The Secular State Reinvents the Inquisition

One of my favorite books is The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.

Set in the 1930s when Mexico was still persecuting the Catholic Church (a persecution which the government of the United States consented to), the novel follows the life of a nameless “whiskey priest” who, despite being a drunk and a fornicator with an illegitimate daughter, continues to illegally minister to the people while other more reputable priests have abandoned their ministry out of fear of the punishment by the government.

The whiskey priest is lured to his doom by his sense of duty, as a request for a deathbed confession is communicated to him by a lying Judas-like figure. Despite his suspicions, the whiskey priest goes and is arrested. Sentenced to die, and denied confession by one of those priests who had abandoned ministry, we see into the whiskey priest’s thoughts for a final time in what I consider the most moving paragraph in all of literature:

What a fool he had been to think that he was strong enough to stay when others fled. What an impossible fellow I am, he thought, and how useless. I have done nothing for anybody. I might just as well have never lived. His parents were dead—soon he wouldn’t even be a memory—perhaps after all he was not at the moment afraid of damnation—even the fear of pain was in the background. He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him, at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint.

The novel ends with another fugitive priest arriving, and a young boy who had previously been a skeptic greeting him enthusiastically, having been inspired by the martyrdom of the whiskey priest.

Years ago, this novel helped convince me that I could enter seminary despite the heavy realization of my own sinfulness. In 2020, those of us who were trying to get sacraments to people despite being forbidden by tyrants certainly could identify with the sense of duty demonstrated by the whiskey priest. I know of one priest who had to remove his cassock, put on jeans, and pretend to be a grandson in order to bring the sacraments to a woman in the nursing home.

The irony in all of this, however, is that some powerful men in the Church wanted the novel placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Thankfully this would not occur, and Greene’s account of the conflict includes a useful comparison to totalitarianism:

The Archbishop of Westminster read me a letter from the Holy Office condemning my novel because it was “paradoxical” and “dealt with extraordinary circumstances.” The price of liberty, even within a Church, is eternal vigilance, but I wonder whether any of the totalitarian states…would have treated me as gently when I refused to revise the book on the casuistical ground that the copyright was in the hands of my publishers. There was no public condemnation, and the affair was allowed to drop into that peaceful oblivion which the Church wisely reserves for unimportant issues.

I’d like to suggest that understanding the use (and abuse) of the religious impulse to limit what type of content an adherent consumes can help us to understand the wave of censorship which has taken hold in the West, especially with respect to what began in 2020.

Censorship as a Function of Religion

It might surprise some readers that a work of fiction could merit the attention of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. In reality, the Church has always asserted that some works, even works of fiction, can be so injurious to faith or morals that the faithful should be forbidden from reading them.

For example, if a work was determined to be derisive of religion, subversive of the hierarchy, blasphemous, or dangerous to morals then it would be appropriately censured. Indeed, the system of theological censure used by the church has always broken the censures down into three groups: “(1) the import, or (2) the expression, or (3) the consequences.”

The first set of censures pertains to propositions which are considered to be untrue. The second set involves things that may or may not be true, but are ambiguously or poorly worded so as to have the risk of causing a person to believe untrue things. Finally, in the third set, we have those things mentioned above that could be deemed harmful to faith or morals regardless of being true, untrue, or even fictional.  

Note that censuring of fiction based upon religious principles was at one point very popular in American culture. Movie producers would try to avoid getting a C rating (Condemned) from the Catholic Legion of Decency, and outside of Catholic circles, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America would be formed and would implement the Hays Code. The system of self-censorship arose out of a sense that informal religious censorship was preferable to formal federal censorship.

Returning to Greene’s book, the reason why a devoted Catholic might be uncomfortable with the plot of his book is evident; the priests depicted in it are not holy. On the one side, we have a priest beset by addiction and unchastity and yet continues in his meager attempts at providing the sacraments. On the other side we have a priest whose only vice is his cowardice, first with regard to possible punishment from the government and then later to his domineering wife whom he has taken in order to avoid that punishment. 

This does not establish a justification for censuring the book, however. The hero of the book admits he would have been happier having been a saint. Despite his sins, God uses him for the glory of his Church, which is made clear will survive even this dark moment. If this story merits being forbidden, then even more does the real story of St. Andrew Wouters, a Dutch priest whose last words before martyrdom were “”Fornicator I always was; heretic I never was.”

