Which Land O’ Lakes ?
mid-60’s Catholic dissent wasn’t centered in Wisconsin
Gary D. Knight, Ph.D.
warnings for the sex-saturated future (Fatima also marked 33 years after
Leo XIII heard satan’s boast to destroy the Church). It’s now also 50 years
since the dissemination in English of the divisive Dutch Catechism, and of
dissent from blessed Paul VI’s exhortation on Catholic education by
selected delegates of Catholic higher education, convened in Wisconsin’s
Land o’ Lakes (LoL). That dissent was a signal move against the Church’s
upcoming teaching on contraception and duly informed conscience.
The LoL retrenchment came only weeks after heretic Charles Curran was
reinstated at CUA, his lapse of contract being protested by many including
the AAUP (founded in 1915 to defend a dismissed Stanford professor’s
eugenic views against Chinese workers). Curran’s support for the Dutch
Jesuits’ permissive stance on contraception was well known, and it is fair to
surmise that the cabalist intentions at LoL were to immunize Catholic
scholars of the Americas from the Church authority soon anticipated.
Truth really is stranger than fiction, because fiction is the product of only
one feverish mind. Some of the vignettes that emerge from the LoL cabal
and its context look like Edvard Munch’s 1884 Skrik , an apocalyptic wail.
Munch (1) was seemingly inspired by a Peruvian mummy. Hey … even Peru
was in this conclave (I suppose to represent all of South America).
1 For colouration, Munch recollected a lake as if aflame under a glowering sky. A
decade later he painted a flushed Madonna, whose sensuality could have been the root
inspiration of that timeless McCartney sendup of motives for family planning.
The signatory roster suggests LoL might be better styled an ‘Indiana
Desideratum’. Indiana is represented by six delegates with the convener,
president of Notre Dame. They equal in number if not weight three each
from Washington (DC) and from Quebec. Well, Land o’ Lakes borders
Michigan-Wisconsin’s ‘Quebec National Forest’ and boasts a nearby Montreal,
so let space-warp allow a denizen of Quebec to look in on this curious
borderland convocation near the most liberal of Catholic universities.
Six isn’t the only plurality in the flock near Lac du Flambeau (flaming lake
– Munch would be proud). Jesuits comprise ten of the 26 alpha-betas. With
four Holy Cross delegates (convener included) and four non-clerical
associates it may well be deemed a SJ-CSC putsch. ‘Rome’ was present in
the persons of a Jesuit and a CSC principal, who likely flew in together.
Now, Indiana is home to the earliest Holy Cross priests in America, and
they run shrines in Quebec too: St. Joseph in Montreal and Cap de Madeleine,
the Trois Riviere Marian shrine. Like some Jesuits in my experience, they’ll
boot a penitent for confessing ‘frivolous’ sin. I grew up in Guelph Ontario,
by the St. Joseph provincial Loyola mother house, where I learned ‘jesuitical’
hair-splitting tricks. Regrettably so did Canada’s late 1960’s prime minister
Pierre Trudeau, who kept Catholicity at arm’s length and legalized abortion
in 1969: right after Canadian bishops were pressured by consultators in
Winnipeg to equivocate on Humanae Vitae. They did that too, by splicing
hairs (‘acting as seems right’ is made the same as ‘good conscience’).
I heard of the LoL declaration in Catholic highschool. “Land o’ Lakes” is
also a popular Ontario holiday region, so the teachers’ eager, furtive tones
gave the suggestion they’d found there a nudist retreat. Those days
dissidence stood for identity, and many of the same teachers would in due
course embrace the Winnipeg statement’s thumbing noses at blessed Paul
VI. Let not Mr. Trudeau solely be faulted for being the first lay primate of a
Common Law country to deny the innate rights of future subjects.
The atmosphere of parallel magisteriae, or nascent ‘national churchism’
(new to the New World), impressed this pubescent pupil of pedagogues
primed with neo-Marxist ideas in cold-war 1960’s. That was the era when
Garp would have been raising a family writing works for feminists like his
mother (bound to backfire, bud). I, as anachronistic younger brother to
Garp (he not penned yet), would say more cavalierly “the author of
feminism is no friend of women”. But I doubt even John Irving would
suppose the words of Paul VI, or mine for that matter, implied the devil.
Anyway, my teachers didn’t, and 1984 was still a generation away.
In the latter ‘60s a sexual revolution did run on prurient interests titillated
by lyrical antics of Stones, Beatles, Who and Led Zeppelin (a virtual fugue
from Aristotle through Plato or Zeno to Dada). But the revolt of secular
modernity against Christian tradition was not rooted there: rather, it made
keen use of it. After all, the gathering in the woods of Wisconsin was no
drum-circle of winsome witches: it was warlocks or wannabe’s envisioning
a national church more immune from disciplines that were due to befall
their friend Chuck, and Canadian counterpart Greg (Baum).
This move was quite clever. Hunkering down over pastoral concerns, like
how to accompany the contracepting faithful, could sell like fawning
paternalism. It was collegial and academic and bespoke a movement for a
changed Church worldwide. The ‘Americas’ cohort of 24 plus Peru and
Puerto Rico might be seen in global intelligentsia as standing for dissidence
on papal rule. Dutch dissidence dates from ca. 1884’s Union of Utrecht,
which opened a path of false irenicism under cover of ecumenism.
In the generation after LoL, the contraceptive mentality took complete
ascendancy – for which reason pregnancies were both unwanted and
disposable. Catholic schools produced a long line of public figures who
would undermine all the Church stood for, including natural marriage. Paul
Martin was the first primate of a Common Law country to have no
problems with a largely Catholic Liberal caucus legalizing same-sex marriage.
That was 2004. The New Dutch catechism would not be fully answered
until 1992 when a generation of budding politicians had already gone
through school in a Church that was caught with her frocks down.
I began to wonder how it was that two prevalent things had so soon come
to pass – one in Ontario, another in Quebec – that led to the more intense
demise of the Church than even American commentators have grasped
from their Pew statistics. The first was the foisting of teaching authority by
bishops onto pedagogues associated in a trade-union structure with
managerial clout (quite like having the fox in a hen-house). The second was
the nearly total desertification of the Catholic identity of former Quebec.
At LoL, Canada was represented entirely by Quebec. At least the Latinics
had both Costa Rica and Peru. The Jesuit Assistant General – a Fordham
man till 1965 -- had offices in Rome, as did the Holy Cross superior
general, another Quebec man. The ‘Indiana Disideratum’ would have
meant little without signature from Curran’s employer, and a CUA second
in command was ready; but why in 1967 was it so important to have a
Sherbrooke bishop, CSC superior and several clerics from Quebec?
Several times in Canada’s short history, civil war (eg. the Louis Riel
rebellion) nearly broke out over the determination of francophones to have
Catholic schools, and Quebec or ‘lower Canada’ in British days wrested this
right from a Westminster government that had even expelled Catholics
from Acadia. All the more remarkable it is, that Quebec took a faith
nosedive so that by 1996 the confession of her schools could be removed
at the stroke of a pen with not the least outcry. What had happened?
Jean LeSage (‘The Wise’) was premier of Quebec in 1965, when Canadian
prime minister Lester Pearson parlayed contraception to the public. That
would’ve been unthinkable only a trice before, for Quebec demographically
made or unmade federal governments. And Quebec was very Catholic: so
Catholic that it took a turn to ultramontanism – more Catholic than popes
-- which required correction. Papal delegate Merry Del Val’s turn-of-
century visit to remove ultra-montanist bishops was resented, and Quebec
became more ‘clericalist’ than ever. Local family decisions of note were
ruled by the village curE. All that changed when LeSage came to power.
After taking leadership of the Liberal party in 1958 LeSage campaigned
for provincial election on the slogan “now is when it changes!”, a challenge
to the pro-Church hegemony. The upset was narrow, but cracked a
floodgate of radical social change: the Quiet Revolution of which LeSage is
deemed the father. The flight from clericalism ran quickly to an embrace of
national socialism: sort of a mini French Revolution, which Quebec had
sorely missed. Quebec is now so socialist, one can’t fix a car in the
driveway without municipal approval; and yes, the police will show up.
