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Contents © 2001
by Jim Holman.
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To Hang, Burn, Waste, Boil, Flay, Strangle, and Bury Alive

Jack Chick's Cartoon Jihad and the Catholic Response

By Søren Filipski

For many years now, uninformed Catholics young and old have had their faith bothered and abused by the anti-Catholic cartoon tracts of Jack T. Chick.

Chick is widely considered to be the premier virtuoso of anti-Catholic fundamentalist propaganda. Since the 1960s, his company, Chick Publications in Ontario, California, has produced volumes of pocket-size anti-Catholic cartoon tracts for distribution by fundamentalists among unsuspecting Catholics. The standard Chick tract is a twenty-two page booklet with eye-catching comic strip artwork. Each tract tells a story which encourages the reader to accept Christ as "personal Savior" according to fundamentalist soteriology.

Most Chick tracts are addressed to generic unbelievers, but many tracts target "false religions," including Mormonism, Islam, Buddhism, and especially Catholicism, by outlining scriptural quotations which purport to contradict the teachings of each religion. Fundamentalist ministries have used these tracts to lure Catholics away from the Faith by canvassing churches and public events where Catholics are likely to be found. Chick tracts have a nasty way of cropping up at World Youth Day and in children's trick-or-treat bags.

Chick himself embraces the old Protestant thesis that the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon, and his tracts labor to validate this belief. Last Rites, one of Chick's most famous tracts, tells the story of a Catholic who dies and appears at God's judgment seat, where God confutes the Catholic faith with a flurry of scriptural proof texts, and then hurls the man into Hell with all the other Catholics in the world.

Other Chick tracts are less temperate than Last Rites. One tract, called Are Roman Catholics Christian?, and another, called The Death Cookie, argue that the Catholic Eucharist is derived from Egyptian sun worship. According to Chick, the Egyptian ankh is the real origin of the chi-rho monogram, and "IHS" actually stands for "Isis, Horus, and Seb." Still another tract called Why Is Mary Crying? explains that the veneration of the Madonna is actually the worship of the Assyrian queen Semiramis.

Chick's Babylonian theories are largely drawn from a nineteenth-century "scholarly classic" called The Two Babylons, or The Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife, by the eccentric Anglican Alexander Hislop. Fortunately for Catholic apologists, Hislop's research is as shoddy as a tabloid. For instance, Hislop claims that Semiramis was the mother of Nimrod, although Nimrod was the grandson of Noah, and Semiramis did not rule in Babylon until three centuries after Moses.

Chick also distributes full-length color comics, which are even more belligerent than his tracts. Since the late 70s, Chick has published a series of comics called Alberto, which recount the testimony of the late Alberto Rivera, who claimed to be a former Jesuit priest who had been party to a covert plot of the Vatican to conquer the world, slay all the Protestants in a new inquisition, and establish the kingdom of Antichrist.

Alberto begins in Spain, in 1942, when seven-year-old Alberto is forced by his pious, Catholic mother to enter a Jesuit seminary. Two years later, Alberto's mother dies with the sacraments, but only moments before her death she begins to scream that demons are surrounding her to carry her to Hell. She dies, and is swept away into a "Christless eternity." The story then skips forward to the 1970s when Alberto, who has now left the priesthood to become a "real Bible-believing Christian," is on the run from Vatican assassins in America.

The adult Alberto relates the events of his life in the Catholic Church as the story flashes back to his days in a Jesuit seminary, where depravity abounds, and the reading of the Bible is banned. But one day, another student approaches Alberto, slips him a copy of the New Testament, and promptly disappears. Alberto, afraid that he will be charged with heresy if anyone sees his Bible, reads it by night under his bed sheets with a flashlight, discovering with every turn of the page that the Catholic Church is condemned by God. Nevertheless, Alberto continues at the seminary, is ordained a priest, and enlists as a Vatican spy under the auspices of the "Jesuit General," who secretly rules the Vatican as the Black Pope. Alberto's mission is to infiltrate and undermine Protestant Bible colleges by planting seeds of scandal and blackmailing anti-Catholic ministers so that they become ecumenical. As time passes, Alberto delves deeper into the Vatican underworld, is secretly ordained a bishop, attends a black mass in Rome, and even takes a blood oath to "hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive" all heretics, meaning, especially, Protestants.

