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La Coupe d’Apocalypse 16:10 vient tout juste d’être répandue

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The Point

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

January, 1957

 

JEWISH INVASION OF OUR COUNTRY

 

Our Culture Under Siege

On the last day of December, 1955, there died at Miami Beach, Florida, an aged Jew named Ludwig Lewisohn. The event was notable; for by it American Jewry was relieved of its most eloquent spokesman — and most incorrigible beans-spiller. Lewisohn had dedicated his mature years and ripe literary talent unstintingly to the work of rhapsodizing his race; but he never made an effort to camouflage the true Jewish character for the sake of appeasing the Gentiles. The creature he celebrated, and dangled defiantly before the eyes of the world, was the naked, unvarnished article: the Jew as he is.

 

For Lewisohn, it is the Jews’ glory, never to be concealed, that they are the enemies of Christ (“a teacher neither original nor important”) and of His Church (“a new Paganism with its thousand altars to its hundred gods”). Moreover, in a fever of racial revelation, he presents his people as unshakeable foes of the very culture, the civilization which Christianity has begotten. “We are a different folk,” he blurts out in one book; “we do remain eternally ourselves … So soon as I express the inmost me — not the economic man or the mere man of knowledge — I come into collision with folk-ways and beliefs and laws … Civilizations express in their totality an ethos which is definite, however hard to sum up in a formula … And the ethos which from within outward built Christian civilization is not ours.”

 

Though many Jews chewed their nails over Lewisohn’s disclosures, a greater number felt it was high time for this frank statement of their position. As a tribute to him, Lewisohn was invited to bellow out his final years as the star of new, Jewish Brandeis University. The general feeling was well-expressed by one rabbi, who said of the book from which the above quotations are taken, “The soul of Israel is revealed in its glorious pages.”

 

And this brings us to the grim consideration: what will be the result of the ever-growing influence of Jews in the United States? Clearly and inescapably, unless this influence is checked it will mean the end of our society. Our traditions, our standards, our ways are not the Jews’ — who neither approve them nor understand them, and who will destroy them if they can. On this point, too, Lewisohn is emphatic. Example: “The laws of the state of New York are based on the Christian assumption that marriage is a sacrament.” The disgrace of New York Jewry, he continues, is that it has not yet demanded “exemption from laws which have no relation to its instincts, its tradition, or its reason.”

 

Inasmuch, then, as Jews have had no part in shaping the culture of Christendom, how can they, Lewisohn wonders, become “culturally creative”? And he answers: “Only by being steadfastly themselves and Judaizing the civilizations of their homelands.”

 

Some random aspects of what this “Judaizing” means, and is going to mean, are indicated in the following paragraphs.

 

                                *   *   *   *   *

 

The swarm of Jewish jurists who have overrun American courtrooms, and who plainly intend to be “steadfastly themselves,” makes our legal system a likely spot to look for evidence of the Judaizing process. Probably the most striking example of such evidence is the recent change of law regarding insanity cases. Formerly these were judged on an old and firm principle. Unless it could be shown that the defendant’s consciousness and free will were warped to the extent that he did not know he was doing wrong when he committed the crime, he would have to take the full consequences of his act and could not have his sentence mitigated “by reason of insanity.”

 

For years the Jews kept hammering at this criterion, and at the Christian belief underlying it: that man has normally the ability to distinguish and choose between a right deed and a wrong one. This concept, the Jews argued, was a medieval hold-over with no place in a modern court of law — where it should be recognized that right and wrong are, at best, relative notions, since “what is right for me may be wrong for you.”

 

In 1954, in the now-famous “Durham Case,” the Jews got what they wanted. The Durham decision, written by Jewish Federal Judge David Bazelon, finally and flatly rejects the “right-wrong test and puts a new code in its place. From now on, decreed Jewish Judge Bazelon, the question of criminal responsibility will hinge simply on whether or not the “unlawful act was the product of mental disease or mental defect.”

 

And who is qualified to say if it was so? Why, the Jewish psychiatrist, of course! He is the one who can determine the mental state of the accused and decide whether or not the crime was the “product” of that mental state.

 

At present, this represents the Jews’ main penetration into our legal structure. But they’re not resting. They are anxious to pursue their present advantage to its logical conclusion. The book Psychiatry and the Law, the Jews’ classic work on the subject, outlines the ultimate goal: “After the defendant has been found guilty … the decision as to what kind of treatment is needed calls for … the psychiatrist … Fixing the sentence should therefore either be taken from the judge entirely and vested in a tribunal of experts … or … the sentence should be a wholly indeterminate one, under which the person would be held as long as necessary, whether that be for a few days or for the rest of his life.”

 

It should be noted that this sentence is to be imposed regardless of the crime committed — so that, at the whim of an anti-Christian quack, a murderer may be turned loose on the public after a week’s confinement, whereas an uncooperative petty thief may be held till he dies, whether of old age or of “treatments.”

 

Other courtroom activities of the Jews include agitation to abolish capital punishment. Though they have been assisted in this by a number of soft-hearted, soft-headed Catholics, it remains a solidly Jewish venture. Locally, for instance, heading the small but shrill Massachusetts Council for the Abolition of the Death Penalty is Mrs. Herbert Ehrman, wife of the top New England official of the American Jewish Committee. While as far away as England, the recent bill for ending capital punishment in the realm was authored and introduced by one Sydney Silverman, M.P.

 

One immediate effect of getting rid of the death sentence will be to increase sharply the dangers of being a policeman. Many desperate criminals, already facing life terms, would be willing to shoot it out with the police or kill a prison guard in a nothing-to-lose gamble for freedom. And this, too, would seem to fit in quite nicely with Jewish purposes. For American “entertainment” — that most effective instrument of Jewish propaganda — has been ardently engaged of late in portraying our police officers as a collection of clowns, dunderheads, and racketeering brutes whom we would be much better off without. The Jews apparently feel that a police force — the non-U. N. variety — is a hindrance to the Judaizing of our culture.

 

Undoubtedly, they are right.

 

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Over the past months, our Catholic hierarchy of the United States have been waging a battle. In the words of Cardinal Spellman, American Catholics have an imperative mission to “resist the growing and alarming disrespect for the reverent observance of Sunday.” Yet, in this admirable concern for the preservation of Our Lord’s Day, there has been a conspicuous omission. No one ever mentions just who is behind the anti-Sabbath agitation. This is the more remarkable because there has been no aspect of the current Jewish program half so blatant, open and admitted as the attack on Sunday. For of all the traditional values which are foreign to the profaners of our Christian culture, none is more remote than Our Lord’s Day — that weekly reminder of Jesus’ triumph over death and the Jews, when He arose from the tomb on the first Christian Sunday, the bright morning of Easter.

 

Although there have been notable successes for the Jews in other localities, New York City, quite understandably, remains the headquarters for the Jewish anti-Sunday war. All battle plans are there cleared through an organization called the “Joint Committee for a Fair Sabbath Law,” which represents at least 25 Jewish groups. At the strategy-helm of the “Joint Committee” is Mr. Leo Pfeffer, of the ubiquitous trio of Pfeffer, Polier, and Maslow, top lawyers for the American Jewish Congress. It is Pfeffer’s dream that some Sunday in the near future, America’s Jewish-owned Main Streets will be bustling with all the commercial activity of “any ordinary day” — and that “business as usual” will smother all public witness to the sanctity of our Christian day of rest.

 

That New York’s Cardinal-Archbishop should have been stirred to any kind of defense of Sunday is, of course, a tribute to the extreme effectiveness of the Jewish “Joint Committee.” Unquestionably, one of the occasions of His Eminence’s anxiety was the report which appeared in the New York Sunday News for last April 8.

 

It seems that one Sol Sacks, a Manhattan Certified Public Accountant, had hit upon the idea of having his staff hired out on Sunday — allowing his clients to have their business affairs checked and put in order, with no interruption in the regular work week. Before long, the city’s police department got wind of Mr. Sack’s scheme, and one Sunday morning as Sol had just unleashed a force of 25 workers at Number 40 Wall Street, a New York patrolman presented him with a summons charging violation of the Sabbath Law.

 

Sacks, accompanied by his attorney, Jacob Shientag, was brought to trial before a fellow-Jew, Magistrate Charles Solomon, in Lower Manhattan Court. The proceedings were quite brief, and very much to the point — to the Jewish point that “the Sunday Blue Law is a statutory crazy-quilt” (as the News put it). Magistrate Solomon concluded the “trial” with one final Jewish sneer at all that Sunday represents: “Nonsense! Case Dismissed!”

 

                                        *   *   *   *   *

 

The contrast between Christian and Jewish values has never been more strikingly evident than in the founding and furthering of the Jewish State of Israel. The tragedy is that most Americans who read the Zionist propaganda reports (“Israel is as American as your home town”) will never investigate further. Few will take the trouble to learn, for example, that very much unlike your hometown, Israel is a state where 85 per cent of the land is the outright property of the central government. However, there is little need for our American system of “a backyard of your own” because family life is all but eliminated by Israeli social legislation. In the Jewish farm communities (whose marriage irregularities we reported last month) children are taken from their parents after birth and raised in separate areas. At determined intervals, parents are invited to visit the children’s barracks to watch the communal progress of their offspring. When they reach the age of 14, most of the young Jews are through with school, and all, both girls and boys, spend their next, most formative years (until they are 20) in the Israeli Army. The sight of a truck-load of 15-year-olds with guns and live ammunition strapped to their shoulders — an everyday scene in Israel — would hardly remind the average American of the high-school pastimes of his youth. Yet the hoax continues!

