1968 - Culture and Counterculture: A Catholic Critique

By Pickwick Publications

Sexual revolution, terrorism, student riots, civil rights, Stonewall Riots, feminism, and the publication of Humane vitae. The year 1968 is a milestone in twentieth-century history. The papers presented in this volume mark an interdisciplinary and wide-ranging approach to a year, and indeed a decade, whose movements and events are still very much alive in contemporary society. The fruits of the conference are published in this volume to invite ongoing reflection and a critical discourse to a watershed moment in our history and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Nov 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781725276819

Book preview

Introduction

There has seldom been a time in which men were more dissatisfied with life and more conscious of the need for deliverance. If they turn away from Christianity it is because they feel that Christianity is a servant of the established order and that it has no real power or will to change the world and to rescue man from his present difficulties.

The great English cultural historian Christopher Dawson was referring to an earlier time when he wrote this, but he could have just as easily written this about the 1960s, and the year 1968 in particular.

The unprecedented cultural upheaval of 1968 makes it something of a watershed in Western culture. For many cultural critics, the 1960s gave birth to wholly positive forms of civil engagement and cultural discourse in the civil rights movement and in anti-war protests, for example. Others see the legacy of 1968 solely as a disastrous sexual revolution accompanied by the harmful deterioration of moral values. They look at 1968 as the year in which the Catholic Church’s dialogue with the modern world came to a disastrous head, with the promulgation of, and widespread dissent from, Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae, which he addressed to all men and women of good will.

In their assessment of 1968, delivered fifty years on in 2018, Time magazine ranked the year alongside 1776, 1861, and 1941 as watershed moments in American history. In some sense this grouping must seem surprising. For while 1776, 1861, and 1941 are associated with the start of great events in American history, 1968 is associated less with a singular event and more with a broad swathe of events that considered together the sense of the 1960s as a revolutionary epoch both in the United States and across the world.

It is of course difficult to measure the significance of a year or even of a decade. It would be impossible and undesirable to cleanly separate 1968 from the years and decades that led to it or to pretend that the events of that year appeared from a historical vacuum disconnected from underlying economic, social, and spiritual forces. Rather the papers contained in this book take 1968 as starting point, as a year when underlying trends and movements suddenly became manifest and it became apparent that the order that had governed the world since the Second World War no longer held currency. Indeed, this is perhaps the best understanding of a watershed moment—a moment in which worldviews are radically shifted so that understandings of the world before that moment are alien to the understandings of the world after it.

The twenty-first century has been replete with years in which worldviews had to be abandoned to accommodate new realities. 2001 was such a year, when the order and progress that many imagine governed the post-Cold War world disappeared with the collapse of the Twin Towers. 2016 was another such year, when the Brexit and US presidential elections exposed a wide disconnect between voters and those pundits employed to explain a world they clearly did not understand. And already in March, all signs point to 2020 being another such year. But the legacy of these years is still in question. Even as this introduction is being written, Joe Biden has become the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, with the promise that 2016 may be written off as a historical accident. This is clearly not the case for 1968. The reactionary attempts to erase the legacy of 1968 have clearly failed.

The fifty years since 1968 have only confirmed the year as a watershed moment in twentieth-century history. But unlike years that are associated with events such as the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Second World War, the events of 1968 have seen no natural terminus. The movements associated with 1968 have yet to declare mission accomplished, and the revolutionary fervor of the decade still bubbles below the surface of contemporary society. In a very real sense the 1960s are still a part of contemporary society in a manner in which the era of the Second World War, for instance, is not.

This collection contains papers first presented at a conference held by the Christopher Dawson Society for Philosophy and Culture at the University of Notre Dame Australia in July of 2018, and as such it makes no attempt at comprehensiveness. Instead it offers something of an opening to a broader conversation. Indeed, in examining the papers collected in this volume, one cannot help but recognize the movements and events of 1968 that deserve the kind of critical examination offered in this collection. While it would be unnecessary—and indeed almost impossible—to offer a comprehensive list of topics for future study and evaluation, some of the more significant omissions deserve recognition. These include the Civil Rights Movement and the assasination of Martin Luther King Jr.; the Cold War and its associated conflict in Vietnam; the rise of second-wave feminism. In the realm of pop culture, too, one witnesses evidence of a new self-awareness with the release of The Beatles’ White Album.

