Quote from Timothy Fitzpatrick on March 26, 2023, 14:44

The Catholic Chatterers

Published July 27, 2019

 

(This is a republishing of an article that first appeared in October, 2016.  I am republishing it because, after having read Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within by Taylor R. Marshall, the truths contained in this article are applicable to Marshall’s latest book if not his entire career.  I anticipate publishing a review of Marshall’s book, which in 224 pages audaciously claims to describe the entire plot over the course of 150 years to destroy the Church.  Marshall’s book culminates with the current Pope as the end result of this supposed plot.  In short, the book is a story that appeals to a target audience, and like any story, it has elements of truth in it with a lot of speculation which also means “made up stuff.”  Marshall’s book ignores a lot and is neither well researched nor well documented, and that all is of course because it has to sell hence a noncontroversial titillating story about conspiracy, secret societies, and sex.  The reality of what happened to the Church is a lot more involved and it includes the complicity and actual work of the Americans to take the Church over for use to advance a certain agenda.)

 

The Resiliency and Fruits of the American Experiment: An Example from the Catholic Chattering Class

Part 1[1]

By David Wemhoff

The arrival of the circus was announced in March. Well, to be more precise and less dramatic, the University of Notre Dame, the pre-eminent Catholic university in the United States if not also in the world, announced the recipients for its coveted Laetare Medal — Catholics Vice President Joseph Biden and former Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner. This announcement was bound to cause a ruckus as had the visit of President Barack Obama in May, 2009 to the University for the Commencement. The pro-lifers and traditional Catholics were out in force during those sunny days protesting, getting arrested, and generally stirring things up because the President was for abortion, which the United States Supreme Court has made clear is a way for women to move up in society. The Spring 2016 announcement promised to bring about a similar reaction, or circus.

The Laetare Medal, according to the University of Notre Dame, is “the most prestigious award given to American Catholics.” The award, created in 1883, “was conceived as an American counterpart of the Golden Rose, a papal honor that antedates the 11th century. The medal has been awarded annually at Notre Dame to a Catholic `whose genius has ennobled the arts and sciences, illustrated the ideals of the Church and enriched the heritage of humanity.’”[2] Some of the previous recipients were Catholics who strongly supported and advanced the cause of the American ideology not the least of who were “Civil War Gen. William Rosecrans…President John F. Kennedy….labor activist Monsignor George G. Higgins….”[3] Rosecrans was a Union general who helped crush any division or dissent in American society as to the proper basis of societal organization when that question arose in a peculiar context in the mid 1800s. JFK was the Catholic who famously said in September 1960 to the Baptist ministers in Houston that his Catholicism would not inform public policy. Higgins, as brought to light by recent scholarship, was an asset of the FBI who informed on his fellow Catholics to J Edgar Hoover.

A curious set of recipients for an award, and a dubious set of accomplishments justifying the same, especially when on the medal is inscribed “Magna est veritas et prevalebit” (“Truth is mighty, and it shall prevail”). Notre Dame’s President, Rev. John I. Jenkins, CSC, said that “We live in a toxic political environment where poisonous invective and partisan gamesmanship pass for political leadership…..It is a good time to remind ourselves what lives dedicated to genuine public service in politics look like. We find it in the lives of Vice President Biden and Speaker Boehner. While both have been loyal and committed partisans, they were leaders who put the good of the nation ahead of partisan victory, seeking through respectful dialogue honorable compromise and progress.”[4]

At least one of the current recipients and his accomplishments would cause consternation with the usual set of Catholics. But first, the Bishop Kevin Rhoades, the ordinary, or bishop of the Diocese of Fort Wayne – South Bend, Indiana, the diocese in which is located Notre Dame, had something to say.

In the March 16, 2016 edition of the Diocesan newspaper, Today’s Catholic, he wrote “I believe it is wrong for Notre Dame to honor any `pro-choice’ public official with the Laetare Medal…I also question the propriety of honoring a public official who was a major spokesman for the redefinition of marriage. The Church has continually urged public officials, especially Catholics, of the grave and clear obligation to oppose any law that supports or facilitates abortion or that undermines the authentic meaning of marriage. I disagree with awarding someone for `outstanding service to the Church and society’ who has not been faithful to this obligation…..If we honor Catholic politicians or public officials, we should make sure there is a basic consistency between their political decisions and sound Catholic moral and social teaching. We should not honor those who claim to personally accept Church teaching, but act contrary to that teaching in their political choices.”[5]

This was a remarkable statement by a Catholic leader, though its significance was attenuated somewhat by mentioning, and condemning, legalized abortion and same-sex marriage. This placed his comments safely in the channels of approved dissent thereby keeping alive the very thing that allowed abortion and same sex marriage to exist and flourish.

However, the remarkable nature of the statement, aside from the fact it came from a Catholic Bishop and leader of the Catholic Church, was that it repudiated the position of New York Governor Mario Cuomo who in 1984 articulated the idea that he was personally opposed to abortion, but because he was an elected official supported the “right to choose.” This was itself a restatement of JFK’s central point of his speech to the Baptist ministers during the 1960 Presidential campaign.

And, as I explained in my book, John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition, it was a Catholic priest, Gustave Weigel, SJ, who articulated the proposition that Catholic politicians, and hence Catholic members of society, can have a split personality when it comes to matters of policy. Weigel, speaking at the heart of Catholicism in America – the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Washington DC – on September 27, 1960 said that a politician must lead “a `double life’ because he worships `as he pleases in his private life, but in his public role “he is a man of the law which is framed for practical purposes and canonizes no philosophy or theology.”’”[6]Weigel’s talk was unchallenged by the Catholic bishops of his time, and so it was impliedly endorsed by the Catholic leadership who adopted, and still largely operate on, a dualistic approach when it comes to people. The wealthy and powerful are largely given passes while the bishops pander to those who sit in the pews by mouthing either some correct doctrine or endorse the hot button social issues of the day like opposition to abortion and opposition to gay marriage.

