["Hark!
The Herald Angels Sing"]
["Hark!
The Herald Angels Sing"] ["Hark!
The Herald Angels Sing"]
I cannot be accused of being a liar about my break with the Catholic Church and its
priesthood.
The experiences that led to my break with Rome took place openly in Phoenix.
The story was in the newspapers and on the radio, and the correspondence is still in
existence.
In one minute, we will take you to Phoenix, Arizona, to meet the ex-Roman
Catholic priest, Dr. Emmett McLaughlin.
["Hark!
The Herald Angels Sing"] Ladies and gentlemen, we are speaking to you from
Phoenix, Arizona.
Here in this thriving, beautiful, typically Western American city lives
Emmett McLaughlin, ex-Roman Catholic priest.
Resigning the priesthood after nearly 15 years at St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church
here in Phoenix, Mr. McLaughlin now speaks out as a private American citizen.
Emmett McLaughlin has written three silent bestseller books, People's Padre,
American Culture and the Catholic School, and Crime and Immorality in the Catholic
Church.
He has traveled the four corners of the land, lecturing to literally hundreds of
thousands.
His mail is measured by the ton, letters from people of all faiths and
walks of life.
The recorded transcriptions you are about to hear contain direct answers to the
questions most often asked in these letters, and from the audiences where he
has spoken.
Many things you are about to hear are direct quotes from his books.
This is authentic.
This is completely uncensored.
This is Emmett McLaughlin, truly the People's Padre.
Mr. McLaughlin tells us first why he speaks.
I would like to make it clear at the very outset that I do not speak out of spite,
nor of hatred, nor of vindictiveness.
I speak for three principal reasons.
The first is to acquaint Roman Catholics themselves with the truth of the secret
inner workings of their own hierarchy.
The second reason is to inform non-Catholic America, from the viewpoint
of one who has seen and who knows, of the nature of this growth that has
spread so luxuriantly in the free and nourishing soil of our land, while at the
same time it is choking freedom of thought in the lands that it controls or with whom
it has concordats, such as Spain, Italy, Portugal, and many of the countries
of South America.
The third reason is the most important of all.
I speak because I feel that I must.
It is not possible for anybody in truth to accuse me of being a fake Roman Catholic
priest.
The record is too well established.
I was ordained in Santa Barbara in 1933, and I functioned as a Catholic priest in
Phoenix from 1934 to 1948.
I am still living and working in this same city.
While a priest, I baptized hundreds of Catholics.
I heard the confessions of many thousands of Phoenix Catholics, and also I buried a
great many of them.
I do not intend to rantingly denounce Roman Catholicism.
It is possible, and I think it should be done, that we make a distinction between
the political activity of the Catholic hierarchy and the religion and faith of
the Catholic people themselves.
As American citizens, we have an obligation to respect the Catholic and his
belief.
In our hospital, we have more than a hundred Catholics working for us.
There are Catholics on the executive committee of the medical staff.
There are many Catholic doctors on the staff itself.
And the bulk of the patients that we take care of in the course of any given year
are Roman Catholics.
But the suppression of the freedom of American Catholics, and the threat of that
suppression to all of us as American citizens, is something else again,
and that we certainly can and should freely talk about.
Free Americans, such as you are, have no conception of the indoctrination,
the walling in, the mental inbreeding that takes place in the training of a Catholic
priest.
And also, free Americans do not realize, nor do Roman Catholics, why Catholics in
their school system are so thoroughly indoctrinated.
It is because the priests are indoctrinated, and so are the nuns,
so that they themselves cannot rise above the level of their own narrow thinking
into the realm of freedom of thought and of imagination and of action that are so
much a part of the American system of life.
The indoctrination to which I was subjected is typical of that of most Irish
Catholic American families who have been born to devout immigrant parents.
My father and mother both came from Ireland.
In fact, both of them from the same area of Ireland, County Sligo.
My first memories are Catholic memories.
I can think of my parents teaching me to say the rosary, teaching me Catholic
prayers.
My memories of the streets of Sacramento are those that led to St. Francis Church
on 26th and K Street.
When I was seven years old, I was enrolled in the parish school attached to that
church across the street from the famous Sutter's Fort.
I can well remember the Catholic indoctrination of the grade schools.
The statues of the Virgin Mary in every classroom with the flowers in front of the
statue and the ever-present, ever-burning votive lights.
The crucifix on the wall.
The prayers before and after every class.
The weaving of the Catholic religion through the old Benziger reader and the
other textbooks that we used as little children.
When I finished grammar school, I was enrolled in the Christian Brothers
College.
It was the only Catholic high school in the city.
It was while I was in the second year of high school that the pressure was exerted
upon me to enter the seminary and study for the priesthood.
It was in 1922 that I was enrolled in Santa Barbara Seminary.
The course there lasted for 12 years.
Although I didn't realize that my ultimate goal was the sacrifice of my life for the
work of the Catholic Church, I was soon enveloped in the indoctrination of a
seminary that was typical of all seminaries throughout the Catholic Church.
Upon a boy's entrance to that or any other seminary, there begins at least 12 years
of the most thorough and effective intellectual indoctrination that the world
has ever known.
It began gently with the blending of the legitimate pleasures of boyhood.
It began also with the stimulus of competition in studies and the pageantry
of the forms of an ancient religion unseen in an ordinary parish church.
That indoctrination ended 12 years later with a rigidity of mental barriers,
of intellectual processes, of medieval superstitions, and religious concepts as
archaic as those of the Buddhist monks upon the isolated frozen mountains of
Tibet.
We were very subtly indoctrinated in Catholicism to the exclusion of all other
thinking.
Attendance at Mass was daily and compulsory.
So were community morning and evening prayers.
All textbooks, even in high school courses, were written by Catholic authors,
usually Jesuit authors.
No daily papers were permitted, nor were any non-Catholic magazines.
Radios for the use of junior seminarians were forbidden.
The priests, and all of the teachers were priests, were permitted a lone radio in
their supervised recreation hall.
And only occasionally, such as when Notre Dame played some non-Catholic school or
when the Pope gave a sermon, were we ever permitted to listen to that radio.
During all those years of seclusion from American life, the indoctrination in the
spirit of the Catholic Church became so intense that I, like all my fellow
seminarians, felt that I alone was a normal Christian, privileged to commune
with God, that the American way of life was a pagan, sinful thing.
I came to believe that the American government is to be tolerated,
although wrong.
Tolerated because it gives unlimited freedom to the Catholic Church,
and wrong because it gives the same freedom to other churches.
I came to believe that the ideal form of government was the one in which I was
living in my seclusion of spirit, the day when the papacy made kings,
and the power to govern came from God to the king through his representative,
the Pope.
My boyhood concept of civics, of the rights of man to the processes of law,
and of government through the consent of the governed, and of separation of church
and state, faded away under the constant repetition of the teachings of Thomas
Aquinas, the moral theologians, and the encyclicals of the Popes.
I became, in all truth, a citizen of the church, living by accident in the United
States.
In going through this seminary, I had to learn obedience.
I had to learn to crush the lusts of the flesh by fasting, self-denial,
and even physical torture.
Many Americans have read stories of the ascetics and the hermits of the early
Middle Ages of Christianity, and how they tortured themselves by wearing hair
shirts, fastening chains about their wrists, and sleeping on boards or in bare
coffins.
But it might surprise them to know that in the senior seminaries for Franciscan
priests in the United States, there hangs inside the door of every cell or bedroom a
scourge.
It is made of several strands of heavy cord, each knotted at the ends.
Each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evening at 545 o'clock, we closed the doors of our
cells in the old mission at Santa Barbara, and to the chant of the misery,
removed our underwear and scourged our flesh to bring it into submission.
However, we were not particularly unhappy.
After years of seclusion and indoctrination, we knew of no other world.
We were unaware of our indoctrination of fear.
We thought it was love.
We were constantly told so.
We had come to accept celibacy as supernatural, not as unnatural.
It is my firm belief that every young man of the thirteen of us meeting before
Archbishop Cantwell on Ordination Day in Santa Barbara Mission in June of 1933 was
so thoroughly indoctrinated in his belief in the Roman Catholic Church, that he
sincerely believed that his was the greatest privilege given to mortal men,
that nothing else mattered, nor friends, nor relatives, nor country, but only the
culmination of his dreams of many years to hear the Archbishop pronounce the awesome
words, Thou art a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.
To himself and to the whole Roman Catholic world, he was an alter Christus,
another Christ.
After my ordination, my first and in fact my only clerical assignment was at St.
Mary's Church in Phoenix, Arizona.
In those days, before refrigeration or any form of air conditioning, an assignment to
any part of Arizona was considered somewhat in the nature of a sentence.
The Provincial Superior at the time told me very bluntly that I was being sentenced
to Phoenix and its heat and hard living conditions because I had been,
as he said, too outspoken and too questioning in my years in the seminary.
I was prepared to some extent for the heat and the dust storms, but I had no concept
whatever of the social conditions existing in the poorer parts of the city.
Nor did I realize the miserable hovels that the discriminated people were forced
to live in.
Gradually, as the years went by, it began to occur to me that something was
wrong.
I had been a Roman Catholic priest for seven years.
I had said Mass every day.
I had heard confessions every Saturday.
I had preached a sermon every Sunday.
People, Catholic and non-Catholic, were kind enough to tell me that I had
become firmly rooted in the religious, economic, and welfare life of Phoenix.
I had sincerely and without restraint given my life for 20 years to the Church.
My dissatisfaction at that time, some seven years after my ordination,
was not due to any doctrinal doubts.
I did not disbelieve the doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ,
the seven sacraments, baptism, the Mass, or even confession.
I did not yet disbelieve the infallibility of the Pope, the historical succession of
the bishops, or even my own power to forgive sins.
My first disillusionment arose from the inconsistency between word and action of
the Roman Church and the Franciscan Order, from their failure to put their ideals
into practice.
I had misgivings about abstract doctrinal matters, but no well-defined doubts.
Still naive, I obeyed the papal law of reading no book that questioned a Roman
Catholic doctrine.
I was living every day with the Church's moral code, trying to apply it to my own
life and that of my people.
I had left the seminary believing that charity was a characteristic of the
Church, that it meant a kind word as well as a crust of bread, and that it applied
to all men.
I thought that poverty meant detachment from the chains of material things,
and that money was intended as a means of survival and not as an end in itself.
I had been taught that the Church was the mother of education, and had held high
through the centuries the light of Christian education, and that the
countries she influenced were the enlightened ones of the world.
I had been taught that rosaries, medals, relics, and the ceremonies of
religion were inducements to prayer and devotion, and not superstitious idols
themselves.
I had believed that the Church's teachings on divorce, mental sin, birth control,
and celibacy would produce moral lives and spiritual freedom.
Should I continue to give my life to a system that could involve the exploitation
of my years of service for the political aggrandizement of the hierarchy?
Most priests, torn between the intellectual realization that they have
been misled and the fear of family reaction, hesitate and live on through
barren years in the priesthood.
My parents were dead, but I had sisters and a brother who was also a priest,
and aunts and uncles, and a swarm of cousins, all Irish and all Catholic.
From them and their friends, I could expect nothing but repudiation if I took
my hand from the plow.
Every priest is taught through the years that anyone who leaves the priesthood will
not only be cursed by God, but rejected by the public.
The standard that Jesus set for salvation was not the wearing of a Roman collar,
the recitation of the rosary, or of the divine office.
It was not the building of a church, or a shrine, or the practice of poverty,
or the non-practice of birth control, or the practice of celibacy.
It was not the wearing of a robe, or sprinkling with holy water,
or anointing with oils, or fasting in Lent, or abstaining on Friday,
or eating in common, or kissing a knot on the end of a cord.
Jesus gave men one standard.
Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the one of the least of these my brethren,
ye have done it unto me.
This exciting program continues in part two.
I had long been facing the deplorable slum conditions of the area, but I had no idea
of what to do about them until I heard of the United States Housing Authority.
We were finally able to promote the State Enabling Housing Act of 1939 for the
establishment of a housing authority in the state of Arizona.
The housing authority of the city of Phoenix was appointed, and I was named
chairman.
We started in to buy the property upon which to build low-cost housing.
Again, I ran into the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church because of the
numbers of Catholics that owned these properties.
They reported me to the bishop, they reported me to the Franciscan
authorities as being a socialist and a communist.
At one time, at a meeting held in the city hall, they even tried to kill me and the
other members of the housing authority.
The housing program was, of course, successful.
We built the lowest-cost units in the United States at some $1,800 a family
unit.
These buildings are now more than 20 years old and are still in as good a condition
as they were when they were first constructed.
Gradually, in my mind, there had developed the concept of building a hospital on the
south side of the city.
By coincidence, the pressure of war activities had tremendously increased both
the military and the civilian population of the city of Phoenix and its surrounding
areas.
The airfields were developing.
The pressure on the other hospitals was becoming greater to the point where there
were not enough beds in the area.
This shortage interested the federal government in the financing of our dream.
In spite of the apprehension of the Church and the rapidly changing requirements of
federal agencies such as the War Production Board as the nation became more
deeply involved in war, in spite of the universal shortage of materials,
the construction began in mid-1943.
The hospital itself opened on February the 14th, 1944.
During this period of construction and while the housing program was developing,
the officials of the Catholic Church became more and more critical of my
activities.
They considered them as non-religious.
Rumors had circulated in the community that the hospital would never open and
that if it opened, it would not continue for any length of time.
However, St. Monica's Hospital, later changed to Memorial Hospital,
was a success.
Finally, the opposition of the hierarchy, and especially the officials of the
Franciscan Order, reached the point where in 1947, the Provincial Superior and the
Definitorium, which is the council of the province of the Franciscan Order,
said this, In our judgment, and by our permission, you may no longer serve in the
capacity of superintendent of St. Monica's Hospital, as we are convinced that it has
led to the spiritual neglect of your parishioners and to laxities in your
manner as a Franciscan and as a priest.
This letter was signed by all the officials of the Franciscan Order in the
western province.
It was merely the beginning of correspondence that went on for over a
year.
It included letters from my own brother, who was a priest, in his attempt to
dissuade me to leave the hospital field and to go back into what he called the
spiritual work of the ministry.
As time developed, when I was becoming more and more convinced that I would break
with the Franciscan Order and the priesthood, I was summoned to a special
meeting of the Provincial Council called at Malibu in California.
I was being punished by being called before them in this estate, which had
originally belonged to some very wealthy person.
The Franciscan Order, which was forbidden by rule to own anything, and in theory
restricted to the use of poor, simple, modest buildings, had purchased
this structure, one of the most luxurious mansions on the west coast, above the
Palisades, north of Santa Monica, high on a hill overlooking a strip of
shoreline that is famous to all that have ever heard of Hollywood, the fabulous
Malibu Beach.
The structure itself was as ornate as the Waldorf Astoria.
Its rambling rooms stepped from one level to another in a profusion of beauty and of
luxury.
In the library, the six elders of the Provincial Council of the Franciscan Order
were in session.
I was summoned before them for a very brief interview.
I was told that I had been failing in the spiritual life.
I was not attending the morning meditation.
They charged that I was not joining the brothers in the recitation of the divine
office, and that I was late for the common meals, if I attended at all.
They said that I had also become very worldly, that I was careless in the
wearing of the Roman collar, and neglectful of the spiritual duties towards
my parishioners.
In other words, they claimed that I had become decadent spiritually, and that my
parish was showing the evidence of this, and also that the hospital was.
After leaving this meeting, a Franciscan priest, who has since quit the priesthood
himself, one of my classmates, drove me back to the Los Angeles Municipal
Airport.
I slipped off to a restaurant to think.
I took off my Roman collar, and put it in my briefcase.
Then I mentally, as I sat there, recreated the scene, and tried to
understand it.
Six priests, sons of the poor St. Francis, with the hems of their brown robes
blending like draperies in a king's palace, into the intricate pattern of
exquisite tile on the floor, with the huge fireplace and the exposed oaken beams of
the roof, the whole picture that could have been a scene from a castle in the
days of King Arthur.
Was I a bad priest?
I didn't always wear the Roman collar.
I didn't eat meals on time.
I did miss morning meditation.
My hospital was giving medical care to 20,000 people a year.
All that, said the Father Provincial, standing in this scene of regal luxury,
was too worldly a work for a Catholic priest.
Was my work too worldly?
My mind slipped back to St. Monica's Hospital.
I saw the graduating class of my student nurses.
In their new smart, starched uniforms, they stood before me, with the highest
average nursing grades in Arizona, grades above the national average.
At the graduation ceremony, the director of nurses fastened a pin on each girl's
uniform.
The symbol of our school, between the upraised wings of the Phoenix bird,
on a field of gold, was the Latin word, Serexi.
I have risen.
I, who proudly wear the emblem of St. Monica's School of Nursing, have risen.
From whatever status in life I might have held, from the immaturity of girlhood,
I have risen to the full stature of the noblest profession given to womanhood,
that of nursing.
God alone could tell where the ripples would reach from this stone thrown into
the pool of humanity.
But the Provincial Council said I was a bad priest.
That good, docile priests of Holy Mother Church were not so material.
They were spiritual.
They always wore the Roman collar.
They ate meals on time.
They were regular at morning meditation.
But what was I going to do?
Submit to the Provincial Council?
Or break away from the Roman Catholic Church?
I felt that a time would come when I would be man enough to face the test.
I prayed to God to give me the moral strength to leave the priesthood if the
hierarchy should finally order me to leave Phoenix.
In a quiet restaurant, waiting for a plane, without benefit of formal prayers,
statues, or rituals, I had experienced the most profound spiritual meditation of my
life.
His bold defiance of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy demonstrated Emmett
McLaughlin's great courage.
Facing insurmountable odds, standing alone, he dared take his hand from the
plow.
He did look back.
The final ultimatum came from the provincial authorities in September of
1948 and stated that I had been removed as pastor and administrator of St. Monica's
Parish, which was commonly known as Father Emmett's Mission, the original church that
I had founded, and continued in these words, which you are to arrange the
matters of your connection with St. Monica's Hospital, so that by January 1,
1949, if not before, you will no longer be superintendent of the hospital,
and that you will be in a position to resign from its board, should the very
Reverend Provincial and the Definitorium decide at that time to assign you to a new
post in the province.
