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The Truth Shall Make You Free: Catholicism and the CIA

139 points by 1cvmask 5y ago

ThinkBeat 5y ago
I feel the introduction via a critique of Trump is an odd choice. These days it seems required in some publications. (no matter what the topic is). It is -not. that I am defending Trump. It is that I dont particularly see the reason to give him more of the spotlight and the mindshare than he seeks and wants. History does have its place and we should not forget. Nor should he be obsessed over.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  It's interesting how some political personalities massively outlive their actual political careers. Here in the UK Thatcher's ghost still haunts many political discussions even in the present day on both the right and left, I suspect Trump will take a similarly long time to fade away into the background noise of both his supporters and detractors. This is one of the reasons I'm not a fan of personality politics and the increasingly presidential style of leadership in the UK. A person's ideas are what's important, and personality politics distracts people from the ideas in favour of what's effectively celebrity gossip.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > This is one of the reasons I'm not a fan of personality politics and the increasingly presidential style of leadership in the UK. A person's ideas are what's important, and personality politics distracts people from the ideas in favour of what's effectively celebrity gossip. That's why Johnson is doing it, and it's hugely effective.
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
      His strategy is definitely very media-centric rather than ideology-centric which in my opinion is really dangerous because it gives undue power to the likes of potentially malovelent actors, traditionally this would be press moguls like Rupert Murdoch but increasingly this means social media companies too. You can trust an ideologue to follow their ideology even off the edge of a cliff but someone buffeted about on the winds of short-term popularity is unpredictable and prone to making bad choices on the basis of "we must do something rather than nothing or we'll lose popularity => x is something => let's do x quickly and skip the checks and balances". Populism and media-centric politics is a Faustian pact in my opinion, the baying crowd that got you into power can easily turn on you in a heartbeat. Just look at Blair, once the people's champion and now his name is less than dirt among the very "Mondeo Men" he once courted to get into power. I'm not sure how we can make democracy less personality-based and more principle-based, but I think less centralised traditional and social media industries would be a good start.
      - pjc50 5y ago
        > traditionally this would be press moguls like Rupert Murdoch It's important to remember that Johnson's Telegraph salary was about twice that of his PM salary: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/oct/03/daily-telegraph-rehires-boris-johnson-on-275000-salary https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/oct/03/daily-teleg... (he was eventually forced to give this up) He's a media man who has a second job as PM, not the other way round, and the conservative party has little will of its own other than what the rightwing press tell it to do. Blair has a personal relationship with Rupert Murdoch, which he rode to power: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14785501 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14785501 - and an even more personal relationship with his wife Wendi Deng.
  - Zigurd 5y ago
    [flagged]
1cvmask 5y ago
One of the great parts in the article on how to manufacture consent for war using celebrities and humanitarian calls: Central to the CIA’s use of Catholicism was a man named Tom Dooley. Though the name is largely obscure today, in 1961 he placed third in Gallup’s “Most Esteemed” man in the world poll. Dooley was a Navy doctor who provided care for South Vietnamese refugees fleeing the chaos after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. His 1956 best seller Deliver Us from Evil, as well as countless articles and media appearances afterward, “justified American intervention in Vietnam and presented Vietnamese Catholics as sympathetic subjects.” He was a central-casting missionary, and the persecuted Vietnamese were precisely the kinds of people Christ charged Catholics to serve. But he was writing CIA-sponsored propaganda to build domestic support for Vietnam, and his stories weren’t “strictly speaking, true.” - And the Edward Snowden of the CIA of that era Philip Agee: But the Tlatelolco student massacre in Mexico City in 1968, in which he felt the CIA was complicit, was his Damascene moment. Agee had begun to immerse himself in the leftist Catholic liberation theology movement sweeping Latin America: “I became the servant of the capitalism I rejected. I became one of its secret policemen. The CIA, after all, is nothing more than the secret police of American capitalism.” Agee didn’t just quit. He moved to Cuba for a time to do “research,” and then, from his residence in the United Kingdom, wrote and published Inside the Company (1975), one of the first books by a former officer to air the CIA’s dirty laundry. But, controversially, he went further: in the book, Agee actually revealed the names of hundreds of active CIA officers and agents. “One way to neutralize the CIA’s support to repression,” he wrote at the time, “is to expose its officers so that their presence in foreign countries becomes untenable.”
- bradrn 5y ago
  I should note that these are direct quotes from the article. (I didn’t notice at first.)
- drran 5y ago
  So, how to manufacture consent for war?
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    You always justify it with something the people you need to support you deeply believe. For instance, in Brazil, we went through a coup and elected a fascist because most people really believe the previous two governments were corrupt and would implement a communist dictatorship given time. The fact they are not measurably more or less corrupt than their predecessors, that they formed a coalition with Center-right parties in order to govern, and that their platform is timidly social democratic were, and continue to be, largely ignored. To the point that now, after more than 600 thousand avoidable deaths, unprecedented unemployment, countless corruption scandals directly connected to him, and the worst economic crisis since the 90’s, only 58% support his impeachment.
eternalban 5y ago
[flagged]
yeetaccount2 5y ago
I can’t help but feel like this article (and a lot of articles written these days) feel like they’re building up to something but end up finishing abruptly and not really going anywhere. Kind of like a TV show that wants to hook viewers, but the writers don’t know where to take it after season 1.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  This article felt pretty consistent to me, but I wonder if you aren't looking at it in term of a call to action, some practical advice, or trying to reach a simple conclusion. I feel these kind of articles are harder to sell (we step outside of the fact based approach, right into beliefs and opinions). There is also the issue of most of these call to action and opinions getting buried pretty fast by virtue of ours current media system, as more often than not the conclusion is pretty brutal and disturbing to a majority of people.
- tareqak 5y ago
  It's a book review: if they told you everything, then you would be less inclined to buy the book.
  - unknown_apostle 5y ago
    No it's actually two book reviews, mixed up with the reviewer's own convoluted and confused mind map regarding the words "Catholic" and "CIA".
- ramatmabrek 5y ago
  That's because it completely leaves out the guerrilla in the room and instead spends the entire article discussing the mouse behind the radiator and the fly in the trash can.
  - pugworthy 5y ago
tptacek 5y ago
The Catholicism in this piece seems tacked-on; it has much more to do with the Philip Agee phenomenon, and with criticism (no doubt well founded) of the CIA's Cold War role as an instigator of war. Agee, ironically, was turned in part by his experience of the oppression of Catholic liberation theologists in Central America.
motohagiography 5y ago
Seems odd to talk about the early and pre-CIA (OSS) without mentioning one its most influential academic writers who is on almost every university syllabus today, and whose work essentially founded the movements that produced everything from Alinsky to intersectionality by studying and adapting the soviet and other european methods, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse Trumpism was a reaction to perceived cultural nihilism, which the CIA has earned popular credit for producing in its role as the O.G. american "deep state." Catholicism has always been state religion, so the base rate of anyone in govt being Catholic was already pretty high in those earlier years and I'd probably not attribute much to it. If you wanted to look at peculiar religious influence on the U.S. intelligence community, I've been told by other contractors that Mormonism has an unusual representation cluster though. However, the interesting bit of Catholicism that lends itself to an organization like the CIA would be the Jesuits, who have been the butt of conspiracy theories since their founding, but also run an old network of elite schools and are considered the Vatican brain trust.
- LogonType10 5y ago
  >However, the interesting bit of Catholicism that lends itself to an organization like the CIA would be the Jesuits, who have been the butt of conspiracy theories since their founding, but also run an old network of elite schools and are considered the Vatican brain trust. Do you have any evidence to back that up?
  - TheMonarchist 5y ago
    I'm not quite sure what exactly you want backed up (nor did I write that), but from the top of my head https://www.chick.com/information/article-listing?subject=catholicism https://www.chick.com/information/article-listing?subject=ca... might answer your question to some extent.
    - ginko 5y ago
      You seriously link chick.com, from the author of Chick Tracts[1] as an authoritative source on Catholicism? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_tract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_tract
nimbius 5y ago
>its flawed understanding of Catholicism led to some of its greatest debacles, including the failure to see the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Daily reminder: the CIA directly and intentionally funded and fomented the rise of islamic fundamentalism in order to counter Soviet interests in Afghanistan through the Mujaheddin in 1976. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone to say the CIA just "misunderstood" religion is outright disinformation.
