It is no longer possible to deny in good faith that the
Council’s outcome has been the spread of an ecclesial disease that now
affects virtually every region of the Mystical Body, and which both
Maritain and Montini loudly deplored in its earliest stages while
resolutely refusing to acknowledge their own role, and that of the
Council, in the growing debacle.
For more than fifty years, traditionalist commentators, remarking the obvious, have chronicled the resulting ecclesial decline in every department. They have warned unceasingly that the reformist mania the Council unleashed—to the applause of both Maritain and Montini and their fellow deluded “conservative” reformers—would end in final disaster for the human element of the Church. Final disaster has arrived with the out-of-control papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his circle of homosexual and homosexual-enabling collaborators, whom he has systematically elevated to positions of power in service to his veritable dictatorship over the Church.
Admitting precisely what traditionalist observers of this pontificate have been saying about Bergoglio over the past five-and-a-half years, the virulently pro-homosexual Father Thomas Rosica declares: “Pope Francis breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants because he is ‘free from disordered attachments.’ Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.”
What Rosica lauds is nothing other than the attempt to impose a personality cult on the universal Church, unbound by any doctrine or practice the head of the cult deems unacceptable. The “new phase” is in fact the terminal phase of the post-conciliar revolution in the Church.
To recall the prophecy of Our Lady of Good Success:
In order to free men from bondage to these heresies, those whom the merciful love of My Most Holy Son will destine for that restoration will need great strength of will, constancy, valor and confidence in God. To test this faith and confidence of the just, there will be occasions in which everything will seem to be lost and paralyzed. This will be, then, the happy beginning of the complete restoration.
[…]
During this unfortunate epoch, injustice will even enter here, my closed garden. Disguised under the name of false charity, it will wreak havoc in souls. The spiteful demon will try to sow discord, making use of putrid members, who, masked by the appearance of virtue, will be like decaying sepulchers emanating the pestilence of putrefaction, causing moral deaths in some and lukewarmness in others.
[…]
[T]he spirit of impurity that will saturate the atmosphere in those times. Like a filthy ocean, it will inundate the streets, squares and public places with an astonishing liberty. There will be almost no virgin souls in the world.
[…]
How the Church will suffer on that occasion the dark night of the lack of a Prelate and Father to watch over them with paternal love, gentleness, strength, and prudence. Many priests will lose their spirit, placing their souls in great danger. Pray insistently without tiring and weep with bitter tears in the secrecy of your heart, imploring our Celestial Father that, for love of the Eucharistic Heart of my Most Holy Son and His Precious Blood shed with such generosity and by the profound bitterness and sufferings of His cruel Passion and Death, He might take pity on His Ministers and quickly bring to an end those ominous times, sending to this Church the Prelate that will restore the spirit of its Priests.
Maritain’s Papal Disciple
While
he lived to regret the ecclesial ruin he had provoked and then sought
desperately to repair—too little, too late—Pope Montini was a
revolutionary who had been formed by the “conservative” Modernism of
another revolutionary: Jacques Maritain. As Montini famously admitted:
“I am a disciple of Maritain. I will call him my teacher.”[1] Maritain’s Integral Humanism (1936) was nothing less than the “‘petit livre rouge’ (‘little red book’) of a whole generation of Christians.”[2] That is, liberal Catholics like Montini, the child of haute bourgeois “patriots” of the Italian state created by the revolutionary violence of the so-called Risorgimento.
Like Maritain himself, Montini was seduced by the ignis fatuus of a New Age of humanity in which the Church, happily reconciled to pluralist democracy and the modern conception of rights, would be the leaven of a New Christendom, free from the disabling structures of what Maritain dismissed as the surpassed “sacral age” of medieval Christendom to which there could never be a return in any form. Montini and Maritain were typical of the false prophets of modernity who could not see, even as it was happening, what the pre-conciliar Popes readily predicted would happen were the Church ever to accommodate her teaching to the spirit of the age with its non-negotiable demand for the extinction of the Catholic confessional state.
The “First Modern Pope,”[3] the deluded disciple of a deluded layman, would lead the Church on a disastrous deviation from the path of all his predecessors, only to be “confronted with the shattered assumptions of his whole pontificate.”[4] In his The Peasant of the Garrone, published in 1966, Maritain joined Montini in lamenting the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council while absolving it of any blame for the post-conciliar neo-Modernist uprising he deplored even though his own “thought,” which had spawned an international cult of Maritainismo to which Montini belonged, was instrumental in facilitating that uprising during and after the Council.
Maritain and Alinsky
In Peasant, Maritain writes of his own relationship to a fellow revolutionary, Saul Alinsky: I see in the Western world no more than three revolutionaries worthy of the name—Eduardo Frei in Chile, Saul Alinsky in America, ... and myself in France, who am not worth beans, since my call as a philosopher has obliterated my possibilities as an agitator…. Saul Alinsky, who is a great friend of mine, is a courageous and admirably staunch organizer of “people’s communities” and an anti-racist leader whose methods are as effective as they are unorthodox.[5]
Inexplicably enough, Maritain was infatuated with the cigar-chomping, Jewish agnostic community organizer, whom he first met in 1945 during his wartime and post-war sojourn in America. The Maritain scholar Bernard Doering notes that whenever Maritain and Alinsky met, they “spent long hours exploring the democratic dream of people working out their own destiny. Both accepted democracy as the best form of government.”[6]
Alinsky’s vaunted career as a social justice warrior in Chicago, where he developed deep connections with the progressive priests and prelates of the Chicago archdiocese, produced little or nothing in the way of actual justice. But, at the urging of none other than Maritain, he did produce a couple of influential books on how to be an effective rabble-rouser and political dirty trickster in the promotion of socialist causes.
