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96 KiB
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28 page printout
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Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
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This file, its printout, or copies of either
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are to be copied and given away, but NOT sold.
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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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**** ****
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Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
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THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 17
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HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
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THE UNIQUE APPARATUS OF THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL
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TO SECURE LOYALTY
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by Joseph McCabe
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HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
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GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
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**** ****
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CHAPTER
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I Death and Damnation for the Unbeliever .............. 1
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II Blinkers for the Believers .......................... 8
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III Drawing the Dragon's Teeth ......................... 16
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IV Sugar Plums for the Loyal .......................... 23
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**** ****
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Chapter I
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DEATH AND DAMNATION FOR THE UNBELIEVER
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In 1928 Bertrand Russell said in the course of an address to
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the British Rationalist Press Association that "in fifty years the
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Roman Catholic Church will dominate America." For once I fail to
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follow the reasoning of the distinguished mathematician. If we take
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the estimate of the number of their members which the clergy supply
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to the public authorities we find that in 1900 they claimed to be
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15.7 of the entire population, in 1910 they had sunk to 14.1, in
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1920 they claimed to be 16.9, in 1930 16.2, and in 1940, according
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to the figures supplied to the Federal Council of the Churches,
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15.9. Instead of a stately and convincing growth toward the
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necessary 60 or 70 percent, much less an abnormally rapid growth,
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we have here a curve of progress that gets back to its starting-
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point in nearly half a century. It is not necessary to add that
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until 1930 the growth of population was entirely different from
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that in the other countries, for from 1900 until that date there
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were about 17,000,000 immigrants, and more than half of these were
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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1
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HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
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Catholics: a fact strangely overlooked by all writers who are moved
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to make profound observations when they see the decennial increases
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of the Catholic population.
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On the other hand even many Americans will not know that not
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only has the flood of immigration subsided to a modest stream but
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there is evidence, which is accepted by Catholic authorities, that
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the Catholic birth rate is being deliberately checked by parents.
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About 80 percent of Catholics live in cities or towns, and in even
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the most Catholic of these there has been a notable drop of the
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birth rate. From 1920 to 1938 it sank in the towns and cities of
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Massachusetts, where Catholics are strongest, from 23.7 to 13.8. In
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New York City it fell from 23.4 to 14.4. Commenting on these
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figures the Catholic Commonweal said:
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The urban Irish have long since stopped even reproducing
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themselves, and the urban Italians and Slavs are rapidly following
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their example.
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From the temperate language of the Catholic writer you would
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not suspect that his Church puts the use of contraceptives on much
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the same level as murder but, of course, he is distracting
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attention from an obvious inference. It is one more proof, like
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that I gave in the last book, of a serious defection from the
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Church. However, what we have to note here is that the Catholic
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body as estimated by the authorities is losing its treasured
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advantage of a full birth rate as well as the advantage of
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immigration. If we further recall that they claim only about 20,000
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to 25,000 converts a year we feel that even Catholic arithmetic
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will be severely strained to show the faintest glimmer of hope of
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ever becoming the majority.
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But we have already seen the worthlessness of these Catholic
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statistics. A common-sense appreciation of the evidence puts the
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number of real Catholics in America at about 9,000,000 in 1900 and
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about 15,000,000 today. The general population has increased by
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nearly 80 percent: the Catholic population, in spite of all its
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peculiarities, by less than 70 percent. The only "miracle" of
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Catholic growth is that it is really a growth downward.
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But after all, you will say, the fact that the Church gets
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15,000,000 Americans to subscribe to such a creed as I described in
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the last book requires some explanation. Indeed, they seem not
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simply to subscribe to it but, according to the apologists and the
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Catholic press, to be more enthusiastic about their "holy faith"
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than the members of any other civilized religion; except,
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significantly enough, the semi-civilized Moslem fanatics who break
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each other's polls in the Near East or the corresponding fanatics
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in India. They take, we are told, such pride in it as a little girl
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does in her first doll: they quite solemnly say that they have a
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right to demand tolerance for themselves and refuse it to others:
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and they swallow the excuses of the Black International for its
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support of the vilest characters as smoothly as we swallow oysters.
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Yet beyond any question the creed is as I stated it. The Catholic
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who questions a single one of the dogmas, literally interpreted,
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not only incurs hell but plainly questions the very foundations of
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Church authority; and the Canon Law lays it down that the Catholic
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incurs this sentence if he confines his "liberalism" within his own
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mind.
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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2
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HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
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Yet again the miracle quickly loses its glamour when you
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examine it closely. Of 15,000,000 people in the United States one-
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third are under the age of 16, and you will not ask me to study
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their beliefs. Indeed, with due acknowledgement of that respect for
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youth which we old folk are learning I doubt if the beliefs of
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youths and girls under 20 matter very much, and that means nearly
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a half of them. To be quite blunt about it, in fact, I see nothing
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to boast about in the belief of the majority of the remainder. Can
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you speak of beliefs or merely practices? The religious life of a
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good half of them consists in dodging the devil by going to Church
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once a week for half an hour and faintly hearing a priest in the
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far distance mumble prayers in Latin. The ease with which such folk
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were swept away from the Church in millions in Europe and South
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America as long as there was freedom of discussion shows what
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shallow and feeble roots their faith has.
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Let us try to get a realistic view of the Catholic Church in
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America instead of repeating all this frothy nonsense, which seems
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to impress politicians, about 20,000,000 devout and enthusiastic
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Catholics who put their faith above everything. Of the forty to
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fifty million Catholic immigrants and their descendants the Church,
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with its vast organization of priests, schools, newspapers, radio,
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etc., and its colossal wealth has managed to retain within its fold
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some 5,000,000 children, 5,000,000 folk who are under 20 or are on
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so poor a cultural level that we are not interested in their
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beliefs, and 5,000,000 men and women of sufficient education (often
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only primary) and intelligence to suggest that they hold their
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beliefs deliberately.
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We are not here concerned with the Angle of the politician who
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counts votes, or the newspaper-proprietor, who counts dollars, or
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the professor or writer, who counts readers. We are just trying to
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understand how the Black International can maintain its baleful
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activity in the 20th Century, and it is most instructive to study
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its basis in America. This that I have described is its basis. All
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talk about 20,000,000 Catholics who are the spiritual cream of the
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country is bunk; and all talk about a triumphant progress that
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promises to "make America Catholic" is double-distilled bunk. And,
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as I have shown, the Roman Church is in modern times in the same
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not very impressive condition in every country except where the
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Black International has won back, by a combination of national
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treachery and vile association with corrupt powers, its old power
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of coercion.
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There is, therefore, not even a fascinating problem of
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psychology in the survival of this medieval faith, as some imagine.
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Sociologists and social psychologists, in fact, become politicians
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when they notice "the venerable Church." It is a massive fact in
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the social fabric, but they do not care to look too closely into
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it. They suspect it may be as dirty and unhealthy, if you go too
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close, as one of those thatched cottages in an old English village
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which look so "cute" to the American who passes in an automobile.
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We are not here examining the survival of the Roman faith in the
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20th Century, or inquiring how grown-up and often educated men and
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women can be induced to call it a "holy faith" and a beautiful
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system, from any psychological interest. We are verifying our
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suspicion that the faith is protected by just the same trickery,
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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3
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HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
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deceit, and coercion as the Axis powers used in working their way
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into a formidable position, and therefore the alliance, which seems
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impossible or improbable to those who prefer to admire the Roman
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Church from a distance, is entirely natural and was inevitable once
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the reaction against democracy began.
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There was in every age a core of believers, of a particular
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temperament, who did not need any action of the Black International
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to bind them to the Church and who in very large part were of high
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character; though their chastity was apt to be tinged with
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intolerance and inhumanity and their charity associated with a sour
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fanaticism. It is waste of time for writers to remind us of these
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"many good men and women." It is the institution and its methods,
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the general situation, that matters. And I have amply shown that
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ever since the first "great Pope," Leo I (440-61), began to use
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forgery in the interest of the Church and to burn heretics,
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deception and violence were the weapons on which it relied rather
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than upon argument. It is enough here to recall four critical
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stages in the history of the Church. When in the 11th and 12th
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centuries it was alarmed by the reawakening of the minds of Europe
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it retorted with the Inquisition. When Protestantism broke its
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power in the 16th Century it tried to drown it in blood in the
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Thirty Years War. When the European powers conquered the French
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revolutionary spirit and Napoleonic liberalism in the 19th Century
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the Church allied itself intimately with the most corrupt of them
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in a murderous attack on freedom and democracy. And when in our own
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time America, Britain, and France in a narrow and discreditable
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view of their own interests permitted new and popular anti-
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democratic forces to gather strength, the Church at once entered
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into alliance with them.
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This policy of violence is, I showed, actually the law of the
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Roman Church. While American apologists were falsely stating that
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the wicked historians of the last century -- the Catholic Lord
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Acton used the strongest language of them all -- lied about the
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Church, and that in any case it now abhors coercion and is all
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sweetness and light, the Vatican press was issuing one edition
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after another of Canon Law in which it is quite indignantly
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affirmed, against "liberal" Catholics, that the Church has never
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abdicated its "right of the sword": which, they explained, includes
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lesser matters like torture or any physical sufferings or material
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inflections (prison, fines, exile, confiscation, etc.). I gave the
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words of the exact references to Marianus de Luca and Cardinal
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Lepicier. The former was professor of Canon Law in the Papal
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University, the latter in a Papal college at Rome, and both had the
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Pope's stamp of approval on their books. Indeed, I see by the title
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page of De Lucas book, which is quite savage in its long arguments
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for the Church's right to kill or maim heretics, that it was
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published in Rome, Ratisbon, and "Neo-Eboracum." As the latter is
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the Latin for New York it seems that this truculent statement of
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Church Law was simultaneously published, privately, in America for
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the clergy, and we may be sure that it has an honored place in
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those seminary or college-libraries in which apologists now pen
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their assurances to the American public that the Church is the
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mother of toleration and the soul of charity.
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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4
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HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
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Professor C.J. Cadoux has an interesting chapter on this
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aspect of Romanism (Roman Catholicism and Freedom, 1936, ch I). He
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sums up its long history in the words of Prof. Lecky: "The Church
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of Rome has shed more innocent blood than any other institution
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that has ever existed among mankind" (The Rise and Influence of
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Rationalism in Europe, II, 32). Lecky is so often quoted by
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Catholics for his (unjust) compliments to the early Roman Church
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that this is a hard saying. However, it is the modern development
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that is particularly interesting. In 1832, when just such a
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clerical-fascist tyranny ruled Europe as does today, Gregory XVI
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said in an Encyclical: "Out of this most foul fountain of
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indifferentism flows that absurd and erroneous opinion or rather
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raving that liberty of conscience ought to be asserted and secured
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for everybody." Catholics were at that time a negligible minority
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in England and were enthusiastic for religious toleration, but in
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the forties the Irish famine drove crowds of them to Britain, and
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the Church became so optimistic that it forgot the mask sometimes.