The instructions went on with regulations, which I refused to accept as an American
citizen, in these words.
You are to grant no interviews to the press, nor to make statements for
publication without the previous individual and express permission of your
local superior, and with due regards to the regulation of canon law regarding the
rights of the ordinary, or the bishop, in this matter.
For two months, in the quiet of my own mind, I prayed and pondered and reached my
decision.
I would not obey.
I would leave the priesthood.
At 9 o'clock in the evening on November 30, 1948, I stood at the door of St.
Mary's Rectory in Phoenix.
I felt like a coward, but I forced myself to enter the monastery where I had lived
for 14 years.
I called the priests together, the men I had studied with, lived with,
prayed with.
I told them I was leaving the priesthood and the Roman Catholic Church.
When I offered my hand in parting friendship, some wept, some blessed me,
and others cursed me.
The die was cast.
That night, I was frightened, mentally naked, and alone.
I had stripped my mind of the robe that throughout my youth had protected me from
the cold questions of life.
I knew that I could not and would never go back.
That decision was made more than 13 years ago.
With the passing of those years, that decision has become even more firm.
Twice since I left the priesthood, I have heard the rustle of the wings of
the angel of death.
On both occasions, doctors told me that I probably would not live through the night.
Both times, I told my wife to make sure that no priests came near me.
Throughout the years prior to my actual break with the Catholic hierarchy,
a great deal of the difficulty I had was with the St. Joseph's Hospital and the
nuns that operated it.
People know very little about nuns and hear a great many stories about them.
Actually, the nun is one of the most remarkable products of the Roman Catholic
Church.
She is one whose willingness to offer her life would fill any communist leader with
jealousy.
One from whom the hierarchy conceals her slavery by the wedding band on her finger.
One who believes that shining the bishop's shoes or waiting on his table or scrubbing
the floor is providing her with treasures in heaven.
She is the workhorse of the Catholic Church.
The one who makes possible the Church's hundreds of hospitals.
The one who teaches in the thousands of parochial schools and orphanages,
not only in the United States but around the world.
She is the one who does the drudgery behind the scenes in the drive of the
bishops to make America Catholic.
But the average nun is also a woman with all the desires, the instincts,
the loyalties, and the hatreds of which a woman is capable.
She is subservient to her man through her indoctrination of her supposed wedding to
Christ.
She is catty and gossipy towards her sister nuns and the hospital student
nurses.
She is maternal in her hovering over priests and children and matriarchal in
her petty politics for the control of her hospital or convent.
She is magnificent in her spirit of abasement, of poverty, and
self-annihilation on behalf of God and of the Roman Catholic Church.
There are many stories about nuns and priests.
Nuns certainly love priests, but usually with the love of a mother and not the love
of a paramour.
The affection frequently embarrasses priests.
When nuns die in their clergy, they hover like moths, obsequious in their
servitude, while the priest would much prefer that they would either sit down and
eat with them or leave.
Mr. McLaughlin sheds some light on the primary education of the Catholic school
system.
The first thing taught to a Catholic child is that the Catholic Church is the most
important thing that exists.
He is taught that the American government doesn't particularly matter, that he is in
existence to know God, to love God, and to serve God, and thereby to gain
heaven.
These are the words of the Baltimore Catechism.
The insidious hoodwinking of little children is that they are taught that to
serve God, they must serve the Church.
The child is taught that the Catholic religion alone is true.
He is forbidden to read anything that says it is not true.
The index of forbidden books rules his mind from the time that he is able to
read.
Catholic children are permitted to read the common nursery rhymes that we might
say are non-denominational, such as Aesop's Fables and things of that nature.
But woven all through these books are Catholic nursery rhymes.
We were allowed to read those things, but through our textbooks were the stories
of the lives of the saints and the Catholic teachings regarding the
infallibility of the Church.
As the child grows older, the warped indoctrination of the Church's school
system gets worse.
History is completely distorted to cover the past and to present the Church in the
most favorable light.
Even the covers of the textbooks are used to extol Catholicism.
Priests are shown welcoming the original Indians on one book or blessing the
covered wagons on another.
In Catholic high school textbooks, children are taught that the American
government was founded on Catholic principles.
That Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington
received their inspiration from the writings of Robert Bellarmine,
a Jesuit priest who lived a hundred years before.
This ridiculous and untrue concept was taught to us in Catholic high schools in
Sacramento.
It is taught now in Catholic textbooks across the nation.
This distortion of history is, of course, one of the principal reasons
for the Catholic Church's system of censorship of books and other means of
communication.
In this battle, we should remember that it is American Protestants who stand for the
American tradition.
Protestants believe in self-government inside and outside their churches.
And they have voted to accept the American public school as an instrument for
educating the people's children regardless of creed.
The separation of church and state and the American pattern of religious freedom are
proud achievements of American Protestantism.
In this critical hour, we need desperately to defend our priceless heritage with
every ounce of devotion and energy we possess.
This basic factor in the American way of life is now being challenged by a hybrid
church-state whose policies are created in the Vatican, dictated by a foreign despot
and committed throughout the world to a policy of demanding public revenue to
support its institutions.
Our mission is to keep America free.
Catholicism can win America and reduce it to the status of Spain or Ireland or
Colombia only if we forget or neglect to preserve our Protestant heritage of
freedom.
For more exciting documentation of this subject by Mr. McLaughlin, listen to part
three.
I am the product of the Roman Catholic school system.
In the years since I left the Roman Church and its priesthood, I have constantly been
attempting to evaluate the education that I received, both in and out of the
classroom from the Roman Catholic Church.
I have considered this matter so important that I studied it for several years and
finally have written a book on the subject, which is entitled American
Culture and Catholic Schools.
I believe that anyone reading it will find it well documented.
I have been curious as to whether my own training was typical of Catholic education
throughout the country.
I wanted to know how it compared with the public educational system, which I had not
been permitted even to sample.
As a youngster, I had no doubts about the Catholic Church.
How could I?
Its voice was the voice of God, reaching back across the centuries and
into eternity.
In other words, my education was designed to help the Church become richer and its
bishops to become more powerful.
The principal quality of the Catholic educational system is loyalty to the
Church.
The Church was a vague, distant thing, so I was taught that loyalty must be to
the nuns and priests that I could see.
Later on, this must become obedience.
Still later, blind obedience.
In the years at the seminary, the example was given that we should be as obedient as
a dead body, which always stayed where it was placed.
Throughout my Catholic education, I was well grounded in subjects that could
be learned by rote or by practice.
I achieved excellence, for example, in the Palmer method of penmanship.
I did well in spelling bees.
Arithmetic was very easy.
The nuns drilled me in geography until I knew the capital of every obscure land on
earth.
The history of America was hazy, but I was taught that it was based on
Catholic teachings.
But I did not learn throughout those years to think.
As the years of childhood slipped through a frustrated adolescence in the seminary
into the days that were supposed to be those of manhood, my mind was moulded in
an intellectual pattern as effectively as though it had been cast in concrete.
The term brainwashed is applied to Chinese communism, but the practice itself is as
old as the Catholic school system.
In short, I was not educated.
I was merely indoctrinated.
I had achieved the level of the rigor mortis of intellectual mediocrity.
I had become an automaton, a priest of sacred half-known rites, as meaningless in
their efficacy as the chants of a Puerto Rican voodoo priest or the blessings of
Tibet's sacred lama.
I was an ecclesiastical technician, trained to mould other young pliable minds
and change their mental bloodstream as effectively as a hospital's doctors and
technicians change the blood of the body of a newborn baby.
I was trained to teach growing youngsters that voting and saluting were the essence
of Americanism, while I was also teaching them the principles that would destroy
democracy.
I was teaching them in the days of St. Monica's church that it was honorable and
sacred to fight and die that democracy might live, while their and my hierarchy
was planning that democracy, as we knew it, must die.
I was a dedicated soldier of the church militant, an indoctrinated shock trooper.
My evaluation of Roman Catholic education and my opinion that that education is very
definitely inferior to the educational system of the public schools was confirmed
by school surveys which I quote in my book, American Culture and Catholic
Schools.
In one of these surveys, which was made by Dr. John Kane, a professor of sociology of
Notre Dame University, only two Catholic colleges appeared at all.
In another survey, 200 universities were scored.
St. Louis University was the first among Catholic colleges, but it was 139th in the
overall group of 200 schools.
Notre Dame ranked 155th among all colleges.
Georgetown was 161st, Holy Cross 171st, and Xavier University 200th.
There are 216 Catholic universities and colleges in America.
To paraphrase the New Testament story of the healed lepers, where were the other
211 Catholic schools?
Not even mentioned scholastically were Fordham, Villanova, Santa Clara,
Loyola, Duquesne, Georgetown, Boston College, Creighton, and other Jesuit
universities, or that giant of the hierarchy in this country, the Catholic
University of America.
Dr. Kane, in this Notre Dame study, concluded on a note of almost hopeless
pessimism, and this is what he said.
There must be some kind of lower middle or lower class orientation among Catholics to
education and occupation, which tends to anchor them in the lower socioeconomic
groups, and which limits those who do achieve higher education to certain
fields, which appear to offer more security, although less prestige and
income.
It seems, he continued, that Catholics creep forward rather than stride forward
in American society, and the position of American Catholics in the mid-20th century
is a little better, but not so much better than it was a century ago.
