Catholic Faith & Power

For the past ten months, the U.S. has been buying, borrowing and talking about a volume popularly called "the Blanshard book." American Freedom and Catholic Power by Manhattan Lawyer-Journalist Paul Blanshard is a well-organized polemic against the Roman Catholic Church. Written from an aggressively secular point of view, it has chilled many a Protestant as it has enraged many a Catholic with its picture of a totalitarian Vatican out to undermine U.S. democracy.

One night last week in New Haven, Conn., an overflow crowd of some 800 students turned out to hear the Yale Law School Student Association stage a debate between Author Blanshard and the personable, brilliant Rev. Robert C. Hartnett,

S.J., editor of the Jesuit weekly, America. Subject: Is the Catholic Church Fundamentally Hostile to American Democracy?

Why Documentation? Jaunty in a blue suit and bow tie, small, brush-mustached Author Blanshard started things off with his statement for the affirmative. He began with an emphatic denial that he was opposed to Roman Catholicism as a faith ; he was against it only as a "system of power which I think is encroaching on American democracy." As one of his proofs of the Catholic Church's "fundamentally undemocratic nature," he pointed out that the 26 million U.S. Catholics have "never been allowed a plenary session," and don't even own their own buildings. Their priests, he said, are chosen by bishops who are appointed by the Pope. And the Pope, added Blanshard, is the "most absolute monarch in the world," the only one who says, "I can't make a mistake."

Big, broad-shouldered Father Hartnett scribbled notes diligently while Blanshard talked and, when he got his turn, quickly abandoned his prepared speech to speak off the cuff. The trouble with Blanshard, he said, "is his lack of firsthand knowledge of Catholicism. Reviewers have praised his book for its documentation. Why does he have to document it so much? . . . Because the man does not know the Catholic Church like those of us who are on the inside. It's very much like the foreigner who had never visited the United States, but wrote a book about it from our Constitution . . . our newspapers, pamphlets . . ."

The rules of the debate gave Blanshard and Hartnett each 25 minutes for their opening statements, two five-minute rebuttals for Blanshard, a ten-minute rebuttal for Hartnett, and a final half-hour of questions from the floor. Instead of a symmetrical, point-by-point exchange of attack and riposte, the discussion often became a kind of verbal Indian warfare, with the opponents sniping at each other from whatever cover was handy. But certain key points came sharply into focus.

Church & State. Said Blanshard: "We believe that . . . our forefathers were right in writing the First Amendment which prevents the government from making taxpayers support a religious establishment in which they do not believe. Now the Catholic Church has never accepted that principle . . ."

Replied Hartnett: "This charge that the Catholics don't believe in the separation of Church & State ... is simply false . . . Cardinal Gibbons set the tone for the American Catholics in an article he wrote ... in 1909 . . . 'American Catholics,' he said, 'rejoice in our separation of Church & State and I can conceive no combination of circumstances will arise which would make a union desirable for either Church or State.' "

According to Blanshard, the U.S. public school is "the basis of democracy." Catholic canon law, he pointed out, rules "that an American Catholic mother who sends her child to an American public school over the objection of a priest can be denied absolution in the confessional." This, he said, was "theological coercion" and added: "Segregation on the basis of creed can be just as damaging to American democracy as segregation on the basis of color."

Hartnett replied that Catholic parochial schools were not so alien from the public schools as Blanshard would have people believe. Protestant Professor Edward S. Corwin of Princeton, he said, had declared that the parochial schools are an "indispensable part" of the U.S. educational system and that "all schools, public or parochial, should be treated alike."

Freedom of Thought. We cannot have "real democracy," said Author Blanshard, "unless we have access to information on both sides of all important questions . . . The Catholic hierarchy, in Canon 1399, says that no Catholic can read, borrow, buy or sell . . . any book which attacks Catholic discipline or Catholic dogma."

Such control of Catholic judgment on the Church, as well as on "foreign affairs, social hygiene, public education and modern science," rejoined Jesuit Hartnett, is not a matter of Catholic political power but of the Catholic faith which Blanshard claims to respect. "It just so happens to be the personal belief of every Catholic that Almighty God, through Jesus Christ, empowered the hierarchy to apply moral judgments to all areas of human conduct, social as well as private. One of the rude errors of this whole thing is the impression that the bishops are herding the people around. People are Catholics because they believe the bishops have that authority. That's one of the reasons they want to be Catholics, to have something to stand for in a world that's coming apart at the seams. Someone to tell them what's right and what's wrong."

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