From “the very first days of their friendship in wartime America,” Doering writes, “Maritain had been urging, indeed relentlessly prodding, Alinsky to publish an explanation of his methods of community organization, a kind of handbook for authentic revolution.”
Alinsky wrote his Reveille for Radicals specifically at Maritain’s request, and Alinsky gave him the exclusive rights to the French translation. In a letter of recommendation for a foundation grant to Alinsky, Maritain described him as “practical Thomist”—an example of just how elastic was Maritain’s so-called Thomism. In the same letter, he described Alinsky as “a great soul, a man of profound moral purity…”[7]
It was Maritain who also urged publication of Alinsky’s last work, the infamous Rules for Radicals (1971), which would influence the careers of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Apparently, Maritain either failed to read or decided to overlook much of the content of the book whose publication he would later laud.
Rules is dedicated to “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.” In Rules, Alinsky declares: “Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement.”[8] He then immediately contradicts himself by laying down one dogma after another, including:
1) The “sacred right” to revolution.
2) The dictum that “Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.” “The spiritual life of the Haves,” quoth Alinsky, is merely “a ritualistic justification of their possessions.”
3) Various ethical rules for the social justice warrior, including the right to employ blackmail other immoral means if really necessary to achieve a so-called social justice end.[9]
According to Alinsky’s ethical rules “the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, ‘Does this particular end justify this particular means?’” “Ethical standards,” says Alinsky, “must be elastic to stretch with the times.” “To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles,” he further declared.
Alinsky even quotes Maritain—unfairly and out of context—to support his claim that SJW’s who will not fight dirty have “fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history is not virtue, but a way of escaping virtue.” Ethical judgments, says Alinsky, “must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point,” and “the less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.”[10]
Here is an example of Alinsky’s “moral purity” from the pages of Rules:
In an interview with Playboy Magazine very shortly before his death from a heart attack in 1972 at the age of 63, which interview is part of a declassified FBI file, the man Maritain asked to pray for him declared that he would unhesitatingly choose hell over heaven:
PLAYBOY: Having accepted your own mortality, do ·you believe in any kind of afterlife?
ALINSKY: Sometimes it seems to me that the question people should ask is not “is there life after death?” but “Is there life after birth?” I don't know whether there’s anything after this or not. I haven’t seen the evidence one way or the other and I don't think anybody else has either. But I do know that man’s obsession with the question comes out of his stubborn refusal to face up to his own mortality. Let’s say that if there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to go to hell.
PLAYBOY: Why?
ALINSKY: Hell would be heaven for me. All my life I’ve been with the have-nots. Over here, if you’re a have-not, you’re short of dough. If you’re a have-not in hell, you’re short of virtue. Once I get into hell, I’ll start organizing the have-nots over there.
PLAYBOY: Why them?
ALINSKY: They’re my kind of people.
Alinsky and Montini
The 30-year-long intimate friendship between “old Jacques” and Alinsky gave rise to a connection between Alinsky and Maritain’s foremost disciple, the future Pope Paul VI. Montini was then Archbishop of Milan, to which post he had been sent off without being made a cardinal after Pius XII lost confidence in him on account of his Modernist tendencies.
In his study The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky, P. David Finks notes that “For years Jacques Maritain had spoken approvingly to Montini of the democratic community organizations built by Saul Alinsky.”[14] Accordingly, in 1958 Maritain arranged for a series of meetings between Alinsky and Archbishop Montini in Milan. Before the meetings, Maritain had written to Alinsky to tell him that, as Finks recounts: “the new cardinal was reading Saul’s books and would contact him soon.”[15]
There were three meetings between Montini and Alinsky in Milan during the late spring of 1958.
On June 20, 1958, Alinsky wrote to Maritain: “I had three wonderful meetings with Montini and I am sure that you have heard from him since.”[16] Among the subjects discussed, according to Nicholas Hoffman, was how to counter rising Communist influence in the industrial north of Italy without “reinforcing reactionary elements that had less interest in democracy than in squelching the working man.”[17]
In other words, the old liberal game of using the threat of one political trap to drive the people into the jaws of another: oppose communism with soft socialism, just as socialism had been opposed by the Party of Order in France. And, in fact, soft socialism became Italian policy under the Moro government elected in an alliance with the Socialists in 1963.
We will never know what exactly passed between Montini and Alinsky during those “three wonderful meetings” in Milan, but we do know that upon his return to Chicago from Italy, Alinsky wrote as follows to George Shuster, two days before the papal conclave that elected John XXIII: “No, I don’t know who the next Pope will be, but if it’s to be Montini, the drinks will be on me for years to come.”[18]
What did Alinsky know? What did he learn from his “three wonderful meetings” with the man who was soon to become the First Modern Pope? He learned what Maritain already knew about his disciple: that if and when Montini became Pope, there would be a revolution in the Church.
And so there was. It was Pope Montini who would declare after the Council on the pages of L’Osservatore Romano (July 3, 1974): “The important words of the Council are newness and updating… the word newness has been given to us as an order, as a program.”[19] Never in Church history had a Pope uttered such nonsense in a public address to the Church universal.
As Doering observes: “Every single one of accomplishments of the Second Vatican Council listed by Maritain in the first part of The Peasant of Garrone had been proposed thirty years before in Integral Humanism” as being “prerequisite to a radical revolution and a Christian transformation of the temporal order.”[20]
But the post-conciliar Church witnessed, not a “Christian transformation of the temporal order,” but rather what Maritain himself, writing in 1966, remarked with astonishment as “a complete temporalization of Christianity!”[21]—accompanied by a rapid collapse of Catholic faith and discipline without precedent in Church history.