Rhoades’ disagreement with Notre Dame over the award of the Laetare Medal to Biden was a repudiation of Weigel’s talk and of the modus operandi of the Catholic leadership since at least 1960. His comments threatened the whole intellectual superstructure that justified Catholics’ obedience to and support of the American ideology. But that threat was carefully managed by Rhoades himself.

Rhoades’ criticism of Notre Dame’s actions occurred in the context of Americanism. He stuck to the sexual issues which the American Catholic leadership embraced instead of challenging the American ideology which is the source of or gives rise to the conditions and the situations that lead to legalization of abortion and of gay marriage. In other words, Rhoades, like all the other Americanist bishops of today and who went before him, and dealt with only the symptoms and not the root cause of the illness in American society. That root cause was the very ideology, the American ideology, that gave rise to this society, distinguishing the people who live within the boundaries of the political entity known as the United States of America, and at the same time is so harmful to the very people who hold it – the Americans. The ideology that distinguishes Americans from others on the planet seems to hold forth the promise of nationhood, yet at the same time this ideology calls them to individualism above nationhood and hence is born a conflict that infuses American existence and surfaces every once and a while in its political arena with the rise of people like Ross Perot in 1992 and Donald Trump in 2016. Another way to put it is that there is at war in America the idea of a universal individualism that came about with Thomas Paine’s Common Sense thereby laying out the terms of the American ideology forming this society, with the idea, if not also the natural reality, of a parochial nationalism born from the reality of people living in a certain geographic area under a common civil authority.

Rhoades and his colleagues might do well to heed the words of Leo XIII who in one of his first encyclicals in 1878 wrote “A religious error is the main root of all social and political evils.” If they did, they would get to the root of the problems that they seem to continuously battle unsuccessfully, and they might actually be able to win a culture war or two. They would then be challenging the American ideology, or the organizing principles of this society which finds itself so conflicted from its inception (see my discussion of nation versus country), and insist on the organization, or perhaps better stated, reorganization of this society along the lines of the Divine Positive Law of Jesus Christ, or the Catholic Faith. This would also mean that public policy would have to be based on that faith which is dependent on a vision of man’s relation to a Triune God and the need to know, love and serve Him in this life so as to be with Him in the next, as goes Catholic teaching. The Church would be established as the state church and this would not only give real moral power to the Church and to the Catholic Faith, but it would check the powerful private interests and the government itself. All of this and more the Catholics could accomplish, or so their history suggests, and this poses a real threat to the American Proposition.

But to attack the American ideology is a dangerous proposition itself, and one that is not popular among American Catholics. I have firsthand knowledge of that. With my involvement in the so-called pro-life movement over a number of years along with involvement in and support of things like traditional values or family values groups, and my participation in any of a number of parish and Church activities and groups, I came to see just how much the American ideology was accepted and defended and advanced by American Catholics. This point was driven home in a most forceful way by, at the time, my own publisher, the guy who should have been getting the word out about my book, its discussion of the American ideology, and how Catholics came to so strongly support the American ideology, which is Liberalism, something Church doctrine condemns.

Breakfast

“You are paranoid, David! You need psychiatric help!” the agitated man yelled in the crowded restaurant at breakfast time. I was the David and the man yelling was E Michael Jones who is neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist, has a PhD in literature and styles himself a journalist. He is also the principal of Ultramontane Associates, In. which operates under the name of Fidelity Press, which printed my book and was supposed to market it, too.

I had just finished explaining a sophisticated form of social control in the society known as America when Jones gave his impassioned outburst. That social control consists of Catholics calling fellow Catholics to fidelity to the American ideology most particularly by elevating the United States Constitution which protects and advances the American ideology. The most notable part of the US Constitution is the First Amendment which not only disestablishes any religion or church, and grants American style religious liberty to everyone, but also protects and encourages people – especially chatterers like Jones and other Catholic journalists and bloggers etc — to write and say whatever they want thereby achieving their own unique version of the American Dream, which of course means indulging and satisfying their disordered passions as some may say. Jones’ violent response to my statements proved my point. And a strange thing that outburst was considering that Jones himself has lectured and written extensively on social control. This is just one of Jones’ many contradictions, which occurs with pride as I will dwell on in greater detail below.

Jones penned a book called Libido Dominandi that claimed “sexual liberation” is a form of political and social control. Political control and social control are topics which Jones has written about quite a bit over the years. In one discussion from his magazine, Culture Wars formerly known as Fidelity, in an article “Education as Magic: Harry Potter and the Culture of Narcissism,” he laid out, what I came to realize later, the very dynamic which also held him in its grip. In that article from about ten or so years ago, he wrote:

“The result is a culture of narcissism, one which promotes the illusion of unlimited power while at the same time using those illusions to promote ever more sophisticated forms of social and political control….The culture of fulfillment through consumption, in other words, is a powerful ally in the narcissist’s war on reality, forging increasingly more sophisticated and intrusive forms of control by pandering to the narcissist’s grandiose vision of his own unlimited power.”

So, when Jones started yelling, aside from the fact that it was reminiscent of the tactics of the Soviets in squelching dissent by claiming mental illness of the dissenter, I found it all very odd since, as I mentioned before, I was discussing a topic in which he should have had some interest – social and political control. (Perhaps he is the paranoid one.) But the reason for his outburst, which was so unlike the image of the all-knowing, college professor that Jones works so hard to cultivate, became clear upon closer examination.

The American ideology benefits Jones by allowing him to satisfy his desires, or to borrow from him, indulge his own disordered passions. His passions are writing literature (that is, stories and storytelling) and standing in front of a camera or before a room of people. If you pick up his magazine, Culture Wars, it is filled with his articles and photos of Jones. The same for his social media such as Facebook® where he puts up post after post of some praise for something or other he has written or said, and where, again, he posts photo after photo of himself.

