Crime and Immorality in the Catholic Church

By Emmett McLoughlin

The stories in this book, which was first published in 1962, centre on the actions of some priests during the 1950s, echoing stories from today’s front pages. However, former Franciscan priest and bestselling author of People’s Padre and American Culture and Catholic Schools, Emmett McLoughlin focus in Crime and Immorality in the Catholic Church is less on the priesthood, and more on the parishioners.

To investigate his theory that the Catholic religion promotes criminal behavior rather than preventing it, he conducted a survey of all the prisons in the country in 1960. In every state, the percentage of Catholic inmates was greater than the state’s percentage of Catholics in the population, even using the church’s inflated figures. He then performed a similar survey of institutionalized mental patients, exploring the theory that Catholic beliefs drive people crazy, and came up with the same results.

A courageous, thought-provoking book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787208575

Emmett McLoughlin

Emmett McLoughlin (born John Patrick McLoughlin, Feb. 3, 1907 - Oct. 9, 1970) was a Catholic priest of the Franciscan order who became known in the 1930s as an advocate for low-income housing in Phoenix, Arizona. He left the priesthood in 1948 in order to remain superintendent of St. Monica’s (later Phoenix Memorial) Hospital, and wrote a number of books, including his autobiography People’s Padre. He grew up in Sacramento, California and entered St. Anthony’s seminary in Santa Barbara, California. He took the name Emmett during his novitiate in the Franciscan Order. After his ordination in 1933 he was assigned a parish in Phoenix, Arizona, and began work there that would last for 14 years. During that time he founded and directed St. Monica’s Hospital, organized a slum clearance campaign, was instrumental in applying for federal funds for the Matthew Henson public housing projects (opened in 1940), was appointed as the first chairman of the Phoenix Housing Authority in 1939, and served as secretary of the state Board of Health. McLoughlin decided that his work for the hospital and urban renewal was more important than his vow of obedience. He resigned as a member of the Catholic priesthood on December 1, 1948 to remain head of the hospital with the support of its board of directors, many of whom were Catholic. On August 13, 1949 he married Mary Davis, whom he met when she came to work at Phoenix Memorial Hospital. He achieved more national prominence with the publication of his autobiography, People’s Padre in 1954. His other published works include American Culture and Catholic Schools (1960), Crime and Immorality in the Catholic Church (1962) and An Inquiry in the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1963). McLoughlin moved to Oklahoma where he died in 1970. He is buried in Berwyn Cemetery, Gene Autry, Carter County in Oklahoma. The city of Phoenix named the Emmett McLoughlin Community Training & Education Center in his honor.

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Text originally published in 1962 under the same title.

© Papamoa Press 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

CRIME AND IMMORALITY

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

BY

EMMETT McLOUGHLIN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

INTRODUCTION 6

CHAPTER ONE—The Church and Society 10

CHAPTER TWO—A Glance Behind the Iron Bars 15

CHAPTER THREE—The Pious Prisoners 23

CHAPTER FOUR—A Crime Trip Around the World 30

CHAPTER FIVE—Two Millennia of Crime 36

CHAPTER SIX—Venial Sin—The Primrose Path to Crime 44

CHAPTER SEVEN—Penal Law—Just Don’t Get Caught! 52

CHAPTER EIGHT—Sex Rears Its Ugly Head 60

CHAPTER NINE—Priests—Their Wives and Concubines in the Age of Faith 68

CHAPTER TEN—Ex-Priests—The Anonymous Legion of Decency 75

CHAPTER ELEVEN—Legions of Indecency 87

CHAPTER TWELVE—Training People to Become Neurotics 98

CHAPTER THIRTEEN—Let the Statistics Tell Their Tragic Story 106

CHAPTER FOURTEEN—Confession—The First Step in Mental Enslavement 119

CHAPTER FIFTEEN—Indulgences—A Profitable Business 129

CHAPTER SIXTEEN—The Cardinal Instructs the Priest on Fighting the Devil 134

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN—What Catholicism Has Done to Catholics 143

NOTES 150

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 151

DEDICATION

To all sincere Roman Catholic priests, who in the emotional self-immolation of their lives into the priesthood, have become as truly needless human sacrifices as the victims of Baal, Moloch, or Tetzcatlipoca—that God may give them the light to find the truth, and that truth itself may set them free.

INTRODUCTION

All organized religions, both ancient and modern, as they spread their wares before mankind, have like giant modern industries boasted of their most important product. It is morality among men.