Both Montini and Maritain were left to wonder why. Of course, this unmitigated disaster could not possibly have had anything to do with what Maritain and his disciple had helped unleash at the Council, whose documents, particularly Gaudium et spes, Dignitatis Humanae and Apostolicam Actuositatem (On the Apostolate of the Laity), breathe Maritain’s “thin” (versus “thick”) Modernism—the very thing Pius XI had reprobated in Ubi Arcano Dei, only 14 years before the appearance of Integral Humanism:
Being the self-deluded visionary that he was, Maritain failed to recognize the historical reality the pre-conciliar Popes had unanimously deplored. The Church had not been freed from her so-called burdens and ties in the Catholic confessional state of the so-called sacral age; rather, they had been ripped from her by force and violence, washed away in rivers of blood as Pope after Pope condemned the destroyers of Christian civilization and the fatal errors on which their new order was based. What Maritain hailed, then, was the Church’s formal surrender to political modernity.
And yet, in the same book, published only a year after the Council’s close, Maritain lamented an ecclesial development he had never noticed before the Council. It seemed that the Church was suddenly kneeling before the world: “The present crisis has many diverse aspects. One of the most curious spectacles it offers us is a kind of kneeling before the world, which is revealed in a thousand ways.”[24]
Maritain had observed no such kneeling only four years earlier at the Council’s commencement, but he failed or refused to link this emergent situation in any way to the Council’s vaunted “opening” to the very world before which so many Catholic churchmen were suddenly bending the knee. On the contrary, he hastened to exonerate the Council:
Despite his insistence on absolving the Council of any complicity in the sudden “temporalization of Christianity,” Maritain had earlier admitted even during the Council that something was seriously amiss with its proceedings. Writing in early 1964 to another of his intimate friends, Julien Green, the French-American novelist and closeted homosexual, Maritain confided the following about what was happening the Council hall:
Montini, simply refused to see this.
Perhaps it was only fitting that none other than the duo of Maritain and Montini would rush to salvage the legacy of their precious Council by means of Pope Paul’s Credo of the People of God. As Sandro Magister reveals in an important essay, during the previous year, just after publication of Peasant, the then 85-year-old Maritain heard from Cardinal Journet that he was about to meet with the Pope concerning the already chaotic post-conciliar state of the Church, which included publication of the radically heretical Dutch Catechism.
Maritain wrote back to say that he had an idea: “The Sovereign Pontiff should draft a complete and detailed profession of faith, in which everything that is really contained in the Symbol of Nicea would be presented explicitly. This will be, in the history of the Church, the profession of faith of Paul VI.”[27]
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Journet presented Maritain’s suggestion to the Pope during his meeting in January of 1968, during which he told Paul that the state of the Church was “tragic,” with the Dutch even daring to “substitute one orthodoxy for another in the Church, a modern orthodoxy for the traditional orthodoxy” as the Pope’s commission on the Dutch catechism warned him.
In the midst of what was already a doctrinal emergency, the first Synod of Bishops, meeting in Rome in September of 1967, had already presented Paul with “a declaration on the essential points of the faith” he would be well advised to reaffirm. Paul VI met again with Cardinal Journet, telling him that he and Maritain [!] should “prepare for me an outline of what you think should be done.”
Maritain then drafted a profession of faith based on the Nicene Creed, sending it to Journet who gave it to Montini. Maritain’s draft, with almost no emendations, became the Credo of the People of God, solemnly proclaimed by Pope Paul on June 30, 1968. Maritain realized that Paul VI had essentially used his draft when he read the text of the Credo in the newspaper.
Consider the staggering implications: Less than three years after the close of the great Second Vatican Council, endlessly vaunted for having eschewed any mere restatement of Catholic doctrine and dogma in favor of a new and vital formulation of the Faith that would appeal to the itching ears of “contemporary man,” Montini had to publish an emergency text that was precisely a restatement of Catholic doctrine and dogma—drafted by the layman who was his mentor!
In the immortal words of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre after he saw a demonstration of the New Mass concocted by Bugnini’s Consilium: “Is this for real?”
Conclusion: The Bitter Harvest of a Revolutionary Fellowship
The relationship between Maritain, Montini and Alinsky was an early reflection of the de facto fusion of the human element of the Church with the world—the “temporalization of Christianity” Maritain was forced to recognize—that has since characterized the post-conciliar crisis as a whole. Thus was the New York Times able to observe early in the Bergoglian pontificate that none other than Barack Obama had “fit seamlessly into a 1980s Catholic cityscape forged by the spirit of Vatican II, the influence of liberation theology and the progressivism of Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin, the archbishop of Chicago, who called for a ‘consistent ethic of life’ that wove life and social justice into a ‘seamless garment.’”[28]
The Times notes that Obama, the young community organizer in Chicago’s progressive Catholic environment, which Saul Alinsky was instrumental in creating, was mentored by Gregory Galluzzo, “a former Jesuit priest and disciple of the organizer Saul Alinsky.” Obama even “had a small office with two cloudy glass-block windows on the ground floor of Holy Rosary, a handsome red brick parish on the South Side, where he would pop down the hall to the office of the Rev. William Stenzel, raise a phantom cigarette to his lips and ask, ‘Want to go out for lunch?’”.
As the Times further observes, while operating on a grant from the Archdiocese of Chicago, “Obama became a familiar face in South Side black parishes. At Holy Angels Church, considered a center of black Catholic life, he talked to the pastor and the pastor’s adopted son about finding families willing to adopt troubled children.
