3,670 words
Enough titillating or discouraging modern details; how did all this happen?
Seeking the roots of the homosexual problem, Martel now backtracks to examine the pontificates of the three previous pontiffs (ignoring John Paul I as a non-entity). He devotes his shortest chapter to Paul VI, although here is where the mystery is solved.
Folks around here at Counter-Currents like to say that “politics is downstream of culture”; apparently, so is theology. As much as it pains those, especially Traditionalists, who think of theology as “the queen of the sciences,” [1] there is such a thing as metatheology.
Indeed, Martel provides an excellent case history for the idea that metapolitics, or metatheology, as the most important determining factor in the Church’s curious development since Vatican II, of liberalizing in every direction but sexuality, is the influence of a French “intellectual” (i.e. pretentious chatterbox), Jacques Maritain.
To get yet more particular, many of the most influential Vatican officials of the period from Paul VI to today came of age in the 30s and 40s, and were first- or second-hand disciples of Maritain, a Catholic convert and deeply closeted homosexual, who contracted a sexless “marriage” with one Raissa, a Jewess with whom the Protestant Maritain underwent what Martel calls a “double conversion,” and preached a doctrine of “celibacy for all” which these closeted seminarians found very. . . convenient. “I’m celibate not because I’m gay — how dare you think such a thing! — but because I’m so much holier than you, you filthy breeder.”
Maritain is largely unknown today, but in his day — the immediate pre- and post-war era — he was the bee’s knees among Catholics who wanted to cite a contemporary Catholic philosopher who was “modern” and “up to date;” sort of a combination of C. S. Lewis, Jordan Peterson, and Ignatius Reilly. [2]
His main function, like Karl Jaspers in Germany, was to promote what he called “personalist democracy” — a Goldilocks amalgamation of Thomism, popular sovereignty, constitutionalism, limited government, and individual freedom. Just as Jaspers provided a figure who was “just as smart as Heidegger, but not a Nazi, in fact, a Christian Democrat!” for postwar virtue-signaling German mid-brains, Maritain “pointed the way towards the necessary rupture between Catholics and anti-Semitism and far-right extremism.” Again, how convenient. For the same reasons, and from the lack of any similar figure (an anti-Evola if you will), “Maritainism really exercised a lasting fascination on the Italian Church.”
So Ignatius found his Myrna, Sheldon his Amy, the end.
But not quite. Maritain, like Sheldon or Ignatius, just couldn’t leave things be (“Homosexuality was an obsession with Maritain”), and spent a lot of time gathering and discoursing — Symposium style, I imagine — with many young, up-and-coming French writers who seemed to share his secret. (French writers, homosexual? I know, I share your amazement; “what a remarkable ‘gaydar’ he must have had,” Martel notes).
With the sort of air of wisdom that his effeminate entourage loved so much, the philosopher discoursed endlessly about homosexual sin, exclaiming “I love you” to his young friends, whom he called his “godsons.”
He tried to convince each to join him (as it were) in the blessed state of celibacy — “conversion and continence” was his motto, “settling the question of homosexuality through chastity, this form of castration, to give pleasure to God,” as Martel summarizes what he called “The Maritain Code,” but each — Gide, Cocteau, Julian Green, Maurice Sachs, and others — declined, and instead worked out their own solutions, as Martel details here. [3] “Never the less, [the Code] would find acceptance among a majority of post-war cardinals and bishops.”
For Maritain had at least one success, one epicene epigone: Jean Guitton. [4] Yeah, I never heard of him either, but he seems to have been a big shot, Académie Française, the whole nine yards, although “his books have been almost completely forgotten today.” [5]
Be that as it may, as a “friend,” or “godson,” of Maritain, he was read throughout the Italian church, and he had a “very special friendship” [6] with Paul VI, as did Maritain himself. Although Paul failed in his attempt to make Maritain a cardinal, he succeeded in getting Guitton — though a layman — appointed to the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II). [7]
And that’s where the catastrophe struck. Overruling the majority of Vatican theologians, Paul “took his decision alone [well, with Guitton by his side for encouragement], ex cathedra,” rallying conservatives like the future John Paul II, and ramming home, here and in such later documents as Humanae Vitae and Persona Humana, all of the hard-line positions so dearly beloved by TradCaths: celibacy for priests; for the laity who cannot eschew filthy, animal sex, marriage under the strictest regulations: no contraception, no abortion, no sex before or outside marriage, no masturbation, and perhaps above all, No Homo!