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In 1855 a writer in the Catholic Rambler (p. 178) attacked "the
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impious and absurd theory of religious liberty" and, answering the
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question what the Catholic would do if he ever got the majority in
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England, he said: "If it would benefit the cause of Catholicism he
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would tolerate you, but if expedient he would imprison you, banish
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you, fine you, and possibly he might even hang you."
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Notice the date, 1885. The revolutionary wave of 1848 had
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spent itself and under the blood-splotched banners of the
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reactionary monarchs the Church was again speaking candidly. In
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that year the Pope issued his famous Syllabus, and amongst the
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"wicked opinions" which he required Catholics all over the world to
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regard as "reprobated, proscribed, and condemned" were several such
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as the following (literally translated from the Latin Syllabus):
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15. Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion
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which he finds true in the light of human reason.
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17. At least there is hope of the eternal salvation of men who
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do not belong to the true Church of Christ.
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80. The Roman Pontiff can and ought to be reconciled with
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progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.
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And as late as 1864 in the Encyclical Quanta Cura he denounced
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this modern fad of "liberty of conscience" as a "liberty of
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perdition."
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But alas for the Papal Canute. The waves were already fretting
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round his feet, and in a few more years he lost the Temporal Power
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and saw the world coldly indifferent to, or jubilant over, the
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defeat of the Church. Democracy, free general education, and a
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demand for increasing liberty spread over Europe and Latin America.
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The age of that "accommodation with modern civilization" which Pius
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IX had contemptuously rejected set in. There was now no country in
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the world in which the Church could exercise the power which it
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claimed. Even in Spain rebels against the Church, who swarmed in
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the cities and the universities, could not be touched unless they
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were so advanced in their political views that they could be
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branded "Anarchists," just as they are now branded Communists or
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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5
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HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
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Bolsheviks. Many hundreds were treated thus, and the American and
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British press lightly dismissed the murders and tortures as an
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unpleasant necessity forced upon these Spanish gentlemen by
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Anarchist bomb-throwers. It happened that I was in close touch with
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one of these "Anarchists," Francisco Ferrer, an idealist who
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loathed violence and polities and who was judicially murdered
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solely to oblige the Church. I raised a stink in the whole English-
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speaking world and got the fact generally recognized, but I could
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not convince the public that Ferrer was only one of hundreds of
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victims of the Spanish Church, and that foul tortures were used on
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them in the jails from 1990 to 1910. The Black International in all
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countries lied and used its power over the press to conceal the
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||
fact that, where it thought it could safely do so, the Church still
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||
exercised its right to maim or kill rebels against itself. It no
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longer dressed them in a white sheet. It stuck a red flag in their
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hands.
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In all the rest of the world except Spain it professed to be
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"reconciled with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization," in
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the words it had solemnly denounced a few decades earlier. Then
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there opened the appalling new chapter in the history of
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||
civilization. The high priests of reaction at Rome began to hear
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||
voices which they thought had been stilled forever. France, needing
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||
the political influence of the Church, treated it with a new
|
||
respect and granted it unexpected privileges and the Church in
|
||
France abandoned the hypocritical language of compromise. The
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||
Jesuit Cardinal Billot, its head, wrote and published a Latin
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||
Tractatus de Ecclesia Christi (1922) and the Jesuit Professor
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||
Sortain a Traite de Philosophie (1924) in which the clergy were
|
||
candidly told that Rome still had the right to use physical
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||
measures including the death-sentence, against heretics. In Italy
|
||
Mussolini began to deride liberty and liberalism in the language of
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||
Pius IX and, after years of hard bargaining, the clergy clasped the
|
||
red hand he held out to them. A new Latin edition of the Canon Law
|
||
was issued, and the Pope in 1929 boldly and emphatically asserted
|
||
its claims for all the world to hear (in the letter to Gasparri
|
||
which I quoted at length in an earlier booklet). The Japs were the
|
||
next to enter into alliance with the resuscitated medieval Church,
|
||
and then Hitler....
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||
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||
We have seen the story. But the Black International in America
|
||
continued to dupe the public and forbid the press to publish the
|
||
worst of the news -- like the Gasparri letter, the approach to the.
|
||
Japs, and the deal with Hitler -- that came from Europe. At the
|
||
very time when the Vatican was negotiating with Mussolini to sell
|
||
its assistance in crushing religious liberty in Italy the Culvert
|
||
Associates, the weightiest propagandist body of the Roman Church in
|
||
America, issued its Culvert Handbook of Catholic Facts, using the
|
||
names of the President (Coolidge) and several heads of professors
|
||
of American universities as "Sponsors." In this, while the Vatican
|
||
was driving a hard bargain for the suppression of the liberties of
|
||
non-Catholics in Italy, they audaciously reproduced, as
|
||
frontispiece, the letter in which Washington rejoices that "in this
|
||
land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of
|
||
bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship
|
||
God according to the dictates of his own heart." Even Leo XIII, we
|
||
saw, had ridiculed that sentiment. And in the text of the book
|
||
these Culvert Associates, sheltering under the patronage of leaders
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
6
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
of American culture and business, assured the public that the
|
||
charge that the Church had used violence was based upon lies and
|
||
misrepresentation and that it is in principle in favor of the
|
||
American rule of religious liberty for all.
|
||
|
||
People had already forgotten in America, and the press was
|
||
careful not to recall, something that had created a mild sensation
|
||
in 1910. President Roosevelt told the ambassador at Rome that he
|
||
was going to visit the king of Italy and would like a visit to the
|
||
Pope also arranged. The Vatican replied that it would welcome the
|
||
visit "if nothing like the recent Fairbanks incident arose to
|
||
prevent it." Vice-President Fairbanks had committed the
|
||
"unspeakable outrage on the common father of Christendom" (as the
|
||
Jesuit paper America called it) of calling at the Methodist Mission
|
||
in Rome after visiting the Pope! So Roosevelt was not to visit the
|
||
king of Italy if he wanted to see the Pope. Roosevelt promptly and
|
||
vigorously withdrew his proposal to call at the Vatican. A few
|
||
years later he entertained me at a lunch of honor at the Harvard
|
||
Club. If it were wildly conceivable that the President Roosevelt of
|
||
today were to confer some such honor on me, I wonder what the
|
||
Catholic, or even the ordinary, press would say.
|
||
|
||
It illustrates what one would almost call the strangle-hold
|
||
that the Church has secured in America since 1918, and one use to
|
||
which it puts this is a complete deception of the public in regard
|
||
to the Church Law on tolerance and coercion. The irony is that its
|
||
position is based entirely upon the unique beauty and efficacy of
|
||
the creed I described in the last book. This is so precious to men
|
||
that the Church must guard them against losing it by burning
|
||
aggressive heretics at the stake and claiming the right to inflict
|
||
any sort of material penalty on men who are even "suspected of
|
||
heresy." Msgr. Ryan, the American Church's arch-apologist, thinks
|
||
it prudent never to discuss the monstrous claims of the Latin Canon
|
||
Law but in one amazing passage he gives away the principle. In 'The
|
||
State and the Church' he says:
|
||
|
||
"The fact that the individual may in good faith think that his
|
||
false religion is true gives no more right to propagandize it than
|
||
the sincerity of the alien anarchist entitles him to advocate his
|
||
abominable political theories in the United States . . . Error has
|
||
not the same rights as truth. Since the profession and practice of
|
||
the erring are contrary to human welfare how can error have
|
||
rights?"
|
||
|
||
And the man who writes this mush of priestly arrogance,
|
||
cunning appeal to prejudice, and bad logic is treated in Washington
|
||
as part of the cream of the national life. Does he mean that it
|
||
must be left to the Catholic to say what is absolutely true and
|
||
what is absolutely false? No. He obviously means that the medieval
|
||
hash of hell and devils, of Jesus Christ in the vest pocket and
|
||
little children suffering torture for all eternity, of blatant
|
||
forgeries and transparently fabricated doctrines, which I described
|
||
in the last book is so self-evidently true that all other religions
|
||
or philosophics of life must be suppressed; and his Canon Law
|
||
argues from the same principle that the Church has the right and
|
||
the duty to kill, maim, torture, or ruin any who attempt to spread
|
||
them. In the same book Ryan assures you that his Church is not one
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
7
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
in perfect harmony with but actually inspired American sentiment on
|
||
these matters! And a British cardinal, Gasquet, tells you that the
|
||
critics of the dear Church are "merchants of filth and garbage" who
|
||
pour out such a "Mississippi of lies" that he is bound to wonder if
|
||
they are "in good faith!"
|
||
|
||
Naturally the Church will never again burn heretics. Even if
|
||
it ever got a large majority of sincere believers in Italy, Spain,
|
||
Portugal, and Brazil it would not dare to apply its law for fear of
|
||
the reaction in America and Britain. Only if all the leading
|
||
countries became solidly Catholic would it venture to do so -- and
|
||
it then certainly would apply the law -- and one might as well
|
||
think of a new Ice Age. The world has sunk low in recent years, but
|
||
the supposition that America, Britain, France, and Germany, would
|
||
ever by a large majority accept the childish creed and crooked
|
||
principles of Dr. Ryan's Church is too eccentric to consider. I
|
||
enlarge on the creed and its maxims only to remind the reader that
|
||
all baptized persons (Catholic or, if properly baptized,
|
||
Protestant) are its subjects, and that it holds the power of life
|
||
and death and all penalties over its subjects, so you understand
|
||
how its leaders come to ally themselves with arch-criminals when
|
||
these promise to restore its moth-eaten powers: how they can stoop,
|
||
as they do in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil to put the false
|
||
brand of Communists or murderous Reds on their critics so that
|
||
sycophantic statesmen will kill or torture them and the world-press
|
||
will say nothing.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Chapter II
|
||
|
||
BLINKERS FOR THE BELIEVER
|
||
|
||
The loathsome little toad Goebbels has never forgotten his
|
||
Catholic education. The entire scheme by means of which he has
|
||
apparently, poisoned the minds of the overwhelming majority of the
|
||
German people is based upon Catholic principles and practice. The
|
||
scheme has, notoriously, two main features. The first is to print
|
||
deep upon the mind by hourly appeals to eye and ear the essential
|
||
Nazi formulae: that the German race is far superior to any other,
|
||
that its head is a particularly august and gifted man who must have
|
||
absolute obedience and any sacrifice he demands, and that there is
|
||
no salvation for any other nation except in the unity of German
|
||
culture and under German control. These assertions are repeated
|
||
every moment at every class in school and college, boomed out in
|
||
the streets, the workshops, and the restaurants, radioed every hour
|
||
into every home, repeated in every column of every paper, on every
|
||
page of every book and magazine, sung at every concert and village-
|
||
dance, incorporated in every drama and film, and implied in the
|
||
"Heil Hitler" which you must repeat when you call in the dog or buy
|
||
a pint of shrimps.
