The English Catholic New Left: Battling the Religious Establishment and the Politics of the Cold War

Abstract

In the 1960s there appeared in England a group of young university educated Catholics who sought to merge radical Catholic social teachings with the ideas of Karl Marx and the latest insights of European and American sociologists and literary theorists. They were known as the English Catholic New Left (ECNL). Under the inspiration of their Dominican mentors, they launched a magazine called Slant that served as the vehicle for publishing their ideas about how Catholic theology along with the Social Gospels fused with neo-Marxism could bring a humanistic socialist revolution to Britain. The Catholic Leftists worked in alliance with the activists of the secular New Left Review to achieve this objective. A major influence on the ECNL was the Marxist Dominican friar Laurence Bright and Herbert McCabe, O. P. Slant took off with great success when Sheed and Ward agreed to publish the journal. Slant featured perceptive, indeed at times brilliant, cutting-edge articles by the Catholic Left’s young Turks, including Terry Eagleton, Martin Redfern, Bernard Sharratt, and Angela and Adrian Cunningham, among others. A major target of the Slant project was the Western Alliance’s Cold War strategy of nuclear deterrence, which they saw to be contrary to Christian just war theory and ultimately destructive of humankind. Another matter of concern for the Slant group was capitalist imperialism that ravaged the underdeveloped world and was a major destabilizing factor for achieving world peace and social equality. Despite their failure to achieve a social revolution “baptized by Christianity,” the English Catholic New Left broke new ground in terms of showing how a traditional religion with a highly conservative and sometimes reactionary history had the capacity to offer new paths forward and remain an inspiration to progressive thinking Christians trying to navigate the shoals of a post-modern world.

1. Introduction

There were a myriad of religious responses to the Cold War, and especially to what were seen to be the Communist challenges to Western culture. No group was more consistently hostile to Communism than the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican condemned the atheism and class divisiveness of Marx’s followers soon after the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848. This revolutionary creed became a more immediate threat after Lenin and his Russian Bolsheviks seized power in 1917.

The American Catholic hierarchy, for its part, mounted a fervent assault on Communist Party activity throughout the 1920s and 30s, culminating in its stalwart support of General Franco’s philo-fascist rebellion against the democratically elected leftist Spanish Republic. Although later Nazi aggression necessitated an Anglo-American alliance with the Soviet Union, many American Catholics were discomforted with the relationship. Throughout the post-World War II decades, both conservative and liberal-oriented American Catholics were at one in recognizing the threat of Communism, though their solutions to the challenge were significantly different. Bishop Fulton Sheen, the influential Catholic radio and television evangelist, gave voice to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s war on domestic Reds when he called for a purge of Communist supporters in government and American higher education. In one of his more alarming broadcasts, Sheen declared:

Communism is the social body what leprosy is to the physical body; in fact it is more serious, for Communism affects personality directly, while disease affects the mind and soul only indirectly. In moral language, Communism is intrinsically evil because it submerges and destroys personality to the status of an ant in an anthill; free government is made impossible through its basic principle enunciated by Engels, that freedom is necessity or obedience to a dictator.

(Allitt 2009, p. 4)

As tensions between the Western powers and the Soviet Union increased because of conflicts concerning nuclear deterrence and de-colonization, a remarkably different Catholic response to these issues occurred in England with the birth of the Catholic New Left. There were other Catholic-inspired leftist mobilizations during the 1960s, ranging from Dorothy Day’s pacifist Catholic Worker movement to the personalism of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). However, the English Catholic New Left (ECNL) and their journal Slant were of a far different timber in that the theoretical basis of their movement was grounded on a neo-Marxist paradigm. Unlike their American counterparts, the English Catholic New Left were not reformers but social revolutionaries. The Slant group was impressed with SDS’s political activism as a way of breaking through the passivity of the 1950s, but they detected something pusillanimous in the movement’s Port Huron Statement. Tom Hayden, who wrote the first draft, emphasized the imperative of moral reconstruction. My advice, wrote Hayden, was to be “directly personal rather than political and programmatic.” “The time has come,” he insisted,” for a reassertion of the personal.” (Hayden 1988, p. 83). From the ECNL’s perspective, what was missing in the founding of SDS was a sufficient theoretical structure to serve as a guide for social reconstruction. Hayden rejected Marxism as too rigid and antiquated. Politics was secondary to the personal, and when expressed “should flow from experience, not from preconceived dogmas or ideologies.” (Hayden 1988, p. 371). The secular New Left’s Stuart Hall appreciated SDS’s breaching the liberal political consensus but noted the stark absence of any rational pattern or ideological scheme that could ground their rebellion (Hall 1967). Such ideological vacuity was not to be found with the English Catholic Leftists.

What set the English Catholic New Left and their journal Slant apart from all Christian responses to Cold War issues was their withering attack on capitalism as the driving ethos of Western culture and its impact on foreign policy. These Catholic radicals joined in political combat with the British secular New left and waged war against what they considered the feckless policies of liberal democracy, outdated Catholic theology, the lukewarm socialism of the British Labour Party, international corporate capitalism driving Western imperialism throughout the Third World and the excesses of Stalinist Marxism. In doing so, they set a new mark concerning how far one could go within the construct of Catholic social philosophy, and they did so by pushing to the very limits of their creed by drafting an interdisciplinary intellectual construct that drew not only from classical sociological theory (Toennies, Durkheim and Weber), the cultural analyses of Raymond Williams, and Richard Hogarth but also from the neo-Marxist writings of Leszeck Kolakowski and Georg Lukacs.1

2. The Battle Begins

The English Catholic New Left came of age during the progressive promises of Vatican Council II, which created a framework for Catholicism to engage constructively with the new age. In Britain the cultural context for the emergence of a more progressive Catholicism was facilitated by a growing recognition that religion could offer more than individual, private spiritual development. There was a major shift in traditional apologetics during the 1960s as a new breed of well-educated lay theologians came on the scene. Before the war only a few hundred Catholics graduated with degrees in higher education. By the mid-1960s some 5000 Catholics were earning university diplomas and another 4000 were entering colleges of education every year. This meant that by the 1960s there was a considerable body of educated lay people who could play a more active role in the Catholic community (Spencer 1967, as cited in (Sharratt 2015)). Several of the intellectuals who were part of this cohort were a product of the pedagogical reforms of the 1944 Education Act, which allowed for the expansion of working-class Catholics to attend universities after 1950.

Many of these newly-minted graduates were more sympathetic than their priests to the changes taking place in the Church. Lower levels of clergy, especially the older priests, had been trained in narrow theological sources and therefore had difficulties adjusting to the changes in liturgy and the move to vernacular forms of worship that were promoted by the Council. Younger priests were no better suited to this calling, since their teachers had not been introduced or trained in the new theology that gave shape to the Council’s reforms. Those who did try to initiate more dynamic and robust leadership were frequently resisted by their superiors who reinforced static and authoritarian theological practices. All this produced considerable frustration for more progressive-minded clergy and younger lay people who had benefited from the post-war educational opportunities. Their views found expression in expanded membership in the Newman Association (the largest, most comprehensive intellectual body of British university Catholics), the publication of letters to the Catholic and national press and in a profusion of articles and books. Yet none of these progressive voices found a sympathetic hearing from Cardinal John C. Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster and leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales.

The cultural landscape of Britain in the 1950s seemed conventionally stable and self-contented. The influential Anglo-American journal Encounter, a forum for expressing the moderate positions of the intellectual left and right, promoted the virtues of Keynesianism and liberal triumphalism. The American sociologist Edward Shils, teaching at the London School of Economics, observed in an Encounter essay of April 1955 that “scarcely anyone here in Great Britain seems any longer to feel there is anything fundamentally wrong. On the contrary, Britain on the whole, and especially in comparison with other countries, seems to the British intellectual of the mid 1950s to be all right and even much more than that. Never has an intellectual class found its society and its culture so much to its satisfaction.” Shils told the British intellectuals that they were “self-satisfied, insular and genteel, too addicted to wine and food, wildflowers and birds, too amused by eccentricity.” (Annan 1990, p. 247).

