Pope Paul and Saul Alinsky . . . Who’da Thunk It?

Certainly not me.  I mean, Pope Paul VI?! the author of Humanae Vitae, which forbade Catholics from using contraception?  Seriously, how much more reactionary can one get?  (Next, you’ll be telling me that two men can marry each other!  Or that drag queens dressed as Baphomet will be reading fairy tales to children.  How absurd!)

Now that you’ve picked yourself off the floor, I can assure you –astonishing as it sounds–it’s all true.  Saul Alinsky and Archbishop Giovanni Cardinal Montinivof Milan, the future Pope Paul VI, were well-acquainted with each other.  

Don’t take my word for it.   Please take the time to watch this latest podcast from Dr. Taylor Marshall.  He lays it all out there:  how Saul Alinsky, a Jewish atheist, a “community organizer” from Chicago, and known admirer of Satan, was BFFs with Montini.

And get this:  he not only met with Montini on at least three occasions in the 1950s but bragged that if he were ever elected pope, “the drinks would be on [him] for years to come”.  

Clearly, things aren’t always as they seem.  

Marshall, of course, has written a book about the infiltration of the Catholic Church entitled Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within, about how nefarious organizations have spent the last two centuries meticulously planting moles throughout the Catholic priesthood and hierarchy.  He lays it all out chapter and verse. 

So ultimately, I guess he’s not surprised.  Me?  Very surprised.  

However, the supposed conservatism of Paul VI makes sense in a sick, twisted, Alinskyite fashion.  Unlike the violent revolutionaries of the past (e.g. Robespierre, Lenin, Mao), Alinsky had no need for bloodshed.  His approach was more subtle:  infiltrate an organization from within.  Use ostensible conservatives.  Make sure they’re presentable.  If necessary, make sure they’re compromised.  Homosexuals should fit the bill.

But whatever you do, don’t rock the boat.  Let the nice ladies know that your not one for fire-and-brimstone sermons; that you like tea and scones when you come calling.  And by all means, dress well and be soft-spoken.  Don’t be too masculine.  As another famous community organizer from Chicago said in the first of his three autobiographies, “Don’t make any sudden moves.” 

In other words, be nice, not Nicene.

And don’t let your top operatives mess with the original structure of the organization.  Like the Roman Catholics, keep your brand intact.  No need to overturn the theology or the ecclesiology whole-hog.  Be incremental.  If you feel the need to monkey around with something, undertake liturgical reforms.  When people start screaming about the new mass, tell them that it’s all in line with Vatican II.  The liturgical dancers may be a distraction but for every step forward with liturgical innovation, it’s OK to take two steps back by preaching against condoms and the birth control pill.  That way you can tell the people not to believe their lying eyes because the Catholic Church is still “traditional”.  

And so Alinsky found in Montini a man whom he could trust to transform the Catholic Church into an organization more amenable to his type of soft radicalism; all the while making sure that externally, things appeared to be pretty much the same.  Just some minor tinkering around the edges.  

Still, the mind boggles at the audacity and success of this enterprise.

I suppose the question before us as Orthodox Christians is not why we should follow Patriarch Bartholomew as he tries to hitch the Orthodox wagon to Rome’s falling star, but instead how we got here in the first place.  To be blunt:  the question is whether or not it is because some of our top people have already succumbed to the Alinsky treatment?  You know, when we keep up the appearance of being pro-life when we are told that “generally speaking our Church is pro-life”. 

After all, nobody —but nobody–would have thought that Paul VI was an ally of Saul Alinsky.  Not in a million years.  Oh sure, those pinko priests in Latin America with their “liberation theology” were but they were priests, not bishops.  Certainly not cardinals.  Anyway, it took sixty years for this to come out.

So the next time you read some Russophobic screed in some mainstream journal (or online forum) that casts aspersions on “fundamentalists”, or you watch a bishop march with known terrorists, you might want to consider the possibility that the subversion has already begun.  

And don’t say “it could never happen to us”.  Because it did happen to the most conservative institution in the Western world.