The choice of topics for publication in this volume in no way reflects a priority of importance. Rather it is hoped that any omissions are received as an invitation for future study and reflection.

As a Catholic critique, these papers see a number of themes coming to the fore with particular prominence. Perhaps most noteworthy is that of the developments in the realm of moral theology that occurred during that year with the promulgation of the controversial encyclical of Pope Paul VI, Humanae vitae. A number of papers in this volume directly address this document, the strengths and weaknesses of its argumentation, and its reception amongst Catholics and others.

Appropriately for a decade marked by violence and sexual revolution, sex and violence are prominent themes running through a number of the papers. The 1960s were a time of new forms of violence from both state and non-state actors. Meanwhile, the widening availability of the oral contraceptive pill throughout the 1960s prepared the foundations for a sexual revolution, the legacy of which is still unfolding today. Sex and violence often appeared in tandem, with the Stonewall Riots and the May student protests in Paris both erupting into violence from which were met in turn with violence from defenders of the status quo.

The legacy of 1968 is particularly fraught in matters of sex and sexuality, with its players and movements automatically cast into the roles of heroes or villains by contemporary ideologues. As the sexual revolution is still undeniably a fraught topic in contemporary society, there can be a temptation to read history backward through either a triumphant or a calamitous lens. However it would also be meaningless to ignore the fifty years of consequences that have followed these movements. Recent revelations of historical sexual abuse manifest in the #metoo movement as well as in the reports of governmental inquiries into institutional child sexual abuse the world over make examination of this facet of the 1960s particularly pertinent. Where possible, it is hoped that the present volume will occasion discussion rather than celebration or condemnation and a measured assessment of the successes and failures of the decade.

While many of the papers examine discrete events occurring at the time, others look to examine particular responses that developed within the context of 1968 itself. While the revolutionary movements were manifestations of a growing discontent with the previous order, those revolutionary impulses too prompted a range of responses. The reactionary response attempted to shore up previous modes of societal and ecclesial organization. This is exemplified in the reaction of the Catholic bishops of the United States to the public dissent of moral theologian Fr. Charles Curran.

Various postmodern thinkers active at this time attempted their own revolution in their efforts to deconstruct those structures that they deemed to be oppressive. This is found in the work of those associated with the Frankfurt School—such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodore Adorno, and Max Horkeimer—and others such as Roland Barthes and, later, Judith Butler. The Italian Catholic priest and educator Fr. Luigi Giussani took a different approach. His example took the unfolding crises of the year 1968 as an opportunity to reassess what it was that truly motivated his own life and the lives of those who surrounded him.

The collection of papers presented here demonstrates an attempt to get beyond simplistic ideological narratives that would merely commend or condemn the movements of this era. These papers seek to verify the realities that they investigate, measuring each on its own merits, and, following Pope St. John XXIII’s exhortation to the Catholic Church at the beginning of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, to discern the signs of the times (Matt 16:4), and in so doing, to make out, in the midst of so much darkness, more than a few indications that enable us to have hope for the fate of the Church and of humanity.

Thomas V. Gourlay and Daniel Matthys

March 25, 2020

The Solemnity of the Annunciation of Our Lord

1

What Happened in the Church and the World in 1968?

Tracey Rowland

This paper will be divided into two sections: The first will offer a panoramic retrospective snapshot of the events of

1968

; the second will focus on how these events were mere epiphenomena of underlying seismic movements in the fields of philosophy and theology. Particular attention will be given to the influence of Frankfurt School philosophy on Catholic theology, changes in the field of Catholic eschatology, the secularization of Catholic social teaching, and the rise of the New Age nun.

Juan Aranzadi, a Spanish Maoist, said of 1968 that its principal characteristic was a kind of spectacle that embodied all the goals of the French Revolution until then.

¹

He also described it as a surrealist utopia which not only he lived, but his entire generation. Historians now refer to the generation of 1968 as the first global generation, and French sociologists have coined the expression the soixante huitards to refer to its members.

²

The year 1968 is like the years 1789, 1848, or 1914. It was one of those years in which history dramatically changed its course.