Neither is it as high as one might expect from such a sizable minority with a large
educational system and a reputed equality of opportunity in a democracy.
This evaluation of the Catholic educational system was repeated again in
Time magazine on February the 9th, 1962.
Jesuit theologian Gustav Weigel of Woodstock College in Maryland admitted,
the general Catholic community in America does not know what scholarship is.
And the predecessor of Hesburgh, the present President of Notre Dame,
who was the Reverend John Cavanaugh, made the statement, rather sorrowfully,
Where are the Catholic Salks, Oppenheimers, and Einsteins?
There is no Catholic equivalent of Amherst, Oberlin, Reed, or Swarthmore,
let alone Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.
Notre Dame itself is not yet among the top schools in America.
Startling historical facts are now divulged by Mr. McLaughlin.
When I first became interested in the story of Abraham Lincoln and the church's
possible part in his assassination, I was astounded.
One of the officials of the Masonic New Age magazine in Washington wrote to me
that the remarkable thing was not that the Catholic Church might be involved in
Lincoln's assassination.
Murder by the hierarchy had been so true throughout history in the assassination of
very many great individuals that this was taken almost for granted by these Masonic
officials.
The remarkable aspect to them was the fact that the Jesuits had been able to keep the
complete story of Roman Catholic participation in the Lincoln assassination
blotted out of the history text.
I am now writing a book about the Lincoln assassination.
The discrepancy in history as it is taught in the public schools, and the Roman
Catholic version of it, was the occasion for a plan here in Phoenix to invade the
Phoenix Union High School board while I was still a priest.
The reason was that the graduates of St. Mary's High School, in attending the
Phoenix College, were learning in their history classes for the first time the
truth of the Inquisition.
The fact that the Inquisition was a department of the Roman Catholic Church
and not merely an agency of the government of Spain.
They were reading for the first time of the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve,
of the false decretals, or doctrines upon which the realm of the papacy is based,
of the existence of so-called heretics, or non-Catholic church groups,
all through the early centuries of the Roman Church, a thousand or more years
prior to the time of Martin Luther, or Calvin, or Swingly, and the other
so-called heretics at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.
I can well remember the time when the priests decided at St. Mary's that they
had to get control of the Phoenix Union High School board and change the history
books.
This is one of the principal reasons why the Catholic Church is quietly trying to
take over the public school boards across the country.
Unfortunately, while Protestants sleep on with tolerance as their excuse,
the Roman hierarchy is succeeding in taking over large segments of the public
school system in America.
Briefly, he touches on crime and superstitions.
My book, Crime and Immorality in the Catholic Church, has shown that the high
rate of crime and sin among Roman Catholics everywhere, and particularly in
the United States, is due to the indoctrination of the Catholic moral code
itself.
It has demonstrated that this immorality is not in spite of Catholic education and
training, but directly because of it.
It has shown that the Catholic child is more apt to grow into adulthood not only
mentally illiterate, but morally criminal and emotionally neurotic if he attends a
Catholic school rather than a public school.
It has shown that the concept of venial sin leads to a breakdown of integrity,
honesty, and truthfulness in society and in business.
In spite of her protestations that she is the only divinely founded church,
that she is holy, that she can and does produce holiness in her members,
the Roman Catholic Church has failed in the past to hold aloft the banner of
morality.
And in our time, she continues to harbor more criminals and sinners than other
churches, more even than among people who renounce all religion.
Some of the reasons for this remarkable phenomenon have been outlined in my books.
venial sins, penal laws, and the church's unnatural and futile handling of sex.
Another significant explanation for much of Roman Catholic lawlessness lies in the
structure of Catholicism.
Its code of behavior is built upon ritual and superstition rather than upon true
religion, reasoned ethics, self-education, and self-control.
The most important ritual for the control and rehabilitation of the behavior of
Roman Catholics is the ceremony of confession.
It is the epitome of superstition in the church's century-old bag of magic tricks
and amulets.
It is an astounding thing that the Roman Catholic bishops have been so successful
in the so-called education of Catholic people and children through the parochial
school system that they have been able to prevent their own people from learning how
un-American these Catholic doctrines are and how ridiculous and how petty some of
their laws can be.
The un-Americanism is particularly found in the prohibition of freedom of thought,
freedom of reading, and freedom of worship as it is taught in the Catholic schools.
In the light of the un-Americanism and anti-Protestantism of the Catholic school
system, it is amazing that the cardinals and bishops have the colossal gall to
demand federal tax funds from the rest of us to build and operate their schools.
Through bills that are now in Congress, they want us to pay them to teach millions
of their children that they will go to hell forever if they worship God in our
churches.
The sad proof of our decadence is that we have been so lulled by the false siren of
tolerance that we will probably let them get away with it.
Mr. McLaughlin speaks at Constitution Hall, Washington, D.C., on an
all-important subject.
Tonight, we are discussing the school system.
And our reason for doing that is that, if you noticed in the papers, that the
issue of federal aid to schools is probably going to be voted on in Congress
within this month or during next month.
And this issue is of tremendous importance because of the battle that is going on
right now between President Kennedy and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church over
the question of federal aid to parochial schools.
It's an issue that can affect us where it hurts the most, in our pocketbooks,
or I might say where it also hurts even more than that, and that is in our ideals
as far as democracy is concerned.
Mr. McLaughlin gives us an insight on one of the Church's innermost secrets and how
it works.
Confession is taught to be one of the seven sacraments, the sacrament of
penance, established by Christ for the forgiveness of sins.
Historically, of course, this is not true.
Confession was a gradual historical growth.
Individual private confession to a priest was not even made a law of the Universal
Church until 1214 in the Council of the Lantern.
The law of the Church now, not the law of Christ, is that Catholics must confess to
a priest at least once a year.
They must confess all mortal or serious sins.
Catholics are taught that the priest has the power, if he wants to, to forgive
their sins.
The confessional is also a part of the Catholic educational system.
It is one of the means that the Church uses for keeping people under its control,
and this was probably the basic reason for its historical development.
It is a sort of a personal classroom, one might say, between the priest and the
individual Catholic.
The confessional offers the priest the opportunity to lecture the Catholic.
In fact, it is required that the priest lecture the person on the law of the
Church and on its observance, on such matters, for instance, as not eating meat
on Friday, and especially on the obligation of attending Mass on Sunday.
Sexual elements of the Church's code are also among the things that priests
routinely question people about.
The confessional offers the opportunity for this very detailed, individual,
concentrated instruction.
Of course, it also offers the opportunity for some of the most violent abuses that
are so notorious in the Catholic Church.
The principal crime in this regard is the seduction of women in the confessional.
This is called solicitation, and any priest who is guilty of it is very
severely punished if he happens to be caught.
It would never occur to me to reveal what people have told me in the confessional,
because they talk to me in confidence, and I respect the confidence of those
people.
In the 14 years that I have heard confessions, I have heard every form of
crime, perversity, and aberration known to the mind of man.
Still, it would never remotely occur to me to reveal any of these things.
The cubicle, or the confessional, the physical compartment in which
confessions are heard, is built for the purpose of helping to guarantee and assure
the secrecy.
The penitent, or the sinner, is in a dark closet that is like a little room where
the priest cannot see him.
And presumably, unless the priest can recognize his voice, the priest cannot
identify him.
Historically, it can be shown that the foundation upon which a great part of
Roman Catholic morality is built is one of weakness.
Sociologically, an aspect of this problem is that with a large part of the faithful,
the ritual of confession makes sin not more difficult, but much more easy.
The secrecy, the darkness, and the anonymity of the confessional,
and the repetition of the ceremony, overcome the shame and make the repetition
of the crime easier.
As long as people are healthy and reasonably assured of living until they
can confess, many Catholics can and do sin with impunity.
Here, a ridiculous point in the Church's teachings is made.
A mortal sin is a serious sin, which, if unforgiven, would plunge a soul
into hell for all eternity at death.
Lesser sins that merely send the soul to purgatory are called venial sins.
Obvious mortal sins are such things as murder, suicide, or adultery.
But the Church uses the concept of mortal sin as a club to keep its people under
control.
Catholics are so thoroughly indoctrinated that they don't realize the ridiculousness
of their Church's laws regarding mortal and venial sin.
For instance, it is a venial sin to steal $99, but it becomes a mortal sin
punishable by eternal hellfire if a person steals $100.
Hell has lost its fury, and death has lost its sting.
You will be shocked by Mr. McLaughlin's further revelations in Part 4 of this
transcribed program.
The word ecumenical means worldwide.
An ecumenical council is presumably a worldwide council of Christians.
Actually, it is not a worldwide council at all.
What Pope John XXIII has called is not even a worldwide council of Roman
Catholics.
It is a worldwide council of the Catholic hierarchy.
That is, the patriarchs, cardinals, archbishops, and bishops of the Roman
Catholic Church.
The Pope has been talking of this worldwide council for more than a year.
It is supposed to be a continuance of the First Vatican Council, which was held in
1870 and was never completed.
That council was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War.
It was that council that, under Pope Pius IX, declared the Pope infallible in all
matters of faith and morals.
This word infallible means that the Pope could not be wrong when he officially
teaches on matters of faith and morals, or belief and behavior.
