Catholic Progressives in England after Vatican II [1 ed.] 0268023107, 9780268023102

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: The English Cultural Setting
Chapter 1: The Church in England
Chapter 2: The Sources of English Catholic Radicalism
Chapter 3: English Catholics and the Establishment
Part II: The Reformers
Chapter 4: Reinforcing the Citadel
Chapter 5: The Role of John XXIII
Chapter 6: The Council
Chapter 7: Vatican II Comes to Britain
Part III: The Revolutionaries
Chapter 8: The Catholic New Left
Chapter 9: The Slant Movement
Chapter 10: The Quest for New Community and Culture
Chapter 11: Jesus and Marx
Chapter 12: Charles Davis and the McCabe Affair
Chapter 13: What Must Be Done?
Chapter 14: Legacy and Impact
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

C AT H O L I C P R O G R E S S I V E S IN ENGLAND A F T E R VAT I C A N I I

C AT H O L I C PROGRESSIVES IN ENGLAND A F T E R VAT I C A N I I

J AY P. C O R R I N

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2013 University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Corrin, Jay P., 1943– Catholic progressives in England after Vatican II / Jay P. Corrin. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-268-02310-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)— ISBN 0-268-02310-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-268-07700-6 (e-book) 1. Catholic Church—England—History—20th century. 2. England—Church history—20th century. 3. Liberalism (Religion)—Catholic Church—History—20th century. 4. New Left—England. I. Title. BX1493.2.C67 2013 282'.420904—dc23 2013029849 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

To my sister and good friend

JANIS HEANEY

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ix

1

PA R T O N E

The English Cultural Setting ONE

The Church in England

9

T WO

The Sources of English Catholic Radicalism

21

THREE

English Catholics and the Establishment

42

PA R T T WO

The Reformers FOUR

Reinforcing the Citadel

63

FIVE

The Role of John XXIII

88

SIX

The Council

121

SEVEN

Vatican II Comes to Britain

148

viii Contents

PA R T T H R E E

The Revolutionaries EIGHT

The Catholic New Left

173

NINE

The Slant Movement

216

TEN

The Quest for New Community and Culture

251

ELEVEN

Jesus and Marx: A Christian-Marxist Convergence?

273

T W E LV E

Charles Davis and the McCabe Affair

302

THIRTEEN

What Must Be Done? The Catholic Left and British Politics

317

F O U R T E E N Legacy and Impact

339

Notes 388 Bibliography Index 489

475

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

I wish to thank the staffs at Boston College’s John J. Burns Library and Georgetown University’s Lauinger Library for their generous assistance in facilitating my use of their excellent special collections on Catholic history. Bridget J. Burke, Associate University Librarian for Special Collections, John J. Burns Library, was especially helpful in creating an archive for my interviews with English Catholic New Left activists, which is now available at Boston College to other scholars. This book examines the development of progressive Catholic thinking that led up to Vatican Council II and its aftermath in the 1960s. Although I tried to examine carefully the plethora of materials published by and about the English Catholic New Left in its reactions to the Council, my assessment of their history would not have been complete without the willingness of those associated with the movement to share their thoughts on what up to now has been an unappreciated but significant episode in the history of Catholic social and political action. My thanks to the following: Neil Middleton, Bernard Sharratt, Terry Eagleton, Martin Shaw, Angela and Adrian Cunningham, Martin Redfern, Brian Wicker, Fergus Kerr, O. P., Christopher Calnan, and John Callenor. Bernard Sharratt, Christopher Calnan, and Neil Middleton spent considerable time in going beyond what one would reasonably expect in interviews, providing me with additional and numerous elaborations on the questions I posed. Angela and Adrian Cunningham sent me a number of obscure but important publications that I had not been able to track down on my own. Bernard Sharratt and Christopher Calnan were also generous in offering to read over and correct some of my assertions concerning the history of the Catholic Left. Regrettably, Mr. Calnan and Angela and Adrian Cunningham passed away before the publication ix

x Acknowledgments

of this book. Their friendly and informative correspondence will be sadly missed. I have been fortunate to have the support of wonderful and dedicated secretaries who always could be counted on to help me through the countless administrative challenges that come from trying to complete a rather lengthy manuscript while overseeing a department of some thirteen energetic faculty members. Thanks to Barbara Storella, Mary Ducharme, and Danielle Vinceguerra. I also wish to express my gratitude to Matthew Hallgren, Boston University’s System Support Specialist, without whom I never could have found my way through the myriad and labyrinthine peculiarities of our computer age. My thanks also go to a former student, Nicholas Epstein, who, after doing research for me on Vatican Council II, claimed to be one of the few Jewish students who could more fully appreciate Catholic social thinking. All this helped to inspire his decision to undertake graduate study in public policy at the University of Chicago. I want to thank Linda Wells, dean of Boston University’s College of General Studies, as well as many supportive colleagues, in particular my teaching teammates and fellow chairs, Peter Busher, Natalie McKnight, Adam Sweeting, and Matthew Parfitt. Their friendship has been crucial for creating a uniquely positive collegial environment that makes both teaching and scholarship rare pleasures. Finally, I have had the good fortune to be blessed with the sharp eye of Rebecca DeBoer, a very kind and forgiving editor who took on the double burden of guiding to publication my previous book with the University of Notre Dame Press as well as the current volume. Of course, any omission and errors that remain in this work are entirely my own.

Introduction

The purpose of this study is to examine the evolution of Catholic social thinking from the end of World War II up through the 1960s. Vatican Council II signaled the victory of what can be identified as the Catholic liberal or progressive tradition, the earlier history of which was the subject of my book Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (2002). Thanks to the ground-breaking work of such Catholics as Jacques Maritain, Virgil Michel, Don Luigi Sturzo, George Shuster, Godfrey Diekmann, John Courtney Murray, Hans Küng, and H. A. Reinhold, among others, there was firmly in place by the time of the calling of the Council a platform from which the Church might launch a progressive, reformist approach to the secular challenges of the modern age. These Catholics were champions of liturgical reform, which aimed to reintegrate Christians with the Mystical Body of Christ as a means of extending Christianity into the broader realms of the community.1 They believed that the ills of excessive capitalism and its opposite, collectivism, could be attenuated by reforming the thought processes and values of modern society. But this was to be a social reconstruction that had to be preceded by a renewal of the Christian spirit, where the doctrine of the Mystical Body uniting Christians with Christ could serve as the link between liturgy 1

2 Introduction

and sociology. As noted by Virgil Michel, this would “revive and foster determination to carry Christ-life into the social and economic sphere.”2 As a means to this end, which required a more active participation in the liturgy, these reformers advocated the use of the vernacular in the Mass. This, in conjunction with a number of encyclicals by Pope John XXIII and his successor, Pope Paul VI, encouraged political pluralism, advances in ecumenical outreach, greater participation by the lay community in Church affairs, and religious toleration. The reforms that issued forth from Vatican II marked the high point of Catholic progressivism in terms of engaging the modern world. However, in the views of more traditionalist Catholics, the Council’s promise of renewal and a willingness to embrace the modern world appeared to open the gates to radical changes that would only disrupt and undermine the spiritual dimensions of the faith. The resistance of establishment Catholics, namely, the Roman Curia and affiliated clerical hierarchies along with conservative lay men and women, was challenged by another, younger coterie of Catholics who believed that the Council had not gone far enough in satisfying what they saw to be the essential objective of Christ’s teachings: the creation of a community of humanistic socialism. Such Catholics were convinced that liberal and progressive reforms were insufficient, indeed even counterproductive, since they only served to sustain the status quo and the privileges of those who controlled the levers of political and economic power. These were Catholics of the Left, and they sought the creation of a genuine Christian community culminating in the Kingdom of God, which they thought could never be realized through the liberal model of institutional reform. Even with the best of intentions and absent entrenched elites, liberalism rested philosophically on the fundamental principle of privileging the individual for maximizing self-advancement, the core dynamic of capitalism. In their view, reformist liberalism as a political philosophy produced social energies that worked against the creation of an egalitarian community of shared cultural values. Liberalism, according to such radical Catholics, was always willing to offer “progressive” solutions to social problems but never to go far enough in overturning the institutional structures that caused such problems in the first place. Whereas conservatives were dedicated to preserving social structures as

Introduction

3

they are, liberals were more insidious and thus more dangerous, since they masked the sources of social dysfunction by simply offering the requisite reforms to make prevailing institutions function more efficiently and humanely. Another significant factor that characterized the English Catholic New Left was its membership. Much of the leadership and energy came from a new generation of Irish immigrant families who, thanks to post–World War II educational reforms, gained access to higher education. These Catholics were intellectually restive and had a far more radical view of how their religion could be used to change the perceived inadequacies of English culture than had either their working-class parents or the aristocratic Catholics who assumed a distinctly paternalistic attitude toward their immigrant co-religionists. Representative of this more radical Catholic thinking was the English writer Terry Eagleton, who proclaimed that “Christian progressivism” was at root parasitic on the social system that it was intended to oppose. The liberal Catholic critique, Eagleton asserted, was an exploration that avoided engaging with “outside” sociological and philosophical theories and, even when it attempted to do so, was co-opted by the “liberal or ‘social welfare’ styles of developed capitalism.” This meant that liberal or progressive Catholicism could never challenge the prevailing orthodoxies of bourgeois society, since it was readily preempted by the ruling establishment in order to “modernise and consolidate a profoundly conservative system.”3 This was the process that Eagleton and his associates saw to be currently at work within the Christian Church. Their objective was to move the Church into more revolutionary channels, thereby pushing to the limits how far one could go and still remain of the faith. I have chosen as a case study of such radical Christianity the experience of the English Catholics, in particular those who associated themselves with the New Left. Unlike their American counterparts, the English radical Catholics succeeded in developing a coherent theological philosophy of revolution based on a synthesis of the “New Theology” that inspired Vatican II and radical economic and social theory, a good deal of which was inspired by the insights of Karl Marx and American and European sociologists and literary theorists.

4 Introduction

The driving force behind what came to be called the English Catholic New Left was a periodical called Slant. The young Catholics who were affiliated with this publication and several other associated leftist organizations devoted themselves as Christians to the mission of advancing socialism, which they saw to be the ultimate incarnation of the Kingdom of God. Slant as the avant-garde of this radical agenda intended to liberate the post–World War II generation of English Catholics from what its writers considered to be the stultifying and anti-intellectual world of immigrant Catholicism as well as the pusillanimity of the liberal political and economic thinking that served to assure the continuity of corporate capitalism. In this endeavor the Left Catholics put forth a new set of sociological and religious ideas that provided a framework for the emergence of a more sophisticated theological consciousness that would challenge capitalism and all its assorted evils. Although the English Catholic New Left did not succeed in meeting their revolutionary objectives, the bold and imaginative efforts made in explicating their positive vision were a source of inspiration to many younger Catholics, who had begun to question the relevance of what they saw as an antiquated religion out of touch with modern times. The Catholic Left offered a perspicacious synthesis of the most seminal socioeconomic and philosophical theories of the modern era and demonstrated how this could be integrated within the framework of Western civilization’s oldest religious tradition. All this certainly underscores the observation of theologian Fergus Kerr, O. P., who wrote that the Catholic Church “is not the monolithic entity that her enemies and most zealous members believe.”4 This book is divided into three separate but integrated parts so as to better explicate the transformation from progressive religious reformism to revolution. Part I, “The English Cultural Setting,” provides the historical backdrop for understanding the nature of Catholicism in England. We see here the roots of a small, conservative, and ultramontane Church that ultimately had to accommodate itself to a Protestant and secularized mainstream culture and, by the early nineteenth century, find space for the influx of Irish immigrants. A considerable gulf developed between the old recusant aristocratic Catholics and their working-class brethren. However, both were culturally conformist and showed no pro-

Introduction

5

clivity for challenging the prevailing order. Although they preferred to stay beneath the political radar, in the early decades of the new century a different breed of Catholic emerged, consisting of a more politicized coterie, spurred on in large part by a number of influential converts to the creed (G. K. and Cecil Chesterton, Eric Gill, Christopher Hollis, Arnold Lunn, and Douglas Woodruff, among others). It was this group that sowed the seeds of social activism, some elements of which would later culminate in the revolutionary positions of the Catholic New Left. Yet by the end of World War II and well into the 1950s, this more politicized Catholicism had waned, and the English Catholics once again returned to the earlier preference for conformity, conservatism, subcultural separatism, and religious quietude. Part II, “The Reformers,” expands the historical context for discussing trends in Catholicism from England to Europe, where there were broader and more systematic theological efforts to bring the Catholic Church into the modern age. The ultimate success of the reformers, reflected in the papacy of John XXIII and Vatican Council II, came after a long and difficult struggle to overcome the legacy of what was anathematized as “modernism” and the influential “integralist” forces that demanded that all public and private life be guided by the authority of Rome. Closely bound up with maintaining the monarchical structures of the Church seen to be challenged by modernism was the Vatican’s battle against all facets of liberalism, which in some ways was considered more lethal than communism itself. This model of Church governance reached its maturation in the papacy of Pius XII. In order to transform the Church and make its existence more relevant to modern life, it was necessary for reformers to overcome two pillars of papal authoritarianism: the theological monopoly of neoscholastic Thomistic orthodoxy, and the Congregation of the Roman Curia, the bureaucratic agents of Vatican business. What opened the doors to progressive voices was the failure of the Church to provide sufficient leadership through the testing of the fascist totalitarianism that had resulted in world war and the social, economic, and political chaos that followed. Now was the time for a new theology that could more realistically address the changes of the postwar world. This burden was undertaken by a group of theologians, many of whom were associated with the University

6 Introduction

of Tübingen in Germany, and these were joined by younger Jesuit and Dominican theologians from France and Belgium. Out of their writings emerged the so-called New Theology that initiated a more imaginative and historical understanding of Scripture, an opening up of Church governing structures, and greater lay participation through liturgical renewal. The new theologians and their ideas about reforming Church teachings and institutional structures so as to better serve the needs of the modern era found a sympathetic ear in Pius XII’s successor, Pope John XXIII, who in turned launched the Second Vatican Council. Finally, Part III, “The Revolutionaries,” describes and analyzes the English Catholic New Left, an increasingly radicalized group of young intellectuals who viewed the liberal reforms of Vatican II as insufficient to achieve what they saw to be the ultimate purpose of the Gospels: a revolutionary transformation of society toward the creation of a humanistic socialism. Their story completes the circle of progressive theological aspirations, which produced a revolutionary reaction, but one that the Left always believed was a turning back to the original intention of scripture.

P A R T

O N E

The English Cultural Setting

O N E

The Church in England

British Catholicism after World War II can best be described as authoritarian and paternalistic in structure, leadership, and teaching. The old aristocratic recusant families that had dominated the Church had been obliged to give way to Vatican ultramontane power with the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850, and gentry influence was further compromised by the huge infusion of Irish immigrants seeking employment in England’s industrial cities.1 Since the time of Cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808– 92), one of the main concerns of the English Catholic leadership was to serve the spiritual and communitarian needs of the Irish laboring class, a group fundamentally alienated from mainstream English culture. Catholicism had been more than a religion for the Irish working people; rather, it defined their cultural identity. In an environment that made immigrants feel strange and different, there had been a natural tendency for them to pull inward, embracing those cultural traditions that gave them the comfort of place. Here is where the familiar religion of Catholicism provided both an anchor of certitude and a regular clerical supply of moral leadership. There were two factors that gave shape to Irish Catholic separatism: the discriminatory and alien English culture itself, and a religion with its unique rituals and institutions that 9

10 T HE E NGL ISH CU LT U RA L SET TING

supplied a sense of community independent of the larger society in which it was located. The immigrant Irish subculture of Catholicism, represented by a close network of primary socialization, allowed participants to locate themselves within a meaningful particularistic tradition from which they might find access to the wider English mainstream culture. But this was a subculture conditioned by deference to authority and undergirded by a heavy dose of spiritual trepidation. Cardinal Archbishop John C. Heenan of Westminster highlighted the efficacy of sin through the confessional box for keeping Catholics in line. Catholics attended Mass, he admitted, rather because of fear than the love of God: “knowing the faithful as a mother knows her children,” the Church tells them what to do for their own good. Catholic adults were like children and had to be told what to do.2 How all this impacted on the consciousness of the individual Catholic was captured by the novelist David Lodge in his book How Far Can You Go?: “Up there was Heaven; down there was Hell. It was like Snakes and Ladders: sin sent you plummeting down towards the Pit; the sacraments, good deeds, acts of self-mortification, enabled you to climb back towards the light. Everything you did or thought was subject to spiritual accounting.”3 Those who faltered might even be punished by the very means through which they were supposed to communicate with their Savior. One London priest, for example, imposed a collective penance of saying “three Hail Mary’s” when members of his church failed to attend a meeting on Catholic education.4 The former Jesuit Peter Hebblethwaite related the story told to him by a Mr. John Holland of Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, who described what it was like to attend the local Catholic school. The parish priest who came into the school on Sunday mornings greeted students with his inquisition: “Hands up, those who were at the 9:30 Mass?” There was no communion at the 11:00 service, meaning that only the lazy and less devout attended. The second and devastating question was, “And which of you missed holy mass?” After a pause, the Clegg children raised their hands. The family had no shoes. The MacDermotts and the Haydens also had missed the service. The MacDermotts had a drunken father, and the Haydens had no dad at all. “These were the scholars who were lashed by the priest’s invective,” explained Holland, “who called upon God to wit-

The Church in England

11

ness the disgrace in which they stood. . . . There was nothing for them . . . but eternal punishment for their damned souls unless they mended their ways.” By the time the priest had finished, Holland concluded, each scholar was petrified with fear—not of God but of the priest.5 Not surprisingly, in the hearts and minds of young Catholics the combination of fear and clerical authoritarianism could inspire grim visions of the Apocalypse. The literary critic Terry Eagleton recalled the school retreats from his youth in the working-class community of Salford, when one of the priests depicted in vivid detail the three dark days of Satan’s rampage, where only holy candles would burn. “Ashen-faced and subdued,” wrote Eagleton, “I lived in constant fear of the Second Coming, which was somehow merged with the threat of Russian invasion — Christ and Khrushchev rolled into one.” There was at least some solace for the young Eagleton, however, since with “low neo-scholastic cunning” he had worked out that it could not happen before 1960, the year when the pope was to open the letter containing the message from Our Lady of Fatima. How could God “blow the whistle before then”?6 Generally speaking, English bishops and priests had not distinguished themselves as intellectuals. Until recently they had been the products of educational training purposely isolated from the main institutions of higher learning. The clergy who served the Irish community were not trained as administrators, diplomats, or university scholars. Their education took place in Ireland and was geared to parish service. The guiding purpose of the parish priest, as Lodge has observed, was to provide pastoral care to a predominantly working-class and lower-middle-class community who, it was assumed, needed to be shielded from the corrosive influence of modern ideas in the arts and sciences through obedience to clerical authority.7 In the words of England’s highest-ranking prelate before World War II, Cardinal Archbishop Arthur Hinsley of Westminster, it was the existence of separate Catholic schools alone that could save the young people from the “easy descent into the depths of paganism.”8 For years the hierarchy had restricted young Catholics in any effort to expand their intellectual horizons through higher education. Cardinal Manning’s successor at Westminster, Cardinal Herbert Vaughan, regarded English universities as centers of infidelity and worldliness. It

12 T HE E NGL ISH CU LT U RA L SET TING

was not until 1895, nearly twenty-five years after the lifting of religious tests for Catholics at Oxford, that the Vatican (after a reluctant petition by Vaughan) gave permission for Catholics to attend the nation’s elite secular universities. Even as late as the 1960s, Catholic chaplaincies at British universities were unable to receive sufficient support from the Church.9 For the most part, young Catholics were taught to conform. Yet what they received in return did not linger long on their intellectual palate. Lodge has written that religious instruction consisted of memorizing the Penny Catechism and monotonously recounting the Ten Commandments and the sacraments. He could not recall being exposed to any other religious textbook, and seldom was any reference even made to the Old and New Testaments.10 Desmond Fisher, editor of the London Catholic Herald during the years of Vatican Council II, noted that Catholics in the 1950s listened to sermons that had no relevance to their real lives, failed to understand the Latin rituals, and only attended church out of habit, fearing the consequences if they did not.11 Intellectual life itself was an exotic rarity among the working-class Irish. Eagleton pointed out that literacy was not the strong point in his childhood community in industrial Salford, a world “which would no more have understood how you make a living by writing books than how you could make one by picking wax from your ears.”12 Despite the criticisms of Lodge, Eagleton, and others, it would be a mistake to assume that all Catholics inhabited an intellectual wasteland. A number of English bishops up to the 1940s received at least part of their higher education for the priesthood in Rome. This certainly was a rigorous intellectual experience, yet it served to mitigate national and parochial perspectives, strengthening instead ultramontane tendencies and devotion to the Vatican. As Cardinal Heenan of Westminster put it, “Romanità,” or the Roman spirit, with its encounters with St. Peter’s Basilica, audiences with the Vicar of Christ, and the solemn pontifical ceremonies, “exercise an imperceptible but permanent effect upon the young clerics.” These experiences above all made the priest especially conscious of being “one of the Pope’s men.”13 The effect of such educational and spiritual conditioning was to bind very strongly the English bishops to a Catholic subculture of separateness, and the ties that bound the hierarchy to Rome partly explain why the English church lagged be-

The Church in England

13

hind its European and American counterparts in pushing for theological and social reform in the years leading up to Vatican Council II.14 On the other hand, Catholics had certainly made their mark on British cultural life. The Chesterton brothers, Hilaire Belloc, Eric Gill’s Guild of Catholic Craftsmen, Graham Greene, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Dawson, and many others had greatly enriched the fabric of British arts and letters, but for the most part these men were converts to the altar and embraced the faith because it was exotic and in opposition to the prevailing spirit of modern secularism and English Protestantism. They were part of what the historian Adam Schwartz has identified as the “Third Spring,” a generation of Catholics distinct from the “Second Spring” that John Henry Newman had called his fellow converts W. G. Ward, George Tyrrell, and others.15 As opposed to Newman’s group, the Catholics of Chesterton’s era were less interested in integrating their faith with the times than in using it as a means of attacking the cultural distortions of modernization. And unlike Newman’s generation, they found comfort in Vatican authority. Although the “Third Spring” intellectuals came to Catholicism from varying backgrounds and experiences, what they had in common was the need to find authoritative spiritual and moral security in a world of vanishing standards and beliefs. Many embraced Catholicism not only because it provided an answer to these personal longings, but also because its ancient verities could serve as the source of rejuvenation for an age rapidly sliding into what they saw as the miasmic confusions of cultural relativism. These men had an enormous impact on non-Catholics, but some critics question whether their work was of permanent service to the Church itself.16 Even Schwartz himself, an admirer of the “Third Spring” Catholics and a critic of the secular trajectory of the modern age, laments that the seeds of their fruit seem to have fallen on rocky soil. The British Catholic historian John Lynch at the end of the 1950s wrote that Chesterton, “in spite of flashes of insight,” has presently no influence on the younger generation in or outside the Church and does not have any relevance to the society in which they live. Nor do they go to the idiosyncratic Belloc for an understanding of British history. As for Greene and Waugh, their writings, Lynch claimed, say little about the nature of English Catholicism, and as writers they are sui generis and not at all

14 T HE E NGL ISH CU LT U RA L SET TING

typically representative of their religious affiliation. Indeed, the romantic conservatism of Waugh, Lynch has argued, with its eccentric devotion to Arcadian aristocratic and antiquated values of privilege, has no meaning whatever to proletarian Catholics.17 Lodge has asserted that “the world-famous partnership that George Bernard Shaw dubbed ‘the Chesterbelloc’ has had a great fall, and few seem interested in putting it together again”; the ideas for which they labored “have largely lost their relevance.”18 The Catholic Church had a certain appeal for the converts and the Irish working class because of its separation from mainstream English culture. Brian Wicker, one of the leaders of the Catholic New Left in the 1960s, commented that when he converted in 1950, it felt like “joining something which put a strange gulf between oneself and the world as one knew it.”19 For those Irish immigrants who felt keenly the boot of English prejudice, the Friday abstinence provided a common sense of community. In the words of the cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas, a meatless Friday was no empty symbol: “it means allegiance to a humble home in Ireland and to a glorious tradition in Rome.”20 Such connections could be a source of pride in the subculture of humiliation and poverty that were the lot of the unskilled Irish worker. Other writers have also remarked on the intransigent separateness from the world that seemed to define British Catholics. In 1950, Archbishop George A. Beck of Brentwood had posited that “the ‘otherworldliness’ in a Catholic must always be his dominant, if not immediately evident, characteristic.”21 The Roman Catholic sense of separateness was promoted by such peculiarities as the Latin Mass, prohibitions against eating meat on Fridays, pilgrimages, and devotion to novenas. Indeed, disappointed with the Vatican’s efforts to modernize its liturgy through Vatican II, the writer Arnold Lunn wondered whether he would have even converted to Catholicism if at the time the Church had embraced the vernacular.22 Bernard Wall wrote to Tom Burns, publisher of The Tablet, scolding him for highlighting the ideas of progressive theologians who gave shape to Vatican II, namely, Hans Küng, Cardinal Leon Suenens, Cardinal François Marty, and others. These men, wrote Wall, were hopelessly out of touch with the modern world. Giving publicity to their alien ideas, he claimed, was “harming our culture and religion

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15

at a time when the situation is desperate.” In Wall’s view the prohibition of the old Mass was “a totalitarian action and likely to achieve the very end which it is intended to avoid—namely a schismatic situation.”23 The endurance of an independent Catholic subculture made it difficult for the Irish to assimilate into mainstream English society. From the outset the strength of the Irish inheritance was a formidable barrier to overcome. Even in the mid-nineteenth century there were working-class districts in the Midlands where the immigrants still spoke Irish routinely. In particular, very few of the women knew how to speak English, and most Irish immigrants who landed in the shipping ports scarcely understood the language.24 Studies of ethnic assimilation in the United States indicate that the process is expedited when the minority group makes concessions to the linguistic, educational, and social norms of their new environment. The object is to abandon some of the more alien features that mark one as different to facilitate acceptance, yet also to maintain sufficient elements of tradition to sustain personal and community identity. In the case of Jews in both Britain and America, for example, as well as other ethnic minorities coming to the United States, the identity anchor has been religion.25 Yet what stands out in the case of assimilation regarding Jews in Britain and other ethnics in America is that these groups had a strong desire to become an integral part of their host culture. A conscious desire to assimilate, however, was not initially present in the Irish Catholic community in Britain. As the sociologist John Hickey has shown, getting too close to English culture was considered disloyal to the historical struggles of the Irish homeland, and its state religion of Protestantism was too threatening to the Catholic faith. This isolation, he points out, was “not only endured but deliberately encouraged.”26 In fact, when Catholics did begin to merge more readily into English mainstream culture after World War II, it was largely the result of the breakdown in religious and social isolation rather than of any conscious effort or positive course of action on their part.27 Another factor that contributed to the making of Catholic separatism was the Irish working class itself. From the beginning of the largescale immigration, Irish workingmen showed little interest in social and political reform. For example, they assiduously opposed the Chartist movement of the 1830s, the first effort to emancipate the working class

16 T HE E NGL ISH CU LT U RA L SET TING

politically through parliamentary reform. When peaceful efforts failed to advance their cause, several prominent Chartists, most conspicuously the Irishman Feargus O’Connor, moved to more direct, even violent, methods to advance the cause. Irish workers remained largely aloof from the Chartists and roundly condemned their insurgency when it became disruptive. In fact, in Manchester, Irish workers broke up Chartist meetings during the anti–Corn Law campaign in the early 1840s and were largely responsible for the defeat of Chartism in that city.28 The Irish opposition to a working-class movement can be partly explained by the same reason that recent immigrants to America have failed to gravitate to unions: the necessity of finding employment quickly regardless of the level of wages. The conditions from which the Irish workers had fled were far worse than what they found in Britain, and the requisites of subsistence or helping a family back in Ireland compelled them to work for nearly any wage. Thus it was imperative to protect a regular source of income from what was seen to be the reckless behavior of working-class activists. In addition to the calling of subsistence, there were political reasons for Irish aloofness from the early English working-class movement. The leading champion of the Irish cause, Daniel O’Connell, MP, was himself opposed to both the Chartist disturbances (he believed that its Irish supporters undermined their people’s efforts to earn respectability) and trade unionism. The activities of trade unionists antagonized the managerial classes and compromised O’Connell’s efforts to unite all sections of Irish society in repealing the Act of Union. Economic and political considerations therefore served to isolate the Irish working class from mainstream English trade-union activism. Whatever political interests they had were essentially channeled into efforts to achieve Home Rule for Ireland and support for the Fenian movement. However, this struggle for Irish independence did not require cooperation or the development of strategic linkages with English trade unionists.29 There were exceptions to this political separateness from workingclass action for social justice, but for the most part they concerned individuals such as Cardinal Manning in the London dock strike of 1889 and the Distributist groups, who threw their support to revolutionary syndicalist action in the pre–World War I years. These were unique cases,

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17

largely outside the general Catholic political trajectory, and their influence altogether was not long lasting. Manning’s success in gaining concessions from the employers during the London dock strike made him a hero to the workingmen. However, the exceptionalism of Manning’s actions was noted by one of his Catholic admirers, who wrote that the cardinal’s efforts “lit up as with a splendid, contrasting, solitary flare the long waste of his Catholic contemporaries’ general indifference to the question of social rights.”30 Such progressive impulses were of short duration. Herbert Vaughan, the successor to Manning (the “People’s Cardinal”), was a son of England’s old Catholic aristocratic tribe with a pedigree that went so far back in time that it lost itself “in the twilight of fable.”31 This gentry background, along with his education in Continental Catholic colleges, contributed to Cardinal Vaughan’s conservative Tory instincts. Unlike Manning, Vaughan was ill at ease with the immigrant working-class Irish. His view of them illustrated the enormous gap in England between aristocratic perceptions and the laboring masses. To Vaughan the working class appeared to be “broad-backed powerful animals.” With “words of the coarsest, foulest, and most degrading meaning,” the workers “are flesh and blood, and they think and speak of nothing else.”32 A delegate from the National Committee of Organised Labour, who met with Vaughan to discuss his support for the group’s pension scheme, related how the cardinal was gracious, refined, and regal, yet somehow out of touch with the world of workingmen: “He wanted to be sympathetic, but did not quite know how, and moved uneasily in dealing with our subject, as one who travels on unfamiliar ground.”33 Although Cardinal Vaughan admitted a moral and intellectual debt to Manning, he openly criticized his predecessor’s public political activity, in particular his role in the London dock strike, and frankly disapproved of many of Manning’s radical social policies. Reflecting the assumptions of the old Catholic traditions, Cardinal Vaughan preferred to address social problems through Catholic institutions under the direction of the official hierarchy, rather than to work for change through public organizations in cooperation with any people who shared his objectives (even Protestants!), a modus operandi with which Manning had been perfectly comfortable.

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After Cardinal Vaughan’s death in 1903, there were sporadic attempts to organize Catholics to promote social reform. One of the more longlasting campaigns was associated with an organization founded in 1906 called the Salford Diocesan Federation, whose mission was to coordinate efforts of the clergy and laity to train Catholics for participation in the political process. The Federation lasted until 1928. One of its major victories was to convince the Labour Party to delete from its platform a clause demanding secular education in public elementary schools. The organization also established a National Conference of Catholic Trade Unionists, which worked to prevent the Labour Party from adopting a socialist agenda. In the long run, what dissipated Irish Catholic political involvement was the granting of Home Rule in 1922. Afterward, with few exceptions, Catholics remained largely apolitical. The Catholic Social Guild (established in 1909) was dedicated to advancing Catholic social doctrine as outlined in the teachings of the great labor encyclicals. It also founded the Catholic Workers’ College (Plater Hall) at Oxford. The guild and college did not achieve notable success, owing largely to the inability of overcoming deeply ingrained Catholic indifference to political and social questions. The persistence of a Catholic subculture largely divorced from significant political involvement prevailed up to the end of World War II. It was a subculture of separateness enforced through insistence on marital endogamy, an authoritarian clergy, strict adherence to the Vatican monarchical power structure, and religious socialization in separate schools. The hierarchy was highly sensitive to the need to protect its people, especially the young, from the secularizing forces of the wider culture, which by the 1950s was itself going through massive changes in moral values and social outlook. Here the Church committed itself to charity work in terms of saving souls, but there was less said about putting into practice the social teachings of the Gospels, and any sort of involvement in matters of politics for the most part was avoided. The authoritarian clerical structure of the English Catholic Church also discouraged involvement of the laity in religious affairs. As one observer of the Catholic situation in England noted, John Henry Newman’s essay in the July 1859 issue of The Rambler, “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of

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Doctrine,” had made a case for restoring lay participation, but Newman’s plea was ignored by the hierarchy for well over a hundred years.34 It must be said that by the early 1960s Catholics had largely failed to make a distinctive mark on either English popular or political culture. There certainly was no clear “Catholic line” on either domestic or international affairs. Catholic members of Parliament were indistinguishable from their fellow party members, or else they did not remain long at Westminster. For the most part, it appears that many Catholics who came of age politically after 1945 simply absorbed the thinking and values of the social class to which they belonged.35 Catholics were also not well represented in Parliament in proportion to their numbers. In the 1960s, for instance, there were roughly the same number of Jewish MPs as Catholic ones, even though they were less than one tenth of the Catholic population.36 This may have been a lingering legacy of historical bias against Catholics since the Reformation and of the siege mentality of the recusants, who deemed it prudent to stay below the political radar. Yet another factor that might explain the apolitical tendency of English Catholics related to the theological dualism that pervaded Catholic education (a Platonic separation of the higher spiritual realm from the mundane) and its consequent antiworld attitudes. Bishop George A. Beck, chairman of the Catholic Education Council after World War II, cited H. O. Evennett’s assessment of Catholic education with approval. The hierarchy of values taught by Catholicism, wrote Evennett, runs counter to much of modern social and moral ideology. It teaches that “Life is a preparatory stage and its values are secondary . . . the quintessential that is left by a Catholic education is a lasting consciousness of the fact and meaning of death.” Moreover, “to pass through the gateway of death in the best possible disposition towards God . . . is the very object of life itself.”37 This does not represent a mindset especially attuned to addressing the troubles of the secular realm. Such was the nature of the English Catholic Church and its community up to the 1960s: insular, apolitical or at least politically conformist, highly authoritative, and out of touch with what was transpiring among Catholic theologians on both the Continent and in the United States. The Catholic hierarchy may have succeeded in the task of ministering to the spiritual needs of its growing community and of constructing

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churches and schools. But it was not equipped to deal with the myriad intellectual and social challenges of a rapidly changing modern culture. Yet there had been a number of lay Catholics who did recognize the imperative of using their religious beliefs as a vehicle for changing prevailing orthodoxies in a progressive, even radical direction. Their legions were small but highly significant in terms of creating an intellectual template from which a later generation might have drawn to advance their own program for transforming the sociopolitical landscape. The roots of this religious radicalism go back to the early twentieth century with the founding of the Christian Socialist Movement, out of which evolved the seminal social and political thinking of G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and their followers.

T W O

The Sources of English Catholic Radicalism

Although English Catholicism in the post–World War II years was clearly politically and socially conformist, there had been an earlier episode of Catholic-inspired radicalism associated with the Distributist ideas of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc that had fundamentally challenged the English ruling establishment. Chesterton and Belloc were two of the best-known and most prolific writers of their generation; each published more than one hundred books and contributed to nearly every major British periodical of the day. Before 1914 and during the interwar years they launched an unconventional assault on the evils of capitalistindustrial society that had a significant influence not only on Catholic writers but also on the secular political left (G. D. H. Cole, R. H. Tawney, and the Guild Socialists).1 As such, the ideas of Chesterton and Belloc that formed the core of what was called Distributism established a legacy of radical socioeconomic thinking that might have served as a philosophical grid for those future Catholics who would advocate overturning the corporate capitalist political order. Radical Distributism had its origins in Christian Socialism and the rise of the labor movement in pre–World War I Britain. 21

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English Catholics had never been especially enamored of socialism or radical politics. Although there had been a momentary surge in political and social activism under Cardinal Manning, this changed with the leadership of his successor, Archbishop Herbert Vaughan. Efforts to galvanize Catholics for social action did not take place until after the death of Vaughan in 1903, and the inspiration for this uphill struggle came from laymen rather than from the Catholic hierarchy. Leslie Toke, one of the leaders of the mildly reformist and short-lived Catholic Social Union, claimed that the organization collapsed in no small part due to the fact that “its name was supposed in some occult manner to connect it with that dreadful Socialism.”2 Toke published a highly critical essay in the Dublin Review (1907) condemning the apathy toward social problems of the old wealthy Catholics as well as their antipathy to anything suggesting socialism. The vast majority of educated Catholics, claimed Toke, not only were ignorant of papal social teachings but were also as benighted regarding political and economic questions as were their French noble counterparts “on the eve of the Revolution.”3 Leslie Toke, Virginia Crawford, and a few other stalwarts launched the Catholic Social Guild (CSG) in 1909. One of its major projects was to popularize the social principles outlined in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum. The CSG worked closely with the Fabian Society and sought “to permeate” the consciousness of the working classes through Catholic social teachings. Yet the CSG also made it clear that it would follow a moderate course of action and make special efforts to avoid political controversy.4 This policy was also applied to other organizations that grew out of the CSG. The Catholic Evidence Guild, for example, established to teach the faith to non-Catholics, was forbidden to incorporate politics into its platform: “The rule is extended in practice to the avoidance of controversial questions of a social and economic nature, which though not strictly political yet might easily distract the meeting from its true aim, which is religious.”5 The laymen chiefly responsible for moving their co-religionists to radical social and political action prior to World War II through the program of Distributism were first nurtured not in Catholic circles but rather in the company of Anglican social activists. Most of the major players in the Distributist movement — Cecil and G. K. Chesterton,

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A. J. Penty, Maurice Reckitt, Eric Gill, and others—had entered the political arena from the traditions of Christian and guild socialism. The early careers of these writers had been influenced by Christian socialists, referring to a group of activists from across denominations who were inspired by the work of F. D. Maurice to apply the Gospels to Britain’s social problems. Maurice had been a critic of the Victorian churches’ narrow insistence on confining religion to personal morality and salvation. The “Kingdom of God,” said Maurice, includes the whole of His creation, embracing man in all his parts, secular and religious.6 The economic thinking of the early English Christian socialists (notably J. M. Ludlow, the founder of the movement, and the novelist Charles Kingsley) derived from French Catholic socialists, some of whom were associated with Frédéric Ozanam. Ludlow had studied the teachings of the Catholic convert and socialist P.-J.-B. Buchez in Paris. Like Ozanam, Buchez had worked for a reconciliation between Catholicism and popular democracy. Buchez believed that a major mechanism for essentially “Christianizing” the forces unleashed by the French Revolution would be a clergy prepared in the traditions of “social deaconry” (the recognition that the clergy, in addition to their sacramental responsibilities, had an obligation to perform welfare work to improve the social life of the community).7 Buchez and other French Catholic socialists preached that capitalism was parasitic and destructive of God’s worldly design. However, they were optimists, firmly believing in the rationality of man and convinced that historical progress was possible through the expansion of democratic, participatory government. For their part, the English Christian socialists were convinced that such progress could not take place while the working classes were alienated from religion. This problem, they believed, was due to the failure of the Victorian churches, whose leaders, in the words of historian K. S. Inglis, cared less about the material and spiritual welfare of the working classes than the workers allegedly cared about religion.8 One of the important offsprings of Christian socialist thinking was the Christian Social Union (CSU), founded during the London dock strike of 1889. Its birth was marked by the publication of a book edited by Charles Gore called Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation. The book attempted to explain the importance of

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Christianity for addressing the central moral and intellectual issues of the day. In addition, the authors, most of whom were radical Anglicans embarrassed by their church’s failure to promote social and economic reform, emphasized the responsibility of owning private property, which, they insisted, must be recognized as a public trust involving explicitly social obligations. It was the book’s insistence on applying Christianity to political and social matters that led to the establishment of the CSU. Its purpose was to study and publicize social and economic problems, and its members were prepared to draw on Pope Leo XIII’s labor encyclical to drive home their arguments. Another issue that galvanized the energies of the Christian Social Union was British imperialism, in particular, the South African Boer War of 1899–1902. Two leading figures of the CSU, Charles Gore and Scott Holland, were especially disturbed by the jingoism that fueled Britain’s overseas expansion. Their criticisms were joined by those of several other young members of the CSU, notably Conrad Noel, whose powerful sermons against munitions makers led to threats to blow up his church,9 and G. K. Chesterton. These men believed that the Boer War was the product of a plot carried out by international mining interests. It was a classic example of what the journalist J. A. Hobson at the time called “economic imperialism,” a redolent Marxist argument highlighting the capitalists’ ravenous search for new markets and investments. G. K. Chesterton gained a large public profile because of the brilliance of his writings on the evils of British imperialism. He soon locked horns with George Bernard Shaw and the imperialist Fabians, who defended the Boer War on the grounds that it would advance civilization. Chesterton asserted that imperialism was the enemy of liberty, since it negated the deepest of democratic principles—it denied the equality of man by imposing “our standards” on another nation, yet learning nothing from them.10 In addition, Chesterton believed that imperialism destroyed true liberty, which he was convinced could be attained only within a defined sphere of activity and by wielding power over “small things.” The radical members of the Christian Social Union, including Chesterton and Noel, ultimately became dissatisfied with the failure to move the establishment to social and economic reform through mere speeches

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and the writing of papers. Out of this frustration was born the Christian Socialist League (CSL) in 1906 by those who wanted a movement primarily devoted to socialist political action and more liberal in matters of religion. Membership in the CSL was now open to persons of all faiths and to those who were willing to commit themselves to a democratic commonwealth founded on “economic socialism,” in which wealth would be owned collectively by the community. The members of the CSL varied widely in the radicalism of their political and social views and included such diverse people as George Lansbury, the future leader of the Labour Party; Conrad Noel, who would become known as the “red priest” of Thaxted; J. N. Figgis, the father of “political pluralism” and a major influence on the later development of Guild Socialism; and the brothers Cecil and G. K. Chesterton. The CSL soon became involved in the wave of working-class unrest that swept England in the years preceding the outbreak of World War I. Noel, a close friend of the Chestertons and a stalwart warrior in many of the causes for which the brothers so ardently crusaded, was typical of the political militancy of the association when he wrote in 1912 that the main hope of the future was in “the revolt of the people against their ‘leaders’ as manifest in sympathetic strikes and the general labour unrest.”11 Noel’s views were undergirded by Christian teaching. He claimed that he was an advocate of “Catholic Socialism,” the seeds of which were found in the teachings of the early Church fathers, who, he believed, were radical revolutionaries committed to the sharing of property and fullscale democracy.12 Perhaps the most radical of the Christian Socialist Leaguers, a group whom the Anglican bishops called “dangerous men,” was Cecil Chesterton. As the leader of the League’s militant wing, Chesterton vigorously opposed the association’s dealings with the Liberal Party and urged that only candidates who were avowedly socialist should be given CSL support.13 One of these “dangerous men,” G. K. Chesterton, came to have the greatest impact on modern English Catholicism. “G. K. C.,” as he was popularly known, converted to Catholicism in 1922. In his well-known book Orthodoxy (1908), a precursor to his conversion, Chesterton argued that Christian theology was the source from which his own liberal sympathies and orientations had evolved. The book was an explanation

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of how liberalism as a creed could reach its fullest potential in a democratic environment of limited government (“the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves”)14 founded on Christian religious principles. Here, Chesterton touched on one of the most salient features of Catholic social theory adumbrated in the teachings of Pope Leo XIII and more formally set down in 1931 in Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno and later in Pope John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris, as well as Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes. This is the principle of subsidiarity. In addition to recognizing that the individual and the family precede the state, subsidiarity affirms that governments and larger organizations should never undertake activities that are better suited to either individuals or smaller social associations. Chesterton’s politics evolved from a moderate version (Christian socialism) to a radical one (anarcho-syndicalism on the eve of World War I). As early as 1900, however, he recognized a disturbing pattern in parliamentary politics: the parties tended to curb the views of their more unconventional members so as not to disturb the political establishment.15 Within a few years, Chesterton became disillusioned with the Liberal Party and the entire political system. He noted that once the Liberals were in power, articles critical of the government ceased to appear in the newspapers for which he wrote, even though they had previously led the charge against corruption within the Conservative government. When his own essays were censored, Chesterton concluded that the press, like the political parties themselves, had fallen under the control of a few rich men who were dedicated to the preservation of the status quo. In addition to the evils of parliamentary government, Chesterton also became alarmed during the first decade of the new century by the threat to individual liberties inherent in the advancement of socialism. He feared that socialism, if followed to its logical collectivist end, would sacrifice the individual to the machinery of the state. This trajectory was manifest in the programs of the Fabian Society, which aimed to centralize the political powers of the state and to turn over governance to bureaucratic experts trained in the science of efficiency. Moreover, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the major forces behind the Fabians, had a lingering distaste for and suspicion of the laboring classes and thought it necessary to discipline them in order to maintain social order. For Sidney

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Webb, the masses were “apathetic, dense, unreceptive to any unfamiliar idea.”16 Indeed, the Webbs’ social ideal later became the Soviet Union. In 1935, after a visit to Russia where they saw Stalinism in action, the Webbs published two exuberant volumes on the Soviet system and hailed it as the dawn of a new civilization. Chesterton presciently contended that the Fabians were working not for a classless society but rather for a planned society via the introduction of a bureaucratic form of socialism. His prognostications later materialized in the fulsome disquisitions of the Webbs on Soviet communism. Another of Chesterton’s targets was H. G. Wells, who had complained that Marx’s notion of socialism was “unattractive to people who had any real knowledge of administration.” Wells was grateful for the Fabian Society’s conversion of “Revolutionary Socialism into Administrative Socialism.”17 Chesterton ultimately condemned socialism for two reasons. First, it addressed the issue of reform from the top, in the form of state bureaucrats deciding for individuals, the little men, what was best for them. Second, as a creed it rested on a false theory of human nature. Social reform imposed from above by the state could never be durable because it did not directly involve those whom it was supposed to benefit. People by nature, Chesterton believed, had the need to participate individually in any programs that would affect their personal lives. Reform directed from above, outside the communities in which the individual associates, would also compromise the democratic process because bureaucratic elites would be usurping initiative from the agents of primary socialization, namely, the family, the workplace, and so forth. In short, collectivist tendencies inherent in socialism would strengthen the state at the expense of the basic social institutions, especially that of the family, which Chesterton viewed as the wellspring of liberty and the source of creativity. His critique of socialism and appreciation of the family as the basic unit of good living—the keystone of all social systems—adhered closely to the principles upon which Pope Leo XIII had drafted his most famous social encyclical, Rerum Novarum. G. K. Chesterton became acquainted with the Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc because both men had a common interest in attacking the evils of imperialism, socialism, and political corruption. Chesterton’s feelings about the sanctity of private property and the qualities of good

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living found in small rural communities unsullied by the filth of industrialization complemented Belloc’s idealization of peasant proprietorship. Belloc had written about the loss of spirit and independence produced by industrialization and came to champion the virtues of rural living. Belloc believed that he had found in peasant society a respect for tradition and communal cooperation that came from working the land, generating a sense of rootedness, family closeness, and a set of religious mores that gave shape and coherence to the whole social matrix.18 The social and political philosophy developed by Chesterton and Belloc, called Distributism, was shaped by two factors in particular. The first was Belloc’s service in the House of Commons as a Liberal MP. The second was the labor unrest that brought Britain to open class warfare on the eve of World War I. Both factors came to define the two writers’ outlooks regarding necessary programs to change the system, provided them with important insights into the ways in which politics were influenced by the establishment, sharpened the anarchistic, antistatist dimension of what came to be the Distributist alternative to capitalism and socialism, and generated a wider audience and coterie of activists for the Distributist mission. Belloc was elected to Parliament in 1906 for the Liberal Party, representing South Salford. He soon discovered that his freedom to act as an independent voice was undercut by the parliamentary bosses of the Liberal Party, “the caucus,” as he called them. After a series of failures in trying to promote reformist causes, Belloc concluded that the legislative powers of Parliament and its executive had fallen under the control of a new financial elite who had replaced the old landed gentry as the major power brokers. He decided not to stand again in the general election of 1910. From this point on, parliamentary politics for Belloc became either the object of cynical jokes or something to be bitterly scorned.19 Labor activity at the time of the working-class unrest in Britain in 1914 was influenced by the infusion of syndicalism, a variety of anarchist thought that had arrived in Britain from the United States and France. The syndicalists called for workers to employ “direct action” tactics outside the conventional political system to win control of their industries. Their ultimate objective was to create a society in which the workers would control their destiny through trade unions. This was called at the time “industrial unionism.”

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Workers who responded to the call of syndicalism had a deep distrust of official leadership and political parties. Those middle-class intellectuals who supported the syndicalist cause were themselves hostile to the political system; they believed it was spawning a new kind of society that would smash the individual for the sake of bureaucratic efficiency. Both these groups shared a common fear of the abuse of state power in the hands of elected officials. Support for syndicalist thinking came from numerous rank-and-file trade unionists; the radical independent labor newspaper, the Daily Herald; an avant-garde and influential journal edited by A. R. Orage called The New Age; and two journals owned by Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, the Eye-Witness and New Witness. Cecil Chesterton had initially been an activist with the Fabian Society but quickly outgrew its statism and, while writing for Orage’s radical journal, developed a strong distaste for parliamentary politics. He also became highly critical of the Labour Party, which he believed was an inappropriate vehicle for advancing socialism. In 1910 Cecil published a book entitled Party and People, arguing for a strongman to arouse the people against corrupt politicians. The book had an obvious appeal to Belloc, and despite some differences concerning private property and socialism the two became fast friends. Cecil soon accepted Belloc’s criticism of socialism and converted to Catholicism. In 1911, Belloc and Cecil Chesterton published The Party System, which asserted that a plutocratic conspiracy had turned parliamentary government into a sham fight between the two major political parties. Its major thesis was that wealthy contributors to the parties’ funds controlled government without reference to the British electorate. A single coterie of “selected” members of Parliament directed politics for these monied powers, thus making the traditional differences between Tories and Liberals meaningless. The plutocracy allowed each party to have its turn for the sake of public appearances, but in reality this “party system” was a fraudulent game that rendered the House of Commons null and the people of Britain impotent and voiceless in political affairs.20 The second weapon used by the Chesterton brothers and Belloc to assault parliamentary politics was Belloc’s most influential book, The Servile State, which first appeared in 1912. Here, Belloc first outlined a Catholic alternative to socialism and capitalism, called Distributism.

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He prophesied that the socialists’ attempts at wholesale nationalization would prove too troublesome, requiring a compromise with capitalists, in which the owners of industry would be allowed to hold the means of production provided that they accepted the responsibility for maintaining their workers in tolerable living conditions. The potentially revolutionary worker would be given security, but at the expense of his freedom, for he now would be a virtual slave to the capitalists and state bureaucrats. This agreement for security would result in a situation where the mass of men would be constrained by law to work for the profit of a minority. As the price of such constraint, the workers would be given the economic protection that capitalism could not provide, but the arrangement would guarantee to the ownership class a monopoly over the devices for producing wealth. Belloc’s proposed remedy to this system of slavery (the “servile state”) was a general redistribution of property into the hands of the broadest number of people (in other words, Distributism, an idea derived from Rerum Novarum) in place of the current scheme, in which a large proportion of property was concentrated in the hands of a few capitalists. The working-class distress of the pre–World War I years in Britain as well as elsewhere was the product of many factors, including falling wages, irresponsible displays of wealth by the elites, and the inability of either the trade union leadership or the political parties to improve working-class living standards. Discontent also was fueled by the introduction of centralized industry-wide collective bargaining agreements, which overlooked local variables. Others were convinced that the unrest was directly inspired by revolutionary syndicalist ideas.21 The growing dissatisfaction with labor’s parliamentary party, the smoldering anger against cautious trade union leadership, and the appeal of syndicalist thinking coincided with the emergence of Cecil Chesterton’s and Hilaire Belloc’s critique of party politics and Fabian collectivism. Both Cecil Chesterton and Belloc, along with many people within the trade union movement, had recognized serious threats to the liberties of every man in the maturation of plutocratic politics. A number of British newspapers were consistent supporters of the spirit of working-class revolt. The most radical was the labor paper the Daily Herald under the direction of George Lansbury. The Chesterton

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brothers and Belloc wrote in Lansbury’s paper and thus were able to build bridges into the world of labor for the cause of Distributism. Along with the Daily Herald and Orage’s New Age, Chesterton’s and Belloc’s papers, the Eye-Witness and New Witness, threw their support behind the plethora of strikes throughout 1910 to 1914. They attacked the labor proponents of conventional party politics and waged a constant struggle against legislation such as the National Insurance Act, which was deemed to be contrary to working-class independence. Belloc’s warnings about the impingement of servile legislation led the Daily Herald to rebel against every move to increase the powers of the state. In the words of one of the Daily Herald’s correspondents, “no one has better claim than Mr. Belloc to claim the honour of being one of the leaders of that revolt.”22 The syndicalist Leonard Hall, a regular correspondent for the Daily Herald, reviewed The Servile State in November 1912. Although Hall could not accept its Catholic and Distributist conclusions, he agreed completely with its analysis of the prevailing political trends and declared that no better critique of the capitalist system had ever been written.23 Both the Eye-Witness and its successor, New Witness, were chiefly concerned with exposing the secrecy surrounding the political process and laying bare the dangers involved in the encroachment of state powers. They also gave unwavering support to the demands of the workers for higher wages and more control over their industries. In its lead article of 7 August 1911 the Eye-Witness completely supported the syndicalist demands of the radical labor activist Tom Mann and urged the workers to reject their parliamentary leaders (a thoroughly middle-class set of men divorced from the populace) and to “organize from below.” Rejecting the government’s scheme for conciliation and arbitration committees as a means for settling disputes (as contained in the Labour Disputes Bill), the Eye-Witness insisted that the workers must always have the right to strike rapidly and without notice. Both the Eye-Witness and later New Witness were firm in their support of the strike as a legitimate weapon of labor and regularly condemned the government’s efforts to end strikes through political means. They also lent their editorial voices to the spread of industrial unionism and were sanguine about revolutionary changes arising from it. In the words of Belloc, “If great masses of labour develop the power to organise from below, to insist upon

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corporate demands, to treat individual delegates as their servant, to mistrust labour ‘representation’ and develop a watchdog agency, then there will be great change in the industrial towns of England.”24 In a number of articles in various journals and newspapers, Belloc was blunt in his defense of the workers’ use of the strike. In the breach of collective bargaining agreements, he claimed, the strike was a morally justified expedient, a legitimate weapon in what had become an issue of class warfare. Since the circumstances surrounding the drafting of such agreements were unequal, the bargains, said Belloc, should have no binding force.25 Most important, in Belloc’s view, the increasing industrial turmoil reflected a shift in the consciousness of the English working class. The workers’ hopes and aspirations of earlier times, when thrift and a commitment to diligent labor in one’s calling had provided access into the ranks of the bourgeoisie, had disappeared. The workers now took the condition of industrial society for granted, and this produced in them a new moral outlook: “the proletariat now think of themselves as proletariat.” As Marx himself would have explained it, the recognition of a class enemy had produced a revolutionary consciousness in the English working class. They despised the system that oppressed them and now were committed to its destruction.26 Belloc went on to condemn the “so-called leaders” of the trade union movement for failing to win satisfactory wage and labor agreements. Nor did he believe workers would be well served by Labour MPs who manipulated trade union officials for their own self-serving purposes. These politicians, in particular J. Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden, were not working class themselves but “theoretically socialists of the regular middle class type,” motivated chiefly by private interests and the advancement of their own careers. They had been “captured by the Liberal machine” through the offer of salaries and the actual payment of public money.27 One of the more popular proposals made by those who supported the working-class agitation was the introduction of a minimum wage as a vehicle for improving the condition of labor. This was advocated by many socialists and especially pushed by the Catholic Social Guild. It was also given support in the encyclical Rerum Novarum, which advocated a “living wage.” Yet from the outset the Chestertons and Belloc steadfastly opposed the idea as a dangerous subterfuge, an insidious

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substitute for what labor really needed— ownership of the means of production.28 This marked a significant rupture in Catholic social thinking, one that advocated a frankly revolutionary solution to the desperate conditions of labor that would later be picked up by the New Left in the 1960s.29 Belloc disagreed with mandated minimum wages because he feared that such a mandate could become part of a series of legal decisions that turned a minimum wage into a national standard wage: “compelling the capitalists to pay at least so much for a particular form of labor will involve the growth of a corresponding right to see that the labor is performed.”30 To the radical Distributists, the promotion of a minimum wage (which was called for in Rerum Novarum) was mere reformism, a strategy that would never assure upward social mobility for the working orders but only solidify the prevailing power structures by giving labor the impression that they were being liberated. True freedom required a far more revolutionary measure: allowing the workers to be equal partners with management in ownership of the means of production. Belloc’s brief career in Parliament caused him to despair of reforming England’s political traditions from within. Eventually, after the years of labor unrest, he concluded that the parliamentary system itself, as currently constructed, was unsuited to govern modern Britain. He saw several signs of parliamentary dysfunction: the basic demands of wage earners were being expressed not in Parliament but out on the streets; good and talented men who wished to serve the people were no longer willing to enter the House of Commons (Belloc saw his own abbreviated parliamentary career as a sign of this problem); and finally, he believed, the “spirit of representative government” had vanished. Members of Parliament now marched to the tune of the real power brokers, the money clique who controlled the party funds. Belloc concluded that the only mechanism that could save Britain from the corruption of plutocratic capitalism was authoritarian government in the form of restored monarchical power. Unlike Belloc, Cecil Chesterton still held out hope that change might be possible through Parliament if labor were willing to take on more militant tactics. In the summer of 1912, for instance, he urged the supporters of labor to develop tactics modeled on the lines of Charles

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Stewart Parnell’s parliamentary party and the Irish Land League. Parnell’s colleagues coordinated obstructionist measures within Parliament while simultaneously directing the essentially revolutionary action of Irish peasants from without. Parnell won the admiration of the Irish people through his aggressive parliamentary policy; simultaneously, by means of the Land League’s militancy, he had made the business of government nearly impossible and encouraged revolution. The Eye-Witness suggested that labor needed a similar two-pronged approach: a group in Commons to fight the machine and, at the same time, an industrial army of labor animated by the same spirit that moved the Land League.31 However, as Cecil Chesterton admitted, such a bold program required another Parnell or an autocrat the likes of a Caesar. All the groups who supported the revolutionary objectives of the working classes in those tumultuous years before the Great War, despite their differences, were conscious of being involved in a common struggle to resist the onslaught of society engineered by adherents of state socialism. A major concern of the syndicalists and the revolutionary press was to stop the drift toward collectivism and, at the same time, to begin building a more democratic society that would allow greater freedom to the individual. This required both the elimination of what was seen to be the sham system of party politics and a restructuring of the political order. A means to this end was the creation of a new style of labor organization in the form of industrial unionism. For many people involved in this activity, industrial unionism was deemed to be a necessary mechanism for unleashing the vital spiritual forces that society needed for its rejuvenation. The collective objective of the radicals who worked toward bringing genuine economic and political power to the trade unions was to build a more balanced political system that would avoid placing excess power in the hands of the state and, at the same time, mitigate bureaucratism. Equally important, industrial unionism was recognized as a way of making the individual worker more productive and independent in order that he might reach his full development as a human being. The writings of Cecil Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc played a critical role in providing an arsenal from which the other antistatists during these years could draw their weapons. This is evidenced by the consid-

The Sources of English Catholic Radicalism

35

erable number of antiparliamentarian critics who made reference to their ideas and freely borrowed the vocabulary of both The Servile State and The Party System. After Cecil Chesterton’s death, the battles that he and Belloc had waged against bureaucratism, capitalist exploitation, and political corruption were carried on during the interwar years by G. K. Chesterton and Belloc in the newspaper called G. K.’s Weekly and in its successor, the Weekly Review. Chesterton was determined to continue the feisty journalism of his brother. He said that his paper would “fight every week for Catholic ethics and economics” in the same manner that the New Statesman was fighting for socialist causes.32 This approach to journalism was partly a response to what Chesterton considered the pusillanimity of the English Catholic hierarchy to engage in religious and political controversy. In fact, many of those who became part of what was called the Distributist circle during the 1930s, in particular Arnold Lunn and Eric Gill, frequently criticized Catholics for their intellectual timidity and for being out of touch with the problems of industrial society. Gill was especially vitriolic on this score, since the clergy failed to support his own well-known experiments in Catholic communal work and living at Ditchling Common. Gill also frequently railed against the hierarchy for lacking the courage to apply the principles of Pope Leo XIII’s social encyclicals to the issues of the day. Papal social teachings were neither widely appreciated nor always fully understood in Britain. Rerum Novarum, for instance, was greeted with a plethora of conflicting interpretations. One Catholic writer argued that it represented an outright rejection of social democracy, while another viewed it as a justification of Fabian socialism.33 Since many English Catholics were insufficiently informed about the content of the papal encyclicals on social issues, they tended to oppose trade unionism as much as they did socialism and communism. An exasperated Gill claimed that when it came to discussing matters of labor and the responsibility of workingmen, ordinary parish priests and laymen were either not interested or frankly antagonistic to any reform whatsoever. Chesterton’s weekly followed a relatively moderate course between 1925 and 1928, voicing concerns about improving conditions for the working class through trade unionism and reforming economic and

36 T HE E NGL ISH CU LT U RA L SET TING

social life through Parliament. It made significant efforts to move the Labour Party toward Distributist principles and worked diligently to check the government’s efforts to undermine the growing political strength of the trade union movement. The test of its commitment concerning the latter came in the spring of 1926 with the outbreak of the great general strike, a revolutionary trade union reaction to capitalism. The strike was precipitated by years of trouble in Britain’s coal industry. As mines became less profitable, management pushed for longer working hours and a reduction in wages, both of which were bitterly opposed by the miners. Arbitration failed, and in April the Trades Union Congress (TUC) laid plans for a general strike in support of the miners. G.K.’s Weekly supported the miners throughout the months of negotiations that led up to the strike. But Chesterton and the Distributists disapproved of a key trade union bargaining demand, namely, its insistence on a minimum or living wage. Focusing on the issue of wages, they argued, would only serve to perpetuate the division of property between employer and employee. Wage bargaining rested on the premise that labor was a commodity, and by engaging in such discussions the trade unions perpetuated the worker’s alienation from the products of his labor and his dependence on a dominant class. Wages were part of the “bread and circuses” of the servile state, designed in large part to diffuse labor’s demands for the more important goal of ownership of the means of production. On the other hand, Chesterton saw the wisdom of the mine owners’ offer to gear wages to the prosperity of the mines. This could represent the opening for an eventual joint business partnership, where remuneration for services would be linked to the industry’s profits. The miners were advised to accept the partnership offer along with its logical corollaries: joint cooperation and co-equal power with management in control of the industry and partnership in profits.34 The essential point in the mining dispute, claimed Chesterton’s newspaper, was the need for the workers to move beyond the idea of mere profit-sharing and cooperative production. What was needed was part-ownership in the companies. A key principle of Distributist industrial policy was “the utilisation of the joint-stock principle of industrial organisation for the multiplication of partners.” Or, putting it more blatantly, the present system of capitalism must be smashed so there could be more capitalists.35

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37

The general strike finally broke out in April 1926, and from the outset G.K.’s Weekly offered the workers its unqualified support. Following the radical traditions of its predecessors, the Eye-Witness and New Witness, the paper asserted that any workman had a right to strike at any time and for any reason. Withholding such rights represented a denial of liberty.36 A special edition of G. K.’s Weekly was published during the strike, but its position brought considerable criticism from many lay and clerical Catholics far less radically disposed than the Distributists. For weeks the paper received letters bristling with anger from Catholics who pilloried its editors for supporting a revolutionary act. Both the Anglican and Roman Catholic hierarchies condemned the strike. Cardinal Francis Bourne, head of the English Catholic Church, scolded the miners in his Sunday sermon at Westminster and found no moral justification for their behavior. It was a direct challenge, said he, “to lawfully constituted authority and inflicts, without adequate reason, immense discomfort and injury on millions of our fellow-countrymen. It is, therefore, a sin against the obedience which we owe to God.”37 Britain’s most influential Catholic monthly, The Tablet, supported Bourne’s position. It asserted that the trade unions were becoming too powerful and that the strike was nothing more than a ploy to hold the public hostage in order to win “sectional privileges from the People’s Government.”38 Many Distributists considered the Catholic Church’s official reaction as yet another example of a congenital reluctance to commit itself to political action, a policy driven by the fear of criticism from the governing establishment. In its special strike edition of May 15, 1926, G.K.’s Weekly accused the industrial combines of goading the workers into calling for a general strike in order to destroy the trade union movement. It also argued that government (thanks to the machinations of Winston Churchill, Lord Birkenhead, and William Joynson-Hicks), with the unofficial support of the organization calling itself the British Fascisti, had worked to create the impression that the trade unions were under the control of Bolsheviks: “The middle and upper classes have been mobilized in defence of the Combines and the rich, and in defiance of the Trade Unions and the poor. The nominal enemy was Moscow and the Red Flag; the real enemy was the Trade Union.” G. K.’s Weekly viewed the general strike not as an act of revolution but rather as a “reasonable defence against plutocracy.”39

38 T HE E NGL ISH CU LT U RA L SET TING

The general strike turned out to be a disaster for the British labor movement. Although the TUC called an end to the strike on 12 May, many angry miners stayed out for another six months. Workers in the long run lost millions of pounds in wages, and thereafter the trade unions experienced a catastrophic decline in membership. The government had been in the mine owners’ camp throughout the struggle, and the aftermath was bitter and vindictive. After the strike was called off, Parliament passed the Trades Disputes and Trade Union Bill, whose proposals included, among other things, outlawing sympathetic strikes, forbidding civil servants from joining TUC-affiliated organizations, and severely limiting the use of trade union political funds. G. K.’s Weekly campaigned long and hard against this legislation, but once the bill was passed into law in 1927, Chesterton and his friends began to lose faith in the possibility of converting the Labour Party and the trade union movement to Distributist ideals. What turned the tide for Chesterton’s group was the willingness of the TUC General Council to negotiate over long-standing differences between management and labor in order to arrive at some compromises in the interests of industrial harmony. Known as the Mond-Turner talks (Sir Alfred Mond was chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries and Ben Turner was chairman of the TUC General Council), these discussions were purposely kept secret for fear of raising the ire of extremists in both camps. In July 1929 the group issued a report indicating that the employers were willing to make concessions: they would recognize trade unions as the sole bargaining units for workers and accept changes in unemployment insurance in favor of labor. Most significant, the Mond-Turner report recommended the establishment of joint consultative machinery by the Trades Union Congress, the Federation of British Industries, and the National Confederation of Employers’ Organisations. These proposals were vehemently attacked by the Distributists, who regarded such understanding and cooperation between employers and workers as a harbinger of the dreaded servile state. The TUC’s willingness to participate in the Mond-Turner talks represented, for Distributists, a sign that the trade unions had given up seeking ownership of the means of production. The trade union movement had forsaken economic independence for the promise of security. Ches-

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39

terton and his supporters also turned their fire on the parliamentary Labour Party. Its politicians, G.K.’s Weekly asserted, had been converted to “respectability”; they had become a “real party” by entering the full political system with the understanding that all the rules laid down by parliamentary precedent would be scrupulously observed. Labor had now earned its badge of respectability; its leaders had graciously become “good parliamentarians,” in violation of the old socialist revolutionary tradition: “In the days of William Morris they had talked of destroying the Houses of Parliament by blowing them up or, more picturesquely, of shelling them from the river. . . . But now their own aim is to preserve Parliament, to make it permanent, to make it safe.”40 In February 1930, G. K.’s Weekly announced to its readers that it could no longer support parliamentary politics. Henceforth, Distributists would work for revolution from without, since any changes would have to be imposed by forces other than legal, parliamentary actions. It is of interest to note here that the Chesterton-Belloc analysis of the Mond-Turner agreements dovetailed with that of the leading English Marxist of the day, R. Palme Dutt. In the Labour Monthly, Dutt pointed out that if the trade unionists accepted the Mond-Turner proposals, it would mark their conversion “from organs of class struggle into organs of co-operation in the capitalist organisation of industry.”41 From this point onward, the Distributists moved further away from conventional politics and sought to gain support for their schemes through a variety of other expedients, including a political alternative proposed by Hilaire Belloc: the restoration of monarchical government. On a more practical and realistic level, throughout the years before the outbreak of World War II, Chesterton’s journal and its successor, along with Belloc and his circle, worked assiduously to arouse the public consciousness to the dangers of political corruption and statist collectivism. Their followers organized the Distributist League, which labored to advance the ideas of Chesterton and Belloc as well as to propose alternative methods of production. Chesterton called attention to Eric Gill’s cooperative experiment at Ditchling Common, the model Distributist community that Gill hoped would serve as a moral and practical inspiration— a “cell of good living”—for building a better society. Here, Gill set up a highly regarded craft guild where workers lived with their families in a

40 T HE E NGL ISH CU LT U RA L SET TING

self-sufficient, loosely knit commune guided by the religious principles of Thomas Aquinas and the philosophy of Distributism. Chesterton also appealed to the government to give his project a helping hand through a variety of programs. Several proposals were advanced to change the economic system so as to promote the development of wider ownership of property. These included, among other things, differential tax schemes targeting those who abused their wealth; elimination of primogeniture; subsidization of experiments in small property holdings; educational programs for teaching handicrafts and farming; and creation of local market systems to replace the huge marketing centers, such as Covent Garden in London. Finally, Chesterton urged workers to organize special guild associations that would exercise cooperative control of all industry, with the ultimate aim of buying out the capitalists as the owners of the means of production. The call for a new Distributist order was truly revolutionary, but Chesterton insisted that it could come about only through the voluntary action of the community. It would be counterproductive to coerce people onto the countryside to revive small-scale farming or into trade guilds because such moves would undermine the personal freedom that was the cornerstone of Distributism. Likewise, a draconian confiscation of wealth and property would destroy the love of proprietorship that the Distributists were trying to revive. Unlike socialism or communism, Distributism was not a thing that could be “done” to people; it could be born only through their approval and active participation. To Chesterton, the Distributist new order required a moral transformation:“But it must be done in the spirit of a religion, or a revolution, and (I will add) of a renunciation. They must want to do it as they want to drive invaders out of a country or to stop the spread of a plague.”42 The death of G. K. Chesterton in 1936 and the rise of fascism ultimately led to a split in the Distributist movement. One group, attracted to the more authoritarian and antiparliamentary thinking of Hilaire Belloc, gravitated to the extremist, anticommunist right. Others who followed the more moderate trajectory of Chesterton (who had himself made a clear break with fascist ideas) denounced the political positions of their fellow Distributists. The reactionary elements eventually gained control of Chesterton’s journal and upheld a philo-fascist line regard-

The Sources of English Catholic Radicalism

41

ing international affairs. A number of writers for the Weekly Review developed ties to British fascist organizations. These included Jorian Jenks, A. K. Chesterton—the intellectual spark plug of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and editor of its two chief propaganda organs, Blackshirt and Action—and J. L. Benvenisti. The Weekly Review dished out a scurrilous screed of anticommunist, anti-Jewish commentaries that served to disgrace the legacy of G. K. Chesterton’s journalism. Although the Distributist movement fragmented by the latter 1930s, the careers of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc for a generation at least had the effect of breaking down the siege mentality and the timidity of Catholics with respect to English politics. In doing so, they established a legacy of radical social and economic thinking that could be tapped by newer generations to address the problems of both an industrial and postindustrial society. However, this breed of confrontational, politicized, anti-establishment Catholicism went into retreat after World War II. The revolutionary social legacy pioneered by Chesterton and the Left Distributists lost its relevance by that point and, with a notable exception, failed to be fully appreciated or thoughtfully engaged with the revival of political Catholicism in the 1960s. Furthermore, English Catholics of the left never gave the Distributists a fair reading, owing largely to the taint of right-wing extremism and philo-fascism bequeathed to the movement by Hilaire Belloc and his followers. Yet there was a socially and economically radical dimension to Distributist thinking that resonated closely with the views of Catholic radicals of the 1960s and, if sufficiently integrated with their programs, could have broadened the audience and given additional religious heft to their cause. The Distributist phenomenon was the taproot of an English Catholic radicalism; in the larger historical context, it culminated in the ideas of the Catholic New Left of the 1960s.

T H R E E

English Catholics and the Establishment

THE OLD GUARD

In contrast to the anti-establishment temperament of radical Distributism, Catholic sentiment after World War II was markedly more supportive of the prevailing cultural and political structures of the English social order. Bishop David Mathew in the third edition of his authoritative study of Catholicism in England (1955) recognized a palpably conservative, Tory inclination among the more prosperous Catholic social strata. This was symbolized, in his view, by the considerable influence of Douglas Woodruff, the rightist owner-editor of the highly respected lay Catholic journal The Tablet. Attached to this broadly conservative frame of mind were what Mathew called those Catholics in the managerial class “who had separated themselves from the Irish nationalismin-England which had so often been their father’s creed.”1 There was a distinct solidarity of opinion or “corporate quality” to their outlook, said Mathew, that was forged by General Francisco Franco’s struggle against the Communists in Spain’s civil war. The consensus among English 42

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upper- and middle-class Catholics, the great majority of clergy, and virtually all members of the hierarchy (with the exception of the bishop of Pella) was that Franco was holding back atheistic Marxism in defense of European Christianity. In short, Mathew concluded that the English Catholic community had been moved to political consensus by accepting the notion that the Spanish imbroglio was a religious war. This was an assertion propounded by the influential Catholic journalist Douglas Jerrold, Woodruff ’s paper, and the writings of other right-wing Distributist epigoni of Hilaire Belloc.2 Those Catholics who had a more nuanced view of the Spanish affair and were critical of Franco’s pro-Fascist policies and unsavory allies (the Dominicans in Blackfriars, Eric Gill, and the left-wing Distributists) were minority voices and had little impact on what Mathew saw as a highly positive solidarity of thought on the political right. What English Catholics learned through the putative “sagacious” editorial guidance of Woodruff and Jerrold was to hold firm against Russian imperialism in foreign affairs and to stand guard against any manifestations of Marxism on the domestic scene.3 What Mathew identified as a consensus in Catholic thinking given focus by the Spanish Civil War downplays the other, darker side of that political coin, namely, the blindness to the evils of fascism and sympathy toward authoritarianism among English Catholics throughout the 1930s. Those whom Mathew honored were at least partly responsible for this. In 1937, for example, Frank Sheed published a book by J. K. Heydon, Fascism and Providence, that spoke of common ground between the Catholic Evidence Guild and what was considered Catholic-inspired fascist movements throughout Europe: both were parallel forces for righteousness in working for the creation of the corporate state.4 Catholics throughout the 1930s had the reputation of being philo-fascist. Indeed, in Leeds, Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), was known as “the Pope” due to the large number of Catholics who supported his movement. The BUF noted in its journal that fascists and Catholics had much in common since both were opposed to democracy.5 Although the English Catholic hierarchy was highly critical of the Nazis after the outbreak of war, it continued to resist condemnation of

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authoritarian regimes in Spain and Portugal, and it seldom said anything negative about various other movements on the political right. There was a certain irony to this position. For example, throughout World War II, Cardinal Arthur Hinsley of Westminster kept a signed photograph of General Franco on his desk. In a personal note thanking Franco, moreover, Hinsley hailed the dictator as the “great defender of the true Spain” and valued his “likeness as a treasure.”6 All the while, Franco’s benefactor, Adolf Hitler, had placed Cardinal Hinsley on the Nazi death list. Hinsley’s double standard could be explained by Cardinal John Heenan, who, after visiting Barcelona for the 1952 Eucharistic Conference,, asserted that “Franco’s Spain is a dictatorship with a difference.”7 This kind of thinking, claimed J. M. Cameron, had essentially crippled the political vision of his fellow Catholics. English Catholics, claimed Cameron in a 1960 discussion of religion and politics, continued to be imprisoned by a number of myths, forms of false consciousness that kept them at the margins of political life. Chief among these was the notion that Franco’s Falangist insurgents were largely responsible for checking the advancement of a Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy to destroy Europe’s Christian civilization.8 The penchant for authoritarianism and rightist political movements, however, was mostly confined to the Catholic upper and middle classes. It was not a salient trait among their co-religionists in the working classes. There was a sizeable social and mental gulf between the small number of upper-class intellectuals who dominated the journals (Woodruff at The Tablet, Jerrold’s English Review, and Michael de la Bedoyere at the Catholic Herald ) and the larger numbers of urban Catholic workingmen, the latter of whom showed no uniform or zealous sympathy with politics on the right.9 In later years there would be a resentment and simmering anger over the Catholic establishment’s reactionary political bent. The animus can be seen, for instance, in a review of Cardinal Heenan’s autobiography, Not the Whole Truth, by G. Egner in the Dominican journal New Blackfriars of March 1972.10 Egner viewed Heenan’s story not simply as the record of one man’s career but as representative of an entire era in English Catholicism. What he discerned in Heenan’s life was an ambiguous emptiness, an absence of moral evaluation regarding the sins of the Church and the political distortions of his day, all of

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which were encapsulated in a blind obedience to authority. “We have suffered,” wrote Egner, “from the social origins of our bishops.” Rarely had they been recruited from settings that gave birth to England’s working and professional classes. Isolation from English culture and educational institutions produced a religious ruling class committed not to the extension of rights and privileges to the lower classes but to protecting the prerogatives of clerical power. The English Roman Catholic establishment was content “once the channel was crossed” to acquiesce in a complex of ideals and preferences that favored “legitimist, authoritarian, imperialist, nationalist, anti-democratic and . . . anti-Semitic” values. This acquiescence, claimed Egner, was due to a failure to examine the “pre-suppositions upon which the Roman Catholic intrasystematic self-interest” had been built.11 There was a small but influential group of Catholics during these years who assumed a more progressive stance, especially in matters of liturgical reform and the use of the vernacular. After Michael de la Bedoyere left the Catholic Herald, he founded a journal called Search that opened its pages to Catholics who championed the liberal trajectory of Vatican II as a counter posture to the more conservative Woodruff group. Neil Middleton and Martin Redfern used their positions at Sheed and Ward to provide English translations of Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Hans Küng, the Continental “new theologians” whose writings provided the reformist framework for the Council. Sheed and Ward also published England’s progressive theologians: Charles Davis, Herbert McCabe, Nicholas Lash, and Rosemary Houghton, all of whom promoted Council reforms. A prominent new journal on the scene was Herder Correspondence, a lay enterprise that specialized in investigative journalism focusing on the latest theological work being published on the Continent. Herder provided in-depth international information about Catholic issues, claiming to speak to the “elite of English-speaking Catholicism” and reaching an audience in some ninety countries.12 All of these groups and publications, noted Bernard Sharratt, “had assimilated and responded to Vatican II more rapidly and enthusiastically than had the clergy and episcopacy.”13 They represented a new voice that challenged the establishment groups that heretofore had claimed to speak authoritatively on religious matters.

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By the early 1960s there was also a growing educated laity and increasing pressures for reforming the traditional, neoscholastic, and conservative historical curricula of England’s seminaries in order to prepare a clergy more attuned to the needs of a modernizing society. At the Westminster diocesan seminary at Ware, for example, Charles Davis, Hubert Richards, and Peter de Rosa introduced a set of courses that were designed to complement the biblical and liturgical thought that informed Vatican II. Starting in 1967, the Catholic seminaries of Heythrop, Ushaw, and Upholland began integrating their curricula with the Universities of London, Durham, Liverpool, and Manchester.14 Yet many lay Catholics with distinguished professional careers thought that their input on Church matters was being thwarted by episcopal authority. For example, in the winter of 1966, Herder Correspondence was attacked by Cardinal Heenan as “a poor man’s ecclesiastical Private Eye.”15 One of the most outspoken laymen for reform was John Murray Todd, who held an important position as editor at Longmans Green and was one of the founders of the Catholic publishing house Darton, Longman and Todd. To him, Vatican II was rich in possibilities for replacing what he considered the legalistic, “gloomy,” and “disapproving” nature of the Church in England. But Todd lamented that the promise of the Council’s document Lumen Gentium, opening the Church to more lay participation, was being ignored in such matters as the appointment of bishops and opinions on contraception and nuclear weapons.16 The cautious attitude of the English weekly press on the birth-control controversy required the more radical Catholics to express their views in the national secular newspapers. At the beginning of the fourth session of the Council, Desmond Fisher, de la Bedoyere’s successor as editor of the Catholic Herald, was recalled from Rome. It was believed at the time that the paper’s directors, fearing a postconciliar “backlash” from the conservative hierarchies, had become nervous about Fisher’s articles promoting ecumenism and laymen’s responsibilities and rights in the Church. Fisher resigned soon thereafter, claiming “policy differences with the board.” The matter was not much commented on in England, but the Dutch Catholic press made a good deal of the affair as a “symptom of the developments in the authoritarian and disciplinarian English Catholic world . . . which has not

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yet reached the stage of maturity in which dialogue is possible.”17 In the view of Louis McRedmond, a lead writer for the Irish Independent, the English Catholic press would probably continue to play it safe by assuming a passive posture for fear of the conservative leadership’s crackdown on liberal efforts to actualize the progressive potential of the Council’s rulings. The consequence of this, McRedmond feared, was to lose the loyalty of the new generation of Catholics, who, having moved beyond the limited horizons of their earlier ghetto mentality, expected forward-looking theological policies. The pusillanimity of the Catholic newspapers would only serve to link them increasingly to the clerical and lay forces who wished to retard change rather than implement the Council’s decrees.18 Although there was growing consternation among a number of liberal-minded Catholic intellectuals regarding ecclesiastical resistance to reform, this was outweighed by a solidarity in sentiment along conservative lines among Catholics in general. As James Lothian has noted, before World War II there was a genuine community of English Catholic intellectuals held together by both close personal relationships and a common ideology.19 This intellectual consensus, as Lothian outlines, had been forged by Hilaire Belloc’s ideas on government, political economy, and history as well as by the force of G. K. Chesterton’s brilliant writings on all aspects of cultural life. The solidarity of the Bellocian vision was weakened after the war, as the influence of Christopher Dawson (who disapproved, among other things, of Belloc’s radical historiography and unconventional politics) moved a number of Catholic intellectuals away from a focus on economic matters and politics to a greater concern with theology and philosophy. Despite some fracturing of agreement among Catholic intellectuals in the postwar years (triggered in part by a rejection of the Bellocian encouragement of segregation from conventional political culture), it can be said that Catholics in England by the 1960s, on both an intellectual and popular level, had largely joined the mainstream and were no longer at variance with the values of the ruling establishment, even if they were not unanimous in their political loyalties. By this point they had moved from Woodruff ’s orthodox conservatism toward more moderate liberal attitudes. The two most prominent political figures were Shirley Williams of the Labour Party and the

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Tory Norman St. John-Stevas. Both assumed leadership positions in their respective parties, although little divided them in terms of practical politics. The most influential man of labor was the Preston Catholic George Woodcock, who served as general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) from 1960 to 1969. Under Woodcock’s leadership the TUC came full circle, bringing to completion the agreements adumbrated in the Mond-Turner talks to end class warfare in the interwar years, which had previously convinced the Chesterbelloc that the political system was rigged. Woodcock managed to move his organization away from being a weapon of workingclass confrontation with the establishment to that of becoming more of a partner with both government and management for planning industrial policy and thereby salvaging capitalism. The effect of the triangular consultations between these three agencies of power assured relatively conflict-free government through common corporate agreement. The importance of ideology and issues of class conflict were increasingly muted. Election campaigns seemed essentially stage-managed by corporate power brokers to mitigate crises and matters of class differences. Historian Keith Middlemas has argued that the class conflicts of 1910 –1914, followed by the 1926 general strike and the challenges of both communism and fascism in the 1930s, led to a common agreement among Britain’s power brokers to prevent revolution. Middlemas identified a “corporate bias,” which, for the sake of sound governance, produced a quasi-secret agreement between the oligarchs who controlled parliamentary parties, industry, and labor to prevent conflict through compromises. This managerial arrangement has had the effect of blurring class conflict and limiting the power of the people to shape the behavior of politicians and bureaucrats. Middlemas’s thesis would seem to corroborate Hilaire Belloc’s and the Chesterton brothers’ prognostications concerning the erosion of parliamentary democracy and the encroachment of the servile state.20 A good example of political Catholicism going mainline could be found in the existence of the Catholic Union. The organization referred to itself as a “non-political association” of Catholic laymen (with roughly a thousand members), which monitored government and public actions on both national and local levels to promote Catholic interests. Mem-

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bership seems to have been reserved for persons who had successful careers or gentrified lineage. The Union preferred to work behind the scenes, using private rather than public measures to satisfy its concerns. The journalist George Scott, in preparing his book on the state of England’s Roman Catholics in the 1960s, discovered that the organization was rather elitist: “We keep the Micks out,” commented one of its aristocratic members.21 It was cautious about the issues it chose to address and seldom took stands on contentious domestic matters. One issue that did move its members to action on the local level involved a firm’s installation of condom machines outside dance halls, a temptation seemingly designed by Satan himself. The Union put considerable pressure on local authorities, and these nefarious dispensers of sin were soon removed. It also lobbied the Foreign Office on such matters as discrimination against Catholic schools in Ceylon and the persecution of Catholics in southern Sudan. For the most part, it took care to give the impression that it was a force for moderation and good sense. In the words of Sir George Rendel, chairman of the Activities Committee, the Catholic Union defends “all Christian interests” and promotes “Christian morality which is not much regarded today. We don’t expect everyone to agree with us but we have the respect of government because we show that Catholics are now trying to play a responsible part and that we are trying to cooperate.”22 The Catholic Union did not seem to garner much respect on the Labour side of the House. One Catholic Labour MP reported to Scott that the organization pretended to represent the “Catholic Establishment in England” but had little to offer ordinary Catholics, who, one might deduce, were less concerned about condom sales or schools in southern Sudan than about stagnant living conditions in England. Several others whom Scott interviewed opined that the Catholic Union was wholly unrepresentative (how can the duke of Norfolk pretend to represent most Catholics?), ineffective, and largely inconsequential.23 One of the major efforts to help Catholics bring some pressure to bear on the labor movement was the creation of the Catholic Workers’ College at Oxford in 1921. Its objective was to train and inspire political and union leaders of the future to advance a Catholic social and economic agenda. Unfortunately, from the outset the college never received

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adequate financial support from Catholic authorities. By 1965 the school had enrolled only 45 students. Joe Kirwan, its principal, expressed disappointment in his 1963– 64 annual report that few students subscribed to courses that dealt with economics and politics, and wrote that there was a general lack of interest in matters of social justice. Although the college had started to develop relationships with the trade union movement, it was not able to draw from its ranks students of high quality. Kirwan urged the clergy to do more to promote social action from the pulpit. Catholics were simply avoiding the issue. As Scott reports, Kirwan said: “The fact of the matter is that in the forty-two years of the College’s life this country has sent only 280 men and women to it. Thirty are still in residence and eighteen are already dead. So small a band spread over so long a time is not going to revolutionise the land.”24 While Kirwan struggled relentlessly to promote Catholic action, he often faced either a wall of indifference or egregious ignorance. He once recalled a layman in Lancashire, for instance, who should have known better, condemning the Workers’ College as “socialist.” This benighted indifference and occasional outright hostility to the college’s mission contributed to what Kirwan saw as a lack of confidence in the laboring classes’ ability to cope with the complexities of modern social problems. There was an unspoken, perhaps unconscious notion that working men and women should follow the orders of their superiors and not dare think for themselves.25 There were also some feeble efforts to promote Catholic social justice on the other side of the class chasm. A few years after World War II, the Associations of Catholic Employers and Managers were founded, following an appeal by Cardinal Archbishop Bernard Griffen of Westminster. Their purpose, according to George Scott, who investigated them for his book on English Catholics, was to study industrial problems from a managerial perspective in light of Catholic social teaching. These organizations were autonomous and lacked any national coordination, and their membership always remained small. Several associations offered industrial leadership courses designed to bring Christian ideals to all aspects of industry, from the docks and factory floors to the boardrooms. Scott examined closely the syllabi of one such course offered by the Jesuit community at Loyola Hall. From 1960 through 1965 there was a steady decline of students in attendance. So-called Indus-

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trial Leadership Leaflets were used as teaching tools, and one of their major goals was to battle communist influence in the labor movement. The economic problems of the day were presented not as the products of industrial restructuring or the consequences of the ravages of a capitalist drive for profit but rather as the results of a widespread spiritual failing. According to “Leaflet, No. 1,” “We must beware of thinking that man is the slave of economic or industrial forces: he has to bend these to his will and make them conform to the principles of Christ.” The central message promoted in these courses, according to Scott, was the imperative of achieving a spirit of accommodation and mutual loyalty between manager and employee. This meant that the workingman owed his loyalty not solely to his union but to the larger community as a whole: “The attitude of ‘my union, right or wrong’ is not Christian.” Therefore, strikes should be avoided for the sake of general cooperation and brotherhood. Both managers and workers were reminded that their ultimate employer was God, not the firm. In order to better serve Him, workers were encouraged to be punctual, “not waste God’s time,” not steal the materials and tools of one’s trade, and so forth. Employers also had to follow rules to better serve God, including practicing generosity and charity and encouraging cooperation. After examining the literature from the Associations of Catholic Employers and Managers’ courses, Scott concluded that they were primarily calculated to benefit the bosses. Management, he argued, seemed primarily inclined to lecture their employees about the virtues of spiritual refreshment. The overall effect was to inculcate a state of docility and compliance to the aims of management. The workers might have sinned through selfishness, but nothing was said about the inhumanity and exploitation wrought by the captains of industry. If there were to be any improvement in the climate of British industry, Scott stated, “our energies should be directed to finding ways of making work itself more tolerable and more ‘personal’, to restoring dignity to labour and, in my view, to changing the structural relationships between employers and workers. But instead of working for change, the Jesuits of Loyola Hall seem to be offering a spiritual tranquilliser.”26 On the other hand, there was nothing tranquilizing about the Church’s campaign against communism. Besides Pope Pius XI’s root-andbranch condemnation of Marxism in the encyclical Divini Redemptoris

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(1937), Catholics in Britain were especially vigilant about the dangers of the creed, given the fate of their co-religionists in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Eastern European countries brutalized by Soviet occupation. All Catholic lay movements after the war adopted strong anticommunist agendas. The Association of Catholic Trade Unions (ACTU) had its roots as a lobby to force the Labour Party conferences to drop from their agendas the annual resolution calling for the secularization of education in the public elementary schools. The organization ultimately succeeded. Later the group formed a permanent body, the National Conference of Catholic Trade Unionists, which took on the mission of educating Catholics about their responsibilities regarding papal social teachings. In addition, it worked assiduously to keep the parliamentary Labour Party with which it was affiliated from becoming an official socialist body. This ended in failure when, in 1918, the Labour Party at its national conference accepted socialism as a central plank of its platform. Disappointed and at loose ends, the National Conference in the same year, at a meeting in Leeds, formally asked the bishops for guidance and general advice on how to proceed. For unclear reasons the group never received a response and ceased to meet after 1918.27 Members later reorganized as the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (still ACTU). After World War II the ACTU, convinced that Moscow’s agents were trying to take over the trade union movement in Britain, took aim at the threat of communism. As part of its agenda, the ACTU worked to expose communists in the ranks of labor. It also cooperated with Scotland Yard to help identify communist front organizations. However, some Catholic trade unionists thought that the ACTU had an exaggerated fear of Marxism and that its attacks were largely counterproductive, producing a backlash against Catholics among rank-and-file union members. This was especially the position of General Secretary Woodcock of the TUC. Woodcock was opposed in general to any specific Catholic grouping, since it might have the effect of alienating those people who should be supportive of the kinds of values relevant to all Christians. Also, attempts to force “Catholic influence” on public issues could be seen as further evidence of Catholic “separateness” from the non-Catholic environment, which Woodcock and others active in political life were trying to overcome. Increasingly,

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the attitude of these Catholics was that the most effective way to be a Christian witness was to be a committed, masterful practitioner of one’s trade or profession. One of the more prominent ACTU leaders, Bob Walsh, who also served as secretary of the Catholic Social Guild, was critical of the ACTU’s negative attacks on Marxists, believing it more efficacious to spell out the positive, radical side of Catholic social teachings that would replace both communism and capitalism. Said Walsh, “Communists and I part company in the method of attack on these evils and in the system that must replace capitalism.”28 The main issue for many Catholics by the late 1940s, however, was not Marxist subversion of the trade unions but rather the more furtive communist evil of “big government” through the introduction of welfare state legislation. The vanguard of this scheme was the 1942 Beveridge Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services. Sir William Beveridge was one of the civil servants who had helped to pass the National Insurance Act of 1911, viewed by the Distributists as the precursor of the dreaded “servile state.” He had now drafted a blueprint for full social security and employment. This was followed by Aneurin Bevan’s National Health Service Act of 1946, with its new Ministry of Health. Subscription to the health and social security services was compulsory, benefits were linked to contributions and general taxation, and the scheme was to cover all citizens irrespective of income. By July 1948 the program in large measure was in operation. In 1944, under the guidance of R. A. Butler, a National Education Act was passed into law. Among other points, the legislation required secondary education for every child (eventually up to the age of sixteen), abolished fee-paying in Local Authority schools, and made nondenominational religious instruction compulsory in state schools. The state granted to religious schools 50 percent of the capital costs for secondary school reorganization mandated by the act. This required Catholics to provide two schools— a junior school and a secondary “modern” school—to replace its traditional all-age schools. This plan was too expensive for most parishes, and in order to address the problem, parishes were obliged to pool their resources and establish a consolidated secondary school for students from several different areas. To administer

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these reforms, the power and scope of the state bureaucracy was considerably expanded with the creation of a Ministry of Education. The Beveridge reforms of social security, the Education Act, and the National Health Service Act—three pillars of what came to be recognized as the welfare state— conflicted with Catholic social teaching regarding volunteerism and the preservation of family rights and responsibilities. In general, the scheme was a direct threat to the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, and its educational restructuring endangered the financial and moral independence of Catholic segregated schools. Finally, the reforms encouraged the breakup of smaller parish schools for larger regional institutions of learning as cost-saving measures, and this had the effect of weakening the sense of parish unity. Catholic responses to the welfare state traversed the political spectrum. The bishop of Leeds, for instance, accused Butler of sleeping “with a copy of Mein Kampf under his pillow.” In an address to the Catholic Truth Society, Cardinal Heenan spoke of Britain going National Socialist. On the other hand, the Finchley branch of the Catholic Parents’ and Elector’s Association viewed Butler’s educational reforms as a Marxistinspired plot to allow the state to assume total control of England’s children.29 The Catholic Social Guild under the leadership of Father Paul Crane, S. J., who edited the guild’s magazine The Christian Democrat, and the influential economist Colin Clark both argued that the Beveridge and Butler schemes would finalize the construction of Belloc’s servile state. As a means of combating these legislative horrors, The Tablet urged Catholics to vote a Tory slate in the 1945 general election. Some of the most critical attacks on the welfare-state legislation came from Catholics associated with the Distributist movement, who saw it as the logical outcome of what Chesterton and Belloc had predicted given the growing bureaucratization of British society. Much of the criticism stemmed from the anti-industrial sentiments that were rooted in Distributist thinking, which romanticized the medieval guilds as protecting the creative and cultural independence of craftsmen. Hilary Pepler, editor of the Distributist Weekly Review, writing in the Catholic Times (22 April 1943), warned that the Beveridge Report was a “network of chains from which no man can escape.” The welfare state, he asserted, would permanently destroy any possibility of reviving a social order of

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stable family communities supported by independent workers. Reginald Jebb, Hilaire Belloc’s son-in-law, wrote in a Catholic Times article that the Beveridge scheme amounted to a “revolution in the sense that it adds political slavery to the present economic slavery of the proletariat. It is a natural development from the past in that it confirms and perpetuates the worst evils of industrial capitalism.”30 In the long run the majority of Catholics came to terms with Britain’s welfare state. The first to appreciate the kinds of security offered by its national programs were members of the working classes. A Stockport parishioner in a letter to the Catholic Herald explained why this was the case: As a Catholic working man and head of a family, I am getting rather tired of those no doubt very comfortable gentlemen whose state of life has kept them well cushioned against poverty and want, and whose purpose in life seems to be to maim, and then destroy, the Welfare State by criticism. The National Insurance and Medical Bills were accepted by all three political parties as a means of ensuring that everyone would have the necessary minimum of equipment for their journey through life and an assurance of some help should they fall, if this is not Christian ethics, what is?31 As the sociologist Peter Coman has shown, by the time of Vatican Council II (1962–1965) the major Catholic journals of opinion had little to say regarding the reality of Britain’s welfare state, although there was a continuing concern about Butler’s Education Act. This was due, in part, to the Church’s fear of losing the ability to guide the moral development of young Catholics and thereby preserve the valued traditions of its subculture. Cardinal Heenan, in an interview with the Vatican paper L’Osservatore Romano, stated: “Our greatest preoccupation is school building; we place the greatest emphasis on education because young people, when they have matured intellectually, generally remain the best Catholics.”32 Yet another concern was the increasing financial burden of maintaining voluntary parochial schools.33 It is Coman’s thesis that Catholics came to accept the welfare state as the lesser of several evils, the most practical way of mitigating the

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blows of capitalism in the workplace, and a realistic alternative to communism. Traditional Catholic social teaching by this point was proving itself incapable of addressing the challenges of corporate capitalism. This, in conjunction with the weakening of the Catholic subculture and the assimilation of Catholics into Britain’s mainstream society, made it too difficult to sustain a uniquely Catholic way of life.34 The mission of furthering the potential for private proprietorship regarding land, protecting the small independent craftsman, and promoting worker industrial shareholding while adhering to the principle of subsidiarity was increasingly problematic in an environment of rapid urbanization and growing concentrations of corporate power. Many Catholics, as they began to leave their subculture and merge into the broader configurations of British secular society, forsook more radical avenues of reform, finding it more convenient to submit to the power structures of the political establishment and its meliorative welfare state. In fact, it was the assessment of Bishop George A. Beck in 1950 that Catholics in general were not actively interested in politics and that the possibilities of achieving anything useful were not worthy of consideration.35

A NEW GENERATION

Catholic assimilation into the broader English society was accelerated by the social changes brought about by World War II, the breakdown of the working-class subculture, and the educational reforms initiated by the Butler Education Act. Young Catholic men who joined the armed forces were exposed to a variety of social and political venues that reshaped and broadened their sense of the world. The German air assault on Britain also served to break down Catholic parochialism, in that it necessitated a unified front, a coming together of every citizen irrespective of class or religion to do battle with a common enemy. But, most significant, the expanded access to higher education after 1944 resulted in a better informed, more intellectually sophisticated, and more professionally oriented coterie of Catholics. All this had significant sociological consequences. It weakened the commonality of interest and discourse

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between the working-class generation and their progeny, whose perspectives and prospects for social mobility moved them further away from their traditional communities. The core of Catholic parish life centered on the industrial towns was now transformed by the movement of younger professionals and their families into the new housing estates in the suburbs. Besides isolating the older generations who stayed behind, the migration into these housing developments also required the creation of new parishes, but ones with little vocational homogeneity to weld them into closely-knit social entities. What could be called the “embourgeoisement” of the Catholic community after the war also had an impact on the status and function of the clergy. Traditionally the parish priest was the “natural leader” of the community, a benevolent and all-knowing father figure whose pastoral training and spiritual guidance gave shelter and succor to an immigrant group that found itself alienated and insecure in a seemingly hostile environment. The immigrant carried with him from Ireland a tradition of clerical respect and thus the custom of deference to the wisdom, authority, and power of his parish priest. Yet the educational training of the parish priest, largely pastoral in nature, did not prepare him to address the needs of an increasingly sophisticated and educated generation of younger Catholics. Indeed, by the 1950s the average priest could not match the educational achievements of many of his communicants. The intellectual and cultural level of the English Catholic clergy was frequently criticized by younger, highly educated Catholics, who complained of mind-numbing sermons mechanically regurgitated from dated seminary textbooks. Few parish priests were university graduates, having been “trained” in pastoral matters in seminaries rather than “educated broadly” in terms of either general or higher culture. The syllabi of the English seminaries were outdated in theological approach, and thus the seminarians were unprepared for serious scholarship. One priest writing in the journal Search, for instance, pointed out that the increasingly higher literacy of lay Catholics with university educations was establishing cultural standards beyond what their parish priests could match.36 The Catholic intellectuals who found their voices in the 1960s labored to expose the failings and inadequacies of their subcultural

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heritage. There certainly was little comfort to be found in this generation from the traditional parochial separatism that had been so appealing to the earlier convert Catholics or, for that matter, to their parents. Terry Eagleton, for example, claimed that being a Catholic made one feel “part of a weird, whispered about minority,” like being “a petty bourgeois black or a homosexual Tory.”37 The postwar assimilation into English society made those who grew up in what the writer Bernard Bergonzi called the “Hiberno-English” subculture highly sensitive to the intellectual and political singularities of their upbringing. For Bergonzi, the symbolic markers of this workingclass and lower middle-class religion were hymns such as “Faith of Our Fathers” and “God Bless Our Pope,” along with bottles of Lourdes holy water and gaudy statues of saints such as St. Philomena (now officially declared never to have existed).38 The symbolic attachment that Catholics had to such markers had helped them to forge a defensive identity in the midst of a dominant Protestant culture. Adding to this ghetto mentality was the long-entrenched, inward-looking temperament of the old recusant aristocratic families. For these core elements of English Catholicism, the Church was a citadel behind which one could fend off the heresies that threatened the good and the true. This notion of the Church as citadel had also been appealing to convert Catholics. It was this image of Catholicism under siege and separated from the secular world that the new generation of Catholic intellectuals represented by Bergonzi and others sought to transform. As Bergonzi himself pointed out in an article on English Catholics in the magazine Encounter in 1965, the intellectual face of Catholicism in the United Kingdom had largely been the creation of the “Chesterbelloc,” but primarily of the Bellocian side of that compound beast. Hilaire Belloc in particular had broken through the siege mentality of the pusillanimous recusant Catholic legacy and given the Catholics of his day a renewed confidence to advance the Roman cause. He provided them with a myth, noted Bergonzi, which asserted that their religion was the seedbed of European culture (“Europe is the faith; and the faith is Europe,” said Belloc) and that Catholics were different from and superior to their Protestant countrymen. Belloc’s triumphalist message was a moral booster to Catholics who for too long had slunk sheepishly

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in the shadows of English politics, but Bergonzi believed that the influence was damaging in the long run. Belloc’s mythology of the exceptionalism of Catholicism led to what the writer Donald Attwater had called a “Latinophile” mentality, the mistaken notion that countries of Latin heritage—Italy, France, and Spain—could do no wrong because they were rooted in Catholic culture.39 This mind-set had encouraged English Catholics in the interwar years to embrace uncritically the reactionary and anti-Semitic Action Française of Charles Maurras, Benito Mussolini’s brand of fascism, and the rightist Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. The journalistic landscape of English Catholicism in the 1960s also elicited little enthusiasm from Bergonzi, since it largely reflected accommodation with common British bourgeois mentalities tempered by large doses of parochialism. For example, the Universe, wrote Bergonzi, the most widely read weekly, reflected the Hiberno-English image back to its readers without challenge, largely reinforcing their traditional prejudices and the image of the Church as a monolithic society. A more highbrow weekly, The Tablet, appealed to an audience similar to that of the New Statesman and Spectator. Its commentaries were intelligent, judicious, moderately conservative, and dull. The Tablet’s right-wing editorship under Douglas Woodruff had little appeal to Bergonzi’s progressive Catholic friends, who sought more intellectually challenging journalism toward the leftist side. The only signs of innovation and advanced thinking for Bergonzi were found in a few smaller publications, most notably the Dominican monthly New Blackfriars, which addressed matters of radical social and economic interest. One other source of creativity was a private newsletter published by Michael de la Bedoyere called Search. For many years de la Bedoyere was editor of the Catholic Herald but was suddenly let go for what may have been his controversial editorial decisions.40 In any case, free from ecclesiastical sanctions, de la Bedoyere became even more willing to take on controversial issues. The purpose of founding Search, he claimed, was to encourage Christians to have more dialogue among themselves concerning radical matters that would not be aired in the mainstream Catholic press. The point, claimed de la Bedoyere, was that “religious journalism can only exist with ‘freedom.’”41 In order

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to stimulate discussion, Search published articles and extracts from the foreign Catholic press. The journal was lively and open-ended, containing, in Bergonzi’s view, the most penetrating correspondence columns of any English Catholic publication. Search, he said, “acts as a safety valve for frustrated Catholic intellectuals.”42 Bergonzi concluded his assessment of English Catholicism in the 1960s on a highly positive note, for he hailed the emergence of a new breed of Catholic intellectual who had finally broken free of hierarchical paternalism and found his voice as an intellectual adult. His counterpart before the war had found little possibility for a disinterested search for truth. Any intellectual quest had to be subordinated to apologetics. The new breed of Catholic was no longer confined to defending or fighting for the spiritual polemic; he was intensely Catholic in conviction but, like other secular English intellectuals, committed to exploring a variety of ideas in the search for truth. Politically, the “new Catholic” was an intellectual on the left who appreciated the complexities of life and was prepared to move beyond the baleful Bellocian myths of the previous era to grapple with ideas that the Church had previously determined were beyond the political pale. This generation represented a completely different kind of open-ended intellectual inquiry. Its members were unwilling to withdraw into the Catholic citadel; they were prepared instead to “move forward from the ‘Chesterbelloc’” to think and act in the world as it actually existed. This was beyond anything that English Catholicism had ever imagined. The new Catholic intellectuals who caught Bergonzi’s attention were not prepared to accept an old guard Church leadership that was politically and culturally conformist. Their mission was to transform that “corporate quality” of conservatism described by Bishop David Mathew into more revolutionary channels so as to bring about a more equitable and democratic social order. These Catholics were initially encouraged by the reformist liberal impulses that informed the Second Vatican Council. In the face of entrenched resistance, the reforms achieved a major breakthrough in moving the Roman Catholic Church into the modern age. Yet even they would not prove sufficient to satisfy the more revolutionary aspirations of the coterie of Catholic intellectuals who identified with the political left.

P A R T

T W O

The Reformers

F O U R

Reinforcing the Citadel

From now on the sole aim of my life—and more so than ever— will be to work to break the circle in which, by a bitter irony, the ‘children of light’ have imprisoned the spirit. We are dying for lack of anyone who knows how to die for the truth. . . . So one can no longer even speak of things which are only distantly relevant to religion, and Christians are beginning to find this situation quite normal. Soon we shall ask for nothing better than the régime that the Gospel came to break 2,000 years ago. —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin1

THE NEW THEOLO GY

The world had altered dramatically in the two decades following World War II. Above all, it was a time of unprecedented social and political change. Europe ceased to play a dominant role in world affairs, the United States and the Soviet Union competed as superpowers to carve out their respective versions of empire, China was now communist, the dangers 63

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of a Cold War were exacerbated by a nuclear arms race that threatened to destroy civilization itself, Third World revolutionaries struggled violently to throw off the shackles of imperialism, discoveries in science were bringing humankind into areas of mastery hitherto only the subject of fiction, and, finally, Western cultural hegemony was increasingly challenged by the emergence of countervailing systems of thought and religion. In the midst of such changes, the Roman Catholic Church appeared frozen in time and committed to preserving its version of universal truth behind the walls of medieval orthodoxy. Although the Leonine social encyclicals had provided a window of opportunity for intrepid Catholic intellectuals to effectively engage the challenges of modernity,2 the Vatican had also encouraged an ethos of theological and institutional absolutism. The ultramontane and antisecular model of Church governance and thought had been considerably bolstered by Pope Pius IX’s A Syllabus of Errors (1864), which condemned a litany of “modern” mistakes in matters of politics, social theory, and theology that had been shaped by the rational spirit of the Enlightenment. This was followed by Pius X’s decree Lamentabili and his encyclical Pascendi (1908), which denounced the heresy of what the Holy Office called “modernism.” This was a blanket term coined by the Vatican to identify a compendium of heresies initiated by progressive intellectuals who claimed the mantle of Christianity to act autonomously from Church hierarchical direction in secular matters. The modernist controversy focused on a number of divisive issues, one of which concerned Christian labor and political movements in France, Italy, and Germany that pushed for increased democratic participation. Their efforts drew the ire of influential “integralist” elements in Vatican circles, conservative Catholics who insisted that public and private activity had to be under the authority of the Church.3 The charge of modernism was also used to condemn Catholic scholars who, like their Protestant counterparts, were seeking a more scientifically based approach to theology and scriptural studies. In 1910, Pius X required Catholic priests to take an antimodernist oath against all beliefs that might serve to privilege science at the expense of the magisterium (the teaching authority of the Church). This obligation remained in effect for all newly ordained clergy as well as for professors and lectur-

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ers in pontifical and ordinary seminaries until 1967. A secret society called the Sodalitium Pianum was created by the Roman Curia to report to the Holy Office the writings and teachings of Catholics in history, biblical studies, and philosophy, as well as in the physical and political sciences, who breached the forbidden boundaries of modernism. It spied on and harassed scholars who behaved independently, opened and photographed private mail, ferreted out the records of bookshops to see what Catholics were reading, and encouraged professors to identify students whose essays veered too far from orthodoxy. Even Angelo Roncalli, who was to become Pope John XXIII, was secretly denounced for encouraging his students to read a book considered suspicious by the society.4 Works that strayed over the line were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Several prominent scholars were removed from their teaching positions.5 The antimodernist crusade sent a deep chill through the worldwide Catholic community well beyond errant theologians. In the words of M. D. Petre, a confidant of George Tyrrell, one of the main targets of the Vatican’s antimodernist campaign, even common priests who were primarily concerned about tending to the spiritual needs of their flocks became “so frightened of being bitten by the sheep dogs that they hardly had time to look after the sheep.”6 The modernist struggle from the outset was intertwined with the Vatican’s assault on liberalism. In some respects liberalism seemed more dangerous than communism itself, for it was believed to be a stealthier enemy in full disguise of its true intentions. As early as June 1871, Pope Pius IX declared: “That which I fear is not the Commune of Paris— no— that which I fear is Liberal Catholicism. . . . I have said so more than forty times, and I repeat it now, through the love that I bear you. The real scourge of France is Liberal Catholicism, which endeavors to unite two principles as repugnant to each other as fire and water.”7 His successor, Pius X, was himself deeply hostile to intellectualism in general, associating the liberal variety with the greatest excesses of the age. In his first pastoral as patriarch of Venice, for example, he called liberal Catholics “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” As pope, he saw it his duty to “unmask” the disease of liberalism, which he believed infected all Catholic intellectual life.8 It bears pointing out that the Church had associated

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the liberal creed with the Jacobean scourge that gave shape to the more extremist dimensions of the French Revolution. Among other things, these denied natural rights against the claims of civic consent, placed unlimited powers in the hands of the state, and sanctioned extreme individualism as a justification for bourgeois political and economic hegemony. This was a Rousseau-inspired liberalism that also declared itself an enemy of Catholicism. This Continental variety of liberalism, however, had little in common with the Anglo-Saxon version that developed in England and the United States, one that recognized the supremacy of natural law, placed limitations on the powers of state and individual liberty, and was never inherently inimical to Christianity.9 Here was an important distinction that the Vatican failed to comprehend, and this partly explains its tendency to side far too long with elements of reaction against democratic capitalism, American-style democracy, and the spirit of scientific inquiry.10 Moreover, the crackdown on modernism and its liberal ideological bedfellow essentially throttled free intellectual inquiry in Catholic seminaries for nearly a century. Any Catholic thinker or publicist who did not appear to conform to the Vatican’s static formulation of teaching was branded a potential heretic. The ultramontane monarchical model of Church governance reached its apogee with Pius XII (1939 – 58), whose pontificate coincided with some of the most convulsive social and political upheavals of modern times. Pius’s authority on matters of faith and the magisterium (the teaching authority of the Catholic Church) derived in large part from the First Vatican Council (1869– 70). Chapter 1 on the “Institution of the Apostolic Primacy in Blessed Peter,” from The First Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ the Lord, had given the successors to St. Peter jurisdiction over the whole Church of God. The Council asserted that the pope was infallible in matters of faith and morals and served as the head of the Church and father and teacher of all Christian people. Thus, the Roman Pontiff, inheriting the powers of the blessed Peter through Christ, ruled and governed the universal Church. Chapter 3, on the “Power and Character of the Primacy of the Roman Pontiff,” declared: “Both clergy and faithful, of whatever rite and dignity, both singly and collectively, are bound to this power by the duty of hi-

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erarchical subordination and true obedience, and this not only in matters of faith and morals, but also in those which regard the discipline and government of the Church throughout the world.”11 The issue of infallibility created much controversy among leading Catholics outside the Council and was expressed in a large volume of pamphlets and articles in newspapers and periodicals. The decrees of the Council were ultimately accepted by the dissidents, with the exception of the followers of Johann Joseph Iznaz von Döllinger, a Catholic priest, Provost of the Theatine Church of St. Cajetan in Munich, and professor of church history at the University of Munich. Döllinger and his followers apostatized and formed the sect known as the Old Catholics. Pope Pius XII endeavored to centralize the Vatican’s institutional powers by tightening authority over the bishops and giving them in return greater authority at the parish levels. His regal penchant for control extended to all important issues concerning theology, politics, and science, even down to the everyday decorum of those who served him. Vatican staff, for instance, were expected to kneel when they answered the phone from his apartments.12 Roman Catholic theology since the High Middle Ages had been firmly grounded in the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. For centuries all problems of faith and morals could be addressed by reference to and exegetical extrapolation from his great Summa Theologiae and other works from his immense opus. Thomistic scholasticism had become the authoritative grid, an official framework or theologia perennis upon which all religious matters were to be adjudicated. It was treated as the incarnation of divine revelation, solidifying the Church’s infallibility regarding faith and thus having universal validity. Attempts to theologize in a different manner could never earn the imprimatur of the allpowerful Roman Curia. Thus, theological renewals gained acceptance only if they found resonance with the Thomistic system. Acceptable additions to Church theology became institutionalized as “neoscholasticism” or “neo-Thomism.” There were two powerful institutional forces that solidified the authoritarian dimension of neoscholastic thinking. The first was the governing structure of the Church itself, the central levers of which came to reside in the Congregation of the Roman Curia, whose officials were

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the administrative agents of Vatican business. Ever since the French Revolution this body had assumed the role of enforcing the absolutist claims of the papacy. It decided on all matters concerning episcopal appointments, controlled religious orders and congregations, oversaw the creation and appointment of dioceses, and monitored faith and morals. What helped to assure its reach was a wide network of apostolic nuncios and delegates to countries throughout the world, who provided the Curia with a steady flow of information on matters political, cultural, economic, and religious. The Curia took on all the characteristics of a highly structured bureaucracy: it was officiously legalistic in observance of protocol, resistant to innovation and change, and protective of administrative and doctrinal prerogatives. The Roman Curia achieved such a degree of supremacy and influence that for a time many of its officials came to see themselves as the embodiment of the Church itself.13 The Thomistic monopoly of theological truth was a powerful means of legitimizing curial power and authority. The second force assuring the continued dominance of neoscholastic thought was the pope himself. Pius XII was a remote, austere autocrat whose entire career had been confined to service in the Vatican bureaucracy. His conception of the papacy was almost medieval in terms of governance. He rarely met or consulted with the papal senate or with individual bishops, aside from a small group of selected favorites. He largely ignored the College of Cardinals and never met to discuss or to deliberate with that body. The cardinals were simply there to listen and to approve the pope’s decisions. As Pius himself said, he wanted “executors,” not “collaborators.”14 Even the powerful Curia, the members of which Pius considered pusillanimous and backward, was short-circuited. Pius XII was also severe with subordinates. He once rebuked his nuncio to France, Bishop Roncalli, for not being available to take one of the pope’s obsessively frequent phone calls. Pius’s aide and confidante, Sister Pascalena, heard him shout into the receiver at the hard-working peripatetic nuncio: “From now on, Bishop Roncalli, you are not to leave the nunciature without my permission. You understand?” Another Vatican official, Monsignor Giovanni Montini, later to become Pope Paul VI, was severely dressed down for delivering to the pope a telegram addressed to someone else. Shouting at Sister Pascalena, Pius harshly ordered the

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nun to teach Montini how to read: “Take him into the next room and begin by having him recite the alphabet.”15 Pius XII’s policies and behavior were calculated to maximize the powers of the papacy. Rather than appointing a successor to Cardinal Luigi Magilione as secretary of state when the prelate died in 1944, Pius managed to increase his own authority by taking on the Vatican’s number two post for himself. A man whose vision of the papacy was monarchical and who had the temerity to serve as his own secretary of state was not one to welcome innovative thinking in matters of theology: ideas incubated in a modern, democratic social environment could only undercut the autocratic prerogatives of the Vatican. Pius’s notions of papal governance were made palpably clear in his influential encyclical Humani Generis (1950): “But if the Supreme Pontiffs in their official documents purposely pass judgment on a matter up to that time under dispute, it is obvious that that matter, according to the mind and will of the Pontiffs, cannot be any longer considered a question open to discussion among theologians.”16 Despite Pius’s will and intentions, however, it was no longer possible to shield Catholics from the secular influences of the increasingly liberal and democratic cultures that surrounded them. The simple fact was that the “old theology” of the Church, a theory of knowledge lacking sensitivity to historical times and to shifting circumstances, was failing to speak to the needs of a modern world whose people, now better educated, were confronted with difficulties and challenges that eluded antique religious formulations. The inadequacies of neoscholasticism were especially noticeable in France, Germany, and northern Europe, those areas most ravaged by the horrors of the Second World War. Having failed to provide sufficient guidance through the minefields of totalitarianism and its accompanying social, economic, and political upheavals, the Christian churches of Europe were in visible decline in terms of membership and sources of moral authority. There was more than ever a need to adapt theology to the realities of the times so as to present Christian truths in a manner that people of the twentieth century would find relevant and understandable. A group of Catholic theologians over a number of years had been searching for ways to elicit new meanings from scripture and to open

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up Church structures for greater lay participation through liturgical renewal. One of the seedbeds for what later came to be called the “New Theology” was the University of Tübingen, where Protestant and Catholic scholars had joined together as teaching faculty. In such close working quarters there occurred a cross-fertilization of religious ideas. Collegial interaction with Protestants also obliged Catholic academics to reexamine the more static neo-Thomistic theological structures in an attempt to increase their humanistic appeal. As early as the 1920s and 1930s, two German scholars, Romano Guardini and Karl Adam, in their search for fresh ways of approaching theology, began to assert that the heart or “essence” of the Church lay not in its dogma and rules but in the human existence of Jesus Christ. Above all, they claimed that the Church had to be understood not as a hierarchical institution privileging bishops and priests but as a community of believers united by the Holy Spirit. Guardini saw the Church as the “Body of Christ,” alive and fully engaged in the world of humankind. His vision was not of a self-enclosed institution focused exclusively on the sacred but rather one that lives and acts in the world of mankind. Karl Adam, in particular, sought an interdisciplinary path to theology, drawing on the works of secular writers who were part of what was called the Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) movement. These included a variety of existentialist writers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Stefan George, and Max Scheler, who endeavored to bridge the gap between man and the natural world by highlighting the organic unity of all phenomena in nature.17 It was the mission of those trained in the Tübingen school to create a synthesis between Christianity and contemporary secular thought in order to renew the Church’s vitality as a living organism and thus place it in a better position to relate to the modern world. Hence, early on, Tübingen had a special status among European institutions of higher learning. As the birthplace of historical-critical exegesis, it was the first university where Catholic and Protestant faculty (the former founded in 1817) worked side by side to engage in constructive, critical discussions of each other’s religious traditions. In doing so, Tübingen pioneered the ecumenical effort to unite historical and speculative theology.18 Additional efforts to bring Christianity closer to the secular life of the community through liturgical reform were carried forward by the

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Benedictines in the abbeys of Maria Laach and Beuron in Germany, and by the monks Lambert Beauduin in Belgium and Virgil Michel in the United States. Over the centuries the Catholic Mass had steadily moved away from actively involving the lay community and had become the exclusive preserve of the clergy. This fact was symbolized by the interior configuration of the churches, where the altar was positioned away from the congregation with the celebrant’s back to the people. Further separation came through the use of Latin, a language now generally understood only by the clergy. Much like the Chinese scholar-gentry elites who monopolized classical Mandarin, an oracular language and writing system wholly unintelligible to the average person, the transformation of the Mass into an orphic liturgical ritual inaccessible to lay Catholics was a means of asserting hierarchical authority and power. Numerous efforts to employ the vernacular had been steadfastly resisted by papal authorities over the centuries. In the late Middle Ages, for example, Pope Alexander VII forbade the translation of the Missal even for personal reading. Paris de Grassis, in a private letter to Pope Leo X in 1516, bluntly argued for maintaining clerical control of the Mass ritual: “if the secrets of the cult were revealed and ceremonies were made more accessible, the immediate result would be a loss of prestige.” In 1794, Pius VI pronounced ex cathedra that “the use of the vernacular in liturgical prayers is false and foolhardy.”19 The liturgical reformers sought to involve the laymen more directly in the celebration of their religion by returning to what they saw to be the original, more intimate forms of worship that were practiced by the early Christians.20 But the reformers’ concerns went beyond prayer and ritual: they aimed to reintegrate Christians with the Mystical Body of Christ, a concept that served as the primary inspiration in the life of the early Christians. The Mystical Body was used as a symbol by St. Paul to illustrate the mutual interdependence of all Christians in a corporate entity united in Christ as the head and body of the Church. For the influential American Benedictine Virgil Michel, liturgical renewal, that is to say, the more direct involvement of each Christian as an active member of the Mystical Body, was also a means of initiating the spiritual revival called for in Pope Paul XI’s Quadragesimo Anno as a prerequisite for reconstructing the social order torn asunder by the twin evils of

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socialism and capitalism. Since liturgical worship was a visible united action on the part of members of the Church, wrote Michel, it “cannot fail to revive and foster in them a determination to carry their Christlife into the social and economic sphere.”21 The desire to make Catholics more active participants in the rituals of the Church convinced the liturgical reformers of the necessity of employing the vernacular in the Mass. Yet there was resistance from the Curia due to a lingering fear that the encouragement of lay participation might diminish the sacramental power of the hierarchy. Lay participation had the strong odor of Protestantism, whereby the important distinction between the priesthood and laity was diminished. However, it was difficult for the watchdogs of orthodoxy to condemn the liturgical reformers since their ideas were grounded in solid historical research and revealed clear spiritual and theological benefits. In 1914 the dialogue Mass was introduced in Germany, where the laity now participated more fully with the priest in the ritual of sacramental celebration. This was followed by a number of Eucharistic congresses after the First World War throughout Europe and the United States. Pius XI in 1928 published A Constitution on Sacred Music, which encouraged active lay participation in the Mass. The Second World War gave further impetus to the popularity of liturgical renewal as Catholics who had experienced the horrors of combat and prison camps found spiritual and psychological comfort in common sacramental worship. Pius XII’s encyclical Mediator Dei (1947) gave official approval to the liturgical movement, but his imprimatur was conditioned by a number of significant caveats: he warned against unorthodox and excessive forms of popular ritual practices, he asserted that liturgical reform was not to be regarded as a panacea for spiritual ills, and he observed that increased lay participation in the Eucharistic sacrifice did not mean a diminution in the sacramental power of the priesthood. At the International Conference on Pastoral Liturgy at Assisi in 1956 he maintained “the unconditional obligation of the use of Latin for the celebrant.” Two years later, Pius reaffirmed the authority of the Holy See and the bishops over all liturgical developments.22 Reform Catholicism gained its greatest nourishment from theologians in France, where the pioneering work of the German thinkers

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matured in what came be called nouvelle théologie. The catalyst for progressive Catholic intellectuals to take more personal responsibility for the Church and society was the legacy of their co-religionists’ support for discredited reactionary causes. These included Catholic involvement with the antidemocratic monarchical program of Action Française, the uncritical and enthusiastic support of Catholics for the philo-fascist policies of General Franco of Spain, the French Catholic establishment’s compromises with the puppet Vichy regime, and its failure to sufficiently support the anti-Nazi resistance. It was now time to restore the Church’s unity with the French people, and to do so it was necessary to initiate a dialogue between the Church and the contemporary world so as to allow Catholicism to “join the world evangelically.”23 The mission was to bring Catholic theologians up to date so they could speak with the modern world. In order to “heal the breach between theology and life,”24 the reformers needed to find a more relevant language of discourse to break through the notion that Catholicism was a closed, antique system and thereby reveal the linkages between historicity, human experience, and the word of God. In the view of the Canadian theologian Gregory Baum, the most fundamental insight of these new theologians, which found its ultimate expression in Vatican Council II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, came from the French lay theologian Maurice Blondel. Although Blondel’s writings were not part of the official syllabi of French Catholic institutions of higher learning, the more progressive theologians were in regular correspondence with him, and they were wrestling with the same problems that were paramount in Blondel’s theological thinking. It was Blondel, asserts Baum, who was the first to recognize that the modern experience of reality required a reevaluation of the problem of God. Blondel realized that the historical experiences of man as expressed through philosophy, psychology, and the corpus of Western culture were a better venue for showing the expression of God’s presence in human life than the more static understandings confined to late medieval patristics. The redemptive message of Christ manifests itself wherever people are present, argued Blondel, and thus the presence of God in human life must be the focal point of Christian thought. It was this essential Blondelian insight that initially loosened the Gordian

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knot of Cartesian dualism, the concept of a fixed natura humana that insisted on the distinction between the natural and supernatural. It thereby offered new possibilities for Catholic theologians to engage in dialogue with a modern scientific world.25 The New Theology (a term coined by conservatives who associated such thinking with modernism) emerged more fully from the work of a group of young French Jesuit and Dominican theologians who recognized the need to revitalize Catholicism for a generation that had largely repudiated the old-fashioned faith of their fathers. This coterie included, among others, the two Jesuits Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou, and Yves Congar and Marie-Dominique Chenu of the Dominican House of Studies at Le Saulchoir. These scholars emphasized the importance of highlighting the relationship between theology and history and called for a reappraisal of how the Church related socially to the world. The notion of the Church embedded in a world of constant movement suggested a modernist recognition of a historical dialectic between the past and present. Some of these theologians, such as Yves Congar, also criticized the ways in which the laity had increasingly been marginalized by hierarchical authority. To them it was a power grab that could find no claim of legitimacy in the documents of the early Church. History, claimed the new theologians, revealed that the Church was not simply made up of the popes, bishops, and priests but rather was the corporate community of all believers, “the people of God.” Furthermore, they asserted, a return to early scripture and patristics would show that Christianity was above all social. Therefore it was imperative to strengthen the Church’s humanistic mission to improve the social and political organization of society.