So, how did this surrealist utopia unfold? The year began quietly on January 1, the only significant event of international significance on that day being the death of the Irish judge and playwright Donagh MacDonagh. However, two weeks later, on January 15, the campus of the Catholic University of Leuven erupted in student protests after the administration announced that classes would continue to be offered in French, in addition to the Flemish language. This was notwithstanding the fact that the Francophone Walloons were a minority group on the campus. This decision led to rolling protest events across Flanders which brought down the Belgian government. The crisis was only resolved by splitting the university into two institutions, one French-speaking and one Flemish-speaking, located twenty-one miles apart.

Such student protest movements were to become a significant element in the surrealist utopia. March 1968 began with the Battle of Valle Giulia (Battaglia di Valle Giulia). As the name suggests, this battle was not in Vietnam but in Rome. It took the form of violent clashes between some four thousand students and the Italian police. Some of the students were of the Left, others of the Right, occupying different buildings. In the clash, there were 148 injuries to police recorded and 478 to students; 228 students were arrested; eight police cars were destroyed; and five police guns were stolen by students.

³

A week later protests broke out in Poland after students were expelled from the University of Warsaw for their criticisms of Soviet-style Marxism. Among those expelled was the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, author of the magisterial Main Currents of Marxism, who was later to become a friend of St. John Paul II. While students in Italy were embracing Marxism, some five thousand students in Warsaw and others in Kraków, Poznan, Lublin, and Wrocław were protesting against Marxism, or at least the version of it that had been imposed upon their country by the Soviet leaders.

A month later in the United States, Columbia University students protesting against the Vietnam War took over administration buildings and effectively shut down the university during a six-day siege—the time it took for the New York Police Department to take control of the situation.

However, by far the most dramatic of the student protest movements began on March 22. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who became known as Danny the Red, led 150 students to occupy the administration building of the University of Nanterre. They had a number of demands, but the highest on their list was the right to sleep together. In December of 1967 the French government had passed the Neuwirth Law lifting the restrictions on the sale of contraceptives, so it is not so surprising that three months later students were demanding the freedom to sleep together on university property. This protest led to the temporary closure of the university, and this act set off further protests at other institutions including the Sorbonne, beginning on May 3. On May 6 twenty thousand student protesters marched towards the Sorbonne and clashed with police wielding batons and tear gas. On May 10 student protesters set up barricades to seal off the streets around the Sorbonne and keep police from entering the area. Jesuit and Dominican priests who were chaplains to various student groups sided with the students against the police and handed out Communion to the protesters regardless of their religious/baptismal status. On May 11 police stormed the barricades around the Sorbonne and on May 13 a one-day general strike was called, with labor groups walking off their jobs to show support for the students. By May 21 eight million French workers were on strike and both the stock market and Orly international airport had been closed. On May 24 President Charles de Gaulle publicly pleaded for an end to the strike and announced an election, which his party won with a large majority.

The French political philosopher Émile Perreau-Saussine once joked that the events of May 1968 were not serious because no one died. There were, he noted, no student martyrs, at least not in Paris.

⁴

Nonetheless, notwithstanding the fact that the protests fizzled out in Paris as the summer ended and the weather turned cold, the culture of university life had undergone a revolution. The university, one of the great institutions of Western civilization, had been a product of medieval Christendom. All the great universities of Europe has been founded by either Christian monarchs or clerics.

⁵

While the Reformation and the rise of atheistic philosophies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had begun the process of their secularization, after 1968 the campuses of universities across the world, not merely in Europe, turned into incubators for varieties of anti-Christian ideologies. Universities changed from merely offering a social sanctuary to skeptics and atheists to being the primary agencies of criticism of Western culture in general and Christianity in particular.

In Marxist philosophy, the concept cultural hegemony refers to the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and moral norms of a ruling class whose worldview is accepted as the cultural norm or universally valid dominant ideology. According to the student radicals of 1968, the ruling classes of Western societies had for centuries promoted Christianity as their dominant ideology, not because it was true, but because it served their political and economic interests. Thus, in order to destroy the power of the nefarious bourgeois social leaders, it followed that one had to undermine the so-called cultural hegemony of Christianity itself.

⁶

Different Marxist factions had different ideas about how best to go about this. The Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci drew a distinction between what he called a war of maneuver and a war of position. The war of maneuver was the Stalinist model. One simply used political violence to achieve one’s ends. Gramsci thought this would not work in the more highly developed Western countries. For these countries, he recommended a war of position. In a war of position, one first identifies switch-points of social power and then seeks to peacefully take control of those switch-points. The switch-points all relate to the field of cultural values. The most important are positions like school principal, university professor, government policymaker, education department bureaucrat, and journalist.