 

In conjunction with the Israel-can-do-no-wrong propaganda, there has been a determined program to keep Americans unaware of the gross injustices, by our standards, which Israel, with Jewish standards, has perpetrated in the Middle East. When the United Nations, that town meeting of world Jewry, first decided to hand over the Holy Land as an autonomous state for the Jews, there was no time lost in dispossessing and expelling every indigenous Arab who was in the way. So messy did the affair become that even a small group of U. N. people (Gentiles, of course) thought that something should be done for the unfortunate Arab “refugees.” The gentleman who dared propose this plan, Count Bernadotte of Sweden, was promptly shot by the Israelis.

 

The number of new Arab refugees resulting from the Zionist police state’s latest aggressions, in Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, has not yet been calculated. But we are assured that there will be no Jewish remorse over the situation. Speaking recently in Boston, Russian-born Golda Meir, Israel’s Foreign Ministress, said very plainly that if the decision to invade Egypt were once more hers to make, then, “As I did it before, I would do it again!”

 

A few days after Mrs. Meir’s speech, Monsignor Peter Tuohy, head of the Pontifical Mission for Palestine, called upon the Christian nations to work immediately for the “repatriation of the Arab refugees and internationalization of Jerusalem.” Although there were few sympathetic ears to hear his plea, Monsignor Tuohy was merely repeating the unswerving position of the Holy See in the matter of Israel: (1) Jerusalem with its Holy Places must not be in the possession of the Jews, and (2) the ousted Arabs, a surprising number of whom are Catholics, must not be left homeless and starving in the deserts beyond the Israeli borders.

 

To emphasize this position, the Vatican has consistently turned down the bold Jewish proposals that diplomatic relations be maintained between the Holy See and Israel. Taking a lead from this, American Catholics might follow The Point ’s example of severing all relations with Israel’s citizens-in-exile, the Jews of America. Such decisive action could well be the beginning of justice for the victims of Zionism, and protection for the sacred shrines of the Holy Land.

 

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Examples of the Christian-Jewish cleavage might be multiplied indefinitely, but a true understanding of them comes only with the foundational knowledge that, all moral and social arguments aside, the abyss which divides us is religious. And the nature of this division has never been more succinctly defined than by the learned bishop whose feast will be celebrated throughout the Church on the twenty-seventh of this month, Saint John Chrysostom. He wrote: “The Jews have crucified the Son and rejected the Holy Ghost, and their souls are the abode of the devil … It is not insignificant controversies which separate us, but the death of Christ.”

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The Point

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

February, 1957

 

WHEN EVERYONE WAS CATHOLIC

 

Courage of the Faith in the Thirteenth Century

 

For five full years now, The Point has considered its most urgent work to be that of alerting Catholics to the dangers which threaten their Faith. Our monthly articles have thus been, purposefully, more “anti” than “pro.” And it was in the midst of exposing the workings of what we might call the “accepted” enemies of American Catholics — the pope-hating, birth-controlling, lodge-going heretics — that we made a discovery. Our readers were quite prepared to learn that Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Scientists and Billy Channing’s Unitarians were ill-disposed toward those of Romish persuasion. But the information that the Jews were also, and more so, enemies of the Faith, left many a bit skeptical.

 

We have, therefore, spent several months in discussions of the Jewish threat to the Church, which even our most cautious readers now recognize as infinitely more deep-rooted and far-reaching than anything which American Protestantism could contrive. Looking ahead to future issues, we have one regret: A Catholic understanding of the entire Jewish problem presupposes a familiarity with the Church’s traditional position on the Jewish people, and her repeated legislations in their regard. Our readers are still hazy about this all-important matter, and so …

 

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There is no fairer way of determining the Church’s official attitude toward that people whom Saint Paul calls the “adversaries of all men,” than to study what the teaching body of the Church has had to say about Jews when it was most free to speak. In short: In the days when the Catholic Church was on top, where were the Jews to be found?

 

Now, the most scrupulous historian would have to agree that the Church was never more exalted as a world influence than it was in the thirteenth century. During all the twelve hundreds, from the reign of Pope Innocent III to the pontificate of Boniface VIII, the Catholic Church was spectacularly and indisputably “on top”!

 

The thirteenth was a century of holiness. It was the age of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Saint Louis of France, Saint Ferdinand of Castile, Saint Edmund of Canterbury, Saint Simon Stock, Saint Peter Nolasco, Saint Raymond of Peñafort, Saint Thomas of Hereford, Saint Hugh of Lincoln, Saint Gertrude the Great, Saint Mechtilde, and Saint Philip Benizi. It was the glorious age of Saint Clare, Saint Francis, and Saint Dominic, and it saw them establish the religious orders which today bear their names: the Poor Clares, the Franciscans, and the Dominicans. It heard the teaching of four of the Church’s twenty-nine brilliant Doctors: Saint Anthony of Padua, Saint Bonaventure, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Albertus Magnus. It witnessed the spread of the Christian guilds and the rise of the Gothic cathedrals. It was the century when Our Blessed Lady’s Rosary was first recited, and her Brown Scapular first worn. It gave our liturgy the Stabat Mater, the Dies Irae, and the entire Office and Mass of Corpus Christi, including the benediction hymn, Tantum Ergo Sacramentum. Three General Councils of the Church were held during the thirteenth century, at one of which cardinals were for the first time given their familiar insignia, the red hat. It was the century of the final Crusade, of the first Inquisition, of England’s Magna Carta, and Marco Polo’s explorations. And in all this activity of the faithful, there was everywhere the maternal hand of the Church, guarding, reproving, encouraging, and guiding.

 

With all of Christendom thus ordered and disposed toward a full Christian life, the Church had the time, and the recognized authority, to look beyond its flock to the unbaptized Jews. The result was a detailed program governing the presence of Jews in all the Catholic nations of Europe. Below, we have pieced together a quick chronology of the development of this program.

 

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On July 15, 1205, Pope Innocent III wrote a letter to the hierarchy of France to remind them that the Crucifiers of Christ ought to be held in continual subjection. And if the Jews of France would not accept this rightful state — if they would not abide by the regulations drawn up for them by the Holy See — then, the Pope instructed his bishops, “We give you our authority to forbid any Christian in the district from entering into commercial relations with them, under pain of excommunication.”

 

Three years later, in a letter to the Count of Nevers, this same Holy Father set forth Catholic teaching even more plainly: “The Jews, against whom the blood of Jesus Christ calls out, although they should not be killed, lest Christian people forget the Divine Law, yet as wanderers ought they to remain upon the earth, until their countenance be filled with shame.”

 

Spurred by the Pope’s words and example, a council of French bishops, meeting at Avignon in 1209, enacted a severe code of anti-Jewish restrictions. And in 1212, another council, at Paris, added to these measures by forbidding any Christian mid-wife from assisting at the birth of a Jewish child.

 

In 1215, Pope Innocent III convoked a general council of all the bishops of Christendom, the decrees of which would be ratified by him personally and be binding on the whole Catholic world. Canon 68 of this assembly, known as the Fourth Lateran Council, prescribes that “Jews of either sex, in every Christian province, and at all times, be distinguished in public from other people by a difference of dress.” And Canon 69 declares, “It is most absurd that a blasphemer of Christ should exercise power over Christians … and we renew the decree forbidding that the Jews be given public offices.”

 

Pope Honorius III, who succeeded Innocent III in 1216, got his pontificate off to a decisive start by ordering that the new synagogue built by the Jews in Rome should be immediately demolished.

 

In 1219, papal authorities ruled that any Jew buying a house from a Christian must pay property taxes to the Church. The same year, the Archbishop of Toledo in Spain established an annual tribute to be paid by every adult Jew in his diocese.

 

The year 1222 saw the English Council of Oxford imposing general strictures on the Jews and the Golden Bull of Hungary forbidding them to hold public office. The first quarter-century was rounded off by the Council of Paris, which ordained in 1223 that Christians must not be employed in Jewish households.

 

                                   *   *   *   *   *

 

The anti-Jewish code of the Fourth Lateran Council was re-enacted in 1227 by the bishops of France meeting at Narbonne; while the city of Marseilles, to implement Lateran’s Canon 68, ruled that every Jew in the area who had reached his seventh year must wear on his chest a large, bright-colored disc.

 

In 1228, the newly-elected Pope Gregory IX decreed that all Crusaders indebted to Jews were to be free from paying interest. And in December of 1230, King Louis IX (Saint Louis) of France declared that Jews could not make legal contracts nor leave the estates of their lords.