Eventually, Alberto discovers to his horror that the Black Pope is secretly a Communist and a Mason. Soon after, Alberto publicly denounces the Catholic Church, only to be kidnapped by Jesuit authorities, who subject him to torture and brainwashing in an Orwellian mental ward. But Alberto defies his Jesuit captors, receives Christ as a Protestant, and escapes from the Vatican's clutches. He flees to England, where he rescues his sister from the catacombs of a Catholic convent where she is being savagely tortured Maria Monk-style.

So far, I have described the first book of the Alberto story and the beginning of Book Two. There are four more books in the series. In each installment, Alberto unmasks further Catholic plots and deceptions throughout history, revealing a list of famous evildoers and ecumenical Christians who have been secret agents of the Vatican. Among these are Mohammed, Lenin, John Wilkes Booth, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Adolph Hitler, Jimmy Carter, Jerry Brown, and Kathryn Kuhlman. For page after page, Protestant readers discover that every myth they have ever heard about Catholicism is true, from the "worship" of Mary to the secret underground tunnels running between monasteries and convents in Spain. The list goes on.

If Alberto's anti-Catholic charges seem sensational, Chick's style of artwork is no less so. His drawings are often grotesque and gory, with detailed depictions of medieval tortures rendered in colorful, operatic glory. Chick's drawings of priests and nuns are always warped and evil, and his occasional depictions of demons carousing inside of St. Peter's are as hoary as anything since Bosch.

The Catholic Church has roundly denied Alberto Rivera's claims to having been a Jesuit, and the Protestant media has repudiated Rivera's allegations. Notable among Rivera's detractors is Gary Metz, who reported in Christianity Today, March 13, 1981, that Alberto Rivera had a lengthy criminal record and that, during the 1960s, when he claimed to have been a Jesuit in Europe, he was traveling across America with a woman, leaving a trail of bad checks from state to state. In response to Metz's article, Chick published a three-page statement asserting that the Vatican had cooked up false documents to cast odium on Rivera's testimony.

Rivera never retracted his claims, even until his death in 1997.

The sheer wildness of the Alberto series and the sensational style of Chick's other writings leads one to doubt whether Jack Chick could be an effective force in evangelization. I spoke with an anonymous customer service representative at Chick Publications about the effectiveness of Chick tracts in the evangelization field. She told me that Chick Publications has no exact means of testing the impact that the tracts have on Catholics, but their customer response suggests that they are effective. She claims that each year Chick Publications receives thousands of testimonials from ex-Catholics who left the Church after reading Chick tracts, that thousands of Protestant ministries worldwide have claimed success in using Chick tracts to win converts, that Chick has sold over 500,000,000 tracts in virtually every country and language, and that anti-Catholic tracts have remained among his best-selling items.

When I asked how Chick had come up with the idea of comic book tracts, his representative replied, "the Lord gave him the idea."

The good news is that Jack Chick is not the only person who has made effective use of cartoons in apologetics. Dan Grajek, an artist in Detroit, Michigan, and his partner, Joe Polgar, have been publishing a series of Catholic cartoon tracts since 1993.

Unlike many fundamentalist tracts like Last Rites, which attack Catholic doctrine with the "the machine-gun-fire approach" of listing a number of Catholic teachings alongside several passages of supposedly contrary scriptural texts, Grajek and Polgar's tracts choose to focus on individual issues of faith. Thus, one tract defends the inspiration of the deuterocanonical books, while another tract explains the Church's teaching on justification.

The tracts themselves are easy to read and blessedly brief, only five pages long. Lori Grajek, Dan's wife and public relations secretary, told me that "the reason my husband wanted to do the single-subject tract was that he wants them to be short and pithy. He wants people to read these. We don't want people to look at this and get halfway through and roll their eyes and say, 'Oh, this is too much.' The Protestants we talk to will have a few pet peeves; like, perhaps, they'll be hung up on Mary and maybe the papacy. We found it works a lot better to give them single-subject tracts -- you can give them a couple if you need to. That way they'll be able to go more in depth."

Only about half of the cartoon tracts are directed towards Protestant issues. Others deal with moral and philosophical topics, such as homosexuality and relativism, and others discuss controversies and divisions within the Church itself, urging dissenting Catholics to accept the complete authority of the Holy See.

