Sect 5th Avenue? Was the Novus Ordo Church Conceived in a Secret Meeting in a midtown-Manhattan Hotel in 1948? Seems Like it.

                                         

   Biltimore Hotel 1948. Even Looks Novus Ordo!

Dr. Chojnowski: There is a book that I cannot recommend highly enough. It is a work that I have just discovered and am now in the process of scouring though it. It is John Courtney Murray, Time/Life and the American Proposition: How the CIA's Doctrinal Warfare Program Changed the Catholic Church by David A. Wemhoff (South Bend, IN: Fidelity Press, 2015). 

This book is fascinating for many reasons, in fact I can hardly believe such a clear and incisive text was written in our time. As I go through the text I will report on it for RadTrad Thomist, however, I would like to bring up some selections from Chapter 8, which is entitled, "The Secret Meeting at the Biltimore April 26, 1948," pp. 122-126. "A group of men met in a secret conference at a luxury hotel in mid-town Manhattan to find a way to deal with what Paul Blanshard [a notorious anti-Catholic] was calling the Catholic problem. The National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), was hosting an important gathering with dinner entitled, 'The Conference on State and Church' at the Biltimore Hotel in New York on the afternoon and evening of Monday, April 26, 1948. The conference was not open to the public....Present at the meeting were 13 Protestant ministers, 8 Catholic laymen, 7 priests, including 4 Jesuits, one university professor, an 3 Jewish rabbis, including the noted civil rights champion, Rabbi Maurice N. Eisendrath. The chairman of the meeting was the Protestant minister, Dr. Everrett R. Clinchy, a man who had devoted his life to making all men accept the American ideology."

"Also, present was Reinhold Niebuhr, considered the most prominent Protestant theologian of the 20th century. Niebuhr developed the concept of Christian Realism, which held that democracy, justice, and power all gave America a special role. Catholic magazine were represented by Wilfrid Parsons, SJ, founder of America magazine, and John G. Brunini, a writer for Commonweal....presiding over the secret conference...was Jesuit theology professor and editor of the Jesuit publication, Theological Studies, John Courtney Murray, SJ."

"The most important topic of the meeting involved a discussion of what was to be done with the Catholics and their understanding of Church and state relations...The Catholics present at the secret meeting joined with the Protestant in concluding the Catholic Church's doctrine on Church and state relations was a problem that needed to be solved....Murray presented Francisco Franco's Spain as the bogeyman....Murray agreed with the NCCJ. When it came to church-state relations Catholicism was the problem not America or as he later put it: "the Church-State problem, is, in a very specific and unique sense, a Catholic problem -- a Roman Catholic problem." (John Courtney Murray Papers, Box 6 File 445, Georgetown University Library, Special Collections Division, Washington, D.C.)

Finally, speaking about anti-Catholic Paul Blanshard's article in The Nation on April 17, 1948 entitled, "The Catholic Church and Fascism," Wemhoff focuses on the ideology of the American WASP elites that Blanshard represented, "Blanshard's views reflected those of a much larger group of people, mainly the Anglo-American Protestants, whose forebears had created and now ruled America. He identified the central issue in what amounted to a war against the Catholics to subdue them so that they would accept the American ideology. In his book American Freedom and Catholic Power, which was based on the articles appearing in The Nation and newer material, Blanshard claimed that the most important issue facing Americans in their fight against the Catholics was 'the Church's philosophy of church and state,' which 'determines the political and social policies which the bishops and priests will pursue throughout the world. The main points of contention between the Americans and the Catholics after World War II were the issues of church and state relations and religious liberty. The American view of these issues allowed real societal and political power to reside in private concerns and it removed  religion, mainly the Catholic Faith, as the basis for the laws and public policies."

More to come from this fascinating book. I think it situates well all of our efforts at Sister Lucy Truth. 

The Equation for NewChurch

+

+

+

+

Equals

Happy New Church!