 

In 1233, Pope Gregory wrote to the hierarchy of Germany: “Ungrateful for favors and forgetful of benefits, the Jews return insult for kindness and impious contempt for goodness … they who ought to know the yoke of perpetual enslavement because of their guilt.” The Pope also wrote to Saint Ferdinand, King of Castile, charging him to see “that the perfidious Jews never in the future grow insolent, but that, in servile fear, they shall ever publicly suffer the shame of their sin.”

 

The year 1240 marks the beginning of open war on the Jewish Talmud. In early Lent of that year, Pope Gregory IX instructed Saint Louis and Saint Ferdinand that, while the Jews of France and Castile were at their synagogues, their homes should be searched and copies of the Talmud confiscated. Saint Louis followed this search by ordering, in June of 1242, Europe’s first official public burning of the Jewish book.

 

In 1244, Pope Innocent IV, continuing Gregory IX’s tradition, issued the famous Impia Gens. In it, he assailed the Talmud as “containing every kind of vileness and blasphemy against Christian truth,” and ordered the book seized, wherever it might be found, and destroyed. Accordingly, Saint Louis held another Talmud-burning at Paris in 1244, and still another in 1248.

 

Meanwhile, in distant Dublin, a law had been passed in 1241, prohibiting the selling of any Irish land to Jews. And, back in France, Pope Innocent IV convened the General Council of Lyons in 1245, which reaffirmed all the Church’s anti-Jewish enactments. The following year, a local council of French bishops, meeting at Beziers, forbade Jews to practice medicine.

 

Shortly after the Council of Lyons closed, Archbishop Philip of Savoy demanded that the Jews get out of the city entirely. Thereafter, no Jew lived in Lyons for a century, and any who passed through had to pay a toll, the same as was paid for cattle, both entering the city and leaving it.

 

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Apparently hoping that they would be more fortunate in the second half-century than they had been in the first, the Jews petitioned Pope Innocent IV, in April of 1250, to let them build a new synagogue at Cordova, Spain. The petition was refused.

 

In December of 1254, Saint Louis of France, with the blessing of the Holy See, expelled all Jews from his kingdom. Seven years later, they were banished from Brabant, in Germany, and the year after that, from Treves.

 

The year 1263 saw a public burning of the Talmud at Barcelona, Spain. And in 1265, Pope Clement IV ordered death for any Jew in the Papal States found with a Talmud in his house.

 

In 1266, the Council of Breslau cautioned Christians not to buy meat or other provisions from Jewish dealers. It also prescribed putting the Jews in a ghetto, to be “divided from the section inhabited by Christians by a fence, wall, or ditch.” The following year, the Council of Vienna forbade Jewish doctors to treat Christian patients and, in conformity with the Fourth Lateran Council, decreed that, whenever a Viennese Jew appeared in public, he must wear a pointed hat.

 

In July of 1267, Pope Clement IV issued the bull, Turbato Corde, extending the Inquisition begun by Gregory IX, so that it could deal not only with heretics, but also with Jews who had seduced Catholics from the Faith. The city of London was aroused in 1271 to prohibit Jews from acquiring any more property there. And, in 1274, occurred the death of the great Saint Thomas Aquinas, who in his De Regimine Judaeorum told Christian rulers: “Jews, in consequence of their sin, are or were destined to perpetual slavery; so that sovereigns of states may treat their goods as their own property; with the sole proviso that they do not deprive them of all that is necessary to sustain life.”

 

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The year 1275 opened with the Jews being expelled from Marlborough, Gloucester, Worcester, and Cambridge in England and, in 1276, from Bavaria.

 

In August of 1278, Pope Nicholas III directed the Jews of Lombardy to attend weekly sermons given for them by Dominican preachers. The Pope further stated that Jews “who, through fear, though not absolutely coerced, had received Baptism and had returned to their Jewish blindness, should be handed over to the secular power.”

 

The Council of Ofen, held in Hungary in 1279 and presided over by a papal legate, decreed that any Christian responsible for putting a Jew in public office was to be excommunicated.

 

In 1280, England adopted Lombardy’s practice by obliging all Jews in the kingdom to attend weekly sermons. This same year, King Alphonso X of Leon and Castile imprisoned his entire Jewish population until it had paid a special levy, plus an additional fine for each day of delay.

 

Archbishop Peckham of London, a city growing acutely uncomfortable for the Jews, gave orders in 1283 that all the synagogues in his diocese must be closed. And the same year, King Pedro of Aragon decreed that no Jew could hold a position that would give him jurisdiction, power, or authority over Christians.

 

In November of 1286, Pope Honorius IV wrote to the English Archbishops of Canterbury and York, calling the Talmud “that damnable book” and urging them “vehemently to see that it be not read by anyone, since all evils flow from it.” A few months later, in May of 1287, King Edward I had the Jews of England thrown into prison. And finally, on November 1, 1290, Edward ordered all Jews to be deported from the country — to which they were not allowed to return till the time of the Protestant Cromwell, almost four centuries later.

 

Two events mark the final year of the thirteenth century: On June 13, Pope Boniface VIII issued his bull Exhibita Nobis, ordaining that Jews could be denounced to the Inquisition without the name of the accuser being revealed, so as to protect Christians against Jewish reprisals. And, to bring the century to a blazing conclusion, the city of Paris held, in 1299, one more public burning of the Jewish Talmud.

 

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Some months ago, the American Jewish Committee’s magazine, Commentary, carried an article which gave details of the anti-Jewishness of the Church in France during the Middle Ages. One of the items which most annoyed the A.J.C. spokesman was an inscription placed over the gate of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris. In bold letters, it read, “Beware of a Jew, a madman, and a leper.”

 

This French inscription makes a pithy summary of all that the Church, at its height of power, tried to indicate concerning the Jewish people. Jews were to be avoided, quite as one would avoid the mad and the leprous. They were to be restrained and quarantined, lest their perfidy and filth infect Christian society. The Church’s prudent devices (ghettos, badges, and the rest) were thus the fruit of a mother’s solicitude for her children. It was only when Europe turned against its mother that these safeguards vanished and the Jewish infection spread abroad in the land — leaving the once-Christian West in its present, unspeakable state of misery.

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The Point

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

March, 1957

 

DUBLIN’S BRISCOE COMES TO BOSTON

 

The city of Boston is not planning a Saint Patrick’s Day Parade for March 17, this year. The reason is not merely that the day is a Sunday. It seems there is a Jew headed for Boston who cannot conveniently get here until the day after Saint Patrick’s Day, and this has been proposed by certain Boston Jews as a fine reason for delaying the March 17 festivities. Some highly-placed Hibernians have been found to agree. Thus, the Catholics of Boston have been instructed to hold off on their tributes to Saint Patrick until said anticipated Jew arrives to witness the proceedings.

 

The advent of this visitor was disclosed on the front page of the Boston Herald: “The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Robert Briscoe, will arrive in Boston, March 18, be welcomed by a band of Irish pipers and be seen by all of South Boston, which postponed its annual Saint Patrick’s Day parade one day so he could be in it.”

 

To those angry, but less highly-placed Hibernians who have protested to us that the guilt for this whole affair lies with the Irish in Ireland for having set up a Jewish Mayor in the first place, we offer the following considerations.

 

Ireland has little notion of that general world distress which we label the “Jewish problem.” The earliest authentic record of Hebrew proximity to Hibernia is dated one thousand years after the Crucifixion. An ancient log recounts that in the year 1079 A.D., “Five Jews came over the sea bearing gifts to Fairdelbach (Hua Brian) and were sent back over the sea.” The Gaelic restraint of this narrative only heightens its eloquence. And we are thus quite prepared to learn that a couple of centuries later, in 1290, it became a universal law in Ireland that no Jew should ever be allowed within the borders. This law was tempered only at the subsequent insistence of Irish-dominating English Protestants — who even succeeded, in the year 1846, in removing from the law books the ancient statute De Judaismo. In compliance with papal teaching, this law required that any Jew who appeared in public in Ireland must wear a distinctive dress to distinguish him from the Christians.

 

As late as 1880, however, there were less than 400 Jews in all of Ireland. Indeed, despite the relaxed regulations, the Jews today constitute but one tenth of one percent of the Irish population (1954 Irish Catholic Directory).

 

The glaring historical truth of the matter is that only lately have the Irish ever seen a Jew. And although instructed by their Faith that the Jews are a perfidious and deicide race, the Irish have never had the lesson driven home for them the way the Poles and the French and the Italians and the Germans and the Spaniards have.

 

Therefore, the “blame” for Briscoe’s current eclipsing of Saint Patrick falls more heavily upon those, on this side of the Atlantic, who are exploiting for their own ends the spectacle of a Jewish Mayor running a Catholic city. These opportunists are, of course, our local Jews, and their purpose, according to our unanimous local press, is the emphasizing of “the intrinsic unity of our Judaeo-Christian heritage.” Briscoe is apparently the best possible symbol they could devise at the moment for perpetuating that most fantastic of twentieth century myths: the notion that Jew and Christian can be hyphenated, that Christianity and Judaism are common foundations of a common culture, that they are two forms of a same belief.

