Ever since Rick Santorum surged ahead in recent GOP primaries, pundits and journalists have been quick to point out how Santorum isn’t a “real” Catholic in the mold of former American Catholic leaders. This opinion has intensified after Santorum’s attacks on President John F. Kennedy. Santorum, however, is advocating theocracy and that is very much in the Roman Catholic political tradition if one looks at the last 1600 years of Church history.
Yes, American bishops in the past have defended the separation of church and state because they were appointed nominally by Roman pontiffs largely unconcerned with a predominantly Protestant United States. The Curia relied on the recommendations of other Americans, or a candidate’s ability to raise money, rather than any interest they held in U.S. political affairs. Post World War II, the Church and U.S. intelligence united against the “Red” threat. That changed somewhat from 1958 to 1978 when Popes John XXIII and Paul VI sought an accommodation with the USSR and tried to reform the Church as a result of the Second Vatican Council. Both appointed the type of American bishop who would champion civil rights and world peace, but politically progressive prelates are not the historical norm.
Since becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, the Vatican – a hill in Rome given to the Church by the Emperor Constantine and location of its headquarters ever since – has been an institution with a supreme interest in temporal affairs of state. Privileges, money, land and royal titles were given to prelates by Roman emperors and subsequent monarchs through the Dark and Middle Ages. In promulgating the “divine right of kings,” prelates exhorted, threatened damnation, propagandized and murdered when necessary to deliver an obedient and docile populace to their protectors and benefactors. Even after the Protestant Reformation, the remaining Catholic ancien régimes were solid unions of church and state. Both prelates and royalty did everything in their power to thwart the democratization of Europe. The Roman Church’s temporal power was only lost along with the Papal States in the reunification of Italy.
The Lateran Treaty signed with Benito Mussolini in 1929 provided Pope Pius XI with over $1 billion in today’s dollars in reparations for the loss of the Papal States. He wisely chose financial genius Bernardino Nogara to invest his money without regard for the morality or ethics of his investments.
Within a few years, the Vatican was one of the strongest participants in the world-wide financial network which gave the Holy See enormous leverage during the 1930’s depression. The pope now had international clout. Any threat to withdraw Vatican investments would have serious consequences. When Mussolini needed arms to invade Ethiopia in 1935, Vatican-owned munitions plants supplied the dictator. Other fascist governments were aided in return for non-interference in the Vatican’s business interests. As would remain true for the next fifty years, often times the quid quo pro for Vatican funds was the bloody suppression of communist movements.(1)
The Roman Catholic Church was now a full-fledged member of the international plutocracy, or what Charles Higham, author of Trading with the Enemy, dubbed The Fraternity - those “business leaders entangled with the others through interlocking directorates or financial sources.” They not only sought a continuing alliance of interests for the duration of World War II but would place The Fraternity in postwar possession of financial, industrial and political autonomy.(2)
There is never too much money or power for The Fraternity, so in the late 1960s and early 1970s American neoconservatives planned for the take-over of the U.S. government and the subsequent transfer of wealth from the working and middle classes to their own pockets. The “Religious Right” is their artificial creation to accomplish the same results as the alliance of church and state during the ancien régimes, i.e. religious leaders would produce compliant and submissive voters easily controlled by the corporatists and the corporatists would provide religious leaders with prestige, deference, and money.
Napoleon Bonaparte already had this figured out. Before signing a concordat with the pope in 1801 restoring some of the Church’s rights lost in the French Revolution, he wrote of the First Estate:
What is it that makes the poor man take it for granted that ten chimneys smoke in my palace while he dies of cold, that I have ten changes of raiment in my wardrobe while he is naked, that on my table at each meal there is enough to sustain a family for a week? It is religion which says to him that in another life I shall be his equal, indeed that he has a better chance of being happy there than I have. (3)
For the neocons, who better than elite Catholics already tied into global corporate and religious networks and the Roman Catholic Church with a millennium of experience in mutually beneficial church/state coalitions to bring this about?
William Simon, Nixon’s secretary of the treasury and a Knight of Malta, an international fraternity of very rich and reactionary Catholics, invented the neocon foundation as a clearing house for corporate donations to be bundled with others creating sums large enough to make a difference. Paul Weyrich was the logistical genius behind creation of the Religious Right, hiring Jerry Falwell and choosing the name, the Moral Majority, for his first such organization. Weyrich also engineered the success of the right-wing media echo chamber and founded ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, among many other organizations. Michael Novak and George Weigel were the “intellects” who justified avarice, war, torture, and impoverishing America as a higher moral order. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, a former Lutheran minister, was charged with uniting formerly bitter enemies (fundamentalist Catholics and Evangelicals) into a single voting bloc.
The first neocon president and pontiff, Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, became collaborators towards the downfall of the USSR, the bloody suppression of freedom movements in Latin America and the creation of a corporatist U.S. government. Wojtyla did his part by appointing American bishops no longer interested in banning the bomb but rather focused on electing Republicans. He also handed control of the Vatican over to Opus Dei, a clandestine group of plutocrats who had already gained control of the Spanish government and were expanding to other parts of the world.(4)
Transformed by illness and infirmity, Wojtyla spent his last strength trying to prevent the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but it was too late. The men he had helped place in power in both the Vatican and the U.S. government, including his own successor, were well on their way to power and wealth possibly beyond even their own expectations.
Many have also incorrectly suggested that because Santorum is Catholic and has links to Opus Dei that he has the backing of the Catholic Church. But as in Reagan and both Bush presidents, as well as the U.S. episcopate’s vicious assault against the Catholic John Kerry in 2004, it makes no difference if an American politician is or is not Catholic or a member of Opus Dei in order to get the backing of the Catholic Church. As we have seen by the sex-abuse scandals, the pre-eminent concern of Church hierarchs is the retention and growth of their own influence and money. Therefore, they will support any pro-business candidate willing to partner with them who they think is electable.
I have been accused in the comments made to my other postings of trying to provoke a return to anti-Catholic hysteria of former generations. In the first place, fundamentalist Christians still refer to the Catholic Church as the “Whore of Babylon.” Secondly, my only point is that Americans should be aware of the enormous influence of a foreign state controlled by, and advocating for (with the exception of some banal religious-sounding platitudes) the global plutocracy in our internal affairs. My goal is to someday read the morning news on Christmas or Easter and find out no one gave a damn what the pope said.
(Betty Clermont is author of The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America (Clarity Press, 2009))
1. Peter J. Wosh review of John E. Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican 1850-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2005) http://www.hbs.edu/...
2. Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy (Delacorte Press, 1983) p. xiv
3. Alec R. Vidler, The Church in an Age of Revolution (Penguin Books Ltd, 1961) p. 19
4. Robert Hutchison, Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei (Thomas Dunne Books, 1997, 2006)