In 1967 Rudi Dutschke, the leader of the West German leftist political movement APO, reformulated Antonio Gramsci’s philosophy of cultural hegemony with the phrase the long march through the institutions. Instead of a long military march such as the one undertaken by the Chinese Marxist Mao Tse-Tung, in the highly developed Western countries the long march would be through the most culturally significant of our social institutions—that is, through schools, universities, courts, and parliaments, and through the media, via newspapers and television.

A second significant element in the surrealist utopian vision of 1968 was the pacifist movement, with its focus on opposition to the Vietnam War. The war in Vietnam began in the mid-1950s and ended in 1975, while the greatest loss of life occurred in 1968. On one side were the anti-Communist forces of South Vietnam, who were supported by some 2.7 million American troops, 320,000 South Korean troops, 61,000 Australian troops, 10,000 troops from the Philippines, 3,800 troops from New Zealand, a small battalion from Thailand, special forces and transport aircraft from Taiwan, and some 30,000 Canadian volunteers. The North Vietnamese Communist team had the support of 3,000 troops, 2,000 tanks, 7,000 artillery pieces, 5,000 anti-aircraft guns, 200 surface-to-air missile batteries, and daily financial aid of US$2 million from the Soviet Union, plus 90,000 rifles and millions of dollars-worth of rice from China, two squadrons of MiG fighter-jets from North Korea, and an assortment of brutal interrogation experts provided by Cuba.

⁷

What is known as the battle of Khe Sanh began in the third week of January, 1968. Over the course of the next seventy-seven days the North Vietnamese Army destroyed the Americans’ main ammunition dump and claimed the lives of 274 American soldiers. This was followed by the Tet Offensive on January 30, which claimed the lives of 245 Americans in one day. A week later, on February 7, American forces shelled the South Vietnamese city of Ben Tre, which had been infiltrated by North Vietnamese agents. Some 1,000 civilians died and 45 percent of the town’s buildings were destroyed in a great propaganda victory for those opposed to the US presence in Vietnam. This was followed in March by the My Lai massacre, when Company C of the First Battalion of the US Army’s 20th Infantry Regiment killed 504 women, children, and elderly men in a Vietnamese village. The following day a demonstration in London’s Grosvenor Square turned violent, with 91 people injured and 200 demonstrators arrested. In Australia, where young men were conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War, the number of student demonstrators was small in 1968. However, by May 1970 the anti-Vietnam War movement had swelled to such a level that there were demonstrations of 100,000 people on the streets of Melbourne. Across Australia the combined protest numbers were around two hundred thousand. Spin-off political activist groups which owed their origins to the Vietnam Protest movements were later funded by the World Peace Council (WPC) which was set up by the Soviet Communist Party between 1948 and 1950 as a means of undermining the military strength of the Western powers.

While Americans and Australians were reeling from the loss of so many lives and asking questions about the manner in which the war was being conducted, British people were informed that their pop music heroes the Beatles, who were all brought up in Irish Catholic pre-Warlockian Liverpool, were travelling to India to visit the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the teacher of transcendental meditation known to his followers as Your Holiness.

⁸

Although his status as guru to the Beatles was short-lived, his association with the Beatles brought the Yogi rather a large amount of public interest and business. Though not the most important event of 1968, it was symbolic of another element of the surrealist utopia, which was the abandonment of all forms of Christianity for experimentation with Eastern religions and the mushrooming of gurus claiming to be legitimate purveyors of some Eastern religious tradition.

In March 1968 the Australian government lifted its ban on the sale of the Kama Sutra, the Indian Hindu text on the arts of courtship and lovemaking. In 1968 things Eastern were in and things Western were out. In February 1968 the number one song on Billboard Hot 100 was Green Tambourine by the group the Lemon Pipers, published under the record label Buddah. The song’s instrumentation included both a tambourine and an electric sitar, the sitar being a plucked, stringed instrument used in Hindustani music. Modes of dress relating to both India the country and indigenous North American Indians also became fashionable. Later in 1968 the Lemon Pipers also released a song called Love Beads and Meditation. Love beads, or multiple strings of multicoloured beads worn by both men and women, have an origin in Hindu and also native American cultures.

