Patrick G.D. Riley

Mass Misunderstandings: The Mixed Legacy of the Vatican II Liturgical Reforms by Kenneth D. Whitehead. St. Augustine’s Press, 2009. Order online at www.staugustine.net or your favorite online bookseller.

The subtitle presents the burden of this highly informative book. Not every liturgical reform given us by the Second Vatican Council sat well with the devout, as older Mass-going Catholics are aware. Nor, as the author makes clear, did the reforms have the desired effect of returning more Catholics to the practice of their faith, measured by attendance at Mass.

Kenneth Whitehead quotes the present pope, when he was the cardinal archbishop of Munich ten years after the Council, as speaking bluntly of “the present decadence of the Catholic Church.” Another decade later, the same words of the same Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger were quoted in the immensely successful book-length interview with him titled The Ratzinger Report. In that book the future pope noted: “Developments since the Council seem to be in striking contrast to the expectations of all, beginning with those of John XXIII and Paul VI.”

No more important development arrived than the widespread and uproarious rejection of Humanae Vitae, Paul’s clear restatement of the aboriginal condemnation of contraception, a condemnation unique to Hebrew tradition and Catholic tradition alike. (For the Hebrew condemnation, which was essentially carried ahead by the Catholic Church, see The Encyclopedia Judaica, under “Birth Control.”) But the way in which the reform of the liturgy mandated by the Council was carried out had to rank high on the list of the shocks undergone by the Church following the Council.

Paul VI’s high expectations for the Council were dashed all too soon. By 1968, three years after the Council’s end, he lamented that the Church was engaged in “self-destruction.” That anguished cry, Whitehead observes, is “equally indicative of what occurred and how it seemed to some observers at the time.”

But how does all this fit in with what Whitehead calls the “mixed legacy of the Vatican II liturgical reforms”? The answer lies in a maxim cited no fewer than five times in this book:  Lex orandi, lex credendi, which can be rendered the law of what we are to pray is the law of what we are to believe. That means that the liturgy embodies the Catholic faith and teaches us our Catholic beliefs. But a seemingly inevitable corollary of that principle is that a distorted liturgy distorts our beliefs.

Certainly the most obvious means of distorting the liturgy lies in translation. The Italian words for translator and betrayer are so close that to link them is proverbial with educated Italians.  Still, translators must be allowed some freedom lest the result be unidiomatic, hence wooden and creaky. But the translations of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) were often “flat, pedestrian, and prosaic,” in Whitehead’s words.

At times they were seriously distorted. Among the most egregious examples is the still current translation of the Gloria. Early in the Mass, the Church gives us the song that the Gospel has the angels sing at Bethlehem, Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis. Straightforwardly, to anyone with even a slight knowledge of Latin, that last phrase means peace to men of good will. Why then did ICEL omit of good will, words implying that Heaven may not give peace to men lacking good will?

Is that not a vital lesson of the Gospel? Of ordinary experience?

Whitehead observes that examples of the same kind could be multiplied in the “liturgical texts that have constituted our liturgy in English over the past nearly forty years”—although he also chronicles the reform of the ICEL carried out over the past decade and more by Cardinals Medina and Arinze so that the new English translations that will be coming out promise to be enormous improvements over what we have had since the Mass began to be celebrated in the vernacular.

ICEL’s original translations were also guilty of omitting repetitions, which might be considered trivial since no meaning seems to be lost. Moreover it has long been a criticism of the Church’s prayers that they engage in the “useless repetition” of the Gentiles. But repetition need not be useless. It is embedded in literature from ancient to modern times, and for good reason. Remove the anguished repetitions of Lear over his dead daughter, and much of the impact vanishes. Moreover you would be bereft of a supreme example of Shakespeare’s dramatic genius.

We might think that drama has little to do with the liturgy. But we must recall that the core of the liturgy, the Mass itself, is a representation of the drama of Calvary. (Note carefully:  that’s re-presentation. I italicize the re and insert a hyphen for fuller clarity.) The Mass deserves the best that our sense of drama can offer.

Three years before his election as Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote of the older usage, ordinarily styled Roman, or Tridentine after the Council of Trent:

“Anyone who nowadays advocated the continuing existence of this liturgy or takes part in it is treated like a leper; all tolerance ends here. There has never been anything like this in history; in doing this we are despising and proscribing the Church’s past. I must say, quite openly, that I don’t understand why so many of my episcopal brethren have to such a great extent submitted to this rule of intolerance, which for no apparent reasons, is opposed to making the necessary inner reconciliation within the Church.” [God and the World.]

This, for all its untempered language, was not far removed from Pope John Paul II’s demand in the motu proprio of 1988 in which he excommunicated the extreme conservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre for ordaining four bishops without the necessary agreement of the Holy See. Despite the excommunication, he cautioned that respect “must everywhere be shown for the feelings of all those who are attached to the Latin liturgical tradition.” However Whitehead notes that it was “only in response to an actual schism that Pope John Paul II finally called for ‘a wide and generous application’ of the indult provisions allowing the celebration of the Tridentine Mass.”