I’d like to suggest that the impulse to excessive censoriousness with respect to Greene’s book was a symptom of extreme institutional unhealth. Battered by many black legends that were false and aware of many moral failures by the clergy that were true, an impulse to protect the Catholic faith of the laity by only allowing the clergy to be depicted in a superficial and pollyannaish manner was as understandable as it was dysfunctional. 

Indeed, in 2008 Phil Lawler would write a book that would simultaneously explain and condemn this phenomenon in the Church as well as demonstrate it: The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture. In this book, Phil shows that institutional corruption preceded the sex abuse scandal by decades, and that the only real solution is for the bishops to “demonstrate a willingness to speak out—not to protect their own status or to polish their public image, but to tell the truth, rally the faithful, and spread the Gospel.”

At least in one case, the response to the book demonstrates the very point. The rector of the Basilica of the National Shrine pulled the book from the shelves of its bookstore and canceled a book signing, saying: “I don’t know if it fosters healing and reconciliation. I thought it contributed to greater breaking down of the church, rather than building it up.” 

Phil’s response makes it clear why this is an abuse of religious authority rather than a justified attempt to censure: “If you have a serious medical problem, you can’t expect to heal it by pretending it’s not there. So too with the Church. If we haven’t addressed the root causes of the scandal—the argument of The Faithful Departed—you can’t expect authentic healing and recovery.”

As with Greene’s book, I observe that only a Church that is experiencing institutional crisis and disease would feel moved to censure.

Comparison to Censorship by the Regime

It appears to me that our secular regime has either stolen or reinvented the system of theological censure for its own purposes. Consider the following three terms, which as near as I can tell began to be used prominently around 2022:

Disinformation: “false or inaccurate information that is intentionally spread to mislead and manipulate people, often to make money, cause trouble, or gain influence.” This is the act of spreading heresy.

Misinformation: “defined as false, incomplete, inaccurate/misleading information or content which is generally shared by people who do not realize that it is false or misleading.” Note that something does not need to be false for it to be labeled misinformation; if it can be interpreted in such a way that it might lead someone to commit heresy that is enough. Hence the existence of fact-checks that claim that “context is needed.”

Malinformation: “refers to information that is based on truth (though it may be exaggerated or presented out of context) but is shared with the intent to attack an idea, individual, organization, group, country or other entity.” This is the truly terrifying term, as anything that might make you doubt the government, those in power, or officially released narratives would merit being censured as “malinformation.” 

When the Church uses theological censure properly, the motivating concern is the salvation of souls; forbidding books or movies were about limiting near occasions of loss of faith or commission of grave sin. When the Church abuses theological censure, it is to protect the public image of the institution and its leaders. By placing the books by Greene and Lawler under suspicion of being “malinformation,” certain clerics were doing the latter.

A government, however, is not a religion. Faith in one’s government is not salvific. A government has no right to faith in it; indeed, a healthy level of skepticism towards the state is in the Founding Document of the United States of America:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that their Creator endows them with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

No doubt the British would have liked to censor the Declaration of Independence as “malinformation” which would be removed from Facebook and LinkedIn!

We should be utterly horrified that our leaders are behaving as if the government is a metaphysical necessity in the manner of true religion, as if loss of faith or confidence in it is the worst possible outcome. The excessive classification of the activities of our government is troubling enough, but with the censorship activities that even Mark Zuckerberg admits has happened, it is now abundantly evident that the people in control and in power are actively subverting and bypassing the “consent of the governed.” 

It is impossible for the people to give consent when they don’t know what is actually happening in DC and any attempt to inform them is censored.

These are abuses and usurpations trending in the direction of despotism.

A Challenge for the New Trump Administration

The only way to restore and maintain confidence in the United States federal government is to risk losing it. Therefore, I offer the following unsolicited advice to the incoming administration:

Declassify every “dirty secret.” Let sunshine dispel the darkness. Every lie, every crime, every coverup must be revealed. The documents regarding the Kennedy assassination would merely be a start. Release every single thing the intelligence community was involved in regarding Covid without redaction. The more your gut tells you that releasing it would be shocking, the more it needs to be revealed immediately!

Our government has behaved like a religion with a very sick institutional culture for far too long and has been engaged in censorship that the Inquisition only could have dreamed of on its worst day.

As a result, our new leaders and appointees need Phil Lawler’s advice even more: “demonstrate a willingness to speak out—not to protect [your] own status or to polish [your] public image!”