South Texas Catholic (Corpus Christi, Tex.), Vol. 21, No. 36, Ed. 1 Friday, October 17, 1986 Page: 8 of 20
twenty pages : ill. ; page 12 x 9 in.View a full description of this newspaper.
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October 17, 1986—2
The Truth About the Sarita K. East Estate
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ed that kind of laissez-faire capitalism which has been
condemned by every pope in the last hundred years.
The desire for profit overrules their social conscience
and social justice is all too often their last concern.
But I suspect that the animosity which The Wall
Street Journal manifests toward the Catholic Church
in its pages from time to time does not arise so much
from any concern that the teachings of the Catholic
Church on socio-economic matters will have any
great impact on the market place as from something
far more insidious: anti-Catholicism. Harvard
historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. is reported by
the noted Catholic historian, Msgr. John Tracy Ellis
in his work, American Catholicism, to have told him:
“I regard prejudice against your Church as the
deepest bias in the history of the American people.”
Yale Professor Peter Viereck has said: ‘‘Catholic
baiting is the anti-semitism of the liberals.” I am not
suggesting that The Wall Street Journal is by any
stretch of the imagination a liberal publication, but
the truth is that if there is one thing that both liberal
and conservative secular publications can agree on, it
is that the institutional Roman Catholic Church is
something to be attacked whenever an opening for at-
tack presents itself.
I believe that I have shown the
underlying motivation for The Wall
Street JoumaTs editors to have been
a desire, conscious or unconscious,
to cast the institutional Church and
its leadership in the most unfavor-
able light possible while at the same
time appearing to espouse the cause
of the poor of South America and
their ‘savior, ’ Christopher Gregory.
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Sarita Kenedy East as a younger woman
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One of the best books on the subject of anti-
Catholicism available today is The Persistent Pre-
judice, Anti-Catholicism in America by Michael
Schwartz and published by Our Sunday Visitor. In
the chapter entitled “What do Anti-Catholics
Want?” Michael Schwartz indentifies the current
diverse and often mutually contradictory themes of
anti-Catholic prejudice. He explains that the anti-
Semite wants to see Jews dead, even if that
necessitates the smoke of an Auschwitz, and the
white supremacist wants to see blacks in a socio-
economic condition of servitude. He then asks the
question: “What in short, is the essence of anti-
Catholicism?”
The first common element, he says, “is that the
object of hatred for the anti-Catholic is not Catholics
as individuals, but the Church as an institution and
individual Catholics only as members of that cor-
porate body.” Schwartz points out that this is in
sharp contrast to anti-Semitism and racism, but it is
rooted in a very obvious fact: a Jew, even if he con
verts to another religion, can never stop being a Jew
and is considered by the anti-Semite to be a social
virus in human form who must be eradicated; and a
black, since it is the color of his skin which the white
supremacist finds offensive, cannot change his color
and so he must be dominated in order to allow the
white supremacist to compensate for his feelings of
inferiority. “With Catholics it is entirely different,
because Catholics have one capability which Jews
and blacks lack: they can stop being Catholic.
Schwartz says that “virtually all anti-Catholics
profess to love Catholics as individuals. Many of
them portray themselves as the true friend of the
Catholic people, seeking only to rescue them from
enslavement to Roman domination. Some would
explain that to mean rescue from domination by the
hierarchy of the Church, or from domination by
clergy. This is what you might hear both the fun-
damentalist and the secularist assert. They would
both agree that no individual Catholic is essentially
bad—they are bad to the extent that they adhere to
the Catholic Faith.
Schwartz concludes: “For all these (different types
of) anti-Catholics, the real culprit is not the poor fool
who is ensnared in Roman Catholicism, but that
massive, shadowy institution which has the temerity
to claim to be the visible communion of saints on
earth, the unique pathway to eternal life, the
authoritative teacher of what we must believe and of
how we must live. That institution is hated with an
unremitting passion, and those who lend it their obe-
dience are deserving of that same hatred. What does
the anti-Catholic want? He just wants us to stop be-
ing so Catholic.”
Michael Schwartz may have given us the key to
understanding why The Wall Street Journal would
have embraced with such ardor the person and the
cause of Christopher Gregory. “That institution is
hated with an unremitting passion, and those who
lend it their obedience are deserving of that same
hatred.” If there is one fact which characterizes the
conduct of Christopher Gregory (Brother Leo) over
the past 25 years during which he has engaged the
bishops of Corpus Christi in litigation, it is his
disobedience toward the institutional Church and its
leaders. He has defied and disobeyed popes, car-
dinals, apostolic delegates, archbishops, bishops and
abbots. That very disobedience cannot but have
endeared him to all who hate the institutional Roman
Catholic Church “with an unremitting passion.”
I believe that I have shown the underlying motiva-
tion for The Wall Street Journal’s editors to have
been a desire, conscious or unconscious, to cast the
institutional Church and its leadership in the most
unfavorable light possible while at the same time ap-
pearing to espouse the cause of the poor of South
America and their ‘savior,’ Christopher Gregory.
What I have not been able to understand and explain
is how a periodical of the standing of the Journal
could have allowed the appearance of articles so filled
with errors and falsehoods. The author of the articles
personally did research here in South Texas. In addi-
tion to his own personal research he obtained copies
of many important and relevant documents from our
Diocesan Attorney, Mr. Richard J. Hatch. Mr.
Hatch offered him every assistance in his research
and he assisted on many occasions Ms. Darla
Morgan, a reporter on the staff of the Corpus Christi
Caller, who was engaged by the reporter for The
Wall Street Journal to carry on the research in South
Texas which his duties on the Journal staff prevented
him from personally accomplishing.
That the articles which appeared in the Journal
were filled with errors and falsehoods should be
perfectly clear to any reader who will take the time to
read the analysis of some of the more glaring ex-
amples of such errors and falsehoods as set forth on
the following pages of this issue of The South Texas
Catholic.
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Freeman, Robert E. South Texas Catholic (Corpus Christi, Tex.), Vol. 21, No. 36, Ed. 1 Friday, October 17, 1986, newspaper, October 17, 1986; Corpus Christi, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth840856/m1/8/: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .