“WE HEAR OF THE North Koreans successfully brainwashing US servicemen in the Korean War, but the Catholic Church carries out the most effective brainwashing program imaginable.”¹

Reading these words, one would think it came from a periodical bent on attacking organised religion. It may come as a shock that these very words were found in the pages of the Aquinas.

Nor was this an isolated article. Indeed throughout the 1970s, there were articles ranging from accusing the Church of treating “women in religious life like children”², to considering the possibility that Karl Marx may have been more Christian than most Christians³, and most importantly authors describing their Catholic upbringing as children as “irrelevant”, “guilt-ridden”, “authoritarian”, “illogical” and superficial.⁴

This was an outbreak of what one commentator termed “Catholic masochism”, which he described as “a curious phenomenon by which Catholics recalled the days of their Catholic childhood in order to ridicule it and render it absurd and contemptible.”⁵

...to Catholic masochism

Why were the most articulate of Catholics eager to denigrate their Catholic upbringing? Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, interviewed in 1985, provided an assessment of the causes of such a crisis when he argued that “the damage that we have incurred in these twenty years is due to the unleashing within the Church of latent polemical and centrifugal forces; and outside the Church it is due to the confrontation with a cultural revolution in the West: the success of the upper middle class and the new “tertiary bourgeoisie” with its liberal-radical ideology of individualism, rationalism and hedonism.”⁶

The 1960s were characterised by what Marwick called “Marxianism”⁷, a belief that current bourgeoisie society was inherently evil but in a state of crisis. As such, good society could be easily attained “if one work(ed) systematically to destroy the language, values, culture and ideology of bourgeois society.”⁸

Ideas like the counter-culture, in which youths experimented with “new types of community, family patterns, sexual mores, aesthetic forms and personal identities”⁹, were deliberately cultivated as a protest against the evils of supposed bourgeoisie values and university students seemed particularly susceptible to revolutionary ideas.¹⁰

The Singapore scenario was somewhat different. While the loudest voices in the 1950s and early 1960s were left-wing radicals eager to point out the oppressive nature of state power, Catholic students were no less vigorous in proposing an alternative vision to Communism which balanced a healthy suspicion of state power with the recognition of its legitimacy. What was different by 1970 was the utter disillusionment with the intellectual resources of their tradition, and a claim that both religion and state were alike, rigid and authoritarian.¹¹

To understand this, one must necessarily situate the change in Catholic self-understanding in the light of arguably the greatest event that hit the Catholic world in the twentieth century, namely the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath.