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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 17
HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
THE UNIQUE APPARATUS OF THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL
TO SECURE LOYALTY
by Joseph McCabe
HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
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CHAPTER
I Death and Damnation for the Unbeliever .............. 1
II Blinkers for the Believers .......................... 8
III Drawing the Dragon's Teeth ......................... 16
IV Sugar Plums for the Loyal .......................... 23
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Chapter I
DEATH AND DAMNATION FOR THE UNBELIEVER
In 1928 Bertrand Russell said in the course of an address to
the British Rationalist Press Association that "in fifty years the
Roman Catholic Church will dominate America." For once I fail to
follow the reasoning of the distinguished mathematician. If we take
the estimate of the number of their members which the clergy supply
to the public authorities we find that in 1900 they claimed to be
15.7 of the entire population, in 1910 they had sunk to 14.1, in
1920 they claimed to be 16.9, in 1930 16.2, and in 1940, according
to the figures supplied to the Federal Council of the Churches,
15.9. Instead of a stately and convincing growth toward the
necessary 60 or 70 percent, much less an abnormally rapid growth,
we have here a curve of progress that gets back to its starting-
point in nearly half a century. It is not necessary to add that
until 1930 the growth of population was entirely different from
that in the other countries, for from 1900 until that date there
were about 17,000,000 immigrants, and more than half of these were
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HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
Catholics: a fact strangely overlooked by all writers who are moved
to make profound observations when they see the decennial increases
of the Catholic population.
On the other hand even many Americans will not know that not
only has the flood of immigration subsided to a modest stream but
there is evidence, which is accepted by Catholic authorities, that
the Catholic birth rate is being deliberately checked by parents.
About 80 percent of Catholics live in cities or towns, and in even
the most Catholic of these there has been a notable drop of the
birth rate. From 1920 to 1938 it sank in the towns and cities of
Massachusetts, where Catholics are strongest, from 23.7 to 13.8. In
New York City it fell from 23.4 to 14.4. Commenting on these
figures the Catholic Commonweal said:
The urban Irish have long since stopped even reproducing
themselves, and the urban Italians and Slavs are rapidly following
their example.
From the temperate language of the Catholic writer you would
not suspect that his Church puts the use of contraceptives on much
the same level as murder but, of course, he is distracting
attention from an obvious inference. It is one more proof, like
that I gave in the last book, of a serious defection from the
Church. However, what we have to note here is that the Catholic
body as estimated by the authorities is losing its treasured
advantage of a full birth rate as well as the advantage of
immigration. If we further recall that they claim only about 20,000
to 25,000 converts a year we feel that even Catholic arithmetic
will be severely strained to show the faintest glimmer of hope of
ever becoming the majority.
But we have already seen the worthlessness of these Catholic
statistics. A common-sense appreciation of the evidence puts the
number of real Catholics in America at about 9,000,000 in 1900 and
about 15,000,000 today. The general population has increased by
nearly 80 percent: the Catholic population, in spite of all its
peculiarities, by less than 70 percent. The only "miracle" of
Catholic growth is that it is really a growth downward.
But after all, you will say, the fact that the Church gets
15,000,000 Americans to subscribe to such a creed as I described in
the last book requires some explanation. Indeed, they seem not
simply to subscribe to it but, according to the apologists and the
Catholic press, to be more enthusiastic about their "holy faith"
than the members of any other civilized religion; except,
significantly enough, the semi-civilized Moslem fanatics who break
each other's polls in the Near East or the corresponding fanatics
in India. They take, we are told, such pride in it as a little girl
does in her first doll: they quite solemnly say that they have a
right to demand tolerance for themselves and refuse it to others:
and they swallow the excuses of the Black International for its
support of the vilest characters as smoothly as we swallow oysters.
Yet beyond any question the creed is as I stated it. The Catholic
who questions a single one of the dogmas, literally interpreted,
not only incurs hell but plainly questions the very foundations of
Church authority; and the Canon Law lays it down that the Catholic
incurs this sentence if he confines his "liberalism" within his own
mind.
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HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
Yet again the miracle quickly loses its glamour when you
examine it closely. Of 15,000,000 people in the United States one-
third are under the age of 16, and you will not ask me to study
their beliefs. Indeed, with due acknowledgement of that respect for
youth which we old folk are learning I doubt if the beliefs of
youths and girls under 20 matter very much, and that means nearly
a half of them. To be quite blunt about it, in fact, I see nothing
to boast about in the belief of the majority of the remainder. Can
you speak of beliefs or merely practices? The religious life of a
good half of them consists in dodging the devil by going to Church
once a week for half an hour and faintly hearing a priest in the
far distance mumble prayers in Latin. The ease with which such folk
were swept away from the Church in millions in Europe and South
America as long as there was freedom of discussion shows what
shallow and feeble roots their faith has.
