The Shame of the Jesuits

By Ray McGovern, Consortium News

17 April 16

A spotlight has fallen on a shameful chapter in the history of Georgetown University’s Jesuits, the 1838 sale of 272 African-Americans into Deep South slavery, but moral lapses didn’t end there, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

nti-war prophet Rev. Daniel Berrigan, S.J., was onto something with his “hunch” – in his 1987 autobiography, To Dwell in Peace – that “the fall of a great enterprise,” the Jesuit university, would end up “among those structures whose moral decline and political servitude signalize a larger falling away of the culture itself.”

Berrigan, a Jesuit himself, lamented “highly placed” churchmen and their approval of war, “uttered … with sublime confidence, from on high, from highly placed friendships, and White House connections. Thus compromised, the Christian tradition of nonviolence, as well as the secular boast of disinterested pursuit of truth — these are reduced to bombast, hauled out for formal occasions, believed by no one, practiced by no one.”

But that “moral decline” among Jesuit institutions of higher learning may have had deeper roots than even Berrigan understood. One of those deep roots is drawing national attention, an 1838 decision by the Jesuit leaders of the Jesuits’ Maryland Province and Georgetown College to improve the school’s financial health by selling 272 African-American men, women and children as slaves into the Deep South.

As New York Times writer Rachel L. Swarns described the scene in Sunday’s editions, “The human cargo was loaded on ships at a bustling wharf in the nation’s capital, destined for the plantations of the Deep South. Some slaves pleaded for rosaries as they were rounded up, praying for deliverance. But on this day, in the fall of 1838, no one was spared: not the 2-month-old baby and her mother, not the field hands, not the shoemaker and not Cornelius Hawkins, who was about 13 years old when he was forced onboard.”

Rev. Thomas Mulledy, S.J., the Provincial (head) of the Maryland Jesuits, sold the 272 enslaved African-Americans to Henry Johnson, the former governor of Louisiana, and Louisiana landowner Jesse Batey for $115,000, the equivalent of $3.3 million in today’s dollars, according to the Times account.

Documents show that $90,000 went to support the “formation” of Jesuits (the preparation of candidates spiritually, academically and practically for the ministries that they will be called on to offer the Church and the world); $17,000 to Georgetown College; and $8,000 to a pension fund for the archbishop of Baltimore.

There is now a campaign among Georgetown professors, students, alumni and genealogists to discover what happened to those 272 human beings and whether Georgetown can do anything to compensate their descendants.

An Earlier Alert

But there is also a sad back story to this telling slice of Jesuit history, in which I became personally involved after I first learned of this scandal two decades ago from Edward F. Beckett, a young Jesuit who had the courage to speak out and summon his superiors to conscience. Beckett published his research in “Listening to Our History: Inculturation and Jesuit Slaveholding” in the journal Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits (28/5, November 1996).

Beckett and I became friends while working at the Fr. Horace McKenna Center where I volunteered at the overnight shelter for homeless men in the basement of St. Aloysius Church in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. The Jesuits were quick to exult Rev. Horace McKenna, S.J., as “Apostle of the Poor” after he died, but – while alive – not so much. Fr. McKenna was known for being something of a pain; he once even wrote a letter to the Vatican complaining – using a sports analogy – that his superiors were “not throwing enough forward passes to the poor.”

During the Great Depression, Fr. McKenna set up a food distribution system and other assistance to struggling farmers, and advocated vigorously for racial integration in churches and schools. He expressed “passionate impatience” toward go-slow approaches which were favored by some of his fellow Jesuits and priests.

After I got to know Beckett as we worked nights with the men in the St. Aloysius Church shelter, he gave me a copy of his booklet relating the history of how – in the 1800s – the Maryland Jesuits rebuffed ethical calls from other religious leaders who were pushing for the abolition of slavery. Instead, the Jesuits were more interested in how much money they could get for selling slaves.

