Do You Evangelize? Wednesday, 3rd May, 2017. Solemnity of St. Joseph

Do You Evangelize?

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In Matthew Chapt. 25 we read the famous parable of the separation of the sheep and the goats.   It speaks of Jesus' judgement and condemnation of souls for not helping others.

Some may believe that this parable only applies to things such as giving people food.

However, this passage is not just speaking of those acts, it is speaking of those who do and do not attempt to spiritually feed others by giving them information that enables them to know and convert to the Catholic faith.

St. Paul said, "And if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor ... and have not charity, it profits me nothing."  1. Corinthians 13:3

 

 

I have found that many of those who even consider themselves to be traditional Catholics, and may claim to agree with what we are saying, don't evangelize.   They may enjoy listening to true teachings and gain comfort from being informed themselves, but they don't really care that much about others.

If they did, they would try to tell others about one of our interesting videos or our website by sending them a link. 

The link can easily be accompanied by a short message about how it's crucial to see the information in the video or on the website.

 

 

There are many who have relatives, friends, acquaintances at work etc., yet many have still never given almost any of them a link to one of our videos or our website.

If you don't evangelize at all (when you can), you will not save your soul.

Whether you evangelize really shows whether you only care about yourself ( and maybe your family) or whether you also care about other people.

 

 

Ask yourself the question: how much do I really care about the  incredibly sad fact that most people alive right now, are on the road to eternal damnation, and, unless they change their path, they will end up going to Hell forever.

 

 

In one sense our time is the easiest in the history of the world to evangelize, particularly due to the availability of the internet, and the fact that about half the world is online.

Centuries ago, missionaries would travel long distances and endure incredible hardships and persecutions, just to reach new people so that they could present the Gospel to them.

 

 

This was the mission Jesus gave his followers: "And he said to them: ""Go into the whole world, and preach the Gospel to every creature.   He who believes and is baptized shall be saved, but he who does not believe shall be condemned." Mark 16:15-16

 

While our period, of course, presents other challenges, the availability of the internet, makes it easier than ever before to contact new people about the true faith.

 

 

You can evangelize today simply by sending people a link to one of our videos or a page on our website.  You will be giving that person an opportunity to come to the knowledge of the truth.

They won't be able to say on the day of their judgement that there wasn't at least one person who attempted to give them an extra chance by telling them what they needed to do to save their soul.

 

 

If you communicate with a person online, the best way to evangelize might be to send them a direct link that goes to our web page dedicated to "The Amazing Evidence For God."

You could also link to another one of our important videos that might particularly fit the needs of the person you are communicating wth, such as sending one of our videos refuting Protestantism to a Protestant etc.  If you meet someone in person, you could give them the website address or a hard copy of something.

 

For example, the new 14:1 DVD would be enough.    You could hand it to them and say something like, "Free DVD," "Free Religious DVD"... "Free DVD that contains interesting and critical information"    

You could get into a long conversation with them and explain more to them.  This is an effective way to evangelize.

What are some other ways?

You can help to evangelize by financially supporting our apostolate.   It is the most important Catholic apostolate in the world today, which gives people throughout the whole world the opportunity to see critical information that enables them to convert and save their souls.

Your financial support would help us to advertise videos or clickable ads which will earn us funds and enable us to place ads on the biggest conservative websites in the world, which will enable people to see our material, and if we receive additional funding we could resume T.V. ads including billboards.

We can see in the world that there may be only a short window of time left to get the message out.  

 

Our Lady of La Salette, told us that "Rome will lose the faith and become the seat of the Antichrist," and that "only faith will survive..." the mission of presenting the true faith of the Catholic Church, to the masses in this time of almost complete apostasy is absolutely essential."

  If someone is interested in supporting this crucial mission in a larger way, please let me know by phone: (800) 275-1126; (585) 567-4433  or by e-mail: mhfm1@aol.com

 

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Coming Soon: French Videos - Why Hell Must be Eternal and The Bowl of Rev. 18:10 Was Just Poured Out [13 May, 2017]

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The Point

Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

January, 1956

THE JEWISH GANGS OF BOSTON

 

The Siege

It has been the repeated warning of a local rabbi named Joseph Shubow that, “Boston, Massachusetts, is a pivotal city for United States’ Jewry.” In plain American, what the rabbi means is that, “Unless we Jews can control the Catholic city of Boston, it will stand as a serious threat to our grip on the rest of the country.”

 

With this in mind, The Point has decided to start off the new year by sharing with its out-of-town readers some on-the-spot information about the full-scale Jewish siege of Boston Catholics. And siege it most decidedly has become, for Joseph Shubow’s spiritual children have taken his message to heart. They are fighting the “Battle of Boston” with dedicated zest, and if, as Shubow complains, some of the less zealous ones do occasionally sleep, we have yet to discover them at it.

 

An outland observer might well conclude to Boston’s Semitic beleaguerment merely from knowing the high concentration of Jews in the place. For, apart from the five-borough ghetto of New York, there is not one city among America’s forty largest which can surpass Boston’s nearly twenty-per-cent Jewish population.

 

To the vanishing Boston Brahmin, and the multiplying Boston Catholic, the Jewish assault is every day becoming more evident. Brandeis University, elbowing its way into Boston’s ivy-covered college clique, is a front-line division in the current Hebrew campaign. At the outset, Brandeis was scheduled to be “Einstein University,” until that frankly-Communist mathematician went into a pout over the appointment of a president. Einstein wanted bright-Red Harold Lasky to get the job, the directors thought the choice “imprudent.” Still, the latest appointment to Brandeis’ Jewish faculty is Dr. Felix Browder, son of Earl, the late head of the American Communist Party. This appointment got rave notices in the Boston press, as do all Brandeis activities. Recent sample: a photograph of Archbishop Richard J. Cushing eagerly attentive to the Semitic jesting of Brandeis Trustee Joseph Linsey, a local Jewish racketeer and racetrack owner.

 

A considerable weapon in the fight to gain control of the city has been an Interfaith organization called the Massachusetts Committee of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, founded by Boston Jew Ben Shapiro. This gentleman’s success came vividly home to The Point when a prominent pastor explained to us that he was obliged to attend a synagogue service because, “Ben Shapiro asked me to!”

 

On Boston’s chief downtown street, the Jews have lately dedicated the “Associated Synagogues Building,” whose street-level, store-front window boldly flaunts copies of the Talmud, the Jewish book so repeatedly condemned by the popes for containing, as Pope Innocent IV said, “every kind of vileness and blasphemy against Christian truth.”

 

Because of the deeply Catholic nature of present Boston, the Jewish besiegers have naturally led with attacks which are designed to neutralize, and ultimately nullify, Catholic influence in public places. At the same time, they have not neglected that work so important to their purposes: national subversion. Boston Jews have played a prominent, and often exclusive, part in the operation of such black-listed outfits as the Boston School for Marxist Studies, the League for Democratic Control, the Progressive Labor School, and the Boston School of Social Science. The House Un-American Activities Committee, which has condemned all the foregoing, also exposed the local Chelsea Jewish Children’s School, branding it as, “A place where Marxism is combined with instruction in the racial tongue.”

 

The overtly-Communist Samuel Adams School of Boston was likewise heavily Jewish-staffed, and last summer a Congressional investigation in New York turned up the fact that a former Adams School instructor, Boston Jew Sol Vail, was a key man in the New York State network of Communist-Jewish summer camps.

 

Zionist summer camps in the Boston area are now known to be the hatching-place of those terrorist gangs which were unleashed in the Boston streets last Fall to crush Saint Benedict Center’s protest against Brandeis University. The headquarters for all Zionist activity in Boston is at Number 17 Commonwealth Avenue, from which there radiate all over the city those Hebrew hawkers who have made Boston Jews the country’s most prolific buyers of Israeli Bonds. Back into this same headquarters (which loyal Boston Israelis call “the little embassy”) there pour gesticulated reports on the progress of the “siege.”

 

The following are The Point ’s own reports on three of the many phases of the current Jewish attack on Boston.

 

The Peddlers’ Gang

 

There was one inevitable consequence of the Jews’ rush on Boston. As their numbers increased, the city’s Jewish merchants sallied forth from their jewelry stores and furniture exchanges to lay siege to every corner of the downtown shopping district. With Jewish retailers buying only from Jewish wholesalers, and Jewish wholesalers giving special prices to Jewish retailers, it was only a matter of time before Gentile owners, surrendering to the “squeeze,” announced that henceforth their stores would be “under new management.”

 

Though Bostonians are generally aware that all commodities from lampshades to limousines are presently purveyed to them by Jews, few realize how zealous the Jews have been to keep the true limits of their influence concealed. Like department store owner Abe Filehne (who became A. Lincoln Filene, and then dropped even the “A”) Jewish dealers have tried to mask their identity by giving their names a Gentile bob. Greenspan has become “Green”; Lubinski has become “Luby”; Rabinovitz has become “Rabb.” (This last alteration inspired the comment that the super-successful chain of supermarkets owned by the “Rabb” family should really be called “Stopinovitz & Shopinovitz.”)

 

Another faction of Jewish peddlers, having dispossessed Yankee merchants of their stores, decided that those stores by any other names might not be so profitable. Consequently, many of Boston’s Jew-run emporiums bear some deceptively un-Judaic appellations: R. H. White’s, Gilchrist’s, the Charles B. Perkins Cigar Stores, Wethern’s, Leeds, E. B. Horn, etc.

 

Into this category, too, fit such unlikely Jewish properties as the Kenmore, Somerset, Vendome, Sherry Biltmore, Lenox and Braemore hotels; the Little Building; and the United States Trust Company.

 

The most striking specimen in this exhibit, however, is assuredly the firm of Brooks Brothers, through whose proper doors legions of proper Bostonians have trudged, content in the knowledge that here they would be outfitted by their own sort of people in their own sort of way. According to the latest edition of Moody’s business directory, Brooks Brothers has in recent days been transferred into the hands of Julius Garfinckel, Inc.

 

Not surprisingly, the task of minding Boston’s business has proved profitable to the Jews in more ways than one. Their bulging purses have enabled them to put into effect whatever ventures seem currently likely to further the Jewish cause, whether it be staging a Chanukkah festival or setting up a slush fund for pushing bills through the legislature. Through large outlays for advertising, without which most Boston newspapers would collapse overnight, they have acquired a sure and sinister power over the press. By dominating both the wholesale and retail phases of Boston business, they can largely determine such matters as how Bostonians will dress, how they will furnish their homes, what books they will read.

 

Lately, the Jews have been using their hold on business as a beachhead from which to assault Boston morality. Most valuable in this campaign have been the city’s movie theaters, all of which belong to Jews. Seizing the chance afforded by relaxations in the censorship code, Jewish owners have recently dedicated a number of expensively-located theaters to the sole work of exhibiting — with graphic advertisements — films which are distinguished only for their obscenity.

 

As a final and thoroughly characteristic gesture, the Jews call these theaters by names like the Beacon, the Exeter, and the Mayflower — apparently in the hope that Bostonians will blame the Brahmins for the city’s avalanche of filth.

 

The Political Gang

 

Quite the most ambitious Jewish plan for the conquest of Boston by political means was the one put forward by a Jew named Jerome Rappaport, who descended upon the city a few years ago with ideas about capturing the “young people’s” vote. Before long, Rappaport had captured for himself one of our local Catholic girls (the daughter of the head of the Massachusetts Democratic Committee), whom he married at a candle-light ceremony on Boston’s T-Wharf.

 

Knowing that one lone Jew would never make the grade as a political force in Boston, Rappaport kept his Jewishness shrewdly under cover and organized a Gentile front — the New Boston Committee. At the head of the NBC (as his project came to be called) Rappaport placed a local doctor named Murphy. Hiding behind a score of such non-Jews, Rappaport made his bid to create a “New Boston” by endorsing candidates for a municipal election. Long before all the ballots were counted, it became apparent that Rappaport’s NBC had won a great victory.

 

But between this election and the following one something happened. Boston Catholics began to wake up to the Jewishness of the “Committee” and they began to resent very much having their names used all over town as “letter-head patrons” for whatever scheme might enter the mind of Rappaport. The next time the voters of Boston went to the polls, not one NBC-controlled candidate was elected. It was received as decidedly happy news when the press finally disclosed that Rappaport’s figurehead, Doctor Murphy, had officially resigned months before, and that the Jewish political vision of a “New Boston” had now fatally faded.

 

Last Fall, in Boston’s primary elections, twenty-seven men entered the race for the nine seats on the City Council. Among all Boston’s 140,000 Jews, only one (not Rappaport) was bold enough to run. He finished next to last, in twenty-sixth place, with twenty-five Catholic candidates ahead of him.

 

The more realistic members of the Jewish political gang have ceased to look upon polling booths as the means of cracking Catholic Boston’s politics. They have taken to “black-washing,” and, by enlisting the aid of every Jew in anything that sounds like an official position, they have launched a smear-campaign against the city.

 

Led by Jewish Judge Adlow of the Municipal Court, they have made wholesale attacks on “district attorneys and prosecuting officers,” and on “corrupt police and friendly prosecuting attorneys.” Jewish Judge Reuben Lurie, who in a term as penal commissioner was accused by a former governor of ruining the local prison system (getting himself roundly and soundly referred to as a “penological crackpot”) has been joined in the fight to discredit our jails by State Attorney-General George Fingold. This latter Jewish office-holder finds much pleasure in orating about the “rotten disgrace” of police departments, and has assigned a detective to Boston’s well-loved City Hospital, a favorite Jewish target, in the hope of discovering a wrongly-open window or an ill-washed baby-bottle.

 

With Doctor Maurice Victor’s widely-publicized charges that Boston has the nation’s number one “alcoholic” problem, the smear-campaign has been lately intensified. Many conclude that the current near-panic among local political Jews has been occasioned by the November defeat of Jewish Jackson Holtz. A Democratic candidate for Congress, Holtz was defeated when the Irish-Catholic Democrats in the West Roxbury section of Boston went against him. Rather than vote for Jewish Mr. Holtz, the West Roxburyites put aside party allegiance, jumped over a high traditional wall of separation, and approved a Yankee Republican as their representative in Washington.

 

The Harvard Gang

 

With apologies for leaving whole areas of Jewish activity uncommented-on, and hosts of local gang-leaders unexposed, we would like to conclude with a word to those readers who think of Boston as that proper Puritan place where “the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God.”

 

The traditional citadel of Boston’s “Cabot culture” has always been that sprawling next-door neighbor of The Point, Harvard University. An examination of the University’s latest listing of teachers and students, however, reveals that the Jewish besiegers have in no sense passed the place by. This year, in all of Harvard’s student body, only six decorous Cabots can be found to balance the aggressive presence of thirty-three shoving Cohens! And on the faculty, one lone Cabot (who comes in from town for an occasional lecture) has left a clear field for eleven ubiquitous Cohens!

 

Everywhere there is evidence of surrender. A local lodge of B’nai B’rith meets in the Harvard faculty building. The head of the University’s Board of Overseers is Jewish Charles Wyzanski. At the Law School, a Jew named Katz (of the Marshall Plan and the Ford Foundation) has lately been assigned to continue the tradition of such conspiring Harvard Jews as Felix Frankfurter, Lee Pressman, and Harry Dexter White. In recognition of how well things are going, New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary has awarded young President Pusey of Harvard an honorary degree.

 

After much diligent searching, The Point has been able to discover just one corner of Harvard that is holding out — and that is the southeast corner of the University’s Memorial Hall. There, in stony witness to Harvard’s Gentile past, a visitor will note, high on the outside wall, the busts of two Christian orators: Saint John Chrysostom and Bishop Jacques Bossuet. These two, who had eloquence and the episcopacy in common, were likewise the sharers of a common sentiment toward the Jews. Saint Chrysostom, in a homily to his people, and Bossuet in an instruction to the Dauphin, both made the Church’s position imperishably clear with the statement, “Jews, God hates you!”

 

The imminent removal of these two bits of statuary will mark the final capitulation of the Cabots’ Boston.

 

For Catholic Boston, we have yet some hope.

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The Point

Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

February, 1956

 

PROFILES OF TWO WHITE JEWS

 

Everybody knows at least one White Jew: one assimilated, non-gesticulating, clean-shaven Hebrew whose distinction — indeed, whose bright shining virtue — is that, “He’s not like other Jews!”

 

White Jews may be found in nearly every field of endeavor and The Point receives a constant influx of letters protesting that, “I know what you say is true of most Jews, but how about N.? He’s really different.”

 

In an effort to shed some light on this matter, we herewith examine two men, of widely divergent careers, who seem most to have impressed our readers by overcoming their innate Jewishness and achieving a universally-acknowledged status of “not like the rest of them.”

 

I — The Adviser

 

When Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov visited the United States a few months back, he called one day at the home of a prominent, but private, American citizen. After conventional pleasantries and cocktails, Molotov and his friend told reporters to go away, then closeted themselves for a leisurely luncheon and conference.

 

Ordinarily, news of such goings-on would have had Americans dithering with demands for an explanation. But this time it caused scarcely a ruffle. For the man on whom Molotov called is one whom Americans have long been trained never to question or suspect. He is that ancient and honorable Hebrew, Bernard Mannes Baruch.

 

It was in 1912 that Bernard Baruch resigned his seat on the New York Stock Exchange to devote his full energies to ordering the affairs of government. Having given his financial and racial endorsement to the candidacy of Woodrow Wilson, Baruch was rewarded by the new President with a series of jobs, culminating, in 1918, with the chairmanship of the War Industries Board. This assignment Baruch carried off with remarkable zest. It gave him, by his own testimony, “more power than perhaps any other man in the war,” and when the Armistice intervened he had plans all drawn up for clothing every adult civilian in the U. S. in “a cheap but serviceable sort of uniform.”

 

Meantime, Wilson invited Baruch into his Cabinet, as Secretary of the Treasury. Baruch declined, as he was to decline the same offer when it was made in the mid-thirties by President Roosevelt. To formulate his policies in public view, to be spotlighted with responsibility for them, was for Baruch a horrifying prospect. He found that by whispering his ideas into important ears, not only could he disseminate them with more telling effectiveness — and through more departments of the government — but could weather whatever political squalls might arise and sail smoothly from one Administration to the next. The Baruch-beholden Washington Post, trying to be nice, summarized the situation this way: “Bernard M. Baruch aspires to be known as the perpetual adviser to all Presidents, of all parties, at all times, and upon all subjects.”

 

By revealing his innermost thoughts to none but the privileged few, Baruch kept the public uncertain as to his true intentions. But, encouraged by the press, Americans took these intentions to be benevolent. As one gaga biographer put it. “The guiding impulse of Bernie’s life … is pure, unselfish and self-effacing public service.”

 

Once, this reputation almost got spoiled. President Hoover strongly suspected that the stock market crash during his Administration had been brought on by the financial finaglings of Baruch. The President ordered an investigation, but at the last minute, for reasons known to himself, called it off.

 

There were occasions, too, when Baruch was almost his own undoing — as when he sponsored publication of the book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and wrote for it an enthusiastic preface. So viciously anti-Catholic was this work that after it first appeared, the publisher, L.C. Page & Co., was descended upon by outraged Boston Catholics and forced to expurgate future editions.

 

By and large, though, Baruch has kept his impulses submerged and adhered faithfully to his whispering campaign, the effectiveness of which can be gauged by the following comment from Fortune magazine: “Bernard M. Baruch is called into frequent conferences with the President. He has financed many a Congressional campaign; and is surrounded by a praetorian guard of Senators, who hang on his every word. The figure of Baruch is swelling into enormous dimensions on the horizon of public life. … He is the Mystery Man of Washington and Wall Street.”

 

So powerful was Baruch in the Roosevelt administration, having lunch each week at the White House, holding court for lesser New Dealers twice weekly at the Carlton Hotel, and presiding between times from his bench in Lafayette Park, that he was generally acclaimed “Assistant President.” He was the supreme, infallible authority on all matters from conserving rubber to remaking the postwar world. And though he himself stayed at the rear, he saw to it that the men he had trained reached the front lines. Two of these, Hugh Johnson and George Peek, headed, respectively, the NRA and the AAA — both of which schemes Baruch himself had conceived, and both of which were ultimately declared unconstitutional.

 

Baruch enjoyed the rare distinction of being one man who was in good favor with Roosevelt from the beginning of his reign until its end. In the spring of 1944, one year before he died, the President took time out from his war-duties for a secluded four-week vacation with Baruch at the latter’s 20,000-acre estate in South Carolina. (Baruch’s own part in the war-effort was well prognosticated by Winston Churchill, who, in 1939, told Baruch, “War is coming very soon … You will be running the show over there.”)

 

When Roosevelt was succeeded by Harry Truman, Baruch was appointed American delegate to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, in which capacity he drew up and presented, as official U. S. policy, “the Baruch Plan,” recommending that all formulas and materials needed for the manufacture of Atom Bombs be put in the keeping of an international “Atomic Development Authority.” This absolute, anonymously-staffed bureau would also be empowered to deal “immediate, swift, and sure punishment to those (nations) who violate the agreements.”

 

After the Republican victory of 1952, Baruch lost little time in demonstrating to the nation that his own position was unshakably secure. On the 5th and 7th of January, 1953, two weeks before his formal inauguration as President, Dwight Eisenhower met and conferred with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The place of their rendezvous: the New York apartment of Bernard Baruch.

 

But it was during the Truman tenure that there occurred that incident which, more than numbers of others, has left us a picture of Baruch with all his “Whiteness” laid aside. In those days, before the state of Israel was established, when gangs of Jewish terrorists sacked the Holy Land in a wild, vengeful orgy of destruction and death, a prosperous Hollywood Jew named Ben Hecht ran a full-page ad in some two dozen of the largest newspapers across the country. It was addressed “To the Terrorists of Palestine” and read in part as follows:

 

“The Jews of America are for you. You are their champions. …“Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.”

The Jews of America, of course, denied that they did any such thing. Every big Jewish organization in the country issued hurried statements repudiating Hecht, saying the sentiments he expressed were his own and not those of American Jewry.

 

In his recent autobiography, Hecht tells the aftermath of his advertisement: “One day the door of my room opened and a tall white-haired man entered. It was Bernard Baruch, my first Jewish social visitor. He sat down, observed me for a moment and then spoke. ‘I am on your side,’ said Baruch. ‘The only way the Jews will ever get anything is by fighting for it. I’d like you to think of me as one of your Jewish fighters in the tall grass with a long gun. I’ve always done my best work that way, out of sight.’ ”

 

Coming from the man whose ideas and influence have dominated American life for half a century, this statement, like a sudden light in a dark room, reveals a picture of recent history that is new, ugly, and glaringly plain. It clarifies some gigantic coincidences: during the era when Baruch has been the constant and intimate adviser to our Presidents, America has been ravaged with wars; has been hitched to an economic roller-coaster riding between boom and bust; has been brought to the brink of cultural and moral disaster; has been established as the foremost champion of World Jewry, the chief instigator in setting up and perpetuating the Jewish State of Israel.

 

At 85, Bernard Baruch can look back on a life in which he has served his race devotedly and with unprecedented success. Soon he, the Supreme Commander, will have to retire from the fight, but before he does we can be sure he will try to choose his successor, another White Jew who will lie in the tall grass, armed with a long gun.

 

II — The Refugee

 

The Point ’s second White Jew is drawn from the religious rather than the secular world, but he has been no less a problem to our readers than Mr. Baruch. He is a refugee from Austria who now conducts, at a Catholic college in New Jersey, a one-man propaganda agency called the Institute of Judaeo-Christian Studies. So “White” is this Jew that at the age of twenty he submitted himself to the ritual of Christian Baptism, and then went on to become a Catholic priest. His name is Father John M. Oesterreicher.

 

Before Baptism, John Oesterreicher had been a student of medicine. Three years and a few theology books later, he was ordained a Catholic priest. Even his most prostrate apologists have wondered at such a speeded-up process. And more thoughtful observers have concluded that in the Church which harbors such painful and multiple memories of deceitfully converted “Marrano” Jews, there is something most unusual, to say the least, about the urgency with which John Osterreicher was rushed from Baptism to Holy Orders.

 

Whether by deliberate design or not, the historical fact is that, for hundreds of thousands of German-speaking Jews, Father Oesterreicher’s sudden priesthood became an immediate weapon against the rising anti-Jewishness of Adolph Hitler. With the weight of the Catholic Church presumably behind him, and the passion of his Jewish blood clearly pushing him on, Father Oesterreicher began a frenzied crusade of writing and speaking. He invoked, as authorities, both saints and sociologists, popes and psychiatrists. He devised arguments from demonology and anthropology, from scholastics and rationalists — all to prove to the Catholics of Austria and Germany that anyone who speaks ill of a Jew is actually blaspheming Jesus Christ Himself!

 

The same Catholics who well knew that the program proposed by Hitler was hardly the Church’s solution to the Jewish question, knew quite as well that Father Oesterreicher did not have the answer either.

 

As Hitler proceeded across Europe, Father Oesterreicher managed to keep several towns ahead of him, and finally, in 1941, turned up as a curate in New York City. Since there were in our whole country only about a dozen Jewish-convert priests, Father Oesterreicher proved to be a popular novelty. He was the object of much parochial curiosity and found no difficulty in gathering an inquisitive crowd for the lectures he started to give within six months of his arrival here. His message was invariably of one theme. Always there was the appeal to respect, to admire, to love, to fall down in the mud and worship the Jewish race. And always the appeal was subtly charged with what Father Oesterreicher hoped would pass for the binding authority of the Catholic Church.

 

But Father Oesterreicher did not have to depend solely upon his own initiative. He had a number of American boosters, of whom perhaps the most zealous was Professor Jacques Maritain. Professor Maritain is the French-born, Protestant-reared, Catholic philosopher who married a Russian Jewess named Raïssa Oumansoff. Although known in this country as a speaker at Jewish seminaries and teacher at Masonic universities, Maritain did try to get a position at a Catholic school. Some years ago, he was interviewed for a job at Fordham University, and stipulated in the course of the discussion that he would expect to be given free rein in all his classes to criticize the pope. Fordham’s Jesuit president turned him down, and Maritain took a job at Princeton, no holds barred.

 

When Professor Maritain received an honorary degree a few months ago from Jewish Brandeis University, his support of Father Oesterreicher accounted for much of the genuine applause he received from the assembled representatives of American Jewry. For Father Oesterreicher, in every point of his Judaeo-Christian program, has complied exactly with the publicized objectives of the powerful American Jewish Committee. In his books, Walls Are Crumbling and The Bridge, Father Oesterreicher’s glorification of the Jews would erase forever from Catholic minds those New Testament texts which the Jewish Committee has so repeatedly attacked as “anti-Semitic.” Saint Peter’s accusation in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 5, that the Jews are the murderers of Christ; Saint Stephen’s vehement repetition of this charge in chapter 7; Saint Paul’s elaboration on the guilt and curse of the Jews in I Thessalonians, 2:15 — these and all other biblical indictments of the Jewish people are blotted out and replaced by Father Oesterreicher’s devotion to such unbaptized “saints” as Jewish logician Edmund Husserl and Jewish intuitionist Henri Bergson.

 

In his compliance with the American Jewish Committee’s declared aim, “to revise Christian religious teaching,” Father Oesterreicher has consistently depreciated the tall stacks of papal legislation against the Jews. And, even more boldly, he has demanded a rewording of the Church’s liturgy, proposing that our annual Good Friday reference to the “perfidious Jews” be changed in meaning! The American Jewish Committee followed up Father Oesterreicher’s proposal by pulling every string within its grasp from here to Rome. The result? The following half-hearted, much-guarded statement by the Vatican’s Congregation of Rites: “This Sacred Congregation, having been consulted about the matter, has deemed it advisable to make the following declaration only: That, in translations into the vernacular, phrases are not disapproved of which the meaning (for ‘perfidious Jews’) is ‘infidels without belief.’ ”

 

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Although we may be assured from our Faith that nineteen hundred years of Church policy toward the crucifiers of Christ will never be undone by one strategically-placed Jew, still, it is encouraging to be presented with clear evidence of just how little pro-Jewish residue Father Oesterreicher leaves behind him. When President Truman’s Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine held its hearings in Vienna, the center of Father Oesterreicher’s “apostolate” during the thirties, there was not the least hint that Austrian Catholics had retained even a remembrance of the Oesterreicher “doctrines.” Indeed, the outlook of Austrian Catholics toward Jews was summarized most orthodoxly by His Excellency, Francis Kamprath, Vienna’s Auxiliary Bishop. As a gauge of the previous effectiveness of Father Oesterreicher’s Judaeo-Christian program, and a pledge of its ultimate failure, we conclude with the statement by Bishop Kamprath, taken from recorded testimony before the Anglo-American Committee:

 

“During the war and in the time of the Nazis there was a great deal of mistaken racial anti-Semitism. Today all anti-Semitism in Austria is religious anti-Semitism. That is justified.”

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The Point

Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

March, 1956

 

FOREIGN ALLEGIANCE OF AMERICAN JEWS

 

The Problem

 

On the night of May 14, 1948, the Jews of America staged a celebration. From New York to Los Angeles, great roaring throngs of them, waving strange flags and bellowing strange anthems, shoved and shouted their way through city streets. By-standers who had seen the headlines of late-edition newspapers were well aware of the cause of this Jewish rejoicing. For at 6:11 P.M. of that spring evening, President Harry Truman, tossing diplomatic precedent to the winds, had accorded official U. S. recognition to a foreign power established just eleven minutes before: the brash, brawling, Jewish State of Israel.

 

The complacency with which Americans accepted this event was the final flowering of an attitude that had prevailed here ever since the Jews revealed their intention of snatching up the Holy Land as their own domain. It was not, however, an attitude prompted by a single motive. Many Americans smiled upon Zionist ambitions by way of expressing their condolence for the sufferings the Jews said they had endured under the Nazis. But for other Americans, the acquiescence to Jewish schemes was inspired by the wild, desperate fancy that setting up the State of Israel would somehow spell an end to America’s own increasingly-urgent Jewish problem.

 

The root of this problem lay in the familiar axiom that Jews everywhere are part of a single, inseparable nation, living in many Gentile lands but belonging to none of them. “Jews are a distinctive nationality,” said Jewish Justice Louis Brandeis, “of which every Jew, whatever his country, his station, or his shade of belief, is necessarily a member.” During the twentieth century, as hordes of Jewish immigrants swarmed into America, the truth of Brandeis’ statement came painfully home. The Jews were a people apart, bristling and intransigent. The notion of America as a great melting pot, blending together all peoples and cultures, thus had to be modified with the significant exemption, “But Jews don’t melt.”

 

With the establishment of the Jewish state, hope surged that America’s “Jewish problem” would be departing as soon as there were boats enough to accommodate it. “We want to go home … home … home. We must go home,” Rabbi Stephen Wise had wailed in the days when Israel was still just a gleam in Jewish eyes. It was improbable that all Jews would turn their backs on the fat life in America in order to pioneer a meager, unmechanized land. Still, it did seem reasonable that those Jews most burningly aware of their Jewishness, their separateness, would head for Israel, where their ardor would be not only in place but most welcome; and that those Jews who wanted to remain here would consent to become less noisy, less aggressive, less of “a nation within a nation.”

 

This naive hope has by now been thoroughly blasted. With the State of Israel about to enter its ninth year of impassioned existence, there are more Jews in America than ever before, and more Jewish nationalism. Besides, it is Israel itself, the country to which the Jews of America have deliberately chosen not to go, that excites and benefits most from their labors. Every day come fresh reports of Jewish demands, ranging from indignant cries for American arms to exploratory requests for American troops.

 

The Jews of America were once instructed by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s Prime Minister, that they must have “neither friendship nor sympathy but love of Israel, of the State of Israel … . It must be an unconditional love. There must be complete solidarity with the State and the people of Israel.” This admonition has been taken fervently to heart. Though nearly half the world’s Jews live in the U. S., their loyalty is to Israel, the political expression of that fierce and blood-bound thing: the Jewish nation.

 

The Pressure

 

In a bulletin put out by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association of Washington Heights, N. Y., there is contained the following bold statement of Jewish allegiance. “Here is Our Pledge, Israel: I pledge my loyalty to God, to the Torah and to the Jewish people and to the Jewish state.”

 

The young pretended-Americans who take this vow of loyalty to a foreign nation owe an enormous debt of gratitude to a top-notch Mason from Missouri. This benefactor is, of course, Harry S. Truman, and the immediate story of how American Jews got him to build the Jewish state starts early in 1948.

 

At that time, United States policy-makers were becoming just a bit wary of carving up the Holy Land into two explosive political divisions, one Arab and one Jewish. Although they had agreed to this so-called “partition,” after every Jew in America had screamed that they should, the U. S. State Department — and even the U. S. delegation to the Jewish-minded United Nations — were coming to feel that the setting-up of a Jewish government on property belonging to Arabs, with Arab governments surrounding it on all sides, would be much more likely to succeed if a period of “U. N. Trusteeship” came first.

 

But when the Trusteeship plan was announced (as the only feasible one which would give the Jews the country they were demanding, and yet forestall U. S. involvement in a Middle East war) the Jews of America began to wail. And then they began to push, shove, and employ all their considerable arts of political pressure.

 

The British occupation of the Holy Land was to cease on May 14, 1948. And the Jews were determined that as soon as the British pulled out, a Jewish government would take over. Every Jewish organization was loudly lobbying for the immediate establishment of such a state. Judge Proskauer of the American Jewish Committee even proposed that we sell U. S. arms to the Jewish gangs of Palestine, thus equipping them to force their will on the Arabs at the moment of British departure. On the 8th of April, 8,000 synagogues all across the nation held special “services” to demand that our government recognize the Jewish state right away, regardless of the consequences to ourselves.

 

Here enters Truman. It was at him that the Jews determined to aim the major pressure. For while the State Department might be hesitating, the President, said the Jews, could solve the whole Jewish-state problem by one swift grant of “official recognition.”

 

1948 was election year, and the fact that three-fourths of America’s Jews are concentrated in 14 key political cities, plus the fact that the Jews can always control New York State’s big bundle of 45 electoral votes, has a terrorizing effect on American politicians. In Truman’s case the pressure was further increased by the fact, later attested to by Jewish columnist David Lawrence, that without Jewish contributions Truman could never have financed his 1948 campaign.

 

Just how the Jews felt, vote-wise, in the matter of the Holy Land was no secret. In the off-year Congressional elections in the Bronx in 1947, a Jewish Labor Party candidate had carried a “solidly Democratic” district by telling the Jews that we should send American troops to Palestine to enforce the partition and protect the new Jewish state!

