The Bookshelf

(Because of the nature of this book and the importance of its topic, the CRIMSON presents reviews by authors holding to both sides of the controversy.)

Paul Blanshard's "American Democracy and Catholic Power" deals with a specific example of the general problem of the special interest group in a democracy. What makes this particular special interest group worthy of individual consideration is: 1) its size, 2) the international and authoritarian nature of the hierarchy that controls it, and 3) the fact that, unlike most of the other special interest groups with which American Democracy is currently confronted, the Roman Catholic Church in its special interest role seeks not the economic advancement of its members but control over the morals, education, and free expression of members and non-members alike.

The clash between American Democracy and Catholic Power arises, as Blanshard shows, because this control which the Church seeks to exert is necessarily illiberal, since it denies the right of "error" (in other words, any view which disagrees with the Church's official position) to be heard. Blanshard's book is a carefully documented study of how the Church is now trying to exert this control in the United States. What makes "American Democracy and Catholic Power" worthy of wide circulation is that most Americans are unaware of the extent of the Church's success in this effort at control. (One example of such success is that the Church was able to force many boards of education,--including New York City's--to ban "The Nation" from public school libraries because it printed a series of articles by Blanshard, the foreruners of "American Democracy and Catholic Power," which attacked the Church's role in American life.)

Because the Church is a minority group in America, its methods of control here are different from those in Spain, for example. Spain comes near the Church ideal, the state which restricts its functions to the maintenance of order while subsidizing the Church in its control of education and morals. In America the strategy involves threats of boycott to offending newspapers, magazines, movie producers and distributors, and radio stations; establishment of a separate school system and attempts to infiltrate and control the public school system; and attempts to force legislative bodies, by the customary pressure group means, to impose the Roman Catholic view on a disagreeing but non-militant citizenry.

This strategy involves questions which the ordinary citizen considers far removed from the religious level, matters such as proper procedure for doctors, what you may see in the movies or read in the newspapers, or the nation's foreign policy.

And it is because of this wide-spread effect of the Roman Catholic strategy that it is ridiculous to suggest, as some have, that criticisms of that strategy ought to be banned as "trouble-making" or "intolerant." An attempt to control the lives and thoughts of every one of us ought not to be permitted to escape criticism by hiding under the blanket of tolerance. For "American Democracy and Catholic Power" is not Ku Klux Klan rabble-rousing, but a picture carefully documented largely from official Roman Catholic sources, of what the Roman Catholic Church is now doing in America and what it would like to do in the future. Sedgwick W. Green

Journalist, author, social reformer Paul Blanshard has produced a hardhitting attack upon the political ideas and practices of the American Catholic hierarchy. His latest book scratches the surface of the Canon Law, spot bombs the Papal Encyclicals, and analyzes in telling journalese pamphlets, articles, and speeches of both leading and lesser clerics throughout the country. His theses are in the main two: The Catholic community in America is tightly organized and disciplined from Rome; and the Church militant is bent upon securing political supremacy for itself and intolerance for all dissenting groups.

"American Freedom and Catholic Power" is a well documented book. Unfortunately its facts are not always as clearly stated as their sources. In a chapter, "Tolerance, Appeasement and Freedom," Mr. Blanshard criticizes the Knights of Columbus for committing "the fallacy of irrelevant conclusion." This means that they deny some misconception very close to one of the "unpopular" Church dogmas in order to deceive people into believing that the Church upholds American principles (and also denies the dogma). When the Knights of Columbus say that it is an "erroneous idea" to believe non-Catholic marriages are invalid, they are knocking over a straw man. The Church teaches (horror of horrors) that a Catholic cannot be married in the eyes of the Church except before a priest. Mr. Blanshard makes this delicate and purely religious matter clear only by implication in the footnotes which are grouped, I think unfortunately, at the end of the book. The rhetorical implication is that Catholics, encouraged by the teachings of their "costumed" clerics, view Protestant and Jewish marriage as conjugal union in a rabbit hutch.

Chapter 12 on "The Catholic Plan for America" is an interesting exergesis from various sources in Church literature, and reads very much like a reactionary Communist Manifesto. It is a program which has never been set forth by the American Catholic Church, and many Catholic clerics, according to Mr. Blanshard's own sources, agree neither with the temper of the thought, or the dogmatic authentication of the sources from which it is derived. Some clerics do agree, and the cases of Quebee and Spain certainly provide strong arguments for the possibility of compromise between Catholicism and fascism. But the blanket implications which Mr. Blanshard draws are politically naive. The social facts in Spain and the United States are only slightly comparable. His simple use of the Papist bug-a-boo as the enduring prime mover of unsavory isms is just too easy.

The great failure of the book is Mr. Blanshard's unwillingness or inability to look to the root of some of the strange anomalies which he merely touches in scanning American Catholicism. Were he to investigate "the core of faith" which Catholic liberals cling to "even when they look with repugnance on the autocratic ecclesiastical system imposed upon the people by the priests," he might gain valuable insight into the more important non-political motives of the Church. As it is, his disdain for the hierarchy blinds the balance of his insight so that he never separates the mystic from the mystigogue, or the sacrament from the sacrilege. The result is a book on an important topic which will contribute little but flame to any genuine controversy of abuses that may exist.   Lawrence F. O'Dennell