It was, you see, an economic issue since the Jesuits no longer needed the proceeds from slave labor on their plantations in southern Maryland because they had received permission from Rome to reverse their longstanding tradition of free education and start charging tuition to the wealthy sons of plantation owners to attend Georgetown.

So, no longer needing the slaves to work the fields, the Jesuits decided to sell them into the Deep South to turn a tidy profit and invest the money in the “moral education” of young Jesuits while also providing a pension to the Baltimore archbishop.

A Chance to Repent

After learning of this history two decades ago, I joined with a small group of activists to ask Maryland Provincial Rev. James R. Stormes, S.J., in effect, to seize a unique opportunity to confess and repent.

We thought our initiative was particularly well timed since President Bill Clinton had announced the appointment of a seven-member advisory board for his initiative on race to promote “a national dialogue on controversial issues surrounding race; to increase our understanding of the history of race relations and the common future people of all races share; to recruit leadership at all levels to help bridge racial divides, and to propose actions to address critical areas such as education, economic opportunity, housing, health care, crime and the administration of justice.”

John Hope Franklin, an eminent historian and educator, whose writings included the 1946 landmark study From Slavery to Freedom, was appointed chair, and Judith A. Winston was named Executive Director of this “One America Initiative,” with a senior staff of national civil rights leaders as senior staff.

As the initiative was getting off the ground, our small, diverse group met with Ms. Winston, herself a graduate of Georgetown University Law School, who was clearly delighted with what we proposed. We told her that we were not about blaming, but rather about acknowledging, apologizing, and reconciling, and said we were approaching then-Georgetown President Rev. Leo O’Donovan, S.J. and Maryland Provincial Stormes as follows:

“We have a vision of Georgetown’s most prominent alumnus standing up before the cameras at Georgetown University this spring (1998) and being able to say, in all sincerity, that he has never been prouder of his alma mater and the Jesuits who run it. He might tell a bit of the story of Georgetown’s origins and then, jointly with Fr. Stormes and Fr. O’Donovan, announce the establishment of a foundation to promote the education of the descendants of the Jesuits’ slaves.  President Clinton could then cite this as precisely the kind of action he had hoped would spring forth from his Initiative on Race, and could call upon others to follow the courageous example of the Maryland Jesuits. We think this could be a welcome boost for the President’s Initiative.”

But our optimism was misplaced. Even though many of us had learned at Jesuit hands about acting in a just way and doing recompense for injustice, we were told that we had no “standing,” as what the Jesuits call “externs” or outsiders who have no right to hold them accountable. We still cannot figure out exactly why the Jesuit leaders were so offended by our initiative and they wouldn’t tell us. We were denied an audience with Stormes – and without Stormes’s nihil obstat, there was no hope for support from O’Donovan.

The final nail in the coffin for our own initiative (as well as Bill Clinton’s) came in early 1998 as his trysts with Monica Lewinsky and his lies about them deprived him of any pretense to moral leadership. The whole Initiative died an inconsequential death.

By chance I found myself sitting next to Judith Winston on a plane a few years ago. She saw my name, recognized me, and recalled our ill-fated common effort. Neither of us could do much more than simply shake our heads.

Jesuit Universities

Perhaps even more sadly, the behavior of those Jesuit leaders in 1838 was not entirely an aberration. As Fr. Berrigan noted in this autobiography, Jesuit institutions have often traded ethics for clout, preferring to hobnob with the great and powerful rather than act as moral critics of social wrongs, such as slavery, war and — in recent times — even assassinations and torture.

Among its graduates, Georgetown University churned out CIA Director George Tenet, who offered “slam dunk” deceptions to justify the invasion of Iraq, and Vice President Dick Cheney’s torture-excusing lawyer David Addington, who graduated summa cum laude.

Nor is Georgetown alone as a Jesuit institution in this dubious position of training people to engage in jesuitical arguments to justify the unjustifiable. My alma mater, Fordham, which has forever been trying to be “just like Georgetown,” produced CIA Director John Brennan, an ardent, public supporter of the kidnapping/”rendering” of suspected terrorists to “friendly” Arab intelligence services for interrogation.