It is impossible, in a relatively brief review, to cover all the important matters raised and fully explained in this wide-ranging book of 240 pages. Among them are some Jewish reactions to the prayers for the Jews in the retained Tridentine Mass, official changes in those prayers, and Whitehead’s careful explanations of them; reasons why some highly dedicated Catholics are uncomfortable with the post-conciliar Mass; extreme reactions against Vatican II among some ultra-conservative Catholics;  prospects for the return of ultra-conservative schismatics; the welcome accorded Benedict XVI’s overtures by the successor to schismatic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre; and the repudiation by most Catholics of the renewed condemnation of contraception by Paul VI in Humanae Vitae.

With that disastrous repudiation, Whitehead concludes Part One of his book, which deals with the revival of the traditional Roman Mass by the new Pope. The middle part, which is by far the longest, deals with Vatican II and the reform of the liturgy.

A relatively brief Part Three examines the Lefebvrite schism more deeply, and recounts the diffusion of “creative” liturgies after the Council. Amazingly, one of the most assiduous initiators of such liturgies was the papal master of ceremonies himself, Archbishop Piero Marini. For example, he staged dances in the liturgy, despite their explicit prohibition. Only after two years and more from Benedict’s election was Marini removed, “kicked upstairs” to head a papal commission. He was replaced by another Marini, named Guido, no relation.

It is unfair to single out any one part of Whitehead’s book as the most important, but I do so anyway. Part Two, on “Vatican Council II and the Reform of the Sacred Liturgy,” has fifteen chapters whose headings will catch the attention of many readers. Among them: Kneeling or Standing?, The Tabernacle of the Blessed Sacrament, How “Altar Girls” Got Approved, and “Inclusive Language.”

 Part Two contains some other devastating criticisms of effects on the liturgy from radical feminism. I hasten to add that radical feminism—to be distinguished sharply from humane feminism—has not only tainted the worship of God through defective translations and arbitrary additions, but has damaged the most basic natural institution of all, namely, the family.

Quite pertinently when speaking of radical feminism, Whitehead quotes the ancient Roman poet Horace:  “You may throw nature out with a pitchfork, but she will keep coming back.” Horace might have added:  “brandishing her own pitchfork.” Or as Horace’s older contemporary Cicero, when speaking of natural law, put it more mildly:  “Whoever disobeys it is fleeing from himself, rejecting his human nature, and hence will suffer the very worst penalties even if he escapes what is commonly considered punishment.”

Whitehead’s chapter, How “Altar Girls” Got Approved, is of interest less for how that happened than for what he thinks female acolytes might comport for the future. He makes the point that women still may not “be appointed or installed as acolytes, or servers at the altar,” but he notes that feminists who want access to priestly ordination consider altar girls “yet another wedge issue,” positioning them all the closer to their goal of reaching the priesthood.

Yet Whitehead is far from critical of the new liturgy. For example, he favors the new Eucharistic Prayers and use of the vernacular, and explains some of the benefits of the new liturgy generally.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should state that I count Kenneth D. Whitehead among my oldest and most cherished friends. One reason that I esteem him so highly is the service he has rendered the Church through his many excellent publications. The present book is an outstanding example.

Patrick G.D. Riley is a member of the Advisory Board of the Catholic League. Ken Whitehead is a member of the league’s Board of Directors.

The December 17 episode of the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) show, RAW, featured a big screen presentation of Booker T. and Stone Cold Austin that mocked the Catholic Sacrament of Reconciliation.

Booker was shown hiding from Austin in a confessional.  A young buxom woman walks into the confessional and proceeds to confess to the sin of adultery.  Booker, posing as a priest, insists on the details.  According to the narrative posted on www.wwf.com, when she admitted videotaping her sexual experience, “Booker said if she did 18 Hail Marys and sent him the videotape, she would be forgiven!”  This scene was soon followed by one that saw Booker questioning a man in the confessional if he had ever been to a red-light district or smoked marijuana.  Then there was another offensive scene between the two wrestlers and several nuns.

Here is what Catholic League president William Donohue said about the show:

“Vince McMahon runs the WWF and he is personally responsible for this irresponsible show.  But given his track record of promoting the most vile and obscene behavior associated with his ‘sport,’ it is doubtful that anything can shame him.  Indeed, his greatest ambition in life seems to be how low he can drop society’s ethical bars, putting him in direct competition with the likes of Larry Flynt and Howard Stern.

“Given the large number of angry complaints we received about this episode, it’s an indication that McMahon’s base may be eroding.  In the meantime, on the hunch that McMahon is an equal opportunity sort of guy, we suggest he pick on another religion next time.  Maybe then he’ll regard Catholicism as a kinder and gentler religion not deserving of his stupid antics.”

By Rebecca R. Messall, Esq.

