaking in with scarves over their
collars to see the pictures they could not suppress -- is a matter
of astonishment to us older men. We want neighbors who are genial,
truthful, straightforward. We want public men who are virile,
strictly honest, broad-minded. We do not care two pins about their
amorous adventures. We live in a world in which for various reasons
a very large body of women will never marry; we are passing into a
world of mourning in which millions of girls and women of every
country will not be able to marry. To forbid them normal life
because some 2,500 years ago somebody started the idea that the
devil made the flesh and
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traced this ancient ethic to its roots and severely checked its
action in history are to be counted a danger to civilization, while
these priests who nearly, succeeded in selling civilization for
thirty pieces of silver are to be considered its custodians, is
simply ludicrous. In a sense all this fury about the world reminds
us of
Chapter IV
WHY PRIESTS DO NOT MARRY
The vow of chastity of priests, monks, and nuns is one of the
most absurd complications into which this attempt to govern modern
life by an ancient superstition leads the Roman Church. Both in the
age when, in the early Church, the Fathers decided that celibacy
was the ideal life for the clergy and in the age (the 11th Century)
when a brood of fanatics finally imposed it upon the clergy the
reason alleged for it was simple. There was something, not exactly
revolting (if you were married) but certainly very indelicate and
contaminating, in all sexual intercourse. A really holy person must
abstain from it. It was not true that, as the heretics said, the
devil had made the body, yet there certainly was something unclean
about its reproductive department, and in a rigmarole of doctrinal
reasoning the Fathers connected it once more with the devil by
saying that God had created the body clean but
It is quite impossible for priests to give this explanation to their men and women followers today. In moral theology casuists try to work out just what, of a sexual nature, is forbidden even to married folk. It is an amusing chapter but I dare not give illustrations. These chapters of Catholic moral theology on sex would, if he could read them, make an Irish policeman's hair stand on end. Practically, sodomy apart, married Catholics have a free run. Herodotus says that the ancient Babylonians, whom modern Catholics regard as so very wicked, compelled a married pair after intercourse to get up and, in modern language, say their prayers. Your Irish, Polish, and Italian married folk on the contrary. ... No. I must give it up. But believe me that they are not told any longer that there is anything in any way repellent about the sex- organs or intercourse once you have the priestly license. At the most there is sometimes an attempt to represent that the voluntary virgin is in some sense superior on account of her sacrifice; but girls are, I understand, rather skeptical about claims of voluntary spinsterhood.
The reasons which the Church gives today for keeping its clergy in this unnatural condition are not taken very seriously. It wants them to be free from the entanglements and burdens of married life so that they may devote themselves strictly to their arduous duties; which is not very convincing when we reflect that men who work 40 to 50 hours a week very much prefer to have the entanglement of marriage whereas the average priest scarcely hits ten or fifteen hours a week of not very exacting work. A more
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serious reason is military discipline. Clerical authorities have a more effective control of what we may call the private soldiers of the Black International army if they have no families: but that is not the kind of reason that they can give to the laity or the world at large. Catholic women, in fact, do not want any reason, and, as there are twice as, many women as men in the only congregations that expect any reasons for anything from the Church -- those with more money and more education -- it is not expedient to say anything about celibacy. You never hear a sermon on it. The women would not have the fluttering regard for their priests which they have if there were a wife looking on or in the background, and they could hardly avoid an uneasy feeling at times that their picturesque confessions might not in spite of the "seal of confession," slip out at night when the married priest sipped his final highball at night by the fire with his wife. Experience gives women a rather cynical view of things one hears "in confidence."
None of these reasons, in any case, explains the celibacy of monks, nuns, and religious brothers, and for this there is no serious reason except the historic plea that virginity is superior to non-virginity because there is something animal and low about sex-indulgence even with a license. You might roundly say that the Church will not abandon the celibacy of its priests, monks, and nuns, though in all ages many sincere bishops have urged it to do so, because this is an important part of the uniqueness amongst religious bodies of which it is so proud. No other Church, except the corrupted Buddhism of Eastern Asia, can get hordes of men and women to make the great sacrifice. That is true, but there is uniqueness in vice as well as virtue, in stupidity as well as wisdom, and the Church can only boast of the voluntary virginity of its vast clerical and monastic army if abstention from sex- indulgence gives a man or woman a superior moral condition.