At Our Lady of the Gardens, he attended peace and black history Masses and conferred with the Rev. Dominic Carmon on programs to battle unemployment and violence. At the neo-Gothic St. Sabina, he struck up a friendship with the Rev. Michael L. Pfleger, the firebrand [i.e., ultra-Modernist dissenter from doctrine and dogma] white pastor of one of the city’s largest black parishes.”
As a Senator in the Illinois State Senate, Obama, the social justice warrior from Alinsky’s Chicago and Bernadin’s corrupt, homosexual-infested Archdiocese, would refuse to support the Born Alive Protection Act, presented to the state legislature when it was revealed that the survivors of late-term induced abortions in Chicago hospitals were being left to die after delivery.[29]
As President of the United States he would defend “partial birth abortion,” the compulsory subsidy of contraception by Catholic nuns, and federal “guidelines” for “transgender bathrooms” in public schools. And today, the Catholic bishops of America, most of whom probably voted for Obama, are united in the conviction that Donald Trump, usurper of the New World Order, must be stopped.
Behold the last and bitter harvest of a revolutionary fellowship between Catholic churchmen and the world, exampled early on by the link between Jacques Maritain, Saul Alinsky and “the First Modern Pope.”
_______________________
[1] In Catherine M.A. McAuliffe, “Jacques Maritain’s Embrace of Religious Pluralism and the Declaration on Religious Freedom”, 41 Seton Hall Law Review 593 (2011) at 610.
[2]Ibid., p. 598.
[3]From the title of Peter Hebblethwaite’s definitive biography of Montini.
[4]Romano Amerio, Iota Unum (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 1996), p. 68.
[5]Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garrone (Eugene Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 1966), p. 23 & n. 16.
[6]Bernard Doering, “Jacques Maritain and His Two Authentic Revolutionaries,” 96 (archival article, State University of New York at Stony Brook).
[7]Bernard Doering, The Philosopher and the Provacateur: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), xx.
[8]Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 4.
[9]Ibid., Chapter 2 (“Means and Ends”).
[10]Ibid., 34.
[11]Ibid., pp. 93-94.
[12]Doering, op. cit., 110.
[13]Ibid., 112.
[14]P. David Finks, The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), p. 114.
[15]Ibid., p. 115.
[16]Bernard Doering, The Philosopher and the Provacateur: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p.79.
[17]Nicholas von Hoffman, Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky (New York: Nation Books, 2010), 186.
[18]Finks, op. cit., p. 115.
[19]Amerio, op. cit., p. 112.
[20]Doering, op. cit. xiii.
[21]Ibid., p. 56.
[22]Ubi Arcano Dei (1922), nn. 60-61 [paragraph breaks added]
[23] Peasant, p. 4.
[24]Ibid., p. 53.
[25]Ibid., p. 63.
[26]Maritain to Green, February 13, 1964 in The Story of Two Souls: the Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Julien Green (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988), 201-202.
[27]Sandro Magister, The Credo of Paul VI, who wrote it and why,” June 6, 2008 http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/204969bdc4.html?eng=y; accessed on June 26, 2018.
[28]Jason Horowitz, “The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Social Activism,” March 22, 2014 @www.nytimes.com/2014/03 /23/us/the-catholic-roots-of-obamas-activism.html; accessed on July 22, 2018.
[29]“Former Nurse on Obama’s Controversial Abortion Vote,” Fox News, August 21, 2008 @ www.foxnews. com/ story/2008/08/21/former-nurse-on-obama-controversial-abortion-vote.html
For more than fifty years, traditionalist commentators, remarking the obvious, have chronicled the resulting ecclesial decline in every department. They have warned unceasingly that the reformist mania the Council unleashed—to the applause of both Maritain and Montini and their fellow deluded “conservative” reformers—would end in final disaster for the human element of the Church. Final disaster has arrived with the out-of-control papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his circle of homosexual and homosexual-enabling collaborators, whom he has systematically elevated to positions of power in service to his veritable dictatorship over the Church.
Admitting precisely what traditionalist observers of this pontificate have been saying about Bergoglio over the past five-and-a-half years, the virulently pro-homosexual Father Thomas Rosica declares: “Pope Francis breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants because he is ‘free from disordered attachments.’ Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.”
What Rosica lauds is nothing other than the attempt to impose a personality cult on the universal Church, unbound by any doctrine or practice the head of the cult deems unacceptable. The “new phase” is in fact the terminal phase of the post-conciliar revolution in the Church.
The Revolutionary Fellowship of Pope Montini, Jacques
Maritain and Saul Alinsky
The next phase in Church history will be a total
restoration of every single element of Tradition the revolution has
overthrown. But it now appears that this inevitable restoration will
have to involve a divine intervention of the most dramatic sort, for
aside from a few remaining traditionalist communities the human element
of the Church, from the head on down, has rendered itself incapable of
turning definitively away from what has been done or allowed to be done
in the name of the most unfortunate ecumenical council in Church
history. To recall the prophecy of Our Lady of Good Success:
In order to free men from bondage to these heresies, those whom the merciful love of My Most Holy Son will destine for that restoration will need great strength of will, constancy, valor and confidence in God. To test this faith and confidence of the just, there will be occasions in which everything will seem to be lost and paralyzed. This will be, then, the happy beginning of the complete restoration.
[…]
During this unfortunate epoch, injustice will even enter here, my closed garden. Disguised under the name of false charity, it will wreak havoc in souls. The spiteful demon will try to sow discord, making use of putrid members, who, masked by the appearance of virtue, will be like decaying sepulchers emanating the pestilence of putrefaction, causing moral deaths in some and lukewarmness in others.
[…]
[T]he spirit of impurity that will saturate the atmosphere in those times. Like a filthy ocean, it will inundate the streets, squares and public places with an astonishing liberty. There will be almost no virgin souls in the world.
