The noun quisling entered history and dictionary in 1945. Its definition is "n. a traitor who serves as a puppet of the enemy occupying his country. After Vidkum Quisling, 1887-1945, head of the state council of Norway during the German Occupation 1940-45."[1]
Kissling is a more recent entry. Kissling refers to Frances Kissling, a former abortion clinic director, dissident Catholic, and head of the foundation-funded, propaganda vehicle Catholics for a Free Choice.
It takes little imagination to envision the American nation as occupied territory. Our society destroys 4,000 unborn children each day and a Kevorkian kills 43-plus persons under the guise of a "treatment of pain" with carbon monoxide — and a Supreme Court is in the process of voting whether assisted suicide and euthanasia are constitutional rights. God help us! This nation is a country imminently threatened with a takeover by the Culture of Death. Let’s review some of the evidence.
The Boston Globe (23 January 1971, page 3), reporting on a hearing the prior day, headlined a four column article "Priest warns against Rights of the Unborn."[2] Sen. Joseph Walsh and Rep. Paul Murphy, at the request of a citizen, the late Dr. Henry Armitage, had filed a bill for an amendment to the state Constitution reading: "all men are conceived and born free and equal and have certain inalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of defending their lives and liberties from the moment of conception."
I was one of four physicians testifying to the humanity and individuality of the human unborn that day. In opposition were Bill Baird and Pamela Lowrey, who represented MORAL (the euphemism for the Massachusetts Organization to Repeal Abortion Laws), and "nearly 50 women’s libbers," mostly young and hugely vocal, who jammed the small hearing room.
As the hearing proceeded, the door opened and into the room and up to the secretary of the hearing strode an itinerant clergyman. He asked to be heard out of turn and was recognized next.
He identified himself as one Fr. Thomas Wassmer, S.J., a Jesuit priest and former philosopher at Ohio University presently studying at Harvard. To what did this itinerant Jesuit priest testify? "An enormous number of Roman Catholic thinkers and theologians disagree on whether life begins at conception." "There is no monolithic agreement among Catholics," and "we believe rational personal life begins about three months after conception."
Either Rep. Murphy or Chairman Bulger raised a point of inquiry, asking whether there was a canon law or common courtesy requirement that a priest going to another state to preach or testify was obliged to notify the local bishop or chancery and, if so, had he done so. Coloring slightly, the surprised witness answered "yes" to the first and "no" to the second. As the hearing broke up, he approached me and said, "They referred to you as Dr. Stanton when you spoke — do you have a brother who is a Jesuit?" I said, "Yes, Fr. Edward Stanton." He said, "Fr. Ned Stanton is a great guy," and then continued softly, "Joe, we have to show them we are broad minded."
Dumbfounded and without realizing it at that moment, I had met my first Catholic quisling, but regrettably not the last. This is the tale of quislings and Kisslings.
Sometime after the birth of Louise Joy Brown, the "test tube baby" in England, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services set up an ethics advisory board on the matter. It held hearings in seven or eight cities across the country and published volumes of testimony.[3] At the Boston hearing, I remember testifying as did Professor Leon Kass, MD and Father Paul Murphy, S.J. Father Richard McCormick, S.J., one of the board members, asked a witness that day in referring to the early human embryo as, "That stuff, or whatever you want to call it." So much for the precision and insight of human embryology. At the Washington, DC meeting of the board, Fr. Charles Curran, then-professor of theology at Catholic University, testified. As a Catholic theologian, he too denigrated the humanity of the early human unborn, again playing right into the hands of the Culture of Death. Out of this deliberately created miasma initiated by, among others, Catholic priest-professors, the term "pre-embryo" was coined to further denigrate the humanity of the unborn.[4]
On 14 September 1984, "Catholics" for a Free Choice held a press conference in Washington, DC, titled "The 1984 Elections, Abortion, Religion and Politics"[5] to show how Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro could support abortion. In the press packet they supplied The New York Times ad where Catholic laity and nuns supported abortion and a paper by J. Giles Milhaven, a former Jesuit priest who then spoke on "Catholic Options in the Abortion Debate." From the text, "Do all Catholic theologians hold beyond dispute that every abortion is wrong? Not all Catholic theologians. Thus they hold it is questio disputata and some hold some abortions are morally licit and may be even obligatory."[6] This ex-priest, former professor at Fordham and Georgetown Medical School, was one of the prime promoters of the speculative theory of delayed animation, given hospitality on Catholic college campuses. Small wonder we have reaped a whirlwind.
