Civil Blood (1962)

"The sin of fragmentation of character may be the most deadly sin of all; to allow ones self to scatter like weeds instead of to grow like a man. I am guilty of it. But who has ever taught me differently? O well, I may catch God on one of his good days when everything is going right. It makes a lot of difference the way you catch a Judge." Civil Blood

In the early 1960s, Lafferty wrote a novel called Civil Blood. I knew a little about it before reading it. I didn’t know it was, in its eccentric way, a campus novel. And though I knew it was anti-communist, I didn’t realize it was about more than that. All the factions in the book are Catholic and anti-communist. So the book isn’t only about opposition between communists and anti-communists; it’s primarily about the internal divisions among the Catholic anti-communists themselves. In a deeper sense, it’s about the ways Catholicism overlapped with the political ideologies of the time. At the same time, Lafferty explores the ongoing idea of the split person, here explicitly in terms of sin. The main character, Pilgrim Berg, is a young man sorting out his Catholic identity and his loyalties within “The Mountain,” a liberal club founded by his father, George (Mountain) Berg. The story is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, with a few surprising allusions to Dante along the way.

The trouble starts in Chapter One, with the Mountain club's plan to egg the fiery Professor Maurice Chapelle. Chapelle is a public intellectual whose ideas challenge the liberal Catholic views of the Mountain, and Pilgrim, the novel's Romeo character, finds himself torn from the start. This aspect of the plot deepens after the campus egging and Pilgrim’s becoming attracted to Chapelle's daughter, Juliana. Following a meeting with Juliana, Barney Rodt, and Johnny Greeneye, Pilgrim’s disillusionment with his father's ideology becomes total. The plot escalates when Professor Chapelle champions Wildcat strikes as a form of protest against corrupt union practices, directly challenging Mountain Berg's union-based authority. From there, the plot shifts between poles of tragedy and comedy, culminating in a final scene that feels very much like a Lafferty and shares some superficial structural similarities with the ending of Archipelago.

In this post, I want to look at the Catholic factions in the novel. Set against a backdrop of Cold War anti-communism and labor unrest, in Civil Blood American Catholicism is cleft into feuding factions loosely modeled on the families of Romeo and Juliet. Within this set up, Civil Blood portrays high Cold War period Catholicism as a spectrum of theological and ideological stances. There are what we would now call rigid traditionalism and liberal humanism, and there are other versions, running from mystical spirituality to pragmatic distributism. Each of these families of Catholic expression show up in distinct characters and groups: conservative clerics, worldly laymen, “labor priests,” devout intellectuals, and ordinary believers. Andrew Ferguson has called the novel preachy. I think Lafferty is usually preachy. But what he is doing here is very much in his didactic mode. The characters who stand in for the various types of Catholicism do a lot of speechifying. Crucially, each expression of Catholicism in Civil Blood is trained on political currents of the time: socialism and communism, liberal capitalist humanism, and fervent anti-communism.

On the most broadly drawn level, major characters - notably union patriarch George “Mountain” Berg (of German Catholic descent), the missionary Father Tabano (Latin American), and the Professor Maurice Chapelle (a Republican of French Catholic descent), personify contradictions that the novel sets out to sharpen. To show how this is not mainly about anti-Communism itself per se, I’m going to draw attention to (1) the novel’s portrayal of various Catholic factions (traditionalist, liberal, mystical, distributist, clerical and lay), (2) the influence of political ideologies (socialism, liberal humanism, communism, anti-communism) on characters’ attitudes toward Catholicism (and vice versa), (3) the role of Catholicism in union and labor politics via key characters, and (4) the ways different Catholic figures engage and oppose communist ideology, both in dialogue and allegorically through the novel’s Shakespearean theme of “where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”

Let’s start with the traditionalist impulses in Civil Blood. Lafferty is critical of everyone in this book, but his criticism is asymmetrical, and it isn’t terribly surprising that he is most sympathetic to the traditionalist faction. It is most clearly seen in characters like Father Raymond Tabano, a wandering priest loosely based on Shakespeare’s Friar Laurence but with a great deal of pre-Liberation Theology Latin American fury thrown in. Tabano is an old-school, militant Catholic spirit. He wears a brown friar’s robe with sandaled feet and “blue face,” and from the second he appears, he feels somewhat otherworldly. His dialogue shows a zealous orthodoxy and intolerance for heresy. Lafferty has often been called reactionary in his Catholicism, and while this is fair from one perspective, I think it is more accurate to say Catholicism believes in permanent things, so it is not reactionary to uphold dogma and sacred doctrine, as opposed to matters of cultural adaptation. Rejecting non-Magisterial changes in doctrine is not reactionary: it is simply being in Catholic communion.