The latter, of course, is pretty funny, since otherwise it reads like exactly the sort of punitive regulations that would be dreamed up by self-hating homosexuals who tell themselves, and others, that actually the reason they aren’t married is that they have been blessed with the gift of being above all that dirty sex stuff. In short, the Maritain Code. [8]
And before the reeeeee-ing starts, let me point out that the issue here isn’t the need to junk tradition and “give in” to modernity. A cardinal interviewed by Martel puts it this way:
The mistake was not [:] to speak out about sexual morality. . . . The error [was]: [by] setting the bar too high, if I can put it like that, and being disconnected and inaudible, the Church has put itself outside the debates on sexual morality. A hardline position on abortion would also have been better understood had it been accompanied by a flexible position on contraception. By advocating chastity for young people, divorced couples, or homosexuals, the Church stopped talking to its own people.
Of course, that’s exactly what the TradCath lusts for: rather than, as Erasmus proposed, a model of the Church as the body of Christ, clergy and laity learning from each other, the TradCath wants a strict dominatrix who brutally imposes The Law on a cowering laity; just like the Protestant fundamentalist with his infallible, inerrant Bible.
Alas, the dominatrix has her own agenda; another theologian tartly observes: “Few heterosexual priests place value on heterosexual abstinence; it’s essentially an idea put forward by homosexuals.” And so Martel provides another rule: “the most fervent advocates of the vow of chastity are therefore, of course, the most suspicious.”
Alas for the TradCaths; it is the degenerate queers who have protected their “traditional” morality from the modernizers! Or, is it the other way around — is it the traditional morality that preserves the safety of the closet?
Like the first part, this one also gives us a portrait of a remarkable cardinal, although only a peripheral one: Jean Daniélou. Daniélou was, of course, the elder brother of Alain Daniélou, pioneer of “world music,” a Traditionalist fellow-traveler, and an out and proud homosexual. [9]
Jean was a French Jesuit and a noted theologian; he was called to Vatican II as an expert by John XXIII, and created a cardinal by Paul VI. Though a “progressive,” he was a friend of Guitton, though not a “friend of Dorothy.” Indeed, his career climaxed, as it were, when he was found dead — and naked — in the apartment of a Parisian prostitute; the cause of death “probably a heart attack brought on by orgasm.” [10]
The relationship between the Daniélou brothers is interesting because it allows me to state today that Jean was sympathetic to Alain’s choice of lifestyle, and that he supported him in his homosexuality. He wanted to shoulder the weight of Alain’s sins and take care of his soul. Cardinal Jean Daniélou went further. From 1943, he went to celebrate a mass for homosexuals every month. This fact is well-established (in Alain’s autobiography and in a detailed biography devoted to the two brothers). It appears that this mass, which also included the famous Islamic specialist Louis Massignon, a Christian who was also homosexual [and another Traditionalist fellow-traveler], continued over several years. The key point here, then, is not the death of Jean Daniélou in the arms of a prostitute, but the organization by a high-profile cardinal, a renowned theologian close to the pope, of regular masses intended for the “salvation” of homosexuals.
One might also go on to ask, given Alain’s thirty-year monogamous relationship with Raymond Burnier, which brother was the more morally flawed, more “intrinsically disordered”? Perhaps those masses did some good.
The longest part of the book, almost half of it, is devoted to the papacy of John Paul II. Martel acknowledges that John Paul is regarded, literally, as a saint, if only for his role in the fall of communism. Yet, it was during his tenure that things took a darker turn; for while Paul’s entourage was made up largely of “homophiles” with creepy ideas about celibacy, the men around John Paul were active homosexuals known in the Vatican as “the ring of lust.”
Here a new element enters: John Paul was not only a product of the pre-Stonewall closet, but also a man who served as a cleric under Communism; this experience not only made him a determined anti-communist, but also caused him to dismiss out of hand any rumors of homosexuality or pederasty since these had been the typical technique used by communists to smear any opponents or liberalizers. [11]
It’s difficult to pick out a cardinal as the star of this section — it’s a “smorgasbord of loathsomeness,” as Crow T. Robot would say — but perhaps the most interesting for our purposes is Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, the Colombian who headed the Pontifical Council for the Family. As a reviewer summarizes for us:
During the rabidly anti-communist papacy of the John-Paul II, Trujillo found favor by opposing the Liberation Theology current among Colombian priests. He gave the names of dozens of leftist priests to death squads, who then murdered them.