Always, the tracts approach their topics charitably, but with due regard to the seriousness of their issues. Several of the Protestant tracts feature an amusing character named Joe Hardhat who stands up as an apologist for Catholicism. Lori explained that Joe Hardhat was invented because Joe Polgar "wanted to have a character whom we could use over and over again as our defender. For some reason Catholics are characterized as being the everyman, the basic hardhat average Joe kind of guy. And so that inspired Joe Polgar to make Joe Hardhat. It seemed to be a good vehicle for us to use a more conversational style."

Dan and Lori are both former Protestants, and Dan's commitment to apologetics evolved through his own story of leaving the Catholic Church and then returning. Before he had returned to the Catholic Church, Dan Grajek "had made his own gospel tracts to share with people," said Lori. "I grew up Lutheran. At the time I was going to an Assembly of God church as was he, and we were in the singles group there and that's where we met. The Protestant mindset is that the main goal of your faith is to go out and win souls. That's the major thrust. So that was why he originally made a few tracts. There was a nice community area where we would try to talk to people and share our faith."

Lori continued: "When we became Catholic, Dan realized that there's so much that needs to be explained about the Catholic faith. A lot of our Protestant friends were scratching their heads saying, 'what are you doing?' They thought we were losing our faith. But when we tried to explain to them what we believed on certain issues, we found that it took too long and their eyes would glaze over. So he and Joe Polgar thought we needed something that we can give a person to read and say, 'Read this, get back with me, and we'll talk some more.' And so that's partly the concept behind the tracts. We wanted to give a little bit of background and a little easier, catchier way for people to try to understand where the Catholic faith stands."

Grajek's and Polgar's "Catholic Cartoon Tracts" entered into widespread publication almost by accident. "Dave Armstrong [whose conversion story is included in Surprised by Truth] had been sending transcripts of books around to different places. And he had sent one out to Catholic Answers in San Diego, and given them one of our tracts. Well, before we knew it, we were getting phone calls from people in California saying, 'Where can we get some of these tracts?' So, it's really a funny story because Dave had not even mentioned [it] to us, and they had apparently just published our tracts, unbeknownst to us."

So far, Grajek and Polgar have produced twenty-five tracts, which have circulated broadly in recent years. Catholic missionaries have used them in foreign countries including Malta, Australia, India, Guam, Saudi Arabia, and Scotland. The Grajeks know of at least one man who has used their tracts to evangelize in a prison. "We get a lot of people writing and saying, 'Oh, thank you. We love these tracts so much!'"

Catholic Cartoon Tracts have often been compared with Jack Chick's. "So many people say to us 'Oh, finally we have an answer to Jack Chick!' We sort of think, 'Touché.' If someone hands you a Chick tract, you turn around and say, 'Here have one of these.'"

But Grajek and Polgar did not begin their tracts with an explicit intention to counter Chick Publications. "I think," says Lori, "that my husband did have somewhat in mind that he wanted to have an answer to Jack Chick tracts, but really more than that you have to understand that Joel and Dan actually went to high school together and, while they were still going to school, they made their own comic books together just for the fun of it."

Lori herself has written the text for their next tract, which will discuss the Church's teaching on natural family planning. "We're calling it Regarding Contraception. We're hoping that that one will be out by Christmas."

When I asked if there were any plans to produce longer tracts, Lori said, "[Dan]'s starting to write a book that Grotto Press is eager to publish for us, called the Family "Ism" Guide which will be a book that will help parents teach their family how to understand the world-view that we're surrounded with now, postmodernism, to help their kids answer the questions that might come at them from a different world view. The book will have quite a bit of cartoons throughout to make it a text that parents can use to help teach their children."

The idea for the Family "Ism" Guide emerged when Dan was teaching two of his young sons about different philosophies. "They love monsters, so he would take one specific type of philosophy, for example secularism, and he would personify it and make it into a monster. My oldest son just ate it up. I mean it was so funny. One time in church the priest asked him, 'What are you going to be for Halloween?' He said, 'I want to be Cynicism.'"

Their tracts' success came as quite a surprise to Dan and Lori, who assert, "It's all the Lord's doing because it wasn't something that we were seeking."

Catholic Cartoon Tracts are available from Grotto Press at www.grottopress.org, where they are accurately advertised as "doctrinally sound, user-friendly, and inexpensive".

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