Let us try to get a realistic view of the Catholic Church in
America instead of repeating all this frothy nonsense, which seems
to impress politicians, about 20,000,000 devout and enthusiastic
Catholics who put their faith above everything. Of the forty to
fifty million Catholic immigrants and their descendants the Church,
with its vast organization of priests, schools, newspapers, radio,
etc., and its colossal wealth has managed to retain within its fold
some 5,000,000 children, 5,000,000 folk who are under 20 or are on
so poor a cultural level that we are not interested in their
beliefs, and 5,000,000 men and women of sufficient education (often
only primary) and intelligence to suggest that they hold their
beliefs deliberately.
We are not here concerned with the Angle of the politician who
counts votes, or the newspaper-proprietor, who counts dollars, or
the professor or writer, who counts readers. We are just trying to
understand how the Black International can maintain its baleful
activity in the 20th Century, and it is most instructive to study
its basis in America. This that I have described is its basis. All
talk about 20,000,000 Catholics who are the spiritual cream of the
country is bunk; and all talk about a triumphant progress that
promises to "make America Catholic" is double-distilled bunk. And,
as I have shown, the Roman Church is in modern times in the same
not very impressive condition in every country except where the
Black International has won back, by a combination of national
treachery and vile association with corrupt powers, its old power
of coercion.
There is, therefore, not even a fascinating problem of
psychology in the survival of this medieval faith, as some imagine.
Sociologists and social psychologists, in fact, become politicians
when they notice "the venerable Church." It is a massive fact in
the social fabric, but they do not care to look too closely into
it. They suspect it may be as dirty and unhealthy, if you go too
close, as one of those thatched cottages in an old English village
which look so "cute" to the American who passes in an automobile.
We are not here examining the survival of the Roman faith in the
20th Century, or inquiring how grown-up and often educated men and
women can be induced to call it a "holy faith" and a beautiful
system, from any psychological interest. We are verifying our
suspicion that the faith is protected by just the same trickery,
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HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
deceit, and coercion as the Axis powers used in working their way
into a formidable position, and therefore the alliance, which seems
impossible or improbable to those who prefer to admire the Roman
Church from a distance, is entirely natural and was inevitable once
the reaction against democracy began.
There was in every age a core of believers, of a particular
temperament, who did not need any action of the Black International
to bind them to the Church and who in very large part were of high
character; though their chastity was apt to be tinged with
intolerance and inhumanity and their charity associated with a sour
fanaticism. It is waste of time for writers to remind us of these
"many good men and women." It is the institution and its methods,
the general situation, that matters. And I have amply shown that
ever since the first "great Pope," Leo I (440-61), began to use
forgery in the interest of the Church and to burn heretics,
deception and violence were the weapons on which it relied rather
than upon argument. It is enough here to recall four critical
stages in the history of the Church. When in the 11th and 12th
centuries it was alarmed by the reawakening of the minds of Europe
it retorted with the Inquisition. When Protestantism broke its
power in the 16th Century it tried to drown it in blood in the
Thirty Years War. When the European powers conquered the French
revolutionary spirit and Napoleonic liberalism in the 19th Century
the Church allied itself intimately with the most corrupt of them
in a murderous attack on freedom and democracy. And when in our own
time America, Britain, and France in a narrow and discreditable
view of their own interests permitted new and popular anti-
democratic forces to gather strength, the Church at once entered
into alliance with them.
This policy of violence is, I showed, actually the law of the
Roman Church. While American apologists were falsely stating that
the wicked historians of the last century -- the Catholic Lord
Acton used the strongest language of them all -- lied about the
Church, and that in any case it now abhors coercion and is all
sweetness and light, the Vatican press was issuing one edition
after another of Canon Law in which it is quite indignantly
affirmed, against "liberal" Catholics, that the Church has never
abdicated its "right of the sword": which, they explained, includes
lesser matters like torture or any physical sufferings or material
inflections (prison, fines, exile, confiscation, etc.). I gave the
words of the exact references to Marianus de Luca and Cardinal
Lepicier. The former was professor of Canon Law in the Papal
University, the latter in a Papal college at Rome, and both had the
Pope's stamp of approval on their books. Indeed, I see by the title
page of De Lucas book, which is quite savage in its long arguments
for the Church's right to kill or maim heretics, that it was
published in Rome, Ratisbon, and "Neo-Eboracum." As the latter is
the Latin for New York it seems that this truculent statement of
Church Law was simultaneously published, privately, in America for
the clergy, and we may be sure that it has an honored place in
those seminary or college-libraries in which apologists now pen
their assurances to the American public that the Church is the
mother of toleration and the soul of charity.
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HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
Professor C.J. Cadoux has an interesting chapter on this
aspect of Romanism (Roman Catholicism and Freedom, 1936, ch I). He
sums up its long history in the words of Prof. Lecky: "The Church
of Rome has shed more innocent blood than any other institution
that has ever existed among mankind" (The Rise and Influence of
Rationalism in Europe, II, 32). Lecky is so often quoted by
Catholics for his (unjust) compliments to the early Roman Church
that this is a hard saying. However, it is the modern development
that is particularly interesting. In 1832, when just such a
clerical-fascist tyranny ruled Europe as does today, Gregory XVI
said in an Encyclical: "Out of this most foul fountain of
indifferentism flows that absurd and erroneous opinion or rather
raving that liberty of conscience ought to be asserted and secured
for everybody." Catholics were at that time a negligible minority
in England and were enthusiastic for religious toleration, but in
the forties the Irish famine drove crowds of them to Britain, and
the Church became so optimistic that it forgot the mask sometimes.
In 1855 a writer in the Catholic Rambler (p. 178) attacked "the
impious and absurd theory of religious liberty" and, answering the
question what the Catholic would do if he ever got the majority in
England, he said: "If it would benefit the cause of Catholicism he
would tolerate you, but if expedient he would imprison you, banish
you, fine you, and possibly he might even hang you."
Notice the date, 1885. The revolutionary wave of 1848 had
spent itself and under the blood-splotched banners of the
reactionary monarchs the Church was again speaking candidly. In
that year the Pope issued his famous Syllabus, and amongst the
"wicked opinions" which he required Catholics all over the world to
regard as "reprobated, proscribed, and condemned" were several such
as the following (literally translated from the Latin Syllabus):
15. Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion
which he finds true in the light of human reason.
17. At least there is hope of the eternal salvation of men who
do not belong to the true Church of Christ.
80. The Roman Pontiff can and ought to be reconciled with
progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.
And as late as 1864 in the Encyclical Quanta Cura he denounced
this modern fad of "liberty of conscience" as a "liberty of
perdition."
But alas for the Papal Canute. The waves were already fretting
round his feet, and in a few more years he lost the Temporal Power
and saw the world coldly indifferent to, or jubilant over, the
defeat of the Church. Democracy, free general education, and a
demand for increasing liberty spread over Europe and Latin America.
The age of that "accommodation with modern civilization" which Pius
IX had contemptuously rejected set in. There was now no country in
the world in which the Church could exercise the power which it
claimed. Even in Spain rebels against the Church, who swarmed in
the cities and the universities, could not be touched unless they
were so advanced in their political views that they could be
branded "Anarchists," just as they are now branded Communists or
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HOW THE FAITH IS PROTECTED
Bolsheviks. Many hundreds were treated thus, and the American and
British press lightly dismissed the murders and tortures as an
unpleasant necessity forced upon these Spanish gentlemen by
Anarchist bomb-throwers. It happened that I was in close touch with
one of these "Anarchists," Francisco Ferrer, an idealist who
loathed violence and polities and who was judicially murdered
solely to oblige the Church. I raised a stink in the whole English-
speaking world and got the fact generally recognized, but I could
not convince the public that Ferrer was only one of hundreds of
victims of the Spanish Church, and that foul tortures were used on
them in the jails from 1990 to 1910. The Black International in all
countries lied and used its power over the press to conceal the
fact that, where it thought it could safely do so, the Church still
exercised its right to maim or kill rebels against itself. It no
longer dressed them in a white sheet. It stuck a red flag in their
hands.
In all the rest of the world except Spain it professed to be
"reconciled with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization," in
the words it had solemnly denounced a few decades earlier. Then
there opened the appalling new chapter in the history of
civilization. The high priests of reaction at Rome began to hear
voices which they thought had been stilled forever. France, needing
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
Jesuit Cardinal Billot, its head, wrote and published a Latin
Tractatus de Ecclesia Christi (1922) and the Jesuit Professor
Sortain a Traite de Philosophie (1924) in which the clergy were
candidly told that Rome still had the right to use physical
measures including the death-sentence, against heretics. In Italy
Mussolini began to deride liberty and liberalism in the language of
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....
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
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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
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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
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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,
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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."
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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-- 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
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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.
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