[…]
How the Church will suffer on that occasion the dark night of the lack of a Prelate and Father to watch over them with paternal love, gentleness, strength, and prudence. Many priests will lose their spirit, placing their souls in great danger. Pray insistently without tiring and weep with bitter tears in the secrecy of your heart, imploring our Celestial Father that, for love of the Eucharistic Heart of my Most Holy Son and His Precious Blood shed with such generosity and by the profound bitterness and sufferings of His cruel Passion and Death, He might take pity on His Ministers and quickly bring to an end those ominous times, sending to this Church the Prelate that will restore the spirit of its Priests.
Maritain’s Papal Disciple
While
he lived to regret the ecclesial ruin he had provoked and then sought
desperately to repair—too little, too late—Pope Montini was a
revolutionary who had been formed by the “conservative” Modernism of
another revolutionary: Jacques Maritain. As Montini famously admitted:
“I am a disciple of Maritain. I will call him my teacher.”[1] Maritain’s Integral Humanism (1936) was nothing less than the “‘petit livre rouge’ (‘little red book’) of a whole generation of Christians.”[2] That is, liberal Catholics like Montini, the child of haute bourgeois “patriots” of the Italian state created by the revolutionary violence of the so-called Risorgimento.Like Maritain himself, Montini was seduced by the ignis fatuus of a New Age of humanity in which the Church, happily reconciled to pluralist democracy and the modern conception of rights, would be the leaven of a New Christendom, free from the disabling structures of what Maritain dismissed as the surpassed “sacral age” of medieval Christendom to which there could never be a return in any form. Montini and Maritain were typical of the false prophets of modernity who could not see, even as it was happening, what the pre-conciliar Popes readily predicted would happen were the Church ever to accommodate her teaching to the spirit of the age with its non-negotiable demand for the extinction of the Catholic confessional state.
The “First Modern Pope,”[3] the deluded disciple of a deluded layman, would lead the Church on a disastrous deviation from the path of all his predecessors, only to be “confronted with the shattered assumptions of his whole pontificate.”[4] In his The Peasant of the Garrone, published in 1966, Maritain joined Montini in lamenting the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council while absolving it of any blame for the post-conciliar neo-Modernist uprising he deplored even though his own “thought,” which had spawned an international cult of Maritainismo to which Montini belonged, was instrumental in facilitating that uprising during and after the Council.
Maritain and Alinsky
In Peasant, Maritain writes of his own relationship to a fellow revolutionary, Saul Alinsky: I see in the Western world no more than three revolutionaries worthy of the name—Eduardo Frei in Chile, Saul Alinsky in America, ... and myself in France, who am not worth beans, since my call as a philosopher has obliterated my possibilities as an agitator…. Saul Alinsky, who is a great friend of mine, is a courageous and admirably staunch organizer of “people’s communities” and an anti-racist leader whose methods are as effective as they are unorthodox.[5]
Inexplicably enough, Maritain was infatuated with the cigar-chomping, Jewish agnostic community organizer, whom he first met in 1945 during his wartime and post-war sojourn in America. The Maritain scholar Bernard Doering notes that whenever Maritain and Alinsky met, they “spent long hours exploring the democratic dream of people working out their own destiny. Both accepted democracy as the best form of government.”[6]
Alinsky’s vaunted career as a social justice warrior in Chicago, where he developed deep connections with the progressive priests and prelates of the Chicago archdiocese, produced little or nothing in the way of actual justice. But, at the urging of none other than Maritain, he did produce a couple of influential books on how to be an effective rabble-rouser and political dirty trickster in the promotion of socialist causes.
From “the very first days of their friendship in wartime America,” Doering writes, “Maritain had been urging, indeed relentlessly prodding, Alinsky to publish an explanation of his methods of community organization, a kind of handbook for authentic revolution.”
Alinsky wrote his Reveille for Radicals specifically at Maritain’s request, and Alinsky gave him the exclusive rights to the French translation. In a letter of recommendation for a foundation grant to Alinsky, Maritain described him as “practical Thomist”—an example of just how elastic was Maritain’s so-called Thomism. In the same letter, he described Alinsky as “a great soul, a man of profound moral purity…”[7]
It was Maritain who also urged publication of Alinsky’s last work, the infamous Rules for Radicals (1971), which would influence the careers of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Apparently, Maritain either failed to read or decided to overlook much of the content of the book whose publication he would later laud.
Rules is dedicated to “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.” In Rules, Alinsky declares: “Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement.”[8] He then immediately contradicts himself by laying down one dogma after another, including:
1) The “sacred right” to revolution.
2) The dictum that “Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.” “The spiritual life of the Haves,” quoth Alinsky, is merely “a ritualistic justification of their possessions.”
3) Various ethical rules for the social justice warrior, including the right to employ blackmail other immoral means if really necessary to achieve a so-called social justice end.[9]
According to Alinsky’s ethical rules “the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, ‘Does this particular end justify this particular means?’” “Ethical standards,” says Alinsky, “must be elastic to stretch with the times.” “To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles,” he further declared.