Trujillo’s fundraising successes with Colombia’s drug barons endeared him to the Vatican. But it was in his international campaign against birth control in defense of “the family” where he really made his mark.
He ranged the world, especially visiting Thailand and the Philippines. Why there? Because the “rent boys” are cheap and plentiful. [12]
Trujillo had a particular taste for young sex workers. He violently raped them and then beat them up.
At the same time, he publicly proclaimed that condoms are “not part of the solution” for AIDS. He also campaigned against expressions such as “safe sex,” “gender theory” and “family planning”.
When he died in 2008, Pope Benedict XVI celebrated a papal mass in his honor.
Let me repeat: this was the head of the Pontifical Council for the Family.
Of course, in a church where upwards of 80% of the clergy are homosexual, “all tendencies included,” one has an embarrassment of riches to choose from; I cannot confine our look at the reign of John Paul II — remember, the longest reign and chapter in the book — to just one cardinal.
So let’s look at “one of the most powerful men in the Vatican, effectively running it with “one of the two main players in the John Paul II years,” the Cardinal Secretary of State Angelo Sodano. “He was the ‘villain’ of John Paul II pontificate — and he is the villain of this book.” Recruited by Paul VI when serving in Hungary, he became papal nuncio to Chile in 1977; as John Paul’s health deteriorated, “Sodano became the true interim Pope.”
Sodano proved an effective diplomat, especially as the anti-Communist Pope navigated the deteriorating situation in the Eastern Bloc, and acquired a black reputation at home as a pure Machiavellian. Yet none of this is our concern; rather, the period ten years before, when Sodano began his rise in the Chilean capital.
First, let’s meet the man himself:
In Chile, Sodano didn’t give the impression of being a churchman at all. He loved good food and power. I was struck by his misogyny, which contrasted with the fact that he was very effeminate. His way of shaking hands was very unusual: he didn’t shake your hand, he gave you a kind of feminine caress, like a nineteenth-century courtesan before she faints and demands smelling salts! Witnesses were also dumbfounded to see Sodano “bowing all the way to the floor” when he met the dictator . . . with his entourage, a pageant of male creatures, devoted to him body and soul.
The dictator was, of course, General Pinochet, to whom Sodano’s attitude was “pragmatic,” to put it mildly. Just as John Paul dismissed rumors of homosexuality or pederasty as Communist propaganda, his nuncio did the same with all criticisms of Pinochet’s regime, to the point where the Holy See was one of few states maintaining diplomatic relations. In fact, Sodano arranged a “highly symbolic appearance of the pope and General Pinochet on the balcony at the Presidential Palace.”
Indeed, not for the first time, “Catholicism, fascism, and homosexuality produced a strange cocktail.” Martel speaks with Santiago Schuler, “a pro-Pinochet gay.”
His gay restaurant, El Toro, tiny inside, but much larger when extended into the street on a terrace under an awning, represents the heart of Santiago’s gay life. And what a paradox! Chile’s emblematic LGBT venue is run by a fundamentalist ex-Catholic, an old personal friend of Pinochet’s! “Homosexuals weren’t very worried under Pinochet, even though the regime was indeed quite macho,” Santiago Schuler suggests. According to Schuler and other sources, Pinochet’s wife was both a practicing Catholic and gay-friendly. The Pinochets even surrounded themselves with a veritable court of Catholic homosexuals. The presidential couple liked to be seen with certain local gay figures, at parties and gala dinners, just as Pinochet liked to be seen with the nuncio Angelo Sodano.
According to Óscar Contardo, Pablo Simonetti, and other experts, the dictatorship didn’t persecute homosexuals as such, in a special or specific way (like Castro’s regime in Cuba, the previous socialist government, led by Allende, wasn’t very gay-friendly either). What is strange, on the other hand, and to some extent startling, is the very existence of a real ‘gay court’ in Pinochet’s entourage.
Sounds pretty good, but there were a few, um, problems, or at least one big one: Fernando Karadima.
According to the 14 witnesses in the trial and the 50 or so complaints registered, the sexual abuse began in the late 1960s and continued until 2010. For 50 years, Karadima abused dozens of boys between the ages of 12 and 17, most of them white and blond.