Jones’ writing is directed to a certain audience (Catholics) and fills a niche (appeals to a certain view of a moral order in which things sexual, such as abortion, “gay marriage,” the family, and the like, are elevated to pre-eminence). This makes him part of a sophisticated mechanism of social and political control that keeps alive, growing, resilient the American Experiment. This great experiment is based on an ideology which encourages individuals to “be all they can be” to borrow from an advertising slogan used by the United States Army years ago. And so no one really wants to change things despite their protestations or implications to the contrary – Jones being one of them. He’ll rail against one official or another, one political movement or another, one individual or another, and always about sex, but he will not, like Bishop Rhoades and the Americanists, go to the root of the problem – the American ideology which is Liberalism.

That morning at breakfast as the most sophisticated mechanism of social control ever devised came into play against me, in the form of my publisher who should be helping me get my message out, I recognized yet again the incredible resiliency of the socio-economic-political-cultural construct known as America. True, Catholics like Biden and Boehner served the American construct by their public service, and many other Catholics did the same with their governmental and military service. But Catholics were crucial to the continuing existence and maintenance of the American experiment in many other ways. This system, with its core ideology, offers all things to all people and co-opts those who should be critical of it and who give the illusion of wanting to change it. One of those is Jones who, because of the American ideology, gets to realize his dream of being a writer and a professor telling us all what to think. In doing so, he feeds his pride, his unlimited desire for self-glory. Yet at the same time we are given the impression that he is a Catholic working to change things by pointing out evils. After all, the leadership of the Catholic Church does not censor or examine or review his writings, and that silence allows Jones, and others, to say and write whatever they want under the self-made cloak of Catholic. It is this unhindered ability to point out as evils those things Jones so desires, and the Catholic Church leadership’s apparent acquiescence, if not also encouragement of his private quest, or crusade, that is itself a powerful endorsement and support of the American system.  And, without dwelling on it, Jones, for the most part, projects on others the very things he does and holds others to a standard that he does not hold to himself all the while indulging his passions in broad daylight, thereby covering up his own serious disorders.

Pride and Contradiction

“Don’t ever criticize America,” Jones told me at another breakfast meeting years earlier when I started submitting articles to him for publication in his magazine. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant at the time, but I had a good idea, and that idea has been confirmed over the years to mean that one is not to either critique or criticize the American ideology which is Liberalism and the fundamental system of social organization of the society known as America. I deal with this topic in my book John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition. It was the American ideology that the Catholic Church leadership has now come to accept as good in principle and propagate around the world. This ideology reorders societies to give real political and economic power to private interests – mostly the financial capitalists – while floating everyone else’s boats, but only incrementally and only after the powerful get their fill first. The Catholic Church’s support of this ideology has made the difference, meaning the Catholic leadership has kept the American experiment alive and strong around the globe. Indeed, the Catholic Church is currently little more than an arm of American power and dominance as it serves as a conduit for Liberalism to all of the societies with which it comes into contact.

Overlaying and gradually gutting an English-Scottish cultural remnant, the American ideology creates a political economy and a system of societal organization that is protected and advanced by the US Constitution. The First Amendment sets forth and protects perhaps the most essential characteristics of the organizing principles of this society. Those are first the disestablishment of any national church or religion which means that religious tenets are not to form the basis of public policy, both radical ideas with the latter being perhaps the most radical of them all breaking with thousands of years of recorded history. And, second, the emplacement of cultural power in the hands of private interests in the form of freedom of the press which logically becomes freedom of expression. Again, this is another radical idea that is unsupported by even the very same Greek philosophers that the American Founders were so fond of quoting on occasion.

The significance of these two principles is that powerful private interests come to dominate society, the government, and religion. These interests invariably are the financial capitalists who were, and are, given a distinct advantage over the rest of society with the US Constitution especially since America was, and is still, so heavily dependent on commerce. These same interests benefit, but so do the smaller people who “carry the water” for this system. The smaller people benefit too from this system, but not as much as the powerful interests. Freedom of the press, or freedom of speech, gets these smaller people like Jones and other chatterers in turn to propagate Liberalism by their work which is never to call Liberalism into question but to always keep us distracted with the hot topic of the day.  This keeps a lot of people watching them, like sycophants, and giving them the attention that Jones and others like him so badly crave. This in turn feeds the pride that lies at the root of Jones’ character and that of many others like him, and that in turn distorts and harms these very same people.

If I haven’t said it already, Jones is just one of many. There are a plethora of Catholic commentators and bloggers that are like him. It is just that I know him the best, and so he serves as the best example of how the Catholic chatterer aid the very system their leadership once condemned.

Pride makes Jones the stuff of contradictions, something that an acquaintance hinted to me about a dozen years ago when I started reading Jones’ stuff and writing articles for his magazine, Culture Wars. Pride holds others to a standard to which one does not hold oneself. A Catholic, Jones claims to present the Catholic viewpoint to all the problems of the world, insists he is in the tireless pursuit of truth, has acquired a small following of disgruntled Catholics, and in doing what he does trades on God’s good name I suppose. Unlike the money-changers in the temple who traded on God’s name to make money, Jones, and many other so-called Catholic commentators, do it for their own glory and out of great pride.

In any event, this acquaintance commented on how Jones criticized Catholics for joining parishes far from their homes. She said that he insisted Catholics should go to the parish closest to their homes, but that he himself did not follow his own advice. And that is one thing Jones has in abundance — advice, and criticism, for everyone and everything — except himself and except the chattering class. In other words, Jones accepts and sets himself forth as good, as a leader, to whom all should repair. And, at the same time, he endorses the idea of a free press, of free expression, so essential for Liberalism to exist. These things permit, if not also fuel, the narcissism that Jones remarked upon in the article mentioned above. Freedom of the press and religious liberty, let him “do his thing” by writing whatever he wants, and that in turn feeds his pride because if there is one thing that Jones likes it is to be the center of attention, which is what he got for a short time years ago as professor at St Mary’s College.