 

Since the press pictures of Mr. Briscoe’s well-defined physiognomy are presently accompanied by much loose verbiage about how being a Christian and being a Jew are, after all, really the same thing, The Point hopes to shed some light this month on what it chooses to call the “Judaeo-Christian-hoax.”

 

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That we Catholics are somehow spiritually bound to Jews of the Old Testament is a reality none of us can miss. The God of Abraham is our God; the prayers of David are our prayers; the Faith of Moses is, in its fullness, our Faith. But it is not to the ancient Jews that advocates of Judaeo-Christianity would link us; it is to the Jews of today. And that switch makes the joining impossible.

 

As surely as there is continuity between Old Testament belief and our own, there is none between Old Testament belief and modern Judaism. For the Messias whom the patriarchs and prophets awaited — whose promised birth was the core of their faith and of their hope — has come. And the Jews, as a people, have witnessed His coming. They have seen the Jewish prophecies blazingly fulfilled. Yet they have, as a people, scorned the Messias, and crucified Him, and called down His Blood as a curse on their race. That curse is the chasm which divides Jews like Abraham from Jews like Briscoe.

 

No one is more keenly aware that there is a religious abyss separating them from their ancestors than are present-day Jews themselves. The American Jewish Committee, principal mouthpiece of U. S. Jewry, recently published an article to point out “the absurdity of regarding Judaism as something that was frozen into an unchangeable pattern some time before the birth of Jesus.” Christians must realize, the argument continued, that they are “no longer dealing with a pre-Herodian people of Palestine whose enthusiasm could be enlisted for a scion of the Davidic dynasty or for an apocalyptic savior ‘coming with the clouds of heaven.’ ”

 

And as the Judaism participating in Judaeo-Christianity differs from the Old Testament variety, so, the Jews feel, the “Christianity” should be unlike the New Testament sort. To provoke such an evolution is, indeed, their only purpose in coupling themselves to the religion of Christ. For Christianity in its orthodox form — as set forth in the New Testament, defined by the popes, and preached by the saints — is a thing which, above all other things, the Jews hate and contemn.

 

Unfortunately, however, some Catholics are still unconvinced that this is the Jewish attitude. They join merrily in the babble about “Judaeo-Christian principles” and assure you that the Jews have nothing but respect for the Christian Faith. The following utterances, as typical as they are bold, should help to disabuse these naive ones of their notions.

 

“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.” (Rabbi Horace Kallen, in a book published by the American Association for Jewish Education)

 

“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. That judgment on the Jews must be expunged from the Christian tradition.” (Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, Dean of the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary)

 

“The Conference unanimously agreed on the necessity for a permanent organization and on a proposal to revise Christian religious teaching, particularly the story of the Crucifixion.” (The American Jewish Yearbook, Vol. 50, reporting on the International Conference of Christians and Jews)

 

“The Christ of Christianity must yield to Yeshua ben Yossef. The God must die and be re-risen as a man. That will be the true resurrection!” (Rabbi Joel Blau, writing in the B’nai B’rith Magazine)

 

“The teachings of the New Testament are in complete and profound conflict with what Judaism teaches. They are in complete and utter conflict with what we teach, for we teach the oneness of God, which to — and in accordance with — our belief, excludes the existence of a Son of God.” (Rabbi Joachim Prinz, speaking in a New Jersey courtroom, as recognized witness for the Jewish community — Tudor vs. Board of Education)

 

“The Synagogue will not conceal its conviction that … Christianity presents in its traditional formulations but an intermediate step between paganism and the ultimate acceptance of Jewish monotheism.” (Commentary, official journal of the American Jewish Committee)

 

It is with these reservations that the Jews are proposing to share with us a “Judaeo-Christian” union.

 

                                     *   *   *   *   *

 

Any Catholic who has the least acquaintance with the story of Saint Patrick would be quick to agree that the Apostle of Ireland was no proponent of a common-denominator, Jewish-Christian creed. And the saint worked abundant miracles to prove the point. One of the most familiar incidents is that of the wizard at Inver Boinde. Although this pagan magician was assuredly no Jew, he was spreading about the countryside the most orthodox Talmudic teaching about the Blessed Virgin Mary. His filthy rantings against the virginity of Our Lady were called to Saint Patrick’s attention. Patrick sought out the wizard, made the Sign of the Cross on the ground beneath him, and the earth promptly opened, swallowing the pagan and his blasphemies; hardly a good tale for Brotherhood Week, but typical of Saint Patrick’s zeal for the truth.

 

As our regular readers well know, we could quote interminably from the writings of the saints and the popes, and the decrees of Church councils, to prove that from the Catholic side there is no foundation whatever for a common cause with post-Crucifixion Jewry. But since action against the Jews is perhaps more memorable (and since Irish action against them would especially fit this issue) we will limit ourselves to the famous story of Father Creagh from Limerick.

 

Back at the turn of the century, there was not to be found in all of Limerick city a more effective or beloved preacher than Father Creagh of the Redemptorists. And nothing made him more esteemed by his congregation than the sermon which he delivered, in his very finest style, on the morning of January 11, 1904.

 

Taking as his theme the general perfidy of the Jews, Father Creagh reviewed, with much gusto, the centuries of Jewish hatred for the Cross, the Jews’ cruel murder of Christian children, their continual blasphemies against Our Lord, and their heartless extortions from any Christian people who befriend them.

 

Father Creagh’s sermon resulted in a city-wide boycott of Limerick’s few dozen Jewish merchants. 6,000 members of the local Catholic Confraternity pledged that they would avoid all commercial contact with Jews. The effect was immediate and lasting. In retaliation, the Jews wrote endlessly in their periodicals against Father Creagh, and accorded him a species of international fame by giving the “Limerick incident” a special entry of its own in the Jewish Encyclopedia.

 

                                     *   *   *   *   *

 

Over thirteen hundred years ago, that giant of Irish monasticism, Saint Columbanus, was able to write with understandable pride to Pope Boniface IV: “All we Irish, living at the uttermost ends of the earth, are the disciples of Saints Peter and Paul, and of all the disciples who wrote the sacred canon under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit: receiving nothing outside the evangelical and apostolic doctrine; no heretic, no Jew, no schismatic was ever amongst us; but the Catholic Faith as it was first delivered to us from you, the successors, that is, of the Holy Apostles, is retained amongst us unchanged.”

 

It was the rooted tradition of men like Columbanus, continuing the work of the apostle Patrick, which saw the flowering of Ireland as the “Island of Saints and Scholars.” And in the midst of the Briscoe fanfare this month, there will no doubt be oratorical reference to Ireland’s holy and learned past. But it may be safely wagered that none of our local scholars will dare sound off with a text from one of the Irish saints. It would make such uncomfortable listening for a Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin.

 

St. Patrick, Bishop of Armagh

 

Born in 387, Saint Patrick lived to be one hundred and six years old. The final sixty years of his life were spent in those famous missionary labors which won him the title of Apostle of Ireland. Universally honored by the Irish, he is given an annual liturgical remembrance by the Church on the seventeenth day of March.

 

Prayer of Saint Patrick

 

At Tara, today, I place between me and harm the virtues of the Birth of Christ with His Baptism; the virtue of His Crucifixion with His burial; the virtue of His Resurrection with His Ascension; the virtue of the coming of the Eternal Judgment …

Christ be with me,
Christ before me,
Christ after me,
Christ in me,
Christ under me,
Christ over me …

May Christ be in the heart of each person to whom I speak,
Christ in the mouth of each person who speaks to me,
Christ in each eye which sees me,
Christ in each ear which hears me.

_____________________________________

The Point

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

April, 1957

 

THE FIGHT FOR THE HOLY CITY

 

Efforts of the Jews to Control Jerusalem

As we move this month through the sorrowful climax of the Lenten season, and into the joy of a new Easter, the Church’s liturgy takes on its most appealing richness. And it does so by a poverty of place, a limit of locale, which barely allows our meditations to stray beyond the gateways of the city of Jerusalem.

 

Our inseparable Lenten devotion is the Stations of the Cross — fourteen remembrances of Our Lord’s bleeding progress through the streets of Jerusalem and out to the hill of Calvary. And as the Passion time yields to the Paschal time, Jerusalem becomes the site of our triumphs: the Resurrection, the Descent of the Holy Ghost, and the Apostles’ first preaching and miracles.

 

Throughout the remainder of the year, the official prayer of the Church offers us Jerusalem as a most versatile symbol — now of the just soul, now of the Church itself, now of that celestial city which will be the eternal home of the saints. And so also with our private prayers — in the most beloved of which, the Rosary, eleven of the fifteen commemorated mysteries are Jerusalem occurrences. Indeed, two of them, the Ascension and the Assumption, begin in Jerusalem and terminate only in Heaven.

 

This prayerful preoccupation of Catholics with the city of Jerusalem is a key to the most potent geography lesson that the world has ever been taught. The lesson started with Our Lord’s own prophecy that the obstinate Jews to whom He was speaking would “fall by the edge of the sword and be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down by the Gentiles … ”

 

It was less than forty years after the Crucifixion that Jerusalem quaked and collapsed under the force of Jesus’ fulfilled words. Roman armies under Titus slaughtered over a million Jews, dispersed the Jewish nation and demolished the Temple, in explicit resolution of Our Lord’s threat that “there shall not be left here a stone upon a stone.”