In his Christmas announcement, the Pope stated for the public that the
council was being called principally to deal with the march of what he said was
militant atheism, which is active on a world level.
Those are the words of the call for the council.
The naked truth is that the council is being called by the Pope in a desperate
effort of the Roman Catholic Church to save itself, and itself only, from the
advance of communism.
The Pope speaks for publication of the danger of atheism.
The truth is that the Pope and the hierarchy are afraid of the political
expansion of the communist regime, and the consequent destruction of Catholic
power and Roman Catholic influence in countries that used to be called Catholic.
This has happened in Hungary, in Poland, in Albania, in East Germany, and in Cuba.
The Church and its leaders are frantically afraid that this same loss of power,
prestige, and money may occur in other Catholic countries, especially the
countries of Latin America.
The first purpose of this ecumenical council, the so-called Second Vatican
Council, is to try to stop the march of communism as a threat to Catholicism.
Its second aim is to attempt in the countries that will not become
communistic, and this means the Protestant countries of Europe, and particularly the
United States, to increase its power and work ever towards the ultimate aim of the
papacy, which is the supreme control of the human race and the human mind,
such as it enjoyed in the early Middle Ages.
The Pope and the hierarchy cloak these purely human and selfish aims with pious
slogans, such as winning souls for Christ or making America Catholic.
The ultimate aims of the papacy under Pope John XXIII are the same as those under
Pope Pius IX at the time of Abraham Lincoln or of Gregory the Great in the
Middle Ages.
The Roman Catholic Church still insists that it alone is the Church that Christ
has founded, and that the Pope is a representative of Christ himself,
and that all men on earth owe primary loyalty to God through the Pope.
The oath of allegiance that any Catholic may take in any country in the world is
secondary to the pledge of obedience to the Church, and presumably, therefore,
to God.
For centuries, the papacy has secured this sacrificing loyalty of men by identifying
itself with God and the papacy with Christ.
In the call of the Ecumenical Council, when the Pope speaks of the unity of
Christendom, he does not mean unity as Americans or Protestants or non-Catholics
in general understand the word unity.
He means the unity of a river with the ocean, or of a small fish with a shark,
or the unity of a sheep with a wolf.
It means the absorption of all other people by the Roman Catholic Church.
This unity is in reality not for the purpose of saving men's souls,
but for the purpose of adding more people, of bringing in more money, and of creating
more power in the centuries-old struggle of the Vatican to rule the world.
In the calling of the Ecumenical Council, Pope John XXIII is not interested in
democracy or in the survival of the people of democratic nations, except as they
constitute a fighting force to be used to fight on the side of the Church.
The Pope in this Council is not interested in helping Protestant Christians.
Through its concordance, this Pope still persecutes Christian Protestants in Spain,
in Italy, and in many countries of South America.
This Pope, in his call for the Ecumenical Council, is not interested in Masonic
Christians.
He still imprisons them through the Concordat of Spain, and he still,
through his canon law, excommunicates Catholics who join them anywhere in the
world.
If the Pope were really interested in the preservation of Christianity, and not in
the mere survival of the Roman Catholic Church, he would have invited all
Christians to attend his Ecumenical Council.
If atheism is such a danger and a threat, it concerns not only Roman Catholics,
but Methodists, and Baptists, and Seventh-day Adventists, and every other
member of the broad family of Christendom.
The Pope could really prove that this Council is ecumenical by inviting
representatives of all these denominations, and of the Christian laity
as well, both Catholic and non-Catholic, to gather to discuss and to have the right
to vote on issues for the welfare of all Christianity.
Most Roman Catholic laypeople, and all too many Protestants, scream of
bigotry, prejudice, and anti-Catholicism, especially at an ex-priest, when he lays
bare the true aims of the papacy, and particularly the aims of the papacy
and the hierarchy in the United States.
The American Catholic hierarchy has assumed such a cloak of civic cooperation,
good fellowship, and the spirit of brotherhood, that Protestants often
apologize in shame for even remembering her past history, or for suspecting that
if she had the power again, she might even revive the Inquisition in its spirit,
if not in its actual cruelty.
Protestants feel so strongly of tolerance in this 20th century, that they believe
the Catholic hierarchy could not even wish, if it had the numerical majority to
do so, to suppress freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of writing,
freedom of reading, and particularly freedom of worship in the United States.
Most Catholics, and many Protestants, all too many for their own future liberty,
are unaware of the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States,
and of what it has gradually, and almost imperceptibly, been doing to take over the
control of this nation.
In the rich, free soil of freedom of thought and of worship, prepared and
preserved by Protestantism and Freemasonry, the poor, discredited Church
of Rome has grown luxuriously.
Our Founding Fathers' precautionary measures for the separation of Church and
State have protected the Catholic Church from government interference.
No ruler picks its bishops or controls its priests, as in many of the countries of
the Old World, including Catholic countries.
No laws cover its schools.
No inspectors censor its sermons.
From a handful of despised, ignorant immigrants, it has grown within a few
generations into the wealthiest, the most numerous, and the most powerful
Church in America.
The Roman Catholic Church has become respectable.
The President of the United States is one of its members.
So, too, are the majority leaders of both Houses of Congress of the United States.
So, too, is the largest single bloc of the members of the Congress.
The head of all law enforcement in the nation, the Attorney General, is a
Catholic, as are a large number of the members of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
The State Department is like one of its own subservient Vatican congregations.
Its priests are the chiefs of chaplains of the great Army, Navy, and Air Force of the
United States.
Its members surround the President in key appointed positions as head of the Central
Intelligence Agency and the Veterans Administration.
They honeycomb governmental offices from Washington to state capitals to county
courthouses and city halls.
Its communion breakfast deliberately advertises its control of many police and
fire departments, like Hitler used to parade his military strength to scare the
people.
Rome claims the greatest church membership in the world, or in history, over 500
million.
In the United States, it frightens thoughtful Protestants with its boast of
40 million, and is generally conceded to have at least 20 million, unless one
subtracts small children and those who have left it.
The gifts of American Catholics, plutocrats, gangsters, and paupers have
built the largest private training school system on earth, indoctrinating between 5
and 6 million American children, born heirs to an unrealized freedom of
worship in the peculiar code of Catholic behavior and morals.
As if this great machine were not sufficient to mold its members and to
secure its future, it is gradually and almost imperceptibly taking over America's
public school system.
Its Newman clubs preserve the faith and even convert Protestants on non-Catholic
campuses.
Catholic teachers infiltrate elementary and secondary schools alike.
Catholic board members, like a creeping blight, take over more and more public
school systems and further the cause by adopting favorable textbooks or by
eliminating those that are hostile.
A third of the country's nurses are indoctrinated in Catholic hospitals,
built largely with tax funds fraudulently exacted from all of us, and they later go
into other hospitals, universities, and health departments to teach the
Catholic prohibition of birth control, abortion, and sterilization.
Its hierarchical council of cardinals and bishops freely and authoritatively condemn
the nation's laws, schools, and morals while arrogantly demanding special
privileges for themselves and their church.
Through inheritances, collections, and tax exemption, it waxes wealthy beyond
belief.
Its property holdings run into the billions of dollars.
Out of deference to its laws or fear of reprisals, practically every restaurant or
public school cafeteria serves fish on Friday.
The Roman Catholic Church in America has the most favorable press in the world.
Newspapers devote far more than proportionate space to publicize its
charitable and religious events and ventures.
The great national magazines usually portray it as the leader of culture and
humanity.
Behind this benign philanthropic facade is poised the stinging whip of Catholic
censorship over all American means of communication, the press, books,
motion pictures, radio, and television.
It reinforces this bastion of favorable presentation of itself with its own press,
both diocesan and national, carrying its side, of all questions, into millions of
homes.
Years ago, it was said that the two greatest world organizations were the
Standard Oil Company and the Roman Catholic Church.
Standard Oil is no longer in the race.
Catholicism, especially in America, now is the most powerful organization in
the country.
It is able, almost at will, to force its demands upon the American people and
institutions.
It seems only a matter of a short time until it will be able to complete its
mopping up operations so that it will be able to make America Catholic and
establish again, in the United States of America, the full power and prestige over
people and their liberties that it enjoyed in the Middle Ages.
I wish that more people could read the letters that I receive from all parts of
the United States.
I wish they could hear the almost despairing attitude of the thousands of
people who, especially in the wintertime, come to Phoenix as tourists and stop into
my office at the hospital to express their very serious fears that the Catholic
Church is, if not actually taking over the control of large segments of the world,
of the country and its institutions, is at least on the verge of doing so.
I wish, too, that people could meet the thousands upon thousands of those that I
have met and continue to meet in cities all over the country.
Columbus, Ohio, Erie, Pennsylvania, Newark, New Jersey, Long Island,
New York, Dallas, Texas, Needham, Massachusetts, San Diego, San Francisco,
Burlingame, Santa Monica, Long Beach, Loma Linda, Sierra Vista, Kansas City,
St. Louis, Portland, Seattle.
Cities everywhere in the country where these thousands of people gather to attend
Protestant and other American united rallies and are very much concerned about
the threat of the Catholic hierarchy's attempt to control the country.
They are concerned that this threat is more imminent than the threat of
communism.