Jones, during the interview for the job as an English professor at St Mary’s, was apparently told by his interviewer that the college was for feminism. Despite that, he took the job. Then he created a scene that lead to his contract not being renewed, and his assuming the mantle of the martyr. It is the classical creation of a crisis and then benefitting from it. And along with that is the practice of projecting onto others and onto other situations the very disorders that are inherent in Jones himself. This is the stuff needed to gain one’s own version of the American Dream, and that is allowed, even encouraged, by Liberalism, and now by the Catholic Church’s leadership which, as I describe, has accepted America and its ideology as good in principle.

There are a lot more contradictions. For instance, Jones loudly proclaimed that the Second Amendment is there to justify killing people and he frequently talks about how agent provocateurs are always trying to get groups to use guns and violence. Listening to him you get the sense he is against violence, but in reality he likes to provoke people to violence. There was the time he went to a wedding and so enraged a guest that the man had to be restrained. Then he provoked a friend of his to push him, and then sounded bitterness and victimhood. The most notable time is when he attended a memorial of Sam Francis, a noted writer and commentator. There Jones gave an incendiary talk that, according to him, caused one of the more prominent attendees to physically confront Jones, and, according to some accounts, Jones’ wife, Ruth, had to fight this fellow off with an umbrella. Jones likes doing that – getting people enraged so they physically assault him. I know from these incidents and also because he tried to provoke me to hit him on more than one occasion. On all these occasions, I did not and that further infuriated him.

It was fury – a form of violence — that ultimately drove Jones to verbally attack me at breakfast a few months ago. Fury brought about by injured pride. Moments before his outburst, I had told Jones to talk in a quieter tone – it was 8:45 a.m. on Friday and I was still working on my first cup of coffee. He gets excited and likes to yell about things and it gets tiring and irritating. In any event, after asking him to be quieter, he became visibly, though silently enraged, as he ate his breakfast. He was waiting for me to say something he could criticize.

I didn’t have to wait long. When asking him what he was going to do about publicizing my book he said he would not do anything. When I asked him about whether I should write for his magazine and what was in it for me, he said I never asked that question before. Then he let me have it when I spoke of a form of social control that silences commentary and critique of the American ideology. Screaming at me, he was acting to protect the American ideology by personally attacking me, and his pride, which had fueled his anger towards me after I told him to quiet down, unleashed his fury and fear.

This pride is encouraged and given vent by Liberalism with its free press and emphasis on the individual. This in turn breeds narcissism, again something of which Jones has written, and even a “malignant narcissism” which is identifiable by a number of different traits as described by bestselling author Shahida Arabi in “20 Diversion Tactics Highly Manipulative Narcissists, Sociopaths and Psychopaths Use to Silence You.”[7] Interestingly enough, Jones practices many of the tactics Arabi described.  For instance, there is something called gaslighting where the narcissist or sociopath screams “are you crazy?” Jones practiced that on myself and a lot of other people more than once. Condescending sarcasm and patronizing tone is another one that Jones used on both myself and others, and, of course, always the attempt to control and to do it by shaming. This way Jones, and other narcissists like him, keep people reading his stuff and keep people loyal to his own private Enlightenment project, which I discuss further down below in this article. These are also ways to keep people from criticizing him and keeping people even writing for him – for free!

Jones once told me that he had a “calling” to write. That was another way of saying that was his way to fame, though not necessarily fortune. He doesn’t really care so much about money. He cares about having his face on the screen, standing in front of the room, talking over the radio and thereby acting the professor by telling us Jones’ view of the world and telling all of us that we must accept his view. His passion is ambition and vainglory, or glory for himself. He just happens to use religion, specifically Catholicism and the Church, as vehicles for advancing that ambition. And he should know about passions, because, as I indicated earlier, he wrote a book about passion, though it focused on sex, another American Catholic love affair.

Liberalism encourages individualism to the point of danger, and as Dr. Martha Stout, a Harvard psychologist wrote in her brilliant and popular book, The Sociopath Next Door, Liberal societies like America have a very high incidence of sociopathology. Liberalism allows Jones ambition and fuels it encouraging thereby his pride and his narcissistic behavior.   The Catholic Church, which he is able to use so adeptly to his purposes, could do something about it, and about him in particular but its leadership won’t or doesn’t, largely because as I explained in my book, it has come to accept America and Liberalism as the model of social organization and now little more than a giant conduit of Liberalism around the globe.

The Church leadership tried to stop the Americans by attempting to thwart their one tool – psychological warfare — which is so easily used by a so-called free press, and by every person who relies on their writings for money or fame, as is the case with Jones. Had the Catholics succeeded, a lot of confusion could have been avoided, the Church itself kept strong and united, and guys like Jones would not be suffering from such inflamed pride. But the Americanists in the Catholic Church subverted that effort by vocally and officially denouncing it more than fifty years ago. Nowadays, Catholics just ignore these efforts by the leadership who announced in 1963 the norm of activity for journalists and writers like Jones, who, like the Americanists, ignores, and on occasion has ridiculed, the Church’s greatest weapon against Liberalism – Inter Mirifica.

Warlords

Inter Mirifica was the first document to come out of the Vatican II Council, and as I explained in my book, it was an attempt by the Church to strike back against the main American weapon – psychological warfare. The Americans had perfected psychological warfare which uses words and images to control thoughts, perceptions, values, and more.