They may have other products with which they sometimes become unduly concerned. Churchmen boast of their vast educational systems, guiding both the sophisticated and the aborigines. They train doctors and nurses to hold up the healing hands of the Savior. They build civilizations for their people, like the Mormons. They move, all too timidly, to try to lower irreligious racial barriers. They proudly recall teaching the Indians to plant grain, orchards and vineyards and to breed vast herds of cattle, as did the Franciscans of California. They visit the poor in the slums, and comfort the dying and bury the dead.

But the most important product of any church or religion is morality. It is to work ever to achieve an almost impossible goal—that man be made but a little lower than the angels. It is to remind man continually of the Ten Commandments. It is to distill the crassness of human and animal nature into the observance of the greatest commandment—the love of God and the love of one’s neighbor as oneself.

Religion means peace among nations, justice among individuals, charity toward those down on their luck. It means the good, living example of a dedicated clergy. It means no killing, no assault, no stealing, and no lying; in short, the observance of the first laws of society.

The Roman Catholic Church claims to be better than all others—Protestant, Jewish or Oriental. It teaches its members that it alone is the divine religion, that Christ alone was the Messiah, the incarnation of the deity; that He established only the organized Church and that through the unbroken succession of its supreme pontiffs it has its roots in the Godhead itself and draws from that source the infallible truth and unfailing grace that alone can sanctify the human race.

The Roman Church holds out the Mass as the renewal and application of the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ to all its members. It channels His grace to them through its seven sacraments. It teaches its children that God’s true Church is one, Catholic, apostolic and holy.{1}

The Baltimore catechism explains it this way: "The Catholic Church is holy because it was founded by Jesus Christ who is all-holy and because it teaches, according to the will of Christ, holy doctrine, and provided the means of leading a holy life, thereby giving holy members to every age."

Every day the Church reminds men of its most successful members—the saints. It has canonized them and guarantees that they have fully absorbed and used its most important products—morality and sanctity—and are now enjoying the beatific vision in heaven. The saints are the models for living Catholics to follow.

The Roman Church has never pointed to a Protestant as a canonized example of morality and sanctity for Catholics.

Children in Catholic schools and students in seminaries are given glowing accounts of the beneficial and moralizing effect of Catholic teaching and clerical example upon the Roman Empire, culminating in the success of Christian life in the medieval age of faith. The Reformation, they are taught, was the triumph of evil. Degeneration continued for centuries, with the sinful growth of Protestant countries, the rise of agnostic intellectualism, the persecution of God’s chosen under the French Revolution, and the dismemberment of the Papal States. The one true Church lay prostrate. In many parts of the world its schools were closed, its churches confiscated and its clergy driven underground like the martyrs of the early centuries. No longer could it adequately display to men and offer for sale its most precious commodities—morality and holiness.

This is what Catholic students are taught.

The Church glosses over the fact that the hamstringing of its priestly salesmen during and after the Protestant Reformation did not at all touch the bulk of its prospects, the many millions in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Ireland, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Peru and the rest of Latin America, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, eastern Europe and French Canada. In all those lands the Catholic hierarchy and clergy remained free through the centuries not only to teach its rituals but, more important, to give the example of its divine way of life and, unhindered by Protestant opposition or irritation, to teach its people the better life and the path to heaven. Any stray Protestants were considered heretics and effectively punished and silenced.

In these countries, for hundreds and in some instances more than a thousand years, the Roman Catholic Church alone was the moral teacher of the millions, and the Roman Catholic Church alone must bear the full responsibility before God, both in the past and in this, our time, for the good or bad morals of the people.

It is certainly true that in the Protestant countries of the world, Roman Catholicism dipped to low esteem in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries. But in our century, except in the Communist nations, it has enjoyed a rebirth of freedom, prestige and power.

This is particularly true in the United States.

In the rich soil of freedom of thought and worship prepared and preserved by Protestantism and Freemasonry (not through the Catholic inspiration of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, as parochial school children are taught), the poor discredited Church of Rome grew luxuriantly.

The founding fathers’ precautionary measures for effective separation of church and state protected the Catholic Church from governmental interference. No ruler picked its bishops or controlled its priests, as in many of the countries of the Old World. No laws governed its schools. No inspectors censored its sermons.

From a handful of despised, ignorant immigrants it has grown within a few generations to the wealthiest, the most numerous, the most powerful church in America.

The Roman Catholic Church has become respectable.

The President of the United States is one of its members. So, too, are the majority leaders of both houses of the Congress of the United States. So, too, is the largest single bloc of the members of the Congress.

