Corita Kent: how the New Art helped the Catholic Sexual Revolution
The political and occult origins of the Rupnik Scandal
“Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.”
Malcolm Muggeridge
"The soul that has tasted the sweetness of union with God can find no rest in anything created."
Abba Isaac the Syrian, late 6th - early 7th c. Desert Father
The Sexual Revolution: why don’t we think about it anymore?
Though a few Christian writers still concern themselves with it - and it horrifies Muslim immigrants to our nations - the Sexual Revolution is an oddly forgotten topic in the secular world. If it is thought about at all it is as a historical relic, almost a footnote, something our grandmothers were involved with, like the Suffragette movement. Like all the monumental and permanent direction changes the human race has undergone - the shift from hunting and gathering to farming, the dawn of mechanised industry, these mass alterations in thinking and worldview simply become the World As It Is, and so the change itself, and what we left behind, gets forgotten.
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So it has become for most people, and therefore for our civilisation as a whole, with sex, marriage, childrearing and “relationships” - the New Paradigm is so accepted it is forgotten there was ever an old one.
As the world goes, so goes the Church, at least in our time. To understand what’s happening to Catholicism - why a malignant incubus like Marko Rupnik is blatantly protected by the pope, for example - we should examine the gargantuan effort of the Baby Boomer demographic cohort in the 1960s to trap the Church forever in the social revolution of the period.
One question I’ve never found any “progressivist Catholic” willing to answer is, “Where are we progressing to? What does a sexually revolutionised Catholic Church look like?” What’s at the end of this road? One way to find out where the VaticanTwoist proposal is headed might be to look at the fate of some of its early and most prominent and vocal promoters.
Who were the most prominent church artists in the late 1960s and early ‘70s? Who were the sexual revolutionaries in the church 60 years ago and what happened to them? I thought we could look today at one very popular figure from that time.
New Catholic Art = sexual, moral and theological perversion
In August last year, I wrote that we probably should have been able to guess at the real character of Marko Rupnik - the former Jesuit and mosaicist credibly accused of rape and decades of grotesquely blasphemous sexual and psychological abuse, by several religious sisters - just by looking at his art.
We all know this kind of art, at least in a general way: it’s the art that tells us we’re stuck forever in the amber of 1969. Rupnik’s is the art of VaticanTwoism, the visual equivalent of Dan Schutte and the St. Louis Jesuits’ music…
What characterises it? In a single word? Childishness. It’s deliberately intended to look “primitive,” like art work from a kindergarten class: bright colours in big blocks, wobbly, mismatched or unparallel lines and angles, visual incoherence, and only vaguely representational - like a child’s stick figure portraits of his mother and father. This comported well with the social fad at the end of the 1960s to reject previous standards of behaviour and adopt a child-like, groovy, care-free approach to life, including religion. Rules, in art and religion, are for squares, man.
Most significantly, a statement by one of his victims pinpoints the very centre of the issue. Though not overtly sexualised in nature, his personal sexual perversions were part and parcel of his artistic work:
“His sexual obsession was not extemporaneous but deeply connected to his conception of art and his theological thought.”
The take-away is clear: the perversion of the traditional art forms of the Church - in Rupnik’s case Byzantine iconography - is an expression of the fundamental perversion of all his thought and the thought of those who commission, promote and protect it.
And from this we can extrapolate some working ideas: we know from just seeing the material output of the official Catholic Church - both from Rome and at the local level - this is the material, visual expression of the New Dispensation of post-Conciliar Catholicism.
And this is the reason Rupnik and his work are being protected, why even “good” bishops are struggling to decide to send it to the dumpsters it belongs in. To renounce this work is to renounce what it stands for. This is why the Rupnik situation won’t just go away; it is forcing them to decide between two paradigms that are radically opposed.
What have we learned from the Rupnik scandal? That artistic perversion cannot help but be an expression of interior disorder. Therefore, the perverted Catholic art, that is the visual expression of the New Catholicism - Novusordoism, VaticanTwoism… whatever you want to call it - is about moral, theological and sexual perversion.
There was a time when this equation was expressed out loud quite boldly. Back when Catholic Vatican Two rebels were open about proposing an entirely different Church, before the strategy was to convince everyone that nothing has been substantially changed.
Sr. Corita Kent - hard left political radical and celebrity darling propagandist of the New Political Vatican
We can learn much by looking at one of the most famous “Catholic” artist “rebels” of the period when this new direction was being established.
