Papa Paulo VI, Jacques Maritain e Saul Alinsky

Meu ex-professor de teologia, Dr. Taylor Marshall, lançou o livro abaixo sobre o processo de infiltração da maçonaria e do esquerdismo na Igreja desde o século XIX.

Desde o lançamento, ando lendo os comentários feitos sobre o livro nos Estados Unidos, além de uma entrevista que o próprio Marshall deu sobre o livro em que rebate algumas críticas.

Sobre o livro, conheço o Dr. Marshall há algum tempo, sei que ele conhece muito a Igreja e sua história. Discordo dele sobre o pensamento que ele tem sobre economia e catolicismo (mais essa não é área de especialização dele) e também discordo dele sobre a atitude que se deve ter em relação ao Papa Francisco (ele considera que o Papa é terrível, mas não defende que o Papa Francisco seja herético, pelo menos não defende isso abertamente).

Mas eu estava lendo uma avaliação do livro feita pelo Padre John Todd Zuhlsdorf (no seu blog Father Z).

Lá no fim do texto, o padre Z diz: "você sabia que o Papa Paulo VI se encontrou três vezes com Saul Alinsky? E que Jacques Maritain era um entusiasta do pensamento de Saul Alinsky? E que Alinsky era um entusiasta do pensamento do Paulo VI?"

O quê? Como?

Caramba, não sabia disso. Saul Alinsky foi uma marxista radical que queria conquistar a sociedade cristã por dentro, por meio de organização de comunidades. Alinsky dedicou seu livro mais famoso (Regras para Radical)  a Lúcifer, por representar a rebeldia contra o domínio. Fico agora sabendo que  o próprio Jacquers Maritain pediu que Alisnky fizesse esse livro.  Perguntado se preferia o Inferno ou o Paraíso, Alinsky respondeu que preferia ir para o Inferno. Barack Obama é fã de Alinsky, assim como Hillary Clinton.

Daí descobri um artigo do The Remnant sobre Paulo VI, Jacques Maritain e Saul Alinsky, escrito por Christopher Ferrara. Gosto muito dos textos de Ferrara, mais até do que os textos de Marshall.

Aqui vai parte do texto de Ferrara sobre esse relacionamento terrível da Igreja com Alinsky:

Saul Alinsky and "Saint" Pope Paul VI: Genesis of the Conciliar Surrender to the World Featured

Written by  Christopher A. Ferrara

This article, adapted from a presentation given at the 2018 symposium of the Roman Forum at Lake Garda, examines the origin of the current unparalleled crisis in the Church at its origin: the neo-Modernist uprising during the Interwar Period, culminating in that catastrophe known as the “opening to the world” at Vatican II.

The conciliar “opening to the world” was assisted mightily by two deluded “conservative” visionaries whose roles were absolutely decisive: Jacques Maritain and his disciple Pope Montini, whose relationship and mutual connection to none other than Saul Alinksy are the focus of this piece.

It is no longer possible to deny in good faith that the Council’s outcome has been the spread of an ecclesial disease that now affects virtually every region of the Mystical Body, and which both Maritain and Montini loudly deplored in its earliest stages while resolutely refusing to acknowledge their own role, and that of the Council, in the growing debacle.

For more than fifty years, traditionalist commentators, remarking the obvious, have chronicled the resulting ecclesial decline in every department. They have warned unceasingly that the reformist mania the Council unleashed—to the applause of both Maritain and Montini and their fellow deluded “conservative” reformers—would end in final disaster for the human element of the Church. Final disaster has arrived with the out-of-control papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his circle of homosexual and homosexual-enabling collaborators, whom he has systematically elevated to positions of power in service to his veritable dictatorship over the Church.

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While he lived to regret the ecclesial ruin he had provoked and then sought desperately to repair—too little, too late—Pope Montini was a revolutionary who had been formed by the “conservative” Modernism of another revolutionary: Jacques Maritain. As Montini famously admitted: “I am a disciple of Maritain. I will call him my teacher.”Maritain’s Integral Humanism (1936) was nothing less than the “‘petit livre rouge’ (‘little red book’) of a whole generation of Christians.” That is, liberal Catholics like Montini, the child of haute bourgeois “patriots” of the Italian state created by the revolutionary violence of the so-called Risorgimento.Like Maritain himself, Montini was seduced by the ignis fatuus of a New Age of humanity in which the Church, happily reconciled to pluralist democracy and the modern conception of rights, would be the leaven of a New Christendom, free from the disabling structures of what Maritain dismissed as the surpassed “sacral age” of medieval Christendom to which there could never be a return in any form. Montini and Maritain were typical of the false prophets of modernity who could not see, even as it was happening, what the pre-conciliar Popes readily predicted would happen were the Church ever to accommodate her teaching to the spirit of the age with its non-negotiable demand for the extinction of the Catholic confessional state.