Here's an example. When the novel’s union patriarch George Berg snidely says that Latin America is “priest-ridden enough,” Father Tabano says that this is “the stupidest statement that I ever heard a grown man make.” He points out the shortage of clergy in Latin American countries, and he says that for the spiritual health of Catholics there “should always be one [priest] per thousand [souls]. That is the safe minimum. Below that grace flows with difficulty, the source is too narrow.” This isn’t reactionary. It’s pretty solid moral theology. And behind it is Lafferty’s own sacramental worldview where clergy are conduits of grace keeping society from spiritual decay. It is also traditionalist because it reflects the longstanding Catholic emphasis on the priesthood and sacraments. Where Father Tabano goes into territory that feels decidedly pre-Conciliar is in his far from irenic disdain for Protestant separated brethren and other faiths. Protestant evangelicals in Latin America are derided for offering “an easier religion, a short-cut faith” with a lax morality, one that “does not carry a high element of truth.” Tabano believes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Lafferty shared some of this in his own beliefs, that its adherents are morally slothful because they don’t (to use the language of Vatican II) participate in “the fullness of the faith.”

This is to say that calling non-Catholic religion a falsity that draws out “the worst” in people is characteristic of a pre-Vatican II traditionalism and triumphalist Catholic stance that the Catholic Church has wisely dialed down rhetorically without altering its Magisterial position. Father Tabano’s own mission to build “the largest possible seminary” on the Texas-Mexico border to train an army of new priests (he wants to graduate “ten thousand a year”) points to a militant restorationist vision of Catholic expansion. I think it’s safe to say that through Father Tabano and like-minded “churchy” figures, Civil Blood gives the readers a traditional Catholicism that is zealous, uncompromising, and protective of orthodoxy, often to the point of belligerence. This is very much part of the Belloc factor that I indicated in Lafferty’s work. The traditionalist faction sees Catholic faith as a bulwark against error (whether Protestantism, secularism, or communism), and it puts first clerical authority, doctrinal purity, and mystical signs (as we will see) in its expression of religiosity.

Counterposed to the traditionalists in the novel are characters who live a more liberal, modernist, or humanistic Catholicism. In the didacticism of the novel, this is plainly a hollowed-out version of Catholic identity that serves social ends. The apogee of it is Mountain Club (the Bergs’ faction, nicknamed “the Mountain”), whose members are all technically in Catholic communion but approach the Church with cynicism and utilitarian logic. George Berg, the labor leader father, says that the Catholicism of men is not the Catholicism of women or boys. His is a distinctly anti-pious, managerial view of Catholicism. In a speech to young club members (all “born to” the Church), Berg orates on the matter: “we will not look at the Church in the same manner as a woman or a worker… We are men.” This cashes out to being what you would expect: true Catholic elites know religion is a tool, not a rule. He goes so far as to look at the Church as if it were a dotty but meddlesome matriarch: “when the Church enters fields where it has no business, then we must curb it. It is a delicate affair, like having to restrain an ancient… looney mother for her own good,”

Lafferty’s message in this novel thesis could not be more clear: the anti-clerical liberal Catholic characters profess personal reverence, and even though they know they have no priestly faculties, they want to curb the Church’s influence in politics and economics. Berg says, “in a sense we have a duty to be anti-clerical. In another sense even the clergy has a duty to be anti-clerical.” This fits with Lafferty’s lifelong hostility to liberal humanist ideology, which in his view thinks religion is acceptable, even useful, so long as it stays in its lane, What is that lane? It’s maintaining moral order among “women and workers,” and its lane is not that of challenging the domain of the secular elites, whether that be the marketplace or the State).

Relevant to the Coscuin Chronicles, members of the Mountain Club pride themselves on an Enlightenment-style worldview that merges Catholic affiliation with secular Realpolitik. Even if they don’t know it, they are on the side of the Red Revolution. Although Lafferty had not yet developed his metaphor of the Green and Red Revolutions, this theme is present in the book. In a rapid-fire enumeration of their ideology’s “cornerstones,” one Mountain character, Ronnie, lists “Humanism, Liberalism, Naturalism, the Dialectic, the human solution to the human problem; the Evolvate State tending to an Integrated World; the maximum security labor establishment; the World Unity Movement for both Church and body Politic; … the secular state within a world secular state; a gnostic religion within a world gnostic religion, [and] the ultimate perfectibility of mankind.” The Mountain faction embraces the progressive secular agenda of the 20th century – world government, technocratic control of labor, even a “gnostic” (hidden or elitist) reinterpretation of religion. This is also part of Lafferty’s simmering hatred of all things utopian since the program falls under the banner of human perfectibility, which is to say Mountain-style Catholicism has been subsumed into a kind of global liberal utopianism.

"I have no wish to be a mawkish or propaganda martyr. I put on a road show (and it is a good one) and I am crucified after every performance. But I am not so good a Christian as Christ. I do not say 'Forgive them for they know not what they do.' I say forgive them Hell! They know damned well what they're doing! Every knowing son of a snake among you knows why he has to throw that egg, why he hasn't the stomach to look at his own face without the mask. So now you get them out of the sacks and begin. And as you throw I will give you some figures."

Lafferty has some fun with this, having the Mountain members speak ignorantly (presumably they don’t know they are quoting Trotsky) of being part of the “permanent revolution” (for them it is Liberalism, not Communism, but Lafferty has made his Red Revolution point). They think that “because the Liberal Revolution has become established is no reason to disestablish it”. They believe any deviation from this established international liberal order is “Reaction” or a regression. In Civil Blood, liberal or humanist Catholicism is a comfortable accommodation with the modern secular world. This is intellectual and spiritual hypocrisy on Lafferty’s view. The Mountain faction are only devout and not at all intellectually honest: Berg encourages his men to be seen at Mass “for the sake of appearances” (calling this “our own special hypocrisy”) but discourages “extreme” sacramental devotion or scrupulous self-examination. Regular confession or the Easter Duty are dismissed as fetishes for women and children rather than men. We even learn that many in Berg’s circle abandon the Catholic Church altogether for easier forms of Christianity when it suits them: “Many… leave it to become Anglicans or Episcopals; the road is so much easier that way.” This is at the heart of the Berg and Tabano conflict. Berg accuses the priest of “disgrac[ing] the Church with [his] intolerance.” The conflict between Berg’s camp and Tabano’s ethos highlights the novel’s internal Catholic divide: pragmatic liberalism versus fervent tradition. What makes this interesting is that a note Lafferty attached to the manuscript mentions false dichotomies, and the book's Romeo and Juliet are the tertium quid.

Running alongside these doctrinal battles, Civil Blood also pulls in elements of mysticism and supernatural belief while maintaining its low mimetic mode. For some of its characters Catholicism is experienced in mystical or mythic terms. Even as rationalists like Berg might look down on pious frauds, there are hints that inexplicable spiritual powers are at play. For instance, Father Tabano – despite Berg’s dismissal of him as a mere “alien” agitator – is hinted to possess almost saintly abilities. He boldly claims, “I have the power of disappearing and bi-location.” One of the novel's best characters, Barney Rodt, at one point blocks a door to protect the departing Tabano and half-seriously warns, “We could never take him… Who can cope with such power?” Barney even says that Tabano “compel[led] me to stand unmoved in this doorway”, a not-so-subtle allusion to mystical gifts of Catholic saints.