Biography from the Corita Kent website:
Corita Kent (1918–1986) was an artist, educator, and advocate for social justice. At age 18 she entered the religious order Immaculate Heart of Mary [in Los Angeles, Ca.], eventually teaching and then heading the art department at Immaculate Heart College. During the course of her career, her artwork evolved from using figurative and religious imagery to incorporating advertising images and slogans, popular song lyrics, biblical verses, and literature. Throughout the ‘60s, her work became increasingly political, urging viewers to consider poverty, racism, and social injustice. In 1968, she left the order and moved to Boston.
She continued producing artworks for the galleries that represented her and on commission and died in 1986, “at the home of a friend,” of cancer.
The progression of a progressivist artist
By the 1960s all pretence of religious imagery was abandoned and leftist political activism and avante garde “pop-art” fully embraced:
Sr. Corita goes to the Venice Biennale 50 years later as a star of the Bergoglian Vatican
Last week I saw a news article that said Sr. Corita’s artworks were going to be prominently included in the Vatican’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale, a major international cultural exhibition hosted in Venice. In case anyone was wondering why, an Italian LGBT propaganda website helpfully spelled it out: “Venice Biennale, Pope Francis will pay homage to Corita Kent, the queer nun who ran away with her lover.”
The Biennale focuses on contemporary art, including dance, architecture, cinema and theatre. As always with large-scale art exhibitions the point is mainly to promote our dominant political viewpoint and worldview, which is now merely the 1960s revolution, having taken every citadel, entrenched in every institution.
From the Biennale website:
The Biennale Arte 2024’s primary focus is thus artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, or refugees—particularly those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North. Migration and decolonization are key themes here…the Biennale Arte 2024, will be a celebration of the foreign, the distant, the outsider, the queer, as well as the indigenous.
Vatican News reported that the Vatican’s pavilion would sponsor the typical Bergoglian themes “human rights and people living on the margins of society,” and “people who are largely ignored while fostering a culture of encounter.”
I don’t know what particular works of Corita’s are included in the Vatican’s display, but it doesn’t really matter; both their style and message are quite precisely and monotonously the same.
A fraudulent “rebellion” fully supported by the institution: “Her work itself aided in the Vatican II movement”
Her close relations with the powers that be in the New Paradigm Church are longstanding:
By the mid 1960s, when Sr. Corita’s star began to rise, the transformation of the institutions of the Church, into whatever we have now, was already well under way. The fiasco of the response from the bishops and Rome to the widespread rejection of the birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae - which ended with the betrayal of the Archbishop of Washington DC for defending it - shows that clearly.
The narrative pretence for the reporters was that she and figures like the Berrigan brothers, with whom she was close, Charles Curran and the Jesuit politician Robert Drinan were somehow heroic rebels sticking it to the Catholic Man, in the person of the pope and bishops, for freedom and justice. But it was an obvious propagandistic fraud, gleefully spun for the press by official sources in the Church who understood they were engaged in a silent civil cold war over the aim of remaking the Church into something new.
And that fraud has been carried on to this day - only now we have the pope himself cast in the heroic hippie rebel role, with Christ, the Doctors and Fathers of the Church, the saints and 2000 years of doctrine all collectively cast as “The Man”.
One reviewer confirmed that by the mid-60s the “rebel” Corita Kent was already deeply embedded in the institutionalised revolution: “Her art classes at Immaculate Heart College became a mecca for the avantgarde, with eminent visitors like film director Alfred Hitchcock, composer John Cage, and geodesic-dome prophet Buckminster Fuller.”
Citing her and the Immaculate Heart sisters’ dispute with the Archbishop of Los Angeles, James McIntyre, who tried in vain to stop the order’s self-destruction, the entrenched “oppressed-heroic-rebel” narrative is summarised by her Wikipedia page: “As both a nun and a woman making art in the twentieth century, she was in many ways cast to the margins of the different movements she was a part of.”
I’m sure someone wrote this with a completely straight face: “Corita's art was her activism, and her spiritually-informed social commentary promoted love and tolerance.”
Her work itself aided in the Vatican II movement, a movement to modernize and make relevant the Catholic Church. Kent's use of English church texts in her work, for example, made an impact on the Vatican II's efforts to normalize conducting Mass in English. Because of her strongly political art, she and others left their order to create the Immaculate Heart Community in 1970 to avoid problems with their archdiocese.