The love-bead fashion had begun at least a year earlier during the so-called Summer of Love when some hundred thousand young people converged on the suburb of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco wearing hippie-style clothing. Their slogan was turn on, tune in, and drop out. The hallmarks of their subculture were communal living, multiple sexual partners, experimentation with drugs, rock and protest folk music, hippie styles of dress, and dropping out from mainstream society. A similar but smaller movement arose in London.

On April 27, 1968 the UK’s Abortion Act 1967 came into effect, legalizing abortion on a number of grounds, with the abortions provided by the National Health Service. One might summarize these elements of the surrealist utopia with the statement that the sexual revolution was a significant component of the cultural upheaval of 1968. In her book Autobiography of a Generation, Luisa Passerini wrote, The idea was to destroy. Abolish the connection between sexuality and love, reject the family, violate fidelity.

⁹

In the United States 1968 was also a presidential election year. On June 5, after thanking supporters for his win in the California primary, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. His assassination followed that of the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jnr. on April 4. In West Berlin, on April 11, Rudi Dutschke was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt and was to die from these injuries eleven years later.

In the United States the civil rights movement was also an element of the civil unrest of the time, though unlike other elements identified above, the civil rights movement was not entangled in a war against Christianity. In many cases leaders of the movement actually appealed to the Christian belief that men and women of all races have been created by God with a common humanity. Martin Luther King Jnr. even appealed to the idea of a natural moral law, which is a key element in Christian ethical theory.

Later in 1968, on August 20, the Soviet government led a Warsaw Pact invasion of what was then called Czechoslovakia to put an end to anti-Soviet-style Marxist political developments in these former provinces of the Hapsburg Empire. In opposition to the so-called Prague Spring—a movement within the ruling Czech and Slovak Communist party to allow Czech and Slovak citizens greater freedom of expression and greater freedom to travel as well as some economic reforms—the Soviets deployed some 500,000 troops, 6,300 tanks, 550 combat aircraft, and 250 transport planes to regain control of this particular Soviet satellite.

Amidst all this political violence and social turmoil and experimentation with Eastern forms of religion, music, food, and dress, the Catholic Church was the only institution with any hope of offering an alternative voice and social vision. So let’s now turn to look at what was happening in Catholic circles in 1968.

The Second Vatican Council had ended in December 1965. In 1966 the Dutch bishops issued what became known as the Dutch Catechism—De Nieuwe Katechismus, geloofsverkondiging voor volwassenen. Its key authors were Edward Schillebeeckx OP and Piet Schoonenberg SJ. It was translated into many languages and became an international best seller. However, it was widely regarded as doctrinally unsound, to such a degree that Paul VI set up a Commission of Cardinals to make a report on the document. The Cardinals’ report included some fifty pages of criticism which was then published by the Dutch bishops as an appendix to their Catechism. Paul VI, however, went one step further and on June 30, 1968 he issued the Apostolic Letter, Solemni Hac Liturgia, in the form of a Motu Proprio, known in English as the Credo of the People of God, which was a more expansive creed, affirming such doctrines as the Virgin Birth, the notion of the Mass as a sacrifice, not a mere memorial meal, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and the primacy of the Petrine Office. The Credo was initially drafted by the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, who in the same year published the book The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time in which he criticized the Church for kneeling before the world.

While the publication of the Credo was an attempt to deal with the doctrinal chaos created by the Dutch Catechism and some theological interpretations of the Second Vatican Council and thus was something of a countercultural move for the era, a couple of months earlier, on March 29, Paul VI had lost the goodwill of significant members of the Italian aristocracy by permitting something of a mini cultural revolution in the papal palace in Rome. Specifically, Paul VI announced a reorganization of the papal court that included the abolition of the centuries-old hereditary papal nobility. This decision was not well received among the members of the Italian aristocracy who had served the papal court for centuries. Many concluded that Paul VI was a middle-class philistine with no understanding of the role of cultural traditions, the social importance of ceremony, and the political importance of keeping Italy’s leading families on the side of the papacy.

Of greater significance, however, was Paul VI’s encyclical, Humanae vitae, released on July 29, 1968, which upheld the Church’s centuries-long teaching against the practice of contraception. One of the encyclical’s opponents, the German theologian Bernhard Häring, wrote that "No papal teaching document has ever caused such an earthquake in the church as the encyclical Humanae vitae."