This article is taken from its fuller version in the fall 2004 issue of Human Life Review, available in its entirety at www.humanlifereview.com.

Everyone knows that the infamous Roe v. Wade opinion legalized abortion, but almost no one knows that legal abortion was a strategy by eugenicists, as early as 1939, to “genetically improve” the population by “reducing” it. In writing his opinion, Roe’s author, Justice Harry A. Blackmun, relied directly and indirectly on the work of these British and American eugenicists. Eugenics is easiest to describe as being the Darwin-based theory behind the Nazis’ plans to “breed” a race of human thoroughbreds. After Hitler, eugenic theorists advocated global control over who has babies, and how many. It has been called “population thinking.” America’s richest families promoted eugenicists and their many social initiatives, including Roe.

One of the clearest links between the eugenics movement and U.S. abortion policy is visible in the American Eugenics Society’s (AES) 1956 membership records, which includes a Planned Parenthood co-founder, Margaret Sanger, and at least two presidents, William Vogt and Alan Guttmacher. The AES had an ugly history of multiple ties to prominent Nazis in Germany. AES members assisted Hitler in crafting the 1933 German sterilization laws. Unbelievably, in 1956— after WWII—the AES membership list included Dr. Otmar Frieherr Von Verschuer, who had supervised the ongoing “science” experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz.

The AES lobbied successfully for involuntary sterilization laws in the United States, which claimed an estimated 63,000 victims. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld those laws in Buck v. Bell, which was cited in Roe. Some states have recently extended official regret and/or apology for those laws.

The Catholic Church was, and is, the nemesis of eugenicists. Politicians in both political parties who position themselves against the Catholic Church and in favor of Roe, align themselves with a host of eugenic strategies and fallout—which include human embryo exploitation (nick-named stem cell research), the trafficking in fetal body parts and euthanasia. They also align themselves with the Rockefeller family dynasty, who funded eugenic scientists decades before Hitler put eugenic theories into practice and who supported many of the leaders of the American Eugenics Society.

The Rockefellers’ support for eugenics began early in the twentieth century, and included support for the Eugenics Record Office. In 1913 John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (“Junior”) incorporated a group, which became a major force in supporting birth control clinics and played a pioneering role in the modern field of population studies.

As early as 1922, the Rockefeller Foundation sent money to fund German eugenics. Of Germany’s 20-plus Kaiser Wilhelm Institute science centers, Rockefeller money built or supported three which “made their mark for medical murder” under the Nazis. One institute was for brain research. During part of Hitler’s rule, it employed Hermann J. Muller, a Rockefeller-funded American socialist and geneticist. It later received “brains in batches of 150-250” derived from Holocaust victims. Another center, the Eugenics Institute, listed its 1935 activities as follows: “the training of SS doctors; racial hygiene training; expert testimony for the Reich Ministry of the Interior on cases of dubious heritage; collecting and classifying skulls from Africa; studies in race crossing; and experimental genetic pathology.”

Junior began funding Margaret Sanger in 1924. Surely he knew of her 1922 book, The Pivot of Civilization. In it Sanger railed against New York’s Archbishop, calling his orthodoxy a “menace to civilization.” Yet she admired Sir Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, whose ideal she called “the rational breeding of human beings.” She said the Neo-Malthusians considered birth control as “the very pivot of civilization.” She said, “Birth control… is really the greatest and most truly eugenic program.”

When Frederick Osborn became president of the AES in 1946, the AES’ journal, Eugenical News, published a state-by-state report on sterilizations. It also reported on the opposition by Catholic hierarchy, religious and laity. In Alabama: “Whenever sterilization bills are introduced the Catholics descend upon the capital in numbers—priests, nuns and laity—and attack the bill as “against the will of God” and “an attack on the American home.” In Colorado, a 1945 bill failed passage due to “vigorous Catholic opposition.” In Pennsylvania: “The Cardinal’s office in Philadelphia immediately sent a letter to every legislator directing him to oppose the bill, and they were visited by the parish priests in their home communities.”

Frederick Osborn was put in charge of the Population Council, a group organized and funded by John D. Rockefeller III. In 1956, Osborn addressed the British eugenics society. Osborn affirmed his belief in “Galton’s dream” and proposed what he called “voluntary unconscious selection” by changing laws, customs and social expectations. To accomplish this voluntary unconscious selection, he advocated an appeal to the idea of “wanted” children.

In 1968, when many people wrongly believed that the eugenics movement had disappeared, Osborn published a book, The Future of Human Heredity: An Introduction to Eugenics in Modern Society. Osborn asserted that “less intelligent women” could be convinced to reduce their births voluntarily, in order to “further both the social and biological improvement of the population.” He utilized a euphemism for racial minorities by urging that contraception be targeted to people “at the lower economic and educational level.” Osborn recommended disguising the reason for making birth control “equally available.” He said: “Measures for improving the hereditary base of intelligence and character are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics.”

Writing his Roe opinion five years after Osborn’s book, Blackmun’s first four introductory paragraphs mention nothing about the newly decreed right of privacy in support of abortion, but he does state: “population growth, pollution, poverty, and racial overtones tend to complicate and not to simplify the problem.” Blackmun directly cited the two men closely connected to the British and the American eugenics societies. Glanville Williams is cited twice. Christopher Tietze is cited three times and Lawrence Lader’s book, Abortion, is cited seven times.

The mystery of Blackmun’s curious opening paragraphs in Roe may be solved by Lader’s book, Abortion, which contains panicked rhetoric such as the following:

“The frightening mathematics of population growth overwhelms piecemeal solutions and timidity. No government, particularly of an underdeveloped nation, can solve a population crisis without combining legalized abortion with a permanent, intensive contraception campaign.”

Glanville Williams (1911- 1997) was a Eugenics Society Fellow in England. Before citing Williams in Roe, Blackmun would have seen Williams’ explicit reference to eugenics:

“Contraception and Eugenics: The problem does not only concern the limits of subsistence, though this in itself is one of sufficient magnitude. There is, in addition, the problem of eugenic quality. We now have a large body of evidence that, since industrialization, the upper stratum of society fails to replace itself, while the population as a whole is increased by excess births among the lower and uneducated classes.”

Before Roe, Ireland’s future cardinal, Cahal B. Daly, had exposed Williams’ anti-Catholic rhetoric: “Examples of the technique occur on every alternate page…Christian moral teaching is ‘reactionary,’ ‘old-fashioned,’ ‘unimaginative,’ ‘primitive if not blasphemous,’ ‘restrictive,’ ‘irrational,’ ‘out-moded,’ ‘dogmatic,’ ‘doctrinaire,’ ‘authoritarian.’

“Contrasted with it are ‘enlightened opinion,’ ‘interesting medico-social experimentation,’ ‘progressive statutes,’ ’empirical, imaginative humanitarianism.'”

Blackmun acknowledged the Catholic scientific view that life begins at the moment of conception, but thereafter Blackmun relied on books and articles espousing the science of eugenics. In fact, one book contains a subheading titled, “The New Eugenics,” and cites two men who can be described as maniacal eugenicists who were seemingly paranoid about a deteriorating human heredity. Blackmun cited an article, “The New Biology and the Future of Man”, which speaks for itself:

“Taken together, [artificial gestation, genetic engineering, suspended animation]…they constitute a new phase in human life in which man takes over deliberate control of his own evolution… There is a qualitative change to progress when man learns to create himself…a reworking of values is required…Submission to supernatural power is not adaptive to a world in which man himself controls even his own biological future…What counts is awareness of the unmistakable new fact that in general new biology is handing over to us the wheel with which to steer directly the future evolution of man.”

In March 1973, two months after Roe was handed down, Osborn’s American Eugenics Society changed its name to the Society for the Study of Social Biology. The announcement said: “The change of name of the Society does not coincide with any change of its interests or policies.” The group had already changed the name of its journal in 1968 from Eugenics Quarterly, to Social Biology. Commenting on the new title, Osborn remarked: “The name was changed because it became evident that changes of a eugenic nature would be made for reasons other than eugenics, and that tying a eugenic label on them would more often hinder than help their adoption. Birth control and abortion are turning out to be great eugenic advances of our time. If they had been advanced for eugenic reasons it would have retarded or stopped their acceptance.”

This, then, is the ideological basis of the abortion industry. 

Department of Justice publications on Religious Freedom

The Civil Rights Divison of the U.S. Department of Justice recently released its Report on Enforcement of Laws Protecting Religious Freedom for the fiscal years 2001-2006. This publication contains useful information regarding protection of your rights in such areas as education, employment, and housing discrimination.

Another Department of Justice publication, Protecting the Religious Freedom of All: Federal Laws Against Religious Discrimination, is an invaluable guide to citizens Wishing to know the full extent of their rights.

Anyone interested in reading about federal law in these areas should go online and visit http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/religdisc/religionpamp.htm.

Catalyst readers will soon learn that many of the injustices the Catholic League opposes each year are indeed illegal.

The Department of Justice highlights the following scenarios as being possible violations of federal law.

Education

• A group of students form a Bible club and ask for permission to meet in a classroom before school. While other student-created groups are given meeting space, the Bible club is barred because it is religious.

• A teacher berates a student in front of the class because he does not share the faith of the teacher and the rest of the class, leading to repeated harassment of the student by other children.

Housing

• An apartment complex has a meeting room that is available for residents to reserve for card games, social activities, and similar events. A resident is told that she may not use the room to hold a Bible study with friends.

• A tenant in public housing places a statue of the Virgin Mary on her balcony. Although other tenants are permitted to place similarly sized decorative objects on their balconies, the property manager says that religious items are not allowed in public housing.

Zoning and landmarks

• A small church is denied a permit to operate out of a storefront in a commercial zone, even though non-profit groups including fraternal lodges, a dance studio, and a theater company are permitted in the same zone.

