CINO in Camelot

Campus Report ^ | March 10, 2008 | Malcolm Kline

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CINO in Camelot

by: Malcolm A. Kline, March 10, 2008

Oddly, even reporters on the education beat seem to have failed to grasp the significance of a meeting that took place 44 years ago of the Catholics they like to cover the most—the Kennedy family and Jesuit theologians.

We have shown how the Tipping Point, as journalist Malcolm Gladwell might put it, for Catholic Higher Education came in 1967. That was when the presidents of the oldest, established Catholic colleges and universities met at one of them—Notre Dame—and declared their independence from all authority lay and clerical.

From there, it was only a matter of time until they faced the very real danger of becoming Catholic in Name Only. We now learn that the seeds for that meeting in ‘67 may have been planted at least three years before Notre Dame President Theodore Hesburgh presided over the Land O’ Lakes conclave.

We can see that the earlier gabfest provided quite a few previews of coming attractions in Catholic higher education. “In July 1964, several liberal theologians received invitations to the Kennedy family compound in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, for a discussion of how a Catholic politician should handle the abortion issue,” Philip F. Lawler writes in The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture. “Notice now that abortion was not a major political issue in 1964.”

“Ostensibly the meeting had been called to provide advice for Robert Kennedy, who was running for a New York Senate seat.” Among those present:

• Father Charles Curran, later of Catholic University; • Father Joseph Fuchs, then at Rome’s Gregorian University; • Father Richard McCormick later of Georgetown and Notre Dame; • Then-Father Albert Jonsen, later of the University of San Francisco; • Giles Milhaven....

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John Courtney Murray S. J. would NOT have approved of what these men did. My b-i-l told me about this meeting many years ago, and how all these Jesuits gave the Kennedys 'cover' for their "I'm personally opposed, but" arguments. They were on the forefront of 'modernity' in the Church, and caused many a Catholic to become just like them, especially in the Northeast, because those Catholics didn't want to seem unsophisticated to their friends; especially the liberal non-Catholic ones. Jesuits have also developed a big problem. Their order is dying out, because so many of the younger men were homosexual, and either died of, or are dying of AIDS, and I don't think they're getting the novitiates that the faithful Catholic religious orders are getting.

I noticed that by the time Fr. Drinan died, just a couple of years ago, that he looked for all the world like a wizened old demon. I can understand why.