|
||
|
||
The second feature is that nothing must enter the eye or ear
|
||
of any German to interfere with this good work. There is no private
|
||
radio, and you are shot if you listen to foreign transmissions.
|
||
Every paper, magazine, book, song, play, lecture, church, library,
|
||
pageant, or sports meeting, etc., in Germany falls under the
|
||
control of a very extensive and elaborate Reichskulturkammer with
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
8
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
a network of ramifications into every village. The social
|
||
psychology is perfect. The older folk may have memories of facts or
|
||
lessons learned in earlier years that may, in rare hours of
|
||
privacy, feebly conflict with this monopolistic message. The
|
||
younger folk have, on the street lines of modern science, no other
|
||
contents of "mind" -- ideas and sentiments, in the old language --
|
||
than these which Nazi education has implanted.
|
||
|
||
The Black International must be green with envy. You might say
|
||
that at all events it has the advantage over Goebbels that it can
|
||
threaten folk who listen to any alien message with eternal torment,
|
||
but in practice it was always more effective to threaten torture
|
||
here and now than in the future. They recite the new Lord's Prayer:
|
||
|
||
"Lieber Herr Gott, mach' mich dumm,
|
||
Damit Ich nicht in Dachau Komm."
|
||
|
||
much more fervently than they did the old. Young women who but a
|
||
few years ago were "Children of Mary" and lustily sang "Immaculate,
|
||
Immaculate" now carry favor by singing unpleasant suggestions about
|
||
Miriam Cohen, which they insist was Mary's full name. For the great
|
||
majority the Catholic or the Protestant faith was skin-deep. The
|
||
Nazi faith is pumped into the marrow of their bones.
|
||
|
||
The Church of Rome recognizes that the procedure is ideal but
|
||
it is in most countries prevented by "the world" (with the devil
|
||
behind it), the wickedness of which it never ceases to deplore from
|
||
carrying it out in all its purity as Goebbels does. In Italy, in
|
||
spite of the disgraceful sacrifices it has made, to get power, it
|
||
is very far from having a monopoly of the culture-stream. In Vichy,
|
||
France, it has, up to the present, been still more disappointed,
|
||
and it remains to be seen how Laval will earn his Papal
|
||
decorations. In Poland it almost had a Black Paradise but its Nazi
|
||
friends have chased it out. Only in Spain and Portugal, in Brazil
|
||
and some of the smaller Latin-American republics, and in stupid
|
||
little states like Slovakia which the Nazis tolerate for the time
|
||
being, has it got something like a monopoly of the mechanism for
|
||
making what we call "minds."
|
||
|
||
Quebec may be indignant at being excluded from this small
|
||
group of enslaved states but it is not quite on the present level
|
||
of Spain and Portugal. In spite of the scandalous reticence of the
|
||
press generally most folk who are likely to read this know the
|
||
orgies of murder and torture in which Franco, under the eyes of
|
||
complacent American and British ministers, has indulged since he
|
||
won Spain for the Santa Fe. It has been going on for years in
|
||
Portugal. Read the section on Portugal (pp. 278-86) in Seldes's
|
||
Catholic Crisis. After quoting what Jesuits admiringly tell America
|
||
about it -- that it is "an applied resume of Catholic political
|
||
philosophy" and a land of profound peace, prosperity, and happiness
|
||
-- he gives this passage from Duff, the official of the British
|
||
Foreign Office who wrote as "Carlos Prieto":
|
||
|
||
"Political prisoners are tortured in a manner which prevailed
|
||
during the Inquisition. . . . As reported by those who suffered
|
||
[Time and Tide, September 12, 1936], they include thumb-screws,
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
9
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
burning of the soles of the feet, squeezing the head in book-
|
||
presses, hanging by wrists and ankles, nude imprisonment in
|
||
temperatures below zero, and walking in a circle until the prisoner
|
||
drops.
|
||
|
||
Salazar being a scientific man has added an electric chair,
|
||
not to kill but to torture, which is more beastly. This was written
|
||
six years ago, when Portugal was generally described as a happy
|
||
little state under its holy Catholic trinity of General Carmona,
|
||
Premier Salazar, and Cardinal Cerejeira.
|
||
|
||
In blissful lands like this, in which the majority of the
|
||
workers are totally illiterate and would regard a radio receiver as
|
||
a new trick of the devil, where the clergy and a small minority of
|
||
interested supporters enjoy the bulk of what wealth there is, the
|
||
Black International can fairly emulate the success of Goebbels. In
|
||
countries like America they apply the two principles as effectively
|
||
as the wicked world allows them. They rely chiefly upon the
|
||
Catholic school, the Catholic press, and the threat of hell for
|
||
reading "bad books" or listening to critics.
|
||
|
||
I described the operation of the Catholic schools in an
|
||
earlier book of this series. The apologist wants the public to
|
||
believe that -- here he puts on his most affable expression -- it
|
||
is just an institution like any other school for making efficient
|
||
citizens so is entitled to a full share of public funds, but the
|
||
Church provides the schools and asks only that it be, allowed to
|
||
give a few lessons to the children in their own faith. I gave the
|
||
words in which the Pope in his open letter to Cardinal Gasparri in
|
||
1929 expressly condemned that version of Catholic education. He
|
||
claimed not only that the education of children belongs primarily
|
||
to the Church not the state but he went on to say that the Church
|
||
would not agree to being "confined to the subsidized teaching of
|
||
religious truth:" that is to say, to including lessons on religion
|
||
by paid priests or teachers in the ordinary curriculum. The Church
|
||
must have the whole school. Its predominant purpose is to make
|
||
life-long Catholics, The Pope (Pius XI) made his meaning clear
|
||
enough in his encyclical on Catholic education:
|
||
|
||
"A school does not become conformable to the rights of the
|
||
Church and of the Christian family and worthy to be attended by
|
||
Catholic children simply because religious instruction is given. .
|
||
. . That a school may be such all its teaching, all its
|
||
arrangements, teachers, program, and books, at all levels, must be
|
||
inspired by the Christian spirit, under the direction and maternal
|
||
vigilance of the Church, so that religion may be truly both the
|
||
foundation and the crown of all instruction, in all grades, not
|
||
only primary but also intermediate and higher."
|
||
|
||
The school, in other words, must be a perfect Goebbelesque
|
||
institution. It must strike one note -- Holy Faith, Holy Father,
|
||
Holy Mother -- and see that it is not disturbed by any other note.
|
||
I do not know about America but in Britain the Catholic clergy get
|
||
about 50 percent of the cost of this sort of thing met out of
|
||
public funds and fire their people with a cry that they are treated
|
||
with gross injustice and prejudice because it is not more.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
10
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
I told in an earlier book how, not satisfied with this, they
|
||
tried to get the teaching, especially the historical lessons, in
|
||
the public schools modelled on Catholic lines. J.W. Poynter, who
|
||
was at the time in the inner circle or plotting center of British
|
||
Catholicism, describes the conspiracy in Roman Catholics and School
|
||
History Books (1930). It amazed and disgusted him even while he was
|
||
a Catholic. They operated with such stealth that, although he was
|
||
a member of their Vigilance Committee, they tried to keep him in
|
||
ignorance, but he contrived to see a copy of the privately printed
|
||
two-volume work (1,400 pages) of the "errors" they wanted corrected
|
||
in the books in use in government schools. Luther was to be
|
||
described as "an unworthy German friar" and Bloody Mary -- the most
|
||
truculent fanatic who ever sat on the English throne -- as a gentle
|
||
lady who was all for religious freedom. They relied on Catholic
|
||
Trade Unionists and Catholic officials in the Education Department
|
||
to secure this monstrous gain for them. Is that what they have done
|
||
in Boston and other American cities?
|
||
|
||
The books they use in their own schools and shower upon the
|
||
children as prizes are poisonous and crammed with lies about saints
|
||
and martyrs, Popes, the medieval Church, the Reformation, and so
|
||
on. I have before me a book written for children and child-like
|
||
adults by the Australian Archbishop Sheehan and much used in
|
||
Ireland and Australia (A Simple Course of Religion, 1938). It is
|
||
deliciously Illustrated. There is a half-tone illustration of Adam
|
||
and Eve with less clothing on than Tarzan and Maureen. There is
|
||
another -- but in this case the child is conscientiously warned
|
||
that it is "not a real picture" -- of the Holy Trinity and (an old
|
||
man, a Nordic type of young man, and a pigeon): one showing the boy
|
||
Jesus ("he who made the starry skies") holding a board while Papa
|
||
planes it: one of Jesus giving "Holy Communion" to the apostles
|
||
1900 years ago in the form of wafers from a modem silver chalice:
|
||
one showing a soul, which is a duplicate of the body, being taken
|
||
up to heaven by angels. Most children will take these to be
|
||
photographs of the actual persons and events.
|
||
|
||
The learned archbishop might plead that it is lawful to tell
|
||
children fairy-tales and open their eyes later, but almost as
|
||
childish is another book I have, by Bishop H.G. Graham (What Faith
|
||
Really Means, 1914), that is intended for grown-ups. Some of you
|
||
may still boggle at my description of the Catholic doctrine of the
|
||
Eucharist: that the real living body of Jesus is physically present
|
||
in every consecrated wafer and drop of wine. Graham to clinch the
|
||
matter, tells his readers that Jesus "often appeared to holy
|
||
priests at Mass under the sweet figure of a little child" (p. 92).
|
||
I told, I think, how another of these pious fairy-tales is that
|
||
blood often spurts from the wafer when wicked Freemasons and
|
||
Satanists stab it. We are not told that Jesus ever does anything
|
||
when he is handled (in the Mass) by priests who smile at the dogma
|
||
or sleep with their domestic servants. However, these doctrines are
|
||
so luminously true that it is "impossible to shake a Catholic's
|
||
faith," the bishop says. Then how about these millions of
|
||
acknowledged seceders in America and Britain? There is no such
|
||
thing as a quite honest seceder, Graham -- in full accord with
|
||
Canon Law -- says. Referring to the man who professes that he has
|
||
left the Church he says: "We know for certain that he has gone
|
||
wrong, and that he has culpably lost the gift of faith": when a
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
11
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
priest secedes Catholics who become aware of it -- the fact is
|
||
denied unless the scoundrel takes to writing books and it can be
|
||
denied no longer -- are always taught that the reason was either
|
||
pride, lust of women, or to get more drink; as if the apostate
|
||
priest, who generally takes years to earn a moderate living, got
|
||
one-tenth the opportunities for fornication or had one-tenth the
|
||
chances to get drunk that he had in the Church.
