Condom, Coercion, and Christianity: A Princeton Tale
by James Hitchcock
When Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind, he was probably not thinking of the “closed mind” under the image of a contraceptive. Still less would anyone be likely to think of the “open mind” that way. But such was precisely the image that seemed to govern a series of events at Princeton University this past year, which culminated in the dismissal of one of the official Catholic chaplains.
C. John McCloskey is a young priest who belongs to Opus Dei (the Work of God), a mixed lay-clerical organization founded in Spain in the 1920s with branches throughout the Catholic world. Opus Dei prides itself on its loyalty to the Pope and its rigorous spiritual discipline. Some of its members were active in the Franco government in Spain, and the group has often been accused of having a conservative political ideology. Officially, Opus Dei states that it has no political position as such but that its members are free to engage in political activity on their own. In the United States, no Opus Dei members are known to be politically active.
The group has for years been in the habit of establishing houses near elite universities, and seems to recruit new members primarily from such environments. (There are degrees of affiliations, some of which are relatively loose.) The group was active at Princeton as early as 1987, and in 1989 it purchased a house just off campus to serve as its local headquarters. The purchase alarmed some Princetonians, indicating as it did that the organization intended to become a permanent presence at the university.
Almost from the beginning, rumors about the group and its alleged hidden agenda were circulated in both Catholic and non-Catholic circles in the community. Among liberal Catholics, Opus Dei has an image somewhat like that of the Masons in earlier times–a malign secret organization with controlling tentacles moving in all directions. Little of this has ever been documented and, whatever the group may do in other parts of the world, it is clear that in the United States its agenda is almost exclusively religious, concentrating mainly on personal piety.
From 1970 to 1988 the official Catholic chaplain at Princeton was Father Charles Weiser, a Trenton diocesan priest who directed the Aquinas Foundation. This organization is Princeton’s equivalent of the Newman Clubs elsewhere, and has its headquarters in a house once occupied by Thomas Mann. Weiser was appointed by the bishop of Trenton and was officially recognized by the university. By his own account, Weiser was at first cool to Opus Dei, and he describes his early encounters with McCloskey as less than friendly. Eventually however, he made the decision to appoint McCloskey an assistant director of the Aquinas Foundation, as much as anything, according to Weiser, “to keep an eye on him.”
Shortly afterwards Weiser terminated official relations with another assistant chaplain, Jesuit Father Robert Ferrick, because of disagreements over Aquinas Foundation policies. Rather than accept Weiser’s policies, Ferrick left Princeton, but his departure caused a good deal of bitterness among his campus admirers.
Running through the dispute over Opus Dei was the question of how to define Catholicism, and it is revealing that Ferrick’s most ardent admirers, who attended a weekly midnight Mass he celebrated, referred to themselves as “the Druids.” One of them, the left-wing journalist Gloria Emerson, noted: “Something remarkable must have been going on to get a Jewish undergraduate, a Puerto Rican Methodist [sic], and an agnostic together for a Catholic worship service.” Ferrick himself, in his farewell message, listed his constituency as “Druids, chapel colleagues , black and Latino friends, those concerned with alcohol and drug abuse, the harassed, the marginal, the foreigner.” Notably absent from the list were those he had been appointed primarily to serve: traditional Catholics.
Ferrick’s departure was the occasion for the first public attacks on Opus Dei, attacks notable for the fact that, in one of the major scholarly communities in the United States, they were made without any felt need to offer proof, not even to define terms. Thus Walter Murphy, a Catholic professor of politics, was quoted in the press as saying Opus Dei had “Fascist ties.” The closest Opus Dei’s critics ever came to offering proof of their charges of a malign hidden agenda was a frequent citing of the book The People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism (Viking, 1989), by the late left-wing journalist Penny Lernoux, which claims that Opus Dei has been involved in various right-wing movements in Latin America. Lernoux was hardly a disinterested scholar, and Opus Dei officials pointed out that the organization had won a libel suit against her in a West German court. Her book, however, was cited over and over again as irrefutable evidence of Opus Dei’s sinister nature.
This alarm was fueled, within a community that prides itself in openness and rationality, by almost unlimited attention in both the campus and the community press to all the group’s critics, frequently citing the same people saying the same things over and over again. For a while no mention of Opus Dei in Princeton failed to recall that the house it had purchased had been owned by an elderly woman found murdered in the basement, despite the fact that this information had absolutely no bearing on the controversy.
For some months before the McCloskey case came to a boil, the press related how some Princeton Catholics were “worried” about the organization and its possible intentions, calling it “cult-like” and possessing a “right-wing reputation.” Murphy alleged that Opus Dei had particularly “targeted” Ivy League universities, a charge which, if true, merely proved that it accepts those institutions’ own evaluation of their worth. Weiser, initially unsympathetic to Opus Dei, observed with some irony the behavior of highly rational academics:
The guy (Mccloskey) was coming down here three times a week and people are paralyzed by anxiety. The immediate feeling I had was that they were acting like an elephant jumping on a chair trying to get away from a mouse. People were afraid Opus Dei was going to take over.