 

At the insistence of Jew Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s ex-partner in the clothing business, the President allowed himself to be closeted in a secret session with Jewry’s arch-intimidator, the ubiquitous Dr. Chaim Weizmann. As May 14 approached, party advisers let Truman know that his victory in the Fall depended entirely upon the Jewish issue. Finally, on the fateful day, Truman had a persuasive private visit from the President of the Jewish Masonic lodges in America, Frank Goldman of B’nai B’rith. Later that morning, Truman held a conference with his full-time Jewish adviser, David K. Niles, and a certain Mr. Epstein from the Jewish Agency in Washington. It was decided then, irrevocably, that as soon as the British Mandate in Palestine should run out (6 P. M. that evening, Washington time) Truman must officially recognize the government of the State of Israel. As a precautionary measure, care was taken that neither the State Department nor our U. N. Delegation should be advised of what the President intended to do.

 

It all came about as the Jews had planned. Mr. Truman granted official recognition at 6:11 P. M., May 14, 1948. And the Jews kept their part of the bargain. The President was returned to office the following November.

 

American Jews have been gloating over their success ever since, and in the February 5, 1953 issue of The American Zionist, Dr. Emmanuel Neumann made a summary statement of Mr. Truman’s role in the creation of the Jewish state. As head of the Zionist Organization of America, Dr. Neumann wrote that the President, “accepted the Zionist line reluctantly and under pressure, at first, but having accepted it, he followed through honestly and firmly.”

 

The Price

 

There is no political figure in the nation who cannot match Truman’s “pressure” story with one of his own. But even more bold than the constant intimidation of America’s public men, is the high-handed, brassy campaign to support the government of the State of Israel with a steady flow of American dollars. Since 1939, the Jews who live in the U. S. have contributed $l,100,000,000 to what they call the United Jewish Appeal. To get some small idea of just how successful the U. J. A. has been, we call attention to the relative receipts of that most familiar of all solicitors, the American Red Cross. In the year 1954, drawing upon a Jewish population which the Jews say is only five million, the United Jewish Appeal was able to set a goal that exceeded by $35,000,000 the amount sought by the entire Red Cross organization, which draws upon one hundred and fifty million Americans!

 

From these arresting figures, it is clear that American Jews look upon the United Jewish Appeal as much more than an ordinary community relief fund. By the Jews’ own boast, we are assured that millions of these dollars, wooed from Gentile pocketbooks on the Jewish-owned Main Streets of America, have gone into the building of their new country in Palestine. So much is this the case that on November 18, 1954, in a speech before the 23rd general assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, U. J. A.’s Dr. Schwartz told American Jews that their “local” spending must be entirely “subordinated” to “allocations for overseas needs through the United Jewish Appeal.”

 

Thus, in obedience to an edict from Israel’s chief rabbi, Halevi Herzog, American synagogues, during the high holy days” of September, 1952, made the auctioning of Israeli government bonds the feature of all their services — a most lucrative form of devotion which has since been repeated. In 1954, besides the regular gifts and bond investments, a hastily-collected $65,000,000 was made available to Israel in order to meet the payments due on the national debt. And only a few months ago, no less a personage than Israel’s Foreign Minister himself landed in America with a trunk full of his government’s bonds and a predatory gleam in his eye. Again, American Jews came through for the “homeland,” sending the Foreign Minister back to Jerusalem richer by several millions.

 

A frightening sidelight on this matter of steady income from Israel’s nonresident citizens came in September of 1952, when a special “Reparations” fee of $715,000,000 was extorted by Israel from the government of West Germany. Fantastic as it sounds, this money (being paid in installments of $60,000,000 per annum) is to compensate for the fact that several years before the State of Israel even existed, German citizens mistreated some fellow-German citizens of Jewish blood. The clear claim of the State of Israel in all this is that the German Jews who suffered under Hitler were not Germans at all, but citizens of the Jewish State. And the only conclusion to draw from such a precedent is that, if the Jews have their way, anyone who offends any Jew, in any country, will be responsible to the government of the State of Israel, and liable for whatever “reparations” the Israelis may demand!

 

The Prospect

 

At a news conference in New York a few weeks ago, Yaacov Liberman, a member of the executive committee of Israel’s powerful Herut party, announced that Jews must soon seize by force the strategic coastal strip near Gaza and the entire Arab kingdom of Jordan. Liberman’s apparent excuse for declaring such a war is that the Jews had actually intended to conquer these additional Arab lands anyway, back in the 1948-49 fighting — when Jewish “regulars” on the Jerusalem front, using Communist arms purchased from Czechoslovakia with American dollars, were under the military command of American citizen, and West Point officer, Colonel David Marcus.

 

American Jews have been indicating of late that when their war in the Holy Land is resumed, they want everyone in the American Army to take part, not just the Jewish officers. For, encouraged by the U. S. Government’s past financial generosity to the new State of Israel ($400,000,000 in outright gifts, as of last summer) the Jews are confident that Uncle Sam can be high-pressured into being equally generous with his armed forces. If such help materializes, Mr. Liberman will have no difficulty with his modest proposal to annex Gaza and the Jordan kingdom. Indeed, the Jews will unquestionably make the most of the opportunity and grab up much more — all in the spirit of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s frank “war policy” statement in January of this year: “We have come a long way without peace. We can go a long way in the future without it.”

 

The prospect of American boys dying for the cause of Jewish imperialism is hardly a comforting one. It is eclipsed in the minds of American Catholics only by the more devastating prospect of what will happen to the Holy Land’s churches and shrines in those not-yet-Jewish areas which, in a future war, would pass into Jewish hands.

 

Readers of The Point are familiar with the previous Jewish desecrations of the Dormition Abbey, the Convent of Mary Reparatrix, the parish churches of Galilee, and countless others — sacrileges financed and approved by Israel’s citizens-in-exile, the Jews of America.

 

The story of the Crucifixion comes to us with new and stark clarity this Lenten season, in the knowledge that the immediate path of Israeli expansion takes in all the sacred shrines of Our Lord’s Passion and Death, the Holy Places of the First Good Friday.

_______________________________

The Point 

Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

April, 1956

 

THE STORY OF GOD AND THE JEWS:

 

Nineteen Hundred Years of Rejection

“However divided the Gentile nations may be in their instincts and aspirations, they unite in their common aversion to the Jew; it is the one point on which they establish immediate agreement.”

 

When Jewish leader Leon Pinsker made the above statement, in the year 1882, the pogroms of Russia, in which tens of thousands of Jews were massacred, had only just begun; Adolph Hitler of Germany was not yet born; the Dreyfus Case of France was still twelve years away. Yet the truth of Pinsker’s statement was as strikingly evident when he made it as it is today.

 

For nineteen hundred years the pattern has been the same — relentlessly, incredibly, almost monotonously the same. Wherever in the world numbers of Jews have appeared, in that place antipathy to Jews has arisen. It is a phenomenon without precedent or parallel in human experience. The hostilities that have grown against other peoples, in particular places, at particular times, cannot be compared with this stupendous, world-filling hatred. Its outbreaks punctuate history like an insistent, recurring theme. So universal is it, that if a colony of Jews should settle in a country where their race had never before been known, it could be predicted, unequivocally, that sooner or later the people of that country would turn against the Jews. It has never failed. And the longer the inevitable reaction is delayed, the more furiously does it eventually burst forth. “The growth of anti-Semitism is proportionate to the number of Jews per square kilometer,” Chaim Weizmann, first President of the State of Israel, once said. “We carry the germs of anti-Semitism in a knapsack on our backs.”

 

In the following paragraphs, The Point presents a summary of what has happened to the Jews as they have wandered through the world with their knapsacks. It is a grim, violent story — concerning a people who, in the words of Saint Paul, “please not God and are adversaries to all men.”

 

                                     *   *   *   *   *

 

Perhaps the most striking evidence of the world’s antipathy toward Jews lies in the well-kept record of Jewish expulsions. Nearly every land which the Jews have entered has, at some point, lost all patience with them and demanded that they pack up and leave. This has been going on, without interruption, ever since the Roman armies turned the Jews out of Jerusalem in the year 70 A. D. Successive Roman emperors continued the suppression, and after the break-up of the Empire, Jews came to be looked upon as the “property” of the many feudal princes, who tolerated or expelled them at their pleasure.

 

With the rise of centralized governments, the Jews incurred far more inclusive edicts of banishment. Thus, they were barred from all of Spain in the seventh century, and again in 1492. The Moorish kingdom of Granada expelled them in 1066, and they were forced out of France in 1182, again in 1306, again in 1394, and again, out of Southern France, in 1682. In accordance with a decree of Pope Leo VII, the Jews were exiled from Germany in the tenth century; they were expelled again one hundred years later, and once again in the year 1349. England ordered them to leave in 1290, preventing their return for 350 years. The Jews were forced out of Hungary twice: in 1360 and again in 1582. From Belgium, they were expelled in 1370. From Austria in 1420 and again in 1670. From Lithuania, in 1495. From Portugal, in 1498. From Prussia, in 1510. From the Kingdom of Naples, in 1540. From Bavaria, in 1551. From the Genoese Republic, in 1567. And from the Papal States, the Pope’s personal domains, the Jews were expelled in 1569 and, once again, thirty years later.

 

                                     *   *   *   *   *

 

The usual history text which sets out to tell the story of the Jews over the past 2,000 years becomes, in effect, a repetitious catalogue of one mass slaughter after another. For, since the dispersion of the year 70, when more than a million Jews were left dead in the streets of Jerusalem, wholesale death — the riot and then the pogrom — has followed the Jew down each new path of his wanderings.

 

The total number of Jews put to death under the authority of the later Roman Empire has never been tabulated to the Jews’ satisfaction. In one three-year period (132-135) 500,000 Middle East Jews fell before Roman swords. And each succeeding age, down to our own day, has left a similar record behind it.

 

The year 523 saw thousands of Jews slaughtered by Christian Abyssinians in Yemen. The Mohammedan Caliph of Damascus took a comparable toll in the early 700’s. The first days of the Crusades brought death to numberless Jewish communities in Central Europe, and when Jerusalem was finally taken by the Christian armies in 1099, the city’s Jewish inhabitants died in the flames of the principal synagogue. The century following saw pogroms in many countries, the most extensive being those of Mohammedan Spain, of France, and of England.

 

Christian Spain and England both started off the next century with slaughters of the Jews, and Germany concluded it with the pogroms of 1283 and 1298. The year 1321 brought anti-Jewish riots in France, which were surpassed in intensity by those of Spain in 1355. During the fourteenth century, in Germany alone, 300 entire communities of Jews were destroyed. Early in the fifteenth century, all the Jews of Salzburg were burned alive and, shortly after, the riots in Rome provoked by the preaching of Saint John Capistrano forced all the Jews in the city to barricade themselves in their houses.

 

The most notable Jewish slaughters of the l600’s were those in Poland, where more than 200,000 were slain under the Cossack leader, Chmielnicki. Such treatment for the Jews of Eastern Europe (over half the world’s number at that time) continued into the present century. During Russia’s anti-Jewish demonstrations of 1905, there were 690 separate pogroms within one eleven-day period. And in the years that followed, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Romania all conducted extensive slaughters of their respective Jews — until these countries became incorporated into that potent anti-Jewish machine which the Jews claim was the bloodiest of all time: the National-Socialist Government of Germany.

 

                                      *   *   *   *   *

 

Behind the expulsions and mass exterminations of the Jews there has been, of course, an ordered and unquestioned tradition of social, political, and religious legislation against them. In the year 315, the first law of Imperial Rome passed under direct Christian influence demanded the death penalty for any gentile who should join himself to a synagogue. Saint Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan (397), instructed his people on the need for avoiding the Jews by saying that, “The very conversation with them is a pollution.” In 418, Jews in the Empire were forever excluded from the Roman army and from all public offices. In 537, they were prohibited from receiving dignities or honors of any kind, and in 553 the Emperor Justinian interdicted their Talmud. Around 650 the Mohammedan Caliph Omar ordered that Jews in his territories must wear a distinctive dress that would make them at all times recognizable. Similar strictures were imposed in 723 by the Byzantine Emperor Leo III. Charlemagne’s son was severely reprimanded in 829 by the ecclesiastical Council of Lyons for advocating the softening of certain anti-Jewish laws, and all during the rest of the ninth and tenth centuries both the feudal states of Europe and the Byzantine Empire in the East kept detailed legislation against Jews strictly enforced.

 

By the year 1006, ghettos had already been established in Bavaria, and the special “Jew tax” was everywhere exacted. This followed upon the universally accepted principle (later taught by the Church’s eminent theologian, Saint Thomas Aquinas) that all property of the Jews belongs by right to the temporal ruler who suffers them in his domains. The year 1155 saw the accession of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who referred to Jews as “belonging to the royal treasury,” and expended them accordingly. The Church’s Fourth Lateran Council, whose decrees are binding on all Catholics, codified and reasserted in 1215 many traditional pronouncements on Jewish segregation. Most emphatically urged were the exclusion of Jews from all public offices and the demand that they wear the “Jew badge.” In some sections this bright-colored badge came to be required not only of unconverted Jews, but also of all Jewish converts.

 

During the next three centuries, in those countries where Jews were still legally allowed to remain, there was vigorous enforcement of further anti-Jewish legislation, including compulsory attendance at “conversionist” sermons, prohibitions against Jews appearing in the streets on Sundays and great Church feast days, more rigorous ghetto edicts, and public burnings of the Talmud. By 1550, there were no Jews lawfully resident in England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries or Russia. Pope Paul IV, in 1555, re-decreed much of the previous papal legislation against the Jews, emphasizing that they must not practice medicine or own real estate in Christian communities. In 1615, King Louis XIII bolstered the “Jew laws” of France by forbidding the Christians, under pain of death and confiscation, to shelter Jews or even to converse with them. Between 1649 and 1882, the Russian government issued over a thousand distinct anti-Jewish measures, The first Jews who arrived in what was to be the United States were asked to leave by Peter Stuyvesant at New Amsterdam; and even Lord Baltimore’s Catholic colony of Maryland, famed for its “tolerance,” would not grant citizenship to Jews. Indeed, it was not until 1826 that Jews in Maryland were given full “emancipation” by the state legislature; while in nearby North Carolina comparable recognition did not come until after the War Between the States.

 

The right of citizenship, withheld from Jews in every country during all the Christian ages, was not allowed to them until the triumph of the Judaeo-Masonic, anti-Christian principles of the French Revolution in 1789. Thus, Jews were not granted citizenship in France until 1791, in Holland until 1796, in Belgium until 1815, in Denmark until 1849, in England until 1858, in Switzerland until 1865, in Austria-Hungary until 1867, in Germany until 1870, and in Russia until 1917.

 

With their new-won citizenship, and the freedom of operation that it brought, the Jews devised spectacular reprisals against the nations which had so long held them in check. And yet, “liberation” of the Jews has in no sense meant immunization from further anti-Jewish outbreaks. Our own century, which has seen the unrivalled height of Jewish power, has already known unprecedented slaughters of the Jews. Europe, wasted by Jewish wars, beleaguered by Jewish Marxism, still, even now, gives indication of resistance — with 53 deputies in the present French Assembly elected on an anti-Jewish platform.

 

Even America, most docile of hosts to the Jews, is not for a moment regarded by them as a lasting, sure asylum. That leading molder of Jewish opinion, the Jewish Examiner of Brooklyn, put the issue very clearly just a couple of years ago with its hold-type warning, “We have no faith in the future security of American Jewry.”

 

                              *   *   *   *   *

 

The history of the Jews, as they have wandered from nation to nation, inevitably leads one to ask: But why have these people been singled out for universal abhorrence? What have they done to make themselves so despised? What is wrong with the Jews?

 

This question has its answer in an event that happened long ago, when a frenzied Jerusalem mob, standing in the courtyard of the city’s Roman governor, hurled at the heavens its defiant shout, “His Blood be upon us and upon our children!”

 

That is what is wrong with the Jews. They have assumed, as a nation, guilt for the death of God They, once God’s chosen people, have called on themselves a curse, which as Saint Jerome says, “rests on them to this very day, for the Blood of the Lord is not taken from them.”

 

The curse which the Jews invoked in the year 33 A. D., and which descended on them with manifest finality in the year 70, had been prophesied 1,500 years before by Moses, who warned the Jews of what would happen if they dared ever to turn away from God (Deuteronomy, Chapter 28): — ”Cursed shalt thou be in the city, cursed in the field … Cursed shalt thou be coming in, and cursed going out … And mayst thou always suffer oppression, and be crushed at all times … And thou shalt he lost, as a proverb and a byword to all people, among whom the Lord shall bring thee in … The Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the farthest parts of the earth to the ends thereof … Neither shalt thou be quiet, even in those nations, nor shall there be any rest for the sole of thy foot. For the Lord will give thee a fearful heart, and languishing eyes, and a soul consumed with pensiveness: and thy life shall be as it were hanging before thee.”

 

The bitter hatred flung at the Jews by all the world can be accounted for only in terms of this divine judgment. The Jews’ baseness and sensuality and perpetual intrigue, their insatiable ambition, their open contempt for all standards of decency and order — all these malignities, these natural reasons for their being hated, spring from and are sustained by the central and supernatural fact that they are cursed.

 

That such has been the teaching of the Catholic Church — openly, vigorously, and abundantly proclaimed — is a circumstance of which the Jews are keenly aware. Mordecai Kaplan, of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, wrote recently, “It is unfortunately true that in the Christian religious tradition the Jews are assumed to be the accursed of God. There is no use evading the fact or prevaricating about it. There is only one way to deal with it; it must cease to be a fact. The judgment on the Jews must be expunged from Christian tradition.”