|
||
|
||
This zone of poison-gas to protect the "precious gift of
|
||
faith" which is planted in the child's mind begins to be formed in
|
||
the school. But in a non-Catholic country the defenses are very
|
||
imperfect. From the exotic atmosphere of the school the child
|
||
rushes, especially in the late afternoon, into a very different
|
||
atmosphere. Distinguished paedagogists and psychologists have
|
||
inquired very learnedly into the frequency of religious conversion
|
||
in the adolescent. That sort of inquiry is legitimate. It does not
|
||
offend Catholics. But no academic authority ever studies the
|
||
immensely greater frequency of religious de-version (if I may use
|
||
the word) amongst the adolescent, especially Catholic boys and
|
||
youths. It is a common subject of discussion at conferences of
|
||
Catholic teachers, and I have earlier quoted the admissions of
|
||
various priests that from 50 to 80 percent of the boys who attend
|
||
Catholic schools give up the faith when they leave. Goebbels can
|
||
keep the blinkers on Nazi boys during all their waking hours. The
|
||
world outside the school is as saturated with the Nazi creed as the
|
||
school itself. But the Catholic boy tears off his blinkers when the
|
||
five or Six hours in school are over and sees the world of reality.
|
||
|
||
I broadly described the system by means of which the priests
|
||
try to protect in post-school years the "Catholic mind" they have
|
||
built up. The weekly sermon, the Catholic press and literature, and
|
||
now the Catholic Radio Hour are the chief agencies, and the main
|
||
purpose of them is to keep the faithful in their blinkers. The
|
||
pretence that the sole object is to maintain a high moral character
|
||
in the Catholic body is disproved by the actual character of that
|
||
body, as I have shown in earlier books and will further show in the
|
||
final book of this series; and the pretence that it is to attract
|
||
outsiders to the faith is disproved by the miserable trickle of
|
||
25,000 converts (often for social or other non-religious grounds)
|
||
a year. The greatest concern of the national branches of the Black
|
||
International in all non-Catholic or mixed countries is to protect
|
||
the belief of Catholics themselves by a smoke-screen.
|
||
|
||
I am not sure if I ought not to say, as I hinted above, a
|
||
poison-gas zone to keep the believers from straying into alien
|
||
pastures. It is another of the discreditable distinctions of the
|
||
Church of Rome that its priests and writers consistently use fowler
|
||
language about their critics and opponents than do the writers or
|
||
clergy of any other Church. The law of libel alone restrains them.
|
||
During the forty-five years in which I have criticized the Church
|
||
-- and they will probably say that I am its most formidable critic
|
||
-- I have never known them to put in print -- they, of course, put
|
||
all sorts of picturesque rumors into whispered circulation -- one
|
||
single word reflecting on my character in such form that I could
|
||
have the matter settled in court, yet it is the almost universal
|
||
practice to say that opponents of the Church are dishonest and
|
||
mendacious. I quoted the most learned cleric of the British
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
12
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
Catholic Church, Cardinal Gasquet affirming that we pour out a
|
||
"Mississippi of lies." But you probably know this feature of
|
||
Catholic literature and propaganda. These booklets contain hundreds
|
||
of examples.
|
||
|
||
The psychology of it is simple. The main element of the
|
||
education of the Catholics themselves is that the body of doctrine
|
||
is so beautiful, so clearly true and reasonable, that no one can be
|
||
in good faith who abandons it and no one can resist its appeal who
|
||
really knows it. It is on this basis alone that Catholics can be
|
||
reconciled to the intolerance which claims complete liberty, or
|
||
even a privileged position, in a non-Catholic country and flatly
|
||
denies liberty to other religions in a Catholic land, as to the
|
||
gross inconsistency of the clergy in urging them to get non-
|
||
Catholics to read or listen to Catholic stuff while sternly
|
||
forbidding them to read what the non-Catholic says. But even the
|
||
Catholic, if he happens to stumble upon, for instance, the official
|
||
report that 31 percent of the conscripts for the armed forces
|
||
confess to Catholic baptism while only about 20,000,000 members of
|
||
the Church are claimed (or about 15 percent instead of 31), must
|
||
feel that it is rather thin to impute "bad faith" to these millions
|
||
of seceders, and that the claim that the faith is irresistible to
|
||
those who know it, when the immense annual expenditure on books,
|
||
papers, lectures, and radio brings in only a few thousand converts
|
||
a year is still thinner.
|
||
|
||
So the Church imposes on believers the supplementary theory
|
||
that their faith is so holy and so necessary for good conduct in
|
||
this world and salvation in the next that it is arch-enemies the
|
||
world and the devil, engage in a gorgeous campaign of lies and
|
||
misrepresentation against it. This may sound melodramatic, but
|
||
after what we saw about the real nature of Catholic dogmas and the
|
||
extraordinary pride of Catholics in them you will expect
|
||
melodramatic or childish features. It is a unique religious system,
|
||
and it is on that basis alone that we can understand the action of
|
||
the Black International in openly conspiring with the enemies of
|
||
America and Britain and of modern civilization yet retaining the
|
||
enthusiastic allegiance of 17,000,000 Americans and Britishers.
|
||
|
||
Naturally this line of argument is handed out on every
|
||
possible note, from hesitating insinuation to blunt and blatant
|
||
affirmation. Most people would be surprised at the extent to which
|
||
even educated Catholics accept it. Soon after I left the Church I
|
||
met on the streets of London a Catholic teacher, master of a school
|
||
in a middle-class suburb, who knew me. He turned pale, either with
|
||
anger or fear, and asked me, very seriously, if I was not afraid
|
||
that the earth would open and let me down to where I belonged.
|
||
Another, an older and better-read Catholic schoolmaster, who had
|
||
been all admirer of mine and to whom I proposed to explain my
|
||
secession, replied (in a letter reproduced in my Twelve Years in a
|
||
Monastery) that he would not listen to a word but left me to "the
|
||
worm of conscience" and only trusted I would not sink to "the
|
||
lowest depths." A well-known priest of high character wrote me that
|
||
he supposed he would soon hear that I had "run off with another
|
||
man's wife." A Catholic novelist can hardly introduce an ex-priest
|
||
into his story without leaving him under a dark cloud and souring
|
||
the reader against him.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
13
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
All this is part of the blinker-system of the Church. One, of
|
||
course, finds some degree of hostility to or dislike of seceders in
|
||
every Church but in none does it approach the virulent hatred of
|
||
seceders and critics inspired by the Black International. Poynter,
|
||
who had been for years on the inner councils of Catholic Action,
|
||
told me, though I hardly needed the information, that the
|
||
instruction given to writers and speakers was that they must not
|
||
directly attack name critics of the Church -- people might want to
|
||
read their books -- but keep up the fiction that all such critics
|
||
and apostates are a lot of scurvy knaves, sold to the devil and
|
||
cooperating in his frenzy to destroy the beautiful Church which
|
||
alone frustrates his strange passion to pervert the whole race. Dip
|
||
into almost any Catholic weekly if you want a little clean fun.
|
||
Correspondents have often told me of the effect of all this on
|
||
Catholics. They turn pale if my name is maliciously dragged into a
|
||
conversation with them, They burn my books when they get an
|
||
opportunity. Once, soon after I left the Church, a society billed
|
||
me in large posters, to lecture in the city of Manchester, and most
|
||
of the bills were torn off the walls during the night. I may
|
||
confess since she came to more liberal views before she died, that
|
||
it was my sister, a Catholic schoolmistress, who spent a night
|
||
roaming over the city, dodging the police and tearing down the
|
||
posters.
|
||
|
||
This calculated hatred and slander of critics has the double
|
||
effect of preventing Catholics from reading them and at the same
|
||
time convincing them that their faith really is the most beautiful
|
||
and salutary thing in the world seeing that the devil and wicked
|
||
men have such a peculiar rage against it. Add that, as Bishop
|
||
Graham says and theology and Canon Law expressly teach, it is a
|
||
mortal sin (like rape or murder) to have even a doubt about a dogma
|
||
of the Church, and it is equally a mortal sin to expose yourself to
|
||
the danger of having a doubt by reading critics, and you have the
|
||
particular strength of the Catholic prohibition of the reading of
|
||
"bad books." Works or articles which criticize the, faith or the
|
||
priests in even the most dignified language are purposely bracketed
|
||
by the Church with what it calls obscene books. They are in fact,
|
||
proved by that famous Catholic logic to be worse than obscene
|
||
books. How? Quite easily. The sin of fornication or masturbation to
|
||
which the obscene book may lead can be confessed and dismissed from
|
||
the mind. But the doubt, the devil's own child, has a way of
|
||
lingering or recurring after confession. . . .
|
||
|
||
One of the real mistakes of outsiders about the Church. --
|
||
they are almost always mistakes in favor of the Church or failures
|
||
to realize the full absurdity or monstrosity of its doctrines -- is
|
||
to suppose that the priest, like any other religious minister, just
|
||
paternally warns his "flock" that it is dangerous to read books
|
||
against his faith. Not a bit of it. The Church of Rome is again
|
||
unique, as it always is when it is protecting the interests of the
|
||
Black International. No other religion has gone so far as to put
|
||
"Commandments of the Church" on the same level as the Decalogue and
|
||
say that transgression of them is punishment with eternal torment.
|
||
And it is a very stern law of the Church that forbids the reading
|
||
of "bad books."
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
14
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
The domestic or private part of the Canon Law in its latest
|
||
version -- now an official code not a professor's lectures -- may
|
||
be read in English, if you can safely separate the text from the
|
||
bemusing commentary in Woywood's Practical Commentary on the Code
|
||
of Canon Law: One of the longest clauses in it (1399) deals with
|
||
the reading of books against faith or morals. The Catholic must not
|
||
read any non-Catholic translation of the Bible -- the English
|
||
Bible, for instance, or books which defend "fortune-telling,
|
||
divination, or magic," or books that defend the law of divorce,
|
||
etc. You wonder how he gets through the Sunday paper. However, the
|
||
main point is that he must not read "books by any non-Catholic
|
||
treating professedly of religion unless it is certain that they
|
||
contain nothing contrary to the Catholic faith" or any books
|
||
"tending in any way to undermine the very foundations of religion."
|
||
Certain Catholics may get permission from the bishop (who in
|
||
practice delegates the authority to confessors) to read a book of
|
||
this kind if they have a serious reason, not merely curiosity, but
|
||
even the bishop's permission "exempts nobody from the provisions of
|
||
the natural law which forbids the reading of books that are for the
|
||
particular reader a proximate occasion of sin" or, in other words,
|
||
may inspire a doubt. So the permission given with the right hand is
|
||
taken away with the left. And lest you should think that this is
|
||
just an academic prohibition -- a sort of paternal "don't let me
|
||
catch you with your pants down" -- clause 2318 grimly says that
|
||
Catholics who possess or read, without permission, books by
|
||
apostates criticizing the Church are ipso facto excommunicated.
|
||
That is hell with the lid off. By the very act of reading a single
|
||
paragraph they incur the awful penalty and cannot approach the
|
||
Church to confess it or hold communication with any other
|
||
Catholics. The Church will give a gorgeous funeral to a notorious
|
||
boss-gangster and murderer but will insist that the monster who has
|
||
read one of these booklets and not been reconciled shall be buried
|
||
like a dog. Any priest can absolve the murderer but the wretch who
|
||
has read one of McCabe's foul books without the bishop's permission
|
||
has to be re-admitted to the Church by the bishop or the Pope.