I am not trying to belittle the danger of the communistic system to our way of life,
but I am glad that thousands upon thousands feel as I do that Roman
Catholicism is a more threatening and even greater danger because it already exists
in the United States.
It already controls our Congress to a great extent.
It controls many of our state capitals, many of our state legislatures.
I used to think that I was alone in my feeling and that perhaps I was a bit
paranoid or was seeing Vatican ghosts under the bed.
When asked about the financial holdings of the Catholic Church in America,
this was his answer.
In the United States, most Catholic property is owned by the bishop of the
particular diocese.
It is under the legal entity of what is called the corporation soul.
This is a corporation which is vested in one individual, the bishop himself.
In case of his death, all of that property goes on to his successor.
Legally, the bishop would have the right to give away or to will any or all of the
church property to anybody he wants to, but under the oath he has taken as bishop,
he is forbidden to do this and must will all of his property to his successor.
Ultimately, however, all Catholic church property belongs to the pope.
According to last month's issue of Church and State, the magazine of P.O.A.U.
or Protestants and Other Americans United, the amount of the Catholic Church's
holdings in the United States are in the vicinity of $11 billion.
The article claims that the Catholic Church is the richest organization in the
United States outside of the United States government itself.
What the church's holdings are in non-church related property and what they
would total in the United States, no one knows.
But we do know that they include distilleries, wineries, radio and
television stations, and all sorts of property and various types of industries.
In the current January 1962 issue of Church and State, an article indicates
also that another very extensive financial resource of the Roman Catholic Church is
its press, which claims 581 publications with a readership of 25 million people.
One of these alone, the Catholic Digest, claims to gross $5 million annually.
One of the Italian Catholic firms now operating within the United States is
called Immobilare.
It is the largest real estate organization in Italy and is owned by the Vatican.
The citizens of Washington, D.C., recently learned with interest of a $75
million housing project for Foggy Bottom, a major urban renewal area.
This project was to be executed primarily by the Associata Generale Immobilare of
Rome, which had already built a large $4 million cooperative apartment building in
the area.
Meanwhile, from Montreal, Canada, comes further reports of Immobilare.
This Vatican firm is about to construct the Place Victoria, which is a building of
three 51-story towers with six underground levels, the largest office grouping in
North America.
I have a book right here in Spanish.
It is called the Misión Secreta en el Vaticano, or the Secret Mission in the
Vatican, and was written by a reporter named Jose Natividad Rosales.
Mr. Rosales is a former Roman Catholic who was trained by the Jesuits and lost his
Catholic faith when he was sent to Rome as a correspondent at the Vatican for the
Mexican magazine Siempre, which is a photo magazine similar to Our Life magazine.
This book was printed in Mexico, and it has several pages of the lists of
corporations that the Roman Catholic Church owns.
This is the only thing of its kind I have seen.
This list includes banks and credit institutions, financial societies,
security corporations, mining companies, mechanical organizations, petroleum
industries, textile industries, food industries, including macaroni and
pasta factories, and even steamship lines.
Alitalia, the Italian international airline, is listed as being owned by the
Roman Catholic Church and many other commercial organizations.
There must be at least 90 corporations listed in this book.
Incidentally, it is interesting that in the listing of these corporations,
the name that appears as the president of the corporation more than any other is the
name Pacelli.
It should be recalled that Pope Pius XII was Pacelli, and the Pacellis listed here
are his relatives.
They are the presidents and managers of many of these corporations, including the
Bank of Rome, two of the steamship lines, and Alitalia, and one of the largest drug
firms.
On record number five, Mr. McLaughlin speaks about a disturbing subject,
and he makes a startling comparison.
The Catholic Church's greed for money is really a shock to a young priest.
As a Franciscan student and a Franciscan monk, I had been taught the ideal of
poverty.
I had made the vow of poverty, under which I was to have no money
throughout my entire life, and under which the monasteries in which I would live
would have no money and would be built according to the strictest ideals of
poverty.
This was in conformity with the ideals of St. Francis, who founded the Franciscan
Order back in the year 1206.
I did not realize through those early years as a student and as a priest the
violations of the ideal of poverty that were really taking place in the monastery
in which I lived in Santa Barbara, or in the monastery in the parish in which
I worked in Phoenix.
This greed for money was brought home very strongly to me for the first time when I
visited New York City.
I went into St. Patrick's Cathedral, and there was an usher with a table of
small change before him who demanded 25 cents of me before I could sit down and
attend Mass.
This struck me as something that was completely in violation not only of the
ideals of Franciscan poverty, but of the ideals of Christ himself.
It brought to my mind the picture of Christ driving the money changers out of
the temple.
The money changers were very much in evidence inside the doors of St. Patrick's
Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York.
Martin Luther had broken with the Catholic Church initially over this question of
money in the sale of indulgences.
An indulgence is a remission of the punishment due to sin, practically
speaking, the most common means by which souls can be brought out of purgatory and
into heaven.
The slogan current when John Tetzel was trying to raise money for the building of
St. Peter's Cathedral as he toured Germany was that when the coin clicked in the box,
the soul popped out of purgatory.
This abuse was called simony.
The word simony comes from the story in the Acts of the Apostles in the New
Testament of Simon Magus, the Samaritan sorcerer, who offered one of the apostles
money in order to secure the power of the Holy Ghost.
Simony means the selling of benefices or of spiritual things.
In the Middle Ages, this abuse referred principally to the sale of bishoprics and
indulgences.
In our days in the seminary, we had read of simony and had been taught that this
abuse had been eliminated by the Council of Trent.
We didn't stop to realize that this was being continued, not only in the sale of
religious articles, but particularly in the sale of masses.
The Mass is taught to Catholics to be the repetition of the sacrifice of Christ on
the cross.
It is taught to Catholics and to seminarians studying for the priesthood to
be of infinite spiritual value.
Catholics are taught that the Mass can be applied not only for material benefits in
this world, but particularly for the releasing of souls from purgatory.
It was not until I was in the priesthood for several years that I began to realize
fully what a commercial traffic in spiritual things the Mass provided.
I was one of those that took in what are called Mass stipends.
A stipend is simply a financial offering for the Mass.
It is called an offering because, presumably, the Mass is not for sale.
On the other hand, if the offering is not made, the Mass will not be said or
recited, so it is for sale.
The required offering used to be $1, but many people would offer $5 or $10.
And it was quite a disillusionment to me to find out that the better-paying
stipends, such as the $5 and $10 and $20 Mass offerings, were kept at St. Mary's
Church in Phoenix, and that the cheaper offerings, such as the $1 stipends,
were sent to the missionaries out on the Indian reservations.
And even as far away as China, so the Masses that people wanted said for
the souls of their relatives or dear ones might not even be said for a year after
the money had been offered.
This is customary throughout the Catholic Church.
Catholics in America feel that in Mexico and throughout South America, the greed of
the Church is more obvious than it is in the United States.
I stood in one spot in the cathedral in Mexico City and saw 13 collection boxes
that could be counted from that one spot.
The people there are not only asked to donate in the collections for Mass every
Sunday, and sometimes I have seen it done in Phoenix, where three collections were
taken up during one Mass.
But in Latin American countries, they have to donate to get any kind of
prayers at all said for them, or any spiritual benefits.
This is nauseatingly obvious in Mexico and Peru, where the people would offer money,
put it into the slots in front of the statues while they pray to the image of
St. Joseph or the Virgin Mary.
The signs on the boxes in these instances said, Limosna a San Jose, Limosla a la
Virgen Maria, alms to St. Joseph, alms to the Virgin Mary.
When both St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary have been dead for 2,000 years,
and they certainly didn't need the alms at all, it was quite obvious where the alms
were going.
But the greed of the Catholic Church is not more prevalent in Latin America than
it is in the United States.
It has merely been going on longer south of the border.
The crassest example of greed that I ever experienced was the desire of the Church
to make money out of me and our hospital.
In spite of all the self-righteous piety of the Franciscan officials and their
constant remonstrances that I was not pious and holy enough, that I was too
worldly in my personal life and social welfare activity, they were willing to
leave me alone if I would pay off in money.
The pastor of St. Mary's Church told me in late 1947 or early 1948 that if I would
put myself on the payroll of this hospital at $500 per month and turn the $500 a
month over to the Franciscan Order, that they would leave me alone for the
rest of my life and not disturb me or try to move me out of the hospital or
interfere in any way with the operation of the hospital.
Now let's listen to some factual truths of what the Catholic Church thinks about the
Jew.
The average Jew has no concept of the continuing mistrust, belittling,
and very real persecution that the Roman Catholic Church has inflicted upon Jews
throughout history and right into our own day.
The Inquisition that robbed, tortured, and killed thousands of Jews in Europe
during the Middle Ages was more of a Roman Catholic Inquisition than it was a Spanish
instrument of torture.
Jews have forgotten that while the six million Jews were killed in Germany by
Hitler and Eichmann, that country had a concordat with the Vatican.
And the Vatican did not excommunicate either Hitler or Eichmann or any of the
rest of the men in charge of that government, most of whom were Roman
Catholics.
The Vatican even refused to protest to Hitler when the American government begged
it to do so in order to try to stop the slaughter of the Jews.
Anti-Semitism is instilled into Catholic children by priests and nuns when they
graphically describe the Jews as mean, cruel people who tortured and crucified
Jesus Christ.