 

Audacious as this campaign is, however, it is quite futile. Even if Rabbi Kaplan and his cohorts should be completely successful in their undertaking — even if all references to the Jews as “perfidious” and “rejected by God” were to be stricken from parochial school textbooks, from the writings of the saints and decrees of the popes, from the prayers of the Church, and from Holy Scripture itself — the Jews would find their lot still no better than it has been for the last nineteen centuries. For the curse upon them is a reality, divinely-imposed and irrevocable, whether anyone talks about it or not. As Saint John Chrysostom declares, ”The Jews say it is men who have brought on their misfortunes; but in fact it is God who has brought them about.”

 

Though the Jews may become powerful for a time in some particular countries, as they once were in Moorish Spain, as they once were in modern Germany, as they now are in the United States, even then, in their hours of triumph, they will be always restless and fearful, knowing from deep experience that at any moment the Gentiles among whom they live may rise up against them.

 

The Jews have fixed their course. Till the end they shall remain a spectacle before all the world of a wicked and unrepentant people — a people who have called on their heads the abiding wrath of God.

______________________________

The Point

Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

May, 1956

 

MASONS, JEWS, AND CATHOLIC SCHOOLS

 

I — The Front Line

 

During the next few weeks, the four million American children enrolled in Catholic schools will close their textbooks, stand for a final classroom Hail Mary, and embark upon that jubilant season called Summer Vacation.

 

As the last parochial school door clicks shut behind the last departing child, another group of four million Americans, an insistently adult group, will be dedicating itself to the task of preventing any child in this country from ever attending a Catholic school again. And at first blush this group would seem bound to succeed, for among its members are Senators, Congressmen, Cabinet Officers, corporation executives, bank presidents, newspaper publishers — the moneyed and the mighty of the nation. The group is, of course, that crafty, fanatic assembly, the American Freemasons.

 

For two centuries, in whatever country Masonic governments have been established, war has been declared against Catholic education. Though Masons are quite willing to appropriate the Church’s buildings, they are careful first to strip the crucifixes from class-room walls, to replace the nuns, brothers, and priests with teachers of their own choosing, to re-write the textbooks and adjust the curricula, and, finally, when all is in readiness, to make it mandatory for all children to attend these new, state-directed schools. Accordingly, the Masons banished Catholic instruction from France in the 1790s, from Italy in 1873, from Portugal in 1910, from Mexico in the 1920s, from Spain in the 1930s, and, save for the decisive protesting of an aroused nation, they would have banished it from the Catholic country of Belgium just last year.

 

The most casual reading of the literature of American Masons is sufficient to show that they have the same designs on parochial schools as have their brothers in Europe and the countries to the south of us. “The American public school, nonpartisan, nonsectarian, efficient, democratic, for all the children of all the people,” has been proclaimed by American Masonry’s Supreme Council as the first goal which all lodges must strive for. And lest there should be any doubt as to what the Masons mean by this directive, the New Age, official journal of the higher Masonic echelons, recently urged that steps be taken “to disabuse every mind of the thought that the convent or the system supporting it have any rightful place in a free America.”

 

Thus far, the strongest bid Masons have made to get their kind of “free America” came in Oregon, where, in 1922, a law was passed — admittedly at Masonic instigation — requiring that all children be enrolled in the state’s public school system. The law was to be rigidly enforced beginning in 1926, but when it was brought to a test the U. S. Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional.

 

Since that time, American Masonry has taken to playing octopus, maintaining at headquarters an air of detachment from the hurly-burly of battle, but lashing out furiously and incessantly with its multiple, well-directed arms. Chief of these for imposing Masonic school policies is the pompous, meddling National Education Association. Currently this organization is coiled about Congress, pressing for approval of large-scale Federal Aid to Education. This program would provide for financial hand-outs to state school departments amounting to three and a half billion dollars — to be used, the NEA insists, for the benefit of public schools only. By necessitating a sharp increase in the taxes paid for school support, the program is calculated to discourage Catholics from continuing to finance an independent school system of their own.

 

The NEA has also lately a report entitled “Public Education and the Future of America,” indicating that unless the former is soon made compulsory for all children, the latter is going to be impossibly bleak.

 

In all these well-laid plans, however, there is, for the Masons, one hitch. The Church is on to them. Even American Catholics, adamantly easy-going though they are, have become increasingly alert to the fact that their parochial schools are under siege. That has been one consequence of the Masons’ direct, open assault.

 

Then, too, being on guard against Masonic maneuverings is a deep-rooted Catholic habit. Since the establishment of modern Masonry in 1717, the cult has been roundly denounced no less than twenty different times, by thirteen popes. Speaking particularly of the Masons and education, Pope Leo XIII warned, “Do not think that any precaution can be great enough in keeping the young from masters and schools where the pestilent breath of the Masonic Society is to be feared.” And Pope Pius XI, who affirmed unequivocally that, “the frequenting of non-Catholic schools … is forbidden for Catholic children,” also declared, “Masonry is our mortal enemy!”

 

Prompted by such precedents, American Catholic spokesmen have shown a growing willingness to stand toe-to-toe with the Masons and fight it out. In recent months, for instance, the National Education Association has been resoundingly blasted by Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles, Bishop Shehan of Bridgeport, the Education Division of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and the head of the Knights of Columbus. Even Monsignor Matthew Smith, editor of the far-flung and faint-hearted Denver Register, is reported to have lately given over his front page to an attack on the NEA and the Masons, accusing them of working in conspiracy to abolish Catholic education.

 

In the light of this general awakening, why should Catholics have anything to fear? For the obvious reason that awareness of peril does not cause peril to disappear. There is still a very real and imminent danger that Masonic proposals will be jammed through Congress or state legislatures and seriously cripple parochial schools. But even more threatening is the fact that the Mason is by no means alone in his hatred for Catholic education. For he has, as his companion, his gleeful prompter, that inevitable enemy of all things Christian, the ever-lurking Jew.

 

When Pope Pius IX called the Masonic Lodges “the Synagogues of Satan,” he was choosing no idle metaphor. From the beginning, the Masons have been directed by, urged on by, inflamed by, the Jews. Their very ritual is shot through with Jewish symbolism. Indeed, it is in their own occult liturgy that the true nature and function of the Masons is most unerringly portrayed. They are, they say, the descendants and counterparts of those Gentile workmen of King Hiram the Tyrian (III Kings, 5), who were engaged by Solomon to have complete charge of building the Temple in Jerusalem where the Jews would worship. Thus in symbol do the Masons reveal what they are in fact: Gentiles doing the work of Jews. But, ironically enough, like the workmen of Hiram, the Masons can expect no part in the spoils, once the edifice of Jewish power reaches completion. For it has been long decreed that “secret societies,” now so vital to the plans of the Jews, will be jealously outlawed and trampled upon when the awaited King of Jerusalem, Anti-Christ himself, mounts his throne.

 

II — Headquarters

 

The assault of the Jews on our Catholic parochial schools might easily, and not untruly, be chalked up to the general Jewish hatred for things Christian. But to see exactly why the “Catholic school attack” has such a high place in the overall battle plans of American Jewry, we need only be reminded that Catholic schools are the preservers and spreaders of that thunderous information which the Jews are so bent on silencing: (1) The Jews killed Christ. (2)God has cursed them for doing it.

 

Throughout the Christian centuries, the Jews have never once lost sight of the fact that it is Christian doctrine itself which has established the firm foundation of the world’s antipathy toward Jews. Writing for the American Association for Jewish Education in 1954, Rabbi Horace Kallen put it this way: “In sum, all anti-Semitism, either old or new, roots in a philosophy of life, a scheme of salvation, whose soil is the emotion imparted by Christian theology.”

 

How, therefore, do the Jews plan to be rid of our doctrine-disseminating Catholic schools? Well, the “direct attack,” we repeat, has long since been delegated by the Jewish policy-makers to their Masonic menials. And although it is possible that at any time the Masons’ frontal blitz may end the whole war in one crashing victory, the concurrent Jewish strategy is purposely less ambitious and, for the moment, more effective.

 

The basic plan is this: to leave the parochial school intact right now, but methodically, patiently, to purge it of its anti-Jewish sting by censoring and changing the story of the Jews and the Crucifixion as it is presented to parochial school children.

 

Among the Jews, agitation for this censorship has become increasingly widespread and frank. Back in 1941, in his book World Crisis and Jewish Survival, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver put the problem before the “thinking” Jews of America when he lobbied against “the manner in which the Christ story is taught to Christian children in many Christian schools.” The Jewish-controlled International Conference of Christians and Jews filed a bolder complaint at its very first organizational meeting (Switzerland, 1947) demanding “a revision of Christian religious teaching by eliminating concepts hostile to Jews.” Volume 50 of the American Jewish Yearbook later carried the identically same demand. And only a few months ago, the official bulletin of the Jewish Masons of B’nai B’rith, January, 1956, fanned the flames of this campaign, in lodges all over the country, by reminding members that the changes in Christian doctrine have not yet been made, and that, still, “Despite its demand that evil be repaid with good, Christianity has for almost 2,000 years taught — and in former centuries backed up that teaching with action — that the Jews must bear the punishment for their ancestors’ rejection of Jesus … that the children of the Jews who crucified Jesus are visited for their fathers’ sin.”

 

And how are the Jews making out with their changing of the Crucifixion story? Perhaps the most striking evidence of their success is that the Catholic parochial schoolroom is the only assured place left where people will still say, still dare to say, that the Jews killed Christ. Just about everywhere else the Romans are being blamed; and this universal swallowing of the Jewish propaganda line has left it a simple matter to bring pressure upon the “narrow, bigoted, behind-the-times” Catholic schools.

 

Working in cooperation with all the major Jewish agencies in the country (through the exclusively Jewish National Community Relations Advisory Council) the American Jewish Committee has been issuing annual reports on how and where the “pressure” is being applied. In its 1954 summary, the Committee boasted that the work was going well and that, “The Catholic Biblical Association, which is responsible for parochial school texts, has expressed appreciation for our assistance in the preparation of materials on Jews and Judaism. And the National Catholic Welfare Conference continues to consult with us frequently.”

 

Having previously worked on an Intercultural Education Syllabus for use in parochial school classes of the Archdiocese of New York, the AJC last year reported that in the Catholic school systems of Boston, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D. C., Jewish Committee censors had made their way right into the classrooms and registered on-the-spot complaints about course material dealing with Jews and the Crucifixion.

 

Yet, for all their boldness, the Jews realize that there lies ahead of them still one enormous obstacle in “rewriting the Christ story for Christians.” Any number of Catholic textbook writers may be bought-off or scared-off by the Jewish book-burners, but where will there be found a Catholic editor, publisher, or parochial school superintendent to assume responsibility for changing that supreme Catholic text, the New Testament?

 

To those several members of the American Jewish Committee who faithfully read The Point each month, we should like to direct a closing request. We invite you, gentlemen, to announce in your next report, just how you propose to go about displacing and rewriting such New Testament messages as that, let us say, of Saint Paul to the Thessalonians, in which you and your children are imperishably identified as, “the Jews who both killed the Lord Jesus, and the prophets, and have persecuted us, and please not God, and are adversaries to all men.”

 

FORBIDDEN BOOKS

 

Below are excerpts from some of the many Catholic textbooks which the Jews are trying to remove from our parochial schools.

 

From Compendium of Bible and Church History, by Brother Eugene, N.Y., 1931.

 

“And ever since, the Jews have wandered about; a people without a flag, a country, a priest, an altar, or a sacrifice; a living testimony that indeed the vengeance of God fell upon them and their children.”

From The Triumph of the Faith, the Catholic High School Religion Series, Book Two, N. Y., 1945, Imprimatur of Cardinal Spellman.

 

The text tells (page 36) how, through Jewish lies, Saint Stephen was betrayed to the Sanhedrin of the Jews, where “he turned on them and boldly declared that they had not lived up to the truth but had betrayed and murdered the Messias. Their sinful pride could not withstand these charges. The Jews rushed upon this brave young man … ”

From Religion: Doctrine and Practice, For Use in Catholic High Schools, by Fr. Francis Cassilly, S. J., Chicago, 1942, Imprimatur of Cardinal Mundelein.

 

“The Jews as a nation refused to accept Christ, and since His time they have been wanderers on the face of the earth without a temple or a sacrifice, and without the Messias … The kingdom He founded — the Church — was a spiritual one, not a temporal one such as the carnal Jews were hoping for.”

From Bible History by the late Bishop Richard Gilmour, N. Y, 1936.

 

“For 1,800 years has the blood of Christ been upon the Jews. Driven from Judea — without country, without home — strangers amongst strangers — hated, yet feared — have they wandered from nation to nation bearing with them the visible signs of God’s curse.”

_________________________________

The Point

Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

June, 1956

 

THE WAR BETWEEN THE BIBLE AND THE JEWS

 

I — The Issue

There has been no bigger hoax put forward in the name of religion than the current propaganda which proposes that Jews and Catholics are sharers of a common Biblical faith — that Jews have the Old Testament, and Catholics have the New.

 

The truth of the matter, as preserved by the guardian of Holy Scripture, the Catholic Church, is, of course, that the Bible stands as one integral book, the treasured property of those who believe in that One, True Faith of which the Bible is the revelation and the record. For just as God is One, and the Faith which He has revealed is One, so God’s Book is inviolably One. And the refutation of those who would split the Bible in two, giving one part to present-day Jews and the other to Catholics, is contained within the Bible itself.

 

Back in 1898, His Holiness, Pope Leo XIII, granted an indulgence of 300 days to anyone of the faithful who would simply sit down with the Bible and read it for fifteen minutes. Our proposal this month is that Catholics do just that. We guarantee that it will take very few sittings to discover what God wants men to know about the religious relationship of Jews and Christians. All of the Old and New Testament is concerned with precisely this relationship, as it figures in the story of God’s plan to become man, to “dwell amongst us” as the Christ, the Anointed Savior.

 

It was promised to the people of the Jews that the Christ would be born from a virginal mother of their own blood, in the city of David their king. Thus, it happened that the Jews came so rightly to be called the people whom God had “chosen.” But how did the Jews accept this favored status? The Church’s illustrious martyr-bishop, Saint Cyprian, has tersely summarized for us the Bible’s story of the Jewish people as they awaited the birth of the Savior. He wrote:

 

“Moses the Jews cursed because he proclaimed Christ. Dathan they loved because he did not proclaim Him. Aaron they rejected because he offered the image of Christ. Abiron they set up because he opposed Him. David they hated because he sang of Christ. Saul they magnified because he did not speak of Him. Samuel they cast out because he foretold of Christ. Cham they served because he said nothing of Christ. Jeremias they stoned because he was praising Christ. Ananias they loved while he was opposing Him. Isaias they sawed asunder shouting Christ’s glories. Manasses they glorified persecuting Christ. John they slew revealing Christ. Zachary they slaughtered loving Christ. And Judas they loved betraying Him.”

 

To Saint Cyprian’s summary of the Old-Testament Jews, we need add only this: that God, all the while the Jews were violating His law and killing His prophets, kept warning the “chosen people” that they were headed toward a fearful perdition, that a divine curse would descend upon them and their children, and that God’s blessing and election would pass to a new and faithful people which He would call out of the nations of the Gentiles. Isaias told them this over and over again; so did Jeremias, and Baruch, and Ezechiel, and Daniel; so did Osee and all the lesser prophets. The warning of this curse overshadows every page of the Old Testament, and when the Messias, the promised Christ, finally arrives, He tells them quite as plainly that there will come upon the ungrateful Jews, “all the just blood that hath been shed upon the earth, from the blood of Abel the Just, even to the blood of Zacharias, the son of Barachias, whom you killed between the temple and the altar. Amen I say to you, all these things shall come upon this generation. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee … behold, your house shall be left to you, desolate.”

 

This judgment of Our Lord is announced to the Jews in the very first book of the New Testament. And throughout the remainder of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse, the Jews are revealed, in all their spiritual desolation, as the universal enemy of the Christians; they call down upon their heads the Blood of Christ. They crucify Him. They kill Saint Stephen and Saint James, persecute Saint Paul in every city where he preaches, obstruct the Gospel message by every means, and are at last identified by Saint John in the final book of the Bible as those, “that say they are Jews and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.”

 

In this way does the Bible complete the story of God’s rejection of the Jewish people. The True Faith in the Christ to come was scorned by the Jews, and that same True Faith, fulfilled now in the Christ Who has arrived, is given over in its entirety, root and flower, Old Testament and New, to another chosen people, gathered out of the lands of the Gentiles, nourished at the altars of Christendom, and guarded by the one who is the Vicar of Christ.

 

II — Counter-attack

 

If copies of the Old Testament — even expurgated ones — are occasionally to be found lying on lecterns in Jewish synagogues, they are being preserved there only as a kind of racial heirloom. For plainly this is not the Jews’ book. Its prophecies concerning the Messias are too plentiful and detailed, its history of Jewish infidelity is too vivid, its foretelling of God’s rejection of the Jews in favor of the Gentiles is too insistent a theme for the Jews to read more than a few scattered verses of the Bible in comfort.

 

Still, that title by which the Jews like to be known — “the people of the book” — is a fitting one. For they do have a book of their own: one perfectly tuned to their temperament and aspirations: one which they cannot merely read, but revel in. That book is the Talmud.

 

Unlike the Old Testament, the Talmud meets the initial requirement for being the book of modern Jewry, by having been composed in post-Crucifixion times. The Palestinian Talmud was completed about the year 300 A. D., and the Babylonian Talmud (the longer, more used version), about 200 years later. Both editions are built on the same scheme. There is a text, called “Mishna,” consisting of non-Biblical maxims and regulations, embracing in minutest detail every aspect of Jewish life. Enlarging upon the Mishna, interpreting and illustrating it, is the “Gemara,” the commentaries of the rabbis.