- remarkEon 5y ago
  >we literally praised and exhalted the Mujaheddin in a Rambo movie I thought this was a photoshop and wasn't actually in the film?
  - reducesuffering 5y ago
    Correct
  - Intermernet 5y ago
    The script to Rambo 3 has three mentions of Mujaheddin in it. Two of them are in the following section: "What you see here, are the Mujahedin soldiers, holy warriors. To us, this war is a holy war. And there is no true death for a Mujahedin, because we have taken our last nights, and because we consider us already dead. To us, death for our land and God is an honor. So, my friend, what we must do is to stop this killing of our women and children. If getting this man free, so he can tell to the free world, and tell what happens here, is necessary then of course we will help." I'm not sure if that's praising or exalting, but it wasn't damning in the context of the movie. My favourite (and probably most prescient and ironic) quote from the movie is: "You can't defeat a people like that. We tried. We already had our Vietnam! Now you're gonna have yours!"
  - pjc50 5y ago
    The specific message is indeed a photoshop, but the film was broadly pro-Mujaheddin as it was anti-Soviet. As was The Living Daylights, in which the Mujaheddin led by an Oxford-educated Afghan help James Bond destroy a rogue Soviet drug-running operation.
Animats 5y ago
I had no idea Catholicism was becoming more influential, or that it had an extreme right-wing branch. But apparently it does.[1] [1] https://www.lifesitenews.com https://www.lifesitenews.com
- ajvs 5y ago
  [flagged]
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Every religious movement has its extremists.
- Datagenerator 5y ago
  Her willingness to be used by the kings of the earth is mentioned in Revelations but that relationship ends disastrous: "And the ten horns that you saw and the wild beast, these will hate the prostitute and will make her devastated and naked, and they will eat up her flesh and completely burn her with fire." ( Rev. 17:16 )
- mjfl 5y ago
  The adjective "extreme" is being thrown around a little readily these days. I would save it for those who carry out organized, intentionally violent attacks to achieve their goals, and not those who read pro life news.
  - trasz 5y ago
    Using all available means to strip a particular group of their rights because of their gender or orientation is not extremism to you?
    - mjfl 5y ago
      You are projecting.
deleted 5y ago
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RNCTX 5y ago
[flagged]
8bitsrule 5y ago
2007 Agee in Counterpunch, "The Descent of the US; the Rise of Latin America" https://web.archive.org/web/20070317212930/https://www.counterpunch.org/agee03142007.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070317212930/https://www.count... I heard Agee talk (not a lecture) to students for an hour at a college in 1987. Far from hyperbolic, he was a decent, square-shooter personality. I distinctly recall his saying (paraphrase) that 'they are planning to turn the US into another Latin America'. I remember that because it kept explaining a lot of what was going on. And still does. Edit: A response to 'Drop of Treason' in Covert Action (May 25, 2021) [https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/05/25/new-book-that-tries-to-brand-cia-whistleblower-philip-agee-as-a-traitor-winds-up-proving-exactly-the-opposite/ https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/05/25/new-book-that-tr...]
trabant00 5y ago
A: Analytics indicates a clear interest in health and toothpaste, do we have anybody working on that? B: Not at the moment but we could have C write something. C: What about toothpaste and health? B sighs: Now that is YOUR job, isn't it? C: Ok, but do we know something new about toothpaste, have you seen any new study or ... B: Find the damn studies! If there aren't any just suggest we don't really know how healthy it is, find something about the fluoride industry, there must be some dirt in there. C: So you want me to suggest it isn't healthy? B: Of course not! Just make sound like it's complicated. C: Sorry B, I really need some help with this, I have no idea how to title it or introduce it since I don't know where I should be going with this. A: Analytics still show a big interest in big T, surely big T brushes his teeth, doesn't he? C: Thank you, I know how to start. C leaves. A: That's why they pay me the big bucks. B: You just can't find competent people any more.
taxyz23 5y ago
Reads like something from the Know Nothing party[1]. Lots of broad characterizations without much support and several internal contradictions, referring to Catholics of different political persuasions..What exactly is the thesis other than a strong anti-Catholicism? . While the article is ostensibly about the CIA, the swipe at the Supreme court at the end gives his biases away.The fact simply is that Catholics of various political persuasions from JFK to John Brennan to Scalia became more prominent in American government as the descendants of poor Irish, Italian, and German Catholics became better educated. Do we really want to descend back to the days when a group of a certain ethnic or religious persuasion can be targeted as a secret cabal of conspirators behind every door? [1]https://www.britannica.com/topic/Know-Nothing-party https://www.britannica.com/topic/Know-Nothing-party
- trasz 5y ago
  „Secret”? Getting rid of Catholic regime was one of the cornerstones of western civilization, a prerequisite for Human Rights.
  - skissane 5y ago
    That’s deeply ahistorical, given that early Protestantism had scarcely more tolerance for diversity of thought than the Catholicism of the same period did. In the Reformation period (1517-1555 or 1648, depending on one’s periodisation choices), the majority of both Protestants and Catholics agreed that the government had the right to impose one version of Christianity on the population and prohibit (with force, even capital punishment) any competing versions of it (to say nothing of non-Christian religions or non-religion), their chief disagreement was over which version of Christianity the state should so impose, whether Catholicism or some version of Protestantism – and Protestants often displayed as much intolerance for competing versions of Protestantism as Catholics and Protestants displayed for each other. Whereas today, both the Catholic Church and the vast majority of Protestant churches officially agree that religious freedom is an important value that every government ought to respect. And how they both got from rejecting religious freedom to embracing it is a complicated story, but I think one should avoid overly simplistic versions of it (such as ones in which all the heroes are Protestant and all the villains are Catholic)
aoetalks 5y ago
This article doesn’t provide much substance, other than listing directors that were Catholic and a rouge Agent who also happened to be Catholic. I was expecting a revelation but sadly this just seems like a clickbait title at worst, and a brief history of leadership affiliations at best.
- Trombone12 5y ago
  It's a book review, and the title references the subject of the books. If one book gets more attention than the other you can probably conclude that it was the more interesting one.
unknown_apostle 5y ago
This article seems to be coming from 5 directions at once and I genuinely fail to bring it all together. I see a huge enumeration of various catholic laypeople. Do these people represent the supernatural Catholic Church, the Vatican or the magisterium? And who are these “right-wing bishops appointed by Popes John Paul II and Benedict”? Are there many of these or just a few? What is their exact relationship to the CIA, if any? And how does Trump (following a peculiar “prosperity gospel”) fit into all of this? What is the relation to the Second Vatican Council? What is the connection between a Church Council and the CIA? Does being conservative in liturgical and theological issues make you a political right winger? Is it related to being “impervious to facts”? Could we replace “Catholic Church” with “Hollywood” or “shoe industry” and get a similar article? Help me out here.
- thyrsus 5y ago
  It would have better reflected reality had the article included Sonya Sotomayor in the list of Catholic Supreme Court justices.
bobthechef 5y ago
[flagged]
stevespang 5y ago
Note that the most "involved" religious group of the illegal migration through our crazy Open Southern Borders - - no covid testing, massive amounts of illegal drug traffic coming in - - are American Catholics offering free shelter and transport to them. These illegals are expected to likely vote democratic and contribute to local Catholic churches in the future . . .
photochemsyn 5y ago
It's very interesting how religious organizations behaved over the course of the 20th century with respect to the rise of communism and fascism and the post WWII Cold War. One of the more interesting episodes revolves around the Spanish Civil War, involving Franco and the Catholic Church and its strange little subgroup, Opus Dei. That story remains shrouded in mystery (the whole Franco-Pius-Hitler-Mussolini connection is probably why, see "Hitler's Pope" by John Cornwell, 1999). Other investigations have revealed the following [1]: > Since World War II, the CIA has: > Subsidized a Catholic lay organization that served as the political slugging arm of the pope and the Vatican throughout the Cold War; > Penetrated the American section of one of the wealthiest and most powerful Vatican orders; > Passed money to a large number of priests and bishops — some of whom became witting agents in CIA covert operations; > Employed undercover operatives to lobby members of the Curia (the Vatican government) and spy on liberal churchmen on the pope’s staff who challenged the political assumptions of the United States; > Prepared intelligence briefings that accurately predicted the rise of liberation theology; and > Collaborated with right-wing Catholic groups to counter the actions of progressive clerics in Latin America. [1] Mother Jones 1983 Martin A. Lee "The CIA and the Vatican’s Intelligence Apparatus" This all foreshadows (and is concurrent with) the CIA's dalliance with violent Islamic groups as a counter to the Godless Commies, from involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood as an anti-Nasser force in Egypt (1950s) onwards, most notably in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but it's a common theme. It's a pretty sordid history, with disastrous consequences (i.e. 9/11 etc.).
jjk166 5y ago
Several cherry picked members of the CIA and the more general US government all happen to belong to the largest single religion in the US. What a surprise.