The “First Modern Pope,”the deluded disciple of a deluded layman, would lead the Church on a disastrous deviation from the path of all his predecessors, only to be “confronted with the shattered assumptions of his whole pontificate.”[4] In his The Peasant of the Garrone, published in 1966, Maritain joined Montini in lamenting the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council while absolving it of any blame for the post-conciliar neo-Modernist uprising he deplored even though his own “thought,” which had spawned an international cult of Maritainismo to which Montini belonged, was instrumental in facilitating that uprising during and after the Council.

Maritain and Alinsky

In Peasant, Maritain writes of his own relationship to a fellow revolutionary, Saul Alinsky:I see in the Western world no more than three revolutionaries worthy of the name—Eduardo Frei in Chile, Saul Alinsky in America, ... and myself in France, who am not worth beans, since my call as a philosopher has obliterated my possibilities as an agitator…. Saul Alinsky, who is a great friend of mine, is a courageous and admirably staunch organizer of “people’s communities” and an anti-racist leader whose methods are as effective as they are unorthodox.

Inexplicably enough, Maritain was infatuated with the cigar-chomping, Jewish agnostic community organizer, whom he first met in 1945 during his wartime and post-war sojourn in America. The Maritain scholar Bernard Doering notes that whenever Maritain and Alinsky met, they “spent long hours exploring the democratic dream of people working out their own destiny. Both accepted democracy as the best form of government.”

Alinsky’s vaunted career as a social justice warrior in Chicago, where he developed deep connections with the progressive priests and prelates of the Chicago archdiocese, produced little or nothing in the way of actual justice. But, at the urging of none other than Maritain, he did produce a couple of influential books on how to be an effective rabble-rouser and political dirty trickster in the promotion of socialist causes. From “the very first days of their friendship in wartime America,” Doering writes, “Maritain had been urging, indeed relentlessly prodding, Alinsky to publish an explanation of his methods of community organization, a kind of handbook for authentic revolution.”

Alinsky wrote his Reveille for Radicals specifically at Maritain’s request, and Alinsky gave him the exclusive rights to the French translation. In a letter of recommendation for a foundation grant to Alinsky, Maritain described him as “practical Thomist”—an example of just how elastic was Maritain’s so-called Thomism. In the same letter, he described Alinsky as “a great soul, a man of profound moral purity…”

It was Maritain who also urged publication of Alinsky’s last work, the infamous Rules for Radicals (1971), which would influence the careers of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Apparently, Maritain either failed to read or decided to overlook much of the content of the book whose publication he would later laud.

Rules is dedicated to “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.” In Rules, Alinsky declares: “Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement.” He then immediately contradicts himself by laying down one dogma after another, including:

1) The “sacred right” to revolution.

2) The dictum that “Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.” “The spiritual life of the Haves,” quoth Alinsky, is merely “a ritualistic justification of their possessions.”

3) Various ethical rules for the social justice warrior, including the right to employ blackmail other immoral means if really necessary to achieve a so-called social justice end.[9]

According to Alinsky’s ethical rules “the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, ‘Does this particular end justify this particular means?’” “Ethical standards,” says Alinsky, “must be elastic to stretch with the times.” “To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles,” he further declared.

Alinsky even quotes Maritain—unfairly and out of context—to support his claim that SJW’s who will not fight dirty have “fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history is not virtue, but a way of escaping virtue.” Ethical judgments, says Alinsky, “must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point,” and “the less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.”

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This was written at the same time neo-Modernist opposition to the Church’s teaching on marriage and procreation was impelling Montini to produce the document that became Humanae Vitae. In spite of all this, Maritain wrote to his beloved friend Alinsky in 1971, one of his last letters, to praise Rules as:

“A great book, admirably free, absolutely fearless, radically revolutionary…. I regard the book as history-making. If middle-class people can be organized and develop a sense of and a will for the common good—and if Saul is there to inspire them—they are able to change the whole social scene for the sake of freedom.”

After a few timid objections to Alinsky’s amoral situation and utilitarian ethics, for which he apologizes, Maritain concludes his dithyrambic epistle to the agnostic Jewish agitator: “You know that I am with you with all my heart and soul. Pray for me, Saul. And God bless you. To you, the fervent admiration and abiding love of your old Jacques.”[13]

In an interview with Playboy Magazine very shortly before his death from a heart attack in 1972 at the age of 63, which interview is part of a declassified FBI file, the man Maritain asked to pray for him declared that he would unhesitatingly choose hell over heaven:

PLAYBOY: Having accepted your own mortality, do ·you believe in any kind of afterlife?

ALINSKY: Sometimes it seems to me that the question people should ask is not “is there life after death?” but “Is there life after birth?” I don't know whether there’s anything after this or not. I haven’t seen the evidence one way or the other and I don't think anybody else has either. But I do know that man’s obsession with the question comes out of his stubborn refusal to face up to his own mortality. Let’s say that if there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to go to hell. 

PLAYBOY: Why?

ALINSKY: Hell would be heaven for me. All my life I’ve been with the have-nots. Over here, if you’re a have-not, you’re short of dough. If you’re a have-not in hell, you’re short of virtue. Once I get into hell, I’ll start organizing the have-nots over there. 