The head of all law enforcement in the nation, the Attorney General, is a Catholic, as are a large number of members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The State Department is like one of its own subservient Vatican congregations. Its priests are the chiefs of chaplains of the great Army, Navy and Air Force of the United States.

Its members honeycomb governmental offices from Washington to state capitols, county courthouses, and city halls. Its Communion Breakfasts deliberately advertise its control of very many police and fire departments, like Hitler used to parade his military strength to scare the people.

Rome claims the greatest church membership in the world—or in history—over 500,000,000. In the United States it frightens thoughtful Protestants with its boast of 40,000,000 and is generally conceded to have at least 20,000,000, unless one subtracts small children and those who have left it. In America, it has 53,000 priests and nearly 200,000 nuns. The gifts of American Catholics, plutocrats, gangsters and paupers, have built the largest private training school system on earth, indoctrinating between 5,000,000 and 6,000,000 American children, born heirs to an unrealized freedom of worship, in the peculiar Catholic code of behavior and morals.

As if this great machine were not sufficient to mold its members and secure its future, it is gradually and almost imperceptibly taking over America’s public school system. Its Newman Clubs preserve the faith and even convert Protestants on non-Catholic campuses. Catholic teachers infiltrate elementary and secondary schools alike. Catholic board members, like a creeping blight, take over more and more public school systems and further the cause by adopting favorable textbooks or by eliminating those that are hostile.

A third of the country’s nurses are indoctrinated in Catholic hospitals, built largely with tax funds fraudulently exacted from all of us, and they later go into other hospitals, universities and health departments to teach the Catholic prohibitions of birth control, abortion and sterilization.

Its hierarchical council of cardinals and bishops freely and authoritatively condemn the nation’s laws, schools and morals while arrogantly demanding special privileges for themselves and their Church.

Through inheritances, collections and tax exemptions it waxes wealthy beyond belief. Its property holdings run into the billions of dollars.

Out of deference to its laws, or fear of reprisals, practically every restaurant and school cafeteria serves fish on Friday.

The Roman Church in America has the most favorable press in the world. Newspapers devote far more than proportionate space to publicize its charitable and religious events and ventures. The great national magazines usually portray it as the leader of culture and humanity. Behind this benign, philanthropic façade is poised the stinging whip of Catholic censorship over all American means of communication—the press, books, motion pictures, radio and television. It reinforces this bastion of favorable presentation of itself with its own press, both diocesan and national, carrying its side of all questions into millions of homes.

Years ago it was said that the two greatest world organizations were the Standard Oil Company and the Catholic Church. Standard Oil is no longer in the race. Catholicism, especially in America, now has the most unique opportunity in all history to achieve its goal and fulfill the purpose for which it claims to have been founded.

Its most important product—its reason for existence—is morality, the molding of lives that are not only good, but better than others, with a greater assurance than that of other religions that its members will be far less sinful, much better emotionally adjusted throughout life and thus more certain of eternal happiness in heaven.

The purpose of this book is to show that the Roman Catholic Church in its most important work is a failure.

Among its members crime and immorality are greater than among the unchurched or the members of other churches. Whatever else the Roman Catholic Church may be able to do in Heaven, on earth and under the earth, it cannot, it has not, and it does not make the majority of its members better and holier.

In the face of the proven facts, an unbiased seeker after truth might be forced to conclude that the Roman Catholic Church was not divinely established. He might reason that morality and the better life are not its most important product after all. He might become rather cynical and wonder if Roman Catholicism be really a religion at all, or whether it is perhaps some less noble enterprise cleverly disguised under the masquerade of religion.

After all, By their fruits you will know them.

CHAPTER ONE—The Church and Society

Would western civilization be better off or worse off if the Roman Catholic Church had never existed? This is the question that is frequently asked by clergymen, educators, sociologists, psychiatrists and criminologists. The question is futile because in religion, as in every other aspect of history, there is no rolling back. What is done is done. The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on.

That the Roman Church has been one of the most powerful influences in the history of all civilization cannot be seriously denied. Through the mere length of its existence and the sheer weight of its numbers, it has deeply affected and still affects our ethics, our customs and our culture.

It has lasted almost two thousand years. Catholics cite this survival as proof positive of its divine origin and continued divine surveillance. The argument is, of course, specious. The dominant Egyptian religion lasted five thousand years, the Buddhist just as long, and the Judaic longer than any of them.

