Sergio Infante, a professor at Yale, is on a mission from God. He’s determined to make sure the new Catholic revival energizing Generation Z is woke.
Contra Professor Infante, it is essential that the new wave of young Catholics be anti-communist. I’d like to encourage them to sign up for the Anti-Communist Film Festival, which will be held at the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C. in October. Registration is free.
Here is Professor Infante from his piece in Slate:
Around the United States, as you’ve probably heard, Gen Z Catholics are heading to the pews in eye-popping numbers. They meet up in pizzerias and follow one another on social media. They flock to Catholic student organizations, which are booming. And at Yale University, where I teach Latin American and global history, they attend classes and public lectures to learn about their faith.
He goes on:
The trend has surprised many in my department. Last spring, the most popular history course at Yale was The Catholic Intellectual Tradition, a survey of Catholic thinking and writing from the first century to the present. It beat out such popular, evergreen classes as The Birth of Europe and The Roman Empire. I was asked to assist with this 85-student course as a teaching fellow. Each week, after scrolling past calls to defund the humanities and to automate the many jobs that make a liberal arts education possible, I found myself surrounded by eager students ready to engage with fourth-century Christology, medieval mysticism, World War II–era debates over “just war” theory, and much more.
So what to do? Drag everybody left, of course:
At Yale, I know exactly what that should look like. Courses on Catholic history should engage women’s voices. My students and I read the 12th-century anchorite Julian of Norwich, a saint in the Anglican faith and the first known woman to write a book in the English language. We also read the journalist and activist Dorothy Day, whose blistering critiques of inequality resonate with students nearly a century after her conversion to Catholicism in 1927. Such texts are a reminder that women have long been among the most astute interpreters of religious and social life.
In its own piece on the new Catholic revival, Vanity Fair quotes liberal Catholic scholar David Lafferty:”When it comes to all the influencers circling around the Church” who seem more attracted to “external displays of piety” than core tenets of the faith, “it’s important to ask: What are they really converting to? Is it belief in what the Church teaches and the fundamental principles of Christianity? Or are they converting to anti-LGBTQ sentiment, anti-globalism, and anti-communism?”
I’m guessing that young people are embracing the idea that men are men and women are women, that immigration is fine but should be legal, and that communism sucks. I would encourage them to read about Fr. Edmund Walsh, the founder of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and one of the greatest anti-Communists of the 20th century. There’s also John Paul II and other Catholic leaders on the evils of communism.
I would also encourage Catholics to watch the classic movie On the Waterfront, which has powerful Catholic themes. As Allan Ryskind notes in his book Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters: Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, liberals despised On the Waterfront director Elia Kazan, who named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. “Kazan was not only the most illustrious former Communist from the entertainment industry to have cooperated with HUAC,” Ryskind writes. “What really galled the Hollywood Left was that Kazan appeared to have become a believing anti-Communist who thought cooperating with the Committee, even if one had to name names, was absolutely justified. That is what the Left has never been able to forgive.” Two days after his HUAC appearance, Kazan took out an ad in the New York Times urging others who knew about Communism to defect.
Kazan called communism this “dangerous “dangerous and alien conspiracy” and added that “any American who is in possession of such facts has the obligation to make them known, either to the public or to the appropriate government agency.” The American Communist Party, his ad continued, “was abjectly taking its orders from the Kremlin,” attempting “to dictate personal conduct,” and “habitually distort[ing] and violat[ing] the truth.” To be a Party member, he stressed, “is to have a taste of the police state.” Firsthand experience with the Communist Party not only “left me with an abiding hatred of Communist philosophy and methods,” but with the conviction that we must fight to preserve “the very things which [Communists] kill” in the countries they already rule. Kazan noted that the communists suppress “free speech, a free press, the rights of property, the rights of labor, racial equality and, above all, individual rights.”
Not surprisingly, Kazan was blackballed by the American Film Institute — the same place that also, after some interest, shot down hosting the Anti-Communist Film Festival.
To be Catholic is to hate communism. The kids will learn this, plus a lot more, by attending the Anti-Communist Film Festival. It’s better than wasting their time at Yale.
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