An Eerie 1968 NBC Documentary Video: “The New American Catholic”. Fr. Z Comments and Reminisces About Many Things.

Father Zed reminisces about the Revolution in the Church.

From Fr Z's Blog

I spotted a video on Twitter/X.

But first…  let me help you get into the mood.

Now that that’s in your head….

The video I spotted is a 1968 documentary from NBC “The New American Catholic”. The Masses you see are being perpetrated with the transitional 1964 Missal, not the Novus Ordo 1969/70 Missal. You can see what the “spirit” of Vatican II has already done in a few short years. Also, you see that NBC is not just reporting… this is also propaganda. It was engineered by the infamous then-bishop, soon to be ex-bishop, the hyper-ambitious ultra-liberal James Patrick Shannon, who was a rising star in the US Church and who fought against Humanae vitae.

At 4:40, you see a shot of St. Helena Church in S. Minneapolis. I was stationed there for a while. When this documentary was made, Shannon, auxiliary of St. Paul and Minneapolis was pastor there. In the film you see a shot of one of the truly beautiful series of windows and then a shot of him saying Mass. The background artwork is still there in the sanctuary. Later he is in the office area of the rectory off of the living room. I had a bit of a shiver seeing it, because, despite the beauty of that church and the wonderful people, it was a year of sheer hell because of how the pastor treated me and the trap that was set by the then VG. But I digress. May God have mercy on his soul. I pray for him at every Mass at the Memento of the living.

I knew of this documentary, but I had never seen it. Msgr. Schuler, my old pastor at my home parish of St. Agnes in St. Paul spoke of it, and of Shannon, whom he knew well. Schuler was a year ahead of Roach and Shannon.

This documentary provoked the wrath of the powerful Card. McIntyre who effectively shut down Shannon’s meteoric climb. When he realized that his ride was over, and that he was doomed to be an auxiliary, he married in secret (his favorable biographers say he married after he quit not before, but older priests of the diocese who had known him from seminary told me otherwise), continued for a while to function as a bishop, and then causing a tsunami of scandal, very publicly renounced being a bishop. He was suspended a divinis. He wound up being a big shot of General Mills. Every year the local paper would interview him around Easter and there he was in his lay clothes still wearing his episcopal ring and talking heresy. Eventually when he was dying the Holy See reconciled with him (somehow) even though Shannon never had to renounce anything he had said or done, including abandon his episcopal vocation.

When I first was working in Curia in Rome I met the late great then-Msgr. and later – way too late! – Cardinal Luigi De Magistris. When he ask me where I was from and I said St. Paul and Minneapolis, he stopped in his tracks and looked at me saying, “Ahhhh… Shannon. And that Archbishop who was in jail.” He meant the late Archbishop Roach who in 1985 when he was president of the NCCB (now USCCB) was arrested for drunk driving after driving his car into the wall of a convenience store. The local sheriffs could no longer turn a blind eye. He wound up spending a short, very short if I remember, in jail. Roach was the one who, ultimately, handed me my hat put my feet on my road away from the St. Paul Seminary toward Rome, away from my home and family and friends, because I had a calling to answer. The reason I was given for being “deselected” – yes, that’s the exact word the spineless rector used – was “You have a driving need to know the truth.”  Verbatim.   No kidding.

I left the Twin Cities with a one-way ticket and $200. Within two weeks in Rome, I had a job in a Vatican Office, a new bishop and a new seminary.  After Roach was out, I would be back in Twin Cities as a priest for while, to which I refer above when I was at St. Helena.

Roach and Shannon were classmates, ordained the same year from the St. Paul Seminary.

Shannon’s blather about how Vatican II calls for a reexamination of the needs of mankind “in the real situation” is eerily familiar right now! There is, right now, a massive push at various paradigm shifts, through praxis as well as through certain ambiguous and downright strange doctrinal expressions.

At about 8:40 you see a Monsignor seated, Msgr. Rudolph Bandas who was, at that time, the pastor of St. Agnes, Msgr. Schuler’s predecessor. Bandas was a peritus at all of the sessions of Vatican II, as an expert on catechesis. When liturgical changes were issued from Rome, he implemented them at St. Agnes as they were written.  Therefore, since nothing in any of the documents said abandon Latin and chant, they were preserved, nothing said tear out altars and say Mass versus populum, they preserved the main altar and used it.  As a matter of fact, there was never a Cranmer table in the sanctuary except one, I think, when Roach came and insisted on a table.  But that was never repeated when either he or any other bishop of cardinal came.    In the documentary, Bandas is seated in the living room – then pastor’s office – of St. Agnes rectory.  That bookshelf was still there when I was staying at the parish over summers back from Rome.  Then Fr. Schuler – the weekend fireman, as it were, while he was teaching at St. Thomas College, was present at St. Agnes’ rectory when NBC showed up to film Bandas for this documentary.    Bandas died in 1969 and Msgr. Schuler because pastor on the cusp of the Novus Ordo.  He maintained strict adherence to the black and white and added the splendor of great sacred music, including 3o Sundays of the year orchestral Masses with a large chorale and members of the Minnesota Orchestra.  That remains today, the Twin Cities Catholic Chorale.  Amazing.   Schuler was friends with Pope Benedict’s brother, also a church musician in Regensburg, Georg Ratzinger and Benedict knew what Schuler was doing at St. Agnes (cause I told him).  He was always interested to see the schedule of the Masses and, when he saw the list he’d comment on them knowledgably.  When Schuler died, I sent a note to Benedict’s secretary Msgr. Gänswein and Benedict sent a beautiful letter to the parish for reading during Schuler’s funeral.

I digress.   This is getting to autobiographical.

Bandas was dead set against Shannon’s agenda.

There is a layman who says “we are adults in the Church”, which is the attitude that lead to standing for Communion and sticking out the hand.  That layman, at about 9:20, is Donald Horman, then publisher of the National Catholic Reporter, aka Fishwrap.  It was already nuts then. in 1968, the same year as the documentary, Bishop Charles H. Helmsing of Kansas City, Missouri, the Fishwrap was located, issued a condemnation of the paper and demanded that it remove the word Catholic from its name. Bishop Helmsing said that it had a “policy of crusading against the Church’s teachings,” a “poisonous character” and “disregard and denial of the most sacred values of our Catholic faith.” Because the publication “does not reflect the teaching of the Church, but on the contrary, has openly and deliberately opposed this teaching,” he asked the editors to “drop the term ‘Catholic’ from their masthead” because “they deceive their Catholic readers and do a great disservice to ecumenism by […] watering down Catholic teachings.” They refused and are so heterodox now that it should be called the National Schismatic Reporter – if one is forced to think of it at all. Best that it be relegated to the cat box. Please see my long-poster Prayer for the Fishwrap.

Around 14:00 they get to the “experimental Community of John XXIII” in Oklahoma City, where they “think for themselves”.   Eventually, I think about 1975, they split from the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City.  They were doing all sorts of things, including giving Communion to non-Catholics.  At about 21:00 enjoy them teaching children to sing Kumbaya with a guitar that I think had never been tuned.  In the Mass clip that follows there is still a three-fold, “Lord, I am not worthy” because it was still in the 1964 Missal.   At 23:00 is Bp. Reed of Oklahoma (in 1972 Tulsa was cut off and OK City became an Archdiocese).

At 25:30 John McKenzie, SJ of Notre Dame comes on and talks in typical Jesuit style about modification of structures.  Then Shannon is right back with “new church” with a pretty clear justification of disobedience for the sake of novelties.