|
||
|
||
You begin to understand the defense-mechanism of the Black
|
||
International but you have not yet got the half of it. It obviously
|
||
follows that the Catholic must not attend a lecture in which the
|
||
Church may be criticized. Once, lecturing in a district which had
|
||
a large Catholic population I saw two burly Irish priests brazenly
|
||
walk through the room and look at every face to see if any of their
|
||
parishioners had dared to attend! On the next Sunday, doubtless,
|
||
they would urge Catholics to drag their non-Catholic, friends to a
|
||
Catholic lecture. But it is not generally known that the Catholic
|
||
is forbidden under the same penalty to enter into private
|
||
discussion of religion with any man who has the ability or the
|
||
knowledge to disturb him. Clause 1325 runs:
|
||
|
||
"Catholics shall not enter into any disputes or conferences
|
||
with non-Catholics -- especially public ones -- without the
|
||
permission of the Holy See or, in urgent case, of the local
|
||
Ordinary (bishop)."
|
||
|
||
The public debate is here forbidden only a little more
|
||
stringently than the discussion of religion with a non-Catholic
|
||
neighbor. You may at times have noticed how shy of discussing his
|
||
faith your neighbor is, but this particular clause is not widely
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
15
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
known to Catholics, and the priest is careful not to mention it.
|
||
The unbeliever might scoff, and even the believer might become
|
||
suspicious when he is told that his faith is solidly based that it
|
||
is "absolutely impossible to shake it" yet he must not argue about
|
||
it with a non-Catholic friend.
|
||
|
||
Catholics never read Canon Law. It is the priest's business to
|
||
convoy these commands of the Church to the faithful. During his
|
||
visits to his parishioners he has a keen scent for heretical books,
|
||
and I have known him to put books of mine (loaned by request) on
|
||
the fire in the house to emphasize the law and his authority.
|
||
Chiefly he acts through sermons. He talks more about bad books than
|
||
he does about chastity, and to a point we will admire his honesty,
|
||
for he would, far rather see them reading spicy novels than
|
||
criticisms of the Church. Every Catholic, therefore, is quite
|
||
familiar with the law. But do not imagine that you will disturb him
|
||
by pointing out that he challenges you to read both sides but must
|
||
absolutely refuse himself to read your side. Error, remember, has
|
||
not the same rights as truth. In any case, he will tell you his
|
||
writers and lecturers always faithfully tell him what the opponents
|
||
of the Church say. The poor fish! If there is one field of their
|
||
work in which they are more recklessly untruthful than another it
|
||
is in quoting or giving an account of the arguments of their
|
||
opponents or suppressing all knowledge of them. Quotations are
|
||
false and no exact reference given so that you cannot check them.
|
||
Priests writing on science are shorn of their clerical titles and
|
||
passed off as authorities. Writers on science of the last century
|
||
are quoted as living authorities. . . . But my works abound in
|
||
examples of the unscrupulous trickery exercised in this field.
|
||
|
||
As to the Index of Prohibited Books, although it is still in
|
||
force and receives an addition every few years, you may dismiss it
|
||
from consideration. No priest has a copy of it, and Catholics have
|
||
no idea of the utter stupidity which the Vatican has betrayed in
|
||
compiling it. Originally and until the 18th Century it served as a
|
||
guide to Inquisitors in examining the library of a suspect. For the
|
||
last century and a half criticisms of the Church have poured out in
|
||
such floods even in Latin countries, that it is impossible to
|
||
compile a catalogue; and there would not be much good literature
|
||
left outside it. The Church relies on the general prohibition of
|
||
the Canon Law and the libeling of critics. Non-Catholic writers who
|
||
praise the "discipline" and "organization" of the Church are as
|
||
culpable as those who a few years ago praised the discipline and
|
||
organization of the Fascist or the Nazi party. One wonders if they
|
||
recognize it even now when they see the Black International in
|
||
alliance with the powers of evil.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Chapter III
|
||
|
||
DRAWING THE DRAGON'S TEETH
|
||
|
||
From figures which I have earlier given we are compelled to
|
||
conclude that if the Roman Church in America has only about
|
||
15,000,000 genuine members there must be at east a further
|
||
10,000,000 who were baptized in the Church and have abandoned it.
|
||
How did they come to surmount the spiked rails the Church puts
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
16
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
round them and venture beyond the poison-zone which lays between
|
||
them and its critics. From observation and inquiry I should say
|
||
that the great majority of these seceders never read anything
|
||
against the Church. Living psychology is a matter of great lucidity
|
||
and infinite variations, but you can fairly divide this mass of
|
||
seceders into two classes: a minority of thinking and reading folk
|
||
and a majority of folk who think little and read less.
|
||
|
||
The apologetic plea that these millions of the majority-folk
|
||
are therefore men and women who just "resented the restraints which
|
||
the good Church put upon their passions" and are pretending to have
|
||
lost faith in it is so childish that you may find it difficult to
|
||
believe that it is urged. Very large numbers of Catholics have
|
||
friends, neighbors, or relatives who have left the Church and know
|
||
how false this theory of their secession is: besides that the idea
|
||
that church-goers do not drink or misbehave as much as seceders
|
||
will tickle many Catholics. "In my parish," said a Glasgow priest
|
||
to me when I was in the Church, "young folk do not marry until they
|
||
have proof that they will have children"; and your 10,000,000
|
||
American seceders must be heroic if they drink more than the Irish
|
||
or are more amorous than the Latin Americans. "Since a Polish force
|
||
was encamped in this district," a British correspondent wrote me a
|
||
few weeks ago, "all the girls are pregnant." I will give figures
|
||
and authorities in a later book.
|
||
|
||
The simplest and most plausible explanation of secession from
|
||
the Roman Church is the utter absurdity, arbitrariness, or
|
||
inhumanity of its characteristic doctrines as I have described
|
||
them. You need no malevolent critic or devil-inspired book to help
|
||
you to see this. As a matter of fact the heaviest secessions, I
|
||
have shown, are of boys of fourteen to sixteen or seventeen, and
|
||
the moralist who suggests that they want to "give rein to their
|
||
passions" is as absurd as the man who supposes that to any extent
|
||
they read books criticizing the Church. They came as spontaneously,
|
||
or with a little assistance from comrades in the workshop, to see
|
||
that what they have been taught is "crazy" as the artist who knows
|
||
only the rich church near his home thinks its services beautiful.
|
||
This is, in fact, often the development in the case of well-
|
||
educated as well as uneducated seceders. Reading critics of the
|
||
Church or theology had nothing whatever to do with my own
|
||
secession, and I have met many other men of intellectual life who
|
||
rejected Romanism because, without outside impulse, they sat down
|
||
to a critical Study of their beliefs.
|
||
|
||
"It Pays to Advertise" businessmen say, in the language of a
|
||
certain comedy. Not always. The Church of Rome in America spends
|
||
hundreds of millions of dollars annually in advertising its goods
|
||
to the general public, and its crop of 20,000 converts a year is
|
||
hardly worth $10,000 a year to it. It is advertising obviously
|
||
unsound goods, and folk stream out of it because they see this.
|
||
Doubt usually precedes inquiry. When a man begins to suspect that
|
||
the iron hand of the Church is a device in its own interest, when
|
||
he looks fantastic or repulsive doctrines squarely in the face, he
|
||
crosses the spiked fence and the poison-zone and his eyes are
|
||
opened to the great deception that has been practiced on him. The
|
||
first step is largely a matter of temperament.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
17
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
That is, I think, in most cases the psychology of the seceder,
|
||
and the clerical defense-mechanism I have described is useless
|
||
against it. But even the first faint doubt is very apt to be
|
||
inspired by some news in the press or some remark in conversation,
|
||
by the sight of the growing general indifference to religion, by
|
||
reflection on the obvious fact that so few men of any intellectual
|
||
distinction ever join the Church, and so on. The doubt that arises
|
||
justifies a man in looking outside the Church for help in checking
|
||
its doctrines, and he soon learns how unscrupulous Catholic writers
|
||
are in pretending to state the arguments of their critics,
|
||
|
||
For instance, I noticed in an earlier book a volume in which
|
||
the very popular and allegedly learned apologist Fulton Sheen
|
||
complains that Catholicism is actually "intellectually
|
||
impoverished" by the lack of "a good sound intellectual opposition"
|
||
today. In the same work he has a chapter on the evolution of man,
|
||
and he tells his Catholic readers that only "two fossils" have been
|
||
found that have a bearing on it. The Catholic reader is free to go
|
||
to the Natural History Museum to see the "two fossils" or to take
|
||
out a book on prehistoric man, and he finds that at the time when
|
||
Sheen made this idiotic statement (betraying an incredible
|
||
ignorance of the subject) the prehistoric remains already
|
||
discovered would, if decently interred, fill a nice little
|
||
cemetery. The Catholic, however orthodox, no longer wonders that no
|
||
scientific man cares to notice his apologists, and he goes from
|
||
science to history and finds that the deception is even greater. He
|
||
realizes that the idea that "the world" -- which means everything
|
||
and everybody outside Catholicism -- is so vicious and depraved
|
||
that it has to be coupled with the flesh and the devil, is a
|
||
clerical trick, and that the malice and untruth are in the Church
|
||
itself.
|
||
|
||
To combat this danger the Church in non-Catholic countries
|
||
like America relies on the third part of its defense-mechanism, the
|
||
first being, as I said, the Catholic school, the second the stern
|
||
prohibition of any access to criticism of the Church. Isolation of
|
||
the active-minded Catholic is no longer possible, though the
|
||
majority of the 7,000.000 or so adult members of the Church in
|
||
America may be trusted to isolate themselves. Of 200 people living
|
||
in the street in which I write I should say that one-fifth never
|
||
read anything and one-fifth never look at anything above the level
|
||
of the picture-paper or a weak sentimental novel. American
|
||
Catholics with their very large proportion of immigrants and the
|
||
poorer workers come under an even less flattering analysis. But
|
||
there are millions of ordinary citizens amongst them who read the
|
||
daily paper through, use the free or subscription library and mix
|
||
freely with neighbors of all religions or none. It is from this
|
||
body that the secessions occur, and it has been found futile to
|
||
hope to counteract all the news and impressions they pick up by
|
||
sophistry and untruth in the Catholic weekly. The Black
|
||
International must neutralize the poison in the sources of their
|
||
information and their impressions. This work began with the
|
||
plausible plea, on the lives of good-neighborly feeling, that
|
||
nothing must be said or done that is "offensive to Catholics," and
|
||
this was so easily accomplished that the Black International went
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
18
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
on to ensure to a remarkable extent that the sources of a man's
|
||
ideas and impressions -- newspapers, radios, books, libraries,
|
||
political speeches, etc. -- should be used to flatter the Church
|
||
and lie about its defects and its achievements.