THE INFLUENCE OF TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

Such progressive thinking reached its most powerful and speculative form in the writings of the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Called the “poet of the new theology,” Teilhard has today achieved something close to cult status. The most comprehensive explanation of his ideas on science and religion, contained in his work Le phénomène humain (The Human Phenomenon), which he laboriously debated and revised for

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over ten years, was written in part during his exile in China from 1939 to 1941. It did not see the light of day until after his death.26 Teilhard was not a theologian but rather a world-renowned paleontologist whose ideas on religion and science were both unique and revolutionary. Teilhard’s study of fossils and the remains of early humans as well as his observation of geological phenomena had convinced him that the world was in the process of continual evolution. Central to this dynamic was the progressive development of man. Out of each historical crisis, asserted Teilhard, humanity has learned from its errors and pushed civilization to ever higher levels of achievement. Although mistakes were made along the way, accompanied by great suffering and angst, history has shown that humans are making progress. As a scientist, Teilhard was far removed from the classical formulations and categories of scholastic philosophy. He was instead intimately engaged in a world where nuclear physics had revolutionized the conception of matter, and where biological science had shown that evolution was the most plausible explanation for the configurations of the natural world. Not surprisingly, his language of discourse was unfamiliar to classically trained theologians. Yet as a deeply religious Jesuit, Teilhard was convinced that he must translate his scientific discoveries into metaphysical categories. He believed that the general laws that governed the natural world in matters of what he called “complexification,” evolution, and “socialization” had direct analogies with scripture and were part of the totality of all God’s creation. In order to establish bridges of communication to disparate audiences, and because he thought that the Church’s language was outdated and thus unable to express the science of the day, he employed a myriad of neologisms, amounting in some ways to a complete vocabulary of his own, to give greater facility to his view of the world. Of all the reform-minded Catholic intellectuals, Teilhard himself was probably the most widely read and broadly educated. He also appears to be one of the most difficult to comprehend and consequently is widely misunderstood. This is due at least in part to the breadth and range of his own exotic experiences, thought, and research. Even his close friend and colleague Sir Julian Huxley admitted that Teilhard’s ideas on the ultimate significance of evolution, called “Point Omega,” remained

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incomprehensible to him.27 The Jesuit theologian Pierre Le Roy, who also knew Teilhard intimately, believed that the richness and originality of his thought made it difficult to find expression, and that this accounted for the ambiguity of Teilhard’s statements.28 A clear and firm grasp of the essence of the man and his ideas requires a complete acquaintance with Teilhard’s personal life and scientific and historical research, for he drew from the broadest opus of Western and Eastern philosophers, scientists, theologians, and historians. After lengthy stays in China (1926–1946), where he lived and worked for years in exile from France, Teilhard became convinced of the necessity of broadening Christianity’s perspectives, “to free our religion from everything that is specifically mediterranean,” as he confessed to his friend Abbé Henri Breuil.29 Eastern religions, averred Teilhard, might be dated, but Christians had to press the universality of Christ’s message, liberating it from the straightjacket of parochial Western precepts. His sojourns in China exposed Teilhard to the larger scale and quality of the world community and thus to the cosmopolitan dimensions (what he called “cosmogenesis”) of Christ’s teachings. Perhaps Teilhard’s greatest contribution to the development of a modernized Catholicism was his answer to the central problem upon which all of his work and thought had focused: What was the relationship between one’s love of God and one’s love for the world? Teilhard’s answer to this query finally shattered the philosophical dualistic barrier against which the new theologians had fought and which had so befuddled the Catholic capacity to embrace fully the world of man. Teilhard’s early letters and essays reveal that he was driven to bridge the dualistic gap between what he called “children of heaven,” those people preoccupied with salvation, and “children of the earth,” those whose concerns were primarily with the secular, material world. As a trained scientist and man of the cloth, Teilhard was a child of both, and his professional studies convinced him that there was no inherent conflict between the two: Situated by circumstances at the heart of two worlds with whose theoretical positions, language, and sentiments I am well acquainted through long experience, I have thus not tried to erect any walls between these two areas of my interior life. . . . I have found that far

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from destroying each other, each has served to reinforce the other. To-day I probably believe more in God than ever,—and I certainly believe more than ever in the world. Do we not perhaps find here, in terms of the life of a single individual, the outline of a solution to the spiritual problem which at present most disturbs the vanguard of humanity?30 Teilhard was driven by what he called an “insatiable need for cosmic organicity,”31 a search for a way of unifying these two seemingly conflictive universes. Taking as his starting point the fundamental doctrinal position of Christianity, the Incarnation and the Redemption, Teilhard sought to understand the meaning of God’s participation in man’s evolving world and His decision to rescue man from perdition. The answer to this quest he found in data of the natural sciences. He believed that the evolutionary process, which affects all living things, suggested a pattern of progress that is converging all matter toward an ultimate unity. The structured evolutionary advancements in the natural world (what Teilhard called the “geosphere”) were in direct parallel with the Christian religion, which promises unity in the Christ who returns at the end of time, thus providing the final completion of life’s journey where man becomes whole by becoming at one with his Savior. Teilhard’s evolutionary vision, the theory of union créatrice, was one in which Christ played center stage in man’s domain through the Incarnation. God was no external actor who withdrew after the creation but rather was omnipresent through the historical Jesus, who provided man with the mission and “Christic Energy” to master the world. “Christic Energy,” wrote Teilhard, is “the superior and ultimate form of all energies from which the arrangement of the Universe around us emerges.”32 This, for Teilhard, rendered obsolete, null, and void the older Christian dualism that insisted that spiritual and material matters were in perpetual conflict. Teilhard always had difficulty in accepting the notion that these worlds were enemies. With his first few hesitant steps into an understanding of the “evolutive” universe, Teilhard saw this dualism “disappearing like the mist before the rising sun.” Matter and spirit “were no longer two things, but two states or two aspects of one and the same cosmic stuff.”33

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In the history of man (the “biosphere”), Teilhard found a parallelism with what he observed in the increasing “complexification” of matters in the natural world, namely, a steady evolutionary advancement toward a higher consciousness that had a cosmic and spiritual significance. In this process, claimed Teilhard, matter was evolving into higher levels of development, but so too was the mind of man. Although there were crises and setbacks (the Holocaust and World War II being the most salient examples), Teilhard believed that in such episodes man took stock of his errors and moved on toward higher levels of cognition and social cooperation. The consistent current of optimism in Teilhard’s thinking is evident. Mistakes would be made along the way, but he was convinced that the achievements of humanity would never be reversed. He believed that the fullest expression of evolutionary life was to be found in the history of man, who has been given the gift of reason as a means of continuing the quest of achieving unity in Christ. As man’s mind matures and reaches higher levels of cognition in what Teilhard called the “noosphere,” he discovers the utility of forsaking the extreme individualism of the late nineteenth century as expressed in the yearnings of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch for the virtues of community. This is accomplished through cooperation with others (“socialization”), a more useful way of maximizing energies for achieving greater truth, knowledge, social justice, beauty, and art. In this endeavor, man’s sense of responsibility to others so as to further solidarity in the human community is vastly deepened. The final choice is to live together in mutual cooperation or to use the tools of our power to destroy each other. And Teilhard had no doubt that man would opt for the former, as evidenced in the increased awareness and communal consciousness in humankind as a whole.34 The drive to create a real community, asserted Teilhard, will ultimately increase man’s capacity to control all the world processes through science and technology, because increased global solidarity will encourage a cross-fertilization of ideas and expand cultural, social, and political practices. In this evolutionary journey, the entire universe ultimately converges and comes together in a state of transcendent communion and unity that Teilhard called the “Point Omega.” This represents the completion of biological and cognitive evolution, where all men not

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only find solidarity with one another but also finally become at one with Christ. In short, Point Omega is nothing less than God’s promise of redeeming the world. This means, of course, that Christ is central to history and is the power and energy that impels all humankind toward Himself. In making this argument, Teilhard thought that he was not necessarily breaking new ground but rather echoing what Christians had already read in St. Paul and the apostle John that, in Teilhard’s words, “to create, complete, and purify the world is for God to make it one by organically uniting it to himself.”35 God unifies the world by immersing Himself in it, thus becoming an active “element” giving direction and leadership to the evolutionary process.

THE TEILHARD PROBLEM

Teilhard de Chardin’s difficulties with Roman authorities began in 1921 when, as a lecturer at the Institut Catholique in Paris, he delivered a paper that touched on the matter of transformism and evolution, the latter of which Church officials had purposely avoided discussing for years.36 Teilhard’s presentation caused a great stir because it suggested that his optimistic view of the universe as a process of growth toward greater complexity gave insufficient play to the problem of evil. It was not a question of Teilhard’s rejecting the existence of evil and sin, for he interpreted the world as growing out of a state of imperfection to more perfect forms; and in such circumstances evil is inevitable, a natural feature in the structure of the world, as he put it. The problem was one of emphasis rather than doctrine. Conservative theologians focused on man as a fallen creature steeped in sin and hence dependent on a higher authority; Teilhard thought it important to highlight the more optimistic promise of redemption. Teilhard’s difficulties also probably stemmed from his scientific training, which made it difficult for him to accept the fundamentalist biblical explanation of the origins of mankind from a single pair of humans. He adhered to the theory that the appearance of Homo sapiens was the outcome of a slow and inconspicuous development. And Teilhard placed his religious beliefs in such a novel and personal perspective that the official keepers of Catholic doctrine were greatly alarmed.37

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Teilhard’s views from the outset were scrutinized by the arch heresy hunter, Cardinal Merry del Val, secretary of the Holy Office. Merry del Val in turn put pressure on the general of the Jesuit order to forbid Teilhard to say or publish anything contrary to the traditional position of the Church on the question of original sin. Other restrictions followed. The chill of the antimodernist crusade was still in the air. Works of Henri Bergson, a major influence on Teilhard’s thinking, had been placed on the Index of forbidden books some years earlier, and the French Dominican journal Études was still reeling from Vatican repression.38 The Jesuits thought it in the best interests of both the order and Teilhard that he confine himself to scientific research rather than venture into the dangerous waters of theology. Teilhard was asked to leave his teaching post at the Institut Catholique. The “Teilhard problem” was handled by essentially exiling him to China for his “dangerous” beliefs, where it was assumed that he could undertake his paleontology research in obscurity and keep his theological speculations to himself. Throughout the years of exile, however, Teilhard wrote countless essays and volumes of private correspondences to his friends, in which he painstakingly worked out his ideas on the synthesis of cosmic and spiritual phenomena and their evolutionary trajectory, an organic unity he called the “cosmogenesis.” But none of this would pass the censors. Teilhard hoped that a theological thaw was beginning in Rome. He made several careful revisions of his all-important manuscript, “The Human Phenomenon,” in which an epilogue and a number of theological qualifications were added to satisfy previous censorial objections. He even made a personal journey to the Holy City to plead his case, but Vatican officials still refused permission to publish. Teilhard then stenciled some two hundred copies of the manuscript for friends as he waited for more favorable days, which were never to come in his lifetime.39 Not only was he not allowed to publish his philosophical and theological ideas; he was also forbidden to teach or address large audiences on such matters. Without the necessary permission to publish, he lamented that his ideas would be disseminated only “by conversation, or as manuscripts passed under a coat.”40 As a loyal Jesuit, Teilhard accepted and obeyed the prohibitions. It was only on rare occasions that he let his guard down and disclosed dis-

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appointment and suffering, and then only to his closest associates. Pierre Le Roy, for one, often found Teilhard depressed and with almost no heart to carry on: “he was at times prostrated by fits of weeping, and he appeared to be on the verge of despair.”41 But Teilhard always managed to recover, vowing to continue the struggle by going underground if necessary. The Vatican, he asserted, was in the hands of dogmatic integralists and had not moved much beyond the age of Galileo.42 But while Teilhard proclaimed his fidelity to the Church, its administrators were another matter: In a kind of way I no longer have confidence in the exterior manifestations of the Church. I believe that through it the divine influence will continue to reach me, but I no longer have much belief in the immediate and tangible value of official directions and decisions. Some people feel happy in the visible Church; but for my own part I think I shall be happy to die in order to be free of it—and to find our Lord outside of it.43 The ideas of Teilhard de Chardin were a threat to the traditional authority and power of the monarchical model of Church governance on matters of the faith. His new cosmology lifted the future of humanity beyond old religious divisions and conflicts, substituting the virtue of harmony rather than a strict adherence to dogma as a means of achieving the Point Omega. Teilhard’s vision emphasized the necessity of reconciling divisions between those people of varying religious beliefs and bridging the gap between religion and science. His ideas on the cosmogenesis with the immanence of the deity as the force for unity and progress had the potential in the minds of Vatican conservatives of making the Church redundant as the vehicle for salvation.44 A major attack on Teilhard and the new theologians began in 1946 and was directed by one of the leading theologians in Rome, the French Dominican R. Garrigou-Legrange. He detected the influence of Blondel and modernism as the perverting sources of their theological speculations and was especially concerned that these ideas were gaining wide currency through the circulation of mimeographed papers. Alarm bells had already gone off earlier. Marie-Dominique Chenu’s explication of

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the theology of Le Saulchoir in his privately published Une École de théologie was placed on the Index, and he was thereafter required to vacate his teaching position. Chenu’s colleague Yves Congar had gotten into serious trouble some years earlier for his works on ecumenism and Church reform. Congar, de Lubac, Karl Rahner, and others were at one time or another condemned by the Holy Office, prohibited from teaching, and sent into exile. But the scourge of Roman orthodoxy weighed more heavily on Teilhard than on the others, with its stifling hand shadowing his travels everywhere in Catholic circles. In the spring of 1937, for example, he was enthusiastically welcomed at Harvard University, but Teilhard knew that the journey across the Charles River to the Catholic Boston College would be a different matter after he was pictured in the local newspaper as “the Jesuit who believes that man descends from apes.” A most embarrassed president of the college informed Teilhard that it had to withdraw the offer to award him an honorary doctorate for fear that American Catholics would believe that the college endorsed his views.45 The encyclical Humani Generis in 1950 was Pope Pius XII’s warning about the aberrations of the new theologians, which he believed had the potential to undermine the fundamentals of the Catholic faith. Pius listed and condemned a number of problems stemming from their writings, ranging from an overemphasis on the humanity of Christ against His divinity, the “pantheistic” notion that life is in a state of continual evolution, and the uncritical fashion of accepting the veracity of science and secular philosophy, among a litany of other errors. Humani Generis insisted that the teachings of St. Thomas were “in harmony with Divine Revelation, and is most effective both for safeguarding the foundation of the faith and for reaping, safely and usefully, the fruits of sound progress.”46 The more progressive Catholic thinkers were dismayed and disappointed with what seemed to be a resurgence of integralism at the Vatican, a terreur intellectuelle, as the French spoke of it. Teilhard in private correspondence with his associates urged against defeatism and recommended that they continue the struggle for neohumanism by working underground. In a letter to Madame Simone Beaulieu, a Canadian painter and confidante, he commented: “How curious that the theolo-

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gians have so much difficulty in understanding that man’s realization of the biological movements of life, and the principles of relativity, are at least as important for our religious attitude to God (and for our very conception of God) as the definition of some new dogma.”47 The Vatican’s misgivings about the influence of the New Theology culminated in what was called the “worker-priest movement.” Progressive theologians had long criticized the Church’s failure to put into practice the teachings of the social encyclicals and regarded this as the main reason why Catholicism was increasingly irrelevant to the European working classes. On the urging of the new theologians to move the Church into the realities of the secular world, a number of French and Belgian priests decided to reach beyond conventional Catholic action and live and work with the laboring classes in areas experiencing industrial unrest. The idea was to have the priests join the workers at their jobs, share with them the challenges and problems of industrial life firsthand, and show that the Church could fight with them to gain social and economic justice. Here would be a living example of how the Church could speak to the modern world. This mission was a difficult one from the outset. The bourgeois background of those who accepted the challenge of traversing the social divide, that is, “crossing over to the people,” as the pioneering Catholic social activist Frédéric Ozanam had put it, left them ill prepared for what awaited them. As the worker-priests of the Mission de Paris pointed out in their report of November 1953: At the time we encountered a world which differed essentially from the world to which the hierarchy had sent us as their missionaries. This missionary order had actually been given us because of certain deficiencies which had become known within Church circles: we, the clergy, knew nothing of the real life of the workers, and had no inkling of the questions that life would pose to the faith of the Church. . . . And the people to whom we came and said: ‘I want to love you!’ replied: ‘But you don’t know us at all.’48 The full immersion of the worker-priests into the hardscrabble life of the laboring poor was shocking and ultimately transforming. The

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jarring encounter with the exploitative methods of industrial capitalism politicized the worker-priests. Several became involved in communistcontrolled trade union actions, others took on speaking assignments at peace rallies, while a few even became strike leaders. Especially embarrassing to the Church hierarchy was the arrest of two worker-priests in demonstrations in Paris in October 1952 against the visit of American general Matthew Ridgway, who was both a symbol of U. S. military and corporate power and, as head of NATO, working to rearm Germany to counter the strength of the Soviet bloc. This led to scathing criticism in the popular press of priests being duped by communist propaganda. Such encounters placed the Church in situations that directly confronted government authority. The Vatican had long harbored deep suspicions of working-class radicalism. As early as 1945, for example, Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard, archbishop of Paris and founder and protector of the Mission de Paris, had been questioned about the priests’ activities and objectives. As Cold War tensions escalated, the Holy Office in 1949 issued an edict forbidding all collaboration by Catholics with communist organizations, and this was followed by a series of condemnations of Marxism from Rome. In 1951, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, under-secretary of the Holy Office, formally attacked the activities of the worker-priests, and soon afterward the Vatican limited any expansion in their numbers. The worker-priest imbroglio was exacerbated by a surge of anticommunism that swept France in the early 1950s, a fear fueled by the struggle with Marxist-inspired, anticolonial revolutionaries in Indochina and by the French Communist Party’s rigid adherence to Stalinism. All this stiffened the government’s resistance to labor’s agitation for wage increases, thus sparking a great wave of leftist-led strikes in August 1953. Any further tolerance of worker-priest activities from the Vatican seemed to have vanished with the replacement of Monsignor Angelo Roncalli as papal nuncio in Paris with Monsignor Marella.49 Roncalli had shown a decided sympathy for the living and working conditions of the French laboring classes. After his departure, French Church leaders were more willing to throw their support to the industrialists and the government as defenders of law and order against the putative troublemakers. In 1954 the French hierarchy, under pressure from Pius XII, severely limited the

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activities of the worker-priests and forbad them from entering into any trade union activity. From the outset, the French Dominicans and their journal, Le Vie Intellectualle, had been the most steadfast supporters of the workerpriest movement. The Dominicans, for instance, fought the Vatican tooth and nail long after their Jesuit colleagues-in-arms had recalled their priests. The price was high for such temerity: in February 1954 the Dominican provincials of Paris, Lyons, and Toulouse were relieved of their offices when the superior-general of the order arrived in Paris. In addition, several Dominican theologians who had advised the priests, including Chenu and Congar, were exiled from Paris. Although it can be argued that Rome had sufficient cause to condemn the worker-priests’ drift into radicalism and communist fellowtraveling, to many the reaction appeared unbalanced, for the Vatican failed to condemn the conditions that had led the priests to embrace extremist positions in the first place. The labor encyclicals certainly highlighted the evils of communism, but they also unambiguously condemned the errors of the social and economic systems that exploited workers and drove them away from the faith into the ranks of the revolutionary left. It was commonly understood through Church teachings at the time that people who took up the communist cause could no longer remain Catholics. But what about those persons who abuse their wealth and power and ignore the social injustices condemned by the Church? “Why,” asked one of the worker-priests, “should we fear the dangers of the working class life when no question is raised concerning the faith of the employers or those who collaborate in the injustices of the capitalist system?”50 The Church’s continuing tendency to side with the political elites rather than “crossing over to the people” was poignantly criticized by the priests of the Mission de Paris in their hurriedly composed “Green Paper” to Cardinal Maurice Feltin just before his departure for the Vatican in October 1953 to answer charges concerning worker-priest activities: We feel that we are to a great extent being sacrificed to the inhuman requirements of a plan of defence which is immobilising the Church more and more. And by retreating back upon herself she is bringing

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about precisely that development which she has been seeking to avoid. . . . What is being so obtrusively defended is an ecclesiastical world outside whose boundaries neither faith nor priesthood are deemed possible, but within which the unbeliever finds no place; he must leave the ecclesiastical confines again or perish. It was our mission, however, to burst open the narrowness which is inevitably bound up within this framework. But now we are to be led back inside that fenced-off domain because the religious authorities regard the strengthening of their own position as of more importance than the out-pouring of the Church into the world, into the midst of the burning questions of the time.51 The case of the worker-priests reveals how far the Catholic hierarchy had drifted from the traditions of nineteenth-century “social deaconry,” a recognition that the clergy, in addition to their sacramental responsibilities, also had an obligation to improve the social life of the community through welfare work.52 In the final analysis, the Vatican’s attack on the New Theology and the episode of the worker-priests revealed a common theme. To many it appeared that the leadership of the Catholic Church was primarily concerned about protecting the prerogatives of privilege and power. In the case of Teilhard de Chardin and company, it would appear that what essentially mattered to the Holy Office was less the revolutionary trajectory of their theology (which in fact could be squared with scripture) than its implications for papal monarchism. As for the worker-priests, the Church in the view of its progressive-minded critics seemed more willing to ignore social justice when perpetrated by the wealthy and politically strong than to tolerate those who gave sympathy and succor to the underprivileged. In each case the hierarchy of the Catholic Church sided with the traditional sources of power and authority. It is interesting to note that the leaders of the French Communist Party asserted that the two dozen priests of the Mission de Paris were clearly a far greater menace to the party’s political agenda than all the bishops and prelates put together, since the hierarchy always managed to highlight themselves as the “Church of the bourgeoisie.”53 Despite the transformative social, economic, and political forces that impacted the Western world after 1945, the leadership and mentality of

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the Roman Catholic Church, as symbolized by the authoritative style of Pius XII, remained fixed in a rigidly neomedieval mind-set that seemed out of step with the times. The new theologians, along with the groundbreaking insights of Teilhard de Chardin, offered new ways of interpreting scripture and patristics that would recalibrate the magisterium in ways more relevant to the world in which the Church existed. The Vatican’s response to what was perceived as existential threats to papal authority and traditional values was swift and uncompromising. Yet the attack on the worker-priests, Teilhard, and the progressive theologians was only the tip of the iceberg. These were the most prominent, high-profile examples of Catholics gone astray. Beneath them were countless lesser figures called to order by a bishop or religious superior and disciplined through censorship, transfer, or ostracism. A great chill descended on the Catholic community, which curbed bold, imaginative thinking and initiatives that might call down upon a believer the fury of the Holy Office. It is said that daylight begins to break after the darkest time of night; so too regarding the apogee of monarchical governance in the reign of Pius XII. The Vatican’s time-tested policy of warding off the presumed dangers of progressive theological thinking behind the citadel of the Curia’s orthodoxy was suddenly and unexpectedly challenged by Pius’s successor, Pope John XXIII.

F I V E

The Role of John XXIII

Chairman John opened the windows of the Catholic Church that, after centuries of stuffiness, a thousand new flowers might bloom beside and above the thousand warts. —Adrian Hastings1

The last years of Pius XII’s pontificate were marked by increasing conservatism. Although his earlier commentaries had sometimes called for audacia, or daring, the 1950 encyclical Humani Generis had slammed shut the doors to that avenue, and those engaging in the New Theology were accused of “relativism” and thus dangerously compromising on matters of the faith. In the same year Pius canonized the antimodernist Pope Pius X and dispatched his glass-incased embalmed body on a sacred journey throughout Italy. The reactionary bent of the Vatican found resonance with political developments shaped by growing tensions in what was becoming, in the words of journalist Walter Lippmann, a “Cold War” between the United States and the Soviet Union. The postwar fear of advancing commu88

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nism in both the United States and Europe contributed to the resurgence of right-wing political movements that found support in the Roman Catholic Church. Americans in those years were subjected to the Redbaiting demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his rightist Catholic supporters.2 In Italy, communists made substantial electoral gains because of their role in the Fascist resistance, and a considerable portion of their hostility was directed toward a Catholic clergy deemed to have been supportive of the Fascist cause. In the area of Emilia-Romagna, for instance, some fifty-two priests were murdered by communists between 1944 and 1946. Pope Pius fought back, fearing that a communist-controlled Italy would fatally weaken the Church. The Vatican provided funding for the Christian Democratic Party and in 1949 threatened excommunication to anyone who either joined the Communist Party or voted for its candidates. In 1952, Pius went so far as to encourage an alliance between the Italian Christian Democrats and right-wing and neo-Fascist groups. Meanwhile, the Western world became increasingly aware of the brutalities of Joseph Stalin. Throughout Soviet-dominated Europe, Catholic schools, seminaries, and churches were closed down, their properties were confiscated, and many Christians were forbidden even to practice their faith. Fear of communist inroads into the West was a major factor in the Vatican’s decision to suppress the worker-priest movement in France. As the aging Pius XII grew more ill and reclusive, ultraconservatives in the Curia, hoping to assure the hold of orthodoxy, maneuvered to have one of the pope’s closest assistants dismissed from office for favoring liberal ideas. This was Giovanni Battista Montini, widely believed to be a front-runner for the papacy. Montini had been critical of the Vatican’s political strategy with the neo-Fascists and had shown sympathy and support for both the worker-priest movement and the new theologians. The long reign of Pius XII came to an end on 9 October 1958. Upon his death the College of Cardinals met for two weeks to choose a successor. The Conclave was deeply split between conservatives who wished to continue the policies of Pius XII and a group of relatively younger cardinals critical of what they considered to be the retrograde authoritarian ways of the pope’s later years. As a compromise candidate, someone assumed to be a temporary benchwarmer until passions cooled, the

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cardinals elected the seventy-seven-year-old patriarch of Venice, Angelo Roncalli. The new pope took the name John XXIII in honor of his own father and of the title of the humble church where he received his first communion. Roncalli ironically remarked at the time that John had been the name of several previous popes, none of whom had had long reigns. It was expected that the new pope, or “Old Log,” as the historian Eamon Duffy has called him, was a safe bet not to rock the barque of Peter while the search went on for a younger, more suitable man for the job. Unlike the austere and remote Pius XII, the jovial and down-toearth Roncalli, affectionately called by Italians “Papa Buono,” was neither Roman nor an aristocrat. He came from poor peasant stock, a country boy raised in the tiny village of Sotto il Monte near Bergamo in northern Italy. Although he spent most of his career in the papal diplomatic service, there seemed to be little indication that his views were anything but conservative and mainstream.3 However, Roncalli’s postings in Bulgaria and Turkey had exposed him to the religious traditions of Eastern Christianity and Islam, for which he developed an understanding and respect. John XXIII was no intellectual, and he viewed himself more as a man of the people, like the parish priest, a pastor of souls devoted to spreading the Word of God, rather than someone who plows in the fields of theology. In addition to an exposure to Eastern culture, Roncalli’s horizons were broadened by frustrating efforts to expand the Church’s social and economic responsibilities in accordance with the prescriptions of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. For his labors, Roncalli briefly fell under the suspicion of radicalism. After the war he was appointed apostolic nuncio to Charles de Gaulle’s government. It was in France that Roncalli experienced firsthand the political and spiritual challenges associated with the worker-priest imbroglio and the Church’s need to better address the problems of industrial capitalism. On 25 January 1959, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church was shaken to its foundations when John XXIII, just three months into his pontificate, called for an ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. Later, when asked by a cardinal why he wanted such a momentous gathering, the pope was said to have walked to the corner of his study and thrown open the window, remarking, “That is what the Council will do. We want to let fresh air into the Church.”4

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The announcement was made to the cardinals of the Curia with little fanfare in the chapterhouse of St. Paul. What followed was a deafening silence, for the possibility of change sent shivers up the spines of the Vatican’s power brokers. Somewhat later one of the cardinals offered the feeble excuse that they had been “too moved and too happy to utter a word.”5 The official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, made no mention of the planned council that evening (only the twenty-first in the history of the Church) and the next day gave it only perfunctory coverage. Although the call for a general council was welcomed by more progressive voices outside the Curia, there was much skepticism about John’s ability to carry it off. As Cardinal Montini put it at the time, “This old boy doesn’t seem to realize what a hornet’s nest he’s stirring up.” Although initially hesitant, Montini later became one of the great supporters of Vatican II, but his warnings of its dangers proved prescient: it could give rise to “expectations, dreams, curiosity, utopias, velleities of every kind and countless fantasies.”6 The main purpose of what came to be known as Vatican Council II was not to buttress the old battle lines in defiance of secularism, communism, and the panoply of perceived heresies but to bridge the gap between Church teachings and the realities of the modern world, that is, to create aggiornamento, bringing Catholicism up to date with the times. All this would require openness, declared the pope, “not only for the spiritual good and joy of the Christian people but also to invite the separated communities to seek again that unity for which so many souls throughout the world are longing these days.”7 John’s notion of the Council was not to use it as a weapon of defiance and opposition to modern life and other religions but for it to serve as a source of pastoral renewal and reconciliation with the wider world. The task, as he put it, was not to debate points of doctrine but “to show in its true light and restore to its real value the quality of human and Christian life, of which the Church is the custodian and mistress throughout the centuries.”8 Participants in the great gathering in Rome were to include with full voting rights all the bishops of the Catholic Church (both Western and Eastern rites), superiors general of exempt religious orders, and prelates within their own special spheres of jurisdiction. Members of Protestant churches and Catholic lay organizations were invited to attend as observers.

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The offers of openness, inclusion, and reconciliation ran counter to the views of the Curia’s old guard, who saw the Church as a citadel of grace amid a culture of secular hedonism. Eugenio Pacelli’s reign as Pius XII had subordinated churches and bishops to Vatican authority, presumably thus sheltering them from the corrosive winds of heresy and materialism. To assemble the world’s three thousand bishops along with theologians and even non-Catholic observers could only visit spiritual anarchy upon the Church. As for the voice of the magisterium, if the people could not hear it then the problem was not with the message or with faulty communication but rather with the cacophony of modern ideas and opinions that drowned out the truth. The solution was not to open the gates for dialogue: in an age of doubt and confusion it necessitated a restatement of the unchanging truths ever more loudly, firmly, and uncompromisingly.9 It was even suggested by some members of the Curia that there was no need at all to bring the bishops to Rome. Instead, copies of conciliar documents with the pope’s imprimatur could be sent to them for approval.10 Was the calling of a general council really necessary? Certainly the Curia and more conservative Catholics did not think so, given the definition of papal infallibility concerning matters of faith. Yet Pope John was keenly aware of an altered consciousness among Catholics, this being directly related to a myriad of societal changes and troubles on several fronts—disturbing trends that if not adequately addressed might cause serious damage not only to the Church but also to the core values of Western civilization itself. As the Swiss theologian Hans Küng observed at the time, despite the increasing secularization of modern culture, the Church, unlike the earlier imagination and singular sense of freedom that characterized its development in the first millennium, had become narrow and rigid and had ceased to adjust to the changes in its environment. These were the very virtues that had assured its initial success in the first thousand years. But the Church no longer represented the intellectual avant-garde. Retreating into a cultural bunker, the Vatican increasingly identified with the ancien régime and reaction. It had become a Church, claimed Küng, that had “to a large extent lost the world.”11 A major problem regarding Church matters was the medieval ultramontane model of governance, which was proving to be static and dys-

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functional in an age of expanding democracy. An increasingly welleducated and activist Catholic laity found the hierarchy deaf to their concerns and desires to play a more constructive role in promoting the social teachings of the Gospels. Reverberations continued throughout Europe over the Vatican’s condemnation of the worker-priest movement: Catholic laborers saw little relevance in Church social and economic teachings and were steadily drifting into the orbits of socialist and communist-controlled trade unions.12 The voices of several of the Church’s most brilliant and loyal scholars (de Lubac, Rahner, Congar, Daniélou, and others) had been silenced by the Holy Office. The sterile insistence on scholastic theology was also having little appeal for younger Catholic intellectuals, priests, and seminarians. The historian Adrian Hastings, for example, wrote that as a student in Rome during the tired years of Pius XII, he and his fellow seminarians felt a constant tension between the strictures of Roman officialdom and the refreshing winds blown in by the new theologians: What the professors were teaching on one side and what we were many of us buying in the college book shop on the other—the works of Congar, De Lubac, and so forth—were very different things. It couldn’t have gone on much longer. Pope John had practical wisdom through which the Holy Spirit could work to open windows, but . . . what happened after . . . his Council was not resurgence after decay but an overdue recognition of the vast changes which had been taking place for years in many parts of the Church.13 Nothing demonstrates Hastings’s observation more saliently than the case of Teilhard de Chardin. The ban on the Jesuit’s writings was lifted upon his death in the spring of 1955, and almost overnight the optimistic and scientific trajectory of his ideas found an eager audience with the Catholic public. Teilhard’s somewhat turgid and densely argued The Human Phenomenon soon became a best seller. In the secular realm the socioeconomic functions and influence of the Church had steadily eroded as governments in Europe and the United States assumed greater responsibility and jurisdiction in the provision of public education and social welfare. Since the end of World

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War II, the nineteenth-century Catholic ghettos in Britain and the United States had started to break up as second-generation cohorts achieved economic success and enjoyed increased geographical and social mobility. This served to undercut the Church’s power to shape cultural life. Its impact on political legislation also diminished as religion itself became more of a private rather than an all-encompassing cultural matter for many Christians. A good example of the compartmentalization of religion was illustrated in the election of the first American Catholic to the presidency in 1960. John F. Kennedy showed a wary public that his own religious beliefs would have no bearing on his executive duties, that matters of faith were strictly a private affair and would not slip into the secular realm. As a politician Kennedy claimed that his first duties were to the state, not to the religious authorities in Rome. Kennedy’s comments in the March 1959 issue of Look magazine showed that he saluted the flag rather than bowed to religion: “Whatever one’s religion in his private life may be, for the office holder, nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution and all its parts—including the First Amendment and the strict separation of church and state. . . . I believe as a senator that the separation of church and state is fundamental to our American concept and heritage and should remain so.”14 Another major contributor to the structural transformation of postwar culture was the rising respect and authority of the natural and social sciences. Unlike the initial encounter with the so-called Modernists, by the 1950s there was little rational ground upon which the Church could stand to effectively beat back the infusion of science into theological circles. The challenges and rapidity of profound social change, that is, the process of modernization itself, had called into being a myriad of sophisticated, scientifically based paradigms for examining social and economic phenomena. Although the theories of Marx, Freud, Durkheim, Weber, and others had taken into account the role of religion, the secular thrust of their analytical models offered alternative ways of understanding social realities that essentially depicted religion as a product of social construction. The cumulative result was a revolutionary critique of established institutions and ways of knowing. Sociological analysis in particular, buttressed by a grounding in scientific methodology, offered approaches to issues of poverty, injustice, educational equality, and even warfare and statecraft that allowed little scope for religion.

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Finally, as the historian William McSweeney has noted, another force that contributed to the alteration of traditional Catholicism was the ideology of individualism and the cultural fragmentation of which it was a part.15 The German sociologist Max Weber had warned about the emergence of an “iron cage” of bureaucracy as a natural consequence of modernization as society sought more efficient means of accomplishing its objectives, a process he called “rationalization.” This rationalization of the social order is greatly facilitated by the reliance on capitalistic modes of production and exchange. Although the capitalist quest for efficiency contributed to economic progress,Weber projected a “polar night of icy darkness” as the rational, bureaucratically organized social order trapped the individual in its metal prison, thereby producing not a cultured individual but rather a passionless, instrumentally oriented, coldly calculating rational actor who, in achieving the objectives of his calling, cares nothing for others.16 All this represented a direct threat to individual freedom, which in turned spawned a variety of theories for protecting private rights and liberties in the face of bureaucratic impersonalism. By the 1960s it became fashionable for people of letters, artists, and philosophers to find alternate paths of individual liberation away from the strictures of both bureaucratic imperatives and outmoded traditions. A major component of this quest was the development of new forms of expression and modes of communication. According to McSweeney, this communicative search took the form of “rejecting the pretensions to categorize reality in the old systems of thought and of respecting the individual, the unique.”17 The task now was to approach language in a different light, not as something reflective of objective reality but as a medium for understanding the relationship between the subjectivity of the narrator and the object of his study. This posed a problem for traditional theology because it was premised on the assumption that language was transparent and thus capable of communicating reality without bias. Consequently, modern scholars recognized the necessity of analyzing theological language in light of the meanings of terms and expressions relative to the cultural setting of the documents under review. The effect of such thinking lent credence to the principle of doctrinal relativity that undergirded the New Theology and thus represented a direct challenge to traditional Catholic thinking: Could the Church have erred on matters of doctrinal and moral fundamentals?

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On every count it was clear that on the eve of John XXIII’s pontificate the Roman Catholic Church had drifted far from the mainstream of modern life. Yet within the Church there were potential sources of regeneration, these being associated with groups who worked to modernize the liturgy, the wide-scale yearning for theological renewal, a variety of ecumenical enthusiasts, and the growing social awareness of many Catholic laymen, clergy, and bishops. But as McSweeney has observed, in order to tap into this potential the Church would need to find a new epistemology based on the contextuality of language and the relativity of thought.18 This would be possible only if the authoritarian structures of the Church could be loosened. That was to be the purpose of Vatican Council II. Although John XXIII was advanced in age, he fully grasped the spirit of those years and recognized that his Church had become distant, disengaged, and hence irrelevant to the era it was supposed to serve. Why were Christians not united in speaking out about the most salient issues of the day—world poverty, the threat of thermonuclear warfare, the excesses of capitalist-induced imperialism, racist persecutions, genocide, the successes of totalitarianism, and the greed of international corporations? The outlook of those good men and devoted servants who surrounded him in the Vatican was out of touch with the thoughts and spirits of the rank-and-file clergy, progressive theologians, and Catholic lay intellectuals. In short, the Church simply was out of date and was thus unable to fulfill its mission of evangelizing the world. It was not a matter of the world adapting itself to the Church but rather the necessity of Christianity’s meeting the needs of the secular culture that engulfed it. The Council was to remedy this problem, that is, change the Church in such a way that its magisterium could speak to the needs of the modern era. It must be pointed out that for Pope John, the Church was not at fault due to the inadequacy of its teaching; the problem was rather one of formulating the message. The magisterium was not being expressed in ways that were relevant and thereby understandable to a modern world audience. The distinction at issue was between the content (infallible) and the forms of articulation (fallible), the latter having proven to be inadequate and ill-suited to the changing cultural structures of

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the day. The Church, claimed John in his opening speech to the Council in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome on 11 October 1962, must “help the world by rejuvenating its own faith and life in Christ by updating itself, by promoting the unity of all Christians, and by directing Christian presence in the world to the works of peace, justice, and well-being.”19 Pope John had ruffled the feathers of conservative Catholics and had greatly pleased more progressive spirits (both Catholic and Protestant) prior to the gathering of the Vatican Council on the seventieth anniversary of Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum. In honor of that legacy, John issued his Mater et Magistra on 15 July 1961. The encyclical marked a significant turning point in Catholic social teaching. In order to appreciate its special contribution, it is necessary to consider the Church’s position on the matter of socialism. Since Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931), an updating of Rerum Novarum (1891), the Vatican had labeled socialism a deviation from Christian truth on several grounds. First, the socialists’ insistence on nationalization of production would concentrate power and authority in the hands of the state, and big, intrusive government would threaten the independence of individuals and their associations. As a moral barrier against such tendencies both Leo XIII and Pius XI invoked the traditional Catholic principle of subsidiarity, a doctrine positing that government intervention into the lives of citizens should occur only when subordinate, smaller social units proved incapable of protecting themselves: “If a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is part of the commonwealth.”20 Second, in Quadragesimo Anno, Pius XI had condemned the philosophy of socialism because it rested on false principles, namely, the dynamic of class warfare, the ultimate abolition of private property, and a materialistic understanding of human life (a denial of natural law and hence God). Third, socialism deemed to reconstruct society solely on economic lines without regard to spiritual values. And finally, socialism’s materialist philosophy would subordinate the individual to the exigencies of production, thus rendering him a mere instrument of the state for satisfying collectivist ends. Hence, in the words of Pius XI, “Whether considered as a doctrine, or an historical

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fact, or a movement, Socialism, if it remains truly Socialism, . . . cannot be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church.”21 Liberal Catholics had faulted the Vatican’s reductionist judgment of socialism on the grounds that it was based on an unreconstructed definition of the Marxist variety and overlooked the modifications made by democratic socialists who altered such procrustean principles because of changing historical circumstances. After all, the social encyclicals had also condemned laissez-faire capitalism for similar reasons, yet in practice the economic doctrine had been transformed by reformist government policies. If socialism had adapted its principles to changing historical conditions, thereby pursuing policies that complemented Catholic social objectives, then could it, like capitalism, expect Catholic cooperation? In fact, Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno recognized that the state had an obligation to come to the aid of individuals and their associations when the power of capital made it difficult to provide their own protection. Even the nationalization of private property could be justified on such a basis. As the theologian Gregory Baum has noted, in the papal social encyclicals “the principle of subsidiarity, which might be translated as ‘small is beautiful,’ was actually balanced by a counter principle, which could be called ‘big whenever necessary.’”22 Although the earlier ground-breaking social encyclicals had established a basic framework for a more activist government, Mater et Magistra breached the traditional barricades against socialism by accepting the concept of the welfare state as a vehicle for achieving the common good. Moving well beyond the scope of his predecessor’s encyclical letters, John, appreciating the contributions of modern science (here was an opening for the rehabilitation of Teilhard de Chardin), recognized that its advancement in knowledge and productive technology “clearly puts it within the power of the public authority to a much greater degree than ever before to reduce imbalances which may exist between different branches of the economy or between different regions within the same country or even between the different peoples of the world.”23 Such powers also provide the state with the means of and responsibility for correcting economic fluctuations and promoting measures to prevent mass unemployment. This demands of those in positions of public authority “to increase the degree and scope of their activities in the economic

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sphere, and to devise ways and means and set the necessary machinery in motion for the attainment of this end.”24 John XXIII cautioned, however, that the increasing reach and influence of the state must never be such as to deprive the individual citizen of his freedom of action. Rather, it must act to augment that liberty while simultaneously protecting personal rights. The main vehicles of social growth — the numerous intermediate bodies and corporate enterprises— must remain autonomous and willingly cooperate with each other and the government in pursuit of the communal good. Finally, Mater et Magistra reaffirmed that remuneration of work could not be decided by the laws of the marketplace or the will of the powerful but only in accordance with justice and equity (no. 71). It urged the gradual transition to labor’s control and ultimate share in the ownership of the means of production (nos. 75, 77, 92, and 109) and insisted that government had the responsibility for promoting a wider distribution of private proprietorship (nos. 113–15). John XXIII’s admonitions greatly expanded the corpus of Catholic social teaching. Never had the economy been such a matter of concern for a papal encyclical. Mater et Magistra not only voiced concern for those exploited in industrial nations, but it also called upon the developed world to help the poor in the colonial and emerging states. In this respect it redefined social justice to include maintaining the economic needs and human dignity of all humankind. The wealth produced by modern technology needed to be shared throughout the world community. John called attention to the West’s global responsibilities: The solidarity which binds all men together as members of a common family makes it impossible for wealthy nations to look with indifference upon the hunger, misery and poverty of other nations whose citizens are unable to enjoy even elementary human rights. The nations of the world are becoming more and more dependent on one another and it will not be possible to preserve a lasting peace so long as glaring economic and social imbalances persist. (no. 157) Central to Pope John’s understanding of the economic prowess of modern industrial society made possible by science and technology was

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the role played by individual initiative and social organization. The complex demands of survival in the modern state produced “an increase in social relationships,” which he welcomed as a manifestation of the working principles of subsidiarity. He called this process “socialization,” a term taken from the writings of Teilhard de Chardin. “Socialization” in this context referred to the recognition that smaller social and economic units had to initiate cooperative relations with broader groups so that collectively they could satisfy individual needs. In such circumstances the power of larger capitalist corporations would have to be curtailed by the state so as to guide the economy in such a way as to assure the needs of the commonweal. Given the complex nature of modern society and despite increasing interactions of subordinating social groupings, it was exceedingly difficult for the individual to satisfy his needs for furthering education, professional training, health insurance, housing, and so on. This required a larger role for the modern state as an agent for meeting these economic and cultural imperatives. The term “socializatio” did not appear in the original Latin text of the encyclical. The American Jesuit journal America pointed out that a Latin stylist would inevitably shy away from translating a vernacular word—in this case, “socialization”—but the term was exactly what the pope meant in describing “the growing interdependence of men” inclining to various forms of group life.25 Mater et Magistra also differed from the previous social encyclicals in style and temperament: a spirit of optimism pervaded its pages, and there was a clear appeal for the Church to reconcile its teachings with the modern world. Absent in particular was the condescending and didactic voice that was a hallmark of earlier encyclicals. Mater et Magistra’s focus on social issues and support for what amounted to the welfare state suggested that John XXIII had a different view of socialism, one that seemed to conflict with that held by leading members of the Curia. These matters came into play before its official publication (and would become more critical in his last encyclical, Pacem in Terris), when high-ranking Italian Church officials involved themselves in national political affairs. In order to fully appreciate the significance of this issue, it is necessary to consider the broader historical context. Since the days of Pius IX and the loss of the Papal States, and in

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spite of the Lateran Treaty of 1929 that settled the Roman Question, the Vatican had never been fully at ease with the secular political life of Italy. The bitterness associated with the Dissidio26 had cut the Vatican off from the social and cultural development of modern Italy. It also contributed to its inability to find a modus vivendi with liberalism and moderate socialism.27 As a means of fighting back the tide of political liberalism in Italy, Pius IX, or Pio Nino as he was known, introduced the so-called nonexpedit, which forbad Italian Catholics from engaging in the political process. In addition, he proclaimed the Non Possumus, an absolute refusal to negotiate with the new Italian state. Calling himself a “prisoner of the Vatican,” he fulminated against the Italian government and its monarch. King Victor Emmanuel II, he charged, was “the new Sennacherib”; the Italian parliamentarians were wolves, liars, and satellites of Satan in human flesh, virtually monsters of hell. Pio Nino encouraged his bishops and parish priests to follow his lead. This had the effect of deepening the divisions between various regions in Italy, at a time when reconciliation with the new regime was needed if the country were to be governed effectively. Such intransigent rhetoric increasingly compromised sensitive Catholic domestic interests throughout Europe. Eventually, thanks to the pressures of eminent bishops such as Germany’s Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler and England’s Henry Manning, more cautious voices were given a hearing at the Vatican. But it was not until the accession of Leo XIII that the Vatican came to realize that the absolutist government of the Papal States was an anachronism in a world energized by the impulses of democratic and nationalist sentiments. The papacy would no longer be an ecclesiastical monarchy, but it could function as a religious and spiritual institution capable of exerting far more influence by its counsels than by its commands. A pope might henceforth employ his time and talents unfettered by political distractions and entanglements. Yet even the more progressive-minded Leo did nothing to ease the non expedit, and during his pontificate many Italians thought that they had to obtain permission from the Vatican simply to vote in elections. Leo’s successors, up through Pius XII, eased up on the stricture but essentially told Italian Catholics for whom they should cast their ballots.

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Even after the nightmare of Mussolini and World War II, when the papacy and the Italian government were obliged to develop a more realistic political relationship, there was considerable distrust and unease on both sides. Pius XII, who hailed from a Roman aristocratic family, had been educated in the city during the 1890s in an environment of intense anticlericalism among liberals, which did not endear him to their social and political ideas. Although Roncalli’s Roman education took place somewhat later, he too had been exposed to the anticlerical prejudices of the Risorgimento. Yet Roncalli, remarkably, was able to move beyond his own outdated, dysfunctional subculture. By the time he was elected pope, he had come to accept the culture of modern Italy. It was his acceptance of democracy and the independence of the secular lay state that ultimately allowed him to transform the papacy and pull a reluctant Church hierarchy into the twentieth century. It had been Roncalli’s firm conviction since becoming pope that in Italy the Vatican should eschew partisan secular politics so as to better promote harmonious collaboration between Church and state. The terms frequently used by John to describe his Italian policy were “disengagement” and “reserve.” This was markedly different from Pacelli’s political modus operandi: Pius XII openly worked with Catholic Action and the Christian Democratic Party to keep communists at bay. Those who had served with Pacelli— Cardinals Alfredo Ottaviani at the Holy Office, Domenico Tardini, and Giuseppe Siri, archbishop of Genoa, and others—preferred papal commitment rather than political disengagement. And since John maintained a low profile concerning such matters (part of the policy of “reserve”), these prelates felt no compunction about sallying forth into the political fray with the ostensible imprimatur of the new pope. On 18 May 1960, L’Osservatore Romano published an article entitled “Punti Fermi” (“Here We Stand”). Although unsigned, the essay was the work of Cardinals Siri, Tardini, and Ottaviani. It made a number of unequivocal political pronouncements: that the Italian hierarchy had a right and duty to command social and political policies; that the bishops alone were qualified to determine the legitimacy of political coalitions and alliances (a moral judgment presumably beyond the capacity of laymen); and that there was an insurmountable conflict be-

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tween Christian teaching and Marxism. Catholics, it asserted, were forbidden to “belong to, support or in any way collaborate with those who adopt and follow Marxist ideology and its applications.”28 “Punti Fermi” caused immediate problems for the leader of the Christian Democrats, Aldo Moro, who was working to broaden the support of his government by forming an alliance with the Italian Socialist Party, a strategy called apertura a sinistra or “opening to the left.” Moro hoped an alliance with Socialists would help check his party’s drift to the neofascist right and at the same time win greater support from the working classes by championing social and economic reforms. Unbeknown to the public at the time, Pope John sympathized with Moro’s efforts as a means of assuring greater political and social stability. The Italian hierarchy in its pronouncements made no distinction between democratic socialists and Marxists, and “Punti Fermi” made it clear that Church leaders would oppose Moro’s opening to the left, thereby making it all but certain that his strategy would fail. As the Church historian Peter Hebblethwaite has noted, the central issue in this squabble was the independence of the Italian people: direct involvement of the Church in the political process, thereby preventing the Christian Democrats from making up their own minds, would set back the maturation of the electorate, thus separating the Italians from their counterparts in France, Britain, and the United States. The Italian bishops’ attack on Moro was vitriolic and at times downright vicious, with one diocesan paper claiming that the good Lord had already condemned him to the fires of hell. As the battle raged on, Cardinal Montini came to Moro’s aid, and the pope, working behind the scenes, silenced L’Osservatore Romano on the subject. Finally, John took more forceful, yet unobtrusive action. Through a clerical intermediary he sent Moro word that his leadership could be trusted and that the attacks would cease. In April 1961, the pope met with Moro’s prime minister, Amintore Fanfani, and publicly announced that the Vatican recognized that history had shown that the Risorgimento, which brought unity to Italy by defeating the Papal States, was in fact a positive, providential occurrence: “If we look serenely at the events of a more or less distant past, the truth of the maxim comes home: history conceals and reveals all.”29 John went on to emphasize that although the Catholic

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Church and the Italian state had different structures and objectives, they were destined to work together, presupposing “a certain reserve in the relationships,” to promote the public good. It was understood by the pope’s comments that he was rejecting “Punti Fermi,” and afterward the combative prelates reluctantly, though haltingly, backed off. In February 1962, John XXIII pronounced that Moro’s “opening to the left” was in harmony with the social teachings of the Church. However, the hard-liners would not remain silent for long. Cardinal Siri and his corporate allies, outraged at the Christian Democratic Party’s proposal to nationalize the electricity industry (in Siri’s mind an opening to communism), requested an audience with Pope John. This was refused, and the pope responded privately that his “reserve” precluded direct involvement in political matters: “In this he follows the example of the patriarch Jacob who, in the midst of his quarreling sons, confined himself to watching, suffering and keeping silent.”30 This was not the complete truth, however, for within a month he gave Moro the audience that he had not granted to the Siri group and pronounced the president “an excellent Catholic statesman, a man of great social concern.”31 The other major encyclical that created a framework for Vatican Council II and revealed the revolutionary nature of John XXIII’s pontificate was Pacem in Terris, issued on 9 April 1963. Where Mater et Magistra had the domestic policies of industrialized, democratic countries as its main concern, this encyclical broadened the focus by expressing the imperative of improving life throughout the world community. Its soaring language was certainly idealistic; its lofty aspirations even inspired the French composer Darius Milhaud to set the encyclical to music, the only encyclical to ever achieve orchestration. The pope himself clearly had no power—other than the force of moral authority—to turn its suggestions into reality. The timing of Pacem in Terris was also significant. Its immediate purpose was to address two major problems: conservative obstructionists were preventing the Council from moving forward on relevant social matters, and the world was threatened by nuclear war occasioned by the Cuban missile crisis. The drafting of the encyclical, which essentially represented John’s last will and testament, was also given special priority since the pope at this point knew that his inoperable cancer gave him less than a year to live.

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Pacem in Terris broke new ground on several fronts. First, it was addressed not simply to the Church hierarchy and the faithful but “to all Men of Good Will.” As opposed to the studied qualifications in previous encyclicals and papal statements, Pope John for the first time contended that democracy was the best form of government. Even though he himself remained a monarch (but always refusing to wear the papal tiara), not once does Pacem in Terris mention monarchy as an acceptable form of secular rule. Although recognizing that prevailing conditions and historical circumstances would naturally shape ruling structures, Pacem in Terris gave clear preference to a system of separated and balanced powers, where citizens are given optimum opportunity to participate in their own governance. Such government also had the responsibility for upholding the dignity of all citizens through the guaranteeing of natural rights: freedoms of speech, publication, religion, and assembly. In accordance with earlier social encyclicals, Pacem in Terris also stressed that the state had the obligation to protect the building cell of society, the individual family. For the first time, as distinct from mere toleration, the Vatican recognized the principle that every person—Protestant, Jew, or otherwise—had the right to worship publicly “in accordance with the right dictates of his own conscience.”32 Furthermore, the encyclical stressed that both men and women had the natural right “to share in the benefits of culture,” meaning opportunities for a good general education and professional training (nos. 12, 13, 14, 26, and 41). The fact that Pacem in Terris was addressed “to all Men of Good Will” marked another significant departure, for here was meant to be an opening for dialogue with those who followed philosophical paths in conflict with Christianity. Pope John gave specific directions to the encyclical’s editorial team, insisting that there should be no condemnations in the projected document: “I can’t attribute ill will to one side or the other,” for this would preclude dialogue “and all doors will be closed.”33 Thus, in sharp contrast to previous doctrinaire condemnations, especially those concerning communism (Pius XI and Pius XII), John, working from a more pragmatic frame of mind, drew on the traditional Catholic thesis and hypothesis doctrine to justify collaboration with Marxists in common pursuit of peace and justice. This doctrine asserts that the ideal or truth (thesis) should be the standard for judging the social and political good. Yet circumstances limit what can be done

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in a given situation (hypothesis), and therefore pragmatic compromise is permissible as a best-case effort to advance toward the ideal. It was through such casuistry that liberalism was eventually acceptable (1878 under Leo XIII), and Pius XI in 1931 recognized that many programs of the moderate socialists had merit. Although communism was a false and pernicious philosophy (aiming at the eradication of religion and private property), its adherents in practice sought objectives—social justice and world peace—that were shared by Christians. As John pointed out in Pacem in Terris, Again it is perfectly legitimate to make a clear distinction between a false philosophy of the nature, origin and purpose of men and the world, and economic, social, cultural, and political undertakings, even when such undertakings draw their origin and inspiration from that philosophy. True, the philosophic formula does not change once it has been set down in precise terms, but the undertakings clearly cannot avoid being influenced to a certain extent by the changing conditions in which they have to operate. Besides, who can deny the possible existence of good and commendable elements in these undertakings, elements which do indeed conform to the dictates of right reason, and are an expression of man’s lawful aspirations? (no. 159) In short, although false philosophical formulas remain static, the movements that they inspire are in constant evolution; thus, the modus operandi cannot avoid being shaped by historical conditions that modify the original goal. Communists, for instance, seek world revolution, but the conditions under which they are obliged to function — given shape by aspirations of freedom-loving people, shifting global economic situations, and resistance from democratic nations— might well compel them to settle for peaceful coexistence. Certainly there were forces within the Soviet Union that were already serving to humanize the doctrinal imperative. For example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and the historical writings of Roy Medvedev did not suggest outright disloyalty to Marxist socialism; yet all have as their main goal the promotion of individual freedom, and they laid out the same criticisms of oppressive rule

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on moral grounds that corresponded in virtually every respect with Catholic human rights teachings. In this case, meaningful engagement with such people—some of whom were certainly Marxists—would serve the practical purpose of advancing the general good. Rather than rigidly rejecting communism and thereby exacerbating the tensions of the Cold War, Pacem in Terris suggested paying less attention to labels. This message was of considerable inspiration to liberal, progressiveminded Catholics. As the editor of the English Dominican journal Blackfriars optimistically observed: “the great apertura a sinistra of the encyclical, even if its first reference may be to continental socialism with its roots in the eighteenth century, plainly refers also to the possibility of co-operation between Catholics and Marxists in countries of the eastern bloc, co-operation and not mere co-existence.”34 What Pacem in Terris did condemn in no uncertain terms was the nuclear buildup that threatened the destruction of world civilization. In John XXIII’s mind, the terrifying force of such modern weapons called into question the very premises upon which the principles of just war theory had been built: “Thus, in this age which boasts of its atomic power, it no longer makes sense to maintain that war is a fit instrument with which to repair the violation of justice” (no. 127). The only solution to the conflict between the great powers was through contact and negotiation: “We are hopeful, too, that they will come to a fairer realization of one of the cardinal duties deriving from our common nature; namely, that love, not fear, must dominate the relationships between individuals and between nations” (no. 129). It was upon such grounds that John XXIII singled out for praise the United Nations (an institution frequently criticized by his predecessor) and welcomed its fledgling efforts at promoting international accord.35 It is clear that John XXIII’s position on the above issues marked a significant break from the Vatican’s traditional approach to world affairs. Previous popes had seen the world as a battleground in which the forces of good and evil were engaged in a Manichean struggle for the heart and soul of civilization. But Pacem in Terris asserted that mistaken philosophical positions were neither fixed in stone nor permanently rooted in error, and that the practical necessity of pursuing one’s notion of justice accompanied by requisite good will had the promise of achieving

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goals that satisfied human dignity and its measures for survival. And might such success have the potential to alter the mistaken structure of the initial philosophical position? Absent from John’s encyclicals was any call for the censorship of ideas and opinions (the pox of “modernism”) or the eighty “false propositions” denounced in Pius XI’s Syllabus of Errors, which had the effect of seriously compromising Catholic efforts at social and economic reform. Pope John’s path to aggiornamento also offered new possibilities for addressing Cold War conflicts. On the other hand, John’s predecessor Pius XII, along with influential conservatives in Britain and the United States, had never accepted the postwar gains of the Soviets, made possible, they believed, by the naivete of President Roosevelt at Yalta. The American government at the time, it was asserted, had made the mistake of trusting Stalin, and communist veto power at the United Nations assured the continued subjugation of freedom-loving peoples throughout Europe and Asia. It was also assumed by these groups that the liberation of Eastern Europe from the yoke of communist domination might well necessitate war if all else failed. At the very least, the Vatican under Pius XII certainly did not advocate comity with Moscow while Stalin was in power. The situation began to change somewhat with the emergence of new Soviet leadership. In June 1955 the German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, a Catholic, accepted an invitation to visit Moscow, and after that point Pius at least began to consider the possibility of coexistence with the communists. Yet the editorials of the Vatican’s paper L’Osservatore Romano even after Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization speech (February 1956) ruled out discussions with the Soviet government. And of course, Moscow’s subsequent invasion of Hungary seriously set back the possibilities of any thaw in relations. Many observers also had the impression before the pontificate of John XXIII that the Vatican was less concerned about liberating people from authoritarian rule if one of the sources employed for oppression was Catholic: examples were Franco’s Spain or the fascist-style dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar’s “Estado Novo” (new state) in Portugal.36 And where had been the moral voice of the papacy speaking out for freedom and human dignity in the nineteenth century, when monarchies suppressed movements of national liberation under the banner

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of liberalism? Pius XII certainly spoke eloquently in defending Catholic freedoms under the boot of Nazi and communist rule in Eastern Europe after the war, but how concerned was he for the liberties of nonCatholics? Pius XI for his part had signed concordats with Mexico, Spain, Italy, and Germany, which recognized the legitimacy of those governments and promised political neutrality in return for the acceptance of Catholicism as the state religion, with rights over marriage and the education of children. However, by forsaking such rights in order to protect its spiritual interests, the Vatican compromised the powers of Catholic politicians—Don Luigi Bosco and Don Luigi Sturzo in Italy, Gil Robles in Spain, and the German Center Party — and thereby undercut their efforts to oppose fascist political objectives. When Pius XII did protest against the excesses of fascism, it was only because they violated Catholic rights guaranteed by the concordats. Pius XII’s campaign against totalitarianism focused exclusively on how it infringed on Catholic interests, not on those of humanity itself. This has been the ground for subsequent criticisms of the Vatican’s failure to address fascist anti-Semitism. And historians have also been critical of Pius XII’s record on the issue of totalitarianism, since he viewed Bolshevism as a far greater threat to the Church than fascism and was thus accused of being too soft on the latter. As Garry Wills has noted, the Nazis might have corrupted churches, but at least they allowed them to exist.37 Pope John XXIII, on the other hand, was manifestly a man of different stuff from that of his predecessors: the introduction to Pacem in Terris made it clear that this pontiff was intending to speak to the rights and freedoms of everyone and not merely those of upright conscience. John XXIII’s encyclicals caused a considerable stir both in Italy and abroad. What seemed to rile the Catholic establishment was that the pope, breaking with a tradition as old as the Crusades, was not taking sides with any particular political bloc, other than stating a clear preference for democratic forms of governance. What John intended was to have the Vatican stand for something positive, that is, to affirm rather than condemn. Of course, such a nonaligned program, absent anathemas, was redolent of “neutralism,”a position reviled by American statesmen. President Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had

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set the tone by insisting that neutrality was nothing more than a mask for communist sympathies. Although the pope’s position upset many Americans and more conservative European Catholics, it attracted the attention of Khrushchev, who rather liked what he saw. Coming himself from peasant stock with a rural mentality, he regarded Pope John less as an ideologue than as a man with good commonsense. However, in Italy itself, Roncalli’s course was continually challenged by the Curia’s conservatives. In January 1960, as the Italian president Giovanni Gronchi announced plans to visit Moscow, Cardinal Ottaviani and other like-minded Italian prelates publicly railed against the dangers of supping with the devil. “Some still stretch out their hands to the new anti-Christ,” said Ottaviani, “and even race to see who can first shake hands with him and exchange sweet smiles.” Should accommodation with the Soviet Union be contemplated, he asked, “when the face of Christ is once more spat upon, crowned with thorns and slapped?”38 Undeterred by such alarmist rhetoric, the pope went about his business. During the 1960 Rome Olympic Games, John made it a point to make a public and well-publicized visit with a Bulgarian general whom he remembered from his days as apostolic visitor to Bulgaria. Although the general expected a lecture on the evils of communism, he was treated instead to pleasantries and was told how much Roncalli had loved Bulgaria. After the general returned home, a Catholic bishop and a number of priests imprisoned by the state were quietly released. In September 1961, Pope John XXIII sent a message of peace and goodwill to the Conference of Non-Aligned Nations meeting in Belgrade. Shortly afterward, Khrushchev, in an interview with Pravda, spoke positively of the Vatican’s posture. This marked the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution that the Soviets had made any public announcement that had not been critical of the papacy. Meanwhile, Pope John had one of his officials meet secretly with the secretary of the Italian Communist Party to discuss ways of improving the Vatican’s relations with Moscow. This produced a telegram from Khrushchev congratulating the pontiff on reaching his eightieth birthday, to which John replied with thanks and best wishes to the Soviet citizenry. Other, more substantive correspondence followed, owing largely to Khrushchev’s appreciation of the pope’s intervention in the Cuban missile crisis.

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John XXIII had made a special appeal urging both Washington and Moscow to settle the Cuban matter for the sake of world civilization. As the crisis reached a critical stage on 23 October 1962, the pope delivered to the American and Soviet embassies a plea for peace: “We implore all rulers not to remain deaf to the cry of humanity for peace . . . to reassume negotiations . . . to set in motion, encourage and accept discussions at all levels and at any time is a maxim of wisdom and prudence.”39 This gesture was given insufficient recognition in the West, but it had served to mitigate criticism from the Kremlin hawks, as the Soviet dictator could justify his retreat as something done in the best interests of saving humanity. When Khrushchev announced the decision to withdraw the Soviet rockets from Cuba on 26 October, Moscow’s Pravda printed the pope’s appeal and praised his realistic understanding of the need for peace. After the crisis was resolved, Khrushchev let it be known that further contacts with the Vatican would be helpful for promoting disarmament and détente.40 In March 1963, overcoming the resistance of Secretary of State Tardini, Cardinal Ottaviani, and other Curia conservatives, Pope John gave an audience to Alexis Adzhubei, the editor of Izvestia, and his wife Rada, the daughter of Khrushchev. Adzhubei had requested the meeting to deliver a personal gift to the pope from his father-in-law. In order to carry this off, Roncalli had to work over the heads of his officials, since Ottaviani had refused the request on grounds that it could be used as propaganda for communist interests. Adzhubei carried the message that Khrushchev wanted direct contact with the Vatican so as to deal with diplomatic problems as they arose. In order to undercut diplomatic misunderstanding, Pope John asked the couple not to publish their version of the audience. He intended, however, to make public his own report at the appropriate time. However, the pope was blocked from doing so by his secretary of state and other members of the Curia, and it was only after John’s death in August that details were made public. It seems that the Curia resisted his intentions because they feared that talk of a friendly meeting with a leading Soviet official would encourage Italians to vote communist in the approaching April general election. Their refusal to publicize the substance of the Adzhubei audience was a source of great frustration and hurt for Roncalli, but by this point he was seriously ailing, and he made the publication of Pacem in Terris his priority.41

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Despite the difficulties associated with Adzhubei’s visit, his papal audience was warm and friendly and did much to continue dismantling the communication barriers between the Church and the Soviet regime. John sent postage stamps and coins to Khrushchev’s grandchildren, and for the premier he had medals struck by the sculptor Giacomo Manzù, who was himself an artist on the left (indeed, a communist who had been excommunicated). All this did not mean that the pope was kneeling before dictators, since he labored diligently and successfully during this time to secure the release of Bishop Josyf Slipyj, primate of the Ukraine, from a Siberian prison as well as the freedom of Archbishop Josef Beran of Prague and Cardinal Josef Mindszenty of Budapest.42 What came to be recognized as John XXIII’s own “opening to the left” was greeted with mixed reviews, depending on sociopolitical perspectives. Progressives welcomed Mater et Magistra’s support of worker and management cooperatives, of increased responsibility of the state for promoting social welfare, and of additional aid for the underdeveloped world, as well as its call for defusing East-West ideological polarization. The Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, writing in Christianity and Crisis (6 August 1961), considered it a “formidable document” and a “welcome extension” of Catholic social teaching “to the new era of a technical civilization that is troubled by the bewildering possibilities of good and evil inherent in automation and nuclear energy.” At some points, wrote Niebuhr, the encyclical read like a page from the Swedish socialist writer Gunnar Myrdal’s Rich Lands, Poor Lands in its advocacy of political means to reduce social and economic inequalities around the globe. Secularists on the left were even more ebullient about the encyclical: the Manchester Guardian and New Statesman hailed what they saw to be the pope’s conversion to socialism. Those more conservatively inclined had a rather different view of what appeared to be the pope’s drift to the left. In Italy the April 1963 general elections brought significant gains to the Italian Communist Party, despite Cardinal Ottaviani’s threat of excommunication for those who supported leftists. The shock was sufficient for President Kennedy to dispatch CIA chief John McCone to Rome with a warning to the pope about becoming too friendly with the perfidious Soviets. The Italian right-wing press blamed Communist Party electoral gains on Aldo Moro’s

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mistaken turn to the left. And some charged that Pacem in Terris, along with the Adzhubei audience and assumed left-wing tendencies of the ecumenical council meeting in Rome, had helped promote public sympathy for the communist political platform. A Milan newspaper went so far as to cynically alter the title of the encyclical to Falcem in Terris (“The Sickle on Earth”). The most pointed criticism of John XXIII’s new direction came from America’s most prominent Catholic conservative, William F. Buckley, Jr., the editor of the influential National Review. Buckley’s commentary was the catalyst for a fierce debate in the American Catholic intellectual community, and the affair played a role in setting some of the ideological rubrics that defined what it meant to be a liberal or conservative Catholic on cultural matters. The squabble also can serve as a template against which one can gauge the concerns of Catholic radicals after the conclusion of Vatican Council II. In the National Review of 29 July 1961, Buckley criticized Mater et Magistra as a “large sprawling document” that at this point in history was both an embarrassment and a “venture in triviality.” It ignored, Buckley warned, the demonic nature of communism and showed scant appreciation of the success of free-market capitalism for the remarkable material well-being of the post –World War II world. Even more fuel was added to the conflagration that followed Buckley’s assessment by a short miscellaneous item in his journal a few weeks later, which lightheartedly mentioned a quip making the rounds in conservative Catholic circles: “Mater si, Magistra no!” (a parody of Fidel Castro’s slogan, “Cuba si, Yanqui no!”). The American Jesuit weekly America took umbrage and pronounced the slogan slanderous. The editor criticized Buckley for his arrogance in brushing off John XXIII’s encyclical as if it were written by a mere liberal Catholic layman. We would be much fonder of Mr. Buckley and his program of “conservatism,” wrote its editor, if he showed signs of comprehending an old, conservative adage: “Qui mange du pape, en meurt” (who eats from the pope, dies).43 Diocesan papers also joined the fray. The syndicated columnist Rev. William J. Smith, S. J., charged that the National Review’s response was the “stuff from which seedling schisms sprout” and that its readers should decide on which side to place their

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loyalty: Buckley’s journal or the Catholic Church. The Providence Journal published a cartoon of Buckley nailing the slogan “Mater, si” to the door of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.44 Buckley took issue with the notion that his journal had to follow some prescribed Catholic line. The National Review was edited by a Catholic, but this did not make it a Catholic publication, argued Buckley, any more than the Kennedy administration was a Catholic government. The journal’s position on the controversial encyclical, he pointed out, was determined by an editorial staff representing three major religions: “Catholic, Protestant, and Jew.”45 The bickering continued, and the Rev. Thurston N. Davis, S. J., editor of America, informed the National Review that it would no longer accept advertisements for the journal. On 10 February 1962 it publicized its reason, without mentioning the National Review by name: America could not give space to a view that “undercuts positions which we judge to be central to our faith, natural law or the explicit and long established social doctrines of the Church.” The journal went so far as to warn Catholic colleges and universities that it would be dangerous to even allow those who subcribe to National Review positions to speak on their campuses: “Doesn’t deliberate opposition to Catholic social doctrine come close to being anti-Catholic? Can anti-labor, anti-U. N., anti-foreign aid speakers be hosted and toasted on a Catholic campus?”46 At the core of this brouhaha were two issues: the authority of papal encyclicals, and economic and political matters concerning capitalism and communism, the responses to the latter largely serving to divide Catholics along the conservative and liberal trajectory. John Cogley, writing in Commonweal (3 May 1963), described the deleterious effect that the ideological struggle was having on the Catholic intellectual community: Mater et Magistra was being used “not as an inspiration and a guide for action but as a kind of loyalty oath” by which various factions within the Church were being tested. Buckley and his National Review circle were stalwart supporters of a relatively unfettered free-enterprise system, which those supporting the America position found to be the source of capitalist greed and what today would be recognized as exploitative, corporative-driven economic globalization.47 After all, the expansion of Western capitalism had

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caused the Opium Wars in China a century ago and contributed to the subsequent humiliation of that once brilliant civilization; it had encouraged genocide in the Belgian Congo and the rapacious exploitation of Africa itself; and its imperialist impulses were a major contributing cause of World War I. Finally, the economic crisis caused by failures in the capitalist system in the 1930s had been a catalyst for both the emergence of fascism and World War II. Buckley’s opponents saw the National Review as promoting a discredited, pernicious economic system. In its issue of 28 November 1959, America charged that Buckley’s crowd were advocating a society “in which individuals of every rank would be equally and absolutely free to rummage in garbage pails for their dinner and to use park benches for their bedding.” But the central issue for Buckley’s associates was stated concisely by Will Herberg, the National Review’s religious editor: liberal Catholics were using papal encyclicals to close the doors to freedom of thought and intellectual inquiry, that is, the diversity of views that had always been part of the “big tent” of Catholic opinion on social and political matters. Herberg, who was Jewish, for years had argued before non-Catholic audiences that there was no such thing as a Vatican doctrinal line on economic, social, and political matters so long as they did not compromise fundamental Church teachings on faith and morals. Did the teaching voice of Mater et Magistra in its advocacy of Keynesian economic policies alter this tradition? Did it mean that the “neoliberal” economics of Ludwig von Mises, Theodore Roepke, and Milton Friedman (to which the National Review subscribed) were non-Catholic, even heretical?48 Buckley’s group had great faith in the power of the free market, which for them was the fountainhead of liberty and a moral engine capable not only of expanding wealth but also of promoting peace and the quality of life throughout the world.49 America responded on 11 November 1961 with the argument that all parts of an encyclical were equally authoritative, but that papal documents had a “distinct character” and thus were authoritative for all Catholics. In addition to disputations on economics, which in this case served to mark the divide between a more orthodox Catholicism and progressiveminded liberal Catholics, there was also the matter of how best to deal with communism and the threat of Soviet totalitarian tyranny. As Buckley

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saw it, underlying Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris was the implicit assumption that addressing violations of social and economic justice, rather than militant resistance, would dry up the swamps that gave rise to communism (hence the priority given to peaceful coexistence). Failing to do so would suggest that Catholics were encouraging the spread of this contagion. Such was the point made by Louis J. Twomey, S. J., in an October 1961 issue of Act, where he claimed, “we are responsible for communism!” Buckley considered the assertion historically nonsensical. Catholics should always promote justice and racial equality, the latter of which was also given a high profile by the encyclicals, but such action would not thwart the communist drive for a moment. Justice for Marxists, claimed Buckley, depended on the imperatives of dialectical materialism, which aimed at the destruction of the capitalist system and the religious underpinnings of Western culture. Many of the so-called social reforms recommended by Twomey had been adopted in Italy and France, two countries where the communist message had gained strength. In fact, Buckley quipped, one of the strongest communist parties in post –World War I Europe was in Germany, the “Mother of Welfare States.” Presently in Europe, communists were the weakest in Spain, where Franco did not tolerate them; in Ireland, because of the strength of its Catholic culture; and in West Germany, a country that had outlawed the creed and whose citizens knew firsthand the fraudulent justice practiced by this estranged sibling whose inhabitants flee its embrace. Thus, argued Buckley, the liberals work from false correlations between the promotion of social justice and the thwarting of communism. In Buckley’s mind, at least three initiatives were relevant to diminishing communist power: directing foreign aid away from eleemosynary missions to only those countries mounting anticommunist enterprises; transforming the Peace Corps into an agency of “evangelists for freedom,” expertly trained in psychological guerrilla warfare for combating the communist appeal; and acknowledging that “justice-as-relatedto-Anti-Communism requires the liberation of the men we betrayed in Eastern Europe.” Through cowardly and unimaginative diplomacy, the Western democracies had turned “tens of millions” toward their communist oppressors. Liberation, insisted Buckley, would in itself be an

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act of justice, but it must be sought as a means of weakening the mortal enemy.50 Buckley appealed for unity among Catholics on the left and the right. As he warned, in an attemp to mend fences with Father Davis in a letter that America refused to print: “When we stand together, as well we may, in that final foxhole, you will discover, as we pass each other the ammunition, that all along we had the same enemy: and that if we acted in concert, we might have spared ourselves that final encounter, under such desperate circumstances.”51 The other major issue highlighted by the National Review –America controversy was the meaning of papal encyclicals, since it raised the question of freedom and authority within the Catholic Church. Did Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris demand a uniform degree of assent? Buckley and his supporters turned the issue over to a young former seminarian, a rapidly rising star in the constellation of conservative intellectuals around the National Review. These intellectuals formed a sort of informal “brain trust” that Buckley was assembling to help guide the journal through the turbulent waters of social, economic, and political advocacy. The seminarian was Garry Wills, who at the time was working to complete a Ph. D. degree in classics at Yale University. Wills quickly immersed himself in the study of Catholic social thinking, with a particular focus on papal encyclicals. He discovered that despite all the recent wrangling over encyclicals, no book in English had ever been written on the subject. Wills’s answer was his Politics and Catholic Freedom (1964). His research revealed that encyclical letters on social problems did not impose a specific form of politics for all Catholics to follow. Therefore, America and the like were unjustified in using what amounted to a loyalty test on such matters as an instrument of political certification. At the time, anti-Catholic critics such as Paul Blanchard had asserted that papal power over Catholics was essentially unlimited and warned that Americans could soon fall under the press of a revived Inquisition. The fact that Rome in the 1950s gave credence to Blanchard’s jeremiads did not help to disabuse more observant critics of this notion. In addition to censoring Teilhard de Chardin and the other proponents of the New Theology, the American Jesuit constitutional scholar John Courtney Murray had also been silenced because of his liberal ideas on democracy and American politics.

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Encyclicals, as Wills came to understand them, were part of the special corporate personality of the Church that allows the institution to break down the “normal processes of rigidification and bureaucratic stultification” that sets in through the passage of time.52 In this respect they give the pope an opportunity to address Catholics about current matters of importance regarding their Church and faith. Yet scholars who have studied their purpose and evolution admit that the true nature of encyclicals is not fully understood. One of the reasons is that theologians have been reluctant to determine the extent of their authority. Encyclicals are also a relatively recent phenomenon (the first was issued by Benedict XIV in 1740), and those that have addressed social matters have primarily served to register changes in the relations between the Church and civil authorities. All this became more complicated with the loss of the Vatican’s temporal authority that resulted from the collapse of the Papal States and the rise of pluralistic theories of secular sovereignty. The First Vatican Council was cut short because of the outbreak of war and therefore failed to complete its ecclesiastical mission by providing a full definition of papal power in the context of a world transformed by modern social, economic, and political changes. Only one dimension of theological doctrine was established by the Council, namely, papal infallibility in matters of faith. There was some clarification regarding papal authority in the social realm when Leo XIII recognized that secular states were politically autonomous. But it appears that the task of fully defining the ecclesiastical grid was left for future generations of leaders. And this was the challenge that confronted the Catholic faithful in the 1960s. Wills’s own education concerning Church authority was greatly enhanced through encountering the ideas of John Henry Newman, who, accused of being a papal “minimalist,” had the temerity to challenge the Vatican’s claims to power. From Newman, Wills not only learned more about the limitations of papal authority but also discovered another perspective on conservatism, which would lead him to break with the National Review circle and eventually to take a more liberal path in matters of the Church and politics.53 Newman’s writings on Church doctrine emphasized the importance of continuity within development. Change is inevitable, and to oppose it is folly and thus unproductive. The chal-

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lenge is to integrate new experiences and ideas within a self-containing continuum. Much like an old tree, which has survived and matured by responding as an organic entity to the winds and seasons of the natural world, the Church too, as a living organic body, must draw on the power to assimilate and be fed by the historical forces that surround it. Newman also asserted that the core of social identity for the Church was the entire body of the faithful, not merely the hierarchy or the priesthood. And there were times, for instance during the Arian controversy, when its spiritual leaders strayed from the faith and themselves drifted onto the shoals of heresy. As Wills discovered, Newman’s historical analyses revealed that the corporate body of the faithful lived closer to the teachings of Christ than did the individuals who were supposed to shepherd the flock. Therefore, noted Wills, “experienced continuity with the Gospel rests in the Christian community at large, not in a private revelation to Popes or the teaching sector (Magisterium) of the Church.”54 This would become one of the central and most decisive issues taken up by Vatican Council II. Pope John XXIII broke new ground by providing an opening for Catholics to update fundamental Church teachings and thus make them relevant to modern living. In doing so he showed a willingness to engage the most pressing secular matters of the day, including the Cold War, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the ideology of communism. John also made decisive deviations from the monarchical model of papal governance that encouraged greater involvement of the lay community in realizing the promises of the Gospels. But it would require Herculean efforts by progressive theologians and committed lay people of liberal persuasion to continue, let alone assure, long-term institutional support for carrying out these forward-looking aspirations. Even the reformist encyclicals that John issued during his short reign galvanized more traditionalist Catholics against what they saw as adumbrations of socialism. In the short run these encyclicals served to lay out the lines of resistance that came to define what it meant to be a liberal and a conservative Catholic. The reaction of radical Catholicism as it played out in the 1960s also has its roots in the struggle over the meaning of John’s encyclicals. The Second Vatican Council served as the battleground for deciding the direction and scale of Church reformism.

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Would the Council be sufficient to achieve what John meant by aggiornamento, integrating Church teachings with the modern age in such a way as to address the needs of an increasingly global community? Would “reform” of Church institutions be adequate to satisfy conservative temperaments as well as Catholics more progressively inclined? The upcoming Council could provide a theological framework for achieving these objectives, but it would require a commitment on behalf of the Church’s leadership to bring these reforms into being.

S I X

The Council

Rahner and Congar and Küng, Their praises are everywhere sung. But one fine domani Old Ottaviani, Will have them all properly hung. —Hans Küng1 Reform of the Holy Office? But we have all the latest electrical equipment. — Cardinal Ottaviani2

Pope John XXIII’s encyclicals revealed that he had found his own voice. They expressed his hopes and desires for further engaging the modern world by advancing the pioneering works on social justice inaugurated by Leo XIII and Pius XI. The purpose of Vatican II was to make pastoral changes within the structures of the Church so that it could more effectively speak to the needs of the secular world. A major part of this 121

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endeavor was ecumenical: to reunite all Christians in a common evangelical mission. There was both great surprise yet considerable optimism for the calling. The U. S. economy was booming, Europe was rapidly recovering from the devastation of war, and moves were under way to forge a united common market. The colonial powers were beginning the process of giving up empires. There was hope for emerging nations to find an alternative “third way” between the Cold War claims of capitalism and communism, and in the Eastern bloc there was talk of another kind of Marxism with a human face. Might there be the possibility of dialogue with the West? In sum, there seemed tangible proof after the fog of despair and destruction that modernization might actually clear the air for cultural and economic improvement. All this complemented the spirit of hope and optimism expressed in the visions of John XXIII. The general public seemed to welcome news of the Council. A young professor of theology at Tübingen, Hans Küng, for instance, found equally young audiences (both Catholic and Protestant) to whom he spoke throughout Germany, Austria, and Switzerland who were enthusiastic about the gathering. Yet among theologians the call met a mixed response. Initially, progressive theologians were anything but optimistic, since John had placed the ban on worker-priests and pushed for increased use of Latin. Conservatives, for their part, feared any alterations in the traditional power structures. Yet, by the time the Council actually came together, the progressives became more hopeful. Even pessimists recognized that something worthwhile might happen. One such French theologian, the American journalist Robert Kaiser reported, commented that “to a world that had lost its soul and was filled with ennui and fear the thought came that maybe the Council would restore life and hope.”3 On the other hand, the Roman Curia and the right-wing Italian press (some of whom were so audacious as to actually label themselves “fascist” or “neofascist”) were in no mood for celebration. Their unease only increased when bishops from Eastern-bloc countries began arriving in Rome to be given special attention by the pope. What made possible the presence at the Council of prelates and diocesan administrators from communist countries was Pope John’s friendly overtures to

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Communist Party leaders. The Kremlin, for instance, out of political considerations and the promising personal relationship between Pope John and Khrushchev, agreed to allow the Moscow patriarchate to attend the Council as an observer, provided that the Vatican would not use the occasion to attack the Soviet system.4 Soon afterward the Vatican, on the heels of some eighteen years of almost complete isolation, was able to make contact with clerics and believers behind the Iron Curtain. But what was perceived as cavorting with infidels proved unsettling to the voices of reaction. One rightist Italian newspaper chided the pope for praying publicly “for the same Russian cosmonauts who said they did not see God in space.”5 John’s calling on the Church to read the “signs of the time” created an opening for the reformist ideas of the new theologians, and soon they were out on the hustings offering an array of recommendations for meeting what they took to be the pope’s progressive objectives. What followed was a highly charged, well-publicized, but unofficial discussion of what the purpose and agenda of the Council should be. A number of these men came to play important roles in giving shape to the work undertaken by the Council and the final outcome of its deliberations. Even before the Council met, two highly influential books appeared that served to outline certain vistas of reform that conflicted with the conservative objectives of powerful prelates of the Curia. These “defenders of the faith,” led by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani (the motto on his coat of arms was Semper Idem, “Always the Same”), secretary of the Sanctum Officium or Holy Office, an updated rendition of the Inquisition and at the time the most powerful arm of the Vatican bureaucracy, intended to set the agenda and control procedures for drafting schemata (conciliar documents). As soon as the pope announced plans for an ecumenical gathering in January 1959, Lorenz Jaeger, the eminent archbishop of Paderborn, undertook a study of the history of Church councils. The resulting book, published as The Ecumenical Council, the Church and Christendom (English translation 1961), made it clear that the mechanical, highly centralized, and Roman-controlled model being put in place by Ottaviani and his Curia associates had no relation to the ways in which councils had historically taken form. Evidence from centuries of teachings of popes

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and bishops showed a strong connection between councils and the prevailing historical environment in which the Church functioned. In short, Jaeger demonstrated that there was no fixed model for councils, that their forms were conditioned by cultural and political circumstances. Hence the First Vatican Council largely reflected a more monarchical model of Church governance, one that resonated closely with the autocratic spirit of the age. A similar paternalistic model would be anachronistic in the democratic, collegial environment of the mid-twentieth century, where a better educated lay community desired a more active role in Church affairs. On the other hand, there was a crucial common bond, a thread of consistency that held all councils together, argued Jaeger, and that was the imperative of Church unity. Irrespective of unavoidable change, councils always exhibited the catholicity of the Church: “The common factor at the heart of all the councils is their Christ-given basis in the collective action of the apostles and their successors under the guidance of the papacy. Thus each council has its own stamp, and it is possible to group together several councils chosen from one period of history and to see that their form does show signs of consistency.”6 Jaeger also pointed out that in accordance with divine law and historical practice in an ecumenical council, all bishops who have territorial jurisdiction must be invited to participate in its deliberations. This is because the bishops, as successors to the apostles, form along with the pope the teaching body of the Church and therefore represent the highest ecclesiastical authority. Traditionally the laity is represented at council through their bishops, and in this way the teaching body of the Church is intimately connected to the whole body of the faithful.7 But since councils historically have been time-conditioned, the gathering called forth by Pope John should allow for some kind of lay participation so as to better accommodate itself to the pluralistic environment of the age, thus satisfying the democratic aspirations of all Christians. Jaeger’s book proved to be a bombshell, since it directly challenged on unassailable historical grounds the ways in which the Curia intended to control and give shape to Vatican Council II. The other and more far-reaching book in influence and prognostication in terms of what the Council would ultimately achieve was written by Hans Küng, who had just been given a chair in Catholic theology at the University of Tübingen. Küng was photogenic (with a passing re-

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semblance to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose leadership style he greatly admired), a gifted speaker and lively writer with the kind of charismatic charms that easily captured public attention.8 He quickly earned a reputation as one of the most brilliant of the Church’s rising theological stars. Küng had been appointed to his prestigious Tübingen professorship at the tender age of thirty-one. His religious bent was shaped by a youthful appreciation of liberty and the virtues of free thinking. As a Swiss citizen, the Nazi occupation of much of Europe had a profound impact on his political sensibilities. The basic challenge of life, wrote Küng in his memoirs, was presented to him by national politics while in the cradle (he was twelve years old in 1940): “conform and go along with events, or stand firm and resist?” Life would always require a “struggle for freedom.”9 And he was proud of the fact that in the years of National Socialist rule in Europe he had never known a single Swiss who had joined the Nazi party. Küng’s heroes were paragons of nonconformity: Winston Churchill, who refused to bow to Hitler and showed the British through his own personal courage how to stand firm, and Charles de Gaulle, the general who against all odds rallied his nation to resist Nazi occupation. In his religious thinking Küng was deeply influenced by the new theologians, in particular by Karl Rahner and Yves Congar. He also had a close working relationship with the influential Protestant theologian Karl Barth, and partly as a consequence was sympathetic to Protestant issues concerning the break with Rome. Küng’s book Konzil und Wiedervereinigung appeared in 1960 and was translated in the United States as The Council, Reform and Reunion (the British edition was entitled The Council and Reunion). Basing his study on a careful examination of Christian history, Küng endeavored to show how through the ages the Church was able to renew its structures and teachings. This was a necessity for survival, since the Church could not afford to remain in stasis. Rather, it must confront the unique challenges of each new era because it is an institution made up of human beings, not one of the world but situated in the world and thus rooted in historical time: And insofar as the Church, because of her human frailty and sinfulness, always needs to be better; insofar as she can never sit and bask in the warmth of her own self-satisfaction but must always be

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pressing on with all the earnest zeal of the penitent—this renewal of the Church is never something finished and done with but is always a permanent duty: and this precisely because she is, and is to remain, the holy Church. Insofar as the Church is constantly, repeatedly deformed, she has to be constantly, repeatedly reformed: ecclesia semper reformanda.10 Given the call to aggiornamento, it was clear to Küng that the ultimate test of continued renewal was the return of Protestants to the mother Church. This ecumenical unification would only be possible if each side recognized and addressed legitimate theological concerns in accordance with the norm of the same gospel. As for Catholics, Küng insisted that there had to be a recognition that the dogmas of the Church were not fixed in stone, that they must be reinterpreted through the shifting circumstances of time. In short, in order to achieve true renewal the Church must be prepared to reform its doctrine.11 A major obstacle to renewal in Küng’s view was the organizational structure of the Church dominated by the office of the papacy. He noted that the most eminent Protestant theologians of the day had a positive appreciation of the Petrine doctrine (that bishops of Rome—popes— inherited Peter’s legacy as leader of the Church) but had serious objections to the modern autocratic form and practice of the office which it justified. At issue here was the “Romanization” of Catholic claims: “Roman theology, Roman thought, Roman authorities take precedence when any Catholic decision has to be reached on discipline, on law, and equally on liturgy and theology.”12 This “Roman technique,” asserted Küng, prevented the growth of one Catholic body in christo. It was overweening romanitàs that drove the Reformation to such extremes and was continuing to be a barrier to unification. Küng’s central argument was that Catholics must come to appreciate Protestant concerns about Roman centralization and address its abuses. This, he was convinced, was the key to satisfying the ecumenical aspirations of Pope John XXIII. In The Council, Reform and Reunion, Küng admitted that theologians could not draw up a plan for the Council or even make proposals (that being the task of bishops) but only “point out possibilities” for action. In this respect, Küng’s book suggested an agenda for Vatican II.

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The central purpose of the Council, as he saw it, was reform of the Church, without which there could be no reunion with the separated brethren. He then laid out several initiatives vital to such renewal. Among the key suggestions was, first, the need to appreciate the valid religious complaints that caused Martin Luther’s rebellion without reducing them to simply political and psychological factors (for example, Luther’s identity crisis). As a means of restoring theological balance, Catholics would have to give a greater place to scripture in religious studies and worship. Second, in order to enable the laity to have a clearer understanding of ritual and to give more meaning to worship, Latin should be replaced by the vernacular in the Mass. Küng noted that there was sufficient precedent for doing this. The imaginative thrust of the early Christian missions, for instance, was fueled by their capacity to constantly adapt to new challenges. The vehicle for dynamic growth was the use of language that the common people could understand. Rather than rigidly adhering to Aramaic and Hebrew, the early missionaries found success by adapting their message to local languages. Liturgical reform first took place in Rome about the year 250. The original liturgical language of Roman Christians was Greek, but Greek was gradually replaced by Latin, at that time the vernacular of the multilingual empire. Later, when the original biblical languages were no longer understood by the faithful, a myriad of scriptural translations were made (Syriac, Coptic, and Arabic, among others). Other adaptions still followed, including shifting the celebration of Mass by lay people in the homes of the faithful to the ordained clergy in basilicas. The point here is that the early Church expanded and thrived because of its capacity for constant renewal and adaptation. Third, in order to create more dialogue between the Church, other cultures, and idea systems, including enticing disenchanted Protestants back into the fold, there needed to be fundamental changes in the organizational structure of the Church. Since the Reformation, the Roman Church had become increasingly dominated by the hierarchy and its bureaucratic offices at the Vatican. What amounted to papal absolutism had been achieved at the expense of the powers and interests of both bishops and laymen. Roman centralism had betrayed the traditional understanding of the role of lay people, namely, the doctrine of the priesthood of all the faithful alongside the ordained clergy. Increasingly, Küng

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noted, the study of theology was being undertaken by lay people, who were also playing an important role in catechetical work. What was needed, he suggested, was a “declaration of principle” on the significance of the layman in the Church: The scriptural concept of the Body of Christ, of which all Christians are members, and of the royal priesthood, to which all Christians are called by baptism, would form the solid foundation for a specific theological declaration that the layman does not belong to the Church in some secondary sense but that he is the Church, not only as a passive, receptive object to be cared for, but as an active subject, taking the initiative, and co-responsible for the Church.13 In order to open up channels allowing for fuller lay participation, as well as to restore to the episcopate their traditional roles in Church governance, there needed to be a decentralization of Roman authority by transferring power and initiative from the Vatican down to intermediate levels. A strengthening of these intermediate bodies (especially national Bishops’ Conferences) would encourage renewal throughout the Church. In other words, what Pius XI said of the state in Quadragesimo Anno in reference to the principle of subsidiarity could also be applied analogously to the Church: smaller groups can carry out with greater freedom and efficiency the tasks that directly involve their interests than can larger, impersonal associations that are unfamiliar with local concerns. Hence, argued Küng, there would be an increase in social initiative if the episcopal office and the local church became more important once again as the loci of authority and action. However, the implementation of ecclesiastical subsidiarity would require a fundamental restructuring and reform of the Curia. It needed to open its ranks to international prelates (it was monopolized by Italians) and devolve power from its Roman bureaucrats, who were too removed from the everyday lives of the faithful, to intermediate and local bodies of governance (in this case to national bishops and diocesan authorities) that were more able to function on the basis of a shared collegiality. Curia officials would function as servants of the bishops rather than act as their masters. As Küng later commented, “it is time for the Catholic Church—

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mutatis mutandis—to be transformed from a Roman ‘empire’ into a Catholic ‘commonwealth.’”14 Finally, a central part of cutting back the powers of the Curia, for Küng, was the elimination of the Index of prohibited books, administered at this point by the Holy Office. This was the instrument through which the Holy Office, working in secrecy, was able to exercise a form of terreur intellectuelle over theologians who had ventured too far off the acceptable orthodox path. As Küng bluntly pointed out somewhat later, in many ways the Roman Inquisition authority had become the spiritual counterpart of the secret police of Moscow’s empire. Just as that Soviet agency altered its hated names (Cheka, NKVD, KGB) and was above the law, so too had the Congregatio Sancti Officii Romanae et Universalis Inquisitionis changed its title from simply the Inquisition to the Holy Office, and then, after Vatican II, to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Like its Soviet counterpart, the Holy Office made catastrophically wrongheaded decisions with its secret authority against freedom of religion and human rights, from the case of Galileo to that of Teilhard de Chardin and the purging of the new theologians under Pius XII. The indirect and intentional result of these measures was to generate fear. Bishops or theologians writing a book or article “must prophylactically exercise ‘caution’ and they do not dare to write anything bold at all.”15 It must be noted that young Hans Küng in his The Council, Reform and Reunion was the first to call for the elimination of the Index, which no bishop or seasoned theologian up to then had the courage to suggest. Such was the chilling power of the Holy Office. Küng’s book struck a positive chord among Catholics in the Western world, becoming a best seller as the German edition was soon translated into several languages. Reviews of the book from highly respected Catholic as well as Protestant theologians and intellectuals were overwhelmingly positive (Gregory Baum, Avery Dulles, Andrew Greeley, Charles Davis, Robert McAfee Brown, and Claude Nelson, among others). The Council, Reform and Reunion was even given positive press in the Communist world; it was observed that in the past, such thinking would have earned its author the label of heretic. The influential press magnate Henry Luce took a liking to Küng’s message, and Luce’s Time magazine (8 June 1962) published a full-page article featuring the book

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with the title “A Second Reformation for Both Catholics and Protestants.” Three portrait photographs highlighted its significance: Küng’s was symbolically placed between those of Martin Luther and Pope John XXIII. A personally signed copy of the book (in French) was sent to the pope through the Vatican Monsignore Antonio Travia, one of the few supportive Curia officials. Travia later reported that John had already procured a copy for himself some months earlier and had spoken favorably of it. In October 1962, Küng received word from the Vatican Secretariat of State that the book sent to the pope “met with high approval.” It was also officially communicated to the young theologian that he had the Holy Father’s “apostolic blessing as a pledge of divine grace.”16 Such gratitude was not shared by conservative members of the Roman Curia, whose resistance to Küng’s views prevented an Italian translation of the book until the end of the Council in 1965. In addition to the reformist agenda set forth in The Council, Reform and Reunion, Küng was able to expand his progressive ideas through a series of lectures, newspaper articles, and radio and television interviews throughout Europe and the United States. Because of Küng’s knowledge of many languages and his extensive travels, he had good contacts with many of the world’s most influential journalists, including Henri Fesquet of Le Monde, Michael van der Plas of Amsterdam’s Elsevier, Joseph Schmitz van Vorst of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Ken Woodward of Newsweek, John Cogley of Commonweal, and Robert B. Kaiser of Time magazine. Their positive coverage of his book and ideas had the effect of raising the consciousness of Catholics throughout the Western world regarding the possibilities for reform, above all for opening closed doors for meaningful lay participation in Church affairs. One of Küng’s doctoral students at Tübingen described how the book’s message resonated with Catholics in his hometown of Chicago: No themes were any longer taboo. . . . ‘Freedom in the Church’ detonated an explosion which is still reverberating through the church and its organizations. ‘Freedom’ was the last thing we American Catholics associated with the Roman Catholic Church. Suddenly it was a programme. Küng’s book opened up the floodgates for Catholic theology in America. The clouds which had hung over

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the heads of theologians like Chenu, Congar, de Lubac, Danielou, Bouyer, Courtney Murray, Rahner and Schillebeeckx dissolved instantly into thin air.17 .

Küng’s book and the publicity it garnered upstaged the Curia’s Preparatory Commission, which was essentially cataloguing a series of issues with wide public support to which any credible Council would be expected to give serious consideration. The Curia conservatives were furious at this young theologian’s publicly jump-starting the ecumenical gathering and holding forth on what he considered the outdated and obfuscatory ways of the Holy Office. In terms of giving voice to the theological and organizational matters that in previous councils the Vatican bureaucracy had kept secret, Küng managed to provide a public agenda for one of the most groundbreaking events in modern Church history. Pope John’s biographer, Peter Hebblethwaite, one of the most perceptive students of Vatican politics, was not exaggerating when he pointed out that never again would a single theologian outside the Vatican bureaucracy exercise such influence in Church affairs.18 Cardinal Ottaviani at the Holy Office and his Curia colleagues were not without the means to fight back. Progressive theologians who supported Küng’s agenda came under relentless attack. In February 1963 the Washington Post announced that the Catholic University of America, a pontifical institute controlled by the Vatican, banned lectures by two leading ecumenists, Gustav Weigel and John Courtney Murray, the latter of whom was a seminal scholar on state-church relations, as well as the Benedictine Godfrey Diekmann, the nation’s leading liturgist and editor of Worship.19 Rounding off the forbidden list was Küng himself. In all, claimed the Swiss theologian, it was an honor to be placed in such illustrious company: “Murray, Weigel and Diekmann in the U. S. A., quite comparable with Congar, Rahner and Schillebeeckx in Europe.”20 The Second Vatican Council was opened by Pope John on 11 October 1962. His earlier summons to meet had made way for the new theologians, who, along with Bishop Lorenz Jaeger and Hans Küng, seized the opportunity to articulate their ideas on a broad range of reformist matters. Therefore, by the time the Council officially started, there was wide public support for their cause. On the other hand, the Curia had

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the responsibility for planning. Its members were given charge of heading the various Preparatory Commissions and were in no way inclined to recommend anything suggested by progressive theologians. In fact, some leading members of the Curia were set on preventing any changes whatever. The pope’s secretary of state, Domenico Tardini, a close confidant of Pius XII, thought the whole matter of an ecumenical council a farce and made little effort to conceal his scorn. He called a press conference soon after John announced his plans and referred to the Council as “the Pope’s toy.” Tardini and Cardinal Ottaviani were determined to exclude new theologians from the Preparatory Commissions, and this included essentially anyone who was touched by the fallout from Humani Generis. However, after a year of pressure from the German bishops, Karl Rahner was finally admitted to the Preparatory Commission, but Ottaviani maneuvered to keep him from the all-important Theological Commission for which he was eminently fit, effectively “banishing” Rahner to the Commission on the Discipline of the Sacraments. Here presumably Rahner’s theological views would have no relevance. In fact, Ottaviani previously had tried on at least three occasions to have Rahner’s work condemned. Ottaviani also vetoed the appointment of Daniélou to the Theological Commission, informing Pope John that he would resign if overruled on the matter. He tried but failed to keep Yves Congar from that body but got around the difficulty by ruling that periti (theological experts) could not offer advice unless called upon. Congar was never summoned for his opinions. Discovering that Ottaviani was ruling with an iron hand, Congar returned to France and later found other ways to get across his views. He gathered together a group of theologians and produced a huge tome on what they considered to be a major purpose of the Council: to define the nature of episcopal collegiality and authority. Cardinal Ottaviani also managed to keep John Courtney Murray from any significant commission (it was only at the final session of the Council that Murray managed to make his appearance as a peritus for Cardinal Francis Spellman). Murray was regarded as too “American,” that is, too democratic in his thinking and thus a source of disruption to the theological principles of the Curia. It was Ottaviani who had silenced Murray back in 1955, ordering his Jesuit superiors to forbid the theologian from writing or publishing any longer on the politics of church-state relations.

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Although Ottaviani could bar the new theologians from the Preparatory Commissions (which were kept secret and thus unseen), he was unable to silence their learned voices, and they quickly found an eager audience. The bishops attending the Council for the most part were woefully unprepared theologically for the roles they were expected to play. The leader of Britain’s Catholics, Cardinal John Heenan, archbishop of Westminster, admitted that the English had been both theologically and geographically isolated from the Continent and had no sense of the religious metamorphosis that had taken place there.21 Most of the bishops were experienced in pastoral affairs, and what theological training they received had ended with their seminary days. Many had been trained in Rome, where the curriculum was Thomistic and automatically dismissive of other theological ideas that could be syllogistically refuted with scholastic logic. Being Roman-trained also meant that the bishops had absorbed ultramontane values and tended to regard any disagreements with orthodox ideas as a sign of disloyalty to the pope himself. This especially applied to the English bishops, who looked upon the likes of Küng and company as passing faddists whose ideas were only “disturbing the simple faithful.” The English delegates at the Council even failed to notice that there was a serious difference of opinion among the bishops. For example, Desmond Fisher, editor of the London Catholic Herald, was rebuked for a headline that read “Bishops Clash over Council Text,” used over an article that accurately highlighted a major controversy between progressives and the old-school conservatives.22 The English prelates played down the perception that there were significant divisions at the first session of the Council, sometimes giving the impression that the whole affair was a kind of angelic-inspired religious ceremony guided to congenial bipartisan conclusion by the Holy Spirit. Cardinal Heenan in his memoirs asserted that the notion of a Council riven by the clashing of conservatives and progressives was a canard largely created by journalists in search of juicy news stories. Writing for the more secular media outlets, these journalists, Heenan argued, did not get their information from the periti but from regular press conferences given by unauthorized theologians brought to the assembly by their bishops. Among these journalists, he noted, were a surprising number of former seminarians who tended to regard themselves as qualified to interpret teachings of the Council to the world.23

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Heenan regarded Ottaviani as “a genial chairman” of the Theological Commission, a voice of moderation and harmony. The only notes of discordance, he claimed, came from the bishops’ periti, especially the German theologians.24 As for Küng’s best-selling book on the Council, Cardinal Heenan claimed that it met with little attention and approval among Catholics. Not only was Heenan off the mark on Küng’s influence, but he also seems to have been unaware of Ottaviani’s impact on the Council’s proceedings. So frustrated were non-Italian prelates with the control of Ottaviani’s conservative bloc (the twelve Roman Curial congregations were controlled by an interlocking directorate of bishops and monsignors who were all Italian) that several resolutions were proposed during the Central Commission’s meetings to abolish outright the Congregation of the Holy Office. The debates became so heated that the pope was obliged to send for leading Vatican officials to calm them down.25 The English author and former member of Parliament, Christopher Hollis, who witnessed much of the first session of the Council, reported that the non-Italian bishops of almost every country were highly dissatisfied with the lack of imagination and administrative management of the Curia.26 At first, it was not easy for outsiders to learn what was actually occurring in the aula (Council chamber). The Curia’s assiduous efforts to cover up disputes and confrontations were so thorough that when outside journalists finally were able to publish what was actually taking place, it took the world’s Catholic community, including leading Church prelates, completely by surprise. The most informative inside voice concerning what was happening within the closed sessions of the Council was that of Xavier Rynne, the pseudonym of Father Francis X. Murphy, an American Redemptorist who covered Vatican II for the New Yorker magazine. He later wrote the authoritative Vatican Council II, to this day one of best sources on the inner workings of the Council. A few in the know recognized Murphy as the source of such valuable information (Rynne was his mother’s maiden name), but it was certainly kept from the public and the Roman authorities. Murphy’s exposure of the debates and squabbles of the Council required a pseudonym, for he feared being pilloried by the Roman power brokers if his true identity were known. This in itself speaks volumes about the chilling, authoritarian environment that was smothering the Vatican.

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It is an exaggeration to simply divide the Council between a minority of conservative “dead enders” and a majority of advanced progressives. As the historian Adrian Hastings has argued, nearly all participants would have been considered moderately conservative in comparison with most other Protestant churches, secular society, and even younger Catholic clergy. It was more accurate, he asserted, to see the Council as riven between “reactionary conservatives” and “liberal conservatives” with very few genuine radicals. The progressive-minded and sometimes radical critic of Vatican policies, the English former archbishop of Delhi, Thomas D. Roberts, S. J., was not even permitted to speak in the Council’s chamber.27 This explains why the Council’s final documents (after four sessions), though ground-breaking, remained somewhat ambivalent, and why Küng and a number of the new theologians remained disappointed with the results. The decisions taken by the Council certainly appeared revolutionary in the context of what characterized Catholic life up to that point. But only a few years later, progressives on the left regarded them as half measures requiring considerably further extension. Many bishops at the Council came to recognize the lacunae in their understanding of post–World War II theology from attending lectures and informal discussions offered by theologians and scholars (Rahner, Joseph Ratzinger, Yves Congar, M. D. Chenu, Henri de Lubac, Edward Schillebeeckx, Küng, and others). They addressed many of the challenges faced by these bishops as pastoral leaders in their home countries. Many of them had also become weary of the imperious and heavy-handed ways of the Roman Curia, and, given the message of the new theologians, saw the Council as an opportunity to retrieve some of their ecclesiastical prerogatives. Those of conservative dispositions who had warned of the need to protect “ordinary” Catholics from the onslaught of new and dangerous thinking (an amalgam of modern science, psychology, sociology, and non-Catholic theology), a pessimistic attitude based on the fear of change, were directly confronted by Pope John in his opening speech to the Council. Addressing the inaugural session in St. Peter’s Basilica on 11 October 1962, John challenged what he called the “prophets of doom” who viewed the world through the eyes of Jeremiah. It was time, he said, to forsake the old ways of fear and leap forward fully embracing the modern world so as to improve it. Catholics must adhere to the old

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faith but “reclothe it in words and ways that would speak fresh to a world hungry for the Gospel, ‘for the substance of the ancient deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another.’”28 All this gave encouragement to the more progressive-minded bishops and periti. The rebellion against the old guard, “the storming of the Bastille,” as Andrew Greeley put it, occurred two days later (13 October), when it became clear at the opening session that the Curia’s draft documents were designed to rubber-stamp the Church’s existing ecclesiastical structures.29 None of the proposed texts suggested aggiornamento, a pastoral or ecumenical agenda. Cardinal Ottaviani and company submitted a prepared list of loyalists of the “Roman School” for the bishops’ approval to staff the various commissions that would shape the conciliar documents known as schemata.30 At this juncture, Cardinal Achille Lienart of Lille, supported by Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne, proposed that the bishops be given a few days to meet in their national and regional conferences to come up with their own list of delegates. The suggestion was enthusiastically carried, and the gathering broke up after a mere fifteen minutes. This was the start of the revolution. Pope John was taking in the activity via closed-circuit television and was pleased that the bishops had insisted on setting the agenda. The Curia had been successfully challenged, the monarchical grip broken. By successfully challenging the Vatican bureaucracy, the bishops showed that collectively they had power. That evening Pope John gave his approval to the move. The subsequently elected commissions were more theologically and nationally diverse, which served to prevent the Curia conservatives from exercising absolute control of schemata. From this point onward the progressive camp was able to move proceedings toward reform, although it also meant that during the first session the proceedings would be marked by confrontation and conflict as the Romanists fought fiercely to regain the initiative. Contrary to Cardinal Heenan’s assessment, Kaiser and Rynne revealed that Ottaviani as chairman of the Theological Commission used methods of intimidation and the power of silencing those who did not hold his opinions. Even progressive theologians who did not participate in the official Council discussions but were critical of Ottaviani’s methods were singled out for attack well after the various sessions were com-

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pleted. Some of his overzealous supporters went so far as to publish a 640-page screed entitled Complotto contro la Chiesa that was delivered to every member of the Council. Written under the name Maurice Pinay, it charged that the cardinals, archbishops, and bishops supporting progressive initiatives at the Council were part of a gigantic communist, Masonic, and Zionist plot to destroy the Church.31 Such a desperate move revealed the bankruptcy of hard-core conservative thinking, and thereafter more progressive elements gained control of the proceedings. This shift in power had been facilitated by Pope John himself. In order to diminish the power of the conservatives at the Council and to move the agenda in the direction he desired, the pope established a new office in the Curia, the Secretariat for Christian Unity, headed by an eminent German Jesuit scholar, Cardinal Augustin Bea. He was ably assisted by Monsignor Jan Willebrands, a practical-minded Dutch ecumenical specialist. This high-powered body was meant to send a signal to the separated brethren that the pope was serious about ecumenical reform. In quest of men to staff his office, Cardinal Bea searched Catholic universities throughout the world for talent. One of his important recruits was Gregory Baum, the Canadian Augustinian and a Jewish convert who had done extensive work on the anti-Semitism of the Gospels and would later establish a reputation as a leading Catholic sociologist. Cardinal Bea as president of the Secretariat for Christian Unity was advanced in age, even older than the pope himself. But his frail and bent frame was driven by a sharp mind; here was a tough and energetic Vatican insider whose many years in Rome (since 1924) were sufficient tutoring for the challenges of this assignment. Indeed, the cardinal proved to be such a font of energy and action that it led to a popular expression, “Come fly with Bea” (a takeoff on a slogan for a British airline). Since Bea had also been Pius XII’s confessor, he could act as a bridge between the two pontificates and make it more difficult for John’s opponents to criticize him for disloyalty to the old order. The pope gave additional assistance to Bea by turning to Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini and the Belgian Cardinal Leon Suenens. Both were committed ecumenists and recognized that the Church had to present a pastoral rather than a bureaucratic vision to the world. They were also supportive of Küng’s agenda, recognizing the necessity of liturgical reform, a restoration of

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collegiality, a sharing of power between the episcopacy and the papal office, and the imperative of engaging the world at every political and cultural level. All this, along with the presence of non-Catholic observers at the Council and the omnipresent media reporting on the debates and conflicts as they played out in the aula, gave impetus to the new theologians, since it became difficult for the Curia conservatives to stifle their agenda.32 In addition, the observers, in the words of Adrian Hastings, provided a “new model for relationships between Rome and the rest of Christendom” that would soon become the norm at every level and in every part of the world.33 During the first session, thanks in part to the tutoring of Küng, Rahner, and others, the views of the bishops from the Rhine countries concerning reform of the liturgy, the promotion of episcopal collegiality, and advancing the spirit of ecumenism carried the day.34 A majority of the bishops supported the claim that the language and style of the Mass and of dispensing sacraments should be decided by what was culturally relevant to the times. It was also determined that lay people should share in ceremonies and sacred rites, governed in part by local episcopates who would refer to the Holy See for final approval. On the whole, it seems that the bishops’ rejection of the Curia’s preparatory schema was a watershed event in itself. In the words of Giuseppe Alberigo, it represented “a refusal to succumb to an oligarchy, and the restoration of full freedom in the Church.”35 This had the effect of putting an end to the marginal status of the theologians sullied by Humani Generis. It liberated, claimed Alberigo, previously sacrificed energies and thereby “restored a healthy atmosphere of responsible confrontation and thus of pluralism as well.”36 In Küng’s view, the most significant result of the Council’s first session was its rejection of reactionary doctrinalism. It meant that the greatest of the dangers facing Vatican II had been defeated.37 Here we see a turning away from the ecclesiocentrism of the earlier Vatican Council I (1869– 70), which established that the Church was a society directed from the top, where communion among its members was mediated only by the authority of Rome. Out of this developed what Küng called a “new consciousness” of the Church, one that recognized the virtue of freedom of discussion. The resulting clashes of opinions led not to a dissensus Ecclesiae but a consensus Eccle-

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siae in the direction of progress and renewal.38 Much like glasnost in the Soviet Union, Vatican II compelled a closed society to open up to the world. This had all the more impact, since the timing of the Council coincided with the emerging communications revolution. Telstar satellite television was introduced in this period, and from 1962 through 1965, household names in television broadcasting brought the Council’s events into the living rooms of people’s homes. The results of Vatican Council II’s first session showed that Pope John XXIII had outmaneuvered the old guard and set the Church on a course more suitable to the needs of the times. But as Küng noted, the Council’s first session was only a beginning and not an end. Its discussions and decisions now had to be explained to the faithful and put into practice by carrying the message abroad to countries, towns, and villages. This mission would be challenged by the Curia’s conservatives. Calling themselves the “remnant of Israel,” the old guard asserted that this was only the first round; they vowed to continue the struggle to advance the traditional teachings of Holy Mother the Church. The unlimited authority that the preconciliar oligarchy had built up over the decades would not be given up. In order to expand the new theological thinking that informed the Council, Küng, Rahner, and Schillebeeckx laid plans to launch a journal called Councilium. Its purpose was to spread the spirit of Vatican II throughout the Catholic world. It appeared simultaneously in German, Dutch, English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Küng himself undertook an eight-week lecture tour between the first and second sessions to inform Catholic audiences in the United States and England about the exciting possibilities for renewal promised by further Council sessions. It was at this point that the Vatican’s reactionary forces struck back, banning Küng and American progressive theologians Weigel, Murray, and Diekmann from lecturing at the Catholic University of America. They also increased control over the granting of honorary doctorates at Catholic universities. After Küng was given such a degree by St. Louis University, which infuriated Roman conservatives, it was mandated that subsequent honorary degree recipients be approved by the Vatican.39 The second session of Vatican Council II opened in the autumn of 1963. Pope John XXIII was dead, having been replaced by Cardinal

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Giovanni Battista Montini as Pope Paul VI (1963– 78).40 As opposed to John, who was unschooled in the complexities of Vatican politics, Montini had worked in the Secretariat of State for over three decades and was as versed in the intrigues of Roman bureaucratic politics as Ottaviani himself. However, the efforts to elect him in the conclave proved to be difficult. The Curia conservatives had opposed his candidacy and earlier had been responsible for pressuring Pius XII to exile Montini from the Vatican bureaucracy to the bishopric of Milan. The new pope came into office with solid liberal ecclesiastical credentials. Montini had played a significant role in promoting John’s reformist mission and helped the pope to overcome the resistance of Curia conservatives. Paul VI’s background was solidly bourgeois, urban, and democratic. His father had been a well-known journalist-politician and a member of Don Luigi Sturzo’s liberal anti-Fascist Partito Popolare. Pope Paul VI turned out to be more of a compromiser (nicknamed “Hamlet” because he always wanted to hear all sides), and, although determined to bring to completion John XXIII’s aggiornamento, he worked to ameliorate conservative concerns by balancing reform with the prerogatives of papal primacy, the latter of which he refused to water down. Much to the chagrin of some progressives, the influence of the New Theology waned under Paul VI. However, due to the broad media coverage and appeal of Küng’s intersessional lecture tours and the influential writings of the Rhenish theologians, the pressures for reform and renewal could not be eradicated. Thanks to the presence of non-Catholic observers at the Council, for whom the New Theology was a welcome acceptance of some of the principles of Reformation doctrine, and the pressure brought by the media, which reported the debates and conflicts, it was difficult for the Curia to stifle progressive opinions. The two most important documents to emerge from the remaining sessions were the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, Lumen Gentium, meaning “Light of the Nations” (11 November 1964), and Schema 13, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes (7 December 1965). The former, among a variety of matters regarding Catholic teachings and structures, recognized the Church as a community of believers and the vital role to be played by laymen. This represented a modern-day acceptance of the biblical no-

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tion of the Church as the “People of God”: “Though they differ from one another in essence and not only in degree, the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are nonetheless interrelated: each of them in its own special way is a participation in the one priesthood of Christ.”41 The hierarchy should both promote the dignity of the layman and also make use of his prudent advice. Although Lumen Gentium restated that the universal Church was necessary for salvation, it did not restrict membership to Roman Catholics alone (nos. 15 and 16). Christians of all denominations were called upon to work collaboratively with all men of good will to promote the betterment of the global community. The centrality of the pope was reaffirmed as well as the doctrine of infallibility but with the addition that such prerogatives also resided in the body of bishops when exercising doctrinal authority (the magisterium) in conjunction with the pope (nos. 20 and 21). The most contentious topics undertaken by the Council— those most hotly discussed, debated, and amended—concerned Schema 13, on the Church’s relationship with secular society. The preface of Gaudium et Spes emphasized that the Catholic community was linked by the deepest bonds to humankind and its history. The Pastoral Constitution accepted the autonomy of the secular order, thereby rejecting a theology that privileged the sacred and demanded subservience to ecclesiastical law. This served to adjudicate the conflict between science and religion (even Galileo was mentioned in a footnote), championing the immanence of Christ in the secular order: here was the “Godlike seed which has been sown” in man.42 But the task of realizing the divine plan was solely the responsibility of man. Gaudium et Spes confidently asserted that from day to day, in every group and nation, increasing numbers of men and women were conscious of the mission of advancing their culture so as to better the world through truth and justice: “thus we are witnesses of the birth of a new humanism, one in which man is defined first of all by the responsibility to his brothers and history” (no. 55). The autonomy of earthly affairs meant that “created things and societies themselves enjoy their own laws and values which must be gradually deciphered, put to use, and regulated by men.” When investigation within every branch of secular learning is concluded in a proper scientific methodology and

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in the context of moral norms “it never truly conflicts with faith. For earthly matters and concerns of faith derive from the same God” (no. 36). God’s spirit, in other words, pervades the human community. After accepting the autonomy of the secular order and recognizing that what God created was good, Gaudium et Spes addressed the question of how the Church could contribute to realizing the potentiality of His creation. In contrast to Rome’s earlier polemical apologetics with secular culture, Gaudium et Spes struck a more optimistic, even Teilhardian, theological tone, authenticating the nobility of man by recognizing evolutionary advances made possible by human intelligence and creative powers. Yet despite such historical progress, far too many people continued to suffer the indignities of poverty and hunger, while advances in weaponry and political conflict threatened the existence of civilization itself. These were the challenges that Christians must take on (an emphasis was placed here on the duty of the rich nations to help the poorer states) as they make their pilgrimage toward the heavenly city; and it was a mission that demanded dialogue with the modern world. The necessity of such dialogue excludes no one: “We include those who oppress the Church and harass her in manifold ways. Since God the Father is the origin and purpose of all men, we are all called to be brothers. Therefore, if we have been summoned to the same destiny, human and divine, we can and we should work together without violence and deceit in order to build up the world in genuine peace” (no. 92). Finally, Gaudium et Spes recognized that its program had to be tentative and open-ended, since the variety of world cultures and everchanging circumstances demanded that the Church be willing to learn and keep reading the “signs of the times.” It was a myth, claimed Archbishop Anthony Jordan of Edmonton, Canada, in the debates that informed the document, that the Church had definitive answers to the world’s problems. She must instead be a “humble inquirer” seeking help from all men “to tap the sources of divine and human knowledge in her search for truth.”43 This meant in effect that the Church and the secular world could learn from each other in reciprocity, thus opening up avenues for dialogue with differing opinions that previously had been anathematized. This is what gave impetus to more progressive Catholics who were prepared to venture into radical social and economic theory.

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What had Vatican Council II accomplished? Sixteen documents were issued over a period of four years. The Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum) drew on the best modern biblical scholarship and clarified the interrelationship of scripture, tradition, and Church authority in the exposition of revelation. Lumen Gentium articulated a biblical understanding of institutional organization, terming the Church the “people of God.” It called on the entire Christian community to participate in spreading the Gospel. Gaudium et Spes positioned the Church firmly in the secular world and committed Christians to meet head-on the challenges of modernity. The Decree on the Liturgy set down a series of principles that introduced the vernacular in place of Latin and thereby allowed for greater simplicity and lay participation in ritual. The Decree on Ecumenism placed the search for Christian unity at the forefront of Rome’s concerns. The medieval notion that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ, the root of the age-old Christian tradition of anti-Semitism, was rejected once and for all in the Decree on Other Religions. Possibly the most groundbreaking document was the Decree on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), for it rejected the traditional teaching (since the time of Constantine) that only Catholics had a right to religious freedom. The older view rested on the principle that error had no rights. The duty of the Church was to proclaim truth and to make certain that the state reinforced such categorical definitions. In some special circumstances the Vatican permitted toleration but never liberty. The Council now went even further, not merely recognizing religious liberty but also insisting that it become a fundamental civil right sanctioned by law. The impact of this decree was felt most strongly in Eastern and Central Europe, for it enabled the Church to take the moral high ground in fighting the Communist Party’s enforcement of state atheism. Dignitatis Humanae was largely shaped by the American theologian John Courtney Murray, who was allowed to attend the last three sessions of the Council. The American bishops played a major role in pressing the issue, fearing that the traditional privileging of Catholicism would discredit the Council in democratic countries. In addition, a principled insistence on freedom of conscience in such matters could also be a powerful weapon against any regime that persecuted religion.

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There were several general responses to Vatican Council II within the Catholic community. Some considered it not only a momentous event but also one of the most important in the history of Catholicism. This position was outlined in a special two-hour American PBS television program, “The Faithful Revolution: Vatican II,” which aired in 1997. It highlighted Catholics who were happy with the changes brought by the Council and who considered themselves more personally and culturally involved in Church affairs. It presented the Council as reenergizing the Church and bringing about a frank dialogue with the modern world. Henceforth, the Church would serve as the well-spring and epicenter of the world ecumenical movement. In short, Vatican Council II represented the most important religious event of the century. A second, more qualified judgment saw it less as a transformative event than as a transition, a much-needed liberation from Roman authoritarianism but not one that was guaranteed long-term success. The Council succeeded in opening the doors to more lay participation in Church affairs, cleared obstructions from a more intellectually vigorous, socially responsible, and scientific approach to contemporary life, and allowed for greater freedom regarding matters of theology and philosophical engagement. In this reading, the traditional Counter-Reformation culture was replaced by a Church dedicated to a constructive renewal in all spheres of life. In some respects, this position was best represented by Hans Küng. Although he still had misgivings, Küng admitted that the concerns of his book The Council, Reform and Reunion were largely addressed by Vatican II. Yet what remained for him and others a highly troubling matter was the continued tension between the reformists and an obstructionist Curia. Unless far-reaching reforms in the Curia’s personnel and structure were carried through, there was a good chance with the passing of time that power might again gravitate to the Roman bureaucracy.44 There also were a number of matters not yet discussed by the Council, warned Küng, that could compromise continuing renewal. These included, among others, the issue of birth control and priestly celibacy. In the final analysis, Küng remained skeptical that the retrograde powers of the Curia could be substantially mitigated. After the fourth session of Vatican II, in 1965, Küng was approached by Pope Paul VI, who suggested that the young theologian could have a central role to play in

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the postconciliar Church if he would go along with the papal party in the Curia.45 Nothing would have been more repugnant to Küng, who had long chastised his fellow theologians and bishops for selling out to the Roman establishment in order to advance their careers. By refusing to “play along,” Küng closed the door to his own advancement within the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Church.46 A third, more radical group of Catholics believed that the Council was too narrowly reformist. It failed to address matters relating to feminist ideologies, global environmental challenges, and theologies of political and economic liberation. In particular, they charged, little was said about the depletion of nonrenewable resources, pollution, and general environmental degredation. In fact, the Council’s very language in Gaudium et Spes concerning humanity and nature—the call for consolidating “control over nature” (no. 9), to “subdue the earth” and the invocation to “increase domination over nature” (no. 63)—seemed to resonate closely with the imperatives of international capitalism, ignoring problems of economic and environmental exploitation of Third World nations. These kinds of developmental concerns reflected the liberal, bourgeois agendas of European theologians who dominated the Council. Absent from the document, they charged, was sufficient attention to the struggles of oppressed racial groups, mass unemployment, the legacy of colonialism, third world indebtedness, and so on.47 Finally, there were Catholics who outright opposed Vatican II, because they were convinced that it constituted a rupture with traditional Church teachings. Among these groups were those for whom the Council was “Protestantizing” the Church. In the United States, for example, conciliar reforms were regularly attacked by the conservative magazine The Wanderer and a group called the “Catholic Traditionalist Movement,” which claimed the support of thirty bishops. Its spokesman was Father Gommar A. DePauw, a Belgian-born priest of the Baltimore Archdiocese, who charged that the Council had been taken over by “extremist advisers to the bishops” (Baum, Küng, and Murray, among others), who, unless repudiated, would turn the Church over to the followers of Martin Luther. Father DePauw called for a massive write-in campaign of protest to the Vatican, the Apostolic Delegation, and local parishes.48 Expressing similar concerns was the right-wing Italian press, which

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conducted a campaign to foment protest against efforts to introduce the vernacular in the Mass. The weekly Il Borghese warned that if progressive reforms were allowed to take hold, then the “unity of the Church would be broken by the Babel of nations and tribes; that a patrimony of culture, memory and grandeur is being abolished; and that Luther began with similar ideas.”49 Others on the more extremist integralist right took issue with the failure of Gaudium et Spes to condemn ideas and movements traditionally considered heretical. For example, it has been alleged that a “Rhine clique” skillfully steered Vatican II away from those who warned about the Council’s abetting the ideas of Karl Marx. As evidence, they cited the written intervention of 450 Council fathers against communism that was mysteriously “lost” after being delivered by France’s Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre to the Secretariat of the Council. In addition, they argued that those who tried to denounce communism were politely silenced.50 The ultraconservative Vatican II rejectionists regarded this as a conspiracy of “modernist” prelates and their periti to go easy on godless communism, a promise made in a secret treaty drawn up between Moscow and Rome.51 A persistent assertion of the ultraconservative Catholics was that the Church had been infiltrated by fifth columnists, namely, communist and Freemason wreckers. Alice von Hildebrand in an interview with Latin Mass magazine (a journal that rejects the liturgical reforms of the Council) stated that “Bella Dodd told my husband [Dietrich von Hildebrand] and me that when she was an active [communist] party member, she had dealt with no fewer than four cardinals within the Vatican ‘who were working for us.’”52 Such phantasmagorical fears even managed to reach the halls of the U. S. Congress. A right-wing organization called the “Verita Committee on Pacem in Terris” issued a report that asserted that Pope John’s encyclical created an environment for the “unilateral dismantling of U. S. strength.” Representative John M. Ashbrook, a Republican from Ohio and a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, commented that the report was a “penetrating analysis” of communist efforts to subvert American Catholics.53 The Catholic community was clearly ambivalent about the meaning and significance of Vatican Council II. Irrespective of the various interpretations, in terms of the historical evolution of Catholic social and

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economic teachings, the Council represented the culmination of a progressive, activist response to the modern age, the origins of which can be traced back to the nineteenth-century mission of social justice inaugurated by Frédéric Ozanam and Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler.54 Vatican II heralds the triumph of a liberal reformist voice in Catholic social doctrine. The question was whether this voice could guide Catholics through the social and political turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s, which challenged many of the core values of Western liberal culture.