At 29:00 we get to Chicago’s Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) which is still around. … I think.  It looks like their site hasn’t been updated for a while.  It was a kind of “labor union” of priests, which could apply pressure for liberal ends.  At 30:30 we get then-Fr. James Groppi of Milwaukee, focused on civil rights.  He left the priesthood, in 1976, married and incurred an excommunication.  He attempted to become an Episcopalian priest but stopped short.  He wound up as a bus driver in Milwaukee.  At 32:30 a priest “on leave” “Robert Duggan former priest” in lay clothes make an appeal for an end to priestly celibacy.  He makes an interesting observation that, for the first time, the Catholic Directory showed decrease in the number of priest because priests were quitting.  Duggan headed up the National Association for Pastoral Renewal.  In 1971  there was a meeting in NYC of 6 dissident groups which were trying to merge: The Society of Priests for a Free Ministry, the National Federation of Priests Councils, the National Association of the Laity, the National Association for Pastoral Renewal, the National Association of Women Religious and Seminarians for Ministerial Renewal.  What a hellish soup.

At 36:30 Shannon introduces feminist Sr Anita Caspary Mother General of the IHMs, in Los Angeles, which I’m sure got McIntyre’s attention.  No habit.  She wound up on the cover on Time in 1970.  She calls the habit a “costume”.  She sounds like the LCWR types do now.  This was the beginning of that madness.  In 1969 Caspary’s crazy moves caused a split in the IHM’s.  50 sisters refused to start a new community with her.  By 1976 that group split into 3 groups.  By their fruits….

Bp. Reed of Oklahoma is back at 46:00 with an appeal for some experimentation.

At this point in the documentary the move has been from the changes among women religious, to their use of small groups, to other small groups with lay people.

Back comes Shannon, who then brings in one of the Protestant observers at the Second Vatican Council.  48:50.  Dr. Albert C. Outler of Southern Methodist University and expert on Wesleyan theology.  He bats clean up.  OF course it would be a PROTESTANT, right?  In 1971 he was made the president of the American Catholic Historical Society and in 1987 got ultra-liberal Collegeville Abbey’s Pax Christi Award.   In WaPo‘s obit for him we read: “In 1986, Outler told a gathering of Catholic priests that official ecumenism was dead. “As a grizzled ecumaniac with a wealth of golden memories, I have to say that, for the time being, official ecumenism seems to be dead in the water,” he said. He blamed the decline on the churches’ “preoccupations with the bewildering range of social, economic, political causes confronting us all,” as well as internal conflicts and membership losses suffered by denominations.” In this documentary, he is still optimistic. He says its all about “freedom” and the Church has finally opened its heart to the world. “The Church is going to make it or fail in the spirit of freedom, persuasion, love, brotherhood.”

At the end, we have various recaps of visuals, including art work that looks very much like the slop produced for the Walking Together on Walking Togetherity. Very much like, come to think of it. And we have plentiful guitars and sprightly singing full of hope at the new springtime of freedom and renewal sweeping through the church like a fresh breeze through the opening windows.   I chased down the final song, 50:00, wasting several precious minutes of my life, which I suspected was by Ray Repp.  Yep, Repp.  “Come, my brothers, and don’t be afraid” from the Hymnal for Young Christians 1966.  I couldn’t find the full lyrics online.  Maybe one of you has that book on a dusty shelf?

This time machine video holds up a mirror to our own time.

The same agendas are now being pushed by people with power who grew up in this stuff and were infected by it to the point that they never grew out of it.

It seems to me that the younger people in other countries and in these USA who are pushing the agenda in this 1968 documentary today are in effect Communists and homosexualists.  In these USA, at least, the older ones pushing this stuff grew up in the halcyon days of protests and Vatican II. Their own identity is fused with the mythic, iconic “spirit” of those times.  When they see something like a biretta or hear the suggest that Latin be used, or Gregorian chant, a switch flicks in their heads and they go into an anti-authority, anti-traditional mode.  Also, clergy and lay alike, if they know something about the older form of Mass, they realize that in the Vetus Ordo they can’t be the center of attention, as they can be in the Novus Ordo.  By now so many priests are conditioned to have to be the focus of attention, the driving energy of the “liturgy”, the main event, the ring master, the host of the party.  This may not even be conscious, at this point.  More could be written.  This is sufficient.

At last, here it is.  Buckle up.  1968.