John Walton asked me about my response to a book by Pat
Buchanan. I have not read that specific book, but I want to respond to the
ideas that John sketched from the book.
1.
A picture of the Catholic Church.
I was delighted to take part in World Youth Day 2000, the
last one that Pope John Paul II sponsored and attended. About 2.3 million young
men and women from around the world gathered in Rome for a week of prayer and
praise and teaching and meeting. It was glorious. In Rome, the age of the
Church is visible and tangible; you can pick a century and go take a look at
something from that time. I loved San Clemente, where there’s a church built on
top of a church built on top of a temple – approx. dates reaching back 400
years, 15 centuries, and 21 centuries. The canon of the Mass begins with a
Roman declaration praising God always and everywhere: “It is right and just.”
When my father was at Harvard, the chaplain of the Harvard Catholic Student
Association (Fr. Feeney, actually, THE Fr. Feeney, if the name means anything
to you) taught that this declaration is from the cult of Mithras, the temple
under San Clemente. Adherents to that cult of martial honor may have included
men such as Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Cicero. Anyway, in Rome, the unity
of the Church through time – through the past 20 centuries, anyway – is
visible, tangible.
The unity of the Church throughout the world was similarly
visible and tangible, a living reality. During the week, celebrations of the
Mass often included readings in English, French, German, Polish, Tagalog,
Swahili, Chinese, etc. There were bits of Hebrew and ancient Greek, of course.
And there was enough Latin to tie everything together. The music was similarly
polyglot, with styles imported from everywhere on earth. This wasn’t just a
clever show; the reason for all the languages was that there were people there
from all over the world.
I loved it. I thought it was a foretaste of heaven. AND
ALSO: I thought it was a foretaste of the new culture and new civilization that
Pope John Paul II talked about so often. The Church is global, and is called to
be unified globally, and is called to strive for global unity in the Church and
outside the Church. This respectful mixture of cultures is a significant
element of the future of the Church.
2.
Blessed Sacrament parish.
I grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland. In the 1950s, that was a
white enclave. But the archbishop of Washington was Patrick O’Boyle, who was
deeply committed to integration. When O’Boyle became the first archbishop of
the newly independent archdiocese (no longer part of Baltimore), he set out to
end segregation there – quietly, with steely determination. He thought that
press attention was polarizing, and avoided it when he could. Quietly, without
fanfare, he got blacks and whites eating breakfast in each other’s homes after
Mass. After a couple of years of that, he re-drew parish boundaries, and
declared that segregation was over in the Catholic Church in Washington. There
were no confrontations; he made it work quietly.
In my parish, all the blacks who lived within the parish
boundaries were welcome. All none of them. It was a white enclave, and we
didn’t bus anyone in. So what did integration mean there? It was mostly an idea
on the horizon, not a lived reality. Still, there were people for it, and
people against it.
My father worked at Army Map Service in the 1950s. He hired
the first blacks there – not janitors, but mathematicians. He gave a test (on
quadratic equations, mostly), and hired the people who did best on the test. The
people who did best were blacks, not because blacks had a superior math gene,
but because they had been passed over by other agencies and companies for so
long. A color-blind test located qualified applicants who had been passed over
due to racist policies. My father thought it was important to be just (“Dignum
et justum est”), and in the short run he thought that he should act as if he
didn’t see color. He had not hired blacks; he had hired mathematicians. But he
did see color, and he did see how the men he had hired were shunned and snubbed
– and at home, he talked about their courage, and he wept.
One evening, probably in 1961 or 1962, there was a knock on
the front door. A black man was collecting signatures on a fair housing
petition. Father brought him, and chatted for a while. The man had come down
Thornapple Street from Connecticut, knocking on doors. How many signatures?
None. My father signed, but also asked if it would be okay if he went with, for
the rest of the street. So they went together – and everyone they asked,
signed. My father declined to go back to the houses where people had refused to
sign; he thought it would be rude.
What I want to say is, in Chevy Chase, in Blessed Sacrament,
in the Archdiocese of Washington, in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a change
underway. The Church could lead, and people could follow. Change was possible.
