Paul Blanshard Replies

THE main contention of my American Freedom and Catholic Power was that the system of power developed by the Roman Catholic hierarchy is encroaching upon certain non-devotional areas of American democracy, such as foreign policy and taxation, education and freedom of thought, marriage and medicine. In building up my case I was persistently specific. With the help of some of the world’s finest and most generous scholars, I loaded down every charge against Catholic policy with detailed documentation out of the mouths of Catholic authorities themselves. I spent very little time in discussing the theory of church and state, and no time at all in discussing the place of religion in society. I explained in my first chapter that this “is a book not about the Catholic faith but about the cultural, political and economic policies of the rulers of the Catholic Church.”

Mr. Ingram ignores the factual side of my book and spends his time discussing the general theory of the relation of church and state, and my alleged position in the world of religious thought. He does not try to deny that the Roman Catholic Church is a complete dictatorship in which the American Catholic people have no participating control; nor does he specifically attempt to justify the particular policies which I attack, such as the celibate rule on birth control, the theological coercion applied to Catholic parents to maintain a segregated Catholic school system, or the treatment of non-Catholics as second-class citizens in mixed marriage.

I have no quarrel with some of his remarks on religion as a means of preserving standards of value. Nor can he find a single quotable sentence to substantiate the notion that I am opposed to all religious influence. The reason is obvious. I wrote my book with scrupulous neutrality on the general questions of religious faith because I thought that the time had come to state the purely American (as distinct from the sectarian) case against the Catholic power-system. It happens that I am neither a positivist nor a secularist “in the sense of indifference to religion,” but whether I am a Mohammedan or a Presbyterian is wholly irrelevant to a consideration of the case I have presented against the encroachments of Catholic power upon American democracy.

I do not necessarily favor an all-powerful state or a state devoid of all religions influences because, in the particular struggle in 1950 between the Catholic hierarchy and American democracy, I happen to favor American democracy. I tend to have a pragmatic view on the competing claims of churches and states for power. I favor a democratic state against an authoritarian church because I do not like governments operated by terror, military or theological; but there are some churches that I might actually support against some states. I might, for example, support a Congregational church in Madrid against Franco, or a Unitarian church in Prague against Gottwald (if he isn’t purged before this goes to print) — or a Roman Catholic church in Moscow against Stalin, provided the sole issue involved happened to be freedom for purely religious activity.

The question before us is not how much religion every state should have in theory, nor even how much authority every church should have in practice, but how much authority should be possessed in the United States in 1950 by an ecclesiastical autocracy which claims prior and superior power over American democracy in determining certain standards of conduct for Catholics in the areas of education, marriage, divorce, sex hygiene, censorship, and medical ethics. Even if Mr. Ingram could “prove” by quoting Thomas Aquinas that the Catholic hierarchy has a “natural right ” to control those non-devotional areas of American life in 1950, that would not prove the wisdom of the particular policies which the Vatican seeks to impose in the exercise of that “natural right.”

I think that the First Amendment prohibits the appropriation of public funds for Catholic schools, and I am happy that the United States Supreme Court, on the whole, bears me out. I oppose the government subsidy of religious institutions as an unfortunate policy because experience has shown that it tends to overburden the state and corrupt the church. If the policy were carried to its logical conclusion in the United States, we might have state-supported school systems for Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, and Jews (to mention only a few), and the purpose of our Constitution, “ to form a more perfect Union,”might in the end be defeated.

Mr. Ingram thinks that it may be unfair to call the Catholic Church a state because it lacks the military trappings and military power of statehood; he prefers the label of bureaucracy. It does not seem to me very important what you call the Roman power-system so long as you understand its dual nature. It operates on both the political and devotional levels. Cardinal Spellman calls it “a sovereign state,” and for once I am inclined to accept him as an authority. It has no army, to be sure, but it has diplomats, and a diplomat may be as effective an agent of imperial power as a gunboat.

Mr. Ingram is within his rights in calling the Vatican “international,”but it is international only in a narrow sense. It is a centralized Roman oligarchy operating in all countries through appointed agents called bishops, who are not responsible to the people in those countries, but to the central oligarchy. The World Council of Churches, with which Mr. Ingram brackets the Vatican, is a truly representative international organization with delegates from the Protestant peoples of various nations. The Vatican will not permit its bishops to sit in the same room with these delegates.

2

ALONG and exciting controversy began with publication of my articles on Catholic policy in the Nation; it led to the banning of that magazine in the New York high school libraries, to a counterattack by American liberals, to the rejection of my book by ten New York publishers, to the final launching in studied silence, and then the slow, steady ascent to the best-seller list. During this fight I have become convinced that what the American public needs, in order to understand the significance of the controversy, is the affirmation and reaffirmation of certain basic facts which both the Catholic hierarchy and the American press are unwilling to state in plain English.

Not the least important fact is that the present Catholic controversy is not a controversy about religious freedom or religious discrimination. There is no personal bias involved, and no “acrid odor of burning flesh” except in the imagination of Mr. Ingram. Almost every American agrees that the Roman Catholic Church should have complete freedom in the United States to advocate any religious or non-religious doctrine or policy that the Holy See wishes to promulgate. And there is no disposition to question the moral worth or patriotic loyalty of the American Catholic people or their rank-and-file priests and nuns.