|
||
|
||
These two series of booklets contain so many hundred
|
||
illustrations of this that I might be content to leave the matter
|
||
there, but unfortunately few people realize to what an appalling
|
||
extent this one-tenth of the nation, with its prodigious wealth and
|
||
its powerful organization, have been permitted to poison the wells
|
||
of public instruction. Until Japan made its crafty attack on
|
||
America it was common to hear rather disdainful expressions about
|
||
the way in which France and Britain had been led by the nose to the
|
||
brink of the pit which the Nazis and Fascists had dug. In Australia
|
||
and Canada as well as America the old formula that the British are
|
||
an old and effete nation, destined to lose the high position they
|
||
had won in history, was revived and generally repeated. The
|
||
apostasy of France did not open the eyes of critics to the truth,
|
||
for even now the press will not tell how the Church had worked for
|
||
that betrayal. The situation is now much the same in America and
|
||
Britain, yet in neither country is there even a broad recognition
|
||
-- in spite of the stubborn isolationism of Catholics to the last
|
||
moment and the present disgraceful conduct of the Church in Quebec
|
||
-- of the monstrous part that the Black International has played or
|
||
the fact that both countries were kept slumbering by a press that
|
||
gravely betrayed them under the equal influence of Catholicism and
|
||
capitalism.
|
||
|
||
At the moment, for instance, there is some fuss because in the
|
||
very middle of its foul onslaught Japan is announced to have
|
||
exchanged ambassadors with the Vatican. I take it -- there is not
|
||
time for American news on this point to reach me -- that your
|
||
apologists smooth out the anger as they do here. One British paper
|
||
(Glasgow Herald), a fairly independent and honest daily, ventured
|
||
to express its editorial indignation, and this was at once
|
||
counteracted by a long letter from a Catholic (a Benedictine abbot,
|
||
I believe) of the most untruthful and misleading character. The
|
||
gist of it was that the Vatican had for years sought in vain
|
||
permission from the Japanese to supervise the spiritual interests
|
||
of its subjects in Japan, and no one would expect it to withdraw
|
||
from so purely religious a request, especially as the Church "never
|
||
interfered in polities," when the Japs offered it in the present
|
||
year. This is the usual constructive lie relying on the poor memory
|
||
of the public and the reluctance of editors to recall facts which
|
||
Catholics would resent.
|
||
|
||
My readers know that in 1937 (The A B C Library of Living
|
||
Knowledge, No. 6) I fully warned them of the criminal aims of Japan
|
||
and the close cooperation of the Vatican with it since 1931. I
|
||
said, and I gave the evidence in an earlier book of this series,
|
||
that the plan to exchange ambassadors was agreed upon in 1935, as
|
||
the Pope's own paper, the Osservatore, joyously announced. In the
|
||
British press this development of cordial relations with the
|
||
Vatican, in order to get Catholic influence on the press all over
|
||
the world, was smothered in the usual way, but Americans ought to
|
||
have known what to expect. In October (14) 1937 the Associated
|
||
Press had a cable from its Rome correspondent generally reproduced
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
19
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
in the papers. The information was from "a reliable Vatican source"
|
||
and was to the effect that "the Holy See has instructed its
|
||
hierarchy and missions in the Far East to cooperate with Japanese
|
||
action in China," and the memorandum it had sent was calculated to
|
||
"give the Japanese military authorities the clear impression that
|
||
on the part of the Catholic Church there is no obstacle to complete
|
||
collaboration." The message was, Seldes says, denied by the Vatican
|
||
and by the Pope's representative at Washington. The A.P. replied
|
||
that its agent had got the message confirmed at the Vatican Press
|
||
Bureau before he issued it. The well-known journalist, Pegler,
|
||
stated in a syndicated article (which is before me now) that from
|
||
his own knowledge of the Vatican Press Bureau, which he described
|
||
as corrupt, he had no doubt of the truth of the report and that
|
||
"the editors of the Catholic Press in this country are not ignorant
|
||
of the situation." Yet the Catholic press denied it with the usual
|
||
show of anger and injured innocence, and the whole weight of the
|
||
Church's influence was used to dupe the public. And meantime, as I
|
||
showed, the Vatican continued -- to cultivate the most cordial
|
||
relations with Japan and gave Matsuoka, its special agent for
|
||
hoodwinking America, a gold medal when he visited the Pope in 1941.
|
||
The plea that Japan has for the first time acceded to the Pope's
|
||
long pressure for diplomatic relations and that the purpose is
|
||
purely ecclesiastical is brazen but Catholics get away with it.
|
||
They control the press.
|
||
|
||
This was not the first or weightiest proof of the way in which
|
||
the Black International in America had began to poison the wells.
|
||
In 1936 Franco had raised the flag of revolt in Spain. The
|
||
spontaneous reaction of America wag to support the Spanish
|
||
government, in spite of the flood of libels of it already released
|
||
in the Catholic press, as the revolt was notoriously a Fascist
|
||
attempt to destroy a democracy. Seldes estimated that 98 percent of
|
||
America was against Franco. 50 percent of American Catholics were
|
||
against him (as shown by a Gallup Survey), but 98 percent of the
|
||
Catholic prelates were strong against the Spanish government. So
|
||
the duped laity of Catholic Action Were driven into the field by
|
||
their clerical slave-drivers. By 1938 hardly a paper in America did
|
||
justice to the Loyalists or dare speak of "Rebels." Every Catholic-
|
||
Fascist lie was endorsed, and the most contemptible methods were
|
||
adopted to suppress the truth and secure the triumph of injustice.
|
||
When a small group of Spanish priests came over to tell America the
|
||
truth they were pitilessly persecuted. Proprietors of halls were
|
||
threatened if they wanted to open them to the priests, and managers
|
||
of hotels were threatened if they gave them rooms. Firms were even
|
||
bullied and boycotted for sending medical supplies to the Spanish
|
||
government. Roosevelt was induced by Catholics to load the scales
|
||
against the hard-pressed democrats by an Embargo, and when the open
|
||
and cynical intervention of Italy and Germany showed that it was
|
||
unjust, he was dissuaded by Catholics from lifting it. A Washington
|
||
official is said to have declared that the one man in America who
|
||
could get the cruel Embargo lifted was Cardinal Mundelein. In the
|
||
end it was difficult to ascertain the truth. Publishers who
|
||
accepted books which told it, newspapers which reviewed them, and
|
||
libraries which circulated them were threatened or penalized. It
|
||
was a massive exhibition of the virtually Fascist power which the
|
||
Black International had won in America.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
20
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
Seldes gave a list of 18 general charges against the Church of
|
||
grave misconduct in turning (as it always does) the tolerance which
|
||
it had won in America into a bitter intolerance of others and a use
|
||
of violent and unscrupulous methods to prevent the public from
|
||
learning the truth. As far as machinery is concerned these charges
|
||
are that it exercises in its own interest a most vicious pressure
|
||
on the press -- it has made an end of the boasted freedom of the
|
||
press in America -- publishers, libraries, public meetings, and the
|
||
letting of public buildings by state authorities. Seldes should
|
||
have added a scandalous interference with the school-books used in
|
||
public schools (Boston, etc.). It achieves its aim generally by
|
||
intimidation, sometimes by organizing mobs of fanatical or low-
|
||
class Catholics to use violence. Generally it is enough to threaten
|
||
a secession of Catholic readers or advertisers. Certain papers
|
||
which have done so much to lower the standard of American
|
||
journalism are ready and eager at any time to reap profit by
|
||
catering to the Catholic authorities and attracting Catholics from
|
||
papers which make some effort to make a stand for freedom and
|
||
independence; just as there has been a lamentable growth in America
|
||
of writers, especially of history, who manipulate or color the
|
||
facts to get Catholic recommendation and circulation. Newspapers
|
||
and books used to be the most dangerous part of that "world" which
|
||
the Black International dreaded, so they have with almost complete
|
||
success drawn the teeth of the dragon.
|
||
|
||
Heywood Broun said years ago that "there is not a single New
|
||
York editor who does not live in terror of this group." I spent six
|
||
months in New York in 1917 and wanted to get out a book on the
|
||
Roman Church. I had not then met Haldeman-Julius and did not know
|
||
how he kept the banner of freedom flying in a corner of Kansas. But
|
||
a well-known New York publisher told me that I would not find a
|
||
publisher for such a work in New York. My friend G.H. Putnam had
|
||
published one for me, but he complained that he had hoped I would
|
||
be less critical and he did not publish another. He had submitted
|
||
the manuscript of his own History of the Index to several priests
|
||
before he published it. The general excuse of journalists, editors,
|
||
writers, publishers, librarians, and bookstore-owners is that they
|
||
do not want to stir sectarian strife. There can be few of them who
|
||
do not recognize in their own minds today that if there bad not
|
||
been this mighty conspiracy during the last ten years to suppress
|
||
all news that the Church wanted suppressed the world would not have
|
||
drifted into its present appalling condition.
|
||
|
||
The political weapon for breaking the teeth of their opponents
|
||
is similar to the economic; indeed both are at the bottom economic.
|
||
It is astonishing to find an intelligent Catholic repeating the
|
||
clerical bleat that "the Church never interferes in polities." Some
|
||
writers discuss the matter at length but the answer is simple.
|
||
Whenever the interests of the Church are involved in any political
|
||
issue it not only interferes but on its own principles is bound to
|
||
do so, and no one accuses it of interfering in a political struggle
|
||
in which its own interests, directly or indirectly, are not
|
||
involved. But when you reflect that its "interests" mean not simply
|
||
the moral or religious welfare of its subjects but very decidedly
|
||
the acquisition of power and wealth -- as a means of doing further
|
||
good, of course -- you see how easily it is entangled in political
|
||
troubles.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
21
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
Why in New York did it take so open a part on the reactionary
|
||
side in the struggle for the Child Labor Amendment, in Washington
|
||
on the question of the enlargement of the Supreme Court, in various
|
||
places in local labor disputes? Why did it flirt so openly with
|
||
Wall Street and the annexationists during the church-trouble in
|
||
Mexico? These are American matters which I leave to writers like
|
||
Seldes, but why the sacred fury year after year against Russia and
|
||
Communism? The persecution of religion was a false and hollow
|
||
excuse. The outstanding reasons were to protect the enormous wealth
|
||
which the Church has in many countries and to win the interest and
|
||
favors of capitalists like Ford.