But in his 1984 presentation, Milhaven revealed that some 15 years before (1968) he had been among a gaggle of theologians invited to Hyannisport by Senators Robert and Ted Kennedy and the Shrivers for a weekend discussion, a private colloquium on abortion. Former priest Albert R. Jonsen, in a paper titled "Theological Ethics, Moral Philosophy and Public Moral Discourse," reports another Hyannisport meeting in 1964 with Senators Ted and Robert Kennedy. Robert was running for the New York Senate seat "and their political advisors wished to discuss the position a Catholic politician should take on abortion."[7] Albert Jonsen, then a Jesuit novice, and Fr. Joseph Fuchs, SJ, Fr. Robert Drinan, SJ, Fr. Richard McCormick, SJ, and Fr. Charles Curran of Catholic University of America were among attendees. After a day and a half of discussion, they reached the conclusion, "That Catholic politicians in a democratic polity might advocate legal restrictions on abortion but in so doing might tolerate legislation that would permit abortion under certain circumstances if political efforts to repress this moral error led to greater perils to social peace and order." Jonsen then goes on, "this position, which of course is much more nuanced than I have stated, seems to have informed the politics of the Kennedy’s."
So here we have the "personally opposed, but reluctantly vote for abortion," which Ted Kennedy and Fr. Drinan have used so effectively ever since. This has spread as a mantra among "Catholic" politicians who by their "personally opposed, but" votes have sustained the ongoing Herodian slaughter of the unborn in the USA. Of course, in 1964 and the years after till 1978 or 1979, the only threat to peaceful discourse came not from opponents of abortion but from radical feminist proponents of abortion, running through statehouses and screaming, "Our Bodies. Our Selves." Thus, years before Roe and Doe, the stage had been set for surrender of a critical Church position. All of the priests involved were Jesuits, excluding Fr. Curran. Their influence on American Catholic university campuses and in scholarly literature were enormous. Its evil fruits flourish even today, quoted ad infinitum by the enemies of life.
When Bernard Cardinal Law came to Boston, old Holy Cross Cathedral echoed and re-echoed with his depiction of abortion as the "primordial darkness of our time."
Yet in reviewing the Drinan correspondence under the Freedom of Information Act, investigative reporter Mary Meehan found a 1974 letter from Fr. Drinan to a key Planned Parenthood lawyer in which he characterized legislators pushing an anti-abortion amendment to a funding bill as "the powers of darkness."[8] A constitutional amendment to forbid abortion he found "undesirable."
To the President of Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts he wrote in 1974: "I feel that hopefully we now have an impetus going in Congress which will never allow such a motion (an anti-abortion amendment) to become the law of the land. I have regularly received information from your associates and will continue to rely on you and your associates."
Planned Parenthood’s three clinics in Massachusetts have been exterminating 20,000 unborn children a year for years. It scoffs at the parental consent law and collaborates with the attorney general, hoping to get that law overturned. Planned Parenthood has no regard for the latency period of 9 to13-year-old boys and girls as it promotes condoms and so-called "sex ed" programs with the blessing of Gov. William Weld.