 

A couple of generations later, around the year 132 A.D., the Jews tried hard to regain their rule over Jerusalem. This time the destruction extended even to the name of the city. For years, Jerusalem was known as the strictly Roman town of Aelia. A law was enforced which prohibited all Jews from residing in this capital which God had once given them, and which God had now irrevocably taken away.

 

With the ascendancy of the Christians, there came a restoration of Jerusalem’s name, and a reclaiming of its Catholic Holy Places. Just once, in the mid-fourth century, under an apostate Emperor, was there a movement to de-Christianize Jerusalem in favor of Christ’s crucifiers. An attempt was made to rebuild the Jewish Temple — an attempt which was quickly abandoned at the miraculous intervention of earthquakes and fires. And no one has tried since.

 

By the middle of the fifth century, the Bishop of Jerusalem had gained the title of Patriarch, and the city itself had become a center of pilgrimage for Catholics in the remotest corners of Christendom. And so it remained to our own day, despite the intermittent changeovers in its political control: despite the fall of the kingdom of the Crusaders to the Saracens at the end of the thirteenth century; despite the Turkish Empire’s seizure of Jerusalem at the time of the Protestant revolt; despite the continual persecutions of the official Franciscan custodians of the Holy Land, who have protected our Catholic claims there, uninterruptedly, for over six centuries.

 

Thus, tragic as the details have often been, this Jerusalem geography lesson has taught a stark truth — that God has turned aside from the people who rejected His Divine Son, that He has blotted their name out of the book of the living (as King David foretold He would) and that He has given over the holy city of the Old Testament to the love and prayers of His New Testament, Gentile faithful.

 

                                      *   *   *   *   *

 

Throughout the past nineteen hundred years of Jewish expulsion from Palestine, the Jews have kept a vengeful memory of Our Lord’s triumph in the city of His first Easter Sunday. “Next year in Jerusalem!” has been the cry at centuries of Jewish festivals, echoing from the plains of the Pale of Settlement to the ghettos of Rome. It has been reserved to our own day however — the post-French Revolution, Freemasonic era — to see the progress of a vast Jewish movement to regain a hold on Jerusalem. And significantly enough, this bold restatement of a national Jewishness, as we now know it, can be traced to the middle of the 1800’s, to a book which bears the antipodal title, Rome and Jerusalem.

 

In any historical study of Zionism (the name the Jews give to their nationalist movement), Rome and Jerusalem must be accorded the position of a new Torah, a formularization at last of that unwritten law which has guided the nation of the Jews during all of Christian times.

 

The book was written in Paris by a Jew named Moses Hess, who aimed it principally at the assimilationist Jews of his native Germany. A long-time disciple of Karl Marx, Hess had a revolutionist’s bent for explosive ideas. On the very first page of his frank preface, he bursts into that basic Jewish thesis which gives Rome and Jerusalem its title. “Papal Rome,” writes Hess, “symbolizes to the Jews an Inexhaustible well of poison. It is only with the drying up of this source that Christian German anti-Semitism will die from lack of nourishment.”

 

As the text unfolds, he adds such refinements as: “It is true that Christianity shed a certain glow during the dark ages of history … but its light only revealed the graves of the nations of antiquity. Christianity is, after all, a religion of death.”

 

Hess then proceeds to the positive means by which Catholic Rome could be defeated. That means, he says, is the building up of Jerusalem — an undefined job which Hess apparently feels must start with each individual Jew. “Every Jew,” he proposes in casual blasphemy, “has within him the potentiality of a Messiah and every Jewess that of a Mater Dolorosa.” In Hess’ dispensation, no Jew could plead for exemption from service to the Jewish nation, because “A Jew belongs to his race and consequently also to Judaism, in spite of the fact that he or his ancestors have become apostates … A converted Jew remains a Jew no matter how much he objects to it.”

 

By the time he gets to page 138, Hess is confidently telling his Jewish patriots that “The Messianic Era is the present age.” A “regeneration” of the world has been going on since the “great” French Revolution. Rome is already on the way down, he declares, and the job of the loyal Jew is to establish Jerusalem in its place. Christianity will be “finally replaced among the regenerated nations by a new historical cult. To this coming cult, Judaism alone holds the key.”

 

It has been the mission of present-day Zionists, who regard Moses Hess as their prophet, to grasp that key securely, and start it turning.

 

                                    *   *   *   *   *

 

By publicly venting those notions and emotions which his people had for centuries been forced to stifle in themselves, Moses Hess showed that the era of Jewish resurgence was at hand. Daring and indispensable as his work was, however, Hess had not done enough for the Jews. His anti-Christian rantings still had to be translated into a practical plan of action. A leader was needed who could point the way to make Jerusalem the Rome-rivaling capital of Jewry not just in symbol, but in fact.

 

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Jews found their needed leader, in the person of an obscure, obsessed Jewish journalist named Theodore Herzl. With fanatic energy, Herzl hurtled from one end of Europe to the other, arguing, writing, organizing, preaching a gospel that entranced wealthy Jews into opening their checkbooks, and fired millions of down-trodden delicatessen-keepers with a vision of triumph.

 

In the early 1900’s, shortly before his death, Herzl set forth upon a final grand tour of the European capitals. Having captivated his own people, he now hoped to win the Gentile heads of state to the Zionist cause. To no one’s surprise, the Masonic coterie then ruling Europe received Herzl and his plans with wide-open arms. Whereupon, enflamed with success, he decided to call on the Pope. Perhaps Herzl fancied that with the changing times the Vatican might have tempered its traditional anti-Jewishness. Perhaps he was carried away with the thought of what a magnificent plum it would make if he could coax a pontifical blessing on his ideas. But whatever high-flying hopes prompted his visit, Herzl was about to see them dashed to the ground. For the year was 1904; and the Pope on whom he called was Saint Pius X.

 

In his Diaries, Herzl describes the visit. After listening quietly to the Zionist plan for restoring the Holy Land to the Jews, Pius X “answered in a stern and categorical manner: ‘We are unable to favor this movement. We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem — but we could never sanction it. The ground of Jerusalem, if it were not always sacred, has been sanctified by the life of Jesus Christ. As the head of the Church, I cannot answer you otherwise. The Jews have not recognized Our Lord; therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.’ ”

 

And to the Pope’s pointed words, Herzl adds in his Diaries the pointed comment: “The conflict between Rome and Jerusalem, represented by the one and the other of us, was once again under way.”

 

                                        *   *   *   *   *

 

During the half-century following Herzl’s death, this “conflict” heightened steadily, and on May 15, 1948, reached its climax. On that date world Jewry announced the establishment of a new state in the Holy Land.

 

At first the Holy City itself was not touched. The Jewish state — which the Jews dubbed “Israel” — had set up its capital at Tel Aviv, on the Mediterranean coast; for Jerusalem lay beyond its reach, some thirty miles into Arab territory. But almost immediately the Jews started hammering at their Arab neighbors, and before long had bulged out the borders of their state in every direction, and had thrust a finger into Jerusalem.

 

At Vatican insistence, enforced by the votes of Catholic countries, the United Nations decreed in December, 1949, that Jerusalem should be governed by neither Jews nor Arabs but by an international council. This administration, the Vatican hoped, would be able to safeguard the Holy Places. In response to this decision, the Jewish state promptly announced that it was moving its capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

 

When the United Nations (after much hemming and hawing) and the U. S. State Department issued timorous protests against such rank defiance, Jewish Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion snarled back, “That city’s future is settled.” Jerusalem, he said, was and would remain his capital. Wild with delight, the Jews of America shrilled their approval of Ben-Gurion’s behavior with full-page advertisements in the daily press and a gloating article in the National Jewish Monthly entitled, “Jerusalem: Now and Forever, Capital of Israel.”

 

Though at present the Jews control only half the Holy City, it is plain they want it all. Itching for a final take-over, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion has called on his compatriots to “show the world that Jerusalem is a Jewish city” — a suggestion that has been carried out with a thoroughness and ferocity only Jews could have conceived.

 

The few hundred Arabs who have remained in the Jewish sector of the city have been subjected to an ordeal of hardship and horror calculated to drive them from the Holy Land, and to discourage previously-evicted Arabs from returning. They are hired for jobs only when no Jews apply, and are paid reduced wages; they are harassed with travel restrictions and nightly curfews; they are given continual and vivid reminders that they may be at any time arrested as enemies of the state, dispossessed of their houses and lands, even murdered in official “reprisal” for some affront of an Arab national against the Jews. As Archbishop Hakim of Galilee recently insisted, the main reason why one million Arabs have fled from their life-long homes in the Holy Land is that they “were terrorized out by the Israelis.”

