The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism [Hardcover]

Michael W. Cuneo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 24, 1997

At the site of the Vatican Pavilion at the old World's Fair grounds in Queens, New York, where the late Veronica Lueken for years came to receive messages from the Blessed Virgin Mary, her followers still gather with apocalyptic expectancy before a portable statue of the Virgin. They are convinced that virtually the entire world, including the great majority of Catholics, will soon perish in a horrible chastisement, and that they alone will be saved. In the theological underground of American Catholicism, mostly hidden from public view, the followers of Veronica are just a few among the many who regard both the broader society and the broader church as irredeemably corrupt. Now, Michael Cuneo's The Smoke of Satan brings these groups vividly to life, shedding valuable light on the current state of Catholicism in North America--and, more generally, on religion in our society.

Images on television and in the popular media have made the Christian right a household concept--but what that usually means is the Protestant Christian right. Cuneo's insightful, provocative study highlights the equally vigorous though less well-known Catholic counterpart. Ranging from the Marianists, such as the followers of "Blessed Veronica" of Bayside, to picketers at abortion clinics across the United States and Canada (militant lay Catholics who believe that "public witness" is a vocational enterprise of the highest order, one which the vast majority of bishops, priests, and nuns are too lacking in faith and nerve to perform themselves); from separatists who believe that even Rome itself has fallen and that true Catholics should withdraw and form alternate communities, to Latin Mass advocates who believe the reforms of Vatican II are the work of Satan himself; these American Catholics are united by a common conviction: in the space of just three decades, the mainstream Catholic church in the United States and elsewhere has fallen into alarming decline, and the task of preserving authentic Catholicism (and thus Christianity itself) from outright extinction has fallen to small bands of the truly faithful. As Cuneo draws striking portraits of these faithful few, he also provides some fascinating asides on contemporary issues, including an innovative analysis of the ideological relationship of right-wing Catholic groups with the militia movement and a provocative assessment of militant Catholic pro-life activism.

In 1972, speaking in the aftermath of Vatican II, Pope Paul VI said "the smoke of Satan has entered by some crack into the temple of God." In this first full-scale account of Roman Catholic fundamentalism, Cuneo details what these dissenters believe the "smoke of Satan" to be, and what they plan to do to halt its spread. Cuneo's profiles of these right-wing groups and the various strategies they have adopted in attempting to carry out this task makes for one of the most fascinating stories in contemporary American religion.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism is a crisp, witty, thorough, and fresh study of the inner workings of the Catholic right. Sociologist Michael W. Cuneo concentrates on three groups: anti-abortion activists, Catholic separatists (who believe that the American Church revoked its authority regarding true Catholicism by distorting the intentions of Vatican II), and mystics and apocalypticists. As Cuneo explains, these groups believe that "the Catholic church in the United States has strip-malled its liturgical life, compromised its doctrine, and squandered its moral capital. Once defiant and blessedly haughty, the church is now a cheap floozy, cozying up to the modern world, smiling, winking, desperate for flattery and approval." In analyzing each of these groups and their distinctive methods of protest against the purported corruption of the American Church, Cunea provides fascinating anecdotes based on wide reading and firsthand encounters. All of them, it seems, pose variations of one essential question--and it is surely one of the most vexing questions at this point in American Christian history: what, exactly, constitutes an ultimate authority worth trusting? --Michael Joseph Gross --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

Based on his personal interviews and visitations to communities in the United States and Canada, Cuneo's (sociology, Fordham Univ.) book documents and evaluates the reasons behind post-Vatican II, disaffected Catholic groups, from moderate to extreme. He divides these factions into conservatives (those mostly remaining within the church), separatists (those disaffiliated from Rome), and marianists (those primarily focused on Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and on doomsday predictions). Intellectuals, eccentrics, and schismatics also pass through these pages. Cuneo covers lesser-known groups, such as the Canadian Apostles of Divine Love, and the more recognized traditionalists such as Gomar DePauw, Marcel Lefebvre, and marianist Virginia Leukens. More journalistic in style but topically similar to Patrick Allitt's Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America (LJ 12/93), this study will be useful especially for academic religion, history, and sociology collections.?Anna M. Donnelly, St. John's Univ. Lib., Jamaica, N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1ST edition (July 24, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195113500
• ISBN-13: 978-0195113501
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,549,228 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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58 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Somewhat muddled, July 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism (Hardcover)

This book is misleadingly titled: the "smoke of Satan" comes from a statement by Paul VI lamenting the radical abuses which multiplied in the bosom of the Church in the 1970's, and did not refer to either the fairly marginal groups which occupy most of the book or the conservative ones which are detailed in two of its chapters. Far from being "the smoke of Satan," one would imagine that groups like Catholics United for the Faith (who supported Humanae Vitae and also held their noses and attended the New Mass) would be welcomed by Paul VI. The title also speaks of dissent, a label which does not really apply to many of these groups: the conservatives represent a position diametrically opposed to dissent and the various sedevacantist and mystical movements have generally removed themselves from the Church - they are not dissenters within it. Only Fr. Gruner and his Fatima Crusade could be accurately described as dissenting. This categorical inaccuracy betrays the author's prejudices: his introductory description of pre-conciliar Catholicism is tendentious at best. Could the Catholic Church of the 1950's really be considered "spiritually vacuous" compared to the banal consumerism of wider American society? Could Catholic schools really have offered a "second-rate education" in comparison to the public schools? These propositions are both laughable and telling. The cynical indifferentism of the opening chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book. The book is, finally, more of a work of teratology than sociology. Most of the groups it describes have no influence within the wider Church and they grow more withdrawn from it every day. Yet there are other groups which, although not as entertainingly demented and titillating as the Bayside and St. Jovite groups, are much larger and more influential. Conservative and traditionalist groups like Opus Dei, Legatus, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, Roman Catholic Faithful, the Coalition in Support of Ecclesia Dei, Christifideles, Una Voce International, CIEL, the National Association of Catholic Home Educators et al.,are much larger and influential than E. Michael Jones' Fidelity for example, but Jones' publication has a meatier, more tabloidesque flavor, so his magazine is given a starring role. There are a plethora of new orders in America which are based around the preconciliar liturgy - the Fontgombault Benedictines of Nebraska, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, the Order of St. John and several more - but any description of these validly ordained and professed priests and monks is eschewed in favor of dubious, do-it-yourself fringe organizations. The net effect of this book is to marginalize a large and growing number of loyal traditionalist Catholics in their twenties and thirties who represent the mainstream of Catholic reaction to the Second Vatican Council. Instead we are given the exploits of aging "antipopes," many of whom founded their organizations well before the Council was convened. This book is an interesting read, and its subjects are treated respectfully - but it fails in the task it sets for itself: to accurately describe the reaction of American Catholics to postconciliar changes they found abhorrent.

38 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars When Children Tell Tales Best Left to Adults..., March 19, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism (Paperback)

