Saturday, March 19, 2016

Interview with David Wemhoff: How the CIA’s Doctrinal Warfare Program Changed the Catholic Church


The Doctrinal Warfare Program is the name given to a classified US Government operation commenced in 1953 (in a document entitled PSB D33 with annexes) which targeted the intellectuals, business leaders, and clerics in a number of different societies with the goal of having them approve of the American ideology in principle.

David Wemhoff is an Indiana attorney and has practiced law for more than twenty years. He received a Juris Doctor degree from the University of the Pacific, and an A.B. in Government from the University of Notre Dame. Wemhoff has taught college courses in Government, Constitutional Law, and Business Law.

Alexis: Your 990-page study, John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition: How the C.I.A.’s Doctrinal Warfare Program Changed the Catholic Church, is filled with archival documents and references, which obviously shows that you have thoroughly done your homework. For people who have never heard of the work and its content, lay out the thesis for us here.

Wemhoff: The American leadership (i.e., the socio-economic-cultural elites in American society) coordinated their efforts (mainly media) with the US Government through its Doctrinal Warfare Program, and by using something called psychological warfare, to change the thinking of the Catholic leadership so as to get them to accept as good in principle the ideology underlying American society and also accept America as the idea of social organization.

I document these efforts, which were part of a broader effort to co-opt leaders of all religions.  The plan of the American leadership was to use the Catholic Church, and other religions, to then propagate the American ideology, which formed the society known as America, all as a response ostensibly to Soviet Communism.

Acceptance and implementation of the American ideology served to align these societies with America and the USA against the USSR and Communism, and it also served to re-order these same societies thereby opening them to powerful private interests. The book discusses this effort, the response by some Catholic leaders and scholars, and it focuses on the period of about 1941 through 1965 or the conclusion of the Vatican II Council.  (more...)


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