 

Even more forceful as a way of showing the world who is running Jerusalem, has been the Jews’ deliberate, wholesale destruction of Catholic shrines, churches, and institutions. Trying to calculate an incalculable loss, the Vatican has charged the Jews with ravaging Church property in the Holy Land at the rate of two million dollars’ worth a year. Targets of Jewish attack in Jerusalem have included the Cenacle, where Our Lord celebrated His Last Supper; the Convent of Mary Reparatrix, which was dynamited during the night while six nuns were known to be still inside; and the Church of the Dormition, which marks the venerated place of Our Lady’s Death, and which the Jews turned first into an artillery post and then into a dance hall for the Jewish army.

 

                                     *   *   *   *   *

 

The words that Saint Pius X spoke to Theodore Herzl — “We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem … ” — have been manifestly, tragically prophetic. Every Pope of this century has followed Pius X’s example of denouncing and warning against the Jews’ ambition to usurp the Holy Land. But the Jews have not been stopped. The pleadings of twentieth-century Popes have gone out into a world vastly removed from the world that rallied to the Crusades. “Will you allow the infidels to contemplate in peace the ravages they have committed?” Saint Bernard of Clairvaux had asked that world in the twelfth century. “The Living God has charged me to declare to you that He will punish them who will not avenge Him against His enemies.”

 

As a symbol, a liturgical remembrance, Jerusalem will be once again the center of Catholic attention this Lent. But as a place, a living, sacred, bled-for city, Jerusalem will remain, at our peril, abandoned to the enemies of God.

____________________________________

The Point

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

May, 1957

 

OUR LADY OF FATIMA WARNED US

 

By 1917, the Catholic country of Portugal stood just where the forces of Freemasonry wanted it. After an assault which lasted more than one hundred years, Portugal’s king had been shot down in the street, and Portugal’s Faith, the binding strength of its people, had been legislated back into the catacombs.

 

The inevitable Masonic “republic” had been declared, which in turn declared many unheard of things in Portugal. Jews, for example, were now to be considered full-dress citizens. Priests and nuns, for example, were now to be arrested for wearing their religious habits.

 

It was to this Portugal that the Mother of God appeared in 1917 as Our Lady of the Rosary. Forty years ago this month, she first spoke to the ten-year-old peasant girl, Lucy dos Santos, and Lucy’s two younger cousins, Jacinta and Francis. Considering the weightiness of what she had to say, the Mother of God could not have picked a more unlikely trio of confidants. They were the children of shepherd-farmers, whose concern with whatever world lay beyond their village extended only as far as a rocky stretch of upland pasture. And the younger two were about to die of influenza in a matter of months. Yet they were to share with the Queen of Heaven her most universal worries; and the surviving one of them, Lucy, was to be the voice of a divine mercy and a divine justice, more tender and more awful than our century could have imagined.

 

The mercy which Lucy dos Santos of Fatima was instructed to tell about consisted in this: Sinful and apostate as men had become, they could still ward off God’s wrath by returning devoutly to Our Lord in Holy Communion, saying the Rosary, doing acts of penance and sacrifice, and dedicating themselves to a little-known and challenging Catholic devotion, the Immaculate Heart of Mary. There was one further condition. Russia must also be consecrated, simultaneously by the Pope and all the bishops of the world, to the Immaculate Heart.

 

                                       *   *   *   *   *

 

This May thirteenth marks the fortieth anniversary of Our Lady of Fatima’s coming. And her conditions of mercy, all of them, are yet to be met. It is therefore not surprising that her consequent justice is so oppressively upon us.

 

That justice, says Lucy, was explained to her in Our Blessed Mother’s following words. “If my requests are heard, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. If not, she will spread her errors throughout the entire world, fomenting wars and persecutions of the Church. ”

 

Were Lucy, at the age of ten, puzzled at what Our Lady meant by the “errors” of Russia, there would have been few in all of Europe to whom she could have turned in 1917 for an explanation. The Russian errors were then only beginning to assert themselves on the world’s stage. 1917 was, indeed, to be the big year for them — the big year for both of them, for they were two.

 

And while these two were familiarly and conveniently called Russian errors, it must be remembered that they were Russian with reservation. By no means were they errors of the Russian people, propagated by them and bearing endemic Russian birthmarks. They were, rather, locationally Russian. Russia was the place where, predictably, they first held forth. For Russia, at the time, was the chief populational home of world Jewry — and these two were errors of the Jews, preached by Jews, and everywhere taken to be Jewish. Their 1917 names were Bolshevism and Zionism, though the former, as is the fashion with Jews, was pleased to be known by more than one name, and has made its subsequent reputation as Communism.

 

A recent book by a former London Times correspondent provides this neat summary of the pair. “These two beanstalks, though neither is Russian, sprang from a common root in Russia. Before the first war they germinated in the cellars and ghettos of Russia. They appeared above ground in 1917, when the alien Communists were helped to usurp power in Russia and the Zionist ambition was espoused by the British government.” (Somewhere South of Suez, Devin-Adair, New York, 1951)

 

A report by another London Times correspondent, published less than two years after the Fatima apparitions, bore further witness to the ghetto origins of Communism. In the issue of March 29, 1919, the third of a series of Times’ “Bolshevist Portraits” began: “One of the most curious features of the Bolshevist movement is the high percentage of non-Russian elements amongst its leaders. Of the twenty or thirty commissaries who provide the central machinery of the Bolshevist movement, not less than seventy-five per cent are Jews … while amongst the minor Soviet officials the number is legion.”

 

To cite a further, and Catholic, statement of the Jewishness of Russia’s Communism, we quote briefly from that late giant of English Catholic letters, Hilaire Belloc. One of his most telling broadsides against Communism was the following which appeared in his book, The Jews (Houghton Mifflin and Company, Boston, 1923): “The Bolshevist movement was a Jewish movement … its agents, directors and masters were seen to be a close corporation of Jews with only a few non-Jewish hangers-on (each of these controlled by Jews through one influence or another).”

 

                                     *   *   *   *   *

 

From the very moment that the sixth and final apparition at Fatima faded into the October sky, the twin errors of Communism and Zionism leaped forward, as it were, unleashed. Within a month, the government of the proud Russian Empire had effectively fallen before the plots of a roomful of Communist revolutionaries. And at the other end of Europe, the Holy Land itself was being promised to the Russian Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, by no less an authority than His Majesty’s Government at London. This English promise, called the Balfour Declaration, was dated November 2, 1917. The final message at Fatima was not yet three weeks old.

 

Forty years later, the fantastic picture is this: Communism sits as the absolute lord of the East, with an empire stretching from Berlin to the China Sea, dominating one quarter of the land area of the world, and a third of the world’s people. Zionism, on the Western hand, stands arrogantly astride the remainder of the world’s powers, with every major head-of-state a self-professed defender of Zionism, every major city a Zionist fund-raising headquarters, and every major Western nation in sustained peril of seeing the cream of its youth killed-off to perpetuate the Zionist state in Palestine.

 

                                 *   *   *   *   *

 

Spectacular as these political considerations are, however, they have been eclipsed in Catholic minds by the horrors which have beset the Church since Fatima. Nothing more pointedly reflects the Jewish inspiration of Communism and Zionism than the vengeance with which they have attacked Our Lord in His Mystical Body.

 

The number of Catholics slaughtered, altars desecrated, priests imprisoned and nuns violated by the Communists, extends into millions. The mere words Mexico, Spain, Poland, and Hungary are labels for the blackest memories of the past forty years. Even now, the Catholics of Eastern Europe, as many as remain, live a sustained crucifixion. In Czechoslovakia, for just one example, there are thirteen archbishops and bishops in Communist jails; seminaries and schools are boarded up; convents and monasteries have been confiscated; 5,000 Czech priests, nuns, and brothers who refused to compromise their Faith now serve as slave-laborers in mines and factories.

 

Zionism’s attack has been even more bold. It set its sights on no less a target than Our Lord’s own Holy Land. And once it got a foothold, the most ancient of Catholic shrines were splintered into trophies for the Jewish marauders. Desecrations of the most unprintably obscene kind were devised for such hallowed places as the Cenacle, the upper room where Our Lord, on the first Holy Thursday, instituted the Blessed Sacrament.

 

And at no time was the enmity between Zionism and the Mother of God made more dramatically unforgettable than when the Benedictine Church of the Dormition, built on the spot where Our Blessed Lady died, was converted by the vengeful Jews into a dance hall for the soldiers of the Zionist state.

 

                                     *   *   *   *   *

 

Still, for all its ferocity, the clash between the Mother of God and the Jewish twins, Communism and Zionism, is but one campaign in a greater, deeper, and more abiding struggle. “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed,” God said to Satan after Adam’s fall (Gen. 3:1 5). And at the same time as He declared war between His Mother and the Devil, and between her children and his agents, God also disclosed how the war would end: “She shall crush thy head,” He told Satan, “and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.”

 

Eventually, Our Lady must tread upon Communism and Zionism as she must prevail over every stratagem of the Devil and his army. Indeed, this final victory was plainly promised at Fatima. “In the end,” Our Lady told the three children, “my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, which will be converted, and some time of peace will be given to the world.”

 

But before anyone relaxes into a state of blissful stagnation, he should note that this assurance of Russia’s turning away from the Jews and into the Catholic Church is an ultimate prospect: “In the end … ” Our Lady said.