|
||
|
||
I have dealt in an earlier book with the remaining aspect of
|
||
the Roman Church's justification of its censorship, intolerance,
|
||
bullying, bribery, and corruption of the organs of public
|
||
instruction: its plea that in getting a large control of the movies
|
||
and the circulation of books and plays it serves a most important
|
||
national purpose by scotching immoral tendencies. It is far more
|
||
anxious to suppress a pro-Spanish (democratic) film like "Blockade"
|
||
or a pro-Russian film than to cut out an occasional sex-joke or to
|
||
turn the clerical microscope upon the celluloid strip of a bathroom
|
||
or bedroom scene. American law has in this respect fixed the limits
|
||
of freedom as narrowly as any other and more narrowly than the law
|
||
of most Catholic countries, and the American public are generally
|
||
content with the police-interpretation of the law. They want no
|
||
dog-collared amateurs to assist them. The Black International seeks
|
||
this power partly because it raises its prestige in the country and
|
||
partly to complete its control of the means of enlightening the
|
||
public. To an outsider it seems amazing how Americans, who in spite
|
||
of police and parsons show in their novels, plays and films that
|
||
they take as sensible a view of sex as any in the world, tolerate
|
||
this hypocritical meddling of a minority which merely seeks to
|
||
advertise and augment its own power. It reminds me of a certain
|
||
British author who was well-known for his writings on and zeal
|
||
against the White Slave Traffic. A friend who lived in the same
|
||
block of apartments -- very expensive apartments -- as he in
|
||
London, assured me that it was not uncommon to see the man going,
|
||
half or more than half drunk, to his rooms at night with a "white
|
||
slave" on each arm.
|
||
|
||
For some readers, in fine, who may have happened to meet a few
|
||
priests and who are reluctant to accept what they feel to be a very
|
||
serious indictment of the clerical body, let me add a few words.
|
||
This attitude is usually very illogical. I have met men who adopted
|
||
it on the strength of a social meeting with a single priest or
|
||
bishop. Not only has this no relation to the question of the
|
||
methods of the clerical body, not only are priests in such
|
||
circumstances only too anxious to impress a non-Catholic as very
|
||
tolerant and broad-minded, but scientific research has exploded the
|
||
fallacy that you can read a man's "character" in that fashion. I am
|
||
from a very long and wide experience as good a judge of character
|
||
as any, yet I was cheated out of $10,000, my life-savings, by a
|
||
lady I had known well for 20 years and considered of exceptionally
|
||
high character.
|
||
|
||
My indictment of the clergy, however, is not so much an
|
||
ethical charge as a claim that their professional zeal forces them
|
||
into practices which are gravely prejudicial to the interests ()f
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
22
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
the community. I will not be misunderstood. Priests are, as a body,
|
||
far from Being men of high character. They are not chosen for
|
||
character and do not take up the career as a rule from the motives
|
||
which the laity imagine. The skepticism which the majority of them
|
||
develop in one degree or other and the clandestine sex-relations
|
||
they enjoy in spite of vows engender a hypocrisy which poisons
|
||
character. But the question of character is not so much involved in
|
||
the charges I make here. Chiefly I accuse them of a comprehensive
|
||
conspiracy to get the truth suppressed in the organs of public
|
||
instruction, and when this is the suppression of truth which would
|
||
injure the Church they regard it as a virtue. Even on the positive
|
||
side, when they pour out, to use their own words against them, "a
|
||
Mississippi of lies," you have to remember their ethical theory of
|
||
mental reservation." The strict meaning of this is that you may, if
|
||
the person you are addressing has "no right to the truth" -- and no
|
||
one has a right to the kind of truth that hurts the Church -- use
|
||
words that he takes to mean something which you say in your own
|
||
mind that you do not mean. It is commonly interpreted as a license
|
||
to lie in the interest of the Church or the clergy. My own
|
||
professor of theology, a priest of great distinction in the
|
||
clerical body at London, lied so easily and unblushingly in the
|
||
interest of the Church that he clearly came to regard the line
|
||
between truth and untruth as of little importance. Another British
|
||
apologist, a man of generally stricter character, explains in a
|
||
little volume of advice to lay apostles that there are two uses of
|
||
facts. One is the logical way to use them -- simply to state them
|
||
correctly and let your hearer appraise them -- and the other is the
|
||
rhetorical use; by which he plainly means that when the facts
|
||
correctly stated tell against the Church or contradict its writers
|
||
you must make your statement of them innocuous or favorable to the
|
||
Church.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Chapter IV
|
||
|
||
SUGAR PLUMS FOR THE LOYAL
|
||
|
||
But we waste time in any attempt to analyze the mind or the
|
||
conscience of churchmen. The ugly and important fact is that they
|
||
have secured such power over the organs of public instruction, even
|
||
in countries where they are a small minority, that it is
|
||
increasingly difficult to convey to the general public facts that
|
||
they ought to know. I have no abstract or Platonist veneration for
|
||
Truth, with a capital letter -- you will probably find this quoted
|
||
as a confession that I have no respect for truth -- nor, on the
|
||
other hand, am I a Pragmatist in the philosophical sense. In all my
|
||
work I aim to convey truth in the form of facts critically -- that
|
||
is to say, intellectually-ascertained and verified, but especially
|
||
facts of social significance or practical importance. That is the
|
||
general attitude of thoughtful Americans, and they now find that,
|
||
whereas fifty years of steady education and mental emancipation had
|
||
opened up a promise of a triumphant spread of it, the Black
|
||
International, in a vile cooperation with other corrupt interests,
|
||
threatens to destroy all the liberty that had been won. This side
|
||
of its work is of vital important in relation to the theme of the
|
||
present series of books: the question how it could keep the
|
||
allegiance of 15,000,000 Americans and the superficial respect of
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
23
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
the majority of the nation while during years it conspired with
|
||
greedy plotters against America and civilization. And when these
|
||
folk at the same time shout them-selves red in the face with
|
||
warnings against the diabolical machinations of Communists,
|
||
Bolsheviks (now, Mr. Churchill says, "our noble Russian friends"),
|
||
Atheists, Freemasons, and even Jews, the situation is nauseating.
|
||
|
||
How it is to be remedied I do not know. The press can help no
|
||
longer, radio is in the hands of the enemy, politicians find the
|
||
arrangement can be used to their own profit, and the immense body
|
||
of university professor's sit silent or, in a few cases, join the
|
||
sycophants. It may be that our victory in the war will be followed
|
||
by a strong anti-clerical reaction. Do not build on it. The Church
|
||
will strain every nerve to keep the grim truth about its connection
|
||
with the war concealed, and it is now a first principle of
|
||
politicians of every shade that "we must not antagonize the
|
||
Catholic Church." What sort of state-structure they hope to build
|
||
on that rotten foundation, and how leaders of advanced parties can
|
||
follow this ignoble policy when wherever Fascism has triumphed
|
||
(outside Germany) the priests are getting their comrades shot by
|
||
the thousands, I do not know. I do my bit in the one field that is
|
||
left open to me.
|
||
|
||
But we have not yet completed our description of the way in
|
||
which the Black International protects the belief in the amazing
|
||
bunch of ancient superstitions and medieval priestcraft which I
|
||
described in the last book. Let us understand at once that the need
|
||
of protection is not so great as one would be inclined to expect
|
||
after reading an account of the childish doctrines and tyrannical
|
||
rules. Here we may confine ourselves to such countries as America
|
||
and Britain, for the long account which I quoted of life in a
|
||
Catholic city dispenses me from any need to explain why people
|
||
cling to the faith, in such conditions. The illiterate mass are in
|
||
the condition of the Irishman who said, "Faith, if the Church said
|
||
it was Jonah who swallowed the whale it wouldn't trouble me" -- a
|
||
story my professor of theology often repeated, hilariously, in
|
||
class -- and the small comfortable minority are protected in their
|
||
privileged position by the priests.
|
||
|
||
One has first to appreciate the social and psychological value
|
||
of the parish. All Churches have the advantage of providing this
|
||
satisfaction of one of the fundamental instincts, but the Catholic
|
||
clergy contrive to give a special force. The man who, finding other
|
||
social contacts to replace it or preferring isolation to listening
|
||
weekly to the mummery of the service and bleat of the sermon,
|
||
ceases to attend church is more sourly ostracized in a Catholic
|
||
than in any other sort of parish. He is a "bad Catholic," which is
|
||
as odious a label as the priest can fasten on him. His wife is kept
|
||
very sensitive of the gravity and disgrace of his condition, and
|
||
many links of old friendship may have to be broken. Few who have
|
||
taken an active part in what is called "the life of the parish"
|
||
would like to face the soured atmosphere of their neighborhood if
|
||
they left the Church. Thus for most of them the clerical warning to
|
||
avoid books and lectures that may start a doubt is hardly
|
||
necessary. The comfort, if not profit, of a hundred ties with
|
||
Catholic neighbors, the weekly meeting at the church-door, the
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
24
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
social meetings and entertainments in the parish-hall or the
|
||
school, the feeling of membership of a large family and the
|
||
interest in its life and fortunes, are worth far more than the cold
|
||
and penalized Satisfaction of knowing the truth.
|
||
|
||
For these folk who make up the greater part of the Catholic
|
||
body, religion is, as I said, not so much a matter of conviction as
|
||
of settled practices. They want no rupture or dislocation of the
|
||
routine. They are, in clerical language, the "practicing"
|
||
Catholics, and the way in which they are contrasted with the "non-
|
||
practicing" -- the conscientious and thoughtful folk who have
|
||
dropped out -- as virtue is contrasted with vice, is amusing.
|
||
|
||
Every reader who belongs or has at any time belonged to a
|
||
religious congregation or parish knows how much this has to do with
|
||
membership of a church. To those who have not experienced it we
|
||
need only recall the furious zeal of the clergy to prevent the
|
||
provision of alternatives on Sundays. In Britain no theater may be
|
||
opened on Sundays, and concerts are provided only on special
|
||
conditions. Until a year ago no cinema was open. When, under
|
||
pressure of public opinion, a law was passed leaving it to local
|
||
option whether the cinemas should be opened on Sunday, the harsh
|
||
condition was attached that the proprietors must hand over the best
|
||
part of the profit to charity, and in most districts the clergy
|
||
organized their congregations in a spirited, and generally
|
||
successful, fight to prevent the opening. They did not trust a
|
||
large part of their own people to go to church if they had an
|
||
alternative, although sermons have been ruthlessly cut, brighter
|
||
music provided, and a Catholic is not compelled to attend more than
|
||
a 25-minute service on the Sunday morning.
|
||
|
||
For large numbers there are additional advantages. The
|
||
Catholic store-keeper, medical man, journalist, teacher, employee
|
||
of a Catholic employer, etc., dare not miss attendance. Women and
|
||
girls, it is notorious, find it the opportunity of the week to show
|
||
off some new apparel or see what others wear. Many consider that
|
||
their matrimonial prospects are far brighter if they remain
|
||
attached to one of these socio-religious bodies. An author has left
|
||
it on record that he found the meeting in church a unique
|
||
opportunity to admire the rounder feminine curves. . . . It is, in
|
||
short, a very large error to suppose that a Catholic group or
|
||
parish is a body of men and women bound together simply by a common
|
||
belief in such doctrines as I described. Mainly it is a body of men
|
||
and women whom the accidents of life and education put on a common
|
||
path and the unpleasantness of quitting it seems to them not worth
|
||
the cold reward of an intellectual satisfaction. It is the obvious
|
||
absurdity of doctrines that compels many to face that
|
||
unpleasantness. When the religious statistics are closely examined
|
||
it will be seen that the Church which alone talks about conquering
|
||
America has in the last forty years lost more than its rivals.