S E V E N

Vatican II Comes to Britain

The refusal of the Hierarchy to embrace radical ideas; their attachment to old, well-tried ways; their heavy condescension: these are the postures and qualities which frustrate the reformers and often reduce them (laymen and clergy alike) to a condition of helpless exasperation. The reformers . . . look for an awareness among their bishops of the magnitude of challenge confronting the Church and see instead minds and imaginations shuttered against the new realities. — George Scott1

The progressive religious energy released by Vatican II arrived in Britain during a decade of unprecedented cultural change, a time of iconoclastic protests that challenged the political and intellectual contentment that grew out of the 1950s. The mood extended well beyond the British Isles. The avant-garde in this respect was American. As early as the mid1950s, David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, John Kenneth Galbraith, and others were criticizing the bland conformity of the Eisenhower administration and the corruptive powers of America’s industrial and financial 148

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elites. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a January 1960 Esquire article, sounded the call for a fresh and more daring approach to the politics of the new decade. Americans were ready for new and exciting things. The sixties, he anticipated, would be “spirited, articulate, inventive, incoherent, turbulent, with energy shooting off wildly in all directions. Above all, there will be a sense of motion, of leadership and hope.”2 In Britain, intellectuals on the left were inspired by a rejuvenated Marxism (based on the discovery of Marx’s early, humanistic writings) that separated itself from the rigid totalitarian policies of the Soviet bloc. Their attacks on the self-satisfied liberal elites were complemented in the arena of popular culture by the Beatles and their musical progeny, who in their own irreverent ways ridiculed the smug world of class consciousness, nuclear diplomacy, bourgeois sexual mores, and politics and religion of all kinds. The erosion of postwar social consensus, combined with the impact of a broader international countercultural movement that was sweeping the Western world in the 1960s, found both the governing establishment as well as the English Catholic hierarchy at odds with the temper of the times. In the years following the Second World War, both Labour and Conservative leaders were committed Keynesians dedicated to the management of market capitalism. Despite great sacrifices and losses, Britain had emerged from the war in better condition than its European counterparts. The mixed economy that Labour passed on to Churchill in 1951 had assured low unemployment and low inflation. There seemed no need to tear down the welfare state. Consensus prevailed between the two main political parties. Conservative chancellor Rab Butler and his Labour predecessor Hugh Gaitskell shared a warm personal relationship, and although Butler could not agree with his friend’s socialist leanings, he noted that both of us “spoke the language of Keynesianism,” only with “different accents and a differing emphasis.”3 Although the Labour Party’s postwar election manifesto stated as its ultimate aim the establishment of a socialist commonwealth, this radicalism was so much persiflage and was not at all taken seriously by its rank-and-file trade union membership. On coming to power in 1945, the party took a pragmatic economic approach and was led for the most part by middle-class politicians, four of whom were members of the

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House of Lords. Only three of its senior ministers claimed left-wing backgrounds: Aneurin Bevan, Emanuel Shinwell, and Sir Stafford Cripps. Bevan, a former coal miner from Tredegar, Wales, and one of Labour’s most outspoken Marxists, took on the airs of bourgeois finery after entering the House of Commons and made friends with wealthy conservatives, including Lord Beaverbrook. Brendan Bracken, a member of Beaverbrook’s entourage, ridiculed Bevin for his political hypocrisy, supposedly addressing Bevin to his face as a “Bollinger Bolshevik,” a “ritzy Robespierre,” and a “lounge-lizard Lenin.”4 Little political or intellectual passion had marked the decade of the 1950s. The Anglo-American monthly Encounter, which represented the moderate positions of those on the left and right, served as a forum for Keynesian principles and the voices of liberal triumphalism. The American sociologist Edward Shils, teaching at the London School of Economics, observed in an Encounter essay of April 1955 that “scarcely anyone here in Great Britain seems any longer to feel there is anything fundamentally wrong. On the contrary, Great Britain on the whole, and especially in comparison with other countries, seems to the British intellectual of the mid-1950s to be all right and even much more than that. Never has an intellectual class found its society and its culture so much to its satisfaction.” Shils told the British intellectuals that they were “selfsatisfied, insular and genteel, too addicted to wine and food, wildflowers and birds, too amused by eccentricity.”5 The Labour Party’s shift from Fabian socialism to faith in Keynesianism was set out in Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism (1956). By the early 1960s the Labour Party leadership (Gaitskell, Crosland, Douglas Jay, and others) had moved so far toward Keynesianism that they seemed to merge with more progressive members of the Liberal Party.6 In the autumn of 1960 the Labour Party’s research department published Labour in the Sixties, indicating a reorientation of policy away from traditional socialist objectives toward an emphasis on economic growth and scientific and technological advancement. There were plenty of outward signs that, as in the United States, Britain needed a shot in the arm to move the nation out of its middle-aged torpor. In October 1960, Crosland, a Labour MP for Grimsby, wrote an influential article in Encounter condemning the complacent conservatism of both his party and the

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trade union movement. Britain needed what the new president John F. Kennedy was bringing to America, he claimed: a renewal of cultural confidence, a commitment to engage the “new frontier” of science and technology to move the nation to higher levels of greatness. After much hand-wringing, Crosland’s article gave birth to the slogan “What’s wrong with Britain” and a multiplicity of suggestions for bringing dynamism to political, economic, and cultural life. Labour’s success in addressing these issues brought the party to power throughout the better half of the 1960s. Yet, despite the talk about “What’s wrong with Britain,” the prevailing electoral winds for change seemingly dissipated by the middle of the decade. Harold Wilson, whose party led Britain up through 1970, worked to keep the nation on a steady keel. At this point Wilson’s government seemed to satisfy the mood of the British establishment. In the 13 May 1966 issue of the Spectator, the new editor, Nigel Lawson, averred that it was time to forsake the cult of change and dynamism: Britain needed a stretch of social and intellectual stability to replenish her roots of strength. In terms of Britain’s political culture, not much seemed to change into the 1960s. The Labour governments between 1964 and 1970 were primarily concerned with fine-tuning the welfare state rather than undertaking additional major social reforms. In 1966 the party gained a more sizeable majority in the House of Commons, and for the rest of the decade it continued its Keynesian pragmatic course, aiming to sustain economic growth and hold down prices and wages. On the whole, the decade of the 1960s brought material progress for both the working and middle classes. Politically, the period was relatively quiescent. The labor unions resisted efforts to fundamentally alter the system of industrial relations, and there were no serious attempts to reform the House of Lords, local government, the civil service, banks, or the legal system. Prime Minister Harold Wilson, observed Anthony Sampson, operated a kind of “‘government by boredom,’ in which pretensions and passions dissolve in the dry atmosphere of technical discussion.”7 The political quietude that characterized the British governing establishment was matched by the British Roman Catholic Church. Many of its ecclesiastics (ultramontane centralists) and theologians (still enmeshed in neoscholasticism) were completely unprepared for the

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consequences of Vatican Council II. Although Pope John XXIII had raised hopes among progressive Catholics that the Church was prepared to modernize its teachings and worldly positions, the Catholic Church throughout the 1960s was still viewed as a bastian of reaction. In the words of historian Arthur Marwick, the Roman Church during this decade “tended to operate as a center of opposition to all the great movements towards greater freedom for ordinary human beings.”8 Whether this was a fair assessment is another matter. But certainly England’s Catholic leaders were more conservative on such issues than their Continental and American counterparts. Cardinal Heenan, archbishop of Westminster, had candidly admitted that British theologians were ill-informed of the new thinking that had swept the Continent and so influenced the Council’s teachings. The Hexham and Newcastle diocesan paper, Northern Cross, gave credence to Heenan’s view when it announced on the eve of the Council (February 1962) that “we need not expect anything dramatic.” There were some thirty converts to Catholicism in Newcastle between 1962 and 1963, and only one had any notion from priestly instructions that there were to be any significant changes in the Church.9 England’s episcopacy well into the first six decades of the twentieth century had not shown an interest in social and political matters. Their primary concern was tending to the spiritual needs of their flock, building churches and schools, and providing a sufficient supply of properly trained parish clergy. There was neither a tradition nor a compelling interest in political matters. In fact, the opposite was the case. Pope Pius X’s influential encyclical Il Fermo Proposito, for example, had criticized “attaching an excessive importance to material interests of the people, forgetting the much more serious ones of their sacred ministry.” This papal warning found expression in the tenure of Archbishop Francis Bourne of Westminster (1861–1935), who insisted on the imperative of Catholic political neutrality. “It is no part of the pastoral duty of the Bishops,” he claimed, “to interfere in what one generally called politics.”10 This remained the norm well into the 1960s. There was also little interest in the application of Catholic social teaching to the broader secular society. The English bishops considered it their duty to articulate the principles of such teaching but not to show how they might be brought to bear on the amelioration of current social problems.

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A similar position on social and political matters was reflected in the Catholic Social Guild’s journal Christian Democrat. From 1963 onward, partly as a response to the reformist impulse of the Vatican Council, the journal finally broadened its coverage of social and economic issues, but it neglected to offer any analysis of British cultural structures from the perspectives of the papal social encyclicals.11 Cardinal Tardini, president of the Antepreparatory Commission for the Vatican Council, asked some 2,500 of the world’s Catholic bishops to forward to Rome suggestions and views that could be subjects of discussion at the Council meetings. The replies (votum) from the English bishops were pedestrian and narrow in their concerns.12 They found little to complain about with respect to Catholics being marginalized by mainstream British culture or the need for radical social and political change. Indeed, Catholics were now fully integrated into British society. The number of converts to the faith reached a record 13,735 in 1959, and throughout the 1960s Catholics were moving into “the mainstream of national power.”13 The English bishops responded to Cardinal Tardini by highlighting the issues of sexual morality, birth control, matters of internal church discipline, and mixed marriages. As the historian Kester Aspden has noted, the role of the Church in the larger secular world was largely ignored.14 What did concern the leadership was the decline in moral standards; the English bishops issued a warning to the faithful in a joint statement in 1962. This decline was seen as a natural consequence of increased economic prosperity and a growing preoccupation with materialism. Cardinal Heenan and his fellow bishops were especially concerned about the loss of Catholic identity and morality by absorption into the wider secular culture. And here the agent of assimilation was the increase in mixed marriages, which between 1960 and 1964 grew by 58.9 percent.15 On the whole, the leadership of the English Catholic Church was not prepared mentally or psychologically for the storm that was unleashed by the Second Vatican Council.16 The ground-breaking theological writings by Congar, Chenu, de Lubac, Daniélou, Rahner, and others that had so fertilized the soil for Vatican II had not filtered down to England’s faithful in the pew. John Braine’s novel The Jealous God, published in 1964, reflected the religious mind-set of small-town Yorkshire

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Catholics during the early years of the Council. Its main character, Vincent Dungarvan, struggles to work out the sexual and marital challenges of an Irish-clerical authoritarian subculture. Vincent tries to find his own moral compass as he confronts the nativist prejudices of an overdomineering, strict, church-going mother. This is a tale of rebellion against postwar, 1950s Catholic authoritarianism. Yet Vincent never thinks about or comes close to engaging the broader theological questions that were raised at the Second Vatican Council. The source of Vincent’s suffering was simply the problem of marrying someone who was both divorced and a Protestant. Not only was Britain’s episcopal leadership unprepared to provide strong direction for implementing the Council’s recommendations, but the lower levels of clergy, especially the older priests, had been trained in narrow theological sources and therefore had difficulty adjusting to changes in the liturgy and the move to vernacular forms of worship. Nor were the younger priests better suited to the task, since their teachers had not been trained in the theology that had given shape to the Council’s reforms. Those who did try to provide more dynamic leadership at the parish level were frequently thwarted by their superiors, with the bishops inclining to reinforce static and authoritarian theological practices. All this produced a good deal of frustration for both the more progressive-minded clergy and younger lay people, many of whom had benefited from the pedagogical reforms of the 1944 Education Act. There was a sizeable expansion of Catholics attending university since 1950, and these graduates and professional people had higher expectations than what their clergy could provide.17 As opposed to their parish priests, moreover, many of these Catholics had greater familiarity with the work of the new theologians and the Council decrees that they had inspired. Increasingly, the more creative theological innovations that complemented the Council were provided by the apostolate of the laity. This produced two interrelated problems: first, lay theology was being seen as an alternative avenue for religious commitment, which in the long term could lead to a reduction in the number of candidates for the priesthood; and second, since episcopal authoritarianism stifled creative theological innovation, growing numbers of priests and seminarians were leaving organized religious life and rejoining the laity.18

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It also must be pointed out that British contributions to Vatican Council II paled in comparison to the seminal roles played by Archbishop Henry Manning, William Ullathorne, William Clifford, and Lord Acton at Vatican Council I. The theological conservatism of Cardinal Heenan, head of the English Church, was out of harmony with the progressives at the Council. The only English theologian more sympathetic to the new thinking and who played any significant role at the Council was Christopher Butler, abbot-president of the English Benedictines. Butler was an eminent biblical scholar and Oxford Anglican convert to the Catholic faith whose status at the Council was not only that of peritus but also that of a full voting member. Looking back at the condition of English Catholics in the 1960s, Butler observed that religious insularity made them unprepared for Vatican II. A growing number of new lay Catholic intellectuals and younger priests saw great promise in the Council’s recommendations, but with the exception of a few journals, such as Herder Correspondence and New Blackfriars, there were not many forums for their ideas, and even fewer in the Catholic community who would have appreciated or understood their concerns. The English Catholic Church leadership, furthermore, had little tolerance for dissident voices from the clergy. The independent-minded Archbishop Thomas D. Roberts was always treated as an extremist whose ideas were outside the mainstream. The Vatican felt the same way: he was thought to be dangerous by Curia authorities and was not even allowed to address the Council. All this did not go down well with those of broader minds. At a “teach-in” on Vatican II organized by University College, London, in February 1966, some of the best laughs of the day were raised by Dennis Rice, the warden of Vaughan College, Leicester, who reported that Continental tourist agencies were now organizing trips to Britain so that Europeans could see what the Church was like in preconciliar days.19 Finally, the changes called forth by Vatican Council II were not only unanticipated but also highly disturbing to many British Catholics. Since they were unacquainted with the Continental new theologians who had long prepared the ground for the Council’s doctrinal shift, the calls for liturgical reforms (especially the use of the vernacular) and a renewed emphasis on scripture, patristics, and ecumenical relations suggested a

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surrender to Protestantism. Douglas Woodruff, still the editor of The Tablet after thirty years, warned that the reforms suggested by the Council could very well undermine the unity of the faith. Highlighting the significance of scripture, the supremacy of conscience, and the notion that all are the people of God, though in some ways helpful, was redolent of Protestantism and could easily serve in the long run to induce division, fragmentation, and conflict. As of now, warned Woodruff, there were over seventy thousand distinct Protestant communions.20 Did Catholicism wish to share a similar fate? A major source of opposition to such changes was influential converts, since what among other things had brought them into the Church was a love of the old Latin rites, which in their view were not merely beautiful but an anchor that united Catholics in every part of the world. As Arnold Lunn put it, “to the traveller and, above all, to the exile, the Latin Mass is a precious link with home.”21 Woodruff, the historian Christopher Dawson, and the writers Graham Greene, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Evelyn Waugh wrote voluminously of their distaste for the revised liturgy and the progressive policies supported by the Council. To these Catholics, the Church had surrendered to the solipsist confusions of modernity. “When one considers the incomprehensibility of the avant garde in literature, drama and painting,” wrote Waugh, “is aggiornamento the right word for such innovations?”22 What the conservative convert Catholic especially admired was the aesthetic qualities of the Latin rites, connecting them with the verities of the past. One of the harshest critics of Vatican II was the poet and convert David Jones, who wrote volumes of letters to friends regarding the follies of tampering with Catholic tradition. Jones insisted that the Latin liturgy was an integral part of the Western cultural heritage; the vernacular, he argued, simply distanced worshippers from the spiritual and humanizing powers of their traditions. It was, in short, a surrender to the vulgar pragmatism of the modern age. The Council’s justifications for liturgical reforms, claimed Jones, had little to do with religion: “the reasons are utile and so-called ‘practical.’ . . . At root, I don’t believe it’s a ‘religious’ matter at all. I believe it’s only part of the Decline of the West.”23 What about those Catholics who did not have the elitist benefits of a classical education and therefore did not understand the mel-

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lifluous Latin phrasings in the first place? Was it better for them to worship in silence and ignorance but at least be guided in a higher spirituality by their superior brethren? In response to the likes of Jones and company, D. A. Herbert, writing in The Tablet (1 August 1965), pointed out that few Catholics were Latin scholars. We are told that the vernacular is “uninspiring or ugly” and Latin “dignified,” but for ourselves, wrote Herbert, we cannot begin to judge the literary merit of the language. In 1965 a number of converts, members of “old Catholic families,” and conservative intellectuals formed the Latin Mass Society as a platform for loyal dissent to the reforms of Vatican II. Hugh Burne, one of its founders, indicated that love of the Latin rites was not the only reason why the society resisted liturgical reform. “What is so remarkable about the 1960s,” he declared, was “that for the first time in history the Church seems to be in the grip of an almost neurotic mania of moving with the times,” when the very reason for the Church’s being “is to stand fast on fundamentals in a changing world.”24 Burne’s group was highly critical of the episcopate for forcing impetuous change on the laity. Many of the outspoken Catholic critics who were converts had accepted Rome in the first place because the Vatican historically stood against the “progressive” cultural currents of modernity itself. The bestknown convert Catholic in the interwar years, with considerable influence on his successors, was G. K. Chesterton. As Chesterton explained it, he had moved to Roman Catholicism precisely because it generally “stood firm against the temptation to compromise with the emerging post-Christian culture.”25 Such converts especially admired the fact that their adopted religion opposed Protestantism’s willingness to accommodate itself to the secularism of the modern world. Catholicism had adhered to a set of beliefs that provided authoritative certainty in an age of spiritual confusion. Cardinal Heenan, agreeing with Malcolm Muggeridge’s warnings of the danger of a second Reformation, told the journalist George Scott that the special strength of the Catholic Church had always been its dogmatism and authority: “People have come into the Church because they needed authority. They don’t know what to believe in this or the other church, but at least here we’ve got the security of faith.”26 Muggeridge argued in an essay entitled “Backward, Christian

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Soldiers” in the New Statesman that Vatican II had given birth to an array of liberal ideas that only served to confuse the faithful, and that without a restoration of authority, the discordant voices would destroy the Church.27 The historian Adam Schwartz has pointed out that the English converts clung to an “Italianate paradigm” (meaning papal supremacy) and thus believed more in rinnovamento (revival) than aggiornamento.28 Adrian Hastings captured the mind-set of such Catholics best when he observed that it was the essential dogmatic certitude that most appealed: “They found in it a sure framework for spiritual progress, literary creativity and political stability, but also for an ordered and coherent view of the world to replace the increasing intellectual and ideological confusion evident outside the walls.”29 And beyond those walls lurked the evil progeny of modernization itself: totalitarian communism, Nazism, and the mindless destruction of World War II, a horror that ironically ended only by unleashing the most lethal product of modern science, nuclear weapons. Ronald Knox’s God and the Atom (1945), which appeared right after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was testimony, claimed the historian Patrick Allitt, to the converts’ sense that the apocalypse was soon at hand: “the modern world had rebelled against God himself.”30 Some of the more reactionary Catholics sought scapegoats for what they understood as the Vatican’s surrender to the moral confusions of secularism. The convenient target here was the unfortunate Teilhard de Chardin, who was silenced in his prime and then turned into a cult figure after his death by his overly exuberant followers. John Eppstein in his book Has the Catholic Church Gone Mad? condemned Teilhard for giving birth to the Council’s errors—he was, after all, “the father of the new theology.”31 Dietrich von Hildebrand devoted an appendix in his book Trojan Horse in the City of God to the “errors” of Teilhard, whom he considered “hopelessly at odds with Christianity.”32 Renewal for Hildebrand meant eliminating the secularized influences that had crept into the Church due to human frailty and the shallow trends of fashion. Not surprisingly, Rahner, Schillebeeckx, Congar, and Küng were also singled out as perverters of the faith. It is worth noting that, as Robert Nowell, the Catholic editor of Herder Correspondence, observed, many of those who took to the barricades against the Council were old men.

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The preconciliar Church they knew and loved “appealed most of all to those overcome by fear of the change which increasingly marks the world in which we live; and instead of helping to overcome that fear it fostered and encouraged it.”33 English Catholics of a conservative bent deplored the abandonment of the Latin rites. The Tablet and the Catholic Herald, as well as The Times and Daily Telegraph, were filled with letters lamenting the introduction of the vernacular. One advertisement in the personals section of The Times (30 November 1964) appealed for people opposed to the English language in the Mass to draft a joint appeal to the bishops. Even before this proposed petition, some three thousand signatures protesting the change had been forwarded to the English and Welsh hierarchy. A Miss M. T. Parnell, writing in the Daily Telegraph (7 November 1964), claimed that the laity had never clamored for such reforms “until the idea was driven into them by clever propaganda.” Defenders of the vernacular labored to point out that the purpose of reform was to enable the laity to assume a more complete, conscious and active part in the Mass now that the liturgy and the celebration would be more comprehensible. The regulations in various dioceses of England and Wales varied in regard to encouraging the vernacular. Although there was a minimum of clerical explanation or enthusiasm for such changes, a majority made English mandatory at all low Masses on Sundays and holidays as well as at evening Masses. Did all this encourage a better sense of community and involvement? My own feeling, wrote Brian Wicker, is that the vernacular liturgy and other changes in public worship “have done little to change fundamental attitudes and show little evidence of doing so.” Wicker was convinced that the structures of worship by themselves could only have marginal impact on how people functioned in the contemporary world. In other words, merely participating in the Mass would not bring on any significant alterations in Catholic actions or behavior.34 The acceptance and encouragement of the vernacular was far more successful in Scotland and Ireland.35 In December 1963 the Scottish bishops decided that English would be used for all forms of worship, with the exception of the Eucharistic prayer. Arrangements also were made for the use of Gaelic where applicable. The bishops drew up a syllabus of sermons and offered a course of practical lectures for the clergy and

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selected laity outlining the ways in which the shift to the vernacular could be intelligible. All this enabled the Scottish bishops to manage a smooth transition to the new vernacular form. Scotland, moreover, was one of the leading countries in accepting the liturgical Constitution. The Irish hierarchy got to work early in preparing both clergy and laity. In October 1964 they published an eight-page document on “The New Constitution of the Liturgy” as a preparatory study for priests who were instructed to carry out the reforms. The document highlighted some twelve “Hints for the Effective Use of the Programme.” As a consequence of such preparation, there was little if any vocal opposition in Ireland. On 7 March 1964, Cardinal William Conway, archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, celebrated the first Mass in Irish at the Franciscan College, Gormanston. In attendance was a distinguished gathering led by President Eamon DeValera, and the event was televised by Ireland’s National Broadcasting Service. The only other area of notable postconciliar achievement in Britain, besides the introduction of the vernacular, was the expansion of ecumenical work. Here Cardinal Heenan played a prominent role, although there were few signs elsewhere that changes were afoot. Heenan had been appointed by Pope John to the Secretariat for Christian Unity, and as archbishop of Liverpool he had forged close working relationships with Free Church leaders and the archbishop of Canterbury. Even before the Council met, Heenan organized a conference on ecumenism at Heythrop College with the Vatican’s Cardinal Bea and the local English ecumenist Henry St. John as principal speakers, in spite of the strong disapproval of Cardinal Ottaviani of the Holy Office. But the spirit of ecumenism engendered by Heenan’s move seemed to pay dividends in the next few years with an increase in theological dialogue and interparish collaboration among Catholics, Anglicans, and Methodists. A study of religious attitudes in the Liverpool area in the late 1960s noted a marked decline in intolerance and prejudice among Catholics and Protestants, the consequence, it asserted, of social and educational changes and of an expanding ecumenism.36 The culmination of postconciliar optimism was the celebrated visit of Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey to the Vatican and Pope Paul in the spring of 1966 and the subsequent establishment of the Anglican-Roman Catholic Joint Prepara-

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tory Commission in January 1967. The cooperative meetings of this international body and the important high-ranking prelates who participated in it gave rise to the hope that there might be “full organic unity” between the two churches in the near future. All this took place despite the vitriol of reactionaries on both sides of the religious divide. For Auberon Waugh, the son of Evelyn Waugh, writing in The Critic (August– September 1964), ecumenical overtures undermined everything that made the Church of Rome special, namely, that Catholics were always right and everyone else wrong, a sentiment that would never be shared with Anglican bishops. “For the Protestants in England,” wrote Waugh, “ecumenism is another vague aspiration like world government. For the English Catholic, it is an invitation to idleness and agnosticism.” At the other extreme, the fiery Presbyterian minister Ian Paisley, who journeyed to Rome in October 1962 to personally protest against the devilry of Vatican II, saw the Decree on Ecumenism as nothing but a veneer for the ongoing effort to win back the “separated brethren” (in other words, “heretics”) to the Catholic fold, in this respect a more sanitized way of continuing the work of the Inquisition.37 Matters concerning the vernacular and ecumenism for Catholics were mere tempests in the proverbial teapot compared to Pope Paul’s encyclical on contraception, Humanae Vitae, issued on 29 July 1968. Its impact was the equivalent of a tsunami sweeping over the Catholic world. There were two issues that Pope Paul thought were too sensitive and threatening to the inner workings of the Church to be deliberated at the Council: priestly celibacy and artificial methods of birth control. The latter issue was turned over to a special commission consisting primarily of lay experts to advise the Vatican. Norman St. John-Stevas, the editor of the Wiseman Review, wrote in the Observer (3 May 1964) that many Catholic lay people and theologians had long been disturbed by what they considered the Church’s rigid and antiquated Augustinian teaching on marriage, with its emphasis on sexual strictures rather than on love and spousal bonding. A 1964 survey revealed that four out of ten British Catholics were already using “outlawed” methods of birth control, and it was known that some Catholic doctors were openly giving advice on contraceptives. An article in the Spectator (September 1963) asked this question: given the

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introduction of the contraceptive pill, should the Church leadership review its position on artificial means of birth control for married couples? The question produced a deluge of letters, with 90 percent supporting a reappraisal of the Church’s teachings on the subject. Archbishop Thomas Roberts added fuel to the flames by writing in Search (April 1964) that if he were not a Catholic, he could agree with the position taken by the Anglican Lambeth Conference that in certain cases both reason and ethical considerations would allow people to practice contraception. It was hoped, wrote Roberts, that the third session of the Council would take up the matter. On 7 May 1964, Cardinal Heenan spoke in the name of the English and Welsh hierarchy. The difficulties confronted by Catholics in marriage should not be examined, he asserted, without regard to moral law. Pope Pius XII reaffirmed in October 1951 that Pope Pius XI’s encyclical “Christian Marriage” (1930), which stipulated that intercourse was unlawful and wicked where conception is prevented, was as valid today as yesterday and would continue to be so into the future. In short, claimed Heenan, contraception is not an open question because it is against the law of God.38 It was known by early 1967 that a majority of Pope Paul’s special commission on celibacy and contraception favored policy change, and that the decision about the use of contraception in marital intercourse should be made by individuals. This position was also supported by the International Congress for the Lay Apostolate in their meeting in the spring of that year. It therefore came as a great surprise when Humanae Vitae condemned artificial methods of contraception as contrary to established Church doctrine. The reaction in England was swift and sweeping. Lay and clerical Catholics of all theological dispositions spoke out on the issue. Even the conservative Tablet, now under the editorship of Tom Burns, came out against the encyclical and published a dissenting statement signed by seventy-five eminent lay Catholics. A plethora of letters against the encyclical appeared in The Times, followed by a letter of nonconformity signed by fifty-five priests. Even the episcopacy was rocked by the ruling. Bishop Butler spoke out against what, in his mind, was clearly a resurrection of monarchical reaction that survived the Council, thus representing a failure to appeal to Christian conscience and therefore a failure

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of authority. Archbishop Cyril Conrad Cowderoy of Southwark, on the other hand, took a hard line in support of the encyclical. Father Paul Weir, a thirty-one-year-old priest in Cowderoy’s diocese, had been quoted in the London Standard (1 August 1968) as saying that the encyclical was “regrettable in every way” and “impossible” to accept. In all good conscience, claimed Father Weir, he could not urge his parishioners to follow the pope’s teaching on the matter. Birth control, he believed, was the only reasonable “licit” means of dealing with the challenges faced by many couples in having families that were too large to be supported financially.39 Humanae Vitae was all the more painful because most Catholics expected that the Church’s outdated policy on birth control, which was broadly criticized by parish clergy as unrealistic, would be reversed after Pope Paul heard from his commission on the matter. On the very next day after Father Weir’s public disclosure, the vicar general of his diocese, Monsignor Hubert Gibney, suspended him from preaching or hearing confessions, thereby preventing the priest from explaining his position to parishioners from the pulpit at St. Cecilia’s, North Cheam, Surrey. Gibney gave Weir the option of disappearing for a time in order to reflect on his miscreant actions but insisted that any priest “who is unwilling to obey the ruling of the Pope will be considered to be in a state of disobedience and will be suspended.” In a later interview on the BBC, Gibney stated that “the Catholic church is an autocratic society and we believe that when the Pope issues a decree, whatever we may believe in our hearts, outwardly we must accept it. If you are not willing to live in a Church which is autocratic, the obvious thing is to get out.”40 Gibney’s position was reaffirmed in a pastoral letter by Archbishop Cowderoy, who complained how “our poor, simple people have been misled by disobedient priests.”41 The archbishop of Southwark and his vicar general viewed the controversy over Humanae Vitae as a matter of authority and obedience, the product of an uprising engineered by radical dissident priests who were rebelling against the teachings of Rome. Cardinal Heenan initially tried to tread a more moderate path regarding Humanae Vitae. The Church, wrote Heenan in his 4 August 1968 pastoral letter, has compassion for those who will undergo hardship because of the pope’s ruling, but they must seek God’s grace to find

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the strength to obey His law. But the strong popular reaction against the encyclical, which added further fuel to the growing rebelliousness of younger Catholics, became in Heenan’s later years a “crown of thorns.” The row over Humanae Vitae was for Heenan a symptom of a far more serious disorder in the Church, namely, the rumblings of destabilizing theological revolutionaries whose mission was to change the Catholic religion itself. “Selective theology under the name of pluralism,” he claimed, was being used to attack all things ancient and true in the historical structures of the Church: anything primitive or old fashioned was now denigrated as hopelessly “medieval.”42 One positive consequence of the turmoil triggered by Humanae Vitae was the creation of the Catholic Renewal Movement (CRM) in 1968. Its initial purpose was to help priests threatened by disciplinary action because of their criticism of the encyclical. It intended as well to encourage more lay participation in Church affairs, to counteract the authoritarian tendencies manifesting themselves in a retreat from the promises of the Second Vatican Council. There were a variety of different elements in the CRM, many of which had divergent ideals and aims. The more radically inclined members opposed the Church’s advocacy of a rigorous private morality, above what they considered the imperatives of social morality. The London component of the CRM, for example, issued a leaflet that raised the question of authority in the Church. Humanae Vitae, it suggested, demonstrated why it was necessary to rethink “the ways in which the successor of Peter should exercise the ministry of service entrusted to him by Christ.” Was it better, it asked, to have three children eating three square meals a day than having nine eating only one square meal a day?43 The CRM became an important vehicle for advancing public debate about conscience, moral authority, and the necessity of encouraging collegiality and responsibility at the grass-roots level. Its Manifesto of Renewal was designed to carry forth the mission articulated by Vatican II to serve the world more effectively. Clifford Longley, one of the leaders of the CRM, exclaimed that “ordinary Catholics have been ducking too long, and the Catholic Renewal Movement exists to help us all to stand up and be counted.”44 Other than the outcry against Humanae Vitae, the majority of English Catholics seem to have been satisfied with the traditional authority

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of the Church leadership and were even troubled and confused by the talk of changes that were supposed to be initiated by the Council. These people were certainly confirmed in their dispositions by the fulminations of eminent conservative Catholics who were critical of conciliar reforms. On the other hand, there was an emerging group of young lay intellectuals who were not only outspokenly frustrated with the hierarchy’s resistance to Vatican II but also beginning to develop a critique of establishment Catholicism; their critique would ultimately break the bonds of liberal reformism and unleash an approach to the faith that was nothing less than revolutionary. One of the harbingers of this type of discontent was a book of essays compiled by the former editor of the Catholic Herald, Michael de la Bedoyere, entitled Objections to Roman Catholicism (1965). De la Bedoyere had left the Catholic Herald because of its conservative strictures and had launched a Catholic avant-garde newsletter called Search, a vehicle for the expression of freewheeling religious thinking unvarnished by episcopal censorship. With the exception of the maverick Archbishop Roberts, the contributors to this volume were all lay Catholics, owing in large part to the improbability of earning an official imprimatur for its publication. The “objections” of the book were to the outdated traditions and resistance to liberal thinking that persisted in the Church and prevented Catholics from meeting the spiritual, social, and political promises of aggiornamento. The authors wanted to break new ground in the spirit of Pope John, thereby opening up a wider discussion in the Catholic community. Above all, the book objected to the authoritarian nature of the Roman Church, which in its view was still under the control of Vatican conservatives. The criticisms ranged from official censorship of the press, bishops’ prohibiting distinguished theologians from giving lectures in their dioceses, and religious orders censoring their members’ preaching and writing, to limitations on free thought in general, the Church’s ban on contraception, and the failure to promote international peace (in particular, a condemnation of nuclear weapons by Archbishop Roberts). John M. Todd’s essay best captured the essence of the book’s objections and its hopes for reform in the spirit of Vatican II. Todd was director of the publishing house Darton, Longman and Todd and a convert from Anglo-Catholicism. In 1956 he published Catholicism and the Ecumenical Movement, a book well ahead of its time in adumbrating

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Vatican II’s calls for Christian unity. Todd also wrote a highly acclaimed and sympathetic biography of Martin Luther, but neither of these books was welcomed by the English bishops. Todd was clearly influenced by his reading of the progressive “new theologians” who had given shape to Vatican II. He noted that Rome had neither understood nor attempted to adjust to the special democratic ethos of English culture. The bishops had been instructed to preach the necessity of studying the social encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius X, but the Vatican completely failed to recognize that these were already virtues and qualities central to the English pluralistic way of life. These encyclicals also were not widely understood or sufficiently promoted in England. All the while, the Vatican bureaucracy steadily drifted away from those whom they were supposed to serve, and its involvement with the world became rigidly institutionalized: “The Gospel,” Todd argued, had been “turned into a matter of rules and regulations.”45 Historically, a central part of the Vatican’s secular investment was working out a modus vivendi with the state, where the Church sanctioned the imperium of governments for its own special interests but in ways that contradicted the Christian Gospel (this had been the pattern in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and South Africa in particular). Drawing on the writings of Père Congar, Todd showed how through the ages the word “Church” came to be understood as a priestly government or its Roman courts, as distinct from the faithful who were seen as outside and beneath those who ruled. From its inception, but especially from the eleventh century onward, the Vatican borrowed many of the features of the imperial courts to give both form and substance to its authority. A good example of this, he observed, is the very word “Curia” used for the bureaucratic engine of papal power, a term derived from the Senate of ancient Rome. Respect for the individual Christian was not deemed of great importance in this context, for the emphasis was on rules, regulations, and obedience. As Todd observed, in the life of the Church, “It is hardly too much to speak of the ordinary members of the Church, even including the parish priests, often enough, as a proletariat; the liturgy which was the point at which they all congregated together was a ritual of which few of either priests or laity understood more than a very small part of its Latin tongue, and whose sacramental and theological significance was hardly grasped by most.”46

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Through the centuries, Todd argued, protests against such impersonal tendencies were made by all the reformist Christian movements, from the Franciscans through the Lollards and Hussites. Despite their different points of view and points of reference, they all said the same thing: “Less pomp and more of the Gospel! You are Constantine’s Church, not the Church of the Apostles.”47 Of course, it was the accumulation of these very abuses that had led to Luther’s rebellion, but since then, argued Todd, the Curia was able to restore its authoritative primacy. Its authority was reasserted even more prominently by the First Vatican Council, to the point that, prior to Vatican II, absolute power was crystallized in the papal offices. The pope was in effect episcopus universalis, and the faithful were merely his child-like subjects. Despite his “objections,” Todd did not give up in despair, for he was and remained a loyal Catholic. Arguing along lines that resonated with the critique of Hans Küng, Todd pointed out that although the Church was subject to tradition, an essential part of such a legacy was the capacity to change. God’s institution was designed to serve all people and therefore had to adapt to changing historical times and circumstances. Those who ran the institution remained mortal men, subject to the temptations of power and prone to error. Much like Küng, Todd’s objection was not to the institutional Church as such but to those who abused its powers. The nonage of the Church belonged to the past, and now it was time for all Christians, lay and cleric alike, to help build the foundations of a more open Church that recognized and respected the maturity of its members. The English bishops, on the other hand, were convinced that the majority of Catholics accepted the Church as it was and fundamentally opposed change. Change, when it did come, had to be cautious and gradual. They feared intellectuals who could not accept compromise and thus could not conform to an institution that was not of their own design and liking. The bishops were primarily concerned with pastoral care rather than with progressive theology, and therefore they had to be certain that the millions of the less intellectually inclined faithful were not damaged by changes that they could not understand. Father Patrick Tierney, archivist to the archbishop of Glasgow, explained to the journalist George Scott that the priests in postwar Britain had the responsibility of meeting

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the needs of a better educated laity, but not at the expense of the ordinary, unquestioning Catholic: “The better educated people among the laity are still a small minority. We realise their present frustration but we can’t cater for them. The intellectuals are wanting to find a way of doing something for the Church at an intellectual level but the lead will have to come from themselves. The ordinary parish priest can’t meet their special needs—he is there to look after all the poor souls needing help.”48 Regarding the movements for reform and criticisms offered by Objections to Roman Catholicism, Father Tierney called it largely an “English thing.” There will always be “wild men” publishing magazines such as Search, said Tierney, as well as the occasional eccentric like Archbishop Roberts, ”but we can’t take them too seriously.”49 This theological avoidance of the intellectual soon led to an explosion of radicalism that moved well beyond anything suggested by Search and so-called liberal Catholic thinking. One of the first prelates to fully appreciate the seriousness of this new challenge from the left was Cardinal Heenan. The cardinal considered himself a reformer, but the increasing radicalism that swept the Catholic community by the late 1960s left him reeling in despair. In the spring of 1970, eighteen Liverpool priests drew up a document of thirtyeight propositions that was circulated widely among the clergy and published in full in the Catholic Herald and The Tablet. They called for making celibacy optional for priests, for the ordination of women, for diocesanbased democratic consultation (including clergy and laity) for the appointment of bishops, and for renewable term limits for bishops. In addition, at a meeting of ninety Birmingham priests, a statement was unanimously approved calling for an open forum for discussion by clergy on issues concerning the Church. Robert Nowell, writing in the New Christian, saw this as a sign that the English Catholics were going down the road of their far more radical Dutch cousins.50 For Heenan, these propositions went beyond the pale: “The barque of Peter,” as he put it, “was ill equipped to face a tornado.” The talk of aggiornamento, or renewal, was being used to commit crimes in its name, as all forms of authority were now coming under attack. It soon became fashionable, claimed Heenan, “to preach a Gospel according to Marx not Mark,” where community was all, and authority was out.51 It was what Heenan called the Marxist Gospel that represented a major, even revolutionary departure in progressive Catholic social think-

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ing, one that was to move well beyond the liberal parameters of Vatican Council II. Those who saw the possibility of a cross-fertilization of radical economic theory and Catholic social teaching were some of the most promising intellectuals of Britain’s 1960s generation. They became part of the English Catholic New Left, the emergence of which marked a transition in Catholic thinking from reformism to cultural revolution. A central target of the Left’s mission was the sociopolitical tradition of liberalism that in their view was the means by which the establishment legitimized the culture of corporate capitalism. As they saw it, the Roman Catholic Church as presently constructed and led was a partner in this endeavor. Their objective was to advance beyond the reformist culture of liberalism and restore to the Church its original biblical purpose: to serve as the vehicle for the creation of a new society of humanistic socialism.

P A R T

T H R E E

The Revolutionaries

E I G H T

The Catholic New Left

Stalinism is Leninism turned to stone. —E. P. Thompson1

ORIGINS

Among the “wild men” to whom Father Patrick Tierney referred in his interview with the journalist George Scott and who Cardinal Heenan feared were highjacking the faith were a number of intellectuals more radical than those associated with Michael de la Bedoyere’s Search. These were young Catholic intellectuals who identified with the “New Left.”2 As opposed to the “Old Left,” early supporters of the Russian road to socialism, the New Left were a varied group, the original leaders being former communists repelled by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, which they saw as the product of hegemonic totalitarianism. As a consequence, many began to examine alternatives to the Stalinist interpretations of Marx.3 The revolt started in Poland, Hungary, and other Eastern European countries, where leading Marxist theorists tried to revive 173

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liberal democratic traditions suppressed by Moscow-dominated regimes. This led to a renewed interest in the democratic socialism of Eduard Bernstein and the criticisms of bureaucratic communism by Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and Milovan Djilas, who in their own ways condemned the excesses of a “new ruling class” of party bureaucrats whose monopoly of power, they believed, betrayed Marx’s revolutionary ideals.4 A leading voice for a “Marxist humanism” and what came to be called the revisionist movement was the Polish intellectual Leszek Kolakowski, who, as the product of a country both Roman Catholic and communist, was especially sensitive to the heavy hand of clerical and party officialdom. For him, both stifled independent thought and behavior.5 Kolakowski maintained that Marxism in Poland had long ceased to have any intellectual or cultural content and had simply become a mechanism for retaining institutional power. The revisionists were, in Kolakowski’s words, the “Protestants of Marxism,” since they took its orthodoxy back to its original sources.6 Revisionism today, he claimed, had a logic which led it out of Marxism and toward social democracy. Kolakowski and his circle found inspiration in Marx’s early writings, notably the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which had been classified as “idealist” by Soviet orthodoxy and suppressed. Sometimes referred to as the “Paris Manuscripts,” these writings reveal Marx in his younger, humanist philosophical days, before his shift to the scientific dialectics of Das Kapital. The Paris Manuscripts explained how capitalism dehumanizes society by treating men and women as mere objects in its relentless drive for profits. Marx believed that this exploitation could be overcome by a deeper understanding of man and the social conditions in which he lived. The New Left had as one of its major objectives a critical renewal of Marxism as a vehicle for creating a democratic socialist society. This necessitated discrediting established communist states, especially the Soviet Union, since its bureaucratic classes had betrayed the humanistic and moral vision of Marx. Stuart Hall, one of the editors of the Universities and Left Review and, at the tender age of twenty-two, the first editor of its sequel, the New Left Review, claimed that his group borrowed the phrase “New Left” in the 1950s from the movement known as nouvelle gauche, an independent political orientation expressed in France Observateur, a weekly newspa-

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per edited by Claude Bourdet.7 An influential activist in the French Resistance, Bourdet championed after the war a “third way” in European politics, meaning an alternative to the rigidity of Stalinism and the feckless democratic socialism in Western European countries. Bourdet and his circle also saw the necessity of moving beyond the polarization of the Cold War driven by the opposing military power blocs of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Inspired by Bourdet, Hall claimed that the British New Left sought to find what he called a “third political space” between the totalitarian dogmas of Soviet communism and American capitalist imperialism. The term “New Left,” although first articulated by the British, became identified with youth radicalism that swept the Western world in the 1960s. Stuart Hall and Perry Anderson, who succeeded Hall as editors of the New Left Review in 1962, represented the second generation of the British New Left. The so-called First New Left founded the journal The New Reasoner, which later was absorbed by the Universities and Left Review. Its major spokesman was the historian E. P. Thompson. The second generation of New Leftists thought that their predecessors were insufficiently pragmatic and too far removed from current theoretical developments in international Marxism. Under Anderson, the New Left Review focused on reforming and regenerating the intellectual and cultural landscape of Britain. Irrespective of the sometimes fractious feuding between the two groups, the New Left, according to Peter Sedgwick is best understood as an eclectic milieu, a mix of different but coexisting traditions challenging conventional social and cultural thinking, rather than a political movement.8 The social groups within this milieu to whom New Left ideas most appealed were the “scholarship boys,” those workingclass students such as the Catholic Terry Eagleton, who benefited from the 1944 Education Act. These also included the people whom Stuart Hall called “the outsiders,” a core constituency at Oxford of the Universities and Left Review, who, like himself, found the English class system suffocatingly alien. Oxford in the mid-1950s, he wrote, “was dominated by the ‘Hooray Henries’ of its time, attempting to relive [Evelyn Waugh’s] Brideshead Revisited. Its atmosphere was relentlessly masculine, and . . . the upper-middle-class English male commanding attention confidently expressed banalities as a sort of seignorial right.”9

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The roots of the English New Left were varied. One strain can be traced back to the guild socialist, syndicalist, radical Christian and Distributist movements of the pre –World War I years. Of special significance here were the guild socialist and Distributist warnings of the insidious dangers of state socialism. Even the search for a “third way” has resonance with the social and cultural project of the Catholic ChestertonBelloc circle.10 In addition, the New Left’s assessment of the obsolescence of parliamentary politics was strikingly similar to that outlined by Belloc and the Chesterton brothers. Although the secular New Left made no recognition of such affinity, they did at least see the connection between their vision and the guild socialist movement.11 They expressed a special indebtedness to G. D. H. Cole, who was himself part of a sociopolitical milieu very much influenced by the Distributist group.12 Besides Cole, a seminal influence on the British New Left was the American radical sociologist C. Wright Mills.13 It is interesting to note that Mills had a far greater impact on the British than did the American New Left, which at this point had not yet fully developed. Mills’s Power Elite (New York, 1959) outlined the major institutional structures of power in the United States, which provided an intellectual grid for his followers to examine capitalism and politics in Britain. The composition, functions, and influence of the elites who dominated the strongholds of British society became the major focus of New Left analysis. Mills pointed out that the Labour Party had become so integrated into the institutional structures of capitalist society that it could never serve as a force for social change. He also convinced many of the New Left that the working class could not be counted on as agents of revolution. For this, Mills had faith in the intelligentsia, in particular the younger generation.14 The theoretical cornerstone of the New Left was what Thompson called “socialist humanism.” This was intended as an antidote to the inhumane ramifications of Stalin’s rule, the excesses of “scientific socialism,” and the bureaucratization and political expediency that had become inherent in social democracy.15 Hall described socialist humanism as “the capacity to feel,” and “the vindication of the moral imagination” that had far too long remained dormant among the old-time socialists. The priorities of the New Left, as he saw it, had to be “a vital capacity

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for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity.”16 Thompson, Hall, and others condemned Stalin for having bastardized Marx in the promotion of his totalitarian agenda. That, in conjunction with Moscow’s rigid economic determinism (described by the New Left as “economism”), had allowed no place for human creativity. Socialist humanism sought to affirm human agency against the deterministic tendencies of Stalinism and the pusillanimity of social democracy, which could be facilitated by a return to the humanism found in Marx’s early writings. There was broad international interest in Marx’s humanism by the early 1960s. Even members of the official communist hierarchy, such as Roger Garaudy in France and revisionists including Kolakowski in Poland and Wolfgang Harich in East Germany, shifted their emphasis from the economic forecasts of Das Kapital to Marx’s earlier writings that had highlighted his understanding of history and human nature. Erich Fromm, for example, claimed that it was not possible to understand Marx’s concept of socialism and his critique of capitalism “except on the basis of the concept of man that he developed in his earlier years.”17 At the center of what the New Left called Marx’s humanism was one of his most essential insights, the nature of alienation and his theory of human labor. The worker under capitalism, in forsaking his productive power for wages becomes separated from the uniquely creative part of labor, the capacity for which constitutes his humanity. (Marx, following David Ricardo and the classical liberal economists, recognized labor as the source of all value.) Under capitalism the worker no longer can find any authentic meaning to either his work or to what he produces and thereby becomes merely an object or tool put to use by the capitalist for the creation of wealth. In this respect, man becomes “objectified” and separated from that creative element that defines not only his own humanity but also the source of all culture. In becoming a mere tool for the capitalist, the worker’s life loses its meaning. What begins in the factory under the captains of industry expands outward to embrace the broader culture, extending the process of dehumanization to other relationships; everyone becomes an object of commerce whose “use value” is measured by the capacity to expand capitalist profit. It is important to appreciate that for Marx, human labor was not merely physical but intellectual as

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well and thereby central to the broadest areas of human activity: “Man does not only produce the means for his physical existence, he creates at the same time, in a single process, a whole form of society.”18 In other words, through his capacity to labor, man becomes the creative vehicle for the production of culture. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 was in print in Germany by 1932 but not made available in English until 1963, when it was translated by Tom Bottomore, professor of sociology at the University of Sussex.19 However, it was Charles Taylor, a Canadian Catholic Marxist and Rhodes Scholar, who first introduced his New Left colleagues at Oxford to Marx’s early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Taylor brought with him from Paris in 1958 a French version of the newly discovered Manuscripts, and this caused a good deal of excitement in New Left circles, since it offered a humanistic Marx as a counterweight to the vulgar determinism of Stalin. What caught the attention of leftleaning Catholics were Marx’s analysis of capitalism and his justification for revolution on moral grounds. In his early writings Marx had described the destructive capacity of capitalism in language that resonated with the social and economic critique of the pioneers of radical Catholic social philosophy, namely, the Frenchman Frédéric Ozanam and the German Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler.20 As opposed to neoclassical theory, radical social thinking in its structural analysis of the economy assumes that social, economic, and political institutions constitute an interlocking network that serves the agenda of private elites. Neoclassical or orthodox economic theory, on the other hand, posits the autonomy of these institutions, thereby separating economic activity from political, social, and cultural dynamics. Rather than recognizing labor itself as central to economic activity, orthodox theory stresses buying and selling. The essence of economic activity is the market, which regulates production and consumption. Ozanam’s observations on the subject predated by some eight years the publication of Marx’s and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, which appeared in February 1848. Ozanam singled out liberalism, the regnant economic philosophy of nineteenth-century capitalists, as the source of labor’s misery. Its doctrines, he asserted, dehumanized the laborer by relegating his value to the impersonal laws of supply and demand,

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thereby transforming his person into a mere commodity. Like Marx, Ozanam recognized that the ethos of unbridled capitalism, buttressed by the classical liberal philosophers of the day (Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and Bastiat), was a powerful tool used to justify the rapacity of the economically strong. In G. K. Chesterton’s and Hilaire Belloc’s Distributist circle in the 1930s, which revealed a clear affinity with the economic ideas of Ozanam, there was a clear acceptance of what is conventionally regarded as a Marxist labor theory of value (although Catholic ideas on this predated Marx). Furthermore, the Distributists’ ultimate vision of social justice—as is the case with radical notions of democratic socialism— required the empowerment of marginalized people; popular control of the productive and political processes (thus a rejection of what today is recognized as corporate capitalism, since this meant sharing power between management and labor); decentralization of economic structures; and the creation of a new ethos of social solidarity.21 In the 1950s a number of Roman Catholic scholars had argued that the papal social encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno had utilized Marxist labor analysis.22 For instance, both Leo XIII and Pius IX described in their encyclicals the interconnection of capital, social institutions, and government. Furthermore, Quadragesimo Anno assumed that social inequality could not be remedied by charity alone but only through structural changes (no. 137) and might require social ownership of the means of production and worker ownership or management (no. 114).23 Finally, by the early 1960s the barriers between Christianity and Marxism were lowered significantly by John XXIII, who asked Catholics to be less rigid and more open-minded about the possibilities of dialogue with opposing secular social and political philosophies, including Marxism itself.

CATHOLICS AND THE SECULAR LEFT

Besides the 1956 crackdown in Budapest, the other crucial event for the formation of the New Left in Britain was the simultaneous Suez Crisis (a botched plan involving France and Britain along with Israel to take control of the Suez Canal), in which the “establishment” politicians

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revealed a continuing grandiose taste for colonial adventures. Whereas Hungary shattered the Left’s faith in the Soviet path to socialism, Suez destroyed the hopes of Britain’s socialists that their country could move toward a socialist society by forsaking imperialism and international conflict. Less than a year after the events of 1956, the British Communist Party lost a third of its membership. Many on the Left now recognized the need to take another direction, one that avoided the tired rhetoric of Soviet-style Marxism and the false promises of liberalism and welfare state programs. This aim gave rise to a discussion of how a truly humane and democratic socialism could be realized without authoritarian methods. An integral part of the debate was an attack on the establishment’s cultural and political elites. The assault took many forms, from John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger at London’s Royal Court Theatre in May 1956 to the highly critical cultural analyses by Richard Hoggart (The Uses of Literacy, 1957) and Raymond Williams (Culture and Society, 1958, and The Long Revolution, 1961), the latter of whom would have a crucial influence on the social and political views of the younger intellectuals of the New Left. A major vehicle for expressing the ideas of this disparate group of malcontents was the bimonthly New Left Review, which in January 1960 absorbed two earlier journals, The New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review.24 Although The New Reasoner was short-lived, publishing only ten issues, those who wrote for it (E. P. Thompson, E. J. Hobsbawm, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others) had close links to the Communist Party. Its contributors condemned the party after the Hungarian episode and focused thereafter on trying to understand the transformation of what they initially saw as a humanitarian Marxism undermined by the dictatorship of Stalin. In the first issue of The New Reasoner, Thompson had argued that the moral core of Marx’s vision was perverted by Stalin through a distorting bureaucratization of power. Thompson and his associates believed that the authentic moral code of Marx would be revealed once the mask of Stalin was smashed for good. Those who came to dominate the New Left Review represented the next generation of leftists. Drawing on the “revisionist” contributions to the Marxist legacy (those who challenged the old Soviet orthodoxy) by its predecessors, the editorials and features of the New Left Review

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focused on essentially four areas: Third World efforts to achieve independence from capitalist imperialism; the creation of a new socialist cultural order for Britain; a rethinking of Marxism in light of the events of 1956; and issues concerning the use of nuclear weapons. The last cause linked members of the New Left with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Thanks to the 1944 Education Act, increasing numbers of workingclass Catholics were now given access to higher education, and this exposed them to ideas that challenged their thinking about the relationship of traditional Catholic beliefs to secular culture. Bernard Sharratt, who along with Terry Eagleton was one of the younger activists with the Catholic Left during these years, noted that as part of the entry workingclass generation into Oxford and Cambridge, his associates tended to be more intellectually attuned and politically committed than the usual public (that is, private) school students. Partly for these reasons the Catholic “scholarship boys” ended up earning a disproportionate share of the Firsts and Fellowships during the immediate postwar years.25 There was also a publishing house— Sheed and Ward—dedicated to serving the growing theological sophistication of this audience. Neil Middleton and Martin Redfern at Sheed and Ward arranged English translations of the Continental new theologians Rahner, Schillebeeckx, and Küng and also published the work of England’s professional theologians Charles Davis, Herbert McCabe, O. P., the editor of New Blackfriars, Nicholas Lash, and others. Sheed and Ward also made itself available to the younger generation of English Catholic intellectuals on the Left, including Eagleton, Brian Wicker, Adrian and Angela Cunningham, Walter Stein, Hugo Meynell, and Rosemary Houghton. The managing director of Sheed and Ward was Neil Middleton, the son-in-law of Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, founders of the esteemed publishing house in 1926.26 The two were willing to give Middleton sole responsibility for running the London operation and never interfered with his decision making, giving advice only when called upon.27 Middleton suspected that neither Frank nor Maisie thought that his support of more radical Catholic ventures was an especially good idea, “but at no time did they question it.”28 Even when Frank and Maisie ran the publishing house, it was known for championing progressive Catholic

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writers, in stark contrast to its main competitor, the more conservative and rightist-leaning Burns and Oates.29 Getting new approaches to theology in Britain was always a tall order, but even before Vatican II, Maisie had pointed Middleton to the work of Hans Küng. It was through Küng that he met Edward Schillebeeckx, both of whom became personal friends of the Middleton family. Middleton had a radical upbringing, and his politics were formed by reading Marx, Lenin, Engels, Luxemburg, Durkheim, and others. This tutoring led him to both advocate for and publish the ideas of Marxists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy when he moved to Penguin Books in the early 1970s. Middleton’s parents were communists, his mother a tradeunion activist and a founding member of the British Communist Party. Middleton’s parental rebellion, he claimed, consisted of becoming a Trotskyite Catholic (he converted to the faith at the age of seventeen). Middleton first encountered Maisie Ward and Frank Sheed through the Catholic Evidence Guild, which had been set up in London in the mid-1930s to train Catholics to speak about their faith on street corners. Guild members were required to attend weekly meetings of serious theological instruction. This street-corner evangelism, wrote Middleton, developed for him into an interest in theology and the view that religion and politics could not seriously be separated. The guild, in short, was the crucial vehicle for shaping Middleton’s religious education: “Its members’ insistence on the absolute necessity to put society and religion together in a comprehensible dialogue also had the foundation for my own attempts at fusing belief in socialism.” The direction of the Hyde Park Corner talks was largely shaped by Frank and Maisie. “Pius XII was regarded as a total disaster,” noted Middleton, “not only in the matter of doctrine but also for his preference for the far right and powerful.”30 Martin Redfern, who joined Middleton at Sheed and Ward and later succeeded him as publisher, was brought up as an Anglican and converted to Catholicism while serving in the Royal Air Force before attending Oxford (1955– 59). There he joined the Union of Catholic Students, which introduced him both to a more radical theology and to making a serious connection between religion and politics. It was at Oxford that Redfern came to know the highly influential Dominican, Father Laurence Bright, a central force for promulgating a radical, biblical-based

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theology for the Catholic Left and the editor of The Newman, the journal of the Newman Association—the largest, most comprehensive intellectual body of British university Catholics. Like many other young and progressive-minded Catholics, Redfern joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. This association became for many on the Catholic Left a formative political experience. Eagleton, for instance, pointed out that the first editor-in-chief of the radical Catholic Slant magazine, Anthony Downing, was initially a Tory but shifted politically to the left only because of the nuclear issue and his membership in the CND. Afterward he became a passionate campaigner for the cause.31 Looking back, observed Martin Redfern, “I’m pretty clear that, if I had remained Anglican, I would probably have developed very differently: it was because I had become a Catholic that I was politicized in the way I was.”32 A forum for the discussion of Catholic leftist ideas was provided by what was called the December Group. The name derived from the fact that the only time available for a “philosophy” weekend at the Dominicans’ Spode House at Oxford was the last one in December. The organizers were Middleton, Bright, McCabe, and Adrian Cunningham. The December Group met annually beginning in 1958. Their objective was to set up a conference “to discuss social problems from a Catholic perspective independent of any official organization”33 but within the conceptional framework of the New Left Review. The organizers saw a need to find a meeting space for Catholic leftists, since all the other Catholic organizations were either voices of the establishment or, in most cases, bastions of the political right. These meetings became well known and attracted precisely the kinds of people whose views Middleton wanted to publish. The Dominicans in England (the “Order of Preachers”) had unconventional cultural views, and in the 1930s and 1940s they leaned to the left. The conferences at Spode House, for example, initially under the direction of Hilaire Belloc’s son-in-law Reginald Jebb, had championed radical economic and social programs. The radicalism of the English Dominicans can be traced back to at least the early decades of the twentieth century, when the Dominicans became incubators of ideas for writers associated with Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. During the 1930s the well-known Vincent McNabb, O. P., professor of philosophy at

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Hawkesyard Priory and a regular preacher at Hyde Park, where thousands regularly heard him take on the issues of the day by debating the likes of George Bernard Shaw, was a colorful and outspoken advocate of Distributist ideas. Once a person heard the inimitable Father Vincent, claimed Chesterton, he would never forget him. McNabb’s Distributist sympathies were carried on by such Dominicans as Conrad Pepler, who published Eric Gill in Blackfriars and was an avid supporter of PAX (the Catholic peace group), Gerald Vann, and Victor White. The Dominicans from their inception in 1216 to the present day prioritized not only spreading the gospel (preaching in the vernacular) but also studying and teaching philosophy and theology at Europe’s principal universities. This accounts for the strong Dominican presence at England’s institutions of higher learning. In 1872, after an absence of four hundred years, the Dominicans returned to Oxford, where they established a house of theology, and they did the same at Cambridge some ten years later. A basic rule of the Dominicans was to live life in close community in an attempt to actualize the ways of scripture. It was the French and Belgian Dominicans, for example, who shed their religious habits and led the ill-fated worker-priest movement. Although the movement was suppressed by the Vatican in 1953, the experience left its mark in helping to expand the order’s political vision beyond the boundaries of traditional Catholic social teaching. Another factor that accounts for the English Dominicans’ presence in the circles of the Catholic New Left was the special character of their founder’s constitutional rules. Saint Dominic gave superiors permission to dispense members from monastic observances whenever they might interfere with the all-important task of study and teaching. He also was not one to stand on ceremony or to regard rigid rules and regulations. His constitutions were designed to give superiors the maximum flexibility to meet the requisites of local conditions. Furthermore, in order to promote personal responsibility, the order’s founder made the Dominicans democratic: superiors were elected and shared authority with the chapters and councils. Obedience was downplayed: those who deviated from the constitutions were not to be automatically considered guilty of the sin of disobedience. The Dominicans also stood out from the other major orders in terms of their theological orientation. The Franciscans,

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for example, were not focused on intellectual matters, and the English Jesuits, as opposed to their South American counterparts, were decidedly not politically or theologically radical.34 Unlike the Jesuits, the Dominicans did not recruit from or associate with upper-class families, a consequence of their traditional identification with the less affluent. Several Dominicans, for instance, had developed close ties with Catholics in Manchester, a core of England’s declining industrial sector with its large Irish working-class population.35 The Dominicans’ emphasis on learning, their pluralistic organizational structures, and the wide latitude given to individual priests and friars to deal with particular challenges in matters of serving the gospel placed them strategically at the crossroads of England’s college-age Catholics who were seeking a rigorous and worldly application of their faith to the cultural and economic problems of the day. Thus, Laurence Bright and Herbert McCabe had been very active in the student and new graduate circuits in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where the Dominicans often served as university chaplains. Given their radical theological and political views, it was only natural that they would find a rich field for their teachings with those who were active in launching Slant magazine. Father Laurence, wrote Redfern, had a good deal of editorial experience and a surprisingly deft practical bent, which were valuable attributes in getting the Cambridge student journal published with Sheed and Ward.36 One of the most influential of the early Spode House figures was the Dominican priest Conrad Pepler, who had been raised in Eric Gill’s radical Distributist community at Ditchling. His father was Hilary Pepler, a great champion of Distributism and co-editor of the Weekly Review, the successor to G.K.’s Weekly. The elder Pepler along with Gill undertook a series of lecture tours in the 1930s, attempting to chart the path for a large-scale return to guild craftsmanship and subsistence farming. The Gill-Pepler lectures marked the beginning of plans for a back-to-the-land movement, a radical alternative to industrial capitalism taken up by several Catholic groups in the interwar years.37 Both Hilary Pepler and Gill were critical of the Catholic hierarchy for not giving sufficient support to their experiments in alternative living at Ditchling. Both men lashed out at the Catholic hierarchy for being out of touch with the problems of industrial society. In Gill’s view, the clergy lacked the intrepidity and energy

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to apply the principles of Catholic social teaching to the life of the times.38 Under Conrad Pepler’s leadership, Spode House sponsored conferences for literary and historical studies, often overlapping in attendance with members of PAX, which had been highly critical of fascism prior to the outbreak of World War II. Pax was founded by Eric Gill, Donald Attwater, and others in 1936 as a small but influential peace society that campaigned for Catholic recognition of the right to conscientious objection. It later took up the cause of trying to influence the Church to condemn the manufacture of nuclear weapons.39 These various associations had a distinctly radical bent to their agendas and helped to shape the intellectual environment favorable to the creation of a Catholic Left. The December Group’s meetings featured lectures by several Dominicans who would later play leading roles in promoting radical Catholic social and cultural initiatives. These included Fergus Kerr, Cornelius Ernst, Charles Boxer, and Geoffrey Preston. One of its earliest programs in 1962 had as its theme the issues of equality and the distribution of wealth. Among the speakers were Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International; Dorothy Day’s colleague Eileen Egan of the American Catholic Worker; and Rosemary Sheed. From the outset the December Group recognized a significant symmetry between Marx’s critique of capitalism and Catholic social teachings. The topics of their meetings ranged from the significance of Marx and Engels to the thought of Teilhard de Chardin.40 Adding significantly to the outreach of the December Group was the journal Blackfriars (later becoming New Blackfriars), which not only opened its columns to writers of the Catholic Left but promoted its agenda in editorials. Blackfriars was one of the few Catholic journals along with the American Commonweal that had the courage and insight to be critical of the Church’s sympathies with Mussolini and of the myriad forms of fascism in the years before World War II. Blackfriars significantly raised its stature among those on the left by condemning General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The journal was also a persistent voice against the excesses of capitalism and its connections with Western imperialism in the interwar years. The Dominicans had found English universities fertile ground for promoting their radical ideas. As early as 1945, for example, they helped to inspire a left-wing publication at Manchester University entitled Hu-

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manitas; and two people associated with it, Walter Stein, editor of Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience, and Herbert McCabe, editor of New Blackfriars, would play major roles in promoting the agenda of the Catholic Left throughout the 1960s. Martin Shaw, the student organizer for the Catholic New Left in the 1960s,41 had known Father Herbert since childhood. His parents had been friends of McCabe while students at Manchester University, where they were involved with Humanitas. The Shaws were also close friends of Walter Stein. Father Herbert had been a fundamental influence on the conversions of a whole group of Manchester University students, including Shaw’s parents, who converted in Leeds in 1955.42 However, the Dominicans’ most productive labor in the student vineyards was at Cambridge University, where Laurence Bright and others in 1965 helped give birth to the most radical of all Catholic groups, the pro-Marxist Slant movement (the name derived from the title of their journal). Many of its members were part of the generation of Catholics who found traditional Catholic teaching dull, unimaginative, and stultifying. The Slant group hoped to open up, refresh, and revolutionize the official content of what was learned through Catholic education by reaching out and integrating new currents of thought with their own eclectic ideas. The Slant circle found a rich source of inspiration for their mission in the New Left Review. One of the founding members of the Slant group was Angela Cunningham, whose faith was renewed by her involvement with the Catholic Left. “Slant-type things kept me in the Church,” wrote Angela, “and I remain to be a trying-to-be practicing Catholic.”43 Angela’s husband Adrian Cunningham was the third of his mother’s generation to grow up in the Dominican parish in Hampstead, North London. His encounter with Distributist material began as a teenager working in a library with publications of St. Dominic’s Press, Ditchling, and the writings of the sculptor Eric Gill. Cunningham later visited Gill’s Distributist-inspired Ditchling Guild and was very impressed with its emphasis on community, handcrafts, and Christian aesthetics. Angela Cunningham also had a strong early interest in Distributism; indeed, it was to be the subject of her Ph. D. dissertation, although she never completed it. Like many of the Catholic Left, the Cunninghams’ political views were significantly

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shaped by their association with CND and PAX. Around 1960, Adrian became secretary of the Catholic Nuclear Disarmament Group (CNDG).44 Another moving force in the peace movement was the Dominican priest Simon Blake, who was also involved in the founding of Amnesty International. At about the same time Adrian attended London anarchist group meetings, and Angela and he worked with the group Solidarity, which was associated with the French “Socialisme ou Barbarie” group that advocated workers’ control of industry.45 These ties with the radical Catholics made a significant mark on the couple’s political positions. Bit by bit, recalled Angela, “I learned there was a Catholic tradition standing up for social justice against conservatism” and other regressive forces.46 Another activist on the Left who became moved by the faith at this time was Martin Shaw. Unlike several others associated with the Catholic Left, Shaw came from a liberal, university-educated, English middleclass family. He was educated in Jesuit and Christian Brothers schools, but by his mid-teens he had reacted strongly against what he saw to be “the backward, sub-intellectual Catholic culture.” However, Shaw continued to cling to the core Christian principles that he considered worthwhile for essentially socialist and pacifist reasons. After entering the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1965, he joined the CatholicMarxist Slant movement, which he thought could reconcile Christian social teachings with a practical socialism. He was a prominent and perceptive contributor to Slant magazine while a student leader at the LSE. Shaw became involved with Slant when he joined the LSE’s Catholic Society, of which he was chair. He was also serving at the time as secretary of the University of London Catholic Society, where Slant had a major influence through the work of Laurence Bright. In addition, Shaw wrote pamphlets for the LSE Socialist Society and International Socialism (IS), as well as articles for The Agitator, the LSE Socialist Society journal.47 In many ways the journey to political consciousness of Christopher Calnan best encapsulates the difficulties encountered by young Catholics who sought a more socially relevant religious faith during these years. Born in Manchester to Irish immigrants in 1946, Calnan as a young adult came to work for Sheed and Ward and acted as circulation editor for Slant magazine. Calnan’s first recollection of a political act was attending an anti-American rally as a schoolboy in Manchester during the 1962

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Cuban missile crisis. He vividly remembered pulling down a hood over his head while local television producers were filming the event for fear of being spotted by one of his teachers. Given the prevailing right-wing nature of his Catholic school, the consequences of being “caught” would have been painful. It was at this rally that Calnan first encountered the CND, which seemed to be the only organization prepared to address his fear of nuclear catastrophe. He joined the CND and worked actively for its mission both at school and on weekends and over vacations— “doing administrative tasks, wearing the CND badge, leafleting, picketing and going on demonstrations.” Yet all the while Calnan encountered few Catholics in the organization and failed to find any politically progressive voices in his own parish. One discussion that stood out in his mind at the time was with a sales assistant in the Catholic Truth Society’s bookshop concerning Franco’s brutal treatment of his political opponents, when he was told that “error has no rights.” Sometime later, Calnan asked his parish priest about the possibility of training in the ministry. He was summarily disabused of any such notion when the priest pointed to his CND badge and said, “No bishop would ordain anyone wearing that.” Calnan was also under constant pressure at school not to wear his CND badge. Calnan’s problems can be explained by understanding that the English Catholic hierarchy was highly critical of Catholics affiliating with the CND, because it brought them into contact with the political left, where they would be exposed to atheistic communist thinking. As Brian Wicker has observed, the CND led Catholics into a more radical leftism, one that was fundamentally different from their earlier associations with trade unionism through the Catholic Social Guild and the Catholic Workers’ College. This older leftism was given life by papal social teaching about the rights of labor and therefore had ecclesiastical backing. The bishops had no intention of giving their imprimatur to this new, more socialist-tinged leftism and therefore strongly disapproved of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.48 Calnan finally found what he considered to be a source of political enlightenment within this insular, right-wing, and anti-intellectual environment while attending a one-day CND conference where a letter from a Manchester-based Dominican priest was read aloud. The letter

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was from none other than Father Herbert McCabe, and it was an important moment for Calnan, who now recognized for the first time that his was not a lone voice fatally out of step with the cultural temper of his faith. He made contact with McCabe and soon thereafter moved to London, where he found other Catholics of similar mind. It was at the Friday Group, which had started as evening Mass, sermons, and informal discussions in St. Dominic’s Priory in North London, that Calnan first began an immersion in a deeper form of social Catholicism. The Friday Group was begun sometime in 1963 by a prior and parish priest Father Daniel for the purpose of explaining to local parishioners the work of Vatican Council II. These gatherings were didactic rather than intended for open discussion, and the disquisitions were rather conservative. All this changed with the arrival of Alex Newman, a young Dominican priest who moved to St. Dominic’s to study at London University. Father Alex broadened the function of the Friday Group beyond its parish boundaries by linking up with the Newman Association at London University and bringing in several of his Dominican brothers. Under his leadership the Friday Group developed into a theologically and socially contentious questioning body, reflecting the interests of the newer “outside” leftist members, who increasingly set the tone at meetings. These elements frequently came into conflict with conservative parish-based members, but their more progressive voices dominated the weekly discussions. Calnan first met Father Alex Newman at St. Dominic’s Priory, where he and his friend Tony Mahoney talked non-stop with the priest over generous glasses of wine for some two hours about the problems of being a Catholic in a reactionary Church. The two left brimming with enthusiasm and began attending the Friday Group with several other mutual friends (Peter Lumsden, Peter Bucknill, Pauline Clough, and Kathy Tither). Soon people were joining the Friday Group discussions from all over London, from the commuter counties beyond the city, and on occasion from out of the country.49 The Friday Group served as a forum for bringing together a number of people from diverse backgrounds who all shared a dissatisfaction with Catholicism as practiced in England. Their meetings opened people to a higher political consciousness with a desire to promote domestic and international peace and

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social justice. The reputation of the Friday Group became widespread, even among those who never attended a single meeting. In this more open intellectual context Calnan for the first time realized that his search for a more radical and relevant form of Catholicism was just as prevalent outside England and Ireland as within. Although the participants in the Friday Group, many of whom felt isolated and alienated from normal Church structures, started out as strangers, they soon developed a close sense of community. Their frequent gatherings for drinks, lunch, and dinner resulted in life-long friendships and a devotion to the cause of progressive, left-leaning Catholic social action.50 It was also at such gatherings that Calnan met Fathers Laurence Bright and Simon Blake, Adrian and Angela Cunningham, and the poet Dinah Livingstone. At a meeting of the Friday Group Calnan also bought his first copy of Slant magazine. From this point onward, Calnan gave himself completely to the Slant project, ultimately an experience that liberated him from feelings of isolation and alienation. The increasing involvement with the Catholic Left had a profound and life-long impact on Calnan’s faith and attitudes to the Church.51 The members of the Friday Group involved themselves in a broad array of Catholic Left activities. Alex Newman wrote a number of articles for Slant, including one on psychological illness as a product of social forces (Slant 20). Peter Bucknill, a radical lawyer, contributed an essay on the Race Relations Bill (Slant 21). Pauline Clough became a leader of the local Slant group in Southampton and made frequent trips to London for Friday Group meetings and demonstrations. But the social interactions of the Friday Group went beyond the pragmatic level. Peter Lumsden, for example, came from an upper-class, wealthy family and gave away much of his inheritance. He was a major presence in the peace movement of the 1960s, working with Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker group. Lumsden chose to marry his wife in an unconventional wedding at a Friday Group Mass in 1968, celebrated by Father Simon Blake and attended by the Cunninghams and others. Dinah Livingstone read the Epistle. As part of his own commitment to the Catholic Left, Christopher Calnan had his daughter Tara baptized by Laurence Bright in June 1970 in central London at St. Etheldreda’s Catholic Church. Aside from personal and family friends, Friday Group members and Slant board members

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were also in the congregation. Tara’s godparents were Peter Bucknill and Pauline Clough.52 The members of the Friday Group constituted what sociologists call a “reference group,” forming close, intimate relationships that created a deeply life-defining experience.53 Several of them carried this relationship into family living by establishing what was known as the Blackheath Commune. In this context, the social location of the Friday Group’s sense of religion gave legitimacy and metaphysical reality to the social responsibilities of their spiritual convictions. Another strand of the Slant circle was represented by Bernard Sharratt. Born in 1944 into a working-class Liverpool Catholic family, Sharratt at the age of twelve entered St. Joseph’s seminary for the Liverpool Archdiocese at Upholland, Lancashire. There he took a rigorous set of courses in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, ancient history, mathematics, and the like, which prepared him well for later studies in Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Descartes, and Sartre. In 1965, Sharratt became an undergraduate resident of the Catholic House of Studies, St. Edmund’s College in Cambridge, next door to the Dominican Blackfriars. He remained there until 1971, graduating in 1968, and then staying to write a Ph. D. dissertation on nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies. At St. Edmund’s, Sharratt was heavily influenced by a collection of international Catholic scholars including, among others, Ernan McMullin of the University of Notre Dame, Olaf Pederson from Denmark, Charles Curran, Gerry O’Collins, Leonard Boyle, and Walter Ong, and, from England, Nicholas Lash and Sebastian Moore. In addition, there was a Jesuit contingent, centered around Xavier Gorostiaga, who had all returned from Central America to take specialized degrees in development economics and related disciplines, with the intention of returning to Central America to promote radical social change. Sharratt’s encounter with these Latin American Jesuits would later become an important personal source for the cross-fertilization of Slant Marxism and liberation theology. Before leaving the seminary, however, Sharratt had become increasingly estranged from the faith and was moving toward atheism. He, like many others, had also become completely disillusioned with the hypocrisy and evasions of the Catholic hierarchy, especially the rigid position

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on contraception and the reluctance to engage social justice. It was in the midst of such growing intellectual disaffiliation that Sharratt encountered the Slant group, which gave him a second chance at recognizing how Catholicism might be useful for advancing meaningful social change. For about five years the Slant project provided Sharratt with the sharp edge that seemed necessary for opening up doors for social and political action. For Sharratt, St. Edmund’s and Blackfriars next door were promising places for rediscovering the best of Catholic tradition.54 The Slant activists committed themselves to promoting a revolutionary socialist vision that in their view best satisfied the social promises of the Gospels. As such, their positions on the power of the English Catholic Church leadership and the country’s domestic and foreign policies constituted a radical challenge to all aspects of the status quo, which dovetailed closely with the positions of their allies of the secular New Left. As opposed to the more conservative and mainstream Catholics in England who were leery of the progressive ramifications of Vatican II, the Slant group criticized the Council for not going far enough, for in effect giving in to the blandishments of a tired liberalism that was designed to continue the status quo and thus assure not only the power of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church but also the political and economic supremacy of bourgeois capitalism.

CAPITALISM AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS

It was not primarily the failings of Vatican II that served as the galvanizing force for creating the Catholic Left. The Council for them was simply symptomatic of a greater set of problems, namely, the prevailing global and exploitative capitalist system, the political climate in Britain that supported its structures, and the morality of incorporating nuclear weaponry into British foreign policy. The Catholic Church, they believed, could be an especially effective tool for addressing these challenges, given its global reach and influence. In the view of Brian Wicker, one of the leading voices of radical Catholicism, it was the recognition of the impossibility of separating the moral from the political problems of the Cold War that provided a mission for what came to be called the Catholic

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Left.55 Most troubling to leftist Catholics was the supine conformity of the Church to capitalist governments and its dogmatic, reflexive anticommunism, both of which were explosive fuel in intensifying the Cold War. A number of leftist Catholics associated with PAX, who earlier had been guided by the Church’s teachings on just war theory, realized that such principles had no application in a world of nuclear weaponry. The voices of Dominicans in PAX as well as the criticisms of Archbishop Thomas Roberts lent significant theological prestige to antinuclear sentiment. The Catholic Left’s moral arguments leveled against just war casuistry raised profound questions about British foreign policy that could not be ignored. The criticisms of such intellectually weighty Catholics, drawing from an arsenal of irrefutable Catholic moral principles, complemented the agenda and tone of the secular New Left as expressed in its journal, the New Left Review. What gave considerable theological heft to this debate was the book edited by Walter Stein, Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience, which resulted from a 1961 symposium. The foreword, written by Archbishop Roberts, noted at the outset the singular and uncomfortable fact that up to this time there had been no official Catholic writings in support of nonviolence. All the contributors recognized the need for a Catholic-Christian witness to the inherent evil of nuclear warfare (besides Roberts, these were Stein, G. E. M. Anscombe, R. A. Markus, P. T. Geach, and Roger Smith).56 Roberts specifically called for Vatican Council II to take up this matter through the formation of what he called a “Council for Survival,” drawing on Protestant religious groups as well as Moslems to advance the case for survival and the salvation of the planet.57 The enormous sums currently spent on nuclear weapons, wrote Stein, could be used more effectively to combat communism by campaigns against poverty.58 The central argument of the book was that nuclear defense cannot provide security, because the probable use of such weapons would lead to total war, the annihilation of civilization, and thereby a fundamental breach of Christian just war principles. In short, there could be no moral alternative to an unconditional renunciation of such strategies of deterrence. Nuclear deterrence involves a conditional willingness to “unleash such a war — and is therefore not only wicked in what it risks, but in terms of implicit intention.”59 Stein

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lamented the fact that no adequate Catholic witness had emerged on the question of nuclear weapons, and he appealed for an authoritative pronouncement from the Vatican. Although the book’s unilateralist recommendations to forsake nuclear weapons were politically unacceptable, none of the “traditionalist” reviews of the work could dent the moral arguments put forth by the symposium’s contributors. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was formed in 1958 by some of Britain’s most eminent progressive intellectuals and politicians, including Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley, Kingsley Martin, and Michael Foot. The group first met in the home of Canon John Collins of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Ultimately, the CND’s aims would be broader than merely organizing opposition to the building and testing of nuclear weapons. Russell was chosen as president, and Canon Collins was selected as chair. CND was formally launched at a public meeting on 17 February 1958 in the Central Hall, Westminster. It was the hope of the New Left that the issue of disarmament could serve as the catalyst for transforming Britain’s tired politics and revitalizing a labor movement that had become bogged down in the conventional nostrums of worn-out left routines. Peggy Duff, general secretary of the CND, saw the New Left as providing the fresh leadership and analytical political prowess for laying the moral foundation necessary for a nationwide campaign for disarmament and socialism.60 The New Left believed that peace and socialism were mutually complementary, each requiring the support of the other. The CND’s sponsorship of protest marches and its participation in working sessions with New Left clubs engendered a sense of belonging among those who participated, resulting, in the words of Ralph Samuel, in “a political coming of age” for a generation of youth and “new forms of cultural politics.” Unless the Labour Party could find a means of relating to these participants and policies, claimed Samuel, “it would wither on the vine.”61 The annual Aldermaston March became the signature event for the CND: in 1960, approximately 100,000 people participated in the final rally of the march. The CND gatherings also proved to be fertile breeding grounds for a different type of activist: many people of working-class backgrounds with newly acquired higher educations who were eager to take on the task of transforming the structure of British politics. Stuart Hall envisioned the CND as a vehicle through which the New Left could broaden

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its politics and educate ordinary people in the “Gramsci sense” about the moral connections between “‘the bomb’, capitalism, NATO, Stalinism, the Warsaw Pact.”62 The pages of the New Left Review also showed a special reverence for Antonio Gramsci, whose ideas seemed directly relevant to the problems confronting socialism in postwar democratic Western countries. Gramsci was a politician, a political theorist, and a founding member of the Italian Marxist Party. He was imprisoned by Mussolini in 1926 and died from complications relating to his incarceration. Gramsci had claimed that capitalism maintained itself not only through violence and economic force but also, and most important, by controlling culture. It was through what he called “hegemonic culture” that the bourgeoisie were able to inculcate their own values into the consciousness of all classes, thereby undercutting the potential for a working-class revolution. Thus, the ruling elites perpetuated their power not only through coercion but also through compliance. The bourgeois power brokers complied with working-class demands for better wages, improved working conditions, and access to party politics, but only to draw the working class into their own cultural matrix—in effect, “embourgeoisifying” their social consciousness. The only way the status quo could be challenged, he asserted, was for the working class to develop a culture of their own, independent of all bourgeois values. It was this kind of Gramscian social awareness that the New Left sought to promote.63 Perry Anderson was the first to attempt to use the ideas of Gramsci to analyze the historical development of English culture. In order to rise above the dominant “hegemonic” culture of the prevailing bourgeois elites, it was imperative, argued Anderson, for the working class to overcome the limits imposed by the regnant “corporate consciousness” of capitalism. A new revolutionary consciousness that would challenge the dominant ideology of the ruling classes could be advanced, Anderson believed, by the intellectuals of the Left.64 An outgrowth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was the Christian CND. Its inspiration was a large meeting in May 1959 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, organized by Christian Action and the Quaker Friends’ Peace Committee. The topic of the gathering was “Modern War: A Challenge to Christians.” Several participants saw the need

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to introduce a religious dimension to the antinuclear campaign, and in the following year they created a peace group as a specialist section of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, called the Christian CND (CCND). Its mission was to awaken the clergy and their congregations to the danger of nuclear weapons and to garner their support for the CND’s efforts to dissuade the government from manufacturing and using such weapons as a means of deterrence. As an affiliate of the parent organization, the CCND reported to the CND national council and annual conference. The CCND rapidly became completely ecumenical, drawing activists from the Anglicans, Catholics, Quakers, Methodists, and Free Churches. This kind of practical ecumenism represented a pioneering effort of people from a cross-section of the nation’s denominations fighting for peace and social justice. As Christopher Calnan has noted, the extent of ecumenical work undertaken by the Left at this juncture was remarkable for its time and in some ways was far more radical than such efforts at a later date, namely, initiatives that were more hierarchically led and more inward in focus.65 Ecumenism remained a singular feature that ran through the Christian Left in the 1960s. A number of Catholics gave public support to the CCND despite strong disapproval from the bishops and conservative clergy and lay people.66 The leading Catholic voice for the CCND was Simon Blake, who frequently took it upon himself to lead its many peace pilgrimages and who also held most of the executive offices in the CCND.67 On their marches the group passed out leaflets about the inhumanity of nuclear weapons especially written from a Christian perspective. One of the first and most effective was entitled “Letter to a Parish Priest,” written by the well-known novelist Pamela Frankau. Diana Collins, wife of Canon Collins, wrote a booklet called Can Christians Accept the Nuclear Deterrent? In 1964, the CCND inaugurated its own journal, Rushlight. It published news regarding activities of CCND local groups as well as poetry and various articles on the campaign from a theological point of view. The large number of protest marches, pilgrimages, vigils, and sheer agitprop signaled the seriousness of the Christian CND’s mission. In 1963, for example, the CCND protested about a British Council of Churches report that accepted nuclear deterrence on military and strategic grounds.

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The Christian Group of the Committee of 100 held a three-day vigil outside Lambeth Palace, requesting a dialogue with the archbishop of Canterbury.68 He finally relented and joined the group for fifteen minutes of prayer. In 1964, the Salisbury CCND convinced their bishop to halt a Good Friday procession that he was leading and join in a prayer for peace. In 1966, Father Blake and the Anglican priest Paul Oestreicher sent a letter to members of Parliament expressing CCND views prior to a parliamentary debate on the war in Vietnam. In other peace initiatives, the CCND targeted Porton Down, Wiltshire, the research facility for the development of the military’s chemical and biological weapons; held demonstrations at the Atomic Weapons Research Centre at Foulness, Essex; and organized numerous vigils of peace at the shipyard that launched Polaris submarines.69 Another association worth mentioning in this context was the Catholic Nuclear Disarmament Group (CNDG). This smaller organization existed between 1959 and 1963. Its younger members carried their banner on the Aldermaston marches and handed out leaflets outside churches. Unlike the CCND, the CNDG was independent, never having become an integral part of the larger CND structure. Among those leading members who were affiliated with the CNDG were Adrian Cunningham, who served as secretary for a time, Slant’s Peter Lumsden, and Bernardine Wall, the daughter of Bernard and Barbara Wall. The combined shock of the Hungary and Suez crises made the British Left increasingly aware of the importance of a strong moral foundation for the construction of a new political consciousness, one that would no longer countenance the betrayal of human values in an irrational arms race that could destroy the planet. E. P. Thompson intended the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to be, as he put it, an “assault against fatalism” opposing “a categorical moral imperative to all the life-corrupting arguments of expediency.”70 The hope was that the Labour Party, with its tradition of pacifism, could become an agent for moral transformation by officially embracing nuclear disarmament. And the CND adopted the New Left’s foreign policy platform: a demand for withdrawal from NATO and the pursuit of a “positive neutralism,” meaning that Britain should help newly independent nations to liberate themselves from the political machinations of the two superpowers, the United States and the

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USSR. The objective was to create a “third space,” a zone of economic freedom where postcolonial nations could follow their own paths of development. Unfortunately, the hopes of the New Left and the CND activists were shattered when the majority at the 1961 Labour Party Conference voted to support the Anglo-American alliance– based defense policy. Peggy Duff claimed that the movement had “scared the politicians stiff ” and thus brought together a coalition of forces within the establishment that crushed the CND’s moral imperatives. They fought the CND and beat it. The culprits were not only “the Tories, but the ‘Socialists,’ the Gaitskells, the Wilsons, the Healeys, the Stewarts, the democratic socialists, the bright young technocrats seeking power, accepting megaton and megadeath, the monstrous doctrine of nuclear-power politics. They fought and won.”71 A significant lesson for New Left Catholics was learned from this episode, namely, that the truth of one’s moral assertions had no effect on influencing policy unless it could be incorporated into a larger political strategy for change.72 It was even more poignant for the young Catholic activists that their own weapon for promoting the CND agenda, Stein’s book Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience, was refused an imprimatur by the Church. The reason given was not based on moral or theological grounds, but rather because its publication was deemed “inopportune.” All this seemed to resonate with Gramsci’s sense of cultural hegemony. An institution supposedly intended to protect the faithful from false doctrine was being used to stifle a discussion central to the fundamental issues of Christian orthodoxy. The refusal to grant an imprimatur was for its critics a symbol of the Church’s historical cooption by the reigning political powers of the day. Many of the Catholic Left recognized a disturbing symmetry between the Church’s behavior on the nuclear issue and its submission to the Nazis in Germany. As was made clear in Gordon Zahn’s German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars (1962)—Zahn was an early contributor to Slant who gained iconic status among pacifists and antiwar activists in Britain and the United States in the 1960s— it was the absence of any thoughtful connection between political commitment and moral standards that enabled the Church for purposes of expediency to acquiesce

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to the Nazi state. Zahn concluded from his research that the average German Catholic had no desire to oppose the Nazis and was actually called on by his religious leaders to support Hitler’s wars. After rigorous investigation, Zahn learned of no more than seven Catholics who openly refused Nazi military service.73 Just two years after Zahn’s book appeared, the American scholar Guenter Lewy published The Catholic Church in Nazi Germany (1964), which gave further scholarly credence to Zahn’s thesis.74 Drawing on copious unpublished German sources, Lewy showed that the bishops were largely supportive of Hitler’s dictatorship, that by 1935 they were diligently trying to find common ground with Nazism, but that in the end they totally misunderstood the nature of the man and his movement: “One must conclude,” wrote Lewy, “that the [Catholic] view of the Nazi regime as merely another conventional political system was based on an unsophisticated political perspective.”75 Zahn’s and Lewy’s books were complemented by a German examination of the social and political reasons for the Church’s failure to combat Nazism. Carl Amery’s Capitulation: The Lesson of German Catholicism (1967) essentially concurred with the Zahn-Lewy critique but carried the analysis forward, showing how such behavior had continued to shape the Church’s current collaboration with entrenched political powers.76 Amery described what he called “Catholicism of the milieu” as the source of the Church’s capitulation to secular political power. “Catholics of the milieu” are those who are almost exclusively dependent on the prevailing ideas and values of the majority without reference to the demands of the gospel.77 In a more recent study of this phenomenon by the eminent German historian Klemens von Klemperer, The German Resistance against Hitler (1992), Klemperer wrote that, on balance, the various Christian churches in Germany took no part in the Widerstand (resistance) against Hitler.78 German Catholics, for their part, were consumed with the need to demonstrate their “national” reliability. This patriotic imperative, combined with a fear of communist dictatorship, made it politically expedient to equivocate on the issue of National Socialism.79 The accumulated historical, political, and moral failings of the Roman Catholic Church prompted one of the first publications from the English Catholic Left to attract scholarly attention. This was J. M. Cam-

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eron’s collection of essays first published in 1960 and issued in book form as The Night Battle (1962). Cameron, along with Brian Wicker, can be considered a pioneer of the Catholic New Left. Together, their books were the first to raise fundamental questions about Catholicism, history, and political culture. Their views provided a template for articulating what Catholics should do to achieve their transformative objectives. Cameron was an eminent professor of philosophy at Leeds University and later became Master of Rutherford College at the University of Kent. He converted to Catholicism from Marxism in 1944 and later served as the British correspondent for Commonwealth magazine.80 He finished his career at the University of Toronto as chair of philosophy, St. Michael’s College, and as Terry Lecturer at Yale University. Cameron identified himself as a “Catholic of the left” and pointed out that the earlier moral failings outlined by Zahn and Amery continued to afflict the Church in the postwar era. Catholics, Cameron asserted, were inclined to what he called “political fetishism,” meaning that they deferred to the commands of the state not only in matters of war and peace but also on all issues concerning the social and economic good. Such reflexive capitulation, undertaken in the absence of traditional moral principles, had prevented not only Catholics but also Westerners in general from objectively examining communism, which had gone through significant transformations since the death of Stalin. Not only had this “fetishism” precluded a more critical understanding of the volatile issues that fueled the Cold War—all the more dangerous in an age of nuclear weaponry—but it had also led to Catholics in general defending the iniquities of capitalism. And there was nothing new about this. Cameron noted that the Church throughout the modern era stood on the fringes of European politics, imprisoned by a number of political myths, a form of “false consciousness” that distorted reality for purposes of sustaining the power of entrenched elites.81 Two of the most egregious examples of distorting political myths, Cameron pointed out, were the Catholic notions of a Jewish-Marxist world conspiracy and the depiction of the Spanish Civil War as a crusade to save Western civilization from godless communism. The Spanish myth, Cameron argued, was part of a larger myth asserting a world conflict between the Church and communism, a battle in lockstep with the Cold War struggle between Western

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democratic capitalism and Soviet totalitarianism. In Cameron’s mind, both ordinary and elite Catholics today were content with and supportive of capitalism, “prepared to defend it as a way of life against what is held to be the relentless and unceasing threat of world Communism to subvert it.”82 The Soviets were imprisoned in a similar myth of their own: the conviction that the Vatican and all Catholics were agents of Western imperialism.83 The result of such thinking prevented critical analyses of communism and the possibility of finding solutions to Cold War conflict and the threat of nuclear catastrophe. Cameron’s critique of both the Church and the current political environment in Britain was substantially influenced and strengthened by his reading of Amery’s Capitulation, for which he wrote the foreword in the 1967 English translation. What Amery had called the “Catholicism of the milieu” that made possible a Franz von Papen (the Catholic politician who helped to move Hitler into the chancellorship) was prevalent today in Britain, claimed Cameron, as witnessed by those Catholics who acquiesced in supporting without question the materialistic, capitalist ethos of getting rich and the potential for mass murder with nuclear warfare. Over the years a certain dualism in values developed within the Catholic community. There was the realm of private morality (mostly sexual), where the Church had full jurisdiction, and the values of the public political sphere, where what was defined by the state prevailed. It was the Church’s insistence on maintaining the solidarity of the Catholic community at all costs that encouraged it to place such a high value on following secular authority without question. In Cameron’s mind, the same set of behaviors that had disgraced the Church in Germany were operating in Britain. Today, he claimed, anything goes in the war against communism: “The moral heresy that the end justifies the means is now the fundamental moral principle of anti-Communist Catholicism.”84 Cameron had no hope of Catholicism being transformed so as to bear witness against the milieu, because in his view the Church was of the milieu. Rather, what was needed was the inner transformation of the milieu itself, and this would require a change in the spirit and working methods in the administrative structures of the Church.85 When his essays were first published, in 1960, Cameron saw little hope of overcoming the delusory thinking of political fetishism through

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intellectual discussion. He believed that only a small number of Catholics could be reached by political argument. The one possibility for transformation lay with the growth in maturity of lay Catholics who might be able to bring change within the Church through liturgical renewal. A mature Catholic would be “the complete man, a social and political animal who takes his membership of the supernatural society seriously and intelligently, is a solvent of mythical thinking.”86 Cameron was convinced that the American Church was better positioned to make this breakthrough. The old centers of Catholicism, England and the Continent, were too heavily conditioned by social and ecclesiastical hierarchies to make the transition. Another prominent Catholic of the left to make his mark at this time was Brian Wicker (who converted in 1951), a member of the Department of Extramural Studies at Birmingham University and a regular correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in the 1960s. Wicker’s involvement with the Catholic Left came about not because of any inherent interest in Marxist social analysis but as a consequence of his concerns regarding nuclear weapons. This became an especially pressing matter after Britain decided to develop its own atomic bomb. Wicker joined PAX in 1958. From that point onward he developed close relations with the Dominican community, the main source of guidance for those in this peace movement. Wicker was instructed in Catholicism by Father Illtud Evans, O.P, who had been part of Eric Gill’s circle. PAX held annual meetings at the Dominican conference center in Rugeley, Staffordshire, where much of the discussion, wrote Wicker, centered on the morality of nuclear weapons and their intrinsic evil. J. M. Cameron was an active member of this group, and he and Wicker became close friends.87 Around this time Wicker also met Walter Stein, who began to draft papers on the peace issues that eventually culminated in Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience. The PAX group was especially intent in getting these matters into the Vatican Council agenda, which was beginning to meet at that time. Archbishop Thomas Roberts, who had confirmed Wicker into the faith, was an influential member of PAX, and the group hoped that his eminent standing in the Church would facilitate a hearing on the morality of nuclear weapons at the Vatican Council. Dorothy Day and Bede

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Griffiths were also involved in pushing this agenda, having been participants at one of the PAX conferences in 1960.88 Roberts drafted speeches to be given at the Council on matters of war and contraception, but his submissions to speak were turned down by Curia conservatives. Roberts’s views were aired only in three press conferences given to the public. His association with PAX and comments made earlier at a Spode House conference regarding nuclear weapons (1959) had already gotten him into trouble with the Holy Office.89 Brian Wicker’s books and articles on a radical approach to social and political matters through Catholicism appeared roughly at the same time as Cameron’s, and both helped to create the framework for developing a uniquely Catholic approach to changing the political culture of England. Wicker’s Culture and Liturgy (1963) was perhaps the first book devoted to outlining the case for a Catholic Left. Wicker gave favorable notice to Cameron’s Night Battle and frequently referenced Cameron’s ideas in his own writings on Catholic issues. Wicker essentially agreed with Cameron on the role of liturgical renewal for addressing the problems of Church and society. Wicker insisted that the cultural task of the individual Catholic who wished to be engaged politically in the world was to mediate the supernatural reality of the liturgical assembly, a “community of the faithful,” to the rest of society so as to promote a more humanistic and egalitarian social order. He took issue with Catholic conservatives who opposed the egalitarian agenda on theological grounds. The traditionalist position was that the Church was not a democracy but rather a hierarchical institution dedicated to the pastoral saving of souls. It would constitute a betrayal of this sacred mission to identify too closely with the secular forces that seek to promote social and economic justice. Conversely, it was a common insistence of the Catholic Left that the problems of morals and culture were intricately linked to the issues of sociology and politics. Their objective, argued Wicker, was not to confuse moral and political issues but to “put morals back into a political world.”90 The Catholic Leftists recognized that one of the major errors of Christians in the industrial era was to withdraw from the secular realm and leave the field to others, in this case revolutionary Marxism and bourgeois evolutionary humanism, the latter of which in their view

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served as a tool for accommodation with the prevailing elitist and capitalist power structures. The problem for the Church was that in reality it had “a foot in both camps,” since it was involved in both the secular and the spiritual realms. The Church certainly regarded itself as a developing social organism, as evidenced by its engagement historically with political forces, and thus as involved in an evolutionary process (a point made by Teilhard de Chardin). Yet Christians were also part of a society that was destined to end and be reborn into a revolutionary, totally transfigured world. The Christian objective, Wicker insisted, was to fuse in some way the evolutionary and revolutionary perspectives. But this required an actively engaged Christian dedicated to the coming transformation of the world.91 Both Wicker and Cameron appreciated the Catholic Left’s attempts to develop a scholarly analysis of society for the purposes of making a radical cultural transformation, but a continued weakness of the Left’s mission was an inadequate philosophy of mankind to guide the process. Wicker hoped that a Christianity grounded on a theological understanding of God’s revelation throughout human history might provide the foundation for this philosophical underpinning. Might not the theology of Teilhard de Chardin serve this purpose? Many on the Catholic Left appreciated the utility of Marxism as theory, in the sense that it was an incisive tool for critiquing bourgeois capitalist society. In their analysis of the British postwar social order, members of the Left drew primarily on Marx. To many observers, the advances since 1945 in the areas of growth in employment, public service, welfare, health, education, the mitigation of large-scale poverty, and the overall increases in income and living standards constituted a “social revolution.” However, the New Left believed that this term was hyperbolic, if not completely false. They asserted that these advances were mere “changes on the edges,” functionally placating the people and disguising the fact that social and economic power was actually concentrated more than ever in the hands of those who controlled corporate business. The leaders of the Labour Party (Gaitskell, Crosland, Harold Wilson and company) depicted these advancements as the first installment on the program for a socialist Britain. This proposition was rejected by the New Left, since they believed that the social and economic inequalities of the capitalist system had remained untouched. The only

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solution in their view was a radical restructuring of the current cultural and social order, and they could draw on Marx to justify why this was necessary. What impressed Cameron about the New Left’s diagnosis of the structural necessity to transform capitalism was less its borrowing from Marx than its willingness to examine British culture at a deeper level by drawing on the work of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy (1957) demonstrated that the enormous rise in working-class literacy and the exposure to print, broadcast, and visual media encouraged a materialist acquisitiveness, a “candy-floss world” that assured the continued acceptance of a capitalist social and economic order. Although the near elimination of illiteracy was to be lauded, the growth of a popular culture that was designed to dissolve awareness of “classness” had in many ways eroded a distinctive working-class culture. As Hoggart lamented, “The old forms of class culture are in danger of being replaced by a poorer kind of classless, or by . . . a ‘faceless’ culture, and this is to be regretted.”92 Hoggart’s work revealed how superficial and misleading were conventional, liberal ideas regarding culture and social change. The Uses of Literacy for the New Left was also a reaffirmation of their Gramscian view that matters of culture were central to assuring a radical transformation of the social order. Although Cameron welcomed the Catholic Left’s commitment to a cultural revolution, he was troubled by the possible influence of the former communists who had helped to give birth to the secular New Left. He called this the danger of a “vestigial bolshevism,” the continuing allegiance of such former communists to a pseudo-scientific, MarxistLeninist orthodoxy for which a radical and violent breach with the prevailing social order was a necessity. There had been a high rate of social change since 1945, claimed Cameron, and there was no reason to assume that Britain’s social institutions had become so rigid that they had to be shattered to achieve the New Left’s goal of a humanist socialism.93 Cameron also was initially not convinced that it was possible to draw selectively from portions of Marx’s work and to disregard the contributions of Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, all of which were natural, perhaps inevitable, outgrowths of the master’s positivistic revolutionary agenda. Would not such selectivity make one a pseudo or “cafeteria” Marxist?94

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The answers to Cameron’s reservations were provided by Raymond Williams and other writers of the New Left. “Socialist humanism,” they proclaimed, had its philosophical roots in a variety of sources that were by no means exclusively Marxist. As Peter Berger and Stanley Pullberg pointed out in the New Left Review, “We believe in the usefulness for sociological theory of certain Marxian categories as well as of insights drawn from the phenomenological analysis of social life. This does not imply any doctrinaire commitment. It is important, rather, to show how sociological theory can be enriched by streams of thought coming from outside the sociological tradition in the narrower sense.”95 In other words, there was no good reason why Marx could not be used selectively along with a number of other intellectuals—Freud, Wittgenstein, Leavis, Teilhard de Chardin—both to critique the prevailing social order and to provide insights on what was required to radically transform it.96 Marxism for Catholics, claimed Wicker, can serve as a philosophical underpinning of certain basic points of Christianity’s revolutionary perspective: “There is a dialogue of understanding and mutual exchange to be undertaken: but beyond that, in practical terms, there is only a multiplicity of approaches to be adopted or abandoned according to the insights offered by that exchange.”97 The Church, in short, can be inclusive in its reach but ultimately must rediscover its eschatological vision and work out for itself a form of revolutionary perspective that satisfies the world’s needs. Cameron’s concerns about the violent revolutionary rupture inherent in vestigial bolshevism on the New Left were addressed in Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), two books that offered a political architecture for the Catholic New Left project. Without question, Williams would prove to be the most influential thinker for young Catholic intellectuals in providing direction and inspiration for their ambitious cultural mission to change both the Church and British society. In Culture and Society, Williams undertook a comprehensive study of the relationship between English literature and society during the period from 1780 to 1950. His central insights on the connection between culture and social change offered to the Catholic Left a solution to the positivism of orthodox Marxism. Although Marx had made the observation that a society’s economic organization could not be excluded

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from its moral and intellectual values, thereby suggesting the importance of studying society in its wholeness, he had failed, Williams noted, to integrate this into a cultural theory. Marx’s followers tended to adhere too rigidly to his notions of reality residing in the distinctions between substructure and superstructure. The former serves as the economic base, which gives shape to the dynamics of politics, values, norms, mores, and so forth that comprise society’s superstructure. Out of this came a mechanistic dialectic asserting that consciousness and culture are products of economic forces controlled by the dominant class. Williams argued that this analysis could not be credibly applied in complex societies marked by the development of mass media communications and the expansion of large-scale organizations in postindustrial stages of development. In addition to raising questions about the universal applicability of Marxist ideas of culture and social change, Williams also took issue with liberal and conservative theories of culture, in this case those developed by F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot, respectively. Leavis asserted that culture was of two types: that of a higher, more refined nature, juxtaposed with the mundane life of commoners. In modern society a defensive elite was struggling to keep the one from being debased by the other. The definition and transmission of “higher values” is the task of the few, an Arnoldian “remnant,” as Terry Eagleton put it, who through the process of education and personal endeavor ensure a gradual, evolutionary cultural progress. Eliot, in his Notes towards The Definition of Culture (1948), directly inspired Williams to develop his own countervailing theory. Unlike Leavis, Eliot recognized an organic “common culture” of shared beliefs and behaviors, yet he was not convinced that ordinary people were intellectually capable of fully participating in it. Their involvement in common culture could only be piecemeal, lived in stratified levels of consciousness roughly analogous to the social class to which they belonged. It was the function of elites (the class with which Eliot himself identified) to preserve and enrich this cultural consciousness. But Eliot’s notion of a common culture was one that could not be democratically shared because of what he regarded as the natural structured inequalities of the human condition.98 Williams, like Hoggart, came from the working class and had a diametrically opposed vision of the nature and purpose of culture. His

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was a more nuanced but complex view than that articulated by Marx, Leavis, and Eliot. Culture, as he envisioned it, contained extreme diversities of situation that could not be automatically directed to any kind of social or personal end. Culture was a constitutive force in social and political reproduction and not, as for Marx, a secondary, superstructural reflection of society’s economic base. Williams recognized the need for a common culture that placed no restrictions on entry to its activities, one that offered equality and opportunity to everyone. Traditionally, the idea of culture was deemed the domain of those of high birth, a leisured aristocratic class dedicated to preserving civilization from those people who would debase it. In modern times a new rising bourgeoisie had tried to liberate itself from such restrictions in their efforts to create a more broadly based and humanistic culture, yet one in practice still controlled by an elite class of wealth and privilege. And today Marxists speak of an alternative proletarian culture. Identifying the matrix of modern social values with single-interest groups was for Williams an oversimplification and highly misleading, for culture in his view should be seen as constituting the total life of the group: culture was crescive, shared and continually created by everyone who participated in it. “The body of intellectual and imaginative work that each generation receives as its traditional culture,” insisted Williams, “is always, and necessarily, something more than the product of a single class.”99 Certainly there were times when a particular class was dominant, yet it was still possible for those in other classes to contribute to the common cultural pool. In any case, Williams believed that what fundamentally defined the essence of culture was less class than shared language. It was through a common language that people articulate intellectual and literary traditions that give shape to individual consciousness, and these were “constantly revalued with every shift in experience.”100 The dynamic engine of English culture was language, which, with its richness and flexibility, was continually evolving and could only be stultified by the imposition of crude categories of class.101 Yet Williams insisted that the distinguishing element in English life since the industrial revolution was not “language, not dress, not leisure—for these will tend to uniformity. The crucial distinction was between alternative ideas of the nature of social relationship.”102 And here the central interaction had been between bourgeois individualist modes

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of behavior and the more collectivist ideas of the working class that were primarily social rather than individual. Both value sets had contributed to the advancement of English culture. As the more extreme deprivations wrought by capitalism became more burdensome, sensitive middle-class intellectuals (from Coleridge to Tawney) made an effort to mitigate excesses of the individualist ethic by stressing the virtue of service. (These efforts led to a reconfiguration of English education that now focuses on the training of civil servants, who in turn serve as a managing elite.) On the other hand, the working class for their part continued to nurture the ethos of solidarity. Having been socialized into a working-class culture, Williams as a scholarship student had experienced considerable discomfort while obtaining a middle-class education. In practice, he recognized that the bourgeois ethic of service at every level confirmed and perpetuated the status quo, which essentially denied the equality of the people among whom Williams had grown up. This made it exceedingly difficult for Williams, when invited to become an upper servant of the establishment, to accept a status of which he fundamentally disapproved and that was deeply resented by those who experienced such paternalistic oversight. The sense of community felt by the ruling establishment was not in any way shared by working-class people. The idea of service, a well-meaning and fundamental value set of bourgeois culture, had broken and became dysfunctional for those at the bottom. In this respect, the ethos of service/management in practice was essentially incompatible with the working-class version of community, which was posited on the principle of equality and group solidarity. Although the idea of service to the community had not been fully accepted by the working class as a form of solidarity, the idea of opportunity, which Williams called “the ladder,” had some ameliorative effect. Those in the working class community with sufficient merit accepted offers to climb the social ladder. But such forms of upward social mobility were also part of the bourgeois model of culture and could not be uniformly shared by the proletariat. Williams, for his part, objected to the ladder version of society on two levels: “first, that it weakens the principles of common betterment, which ought to be the absolute value; second, that it sweetens the poison of hierarchy, in particular by offering

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the hierarchy of merit as a thing different in kind from the hierarchy of money or birth.”103 Williams thought that the solution to this unequal cultural bifurcation was the principle of solidarity, for this is what would allow for the growth of a common culture with a sense of shared community for all social classes. A living culture of this kind would encourage everyone to contribute to its maturation and development. Culture and Society had an immediate, personal appeal to the generation of postwar Catholics whose exposure to the establishment’s higher education system had raised precisely the same sensitivities and discontents described by Williams. They also resented the subtle but forced conformity to bourgeois mentalities. “The ladder,” according to Eagleton, was the dominant image that defined the ethos of liberal paternalism. The fact that the working class had now been given opportunities to climb to the top was to be celebrated, but absent from this image was the caveat that the climbing must be done on the terms of those who owned the ladder. Each rung demanded acceptance of certain values. For Eagleton, this was reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Church’s attitude toward people, because the values of the rungs were not subject to redefinition or remaking: “they are offered for verification, and by climbing up this is what we are doing: we’re accepting the pre-labeled rungs, the pre-formed values, the ways they think we should live.”104 Williams’s critique of what amounted to liberal paternalism closely meshed with what the Catholic Left found objectionable in the Roman Church. His call was for a humanist socialism, outlined more fully in The Long Revolution (1961), that allowed for the achievement of full and free selfhood and could be realized only by overcoming the cultural paternalism of the ruling elites. The Catholic Church in England was itself developing a liberal paternalistic response to demands for more openness and lay participation. The hierarchy appeared to be shaping protests concerning implementing Vatican II reforms into channels that assured the maintenance of the status quo, thereby keeping the structural realities intact. The Leftists asserted that discussions of Church governance and theology initiated by the middle classes, confined to the mores of liberal principles, were kept within boundaries that prevented a capacity for thinking in revolutionary channels. Stability was further assured by the traditional mentalities of the working classes, which were

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shaped by Irish attitudes of deference to clerical authority. Members of the Catholic Left, many of whom were sympathetic to the working-class political traditions from which they emerged, saw themselves as the lone voices for a radical alternative to what Williams described as the cultural conformity of liberal paternalism. Williams’s emphasis on solidarity, community, and equality fired up these young Catholic intellectuals, who were quickly coming to the conclusion that social democracy could be realized in England only by means of a thorough revolution in culture. Williams’s theory of culture as society’s total way of life also made clear that the only way to bring about change was by engaging power, meaning the necessity of becoming politicized. Williams’s idea of culture had no less of an impact on the secular New Left. Perry Anderson, writing in the New Left Review, proclaimed The Long Revolution “the only major theoretical departure in English social thought in the last decade.”105 Stuart Hall outlined three ways in which Williams’s notion of culture merited major political investment. First, it was in the domain of culture that social and political change was making itself most pronounced. Second, rather than being a secondary dimension of reality, culture was constitutive and thus was an answer to the reductionist “economism” inherent in orthodox Marxism. Third, the discourse of culture was a core necessity to any language for the creation of socialism. For these reasons, claimed Hall, the New Left would put matters of cultural analysis and cultural politics at the center of its project.106 The Long Revolution served as a sequel to Williams’s Culture and Society. This revolution was defined as a universal struggle for freedom, the desire for people everywhere to govern themselves in a truly democratic society of their own making. As Williams explained it, the long revolution consisted of three parts: industrial (economic), democratic (political), and cultural (the popular expansion of learning, skills of literacy, and other forms of advanced communication). It was the third revolution that currently was the most insidiously resisted in Britain. However, these revolutions are intertwined and cannot be seen as separate processes, and the interactions of all three continue to shape communities, schools, families, entertainment, and modes of communication. Britain in the 1960s, observed Williams, had made substantial advances in all three areas of revolution, but they were far from complete.

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There was a serious state of imbalance between the income and wealth enjoyed by those at the top and the unmet social and individual needs of people in the lower classes. Yet there was little recognition that the inequities of class could be adjudicated only by sacrificing individual profit for social fairness.107 The need to address these inequities was made all the more imperative by the increasing complexity and interdependency of social relationships necessary for running a modern urban economy: In a society whose products depend almost entirely on intricate and continuous cooperation and social organization, we expect to consume as if we were isolated individuals, making our own way. We are then forced into the stupid comparison of individual consumption and social taxation—one desirable and to be extended, the other regrettably necessary and to be limited. From this kind of thinking the physical unbalance follows inevitably.108 Williams argued that the economic and social distortions widened by the continuing tripartite revolutions could only be ameliorated by the encouragement of a realistic sense of community. The major contributor to a fragmented community was capitalism, an economic system that functioned exclusively on the twin principles of consumerism and market dynamics. Its sole purpose was profit rather than any sense of social or humanistic utility. And here, Williams drew on Marx’s notion of alienation to show how such a system dehumanized the laborer by reducing the meaning of work to wages alone. Socialism was the single challenge to this system, but in Britain today, claimed Williams, the labor movement in its political and industrial thinking had been coopted by the very capitalists whom they had once opposed, through expanding levels of consumption and prosperity. Yet these gains not only masked the continuing strength of capitalist power but also further promoted its controls. This explained why many on the left had given up on the Labour Party, which was now merely regarded as “an alternative power group.” The trade unions, moreover, had followed a similar path of compliance. In Culture and Society, Williams had seen these workingclass institutions as offering a viable plan of social and economic organization for the future. In The Long Revolution he withdrew this claim, for

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Williams was now convinced that the prevailing elites had managed to convert these institutions into vehicles for maintaining the existing order. Williams identified three powerful forces that worked against the long revolution. The first and most significant was the ability of the power elite to resist the extension of democracy, wealth, and education to others. The second were the allies whom the elites recruited to support the existing system, namely, those who were bought off by the sweets of capitalism and saw personal benefits in continuing its existence (the history of the labor movement exemplified this). And third was the willingness of the common people to accept the elites’ version of social reality, one that essentially defined them as second-class citizens. This psychological acceptance of an inferior status produced a negative sense of self and limited social expectations.109 There was no single remedy to these problems, but Williams did see a myriad of ways in which the long revolution could be advanced. These included the expansion of democratic decision making in communities, more frequent political elections at both the local and national levels, and the development of a sense of community—“the true knowledge that we are working for ourselves and for each other . . . which is continually confused and in some cases cancelled by the plain fact that most of us do not own or control the means and product of our work.”110 In addition, it was imperative to extend culture within the context of economic and political life and to recognize how capitalism distorts its meaning and function. Williams envisioned a social construction that would greatly extend freedom to the producers of culture by limiting dependence on financial groups (monopolies in the media, for example). Finally, what Williams called the long revolution was ultimately driven by human energy, the conviction that individual men and women in exercising their freedoms were masters of their own lives. Williams’s notion of the long revolution and of what was required to achieve it became the clarion call to action for the organizational structures of the Catholic New Left. The ideas concerning culture and politics articulated by Williams and Hoggart, both of whom recognized the value of a Marxist critique of power, meshed closely with the intellectual dispositions of Catholics on the left. The architectural framework for their goal of a society of

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humanistic socialism required the creation of what Williams called a community of common culture. The task of such cultural construction was undertaken by a group of young Catholic university graduates who, under the inspiration of their Dominican mentors, launched a radical magazine called Slant. Its writers and the broader movement that took its name became the intellectual power house and seedbed of the Catholic New Left.

N I N E

The Slant Movement

The true descendent of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labour theory of value. The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx. —R. H. Tawney1

LEFTIST BEGINNINGS

In 1964 a group of undergraduates at Cambridge University and their clerical advisors decided to launch a journal whose purpose was a radical examination of traditional Catholic theology so as to promote the social goals of the Gospels. For them, these goals implied a socialist revolution. Their vision of socialism was essentially that of the secular New Left, a “socialist humanism,” but one “baptized” by Christianity. The éminence grise behind the effort was the Marxist Dominican friar Laurence Bright, who ran a student group at Cambridge called the Aquinas Society.2 It attracted left-wing Catholic undergraduates largely of workingclass and lower-middle-class backgrounds who chafed under the official chaplaincy dominated at the time by exclusionary Catholic public-school 216

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types. Their leader was Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, chaplain of Fisher House, who “ran the place as a public school extension” and whose benighted version of conservatism ran to excluding women from attending the main Sunday Mass.3 Father Laurence’s coterie mounted an attack on such traditionalist and elitist posturing by publishing a bimonthly journal dedicated to the Catholic Left, called Slant. The group initially chose Bias as their moniker but dropped the name when Fergus Kerr discovered a Southampton University magazine of that name. Ironically, no one ever heard of the Southampton journal again.4 The title Slant was meant to symbolize the trajectory of its thinking: “As theological and ecclesial insights develop, it should become more apparent that the natural Christian slant is to the Communal, i.e., leftwards.”5 Under the inspiration of Father Laurence, the Slant group, which the historian Adrian Hastings called a sort of “intellectual Beatles,”6 energetically and enthusiastically promoted a Marxist critique of all forms of conventional thinking. Several of the Slant circle already involved in leftist politics were soon joined by associates of the December Group. The latter’s annual 1965 meeting, directed by Brian Wicker, was essentially dominated by the Slant agenda, and the two groups merged to sponsor a number of symposia and to publish books dedicated to a cross-fertilization of radical Catholic social philosophy and Marxism.7 The fledgling undergraduate publishing enterprise took off with surprising speed, and within two years Slant, thanks in part to the support of Neil Middleton, was taken over by the leading Catholic publisher Sheed and Ward and moved to London. The founders of Slant were responsible for all of the editing, and Sheed and Ward took on the task of getting the magazine into production.8 The intermediary for this arrangement was Father Laurence, who was a friend of Middleton’s.9 The imprimatur of such a respected publishing firm, along with the support of the Dominicans’ New Blackfriars, assured that their radical views would be carried to a national audience.10 The Slant Manifesto (1966) announced that “Christians can never be conservatives, or liberals or even right-wing socialists; they must fight capitalism as evil; they must align themselves perhaps with all those traditional enemies of the Church, left-wing socialists and atheistic Marxists.”11 Several informal meetings and discussion sessions between Slant and the editors of the

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journal Marxism Today followed. As Bernard Sharratt recalled, the offices of several leftist organizations were nearby— Sheed and Ward was one street away from the Communist Party headquarters in King Street, the Africa Center was opposite the offices of the Communist Party, and the Newman Association was almost next door to the New Left Review. With such proximity there was a fair amount of casual as well as formal “dialogue” going on, and all concerned drank at the same Covent Garden pubs.12 The origins of the Slant movement must be seen in the context of rapid postwar social change and a Church hierarchy with a tin ear for the needs of an increasingly refractory and intellectually charged Catholic middle class. Many of the latter had managed to enter Britain’s universities, others had graduated from them and were eager to have their voices heard regarding religious, social, and political matters. Their frustrations stemmed in large part from the traditional assumptions undergirding Catholic education. For generations the Church hierarchy had seen its responsibility as one of serving two widely separated social groups: aristocratic recusant families and a handful of eminent converts on the one hand, and, on the other, their uprooted co-religionists, the Irish immigrants who had fled the ravages of poverty and famine for work in England’s factories and their descendants. The latter, it was assumed, required protective pastoral care rather than exposure to the finer points of theology, literature, and philosophy. The Church and its upperclass elites took on the role of providing a protective leadership to the so-called underprivileged Catholic masses. Out of this paternalistic tradition emerged an aristocratic mode of service that gave the English Catholic Church the social configuration of a special caste. There was no place in it for a Catholic middle and professional class, whose numbers increased substantially after 1945; their choices were between the upper service caste or the undifferentiated working-class multitude.13 The cultural cleavage between aristocratic Catholic families and an ethnically sensitive working class was unique to English Catholicism. This was largely absent in the United States, with its broader variety of immigrant Catholics and the lack of an entrenched upper class of Catholics claiming the prerogatives of privilege. Moreover, as opposed to England’s Catholic hierarchy, the vast majority of the twentieth-century

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American episcopacy came from working-class backgrounds. The considerable cultural gulf between the older recusant Catholics and their Church leaders, on the one hand, and the Irish immigrants with middleclass aspirations, on the other, gave a sharper edge to political Catholicism in England. The Catholic Left, for example, had a deep revulsion against class privilege and were prickly about any manifestations of cultural elitism. The large gap between the English hierarchy and the intellectual and social needs of a growing and sophisticated Catholic bourgeoisie was revealed by social psychologist Monica Lawlor. Although middle-class Catholics were increasingly eager to participate in meaningful lay leadership projects, the Church continued to confine their roles and religious duties to prosaic areas of responsibility. For example, the hierarchy published a manual that listed five good works that the Church considered suitable for middle-class girls: l. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Every year to prepare a certain number of little girls for their First Communion, providing their clothes, etc. To place poor girls in Homes. To help ecclesiastical and religious vocations. To get any poor families they may know to send their children to Catechism. To assure a good education to children who would otherwise be deprived of it through loss of fortune. There is no position which is secure against such loss.14

These directives, largely crafted from the writings of Pope Pius XII, represented the extent to which the English hierarchy expected lay men and women to have a voice in Church matters. The emphasis, noted Lawlor, was on law, authority, rights, and duties, but nothing here reflected a sociological understanding of the functioning of a human community. The underlying flaw in Catholic social teaching was epitomized in the English Catholic Social Guild’s 1964 publication, A Catholic Guide to Social and Political Action by C. C. Clump, S. J. This was intended as a manual for the teaching of social thinking in Catholic schools. Drawing on numerous papal quotations, Father Clump made a distinction

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between what should concern a Christian and what was purely political. The Church, he insisted, must remain aloof from the “fleeting exigencies of politics.” Little was said here about how the Catholic must deal with challenges that evolve from the nature of a class-divided society or industrial capitalism.15 Clump’s missive was illustrative of the limitations of Catholic social teaching and especially of the watered-down English variety. From the outset, observed Slant’s Adrian Cunningham, the maturation of Catholic political mentality was significantly affected by the powerful cultural presence of capitalism and English social history, each of which inhibited the development of a radical edge to Catholic social thinking. Britain was the first, and for two centuries the most highly articulate, capitalist society. This social setting had a far more paralyzing effect on the emergence of radical Catholic social teaching than was the case on the Continent because of the British establishment’s economic capacity to co-opt dissenting voices. In addition, the Catholic hierarchy in large part was educated at the English College in Rome, which traditionally was a bastion of conservatism. This meant that the leaders of the English Catholic Church would not be supportive, by disposition or intention, of far-reaching theological experimentation. Furthermore, the precarious position of the leading recusant families, wracked by tensions of Catholic emancipation and accusations of ultramontanism, placed a premium on accepting the political status quo. The other segment of the English Catholic population, the working class of largely Irish origin, failed to develop a correlation between their religious beliefs and politics during the period of the formation of English working-class consciousness. Much of this was due to the Irish priests who quickly followed their peasant flocks as they emigrated to England in search of factory jobs. The Irish clergy sought to avoid bringing attention to the growing Catholic minority in England for fear of encouraging further limitations on what could be perceived as an unruly and untrustworthy alien population. Irish workers, for example, were encouraged by their clergy to resist unionization and avoid strikes. Unlike Protestant groups in England, the Catholic Church, noted historian E. P. Thompson, produced no “maverick” clergy who dedicated their leadership powers to furthering the development of the growing working-

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class movement.16 The result was that the Irish workers, much like their aristocratic co-religionists, preferred to stay beneath the political radar. The two-tiered class distribution of English Catholics fell both above and below the middle class, whose dissenting cultural values first gave shape to the intellectual content of a native socialism. Cunningham asserted that the interplay of all these factors— the acceptance of the political and economic status quo, a conservative-minded hierarchy, fears of antiCatholic measures, the absence of a religious-centered anticapitalism, and political prudence dictated by suspicions of ultramontanism— meant that support for any kind of socialism “was silent and inchoate.”17 For all of these reasons, Slant decided to target the growing Catholic middle class, which, although ignored by the official hierarchy, was beginning to express itself in organizations such as the Newman Association and the Union of Catholic Students, or by becoming active in a number of secular movements. It is notable that none of these groups received substantive support from the English bishops. Catholic university associations, for instance, were offered little official encouragement or funding by the Church, and whenever possible, the hierarchy tried to keep them under clerical control. The editors of Slant also hoped to make political capital out of the frustration among many Catholics concerning the English episcopate’s dilatory response to the progressive messages of Vatican II, especially those that envisioned more actively engaged lay men and women in religious affairs. The retrograde mind-set of the hierarchy regarding institutional reform was captured by one English bishop, who, in writing to his diocese from the Council, with misplaced confidence happily reiterated the message that “there was no need to fear, nothing had really changed.”18 The English bishops for the most part generally identified with the old Catholic families whose perspectives on religious matters and sociopolitical issues were not merely conservative but in some instances reactionary. Thus, the Slant group considered this a propitious moment to advance its agenda, especially since the English Catholic middle class was now increasing in sufficient numbers to develop a sense of corporate identity. The general idea, wrote Terry Eagleton, “was to try to shift a catholic middle class which hadn’t really got beyond a liberal-progressive stage (though that itself was much to be admired, more so than we felt at the time) to the political left—i.e.