¹⁰

He may well have been correct about this. Cardinal Francis Stafford, who supported the document, described 1968 as Year of the Peirasmós (spiritual trial). The magnitude of the seismic pressures placed on the papacy and the priesthood after the July 29 release of the encyclical is evident in the following memoir of Cardinal Stafford:

The summer of

1968

is a record of God’s hottest hour. The memories are not forgotten; they are painful. They remain vivid like a tornado on the plains of Colorado. They inhabit the whirlwind where God’s wrath dwells. In

1968

something terrible happened in the Church. Within the ministerial priesthood ruptures developed everywhere among friends which never healed. And the wounds continue to affect the whole Church. The dissent, together with the leaders’ manipulation of the anger they fomented, became a supreme test. It changed fundamental relationships within the Church. It was a Πειρασμός for many.

¹¹

Opposition to Humanae vitae fostered a widespread culture of dissent. If one magisterial teaching could be rejected or read-down or declared to be a mere moral ideal then the teaching authority of the magisterium was in crisis. The unity of the Church was stretched to breaking point, with different priests, bishops, and even bishops’ conferences offering the laity a variety of interpretations and tax-lawyer-style loopholes. The possibility for the Church to offer an alternative vision of the meaning of human sexuality to the generation of 1968 was lost. It was not for another decade, with the election of Karol Wojtyła in 1978, that an alternative vision was finally offered in the form of John Paul II’s Catechesis on Human Love.

One significant Catholic intellectual contribution in 1968 was Joseph Ratzinger’s book Introduction to Christianity. It did not address all the issues of the time, but it did at least plead the case for the reasonableness of Christianity, and it was an international bestseller that was translated into some fourteen languages. It was even described by one reviewer as an alternative to the Dutch Catechism.

¹²

In this work, Ratzinger begins by addressing the myopia of those within the Church who thought that the solution to the social marginalization of Christianity was to dress up the Christian message in more contemporary garb. Rhetorically, he asked:

Need we only call on the aggiornamento, take off our make-up and don the mufti of a secular vocabulary or a demythologised Christianity in order to make everything all right? Is a change of intellectual costume sufficient to make people run cheerfully up and help to put out the fire which according to theology exists and is a danger to all of us?

¹³

This was the project that came to be known by the concept correlationism: the idea was to find elements of contemporary culture that were popular and then to tie or correlate the Catholic faith to them. The project was particularly popular with theologians from Belgium and Holland, especially Edward Schillebeeckx OP. These countries were precisely the places that experienced the most dramatic drop in ecclesial participation and religious vocations in the 1960s and 70s. As a general sociological principle one can say that the more money an archdiocese spent on correlationist pastoral programs the fewer people it had in its pews.

Ratzinger summed up the feeling of many a faithful Catholic in 1968 by quoting from the monologue at the beginning of Paul Claudel’s play Le Soulier de Satin:

Fastened to the cross—with the cross fastened to nothing, drifting over the abyss. The situation of the contemporary believer could hardly be more accurately and impressively described. Only a loose plank bobbing over the void seems to hold him up, and it looks as if he must eventually sink. Only a loose plank connects him to God, though certainly it connects him inescapably and in the last analysis he knows that this wood is stronger than the void which seethes beneath him and which remains nevertheless the really threatening force in his day-to-day life.

¹⁴

Fifty years later, it could be said that the situation has not really improved, though we do now have some significant intellectual antidotes. If we combine the publications of St. John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI we have quite an arsenal. There are also many lesser names who have undertaken excellent academic work on various aspects of the surrealist utopia. Some of the best material has come from scholars in formerly Communist countries who have been able to identify the strands of the intellectual DNA shared by cultural Marxists and Liberal social engineers. Poland’s Ryszard Legutko is an example of someone who has undertaken this kind of analysis. The British philosopher Roger Scruton also stands out as an Anglophone academic whose works offer a sustained critique of the zeitgeist of 1968. It is also the case that St. John Paul II defeated the Old Left—the Stalinist types—and through his leadership and with help from leaders in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union collapsed and with it the countries of central and eastern Europe were free to make their own political and economic policies. The new problem is that the European Union now tries to control these countries, including promoting anti-Christian social engineering programs within them, with much more political sophistication than the Soviets. That said, the fact is that one heroic pope did manage to destroy one whole evil system. No less a person than Mikhail Gorbachev said that the destruction of the Soviet Union and its external influence would have been impossible without John Paul II.