Critics of McCloskey studiously avoided one inconvenient fact–students and others in the Princeton community were appreciative of his religious guidance, and it was by no means clear that his critics outnumbered his supporters. The critics claimed, with considerable vehemence, that McCloskey’s approach to religion was inherently offensive and oppressive and, in case that fact was not known widely enough, gave it maximum publicity. But, if that was so, it seemed to follow that in a highly sophisticated community like Princeton, McCloskey’s approach would have little success and he would be in time forced to withdraw. What really bothered his critics, which for obvious reasons they could not admit, was that intelligent people, including undergraduates, did find his message attractive. The critics’ task, then, was to save such people from themselves.
The most vocal critic was an undergraduate named Robert Taliercio, a member of the left-wing religious group Pax Christi (the Peace of Christ), who was one of those constantly referring to Opus Dei’s supposed “right-wing” political ties. Taliercio claimed to have attended an Opus Dei program in Spain one summer, and to have been shocked by the fact that members lived in “very luxurious” surroundings. If living in opulence is grounds for condemnation, it might be supposed that many Princeton students themselves would have to be damned. However, for all the talk about “right-wing” political ideology, no Princeton critic of Opus Dei ever reported any direct experience of this. No one claimed that McCloskey tried to influence his political views, or to recruit him into any kind of political activity, even on such identifiably “Catholic” issues as abortion.
Instead, a small number of students reported that they had been offended by McCloskey’s approach to what the Catholic Church calls “spirituality” or personal religious discipline. Some undergraduates (no more than half dozen were ever identified) complained that he was “overly negative,” “rigid,” and “censorious,” which turned out to mean that he placed a good deal of emphasis on personal sin, warned students to avoid certain “occasions of sin,” and suggested that the larger world might be fraught with spiritual peril. All this was merely classical Christian doctrine (once taught at Princeton and other Protestant schools) and, if it is indeed unattractive to modern Americans, the problem, again, would have been self-correcting–McCloskey would simply have failed in his mission. Thus critics were forced once more to avoid the central issue: that in a truly “pluralistic” environment Catholics were free to accept or reject McCloskey’s advice as they saw fit. Instead, they had to go through remarkable contortions to conceal the fact that they simply wanted church and university authorities to suppress an individual whose views they found personally distasteful.
Some attempt was made to imply that McCloskey had engaged in improper actions, such as a female student’s claim that he questioned her in the confessional about her sexual activities. Allegedly, these improprieties had been reported to university authorities. The nadir of yellow journalism in the case was reached by the Trenton Times, which reported that evidence of these actions had been given to “university sources, who prefer to remain anonymous because they were frightened that Opus Dei would take legal action against them.” The Times thus found it possible to insinuate serious improprieties on McCloskey’s part, to offer no proof, to claim that the evidence existed but was being suppressed, and to charge that the university had been intimidated by Opus Dei. (If the university did indeed keep the complaints confidential for fear of legal action, a logical assumption might be that the complaints were unfounded and would not withstand scrutiny.)
Unable to state frankly that they sought to suppress McCloskey’s opinions simply because they found them offensive, his critics next fell back on a relatively narrow point—that he should not be allowed to represent the Aquinas Foundation, since it would officially associate the Catholic Church with his own allegedly distorted theology. But it was the prerogative of the foundation’s director, and ultimately of the bishop of Trenton, to decide who could enjoy official status in the chaplaincy. Weiser later stated that he had investigated every complaint against McCloskey and found no improprieties, even though he did not always agree with the other priest’s methods.
The logic of the critics’ position was that no one who could be viewed as “controversial” ought be given official status by the foundation, a contention they would hardly have defended under other circumstances (Father Ferrick had also been highly controversial). A priest who, for example, might have offended some people by passionately supporting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua would in all likelihood be dubbed a “prophet” and praised for his courage.
The nub of the issue was half-consciously expressed by Taliercio when he accused Opus Dei of trying to “stamp out those who do not agree.” But McCloskey was not demanding the expulsion from the Aquinas Foundation of those who did not support his views; rather the reverse was the case. In effect his critics’ position was, “Opus Dei wants to suppress disagreement, so we have to suppress it first.” It was the dilemma of modern liberalism in a nutshell: is “tolerant pluralism” either tolerant or pluralistic enough to tolerate those who believe in dogmatic truths, or is it limited to “tolerating” only those whose views are like its own?
Taliercio said that he had originally been attracted to Opus Dei because “it provided security and it makes complicated lives very simple. Everything is black and white. You don’t have to think.” It was a curious confession for an Ivy League student to make, prompting, as it did, the obvious question, “If you were so easily manipulated then, how do you know that you are really ‘thinking’ right now?” But it was also necessary to justify the exercise in liberal censorship—those who accept the Opus Dei position allegedly do not do so with full freedom and understanding, and must be protected by those who know better.
In December 1989, Suzi Landophi, a professional comedienne, performed a routine at Princeton designed to promote both “safe sex” and feminism, which included such silly things as pulling a male student in front of a video camera, ordering him to say “vaginal fluid,” and commenting, “You sound like it got caught in your throat.” She also had female students stretch condoms over male students’ heads as a means of “desensitizing” the audience to contraceptives. McCloskey subsequently published a letter in the Daily Princetonian, the official campus newspaper, objecting that Landolphi viewed students as “salivating animals without any capacity for self-control.” One student responded in a letter by accusing McCloskey of trying once more to “enslave” women with “the holy bond of matrimony” and of “keeping them barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen,” an illogical charge given the fact that McCloskey was preaching chastity. The student concluded by suggesting that “perhaps the Princeton community and society at large should advise McCloskey to take to drinking nothing but the semen of AIDS patients.”
Earlier, Mcloskey’s critics had met with the new director of the Aquinas Foundation, a Trenton diocesan priest named Vincent Keane, to demand McCloskey’s removal. Keane, who remained publicly noncommittal, let it be known after the Landolphi incident that he was angry with McCloskey for using the foundation’s name in his letter.
Following the “semen” letter it might have been thought that at least some of McCloskey’s critics would begin to wonder whether the tone of the debate was sinking lower than was proper for an elite university, but there is no evidence that they were embarrassed by such rhetoric. In some ways the essence of the matter was stated by another student letter-writer, who explicitly denied that Opus Dei was entitled to the toleration of a “pluralistic, open society” on the grounds that “their agenda is to establish a universal hegemonic view.” The writer concluded: “In a plural, liberal democracy, McCloskey is allowed to spread his AIDS: Assault on Inquiry, Discourses, and Speech. But we have our contraceptives: open minds.” The Landolphi incident revealed most clearly that the real opposition to Opus Dei, therefore, was not over its alleged “right-wing” political ties, but over sexual “liberation,” and McCloskey was accused of trying to establish “a universal hegemonic view” because he dared to disagree publicly with current conventional wisdom. Intellectual Freedom was explicitly described as a “contraceptive,” the purpose of which is to exclude consideration of unfashionable views.
That sexual orthodoxy was the root of the tension between McCloskey and some in the Princeton community was confirmed when the G.K. Chesterton Society sponsored a talk by Maggie Gallagher, the author of a book arguing that women have been exploited by the sexual revolution. Gallagher faced a partially hostile audience, which at one point pelted the stage with condoms. A feminist student published a review of the speech which stopped just short of saying that Gallagher should have been barred from campus, arguing that she appeared under false pretenses, since she failed to acknowledge that she supported “patriarchy.” The Chesterton Society was then accused of being an Opus Dei front organization founded to give the group unmerited intellectual respectability, although members pointed out that only some of them were affiliated with Opus Dei.
McCloskey’s defenders soon found themselves in a situation in which every public defense of the priest brought forth yet another barrage of attacks, which widened to include not only McCloskey but any student who dared to defend him. The techniques were classic McCarthyism: ceaselessly repeated charges offered without proof, unsubstantiated claims often by unnamed people, hints about confidential evidence which was being suppressed. Opus Dei found itself in the impossible situation of having to say, in effect, over and over again: “We are not a cult.”
McCloskey’s critics repeatedly criticized the Aquinas Foundation and the university for not investigating their charges. But Luis Tellez, head of Opus Dei’s Princeton house, pointed out that no one had ever filed a formal complaint against McCloskey with the university authorities, which would have resulted in an investigation in which McCloskey could have defended himself. The critics’ weapon was primarily an unceasing propaganda barrage, and they seem to have calculated (correctly, as it turned out), that such an assault would eventually achieve their goal without the obligation of having to prove their charges in any rigorous way.
Beside the charge that McCloskey was insensitive concerning matters of sexual behavior, the critics began claiming that he had warned students against taking particular courses and prohibited them from reading particular books, and that Opus Dei members themselves are forbidden to read certain works. They therefore asserted that McCloskey’s approach to education was fundamentally at odds with the nature of the university. McCloskey, in turn, claimed that the allegations were untrue or highly distorted. The only “smoking gun” the critics could find, which they attempted to establish as the murder weapon, was a memo from the priest listing about forty “courses of possible interest from a Christian culture view point at Princeton University.” The list was drawn directly from the university catalogue and included nine academic departments, its net cast wide enough to include both “The Religion of Islam” and “The Origins of Modern Science.” Criticism centered on a note appended to the list: “Remember everything depends on the outlook of the teacher giving the course. The latter may seem quite interesting and stimulating but if it is given by an anti-Christian, its impact is counter-productive.” This warning, critics trumpeted, was censorship of the worst kind and in violation of the very nature of free inquiry.
But no critic even alleged that McCloskey’s list omitted courses that should have been included, which would have been the obvious way of “censoring” courses the priest thought unacceptable, and on the face of it the list was a recommendation, not a condemnation. McCloskey gave no indication which courses, if any, he considered “anti-Christian” and his warning was no different from the kind feminists and militant ethnic minorities issue all the time on university campuses. Thus critics were in the position to assert that McCloskey had no right to evaluate university courses, no matter how mildly or obliquely, a curious understanding of the nature of free inquiry.
Tellez issued a detailed response to the petition, mentioning, among other things, the libel suit against Penny Lemoux and the fact that no formal complaint against McCloskey had been lodged with the university; he also said that certain statements attributed to McCloskey were not authentic. McCloskey’s defenders were at a constant disadvantage, however, since his critics used each defense merely as an occasion to mount the same charges even more aggressively, a tactic which both the university and the community press were more than willing to permit.
Keane, who had met with twenty people demanding McCloskey’s ouster, now made his first public comment: a judgment that McCloskey had “no right” to warn students about “anti-Christian” courses. Keane cited his own experience as a college professor (of speech pathology) to justify his judgment, apparently an act of professional solidarity with professors for whom freedom includes immunity from criticism. The Daily Princetonian, after giving McCloskey’s critics maximum publicity for months, now formally sided with those critics in an editorial decreeing that the “Opus Dei group should be allowed to preserve its religious identity—but only to the extent that its practices do not intrude upon the university’s academic mission.” Both this statement and Keane’s seemed to imply that academic freedom includes professors’ immunity from “outside” criticism. The Princetonian’s formula also seemed to imply that Opus Dei’s preservation of its religious identity is a privilege granted by the university.
In April, Keane announced that McCloskey would not be returning to the Aquinas Foundation in the fall, a decision McCloskey said had been conveyed to him in December, the time of the Landolphi incident. He pointed out the only six of approximately nine hundred Catholic students on campus had signed the petition against him, and categorically denied their charges. The Princetonian article announcing his dismissal was a comedy of errors which scarcely bolstered the claim that McCloskey’s critics represented responsible scholarship. Keane appeared to be advocating affirmative action for Hawaiians when he was quoted as saying that he hoped to replace McCloskey with a “lei woman,” and the student paper identified Keane’s photograph as McCloskey’s, giving rise to a deliciously wicked fantasy on the part of McCloskey’s supporters, that of posting copies of the paper all over the campus with the notation, “This man has been officially found to be dangerous to students. If you see him on campus, detain him and call the police.”
Now, even the claim by McCloskey’s critics that the issue was the relatively narrow one of whether he ought to be officially associated with the Aquinas Foundation was belied when, following the announcement of his “non-renewal,” they continued to press for a university investigation (without formally requesting one) and continued to air the same charges against him.
Keane’s action in surrendering to McCloskey’s critics was curious in part because of their increasingly frank agenda. One student writing for the Princetonian accepted Opus Dei’s claim to loyalty to the Pope but asserted that “good Catholics” need pay no attention to him. One leader of the anti-McCloskey faction, who published a lengthy attack against him, signed a pro-abortion advertisement in the Princetonian. However, when Weiser wrote a letter to the newspaper arguing that McCloskey had been mistreated, it was not published. (The letter later appeared in a conservative student publication, the Princeton Sentinel, in a summary of the case in which several of the students who signed the petition against McCloskey admitted that they never met him and had signed at the urging of their friends.)
McCloskey and Opus Dei intend to remain active in Princeton, and McCloskey has said that his exclusion from the Aquinas Foundation might actually make his work easier. The pastor of St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Princeton, Father Evasio De’Marcellis, a board member of the Aquinas Foundation who said he was not consulted about McCloskey’s removal, has commented: “It seems that a little orthodoxy scares a lot of people.” Princeton University itself seems to bear little responsibility for what happened to the priest. There is no evidence that the university sought his removal, although the few officials who spoke publicly mildly criticized McCloskey. Primary responsibility rests with Keane, who appears to have decided simply to buy peace. Even if every single charge against McCloskey were true, his comments and actions were within the bounds of what is usually defined as academic freedom. Ironically, in the future, those in the Princeton community inclined to think that Catholic officials fail to respect this freedom have only to look at the treatment accorded John McCloskey to find prime evidence for their thesis.
Taken from Academic Questions of Winter 1990-91, Volume 4, Number 1.
