“Conservative” Catholics who are not to be trusted

In his July 10 blog entry at his magazine First Things, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus talks about the late sociologist Philip Rieff, and Rieff’s great pessimism about the state of our culture:

I’m still reading [Rieff’s] last book, but I think Rieff is saying that it’s all over. I don’t think he’s right about that. I hope he’s not right about that. But he could be right about that. At the very least, it is a possibility to be considered when proposed by one so thoughtful as Philip Rieff. Christ never said of Western Civilization that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

Leaving aside the fact that Rieff hated the Christian civilization of the West and is hardly a reliable guide on cultural matters, it is of course true that Christ never said that the gates of hell shall not prevail against Western Civilization; he said they shall not prevail against the Church, which, of course, for Catholics, means the Catholic Church. But why would Neuhaus bother uttering this truism in this context, unless to signal that he’s not committed to defending the West and America, that he’s getting ready to surrender?

As the numerically superior Moslem army was sweeping into central France in 732, would Charles Martel have said, “Christ never said of the Frankish empire that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”? After the Continental Army had retreated across Delaware in December 1776 and was facing imminent dissolution, would George Washington have said, “Christ never said of the United States of America that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”? When the German Luftwaffe was on the verge of breaking the Royal Air Force in the summer of 1940 leaving Britain defenseless against German invasion, would Winston Churchill have said, “Christ never said of Great Britain that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”? No. These leaders, both Catholic and Protestant, knew the Bible and knew what Christ had said. Yet each of them had committed his entire being to the defense of his country and his civilization. But Richard Neuhaus, instead of saying he will fight to the end to defend our culture, smugly remarks that the West was never guaranteed to survive anyway. He could only make such a gratuitous comment if his aim was to let on that he himself does not care enough about our culture to try to preserve it, especially when the odds appear to be against it.

It is time to recognize that certain conservative and neoconservative Catholics—their numbers include Neuhaus, his managing editor Joseph Bottom (a long-time regular at The Weekly Standard), and his contributors George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard University—do not at bottom believe in the United States or in the West. They only believe in the Catholic Church. It’s not just that the Church represents to them, as it ought to do, a higher, spiritual loyalty beyond this world. It’s that the Church represents their highest earthly and political loyalty, trumping any loyalty to the U.S. If this were not true, Neuhaus would not have made the unworthy comment he made above. If this were not true, Joseph Bottom would not have said that excluding prospective Muslims immigrants from the U.S. would make us as “immoral” as the Muslim jihadists. If this were not true, Mary Ann Glendon would not have obediently echoed a group of American and Mexican bishops who have urged that America, as the “strong,” must open its borders to 40 million Mexicans, “the weak.” And if this were not true, George Weigel would not have said that American national identity must play second fiddle to the Catholic duty to be “generous” to non-Western immigrants.

The problem of open-borders, anti-American, leftist Jews is well known. The problem of open-borders, anti-American, “conservative” Catholics is not so well known, but may be equally serious.

- end of initial entry -

Karen writes:

All the examples you quote in this post, except the Moslem invasion of France, were fought by Protestants and not by Roman Catholics. Roman Catholic nations caved in to Hitler (France, Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia) and none of the RC countries has been a major military or economic power in recent times with the exception of France. Rome likes the power of numbers. Roman Catholics are taught not to question the teachings of their priests and bishops and whenever RCs are allowed to enter a largely Protestant nation, they are subversive. Hence it is in the interest of Rome to flood the USA with RCs from Latin America. Latin America and the Philippines are the Vatican’s largest dioceses.

LA replies:

But you’re leaving out some of the greatest examples of courageous Catholic resistance to enemies of the West: Catholic Europe against the Muslims (Charles Martel at Tours/Poitier in 732 and the Poles at Vienna in 1683); Catholic Europe against the Slavic barbarians; Catholic Europe against the German barbarians (three generations of ceaseless struggle by the Carolingians to Christianize and civilize Germany); Catholic Europe against the Viking barbarians (they lost that one but the Vikings ultimately settled down and became Catholics); Catholic Poles against the Communist Russia circa 1919 (when they defeated a Communist invasion and forced Lenin to give up his idea of an immediate world revolution); and Catholic Poles against the Soviet Union in the 1980s (when Solidarity delivered to the Soviet empire what turned out to be its mortal wound).

Howard Sutherland writes:

More loyal to the Church than to America? Probably. But unfortunately the Church they are loyal to is the post-Vatican II, fanatically ecumenist neo-Catholic church that is busy cutting itself off from Catholic tradition.