Writers like Jones write for a living – so they have to manipulate words and images in a way that appeals to a certain segment of the population. This translates to manipulating the reader usually by pandering to the reader’s darker side. Usually, the appeal is to those who are disgruntled or angry or confused or hurt, as those are the most loyal followers, especially if they seek an explanation and a target for their anger. But sex sells too and Jones for one just loves to write about sex, though Catholic writers and commentators (e.g., (Gary) Michael Voris, Louis Verrechio, John Vennari, Mark Shea, Amy Welborn, etc.) in general are fixated on sex and sexual matters (again, “gay marriage,” contraception, abortion, “family values” etc.) thereby missing the big picture and the reality which is that it is the desire for wealth that primarily drives human activity.  And, if one claims to be Christian, then one has to conclude, by reading the words of the Gospel, that one must choose between serving wealth or serving God.

Social class is tied to wealth accumulation, but it includes so much more. The Catholic chatterers won’t touch any of this, discussions these guys won’t touch because they are all secretly seeking to raise their own social class. After all, that is just what America was founded on: the opportunity to improve oneself in a society where wealth, not birth, opens doors, and where anyone can gain that wealth, or open those doors, by their own efforts. The failure to reveal their true motivations is a matter of dishonesty and lack of integrity for all of these Catholic chatterers who make their living from telling stories to sell ink. They want the American Dream, too, and that is not always money, but it can be whatever you want to be – that is, satisfying whatever your desire is, or your passion demands. It can be, perhaps most importantly to these people, being somebody! And that ultimately class.

So the Catholic commentators devise some overarching fairy tale, or private nightmare, to guide their bloviations. The late John Reilly, who served as Jones’ book review editor for years, explained the phenomenon quite well in an open letter that he put on the internet and remains there to this day due to a young man who was impressed by Reilly’s view of things. In pertinent part, that letter explains this creation of a private fairy tale or private nightmare by Jones which draws a few people into his circle, is really the result of the Enlightenment, or, to put it another way, is encouraged and brought to life by Liberalism – the very principles that create the evils which Jones and the others consistently seem to decry for a few dollars and a chance to be the center of attention for a while at least.

Reilly was disassociating himself from Jones whose writings Reilly came to dislike. Here’s the relevant part of his 1998 letter in which Reilly described the creation of private realities and private worldviews that Liberalism and the American ideology brings about for many people, especially writers like Jones and the rest of the Catholic chatterers:

“Finally, regarding the Enlightenment, I think you persistently misunderstand what order of thing it is. The Enlightenment is like the Hellenistic period, and equally contains both good and bad. Richard Rorty is a man of the Enlightenment. John Paul II is a man of the Enlightenment. E. Michael Jones is a man of the Enlightenment. So was Augustin de Barruel. Left and Right, Progressive and Traditional, Liberal and Conservative, all these are oppositions that began with the Enlightenment and are meaningful only within it. The revolutionary tradition is a creature of the Enlightenment. So is the grand tradition of conspiracy theories, to which I have no desire to contribute.”[8]

The reference to “conspiracy theories” was a reference to Jones’ writing which Reilly increasingly styled as psycho-sexual, which was, and still is, an accurate description of Jones’ work. That comports with the idea that Jones has to titillate his audience so as to sell ink and get himself television and radio talk gigs. If there is anything that intrigues people, and plays to the strengths of a storyteller or a person with a doctorate in literature, it is sex, conspiracy, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Jones, like so many other storytellers, created and now propagates his own skewed view of reality with his writings.

John Beaumont, an English lawyer is an avid fan of Jones, and perhaps one could even call him a sycophant as he seems to rave over everything Jones writes, says, and does. And, sycophants Jones craves because they give him and his project legitimacy while providing the only real social connection outside of his wife.  Friends he does not have because there is a give and take in friendship with the implication that friends are somehow equal, and Jones craves superiority. And, if one dares disagree with him, Jones proceeds to yell at them and personally attack them as he did with me at breakfast a few months ago, all of which are tactics of highly manipulative narcissists.

Anyways, Beaumont assembled a book published by Jones’ company and entitled The Mississippi Flows Into the Tiber: A Guide to Notable American Converts to the Catholic Church. The book also deals with a category of people called “reverts”. Guess what, Jones is a “revert.” That means someone who comes back to the Catholic Faith. The title of the book and Jones inclusion in it suggests that he is “a notable American,” and indeed he is though perhaps not in a way he prefers to be known. The article on Jones describes how he came to see the Catholic Faith and the Catholic Church as his way to literary stardom. Beaumont writes, quoting Jones:

“I don’t remember any specific argument from the book [Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain]….The Seven Storey Mountain I thought was first-rate writing and if a man with this much literary talent could believe in God, well belief in God was good enough for me too….”[9]

All of this tracks with what Jones told me once – he has a calling to write. That means a desire, an ambition, a passion to do something, and it is something he feeds by constantly writing for the sake of writing (and feeding his desire for glory), not for telling the truth which is the call, the requirement, of Inter Mirifica, a document Jones has himself ridiculed.

Professor John Rao teaches history at a Catholic college in New York. He has made a number of excellent observations over the years with one of them being that the Catholics have fractured and now we are faced with a situation in which there are any of a number of different rhetorical and ideological warlords who gather their followers. Rao’s comments echo St Paul’s from 1 Corinthians 1:11-13:

“For it has been reported to me about you my brothers, by Chloe’s people that there are rivalries among you. I mean that each of you is saying `I belong to Paul,’ or `I belong to Apollos,’ or `I belong to Cephas,’ or `I belong to Christ’.”

Paul, Apollos, Cephas could be substituted nowadays perhaps by Voris, Vennari, Matt, The Wanderer, Jones. Jones is one of the rhetorical warlords, and he wields his power by a frowning, angry demeanor, with a tone of “knowing it all” which appeals powerfully to at least some people. And he has years of experience of knowing what people (or at least some of them) like to hear or read and so he panders to that with his writing, which is the storytelling he was trained to do by virtue of his PhD in Literature.

