Before he died, Robert Blair Kaiser, Time magazine reporter at the Vatican II Council, told me that the reporters were “participant-observers to influence the schemas.” This was part of a worldwide assault on Catholic doctrine, noticed years before, and Vatican II provided an opportunity for the American “deep state” and “globalists” to place the Catholic Church in their service. The Council was occurring within about 17 years after the end of the bloodiest war in history and that war was vivid in the minds of many participants. At the same time, the world was locked in the Cold War, a titanic struggle between two different world views – one represented by Soviet Communism and the other by America. The former was depicted as dark and foreboding, the latter as light and prosperous. The American media helped to paint that picture.
Time magazine was the creation of Henry Robinson Luce. Luce was the son of a Presbyterian minister and could trace his lineage back to the American Revolution. He invented the newsmagazine with the founding of Time. With the mentoring of Walter Lippmann, Luce put into practice the emerging science and systemization of psychological manipulation which used images, words, and emotions to shape, form, and influence views, ideas, and perceptions both in the United States and overseas. Luce’s magazines made him one of the most powerful and influential men in America, and eventually the world. It is said that there was not a day that he did not speak of the United States Constitution which came to represent the political manifestation of the organizing principles of American society, or in other words, the American ideology. At the heart of this ideology were the tenets of the First Amendment.
Luce long had his eye on the Catholic Church with its doctrine of church and state. The Church was both an obstacle to the designs of the plutocratic interests to rule America and the world, and at the same time an opportunity to facilitate that objective of greater power and control. Luce shared the sentiments of Paul Blanshard, whose book American Freedom and Catholic Power became the bible of anti-Catholic liberals. Blanshard observed that the priest was the “agent for Roman spiritual and political goods” and “is subordinate to the hierarchy.”[1] The priest lent credibility to any idea, and a priest who was a theologian was even more of an authority. Blanshard understood the role of theology in helping the Church maintain its power. According to Blanshard,
The Church’s philosophy of church and state is far more important than the continued existence of a bit of acreage which has its own postage stamps and flag. In fact, the philosophy of church and state espoused by the Vatican is the most important thing in the whole Catholic system because it determines the political and social policies which the bishops and priests will pursue throughout the world.[2]
So, Luce and the socio-economic elites whose interests he advanced, needed a theologian to espouse approval of the American system of social organization. The American elites wanted the Church to approve the First Amendment with its Establishment Clause that disestablished any religion as the basis of the laws of a society, and that gave real power to the private interests with the free speech and free press clauses. That theologian would be John Courtney Murray, SJ, a professor at Woodstock College and editor of Theological Studies.
A secret meeting was held on April 26, 1948 at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, and hosted by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.[3] Representatives were present from Protestantism, Judaism and Catholicism. The main issue was the relation of church and state. Murray agreed there was a problem. 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 the very specific and unique sense, a Catholic problem – a Roman Catholic problem.”[4] By agreeing to provide “a more liberal interpretation” of Catholic doctrine on church and state relations, Murray embarked upon an enterprise that would eventually weaken in the minds of many Catholic leaders one of the most important doctrines of the Catholic Faith.