¹⁵

Having recalled the seismic events of 1968, the argument to be made now is threefold: first, the attack on Christianity arose not from outside the Church, but from inside the Church. In other words, 1968 would not have been possible without certain defects and crises within the Church herself. Secondly, if we are to turn the ship of Western civilization around to face Christ again we need to fix these problems within the Church herself. Thirdly, we need to rebuild tertiary education institutions where the intellectual patrimony of the West can be taught again to a new generation of students who are growing up amidst the debris of a trashed, and in some ways mutated, Christian culture.

One work which helps to explain the Church’s own complicity in the events of 1968 is The Spirit of Vatican II: Western European Progressive Catholicism in the Long Sixties by Gerd-Rainer Horn. This work is an historical overview of western European leftist Catholicism in the long sixties (1956 to 1976). It helps to explain how some of the strongest Catholic communities in the world (for example the Dutch Church of the 1950s) could within a decade become penetrated by Marxist ideology. In 1962 there were 388 seminarians in Holland; by 1968 there were only sixty-eight. Between 1968 and 1970, four hundred Dutch priests abandoned the priesthood in order to marry.

In the first chapter Horn examines elements of Catholic theology in the 1960s which led lay and clerical leaders to see elements of the surrealist utopia as something positive. There is not space in this paper to give a detailed account of these elements, but simply to flag them. First there are the liberal readings of the Conciliar document Gaudium et spes, or what may be called the Schillebeeckxian reading rather than the Wojtyłian reading. This includes the signs of the times theme. The liberal reading of Christ’s exhortation to his apostles to read the signs of the times is that the Holy Spirit speaks through social movements. The way that Joseph Ratzinger interprets the same exhortation is to say that Christ was making an eschatological point. He was telling his apostles that they must understand that he, Christ, was the sign of their time. They must understand that they are now living in the Christian era, the era after the Incarnation and the era before the return of Christ in glory. According to Ratzinger, Christ was not telling his apostles that the Holy Spirit makes his intentions known through the claims of leaders of social movements. A second flag can be placed over liberal readings of the Conciliar document Lumen Gentium, especially its people of God theme, which has been latched upon by people wanting to foster a more Congregationalist-style ecclesiology. A further flag can be hoisted over the contributions of theologians associated with the Concilium journal, above all by the contributions of Edward Schillebeeckx and Johann Baptist Metz.

¹⁶

The second of Horn’s chapters is titled Red Priests in Working-Class Blue. It examines the influence of the worker-priest movement in France, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland. Horn draws attention to the activities of radical priest associations that sprang out of the experience of the worker-priest movement and the episcopal attempts to close them down. He makes the point that the priests who had been members of the worker-priest movement were often radicalized to such a degree that they found it easy to embrace Marxism.

The fourth chapter, however, is perhaps the most sociologically interesting insofar as it examines the strongly Christian backgrounds of the leading student radicals of the mid to late 1960s. As Horn moves from country to country citing the national student leaders who in their time were household names, their biographies reveal one after another that not only did they have strong Christian formations, but in many cases they were former seminarians.

Horn’s macro-level thesis is that a utopian, messianic dimension of Catholicism overlapped with the secular ideals of the generation of the 1960s. Messianic Catholicism and Marxism captured the imagination of a generation and these twin forces reinforced one another. The ground for this was prepared by the idea of reading the signs of the times and being open to the world, and especially by theologians like Johann-Baptist Metz who linked the concepts of salvation and liberation. In the 1960s the idea of building the kingdom of God morphed into the project of working for various types of minority liberation. From this perspective the liberation movements of the 1960s can be construed, at least in part, as secular mutations of the earlier pre-war Catholic Action projects.

¹⁷

Another most interesting academic analysis is by Julie Pagis.

¹⁸

In her research on the social backgrounds and belief systems of student leaders of 1968, Pagis notes that as many as 40 percent of those she interviewed reported having experienced a primary religious socialization, and many began their activist careers by joining a religious youth association. One of the key concepts used in Pagis’s research was the distinction between