139 points by 1cvmask 5y ago

I feel the introduction via a critique of Trump is an odd choice. These days it seems required in some publications. (no matter what the topic is). It is -not. that I am defending Trump. It is that I dont particularly see the reason to give him more of the spotlight and the mindshare than he seeks and wants. History does have its place and we should not forget. Nor should he be obsessed over.

BoxOfRain 5y ago
It's interesting how some political personalities massively outlive their actual political careers. Here in the UK Thatcher's ghost still haunts many political discussions even in the present day on both the right and left, I suspect Trump will take a similarly long time to fade away into the background noise of both his supporters and detractors. This is one of the reasons I'm not a fan of personality politics and the increasingly presidential style of leadership in the UK. A person's ideas are what's important, and personality politics distracts people from the ideas in favour of what's effectively celebrity gossip.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > This is one of the reasons I'm not a fan of personality politics and the increasingly presidential style of leadership in the UK. A person's ideas are what's important, and personality politics distracts people from the ideas in favour of what's effectively celebrity gossip. That's why Johnson is doing it, and it's hugely effective.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    His strategy is definitely very media-centric rather than ideology-centric which in my opinion is really dangerous because it gives undue power to the likes of potentially malovelent actors, traditionally this would be press moguls like Rupert Murdoch but increasingly this means social media companies too. You can trust an ideologue to follow their ideology even off the edge of a cliff but someone buffeted about on the winds of short-term popularity is unpredictable and prone to making bad choices on the basis of "we must do something rather than nothing or we'll lose popularity => x is something => let's do x quickly and skip the checks and balances". Populism and media-centric politics is a Faustian pact in my opinion, the baying crowd that got you into power can easily turn on you in a heartbeat. Just look at Blair, once the people's champion and now his name is less than dirt among the very "Mondeo Men" he once courted to get into power. I'm not sure how we can make democracy less personality-based and more principle-based, but I think less centralised traditional and social media industries would be a good start.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      > traditionally this would be press moguls like Rupert Murdoch It's important to remember that Johnson's Telegraph salary was about twice that of his PM salary: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/oct/03/daily-telegraph-rehires-boris-johnson-on-275000-salary https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/oct/03/daily-teleg... (he was eventually forced to give this up) He's a media man who has a second job as PM, not the other way round, and the conservative party has little will of its own other than what the rightwing press tell it to do. Blair has a personal relationship with Rupert Murdoch, which he rode to power: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14785501 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14785501 - and an even more personal relationship with his wife Wendi Deng.
- Zigurd 5y ago
  [flagged]

1cvmask 5y ago

One of the great parts in the article on how to manufacture consent for war using celebrities and humanitarian calls: Central to the CIA’s use of Catholicism was a man named Tom Dooley. Though the name is largely obscure today, in 1961 he placed third in Gallup’s “Most Esteemed” man in the world poll. Dooley was a Navy doctor who provided care for South Vietnamese refugees fleeing the chaos after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. His 1956 best seller Deliver Us from Evil, as well as countless articles and media appearances afterward, “justified American intervention in Vietnam and presented Vietnamese Catholics as sympathetic subjects.” He was a central-casting missionary, and the persecuted Vietnamese were precisely the kinds of people Christ charged Catholics to serve. But he was writing CIA-sponsored propaganda to build domestic support for Vietnam, and his stories weren’t “strictly speaking, true.” - And the Edward Snowden of the CIA of that era Philip Agee: But the Tlatelolco student massacre in Mexico City in 1968, in which he felt the CIA was complicit, was his Damascene moment. Agee had begun to immerse himself in the leftist Catholic liberation theology movement sweeping Latin America: “I became the servant of the capitalism I rejected. I became one of its secret policemen. The CIA, after all, is nothing more than the secret police of American capitalism.” Agee didn’t just quit. He moved to Cuba for a time to do “research,” and then, from his residence in the United Kingdom, wrote and published Inside the Company (1975), one of the first books by a former officer to air the CIA’s dirty laundry. But, controversially, he went further: in the book, Agee actually revealed the names of hundreds of active CIA officers and agents. “One way to neutralize the CIA’s support to repression,” he wrote at the time, “is to expose its officers so that their presence in foreign countries becomes untenable.”