 

Concerning the place which this strange, contrived work has in their affections, the Jews have a saying: “The Bible is like water, the Mishna like wine, the Gemara like aromatic liqueur.” And another: “Jehovah himself studies the Talmud, standing out of respect.”

 

The full significance of such statements strikes home only when one realizes what the Talmud is. For in its fourteen folio volumes and 6,000 crowded pages, this monument of Judaism is compounded of three principal elements: stark, shrieking anti-Christian blasphemy; rank obscenity; and a driving, irrepressible contempt for the people and customs of the Gentile world.

 

Thus is constructed the world’s most characteristically, quintessentially Jewish hook. No Christian — no matter how far he had strayed from grace — could ever have conceived it. It belongs to the Jews and to no other people. The Jews belong to it and to no other book. They have made it, and it in turn has nurtured and sustained them. For 1,500 years they have been steeped in it — in its foul vocabulary, its sordid, blasphemous anecdotes, its depraved, anti-social principles. And it belongs not just to one faction or sect of Jews but to all the race. Even those Jews who do not regard the Talmud as “divine,” as the Orthodox Jews do, consider it “the supreme guide.” In a recent article published by the American Jewish Congress, Rabbi Simon Federbush declared, “The Talmud is unique among the classics of world literature. No other book has exercised such an over-whelming influence upon the spirit of men as the Talmud upon the Jewish people.”

 

Yet, it must not be thought that the Jews derive their perfidy simply from perusal of the Talmud, or that destruction of the Talmud would put an end to the Jewish problem. For the Talmud is more than just the molder of the Jewish mind. It is its mirror.

 

Perhaps the most striking way to indicate the horror of the Talmud, to show that it is “really that bad,” is to cite some of Christendom’s reactions to it. On May 3, 1240, Pope Gregory IX gave orders that while the Jews of France were in their synagogues, their homes were to be searched and all copies of the Talmud confiscated. Additional copies were rounded up and burned in Paris, by order of King Saint Louis IX in 1244 and 1248, and, after his death, in 1299 and again in 1309. Rome had a public Talmud burning, at the direction of Pope Innocent IV, in 1244, and Spain held one, at Barcelona, in 1263. Pope Honorius IV, in 1286, wrote to the Archbishops of England, calling the Talmud “that damnable book” and enjoining them “vehemently to see that it be not read by anyone, since all evils flow from it.”

 

Pope Clement IV decreed death for any Jew in the Papal States found with a Talmud in his house, and during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries such Popes as John XXII, Martin V, Julius III, and Saint Pius V added their own particular condemnations to the lengthy canon of anti-Talmudic legislation.

 

Volume III of the Jewish Encyclopedia contains a “black-list” of sixty-nine censors of the Roman Inquisition who at various times have been assigned to delete from the Talmud its immoral and blasphemous passages. Such censorship came to be regulated by the Church’s Index Expurgatorius, and for several years after its initial appearance, this Index was aimed exclusively at Talmudic and related texts.

 

Better known than the Index Expurgatorius is the Church’s more inclusive Index of Prohibited Books, whose very first listing condemned not only the Talmud, but also all of its “glosses, annotations, interpretations, and expositions.” So thorough and emphatic was the Church’s ban of the Talmud that in 1939 the Jews complained that only one original copy from the High Middle Ages was known to be still in existence.

 

The invention of printing in the fifteenth century eventually brought more wide-spread distribution of the Talmud, causing such a furor that in 1631 the Jewish Synod of Poland, in an effort to take the heat off, sent the following decree to all synagogues: “We order you in all future editions (of the Talmud) to leave blank the passages treating of Jesus of Nazareth and to put in place of them a circle like this: 9675;. This will be an indication to the rabbis and teachers to acquaint their pupils with these passages only orally. By this precaution the learned among the Nazarenes will have no excuse for attacking us on this point.”

 

On October 4, 1890 some of the “learned among the Nazarenes” — the Jesuit priests at Rome — published in their magazine, Civilta Cattolica, the following: “That the sinister Talmudic code, in addition to horribly immoral rules of conduct, enjoins hatred of all who are not of Jewish blood, and especially of Christians, and allows them to be plundered and maltreated as noxious brutes, are no longer matters of controversy.” And the late Bishop Landrieux of Dijon, France, in agreement with the Jesuit fathers, had this shrewd observation to make: “In our day the Talmud does not provoke either astonishment or anger among Catholics, because it is no longer known.”

 

The following excerpts from the Talmud, and its summary, the Shulkan Aruk, are representative of the many passages which the Church has explicitly complained about in condemnations of Talmudic literature:

 

“The world was created only for Israel; none are called children of God but Israel; none are beloved before God but Israel.”

 

“If an ox of an Israelite bruise an ox of a Gentile, the Israelite is exempt from paying damages.”

 

“A Jew may rob a Gentile, that is, he may cheat him in a bill — provided he is unlikely to be perceived; otherwise the name of God might be dishonored.”

 

“To communicate anything to a Gentile about our religious relations would be equal to killing all the Jews; for if the Gentiles knew what we teach about them, they would kill us all openly.”

 

“If you must go to war, then do not march in the front ranks, but rather in the rear ranks, that you may be the first to return.”

 

“Cursed be those who calculate the time of the Messias.”

 

The most vile of all the Talmud’s passages are those which deal with Our Lord Himself and His Ever-Virginal Mother. We could never reprint the filthy allegations leveled against the spotless Mother of God, but we will leave our readers with a very real impression of just how bitterly foul the Talmud is in this matter. Commenting on the Jewish teaching concerning the birth of Jesus, the Jewish Encyclopedia (Funk & Wagnalls, N. Y., 1906), in its article on “Jesus,” boldly justifies the Talmud’s unprintable details by saying, “For polemical purposes it was necessary for the Jews to insist on the illegitimacy of Jesus as against the Davidic descent claimed by the Christian Church.”

 

                                       *   *   *   *   *

 

There is a saying popular among Catholics which goes: “The poor Jews are like expectant travelers waiting in a railroad station for a train which went by 2,000 years ago.”

 

The saying is, assuredly, some sort of tribute to the dogmatic fact that the Incarnation, and the birth of Our Lady’s Divine Child, have long since occurred. But the patronizing naivete of such a remark is a further argument for the proposal we made at the outset of this issue: that Catholics should take to heart what the Old and New Testaments have to say about the present condition of the Jews.

 

When Our Lord, in Saint Matthew’s Gospel, wanted to indicate the rejected and dejected status of New Testament Jewry, He gave us a much more astringent picture than the above “railroad station” scene. Emphasizing that the Gentiles would become the children and heirs of the Old Testament patriarchs, and that the Jews would be disowned and cursed, Our Lord said, “Many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven: But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into the exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

 

This is Our Lord’s own summary of the “Judaeo-Christian” situation. We could hardly presume to add to it.

________________________________________

The Point

Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

July, 1956

 

CHRISTMAS IN JULY

 

To all the readers of The Point, we, the Editors, extend our earnest and prayerful wishes for a happy and holy Christmas. May the joy of the shepherds and the reverence of the Magi fill your hearts, as, in Christian remembrance, the Most Blessed Virgin, who is the Most Blessed Mother, brings forth the Man-child Who is God.

 

And if our greeting startles you — if sultry mid-July seems worlds-apart from Christmas Eve and the frosty walk to Midnight Mass; if the annual parish lawn-party has put to flight all recollection of last December’s Nativity play; if, in brief, the magic of Christmas lies packed away in some seasonal corner of your mind — then, we beg you, pull it out immediately!

 

Muster whatever you can of candles and carols. Dust off the Christmas crib figures. Find some fresh straw for the manger. Then call in the children from all the distractions of summer and tell them again the Bethlehem story: of the angels, the star, the oxen, the stable. And when the happy part is finished, tell them how it happened that Christmas resolved in a warfare. How the enemies of Christmas slaughtered the Holy Innocents. How the Christ-Child of Christmas had to be hurried away by night and off into Egypt, far from the grasp of those who demanded that Christmas be over and done with and put out of mind.

 

And if they should ask how it all turned out — whether Christmas won, or its enemies — you can tell them that the battle is still going on. That, in fact, Christmas needs their prayers this very summer, because …

 

Then tell them, in a child’s fashion, this thing which we herein report to you, adultly, forthwith, as follows.

 

One day last January, at the bright, bustling headquarters of the American Jewish Committee, in New York, a worried conference was held. The topic: the recent celebration by Americans of the 1955th anniversary of a Birth in Bethlehem. As the principal nerve-center directing the energies of Jews in the U. S., the American Jewish Committee felt particularly concerned that this annually-recurring celebration should once again be observed. For the AJC and its associates had been warring against it, tirelessly, aggressively, year in and year out, for well onto half a century.

 

It was true that the Jewish siege had not been entirely without effect. Indeed, in its outward aspects, the festival of Christmas had become debased almost beyond recognition. Yet beneath the tinsel and the Tin Pan Alley blare, there still lay the prime, insistent reality that this was a day of jubilation because on it Christians celebrated the Birth of the Incarnate God. That this should stand as our foremost national holiday, marked America — vestigially, at least — as a Christian country. And so, one cold, troubled day last January, the Jews of the American Jewish Committee met together to analyze, with Jewish deliberation, the problem of Christmas. And, after much discussion, the Jews of the American Jewish Committee came to some conclusions, which, with Jewish anxiety, they formulated into a program and promulgated in the next issue of their paper, the Committee Reporter.

 

Underlying this program is a simple, forthright proposition: If Christmas celebrations still endure in America, despite all the Jews have done to combat them, then the Jews must do more. If thus far Jewish warfare on Christmas has consisted mainly of sniping and skirmishes, this year, the AJC declares, there must be a blitz. Moreover, the Jews must strike not when the signs of the holiday are already upon us, in November or December, but while Christmas is still out of sight and, for most Americans, out of mind. This year the Jews must launch their attack in July.

 

The fatal fallacy of holding back their fire too long had been strikingly demonstrated to the Jews in an incident of Christmas, 1955. The Superintendent of Schools of Sayreville, New Jersey, one R. S. Pollack, had sent the following letter to all public school principals in town, directing them to abolish from their planned Christmas programs any indications whatsoever of the day’s religious significance. In its purpose and tone, its appeal to the law and the changing times, the letter seemed to the Jews a masterpiece. Yet it failed in its goal. Before Pollack’s “suggestions” could be put into effect, the Board of Education of Sayreville demanded the letter’s withdrawal.

 

                                *   *   *   *   *

 

Office of the Superintendent
Sayreville Public Schools
425 Main Street
December 6, 1955

Superintendent’s Bulletin 14

Subject: Christmas and the New Jersey Department of Education.
Anti-discrimination Division

To: All Principals

The purpose of this bulletin is advisory. We are told, by the State department in charge of enforcing the anti-discrimination statutes, that there is a growing feeling, in various parts of the state, with respect to the celebration of Christmas by special observances and exercises in public schools. While this is not yet a situation which could be characterized as a problem, it is one that is growing and which will require our attention in the near future. It might, therefore, be wise to be somewhat beforehand in this respect with the end in view of lessening the impact in this community if, when and as the situation becomes critical.

At this time, no specific action is indicated but it may be wise to consider, beginning at once, how the Christmas Program to be offered in your school could be re-planned so as to de-emphasize the sectarian religious aspect thereof and to emphasize instead the folklore values. As an illustration, it may be possible to substitute such folksongs as “Deck the Halls with Holly” for one of the more religious type songs which are generally used. It is the opinion of your Superintendent that within the foreseeable future, say the next three to ten years, it will be required by the courts that the specifically religious aspect of the celebration be deleted from public school programs and that it will become illegal to use some of the hymns and anthems that are now quite common and that it will become necessary to avoid pageants involving the nativity, angels and similar props. It is suggested that it might be well to begin to replan this program in this direction so that the change-over is so gradual as to be unnoticeable to the general public over a period of years.

Signed: R. S. Pollack, Superintendent

                                      *   *   *   *   *  

For the high-tensioned American Jewish Committee, this and similar incidents added up to a lesson. “Holidays spur emotions to a high pitch,” observed the Committee Reporter. “The man who objects to some aspect of a Christmas observance at Christmas-time is unlikely to get anything accomplished — with the possible exception of incensing his neighbors against the interloper who seems to be threatening their deepest social and religious value.”

 

Thus, as this mid-summer issue of The Point is published, as Catholics are concerning themselves with matters like suntans and sailboats, the Jews of America are turning their thoughts to Christmas. Briefed by the American Jewish Committee, they are at this moment beginning their drive for a beach-head, confident that the seasonal psychology of Christians will result in their being unopposed.

 

The procedure called for by the AJC is cautious, thorough, and painfully Jewish. It involves such measures as a quiet “reconnaissance” before battle begins, to determine where and how Christmas is observed. This is to be followed by “intensive discussions among representative local Jewish leaders and rabbis,” at which it is imperative that “the possible consequence of any course of action be clearly spelled out” (“otherwise, the first heavy winds of community conflict may sweep away supporters who simply do not appreciate the implications”). Finally, when all preliminary steps have been taken, the entire Jewish population in each community is to move against Christmas as a single, coordinated body. (“It should never be a one-man foray,” warns the AJC).

 

There is, however, one group of Jews who are likely to be coordinated with difficulty — namely, the merchants. In past years, these enterprising hucksters have enthusiastically taken part in the annual anti-Christmas drives of their co-racists — when the object of those drives was simply to strip Christmas, by any means available, of its Christian meaning. As their contribution, the Jewish shopkeepers managed to transform the festival into a commercial heyday, dedicated to the swapping of unreadable books for unwearable ties. By this endeavor they not only rendered a handsome service to their race, but pulled in their richest profits of the year.

 

But the strategy for 1956 may find the Jewish merchants less eager to participate. For this year official Jewry will not be satisfied with seeing Christmas reduced to a money-making interfaith “folk festival.” The American Jewish Committee has finally decided that, no matter what trappings are hung on it, Christmas can never become a Jewish holiday. It is at root unalterably Christian. And therefore, concludes the AJC, the Jews of America will never know peace or happiness till Christmas is utterly banished from American public life. If Christians care to continue observing the feast in the privacy of their homes, that is their own affair; but there must be no official recognition of the day by way of civic or public school programs.

 

That is the goal which American Jews, this very summer, are striving for.

 

                                     *   *   *   *   *

 

In the American Jewish Committee’s summary report for the years 1954 and 1955, its executive vice-president describes the Committee’s work as “our long range efforts to cope with the problem that has been with us for 2,000 years.” That problem is, of course, Christmas — and all that has followed upon it. Saint Matthew’s Gospel tells us, in fact, that from the very first hint of a Christmas the Jews began to worry. At the mere rumor that the Messias might have been born, “Herod the King was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.”

 

Through centuries of dispersion, the Jews carried this anxiety in their hearts. In Babylon, and Spain, and Turkey, and Poland, and Russia. In the ghettos of Rome and Antwerp, Vienna and Prague, they watched each succeeding Christian December, and saw in each new Christmas Day the starting again of their troubles. Bethlehem is the beginning of the changeless Gospel story. And Christ in the arms of His Virginal Mother is a fleeting prelude to Christ in the outstretched arms of the Cross — to Christ put to death by the mobs of Jerusalem — to Christ of the Crucifix, Whose Precious Blood is fallen as a curse upon the children of the Jews.

 

That this anxiety about Christmas fills Jewish hearts in America, we have long since known. The American Jewish Committee’s Christmas-in-July plan is notable in its boldness and daring, but not in its ultimate objective: that Jewish proposal desired down the centuries: the outlawing of Christmas everywhere. Such a proposal may not be forthcoming from the American Jewish Committee this year — or even next — but individual Jewish leaders have been lately, however indiscreetly, tipping their hand on the matter.

 

We are grateful to a reader in Portland, Oregon, who mailed us several weeks ago the most forthright “tip” we have yet seen. It was in the form of a news-clipping from the local paper, the Portland Oregonian. The clipping was dated Sunday, April 1, 1956 and the caption in bold type read: “New Testament Branded as Libel by Rabbi Nodel.” Under the signature of Oregonian staff writer, Gerry Pratt, the article began: “Rabbi Julius J. Nodel in the role of defense attorney for the Jews of the world Friday night branded the New Testament a work of malicious libel and the story of events leading to the trial of Jesus and crucifixion, a dragon seed from which has come misery, bloodshed and suspicion. ”

 

The Oregonian is the largest newspaper in the state and Nodel is the principal Rabbi. This blasphemous explosion against Our Lord and the Gospels cannot be dismissed as idle ghetto-raving.

 

For the Catholic priests of America the issue is unescapably clear: Christmas, Christ’s Mass, their Mass, is in danger. The protection can come only from themselves, in their Sacrament.

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The Point

Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

August, 1956

 

SOME JEWS IN GENTILE CLOTHING

 

I — Dublin’s Lord Mayor

By now, there is no household in all the forty-eight states which is not abundantly aware of the fact that the new Lord Mayor of Dublin, Ireland, is a Jew. The Jewish-controlled public press of America has out-done itself in presenting every detail of the unlikely story of Robert Briscoe — fighter for Ireland’s freedom, intimate friend of de Valera, long-time representative of the Irish people in their parliament.

 

And for the “little” Jews of America, lest they be tempted to take too seriously this fiction of a patriotic Jew, there has been equal coverage in the strictly Jewish publications. A typical account may be found in the National Jewish Monthly, current issue. Robert Briscoe is therein revealed to be one of the founders of the Dublin Lodge of B’nai B’rith and an “active supporter” of the infamous Irgun.