Partially through the persuasion of preaching missionaries but more often by the threat and the use of the dungeon and the sword, the Roman Catholic Church spread itself over large sections of the European continent and throughout the colonies of Spain, Portugal, France and Belgium. It converted the coastal nations of Africa, all of Central and South America, Mexico, Canada and most of the island peoples of all oceans.

In the United States it has grown from a despised minority of illiterate immigrants to a cohesive, mentally-regimented body. Although still a numerical minority, it has, through the adoption of the most notorious features of modern propaganda, boycott and censorship, made itself at least politically the most powerful single force in the nation.

During its tenure on earth and around the world, the Roman Catholic Church has, for good or evil, profoundly affected the lives of billions upon billions of human beings.

It is my contention and my sincere conviction, from my experience in the Catholic educational system, my life of fifteen years in the priesthood, and thirteen years of constant observation and intense study since leaving the Church, that its influence on all civilization has been far more of evil than of good.

Intellectually, the Chinch of Rome has done its best to strangle the human mind and stifle mental initiative. It must do this if it is to survive. No thinking, intelligent, historically studious person, especially a freedom-loving American, can become or remain a Roman Catholic.

As I demonstrated in my book, American Culture and Catholic Schools, the hierarchy in its parochial school system must give a Roman Catholic version of history, philosophy, religion and, unfortunately for America, of morals. All of these are false, bad or unworkable. It tries by threats of sin and false propaganda as to the quality of the education, to keep all Catholic youngsters in parochial schools. At teaches them to read and write, so that technically they are literate, but it anesthetizes their minds so that the result is like an engine running with its gears not meshed. The mind goes nowhere. That is why the Catholic school system has produced no measurable number of outstanding scientists, philosophers, first-rate writers and, according to honest Catholics, very few first-rate readers.

And lest the Catholic mind should accidentally become meshed and start to move, the Church builds all the fences of censorship around it so it has no place to go.

In America, the hierarchy insists that its children go through the motions of education because American Protestant culture demands it and has set the example. Where the Church has been on its own for centuries as the only cultural and educational force, the people are almost as illiterate as they were before touched by civilization. A study of the literacy tables for Spain, Portugal and Latin American countries in any current almanac will bear out this shocking statement.

Morally, this book will show the high rate of crime and sin among Roman Catholics everywhere, and particularly in the United States. It will also demonstrate that this immorality is not in spite of Catholic education and training, but directly because of it. It will show that the Catholic child is more apt to grow into adulthood not only mentally illiterate but morally criminal or emotionally neurotic if he attends a Catholic school rather than a public school. It will show that the concept of venial sin leads to a breakdown of integrity, honesty and truthfulness, in society and in business.

This is the God-centered education that Cardinal Spellman boasts of so lustily. This is the system for which the hierarchy in 1961 demands tax support in defiance of the Constitution of the United States.

It is inevitable that the intellectual and moral code of the Roman Catholic Church should affect all America. No man is an island and no people can live with, work with and marry millions of Catholics, be they forty million or twenty million, and not be held back in the struggle toward a richer and fuller life. A capsule comparison of two peoples, with and without Roman Catholic influences, can be made—Sweden with its progressive culture and Italy with its Mafia.

Many statements in this book will be violently denied not only by Catholic critics and priests but by tolerant Protestants, by some of my own brother Masons and Shriners, and by the let-well-enough-alone sponsors of Brotherhood Week and members of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. They, particularly the Jews, have forgotten their own past and they cannot see what the Roman Church has done to them in our generation.

With the publication of this book I shall be branded even more strongly as a bigot, an anti-Catholic and a plain liar.

In truth, I am no more anti-Catholic than the Canadian government crime report, or the studies of Henry Charles Lea, or the statistics of penitentiaries or insane asylums. I am simply telling the truth. I do not hate Catholics.

It was St. Paul who gave the precedent by saying when attacked: I repeat, let no one think me foolish, but if so, then regard me as such, that I also may boast a little.

In People’s Padre, I tried to explain that in brushing aside the code, the ritual and the superstitions of Roman Catholicism I had not foresworn God. I had come closer to Him and had learned to know Him: As long as you did it for one of these, the least of my brethren, you did it for me.

These words formed my lodestar eighteen years ago when we opened our hospital and thirteen years ago when I broke with the Roman Catholic Church and its priesthood. These words are still my guide today.

During the eighteen years of its operation, Memorial Hospital of Phoenix, Arizona, of which I am proud to be superintendent, has cared for 200,000 in-patients plus almost 300,000 emergency cases, some sixty per cent of