• A town’s zoning ordinance requires all houses of worship to obtain a variance in order to locate within its borders. While there are a number of churches already in town, every application for a new house of worship since the ordinance was adopted has been denied.

Penal system

• Catholic prisoners seek space in a prison chapel on Sunday and permission for a volunteer priest to come in to say Mass, but are told that they should attend the nondenominational Christian service run by the prison’s Protestant chaplain.

It is reassuring for people of all religious faiths to know that the federal government takes seriously violations of religious liberties such as the ones mentioned above. Americans of all creeds would do well to arm themselves with the information provided in these Department of Justice religious freedom publications.

Remember, knowledge is power—if you don’t know your rights, you won’t realize it when you’re not getting a fair shake.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, responds today to the latest remarks by University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer:

“The website, www.worldnetdaily.com, is currently featuring a story based on our news release yesterday regarding the Insurgent, a University of Oregon student newspaper; the March edition ran cartoons of Jesus that are vulgar beyond belief.  I had no intention of doing anything more about this matter than what I did yesterday (which was to send a letter criticizing Dave Frohnmayer, the school’s president, to Oregon lawmakers and others—along with a copy of the two worst depictions), until I read Frohnmayer’s reply to the publicity.  But now that he is being dishonest, it is time for further action.

“Frohnmayer is now saying that the reason he didn’t do anything about this matter, save for issuing a lame criticism of the Insurgent, is because the student newspaper ‘is not owned, controlled or published by the University of Oregon and is funded with student fees.’

“The fact is that the University of Oregon forces all students to pay $191 per term in student fees, and that these fees are a condition of class enrollment.  The Student Government awarded the Insurgent $18,349 in student fees this academic year to pay for its costs, without which the newspaper could not function.  The newspaper’s offices are not located off-campus—they are given space by the university on campus.  And for at least the last four years, the newspaper has been allowed to use the university’s non-profit bulk-mail permit (school officials got nervous when the March edition appeared and only then did they stop the Insurgent from using its mailing permit).

“Given all this, it is so disingenuous for President Frohnmayer to claim that he is impotent to act.  He didn’t even have the moral decency to publicly condemn the decision by David Goward, Program Director of the Associated Students of the University of Oregon, who—after meeting with a university attorney—said the Insurgent need not apologize nor refrain from Catholic bashing again.”

Contact Frohnmayer at pres@oregon.uoregon.edu. 

Time magazine is conducting a poll via the internet looking for the public’s choice of the 100 most influential people in the 20^th century. It will use the results to publish special issues in commemoration of such individuals and will tally the final results with an eye towards naming the Man or Woman of the Century. One of our members noticed that Pope John Paul II is not on the list so far. You can change that by voting on the following website:                                                              http://www.pathfinder.com/time/time100/poc/century.html

Rev. Michael P. Orsi

Catholic Priests Falsely Accused: The Facts, The Fraud, The Stories by David F. Pierre, Jr., Mattapoisett, Massachusetts: www.TheMediaReport.com

David Pierre is one of the country’s leading observers of the Catholic Church abuse narrative. In Catholic Priests Falsely Accused: The Facts, the Fraud, the Stories, he presents case studies backed by hard data which clearly demonstrates some of the injustices foisted on Catholic priests and the Church.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) is identified by Pierre as a major culprit in advancing the destruction of innocent priests. He outlines the methods used by the group to manipulate clergy abuse charges and how they play the media. The organization, he says, provides talking points and staging tips for accusers and their attorneys at the workshops they hold at their yearly conference. SNAP’s tactics, he says, have grossly exaggerated the clergy abuse problem in the Church. He contends, that with data garnered by expert crime investigators, it is not unreasonable for an observer to deduce that “approximately one third” of all accusations against Catholic priests are entirely false or greatly exaggerated.

It is important for Church officials to challenge and, if need be, litigate every accusation. The results of these investigations should be publicized. And, if the allegations prove to be false, the name of the accuser, if an adult, should be made public. Not to do so lets the lies live on and continue to undermine the Body of Christ. “According to a sworn declaration submitted to the Los Angeles County Superior Court in November of 2010,” Pierre writes, “attorney Donald Steier claimed, ‘One retired F.B.I. agent who worked with me to investigate many claims in the Clergy Cases told me, in his opinion, about ONE-Half of the claims made in the Clergy Cases were either entirely false [or] greatly exaggerated.’”

Other culprits identified by Pierre adding to the abuse frenzy are plaintiffs’ attorneys and Church insurance carriers. Attorney fees, which are usually up to forty percent on a settlement have made pursuing allegations, even false ones, very lucrative for this new breed of ambulance chasers. These attorneys realize that many claims will be settled out of court because insurers and the Church would rather pay out “large scale blanket settlements” than go to trial where litigation costs will be exorbitant. They also fear losing a case due to a jury prejudiced against the Church or sympathetic to those claiming victim status. This may, in fact, incur greater putative and compensatory damages.