So we come back always to the original root of all this morbid
glorification of virginity and dark view of sex. The early Church
was, as everybody knows, cradled in a mighty struggle of those who
called themselves orthodox Christians and those whom they called
Gnostic heretics. This cradle, as I call it, was the line of cities
round the eastern end of the Mediterranean -- Judaea had really
little to do with the origin of Christianity as a new religion --
and the whole region was steeped in the new ascetic mysticism which
Persian influence had engendered, Egyptians, Jews, Syrians, and
Greeks as well as Persians all having different versions of it.
Common to almost all of them was the belief that the devil had
created matter, and that the quintessence of its diabolism, so to
say, was found in the organs of generation. There are modern
writers who hold that what came to be called Christianity was at
first just a local variation of this widespread Gnosticism. It
seems to me more probable that the Gnosties fastened upon the story
of
However that may be, not even Catholics dispute that it was a general tenet of the Gnostic leaders that the flesh, especially in its sex-part -- one often wonders whether the nearness of the Sex organ to the excretory organs had not a lot to do with the odium it
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incurred amongst these mystics -- was so thoroughly evil that even
a marriage-license did not remove the unpleasantness, The Catholic
leaders or Fathers retorted that God created man, body and soul,
and, though the body was fouled by the sin of
The Roman Church, as I have earlier explained, humanized its
attitude when it found that the Romans continued to despise the
obscure little conventicle across the river.
It is agreed that
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1050) such sheer animalism -- as the eleven or twelve centuries
that followed the triumph of the Roman Church. The only practical
issue of the teaching of the Fathers was that bishops who sincerely
shared it tried to get marriage forbidden to the priests; and in so
far as they were successful they brought upon the world a flood of
vice of a new type -- sex-indulgence not merely without license but
in spite of solemn vows to avoid It. In earlier works (History of
the Roman Church, History of Morals, etc.) I have shown that
On the other hand the story of the development of the law or
custom of sacerdotal celibacy is, as usual, falsely told by
Catholic writers; one of whom seems to have got the job of writing
the article on it in the new and painfully pro-Catholic
Encyclopedia Americana. The best generally available article is
that in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. Attempts to impose
the law were local, rare, and soon obliterated. The 'Decretum
Gratiani,' the basic document of Canon Law, names ten
There is nothing in the history of religion remotely like the general license of Catholic priests, monks, and nuns from the 4th Century to the 16th. In Catholic circles all this is called "a few irregularities, and the faithful are uplifted with a charming account of the way in which their unique Church inspired millions to forswear the most intense pleasure in life (on the promise of 1,000 percent interest in the next life) while no other branch of the Christian Church could inspire any. It certainly was unique -- in a consecrated vice which makes the practice of the sacred prostitute's of ancient religions look white in comparison. But for all that I must refer to my larger books.
With these 800 years of clerical and monastic vice before
their eyes -- for although history was then rudimentary, every
saint whom they read, from
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hinted, writing for Catholics, that I had descended to some vague but awful depth which he had not expected even of me. What had I done? Merely suggested that Hildebrand, Damiani, and Anselmo of Lucca, the monks of the Papal Court who led the fight against the marriage of priests, were probably impotent: a condition which, if they enjoyed it, would have filled them with pride. Anyhow it did not lower their fighting qualities. The language which Cardinal Damiani uses in his extant sermons provide an outfit for a New York stevedore. They led imperial troops and, the scum of the Italian cities (to whom they promised the loot of married priests' houses) and after years of struggle imposed celibacy on all priests and monks (some of whom were still married).