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to fill in what we felt was the missing political dimension of Christian renewal.”19 Because the new theology was thought too esoteric and distant from working-class consciousness, the plan was to mobilize advanced elements of the bourgeoisie as an intellectual avant-garde to prod the religious establishment into transforming the internal structures of the Church so it could play a more meaningful role in bringing on a revolutionary and humanistic socialism. Slant would serve as the theoretical breeding ground for the promulgation of radical Catholic thinking necessary to complete this project.20 From the outset, however, Slant writers, fresh from their university studies, employed complex language to explicate ideas that were themselves complicated and thus difficult for the uninitiated to understand. The project of transforming the Church as a vehicle for socialist revolution, and bringing along with it the new middle class, led them to draw synthetically from the latest philosophical, political, and sociological writers on the Continent and in the United States. These were then integrated with new trends in theology. A grasp of the full meaning of Slant’s erudite disquisitions demanded patience and careful reading, which naturally limited the audience. It is important to point out that the Catholic Left was an amalgam of several overlapping groups. Slant stood out as the most radical one, and because of the intellectual power of its members and their prolific publications the movement came to cut the highest profile. Some of the associations of the Catholic Left were more interested in theory, others in praxis; some were more interested in reform, others in revolutionary politics. Besides the Slant group, the following would be considered part of the English Catholic Left: the Friday Group; the Blackheath Commune; the Renewal Movement; the Christian CND; the December Group; the Dominican Order; New Blackfriars; Sheed and Ward; Grille (Dublin); Slant X; the Newman Society; and the Student Christian Movement (SCM). The latter was the British section of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF), an association of autonomous national Student Christian Movements forming the youth and university student arm of the global ecumenical movement. The WSCF was founded in 1895 in Vadstena Castle, Sweden, and includes Protestant, Catholic, Anglican, Pentecostal, and Orthodox students. WSCF’s aims are to call

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members of the academic community to engage their faith in striving for peace and justice in and among nations. Throughout its history the WSCF has brought students together across theological and cultural boundaries to provide leaders for advancing the ecumenical movement, the Christian Left, progressive governments, and radical social movements. Generally associated with the left, the national SCMs have tended to foster such issues as liberation theology, Christian anarchism and Christian pacifism, interfaith dialogue, Christian socialism, environmentalist movements, and Christian feminism. Some famous members of the WSCF have been Archbishop William Temple, Jurgen Moltmann, Dietrich Bonhoffer, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the president of Liberia. The main force behind this early resurgence of Catholic leftism, Laurence Bright, O. P., had a varied and unorthodox career before joining the Dominican Order in 1947 at the age of twenty-seven. Born in 1920 to a solid middle-class family (his father was the headmaster of a grammar school), Bright started out as a moderate agnostic, at some point joined the Church of England, worked on the atomic bomb project as a nuclear physicist at Oxford, and in 1945 gave up what he called “Eliotlike Anglo-Catholicism” for the real thing: he joined the Church of Rome. It was a visceral dislike of capitalism that pushed him into leftwing politics, made all the easier, he claimed, by the radical traditions of the English Dominicans. Within the Slant movement itself, Father Laurence, in the words of Bernard Sharratt, was “the great interconnector,” facilitating relationships between the magazine and various other associations that were part of the Catholic Left—the Newman Association, the Renewal Movement, and the international and ecumenical WSCF, among others.21 It was Father Laurence, Herbert McCabe, the maverick editor of New Blackfriars, and Raymond Williams who had the greatest influence in these early years on Terry Eagleton, the most gifted and prolific writer of the younger Catholic New Left.22 Indeed, McCabe gave a radical turn to the religious thinking of two generations of young leftist Catholics.23 On the seventieth birthday of Father Herbert, Terry Eagleton wrote: “Dismally few people when you come to weigh it up, really change your life, even those who are traditionally supposed to. My supervisor at

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Cambridge changed my life about as much as [popular singer] Vera Lynn did. But without my friendship with Herbert McCabe I wouldn’t be at all what I am. So you can blame it all on him.”24 Herbert McCabe’s radicalism was given shape by spending three years as a priest in an inner-city parish in the industrial city of Newcastle. Afterward he became chaplain at De La Salle College, where he first met Eagleton. Besides tending to his chaplaincy duties, McCabe was a regular participant at Spode House events and traveled widely around England and Scotland lecturing on philosophy and theology to student groups. McCabe’s ideas were decidedly radical, in drawing imaginative connections between Christian theology and revolutionary Marxism. As the historian Eugene McCarraher has pointed out, what made McCabe’s teaching so unique and influential was his assertion that a revolutionary politics could be linked to a vibrant theological orthodoxy.25 McCabe was always able to show how his provocative political opinions were a reflection and fulfillment of classical theological teaching. An example was his radical assertion that, just as Marx looked forward to the final withering away of the state and of religion, similarly, achieving the fuller and more complete revolution as promised in the Kingdom of God would lead to the abolition of religion itself. Marx’s ideas, he argued, were relevant because they filled a gap in current Christian teaching, with its privileging of the personal and the spiritual at the expense of the communal context of everyday living, thus diverting attention from the broader secular and social promises of the Gospels. Marx’s critique of capitalism with its bourgeois bulwarks proved useful for McCabe in exposing the fraudulence of liberalism. He boldly asserted that liberal Christianity was theologically naive and even a perversion of the Gospels, because it promoted the illusion that the evils of capitalism could be attenuated by nice people “talking round a table and exercising . . . free choices at elections”—a notion based on the liberal assumption that if people could “only talk together it would be all cleared up.”26 Today, McCabe is considered one of the most significant English theologians of the twentieth century. In addition to Eagleton, he has instructed and significantly influenced people well beyond the Slant circle. These include, among others, Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Alasdair MacIntyre, James Alison, Seamus Heaney, Anthony Kenny, Charles Taylor, and Denys Turner.

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McCabe’s eager student Terry Eagleton arrived as an undergraduate at Cambridge University in 1961, the same year that Raymond Williams was appointed to a lectureship on the English faculty. Eagleton’s early understanding of cultural politics developed under Williams’s tutelage and was later nourished by an ongoing dialogue with Williams on related matters. A natural affinity developed between the two men, at least in part because both felt like outsiders — working-class “scholarship boys” offered entry into Britain’s elite institutions because of their sheer talent. Eagleton claimed that his attraction to Marxism may well have stemmed from his childhood as the son of a factory worker of Irish heritage in Salford, England. The city was fouled by air clogged with industrial waste, and two of Eagleton’s brothers died in infancy. Low wages made it difficult for his father to keep the family well fed and healthy. Salford was so poor and grimy that a researcher who undertook a sociological study of the city titled his book The Classic Slum.27 Eagleton himself suffered from serious asthma during his childhood, and although this prevented him from playing with his friends, it gave him time for prodigious reading. While a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Eagleton proved to be a brilliant scholar, winning the Rylands and Beddington Prizes for the best Tripos examination results. Eagleton began his professional academic career in 1964 at Jesus College, Cambridge, where at the age of twenty-one he was appointed the youngest research fellow since the eighteenth century at that institution. Williams was a fellow at Jesus College at the time when Eagleton was given his faculty position (and seems to have been partly instrumental in winning his appointment), and both men recognized the need to interpret English literature in a more radical and broader social framework. This contributed to the hostile treatment given the two working-class scholars at the hands of Cambridge’s traditionalist dons. They regarded us as the “New Barbarians,” said Eagleton, who were getting our grubby working-class hands on their precious culture. The old guard knew we were “burrowing away in politics, down in the engine room—but now we were getting on the bridge.”28 As a Cambridge fellow, Eagleton regarded it as his job to act as a focal point for others who felt alienated from the university’s academic and social life, which included mainly women, students from former British colonies, and all those of a social class different from the people who ran the institution.29

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Laurence Bright’s presence at Cambridge coincided with that of Eagleton and Raymond Williams. Eagleton described Bright as a bit of an odd duck on the left, “a cross between Oscar Wilde and a footloose cleric,” but someone who could “give people a nasty knee in the ideology while seeming only to pass the time of day, from which it would take them weeks to recover.”30 Perhaps this is why Bright had the rare success of winning accolades from Raymond Williams. Eagleton wrote that Williams and Bright only met once briefly, but that Williams considered Bright “a real man.” This was a genuine compliment, claimed Eagleton, since “Williams was reluctant to concede reality to most people he encountered in Cambridge.” Williams, moreover, was shrewd enough to have an insight into the true core of Father Laurence: “He could see that he belonged with the class of foppish secret agent who fusses over his brand of mustard but could kill you with a matchbox.”31 It was Father Laurence who freed Eagleton from what he called a “stiff-necked papist correctness” and made him into a full-blown socialist with a Marxist hue. How far could a Catholic go to the left without falling off? asked Eagleton. “Oh, as far you like,” replied Father Laurence. It seems that the answer to David Lodge’s novel How Far Can You Go? was something that only traditionally educated Catholics would think was about sex.32 Williams was considerably uncomfortable among his English upperclass colleagues at Cambridge, who, in turn, were severe regarding his working-class background and radical cultural views. Williams’s arrival at Cambridge in 1961 was greeted by a savage article in the Cambridge Review (May 27) by conservative historian and fellow of Peterhouse College, Maurice Cowling. Never in the history of Cambridge, claimed Williams’s biographer, had a new lecturer been given such a hostile welcome.33 What especially unsettled Cowling and his colleagues was that someone from the periphery of cultural and academic life could be given such a prestigious position at one of Britain’s premier institutions of higher learning. As for the vulgar project of the New Left, it was unseemly, wrote Cowling, for “an English scholar to engage in social criticism.”34 Yet Williams was too authoritative a figure for Cowling’s crowd to gun down personally. Instead they gunned for his acolytes, such as Eagleton.35 One can detect through the writings of the Slant circle a deep and abiding resentment of the cultural establishment dictated by the likes of

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Cowling and his crowd. Cowling was the progeny of the generation and mind-set described so brilliantly in Noel Annan’s Our Age, the intellectuals of the upper classes who grew up in public school and went to Oxford, Cambridge, or the London School of Economics. These were the men (and they were men, mostly) “who make their times significant and form opinion.”36 One became a member of this group, wrote Annan, by ability, family connections, and knowing the right people. The last criterion was the most important, and that came about primarily through the old school ties. These people spoke with the same tone of voice, laced with in-group jokes and elitist allusions. This class-bound “coterie culture” was severely pilloried by the New Left, and it explains why the Slant group felt so alienated from them. In short, it was the elite progeny of Our Age who represented the power brokers running Britain, and their prerogatives had to be checked if the promise of a socialist revolution were to be realized.

SLANT AND THE CATHOLIC ESTABLISHMENT

The Slant circle was convinced that the Catholic Church had succumbed to the charms of the English ruling elite; its leadership had been co-opted by their normative system and thereby promoted an unjust social and economic order. The root of the problem, as Father Bright saw it, was that Christians in general, despite denominational differences, operated from a distorted version of Christ’s teachings, and this had the effect of underscoring and supporting the sociopolitical establishment. Bright outlined four sources of this perversion, especially distinctive among Catholics. First was what he called “fundamentalism,” the reflexive belief that all problems had to be addressed by appealing to authority (in the Protestant tradition, the answers are found in scripture; Catholics turn to the Roman hierarchy, bishops, priests, and nuns). The second was “supernaturalism,” a failure to recognize the humanity of Christ as he lived and died in the secular world of man. Third was what Bright termed “individualism,” the mistaken belief that one’s relationship with God was more important than one’s relationships with others. And finally was “spiritualism,” where abstract moral principles were privileged at the expense of

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social and economic issues.37 To each of these “isms,” Bright contrasted what was outlined in scripture from a historically based reading of the Bible. This, he argued, revealed a new and radical demand of Christianity for transforming the human condition. In other words, a true reading of Christianity required an understanding of its historical roots. And if it can be recognized that Christianity is a revolutionary movement of liberation rather than a belief in abstract doctrinal statements—that is, a religion primarily concerned about a change in humanity’s actual condition, which is, of course, possible only through political means—then it can be seen that Christianity is not incompatible with Marxism in the broadest sense. Both are concerned with the liberation of man and the creation of a true community founded on the principles of equality and brotherhood. This is why Slant insisted that Catholics ought to be on the left. It is only the political left that works against the status quo, which is promoted by undemocratic elitist social and economic forces that militate against the radical promises of a Christian transformation. Bright insisted that Christianity must not continue to be identified with some of the forms it had assumed historically (for example, supportive of monarchists, authoritarian, and paternalistic political regimes, and even in some cases fascism). Likewise, Marxism should not be identified with particular communist parties or the many forms taken by communist revolutions. Both Christianity and Marxism in this sense had fallen prey to historical distortions of their true natures. Bright’s insight was echoed by Czech sociologist Erika Kadlecova, who had left the Communist Party because of Soviet repression. Yet Kadlecova admitted that the original communist ideals, much like the religious principles inculcated in those who were raised in Catholic families, penetrated deeply under her skin. She thus remained culturally a Marxist, but there was nothing intellectually discordant with this. After all, commented Kadlecova, “a Christian does not repudiate the Sermon on the Mount because of the Inquisition.”38 The Slant circle went on to play an important part in encouraging a dialogue between Christianity and Marxism, in the hopes of finding common ground for promoting socialist humanism. Some leftist Catholics and Marxists discovered Teilhard de Chardin as a possible bridge over the historical chasm of their mutual differences. Teilhard held that

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Christians and Marxists shared one overriding conviction, a common faith in the dignity of man: “By ‘faith in man’ we mean here the more or less active and fervent conviction that Mankind as an organic whole possesses a future: a future consisting not merely of successive years but of higher states to be achieved by struggle.”39 The ultimate, albeit ambitious, objective of the Slant movement was the transformation of British society through a socialist revolution. The first step specific to a Catholic Left was the restructuring of their coreligionists’ thinking.40 Although some English Catholics were energized by the promises of conciliar renewal, they shared, at the same time, the flawed political consciousness of the general population. This limited mind-set was described by Slant as “liberalism,” a term defined as a willingness to genuinely engage the problems of contemporary society but one that crucially stopped short of a systematic critical enquiry into the fundamental structures that undergirded the sociopolitical order. But there was hope for change. Echoing Bright’s identification of the sources of Christianity’s distortions, Eagleton made the observation that British Catholics, “trained to an individualist, one-sided spirituality which covertly . . . denigrated the historical, the physical and political . . . seemed to us, after Vatican II, to be no nearer to confronting the hard social and political implications of their own belief; and yet, with the emergence of a new theology which placed crucial emphasis on history, community, the human and bodily, the ground seemed to be prepared for such a confrontation.”41 The confrontation that Slant had in mind, however, was not one to advance the cause of reform within the existing structures of the Church but rather to shatter the institutional foundations for purposes of revolution. We cannot be satisfied with an aggiornamento that simply brings the Church up to date, insisted Neil Middleton, because the foundations of the edifice to be modernized were in the advanced stages of dry rot. All the good work accomplished from Rerum Novarum through Pacem in Terris, as expressed in the promising religious insights of Protestant scholar Harvey Cox, were based on the assumption that the structural foundations of Christianity would remain unaltered.42 But the Church as traditionally constructed, wrote Middleton, was incapable of realizing a true democratic socialist community because of its consistent tendency

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to be a creature of the political right. Only a radically reconstructed Church could find relevance as part of the complex, interweaving pattern of world revolutionary change as sketched out by the revered Raymond Williams.43 Middleton frequently reiterated his views on the imperatives of a structural transformation of the Church as presently constituted: The structures of this church (the Roman Church in England) are based on that of a medieval aristocracy with a hierarchy who confront their people as a ruling elite. If we really want to engage in serious ‘ideological struggle’ with this enormous and corrupt organisation in England, then we must be clear that what we are working for is the overthrow of the church as we know it. We cannot change such things in the church without changing in some measure everything we normally mean when we use the word church.44 Middleton’s analysis was typical of the kind of revolutionary rhetoric frequently employed by Slant activists, but it may not have projected an agenda that would appeal to moderate, highly educated, but politically uncommitted Catholics—precisely the audience whom the Left hoped to mobilize. And many of Slant’s critics dismissed such writings as nothing more than utopian juvenilia. Much of Slant’s extremist rhetoric was part and parcel of its revulsion against liberalism and its conviction that the only way to break the conformist grip of liberalism on public opinion was to highlight its insidious ways through a dose of shock therapy. Indeed, the Catholic Left’s critique of liberalism was only slightly less alarmist than that of their nineteenth-century reactionary co-religionists. One difference between the two antiliberal positions is that the Left had a stronger case, given the close association, indeed, the collaboration of liberal politicians with what Slant clearly identified as the corporate enemy. The Catholic Left was also convinced that the Church had allowed itself to be cut off from the dynamism of the secular world. The source of the trouble, Middleton asserted, was a philosophical dualism embedded in the prevailing neo-Thomism that served as the bedrock of Church theology. Orthodox neo-Thomism was essentially a view of humankind as consisting of two parts (body and soul), in which the former, in other words, the world, was deemed twisted in sin. The ori-

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gin of this outlook would appear to be Augustine’s City of God, which juxtaposed the heavenly kingdom with the sinful earthly realm. To Middleton, this was a denial of the Incarnation: Christianity had “withdrawn into a kind of other-worldly club” that rendered it difficult to connect with the real issues of everyday life.45 This neo-Thomism was what the Protestant French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul called “disembodied spiritualism.” In practice, the Christian faith had become an individual and private matter expressed in “feelings, and intentions, and sterile contemplation never translated into actions.” Ellul saw a clear dichotomy between the Sunday churchgoer and what the same person does during the rest of the week.46 This dichotomous spiritualism, he argued, was a negation of the Old Testament and the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Both are in their very essence “materialist,” focusing on living in the real world and on the history of humankind. In order to make the requisite secular connections, Slant recommended a radical reordering of priorities: “If we want to know what God is up to in the world, where he is making demands on us, we read the Guardian; if we let ourselves be persuaded that it is only the Catholic Herald that will give us the low-down we will certainly fail to get his message.”47 The essence of the Left’s critique of what they perceived as theological dualism (the secular/spiritual split) was that the Church was overly focused on personal avenues to salvation, thereby privileging the spiritual at the expense of dealing with the challenges of the secular realm. Compounding the problems inherent in neo-Thomistic theological bifurcation was what the Slant group considered the inadequacy and hence irrelevance of the language of the Church. In developing this argument, Eagleton, Middleton, and others drew heavily on Wittgenstein and Heidegger, who asserted that language was the constructive agent of identity and understanding. The language of community changes through time because of shared experiences and historical events. The Gospels of Christianity, locked into a theocratic world in which Jesus was born over a thousand years ago, were written in a language appropriate to a civilization long departed. Although the Christian language (Latin) is inclusive of all racial and ethnic groups and has expanded beyond any particular geographical divisions, it has failed, asserted the Slant circle, to evolve in any historical dimension. Because of its distancing from any

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particular culture, the Christian language has become solidified and static. The result is that Christians have the self-conscious language of an “in-group”: inflexible, almost useless for modern theological debate, and cut off from the larger sections of society.48 Eagleton, for example, illustrated the dated and thus unrealistic language of the Church in his analysis of The Decree on the Instruments of Social Communication, the second Vatican Council II document to be voted on before the Council had shifted to a more progressive trajectory. This was the first time that an ecumenical council had dealt with the issue of communications, and, although only an initial step, it fell far short of understanding or appreciating the nature of the modern media. It took too narrow a view of communication, not understanding that information was to be seen not only in terms of news and entertainment but also as a means of disseminating culture. Its emphasis on Christian norms of morality, Eagleton pointed out, were rigid and abstract, cut adrift from the social and political context of the age. The Council’s recommendation for establishing institutions of censorship and propaganda calling for “energetic enforcement” of standards in art, doctrine, and ethics would have caused even Mussolini to blush.49 The effect of this, he asserted, was to call into question the whole style of the Church’s promulgations. If the Church were to seriously engage modern social problems, then it needed to find a language supple enough to cope with complex and changing conditions. According to the Slant group, this shunning of the real world redolent even in the ossified language of the Church had led to a profound alienation from secular society that currently plagued the Christian community. The thrust of traditional Christian teaching had been to focus almost exclusively on some next and distant world far removed from that in which everyone currently lived. It was this theological dislocation from the present that prompted Marx’s observation that religion was the “opium of the masses,” the means by which the pain of the present could be anesthetized for the promise of spiritual happiness. But this theological dualism, privileging the soul as an eternal avoidance of a tortured secular world, explained why it had become difficult for Christians to create a truly humanistic community: it envisioned fulfillment as belonging outside the human sphere. Religion in this context had the effect of

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serving individual needs for personal salvation rather than the larger social prerequisites of the community. And, most important, contemporary Christianity in its avoidance of the secular failed to recognize the importance of politics for meeting the practical necessities of improving the quality of life in the human realm. Middleton accused the Church of overemphasizing the individual as distinct from society, the soul as distinct from the body, and the afterlife as distinct from the secular world. It was this soul/body dualism in Thomism that prevented the Church from meeting the needs of man in the real world. The practical consequences of this dualistic theology were revealed in a survey on religious attitudes conducted under the direction of social psychologist Monica Lawlor. Her study indicated that most British Roman Catholics viewed religion as a personal and private matter with little connection to the wider community: To sum up then, the Good Christian is seen as one who is concerned with God and prayer and with following the example of Christ, but he does not set much store by things like going to evening classes, being kind to animals, giving up the Bomb or helping local charities. He is theocentric, concerned with his own conscience, but not concerned with the personal virtues and social involvements that characterize much of the English way of life at its best.50 What these Catholics deemed important were essentially “interior things” of the soul as well as rules for being a “good Christian.” Community responsibility was not high on the list of duties. Indeed, according to Lawlor, questions concerning Catholic views on morality, matters of education, nuclear warfare, and political judgment were given no priority whatever.51 The transformation of this retrograde mind-set of English Catholics required a full-throttled assault, and this Slant announced it would do in its eighth issue, the first underwritten by Sheed and Ward to have a national audience.52 Here, Eagleton declared that Slant’s purpose was to promote a Christian socialist revolution that required the elimination of the bourgeois cultural and political order. The prevailing Catholic political thinking embedded in the social encyclicals, the Catholic Social

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Guild, and the “timid and bloodless liberal conservatism of Vatican II” all suggested, claimed Eagleton, that the liberal reformist impulses within the Church were effectively converting it into one huge Liberal Party cut loose from the real issues of capitalism, Third World revolutions, nuclear violence, and brutal cultural degradation. In order to expedite the revolutionary imperative, Slant would mediate between the ideas and values of the political left and the Church and explore the possible interconnections between a theological and political radicalism. These efforts called for a flexible, interdisciplinary theoretical approach. For this purpose Eagleton announced that the Slant group intended to draw on the ideas of Marx and Sartre, on existential psychologists such as R. D. Laing, on the writings of Heidegger and Wittgenstein on language, and especially on Raymond Williams’s work on communication and culture.53 Middleton, one of the more radical of the Slant circle who served as the magazine’s editor as well as managing director of Sheed and Ward, began to fill in the details of Eagleton’s theoretical architecture of revolution in the next issue of Slant. He presented to the magazine’s readers a model of what Slant stood for in terms of working out a Christian mission to advance a revolutionary community of belief. This was Camilo Torres, a left-wing socialist intellectual and priest who had died fighting in the ranks of Colombian revolutionaries. Torres was born into the Colombian aristocratic ruling class. After ordination he was sent to Louvain to earn a doctorate in sociology. Torres’s decision to join guerrilla forces was the consequence of his belief that Colombia’s feudal system was run by a corrupt government and supported by neocolonizing U. S. corporations whose primary objective was to maximize profits. Because he was convinced that the Church had allied itself with the ruling establishment, Torres asked to be relieved of his priestly duties, but, as he was careful to point out at the time, “I have put aside the privileges and duties of the clergy but I have not stopped being a priest.”54 Torres organized an association called the United Front, which called for “active abstention” from the rigged national elections. The group fought for a radical reform of society along democratic lines so as to free the poor from capitalist exploitation. Torres represented a revolutionary commitment that Slant hoped to inculcate into a new Catholic leftist elite. However, as Middleton

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frequently insisted, a major impediment to promoting the revolutionary social promises of the Gospels was the institutional structure of the Roman Church. Jesus came into the world, noted Middleton, not simply to found a church but to call humankind to transform the world. Churches were a secondary means to this end. The real struggle at the moment was between international capitalism and socialism, and in this battle the Church was already irrelevant. Torres, on the other hand, represented the repristination of Christ’s original mission: a direct personal involvement in the international struggle to transform the world into a Christian socialist culture.55 The celebration of a Catholic who was associated with guerrilla warfare to advance social justice was a hard sell, however, and played into the hands of both liberals and conservatives, who portrayed the Catholic Left as dangerous extremists drawing on communism in their support of violent revolution in the developing world. Middleton believed that most left-wing, middle-class Catholics had not yet faced up to the task of revolution. Although Slant saw itself as nondoctrinaire but rather selectively Marxist in the sense of the New Left Review, its adherence to a Marxist paradigm (which was neither classical nor revisionist) involved an honest commitment to the destruction of bourgeois society. The Marxist revolutions sweeping the world had to be repeated in Britain. Middleton cited the revolutionary thoughts and practices of Mao Zedong as a possible guide for the kind of revolution toward which Catholic leftists should strive. All this seemed a far cry from the bourgeois culture of the West. But as was the case with the adulation of Camilo Torres, Mao was yet another reflection of the extremist tendencies that establishment Catholics could reference to alarm the middle classes about the revolutionary dangers of the New Left’s agenda. By the mid-1960s, Mao had taken on an iconic status for many on the New Left. His revolution appeared antibureaucratic and populist, dedicated to creating a more genuinely humane community serving everyone. The Herder Correspondence’s leading editorial of March 1967 praised his humanism. Mao, it said, “has consistently expressed himself as one of the greatest of contemporary believers in Man.” According to the magazine, Mao had always maintained that the quality of human

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life was more important than simply an access to consumer goods and rising standards of material existence. Even Raymond Williams had singled out Mao as having fostered conditions that accorded closely to what he had called for in The Long Revolution. Mao, noted Williams, had demanded the full participation of the people in the remaking of China’s society and culture, a mission that could not be undertaken for them by any elite groups. Mao’s teachings revealed that it was not the party in the Leninist sense that would constitute the vanguard for change but rather the peasant masses. They would push forward a revolutionary process that had to be continuous because it could never be completed in any final form. As William observed, “Nobody can inherit a common culture—it has always to be made, and re-made, by people themselves— and the perspective which Mao is now opening up, of a socialist struggle which includes the continual, common re-making of values and most active conflict, seems to me wholly compatible with the idea of a common culture as I have argued it.”56 A major supporter of the corrupt bourgeois status quo, observed Middleton, was none other than the Vatican itself, whose financial interests were closely integrated into the international capitalist order. As a mechanism of control to advance its cause, Rome relied on a medieval aristocratic leadership utilizing a bureaucratic hierarchy that confronted the faithful as a ruling elite. Quoting from the observations of both Mao and the Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon, Middleton justified why it was imperative that the Catholic Left work for the overthrow of the Church as currently constructed. Was it possible to stop the exploitation of international capitalism without resorting to violence? Middleton noted that Torres, Fanon, and the revolutionaries in the Congo and Guatemala did not believe so. Violence, wrote Middleton, was forced upon the world by the capitalist bourgeoisie: “for us to advocate nonviolence is to fall into their liberal trap and to help maintain the status quo.” These questions concerning revolution, he concluded, had to be fully addressed if the Left were not to join the ranks of the English Roman Catholic liberals.57 Middleton’s article established a theoretical framework for further discussion among Slant writers concerning what kinds of commitments were necessary for the Catholic Left to advance the cause of socialist

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revolution.58 But theory alone was only a requisite starting point, one that provided the intellectual construct for all-important political action. Here, Slant drew on what Marx called “praxis,” which Stuart Hall described with a prolixity that soon became the fashion of the Left’s “in house” method of discourse: “praxis,” he wrote, was the “whole dynamic by which latent human needs are expressed in political terms and, by being formulated, become the conscious demands of a section of the society around whom a political agitation can be built, maintained and carried.”59 Eagleton defined the term more concisely: the aim of praxis “is not to describe the world but to overcome it,” or, as St. James put it, to “be doers of the world.”60 In short, praxis meant using theory as a guide for pursuing practical political and social change. Linking theory with political action required the Catholic Left to reject the prevailing bourgeois trends of British society, in particular to resist the major political parties, which in Slant’s view had been co-opted by liberal, middle-class ideology. Indeed, the Slant circle considered liberalism their most immediate challenge, since it had in its aspirations the language of progressive change, improvement, and development. But this was really political fool’s gold, because the consequences of such an agenda only served to bolster the status quo. As Eagleton pointed out, conservatives work to keep social structures as they are; liberals want to make them work more efficiently and humanely; radicals recognize that in the case of certain structures change can take place only through total rethinking.61 Slant believed that the insidious thinking of liberalism had infiltrated the Roman Church as well as the British political system. Herbert McCabe wrote in the January 1966 issue of New Blackfriars that the real division currently in the Church was no longer between “progressives” and “conservatives,” as seemingly played out in the aula of Vatican Council II. The division was now between the progressive liberal reformers who sought to improve and humanize the present organization of the Church and the radicals who had a vision of a new kind of Church and for whom reforms simply masked the problems that cried out for redress. New Blackfriars and Slant made this opposition very clear, as the Catholic Left found that much of Vatican II was essentially furthering the agenda of liberal reformism.

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The revolutionary direction set forth by the Slant circle can best be appreciated by their attack on the most eminent symbol of progressive Catholicism, the philosopher Jacques Maritain. A close friend of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, Maritain was one of a handful of liberal-minded intellectuals who had seen through the smoke screen of fascist corporatism that so beguiled conservative Catholics in the interwar years. His analysis of the various programs of European dictators revealed how much they deviated from Catholic social teachings. Moreover, Maritain had been a major voice of reason in opposition to the inquisitional attacks of the political right on their fellow Catholics, and his critique of their ideas and actions (notably, Catholic support of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War) had a seminal impact on liberal British and American Catholics.62 Maritain and several Catholics of the cercle Thomiste (which included François Mauriac, Gabriel Marcel, and Emmanuel Mounier) made their first public statement on the proper role of the Christian in politics in the wake of the so-called Stavisky riots of February 1934, an ugly episode of financial corruption that raised the specter of a fascist takeover in France. Their response took the form of a manifesto, Pour le Bien Commun. This was a key document in the emergence of Maritain’s political philosophy. It publicly announced the basic principles upon which he believed the conscientious Catholic should face the secular challenges of the twentieth century. The manifesto had two purposes. First, it emphasized the obligation of Catholic intellectuals to move from the spiritual realm of theological speculation and ivory-tower academics into the turmoil of the political marketplace. The increasingly public struggles between fascist and Marxist extremists called for peacemakers, voices of Christian sanity in a society whose discourse had sunk to the level of political vitriol. Second, it cautioned Catholics against becoming part of the marketplace in the sense of actually identifying with a single political party. Becoming a partisan of a particular political movement could only compromise the independence of the true Christian. The signatories emphasized that the Christian must be “in the world” but “not of the world.”63 Maritain worked for a revived Christian culture that could provide the necessary social healing after the traumas wrought by communism

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and the many varieties of fascism. His political philosophy was inspired by the Leonine encyclicals and envisioned a pluralistic body politic, bringing together in an organic unity diverse social groupings and structures, with each claiming the right to exercise basic freedoms independent of the larger, superimposing political organizations so characteristic of both communist collectivism and fascism. Citing Quadragesimo Anno, which spoke of the injustice of higher political institutions arrogating to themselves functions performed more efficiently by smaller bodies (the latter is what the Church called subsidiarity), Maritain insisted that a “new Christendom” (his term for a future temporal regime whose structures in varying degrees reflect the imprint of a Christian conception of life) would allow maximum autonomy both for individuals and for the social groups that give direction and meaning to their lives.64 The groundwork for this new Christian order was to be found in the democratic and liberal institutions that had evolved in Britain, France, and the United States. The Slant circle considered Maritain and the neo-Thomistic philosophical position that he promoted as the official ideology of the Catholic Church a major barrier to achieving their vision of a radical socialism. Although Maritain labored to encourage Catholics to be more actively engaged in social and political action, he always insisted that their conduct be subject to the hierarchical control of the Vatican. In the view of Slant’s Adrian Cunningham, such ultramontane leanings along with the inherent philosophical dualism of neo-Thomism meant that Maritain was at one with “an uncompromising intégrisme,” a hierarchic and theocratic systemization radically separating the natural and the supernatural.65 Maritain, for example, thought it necessary to know what was beyond the claim of Caesar: “both society itself and its common good are indirectly subordinated to the perfect accomplishment of the person and his supra-temporal aspirations as to an end of another order—an end which transcends the body politic.”66 In summary, wrote Maritain, the natural force that governs here is “the law of the primacy of the spiritual.”67 Adrian Cunningham made the ironic claim that Maritain’s neoThomism was an exact political complement to Charles Maurras’s Action Française, an extremist reactionary political movement that was

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eventually condemned by the Vatican. Although Maritain himself had been a member of this group, he tendered his resignation after Pius X’s condemnation in 1926 and subsequently became a vehement opponent of Maur ras’s authoritarian monarchism. Cunningham argued that although the lines of Action Française and neo-Thomism seemed antithetical — the former was oriented to the Renaissance and the seventeenth-century grand siècle (politique d’abord), the other to the eleventh century in its dualism (the temporal-political subordinated to the spiritual)—their crucial connection was the unrealistic linkage between the ideal classical tradition and real politics, in the case of Maurras, and the unbridgeable gap between Maritain’s notion of the natural and the supernatural. Each in its own way was a denial of historical reality, incapable of recognizing the imprint of cultural determinates: the classical could no more be reified in the context of current political realities than could the sacred prioritizing in neo-Thomism have meaning in the climate of modern secularism. In Cunningham’s view, the experiential gap in neo-Thomism between the sacred and the secular precluded the possibility of any realistic political dialectic and instead produced a false consciousness for Catholics concerning social reality. Cunningham and his Slant colleagues saw a close parallel between Maritain’s neo-Thomistic philosophy and the bourgeois culture that it claimed to oppose. Maritain, they asserted, only hoped to reform the latter, a call that he saw posited in the papal social encyclicals. Catholics, wrote Maritain, should follow “a programme of unqualified adhesion to every pontifical direction.”68 We must “think outwards from the Vatican City . . . the test of integral Catholicism is to think with the Pope and to respond to his direction: to oppose his direction in any way, even when it may appear mistaken, is the subversion of the whole supernatural order.”69 In his book Scholasticism and Politics, Maritain insisted that the role of Catholic action should be primarily spiritual. Any political or social reforms that might result from such endeavors were secondary: “economic and professional works— co-operatives, social insurance, trade unions and the like—no matter how Christian their inspiration may be, do not enter into the concept of Catholic action; nor do works of social relief and assistance . . . nor do political works, though under

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Christian inspiration.”70 In short, for Maritain it was not the direct and proper function of Catholic action to solve the social problem. Its purpose, he insisted, was to “make the vivifying inspiration of the Kingdom of God and His justice penetrate the social matters themselves.” It was simply an “additional matter” if the social problem were resolved.71 Maritain contended that Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno marked the end of outdated Christian notions concerning separatism and dualism. “Let us not forget,” he insisted, “that the social, the economic, and the political, are intrinsically dependent on ethics, and that by this title . . . the social, the political, and the economic, are concerned with eternal life, and therefore with the pastoral ministry of the Church.”72 This in his view was how the social encyclicals bridged the dualistic gap between the sacred and the secular. The Slant group could accept nothing of Maritain’s claims, since his vision of a new Catholic action in their view essentially accepted the social milieu of capitalism. This was highlighted by Maritain himself when he quoted with approval Pius XI’s definition of the Christian apostolate: “The first apostles, the immediate apostles of the workers, will be workers; the apostles of the industrial and business world will be industrialists and businessmen.”73 In this way, observed Cunningham, everything remains the same, thereby securing the liberal capitalist order. The primacy of the spiritual provides a theological amalgam. The dualisms have not really been resolved but rather canonized. Slant Catholics also took issue with Maritain’s political vision, which was expressed in what he called “organic democracy” (democracy of the person), which was intended to move Catholic thinking away from its eighteenth-century philo-monarchism to the pluralist values of the modern era. Organic democracy was also to serve as a corrective to the nineteenth-century deification of the individual as expressed in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. These philosophers expressed a democracy of the anarchistic type tending toward atheism. Maritain’s sense of the democratic good was rooted in natural law, one inconceivable, as he put it, “without the super-elevation which nature and temporal civilizations receive, in their proper order, from the energies of the Christian leaven.”74 For Maritain, nature required a hierarchic differentiation within the social totality, where one

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must be placed above the other to guide the common work. This prescription separated politics into two parts. A legislative body would deliberate and educate; a higher executive would make decisions and execute laws and claim its authority to do so from natural law. In this respect, observed Cunningham, authority is not located in or exercised by the community but simply “passes through it” to the top.75 In such political schemata the community is only given a passive role, allowing no creative entry into the actual tasks of decision making. Political parties have no essential powers of execution. Their function is merely pedagogical: to provide political education to the masses. Maritain’s organic democracy, claimed Cunningham, was yet another manifestation of the dualism that prevented men from realizing their own creative capacities for governance. It only served to perpetuate an exploitative, humanely dysfunctional status quo. The Slant group considered the dualistic problem to go well beyond politics. The neo-Thomistic rationality that so infused Catholic intellectual thinking in Britain during the interwar years and whose sway continued up to the present created a distorted understanding of culture itself. And once again it was Maritain, they insisted, who erected the intellectual scaffolding for such false consciousness in his influential 1931 book Religion and Culture. The disciples of Maritain’s neo-Thomism who gave voice to British Catholicism during this time were the likes of Christopher Dawson, Bernard Wall, E. I. Watkin, Douglas Woodruff, and Martin D’Arcy. Sheed and Ward, the first publishing house to translate Maritain’s works into English, became the launching pad for these writers. Cunningham noted that Dawson’s introduction to the first volume of Sheed and Ward’s Essays in Order series (from 1931 onward) echoed Maritain’s neo-Thomistic dualism: “Catholicism,” he wrote, “is the great historic representative of the principle of spiritual order—an order which is not the creation of the human mind, but its ruler and creator.”76 Much like St. Paul and St. Augustine, from whom he drew numerous quotations, Dawson shared their awareness of the inevitable conflict between the spirit, reflecting the divine consciously, and the world, which in its animal nature was but a passive and unconscious mirror.77 Dawson criticized Protestants for their efforts to come to terms with the secularism of modernity, a theological turn that made them in his words

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“exclusively this-worldly.”78 Maritain in Religion and Culture defined man as “a spirit animating a body of flesh.” His culture had to be subordinated to a higher eternal standard, one in which the contemplative life was given greater priority than the active life. Human culture grows from the earthly soil, but the roots of the Church are in the sky of the supernatural. Christian civilization, claimed Maritain, even though subordinated to the last supernatural end, “is still something temporal, essentially terrestrial and therefore deficient.”79 One of Cunningham’s chief criticisms of these Catholic writers was their failure to be theologically creative. He singled out Christopher Dawson as a case in point. Dawson, perhaps the most brilliant of the English neo-Thomist intellectuals, in his Understanding Europe (1951) held that the crisis of his times was rooted in the soul of man, requiring a reawakening of the spiritual sources that had animated Western civilization in the Age of Faith. In much of his writing, Dawson drew on Augustine (one of the first to infuse a Platonic dualism in Christian theology) and made frequent references to the distinctions between the cities of God and man.80 Rather than attempting to integrate sufficiently Christ and culture, claimed Cunningham, Dawson and his fellow neo-Thomists consistently juxtaposed and exaggerated the differences between religion and secular life. The result was to perpetuate the false dualism in analytical categories that locked neo-Thomistic theology into a closed circularity of thinking, one that prevented meaningful Catholic mediation with the revolutionary forces of the modern world. A problem with Cunningham’s perceptive and tough-minded attack on the neo-Thomists was a lack of nuance and a Procrustean tendency to force its advocates into a rigidly fixed theological box. This was especially the case with Dawson; Slant readers were never given a coherent intellectual portrait of him, and Cunningham’s references to his writings were opaque and incomplete. Even J. M. Cameron, a supporter of the Catholic Left, had difficulty with Cunningham’s sweeping and over-generalized critique of the neo-Thomist writers and struggled to make sense of his obfuscated writing style.81 Cunningham seemed to have overlooked Dawson’s efforts to modify medieval dualism in reviving Christianity’s role as an active agent for social change. The Incarnation, he insisted, meant that Christianity was

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not an abstraction but a concrete reality; the person of Christ was embedded in the historical experience of man. Thus, the Christian understanding of history revealed a close sensitivity to both transcendent and temporal events: “the absolute and the finite, the eternal and the temporal, God and World were no longer conceived as two exclusive and opposed orders of being. . . . The two orders interpenetrate one another.”82 Dawson also was critical of those who carried Thomas’s theology to extremes, who focused almost exclusively on metaphysics and not on social theory.83 On the other hand, Dawson’s abundant references to and admiration for the continuing relevance of the Augustinian and Thomistic systems provided sufficient grist for the Catholic Left’s mill, with its condemnation of the prevailing grip of medieval dualism on Catholic theology. The neo-Thomistic synthesis was based on the concordance in difference of the two orders (faith and reason/spiritual and temporal), but the Catholic leftists objected to its elevating and privileging the sacred over everything else. The essential hierarchies of neo-Thomistic rationality, claimed Cunningham, allowed only “a downward integration from the spiritual” and permitted no lateral relations with the “various fields of history, religion, tradition, sociology in their complex interactions.”84 The neo-Thomistic assertions of “essential transcendence” and the “primacy of the spiritual” translated in practice to the formula that all sociopolitical and economic problems of the secular realm could be ameliorated by a “change of heart.” To those on the Catholic Left, there were two problems with current Catholic notions on social change. First, their immediate effect was to bolster the liberal, so-called progressive agenda, for which improvement and progress were only possible within already existing social structures. The energy expended on realizing this agenda would be at the expense of efforts to bring about imperative radical changes in social and political institutions. In addition, asked Eagleton, was there any indication that such efforts would make any significant difference? “Much progressive thinking seems to envisage a fine, flexible, dynamic life, which will work within (very largely) existing structures, making them humane and authentic where it can. The basic problem is perhaps whether certain familiar structures, authentic or not, will in the long run do at all.”85 The

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second problem was with the neo-Thomistic primacy of the transcendent, which constituted a restricted or “closed dialectic,” the acceptance of an abstract spiritual truth that permeated a rich but static past juxtaposed with a rootless present that waited for a return of sanctity. This outlook narrowly restricted the parameters in which the dialectic was allowed to operate. The Catholic Left called for an indeterminate “open dialectic” where there could be a mutual modification in relationship between the historical past and present. This “open form” was the dialectic employed in Marxist theory, and its praxis required a revolutionary alteration in social structure that went well beyond a mere ameliorative change of the heart.86 The Slant group’s objection to the dualism inherent in Catholic social thinking carried over to their critique of Vatican Council II. Unlike conservatives who thought that the Council went too far, and liberals who welcomed it as the dawn of a new more enlightened era, Catholics of the Left saw significant problems with Vatican II. It fell far short of fulfilling the Christian promise of a complete social doctrine to serve the needs of a human community. The Slant Catholics, having been influenced by modern sociological and philosophical writers on the Left (Peter Berger, C. Wright Mills, Alasdair MacIntyre, Georg Lukacs, R. D. Laing, and others), were convinced that men could be understood as individuals only in terms of their dialectical relationship with the social order in which they were embedded.87 As Middleton noted, this liberating discovery gave his circle greater appreciation of human freedom than was possible in the past: “It made us, for example, abandon the old approach to the abstract isolated individual as the basis for our thinking in favor of seeing real men as they really are among other men.”88 In this endeavor the Catholic Left sought a clearer connection between theology and society, and this, asserted Adrian Cunningham, could best be found in the sociological tradition that views religion “as an anthropological fact of human transcendence” and what Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, and other contemporary sociologists of religion called the “social construction of reality.”89 Despite the obvious advances in recognizing social reality contained in Second Vatican Council’s most significant achievement, Gaudium et Spes (the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World), the Catholic leftists believed that its

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outlook was fundamentally compromised by a deeply conservative ontological positioning shaped by its inherent neo-Thomistic dualism. Middleton, for example, gave evidence for this claim by examining the wording of the encyclical’s introduction and first two chapters. Although Gaudium et Spes made a cursory reference to man as a social being whose development requires relationships with others,90 the assertion was vitiated, claimed Middleton, by an immediate falling back on the old Platonic analysis of man: Man is a unity of body and soul; by virtue of his bodily condition he is compounded of elements of his material world. . . . When he recognizes his own soul as spiritual and immortal he is not the victim of some vain fancy coming from his physical or social condition, but is penetrating to the heart of the matter.”91 In addition, the encyclical reads: Man is not deceived when he recognizes himself to be superior to bodily things. . . . There are interior resources in him which can transcend the world of experience. Participating in the light of the divine mind, man rightly judges that his understanding transcends the world of experience.92 The problem here is that the stated dualistic abstraction opened up numerous possibilities for Church officials (an aristocratic elite in the minds of the Left) to disrupt any sense of a real human community and also redirect Catholic action from actual social and political matters to the transcendent realms where morality is redefined not in social terms but in the domain of the personal and subjective. Men are not to be understood in the context of their actual social situation but within an abstract and unrealistic moral ideal.93 Furthermore, instead of recognizing society in terms of modern sociological insight as a whole complex of human relationships, Gaudium et Spes’s social descriptions had a cold and mechanical tone to them. Society is something “given” rather than a product of dialectical interchange between individuals and their social institutions. The continuing bifurcation of the sacred and profane

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recognizing seemingly discrete spheres of responsibilities, one to the Church, the other to society, had the effect of removing the social world from man’s creation. Even in praising the subsequent encyclicals of Pope Paul VI that condemned the abuses of laissez-faire capitalism and its deleterious impact on the world community (for example, Populorum Progressio), the Slant Catholics saw fit to highlight the limitations that compromised its message. There was a continuing and persistent bias in separating man and society, hence Church and world. For Populorum Progressio the world was mired in economic sickness, but the disease was deemed less the product of a monopoly of power by the few than the lack of brotherhood among individuals and peoples. Once again, the solution, it seemed, lay with a “change of heart” rather than a realistic redistribution of economic resources, which could be made possible only through social and political revolution. The latter was Slant’s mission. The Church’s position, Slant insisted, remained a scandal to the world, but the journal could assure its readers that none of this was the folly of the cross.94 The Slant circle also took issue with the encyclical Mater et Magistra. This document was the furthest yet that the Vatican had gone in accepting the legitimacy of socialism and was a reflection of John XXIII’s bold efforts to have the Church embrace the modern world. In Cunningham’s reading, the encyclical gave an overall validation to what the New Left called “neocapitalism,” that is, a reformed, progressive form of the creed embracing social engineering and “managerialism” to mitigate class tensions for the sake of economic cooperation and social harmony. There was a continuity of ideas in Mater et Magistra going back to the vocational group principles articulated in Quadragesimo Anno, urging a bonding or union of all social groups for the common good.95 Where Pius XI’s encyclical tended to align itself with the conservative corporatist ideas of the 1930s, Popes John and Paul updated their social encyclicals to reflect the requirements of the more modern “liberal” corporatism of the 1960s. Mater et Magistra recommended “socialisation” as a means of advancing the social good, but it did so in terms of an updated capitalist ethos. The state was obliged to take action for the general interests of society (for Slant this meant the national ruling class) while preserving the autonomy of corporate intermediary

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bodies. Workers were called upon to “participate” in the economic life of the community through their trade unions. Yet, as the leftist Catholics noted, these bodies were not to fight for the claims of labor but rather to “pacify the workers in the ‘national interest.’” Their purpose was no longer to agitate but to cooperate. The key point in both Mater et Magistra and Populorum Progressio, observed Slant’s Martin Shaw, was to achieve harmony and cooperation “within the existing framework of social relations.” The idea was to serve the brotherhood necessary for community. But Slant insisted that the absence of brotherhood was the logical consequence of capitalist economics. There could be no community unless the economic structure was altered.96 There was at bottom a fundamental conflict concerning the means by which the papacy and the Catholic Left hoped to achieve their objectives. The social encyclicals were designed to downplay the issue of class struggle, since highlighting the problem would create social tensions that could only exacerbate socioeconomic conflict, thereby making it even more difficult to achieve the promises of Christian brotherhood. For these reasons the papacy always strove for consensus. The Left, on the other hand, urged the practical necessity of exposing the myriad ways that class interests had contributed to inequalities; it was firmly convinced that consensus was nothing but a prophylactic preventing the public from seeing how the system functioned to secure the interests of elites. The iniquitous system could not be transformed until the public had been made aware of the consequences of class-interest politics. Despite the passage of liberal reforms, the corporate system was as firmly entrenched as ever. Terry Eagleton traced this intrinsic inability to break out of the capitalist cycle back to nineteenth-century Christian Socialist thinking, an early and important influence on English Catholic social philosophy.97 Anglican progressives F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley attempted to give Christian Socialism a special ideological channel of its own, separate from revolutionary creeds such as Marxism. But their approach to the working classes was compromised by divided intentions: Christian Socialists sought to win their support by improving working conditions, thereby validating their own Christian ideals and at the same time giving workers reasons to remain within the confession. Yet they

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also wanted the institutional survival of the Anglican Church, which depended on the support of the liberal establishment. The object was to satisfy labor’s needs for social and economic reform yet prevent an ideological slide toward true revolution. Hence, from the origins of a Christian-style socialism, there was a built-in bias in favor of the status quo, thereby assuring its linkage to the capitalist system. In addition to the limitations of these early reformist and ameliorative objectives was the priority given to a moral revolution in men’s hearts, rather than to an acceptance of the necessity of institutional change through the political process.98 Kingsley and the Christian Socialists, argued Eagleton, “were too ready to fall into the mistake of believing that social reform can be achieved without legislative reform, and men’s hearts changed without acts of parliament.”99 The Christian Socialists’ distrust of legislative initiatives signaled their disengagement from social reality. Socialism for them, said Eagleton, was understood on a theological level focusing on the Incarnation of the divine in human society. But this also meant that the center of concern would be the divine rather than the human.100 Eagleton was convinced that the lack of balance between moral and institutional structuring that had compromised the potential radicalism of Christian Socialism had been carried through to the present: “Dawson, Maritain, Berdyaev show the same tensions between a critique of industrial capitalism and a call for an essentially ‘spiritual’ revival.”101 Finally, Christian Socialism as well as Catholic social thinking harked back to the past, their anticapitalism being linked to the economic and social erosion of organic relationships once satisfied in the authoritative ordering of medieval society. All this reflected Catholics’ inability, typical of liberalism, to think and feel beyond the bonds of paternalist and family communities in discussing issues of modern politics. This would explain why at present there was no radical alternative to merely liberal renewal. In short, Catholics had been co-opted and absorbed into the great liberal agenda of the bourgeois political elites. If the Slant circle were to realize their goal of cultural transformation, then it would be necessary to break the institutional bonds and paternalistic habits of mind that prevented the development of a revolutionary Catholic consciousness. Their critique of liberal-buttressed

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corporate culture and the role of the institutional Church within that dynamic drew on a complex of sophisticated sociological, economic, and theological ideas ranging from Marx to McCabe and Williams. However, in order for their targeted audience to reach the requisite advanced level of revolutionary consciousness and find the light, they would have to thread their way through some very demanding theoretical revolutionary discourse. And this would be no easy matter. But the first step in the Left’s goal of achieving a Christian socialist transformation was to generate conditions conducive for creating a community of shared values. They believed that the Roman Catholic Church had a key role to play in this cultural imperative.

T E N

The Quest for New Community and Culture

Our task is not to convert the world, but to change it. —Neil Middleton1

THE IMPERATIVES OF COMMUNITY

A major component of the Catholic Left’s agenda for achieving what Brian Wicker called a “socialist humanism”2 was the quest for community, the framework necessary for the realization of Raymond Williams’s notions of a “common culture.” The advancement of what he called the “Long Revolution” required the expansion of democratic participation in the political process, and this could be accomplished only by developing a unified cultural community. The Catholic Left considered political action essential for achieving this end. However, their definition of “politics” was to be distinguished from the conventional “dirty” interest group variety practiced by the regnant “party system.” Although 251

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the Left failed to acknowledge it at the time, their analysis and condemnation of Britain’s parliamentary party politics were in fact the same as that first articulated by Cecil Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in their book The Party System (1911).3 As Slant’s Martin Redfern complained, ever since the introduction of universal suffrage there had been no meaningful evolution toward full participatory democracy in Britain. The electorate was given the choice of merely selecting between partydesignated alternatives, neither of which in practice permitted direct citizen input in political decisions, nor did they represent any substantial differences in the approach to governance. All three major political parties in Britain —Labour, Liberal and Conservative— professed “a loud and doubtless sincere belief in the ‘party system’—in the system whereby the party in power at any given time is ‘counterbalanced’ by the other party or parties, and political power alternates between two or more parties.”4 This duplicitous system where Peter pays Paul had to be unmasked and real political power given to the community. The Catholic Left’s version of politics also differed from the liberal model, which was deeply suspicious of any activity that compromised individual freedom for the sake of the collective whole. The liberal political idea was deemed far too narrow and culturally limiting. It was also socially conflictive, since the liberal antithesis of the autonomous individual and a conformist society undermined a sense of shared community. The practice of politics, the Left insisted, had to be a concern of the community at large, since what is necessary for the fulfillment of the individual can only be satisfied when all men come together through a network of shared social institutions. Martin Shaw, student organizer for the Catholic Left, wrote that what Slant called the “primacy of politics” should more intelligibly be called the “primacy of human community.” We use the word “politics,” he asserted, “to indicate the continuity between ‘personal’ and ‘structural’ relationships, the fact that both are aspects of our human, social existence.”5 Politics in this respect is the language of the way in which people live together in society. Politics shapes the quality of culture and society, and because therefore it demands the involvement of the entire citizenry, well beyond that permitted by the prevailing “party system,” which limits popular participation in the interest of preserving the power of capitalist elites. “If man is essentially a

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learning, creating and communicating being,” wrote Williams, then “the only social organization adequate to his nature is a participating democracy, in which all of us as unique individuals learn, communicate and control.”6 In April 1965 a symposium sponsored by the London and Downside Slant groups was held at the University of Birmingham. Its purpose was to suggest ways in which scripture could more effectively speak to the social and political needs of laymen. The proceedings were subsequently published as The Committed Church (1966), edited by Laurence Bright and Simon Clements. The book drew its title from the participants’ “commitment” to Catholic action, which was to be taken through Britain’s political structures and institutions for bettering the human condition.7 The Church itself was supposed to play a prominent role in this endeavor through the development of a more socially relevant liturgy. In this regard the Church had to commit itself politically to giving direction to the creation of a single unified culture in which the sacred and secular would each play its part in giving unity and shape to the complex social whole.8 A central issue addressed by the symposium was the necessity of reconnecting disparate, atomized individuals with a broader unified community, a pressing issue given the rupture in structures caused by rapid social changes brought on by the forces of capitalism. J. D. Halloran, for example, drawing on the classical sociological paradigms of Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Emile Durkheim, painted a stark picture of how tendencies toward Gesellschaft (Tönnies’s term for social structures that correspond to modern urban living and the formalities of a capitalist corporation) could explain why the dynamics of a market economy were eroding the traditional sense of community (what Tönnies called Gemeinschaft). The plethora of secondary relationships that prevail in the former, diverging as they do from the personal, primary interactions of traditional communities where each individual had a deep and abiding sense of place, was a major source of the fragmentation of modern society. What was needed, claimed Halloran, was a fundamental base for rebuilding community, a set of shared values and social objectives that could serve as catalysts for creating a common culture along the lines outlined by Williams.9

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Brian Wicker, another symposium participant and one of the founding fathers of the Catholic Left, believed that the new theological understanding of the Church as the community of God’s people (Vatican II) gave the greatest promise for realizing Williams’s call for a cultural community where every citizen is both a member and an active political agent.10 Wicker insisted that the Church through its liturgy had a constructive role to play in advancing the progressive political agenda of the Left. But this required that the Church make its teaching intelligible in a language compatible with modern thought.11 After all, as Williams insisted, “any real theory of communication is a theory of community.”12 This meant that there had to be a connection between understanding the place of language in an individual’s life and an appreciation of how that was related to the broader context of the society of which he was a part. The challenge was to allow the individualist conception of language (in the case of Catholics, one that was alien to the ears of outsiders) to align itself with the collectivist understandings of the larger community. The Slant Catholics were highly impressed with Heidegger’s idea that language is born in conversation. In a well-known passage from his book Erlauterungen, Heidegger wrote: “We—human beings— are in conversation. The being of man is rooted in language; but language occurs really only in conversation.”13 Consequently, argued the Left Catholics, any reaching out to community, which is solidified through conversation, demands the creation of a shared world of meaning. This involves, observed Fergus Kerr, the principle of interdependence: “language is where we depend on one another most, it is where we make one another human, it is where we respect and value one another, it is where we understand and love one another, it is where we make community.”14 Wicker noted that Marx also understood that labor, which gives objectivity to the natural world, was inseparable from language. It was man’s capacity to labor, that is, the power to create both material and nonmaterial culture, that produces language in the first place. Like human consciousness, language arises from the need to have intercourse with others, a prerequisite for labor itself. Language and consciousness, asserted Wicker, are therefore social products, the “ether in which we communicate” giving existence to mankind’s shared world. In this, Marx and Wittgenstein are as one.15

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If the Church were to reach a broader audience for the sake of creating a true community, it not only had to democratize its language (making the breakthrough from the individualist to the collective) but also had to restructure its institutions. Wicker realized that the Church’s medieval administrative structures had little relevance to the needs and realities of the modern world. As currently set up, there was no way the internal governance of the Church could reach out and speak more relevantly to a broader social community. The Church in this effort could no longer remain independent of politics. It must rather take on the responsibility of helping to forge a new concept of politics by encouraging a level of consciousness that recognized the interconnectedness of all dimensions of social experience. This involves a readiness to accept a degree of social change that could lead to the dissolution and martyrdom of the Church itself. In Wicker’s words, facing up to this possibility can prepare the Church for the ultimate challenge that awaits it in the contemporary world: “that of becoming an eschatological community dedicated to its own surpassment, and so to the final transfiguration of the world by the power of Christ’s resurrection.”16 Several writers of the Catholic Left referred to the psychological theories of R. D. Laing and cited the plays of Harold Pinter and John Osborne as illustrative of the problems of disconnection and the loss of a sense of shared community. Marx, of course, produced the first in-depth study of the causes of social alienation, and Laing creatively drew on his pioneering work to show how changes in economic and social structures were linked to schizophrenia. Under capitalism the worker does not belong to himself; he is obliged to sell his labor for a wage, the conditions and forced agreements of which lead ultimately to alienation from both the products of his labor and his personal sense of self. In Marx’s interpretation, alienation is not a subjective personal feeling but an objective social reality. The more the laborer devotes his life to work as a means of satisfying basic physical needs and produces objects that have no intrinsic meaning to him, the poorer he becomes in his inner life and the less he belongs to himself. The worker becomes numbed by adapting to the rhythms of the machine and essentially ceases to think. Similarly, noted Marx, much like becoming at one with the machine, the more of life that man attributes to God, the less he has left in himself. Thus, the more the

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worker, because of market necessity, puts his life into the objects he is obliged to make, the less his life belongs to him: All these consequences follow from the fact that the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For it is clear on this presupposition that the more the worker expends himself in work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself. . . . The worker puts his life into the object, and his life then belongs no longer to himself but to the object.17 Ultimately in the marketplace of capitalism the worker himself becomes an object to be bought and sold by the capitalist for a cost that maximizes the profit margin. With the worker’s loss of spontaneous, creative life, his capacity to take independent action breaks down, and he now becomes inauthentic, in fact, no longer in possession of the attributes that define his humanity. In this dynamic the worker has become alienated from nature, from his personal life (his body has become a mere instrument of labor). Marx observed that the owners of capital are also affected by the process employed to exploit labor. The slavery of the slave is communicated to the master, who can only exist by his complete dependence on the sweat of his underlings. Much like the workers, the capitalists define their lives in terms of objects, thereby becoming slaves themselves to the routines of the competitive methods of production. Their existence is defined exclusively by profit. In this sense they have become as alienated from their humanity as have the workers whom they exploit. In advanced capitalism the forces of alienation spread beyond the workplace and penetrate the entire social structure. This led to what Laing recognized as schizophrenia, a condition that is a product of a society that lacks community. The “cause” of schizophrenia, argued Laing, can be found not in the individual alone but within the social context in which the psychiatric ceremonial is being conducted.18 For Laing, schizophrenia should not be thought of as a physical disease or an individual psychological aberration but rather as a symptom of the collective sick-

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ness of neocapitalist society. “True sanity,” he asserted, “entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality.”19 In other words, therapy should be a community affair, but there could be no satisfactory treatment of the illness until private property was removed as the source of social alienation. The Catholic Left recognized a salient connection between Laing’s psychological analyses and the neo-Thomistic nourishing of the false body/soul dualism.20 Such teachings served to alienate the Christian from the “outward” material world, where he was obliged to find his sense of identity, and what was regarded as a higher and separated “inward” reality. Yet there was a common bond, they insisted, between Marx/Laing and the mystical body of Christ. This was made manifest, observed Terry Eagleton, by substituting “human community” for “Christ.” According to Eagleton and Laing, it is in a genuine community that men overcome alienation and find their authentic selves. For Christians, Christ is community, for he is made present in a human world.21 The call for a true participatory democracy in the making of a common and unified culture was carried to strikingly radical ends by the Catholic Left. The once inchoate suggestions about the necessity of shattering the traditional institutional structures of the Church soon became more specific as the Slant group built up confidence and steam. Eagleton, for example, saw the parish church itself as in conflict with the creation of a common culture because its paternalistic and clerical priestly structures infantilized the laity. This negated any possibility of realizing what Vatican II called the Church as the “community of the faithful,” a body of lay people whose priesthood is to be “in the world.” As currently constructed, the parish, a core building block of Christian culture, remains “outside” the world so long as its priests are a privileged caste above the lay community. It was not enough for radical Catholics to change Christian consciousness. Equally important was the transformation of Church culture: “As long as priests exist as men apart for other men to bring their problems to, whether the problems are spiritual or social or psychological, serious inequality is likely to be created, and the movement towards a common culture constantly blocked by this paternalism.”22 The common culture for a radical socialist, concluded Eagleton, could

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only become reality when it engaged to the fullest collaborative capacity the artistic, political, moral, and economic energies of all its members. The current institutional structures of the Roman Catholic Church prevented this from happening. As a way of opening up the Church to the community, Slant’s Leo Pyle proposed the creation of what he called “parish councils,” completely democratic and elected bodies without any franchise exclusions.23 These presumably would minister to the needs of the parish community. The clergy would be allowed membership in these deliberative bodies but not necessarily act as leaders in the capacity of chairmen. These structures would be one way of linking the institutional governing bodies of the Church more closely to the secular community of which they must become an integral part.24 Pyle hoped that such structures could encourage ecumenical dialogue and eventually serve as vehicles for transforming society by battling the features of advanced capitalism that have ruptured the sense of a unified community. But it would require more than mere eleemosynary outreach. What Pyle had in mind was something along the lines of the French worker-priest movement, communal political action beyond preaching: “We must face up to the need for political conflict and prepare for the tensions this will inevitably bring, for taking this commitment we take up the cross.”25 The practical side of implementing Pyle’s innovative program of parish councils, however, would mean taking on the leadership of England’s Catholic Church, in particular the power of Cardinal Archbishop Heenan, a task well beyond the capacity of a small group of religious revolutionaries with a diminutive base of public support. Eagleton carried the argument a good deal further. He believed that the parish as currently constructed was duplicating the functions of professionals in mainstream society. The traditional institutional assignment of the priest as an educated factotum to be consulted on all matters spiritual, psychological, cultural, and social was a dysfunctional anachronism in a modern society where no one had the capacity to monopolize knowledge and insight. Historically, the defining function of the priest was to preside over the liturgical assembly and preach the word of God. But the liturgy was never meant to be a one-way didactic street, where the teacher imparts wisdom to others through divine affla-

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tus. The “living” liturgy of the Church must be an ongoing activity involving everyone as both teachers and learners. Ultimately, the function of the priests, concluded Eagleton, “is to eliminate themselves so the church can operate.” In his historical schema, Eagleton likened the role of the priest to that of revolutionaries in a Marxist state. Both would “wither away so that a real, human society can come into existence: so that the era of paternalism may yield to a genuine community.”26 It was Eagleton’s conviction that Marxism was the most elaborated revolutionary theory of our times. Therefore there could be no revolutionary perspective that was not on some level Marxist. The Christian and the Marxist experience a common parallelism, for what lies at the core of both is a recognition of the struggle necessary to transcend an era of destructive and illusory “freedom” and to achieve genuine communal liberation. But unlike the Marxist, the Christian “recognizes the risen Christ as the ground of this historical movement. He believes this because Christ, uniquely, is both a body and a language: he is an animal, yet an animal with the universal availability of language, the word of God.” In Christ the Christian experiences a fully human and universal communication where “language and bodiliness finally converge into a single life.”27 Much like Lenin, whose merging of theory with praxis he admired, Eagleton never believed that the dispossessed (in biblical terms, the anawim, those who were oppressed and exploited) could bring about the necessary revolutionary transformation on their own. This would require, he concluded, the work of a revolutionary vanguard based on the Leninist model: in the Christian context, the responsibility for spearheading change would be assumed by the ministerial priesthood. Although Marx regarded the proletariat as the vanguard for socialist revolution, Lenin highlighted a second “subsidiary” vanguard within that body: this was the party itself. Lenin’s Bolsheviks had a two-part role to play. The first was to generate the vital energy for revolution among the masses; the second was to serve as an activating coterie, a mediating body through which the proletariat would be shaped to do battle with the ruling establishment. In this respect the party is a generator for bringing the masses to the point where they can challenge and overcome the conditions that oppress them. Eagleton seems to have believed that the Leninist model did not include the vanguard imposing itself on a

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civil society (although that is precisely what the Bolsheviks did do) but instead would be responsive to the actual conditions of the moment, giving form and direction to the social forces for revolution. In short, the vanguard “must be at once the servant and shaper of the popular good.”28 Eagleton saw a direct connection between Lenin’s accomplishment and the secular challenges facing the Church. In his view, Catholic progressives (liberals), who saw the need for restructuring elitist institutions, were the equivalent of Lenin’s Menshevik opponents, who were prepared to wait for the dialectic to bring about the conditions conducive to socialist revolution. Like them, liberal Catholics labored under the sentimentalist fiction of a false populism based on the belief “that the world will grow to its own good fruition in its own good time.”29 But the Christian Leninist, argued Eagleton, being liberated from the strictures of “false consciousness,” has a realistic view of the prevailing power structure and understands the necessity of an elite vanguard—the parish clergy—coordinating and shaping the forces for change. Vatican Council II helped to reverse the separation between the priesthood and the laity as well as to reintegrate the Church as an institution with the secular world. Now that the barriers had been breached, the priest, much like Lenin’s “vanguard-within-the vanguard,” should take on the role of a central political leader. In this sense he becomes a paradigmatic Martin Luther King or a Camilo Torres, who through both charisma and sacramental authority acts through the community to guide it to revolution.30 Eagleton’s ideas concerning clergy and Leninism were significantly influenced by Herbert McCabe. McCabe argued that the Church’s central mission was to transform the world, and thus the priest’s function should be that of an agent of change, one who works in the secular realm and not simply within the Church. He rejected the traditional view that gave ordinary clergy a greater insight into the Gospels; this amounted to an elitist position that those with superior status could pronounce ex cathedra on activities in many diverse fields. This elitism was rejected by Vatican II. Nor did McCabe accept the liberal position on such issues, namely, that clergy should not venture into areas beyond their professional expertise and instead restrict themselves to sacramental matters. The priest’s role, insisted McCabe, was that of “revolutionary leader,”

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giving direction to the ways that society could be transformed along the lines set forth by Marx. For McCabe, Marx’s notion of the proletariat, whose alienation and developing class consciousness would ultimately transform society, ran parallel to the biblical idea of the anawim. Now, Christians were called upon to serve the poor and all humankind by working for the promise of Christ’s kingdom, a task that required overturning the forces of social oppression.31 Eagleton and McCabe offered a hard testimonial of the Catholic Left’s commitment to a revolutionary redefinition of the institutional structures of the Roman Church as a vehicle for forging community through a radical humanistic socialism. The Catholic Left also saw the need for a perpetual worldwide revolution. After all, Christ’s call for the transformation of the world was not a static command applicable only to a given time and place. The institutional Church, co-opted by the capitalist establishment, had accepted the propaganda of the West that “liberal democracy” and the free market represented the end of all human endeavor.32 Therefore, many Christians had ceased to see the need for promoting change in a worldwide context. Yet large areas of the world were still mired in poverty, sociopolitical repression, and military conflict, much of which was a product of Western imperialism. And all of these problems undermined the capacity to achieve a humanistic community. The call of Christ, noted Neil Middleton, shows that the demand for revolution involves all Christians, who must stand with the masses, the disinherited of the earth.33 The Catholic Left asserted that the source of such worldwide exploitation lay in the West itself. It was the economic system of capitalism, which destroyed community at home and through its quest for wealth exploited labor and raw materials in the Third World. A natural by-product of this “informal” imperialism was conflict and war. For the most part, the Western public saw no connection between their economic system and destitution in postcolonial countries. This was largely due to mystifications perpetrated by the capitalist elites (the function of what Marx called ideologies), the chief bulwark of which was the myth that Western empires had bequeathed to the underdeveloped world the political and economic institutions necessary for independence, and that the civil chaos in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere was the

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consequence of either cultural immaturity or the betrayal of the West’s benevolent colonial legacy. However, the essential taproot of postcolonial depravation, the Left asserted, was the global expansion of the capitalist system, which brought the rest of the world into the sphere of Western economic domination. The engines of capitalist exploitation, having been modified and mitigated in the West by trade unionism and state-sponsored welfare programs, were exported to the developing world in an unreconstructed form, resulting in civil war (at the time, the conflict in Nigeria-Biafra, for instance, was triggered by Western oil interests) and the general balkanization of the African continent. The patterns of global economic relationships, where agricultural and extractive industries became linked to the international market, were determined by the needs of modern monopoly or oligopoly capitalism. An important tool for protecting and expanding this system was a strong military, which was deemed crucial in pushing back the threat of international communism. In addition, armed force was necessary to maintain and possibly improve the capitalists’ positions within the exploitative hierarchy of the colonial countries. Hence, the Catholic Left saw a clear relationship between capitalist economic expansion and militarism. Middleton’s views on this subject were influenced substantially by the ideas of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, the first to extend Marx’s economic analytical model to the conditions of international monopoly capitalism.34 Fergus Kerr, writing in New Blackfriars, welcomed the publication of Baran’s and Sweezy’s book Monopoly Capital in Britain as backing up and further extending the project outlined in the New Left’s May Day Manifesto 1968.35 According to their analysis, the inability of Western corporations to absorb their own surplus capital results in economic recession. State-supported welfare programs constitute an essential portion of the necessary structures of monopoly capitalism. Rather than being regarded as a move toward a genuine egalitarian society (part of the rhetoric, noted Middleton, of the current Labour government under Harold Wilson), welfare institutions serve as a buffer against the socially destructive forces of capitalist stagnation. In addition, contrary to the conservative myth that government spending is wasteful and an encroachment on individual liberty, state-funded social programs are an essential means for absorbing surplus capital. Thus the creation of the

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welfare state is not a move toward socialism but rather a major prop in the structure of monopoly capitalism.36 Of course, the major source for the profitable exportation of surplus capital is in the developing markets of the Third World. The bald face of this economic pillaging is masked by so-called foreign aid, which in reality amounts to “handouts to corrupt dictators designed to insure their loyalty” to the corporate investors rather than any benefit to the host nation.37 The political project of the Catholic Left concerning revolution and imperialism and its differences with the post–Vatican II liberalism of the official Church can be appreciated in its response to a document issued by sixteen Third World bishops endorsing Pope Paul’s Populorum Progressio in August 1967.38 The bishops were pleased and highly supportive of the Vatican’s dissociating itself from “the imperialism of money,” a force to which it was once tied. The Gospels had always called for the potent fermentation of deep social change, and history showed that revolutions were part of this process. Revolutions achieved positive gains for human rights. The French Revolution of 1789 was of this type, observed the bishops, but not those advancing “atheism and collectivism” (a reference to communist-style revolutions along the lines of the Bolshevik model of 1917). The document praised the pope’s references to St. Basil’s sixth homily against wealth—“it is not your rapaciousness that is here condemned, but your refusal to share”—and the inclusion of St. Ambrose’s dictum “the earth is given to everyone, and not only the rich.” The Church should rejoice, claimed the bishops, that a social system has emerged to challenge the rapaciousness of capitalism, one that more conforms to the moral teachings of the prophets and the Gospels. Therefore, Catholics have the responsibility to demonstrate “that true socialism is a full Christian life that involves a just sharing of goods, and fundamental equality.”39 Slant in its editorial comments of August 1967 welcomed the bishops’ manifesto against imperialism and support for socialist revolutions in the underdeveloped world. However, the bishops were taken to task for what Slant considered naive and confusing suggestions for advancing the cause. Most important, the bishops were not prepared to lead the revolution or to indulge in politics. They emphasized in their manifesto that there was to be “no political aim of any kind behind our words.”40

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Here was a clear example of officialdom’s reluctance to accept the obligation of realistically engaging the political process. A second failing was the means by which the bishops advocated change in the Third World. They supported the pope’s call for the expropriation of property if it damaged the country’s interests, and they actually went further than Populorum Progressio in stating that rich foreigners not be “allowed to come for the purpose of exploiting our poverty-stricken peoples under the pretext of business and industry.”41 This they opposed because it caused a “bitter nationalism” that divided the people and undermined possibilities for social cooperation. As for moving forward the revolution for full equality, it was for the lay people to push their own advancement, “to educate themselves out of illiteracy” and to hear those progressive voices that could ignite their sociological imagination. They also should have the right to form real trade unions, protected by the state, which in turn “must labour to bring to an end the class war” that “has been unleashed . . . by the rich.”42 All this the people must strive to do, guided in their endeavors by lawful governments. What was clear, asserted Slant, was that the bishops were unable to analyze and thus fully comprehend the actual social structure of imperialism and capitalist domination in the Third World. It was naive and unrealistic to expect the masses to use their “lawful governments” to nationalize private and foreign capital or to promote and protect “real trade unionism.” In Slant’s view this was the equivalent of advising the Jews in Hitler’s Germany to work within the Nazi system. In Latin America and Africa, most governments were not “lawful” but rather the creation of imperialist forces acting through the CIA and other agencies of international capitalism. The only way such governments could be representative of the masses was through revolutionary action of the kind advocated by Frantz Fanon, Fidel Castro, and other Third World freedom fighters. Both the demand and the expectation that governments representative of capitalism could abolish class war were the products of the liberal-democratic myth of the impartiality of the state. Marx had perceptively observed that the state was always the executive of the ruling class. Class warfare would be an integral part of all societies until the economic conditions that produce class division were destroyed. Finally, the bishops’ disparaging references to a “bitter nationalism” failed to

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comprehend that nationalism itself is a necessary stage in arousing the class consciousness of peasants and workers, so that they will more fully understand the ways in which they are exploited by the international system. Individual morality, insisted the Catholic Left, is insufficient to defeat imperialism, and unless the bishops of the Third World come to understand this fact, they “run the risk of being swept away by radical political movements.”43 Similar views on the necessity of revolution in the Third World were expressed at the time in New Blackfriars, whose editors asserted that “the choices and chance before the Church . . . now is to fuse its revolution with those of the Third World.”44 Slant’s analysis of the liberal, democratic state and its close association with expansive, corporate capitalism, which served to undermine the development of community at home and abroad, was in all respects cutting-edge, imaginative, and surprisingly prescient, given capitalism’s further maturation into the next century.

ANTICIPATING LIBERATION THEOLO GY When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist. —Dom Helder Camara45

Slant’s perspicacious critique of the bishops’ manifesto anticipated what would become the starting point of liberation theology, one of the best examples of the blending of Christianity and Marxism for the creation of a humanistic socialist community. It has been argued that Father Laurence Bright in his promotion of Marxist social theory, political commitment, and biblical studies was a pioneer in the development of liberation theology.46 The formal birth of this theology occurred at the Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellín, Colombia, in September 1968. This meeting was inspired in large part by the ideas of Dom Helder Camara, who had labored throughout Vatican II to push the Church into giving more emphasis to serving the

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poor and promoting greater dialogue between the industrial and undeveloped worlds.47 Branded as the “Red Bishop” by the Brazilian military dictatorship, whom he opposed, Camara considered class analysis an integral tool for understanding social dynamics and insisted that this could be facilitated by using the insights of Marxism without becoming a Marxist. Camara, however, was an advocate of nonviolent methods to promote social justice. Yet progress in achieving this objective required the involvement of the Church in the political, economic, and social struggles of the poor. He placed great hope in the engagement of minorities oppressed by the capitalist system, which could serve as the “nuclear energy for change.”48 Dom Helder had been successful in influencing his friend Giovanni Battista Montini as Pope Paul VI to issue the encyclical Populorum Progressio (“On the Development of Peoples”). At the Medellín Conference the bishops identified the Church with the poor, the voiceless, and the oppressed in an attempt to place the goals of Vatican II in a Latin American context. The bishops asserted that poverty in the undeveloped world was largely the product of rightist national oligarchies supported by the international imperialism of capital. In the words of Dom Helder, “the heart of the problem, of course, is the unjust politics of international commerce.”49 The Latin American bishops committed themselves to a radical transformation of this condition by supporting the liberation of the masses from all sources of subjugation. The impulse of the Medellín Conference gave shape to the theology of liberation in the writings of Gustavo Gutiérrez, Juan Luis Segundo, and others. These theologians criticized what they called “developmentalism” and its logical enabler, liberal Catholicism. Developmentalism for these theologians had a pejorative meaning, because it represented the attempt to achieve social advances within existing power structures. As an approach to reform, it failed to recognize the roots of economic injustice, which lay in the existing economic and political institutions. Gustavo Gutiérrez, O. P., considered the founder of liberation theology, is a Peruvian theologian who spent much of his life before entering academia working with the poor of Lima. He believed that it was imperative to break through the “development mystique” that modernization can only be achieved through the agencies of international capitalist organizations that are closely linked to the governments control-

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ling the global economy. The consequence of allowing these forces to direct international development is the perpetuation of dependency, where poor countries not only rely on the largesse of the rich nations but also experience economic volatility by having to link their fledgling economies to the vicissitudes of the international market.50 The theology of liberation was an attempt to provide a Christian means for overturning the status quo, the only possible way to create a new, more equitable, social community. In the view of Gutiérrez, this required a radical attack on established institutions, meaning “a profound transformation of the private property system, access to power of the exploited class, and a social revolution” that would break the dependence of the masses on the very structures that oppressed them.51 This was the only way in which a society of socialist humanism could be achieved. Finally, much in the spirit of the English Catholic Left, the liberation theologians saw the need to establish a more direct connection between the Christian faith and political action.52 Politics comprises the science of power, and those who monopolize the levers of government will not willingly relinquish their hold without the application of force. It was in this arena that the Left hoped to further develop what Marx meant by fusing theory with practice. As part of its commitment to promoting revolutionary social change, New Blackfriars saw fit to publish a paper by Richard Shaull, a professor of theology at the Princeton Theological Seminary, delivered at the Conference of the U. S. Bishops’ Committee for Latin America and the International Documentation on the Conciliar Church in St. Louis, Missouri, at the end of January 1968.53 The editors considered Shaull’s paper important and believed that publication in New Blackfriars would spread its message to a broader audience. Echoing Teilhard de Chardin’s thinking on evolution, Shaull argued that man’s historical existence was gradually moving toward a goal: the creation of a “new humanity” within a “new social order” driven by breakthroughs in Europe’s successful social and political revolutions, all of which suggested that God’s hand was at work in human history as a force for an ongoing process of liberation. Shaull claimed that this discovery of self-hood shaping the future was evident in the “Negro revolution,” in the new stirrings of youth in the West, and in the revolutionary awareness in the Third World.54 It was

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the last phenomenon, however, that Shaull believed was eluding Western consciousness. In order for Christians to comprehend what was currently sweeping Latin America, insisted Shaull, it was necessary to recognize the failure of American liberalism as a means of coming to terms with the dynamics of history. Drawing on the work of the Catholic professor Candido Mendes of Brazil, Shaull pointed out that underdevelopment was not the result of inadequate resources and techniques, but rather the product of social structures and relationships with the outside world that had developed during the colonial era and that distorted a nation’s economic relationships and stifled its own cultural life. Mendes insisted that the only way to overcome such subservience was emancipation from the U. S.-controlled capitalist system and the integration of the nation through common economic and cultural goals in the direction of socialism. Unfortunately, many politicized Latin American Catholic youth, as well as numerous priests and lay activists, were increasingly turning to violence as a means of breaking the culture of dependency through armed movements of national liberation.55 The Church, insisted Shaull, had to offer an alternative, and this required a deliberate and strategic participation in the political process: The only possibility I see is if Christians and the Church could become a catalytic force in the development of a new type of opposition to the present trend and power structures. This would mean accepting all the risks involved in creating pressure groups that would try to break the situation open; confront the present forms of domination; insist on freedom to build the political power of peasants, workers and students; and support students, labour leaders, intellectuals and priests who are now working to build a new order.56 Schaull recognized that this would be difficult and might never succeed, but political action would at least open the possibility of a rebirth of hope in the struggle for social reconstruction in the Third World. As for those who resided in the developed world, their task was to accept the responsibility for engaging in a long-term struggle to change the very social and political conditions in their own countries that had

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produced imperialist exploitation in the Third World. Shaull did not advocate lobbying the political establishment or pressing for more economic aid. Instead, he proposed creating alliances with other radical groups and forming small activist communities to serve as a base of political power for radical change on a long-term basis.57 Many on the Catholic Left had long associations with Latin American theologians and were highly supportive of liberation theology.58 Herbert McCabe, for example, contended that “participation in the revolutionary movement of liberation is the social visibility of the life of faith.”59 Martin Redfern at Sheed and Ward published Segundo’s fivevolume Jesus of Nazareth Yesterday and Today, and Slant’s Francis McDonagh collected the essays of Dom Helder Camara and wrote an introduction to his ideas in a volume entitled Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings (2009). Another Slant activist was the poet Dinah Livingstone, who translated Camara’s The Desert Is Fertile (1974) into English. Neil Middleton was deeply influenced by Dom Helder in his thinking about the deleterious effects of imperialism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Archbishop Camara, he wrote, was the clerical standard bearer of the combined ecclesiastical and lay determination to right the appalling wrongs in that part of the world—and Fidel Castro and Camilo Torres were his lay counterparts.60 Shortly after Vatican Council II, Middleton helped to found and organize what was called the Haslemere Group, whose purpose was to offer a critique of Western foreign aid and trade policies in the Third World. In March 1968 the group published the Haslemere Declaration, which outlined the near-total failure of industrialized countries such as Great Britain and the United States to address the growing social and economic dislocations in the underdeveloped world. Overseas aid, they asserted, was largely a myth, since at best it was no more than an inadequate way of paying for imported Western goods, and at worst a clever but nefarious means of continuing the exploitation of poor countries by the rich.61 The declaration went on to condemn the rules of the “international economic game,” a rigged formulation in capitalist freemarket dogma designed to suit the needs of the industrial nations.62 Slant, in collaboration with the Haslemere Group, organized a major conference in the Round House, North London, at which Archbishop

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Camara was the central speaker. His presence and talk were a great success. Middleton wrote that it was probably the only time that London had witnessed a left-wing Catholic archbishop on public display.63 Another influence on some of the Catholic New Left was Xavier Gorostiaga, S. J., who in 1992 became rector of the Central American University in Managua, Nicaragua.64 This Jesuit-run and Church-financed institution was a stronghold of Sandinista thought and sympathy. Father Gorostiaga had an important impact on Bernard Sharratt; the priest had been at Cambridge at the same time as Slant and McCabe, and Sharratt got to know him rather well there. Gorostiaga was a strong advocate of democracy in the Third World, but he thought that democracy was impossible in the context of pervasive poverty. The archenemy of democracy in his view was capitalism, because democratization itself would undermine global economic structures such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and this was something the industrialized nations of the North would never allow. The pattern of current capitalist development, where the rich moved ahead while the poor fell further behind, was viable only because of extreme inequality. Such conditions had to be maintained, argued Gorostiaga, otherwise the world’s resources would be exhausted: “Therefore inequality is not a distortion of the system. It is a systematic prerequisite for growth and permanence of the present system.”65 He was especially concerned about the impact of market capitalism in breaking up self-sufficient rural communities because of the imposition of agricultural industrial production for export.66 When the Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua, a number of radical Jesuits accepted important posts in their government. Gorostiaga served as the Sandinistas’ chief economic advisor and director of national planning from 1979 to 1981. He continued to collaborate with the new government in his subsequent role as director of Managua’s National Institute of Social Studies, which published periodicals and monographs and sponsored seminars dedicated to explaining and defending Sandinista policies and programs. Although Sharratt had a fairly close relationship with Gorostiaga (they were both at St. Edmund’s House, next door to McCabe’s New Blackfriars), he never tried to involve him directly with the Slant project.67 The modus operandi of the Catholic Left, much as

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Shaull had advised, was to highlight the importance of liberation theology and to create informal alliances to promote awareness of political events in the Third World, as a first step in creating the requisite structures for advancing socialist revolutions. A number of the Catholic Leftists merged theory with praxis. Leo Pyle of the Slant circle, for example, went to work for Salvador Allende, the Marxist president of Chile. A connection also developed somewhat later between those associated with Slant and Christians for Socialism (CFS), an organization established in Santiago, Chile, in April 1972 in support of the Allende government. The CFS intended to prevent the use of Catholicism to attack Allende and in the process sought to unmask the unconscious link between Christianity and capitalist imperialism.68 The CFS also developed an instrumental synthesis between Christianity and Marxism to critique Latin American politics in general.69 The CFS connection enabled Slant to invite several of Allende’s ministers to a meeting of the December Group at Spode House soon after the CIA-directed military coup that overthrew his government.70 Sharratt was sufficiently moved by Gorostiaga’s charismatic revolutionary vision to consider joining Gorostiaga’s group in 1976, then working in Guatemala with the Ligas Campesinas, but he decided he could make no specifically useful contribution.71 Despite the ways in which liberation theology inspired the Catholic Left in their endeavors to battle the ills of capitalist imperialism, they were frustrated by an inability to translate liberation theology into an English context and make it relevant to what was transpiring in the developed world.72 After reading Gutiérrez, Eagleton noted that for Christian Marxists in Europe, revolution was mainly an academic affair, “a matter of high brow journalists and placid dialogues”; one did not have to commit oneself to working things out in the dirty business of actual politics. But Christian Marxism in Latin America was more of a natural understanding of the bond between preaching the message of the Gospels and fighting imperialist capitalism. Gutiérrez recognized that the answer to this problem had to be found in the heartlands of monopoly capitalism.73 Sharratt believed that the difficulty in applying the transformational strategies of liberation theology to Britain was due to the “oblique” position of the Catholic Church in relation to prevailing

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secular social networks. The Catholic Church was neither institutionally integrated within the larger social structures of British society, nor was it culturally very significant. This meant that the radicalizing techniques of liberation theology, even if they made inroads into hierarchical Church structures, could have only a marginal impact on the controlling features of British society. This suggested, wrote Sharratt, that radical Catholic action might be more effective in secular political activities.74 Although the Catholic New Left may have felt frustrated by the failure to integrate liberation theology sufficiently with their own domestic agenda, they could at least take a certain satisfaction in knowing that their project and aspirations had some impact on Third World revolutionaries. The Slant Manifesto was translated into Spanish and Portuguese for South American readers at a time when both Spain and Portugal were under the grip of fascist-style dictatorships. The Filipino liberation theologian Father Ed de la Torre told Angela Cunningham that Slant had influenced his thinking.75 In the final analysis, the Slant Catholics not only recognized the imperative of grounding their hopes for a domestic humanistic socialism in what Raymond Williams had called a “community of common culture,” but also were prescient in recognizing the relationship between such a community and developments in the Third World. The New Left Catholics did not succeed in creating a political movement to bring their ideas into being, especially as they related to the objectives of liberation theology. And this must be recognized as a signal failure of the Catholic Left: their presence was almost completely absent in the more practical realm of British politics. But despite this disappointment and their small numbers, at least the Slant Catholics had some success in creating the intellectual seedbed for advancing an awareness of the connection between Western corporate capitalism and Third World underdevelopment. They were convinced that the most efficacious way of articulating these linkages was by drawing on the economic and social insights of Karl Marx.

E L E V E N

Jesus and Marx A Christian-Marxist Convergence?

Christianity is Marxism carried a great deal further. —Herbert McCabe, O.P.1

SL ANT AND MARX

The Catholic Left’s recognition of the need to radically transform British society drew them naturally to the ideas of Karl Marx. It was their effort to merge Catholic social thinking with Marxism that was one of the most radical and controversial parts of their socialist project. In the autumn of 1960 the Catholic Student Society at the Netherlands’ Wageningen Agricultural College invited Bernard Delfgaauw to give a course on the writings of Karl Marx. Delfgaauw was himself a Catholic who had done extensive work on the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin and who recognized a certain resonance between Teilhard’s thinking and that of Marx. The course proved to be highly popular, and Delfgaauw’s lectures were published in Dutch in 1962. Slant’s Martin Redfern 273

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and Franklin Schutz recognized the importance of Delfgaauw’s work for the British Catholic Left, translated the book into English, and arranged for its publication by Sheed and Ward under the title The Young Marx (New York, 1967). It was largely through Delfgaauw’s interpretation of Marx that the British Catholic Left measured the confluence of radical Catholic social theory and Marxism.2 Delfgaauw’s analysis drew on Marx’s work up to the publication of The Communist Manifesto in 1848. This was before a rigid dogmatism appeared in Marx’s later writings, which was furthered by the additions of Lenin and Stalin. Delfgaauw pointed out that Marx had rejected the philosophical materialism of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and German thinkers (especially Baron d’Holbach and Ludwig Feuerbach). Both Engels and Marx had opposed their mechanical philosophy, arguing that it relegated man to the fringes and ignored his unique place in the world. Marx claimed that man was a “spiritual” or “intellectual” being.3 Delfgaauw also asserted that Marx’s classic insight concerning “historical materialism,” although prone to a dangerous one-sidedness in its strong opposition to Hegel’s insistence on the “idea” as the creative force in history, had been exaggerated by his later acolytes and led many to believe that ideas for Marx were solely determined by the “productive forces” of society. In a letter written to P.V. Annenkov from Brussels on 28 December 1846, Marx had attacked Proudhon for dismissing the importance of human action in the historical process. Men, insisted Marx, produce social relations in accordance with their material productivity and also “produce ideas, categories, that is to say the abstract ‘ideal’ expressions of these same social relations.”4 Thus in the early writings Marx recognized the individual person as an active and creative agent in the making of history. A major problem for all Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, was Marx’s atheism. The essence of Marx’s philosophy is that man is alienated from himself, a reflection of this being his acceptance of religion as a means of narcotizing one’s self from the meaninglessness of life. Based on examining Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, the German Ideology, and the German-French Annals, all written before 1848, Delfgaauw observed that Marx had dismissed religion and metaphysics before he rejected the prevailing capitalist economic system. Marx’s 1841 doctoral

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dissertation dealt with what Delfgaauw called a “de-duplication” of reality, that is, a refusal to accept the legitimacy of two realities, the one secular, the other religious. On a philosophical level this represented a rejection of what the Catholic Left called neo-Thomistic dualism. As Marx observed in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State (1841– 42), “In fact religion does not stand in direct contrast to philosophy; philosophy comprehends religion in its illusory reality. For philosophy, then, religion, insofar as it wishes to be a reality, is dissolved in itself. There is no real reality of being.”5 Man embraces religion because it is the only way he can find to anchor himself in a world without meaning. Thus, “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”6 Marx believed that man had to reject religion in order to become a more creative agent of his own condition. In this sense he advocated a radical turning toward real life, which in the philosophical meaning of his time amounted to atheism. This is precisely what the Catholic Left was striving to do with Christianity: break the dualism implicit in neoThomism so that religion can more effectively humanize the world. Delfgaauw asserted that it was only later in his writings that Marx came to realize that religion was related to social structure; and it was the religious angle, he believed, that fundamentally conditioned Marx’s critique of socioeconomic conditions. Delfgaauw highlighted the theme of religious alienation as a preliminary step to Marx’s later ideas because it offered greater potential for a dialogue between Christianity and Marxism. As a starter, Christians needed to make it clear to Marxists that embracing religion did not necessarily entail alienation from the world. This would require a more critical analysis of how their religious teachings privileged spirituality and otherworldly consciousness in ways that worked to legitimize social and economic inequality. Christians, moreover, also needed to develop a deeper understanding of Marx’s antipathy to religion. An important step in this direction was taken by Martin Redfern, who concluded that Marx’s atheism was not a conscious rejection of a saving God but rather the rejection of an unauthentic Christianity that had withdrawn responsibility for the secular world.7 In other

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words, atheism was a consequence of Marx’s understanding of the failure of Christianity to address real suffering but not something necessary for Marxism. After all, even the early Christians were atheists in the context of their historical environment, since they rejected the idols on which the Roman worldview was built: Rome’s gods served to narcotize the worldly pain of the masses and legitimized the power structures that oppressed them. Delfgaauw also believed that there was sufficient evidence in Marx’s early philosophical writings regarding the inherent humanism of man to suggest that he shared with Aristotle and Aquinas the view that it is possible and even necessary to move into matters of the spirit. But this was possible only after man was released from the burdens of satisfying the needs of subsistence and earthly livelihood. Religion had the capacity to console man spiritually, but it also prevented him from realistically dealing with the conditions that alienated him from his worldly estate. Thus Marx’s atheism, Delfgaauw insisted, was his refusal to escape from the real world. And it was something that cannot be separated from his humanism, which was a will to abolish man’s self-alienation caused by the inequities of capitalism. Communism, therefore, was never meant to be a totalitarian, dehumanizing enterprise but rather was a condition for satisfying all of mankind’s material and spiritual needs. For Christians to fully understand Marx, it was necessary to study his early philosophical writings and to read them unadulterated by the distorting additions of Lenin and Stalin.8 The Catholic Left had criticized Christianity for having allied itself with the modern power brokers; in this sense they asserted that organized religion had sold out to the capitalist establishment. The elites, in turn, used religion as a tool to oppress the lower orders by diverting concern from their worldly conditions to transcendental matters. The challenge for the Left was to show that modern Christianity was not turning away from the world but was rather politically dedicated to changing it by fighting for equality and justice for everyone. Here was an area of radical Christian congruence with Marx’s communism, which insisted on the socialization of society’s productive forces as a means of achieving man’s humanistic longings. Martin Redfern, for example, pointed out Christianity’s built-in socialism as exemplified in the Old and New

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Testaments’ concern with the poor and oppressed. There was also the communism of the early churches.9 Moreover, Christianity, he insisted, was fundamentally a religion of history, developing out of the past and at the same time giving structure to it. Unlike neo-Thomism, which was posited on a systematization of doctrine supposedly relevant for all time, Christian theology had shown a capacity to evolve through the ages, adjusting its teachings to shifting circumstances and thereby helping to shape the direction of history itself.10 Similarly, socialism had also evolved through history from its origins in primitive societies to its current application to the challenges of an industrial society. Another area of congruence was in the content of Christian and socialist histories: both shared a commitment to serve humankind equally and a dedication to emancipate the oppressed. “Sin” must be understood, claimed Redfern, as the force that works against the achievement of such liberation, a necessary condition for the creation of a true human community. In Herbert McCabe’s mind, original sin was something that manifested itself primarily in sinful social and political structures.11 The basic evil for Marx was the breakdown in harmony between man and nature brought about by the alienation of human labor under capitalism, which, in turn, also prevented the development of community. It was through work that man extended his control over nature and in the process transformed it in such a way as to improve the quality of the world in which he was placed. This was the root of Marx’s humanism, and it was also at the core of Christian humanism. Christ, as Terry Eagleton noted, in drawing all things to himself, made his kingship over all creation through man’s activity in the world. Christ’s command was for man to transform the world and give it meaning. And this was only possible through labor. In this respect, for both Marx and the Christian, man is the center of creation.12 Christianity and Marxism saw the necessity of struggling against antihuman forces; both sought to end domination by an oppressive elite and find redemption by a community of the poor. For all these reasons, Eagleton could say that Marxism offered a profoundly serious historical insight. Slant was thus able to accommodate Christian and atheistic ideas within the same context. There was nothing in Marx’s critique of nineteenth-century Christianity with which the Catholic Left could

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disagree. Slant’s interest in Marxism, Eagleton contended, was its recognition of the unity of theory and practice. Any serious effort to replace the acquisitive capitalist system with the Christian community of socialist cooperation required the strength of Marxism’s vision and sociological analysis.13 But Christianity, as McCabe averred, is Marxism carried further. Marx only dealt with alienation caused by conditions of labor. Jesus dealt with alienation in both this world and the next one brought by death.14 It was this difference regarding the most fundamental form of alienation that divided Marxism and Christianity, since Marx denied the existence of a future beyond this world. Yet such differences would not preclude a fraternal alliance, since both Marxists and Christians agreed on the causes of alienation and had as their ultimate goal the creation of a community of humanistic socialism. Martin Redfern in the Slant Manifesto saw Marx’s demand for the emancipation of the alienated class through revolution analogous to the Church’s role in the world: to liberate man from the sin of economic and political oppression that both alienated and disrupted community.15 Redfern showed that although the Church was traditionally a closed structure serving as a model of brotherliness for the rest of humanity, its real mission was to serve the world. This ultimately required the diffusion of its brotherliness by incorporating the Church with humankind. The Church was only there to serve the world, claimed Redfern, and “insofar as it does serve the world, it becomes one with the world, and to that extent ceases to be ‘church.’”16 Here again there was a congruence with Marx, since by becoming part of the human experience by committing itself wholly to the world, Christianity is truly a rejection of religion in the traditional neo-Thomistic sense of the term. Thus, the radical Christian project resonated with the power of the Marxist myth of sin, suffering, and redemption. As J. M. Cameron pointed out, the biblical Fall of mankind was in Marxism the transition from primitive communism to a society of classes. Redemption comes from the suffering of the proletariat, who, through revolutionary struggle, will move society to communism, representing “a return to man’s primitive integrity but at a higher level.”17 In this respect the Catholic Left could claim that its project for transforming modern society was both Christian and Marxist.

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THE CHRISTIAN ANTECEDENTS FOR DIALO GUE Christianity as a religion ‘started out to change the world, [but] became controlled by the world,’ and perhaps the same could be said of Marxism. Both need to rediscover the revolutionary sources of their own beginnings and their ultimate accountability to the poor and oppressed of this world. —Robert H. Craig18 Dialogue is simply evidence that ideological self-sufficiency is weaker than human interdependence. —Paul Oestreicher19

The willingness of the British Catholic Left to use Marx as a tool to advance their revolutionary project was by no means unique for Christians. Indeed, their social analysis had been anticipated years earlier in the works of the American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his colleague Paul Tillich. Tillich was suspended from his teaching position at the University of Frankfurt in 1933 for his anti-Nazi criticism and immigrated to the United States a year later, where Niebuhr arranged a position for him at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. Niebuhr recognized as early as the late 1920s that if Christianity were to have any relevance to the challenges of modern society, then it had to accept the reality of class conflict. He embraced socialism from firsthand experience while serving a working-class parish in Detroit from 1915 to 1928. Although not a Marxist, Niebuhr did largely accept Marx’s historical analysis.20 He found Marx’s critique of capitalism particularly compelling and was convinced that it provided “the only possible property system compatible with the necessities of a technical age.”21 As Dale W. Brown has noted, Niebuhr’s essay “Marxism and Religion” in The World Tomorrow (March 1933) was a precursor to what became the MarxistChristian dialogue of the 1960s. Niebuhr’s purpose here was to expose those elements in middle-class Protestantism that checked any possible

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radical promotion of social justice as promised in the message of the Gospels. It was the individualistic philosophy of the middle classes, claimed Niebuhr, that espoused an otherworldliness (redolent of neoThomism) emphasizing personal rather than social redemption, and thus served to perpetuate the passivity of the poor as an opiate. In addition, this otherworldliness promoted by the ruling classes emphasized finding “the basis of happiness in inner values which transcend external and social circumstances. . . . The ability to reconcile men to the inevitable and to give them inner security against the most untoward circumstances . . . can easily be used by a dominant group to persuade a subject class into acquiescence.”22 Another dimension of bourgeois religion that served to narcotize the poor, observed Niebuhr, was the doctrine of progress, which glossed over the realities of social conflict and capitalist oppression. Their version of the Gospels as practiced was to urge the oppressed to be patient (the rewards in any case are in the world-to-come) until the elite classes had actualized the ethical virtues of Christian decency and love. The Christian moral sanctions against force as a means of the poor for achieving their freedom was “rightly discounted today because it is used to stabilize a world reeking with injustice.”23 Tillich had embraced social democracy in Germany. Although no Marxist, he appreciated the moral vision of Marx’s early writings and thought it important for Christians to understand Marx’s analysis of capitalism. Tillich advocated exploring parallels between Christianity and Marxism, recognizing that communism represented in some ways a secular manifestation of Christian prophetic moral principles. He believed that Marx himself had been influenced by Christian thinking, as reflected in his analysis of capitalist-induced alienation, which seemed to parallel closely the biblical notions of the Fall. Tillich also saw an analogy between Marx’s vision of linear, progressive historical development and the Christian recognition of human movement toward an eschaton, or endtime, by the God of history.24 Yet, like Niebuhr, Tillich detected a damning error in Marx’s political thinking. Marx’s vision permitted an elite group presumably representing a single messianic social class to create the new order. But without the acceptance of a transcendent God, there would be no limits placed on the construction of the communist utopia, as evidenced in the totalitarian regime of Joseph Stalin.25

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By the mid-1960s a growing number of Catholic lay people not associated with the Slant movement were recognizing connections between the Gospels and Marx.26 For example, Joseph Blenkinsopp, writing in The Newman (January 1968), drew vital comparisons between early Christianity and Lenin’s communist revolution of 1917: both pivoted on prophecy and fulfillment. Marx condemned the dehumanization of capitalism and the role of the Christian establishment in abetting it, in much the same way that the Hebrew prophets had denounced social injustice and the institutionalized religion that condoned it. Marx’s proposals for the future, observed Blenkinsopp, were not entirely dissimilar from the kind of eschatological vision found in Ezekiel: both were “messianic prophecies ending in a violent restoration of a just social order.” Christianity was given birth through Judaism and thus shared with it an eschatological understanding of history.27 Blenkinsopp was concerned with absolutizing and institutionalizing the symbols of freedom expressed in modern sociopolitical revolutions, namely, the French and Russian. Up until Vatican Council II, Christians had succumbed to the same danger, namely, institutionalizing Christ’s word under the modern state concepts of imperium and regnum. The early Christians, argued Blenkinsopp, had no desire to emulate the Jewish church-state model but rejected it for a radical restructuring based on a sacramental community localized around the Eucharist. Blenkinsopp, it seems, was a conflicted, progressive Catholic who struggled to stay within the Church. In his book Celibacy, Ministry, Church (London, 1969), he went to great lengths to show the preeminence of the prophetic rather than the institutionalized (priestly) tradition in Christianity: “No Christian is referred to as a priest in the apostolic or sub-apostolic periods. The New Testament witness associates priesthood with both the mission of Jesus and that of the Church in relation to the world.”28 It also must be pointed out that a number of eminent Catholic theologians had appreciated the ways in which Marx had opened up new windows for examining the interconnections between economics and social structures. One of the Church’s leading specialists on Catholic social doctrine, Germany’s Oswald von Nell-Breuning, noted that Quadragesimo Anno’s analysis of industrial society was based on Marx’s examination of the problems of capitalism and that all subsequent Catholic critiques of market dynamics and social structures drew from Marx to

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one degree or another. As Nell-Breuning put it, “we are all riding on Marx’s shoulders.”29 But this presented a major problem for conservatives: identifying such influence on papal social thinking raised the question of what aspects of Marx’s ideas would be acceptable for Catholics. If it could be shown that the popes utilized parts of Marxism in their own social analysis, then it could no longer be justifiable to reject Marxism tout a fait. Among the early Catholic precursors of Slant-style notions regarding the complementary nature of Christianity and Marxism was the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. A remarkable feature of his book Marxism: An Interpretation (1953) was that MacIntyre aspired to be both a Christian and a Marxist in the pre–Vatican II years, when communism was closely identified with Stalinist Russia and when virtually all Catholics considered the two creeds irreconcilable. Many of the themes and observations discussed by MacIntyre were similar to those taken up by the Slant group.30 MacIntyre began his book with two quotations, both of which were meant to highlight the symmetry in his own thinking regarding Christianity and Marxism: “Christianity is the grandfather of Bolshevism” (Oswald Spengler); and “The true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labour theory of value. The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx” (R. H. Tawney). Much like the Slant writers, MacIntyre criticized what he called “bourgeois religion” for its dualism, separating the sacred and secular and divorcing the practice of its teachings from everyday activities. Only a religion that is engaged in every sphere of life can hope to survive. For this reason, he claimed, Christianity was on the verge of dying.31 MacIntyre published an updated and substantially revised version of the subject in 1971 under the title Marxism and Christianity, where he was critical of both creeds. However, in this volume less attention was given to Christianity (its importance, he claimed, was primarily as a historical ancestor to Marxism). The focus in this book was on Marx’s ideas, suggesting that Marxism by this point had more relevance to his own thinking. Marxism, claimed MacIntyre, was one secular doctrine that contained within it the scope of traditional religion, showing how men were part of a larger historical context and, at the same time, offering strategies for transcending their immediate social and spiritual cir-

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cumstances. Presumably, Christianity by this point was truly dead. The tragedy of contemporary Christianity, MacIntyre asserted, was that attempts to demythologize its teachings were platitudinous: it presented “a way of life in accordance with the liberal values and illiberal realities of the established order.”32 This was essentially the same criticism of establishment Catholicism made by the Slant writers. Any attempt at a radical restructuring of the current social order was doomed by liberal attempts to assimilate Christianity with the present. The object was not assimilation but rather opposition to the prevailing culture of capitalism. It had to be destroyed in order for a new community of humanity to be born.

THE DIALO GUE EXPANDS

The English Catholic New Left was part of an international dialogue in the 1960s between Christians and Marxists to find common ground in an effort to achieve social democracy. This project was prompted by a number of factors. Certainly one of the major catalysts for Catholics to move in such a direction was Pope John XXIII’s Ostpolitik, the Vatican’s diplomatic effort to negotiate agreements with communist governments in Eastern Europe in order to secure a safe environment for Catholic churches in those countries. The pastoral part of Pope John’s last encyclical, Pacem in Terris, had also opened up the door to communication with those who were in conflict with Church teachings. John made a distinction between “philosophical teachings” and “historical movements.” Whereas the former remained fixed, the latter were subject to pragmatic circumstantial adaptations and might deserve approval. Furthermore, asserted the pope, contacts between divergent groups can offer greater opportunities for the discovery of truth.33 Pope Paul VI reaffirmed such principles in Ecclesiam Suam (6 August 1964) and noted how frequently “atheists” (meaning communists) had borrowed Christian language to express their sentiments and concepts. Pope Paul even hoped that dialogue with Marxists might lead them back to Christian moral sources. The impulse for a Christian-Marxist dialogue was also fueled by a deep sense of anger and perhaps even guilt among certain Catholics who thought that, aside from a few individuals, the official Church had

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largely failed to sufficiently develop and carry through on any significant social programs. The consequence of such oversight was to open the door to Marxism. This type of Catholic ire was reflected in the views of Robert Adolfs, the prior of the Augustinian house of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. The Church’s alliance with the feudal establishments in Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary and its resistance to land reform, argued Adolfs, explained why there was initial popular support for Soviet agrarian programs and why the revolution, when it came, was so brutal and driven by hate. The poisonous environment had been nurtured in no small measure by an established religion whose leaders had separated themselves from the common man and whose Christianity had become essentially a private, personal matter. As Adolfs saw it, Christianity had become imbued with the ethos of a drawing-room culture, where the practice of faith was nearly always “relegated to a man’s closet or confined within the walls of some sacred edifice. Christian witness played no active and effective role in public life.”34 In this respect, communism and its later Leninist guise represented an indictment of a “‘Churchified,’ remote, middle-class, laissez-faire Christianity.” Such soul-searching among Christians was complemented in the late 1950s by a wave of Marxist revisionism that swept through countries of Eastern Europe and communist parties in the West. 35 The thrust of these reappraisals, which had a telling influence on the New Left, was to attack the rigidity of Soviet party practice in the name of a more autonomous and humanistic Marxism. Many of these revisionist intellectuals, following the posthumously published Testament (summer 1964) of Palmiro Togliatti, the former general secretary of the Italian Communist Party, recognized the folly of the Left’s traditional antireligious propaganda. Togliatti proposed a different strategy for reaching Christians: The old atheistic propaganda is of no use. The very problem of religious conscience, its content, its roots among the masses, and the way of overcoming it must be presented in a different manner from that adopted in the past if we wish to reach the Catholic masses and be understood by them. Otherwise our outstretched hand to the Catholics would be regarded as pure expediency and almost as hypocrisy.36

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There was also a recognition that Marxists had much to learn by engaging in dialogue with Christians as a means of further humanizing the appeal of their ideas as a tool for creating a better world.37 At the same time, a number of organizations had developed to promote discussion among Christians and Marxists, the most significant being the Paulusgesellschaft in Germany, which in the 1960s sponsored conferences that brought together Christian theologians and Eastern European Marxist philosophers.38 The Catholic New Left insisted that its engagement with Marxism was not an aberration of Christian theological tradition. The early Church fathers, after all, had integrated into their theology the ideas of such pagan philosophers as Plato and Aristotle, whose positions on many matters directly contradicted scripture. By the 1960s a number of highly respected Catholic intellectuals and theologians throughout the world were beginning to appreciate the potential of a healthy crossfertilization of ideas between Marxism and Christianity (Michael Novak and Gregory Baum, among others).39 Those who went down this path drew on what has been called “cultural Marxism,” a repudiation of political Marxism but a recognition of its useful sociological and psychological insights for advancing a “third way” between unfettered capitalism and statist socialism. In Baum’s opinion, Marxism had become part of the Western intellectual tradition, and since the same had been the case with Christianity it was only natural for there to be a sociological dialogue between the two.40 In the 1950s, theologians Henri de Lubac and Marie-Dominique Chenu, responding to the sociological analyses of French Marxists, recognized the necessity of developing more fully the social dimensions of the Gospels. The redemption demanded by Christ, they argued, applied not merely to individuals but also to the societies of which they were a part.41 Later in the 1960s, Johann Baptist Metz, in dialogue with the Marxists of the Frankfurt School, developed an approach to scripture called “political theology,” a more systematic examination of Christian doctrine designed to recover the social messages that were often obscured by individualist readings of the Gospel.42 “God is no longer merely ‘above’ history,” wrote Metz, “he is himself in it, in that he is also constantly ‘in front of it’ as its free, uncontrolled future. . . . He is of decisive importance

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for the reality of history itself.”43 The advocates of political theology have learned much from Marxist writings, he argued, and accept the efficacy of integrating the Marxist critique of religion and society with Christian thinking. Political theology challenges the traditional Christian emphasis on transcendence, because one of the effects of the latter is the privatization of the faith, that is, the relegation of religion to the private, individual sphere and its exclusion of faith from the public sphere. Metz has called this traditional emphasis the “deprivatizing theology,” since, he argued, religious teaching cannot simply focus on the individual and cannot remain isolated from the social, political, and economic spheres. Metz was joined in this effort by two Protestant theologians, Jurgen Moltmann and Dorothee Soelle.44 Their writings emphasized the necessity of understanding that notions of Christian sin and that the call for conversion and engagement with a new life advocated in the Pauline Epistles had both personal and social meaning.45 Baum has found Marx highly relevant for Catholics not so much for his political or historical philosophy but rather for his sociology, which was based on an insightful form of humanism. Marx appreciated how capitalist-induced alienation had transformed men and women from their natural condition of social species into materialist and egoistic beings. This condition was in direct conflict with human nature. Egoistic man is the creation of a society that has placed a premium on competition between individuals and employed cash value as the measurement of usefulness. The effect is to destroy the social matrixes that traditionally bind individuals to one another. What has appealed the most to theologians such as Baum has been Marx’s recognition of the forces that destroy the natural solidarity of the human community and his dedication to finding the means of overcoming such impoverishment. Marx was convinced that alienation in such circumstances could only be overcome when people become involved themselves in a common effort to remake the social order. In this respect, Marx saw another kind of transcendence, realizing a more fitting material as well as spiritual existence beyond capitalism.46 For Baum, it was possible to weld the insights of the founding fathers of classical sociology (Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, all of whom developed a critical humanism) with Christianity as a more effective way of making theology speak to the needs of modern life.