All this stood in stark contrast to the cultural foment taking place in avant-garde American intellectual circles. As early as the 1950s David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, John Kenneth Galbraith, and others were criticizing the bland conformity and sappy religious bromides of the Eisenhower administration as well as the corruptive powers of America’s industrial and financial elites. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a January 1960 Esquire article made a call for a more daring approach to the politics of the new decade. Americans, he wrote, were ready for new and exciting things. He anticipated that the sixties would be “spirited, articulate, inventive, incoherent, turbulent, with energy shooting off wildly in all directions. Above all, there will be a sense of motion, of leadership and hope.” (Bookes 1992, p. 141). And of course, in the arena of popular culture waited the Beatles and their musical progeny, who in their own irreverent ways ridiculed the smug world of class consciousness, nuclear diplomacy, bourgeois sexual mores, politics and religion of all kinds. This harbinger of a breakdown in postwar social consensus, combined with the impact of a broader international countercultural movement sweeping the Western world by the 1960s, found the British governing establishment at odds with the temper of the times.

Edward Shils’ description of the stale complacency of British cultural life was clearly reflected in the mindsets of the nation’s contending political parties. Both Labour and the Conservatives found consensus in a mutual commitment to the economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes and saw as their main task the management of market capitalism. The Labour governments between 1964 and 1970 were primarily concerned with the fine-tuning of the welfare state rather than initiating major social reforms. For the most part both the working and middle classes experienced material progress throughout the 1960s. Politically the nation was relatively quiescent. The labor unions had little interest in changing the system of industrial relations, and there were no efforts made to reform the House of Lords, the civil service, banks, or the legal system. There was also political agreement that Britain would remain fully committed to the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) military alliance, supportive of and linked to Washington’s strategy of nuclear deterrence and continued support for engagement with global corporate capitalism.

The political quietude of the nation’s governing establishment was matched by the leadership of the British Roman Catholic Church. Most of its ecclesiastics were unprepared for the consequences of Vatican II’s reforms. As Terry Eagleton observed, the “only impact Vatican II seemed to have on the English hierarchy was to stir them to oppose or dilute most of its proposals while maintaining a perfunctorily obedient external mien.”2 Even Cardinal Heenan candidly admitted that British theologians were ill informed about the new thinking that had swept the continent and informed the Council’s teachings. The Hexham and Newcastle diocesan paper, Northern Cross, gave credence to Heenan’s view when it announced on the eve of the Council (February 1962) that “we need not expect anything dramatic.” There were some thirty converts to Catholicism in Newcastle between 1962 and 1963, and only one had any notion from priestly instruction that there were to be any significant changes in the Church (Archer 1986, p. 126). England’s episcopacy well into the first six decades of the twentieth century had not shown an interest in social and political matters. Their primary concern was tending to the spiritual needs of their flock, building churches and schools, and providing a sufficient supply of properly trained parish clergy. There was neither a tradition nor a compelling interest in political matters.

The English Catholic hierarchy had long been reluctant to engage in religious and political controversy. In fact, G. K. Chesterton’s commitment to radical journalism in publishing G.K.’s Weekly (1925–1936) was partly the consequence of this fact, as well as of his disappointment that Catholics in general were avoiding the problems of industrial society. Those in Chesterton’s circle (Eric Gill and Arnold Lunn in particular) regularly criticized their fellow Catholics for intellectual and political timidity. For the most part, the Catholic clergy in both Britain and the U. S. largely ignored or misunderstood the messages of the papal labor encyclicals (Corrin 2002).

One significant political event that marked an early division between more progressive Catholics from establishment opinion and the hierarchy’s feckless social policies was Chesterton’s unqualified support of the syndicalist-inspired General Strike of 1926. This unprecedented, seemingly revolutionary trade union response to capitalism was precipitated by years of trouble in Britain’s coal industry. Inefficiencies and declining profits led to management’s demand for longer working hours and a reduction in wages, which were bitterly opposed by the miners. G.K.’s Weekly went beyond supporting labor’s claims for simply increasing wages and improving working conditions. It instead recommended the smashing of the capitalist system as inherently exploitive, and demanded that the workers get joint ownership of the mines themselves. Chesterton insisted that any workman had a right to strike at any time, and for any reason. Withholding such rights represented a denial of liberty.3 All this produced serious criticism from more conservative lay and clerical Catholics. Typical of the establishment’s mind set was Cardinal Bourne, head of the English Church, who condemned the General Strike as a “direct challenge to lawfully constituted authority” and “a sin against the obedience which we owe to God.” The leading Catholic journal of opinion The Tablet saw G.K.’s Weekly’s support of the strikers to be the product of a radical, communist-leaning clique within the journal’s editorial offices.4 G.K.’s Weekly saw all this to be illustrative of the hierarchy’s congenital failure to commit itself to political action as a means of helping the wage-slavery of Britain’s coal miners.

There were numerous other skirmishes between Chesterton’s circle and the Catholic establishment that followed. G.K.s Weekly was fully committed to attacking the abject failure of the English Catholic hierarchy to engage with social, economic, and political matters it considered of central importance for the health of the nation. For a brief time, there was an effort by the hierarchy to address these issues. Henry Edward Manning as Archbishop of Westminster, for example, had been profoundly disturbed by capitalism’s exploitation of the laboring classes and waged relentless war against what he called “the Plutocracy,” most notably in his personal intervention in helping the workers in settling the London Dock Strike of 1889.5 “God forbid,” claimed Manning, that “we should be looked at as servants of plutocracy instead of guides and guardians of the poor.” (Slesser 1958). Manning’s successors, however, declined to advance his support for social Catholicism. Herbert Vaughan, who followed Manning as Archbishop of Westminster, was a crusty old Tory and assumed a conservative political profile that became a characteristic of his successors. Although Vaughan greatly admired Manning, he considered his former patron’s overzealous public political activity on part of the dock workers as a product of “senile decay.” (Gilley 1992, p. 492). It was ill-advised and even dangerous, observed Vaughan, for the Church to be involved in “worldly” affairs.

After the social and political achievements of Manning, the following generation of leaders were administratively bland and insular. Apart from Manning, only Edward Bagshawe (1829–1915), Bishop of Nottingham, displayed any sustained support for social reform, and in doing so was chastised by conservative Catholics (Roberts 1985, pp. 455–63). Archbishop Bourne of Westminster (1861–1935) insisted that it was no part of the pastoral responsibility of the bishops to engage in “what one generally called politics.” (Aspden 2002, p. 10). Kenneth Aspden’s analysis of Britain’s Catholic bishops shows that their primary concerns were not social and political matters but the spiritual welfare of their parishioners. A major priority, of which they had notable success, was building churches and schools, fearing that absent sufficient indoctrination, many Catholics would fall out of the faith as adults (Aspden 2002). Aspden concludes that the bishops were generally a conservative and insular group, with few friendships or interests outside their church. Indeed, Edward Ellis, Bishop of Nottingham, went so far as to prohibit even silent prayers with Protestants (Aspden 2002, p. 305).

By the mid-1960s there emerged a group of young lay intellectuals who were outspokenly critical of the English hierarchy’s congenital conservatism now manifested in their failure to fully engage the reforms of Vatican II. Their critique of establishment Catholicism would ultimately break the bonds of mere liberal reformism and unleash an approach to the faith that would be nothing less than revolutionary. One of the early signs of this type of discontent was a book of essays compiled by the former editor of the Catholic Herald, Michael de la Bedoyere, entitled Objections to Roman Catholicism (1965). De la Bedoyere had left the Catholic Herald because of its conservative strictures and launched a Catholic avant-garde newsletter called Search, a vehicle for the expression of freewheeling religious thinking unvarnished by episcopal censorship. The “objections” of the book were to the outdated traditions and resistance to liberal thinking that persisted in the Church and prevented Catholics from meeting the promises of the Council. The criticisms ranged from official censorship of the press, bishops’ prohibiting distinguished theologians from giving lectures in their dioceses, the failure to promote international peace, and a condemnation of nuclear weapons by Archbishop Thomas Roberts, S.J.6

Cardinal Heenan for his part sensed early on the potential dangers presented by what he saw to be the Catholic Left. He was particularly alarmed in the spring of 1970 when eighteen Liverpool priests drew up a document of thirty-eight propositions circulated among the clergy and published in full in the Catholic Herald and The Tablet. Among its radical proposals was optional priestly celibacy, the ordination of women, more diocesan democracy and a greater attention to social and economic matters. For Heenan these propositions went beyond the pale: “The barque of Peter,” as he put it, “was ill equipped to face a tornado.” He warned that talk of aggiornamento (the renewal called for by Pope John XXIII) was being used to commit crimes in its name, as all forms of authority were new coming under attack. It soon became fashionable, claimed Heenan, “to preach a Gospel according to Marx not Mark,” where community was all, and authority was out (Heenan 1974, p. 390).

Among the “dangerous” men Heenan feared were hijacking the faith would prove to be far more radical than those associated with Michael de la Bedoyere’s Search. These were young Catholic intellectuals who identified with the “New Left.” As opposed to the “Old Left,” early supporters of the Russian road to socialism, the New Left were a varied group, the original leaders being former Communists appalled by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, which they saw as the product of hegemonic totalitarianism. As a consequence, many began to examine alternatives to the Stalinist interpretations of Marx. This group found inspiration in Marx’s early writings, notably the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. This had been suppressed by Soviet orthodoxy. Sometimes referred to as the “Paris Manuscripts,” these writings reveal Marx in his younger, humanist philosophical days, before his shift to the scientific dialectics of Das Kapital. The Paris Manuscripts explained how capitalism dehumanizes society by treating men and women as mere objects in its relentless drive for profits. Marx believed that this exploitation could be overcome by a deeper understanding of man and the social conditions in which he lived. The New Left had as one of its major objectives a critical renewal of Marxism as a vehicle for creating a humanistic socialist society. This necessitated discrediting established Communist states, especially the Soviet Union, since its bureaucratic classes had betrayed the humanist and moral vision of Marx. But their mission was also to change the domestic and foreign policy of the established political parties in Britain.

The New Left included a galaxy of Britain’s leading intellectuals, including E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, E. J. Hobsbawm, and a second generation of younger Marxists such as Stuart Hall and Perry Anderson, the latter of whom took on the editorship of the New Left Review in 1962. A seminal influence on the group’s political thinking was the radical American sociologist C. Wright Mills. His Power Elite (Mills 1956) outlined the major institutional structures of power in the United States, which offered an intellectual architecture for his followers to analyze the interplay of capitalism and politics in Britain. Mills pointed out that the Labour Party had become so integrated into the institutional structures of capitalist society that it was incapable of being a force for social change. Yet Mills never felt the working class could be agents of change since they had been co-opted by the powers of capital through bread and circuses and therefore comfortable with the existing economic and political system. Instead, Mills had more faith in the intelligentsia, in particular the younger generation (Mills 1948).

A forum for the discussion of Catholic leftist ideas was provided by the December Group. Their meetings took place at the Dominican’s Spode House at Oxford. The English Dominicans through their journal New Blackfriars had a well-earned reputation for unconventional social and political thinking, often assuming positions contrary to the Catholic establishment. As of yet, there has been no adequate historical study of the important role the English Dominicans have played in advancing a progressive brand of Catholic social and political ideas.7 As opposed to frequent conservative Catholic support for authoritarian policies, for example, the English Dominicans and their French affiliates were persistent voices of protest against inter-war Fascism, and during the civil war in Spain they were highly critical of General Francisco Franco’s use of religion to justify his rebellion against the Spanish Republic.

The December Group began to meet annually beginning in 1958 and intended to set up a conference “to discuss social problems from a Catholic perspective independent of any official organization” but within the conceptual framework of the New Left Review (Cunningham 1991, p. 211). The participants saw a need to find a meeting place for Catholic leftists, since all the other Catholic groups were dominated by rigid theological authoritarians or voices of the political right.

The progressive thinking of the December Group ultimately found its most advanced articulation in 1964 when Laurence Bright, O. P., and other Dominicans brought together some clever Cambridge University students to launch a magazine of radical Catholic opinion. This marked the birth of the pro-Marxist Slant movement, which took the title from the name of its magazine. The Slant activists intended to open up, refresh, and revolutionize what was learned through their Catholic education by reaching out and integrating new currents of sociological and theological currents of thought with their own eclectic ideas. Their ultimate objective was to bring a revolution to Britain, through what they called a culture of “socialist humanism” but one “baptized” by Christianity. The Slant circle found a rich source of inspiration for their mission in the New Left Review.

The Marxist Dominican friar Laurence Bright was the eminence gris behind the Slant project. Bright along with his friend Father Herbert McCabe, O. P., editor of New Blackfriars, and one of the twentieth century’s most eminent theologians, convinced their progeny to publish articles and books dedicated to a cross-fertilization of radical Catholic social philosophy and Marxism.8 Drawn into this circle were some of Britain’s brightest young Catholic intellectuals, including Terry Eagleton, Neil Middleton, Martin Redfern, Leo Pyle, Adrian and Angela Cunningham, Martin Shaw, Christopher Calnan, Bernard Sharratt, and Brian Wicker among many others.

This fledgling undergraduate enterprise took off with surprising speed when the leading Catholic publisher Sheed and Ward committed to publishing the Slant journal in 1966, moving the operation to London. The imprimatur of such a respected publishing firm, along with the support of New Blackfriars, assured that Slant’s radical views would reach a national audience. The managing director of Sheed and Ward was Neil Middleton, the son-in-law of Frank and Maisie Ward, founders of the esteemed publishing house in 1926. Although Middleton took the operation in far more radical directions than the founders, both Frank and Maisie had championed progressive Catholic writers, in stark contrast to their main competitor, the more conservative and rightist-leaning Burns and Oates.9 Maisie, celebrated author of a highly regarded biography of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, introduced Middleton to the ground breaking progressive writings of Swiss theologian Hans Küng. It was through Küng that he met the fellow-travelling progressive theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, both of whom became friends of the Middleton family. Middleton was responsible for introducing the English audience to the new theology of the Continent that had undergirded the aggiornamento of Vatican Council II (publishing translations of the work of Karl Rahner as well as Küng and Schillebeeckx). England’s progressive theologians also found a home with Sheed and Ward: Charles Davis, Herbert McCabe, Nicholas Lash, and Rosemary Houghton, all of whom promoted Council reforms.

The Slant movement hoped to transform British society through a socialist revolution, and one of the vehicles for this was to be the Catholic Church itself. This would be a Herculean task, given the fact that the nation’s hierarchy was rigidly conservative and had a distinctly different view of its responsibilities. For generations the Church leadership had seen it necessary to serve two widely separated social groups: aristocratic, highly conservative but political quiescent recusant families (those of noble blood who refused to accept the Church of England) and a handful of eminent converts (Newman, Chesterton, and others) on the one hand, and, on the other, their uprooted co-religionists, the Irish immigrants who had fled the ravages of poverty and famine for work in England’s factories and their descendants. It was assumed that the latter required protective pastoral care rather than exposure to the finer points of theology, literature and philosophy. Out of this paternalistic tradition emerged an aristocratic mode of service that gave the English Catholic Church the social configuration of a special caste overseeing a compliant working class. This explains why the Catholic Left developed a deep revulsion against class privilege and were prickly about any manifestations of cultural elitism. Their hope was to mobilize the emerging Catholic bourgeoisie to work within the Church to create the requisite conditions for the revolution to come.

The wide gap between the Church hierarchy and the social objectives of the Leftists was illustrated in the 1964 English Catholic Social Guild’s A Catholic Guide to Social and Political Action by C. C. Clump, S. J. This was intended to be the guide for teaching social thinking at Catholic schools. Father Clump drew a sharp distinction between what should be the main concern of all good Christians and what to be avoided: much like the Church itself, they must remain aloof from the “fleeting exigencies of politics.” Nothing of substance was said about challenges presented by the nature of a class-divided society or industrial capitalism. 10

Clump’s missive was illustrative of the limitations of Catholic social teaching and especially the watered-down English variety. From the outset, observed Slant’s Adrian Cunningham, the maturation of Catholic political mentality was significantly affected by the powerful cultural presence of capitalism and English social history, each of which inhibited the development of a radical edge to Catholic social thinking. Britain was the first, and for two centuries the most highly articulate, capitalist society. This social setting had a far more paralyzing effect on the emergence of radical Catholic social teaching than was the case on the Continent because of the British establishment’s economic capacity of co-opting dissenting voices. The Slant circle was convinced that the Catholic Church had succumbed to the charms of the ruling elite and thus promoted an unjust social and economic order.

An alternative to these inequities, wrote Father Laurence Bright, was a historically based reading of Scripture. Here, he insisted, one could find a new and radical demand of Christianity for transforming the human condition. A true understanding of Christianity’s historical roots revealed a religion of revolutionary liberation rather than a belief in abstract doctrinal statements—that is, a religion concerned about a change in humanity’s actual condition, which is, of course, possible only through political means. If that is indeed the case as shown in the Bible, then it can be seen that Christianity is not incompatible with Marxism in the broadest sense. Both are concerned with advancing cognitive liberation and the creation of a true community founded on the principles of equality and brotherhood. This is why Slant insisted that Catholics ought to be on the left. It is only the political left that works against the status quo, which is promoted by undemocratic elitist social and economic forces that militate against radical promises of a Christian transformation by focusing on the individual rather than the community.

Bright identified several sources of theological perversions that prevented achieving the promises of the social gospels, including the reflexive belief that all problems can be addressed by appealing to authority (the Roman hierarchy), “supernaturalism,” the failure to recognize the humanity of Christ as he lived and died in the secular world of man, “individualism,” the mistaken idea that one’s relationship with God was more important than one’s relationship with others, and finally “spiritualism,” where abstract moral principles were privileged at the expense of social and economic matters (Klugmann and Oestreicher 1968, pp. 119–20).

An important step in preparing British society for socialist revolution was the restructuring of Catholic thinking. Although some English Catholics were energized by the promises of conciliar renewal, they shared, at the same time, the flawed political consciousness of the general population. This constricted mind-set was described by Slant as “liberalism,” a term defined as a willingness to genuinely engage the problems of society but one that crucially stopped short of a systematic critical enquiry into the fundamental structures that undergirded the socio-political order. Echoing Bright’s identification of the sources of Christianity’s distortions, Terry Eagleton made the observation that British Catholics, “trained to an individualist, one-sided spirituality which covertly…denigrated the historical, the physical and political…seemed to us, after Vatican II, to be no nearer to confronting the hard social and political implications of their own belief; and yet, with the emergence of a new theology which placed crucial emphasis on history, community, the human and bodily, the ground seemed to be prepared for such a confrontation.” (Eagleton 1970, p. 552).

Terry Eagleton, who created a sensation when as a young Marxist scholar was appointed Oxford’s Warton Professor of English Literature and today is recognized as one of Britain’s most eminent literary critics and public intellectuals, was Slant’s most influential writer. In its eighth issue, the first underwritten by Sheed and Ward to have a national audience, Eagleton declared that the journal’s purpose was to promote a Christian socialist revolution that required the elimination of the bourgeois cultural and political order. In his view even Vatican Council II had been inadequate for this task. The positions taken by the Catholic Social Guild, and the “timid and bloodless liberal conservatism of Vatican II” all suggested, claimed Eagleton, that the liberal reformist impulses within the Church were effectively converting it into one huge Liberal Party cut loose from the real issues of capitalism, Third World revolutions, nuclear violence, and brutal cultural degradation. In order to actualize the revolutionary imperative, Slant would mediate between the ideas and values of the political left and the Church and explore the possible interconnections between a theological and political radicalism. These efforts called for a flexible, interdisciplinary theoretical approach. For this purpose Eagleton announced that the Slant group intended to draw on the ideas of Marx and Sartre, on existential psychologists such as R. D. Laing, on the writings of Heidegger and Wittgenstein on language, and especially on Raymond Williams’s work on communication, culture and the imperatives of creating community (Eagleton 1966).

As editor of Slant, as well as managing director of Sheed and Ward, Neil Middleton began to fill in the details of Eagleton’s theoretical architecture of revolution. Middleton of the Catholic Left was the most deeply concerned and informed about Third World issues. He also seems to have been one of the more politically radical of the Catholic Left. Middleton had joined the Trotskyist International Marxist Group in the early 1970s and was a comrade of Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn. As magazine editor, Middleton presented to Slant’s readers a model person representing what the journal stood for in working out a Christian mission to advance a revolutionary community of belief. This was Camilo Torres, a left-wing socialist intellectual and priest who had died fighting in the ranks of Colombian revolutionaries. Torres was born into the Colombian aristocratic ruling class. After ordination he was sent to Louvain to earn a doctorate in sociology. Torres’s decision to join guerrilla forces was the consequence of his belief that Colombia’s feudal system was run by a corrupt government and supported by neo-colonizing U.S. corporations whose primary objective was to maximize profits. Because he was convinced that the Church had allied itself with the ruling establishment, Torres asked to be relieved of his priestly duties, but, as he was careful to point out at the time, “I have put aside the privileges and duties of the clergy, but I have not stopped being a priest.” (Torres 1967, p. 74).

Torres represented a revolutionary commitment that Slant hoped to inculcate into a new Catholic Left elite. However, Middleton saw the institutional structure of the Roman Church to be a major impediment to promoting this objective. Jesus came into the world, noted Middleton, not simply to establish a church but to call humankind to transform the world. Churches were a secondary means to this end. The real struggle at the moment was between international capitalism and socialism, and in this battle the Church was already irrelevant. Torres, on the other hand, represented the repristination of Christ’s original mission: a direct personal involvement in the international struggle to transform the world into a Christian socialist culture (Middleton 1966b). The celebration of a Catholic who was associated with guerrilla warfare to advance social justice was a hard sell, however, and this played into the hands of both liberals and conservatives, who portrayed the Catholic Left as dangerous extremists drawing on Communism in their support of violent revolution in the developing world.

Middleton contributed to this image by writing a favorable review of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice for Slant. It was a book, he concluded, that would join The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, and the works of Che Guevara as a needed stimulus to greater revolutionary awakening throughout the world (Middleton 1968). Middleton believed that most left-wing, middle-class Catholics had not yet faced up to the task of revolution. Although Slant saw itself as non-doctrinaire but rather selectively Marxist in the sense of the New Left Review, its adherence to a Marxist paradigm involved an honest commitment to the destruction of bourgeois society. The Marxist revolutions sweeping the world had to be repeated in Britain. Indeed, Middleton went so far as citing the revolutionary thoughts and practices of Mao Zedong as a possible guide for the kind of revolution toward which the Catholic leftists should strive. All this seemed a far cry from the bourgeois culture of Britain. But as was the case with the adulation of Camilo Torres, Mao was seen to be yet another reflection of the extremist tendencies that establishment Catholics could reference to alarm the middle classes about the revolutionary danger of the New Left’s agenda.