PLAYBOY: Why them? 

ALINSKY: They’re my kind of people

Alinsky and Montini

The 30-year-long intimate friendship between “old Jacques” and Alinsky gave rise to a connection between Alinsky and Maritain’s foremost disciple, the future Pope Paul VI. Montini was then Archbishop of Milan, to which post he had been sent off without being made a cardinal after Pius XII lost confidence in him on account of his Modernist tendencies.

In his study The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky, P. David Finks notes that “For years Jacques Maritain had spoken approvingly to Montini of the democratic community organizations built by Saul Alinsky.” Accordingly, in 1958 Maritain arranged for a series of meetings between Alinsky and Archbishop Montini in Milan. Before the meetings, Maritain had written to Alinsky to tell him that, as Finks recounts: “the new cardinal was reading Saul’s books and would contact him soon.”

There were three meetings between Montini and Alinsky in Milan during the late spring of 1958.

On June 20, 1958, Alinsky wrote to Maritain: “I had three wonderful meetings with Montini and I am sure that you have heard from him since.” Among the subjects discussed, according to Nicholas Hoffman, was how to counter rising Communist influence in the industrial north of Italy without “reinforcing reactionary elements that had less interest in democracy than in squelching the working man.”In other words, the old liberal game of using the threat of one political trap to drive the people into the jaws of another: oppose communism with soft socialism, just as socialism had been opposed by the Party of Order in France. And, in fact, soft socialism became Italian policy under the Moro government elected in an alliance with the Socialists in 1963.

We will never know what exactly passed between Montini and Alinsky during those “three wonderful meetings” in Milan, but we do know that upon his return to Chicago from Italy, Alinsky wrote as follows to George Shuster, two days before the papal conclave that elected John XXIII: “No, I don’t know who the next Pope will be, but if it’s to be Montini, the drinks will be on me for years to come.”

What did Alinsky know? What did he learn from his “three wonderful meetings” with the man who was soon to become the First Modern Pope? He learned what Maritain already knew about his disciple: that if and when Montini became Pope, there would be a revolution in the Church.

And so there was. It was Pope Montini who would declare after the Council on the pages of L’Osservatore Romano (July 3, 1974): “The important words of the Council are newness and updating… the word newness has been given to us as an order, as a program.”Never in Church history had a Pope uttered such nonsense in a public address to the Church universal.

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Conclusion: The Bitter Harvest of a Revolutionary Fellowship

The relationship between Maritain, Montini and Alinsky was an early reflection of the de facto fusion of the human element of the Church with the world—the “temporalization of Christianity” Maritain was forced to recognize—that has since characterized the post-conciliar crisis as a whole. Thus was the New York Times able to observe early in the Bergoglian pontificate that none other than Barack Obama had “fit seamlessly into a 1980s Catholic cityscape forged by the spirit of Vatican II, the influence of liberation theology and the progressivism of Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin, the archbishop of Chicago, who called for a ‘consistent ethic of life’ that wove life and social justice into a ‘seamless garment.’”

The Times notes that Obama, the young community organizer in Chicago’s progressive Catholic environment, which Saul Alinsky was instrumental in creating, was mentored by Gregory Galluzzo, “a former Jesuit priest and disciple of the organizer Saul Alinsky.” Obama even “had a small office with two cloudy glass-block windows on the ground floor of Holy Rosary, a handsome red brick parish on the South Side, where he would pop down the hall to the office of the Rev. William Stenzel, raise a phantom cigarette to his lips and ask, ‘Want to go out for lunch?’”.

As the Times further observes, while operating on a grant from the Archdiocese of Chicago, “Obama became a familiar face in South Side black parishes. At Holy Angels Church, considered a center of black Catholic life, he talked to the pastor and the pastor’s adopted son about finding families willing to adopt troubled children. At Our Lady of the Gardens, he attended peace and black history Masses and conferred with the Rev. Dominic Carmon on programs to battle unemployment and violence. At the neo-Gothic St. Sabina, he struck up a friendship with the Rev. Michael L. Pfleger, the firebrand [i.e., ultra-Modernist dissenter from doctrine and dogma] white pastor of one of the city’s largest black parishes.”

As a Senator in the Illinois State Senate, Obama, the social justice warrior from Alinsky’s Chicago and Bernadin’s corrupt, homosexual-infested Archdiocese, would refuse to support the Born Alive Protection Act, presented to the state legislature when it was revealed that the survivors of late-term induced abortions in Chicago hospitals were being left to die after delivery.[29] As President of the United States he would defend “partial birth abortion,” the compulsory subsidy of contraception by Catholic nuns, and federal “guidelines” for “transgender bathrooms” in public schools. And today, the Catholic bishops of America, most of whom probably voted for Obama, are united in the conviction that Donald Trump, usurper of the New World Order, must be stopped.

Behold the last and bitter harvest of a revolutionary fellowship between Catholic churchmen and the world, exampled early on by the link between Jacques Maritain, Saul Alinsky and “the First Modern Pope.”