What happened to the IHMs? The infamous incident that triggered a tsunami
The propaganda for this “heroic subversives” narrative continues to this day, as all but a handful of the sisters have long since gone to their reward. This is the trailer for a new documentary film about the incident that was a big hit at the Sundance festival in 2021.
The Corita Kent website, with absolutely breathtaking dissimulation, also mentions in passing the destruction of her religious order, some time after she left it, saying, “The religious order IHM reforms as an ecumenical lay community, the Immaculate Heart Community.” That’s certainly one way of putting it.
Stripped of its polemical narrative, the incident of the Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters of Los Angeles is one of the most infamous of the whole post-conciliar period of upheaval and auto-destruction. And it’s perhaps the one with the most far-reaching consequences after the destruction of the Latin liturgy.
The Immaculate Heart Community - the organisation formed by the break-away sisters in the late 60s - was somewhat more forthright: “Responding to the changes prompted by Vatican II and moved by contemporary philosophies, modern psychology and evolving feminist consciousness, the Immaculate Heart Sisters embraced the call to transformation.”
Though many readers are probably familiar with the story, it bears repeating that the destruction of the Immaculate Heart community was the result of a bizarre incident in which a group of experimental psychologists - the notorious “encounter groups” fad - targeted the community, using them as experimental test subjects. This group wanted to find out what Carl Rogers’ “non-directive” therapy would do to a cohesive and highly disciplined religious group. It was like detonating a nuclear device with shockwaves that reached every corner of the Catholic world.
The IHMs’ eager compliance - they were already known as a “progressive” community - with the experiment not only ended one of the largest teaching orders in the US, but sparked a revolution of apostasy, psychological chaos and sexual permissiveness in religious orders across the US, and finally around the Catholic world that contributed to the complete collapse of the active religious life in the Church, a wave of psychological and spiritual cancer that is still playing itself out.
“They delivered her into the hands of non-directive psychology”
In a now-famous interview with Dr. William Marra, William Coulson, one of the experimenters, admitted that they had effectively destroyed the community. In 1964 Coulson, as chief of staff at Rogers' Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, Ca., he was to "gather a cadre of facilitators to invade the IHM community" and later two dozen other orders, including the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Providence, and the Jesuits. The word “invade” was his. Coulson repented of the catastrophe he was partly responsible for, but it was too late to stop the destruction.
“We corrupted a whole raft of religious orders on the west coast in the '60s by getting the nuns and priests to talk about their distress.”
Carl Rogers, he said, “was probably anti-Catholic” but this went unnoticed by Coulson at the time. “I didn't recognize it because I probably was, too.”
“We both had a bias against hierarchy. I was flush with Vatican II, and I thought, ‘I am the Church; I am as Catholic as the Pope. Didn't Pope John XXIII want us to open the windows and let in the fresh air? Here we come!’ And we did, and within a year those nuns wanted out of their vows.”
We inundated that system with humanistic psychology. We called it Therapy for Normals, TFN. The IHMs had some 60 schools when we started; at the end, they had one. There were some 615 nuns when we began. Within a year after our first interventions, 300 of them were petitioning Rome to get out of their vows. They did not want to be under anyone's authority, except the authority of their imperial inner selves.
Coulson spoke to Dr. Marra about the case of Sr. Mary Benjamin, IHM whose experience with non-directive therapy resulted in her turn to lesbianism.
This is Sister Mary Benjamin, IHM. Sister Mary Benjamin got involved with us in the summer of '66, and became the victim of a lesbian seduction. An older nun in the group, "freeing herself to be more expressive of who she really was internally," decided that she wanted to make love with Sister Mary Benjamin. Well, Sister Mary Benjamin engaged in this; and then she was stricken with guilt, and wondered, to quote from her book, "Was I doing something wrong, was I doing something terrible? I talked to a priest--"
Unfortunately, we had talked to him first…
TLM: This is her liberation?
COULSON: This is her liberation. Now, her parents had not delivered her to the IHMs in order for her to be on her own. She was precious to them. She describes the day in 1962 when they drove her in the station wagon to Montecito, to the IHMs' novitiate. How excited they were, to be delivering someone into God's hands! Well, instead they delivered her into the hands of nondirective psychology.