The reason for explaining all this is to respond to Pat
Buchanan. He grew up in O’Boyle’s Washington. He grew up in Chevy Chase (the DC
side). His little brother Bucky was a classmate of mine; we were confirmed
together; I took the name Isaac, and Bucky took the name Jogues. Pat’s a little
older than me; he was born in 1938; Bucky and I were born in 1950. I know the
house where Pat grew up, with the long curved driveway, behind St. John’s
College High School, home of the Johnny-mops. I know some of the forces in his
life.
3.
Vatican II and Blessed Sacrament
I was in grade school when Pope John XXIII called for an
ecumenical council. Pat was in college, and was perhaps less touched by events
within his childhood parish. Perhaps.
The nuns talked a lot at school about the Vatican Council. I
didn’t understand much of what they said, but it was still interesting. One of
my classmates, Julianna Work, was very proud of her father who was always going
down to the airport to get a plane to Rome, where he was something
incomprehensible – the only layman who was an active participant in the
Council? He was a lay representative, and helped draft documents. I didn’t know
what the laity was, and was unclear about what drafting was. Airports I
understood. So I didn’t have a firm grasp on what the fuss was about. But the
fuss in Rome was not something a million miles away. I met this tall and gentle
man, Martin Work. And I liked him. And he was a part of the fuss in Rome.
My parish – Pat Buchanan’s family’s parish – was full of
people who were wealthy and/or powerful and/or influential. And even the grade
school kids were aware of Vatican II.
4.
Gaudium et Spes, JFK, and the Democrats
The Council was prolific. If you want to read the documents
it issued, you have to settle down for a good long time. The best known
document from the Council was “Gaudium et Spes,” with the English title “The
Church in the Modern World.” It’s a thorough re-orientation of the Church, away
from churchy issues toward human issues. And portions of it sound like the
Democratic Party platform. It condemns abortion, but also takes a stand against
nukes, the arms race, torture, inequality, injustice, sexism …
An excerpt: “whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any
type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or wilful self-destruction,
whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation,
torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself;
whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary
imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and
children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as
mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these
things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society,
but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the
injury. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator.” (GS, 27)
John Kennedy and the Vatican Council pushed Catholicism and
the Democratic Party closer and closer together. The Catholic Church did not
adopt positions to please the Democrats in America, of course. But there was a
confluence of ideas.
5.
Here’s my point. Buchanan resisted, at every
step.
Buchanan worked for Nixon, and at some point, he went to
work to explain to his boss how to maintain the strength of the Republican
Party in the face of Kennedy, Johnson, and John XXIII. Last year, I tried to
for a few days to find the memo (or string of memos) that Buchanan wrote, and I
failed. So, if you like, you can discredit everything I say here – until a
competent researcher finds the documentation. It’s not hidden. Buchanan
explained, in brief, that the Catholic Church was drifting to the left, because
of Vatican II. The way to fight back was to emphasize abortion, to seize the
issue and make it a Republican issue. If Republicans failed to make abortion their
own issue, then the Democrats would be the party of conscience, and Catholics
would all drift out of the GOP.
Buchanan did not embrace Vatican II; he rejected it, and
thought about how to push back against it. And he did not oppose abortion
because he wanted to protect children; he opposed abortion to save the GOP from
oblivion.
It baffles me when so many Catholics who oppose immigration
in politics also oppose Pope Francis on religious issues. There’s no logical
reason for these two phenomena to overlap. But it seems to me that there is
extensive overlap. Views on immigration are not a perfect predictor of views on
divorce/re-marriage/communion – not perfect, but pretty good. Views on
divorce/re-marriage/communion are not a perfect predictor of views on
immigration – not perfect, but pretty good. That’s not logical, not at all
logical. And, to be sure, I may be wrong about it; the predictive overlap that
I think I see could be a mirage. But I think it’s there.
And – to answer your question, John – I think that Pat
Buchanan is a large piece of the link. When the Archdiocese of Washington
embraced racial integration, Pat Buchanan did not. When Blessed Sacrament
embraced integration, Pat Buchanan did not. When Vatican II embraced civil
rights other leftist views, Pat Buchanan resisted. When the Church called for a
global perspective, Pat Buchanan rebelled. And when the GOP was on the brink of
becoming the anti-conscience party, Pat Buchanan devised a strategy to defeat
the Church and save the party – not to protect children, but to save the party.