Brennan also defended the use of U.S. secret prisons abroad, as well as “enhanced interrogation techniques” (also known as torture).

But Brennan was a big shot in the White House and Fordham’s Trustees were susceptible to the “celebrity virus.” So, Fordham President, Rev. Joseph M. McShane, S.J., invited Brennan to give the university commencement address on May 19, 2012, and to be awarded — of all things — a Doctorate of Humane Letters, honoris causa.

Several graduating seniors, who were aware of and cared about what Brennan represents, did their best, in vain, to get him dis-invited. They saw scandal in the reality that the violent policies Brennan advocated remain in stark contrast to the principles that Fordham University was supposed to stand for as a Catholic Jesuit University.

Controversy on campus grew, catalyzed by two protest petitions created by Fordham students and multiple articles in the school newspaper, The Ram. Eventually, Fordham senior and organizer, Scott McDonald, requested a meeting with university president McShane to discuss why Fordham’s trustees could not be trusted to invite someone more representative of Fordham’s core values.

McDonald met with McShane, Vice President Jeffrey Gray and university secretary Margaret Ball, but McShane dismissed Scott’s qualms about torture: “We don’t live in a black and white world; we live in a gray world.”

Then McShane announced that what was said at the meeting was “off the record…not to leave this room.” But McDonald had not agreed to that. He left the meeting wondering if the moral theologians at Fordham would agree that torture had now become a “gray area.”

We who attended Jesuit institutions decades ago were taught that there was a moral category called “intrinsic evil” – actions that were always wrong, such as torture, rape and slavery. At Fordham, at least, torture seems to have slipped out of that category.

Now that the issue of the 272 slaves has again surfaced, Georgetown University needs to acknowledge its institutional guilt, apologize and find some way to make restitution to the descendants of those African-Americans.

Though clearly whatever is done will fall into the category of way-too-little and way-too-late, confession of this earlier sin might finally put the brakes on the steady moral decline of what once was an important social as well as religious institution – the Jesuit university.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He graduated from Fordham Prep (just 41 years after Horace McKenna did), earned B.A. and M.A. degrees from Fordham University, and finds it difficult to un-learn what he learned there.

Alabama Is No Stranger to Sex Scandals. It Just Never Expected One From This Guy.

By Neely Tucker, The Washington Post

17 April 16

n the mortuary of disaster that is Alabama politics, it is important to note that Gov. Dr. Robert J. Bentley is still in charge, for now.

The 74-year-old, balding grandfather and star of sexy phone chats to the senior political adviser three decades his junior appears to be at the center of a complex web of deceit, betrayal and mendacity that falls somewhere between the better parts of the Old Testament and the steamy Southern plays of Tennessee Williams.

Nor is it, by any means, over.

Reporters hound Bentley at his every appearance, asking about his $1,800 burner cellphones and the use of a state helicopter to pick up his forgotten wallet. “I’m the governor. And I had to have money. I had to buy something to eat,” Bentley said last Thursday by way of explanation.

The state House is expected to vote next week to set up an impeachment committee, and the lieutenant governor has been blunt: She’s ready to take over as soon as she’s needed.

The state’s former top cop, Spencer Collier, plans to file a wrongful-dismissal lawsuit next week. Once a staunch ally of Bentley, he claims the governor sacked him because he refused an illegal order to not cooperate with a grand jury investigation involving the speaker of the House, who goes on trial next month on 23 felony counts of ethics violations.

As calls for the conservative Republican’s resignation mount, the variety of investigations underway are heading into “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup” territory.

“Robert Bentley should not be sitting in the governor’s office,” says Allen Farley, the Republican House member who last year asked the state attorney general’s office to investigate Bentley’s use of state resources to carry out his alleged affair. The woman in question is Rebekah Caldwell Mason, a 44-year-old married mother of three.

“He’s the state of Alabama’s spokesperson, our representative,” Farley said in an interview. “And this is someone I want negotiating on behalf of the state? I don’t think so.”

