Crusader to the stars... or CIA puppet?
For Father Patrick Peyton, the Rosary was a weapon. But who was guiding it?
THE family that prays together stays together – it’s a saying very likely ingrained on the minds of everyone of a generation who ever was called upon just after teatime to say a decade of the Rosary at the kitchen table or in front of the fire. It was popularised by Fr Patrick Peyton, an emigrant from Mayo to the United States who, after a vocation to the priesthood, dedicated his life to encouraging families all over the world to pray the Rosary together.
From a young age, he was convinced by the power of direct communication with a higher power. ‘Every problem in the world and every ailment could be cured by prayer,’ he believed, a view reinforced when he overcame tuberculosis after a grimly pessimistic prognosis.
To promote his message, he used all the latest media techniques of the last century, encouraging the biggest stars in Hollywood – Shirley Temple, Gregory Peck, Edward G Robinson, Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra among them – to take part in his radio programmes and religious films.
PRESIDENT Richard Nixon said of him: ‘He speaks for the best of America’, and his rallies all over the world drew massive crowds, including over 400,000 in Ireland when he visited 21 venues in 1954. Such was the power of this populist movement, the Central Intelligence Agency was persuaded to fund it as a bulwark against the spread of communism in South America, and even achieved regime change in Brazil as a result.
Fr Peyton’s is an extraordinary story. Seen by many as a saint in waiting (a canonisation campaign has been running since his death in 1992) and by others as a naïve dupe whose covert ties to the intelligence community were an embarrassment to the Catholic Church, he remains a divisive figure. His story is told in Gun & Rosaries, a documentary narrated by actor Martin Sheen that will be shown tonight on RTÉ One.
Patrick Peyton was born sixth in a family of four girls and five boys in Attymass, Co. Mayo, on January 9, 1909, to John Peyton and Mary Gillard, devout Catholics who made their living as subsistence farmers.
Rebellious in his youth, Patrick ended up working the land and later said it was there he discovered his deep relationship with God – and, particularly, with the Virgin Mary. ‘The family Rosary prayed night after night brought Mary to life,’ he later recalled.
At 19, he and his brother Thomas emigrated to join their sisters in Scranton, Pennsylvania. At first he found it hard to settle, but thanks to the intervention of his sister Nellie with Monsignor Paul Kelly, Patrick got a job as sexton of St Peter’s Cathedral, and then decided to enter the seminary at the University of Notre Dame.
After his brush with TB, he completed his theology studies at Holy Cross College in Washington DC and was ordained in June 1941.
In view of his recent poor health, he was given very light duties as chaplain to the Holy Cross Brothers of the Vincentian Institute in Albany, state capital of New York. With time on his hands, he decided to write to as many priests, bishops and lay people as possible to start a Rosary Crusade that he envisaged would recruit ten million families to commit to praying the Rosary together every day.
America had entered the Second World War the previous year, and with so many men serving in the Pacific and European theatres, there was a void in the lives of those left behind.
Catholics had not always been greeted with a warm welcome in the US, but popular movies with religious themes changed all that. Going My Way and its sequel The Bells Of St Mary’s starred Bing Crosby as Fr Chuck O’Malley (he won the Best Actor Oscar for the former, which was the highestgrossing movie of 1944) brought a muscular and caring Catholicism to a wider audience, and the time was ripe to strike.
Television stations often gave free airtime to religious groups, and when the NBC network awarded a slot to the National Council of Catholic Men, Fr Peyton was invited to publicise his Rosary Crusade. He offered free literature on how to say the Rosary and expected 5,000 responses; instead, he got 50,000, and it was a lesson in the power of broadcast media. When he was invited by the Mutual Broadcasting Company to present a programme on Mother’s Day 1945, he asked the mother and sister of the legendary Sullivan brothers to pray with him.
All five brothers had been killed when their ship, the USS Juneau, was torpedoed (their story later served in part as the inspiration for Saving Private Ryan) and they were national heroes.
Concerned that this alone would not be enough to attract an audience, Mutual suggested to Fr Peyton that he also enlist a Hollywood star. With the success of the fictional Fr O’Malley in mind, Fr Peyton simply lifted the phone to Bing Crosby, who agreed.
MUTUAL was so impressed, it told Fr Peyton that the best way forward was to go to Los Angeles and recruit more stars. Tapping into the Los Angeles network of Irish priests, he ended up at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, where he met Loretta Young, a devout Catholic who would win the Best Actress Oscar in 1948 for The Farmer’s Daughter.
Her husband, Tom Lewis, had been the boss of the armed forces’ radio network, and soon became an adviser, and the Family Theatre, a radio and later television series that delivered parables dressed up as entertainment, was born. One programme, Hill One, was the first credited appearance of a young actor called James Dean, who in his own way would become just as big an influence on the counterculture of the late Fifties and early Sixties.
Fr Peyton asked Irish screen legend Maureen O’Hara for help too and she initially turned him down. To her surprise, he fell to his knees in front of her and, with tears streaming down his face, began praying the Hail Mary. ‘It melted my heart so I decided to help him out,’ she said.
By 1957, after spreading his wings to Europe and Australia, Fr Peyton had achieved his goal of ten million families dedicated to praying a daily Rosary, but one prize awaited – South America. The continent was poor, and ripe for the ideals of communism, but the Church there had no money to stage massive rallies.
Through shipping magnate Peter Grace, whose grandfather William Russell Grace had emigrated from Co. Laois to Peru in 1851 and started the family chemical and transport business, Fr Peyton was introduced to brothers Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA, and secretary of state John Foster Dulles, after whom Washington DC airport is named.
Fr Peyton once said in a radio broadcast: ‘The Rosary is the offensive weapon that will destroy communism – the great evil that seeks to destroy the faith.’
With a million dollars in his back pocket, Fr Peyton organised a series of Rosary rallies in Brazil. These gatherings kickstarted a backlash against the left-wing president João Goulart, who was deposed in a US-backed military coup d’état on April 1, 1964.
The CIA had spent its money well, but when the Vatican found out, it feared the scandal could prove embarrassing. At a United Nations summit, Pope Paul VI told US president Lyndon B Johnson to stop the flow of cash, but it continued. Ordered by his supervisors not to take it, Fr Peyton merrily went his own way – as one friend said, ‘he believed the Virgin Mary was his boss’. Slowly, though, his influence waned. The world was changing, and in the era of the sexual revolution and student riots, the Rosary Crusade was an anachronism. However, there would be one last hurrah, when a prayer rally attended by two million people in Manila in 1985 led to the peaceful end of the corrupt Marcos regime in the Philippines.
Ageing now and aware his days were coming to an end, Fr Peyton was philosophical. ‘I’ve always longed to die,’ he said. He got his wish at age 83 on June 3, 1992, and is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery on the grounds of Stonehill College in Massachusetts.
One of the most famous priests in the world, a friend to Hollywood stars and the accidental agent of political change, he died as he lived, with a set of Rosary beads in his hands as he prayed.
Guns & Rosaries will be shown on RTÉ One tonight at 10.15pm