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Those who can get in touch with the classical tradition of sociology, insisted Baum, “will discover it as a source of clarification and as nourishment” for Christian social longings.47 In all this, Baum was at one with the English Catholic Left. The best-known advocate of Christian-Marxist communication on the communist side was the prominent French intellectual Roger Garaudy. As a professor of philosophy at the University of Poitiers, Garaudy was not merely a theoretician but also a highly placed member of the French Communist Party’s Central Committee and Political Bureau, as well as director of the Centre for Marxist Study and Research. Garaudy insisted that Marxists had underestimated what he called “the Christian moment,” and this error, he believed, risked their cultural heritage of becoming a “closed humanism,” a fate contrary to the spirit of Marx. Christians for their part also had much to lose—“evaporating into a purely personal piety” absent social responsibility—by failing to integrate the sociological analysis of Marxism into their own vision of the future.48 A seminal catalyst for such a cross-fertilization of ideas was Garaudy’s De L’Anathème au dialogue, published in Paris in 1965. Its significance was such that Herder and Herder published an English translation in 1966 entitled From Anathema to Dialogue: A Marxist Challenge to the Christian Churches, with an introduction by the English Catholic theologian Leslie Dewart. Another publication that had a telling impact on promoting dialogue was Marxismus und dialektische Theologie by the Czech Marxist Milan Machovec, a German translation of Machovec’s book that had appeared in the Czech language in 1961. What both of these books had in common was an interest in Christianity for its own sake, the idea being that Marxists could learn something about what Garaudy called “subjectivity and transcendence.” These two distinguished Marxist thinkers were not interested in merely recruiting Christians to their positions; they were genuinely interested in facilitating dialogue to improve the substance of both traditions. Garaudy was driven to seek dialogue because of the possibility of nuclear conflict between the two opposing superpowers in the Cold War: “The future of man cannot be constructed either without believers [Christians] or against them. Neither can it be constructed against communists or without them.”49 He believed that current political and

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economic conditions not only made it imperative for Marxism and Christianity to have a fuller understanding of each other, but, at the same time, offered new possibilities for action to promote their objectives. The colonial era was ending and national independence movements were developing throughout the Third World. Vatican Council II accepted the legitimacy of these endeavors and recognized that the Western capitalist model was not necessarily appropriate for meeting such aspirations. At the same time, Marxists were beginning to accept the principle of differing roads to socialism in the developing countries. In addition, the encyclical On the Church in the Modern World qualified the Church’s traditional teachings on the right of private proprietorship (there should be opportunities for sharing earthly goods) and, by doing so, provided a possible opening for socialist alternatives. Marxists, for their part, were now recognizing that state control of the means of production did not always prove economically functional and in some cases increased the alienation between the party and the workers. Although the times were propitious for dialogue, Garaudy had the foresight to recognize the necessity of explaining Marxism’s hostility to religion. Marx’s criticism, he asserted, was based on the religious tradition of “Constantinianism,” which identified Christianity with the state and the ruling classes. Established Christianity, with its hierarchical view of the world and connection with social elites and power structures, would naturally resist change. But Garaudy pointed out another, frequently suppressed, apocalyptic Christian tradition, that of the social teachings of the Gospels, an authentic protest stream that flowed naturally into Marxism. Marx, he insisted (and this was a common theme with many revisionists), was only against religion that led men away from the real world, thereby playing into the hands of their oppressors. Garaudy praised the anti-establishment trajectory of Christianity that was now on the ascendency through the writings of the new theologians as expressed in the promises of the Second Vatican Council. What gave Garaudy hope for convergence was the Church’s willingness to embrace science in its continuing post–Vatican II efforts to make religion more relevant to the secular world. Here, Garaudy saw the significance of Teilhard de Chardin’s writings on the fusion of science and faith, which as early as 1947, during the height of Stalinism,

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showed that Christians and Marxists could learn something by talking to each other. Each side was certain of its own truths, and although such truths might be different, both creeds were inspired by a deep and radical faith in man. Although Marxist and Christian doctrines seemed to clash, is it not certain, Teilhard asked, that what formulates their faith is a sympathy “based on evidence yet dimly perceived that they are travelling on the same road, and somehow or other and in spite of the conflict between their dogmas (formulas) they will finish up by finding each other on the same mountain peak?” In the end, Teilhard believed, the two trajectories would converge because “of its very nature that which is of faith, rises; and what rises must inevitably meet.”50 Garaudy was especially impressed with Teihard’s phenomenology, his historical explication of the upward movement of creative consciousness as outlined in The Phenomenon of Man. This represented a synthesis, argued Garaudy, that found an echo in Engel’s Dialectic of Nature. The master idea of Engels and Marx was that evolution was no longer a theory but rather a fundamental category of all scientific thought. Teilhard’s great accomplishment was to show Christians that it was possible to integrate their faith with a scientific conception of the world. No longer must the two be seen in opposition: Teilhard’s phenomenology, yoking together science and faith in man’s unfolding levels of consciousness, showed that rather than conflict, each category called upon and complemented the other. Garaudy was convinced that Father Teilhard’s work established the decisive meeting ground for a dialogue between Marxists and Christians. By stressing how man through science, labor, culture, and art shaped his own material conditions (to do so is what constituted the true Christian heeding Christ’s call to remake the world), Teilhard de Chardin showed that religion was no opiate. Man, in short, could not reach God by turning his back on the world. Teilhard’s legacy was to bid the faithful not to denounce the world but to utilize their creative resources to transform it for the better.51 Another important Marxist who advocated the efficacy of engaging Christians, as indicated above, was Milan Machovec, professor of philosophy at the Charles University in Prague from 1953 to 1970.52 Machovec chose to look at Jesus through a Marxist lens. Theology, he claimed,

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was too important to be left solely to believing theologians. It was also imperative to know how theology affected contemporary unbelievers. As a means to this end, he brought together international theologians and Marxists to discuss the matter in a series of seminars at the Charles University. These were attended by Jurgen Moltmann and Johann Baptist Metz, who both had a deep influence on Machovec’s thinking, as did Machovec on theirs. In the seminars, both sides read each other’s basic texts for the light they could shed on present-day events. The Christians who participated came to appreciate how much Marx’s views on the development of ideology as a means of group legitimation and as a protection from perceived threats corresponded to the way dogma had evolved in the Christian churches. The participants saw a parallel between Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach—“The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it”— and the scriptural insistence that what counts is not “word and speech” but “deed and truth” (1 John 4:16). Both groups recognized that they had roots in the Jewish prophetic tradition. The broader forum for the dialogue initiated by Machovec was organized by the Paulusgesellschaft. This society of Catholic Germanspeaking theologians and scientists, following the principles set down by their patron, St. Paul, held that Christianity had to be part of the secular debate in order to advance Christ’s vision of liberation. Theology therefore could not be separated from the issues of secular life. The society sponsored three successive meetings with Marxists and Christians from both Western and Eastern Europe. The first met at Salzburg in 1965, and two more were held at Chiemsee in Germany in 1966 and at Marienbad, Czechoslovakia, in 1967.53 The dialogue was expanded beyond the Paulusgesellschaft meetings to a broader international level (bringing into play currents of thought in Asia and Africa) after 1967 when the Austrian review Neus Forum emerged as the official medium for a Marxist-Christian dialogue. On the Marxist side, Garaudy was the major force at all three of the Paulusgesellschaft conferences. Throughout the discussions he insisted on a number of key points: (1) Marx was misunderstood regarding religion. He opposed only religious ideas that debarred men from action;54 (2) the individual in Marxism cannot be lost in the species; (3) commu-

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nism was not the final movement of history but simply the last phase on the threshold of man’s liberation; (4) the goal of Marxist revolution was liberation, to make every man a creator; and (5) the abolition of private property was necessary for the realization of freedom. Garaudy insisted that Marxists were now discovering the significance of Christianity and were open to the values of interiority central to its beliefs. On this count, Marxists could be enriched by the relationship: “To overlook what Christianity has meant in history would mean an impoverishment of Marxism. It is impossible to restrict our attention to history, however. What is in question is gaining mastery in common over the present.”55 Among the Christian theologians who were prominent voices in the Paulusgesellschaft conferences were Metz, Moltmann, Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, and Don Giulio Girardi, S. D. B., a professor of philosophy at the Salesian Pontifical University in Rome and a member of the Vatican’s Secretariat for Non-Believers. The Protestant Moltmann deemed dialogue as necessary because today both Christians and Marxists were struggling with problems that for historical reasons were not encompassed in traditional doctrines.56 Congar, having had much experience with ecumenical encounters, was able to make clear linkages between traditional Christian theology and its logical historical connections with the modern world described by Marxist dialectics. Although Christianity and Marxism were on similar ground here, the difference was that Christians saw man as ultimately subject to the power of God’s transcendent presence in history. The Marxists had a more limited view of man, one that recognized nothing beyond the conditioning forces of society. Metz emphasized in his presentations the necessity of Christians actively engaging in the social and political actions of the age. Christianity’s central obligation was to act as a critic of concrete society. This should not be carried out through forced authority mediated by power politics. The reverse side of this danger was too often illustrated by Marxism, which in its institutional form and ideology had engaged society by force of revolutionary absolutism. The development of a free social order, claimed Metz, could be achieved only when Christianity’s and Marxism’s institutions of critique objectively served the public without their historical tendencies to perpetuate the status quo. Since Vatican Council II, the Church had started the process of dissolving the traditional structures

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and ideological tenets that allied its institutions to the prevailing secular power structures. And now, claimed Metz, it was time for Marxists to turn their institutions into agents of independent social critique, including their own failures, if they wished to stand in meaningful dialogue with Christians. The all-important issue of freedom in society was most fully addressed by Moltmann. Was Christianity, for example, a promoter of universal freedom or intended only for those embracing the faith? Christian and Judaic beginnings, claimed Moltmann, identified God with freedom. The God of Exodus was a liberator-God whose eschatological kingdom was one where all were to be free. Christ’s teachings were part of this tradition, with the difference that having faith in that promise rather than in the privileged power of a chosen people offered one access to the kingdom. St. Paul’s preaching the spirit of freedom in Christ made no class, racial, or ethnic distinctions. But once the Christian embraced this idea of freedom, he should logically became radically opposed to the status quo, since achieving the freedom of Christ’s promise demands a transformation of the present world, which requires a continuing struggle against all forms of injustice and exploitation. Moltmann insisted that the basis of Western notions of universal liberty evolved organically from the Christian ideal of freedom. (Garaudy supported this idea as well, claiming that Christianity was the root of the Western movement of freedom.)57 Metz also argued that recent stages in the struggle for freedom (the French and Russian Revolutions) could be sustained only be integrating themselves with the previous stages of human freedom given birth by the Judaic-Christian tradition. Modern Marxist revolutions must thus regard themselves as only a provisional, at best a transitional, stage of development toward the final achievement. Moltmann outlined six stages through which the freedom movement expressed itself in the West, the last being the bourgeois revolution that materialized in the nineteenth century.58 The task of the Marxist revolutions, thereby ushering in yet a higher stage of development, was to expand the notion of freedom beyond class to embrace all humankind. Yet this could not be realized unless Marxist actions were integrated with the previous dialectical stages of the freedom movement. Without such a connection, the absolute power of the party (Leninism) and the ideal of Marxist

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freedom without a God becomes dangerously utopian. Like the previous stages of revolutionary development, Marxism cannot claim to be the ultimate one, because, like its predecessors, it too is subject to the dialectic of movement to the higher transcending goal of total freedom only possible in the Christian eschatological kingdom. The single condition that assures the forward thrust in a post-Marxist revolutionary state is the imperative of democracy. Moltmann’s analysis of history was that there could be neither socialism nor freedom in the absence of public and political pluralism.59 One of the theologians most schooled in Marxism was the Catholic Don Giulio Girardi. Girardi made a distinction between Marxist integrism, that is, the institutional, state party type of Marxism that officially prevailed in Eastern Europe and that sacrificed the individual to the rigidity of dialectics, and the views of the young Marx of the Paris Manuscripts. Girardi believed that the former, carrying the burden of Stalin, could be replaced by returning to the earlier Marxism, one that he believed was more open to dialogue.60 Christianity had been prone throughout its history to a form of integrism as well, what Girardi called “axiological monolithism,” a rigid hierarchy of values privileging the institution over the person.61 In such conditions the will of authority becomes the criterion of truth. Dialogue is not possible when either Marxism or Christianity displays integrist attitudes. The Church, thanks to Vatican II, was working to overcome integrist traditions by returning to its origins. Could Marxism in power, which always turns integrist, do the same? Luciano Gruppi, a member of the Central Committee of the Italian Communist Party, answered Girardi’s question at the Marienbad Conference in the affirmative. Communist states, he claimed, were not oligarchies and had great popular support. In that case, answered Girardi, they could swiftly move forward toward the promised democratic goal by opening up freedom of the press and religion and allowing for open and fair elections. The Christian objection, said Girardi, was “not that our Marxist friends are not revolutionary, but that they are not revolutionary enough, and that a revolution begun in the name of freedom should not have been carried through to its conclusion.”62 The inauguration of English Catholic involvement in the ChristianMarxist dialogue can be traced to issues raised in J. M. Cameron’s book

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Scrutiny of Marxism (1948). Cameron here outlined within an ethical construct the similarities and differences between these two seemingly contradictory approaches to social transformation. The English Dominican Province by the late 1960s began to promote a dialogue by organizing discussion meetings at Spode House. Conrad Pepler was Warden of Spode House, and Laurence Bright and Herbert McCabe were the “enablers” in terms of providing the energy and direction for the dialogue to take place. According to Brian Wicker Pepler generated the intellectual excitement and provided the forum for dialogue, Bright was the networker at the beginning who brought people together for debate and arranged for their views to be published in Slant, and McCabe, as editor of New Blackfriars, gave them additional journal space along with his trenchant commentaries on the subject.63 The dialogue was also energetically promoted by the British Communist Party’s journal Marxism Today, and it was the central topic of discussion at the first conference of the Teilhard de Chardin Association of Great Britain. The Communist journal ran explorations of the topic for some eighteen months. Slant’s Adrian Cunningham made regular contributions in its pages from the Catholic Left’s perspective. Lectures were given by Garaudy at several gatherings throughout England. In churches, local libraries, universities, union halls, Roman Catholic theological colleges, and Communist Party branches, lively discussions, seminars, and public debates were held concerning the crossfertilization of the two traditions, all of which reportedly were well attended.64 Two of the principal supporters of the dialogue in Britain were Rev. Paul Oestreicher (Church of England), who was associate secretary of the International Department of the British Council of Churches, and James Klugmann, editor of Marxism Today. The two collaborated on a book entitled What Kind of Revolution? A ChristianCommunist Dialogue (1968). The British Communist Party Executive Committee in May 1967 published an official statement on the discussions: “We wish to make it clear that the Communist Party will fight now under capitalism, and work in the future under socialism, for complete freedom of religious worship.”65 The Dominicans’ Spode House was the setting for four ChristianMarxist dialogues between 1969 and 1979. These were organized by

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Klugmann and Giles Hibbert, O. P.66 Several Slant writers also participated in similar discussions in Bonn and East Berlin. A few Catholics associated with the December Group joined the British Communist Party, and one of these, Irene Brennan, later served as an editor of Marxism Today. A number of other radicals of the secular New Left also were invited to give lectures at December Group meetings, including Ken Coates of the Institute for Workers Control, Tom Wengraf of the New Left Review, and Reg Groves and others associated with the radical organization International Socialism.67 The Communist Party’s John Lewis (a former Presbyterian minister and now an influential Marxist intellectual) appreciated the fact that England had a long tradition of radical Christianity that went back to Frederick Dension Maurice, Charles Kingsley, Scott Holland, Conrad Noel (the “Red Priest” of Thaxted), and Bishop Charles Gore. In fact, F. L. Donaldson, a prominent member of the Christian Social Union, had told his followers that “Christianity is the religion of which socialism is the practice.”68 Lewis made the point that the Christian-Marxist dialogue actually began in England in 1842 with the work of Maurice and the other Christian Socialists.69 There was also a clear line of philosophical convergence between the radical Christian Socialists and Catholic Distributist writers associated with G. K. Chesterton.70 It was agreed by both Christians and Marxists participating in these discussions that it was not compromise in the spirit of the two philosophies that was important—or even possible—but rather the creation of unity for the common cause of making practical social changes. As Lewis put it, in the words of Mario Gozzini of Florence, “we do not ask the Church to build socialism. We ask it to grant Catholicism the freedom to work for socialism.”71

THE RESULTS OF DIALO GUE

What was gained by the Christian-Marxist dialogue? It did not lead to a convergence between the two creeds. But it did produce a better understanding of each by those who were willing to engage the debate, and the questions raised gave impetus to an ideological reexamination of both belief systems. On the Christian side, three main criticisms were

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raised against Marxism. First was the matter of historical materialism, the philosophy that asserts that social reality is engineered by economic forces allowing no independent creativity for man. Individual humans had no rights and were devoid of imagination. Considerable light was shed on these matters when the Christian participants in the dialogues became aware of what was actually transpiring within Marxist intellectual circles. What many in the West had not realized was that these critical concerns were already being addressed by revisionists and were central to an inner Marxist debate that had broken out in communist intellectual circles in Eastern Europe. Marxist tendencies toward scientific reductionism, for example, had been challenged even before World War II by Hungary’s Georg Lukacs in his History and Class Consciousness (1922). The failure to recognize human consciousness as a force in making history, a position articulated by the Second International before World War I, was for Lukacs a misreading of dialectical philosophy. He called this “vulgar Marxism,” meaning the reduction of Marx’s ideas to a crude economic determinism, which overlooked the subjective and imaginative elements that shape human behavior, undermined a proper understanding of what Marx actually meant by human nature, and thus led to a false understanding of social reality. Lukacs wrote of an ongoing dialectic relationship between society and human consciousness, and it was the latter, he insisted, that played the creative role in constructing history. Slant was a great promoter of Lukacs’s ideas and argued that his insistence on examining the totality of human experience, the social conditioning of institutions, and the dignity of the individual was fertile ground for a Christian-Marxist dialogue. Lukacs was highly critical of the Hungarian Communist Party’s attack on the Catholic Church and the papacy as a “subsidiary Wall Street,” and he called for a serious intellectual investigation of the commonalities between Marxist materialism and Thomistic realism.72 Lukacs’s appreciation of the subjective dimension of human behavior was redolent as well in the writings of Antonio Gramsci, who also railed against the theory of economic determinism and proposed instead a voluntaristic understanding of Marxism. For Gramsci, revolution was not an inevitable part of the crunch of the dialectic but was possible only if people freely stood together in alliance to change the

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sources of their oppression. Such thinking was also a central feature of Ernst Bloch’s philosophy and found its fullest expression in the positions taken by Roger Garaudy, who asserted that Marxist thought was fundamentally humanistic. Garaudy, as discussed earlier, was instrumental in highlighting the early writings of Marx, which most clearly reflected his appreciation for the subjective element in human behavior. All of these issues and the ways in which Marxist philosophers were grappling with them were clarified in the Christian-Marxist dialogues. A second Christian concern was the totalitarian tendencies in Marxism. The dialogue revealed to the Christian participants that such matters had actually been taken up soon after Stalin’s death. A number of eminent Marxist intellectuals began to examine, without gloss, the failure of socialism in the Soviet Union and in the countries of the Eastern Bloc. It was clear, they asserted, that the abolition of private property had no effect on eliminating alienation. Although social classes had been abolished in the traditional sociological sense, a new elite of bureaucrats had emerged in the Soviet system who wielded power and promoted corruption that was every bit as destructive as those so-called capitalist elites they had replaced. On the other hand, the existence of the ChristianMarxist debates, although of value in terms of furthering tolerance and understanding, had no effect in promoting political and religious freedom in Communist countries. The Marxist participants, virtually all of them revisionists, were a distinct minority and not politicians. Therefore they were unable to change political conditions. A third criticism raised by Christians was never resolved by the dialogues, and that was the matter of Marx’s atheism. The British Marxist John Lewis tried to allay such concerns by insisting that Marx never opposed religion in principle but rather viewed it as merely “an illusion which made life bearable as long as evil conditions were incapable of being removed.”73 Garaudy and others, on the other hand, recognized Marx’s hostility to religion but asserted that it was not intrinsic to his analyses of social ills. It was rather a product of his contempt for Christianity’s alliance with ruling elites, making religion a barrier for meaningful social change. But none of these explications were sufficient to satisfy those Catholics who saw no recognition of the necessity of God in Marxist dialectics. For many on the Left, the insoluble problem

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concerned the matter of faith, the conviction that man’s future transcended to God and not simply to a higher stage in secular history. Even Terry Eagleton, one of the most Marxist-inclined of the Catholic Left, recognized that the clearest theoretical difference between Christianity and Marxism was the Christian belief that the pleroma, the realization of the kingdom, was to be the reign of God, not man. The Christian has a transcendental perspective, wrote Eagleton: he is more certain of the coming of the kingdom than is the Marxist because it is of God. This certainty of conviction only intensified the Christian’s commitment to the practical struggle for revolution.74 Eagleton believed that Christians and Marxists shared a common perspective in understanding social reality and the direction of history. Both saw history moving through three distinct stages: primitivism, “an era of destructive and serialized freedoms,” and finally a time of reintegration in which freedom finds ultimate expression in community. The last stage, reflective in the liturgy, represented in the Marxist sense an overcoming of alienation. The radical Christian stays in the Church, claimed Eagleton, because he believes that what is spoken and symbolized in the liturgy “has enduring authenticity.”75 The God issue, however, was enough to alienate many Catholic Leftists from fully embracing Marxism. Wicker, for example, in debating Denys Turner in a series on the dialogue in New Blackfriars, argued that Christianity’s sense of the transcendent power of God went beyond Marxism and at that point ceased to be compatible with it. A belief in God, insisted Wicker, was actually needed to complete Marxism. Without it there was an unbridgeable gap between what he called sincerity and authority.76 Wicker’s position was representative of those of the Catholic Left who recognized the benefits of Marxist social analysis but could not go all the way in making the convergence. McCabe, for example, recognized that the disagreements between Marxists and Christians were unbridgeable unless Marxists abandoned their atheism or Christians their belief in the Father. Yet this did not foreclose cooperation on certain economic and political levels, as was being clearly demonstrated in matters concerning South America, Vietnam, and elsewhere.77 Eagleton, on the other hand, was emblematic of those who bridged the transcendent gap

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and were prepared to embrace Marxism more fully. The Catholic Left, claimed Eagleton, could draw deeply from the theoretical insights and historical perspective of Marxism. Its rich humanism offered a more coherent framework for rethinking theology within the context of the orthodox Catholic tradition. Given the Christian ethic of community, cooperation, and equality of being, there was nothing, claimed Eagleton, that the Catholic Left could disagree with regarding Marx’s critique of both capitalism and the shortcomings and outright falsehoods perpetrated by nineteenth-century Christianity. The popes from Leo XIII to Benedict XVII have condemned the abuses of capitalism as well as communism as ideology and governance. Could Marxism and Christianity be compatible? Father Bright saw no inherent contradiction between the two, because Christianity was a revolutionary creed, not a mere collection of abstract doctrinal statements. Its goal was to transform human earthly conditions by breaking down divisive social distinctions. Since this was also the objective of Marxism, there was no incompatibility in the broad sense. In order to achieve praxis, Christians were obliged to utilize secular thinking and institutions to bring Christian ideas into reality.78 Denys Turner, writing in New Blackfriars, carried the argument one step further, arguing that “Marxism is not only not inconsistent with Christianity: Christianity is compatible only with Marxism.” Turner’s assertion was based on the premise that capitalism prevented what the Church meant by community and was itself such an unmitigated evil that everything must be done to destroy it.79 As for Slant, its position was that any serious effort at social change along Christian lines, especially given what was needed to overturn the acquisitive and socially divisive structures of capitalism, required both the vision and analytical insights of Marxism.80 This is why Eagleton and some others of the Catholic Left could call themselves both Christians and Marxists. Despite all the esoteric discussion about what divides Christians and Marxists, wrote Turner in the New Blackfriar debates, the best argument for convergence was that to create community, capitalism had to be destroyed, and Marxism offered the best praxis for doing so. Thus, good Christians, he insisted, must be Marxists.81 The only consensus among those of the Catholic Left was that Christianity and Marxism could learn from each other through dialogue and

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that this would strengthen their mutual struggle in a united front against capitalism in the quest for humanistic socialism. The non-Christian Marxist Francis Barker seems to have captured the essence of this difficult relationship when he observed that in all united fronts there was “an alliance founded on a difference and not simply on the notion of common identity or even a close compatibility at the level of theory.”82 However, the effort to bridge gaps in communication between Christians and Marxists took a toll on two of the most important participants in the endeavor. Garaudy had insisted that the ChristianMarxist dialogue would fail if it remained the concern of a small group of isolated pioneers, whose views on orthodoxy might be suspect in their respective communities. What was required was frank and open discussion between the two communities. He earned the wrath of the French Communist Party for having underestimated the ideological differences between the two groups. In France Nouvelle, 8 June 1966, Antoine Casanova attacked Garaudy’s naivete: “It is scientifically mistaken and politically dangerous to put on the same level the community represented by the Party—a community which excludes and combats class enemies — and the Catholic Church which includes all the contradictions of class-ridden society.”83 The attacks on Garaudy continued, and in February 1970 at the Party Congress in the Palais des Sports at Nanterre he was expelled from the Communist Party. As Peter Hebblethwaite noted at the time, the “Marxism of institutions” was not ready for such openness and was therefore incapable of change.84 The possibility of dialogue suffered a severe blow when Rahner’s warnings of unchecked power were made real in the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Girardi, one of the Church’s leading experts on Marxism, tried to overcome the disappointments of the events in Prague by turning his attention increasingly to Latin America. On 18 September 1969 it was announced that this eminent consultor of the Vatican Secretariat for Non-Believers had been suspended from his post as professor of philosophy at the Salesian University in Rome. The authorities contended that his suspension was purely an internal matter relating to pedagogy and that there was no question of Father Girardi’s orthodoxy. Publicly, Pope Paul described him as “competent and learned,” but an article by Maria Marcolla that appeared in L’Osservatore Romano on

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12 August 1969 struck a different tone. Marcolla wrote of “unacceptable” approaches and solutions outlined in Girardi’s recent book on the philosophy of dialogue: “It is surprising and sad to confirm that the fruitful revival of Catholic culture after the Council also bears bitter fruit and reveals the ingenuous discovery of ideological formulae which even secular culture has now abandoned.”85 Girardi’s supporters fought back. Forty-nine priests, religious, and lay people of the archdiocese of Turin, headquarters of the Salesian Order, sent an open letter to their archbishop, Cardinal Michele Pellegrino, asking for the reasons why the wellqualified Father Girardi was disciplined. This was followed by a statement from 134 distinguished Catholic and non-Catholic intellectuals, which emphasized that the removal of Don Giulio Girardi from the chair at Salesian University represented the disavowal by the ecclesiastical authorities of a dialogue that was not only promising but had already borne fruit. The Salesian University responded once again by insisting the removal was strictly the product of internal issues relating to Girardi’s difficulty with students at the university and did not relate to his position on dialogue. Girardi’s students responded by boycotting their classes as a protest against the Salesian authorities. It was clear that the authorities of the Vatican establishment, much like their communist counterparts, were not prepared to entertain the concept of a dialogue with the putative enemies of freedom. Any fruitful cross-fertilization of ideas about how to bring into reality the humanistic promises of Marx and Jesus came from those outside the sacred canopy, from independently minded intellectuals who could critically examine the revolutionary potential and administrative failures of both their creeds. In the end, the Slant circle and fellow travelers on the Christian left, as well as their allies among the Marxian revisionists, were not able to fully integrate the various parts of their traditions into a unified faithbased movement for cultural transformation. Nor were they able to move their respective bureaucratic establishments toward any meaningful ideological or pragmatic alliance. Yet in openly exploring possibilities for convergence, each side enriched and further expanded the corpus of their creeds. In the process they gained new analytical insights about how to overcome the institutional forces that worked against the realization of their mutual goal of creating a humanly based democratic socialism.

T W E L V E

Charles Davis and the McCabe Affair

I reached the conviction that the Roman Church is not a zone of truth but rather of untruth, and so is no longer credible for me as the embodiment of Christian faith. — Charles Davis1

Given the Vatican’s reluctance to explore the transformative potential of a Christian-Marxist dialogue and its foot-dragging with regard to promoting the reformist possibilities of Vatican II, it was only natural that the Catholic New Left came to view the institutional Church along with its administrative structures and ecclesiastical hierarchy as major obstacles to the creation of a Christian community of socialist humanism. The personification of this problem, as they perceived it, was manifested in what was called the “McCabe affair.” Theological questions surrounding this episode also served to clarify why the Catholic Left chose to remain in the institutional Church and how far they would go in promoting radical change. In December 1966 shock waves reverberated through Britain’s religious circles when the country’s preeminent theologian announced his 302

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decision to leave the Roman Catholic Church. Charles Davis, along with Gregory Baum, Hans Küng, Karl Rahner, and Edward Schillebeeckx, was part of a constellation of bright scholars sent to Vatican Council II as periti (theological advisers). Davis had been given a professorship at Heythrop College after it had been designated a Pontifical Athenaeum, and as editor he greatly increased the influence and circulation of The Clergy Review, a journal for Catholic clergy and educated laity. The surprise of Davis’s departure was all the greater because he had not taken radical religious positions and was known as a theological moderate. Although he had decided to marry, Davis made it clear in a detailed explanation of his actions in the Observer of Sunday, 1 January 1967, that he was leaving the priesthood for other reasons. The structures of the Roman Catholic Church, claimed Davis, had created “a zone of untruth” that blocked Christians from reaching a greater understanding of their faith in a secular world. The Church’s ecclesiastical institutions had revealed time and time again, lamented Davis, that their central purpose was to monopolize power and prestige rather than to seek truth. Since the Church was out of harmony with the thinking, needs, and aspirations of modern Christians, it was no longer credible. Therefore, announced Davis, he had no choice but to leave the Church, since reform was not possible from within its institutions. He would continue to be a Christian and theologian but in disaffiliation with other denominations. In a book that detailed his religious views more fully, A Question of Conscience (1967), Davis committed himself to practicing Christianity in small faith communities immersed in the concerns of everyday life and liberated from the bureaucratic institutions of an ecclesia walled off from the realities of the secular world. Charles Davis’s departure and subsequent public venting of the duplicity, evasions, and secret political machinations within the Church presented a serious challenge to left-leaning Catholics, given their own critique of the failings of the Church and the fitful and half-hearted ways in which, they believed, the Curia and its national episcopates were addressing the message of Vatican Council II. The challenge presented by Davis to Catholics was addressed in the February 1967 editorial of New Blackfriars by its editor, Herbert McCabe. He concurred with his friend Charles Davis that the Church was apprehensive and insecure regarding

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secular matters and was concerned more with authority than with truth. “The Church,” wrote McCabe, in referencing a charge made earlier by Brian Wicker in the Guardian of 6 January 1967, “is quite plainly corrupt: a Cardinal selects Christmas as the occasion for supporting the murder of Vietnamese civilians; the Pope alleges that the Church’s teaching is not in doubt about birth-control . . . while nearer home and more comically, a Bishop has expressed the fear that Catholics who sing carols in Anglican churches are endangering their faith and morals.”2 McCabe and the Catholic Left were disturbed that the Church hierarchy had not raised a prophetic voice against such abominations as nuclear war, world hunger, and imperialism. On the other hand, the Church spoke with a clarion voice when asked about adultery, divorce, abortion, or masturbation.3 After pointing out the failings of the Church, which McCabe identified with the limitations of the men who ran it, he went on to explain why Catholics far more radical than Davis would and should remain Catholic. Davis had contended that those who were progressive-minded remained Roman Catholic only because they lived their Christian lives on the fringes of the institutional Church and largely ignored the magisterium. McCabe rejected the charge, asserting that there were plenty of institutions— Spode House, the Newman groups, the Union of Catholic Students, the Young Christian Workers, the university chaplaincies, and even the Dominican’s New Blackfriars, among numerous others—in which Catholics were able to nourish their faith. None of these associations were “on the fringe.” To think otherwise was to fall prey to a “clericalist view” of what counted as an institution. If there were a group that worked on the institutional fringe in this sense, claimed McCabe, it was the bishops, who were doing little to promote the spirit and concrete reforms of Vatican II. McCabe admitted that the hierarchy could at times be a hindrance to progress, but this was simply part of the dialectical tension within the framework of the Church that was in itself productive of religious growth. Yet, asserted McCabe, in the absence of the “relatively impersonal structure of the Church hierarchy,” none of the more actively engaged institutions could exist. And that, he concluded, was why we stay in the Church. Overall, the purpose of McCabe’s editorial was not to condemn the hierarchy of the Church for its failures (the Catholic Left had already written volumes on this topic) but rather to show his fellow Eng-

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lish Catholics, many of whom were befuddled by the moral confusions of the day, why they should not despair over the institutional problems of the Church and follow the path taken by Charles Davis. Some five weeks after his apostasy, Davis was married in the Anglican Church, in the presence of many Catholic writers and lay activists including his friend Father McCabe. The event was widely publicized on television and in the newspapers, and in all likelihood someone supplied a copy of the guest list to Cardinal Heenan. It is clear that McCabe’s attendance at the Davis wedding greatly annoyed the English hierarchy.4 Simon Clements and Monica Lawlor, who wrote the most complete inside and balanced account of the McCabe affair, claimed that it was quite possible that the same person also sent a similar list to one of the Vatican Curia offices.5 The Sunday newspaper accounts of the wedding also included reports of McCabe’s editorial. The Sunday Telegraph, for example, published the story in bold, twenty-column inches under the headline, “Church corrupt, Says Dominican.” On the following Tuesday the editor of the Catholic Herald published a story based on his interview with the apostolic delegate to England, Archbishop Hyginus Cardinale. Although he had not yet read the full text of McCabe’s editorial, Cardinale commented that it displayed “considerable immaturity, ignorance, lack of pastoral concern and a childish desire to be with it.” It now was the fashion, he claimed, to attack the Church. The apostolic delegate further stated that McCabe was “not in good faith,” and was “irresponsible and undeserving of credit.”6 The Catholic Herald interview appeared at the same time that the Master General of the Dominican Order in Rome announced Father McCabe’s dismissal as editor of New Blackfriars and his suspension from exercising his priestly duties. Father McCabe was given no chance to defend his position. What was particularly troubling to English Catholics was that while the nation’s common law recognized that a person was innocent until proven guilty, this is not the case in canon law. When McCabe was punished without a hearing, English national sensibilities were deeply offended, and any gains in public opinion that Catholicism may have made for its acceptance of modern, democratic values coming out of Vatican II were now quickly dashed. Within short order, a nationwide protest was put in place. The campaign was largely organized by the Newman Society,

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using Slant’s subscription list as well as sources provided by Sheed and Ward. McCabe’s supporters drew up a petition to the Master General of the Dominicans, who had ordered the sanctions from Rome.7 The Dominican headquarters in Rome replied in The Times (16 February 1967) that McCabe was disciplined as editor of New Blackfriars because he had leveled false claims of corruption against the Catholic Church, thereby giving the public the mistaken impression that this was the position of the Dominican Order. The suspension of Father McCabe’s priestly duties was soon rescinded, but his dismissal as editor remained in effect.8 This led to a petition for his reinstatement that eventually included 2,800 signatories.9 Dr. John Bryden, chairman of the Newman Association, made a hurried journey to Rome and presented the petition, drafted without McCabe’s approval or disapproval, to the Master General. It formally protested the dismissal and requested Father McCabe’s reinstatement. The signatories represented a cross-section of Britain’s Catholics, ranging from manual workers to university professors (the names of dozens of priests and religious who offered support were deliberately excluded from the formal petition for fear of ecclesiastical recrimination). The petition highlighted McCabe’s right to make serious and sincere comments on issues currently troubling Christians regarding the Roman Church. Several of the Catholic media in England were critical of this effort (notably The Tablet and the Catholic Herald), but McCabe’s supporters organized a pray-in at Westminster Cathedral as a way for the laity to express their concerns over the matter of freedom within the Church.10 Although Cardinal Heenan as archbishop of Westminster distanced himself from the issues behind the pray-in, he consented to preside over this event involving some two thousand participants. Heenan personally felt that the pray-in was the consequence of an unrepresentative minority of malcontents. The pray-in was followed by a teach-in on the freedom of speech at Central Hall, Westminster, organized by the Newman Association. The event was covered extensively by Trevor Beeson, writing for the journal New Christian. Father McCabe himself spoke here. Given the heat sparked by the word “corrupt,” McCabe said that he was ready to substitute the phrase “the Church is in a right mess,” if it would be more helpful. By

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this he meant the Church as an institution — not the officials but the structures. If there were flaws in the institution, then they needed to be corrected, as called for by Vatican Council II. But there was no justification for any critic to leave the Church, for this would ultimately mean a failure to work for reform.11 At the teach-in at Central Hall, McCabe also spoke about the need for better channels of expression for dissident voices, who currently were blocked by “medieval patterns of authority.” Church governance had too long been guided by the rules of monastic obedience: modern secular society required modern lines of communication to link the hierarchy more closely to the Christian community. (It should be noted that from the inception of the Dominican Order, its founder had insisted on flexibility and commonsense pragmatism, unfettered by the rigid strictures of higher authority, so as to effectively preach the gospel.) Next, Brian Wicker of Birmingham University stressed the need for a restructuring of the Church that would allow for a more beneficial dialectic between its ecclesiastical leadership and the Christian community. Trevor Beeson reported that after the wisdom imparted by the first group of speakers (McCabe, Wicker, et al.), a “mountain of nonsense” came from the floor, ranging from a charge that the house of Sheed and Ward, publishers of Slant, was like a “subdepartment of the Kremlin,” to claims that the problems of the world were the doings of Jews and Freemasons. All together, wrote Beeson, it was a memorable evening, showcasing the growing pains of a Church as it “comes of age” with the realities of modern life: “Martin Luther would have loved it.”12 Clements and Lawlor contended that the teach-in was significant because it allowed Catholics to bring Church issues into public view. Terry Eagleton believed that the event represented a new militancy and selfconfidence in the liberal-to-left Catholic movement, a new coalition willing to speak out against the intransigence of the Church.13 The organizers of the teach-in provided McCabe with the only opportunity he had to defend himself in public since his suppression two months earlier. As Eagleton noted, the McCabe affair served to activate both radical and liberal Catholics who rallied against the Vatican’s ham-handed crackdown on what was considered freedom of the press. Yet there were also a number who were highly critical of McCabe. The McCabe affair

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had the effect of enraging the conservative end of Catholicism. This is confirmed by the flood of letters sent to The Tablet and the Catholic Herald, whose editors were themselves hostile to McCabe. Archbishop John Aloysius Murphy of the Archdiocese of Cardiff responded to the affair in a pastoral letter delivered on Sunday, 26 February, where he thundered against the evils of contemporary society and denounced those who offered unwelcome publicity and criticism of Church authority. Cardinal Heenan joined in and attacked both Father Laurence Bright and Neil Middleton in a sermon in Westminster Cathedral.14 The Left Catholics and in particular Middleton were also denounced by Douglas Woodruff, editor of The Tablet. Woodruff, wrote Martin Redfern, wanted a clear separation between politics and religion. The former was, in his view, a field activity for laymen, in which the clergy had no role to play. Theology and liturgy were declared an exclusive clerical province, an area of spiritual concern where the layman had no business interfering. We, on the other hand, insisted Redfern, “were sure that both priests and laypeople should be politically active and theologically literate.”15 One of the more unsavory reactions against the Catholic Left was instigated by Father Joseph Christie, S.J., who, according to Clements and Lawlor, hoped to start “a chain reaction of anti-liberalism.” Just after the Davis wedding, the Cambridge Aquinas Society of Catholic Students (at that time run by Slant sympathizers) organized a lecture by Archbishop Thomas Roberts, S.J., who had long been associated with the Catholic Left. In July 1950, Roberts had created a minor sensation when he resigned his position as archbishop to the Metropolitan See of Bombay (he felt comfortable as a British citizen in this position after India’s independence) and forced a reluctant Vatican to install an Indian cleric as archbishop of Bombay. In England he worked with Amnesty International in its campaign to liberate political prisoners (especially in Franco’s Spain), was open to consider the issue of birth control, and was an activist in the peace movement. Roberts had little time for Rome’s inward focus on strictly spiritual matters and urged the Church to reflect more on the troubles of the world: overpopulation, the nuclear arms race, the struggles for liberation in the third world, and so on. For conservative Catholics Archbishop Roberts was considered a polluter of innocent minds. In order to deal with such dangerous problems, Father

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Christie, acting as temporary chaplain at the University of Cambridge, dramatically closed down Roberts’s lecture to the Cambridge Aquinas Society in the middle of his talk and accused him of heresy. In The Times of 28 February, Father Christie was quoted as saying, “People are sick and tired of listening to criticisms of the Holy Church and it is time someone stood up against it.” All this was redolent of the many religious in England who were offended by progressive theological positions that in their minds was a poison arising from Vatican Council II. In the weeks after the public meetings in support of McCabe, the Catholic weeklies were full of angry letters deploring the protests, which they blamed on the encouragement of groups such as the Newman Society and the Slant crowd. Slant in particular was reproved for printing scurrilous attacks on bishops. It was clear, however, that the writers of these letters were not readers of that publication and were criticizing what they imagined rather than anything Slant had actually printed.16 The Davis matter also was a subject of sharp debate at the Friday Group. Some progressive members considered Davis a hero and wanted him as a star guest at one of their meetings, but they insisted that the question of his leaving the Church and the priesthood should not touch on the issue of his marriage. The more conservative members, on the other hand, saw Davis as a traitor to the faith who had sold his sacred calling for a mess of pottage. They insisted on expressing their incredulity over his apostasy and marriage and even wanted to ask if he were prepared to repay the Church for the cost of his education. This sparked heated discussions without any noticeable consensus. Father Simon Blake observed that the Davis affair was too sensitive, and the matter was quietly dropped.17 There was much speculation as to how Father McCabe came to be dismissed. The Master General of the Dominicans was Father Aniceto Fernández, a Spaniard who spoke no English and could understand McCabe’s commentary only through translation. Despite those who could offer reliable translations in the Dominican headquarters at Santa Sabina in Rome—the origin of the ruling to dismiss McCabe—even the best translations done in haste can obscure nuances and overtones. In fact, it was Dr. Bryden’s impression when he spoke with Fernández that he had been given a false idea of McCabe’s commentary. As to why he was

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dismissed, the speculations ranged from a perceived “calumny” against the pope and the Church hierarchy to the Master General’s concern about the Dominican’s link with the pro-Marxist Slant group and the English bishops’ worries about the leftist inclinations of certain clergy and lay activists.18 The ill-considered reaction to the McCabe article was also the product of Rome’s failure to be sufficiently in touch with the problems of theology and Church leadership that engaged the lay community at local levels. The sanction of McCabe was largely the result of his use of the word “corrupt.” Yet it was clear that the Roman authorities, from Archbishop Cardinale on down, were confused as to what McCabe meant by it, since they did not understand the context in which the word had been used. Indeed, McCabe himself frequently commented that the Vatican hierarchy had trouble with the English language. The issue of corruption to which McCabe referred was first brought up in an article in New Blackfriars by Michael Dummett in August 1965. Here, Dummett had argued that the Church did on occasion fall into corruption because it was made up of mortals, who were prone to lapses into sin. We should be able to recognize such perdition when it occurs (the failure to sufficiently resist Nazism and various forms of fascism, anti-Semitism, racial prejudice, and nuclear war), argued Dummett, and “not be seduced into taking as the word of God what is only the babbling of men.” Thus it was important, Dummett concluded, to recognize the state of such corruption in order to shake it off.19 A discussion of Dummett’s argument continued in the pages of New Blackfriars with Eagleton and Wicker for another year, and it was this debate to which McCabe had alluded. The important thing, claimed Dummett, was that such corruption was a historical fact and frequently occurred now both within the Church hierarchy and among the laity. If loyalty to the Church required the litmus test of such denial, Dummett later wrote, “then we expose ourselves to the utmost danger of betraying the Son of Man with a kiss.”20 But Father McCabe’s reference to the word “corruption” by no means meant that he was suggesting that the claims of the Church were invalid; rather, he meant that its leaders and followers were capable of sin. It is clear that the McCabe affair was a serious setback for those progressive English Catholics who worked diligently to show their country-

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men that the Church, thanks to Vatican II, was finally moving out of the medieval shadows into the daylight of the modern age. As Bryden sadly observed, it was a shame that the main point of Father McCabe’s editorial—that Davis should not have left the Church—was ignored in favor of attacking freedom of thought and expression. Given the nation’s deep-seated historical views on the freedom of the press and its tradition of habeas corpus, it was difficult for the English public to tolerate the means by which McCabe was not only dismissed but also, above all, silenced and judged miscreant without being given the opportunity to defend himself before his accusers. The affair also gave conservative Catholics an opportunity to lash out at Slant and what they considered to be the threat of leftist thinking spawned by the permissiveness of Vatican Council II. It was obvious from Cardinal Heenan’s dialogue with lay theologian Rosemary Houghton that he considered the Catholic Left a serious problem for the English Church, and it is thought that he raised these matters with the Master General on the latter’s visit to England in December 1966.21 Heenan called the Slant group religious dilettantes who arrogantly attacked the Church with a superficial understanding of Marx. “They remind me of Lysenko,” wrote the Cardinal, “who sought to depose Mendel from the biologists’ Olympus in favour of the Marxist Michurin.”22 (Lysenko was a phony scientist whose crackpot ideas on the determinism of Marx set back the study of biology for years in the Soviet Union.) The Catholic Leftists, in Heenan’s judgement, were doing comparable damage to the Church today. Moreover, their efforts to reform the Church, which Houghton defended, were in Heenan’s view part of an agenda completely drained of love: “No word of praise or love of the Church escapes them. To destroy and tear down the Church as we know it is their declared intent.”23 The problem in the Church today, he went on to say, was not a crisis of authority, as Houghton alleged, but rather the failure of obedience.24 In the meantime, the English hierarchy did not make it easy for Father McCabe to find another vocation and in fact raised a number of barriers to ensure that he would not have the opportunity to cause more trouble. G. P. Dwyer, archbishop of Birmingham, refused to give McCabe a post in his archdiocese and in effect nullified him as a priest.25 McCabe was exiled first to Spode House and then to a Dominican community in

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Dublin. His exile to Ireland seems to have had a major impact on his personality and political disposition. Eagleton, who was close to McCabe, claimed that he was badly disenchanted with the Church at this point but still remained a loyal Catholic.26 Eamon Duffy asserted that the sojourn made McCabe more aware of his family’s hereditary Irishness. McCabe developed a much stronger left-wing sensitivity to the troubles in Northern Ireland and a more severe moral critique of British society.27 Although the Catholic Left was by no means the only group behind the petition urging McCabe’s reinstatement, the affair in their view was a clear sign of the unreconstructed and reactionary mentality of the hierarchy—a striking symbol of what was wrong with the institutional leadership of the Church. Geoffrey Moorhouse, writing in the Guardian of 15 February 1967, saw the McCabe affair as directly connected to a closing down of independent voices in the Church, a pattern of repression ranging from the enforced resignation of Desmond Fisher from the editorship of the Catholic Herald to similar crackdowns on the Dutch papers Nieuwe Linie and De Bazuin, the former of which was closed by order of its Jesuit center in Rome. It was saved only by being taken over by laymen. The Roman Catholics in England, wrote Slant’s Neil Middleton, were “tired of being treated like imbeciles or infants.” He warned that if Rome failed to make amends and fulfill the promises of Vatican II, the Curia would lose from their co-religionists far more than mere sympathy.28 Christians would conclude that their Church was indeed “a fringe organisation” and “largely irrelevant.”29 After all, was this not why Charles Davis had left the Church in the first place? Walter Stein and Brian Wicker of the Catholic New Left considered the punishment of McCabe by the Dominican center in Rome sufficient cause to dissociate themselves from New Blackfriars. Despite McCabe’s pleas, Stein considered the issues too critical for political compromises and announced that he would no longer write for the journal.30 Writing in the Guardian (11 May 1967), Wicker along with Stein made the point that the Church had so discredited itself as an institution that further collaboration with one of its official organs would be moral turpitude. Wicker would henceforth advocate for the authentic purposes of Christianity in lay-controlled publications.31 Slant, for its part, continued its collaboration with New Blackfriars but recognized that the McCabe affair raised more issues than simply

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that of free speech: it was rather a matter of fighting for basic human rights in the framework of the reforms of Vatican Council II. The heavyhanded tactics of the Roman authorities served to galvanize into action a cross-section of lay intellectuals in the Newman Association, the Union of Catholic Students, and the Slant movement in a nationwide call for democratic openness in the Church. Slant’s Martin Redfern recognized a close analogy between the impact of the McCabe affair and the student protest movement against authoritarian action at the London School of Economics. The appointment of the controversial Dr. Walter Adams as the London School’s new director was the catalyst for a growing demand for democracy and student power along lines similar to those advocated by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the United States. In both instances, observed Redfern, a single case of gross injustice brought to the surface pressures for democracy that coalesced into a wide coalition of the “oppressed” classes, led by radicals and broadly supported by students, lay people, and even junior lecturers and younger clergy whose positions prevented them from taking direct public action. In both the London School of Economics protests and in the McCabe affair, the demands went beyond the immediate issue by calling into question the governance of the Church and English higher education.32 Charles Davis expressed essentially the same frustrations with Rome as had the Catholic Left. And although they could sympathize with Davis and accept the challenge of examining his charges with care, the Catholic Left disagreed with his decision to leave the community. In this they were at one with McCabe. J. M. Cameron, one of the first Catholic intellectuals to identify himself with the Left, found the Church as described by Davis “totally unrecognizable,” a depiction that largely ignored Vatican II.33 Slant credited Davis with having done more than any other of his generation of theologians to advance the claims of the Catholic Church. Yet the journal could not accept Davis’s charge that the Church was no longer the source of Christian values and thus worthy of desertion. Laurence Bright, the Slant group’s Dominican advisor, argued that Christianity was a way of life grounded on a shared ideology, which implied some organization. The form taken by the organization was the responsibility of its members, and if it required radical transformation, it was the obligation of its members to do so from within, “breaking down the barriers that divide it from other churches and from the world, barriers that divide each

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member from another.” But to give up on the task was to despair of Christianity itself. Yet, wrote Father Laurence, Davis should be complimented for calling attention, like the Catholic Left, to the fundamental lack of truth within the Catholic community.34 Among the progressive theologians who weighed in on Davis’s decision to leave the Church was his friend Hans Küng, who praised Davis as a modest and moderate man of the center who was true to himself and to his calling in an uncompromising truthfulness. Both theologians shared the same concerns about the Vatican’s failures to realize the promises of reform but differed profoundly in how they would seek solutions to the problem. Davis sought change from the outside; Küng saw the necessity of doing so from within its structures. Ultimately, wrote Küng, “our task is not simply to interpret the reality of the Church, but, in the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to change it.”35 This was only possible by remaining a member of the Church and working for transformation from inside its institutional walls.36 Perhaps the most detailed critique of Davis’s apostasy was offered by Gregory Baum, the Canadian Catholic on the left who, with Davis, had been selected as a peritus at Vatican Council II. Baum was both a theologian and a sociologist. In his view the sins of the Church outlined by Davis were the manifestations of a social pathology that affects all institutions. Such patterns of dysfunctional behavior must be recognized and countered, but in the case of the Roman Catholic Church they did not in any way vitiate its claim to be a true expression of Christ’s will. The major difference between the two theologians was Baum’s evaluation of the redemptive potential of Vatican II, which opened up the Church to approved dialogue with other religions and philosophies so as to deal more effectively with the fundamental challenges of the modern world. The Council acknowledged the need to develop new approaches to secular living and made the participation of all Christians the key concept for reform of the Church’s institutions. Baum asserted that Davis’s catalogue of the Church’s sins did not signify the death of its institutional credibility but rather reflected an ongoing struggle for relevance in a changing historical context. Davis had identified a social sickness in the Church, a pathology that at one time or another infects all human institutions. This was a problem rec-

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ognized by the Council and clearly affirmed by the Decree on Ecumenism, which stated: “The Church, inasmuch as she is an institution made up of men, is in perpetual need of reformation.”37 The natural tendencies toward social pathology not only were a manifestation of inherent flaws in human nature but also were embedded within the very structures of the institutional Church itself. As the Church entered into new historical environments, it had to adapt to different and challenging situations, finding new ways of articulating the Gospel and serving the needs of the people in language that resonated meaningfully with the age. In contrast to Davis, Baum was optimistic about what he saw as the restlessness in the Catholic Church, which for him was a sign of an emerging anthropological self-understanding as promised in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation and The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. Baum was convinced that the Church was going through a profound transformation by responding to what sociologists call a “social movement.”38 As opposed to a Christian closed society, as expressed in canon law and the diocesan-patriarchal structure, the doctrinal shifts brought by pressures outside the official bureaucracy of Rome allowed people via the Council to involve themselves in a Christian life through a variety of ways, since the boundaries of what is the Church had broadened and were less visible. But the Church was still a community; only since the Council had it extended its fellowship to others. In order to give the Church a life force, it was incumbent on Christians to actively engage in “more reflection, more dialogue, more theological research, more vital engagement in Christian life.”39 For Baum, all this represented the open Church in the making. In his view, Davis was too impatient and in error by forsaking the participatory promise of redemption offered by the postconciliar Church. The McCabe affair crystallized for the Catholic Left the corruption that needed to be extirpated from within the Church if Christianity could serve as a vehicle for creating a society of humanistic socialism. Yet they continued to believe that this could be accomplished only by working for transformation within the institutional structures of the Church itself— and this is why they remained Catholic. Davis’s apostasy had the salutary effect of forcing members of the Left to recognize how far one could go in this mission, and it did not mean going beyond

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the fixed boundaries and historical experiences of the Catholic community as sanctified by Christ. Terry Eagleton, in addressing the Davis case, explained why Slant was still in the Church with an analogy between Marxism and Christianity. A true Marxist, he argued, is not one who commits himself to a particular revolutionary vehicle (for example, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union). Instead, he defines himself through allegiance to a specific world of meaning that has been historically formulated and transcends eras of corrupt Marxist practice. But in no way do the distortions of Marxist politicians nullify the validity of Marxist thinking. Much like the Catholic who remains in the Church, the true Marxist evaluates the historical moment of disintegration against the writings of Marx himself and other Marxists whom he judges to be authentic and rooted in the traditions of the creed. The Christian, wrote Eagleton, “in placing the life of Christ and a mainstream of authentic theology against contemporary and past Christian failure, takes a similar standpoint.” In other words, the radical Christian remains in the Church because of an allegiance to the Christian order of meaning, which has an enduring authenticity for all time and is not negated by the sins of its individual practitioners in a single historical moment of sin.40 The McCabe affair was a line drawn in the sand, in terms of how far theologically the Catholic New Left would go in promoting their vision of a humanistic socialism for England. It would not be one removed from the current institutional structures of the Roman Church.

T H I R T E E N

What Must Be Done? The Catholic Left and British Politics

The more respectable elements in both parties tended, and still tend, to be dragged at the cart-tail of Big Business. The advent of the Labour Party has complicated the problem without changing it. — Chesterton1

The support of theological linkages with Marxists, the embrace of radical economic and social ideas to enrich Catholic teaching, and the promotion of liberation theology and its position regarding Charles Davis and the McCabe affair indicated how far the Catholic New Left was prepared to go in the support of a cultural revolution in the 1960s. But how did such radical inclinations play out in the real world of British politics? Terry Eagleton, looking back at the Slant experience, singled out two key issues in the Catholic Left’s project of advancing a socialist revolution. One was the growth of the Christian-Marxist dialogue, which made Christians aware of a fraternal connection between their historical 317

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efforts at liberating humanity in the Kingdom of God and the similar communitarian and eschatological vision of Marxist humanism. The other, which galvanized the Catholic Left, wrote Eagleton, was that of Britain’s Labour Government, which was elected to advance socialism but surrendered its priorities without a struggle to the agenda of capitalism.2 In the past, the secular Left supported the Labour Party in the campaign for socialism in the hope of creating a more equitable society. The energy and hard work of a young generation of activists campaigning for alternatives to the nuclear strategy and stronger antipoverty and cultural programs, along with the support of trade-union shop stewards, had contributed to the revival of the Labour Party’s good fortunes under Harold Wilson in the early 1960s. Wilson had given hope to these groups, since he seemed to represent the Left in the Labour Party. In fact, a few close to Wilson—Peter Shore and Barbara Castle—had developed strong connections to the New Left. There was some skepticism among the radicals (“We must vote Labour, but with the reservation that we do so in the hope, however forlorn, of forcing the party back to socialism,” Slant 2, editorial, April– May 1966), but this view was tempered in some quarters with measured doses of enthusiasm. Yet there were voices of caution. Ralph Miliband, a significant intellectual force in the New Left, saw Wilson’s coming to power as a troubling omen. There were far too many in his close circle who were on the right of the party, and Wilson’s whole career since 1951, in Miliband’s view, was ideologically ambiguous. Among the Left, support began to dissipate rapidly by the summer of 1966 with the seamen’s strike and the Labour government’s subsequent support for a wage freeze. Once in power the Wilson government determined that it was necessary to curb the activity of trade-union activists in the interests of strengthening the nation’s economic prospects. At this point the reformist rather than the revolutionary tendencies in the Labour Party were on the ascendancy, in large part influenced by its leaders’ sense of Britain’s loss of economic and geopolitical supremacy. Hence the importance of strengthening the nation’s commercial and industrial position, which necessitated managing the various components of the economy more effectively. This explains why Wilson decided to get tough on forc-

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ing a settlement of the seamen’s strike that began in May 1966. When efforts to end the stoppage through minor concessions and promises of future improvements failed, the prime minister turned against what he called a small group of politically motivated men (he identified them as communists) who resisted their leaders’ willingness to compromise; these he considered the source of the trouble. Conjuring up images of the “Red Menace” worked. The strike was called off, but problems continued with international pressures on the pound sterling. In July the Labour government forced through a legally binding wage freeze for six months, to be followed by a period of “wage restraint.” Wilson announced that his government’s income policy was necessary to assure both social justice as well as financial stability. But to the rank- and-file laborers it appeared to be only a justice for “others,” ensured by the workers’ own sacrifices. In fact, by the 1970 general election, both poverty and the income gap between rich and poor had substantially increased. Within a year of Wilson’s income policy, unemployment rose over the half million mark and remained there through his tenure. Harold Wilson came into office promising to modernize the practice of government. This meant finding the means to manage the capitalist economy by closer collaboration between the agencies of government, industrialists, and the official trade-union leadership. The idea was outlined in an official Labour Party document entitled Signposts published in 1961. This called for more efficient utilization of the nation’s natural resources by taking advantage of scientific approaches to planning. However, the New Left Review showed some concern about the final draft of Signposts. The draft submitted to the Labour Party by the New Left emphasized to a greater degree the need to democratize all aspects of British society, including the economy, and was highly critical of the hierarchical nature of many public institutions about which the Labour Party had been largely silent. In effect, the New Left had a different notion of modernization from that of the Labour Party leadership. The former’s conception of modernization was one that would promote a stronger sense of community by assuring a more equitable sharing of economic benefits and by expanding grass-roots, participatory democracy. For the Wilson government, the major objective was to maximize state control over the nation’s economy.

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A major stumbling block for the implementation of the Wilson strategy for rationalizing the national economy was not the unions themselves but a small group of rank-and-file trade-union activists who were defying their own leaders and engaging in unofficial strikes. What was needed to curb what the government called “unconstitutional strikes” was a better disciplined labor force. The Wilson government’s income policy, its hostile response to trade union rank-and-file disruptions, and its full-throttled support of the NATO-based defense strategy of the United States were a clear signal of betrayal to those on the left. “History,” observed the historian David Widgery, “that greatest of all Marxists, slowly peeled the socialist stickers off Wilsonianism, what emerged as his aim was a shiny corporate state with a working class more closely integrated, more intensely exploited and more closely disciplined at the market-place than ever before.”3 All this demanded from the New Left a strong socialist response. In August 1966 a meeting was held in London by Britain’s leading intellectuals from a variety of radical groups in the universities and from journalism to draw up a manifesto outlining what was wrong with the country and what could be done about it. Among the participants from the Catholic Left were Eagleton, Herbert McCabe, and Adrian Cunningham. An editorial trio consisting of Stuart Hall, E. P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams was elected and charged with drawing together and publishing a summary of the discussions. The result was the May Day Manifesto of 1967, largely written by Williams, who had been the initiator of the protest.4 At this point, Williams’s disappointment with Harold Wilson had led to his resignation from the Labour Party. The 1967 Manifesto was privately published and distributed, and the response was so great that it had to be reprinted numerous times. The editors were deluged by letters from both home and abroad, and there were many requests from people who wished to speak at their meetings. A second, substantially revised and expanded version was published in 1968, jointly edited by Williams, Thompson, and Hall. This edition was made available to a broad public by Penguin Books and translated in whole or in part in several languages. The May Day Manifesto claimed that Britain was in the process of moving to a new and higher stage of capitalism and that the governing

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Labour Party and the official trade-union movement were major enablers of this transition. It admitted that there was an overall rise in the standard of living under the Labour government, but there was also a continuing and widening gap between the affluent and the poor. The document’s editors pointed out that 10 percent of the British people still owned 80 percent of all private wealth. Adding income from this property to earnings meant that 1 percent of the most affluent received roughly as much as the bottom 30 percent put together. While the wages of millions of workers were frozen, and thousands of people were without homes and burdened with overcrowded schools and a breakdown in public health, the wives of Labour Party cabinet members were presiding over lavish launchings of nuclear missile– loaded Polaris submarines. Like its American ally, the Labour government continued to spend excessively on military weaponry, tamely followed the U. S. lead in Vietnam, and supported the advancement of exploitative capitalist enterprises throughout the Third World. The old colonial empire of the Union Jack was replaced by “the commodity market and international banker.” The central connection between the “developed” and the “underdeveloped” Third World nations that struggled to overcome the old imperialism was no longer a predatory colonial governor but “the City of London,” a linkage solidified “by sterling, by Unilevers; by gold, by oil, by rubber, by uranium, by copper; by aircraft carrier, by expeditionary forces, by Polaris.”5 What went wrong with the party of socialism? The answer, claimed the editors of the May Day Manifesto, was that British capitalism was in the process of adapting to changing economic and political conditions. In order to reshape a global economy in relative decline (slow rates of growth, cycles of inflation and recession, balance-of-payment issues, and so on), the capitalist system was obliged to modify its traditional principles and strategies for growth. Capitalism was now in transition, moving from a reliance on the mechanisms of the free market to conditions in which a handful of larger corporations controlled all economic sectors. The scale of operations and the complexity of organization and production techniques were so great as to defy the play of an open market. What was required was advancement in the process of rationalization that could better control pricing, wage negotiations, and increases

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in the efficiencies of general planning. In order to facilitate all this, private interests and the state had to work more closely together. This “new model”of restructuring required the co-option of the Labour Party and its affiliated trade unions. The Manifesto’s explication of the relationship between political power and capitalism seems to have drawn substantially from the contributors’ reading of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s ideas about the elite’s use of culture to forge social consensus had first been introduced into New Left discourse by Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn in their book Towards Socialism, published in 1966. Anderson’s essay “Origins of the Present Crisis” argued that the working classes, through cultural and political pressures, were developing a “corporate” mentality that perfectly served the needs of Britain’s “hybrid” elite. Blackburn’s essay “The New Capitalism,” borrowing the latest ideas from continental Marxist writers (André Gorz, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Henri Lefebvre) and integrating them into a British context, provided the theoretical economic construct that the May Day Manifesto drew upon in explaining the transformation of capitalism. Most important, in order to serve “new capitalism” the state would be obliged to take more responsibility for managing the economy. The government needed to regulate competing interests and bring about the requisite public consensus to support corporate strategies (much as the Labour government did in settling the 1966 seamen’s strike). A major function of the government, the Manifesto asserted, was to bring the unions into the system by involving their leaders in fixing labor norms favorable to the continuing expansion of capitalist profits. The challenge was to create mechanisms for better managing inflation and recession cycles, thereby giving greater stability to international markets. This required a compliant labor force, whose support could be ensured by a regular and steady share of wages. Even the welfare system itself was now necessary as an integral part of the support structure in the new capitalism, not merely providing a safety net but also, and more importantly, bolstering social stability and public consensus—that is, welfare was seen now as an agent of capitalism for creating cultural hegemony, not as a device for a transition to socialism.6 Although on a superficial level this economic rationalization could be mistaken for socialism, it was not designed in any way to redistribute

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wealth or power. Wage claims had to come out of the margins of economic growth and could be satisfied only through negotiation. Benefits to labor must be tied to productive agreements, not to claims of equality. In short, the rising living standards of workers would be linked to the growth and good fortunes of private enterprise. A key component of this strategy was to use government and media forces to cajole, blackmail, and pressure union leaders to collude with the “System.” But by no means did the “new bargain” assure a more equitable distribution of income, wealth, opportunity, authority, or power. The “new capitalism” was designed to address the contradictions of the old system. As the 1967 May Day Manifesto stated, “Market capitalism created the hostile conflict relations of a class society; organized capitalism, where successful, seeks to end these conflicts, not by changing the real relations of property and power, but by suppressing all the human considerations of community and equality in favor of the planned contentment of organized producers and consumers.”7 The Labour Party, claimed the Manifesto, had become an agent of the state for “modernizing” (the term represented the “theology” of new capitalism) Britain by improving economic and political efficiency through planning for the sake of capitalist consolidation. In conjunction with this, the practice of politics would now have to be geared to create consensus among bogus conflicting groups. On the surface, a democratic process would be in place. Governments would still be elected, argued the Manifesto, and Members of Parliament might “assert the supremacy of the House of Commons. But the real business is the management between the most powerful and organized elites.”8 What the May Day Manifesto was describing (and what also the radical Catholic Distributist group of the interwar years identified as the “Party System” and “Servile State”) was later outlined by Keith Middlemas as a tendency toward “corporate bias,” that is, a governing system directed not by Parliament but by a corporate triangle consisting of the main representative bodies of business, labor, and, on the government’s side, officials of the state.9 Another contemporary scholar of British politics, Keith Burgess, corroborated Middlemas’s argument, although instead of accepting his triangular model, Burgess identified a series of “power blocs” that had a similar function. Burgess shed particular light on the role of bureaucrats who, though supposedly disinterested, had special

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connections and status-group ties with the various worlds of Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge), industry, and finance. This was a long-standing argument of the New Left, frequently expressed in the writings of Williams, Eagleton, and others. Burgess asserted that this power bloc had solidified by the 1930s and that it would successfully control British life for the next forty years. It was dominated by the bureaucrat: These were personified by the more ‘progressive’ sections of big industrial capital, represented by employers in the growing home industries and including huge combinations like ICI with their oligopolistic control of world markets. There was, in addition, the expanding body of salaried employees who phased into a new managerial elite at the highest echelons of administration in commerce, industry, and government.10 The May Day Manifesto called for an end to “consensus politics,” an outdated, traditional Labour policy that had been based on compromise between its socialist objectives and existing power constraints. By now the official Labour Party itself had gone beyond reform and compromise and was merely a “voting machine” and an effective bureaucracy dedicated to nothing more than operating the existing system more efficiently. The process of parliamentary politics had been steadily transformed by “a new and interlocking set of governing institutions” that ran the state. The political parties and Parliament itself were necessary only to give legitimation to the operative imperatives of “new capitalism.” What could be done? The Manifesto’s supporters called for a consolidation of radical groupings at the national level to push for democratic and socialist objectives from the grass-roots level. They also recognized that the “System” could not be defeated by electoral means alone. Yet, other than recommending that the New Left take part in social conflict at all levels to weaken the System, precious little in specifics was offered as a strategy for action. And this remained a persistent problem with the politics of the New Left. The Manifesto reasoned that the inevitable series of crises produced by the contradictions of new capitalism would allow opportunities for highlighting the character of the System, and that this would somehow create a shift in public consciousness sufficient to

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place pressure on the capitalist network to collapse. During this period of transition the New Left would seek to create a coalition of socialists of all varieties to promote education, propaganda campaigns, and discussion groups at the international level so as to expose the nefarious nature of transformed capitalism. In short, the New Left’s answer to this nasty set of developments was to be in the business of consciousness raising. The Manifesto’s supporters decided to call for a “National Convention” whose purpose was to give their movement a higher profile and to launch a more spirited attack on the increasingly rightward trend of Wilson’s government. Those supporting the idea of a convention met at various times up through 1969, but the results were not encouraging. The meetings turned out to be argumentative and fractious, as various leftist elements battled over rather arcane ideological and strategic matters of the past (usually the mid-1920s, according to Williams). There was common agreement, however, on current social and foreign policy issues (NATO and Vietnam). The convention issued a final document calling on those of the Left to set up discussion clubs in their local areas to be coordinated by the movement’s London preparatory commission, made up of representatives from all national leftist groups.11 Eagleton, writing in Slant, welcomed the May Day Manifesto as a major turning point in the Left’s capacity to outline what was wrong with Britain. It managed to weave together the disparate threads of social poverty, the operations of neocapitalism and neo-imperialism, and the mysterious interconnections of foreign defense and domestic politics “into a total and unanswerable case.”12 However, Eagleton saw significant weaknesses in the document, owing to its vague proposals and lack of specificity in translating a theoretical critique into a concrete program of action.13 But at least the Manifesto had the effect of providing a framework that excluded the older, worn-out leftist arguments and opened up channels for change. The document also revealed a sensibility and hard analysis that the Catholic Church, in the wooliness of its recent encyclicals, could not match. In a vital although piecemeal way, the Manifesto had outlined for discussion by a broad national audience the very issues that Slant had consistently raised in its pages. Slant’s criticism of liberalism as the Gramscian vehicle for sustaining the capitalist

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status quo in its cultural co-option of various social classes, its exposure of the sham of the party system and the Labour movement’s shift from a revolutionary agenda to reformism, highlighting the relationship between corporate interests and imperialism in the Third World, and its call for a true democratization of British society were issues central to the May Day Manifesto. All this and more the Slant writers had laid out in their journal, well in advance of the New Left’s political document. The Catholic Left, as Slant’s writers had always insisted, was fully integrated with the values and aspirations of the secular New Left but with a Christian twist. The task of presenting a detailed analysis of the May Day Manifesto for Slant was turned over to Martin Shaw, the movement’s young, precocious student organizer. The decision to give Shaw this task was probably a consequence of his keeping a close eye on the rapidly developing student movement and on Slant’s interest in getting that support for its programs. The editors may also have been impressed with the insightful ideas of this rising star of the next generation, whose articles frequently appeared in the journal throughout 1967.14 The best section of the Manifesto, Shaw argued, was its systematic portrayal of the ways in which the Labour Party and the Trades-Union Congress (TUC) had become culturally co-opted by the ruling establishment and accepted its capitalist solutions to economic and social problems. This represented a complete perversion of their original socialist impulses. Yet, even here, asserted Shaw, the authors of the May Day Manifesto failed to understand and thus correctly identify the coercive weapons available to the ruling class for undermining the popular will. This was reflected in the Manifesto’s tendency to identify the enemy as “the machine” or “the System,” whereas in fact the problem was less mechanical domination than the existence of a more intellectual and imaginative ruling class that wielded a myriad of coercive instruments of social and political control. In Shaw’s mind, this was the central failure of the Manifesto: it neglected to recognize and expose the class character of the problem. The Manifesto envisioned a step-by-step popular takeover of government by extending the democratic process. But how was this to be done? The state, claimed Shaw, was not simply the “watchdog of ruling-class interests” and therefore subject to public pressure to serve as an agent of social change. It was instead an

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instrument of rule, closely integrated at every point with class domination: “If socialism means the more or less direct control of the mass of workers over society, the bureaucratic capitalist state cannot be the means of its construction.” This, noted Shaw, was a reality recognized by Lenin in his classic State and Revolution. And since Lenin’s day, the state in capitalist society had become even less responsive to democratic forces, since it has been given further time to become integrated with ruling-class decision making. Shaw insisted that the real test of the New Left’s project would be in action, not in some national convention and other such forums of feckless discussion, but “at the factory gate and on the housing estate, with the shop stewards’ committee and the tenants’ association.” In short, socialism required direct action by the working class beyond conventional electoral processes.15 What became clear at this juncture was that Shaw was moving in a trajectory concerning strategy and agency that conflicted with that of his Slant colleagues. In addition to serving as Slant’s student coordinator, Shaw was also a regular contributor to The Agitator, the theoretical and muck-raking journal of the London School of Economics’ Socialist Society. Shaw’s own views on labor issues and political power were sharpened by his involvement in student protests at the London School of Economics (LSE). In October 1966 Shaw’s associates in the Socialist Society published an attack on the LSE Governors’ appointment of Walter Adams, principal of the University College of Rhodesia at Salisbury, as the new director of LSE.16 Adams had been greeted in the press as an able and far-sighted administrator with a “liberal record.” The Agitator in a pamphlet painted a starkly different picture, namely, that Adams had in fact failed to stand up for academic freedom under attack by the regime of Ian Smith, that he failed to make timely managerial decisions, that he remained isolated from staff and students, and that he was an inefficient administrator. These charges were carefully documented by various independent sources, including Amnesty International. The pamphlet asserted that Adams was not a suitable leader for the LSE, a decision soon accepted by the school’s Student Union and which it was committed to oppose. The Agitator argued that British universities should serve as independent centers of social criticism. Adams’s appointment suggested that

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LSE would now be less able or willing to resist strong pressures from industry to devote more of its resources to business and managerial studies. The LSE, asserted Shaw, was fast becoming a “service station for the ruling class,” a factory for training “lawyers, the economists, the managers, the market researchers, the marginally-oriented trade union bureaucrats and the sociologically sophisticated apologists, which British capitalism needs.”17 What The Agitator urged was a leader who would fight the economic pressures to turn the LSE into a training school for corporate capitalism and encourage instead genuinely independent, critical thought. The LSE Governors refused to reply to these criticisms and forbade the Student Union to send its findings to The Times for publication. The Socialist Society (of which Shaw was a leading member), inspired by the American Hal Draper’s writings on the student rebellions at Berkeley, held a teach-in on “student Power.”18 The LSE administration’s refusal to negotiate led to a strike supported by an estimated 78 percent of the school’s students. Hundreds took to the streets. Ultimately, some of the demands were met, and the administration was forced to relinquish its position of refusing to regard student opinion. The real victory, as Shaw saw it, was that the students and the staff who supported their actions (the faculty tended to side with the Governors) had been able to challenge the arbitrary and irresponsible power of the LSE administration. In short, unlike the Labour Party and the official trade-union leadership, the activists in the Student Union had shown that they could not be co-opted by the System, of which the university was an integral part. The students certainly did not get everything they wanted (they won neither full democracy nor the dismissal of Adams), but they at least refused to allow their organization to become a “company union,” and their actions, which forced the administration to be more responsive to their concerns, had positive implications for the promotion of future issues concerning “student control” and even “student power.” The struggle at the LSE to oust Adams continued. This led to disciplinary action against members of the Student Union Council, which led to a massive sit-in as students from all over the country gathered at the LSE and staged a protest march and rally.19 The Governors eventu-

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ally agreed in mid-April 1966 to suspend the disciplinary sentences. Shaw and his Socialist colleagues once again considered this a victory. In opposing the appointment of Adams, the students had exposed the structure of power hidden within the specious notion of an “academic community.” The struggle, in turn, gave the students a sense of collective radical consciousness analogous to what was currently developing among rank-and-file labor as they fought to promote their interests against the corporate powers of the workplace. “Like the workers in the factory, on the building site, or in the docks,” noted Shaw, “the student finds his life determined by others, and suffers a real estrangement. Because this has social roots, in beginning to exert control over his own situation the student confronts a total structure of power.” It was this stark realization, believed Shaw, that would produce the requisite consciousness to prevent absorption into the short-cut socialism of Labour’s Fabian tendencies, which only strengthen the imperatives of new capitalism. Such experience in the long run, hoped Shaw, would convince students to lend themselves to the working-class movement’s task of changing the social order.20 The struggle at the LSE produced the first mass student sit-ins in Britain, thus inaugurating the country’s engagement with the youth movement sweeping through the Western world. Shaw welcomed the experience as a key event in the broader context of the New Left’s campaign for a democratic socialist society. Those who controlled the LSE were part of the power structure that ran British society. The Socialist Society had consistently criticized the class bias of the school’s social science faculty and the elitist connections of the Governors (61 percent of whom held an average of seven company directorships apiece).21 The struggle for student-union autonomy at the LSE, claimed Shaw, was directly related to the laboring classes’ efforts to defend their own industrial organizations. In short, Shaw and his fellow members of the Socialist Society saw a clear connection between the arbitrary powers of the LSE authorities and the ruling group networks in wider British society—what the New Left’s guru C. Wright Mills had called “the Power Elite.”22 Although the LSE might not be “Britain’s Berkeley,” at least it served to expose the connections between the university and the power elites and showed possible paths for reaching true democratic socialism. Students had learned

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through their struggle the necessity of militancy in defense of freedom and union rights. Slant after the LSE affair took up the task of convincing the student movement to integrate its tactics more closely with the struggle of the working class for increased wages, better housing, and political representation: “The real thrust of that struggle will only come when the tactics and analysis are rooted in the tradition, culture and experience of the working class, the technicians, the administrators and the peasants.”23 Shaw’s colleagues at Slant remained loyal to the international student revolts of the 1960s. Neil Middleton, for example, praised the student militancy that erupted from Berkeley to Berlin and Tokyo as good examples of how young people were prepared to put their lives on the line, much as an earlier generation had done in going to Spain in the 1930s and fighting for the Republic. In addition, noted Middleton, there had been an effort on the part of the bourgeois establishment to play down the degree to which trade-union and working-class activists had been involved in this effort. Finally, echoing Shaw’s contention that underlying class conflict was central to the events of the 1960s, Middleton asserted that the international student rebellion was essentially fueled by class struggle, since their anger was clearly related to a recognition between “the misery of the poor and hungry in the Third World” and the relationships that produced deprivation at home.24 The lessons learned at the LSE sharply honed Shaw’s analysis of the May Day Manifesto. Not surprisingly, his articles in Slant reflecting on the Manifesto revealed a revolutionary frame of mind that ranged far beyond many of the Old New Left. Drawing on Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Shaw asserted that the only true solution to the Left’s efforts at overturning capitalism and creating a socialist community was the abolition of social classes.25 The Left maintained that the major aim of the political elites in Britain was to contain class conflict, thereby preserving the entrenched power networks. These elites were especially adept at using the established forms of democratic practice to channel and reduce such conflict. Shaw, however, believed that class warfare would be necessary to achieve socialism and thus a classless society. This could be accomplished, he insisted, only through the politicization of the working class. Marx’s successors, not being satisfied with this concept of revolution, had sought replacements for the

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working class in the revolutionary process. Perry Anderson, noted Shaw, recognized a curious connection between Lenin’s party strategy and social-democratic parliamentarianism: both sought to bypass the working class and impose their own solutions on the problem of capitalism.26 In the Russian case this led to an elite-dominated totalitarian society, and in the West, through social democratic policies, it led to a welfare state that was incapable of overturning capitalism because it worked within the system. The only way to establish socialism, asserted Shaw and Anderson, was for the working class to make their own revolution independently from the control of elites or from those whose stake lay in preserving the current power structures. Shaw and Anderson had little hope that the working class could achieve their goals through trade unionism. The officially recognized unions were products of capitalism and thereby conditioned by their relationship to capital. Anderson contended that trade unions did not challenge the existence of a class-based society but merely expressed its legitimacy. In fact, a responsibly run trade-union movement was vital for assuring the smooth functioning of the capitalist system.27 Trade unions can only bargain for limited gains; they can never transform the corporate body of which they are an integral part.28 Engels himself had recognized this problem with trade unionism as early as 1885. The ruling-class attitude on unions had changed. Engels claimed that they “were now petted and patronized as perfectly legitimate institutions, and as useful means of spreading sound economic doctrines amongst the workers.”29 In addition, according to sociologist Robert Michels’s “law of oligarchy,” bureaucracies and democratic aspirations in largescaled corporations were essentially incompatible with each other, since power gravitates to the elites who control the system. Trade unions have an inherent bureaucratic tendency, and this leads to what Michels identified as “economism” (where workers care more about their economic self-interests than about changing the system that exploits them). In this sense, trade unionism is “the capitalism of the proletariat.” Another impediment to working-class action in Britain was the Labour Party’s economic policies. In explicating the problems with the Labour Party, Shaw drew extensively on the work of Tony Cliff and Ralph Miliband.30 Cliff was a leading voice in the International Socialists (IS),

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of which Shaw had become a member at the end of 1966. The IS advanced what it considered a classical Marxist critique of industrial society and was dedicated to a militant emancipation of the working class, which the organization believed could be the only true expression of socialism. Its main recruiting field was young people who were associated with the Young Socialists (YS)—radical activists supporting victory for the Vietcong and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The IS produced a monthly newspaper called the Labour Worker that supported unofficial strikes and outright resistance to the Wilson government’s income policy. This was the group that led the student occupations at the London School of Economics.31 Central to the IS program was its conviction that the avant-garde of the socialist revolution in Britain would be the nation’s 200,000 shop stewards. The organization hoped to organize these shop stewards both politically and industrially, and to that end the IS founded a London Industrial Shop Stewards’ Defense Committee in January 1966.32 Tony Cliff and C. Barber of the Defense Committee published a short book in 1966, explaining how Labour’s programs were disenfranchising the worker.33 The authors asserted that under the Labour government’s income policy, the position of the Trades-Union Congress was considerably strengthened at the expense of the rank and file. The TUC had long been cut off from the working class, and many local union leaders were estranged from its offices. This alienation of the rank and file, asserted Cliff and Barber, had been caused by the bureaucratization of the official union leadership who had become, in consciousness and behavior, essentially middle class. As such, they had little incentive to fight for working-class interests. Moreover, the continuing bureaucratic set-up, which was bolstered by the ongoing successes of corporations, militated against any lingering sympathies that these officials may have had for overturning the “System.” This explained the plethora of unofficial isolated strikes throughout the mid-1960s, which reflected the divorce of the union leaders from the men on the floor.34 Continued economic growth, Cliff and Barber observed, depended directly on strengthening British capitalism. The Labour government’s income policy, whose purpose was to regulate wages, was a key ingredient in this dynamic by assuring lower production costs, thereby increasing both

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profits and investments. In this respect, Labour’s national economic plan and income policy had the effect of strengthening capitalism.35 Shaw, Cliff, and Barber believed that increasing efforts to throttle workingclass independence through government-enforced income policy could well have the effect of radicalizing the rank and file and thus unifying their energies for overthrowing the System. Martin Shaw, referencing Ralph Miliband’s political analysis of parliamentary politics, saw little hope that the Labour Party could serve as a platform for a long-term socialist strategy, because it had become an integral part of the operating mechanism of the state and therefore an agent of the System.36 It was Miliband’s conviction that the Labour Party had essentially sold out to the ruling establishment. Its leaders had ceased to think of the party as a vehicle for ideas. It was rather a political and electoral machine: the task was not to make converts to socialism but to win votes at elections. Once in office, the Labour Party followed the capitalist script and thereby functioned as a force for promoting the status quo. Labour leftists who made it into Parliament encountered a system that was designed to limit their capacity to force radical change or challenge their leaders. A premium was placed on “loyalty” and on accepting compromises in order to assure party unity. On occasion, Labour leaders made “radical-sounding noises,” seemingly in response to pressures of the Left, thereby allowing the venting of dissident voices, but they would never permit action beyond the boundaries of what was acceptable to them. The function of the Labour Party was to promote modest social reform within the confines of a capitalist system. In this sense the party served the role of bolstering the establishment: it managed discontent and assured that activists stayed within safe bounds.37 Yet, wrote Miliband, the lack of a viable socialist alternative through conventional political processes was no reason to give up hope. One of the first indispensable steps in preparing the ground for a true socialist program was to expose the political illusion that the Labour Party and its trade-union affiliates could serve as vehicles for social change. In the words of Michael Newman, Miliband’s biographer, “The way forward was to accept that the Labour Party was a ‘class party’, and to transcend the orthodoxies of labourism.”38 In working toward this end, Shaw called for a different kind of political party with the specific objective of “combating the power of

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the state in the sphere of the state itself.”39 Shaw’s reading of Cliff, Anderson, and Miliband shaped the way in which he responded to the deficiencies of the May Day Manifesto, and it would soon lead to his break with Slant. Shaw’s advocacy of direct action by rank-and-file labor for political and economic change outside the ballot box and his association with the socialist tradition of the periodical International Socialism40 ultimately led him to reject Slant’s engagement in the Christian-Marxist dialogue, as well as its willingness to collaborate with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).41 Shaw called upon his Slant colleagues to repudiate their willingness to collaborate with the British Communist Party, because it had forsaken a commitment to revolutionary politics in favor of reformed parliamentarianism.42 In his view the Christian-Marxist dialogue project given priority in Marxism Today, the official organ of the CPGB, and which Slant supported, was essentially an engagement with the “liberal” social and political agenda. The leading British Communist Party intellectual, John Lewis, emphasized in the pages of Marxist Today the necessity of avoiding controversy on theoretical differences in order to facilitate cooperation with Christians. One can only ask, insisted Shaw, what kind of broad common action was possible without theory? The trade union rank-and-file, he claimed, had no interest in the efficacy of parliamentary politics and therefore had no time for propelling the Communist Party “towards the petty bourgeoisie.” Shaw concluded that Slant’s insistence on the creation of a socialist community of brothers could never be realized without the elimination of the source of material evil: the bourgeoisie as a social class. Slant, of course, had recognized some significant problems with the social encyclicals Mater et Magistra and Populorum Progressio. The encyclicals were ultimately supportive of the status quo in that they called for class cooperation within the existing framework of social relations. But Shaw had concluded that Slant’s call for a “higher” level of Christian doctrine (as expressed by Eagleton) in contradiction to the limitations of papal teaching was too ambiguous and abstract, and thus ineffective for raising the necessary social forces (the working class) for revolution. The ideal essence of Christianity to which Slant appealed simply had no basis in reality. Eagleton and Giles Hibbert, for example, had asserted that the Catholic Left could retain their identity through historical change in

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terms of a common “community of language” and a continuity of liturgical practice.43 The Slant group agreed that an independent and revolutionary proletariat had to be a necessary and integral part of an overall socialist strategy. In fact, Eagleton pointed out that the only way to get the sluggish official trade-union machinery moving was for rank-and-file to continue their unofficial strikes. It was only at the grass-roots level that action could take place in the interests of the workers, given that their leaders were against them.44 But working-class direct action could never be the sole force or even the chief element in achieving socialism. The long history of parliamentary politics in Britain and the inherent conservatism of the British labor movement (30 percent of the working class voted for the Conservative Party) argued against a quick radicalization in working-class consciousness and increased militancy. Britain was a far different political culture from Russia in 1917, when a militarized working class led by a revolutionary party quickly overturned the Provisional Government that had emerged out of the initial March Revolution that threw out the Romanovs. As Martin Redfern pointed out, power in Britain was elusively and subtly distributed broadly throughout the social matrix. Therefore, a more realistic socialist project required strategies to increase working-class influence in the multiple centers of state power. Redfern backed Slant’s position on the “Long Revolution” by citing Perry Anderson’s observation on why the Leninist approach had no market in Britain: For the societies of Western Europe constitute a wholly different universe from those of Eastern Europe, let alone Asia. Their highly advanced economies and their complex, dense, tessellated histories have created a social and cultural world entirely of its own. The great political achievement of this world has been democracy. Whatever its lacunae or limitations, this democracy represents a permanent acquisition of mankind. . . . It is important to emphasise that a Leninist strategy in the West is fundamentally regressive: it threatens to destroy a vital historical creation, when the task is to surpass it. . . . Neither as norm nor as strategy is it an acceptable option. It is refused by the whole cultural texture of the advanced capitalist societies of the West.45

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Drawing on Anderson’s insights, Redfern also recognized the false option of social democratic politics. Its approach was based on a strategic error: that power for socialists in advanced capitalist states could be achieved through parliamentary elections. Socialists might win elections, but under present conditions, that power in practice was simply the “permission to operate the status quo.” The only path between Leninism and a liberal-infused socialism, Redfern asserted, was Anderson’s call for the creation of an authentic mass socialist party offering a global alternative to the capitalist imperialist order. It would be necessary in this case to work strategically with all groups in Britain, engaging in action across a wide spectrum of social, economic, and cultural centers as outlined in the May Day Manifesto. Slant’s particular mission in this context was to politicize the Catholic Church. For this purpose, Redfern outlined four areas for Church activity: working toward Christian ecumenism for sociopolitical ends; advancing the liturgical movement for socialist purposes; the laicization and democratization of the Church at all levels; and, finally, “the desacralization of the Church and its self-understanding.”46 Martin Shaw came to the reluctant conclusion that the English Catholic Church was less useful as an arena of struggle or as an agency for change than the shop stewards movement. This meant that he could no longer support the Slant project.47 Slant, of course, had always asserted that the Church was a supportive institution of bourgeois-capitalist society. Yet, claimed Redfern, like all bourgeois institutions it had to be changed as part and parcel of the entire cultural complex that required transformation. The Church, in the process of pushing forward the revolutionary imperatives, would ultimately destroy itself once its purpose was achieved, namely, by the creation of a true socialist society. Where Shaw and Slant parted ways was in the time required for such a transformation and over the issue of creating alliances to achieve that objective. First, the Slant group insisted that Britain was far from reaching the tipping point for socialism that Shaw expected. Instead, the country was in the midst of what Raymond Williams called the “Long Revolution.” Within this historical trajectory, Britain was nowhere near reaching even a pre-revolutionary condition. A revolutionary transformation was “fifty or a hundred or two hundred years away.” Therefore, the only realistic

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approach was the “Fabian tactic,” which is Marxist in the sense that its ultimate goal satisfies the label. Any other more direct strategy, based on reliance on the immediate revolutionary potential of a British workingclass uprising in solidarity with the aspirations of Third World liberation movements, would amount to another form of liberal evasion.48 Second, the Slant board had reached a common agreement that there should be no enforcement of a single political party line.49 In the final analysis, Slant’s commitment to the project of the New Left was to stimulate discussion on a theoretical level along the lines outlined by the May Day Manifesto for the sake of stimulating public action. The Slant group was always clear about their mission: their vehicle for advancing the “Long Revolution” was Catholicism itself. This could not satisfy the syndicalist inclinations of Shaw, and he therefore tendered his resignation from the Slant board of directors. Adrian Cunningham wrote Shaw a letter just after his resignation, appealing for him to reconsider. Shaw’s departure, claimed Cunningham, would be a serious loss for the Catholic Left. Although he admitted that it might prove somewhat awkward at this point, Cunningham suggested that Shaw’s remaining on the board could critically influence others. In the same letter, Cunningham admitted to having thoughts himself about the futility of Slant’s mission. Yet, given his own syndicalist background and temperament, Cunningham’s commitment to revolution was more generalizedand therefore sympathetic to the idea that the best possibility for change came about through a rough alignment of different groups aiming for the same radical ends. Cunningham wrote that his commitment to Catholicism was of the same kind: it constituted a generalized tradition that posed questions in cultural, ideological, and sociological terms of great importance. He viewed the Slant project from this perspective: it was doing “a minor job of as yet unproved value within a broad movement which is still very confused about what it is or should be doing.” But its main virtue was that, as a religious vehicle for transformation, Slant was making it possible to reach people who were otherwise wholly excluded from revolutionary narratives, to persuade them to consider the intelligible option of socialism.50 Therefore, Cunningham emphasized to Shaw, staying the course does make a difference if one sees the job not as one of immediate mobilization but as part of

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“a general de-mystification with as yet unclassifiable results.51 Shaw, however, had already made up his mind about resigning from the Slant board, although in some ways he would continue to work with the Catholic Left in advancing the socialist cause. The McCabe affair, as we have seen, had signaled the lengths to which the Catholic Left would go in trying to achieve their theological objectives. They were determined to work for a revolutionary religious transformation from within the institutional structures of the Catholic Church. In this respect, the McCabe affair served to clarify the revolutionary boundaries beyond which the Left refused to go. Unlike Charles Davis, the Slant revolutionaries remained Catholic. In a like manner, Martin Shaw helped to clarify how far Slant was willing to go in its quest for socialist revolution. Politically, the Slant project rejected a full-tilt class warfare in favor of a more pragmatic, inclusive, and leveraged radicalism that fit within the historical boundaries outlined by Raymond Williams’s notion of the “Long Revolution.” In the final analysis, the Catholic Left’s revolutionary objectives avoided certain levels of extremism by staying within boundaries set by institutional religion and British history.

F O U R T E E N

Legacy and Impact

“Isn’t it time,” a no less sophisticated friend remarked to me, “that we should return to Chesterton?” —Robert Speaight1

THE CRITICS

It should come as little surprise that the adherents of the Catholic New Left found no support among traditionalists of the faith.2 Douglas Woodruff, a paradigm of pre–World War II conservative Catholicism and editor of The Tablet in its most politically reactionary days, was appalled by their writings. Woodruff never accepted the modernizing efforts of Vatican Council II and was scandalized by Slant, which he asserted was not only perverted by Marxist dogma but also actively supportive of communist regimes.3 It was a tragedy, he claimed, that such nefarious nonsense was supported by the “once respected house of Sheed and Ward.”4 Woodruff took particular umbrage with Neil Middleton’s attack on the capitalist system and his suggestion that violence could be a necessary 339

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component of advancing socialist objectives. This “Communist propagandist” and “Mao man,” asserted Woodruff, only appealed to callow undergraduates and those “among the long-haired and the beatniks and those in revolt against parents or schools.”5 Woodruff saw considerable merit in the capitalist tradition and emphasized that the Church had always upheld the sanctity of private proprietorship as the wellspring of progress for society. Martin Redfern’s advocacy of workers’ control of industry (something that G. K. Chesterton’s Distributist followers—whom Woodruff admired—had fervently supported) was summarily dismissed by Woodruff on the grounds that the sophisticated workings of production and marketing advanced by modern industry were simply beyond the ken of the laboring classes. People on workers’ councils had a primitive economic understanding, and what they were capable of discussing on such matters was therefore limited. It was best, claimed Woodruff, that their needs be looked after by the trade-union leadership. Arnold Lunn — who was an ally of Woodruff, an influential voice of pre–World War II Catholicism in Britain, and a regular lecturer on the American academic circuit, promoting Catholic apologetics against what he considered a triumphal secularism abetted by Vatican Council II—called for a strong dose of militancy for the preservation of traditional values. The current Catholic preoccupation with economic and social problems, claimed Lunn, was a deviation from the Church’s more important mission: “the salvation of souls and the conversion of those who now reject the supernatural.”6 Supporters of the Catholic Left quickly responded to Woodruff ’s attack. J. M. Cameron, for example, pointed out that the Church had not always upheld the right to own productive property as the engine of historical progress. In fact, a common teaching of the Church Fathers was that private ownership, like slavery and the use of violence by the state, was the consequence of the Fall. Moreover, the social encyclicals condemned the misuse of property and emphasized that labor, as the expression of human personality, must be rated higher than the possession of private goods.7 A more pointed rejoinder to Woodruff was provided by Father Herbert McCabe. Woodruff objected to Slant’s support of communist regimes (which was highly selective and applied primarily to South Amer-

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ica), but McCabe noted that when he first began to read The Tablet under Woodruff ’s editorship, that journal cheerfully advocated for fascist governments. Where Woodruff was shocked that some Slant writers seemed to support violence to achieve their aims, The Tablet and other right-wing Catholic journals had no qualms about approving the use of violence by Franco in the Spanish Civil War or by the Americans in Vietnam. It was time, wrote McCabe, to move beyond the myth of a righteous Catholic political neutrality. The Tablet’s editorializing for conservative causes was simply the right-wing mirror image of Slant.8 There also was much criticism from other quarters regarding the Catholic Left’s sympathies with Marxism. Colm Brogan, writing in the Spectator in June 1966, set off a barrage of letters to the editor both against and in defense of Slant. Brogan’s central criticism was that Marx was an atheist, which precluded any possibility of synthesizing his materialistic ideas with Catholic social teachings. He was particularly concerned that Slant was targeting the malleable minds of college students, a youthful group only half informed and open to the “fashionable sophistries” of the mass media of higher education. Even the Newman Association, Brogan noted, had given their meetings over to Slant propaganda.9 McCabe, Adrian Cunningham, Father Laurence Bright, Monica Lawlor, and others tried to disabuse Brogan and his colleagues of such Marxist reductionism, and the back-and-forth commentaries on these charges went on into the three summer months of 1966. Catholicism and Marxism as customarily presented, wrote McCabe, could never fit together. But both Christian theology and Marxist thinking were curently undergoing renewal, and out of a dialogue both could be enriched by mutual insights.10 Terry Eagleton contended that any serious effort at replacing an “acquisitive, minority-dominated and divided society with the Christian ethic of cooperation, community and equality of being” needed for its engine of social change the vision and analytic powers of Marxism.11 Eagleton believed, moreover, that there was no difference between the Christian and Marxist moralist: “we both believe that, in order to love truly, we have to abolish the historical contradictions which now prevent us from doing so.”12 It was also important to appreciate that the Catholic Left was trying to expand its social philosophy by drawing on the ideas of other

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thinkers beyond a narrow Marxism. These included, among others, a philosophy of language deriving from Ludwig Wittgenstein and cultural perspectives from Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and Stuart Hall. The French, German, and American sociologists (Durkheim, Weber, Tönnies, C. Wright Mills, and Peter Berger) also found expression in the Slant group’s synthetic thinking. The Catholic New Left could not be correctly understood simply through the lens of Marx.13 More progressive and liberal-minded Catholics gave the Slant group more serious analyses.14 Donald Nicholl, writing in The Clergy Review, saw the Catholic New Left as a promising group bolstered by some of the best and brightest young stars of British Catholicism. These Catholics, without official backing, had managed to launch a journal that by 1966 commanded a circulation of some two thousand. Surely they merited more serious attention than those Catholics who had either ignored them, offered superficial criticisms, or simply denigrated their agenda. What caught Nicholl’s critical eye, however, was his ironic discovery that the polemical tone of Slant resembled that of the French extreme right-wing, neo-monarchist movement Action Française.15 Both believed in the primacy of advancing a distinct political agenda. Indeed, Brian Wicker’s book First the Political Kingdom, which to many readers launched the Catholic New Left’s agenda for a fully socialist humanism, commended the motto coined by Ghana’s revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah, “Seek ye first the political kingdom.”16 Wicker had called here for a “theology of politics,” and Eagleton at the time agreed with Nkrumah’s injunction. It seems to me, claimed Eagleton, that given the radical definition of politics—that is, a commitment to an alternative version of man in society—this is precisely what Christianity must be about.17 Christianity was now emerging from an era in which religion was considered primarily a matter of individual salvation. But as McCabe pointed out, there was a contemporary relevance to Christianity in that it recognized that human behavior is primarily a matter not of individual salvation but of politics: “it is concerned first of all with the media of communication, the structures of relationship within which men live.”18 Nicholl found this political stance deeply troubling. Much like those on the Right, who insisted that a true Catholic could never be a socialist, those on the Left asserted that the ultimate test for determin-

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ing the authenticity of one’s Catholic faith was a commitment to socialism. Both sides also talked of the need for revolution. As for revolution, Nicholl warned: “None of those who talk this way have ever seen a bazaar mob rioting, to say nothing of having seen a shot fired in anger, and then they would be just as sickened by the reality when they encountered it as were the Action Française adherents who at first welcomed the National Revolution of Pétain and then were horrified when they saw the milice [militia] enforcing it.”19 Action Française eventually became a party preaching a political objective rather than a body of laymen representing the teachings of the Church. At the time of the Dreyfus Affair, the eminent French philosopher Charles Péguy wrote that the monarchist movement had served to transform the Christian mystique by perverting it into a politique, that is, a force for politicizing life by subjecting it to rigid political categories. Instead of the mystique of Christianity that nourished the times spiritually and with humane tenderness, the agenda of Action Française promoted the political vices of intolerance, violence, and power-seeking. Was Slant, in asserting the primacy of politics, moving down the same perilous path as its right-wing twin? Would it ultimately finish up as a political sect?20 Paul Crane, S. J., corroborated Nicholl’s concerns in a subsequent article in The Clergy Review.21 The primacy of politics, he asserted, would draw the Church into contentious political disputes and open it up to censure and oppression from governments at a time when, after years of patient action, Catholics have liberated themselves from both. What the Church needed, as Pope Paul reminded the United Nations, was freedom. This could be achieved only if it refrained from involving itself in the settlement of particular political issues. Crane recognized the imperative of a Christian commitment for social development, but he disagreed with the means advocated by the Catholic Left to achieve that objective. It was not the role of the institutional Church to commit itself to political agendas but rather the responsibility of individual Christian citizens, who could draw on Church teachings as a legitimate guide to action.22 Wicker accepted Nicholl’s critique as a legitimate challenge to the Catholic Left. It was true, he admitted, that it would be a disaster for the Church in its structural and institutional form to be identified with any particular political orientation. The solution, Wicker contended, was to

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arrive at an alternative concept of Church, that is, a new kind of theology, one which would not make the Church a political competitor, yet would show at the same time how the individual Christian must be committed to the Left. The institutional Church had been a false witness, too often sacrificing commitment to justice and truth in the interests of its own self-preservation. Its history had been too long associated with the forces of reaction or, at best, in support of the capitalist status quo. This was the central problem for which the Catholic Left was seeking an answer. But it was only fair, asserted Wicker, to appreciate that this was a challenging undertaking, which Eagleton’s The New Left Church, Wicker’s own Culture and Liturgy, and Slant had taken the first important steps to address.23 Although Nicholl offered an intriguing comparison between Slant and Action Française, his analysis rested on a misunderstanding of the Catholic Left’s notion of politics and revolution. The Slant writers were always careful to draw a distinction between what they meant by politics as opposed to “party politics,” the latter of which also had been condemned by the Left’s radical predecessors, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. It was the politics of party special interests that Chesterton and his supporters had repudiated in the careerism of David Lloyd George and the leadership of the Labour Party, which they believed had deserted the initial principles upon which the working-class movement was built. Politics in terms defined by Eagleton and Cunningham referred to the language in which people discuss the ways in which they live together. All experience is therefore political in that it defines the relationships between men and women and the social structures that embed them. The Slant group advocated a wider politics, one that eschewed individualist philosophical positions and appreciated people as social beings participating in a wider human community. Their approach recognized the imperative of developing a fuller understanding of human behavior by focusing on relationships embodied in the major institutional arrangements of society. The means by which men interact with one another to satisfy both the individual’s and society’s productive needs is through a commonly shared language and human labor. It is within and through their work that men should be able to find a satisfying relationship with their communities. As Slant’s Martin

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Shaw pointed out, in the final analysis what the Catholic Left meant by the “primacy of politics” was more appropriately called the “primacy of human community.” The term “politics” was a recognition of the continuity between “personal” and “structural” relationships that constituted the human condition.24 Capitalism serves to frustrate this communal imperative by reducing all relationships to the profit motive. The Left’s turn to Marx was meant in no way as a panacea for social problems but rather as one that simply addressed more sufficiently the need to change the structures of society in a human direction. The prevailing party political system was not structured to meet this objective. Despite all that the Catholic New Left wrote about politics and about how their version of it was not to be confused with the politics of special interests that rendered government the executive of corporate capitalism, it remained difficult for anyone outside their circle of argumentative dialectics to clearly understand what they meant by the term. The Left’s definition of politics always remained somewhat amorphous. Fergus Kerr seems to have described it best as the “exercise of social power.”25 This vision of politics included all facets of human intercourse unhindered by barriers of class or education, the ultimate purpose of which was to overcome what Raymond Williams called the prevailing diminutive mode of bourgeois social relationships that prevented the individual’s integration into a larger cultural community. This remained a difficult task, since every dimension of cultural consciousness was shaped by possessive individualism that encourages competition and is thus supportive of the ethos of capitalism. The alternative was to think and act not competitively but collectively, according to the principle of community. To do so required the development of a different theory of language, the means by which all social interaction (politics in this sense) takes place. This is why members of the Left were so concerned about language. They drew on the philosophical work of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, both of whom saw language not merely as a vehicle for communication but the means by which the broader social world is opened for human comprehension. They determined that language is how man finds culture and his place in it. Therefore, as Heidegger observed, becoming human was rooted in conversation, and that is where we find the making of community. It is in this sense that all relationships are political.

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Donald Nicholl’s critique of the Catholic New Left also betrayed a mistaken understanding of what its members meant by revolution. It had nothing to do with crazed bazaar mobs and violent upheavals. In talking of revolution, the Left always meant the kind of social and cultural changes described by Raymond Williams in The Long Revolution. This shift from a capitalist order to socialism in Western industrialized societies such as Britain would never be violent upheavals of the established order. The matter of violence was something that had been employed to overcome colonial exploitation in the Third World, and although Slant writers had appreciated the efficacy of force in such circumstances, the Shaw-Redfern controversy demonstrated that they did not support these measures in the developed world.26 The Catholic Left’s notion of revolution was outlined more fully by McCabe in responding to Martin Green, a New Blackfriar supporter who questioned the strong antiliberal bias of Slant. McCabe explained that the Left wanted Christians to be revolutionaries, not mere liberal “reformers,” in terms of satisfying Christ’s call to subvert the world. The world here was “not Nature or Creation or Man” but rather the prevailing social and political structures in which Christianity is obliged to work (which frequently take the form of police violence, imperialist oppression, and war). Christian revolutionaries oppose liberalism because its reforms only serve to gloss over and thus mask the need for the substantive radical changes required to purge the world of the sin that blocks the realization of Christ’s promise. Liberal Christianity, noted McCabe, is a further development of conservatism in that it sees all political institutions as equally good in their time and place—“we should seek to understand the headhunters rather than change them.”27 The force of violence, which Green found greatly troubling, might be necessary in certain instances, commented McCabe, in order to confront and overcome evil. But for the Christian, violence only achieves its aim in a context of nonviolence and must never attempt domination, thereby losing its revolutionary meaning by conforming to the world that needed to be subverted. There would be contexts that justified violence, but the challenge was to recognize these special circumstances and make its use redemptive.28 The most significant critique of the Catholic Left came from the Church’s most eminent lay philosopher, Jacques Maritain. His response

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to the Left served to define the fundamental divide between progressive, liberal Catholicism—that which prepared the ground for the renewal promised in Vatican Council II—and the main focus of this book: the more revolutionary breed of Catholic who sought to restructure the Church as the means for creating a new humanistic social order. Maritain was not responding specifically to Slant and the English Catholic New Left. His issue was with the general leftist trajectory of post–Vatican II theology and sociopolitical thinking, in particular as expressed by Catholics in France. The Slant group was certainly an integral part of the perceived excesses that concerned Maritain. In this respect, the eminent Catholic philosopher’s arguments are highly significant, since they symbolically marked the most decisive dividing line between the meaning of liberal and radical/revolutionary Catholicism. For the Left, Maritain’s neo-Thomism (a term the philosopher refused to accept as a description of his own Thomistic views) was essentially antimodern, a sterile dogma steeped in a nostalgia for the authority that governed a Christendom of the past. Maritain’s dedication to a Thomistic theological paradigm seemed to preclude the possibility of a true democracy: it denied the autonomy of the temporal order in proclaiming the necessity of a spiritual unity. On one level, Maritain’s political and social philosophy appeared to complement that of the Catholic Left. He attacked bourgeois liberalism, condemning its individualism and preoccupation with the amassing of private property as damaging to the social community. Maritain acknowledged the necessity of using the state to promote the public good and supported what he called “economic pluralism” as an antidote to corporate capitalism. He advocated a reformulated industrial structure based on an associative form of proprietorship, where workers share with management the ownership of the means of production.29 Maritain’s writings in the 1930s and 1940s were especially critical of capitalism, and his concern with the proletariat as “the bearer of fresh moral reserves which assign to it a mission . . . of liberation”30 helped prepare the ground for radical liberation thinking in Latin America.31 In his Lettre sur l’Indépendance (1935), Maritain contended that a “healthy Christian politics” would undoubtedly go far to the left and demand a transformation of the capitalist economic system.32

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French traditionalists blamed Maritain for a leftist drift of Catholicism as expressed in the reforms of Vatican Council II. Maritain’s Integral Humanism had an important influence on the thinking of Cardinal Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, whom conservatives thought too progressive. Both men had become close friends when Montini was secretary of state to Pius XII during Maritain’s service as French ambassador to the Vatican. Montini had translated Maritain’s Trois Réformateurs: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau into Italian. Thereafter, Montini often referred to Maritain as his “teacher.” In the encyclical Populorum Progressio, Pope Paul VI cited Maritain several times, and it was to Maritain that he delivered the message to the intellectuals of the world at the close of Vatican II.33 Although Maritain identified himself in temperament as a man of the Left and arguably did more than any other Catholic intellectual to show how Catholicism shared common ground with democratic forms of government, he concluded that the political definitions of left and right had lost their meaning by the 1960s. They had been transformed in his view into two opposing forms of religion. In France, rightist extremism was saturated with frustrations and bitterness in a nostalgic memory of Marshal Pétain and the disappointments of the Algerian War. The French Left had also become extremist through demagoguery and aggressive conformism. Neither political camp in its zeal served the truth. Maritain called the archetype of such leftist tendencies “the Sheep of Panurge,” a reference to Rabelais; it is these sheep, who blindly follow one another to disaster, who have gained sway over the clerical professors of the Left. In a 1964 letter to his friend Julien Green, Maritain wrote “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 stupid. There is a new modernism full of pride and obstreperousness that seems to me more dangerous than that of Pius X [who condemned modernism].”34 Some months before the conclusion of Vatican Council II, Maritain, a man of advanced years at this point, had retired to Toulouse in search of reflection and silence. But what Maritain considered a misguided excess coming out of the Council compelled him, at the age of eighty-four, to speak bluntly, with common sense—as a “peasant from

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the Danube”— about the disorientation of Christian thinking regarding the Church and the faith. Although generally pleased with the thrust of Vatican II’s reforms, Maritain was disturbed by the ways in which theologians—“neomodernists,” as he called them—were trying to bring about a complete temporalization of Christianity. There seemed to him at the Council an atmosphere of enthusiasm for anything new, reflecting a determination to cut the Church off completely from linkages with the past. The frenzied neomodernist infatuation with science was emptying the faith of any spiritual content. Maritain’s response to such matters was his most controversial book, Le Paysan de la Garonne, or The Peasant of the Garonne. The target of Maritain’s jeremiad against the neomodernists were the French Catholics who were in dialogue with the French Communist Party. Yet his criticisms, although not intended for the English Catholic New Left (about whom he probably knew very little), had much to do with the kind of criticism leveled by the Slant group against his beloved Thomistic system. Maritain was concerned about the uncritical embrace of Marx by French Catholics and current trends in sociology and anthropology, all of which in his view were encouraging a complete secularization of Christianity. The Peasant of the Garonne proved to be “quite literally a bomb” thrown into Catholicism.35 Within a month of its publication, it became the best-selling nonfiction work in France. It went through seven printings in four months and turned out to be the most popular book that Maritain ever wrote. It triggered an avalanche of angry denunciations from both the Left and the Right, but the attacks from the Left were the most telling in terms of the radical transformation of Catholic social philosophy since Vatican Council II. Maritain’s book criticized what he took to be the philosophical and sociological fashions that were undermining the metaphysics and spirituality of his understanding of Catholic thought. He believed that the intellect of the human person needed to be linked to a spiritual experience requiring a union of the “knower and the known.” In other words, there must be contact between things of this world and God. Maritain condemned the ways in which the new theologians were drawing on Teilhard de Chardin, Marx, Max Weber, and other thinkers to challenge the Thomistic synthesis. These neomodernists in Maritain’s mind were

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“kneeling before the world,” inverting the teachings of the Council to adapt the Church to the natural and temporal structures in such a way as to bring about a complete secularization of the faith.36 The old Church, they claimed, had been so corrupted by its historical alliance with political elites that it had alienated itself from the faithful. The Left’s solution was to construct a new Church that could become a more vital force for reconstructing the world. Maritain recognized the need for Christians to fight against social and political injustices, yet this was not the only reality to which Christians must commit themselves. The temporal challenge could be satisfied only if grace and prayer rendered the energy of the Christian spiritually pure and uplifted. It was an error, claimed Maritain, to interpret the aggiornamento as an adaption of the Church to the modern world.37 Rather, it was a renewal and a more profound expression of how the Church could advance efforts for the common good. The Council was the manifestation of forces always inherent in Catholicism’s evangelical teaching. In keeping with the demands of its quest for truth, the Church’s mission gives primacy to the person over the community. The neomodernists, on the other hand, were mistaken in giving primacy to the community over the person. Given the perils of the contemporary world, the Church, claimed Maritain, “will increasingly become—bless Her—the refuge and support (perhaps the only one) of the person.”38 Here is where Maritain ascertained that the Marxist categories fashionable with the Left were entering dangerous territory. These categories opened the way to a lethal statism that could easily absorb the autonomy of the individual in its communitarian quest for social revolution. The curious “kneeling of the neomodernists” to which Maritain referred in The Peasant of the Garonne was the result of a mistake, namely, the confusion between two different meanings of how the word “world” is understood. There is the world of “ontosophic truth” found in the natural structures that surround us; and there is another world that serves as the repository of “religious” or “mystical” truth. This latter world is the Kingdom of God. The two worlds have been brought together through the Incarnation. Insofar as the natural world accepts the Kingdom, it is saved; but refusing that Kingdom (that is, the dualism that separates the spiritual from the temporal) constitutes a rupture with God’s order. Too

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many Christians at the moment, asserted Maritain, were in a muddle about the meanings of these worlds. Those Christians who imagine that the natural world has the capacity to absorb the Kingdom of God (ontosophic truth assumes that man is the measure of all things) are in effect saying that there is no Kingdom distinct from the natural world. This, Maritain believed, was Teilhard de Chardin’s error, namely, assuming that the natural world was in a state of becoming the Kingdom. Maritain in fact devoted several pages to Teilhard de Chardin in The Peasant of the Garonne. He considered Teilhard a poet rather than a scientist, theologian, or philosopher. “One does not expect a poem,” wrote Maritain, “to bring us any rational knowledge whatever, whether scientific, philosophical, or theological.”39 Teilhard was a “dangerous and ambitious dreamer,” claimed Maritain, whose ideas had a distorting impact on Catholics who flirted with Marx.40 The logical conclusion of such erroneous Teilhardian evolutionary mythologizing was that there was not the slightest need to be saved from above, for man was now capable of saving himself. “Down on your knees, then, with Hegel and his followers,” wrote Maritain, for such people believe themselves “more Christian than ever since Christ is in it [the natural world], and is consubstantial with it.” But this, he held, was a false reality, an illusory world detached and now dangerously adrift from its Christians moorings.41 Maritain concluded that the excessive secularization encouraged by Vatican II had pushed the pendulum to the opposite extreme, compared to the sins that had previously damaged the Church for a century and a half. Maritain had played an important role in trying to overcome these sins, by dedicating himself to the temporal Christian mission of battling social and political evil in order to build up a Christian-inspired social and political order. But the Left had become excessive in continuing the struggle beyond what Maritain considered the proper Christian boundaries.42 On a fundamental level, Maritain was less idealistic, less hopeful than his left-leaning co-religionists about what was possible in a natural world removed from God. The Christian, as St. Paul said, will suffer persecution when he tries to live the godly life in Christ. This is because the Christian is not of the world—he will always be a foreigner to it—since the world in which he lives is separated from God.43 Maritain pointed out that man’s noble efforts to improve the world through Christian

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truths as reflected in the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment, which culminated in the French Revolution (the marker for historians of modern times), ultimately became corrupted. Maritain was neither Manichean nor gloomily Spenglerian in his view of history, but he certainly was ambivalent about its promise of progress. The great achievements were too often compromised by doctrinal errors. The French Revolution, for instance, inaugurated democracy and the principle of legal equality, yet was vitiated by the terrible zeal of Robespierre. But Maritain did believe that throughout the course of history, man’s conscience had become increasingly refined and more attuned to the teachings of the Gospels.44 As the English Catholic New Left saw it, Maritain’s Thomistic synthesis was no longer relevant in a modern world where the forces of secularism determined the definition of reality. Secularization, they insisted, is the product of man’s growing maturity, self-confidence, and hence self-understanding. Man is now capable of perceiving himself as a creative subject. His perspective in the process shifts from that of the cosmological to an anthropological vision, a direct consequence of the expansion of scientific knowledge. Man can now envision himself as an agent of history; he now can discover the laws of nature and in doing so become responsible for his own destiny. Out of this Teilhardian understanding of the evolutionary process comes a different way of understanding God. In this ontological rendering, secularization is a process that coincides perfectly with a vision of man that makes possible a more complete fulfillment of Christian life.45 Maritain was not only a central inspiration behind the renewal promised by Vatican Council II but also a symbol of what was meant by liberal Catholicism in the post–World War II years—that is, a conciliation of Christianity with a democratic, pluralistic political culture. As such, his views stand as a clear demarcation, a dividing line, between a progressive, reformist Catholicism that prepared the soil for Vatican II, and a more revolutionary approach to the challenges of a postindustrial society represented by the revolutionary aspirations of the Catholic Left. For the English Catholics of the Left, Maritain’s Thomistic dualism, which championed the “primacy of the spiritual” and not what Brian Wicker called “first the political kingdom,” prevented the realization of

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their version of humanistic socialism. Maritain sought a “third way,” a middle path between capitalism and socialism. But this was simply insufficient for those of the Catholic Left, who sought revolution. As Gustavo Gutiérrez put it, Maritain’s model for what he called the “New Christendom” depended on ideas that were too “timid and basically ambiguous.” Although Maritain’s model encouraged political participation by Christians, it was not willing, claimed Gutiérrez, to propose “radically new social forms.”46 Indeed, for Adrian Cunningham, Maritain’s system “formed a coherent ideological scheme for a particular and pervasive socio-cultural stance,” one that simply served to provide a legitimation for the political status quo.47

MEASURING SUCCESS

A main objective of the Catholic New Left was to mobilize heretofore apolitical or, at best, status quo– minded, middle-class Catholics to push British society toward a humanistic socialism. They, in turn, would also be the agents of change by restructuring the Church as an important institutional means to this goal. From the outset, the Slant activists were less concerned about targeting the laboring classes as the catalyst for this endeavor. They were not convinced that the British working classes were able to serve as the avant-garde of their revolutionary agenda. In their view, this inability was the consequence of both the conservative nature of the nation’s political culture and the temperament of the British workingman. It was the failure of Slant’s leaders to back Martin Shaw’s ambitious efforts to work with the shop stewards’ movement that led to his departure from the Catholic Left. The issues here concerned both strategy and agency. Slant’s editors at this juncture wanted an attack on a broad array of fronts and not exclusively through the shop stewards’ movement. They also objected to Shaw’s call for a working-class revolution on the grounds that the country was not prepared for such an extreme measure and that Britain’s move to socialism had to follow what Raymond Williams had identified as the “Long Revolution.”48 On the other hand, as their response to the Charles Davis case and the resulting McCabe affair made

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clear, the Left never intended to forsake the Church as an agency of revolution. Indeed, the history of Slant and the Catholic New Left in Britain is testimony to how far one could go before ceasing to be of the Church. Davis crossed a line beyond which the Catholic Left would not venture. They could understand and empathize with Davis’s critique of the Church’s institutional failures, but they refused to follow him into apostasy. The Catholic intellectual avant-garde demonstrated a remarkable ability to synthesize and integrate Catholic social thinking with the most advanced epistemological innovations of the social sciences and humanities. Yet, despite the Left’s trenchant critique of the prevailing politically liberal and capitalist economic establishment, they failed to communicate their ideas to the Catholic bourgeoisie, to the Church, or to the nation as a whole. There were several sociopolitical and cultural reasons for their failure. For one thing, aside from those elements already sympathetic to a radical politics, the audience for their message was small. As Slant fellow traveler John Challenor observed, although the Catholic New Left commanded considerabe interest and qualitatively intense support, its base was quantitatively minimal: “Slant was almost farcically unrepresentative of the English Catholic Church as a whole, and was in fact ridiculed by the leadership [Heenan, and so on].”49 The British social classes have generally been conservative to moderate in political sentiment. Michael P. Hornsby-Smith’s sociological research suggests that by the 1960s there was a high level of convergence between English Catholics and non-Catholics on a range of social, economic, and political issues. This reflected, he claimed, a process of embourgeoisiement and socioeconomic assimilation that essentially domesticated English Catholics, making them no more supportive of radical social engineering than were the mainstream and complacent Protestant and secular middle classes. “The powerful in Britain can sleep safely,” wrote Hornsby-Smith, “confident that there will be no prophetic uprising of five-and-a-half million English Catholics to bring the ‘Good News to the Poor.’”50 The English working classes were also in no mood for a revolutionary socialism. The Labour Party had long dissociated itself from Marxism and was clearly satisfied to work within the system to meet its needs. Alasdair MacIntyre in his book Secularization and Moral

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Change raised the question as to why the Communist Party had failed to make an impact on British political culture. Part of his answer was that British employers recognized the efficacy of compromise under the pressure of working-class resistance. The workers, in turn, discovered that they could make bread-and-butter gains without violence and thus valued wages over Weltanschauung. Even the Marxist historian E. J. Hobsbawm had to admit that up until the late 1960s, capitalism—a system he personally abhorred—had been “by and large, a sensational success economically, technologically and . . . in the provision of material prosperity (or hope of it) for the masses.”51 The Catholic Left also was burdened with the seemingly insurmountable task of trying to convince the Christian community (Protestant and Catholic alike) that there could be some value in collaboration with Marxists. Marx’s atheism proved to be a deal breaker for conventional Christians. Indeed, the mere suggestion that the Left were Christian-Marxists kept the public from a careful reading of their positions. Yet Slant members worked diligently to engage a broader public by attending Catholic gatherings and debating with a wide range of groups, including the Newman Association, students, seminarians, and priests. Bernard Sharratt, for instance, recalled how much time Slant editors spent on the road, giving talks to all sorts of people and organizations throughout the country. Sharratt himself came across an old folder with “current talk” scribbled on the pages, with dates and places indicating about thirty speeches in a matter of weeks. There always seemed to be a steady demand for speakers from Slant, and it was not just Catholics who vied for Slant’s attention.52 Sharratt also pointed out that Slant members devoted substantial time and energy, along with the rest of the Left, in trying to work with and within various working-class institutions, from trade unions to the Worker’s Educational Association. “And if working-class Catholics were around,” wrote Sharratt, “that was a sort of bonus.”53 Where the Catholic Left failed to get much traction was with the Catholic media. Frequently, pundits and critics who did provide assessments had either not examined their work very closely or, worse yet, vented their hostility without having bothered to read what the Left had actually written. The members of the Left also had difficulty in

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communicating their ideas to a broader Catholic audience, due in large part to their tendency to write in the specialized vocabulary of literary theory and sociology. To many readers, this came off as ideological jargon, delivered with a prolixity that even those sympathetic to the Left found off-putting. Theo Westow, for example, cited the following from Slant 26 to illustrate the obfuscatory nature of the group’s writing: “The extended, global communication which capitalism historically opened up, with its concomitant alienations would have to be placed in the context of the estrangement, breakdown and destructiveness implicit in all extension of communications, from the invention of the tool to the advent of the cultural communications media.”54 Even J. M. Cameron, one of the pioneers of the Catholic Left, had difficulty in fully grasping the ideas advanced by Eagleton and his circle because of their ponderous style.55 From the outset the Left’s rhetorical challenge for creating a “common culture” was an especially daunting one. This had much to do with the complex sociological and philosophical theories that they hoped to integrate with Christian teachings. It became easier for the cognoscenti of the Left, Slant people in particular, to communicate with one another in a sort of code, a philosophical shorthand intelligible only to the initiated. The result was a self-insulating hermeneutic, an uncritical assimilative style loaded with jargon and passwords that generally mystified outsiders and obscured whatever ideas the writers were intending to promote. In its defense, Slant pointed out that Christian theology itself required specialized language not always familiar to laymen (read, for example, Karl Rahner’s “In Search of a Short Formula of Faith,” Concilium, March 1967). The same was true for those who wrote about radical political theory: not everyone would understand the true meaning of “class-consciousness,” “praxis,” “alienation,” and so forth. Certainly, much of what Slant wrote was “new” language for most Catholics, and new languages can easily be dismissed as jargon by those unwilling to entertain ideas contrary to their own. The point that Slant endeavored to make was that there is a contemporary living language of radical politics, and if Christians are serious about creating a true socialist “community,” they must learn this mode of communication: “the language of Christian theology and the language of radical politics have a great deal in common.”56

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Compounding the problem of recondite language in limiting the Catholic Left’s outreach was a contempt for conventional politics, as polluted by what their Chesterbellocian predecessors had called the “party system.” Aside from its association with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the May Day Manifesto, and the student protest movement, the Left found the prevailing political culture so tainted that its members chose for the most part to avoid engaging with it. This meant that the leading voices of the Catholic Left were largely absent from the nation’s essential politics.57 To many observers it seemed that Slant had failed to make the connection between theoretical analysis and what Marx called praxis, that is, translating ideas to practical political action. J. M. Cameron, who was skeptical of the Christian-Marxist convergence, criticized the Catholic Left for not paying sufficient attention to strategy and tactics on a practical level. What they wrote, he complained, was burdened by “a remote and utopian character.”58 The ambiguity of the Left’s enterprise also raised the question of whether they were using Christianity to further Marxist objectives or Marxism to strengthen Christianity. Peter Hebblethwaite, for example, feared that revolution for the Left was the priority and that Christianity would come later only as a means of legitimizing the enterprise.59 For Hebblethwaite, Neil Middleton’s The Language of Christian Revolution seemed to confirm his fears. Middleton, he noted, claimed that Christian doctrine must be variable, since language is tied to culture, which constantly shifts through time. For Middleton and his Slant associates, Christianity was really about changing human relationships, which needed to be ordered for revolution.60 In any case, the ambiguity of Slant writing had the effect of further pushing the Catholic Left to the fringes. Because Slant writers were generally ignored by the mainstream Catholic media, they, in response, reserved their comments for articles and books that resonated with their own radical dispositions and excluded the rest. There also was a tendency for Slant writers to persistently refer to their own closed circles of radical commentary, quoting one another in what some saw as an incestuous cycle of ideological reinforcement that excluded outsiders. This style has been typical, of course, of other such groups who were forging new paths of criticism and analysis. It seems that security and self-confidence come

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with consensus. On the other hand, despite their mutual reinforcement of ideological positioning, the Catholic Left was at the same time very self-critical. It was the norm, for example, for various Slant writers to mount vigorous attacks on each other in order to clarify their philosophical positions, which were always considered a work in progress. In the broad context of what it meant to be of the Left, there were a variety of divergent and clashing views within the Slant circle. In a paper delivered at the December Group in 1968, Sharratt offered his own perceptive assessment of the problems that Slant confronted in a national atmosphere absent revolutionary traditions. Working within an ethos lacking a “language of revolution” obliged the Left to give priority to developing theory, meaning that there was less focus on the existing political and social conditions that provided the medium for revolutionary praxis. But prioritizing theory without a sufficient appreciation of historical conditions can have a serious downside. As Mao Zedong warned his struggling comrades in 1930, “studying the social sciences exclusively from books” may lead to the road of counterrevolution. “Of course we should study Marxist books,” insisted Mao, “but this study must be integrated with our country’s actual conditions. We need books but we must over-come book worship which is divorced from the actual situation.”61 In other words, theoretical knowledge must be acquired from practice. Sharratt noted the impressive array of conceptual tools that Slant had provided for “a house of theory,” yet he saw little evidence of contact between that framework and the position of most Catholics in England. Who were Slant’s readers? Slant had become a theoretical journal with an appeal to academic readers. This restricted audience led to the danger of intellectual elitism, a tendency furthered by the highly specialized language of its writers. All this was in contradiction to the very idea of Church and society that had led to the founding of Slant in the first place. The Catholic Left aimed to create a common culture; this required that all men and women participate in its creation. Yet its attempt to translate a Catholic theological vocabulary into the language of Marx, Sartre, and others mystified those Catholics who had to be moved to the left. Sharratt was convinced that Slant had to modify its language to one in which “its theological concerns can fruitfully interact . . . as a way of

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reaching and shaping a wider audience.”62 Its main thrust should be more clearly focused on England’s Catholic literary traditions—“from pastorals and sermons through to the work of ‘Catholic writers’ this century, that in a sense ‘the Church’ has itself produced as well as coming to grips with the wider literary-cultural scene.” To a great extent, claimed Sharratt, despite Slant’s impressive theoretical syntheses, it “seems still to be conducting a (fascinating) conversation with postulated nowheremen living in some nowhere-land.”63 In this sense, a Catholic Marxism was a theory without a movement. The subsequent founding of the Slant Bulletin, Slant X, and the various Slant groups were intended to address this problem. Even Raymond Williams, one of the initial sources of inspiration for the Catholic New Left, recognized that nothing much practical would be gained by Slant’s highly verbalized synthesis of Christianity and Marxism without a clear linkage to social reality. A dialogue that attempts to equate the parallelism of “the fall” and “alienation,” or “redemption” and “emancipation” as identical concepts, claimed Williams, represents a search for impractical, idiosyncratic solutions to cultural problems. As Williams put it, “I’m looking for the active continuity of the critique, and what I do not look for and must reject, is a prolonged inquiry into the appropriation.”64 Williams’s point about excessive theorizing was a source of some controversy among Slant groups. London readers, for example, urged more involvement in practical politics and believed that the increasing preoccupation with theorizing was a product of the elitist Cambridge setting that informed the thinking of Slant at its origins.65 The leaders of Slant, on the other hand, coming from academia and the world of publishing, inclined more to theory than to praxis. They preferred to highlight the intellectual side of the revolutionary project and urged their readers to take responsibility for praxis by forming local groups with practical outreach to the broader public and especially to “the church porch.” A Slant symposium held in Birmingham in September 1967 entitled “Problems of a Common Culture” was attended by a wide range of people sympathetic to the Left but with no previous connections with Slant. The purpose was to bring together different ideas and disciplines

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that could be useful in analyzing the bases of socialist revolution. As a means of achieving this goal, Bernard Sharratt, Phil Biesley, and Mike Heffernan published what was called the Slant Bulletin (a typescript newsletter) out of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.66 It was designed to be a source of information for a cross-section of people (many nonChristian) whom the 1967 Slant symposium had identified as moving to the political left. The editors admitted that the Slant journal had verged on intellectual elitism and that its supporters failed to move the Church into a more progressive and revolutionary trajectory. Indeed, Slant was not read in parishes, and the readership in Catholic seminaries was not increasing. Hostility had always come from “the top,” and now it was time to work at the street level to build a movement by reaching out to more students and workers and forging a sense of identity and common purpose. To this end, it was decided by Sharratt and others to form a number of Slant groups throughout the country that would meet on a regular basis and plan strategies to advance social change. The Slant Bulletin tried to bring these groups together to discuss aims and practices. As of the autumn of 1968, the Slant Bulletin listed twenty-five local Slant groups established around the country.67 Most of its articles dealt with various initiatives to relieve pressures on the homeless and with other “hands-on” projects that local Slant groups could and did undertake. One such example was Slant’s support for the formation of the People’s Democracy (PD), founded on 9 October 1968 at Queens University, Belfast, by students Bernadette Devlin and Cyril Toman and college lecturer Michael Farrell. As a political organization, the PD supported the campaign for civil rights for Northern Ireland’s Catholics but insisted that this could be accomplished only by creating a socialist republic for all of Ireland. In February 1969 the PD drafted a “Manifesto of the People’s Democracy” with an eight-point platform that ranged from a demand for redrawing voting boundaries to better reflect ethnic and religious demographics, to the repeal of the Special Powers Act and the disbanding of the Ulster Special Constabulary. The group staged a sit-in at Belfast’s Stormont Castle on United Nations Day; government ministers joined the demonstration along with pickets demanding that issues of civil rights remain front and center in the media coverage of events in Northern Ireland. The Slant Bulletin proudly proclaimed: “No longer were we just protesting. Now we were campaigning.”68

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The most active of the Slant groups was based in London, under the leadership of Christopher Calnan. The London group intended to avoid the charge of exclusivity and worked to connect their revolutionary theory with political action in the community. One of its leaders was Francis McDonagh, who had been a founding editorial board member of Slant in its Cambridge days. The successor to the Slant Bulletin was called Slant X, and its editions from September 1969 through 1971 listed a number of causes in which the group had been involved, including, among others, protests for squatters’ rights, a campaign against a South African cricket-team tour in England, the expansion of civil rights in Ireland, and, most significantly, attempts to unionize a local factory. The Irish Catholic Church was frequently attacked in the Slant Bulletin and Slant X, not so much for being actively repressive but for encouraging an apolitical mentality facilitated by the subtle mechanisms and built-in habits of “being a Catholic.” This only helped to perpetuate repression by stifling active opposition. In Ireland and Spain, the writers argued, the official Church had been content to breed political sonámbulos (sleepwalkers).69 Another interesting effort to build community and promote social activism at the grass-roots level was the Blackheath Commune. The source of this idea was the Student Christian Movement (SCM), which, according to Christopher Calnan, served as the unofficial Christian representative at the table of educational upheaval during the1960s and 1970s. The SCM was influenced by radical student activities in Germany and France, especially informal experiments in communal living. Although the founding members of the Blackheath Commune were Protestant, an early effort was made to broaden its reach and interface with Slant and the Catholic Left. The inspiration for this outreach was Slant’s Christian-Marxist dialogue and its organization of political action around the Vietnam War, anticolonial struggles, and apartheid in South Africa. In the late 1960s, Father Laurence Bright was employed by the SCM to provide direction to its Political Commission (PC). In this capacity he initiated an ecumenical drive to break down denominational barriers in an effort to advance peace and social justice, the history of which went back to the creation of the Christian CND in the early to mid-1960s. In 1968, Calnan, due to his leadership in directing protest

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activities behind the Slant banner and at Laurence Bright’s urging, became a member of the PC.70 He became acquainted with SCM activist plans to set up a Christian commune during PC meetings. Calnan and his partner Jacqui Calnan soon signed up for membership. A house was procured for the group by the radical clergyman and advocate of furthering the Christian-Marxist dialogue, Paul Oestreicher, whose parish was in the South East London suburb of Blackheath. The founding members began to move in gradually during September 1969. Each member, or “communard,” of the Blackheath Commune (there were originally nine) was required to be some kind of Christian and committed to advancing socialism. The commune was socialist (most members had Marxist tendencies but were not party political) rather than “hippie,” and it certainly did not condone a hippie lifestyle.71 Most of the members had jobs and pooled their income to support the needs of the commune. Ten percent of the net income was dedicated to financing political work or backing other like-minded groups and organizations. These included, among others, the Black Unity and Freedom Party and Christian Aid. Drug addicts were often invited for treatment at the commune itself, which proved highly stressful for its residents. The communards also initiated demonstrations against lifting the British arms embargo on South Africa and led opposition to anti– trade union legislation. In addition, commune volunteers ran teach-ins, where they explained the injustice of trade relations between Britain and the Third World and business links to the South African apartheid regime. The Blackheath Commune for a time served as the London headquarters for the Christian Left, and Slant 29 and Slant 30 gave the commune as the address of Slant X. The decision to form the Blackheath Commune was part of a larger effort to provide an alternative to the bourgeois-inspired nuclear family, which at the time had come under criticism from radical psychiatrists such as the Slant favorite R. D. Laing. “Our basic conviction,” wrote Christopher Calnan, “was that people were most fully human when they existed together in a mutual relationship.” The communards had reached this conviction through a Christian understanding of life and from a Marxist understanding of history.72 The Blackheath Commune lasted from 1969 through 1971. This experiment in communal Christian living and socialist thinking came to

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an end not because of the usual factional conflicts that have plagued other such enterprises but because of the conviction that the communards had done all they could to usefully promote their ideas. The members decided to take what they had learned from communal living to inform other challenges in achieving a Christian-Marxist inspired socialism.73 There was always an undercurrent of dissatisfaction within the Catholic Left with the priority given both to Christianity and to the Long Revolution. Neil Middleton represented this trajectory in his highly critical commentaries on Church leadership and the necessity of eliminating the Church in the new socialist order.74 The last edition of Slant X featured an anonymous article by a student activist who vowed to work toward socialism by dropping religion altogether. Religion, he claimed, was part of the deadwood of capitalism that had played an important role in the mystification of the oppressed as to the real nature of their problems. It was no longer useful to sit back and theorize—“we must get out and FIGHT.”75 In 1975, Bright wrote an article for a journal called Cross Left in which he asserted that Slant’s focus on mobilizing the middle class was a mistake, apparently suggesting that workingclass support should have been sought for the project.76 In what ways might the Catholic New Left have been more effective? Sharratt’s suggestion that the Slant writers should draw more carefully from earlier Catholic thinkers and be more open-minded about Vatican II’s intentions may have broken down the resistance of those who failed to give the Left a hearing. Contrary to what some observers have written, it is not the case that the Catholic Left lacked a religious tradition to inspire them. Anthony Archer in his study of the Catholic Church after Vatican II wrote that there “was no tradition for them [the Catholic Left] to draw on, and no history of radical Church opposition to the state for them to point to as a model.”77 But in fact, in many respects the English Catholic New Left represented a further development of the radical side of Catholic social thinking that had culminated earlier in the Distributist movement inspired by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc but had fallen into decline in the conservative 1950s. Sharratt may have been correct in recognizing that the Left could have gotten more traction by linking their project with other English Catholic writers.78 Certainly, a clearer referencing of a connection to the

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radical dimensions of Chesterton’s and Belloc’s political and economic ideas might have added legitimacy to their vision of humanistic socialism as an integral part of Catholic social thought, rather than as something alien to that tradition, as was suggested by engaging Marx.79 The Catholic Left would not have been enthusiastic about Chesterton’s defense of private property, but on the other hand, they would have discovered a close relationship between their own cultural positions and Chesterton’s moral critique of capitalism and imperialism, his sense of the importance of community, and his analysis of the corrosive influence of special interests in politics. A few on the Catholic Left recognized this relationship (the Cunninghams in particular), but for the most part it did not seem to receive sufficient attention. Yet in looking back on these years, Fergus Kerr claimed that a number of those on the Left were steeped in the thinking of the Chesterbelloc. Herbert McCabe, for example, once told Kerr that for him a key influence in his thinking, long before he read any Marx, was Hilaire Belloc’s The Servile State.80 Kerr pointed out that he and his fellow Dominican Geoffrey Preston, as well as others in the order who wrote for Slant and participated in their conferences, were in what he called “the Vincent McNabb, Eric Gill, G. K. Chesterton tradition.”81 At the time, claimed Kerr, it may not have been very visible in their writings, but a fresh, contemporary look at their work indicates a close symmetry between the Catholic Left and many Distributist ideas. There certainly was considerable resonance between Distributist economics and Marxist radical theory in terms of a mutual recognition of the centrality and interconnection of economics with culture. Radical Catholic social thought, as represented in the progressive ideas of Ozanam, von Ketteler, Distributism, and the labor encyclicals, also rested on the labor theory of value, an understanding of the process of social production that predated Marx’s own writings on the matter. And the Left had repeatedly outlined linkages between Christianity and Marx’s insights on the causes of alienation and how and why it had to be overcome for the creation of community and a common culture. Part of this fulfillment necessitated the liberation of the working class from the controls of capitalism. Both the Distributists and the Catholic New Left despised liberalism as an ideology for maintaining the status

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quo and were persistent critics of Britain’s capitalist-driven imperialist ambitions.82 The Catholic Left and G. K. Chesterton shared a common ground in their concern for building community. Chesterton’s Distributist vision resembled what the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies called Gemeinschaft, a unified, humanistic community that satisfied the central needs of individuals at the most intimate levels. Chesterton, Tönnies, and the Catholic Left viewed the destruction of communal solidarity as the product of unbridled capitalism and the growth of a modern, largescale society, where relationships that were familial and primary gave way to impersonal secondary interactions based on nothing more than materialist use-value. Anticipating sentiments later expressed by Wicker and others of the Catholic Left, Chesterton believed that the Catholic Church, representing the community of God’s people, could serve as the sociological framework for transforming fragmented, alienated modern life into a common and more humane culture. Much like the Catholic Left, Chesterton had called for a revolution to rid the capitalist world of its sins. His support of syndicalist aspirations in the pre–World War I years saw the rise of the poor against the rich as both expected and welcome. Only a few historians have fully appreciated Chesterton’s early radical tendencies. One such scholar has been the political theorist Margaret Canovan, who argued that Chesterton’s religious views had little in common with traditional, right-wing Catholicism, which favored authority, hierarchy, and obedience. Chesterton instead found in the Catholic tradition a respect for freedom, equality, and a resistance to oppression. Canovan asserts that Chesterton’s novels The Ball and the Cross and The Return of Don Quixote are on some levels a repudiation of right-wing Catholic politics.83 Chesterton’s revolutionary, anticapitalist sentiments were echoed decades later by the Catholic Leftist Denys Turner in explaining how and why he could embrace both Marxism and Christianity. The structures of the capitalist world, claimed Turner, raised material and psychological barriers against the love and emancipation promised by the creation of a Christian community. Marxism, he insisted, offered the clearest definition of the revolutionary praxis against the capitalist world that Christians could follow in tearing down the obstacles against the realization of community.84

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Finally, there was a direct connection between Chesterton and Belloc’s condemnation of the corporate domination of English politics and Slant’s views on the party system. The historian Adrian Hastings also recognized a number of affinities between Distributism and the Slant movement. Both had allies with the Dominicans and were favorably featured in the pages of Blackfriars, both avoided engagement with the mainstream political parties, and both were almost entirely theoretical in approach and managed to maintain considerable theoretical consistency.85 In addition, both Slant and Distributism inspired local groups who took responsibility for making the practical connections between theory and praxis. This, for the Distributists, was the charge taken on by the various league branches, the most active being the Birmingham group.86 Slant’s Adrian Cunningham was one of the few of its writers at the time to note the Left’s intellectual debt to radical Distributism. The same was true of his wife, Angela Cunningham, who wrote the entry on the Dominican Distributist Vincent McNabb for the Dictionary of National Biography. The movement represented in Adrian Cunningham’s mind “the maximum possible consciousness of the social Catholicism” that immediately preceded the Catholic New Left.87 Distributism, claimed Cunningham, was an integral part of the cultural apparatus through which British Catholics established their current identities: it created the context for Catholic middle-class self-consciousness. Thus it was important to study Distributist theoretical contributions in order to better understand the broader cultural framework in which the Left functioned. Cunningham had special praise for one Distributist, the sculptor, essayist, and leftist Eric Gill, who steadfastly held firm against the movement’s drift to authoritarian and philo-fascist politics. Gill, claimed Cunningham, was the radical precursor of Slant politics, a pioneer in a moral and intellectual desert, a man who successfully combined theory and practice with a ruthless consistency in paving the way for the overthrow of Catholic messianic anticommunism.88 Although Cunningham appreciated the role of Distributism in encouraging a more radical middle-class consciousness, especially regarding the baleful impact of capitalism on British politics,89 he also recognized that its strongly antisocialist critique of modernity and its admiration for the comforts and stability of a mythical past glorified by shopkeepers and

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small-scale peasant proprietors could easily retreat into authoritarian reaction. A minority of Distributists— symbolized by Gill— maintained the radical syndicalist connection valued by Slant in stressing the importance of workers becoming owners of the means of production. Gill’s humanist writings also highlighted the creativity of labor and the destruction by the capitalist profit motive of the nobility and meaning of work, which directly reflected what Marx meant by alienation. Gill and other Chestertonians such as Donald Attwater were also founding members of PAX, the Christian pacifist organization with which many of the Slant community were closely involved. Unfortunately, many Distributists were seduced by the promises of Mussolini’s corporate state and Oswald Mosley’s home-grown fascist version.90 After the war, observed Cunningham, the breakdown of the initial Distributist radicalism could be seen in its retreat “to the terrain of the family,” held together by the bond of sacrament and land, basically an apolitical and quietist myth that provided “a safety net for almost any kind of Catholic political adventurousness.”91 Finally, although there was humane strength and a radical vision in the Distributist position, it could never escape the limited analysis of Thomistic ideas regarding economics and private property and the rigidities of natural law that Thomism embraced: “It was not possible to generalise it to an operative theoretical scheme capable of engaging with the complexities of the concrete world, to master them.”92 Slant, claimed Cunningham, had the capacity to move beyond the static nature of these earlier Catholic ideals. In this respect, the radical elements of the Distributist critique represented the highest, yet circumscribed, stage of Catholic theoretical possibilities achieved up to that time. But the Slant group believed that they had been able to move Catholic thinking to a higher stage by engaging and synthesizing theory with intellectual and historical developments inside and outside English Catholicism. Nevertheless, it can be argued that the Catholic Left might have reached a broader audience if others besides Adrian and Angela Cunningham could have recognized and written about their theological debt to, and historical roots in, previous Catholic efforts at renewal. It also would have strengthened the Left’s cause by embracing more systematically the latest papal social encyclicals.93 Douglas Hyde, writing

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on the Catholic New Left in England’s Jesuit journal The Month, observed that the Slant group had largely underplayed the significance of recent Catholic social thought. Hyde believed that if the teachings of Mater et Magistra, Pacem in Terris, and Vatican Council II’s On the Church in the Modern World had been put into practice, the social and economic objectives of the Catholic Left would have been essentially satisfied. Quoting from a 1958 Quaker conference, Hyde wrote: “The structure of the society in which we live is not something fixed and immutable. If Christians and others successfully worked to rid it of its antihuman features, replacing non-Christian values with truly human values, it would cease to be capitalism. It would be changed from the roots up.”94 This is precisely what Pope John XXIII and the Council urged Catholics to do. Any careful reading of Vatican II publications reveals a clear connection between the growing wealth of the developed countries and the increasing poverty of the Third World. The poor became even more destitute because the wealthy nations consistently paid less and less for their products. If Catholics were to achieve what the post–Vatican II Church demanded, it would be necessary to carry through the kind of revolution demanded by the Left. It is revealing that Wicker, in assessing the legacy of the Catholic New Left, observed that Slant was not founded to serve as a platform for Marxist-Christian dialogue but rather as a vehicle for realizing the promises of Vatican Council II, which was given considerable potential by the emergence of the secular New Left among British intellectuals.95 Despite its ideological excesses, its daring, perhaps unrealistic objectives, and its disappointments in terms of achieving a Christian humanistic socialism, the Catholic New Left occupies a significant niche in the history of British Catholicism. On one level their efforts as change agents illustrate the capacity of this religion to reach beyond conventional theological thinking and to speak more immediately and relevantly to the problems of an industrial and postindustrial world. This intellectual avant-garde broke from the confines of one of the more conservative religious subcultures of Western Christendom, bolstered at the top by a reactionary leadership structure, to synthesize and integrate Catholic social thinking with some of the most advanced epistemological innovations in the social sciences to produce an ideological paradigm for revolutionary socialism.