bradrn 5y ago
I should note that these are direct quotes from the article. (I didn’t notice at first.)
drran 5y ago
So, how to manufacture consent for war?
- rbanffy 5y ago
  You always justify it with something the people you need to support you deeply believe. For instance, in Brazil, we went through a coup and elected a fascist because most people really believe the previous two governments were corrupt and would implement a communist dictatorship given time. The fact they are not measurably more or less corrupt than their predecessors, that they formed a coalition with Center-right parties in order to govern, and that their platform is timidly social democratic were, and continue to be, largely ignored. To the point that now, after more than 600 thousand avoidable deaths, unprecedented unemployment, countless corruption scandals directly connected to him, and the worst economic crisis since the 90’s, only 58% support his impeachment.

eternalban 5y ago

[flagged]

yeetaccount2 5y ago

I can’t help but feel like this article (and a lot of articles written these days) feel like they’re building up to something but end up finishing abruptly and not really going anywhere. Kind of like a TV show that wants to hook viewers, but the writers don’t know where to take it after season 1.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
makeitdouble 5y ago
This article felt pretty consistent to me, but I wonder if you aren't looking at it in term of a call to action, some practical advice, or trying to reach a simple conclusion. I feel these kind of articles are harder to sell (we step outside of the fact based approach, right into beliefs and opinions). There is also the issue of most of these call to action and opinions getting buried pretty fast by virtue of ours current media system, as more often than not the conclusion is pretty brutal and disturbing to a majority of people.
tareqak 5y ago
It's a book review: if they told you everything, then you would be less inclined to buy the book.
- unknown_apostle 5y ago
  No it's actually two book reviews, mixed up with the reviewer's own convoluted and confused mind map regarding the words "Catholic" and "CIA".
ramatmabrek 5y ago
That's because it completely leaves out the guerrilla in the room and instead spends the entire article discussing the mouse behind the radiator and the fly in the trash can.
- pugworthy 5y ago

tptacek 5y ago

The Catholicism in this piece seems tacked-on; it has much more to do with the Philip Agee phenomenon, and with criticism (no doubt well founded) of the CIA's Cold War role as an instigator of war. Agee, ironically, was turned in part by his experience of the oppression of Catholic liberation theologists in Central America.

motohagiography 5y ago

Seems odd to talk about the early and pre-CIA (OSS) without mentioning one its most influential academic writers who is on almost every university syllabus today, and whose work essentially founded the movements that produced everything from Alinsky to intersectionality by studying and adapting the soviet and other european methods, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse Trumpism was a reaction to perceived cultural nihilism, which the CIA has earned popular credit for producing in its role as the O.G. american "deep state." Catholicism has always been state religion, so the base rate of anyone in govt being Catholic was already pretty high in those earlier years and I'd probably not attribute much to it. If you wanted to look at peculiar religious influence on the U.S. intelligence community, I've been told by other contractors that Mormonism has an unusual representation cluster though. However, the interesting bit of Catholicism that lends itself to an organization like the CIA would be the Jesuits, who have been the butt of conspiracy theories since their founding, but also run an old network of elite schools and are considered the Vatican brain trust.

LogonType10 5y ago
>However, the interesting bit of Catholicism that lends itself to an organization like the CIA would be the Jesuits, who have been the butt of conspiracy theories since their founding, but also run an old network of elite schools and are considered the Vatican brain trust. Do you have any evidence to back that up?
- TheMonarchist 5y ago
  I'm not quite sure what exactly you want backed up (nor did I write that), but from the top of my head https://www.chick.com/information/article-listing?subject=catholicism https://www.chick.com/information/article-listing?subject=ca... might answer your question to some extent.
  - ginko 5y ago
    You seriously link chick.com, from the author of Chick Tracts[1] as an authoritative source on Catholicism? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_tract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_tract

nimbius 5y ago

>its flawed understanding of Catholicism led to some of its greatest debacles, including the failure to see the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Daily reminder: the CIA directly and intentionally funded and fomented the rise of islamic fundamentalism in order to counter Soviet interests in Afghanistan through the Mujaheddin in 1976. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone to say the CIA just "misunderstood" religion is outright disinformation.