However, warlords, as you may know, cannot exist without holy men and warriors. They just don’t rise to the status of warlords if they don’t have blessings and beasts.

We’ve spoken of Inter Mirifica and in my book I set out how that was supposed to be implemented. The laity were to coordinate their efforts with the clerics who served as a check on what they wrote, and all are supposed to follow the Catholic Faith. Jones gives the impression he is all on board with that idea because he calls his non-profit company Ultramontane Associates, Inc. Ultramontane is the name given to those Catholics in the 1800s who held closely to papal authority and teaching against, of all people, those advancing Liberalism (yet another contradiction). One would think that Jones would submit to priestly guidance and suggestions and even submit his materials to review by priests but in my years of knowing him that has never happened. In large measure that is due to another dynamic I document in my book – the remaking of the Catholic Church to be like America, which means the Catholic leadership (i.e., the priests) no longer lead, because to do so would smack of authoritarianism, something viewed as bad. So, the Church becomes a version of America with everybody doing their own thing, and the priests facilitating all of this America imitation.

There are two priests who regularly write for his magazine and with whom he is in touch on a regular basis. One is Brian Harrison, OS who is a member of an order founded by a Notre Dame Graduate around the 1960s. Harrison made a career of putting Dignitatis Humanaeunder a microscope with the result that it becomes unintelligible while twisting the entire meaning and significance of the document. Harrison’s only comments to Jones are to question a picture or headline or disagree on some arcane point, but he is essentially there to give an endorsement to Jones and his project.

Another Church leader who could do something and rein in Jones’ pride is Jeff Langan, an Opus Dei priest and graduate of the University of Notre Dame.   Possessing a weak, or perhaps one could say phlegmatic, personality, though well-read (which is often the case with even the best of the Church leadership), Langan is about 20 years younger than Jones and agrees with everything Jones says – at least I have never heard him challenge or correct Jones on anything. Instead, Langan seems to affirm Jones’ every thought and report on all that is going on. He also contributes to Jones’ magazine, and in doing so endorses Jones while facilitating Jones efforts and Jones’ disordered personality. If Jones puts something on his Facebook® page, almost invariably Langan will “Like” it.

If anything, Langan and the other Catholic leaders should look to Inter Mirifica as the basis of their authority to require Jones and other Catholics to submit to their judgment before writing or publishing anything. The review of the writings would do a lot of good for the writer because it would temper his or her pride and therefore protect his or her soul, an especially important consideration given that the Church is supposedly in the business of saving souls. But that is not the case anymore as the Church leadership is intent on keeping the Church like America, again another theme of my book, and that is to encourage a cacophony of voices, a number of warlords. Both of these Church leaders – Harrison and Langan – as they relate to Jones are paradigmatic for the situation in the Catholic Church.

A warrior for Jones is Andrew Weiss, an insurance salesman for the Knights of Columbus. When I talked to him in October, 2015, he made clear that he is a devotee of Jones and Langan and, while selling insurance, Jones has him going around trying to sell Jones as an authority on everything. That helps Jones sell his writings and, more importantly, it gets him to lecture people on what to think. He’s back in front of the classroom again, in a way. With a sycophant like Weiss, Jones is being fed a lot of information about other Catholics, and hence his market thereby giving him a competitive edge on other Catholic chatterers.

The American ideology lets Jones and others do all this and thereby create the very state of nature that Locke’s society was supposed to replace. The Catholic Church, as my book describes, came to accept America as good in principle and so conformed itself to be like America. The current Pope is a great example of this dynamic as he never criticizes America and constantly is seeking to make the Church more like America, and so it supports this state of nature within the Church itself.

There’s another important consideration here. Jones knew that to use the Catholics as his market, he had to conform to the leaderships’ Americanist views. And so he dwelt, and dwells on sex. And that’s another very important discussion – Jones and his fellow Catholic chatterers are operating within, and perpetuating, Americanism within the Church, because they will not deal with the root of problems – Liberalism – which also happens to feed their passions and helps them achieve their own private American Dreams on this earth.

The Americanist Die

My book recounts, in short form, how the Catholic leadership, that is the priests, came to accept America as the ideal form of social organization. Once accomplished, all the priests and laity can prattle about are the sexual issues or education. Beaumont’s book recounts this and Jones’ acceptance of these parameters of debate. Beaumont writes:

“…the Catholic Church consistently picked up the banner of sexual morality which the mainstream Protestant denominations had let fall…..”[10]

Once the Church decided to view America as good in principle or incapable of being changed for practical reasons, then Catholics were relegated to fighting only three issues, all of which they lost. Beaumont recounts the “culture war” in which Jones’ and others engaged, paralleling the efforts of the Catholic prelates:

“…the battle over the schools….The second area of contestation he mentions ins obscenity….The final area of cultural revolution delineated by Pfeffer had to do with whose idea of the family would dominate in the culture.”[11]

Jones was given his opportunity to be somebody. If he wrote about sex and sexual issues, which is what the priests were concerned about, he could get the Catholic market in a big way – after all, sex is titillating, and the Catholics were consumed by the subject, having surrendered on the more important and fundamental issue being the principles of societal organization. All he needed was some doctrinal justification for his writing, and so he turned to St Augustine for some dicta to use.   That dicta was that illicit sex distorted souls which in turn distorted the work of these souls, but as time passed, Jones could neither support nor explain anomalies in the world about us.