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Slant’s Fergus Kerr believed that the greatest achievement of the Catholic New Left was to show that all social problems were interrelated and to make clear that it was thus necessary to cultivate a sense of the whole before developing a particular critique or course of political action.96 Although they had not completely succeeded in this objective, at least the Catholic Left can claim to have started the process. Yet the sociologists Michael Hornsby-Smith and Graham Dann would charge that by the 1970s, the Catholic Church had largely failed to understand and adapt to the changes produced by industrial and corporate capitalism, nor had it sufficiently addressed the needs of those who had been economically and psychologically damaged by cultural dislocations. They lobbied for more sociological research, which could offer insights on group dynamics and provide solutions to the challenges outlined in Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes: The Church has always had the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the gospel. Thus, in language intelligible to each generation, she can respond to the perennial questions which men ask about this present life and the life to come, and about the relationship of the one to the other. We must therefore recognize and understand the world in which we live, its expectations, its longings and its often dramatic characteristics.97 The sociological matter of making the secular world more intelligible and its problems more amenable to the social teachings of the Gospels was a signal purpose of the Catholic New Left. They, before anyone else of the faith, recognized that the founding fathers of sociology—Marx on capitalism, Durkheim and Tönnies on how religious norms and shared values produced social solidarity, and Weber’s insights on how the rational processes of modernization could lead to the “icy night” of bureaucratic tyranny—offered viable alternatives to the traumatic effects of industrial change. But despite their efforts, the Church establishment provided little support for such an enterprise. Pope Paul VI was quoted in the London Times as saying that sociological studies could result in “moral uncertainty” and be “socially very dangerous.” Sociological data, the pope asserted, should not be judged on their own merits but subjected to “other and higher criteria, such as the essential doctrine

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of the faith, pastoral guidance and the sentiments of the Gospel.”98 There was a particularly strong suspicion of sociology in the English Roman Catholic Church. Cardinal Heenan, for example, put an end to the Newman demographic survey in the late 1960s with the remark: “The true state of any Church is known only to God.”99 Sharratt recalled that all the efforts they made to commission sociological research got firmly locked away by the Church hierarchy. Heenan wanted to maintain the status quo because he thought that sociologists were both impertinent and subversive. What further proof was needed? Berkeley, Nanterre, and the London School of Economics—the centers of student unrest—all had strong faculties of sociology. Not surprisingly, Hornsby-Smith and Dann (who had spent over twenty years studying the English Roman Catholic Church) rejected this anti-scientific deduction and asserted that empirical sociological research not only posed no threat to theology but could provide a useful tool for an understanding of complex religious matters, thereby advancing the mission of the magisterium. Perhaps the Left’s signal contribution to advancing progressive Catholic social action was in the area of theory. And here they contrasted sharply with their counterparts in the Unisted States. From the outset the American Catholic intelligentsia differed from the Slant circle in that their theological disposition was liberal, not radical; they were philosophically personalists rather than social revolutionaries. Much of their sociological and theological positioning had been shaped by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement and by the neo-Thomism of Jacques Maritain. The personalists believed that the modern emphasis on the material world, and the individualist ethos of capitalism and communist collectivism that emerged with it, had corroded the spiritual side of life. As an antidote they sought to reaffirm the freedom and authentic spiritual needs of the individual person threatened by the technological forces of contemporary life. The Slant group was initially impressed with the vigor, courage, and revolutionary thrust of the American New Left as expressed by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), whose charter was the Port Huron Statement, drafted by the radical Catholic Tom Hayden. The English Catholic Left considered the SDS the most exciting and progressive development in the Long Revolution. The student activists who

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provided the energy for the American New Left were refreshingly antiestablishment. They called for participatory democracy outside the bureaucracies of leadership, starting at the grass roots. The emphasis was on ordinary men and women who, in the words of C. Wright Mills, would become “agents in the history-making process.”100 Yet, as Stuart Hall observed, even though the American radicals had punched a hole through the liberal political consensus, there had been no effort to fit their rebellion into any rational pattern or ideological scheme. Perhaps this was due, Hall speculated, to the inherent American distrust of ideology and of rational, sequential linear modes of logic and perception.101 Jack Newfield, a sympathetic historian of the American New Left, argued that the Port Huron Statement’s call for participatory democracy was an effective, therapeutic organizing technique but lacked the substance to serve as a theory of social change.102 The SDS was to be celebrated for making an important break with the passivity of the 1950s. But at this point the American New Left, in the words of Todd Gitlin, one of its leading activists, “had a practice and a spirit before—or more than—it ever had an ideology. At its luminous best, what the movement did was stamped with imagination.”103 The purpose of the Port Huron Statement was to inspire a new form of political activism, not to formulate an ideology. Hayden saw that the primary question for the SDS was to change the values of American society, and this meant that moral realignment had to precede political realignment. In Hayden’s words, the SDS’s intellectual assumption was that “politics should flow from experience, not from preconceived dogmas or ideologies.”104 The inspiration for the American New Left was Albert Camus and C. Wright Mills—not Karl Marx. Hayden considered Marxist theory mechanical, dogmatic, and outdated. Its conclusions were also far too dreary for the idealistic and optimistic activists who had founded the SDS. Hayden’s advice to his SDS colleagues in drafting the Port Huron Statement was, as he put it, “directly personal rather than political or programmatic.” “The time has come, “ he asserted, “for a reassertion of the personal.”105 The personalism that echoed throughout the Port Huron Statement was necessary for the development of radical consciousness. But as the eminent American Catholic historian David O’Brien has observed, for

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personalism to find a coherent and constructive expression it was necessary to connect with a theoretical structure developed from a sophisticated social analysis. Here is where an American willingness to join in a Christian-Marxist dialogue would have been fruitful. Marxism, noted O’Brien, offered the analytical social tools that are a necessary adjunct to a meaningful personalism. The SDS, however, prided itself in not speaking in “Marxist dialectics” and drew inspiration instead from traditional American individualism. Their solution to the ills of technological culture was the creation of a more humanistic, personalist, and communitarian society. The socialism of the SDS, however, lacked the language of class struggle; it was deliberately non-Marxist and placed value on an individualistic anarchism that was supposed to build community.106 O’Brien praised the Slant group for their willingness to engage Marx as a means of developing the theoretical basis for a reformed Christianity. The English, unlike their American co-religionists, had succeeded in articulating a compelling and cohesive philosophy for social revolution. The Slant radicals, wrote O’Brien, took Pope John’s call to streamline the Church as the agent of social change “much further to a positive vision of a socialist Kingdom of God.”107 They recognized that Marx provided the best means for identifying the evils that must be overcome in order to build a better, more egalitarian community. O’Brien also supported the English Left’s insistence on revolution as the only way to promote Christ’s promise: the piecemeal and ad hoc reforms of liberalism inevitably result in supporting the existing order. O’Brien saw merit in Wicker’s explanation that the Catholic Left’s program would be revolutionary in the sense of understanding that the present state of affairs cannot stand. The Slant radicals accepted the inevitability and the constructive role of conflict but ruled out any consequences that would stand in the way of men and women shaping their own destinies. This was the kind of theoretical paradigm for revolution that, for O’Brien, American radicals should embrace. Agitation, propaganda, confrontation with the ruling establishment, and civil disobedience must remain the tactics of the radical cause, wrote O’Brien, but, divorced from political and social ideology, they can give no coherent direction to finding solutions to human problems.108

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David O’Brien was not the only American Catholic to recognize the major theoretical failings of his country’s Catholic radicals. William A. Au, the author of one of the most celebrated books on the Catholic antiwar movement, criticized the Left for not formulating an integrated social vision. Many of the difficulties in addressing problems of social change, he asserted, were rooted in the lack of a coherent set of ideas concerning revolution. Au considered the inherent anarchism of the American Catholic Leftists as a major crippling factor here, since their doctrinaire pacifism rejected the legitimate utility of the modern state because of its assumed totalitarian tendencies. Since Catholic pacifists limited themselves to personalistic protests, it was not possible for them to address in any sufficient way the question of institutional change. The endemic anarchism of radical American Catholicism rejected the modern state, and this prevented the development of a social analysis that could envision a United States capable of social change. Such thinking fostered a concept of revolution, Au contended, that represented “a sectarian withdrawal from American society.” Rather than encouraging positive social change, the anarchistic tendencies led to a desire to preserve personal integrity by sociopolitical disengagement. Au concluded that the deep sense of cultural alienation that also infused the American Catholic Left gave further thrust to the desire for disaffiliation rather than identification to the society it sought to reform.109 Rather than retreat into a form of institutional escapism, the English Catholic Left engaged the political moment by reaching beyond their religious traditions and not only embracing the utility of Marxist social analysis but also recognizing the value of working with the ideas of other classical sociologists and contemporary literary theorists to strengthen and update Catholic social thinking. What especially distinguished the English Catholic Left from their American brethren was their theological and political eclecticism. Their writings reflected the insights of Durkheim, Weber, Tönnies, Simmel, Berger, and others that showed an appreciation for the centrality of religion in human affairs. These sociologists, along with Marx, recognized that all human thought was socially constructed and that the methodologies that drove sociological inquiry had the potential to advance human cultural development, and they all labored diligently in their disciplines to deliver people from social

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suffering. The English Catholic Left believed that breakthroughs in sociological analysis could complement and even help supplement Catholic efforts to create more humane, inclusive, and egalitarian social communities. However, the efforts at a Christian-Marxist dialogue so enthusiastically supported by the English Catholic Left revealed that a synthesis between the two would not be possible. The major obstacle was the Marxist rejection of God. Where the two could find resonance was in methodologies of social analysis and their mutual goal of achieving a humane and just society. But the Marxist earthly vision was ultimately utopian. The Christian doctrine of hope could fill the void left by the Marxist utopian longing, yet Marxism created a craving that could never realistically be satisfied. If the utopian objective were believed, then anything could be justified in the quest to attain it. As Karl Rahner observed, it is highly dangerous to turn the future into an idol on whose altar present generations can be sacrificed. For Rahner, the antidote to evil was the idea of God as “the absolute future,” against which all human efforts to bring about social life will be judged. Without God, the social world would be more susceptible to totalistic controls. In this sense, the sociological function of God is to prevent the divinization of anything less than God, be it the state, the party, or the future.110 In some respects what one sees in the history of the New Catholic Left is an English version of Ivan Turgenev’s portrayal of conflict between two generations of Russians in his classic novel Fathers and Sons. Turgenev’s “sons,” having been exposed to currents of thought from the West and frustrated with the failure of the tsarist regime to effectively modernize, tended to be far more radical and uncompromising than their “fathers.” They in turn became the first generation of Russia’s revolutionary intelligentsia. The driving force behind the New Catholic Left was a generation of sons of working-class Catholics, whose horizons had been expanded by the benefits of a higher education not available to their parents. Much like Turgenev’s sons, the Left represented for Britain’s Catholic culture a generation of intellectual revolutionaries frustrated with the seemingly delayed adjustment of their religious heritage to the modern world. They were not always understood by their more conservative and cautious fathers.

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The Slant movement played a seminal role through its journal and local organizations in raising the political consciousness and activism of a younger generation of Catholics. As Brian Wicker reflected in his analysis of postconciliar Britain, Slant represented an important and long-overdue challenge within Catholicism to the traditional conservative pieties of the English episcopate and leading theological lay people, on the one hand, and, on the other, a significant attempt to stimulate the inarticulate working-class Irish to demand more from the conservative Labour Party leadership.111 These efforts had the effect of getting Catholics more involved in political activities and social movements, heretofore the preserve of more radical and progressively inclined Britons. Catholics were well represented in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, in the drafting of the May Day Manifesto, and with student and working-class activism. The Slant group also played a significant role in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) and in struggles against apartheid in South Africa and the racist policies of Ian Smith’s government in what was then Rhodesia. The 1968 August– September issue of Slant featured a full-page notice of an anti –Vietnam War demonstration to be held on Sunday, 27 October 1968, and called for people to gather for a march behind Slant leaders. The VSC did not merely exert pressure for peace but also tried to advance collaboration with the revolutionaries in Vietnam. The Christian contingent consisted not only of liberal pacifists but also of other groups committed to a revolutionary politics. In the October London demonstration the Slant group was joined by the SCM’s political commission, which gave the event wider publicity. However, the Catholic Left still found the event disappointing since it did not live up to its planned “militant demonstration,” that is, a demonstration unbounded by polite conventions of traditional political practice. Slant’s Christopher Calnan had a close association with the Christian CND as well as a working relationship with Sheed and Ward, and for these reasons he was given the task of organizing protest activities. His group had their own “Slant banner,” in a deliberate effort to identify the Catholic Left with such protests and distinguish it from other political groups marching under their own banners.112 Terry Eagleton recalled that one of the main anti-Vietnam activities, apart from demonstrators

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being trampled by police horses outside the U. S. embassy in London, was the drafting of a petition to the English bishops, pleading with them to speak out against the war. Although the drafters were able to garner an impressive list of signatures, nothing of course came of it.113 Slant also inspired a similar endeavor to radicalize the Catholic Church in Ireland. In early 1968 a group of Irish Left Catholics inaugurated the journal Grille, whose purpose was to encourage a MarxistChristian alliance to promote a socialist revolution along the lines proposed by their English counterparts. Ireland, much like Spain, was under the influence of a highly traditional and authoritarian clerical and political leadership, and the Grille movement aimed to liberate the current generation from being poorly housed and ill educated.114 Grille opposed an Irish government that was keen on proposing a program of capitalist expansion, by welcoming foreign monopolies into the country and exposing Irish workers to competition from an increasingly industrialized Europe. Politically, Grille saw itself as part of a continuing revolutionary trajectory in Ireland that embraced the legacy of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen, the Young Ireland movement, the Fenians, and, most important, James Connolly. We see our function, wrote the editors, as contributing to and uniting these many elements that share a revolutionary vision by spreading their thoughts and hopes in areas of Irish life, which so far had rejected them as being incompatible with Christian belief.115 Slant and Grille organized a joint four-day conference in Dublin in October 1968. Although efforts were made to sabotage the event, and Herbert McCabe and Laurence Bright were prevented from speaking by their Dominican superiors, the meeting was reported to be a great success. Neal Middleton and Adrian Cunningham, among others, delivered well-received papers, but even more interesting than the content of the conference was the nature of the audience: leading representatives of the Irish Labour Party, Sinn Fein, and the Irish Workers’ Party (CP) were in the hall. The discussions revealed that after a long period of “McCarthyist” oppression in Ireland, there was solid evidence that Grille could play a significant role “from within” in the revival of a Left tradition.116 In addition to Grille and the Irish Left, several others on the English side played prominent roles in highlighting the relevance of Catholi-

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cism as a force for cultural and social change. Brian Wicker became a high-profile religious commentator for the influential newspaper The Guardian, and J. M. Cameron represented new Catholic thinking as British correspondent for America’s Commonweal. Catholics of the Left such as Terry Eagleton, Leslie Dewart, Herbert McCabe, Fergus Kerr, Adrian Cunningham, Angela Cunningham, Rosemary Houghton, Neil Middleton, Martin Shaw, Bernard Sharratt, and others also became well known to the reading public through prolific publications of books and articles. Houghton even managed to engage Cardinal Heenan in a debate on Catholicism and the Left, which was published as Dialogue: The State of the Church Today (1967). The Left also had an important social and political influence on various Catholic lay groups, in particular giving energy to the nation’s principal organization of Catholic university graduates, the Newman Association. In all this the Slant enterprise served as a breeding ground for raising vital issues concerning the relationship between theology and politics, thereby stimulating what the writer Alan Wall recognized as a much-needed discussion of “many important and previously neglected questions.”117 Thus one can say that Slant took a prominent place among a number of post–World War II Christian lay movements (the Union of Catholic Students, Social Christian Movement, Newman Association, Young Christian Workers, Renewal, and others). But what distinguished it was the sophistication of its sociological and theological analyses and its strident voice, which had the effect of giving the other elements of the lay movement considerably greater self-confidence and a more radical bent. In later years the leftist energy unleashed by Slant was channeled into organizations such as CAFOD (Catholic Fund for Overseas Development), CIIR (Catholic Institute for International Relations, now renamed Progressio), Justice and Peace, PAX, CHAS (Catholic Housing Aid Society, now part of Housing Justice), and several others with humanitarian goals.118 As an integral part of the broader English New Left, the Slant group could also claim to be part of the first mass resistance to postindustrial capitalism.119 Georg Lukacs and Herbert Marcuse, Marxist philosophers who inspired these efforts, believed that the New Left, in recognizing the beginning of a crisis in capitalism that would not reach its crescendo for many years to come, was the “canary in the mine.” This was a rather

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prescient observation, given the collapse of global financial markets and the socialist efforts of capitalist governments to stave off the disaster in 2008.120 A number of factors helped put an end to the intellectual vitality of Catholicism on the Left. One major event was the publication of the papal encyclical on birth control, Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, promulgated against the advice of the special commission appointed by the Vatican to study the matter. The encyclical had the effect of splitting the Catholic community in two, and those who rebelled most intensely against it alienated the older, more conservative English Catholics who earlier had shown a willingness to entertain prospects of liberalizing the Church. What followed was the emergence on the Right of such organizations as Pro Fide, which worked to revive the older tribal Catholicism that had been put on the defensive by the Left. There were similar developments in the United States, where a group of neoconservative Catholics gathered around the Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic convert from Lutheranism who launched the highly influential journal First Things. Its primary mission was to turn back the secular tide of American culture, a trajectory abetted by what Neuhaus considered the misguided reforms of Vatican Council II.121 These kinds of groups, along with the revival of conservative forces in the Roman Curia, helped to reimpose the centralized and authoritarian tendencies of an earlier brand of Catholicism. The increasingly reactionary theological environment drove Charles Davis, Britain’s best-known theologian, into apostasy and led to the Vatican sanctions against Father Herbert McCabe. The kind of entrenchment symbolized by Humanae Vitae and the revival of conservative Catholicism added fuel to the frustrations of many younger and mainstream Catholics, who increasingly viewed the institutional Church as superficial and irresponsible. Now the promise of Vatican Council II seemed irrelevant: the windows that Pope John had opened to the world had slammed shut to keep out whatever the reactionaries deemed threatening to the old ways. All this, for many Catholics, encouraged a turning inward, a retreat into a private religious mind-set that was the polar opposite of what the New Catholic Left had labored so long and hard to achieve. Another factor that diluted the organizational structures and coherence of the Catholic New Left was a general cultural malaise that set

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in by the early 1970s, a declining hope that profound changes in society could ever be realized. This was underscored by the rightward move in British politics, which led to the ascendancy of Margaret Thatcher (and Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in the United States). It was increasingly clear that the Catholic Left was having no discernable impact on moving the mainstream Church in a progressive direction. Meanwhile, Sheed and Ward experienced serious financial losses (the main reason why they ceased to publish Slant), owing in large part to declining market numbers and the drifting away from the Vatican-directed Church by those who left the priesthood. The effectiveness of the Slant project may also have been compromised by a growing rift between the journal’s board, consisting mostly of the university-based founding members, and activists in the various Slant groups. Many of the latter, according to Christopher Calnan, certainly respected the precociousness of board members but saw them as “intellectually arrogant, a bit humourless, a little socially uneasy,”122 and far more comfortable with theory than practice, which in itself was a deviation from Marxist principles. On the other hand, Martin Redfern did not recall any conflicts between “intellectuals and community builders, partly because in many cases individuals were both.” The only conflicts that he remembered concerned various ideological matters, which at the time seemed significant but in the end did not last long or damage friendships or collaborations.123 Bernard Sharratt seems to have agreed with Redfern’s recollection, namely, that the “intellectual side of the project” with its revolutionary aspirations was shared by all those associated with Slant.124 For the most part, very few of Slant’s intellectual luminaries had any practical political experience, having moved straight from grammar school, university, or seminary into the world of publishing. And to some observers, they did not welcome much input from those outside this circle. Dinah Livingstone recalled how difficult it was to get approval from the Slant board to have a joint meeting with London Slant X activists. After several requests were ignored, Livingstone sent word that they intended to show up uninvited at the next board meeting. The board responded by warning them that the police would be called to eject them. After this rejection, Slant X carried the strap line, “Slant X’s editorial meetings are open to all comrades.”125

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Slant X editors and London activists appear to have resented the turgid theorizing of the Slant board and its failure to initiate and provide direction to practical ground-level activities. There was a perceived reluctance on behalf of the leaders to leave the “university/Dominican comfort zone” and develop a realistic strategy for engaging the progressive elements in the Catholic parishes and taking on the conservative bishops.126 Moreover, the activists believed that the elitist tendencies of the Slant board only served to undercut the goal of opening up the Church to more democracy, since Slant itself had to become a more open democratic body and allow its supporters to shape policy. In Calnan’s view, had Slant become a movement rather than a theory, the interaction between its membership and the board would have been much more fruitful. He and others, reflecting back on their experiences, have recognized that most of the Left’s activities had little or no impact on the institutions of the Church or on parish life. Those of the Left who attended their local parishes did so in the same passive and individualistic way as anyone else. The English Catholic Left, in Calnan’s words, was “led in the main by a coterie of intellectuals and members of the Dominican Order” who were largely isolated from the realities of mainstream English Catholic life.127 There were some strategies that might have altered this trajectory, in particular, Leo Pyle’s visionary proposal about establishing parish councils to move the Church in a more progressive direction at the grass-roots level. This would have been crucial if Catholicism were a vehicle for the Long Revolution. Yet this would have required a herculean struggle to overcome the resistance of Cardinal Heenan and the other bishops. Of course, Pyle’s strategy was never launched, and the absence of openness and the need for at least some degree of democracy in the Church remains unresolved to this very day.128 In retrospect, it was also probably a mistake for the Slant leadership to rely heavily on discussions with the British Communist Party at the expense of trying to work with the mainline institution of the British Left, namely, the Christian socialist elements in the Labour Party. Not only did the Communists’ sclerotic and supine behavior with respect to the 1968 student rebellion in France betray their revolutionary heritage, but Slant’s intellectual outreach to the British Communist Party also had the effect of opening it up to charges of supporting the persecutors of

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Christians. There might have been an opportunity for Slant to act as an energizing force within the Labour Party, which at the time had earned the support of the overwhelming majority of working-class Catholics.129 Yet the New Left had largely turned away from the Labour Party after the May Day Manifesto, and by that time there was precious little hope within leftist ranks that Labour could be loosened from its privileged association with the ruling establishment. The Left Catholics had also largely given up on cultivating potential allies through their coreligionists in the trade union movement. A deep disappointment with the Church’s failure to implement the promises of Vatican II also contributed to the religious disengagement of several important writers on the Left. Terry Eagleton, for example, wrote that after Slant folded, “we all felt that the radicalizing project had run out of steam,” given the years of conservative resistance by the English hierarchy.130 Afterward, Eagleton moved away from writing about religion to Marxist cultural criticism and joined the International Socialists. Christopher Calnan by the early 1970s ceased being a practicing Catholic. Yet he admitted that even during these years the Catholic Left continued to shape his political views. He became active on the left of the Labour Party, supported the struggle for a united Ireland, and was twice a Labour councilor for the north London borough of Islington. Calnan noted that the borough’s socialist commitment was symbolized by the flying of the Red flag over the town hall whenever the council was in session. He became involved in grass-roots politics with various community groups trying to hold the police to account. By the time of his death in June 2011, Calnan had come full circle: he remained committed to socialism but once again became a practicing Catholic. He still envisioned the Church, despite its flaws, as a seedbed for a more radical approach to social organization.131 John Challenor has also written of the widespread disillusionment that set in among many of the Catholic Left after Humane Vitae. In 1972– 73 he left the priesthood and married. After the reaction against the promises of Vatican II, Challenor, as well as many other Catholics of the Left, continued the radical struggle by working for the Catholic Renewal Movement.132 One of the first to leave the faith was Martin Shaw, who concluded that the language in which Slant delivered its radical goals was both

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obfuscatory and superfluous and that a humanist and socialist understanding gained little within a Christian framework. Shaw has written that a fundamental political position for him was pacifism. He was an “absolute pacifist” in 1965– 66 when he was most involved with Slant and modified this position slightly in his more Marxist stage. After 1976, Shaw moved away from International Socialism and gave up on Marxism altogether. From 1979 to 1984 he was closely involved with E. P. Thompson in European Nuclear Disarmament.133 Since 1995, Shaw has been professor of international relations and politics at the University of Sussex. He is best known for his sociological work on war, genocide, and global politics. Bernard Sharratt also left the Church and became an atheist by the early 1970s. He simply lost the capacity to believe in God when the notion no longer made any coherent sense to him. Like others, Sharratt was disillusioned with the Vatican’s authoritarian ways and disgusted with its mistreatment of the faithful, but he insisted that the main source of his disaffiliation was theological.134 He retired from being chairman of Communication and Image Studies at the University of Kent. Neil Middleton apostatized in 1968 but continued his connections with the Slant group. Although he no longer believed in the existence of God or a life hereafter, Middleton wrote that in a distant sort of way he remained attached to the Church he had once known. His politics were essentially the same as Herbert McCabe’s, who was politically on the left with the rest of the Slant writers, although in theology, claimed Middleton, he was “a bit more conservative than the rest of us.” Middleton maintained a long-standing friendship with McCabe. In conversations about his leaving Catholicism, McCabe generally ended their discussion with the remark, “I worry about your future.” This was never sententious, recalled Middleton, “but it was clear that Hell did have a place in his thinking.”135 After his departure from Sheed and Ward, Middleton went on to a distinguished publishing career with Penguin Books. A number of the Slant circle stayed the course and remained in the Roman Catholic fold, still fully committed to promoting the progressive agendas of the Left. These included, among others, Eagleton, Wicker, the Cunninghams, Redfern, Francis McDonagh, and the late Leo Pyle. Fergus Kerr went on to a distinguished career as editor of New Blackfriars,

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as Regent of Blackfriars, Oxford, as an honorary fellow of the Divinity Faculty at the University of Edinburgh, and as the author of several important books on theology. Kerr had played only a minor role while at Cambridge when Slant was launched, and afterward was not much involved with it. However, he remained an ally of its editors, wrote at least one significant article for the journal (“Christianity and the Liberal Vision,” June/July 1966), and elaborated on many of Slant’s positions in his writings in New Blackfriars.136 Today, Kerr is regarded as one of Britain’s leading Catholic theologians and has stirred considerable interest in ecumenical circles by embracing many of the tenets of what is called Radical Orthodoxy. Its positions would seem to have a certain resonance and linkage with the writings of the 1960s Catholic Left; those who subscribe to Radical Orthodoxy envision the Church as the progenitor of a true community, recognize the need to critique the ways of corporate capitalism and its perversion of politics, and commit themselves to radical socialism.137 This intellectual movement was started by a group of Anglican theologians at Cambridge who gathered around John Milbank. In 1999, Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward published an anthology entitled Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology. The three editors and seven of the twelve contributors were Anglican; the other five were Roman Catholic. Since then, a number of Catholics have expressed support for their program. Radical Orthodoxy argues against the theological duality of reason and revelation (reminiscent in some ways of Slant’s attack on Thomistic dualism). It claims a commitment to the creedal Christianity of the tradition of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas (hence its orthodoxy), whereas its radicalism is expressed by employing the Augustinian vision of all knowledge as divine illumination to systematically critique every aspect of modern society. Radical Orthodoxy’s goal, according to Milbank, is “to articulate a more incarnate, more participatory, more aesthetic, more erotic, more socialized, even ‘Platonic’ Christianity.”138 A central complaint of Radical Orthodoxy is the disruption between philosophy and theology resulting from the Renaissance and Enlightenment intellectual revolutions (a prime villain here is John Duns Scotus), which posited the notion of an ontology and epistemology

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unconstrained by theology. Milbank asserts that once philosophy became independent of theology, theology fragmented and lost its concern with reality. In the writings of the Church Fathers, on the other hand, both faith and reason were included in the more generic framework of participation in the mind of God. Radical Orthodoxy seeks to destroy the duality of faith versus reason so as to strengthen theology’s engagement with modernity.139 In doing so, Radical Orthodoxy takes up, in its view, the mission of the theology that motivated the reforms of Vatican Council II.140 Fergus Kerr finds Radical Orthodoxy’s return to the patristic tradition deeply attractive and supportive of his own conviction that the radical split in late medieval thought between philosophy and theology “was a complete disaster.”141 However, Radical Orthodoxy for him is not in the Marxist tradition but rather very much in the Distributist anticapitalist camp.142 Alison Milbank, Kerr recalled, spoke respectfully of Hilaire Belloc and his ideas.143 John Milbank has made it clear that Radical Orthodoxy’s notion of socialism has roots in Christian Socialism and not Marxism. The problem with Christian Marxism, he has argued, is that it lacks a moral critique based on traditional (pre-Enlightenment) Christian values. Unlike Marxists, the Christian Socialists never saw capitalism as the next dialectical stage in the progress of humanity. Instead, they criticized capitalism as “pseudo-progress,” a naive notion of reality that leads to false consciousness. The Christian Socialists condemned capitalism on the grounds of injustice, not, like Marxism, because it limited social and economic freedoms. In doing so, Christian Socialists appealed to the fragmentary justice of the past and sought to show how present secular injustice was the product of past social and ecclesiastical error. Milbank identifies a different source for the critique of capitalism in Marxist-based liberation theology, and here is where Radical Orthodoxy separates itself from the Slant writers of the 1960s. Milbank draws on the arguments of the American Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas, who raised questions about the revolutionary ideas of Gustavo Gutiérrez and Juan Luis Segundo. Both of the latter supported revolution on the basis of Enlightenment notions of freedom. Hauerwas points out the limits of liberation as a central theme for Christian ethics, because it

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lacks a strong grounding in fellowship and social justice. “Liberation” for Gutiérrez, argues Hauerwas, is too abstract, since the “stuff ” of liberation involves taking power from some and giving it to others: “Unless we have some sense of how that is done justly, calls for liberation can too easily result in false consciousness.” In short, liberation is inadequate as a single strategy, since it ignores equality and power as crucial categories of social justice.144 As St. Paul has shown in Galatians 5:13–15, freedom is not an end in itself but the means for us to serve each other more effectively. Milbank’s objection is that liberation theology associates Marxism with a Christian acceptance of an Enlightenment concept of freedom and thereby makes a positive, uncritical assessment of secular modernization. In this dynamic it is a “baptised” Marxism rather than a traditional Christian Socialism that provides the specific critique of capitalism. In the process, the critique switches from the denial of justice in capitalism to its inhibition of human freedom. Christian Marxism is also “unhistorical,” since it subordinates salvation to liberation and defines humanity in narrow terms of economic needs. The final result is a displacement of ethics for dialectics.145 Thus, the most recent iteration of Christian revolutionary thinking in the form of Radical Orthodoxy finds its inspiration in more traditional Christian, Distributist-based radicalism, rather than in the Christian Marxism that defined an important segment of the Slant project. A major source of Marxist influence that gave shape to the Slant circle and the English Catholic New Left came from the ideas and activities of Laurence Bright. His untimely death in March 1979 at the age of fiftyseven, after a long battle with cancer, marked the formal end of this radical era in English Catholic circles. Despite the criticisms that many of the survivors have made about the inadequacies of their project, it remains clear that without Father Laurence, there would have been very little history to tell of the English Catholic Left.146 Was it all worth the struggle? In some ways, Terry Eagleton has answered the question most fully. Slant, he reflected, produced some deeply impressive and original thinking of high caliber. It was “bold, imaginative and path-breaking.”147 Even a cursory and disinterested reading of Slant today attests to the acuity of Eagleton’s claims. As Brian Wicker put it,

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Slant made the reader who could understand it think more deeply, its writers displayed impressive learning, it was highly theoretical, and it was unquestionably clever.148 But as Eagleton surmised, Slant was disabled by its political time and place. In this sense the project of the English Catholic New Left was avant-garde, but it was also too far advanced for its time and therefore both underappreciated and misunderstood. As the editors proudly proclaimed in one of their own advertisements, Slant was writing about black power and birth control, secular theology and student protest, Third World revolution, the insidious quasi-totalitarian power of international corporations, and the cross-fertilization of Christianity and Marxism as a means for creating a community of humanist socialism long before these matters became front-page news or feature articles anywhere else. John Challenor claimed that the strong conservatism of the British and Irish Roman Catholic Churches meant that Slant and the Catholic New Left, despite their perspicacious perspectives, would always be “marginal, ineffectual, maybe utopian or quixotic—honourable and exciting, but a lost cause before it started.” After all, if the English Catholic Church could not follow through on its own Vatican Council, how would it ever embrace socialism and revolution? And yet, Challenor concluded, perhaps this was a bit too pessimistic: maybe the Catholic New Left was merely a decade too early.149 In fact, it now seems that Challenor was wrong in his timing by over two decades. It took nearly half a century for the leadership of the Catholic world to catch up with some of the core arguments put forth by the English Catholic New Left. Rather than appeal any longer to reform in the liberal tradition, Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth) proposed a rethinking and radical transformation of the prevailing global capitalist system. The Vatican, it appears, at long last has recognized the human destruction wrought by the dynamics of unfettered free-market economics, a long-established and central theme of the English Catholic Left. The encyclical Caritas in Veritate recognizes that progress of a merely economic and technological kind is no longer sufficient. Economic development needs to be managed in such a way that satisfies the integral needs of the full community, and it must be directed in such a way as to

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give poorer nations an effective voice in shared decision making. The Vatican has now realized that the capitalist system has failed to satisfy such imperatives. The conviction that the economy must be “autonomous” and shielded from “influences” of a moral character has led to exploitation of the poor and the trampling of personal and social freedoms. In a clearly articulated condemnation of laissez-faire capitalism that could well have been penned by the editors of Slant, the pope has stated: “If the market is governed solely by the principle of the equivalence in value of exchanged goods, it cannot produce the social cohesion that it requires to function well. Without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfill its proper economic function.”150 Caritas in Veritate is not well received by conservative Catholics for whom the Church is a citadel against socialism and the stolid upholder of the sanctity of private property, which has undergirded traditional capitalist economic thinking.151 Benedict’s encyclical shows special concern for the poor, especially those in the developing world who have suffered from the ravages of imperialism. In addition to calling attention to capitalism’s spoliation of the world economy, the pope also points out the connection between the logic of profit and the degradation of the environment. The Church from this point onward proclaims that it will measure economic policy not in terms of material gain (that is, capitalism) but in terms of how it enhances human dignity and promotes community. In addition, this encyclical echoes the insights of Walter Stein and those Left Catholics engaged with PAX and the CND who were summarily denounced by the English episcopate for extremism. Benedict calls our attention to the fact that “less than half of the immense sums spent worldwide on armaments would be more than sufficient to liberate the immense masses of the poor from destitution. This challenges humanity’s conscience.”152 Despite what at the time appeared to be the improbable goal of transforming the Church to serve as the universal vehicle for realizing a humanistic socialism, Eagleton, with farreaching insight, had good reason to conclude that “what Slant said, in my view, remains just as true as it ever was.”153

N O T E S

Introduction 1. Virgil Michel, O. S. P., and Hans Anscar Reinhold, writing in the journal Orate Fratres and later Worship, were America’s most influential proponents of liturgical renewal. Reinhold, for example, was described as a “planter of ideas,” whose liturgical work helped to fertilize the soil from which sprang the reforms of Vatican Council II (John S. Kennedy, “Variations in Accomplishments,” Hartford Transcript, 26 January 1968). 2. Virgil Michel quoting Christopher Dawson, “The Liturgy: The Basis of Social Regeneration,” an address given at the thirty-seventh annual convention of the Minnesota branch of the Central-Verein, Mankato, MN, 22– 24 September 1935, as reprinted in Oratre Fratres, 2 November 1935, p. 545. 3. Terry Eagleton, The Body as Language: Outline of a “New Left” Theology (London, 1970), pp. 96– 97. 4. Fergus Kerr, O. P., Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians (Oxford, 2007), p. 203.

ONE

The Church in England

1. The recusants were Catholics whose lines could be traced back to preReformation times and who were penalized for refusing to accept Anglican services. The term “ultramontane” refers to a national Roman Catholic Church’s close conformity to papal authority. In the words of Gabriel Daly, “Ultramontanism is, in short, the predominant form taken by fundamentalism in a Catholic context, and it trivialises theology by reducing all issues to questions of authority and obedience.” Quoted in Michael P. Hornsby-Smith, Roman Catholics in England: Studies in Social Structure since the Second World War (Cambridge, 1987), p. 22. 2. Anthony Archer, O. P., “The Church and Social Class,” in John Cumming and Paul Burns, eds., The Church Now: An Inquiry into the Present State of the Catholic Church in Britain and Ireland (London, 1980), p. 152. 3. David Lodge, How Far Can You Go? (London, 1980), p. 6.

388

Notes to Pages 10 –15

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4. Catholic Herald, 23 July 1943. 5. Peter Hebblethwaite, “What About the Workers? A Note on Anthony Archer’s Book,” Peter Hebblethwaite Papers, Box 4 Articles, PH 7 KC 65, Burns Library, Boston College. 6. Terry Eagleton, “Memories of a Catholic Childhood,” The Tablet, 7 August 1976, p. 765. 7. David Lodge, “The Church and Cultural Life,” in Cumming and Burns, The Church Now, p. 183. 8. Catholic Herald, 6 November 1942. 9. George Scott, The R.C.s: A Report on Roman Catholics in Britain Today (London, 1967), p. 86. 10. David Lodge, “Memories of a Catholic Childhood,” The Tablet, 25 September 1976, p. 932. 11. Desmond Fisher, The Church in Transition (London, 1967), p. 28. 12. Terry Eagleton, The Gatekeeper: A Memoir (New York, 2001), p. 51. 13. John C. Heenan, Cardinal Hinsley (London, 1944), pp. 25– 27. 14. Much of the ultramontane orientation of the English Catholic clergy was forged in the nineteenth century. The genesis of this bonding is discussed in a book by J. Derek Holmes, whose very title sums up the consequences of the Vatican ties: More Roman than Rome: English Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1978). 15. See Adam Schwartz, The Third Spring: G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson and David Jones (Washington, DC, 2005). 16. This issue is raised by Mary P. Carthy in Catholicism in English-Speaking Lands (New York, 1964), p. 110. 17. John Lynch, “England,” in Adrian Hastings, ed., The Church and the Nations (London, 1959), p. 9. 18. David Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads, and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism (Ithaca, NY, 1971), p. 145. 19. Brian Wicker, The Tablet, 24 February 1979. 20. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York, 1970), p. 36. 21. George Andrew Beck, “To-Day and To-Morrow,” in George Andrew Beck, ed., The English Catholics, 1850–1950 (London, 1950), p. 604. 22. Arnold Lunn to Douglas Woodruff, n.d., “Confidential,” Box 5, Folder 10, Douglas Woodruff Papers, Special Collections, Georgetown University Library. 23. Letter to Tom Burns from Bernard Wall, 20 December 1971. Wall sent Cardinal Heenan, archbishop of Westminster, a copy of this letter. The cardinal thanked him and wrote that it “would be hard to imagine any greater contrast between Douglas Woodruff ’s and Tom Burn’s Tablet.” Heenan to Wall, 22 December 1971, Bernard and Barbara Wall Papers, Box 1, Folder 15, Special Collections, Georgetown University Library.

390 Notes to Pages 15 – 23 24. This was the assessment of A. M. Sullivan, a special correspondent for the Irish Nation who visited the industrial centers in northern England in 1856. See Denis Gwynn, “The Irish Immigration,” in Beck, The English Catholics, p. 267. 25. See M. Freedman, A Minority in Britain (London, 1967), and Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (New York, 1955). 26. John Hickey, Urban Catholics: Urban Catholicism in England and Wales from 1829 to the Present Day (London, 1967), p. 169. 27. Holmes, More Roman than Rome, p. 251. 28. See D. Read, “Chartism in Manchester,” in Asa Briggs, ed., Chartist Studies (London, 1959). 29. For a fuller discussion see Hickey, Urban Catholics, pp. 135– 45. 30. Rev. Philip Hughes, “The Coming Century,” in Beck, The English Catholics, p. 27. 31. J. G. Snead-Cox, The Life of Cardinal Vaughan (London, 1910), vol. 1, p. 2. 32. Quoted from E. R. Norman, The English Catholic Church in the 19th Century (Oxford, 1964), p. 352. 33. F. Rogers, Labour, Life and Literature: Some Memories of Sixty Years (London, 1913), p. 246. 34. Carthy, Catholicism in English-Speaking Lands, p. 108. 35. Ibid., p. 109. 36. Scott, The R.C.s, p. 38. 37. H. O. Evennett, The Catholic Schools of England and Wales (London, 1944), pp. 124– 25. Quoted in Beck, The English Catholics, p. 596.

TWO The Sources of English Catholic Radicalism 1. The Guild Socialists was a revolutionary movement championed by A. R. Orage’s journal The New Age (see below in this chapter), which did not include the Catholic Social Guild. 2. All this was the result, claimed Toke, of “a quaint instance of unfamiliarity with ordinary social terminology.” See Leslie Toke, Some Methods of Social Study (London, 1908), p. 2. 3. Ibid., p. 4. 4. Georgiana Putnam McEntee, The Social Catholic Movement in Great Britain (New York, 1927), p. 189. 5. Henry Browne, S. J., The Catholic Evidence Movement (London, 1921), p. 60. 6. Peter d’A. Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival, 1877–1914 (Princeton, 1968), p. 12. 7. See Barbara P. Petri, The Historical Thought of P.-J.-B. Buchez (Washington, DC, 1958).

Notes to Pages 23– 32

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8. K. S. Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London, 1963), p. 21. 9. See Conrad Noel, Autobiography (London, 1945), p. 57. 10. Maurice Evans, G.K. Chesterton (Cambridge, 1939), p. 49. 11. Church Socialist 1, no. 2 (February 1912): 4. See also Conrad Noel, Socialism in Church History (London, 1910), p. 272. 12. See Noel, Autobiography, pp. 28– 29. 13. See P. E. T. Widdrington, “The History of the Church Socialist League II,” Commonwealth, no. 7, July 1927. 14. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London, 1908), p. 45. 15. Leo Hetztler, “Chesterton’s Political Views, 1892–1914,” The Chesterton Review 8, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 122– 23. 16. From Sidney Webb, A Stratified Society, p. 5, quoted in Anthony W. Wright, “Fabianism and Guild Socialism: Two Views of Democracy,” International Review of Social History 23 (1978), part 2, p. 230. 17. From Wells, New Worlds for Old, p. 261, as quoted in Alex Zwerdling, Orwell and the Left (New Haven, CT, 1974), p. 35. 18. See Hilaire Belloc’s An Essay on the Restoration of Property (London, 1936) and The Place of Peasantry in Modern Civilization (Manchester, UK, 1910). 19. “Talking of bad sherry, you know where the Devil would go if he lost his tail? He would go to the bar of the House of Commons, where bad spirits are re-tailed.” Belloc to Oriana Haynes, 20 May 1931, Personal Letters, Hilaire Belloc Papers, Burns Library, Boston College. 20. Cecil Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, The Party System (London, 1911), pp. 33– 34. 21. See, for example, the Daily Mail, May 1912; Sir Arthur Clay, Syndicalism and Labour (London, 1912); and Margaret Cole, “Labour Research,” in Margaret Cole, ed., The Webbs and Their Work (New York, 1974). 22. G. R. S. T., “Reflections,” Daily Herald, 29 June 1912. 23. Leonard Hall, “The Servile State,” Daily Herald, 8 November 1912. 24. “Two Strikes: 1889–1911,” Eye-Witness, 17 August 1911. 25. For example, see “The Present Industrial Dispute,” sent to the Manchester Daily Dispatch, 15 September 1910, MSS Box 9, Hilaire Belloc Papers, Burns Library, Boston College. The editor in this case had asked Belloc’s opinion on the London Boilermakers’ Lockout. 26. See Hilaire Belloc, “The Unrest of the Year,” Manchester Daily Dispatch, sent on 17 October 1910, MSS Box 9, Hilaire Belloc Papers, Burns Library, Boston College. 27. Hilaire Belloc, “The English Railway Strike,” sent to the periodical Movement Social de Novembre, n.d., MSS Box 9, Hilaire Belloc Papers, Burns Library, Boston College.

392 Notes to Pages 33– 43 28. The demands for working-class management and ownership of the means of production, as well as the issue of minimum wages, were some of the reasons why the Catholic Social Guild under the leadership of Henry Somerville refused to support the programs of Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, and the Distributists. The CSG considered them too radical. 29. This represents only one of several radical economic and political positions shared by the Catholic New Left with the Distributist movement. The issue of a living wage was a significant marker that begins to separate Catholic reformers from radicals. 30. Hilaire Belloc, “On the Minimum Wage and the Servile State,” sent to the Catholic Times, 27 December 1913, MSS Box 7, Hilaire Belloc Papers, Burns Library, Boston College. 31. “The Strike and the Vote,” Eye-Witness, 27 June 1912. 32. Dudley Barker, G.K. Chesterton (London, 1973), p. 26. 33. See Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England, p. 26. 34. G. K. Chesterton, “Straws in the Wind: Wages and Profits,” G. K.’s Weekly, 24 April 1926. 35. See B. D. Acland, “Distributism in Industry,” G.K.’s Weekly, 27 February 1926. 36. “The Great Lockout,” G.K.’s Weekly, 8 May 1926. 37. The Tablet, 15 March 1926, p. 639. 38. Ibid., pp. 638– 39. 39. “The League against the Poor,” G.K.’s Weekly, 15 May 1926. 40. G. K. Chesterton, “The Respectable Radicals,” G. K.’s Weekly, 22 February 1930. 41. As cited in “Notes of the Month,” Commonwealth, September 1928. 42. G. K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity (New York, 1927), p. 246.

THREE

English Catholics and the Establishment

1. David Mathew, Catholicism in England: The Portrait of a Minority: Its Culture and Tradition, 3rd ed. (London, 1955), p. 270. 2. It is interesting to note that in an earlier edition of his study, Mathew had pointed out that politics played an insignificant part in the Catholic community, except among Distributists. See David Mathew, Catholicism in England: The Portrait of a Minority: Its Culture and Tradition (London, 1936), p. 261. 3. Douglas Jerrold’s journalism was highly polemical; it shows a support of fascism and is considered notoriously unreliable by historians. As late as 1938, for example, Jerrold claimed in his book The Future of Freedom that there was no persecution of religion in Hitler’s Germany, an assertion that Pope Pius XI himself contradicted in the 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. In the view of

Notes to Pages 43– 45

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Allen Guttmann, Jerrold’s articles on Spain were some of “the least accurate accounts of the war” (The Wound in the Heart [New York, 1962], p. 23). Jerrold was a key figure in the creation of the myth concerning Guernica, which, contrary to the distortions of pro-Insurgent propaganda, was in fact destroyed by German air bombardment. Herbert Rutledge Southworth, who wrote the definitive study on the subject (Guernica! Guernica! A Study of Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda, and History [Berkeley, CA, 1977]), concludes that Jerrold’s tendentious but highly influential work on the Spanish Civil War was not only unreliable but also the product of deliberate lies. 4. See Adrian Hastings, “Some Reflections on the English Catholicism of the Late 1930s,” in Adrian Hastings, ed., Bishops and Writers: Aspects of the Evolution of Modern English Catholicism (Cambridge, 1977), p. 119. 5. For a discussion of British fascist efforts to entice Catholics into their fold, see Thomas Moloney, Westminster, Whitehall and the Vatican: The Role of Cardinal Hinsley, 1935– 43 (Tunbridge Wells, Kent, 1985), pp. 55– 60. 6. Hinsley to Franco, 28 March 1939, Archives of the Archbishop of Westminster, Hi 2/217, as cited in Moloney, Westminster, Whitehall and the Vatican, p. 71. 7. Tom Buchanan, “Great Britain,” in Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway, eds., Political Catholicism in Europe, 1918–1965 (Oxford, 1966), p. 269. 8. See J. M. Cameron, The Night Battle: Essays (Baltimore, 1962), pp. 5– 7. 9. For more on this, see Hastings, “Some Reflections on the English Catholicism of the Late 1930s.” 10. The Dominicans who wrote for New Blackfriars and other journals were not under the jurisdiction of the English hierarchy. This meant that they were largely beyond the reach of reactionary disciplining. Secular clergy, on the other hand, were indeed subject to English prelates and therefore courted risks if they showed sympathy for progressive social causes not approved by the hierarchy. Those who were involved with the radical journal Slant or chose to express their views elsewhere were subject to disciplining and consequently often wrote under pseudonyms. “G. Egner,” for example, was not the real name of this person, who was a contributor to Slant as well as to New Blackfriars. The use of pseudonyms was indicative of the pressures that could be brought to bear on seculars whose views diverged from a distinctly unsympathetic hierarchy. Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 30 August 2011, English Catholic New Left– Jay Corrin Correspondence, Library, Boston College. Hereafter this collection of correspondence in the Burns Library of Boston College is referred to as JCC-BC. 11. G. Egner, “Look Back in Ambiguity,” New Blackfriars, March 1972, p. 106. Catholics who were associated with the Left in the 1960s had a deep resentment of Cardinal Heenan’s policies and saw him as a shill for the political establishment. 12. The Editors, Herder Correspondence, vol. 3, no. 1, January 1966.

394 Notes to Pages 45 – 57 13. Bernard Sharratt, “English Roman Catholicism in the 1960s,” in Adrian Hastings, ed., Bishops and Writers: Aspects of the Evolution of Modern English Catholicism (Cambridge, 1977), p. 133. 14. See ibid., p. 134. 15. See the London Sunday Telegraph, 6 February 1966. 16. See John Murray Todd, “Making the Council Work in England,” Herder Correspondence, vol. 3, no. 11, November 1966. 17. Ben Sies, London correspondent of De Nieuwe Linie, as cited in Louis McRedmond, “A Doubtful Future for the British Catholic Press,” Herder Correspondence, vol. 3, no. 5, May 1966, p. 133. 18. Ibid. 19. See James R. Lothian, The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910–1950 (Notre Dame, IN, 2009). 20. See Keith Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society: The Experience of the British System Since 1911 (London, 1979). 21. Scott, The R.C.s, p. 72. 22. Ibid., p. 74. 23. Ibid., pp. 72– 75. 24. Ibid., p. 87. 25. Ibid., p. 88. 26. Ibid., p. 95. 27. See Hughes, “The Coming Century,” in Beck, The English Catholics, pp. 39 – 40. 28. Communism: A Catholic Worker Special (Manchester, UK, 1950), p. 9. 29. See Peter Coman, Catholics and the Welfare State (London, 1977), p. 45. 30. Catholic Times, 7 March 1943. 31. Coman, Catholics and the Welfare State, p. 70. 32. Ibid., p. 79. 33. Catholics made frequent requests for increased government funding for the construction of their new voluntary schools. The debt for funding these was estimated by 1968 to be at some 50 million pounds (Bernard Tucker, ed., Catholic Education in a Secular Society [London, 1968], p. 22). 34. Coman cites the demise of the Catholic Social Guild and its journal The Christian Democrat as a symptom of the fecklessness of Catholic social teaching. The CSG was the premier organ for the expression of such teaching in Britain. But unlike the Fabian Society, which had links to the parliamentary Labour Party, the CSG failed to develop a relationship with a comparable political vehicle and thereby lacked the means by which to transfer its theory into action. See Coman, Catholics and the Welfare State, p. 92. 35. George Andrew Beck, “To-Day and To-Morrow,” in Beck, The English Catholics, pp. 603– 4. 36. Bernard Bergonzi, “The English Catholics,” Encounter, January 1965, p. 24.

Notes to Pages 58 – 65

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37. Terry Eagleton, “Memories of a Catholic Childhood,” The Tablet, 7 August 1976, p. 765. 38. Bergonzi, “The English Catholics,” p. 19. 39. See Donald Attwater, “English Catholic Fascists?” Commonweal, 10 January 1941, pp. 296– 302. 40. De la Bedoyere had been able to transform the Catholic Herald in both content and readability from a rather dull, pedestrian paper into a lively and radical intellectual enterprise. Under his direction the paper’s circulation rose to nearly six figures. Yet in the process his forceful language and liberal ideas— it was said that De la Bedoyere was “ecumenical long before his time”— angered the more traditionally-minded clergy. He claimed that he was dropped from the Catholic Herald through curious circumstances, for reasons that he never understood (“Dear Subscriber,” Search, October 1965). It seems that the Catholic Herald under his leadership caused numerous problems both for the British government during World War II as well as for Cardinal Hinsley of Westminster. De la Bedoyere was frequently seen to be out of line with the British Catholic community, and his dismissal as editor may well have been due to his free-wheeling, independent journalism. For more on these issues, see Moloney, Westminster, Whitehall and the Vatican, pp. 171– 77, 220– 22. Adrian Hastings claimed that de la Bedoyere was forced out because he was too progressive. See Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920– 2000 (London, 2001), p. 697, n7. 41. “Dear Subscriber,” Search, May 1967. 42. Bergonzi, “The English Catholics,” p. 24. FOUR Reinforcing the Citadel 1. Letter from Teilhard de Chardin to Valensin, 20 October 1932, as quoted in Robert Speaight, Teilhard de Chardin: A Biography (London, 1967), p. 190. 2. For example, see Jay P. Corrin, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Notre Dame, IN, 2002). 3. In the vocabulary of the Church, “integralism” developed as a term to represent a mind-set that stood in opposition to all aspects of “modernism.” 4. Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven, CT, 1997), p. 250. The young Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, wrote in Milestones: Memoirs, 1927–1977, that he was required to rewrite his postdoctoral thesis on Bonaventure’s theology of history and revelation because of its modernist tendencies (cited in Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, p. 185). 5. See Xavier Rynne, Vatican Council II (New York, 1968), p. 14. 6. Mark Schoof, A Survey of Catholic Theology, 1800–1970 (New York, 1970), p. 68. 7. Quoted from Michael Muller, The Catholic Doctrine (New York, 1888), p. 282.

396 Notes to Pages 65 –70 8. Duffy, Saints and Sinners, p. 249. 9. Liberalism is a slippery term with many different meanings. In the words of one well-known contemporary Catholic writer, liberalism is “confused, vague, contradictory” (see Peter Steinfels, “The Failed Encounter: The Catholic Church and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century,” in R. Bruce Douglas and David Hollenbach, eds., Catholicism and Liberalism: Contributions to American Political Philosophy [New York, 1994], p. 23). The varying guises of liberalism were recognized by American Catholic intellectuals. For example, the historian Carleton Hayes in his book A Generation of Materialism drew a sharp distinction between what he called “ecumenical” or “general” liberalism and “sectarian” liberalism. “Ecumenical” liberalism meant to embrace all classes and people; it opposed despotism and promoted participatory government and individual freedoms from the Reformation through the revolutions of the modern era. Hayes argued that after the 1870s the creed was hijacked by antireligious ideologues who used the rational scientific foundations of liberalism to attack ecclesiastical authority for their own exclusive class and nationalist agendas. In Hayes’s view, American Catholicism rejected this “sectarian” liberalism for the “ecumenical” variety that had given shape to the American political experience. See A Generation of Materialism, 1871–1900 (New York, 1941), pp. 46– 50. 10. Pope Leo XIII had warned against what was termed “Americanism” in the 1899 letter Testem Benevolentiae. The pope considered American democracy too closely allied with liberalism, although in reality the Jacobean variety had never found fertile soil in the United States. However, the American liberal emphasis on individuality was seen to be in conflict with the Vatican’s notion of the “organic” society, which highlighted communal rights over individualist claims. 11. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner, S. J., www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum20htm. 12. Duffy, Saints and Sinners, p. 263. 13. This is the view expressed in Rynne, Vatican Council II, p. 18. 14. J. Derek Holmes, The Papacy in the Modern World, 1914–1978 (New York, 1981), p. 196. 15. Paul I. Murphy (with R. René Arlington), La Popessa (New York, 1983), p. 248. 16. Humani Generis, no. 20, www.vatican.va. 17. For a good discussion of Guardini’s and Adam’s contributions to what was called “reform Catholicism” as a means of breaking through the limitations of neoscholasticism, see Robert A. Krieg, ed., Romano Guardini: Proclaiming the Sacred in a Modern World (Chicago, 1989), and his Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany (New York, 2004). 18. Tübingen had a tradition of free and independent thinking. It provided succor and shelter to such free-thinking liberal theologians as Hans Küng. It was here, for example, that Küng was able to breathe in theological freedom as he la-

Notes to Pages 71–77

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bored to breach the walls of the Roman Curia’s conservatism. See his My Struggle for Freedom: Memoirs, trans. John Bowden (Cambridge, 2003). 19. Quotations from William McSweeney, Roman Catholicism: The Search for Relevance (Oxford, 1980), p. 110. 20. The word liturgia in Greek means “the work of the people.” The early liturgists followed a multitude of different forms of worship and used a variety of different languages. However, the central consideration in the liturgy of the early Church was collegiality, the notion that the Christian community consisted of the whole people of God—clergy and lay-folk alike. 21. Quoted in R.W. Franklin and Robert L. Spaeth, eds., Virgil Michel: American Catholic (Collegeville, MN, 1988), p. 15. 22. See Holmes, The Papacy in the Modern World, p. 190. 23. Schoof, A Survey of Catholic Theology, p. 99. 24. Ibid., p. 110. 25. See Gregory Baum, The Credibility of the Church Today: A Reply to Charles Davis (New York, 1968), pp. 13–15. 26. Although The Human Phenomenon is not easily accessible for a lay audience, it became a best seller, almost a half-million copies having sold by the end of the 1950s. Teilhard’s popularity among progressive thinkers seems to be gaining ground. Not only does he have a society and academic journal dedicated to his person and ideas, but devotees also consider him one of the most prescient intellectuals of the century. Brian Swimme of the California Institute of Integral Studies, writing the foreword to Sarah Appleton-Weber’s highly acclaimed new translation of The Human Phenomenon, noted that the eminent philosopher Thomas Berry of the Riverdale Research Center said he fully expected that “in the next millennium Teilhard will be generally regarded as the fourth major thinker of the Western Christian tradition. These would be St. Paul, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Teilhard” (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, trans. Sarah Appleton-Weber [Brighton, UK, 1999], p. xiv). 27. Introduction to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Letters From a Traveller (New York, 1962), p. 14. 28. Ibid., p. 41. 29. Letter to Breuil, 27 May 1923, as cited in Charles R. Raven, Teilhard de Chardin: Scientist and Seer (New York, 1962), p. 170. 30. Quoted from a 1934 essay by Norbert Max Wildiers in An Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin (New York, 1968), p. 13. 31. Le Coeur de la Matière, p. 22, quoted in Wildiers, An Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin, p. 22. 32. See Teilhard’s letter to Lucile Swan, 10 October 1949, in Thomas M. King, S. J., and Mary Wood Gilbert, eds., The Letters of Teilhard de Chardin and Lucile Swan (Scranton, PA, 2001), pp. 251– 52. 33. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of the Matter (New York, 1978), pp. 25– 28, as excerpted in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Writings, selected with an

398 Notes to Pages 78 – 85 introduction by Ursula King (Maryknoll, NY, 1999). This is a position that is currently asserted by those associated with what is called “Radical Orthodoxy.” For more, see Laurence Paul Hemming, Radical Orthodoxy? A Catholic Enquiry (Aldershot, UK, 2000). It is a theological approach given support by one of the participants in the Catholic New Left of the 1960s, namely, Fergus Kerr, O. P., currently editor of the New Blackfriars. 34. Teilhard’s insistence on the Christian imperative of creating community seemed to be reflected in the writings of the English Catholic New Left. Teilhard’s ideas had a considerable influence on the emergence of a radical Catholicism in the 1960s and especially on what was called the Christian-Marxist dialogue. Yet many of the English Catholic Left found his writings obfuscatory and fanciful. 35. Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, p. 211. 36. Evolution was not even mentioned in papal pronouncements until the publication of Pius XII’s Humani Generis in 1950, ninety years after the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species. 37. Speaight, Teilhard de Chardin, p. 102. 38. Teilhard had discovered Bergson while in exile in Hastings, East Sussex, England (where Jesuit exiles from France had established themselves). Bergson’s Creative Evolution spurred Teilhard to study more closely the theory of evolution. Here he found a scientific justification for the unity that he believed humans shared with the natural world and saw the need to dedicate his life to the pursuit of two distinct yet parallel tracks: science and religion (see Amir D. Aczel, The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man [New York, 2007], pp. 74– 75). 39. Letter to Lucile Swan, 5 September 1949, in King and Gilbert, Letters of Teilhard and Swan, p. 250. 40. Letter to his cousin Marguerite Teilhard-Chambon, as cited in Aczel, The Jesuit and the Skull, p. 78. 41. Teilhard de Chardin, Letters from a Traveller, p. 36. 42. See letter to Lucile Swan, 4 February 1949, in King and Gilbert, Letters of Teilhard and Swan, p. 243. 43. Speaight, Teilhard de Chardin, p. 140. 44. McSweeney, Roman Catholicism, p. 106. 45. Letter to Lucile Swan, 5 April 1937, in King and Gilbert, Letters of Teilhard and Swan, pp. 77– 78. 46. Humani Generis, no. 31, www.vatican.va. 47. Speaight, Teilhard de Chardin, p. 299. 48. Gregor Siefer, The Church and Industrial Society (London, 1964), p. 136. 49. In the view of Siefer, ibid., p. 71. 50. Quoted in Roger Charles, S. J., “The Worker Priests and the Catholic Conscience,” The Month, April 1965, p. 219.

Notes to Pages 86 – 90

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51. Siefer, Church and Industrial Society, p. 79. 52. The tradition of “social deaconry” is explained by Edgar Alexander, “Church and Society in Germany,” in Joseph N. Moody, ed., Church and Society (New York, 1953). 53. Siefer, Church and Industrial Society, p. 59. FIVE

The Role of John XXIII

1. Adrian Hastings, In Filial Disobedience (Essex, UK, 1978), p. 10. 2. In 1961, half of the members of the extremist anticommunist John Birch Society were Catholics, and Father Richard Ginder, a ferocious anticommunist journalist (associate editor of Our Sunday Visitor) and one-time supporter of Senator McCarthy, was a member of the association’s National Council. Also serving on this council were Father Francis E. Fenton, pastor of the Blessed Sacrament Church in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Clarence Manion, former dean of the Law School of the University of Notre Dame. The most right-wing member of the American Catholic hierarchy, Cardinal J. Francis McIntyre of Los Angeles, was also openly sympathetic to the John Birch Society and its founder Robert Welch, as was the national Catholic weekly The Wanderer. William F. Buckley, Jr., the highly influential conservative Catholic anticommunist founder and publisher of the National Review, was also a supporter of McCarthy, as were a number of other well-known national Catholic figures. These included Father Edmund A. Walsh, founder and dean of Georgetown University’s prestigious School of Foreign Service (who first suggested to the senator that communism would be a good political issue), and Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, who was perhaps McCarthy’s most loyal defender and financial supporter. For more, see Donald F. Crosby, God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950–1957 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978). 3. What many did not see at the time was that Roncalli had in fact demonstrated a deep sympathy for the cause of social deaconry. He was secretary to the bishop of Bergamo, Giacomo Radini-Tedeschi, who in the autumn of 1909 made a financial contribution to workers on strike in a local textile factory. The right-wing press was furious for what they regarded as a bishop consecrating the strike and giving his blessing to a socialist cause. Radini-Tedeschi had earned the moniker “Red Bishop,” and influential sources made appeals to Pope Pius X to disavow him. Roncalli defended his bishop in the Vita diocesana. In this case, claimed Peter Hebblethwaite, one can see an adumbration of some of the themes of liberation theology, which did not develop until after John XXIII’s death. The bishop could not remain neutral, for in the Gospels, Christ’s preference goes to the disinherited, the weak, and the oppressed, and Roncalli put his career on the line by defending him. Peter Hebblethwaite to Harold Heifetz, n.d., Hebblethwaite correspondence, Blackwell-Byron, Hebblethwaite Papers, Burns Library, Boston College.

400 Notes to Pages 90 – 97 4. Quoted in Fisher, The Church in Transition, p. 40. This can also be found in Basil Christopher Butler, The Theology of Vatican II (London, 1967), p. 6. 5. Robert Blair Kaiser, Pope, Council, and World: The Story of Vatican II (New York, 1963), p. 15. 6. Peter Hebblethwaite, John XXIII: Pope of the Century (London, 1994), p. 165. 7. Fisher, The Church in Transition, p. 42. 8. Quoted in E. E.Y. Hales, Pope John and His Revolution (London, 1966), p. 104. 9. Ibid., p. 43. 10. Duffy, Saints and Sinners, p. 271. 11. Hans Küng, The Council, Reform and Reunion (New York, 1961), p. 18. 12. Although John’s supporters were greatly disappointed when he quietly banned the worker-priest movement in the first year of his pontificate (as papal nuncio to France he had shown an appreciation of their mission), his reasons for doing so were not the result of an insensitivity to the problems of industrial life. Rather, Roncalli, much like Pius XII, thought that it was nearly impossible for the priests to carry out their sacramental duties while devoting so much time and energy to manual labor. Factory work and its surroundings, observed the new pope, exposed the worker-priest to a materialist culture that could be a serious challenge to his vow of chastity and the spiritual life. Moreover, engaging in the industrial squabbles of the workplace naturally induced the priest to take part in class struggle, which is not a permissible part of his calling. These were the reasons for the ban given to Cardinal Maurice Feltin, archbishop of Paris and president of the Worker’s Mission, as relayed from Pope John through Cardinal Guiseppe Pizzardo, secretary of the Holy Office (see Hales, Pope John, p. 114). Of course, the issue of clerical involvement in class struggle would be raised again during the papacy of John Paul II when he condemned liberation theology. 13. Hastings, In Filial Disobedience, pp. 141– 42. 14. Thomas Maier, The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings (New York, 2003), p. 317. 15. See McSweeney, Roman Catholicism, pp. 250– 55. 16. See Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds., Economy and Society, vol. 2 (Berkeley, CA, 1978). 17. McSweeney, Roman Catholicism, p. 250. 18. Ibid., p. 138. This new appreciation for language became a major interest of the English Catholic New Left in the 1960s. They were especially influenced by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. See, for example, the writings of Fergus Kerr, O. P., in New Blackfriars. 19. Pope John XXIII, Address at the Opening of Vatican Council II, 11 October 1962. http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/pope 021i.htm.

Notes to Pages 97–101

401

20. Rerum Novarum, no. 14, as cited in Etienne Gilson, ed., The Church Speaks to the Modern World: The Social Teaching of Leo XIII (Garden City, NY, 1954), p. 212. 21. Quadragesimo Anno, no. 117, www.vatican.va. It should be pointed out that Quadragesimo Anno’s repudiation of socialism and Pius XI’s admonitions against Catholics working with its various affiliated groups in 1931 had serious consequences. Since it coincided with Stalin’s declaration of war on democratic socialism, it prevented Catholics from collaborating with such political parties against fascism, hence isolating the Social Democratic Party in Germany during its resistance to the Nazis. 22. Gregory Baum, Catholics and Canadian Socialism (Toronto, 1980), p. 90. 23. Mater et Magistra, no. 54, www.vatican.va. 24. Ibid., no. 54. 25. See “Current Comment,” America, 26 August 1961. I should point out that the word “socialization” does not appear in the English translation used for reference in the present chapter of this book. The Canadian theologian Gregory Baum suggests that the term was not used in English translations of the encyclical because of the confusion of its meaning and seemingly close affiliation with socialism and nationalization. Instead, the translator expressed the tendency as “the multiplication of social relations,” beyond mere economic functions in which various interest groups were guided by higher authorities. For an elaboration, see Baum, Catholics and Canadian Socialism, pp. 90– 91. 26. The Dissidio referred to the separation between the Holy See and the Italian government brought about by the seizure of the Papal States by the Italian kingdom as part of the Risorgimento. Afterward, Pius IX instructed all Catholics to reject the Italian state. The Dissidio lasted from 1870 to 1929, when the Lateran Treaty was signed between Mussolini and Pope Pius XI. 27. In fact, the animus against liberalism was so strong among Catholic conservatives at the time that it gave birth to what was called the Black International (which saw itself in battle against the communist-inspired Red International). This highly secretive organization left behind almost no documentary evidence in public or ecclesiastical archives and consequently remained a mystery to historians until very recently. It came into existence after the capture of Rome by Italian troops from French forces in September 1870. Its purpose was to mobilize European Catholics to defend the temporal sovereignty of the papacy and to help restore the social and moral authority of the Church. The leading figures of the Black International were conservative Catholic aristocrats who were threatened by the growing power of the bourgeoisie and their ideology of liberalism. Their intention was to activate ordinary Catholics to protect the Church, safeguard the traditional social and moral order, and restore the power of Europe’s Christian monarchs. The Black International published a newspaper under Vatican supervision called La Correspondance de Genève, which served as the mouthpiece for

402 Notes to Pages 103–108 the pope on matters deemed important to the Holy See, namely, the “Roman Question” and the dangers of liberalism, nationalism, and international socialism. The so-called Geneva Committee that ran the Black International and its newspaper served as a tool for orienting the European Catholic press on Church affairs and for helping to liberate the “prisoner of the Vatican.” The full story of this remarkable episode in Church history is told in Emiel Lamberts, ed., The Black International/L’Internationale noire, 1870–1878: The Holy See and Militant Catholicism in Europe/Le Saint-Siege et le Catholicisme militant en Europe (Leuven, 2002). 28. Hebblethwaite, John XXIII, p. 183. See his chapter “The Italian Connection” for a fuller treatment. A plethora of Hebblethwaite’s journalistic writings on Pope John and the Vatican Council can be found in the Peter Hebblethwaite Papers, Burns Library, Boston College. 29. Quoted in Hebblethwaite, John XXIII, p. 185. 30. Ibid., p. 189. 31. From a letter written by Archbishop Loris Capovilla to Peter Hebblethwaite, 13 May 1983, in Hebblethwaite, John XXIII, p. 189. 32. Pacem in Terris, no. 14, www.vatican.va. 33. Quoted in Hebblethwaite, John XXIII, p. 243. 34. “Commentary,” Blackfriars, June 1963, p. 242. 35. It is important to note that despite Pope John’s warnings about the moral and physical dangers of nuclear weaponry, the English Catholic bishops from the beginning opposed the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, forbad lay men and women from joining the movement, and punished clergy who had the temerity to defy the sanction. This is only one of the reasons that left-leaning Catholics in the 1960s had virtually no respect for the English episcopate. 36. The inspirational core of Salazar’s Estado Novo came overwhelmingly from Catholic sources concerning corporative theology. However, as in Italy and Spain, the propertied classes monopolized power in the corporative system, which they ran in a paternalistic manner and often for the purpose of advancing their own interests. The dictatorship rested on sheer military power and on the legitimation given it by the Catholic Church. As opposed to Franco in Spain, who rather cynically manipulated Catholicism for his narrow political objectives, Salazar was a true believer with devout, uncompromising Christian convictions, and for this reason the Church in Portugal was given power and privileges that were absent in either Spain or Italy. The “fascistization” of Portugal, with its military marches, salutes, slogans, and rubber truncheons reminiscent of Mussolini’s Italy, largely took place after 1936 when the civil war in Spain heated up. All this was to be a sort of defensive shield for the corporatist order in case the Spanish conflict spilled over the border, but it never reached the levels of brutality seen in Spain and Italy. In May 1940 a concordat with the papacy solidified the Church’s status. Yet throughout the three decades after World War II, Portugal remained an oppressive dictatorship legitimized by the Catholic hierarchy. In 1963, Salazar

Notes to Pages 109 –112

403

wrote: “the Government only suppresses writings that criticise the President, Prime Minister and other members of the Executive, Members of the Chamber, Judiciary, officers of the Armed Forces, Heads of Civil Service, irresponsibly or insolently—i.e. without factual substantiation or the politely worded reverence due to the authorities as such.” Although 77 percent of the population were working class, no strikes were allowed, and the only trade unions were vocational (industrial) and the compulsory Corporative Syndicates. One major company was given a monopoly on almost every consumer product, and 40 percent of the state budget was spent on wars to sustain Portugal’s colonial rule in Mozambique and Guinea. (This information comes from Bernard Sharratt, “Revolutionary Intersections?,” The Newman, July 1970.) For a more complete discussion of Portugal’s variety of fascism in comparison to stronger types, see Alan Cassels, Fascism (Arlington Heights, IL, 1975). 37. Garry Wills, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (New York, 2000), p. 35. For highly critical analyses of papal policies concerning Nazism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust, see Wills, Papal Sin; John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York,1999); and James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: A History of the Church and the Jews (Boston, 2001). For a highly critical and scholarly analysis of these views, see Justus George Lawler, Popes and Politics: Reform, Resentment, and the Holocaust (New York, 2002). José M. Sanchéz in his book Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy (Washington, DC, 2002), examines the writings of both the defenders and the critics in terms of how they have used documents to construct their own theories. Sanchéz does not pretend to ignore his own subjectivity but does manage to offer a well-balanced and judicious account of these issues. 38. Kaiser, Pope, Council, and World, p. 47. 39. Quoted in Hansjakob Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 1917–1979 (Athens, OH, 1981), p. 305. 40. Khrushchev acknowledged Pope John’s important role in the Cuban missile crisis. He told Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review and confidant of the pontiff, that what the pope had done for peace would go down as one of the great events of history (ibid., p. 306). President Kennedy thanked Pope John privately for his help, but one finds little, if any, commentary in Kennedy biographies about the pontiff ’s role in the affair. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in his book A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston, 1965), which for many years was considered one of the most insightful revelations into the Kennedy administration, makes no reference to the pope’s contribution. This could have been a deliberate White House policy to avoid raising suspicions about the influence of Rome on American politics. 41. See Hebblethwaite, John XXIII, chapter entitled “Last Will and Testament,” for a fuller treatment of the Adzhubei affair. 42. The Slipyj case was helped along through the informal intervention of Norman Cousins, who brought up the problem with Khrushchev. The Soviet

404 Notes to Pages 113–119 leader did not have any current knowledge of the condition of the bishop but promised to look into the matter and not rule out his release, provided that the Vatican would not make a political case of it (Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, p. 307). 43. See America, 19 April 1961, pp. 624– 25. 44. Garry Wills, Politics and Catholic Freedom (Chicago, 1964), pp. 6– 7. 45. William F. Buckley, Jr., “The Strange Behavior of America,” National Review, 26 August 1961. 46. America, 2 December 1961. 47. The first to recognize what today we call globalization were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. One of the core insights of their 1848 Communist Manifesto was that “the bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all nations, even the most barbarian, into civilization. . . . It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. . . . It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production, it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image.” 48. See Herberg’s remarks in the foreword to Wills’s Politics and Catholic Freedom. 49. A good contemporary example of such analysis and of hopeful prognostications for the future can be found in Thomas L. Friedman’s book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (New York, 2005). Friedman is recognized as one of the most influential publicists of neoliberal ideas. 50. William F. Buckley, Jr., “Catholic Liberals, Catholic Conservatives, and the Requirements of Unity,” in Rumbles Left and Right (New York, 1964), pp. 115–16. 51. Wills, Politics and Catholic Freedom, p. 10. 52. Ibid., p. 51. 53. Soon afterwards, Wills left Buckley’s journal to write for the newly founded liberal National Catholic Reporter. What was ironic about this stint as a NCR columnist, Wills has written, was that he earned his conservative reputation (he was on the “free speech” side of things) by taking liberal stances on civil disobedience in the antiwar and civil rights movements by asserting that one should “work within the system” to effect change. This was a position he would soon regret. (See Garry Wills, Confessions of a Conservative [Garden City, NY, 1979], p. 67.) The break with Buckley and the National Review group occurred over differences concerning civil rights and the Vietnam War, the latter of which Wills opposed. He also came to regard the National Review’s anticommunism as obsessive and wrongheaded. However, Wills rejects for himself the term “liberal,” since he associates it with a belief in the laws of market capitalism and the quest for systems building. 54. Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, p. 65.

Notes to Pages 121–133

SIX

405

The Council

1. Küng, My Struggle for Freedom, p. 281. 2. A joke attributed to Cardinal Ottaviani. Peter Hebblethwaite, “An Open Letter to Neil Middleton,” New Christian, 10 February 1966. 3. Kaiser, Pope, Council, and World, p. 62. 4. Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, p. 303. 5. Kaiser, Pope, Council, and World, p. 83. 6. Lorenz Jaeger, The Ecumenical Council, the Church and Christendom (London, 1961), p. xiii. 7. Ibid., p. 86. 8. Along with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Küng remains one of the most widely read Christian theologians of the modern era, reaching an audience well beyond the Catholic community. M. J. Benton, owner of Essentially Books in Scottsdale, Arizona, testified to Küng’s ongoing popularity in January 2006 by reporting that she could not keep up with the demand for his books (see National Catholic Reporter, 6 January 2006). Küng frequently draws sold-out ecumenical audiences when lecturing in the United States. 9. Küng, My Struggle for Freedom, pp. 8– 9. 10. Küng, The Council, Reform and Reunion, p. 36. 11. Küng was given the necessary theological imprimatur for this claim by convincing the Church’s censor, the professor of dogmatics Johannes Feiner of Chur, that there was historical evidence for the development of dogma and polemics against it. See Küng, My Struggle for Freedom, p. 187. 12. Hans Küng quoting the Protestant theological Heinrich Fries from Antwort an Asmussen (Stuttgart, 1958), ch. 7, “Der Marianische Maximalismus,” pp. 127– 54, in The Council, Reform and Reunion, p. 135. 13. Küng, The Council, Reform and Reunion, p. 183. 14. Küng, My Struggle for Freedom, p. 379. 15. Ibid., p. 375. 16. Ibid., p. 266. 17. Ibid., p. 319. 18. Hebblethwaite, John XXIII, p. 194. Writing in 2007, one of England’s leading theologians, Fergus Kerr, O. P., editor of New Blackfriars, insisted that “like it or not, The Council and Reunion is the key for beginning to understand what happened at Vatican II” (Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, p. 51). 19. The Catholic University of America is the only university in the United States with pontifical faculties, of which there are some half dozen, the rest being seminaries. 20. Küng, My Struggle for Freedom, p. 302. 21. John C. Heenan, A Crown of Thorns: An Autobiography, 1951–1963 (London, 1974), p. 339.

406 Notes to Pages 133–138 22. Fisher, The Church in Transition, p. 47. 23. Heenan, A Crown of Thorns, p. 340. No doubt one of these former seminarians referred to by Heenan was Robert Blair Kaiser, a correspondent for Time magazine. His widely acclaimed book Inside the Council drew on information concerning the inside struggles from Hans Küng and several other of the new theologians, some of whom were shut out of the aula by Ottaviani. Kaiser hosted informal Saturday evening gatherings open to a variety of Vatican watchers, in which various goings-on both inside and outside the Council meetings were discussed and analyzed. Besides Küng, the regulars were a myriad of progressive theologians including the Canadian peritus Gregory Baum and the Americans George Higgins, John Courtney Murray, Gus Weigel, and Vincent Yzermans. Several bishops also made frequent appearances, including Paul Hallinan of Atlanta, Mark McGrath of Panama, and England’s Thomas Roberts, the former bishop of Delhi. 24. Heenan, A Crown of Thorns, p. 356. 25. Rynne, Vatican Council II, p. 32. 26. Christopher Hollis, The Critic, February– March 1963. 27. Adrian Hastings, ed., Modern Catholicism: Vatican II and After (London, 1991), p. 4. Roberts humorously described the Council as nothing more than “a football [soccer] match in which all the players are bishops” (Fisher, The Church in Transition, p. 56). 28. Quoted in Duffy, Saints and Sinners, p. 272. 29. In his book The Catholic Revolution: New Wine, Old Wineskins, and the Second Vatican Council (Berkeley, CA, 2004), Greeley points out that few Catholics at the time, including their bishops, realized the revolutionary nature of what was to follow. Subsequent changes so transformed the structures of the Church, sweeping away the old rules and rituals, that contemporary Catholics have not yet found the means to accept or adjust to them. 30. As Peter Hebblethwaite had noted, these were churchmen whose theology was premised on the exposition and defense of known truths rather than on an exploration of the frontiers of knowledge (John XXIII, p. 191). They also were mostly Italian and deeply skeptical of all things modern, never having gotten past the secular traumas delivered by Cavour and Garibaldi in the previous century. 31. Kaiser, Pope, Council, and World, p. 187. 32. It should be pointed out that nuns and women in general were excluded from the preliminary planning commissions and the official invitation lists. The views of nuns were not solicited in any way, and they were not even allowed to attend the various sessions as observers. It was only after the Council was half over that Cardinal Suenens made an appeal to have them included, reminding his brethren that they represented “half of humanity.” It was finally agreed that some twenty-three women would be invited to the third and fourth sessions, joining three thousand men in attendance. The rule was that the nuns could watch and listen but not speak on the floor. Even at this stage the nuns, according to Sister

Notes to Pages 138 –139

407

Carmel McEnroy’s account (Guests in Their Own House: The Women of Vatican II [New York, 1996]), were “ignored or trivialized.” Archbishop Pericle Felici, secretary of the Council, never even bothered to acknowledge their attendance or even look their way during the proceedings. During the breaks the sisters were forbidden to mingle or speak with the men and were referred to a separate table where they might find coffee. (See Kenneth A. Briggs, Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns [New York, 2006], ch. 4, “Vatican II: Unforseen Consequences.”) 33. Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–2000 (London, 2001), p. 520. The Protestant observers were regularly consulted at the Council for feedback. In return they gave frank opinions and criticisms. The influential American Protestant theologian Robert McAfee Brown, for example, felt very involved and respected, and he greatly appreciated that his opinions were given serious consideration. The Protestant guests were also pleased that the Council’s fathers referred to them as “separated brethren,” certainly a more positive image than the previous designations “schismatics” and “heretics.” The hospitality and solicitation shown the Protestant guests stood in sharp contrast to the treatment of the stalwart Catholic sisters, who were essentially given the cold shoulder. 34. It is the thesis of Rev. Ralph M. Wiltgen, S.V. D., that the northern European countries through which flows the Rhine dominated and largely gave shape to the advances made by the Second Vatican Council. See his The Rhine Flows into the Tiber: The Unknown Council (New York, 1967). Melissa J. Wilde in Vatican II: A Sociological Analysis of Religious Change (Princeton, 2007), argues that in countries where there was a good deal of religious competition (as was the case in Germany and especially at Tübingen), Church leadership tended to be more open to change. The most conservative bishops at the Council were from what she called “monopolistic countries,” namely, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland. These prelates also had closer ties to the Curia and generally opposed the New Theology. The most progressive bishops came from Latin America. In Wilde’s view this was due to the challenge of evangelicals and Marxist political parties. By the 1960s, however, the Catholic Church was in decline in Latin America. 35. Giuseppe Alberigo, “The Christian Situation after Vatican II,” in Giuseppe Alberigo, Jean-Pierre Jossua, and Joseph A. Komanchak, eds., The Reception of Vatican II (Washington, DC, 1987), p. 9. 36. Ibid., p. 11. 37. Hans Küng, The Council in Action: Theological Reflections on the Second Vatican Council (New York, 1963), p. 268. 38. Ibid., p. 266. 39. Ottaviani’s legions also mounted attacks on Küng’s writings. One of his close allies, Monsignor Joseph Fenton, dean of the School of Theology at Catholic University, denounced Küng’s The Council, Reform and Reunion in the September 1963 issue of the American Ecclesiastical Review as a “ridiculous

408 Notes to Pages 140 –141 hodge-podge” of theological nonsense. The ultraconservative magazine The Wanderer, edited by the Matt brothers of St. Paul, Minnesota, was more specific in its campaign, charging that Küng and the progressive bishops and theologians at Vatican Council II were “modernist heretics.” With the exception of such prelates as Cardinal Archbishop Richard Cushing of Boston and Cardinal Joseph Ritter of St. Louis, Küng noted that the hidden arm of the “Roman old boys” network ensured that large parts of the American episcopate remained subservient to Rome. These prelates, he claimed, were men who sought careers and titles and were willing to do anything that advanced their standing with the Vatican. Some, such as Archbishop Leo Binz of St. Paul and Archbishop Cardinal James McIntyre of Los Angeles, canceled public lectures that Küng was scheduled to deliver at their institutions. These were Ottaviani’s men, wrote Küng, reactionaries on the losing side of history, benighted Republicans, it seems, who had “mostly voted for Nixon rather than Kennedy” (Küng, My Struggle for Freedom, p. 321). Küng also came under attack for his book Structures of the Church (1962), which was subjected to formal proceedings by the Holy Office. It earned an acquittal thanks to the intervention of Cardinal Bea. (See the preface of the 1982 edition of Structures of the Church [New York, 1982] , “Twenty Years Later,” p. vii.) This book emphasized the importance of expanding the ecumenical reach of the Church and the necessity of returning to the original historical structures of governance that allowed for greater lay participation. Küng here raised the issue of the primacy of papal infallibility as one of the greatest barriers to oikoumene (a united Christian church). In the autumn of 1963 the Roman Vicariate, apparently on the orders of the Vatican censors, called for the removal from bookstore windows of any books by Küng, Xavier Rynne, the author of the authoritative Vatican Council II, and Robert B. Kaiser. It appears that the reading public needed to be shielded from the baleful views of what Ottaviani’s circle called the “sans-culottes of theology” (Küng, My Struggle for Freedom, pp. 351– 52). 40. Pope John had let it be known that he wanted Montini as his successor, because he knew that the cardinal of Milan would continue to support aggiornamento. 41. Lumen Gentium, ch. 2, “On the People of God,” no. 10, www.vatican.va. Previously the Church had been referred to as the “Mystical Body of Christ”; it was now to be called “The People of God.” The collegiality advocated by Lumen Gentium was bitterly opposed by a number of conservative Council fathers. One of its leaders was Cardinal Arcadio Larraona, a Spaniard, prefect of the Congregation of Religious, and patron of Opus Dei. Larraona warned Pope Paul that “collegiality” was an unfounded, illogical, and incoherent doctrine. If approved, it would lead to endless debates leading to crises and troubles, thereby threatening the unity and discipline of the Church and undermining the power of the Roman pontiff. Cardinal Larraona had been a Franco supporter, and his group, which included Archbishop Marcel LeFebvre,

Notes to Pages 141–144

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also opposed religious liberty. These conservatives believed that the pope should always exercise authority as he saw fit, in line with a monarchical model of governance. These concerns were set forth in a secret letter to the pope — the nota praevia—designed to heighten Paul’s fears about squandering his pontifical birthright. According to Sean O’Riordan, writing in The Furrow (September 1991), there was another dynamic at work here, largely overlooked by English-language coverage of the Council, which had its roots in the Fascist era. Larraona’s position was a product of what was called the “decisionist philosophy of society” developed in Italy by philosophers such as Giovanni Gentile, who supported Mussolini’s dictatorship. These men had been influenced by German intellectuals who favored Hitler, in particular, Heidegger and the Catholic jurist Carl Schmitt. The latter’s Decisionismo, Entscheidungs politik was a response to the social and political chaos of the Weimar Republic. Schmitt advocated a strong government of national rehabilitation where the Church would work closely with the Nazi state to preserve order. Larraona’s group recognized the necessity of an “integrist” model of papal rule, one that was inspired by the decisionist philosophy of Schmitt and others and that would allow the Church to work closely with secular authorities to preserve order. Pope Paul did not take such advice, and chapter 3 of Lumen Gentium accepted collegiality. As he confided in his quasi-diary, collegiality meant having collaborators and therefore was not contrary to the monarchical prerogative. (Peter Hebblethwaite, Folder: Notre Dame Lecture # 3, Peter Hebblethwaite Papers, Burns Library, Boston College.) 42. Gaudium Spes, no. 3, www.vatican.va. 43. Fisher, The Church in Transition, p. 137. 44. Richard McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, noted that Vatican II did away with the concept of a hierarchical Church. It was now to be a Church of the people. Yet despite the lip service given to the idea of a community of equals, McBrien lamented that the Curia still continued to hold the reins in directing Church affairs and did so at the expense of the laity. See PBS, “The Faithful Revolution,” 1997, part 4, “A World Transformed.” The Vatican uses the imprimatur of what is called the missio canonica, or canonical mission, as its tool for controlling theologians. It is the current Vatican’s view that theologians are to serve, not challenge, the magisterium. Theologians whose views are contrary to those of the Vatican can have their missio withdrawn. Küng suffered such a fate in 1979 for challenging papal infallibility in his book Infallible? An Inquiry (1971). He was interrogated by his old friend Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and thereafter had his license to teach Catholic theology revoked. Afterward, Küng, thanks to the urging of Protestant colleagues, was able to teach at the University of Tübingen not as a professor of Catholic theology but as a professor of ecumenical theology. Was Küng’s fate the product of his being a “dissident Catholic”? That was the question posed to him by Peter Hebblethwaite, who called Küng a “maverick,” a

410 Notes to Page 145 young bull that refuses to run with the herd. Küng denied the labels. The most the theologian would concede was that he was simply a member of the Church’s “loyal opposition,” a concept not yet recognized at the Vatican. (See Peter Hebblethwaite, “Hans Küng’s Last Decade,” PH 24, KC674, Articles A-L [II], Peter Hebblethwaite Papers, Burns Library, Boston College.) 45. This is what Küng told Robert Blair Kaiser. See Kaiser, National Catholic Reporter, 6 January 2006. 46. Küng’s career in the Church stands in curious contrast to that of his onetime friend Joseph Ratzinger, whom Küng had hired to teach theology at the University of Tübingen. Ratzinger had been a progressive peritus at Vatican II and, along with Küng, had opposed Cardinal Ottaviani. However, he was traumatized by the student radicalism of the 1960s, which was especially strong at Tübingen. His classes were often interrupted by contentious students. This, along with his fear of the influence of Marxism among the student left, appears to have moved Ratzinger to a more conservative position. He soon departed Tübingen for Bavaria and took up a teaching position at the university in Regensburg, where he eventually was appointed dean and then vice president. In 1977, Ratzinger was named archbishop of Munich-Freising and soon rose swiftly in the Roman hierarchy, his conservative credentials being sufficient to earn him an appointment as prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith by Pope Paul VI in 1981. As head of this important office, as noted above, Ratzinger revoked Küng’s license to teach Catholic theology. For more, see John L. Allen, Jr., Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican’s Enforcer of the Faith (New York, 2000). For more on the Küng-Ratzinger relationship, see Hans Küng, Disputed Truth: Memoirs II, trans. John Bowden (New York, 2008). 47. For more on this, see Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” in David Spring and Eileen Spring, eds., Ecology and Religion in History (San Francisco, 1974), and D. Dorr, Option for the Poor: A Hundred Years of Vatican Social Teaching (Maryknoll, NY, 1983). Members of the English Catholic New Left would also be placed in this category: they thought that the Council had not gone far enough in addressing the evils of capitalist imperialism. With the papacy of John Paul II there was even less support for liberation movements. In this context, note the Vatican’s treatment of progressive Latin American prelates such as Mexico’s Bishop Samuel Ruiz, who had supported the poor in Chiapas. In 1993, Ruiz denounced the Mexican government for ignoring the poor. Rome has long worked to remove Ruiz from his bishopric, but because of the Zapatistas’ revolt it has had to back off, since the bishop has served as a useful intermediary between the government and the rebels. Ruiz supported the Zapatistas’ goals for social and economic reforms but not their methods to reach them. 48. See “Backlash Organized,” National Catholic Reporter, 7 April 1965. Many of the reforms of Vatican II have also been opposed by the journal First Things, founded by a convert from Protestantism, the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus. For

Notes to Pages 146 –150

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more on the work of Neuhaus and his circle, see Damon Linker, The Theocons: Secular America under Siege (New York, 2006). 49. “Letter from Rome: Italian Right Wing Fights Change,” National Catholic Reporter, 3 March 1965. 50. See Father Paul Kramer, The Devil’s Final Battle (Terryville, CT, 2002), p. 52. This book represents the ultraconservative Catholic critique of Vatican II and is frequently referenced by supporters of excommunicated reactionary Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. 51. A few years after the conclusion of Vatican II, the rejectionists drew attention to the so-called Bayside Prophecies, supposedly visitations by Jesus, Mary, and the saints. These were directives from Heaven delivered to Veronica Lueken at Bayside, New York, from 1968 through 1995. Among other things, “Our Lady of the Roses” assured Ms. Lueken that Teilhard de Chardin, whose spirit pervaded Vatican Council II, was forever burning in hell for the contamination he had spread throughout the world, and that Schillebeeckx, Küng, Rahner, and the other “new theologians” were agents of Satan with a mission to wreak havoc in the Church. For more along such lines, see roses.org/prophecy/seqevnt.htm. 52. Latin Mass, Summer 2001. 53. “Rightist Sees Subversion of Encyclical,” National Catholic Reporter, 4 August 1965. 54. For more on their significance, see Corrin, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy, ch. 1, “European Catholics Confront Revolution.” SEVEN Vatican II Comes to Britain 1. Scott, The R.C.s, pp. 235– 36. 2. Quoted in Christopher Bookes, The Neophiliacs: The Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties (London, 1992), p. 141. 3. Rab Butler, The Life of the Possible: The Memoirs of Lord Butler (London, 1973), pp. 162– 63. 4. Eric Hopkins, The Rise and Decline of the English Working Classes, 1918–1990: A Social History (New York, 1991), p. 96. 5. Noel Annan, Our Age: English Intellectuals between the World Wars—A Group Portrait (New York, 1990), p. 247. Looking back on this era, the historians V. Bogdanor and Robert Skidelsky corroborated Shils’s assessment by concluding that there was an “increasingly active identification of a large and influential segment of the academic community with the forces supporting the status quo” (V. Bogdanor and Robert Skidelsky, eds., The Age of Affluence, 1951–1964 [London, 1970], p. 12). 6. The view of J. L. Arnold, “Britain: The New Reasoners,” in Leopold Labedz, ed., Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas (New York, 1962), p. 300.

412 Notes to Pages 151–158 7. Anthony Sampson, Anatomy of Britain Today (New York, 1965), p. 673. 8. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (New York, 1998), p. 34. 9. Anthony Archer, The Two Catholic Churches: A Study in Oppression (London, 1986), p. 126. 10. Cited in Kester Aspden, Fortress Church: The English Roman Catholic Bishops and Politics, 1903–1963 (Leominster, Herefordshire, UK, 2002), pp. 9–10. 11. See Coman, Catholics and the Welfare State, p. 81. 12. Aspden, Fortress Church, p. 289. 13. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920– 2000, pp. 561– 62. 14. Aspden, Fortress Church, p. 290. 15. Coman, Catholics and the Welfare State, pp. 100–101. 16. For more on this, see Clifford Longley, The Worlock Archive (London, 2000). 17. Barely a few hundred Catholics in Britain graduated each year from universities prior to World War II. As of 1967, some five thousand had left English and Welsh universities every year and perhaps a further four thousand came out of colleges of education and other institutions of higher learning (Herder Correspondence, December 1967, p. 363). 18. For more on this, see “Crisis of Priestly Vocations in England” by A. E. C.W. Spencer at the Ninth International Conference on the Sociology of Religion, Summer 1967, Montreal, Canada, republished as “Priest Shortage: An English View,” Herder Correspondence, December 1967, pp. 361– 64. 19. “Spotlight,” New Christian, 24 February 1966. 20. Douglas Woodruff, “The Day of the Periti and a Warning on Aggiornamento,” The Tablet, 27 November 1965. 21. Arnold Lunn, The Tablet, 7 August 1965. Lunn was president of the Latin Mass Society. 22. Evelyn Waugh, The Tablet, 21 August 1965. 23. Jones to Harman Grisewood, 6 July 1964, as cited in Schwartz, The Third Spring, p. 363. 24. V. Allan McClelland, “Great Britain and Ireland,” in Adrian Hastings, ed., Modern Catholicism: Vatican II and After (London, 1991), p. 367. 25. As quoted in Schwartz, The Third Spring, p. 18. 26. Scott, The R.C.’s, p. 253. 27. Malcolm Muggeridge, “Backward, Christian Soldiers,” New Statesman, 15 May 1965. 28. Schwartz, The Third Spring, p. 24. 29. Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–1985 (London, 1986), pp. 279– 80. 30. Patrick Allitt, Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Ithaca, NY, 1997), p. 164.

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31. John Eppstein, Has the Catholic Church Gone Mad? (London, 1971), p. 115. 32. Dietrich von Hildebrand, Trojan Horse in the City of God (Chicago, 1967), p. 236. 33. Robert Nowell, “The Conservative Catholic Mentality,” The Month, August 1971, p. 51. 34. See Brian Wicker, “Post-Conciliar Catholicism: England More Civilized, Less Interesting,” Commonweal, 9 March 1973. 35. For details, see “English in Public Worship: Application of the Council’s Liturgical Constitution,” Herder Correspondence, April 1965. 36. See N. Kokosalakis, “The Impact of Ecumenism and Denominationalism: A Sociological Study of Five Christian Communities in Liverpool,” Ph. D. thesis, University of Liverpool, 1969. 37. More of Paisley’s views can be found in his journal, European Institute of Protestant Studies. 38. See “Christian Morality and the Contraceptive Pill,” Herder Correspondence, July 1964. 39. The Church’s sanction against artificial methods of birth control had already created considerable personal conflict for young Catholic married couples. David Lodge’s comic novel The British Museum Is Falling Down, published three years before Humanae Vitae, captures the angst of an aspiring Catholic academic who can barely concentrate on his scholarly research due to the fear that his wife’s delayed menstruation might lead to yet another mouth to feed in a family already growing beyond his means. 40. “Freedom and Honesty in the Church,” Herder Correspondence, October 1968, p. 292. 41. Ibid. 42. Heenan, A Crown of Thorns, p. 390. 43. Peter G. McCaffery, “Catholic Radicalism and Counter-Radicalism: A Comparative Study of England and the Netherlands,” D. Phil. Thesis, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, 1979, p. 69. 44. “The Catholic Renewal Movement,” The Newman, January 1970, p. 213. 45. John M. Todd, “The Worldly Church: Political Bias, Autocracy and Legalism,” in Michael de la Bedoyere, ed., Objections to Roman Catholicism (New York, 1965), p. 52. 46. Ibid., p. 58. 47. Todd quoting Père Congar, “The Worldly Church,” p. 66. 48. Scott, The R.C.s, p. 233. 49. Ibid. 50. See Robert Nowell, “En Route for Holland,” New Christian, 30 April 1970. 51. Heenan, A Crown of Thorns, pp. 381– 82.

414 Notes to Pages 173–176 EIGHT

The Catholic New Left

1. E. P. Thompson’s response to the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, “Through the Smoke of Budapest,” The New Reasoner 3, Fall 1956. 2. A good brief introduction to the New Left and how it differed from the Old Left can be found in Rosemary Ruether’s “The New Left: Revolutionaries after the Fall of Revolution,” Soundings 52, no. 3 (Fall 1969): 245– 63. See also Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham, NC, 1997). 3. Soviet efforts to monopolize the study of Marx’s ideas proved stultifying. As Tom Bottomore noted, “in the sixty-five years of the existence of the first socialist state not a single original work of Marxist social theory has been produced there.” From Bottomore, “Sociology,” in David McLellan, ed., Marx: The First Hundred Years (London, 1983), p. 117. 4. There was some disagreement among the critics of Lenin’s and Stalin’s dictatorships regarding the notion of “class,” since in a communist state there is no private property and thus the state in the name of all the citizens theoretically owns the means of production. But Milovan Djilas in The New Class concluded that in Yugoslavia — and by extension in the Soviet Union — the party bureaucrats had become the owners of national wealth: “Ownership is nothing other than the right to profit and control. If one defines class benefits by this right, the Communist states have seen, in the final analysis, the origin of a new form of ownership or of a new ruling and exploiting class” (The New Class [New York, 1957], p. 35). 5. In 1966, Wladyslaw Gomulka expelled Kolakowski from the Polish Communist Party for having defended the 1956 uprising in Poland against oldtime Stalinist rulers. He was then dismissed from the philosophy department at the University of Warsaw. 6. Quoted by Peter Hebblethwaite, “As I See It: The Death of Revisionism,” Hebblethwaite Papers, Burns Library, Boston College. 7. Stuart Hall, “The ‘First’ New Left: Life and Times,” in Robin Archer et al., eds., Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On (London, 1989), pp. 14–15. Hall was a Rhodes Scholar, arriving at Oxford from Jamaica in 1951. He claimed to have been influenced by Marx but was not a Marxist in the conventional sense. As with other Third World students at Oxford during these years, Hall found that Marx had little to offer on matters concerning race and ethnicity, and he was mystified by the refusal of the few communists whom he knew to acknowledge the failures of the Soviet system. 8. Peter Sedgwick, “The Two New Lefts,” in David Widgery, The Left in Britain, 1956–1968 (London, 1976), pp. 131– 55. 9. Hall, “The ‘First’ New Left,” p. 19. 10. See chapter 2 in this book.

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11. Michael Kenny, for example, saw the New Left as an early response to issues raised by a number of previous radical social and political movements, above all the guild socialists of the 1920s. See, for example, The First New Left: British Intellectuals after Stalin (London, 1995), p. 5. However, neither he nor Lin Chun (The British Left [Edinburgh, 1993]) recognized the radical Catholic affiliation with such endeavors. 12. For a discussion of the interconnections between the Distributists, G. D. H. Cole, and the guild socialist movement, see J. A. Hall, “Chesterton’s Contribution to English Sociology,” Chesterton Review, Spring/Summer 1977, and Jay P. Corrin, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc: The Battle against Modernity (Athens, OH, 1981), pp. 81– 91. 13. Mills was a close friend of Ralph Miliband, a major intellectual force of the English New Left, whose analysis of parliamentary politics set the essential framework through which the New Left examined British politics. 14. See Mills’s The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders (New York, 1948), and White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York, 1951). Mills concluded that workers were co-opted by the powers of capital through bread and circuses, had become comfortable with the existing economic and political system, and therefore could not be counted on to push for structural changes. 15. See E. P. Thompson, “Socialist Humanism,” The New Reasoner 1, Summer 1957. 16. Stuart Hall, “In the No Man’s Land,” Universities and Left Review 3 (Winter 1958): 87. 17. Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York, 1961), p. 79. For more on the attention given to Marx’s early texts as a key for understanding his complete thoughts, see Erich Fromm, ed., New Humanism (London, 1967). 18. Tom Bottomore, “Marxism and Sociology,” in Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet, eds., A History of Sociological Analysis (New York, 1978), p. 119. 19. See Tom Bottomore, Karl Marx: Early Writings (London, 1978). 20. Ozanam had begun his analysis of labor and capital in response to the socialist followers of Saint-Simon, who had demanded to know how Catholicism could do anything positive to improve the lives of the working poor. His subsequent writings on the labor question went far beyond the analyses of the Saint-Simonians and revealed a level of sophistication and moral insight that compare more closely with Marx’s critique of capitalism. 21. For a further treatment of the relationship between radical theory and Catholic social teaching, see Baum, Catholics and Canadian Socialism. Baum argues that the Church has been afraid of the radical conclusions to which its own principles and socioeconomic analyses have led (p. 83). Perhaps the fullest discussion of the radical affinities between Catholic social theory and Marxism can be found in Mary E. Hobgood’s Catholic Social Teaching and Economic Theory: Paradigms in Conflict (Philadelphia, 1991). Hobgood elaborates on Baum’s

416 Notes to Pages 179 –181 observation: the organic social theory upon which Catholic social thinking rested conflicted with its own analysis of the capitalist system, a critique, she asserts, that was essentially the same as Marx’s (p. 123). 22. See Christine E. Gudorf, Catholic Social Teaching on Liberation Themes (Lanham, MD, 1981), p. 169. Hobgood asserts that the social encyclicals of John XXIII and Paul VI took hesitant steps toward the possibility of Christian-Marxist collaboration. See Hobgood, Catholic Social Teaching and Economic Theory, p. 231. 23. The observations of Hobgood, Catholic Social Teaching and Economic Theory, p. 229. 24. The estimated circulation of the new journal was between eight thousand and ten thousand. Its board of editors consisted of former members of the Communist Party and traditional left-wing Socialists. For a discussion of this journal and its antecedents, see Arnold, “Britain: The New Reasoners.” In order to facilitate its views, the New Left Review hoped to create its own book series. Perry Anderson saw the need for a Left publishing imprint that would disseminate European theoretical writings and gave as an example the Catholic publisher Sheed and Ward as a model for the planned New Left Books. 25. Sharratt correspondence with author, 17 February 2009, JCC-BC. 26. Middleton married Rosemary Sheed and was given 25 percent of the shares of the London business; 50 percent went to his wife and her brother Wilfred, who took little interest in the operation. Frank retained the other 25 percent. (Middleton correspondence with author, 12 February through 24 February 2009, JCC-BC.) Frank Sheed, it appears, carefully guarded the company’s legacy. Tom Burns, who joined the firm at its founding, asked to be taken into the partnership, but Frank turned him down, claiming that he wanted it to be “a family concern.” Burns departed “in friendly fashion—at least to all appearances—in January 1936.” (Tom Burns, The Use of Memory: Publishing and Further Pursuits [London, 1993], p. 55.) 27. Middleton was primarily involved in running the London operation for Sheed and Ward. Dealing with the New York office, however, proved troublesome. At least two trips per year to the United States were required, and Middleton, it seems, had a long struggle with American immigration officials, who put restrictions on anyone “left of Disney.” (Neil Middleton correspondence with author, 12 February 2009, JCC-BC.) 28. Ibid. Wilfrid Sheed in his family memoir claimed that the relationship between Frank Sheed and Middleton as managing editor was at first harmonious but later fractious, although he provided few details on the matter. For the most part, Wilfrid avoided passing judgment on the rights or wrongs of their possible disagreements. Neil Middleton, conceded Wilfrid, was a brilliant publisher, as was later shown with his many years at Penguin Books, but he thought that Middleton’s place in a small rarified Catholic publishing house was not a good fit. (Wilfrid Sheed, Frank and Maisie: A Memoir with Parents [New York,

Notes to Pages 182 –183

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1985], p. 267.) Wilfrid was sent to work at Sheed and Ward by his father who wanted him to learn something about the real world of publishing books, but he clearly did not fit well into the operation and generally did not like it. On the other hand, Wilfrid admitted that it was a worthwhile experience in terms of learning the publishing business (p. 271). 29. The managing editor of Burns and Oates was the right-wing ideologue Douglas Jerrold. He asked his old friend Tom Burns to join the firm after World War II. Burns, whose great-uncle James Burns was the founder of the firm, eventually purchased Burns and Oates. There was no family succession because James’s only son was a priest and his five daughters became Ursuline nuns (Burns, The Use of Memory, p. 31). Tom Burns had married into the Spanish Catholic aristocracy and was an ardent supporter of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In the late 1920s and into the 1930s, Burns headed up what was called the Chelsea group, which was described as a right-wing, Catholic version of Bloomsbury (Lothian, The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, p. 248). In the words of Harman Grisewood, Burns and friends were “avant garde” but in a “rightist, Catholic, European style, not only in the arts but in politics, religion, economics, social and personal relationships” (Thomas Dillworth’s introduction to Grisewood, “Remembering David Jones,” Journal of Modern Literature 14 [Spring 1988]: 568). Both Frank and Maisie had a long association with progressive and even radical Catholic thinking. Maisie, for example, was a close friend of Dorothy Day and frequently visited the Catholic Worker headquarters. Along with Day, Maisie protested the war in Vietnam and in 1968 campaigned for presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. She also was a champion of the French Catholic-Workers movement and, according to Wilfrid Sheed, always believed in getting clergy “out of the damned seminaries and into the street” (Wilfrid Sheed, Frank and Maisie, p. 216). Frank Sheed’s father was an ardent Marxist who over dinner regaled the family with the wonders of socialism, and Frank himself retained a strong interest in Marx’s approach to social issues. (See Frank Sheed, The Church and I [Garden City, NY, 1974].) In 1936 he wrote Communism and Man, which demanded that the Church become more socially active. The book was highly regarded by Marxists, and the first half (before Sheed outlined what was wrong with the creed) was widely read in communist study circles. Wilfrid Sheed claimed that Maisie was more radical than Frank. On Vatican Council II, he wrote, “Maisie was probably more excited by the South American bishops and their cry from the Dark for social justice, while Frank was moved by the opening of the Eastern rite churches and the breach in institutional walls” (Wilfrid Sheed, Frank and Maisie, p. 256). 30. Middleton correspondence with author, 12 February 2009, JCC-BC. 31. Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC. 32. Martin Redfern correspondence with author, May 2009, JCC-BC.

418 Notes to Pages 183–186 33. Adrian Cunningham, “The December Group: Terry Eagleton and the New Left Church,” in The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 1 (1991), p. 211. 34. Terry Eagleton admired the Dominicans because they claimed to have a long record of showing how theology had a direct bearing on contemporary secular thought. This was the case from the Jungians in the 1930s and 1940s to the leftists of the 1960s and 1970s. He found the Dominicans appealing precisely because they were the radical intellectuals of the Church “as opposed to the Establishment intellectuals (Jesuits), non- or anti-intellectuals (Franciscans, Capuchins) and gentle, unworldly tree-huggers (Benedictines).” (Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, October 2011, JCC-BC.) 35. Adrian Cunningham noted a strong connection among the Catholic Left with not only the English Dominicans but also the city of Manchester itself. McCabe, Walter Stein, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Roy Shaw (the father of Slant’s Martin Shaw) were all part of the Manchester University generation. Those who served on the Slant board—Terry Eagleton and his wife Rosemary, Leo Pyle, and Damian McDevitt — were all from Manchester. (Adrian Cunningham correspondence with author, 16 November 2009, JCC-BC.) 36. Martin Redfern correspondence with author, 13 August 2011, JCC-BC. It should be pointed out that it was mostly a particular group of English Dominicans who were in close sympathy with the Catholic New Left (Bright, McCabe, Fergus Kerr, Alexander Newman, Giles Hibbert, and Charles Boxer, among others) and not the entire English province. 37. For more on this topic, see John McQuillan et al., Flee to the Fields: The Founding Papers of the Catholic Land Movement, original introduction by Hilaire Belloc and a new introduction by Dr. Tobias Lanz (Norfolk, VA, 2003); and Harold Robbins, The Last of the Realists: A Distributist Biography of G.K. Chesterton (Norfolk, VA, 2009). The latter is the best and most complete discussion of the activities of the Distributist League. 38. It appears that the Catholic clergy had generally ignored or misunderstood the social teachings of the papal encyclicals before 1930. The publication of De Rerum Novarum, for example, was greeted by a variety of conflicting interpretations. One Catholic writer argued that it indicated the pope’s rejection of social democracy, while another saw it as justifying Fabian collectivism. (K. S. Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England, p. 317.) But generally, English Catholics paid little attention to the encyclical; indeed, it was not even mentioned in the Catholic Truth Society’s official short history of the Catholic Church (1895), nor was there any reference to it in Purcell’s biography of Cardinal Manning (1895) or in Snead-Cox’s life of Cardinal Vaughan (1910). Since Catholics knew little of the content of the encyclicals, they tended to oppose trade unionism as much as they did socialism and communism. This greatly annoyed Gill, who explained that when it came to discussing matters of

Notes to Pages 186 –191

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human work and the responsibility of workingmen, ordinary parish priests and laymen were either not interested (probably owing to their ignorance of the encyclicals) or frankly antagonistic to any reform whatsoever. 39. In 1971, PAX merged with Pax Christi, an international Catholic peace movement established at the end of the Second World War with official Catholic Church recognition. PAX Christi has branches and contacts in several countries. 40. There was also a younger generation of Dominicans who wrote little but were part of the ongoing debates into the small hours of the morning at the December Group or at Blackfriars, Oxford. These included Alban Weston, Geoffrey Preston, Timothy Radcliffe, Guy Braithwaite, and others. The most influential Dominicans at the time were Fathers Laurence Bright, Herbert McCabe, Fergus Kerr, and Cornelius Ernst. Adrian Cunningham encouraged the group to study the writings of Victor White, O. P., and Angela Cunningham talked of the importance of David Jones. McCabe, wrote Sharratt, was successful in articulating Catholic doctrine in a unique way that integrated Wittgenstein, Aquinas, and Marx within a position of the faith. (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 17 February 2009, JCC-BC.) 41. Since the radical Catholics were in alliance with the secular New Left (indeed, they considered themselves an integral part of it), they have frequently been called the Catholic New Left (CNL). The terms “Catholic Left” and “Catholic New Left” will be used interchangeably throughout this book. 42. Martin Shaw correspondence with author, 7 February 2009, JCC-BC. 43. Angela Cunningham correspondence with author, 15 May 2009, JCC-BC. 44. Among other things, wrote Adrian Cunninghan, the CNDG would stand outside churches with placards and leaflets about just war theory, often to the fury of the clergy. 45. Adrian Cunningham correspondence with author, 30 June 2009, JCC-BC. 46. Angela Cunningham correspondence with author, 15 May 2009, JCC-BC. 47. Martin Shaw correspondence with author, 7 February 2009, JCC-BC. 48. See Brian Wicker, “Justice, Peace and the Dominicans, 1216–1999: VIII— Slant, Marxism and the English Dominicans,” New Blackfriars, October 1999. 49. Many fell under the influence of the charismatic Father Alex, and he seems to have been an especially attractive figure to women. He had a keen interest in psychology and for many years corresponded with the radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing. Alex Newman left the Dominican Order in 1967, married twice, became a therapist, and worked with D.W. Winnicott, the well-known psychoanalyst and child psychiatrist. Newman founded the Squiggle Foundation in the late 1970s, which is dedicated to the study and dissemination of Winnicott’s ideas. He died in 2005. (Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 28 September 2009, JCC-BC.) 50. There was an anonymous complaint sent to Cardinal Heenan by a visiting Dominican priest about the dangerous radicalism being propagated by the

420 Notes to Pages 191–194 Friday Group. Heenan allegedly responded by expressing the view that it was better for the Friday Group to be out in the open than to labor secretly in the shadows and to weaken the Church by going underground. 51. Much of the Calnan story comes from the author’s correspondence with Christopher Calnan, 8 June 2009, JCC-BC. The author was saddened to learn that Calnan, whose information on the Slant movement proved invaluable for this study, died suddenly on 10 June 2011. The years with the Catholic Left were an important part of Calnan’s life, and he made efforts well beyond the call of duty to track down people and documents for this book. Suffice it to say that this effort to tell the story of the Catholic New Left would have been incomplete without his generous help. A memorial service was celebrated in his honor in September 2011 at St. Etheldreda’s Church in Central London, the same church where Father Laurence Bright baptized Christopher’s daughter Tara. 52. Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 16 November 2009, JCC-BC. 53. Reference group theory was first introduced by Herbert Hyman in the 1940s and further developed by the American sociologists Robert Merton and Tamotsu Shibutani. Peter Berger has described a reference group as a primary association whose opinions and courses of actions are decisive, internalized factors in the formation of social consciousness and behavior. Reference-group theory suggests that social affiliation carries with it specific cognitive commitments that essentially define life’s meanings and responsibilities for those persons engaged in collective social interaction. This was an important force in giving shape to the social movements for radical change that emerged throughout the 1960s and was no less a seminal factor in the formation of the Catholic Left. See Peter L. Berger, “Sociological Perspective— Society in Man,” in his Invitation to Sociology: A Humanist Perspective (New York, 1963). 54. Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 17 February 2009, JCCBC. Sharratt made contact with Terry Eagleton and Adrian Cunningham when he arrived in Cambridge in 1965 but only joined the Slant editorial board much later, partly because of his residual seminarian status, which made him vulnerable to the discipline of ecclesiastical authorities. Sharratt’s own idiosyncratic theological position was outlined in two articles in Slant, “Locating Theology” (Slant 22) and “Absent Centre” (Slant 24 and 25) and in several contributions to New Blackfriars. 55. See Brian Wicker, First the Political Kingdom: A Personal Appraisal of the Catholic Left in Britain (Notre Dame, IN, 1967), p. 3. 56. In 1965, Merlin Press issued a second edition, this time with a prologue by Rev. Anthony Kenny reprinted from the Clergy Review. 57. Walter Stein, ed., Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience (London, 1961), p. 13. 58. Ibid., p. 21. 59. Ibid., p. 23.

