Serious Farce: Catholic Fantasies and the History of the US National Security State
by Katherine D. Moran
Title: “Ellsberg: Wouldn't you go to jail if it would help end the war?” (1971). Library of Congress.
“My children, God in His infinite wisdom has stricken your leaders blind. His sixth Commandment is Thou Shalt Not Kill. This blindness of your leaders is a warning that you should lay down your arms and return to the ways of peace.”
These words are quoted in Michael Graziano’s thought provoking and deeply researched new book, Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors. They were not actually papal speech, though they were meant to sound like they were.
These words were written by a member of the Office of Strategic Services—the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. They were part of a plan to win World War II through the manipulation of religious faith and authority. This plan was never put into practice, but it was quite a plan: first, an operative would permanently blind Hitler and Mussolini with liquid nitrogen-mustard gas, diffused in a room in which they were meeting. Then, the pope would issue, in the words of an OSS officer, “a Papal Bull or whatever is appropriate,” claiming that the Axis leaders’ blindness was God’s work, that God favored the Allies. This plan would succeed in getting German and Italian soldiers to lay down their arms, the thinking went, because, “a great number of the German and Italian fighting forces are Roman Catholics” so they “will heed Pius XII.” The plan was the brainchild of the OSS’s Stanley Lovell, a man whom Graziano describes as a real-life version of Ian Flemming’s “Q.”
It is easy to imagine Lovell as Q. Perhaps bored of devising lipstick cameras and wrist-watch bombs, he turns to a different, powerful technology: Roman Catholicism. What if, he thinks to himself, the power of the pope—operationalized through the actions of millions of faithful foot soldiers—could be harnessed for the Allied cause?
This might seem comical, even delusional. Indeed, there are moments in Graziano’s book when the planning and plotting of the OSS or CIA seems to stumble into farce. But it would be a mistake not to take it seriously. Because at work in this plan are a number of assumptions about the nature of Roman Catholicism and its relationship to the US state. These assumptions—Graziano argues convincingly—mattered. They mattered because they affected the way the OSS dealt with the Roman Catholic Church and also because the OSS’s World-War-II engagement with Catholicism structured the CIA’s later operating assumptions about religion in general. As a historian of American Catholicism, I’d like to explore some assumptions I see in Lovell’s papal plot—and OSS and CIA approaches to Catholicism more generally—thinking about them within the context of the historiography of Roman Catholicism in the United States.
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It’s hard to imagine a real pope following a script written for him by US intelligence, and it’s hard to imagine real, twentieth-century Catholic soldiers rejecting their commanding officers’ orders, en masse, in response to a papal decree. Lovell’s pope was a fantasy pope; his Catholicism a fantasy religion.
But his particular Catholic fantasy had a long history. The idea that the pope embodies a religious authority so total that ordinary Catholics are defenseless against his words was, as Graziano points out, itself a staple of Northern European and US anti-Catholic discourse. In the United States, the presumption of Catholics’ willingness to blindly follow their religious leaders was so powerful in the late nineteenth century that it inspired the American Protective Association’s warnings that American Catholics were stockpiling weapons in church basements, waiting for word of a papal invasion. It was still so common, even in the mid-twentieth century, that John F. Kennedy famously had to reassure the Greater Houston Ministerial Association that he believed in an America where “no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope.” In short, Lovell’s Catholic fantasy was not his own invention: it was crafted out of longstanding anti-Catholic tropes.
Echoes of anti-Catholicism can also be heard in other OSS and CIA Catholic fantasies, some of which were even the work of Catholics. Lovell’s boss was “Wild Bill” Donovan, an Irish American Catholic who was no stranger to the power of American anti-Catholicism. He did not sign on to Lovell’s papal plot, but he did advocate that the OSS cultivate the Vatican as the center of a potentially global intelligence network, and his arguments for doing so resembled anti-Catholic rhetoric. “Ironically,” writes Graziano, “the image of the Vatican as an oasis of secret knowledge…stemmed from the same anti-Catholic tendencies in American culture that derailed Donovan’s earlier, promising political career” (42). Later, in describing Tom Dooley’s brand of Catholic anti-communist writing, Graziano points out that, once again, anti-Catholic rhetoric was being invoked and re-cast. “Catholic practices long criticized by Protestants,” he argues—practices like the flying of a papal banner or the veneration of a statue of the Virgin—“were reimagined as potent Christian weapons against Communism” (106). Lovell, Donovan, and Dooley were essentially taking the terms of anti-Catholicism and turning them on their heads: what if the Catholic Church WAS an authoritarian church controlled by an all-powerful pope, the Vatican truly a source of secret knowledge, and Catholic objects actually imbued with potent power for the faithful? These ideas about Roman Catholicism, long staples of anti-Catholic discourse, were now redeployed as a Catholic essence useful to the OSS and CIA.
