The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism.

Michael W. Cuneo. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 214pp. $27.50 (cloth).

Michael Cuneo's Smoke of Satan is an engaging survey of traditionalist American Catholics, all of whom are angry at the legacy of the Second Vatican Council. For convenience he divides them into three distinct groups. The first, whom he labels conservatives, believe that most of their fellow Catholics misinterpreted the message of the Council. They argue for an interpretation of its documents that emphasizes continuity with the past instead of the jarring disjuncture they have witnessed over the last thirty years. The second group, Catholic separatists, have broken away from the church altogether, believing that it no longer represents the true Catholic faith. They now belong to an cluster of exotic movements that try to keep the preconciliar flame burning but squabble among themselves, and live with the contradiction of being schismatic in the name of orthodoxy. Cuneo points to the irony that many of these splinter groups, seeking shelter from the corrosions of American life, are actually reliving one of the most familiar patterns in American religious history. Marianists, the third group, are devotees of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who believe that visions at Fatima (Portugal), Medjugorje (Herzegovina), and even Bayside, in Queens, New York, offer supernatural guidance to a church adrift in the chaotic modern world. The three groups overlap at times. Pro-life activists among the conservatives, for example, are often devotees of Mary too, and separatists often started out as members of conservative or Marianist groups before making their jump.

Cuneo's subjects are the antithesis of the everyday American Catholic in the pew. For example, Francis Schuckardt (b. 1937), moved in the 1970s from a Marian organization, the Blue Army of Fatima, to running his own church, the Tridentine Latin Rite Church in Spokane, which gathered a few hundred followers. "From beginning to end," writes Cuneo, "he insisted [that] the Second Vatican Council was a demonic conspiracy aimed at subverting the traditions of the church and thereby preparing the way for an atheistic world order" (103). His group's parochial school children were subjected to gruesome forms of penance by sadistic nuns, and Schuckardt himself was forced to turn into a fugitive and survivalist after allegations of homosexual abuse at his Mount St. Michael's seminary.

Michael Jones, editor of Fidelity, is often accused of fanaticism too, though he seems mild by comparison with Schuckardt. He was fired from his job as an English professor at St. Mary's College, South Bend, in 1981, after just two years, for taking what his colleagues saw as a stance of Catholic absolutism. He believes that "rationalized sexual misconduct" is the source of nearly everything distinctive and bad in the modern world, from its music, architecture, and art, to the anthropological theories of Margaret Mead. Brilliant, impractical, and always willing to alienate allies, Jones could have built up his journal's readership by supporting the Marian devotions beloved of most traditionalists, but instead wrote scornful articles against the Medjugorje cult.

Anti-abortion activists Joseph Scheidler, Paul Marx, Judie Brown, and Theo Stearns are also more interested in principles than popularity. Their demonstrative use of statues and rosaries at abortion clinic "rescues" horrifies the mainstream National Right to Life Committee, which wants to muffle the religious side of the anti-abortion movement for pragmatic political reasons. In their view people with a "contraceptive mentality" are more likely to avail themselves of abortions in the event of an unexpected pregnancy. Another prolifer, John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe, admits that "our public protests are potentially disastrous in terms of public image," and that their ostentatious Marian piety "allows the enemy to label us as fanatical Catholics." But, he continues, "We're called to witness to the truth and our Marian piety is the truth and the source of our strength. Mary's role in creation is immense and she is a feminist model for today. After all, Mary said Yes at the Annunciation" (75).

Few traditionalist Catholics are feminists in the usual sense, but women are prominent among them. Cuneo describes the life and work of Veronica Lueken (1923-95) of Bayside, a working class fortune-teller who began to see visions of St. Therese of Lisieux and Mary in 1968. By the early 1970s she had gathered a huge crowd of believers in her frequent revelations. After humble beginnings with a mimeograph machine, she later recited her spiritual visitors' messages (on both mundane and heavenly matters) straight into a tape recorder for distribution to followers nationwide. The crowds of devotees, sometimes chanting and praying for hours together outside her house, prompted her to move the devotion to the site of the 1965 World's Fair in Flushing Meadow Park. Her closest followers formed the austere Lay Order of St. Michael, while pilgrims and tourists took thousands of Polaroid photographs in the hope of getting an image of the Virgin (whom none but Mrs. Lueken could actually see). Local Catholic officials were reluctant to accept the apparitions as genuine, which placed the dedicated in tension with the church and also tempted them to separate. Disabused former members investigated Lueken's cult critically for signs of fraud or demonic manipulation.

All the Catholics studied here worry about the question of papal authority. Traditionalists in Catholics United for the Faith (CUF) and those who read The Wanderer were dismayed by the abandonment of the Latin Mass after Vatican II but are pledged to uphold the full magisterium and do so, even if it means holding their noses. Separatists, by contrast, broke away but can no longer be sure that they stand in the line of Apostolic Succession. For a while new priests in the separatist groups could be ordained by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (1905-91), who had refused to sign the Vatican II's declarations and become leader of the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X. Another possibility was Pierre Martin Ngo Dinh Thuc, former Archbishop of Hue in South Vietnam and brother of the assassinated leader Ngo Dinh Diem. Exiled in Europe, he too ordained priests and bishops in splinter groups and dabbled in reactionary right-wing politics. The most inflexible among the separatists found even Lefebvre and Thuc too conciliatory, however, and split off to form the Society of Saint Plus V (SSPV).

Sedevacantism, a theory espoused by Francis Schuckardt and some SSPV members, is the belief that makeshift ordination methods are now justified because the Vatican is occupied by heretical impostors who have tampered with the unchanging truths of Christianity - in other words, that the seat once occupied by Saint Peter, the first Pope, is now empty. Sedevacantism is the ideal breeding ground for conspiracy theories, and during his research Cuneo met advocates of the theory that Pope John-Paul I was assassinated by Communists (who had infiltrated the Curia), and that the conservative Cardinal Giuseppe Siri was twice elected Pope (in 1958 and again in 1963) but was forced to abdicate both times after threats of a catastrophe (possibly nuclear) made by B'nai B'rith on behalf of a Jewish-Freemasons' conspiracy. Veronica Lueken got a milder version of this story from the Virgin Mary herself in 1975 - that Paul VI (hitherto a real pope), had been drugged and imprisoned by three evil cardinals, who had then replaced him with an actor, remodeled by plastic surgery to be Paul's exact double.

Cuneo has visited and interviewed most of his book's characters and he describes each group in a journalistic way, sketching elements of their appearance and setting. He makes a show of neutrality and even-handedness but usually his aversions, especially from the anti-Semitic and conspiracy-minded separatists, are clear enough. Readers will expect the worst once they have learned that Fatima devotee Fr. Nicholas Gruner is "slight and bespectacled, with just a hint of paunch..." (81), that his colleague Brother John is "brown-robed and balding ... [having] ... a long angular face with bulging eyes that seemed to grow larger for emphasis as he spoke" (83), and that publicity-shy "Mark," another member of their group, is "burly and baby-faced" (84). One of the difficulties of writing a book of this kind, about people whose ideas have a kind of internal consistency but only for those who have accepted the strange initial premise, is finding the right tone of voice in which to describe them. Cuneo guides his readers' judgments without being heavy-handed. It is clear that he has little patience with the conspiratorial separatists but that he can respect the die-hard CUF-types, the Marianists, and the passionate pro-lifers, even while not agreeing with them.

PATRICK ALLITT