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60. Peggy Duff, Left, Left, Left: A Personal Account of Six Protest Campaigns, 1945– 65 (London, 1971), p. 128. 61. Ralph Samuel, “Born-Again Socialism,” in Archer, Out of Apathy, p. 44. 62. Hall, “The ‘First’ New Left,” pp. 32– 33. 63. For a further explanation of what Gramsci meant by the concept of “hegemony,” see his Letters from Prison, selected, trans. from Italian, and introduced by Lynne Lawner (London, 1973). 64. See Perry Anderson, “Origins of the Present Crisis,” in Towards Socialism, ed. Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn (Ithaca, NY, 1965). 65. Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 16 November 2009, JCC-BC. 66. The following Catholics participated on CCND speaker panels: Adrian Cunningham; Simon Blake, O. P.; Dom Bede Griffiths, O. S. B.; Christopher Hollis; Franziskus Stratman, O. P.; Laurence Bright, O. P.; Vera Brittain; Eddie Linden; Peter Lumsden; the Very Reverend Henry St. John; Archbishop Thomas Roberts, S. J.; and Dom Philip Holdsworth, O. S. B., as well as a good number of religious from Ampleforth Abbey. (Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 22 September 2009, JCC-BC.) 67. Christopher Calnan recalled that Father Simon was certainly no Marxist, and although they worked together in the CCND, Father Laurence Bright and he were wary of each other and merely co-existed. (Ibid.) 68. The Committee of 100 was a group started by Bertrand Russell, Stuart Hall, April Carter, Ralph Schoenman, and others. The name came from one hundred people who signed the group’s charter against weapons of mass destruction. Their strategy was to garner press attention for the CND through mass acts of civil disobedience. 69. It appears that there were conflicts within the Christian CND between moderates of a more pacifist bent and radicals willing to entertain sharper methods. Adrian Cunningham and Peter Lumsden represented the former, whereas Christopher Calnan and others thought that violence, including insurrection, was justified to overthrow governments that were unjust. Calnan remembered “arguing with a number of comrades at the time that what we wanted was not Just War theory but Just Revolution theory.” (Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 22 September 2009, JCC-BC.) 70. The New Reasoner 5, as cited in Archer, Out of Apathy, p. 7. 71. Duff, Left, Left, Left, p. 143. 72. For more on this topic, see Wicker, First the Political Kingdom, and Adrian Cunningham et al., eds., Slant Manifesto: Catholics and the Left (Springfield, IL, 1966). Wicker argued that it was the moral issue that led Catholics into the CND and to embrace the causes of the secular left. 73. Zahn’s arguments caused considerable vexation in certain high Church circles. Zahn wrote to the refugee priest H. A. Reinhold that the German hierarchy had formally protested against his research report. The president of Loyola

422 Notes to Pages 200 – 201 University in Chicago was told that some “top-ranking prelate” in Rome was monitoring Zahn’s work and might demand “redress.” It appears that neither Zahn nor the president of Loyola was intimidated by these pressures. (Zahn to Reinhold, 1 March 1960, Box “Correspendence: File Z, Special Collections, Burns Library, Boston College.) 74. Lewy and Zahn were Fulbright scholars whose periods of study in Germany briefly overlapped. Zahn suggested some of the more important Catholic leaders for Lewy, a non-Catholic, to seek out for his research. (Interview with author, September 1996.) 75. Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church in Nazi Germany (New York, 1963), p. 169. 76. It is worth noting that both Zahn’s and Amery’s books were published by Sheed and Ward. 77. Carl Amery, Capitulation: The Lesson of German Catholicism (New York, 1967), p. 186. 78. Klemens von Klemperer, The German Resistance against Hitler (Oxford, 1992), p. 37. 79. Ibid., p. 38. 80. Professor Cameron became the first Catholic since the Middle Ages to be awarded a chair in philosophy at a British university (Leeds). However, Cameron was given a rather difficult time teaching in England and later emigrated to Canada, where he joined the faculty at the University of Toronto. There he held the Chair of Philosophy from 1960 to 1967 and was also Terry Lecturer at Yale University from 1964 to 1965. Both Cameron and Brian Wicker were closely involved in the Dominican Spode House meetings. Although he did not write for Slant, Cameron was considered a close friend of the movement and was in general sympathetic to their positions. (Neil Middleton correspondence with author, 12 February 2009, JCC-BC.) 81. Although Cameron did not use the term “false consciousness,” what he was arguing was a clear example of what the concept suggests. The notion of “false consciousness” as formulated by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology has since become central to what is known as the sociology of knowledge. The theory posits that prevailing values and belief systems—i.e., ideologies—are designed to sustain the power of governing elites. In this sense, ideas, much like individual consciousness or senses of self, are socially constructed and designed to promote understandings that maintain the status quo. The prevailing ideology of a society frequently distorts reality or truth in order to legitimize thinking as usual. As Terry Eagleton put it, The German Ideology insisted that “consciousness is essentially practical, and that one of its practical uses is to distract men and women from their oppression and exploitation by generating illusions and mystifications” (Terry Eagleton, Ideology [London, 1994], p. 6). The New Left argued that understanding the nature of ideology provided insight to both past history

Notes to Pages 202 – 206

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and present cultural realities and could therefore serve as an important means of social liberation. For a discussion of how such insights could be gleaned from literature, see Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley, CA, 1976). 82. J. M. Cameron, “Catholicism and Political Mythology,” in The Night Battle, p. 3. 83. Ibid., pp. 8– 9. 84. Foreword to Amery, Capitulation, p. xi. 85. Ibid., p. xvii. 86. Cameron, “Catholicism and Political Mythology,” in The Night Battle, p. 16. 87. In 1959– 60, Wicker wrote a master’s thesis on the “Logic of J. H. Cardinal Newman.” Professor Cameron served as external examiner. 88. Brian Wicker correspondence with author, 5 December 2008, JCC-BC. Wicker to this day remains very concerned about the ethics of nuclear deterrence. For this reason, after retiring from teaching, he took a Master’s in War Studies at Kings College, London University, 1988– 89. 89. For more on the troubled career of this noble servant of the Church, see David Abner Hurn, Archbishop Roberts S.J. (London, 1966). Roberts’s views on matters of Church-state relations and war had been deeply influenced by Gordon Zahn’s German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars. Writing in the May 1963 issue of Continuum, Roberts discussed the development of his thoughts on the arms race and Vatican II. What he found particularly shocking in Zahn’s book was not so much seeing “Hitler echoed over the signatures of great Catholic names,” but rather “the realization that nationalism, mass hysteria, and above all fear, paralyzes Christian judgment.” Modern Christianity, he concluded, had essentially ceased “to be such a leaven of peace as the life of Christ would suggest.” Moreover, it is interesting to note that the ideas of Slant’s Martin Shaw on war and nuclear disarmament were also given shape by Gordon Zahn. Shaw’s pacifism was influenced by Zahn’s book on Franz Jagerstatter, the Austrian Catholic pacifist who was executed for his resistance to the Nazis. (Martin Shaw correspondence with author, 16 August 2011, JCC-BC.) 90. Brian Wicker, Culture and Liturgy (New York, 1963), p. 43. 91. For more on this line of discussion, see Brian Wicker, “Eschatology and Politics,” in Terry Eagleton and Brian Wicker, eds., From Culture to Revolution: The Slant Symposium, 1967 (New York, 1968). 92. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (New York, 1976), p. 280. 93. J. M. Cameron, “The New Left in Britain,” in The Night Battle, p. 74. 94. Cameron raised a legitimate question here, one that has relevance to most Western intellectuals today. To what extent have they been influenced by Marx’s economic and historical ideas? Does accepting a portion of his insights make one a Marxist? Even Marx fled from the label, claiming that he himself was no Marxist. Most American intellectuals avoid the appellation like the plague,

424 Notes to Pages 207– 209 given the country’s deep and sometimes irrational and ill-informed phobias about all things socialist. Many of the Catholic New Left had no trouble identifying themselves as both Marxist and Catholic, since the one in their view need not negate the other. Indeed, Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right (2011) and his debunking of Christopher Hitchens’s and Richard Dawkins’s atheism (see his Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate [New Haven, CT, 2009]) make it clear that he is still both a Catholic and a Marxist, and in his mind not someone who partakes in intellectual buffets. 95. Peter Berger and Stanley Pullberg, “Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness,” New Left Review 35 (January– February 1966): 57. 96. Peter Berger, for example, in responding to Ben Brewester’s critique of the Berger-Pullberg article on the Marxist notion of reification, defended their conceptual eclecticism and saw the integration of some Marxist concepts as important for deepening sociological theory, yet Berger was emphatic in insisting that he was no Marxist. After all, he wrote, “some people (Marxists for instance) operate with notions that are derived from Christianity, such as a historical perspective on the human condition, while refusing to accept the Christian scheme as a whole.” (Peter Berger, “Response,” New Left Review 35 [January– February 1966]: 76.) 97. Wicker, “Eschatology and Politics,” in Eagleton and Wicker, From Culture to Revolution, p. 276. 98. See Terry Eagleton, “The Idea of a Common Culture,” in Eagleton and Wicker, From Culture to Revolution, for a fuller discussion of Eliot, Leavis, and Williams on the subject of culture. 99. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York, 1958), p. 320. Williams objected to Marxist cultural theory because it reduced social behavior to relations of production. If the economic base of society were determinating, then it would affect the “whole way of life,” and it was to this way of life—not the base—that cultural practices must be related. See Raymond Williams, “Culture Is Ordinary,” in his Resources of Hope (London, 1989). 100. Williams, Culture and Society, p. 321. 101. Williams’s theory of culture as inclusive, embracing every facet of society’s social, economic, and political behavior, directly corresponds to the standard anthropological definition of culture. As early as 1871 in his seminal study Primitive Culture, the British anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor wrote: “Culture . . . taken in its widest . . . sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” (Quotation taken from Conrad Phillip Kottak, Cultural Anthropology [New York, 1979], pp. 4– 5.) Tylor’s definition, universally accepted by cultural anthropologists, focuses on the behavior and consciousness that individuals gain not through biological heredity but exclusively by belonging to a particular society. Other anthropologists following in Tylor’s footsteps have elaborated further on his definition but

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without modifying its fundamental insight as culture consisting of the “total life of the group.” Williams seems to have gotten his own sense of the meaning of culture from the eminent American anthropologist Ruth Benedict. As Dai Smith has noted in his recent biography of Williams, his wife Joy referred Williams to Benedict’s classic Patterns of Culture just as he was struggling with the terminology of culture. Williams found Benedict’s book “lucid, praiseworthy and distinguished.” (Joy Williams interview with Dai Smith, 1990, as cited in Dai Smith, Raymond Williams: A Warrior’s Tale [Cardigan, UK, 2008], p. 334.) What Williams especially found significant was Benedict’s generalization concerning the relationship of individuals to their society. Williams’s ideas have also been corroborated by other anthropologists. One year after Williams published Culture and Society, the anthropologist Leslie White, who was undoubtedly influenced by the insights of American sociologist George Herbert Mead’s theory of “symbolic interaction” as a central mechanism for socialization, stressed the unique and critical significance of symbolic thought for the creation of cultural values. In this respect White highlighted in crossdisciplinary fashion Williams’s recognition of the centrality of language in shaping consciousness and values. See L. A. White, The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome (New York, 1959). 102. Williams, Culture and Society, p. 325. 103. Ibid., p. 331. 104. Terry Eagleton, “Priesthood and Paternalism,” New Blackfriars, December 1965, p. 145. 105. New Left Review 35 (January– February 1966). 106. John Higgins, Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism (London, 1999), p. 51. 107. The same imbalance in income and wealth currently plagues both Britain and the United States and is far worse today than the patterns of inequality in the 1960s. 108. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York, 1961), p. 299. Williams’s observation here speaks volumes regarding current troubles with the excesses of Wall Street and corporate capitalism. 109. This phenomenon is what sociologists call “the definition of the situation.” Although Williams did not use the term, he was in effect recognizing the Thomas theorem, named after the American sociologist W. I. Thomas. Given Williams’s interactions with the contributors to the New Left Review and the nature of his interdisciplinary scholarship, he would have been familiar with the work of sociologists such as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, who wrote about the social construction of reality, the process by which people create an understanding of their environment through the social forces that embrace them. Thomas made the simple but profound observation that “if people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Ian Robertson, Sociology,

426 Notes to Pages 214 – 217 3rd ed. [New York, 1987], p. 160). In other words, the beliefs concerning identity are socially constructed. People given identity labels supported and sustained by those in a position of power will accept the reality of the definition whether it is actually true or not. It is also important to note that many of these scholars knew each other personally and exchanged ideas in a variety of informal settings. Leavis and Williams, for instance, were on the same faculty board committees. Leavis used to come to tea at St. Edmund’s and tell anecdotes about T. S. Eliot and Wittgenstein. Sharratt wrote that Althusser once remarked of his relations with Foucault and Derrida that he did not read their books when he could talk to them over coffee every day. (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 9 September 2009, JCC-BC.) 110. Williams, The Long Revolution, p. 335.

NINE

The Slant Movement

1. R. H. Tawney, quoted as the epigraph to Alasdair MacIntyre’s book Marxism: An Interpretation (London, 1953). 2. Nearly all the Slant activists contacted by the author have acknowledged that Laurence Bright was a seminal influence on the Catholic Left. However, Neil Middleton has asserted that the Dominicans had little if anything to do either with the inspiration or the direction of Slant. The journal, he wrote, was founded by Catholic undergraduates at Cambridge University. Bright and Herbert McCabe were supportive of the enterprise but had nothing to do with the actual production. (Neil Middleton correspondence with author, 16 August 2011, JCC-BC.) 3. Adrian Cunningham recalled that Dorothy Day and Eileen Egan insisted on attending Monsignor Gilbey’s Sunday Mass, but in accompanying them he felt highly uncomfortable: we were given “frosty looks.” (Adrian Cunningham correspondence with author, 3 July 2009, JCC-BC.) Gilbey was replaced by Canon Richard Incledon in 1966. Incledon noted that the radical Catholic Leftists who were part of the Slant group did not find much comfort in Fisher House. He felt that their journal engaged in increasingly obscure private language that relegated its adherents to “a corner, away from the central bodies of their fellow Catholics to the detriment of both.” For his part, Canon Incledon tried to engage them in dialogue but presumably with minimal success. See “Memories of Fisher House— Canon Richard Incledon, Chaplain 1966–1977,” Fisher House Newsletter, 2003. 4. Father Laurence sometime later came across a porn magazine in Soho also named Slant, which even employed the same design as their journal. He got a chuckle circulating it to his editors. Fergus Kerr was in Cambridge when Slant was

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founded and believes that he was responsible for coming up with the journal’s name. (Fergus Kerr correspondence with author, 9 November 2009, JCC-BC.) 5. Quotation taken from an editorial of Slant replicated by Laurence Bright in “Christian Radicalism,” Search, October 1964, pp. 216–18. Not all those associated with the Slant project were Catholic. Later members of the Slant board, for example, included the Methodist Peter Grant and the Anglican Chris Holmes. (Martin Redfern correspondence with author, May 2009, JCC-BC.) 6. Hastings, History of English Christianity, 1920– 2000, p. 570. 7. The books published included Terry Eagleton, The New Left Church (1966); Terry Eagleton and Brian Wicker, eds., From Culture to Revolution (1968); Laurence Bright, O. P., and Simon Clements, The Committed Church (1966); and Neil Middleton, The Language of Christian Revolution (London, 1968). 8. Neil Middleton correspondence with author, 16 August 2011, JCC-BC. 9. The editors at this point were Anthony Downing, Terry Eagleton, Mario McNally, Leo Pyle, Damian McDevitt, Kenelm Foster, O. P., David Cripps, and Oliver Hawkins. Closely associated with them were Adrian and Angela Cunningham and Francis McDonagh. (Neil Middleton correspondence with author, 12 February through 24 February 2009, JCC-BC.) 10. Between 1964 and 1965, Slant was produced and mainly circulated in universities. Sheed and Ward took over publishing the journal in 1966, and Slant continued to be published in this form until 1970. At its height Slant claimed a circulation exceeding two thousand. However, Christopher Calnan, who was responsible for Slant’s circulation list, spoke with Martin Redfern and both agreed that there were at best between two hundred to three hundred subscribers, with the rest of the copies often being given away at meetings and conferences. “Many people took Slant,” wrote Calnan, “as much as a symbol of the Catholic Left as their understanding of or detailed agreement with the contents.” (Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 16 November 2009, JCC-BC.) 11. Quoted in Paul Oestreicher, ed., The Christian Marxist Dialogue (New York, 1969), p. 179. Slant’s position on working with an alliance of differing ideological groups in the promotion of social justice was forcefully supported by the famous Brazilian “Red Bishop” of liberation theology, Dom Helder Camara. See Dom Helder Comara: Essential Writings, selections with an introduction by Francis McDonagh (Maryknoll, NY, 2009). Camara was a great inspiration to the Catholic Left. Some of the most committed to liberation theology among the Slant group were Bernard Sharratt, Neil Middleton, and Francis McDonagh. The latter two were especially close with Camara and learned much from his views about what was needed to promote peace and social justice in Latin America. 12. Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, beginning 17 February 2009, JCC-BC. Members of the Slant board had occasional dialogues with fulltime staff members at the Communist Party headquarters. This made for a useful talking-shop. Informal encounters with a variety of others on the New Left

428 Notes to Pages 218 – 223 resulted in some co-publishing ventures between Sheed and Ward and New Left Books, the most successful of which was Nicos Poulantzas’ Political Power and Social Classes in 1974. (Martin Redfern correspondence with author, May 2009, JCC-BC.) 13. For a fuller discussion of these matters, see Monica Lawlor, “Two Tier Conspiracy,” New Christian, 26 January 1967. 14. Ibid., p. 10. 15. See Terry Eagleton’s review of Clump’s book in Blackfriars, June 1964. 16. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963), p. 442. 17. Adrian Cunningham, “The Failure of the Christian Revolution,” in Cunningham et al., Slant Manifesto: Catholics and the Left, pp. 106– 7. 18. Neil Middleton, “Avoiding the Wind of Change,” New Christian, 27 January 1966, p. 8. 19. Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC. 20. For more on this, see Alan Wall, “Slant and the Language of Revolution,” New Blackfriars, November 1975. 21. Bright once lost his address and appointments book, recalled Sharratt, and such was his role as political quarterback that it seemed that the entire Catholic Left would cease to function until it was found again. Father Laurence was a perpetual motion machine, always giving lectures here and there or writing and editing for various journals. He also had the capacity to get his acolytes to do the unimaginable. He was very persuasive, wrote Sharratt, and managed to talk him into producing articles for the Newman Society journal that were beyond his dreams of ever completing on such short notice. (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 17 February 2009, JCC-BC.) 22. Even in his youthful years as a writer with Slant, it was clear that Eagleton was himself a powerful intellectual force in Catholic New Left circles. He certainly wrote more than anyone else for Slant and was also well published in other Catholic and secular journals of the day. Eagleton’s essays set the tone, and his colleagues would generally pick up on his insights and positions to develop them more fully. He also remained the most consistently Marxist of the Slant group. Today, Eagleton sees no fundamental conflict between his Catholic religion and Marxism, whereas a number of others in that circle have either left the Church or have diluted their previous enthusiasm for revolutionary Marxism. 23. Virtually all of the former activists whom the author has contacted concerning their experiences with the Catholic Left have written of their debt to Father McCabe as a seminal force in the development of their social and political ideas. Bernard Sharratt wrote that he once asked Father Herbert how he first got involved in politics. It wasn’t Ireland, he emphasized (although McCabe was an avid supporter of the Irish Republican agenda and ultimately renounced his British citizenship as an act of solidarity with his ancestral homeland), but rather

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the impact of encountering Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah (or was it Kambarage Nyerere?) at Manchester to discuss the anticolonial struggle for the 5th Pan-African Congress in 1945. For the Catholic Left in the 1960s, Western imperialism, the absence of social justice in Latin America, apartheid in South Africa, and the Vietnam War were issues of primary importance and matters that activated their followers. There was even a SCM-financed project that brought former guerillas from Zimbabwe and Mozambique into the UK. Unfortunately, noted Sharratt, one of their benefactors was now doing something nasty in Mugabe’s government. (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 17 February 2009, JCC-BC.) 24. Terry Eagleton, The Independent, 25 July 2001. 25. See Eugene McCarraher, “Herbert McCabe’s Revolutionary Faith,” Commonweal, 8 October 2010. This is an excellent introduction to the nature of McCabe’s revolutionary theology and its relevance to our times. 26. Ibid., p. 4. 27. From Eugene McCarraher, “Still a Good Catholic Boy,” In These Times, 11 November 2002. For more, see also Dinitia Smith, “Cultural Theorists, Start Your Epitaphs,” New York Times, 3 January 2004. 28. From Sian Griffiths, “In the Belly of the Beast,” Times Higher Education Supplement, 21 June 1991, p. 18. 29. Years later, Eagleton, long regarded as “the enfant terrible of Oxford’s English establishment,” was appointed Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at that institution, succeeding John Bayley. This was both a shock and a delight to some in the English literary world. Even Prince Charles was reported to have once referred to him as “that dreadful Terry Eagleton” (Smith, “Cultural Theorists, Start Your Epitaphs”). At Oxford, Eagleton, while holding one of the university’s most prestigious chairs, also happily sold revolutionary newspapers in the town of Oxford’s shopping centers. He also made it a point to join the Socialist Workers Party. His presence at Oxford led to the introduction of Marxist literary theory into the curriculum at a time when the faculty was dominated by traditionalists. Eagleton’s lectures were enormously popular and influential, raising him to iconic status. This further fueled the animosity of conservative faculty. In his memoir The Gatekeeper, Eagleton described the Oxford faculty as “petulant, snobbish, spiteful, arrogant, autocratic and ferociously self-centered.” He left Oxford after thirty years and joined the faculty of Manchester University in 2001 as professor of cultural theory, hired into the position by two of his radical former students at Oxford. See Sian Griffiths, “Marxist Elevated at Oxford,” Times Higher Education Supplement, 22 March 1991; and the profile “High Priest of Lit Crit,” The Guardian, 2 February 2002, http://education.guardian.co.uk/academicexperts/story/0,1392,643458,00.html. Eagleton today has shifted (until recently) from writing about religion and has replaced Leavis as the best-known and most influential literary critic in Britain. Indeed, he is also recognized as one of the

430 Notes to Pages 226 – 228 leading Marxist literary theorists in the Western world. No cultural critic today can match his popularity or prolific output. His Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), which proposed the replacement of literary studies by cultural studies, has sold over 800,000 copies worldwide. For a further discussion of Eagleton’s career, see David Lodge, “Goodbye to All That,” New York Review of Books, 27 May 2004, and Bernard Bergonzi, “The Terry Eagleton Story,” in his The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature (New York, 1986). 30. “High Priest of Lit Crit,” The Guardian, 2 February 2002, p. 4. 31. These descriptions can be found in Eagleton, The Gatekeeper, pp. 25– 26. 32. Ibid., pp. 28– 29. 33. For Williams’s experiences at Cambridge, see Higgins, Raymond Williams. Eagleton years later still remembered the uncharitable behavior of Maurice Cowling, who made certain that things remained unpleasant for Williams, Eagleton, and anyone else whose ideas were left of center. (Terry Eagleton conversation with author, 19 March 2010.) 34. Higgins, Raymond Williams, pp. 50– 51. 35. Eagleton was refused a lectureship at Cambridge due to Cowling’s machinations, which is the reason he left for Oxford. (Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC.) His appointment as Thomas Warton Professor at Oxford was highly unusual. During the Cold War years, Marxist scholars, especially historians, were defensive and isolated, under siege. Christopher Hill, for example, was the only Marxist historian to be given a professorship at Oxford. He believed that the Oxford establishment considered him a rather “tame” version of the creed and used him as a symbol of their liberal bona fides for academic freedom. Yet they were intent on never repeating the error of hiring another “Red.” (Dennis Dworkin interview with Christopher Hill, 9 May 1984, in Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain, p. 21.) As Dworkin has pointed out, it is significant that, with the exception of Hill, none of the Marxist historians of his generation, irrespective of their international eminence, would ever be given a permanent position at either Oxford or Cambridge. 36. Annan, Our Age, p. 3. 37. See Laurence Bright, O. P., “Christian and Marxist,” in James Klugmann and Paul Oestreicher, eds., What Kind of Revolution? A Christian-Communist Dialogue (London, 1968), pp. 119– 20. 38. Quoted in Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford, 2002), p. xv. Kadlecova was a prominent figure at the Christian-Marxist Marianske Lazne, where she promoted a cross-fertilization of Catholic theology and Marxism. She later served as education minister under Alexander Dubcek but was widely denounced at the time by the communist press for what was called revisionism and effrontery. See Peter Hebblethwaite, “Fr. Ludwig Kaufmann, S. J.,” Obituary, Daily Telegraph, 17 July 1991, Hebblethwaite Papers, KC 674, PH 24, Articles A-L (6), Burns Library, Boston College.

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39. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (New York, 1964), p. 185. Teilhard de Chardin was better received in France than in England by the Catholic Left. Eagleton, for example, found his language strangely mystical and positivisitic. In his writings, “the real actions of men are transposed and depersonalised into abstract configurations of force and the apparent ‘radicalism’ of Teilhard, when one strives to determine its content, mysteriously evaporates” (Eagleton, The Body as Language, p. 99). Laurence Bright was equally dismissive of Teilhard. For a paper prepared for the 1970 conference of the World Student Christian Federation, Bright wrote: “After centuries of capitalism, this [the positivist and empirical approach] is mere common sense to the Anglo-Saxon, and cultural imperialism has spread the message, so that it has seemed equally acceptable to sensible men like David Hume and fools like Teilhard de Chardin.” (Quoted by Peter Hebblethwaite, The Tablet, 13 February 1971, PH– Marxism Folder, Hebblethwaite Papers, Burns Library, Boston College.) Christopher Calnan recalled meeting Father Laurence one evening for a drink and found him in an especially bubbly mood: “He told me that he had just come from addressing a meeting of the Teilhard de Chardin Society where he had demonstrated to them that T. de C. was a proto fascist!” (Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 16 November 2009, JCC-BC.) Brian Wicker has written that Teilhard was not at all influential for his group. He was rather regarded as “alien, and his theology was repugnant and unacceptable.” Those who promoted Teilhard, it seems, were not at all political, and thus the Catholic Left was hostile to him. (Brian Wicker correspondence with author, 5 December 2008, JCC-BC.) 40. Slant did not see as its main function the formation of a particular political program but rather the shift of the focus of Catholic thinking to revolutionary channels. The movement would be taken to task by its detractors for failing to satisfy the former. See Angela and Adrian Cunningham, “More Questions for the Catholic Left,” Slant 12, December 1966– January 1967. 41. Terry Eagleton, “Slant: Intentions and Achievements,” The Clergy Review, July 1970, p. 552. 42. Middleton had initially praised Cox’s book The Secular City but objected to its reliance on a church to work out a “theology of social change.” See Slant 10, August– September 1966, p. 17. Bright, on the other hand, criticized the “secular Christianity” of both Charles Davis and Harvey Cox for taking capitalist structures as the norm: “They are just not politically radical enough to guide us towards the brave new Church” (The Newman, January 1968, p. 51). Bright, Middleton, and the Slant writers were convinced that the Church required complete liberation from its current administrative structures. 43. See Middleton, The Language of Christian Revolution, pp. 2– 5. 44. Slant 11, October– November 1966, p. 25. 45. Middleton, The Language of Christian Revolution, p. 9.

432 Notes to Pages 231– 236 46. Jacques Ellul, Jesus and Marx: From Gospel to Ideology (Grand Rapids, MI, 1988), p. 7. Middleton arranged to have Ellul’s books published by Sheed and Ward. There was a significant connection between the English Catholic New Left and Ellul’s Cuernavaca Institute (Herbert McCabe was a visiting lecturer there), and his position on liberation theology resonated closely with that of the Slant group. Ellul was also known as a brilliant lay theologian and a Christian anarchist. His major fear was that the power of modern technology would undermine human freedom. He saw Christianity and anarchism as working toward the same goal of liberating humanity from the strictures of corporate and state bureaucracy. 47. Father Preston, O. P., writing in Slant, as quoted by Colm Brogan, “The Catholic Marxists,” The Spectator, 24 June 1966, p. 784. 48. Middleton, The Language of Christian Revolution, p. 59. 49. Terry Eagleton, “The Council and Communications,” in Terry Eagleton, ed., Directions: Pointers for the Post-Conciliar Church (London, 1968), pp. 172– 73. 50. Monica Lawlor, Out of This World (London, 1965), pp. 62– 63. 51. Ibid., p. 76. 52. After establishing a relationship with Sheed and Ward, Slant moved its operations from Cambridge to London. The move symbolized its coming of age, when it ceased to be a mere undergraduate publication and now targeted a broader national audience. Yet the student cadre that had launched Slant continued to take responsibility for editorial matters. 53. Terry Eagleton, “Slant on Christianity and Politics,” Slant 7, February– March 1966. 54. Camilo Torres, Priest and Revolutionary (London, 1967), p. 74. The book was published by Sheed and Ward. 55. Neil Middleton, “Slant on Torres,” Slant 8, April – May 1966. Middleton wrote a favorable review of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice for Slant. It was a book, he concluded, that would join The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, and the works of Che Guevara as a needed stimulus to greater revolutionary awakening throughout the world (Slant 27, September 1969). 56. Raymond Williams, “Culture and Revolution: A Response,” in Eagleton and Wicker, From Culture to Revolution, p. 298. To contemporary readers such praise of Mao’s humanity is jarring if not downright obscene. But it must be appreciated that few outsiders at this time were fully aware of the murderous destruction brought about by Mao’s numerous and vicious anti-campaigns, the Great Leap Forward, which created a famine that killed over 25 million people, and the mindless horrors of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It was only after native Chinese began to publish their memoirs that Westerners learned of the brutality of Mao’s rule. One of the most significant books to open Western eyes to the real nature of the man was by Mao’s personal physician, Dr. Li Zhisui.

Notes to Pages 236 – 241

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See his The Private Life of Chairman Mao (New York, 1994). Mao’s recent biographers, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, claim that Mao was the greatest mass murderer in history, having been responsible for over 70 million deaths, and those being in peacetime. See their Mao: The Unknown Story (New York, 2005). 57. Neil Middleton, “Questions for the Catholic Left,” Slant 7, October – November 1966. 58. For example, see Angela and Adrian Cunningham, “More Questions for the Catholic Left,” Slant 12, December 1966– January 1967. 59. “Slant on Praxis,” Slant 11, October– November 1966, p. 2. 60. Eagleton, The Body as Language, p. 102. 61. “The Language of Renewal,” New Blackfriars, October 1965, p. 23. 62. Maritain had been a major target of the Right’s attack on Catholics who had wandered too far off the official ideological reservation. The French rightwing press called him the ringleader of a cabal of disloyal Catholics, what they labeled the “chrétiens rouges,” who opposed what they considered the proper Vatican line. Such voices of criticism had contacts with reactionary elements in the Vatican, and the general effect of their denunciation was to engender a hostile climate of suspicion against independent thinking in the conservative Catholic press throughout Europe and the Americas. Some of these sources gave the impression that Maritain’s anti-Francoism was the product of insidious Jewish influence. Maritain’s Catholic wife Raïssa and her sister were of Russian Jewish origin. Maritain’s enemies tried to use this family heritage to cast doubt on his religious credibility. 63. Bernard Doering, Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals (Notre Dame, IN, 1983), p. 71. 64. Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom, trans. Joseph W. Evans (New York, 1968), p. 164. 65. Adrian Cunningham, “Culture and Catholicism: A Historical Analysis,” in Eagleton and Wicker, From Culture to Revolution, p. 120. Much of what follows is drawn from Cunningham’s critique of Maritain as articulated in this lengthy essay. 66. “Church and State,” in Joseph W. Evans and Leo R. Ward, eds., Jacques Maritain: Challenges and Renewals (New York, 1968), p. 310. 67. “The Things That Are Not Caesar’s,” quoted in Jacques Maritain: Challenges and Renewals, p. 311. Maritain lived his life as the embodiment of this spiritual ordering. He and his wife Raïssa began their marriage with a vow of chastity. 68. Jacques Maritain, The Things That Are Not Caesar’s (New York, 1930), p. 116. 69. From the editorial “Unam Sanctum,” Colosseum, September 1935. 70. Jacques Maritain, Scholasticism and Politics, trans. Mortimer J. Adler (New York, 1960), pp. 188– 89.

434 Notes to Pages 241– 245 71. Ibid., p. 193. 72. Ibid., p. 192. 73. Ibid., pp. 191– 92. 74. Ibid., p. 100. 75. Cunningham, “Culture and Catholicism,” in Eagleton and Wicker, From Culture to Revolution, p. 133. 76. Christopher Dawson, in Jacques Maritain, Peter Wust, and Christopher Dawson, Essays in Order (New York, 1931), p. xxv. 77. Christopher Dawson, Religion and World History (New York, 1975), p. 312. 78. Dawson, in Maritain et al., Essays in Order, p. ix. 79. Jacques Maritain, Religion and Culture (New York, 1931), p. 37. 80. Several historians have criticized Dawson for linking his theology too closely to the Middle Ages, thus revealing an affinity with the romantic medievalism of Chesterton and Belloc. See Hayden White, “Religion, Culture, and Western Civilization in Christopher Dawson’s Idea of History,” English Miscellany 9 (1958). A different view can be found in Schwartz, The Third Spring, and James Ambrose Raftis, “The Development of Christopher Dawson’s Thought,” The Chesterton Review 9, no. 2, May 1983. 81. See Cameron’s “Culture and Revolution,” New Blackfriars, July 1969. 82. Dawson, in Maritain et al., Essays in Order, 216. 83. See Dawson to John J. Mulloy, 30 July 1954, Dawson Correspondence, as cited in Schwartz, The Third Spring, p. 247. 84. Cunningham, “Culture and Catholicism,” p. 143. 85. Terry Eagleton, “The Language of Renewal,” New Blackfriars, October 1965, p. 21. This distrust of institutions and the prevailing structures of bourgeois society were also persistent themes in the writings of the Brazilian liberation theologian Archbishop Dom Helder Camara, with whom the Catholic Left found common ground. 86. Examples of the “open dialectic” could be found in the works of Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, and R. D. Laing, among others. 87. Mills, for example, spoke of the necessity of developing what he called a “sociological imagination,” meaning a recognition of how one’s personal biography is connected to and shaped by broader historical and contemporary social forces. An understanding of the cause-and-effect relationship between the two can be a source of liberation and the starting point for allowing individuals to give shape to the world in which they live. See his The Sociological Imagination (New York, 1959). But the fundamental reality, as Peter Berger emphasized, is that “man is in society” and “society is in man.” In short, individuals are not abstract, autonomous actors whose culture, socialization, and consciousness are bequeathed by some transcendental cosmic spark. Rather, self and consciousness are socially constructed. See Berger’s Invitation to Sociology (New York, 1963).

Notes to Pages 245 – 252

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88. Neil Middleton, “Man and Society at Vatican II,” Slant 12, December 1966– January 1967, p. 20. 89. Adrian Cunningham, “Notes on Strategy,” Slant 30, March 1970, p. 10. 90. The Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World (Boston 1966), N. C.W. C. translation, chapter 1, article 12. 91. Middleton draws these quotations from the translation made by William Purdy, published by the Catholic Truth Society (London, 1966), p. 17. 92. Ibid., pp. 15 and 17. 93. Middleton, “Man and Society at Vatican II,” p. 21. 94. “Slant on Papal Socialism,” Slant 15, June– July 1967, p. 2. 95. See Cunningham, “The Failure of the Christian Revolution,” in Cunningham et al., eds., Slant Manifesto: Catholics and the Left, pp. 102– 4. 96. Martin Shaw, “Christianity and Marxism,” Slant 19, February– March 1968. 97. See chapter 2 of this book for the linkages between Christian Socialism and the development of Catholic social philosophy through the contributions of the Chesterton brothers, Belloc, and others. 98. See letter from Maurice to Ludlow, quoted in K. S. Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England, p. 22. 99. Terry Eagleton, “The Roots of the Christian Crisis,” in Cunningham et al., Slant Manifesto: Catholics and the Left, p. 70. Yet the Slant activists repeated the putative errors of the Christian Socialists, since, like Charles Kingsley and company, they also gave impassioned rhetorical support to transformative social change but offered little in terms of how to advance it in a practical political way through the legislative process. 100. Ibid., p. 71. 101. Ibid., p. 74.

TEN The Quest for New Community and Culture 1. Middleton, The Language of Christian Revolution, p. 180. 2. Wicker, First the Political Kingdom, p. 31. 3. This was just one of many linkages between the early twentieth-century radicalism of the Chesterton-Belloc variety and the Catholic New Left. 4. Martin Redfern, “The Church, Sacrament of a Socialist Society,” in Cunningham et al., Slant Manifesto: Catholics and the Left, p. 176. The resonance between Redfern’s criticism of party politics and that outlined by Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton is striking. Belloc and Chesterton had asserted that a plutocratic conspiracy had turned parliamentary government into a sham fight between the major political parties of their day. Real power was in the hands of a small coterie beyond the sway of the electorate, who used the political parties as

436 Notes to Pages 252 – 253 window dressing to legitimize their ability to control affairs behind the scenes. Issues were manufactured periodically by the politicians “in order to give semblance of reality to their empty competition.” This “Party System” rendered the House of Commons null and the people of Britain impotent without a voice in political affairs (Chesteron and Belloc, The Party System, pp. 33– 34). 5. Martin Shaw, “Slant’s View of Politics,” The Clergy Review, November 1966, p. 901. 6. Quoted by Brian Wicker in “The Church: A Radical Community,” in Laurence Bright, O. P., and Simon Clements, The Committed Church (London, 1966), p. 257. 7. In 1967 Slant sponsored a follow-up symposium to the one discussed in The Committed Church, the results of which were published the following year as From Culture to Revolution, edited by Terry Eagleton and Brian Wicker. The participants were Catholic radicals and the secular New Left (notable here were Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall), who shared a mutual commitment to socialist revolution. The nature of their vision was Williams’s concept of a “common culture,” which they explored from the multiple angles of philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology. It was agreed that the only way to achieve their goal was in terms of “concrete revolutionary politics.” 8. The Catholic Left spilled a good deal of ink in writing about the necessity of revitalizing the liturgy, and Eagleton interpreted the liturgy from a socialist perspective in Slant articles. But not much was done in a practical or systematic way to advance the cause. Among the Catholic Left, it was Brian Wicker who achieved the most in writing about liturgical reform (see his Culture and Liturgy). Martin Redfern contended that Slant itself did not articulate a liturgical stance. The magazine did support the change from Latin to the vernacular, but Redfern could not recall liturgical reform being a major interest of any of the members of the editorial board. (Martin Redfern correspondence with author, 13 August 2011, JCC-BC.) Neil Middleton did remember that when Slant colleagues met at his home with either Father Laurence or Father Herbert, the Mass was celebrated around the kitchen table. (Neil Middleton correspondence with author, 16 August 2011, JCC-BC.) The main Slant “stand” on the liturgy, wrote Sharratt, was that its celebration in any form was intended to assert the bonds of a humanistic socialist community. The emphasis was never placed on ceremonial forms but rather was on the theological-political significance of the liturgy. (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 23 August 2011, JCC-BC.) 9. See J. D. Halloran, “Community in the Urban-Industrial Society,” in Cunningham et al., Slant Manifesto: Catholics and the Left, pp. 46– 59. Halloran’s sociological analysis, along with the juxtaposition of family (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft), was pushed further by Leo Pyle in “Vatican II and the Parish,” in Eagleton, Directions: Pointers for the Post-Conciliar Church. Pyle also drew on the sociological work of Wilmott and Young in highlighting the chal-

Notes to Pages 254 – 257

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lenges of recreating community in an industrial society. See P. Wilmott and M. Young, Family and Class in a London Suburb (London, 1960). It is notable that several writers of the Catholic Left drew heavily from the latest works in sociology, psychology, and literary criticism in developing their ideas about revolutionary social and political change. Eagleton, for example, wrote that “Peter Berger influenced us with his phenomenological sociology,” along with “R. D. Laing’s phenomenological anti-psychiatry.” He emphasized that his circle was also deeply influenced by the Andersonian New Left Review but perhaps even more so by the older, more humanistic/pacifist journal given focus by Stuart Hall, E. P. Thompson, and others before the Anderson takeover. “That broader, less rigorous socialist humanism,” he claimed, “was more hospitable to our concerns. In a sense, Slant was the Christian wing of the New Left.” (Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC.) 10. This argument was initially developed more fully in Wicker’s Culture and Liturgy. 11. The Catholic Left drew substantially on the works of Wittgenstein and Heidegger to advance their arguments for revising the language of the liturgy. See Terry Eagleton, The New Left Church (Baltimore, 1966), pp. 74– 84, and Fergus Kerr, O. P., “Language and Community,” New Blackfriars, November 1967. 12. Williams, Culture and Society, p. 301. 13. Quoted in Kerr, “Language and Community,” New Blackfriars, November 1967, p. 99. 14. Ibid., p. 104. 15. Wicker, “The Church: A Radical Community,” in Bright and Clements, The Committed Church, p. 260. 16. Wicker, “Eschatology and Politics,” in Eagleton and Wicker, From Culture to Revolution, p. 295. 17. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, reprinted in A. Giddens and D. Held, Classes, Power, and Conflict: Classical and Contemporary Debates (Berkeley, CA, 1982), pp. 13–14. 18. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York, 1967), p. 103. After examining over one hundred cases of psychological dysfunction, Laing and his associates decided that the experience and behavior labeled “schizophrenia” was “a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.” In short, the cultural conditions were so paradoxical and confusing that the individual had to find alternative forms of identity in order to survive. Laing thus concluded that it was the social system, not the individual extrapolated from it, that had to be the subject of study (p. 115). 19. Ibid., p. 119. 20. Lin Chun in her study of the British New Left points out that it was a loss that the movement did not pay sufficient attention to Laing’s contribution to their cause. Her criticism, however, would not apply to the Slant group, who

438 Notes to Pages 257– 261 certainly did give considerable play to Laing’s ideas as bolstering their own analysis of capitalism’s failings. See Chun, The British New Left, p. 117. 21. See Eagleton, The New Left Church, pp. 160– 63. 22. Ibid., p. 110. A more recent argument along these lines can be found in Garry Wills, Why Priests? The Real Meaning of the Eucharist (New York, 2013). 23. Leo Pyle was a much-respected scientist who gave his time and energies to promoting the Slant project. He lost his life in a mountain-climbing accident. Terry Eagleton dedicated his book Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009) to the memory of his friend Leo Pyle. 24. See Pyle, “Vatican II and the Parish,” in Eagleton, Directions, pp. 44– 46. 25. Ibid., p. 58. 26. Eagleton, The New Left Church, pp. 113–14. 27. Terry Eagleton, “Bodies and Language,” in The Body as Language, p. 12. 28. Terry Eagleton, “Priesthood and Leninism,” Slant 27, September 1969, p. 13. 29. Terry Eagleton, “Priesthood and Leninism,” in The Body as Language, p. 79. 30. Eagleton’s ideas on the clergy and revolution were first set forth in Slant 27 in September 1969 and later published as a chapter in his The Body as Language. According to Bernard Bergonzi, this book contains Eagleton’s last overtly Catholic writing. At some point after 1970 it appeared that Eagleton gave up on focusing on Catholicism for Marxism, although never having openly repudiated his religious faith. For more, see Bernard Bergonzi, “The Terry Eagleton Story,” in his The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth-Century Literature. Others have noted that Eagleton by this juncture had moved away from the early humanistic Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts, which had inspired the Catholic New Left, to the Marx of Louis Althusser. The Althusserian view emphasized the scientific rather than the humanistic as the core of Marx’s thinking, thus highlighting the centrality of class struggle as the shaping force in history. For more on this, see Simon Clarke et al., eds., One-Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and the Politics of Culture (New York, 1980). On the other hand, it can be argued that Eagleton’s subsequent journey from the Slant years defies facile categories of any kind. As he pointed out, subsequent books between The Body as Language (1970) and Reason, Faith, and Revolution (2009) have dealt with political theology (Sweet Violence, The Gatekeeper, Holy Terror). “I always valued the Slantite heritage,” Eagleton wrote, “and returned gradually to theology as I grew older, without ever having entirely left it. . . . What I believe now is pretty much what I believed when I was 15.” (Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC.) 31. McCabe’s ideas on the revolutionary role of the priesthood were expressed in an address given to the Interdenominational Study Conference sponsored by the Unity Committee of the Newman Association at Spode House in the spring of 1968. His comments on these matters were outlined by Francis McDonagh and Leo Pyle in “Structures of the Church,” The Tablet, 23 March 1968.

Notes to Pages 261– 264

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32. A more contemporary version of such triumphalism can be seen in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992). The essential “direction” in human history, argued Fukuyama, was propelled by the forces of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. He cited the collapse of Soviet communism and the dismantling of Bolshevik-dominated regimes in Eastern Europe as signposts of this historical trajectory. 33. Middleton, The Language of Christian Revolution, p. 176. 34. See Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York, 1966). Middleton was very impressed with Baran’s work; when he moved to Penguin Books, he published Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth in the Pelican list (1973) and set up a third printing of Monopoly Capital in 1973. (Neil Middleton correspondence with author, 12 February 2009, JCC-BC.) Where Marx had employed his analytical methods to understand the competitive capitalist system that developed in Britain, Baran and Sweezy drew on his model to examine capitalism’s move to a higher stage—that embodied in U. S. economic expansion after World War II, characterized by what they called “monopoly capitalism.” As opposed to Marx’s era, the typical economic units of today are no longer small firms in competition with each other and with limited industrial capacity in a homogeneous market, but rather large-scale enterprises producing a significant share of industrial output and thus able to control volume of output, prices, and investments—the attributes associated with monopolies. The first to see this connection between militarism and monopoly capitalism was Lenin himself in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Baran and Sweezy updated the observation and explicated its relevance to the post–World War II era. 35. Fergus Kerr, “Politics and Theology: Retrospect and Agenda,” New Blackfriars, August 1968, p. 578. 36. Neil Middleton, “Why Revolution: 1. Capitalism and Colonialism,” Slant 23, January 1969, p. 24. 37. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, p. 203. This “economic support” takes the form of two types of military aid: payment for maintaining the troops of the investor nation in the client state (the United States in the post-1945 world), and the provision of material and financial support for the client state. 38. The document originally appeared in Témoignage Chrétien on 31 August and was later published in translation by New Blackfriars in the December 1967 issue. The best known of the signatories was Helder Camara, archbishop of Recife, Brazil. Nine others came from Latin America and the rest from North Africa, the Middle and Far East, and Yugoslavia. 39. Patriarch Maximus IV at the Vatican Council, 28 September 1965. Quoted in “‘Gospel and Revolution’ by 16 Bishops of the 3rd World,” New Blackfriars, December 1967, p. 144. 40. Paragraph 17, ibid., p. 145. 41. Paragraph 20, ibid., p. 147.

440 Notes to Pages 264 – 268 42. Paragraph 22, ibid. 43. “Slants,” Slant 19, February– March 1968, p. 25. 44. “Comment,” New Blackfriars, July 1968. 45. Quoted by Francis McDonagh, introduction to Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings, p. 11. 46. See John Challenor, “Laurence Bright O. P.: A Trailer for Liberation Theology,” Renew: Newsletter of Catholics for a Changing Church, no. 122, June 2002. Challenor calls the reader’s attention here to Father Laurence’s twelve-volume Scripture Discussion Commentary (Sheed and Ward, 1969–1972), which was used as an influential resource for study groups. The historian Eugene McCarraher also considers Herbert McCabe a pioneer in the articulation of liberation theology and ranks him with James Cone, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Jurgen Moltmann, and Gustavo Gutiérrez. Yet he views McCabe as “a more incisive theorist of revolution because of his creative fidelity to orthodox Catholic theology.” McCarraher, “Herbert McCabe’s Revolutionary Faith,” Commonweal, 8 October 2010, p. 4. 47. Dom Helder Camara was nominated four times for the Nobel Peace Prize and had an excellent chance of winning, were it not for the intervention of high-ranking and influential sources in the Brazilian military. Camara’s advocacy of land reform and human rights in his impoverished North Brazilian diocese from 1964 to 1985 led to numerous death threats against him and the lasting enmity of the military government in power at the time. Once, when Camara was out of the country, his home was torn apart by machine gun bullets. 48. Dom Helder Camara, The Desert Is Fertile, trans. Dinah Livingstone (Maryknoll, NY, 1974), p. 3. 49. Dom Helder Camara, The Conversation of a Bishop: An Interview with José de Broucker (London, 1979), p. 173. 50. See Gustavo Gutiérrez, O. P., A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, NY, 1973). 51. Ibid., p. 26. 52. See Juan Luis Segundo, The Liberation of Theology (Maryknoll, NY, 1976). 53. Richard Shaull was an activist in the Democratic Party who, together with others, founded the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). Shaull outlined the goals of this organization at the 1968 Catholic Inter-American Cooperation Session in St. Louis. It was this presentation that New Blackfriars saw fit to publish in order to spread its message to a wider public. 54. Thomas C. Bruneau, writing in Commonweal (2 February 1968), declared, ”It is a simple fact that the Church’s teaching [liberation theology] is now the most radical body of thought in Brazil, and that certain Catholic leaders, among the hierarchy and the laity, are the most revolutionary figures in Brazilian society.” 55. A tragic but poignant example can be seen in the case of the American Jesuit James Francis Carney. The American priest was deeply influenced by Se-

Notes to Pages 268 – 269

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gundo’s Evolution and Guilt, which taught that “the revolutionary dialectic has to overcome the sin of conservatism in the Church.” Carney participated in guerrilla training of Marxist cadres and became a fighter himself. Inspired by the freedom promised in the idea of the Church as a group of autonomous communities, Carney and a number of his fellow Jesuits came to believe that anything was permitted as long as it furthered the concept of the new “people’s Church.” Father Carney’s ninety-man commando unit was wiped out in a battle with Honduran troops in September 1983. For the James Francis Carney story and other such Jesuits, see Malachi Martin, Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church (New York, 1987). 56. Richard Shaull, “A Theological Perspective on Human Liberation,” New Blackfriars, July 1968, p. 516. 57. At this point there were increasing numbers of influential Catholic thinkers who also recognized the imperative of merging their Christian faith and politics. “I believe that because God made us body and soul,” concluded the eminent Catholic writer Barbara Ward, “there is really no escape from involvement in politics.” Christians, she claimed, had the responsibility to create their own worlds and thus could not do so without being involved fully in human affairs. (From Barbara Ward, Poverty and Politics [London, 1968], as quoted in New Blackfriars, July 1968, p. 543.) 58. An interest in liberation theology did not go beyond liberal and leftwing Catholic circles. Dr. Deane William Ferm, for example, wrote to Peter Hebblethwaite asking what theologians and Church leaders thought about Third World liberation theology’s response to the needs of the poor and oppressed. “Most do not perceive Third World liberation theology at all,” responded Hebblethwaite, “because they don’t read it.” There were exceptions, he said, namely, the Catholic Institute of International Relations, George Gelber, and Francis McDonagh (of Slant). (Peter Hebblethwaite to Dr. Deane William Ferm, 15 April 1985, Orbis Books, Corres. O to Q, Hebblethwaite Papers, Burns Library, Boston College.) 59. Herbert McCabe, O. P., Law, Love and Language (London, 1968), p. 170. 60. Neil Middleton correspondence with author, 24 February 2009, JCC-BC. 61. A more recent account of how international programs to relieve poverty in the underdeveloped world work to further corporate profit (which very much corroborates the critique of imperialism put forth by liberations theologians) can be found in John Perkins, Confession of an Economic Hit Man (San Francisco, 2004). Perkins provides an insider’s perspective, based on his own personal employment, of how funds from the World Bank, the U. S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are manipulated by insiders (“Hit Men”) in such a way as to vastly increase the wealth of the “corporatocracy” of multinational companies in their endeavors to build a global capitalist empire.

442 Notes to Pages 269 – 271 62. The Haslemere Programme outlined a series of ten proposals for which the group intended to campaign. These were designed to promote the amelioration of poverty and political exploitation by the wealthy nations in the developing world. Herbert McCabe provided a summary of the Heslemere Declaration in the index of Law, Love and Language. 63. Neil Middleton correspondence with author, 24 February 2009, JCCBC. The other well-known archbishop of the Left was Thomas Roberts, and he generally preferred and assumed a low-key public profile. 64. Julian Filokowski, director of the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development (CAFOD), Britain’s leading Catholic charity, was directly influenced by Xavier Gorostiaga and went to Central America partly through meeting him in St. Edmund’s. Father Jim Trainor, also from St. Edmund’s, left for Guatemala and stayed there with Gorostiaga’s group. Xavier Gorostiaga himself worked with the CAFOD while in the United Kingdom. (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 9 September 2009, JCC-BC.) 65. Quoted in Antonia Darder, “The Politics of Biculturalism: Culture and Difference in the Formation of Warriors for Gringostroika and the New Mestizas,” in Antonia Darder, ed., Culture and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Bicultural Experience in the United States (Santa Clara, CA, 1995), p. 8. 66. A further historical elaboration of Gorostiaga’s argument of how international corporate capitalism cripples the self-sufficient agricultural systems of traditional societies can be found in Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins, “Why Can’t People Feed Themselves?” in Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity (New York, 1978). These scholars argue that current agricultural “underdevelopment” and the “hunger crisis” are linked to the ongoing historical processes of colonialism, which have created conditions of dependency by undermining traditional subsistence-agriculture systems with plantations and cash cropping, thereby subjugating Third World populations to the vicissitudes of international market pricing. 67. Sharratt’s reluctance to broach the Slant project with Gorostiaga seems to have been related to his belief that the Jesuit was far too “seriously experienced and committed” to be concerned with the English Catholic Left’s neophyte efforts. (Sharratt correspondence with author, 9 September 2009, JCC-BC.) 68. See an interview with one of its founders, Father Gonxalo Arroyo, S. J., in New Blackfriars, November 1974. 69. Peter Hebblethwaite, who was sympathetic to liberation theology on some levels (his wife is currently Latin American correspondent for The Tablet), found Marxism an impossible fit with Christianity. Christianity, he insisted, was not so much synthesized by the CFS as used and subordinated to Marxist ends: “When the crunch comes, it is Christianity that has to go.” (“Christians for Socialism,” Peter Hebblethwaite Papers, Box 4 [articles], Burns Library, Boston College.) 70. Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 17 February 2009, JCC-BC.

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71. Sharratt decided that he would be of little help to Gorostiaga’s in-country project, if only, he recalls, because of an utter incapacity to learn the local Quiche language. That Sharratt was no longer a believing Christian by then was also a decisive factor. (Bernard Sharatt correspondence with author, 9 September 2009, JCC-BC.) 72. These sentiments were expressed to the author by both Christopher Calnan and Bernard Sharratt. 73. Terry Eagleton, “New Theology,” The Tablet, 11 May 1974, pp. 449– 50. 74. Bernard Sharratt, “Revolutionary Intersections?” The Newman, July 1970. 75. Angela Cunningham correspondence with author, 15 May 2009, JCC-BC.

ELEVEN Jesus and Marx 1. Herbert McCabe, “Priesthood and Revolution,” Slant 27, September 1969, p. 9. 2. Martin Redfern became more heavily involved in the publication of the book than he had intended. He was obliged to rewrite an unsatisfactory original translation, and he claims that this influenced his own thoughts on the subject. It was Redfern’s view that Marxist analysis “was not only very useful but also, in its main lines, indispensable, even if some of the hard Marxist positions couldn’t be taken uncritically.” (Martin Redfern correspondence with author, April 2009, JCC-BC.) 3. In both German and Dutch the word used by Marx in this context is the same: geistig and geestelijk, respectively, meaning spiritual or intellectual. The ambiguity is not adequately rendered in English. (Bernard Delfgaauw, The Young Marx [New York, 1967], p. 2.) 4. Karl Marx, Letter to P.V. Annenkov, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow, 1956), p. 47, as quoted in Delfgaauw, The Young Marx, p. 3. 5. Karl Marx, “Kritik der hegelschen Statsphilosophie,” in Die Frühschriften, ed. Siegfried Landshut (Stuttgart, 1953), p. 118, as quoted in Delfgaauw, The Young Marx, p. 29. 6. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore (London, 1963), pp. 43– 44, as quoted in Delfgaauw, The Young Marx, p. 30. Delfgaauw points out that W. Banning in his biography of Marx noted that he wrote, “religion is the opium of the people, not for the people” (Banning, Karl Marx [Utrecht, 1960], p. 64). 7. Martin Redfern, “The Church, Sacrament of a Socialist Society,” in Cunningham et al., eds., Slant Manifesto: Catholics and the Left, p. 171. 8. It is noteworthy that the official texts in the Soviet Union largely deemphasized the early Marx. The Catholic Left recommended reading the French

444 Notes to Pages 277– 280 Marxists, especially Roger Garaudy, and the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, who was himself trained as a Dominican. Both were leading figures promoting a Marxist-Christian dialogue. 9. Redfern, “The Church, Sacrament of a Socialist Society,” in Slant Manifesto: Catholics and the Left, p. 153. 10. Redfern cited the Dutch theologian Piet Schoonenberg, S. J., who asserted: “Theology stands in history, not in eternity. . . . Theologians who thought they wrote for all time . . . were historically conditioned.” We try to remain faithful to the Gospel, wrote Schoonenberg, by translating it for our own times. Piet Schoonenberg, Man and Sin (London, 1965), p. 192. 11. Eamon Duffy, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 12. Eagleton, The New Left Church, pp. 63– 65. 13. Terry Eagleton, “Slant: Intentions and Achievements,” The Clergy Review, July 1970, pp. 553– 54. 14. Herbert McCabe, “Priesthood and Revolution,” Slant 27, September 1969, p. 9. 15. Brian Wicker associated this sin with what the New Testament writers might call “bondage to the principalities and powers of the world.” (Wicker, First the Political Kingdom, p. 73.) 16. Redfern, in Slant Manifesto: Catholics and the Left, p. 169. 17. J. M. Cameron, “The New Left in Britain,” in The Night Battle (London, 1963), pp. 72– 73. 18. Robert H. Craig, Religion and Radical Poliics: An Alternative Christian Tradition in the United States (Philadelphia, 1992), p. 228. 19. Oestreicher, The Christian Marxist Dialogue, p. 26. 20. See Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York, 1932). This book established high standards for Christian social thought as well as for ethics in America during the interwar years. However, Niebuhr was keenly aware of Marxism’s totalitarian tendencies, which came to full life under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Although he appreciated Marxism’s social analysis, he faulted Marx’s political thinking for its failure to recognize the misuses of power. Such an ideology that had the potential for such abuse of political power could never be accepted by Christians. 21. Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York, 1979), p. 113. 22. Niebuhr, quoted in Dale W. Brown, The Christian Revolutionary (Grand Rapids, MI, 1971), p. 97. 23. Ibid. 24. A good brief discussion of Tillich’s contribution to the religious socialist movement and his appreciation of the prophetic dimension of the early Marx can be found in Terrence McCoughey, “Protestantism and Marxism,” Grille, no. 2, Autumn 1968.

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25. See the essay “Christianity and Marxism,” in Paul Tillich, Political Expectations (New York, 1971), pp. 89– 96. A good discussion of Niebuhr’s and Tillich’s importance for the Christian-Marxist dialogue can be found in Paul T. Jersild, “The Christian-Marxist Encounter in the West,” in Wayne Stumme, ed., Christians and the Many Faces of Marxism (Minneapolis, 1984). 26. A informal dialogue between Marxists and Christians in a university setting began in the late 1950s in Czechoslovakia, Italy, West Germany, and France. 27. Joseph Blenkinsopp, “Christianity as a Revolutionary Movement,” The Newman, January 1968, p. 33. 28. Joseph Blenkinsopp, Celibacy, Ministry, Church (London, 1969), p. 126. 29. Quoted in José Porfirio Miranda, Marx and the Bible (New York, 1971), p. xiv. Nell-Breuning’s statements on Marx’s influence were somewhat ambivalent. In an essay entitled “Catholische Marx-Renaissance?” Stimmen der Zeit, Munich, January 1969, he rejected the view that Catholic social teaching owed a particular debt to Marx. The Thomist juridical review of property, he asserted, had a more radical “demythologizing” effect on the Catholic position on property than did Marx’s. On the other hand, Nell-Breuning qualified this assessment by saying that the position of Gustav Gundlach, S. J., the author of many of the social encyclicals of Pius XII, which greatly enriched Catholic teaching through their perspicacious insights, could have been taken decades earlier from Marx himself “if Catholic social thinking had been more open-minded and less tied to outdated concepts” (“Review of Reviews,” Herder Correspondence, February 1969, p. 63). 30. MacIntyre was only twenty-three years old at the time. Afterward he served on the editorial boards of Universities and Left Review and International Socialism. Sometime later he gave up on Christianity and became a Marxist. Still later he became critical of both. 31. In its origins, wrote MacIntyre, Christianity strove to abolish exploitation and was thus revolutionary. It only became otherworldly when attempts at transformation failed. Thereafter, hopes for the good society were transferred to another world. In this sense it places far away the transformation offered by Marxism (Marxism: An Interpretation, pp. 79– 80). 32. Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (Notre Dame, IN, 1984), p. 142. 33. It should be pointed out that Vatican Council II refrained from any renewed condemnation of Marxism. 34. Robert Adolfs, “Church and Communism,” in Oestreicher, The Christian Marxist Dialogue, p. 39. 35. The catalyst for this was Khrushchev’s “secret speech” attacking Stalin on the night of February 24– 25 at the 1956 Twentieth Party Congress and the subsequent revolution against Soviet-controlled rule in Hungary. For more on such matters, see Leopold Labedz, Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas (London, 1962).

446 Notes to Pages 284 – 285 36. Quoted by Harvey Cox, “The Marxist-Christian Dialogue: What Next?” in Herbert Aptheker, ed., Marxism and Christianity: A Symposium (New York, 1968), pp. 20– 21. A good explanation of how this affected the British Communist Party can be found in John Lewis’s essay in James Klugmann, ed., Dialogue of Christianity and Marxism (London, 1968). 37. Another eminent but unorthodox Marxist who began exploring connections between communism and Christianity and thereby proved influential in promoting dialogue was the German philosopher Ernst Bloch. Although he remained an atheist, Bloch was deeply impressed with the prophetic and apocalyptic messages of the New Testament, insights into which he gained from researching Christian mysticism and messianic thinkers. This resulted in his publication of a biography of the radical Anabaptist Thomas Muntzer, who advocated the creation of a simple communistic society of the faithful. Bloch taught at the University of Leipzig, but his revisionist writings were censored by Communist Party officials. He gained political asylum in West Germany and ended his career as a professor at the University of Tübingen. See his On Karl Marx, trans. John Maxwell (New York, 1971); Man on His Own, trans. E. G. Ashton (New York, 1970); Atheism in Christianity, trans. J. T. Swann (New York, 1972); and A Philosophy of the Future, trans. John Cunning (New York, 1970). 38. The Paulusgesellschaft as of the late 1960s claimed a membership of over six hundred intellectuals from around the world (James Colaianni, The Catholic Left [Philadelphia, 1968], p. 92). There were also a number of theologians during these years who regarded themselves as Marxists and supported Marxist political parties (most notably, Giulio Giraudi of Italy), as well as lay organizations such as the Chilean Christians for Socialism, which backed the Marxist government of Salvador Allende. Christians for Socialism was strong in Italy, France, and Spain and included Catholics and Protestants. 39. Novak at this point in his many theological peregrinations saw the increasing secularism of the 1960s as an opportunity to revitalize religion. There was little to fear from Marxism in this respect, claimed Novak, because it could serve as a pragmatic bridge to Christianity. Both he and Baum saw the need for human action to end suffering by overturning the forces of oppression. See Michael Novak, A Time to Build (New York, 1967), and Belief and Unbelief: A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge (New York, 1965). 40. Gregory Baum, ed., The Twentieth Century: A Theological Overview (Maryknoll, NY, 1999), p. 184. 41. See Henri de Lubac, Catholicisme: Les aspects sociaux du dogme (Paris, 1953), and M.-D. Chenu, Pour une theologie du travail (Paris, 1955), as cited in Baum, The Twentieth Century, p. 178. 42. See Johannes B. Metz, Theology of the World, trans. William GlenDoepl (New York, 1969). The genesis of a “new” political theology has its origins in Germany after World War II and the shock of Auschwitz. Those of us who came to theology after the war, wrote Moltmann, were “painfully aware of hav-

Notes to Pages 286 – 290

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ing to live in the shadow of the Holocaust perpetrated against the Jews” (Jurgen Moltmann, God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology [Minneapolis, 1999], p. 42). These theologians associated the name Auschwitz not only with moral and political categories but also with a crisis of Christian faith. Why was there so little Christian resistance against such evil? Was religion a private affair with nothing to do with politics? 43. Metz, Theology of the World, pp. 22– 23. 44. See Dorothee Soelle, Political Theology (Philadelphia, 1974), and Jurgen Moltmann, “Towards a Political Hermeneutic of the Gospel,” in Religion, Revolution, and the Future, trans. M. Douglas Meeks (New York, 1969). 45. A brief history of political theology can be found in Charles Davis, Theology and Political Society (Cambridge, 1980). Davis outlined the distinction between an earlier political theology, which used religion for political ends (a recent example being the writings of pro-Nazi Carl Schmitt), and the newer form as outlined by Metz. Metz was aware of the ambiguity of the name and the negative connotations associated with its historical legacy. The political theology of the old style, wrote Davis, can best be understood as a “sacralization of politics,” whereas the new political theology “is a secularization of theology” (p. 17). Jurgen Moltmann also discusses Carl Schmitt’s admiration for the power of the state and his paganization of it. See Moltmann, God for a Secular Society, pp. 39– 42. 46. See Gregory Baum, The Social Imperative (New York, 1979), pp. 157– 60. 47. Ibid., p. 167. 48. Roger Garaudy and Quentin Lauer, S. J., A Christian-Marxist Dialogue (Garden City, NY, 1968), p. 23. 49. Roger Garaudy, From Anathema to Dialogue: A Marxist Challenge to the Christian Churches, trans. Luke O’Neill (New York, 1966), p. 26. 50. Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, pp. 191– 92. 51. For Garaudy’s recognition of Teilhard’s opening the door for dialogue, see his “The Meaning of Life and History in Marx and Teilhard de Chardin: Teilhard’s Contribution to the Dialogue between Christians and Marxists,” in Association of Great Britain and Ireland, Evolution, Marxism and Christianity: Studies in the Teilhardian Synthesis (London, 1963), pp. 58– 72. 52. Peter Hebblethwaite translated and wrote an introduction to Machovec’s Jesus for Atheists, in which he had high praise for the Marxist philosopher’s open-minded approach to opening dialogue with Christians. This book, he claimed, would help powerfully “to create a spiritual atmosphere in which change is possible” (p. xi). See Peter Hebblethwaite Papers, Box 4 Articles, PH 7 KC 65 (7– 8, 15), Burns Library, Boston College. 53. Nothing symbolized more poignantly the political thaw between Christians and Marxists at this juncture than the appearance at Marienbad of Dolores Ibárruri, the legendary anti-Franquist and communist firebrand known as “La Pasionaria.” The comrades who fought on La Pasionaria’s side in the Spanish Civil War must have been shocked when she made a plea for dialogue with Catholicism.

448 Notes to Pages 290 – 293 54. The Czech philosopher Milan Machovec, whose thinking along these lines paralleled Garaudy’s, stated at the Paulusgesellschaft’s international conference at Marienbad that Marx’s atheism was opposed to theism only insofar as it led to mystification. “Genuine Marxist atheism,” he claimed, “is not dogmatism turned upside down. The ‘non-existence’ of God is a methodological need, not a dogma.” (Quoted by Peter Hebblethwaite, S. J., in “Last Week at Marienbad,” The Tablet, 6 May 1967, p. 494.) 55. Roger Garaudy, “Christians and Marxists at Herrenchiemsee,” Herder Correspondence, August 1966, p. 246. It was pointed out at these conferences that the Christian criticisms of integrist Marxism in power (the rigid party dictatorship of the Soviet system imposed on the Eastern Bloc) were being expressed openly and tacitly among the Marxists themselves (e.g., Garaudy, Mury, and Goldmann in France, Schaff and Kolakowski in Poland, Bloch and Havemann in Germany, Lukacs and Marcus in Hungary, Lombardo-Radice and Luporini in Italy). The point made by the Catholic participants was that, like the Marxist revisionists, progressive theologians with the help of the Council were struggling to overcome their own integrist traditions by finding the way back to Christianity’s origins. 56. Moltmann, Religion, Revolution, and the Future, p. 65. 57. This was further substantiated in the Marxist writings of Ernst Bloch, Leszek Kolakowski, Robert Kalidova, and others. 58. Stage l: Judaic and Christian teachings liberated man from pagan bondage and thus enabled him to think for himself; stage 2: the freedom of church from empire; stage 3: the freedom of the layman and freedom of the churches within the Church (the Reformation); stage 4: the liberty of individual conscience, a tendency toward democracy but limited to Christians alone; stage 5: acknowledgment of human rights in general to the Western world; and stage 6: a limited expansion of these freedoms to the property-owning classes of Europe’s whole population. (See George Vass, S. J., “Last April in Marienbad: 1. The Christians,” Slant 18, December 1967– January 1968, pp. 9–10.) For a more complete explication, see Jurgen Moltmann, “History of Revolutions for Freedom,” in his Religion, Revolution, and the Future, trans. M. Douglas Meeks (New York, 1969). 59. For a fuller discussion of Metz’s and Moltmann’s contributions to these dialogues, see Vass, “Last April in Marienbad,” Slant 18, December 1967– January 1968; Peter Hebblethwaite, S. J., “More Talking with Marxists,” The Month, June 1967; and Peter Hebblethwaite, The Christian-Marxist Dialogue: Beginnings, Present Status, and Beyond (London, 1977). 60. See Giulio Girardi, Marxism and Christianity (Dublin, 1968), p. 204. 61. See Garaudy, “Christians and Marxists at Herrenchiemsee,” Herders Correspondence, August 1966. 62. From Hebblethwaite, “Last Week at Marienbad,” The Tablet, 6 May 1967, pp. 494– 95.

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63. Brian Wicker, “Justice, Peace and Dominicans, 1216–1999: VIII—Slant, Marxism and the English Dominicans,” New Blackfriars, October 1999, p. 436. 64. For a discussion of how the dialogue in Britain was carried out at the popular level, see Robert Nowell, “Grassroots Dialogue,” The Tablet, 27 May 1967. Nowell describes here the first public meeting aimed at fostering better understanding between Christians and Marxists and chaired by the eminent theologian, Anglican bishop Dr. William Chadwick. The gathering took place at Ilford and drew over one hundred enthusiastic trade unionists and teachers. Those in attendance hoped to encourage the formation of other groups of Christians and communists to explore commonalities of thinking and what might be done to advance social justice and peace. One issue that arose time and again by speakers from the audience was how to stop the fighting in Vietnam. Virtually all the participants—communist and Christian alike—were scandalized by Cardinal Francis Spellman’s bellicose 1966 Christmas sermon to American troops in Vietnam, where he praised soldiers for their fighting spirit and claimed that nothing short of victory was permissible. The cardinal was one of President Lyndon Johnson’s most vociferous supporters of the war in Vietnam, essentially seeing the conflict as not merely a threat to U. S. security but also a moral crusade against communism. As the war dragged on, Spellman made a public display of blessing bombers and machine guns. When Johnson asked Spellman and Billy Graham at a luncheon what he should do next to defeat the Vietcong, Graham was uncomfortably silent. Spellman without hesitation urged the president, “Just bomb them.” (Marshall Frady, Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness [Boston, 1979], p. 429.) 65. Paul Klugmann, “Dialogue between Christianity and Marxism,” Marxism Today, September 1967, p. 288. 66. Giles Hibbert was on very friendly terms with James Klugmann and Jack Dunman of the Communist Party. He was perhaps one of the greatest advocates of the Christian-Marxist dialogue among the Dominicans. Hibbert, however, had no time for Distributism and once told Fergus Kerr that he was a Leninist. (Fergus Kerr, O. P., correspondence with author, 13 September 2011, JCC-BC.) 67. See Adrian Cunningham, “The December Group: Terry Eagleton and the New Left Church,” in The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 1 (1991). 68. Quoted in Maurice Reckitt, Maurice to Temple (London, 1947), p. 151. 69. John Lewis, “Dialogue between Christianity and Marxism,” Marxism Today, October 1967, p. 310. 70. See chapter 2 of this book. 71. John Lewis, “The Dialogue between Christianity and Marxism,” Marxism Today, March 1966, p. 71. It is interesting to note that Americans played virtually no role in efforts to promote an international Christian-Marxist dialogue. Indeed, American Catholics were not especially moved, at least in terms of any

450 Notes to Pages 296 – 300 philosophical integration in their social thinking, by the notion of examining Marxism and other radical approaches to social change. An explanation for such insouciance perhaps relates to the deep-seated fear and animosity in American culture for anything associated with socialism, let alone Marxism. (For more on this, see Patrick N. Allitt, “Catholic Anti-Communism,” Catholicity, 4 April 2009.) The American Catholic hierarchy was also comparatively conservative on doctrinal matters and never seems to have exhibited any deep appreciation of the social encyclicals. In some instances there was evidence of a clear misunderstanding of the purpose of papal encyclicals. For example, the editors of the Jesuit journal America were not only singularly unmoved by Pacem in Terris but believed that the document precluded a dialogue with Marxism. The editors criticized the American Communist Party’s interest in discussing the encyclical as a sinister effort to “turn the papal letter to the advantage of international communism.” (See America, 9 November 1963.) 72. See John Cumming, “Garden or Wilderness: Georg Lukacs and the Novel,” Slant 7, February– March 1966. 73. Introduction to Aptheker, Marxism and Christianity: A Symposium, p. xi. 74. Terry Eagleton, “Faith and Revolution,” New Blackfriars, April 1971, pp. 160– 63. 75. Terry Eagleton, “Why We Are Still in the Church,” Slant 14, April– May 1967, p. 28. 76. Brian Wicker, “Sincerity, Authenticity and God,” New Blackfriars, May 1976, p. 187. Wicker defined sincerity as a condition in which a person’s interior and exterior lives are in harmony. Authenticity he defined as a condition in which what a person does corresponds to the demands of his historical and moral situation. For a Christian, both sincerity and authenticity are obligatory if he is to live up to human potential. It was only God, wrote Wicker, who could see “from outside history how the parallel paths of sincerity and authenticity converge in an ultimate future” (p. 202). 77. McCabe, Law, Love and Language, pp. 168– 69. 78. Laurence Bright, “Christian and Marxist,” in Klugmann and Oestreicher, What Kind of Revolution?, p. 124. 79. See Hebblethwaite, The Christian-Marxist Dialogue, p. 110. 80. Terry Eagleton, “Slant: Intentions and Achievements,” The Clergy Review, July 1970, p. 553. 81. See Denys Turner, “Morality is Marxism,” Parts I and II, New Blackfriars, February and March 1973; “Can a Christian Be a Marxist?” New Blackfriars, June 1975; and “Marxism, Christianity and Morality: Replies to Francis Barker and Brian Wicker,” New Blackfriars, April 1977. 82. Francis Barker, “The Morality of Knowledge and the Disappearance of God,” New Blackfriars, September 1976, p. 414. 83. Quoted by Hebblethwaite, The Christian-Marxist Dialogue, p. 36.

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84. Ibid., p. 37. 85. “The Girardi Case,” Herder Correspondence, February 1970, p. 53.

TWELVE

Charles Davis and the McCabe Affair

1. Charles Davis, A Question of Conscience (New York, 1967), p. 75. 2. “Comment,” New Blackfriars, February l967. McCabe and others were particularly disturbed by Cardinal Spellman’s widely reported 1966 Christmas Eve sermon where he called the U. S. involvement in Vietnam a “war for civilization” and where “less than victory is inconceivable.” McCabe’s careful reading of the views of Thomas Aquinas and of just war theory made it clear in his mind that the Vietnam conflict was a sin against Christ. McCabe wrote Law, Love and Language (1968) during the Vietnam War and was especially critical of the indiscriminate use of napalm and other horrific weapons in the killing of innocent civilians. 3. See, for example, Neil Middleton’s response to McCabe’s editorial in his “Overcoming Corruption,” New Christian, 16 November 1967. 4. Also in attendance at the wedding was Bernard Sharratt. Since he was still a seminarian at that point, Sharratt was summoned to Liverpool and interviewed by the rector of Upholland, who told him that Cardinal Heenan was furious and wanted to know how Sharratt justified attending the wedding of a “heretic.” (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 17 February 2009, JCCBC.) This episode was symptomatic of the pressures that the English hierarchy were prepared to bring on what they considered to be the out-of-control Left. 5. Simon Clements and Monica Lawlor, The McCabe Affair: Evidence and Comment (London, 1967), p. 18. Middleton at Sheed and Ward made certain that this book could be published in double-quick time. (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 17 February 2009, JCC-BC.) 6. From the Catholic Herald, 10 February 1967, as quoted in Clements and Lawlor, The McCabe Affair, pp. 20– 22. 7. The organizers of this effort were Brian Wicker, Dr. John Bryden, Monica Lawlor, Oliver Pratt, Philip Daniel, and Neil Middleton, among others. 8. McCabe was not reinstated at New Blackfriars until some three years later, in 1970. He then began his comments section in typical pugnacious style: “as I was saying before I was so oddly interrupted” (“Comment,” October 1970). McCabe was later wryly amused by Sharratt’s title for an article he wrote for New Blackfriars: “Corruption Begins at Home” (February 1971). (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 17 February 2009, JCC-BC.) McCabe’s dissident voice was not silenced, and from there he was brave enough to criticize the errant deviation of what he considered the orthodox Catholic tradition by the Vatican’s ban on contraception in Humane Vitae and strictures against the ordination of women. “We need institutional channels,” wrote McCabe, through which people

452 Notes to Pages 306 – 307 can articulate modern and dissenting views. New Blackfriars had tried to provide a channel for fifty years, a “meeting place for different and sometimes conflicting insights into the ‘theological articulation of contemporary experience.’” 9. This was done on very short notice and included people well beyond the subscription list of New Blackfriars. The magazine had a small circulation, not at all reflective of its influence, consisting of roughly two thousand subscribers, and most of those were Americans. McCabe at this point was in the Oxford priory in St. Giles, where he had the full support of all the friars, including the much more conservative Cornelius Ernst. None of the Catholic Left disagreed with McCabe’s protest of the Church’s corruption, most of which was directed at the undoing of whatever was promised at Vatican Council II. (Neil Middleton correspondence with author, 24 February 2009, JCC-BC.) 10. All this, claimed The Tablet, was partly a product of the “confusion of mind” generated by the Vatican Council and the current fashion to oppose and denounce authority. The hope is that the Church would recover its confidence and show that neither the Holy See nor its national hierarchies “can be pushed around.” (”Fair Play All Around,” 4 March 1967, p. 229.) The right-wing Bellocian devotee, Father Brocard Sewell, O. P., tried to play down the Davis apostasy by making the curious claim that he was not all that important as a theologian and thus hardly worth such fuss. (Neil Middleton, “Slant on Davis,” Slant 13, March 1967, p. 2.) 11. What the Catholic Left meant by “corrupt” was more pointedly defined by Neil Middleton in a letter to the New Christian: “Let us say that by it we mean a state of affairs within the Church’s organization, intellectual life, teaching or action, which is so removed from the life of its members in their secular societies that reconciliation of the two becomes difficult or impossible. . . . many of us who use the word do so with meaning of this sort in mind.” (“Letters,” New Christian, 23 March 1967, p. 15.) It was much easier for lay members of the Catholic Left to engage in more blunt, even inflammatory rhetoric in making their case for transforming the Church than it was for the clergy, who did have institutional responsibilities for teaching the faithful. Yet, there was no evidence at the time of McCabe’s disciplining that there were any substantial differences between the lay and clerical leftist elements with respect to how far one could go in demanding revolutionary changes before becoming apostate. In later years, some of the key activists with Slant would leave the Church, but before, during, and after the McCabe affair there appeared to be a prevailing ideological and programmatic consensus within the Slant circle regarding the issues under review. 12. Trevor Beeson, “Westminster Free-for-all,” New Christian, 23 March 1967. 13. Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC. Christopher Calnan felt the same way. McCabe’s refusal to be pushed out of the Church, he believed, stimulated a number of Catholics beyond leftist circles to

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become more actively engaged in matters of the faith. I remember being at a Newman Society “teach in,” at which Herbert spoke, wrote Calnan, and the “atmosphere was electric and the impact of the whole McCabe affair had a radicalising effect on a lot of young middle-class professional Catholics.” (Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 8 June 2009, JCC-BC.) 14. Cardinal Heenan was especially displeased with Middleton’s refusal to allow censorship as head of Sheed and Ward. Middleton had long stopped asking for “Nihil Obstats” unless a clerical author really wanted one. The Slant group found Heenan’s attack in the Westminster Cathedral sermon mildly exciting at the time but were pleased that they were at least not being ignored. (Neil Middleton correspondence with author, 29 February 2009, JCC-BC.) There was a rumor at the time that one or two bishops had inquired whether they could close down the Slant operation. This was not possible because the journal was a lay-run operation, and any clerics involved tried to keep a discreetly low profile. (Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC.) 15. Martin Redfern correspondence with author, May 2009, JCC-BC. 16. Clements and Lawlor, The McCabe Affair, p. 132. 17. Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 28 September 2009, JCC-BC. 18. Most of those working with Slant were certain that it was Cardinal Heenan and his Vatican allies who ordered McCabe’s dismissal as editor of New Blackfriars. For the most part, members of the religious orders, particularly the Dominicans, Benedictines, and Oratorians, were independent of the English hierarchy and could largely ignore them. But this was not the case with the diocesan clergy. The Catholic Left claimed that Charles Davis was driven from the Church in good part by the policies of Heenan, as were a number of other clergy within the Slant circle who subsequently became laicized. (Neil Middleton correspondence with author, 12 February 2009, JCC-BC.) Besides Davis, another priest who endured pressure from the English Catholic establishment’s antiliberal campaign was the highly regarded Father Anthony Kenny. He was from the Liverpool middle classes, but his ministry in that city made him very sensitive to working-class issues, especially the matter of inadequate housing . His sympathy for more aggressive social action brought him into contact with the Slant movement. Kenny felt pressure from the bishops for his views on nuclear weapons, since he seemed to violate the principle that “priests should keep out of politics.” To have an attachment to the cause of nuclear disarmament,” wrote Kenny, “was something regarded as eccentric and dangerous, characteristic of unreliable figures like the Dominicans.” (Anthony Kenny, A Path from Rome: An Autobiography [London, 1985], p. 169.) Kenny insisted that the use of nuclear weapons was immoral and contrary to Christian just war principles, and he felt shut out of the political arena by not being able to express his views. Both the Catholic Gazette and The Tablet, for instance, refused to publish

454 Notes to Pages 310 – 312 his letters. The only journal that would freely air Kenny’s opinions was The Clergy Review under Charles Davis. (The bishops, it seemed, did not mind if priests published in journals that were only read by other clergy.) Kenny insisted in an article written in Davis’s journal in April 1962 that public morality is as much within the sphere of religion as private morality. Those prelates who criticized clergy for writing on the evil of nuclear weapons, he noted, did not hesitate to preach and write against communism, which is clearly a political system. Walter Stein asked Kenny to contribute to a second edition of Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience. He wrote the postscript, asserting that no Catholic should support the NATO nuclear deterrence policy and that it should be abandoned “as a moral imperative” (p. 165). Kenny and Archbishop Roberts (who was beyond the control of Cardinal Heenan) were the only Catholic clergy to contribute to Stein’s book, although by the time of publication of the second edition, Kenny had left the priesthood over matters concerning the faith. He moved on to have a distinguished career as a philosopher and pro-vice chancellor of the University of Oxford. 19. Michael Dummett, “How Corrupt Is the Church?” New Blackfriars, August 1965. 20. Michael Dummett, “What Is Corruption?” New Blackfriars, June 1967. 21. See Rosemary Houghton and Cardinal Heenan, Dialogue: The State of the Church Today (New York, 1967). 22. Ibid., p. 118. 23. Ibid., p. 119. 24. Ibid., pp. 143– 44. Such battles between conservative Catholics and their leftist interlocutors can take ironic turns. It seems, for example, that Terry Eagleton and Cardinal Heenan were cousins: “We maintained,” wrote Eagleton, “a tacit agreement that both of us should ignore this mutually embarrassing affinity.” (Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC. 25. Clements and Lawlor, The McCabe Affair, pp. 172– 73. 26. Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC. 27. Eamon Duffy, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. McCabe’s drinking companion Bernard Sharratt was immune to his “Irish Republican mode” as expressed in his pub singing of Irish rebel songs: it “left me stone cold and I would normally slide out when he started.” (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 17 February 2009, JCC-BC.) 28. Had the principles of governance suggested by the Council been carried out, the process of dealing with McCabe would have been handled at the local level, where there was a clearer understanding of the issues. It would not have been adjudicated by Rome. 29. “The McCabe Affair,” New Christian, 23 February 1967, p. 7. 30. Walter Stein, “An Explanation,” New Blackfriars, June 1967, pp. 493– 94. 31. Because of Wicker’s highly respected writings on the Catholic New Left, he was recruited by Christopher Driver, the features editor of the Guardian,

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to write a regular column without restrictions on whatever he thought appropriate. Wicker wrote a monthly piece for the paper from 1963 through 1968. After the Davis affair, Wicker focused more of his attention on the Guardian column and only ended this association after 1968, when he went to Michigan to teach. Wicker, however, always remained a supporter of the Catholic New Left. His involvement with Slant began early on when he was asked by Laurence Bright, who was in Cambridge with him at that time, to offer some sympathetic but critical help to the group of Cambridge undergraduates who were in the process of getting the paper started. Wicker was an important link between the Catholic Leftists and secular writers, having been friends with Stuart Hall, editor of the New Left Review, while both were at Birmingham University in the 1960s and 1970s. He also knew Richard Hoggart when he was a professor at Birmingham. Hoggart introduced Hall to the university and created the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) for him. The Centre was a seminal influence on a generation of students and academics in the United Kingdom. Both Hoggart and Hall, wrote Wicker, were sympathetic to the Catholic New Left in a theoretical way, although neither was a Christian. (Brian Wicker correspondence with author, 5 December 2008, JCC-BC.) 32. Martin Redfern, “Slants,” Slant 14, April– May 1967. For coverage of the student protest movement at the London School of Economics, see Slant issue 13, February– March 1967, and issue 15, June– July 1967. 33. See New Blackfriars, March 1968, p. 333. 34. Laurence Bright, “Slants,” Slant 13, February– March 1967, p. 25. 35. Hans Küng, “A Question to the Church,” The Month, November 1967, p. 261. 36. Davis was wrong, noted Küng, in thinking that the traditional structures of the Roman Church would collapse and that the future would belong to small church communities privileging lay power. But he was correct in his prediction that countless clerical and lay men and women would leave the Church because of its authoritarian leadership. They have been a considerable loss to the Church, as these people in their disaffiliation have continued productive careers expressing spiritual energies in new freedoms denied them by the hierarchy. For more on Küng’s thoughts on Davis and his subsequent career, see his “A Radical Response: Charles Davis Leaves the Church,” in Disputed Truths: Memoirs II. 37. Article 6, cited in Baum, The Credibility of the Church Today, p. 77. 38. Sociologists define a social movement as “a collective attempt to further a common interest, or secure a common goal, through collective action outside the sphere of established institutions.” (Anthony Giddens, Introduction to Sociology [New York, 1991], p. 769.) Social movements generally develop when formal institutions do not sufficiently respond to popular demands for change, and when they fail, the result in some cases can be revolution. Baum was referring to what are called “reformative social movements,” which have as their purpose the mobilization of outside resources to pressure institutions for more limited

456 Notes to Pages 315 – 324 transformative objectives. In this instance the goal was reformation or updating, not revolution. 39. Baum, Credibility of the Church Today, p. 203. 40. Terry Eagleton, “Why We are Still in the Church,” Slant 14, April– May 1967.

THIRTEEN What Must Be Done? 1. Quoted in Robbins, The Last of the Realists, p. 36. This writing of Chesterton was also printed in the journal of the Catholic Land League, Cross and the Plough, vol. 15, no. 1 (1948), p. 14. 2. See Terry Eagleton, “Slant: Intentions and Achievements,” The Clergy Review, July 1970, pp. 552– 53. 3. Widgery, The Left in Britain, 1956–68, p. 201. 4. Adrian Cunningham drafted the section on housing in the May Day Manifesto. He had been invited to participate in drafting the Manifesto by Raymond Williams, his Ph. D. advisor and personal friend. In addition to Eagleton and McCabe, Leo Pyle, Charles Swann, Peter Grant, and perhaps Chris Homes were also closely involved. (Adrian Cunningham correspondence with author, 30 June 2009, JCC-BC.) 5. Raymond Williams, ed., May Day Manifesto 1968 (London, 1968), p. 68. 6. This was an argument first asserted by Barnes and Sweezy, which had substantial influence on Neil Middleton’s assessment of capitalism. See chapter 10 of this book. 7. Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and Edward Thompson, eds., “The May Day Manifesto,” in Carl Oglesby, ed., The New Left Reader (New York, 1969), p. 117. 8. Ibid., p. 121. The May Day Manifesto’s critique of British politics was essentially the same as that outlined by Cecil Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in The Party System and in Belloc’s The Servile State, published well over fifty years earlier. Virtually no one at the time, including those on the Catholic Left, recognized the almost exact similarity of the analysis. This is especially surprising given the broad public attention paid to both books when they were published and the relentless, almost obsessive iteration of their theses in the political campaigns of the Chesterbelloc and their circle. 9. See Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society. 10. Keith Burgess, The Challenge of Labour: Shaping British Society, 1850–1930 (New York, 1980), p. 248. A major figure in the political transformation identified by Burgess and Middlemas was David Lloyd George, the bête noire of Chesterton and Belloc. Lloyd George was one of the first politicians to recognize the necessity of a managerial concept of government to overcome party and

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class differences. He intended to create a special administrative body, or center group of power brokers, to regulate political and economic life. What particularly frightened Lloyd George and the moguls of industry were the anarcho-syndicalist activities of 1911–1914, in which Chesterton and Belloc had played leading roles. These activities clearly revealed that the official labor leadership was unable to control the extreme fringes of the working-class movement by fusing it with parliamentary democracy. Syndicalist activity had potentially disastrous consequences for industrial production and political order, a situation all the more serious because of worsening diplomatic relations with Germany. By 1929 the National Confederation of Employers Organisations, the Federation of British Industries, and the Trades-Union Congress agreed to undertake permanent discussions on fundamental questions of industrial legislation, unemployment, and national economic policy. Middlemas argues that by the 1930s, this new institutional collaboration had supplemented the parliamentary system and was largely responsible for the relative harmony of the interwar years. During this period the function of the political parties changed, and henceforth, under the tutelage of the triangular bloc, ideological differences and substantive discussions largely disappeared from party warfare. Thus, long before 1945, Parliament and the political system were simply used by the corporate leaders to win popular mandates for decisions that they either had already arrived at or would soon make. Both Burgess and Middlemas describe in their books a process in the consolidation of power away from Parliament and popular democracy that, at the time, was identified with exquisite precision in the political analysis of Chesterton and Belloc and later was clearly central to the critique of “new capitalism” put forth by the May Day Manifesto. 11. For more, see Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London, 1979), p. 374. Bernard Sharratt recalled that the May Day Manifesto was perhaps the closest in his view to a political stance broadly shared by most of the Slant group. (Middleton and Shaw had reservations.) In the aftermath of the May Day Manifesto, Sharratt remembered endless meetings of what became a May Day Manifesto spin-off, the Free Communications Group (FCG). This included an impressive array of UK leftist journalists (Paul Foot was characteristically energetic). The group published a journal (Open Spirit), prepared a bid for the Channel 4 television franchise, and attempted to set up a London Left radio station, among other bold endeavors. (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 9 September 2009, JCC-BC.) 12. Terry Eagleton, “Slant on the Manifesto,” Slant 16, August– September 1967. 13. Eagleton made a perceptive judgment of both the attributes and weaknesses of the May Day Manifesto. But ironically this analysis could be applied to the Slant circle as well: they also offered a brilliant and wide-ranging cultural critique but failed to articulate a practical way to realize the goals of their vision.

458 Notes to Pages 326 – 328 14. Martin Shaw had close contact with the Dominicans during his childhood through his parents, who had a long-standing friendship with Herbert McCabe since their student days at the University of Manchester. Shaw was familiar with Slant before attending the London School of Economics in October 1965 at the age of eighteen to study sociology. Three factors were apparently crucial in drawing Shaw into the Slant circle. The first was a highly impressionable encounter with Father Laurence Bright in 1964 at a Spode House PAX Christi event. Shaw had further contact with him as a student in London when he regularly attended the University of London’s Catholic Society meetings, where Bright played a prominent role in raising the political and social consciousness of its members. The second factor was Shaw’s Christian pacifism and his appreciation of Slant’s moral stance on nuclear weapons, its criticism of the Cold War, and its opposition to the U. S. conflict in Vietnam. And third, on the theoretical side, in 1965 and early 1966 Shaw had a broader and deeper intellectual confrontation with a libertarian Marxist form of humanism. He found Slant’s humanist approach to Christianity both liberating and reflective of a Hegelian interpretation of religion. Slant was also known for its great openness, which Shaw found refreshing. It eagerly sought out connections with student activists, but also wanted to talk to old Communist Party members such as James Klugman. (Martin Shaw correspondence with author, 12 August 2011, JCC-BC.) 15. Martin Shaw, “Socialism: Class Struggle or Intellectual Movement?” Slant 16, August– September 1967. 16. See “LSE’s New Director: A Report on Walter Adams,” a pamphlet published by The Agitator, 17 October 1966. 17. “Students in Revolt: Present Events at LSE,” Slant 13, February– March 1967, p. 21. The substantive criticisms of the student protests at the LSE were prescient in analysis and adumbrated the dangers of corporate power that today can be found in such books as Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (New York, 2009), and Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (New York, 2009). See in particular Hedge’s critique of American higher education, which due to the imperatives of corporatism have contributed to the undermining of liberal arts in favor of essentially vocational programs, training “professionals” to serve the needs of capitalism (Empire of Illusion, pp. 96–114). Along the way, the elites have forgotten that the true purpose of education was to nurture minds capable of critical thinking, not careers. Such education, much as the students at the LSE had warned, was designed to provide the managerial skills necessary for managing corporate capitalism. 18. Shaw had praised Draper’s Berkeley: The New Student Revolt (New York, 1966) as an excellent history of the student radicalism sweeping the American campuses, a general raising of student revolutionary consciousness that he hoped would spread to Britain. 19. For a full account, see the LSE Socialist Society pamphlet “LSE: What It Is, and How We Fought It,” published by The Agitator.

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20. Martin Shaw, “Student Power and Politics: The LSE Experience,” Slant 15, June– July 1967, pp. 24– 25. 21. “Students in Revolt: Present Events at LSE,” Slant 13, February– March 1967, p. 21. 22. Mills contended that the United States was ruled by an essentially closed status group consisting of elites who controlled the bureaucracies that ran business, the military, government, and academia. The British leftists were quicker to appreciate the relevance of Mills’s notions of a power elite to their own society than were their American counterparts. 23. “Slant on Uniting the Left,” Slant 24, March 1969, p. 2. 24. See Neil Middleton, “Why Revolution? 1. Capitalism and Colonialism,” Slant 23, January 1969. 25. See Martin Shaw, “Class, Movement, Party,” Slant 10, August – September 1966. 26. See Perry Anderson, “Problems of Socialist Strategy,” in Anderson and Blackburn, Towards Socialism. 27. The Royal Commission on Labour concluded in a 1984 study that strong organizations of workers and employers meeting regularly were key sources of social order and economic stability. Strikes were more easily settled when unions were well-disciplined than when weak and unrecognized. 28. See Perry Anderson, “The Limits and Possibilities of Trade Union Action,” in Robin Blackburn and Alexander Cockburn, eds., The Incompatibles (London, 1967), pp. 264– 65. 29. Quoted in Richard Hyman, “Class Struggle and Trade Union Movement,” in David Coates, Gordon Johnston, and Ray Bush, eds., A Socialist Anatomy of Britain (Oxford, 1985), p. 100. 30. Tony Cliff was a pseudonym adopted because of the activist’s thirteenyear resistance against British rule in Palestine. Born into a middle-class Zionist family in 1917, Cliff became outraged by the treatment of Arab children, and especially the failure to give them adequate educations. From his youth he became anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist. 31. The IS was the largest of the far-left groups, claiming some three thousand members drawn from the ranks of industrial workers, students, teachers, housewives, and white-collar workers. Much of this section on the IS comes from an interview with Tony Cliff conducted by Nicolas Walter for the Idiot International (6 June 1970), a nonsectarian publication of the revolutionary left. 32. For more on this, see Widgery, The Left in Britain, pp. 487– 88. 33. Tony Cliff and C. Barber, Incomes Policy, Legislation and Shop Stewards (London, 1966). 34. In 1960 there were 1,180 strikes; by 1965 there were 1,496. (Ibid., p. 81.) 35. This analysis stands in sharp contrast to Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism (London, 1956), which asserted that full employment and more state intervention in the economy indicated the transition from capitalism to socialism.

460 Notes to Pages 333– 334 36. See Ralph Miliband, “Parliamentary Socialism,” in Ralph Miliband and John Saville, eds., The Socialist Register (London, 1966). Miliband had been a student of Harold Laski, whose Parliamentary Government in England (1938) was a pioneering Marxist analysis of the impact of class-based politics. Miliband had come to recognize one of its basic weaknesses, namely, Laski’s claim that the Labour Party had been able to transform the system of British politics and therefore advance social change in the direction of socialism. See Miliband, Capitalist Democracy in Britain (New York, 1982), p. 16. 37. Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour, 2d ed. (London, 1973), pp. 375– 76. There is a certain irony in that Miliband’s son David served as foreign secretary in the Labour Government under Gordon Brown. His younger brother Ed was secretary of state for Energy and Climate Change and later became leader of the Labour Party. 38. Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left (London, 2002), p. 75. 39. Shaw, “Class, Movement, Party,” Slant 10, August– September 1966, p. 9. 40. The journal International Socialism advanced a classical Marxist critique that stressed the self-activity and unofficial spontaneous revolt of the shop stewards. Shaw had gradually become more sympathetic with the radical politics of the IS than he was with the Catholic Left. In retrospect, he reflected, Slant was very important for a year or two as a stepping-stone to a secular Marxism, which was a pervasive force in shaping his outlook up to the end of the 1970s. (Martin Shaw correspondence with author, 7 February 2009, JCC-BC.) Terry Eagleton considered Shaw to have been an “uneasy fellow-traveller with Slant,” whose interest was more sharply focused on issues of practical, secular politics. As a prominent member of the IS, he was “somewhat ‘workerist’ in tendency like the group itself.” (Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC.) Shaw does not entirely support Eagleton’s assessment, instead insisting that he was in complete agreement with the Slant program and only became more interested in secular politics toward the end of his involvement with the group. (Martin Shaw correspondence with author, 16 August 2011, JCC-BC.) 41. Adrian Cunningham, for example, in the February 1967 issue of Marxism Today, claimed that if he were a member of the Communist Party in Eastern Europe, he could envision himself as a “left-oppositionist” (hostile to both Church and state) but as sympathetic to the Communist Party in Western countries where the party was in a minority or in opposition. The editors of Marxism Today appreciated such sentiments and, in commenting on the “Slant Manifesto,” had felt a “warm sympathy and deep intellectual interest.” (Slant 13, February– March 1967.) 42. Shaw cited the CPGB’s 1966 election manifesto to drive home his point: “It is time that Britain took the path of real change, ended the waste, poverty, selfishness and injustice of capitalism, and moved on to socialism. If you want

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this kind of change, vote Communist and get it.” (“Christianity and Marxism,” Slant 19, February– March 1968, p. 6.) Shaw admitted that he never had much sympathy for communist parties or the Soviet Union. A seminal event for him was the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. Although Shaw was only nine years old at the time, it was a benchmark in his political thinking. (Martin Shaw correspondence with author, 7 February 2009, JCC-BC.) Christopher Calnan shared with Shaw some of his views on Slant’s willingness to collaborate with the British Communist Party, “a body which I regarded as no more likely to bring about a revolution than the Salvation Army.” The CPGB, noted Calnan, was essentially a puppet of the Soviet Union, and the collapse of one was quickly followed by the demise of the other. (Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 16 November 2009, JCC-BC.) 43. See Slant 14, April– May 1967. 44. Terry Eagleton, “Slant on Unions,” Slant 26, July 1969. 45. Anderson, “Problems of Socialist Strategy,” p. 230, as cited in Martin Redfern, “Socialism and Christianity: A Slant Viewpoint,” Slant 19, February– March 1968, p. 16. 46. Ibid., p. 17. 47. Shaw wrote that his departure from the Slant board was a consequence of recognizing “the intellectual thinness of the Catholic veneer” and the practical dissonance between Catholic Left theorizing that was removed from real-life political conflict, and the “real” student and working-class struggles in which he was involved at the LSE through the LSE Socialist Society and International Socialists. Shaw also announced his apostasy from the Church at the University of London’s Catholic Society meeting in late 1966 and resigned as the group’s secretary. (Martin Shaw correspondence with author, 7 February 2009, JCC-BC.) 48. Martin Redfern, “Martin Redfern Replies,” Slant 21, June– July 1968. 49. “I suspect,” wrote Martin Redfern many decades later, “that it was this refusal to set a single policy decision that persuaded Shaw to leave the board, though he continued to contribute.” (Martin Redfern correspondence with author, May 2009, JCC-BC.) Christopher Calnan corroborated Redfern’s point. The board, he claimed, had little choice but to resist Shaw’s strategy. It was the essence of the Catholic Left in general and Slant in particular that it did not drift into sectarianism but was able to accommodate people from different positions, meaning cooperation with pacifists, anarchists, socialists, and Marxists. “If it had abandoned that for the easy pleasures of Trotskyism,” wrote Calnan, “the whole thing would have collapsed.” (Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 8 June 2009, JCC-BC.) Calnan agreed with Shaw that there was little merit in many of the “forums of feckless discussion” regarding the New Left agenda, which seemed to him a sleepwalking form of Fabianism that was meaningless in terms of any practical politics. But he took issue with Shaw’s retreat into sectarianism and his syndicalist

462 Notes to Pages 337– 339 contempt for electoral politics. Calnan was himself an activist, putting in time “at the factory gate and on the housing estate, with the shop stewards’ committee and the tenants’ association,” but all this was incomplete, he insisted, without an electoral manifestation of socialism. It was no accident, wrote Calnan, that the “Trotskyite contempt for elections” was matched by an inability to win any. (Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 16 November 2009, JCC-BC.) 50. The people whom Cunningham had identified as “excluded from the revolutionary narratives” were apparently middle-class Catholics who, up to this point, had been apolitical, as well as those not yet willing to move beyond the confines of liberal progressivism. It was never made sufficiently clear as to how such Catholics could either be mobilized to action or convinced to join a revolutionary movement. The Slant activists failed to reach sufficiently broad elements of the Catholic bourgeoisie, and this in the end was a major weakness of their movement. 51. Adrian Cunningham to Martin Shaw, 9 February 1967, JCC-BC. A copy of this letter was given to the author by Martin Shaw.

FOURTEEN Legacy and Impact 1. Robert Speaight, “America’s Avant-Garde,” The Tablet, 6 May 1967, p. 497. 2. Terry Eagleton, in reflecting back on these years, noted that the climate was not conducive to their project, although it gave him pleasure to know that the Catholic Left “succeeded in valuably annoying a number of people.” This included the editor of the influential Catholic Herald, who apparently gave the order that there should never be any reference to the group in his pages. (Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC.) 3. In fact, Slant and the Catholic New Left were critical of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe and for this reason were frequently mistrusted by the British Communist Party despite their efforts to collaborate. Slant writers were supportive of the condemnations of Marxist regimes offered by Roger Garaudy, Adam Schaff, and Leszek Kolakowski, all of whom were purged for their political views. Adrian Cunningham viewed communism in its Russian form as stagnant and incapable of social and economic growth: “Communist Marxism tends to use the concept of dialectic only to fill in the gaps in a system of mechanical causality.” (Adrian Cunningham, Adam [London, 1968], p. 147.) 4. Douglas Woodruff was Martin Redfern’s employer when he worked for The Tablet. There were occasions, wrote Redfern, when he tried to tell Woodruff that he disagreed with him on some matters of politics and theology. But Woodruff did not think that the views of his business manager were of any interest or importance. When Redfern left a few years later to join Sheed and Ward and published the “Slant Manifesto,” Woodruff wrote a virulently hostile review—

Notes to Pages 340 – 342

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“saying, among other things, that I was old enough to know better.” The review proved to be a bonanza for book sales. Redfern remembered getting phone calls from people saying, “I can’t believe I’ll like the book, but if it made dear old Douglas so angry it must be worth reading.” (Martin Redfern correspondence with author, May 2009, JCC-BC.) 5. Douglas Woodruff, “The Church’s Red Guards,” The Tablet, 19 November 1966, p. 297. Middleton, for his part, considered Woodruff and his crowd as representing “a waning English middle class,” many of whom were to a considerable degree “theologically and philosophically illiterate.” Those of us on the Left, wrote Middleton, “simply saw no point in responding to the Woodruff faction . . . we were not talking the same language.” (Neil Middleton correspondence with author, 12 February 2009, JCC-BC.) 6. Arnold Lunn, “Changes in American Catholicism: Impressions of a Lecture Tour,” The Tablet, 28 January 1967. 7. J. M. Cameron, “Marxism and Christianity,” The Tablet, 26 November 1966, p. 1339. 8. Herbert McCabe, “Slant and The Tablet,” The Tablet, 26 November 1966, p. 1340. 9. Colm Brogan, “The Catholic Marxists,” The Spectator, 24 June 1966. 10. Herbert McCabe, O. P., “The Catholic Marxists,” The Spectator, 1 July 1966. 11. Terry Eagleton, “Slant: Intentions and Achievements,” The Clergy Review, July 1970, p. 554. 12. Terry Eagleton, “Marxists and Christians: Answers for Brian Wicker,” New Blackfriars, October 1975, p. 469. However, there was little connection between the Catholic Left’s recognition of certain virtues in Marx’s writings and its support for official communist parties. Eagleton, for instance, wrote that the Slant group saw themselves well to the left of the British Communist Party — “not a difficult achievement, to be sure”—and their many dialogues confirmed their differences. The Catholic Left was especially critical of what Eagleton called the French Communist Party’s “supine role” in the événements of 1968, “which seemed to us evidence enough of its sclerotic, neo-Stalinist character.” (Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC.) 13. Eagleton emphasized that the English Catholic New Left was influenced by Peter Berger’s phenomenological sociology and that there was an intense interest in other American and European sociologists along with R. D. Laing’s phenomenological anti-psychiatry. Even certain currents of Distributism fed into the Slant project, claimed Eagleton, given Adrian Cunningham’s lifelong interest in its programs. Angela Cunningham also played a role in pushing such ideas, since she had started but not finished a Ph. D. thesis on Distributism at Lancaster University. (Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC.)

464 Notes to Pages 342 – 345 Another activist with the Slant group was John Challenor, who, from a conservative clerical culture (Newman’s Birmingham Oratory), was ultimately drawn as a Catholic priest to the Left after the promises of Vatican II. Challenor was typical in terms of how the Catholic Left educated themselves about revolutionary socialist ideas. Readings that set the tone and focus of his own development included Tom Bottomore’s edition of Marx’s early writings, Ronald Segal’s The Race War, and Peter Berger’s and Thomas Luckman’s Social Construction of Reality. Also of crucial importance in the philosophical journey of the Catholic Left, according to Challenor, were the Frankfurt School and the writings of Theodor Adorno, among others. (John Challenor correspondence with author, 20 July 2009, JCC-BC.) 14. See, for example Peter Hebblethwaite, S. J., “Ambivalence in the Catholic Left,” The Tablet, 9 August 1969. 15. The movement led by the philofascist Charles Maurras was condemned by the Vatican in December 1926. Pius XI concluded that Action Française’s emphasis on politics and its specious linkage of religious faith and patriotism were corrupting the spiritual purity of the Church. 16. Wicker’s First the Political Kingdom had on the cover of its first British edition a picture of a revolutionary with a gun held high. The American edition published one year later was slightly less provocative, depicting instead a single hand with the index finger in the air. 17. Terry Eagleton, “What is Politics About? . . . Terry Eagleton replies to Bernard Bergonzi,” New Blackfriars, April 1966, pp. 372– 73. 18. McCabe, Law, Love and Language, p. 162. 19. Donald Nicholl, “A Layman’s Journal,” The Clergy Review, August 1966, p. 641. 20. Ibid., pp. 639– 42. 21. Father Crane was secretary of the Catholic Social Guild and editor of its journal, The Christian Democrat. He became a fierce opponent of Britain’s postwar welfare state. Finding himself isolated among CSG people on the matter, he resigned his post in 1959 and started a journal called Christian Order, which was initially circulated privately. The journal served as a vehicle for expressing his antistatist views. Crane accepted the necessity of working for social justice but not at the expense of preparing Christians for salvation. Christian Order became the voice of Catholic conservatism in the 1970s. 22. Paul Crane, S. J., “English Catholics after the Council,” The Clergy Review, August 1967. 23. Wicker, First the Political Kingdom, pp. 121– 22. 24. Martin Shaw, “Slant’s View of Politics,” The Clergy Review, November 1966, p. 901. 25. Fergus Kerr, O. P., “Language and Community,” New Blackfriars, November 1967, p. 93.

Notes to Pages 346 – 350

465

26. As Neil Middleton pointed out, militancy of the Left in Britain can mean many things: “it can mean squatting, it can mean liberating squares in Notting Hill, it can mean forming tenants’ associations with the object of fighting the rise in rents, it can mean helping strikers and so on.” (Slant X, no. 4, September 1969, p. 1.) And in fact, these activities are precisely what the Slant group engaged in to address problems of social and economic injustice. 27. Herbert McCabe, “Comment,” New Blackfriars, February 1966, p. 227. 28. See McCabe’s response to Martin Green’s critique (New Blackfriars, October 1966) in “Comment,” New Blackfriars, November 1966. Emmanuel Mounier, the founder of Esprit, since the 1930s had built up a compelling case that the ideology of free-market capitalism was itself responsible for worldwide institutionalized violence. He did not exclude the necessity of using force to both expose its damage and to combat it. As Fergus Kerr observed, Mounier, whose legacy was a crucial inspiration to the English Dominicans, recognized a place for violence but only “within the context of non-violence and forgiveness.” (Fergus Kerr, O. P., “Politics and Theology: Retrospect and Agenda,” New Blackfriars, August 1968, p. 574.) 29. Much of this is outlined in Maritain’s Integral Humanism. 30. Ibid., p. 235. 31. Like Marx, Maritain saw the necessity of revolution as a force for transforming the world. Sydney Hook argued that Marx’s doctrine of violent revolution was not objectionable to Maritain so long as it would uproot the “bourgeois man” for whom he had deep, almost un-Christian contempt. (Sydney Hook, Reason, Social Myths, and Democracy [New York, 1950], p. 79.) 32. Jacques Maritain, Lettre sur l’Independance (Paris, 1935), p. 45. 33. See Bernard Doering’s note to Maritain’s letter 165 in Henry Bars and Eric Jourdan, eds., The Story of Two Souls: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Julien Green, translated with an introduction and revised notes by Bernard Doering (New York, 1988), pp. 187– 88. See also Time, 7 May 1973, p. 70, and Joseph W. Evans, “Jacques Maritain: Philosopher Was Pope’s Teacher,” National Catholic Reporter, 11 May 1973, p. 5. 34. Une Grande Amitié, letter 152, as cited in Doering, Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals, p. 225. 35. Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, “An Angry Meditation on the Catholic Church,” Chicago Tribune, 24 March 24 1968, as cited in Brooke Williams Smith, Jacques Maritain, Antimodern or Ultramodern? An Historical Analysis of His Critics, His Thought, and His Life (New York, 1976), p. 22. 36. Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time, trans. Michael Cuddihy and Elizabeth Hughes (New York, 1968), p. 53. Maritain was referring here to the neomoderns kneeling before the altar of “the pure world of science, of astronomers and geologists, physicists and biologists, psychologists, ethnologists, sociologists, as well as the world of technicians, manufacturers, trade unionists, statesmen” (p. 54).

466 Notes to Pages 350 – 355 37. Ibid., p. 51. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., p. 86. 40. Letter 198, Maritain to Green, in Bars and Jourdan, eds., The Story of Two Souls, p. 222. 41. Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne, pp. 60– 61. 42. A similar conclusion had been reached by two other influential forces behind the reforms of Vatican II, namely, the advocate of new theology, M.-D. Chenu, and Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. 43. Jacques Maritain, On the Philosophy of History, ed. Joseph W. Evans (New York, 1957), p. 154. 44. Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (Chicago, 1956), p. 94. 45. See Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, pp. 66– 72. Gutiérrez draws on the writings of Antoine Vergote, Carlos Alvarez Calderón, Edward Schillebeeckx, and others to explain the ways in which the secular age can bring humankind closer to Christ. 46. See Paul E. Sigmund, “Maritain on Politics,” in Deal W. Hudson and Matthew J. Mancini, eds., Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend (Macon, GA, 1987), p. 167. Sigmund here draws from Gutiérrez’s “Notes for a Theology of Liberation,” Theological Studies 31, no. 2 (June 1970). 47. Adrian Cunningham, “Culture and Catholicism: A Historical Analysis,” in Eagleton and Wicker, From Culture to Revolution, p. 119. 48. The Slant group certainly appreciated the potential and crucial role of labor for revolutionary socialist transformation. After all, many members came from the working classes and, as Marxists, class analysis was always central to their thinking. But the angle of intervention, as Bernard Sharratt has noted, was not the Roman Catholic working class but the Catholic intelligentsia and their institutions. Moreover, Sharratt, Eagleton, the Cunninghams, and others, as Leftists in association with Slant, had never intended to work for revolution only inside the Church; nor did they restrict themselves to purely Catholic activism. Along with Shaw, many on the Catholic Left worked with shop stewards, the Vietnam Solidarity group, and the International Socialists, and participated in numerous activities supporting workers’ strikes, student sit-ins, and so on. (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 9 September 2009, JCC-BC.) 49. John Challenor correspondence with author, 20 July 2009, JCC-BC. 50. Hornsby-Smith, Roman Catholics in England, p. 216. 51. Hobsbawm as quoted in Jonathon Green, All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture (London, 1998), p. 243. 52. Sharratt wrote that he “grew wary of keen Methodist ministers who would finally say, about 11 pm at the end of some awful evening of crossed wires, ‘Now I’m sure you’d like a drink before I show you your room’—and offer hot chocolate.” (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 17 February 2009, JCC-BC.)

Notes to Pages 355 – 357

467

53. Ibid. There were a number of national trade union leaders in the 1960s who were Catholic, most notably George Woodcock, who was general secretary of the TUC from 1960 through 1968. Although some were stalwart anticommunists, a few were sympathetic to the Left. Jack Jones, for example, was a Liverpool Irish Catholic who was a strong supporter for a while of the Institute for Workers Control, which had some Slant connections. The best of the lot, wrote Bernard Sharratt, was Lawrence Daly, secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1968 to 1984. (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 9 September 2009, JCC-BC.) Daly earned iconic status when he played a key role in the NUM’s two successful confrontations with Edward Heath’s Conservative government in the early 1970s. As a trade-union activist, Daly was an instrumental link between the New Left and the labor movement. After publicly tearing up his Communist Party membership card in 1956 (following Khrushchev’s exposure of Stalin’s crimes), Daly founded the Fife Socialist League (FSL), a political discussion forum and a base from which to launch independent candidates in local and national elections. In addition to joining with Bertrand Russell as part of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s war crimes tribunal set up to investigate reported U. S. atrocities in Vietnam, Daly was on the board of the student-based Universities and Left Review and the New Left Review. He also was a contributor to these journals and a good friend and colleague to the wide ex-communist diaspora that gave birth to these magazines. 54. Theo Westow, “Letters to the Editor,” The Tablet, 13 September 1969, p. 910. 55. “I find their style opaque,” wrote Cameron. “Certain terms seem to be terms of art, but one is left to pick up the sense as one goes along. ‘Totalization’ is one that is coming in; ‘Structure’, of course, both as substantive and a verb, but this is perhaps the influence of American sociological writing; losing and making connexions between ‘cultural meanings’ seem to be important but elusive processes; we have ‘praxis’, and so on.” (J. M. Cameron, “Culture and Revolution,” New Blackfriars, July 1969, p. 524.) Martin Shaw has commented that Eagleton’s complex writing style has improved over time, advancing in clarity from the “Williams-like vagueness through structuralist Marxism to something much more pithy and accessible in recent years.” (Martin Shaw correspondence with author, 16 August 2011, JCC-BC.) 56. “Letters to the Editor,” a joint response by Terry Eagleton, Laurence Bright, Adrian Cunningham, Angela Cunningham, Peter W. Grant, Francis McDonagh, Leo Pyle, Martin Redfern, and Bernard Sharratt, The Tablet, 6 September 1969, p. 886. 57. For a detailed criticism of the Catholic New Left’s failures in this arena, see “England’s Troubles and the Catholic Left,” editorial (Robert Nowell), Herder Correspondence, August 1969. John Challenor believed that it was perhaps a mistake of the Catholic New Left to avoid entering the fray of British politics, “but

468 Notes to Pages 357– 360 given the pitifully small clout of the CNL it probably made little difference.” (John Challenor correspondence with author, 20 July 2009, JCC-BC.) 58. Cameron, “Culture and Revolution,” New Blackfriars, July 1969, p. 524. Yet Cameron’s criticism of aloofness and intellectual preciosity seems somewhat off-base when considering the practical and taxing “leg work” that Sharratt remembered about his own days with Slant. Even during the fallout of the McCabe affair. he recalled the summer of 1967 primarily as one of sitting in on meetings of the Shop Stewards Liaison Defence Committee some evenings, traveling across London most other nights to attend sessions of the Dialectics of Liberation Congress at the Roundhouse, listening to lectures by the likes of Laing, Carmichael, or Marcuse until the early hours of the morning, before crawling back to his student vacation jobs at a truckstop café and factory shifts at Delta Metal Steelworks. (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 17 February 2009, JCC-BC.) 59. See Peter Hebblethwaite, “Ambivalence in the Catholic Left,” The Tablet, 9 August 1969. Hebblethwaite was in some ways the quintessential liberal Catholic who never trusted the Left’s associations with Marxism. “Max Weber once said,” noted Hebblethwaite, “that Marxism was like taking a taxi: those who believed they could alight from it whenever they chose were in illusion—the taxi goes to the end of the dialectical material road.” (Peter Hebblethwaite, “A Bridge Too Far,” BBC, Broadcast, 7 January 1978, Peter Hebblethwaite Papers, Box 4 (articles), Special Collections, Burns Library, Boston College.) 60. Hebblethwaite, “Ambivalence in the Catholic Left,” p. 784. 61. Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tse Tung (Peking, 1967), p. 35, as cited in Bernard Sharratt, “Absent Centre 1,” Slant 23, January 1969, p. 21. 62. Ibid., p. 24. 63. Ibid., pp. 24– 25. 64. Raymond Williams, “New Left Catholics,” New Blackfriars, November 1966, p. 75. 65. A retrospective analysis by Dinah Livingstone given in an interview with Peter McCaffery in his “Catholic Radicalism and Counter-Radicalism, p. 56, note 29. 66. The Slant Bulletin and the later Slant X were pale imitations of their parent journal. Sheed and Ward ceased to publish Slant afer March 1970. The editors at this juncture had decided to shift gears and appeal to a less-educated audience and to move away from theory to practical, everyday matters concerning social and economic justice. Both of these publications were typed up by volunteers and were generally no more than three to five pages in length. The editorial work on Slant X was done at Dinah Livingstone’s Katabasis Press in Camden, North London. 67. A list of each chapter was reported in Slant Bulletin, no. 1, November 1968. 68. Slant Bulletin, no. 2, March 1969, p. 3.

Notes to Pages 361– 365

469

69. Ibid., p. 1. 70. Calnan was not the only Slant member on the SCM’s political commission, since Peter Grant was also on this board by then. 71. Anthony Hill of the Blackheath Commune recalled Christopher Calnan’s clear position on beer and dope: “the former fuelled class anger and action, the latter engendered anti-revolutionary lassitude!” (Letter to Calnan’s daughter Tara from Anthony Hill, 19 September 2009, provided to the author by Christopher Calnan, JCC-BC.) 72. In addition to its inspiration from Marx, the Blackheath Commune may also have been inspired by the Dominicans, who placed high value on the communal living of their brothers in Christ. 73. The story of the Blackheath Commune was provided to the author by Christopher Calnan, letter to his daughter Tara from Anthony Hill, 19 September 2009, JCC-BC. 74. See Middleton’s review of Harvey Cox’s The Secular City in Slant 10, August– September 1966, p. 17 and Slant 11, October– November 1966, p. 25. 75. Slant X, Easter 1971. 76. See McCaffery, “Catholic Radicalism and Counter-Radicalism,” p. 61. 77. Archer, The Two Catholic Churches, p. 200. 78. It should be pointed out that Sharratt suggested drawing on earlier Catholic writers, but he never gave much thought to the Chesterbelloc in this context. 79. The legacy of Chesterton today has been largely claimed by Catholic conservatives. For instance, The Chesterton Review and the affiliated G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture, which feature and encourage highquality scholarship promoting Chesterbellocian thought, are underwritten by the ideologically conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The argument advanced in this book suggests that Chesterton presented a highly complex perspective on matters of modernity that defies easy classification and in many ways resonates with both the Left and Right. 80. Fergus Kerr, correspondence with author, 13 September 2011, JCC-BC. 81. Fergus Kerr, correspondence with author, 10 September 2011, JCC-BC. 82. G. K. Chesterton, for example, had ongoing battles with George Bernard Shaw and the Fabian Society over their support of British imperialism. Chesterton considered the defense of imperialism the moral enemy of true patriotism and an affront to human dignity. He defined imperialism as an attempt by a European country to create a sham Europe, which it could dominate, instead of the real Europe, which it could only share: “It is a love of living with one’s inferiors” (G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World [New York, 1910], p. 10). Chesterton saw imperialism to be the enemy of freedom, for it negated the deepest of democratic principles—it denied the equality of man by imposing “our standards” on another nation, yet learning nothing from them.

470 Notes to Pages 365 – 370 (Also quoted in Evans, G.K. Chesterton, p. 49.) The attack on all forms of British imperialism was continued in Chesterton’s journal, G.K.’s Weekly. 83. See Margaret Canovan, G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist (New York, 1977), pp. 119, 124– 25. 84. See Denys Turner, “Can a Christian be a Marxist?” New Blackfriars, June 1975. 85. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–2000, p. 572. 86. A good example of how the Distributist League attempted to apply economic theory to practice can be seen in John McQuillan et al., Flee to the Fields: The Founding Papers of the Catholic Land Movement, original preface by Hilaire Belloc and introduction by Tobias Lanz (Norfolk, VA, 2003). 87. Adrian Cunningham, “Aspects of Distributism,” The Newman, January 1969, p. 4. 88. See Adrian Cunningham’s “Gill sans . . . ,” New Blackfriars, October 1966, and “Exchanges,” New Blackfriars, December 1966. The latter was a discussion between Robert Speaight and Cunningham. Cunningham had reviewed Speaight’s biography of Gill, which he believed dealt insufficiently with Gill’s seminal social and political views. Gill was one of the few in the 1930s, claimed Cunningham, who recognized the need for the kind of revolution endorsed by the Left. 89. Belloc’s The Servile State played a crucial role in this regard. For Belloc, Britain was becoming a society in which the owners remained a small minority and the great majority accepted security at the cost of servitude. 90. See, for example, Corrin, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, pp. 172– 200. 91. Cunningham, “Aspects of Distributism,” The Newman, January 1969, p. 9. 92. Ibid., p. 11. 93. Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 6 October 2009, JCC-BC. 94. Douglas Hyde, “The New Catholic Left,” The Month, December 1966, p. 321. 95. Brian Wicker, “Justice, Peace and Dominicans, 1216–1999: VIII—Slant, Marxism and the English Dominicans,” New Blackfriars, 27 July 2007, p. 438. 96. See Fergus Kerr, “Politics and Theology: Retrospect and Agenda,” New Blackfriars, August 1968. 97. Section 4 in W. M. Abbott, ed., The Documents of Vatican II (London, 1966), pp. 201– 2, as quoted in Michael P. Hornsby-Smith and Graham Dann, “The Contribution of Sociology to the Catholic Church,” New Blackfriars, August 1975, p. 342. 98. Ibid., pp. 342– 43. 99. Quoted in Peter Hebblethwaite’s review of Michael P. Hornsby-Smith’s Roman Catholics in England, Peter Hebblethwaite Papers, KC 674, PH 24, Articles A-L (6), Burns Library, Boston College.

Notes to Pages 371– 376

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100. This was a concept employed by C. Wright Mills in his book The Power Elite (New York, 1956). Mills was a major influence on Tom Hayden and the group who organized SDS. 101. See Stuart Hall, “The New Revolutionaries,” in Eagleton and Wicker, eds., From Culture to Revolution, pp. 200– 201. 102. Jack Newfield, A Prophetic Minority (New York, 1966), p. 126. 103. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1987), p. 85. 104. Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York, 1988), p. 75. 105. Ibid., p. 83. 106. It was only after the frustrations with the Vietnam War and the campus uprisings in 1968– 69 that the SDS moved toward Marxism, seeing value at this point in the Cuban and Chinese revolutions as models to emulate. From that point onward the SDS became absurdly strident and lacked the substantive coherence of the European or British Left. 107. David O’Brien, The Renewal of American Catholicism (New York, 1972), p. 225. For a fuller discussion of the Catholic Left in the United States, see O’Brien’s “What Happened to the Catholic Left?” in Mary Jo Weaver, ed., What’s Left? Liberal American Catholics (Bloomington, IN, 1999). 108. O’Brien, Renewal of American Catholicism, pp. 227– 29. 109. See William A. Au, The Cross, The Flag, and the Bomb: American Catholics Debate War and Peace, 1960–1983 (Westport, CT, 1985), pp. 260– 63. 110. See Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, trans. with an introduction by Cornelius Ernst (Baltimore, 1963), pp. 58– 68. 111. See Brian Wicker, “Post-Conciliar Catholicism: England More Civilized, Less Interesting,” Commonweal, 9 March 1973. 112. The core group affiliated with Slant and the London contingent would usually assemble at Sheed and Ward’s offices just off Trafalgar Square, where a Mass or nondenominational prayer service would sometimes be held. Calnan recalled one memorable occasion when the leader of the service was the eminent Protestant theologian Jurgen Moltmann, an old sparring partner of the current pope. The demonstrations were usually peaceful, but Calnan remembered on one occasion being arrested after coming to the aid of a protester whom the police were beating up. (Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 8 June 2009, JCC-BC.) 113. Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC. 114. It is interesting to note in light of the recent scandal in Ireland over the cruel treatment of children in schools run by the Christian Brothers Order that Grille tried to write an editorial in support of the schoolboy David Moore, who was involved in legal action against a Christian Brother by the name of Quinn over the matter of child abuse. Solicitors, however, prevented publication on threat of libel. The boy was abused, assaulted in mind and body for his slowness

472 Notes to Pages 376 – 381 to learn. This episode prompted Grille to initiate an investigation into the suppression of truth in the legal profession. (Editorial Supplement to Grille, no. 2, Autumn 1968.) 115. Grille, Editorial “Grille on Grille,” no. 2, Autumn 1968, p. 4. 116. “Irish Conference: Grille and Slant,” Slant Bulletin, no. 1, November 1968. 117. Alan Wall, “‘Slant’ and the Language of Revolution,” New Blackfriars, November 1975, p. 516. 118. According to the analysis of Martin Redfern. (Martin Redfern correspondence with author, May 2009, JCC-BC.) 119. See the editorial and Mandel, “Lessons of May,” both in New Left Review 52, November– December 1968. 120. See Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston, 1972), and Georg Lukacs, “The Twin Crisis,” New Left Review 60, March– April 1970. 121. As part of this project, Neuhaus and company had also given theological support to President George W. Bush’s muscular foreign policy for advancing democracy and capitalism, both of which were believed to be an integral component of America’s moral recovery. For more on this, see Jay P. Corrin, “The Iraq Project and Just War Theory,” Motives, e-magazine, Autumn 2009. 122. Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 6 October 2009, JCC-BC. 123. Martin Redfern correspondence with author, 13 August 2011, JCC-BC. 124. Sharratt believed that the distinction, if any, was between those who were seen by others primarily as writers and those who did not write but may have wished to do so. Also, claimed Sharratt, most of the Slant writers were not based in London but rather in Oxford, Cambridge, Lancaster, and Birmingham. (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 23 August 2011, JCC-BC.) 125. To this day Dinah Livingstone is uncertain whether the threat was real or merely a heavy-handed joke. (Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 6 October 2009, JCC-BC.) 126. Looking back on her experiences with the Catholic Left, Dinah Livingstone also thought that many on Slant’s board had rather old-fashioned attitudes toward women that surely would have been challenged by more assertive feminists in today’s world. (Ibid.) 127. Christopher Calnan correspondence with author, 16 November 2009, JCC-BC. 128. Eagleton thought highly of Leo Pyle because he was both a Christian and a scientist. As noted earlier, Eagleton’s book Reason, Faith, and Revolution is dedicated to his memory. 129. These are the views of Christopher Calnan in 6 October 2009 correspondence with author, JCC-BC. 130. Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC.

Notes to Pages 381– 384

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131. Ibid. 132. John Challenor correspondence with author, 20 July 2009, JCC-BC. 133. Martin Shaw correspondence with author, 7 February 2009, JCC-BC. 134. Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 17 February 2009, JCC-BC. 135. Neal Middleton correspondence with author, 12 February 2009, JCC-BC. 136. Bernard Sharratt described Fergus Kerr as someone who was rather taciturn and remote but who wrote numerous and intellectually formidable articles in New Blackfriars that reflected Slant’s views. He would make appearances at Spode House, delivering stunning papers there, and then disappear for a time. Sharratt found Kerr an engaging interlocutor, but not one interested in casual pub chats. (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 30 August 2011, JCCBC.) But of all the Dominicans, claimed Sharratt, it was Kerr who had the most influence on his own intellectual development. (Bernard Sharratt correspondence with author, 17 February 2009, JCC-BC.) 137. One of its leading proponents, Catherine Pickstock, in an interview with Stratford Caldecott in Catholic Culture, said that they are supportive of socialism because of the need to link ownership and entitlement to advance the public good. Socialism, as she put it, meant “something like opposition to economic exchange organized only for the maximization of production and profit” and the reorganization of the economy on a cooperative basis. (Stratford Caldecott, “Radical Orthodoxy,” www.catholicculture.org.) 138. John Milbank, “Introduction. Suspending the Materials: the Turn of Radical Orthodoxy,” in John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London, 1999), p. 3. 139. See John Milbank, “Knowledge: The Theological Critique of Philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi,” in Radical Orthodoxy. 140. One of John Milbank’s more avid supporters is Phillip Blond, who edited the first collection of Radical Orthodoxy essays. Blond has been trained as an Anglican theologian and went on to establish a think tank called ResRepublica that promotes a “third way” representing the principles of Radical Orthodoxy. Its signature approach is what Blond has called “Red Toryism,” defined as the tradition of communitarian civic conservatism. The New Statesman has described Blond as the Conservative Party’s “philosopher king.” Blond, the stepbrother of the actor Daniel Craig, has such a close working relationship with Prime Minister David Cameron that he has been described as Cameron’s “spin doctor.” 141. Fergus Kerr, O. P., “A Catholic Response to the Programme of Radical Orthodoxy,” in Hemming, Radical Orthodoxy?, p. 52. 142. Fergus Kerr correspondence with author, 10 September 2011, JCC-BC. 143. Fergus Kerr correspondence with author, 13 September 2011, JCC-BC.

474 Notes to Pages 385 – 387 144. Stanley Hauerwas, “Some Theological Reflections on Gutiérrez’s Use of ‘Liberation’ as a Theological Concept,” Modern Theology 3, no. 1 (1986): p. 72. 145. See John Milbank, “On Baseless Suspicion: Christianity and the Crisis of Socialism,” New Blackfriars, January 1988. 146. According to Fergus Kerr, Bright was the only genuine Marxist among the Dominicans. The other Dominicans on the left borrowed more selectively from Marx’s writings, especially drawing from the Paris Manuscripts. Those who knew Bright as a physicist working on uranium isotopes in the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford during the war realized that he was a Marxist and were surprised when he converted to Catholicism and became a Dominican in 1945. Kerr was once asked by a journalist if Bright were a Soviet “mole,” a logical question given the discovery of other communist sympathizers who were sending information on Britain’s atomic bomb research to Moscow. (Fergus Kerr correspondence with author, 13 September 2011, JCC-BC.) 147. Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC. 148. Wicker, “Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999,” New Blackfriars, 27 July 2007, p. 439. The historian Eugene McCarraher believes that Slant and New Blackfriars published some of the most brilliant theology of the Cold War years in its coverage of such events as the wars of national liberation, the liturgy as cultural critique, the student revolts, and the evils of international corporate capitalism. (Eugene McCarraher, “Herbert McCabe’s Revolutionary Faith,” Commonweal, 8 October 2010.) 149. John Challenor correspondence with author, 20 July 2009, JCC-BC. 150. Caritas in Veritate, www.vatican.va, ch. 3, sect. 35. 151. President Barack Obama met with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican on 10 July 2009 just after the issuance of Caritas in Veritate, and the alarm bells soon went off in conservative circles. FOX News, for example, asked the worrisome question of whether Benedict and the U. S. president were now in an alliance to destroy capitalism, a team approach that resembled the way in which Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan joined forces to combat communism. 152. Quoted by Thomas J. Reese, S. J., “Pope’s Delayed Message on Greed,” Washington Post, 23 June 2009. 153. Terry Eagleton correspondence with author, June 2009, JCC-BC.

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Journals and Periodicals The Agitator America Blackfriars Catholic Herald Catholic Times Catholicity The Chesterton Review The Christian Democrat Church Socialist The Clergy Review Colosseum Commonweal Commonwealth Continuum The Critic Daily Herald Encounter English Miscellany The Eye-Witness First Things Fisher House Newsletter G. K.’s Weekly Grille Herder Correspondence Idiot International The Independent Journal of Modern Literature

Latin Mass Marxism Today The Month National Catholic Reporter National Review New Age New Blackfriars New Christian New Left Review The New Reasoner New Statesman New York Review of Books The Newman Oratre Fratres Renew: Newsletter of Catholics for a Changing Church Search Slant Slant Bulletin Slant X Soundings The Speaker The Spectator The Tablet Theological Studies Universities and Left Review

475

476 Select Bibliography Archival Sources Hilaire Belloc Papers, John J. Burns Library, Boston College English Catholic New Left – Jay Corrin Correspondence, John J. Burns Library, Boston College (abbreviated as JCC-BC) Peter Hebblethwaite Papers, John J. Burns Library, Boston College H. A. Reinhold Papers, John J. Burns Library, Boston College Bernard and Barbara Wall Papers, Special Collections, Georgetown University Library Douglas Woodruff Papers, Special Collections, Georgetown University Library

Primary and Secondary Sources Abbot, W. M., ed. The Documents of Vatican II. London, 1966. Aczel, Amir D. The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man. New York, 2007. Alberigo, Giuseppe, Jean-Pierre Jussua, and Joseph A. Komonchak, eds. The Reception of Vatican II. Washington, DC, 1987. Allen, John L., Jr. Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican’s Enforcer of the Faith. New York, 2000. Allitt, Patrick. Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome. Ithaca, NY, 1997. Amery, Carl. Capitulation: The Lesson of German Catholicism. New York, 1967. Anderson, Perry, and Robin Blackburn, eds. Towards Socialism. Ithaca, NY, 1965. Annan, Noel. Our Age: English Intellectuals between the World Wars—A Group Portrait. New York, 1990. Aptheker, Herbert, ed. Marxism and Christianity: A Symposium. New York, 1968. Archer, Anthony, O. P. “The Church and Social Class.” In John Cumming and Paul Burns, eds., The Church Now: An Inquiry into the Present State of the Catholic Church in Britain and Ireland. London, 1980. ———. The Two Catholic Churches: A Study in Oppression. London, 1986. Archer, Robin, et al., eds. Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On. London, 1989. Arnold, J. L. “Britain: The New Reasoners.” In Leopold Labedz, ed., Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas. New York, 1962. Aspden, Kester. Fortress Church: The English Roman Catholic Bishops and Politics, 1903–1963. Leominster, Herefordshire, UK, 2002. Au, William A. The Cross, the Flag, and the Bomb: American Catholics Debate War and Peace, 1960–1983. Westport, CT, 1985. Baran, Paul A., and Paul M. Sweezy. Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. New York, 1966.

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Barker, Dudley. G.K. Chesterton. London, 1973. Bars, Henry, and Eric Jourdan, eds. The Story of Two Souls: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Julien Green. Translated with an introduction and revised notes by Bernard Doering. New York, 1988. Baum, Gregory. Catholics and Canadian Socialism. Toronto, 1980. ———. The Credibility of the Church Today: A Reply to Charles Davis. New York, 1968. ———. The Social Imperative. New York, 1979. ———, ed. The Twentieth Century: A Theological Overview. Maryknoll, NY, 1999. Beck, George Andrew, ed. The English Catholics, 1850–1950. London, 1950. Belloc, Hilaire. An Essay on the Restoration of Property. London, 1936. ———. The Place of Peasantry in Modern Civilization. Manchester, UK, 1910. ———. The Servile State. New York, 1946. Berger, Peter L. “Sociological Perspective— Society in Man.” In Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanist Perspective. New York, 1963. Bergonzi, Bernard. “The English Catholics.” Encounter, January 1965. ———. The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature. New York, 1986. Blackburn, Robin, and Alexander Cockburn, eds. The Incompatibles. London, 1967. Blenkinsopp, Joseph. Celibacy, Ministry, Church. London, 1969. Bogdanor, V., and Robert Skidelsky, eds. The Age of Affluence, 1951–1964. London, 1970. Bookes, Christopher. The Neophiliacs: The Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties. London, 1992. Bottomore, Tom. Karl Marx: Early Writings. London, 1978. ———. “Marxism and Sociology.” in Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet, eds., A History of Sociological Analysis. New York, 1978. ———. “Sociology.” In David McLellan, ed., Marx: The First Hundred Years. 1983. Briggs, Asa, ed. Chartist Studies. London, 1959. Briggs, Kenneth A. Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns. New York, 2006. Bright, Laurence, O. P., and Simon Clements, eds. The Committed Church. London, 1966. Brown, Dale W. The Christian Revolutionary. Grand Rapids, MI, 1971. Browne, Henry, S. J. The Catholic Evidence Movement. London, 1921. Buchanan, Tom, and Martin Conway, eds. Political Catholicism in Europe, 1918–1965. Oxford, 1966. Buckley, William F., Jr. Rumbles Left and Right. New York, 1963. Bull, George. Vatican Politics: At the Second Vatican Council, 1962–1966. London, 1966.

478 Select Bibliography Burgess, Keith. The Challenge of Labour: Shaping British Society, 1850–1930. New York, 1980. Burns, Tom. The Use of Memory: Publishing and Further Pursuits. London, 1993. Butler, Basil Christopher. The Theology of Vatican II. London, 1967. Butler, Rab. The Life of the Possible: The Memoirs of Lord Butler. London, 1973. Caldecott, Stratford. “Radical Orthodoxy.” www.catholicculture.org. Camara, Dom Helder. The Conversation of a Bishop: An Interview with José de Broucker. London, 1979. ———. The Desert Is Fertile. Translated by Dinah Livingstone. New York, 1974. ———. Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings. Introduction by Francis McDonagh. Maryknoll, NY, 2009. Cameron, J. M. The Night Battle: Essays. Baltimore, 1962. ———. Scrutiny of Marxism. London, 1948. Canovan, Margaret. G.K. Chesterton: Radical Populist. New York, 1977. Caritas in Veritate. www.vatican.va. Carroll, James. Constantine’s Sword: A History of the Church and the Jews. Boston, 2001. Carthy, Mary P. Catholicism in English-Speaking Lands. New York, 1964. Cassels, Alan. Fascism. Arlington Heights, IL, 1975. Caute, David. The Years of the Barricades: A Journey through 1968. New York, 1988. Chesterton, Cecil, and Hilaire Belloc. The Party System. London, 1911. Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy. London, 1908. ———. The Outline of Sanity. New York, 1927. ———. What’s Wrong with the World. New York, 1910. Chun, Lin. The British New Left. Edinburgh, 1993. Clarke, Simon, et al. One-Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and the Politics of Culture. New York, 1980. Clay, Arthur. Syndicalism and Labour. London, 1912. Clements, Simon, and Monica Lawlor. The McCabe Affair: Evidence and Comment. London, 1967. Cliff, Tony, and C. Barber. Incomes Policy, Legislation and Shop Stewards. London, 1966. Coates, David, Gordon Johnston, and Ray Bush, eds. A Socialist Anatomy of Britain. Oxford, 1985. Colaianni, James. The Catholic Left. Philadelphia, 1968. Cole, Margaret, ed. The Webbs and Their Work. New York, 1974. Coman, Peter. Catholics and the Welfare State. London, 1977. Communism: A Catholic Worker Special. Manchester, UK, 1950. Cornwell, John. Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. New York, 1999. Corrin, Jay P. Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy. Notre Dame, IN, 2002. ———. G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc: The Battle against Modernity. Athens, OH, 1981.

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Craig, Robert H. Religion and Radical Politics: An Alternative Christian Tradition in the United States. Philadelphia, 1992. Crosby, Donald F. God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950–1957. Chapel Hill, NC, 1978. Crosland, Anthony. The Future of Socialism. London, 1956. Cumming, John, and Paul Burns, eds. The Church Now: An Inquiry into the Present State of the Catholic Church in Britain and Ireland. London, 1980. Cunningham, Adrian. Adam. London, 1968. ———. “The December Group: Terry Eagleton and the New Left Church.” The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 1 (1991). Cunningham, Adrian, et al., eds. Slant Manifesto: Catholics and the Left. Springfield, IL, 1966. Darder, Antonia. “The Politics of Biculturalism: Culture and Difference in the Formation of Warriors for Gringostroika and the New Mestizas.” In Antonia Darder, ed., Culture and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Bicultural Experience in the United States. Santa Clara, CA, 1995. Davis, Charles. A Question of Conscience. New York, 1967. ———. Theology and Political Society. The Hulsean Lectures in the University of Cambridge. Cambridge, 1980. Dawson, Christopher. Religion and World History. New York, 1975. De la Bedoyere, Michael, ed. The Future of Catholic Christianity. Philadelphia, 1966. ———, ed. Objections to Roman Catholicism. Philadelphia, 1965. Delfgaauw, Bernard. The Young Marx. New York, 1967. Dillworth, Thomas. Introduction to Harmon Grisewood, “Remembering David Jones,” Journal of Modern Literature 14 (Spring 1988). Djilas, Milovan. The New Class. New York, 1957. Doering, Bernard. Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals. Notre Dame, IN, 1983. Dorr, D. Option for the Poor: A Hundred Years of Vatican Social Teaching. Maryknoll, NY, 1983. Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York, 1970. Douglass, R. Bruce, and David Hollenbach, eds. Catholicism and Liberalism: Contributions to American Public Philosophy. New York, 1994. Draper, Hal. Berkeley: The New Student Revolt. New York, 1966. Duff, Peggy. Left, Left, Left: A Personal Account of Six Protest Campaigns, 1945– 65. London, 1971. Duffy, Eamon. Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes. New Haven, CT, 1997. Dworkin, Dennis. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Durham, NC, and London, 1997. Eagleton, Terry. The Body as Language: Outline of a ‘New Left’ Theology. London, 1970. ———. The Crisis of Contemporary Culture. Oxford, 1993. ———, ed. Directions: Pointers for the Post-Conciliar Church. London, 1968.

480 Select Bibliography ———. The Gatekeeper: A Memoir. New York, 2001. ———. Ideology. New York, 1994. ———. Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley, CA, 1976. ———. “Memories of a Catholic Childhood.” The Tablet, 7 August 1976. ———. The New Left Church. London, 1966. ———. Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. New Haven, CT, 2009. ———. Why Marx Was Right. New Haven, CT, 2011. Eagleton, Terry, and Brian Wicker, eds. From Culture to Revolution: The Slant Symposium, 1967. New York, 1968. Easthope, Antony. “Iron on the Shoulder: For Young Terry Eagleton at 50.” The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 1, 1991. Ellul, Jacques. Jesus and Marx: From Gospel to Ideology. Grand Rapids, MI, 1988. Eppstein, John. Has the Catholic Church Gone Mad? London, 1971. Evans, Joseph W., and Leo R. Ward, eds. Jacques Maritain: Challenges and Renewals. New York, 1968. Evans, Maurice. G.K. Chesterton. Cambridge, 1939. Fisher, Desmond. The Church in Transition. London, 1967. Freedman, M. A Minority in Britain. London, 1967. Fromm, Erich. Marx’s Concept of Man. New York, 1961. ———, ed. New Humanism. London, 1967. Garaudy, Roger. From Anathema to Dialogue: A Marxist Challenge to the Christian Churches. Translated by Luke O’Neill. New York, 1966. ———. “The Meaning of Life and History in Marx and Teilhard de Chardin: Teilhard’s Contribution to the Dialogue between Christians and Marxists.” In Association of Great Britain and Ireland, Evolution, Marxism and Christianity: Studies in the Teilhardian Synthesis. London, 1963. Garaudy, Roger, and Quentin Lauer, S. J. A Christian-Marxist Dialogue. Garden City, NY, 1968. Gaudium et Spes. www.vatican.va. Gilson, Etienne, ed. The Church Speaks to the Modern World: The Social Teaching of Leo XIII. Garden City, NY, 1954. Girardi, Giulio. Marxism and Christianity. Dublin, 1968. Gish, Arthur G. The New Left and Christian Radicalism. Grand Rapids, MI, 1970. Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York, 1987. Gramsci, Antonio. Letters from Prison. Translated and introduction by Lynne Lawner. London, 1973. Greeley, Andrew. The Catholic Revolution: New Wine, Old Wineskins, and the Second Vatican Council. Berkeley, CA, 2004. Green, Jonathon. All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture. London, 1998. Griffiths, Sian. “In the Belly of the Beast.” Times Higher Education Supplement. 21 June 1991.

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———. “Marxist Elevated at Oxford.” Times Higher Education Supplement. 22 March 1991. Gudorf, Christine E. Catholic Social Teaching on Liberation Themes. Lanham, MD, 1981. Gutiérrez, Gustavo, O. P. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll, NY, 1973. Guttmann, Allen. The Wound in the Heart. New York, 1962. Gwynn, Denis. “The Irish Immigration.” In George Andrew Beck, ed., The English Catholics, 1850–1950. London, 1950. Hales, E. E.Y. Pope John and His Revolution. London, 1966. Hall, Stuart. “The ‘First’ New Left: Life and Times.” In Robin Archer et al., eds., Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On. London, 1989. Hall, Stuart, Raymond Williams, and Edward Thompson, eds. 1967 New Left May Day Manifesto. London, 1967. Hastings, Adrian. A History of English Christianity, 1920–1985. London, 1986. ———. A History of English Christianity, 1920– 2000. London, 2001. ———. In Filial Disobedience. Essex, UK, 1978. ———, ed. Modern Catholicism: Vatican II and After. London, 1991. ———. “Some Reflections on the English Catholicism of the Late 1930s.” In Adrian Hastings, ed., Bishops and Writers: Aspects of the Evolution of Modern English Catholicism. Cambridge, 1977. Hauerwas, Stanley. “Some Theological Reflections on Gutiérrez’s Use of ‘Liberation’ as a Theological Concept.” Modern Theology 3, no. 1 (1986). Hayden, Tom. Reunion: A Memoir. New York, 1988. Hayes, Carleton. A Generation of Materialism, 1871–1900. New York, 1941. Hebblethwaite, Peter. The Christian-Marxist Dialogue: Beginnings, Present Status, and Beyond. London, 1977. ———. John XXIII: Pope of the Century. London, 1994. ———. Runaway Church. London, 1975. Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York, 2009. Heenan, John C. Cardinal Hinsley. London, 1944. ———. A Crown of Thorns: An Autobiography, 1951–1963. London, 1974. Hemming, Laurence Paul, ed. Radical Orthodoxy? A Catholic Enquiry. Aldershot, UK, 2000. Herberg, Will. Protestant, Catholic, Jew. New York, 1955. Hetztler, Leo. “Chesterton’s Political Views, 1892–1914.” The Chesterton Review 8, no. 2 (Spring 1981). Hickey, John. Urban Catholics: Urban Catholicism in England and Wales from 1829 to the Present Day. London, 1967. Higgins, John. Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism. London, 1999. Hildebrand, Dietrich von. Trojan Horse in the City of God. Chicago, 1967.

482 Select Bibliography Hobgood, Mary E. Catholic Social Teaching and Economic Theory: Paradigms in Conflict. Philadelphia, 1991. Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. New York, 1976. Holmes, J. Derek. More Roman than Rome: English Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century. London, 1978. ———. The Papacy in the Modern World, 1914–1978. New York, 1981. Hook, Sydney. Reason, Social Myths, and Democracy. New York, 1950. Hopkins, Eric. The Rise and Decline of the English Working Classes, 1918–1990: A Social History. New York, 1991. Hornsby-Smith, Michael P. Catholics in England, 1950– 2000: Historical and Sociological Perspectives. London, 1999. ———. “Recent Transformations in English Catholicism: Evidence of Secularization?” In Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis. Oxford, 1992. ———. Roman Catholic Beliefs in England: Customary Catholicism and Transformations of Religious Authority. Cambridge, 1991. ———. Roman Catholics in England: Studies in Social Structure since the Second World War. Cambridge, 1987. Houghton, Rosemary, and Cardinal John Heenan. Dialogue: The State of the Church Today. New York, 1967. Hudson, Deal W., and Matthew J. Mancini, eds. Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend. Macon, GA, 1987. Hughes, Rev. Philip. “The Coming Century.” In George Andrew Beck, ed., The English Catholics, 1850–1950. London, 1950. Humani Generis. www.vatican.va. Hurn, David Abner. Archbishop Roberts, S.J. London, 1966. Inglis, Fred. Raymond Williams: His Life and Times. New York, 1995. Inglis, K. S. Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England. London, 1963. Jaeger, Lorenz. The Ecumenical Council, the Church and Christendom. London, 1961. Jersild, Paul T. “The Christian-Marxist Encounter in the West.” In Wayne Stumme, ed., Christians and the Many Faces of Marxism. Minneapolis, 1984. Jones, Peter d’A. The Christian Socialist Revival, 1877–1914. Princeton, 1968. Kaiser, Robert Blair. Pope, Council, and World: The Story of Vatican II. New York, 1963. Kenny, Anthony. A Path from Rome: An Autobiography. London, 1985. Kenny, Michael. The First New Left: British Intellectuals after Stalin. London, 1995. Kernan, Julie. Our Friend, Jacques Maritain: A Personal Memoir. New York, 1975. Kerr, Fergus, O. P. Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians. Oxford, 2007. King, Thomas M., and Mary Wood Gilbert, eds. The Letters of Teilhard de Chardin and Lucile Swan. Scranton, PA, 2001. Klugmann, James, ed. Dialogue of Christianity and Marxism. London, 1968.

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Klugmann, James, and Paul Oestreicher, eds. What Kind of Revolution? A ChristianCommunist Dialogue. London, 1968. Kottak, Conrad Phillip. Cultural Anthropology. New York, 1979. Krieg, Robert A. Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany. New York, 2004. ———, ed. Romano Guardini: Proclaiming the Sacred in a Modern World. Chicago, 1989. Küng, Hans. The Council in Action: Thleological Reflections on the Second Vatican Council. New York, 1963. ———. The Council, Reform and Reunion. New York, 1961. ———. Disputed Truth: Memoirs II. Translated by John Bowden. New York, 2008. ———. Infallible? An Enquiry. New York, 1971. ———. My Struggle for Freedom: Memoirs. Translated by John Bowden. Cambridge, 2003. ———. Structures of the Church. New York, 1982. La Due, William J. The Chair of Saint Peter: A History of the Papacy. Maryknoll, NY, 1999. Labedz, Leopold, ed. Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas. New York, 1962. Laing, R. D. The Politics of Experience. New York, 1967. Lamb, Mathew L. Solidarity with Victims: Toward a Theology of Social Transformation. New York, 1952. Lamberts, Emiel, ed. The Black International/L’Internationale noire, 1870–1878: The Holy See and Militant Catholicism in Europe/Le Saint-Siège et le Catholicisme militant en Europe. Leuven, 2002. Lappé, Frances Moore, and Joseph Collins. Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity. New York, 1978. Lawler, Justus George. Popes and Politics: Reform, Resentment, and the Holocaust. New York, 2002. Lawler, Monica. Out of This World. London, 1965. Lewy, Guenter. The Catholic Church in Nazi Germany. New York, 1963. Linker, Damon. The Theocons: Secular America under Siege. New York, 2006. Lodge, David. “The Church and Cultural Life.” In John Cumming and Paul Burns, eds., The Church Now: An Inquiry into the Present State of the Catholic Church in Britain and Ireland. London, 1980. ———. How Far Can You Go? London, 1980. ———. “Memories of a Catholic Childhood.” The Tablet, 7 August 1976. ———. The Novelist at the Crossroads, and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism. Ithaca, NY, 1971. Longley, Clifford. The Worlock Archive. London, 2000. Lothian, James R. The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910–1950. Notre Dame, IN, 2009. Lumen Gentium. www.vatican.va.

484 Select Bibliography Lynch, John. “England.” In Adrian Hastings, ed., The Church and the Nations. London, 1959. MacIntyre, Alasdair. Marxism and Christianity. Notre Dame, IN, 1984. ———. Marxism: An Interpretation. London, 1953. Marcuse, Herbert. Counterrevolution and Revolt. Boston, 1972. Maritain, Jacques. Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom. Translated by Joseph W. Evans. New York, 1968. ———. Lettre sur l’Independance. Paris, 1935. ———. Man and the State. Chicago, 1956. ———. On the Philosophy of History. Edited by Joseph W. Evans. New York, 1957. ———. The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time. Translated by Michael Cuddihy and Elizabeth Hughes. New York, 1968. ———. Religion and Culture. New York, 1931. ———. Scholasticism and Politics. Translated by Mortimer J. Adler. New York, 1960. ———. The Things That Are Not Caesar’s. New York, 1930. Maritain, Jacques, Peter Wust, and Christopher Dawson. Essays in Order. With an introduction by Christopher Dawson. New York, 1931. Martin, Malachi. Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church. New York, 1987. Marwick, Arthur. The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958– c. 1974. New York, 1998. Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Reprinted in Andrew Giddens and D. Held, eds., Classes, Power and Conflict: Classical and Contemporary Debates. Berkeley, CA, 1982. Mater et Magistra. www.vatican.va. Mathew, David. Catholicism in England: The Portrait of a Minority: Its Culture and Tradition. 3rd ed. London, 1955. 1st ed., London, 1936. McCabe, Herbert, O. P. Law, Love and Language. London, 1968. McCaffery, Peter. “Catholic Radicalism and Counter-Radicalism: A Comparative Study of England and the Netherlands.” D. Phil. Thesis, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, 1979. McCarraher, Eugene. “Herbert McCabe’s Revolutionary Faith.” Commonweal 8, October 2010. ———. “Still a Good Catholic Boy.” In These Times, 11 November 2002. McClelland, V. Allan. “Great Britain and Ireland.” In Adrian Hastings, ed., Modern Catholicism: Vatican II and After. London, 1991. McEnroy, Carmel. Guests in Their Own House: The Women of Vatican II. New York, 1996. McEntee, Georgiana Putnam. The Social Catholic Movement in Great Britain. New York, 1927.

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McQuillan, John, et al. Flee to the Fields: The Founding Papers of the Catholic Land Movement. Original preface by Hilaire Belloc and introduction by Tobias Lanz. Norfolk, VA, 2003. McSweeney, William. Roman Catholicism: The Search for Relevance. Oxford, 1980. Meconis, Charles. With Clumsy Grace: The American Catholic Left, 1961–1975. New York, 1979. Metz, Johannes B. Theology of the World. Translated by William Glen-Doepel. New York, 1969. Middlemas, Keith. Politics in Industrial Society: The Experience of the British System since 1911. London, 1979. Middleton, Neil. The Language of Christian Revolution. London, 1968. Milbank, John. “On Baseless Suspicion: Christianity and the Crisis of Socialism.” New Blackfriars. January 1988. Milbank, John, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, eds. Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology. London, 1999. Miliband, Ralph. Capitalist Democracy in Britain. New York, 1982. ———. Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour. 2d ed. London, 1973. Miliband, Ralph, and John Saville, eds. The Socialist Register. London, 1966. Mills, C. Wright. The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders. New York, 1948. ———. The Power Elite. New York, 1956. ———. The Sociological Imagination. New York, 1959. ———. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York, 1951. Miranda, José Porfirio. Marx and the Bible. New York, 1971. Moloney, Thomas. Westminster, Whitehall, and the Vatican: The Role of Cardinal Hinsley, 1935– 43. Tunbridge Wells, Kent, 1985. Moltmann, Jurgen. God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology. Minneapolis, 1999. ———. Religion, Revolution, and the Future. Translated by M. Douglas Meeks. New York, 1969. Muller, Michael. The Catholic Doctrine. New York, 1888. Murphy, Paul I., with R. René Alington. La Popessa. New York, 1983. Newfield, Jack. A Prophetic Minority. New York, 1966. Newman, Michael. Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left. London, 2002. Niebuhr, Reinhold. An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. New York, 1979. ———. Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. New York, 1932. Noel, Conrad. Autobiography. London, 1945. ———. Socialism in Church History. London, 1910. Norman, E. R. The English Catholic Church in the 19th Century. Oxford, 1964. Novak, Michael. Belief and Unbelief: A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge. New York, 1965. ———. A Time to Build. New York, 1967.

486 Select Bibliography O’Brien, David. The Renewal of American Catholicism. New York, 1972. O’Brien, David, and Thomas Shannon, eds. Catholic Social Thought: The Documentary Heritage. Maryknoll, New York, 1992. Oestreicher, Paul, ed. The Christian Marxist Dialogue: An International Symposium. New York, 1969. Oglesby, Carl, ed. The New Left Reader. New York, 1969. The Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World. Boston, 1966. Perkins, John. Confession of an Economic Hit Man. San Francisco, 2004. Petri, Barbara P. The Historical Thought of P.-J.-B. Buchez. Washington, DC, 1958. Quadragesimo Anno. www.vatican.va. Rahner, Karl. Theological Investigations. Translated by Cornelius Ernst. Baltimore, 1963. Raines, John C., and Thomas Dean, eds. Marxism and Radical Religion: Essays Toward a Revolutionary Humanism. Philadelphia, 1970. Raven, Charles R. Teilhard de Chardin: Scientist and Seer. New York, 1962. Reckitt, Maurice. Maurice to Temple. London, 1947. Reese, Thomas J. Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church. Cambridge, MA, 1996. Regan, Stephan, ed. The Eagleton Reader. Oxford, 1998. Robbins, Harold. The Last of the Realists: A Distributist Biography of G.K. Chesterton. Norfolk, VA, 2009. Rogers, F. Labour, Life and Literature: Some Memories of Sixty Years. London, 1913. Rushkoff, Douglas. Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back. New York, 2009. Rynne, Xavier. Vatican Council II. New York, 1968. Sampson, Anthony. Anatomy of Britain Today. New York, 1965. Samuel, Ralph. “Born-Again Socialism.” In Robin Archer et al., eds., Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On. London, 1989. Sánchez, José M. Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy. Washington, DC, 2002. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Boston, 1965. Schoof, Mark. A Survey of Catholic Theology, 1800–1970. New York, 1970. Schoonenberg, Piet. Man and Sin. London, 1965. Schwartz, Adam. The Third Spring: G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones. Washington, DC, 2005. Scott, George. The R.C.s: A Report on Roman Catholics in Britain Today. London, 1967. Sedgwick, Peter. “The Two New Lefts.” In David Widgery, The Left in Britain, 1956–1968. London, 1976. Segundo, Juan Luis. The Liberation of Theology. Maryknoll, NY, 1976.

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Sharratt, Bernard. “English Roman Catholicism in the 1960s.” In Adrian Hastings, ed. Bishops and Writers: Aspects of the Evolution of Modern English Catholicism. Cambridge, 1977. Sheed, Frank (F. J.). The Church and I. Garden City, NY, 1974. ———. Communism and Man. New York, 1938. Sheed, Wilfrid. Frank and Maisie: A Memoir with Parents. New York, 1985. Siefer, Gregor. The Church and Industrial Society. London, 1964. Smith, Brooke Williams. Jacques Maritain, Antimodern or Ultramodern? An Historical Analysis of His Critics, His Thought, and His Life. New York, 1976. Smith, Dai. Raymond Williams: A Warrior’s Tale. Cardigan, UK, 2008. Snead-Cox, J. G. The Life of Cardinal Vaughan. Vol. 1. London, 1910. Soelle, Dorothee. Political Theology. Philadelphia, 1974. Southworth, Herbert Rutledge. Guernica! Guernica! A Study of Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda, and History. Berkeley, CA, 1977. Speaight, Robert. Teilhard de Chardin: A Biography. London, 1967. Stehle, Hansjakob. Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 1917–1979. Athens, OH, 1981. Stein, Walter, ed. Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience. London, 1961. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Future of Man. New York, 1964. ———. The Human Phenomenon. Translated by Sarah Appleton-Weber. Brighton, UK, 1999. ———. Letters from a Traveller. New York, 1962. ———. The Letters of Teilhard de Chardin and Lucile Swan. Washington, DC, 1993. ———. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Writings. Selected with an introduction by Ursula King. Maryknoll, NY, 1999. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York, 1963. Tillich, Paul. Political Expectations. New York, 1971. Todd, John M. “The Worldly Church: Political Bias, Autocracy and Legalism.” In Michael de la Bedoyère, ed., Objections to Roman Catholicism. New York, 1965. Toke, Leslie. Some Methods of Social Study. London, 1908. Torres, Camilo. Priest and Revolutionary. London, 1967. Tucker, Bernard, ed. Catholic Education in a Secular Society. London, 1968. Turner, Denys. Marxism and Christianity. Oxford, 1983. Von Aretin, Karl Otmar. The Papacy and the Modern World. London, 1970. Von Klemperer, Klemens. The German Resistance against Hitler. Oxford, 1992. Weaver, Mary Jo, ed. What’s Left? Liberal American Catholics. Bloomington, IN, 1999. White, L. A. The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. New York, 1959. White, Lynn, Jr. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” In David Spring and Eileen Spring, eds., Ecology and Religion in History. San Francisco, 1974. Whyte, John H. Catholics in Western Democracies: A Study in Political Behavior. New York, 1981.

488 Select Bibliography Wicker, Brian. Culture and Liturgy. London, 1963. ———. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. London, 1958. ———. First the Political Kingdom: A Personal Appraisal of the Catholic Left in Britain. Notre Dame, IN, 1967. ———. Toward a Contemporary Christian Culture and Theology. Notre Dame, IN, 1967. Widdrington, P. E. T. “The History of the Church Socialist League II.” Commonwealth, no. 7, July 1927. Widgery, David. The Left in Britain, 1956–1968. London, 1976. Wilde, Melissa J. Vatican II: A Sociological Analysis of Religious Change. Princeton, 2007. Wildiers, Norbert Max. An Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin. New York, 1968. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. New York, 1958. ———. The Long Revolution. New York, 1961. ———, ed. May Day Manifesto 1968. London, 1968. ———. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London, 1979. ———. Resources of Hope. London, 1989. Wills, Garry. Confessions of a Conservative. Garden City, NY, 1979. ———. Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit. New York, 2000. ———. Politics and Catholic Freedom. Chicago, 1964. ———. Why Priests? The Real Meaning of the Eucharist. New York, 2013. Wilmott, P., and M. Young. Family and Class in a London Suburb. London, 1960. Wiltgen, Ralph M. The Rhine Flows into the Tiber: The Unknown Council. New York, 1967. Zwerdling, Alex. Orwell and the Left. New Haven, CT, 1974.

Interviews Christopher Calnan John Challenor Adrian Cunningham Angela Cunningham Terry Eagleton Fergus Kerr Neil Middleton Martin Redfern Bernard Sharratt Martin Shaw Brian Wicker

I N D E X

Acton, Lord, 155 Adam, Karl, 70; on “Reform Catholicism,” 396n.17 Adams, Dr. Walter, 327– 29; and student protests at London School of Economics, 313 Adenauer, Konrad, 108 Adolfs, Robert: critical of traditional Christianity, 284 Adzhubei, Alexis, editor of Izvestia, 111–13 aggiornamento, 91, 120, 126, 136, 140, 156, 165, 168 Alberigo, Giuseppe, 138 Alexander VII, Pope, 71 Alison, James, 224 Allitt, Patrick, 158 Ambrose, St., 263 America: controversy with William F. Buckley and Mater et Magistra, 113–15, 117; on meaning of social encyclicals, 117–18 American Catholic Left: compared to English Catholic Left, 370; influence of Dorothy Day, 370; influence of Jacques Maritain, 370 American Catholics: and ChristianMarxist dialogue, 449n.71; and Pacem in Terris, 449n.71 American New Left, 370– 71; influence of Albert Camus, 371; influence of C. Wright Mills, 371

Amery, Carl: on Catholic Church and Nazis, 200; on “Catholics of the milieu,” 200; on Franz von Papen, 202 anawim, 259, 261 Anderson, Perry, 416n.24; on Antonio Gramsci, 196; on English working class, 322; on Leninism, 335– 36; and New Left Review, 175; on socialist revolutions, 335– 36; on trade unionism, 331 Anglican-Roman Catholic Joint Preparatory Commission, 160– 61 Annan, Noel, 227 Anscombe, G. E. M., 194 Anselm, St., 383 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 383; and neoThomism (neoscholasticism), 67– 69; and Summa Theologiae, 67; teachings, 82 Archer, Anthony, 363 Ashbrook, John M.: on Pacem in Terris, 146 Aspden, Kester, 153 Association of Catholic Trade Unions (ACTU), 52– 53 Associations of Catholic Employers and Managers, 50– 51 Attwater, Donald, 367; on “Latinophile” Catholics, 59; and PAX, 186

489

490 Index Au, William A.: on failings of American Catholic Left, 373 Augustine, St., 243– 44, 383 back-to-the-land movement, 185 Baker, Francis, 300 Baran, Paul A., and Paul M. Sweezy: Monopoly Capital, 262– 63, 439n.34, 439n.37 Barker, C., 332– 33 Barth, Karl: relationship with Hans Küng, 125 Basil, St., 263 Baum, Gregory, 137, 401n.25, 406n.23, 415n.21; on Charles Davis, 314–15; on ChristianMarxist dialogue, 285; and English Catholic New Left, 287; and founding fathers of classical sociology, 286– 87; on Marx, 286; on the principle of subsidiarity, 98; on social movements, 455n.38; on Vatican Council II, 314–15; views on Maurice Blondel, 73 Bayside Prophecies, 411n.51 Bea, Cardinal Augustin, 407n.39; and ecumenism in Britain, 160; at Secretariat for Christian Unity, 137 Beatles, the, 149 Beauduin, Lambert, 71 Beaulieu, Madame Simone, 82– 83 Beaverbrook, Lord, 150 Beck, Archbishop George A., 14, 19; on Catholics and politics, 56 Beeson, Trevor: on teach-in for Herbert McCabe at Westminster Cathedral, 306– 7 Belloc, Hilaire, 363– 64; on Distributism, 28; on House of Commons, 391n.19; influence

on English Catholics, 41, 47, 58– 59; influence on G. D. H. Cole, R. H. Tawney, and Guild Socialists, 21; influence on revolutionary ideas pre–World War I, 34– 35; on labor unrest, 28, 31– 32; as Liberal M. P., 28; on minimum wage, 32– 33; parliamentary career, 33– 34; on party politics, 344; The Party System, 29; on peasant proprietorship, 28; relationship with G. K. Chesterton, 27– 28; and radical Distributism, 21– 22; on restoration of monarchy, 34, 39; The Servile State, 29– 31, 470n.89 Benedict XIV, Pope, 118: and Caritas in Veritate, 386– 87 Benedictines at Maria Laach and Beuron, 71 Benson, Peter, 186 Benton, M. J., 404n.8 Benvenisti, J. L., 41 Beran, Archbishop Josef of Prague, 112 Berger, Peter, 434n.87; influence on Slant circle, 245; on Marx and sociology, 207; on Marxism and Christianity, 424n.96; and reference group theory, 420n.53; on “social construction of reality,” 245 Bergonzi, Bernard: on English Catholic subculture, 58– 60; praises Catholicism on the Left, 60; on Terry Eagleton, 438n.30 Bergson, Henri, 80 Berry, Thomas: on Teilhard de Chardin, 397n.26 Bevan, Aneurin, 150: and National Health Service Act, 53

Index

Beveridge, Sir William: Beveridge Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services, 53 Biesley, Phil, 360 Binz, Archbishop Leo of St. Paul, 407n.39 Black International, 401n.27 Black Unity, 362 Blackburn, Robin: on “new capitalism,” 322 Blackfriars (later New Blackfriars), 192– 93; Pacem in Terris, 107; on Spanish Civil War, 186; supports Catholic Left, 186 Blackheath Commune, 22, 192, 361– 63; influence of Dominicans, 469n.72 Blake, Simon, O.P.: and Amnesty International, 188; and Christian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CCND), 197– 98; on Charles Davis, 309; and Friday Group, 91 Blanchard, Paul, 117 Blenkinsopp, Joseph: on early Christianity and Marx, 281 Bloch, Ernst, 297; on Christianity and Marxism, 446n.37; and Thomas Muntzer, 446n.37 Blondel, Maurice, 81 Boer War, 24 Bogdanor, V., 411n.5 Bolsheviks, 259– 60, 263 Bonhoffer, Dietrich, 223, 405n.8 Bottomore, Tom, 178; and Marxism, 414; on Soviets, 414 Bourdet, Claude, 174– 75 Bourne, Cardinal Francis: on Catholics in politics, 152; and general strike (1926), 37 Bouyer, L., 131 Boxer, Charles, O.P., 186

491 Boyle, Leonard, 192 Bracken, Brendan: on Aneurin Bevan, 150 Braine, John: The Jealous God, 153– 54 Bright, Laurence, O.P., 253, 341, 376; and Aquinas Society, 216–17; on Charles Davis, 313–14, 431n.42; on Christianity and Marxism, 299; criticizes Catholic establishment, 227– 28; and David Lodge, 226; and December Group, 183; as editor of The Newman, 183; and Friday Group, 191; and Harvey Cox, 431n.42; influence on Catholic Left, 426n.2, 428n.21; influence on Martin Redfern, 182; influence on Slant, 216–17; influence on Slant circle and Catholic New Left, 385; influence on Terry Eagleton, 223; influence at University of London, 188; on Marx, 228, 265; on mobilizing middle classes, 363; personal background, 223; as pioneer of liberation theology, 265; promotes Christian-Marxist dialogue, 294; and Raymond Williams, 226; and Slant, 185, 426n.4; and Student Christian Movement (SCM), 361; and Tara Calnan, 191; on Teilhard de Chardin, 431n.39; university activities, 185 Britain: economic and political conditions after World War II, 149– 51 British Catholicism: after World War II, 9–12; bishops and clergy, 11–13, 18– 20 British Communist Party, 180

492 Index British intellectuals on the Left, 149 Brogan, Colm: on Slant, 341 Brown, Dale W.: on Reinhold Niebuhr, 279 Brown, Robert McAfee: and Vatican Council II, 407n.33 Bruneau, Thomas: and liberation theology, 440n.54 Bryden, Dr. John: on dismissal of Herbert McCabe, 309–11; leads campaign to reinstate Herbert McCabe, 306 Buchez, P.-J.-B., 23 Buckley, William F., 399n.2; on fighting communism, 116–17; on meaning of social encyclicals, 117; National Review attacks on Mater et Magistra, 113–17 Bucknill, Peter, 190– 91; and Tara Calnan, 192 Burgess, Keith: critique of Labour Party’s “new capitalism,” 323– 24; and May Day Manifesto, 323– 24 Burne, Hugh: founding of Latin Mass Society, 157 Burns, Tom, 14; at Burns and Oates, 417n.29; and Chelsea Group, 417n.29; and Frank Sheed, 416n.26; and General Franco, 417n.29 Butler, Bishop Christopher: against Humanae Vitae, 162– 63; at Vatican Council II, 155 Butler, R. (Rab) A., 149: and National Education Act, 53– 54 Calnan, Christopher, 361– 62, 381, 420n.51; and British Communist Party, 460n.42; and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 189; and Christian CND, 197, 375; on Friday Group,

190– 92; impact of McCabe Affair, 452n.13; influence of Alex Newman, O.P., 190– 91; influence of Herbert McCabe, O.P., 189– 90; and Jurgen Moltmann, 471n.112; on Laurence Bright, O.P., and Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., 431n.39; on Martin Shaw’s departure from Slant, 461n.49; personal background and influences, 188–192; and protests, 471n.112; and Sheed and Ward, 188, 375; and Slant, 188, 191, 380; Slant’s circulation, 427n.10; and Student Christian Movement’s (SCM) Political Commission (PC), 361– 62 Calnan, Jacqui, 362 Camara, Archbishop Dom Helder, 269, 439n.38: and Brazilian military dictatorship, 266; and Catholic Left, 427n.11; critique of bourgeois society, 435n.85; and Haslemere Group, 269– 70; inspires Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops, 265– 66; on Marxism, 266; and military death threats, 440n.47; nominated for Noble Peace Prize, 440n.47; and Populorum Progressio, 266; at Vatican Council II, 265– 66 Cambridge Aquinas Society of Catholic Students, 308 Cameron, J. M., 377: academic career, 422n.80; on Adrian Cunningham’s neo-Thomistic criticism, 243; and Brian Wicker, 203– 4; and Catholic Left, 201, 205– 6; on Charles Davis, 313; on Christian-Marxist convergence,

Index

357; on Christian-Marxist dialogue, 293– 94; on communism, 201– 2; critical of conservative Catholics, 44; critique of Church and parish politics, 202– 3; on Douglas Woodruff, 340; influence of Carl Amery, 202; on Marx, 206– 7, 433n.94; and Marxism, 278; on New Left’s writing style, 243, 467n.55; Night Battle, 204; and PAX, 203; on “political fetishism,” 201– 2; and Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, 206– 7; and Slant, 422n.80; on Slant’s use of language, 356; and sociology of knowledge, 422n.81 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 375, 387; adopts Labour Party’s foreign policy platform, 198– 99; Aldermaston March, 195; Committee of 100, 421n.68; on G. K. Chesterton, 365; origins and aims, 195; relationship with New Left, 195 Cardinale, Archbishop Hyginus: on dismissal of Herbert McCabe, 310; on Herbert McCabe and Charles Davis, 305 Caritas in Veritate: and President Barack Obama, 474n.151 Carney, James Francis, S.J.: and guerrilla warfare, 440n.55 Casanova, Antoine: attacks Roger Garaudy for supporting Christian dialogue, 300 Castle, Barbara: and New Left, 318 Catholic clergy (English): challenged by college graduates, 57– 58; and Irish immigrants, 57 Catholic conservatives, 2 Catholic Education Council, 19

493 Catholic Evidence Guild, 22, 182; Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward on Pius XII, 182; influence on Neil Middleton, 182 Catholic Fund for Overseas Development (CAFOD), 377 Catholic Herald, 59; on McCabe Affair, 305– 6, 308– 9; and Vatican II, 159 Catholic Housing Aid Society (CHAS), 377 Catholic Institute for International Relations (Progressio), 377 Catholic liberalism, 2 Catholic liberals, 98 Catholic Members of Parliament (MPs), 19 Catholic New Left (English): achievements, 368– 71; on British Communist Party, 462n.3; and C. Wright Mills, 342; and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 183, 186, 199, 357; and capitalism, 4, 261– 62, 169, 193– 94, 276; and Cardinal John C. Heenan, 393n.11; and Cecil Chesterton’s and Hilaire Belloc’s The Party System, 252; on Charles Davis, 313, 315–16; and Chesterton and Belloc, 363– 64; and Chesterton on community, 365; and Christian-Marxist convergence, 278, 374; and Christian-Marxist dialogue, 283, 299– 301; on class privilege, 219; and classical and contemporary sociologists, 373– 74; on Cold War, 194; and “common culture,” 251; on community of socialist humanism, 261; compared to American Catholic Leftists, 370;

494 Index Catholic New Left (English) (cont.) conflicts within, 421n.69; creating a common culture, 358, 364; criticism of Catholic establishment, 204– 5, 211–12; criticism of Labour Party, 205; demise, 378– 79; differences with papacy and social reform, 248; differs from “old Left,” 173; and Distributist movement, 363– 65, 392n.29; and Emile Durkheim, 342, 369; failures, 368– 69; and Ferdinand Tönnies, 342, 369; impact of McCabe Affair, 315–16; on imperialism, 261– 62; includes numerous groups, 222; influence, 4, 377; influence of Bernard Delfgaauw, 274; influence of December Group, 186; on institutional Church, 302; and Ivan Turgenev, 374; on Jacques Maritain, 347, 352– 53; on just war, 194; on Leszek Kolakowski, 443n.8; on liberal paternalism, 212; on liberalism, 2– 4, 6, 169, 263, 364– 65; on liberation theology, 269, 270– 72, 410n.47; on Ludwig Wittgenstein, 342, 400n.18, 437n.10; and Martin Heidegger, 437n.10; and Marx, 3, 178, 205– 6, 213, 273– 76, 345– 55, 357, 364, 369, 373; on Marx and Christianity, 424n.94; and Max Weber, 369; on May Day Manifesto and militarism, 262; on New Left Review, 194; on “new theology,” 3; and Newman Association, 377; on nuclear issues, Church, and Nazis, 199– 200; on nuclear weapons, 193; and papal social encyclicals, 367– 68; and Peter Berger, 342;

on “politics,” 251– 53, 345, 357; and R. D. Laing, 257; and Raymond Williams, 211–12, 272, 342, 363; and reference group theory, 420n.53; on revolution, 4, 261, 346; and Richard Hoggart, 342; and Roger Garaudy, 443n.8; and self-criticism, 358; on socialism, 4, 6; and Soviet invasion of Hungary, 173; and Stuart Hall, 342; on Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 370– 71; and Teilhard de Chardin, 398n.34; and Third World bishops’ manifesto, 263– 64; on Vatican, 437n.10; on working class, 211–12. See also Slant circle Catholic Nuclear Disarmament Group (CNDG), 198 Catholic nuns: and Vatican II, 406n.32 Catholic representation in Parliament, 19 Catholic social action, 22 Catholic Social Guild, 18, 189, 394n.34; and C. C. Clump, S.J., 219– 20; Catholic Guide to Social and Political Action, 219– 20; on Distributists, 392n.28; and Fabian Society, 22; and minimum wage, 32; and social encyclicals, 153; and welfare state, 54 Catholic social reform, 18 Catholic Socialist Union, 22 Catholic Student Society (Netherlands), 273 Catholic Traditionalist Movement, 145 Catholic Truth Society: and Rerum Novarum, 418n.38 Catholic Union, 48– 49 Catholic University of America, 405n.19

Index

Catholic Worker Movement, 238 Catholic Workers’ College (Oxford), 18, 49– 50, 189 Catholics and assimilation into English society, 56– 57 Catholics and Butler Education Act, 55– 56 Catholics and welfare state legislation, 54– 55, 64 Central American University, Managua, Nicaragua: and Sandinistas, 270 Chadwick, Bishop William: and Christian Marxist dialogue, 449n.64 Challenor, John, 381; on Catholic New Left and politics, 476n.57; influences, 463n.13; on Laurence Bright and liberation theology, 440n.46; on Slant, 354, 386 Chang, Jung, and Jon Halliday, 432n.56 Chartist movement, 15–16 Chenu, Marie-Dominique, 81– 82, 85, 131, 135, 285 Chesterbelloc, 14; Chesterbelloc circle and New Left, 176 Chesterton, A. K., 41 Chesterton, Cecil, 22, 25; and parliamentary politics, 34– 35; Party and People, 29; The Party System, 29; relationship with Hilaire Belloc, 29 Chesterton, G. (Gilbert) K. (Keith), 13, 25– 26, 183– 84, 295, 340; and anarcho-syndicalism, 26, 365; on Boer War, 24; disillusioned with Liberal Party and parliamentary government, 26; on Distributism, 28; on Fabianism, 27; and Fascism, 40– 41; and Ferdinand Tönnies, 365;

495 and George Bernard Shaw, 24; on H. G. Wells, 271; on imperialism, 24– 25, 469n.82; influence on Catholics, 41, 47; influence on G. D. H. Cole, R. H. Tawney, and Guild Socialists, 21; influence on revolutionary ideas pre–World War I, 34– 35; on labor movement, 28; on Labour Party, 317; on liberalism, 26; on minimum wage, 32– 33, 36; and orthodoxy, 25– 26; and party politics, 344; on principle of subsidiarity, 26; on Protestantism, 157; on radical Distributism, 21– 22; relationship with Hilaire Belloc, 27– 28; and Rerum Novarum, 27; and Slant circle, 365; on socialism, 267; and sociopolitical positions, 366; and split in Distributist movement, 40– 41 Chesterton Review: and G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture, 469n.79; and Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 469n.79 Chiemsee conference on ChristianMarxist dialogue, 290 Christian Aid, 362 Christian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CCND), 196– 97, 222, 361; and Christian group of the Committee of 100, 198; and ecumenism, 197; launches journal Rushlight, 197; and resistance of conservative Catholics, 197; and speaker panels, 421n.66; and various protests, 198; and war in Vietnam, 198 Christian Democrats (Italy). See Moro, Aldo

496 Index Christian-Marxist dialogue: on atheism, 297; consequences, 295– 97, 301; on historical materialism, 296; on Marxist totalitarianism, 297 Christian-Marxist synthesis, 374 Christian Social Union (CSU), 23– 24 Christian Socialism, 384; and working classes, 248– 49 Christian Socialist League (CSL), 25 Christian Socialist Movement, 20 Christian Socialists, 295 Christians for Socialism (CFS): and capitalist imperialism, 271; and Marxism, 271; and Salvador Allende, 271 Christie, Joseph, S.J., 308– 9 Chun, Lin, 415n.11; and R. D. Laing, 437n.20 Churchill, Winston, 125, 149 Clark, Colin: and welfare state legislation, 54 Clements, Simon, 253 Clements, Simon, and Monica Lawlor: on McCabe affair, 305; on teach-in for McCabe, 307 Cliff, Tony, 331– 34, 459n.30 Clifford, William, 155 Clough, Pauline, 190– 91; and Tara Calnan, 192 Coates, Ken: and Christian-Marxist dialogue, 295 Cogley, John: on Mater et Magistra, 114; supports Hans Küng on Vatican II, 130 College of Cardinals, 68 Collins, Canon John, 195 Collins, Diana: and Christian CND, 197 Coman, Peter: on Catholics and the welfare state, 55– 56 Commonweal, 186

Complotto contro la Chiesa: alleges plot to undermine Vatican Council II and Church, 137 Congar, Yves, 82, 85, 93, 131, 135; influence on Hans Küng, 125; influence on John M. Todd, 166; and Paulusgesellschaft conferences, 291 Connolly, James, 376 Constitution on Divine Revelation. See Dei Verbum convert Catholics: cultural contributions, 13–14 Conway, Cardinal Archbishop William, Primate of All Ireland, 160 Councilium, 139 Cousins, Norman: and Cuban missile crisis, 403n.40; and Slipyj case, 403n.42 Cowderoy, Archbishop Cyril Conrad of Southwark: and Humanae Vitae, 163 Cowling, Maurice, 226– 27; on Raymond Williams, 226 Craig, Robert H.: on Christianity and Marxism, 279 Crane, Paul, S.J., 343; and Christian Order, 464n.21; responds to welfare state initiatives, 54 Crawford, Virginia, 2 Cripps, Sir Stafford, 150 Crosland, Anthony, 150– 51, 205; The Future of Socialism, 459n.35 Cunningham, Adrian, 341, 376– 77; and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and PAX, 188; and Catholic establishment, 220– 21; on Catholic New Left and Distributism, 366– 67; and Catholic Nuclear Disarmament Group (CNDG), 198, 419n.44;

Index

on Charles Maurras and Action Française, 239– 40; and Christian-Marxist dialogue, 294; on Christopher Dawson, 242– 44; and December Group, 183; and Distributism, 187, 463n.13; and Ditchling guild, 187; and Dorothy Day and Eileen Egan, 426n.3; on Eric Gill, 187, 366– 67, 470n.88; on European communist parties, 460n.41; and Friday Group, 191; influences, 187; on Jacques Maritain, 239– 44, 353; on Manchester and Catholic Left, 418n.35; on Martin Shaw’s Slant resignation, 337– 38; on Mater et Magistra, 247– 48; and May Day Manifesto, 320; on middle-class Catholics, 461n.50; on “new capitalism,” 247– 48; on politics, 344; and Robert Speaight, 470n.88; as Secretary of Catholic Nuclear Disarmament Group, 188; on Slant’s mission, 337– 38; and “Socialisme au Barbarie,” 188; and Solidarity, 188 Cunningham, Angela, 377; association with Solidarity and “Socialisme au Barbarie,” 188; on Catholic New Left and Distributism, 366; and Distributism, 187, 463n.13; and Father Ed de la Torre, 272; and Friday Group, 191; influence of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and PAX, 188; and Slant movement, 187; on Vincent McNabb, O.P., 366 Curran, Charles, 192 Cushing, Archbishop Richard of Boston, 407n.39

497 Daily Herald, 29– 30; and labor unrest, 30– 31 Daily Telegraph: and Vatican Council II, 259 Daly, Gabriel, 388n.1 Daly, Lawrence: and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 467n.53; founded Fife Socialist League (FSL), 467n.53; supporter of New Left journals, 467n.53; trade union activist, 467n.53 Daniélou, Jean, 93, 131 Dann, Graham: on Catholic New Left, 369; on Church and sociological research, 370 D’Arcy, Martin: and neo-Thomism, 242 Davis, Charles, 46, 338, 378; leaves Roman Catholic Church, 303; marriage, 305; and political theology, 447n.45; on Roman Catholic Church, 302– 3 Davis, Rev. Thurston N., S.J.: editor of America and controversy with National Review, 114, 117 Dawson, Christopher, 47; and Middle Ages, 434n.80; and neoThomism, 242– 43; and philosophical dualism, 243– 44; on Vatican II, 156 Day, Dorothy, 186, 238; and American Catholic Left, 370 de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard, S.J., 63, 74, 98, 100, 117, 129, 205, 267, 411n.51: accepts prohibitions, 80– 81; ban lifted on his publications, 93; Boston College withdraws honorary doctorate offer, 82; and Christian-Marxist dialogue, 228– 29, 294; complexity of language, 75– 76; on “cosmogenesis,” 80; and

498 Index de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard, S.J. (cont.) English Catholic New Left, 431n.39; and evolution, 79; and exile to China, 80; and Henri Bergson, 398n.38; The Human Phenomenon, 74– 75, 80, 93, 397n.26; institutional views, 75; legacy, 397n.26; loses faith in Curia, 81; on “Point Omega,” 75, 78– 79, 81; possible influence on Gaudium et Spes, 142; recommends progressives work underground, 82– 83; target of Vatican II reactionaries, 158; troubles with Vatican, 79– 82; and union créatrice, 77– 79 de Gaulle, Charles, 125 de Grassis, Paris: and vernacular, 71 de la Bedoyere, Michael, 44; and Catholic Herald, 395n.40; influenced by Slant, 272; launches Search, 165; leaves Catholic Herald, 165; and Objections to Roman Catholicism, 165, 168; and Search, 45, 59– 60 de Lubac, Henri, 82, 93, 131, 135, 285 De Rerum Novarum: reception in England, 418n.38 de Rosa, Peter, 46 De Valera, Eamon, 160 December Group, 358: on ChristianMarxist dialogue, 295; influence on Catholic New Left, 186; on Marx and Catholic social teachings, 186; and New Left Review, 183; and Salvador Allende, 271; and Slant, 217; on Teilhard de Chardin, 186 Decree on Ecumenism, 315 Dei Verbum (Constitution on Divine Revelation), 143, 315

Delfgaauw, Bernard, 273; on Marx, 273– 76; on Marx and religion, 275– 76; on Teilhard de Chardin, 273 DePauw, Father Gommar A.: critical of Vatican Council II, 145 Devlin, Bernadette, 360 Dewart, Leslie, 287, 377 Diekmann, Godfrey, O. S. B., 131, 139 Dignitatis Humanae, 143; influence of John Courtney Murray, S.J., 143; on religious liberty, 113 Dissidio, 101, 401n.26 Distributism, 22, 28, 30; and the Catholic New Left, 41; on liberalism, 364– 65; on Marx and New Left, 176; and Slant, 366– 67 Distributist groups: support for syndicalism, 16–17 Distributist industrial policy, 36 Distributist league, 39– 40 Distributist movement: and welfare state legislation, 54 Distributist political and economic positions. See G.K.’s Weekly Distributists: affinity with Ozanam’s and Marx’s social and economic ideas, 179; left wing, 42 Divini Redemptoris: condemnation of Marxism, 51– 52 Djilas, Milovan, 164; and The New Class, 414n.4 Dodd, Bella, 146 Döllinger, Johann Joseph Iznaz von: and the old Catholics, 67 Dominicans (England), 222– 23; and Catholic New Left, 418n.36; connections with English working class, 185; and December Group, 419n.40; educational and theological mission, 184, 187; influence on

Index

English Catholic New Left, 184, 186– 87; influence on Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, 183; influence on Slant movement, 187; inspired journal Humanitas, 186– 87; institutional structure, 307; at Oxford and Cambridge, 184; political history, 183– 87; promotes Christian-Marxist dialogue, 294– 95 Douglas, Mary, 14 Downing, Anthony: Slant and CND, 183 Duff, Peggy: and CND, 195, 199; and New Left, 195 Duffy, Eamon, 90; on McCabe’s exile to Ireland, 312 Dulles, John Foster, 109–10 Dummett, Michael: on Church corruption, 310 Dungarvan, Vincent: in The Jealous God, 154 Duns Scotus, John, 383 Durkheim, Emile, 94 Dutt, R. Palme: and Mond-Turner agreement, 39 Dworkin, Dennis, 430n.35 Dwyer, Archbishop J. P. of Birmingham: punishes Herbert McCabe, 311 Eagleton, Terry, 58, 181, 183, 334, 356, 377, 382; academic career, 225– 26; analysis of The Decree on the Instruments of Social Communication, 232; and anti–Vietnam War activities, 375– 76; appointed Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature, Oxford, 429n.29; on British Communist Party, 463n.12; on capitalism, 248– 49;

499 and Cardinal Heenan, 454n.24; on Catholic middle class, 221– 22; on Charles Davis, 316; on Charles Kingsley, 248– 49; on Christian-Marxist convergence, 298; on Christian-Marxist dialogue, 318; on Christian socialism and working classes, 248– 49; on Christian socialist revolution, 233– 34; on Christopher Dawson, 249; on Church corruption, 310; on Continental communist parties, 463n.12; on the creation of a common culture, 257– 59; defines “praxis,” 237; on Distributism, 463n.13; on Dominicans, 418n.34; early influences, 223; and F. D. Maurice, 248; on Gustavo Gutiérrez, 271; influence on Catholic Left, 428n.22; influence of Herbert McCabe, O.P., 261– 62; influence of New Left Review, 436n.9; influence of Peter Berger, R. D. Laing, Stuart Hall, E. P. Thompson, and Perry Anderson, 436n.9; on Jacques Maritain, 249; joins faculty at Manchester University, 429n.29; joins International Socialists (IS), 381; joins Socialist Workers Party, 429n.29; and Labour Party, 318; on “the ladder” and liberal paternalism, 211; on language, 232; on Laurence Bright, O.P., 226; on Lenin, 259– 60; on Leo Pyle, 472n.128; on liberalism, 237, 244, 249; on liberals, 260; on liberals and Christian progressivism, 3; on limitations of Vatican II, 234;

500 Index Eagleton, Terry (cont.) and Louis Althusser, 438n.30; on Martin Shaw, 460n.40; on Marx, 225, 259– 61, 277– 78, 428n.22; on Marx and Christianity, 299, 316, 341, 423n.94; on Maurice Cowling, 430n.35; on May Day Manifesto, 320, 325, 457n.13; on McCabe’s exile to Ireland, 312; on Nicholas Berdyaev, 249; at Oxford, 429n.29; on the parish, 257– 58; personal background, 225; on politics, 344; on priests, 258– 59; and Raymond Williams, 225; on Slant, 381, 385– 87, 438n.30; on Slant and the Catholic Herald, 462n.2; on Slant’s mission, 317–18; and sociology of knowledge, 422n.81; on teach-in for McCabe, 307; on Teilhard de Chardin, 431n.39; on trade unions, 331; on traditional Christianity, 229; on workingclass revolution, 335; youth in Salford, 11–12 Ecclesiam Suam, 283 Education Act (1944), 154, 175; and working-class Catholics, 181 Egan, Eileen, 186 Egner, G.: critical review of Cardinal Heenan’s autobiography, 44– 45 Eisenhower, President Dwight David, 109; administration of, 148 Ellul, Jacques: and “disembodied spiritualism,” 231; and English Catholic New Left, 432n.46 Encounter, 150 Engels, Friedrich, 274; and globalization, 404n.47 English aristocratic Catholics, 4– 5, 9 English Catholic bishops: and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 402n.35;

and Hans Küng, 133; on Vatican Council II, 133 English Catholic clergy: Birmingham clergy and radical reforms, 168; conflicts with hierarchy, 154; Liverpool priests and radical changes, 168; problems with laity, 154 English Catholic hierarchy, 149, 152; authoritarian tendencies, 393n.10; and Catholic university students, 221; on change in the Church, 167; conservative social and theological leanings, 45– 47, 221; critical of CND, 189; failures to implement Council reforms, 153– 54; little interest in social and political matters, 152– 53; prioritizes moral concerns, 153; punishes Herbert McCabe, 311–12; support of authoritarian political regimes, 43– 45; and theological dissidents, 155; on Vatican II, 221 English Catholic progressives, 45– 46 English Christian Socialists, 23 English Roman Catholics: and anticommunism, 52; authoritarian tendencies, 43– 44; concerns about big government and the welfare state, 53; conservative inclinations after World War II, 42, 47; conservatives and Vatican II, 159; converts resist Council reforms, 156; political divisions among Catholic social classes, 44; reactionaries and Vatican II, 158– 59; responses to Vatican II, 155– 61; shift to more moderate positions, 47– 48; and Spanish Civil War, 42– 43; supporters of reforms, 157

Index

English working-class Catholics, 4– 5; conservative tendencies, 220– 21; pre–World War I distress, 30 Eppstein, John: condemns Teilhard de Chardin, 158 Ernst, Cornelius, O.P., 186 ethnic assimilation in Britain and the United States, 15 E˙tudes, 80 Evans, Illud, O.P.: and Brian Wicker, 203 Evennett, H. O.: on Catholic education, 19 Eye-Witness, 29, 31; and labor unrest, 34, 37 Fabians, 24, 26– 27, 394n.34 Fanfani, Amintore, 103 Fanon, Frantz, 236, 264 Farrell, Michael, 360 Feiner, Johannes, 405n.11 Felici, Archbishop Pericle: and nuns at Vatican II, 406n.32 Feltin, Cardinal Maurice, 85– 86, 400n.12 Fenton, Father Francis E.: and John Birch Society, 399n.2 Fenton, Msgr. Joseph: and Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, 407n.39 Fernandez, Aniceto, O.P. (Master General of the Dominicans): on dismissal of Herbert McCabe, 309–10 Fesquet, Henri (of Le Monde): supports Hans Küng on Vatican II, 130 Figgis, J. N.: and political pluralism, 25 First Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ the Lord, 66 First Things, 378

501 Fisher, Desmond, 12, 46; resigns as editor of Catholic Herald, 46– 47, 312; on Vatican Council II, 133 Foot, Michael, 195 Franciscans, 184– 85 Franco, General Francisco, 108, 116, 402n.36 Frankau, Pamela: and Christian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CCND), 197 Freedom Party, 362 French Catholic Socialists, 23 French Catholics and Vichy, 73 French Communist Party: encourages labor unrest, 84; and workerpriests, 86 French Dominicans: support workerpriest movement, 85 French Revolution of 1789, 263 Freud, Sigmund, 94 Friday Group, 190– 91, 222; and Blackheath Commune, 192; building a sense of community, 191– 92; and Charles Davis, 309 Friedman, Milton, 115 Friedman, Thomas L., 404n.49 Frings, Cardinal Josef of Cologne, 136 Fromm, Erich: on Marx’s humanism, 177 Fukuyama, Francis, 439n.32 G.K.’s Weekly, 185; and Distributist League, 39– 40; and general strike (1926), 36– 37; and Labour Party, 36, 39; on minimum wage, 36; on Mond-Turner agreements, 38– 39; promotes private proprietorship, 40; on Trades Disputes and Trade Union Bill, 38; turns against parliamentary politics, 39 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 148 Gaitskell, Hugh, 149– 50, 205

502 Index Galileo, 141 Garaudy, Roger, 292; British lecture tours, 294; and ChristianMarxist dialogues, 297; expelled from French Communist Party, 300; on failings of Christians, 287; influence on ChristianMarxist dialogue, 287, 289; on Marx’s humanism, 177; on Marx and religion, 288, 297, 300; at Paulusgesellschaft conferences, 290– 91; on Teilhard de Chardin, 388– 89; on Vatican II, 288 Garrigou-Legrange, R.: directs attack on Teilhard de Chardin and new theologians, 81– 82 Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World), 26, 73, 140– 43, 145– 46, 245– 46, 315, 369; gives impetus to progressives, 142 Geach, P. T., 194 Gemeinschaft, 253 Geneva Committee and Black International, 401n.27 general strike (1926): and impact on labor movement, 38 Gentile, Giovanni: and Mussolini, 408n.41 German Social Democratic Party (SPD), 401n.21 Gesellschaft, 253 Gibney, Msgr. Hubert: and Humanae Vitae, 163 Gilbey, Msgr. Alfred, 426n.3; and Fisher House, 216–17 Gill, Eric, 35, 184, 364, 366– 67; critical of English Catholic hierarchy, 185– 86; and Ditchling Common, 39– 40, 185; lectures with Hilary Pepler, 185; and papal encyclicals, 418n.38; and PAX, 186

Ginder, Father Richard: and John Birch Society, 399n.2 Girardi, Giulio: on Marx and Christianity, 293; and Marxism, 446n.38; at Paulusgesellschaft conferences, 291; suspended as professor at Salesian University, 300– 301 Gitlin, Todd: on the American New Left, 371 Gomulka, Wladyslaw: and Leszek Kolakowski, 414n.4 Gore, Bishop Charles, 23– 24, 295 Gorostiaga, Xavier, S.J.: and Bernard Sharratt, 192; on capitalism, 270; director, Managua’s National Institute of Social Studies, 270; influence on English Catholic New Left, 270; influence on Julian Filokowski and Father Jim Trainor, 414n.64; and Sandinistas, 270 Gorz, André: influence on English New Left, 322 Gozzini, Maria, 295 Gramsci, Antonio, 199, 296– 97; on “hegemonic culture,” 196; and New Left, 196 Greeley, Andrew: on Vatican II, 136, 406n.29 Green, Martin, 346 Greene, Graham, 13: on Vatican II, 156 Griffen, Cardinal Archbishop Bernard, 50 Grille (Dublin), 222; on child abuse in Christian Brothers Order, 471n.114; and Slant, 376 Gronchi, President Giovanni, 110 Groves, Reg: on Christian-Marxist dialogue, 295 Gruppi, Luciano, 293 Guardini, Romano, 70; on “reform Catholicism,” 396n.17

Index

Guild Socialism, 25 Guild Socialists, 390n.1; and New Left, 176 Gundlach, Gustav, S. J: and social encyclicals, 445n.29 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 266, 353, 384– 85; and liberation theology, 266– 67 Guttman, Allen: on Douglas Jerrold, 392n.3 Hall, Leonard, 31 Hall, Stuart: on American New Left, 371; and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 195– 96; critical of Oxford intellectuals, 175; describes socialist humanism, 176– 77; editor of New Left Review, 175; inspired by Claude Bourdet, 175; on Marx, 414n.7; and May Day Manifesto, 320; on Stalin, 177 Hallinan, Bishop Paul of Atlanta, 406n.23 Halloran, J. D., 436n.9; on building cultural community, 253; and George Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Emile Durkheim, 253 Harich, Wolfgang: on Marx’s humanism, 177 Haslemere Declaration, 269 Haslemere Group, 269 Haslemere Programme, 442n.62 Hastings, Adrian, 88, 138; on Catholics and dogma, 158; on Michael de la Bedoyere, 359n.40; on new theologians, 93; on Slant group, 217; on Vatican II, 135 Hauerwas, Stanley, 384– 85 Hayden, Tom, 370– 72; and C. Wright Mills, 471n.100; on Marx, 371 Hayes, Carleton: on liberalism, 396n.9 Heaney, Seamus, 224

503 Hebblethwaite, Peter, 10, 103; on Catholic New Left and Marxism, 468n.59; on Christian-Marxist dialogue, 300; on Christianity and Marxism, 442n.69; and Hans Küng, 131, 409n.44; on liberation theology, 441n.58; on liberation theology and Roncalli, 399n.3; on Milan Machovec, 447n.52; on Neil Middleton, 357; on Vatican hierarchy, 406n.30 Hedges, Chris, 458n.17 Heenan, Cardinal Archbishop John D., 10, 12, 133, 136, 258, 377, 380; attacks Father Laurence Bright and Neil Middleton, 308; attacks Slant circle, 311; on Butler Education Act, 55; on Catholic Marxists, 168; on Charles Davis, 305, 453n.18; criticizes Herder Correspondence, 46; on dangers of Catholic Left, 311; dialogue with Rosemary Houghton, 311; on disciplining Herbert McCabe, 306; on Douglas Woodruff and Tom Burns, 389n.23; on Father Anthony Kennedy, 453n.18; on Friday Group, 419n.50; on General Francisco Franco, 44; on Küng’s influence at Vatican II, 134; on Lysenko, 311; and McCabe Affair, 308; on Neil Middleton’s refusal to allow censorship at Sheed and Ward, 453n.14; on Ottaviani, 134; recognizes challenge from the Left, 168; responds to welfare state initiatives, 54; on Robert Blair Kaiser, 406n.23; on sociology, 370; and Vatican II, 130– 34 Hefferman, Mike, 360

504 Index Hegel, Friedrich, 274 Heidegger, Martin, 408n.41; influences Slant circle on language, 231– 32 Herberg, Will: on papal encyclicals, 115 Herbert, A. D.: on Latin rites, 157 Herder Correspondence, 45; praises Mao’s humanism, 235– 36; on Vatican II, 155 Heydon, J. K., 43 Hibbert, Giles, O.P., 334– 35; and Christian-Marxist dialoguge, 295, 449n.66 Hickey, John, 15 Higgins, George, 406n.23 Hill, Anthony, 469n.71 Hill, Christopher, 430n.35 Hilderbrand, Alice von: on communist influence at Vatican Council II, 146 Hilderbrand, Dietrich von, 146: attacks Teilhard de Chardin, 158 Hinsley, Cardinal Archbishop Arthur, 11, 395n.40; and General Francisco Franco, 44 Hobgood, Mary E.: on Christianity and Marxism, 415n.21, 416n.22 Hobsbawm, E. J.: and British Communist Party, 180; on capitalism, 355 Hobson, J. A.: and “economic imperialism,” 24 Hoggart, Richard: influence on New Left, 206; and The Uses of Literacy, 206 Holland, John, 10–11 Holland, Scott, 295 Hollis, Christopher: on Curia at Vatican Council II, 134 Holy Office, 65, 87, 93, 123, 129, 131; Congregation for the Doctrine of

the Faith, 129; forbids collaboration with communist organizations, 84 Hook, Sydney: on Jacques Maritain and revolution, 465n.31 Hornsby-Smith, Michael: on Catholic assimilation, 354; on Catholic New Left, 369; on Church and sociological research, 370 Houghton, Rosemary, 377; dialogue with Cardinal Heenan, 311 Housing Justice, 377 Humanae Vitae, 378, 381; and creation of Catholic Renewal Movement (CRB), 164; reaction in England, 162– 64 Humani Generis, 132, 138, 398n.36 Huxley, Julian, 195; on Teilhard de Chardin, 75– 76 Hyde, Douglas: on Slant group, 368 Hyman, Herbert: and reference group theory, 420n.53 Ibárruri, Dolores: and ChristianMarxist dialogue, 447n.53 Il Borghese: and Vatican II, 146 Incledon, Canon Richard, 426n.3 Index Librorum Prohibitorum, 65 industrial unionism, 28– 29. See also syndicalism Inglis, K. S., 23 Integralism, 395n.3 Integralist Catholics, 64– 65 International Monetary Fund, 270 International Socialists (IS), 331– 32, 459n.31; and Labour Worker, 332; and London Industrial Shop Stewards’ Defense Committee, 332; and Martin Shaw, 460n.40; and student protests at London School of Economics, 332

Index

Irish Catholic Left: and Grille, 376; and Marxism, 376; revolutionary roots, 376 Irish Home Rule, 18 Irish immigrants, 9–10; and subculture, 10–12, 14–16, 18–19 Irish working class in England, 13–17 Italian bishops: attack Aldo Moro, 103 Italian Communist Party, 112–13 Italian press: right-wing attacks on Vatican Council II, 145– 46 Jaeger, Bishop Lorenz of Paderborn: The Ecumenical Council, the Church and Christendom, 123– 24; on models for councils, 123– 24 Jay, Douglas, 150 Jebb, Reginald: responds to welfare state legislation, 55 Jenks, Jorian, 41 Jerrold, Douglas, 43– 44; at Burns and Oates, 417n.29; as journalist, 392n.3 Jesuits, 185 John XXIII, Pope, 5– 6, 87, 121– 22, 152, 368; angers conservatives, 109–10; and Bulgaria, 110; calls for ecumenical council, 90– 91, 96; and communist leaders, 122– 23; and Cuban missile crisis, 110–11; and dialogue with Marxists, 179; diminishes power of conservatives at Council, 137; establishes Secretariat for Christian Unity, 137; and Giovanni Montini, 408n.40; and Italian politics, 102– 4; and Khrushchev, 110, 113, 123; and Mater et Magistra, 97; on nuclear weapons and just war principles, 107; opening address

505 at Council, 97, 135– 36; opening a dialogue with Marxists, 283; Ostpolitic, 283; and Pacem in Terris, 104– 9, 111; sees need for change, 96; significance, 119– 20, 139; social background, 102; supports Aldo Moro, 103– 4; and United Nations, 107; and worker-priest movement, 400n.12 Johnson, President Lyndon: and Vietnam War, 449n.64 Johnson-Sirleaf, Ellen, 223 Jones, David: on Vatican Council II, 156 Jones, Jack, 467n.53 Jordan, Archbishop Anthony of Edmonton, Canada, 142 Justice and Peace, 377 Kadlecova, Erica, 430n.38; and Czech Communist Party, 228 Kaiser, Robert, 122, 136, 407n.39; supports Hans Küng on Vatican Council II, 130 Kennedy, Joseph P., 399n.2 Kennedy, President John F., 94, 151; and Pope John XXIII, 403n.40 Kenny, Anthony, 224; and nuclear weapons, 453n.18; and Slant movement, 453n.18; and working-class issues, 453n.18 Kenny, Michael: and New Left, 415n.11 Kenyatta, Jomo: influence on Herbert McCabe, 429n.23 Kerr, Fergus, O.P., 4, 186, 217, 377, 382– 83, 405n.18; on achievement of Catholic New Left, 369; on Baron’s and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, 262; on Chesterbelloc, 364; and

506 Index Kerr, Fergus, O.P. (cont.) Distributism, 384; on language and community, 254; on Laurence Bright, O.P., 474n.146; on politics, 345; and Radical Orthodoxy, 383– 84; on Slant, 383, 426n.4 Kettler, Wilhelm Emmanuel von (bishop of Mainz), 101, 147, 364; on Marx, 178 Keynes, John Maynard: influence on Labour and Conservative Parties, 149– 51 Khrushchev, Nikita, 108; and Cuban missile crisis, 111; and John XXIII, 110–11, 403n.40; and Stalin, 445n.35 King, Martin Luther, 260 Kingdom of God, 4, 23 Kingsley, Charles, 23, 248– 49, 295 Kirwan, Joe, 50 Klemperer, Klemens von: on German churches and Hitler, 200 Klugmann, James: on ChristianMarxist dialogue, 294– 95 Knox, Ronald: God and the Atom, 158 Kolakowski, Leszek: expelled from Polish Communist Party, 414n.5; and “Marxist humanism,” 174, 177; on revisionism, 174 Küng, Hans, 121– 22, 124, 137, 405n.11, 411n.51; calls for structural changes in Church, 127– 28; Catholic University of America bans his lectures, 131, 139; on Charles Davis, 314, 455n.36; concerns about pre–Vatican II Church, 92– 93; The Council and Reunion, 125– 31; and Councilium, 139; early political and theological influences, 125; on ecumenism,

126– 27; on expanding lay participation, 128; on Holy Office, 129; impact of his intersession lecture tours, 140; on Index of prohibited books, 129; lecture tour promoting Council’s first session, 139; license to teach Catholic theology revoked, 409n.44; on Martin Luther, 127; popularity, 405n.8; on Protestants, 126; rejects career advancement with Curia, 145; relationship with Joseph Ratzinger, 410n.46; on results of Vatican Council II, 135, 138– 39, 144; and Roman Curia, 128– 29; and Structures of the Church, 407n.39; and University of Tübingen, 396n.18; on vernacular, 127; wins approval of John XXIII, 130 labor unrest and syndicalism (1914), 28– 31 Labour in the Sixties, 150 Labour Party, 18, 52, 195; and CND, 198– 99; and Marxism, 354; political culture, 151; in power, 149– 51; shifts from Fabianism to Keynesianism, 150; Signposts, 319; supports Anglo-American defense policy, 199 Laing, R. D., 362: influence on Slant circle, 245; on schizophrenia and capitalism, 255– 57, 437n.18 Lansbury, George, 25, 30– 31 Lappé, Frances Moore, and Joseph Collins: on Xavier Gorostiaga and international market pricing, 442n.66

Index

Larraona, Cardinal Arcadio: and Vatican Council II, 408n.41 Lash, Nicholas, 192 Lateran Treaty (1929), 101, 401n.26 Latin Mass, 146 Latin Mass Society, 157 Lawlor, Monica, 341; on Church and middle classes, 219; on consequences of dualistic theology, 233 Lawson, Nigel, 151 Le Roy, Pierre, 81; on Teilhard de Chardin, 76 Le Vie Intellectualle: supports workerpriest movement, 85 Lebensphilosophie, 70 Lefebvre, Archbishop Marcel, 146, 411n.50; and Vatican Council II, 408n.41 Lefebvre, Henri: influence on English New Left, 322 Lenin, 335– 36; and State and Revolution, 327 Leo X, Pope: and vernacular, 71 Leo XIII, Pope, 22, 24, 97, 101, 118, 179; on Americanism, 396n.10; on liberalism, 106; and Quadragesimo Anno, 71– 72 Lewis, John, 334; on ChristianMarxist dialogue, 295; on Marx and religion, 297 Lewy, Guenter: on Church and Nazis, 200 Li, Dr. Zhisui, 432n.56 Liberal Party, 150 liberalism: Anglo-Saxon vs. Continental variety, 66; definitions, 396n.9 liberation theology, 265; and Marx, 267; and Slant, 265 Lienart, Cardinal Achille of Lille, 136 Lippmann, Walter, 88

507 liturgical reformers, 1– 2, 71– 72; early history, 397n.20; and Mystical Body of Christ, 71; and vernacular, 72 Livingstone, Dinah, 379; and Dom Helder Camara, 269; and Friday Group, 191; on Slant’s board and attitude toward women, 472n.126 Lloyd George, David, 344, 456n.10 Lodge, David, 10–12, 14; and The British Museum Is Falling Down, 413n.39 London School of Economics (LSE): student protests and corporate capitalism, 458n.17; student unrest, 327– 30. See also Shaw, Martin Long Revolution, 380. See also Williams, Raymond L’Osservatore Romano, 108; publishes “Punti Fermi,” 102– 3; response to call for ecumenical council, 91 Lothian, James, 47 Luce, Henry: and Time and Hans Küng, 129– 30 Luckmann, Thomas: on “social construction of reality,” 245 Ludlow, J. M., 23 Lueken, Veronica, 411n.51 Lukacs, Georg, 296; influence on Slant circle, 245; and New Left, 377– 78 Lumen Gentium, 46, 140– 41, 143, 408n.41 Lumsden, Peter, 190– 91; and Catholic Nuclear Disarmament Group (CNDG), 198; and Catholic Worker, 191 Lunn, Arnold, 14, 35, 340; on Latin Mass, 156 Luther, Martin, 145– 46, 307

508 Index Lux Mundi, 23– 24 Luxemburg, Rosa, 174 Lynch, John, 13–14 MacDonald, J. Ramsay, 32 Machovec, Milan: on ChristianMarxist dialogue, 287, 289– 90; on Marx’s atheism, 448n.54 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 224; on British Communist Party, 180, 354– 55; on Christianity and Marx, 282– 83, 445n.30, 445n.31; influence on Slant circle, 245; resonance with Slant, 282– 83 Magilione, Luigi, 69 magisterium, 92, 96, 141, 119 Mahoney, Tony, 190 Marcolla, Maria: on suspension of Giulio Girardi, 300– 301 Marella, Msgr., 84 Manion, Clarence: and John Birch Society, 399n.2 Mann, Tom, 31 Manning, Cardinal Henry Edward, 9, 22, 101, 155; London dock strike (1889), 16–17 Manzù, Giacomo, 112 Mao Zedong, 358 Marcel, Gabriel, 238 Marcuse, Herbert: and New Left, 377– 78 Marienbad conference on ChristianMarxist dialogue, 290, 293 Maritain, Jacques: and Action Française, 239– 40; on aggiornamento, 350; attacked by the Right, 433n.62; on capitalism, 347; and Cardinal Montini, 348; on categories “left” and “right,” 348; on Catholic action, 240– 41; and Catholic Left, 346– 52; on culture, 243; on

democracy, 241; on fascism, 238– 39; on Francisco Franco, 238; and French Communist Party, 349; on French Left, 348; and French Revolution, 352; and Julien Green, 348; and liberal Catholicism, 352; on liberalism, 347; on Marx, 238– 39, 349; on Max Weber, 349; on neomodernist theologians, 349– 50; and neo-Thomism, 347; and “New Christendom,” 239; on papal teaching, 240; the Peasant of Garonne, 349– 52; political philosophy, 238, 242; and Pope Paul VI, 348; and Pour le Bien Commun, 238; on Quadragesimo Anno, 241; represents dividing line between liberal and radical Catholicism, 347, 352; and Slant, 347; and Teilhard de Chardin, 349– 51; on Vatican Council II, 348– 50, 351– 52; and Raïssa Maritain, 433n.67 Markus, R. A., 194 Martin, Kingsley, 195 Marwick, Arthur: on Roman Catholic Church, 152 Marx, Karl, 94, 347; on alienation, 255– 56, 277; on Aristotle and Aquinas, 276; on Baron d’Holbach and Ludwig Feuerbach, 274, 290; Communist Manifesto, 178; on culture, 177– 78; Das Kapital, 174, 177; early writings, 149, 274; Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (“Paris Manuscripts”), 174, 178, 293; on globalization, 404n.47; and Hegel, 275; humanism in early writings, 177– 78; ideas on

Index

alienation and labor, 177– 79; and P.V. Annenkov, 274; and Proudhon, 274; and religion, 274– 75, 232 Marxism, cultural, 285 Marxism Today, 334; promotes Christian-Marxist dialogue, 294. See also Slant Marxist revisionism, 284 Marxists: on need for dialogue with Christians, 285 Mater et Magistra, 97–100, 104; criticized by conservatives, 112; curtailing capitalist corporations, 100; expands role of state in economic life, 98–100; on rights of labor, 99; welcomed by progressives, 112 “Mater si, Magistra no!” 113 Mathew, Bishop David, 42– 43, 60; on Distributists, 392n.2 Mauriac, François, 238 Maurice, F. D., 23, 248, 295 Maurras, Charles, 464n.15 May Day Manifesto, 262, 320, 375, 381; and Catholic Left participants, 451n.4; and Cecil Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, 456n.8; and Distributism, 323; influence of Antonio Gramsci, 322; on Labour Party’s policies, 321– 22, 326; and “National Convention,” 325, 327; on “new capitalism” and labor, 322– 23, 326; and political analysis of Keith Burgess, 456n.10; and Slant, 325– 27, 337; strategy for changing the “system,” 324– 26, 328, 336; and trade-union movement, 321– 23, 326; on transformative of capitalism, 320– 23; versions 1967 and 1968, 320

509 McBrien, Richard: and Vatican Council II, 409n.44 McCabe, Herbert, 378, 382; attends Charles Davis’s wedding, 305; on Belloc’s influence, 364; and Cardinal Spellman, 451n.2; Christianity as Marxism, 273, 278; on Christian-Marxist dialogue, 294, 341; conversions at Manchester University, 187; on Davis and Church “corruption,” 303– 5, 310; and December Group, 183; dismissed as editor of New Blackfrairs, 305– 6; dismissed from priestly duties, 305– 6; on Douglas Woodruff, 34– 41; exile to Ireland, 312; and Humanae Vitae, 451n.8; influence on Catholic Left, 187, 428n.23; influence on Terry Eagleton, 223– 24; and Irish Republicanism, 454n.27; on liberalism, 224, 237, 346; on liberation theology, 269; and Martin Shaw, 187; and Marx, 224, 261; on Marxist atheism, 298; and May Day Manifesto, 320; on original sin, 277; personal background, 224; on priests, 260– 61; radical ideas, 224; reinstated as editor of New Blackfriars, 451n.8; on revolution, 346; on revolutionary role of clergy, 458n.31; and Slant, 185, 426n.2; support within English Dominican Order, 452n.9; theological influence, 224; and university activities, 185; on Vatican and English language, 310; on Vietnam War, 451n.2

510 Index McCabe Affair: impact on Catholic progressives, 310–11; impact on Newman Society, 313; impact on Slant circle, 313; impact on Union of Catholic Students, 313; and pray-in at Westminster Cathedral, 306; reaction of conservative Catholics, 308 McCarraher, Eugene: and Dom Helder Camara, 427n.17; on Herbert McCabe, 224; on McCabe and liberation theology, 440n.46; on Slant and New Blackfriars, 474n.148 McCarthy, Joseph, 89 McCone, John, 112 McDonagh, Francis, 361, 382; and Dom Helder Camara, 269 McEnroy, Carmel: on nuns at Vatican Council II, 406n.32 McGrath, Bishop Mark of Panama, 406n.23 McIntyre, Archbishop Cardinal James of Los Angeles, 407n.39 McMullin, Ernan, 192 McNabb, Vincent, O.P., 183– 84, 364; on George Bernard Shaw and Distributism, 184 McRedmond, Louis: critical of English hierarchy, 47 McSweeney, William, 95– 96 Medvedev, Roy, 106 Mendes, Candido: on U. S. imperialism, 268 Mensheviks, 260 Merry del Val, 80 Merton, Robert: and reference group theory, 420n.53 Metz, Johann Baptist: on integration of Marx with Christianity, 286, 290; at Paulusgesellschaft conferences, 290– 92; and “political theology,” 285– 86, 447n.45

Michel, Virgil, O. S. P., 2, 71– 72, 388n.1 Michels, Robert: and “economism,” 331; and “law of oligarchy,” 331 Middlemas, Keith: on corporateinfluenced government, 456n.10; and ideas of Belloc and the Chesterton brothers, 48; and May Day Manifesto’s critique of “new capitalism,” 323 Middleton, Neil, 217, 245, 251, 363, 376– 77, 382; on aggiornamento, 229; on Camilo Torres, 234– 35, 269; and Che Guevara, 432n.55; criticizes Vatican, 236; and December Group, 183; and Dom Helder Camara, 427n.11; on Douglas Woodruff, 463n.5; and Eldridge Cleaver, 432n.55; on failure to promote Vatican Council reforms, 312; on Fidel Castro, 269; on Frantz Fanon, 236, 432n.55; friendship with Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx, 182; on Gaudium et Spes, 246– 47; on Harvey Cox, 229, 431n.42; and Haslemere Declaration, 269; and Haslemere Group, 269; on Herbert McCabe, 382; on imperialism, 262; influence of Dom Helder Camara, 269; influence of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, 262; on liturgical reform, 436n.8; and Malcolm X, 432n.55; managing director, Sheed and Ward, 181; on Mao Zedong, 235; marries Rosemary Sheed, 416n.26; on meaning of “corrupt,” 452n.11; meeting Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, 182; on militancy of the Left,

Index

465n.26; on neo-Thomistic philosophical dualism, 230– 31, 233; at Penguin Books, 182; personal background and influence, 182; publishes Jacques Ellul, 432n.46; publishes new theologians and England’s progressive theologians and writers, 45, 181; publishes Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, 182, 439n.34; on revolution, 234– 37, 261; and Sheed and Ward, 416n.26, 416n.27; on student protests, 330; on transformation of the Church, 229– 30, 235; on violence, 236; on Wilson’s Labour government, 262 Milbank, Alison: on Hilaire Belloc, 384 Milbank, John: and Christian Socialism, 384– 85; on liberation theology, 384– 85; on Marx, 384– 85; and Phillip Blond, 473n.140; and Radical Orthodoxy, 383– 85; on Stanley Hauerwas, 384– 85 Miliband, Ralph: and C. Wright Mills, 415n.13; and Harold Wilson, 318; on Labour Party, 333– 34, 460n.36 Mills, C. Wright, 148, 371, 415n.14; influence on English New Left, 176; influence on Slant circle, 245; on Labour Party, 176; and “power elite,” 176, 329, 459n.22; and “sociological imagination,” 434n.87; on Tom Hayden and SDS, 471n.100 Mindszenty, Cardinal Josef of Budapest, 112 Mises, Ludwig von, 115 Mission de Paris: on worker-priests, 83, 85– 86; “Green Paper,” 85– 86

511 modernism, 5, 64– 65, 94 Moltmann, Jurgen, 223, 286, 290, 446n.42; at Paulusgesellschaft conferences, 291– 93 Mond, Alfred, 38 Montini, Cardinal Giovanni Baptista (Pope Paul VI), 68– 69, 137; on calling of ecumenical council, 91; comes to Aldo Moro’s aid, 103; and Jacques Maritain, 348; election to papacy, 140 Moore, Sebastian, 192 Moorhouse, Geoffrey: on McCabe Affair, 312 Moro, Aldo, 112–13; and “Punti Fermi,” 103 Mosley, Oswald, 367; and British Union of Fascists, 41, 43 Mounier, Emmanuel, 238; influence on English Dominicans, 465n.28 Muggeridge, Malcolm: on Vatican Council II, 156– 58 Murphy, Archbishop John Aloysius of Cardiff: on McCabe Affair, 308 Murray, John Courtney, 117, 131, 406n.23; banned from lecturing at Catholic University of America, 131, 139; influence on Dignitatis Humanae, 143 Mussolini, Benito, 367 Myrdal, Gunnar, 112 Mystical Body of Christ, 1 National Conference of Catholic Trade Unionists, 18, 52 Nell-Breuning, Oswald von, S.J., 281– 82, 445n.29; on Quadragesimo Anno and Marx, 281– 82 neoclassical economic theory: differences with radical social thinking, 178

512 Index neo-Thomistic philosophical dualism, 280; and Catholic New Left, 275; and Dawson, 242– 44; and Maritain, 347; and Marx, 275; and Middleton, 230– 31, 233; origin in Augustine’s City of God, 231. See also under Slant; Slant circle Neuhaus, Rev. Richard John, 378; and First Things, 410n.48; and President George W. Bush’s foreign policy, 472n.121 Neus Forum: and Christian-Marxist dialogue, 290 New Age, 31 New Blackfriars, 222; on liberalism, 237; praised by Bernard Bergonzi, 59; relationship with Slant, 217; on revolution, 265; and Richard Shaull, 267– 69; on Vatican Council II, 155, 237 New Left: and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 181; and Chesterton and Belloc, 33; and democratic socialism, 174; critique of communist states, 173– 74; on “economism,” 177; and G. D. H. Cole, 176; on Hungarian uprising (1956), 179– 80, 198; influence of Raymond Williams, 212; and Labour Party, 213; on language, 345; and liberalism, 180; on Ludwig Wittgenstein, 345; and Mao Zedong, 235; and Martin Heidegger, 345; on Marx’s humanism, 177; on modernizing Labour Party, 319; and “Old Left,” 173; origins, 174– 76; and socialism and CND, 195; and “socialist humanism,” 176– 77, 207; on Soviet-style

Marxism, 180; and Soviet Union, 174; on Suez crisis, 179– 80, 198; and Vatican Council II, 368 New Left Review, 174– 75, 416n.24; absorbed New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review, 180; and Antonio Gramsci, 196; and first New Left, 175; major focus, 180– 81; on revisionism, 180– 81 New Statesman, 59 new theologians, the, 5, 6, 129, 138; influence on English clergy, 154; influence wanes under Pope Paul VI, 140; at University of Tübingen, 6; on worker-priest movement, 83 New Theology, 70, 73– 74, 95, 117, 158, 222; and Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, and Marie-Dominique Chenu, 74; at University of Tübingen, 70 New Witness, 29, 31; and labor unrest, 37 Newfield, Jack: and American New Left, 371 Newman, Alex, O.P.: and D.W. Winnicott, 419n.49; and Friday Group, 190; leaves Dominican Order, 419n.49; and R. D. Laing, 419n.49; and Slant, 341; and Squiggle Foundation, 419n.49 Newman, John Henry, 18–19, 118 Newman, Michael, 333 Newman Association, 221 Newman Society, 222– 23, 309; organizes campaign defending Herbert McCabe, 305– 6 Nicholl, Donald: and Slant group, 342, 346; on Slant and Action Française, 342– 44

Index

Niebuhr, Reinhold: on Christianity and Marx, 297– 80; criticizes Christianity’s other-worldliness, 279– 80; on Marxism, 444n.20; welcomes Mater et Magistra, 112 Nigeria: Biafra, 262 Nixon, President Richard, 379 Nkrumah, Kwame, 223, 342; influence on Herbert McCabe, 428n.23 Noel, Conrad, 24– 25, 295 nota praevia: and Vatican Council II, 408n.41 Novak, Michael: on ChristianMarxist dialogue, 285; on Marxism, 446n.39 Nowell, Robert, 168; as editor of Herder Correspondence, on opponents of Council reforms, 158– 59 Nyerere, Kambarage, 428n.23 Nyerere, Mwalimu Julius, 223 O’Brien, David, 371– 72; on failure of American Catholic Left, 371– 73; on Marx, 372; on personalism, 371– 72; on Slant circle, 372– 73 O’Collins, Gerry, 192 O’Connell, Daniel, 16 O’Connor, Feargus, 16 Oestreicher, Paul: and Blackheath Commune, 362; and Christian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CCND), 198; on Christian-Marxist dialogue, 279, 294 Ong, Walter, 192 Orage, A. J.: and The New Age, 29 O’Riordan, Sean: on Vatican Council II, 408n.41 Osborne, John: and Look Back in Anger, 180

513 Ottaviani, Cardinal Alfredo, 102– 3, 112, 121, 123, 406n.23; attacks Hans Küng and progressive theologians, 131– 34; attacks progressive theologians, 407n.39; attacks worker-priests, 84; excludes new theologians from preparatory commission of Vatican Council II, 132; on Jean Daniélou, 132; on John Courtney Murray, 132; on Karl Rahner, 132; opposes ecumenism in Britain, 160; relations with Moscow, 110–11; tries to control schemata at Council, 136– 37; on Yves Congar, 132 Ozanam, Frédéric, 23, 83, 147, 364; on liberalism, 178– 79; on Marx, 178; and Marx’s critique of capitalism, 415n.20 Pacem in Terris, 100, 104– 7, 113, 116–17, 283; condemns nuclear arms race, 107; and Darius Milhaud, 104; and Marxism, 106– 7; opens dialogue with other creeds, 105; promotes democracy, 105; thesis and hypothesis doctrine, 105– 6 Paisley, Ian: protests Vatican Council II, 161 papal encyclicals: and English clergy, 418n.38 papal policies: on fascism and Holocaust, 403n.37 Paris Manuscripts. See Marx, Karl: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Parnell, Charles Stewart: and Irish Land League, 34 Parnell, M. T.: and Vatican Council II, 159

514 Index Pascalena, Sister, 68– 69 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. See Gaudium et Spes Paul VI, Pope, 343; background, 140; on Christian-Marxist dialogue, 283; election to papacy, 140; on Giulio Girardi, 300; impact of Humanae Vitae, 161; and Jacques Maritain, 348; resisted by Curia, 140; on sociology, 369– 70; and vernacular, 71. See also Populorum Progressio Paulusgesellschaft, 446n.38; conferences promoting Christian-Marxist dialogue, 285, 290– 91; revisionist Marxists and progressive Catholics, 448n.55 PAX (Catholic Peace Group), 184, 186, 367, 377, 387, 203; and Dorothy Day and Bede Griffiths, 204; and Vatican Council II, 203 PAX Christi, 419n.39 Pederson, Olaf, 192 Péguy, Charles, 343 Pellegrino, Cardinal Michele: on Giulio Girardi suspension, 301 People’s Democracy (PD), 360; and “Manifesto of the People’s Democracy,” 360 Pepler, Conrad, O.P., 184; critical of English Catholic hierarchy, 186; promotes Christian-Marxist dialogue, 294 Pepler, Hilary: lectures with Eric Gill, 185; responds to welfare state legislation, 54– 55 periti (theological experts), 132– 34, 136, 146 Perkins, John: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 441n.61 personalism, 370, 371– 73

Petre, M. D.: and modernism, 65 Petrine doctrine, 126 Pickstock, Catherine: and Radical Orthodoxy, 383; Radical Orthodoxy and socialism, 473n.137 Pinay, Maurice: and plot to destroy Church, 137 Pius IX, Pope (“Pio Nino”), 100, 179, 401n.26; introduces non expedit, 101; and liberalism, 65; proclaims Non Possumus, 101; Syllabus of Errors, 64 Pius X, Pope, 348, 399n.3; Il Fermo Proposito, 152; Lamentabili and Pascendi, 64; and liberalism, 65– 66 Pius XI, Pope, 97– 98, 109; and Constitution on Sacred Music, 72; and first New Left, 175; on liberalism, 106; Quadragesimo Anno, 97– 98 Pius XII, Pope, 5, 101, 129, 140, 219, 400n.12; and alliance with rightist groups, 89; attacks new theology, 88; canonized Pius X, 88; and Christian Democratic Party, 89; and communism, 89, 109; on contraception, 162; and fascist anti-Semitism, 109; and Humani Generis, 69, 88; Humani Generis and new theologians, 82; and Italian politics, 102; and Mediator Dei and the liturgical movement, 72; and monarchical style of governance, 66– 69, 87; on Nazis, 109; on Roosevelt and Yalta Conference, 108; social background, 102; and Soviet Union, 108; struggle for successor, 89– 90; on workerpriest movement, 84– 85

Index

Pizzardo, Cardinal Guiseppe, 400n.12 Populorum Progressio, 247, 248, 263– 64, 266, 348 Port Huron Statement, 370– 71 Preston, Geoffrey, 186, 364 Pro Fide, 378 Protestant observers at Vatican Council II, 407n.33 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 241, 274 Providence Journal: and Mater et Magistra, 114 Pullberg, Stanley: on Marx and sociology, 207 Pyle, Leo, 380, 382, 436n.9; and “parish councils,” 258; and Salvador Allende, 271; and Slant, 438n.22 Quadragesimo Anno, 97– 98, 128, 239, 247; and Marxist labor analysis, 179; and socialism, 401n.21 Radical Orthodoxy, 383, 397n.33; and Distributism, 385; and Slant, 384– 85 Radini-Tedeschi, Bishop Giacomo, 399n.3 Rahner, Karl, 82, 93, 131, 135, 300, 356, 374, 411n.51; admitted to Preparatory Council, Vatican II, 132; and Councilium, 139; influence on Hans Küng, 125; at Paulusgesellschaft conferences, 291 Ramsey, Archbishop Michael of Canterbury: visits Pope Paul VI, 160– 61 Ratzinger, Joseph, 135; and Cardinal Ottaviani, 410n.46; and Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, 410n.46; postdoctoral thesis, 395n.4; at

515 Regensburg, 410n.46; teaching at University of Tübingen, 410n.46 Reagan, President Ronald, 379 Recusants, 388n.1 Redfern, Martin, 379; and Bernard Delfgaauw, 274, 443n.2; on Christianity’s convergence with Marxism, 276– 78; on Douglas Woodruff, 308, 462n.4; joins Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 183; and Juan Luis Segundo, 266, 269; with Laurence Bright, 182– 83; on Laurence Bright and Slant, 185; and liturgical reform, 436n.8; on Martin Shaw’s departure from Slant, 461n.49; on Marx’s atheism, 275– 76; on the “party system,” 252; and “party system” as outlined by Cecil Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, 435n.4; personal background and influences, 182– 83; and Piet Schoonenberg, S.J., 444n.10; publishes new theologians and England’s progressive theologians and writers, 45, 181; and role of Church in promoting revolution, 336; sees connection between McCabe Affair and student protests at London School of Economics, 313; on Slant’s circulation, 427n.10 Reinhold, Hans Anscar, 388n.1 (Introduction) Rendel, Sir George: and Catholic Union, 49 Renewal (movement), 377 Rerum Novarum, 22, 32– 33, 90, 97; and Distributism, 30; and Marxist labor analysis, 179; reception in England, 35

516 Index Ricardo, David: and classical liberal economists, 177 Rice, Dennis: at Vatican II “teach-in,” 155 Richards, Hubert, 46 Ridgway, General Matthew, 84 Riesman, David, 148 Risorgimento, 102, 103, 401n.26 Ritter, Cardinal Joseph of St. Louis, 407n.39 Roberts, Archbishop Thomas, 165, 168, 406n.23; and Brian Wicker, 203; critical of Vatican’s theological, social, and political policies, 308; and Curia, 155; on difficulties with the Curia and Holy Office, 204; and Gordon Zahn, 423n.89; influence on anti-nuclear sentiment, 194; on Lambeth Conference views on contraception, 162; on nuclear weapons, 453n.18; and PAX, 203– 4; resigns as Archbishop of Bombay, 308; and Vatican Council II, 135, 203– 4, 406n.27; work with Amnesty International, 308 Roepke, Theodore, 115 Roman Catholic Church (Britain): compared to American Catholic Church, 218–19; converts in 1960s, 152; and ecumenical work, 160; on introducing vernacular, 159– 60; and liberal paternalism, 211; new cultural and social challenges after World War II, 94– 96; and social classes, 218–19; unprepared for Vatican Council II, 151– 54 Roman Curia, 2, 5, 65, 67– 68, 72, 110–11, 130, 144; agenda for schemata defeated, 136, 138;

arranges dismissal of Giovanni Battista Montini as papal assistant, 89; cover-ups at Council, 134; and Mater et Magistra, 100; origins, 166; and Preparatory Commission at Vatican Council II, 132; resistance to Council reforms, 136, 139; resists Hans Küng’s views, 130– 31; response to calling of Vatican Council II, 91– 92, 122– 23 Roncalli, Angelo (Pope John XXIII), 65, 68, 399n.3; background and disposition, 90; election to papacy, 90; experiences in France as apostolic nuncio, 90; and worker-priest movement, 84, 90 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 66, 241 Royal Commission on Labour: on trade unions, 459n.27 Russell, Bertrand, 195 Russian Revolution (1917), 335 Rynne, Xavier (Father Francis X. Murphy), 136, 407n.39: on Vatican Council II, 134 Salazar, Antonio de Oliveria, 108; and Estado Novo, 402n.36 Salesian Order: on Giulio Girardi’s suspension, 301 Salford Diocesan Federation, 18 Salzburg conference on ChristianMarxist dialogue, 290 Sampson, Anthony, 151 Samuel, Ralph: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and New Left, 195 Sandinistas: and Jesuits and Xavier Gorostiaga, 270 Sartre, Jean-Paul: influence on English New Left, 322 schemata, 123, 136

Index

Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., 149 Schillebeeckx, Edward, O.P., 131, 135, 411n.51; and Councilium, 139 Schmitt, Carl: and Nazis, 408n.41 Schutz, Franklin: and Bernard Delfgaauw, 274 Schwartz, Adam, 13; rinnovamento (revival) vs aggironamento, 158 Scott, George, 49, 157; on Associations of Catholic Employers and Managers, 50– 51; on Catholic Workers’ College, 50; critical of Catholic Union, 49; and Father Patrick Tierney on needs of the faithful, 168; on hierarchy and Vatican Council II, 148 Search, 168 Second and Third Spring Catholics, 13 Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops, 1968 (Medellín Conference), 265– 66; and Gustavo Gutiérrez, 266– 67; and Jean Luis Segundo, 266 Sedgwick, Peter: on Old and New Left, 175 Segundo, Juan Luis, 384; influence on James Francis Carney, S.J., 414n.55 Sharratt, Bernard, 45, 218, 377, 379, 382; and Chesterbelloc, 469n.78; on Church and sociological research, 370; disillusioned with Catholicism, 192– 93; and Dom Helder Camara, 427n.11; early influences, 192; on Fergus Kerr, 473n.136; and Free Communications Group, 457n.11; and Herbert McCabe, 428n.23; on Herbert McCabe’s Irish Republicanism, 454n.27; influence of Xavier Gorostiaga,

517 270– 71, 442n.67, 443n.71; on language, 358– 59; and liberation theology, 271– 72; and liturgical reform, 436n.8; on May Day Manifesto, 457n.11; on Methodist ministers, 466n.52; personal background, 192; promoting Slant’s agenda, 468n.58; and “scholarship boys,” 181; and Slant, 223, 420n.54; on Slant’s challenges, 358– 59, 363; and Slant circle, 193; on Slant speaking tours, 355; on Slant writers, 472n.124; and wedding of Charles Davis, 451n.4 Shaull, Richard, 440n.53; and Candido Mendez, 268; on Latin American liberation, 267– 69 Shaw, George Bernard, 14 Shaw, Martin, 377; and Agitator, 327– 28; and breaks with Slant, 334– 36, 338, 461n.47; on British Communist Party, 334, 460n.42; as chair of London School of Economics’ Catholic Society, 188; on Christian-Marxist dialogue, 334; contributor to Slant, 188; and Dominicans, 458n.14; and E. P. Thompson, 382; on Eagleton’s writing style, 467n.55; and Gordon Zahn, 423n.89; on Hal Draper, 458n.18; and International Socialists (IS), 331– 32; involvement in student protests, 327– 30; joins Slant movement, 188; on Labour Party, 331– 33; and Laurence Bright, 458n.14; and London School of Economics, 188, 327– 30; and Marx, 330– 31, 460n.40; on Mater et Magistra and Populorum Progessio, 248;

518 Index Shaw, Martin (cont.) and May Day Manifesto, 326– 27, 330, 334; and nuclear weapons, 458n.14; and Perry Anderson, 331, 334; personal background and influences, 188; on politics, 252– 53, 344– 45; as Secretary, University of London Catholic Society, 188; on Slant, 460n.40; and Slant circle, 458n.14; and Socialist Society, 328; on Soviet invasion of Hungary, 460n.42; on trade unions, 331– 33; on working-class revolution, 330– 31; writes for London School of Economics Socialist Society, International Socialism, and Agitator, 188 Sheed, Frank, 43, 181– 82; and Marxism, 417n.29 Sheed, Rosemary, 186 Sheed, Wilfrid: on Neil Middleton and Frank Sheed, 416n.28; on radicalism of Maisie Ward, 417n.29; at Sheed and Ward, 416n.28 Sheed and Ward, 181– 82, 222, 339; ceases to publish Slant, 379; compared to Burns and Oates, 182; and Jacques Maritain, 242; and McCabe Affair, 306– 7; publishing Slant, 427n.10. See also Middleton, Neil; Redfern, Martin Shibutani, Tamotsu: and reference group theory, 420n.53 Shils, Edward, 411n.5; on British intellectuals, 150 Shinwell, Emanuel, 150 Shore, Peter: and New Left, 318 Siri, Giuseppe, 102– 4 Skidelsky, Robert, 411n.5

Slant, 4, 183; on achieving socialism, 336; attacked by conservative Catholics, 309; and British Communist Party, 380– 81, 427n.12; on building cultural community, 253; on capitalism, 264; and Catholic middle classes, 221– 22; and Catholic New Left, 215; on Charles Davis, 313, 353– 54; and Christian-Marxist dialogue, 361, 296; on Christian socialist revolution, 233– 35; and Christian Socialists, 435n.99; on Christianity and Marxism, 299; and Christians for Socialism (CSF), 271; on Church and socialist revolution, 336– 37; circulation, 427n.10; collaboration with Haslemere Group, 269; creating a political program, 431n.39; demise, 378– 82; and extremist rhetoric, 230; on failures, 354– 60; and Georg Lukacs, 296; and Grille, 376; on imperialism, 264– 65; and Ireland, 376; and labor classes, 353; on Labour Party, 318, 380– 81; and liberalism, 229– 30, 237; and liberation theology, 265; and liturgical reform, 436n.8; on “Long Revolution,” 323– 25, 337– 38, 353– 54; on Martin Shaw’s Shop Stewards Movement, 353; and Marx, 217, 235, 264; on Marx and “praxis,” 237; and Marxism Today, 218; on Mater et Magistra, 334; on May Day Manifesto, 326– 27, 337; and McCabe Affair, 306– 7, 312–13, 353– 54; and middle-class Catholics, 353; on neo-Thomistic philosophical

Index

dualism, 230– 33, 383; and New Left Review, 235; objectives, 216, 222, 229, 233– 34, 247, 337; origins, 216–18; on “party politics,” 344; on politics, 337; on Populorum Progressio, 334; on revolution, 264– 65; and Salvador Allende, 271; and Sheed and Ward, 217, 432n.52; and Slant Manifesto, 217; and student movement at London School of Economics, 330; and Symposium on Socialist Revolution (1967), 436n.7; on Third World Bishops’ Manifesto (1967), 263– 65; and trade-union movement, 381; and Vatican Council II, 221, 313, 368; and working-class revolution in Britain, 335; and writing style, 355– 58 Slant Bulletin, 359– 61, 468n.66 Slant circle, 381– 83; on Catholic establishment, 227– 28; on Christian-Marxist dialogue, 228– 29, 295, 301; community projects, 360– 61; compared to American Catholic leftists, 370– 71; on corporate capitalism and Third World underdevelopment, 272; critical of Vatican Council II, 193; and cultural transformation, 249– 50; on differences within, 359– 63; and Ian Smith, 375; influence, 375; influence of Dominicans and Laurence Bright, 187; influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, 231– 32, 234; inspired by New Left Review, 187; on Jacques Maritain, 238– 43; on Jean-Paul Sartre, 234; on language,

519 232– 33, 254; on liberalism, 229– 30, 244; and liberation theology, 269, 271– 72; on Martin Heidegger, 254; on Mater et Magistra, 247– 48; on Marx, 234, 244, 272; on Marx and Christianity, 277– 78; mission, 187, 193; and neoThomism, 349; on neoThomistic philosophical dualism, 230– 33, 239– 40; on Newman Association, 355; on Popularum Progressio, 247, 250; and post-industrial capitalism, 377; on R. D. Laing, 234; on Raymond Williams, 234; speaking tours, 355; and Student Christian Movement (SCM), 375; and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 370– 71; on upper-class intellectuals, 227; and Vatican Council II, 245– 48; and Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), 375; and working class, 466n.48 Slant Manifesto, 278; influence beyond Britain, 272 Slant symposium (Birmingham), 359– 60 Slant X, 222, 363, 359, 361, 380, 468n.66; and disagreement with Slant board, 380 Slipyj, Bishop Josyf of Ukraine, 112 Smith, Ian, 327 Smith, Roger, 194 Smith, William J., S.J.: and Mater et Magistra, 113–14 Snowden, Philip, 32 Social Christian Movement (SCM), 377 social deaconry, 23, 88; and Roncalli, 399n.3

520 Index Socialist Society (London School of Economics), 328– 29; and Hal Draper, 328 sociology of knowledge, 422n.81 Sodalitium Pianum, 65 Soelle, Dorothee, 286 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 106 Southworth, Herbert Rutledge: on Douglas Jerrold, 392n.3 Soviet Union: invasion of Czechoslovakia, 300 Speaight, Robert, 339 Spectator, 59, 151; on Humanae Vitae, 161– 62 Spellman, Cardinal Francis, 132; and Vietnam War, 449n.64 Spode House conferences, 183, 186; and Conrad Pepler, O.P., 185; and Reginald Jebb, 183 St. Edmunds’ College, 192– 93 St. John-Stevas, Norman, 48; on Humanae Vitae, 161 Stalin, Joseph, 89, 280; and democratic socialism, 401n.21 Stavisky riots, 238 Stein, Walter, 387; and Archbishop Thomas Roberts, 194; dissociates from New Blackfriars over McCabe Affair, 312; and influence of Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience, 194– 95; and just war principles, 194– 95; and Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience, 187; Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience denied imprimatur by Church, 199; relationship with Martin Shaw, 187 Student Christian Movement (SCM), 222– 23, 361– 62 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 370, 372; and Marxism, 471n.106; and protests at

London School of Economics, 313; and Vietnam War and campus unrest, 471n.106 Sturzo, Don Luigi, 140 subsidiarity, 26, 54, 56, 97, 100, 128, 239 Suenens, Cardinal Leon, 137; and nuns at Vatican Council II, 406n.32 Suhard, Cardinal Emmanuel, 84 Swimme, Brian: on Teilhard de Chardin, 397n.26 syndicalism: and labor unrest (pre–World War I), 30– 31, 34; and New Left, 176 The Tablet, 59, 341; and general strike (1926), 37; and McCabe Affair, 306, 308– 9; Tom Burns and Humanae Vitae, 162; and Vatican Council II, 159; and welfare state legislation, 54 Tardini, Domenico, 102– 3, 111; surveys English bishops on Council matters, 153; on Vatican Council II, 132 Tawney, R. H., 216 Taylor, Charles, 224; introduces New Left to Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 178 Temple, Archbishop William, 223 Thatcher, Margaret, 379 Thomism, 5 Thompson, E. P.: and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 198; on Catholic clergy and working classes, 220– 21; and Communist Party, 180; and May Day Manifesto, 320; on “socialist humanism,” 176– 77; on Stalin, 177, 180; and Universities and Left Review, 175

Index

Tierney, Father Patrick, 167– 68; interview with George Scott, 173 Tillich, Paul: on Christianity and Marx, 279– 80 The Times: and Humanae Vitae, 162; and Vatican Council II, 159 Tither, Kathy, 190 Todd, John Murray, 46, 165– 67; Catholicism and the Ecumenical Movement, 165; on the Curia, 166– 67; and Hans Küng, 167; influence of new theologians, 166; on Martin Luther, 166– 67; on Vatican Council II, 166 Togliatti, Palmiro: on anti-religious policies of Italian Communist Party, 284 Toke, Leslie, 22 Toman, Cyril, 360 Tone, Wolf, 376 Torres, Camilo, 234– 35, 260 Trades Disputes and Trade Union Bill, 38 Trades Union Congress (TUC), 332; and general strike (1926), 36, 38; and Mond-Turner talks, 48 Travia, Msgr. Antonio, 130 Trotsky, Leon, 174 Turner, Ben, 38 Turner, Denys, 224; on Christianity and Marxism, 299, 365; debates Brian Wicker on ChristianMarxist dialogue, 298 Twomey, Louis J., S.J., 116 Tyrrell, George: and modernism, 65 Ullathorne, William, 155 Ultramontanism, 9, 388n.1, 389n.14 Union of Catholic Students, 377 Universe, 59 Universities and Left Review, 174; absorbs New Reasoner, 175 University of Tübingen, 124– 25

521 van der Plas, Michael, of Amsterdam’s Elsevier: supports Hans Küng on Vatican Council II, 130 Vann, Gerald, O.P., 184 Vatican: attacks liberalism, 65– 66; attacks modernism, 64– 65; and Bishop Samuel Ruiz of Mexico, 410n.47; and capitalism, 386– 87; on Christian-Marxist dialogue, 301– 2; condemns worker-priest movement, 85– 87; impact on free intellectual inquiry, 66; and Italian politics, 101– 4; and liberalism, 5, 401n.27; and missio canonica (canonical mission), 409n.44; on socialism, 97– 98 Vatican Council I, 18, 124, 138, 155; and doctrine of papal infallibility, 66– 67 Vatican Council II, 2, 5– 6, 60, 119– 29, 260, 291– 92, 303– 4, 349, 363, 368, 378, 381, 384; accomplishments, 143, 146– 47; and Charles Davis, 313; disliked by conservatives, 309; and English bishops, 133; four responses to Council, 144– 47; initial public reception, 122; intended participants, 91; introducing vernacular in Ireland and Scotland, 159– 60; and Latin America, 266; and new theologians, 123, 135; and Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, 73; purpose, 91, 96, 121– 22; reception in England, 148, 165; reception by theologians, 122; resistance to Ottaviani, 134; resolutions to abolish Holy Office, 134; response by conservative Italian press, 122– 23; results, 135, 138– 39; second session, 139– 40

522 Index Vaughan, Cardinal Herbert, 11–12, 17–18, 22 Verita Committee on Pacem in Terris, 146 Victor Emmanuel III, 101 Wall, Alan, 377 Wall, Bernard, 14–15, 389n.23; and neo-Thomism, 242 Wall, Bernardine: and Catholic Nuclear Disarmament Group (CNDG), 198 Walsh, Bob, 53 Walsh, Father Edmund A., 399n.2 The Wanderer: and Vatican Council II, 145, 407n.39 Ward, Barbara: on Catholics and politics, 441n.57 Ward, Graham: and Radical Orthodoxy, 383 Ward, Maisie, 181– 82; and Dorothy Day, Eugene McCarthy, and anti–Vietnam War protests, 417n.29 Watkin, E. I.: and neo-Thomism, 242 Waugh, Auberon: opposes ecumenism, 161 Waugh, Evelyn, 13–14; on Vatican Council II, 156 Webb, Beatrice and Sidney, 26– 27 Weber, Max, 94– 95; on bureaucracy and “rationalization,” 95 Weekly Review, 35, 185; support of fascist movements, 41; and welfare state legislation, 54– 55 Weigel, Gustav, S.J., 406n.23; banned from lecturing at Catholic University of America, 131, 139 Weir, Father Paul: against Humanae Vitae, 163 Wengraf, Tom: on Christian-Marxist dialogue, 295

Westow, Theo: on Slant’s use of language, 356 “What’s wrong with Britain,” 151 White, Leslie: and George Herbert Mead’s theory of “symbolic interaction,” 424n.101 White, Victor, O.P., 184 Wicker, Brian, 14, 217, 254, 342– 44, 352, 365, 377; on Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 189; and Catholic New Left, 201, 203– 5; and Christian-Marxist dialogue, 294; on Church “corruption,” 304, 310; on Cold War, 193– 94; on creating a cultural community, 254– 55; Culture and Liturgy, 204; debates with Denys Turner on ChristianMarxist dialogue, 298; dissociates from New Blackfriars, 312; and ethics of nuclear deterrence, 423n.88; First the Political Kingdom, 464n.16; and J. M. Cameron, 203– 4; on language, 255; on liturgical reform, 436n.8; and Ludwig Wittgenstein, 254; on Marx, 207, 254; on McCabe Affair, 454n.31; and PAX, 203; on politics, 255; on Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, 454n.31; on sincerity, 450n.76; on Slant, 375, 385– 86, 454n.31; on Slant’s mission, 368; on “socialist humanism,” 251; on Teilhard de Chardin, 431n.39; theological views, 204– 5; on transforming Church structure, 255; on vernacular, 159; and Walter Stein, 203; at Westminster teach-in for McCabe, 307; writes for the Guardian, 454n.31 Widgrey, David: on Wilsonianism, 320

Index

Wilde, Melissa: and Vatican Council II, 407n.34 Willebrands, Msgr. Jan, 137 Williams, Raymond: at Cambridge University, 226– 27, 430n.33; on capitalism and community, 213–15; and Catholic New Left’s work for the “Long Revolution,” 251; on community, 345; critique of British society, 213–15; and Culture and Society, 180, 207, 211; on democracy, 253; on F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot, 208– 9; and “humanist socialism,” 211; influence on Catholic intellectuals, 207, 211, 214–15; influence on Terry Eagleton, 223; on language, 209; and Laurence Bright, 226; and liberal paternalism, 211; The Long Revolution, 180, 207, 211–13, 215, 336; and Mao Zedong, 236, 432n.56; on Marx, 207– 9, 424n.99; and May Day Manifesto, 320; resigns from Labour Party, 320; and Ruth Benedict, 424n.101; on Slant, 359; views on culture, 208–12; and W. I. Thomas, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckman, 425n.109; on the working class, 209, 211, 213–14 Williams, Rowan, 224 Williams, Shirley, 47– 48 Wills, Garry, 109; breaks with William F. Buckley, 118, 404n.53; influenced by John Henry Newman, 118–19; on liberalism, 404n.53; on meaning of encyclicals, 117–18

523 Wilson, Harold, 151, 205; income policy, 319; and Labour Party, 318; and seaman’s strike, 319; support for NATO, 320; on trade-union activists, 318, 320; and unemployment, 319 Wiltgen, Robert M., S.V. D.: and Vatican Council II, 407n.34 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: influences Slant circle on language, 231– 32 Woodcock, George, 48, 52– 53, 467n.53 Woodruff, Douglas, 42– 44, 47, 59; attacks Neil Middleton, 308, 339– 40; on Catholic New Left, 339; on Council reforms, 156; on Martin Redfern, 340; and neo-Thomism, 242; on Slant, 339– 41 Woodward, Ken, of Newsweek: supports Hans Küng on Vatican Council II, 130 Worker’s Educational Association, 355 worker-priest movement, 83– 87 World Bank, 270 World Student Christian Federation (WSCF), 222– 23 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 106 Young Christian Workers, 304, 377 Young Socialists (YS), 332 Yzermans, Vincent, 406n.23 Zahn, Gordon: on Church and Hitler, 199– 200; and German Catholic hierarchy, 421n.73; and Guenter Lewy, 422n.74 Zapatistas, 410n.47

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J AY

P.

C O R R I N

is professor of social sciences at Boston University. His book Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002) won the American Catholic Historical Association’s John Gilmary Shea Prize in 2003.