It should be emphasized, of course, that the Roman Catholic Church, the largest and most powerful church in the United States, is not an American church. It is a Roman church functioning on American soil. All its major policies and doctrines are determined in Rome.

The American Catholic people pay most of the expenses of this central organization, but they have no representation at headquarters. They are never permitted to hold a plenary convention of the American Catholic people, or even of the American Catholic bishops. They are never allowed to choose their own priests, bishops, cardinals, or popes, or to determine their own policies or doctrines. It is one of the basic assumptions of the Catholic system of power that authority over all Catholics in the world has been granted by God to one man in Rome.

This Roman Catholic power-system is not merely a church. It is a completely undemocratic government with temporal status, a Secretary of State, and diplomats at the leading capitals. It constantly uses the power of some 350 million Catholics throughout the world in behalf of purposes that are political, cultural, and medical as well as religious. It never gives the American Catholic people as a group the chance to decide for themselves whether they should favor more liberal divorce laws, or accept birth control, or send their children to public schools as other Americans do. At the present time, without any vote of the American Catholic people, the hierarchy is using its political influence in behalf of three Catholic dictators who are opposed to almost everything that American democracy represents — Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, and Perón in Argentina. When, because of the Vatican’s friendship for these three dictators, American Catholics hear Catholicism described as “the fascist form of Christianity,” they can only wince and fume at this half-truth; they cannot change the policies which have given their church this reputation.

3

WHY is it that the policies of the Catholic hierarchy are almost never discussed publicly in the United States on their merits? One reason for the silence and evasion is that critics are subjected to three kinds of censorship which, in effect, have become part of the Catholic system of power.

Censorship by suppression. Within the Catholic community the hierarchy suppresses hostile criticism by teaching that error has no rights against truth, and that any dogma taught by the Pope is per se true. Under its canon law, the hierarchy will not permit any Catholic, except by special permission, to read, buy, sell, borrow, lend, or favorably review any book which directly attacks the hierarchy and its dogmas. There is no “artificial hush” about this rule; the machinery designed to enforce it operates openly and without disguise.

Naturally, the hierarchy is more indirect and discreet in attempting to apply its censorship system to non-Catholics than to Catholics. In these days it almost never (in the United States) threatens a publisher or a political figure directly. Politicians and publishers are usually so amenable to Catholic pressure that no overt threats are necessary. Several of the ten publishers who rejected American Freedom and Catholic Power admitted quite frankly that the real reason for the rejection was that they feared Catholic reprisals, but I do not believe that one of them was approached or threatened directly by any agent of the hierarchy.

The worst punishment that can be meted out to any author in the American book world is silence and avoidance. When the book was finally published by a courageous Boston house, and sent to 150 daily newspapers for review, only seven of them ventured to touch it. One great newspaper, for the first time in its history, sent orders to its book review department, even before the book had arrived, that under no circumstances must it be reviewed. One syndicate ripped out a favorable review from a printed feature sheet, held up the sheet, and then ran two or three unfavorable paragraphs taken from the review as the expression of the reviewer’s judgment.

When the Beacon Press tried to insert in the New York Times an advertisement which included the very generous endorsement of John Haynes Holmes, the advertisement was rejected, and to this day, even after the book has been recommended by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the American Library Association, the Times still adheres to its decision.

Censorship by vilification. Any person in public life who directly criticizes Catholic policy as stupid or reactionary is vilified by the hierarchy as “antiCatholic” or “bigoted”; and such an attack is usually enough to ruin the political career of any candidate for public office in the North or East. The attack on critics is sometimes made by an organization like the Catholic War Veterans, sometimes by an individual, as when Cardinal Spellman attacked Mrs. Roosevelt.

Censorship by appeasement. Some liberal intellectuals in this country impose upon themselves a kind of self-censorship which prevents any direct criticism of Catholic policy. They know that it would be a cultural disaster of the first magnitude if the United States became a clerical state, but they want someone else to do their fighting for them. They tend to rationalize their timidity as tolerance, an to look down their noses at all crusaders. Fortu nately, the timid intellectuals do not represent the American majority, and increasingly they are accepting the notion that it is not intolerant to attack an intolerant system of power.

To me the most depressing fact in the whole controversy is that liberal Catholics have almost no voice or forum within the Catholic system of power. If they agree with me—and I am convinced that many do — they cannot reach their fellow Catholics through any existing organs of the Church. When, after I had been repeatedly assailed in a Vermont Catholic paper, I offered to bring a carload of my Catholic neighbors to the nearest Vermont church and state my case to an allCatholic audience, the answer was an evasive negative. Probably 90 per cent of the critical letters I have received during the last three years from devout Catholics have revealed by internal evidence that the writers had never read a page I had written.

Conversely, the hierarchy does not control our non-Catholic universities, and that is where American Freedom and Catholic Power has received the biggest welcome —for a time it was the No. 2 best-seller in college bookstores throughout the country. This interest in the colleges raises the hope that in the future the resistance movement against the abuses of Catholic power will keep its sights high and avoid the pitfalls of fanatical partisanship.