There followed four centuries of worse vice than ever, as a
very high proportion of the clergy had hitherto been married. The
state of Christendom was such that several Church Councils
seriously considered the question of revoking the law -- see
Naturally large numbers of Catholics, especially men, have their doubts. A friend of mine visiting relatives in the Rhine Province while the trials of monks for sodomy were revealing to Germany the amazing corruption of the Church asked several who lived near the infected monasteries what they thought of the revelation. "We always had some suspicion of it" they said. But again the Black International took every precaution to keep the truth about their "holy men" out of the press. Haldeman-Julius was the one publisher in Britain or America who let me tell that truth, Five years after the first series of trials, in which 250 monks (religious brothers) were brought up in the courts of Catholic cities and put through ordinary legal procedure that the Catholics of the provinces fully respected, a widely-read novel on German life said that the Nazis brought against the monks foul charges "In support of which they had never adduced any evidence." By that time thousands of witnesses had been examined in the open courts of Catholic Bonn, Cologne, Coblentz, and Munich -- not in Nazi courts -- and several thousand priests and monks who had taken the vow of virginity were in jail for sodomy or corruption of the. young Catholics pleaded that the proportion of priests was small. Naturally, simple fornication is not an offense in German law and no priest was arrested for it.
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I have in an earlier number given ground to believe that the majority of priests today violate their vow. In Catholic countries this notoriously is the situation. See the picture of Catholic life by a man who lives in a solidly Catholic country which I quoted in No. 14 of this series. Here I speak of America, and on the basis of conversations with ex-priests in America. What else would any sensible man expect? Recruits for the priesthood are usually secured at the age of 13 to 15. They have, as a rule, the habits of youths at that age, but a renunciation of marriage is still to them a vague and not intimidating prospect. Its irksome features are outweighed by what they have been taught to regard as the high prestige of the priest's position. They are for the most part sons of working-class or lower middle-class parents, preferably of Italian, Polish, Irish, or German blood, and to them ordination means elevation to a social rank of which, unless they became priests, they have no hope.
I am not here generalizing from a personal experience, though my parents belonged to the lower middle-class. But I was not sexually developed until I was 26, and the successive vows of chastity I ruled off as candidate for the monastery and the priesthood, meant nothing to me. Such freaks as I are rare, but, though the overwhelming majority of candidates are sexually mature at the first vows, they are too young to realize what the life- sacrifice means and are dazed by the prospect of the easy, comfortable, and privileged lift of the priest. A Catholic would explain to you that Rome is always willing to consider a request for an annulment of the vow in its first form. Yes, Rome, not the local bishop. It is made more intimidating by this need to appeal to the Vatican; and, especially, it requires a moral courage that very few youths and girls possess to cone back to a Catholic home and friends, after taking the vow of a cleric or a nun, and meet the almost contemptuous glances from all sides and the bitter disappointment of one's family.
Certainly this celibacy of the clergy is unique to the Roman Church. No other would tolerate an institution that is so cruel to the loyal, so productive of hypocrisy in the disloyal. It is part of the hard, calculating, unscrupulous attitude of a body of men who believe that the end justifies the mean's. It makes the Roman Church a fit ally for the Axis powers.
Chapter V
MELODRAMA ABOUT THE WORLD, THE FLESH,
AND THE DEVIL
It seems at first sight an amazing thing to suggest that a Church which boasts that it has more hundreds of millions of members in this age of science, than any other religion in the world should embody in its teachings, indeed force upon our attention, ideas which were elucabrated by shaggy dervishes speculating on life on the Persian hills 2,500 or more years ago. It becomes bewildering when we find this Church in one breath defying the world in which (or on which) it lives as something alien and contaminating and in the next breath boasting that its
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principles are in perfect harmony with those of the most advanced democracy of the age. I have explained a good deal of the paradox. The American apologist says that what his Church agree's with, what it has in fact itself inspired, is the fundamental American principle of freedom and democracy, and what it defies and attacks is its godlessness (as a state) and its paganism in art and morals. But when you press these very logical professors for definitions you find them quoting Papal declarations that "freedom" must be understood in the "Catholic sense," which means a galling tyranny, and democracy means, in a Catholic mouth and in the Papal Encyclical of 1931, the kind of rule we see in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Vichy France. As to those apologists who add that in religious toleration we have another point of agreement or of American learning from Catholicism, I have quoted their most authoritative writers brazenly admitting that the Church is and must be "intolerant" and could have quoted as many more as you wish. But as I gave the text of the Church Law, officially published in Rome, on the complete refusal of the rights to other Churches, the dogmatic rejection of the right of "freedom of conscience" (or to follow your reasoned convictions in regard to religion), and the "right and duty" of the Church to put seceders from its ranks to death, there is no need to say more.
