Keys of This Blood

by Malachi Martin

  In the fall of 1958, the smiling, rotund little Cardinal of Bergamesque peasant stock, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, was elected to the papacy as John XXIII. Within a scant three months of his election, Pope John stunned his Catholic hierarchy and the entire world with the announcement that he would convene the twenty-first ecumenical council in the two-thousand-year history of the Catholic Church. The Second Vatican Council.

  With that announcement, there came a sort of undeclared truce in the deep and professional enmity long held by the Vatican and the Church against Marxism and the Soviet Union. For all the decades since Lenin’s coup d’état of 1917 and right through the papacy of Pope Pius XII, the Soviet Union and its Marxism were considered and described as the enemy of Catholicism and the seedbed of anti-Christ.

  During the three years of preparation for the Council that followed his initial announcement, however, Pope John reversed that policy for the first time. For one of his principal aims was to convince Nikita Khrushchev to allow two Russian Orthodox clerics from the USSR to attend his Council in Rome as observers.

  The Pope’s idea was much more open than Gramsci’s backhanded blueprint for cultural penetration; and it was far more benign, as well. The Pontiff’s idea in calling the Council together at all was that the Holy Spirit would inspire all who attended with renewed vigor of faith and renewed evangelism around the world, and he wanted to include the Soviet Union in that renewal.

  Pope John paid more than one stiff price for Khrushchev’s agreement to send those two Soviet clerics as observers. And one price was the opening of the first serious breach in the Catholic bulwark against Communism. For, at Khrushchev’s insistence, the Pontiff secretly agreed that his upcoming Council would not issue a condemnation of Marxism and the Communist state.

  Such an agreement was a huge papal concession; for precisely such condemnations had always been included as standard fare in any Vatican or Roman Catholic commentary on the world at large. And the scope of Vatican II, as the Council was quickly dubbed, was certainly intended to include the world at large.

  Another price Pope John paid came as a deep disappointment to millions of faithful and expectant Catholics around the world, and came to be seen by them as another breach in the Catholic anti-Communist rampart. A powerful Church tradition had it that if, in the year 1960, the reigning Pope would perform a public act consecrating the Soviet Union to the protection of the Virgin Mary, the USSR would be converted from its official hard-core atheism, and a long period of world peace would ensue.

  As it turned out, John XXIII was that Pope. But in the circumstances, he felt that to carry out such a public act would be to declare war all over again on Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, branding it anew, and on an international stage, as a nest of atheists. “This step is not for our time,” Pope John observed privately, and he shelved the whole proposition.

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  Vatican II consisted of four sessions, and spanned more than three years, from the fall of 1962 until December 1965. By the time it ended, John XXIII and Nikita Khrushchev were both dead. And the story of the Church in the following twenty-five years became the story of the secularization of Roman Catholicism.

  Very soon after the first Council session convened, the breach already opened by John in his agreement with Khrushchev was widened. More than five hundred of the bishops attending—well in excess of the quorum required—proposed that the Council issue a condemnation of atheistic Communism and its Marxist ideology. The proposal was unilaterally quashed by Vatican authorities, and so never made it to the floor of the Council for a final vote.

  For the most part, the other concerns of the Council, as expressed in the documents that did come to a successful vote, seemed legitimate enough to the average observer—which is to say, they appeared to be properly pastoral in intent and purpose.

  In its survey of the contemporary world, for example, what could have been more pastoral than for the Council to single out the poor—and particularly the poor of the Third World—as especially deserving of attention by the Church?

  The document on religious liberty did seem a little dicey to some, declaring as it did the principle that everyone should be free from any constraint in religious matters, including the choice and the practice of whatever religion one might care to select. Couldn’t this be taken to mean that you need not become a Roman Catholic to be saved from Hell-fire? Many have so interpreted it. Still, the ayes had it.

  Then, too, there was the curious question of ecumenism. Traditionally, the terms “ecumenism” and “ecumenical” had referred exclusively to Christians, and specifically to the matter of reunification among the separated Christian churches.

  Before the end of the fourth and final session of Vatican II—presided over by Pope John’s successor, Paul VI—some bishops and Vatican personnel had already adopted entirely new and innovative meanings for the idea of ecumenism. The powerful Augustin Cardinal Bea, for example, was a leading figure at the Council and a close adviser to Paul VI, as he had been to Pope John. Bea was seen as the Vatican’s own spearhead in what came to be nothing less than an ecumenical revolution. The Cardinal organized “ecumenical gatherings” that included not only Roman Catholics and Protestants as usual, but Jews and Muslims as well. In time, as was only logical, Buddhists, Shintoists, animists and a host of other non-Christian and even nonreligious groups would find a place in the poorly and broadly defined new “ecumenism.”

  In such various ways—sometimes open, sometimes very subtle indeed—was the breach steadily widened in what had for so long been the Catholic bulwark against Communism. By December of 1965, when the Council ended its final session, the groundwork had been laid for the key transformations in faith and in practice that were to follow in its wake.

  As reigning Pope, Paul VI gave a farewell address to the departing bishops of the Council on December 5. That speech provided the broad philosophic and quasi-theological umbrella beneath which secularism within the Roman Church would be protected from the storm of protest and outrage mounted by traditional Catholics in the years following the Council.