People read Jones’ stuff and that of others because it appeals to them – not because they know it true, but because it appeals to them, that is they like it. That “like” comes from the constant bashing done by Jones and others of anything and almost everything. Jones would complain about the status quo, but he offered nothing to replace it though the impression he created was that he wanted to change things. He did offer a League of St Benedict which was a way to use vacant Church property for young families – another recurring, and engaging theme, for Jones, which garners some following for him especially among traditional or conservative Catholics who make the family a false god. But beyond that, he has offered nothing except more writing. He doesn’t want to change anything because if society were properly ordered, he might end up a mailman.

When I floated an idea to him to host a conference about what a Catholic society should look like, he laughed saying he and I would be the only two speaking. Then he said he would think about it which means, “no.” He was uncomfortable with the idea when I floated it to him in June of last year and he was again uncomfortable with the idea when I reiterated it in October, some four months later. By then, it was clear that Jones had other plans, and had had these other plans for a very long time. He did not want to upset Liberalism, he did not want to criticize America as he told him bluntly one day years earlier, and he made that even more apparent with his comments on the Pope’s visit to Philadelphia when he mentioned that the foundational principles of America do not matter as America had broken from them. Of course, that is not true as put forth in my book, as those principles are shipped around the world by the USA and the Catholic Church all to reorder societies to allow for the preeminence of private interests, namely private capital, and as those principles continue to hold sway in America to this day. But it is important to misdirect people and to channel dissent so that it becomes harmless, which is what a free press does and what Jones also does by virtue of his being part of that free press.

Most significantly, though, Jones never even mentioned the Pope’s address at Independence Hall which was Francis’ acquiescence to Liberalism and submission to America and the USA. As if in a reversal from the days of the Holy Roman Empire when the Catholic Church was at its most powerful and required the secular rulers to go to Rome for crowning by the popes, today, during the American Captivity of the Catholic Church, the popes come to America – either Washington or Philadelphia – to profess their allegiance to Liberalism in the form of approving of the foundational principles of America. In doing so, they submit the Church to continuing on as an arm of American soft power.

The stuff Jones and the other chatterers write is appealing and likeable to the disgruntled and unwary because disgruntled people, especially disgruntled Catholics of a certain ilk, are naïve and vulnerable and Jones and others ruthlessly and shamelessly take advantage of them and their unwariness. The chatterers are not above exploiting the hurt and feelings of inferiority that some people harbor, and they do so most effectively. Part of the reason Jones and company are able to write so well is that they are able to project – what they write about they know because they either practice it, or are engaged in it in some way, or possess or harbor or feel the very thing they condemn.

But by far Jones’ greatest passion is his pride, if not also his anger that he cultivates to give a holier than thou tone in all he does. Liberalism allows him to engage and grow this pride because it promises unrestricted writing, or fulfillment of what he called his vocation. If you look at You Tube, you will see hundreds of postings/videos/audios of him talking about everything from soup to nuts with absolute certainty. If you look at his pages on Facebook®, you will see photo after photo of E Michael Jones. That is the same as his magazine, Culture Wars, from which I unsubscribed months ago. When I told him that and asked if he was God, Jones smiled, looked up and away all as if to say, “Yes! I Am! And no earthly power has revealed that to you.” It was a frightening moment.

People with this kind of pride are not team players, but are the malignant narcissists that Arabi describes. Adding to the contradictions that define Jones, and are the mark of the Devil if you ascribe to certain aspects of Catholic doctrine, Jones rails on about the need to build small Catholic communities. Yet he himself cannot keep a friendship, he alienates his closest friends, and he won’t help those who want to be fellow-travelers. He could have built a think tank, he could have put together a group of Catholic and other scholars to build a new and better societal blueprint for all of us, but he did not want to because of his pride, his focus on himself. I know that from the way he treated me in the handling of the publishing of my book. Jones refused to give me information, constantly belittled me and insulted me, has not fulfilled his promises, and blatantly refused to do so. This is the kind of guy who talks about building Catholic communities, and, interestingly enough, this is the kind of guy a lot of Catholics like.

A Lack of Integrity, The Lower Class

At core, the E Michael Jones project, like many others, is dishonest because when pride of self is foremost, everything else serves that pride and so everything written or commented upon by such a person is shaded in one way or another to garner support or, better yet, sycophancy. Therefore, what people like this write, one cannot really trust or believe to be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That is especially so if someone writes for a living, and they seem to have the answer to everything, which is what Jones does.

There is a saying that you can’t trust a man who abbreviates his first name down to a single letter. That saying could also apply to one who drops their first name, like Michael Voris of ChurchMilitant.com, whose first name is Gary. (Perhaps he dropped the first name to keep from being called “Gay Gary.”) But in any event, the example is given of J Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI which served to keep people in line with the Liberal experiment through governmental and law enforcement actions and power. Hoover manipulated people by, among other ways, building dossiers on them, but by always using or tapping into the dark side of people.

Jones wrote of the use of sexual perversion to control people, and he himself asked for personal stories as a way to control people. The CIA also keeps people in line with the Liberal experiment known as America, and if there is someone who just loves to write about the CIA it is Jones. Again, he’s projecting and he is the epitome of contradiction because as he told me, he has published material from the CIA in his magazine.

That is all a lack of integrity, or perhaps it is just hypocrisy, from a guy who so strenuously condemns everything (except himself and what he does), but really only does so to promote himself and be like, as one friend said, another great American writer.   So, Jones doesn’t practice what he seems to preach. The standard he demands from others he does not apply to himself. That’s what being God let’s one do, and Liberalism lets each person be their own God. So much for the idea of a poor scholar or dedicated journalist trying to bring out the truth, and so much for Jones’ integrity. The E Michael Jones project – like so many other Catholic chatterers — is really about one thing – feeding the passions of E Michael Jones and in the process advancing his social status, or so he thinks. After all, social class or status infuses all aspects of American life and to better oneself – the essence of the American Dream – is what the American ideology serves and is thereby able to garner so much support from so many people, and hence, its resilience. Joe Biden bettered himself. John Boehner did the same. As did Mario Cuomo. Jones is just like them. Jones writes to better himself, but he can’t because he is what he is and that is of a lower class despite all of the Greek and Latin he may know and throw around, which is itself a lower class trick.   E Michael Jones joins those who he criticized and criticizes, to include J Edgar Hoover, who also was a defender of the American ideology and who also manipulated people by dealing in their darkness, thereby feeding his own passions along the way. They are all marching in the same direction, to the same goal, serving the same purpose – the defense of the American ideology – to achieve their own private American Dreams. Truth, or at least a part of it, is a useful tool on the way to stardom.