By the mid-1960s, Mao had taken on an iconic status for many on the New Left. His revolution appeared anti-bureaucratic and populist, dedicated to creating a more genuinely humane community serving everyone. The Herder Correspondence’s leading editorial of March 1967, for example, praised his humanism. Mao, it said, “has consistently expressed himself as one of the greatest contemporary believers in Man.” According to the magazine, Mao had always maintained that the quality of human life was more important than simply an access to consumer goods and rising standards of material existence. Even Raymond Williams had singled out Mao as having fostered conditions that accorded closely to what he had called for in his highly influential The Long Revolution. Mao, noted Williams, had demanded the full participation of the people in the remaking of China’s society and culture, a mission that could not be the party in the Leninist sense that would constitute the vanguard for change but rather the peasant masses. They would push forward a revolutionary process that had to be continuous because it could never be completed in any final form. As Williams observed, “Nobody can inherit a common culture—it has always to be made, and re-made, by people themselves—and the perspective which Mao is now opening up, of a socialist struggle which includes the continual, common re-making of values and most active conflict, seems to me wholly compatible with the idea of a common culture as I have argued it.” (Eagleton and Wicker 1968).11

Middleton and the other Slant activists concluded that the Vatican itself was a major supporter of the corrupt bourgeois status quo. Its financial interests they believed were closely integrated into the international capitalist order. As a mechanism of control to advance its cause, Rome relied on a medieval aristocratic leadership utilizing a bureaucratic hierarchy (the Roman Curia) that confronted the faithful as a ruling elite. Quoting from the observations of both Mao and the Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon, Middleton justified why it was imperative that the Catholic Left work for the overthrow of the Church as currently constructed. Was it possible to stop the exploitation of international capitalism without resorting to violence? Middleton noted that Torres, Fanon, and the revolutionaries in the Congo and Guatemala did not believe so. Violence, wrote Middleton, was forced upon the world by the capitalist bourgeoisie: “for us to advocate non-violence is to fall into their liberal trap and to help maintain the status quo.” These questions concerning revolution, he concluded, had to be fully addressed if the Left were not to join the ranks of the English Roman Catholic liberals (Middleton 1966a).

Given the Slant circle’s hostility to international capitalism, which they saw as a major contributor to the Cold War, it was to be expected that many of its activists would become stalwart supporters of liberation theology that swept Latin America in the early 1970s. The formal birth of this movement occurred at the Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellín, Colombia, in September 1968. This came about through the inspiration of Vatican II and the leadership of Dom Helder Camara, who at the Council advocated that the Church give more attention to serving the poor and promoting greater dialogue between the industrial and undeveloped worlds. Camara was branded the “Red Bishop” by the opposition Brazilian military dictatorship, which was responsible for numerous death attempts on him. Camara insisted that class analysis could be a tool for better understanding social dynamics and insisted this could be facilitated by using the insights of Marxism without becoming a Marxist. Yet this would require the active involvement of the Church in the political, economic, and social struggles confronting the poor. He put hope in the engagement of minorities oppressed by the capitalist system, which could serve as the “nuclear energy for change.” (Camara 1974, p. 3).

Another influential force at Medellín was the Peruvian Dominican priest, Gustavo Gutiérrez. A few years after this meeting he published A Theory of Liberation (1971), which became the magnum opus of this revolutionary movement with Gutiérrez as its spokesman. He believed that the promotion of social equality would require a radical assault on established institutions, “a profound transformation of the private property system, access to power for the exploited class, and a social revolution” so as to break the dependence of the masses on the very structures that oppressed them.” (Gutiérrez 1973, p. 26). Finally, many liberation theologians saw the need to establish a more direct connection between the Christian faith and political action (See (Segundo 1976)). Politics reposes on the science of power, and those who monopolize the levers of government will not relinquish their hold willingly. It was in this arena that many liberation theologians hoped to further develop what Marx meant by praxis--that is, fusing theory with the practice of politics.

There was a close resonance from the outset between the scholars of liberation theology and Gutiérrez’s fellow Dominican, Father Laurence Bright. His promotion of Marxist social theory, Christian political commitment, and biblical studies predated Gutiérrez’s work, and for this reason Bright has been hailed as a pioneer in the development of liberation theory (Challenor 2002). Bright’s twelve-volume Scripture Discussion Commentary (1969–1972) was used as an influential resource for Catholic New Left study groups exploring issues of how a radical theology could facilitate advancing revolutionary social change in the developing world. Historian Eugene McCarraher also considers Herbert McCabe to be a pioneer in the articulation of liberation theology and ranks him in importance with James Cone, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Jürgen Moltmann, and Gustavo Gutiérrez. Yet he views McCabe as “a more incisive theorist of revolution because of his creative fidelity to orthodox Catholic theology.”12

Slant’s divergence from the post-Vatican II liberalism of the official Church, and an early sign of a shift to what would become its more radical version of liberation theology can be seen in its response to a document issued by sixteen Third World bishops endorsing Pope Paul’s Populorum Progressio (“On the Development of Peoples”) in August 1967. This document was influenced by Pope Paul’s friend Dom Helder Camara. The bishops were pleased and highly supportive of how this encyclical demonstrated the Vatican’s dissociating itself from “the imperialism of money,” a force to which it was once tied. The Gospels, the bishops noted, had always called for the potent fermentation of deep social change, and history showed that revolutions were part of this process. Such revolutions receiving their imprimatur were those like the French Revolution of 1789 but not the type advancing “atheism and collectivism” (a reference to communist-style revolutions along the lines of the Bolshevik model of 1917). The bishops rejoiced that this Vatican document challenged the rapaciousness of capitalism. Catholics, they wrote, now have the responsibility to demonstrate “that true socialism is a full Christian life that involves a just sharing of goods, and fundamental equality.”13

Although the English Leftists welcomed what they saw as the bishop’s attack on imperialism and support for socialist revolutions in the underdeveloped world, they did not think the manifesto went far enough. And here is where the Slant group separated themselves from mainstream liberation theologians. Besides being more willing to embrace the Marxist critique (the theologians who did so were more nuanced, and not all were even willing to go that far), the Leftists took the bishops to task for what they saw to be their naïve and confusing strategy for advancing the cause. Most significantly, the bishops were not prepared to lead the revolution or to indulge in politics themselves. They emphasized in their manifesto that there was to be “no political aim of any kind behind our words.” (16 Bishops of the 3rd World 1967, p. 145). This was seen as officialdom’s persistent reluctance to accept the obligations of realistically engaging the political process. Instead, lay people were to push for revolution through lawful governments, “to educate themselves out of illiteracy” and to hear those progressive voices that could ignite their sociological imagination (16 Bishops of the 3rd World 1967, p. 147). In Slant’s view this was the equivalent of advising the Jews in Hitler’s Germany to work within the Nazi system. In Latin America and Africa, most governments were not “lawful” but rather the creation of imperialist forces acting through the CIA and other agencies of international capitalism. The only way such governments could be representative of the masses was through revolutionary action of the kind advocated by Frantz Fanon, Fidel Castro and other Third World freedom fighters. The idea that governments representing capitalism could abolish class warfare was the product of the liberal-democratic myth of the impartiality of the state. Marx had perceptively observed that the state was always the executive of the ruling class. Class warfare would be an integral part of all societies until the economic conditions that produced class division were destroyed. The belief that individual action and a higher morality could defeat imperialism betrayed an ignorance of the power realities that drove American capitalism in its Cold War competition with the perverted Marxism of the Soviet Union. Until the bishops understand this fact they “run the risk of being swept away by radical political movements.”14

The Catholic Left had long associations with the Latin American theologians and had been deeply impacted by what they learned was taking place in their countries. Yet their interest in such matters did not go beyond liberal and left-wing Catholic circles. The Catholic historian Peter Hebblethwaite, for example, in responding to an inquiry about what Church leaders thought about liberation theology’s positions regarding the needs of the poor and oppressed in the underdeveloped nations, candidly wrote that “Most do not perceive Third World liberation theology at all because they don’t read it.” The exceptions, he said, were the Catholic Institute of International Relations, George Gelber, and Francis McDonagh of Slant.15 Fathers Laurence Bright and Herbert McCabe, Martin Redfern at Sheed and Ward, Neil Middleton, Bernard Sharratt, Francis McDonagh, the poet Dinah Livingstone, among many others on the Catholic Left had deep associations with the Latin American liberation theologians and actively promoted their cause. Indeed, Herbert McCabe considered that such efforts should be the responsibility of all good Christians, contending that “participation in the revolutionary movement of liberation is the social visibility of the life of faith.” (McCabe 1968, p. 170).

