Still, the Crusade’s relationship with the CIA was not ended, with the Agency delaying payment of the subsidies it had promised in July and questions arising about the financing of postcrusade work in Ecuador.119 In April 1966, at a meeting of eastern province priests in Montreal, Lalande was horrified to learn how thoroughly the Family Rosary had been controlled not only by the CIA, which has “decided for several years now the places where the crusades should take place,” but also by “large American capitalist enterprises that have interests in Latin America.” As a result of his “blind and exaggerated confidence in Peter Grace,” the Superior General realized, Peyton did “not see very clearly in all of this.” At the close of the meeting, Lalande set specific deadlines in June and September, after which no official funds could be received by the Crusade. Nonetheless, Grace and Peyton persisted, proposing that Francis Spellman take over as the principal conduit of CIA support for the Family Rosary. Lalande countered by warning Sullivan that he would inform Rome if he ever discovered any evidence of Spellman’s performing such a role. Finally, by October, the last of the secret funds had changed hands, and Lalande breathed a sigh of relief. “Not a day passes when we do not read in the papers . . .
harsh criticisms about the organization which was procuring this aid,” he remarked to Sullivan. But even then the Superior General was not entirely released from his anxiety about the Family Rosary Crusade. Some surplus funds, it appeared, remained locked in a strongbox in the Immigrants Bank in New York, and the only two with keys were Patrick Peyton and Peter Grace.120
Despite suffering recurrent poor health as a result of the huge demands he made on himself, Peyton lived to a ripe old age, dying at the age of eighty-three in 1992. His reputation, which had suffered in the wake of Vatican II and the accompanying liberalization of American Catholicism, was largely restored by the time of his death, thanks in no small part to the revival of Catholic traditionalism and anticommunism that occurred during the papacy of John Paul II. It remains to be seen whether a campaign to have him canonized, launched in 2001, will be derailed by revelations about his links to the CIA, as happened in the case of Tom Dooley. Any assessment of this episode in his life would have to take account of the fact that, unlike Dooley, Peyton was fully witting of the Agency’s role in the Family Rosary Crusade. At the same time, it should also acknowledge
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the complete trust Peyton placed in his Edward Lansdale, J. Peter Grace, and his utter conviction that all other considerations were secondary to the cause of Marian devotion.
As for the larger pattern of secret CIA funding for Catholic missionaries to which Peyton’s example points, several conclusions seem possible, apart from the perhaps obvious point that the story of Peyton and his Family Rosary Crusade was symptomatic of the blurring between religion and politics that has been a dominant theme in recent American history.
One is that, like many of the unnatural institutional alliances conjured into existence by the covert Cold War, the partnership was beset by various tensions and disagreements, strongly echoing earlier church-state conflicts involving perceived secular usurpations of ecclesiastical authority.
Another is that, while in the short term the secret subsidies appear to have served the CIA’s interests well, as shown in Peyton’s impact on Brazilian politics, their eventual exposure badly damaged the United States’s image, turning even anticommunist missionaries against the American government.121
Finally, the CIA’s use of the Family Rosary Crusade in South America throws a revealing light on the Agency’s internal politics. It is generally assumed that the International Organizations Division was predominantly liberal and internationalist in its political sympathies, an image personified by the world-federalist, UN-supporting target of McCarthyism Cord Meyer. The examples of the National Student Association, the Committee of Correspondence, and even the Kennedyesque, “crossover”
Catholic Tom Dooley, with his links to the Ugly American Edward Lansdale and NCL-dominated Vietnam Lobby, would seem to confirm this impression. However, the pre–Vatican II Catholicism of Patrick Peyton and the aggressive Americanism of Peter Grace complicate the picture, suggesting that, as in the realm of cultural patronage and aesthetic taste, the CIA was rather more flexible and pragmatic in its choice of front groups than has previously been supposed. Defeating communism and advancing American power were the primary objectives; the promotion of social progress and international understanding came second.
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Into Africa
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