When Bentley was first elected in 2010, he was a popular, soft-spoken dermatologist, devout Baptist deacon, father of four and grandfather of eight, and married for half a century. He said he wouldn’t take his $120,000 a year salary until the state reached full employment, and he hasn’t.

One year into his second term, he is divorced, estranged from his family, expelled from his church, ostracized by his party, pilloried by the public and at the center of an alleged sex and abuse-of-power scandal that may drive him from office.

“It’s like King David and Bathsheba in the Old Testament,” says Johnny Mack Morrow, a Democrat from rural Franklin County, another former ally of the governor turned harsh critic. “Or maybe like Percy Sledge’s song, ‘When a Man Loves a Woman.’ ”

On a leaked phone recording that went viral, the septuagenarian governor tells Mason explicitly of his yearnings.

“You’d kiss me? I love that. You know I do love that. You know what? When I stand behind you and I put my arms around you, and I put my hands on your breasts, and I put my hands on you and pull you in real close. Hey, I love that, too.”

The governor has admitted to an “inappropriate relationship; both have denied a physical affair. Throughout it all, he continues to insist he did nothing illegal.

The Southern politician with an outsize personality and appetites to match is by turns a staple and cliche of the region. Lyndon Johnson in Texas, Huey Long and Edwin Edwards in Louisiana, Theodore Bilbo in Mississippi, Bill Clinton in Arkansas — the list is as long as one wishes to make it.

And the Roll Tide/War Eagle state that likes to advertise itself as the Heart of Dixie is, after all, accustomed to state-capital shenanigans. Big Jim “Bait a Trap with a Blonde” Folsom presided as governor here, as did George “Segregation Forever” Wallace.

More recently, backwoods-preacher-turned-governor Guy Hunt (R) was convicted of crimes in office in 1993. Gov. Don Siegelman (D), in office a decade later, was convicted of bribery and is still serving time.

In Montgomery, people aren’t surprised to have a governor mired in a sex-and-power scandal. They’re just astonished it’s Bentley.

Tall and thin, possessed of a mild manner and quiet disposition, he named his four sons after biblical apostles. He came to the state capital as a legislator in 2002, at 60 the oldest freshman Republican legislator elected in that cycle.

He struck up a friendship with Collier, at 32, the youngest freshman Republican elected that year. Bentley made no waves. He did not go out on the town.

He certainly did not impress anyone as a ladies’ man. Steve Flowers, the state’s veteran political commentator and author of “Of Goats and Governors: Six Decades of Colorful Alabama Political Stories,” compares Bentley to Goober and Gomer Pyle, small-town unsophisticates in the long-ago television series set in the South. Mark Childress, the novelist from Monroeville and author of “Crazy in Alabama,” independently suggested the milquetoast shop owner Sam Drucker in “Petticoat Junction.”

“He was a just good, moral person,” said Morrow, the Democratic representative, “decent, likeable, very low key. He and his wife, Dianne, they were good people.”

Collier and Bentley held similar political views and became close friends over eight years together in the legislature, in a father-son sort of way, Collier said in a news conference after he was fired. They and their wives often had dinner after political conferences. When Collier’s father died after years of mental illness and dementia, he and Bentley prayed together.

When Bentley won an upset bid for governor in 2010, part of his appeal was the straight-arrow family man (notwithstanding him legally changing his name so that Dr. was right there on the ballot). Well-off but not wealthy, he lived simply and tended to dress in khakis. He made his pledge to forgo his salary and released his tax returns even before he was elected as evidence of his transparency.

He was pro-gun, pro-business, pro-church, and anti-immigrant and anti-new taxes, all popular positions in Alabama. But at the start of his second term, he switched directions on taxes and called for a $500 million increase, stunning his Republican colleagues. He has since been viewed as increasingly out of touch.

And in that second term, Mason, an accomplished broadcast journalist, moved up from his communications staff to become his senior political adviser.