Martin Redfern at Sheed and Ward published the liberation theologian Juan Luis Segundo’s five-volume Jesus of Nazareth and Today. Slant’s Francis McDonagh collected the essays of Dom Helder Camara and wrote an introduction to his ideas in a volume entitled Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings (2009). And Catholic Leftist poet Dinah Livingston translated Camara’s The Desert is Fertile (1974). Livingston and McDonagh also provided a number of translations from Spanish, Portuguese, French and German in The Future of Liberation Theology: Essays in Honor of Gustavo Gutiérrez (1989) as well as other publications on liberation theology.

Shortly after Vatican II Neil Middleton helped found and organize what was called the Haslemere Group. Its purpose was to offer a critique of Western foreign aid and trade policies in the Third World. The Haslemere Declaration was published in March of 1968 and outlined the near-total failure of industrialized countries such as Great Britain and the United States to deal with social and economic difficulties in the underdeveloped world. Disinterested overseas aid, they claimed, was largely a myth, since at best it was no more than a means of paying for imported Western goods and a nefarious way of continuing the exploitation of poor countries by the rich. The Declaration condemned the rules of the “international economic game” as a rigged formulation in free-market dogma designed to suit the needs of the industrial nations. The Haslemere Programme outlined a series of ten proposals for which the group would campaign. These were intended to promote the mitigation of poverty and political exploitation created by the imperialism of corporate capital. 16 Slant, in collaboration with the Haslemere Group, organized a major conference in the Round House, North London, at which Archbishop Camara was the featured speaker. This was a great success, and Neil Middleton wrote that it was probably the only time that London had witnessed a left-wing Catholic archbishop on public display.17 The other well-known archbishop of the Left was Thomas Roberts, and he generally preferred and assumed a low-key public profile.

Another influence on some of the Catholic New Left was Xavier Gorostiaga, S. J. who in 1992 became rector of the Central American University in Managua, Nicaragua. He was in regular contact with Herbert McCabe and while at Cambridge at St. Edmund’s House also developed a close relationship with Slant’s Bernard Sharratt. Gorostiaga was a strong advocate of democracy in the Third World, although he thought that it was impossible to develop in the context of pervasive poverty. The archenemy of democracy in his view was capitalism, because democratization itself would undermine global economic structures such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and this was something the industrialized nations of the North would never allow. The pattern of current capitalist development, where the rich moved ahead while the poor fell further behind, was viable only because of extreme inequality. These conditions had to be assured otherwise the world’s resources would become exhausted. As Gorostiaga put it: persistent inequality in the developing nations is “not a distortion of the system. It is a systematic prerequisite for growth and permanence” of global capitalism.18 He was especially concerned about how market capitalism was breaking up self-sufficient rural communities because of the importation of agricultural industrial production for export.19

When the Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua, a number of radical Jesuits accepted important posts in their government. Gorostiaga served as the Sandinistas’ chief economic advisor and director of national planning from 1979 to 1981. He continued to collaborate with the new government in his subsequent role as director of Managua’s National Institute of Social Studies, which published periodicals and monographs and sponsored seminars dedicated to explaining and defending Sandinista politics and programs. Although Bernard Sharratt had a fairly close relationship with Gorostiaga (St. Edmund’s House was next door to McCabe’s New Blackfriars), he never tried to involve him directly with the Slant project. Although the two shared a common set of views about the ills of corporate capitalism, Sharratt was reluctant to broach the subject of collaborating with his journal because in his view the Jesuit “was far too seriously experienced and committed” to be concerned with the English Catholic Left’s neophyte efforts.20

There were a number of Catholic Leftists who practiced what Marx meant by merging theory with praxis. A good example of this with respect to battling America’s imperialist policies was Leo Pyle. Along with his close friend Terry Eagleton, Pyle was one of the founders of Slant and went to work for Salvador Allende, the Marxist president of Chile. However, his family was forced to flee Chile when their son was threatened by rightwing extremists.21 A connection also developed somewhat later between those associated with Slant and Christians for Socialism (CFS), an organization established in Santiago, Chile, in April 1972 in support of the Allende government. CFS intended to prevent the use of Catholicism to attack Allende and in the process sought to unmask the unconscious link between Christianity and capitalist imperialism.22 CFS also developed an instrumental synthesis between Christianity and Marxism to critique Latin American politics in general. The CFS connection enabled Slant to invite several of Allende’s ministers to a meeting of the December Group at Spode House soon after the CIA-directed military coup that overthrew his government.23 Bernard Sharratt was sufficiently inspired by Gorostiaga’s charismatic revolutionary vision to consider joining Gorostiaga’s group then working in Guatemala in 1976 with the Ligas Campesinas, but decided he could make no specifically useful contribution.24

Another project that demonstrated the English Catholic Left’s commitment to Marxian praxis in confronting the challenges of the Cold War was its involvement with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). A number of Catholic academics joined the movement, including J. M. Cameron, a supporter of the Catholic Left and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Leeds.25 Cameron served on CND’s Executive Committee and was a regular at the Dominican’s Spode House, which had become an important center of Catholic peace activity. However, it was not only the perceived limitations of Vatican Council II, the inadequacies of the religious and political establishments in Britain and global capitalism that were the galvanizing forces that forged the Catholic New Left. Equally significant was a quickening of the arms race, Britain’s acquiring the hydrogen bomb in 1957, and the nation’s embracement of America’s Cold War nuclear strategy.

A number of progressive minded Catholics along with several Dominicans had long been associated with PAX—the Catholic peace organization. This group was founded in 1936 by Donald Attwater, Eric Gill, and others. Many of PAX’s early members were part of Chesterton’s circle and hoped the movement might help raise the consciousness of their co-religionists about the pacific and economic reformist principles of Catholic social teachings. Attwater, who had earlier served as editor of The Catholic Herald, was selected as PAX’s first chairman. Attwater worked diligently to expose General Franco’s war crimes by the regime’s bombing of civilians and his close association with Mussolini and Hitler. Although PAX membership was mostly Catholic, it purposely did not want to be identified as an official Catholic organization, since this could open the door to ecclesiastical censorship. As it was, the Church hierarchy was not pleased with PAX’s condemnation of Franco’s behavior in the Spanish Civil War and was highly suspicious of what it considered the group’s possible communist leanings. PAX grew considerably by the mid 1950s when its membership expanded from mostly pacifists to a number of intellectuals who could not accept the Church’s official line on the traditional applicability of “just war” theory in a world of nuclear weapons. Given the Roman Catholic Church’s global reach, PAX members believed it should assume the moral leadership against the use of nuclear weapons as a tool of war.