Dubious claims of the widely discredited psychological theory of “repressed memories,” have been used to put priests at a significant disadvantage in obtaining justice. In these cases, individuals claim that a priest molested them years earlier and assert that they repressed the memory due to the trauma. The alleged incident is often recalled, Pierre says, “through the suggestive questioning of an unprincipled therapist and, often under hypnosis.” Naturally, hypnosis leaves people open to the power of suggestion. Many experts believe that repressed memory is simply bogus. Dr. James McGaugh, from the University of California, Irvine, an expert in the area of memory, states, “I do not believe there is such a thing as a repressed memory… And there’s absolutely no proof that it can happen. Zero. None. Niente.” Dr. Richard J. McNally, Director of Clinical Training in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University claims, repressed memory therapy is “the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.”

Regarding Diocesan Review Boards, Pierre says, “they are very often composed of individuals who have profound sympathy for victims of abuse. These panels consist of child welfare advocates, social workers, therapists, child psychologists,” as well as “individuals who were actual victims of clergy abuse.” Perhaps this is why these boards tend to be less than sympathetic to accused priests. Another reason for these review boards’ bias may be the “credible” evidence standard that they use when determining whether a priest should be put on Administrative Leave. “When an accuser comes forward to allege abuse from decades earlier,” Pierre writes, “one can deem the accusation ‘credible’ simply because the accuser can show that he or she lived at a given time in the same general geographical area of a priest.”

Media bias needs to be met with the facts. For example, Pierre says, a book by Marci A. Hamilton─a professor at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, in New York City─ entitled, Justice Denied: What America Must do to Protect Its Children (2008), excoriates the Catholic Church for its handling of the abuse crisis and accuses the Catholic leaders of orchestrating the sexual abuse of children. Yet, according to legal experts, the book contains “a number of outright falsehoods and misleading passages.” For instance, when attorney L. Martin Nussbaum and his wife, Melissa, reviewed Hamilton’s book for First Things in an article entitled, “MarciWorld” they noted that “Hamilton claimed, that in some states, a child abused at age seven would have only until the age of nine to sue the abuser. That is simply false in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.”

Pierre notes that, “Hamilton has represented SNAP and has done extensive legal work for the organization.” She is also, according to Pierre, closely associated with the Philadelphia district Attorney’s Office, which Pierre shows to have a particular animus toward the Church. He says, “the Philadelphia D.A.’s Office has not targeted any other organization for its past abuses with the same prosecutorial zeal.” Pierre then cites statistics that show public school teachers have a much higher rate of abuse than Catholic priests. Yet, they have escaped the same kind of scrutiny by Hamilton.

Hamilton is a strong advocate of dropping the “statute of limitations” for private institutions under the auspice of “protecting children.” However, Pierre claims, “Hamilton has made it her crusade to lobby state legislatures to remove the statute of limitations in order to inflict maximum financial and institutional damage to the Catholic Church.” Alarmingly, Pierre points out that, “public schools have a special immunity from being sued.” As a government entity, they are shielded by the doctrine of “sovereign immunity,” which only allows an accuser a limited window to make an accusation and limits lawsuit damages, making claims less profitable for attorneys and their clients.

It is important, Pierre believes, to aggressively market the fact that the Catholic Church now has the safest environment in the world for protecting children. Data collected from The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) indicates allegations of abuse of minors to be on average less than 10 per year since 2005 nationwide. The Church’s safeguards and accomplishments need to be widely disseminated by Her authorities and related organizations.

The most troublesome accusations are those leveled against dead priests. Pierre reports that, according to CARA, 43% of all priests accused of abuse in 2010 were deceased. How can the dead defend themselves? The simple solution in many cases for a diocese is to simply pay out. And, unfortunately in some dioceses, the deceased priest’s name is added to a diocesan website listing him as a pedophile or accused of being one. The intangible losses in doing this far exceed the monetary costs. The ruination of a priest’s reputation along with the sorrow that it causes to his family and those whom he had served who have fond memories of him─ giving them their First Holy Communion, presiding over their marriage, or offering them advice and consolation in times of need─ is a source of great discouragement among the faithful.

There is an old cliché, “the best defense is a good offense.” Church officials have been too reluctant to expose the lies about priests, the obvious anti-Catholic bias in the media, the greed and the anti-Catholicism of some in public office which feeds the abuse crisis. This has caused a decline in clergy morale and vocations to the priesthood. Large monetary settlements have hindered Catholic evangelization and charitable work and have led to the bankruptcy of some dioceses. But, worst of all, it has also caused a loss of confidence by many Catholics in the institutional Church.