So then, Lester Pearson, popular for the US-Canada Auto Pact, not long
since awarded a Nobel Peace prize for brokering a UN intervention in
Suez, had penned a mean little promo on population control. He well knew
his course must collide with the Church. The ascendancy of LeSage and the
furor with which all things Catholic were being gutted gave the platinum
opportunity: Lester needed only the accession of the most influential
prelate in Quebec, Montreal’s Cardinal Paul-Emile Leger.
Cardinal Leger was one of the liberal voices (along with Gregory Baum
and Remi DeRoo( 2) ) at the just-closing 2nd Vatican Council. Well aware that
priestly congregations in his province were seeking a new ‘superior’ identity
outside of clericalism, he was not eager to have contraception preached-
against. This was very remarkable, as Quebec’s pride had been styled the
revenge of the cradle. Her great celebrities had been the Dion sister quintuplet,
2 Bishop DeRoo was co-consecrated by Georges Cabana, archbishop of Sherbrooke,
who oddly enough resigned his office after LoL.
and Mr. Pearson was having none of that hyperfertility even if Canada was
virtually barren.
It is easy to see how conscience was compromised in the legal access to
chemical steroidal hormones that act as often to abort a pregnancy as to
inhibit one. When state-sanctioned ‘medical’ recourse fails, responsibility
shifts from the individuals, with resulting pregnancy seen as the state’s
onus. Demands for access to abortion escalated into a virtual mass
movement, providing the main engine of a Marxist-feminist ground-shift.
This narrative glosses the neo-Marxist ‘higher criticism’ sophistry then
rooting in academic institutions. The ‘era’ of senator McCarthy was roundly
dissed in 1954, and the effect of that trouncing on open critique of socialist
thought retains its chill today (3) . LoL’s Wisconsin conclave could play to the
distaste for that state’s most forgettable bulldog. Participant John Cogley
(Religion editor at NY Times and founder of CDSI), had written the
scathing 1956 “Report on Blacklisting”, to be republished in 1971.
Senator McCarthy’s intel was far better than hearsay; but with verbal
recklessness even the most trenchant and unrefuted observations lose
street cred. McCarthy shot the wad too soon to be taken seriously after. In
opposing supreme court nominee Bill Brennan, whose liberalism would in
fact be key to the Roe v. Wade pro-abortion ruling, he was isolated.
One unrefuted bit of intel was soviet influence on broadcaster Edward
Murrow, who coined the memorable hair-split: “we must not confuse
dissent with disloyalty”. Verbatim these words betoken the Chuck and
Greg mantra that national church dissent from papal teaching does not
amount to disowning the faith. This doctrine, a reverse ultramontanism
that makes of local bishops national popes, the LoL desideratum would
immunize from Church censure under cover of academic freedom.
3 Evidence that the cold war was won by the frosted side, contrary to wishful belief.
Only 45 years later over 200 dissident international theologians could (at
Utrecht no less) openly sign a declaration of “loyal dissent”: John
Wijngaards’ Catholic Scholars’ Declaration on Authority, with staged
endorsements at the London House of Parliament (4) . Two years before, Der
Spiegel could ink a screed (50 openly hostile to pope Benedict’s intelligent and
sensitive pastoring of a keeling boat.
Back to heady 1967, Toronto ran a love-in featuring Catholic educators
and advisors who to a man favoured Curran’s style of “loyal dissent” from
the Church’s rescript against unnatural birth spacing. One was at variance
with the dissenting theologians who’d been sending missives through
bishops to pope Paul, prior to his dreaded encyclical, and she was admitted
to the Mensa-like club because her paper’s title “You can have sex without
babies” was thought to support contraception. But it prophesied the value
of natural family planning, no darling of athose preferring infecund sex.
Catholic schools in Ontario are union-run, but that structure was not
securely entrenched in 1967, so its heads pursued mid-level degrees from
the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. In 1965 OISE (6) congealed
out of Toronto’s backroom ‘Department of Education Research’ which
aired much new radicalist theory from U.S. sources whose left-wingery was
not quite so embraced as some hoped after McCarthy. In the heyday of
breakneck spending by the minister of Education and University Affairs,
DER morphed into OISE. In two years it founded the Feminist Party of
Canada, and hosted the above back-slapping camaraderie of dupes.