Brian Wicker, a leading voice and scholar of Catholic radicalism, asserted that the immediate sources of Catholic Left ideas had roots in two main areas, neither of which had to do with the failures of the Council to alter the Vatican’s ecclesiasticism. He claimed that the sources of discontent that activated the movement were the political climate of the post-1956 years and the moral problem of nuclear warfare and deterrence, both of which were intertwined. “It could be said,” wrote Wicker, “that the catholic left was born out of the recognition that there was no possibility of effectively separating the moral from the political problems of the cold war” (Wicker 1967, p. 3).

At the outset influential Dominicans in PAX as well as Archbishop Thomas Roberts brought significant theological heft to the debate on nuclear weapons that was a regular feature in the New Left Review, thereby raising serious ethical issues that could not be ignored. The culmination of this religious challenge to just war casuistry was the appearance in 1961 of a symposium entitled Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience. This was published under the editorship of University of Leeds academic Walter Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism. Archbishop Roberts who wrote the book’s forward noted the singular and uncomfortable fact that up to this time the Church had produced no official policy in support of nonviolence. For example, the French theologian, Père Règamey, O. P., in his book Non-Violence and the Christian Conscience searched in vain for Catholic materials on the subject and had to turn to the writings of Gandhi for such matters. All the contributors to Stein’s book recognized the need for a Catholic-Christian witness to the evil of nuclear warfare. Roberts requested that the deliberations at Vatican II take up this challenge through the formation of what he called a “Council for Survival,” drawing on Protestant religious groups as well as Moslems to advance the case for survival and the salvation of the planet (Stein 1961, p. 13). Roberts pointed out that the enormous sums currently spent on nuclear weapons could be used more effectively to combat communism by campaigns against poverty (Stein 1961, p. 21). The consensus of those who contributed to Stein’s book was that nuclear defense cannot provide security, because the probable use of such weapons would lead to total war, the annihilation of civilization, and thereby a fundamental breach of Christian just war principles. In short, there could be no moral alternative to an unconditional renunciation of such strategies of deterrence. Nuclear deterrence involves a conditional willingness to “unleash such a war and its therefore not only wicked in what it risks, but in terms of implicit intention.” (Stein 1961, p. 23). Stein lamented that there was no adequate official Catholic witness to the problem of nuclear weapons and appealed for an authoritative pronouncement from the Vatican. Although the unilateralist recommendations were politically unacceptable in terms of current Soviet threats, none of the “traditionalist” reviews of the symposium’s recommendations could counteract the moral arguments put forth by its contributors.

Archbishop Roberts’s plea for the Council to consider the issues of just war and nuclear weapons found virtually no support in the Vatican. His drafted positions on the subject and submissions to speak were turned down by Curia conservatives. During the Council Roberts was allowed to express his views in only three public press conferences. His association with PAX and comments made previously in 1959 at a Spode House conference on nuclear weapons had already gotten him into trouble with the Roman Catholic Curia. Early on Roberts had established a reputation as a dangerous activist because of his work with Amnesty International in its campaign to liberate political prisoners (especially in Franco’s Spain), his openness to consider the issue of birth control, in addition to his long activism in the peace movement. Roberts had little time for Rome’s inward focus on strictly spiritual matters and urged the Church to reflect more on the troubles of the world: overpopulation, the nuclear arms race, the struggles for liberation in the third world, and so on. Catholic conservatives deemed him a polluter of innocent minds. Indeed, the chaplain at the University of Cambridge dramatically closed down Roberts’s lecture in the middle of his talk to the Cambridge Aquinas Society and accused him of heresy (Clements and Lawlor 1967, p. 132). As historian Adrian Hastings noted, Archbishop Roberts was “an asker of awkward questions and a thorn in the side of the hierarchy.” This proved very frustrating, but there was little they could do to punish Roberts, since he was not directly under their authority (Hastings 1987, p. 485).

It is worth noting that Roberts’s views on Church-state relations and war had been deeply influenced by the American historian Gordon Zahn’s ground-breaking book, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars (1962), which exposed the ways in which the Catholic Church not only failed to sufficiently resist the Nazis but even helped justify their policies. Writing in the May 1963 issue of Continuum, Roberts said that he was shocked to learn from Zahn’s book the ways in which nationalism, mass hysteria and fear paralyzed Christian judgment. Gordon Zahn’s book on Franz Jagerstatter, the Austrian Catholic pacifist who was executed for his resistance to the Nazis, also did much to shape Martin Shaw’s thinking on war and nuclear disarmament. 26 Shaw was Chair of London School of Economics’ Catholic Society and Slant’s student organizer. He played a seminal role in the successful student protests at LSE in October 1966, which ultimately produced the first mass student sit-ins in Britain, thus inaugurating the country’s engagement with the youth movement sweeping through the Western world. This protest managed to expose the hidden power of corporate interests that governed Britain’s universities and colleges.

After having no effect on the policies of the Church on matters of nuclear weapons, many leftist Catholics turned to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) that was formed in 1958 by some of Britain’s most eminent intellectuals and politicians, including among others Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley and Michael Foot. It was the intention of the New Left alliance to use the issue of disarmament as a catalyst for transforming Britain’s politics and revitalizing a labor movement that had become bogged down in the conventional nostrums of worn-out left routines. Peggy Duff, general secretary of the CND, saw the New Left as providing the fresh leadership and analytical political prowess needed for laying the moral foundation necessary for a nationwide campaign for disarmament and socialism (Duff 1971, p. 128). The New Left believed that peace and socialism were mutually complementary, each requiring the support of the other. The CND’s sponsorship of protest marches and participation with workshops with New Left clubs created a sense of belonging and purpose for those who joined the cause. Its greatest success in mass protest was the annual Aldermaston March, which in 1960 drew some 100,000 people. Many of working-class backgrounds with newly acquired higher educations eager to transform the structure of British politics were some of the most stalwart of its activists. Stuart Hall, editor of the New Left Review, envisioned the CND as a vehicle through which his group could broaden its politics and educate ordinary people about the moral connections between the bomb, capitalism, NATO, Stalinism, and the Warsaw Pact.

An outgrowth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was the Christian CND. Organized in May 1960, this group intended to introduce a religious dimension to the antinuclear campaign and hoped to awaken the clergy and their congregations to the danger of nuclear weapons. The Christian organization (CCND) became ecumenical, drawing activists from all churches in an effort to promote peace and social justice. There was strong support from Catholics on the left despite strong disapproval from the bishops and conservative clergy and lay people.27 On their marches the group passed out leaflets about the inhumanity of nuclear weapons written from a Christian perspective. In 1964 the CCND began publishing its own journal, Rushlight, which covered news about CCND’s local groups as well as poetry and various articles on the campaign from a theological perspective. Another religious organization that came of age at this time was the Catholic Nuclear Disarmament Group (CNDG), a smaller organization that existed between 1959 and 1963. Unlike the CCND, the CNDG was independent, never having become an integral part of the larger CND structure. Among those leading members who were affiliated with the CNDG were Adrian Cunningham, who served as secretary for a time, as well as Slant’s Peter Lumsden, and Bernardine Wall, the daughter of Bernard and Barbara Wall.