 

This is all the tip-off an American Jew needs. Robert Briscoe has in no sense abandoned the objectives of his own kind by becoming the Mayor of Dublin. Membership in the B’nai B’rith means a total and conscious dedication to the highest goal of Judaeo-Masonry: the complete destruction of the Christian world and the establishment of the kingdom of Anti-Christ himself. Briscoe’s support of the Irgun is equally telling. It was this band of Jewish marauders which took chief credit for desecrating the Catholic churches and shrines of Palestine, destroying Catholic hospitals, shooting at Catholic schools and convents, and generally wrecking and defiling Catholic property in the Holy Land at the rate of two million dollars worth a year.

 

It matters little whether Mayor Briscoe has been able to keep these facts about himself suppressed in 95-per cent Catholic Dublin. For what is troubling Dublin’s Catholic conscience right now is the bare, incontestable information that the city’s chief magistrate is a Jew, who will not make the Sign of the Cross, who will not say the Our Father or the Hail Mary, who denies that the Ever-Blessed Virgin is the Mother of God, and who thinks that the adorable Jesus present in all the Catholic tabernacles of Dublin is not the Messias promised by God, but is rather a brazen impostor.

 

II — Barney’s Career

 

As every man knows, the one part of a newspaper where shots of Jewish profiles seldom appear is the sports section. Somehow, when it comes to walloping a baseball, or plunging through tackle, or even paddling a tennis ball over a net, Jews exhibit a remarkable lack of ability. Consequently, that supreme adulation which Americans bestow on good athletes — the unqualified American Heroes — has thus far been reserved for Gentiles.

 

The only game crowded with Jewish players is basketball. But this is a special case. In his book Farewell to Sport, former sportswriter Paul Gallico accounts for it as follows: “The reason, I suspect, that it (basketball) appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging, and general smart-aleckness.”

 

Inasmuch as the American public has never found such traits particularly endearing, the fact that lots of Jews play basketball does not affect the rule: Jews do not become Heroes.

 

Once, however, there was a Jew who almost broke the rule. He was a boxer, and he almost became a Hero.

 

His name was Barney Ross, and at one time (1935-1938) he held the welterweight boxing championship of the world. Now, boxing is a sport whose top men are, or were, freely idolized. Yet, for some reason, the public restrained itself with Barney. Perhaps they were bothered by the still-vivid memories of another star Jewish boxer, Max Baer — Maxie the Clown — who, having sampled the right hand of a young aspirant named Joe Louis, abruptly terminated his clowning and his career by squatting ingloriously on the canvas while the referee counted ten.

 

And so, Barney Ross won his championship title, held it for three years, and finally lost it, without once having the public really warm up to him. But then, just when it seemed he had lost all hope of becoming a Hero, Barney got a second chance.

 

When the hostilities known as World War II commenced, Barney Ross discovered with dismay that he was at the awkward age which made a call from his local draft hoard imminent. It would be unseemly for him to seek a “4-F” status; nor would the public be likely to countenance his trotting off with the rest of the Jewish soldiers to language, or radar, or cooks-and-bakers school. Unable to find a neutral corner, Barney, in wild desperation, signed up with the Marines.

 

It was a fortunate move. For, though he had to spend some miserable days and nights crouched in a foxhole while his Marine Division fought for Guadalcanal, still, after the battle was over, Barney was sent back home. He arrived to a fanfare of publicity, and in short order found himself presented with a Silver Star for “heroism under fire,” invited to the White House for a personal citation from the President, awarded a plaque as boxing’s Man of the Year, honored at banquets and celebrations all over the country — and, to top it all, promised a medical discharge as soon as things would quiet down a little.

 

At last, Barney was a Hero. And not just a Sports Hero, but that most exalted of all American specimens, a War Hero. He was one Jew who had finally made good — that is, in the newspapers.

 

But for some reason Americans weren’t believing all they read in the papers that year, and the high-powered campaign to present the nation with a glorified Jew slowly ground to a stop. The cause of this failure we don’t know. Maybe too many of the Marines who had fought on Guadalcanal had been writing letters home, telling on Barney. We do know that when he came to Boston in the early summer of 1943, shortly after his return to the States, he was hooted and hissed out of town by a large and eloquent delegation of servicemen, including several hundred Marines from the barracks in Chelsea.

 

After a few hapless months touring the country, Barney Ross disappeared from public view. He was not heard from again until 1946, when he was admitted to the government hospital at Lexington, Kentucky. For Barney had become a drug addict, and was in need of extended medical treatment.

 

The last chapter in the saga of the Jew who almost became a Hero appeared in the New York Times of March 31, 1948. Released from the hospital, Ross had applied for a passport that he might go to Palestine and fight in the Jewish army which was then terrorizing the countryside in its efforts to establish a Jewish state. When our State Department refused his request, Barney announced that although he didn’t want to lose his U. S. citizenship, still, he was going so Palestine anyway, because, he said, he was determined “to be a private in that army.”

 

For the career of such an unlikely Jew, it made a likely finale.

 

III — Boston’s Inferno

 

Back in the 1880’s, when Boston, Massachusetts still cherished its dream of being the “Athens of America,” and when many Bostonians remained convinced that their home-town was indeed the “Hub of the Universe,” it came to pass that Boston acquired for itself a permanent symphony orchestra. The job of conducting this precious cultural acquisition could, of course, be entrusted only to someone of integral Boston lineage and impeccable Harvard training — or so the Brahmins thought. When the Symphony’s first concert season opened, however, Bostonians were confronted with a most unseemly gentleman who had but lately stepped off the boat. He bore the suspicious name of Henschel, and, once he appeared on the stage, even the farthest reaches of the second balcony could only conclude that the Boston Symphony’s first conductor was an unashamed, full-blooded Jew.

 

Boston was thus the more prepared, several seasons later, for the news that its first permanent opera company was likewise in the hands of a Jew, one Henry Russell.

 

With the passing years, local Puritan concert-goers have watched the Jewish grip on their music tighten. And the process has been facilitated by the fact that Boston’s musical taste is of the sort which the Jews are most able to satisfy. For the city likes virtuosos — the kind of high-strung, high-paid soloist that every Jewish parent is planning on when he first straps his three-year-old offspring to a piano stool.

 

Example: Boston is much taken with keyboard performers like Artur Rubenstein, Myra Hess, Rudolph Serkin, Wanda Landowska, Artur Schnabel, William Kapell, Alexander Brailowsky, Leopold Godowsky, Vladimir Horowitz — all Jews. And with concert-violinists like Fritz Kreisler, Isaac Stern, Nathan Milstein, Mischa Mischakoff, Joseph Szigeti, Efrem Zimbalist, Joseph Fuchs, Mischa Elman, Michel Piastro, Erica Morini, Yehudi Menuhin, Jascha Heifitz — Jews who lend support to the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia ’s boast that “The entire history of violin-playing is virtually a Jewish art.”

 

Beyond this, Boston is a “symphony” rather than an “opera” town. Russell’s Boston Opera Company quickly faded, but Henschel’s Boston Symphony became world-famous. Among the Yankees, in fact, going to the Symphony took on all the aspects of a new form of worship. As one astute, out-of-town observer remarked: when a Boston lady walks down the center aisle of Symphony Hall, you fully expect a profound genuflection before she enters her seat.

 

The Boston Symphony Orchestra a few years ago sustained the loss of its most long-lived Jewish conductor, Serge Koussevitzky, the despot of local music for twenty-five years. And when devoted Bostonians were not actually in the presence of Koussevitzky (or his Jewish colleague, Arthur Fiedler) at Symphony Hall, they were home listening to recorded performances of the rest of the country’s symphony orchestras, directed by the rest of the country’s Jewish conductors. For, with about three notable exceptions, the men who gesticulate before the chief orchestras of the nation are all Jews.

 

The following is a partial list: Artur Rodzinski, Alfred Wallenstein, Leonard Bernstein, George Szell, Erich Leinsdorf, Otto Klemperer, Efrem Kurtz, Bruno Walter, Vladimir Golschmann, Walter Damrosch, Eugene Ormandy, Alexander Smallens, Fritz Reiner, Pierre Monteux, Josef Pasternak, Erich Kleiber, Max Reiter, Fabien Sevitzky, Andre Kostelanetz.

 

And what, in the face of all this, does The Point propose for a remedy? The situation is obviously critical. What do we recommend as a course of effective action for Bostonians? Shall we start a crusade to rescue the holy precincts of Symphony Hall from the sacrilegious hands of the Jews? Shall we picket the box-office? Shall we assault the place? Storm it in mid-season? Shall we sweat and bleed and die for the right to hear Beethoven conducted by a Mayflower descendant?

 

After proper consideration, we think not. We think that perhaps this time we will restrain our wrath, run the risk of being labeled “above it all,” and just contemplate with medieval, Romish satisfaction, the prospect of a stuffy hall-full of heretics being serenaded by a pit-full of infidels — for all eternity.

 

Dante himself might envy us such a vision.

 

IV — Elmer’s Dilemma

 

While it is surprising to find a Jew who has made himself acceptable to Dublin’s politics, New York’s prizefights, or Boston’s polite society, it is closer to sensational to discover a Jew who has been attacked by the B’nai B’rith, who thinks the big Jewish money-drives are a fraud, and who says that the State of Israel is an aggregation of aggressive “kikes” looking for trouble!

 

There does exist such a Jew. And, what is more, he is a full-fledged rabbi. His name is Elmer Berger.

 

Rabbi Berger is such an unusual Jew that a few months ago, when his latest anti-Zionist book appeared, the publishers mailed a complimentary review copy to the editors of The Point. They apparently felt that here, at last, was one Jew that we could find no quarrel with. Here was a Jew who agrees with us that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to America; that the leaders of Zionism in our country have been forcing the hand, and thus forging the policy, of the U. S. State Department; that American Jews are promoting by every means possible the nationalist program of a foreign state (Israel) and that, therefore, they will not “melt” into the stream of American life.

 

We do understand Rabbi Berger. He stems from a tradition in Jewry which has been all but blotted out by the incredible triumph of Zionism during the past fifty years. Rabbi Berger is the more cautious Jew; the Jew who likes the good life which comes with being only a moderate parasite among the Goyim; the Jew who willingly takes on the protective coloring of cultural assimilation; who feels that a Christmas tree in his living-room is very little compromise for all the security it will bring to his children.

 

Berger long ago scoured the country for other Jews who might be ill-disposed toward Zionism. Such dregs as he found were subsequently organized as the American Council for Judaism, chief member: Mr. Lessing Rosenwald, retired head of Sears, Roebuck and Co.

 

With this straggling band of cautious Jews behind him, Berger has become official publicist for the wishful theory that Jews can really be normal citizens. And it is in the course of this publicizing, in the heat of his anti-Zionist fervor, that the rabbi truly reveals himself. For in his effort to be against Zionism but for Judaism, Rabbi Berger seasons his argument with all the standard Jewish sneers at the Catholic Church. He brands the Church’s influence in Western society as “the iron ring of medievalism”; he describes the flowering of Catholic life in the Middle Ages as “a generally decadent society”; he charges that “Paul of Tarsus” started the Catholic Church which Jesus Christ (a mere “human personality”) had no notion of founding. And much more.

 

Rabbi Berger’s message to the Zionists of America is that they are headed for pogroms, because Americans will not tolerate their allegiance to a foreign Jewish state. The Zionists might well remind the rabbi that, long before Zionism ever existed, Catholic men were placing the likes of Elmer Berger in well-defined ghettos, with conspicuous badges, compulsory sermons, and not one glimmer of “citizenship.”

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The Point

Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

September, 1956

 

ANOTHER CHALLENGE TO JEWS AND MASONS

 

The Point is against the Jews. It is against the Masons. It is against Interfaith. The Point maintains that the Catholic Church is against the Jews, against the Masons, and against Interfaith. And, by way of proving its contention, The Point quotes freely from Catholic saints and popes, who are unmistakably against the Jews, against the Masons, and against Interfaith.

 

Occasionally someone objects to this Point procedure. How do we know, snips our critic, that the Church hasn’t modernized her ideas since the time of the saints and popes whom we quote in our favor? Or, at least, how do we know she won’t?

 

Last month, our objector got his answer. It was in the form of a news bulletin from Rome, announcing that Catholics can soon expect to have a new saint; for the cause has been introduced and the first steps successfully completed in the canonization of Giovanni-Maria Mastai-Ferretti, His Holiness, Pope Pius IX.

 

For those with eyes to see, this announcement is clear and cogent evidence that the Catholic Church, when she acts officially, is most emphatically not “modernizing her ideas,” regarding either herself, her mission, or her enemies.

 

Pope Pius IX, who shepherded the Church through thirty-two embattled years — next to Saint Peter’s, the longest pontificate in history — was hated by the Jews and Masons during his lifetime and has been remembered by them ever since. He was their enemy, deliberately and implacably; and so abidingly forceful were his utterances against them, so decisive his actions, that he has stood to this day as a symbol of opposition to all that Judaeo-Masonry strives to achieve.

 

And now this man is about to be presented to the Catholic world as a model: a supreme and shining exemplar of orthodoxy in teaching and holiness in conduct. And as salt for their wounds, the Jews and Masons will note that this celebrated foe of theirs has been carefully and singularly chosen for the dignity he is to be given. For of all the popes of the last three centuries, only he and his admiring successor, Saint Pius X, have been singled out by the Church for sainthood.

 

By way of introducing “Pio Nono” and of indicating the reasons for the Jewish-Masonic rancor against him, we invite you to consider the following propositions:

 

“Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall believe true.”

 

“Men may, in any religion, find the way of eternal salvation and attain eternal salvation.”

 

“In our times it is no longer necessary that the Catholic religion should be the only religion of the State to the exclusion of all others whatsoever.”

 

“Hence it has been wisely provided by law that in certain regions, Catholic in name, immigrants shall be allowed the public exercise of their own forms of religion.”

 

Any faithful reader of America’s Jew-dominated press will be quick to endorse these four statements as self-evidently true. They are the very foundation of the Interfaith movement. Without them, “Brotherhood” is inconceivable. The National Conference of Christians and Jews stakes its whole future on their affirmation.

 

Which is just one of the reasons that the canonization of Pope Pius IX is a wonderful and delightful thing to contemplate. For Pius IX sets down the above propositions in his famous Syllabus of Modern Errors (1864), and flatly condemns all four of them as flagrant and untenable heresy!

 

Against Freemasonry, rife in nineteenth-century Europe, Pius IX waged an equally fierce warfare. He referred to the ever-plotting, many-faced society as “that perverse sect, popularly called Masonic, which, hidden at first in dark alleys, has finally come to light, to ruin religion and civil society.”

 

And by way of confirming the Pope’s judgment against them, the Masons, led by the vile, viciously anti-Catholic Mazzini and his eager colleague Garibaldi, stole from Pius IX that swath of lands in mid-Italy called the Papal States — the Patrimony of Saint Peter — which had been given to the Vicars of Christ, for their welfare and protection, since the time of the Emperor Constantine.

 

Even more than for his anti-Masonic stand, however, Pius IX is today remembered for his iron determination to hold back the Jews. There has yet to be published a Jewish evaluation of the nineteenth century which fails to mention how Pius IX, so “tolerant” toward the Jews during his first two years in the papacy, turned completely about-face, and held adamantly to the Church’s long-established policy of keeping all Jews very well in hand.

 

The remainder of our issue is devoted to the most-publicized incident, and the ultimate summary, of Pope Pius IX’s courageous fight to protect the Church of Christ from His crucifiers.

 

The Mortara Case

 

During the early 1850’s, the Italian city of Bologna was still under the temporal rule of the Pope, a portion of the traditional Papal States. There was resident in Bologna at this time a certain Mortara family, Jews who, while excluded by the Pope from the privileges of citizenship, managed to make a very comfortable living among their Catholic neighbors. Encouraged by the growing revolutionary spirit of the city (which was soon to be out of Papal hands and annexed by the Masonic government of Italy), the Mortaras had lately defied the very explicit Papal law which forbids Jews to have Christian servants. A young Catholic girl of Bologna, Anna Morisi, had been hired as a domestic in the Mortara household.

 

One day in November of 1857, Anna was describing to a friend the highly serious illness of one of the Mortara children. At the friend’s suggestion that perhaps the child should be baptized, discreetly, before it died, Anna protested that under no circumstances could she do that. She then proceeded to unburden her Catholic conscience by revealing that once before, in a similar circumstance, she had baptized a dying Mortara baby, and the child had afterward recovered — was now, in fact, a healthy six-year-old, and being raised as a Jew!

 

News of the Mortaras’ baptized boy ultimately reached the Archbishop of Bologna. The sacred integrity of Baptism, and the Church’s obligation to provide for the Christian upbringing of baptized children, left only one course of action to the prelate. Under orders approved by the Holy Office, Anna Morisi, protected by Papal guards, left her Jewish employer’s house, and with her there went the baptized child, Edgar Mortara.

 

The arrival of Edgar in Rome, where he was to be raised as a ward of Pius IX, made hotly-protested news in every major city of Europe and America. There were cries of “Medievalism!” “Inquisition.” “Popish Tyranny!” Immediately, mass meetings of protest were organized in England and the United States. The powerful alliance of German rabbis sent a formal petition to Pius IX, demanding the Mortara child’s immediate release. Sir Moses Montefiore, the Rothschilds’ roving ambassador, rushed to the Papal Palace at Rome to deliver a personal protest to the Pope. Unmoved, His Holiness dispatched Cardinal Antonelli to tell Sir Moses about the Church’s ancient position in the matter of baptized children, adding that by their boldness in employing a Catholic servant, the Mortaras themselves must take full responsibility for any unpleasantness that had resulted. Other indignant callers, and many appeared, got similar receptions.