Yes, Fascism and Catholicism, the twin pillars in defense of traditional values. But after all the pompous verbal diarrhea, it’s squareheads down for the big boche gangbang.
The priest’s actions caused outrage throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but Pinochet’s gay entourage and the Chilean episcopacy protected Karadima and brushed the whole case under the carpet.
The reasons that led Sodano (as well as Cardinal Errázuriz and Cardinal Bertone, who replaced Sodano as secretary of state in 2006) to protect this pedophile priest remain mysterious. Everything suggests that it was not just a matter of covering up for a priest accused of sexual abuse, but of a whole system in which the Church and Pinochet’s dictatorship were closely linked, and would have had a lot to lose if the priest had begun to talk. In any case, out of loyalty to the system, Sodano would always defend priests accused of sexual abuse, to preserve the institution, defend his friends, and perhaps also to protect himself.
But wait. . . there’s more! Sodano — known among insiders as “Pinochette” — had some interesting members of the entourage, such as these two:
An extravagant if closeted homosexual, Arancibia Clavel, was close to the dictator and the army, being responsible for operations involving the physical elimination of political opponents; [13] he received a heavy sentence for his crimes before being murdered by a “taxi boy.” [14] The second, Jaime Guzman, was one of the theorists of the Pinochet regime: this rigid ultra-Catholic law professor was named in a DINA portfolio under the label “homosexualismo,” according to Óscar Contardo in his book Raro, Una historia gay de Chile; he was murdered in 1991 by the far-left.
Basta!
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Notes
We had on occasion agreed, of course, or more correctly we had both espoused the general view, that philosophy was the queen of the sciences. . . . But there is, if you like, a discipline in which Queen Philosophy becomes the servant, the ancillary science, academically speaking a subsidiary branch of another; and that other is theology. Where love of wisdom lifts itself to contemplation of the highest essence, the source of being, the study of God and the things of God, there, one might say, is the peak of scientific dignity, the highest and noblest sphere of knowledge, the apex of all thinking; to the inspired intellect its most exalted goal is here set. The most exalted because here the profane sciences, for instance my own, philology, as well as history and the rest, become a mere tool for the service of knowledge of the divine — and again, the goal to be pursued in the profoundest humility, because in the words of the Scriptures it is “higher than all reason” and the human spirit thereby enters into a more pious, trusting bond than that which any other of the learned professions lays upon him.
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1999), Chapter X.
[2] This angle was news to me, but having attended a small, backward, Catholic college in Ontario, I can attest that well into the 80s Maritain was considered the gold standard for “an intellectually sound Catholic.” Just as Protestants read C. S. Lewis rather than Cranmer or Calvin, you can bet dollars to doughnuts that any TradCath spouting off about “Thomism” or “natural law” has read Maritain, not Thomas.
[3] Maritain’s greatest failure was with Gide, whom he could not dissuade from publishing his memoirs of dalliances with Arab street boys. “I hate lying. That’s where my Protestantism takes refuge. Catholics don’t like the truth.” Having already mentioned Frederick Rolfe, I must add that this reminds me of what former seminary classmates of “Fr. Rolfe” (as he liked to misleadingly style himself, when he wasn’t “Baron Corvo or half a dozen other aliases) said: “Being a convert, he had the Protestant hatred of lying.” This amused his classmates since “it was generally agreed that he was the biggest liar we ever saw.”
[4] Martel describes Guitton’s obsession with Maritain-style chastity as going to lengths that were “insane.”
[5] One reason perhaps: with delicious irony, Maritain’s one success was an enthusiastic collaborator, and a close advisor to Marshal Petain.
[6] David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, Plato (whom Paul VI took off the Index), you know the drill. Martel devotes a chapter here to the promotion of the meme “special friendships” by Maritain and his crypto-homosexual disciples.
[7] “The pope committed an imprudence in putting Guitton on the council,” said Cardinal Daniélou, whom we will meet again. Others describe him as “not really a thinker,” a “second–rate writer,” and “a theologian for the middle class.” Once more, the curse of the mid-cult.