It is worth noting that this is not an unfamiliar dynamic in US Catholic history. Though Catholic practice has often been derided by Protestants as an unholy mixture of the physical and the spiritual, Colleen McDannell, for example, has shown that the very vivid materiality of Catholic ritual has made it a popular religion to film. Though European Catholic church architecture was often criticized by Protestants travelers for what they took to be its gilded excesses, Ryan K. Smith has shown that nineteenth-century Protestant ministers also attempted to replicate Catholic church design. In my own research I have found that late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century US Protestants began to erect monuments to Spanish and French Catholic missionaries, admiring them for precisely the imagined qualities that were often derided in anti-Catholic literature: their paternalistic authority, for example, or their putatively feminine nature. My current research explores the history of the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum, a Catholic-run asylum that, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, acted as a state-supported carceral institution for young girls. It reveals a moment when the state was, in essence, paying nuns to lock up girls, barely a generation after bestselling convent captivity narratives provoked salacious delight and anti-Catholic fervor.
Graziano’s careful reconstruction of how anti-Catholic tropes were turned on their heads by the OSS and CIA, imagined as essential elements of Catholicism and reassessed as particularly valuable, should not only inform our understanding of the entangled histories of religion and US intelligence. Graziano’s book also reminds us that we would do well to recognize how very common this particular rhetorical move was. In the intelligence community as elsewhere, anti-Catholic rhetoric informed widespread popular conceptions of Catholicism itself, even among those who sought to praise—or profit from—the Church.
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Lovell’s papal plot also rests on the assumption of a single, unitary Catholicism. To imagine Catholicism this way was to ignore much of the diversity and conflict of the actual church, even just in Lovell’s own home country. It ignored the existence of Catholics not in communion with Rome, and the long history of trusteeship controversies. It ignored Italian-, Polish-, or Mexican-American Catholics with their own material cultures, rituals, and liturgical styles, often suspicious of a US Catholic hierarchy dominated by Irish-American priests and prelates. It ignored low mass attendance; it ignored the frustrated homilies of priests attempting to corral rebellious parishioners.
To be sure, there were others in the OSS who saw a more multifarious Catholicism. To some extent, Donovan’s own personal history, as a Catholic who sometimes disagreed with his fellow Catholics, led him to recognize this complexity. And the OSS intelligence officer Zsolt Aradi explicitly warned his compatriots not to assume that the Vatican dictated a monolithic Catholicism. Yet, as Graziano notes, the push to get the OSS to recognize diversity within Roman Catholicism was an uphill battle, never fully achieved.
The same can certainly be said about visions of Catholicism as fundamentally opposed to communism. Graziano makes a convincing argument that the CIA understood Catholicism—and religion as a whole—as necessarily anti-communist (and thus necessarily pro-American in the dualistic terms of the Cold War). The agency was shocked out of this assumption, he notes, only with the rise of liberation theology.
To be sure, the association of Catholicism and anti-communism seems to have been broadly accepted in US law enforcement and intelligence circles. J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation recruited young Catholic college graduates in the 1950s in part because of their presumed anti-communist credentials, and anti-communist leaders in the church, including those connected with the powerful National Catholic Welfare Conference, had close, information-sharing relationships with officials in the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. The US support for Ngô Đình Diệm in Vietnam was premised in part on Diêm’s Catholicism, and the belief—prevalent among policymakers—that communism and Catholicism were antithetical to one another. Anti-Communist Catholic celebrities such as Tom Dooley, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, and Joseph McCarthy all became household names.
Yet they were not the only Catholic celebrities of the era. The history of mid-twentieth-century US social movements is filled with religious people—including Catholic people—articulating sophisticated critiques of US American racism, imperialism, and capitalism. During the 1960s, after Tom Dooley’s rise to celebrity but well before the shock of Oscar Romero’s death, Sr. Corrita Kent was celebrated for her anti-war pop art. Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Sr. Antona Ebo, and Daniel Berrigan were all famous Catholic activists. (Indeed, most if not all of them were also investigated by the FBI, suspicious of their politics and their Cold War loyalties.) As Graziano notes, CIA officials themselves expended some effort in the late 1960s to shut down the leftist Catholic magazine Ramparts (123).