 

Within two years of Edgar Mortara’s arrival at Rome, the city of Bologna was seized by the Italian Kingdom. Under this new and anti-papal government, the Jews attempted to institute criminal proceedings against the servant-girl, Anna Morisi, charging her with kidnapping. Anna, however, had since entered a convent, and when it became known that the Jews were proposing to violate the sacredness of the cloister and drag a nun into the civil courts, popular indignation forced them to abandon the cause, and to consider the whole Mortara Case ended.

 

Actually, the end did not come until 1940. In March of that year, a white-haired Augustinian priest died at Liege in Belgium. He was nearly ninety years old and all during his priestly life he had been known as Father Pius, O.S.A., a name which he had taken in honor of his beloved guardian, Pope Pius IX. There were few who took notice of Father Pius’ death, and fewer who realized that he was the same Edgar Mortara who close to a century before had so electrified the world.

 

Cut off from the cursed blood of the Jews, fed upon the Precious Blood of the Altar, Father Pius Mortara, we have good reason to hope, is even now, in the Beatific Vision, a happy symbol of the sacredness of Holy Baptism, a witness to the courageous faith of a holy Holy Father.

 

Summary

 

Throughout the heat of the Mortara controversy, the official position of Pope Pius IX was entrusted, for defense and exposition, to the Jesuit fathers of the magazine Civiltà Cattolica. Pius IX had himself established these priests in their special status as a papal “college of writers, constituted in perpetuity.” And they became his most insistent and outspoken champions.

 

It was only a few years after Pius IX’s death that Civiltà Cattolica published a series of three articles which attempted to isolate and identify those forces which had so beset Catholic Europe in the wake of the French Revolution; which had warred incessantly against the Pope; and which had gained the enormous triumph of seeing Pius IX end his days as a prisoner in the Vatican, dispossessed of the ancient temporal domains of the papacy.

 

This series of Civiltà Cattolica articles, dated October, November, and December, 1890, is entitled “The Jewish Question in Europe.” The magazine’s summary statement, faithfully reflecting the mature and saintly judgment of Pope Pius IX, is reprinted below. It is the Church’s traditional position, and, therefore, as our readers will recognize, The Point ’s.

 

“In order that the Christian nations may be delivered from the yoke of Judaism and Freemasonry, which is daily growing more oppressive, the only way open to them is to go back along the road they have traversed, to the point where they took the wrong turning. If the Jews are not rendered harmless by means of special laws depriving them of that civil equality to which they have no right, nothing useful or lasting will be accomplished. In view of their presence in different countries and their unchangeable character of foreigners in every nation, of enemies of the people in every country that supports them, and of a society segregated from the societies amongst which they live; in view of the Talmudic moral code which they follow and the fundamental dogma of their religion which spurs them on to get hold of the possessions of all peoples by any means in their power, as, according to it, they are entitled to rule the world; in view of the fact that the experience of many centuries and our present experience have proved conclusively that the equality of civil rights with Christians, granted them in Christian states, has had for effect the oppression of Christians by them, it follows as a necessary consequence that the only way to safeguard the rights of Christians, where the Jews are permitted to dwell, is to regulate their sojourn by laws such that it will be impossible for them to injure Christians.

 

“This is what has been done in the past. This is what the Jews have been seeking to undo for the last hundred years. This is what will have to be done over again, sooner or later, whether one likes it or not. The position of power to which the laws inspired by the Revolution have raised them in our day is digging under their feet an abyss just as deep as the height to which they have ascended.

 

“It is certain that one of the signs of the end of the world foretold in Holy Scripture is the entrance of Israel into the One True Fold. But we are not convinced that there are indications of that conversion visible at present. This people scattered over the face of the earth … is today what it became after the destruction of Jerusalem, without a king, without a priesthood, without a temple, without a native land, and, at the same time, a most bitter enemy of the Name and of the Church of Jesus Christ, True God and True Man, crucified by their ancestors. We see no proofs, evident or otherwise, that it is likely to change for the better and welcome as its Saviour that Jesus Whom it put to death.”

 

— Civiltà Cattolica, Rome, 1890

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The Point

Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

October, 1956

 

THE CHURCH MILITANT AND THE JEWS

 

Some Front-line Reports  

Late last month, Harvard University settled down to its academic year number three hundred and twenty. Although statistics are not yet available on the student body, we have it from an exceptionally reliable source that the University’s faculty is still more than fifty per cent Gentile.

 

This measured majority of non-Jewish instructors, however, is in no sense calculated to make the Jewish student uneasy — nor does it. For all of Harvard’s Gentile faculty members are well-schooled and long-practiced in giving their annual courses the anti-Christian, and thus inevitably the Jewish, slant.

 

One such Harvard Gentile is Doctor Gordon Allport, professor of psychology, champion of UNESCO, and pride of the University’s recent and bulging Social Relations Department. Among Doctor Allport’s more eloquent classroom lectures is the one which deals with the “anti-Semitism of the Saints.” In 1954, he incorporated this material in his book, The Nature of Prejudice, and got Paul Blanshard’s publisher to distribute it for him.

 

At the risk of minor scandal, we shall be bold enough to say that in one aspect of his argument, Doctor Allport is not entirely wrong. He points out that it is in no sense exceptional with the Catholic Church’s Saints to “slip from piety into prejudice.” Since by prejudice Doctor Allport here means anti-Jewishness, we are bound to agree. In fact we have determined to illustrate the matter at some length this month, with pertinent stories and quotes from our files. The miscellaneous items which now follow, expanding the theme of “our anti-Jewish Saints,” may reveal even to Doctor Allport the enormity of the truth which, however clumsily, he managed to stumble upon.

 

                                *   *   *   *   *

 

The most exalted of the Church’s Saints are, of course, her martyrs. And the very first martyr, as every parochial school student knows, was the deacon Saint Stephen.

 

After hearing Stephen’s denunciation of the Jews in Chapter Seven of the Acts of the Apostles, and after seeing the vengeful Jews stone him to death in the same chapter, a Catholic child is hardly surprised to learn that the chief of the Apostles, Saint Peter, was constantly preaching against the Jews, reprimanding them for killing Our Lord, and that Saint Paul, who gloried in his title “The Apostle to the Gentiles,” complained in his First Epistle to the Thessalonians that the Jews “both killed the Lord Jesus, and the prophets, and have persecuted us, and please not God, and are adversaries to all men; prohibiting us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved, to fill up their sins always: for the wrath of God is come upon them to the end.”

 

Similarly, Saint John, Our Lord’s favorite Apostle, refers to the Jews as those “that say they are Jews and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan” — a statement which echoes the words of Our Lord Himself Who, in Saint John’s Gospel, tells the Jews they are the children of the devil.

 

Knowing that such precedents have been set by the Church’s very first Saints, Catholic children (and those who have become as little Catholic children) are prepared for what follows: the example of canonized Catholics, all down the Christian centuries, whose lives further illustrate, with an overwhelming variety of detail, that Saints and Jews just don’t mix!

 

                                   *   *   *   *   *

 

California’s mission church of San Juan Capistrano — dear to American folklore as a romantic haven to which the swallows annually and melodiously come back — is dedicated to a fifteenth century Franciscan friar known during his life and since as “the scourge of the Jews.”

 

How Saint John Capistran came by his admiring title is a record of fiery sermons, assiduous labors, and incidental remarks — for instance, his unfollowed but unforgotten suggestion to the city of Rome that it round up all its Jews, herd them aboard ships, and deport them overseas.

 

When a Sacred Host was desecrated in the Polish city of Breslau, Saint John Capistran persuaded the King of Poland to revoke the pro-Jewish ordinances he had allowed and to order all Jews in Breslau imprisoned until the culprits be identified. Ultimately, 58 Jews were found guilty of the Host desecration and executed; whereupon the local rabbi hanged himself.

 

The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia (a work concocted at the expense of the U. S. Government, as a project of the WPA) pays a tribute to Saint John Capistran’s efforts by including him in its select list of the greatest anti-Semites of all time.

  

                                    *   *   *   *   *

The teachings and preachings of Saint Ambrose, fourth century Bishop of Milan, have so impressed the Church with their holy brilliance that he has been long designated one of the four Great Latin Doctors.

 

Among the utterances of this most learned teacher there are, not surprisingly, some stringent words concerning the Jews. “The very conversation with them is a great pollution,” is one of the Ambrosian aphorisms.

 

Once, in a sermon at Milan, Saint Ambrose thundered so mightily against the synagogue, calling it “a house of impiety, a receptacle of folly which God Himself has condemned,” that his Milanese parishoners, on leaving the Cathedral, hurried over to the nearest Jewish temple and burned it to the ground. When a delegation of the city’s Jews and their friends protested the deed to Saint Ambrose, he brought them up short with the following notice:

 

“I declare that I set fire to the synagogue, or at least that I ordered those that did it, that there might not be a place where Christ was denied. If it be objected to me that I did not actually set the synagogue on fire here, I answer that it began to be burnt by the judgment of God.”

 

On another occasion, when the Emperor Theodosius ordered a Bishop in the East to pay for the rebuilding of a demolished synagogue, Saint Ambrose, seeing Theodosius present in his Cathedral, refused to start Mass until the Emperor had promised to rescind the order.

 

                                    *   *   *   *   *

 

If any of our current candidates for public office would like to know what qualities the Church thinks a ruler should have, he will find them exemplified in the canonized king for whom the city of Saint Louis, Missouri, is named.

 

Ruling France from 1226 to 1270, King Louis IX stood as a beacon in the brightest of all Catholic centuries. The wisdom and justice of his public acts, together with his personal valor and devotion (he led the armies of the last two Crusades) are the legacy and legend of his country.

 

In his solicitude for both the earthly and eternal welfare of his subjects, Saint Louis was, of course, a confirmed enemy of the Jews. His first recorded act against them was a decree, in 1230, prohibiting Jewish usurers from pursuing their lucrative occupation. Later he followed this up by prescribing that all French Christians who were indebted to Jews should slice one-third from the amount they owed.

 

In June of 1242, Saint Louis set the style for other Catholic monarchs by ordering, at Paris, Europe’s first official public burning of the Talmud. Additional copies of the Jewish book were confiscated and burned by order of the King in 1244 and in 1248.

 

Even more blazingly expressive than his Talmud-fueled fires, however, is Saint Louis’ forthright advice to the laity of France regarding disputations with Jews: “I say to you,” he told them, “that no one, unless he be a very good cleric, should argue with them; but the layman, when he heareth the Christian law reviled, should not defend it but by his sword, wherewith he should pierce the body of the reviler as far as it will go.”

 

                                        *   *   *   *   *

 

The Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Boston, the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Detroit, and Saint Alphonsus Church in New Orleans are three of the more than one hundred beautiful churches throughout the country which are staffed by the priests of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. These Redemptorist Fathers, as they are popularly called, belong to an order which was founded in Italy in the eighteenth century by an Italian Bishop and Doctor of the Church, Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori. And to the embarrassment of the more liberal Redemptorists, Saint Alphonsus Maria is true to traditional form on the question of the Jews.

 

In previous issues we have cited Saint Alphonsus’ prohibitions against Catholic patronage of Jewish physicians, and against Catholic support of Jewish candidates for public office. But like all the Church’s official theologians, Saint Alphonsus lashes out against the Jews for that supernatural, New-Testament reason: their betrayal and crucifixion of Our Lord. The Saint treats extensively of this betrayal in his book, The Passion and Death of Jesus Christ, and we quote the following passage from page 198 of Father Eugene Grimm’s authorized translation, bearing the Imprimatur of the late Cardinal Hayes, Archbishop of New York.

 

“Saint Luke says that Pilate delivered Jesus into the hands of the Jews that they might treat Him as they pleased. Jesus was delivered up to their will. (Luke xxiii, 25). This is what really happens when an innocent man is condemned. He is given over to the hands of his enemies, that they may take away his life by the death which is most pleasing to them. Unhappy Jews! you then said, His blood be upon us and upon our children. (Matthew xxvii, 25). You have prayed for the chastisement; it has already come. Your nation bears, and shall bear to the end of the world, the punishment due to the shedding of that innocent blood!”

 

                                       *   *   *   *   *  

 

“Marrano” is a Spanish word meaning swine. It is also a word used to identify that familiar figure of the Spanish Middle Ages: the Jew who had held his head over a Baptismal font and was pretending to be a Christian while remaining at heart a dedicated enemy of Christ.

 

So many were there of this breed, that during the early fifteenth century the professedly Jewish population of Spain dwindled from 5,000,000 members to 200,000. Except for the handful who were genuinely converted, the bulk of the four million-odd missing Jews had become Marranos. In the guise of Catholics, they crowded into, and crowded Gentiles out of, every phase of Spanish life. Not only were they the merchants and money-lenders of the country, its lawyers and physicians and apothecaries, they had finally come to dominate the royal court. Even the Church was beginning to buckle under the influence they exerted as monks, as priests, and, in ever-increasing numbers, as bishops.

 

Inevitably, Christian Spain awoke to the stark realization that the “converted Jews” in their midst had not been converted at all: that, indeed, they still hated the Catholic Church with the congenital fury of their race and longed to see her devastated — a work they were now terrifyingly equipped to accomplish.

 

In 1478, Queen Isabella of Spain (the same who later sent Columbus on his voyage to the New World), shaking off her Jewish councillors, petitioned Pope Sixtus IV to authorize the establishment of an Inquisition for the purpose of exposing secret Jews. The effectiveness of this Spanish Inquisition may be gauged by the frenzy with which the Jews have been denouncing it ever since.

 

Though the anti-Jewish Queen Isabella (who was eventually obliged, in 1492, to expel all Jews from Spain) has not been canonized, one of the first Inquisitors has been. He is Saint Peter Arbues, and so notably well did he do his job of finding and foiling the Marranos that they murdered him. A few weeks ago, on September 17, Catholic religious all over the world heard this commemoration read from the Roman Martyrology: “At Saragossa in Spain, of Saint Peter Arbues, first Inquisitor of the Faith in the Kingdom of Aragon, who was cruelly butchered by relapsed Jews for the sake of that Catholic Faith which he had so zealously protected by virtue of his office. Pope Pius IX added him to the list of martyr saints.”

 

                                      *   *   *   *   *

 

Four hundred years before the brutal attack on Saint Peter Arbues, another Saint, Pope Gregory VII, had been forced into action against the Jews of Spain. In 1081, Saint Gregory wrote to King Alphonso VI of Castile, “You must cease to allow Jews to rule over Christians … For to allow Christians to be subordinate to Jews, and to be subject to their judgment, is the same as to oppress God’s Church and to exalt the Synagogue of Satan. To wish to please the enemies of Christ means to treat Christ Himself with contempt.”

 

                                          *   *   *   *   *

 

We neglected to say at the outset of this issue that when Harvard’s Doctor Allport was looking around for a particular saint to illustrate his “piety and prejudice” theme, he chose that giant among the Church’s theologians, Saint John Chrysostom.

 

Ever since the early fifth century, John Chrysostom has been a name to terrorize the very boldest Jew in the ghetto. The Jewish Encyclopedia includes a special article on him, accusing him, among so many other things, of saying that the “holy ark” which Jews now have in their synagogue is “no better than any wooden box offered for sale in the market.”

 

The quotation from Saint Chrysostom which Doctor Allport selected for his book is a more famous one. It is taken from the Saint’s Six Homilies Against the Jews, as found in Migne’s Greek Patrology.

 

From this work we reprint the passage on “the synagogue” — a striking summary of the Catholic position, and a fitting conclusion for our miscellany of “holy bigotry.”

 

“The synagogue is worse than a brothel … it is the den of scoundrels, and the repair of wild beasts, the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults … a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ … a den of thieves, a house of ill fame, a dwelling of iniquity, a refuge of devils, a gulf and abyss of perdition … Whatever name even more horrible could be found, will never be worse than the synagogue deserves.”

_______________________________

The Point

Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

November, 1956

 

THE JEWISH PLAN TO DESTROY CHRISTIANITY

 

The Real Purpose of Interfaith

For nineteen hundred years Jewish spokesmen have been wrestling with an insistent and galling question: Why is it that wherever in the world Jews are found, there is also found distrust and hatred and loathing of Jews?

 

The Church’s explanation of this phenomenon is, of course, that it springs, directly and inevitably, from the curse which the Jews called down on their race when they rejected and crucified Christ. Unwilling to accept this solution, the Jews have given it a reverse twist and come forth with the accusation that, by telling people about the curse, the Church herself has brought on Jewish misery. This neat analysis constitutes the Jews’ definitive answer to their perennial question, Why are we hated? Thus, in January, 1944, the official organ of the American Jewish Congress, posing the query “Where is anti-Semitism spawned?” coyly replied, “In a denomination other than Protestant.”

 

Having furnished themselves with cause for shunning all things Catholic, however, it now appears that the Jews will not throw us aside entirely. For they are currently on view wrapping American Catholicism in a most fervent embrace — copiously illustrated in the daily press with prints of Jews shaking hands with Catholic priests, giving picnics for Catholic children, presenting plaques to Catholic bishops.

 

And what is the reason for this strange behavior? Is it some gross oversight on the part of American Jews? Are they abandoning their traditions? Or have they made a re-evaluation of the Church’s history and decided that she is not really so black as they once painted her?

