By JAMES LIKOUDIS
Last April, the Church in the United States lost to cancer one of its most dedicated and well-informed laymen. His life was dedicated to defending the faith from the major errors that have afflicted the Church in the postconciliar period.
I had the great privilege of working with Ken Whitehead when for eight years he was executive director of Catholics United for the Faith (CUF) then headquartered in New Rochelle, N.Y.
He was a former career foreign service officer who had served in Rome, the Middle East, and North Africa, and for a time served as the head of the Arabic service of the Voice of America. He would later serve in the U.S. Department of Education as President Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of education for postsecondary education.
Gifted with prodigious energy and talent, and knowledge of languages, he was prolific as CUF’s executive director in correspondence and writing articles responding to the cries of laity seeking CUF’s guidance regarding the corruption that had taken place in catechetics, “sex education,” and the liturgy. These were all early indicators of the alarming secularization of Catholic faith and morals that had taken place in the United States and Canada.
As CUF viewed the liturgical confusion in the postconciliar period and the fierce attacks on the revised liturgy by Lefebvrists and sedevacantists and other so-called “traditionalist” groups claiming a “hermeneutic of discontinuity” in the worship of the Church, and even declaring Pope Paul VI “a heretic,” I was privileged to join Ken in coauthoring in 1981 The Pope, the Council, and the Mass. It received praise in L’Osservatore Romano as a book much needed in the Church.
The book systematically refuted the many misconceptions, falsehoods, and outrageous charges hurled against Vatican II and the conciliar reforms. With the continuation of much liturgical unrest and grievances by the Society of St. Pius X, it retains its great value today (a 2009 revised edition is available from Emmaus Road Publishing).
Ken would return to important reflections on the liturgy with another work Mass Misunderstandings: The Mixed Legacy of the Vatican II Liturgical Reforms (St. Augustine’s Press: 2009), and this in the context of Pope Benedict XVI’s action to allow priests to freely celebrate the Tridentine Mass as an Extraordinary Form of the Western Church’s worship. He explained in great detail why this was done with particular emphasis on the Pontiff’s own voluminous writings on the nature of Catholic liturgy and the many Vatican documents directed at eliminating liturgical abuses.
In his many articles and books, there was hardly an aspect of Catholic life subjected to the corrosive acids of modernity, modernism, and liberalism that he did not explore. The state of catechetics, family and marriage life, contemporary moral and dogmatic theology; the growing threat of the secular state to religious freedom; the betrayal of the Church by dissenter theologians; the loss of Catholic universities and colleges refusing to uphold the Magisterium; the grave harm done Catholic solidarity by pro-abortion politicians; and the subtle attacks designed to weaken papal authority by theologians and even some bishops.
Much of Ken’s writings dealt with how dissent became “institutionalized” in the Church in America with the rejection of Humanae Vitae by “the intellectual class.” In 2000 he wrote a superb work of apologetics One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic (Ignatius Press) demonstrating that the early patristic Church was the Catholic Church.
His book Affirming Religious Freedom: How Vatican II Developed the Church’s Teaching to Meet Today’s Needs (Alba House: 2010) met the criticisms of dissenter theologians and cogently argued that Vatican II’s document on religious freedom did not in any way contradict past teachings of the Church’s Magisterium.
His book Catholic Colleges and Federal Funding showed how many Catholic colleges deliberately and foolishly divested themselves of their Catholic governing boards in order to claim institutional autonomy to protect their federal funding. Ironically, no such federal requirement existed.
His many years of study of Vatican II culminated in his The Renewed Church: The Second Vatican Council’s Enduring Teaching About the Church (Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University: 2009).
He was indefatigable as an editor of other books defending truths of the faith and enlisting the contribution of the best Catholic specialists, such as: John Paul II: Witness to Truth; The Catholic Citizen: Debating the Issues of Justice; After 40 Years: Vatican Council II’s Diverse Legacy; and The Church, Marriage, and the Family.
His skill as a translator was evidenced in making available to a wider English-speaking audience Archbishop Agostino Marchetto’s remarkable The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council: A Counterpoint for the History of the Council (Chicago: University of Scranton Press: 2010). In this major work, Archbishop Marchetto dispelled the erroneous interpretations of Vatican II by the Bologna School of theologians, writers, and sensationalist journalists (and their French and American allies) who had their own agenda to posit a “hermeneutics of discontinuity” with past Catholic doctrine.
A prominent member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars (FCS), Ken edited the proceedings of the 24th annual convention of FCS The Catholic Imagination (2003) and that of the 25th annual convention Voices of the New Springtime: The Life and Work of the Catholic Church in the 21st Century (2004).
Vatican II’s Decree on the Laity spoke eloquently of Catholic lay faithful who “generously exert all their energies in extending God’s Kingdom, in making the Christian spirit a vital energizing force in the temporal sphere. In life’s trials they draw courage from hope, ‘convinced that present sufferings are no measure of the future glory to be revealed in us’.”
Kenneth D. Whitehead was one of those laymen who faithfully exemplified that Christian spirit and the need for authentic Catholic action. R.I.P.
Ken is survived by his loving wife Margaret, and four sons, Paul, Steven, Matthew, and David, who live in Falls Church, Va.
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