remarkEon 5y ago
>we literally praised and exhalted the Mujaheddin in a Rambo movie I thought this was a photoshop and wasn't actually in the film?
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  Correct
- Intermernet 5y ago
  The script to Rambo 3 has three mentions of Mujaheddin in it. Two of them are in the following section: "What you see here, are the Mujahedin soldiers, holy warriors. To us, this war is a holy war. And there is no true death for a Mujahedin, because we have taken our last nights, and because we consider us already dead. To us, death for our land and God is an honor. So, my friend, what we must do is to stop this killing of our women and children. If getting this man free, so he can tell to the free world, and tell what happens here, is necessary then of course we will help." I'm not sure if that's praising or exalting, but it wasn't damning in the context of the movie. My favourite (and probably most prescient and ironic) quote from the movie is: "You can't defeat a people like that. We tried. We already had our Vietnam! Now you're gonna have yours!"
- pjc50 5y ago
  The specific message is indeed a photoshop, but the film was broadly pro-Mujaheddin as it was anti-Soviet. As was The Living Daylights, in which the Mujaheddin led by an Oxford-educated Afghan help James Bond destroy a rogue Soviet drug-running operation.

Animats 5y ago

I had no idea Catholicism was becoming more influential, or that it had an extreme right-wing branch. But apparently it does.[1] [1] https://www.lifesitenews.com https://www.lifesitenews.com

ajvs 5y ago
[flagged]
jacquesm 5y ago
Every religious movement has its extremists.
Datagenerator 5y ago
Her willingness to be used by the kings of the earth is mentioned in Revelations but that relationship ends disastrous: "And the ten horns that you saw and the wild beast, these will hate the prostitute and will make her devastated and naked, and they will eat up her flesh and completely burn her with fire." ( Rev. 17:16 )
mjfl 5y ago
The adjective "extreme" is being thrown around a little readily these days. I would save it for those who carry out organized, intentionally violent attacks to achieve their goals, and not those who read pro life news.
- trasz 5y ago
  Using all available means to strip a particular group of their rights because of their gender or orientation is not extremism to you?
  - mjfl 5y ago
    You are projecting.

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RNCTX 5y ago

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8bitsrule 5y ago

2007 Agee in Counterpunch, "The Descent of the US; the Rise of Latin America" https://web.archive.org/web/20070317212930/https://www.counterpunch.org/agee03142007.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070317212930/https://www.count... I heard Agee talk (not a lecture) to students for an hour at a college in 1987. Far from hyperbolic, he was a decent, square-shooter personality. I distinctly recall his saying (paraphrase) that 'they are planning to turn the US into another Latin America'. I remember that because it kept explaining a lot of what was going on. And still does. Edit: A response to 'Drop of Treason' in Covert Action (May 25, 2021) [https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/05/25/new-book-that-tries-to-brand-cia-whistleblower-philip-agee-as-a-traitor-winds-up-proving-exactly-the-opposite/ https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/05/25/new-book-that-tr...]

trabant00 5y ago

A: Analytics indicates a clear interest in health and toothpaste, do we have anybody working on that? B: Not at the moment but we could have C write something. C: What about toothpaste and health? B sighs: Now that is YOUR job, isn't it? C: Ok, but do we know something new about toothpaste, have you seen any new study or ... B: Find the damn studies! If there aren't any just suggest we don't really know how healthy it is, find something about the fluoride industry, there must be some dirt in there. C: So you want me to suggest it isn't healthy? B: Of course not! Just make sound like it's complicated. C: Sorry B, I really need some help with this, I have no idea how to title it or introduce it since I don't know where I should be going with this. A: Analytics still show a big interest in big T, surely big T brushes his teeth, doesn't he? C: Thank you, I know how to start. C leaves. A: That's why they pay me the big bucks. B: You just can't find competent people any more.

taxyz23 5y ago

Reads like something from the Know Nothing party[1]. Lots of broad characterizations without much support and several internal contradictions, referring to Catholics of different political persuasions..What exactly is the thesis other than a strong anti-Catholicism? . While the article is ostensibly about the CIA, the swipe at the Supreme court at the end gives his biases away.The fact simply is that Catholics of various political persuasions from JFK to John Brennan to Scalia became more prominent in American government as the descendants of poor Irish, Italian, and German Catholics became better educated. Do we really want to descend back to the days when a group of a certain ethnic or religious persuasion can be targeted as a secret cabal of conspirators behind every door? [1]https://www.britannica.com/topic/Know-Nothing-party https://www.britannica.com/topic/Know-Nothing-party