Alinsky even quotes Maritain—unfairly and out of context—to support his claim that SJW’s who will not fight dirty have “fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history is not virtue, but a way of escaping virtue.” Ethical judgments, says Alinsky, “must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point,” and “the less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.”[10]
Here is an example of Alinsky’s “moral purity” from the pages of Rules:
I have always believed that birth control and abortion are personal rights to be exercised by the individual. If, in my early days when I organized the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago, which was 95 per cent Roman Catholic, I had tried to communicate this, even through the experience of the residents, whose economic plight was aggravated by large families, that would have been the end of my relationship with the community.This was written at the same time neo-Modernist opposition to the Church’s teaching on marriage and procreation was impelling Montini to produce the document that became Humanae Vitae. In spite of all this, Maritain wrote to his beloved friend Alinsky in 1971, one of his last letters, to praise Rules as:
Some years later, after establishing solid relationships, I was free to talk about anything, including birth control. I remember discussing it with the then Catholic Chancellor. By then the argument was no longer limited to such questions as, “How much longer do you think the Catholic Church can hang on to this archaic notion and still survive?”[11]
“A great book, admirably free, absolutely fearless, radically revolutionary…. I regard the book as history-making. If middle-class people can be organized and develop a sense of and a will for the common good—and if Saul is there to inspire them—they are able to change the whole social scene for the sake of freedom.”[12]After a few timid objections to Alinsky’s amoral situation and utilitarian ethics, for which he apologizes, Maritain concludes his dithyrambic epistle to the agnostic Jewish agitator: “You know that I am with you with all my heart and soul. Pray for me, Saul. And God bless you. To you, the fervent admiration and abiding love of your old Jacques.”[13]
In an interview with Playboy Magazine very shortly before his death from a heart attack in 1972 at the age of 63, which interview is part of a declassified FBI file, the man Maritain asked to pray for him declared that he would unhesitatingly choose hell over heaven:
PLAYBOY: Having accepted your own mortality, do ·you believe in any kind of afterlife?
ALINSKY: Sometimes it seems to me that the question people should ask is not “is there life after death?” but “Is there life after birth?” I don't know whether there’s anything after this or not. I haven’t seen the evidence one way or the other and I don't think anybody else has either. But I do know that man’s obsession with the question comes out of his stubborn refusal to face up to his own mortality. Let’s say that if there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to go to hell.
PLAYBOY: Why?
ALINSKY: Hell would be heaven for me. All my life I’ve been with the have-nots. Over here, if you’re a have-not, you’re short of dough. If you’re a have-not in hell, you’re short of virtue. Once I get into hell, I’ll start organizing the have-nots over there.
PLAYBOY: Why them?
ALINSKY: They’re my kind of people.
Alinsky and Montini
The 30-year-long intimate friendship between “old Jacques” and Alinsky gave rise to a connection between Alinsky and Maritain’s foremost disciple, the future Pope Paul VI. Montini was then Archbishop of Milan, to which post he had been sent off without being made a cardinal after Pius XII lost confidence in him on account of his Modernist tendencies.
In his study The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky, P. David Finks notes that “For years Jacques Maritain had spoken approvingly to Montini of the democratic community organizations built by Saul Alinsky.”[14] Accordingly, in 1958 Maritain arranged for a series of meetings between Alinsky and Archbishop Montini in Milan. Before the meetings, Maritain had written to Alinsky to tell him that, as Finks recounts: “the new cardinal was reading Saul’s books and would contact him soon.”[15]
There were three meetings between Montini and Alinsky in Milan during the late spring of 1958.
On June 20, 1958, Alinsky wrote to Maritain: “I had three wonderful meetings with Montini and I am sure that you have heard from him since.”[16] Among the subjects discussed, according to Nicholas Hoffman, was how to counter rising Communist influence in the industrial north of Italy without “reinforcing reactionary elements that had less interest in democracy than in squelching the working man.”[17]
In other words, the old liberal game of using the threat of one political trap to drive the people into the jaws of another: oppose communism with soft socialism, just as socialism had been opposed by the Party of Order in France. And, in fact, soft socialism became Italian policy under the Moro government elected in an alliance with the Socialists in 1963.
We will never know what exactly passed between Montini and Alinsky during those “three wonderful meetings” in Milan, but we do know that upon his return to Chicago from Italy, Alinsky wrote as follows to George Shuster, two days before the papal conclave that elected John XXIII: “No, I don’t know who the next Pope will be, but if it’s to be Montini, the drinks will be on me for years to come.”[18]
What did Alinsky know? What did he learn from his “three wonderful meetings” with the man who was soon to become the First Modern Pope? He learned what Maritain already knew about his disciple: that if and when Montini became Pope, there would be a revolution in the Church.
And so there was. It was Pope Montini who would declare after the Council on the pages of L’Osservatore Romano (July 3, 1974): “The important words of the Council are newness and updating… the word newness has been given to us as an order, as a program.”[19] Never in Church history had a Pope uttered such nonsense in a public address to the Church universal.
Willful Blindness, Desperate Retrenchment
As Doering observes: “Every single one of accomplishments of the Second Vatican Council listed by Maritain in the first part of The Peasant of Garrone had been proposed thirty years before in Integral Humanism” as being “prerequisite to a radical revolution and a Christian transformation of the temporal order.”[20]
But the post-conciliar Church witnessed, not a “Christian transformation of the temporal order,” but rather what Maritain himself, writing in 1966, remarked with astonishment as “a complete temporalization of Christianity!”[21]—accompanied by a rapid collapse of Catholic faith and discipline without precedent in Church history.
Both Montini and Maritain were left to wonder why. Of course, this unmitigated disaster could not possibly have had anything to do with what Maritain and his disciple had helped unleash at the Council, whose documents, particularly Gaudium et spes, Dignitatis Humanae and Apostolicam Actuositatem (On the Apostolate of the Laity), breathe Maritain’s “thin” (versus “thick”) Modernism—the very thing Pius XI had reprobated in Ubi Arcano Dei, only 14 years before the appearance of Integral Humanism:
Many believe in or claim that they believe in and hold fast to Catholic doctrine on such questions as social authority, the right of owning private property, on the relations between capital and labor, on the rights of the laboring man, on the relations between Church and State, religion and country, on the relations between the different social classes, on international relations, on the rights of the Holy See and the prerogatives of the Roman Pontiff and the Episcopate, on the social rights of Jesus Christ, Who is the Creator, Redeemer, and Lord not only of individuals but of nations.