 

As to what storms we can expect before this concluding calm, the Mother of God has given a severe forecast. Unless her requests are heeded, she told the Fatima children, Russia “will spread its errors throughout the entire world, fomenting wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have to suffer much, various nations will be annihilated.”

 

It is evident, from the religious, cultural, and moral chaos which the world has embraced, that the warnings of Fatima are being ignored. It is also evident that the world now has weapons with which it may scourge itself out of existence. The stark terror induced by these weapons is accentuated for many by the knowledge that there is in the keeping of the Bishop of Leiria, in Portugal, a sealed letter, given him by Lucy dos Santos, which is to be opened in 1960. This letter contains the final “secret” of Fatima — the one part of the apparition still to be revealed.

 

But whatever this last word from Our Lady of Fatima may be (who, in previously-published words foretold the coming of World War II), we have already been shown what is our one refuge.

 

“God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.” That was the thunderous ultimatum which the Queen of Heaven entrusted, just forty years ago, to three quiet children on a quiet hill in Portugal. Only by complying with it can we smash the Communist-Zionist machine. Diplomatic conferences cannot do it; nor guided-missile defenses; nor billion-dollar programs of foreign aid and propaganda. Only one remedy can save the world from the hell it is facing both here and hereafter: devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary: true devotion, flowering in the one true Faith.

 

Red Sidelight

 

The recent national convention of the Communist Party of America, held in New York, achieved at least one thing. It provided an eloquent answer to the following favorite objection: Granted that Communism is authored and motivated by Jews, doesn’t its wildfire dispersion through all the world warrant its now being called a Gentile movement?

 

As reported in the public press, the roster of delegates to the Communist conclave — the first since 1950 — reads like the guest register of a Miami Beach hotel. Public Relations chief was Simon Gerson. Chairman of the Resolutions Committee was Sidney Stein. National Educational Director was Max Weiss. Submitting majority and minority reports recommending Party policy were, respectively, William Schneiderman and Esther Cantor. Leading the faction whose ideas ultimately prevailed was the editor of the Daily Worker, John Gates (known to his childhood chums as Israel Ragenstreif).

 

Shortly before the convention opened, three likely delegates were prevented from attending when the F.B.I. arrested them as Soviet spies. It was the most notable such arrest since the Rosenbergs. Race of the three: same as the Rosenbergs.

_________________________________

The Point

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

June, 1957

 

THE REJECTED PEOPLE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

 

Why the Jews Fear the Bible

With the coming of summer and those languid days traditionally given to resting and reading, The Point would like to make a suggestion. We recommend that this year you ignore all the frothy tomes which have been specially confected for your beach-chair entertainment, and read instead that most substantial and engrossing of all books, the Holy Bible.

 

The prime incentive for reading God’s word is always, of course, just that: it is God’s word — the thundering, inspired account of man’s long climb from Genesis to Apocalypse; how he fell from grace, how he was redeemed, what he must do to be saved.

 

But there is another reason also why now, particularly, we ought to take our Scriptures off the shelves. The notion has got around (at whose prompting, we will let you guess) that the Bible is a book which celebrates the Jews; and that since we Catholics are supposed to reverence the Bible, we ought also to honor the race to whom it is devoted.

 

The number of people who have been deceived by this artful dodge indicates one thing: how crass and colossal is our present-day ignorance of Holy Scripture.

 

No one could possibly read the seventy-two books which constitute God’s revelation and conclude that Jews deserve the esteem of Catholics. For albeit the Bible presents Jewish history, it is not the sort of history the Anti-Defamation League would approve. It is the story of how a few faithful Jews in each generation championed God against the rest of their race — a proud, stubborn, ungrateful, and unbelieving multitude. Far from promoting love for the Jews, the Bible is thus the font of Christian anti-Jewishness. No other book gives such a strong, sure taste of their perfidy.

 

It is in the New Testament that the Jews are shown at their ultimate worst — when they are confronted with the Messias, reject Him, crucify Him, call down His Blood as a curse upon them, and then do their utmost to prevent His gospel from being spread through the world. A partial report on this New-Testament portrayal of the Jews appears below. But even under the Old Law it is evident what the Jews are coming to. Prophet after prophet castigates them for their wickedness and warns them that they are going to be rejected by God in favor of the Gentiles; and prophet after prophet is killed by the Jews in defiant retort. As early as the book of Exodus, God has said to Moses: “See that this people is stiff-necked. Let me alone, that my wrath may be kindled against them, and that I may destroy them: and I will make of thee a great nation.” (Exodus 32:9)

 

Plainly, it is not for their own sakes, or for any goodness inherent in the race, that the Jews are kept at the center of the Old-Testament stage. It is, rather, because through some Jews — a holy, beleaguered handful, like Moses and Joshua and David and the prophets — the true Faith is kept alive down to the time of Our Lord. And the other reason for God’s sustained interest in the Jews is that eventually from their thorny midst there will blossom His one perfect creature, the Virginal Mother of His Son.

 

But if the Jews make such a poor showing in the Old Testament, how do they bear to read it? The answer is, they don’t. Their religious reading time is devoted to a post-Crucifixion book of their own devising, the Talmud. The Jews have rejected the first part of Holy Scripture as surely and as violently as they have rejected the second. Nor is it merely the treatment of their ancestors that the Jews object to; it is equally the Old Testament’s prophecies of the coming Messias, so blazingly and unmistakably fulfilled in Jesus.

 

Yet it should not be assumed that in shunning the Faith of Moses and David the Jews have abandoned all religious doctrine. Everyone familiar with Jewish practices knows that they still do believe most fervently in a Messias. And they profess this belief constantly — when they force Gentile merchants out of business and take over a city’s shopping district; when they take control of a nation’s newspapers and other means of disseminating ideas; when they demand that laws be passed forbidding anyone to speak against the Jews; when they drive a million Arabs from their homes and appropriate the land for themselves; when they insist that Western nations not only allow this outrage, but support it with their wealth and the blood of their youth — in all these ways and in hundreds of others, the Jews testify to their belief in a Messias.

 

And if anyone is still wondering who the Jews think the Messias is, Dr. Joseph Klausner, internationally recognized Jewish spokesman, supplies the answer. In his book, The Messianic Idea In Israel (Macmillan, 1955), Dr. Klausner declares that a personal savior has long since been an old-fashioned notion with the Jews and that, “Thus the whole people Israel, in the form of the elect of the nations, gradually became the Messiah of the world, the redeemer of mankind.”

 

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It is a common complaint of public Jews that the most anti-Jewish book in the New Testament is the Fourth Gospel. The Point would venture to propose, however, that the Fourth — Saint John’s — Gospel has a close rival in the book which is placed immediately after it in every edition of the New Testament. That book is the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Luke’s inspired account of what happened to Saint Peter and, at greater length, to Saint Paul from the time the Church was born at Pentecost until the year of Saint Paul’s imprisonment at Rome, A. D. 62.

 

In chapter one of the Acts (there are twenty-eight chapters in all), Saint Peter establishes the anti-Jewish theme with a resounding speech about the traitor Judas, who “being hanged, burst asunder in the midst: and all his bowels gushed out.” By the time you reach the fifth chapter, Saint Peter has five times pontifically berated the Jews for crucifying Jesus. And, not surprisingly, he and the rest of the Apostles have made their first of many trips to jail.

 

The deacon, Saint Stephen, the first martyr of the Church, is the hero of chapters six and seven. Just before the Jews take up their stones to silence him, Stephen concludes his summary of the Jewish situation by addressing his executioners as, “You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do you also. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? And they have slain them who foretold of the coming of the Just One; of whom you have been now the betrayers and the murderers!”

 

The Acts of the Apostles’ ninth chapter introduces us to Saint Paul, who after his miraculous conversion, tries to convert the Jews at Damascus, who in turn try to kill him. Paul escapes their rage only by the most stealthy resourcefulness, being lowered over the city walls in a basket.

 

Paul’s flight from the Jews serves as a likely prelude to the events of the next chapter, when Saint Peter beholds the great vision in which God signifies to him that he must work for the conversion of the Gentiles to the infant Church. And in his catechism instructions to the Roman Cornelius, immediately after, Peter repeats once more that the Jews have murdered Our Lord. Back at Jerusalem, Peter explains the Church’s mission to the Gentiles, while Saint Paul, up in Antioch, has the distinction of hearing himself and his converts called, for the first time, Christians.

 

This brings us to chapter twelve, which begins with the information that King Herod “killed James, the brother of John, with the sword, and seeing that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to take Peter up also.” Peter is delivered from the designs of his Jerusalem enemies, and from chapter thirteen until the end of the book, the Acts tells the story of the mission work of Saint Paul. Everywhere the pattern is the same: Paul preaches, many are converted, the local Jews are aroused, and the Apostle is forced to flee for his life.

 

In Pisidia, for example, “The Jews stirred up religious and honorable women, and the chief men of the city and raised persecution of Paul and Barnabas: and cast them out of their coasts.” Again, in chapter fourteen, we read about the near-stoning of Saint Paul at Iconium, and the Jews’ pursuit of him throughout Lycaonia, until finally he is mercilessly beaten, dragged out into a country place, and abandoned as dead.