What, then, accounts for the persistence, in the US intelligence community, of the idea of a monolithic Catholicism, supportive of US imperial pursuits and decidedly anti-communist?
Graziano argues that the agencies’ assumptions about the essential characteristics of Roman Catholicism can be traced to a tendency—common in both the academy and in the intelligence community—to broadly theorize about religion as a unitary category and assume a lack of diversity within religious groups. This is both an excellent point and a deeply intriguing parallel. But what I am most struck by is the element of choice here: agency thinkers knew about the varieties of Catholicisms yet they chose to define Catholicism in a limited and highly selective way.
The religious theorists of the CIA, then, were not misunderstanding Roman Catholic religion so much as they were privileging one form of Catholicism over another, one set of Catholic individuals over another, one Catholic politics over another. They were doing so as an arm of the imperial state, alongside agencies like the FBI, intent on repressing dissent and maintaining elite privilege in the name of social order, at home and abroad. By selling Dooley’s brand of anti-communist Catholicism as apple-pie American, they were not only using the charismatic doctor to win support for the Vietnam War among US Catholics, and not only arguing for the incorporation of Catholicism into an American religious mainstream. They were also elevating politically conservative, militantly anti-communist Catholicism as American orthodoxy, over and against the social justice, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist Catholicism embodied by figures like Day, Chavez, and Ebo. The history of the CIA is, as Graziano lucidly argues, a history of state actors theorizing about religion. It is also, crucially, a history that illuminates just how entangled the act of theorizing about religion is with the act of shaping and authorizing a particular form of religion.
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Finally, Lovell’s papal plot rested on another grand assumption: that the head of a powerful global church would willingly, even enthusiastically, support the projects of the US state. Lovell’s conviction that the pope would parrot his words might have been overly optimistic, but the general idea that Catholic leaders and organizations would work to serve the needs of the US state was not far off, as Graziano’s telling depiction of the OSS’s use of the Catholic International Press for information-gathering demonstrates. The OSS’s excitement about the prospect of this intelligence haul seems initially less surprising than the fact that the Catholic International Press willingly participated in this partnership at all.
But of course, it should not be surprising. The history of anti-Catholicism in the United States—not to mention popular assumptions about an ostensible separation of church and state—has led even professional historians to assume that Catholicism has been an outsider’s religion, at least until the middle of the twentieth century. Yet US history is filled with Catholic church/state partnerships, domestic and international, from the early nineteenth century onward. These include Catholic missions in the US West and Catholic-run Native American boarding schools. They include moments when Catholic priests and prelates were called in to advise government officials on US overseas colonial projects, in places like the Philippines. They include state-funded Catholic carceral institutions. In short, Catholic organizations and leaders have a long history of supporting the projection and exercise of US state power.
Graziano’s book should inspire us not to be surprised at Catholic church/state partnerships in US history. And it can lead us even further: to interrogate this history on its own terms. If retold not as a series of surprising aberrations, but rather as part of a pattern, the history of Catholic partnerships with the US state illuminates aspects of the history of American religion, US empire, and state-formation that have long been obscured by assumptions about a secular state or an over-emphasis on an informal Protestant establishment.
Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors is an intriguing book for the history of US Catholicism. It places Catholicism squarely within the inner workings of the national security state, itself an important archival feat. It also pushes us to rethink some big questions. How, we are compelled to ask, have anti-Catholic tropes been redeployed—even by Catholics—to shape powerful notions of an essentialized Catholicism? How have state officials and US imperial projects contributed to the shaping of American Catholicism? And what roles have Catholic leaders and institutions played in the projection and exercise of US state power?
Kate Moran is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies at Saint Louis University and co-founder of SLU’s Center for Research on Global Catholicism. She holds a PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University. Her book, The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire (Cornell University Press, 2020) examines cross-confessional commemorations of Catholic history as part of the rhetoric of US empire. Her second book project, provisionally entitled California Magdalens: Women, Religion, and the Carceral State, 1850-1940, is a globally-situated history of the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum.