BOOK REVIEW

'Smoke' tackles Catholic fundamentalism

By Diego Ribadeneira, Globe Staff, 07/03/1997

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hat happens when a 2,000-year-old organization decides to change the rules? You end up with many bewildered and unhappy members. To some degree this has been the fallout from the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church's attempt to reconcile an ancient, mysterious faith with the modern world.

The three-year conclave held more than 30 years ago touched on every aspect of Catholic life, from the role of priests and nuns to the treatment of other religions, and produced legions of critics on both the left and the right. Liberals said the council didn't go far enough, failing, for example, to allow married priests. Conservatives blasted the council for going too far. The elimination of the Latin Mass still rankles.

Michael W. Cuneo, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Fordham University, uses the Second Vatican Council and the seismic shift it unleashed as a framework for vivid profiles of the church's unnoticed players -- Catholic fundamentalists. His well-researched, eye-opening book shows them to be a fascinating and, at times, bizarre and disturbing subgroup, whom even faithful Catholics would have a hard time embracing. With crisp and concise writing, Cuneo uses colorful anecdotes to shine a light on a mostly unknown part of the church.

At the old World's Fair grounds in Queens, N.Y., Cuneo reports, followers of the late Veronica Lueken, who believed the Virgin Mary routinely appeared to her to give instructions, gather regularly before a portable statue of Mary. They believe, based on what Mary supposedly told Lueken in a sequence of apparitions beginning in the 1970s, that the world and the Catholic Church are so corrupt that everyone, except Lueken's followers, will soon perish in a fiery apocalypse.

On the West Coast, meanwhile, at a former Jesuit college outside Spokane, Wash., a group of Catholic traditionalists has built its own version of a Catholic utopia. Having completely abandoned the institutional church, they have their own priests and nuns, and schools.

For other conservative Catholics, the touchstone, the dividing line between true and merely nominal commitment to the faith is the 1968 papal encyclical opposing artificial birth control. The fact that most American Catholics reject the church's teaching and that many bishops rarely talk about it is a sign to conservatives of how polluted the church is with secularism. Of all the conservative Catholic groups Cuneo examines, the most familiar are the antiabortion organizations, such as the Pro-Life Action League or Human Life International. For them, "public witness" -- praying and picketing in front of clinics that perform abortions -- is a vocation, a true living out of their faith that most members of the institutional church don't have the nerve to do.

"Four thousand human beings in the United States are butchered daily under the law, and the response of the American Catholic leadership has been weak-kneed and ineffectual and cowardly," Monica Migliorino Miller, an antiabortion activist who served nine months in jail for protesting clinics in the Midwest, told Cuneo.

While striving to be objective, Cuneo paints a fairly negative picture of conservative forces that are clearly out of the mainstream of American Catholic life. What emerges from Cuneo's portrait is a Catholic underground that is reactionary, intolerant, naive, and, in some cases, paranoid.

One of the more popular stories among the extreme right of the church is that in 1958 and 1963, the cardinal who had been legitimately elected pope was forced to yield the papacy to candidates favored by a cabal of conspirators that included Jewish groups out to dismantle the traditional church. This cardinal, Giuseppe Siri, was forced, so the story goes, to live in an Italian monastery until his death in 1989.

"Conservatives in general seem almost willfully out of touch with the complex political and cultural dynamics of the contemporary church," Cuneo writes.

Nevertheless, he is sympathetic to the dim view Catholic fundamentalists take of the Second Vatican Council. "Over the past thirty years," he writes, "a new or progressive approach to Catholic theology has won almost complete ascendancy within the American church, and in the process everything from the Virgin Birth to the Resurrection has been debunked and deconstructed and demythologized practically into submission."

And while the fundamentalist groups Cuneo describes are a tiny part of American Catholicism, he concludes, correctly, it seems, that the "religious hopes and grievances they represent are not likely any time soon to fade quietly into the night."

This story ran on page E7 of the Boston Globe on 07/03/1997.
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