In spite of these protestations, they speak, write, and, what is more, act as if it were not necessary any longer to follow, or that they did not remain still in full force, the teachings and solemn pronouncements which may be found in so many documents of the Holy See, and particularly in those written by Leo XIII, Pius X, and Benedict XV.There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which We condemn, no less decidedly than We condemn theological modernism.[22]In Peasant, Maritain expounded the delusional social modernist line of Cavour’s new age of “a free Church in a free state,” meaning a subjugated Church in a tyrannical state. At the Council, boasted Maritain in his heady French prose, “the Church has broken the ties which pretended to protect her, and has rid herself of burdens which people used to think equipped her better for the work of salvation. Free henceforth from these burdens and these ties, she mirrors better the true face of God, which is Love, and for herself asks only liberty. She spreads her wings of light.”[23]
Being the self-deluded visionary that he was, Maritain failed to recognize the historical reality the pre-conciliar Popes had unanimously deplored. The Church had not been freed from her so-called burdens and ties in the Catholic confessional state of the so-called sacral age; rather, they had been ripped from her by force and violence, washed away in rivers of blood as Pope after Pope condemned the destroyers of Christian civilization and the fatal errors on which their new order was based. What Maritain hailed, then, was the Church’s formal surrender to political modernity.
And yet, in the same book, published only a year after the Council’s close, Maritain lamented an ecclesial development he had never noticed before the Council. It seemed that the Church was suddenly kneeling before the world: “The present crisis has many diverse aspects. One of the most curious spectacles it offers us is a kind of kneeling before the world, which is revealed in a thousand ways.”[24]
Maritain had observed no such kneeling only four years earlier at the Council’s commencement, but he failed or refused to link this emergent situation in any way to the Council’s vaunted “opening” to the very world before which so many Catholic churchmen were suddenly bending the knee. On the contrary, he hastened to exonerate the Council:
If there are any prophets of the avant-garde or of the rear guard who imagine that our duties to the world, such as they have been brought to light under the grace of the Holy Spirit by the Second Vatican Council, erase what the Lord Jesus Himself and His apostles have said of the world—The world hates me, The world cannot receive the Spirit of truth, If anyone loves the world the love of the Father is not in him, and all the other texts that I recalled earlier—I know well what must be said of such prophets… they are poking the finger of God in their eye.[25]One cannot reasonably avoid the conclusion that both Maritain and his disciple Pope Montini willfully blinded themselves to the undeniable fact that this sudden posture of kneeling before the “modern world” was connected to the very Council whose inexplicable optimism about that same world—here the word fatuous fights for acceptance—strictly precluded any admission that the world hated Christ more than ever; that more than ever the world rejected His word; that more than ever love of the world was excluding love of the Father.
Despite his insistence on absolving the Council of any complicity in the sudden “temporalization of Christianity,” Maritain had earlier admitted even during the Council that something was seriously amiss with its proceedings. Writing in early 1964 to another of his intimate friends, Julien Green, the French-American novelist and closeted homosexual, Maritain confided the following about what was happening the Council hall:
The kind of throwing of the reins on the horse’s back by John XXIII was absolutely necessary, but what a risk at the same time. All that is professionally intellectual (professors, universities, seminaries), seems to me either spoiled or in a very dangerous position. A certain exegesis has gone mad and become stupid. There is a new modernism full of pride and obstreperousness that seems to me more dangerous than that of Pius X’s time. (It was after all a rather strange spectacle to see all the bishops of the Council—the Teaching Church—each one flanked by his experts, professors, scholars and pedants of the Taught Church, of whom a good number were off their intellectual rails, and of whom almost none had any wisdom.) So, it is in the middle of all this hubbub that the work of the Holy Spirit is carried out.”[26]The “hubbub” Maritain described, this suddenly emergent “new modernism,” was an ecclesial catastrophe that had begun in the Council’s very midst. He, like his student
Montini, simply refused to see this.
Perhaps it was only fitting that none other than the duo of Maritain and Montini would rush to salvage the legacy of their precious Council by means of Pope Paul’s Credo of the People of God. As Sandro Magister reveals in an important essay, during the previous year, just after publication of Peasant, the then 85-year-old Maritain heard from Cardinal Journet that he was about to meet with the Pope concerning the already chaotic post-conciliar state of the Church, which included publication of the radically heretical Dutch Catechism.
Maritain wrote back to say that he had an idea: “The Sovereign Pontiff should draft a complete and detailed profession of faith, in which everything that is really contained in the Symbol of Nicea would be presented explicitly. This will be, in the history of the Church, the profession of faith of Paul VI.”[27]
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Journet presented Maritain’s suggestion to the Pope during his meeting in January of 1968, during which he told Paul that the state of the Church was “tragic,” with the Dutch even daring to “substitute one orthodoxy for another in the Church, a modern orthodoxy for the traditional orthodoxy” as the Pope’s commission on the Dutch catechism warned him.
In the midst of what was already a doctrinal emergency, the first Synod of Bishops, meeting in Rome in September of 1967, had already presented Paul with “a declaration on the essential points of the faith” he would be well advised to reaffirm. Paul VI met again with Cardinal Journet, telling him that he and Maritain [!] should “prepare for me an outline of what you think should be done.”