The first is from a piece of British literature but it is so important from the Catholic viewpoint that it is worth considering. As one part of their attempt to force their way into the cultural swim, British Catholics began some years ago to hold a Summer School under the shadow of the venerable University of Cambridge. In the holiday sessions of 1931 the subject was human nature, and the papers read are published with the title Man (1932). The big guns were trundled along from all the chief Catholic colleges in
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England, so you are not reading vapid and irresponsible jibes at modern thought like W.D. Nutting's 'How Firm A Foundation?' (1939). Yet the whole book is a flat defiance of modern scholarship in the name of ancient superstitions as served up in Geneses.
Dr. T.E. Flynn deals with the evolution of man. He shows that
all Catholics are compelled to believe that the whole human race
descends from
The second book, 'The Two Kingdoms' (1931), is a series of
essays by six well-known British priests with -- note this -- a
very cordial letter of introduction by the late
Our world, it seems, is gathering round two poles,
"Catholicism and
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(194). Queer dress for an
Is it an improbable conjecture that humanistic
philosophy, biology, psychology, and sociology, with the aid
of false history and the deceptive marvels of Spiritism, may
supply this, and then
Nuts, you say: turn to something serious. But I have already
explained that these priests are important enough and their ideas
are sound enough from the Catholic angle to get a warm letter of
introduction from
The Greeks had a word for this thing. But make no mistake
about it. This is, apart from the hints that the end of the world
is near, just the ordinary Catholic attitude. The
Seriously, this melodramatic stuff is Catholicism. The system
of ideas and practices as a whole we will examine in the next book,
but one of the most important factors in the Church's remarkable
hold on some 100,000,000 folk (omitting children and savages) is
the world, the flesh, and the devil -- though the three-in-one
means a legion of devils that multiplies by spontaneous as the race
multiplies -- are out for their immortal souls, and the Church
alone can effectively foil them. Hence the morbid emphasis on sex.
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It is a topsy-turvy world. Catholics number, as I showed, about 180,000,000, if you include children and illiterates on the fringe of civilization. In countries that we consider fully civilized and organized they are about one-twentieth of the population. They turn upon the 1920's with an insolence, an air of superiority, like that of a duchess amongst her maids; and this air of superiority is based upon a belief in devils and in uncleanliness of sex that belongs essentially to an age of profound ignorance. Catholic Action, remember, is not based upon the smooth approaches of Catholic politicians when they seek office or influence, or on the tactical affability of Jesuits in dealing with non-Catholic, or on the spontaneous neighborliness of Catholic men and women of the less fanatical type. It is based upon the teaching and attitude of the Church as I have quoted them from the most authoritative sources. It is in virtue of these doctrines that Catholics are reconciled to see their Black International drag them into alliance with all that is vilest and most dangerous in modern life.
Yet in America and Britain the nine-tenths or nineteen- twentieths of the nation that are described in Catholic literature as a debauched generation, a contamination and danger to the virtuous Catholic family, load the Church with eulogies and privileges. Upton Sinclair had the amusing impertinence to say, when Haldeman-Julius invited him to reply to me, that he refused to have anything to do with us because we did not rely upon "facts" as he did! What has he done in regard to the massive volume of ugly facts which I have given in these books? He illustrates his meaning by quoting the instance of telepathy -- on which, by the way, I spent months of research and wrote many pages before, apparently, he ever heard of it -- and seems to invite us to bury ourselves in a mound of tricky claims about this triviality while the Black International gathers such wealth and power that it helps to flood the world with misery and hopes to paralyze freedom in America. It has already won such a position that the literature in which it argues in favor of these weird ideas of the Dancing Dervishes of old times is treated with deep respect by the press and libraries, while literature in which we warn the world of the facts is deliberately isolated from the public and treated as disreputable. If statesmen, writers. editors, and professors really think that they can maintain the solidity of their civilization by sacrificing all their professed respect for reality and justice in one important field and asserting it in others, by flattering what they know to be untruth and closing their eyes to social poison, we do not wonder that the fortunes of the race are so dangerously menaced. It was by taking advantage of just such an attitude in Britain, and France that the Axis powers gathered their formidable strength.
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