|
||
|
||
A special device of the Catholic clergy to restrict this large
|
||
leakage as far as possible is the organization of the laity in
|
||
special societies, guilds, fraternities, sororities, etc., so as to
|
||
keep them closer under clerical vigilance and control. I have
|
||
earlier explained how it is by means of these societies that the
|
||
priest turns the obligation to confess once a year into an
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
25
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
obligation to confess, every month. Best known and most powerful of
|
||
all in America is the Knights of Columbus, more than half a million
|
||
strong, which renders most important services to the clergy and
|
||
finds very substantial sums of money for them and the Pope. The
|
||
society was founded in 1882 mainly as a "fraternal benefit society"
|
||
or Catholic insurance company, and it still does a big and
|
||
profitable business in insurance. With the usual grotesque false
|
||
idea of the character of the European knights of the Middle Ages
|
||
Catholic men were enrolled in what professed to be a chivalrous and
|
||
romantic body of modern knights errant for the service of the
|
||
Church and of each other. They became a vast association of
|
||
Catholic men something in character between the Freemasons and the
|
||
German Shock Troops with a few features borrowed from the Gestapo.
|
||
|
||
The article on them in the new Encyclopedia Americana is part
|
||
of the advertising scheme of the Roman Church which is a feature of
|
||
the work. It airily dismisses the much-discussed question of the
|
||
Secret oath of the Knights by saying: "Has no oath, only obligation
|
||
of secrecy," which, when you are referring to a Catholic
|
||
organization, is much like saying that a man "has no dog, only a
|
||
canine quadruped." The form of oath that is often attributed to
|
||
them seems to be a forgery based upon a crude idea of Catholic aims
|
||
but one would like to know in what form the obligation of secrecy
|
||
is imposed. A friend of mine, a distinguished Canadian, learned a
|
||
few years ago through an amusing hotel adventure, that the Quebec
|
||
Premier Tascherean had been initiated as a Knight but it must be
|
||
kept a deadly secret. Imagine the leonine roar of the Catholic
|
||
press if a president were discovered to have been secretly
|
||
initiated to Freemasonry! And what would be the position of
|
||
Tascherean if the question of the annexation or Anschluss of
|
||
Canada, for which the Knights are ready to work as they work for
|
||
the annexation of Mexico, ever became a live issue?
|
||
|
||
However, the public action of the Knights is well known. What
|
||
is of interest here is that the organization is probably the most
|
||
valuable means that the Black International has in America for
|
||
holding grown-up and educated men to a profession of those medieval
|
||
speculation's which I described in the last book. It enlists
|
||
profit, patriotism, and piety in a harmonious regiment. To one-
|
||
third it says: Be a Knight and expand your bank-roll. To another
|
||
third: Be a Knight and break a lance for American (financial)
|
||
institutions on these Reds, Mexican bandits, Anarchists, Atheists,
|
||
Birth-controllers, etc. And to the genuine religious third it says:
|
||
Be a Knight in the service of Mary and the Lord. Why leave the
|
||
Church when it offers such golden, as well as gastroilomic,
|
||
opportunities? Since 1928 they have trained the young, as
|
||
"Columbian Squires" for the high function of Knights. One trusts
|
||
they have not to render all the services of the medieval squires
|
||
and pages.
|
||
|
||
Seldes (The Vatican) tells us that during the few years before
|
||
1929, the period of the stormy courtship of Mussolini and the Pope,
|
||
there were amusing variations of the public policy of the Fascists.
|
||
At times when Mussolini was pressing and there was hope of an
|
||
agreement the Fascist police stopped young women on the streets and
|
||
painted marks on their stockings to which the skirts must be
|
||
lowered. When the Pope pressed and the hope of a bargain grew faint
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
26
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
-- well, one gathers that the legs were not daubed in public and
|
||
the low-water mark was much higher. The Church similarly adopts
|
||
itself, and for the more puritanical laymen of the American Church,
|
||
the men who cannot afford or do not like the social amenities and
|
||
robust services of the Knights, it has organized the gentler
|
||
society of the Holy Family. In this the wife may collaborate. An
|
||
important duty of theirs is to denounce wicked books, plays, and
|
||
pictures which have escaped the censor and are calculated to
|
||
corrode the foundations of American civilization. The sororities of
|
||
Catholic virgins are expected to cooperate in this, and the members
|
||
face the duty of seeing whether a film is really proper as firmly
|
||
as they face the intimate talk on sex in the confessional. Once I
|
||
saw a remarkably long queue of women outside the chief picture-
|
||
house in Chicago and learned that they were waiting to see a
|
||
picture which had so unpleasant a reputation that the police were
|
||
hourly expected to suppress it. Chicago was just then preparing for
|
||
a Eucharistic Congress and in mitigation of the subservience of the
|
||
civic authorities: to the Church the papers explained that one-
|
||
third of the citizens are devout Catholics. I concluded that the
|
||
bright-eyed women in the queue were mostly Catholics who wanted to
|
||
see if the film ought to be denounced to the police to save the
|
||
women and children of America.
|
||
|
||
It is impossible here to name all the titles, decorations, and
|
||
festivities of the groups into which the faithful are Sorted; and,
|
||
indeed, you will soon begin to wonder why so many millions leave
|
||
the Church, if not why anybody leaves it. See, if you can, some
|
||
account of the vast net of activities covering the life of America
|
||
and centered in the offices of the National Catholic Welfare at
|
||
Washington. Everybody, from Catholic artists or scientists (number
|
||
not stated) to Catholic shoe-shiners, is organized and directed by
|
||
the clergy to discharge some function or other for Our Holy Mother
|
||
the Church. It is the American version of what in other countries
|
||
is called Catholic Action: the activity that invited Mussolini and
|
||
Hitler to overthrow the legitimate government in Spain, delivered
|
||
Vienna into the hands of the cardinal who grewed flowers in the
|
||
path of Hitler when he seized it, got the freethinking politicians
|
||
and bankers of Buenos Aires to give literally, a royal reception to
|
||
Cardinal Pacelli when he arrived to plot against democracy in South
|
||
America, filled the jails of Rio with the groans of tortured men,
|
||
put Petain in power in France and for the first time in many
|
||
centuries brought dishonor upon the country, betrayed Czecho-
|
||
Slovakia, paralyzes Canada today, etc., etc. In an earlier book I
|
||
quoted the Pope asking: "How could any fair-minded man say that the
|
||
Church ever interferes in polities?" In the same year a Catholic
|
||
writer in the Catholic fortnightly, the Revue des Deux Mendes,
|
||
opened his article with the sentence: "Rarely in history has the
|
||
Catholic factor had such influence as it has today on the political
|
||
movement throughout the world"; and he traced it in detail, and
|
||
with much joy, in Germany, Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, Spain, Italy,
|
||
Yugoslavia, Hungary, Rumania, and Japan.
|
||
|
||
In America and Britain the chief aim of Catholic Action, which
|
||
specifically means action by the laity under clerical control, is
|
||
to carry out that poisoning of the wells of public information
|
||
which I have described, especially by intimidating the editors of
|
||
newspapers, the publishers of books, and librarians. To the outside
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
27
|
||
|
||
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
|
||
|
||
world this is presented as a very natural and innocent precaution
|
||
that nothing offensive to Catholics is published. One would imagine
|
||
at times, from the way Catholics talk, that the papers and books
|
||
were until a few year's ago filled with lies and libels against the
|
||
innocent Church, stories of escaped monks and nuns and debauches in
|
||
convents, unjust suspicions of plots on the part of the good
|
||
Jesuits and the intensely spiritual Vatican, and so on. This is, of
|
||
course, sheer non-sense. It is a mere face-saving excuse for the
|
||
unfortunate editors and publishers who have to submit to the most
|
||
brazen maneuvers of modern priestcraft. For the aim is not to
|
||
exclude lie's, which a paper easily detects and rejects, but to
|
||
secure the suppression of the truth about life in the Catholic
|
||
Church and the activities of the Vatican, which the public has a
|
||
right to know and publicists a duty to tell, and to compel papers
|
||
to publish untruthful statements to the advantage of the Church and
|
||
libraries to accept and circulate books that contain them. Since
|
||
the whole of these booklets illustrate that clerical maneuver I
|
||
need not here enlarge further on it.
|
||
|
||
I have space to notice one more sugar plum, the sweetest of
|
||
all for the laity: the sale or awarding of Papal horrors, titles,
|
||
and decorations. Knights and counts are a dollar a dozen in Europe.
|
||
It is in the democratic atmosphere of America that these things
|
||
sparkle most. But I have dealt with them earlier. As a rule they
|
||
are, like titles in Britain, directly or indirectly bought. They
|
||
are a reward for "aims to the Church" or zeal in its service. I
|
||
notice in the British Catholic Who's Who an American named C.L.
|
||
Hearn who was for 10 years Supreme Knight of the Knights of
|
||
Columbus. I do not know whether he has sunk into the grave under
|
||
the burden of his honors -- I find no mention of him in Who's Who
|
||
in America or the Encyclopedia Americana -- but it seems that he
|
||
was a Knight of St. Gregory, a Commander with the Star and Grand
|
||
Cross, a Count of the Papal Court, and a Privy Chamberlain of the
|
||
Sword and Cape. I do not know whether he had a nice salary to
|
||
sustain their dignities in a democratic world but I gather that on
|
||
behalf of the valorous Knights he took some fat checks to Rome. But
|
||
see an earlier book for these supreme rewards to the faithful
|
||
laity.
|
||
|
||
Do not, in fine, lose sight of the fact that the boast that
|
||
the Church has 20,000,000 or 25,000,000 followers in America is
|
||
just part of the big bluff of the Black International. No one dare
|
||
make an actual inquiry, such as was done 30 years ago in London,
|
||
how many people do in fact attend Catholic churches regularly,
|
||
which is the only test of membership of the Church. I have shown
|
||
that 15,000,000 is a generous figure to assign yet that of the
|
||
living population of America something like double that number have
|
||
been baptized in the Church. That the vast organization of priests,
|
||
monks, nuns, journalists, teachers, paid and amateur agents, now
|
||
the most wealthy religious body in the world, should, with such a
|
||
scheme of threats and attractions as I have here described, succeed
|
||
in keeping about one-half of the mass, predominantly at the lowest
|
||
cultural level of those who by birth and upbringing ought to be
|
||
Catholics is scarcely a miracle. But the point of chief interest
|
||
here is that the mechanism for securing loyalty or checking
|
||
disloyalty is essentially Fascist and illustrates once more that
|
||
close affinity of the Black International with the corrupt powers
|
||
that darken the earth.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
28
|
||
|