Report: Time magazine gave journalist $20,000 per month to host progressivist parties during Vatican

[Stone]

Report: Time magazine gave journalist $20,000 per month to host progressivist parties during Vatican II

The U.S. secular TIME magazine hosted luxurious gatherings throughout the 1962-1965 Vatican II sessions with numerous influencers
in order to push the Council in a more progressivist direction, according to this report.

May 14, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – Dr. Robert Moynihan, a veteran journalist and Vatican expert, has published an article (Moynihan Letter #26) in which he relates what a Time magazine journalist revealed to him in 2004. The now-deceased Robert Blair Kaiser told Moynihan that he was sent by Time’s Clare Booth and Henry Luce to the Second Vatican Council in Rome with a budget of $20,000 per month so that he could host parties for the participants of and journalists reporting on the Council.

As Kaiser told Moynihan, he had rented an “intentionally large apartment” in Rome. He also said that he had met with the Luce couple before coming to Rome. They “had hoped,” he said, “the residence would become a place where ideas could be exchanged among Council participants.”

He added, “They gave me a generous Time magazine expense account – $20,000 each month during the (Second Vatican) Council sessions – to hold regular dinner parties in my large apartment.” As he told Moynihan, he and his wife would “often host 50 or 100 journalists and monsignors, priests, and bishops and diplomats, sometimes during the week, sometimes on the weekend.”

The purpose of these gatherings was clear: it was not only to share information, but, as Moynihan reports, “to provide a space where the agenda of a ‘more open Church’ could be freely discussed, Kaiser said.”

That is to say: the U.S. secular Time magazine hosted luxurious gatherings throughout the 1962-1965 Vatican II sessions with numerous influencers in order to push the Council in a more progressivist direction. As Moynihan says, Kaiser quickly became “one of the most influential journalists in the city. His coverage of the Second Vatican Council set a standard and tone and ‘line’ – the ‘line’ was that the Catholic Church was undergoing a revolution which would change the Church profoundly.”

Moynihan also quotes from Kaiser's published account of his work during the Council. In his book Clerical Error (2002), Kaiser wrote, “Our spacious apartment, with its huge picture windows and sparkling marble floors, became something of a gathering place for conciliar progressive(s).” Kaiser continues to describe how they had practically “every other night of the week” a small dinner party with eight people. These dinners then grew into large gatherings that were called “the Kaisers’ Sunday nights,” which regularly included the journalists from the Jesuit weekly America.

Among the other guests was also Archbishop Thomas d'Esterre Roberts, S.J., of Bombay, India, who was of British descent. He and other fellow prelates, according to Kaiser, “thought (and said out loud) that the Church was overloaded with excess baggage, myth, superstition, and nonsense. With him, they voted on all the important reforms of Vatican II, most of which tended to make the Church less Roman – and more Catholic … ”

Dr. Moynihan puts this Time magazine story in connection with Pope Benedict XVI’s own February 14, 2013 speech, according to which there had been purportedly “two Councils” – the one of the media, and the other of the council fathers.

The Vatican expert adds that “we urgently need a more full and accurate understanding of what happened at Vatican II in order to continue the task of receiving the Council and interpreting it in the light of the perennial doctrine of the Church, handed down from the beginning.”

This revelation from Dr. Moynihan can also be seen in light of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò's own statements, in which he himself stresses that the Second Vatican Council was manipulated.

For example, in response to questions from LifeSite editor-in-chief John-Henry Westen, the Italian prelate wrote last year that the Council, “from its origin,” was “made the object of a grave manipulation by a fifth column that penetrated into the very heart of the Church that perverted its purposes, as confirmed by the disastrous results that are before everyone’s eyes.” Somewhere else, he spoke of a “very deceptive” project “to infiltrate in some way into the Church,” and that this project was linked with Freemasonry.

Moreover, Archbishop Viganò, in an interview with LifeSite about the abolition of the Oath against Modernism that took place in 1967, very shortly after the end of the Second Vatican Council, stated:

If we apply (Antonio) Gramsci’s recommendations to what has happened in the heart of the Church in the last century, we can see that the work of conquering the ecclesiastical “casemates” was conducted with the same subversive methods; certainly the infiltration of the deep state into civil institutions and of the deep church into Catholic institutions corresponds to this criterion.

As Dr. Moynihan says, more research needs to be done. I hope so, too, in order to learn more about who tried to influence the Council and its message, and whom they really served at the time.

We might ask, for example, where the Luce's $20,000 monthly checks really came from and whether this operation had any links to the U.S. government, since Time and the Luce couple have been rumored to have had ties with U.S. intelligence. David Wemhoff, the author of the book John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition clearly indicates that this was the case. In his book introduction, it says that “Media mogul Henry R. Luce, founder and publisher of enormously influential magazines like Time and Life, used the CIA’s doctrinal warfare program to turn the Catholic Church into a promoter of American ideas,” such as the idea of religious liberty.

Dr. Moynihan announced that he will publish a second part of his essay on this topic. We look forward to reading it.