St. Augustine once commented that it is pointless to try to understand so as to believe in Christianity, that rather one must believe in order to understand. Michael Cuneo has made his unbelief and lack of understanding of Christianity quite clear in this book. For him, Catholics and struggling Catholic-at-heart people, trying to make out the best of a horrid ecclesiastical situation are but exhibits to display in his printed zoo. No matter how much sympathy he pretends to display towards the persons he appears to have interviewed, the cumulative effect is to make authentic Catholicism and those sympathetic to it look like some bunch of fragmented fools.
The scholarship is rather bad, and seemingly based on all the most outrageous quotes he can find as opposed to a realistic and honest appraisal of the Catholic community at large.
For starters, the whole phenomena is treated as though it were almost totally an American phenomena, with only a couple side trips to Canada. It would be legitimate to say "This is all over the world, but I am going to choose to focus most on that part nearest to my own locale." But instead he equates Catholicism with Americanism, American economics (The Wanderer), American utopian colonies (his "Separatists" - more about that in a moment), and American entrepreneurialism (Veronica Leuken), virtually ignoring the truly international, global, worldwide, universal, "Catholic" aspect of traditionalism.
Beginning with the "Conservatives": This book is typical of the writings of leftist academicians, for Mr. Cuneo, anything to the right of Al Gore is "extreme" in the pejorative sense of that word. In upholding Humanae Vitae and fighting the social evils of abortion, euthanasia, communism, socialism, and the overall "culture of death," H. Lyman Stebbins, James Hitchcock, Alphonse Matt (Sr. & Jr.), and Joseph Scheidler are simply doing their Catholic duty as activist laymen as specified in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Nothing "extreme" or worth treating as zoo exhibits here at all.
Moving over to his next catagory, naming it "Separatists" is a flat-out misrepresentation. Reading it, one would conjure up an image of various little groups going off into the jungle or the desert or mountain somewhere and creating a self-enclosed utopian society, akin to the Shakers or Oneida colonies, and morally committed to all the most outrageous conspiracy theories. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Catholics of the SSPX, SSPV, CMRI and so forth are as much involved and committed to upholding the Social Reign of Christ and fighting abortion and the overall "culture of death" as anyone in his "conservative" category. Furthermore, they never separated themselves from the Church, rather the modernists in the Vatican separated themselves from many of these Catholics. And as for the Catholics that the Vatican modernists didn't separate themselves from, the FSSP, ICR, and other Indult communities, where would they have fit in Mr. Cuneo's zoo? No one calls them "separatists" yet put a priest of the FSSP next to a priest of the SSPX (and their respective congregations as well), and one would have extreme difficulty telling which one was which. And so what if Joseph Berchtold and Fr. Baumberger (sedevacantists) know little or nothing of Humanae Vitae? The fact remains that both know well Casti Connubii which teaches the same morality, and which is lived just as seriously by sedevacantists as Humanae Vitae is lived by conservatives.
Moving over to the "Marianists" (Appiritionists or Visionaries or Seers would have been a more appropriate title), again one sees him focusing on the most outrageous ones, Bayside, St. Jovite, etc. while leaving more representative contemporary visionaries such as Betania or Akita unmentioned. Fatima gets mentioned primarily in the context of the speculation surrounding the "third secret" and Fr. Gruner's continual struggles for recognition and acceptance. One sees here a clear taste for the sensationalistic, the ridiculous, and the worthless and contemptible, obviously included for no reason than to associate the more rational Catholics with the most outrageous "cases."
There is some information of interest, and much of it is wittily presented (his use of the phrase "Rock'n'Roll outlaw of Catholic Traditionalism" in reference to Bp. Shuckardt is so clever I've used it myself at times), but really, one does have a right to expect more solid and reputable information from a university professor.

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Concentrates on epiphenomena, January 2, 1998

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gundagirl "gundagirl" (Pittsburgh, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism (Hardcover)

Cuneo's book is well-written and thoroughly researched, but falls well short of providing a comprehensive overview of Catholic traditionalism in the United States. His book covers almost exclusively groups that have separated themselves from the Church, without any mention of the dramatic growth since 1988 of interest in the traditional Latin liturgy within the Church, a development encouraged by Pope John Paul II in his letter Ecclesia Dei. While these numerically insignificant separatist groups are unquesionably colorful, a book that concentrates on them while ignoring the far larger movement within the Church is ultimately unsatisfying simply because it is a study limited to epiphenomena that appear to be chosen on the basis of which will make "good copy" than on explaining a larger and more significant development. Cuneo should be given credit for thoroughly and reasonably fairly reviewing the traditionalist groups he surveys, and gaining interviews with a number of individuals with a deep-seated mistrust of outsiders of any disciption. However, since these groups are considered completely outside of context, this book can be better thought of as a collection of well-written feature articles than a serious academic study. In passing, it should be noted that Cuneo's implicit categorization of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars with various sedevacantist groups and fraudulant apparitionists is nothing short of outrageous, and raises questions about his objectivity. If those questions are unfair ones, I suspect that Cuneo is quite capable of producing comprehensive and fair-minded study of conservative and traditionalist Catholicism in the United States. This book, though, is not it.