The real threat to America is the existential threat, but that threat is effectively squelched thanks to the principles that allow freedom of speech or expression, and the Catholic Church’s leadership’s approval of these principles, their modeling of the Church after America, and their encouragement of and involvement in a manufactured, safe struggle known as “the culture war”. The Americans would justifiably so be afraid of those who opt out recognizing that there is an authority greater than themselves. But that won’t happen anytime soon with the current lot of Catholic chatterers who tell everyone that the sky is falling, that they are the leaders and know everything, and that everyone should follow them – after buying their magazines, and newspapers and books, of course. As this is being written, Jones is garnering even more fame and glory by his verbal attack on Voris who earlier this year “came out” as being gay, or perhaps more correctly living a “gay lifestyle” though he is now claiming to be celibate. Jones, using tactics that he once deplored – referencing anonymous sources – criticizes Voris and Voris’ project as being a “fundamentally dishonest operation which was doing damage to the Church.”[12] While that may be true, Voris is merely acting like any other American Catholic who is allowed the right to prattle on about sensational stuff in a sensational way. Voris is doing the same thing Jones is doing and enjoying the same liberties that Jones is enjoying. Voris professes to have the answers to everything, as does Jones. Voris has his followers, as does Jones. Everybody wins, and no one really has to do or change anything. Thank God for gays and abortion and any of a litany of sins, the chatterers secretly pray. The Catholic chatterers support Liberalism, an ideology condemned by Catholic doctrine.

All of this is another reason that America with its American ideology, and Liberalism in general, is so resilient. If people withdraw, or, better yet, say there is a higher authority than the individual and defer to that higher authority, and if that higher authority is willing and able to enforce its claim, albeit in a moral if not also social sense, then the American Experiment, and Liberalism itself, is in trouble because then a credible existential threat exists. This could start with individuals rejecting the idea of and promises of an American Dream, but the Catholic chatterers and priests, as I hope this article has begun to demonstrate, are there to make sure that will not happen. For as they criticize aspects of the society or the political system (e.g., abortion, gay marriage) in which they live, they are actually reinforcing the very Liberalism that gives rise to that society, the political system that protects it, and the evils against which they rail all to their own benefit and vainglory. The solutions they propose only perpetuate the very principles, the very error, that gives rise to the very evils they seem to denounce. The don’t – they can’t – get to the root of the problem because to do so would be to silence themselves, and that would mean the end of their own private dreams which is what Liberalism is essentially about – being and offering all things to all people. Liberalism is about the American Dream – realizing whatever your private dream may be which means indulging your own private passions. That is what Voris does, that is what Jones does, and that is what the whole lot of American Catholic chatterers do.

If they criticize the underlying principles of this society, when they point out the very ideology that allows them to appoint themselves as leaders and which creates this society, but which is so harmful to the members of this society, then the Catholic leadership could present a real existential threat to America. But there is no indication that will happen, even though the Catholics have a very well-defined body of work to justify such and to propose an alternative of social organization. The Catholic leadership just does not have the will to undertake this risky proposition, because they have in fact accepted the American Proposition, and comfortably enjoy their American Captivity, which all began as I detail in my book, a book that remains buried due to the guy who claimed to be my publisher.

 

[1] This is one in an ongoing series of articles that I will write to document and comment upon the resiliency of the American experiment. These articles are intended as an objective analysis of this most peculiar and unique system, America.

[2] “The Laetare Medal,” University of Notre Dame, http://laetare.nd.edu/about/ accessed June 16, 2016.

[3] Id.

[4] Dennis Brown, “Biden and Boehner to jointly receive Laetare Medal,” March 5, 2016, “Notre Dame News,” http://news.nd.edu/news/65074-2016-laetare-medal/ accessed June 16, 2016.

[5] Bishop Kevin Rhoades, “Concerning the decision of Notre Dame to honor Vice-President Biden and former Speaker Boehner with the Laetare Medal,” Today’s Catholic, March 20, 2016.

[6] David A Wemhoff, John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition,” (South Bend, Indiana: Fidelity Press, 2015), 592. (Emphasis supplied)

[7] Shahida Arabi, “20 Diversion Tactics Highly Manipulative Narcissists, Sociopaths And Psychopaths Use To Silence You,” http://thoughtcatalog.com/shahida-arabi/2016/06/20-diversion-tactics-highly-manipulative-narcissists-sociopaths-and-psychopaths-use-to-silence-you/, retrieved July 21, 2016.

[8] From “With Both Hands” http://www.benespen.com/journal/2015/9/27/the-long-view-an-open-letter-to-e-michael-jones retrieved July 15, 2016.

[9] John Beaumont, The Mississippi Runs Into the Tiber (South Bend: Fidelity 2014), 462.

[10] Beaumont, The Mississippi Runs Into the Tiber, 454.

[11] Id., p. 456.

[12] E Michael Jones, Facebook, July 29, 2016: “E Michael Jones Michael Voris was running a fundamentally dishonest operation which was doing damage to the Church. I wrote the piece because no one could explain what was really going on. Everything I said can be verified, but I am going to honor the wishes of those sources who wish to remain anonymous.”

 

 

Source: https://theamericanproposition.com/the-catholic-chatterers/