The FBI and the Catholic Church, 1935-1962

Afterword

275 Afterword Father Hugh Calkins, O.S.M., who wrote two weekly columns— “Lights and Shadows” and “Two Worlds”—for the Novena Notes in the 1940s and 1950s, found little good in the world around him. A member, as were two brothers and two nephews, of the Servites, or Friar Servants of Mary, who oversaw the enormously popular Our Lady of Sorrows Friday night ritual, Calkins railed constantly at secular evils. Sexual politics particularly concerned him. In one sense his writings, especially in the 1940s, might be seen as an unending jeremiad against Americans’ misuse of the body. He firmly believed, moreover, in a patriarchy of the most traditional kind. Calkins, finally, was a “black-hole” anti-Communist, who projected onto “Reds” his deepest anxieties and desires. His metaphors more generally coded danger as female.1 J. Edgar Hoover would have entirely agreed with this Calkins. Not so, however, with the one who consistently advocated social Catholicism. The Servite regularly attacked racism and discrimination as un-Catholic behavior . In a story that he repeated periodically, Calkins told of Christ “born a Negro” and lynched while saying Mass. He not only supported the right of all workers to join unions but also backed specific strikes, for example , the telephone workers’ strike of 1950, which few Catholic journalists even noticed. He reprinted the Detroit Association of Catholic Trade Unionists’ principles of “economic democracy” which laid out a Catholic vision of a moral economy.2 Both social Catholicism and Catholic sexual politics were, for Calkins, integral parts of the same “Catholic pattern.” As he put it at one point, Catholic thinking was “like a perfect necklace: Each part is linked 276 Afterword inseparably to the others. You can’t pick some parts for acceptance and others for rejection.” Part and parcel of this “Catholic Mind” was support for Franco’s Spain, defense of the Inquisition, and a limited commitment to toleration for doing and thinking incorrectly.3 Until the mid-1980s or so this Catholic pattern ironically provided a big umbrella under which stood priests and bishops who, while believing in all of it, emphasized one piece over another. One looks in vain, though, for any discussion of the social issues that the U.S. Church used to stand for in the various position papers and joint declarations issued by Catholics and evangelicals since then. What has brought these two groups together is not just some sort of theological and doctrinal truce—if not agreement—but rather a common stance toward sexual politics, what Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom call “social-political cobelligerency” in the U.S. culture wars.4 The way contemporary Catholicism handles Calkins is suggestive of this narrowing of Catholic thinking. Calkins vehemently opposed not only artificial birth control but also the rhythm method for limiting conception. He was in fact, as Leslie Woodcock Tentler argues, a “near-apoplectic critic.” It is impossible to find anything about Calkins’s social Catholicism on the Internet these days, but there are numerous references to his critique of the rhythm method. His 1948 attack on it, “Rhythm: The Unhappy Compromise,” is available on-line and regularly referred to by Catholics who are not content with opposing abortion. In it, as Tentler writes, Calkins seems to “regard” rhythm as “a mostly female plot.”5 This book, in its focus on what brought the FBI and the Catholic Church together, might be seen as the prefiguring or prehistory of the Catholic-evangelical alliance that has become such an essential part of American political life. What united them both was a commitment to— and implementation of—a set of stances toward gender and sexual politics that originated in an essentialism and a conviction of male superiority, no matter the idiom in which it was couched, that prescribed women’s subordination. The Church’s refusal to apply to men the same litmus test in “culture of death” issues that it applies to women is indicative of the hierarchy’s continuing interest—whether conscious or unconscious, intended or unintended—in the subjugation of women.6 It has often appeared in recent years that this is the only thing in which the hierarchy—and therefore the Church—is interested. Adopting a purely defensive and apologetic stance, it discourages, and if necessary suppresses, the kind of theological and intellectual work that Afterword 277 might provide genuinely Catholic answers—here I am thinking of Radical Orthodoxy—to pressing...