[8] One can’t help but think that the ex-Protestant Maritain has imported in the old Gnostic or Encratite heresy, via some French Jansenism:
The second-century Encratite sect of Asia Minor, and many kindred spirits elsewhere, sought to effect a symbolic return to Edenic innocence. They believed, thanks to an admirably literal reading of Genesis 2-3, shared by Gnostics, that the original sin was sexual intercourse and that the divisions subsequently introduced into mankind (male vs. female; slave vs. free, ruler vs. subject, Israelite vs. gentile) would all fall away if we repudiated sex and the family structure. “Encratism” comes from the Greek encrateo (“self-control”), denoting sexual continence. The Spirit could indwell and empower all alike without regard to worldly and physical distinctions which were henceforth to be ignored by God and mortals alike. The practical results included vegetarianism, teetotalism, universal celibacy, anarchism, egalitarianism, pacifism, communal ownership, and so on. . . Encratism was understandably viewed by outsiders as fanaticism. But as its theology and ethos were not far from those of emerging Catholicism, encratites eventually found themselves brought on board by the Catholic Church. The church would honor them as long as they conceded that the path of chastity and poverty was not for the common run of Christians, but only for an elite. The celibacy gospel became “counsels of perfection.” Encratites became monks and nuns. . . . The encratites held their noses at the worldly stench of meat-eating, sexually active, wine-drinking Christians whom they now had to accept as brothers and sisters. Likewise, the Catholics could not help viewing their new co-religionists as neurotics cringing inside a cocoon of ultra-piety, a retreat from a world God created (not the demiurge!) for the enjoyment of the saints.
The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul by Robert M. Price.
[9] I and others have non-infrequently written on Daniélou here at Counter-Currents, thus. See also Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp 119-20.
[10] He came and went! Bada bing, bada boom! Don’t forget to tip your waitress!
[11] An interesting implication, for those comfortable Westerners who give a backhanded compliment to Communism: “at least they preserved traditional morals!”
[12] A fat bald guy in Eastern Europe screams, “Trujillo, you magnificent bastard, you read my book!”
[13] I suppose this means, or includes, those “helicopter rides” so popular among the “edgy” alt-right trolls. This revelation should produce a flood of Jolt cola, and perhaps other fluids, over keyboards throughout the manosphere.
[14] Pasolini’d?
5 comments
Fascinating stuff James. For some uncanny reason your mentioning of Jaques Maritian made me think of Mary Daly, the radical feminist philosopher who died in 2010. She wrote a PHD thesis on Maritian. She also would have copious footnotes which I alway found frustrating because she never said from what in a certain book was the idea she got her idea. What I mean is that she would say that she used male writers’ works as ‘jumping off points” for her works, but not say what specific idea. So it dawned on me that her ‘jumping off’ was like Maritian’s ‘creative intuition’ and that she just called it something else. A puzzle solved. Then other things fell into place too. I will always have an affection for her for three reason.
1. She ran out of Plato’s cave screaming “I want sunshine.”
2.The feminists today are the very ones she warned about in her books.
3. In one of her books she did what I now would call intellectual astral travelling, but at the time I didn’t get it. Another of her books she held conversations with dead feminists whom she called her foremothers. In that vein, Maritian must be a forefather, but unacknowledged as such.
So thanks James for being the one to solve this puzzle for me. Uncanny indeed.
Hi James. You need more source texts as references. Try Michael Rose’s, “Goodbye Good Men” about homosexual predation in the seminaries. Bishop Rueda’s book about Homosexual Networks in the Church (forget the title) and lastly, This by Saint Peter Damian whom Dante put in the highest circle of Paradise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Gomorrhianus
Congratulations on the Victory today. You all are going to savage us with this one. The Saints of the Last Days will be hard pressed indeed.
An excellent series, which the author evidently enjoyed writing.
Does the he agree that it is only a matter of time before Raïssa Maritain is recovered for jewry as a major figure in her own right, and that her reputation, perhaps as a feminist pioneer, will eventually eclipse that of her husband?
The comedian Jackie Mason has often remarked on the frugality of jewish ladies with regard to marital duties: can we perhaps speculate that (as seems to have been the case with the Mathers ménage), the celibacy of the husband was agreeable to, and possibly even instigated by, the wife?
“no contraception, no abortion, no sex before or outside marriage, no masturbation, and perhaps above all, No Homo!” Excellent. The only possible program to keep the white race having enough babies to prevent self-extinction.
All very fascinating but it k8bd of falls off the rails when it infers that Catholuc sexual morality was a 20th century invention of Maritain.
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