On 4 June 1996, Robert F. Drinan, S.J., identifying himself as a Jesuit priest and professor of law at Georgetown, endorsed near-birth abortions — which even Sen. Patrick Moynihan said, "is to close to infanticide," and which former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop said is never medically necessary. On that date, Fr. Drinan in a New York Times Op-ed piece told the president he was right to veto the bill which would have saved viable children from a ghastly and barbaric death.[9]
For the first time a quisling met his match. Cardinal Law attacked the piece and The Pilot for one had a seething editorial.[10] John Cardinal O’Connor, in Catholic New York, thundered, "I’m sorry Fr. Drinan, but you are wrong, dead wrong. You could have raised your formidable voice for life, you raised it for death. Hardly the role of a lawyer, surely not the role of a priest."[11]
But Fr. Drinan’s posture continues to be cited by purported Catholic legislators. Massachusetts Congressman Marty Meehan (D-Lowell) in a letter dated 16 August 1996 to a constituent justifying his pro-abortion vote to sustain Clinton’s veto, wrote: "Finally, I thought you might be interested in reading an article by Fr. Drinan, a Jesuit priest. Fr. Drinan’s New York Times article outlines the arguments I have made from a unique and moral perspective."[12]
Yet the dissenters, including Fr. Drinan, continue to receive hospitality from America’s politically correct press. "Catholics" for a Free Choice is a tax-free, richly funded foundation whose executive director since 1978 is a sterilized former abortion clinic director.[13] You can see Frances Kissling on shows hosted by Ted Kopel and Tom Brokaw. You read her in the Times, the Globe and the Herald as a "Catholic" voice. After being in a convent for six months, early on she left convent and Church and ran abortion clinics. She later returned but "not to the hierarchical sacramental church" and became a virulent anti-Catholic and abortion advocate. "I came back to the Church as a social agent," she said. "I came back to women church." She is committed "to provide Catholics with a rational alternative to Church doctrine."[14]
Now if here in America a Jewish person took a highly subsidized, anti-Israel position — or an Italian who took an anti-Italian position — and the media recognized them and treated as biblical truth their every utterance, as the media does Ms. Kissling, just how long do you think it would be before those publishers and producers were visited by senior leaders of the offended group? If they continued to publicize the dissident, the one or two largest advertisers would promptly be visited and told that although their people liked their products, if they did not immediately use the power of their advertising dollar to influence the paper to stop they would advise their fold to boycott that business. That’s how big boys and girls play the game!
The Vatican in 1990 in Ex Corde Ecclesia called upon leaders of Catholic institutions of higher education to take care that, at a minimum, the religion and philosophy departments faithfully portray church teachings. John Paul II understands that the real crisis in Catholic higher education is not football gambling, but rather the hospitality it extends to dissent and denial of pope and magisterium.
The college presidents huffed and puffed that "this is America" and about "academic freedom," "dictatorships not accepted," etc. There are signs that representatives of the bishops are softening, maybe preparing for only a cosmetic change. Cosmetic changes are not enough. The Augean stables must be cleansed of denial and dissent to pope and magisterium. Catholic parents sending sons and daughters to Catholic educational institutions have a right to demand that the faith be respected and nourished — and not subverted.
A minimum, non-negotiable, demand, I believe, should be that college presidents exercise the God-given authority that is theirs and follow the Holy Father’s call voluntarily. This should include, at least in religion and philosophy departments, academically qualified persons of faith clearly explicating, even with enthusiasm, the treasure that is there in this Pope’s theology of the human person and the wisdom in Humanae Vitae, Donum Vitae and Evangelium Vitae.
Today the fight is not just for this Church and this nation but, in a larger sense, it is a struggle for the very soul of western civilization. If the third millennium is to be an era in which Evangelium Vitae — the beautiful gospel of life — is to triumph, the Church must forthwith, at long last, neutralize the Kisslings and the quislings who have belabored and betrayed its message so long. May our appointed shepherds and each of us be equal to the task.
1 American Heritage Dictionary. New College Ed., 1981, p. 1072.
2 Boston Globe, 1/23/71, p. 3 "Priest warns against Rights of the Unborn."
3 Department of Health and Human Services Ethics Advisory Board, U.S. Government Printing Office.
4 C. Ward Kischer, Ph.D. and Diane Irving, Ph.D. "The Human Development Hoax," Gold Leaf Press, 1996.
5 Catholics for a Free Choice Press Conference, 9/14/84, Washington, DC.
6 "Catholic Options in the Abortion Debate," J. Miles Milhaven, pp. 2-3.
7 "Theological Ethics, Moral Philosophy and Public Moral Discourse," Albert R. Jonsen, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Vol. 4, n. 1 (1-11) 1994, John Hopkins University Press.
8 Our Sunday Visitor, 9/8/96, p. 8, Mary Meehan, "Father Robert Drinan Under Siege."
9 New York Times, Sunday, June 4, 1996, Op ed.
10 The Pilot editorial, p. 10, 6/7/96, "The Disturbing Father Drinan."
11 Letter to constituent from Cong. Martin Meehan (signed copy in file of speaker.)
12 Catholic New York editorial by John Cardinal O’Connor, 6/20/96.
13 Human Life Review, Vol. 10, n. 4 (1984) pp. 42-60, Mary Meehan, "Foundation Power."
14 Catholic World Report, January 1994, pp. 41-42, C. Joseph Doyle, "Agent of Influence."