FD writes:

Your criticism of certain Catholic intellectuals is largely fair but I am surprised that you even posted the comment by Karen that is so transparently informed, if that’s the word, by reflexive anti-papism. I commend you for pointing out the numerous historical instances of Catholic nations standing firm against barbarism of the ancient or modern kind. If I may, I would like to add that referring to Poland as “caving in” to Hitler, as Karen does, is either brazenly slanderous or breathtakingly ignorant. Poland fought with all available forces in 1939, facing not one but two totalitarian aggressors (the Soviet Union having invaded on September 17). For this it received only lip service from its ostensible allies, Britain and France. After the inevitable defeat many soldiers escaped to fight on with the Allies in just about every theater of the war, forming multiple divisions and brigades. Polish pilots shot down over ten percent of German aircraft during the Battle of Britain. And I won’t even mention the underground army that heroically fought on against the singularly brutal occupation at home. The Poles’ Catholicism was hugely significant as a motivating force in all of this.

Thank you for your thought-provoking writing.

LA replies:

Thanks to F.D. particularly for the correction about Poland in World War II. However, while I don’t agree with all of Karen’s characterizations, why should I not have posted her comment? She has a view that is, we would all agree, highly critical of and even hostile toward the Catholic Church, but (1) it is a view with a long provenance in Anglo-American Protestant civilization (it could even be called “traditional,” just as there was, and still is in some quarters, a traditional Catholic hostility against Protestantism); (2) there are many sound reasons for being opposed to today’s Catholic Church, particularly because of its ecumenism toward the non-West and its hostility to Western nationhood; (3) her view is out in the open and is not expressed in an offensive or unpublishable way; and (4) to the extent that she exaggerates or overstates or is just plain wrong, others are free to correct her. Furthermore, without her charge of a historic pattern of Catholic passivity and surrender to enemies of the West, I wouldn’t have been spurred to catalog some of the many great historic instances of successful Catholic defense of the West.

Gintas writes:

To say that Poland, France, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, Finland, Hungary, and Rumania “caved” in to Hitler is simply ludicrous. For some reason Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland didn’t. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, and Poland “caved” in their own way to the Russians. To blame Catholicism for European countries “caving” in to Hitler is absolute balderdash.

To accuse the Poles of caving! My oh my oh my.

The Germans in early WWII revolutionized land warfare, and our American army still wages war the way the Germans did: highly mobile forces with airpower as the key factor. There was little caving going on.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

I notice that Karen declines to mention that Germany was and is a Protestant country, and that Hitler’s legions were unleashed first on Catholic Poland, then Catholic France.

It’s hard even to know where to begin refuting the notion that the Church has somehow been a constant enemy of the very civilization it built. Typical of simple-mindedly anti-clerical British and American Protestants, she behaves as though pre-Reformation Christianity simply never happened, and that the Church is some bizarre alien presence in the heart of the Christendom it has built, shaped, guided, defined, and defended for millennia. Pre-Reformation heroes such as Martel and even more recent heroes such as Jan Sobieski, who defeated the Turks at Vienna in 1683, are also entirely beyond her historical field of vision.

LA comments:

There is something to be said for the idea that most modern Americans (Karen is English by the way) are ignorant of and hostile to everything in Europe between the end of the Classical period and (alternatively) the Renaissance, the Reformation, or the Enlightenment, a period of 900 to 1,200 years that they have been taught to see as nothing but darkness and superstition. It’s a major problem. Whether one is Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or secular, one’s sense of Western patriotism is going to be stifled and incomplete if one lacks at least some knowledge of and a sense of identification with European civilization over the last two millennia, particularly the Middle Ages when the West was Christendom and Christendom was at its height. Westminster Abbey, built in the 13th century, is the product of a culture that may have been rough and brutal in all kinds of ways, but, at its core, was also much higher than our own. If the West is not just ideas and principles, but something concrete that we belong to, what is that something? To me, it is Christian and Western civilization and the peoples who created it, plus their Classical and Hebraic antecedents.

Gintas writes:

I have Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Liberty or Equality. K-L was an Austrian Catholic, I believe, and it’s a very pro-Catholic book; I think he traces the genealogy of Nazism back to Luther. I think many Catholics might trace a lot of problems back to Luther…. I myself am not a Catholic.

On pages 225-227 he has three maps of Germany. The first one is the percentage of population in Germany that is Catholic, wherein we see the south and West of Germany is dominated by Catholics. The rest is not, but Silesia is. The second map is a map of how Germans voted for the Nazi party. It’s roughly an inverse of the first. The third map is how Germans voted for Communists, it’s not a similar pattern at all.

His point is that it was “the Protestant areas, with exceedingly few exceptions, who were the main “producers” of the Nazi votes. In those Protestant districts where the Nazis were relatively few, we find a high percentage of Communist votes.” (p. 217)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 11, 2006 01:32 PM | Send