Lafferty reinforces this mysticism theme with religious allusions: for example, a witty exchange between two characters references “St. Tony (the Egyptian one)” (St. Anthony of Egypt) when chiding someone to smile, subtly reminding the reader of the desert mystics and hermits of old. In Juliana Chapelle – the professor’s daughter and the story’s gentle “Juliet” figure – we see another facet of mystical Catholicism: the quiet, contemplative piety of a “blue-stocking and a churchy” Juliana who is deeply religious. Near the beginning of the novel, she takes a direct hit from a thrown rotten egg, thrown by Pilgrim, at her father’s speech without wiping it away, a Lafferty-esque image of martyrdom or at least stoic forbearance. The overall impression of Julian is one of saintly long-suffering. In conversations, Juliana isn’t shy to discuss profound or taboo topics (such as the romantic pull of the moon or the moral challenges of human passions). She is one of Lafferty’s most sophisticated heroines, possessing a reflective soul attuned to life’s religious mystery; a form of mysticism in its own right.

Catholic mysticism runs as a deep undercurrent through the book—a belief in miracles, saintly powers, contemplative wisdom, and spiritual combat with evil. This mystical outlook unsettles the materialism of the other characters. The presence of Father Tabano becomes a kind of catalyst, revealing the spiritual blindness of Berg’s circle. In Barney’s admiring words, Tabano is a man who might have “powers” they are not equipped to understand.

Among the ideological variants of Catholicism in Civil Blood is Distributism, the socio-economic philosophy rooted in Catholic social teaching. I’ve written about distributism, as articulated by thinkers like G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, on the blog. It proposed a “third way” economic system (widespread small property ownership, cooperative economics) in opposition to both unfettered capitalism and state socialism. In Civil Blood, Maurice Chapelle is the chief proponent of ideas akin to distributism and the papal social encyclicals. Chapelle is an erudite Catholic intellectual (and patriarch of the Capulet/Chapelle family). He is known to lecture on topics like “the Distributive State”. Pilgrim and his friends note that “he has one [lecture] on the Distributive State”, and they ask, “Are we for or against the Distributive State?” – to which Ronnie replies, “We are naturally against if he is for it.” This exchange flags Chapelle’s Distributist sympathies, but it does something else. It shows how polarized the Catholic factions are: the Mountain Club will reject any doctrine that Chapelle endorses, regardless of merit.

Chapelle also “sometimes analyses the Encyclicals” in his talks, drawing on the Catholic magisterium’s teachings on social justice (for example, Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and its successors). One Mountain Club member waves this off, saying, “Your own father can give you the best answer on those [Encyclicals]” – implying George Berg’s interpretations trump Rome’s – or offers a cynical pamphlet titled “Defining the Encyclical Idea in Practical Application or the Leonine Limitations.” This pamphlet (likely authored by Berg’s circle) suggests that Pope Leo’s social teachings have strict “limitations” and should not upset the status quo. The novel puts it this way: “This man [Chapelle] is a Charlatan and the Churchies are dangerous. Christ drove the marketplace out of the temple… But we have a like obligation to drive the Temple out of the Market Place.” In other words, Berg’s faction accuses Chapelle’s Distributist, encyclical-based approach of improperly “mixing” religion with economics, and they respond with an extreme secularist stance that religion must be expunged from economic life. The very use of the term “Churchies” for Chapelle’s followers underscores how his integration of Catholic teaching with socio-economic critique is seen as subversive by the novel’s establishment.

Professor Chapelle represents the strand of Catholic social ideology that is deeply informed by Church doctrine (the Leonine tradition of advocating workers’ rights, subsidiarity, etc.) and by distributist ideas. In Chapelle’s climactic campus speech, we can detect echoes of distributist thought even in what amounts to being a jeremiad. The Chapelle faction quotes Chesterton – “Chesterton wrote (we quote him a lot here) . . .” – and purports to tell the audience “What is Wrong with the World” (one has to hear the the title of Chesterton’s famous social critique). While Chapelle himself focuses on unmasking an enemy, this fits with a distributist skepticism of both capitalist monopolies and communist collectivism.

