October, 1953
These were the plans, that is, until the Bishop of Saint Augustine, Florida, came out against the whole thing. The official diocesan statement said, “The Catholic mind shrinks from the concept of a ‘non-sectarian’ Christ as it does from other aspects of the plan set forward in the Catholic Digest.”
Every time the Catholic Digest departs from its customary fare and tries to go a little theological, it gets into trouble. We hope this Florida rebuke will help it to re-see its vocation as a second-rate Reader’s Digest and to stick to the kind of thing it knows, articles like, “How to Tan Gloriously Without the Aid of Grease.”
Here is the way she spoke during her last illness. “Oh, how happy I would have been to fight at the time of the Crusades, or later on to fight against the heretics. Be assured, I would not have been afraid of the fire! Oh, is it possible that I should die in bed?”
The United States of America is the most Masonic country in the world. Three and a half million Masons, more than 75 per cent of the world’s total, live here.
American Catholics persist in regarding these Masons who surround them as nothing more than a bunch of harmless, fun-loving fellows, who like to sponsor football games to aid aged widows. Yet, in all the history of the Church, there is no organization that the Popes have condemned so insistently, urgently, and severely as Freemasonry. It has been anathematized seventeen different times, and has in some way been warned against by almost every Pope of the last two centuries.
The fact that Masons in this country have such an innocuous reputation is the result of deliberate and prudent Masonic planning. Instead of attacking the Church frontally, which would reveal them as enemies, and would enable the Church to defend herself, the Masons launch their attack obliquely, sinisterly, as it were by night. They rarely declare themselves as being anti-Catholic — particularly among the Thirty-third Degree members, by whom Masonic policy is established and understood. Rather, they always have some apparently innocent program they want to put into effect, like Interfaith, or universal public school education. It is by such programs that they achieve their ends.
The Masons pretend they are concerned with political reforms; but their real objectives are not political, they are religious. They talk loftily of wanting to establish “progress” and “freedom” and democracy.” But if you probe deep enough, or wait long enough, you will discover what they mean by these terms. For the Masons have but one goal: the utter destruction of the Catholic Church throughout the world; and whatever else they may seem to be for or against, as is ultimately for the sake of achieving that goal. Since the time of the French Revolution, when they marched against the Church under the specious banner of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, the Masons have been active wherever there has been a chance to assail Christ the King and His Mystical Body.
Though the Masons will pose as great patriots when it suits their designs, the Masons are really loyal to no country. In its war against the Church, Masonry transcends all national boundaries, all forms of government, all economic systems. That alone explains such a strange league as the capitalistic Masons of the United States supporting and encouraging avowed Communists in Mexico and aiding them to take over the government there. They did so because the Communists had declared war on Christ the King and had sworn to crush the Faith of the Mexican people.
But of all the schemes the Masons have devised against the Church, of all their weapons, the most terrible, the one that makes them such a dangerous and desperate enemy, is this: they have unleashed on Christendom the fury of the Jews.
Until the Masons came to power, the ancient, bitter hatred that the Jews have for their King and for those who are loyal to Him, was kept in check. They were obliged to live in ghettos, and the Christians were well-warned against them. But as the Masons took over the nations of Europe, they invited the Jews to leave their ghettos and to mingle freely with the rest of society. Like Pilate befriending Herod, the Masons overcame their natural abhorrence of the Jews and, for the sake of their common foe, took them as an ally.
Once out of their ghettos, the Jews found that, by the alert practice of usury, they were soon able to control the finances of whatever countries they were in. They then proceeded to take over, thoroughly and securely, all those media by which the thoughts and opinions, the sympathies and emotions, the values and attitudes of men and of nations are ruled.
Today, in the countries which the Masons dominate, notably the United States, the Jews control the book publishing industry, they control the press, they control the news agencies, they control the movies and radio and television and entertainment. They control what information, under the guise of “news,” shall be given to the people, and what shall be withheld. By their command of the news agencies, especially the international ones, they can determine what slant the news shall have at its very origin. Witness their vicious propaganda campaign against Catholic Franco and for the Communists during the Spanish Civil War.
Those newspapers that the Jews do not shape positively, by writing, editing, or publishing them, they regulate quite effectively in another way — by threatening to stop advertising their department stores in the papers, if they print anything detrimental to Jewish interests.
Thus, the Jews are able to spread the Masonic principles and programs, which they, for their own Judaic reasons, share. They can make it look as though a person is against public opinion, against democracy, against America who does not hold, for instance, that one religion is as good as another.
But important as this work of indoctrination is in combating the Faith, the Masons have given the Jews another assignment which is even more important. It is to subject Christians to the evil influence of Jewish morals. This task the Jews perform with delighted thoroughness. By their movies, their television programs, their advertisements, their books and magazines, the Jews saturate society with their sensualism and filth, their what’s-in-it-for-me outlooks. No one can withstand long exposure to this Jewish influence without becoming completely demoralized.
Traditionally, the Masons’ final step is to foment a revolution, overthrowing by violence the existing government and setting up one based on anti-Catholic, Masonic principles. But here, in our time, the Masons are going to try and destroy the Faith in a nation of 30 million Catholics without violence, or bloodshed, quietly and legally.
However, there is one condition necessary for the accomplishment of this Masonic scheme: American Catholics must continue on the same merry, unguarded, unsuspecting way they have been going. They must continue to believe they have nothing to fight in the power of the Masons, nothing to fear in the influence of the Jews.
