John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition

John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition

In 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his famous "Four Freedoms" speech. In that speech, FDR set forth a vision for the reengineering of societies around the globe. The means was psychological warfare, involving the manipulation of ideas, words and symbols to divide target societies and convince these societies of the ideology that formed America. The most important society America targeted was the Roman Catholic Church. 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. This struggle reached its culmination at the Second Vatican Council with the promulgation of the document Declaration on Religious Liberty. Catholic doctrine did not change, but, defeated at the Council, the Americanists used their media power to win the battle over who got to interpret the Council with significant consequences for both the world and the Catholic Church, whose leadership came to espouse the doctrines of Liberalism something its leadership had condemned just a few years earlier.

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