PURITAN NEWS
WEEKLY
10/22/03
AMERICAN CONSERVATISM AND ROMANISM
By J. Parnell McCarter
The American conservative movement is increasingly led by Roman Catholic political pundits. Simply look at the authors represented in the Conservative Book Club. There you will find William F. Buckley, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy, Robert Bork, William Bennett, Linda Chavez, Alan Keyes, Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Buchanan, Barbara Olson, Robert Novak, … - Roman Catholics all. Roman Catholic views on man, God, law, society, etc. permeate their writings. And American conservatives – "Protestant" as well as Roman Catholic – are lapping it up.
Dr. Stephen Mumford – though a rank humanist – has provided valuable insights into the nature of the Roman Catholic Church in the American conservative movement. Here are some of his findings, which can be read at http://www.mosquitonet.com/~prewett/amdem4344.html :
Page 43-44 .........
The Catholic Church and Social Justice Issues
............ The Reagan Administration is clearly being manipulated by the [Roman] Catholic Church, apparently with the president's blessing. In an April 1982 speech before the National Catholic Education Association, Reagan made the incredible statement,
"I am grateful for your help in shaping American policy to reflect God's will ...., And I will look forward to further guidance from His Holiness Pope John Paul II during an audience I will have with him in June."
Mr. Reagan is obviously leaning on the Vatican for a lot of help, and he's getting it - much of it not in the best interest of the United States. If the United States government shows no more willingness to deal with illegal immigration than has been shown by the Reagan Administration, then a migration from Latin America of the magnitude described above is certainly imminent. A [Roman] Catholic majority in the United States and Vatican control of our government would greatly enhance the power of the Church not only in this country but worldwide.
The Abortion Movement
In 1980, Federal Judge John Dooling, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, declared that the Hyde Amendment, which prevented Medicaid payment for abortion, was unconstitutional. (Copies of Judge Dooling's 328-page decision in McRae vs. HEW are rare. During a recent conversation with the Brooklyn United States District Court, I was told that their copy had disappeared and, for this reason, they were not in a position to reproduce it.)
Judge Dooling had spent a year gathering evidence and studying the anti-abortion movement, and his findings showed that the anti-abortion movement was essentially a Roman Catholic movement with a little non-Catholic window dressing. The amendment, says Dooling bluntly, was a ploy by anti-abortion congressmen frustrated in their attempt to pass a constitutional amendment that would override the Supreme Court's 1973 pro-abortion decision; its purpose was quite simply to circumvent the Court's ruling and prevent as many abortions as possible.
Dooling, a practicing Catholic, makes short shrift of the anti-abortionists' pretensions to be a spontaneous grass-roots movement that owes its political victories to sheer moral appeal. He confirms that the right-to-life's main source of energy, organization, and direction has been the [Roman] Catholic Church, and he describes in detail how the movement uses one-issue voting to put pressure on legislators, candidates, and the party organizations that nominate them - a tactic that gains influence far out of proportion to its numbers. Please see appendix one for excerpts from Judge Dooling's decision in McRae vs. HEW.
What is most significant in this extract is Judge Dooling's finding that the anti-abortion movement's main source of energy, organization, and direction has been the [Roman] Catholic Church.
The bishops' Pastoral Plan prompted the creation of the Moral Majority.
Richard A. Viguerie, a Catholic, is the man most responsible for the development and success of the New Right, and he will be the first to claim that honor. He was also involved in the original discussions that led to the creation of the Moral Majority and, as its fundraiser, can be credited with its financial success.
Paul Weyrich, a [Roman] Catholic, claims credit for originating the idea for the group and the name itself. In their search for an attractive front man for the organization, they chose Jerry Falwell, who, according to intimates, has an insatiable lust for power - and, thus, Moral Majority, Inc., was born.
It is inconceivable that these Catholic laymen were not responding to the bishops' Pastoral Plan. Much went into avoiding public disclosure of the role of the [Roman] Catholic Church in the creation of the Moral Majority.
Maxine Negri, in "A Well-Planned Conspiracy," exposed involvement of the [Roman] Catholic hierarchy in the Moral Majority. Then, the June 21, 1982, issue of U.S. News and World Report noted:
At the heart of Moral Majority is a direct-mail operation..... Membership claims.... put the number of Moral Majority's active supporters at roughly 4 million Roman Catholics, Protestant fundamentalists, and orthodox Jews. The organization says its "hardcore contributors," numbered at more than 400,000, include a cadre of 80,000 priests, ministers, and rabbis organized into fifty autonomous chapters.