The anti-Semitism is intensified by the Church's laws on marriage.
If a Catholic marries a person who is not a Catholic, he must have a dispensation.
Normally, if he is marrying a Gentile Protestant, that dispensation can be given
by a person who is called the Dean, that is, a priest in any large community
who is authorized or delegated by the bishop to give that dispensation.
If he is marrying a Jew, it requires a very special dispensation which has to
come from the bishop alone.
When I was a priest, the liturgy of the Catholic Church, whenever it referred to
the Jews, used the term of the perfidious Jew.
In other words, a Jew is not to be trusted.
This phrase, the perfidious Jew, was finally eliminated from the liturgy of
the Roman Catholic Church by a special act of Pope John XXIII on March 17,
1959.
I saw Roman Catholic anti-Semitism in its most crude form when I first went to New
York in the early 1940s.
As a Franciscan, I had to stay at a Franciscan church.
The one that I stayed at was St. Francis Church, the Franciscan Church on 31st
Street.
While there, during Holy Week, I went into the church and listened to the
sermons being preached in the upper and the basement church about Christ's
salvation on the cross, his sacrifice, the benefit of that sacrifice for all
human beings, and his love for all mankind.
Outside the church building were women barking like fishwives, selling Father
Coughlin's paper, damning the Jews.
I went into the pastor's office and told him what I had seen and heard,
and that I could not understand the lack of consistency between the sermons being
preached inside his church and the headlines being screamed outside the
building by those women.
He told me very bluntly that it was none of my business, that I knew nothing of the
situation of the Catholic Church and the Jews in the East, and that I should go on
back to Arizona.
I could not reconcile this attitude of the Catholic clergy with the charity that was
supposed to permeate the Roman Catholic Church.
Mr. McLaughlin has a few words to say about the celibate life of the priest.
The idea of the Old Testament, as we know, is contrary to the idea of
celibacy.
Celibacy was brought in from the Orient.
It is not a Jewish tradition at all.
It supposedly came in through the Essenes, who were the group that are said to have
written the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Celibacy is an ideal of the Catholic Church that really I don't believe the
Church itself expects to be followed.
There is no excommunication involved for a priest who lives with a woman.
The excommunication occurs when he marries that woman.
When one of my first classmates, named Father Wilfred Elb, left the
priesthood, I was sent to the courthouse to get proof of the marriage.
The pastor at the time made this statement.
Why didn't he merely live with her for a while?
Why did he have to marry her and be excommunicated?
The Church doesn't recognize the validity of the marriage of the clergy since the
days of the Council of Trent.
Celibacy was only a gradual development in the Roman Catholic Church.
And it was not until the time of the Second Council of the Lateran in 1214 that
the marriage of the clergy was forbidden.
But that council did not forbid the marriage of the clergy under the penalty
of invalidity of the marriage.
It was sinful or illicit, but not invalid.
The important point was that throughout those early centuries and during the
Middle Ages, while the marriage of the clergy was constantly condemned,
it was very widespread and still considered valid.
On the basis of my own personal experience in hearing the confessions of priests,
living with them, and talking with ex-priests from all parts of the United
States, I am convinced that celibacy is no better observed now than it was in the
days of the Council of Trent in the 16th century.
In the United States, the violations are merely concealed more carefully.
In my book, Crime and Immorality in the Catholic Church, there are several
chapters on the past and present history of celibacy.
One of my acquaintances, a former priest by the name of Bruce Dixon, who lives in
Tucson, named names, dates, and places of the violations of celibacy to me.
He contended that many of the priests that he knew were wantonly homosexual.
Others routinely had affairs with as many as a half a dozen women at once.
He named a cardinal who brought his mistress from Nashville and maintained her
in a Chicago hotel.
He witnessed the cardinal's orgies with this naked woman.
He named a pastor who had a mother and two daughters as his housekeeper and lived
carnally with all three of them, frequently in the presence of each other.
When physically exhausted, this priest had asked my ex-priest friend to take over for
him, but in such a manner that he could observe and supervise the proceedings.
This same pastor indulged in the molesting of ten- and twelve-year-old girls.
He named the rector of a seminary who indulged in homosexual relations with
young students for the priesthood over a period of thirty years.
A dozen boys at a time were his favorites, and he promised them good parishes if they
succumbed to him.
Many of them continued their homosexuality after their ordination to the priesthood.
One of his protégés fell afoul of the law when he ruptured the rectums of some young
boys in his parish.
My own judgment on this matter is that due to the celibate life and stringent
regulations, it is a wonder that there are not more cases like these I have quoted.
Another ex-priest insists that, judging by his seventeen years of
experience in the secular priesthood, the violations of chastity are far more
flagrant than that.
He has been married and out of the priesthood now for some twenty years.
During his clerical years in the priesthood, his work took him routinely
through the north-central part of the country.
Over a period of years, he knew personally and intimately some five hundred Catholic
priests.
Among them were two cardinals, several archbishops and bishops,
many monsignori, teachers, pastors, and ordinary priests.
Of these five hundred, all but fifteen priests flagrantly violated their vow of
chastity.
That average of violations would certainly make these American priests as gross as
their clerical ancestors or their colleagues in South America.
Who is responsible for all these transgressions?
The villains in the peace are not the priests themselves, for priests are not
disembodied angels devoid of human instincts.
The ceremony of ordination to the Roman Catholic priesthood does not include any
divine desexing miracle.
The priests remain human.
The responsibility and the monstrous guilt for all these lives of both the men and
the women that are ruined rests squarely upon the shoulders of Pope John XXIII and
his fawning puppets, the cardinals and the rest of the hierarchy.
Merely for the sake of power and money, they hold these thousands of priests and
nuns as slaves, chained by an unnatural sexual code.
Mr. McLaughlin voices his opinion on birth control.
The practice of birth control is undoubtedly the most widely spread sin of
good Roman Catholics.
It is practiced, as I well knew from my own experience in 15 years in the
confessional, by the majority of Roman Catholics of childbearing age.
My own beliefs regarding birth control became heretical some years before my
actual break with the church and the priesthood.
I believed in birth control and instructed our medical interns from the day our
hospital opened in 1944 to give all the contraceptive advice necessary to the
numerous mothers who crowded our clinics, spawning more offspring than they could
feed.
Our experience had shown that too large a percentage of unplanned waifs would be
back later on in our pediatric department, suffering from malnutrition, diarrhea,
and simple neglect.
The next record, part six, is unbelievable, but true.
We now hear about things psychiatric, along with related side effects.
Many psychiatrists, especially Catholics, had written to me when I was collecting
material for my book Crime and Immorality in the Catholic Church, that the teachings
of Catholicism could not cause or aggravate mental illness because religion
offers the comfort, solace, and rituals that prevent insanity.
Certainly, among them at least, God's grace should be sufficient.
There should not be the manic depressives, the split personalities, the anxiety
neuroses that scourge those who have no divine mental or moral anchors.
And in their lives, abounding with grace and the blessings of the sacraments and
the sacramentals, women should be protected by God from giving birth to
idiots, mental defectives, and monstrosities.
The facts were otherwise.
The indictment of Catholicism and its system would be strong enough if the
percentage of Catholics in the various states and in mental hospitals were equal.
That would prove that confession, the mass, the other sacraments,
and the solicited aid of Mary were merely useless.
However, the figures themselves condemn Catholicism as a threat to mental health.
By their fruits ye shall know them.
The state hospitals include all categories of the mental ill.
Many of these types could in no way result from a religious background.
Some, however, the psychiatrists insisted, might well be caused by the mental strain
of religious indoctrination or the continuance of childbirth because of
church law after the couple had one or more mentally deficient children.
Catholics who go to prison are those, in my opinion, who take their moral code
too lightly.
Those who go to the insane asylums are those who take it too seriously.
Married Catholic women caught between the prohibition of birth control and the
realization that an uncontrolled series of pregnancies can wreck their health,
bankrupt their families, and alienate their husbands.
Incidentally, the hierarchy constantly emphasizes the double financial burden
that Catholics are bearing.
They support their own schools, and they also pay taxes for public schools
that they don't use.
Protestants and Jews can certainly make a similar complaint about prisons and insane
asylums.
They are not only supporting their own in these institutions, but also the great
excess of Roman Catholics.
Mr. McLaughlin lays bare some skullduggery that is going on.
Let's listen.
People, especially some conservative Protestant ministers and some Jewish
rabbis, often condemn me as an agitator when I state simply that the Vatican would
make peace with the Kremlin if it should be advantageous to the Catholic hierarchy.
This should be one of the most shocking facts facing Americans, especially those
who are so conscious now of the growth of communism.
I could briefly outline the answer in these points.
Number one, no form of government matters to the Catholic Church so long as it is
favorable to the Church.
Number two, no religion of any government in the world matters to the Church so long
as it is favorable to the Vatican.
Number three, the Church prefers a dictator state.
It has preferred such a state through history as it is much easier to control.
Number four, the Vatican has already made working agreements with communist
countries.
Number five, the methods and teaching of communism and Catholicism, except for the
belief in God, are practically identical.
Number six, every country in Western Europe and America that has gone communist
in recent years has been a Roman Catholic country.
Number seven, the countries that are now in danger of becoming communistic in Latin
America are Roman Catholic countries.
