In 1954 Fr.
Peyton came to Belfast where tens of
thousands of men, women and children gathered in an open air venue, a cinema and
a football ground to hear him. Already he had attracted not only millions of
hopeful listeners worldwide but also teams of films stars, technicians,
industrialists, investors, newspaper owners to help him spread his religious
message. Film stars of that time, Bing
Crosby, Edward G. Robinson, Frank Sinatra, Maureen O Hara , James Cagney and
many others not forgotten even yet,
helped in his "Crusade for the Family Rosary". In Ireland church
committees were appointed to arrange
great assemblies of people to hear the
message "The Family That Prays Together Stays Together" and to promise their families would be like that. The Family Rosary - families
on their knees praying together at home -
found many new homes for this simple, repetitive prayer that was now blossoming
out from Patrick Peyton's Mayo fireside into families across the world.
Some Irish
bishops, like Dan Mageean in Belfast, welcomed Patrick Peyton and prepared
happily for monumental rallies, others,
like John Charles Mc Quade in Dublin disapproved of them .
Bishop
Mageean appointed committees to organise rallies in Belfast,
Ballymena and of course
Downpatrick, traditionally said to be St Patrick's very special place; people
marched with banners and flags, singing all the way to
the hosting places.
The rallies
were spectacularly successful. Tens of thousands of families made a pledge to pray
once every day as a united Family who, praying together, would stay
together, holding fast against the modern trend towards divorce and the
dissolution of Family as the bedrock of civilised Christian living.
It was hard
to imagine all this attracting the helpful
assistance of governments and their
financiers and perhaps even being
financed by the CIA, none of them being
noted for special piety. But it happened.
The BBC
programme "Guns and Rosaries" helps to fill in the outline of what people in Belfast in
later years began to suspect. The Rosary
Rallies were too vast and too popular not to be of great interest to government
agencies, financiers and politicians who were fascinated by the efficiency
with which Patrick Peyton attracted millions to his cause and dollars to match.
He believed the simple traditional family prayer that
helped Irish people to endure hunger and cruelty would help
the modern world to endure, possibly even lessen, some of the abuses of
the modern world, starting with America - if he could persuade millions of
good people in millions of good families
to help him, and if he could get the celebrities whom the people loved to help him too.
Powerful
people who noticed his success, however, were fighting their own crusade at
the time, "against godless communism". Patrick Peyton's religious mission was born at a time when sentiment
was replacing spirituality in
both popular and official religion,
sentiment more comfortable in the cinema than in the hardship of many religious
households, when Christian religious action and concern were being directed away from the present evils of present
miserable systematic poverty, more and more towards the future defeat of the possibly
future evils of possibly " godless communism", when Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald were
still on cinema screens as Fathers O'Malley and Fitzgibbon showing how personal
religious sweetness and light could overcome even the hardest of capitalistic
hearts when personal holiness mattered and social change did not. In Europe and the USA after WW2 great political and financial interests seemed
reasonably under control but even there
and certainly in other parts of the world new and worrying religious and social
thoughts were emerging, most of all in
Latin America where even important members of the Catholic church had rediscovered
that religion was for setting people
free of repression, not for enclosing them in oppressive economic cages. Liberation Theology in the decades after WW2 was
becoming dangerous doctrine.
The CIA was
one of many organisations intent on dealing with dangerous social doctrines. It
offered finance to the crusading work of
Patrick Peyton. The family hearth after all was the very heart at which
"godless communism" was striking; the Bay of Pigs was not the only
kind of answer to this, or the assassination of one archbishop, or the freezing out of another.
Indeed these might prove no answers at all. So rumour was that the CIA had
become a subscriber to the Fr. Peyton Rosary Crusade funds.
Rumours
of what was happening to, or with, the Peyton Crusade in other parts of
the world stirred up little interest in
Belfast. During the next decades we had other
matters to think about, not yet realising how globalisation meant we are all involved now in everything, everywhere. But we also had to think of what our religious
belief and action - or religious doubt and inaction- really meant in our
rapidly changing world and about what political and economic campaigns religious people were being pulled into. Anyway, the threat of
Belfast being overwhelmed by "godless communism" was remote. The communist newspaper in the shop where I
got mine was bought by three people, one was the Secretary of the local Party, another was me and I forget who the
third one was. Betty Sinclair maybe or Andy Barr who, as far as I knew were too busy trying to
get people decent houses and jobs to be over- concerned about the CIA and its
crusade.
"Guns and
Rosaries" strengthens the rumours, it does not prove a case against
Patrick Peyton. But it prompts questions about leadership, about how our religious ideas come
into fashion or go out of it. The pre-Christian lawyer Cicero used to ask, as
first step in solving cases, "Cui bono?, who gets the advantage from all
this "?
Good
question. Does it matter why John Paul was elected Pope and created a campaign against "godless
communism" in his native Poland? Or why an Archbishop of Buenos Aires
became Pope, or Archbishop Fulton Sheen in the nineteen fifties created a
mission for Latin America supported by funds from his TV success in the USA at a time when the USA had its own unsolved problems of
poverty and injustice? Or if a Rosary Crusade became funded by, among other
interested parties, The Central Intelligence Agency ?
Or that
Archbishop Romero was shot dead at Mass
in San Salvador?
Questions worth coming back to
sometime.......after Brexit maybe ?....... Cui bono ?...........
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