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DIED. Paul Blanshard, 87, anti-Catholic polemicist and lawyer who bedeviled the church in the 1940s and '50s with numerous lawsuits and such incendiary treatises as the bestselling American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949); in St. Petersburg, Fla. A third-generation clergyman and twin brother of Philosopher Brand Blanshard, Paul was a Congregationalist minister before deciding that "Christianity is so full of fraud that any honest man should repudiate the whole shebang and espouse atheism instead." His broadsides against the church's "authoritarian control over the minds of men," something he equated with Stalinism, and its "unAmerican" involvement...
...Church grew into the most powerful religious body in the U.S. After World War II, Catholics through determination and force of numbers exerted pressures for public aid for parochial schools and hospitals; they interjected themselves into debates on legalized birth control. Such campaigns seemed to give credibility to Paul Blanshard, prolific anti-Catholic pamphleteer. His widely read American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949) declared, "The Catholic people of the U.S. are not citizens but subjects in their own religious commonwealth. The secular as well as the religious policies of their church are made in Rome by an organization that...
More recently, Paul Blanshard's "Protestants and Others United for the Separation of Church and State" had as its agenda the rollback of the alleged Catholic takeover of the American (nee Protestant) system including the public schools; through lectures and a best-selling book The People's Padre, ex-priest Emmett McLoughlin exposed contemporary Romish abuses to the delight of many...
Before such chilling views took hold, philosophers always were men who thought, says Yale's Professor Emeritus Brand Blanshard, that "they could sit down in their studies and arrive by reasoning at a knowledge of the ultimate nature of the world." Perhaps in no other age had philosophers greater confidence in their capacity to do this than in the 19th century. Hegel tried to encompass all aspects of life within his dialectical logic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, in 18 ponderous tomes. His idealistic principle that the material world exists only in relation to the Absolute mind...
...trouble with U.S. Catholic colleges is an "abysmal mediocrity" that has made them "almost universally destitute of intellectual leadership" in U.S. life. These words were spoken neither by Paul Blanshard nor by any other Catholic baiter-though some Catholics greeted them as if they were-but by a man who cares deeply about the fate of Catholic education: the Rev. Theodore Martin Hesburgh, C.S.C., president of the University of Notre Dame...