Yet Catholics who wished to be engaged in the activities of the antinuclear protests were not encouraged by their religious leaders. The bishops did not welcome these lay incursions into such a politically contentious area. The personal journey to political consciousness of Christopher Calnan best encapsulates the difficulties encountered by young Catholics who sought a more socially relevant religious faith during these years. As a young adult Calnan came to work for Sheed and Ward where he served as acting circulation editor for Slant magazine. His first recollection of a political act was attending an anti-American rally as a schoolboy in Manchester during the 1962 missile crisis. He vividly recalled pulling down a hood over his head while local television producers were filming the event for fear of being spotted by his teachers. Given the prevailing right-wing nature of his Catholic school, the consequences of being “caught” would have been painful. It was at this rally that Calnan first encountered the CND. He later joined the organization and worked actively for its mission both at school and on weekends and over vacations. Yet all the while he found few Catholics in the organization and failed to find any politically progressive voices in his own parish. Although he asked his parish priest about the possibility of training in the ministry, he was summarily disabused of the notion when the priest pointed to his CND badge and said, “No bishop would ordain anyone wearing that.” Henceforth Calnan was under constant pressure at school not to wear his CND badge.28

Calnan’s problems were a result of the English hierarchy’s fear of the CND because it brought young Catholics into contact with the political left, where they would be exposed to atheistic communist thinking. As Brian Wicker has observed, the CND led Catholics into a more radical leftism that was fundamentally different from their earlier associations with trade unionism through the Catholic Social Guild and the Catholic Workers’ College. This older progressivism was the product of papal social teaching about the rights of labor and therefore had ecclesiastical backing. The bishops had no intention of giving their imprimatur to this new, more socialist-tinged leftism and therefore strongly disapproved of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.29 In Archbishop Heenan’s view the frenzy of demonstrations by CND had “its roots in unbelief.” (Aspden 2002, p. 228).

3. Conclusion

The hopes of the New Left and the CND activists were shattered when the majority at the 1961 Labour Party voted to support the Anglo-American alliance-based defense policy. Peggy Duff claimed that the movement had “scared the politicians stiff” and thus brought together a coalition of forces with the establishment that crushed the CND’s moral imperatives. They fought CND and beat it. The culprits were not only “the Tories, but the ‘Socialists,’ the Gaitskells, the Wilsons, the Healeys, the Stewarts, the democratic socialists, the bright young technocrats seeking power, accepting megaton and megadeath, the monstrous doctrine of nuclear-power politics. They fought and won.” (Duff 1971, p. 143).

This was a hard lesson for the New Left Catholics. They now learned that the truth of one’s moral assertions had no effect on influencing policy unless it could be incorporated into a larger political strategy for change.30 Even more of a disappointment for young Catholic activists was that their own weapon for promoting the CND agenda, Stein’s book Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience, was refused an imprimatur by the Church. The reason given was not based on moral or theological grounds, but rather because its publication was deemed “inopportune.” All this seemed to resonate with what the neo-Marxists had called “cultural hegemony.” An institution supposedly intended to protect the faithful from false doctrine was being used to stifle a discussion central to the fundamental issues of Christian orthodoxy. The refusal to grant an imprimatur was for its critics a symbol of the Church’s historical co-option by the reigning political powers of the day.

The Catholic Left was similarly disappointed by their failure to advance the cause of liberation theology within the context of British politics. The Slant group’s support of liberation theology had been a natural consequence of their mission to forge community through a radical humanistic socialism. But this could be realized only through world revolution. Christ’s call for the transformation of the world did not apply to a limited time or place. Many Catholics had not recognized the need for promoting change in a worldwide context partly because the institutional Church had joined the capitalist establishment and accepted Western propaganda that “liberal democracy” along with the free market represented the penultimate end of human endeavor.31 Yet the expansion of such programs abroad produced poverty, sociopolitical repression, and military conflict. In short, the source of Third World economic and political dysfunction lay in the industrialized nations, a natural by-product of capitalism itself. In the final analysis, any solution to the evils of imperialism had to be first addressed within the Western nations themselves.

Liberation theology certainly inspired the Catholic Left in their endeavors to battle the ills of capitalist imperialism, a central catalyst to the Cold War itself. But in the end they were frustrated by an inability to translate liberation theology into an English context and make it relevant to what was transpiring in the developed world.32 After giving more careful thought to the writings of Gustavo Gutiérrez, Terry Eagleton had to conclude that for Christian Marxists in Europe, revolution was mostly an academic affair, “a matter of high brow journalists and placid dialogues,” neglecting the necessity of having to commit oneself to working things out in the dirty business of actual politics. This was of course a candid recognition of the Catholic Left’s failure to focus sufficiently on the task to participating in the political process, a dirty game they always condemned. The leaders of the Slant project came largely from academia and the world of publishing, and they were more inclined to engage with theoretical matters rather than praxis, that is the task of soiling one’s hands by working in the streets of practical politics. They preferred to highlight the intellectual side of their revolutionary project and urging readers to take responsibility for praxis by forming local groups with practical outreach to the broader public and especially to “the church porch.” But Eagleton recognized that the Christian Marxists in Latin America, on the other hand, had a natural understanding of the bond between preaching the message of the Gospels and fighting imperialist capitalism. A problem, said Eagleton, was that “we were so physically and culturally remote from a situation like Latin America, where the Christian-leftist connection could really mean something concrete.”33 Gutiérrez saw that the key to liberation had to be found in the heartlands of monopoly capitalism (Eagleton 1974, pp. 449–50), and that required direct and practical participation in the political process; this, for the most part, the Slant intellectuals themselves failed to do.

Bernard Sharratt for his part believed that another barrier to applying the transformational strategies of liberation theology to Britain was the “oblique” position of the Church in relation to prevailing secular social networks. Official Catholic leadership was neither institutionally integrated within the larger social structures of British society nor culturally very significant. This meant that the radicalizing techniques of liberation theology, even if they had made inroads into hierarchical Church structures, could have only a marginal impact on the controlling features of British society. This suggested, wrote Sharratt, that radical Catholic action might have been more effective in secular political activities, which like Eagleton noted, the Slant activists had not prioritized (Sharratt 1970).

Despite the inadequacies of their domestic agenda, the Catholic New Left might at least take some satisfaction in knowing that their project and aspirations had an impact on Third World revolutionaries. The Slant Manifesto that had boldly set out its ambitious project for advancing a humanistic socialism was translated into Spanish and Portuguese for South American readers at a time when both nations were under the grip of fascist-style dictatorships. The Filipino liberation theologian Father Ed de la Torre told Angela Cunningham that Slant had been an important influence on his thinking.34

One must also appreciate the fact that Slant’s radical mission was fiercely resisted by The Catholic hierarchy and traditionalists of the faith. The highly influential Catholic writer Douglas Woodruff typified these elements. Not only was he opposed to the modernizing efforts of the Council. Woodruff was the editor of The Tablet during its most politically reactionary pre-war days and had a soft spot for authoritarian regimes. He was scandalized by the Catholic Left’s attack on capitalism, which he asserted was dogmatically Marxist (which it was not) and actively supportive of communist regimes (which it was not). All this was a tragedy, he claimed, especially that such nefarious nonsense was supported by the “once respected house of Sheed and Ward.” When Martin Redfern, who once worked for Woodruff at The Tablet, published the “Slant Manifesto,” Woodruff wrote a scathing review–saying among other things, that Redfern “was old enough to know better.”35

In the final analysis, the Catholic New Left, despite their relatively small numbers, broke new ground in their willingness to engage Marx as well as other classical and current sociologists (from Durkeim and Weber to Mills and Peter Berger) in developing a solid theoretical basis for a reformed Christianity.36 Slant’s eclectic project did raise the political consciousness and activism of a younger generation of Catholics. Many who rose to its calling played a significant part not just in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the advocacy of liberation theology but also in a myriad of other areas too numerous for inclusion here.37 In some ways the English Catholic New Left was too far advanced for its time and therefore underappreciated. But Slant could justifiably proclaim that it was writing about black power, and birth control, secular theology and student protest, Third World revolution, the insidious quasi-totalitarian power of international corporations, and the cross-fertilization of Christianity and Marxism as a means for creating a community of humanist socialism long before these matters became front-page news or feature articles anywhere else. Additionally, it does carry some weight when Terry Eagleton, in reflecting on this part of his history could say that Slant, produced some deeply impressive, original thinking of a consistently high caliber: “It was bold, imaginative and path-breaking but was disabled by its political time and place.”38 It was all a product of the 1960s.