trasz 5y ago
„Secret”? Getting rid of Catholic regime was one of the cornerstones of western civilization, a prerequisite for Human Rights.
- skissane 5y ago
  That’s deeply ahistorical, given that early Protestantism had scarcely more tolerance for diversity of thought than the Catholicism of the same period did. In the Reformation period (1517-1555 or 1648, depending on one’s periodisation choices), the majority of both Protestants and Catholics agreed that the government had the right to impose one version of Christianity on the population and prohibit (with force, even capital punishment) any competing versions of it (to say nothing of non-Christian religions or non-religion), their chief disagreement was over which version of Christianity the state should so impose, whether Catholicism or some version of Protestantism – and Protestants often displayed as much intolerance for competing versions of Protestantism as Catholics and Protestants displayed for each other. Whereas today, both the Catholic Church and the vast majority of Protestant churches officially agree that religious freedom is an important value that every government ought to respect. And how they both got from rejecting religious freedom to embracing it is a complicated story, but I think one should avoid overly simplistic versions of it (such as ones in which all the heroes are Protestant and all the villains are Catholic)

aoetalks 5y ago

This article doesn’t provide much substance, other than listing directors that were Catholic and a rouge Agent who also happened to be Catholic. I was expecting a revelation but sadly this just seems like a clickbait title at worst, and a brief history of leadership affiliations at best.

Trombone12 5y ago
It's a book review, and the title references the subject of the books. If one book gets more attention than the other you can probably conclude that it was the more interesting one.

unknown_apostle 5y ago

This article seems to be coming from 5 directions at once and I genuinely fail to bring it all together. I see a huge enumeration of various catholic laypeople. Do these people represent the supernatural Catholic Church, the Vatican or the magisterium? And who are these “right-wing bishops appointed by Popes John Paul II and Benedict”? Are there many of these or just a few? What is their exact relationship to the CIA, if any? And how does Trump (following a peculiar “prosperity gospel”) fit into all of this? What is the relation to the Second Vatican Council? What is the connection between a Church Council and the CIA? Does being conservative in liturgical and theological issues make you a political right winger? Is it related to being “impervious to facts”? Could we replace “Catholic Church” with “Hollywood” or “shoe industry” and get a similar article? Help me out here.

thyrsus 5y ago
It would have better reflected reality had the article included Sonya Sotomayor in the list of Catholic Supreme Court justices.

bobthechef 5y ago

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stevespang 5y ago

Note that the most "involved" religious group of the illegal migration through our crazy Open Southern Borders - - no covid testing, massive amounts of illegal drug traffic coming in - - are American Catholics offering free shelter and transport to them. These illegals are expected to likely vote democratic and contribute to local Catholic churches in the future . . .

photochemsyn 5y ago

It's very interesting how religious organizations behaved over the course of the 20th century with respect to the rise of communism and fascism and the post WWII Cold War. One of the more interesting episodes revolves around the Spanish Civil War, involving Franco and the Catholic Church and its strange little subgroup, Opus Dei. That story remains shrouded in mystery (the whole Franco-Pius-Hitler-Mussolini connection is probably why, see "Hitler's Pope" by John Cornwell, 1999). Other investigations have revealed the following [1]: > Since World War II, the CIA has: > Subsidized a Catholic lay organization that served as the political slugging arm of the pope and the Vatican throughout the Cold War; > Penetrated the American section of one of the wealthiest and most powerful Vatican orders; > Passed money to a large number of priests and bishops — some of whom became witting agents in CIA covert operations; > Employed undercover operatives to lobby members of the Curia (the Vatican government) and spy on liberal churchmen on the pope’s staff who challenged the political assumptions of the United States; > Prepared intelligence briefings that accurately predicted the rise of liberation theology; and > Collaborated with right-wing Catholic groups to counter the actions of progressive clerics in Latin America. [1] Mother Jones 1983 Martin A. Lee "The CIA and the Vatican’s Intelligence Apparatus" This all foreshadows (and is concurrent with) the CIA's dalliance with violent Islamic groups as a counter to the Godless Commies, from involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood as an anti-Nasser force in Egypt (1950s) onwards, most notably in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but it's a common theme. It's a pretty sordid history, with disastrous consequences (i.e. 9/11 etc.).

jjk166 5y ago

Several cherry picked members of the CIA and the more general US government all happen to belong to the largest single religion in the US. What a surprise.