Sr. Mary Benjamin’s experience was highlighted in a 1985 book, “Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence”. She wrote in it that after her order’s introduction to “sensitivity training” and the “encounter movement” she entered into a relationship with another sister, and was filled with doubts, asking, “Was I still celibate?” and “Was I doing something terrible?” The priest’s response, “opened a door" and she walked through, after which she realised she was “on my own.”
The result of these psychological experiments was finally the complete disintegration of the entire IHM order, and the abandonment of the Catholic religion in favour of a syncretistic and highly politicised feminist “ecumenism”.
Similar results came in every venue of religious life that these researchers undertook their experiments. Remember that Coulson said the group targeted “some two dozen other orders, among them the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Providence, and the Jesuits.”
The remaining former-IHMs have, of course, blanketed the experience thickly in the 1960s narrative of a heroic rebellion of free-spirited free-thinkers against the dark forces of institutional oppression.
They set out to form a spiritual community free from hierarchical and patriarchal governance. Today, over fifty years later, we have evolved into an ecumenical community that includes differences in worship styles, gender, sexual orientation, economic position, single or committed relationship status, race and culture.
It was everywhere and ate everything in its path
I’m old enough to remember the late stages of this movement. I was born in 1966, but the “encounter” movement and “non-directive therapy” for everyone was still a popular fad on the west coast of my hippie childhood. My mother became immersed in it in her late 20s. It started when she approached her local parish to be received into the Church, when I was five. She was led into the movement’s sticky quicksand by the Sisters of St. Anne, who had been put in charge of the new RCIA programme for the diocese of Victoria.
These are the sisters who ran most of the Catholic institution on the Canadian coast in the early 70s. Their own involvement in this toxic suite of experimental pseudo-psychology quickly deteriorated into straight-up occultism and various New Agey flavours of nonsense, particularly after their occultist bishop, the crook Remi de Roo, had finished indoctrinating them into his speciality, the “Enneagram”. Neither my mother nor the Sisters of St. Anne ever recovered.
When I was in my 20s I visited what had been their novitiate, hoping see their library. It had been turned into some kind of New Age “women’s spirituality centre” that offered tantric this and centring that and encountering-your-inner whatsit the other thing. By the 90s, of course, they hadn’t had a new vocation in a couple of decades - I think they finally sold their Queenswood property, by that time a nursing home for their elderly sisters, in 2010 to the University of Victoria.
These sisters had pioneered the new territories of British Columbia’s most remote forests in the 19th century, all the way from Quebec, before railroads or even roads, coming overland and later up through the Panama Canal in time for the Gold Rush. They had built and run the hospital I was born in, and the elementary school I attended.
Now they were a tiny handful of elderly weirdo hippie space cadets, waiting for the end. And doing it in the state of supremely impenetrable insouciance - one of the primary long term symptoms of the Rogers Encounter treatment - at what they had done both to themselves and to the Church as a whole.
The Sisters of St. Anne say they’re moving toward “completion” in the Pacific Northwest.
With a laugh, Sister Marie Zarowny acknowledges: “We say we’re ‘nearing completion’ instead of saying we’re ‘dying off.’”
God have mercy on them.
A not well known fact: three Sisters of the IHM Order moved to Wichita, KS in the early 1970’s and were accepted by the orthodox bishop. They “refounded” the Order faithful to the Church and original charism.
They are a small but growing group of Sisters, in a habit, living according to the Rule and teaching in the thriving Wichita diocesan schools. Blessed is our God!
Golly, this is so depressing. That interview with the curator of Corita's art - did you see how dead her eyes are? Must be from being surrounded by this horrendous Rupnik-like "art" all the time. It all makes me shiver. I lived through that time also and left the church in my teens - not because I loved the winds of change but because my beloved church had been a spiritual oasis of peace and truth and a contemplative Mass. And from one day to the next, it was ripped away and had become a tambourine-guitar twanging-people swaying-felt banner hanging-holding hands hootenanny. I felt like I had been thrust into a bizarre folk festival with nothing to do with Jesus, and a very bad festival, at that. It was a total train wreck and I ran from it because there was nowhere to go at that time. The dear elder pastor had suddenly been suppressed by a weird young priest whose only desire seemed to be to impress about how cool he was and how desperate he wanted to be liked. Thanks be to God, I did return eventually. Now it's a rerun of the bad days and we have to hang tight through the Bergolian train wreck. So much could be said. I leave it that. I appreciate this sorry tale - it does explain well what happened. Jesus was nowhere in this miasma...