The Most Holy Family Monastery is just one of three hundred centers of traditionalist (or separatist) Catholicism currently in operation across the United States. The monastery was founded in 1967 by a self-proclaimed Benedictine monk named Brother Joseph Natale as a community for handicapped men, but it rapidly evolved instead into a beachhead for right-wing extremism. Throughout the late sixties and seventies, Brother Joseph fervently denounced both the Second Vatican Council and the new Mass, and by the mid-seventies his community had broken off entirely from the institutional church to become probably the first independent traditionalist monastery in America Over the years, a number of church officials, including the current bishop of the Camden, New Jersey, diocese, James T. McHugh, have attempted to discuss the possibility of working out some sort of rapprochement, but Brother Joseph has consistently refused to answer their calls. In the mid-eighties, there were a total of ten monks in residence at the monastery, but since then the number has shrunk to just three. (The most recent defection occurred shortly after the May 1994 conference, when Brother John [Vennari], the aforementioned Sacred Heart lecturer, fled to Fort Erie to work for Fr. Gruner.) In addition to its annual conference, the monastery sponsors monthly retreats and a Tridentine Mass on Sundays that draws between two and three hundred people.
Several months after the conference, I visited the monastery again, this time to meet personally with Brother Joseph. Upon arriving I was ushered into a paneled waiting room by a rotund monk in his mid-fifties who identified himself as Brother Thomas. On one wall there were framed photographs of Popes John I and John Paul II, and on the other there was a larger photograph of Brother Joseph and Brother Thomas, both beaming and wearing suits, with a beaming Jimmy Durante standing between them. After finishing his lunch Brother Joseph came into the room on crutches, greeted me warmly, and took a seat behind a large wooden desk.
He told me that he had been born into a working-class family in Philadelphia in 1933, but contracted tuberculosis of the bone at age four and had been forced to spend most of the next seventeen years shuttling in and out of hospitals. After a stint in the private import business, he entered the Benedictine Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in 1960 as a lay postulate, but left less than a year later to lay the groundwork for the Holy Family Monastery. (I was later informed by the archivist of the Saint Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe that brother Joseph left before taking his final vows and thus never became a Benedictine monk.)
Brother Joseph suggested to me that he had been infused as a young man with the gift of prophecy (“a special, mysterious and divine knowledge”, is how he referred to it), and it was this that had afforded him special insight on to the travails of contemporary Catholicism. “I know it is hard for you to understand, so I’ll just give you a couple of illustrations,” he said. “Even before Vatican II was finished, I knew, and knew absolutely, that it was part of a communist conspiracy to destroy the Church. The Bishops at the council wanted democratize Catholicism, they wanted an egalitarian theology, and most of them were secret communists and Masons. They knew exactly what they were doing. My community here was the first one in the United States to see the council for what it really was, and we rejected it completely.” Brother Joseph’s second illustration of his prophetic powers concerned Pope John I, who was found dead in his quarters of an apparent heart attack on September 28, 1978, just one month after his election to the papacy. “Regardless of what you have been told,” he said, “John Paul I did not die of natural causes. He was murdered. Shortly after his election I went into a kind of trance and was told that John Paul I would be murdered because he wanted to return the Church to its traditions. He was murdered by his own. The communist infiltrators in the Vatican and the College of Cardinals, working together with the Masons, killed John Paul I. At the same time I had a vision of John Paul II, and was told he’d be the next pope and also that he’d be an authentic pope, even though most of his actions would be controlled by communist advisers and manipulators in the Vatican.”
His prophetic credentials now established, Brother Joseph next showed me a grade-six catechism, “Christ with Us”, published in 1967 by Willian Sadlier, Inc. On the first page was an excerpt of a prayer delivered by Pope Paul VI to the United Nations that the publisher had decorated with what seemed to be a random sprinkling of brown dots. With a sheet of tracing paper Brother Joseph connected the dots, in the process, produced an image that crudely resembled a hammer and sickle.
“Do you see what this is?” he asked, triumphantly. “It’s the emblem of communism, and it was secretly put on these catechisms for Catholic school children. Do you see the point? The Second Vatican Council was an ingenious plot designed by communists to take over the Church, and after the council was finished, communism infected every aspect of the Church. Communism isn’t dead; it’s stronger than ever. The United States is next, and then the entire world!”
At this point we were briefly interrupted when Brother Thomas entered the room and asked permission to go into town and get a haircut. Brother Joseph handed him a ten-dollar bill and reminded him to bring back the change.
I asked Brother Joseph where the operating funds for the monastery came from. “Almost all our money comes from private donations, which almost never exceeds $100,” he said, “and the rest comes from the sales of our books and videos.” (The monastery operates a small gift shop that is heavily stocked with “traditionalist” Catholic literature.) “We have a mailing list of one hundred thousand homes across the country, and we send our begging letters to every one of them. We also send our newsletter, Cry in the Wilderness, to traditional Catholics in twenty countries, and it brings us some donations. But we don’t have any big financial backers. In twenty-eight years, the biggest donation we’ve ever received was $10,000, and that was only once.”
As I prepared to leave, Brother Joseph broke into an apocalyptic tirade that was clearly intended to prolong our conversation. “Five years is about all the time the world has left,” he declared. “Canada and the United States today are completely atheistic. Doomsday is on the way! What’s the United Nations? It’s a communistic house of subversion designed to bring about a one world government. What’s gun control? It’s an effort to disarm the American people so they won’t be able to resist a communist takeover. Why isn’t Bill Clinton impeached? He’s totally immoral; his wife’s a homosexual. Who puts drugs on our streets? Who? Government agents, that’s who. Doping the people makes them helpless.”