A sure way to ameliorate the injustices perpetrated against priests and to rehabilitate the reputation of the Church would be to re-examine the cases of those priests found guilty due to false or dubious abuse claims filed against them. The widely reported case of Fr. Gordon MacRae, of the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, would be a good place to start. Pierre outlines it in his book. It is quite obvious that Fr. MacRae did not receive a fair trial according to the facts cited in a piece published in The Wall Street Journal. MacRae’s accuser, a fifteen year old boy, had a lengthy juvenile record and presented doubtful evidence in trial testimony. The judge even went so far as to order the jury to “disregard inconsistencies in Mr. Grover’s (his accuser) testimony.” Father MacRae, protesting his innocence, refused a plea bargain deal of two years in prison. Now he is serving a 67 year sentence. His own, now retired, bishop believes him to be innocent. What a moral boost this would be for the nation’s priests and for the Catholic laity if the Church in New Hampshire began a petition drive to have this case reopened!

In a chapter entitled, “Kathy Told a Story,” Pierre chronicles the tale of an Irish woman, Kathy O’Beirne, who wrote of the abuse she sustained at one of Ireland’s institutions that cared for young women, the Magdalene Home. She reports being severely abused by nuns and having been raped by a priest. “Her chronicle,” says Pierre, “enthralled readers.” It received rave reviews and achieved bestseller status. Except, the woman’s siblings claim “Our sister was not in the Magdalene Home… Our sister has a self-admitted psychiatric and criminal history, and her perception of reality has always been flawed.” A further investigation revealed Kathy’s book to be a fraud. Nevertheless, this book continues to secure five star reviews in Amazon.com’s U.K. site and has respectable sales in England and Ireland.

If the late Paul Harvey were able to comment on this book, he would have certainly said, “And now the rest of the story.” This book is concise, easy to read, filled with verifiable data, and points out the problems with both the ecclesiastical and civil responses to the clergy abuse crisis.

Father Orsi is Chaplain and Research Fellow in Law and Religion at Ave Maria School of Law.

Joseph A. Varacalli, Ph.D.

Stephen M. Krason, The Transformation of the American Democratic Republic. Transaction Publishers, 2012. To order visit www.transactionpub.com or call 1-888-999-6778.

American civilization is in the midst of a cultural and political crisis of unprecedented proportions. The crisis is multi-faceted with all its aspects interrelated and mutually shaping. One facet involves the expansion of government, the movement toward statism, and the rise of a gnostic-like class of social engineers.

Another is a radical reconstructionism in the country’s constitutional foundations indicative of the spread of subjectivism, a self-centered hyper-individualism , judicial activism, and the replacement of truth with naked power. Another aspect of the crisis is the spread of materialism as the answer to the question of what constitutes the ends of life with the unleashing of sexual constraint as one indicator and with a utilitarian calculus accepted as legitimate means to acquire such ends. There is also the rejection on the part of too many of the concepts of honor, duty, responsibility, hard work, and the idea that the intact family is the basic cell of a successful civilization. And, among yet other considerations, there is the increasing secularization of American society along with the institutionalization of cultural, moral, and religious relativism.

In The Transformation of the American Democratic Republic, Stephen M. Krason, the distinguished political scientist from Franciscan University and the President of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, argues that American civilization has been radically altered from the outlines laid out by the Founding Fathers over two hundred years ago. He traces this transformation through eight historical periods, from 1789 through to the present. They are: 1789-1817, “The Formative Years, the Federalist Party Era, and Jeffersonianism”; 1817-1840, “The Era of Good Feeling and Jacksonian Democracy”; 1840-1877, “Expansion, Sectionalism, the Civil War, and Reconstruction”; 1877-1920, “The Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, and World War I”; 1920-1945, “The ‘Roaring Twenties,’ the Great Depression, and World War II”; 1945-1960, “Post-World War II America and the Cold War”; 1960-1980, “The Welfare State, Cultural Upheaval, and the Reign and Decline of Liberalism”; and 1980-present, “The Upsurge of Conservatism, Economic Transformation, and Post-Cold War America.”

In each stage, Krason addresses two key questions. The first is “to what degree are the principles of the Founding Fathers either maintained or changed?” And the second is “to what degree does the surrounding culture either support or oppose the original vision?”

In large part, the author sees the original political and cultural stance of the Founding as salutary and exceptional. It serves, for Krason, as the baseline for analyzing, both cognitively and normatively, subsequent social change in the civilization. The American democratic republic, as both envisioned and constructed by the Founding Fathers, is one where “the consent of the governed…is at the heart of the American political order, but its force is mitigated by the restraints of representative institutions, the rule of law, and social, cultural, and moral influences.” The intent was one in which “the majority’s will is not only not abusive…(and)…also that the common good of the political order will be promoted.”

A democratic republic can be sustained by certain 1) institutional arrangements, 2) democratic principles and practices, and 3) social conditions. Examples of the first are to be found in a system featuring a separation of powers, checks and balances, an independent judiciary, and federalism. Examples of the second are popular sovereignty, a limitation of the franchise to those who demonstrate some permanent attachment to the nation, ordered liberty, political liberty, respect for private property, and the guarantee of various political and legal rights in the areas of speech, the press, religion, assembly, trial by jury, among others. Examples of the third include a vital presence of religion, education, family life, morality, respect for the law, respect for meritocratic achievement, and a general economic condition of at least moderate prosperity with a middle-class base.