  While the Catholic faithful were protesting, that same speech was used by the heirs of Antonio Gramsci to drive a coach-and-four as handsomely as you please through the worldwide structural organization of the Roman Catholic Church.

  Pope Paul VI told the departing bishops that their Church had decided to opt for man; to serve man, to help him build his home on this earth. Man with his ideas and his aims, man with his hopes and his fears, man in his difficulties and sufferings—that was the centerpiece of the Church’s interest, said the Pontiff to his bishops.

  So pointedly did the Pope elaborate on that theme of the Church’s devotion to subserve material human interests that Gramsci himself could not have written a better papal script for the secularization of Roman Catholic institutions or for the de-Catholicization of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, clergy and faithful.

  By the mid-1960s, then—with Brezhnev at the helm of the Leninist geopolitical structure, and with Paul VI at the helm of the Roman Catholic georeligious structure—it appeared that the ghost of Antonio Gramsci had all but won the day. In Moscow, his doctrine of revolution through disguised and clandestine penetration of capitalist populations had come out on top in the political wars of the Leninist-Marxist leadership. And in Rome, the Second Vatican Council had handed over the keys to the millennial faith of the Catholic Church, and to the culture that had for a thousand years been the living expression of that faith.

  What happened to the Roman Catholic Church in the decades following the Second Vatican Council also happened to the majority of mainline Protestant churches. With partial and self-serving interpretations of Pope Paul’s formula as their armor, and the vague wording of the documents produced by the bishops of Vatican II as their justification, new and pointedly secularist heresies swept through Christianity.

  The special attention the bishops had intended that the Church pay to the plight of the poor of the
world was translated into something called the “preferential option for the poor”; and that in turn was taken as a carte blanche mandate for deep political alliances with socialists and Communists, including terrorist groups.

  Paul VI’s emphasis on human interest became the basis for discarding sacrifice and prayer and faith and the Sacraments of the Church as the watchwords of hope in this world. They were replaced by human solidarity, which became the aim and the centerpiece of Catholic striving.

  Ecumenism was no longer an attempt to heal the heretical and schismatic rifts that over the centuries had split the one Church Christ had founded on the Rock of Simon Peter’s central office. Ecumenism was a means not of genuine healing but of leveling differences of whatever kind between all Christian believers and nonbelievers. That fit nicely with the new central aim of human solidarity as the hope of mankind.

  The fundamental struggle in which the Church and all Catholics were engaged was no longer the personal war between Christ as Savior and Lucifer as the Cosmic Adversary of the Most High in the quest for men’s souls. The struggle was no longer on the supernatural plane at all, in fact. It was in the material circumstances of the tangible, sociopolitical here and now. It was the class struggle Marx and Lenin had propounded as the only worthwhile combat zone for humans.

  Liberation was, therefore, no longer release from sin and its dire effects. It was the struggle against oppression by big capital and by the authoritarian colonialist powers of the West—particularly the United States as the archvillain of all human history.

  Within five years of the end of Vatican II, by the dawn of the 1970s, the whole of Latin America was being flooded with a new theology—Liberation Theology—in which basic Marxism was smartly decked out in traditional Christian vocabulary and retooled Christian concepts. Books written mainly by co-opted Catholic priests, together with political and revolutionary action manuals, saturated the volatile area of Latin America, where over 367 million Catholics included the lowest and poorest strata of society—that ninety percent of the population which had no concrete hope of any economic betterment for themselves or their children.

  Liberation Theology was a perfectly faithful exercise of Gramsci’s principles. It could be launched with the corruption of a relatively few well-placed Judas goats. Yet it could be aimed at the culture and the mentality of the masses. It stripped both of any attachment to the Christian transcendent. It locked both the individual and his culture in the close embrace of a goal that was totally immanent: the class struggle for sociopolitical liberation.

  Swiftly, the linchpins of Vatican and papal control were replaced by the action-oriented demands of the new theology. The most powerful religious orders of the Roman Church—Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, Maryknollers—all committed themselves to Liberation Theology. In Rome and in the worldwide field of their apostolates, the policies and the actions of these religious orders became the lifeblood of the rising colossus of Liberation Theology.

  Corruption of the best is the worst corruption. It was not long before a majority of diocesan bishops—not only in Latin America but in Europe and the United States, as well—were swept up in the new theology of this-worldly liberation. The entire effort was helped along by the careful and intricate networking of Catholic dioceses by a new creation: the Base Community. Essentially composed of lay Catholics, each Base Community decided how to pray, what priests to accept, what bishops—if any—would have authority, what sort of liturgy they would tolerate. All reference to traditional Catholic theology and to Rome’s central authority was considered secondary, if not altogether superfluous.

  The Base Communities in Latin America—riddled with Liberation Theology and openly Marxist in their political philosophy—were pronounced in their hatred of the United States. They were stubborn in their attachment to the Soviet Union. And they were fierce in their preference for violent revolution—the one non-Gramscian note in an otherwise faithful adherence to his blueprint.