Like Lafferty, Chapelle is furious with the near totality of modern culture: “journalism, drama, belles lettres, bureaucracy, non-centrist Christianity, demagoguery, finance,” all seen as part of a masked system serving “organized greed and cosmic blasphemy.” This amounts to a Catholic critique of industrial-modernity gone awry. I think it’s safe to say that distributism in the novel is depicted as a courageous but embattled position. Chapelle and his entourage are loathed by both the capitalist-leaning union establishment and by secular liberals. They are the “Churchies” who dare to bring the Church’s moral voice into the public square of labor and economics. For this they are called dangerous. By including this faction, Lafferty acknowledges the Catholic Left (or Catholic social justice) dimension of the period. This movement sought to make real papal teachings in pursuit of a more equitable society, often finding itself caught between capitalism and communism.

One of the deepest layers of Civil Blood is how it thematizes the relationship between clericalism, the influence or dominance of clergy in social affairs, and anti-clericalism, the desire to limit Church authority to purely spiritual matters. As should be clear by now, characters in the novel take different stances on this issue. Father Tabano, as discussed, represents an unabashed clerical assertiveness. He wants to sway laypeople and to raise huge funds for a seminary, expanding the clergy’s reach. His attitude is that the Church should shape society’s soul and even its intellectual life. His seminary plan is an ambitious project of clerical formation to influence entire nations.

On the opposite side stands George Mountain Berg and his associates, who are overtly anti-clerical, despite being Catholic themselves. Berg’s earlier remarks likening the institutional Church to a mother who must be restrained capture his paternalistic anti-clericalism. He believes the laity, or rather an elite cadre of lay “fathers” like himself, must manage the Church’s role. In Berg’s view, the Church’s value lies in providing moral order for the masses, but priests should not meddle in higher political or economic decision-making. “The State has its own areas. ‘Render unto Caesar’ is a command,” declares the Mountain Club’s pamphlet, insisting that the secular realm, the “Market Place,” must be kept free from clerical influence.

This reflects a class-based anti-clericalism. For Berg, “privilege is for the few,” and those few, himself included, are exempt from the moral restrictions that clergy or religion might impose on “children,” his term for workers and common people. Ironically, Berg even expects priests themselves to adopt anti-clerical discipline. He acknowledges a “refreshing number of young Labor Priests” in the Church, but he complains that “often they do not agree with us about the nature of Labor; never do they agree… wholeheartedly. We can lead them only so far… And they are also subject to reprimand just when they have reached their most useful level.”

Civil Blood draws attention to lay Catholic religiosity - the faith as lived by ordinary people, rather than by high clergy or powerful elites. We see sincere lay devotion and moral conscience in characters like Juliana Chapelle and Barney Rodt, who stand apart from the extremes discussed earlier.

Juliana, as noted, is devout (“churchy”) and travels with an older companion, Miss Conners (the nurse in Romeo and Juliet), who acts as a kind of chaperone, showing that Juliana’s virtue is carefully protected. Her faith is gentle but firm. She speaks of her father’s hope that his words might touch someone’s soul: “He always says that if he reaches only one in a crowd he is successful. I had hoped that Pilgrim would be the one.” This shows her quiet hope for the conversion of Pilgrim Berg. His own moral doubts and conscience about his family’s tactics begin to grow as a result of his connection with her.

Barney Rodt, one of Pilgrim’s peers in the Mountain Club and his college roommate at Furstenburg College (literally "Foremost Mountain" in German), also represents a layperson’s awakening conscience. We learn that Barney has embarrassed the other club members by criticizing their sexual behavior and pursuit of pleasure, things considered normal for young men. Berg scolds him for being immature. But in this, Barney stands out as a voice of morality among the lay elite. He challenges their hedonism, showing a form of religious ethics that values personal virtue over social acceptance. He is also the only member of the club to openly disagree with Berg’s statements about the Church and politics. When Berg calls for everyone to support a “fair middle ground,” Barney replies, “I am not [in agreement]… and one other, I believe, is not in complete agreement. And the rest, I am sure, agree slavishly.” By calling his peers “slavish,” Barney shows that his religious beliefs lead him to think for himself.

Later, Barney takes Father Tabano’s side during a confrontation. He blocks Berg’s men from chasing the priest and, half-jokingly, uses mystical language to defend him. Berg responds by accusing Barney of committing a Wildcat offense and expels him from the liberal Catholic elite: “You have just dropped out of the class you were born into, Barney. Now you are one of the rabble.” This moment is important. It shows that a lay Catholic who stays true to his conscience and faith, instead of following elite expectations, will be rejected by the powers of the world.

At the same time, Barney’s stand shows that there is still a faithful remnant among the laity. These are people who do not hold positions of power in the Church, but who still live by its teachings on personal morality and justice. They resist both the shallow faith of the Mountain set and the violence of political extremes.

Civil Blood carefully differentiates the modes of Catholic life among its lay characters. Some, like Pilgrim’s friend Charley Mercury, are co-opted into the cynical political Catholicism of Berg’s club (Charley warns Pilgrim to conform and is a willing propagandist). Others, like Juliana and Barney, represent laypeople for whom Catholicism is an authentic source of identity, moral guidance, and truth beyond politics. Juliana’s feminine piety and Barney’s integrity demonstrate that, even amid the novel’s conspiracies and conflicts, lay religiosity endures. It is often quiet and unimposing (Juliana’s way) or manifests as simple moral courage (Barney’s protest), but it remains the heartbeat of Catholic life as distinct from both clerical extremes and political manipulations.

There is much more going on in the novel, but I’d like to end this by summarizing how each Catholic faction approahces communism in different ways:

• Berg’s faction approaches communism by co-opting its methods (secrecy, indoctrination, global vision) and by performing an anti-communist purging of dissent. It treats “communist” as a label to break any challengers. It brands independent thinkers like Barney as being de facto communist (a wildcat outlaw). This allegorizes how anti-communist rhetoric can become tyrannical; Berg’s authoritarian streak is an example of what he says he hates. This is why Chapelle accuses the culture around Berg of being functionally communist (“organized greed and cosmic blasphemy” behind a mask) , implying that Berg’s America has the soul of communism (godless materialism) even while fighting its name.

• Chapelle’s faction approaches communism by staying true to radical Christian ethics and denying communists the moral high ground. In effect, Chapelle says: if the system is unjust and regimented, honest men might have to abstain from voting and strike spontaneously. These are precisely the actions communists advocate. They just happen to be the last resort of free humans under God, not as Marxists living through class struggle. He reclaims protest as a Christian act of conscience rather than a communist act of revolution. Allegorically, Chapelle tries to beat communists at their own game, but with Christ, not Marx.

• Father Tabano’s faction approaches communism by doubling down on evangelization. Instead of yielding souls to communist atheism, he hopes to flood the world with priests to convert and fortify populations. Tabano’s intolerance for communists is explicit in his scorn for how America treats “Communists they fawn on with open arms… But an honest man is circumscribed” – he lumps communists with “heretics and perverts” whom authorities welcome while hindering truth-tellers like himself. Here, Tabano equates communists with moral degenerates and casts his own anti-communist activity (for which he had previously been deported and harassed) as the work of an “honest man” persecuted by a misguided state. Allegorically, Tabano might represent the Church’s persecuted missionary in communist lands (he could be seen as analogous to those priests expelled from China or Eastern Europe). His claim to bilocation and miraculous escape from arrest in the novel’s climax further the allegory: the Church cannot be caught or killed by communist regimes – it will slip through and reappear elsewhere, sustained by supernatural grace.

Civil Blood is a quirky but sophisticated allegory of its time. It is a novel of ideas, where Catholicism is both weapon and aegis, used by different characters for opposing purposes. The central question is: What form of Catholic witness can lead society out of civil fragmentation? Lafferty answers that it will be Catholicism that is truly itself, neither taken over by worldly ideologies nor withdrawn from the struggles of the world.

Civil Blood is a fascinating experiment, written by Lafferty at the start of the 1960s, before he began to explore these deep issues in genre fiction, growing both more trenchant and more brilliantly cutting as he went along. Is it preachy? Yes. But it’s much more than that; it throws light on all his work, including Past Master, and it’s a shame it will probably be a long time before it sees print, if ever it does. One can learn a great deal about Lafferty by reading it.