Overall, regarding his evaluation of the Founding period of the American democratic republic, Krason concludes that “it is difficult to say that its principles and ideas for the structuring of a free government were anything but magnificent and had reverberating effects for the entire world over time. It is also difficult to say that the convictions and practices of its culture were, on balance, anything but exemplary in matters of social morality, community, and personal and interpersonal norms.”

However, the author by no means views the original vision and reality of the Republic as flawless. Krason is “aware of the shortcomings of that era and like any period and place in human history, it had them, and one of the most evident ones was the existence of slavery.” Furthermore, he notes some limitations of the Founding Protestant and Enlightenment vision that contributed to unfavorable political and cultural changes further down the path of American history. Included as a secondary concern in the author’s analysis is that the Founding Protestant and Enlightenment influences could profitably incorporate certain features and emphases of the Catholic heritage as correctives.

One would be a philosophically articulate natural law based public philosophy to support the maintenance of the original American political-institutional arrangements that together comprise the American democratic republic. Another involves a more positive, as compared to constraining, vision of government as an agent to promote the common good. A third entails a more spiritual and less commercial understanding as ultimately definitive of the American experiment. A fourth, following the principle of subsidiarity, would be a greater attention to the development of intermediary institutions in the civil sphere as a check to developments in the American polity. A fifth would involve some provision for an informal consideration of the corpus of Catholic magisterial thought; it doesn’t surprise Krason that, given this absence, a secularized Supreme Court would emerge as the ultimate arbiter of social morality in America.

Krason’s analysis admits of changes in each era, both positive and deleterious. The engines for that change include, among others, “political, constitutional, and legal developments; economic and technological developments; the role of government and relations among the three branches of the federal government and between the federal government and the states; popular movements; socio-cultural (including religious) developments; demographic developments and relations among social groups; war, foreign affairs, and territorial expansion ; and philosophical perspectives and currents in socio-political thought.”

Basically he argues that the most significant transformation away from the basically positive vision of the Founding Era occurred during the periods of 1817-1840; 1877-1920; 1920-1945, and, especially during the 1960s-1970s. A not insignificant (but woefully inadequate) sliver of the author’s overall and impressive argument is that Jacksonian democracy eventually weakened the republican character of America with the latter’s focus on a “natural aristocracy” promoting societal welfare. This was followed by the corruption and excesses of democracy fueled by a philosophy of materialism and scientism which arose during the Progressive Era. This, in turn, set the stage for a decisive change in American society starting in the 1930s but sharply accelerating in the 1960s with the growth of a central administrative state.

The contemporary period, in many respects, for the author, has institutionalized even further the degenerative movements of the 1960s-1970s while at the same time evincing signs of an attempt to reverse the historical damage inflicted upon the democratic republic. One nascent indication of the latter, for the author, is the contemporary Tea Party movement, which bears watching regarding its long-term development and impact. Krason is aware that the degeneration of American political and cultural life took many decades to develop and, as such, any solutions are necessarily partial and equally as long term.

For Krason, these piecemeal but very doable solutions involve the strengthening of individual character and moral development with a greater involvement of an educated citizenry into the affairs of everyday political, civil, and religious life. Krason understands well that a healthy civilization requires a citizenry capable of making prudent and courageous decisions aimed at the common good. A just and well-functioning political system presupposes a healthy culture that undergirds it.

Krason admits that “the evidence mustered and the argument made is clear and troubling and all concerned about the American Founding, Our Constitution, and the future course of our political life should examine and ponder it.” However, he concludes with the conviction that “it is not inevitable that it remain in its current condition and that the possibility of restoration is foreclosed.” The recently emerged Tea Party is but one example of what sociologists would call a “revitalization movement” trying to right the American ship. The question remains as to whether this and other possible attempts are “too little and too late” for the civilization to escape a “fall and decline” scenario and whether the citizenry still has enough moral and cultural character to sufficiently reform the civilization and, perhaps even further, redress any foundational deficiencies.

In The Transformation of the American Democratic Republic, Krason demonstrates a masterly command of the facts of American history and of many complementary academic disciplines used to interpret that empirical reality. Like the good Catholic and natural law scholar that he is, his approach is synthetic and integrative, including, and alternating between, both normative and cognitive analysis. While the volume is thoroughly interspersed with his prudential judgments, the author doesn’t confuse his own value orientation or interpretation with historical reality; Krason is a scholar not an ideologue. His accounting of American history is presented as objectively as humanly possible and the educated reader can easily disentangle interpretation from the mere facts of the matter.

Joseph A. Varacalli, Ph.D., is State University of New York Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Center for Catholic Studies at Nassau Community College-S.U.N.Y. He serves on the advisory board of the Catholic League.