Now, to give a little more detail on these points, I would like to add this.
No religion of a government matters.
For many decades after the American Revolutionary War, the Vatican and the
Catholic leaders condemned the American government as materialistic, and some said
even godless, because it was Protestant.
Yet, it worked with that government to its own ends because the American Bill of
Rights gave it more freedom than it had anywhere else in the world.
Another point that I made was this.
The Church prefers a dictator state.
This is simply another way of stating the old slogan about the divine right of
kings, which the hierarchy has held to for centuries.
The classical example, of course, in Catholic history, was the reign of
Charlemagne in the 9th century.
The Pope crowned the king, and the king protected the Pope.
This is the same idea as the theory of the two swords, the sword of civil power and
the sword of the spiritual power, or the Church.
But always, the sword of the king was subject to the sword of the Pope.
The tiara, or the triple crown of the Pope, also shows dominion over the entire
world, and this conveys the same concept.
It is enough in proving this point to simply consider the dictators of our own
time that the Vatican has had close working relationship with, or still does,
if those dictators still exist.
We have had Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Perón in Argentina,
Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, Batista in Cuba, Trujillo in the Dominican
Republic, and even Castro in Cuba, until he turned against the Church.
I have stated that the methods and teachings of the Church and the Communist
program are identical.
It would take too long to go into detail in this, but a few will suffice.
The torture and murder of those who disagree with Communism and Catholicism
have been treated exactly in the same way.
Siberia and the Roman Catholic Inquisition differed only in time and in geography.
We have the same identical suppression of freedom and censorship in Communism that
we have in Catholicism.
The Communist control of freedom is the same in reading and in books as the index
of forbidden books in the Catholic Church and in canon law.
This is still in existence at the present time and practice wherever the Church is
powerful enough to enforce it.
The control of newspapers, magazines, books, motion pictures, radio,
and television are absolutely the same whether that control is exercised by the
leaders in Moscow or by the National Catholic Welfare Conference in Washington.
One of the strongest examples of all in the similarity of Catholicism and
Communism is the fact that now, in our day, in order to keep Latin America
from falling into the hands of the Castro Communists and the Khrushchev Communists,
the Roman Catholic bishops of South America are advocating a Catholic form of
Communism.
They know and admit that they are on the verge of losing South America.
And if they lose South America to the Catholic Church, they will lose fully
one-third of the entire Roman Catholic population of the world.
In the first place, the bishops have embarked on a program of appeasing the
Latin American people by slurring the United States whenever they can,
even while they are still taking our money.
Here is an example.
The Most Reverend Bernardo Pinera, the Bishop of Temuco in Chile,
made this statement on a tour towards Canada.
And these are his words.
Communists fight with tenacity and determination for and with the working
people to better their lot.
If bishops or priests forthrightly condemn the Communists, who seemingly are trying
to help the poor, the workers will distrust the clergymen and bracket them
with the rich classes and the impersonal rich countries like the United States.
Telling the worker, this Catholic paper goes on, that Communism deprives him of
the right to own private property is no threat to a man who owns nothing,
and never has and never hopes to own anything under conditions now existing.
Likewise, talking of freedom or slogans like Better Dead Than Red make no
impression on a starving and hopeless people.
The Catholic hierarchy of Latin America has gone beyond this saying and is now
even advocating a Catholic form of Communism to counteract or to avoid
Russian or Castro Communism.
Here is a program of some of the bishops of South America.
Number one, the nationalization of big business.
Number two, the encouragement of production cooperatives.
Number three, high inheritance taxes.
Number four, business reform to coordinate production.
Number five, the expropriation and redistribution of private property.
Now these are the slogans not of Castro or of Khrushchev.
This is the program enunciated by Archbishop Leonardo Rodriguez Bayan,
the Archbishop of Arequipa, Peru, in a pastoral letter which went out
recently to all of Peru's Catholics in connection with Peru's Catholic Social
Week.
We should stop and consider what this means.
If this program enunciated by this Bishop of Peru were put into effect, every
American investor in every American corporation that does business in Latin
America would be coming under the same ruthless power that has stolen American
investments in Cuba and in other countries that have come under Communistic or
Socialistic control.
This is not the program merely of this Bishop of Peru.
It is the same program mentioned by Archbishop Luis Chavez and Gonzalez of San
Salvador, Archbishop Carlos H.
Rodriguez of San Jose in Costa Rica.
This is the same program that was enunciated by all of the Bishops of
Ecuador and by Cardinal de la Torre, the Archbishop of Quito.
It is the program gradually being adopted by all of the Latin American Bishops.
The Latin American authorities themselves feel that it may be too late to save Latin
America for the Catholic Church because in their pastoral letters and in their
sermons, they commonly reiterate the phrase, Act now before it is too late.
It is a fact that in all Latin America, because of the Catholic Church,
illiteracy is the highest that it is any place in the world.
The people cannot read and write.
They are subject to all of the slogans of Communism.
And what the Catholic Bishops know is that they too, just like the people in other
countries that have fallen under dictatorships, may fall for the slogan
that we have heard for so many years, Arise ye workers, all you have to lose is
your chains.
The next expose is about an unusual dehydrating factory.
When one analyzes the experience of ex-priests, including myself, one sees a
close relationship between the intersexual conflicts due to the law of celibacy and
the excessive alcoholism among Catholic clergymen.
Although priests would not be compared as drinkers to sailors on shore leave,
they certainly imbibe far more than the ministers of other denominations.
I can well remember the old missionary from the Yuma Indian Mission saying as he
fondled his jug of wine, The Pope won't let me have a wife, so I have married this
bottle.
There is an extremely common saying in clerical circles, as another bottle is
emptied, Its soul is saved, it died with the priest.
Any sort of occasion was excuse enough for an extra supply of liquor in order that
the visiting clergy might be shown the proper hospitality.
In fact, I used to function as bartender for many of these clerical cocktail
parties, years before I was distinguished with an honorary lifetime membership in
the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders Union Local 631.
I do not want to give the impression that I have adopted a sneering, disparaging
attitude towards the drinking habits of priests.
I am merely pointing out the almost universal prevalence of the custom.
I certainly did my share to help the Christian brothers, the Jesuits and the
Benedictine monks in their church-related liquor industries.
It took quite a while after leaving the priesthood for me to find that I no longer
had anything to escape from.
There are institutions in the United States that are devoted to the treatment
of alcoholism among priests.
The most famous of these is Guest House at Lake Orion, Michigan, some 35 miles from
Detroit.
I have a letter from its director, Austin Ripley, and this is what he had
said.
We are dedicated to helping sick alcoholic priests to complete recovery from their
devastating malignant addiction and to the acquisition of permanent happy and
effective sobriety.
Unhappily, we have a long waiting list, so I am afraid that we would not be able
to accept your friend for several months.
But if he needs treatment and therapy now, certainly he will need them then.
So in his interests exclusively, I suggest that you have us put his name on
our waiting list.
Otherwise, it may be six months before we can accept him.
The need for a second guest house for the treatment of priests is of great urgency.
But as yet, we have been unsuccessful in arousing sufficient interest to acquire
property elsewhere or the funds with which to establish a second treatment facility.
Our rate is $600 per month.
The rate of $600 a month, incidentally, does not cover our cost of treatment.
Indeed, there is a large deficit each month for each priest treated at guest
house.
This deficit we try to obtain through charitable appeals.
One of the several brochures which Mr. Ripley sent me quotes testimonials from
priests and explains the sympathetic program and need for financial assistance
for priests whose bishop or family cannot or will not foot the bill.
The cover is entitled, Guest House Saved My Life, My Very Priesthood.
And the text goes on with these words.
A clinical psychological examination followed by psychiatric evaluation is
given each priest patient.
These are administered by Catholics of deep understanding and of the highest
professional rating.
The sick priesthood of Christ is entitled to the best treatment the world can
provide.
At guest house, each patient gets it.
With your charity, we can help many such sick, despairing priests.
Without it, guest house cannot continue.
This is a hidden charity.
If we could broadcast appeals, we would have no financial problems.
We cannot.
So we come to you begging, pleading.
Where else can you get as rich a return for your charity dollar?
Here it can purchase the life, perhaps even the immortal soul of a
priest.
Surely you will not refuse God's very own in their need.
We believe the sick priest deserves the best treatment.
Here he gets it.
Please, for the love of God, help us to continue guest house, whose simple concept
is based on the supreme dignity of Christ's eternal priesthood.
The tragedy of all this is that there should be any need for guest house at all.
Why are so many Roman Catholic priests alcoholics?
What the cardinals and bishops might well spend their money on is a psychological
study of why priests drink so much.
What they are trying to forget and from what so many of them are attempting so
desperately to escape.
To the best of my knowledge, in the entire United States, there is not a single
alcoholic rehabilitation sanitarium exclusively for Protestant ministers.
Either of a single denomination or an interdenominational center sponsored by
the National Council of Churches or by any other of the national Protestant groups in
America.
Could it be because they do not need such an institution?
It is my contention and my sincere conviction from my experience in the
Catholic educational system, from my life of 15 years in the priesthood,
and 13 years of constant observation and intense study since leaving the church,
that the influence of the Roman Catholic Church on all civilization has been far
more of evil than of good.