This claim of autonomy should not be taken seriously. What is described here is exactly the organization described in the Pastoral Plan of Action down to the details. None of us who has ever worked extensively with fundamentalist churches or lived among fundamentalists ever took the claim that the Moral Majority was a fundamentalist organization seriously.
One characteristic common among fundamentalists is a keen sense of individualism, and individualists are often fundamentalists because of this trait. There is self-selection. They strongly resist the "herding" that characterizes other major denominations such as the [Roman] Catholic Church. It is very difficult to organize two or three local fundamentalist church-......
[end page 44] -END QUOTE-
Also suggested reading-
The Right to Lifers ........ by Connie Paige, Summit Books
AND
Politics, Power and the Church .......by Lawrence Lader, Macmillan
Latter two available via-
Tom Davis Books POBox 1107 Aptos, CA 95001
The anti abortion movement is a Roman Catholic movement.
Not Christian at all.
F. page 207
"The New Right, which is dominated by Catholics such as Richard Viguerie and which answers to the Vatican, drew the fundamentalists in under the guise of religion-but for explicitly political purposes".
page 203
AMERICAN CONSERVATISM vs. THE RADICAL RELIGIOUS
"If we didn't know the Pope agrees with us, we Catholics in the New Right would have serious conscience problems. I would never work counter to the Church's official position." -Paul Weyrich, founder Moral Majority Christian Voice Religious RoundtabIe
The radical religious in our country, the so-called New Right, religious right, religious conservatives, and the Moral Majority, according to Paul Weyrich, will be guided by policy established in the Vatican. To ensure that the Moral Majority does not act in ways in which the pope would not approve, the opinion of Weyrich and other Catholics in the organization must bear considerable weight in decision-making by the Moral Majority organization. They must be in positions of leadership. We have discussed earlier the Vatican's control over faithful laypersons, and Weyrich is apparently in this mold. Weyrich and his Catholic colleagues control the Moral Majority. The Vatican controls Weyrich and his colleagues. Thus the Vatican controls the Moral Majority. It is a fact that the American Catholic bishops described the Moral Majority in their 1975 Pastoral Plan of Action (appendix two), four years before Jerry Falwell was asked by the Catholics who named the organization to head it. The importance of this......
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“Protestant” conservative pundits are largely extolling the Romish Church. A case in point is World Magazine. World Magazine serves as an influential conduit of information for the American evangelical community. Its roots lie in “conservative” southern Presbyterianism. Its editor and publisher (Marvin Olasky and Joel Belz) are both prominent members of the Presbyterian Church in America. (see http://www.puritans.net/news/reformedjournalism.htm ) On both its website and magazine in October 2003 it ran the following cover story:
COVER STORY
A
Shepherd and A statesman
COVER STORY: He challenged and endured
Nazi and Communist tyrannies. He helped institute reforms that opened the Bible
to millions of Catholics. He stood fast for traditional morality in an age of
relativism. Last week, with his health in serious decline, millions used the
occasion of his 25th anniversary as pope to remember (and say farewell to) Pope
John Paul II, man of courage and man of conviction…
It allows the Jesuit Ignatius Press run prominently placed ads in its magazine, yet refuses a Reformation Day Statement by Trinity Foundation which it regards as “unloving”.
And World Magazine is hardly alone in conservative American “Protestantism”. Rather, it is representative of this movement.
We can only conclude that American political conservatism (at least in most of its expressions) is morally bankrupt, having largely rejected the historic reformed faith.
World Magazine has also distributed Robert George's book The Clash of Orthodoxies to its subscribers, free of charge, as a bonus for bringing in new subscribers. Robert George is a Roman Catholic neo-conservative scholar and Princeton professor. A recent edition of Princeton Alumni Weekly notes: "At Princeton, George is adored by conservative students, who credit him with widening the diversity of public discourse on campus." ("Heretic in the Temple", Princeton Alumni Weekly, December 8, 2003) The Clash of Orthodoxies is in fact a subtle yet very real apologetic for Roman Catholic political philosophy and theology.
This is simply a representative sample of the Romanistic influence in the American conservative movement.