Maritain then drafted a profession of faith based on the Nicene Creed, sending it to Journet who gave it to Montini. Maritain’s draft, with almost no emendations, became the Credo of the People of God, solemnly proclaimed by Pope Paul on June 30, 1968. Maritain realized that Paul VI had essentially used his draft when he read the text of the Credo in the newspaper.
Consider the staggering implications: Less than three years after the close of the great Second Vatican Council, endlessly vaunted for having eschewed any mere restatement of Catholic doctrine and dogma in favor of a new and vital formulation of the Faith that would appeal to the itching ears of “contemporary man,” Montini had to publish an emergency text that was precisely a restatement of Catholic doctrine and dogma—drafted by the layman who was his mentor!
In the immortal words of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre after he saw a demonstration of the New Mass concocted by Bugnini’s Consilium: “Is this for real?”
Conclusion: The Bitter Harvest of a Revolutionary Fellowship
The relationship between Maritain, Montini and Alinsky was an early reflection of the de facto fusion of the human element of the Church with the world—the “temporalization of Christianity” Maritain was forced to recognize—that has since characterized the post-conciliar crisis as a whole. Thus was the New York Times able to observe early in the Bergoglian pontificate that none other than Barack Obama had “fit seamlessly into a 1980s Catholic cityscape forged by the spirit of Vatican II, the influence of liberation theology and the progressivism of Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin, the archbishop of Chicago, who called for a ‘consistent ethic of life’ that wove life and social justice into a ‘seamless garment.’”[28]
The Times notes that Obama, the young community organizer in Chicago’s progressive Catholic environment, which Saul Alinsky was instrumental in creating, was mentored by Gregory Galluzzo, “a former Jesuit priest and disciple of the organizer Saul Alinsky.” Obama even “had a small office with two cloudy glass-block windows on the ground floor of Holy Rosary, a handsome red brick parish on the South Side, where he would pop down the hall to the office of the Rev. William Stenzel, raise a phantom cigarette to his lips and ask, ‘Want to go out for lunch?’”.
As the Times further observes, while operating on a grant from the Archdiocese of Chicago, “Obama became a familiar face in South Side black parishes. At Holy Angels Church, considered a center of black Catholic life, he talked to the pastor and the pastor’s adopted son about finding families willing to adopt troubled children.
At Our Lady of the Gardens, he attended peace and black history Masses and conferred with the Rev. Dominic Carmon on programs to battle unemployment and violence. At the neo-Gothic St. Sabina, he struck up a friendship with the Rev. Michael L. Pfleger, the firebrand [i.e., ultra-Modernist dissenter from doctrine and dogma] white pastor of one of the city’s largest black parishes.”
As a Senator in the Illinois State Senate, Obama, the social justice warrior from Alinsky’s Chicago and Bernadin’s corrupt, homosexual-infested Archdiocese, would refuse to support the Born Alive Protection Act, presented to the state legislature when it was revealed that the survivors of late-term induced abortions in Chicago hospitals were being left to die after delivery.[29]
As President of the United States he would defend “partial birth abortion,” the compulsory subsidy of contraception by Catholic nuns, and federal “guidelines” for “transgender bathrooms” in public schools. And today, the Catholic bishops of America, most of whom probably voted for Obama, are united in the conviction that Donald Trump, usurper of the New World Order, must be stopped.
Behold the last and bitter harvest of a revolutionary fellowship between Catholic churchmen and the world, exampled early on by the link between Jacques Maritain, Saul Alinsky and “the First Modern Pope.”
_______________________
[1] In Catherine M.A. McAuliffe, “Jacques Maritain’s Embrace of Religious Pluralism and the Declaration on Religious Freedom”, 41 Seton Hall Law Review 593 (2011) at 610.
[2]Ibid., p. 598.
[3]From the title of Peter Hebblethwaite’s definitive biography of Montini.
[4]Romano Amerio, Iota Unum (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 1996), p. 68.
[5]Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garrone (Eugene Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 1966), p. 23 & n. 16.
[6]Bernard Doering, “Jacques Maritain and His Two Authentic Revolutionaries,” 96 (archival article, State University of New York at Stony Brook).
[7]Bernard Doering, The Philosopher and the Provacateur: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), xx.
[8]Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 4.
[9]Ibid., Chapter 2 (“Means and Ends”).
[10]Ibid., 34.
[11]Ibid., pp. 93-94.
[12]Doering, op. cit., 110.
[13]Ibid., 112.
[14]P. David Finks, The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), p. 114.
[15]Ibid., p. 115.
[16]Bernard Doering, The Philosopher and the Provacateur: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p.79.
[17]Nicholas von Hoffman, Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky (New York: Nation Books, 2010), 186.
[18]Finks, op. cit., p. 115.
[19]Amerio, op. cit., p. 112.
[20]Doering, op. cit. xiii.
[21]Ibid., p. 56.
[22]Ubi Arcano Dei (1922), nn. 60-61 [paragraph breaks added]
[23] Peasant, p. 4.
[24]Ibid., p. 53.
[25]Ibid., p. 63.
[26]Maritain to Green, February 13, 1964 in The Story of Two Souls: the Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Julien Green (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988), 201-202.
[27]Sandro Magister, The Credo of Paul VI, who wrote it and why,” June 6, 2008 http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/204969bdc4.html?eng=y; accessed on June 26, 2018.
[28]Jason Horowitz, “The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Social Activism,” March 22, 2014 @www.nytimes.com/2014/03 /23/us/the-catholic-roots-of-obamas-activism.html; accessed on July 22, 2018.
[29]“Former Nurse on Obama’s Controversial Abortion Vote,” Fox News, August 21, 2008 @ www.foxnews. com/ story/2008/08/21/former-nurse-on-obama-controversial-abortion-vote.html