“Let us remember that Christianity and Freemasonry are, by their nature, irreconcilable.” — Pope Leo XIII
“The Masons blasphemously profane and defile the Passion of Jesus Christ by their sacrilegious ceremonies ... They cherish a very special hatred against the Apostolic See, which they are striving to overthrow.” — Pope Pius VII
“It is not alone the Masonic body in Europe that is referred to, but also the Masonic associations in America and in whatsoever part of the world they may be.” — Pope Pius IX
Our Lord, in the few observational remarks he made about children, never commented on a child’s good looks, soft hair, or bright utterance. He blessed and canonized their innocence in a single pronouncement: “Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of God.”
A child offers Christianity all it needs on which to build by way of value. It is on what a child can readily know about a lamb, a pearl, a field of wheat, a leper, a fisherman, a lamp, the taste of salt, the odor of wine, a gift of gold, frankincense and myrrh, that the entire Gospel story is written. Christianity seeks to win the approval of the child, knowing that the best way to know how to be great is to let children teach us value. A child’s questions, problems and delights are the poetry, philosophy, theology and mysticism of Catholic life in one little blue-eyed inquiry.
If Our Lord has set such importance on a child’s interests in order to make Revelation fruitful, it must follow that a continued childhood — a perennial let-the-dead-bury-the-dead, take-no-heed-for-tomorrow outlook — is the very best manner in which to let the seed of faith, once given, take root in fruitful soil. As Catholics, we must preserve — or, if lost, re-establish — the child in us, in order to be saved. ...
Little Jesus did not enter this world to give us the privilege of condescension toward something inferior to us. He came to be our King, issuing commands by His small silences, His tiny fingers and His great need. God could easily have entered the world by some thunderous and impressive route. He is well-known for His power to split the sky with lightning, tear the air with a tornado, spill a mountain into an avalanche, or unsettle a continent with an earthquake. By way of any of these cosmic overtures, He could have made His entrance into our world, led by twelve legions of Angels. But, no. The road He chose to travel to us was the innocent portal of a mother’s womb, garlanded with the no-hurries and long delays of love.
(first printed in The Messenger of the Sacred Heart)
Amid the ordered barbarism which the late Dr. Roosevelt was wont to call “our American way of life,” there is established a pattern which may be identified by the name of “our club culture.” For the levels of American sociability lend themselves admirably to a breakdown by “clubs” — beginning at the top with the polo club, the yacht club, the country club, descending through the women’s club, the bridge club, the Lions Club, and terminating inelegantly at “Mike’s Club — Beer Ten Cents a Glass.”
Distributed up and down this vertical hierarchy (generously in the middle, sparsely at either end) are the subsidiary clubs — aggregations of button collectors, bird watchers, and the offspring of American Revolutionaries. With pompous Mesdames President and dutiful sub-chairmen, the members of the clubs sustain themselves in that one interest which provides their common unity — to wit, bizarre buttons, odd birds, or rabble-rousing ancestors.
In the midst of these lesser gatherings, and willing to be taken for one of them, is the Newman Club Federation, that appraisal of the Catholic Faith as “something to have a doubt about.”
Newman Clubs are now about fifty years old. Their members are those tragically misplaced persons, Catholic students at non-Catholic colleges. And their very name, Newman, gives them away.
It was the spirit of Newman’s writings, quite as much as his over-esteemed clarity, which made him so fit the purposes of American Catholics at non-Catholic colleges. For in everything that Newman said in print, after he rationalized his way into the Church, there is a clear determination to dissociate himself from all that he considered vulgar (that is, not English) in his new-found religion. He felt, for example, that devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary was being carried too far, and that the infallibility of the Pope was something to keep quiet about!
As they started off, the Newman Clubs selected John Henry Cardinal Newman as their patron for many reasons, one of which was their certainty that he would never embarrass them by getting canonized and turning into a patron-saint. Newman, they decided, was an eminently acceptable variety of Catholic to bring to the attention of our secular universities. To begin with, he was not a noisy Irish-American Catholic, but an ex-Anglican English one. And he was not only literate, he was even literary.
The establishers of the Newman Clubs must have realized, however, that in importing his spirit, much of Newman’s Oxford refinement and Anglican propriety would be lost in transit. For when it is found on a Midwestern university campus, clad in blue-jeans at a Newman Club weenie roast, the spirit of John Henry Cardinal Newman as stripped of all but its most basic elements: compromise of and apology for the Faith.
The Newman Club maintains that a Catholic student can “stick it out” at a secular college and preserve his Faith by means of weekly teas, monthly dances and an occasional festive breakfast, preceded by a hasty Holy Communion. In fact, Newman Club bulletins point proudly to recent surveys which report that although the percentage of Catholic students who leave the Faith at secular colleges is very high, the number is considerably lower among those students who are Newman Clubbers.
The Newman policy is blithely and blindly to assume that the student who does not openly break with the Faith must therefore still have it. And this policy explains the Newman Club alumni, those secularly-educated thousands who are, in name, Catholic, but who are, in sympathy, outlook, judgment, appreciation, manner, in their very impulse, non-Catholic, and what is worse, unconcerned that this is the case.
The declared purpose of the Newman Club movement is, “the religious, intellectual, and social betterment of its members.” Understood, is the qualification, “provided such betterment in no way interferes with that primary consideration, the Catholic student’s acquisition of a secular college degree.” Thus, the effectiveness of a Newman Club as a secular college is the effectiveness of the boy who held his finger in the leaking dike, hoping to keep back the flood which was pouring in over the top.
Our necessary conclusion? We prefer degree-less Catholics to drowned ones.