No longer paid by the state, she was president of her own company, RCM Communications, and served on a consultant basis as the governor’s senior political adviser. She was paid from campaign funds — a total of $500,000 over four years — and the source of those campaign donations was not known. This meant that no one was entirely sure who was indirectly paying her.

Collier, Morrow and other legislators noticed that the governor began to be hard to reach. He started dressing more sharply. Mason began to be seen around the legislature as the gatekeeper to the governor, holding sway over his opinions. The recorded conversations reveal the intensity of their relationship.

“You know, I worry about sometimes I love you so much, I worry about loving you so much. I do. I do,” he can be heard saying. “I feel like, all the time I’m thinking, ‘How can I contact her? How can I call her? How can I text her? How can I be in contact with her? How can we do this?’ ”

“He just fell in love, bless his heart,” says Flowers, the columnist. “He was like a little schoolboy with a crush.”

This was not a secret, Collier says, to the governor’s staff, family or close observers. The governor’s wife filed for divorce shortly after he was sworn in for a second term in January 2015.

Flowers says Mason and Bentley called him to Bentley’s office in December to chew him out for a column he’d written months earlier, when the governor’s divorce was finalized, about the rumors about their relationship.

“She took control of the meeting and started browbeating me. .?.?. The governor was sitting there about to cry, saying he hadn’t seen his family at Christmas,” Flowers said. “She was going on for fifteen minutes. .?.?. I felt really sorry for him. He was trying to talk at me, but she was too busy doing it.”

The whole messy affair blew up on March 22 when Bentley fired his longtime friend from his post as the highly respected executive director of the 1,400-member Alabama Law Enforcement Agency. Collier, 44, then said he had seen and investigated text messages and audio “of a sexual nature” between Bentley and Mason. The governor, through a spokeswoman, denied the allegations.

The next day, the governor’s ex-wife gave the sex-spiced recordings to Yellowhammer News, a conservative website that promptly made them available to the world.

A week after that, Mason resigned. She is still married to Jon Mason, a former TV weatherman who continues to serve the governor in a cabinet-level position as his head of faith-based initiatives. She is no longer a member of the Tuscaloosa First Baptist Church: Like the governor, she was kicked out.

Mason declined interview requests for this story. But she did email WHNT-TV after the recordings went public. She blasted critics as good ol’ boy sexists.

“There are those who are bent on hindering women’s abilities to work in politics. I have dealt repeatedly with those obstacles in my career, and continue to succeed in spite of those efforts,” Mason wrote. “It’s disappointing that a working mom can’t simply do her job and do it well without inviting unwarranted criticism.”

Before and after the uproar that has followed, the state auditor and four legislators, including several fellow Republicans, filed separate requests asking the state’s ethics and criminal justice agencies to investigate the governor’s conduct. A fifth legislator filed an impeachment motion last week. Rumors swirl in Montgomery’s political circles of a federal investigation.

“We’re all very disappointed in the governor’s activities and actions,” Ivey, the lieutenant governor, said in an interview Tuesday with the student newspaper at Auburn University, her alma mater. “They speak for themselves. It saddens me that the highest office in the land is receiving such low marks right now.”

Meanwhile, the governor’s train wreck is hardly the only one on the Alabama political tracks.

Eighteen months after he was indicted on allegations of using his office for personal gain and soliciting things of value, House Speaker Mike Hubbard, a powerful leader in the state Republican Party, is finally going on trial. Bentley is expected to be a witness. Should impeachment proceedings come to pass, they would be overseen by state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was removed from office in 2003 for defying federal orders to remove a stone monument of the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the state’s Judicial Building.

Voters reelected him anyway in 2013.

“If I sent this story to my fiction editor,” says Childress, the novelist, “she would send it back and tell me to make it more realistic.”

Morrow, the veteran legislator, reflects on the plight of the central character in the story, his biblical fall from grace and his persistent defiance.

He does not think this is going to end well.

“Robert is just not strong enough a person for this,” he said. “It’s only going to get worse. He’s trying to go out and do business as usual, and people are not going to let him. We’re a laughing stock.”