  The accelerating spread of both Liberation Theology and Base Communities was boosted beyond measure by several factors. But among the most important was the string of Peace and Justice Commissions—branch offices, as one might say, of the central Commission in Rome—that existed throughout the worldwide dioceses of the Roman Church. These commissions became powerful allies of Liberation Theology. Manned mostly by clerics, nuns and laity who were already convinced Marxists, they turned themselves into centers for the dissemination of the new theology. They ate up Vatican funds to pay for congresses, conventions, bureaucratic trips and a flood of printed materials—all of it aimed squarely at the reeducation of the faithful.

  In the United States and Europe, meanwhile, the poor were too small in numbers, too isolated and too uninterested to serve as a primary target of Gramscian opportunity. No matter. For in both areas there were major seminaries that were already antipapal in their sentiment and antitraditional in their theology. They rapidly enshrined Liberation Theology as the new way of thinking about all the old questions. Reference to Catholic theology and to orthodox Roman teaching went out the window.

  The process of secularization in the Catholic and Protestant churches progressed so rapidly and with such energy that, just as Gramsci had foreseen, it fed into other streams of anti-Church influence in the West. Those were streams that, seemingly independent of Marxist influence, advocated a materialistic interpretation of all sectors of human thought, investigation and action.

  At some date toward the end of the sixties, it had already become evident to a surprisingly cohesive minority that the technical solution to the problems of overpopulation and the rising costs of living could lie only in contraception and abortion. The push was quickly mounted to count those solutions as part and parcel of basic human rights. Legislative measures had to be taken, of course, to have such measures officially declared as human rights. Accordingly, legislative approval and sanction for contraception and abortion were widely proposed throughout the West by movements other than Communist parties, movements that had become strange allies indeed.

  The flood tide of secularism was not all legalistic and legislative, however. As time went on, the academic faculties of Europe and America, already proud of their position in the vanguard of liberal and forward-looking political thinking, took like ducks to the rising tide of Marxist interpretations of history, law, religion and scientific inquiry. The complexion of education in everything from genetics to sociology and psychology became decidedly, and often exclusively, materialistic.

  Everything now seemed to proceed on the principle that all the puzzles of humankind and all the problems of human life had to be solved without any admixture of the transcendent. All the meaning of human life and the answer to every human hope were contained within the boundaries of the visible, tangible, material world of the here and now.

  As John Paul II settled into the Apostolic Palace in Rome as successor to Paul VI and the short-lived John Paul I—by the end of the 1970s and into the early 1980s—the many and varied streams of materialist influence had already broken over their banks and flooded into the general landscape of Western culture. Everything seemed to coalesce in Gramsci’s favor.

  Christian-Marxist dialogues and conventions were everywhere. The influence of the unequivocally Marxist and pro-Soviet World Council of Churches went through the roof. Traditional principles of education collapsed in Catholic schools, from primary through university levels. The refusal of Western bishops to insist on obedience of the faithful to Church laws about divorce, abortion, contraception and homosexuality became the norm, not the exception. Everywhere, in fact, there was a massive lethal thrust, on Antonio Gramsci’s terms, at the Catholic and Christian culture of the West nations.

  By the time John Paul II came to the papacy, in fact, it was no longer even a secret that echelons of clerics in the Vatican itself had been deeply affected. Indeed, perhaps the profoundest victory of the Gramscian process was visible primarily in the mind-boggling confusion, ambigui
ty and fluidity that was already the hallmark of Rome’s reaction to the rapid de-Catholicizing of the Church, as well as of Vatican dealings with bishops who sometimes openly declared their independence from papal authority. To a large degree, papal and Vatican control had been effectively removed from the georeligious machinery of the Roman Catholic Church.

  Pope John Paul did not arrive from Poland unaware. He understood better than most what had happened to his Church in the West. He was, in fact, probably the only major non-Communist world leader who knew the contribution Antonio Gramsci had made to operational Marxism around the world, and who understood both the murky process he had advocated and the Leninist machinery in which that process was now enshrined.

  Nevertheless, if John Paul had hoped that in his five papal trips to Latin America, he could put a dent in the allegiance of his clergy there to Liberation Theology, or that he could recall his bishops and his religious orders in the region to their vows of obedience, he was disappointed in those hopes. No papal exhortations in public or in private, and no directives by his Vatican, made the slightest substantial difference in the situation there.

  Indeed, by 1987, the pro-Soviet and violence-prone Base Communities in Latin America alone numbered over 600,000. By comparison, there were not even 1,000 Roman Catholic dioceses in North and South America combined—and virtually all of those were at least questionable in their allegiance to Rome.

  Finally, even in such countries of the Catholic heartland as Italy and Spain, there was nothing to stand in the way of the legalization of divorce and the liberalization of all Christian-based laws and moral constraints, including the most basic and personal ones concerning family, sexuality and pornography.

  Inevitably, as the 1980s progressed, non-Marxist streams of influence were increasingly and ever more rapidly affected by Gramscian penetration and cooperation. The “liberalized” culture of the West nations essentially converged with the process of mounting secularization, sharing freely and solidly in the new sacred principle that all the life, activities and hopes of mankind rested on the solid structures of this world alone.