4 The BBC reported “Catholic scholars from around the world [are] pushing for the
new Pontiff, who will be appointed this month, to embrace a more open, accountable
and democratic approach to the running of the church.” [my emphasis: to whom?]
5 The Pope’s Difficult Visit to his Homeland [Sept. 20, 2011] written by four ‘staff’.
6 The OISE edifice was erected in 1970 just before minister Davis took the
premiership. Key graduates would stakehold in Catholic schools (albeit in doctrinal
dissent): long after Davis’ initial opposition to full separate school funding, in 1984
they prevailed to change his mind. Now the vixens really were in with the chics.
Notwithstanding the conspicuous absence from LoL of these anglophone
Canadian sycophants of Baum and Curran, the bigger surprise is absence of
academics (7) who, at St. Francis Xavier university in Nova Scotia (Acadia),
would sign an intent of dissent the same year.
The Acadians were not teachers at elementary and secondary schools, but
university academics, from a Jesuit foundation too. Perhaps they were
overly far away by ferry (always too costly to Maine). Also, LoL was in July,
and StFX may have been on a trimester system for its historic school of
extension and cooperative education (8) . Even mavericks can find themselves
too busy to lend legitimacy of numbers to a rogue happening.
This background groundswell of dissent and local-church self justification
was something the LoL cabalists knew, as well they did that its root was
less ‘highbrow’ academic than it was a child of ‘critical theory’: code for
creeping socialist thought dressed up with the airs of higher learning and
the Frankfurt School of neo-enlightenment. It did not take more than a
generation afterwards for Marxist-feminist theory to be hugely touted
throughout academia in North America and beyond.
The etiology of revolution – even quiet revolution (the ‘silent scream’ of
Munch or of Bernard Nathanson’s film) – manifests in social dynamics cast
as innate conflict. Woodenly applying a Hegelian dialectic, the sophisticate
projects conflict, contrives vying parties or ‘hard cases’, caricatures their
war, and agitates for synthetic change. That was the feminist method
(conflict with ‘male dominance’ – now extending to a tension of gender
identities) and it was readily generalized to conflict between a mother’s
privacy and child’s existence (Roe v. Wade 1972) or between a mother’s
person and child’s prenatal development (Morgentaler 1988).
7 The local bishop gave these 58 scholars an epithet: “the cream of Antigonish”.
8 One of the first North-American education co-ops, the program had won the name
“Antigonish movement” spurred by a booklet called The Antigonish Way.
A marker of ‘higher’ critical method was construal of conflict between
faith and obedience, synthesized by Baum and Curran or Kuhn and
Wijngaards into ‘loyal dissent’. The proof of method worked, in so far as it
hoodwinked many bishops (9) in Canada, the United States and the world.
An example was the Winnipeg Statement: out of an impasse between what
is objectively wrong and what free wills are going to want to do, the
sophisticate synthesizes that good conscience consists in doing whatever
seems right. The one shepherd pushing this specious splice embraced neo-
Marxist liberation theology: a ‘critical’ construct that puts social justice –
expressed in socialist terms (10) – ahead of the peace of Christ when seen as
bourgeois luxury or downright insensitivity, or at best an ‘opiate’.
The liberation mantra is in effect “give us justice and then we’ll give you
peace”, emerging with force from the conflict construed to exist systemically
between what is just and what is peaceable. For polarizing caricature, the
conflicting ‘systemic sin’ (capitalism), and ‘complicity’ (due process or
democratic restraints) are repudiated. Where ‘preferential option for the
poor’ or fair distributivism should emerge, what comes instead is activism
on intimate terms with socialism’s other trophies: abortion, ‘free love’,
gender-bending identity, and now euthanasia and same-sex marriage.
Abortion is a ‘trophy’ of Marxist-feminism, which recently expressed itself
at a Planned Parenthood congress by chanting “abortion is sacred”. I heard
words of similar gravity uttered in 1984 when leaders in the Ontario
Catholic teachers’ union (who require teachers to pass their indoctrination
course to obtain a contract) insisted that women should be priests because
‘only women bleed’ (to quote Alice Cooper). Already they were saying,
before we heard it from Hillary Clinton, that abortion is a human right.