 

No, the reason is none of these. It is simply that, along with their other schemes for wrecking the Church, the Jews are presently trying to see if they might not stifle her with affection. They are well aware that submission to Jewish attentions has a marvelously enfeebling effect upon Catholics. It makes them grow languid and doctrinally dissolute. It makes them lose all resemblance to those virile Catholics of history who forged Christian culture and preserved the Christian Faith. It makes them, in summary, willing and able participants in the activities of Interfaith — which, for a Catholic, is the final gesture of surrender to the Jewish embrace.

 

And herein the Jews exhibit a wiliness that marks them as true children of their father, who was, after all, an angel of light. For when they devised the cult of Interfaith, for the purpose of subverting the Church, the Jews did not set as its goal the condemnation of Talmud-burning or ghetto-building or other such apparent vexations of the Catholic past. Instead, they leveled their guns at a seemingly harmless, seemingly irrelevant principle of theology. Yet this principle is the bedrock upon which the entire structure of the Faith is laid: the dogma that the Church is the one divinely established way leading to eternal life.

 

Any participation in Interfaith involves a tacit but clear denial of this belief in the Church’s singularity. It involves the assumption that there exists a supreme, transcendent “Religion” with three aspects, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism, which are all three on a par, both naturally and supernaturally. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, as dean of New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, states the Jewish position with gratifying forthrightness. The very first obstacle in the way of “intergroup goodwill,” says the Rabbi, is the mistaken belief that, “There can be only one true method of salvation for all human beings, regardless of their group affiliations.” Driving this point home, Kaplan then continues, “As the United Nations should call for the surrender of absoluteness in national sovereignty, so should the World Parliament of Religions call for the renunciation by every religious communion of any claim to exclusive possession of salvation.”

 

The following resume of Church teaching will indicate just how thoroughly Catholics are committed to this doctrine of one-way-to-heaven, which Jewish Interfaith is so determined to destroy.

 

                                *   *   *   *   *

 

To begin with, the Catholic Church’s “claim to exclusive possession of salvation” is not some lately and lightly adopted fancy. From the moment that Our Lord founded it upon Saint Peter, the Church has proclaimed, through all of Peter’s successsors, that it is the one fold, the single ark, the only salvational refuge. Take, for example, the three following pronouncements, infallible teaching from three of our Holy Fathers. These unequivocal statements are binding upon every Catholic, and denial of them incurs the Church’s most resounding anathemas.

 

Pope Innocent III, with the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215: “There is but one universal Church of the faithful, outside of which no one at all can be saved.”

 

Pope Boniface VIII, in his bull Unam Sanctam, November 18, 1302: “Urged by Faith, we are obliged to believe and to hold that the Church is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. We firmly believe in her, and We confess that outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins … Furthermore, We declare, say, define, and pronounce, that it is wholly necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”

 

Pope Eugene IV, in his bull, Cantate Domino, February 4, 1441: “The most Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes, and preaches that none of those existing outside the Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life eternal; but that they will go into the eternal fire ‘which was prepared for the devil and his angels,’ unless before death they are joined with her; and that so important is the unity of this ecclesiastical body that only those remaining within this unity can profit by the sacraments of the Church unto salvation, and they alone can receive an eternal recompense for their fasts, their almsgiving, their other works of Christian piety, and the duties of a Christian soldier. No one, let his almsgiving he as great as it may, no one, even if he pour out his blood for the name of Christ, can be saved, unless he remain within the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church.”

 

When Pope Eugene IV issued the above decree in the fifteenth century, he was speaking in such accord with the traditions of the Church that we can go back one thousand years to the fifth century’s brilliant Saint Augustine and read the identical message in one of his sermons to the people of Caesarea: “No man can find salvation save in the Catholic Church. Outside the Catholic Church he can find everything except salvation. He can have dignities, he can have the Sacraments, can sing ‘Alleluia,’ answer ‘Amen,’ accept the Gospels, have faith in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and preach it, too, but never, except in the Catholic Church, can he find salvation.”

 

In the face of the Protestant Revolt, the saints of the sixteenth century were constantly called upon to profess the doctrine of “No Salvation Outside the Catholic Church.” Here is how one of them, Saint Peter Canisius, of the Society of Jesus, phrased it in his famous Catechism: “Outside this communion (as outside the ark of Noe) there is absolutely no salvation for mortals: not to Jews or pagans, who never received the Faith of the Church; not to heretics who, having received it, forsook or corrupted it; not to schismatics who left the peace and unity of the Church; finally neither to excommunicates who for any other serious cause deserve to be put away and separated from the body of the Church, like pernicious members … For the rule of Cyprian and Augustine is certain: he will not have God for his Father who would not have the Church for his Mother.”

 

To keep an explicit statement of the Catholic teaching on salvation always before her priests, the Church has relied not merely upon theology textbooks and bulky volumes of papal decrees. She has carefully placed the doctrine among the priests’ compulsory devotions. Thus, in the Roman Breviary, “the priest’s prayerbook,” we find the Athanasian Creed, that ancient profession of the Catholic Faith which begins: “Whosoever wishes to be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith, except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish eternally.”

 

After proclaiming the articles of the Creed, the prayer concludes: “This is the Catholic Faith, which except a man believe faithfully and firmly, he cannot be saved.”

 

For the Catholic laity, the Church’s “claim to exclusive possession of salvation” is the dogmatic underpinning of countless everyday observances. It is thus that Catholics are so strictly forbidden to attend non-Catholic religious services, to join and encourage any of the Freemasonic organizations, to read the proscribed works of non-Catholic writers, to marry someone who is not a member of the Church. And, to elaborate one such point, it is thus that a Catholic parent must keep his child away from the non-Catholic school, for, as Pope Pius XI decreed in his encyclical letter on the Christian Education of Youth: “We renew and confirm these declarations, as well as the Sacred Canons in which the frequenting of non-Catholic schools, whether neutral or mixed, those namely which are open to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, is forbidden for Catholic children, and can be at most tolerated, on the approval of the Ordinary alone, under determined circumstances of place and time, and with special precautions.”

 

The Catholically-schooled Catholic child is given a firm foundation in the unique necessity and singularity of his Faith. He learns, for example, that supreme lesson about Christian Baptism: even the helpless, new-born child of a devout Catholic mother will never see God in Heaven, if he dies unbaptized. With this norm of Divine justice in mind, the Catholic child is hardly taken aback when he later learns that a convert to the Catholic Faith, upon being received into the Church, makes the following “Abjuration of Heresy” (English text from The Priest’s Ritual).

 

“I, _____, having before me the holy Gospels which I touch with my hand, and knowing that no one can be saved without that Faith which the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Roman Church holds, believes and teaches, against which I grieve that I have greatly erred, inasmuch as I have held and believed doctrines opposed to her teaching, I, now, with sorrow and contrition for my past errors, profess that I believe the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Roman Church to be the only and true Church established on earth by Jesus Christ, to which I submit myself with my whole soul. I believe all the articles of Faith that she proposes to my belief and I reject and condemn all that she rejects and condemns, and I am ready to observe all that she commands me. And I make the following profession of Faith.”

 

The express objects of Catholic belief follow, and then the convert concludes:

 

“With a sincere heart, therefore, and with unfeigned faith, I detest and abjure every error, heresy, and sect opposed to the said Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Roman Church. So help me God, and these Holy Gospels, which I touch with my hand.”

 

These examples of the Church’s “exclusive” mission in the world might be multiplied for pages, but perhaps no further pronouncement could be quite as pertinent as the words of Pope Pius VII when he deplored the presence in Catholic countries of propagandists who were bent on destroying the Faith of Catholics: “By the fact that freedom of all forms of worship is proclaimed, truth is confused with error, and the Holy and Immaculate Spouse of Christ, outside of which there is no salvation, is placed on the same level as heretical sects and even as Jewish perfidy!”

 

This is the Church’s answer to the Jewish proposal of Interfaith: Truth cannot share the platform with error, God’s one Faith must not be placed on a level with the devisings of men. It was precisely this message which the Vatican last year transmitted to the Bishops of England, ordering all Catholics to withdraw immediately from the Council of Christians and Jews, England’s number one Interfaith organization.

 

The prompt and publicized resignation of His Eminence, Cardinal Griffin, so lately deceased, was a great comfort to those in Rome who had condemned the Interfaith movement “on the ground that it was preaching a doctrine unacceptable to Catholics: that all religions are equal.”

 

                                *   *   *   *   *

 

The present campaign of the Jews to make the Church say that it is not a necessary item, that men can attain Heaven without it, should never be interpreted as the final goal of Interfaith. For even a debilitated Church body, even the most pliant hierarchical relic, would be still, by its very existence, a threat to Jewish security. The ultimate aim of the Jews’ program is the dissolution of the Catholic Church — an aim which long ago appeared in public print, wrapped, of course, in the soft garments of “brotherhood.”

 

In the Jewish World of London, for February 9, 1883, there appeared this benevolent message: “The dispersion of the Jews has rendered them a cosmopolitan people. They are the only cosmopolitan people, and in this capacity must act and are acting as a solvent of national and racial differences. The great ideal of Judaism is not that Jews shall be allowed to flock together one day in some hole-in-the-corner fashion, for, if not tribal, at any rate separatist objects, but that the whole world shall be imbued with Jewish teachings, and that in a universal Brotherhood of Nations — a greater Judaism, in fact — all the separate races and religions shall disappear.”

 

To the Catholic prelates and priests of America, The Point cannot overemphasize the urgency of this situation — nor yet, on the other hand, do we faint in despair at the enormity of the counter-blow which is needed.

 

One bishop can do it. One strong voice, raised in episcopal authority against the babble of “brotherhood” would be enough to electrify the whole nation, smash the Jewish Interfaith edifice, and preserve the Faith for this land which all the bishops of America so long ago dedicated to the Mother of God.

  __________________________

The Point 

 

Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

December, 1956

 

This Christmas men are looking to the Holy Land, and they are listening — not for the strains of “Glory to God in the Highest,” but for the sounds of war upon earth. And we might say: It is just. God long ago crashed the Temple of Jerusalem to the ground, and cursed its people, the Jews, to be forever homeless and wandering. If the world has defied this Divine judgment and supported a Jewish return to Palestine, then let the world bear the consequences of God’s righteous anger.

 

But this leaves a greater part unsaid. For the Holy Land is infinitely more than a geographical locality which God has forbidden to the Jews. It is, for all time, the precious countryside where God became the Child of a Virginal Mother, and where God as Man walked and taught and died for us. It is, indeed, God’s Land.

 

If, therefore, we are anxious this Christmas, our concern is this: The leaders of our nation have proposed that Christian boys be ready to shed their blood in order to make the Jews secure within the borders of the Holy Land. But should this happen, should Christian lives be spent to keep God’s Land in the hands of His crucifiers, the price of such betrayal will not be confined to the deserts of the East. We will be paying, in kind, on bloody Main Street, U. S. A.

 

THE ENEMIES OF CHRIST AT CHRISTMAS

 

Soon, the Jews of America will be trying once more to jostle Christmas from its place as the nation’s chief interest in late December. As elbow for this endeavor, the Jews will rely again on their festival of Chanukah — once a minor holiday but recently seized on because of its timely Yuletide occurrence and now celebrated with all the blare and bluster the Jews can produce.

 

Though originally set up in 165 B. C., the observance of Chanukah (Hebrew for “Dedication”) has long since lost its holy, Old Testament meaning. Thus, when Jewish leaders decided a few years back to revive and exalt the holiday, they found it expedient also to invest it with a fresh and acceptable significance. They have, accordingly, made it an annual practice to hire the principal halls in the principal cities of the country for the staging of special Chanukah pageants. These loudly-trumpeted extravaganzas (“Inspiring — Breathtaking — Spectacular”) oppose the Birth of the true Messias by dramatizing, with the solemnity of religious ritual, the birth of their own messianic empire: the Jewish state of Israel.

 

It is, of course, true that the Jews would have been eager to exploit any one of their festivals that was opportune in order to affront the beauty and singularity of Christmas. Yet Chanukah is especially suited for such a use — because it was on that day that Our Lord revealed Himself to the Jews as the Messias, and, for doing so, was almost stoned. The story is told in the Holy Gospel of Saint John (Chap. 10, v. 22-39):

 

“And the Dedication was in Jerusalem: and it was winter. And Jesus walked in the temple, in Salomon’s porch. The Jews therefore compassed him round about, and said to him, How long doest thou hold our soul in suspense? If thou be Christ, tell us openly. Jesus answered them, I speak to you: and you believe not, the works that I do in the name of my Father, they give testimony of me, but you do not believe, because you are not of my sheep. My sheep hear my voice: and I know them, and they follow me. And I give them life everlasting: and they shall not perish for ever, and no man shall pluck them out of my hand. My father, that which he hath given me, is greater than all: and no man can pluck them out of the hand of my father. I and the Father are one. The Jews took up stones, to stone him. Jesus answered them, Many good works I have showed you from my father, for which of those works do you stone me? The Jews answered him, For a good work we stone thee not, but for blasphemy, and because thou being a man, makest thyself God. Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, that I said, you are God’s? If he called them God’s, to whom the word of God was made, and the scripture can not be broken: whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world, say you, That thou blasphemest, because I said I am the son of God? If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. But if I do, and if you will not believe me, believe the works: that you may know and believe that the Father is in me, and I in the Father. They sought therefore to apprehend him: and he went forth out of their hands.”

Because it is reckoned by the Jewish calendar, the day on which Chanukah falls may vary from year to year by as much as a month. This year it is due to fall on its earliest possible date. But Jews have never been ones to let liturgical niceties stand in the way of more vital considerations, and so, the Jews of Boston (the only segment of whose plans we have heard) are making an adroit adjustment in their schedule. Their annual Chanukah pageant at the Boston Garden will be held this year, not when the calendar says Chanukah should occur, but some three weeks later, on December the twenty-third — just a stone’s throw from Christmas.

 

                                  *   *   *   *   *

 

The pride of Jewish rural life is the “kibbutz,” a sort of collective farm settlement, of which there are presently some 250 well-populated examples in the state of Israel. A recent volume to swell the praises of these communes is Harvard University Press’ Kibbutz, Venture in Utopia. The following two extracts from this book provide a raw, startling picture of the Jews who today inhabit the Land of Christ’s Birth:

 

“In its attempt to create a better world, the kibbutz has found that it faces considerable opposition, and it has come to view this opposition with an intense hatred. Indeed, it is not unfair to say the kibbutz hates almost everybody, since it views almost everybody as an opponent. Outside of Israel, all the ‘bourgeois’ countries are hated, and only the Soviet Union and ‘People’s Democracies’ are ‘loved.’

“As for marriage, they believed — and still believe — that a union between a man and woman was their own affair, to be entered into on the basis of love and to be broken at the termination of love; neither the union nor the separation were to require the permission or the sanction of the community. Today, for example, if a couple wishes to marry, the partners merely ask for a joint room; if they wish a divorce, they return to separate rooms.”

 

                                   *   *   *   *   *

 

Each year when the Church commemorates the arrival of the Magi at Bethlehem, on the Feast of the Epiphany, our priests are required to read, as an integral part of their Breviary prayers, the following homily by Pope Saint Gregory the Great:

 

“All things which He had made, bore witness that their Maker was come … And yet, up to this very hour, the hearts of the unbelieving Jews will not acknowledge that He, to Whom all nature gave testimony, is their God. Being more hardened than the rocks, the Jews refuse to be rent by repentance.”

This is but one instance of what the Jews would term the “anti-Semitism” of the Church’s Advent and Christmas Season liturgy. With the possible exception of Holy Week in Lent, there is no period in the whole liturgical year which more emphasizes the bridgeless chasm separating Christian faith and Jewish infidelity.

 

From Advent through the Epiphany Octave, the texts of the Mass and the Divine Office resound repeatedly with that theme which is at once the fulfilled expectation of the Jews of the Old Law, and the indictment of the deicide Jews of today:

 

“Behold, O Israel, your king … Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, for the day of the Lord is nigh … It is the birth of the Christ, O Jerusalem … The Savior of the world will be our King … He shall sit upon the throne of David His father.”

These are the tidings of great joy which plague the Jews as sorely this December as they did more than nineteen hundred years ago. And among these tidings there is, for the Jews, no more hateful information than the exultant shouts that the Baby of Bethlehem is the true Son of David, inheriting a royal title from His foster father, Saint Joseph, and royal blood from His Spotless Mother, the Virgin Mary. It was precisely to attack this central truth of Christmas that the rabbis of the early Christian centuries concocted that unprintably-filthy version of the Birth of Christ which is now found in the Jews’ “holy” book, the Talmud. We have determined never to reprint, in direct quotation, these blasphemous assaults against the purity of the Mother of God. But that they were invented by the rabbis, for the express purpose of challenging Our Lord’s title to the Throne of David, is abundantly admitted by Jewish authorities. The Jewish Encyclopedia, for example, blithely states, in its article on “Jesus,” that, “For polemical purposes it was necessary for the Jews to insist on the illegitimacy of Jesus as against the Davidic descent claimed by the Christian Church.”

 

At no point in the Christmas liturgy, however, does the Church’s consciousness of Jewish perfidy becloud her joy at the Birth of the Messias. In this spirit, therefore, we anticipate the coming gladness, and leave our readers with that jubilant exhortation from the Third Mass of Christmas:

 

“Come ye Gentiles and adore the Lord, for this day a great light hath descended upon the earth!”

_______________________________________