9 Some of these bishops, to be fair, were not hoodwinked but themselves fully
embraced the ‘dialectical’ method of revisionism.
10 Remi De Roo saw capitalism as systemic evil, and bilked his diocese of millions of
dollars on luxury investments. Cynics who decry the free market will often abuse it.
Not many years later, as the indoctrination is now also taught at a former pontifical institute in Canada, several star women students got themselves ordained
in schism, on a boat on the St. Lawrence seaway. Female ordination
motivated by feminist theory has been the primary battering ram (priestly
non-celibacy is secondary by far) by dissident Catholics claiming to be in
“loyal disobedience” ever since 1965-7. One of the main exponents from
Ontario (a major player in the teachers union and OISE) opted to become
Anglican when Benedict XVI was elected, in order to be ordained.
About the innocuous sound of “loyal dissent”, what is most chilling is
that it leads by degrees to a claim that one has a right to sin. The will’s
freedom to sin is lightyears from the position advocating the choice of the
will that is disobedience. Saint John Paul made it clear in Dominum et
Vivificantem (46,47) that declaring sin as a right is equivalent to the
unpardonable: by its nature it blocks salvific - even prevenient - grace.
One would be rather dull not to take the slogan “abortion is sacred” or
“jesus be damned” (11) as intended blasphemy. It is perhaps less obvious that
all the justices of Canada’s supreme court in 2015 made an egregious error
against natural law by taking as given that someone has an inalienable right
to commit suicide. In effect ‘higher’ criticism led them to conclude in Carter
2015 that being delayed in your quest to die may impede the quality of your
life – a right to quality brought into dialectical ‘conflict’ with quantity. But as
Charlie Gard has shown us, life isn’t a quantity: it is a sacred behest.
The Carter argument that reaches this far into the abyss of quantifying and
qualifying life was constructed out of hypothetical outcomes of a hard case
(a patient who went to Switzerland to be terminated (12 ). A principle that hard
cases make bad law was set aside to achieve the desired result: bad law.
11 Chanted by Josef Ratzinger’s 1968 students: the shock and dismay woke him up.
12 In the Canadian abortion context, when in 1989 a Chantal Daigle went to New York
to be aborted, Borowski’s case for the unborn was declared moot. Not Carter’s .
Two years before, Ireland declared same-sex marriage a constitutional
right: a tacit declaration of moral war against the Church. Many of the silent
(a third stayed home on the day of vote ) were churchgoers who’d been
given to think they had a right to abstain – a right to be loyal, if dissenting.
There is another natural law expression: “for justice to be done, it must be
seen to be done”: to oppose an immoral law is a duty, not a freedom. This
too is a principle that will now be lost, in the cauldron of ‘loyal dissent’.
Much else must go out with the tide. ‘Sober second thought’ will be
stifled. As in 1938 Munich, courts will determine – and settle - the
contentions of politics. To cover for turpitude in prejudicial benches,
media will silence expressions of informed conscience because savvy
protest upsets the ‘conscience’ to do ‘as one sees fit’. A legal architect of
Carter and of subsequent euthanasia law, persuaded the Ontario college of
physicians and surgeons that ‘conscience’ should be renormalized as
professional ‘conscientiousness’ to do as one is told by public policy.
Coincident threats are hissed by the premier of Ontario: since Catholic
schools embraced radicalized sex-ed propaganda 13 there’s no further reason
to fund them separately. This is logical; but she has also criminalized home-
schooling parents as first educators and speakers in general (from pulpits)
who contradict the ‘critical’ theory of gender identity. Coming online are
thought police, spreading like a squall, a skrik over the Americas and
abroad. These, my lands o’ lakes, spew not their feisty blue or fiery waters,
but the ochre pall of sightless cloud. And so, Hail Mary, full of grace …
13 Whose roots are entrenched in the unratified principles of the UN Yogyakarta
‘agreement’, another example of a rogue cabal wagging the dog.
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