 

Restored to his work, he is, of course, re-exposed to the Jewish plots against him. In the city of Thessalonica, “The Jews, moved with envy, and taking unto them men of the vulgar sort, and making a tumult, set the city in an uproar.” Paul survives this onslaught also, and when we arrive at chapter eighteen, he even sees a temporary victory over the Jews. The Gentiles of Achaia soundly trample upon the ruler of the synagogue who was there plotting against Paul.

 

From chapters twenty-one to twenty-eight, Saint Paul is a prisoner of the government, with new and bitter complaints constantly being brought against him by the Jews. The local authorities are at last most grateful to be rid of their controversial charge when Saint Paul, under appeal to Caesar himself, is dispatched to Rome. It is at Rome, shortly after Paul’s arrival, that the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles is terminated.

 

The final verses of the last chapter give us Saint Paul’s electric speech to the Jews of Rome. Reproving them with the words of Isaias, he says, “The heart of this people is grown gross, and with their ears they have heard heavily, and their eyes they have shut; lest perhaps they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted.” And the Apostle prophetically concludes: “Be it known to you, therefore, that this salvation of God is sent to the Gentiles, and they will hear it!”

                                   *   *   *   *   *   *

 

 The examples set by Saints Peter and Paul, and preserved in the pages of Holy Scripture, have of course had the precise effect which God intended when He inspired them. They have been a source of edification, and a prod to imitation, for the Christian leaders of all the Christian centuries. Thus, the saints of every age, in aspiring to be “other Christs,” have contracted to assume not only the sunlight of Christ’s meekness but, quite as much, the thunders of His indignation.

 

The resultant warfare between the canonized children of the Church and the crucifiers of Jesus has left an abundant literature of its own; which is most sublime when it takes the form of Biblical commentaries, and most authoritative when written by that select group of Catholic theologians, the twenty-nine Doctors of the Universal Church. From the writings of two of these saints, we have chosen passages which will indicate the intensity (though, regrettably, not the extensiveness) of the anti-Jewish sentiments provoked by the Bible.

 

Among the works of the fourth-century Doctor, Saint Ephrem the Deacon, there is no selection more representative in style and content than his poetical “Rhythm Against the Jews, Delivered on Palm Sunday.” Anticipating the Jewish treacheries of Holy Week, Saint Ephrem comments upon the Gospel story of Our Lord’s betrayal and crucifixion at the hands of the Jewish people, whom he calls “that asp that loveth adulterers.”

 

“What is thine iniquity, O daughter of Jacob,” he asks, “that thy chastisement is so severe? Thou hast dishonored the King and the King’s Son, thou shameless one and harlot … The Jews, then, not only made themselves strangers to the covenants, but dishonored the Father and killed the Son in envy. The Prophet invites the congregation of the house of Israel to praise Him, but it went about to kill Him, and hastened to do evil.”

 

Our second Doctor, the great Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, has often been cited by Jewish apologists as “the saint who liked the Jews.” Bernard’s qualification for this title rests upon the sole circumstance of his plea to twelfth-century Catholics that they must find some other means than annihilation for resolving the Jewish problem.

 

In commenting upon the book of the prophet Isaias, Saint Bernard places himself staunchly within the ranks of the Church’s anti-Jewish Scriptural commentators. He says, “O intelligence coarse, dense and, as it were, bovine, which did not recognize God, even in His own works! Perhaps the Jew will complain, as of a deep injury, that I call his intelligence bovine. But let him read what is said by the prophet Isaias, and he will find that it is even less than bovine. For he says, ‘The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib; but Israel hath not known me, and my people hath not understood.’ (Isaias 1:3) You see, O Jew, I am milder than your own prophet. I have compared you to the brute beasts; but he sets you even below these.”

 

Warning!

 

Readers who are determined on a re-look at the Bible should be wary of an English version, available at many Catholic book-stores, advertised as the Knox Bible. This appropriative title derives from the name of the translator: ex-Protestant minister, Monsignor Ronald Knox.

 

Had he not taken up with the Catholic Church, Ronald Knox might be presently remembered among readers of English as the author of two first-rate murder mysteries and of several uncommonly clever limericks. This kind of literary endeavor, however (even when supplemented by innumerable witty sermons), would leave any Englishman tragically ill-equipped for the prayerful, reverent, anything-but-clever vocation of translating the revealed Word of God.

 

And we were prepared to believe that it was chiefly this secular smartness which made Monsignor Knox’s translation of the Bible so repugnant; until we happened upon his rendering of Isaias, 7:14, that portentous prophecy of Our Blessed Lady: “Behold a Virgin shall conceive and bear a son.” Monsignor Knox’s presentation of this text not only fails to call Our Lady a Virgin, but gives the Virgin Birth all the clinical air of a maternity-ward delivery. He writes: “A Maid shall be brought to bed of a son.”

 

By Christian standards, such a statement is neither clever nor orthodox. What further worries us is that, by Jewish standards, it is both.

____________________________

The Point

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

July, 1957

 

THE JUDAISING OF CHRISTIANS BY JEWS

 

Tactics of the Church’s Leading Enemies

The recent death of Spain’s Cardinal Segura, Archbishop of Seville, offered our Judaeo-Masonic press an opportunity of the sort which it will always pounce upon, with gusto. His late Eminence provided a timely “for instance” for that legion of editors whose favorite national aversion is Spain, and whose notion of all that is black, backward, and evil remains epitomized in the words, Spanish Catholicism — or (in quick descent from genus to species) Spanish Inquisition.

 

Apace with this secular attack, explanations and apologies for Spain and the Inquisition fill the question-and-answer columns of our Catholic press, and the Spanish chapters of our Catholic history texts. And, as if by some eerie pre-arrangement, neither the offense nor the defense in this chronic war dares a frank discussion of that urgent problem which made the Inquisition necessary in the first place.

 

Actually, it is no secret that the Spanish Inquisition was somehow concerned with Jews. Least of all, do the Jews try to hide the fact. Any Jewish discussion of the Inquisition will invariably and boldly lay the historical cards on the table. With their incomprehensible eagerness to boast about anything that any Jew has ever done, current Jewish spokesmen will give detailed reasons why the Inquisition and the Jews are inseparable. Those reasons are the key to centuries of history on either side of the Spanish Inquisition. And they are best summarized in that one eloquent word, Judaizing.

 

Generally defined, Judaizing is a term for any activity which aims at softening the attitude of Christendom toward Jews, or which results in the overthrow of Christian doctrines in favor of Jewish ones. The Inquisition was Spain’s answer to Judaizing. And it was the most effective answer the Jews have ever been given.

 

The particular, though not peculiar, tactic of the Spanish Judaizers was infiltration. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of Jews entered the Church’s ranks in Spain. They were recognized as a problem almost immediately. But by the time the remedy of the Inquisition was introduced, these “New Christians” were firmly established in all the higher levels of Spanish society, including, in pronounced numbers, the clergy. Representative of the kind of clerical case brought to the attention of the Inquisitors was that of Andres Gomalz, a Jewish parish priest who, on trial at Toledo in 1486, confessed that for fourteen years as a Jewish infiltrator he had said his parish Mass having expressly no intention to consecrate, and that during the same period he had, secretly, never given absolution to the penitents who came to him for Confession.

 

It is small wonder that the word applied to these Jewish Christians was “Marranos,” a vivid colloquialism derived from the Spanish word for swine. In its article on the Marranos, the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia acknowledges this unsavory etymology and continues, quite defiantly, “The Inquisition, which was newly organized in 1481, was intended to suppress the remnants of the old Faith (Judaism) among the Marranos. However, the proceedings of the Inquisition showed clearly, for the first time, the strong attachment of the Marranos to Judaism, how deeply the Jewish religion and traditions were rooted in their hearts.”

 

Spain’s vigorous handling of the Judaizing problem kept the evil effects of Jewish influence at a minimum. The Church in other nations, under other Judaizing pressures, has been less fortunate. The Apostles themselves suffered much from the wiles of Judaizers. Saint Paul had constantly to battle them, saying finally, in his Epistle to the Galatians, that anyone who now supports the Old Law against the New is under a curse directly imposed by God. Despite this warning, however, great numbers of the early Church heretics (Theodotus, Neotus, Paul of Samosata, Sabellius, Arius, etc.) were “sprung from the Jews,” as Bishop Challoner puts it.

 

The Church’s seventh Ecumenical Council, held at Nicaea in 787, was forced to enact severe legislation against Jews “who have become Christians in appearance only.” And it was, significantly enough, this same Council which condemned the widespread Eastern error, so identical with Jewish teaching, that the Faithful should not venerate images of Our Lord, Our Lady, and the Saints.

 

In the West, the episode of the Spanish Marranos had been preceded by the heretical disruptions of the Albigensians in Southern France. Here again, Jews boast of being the fomenters of religious discord, and it took all the preaching of a Saint Dominic and all the papal power of an Innocent III to restore order.

 

The Jews’ greatest triumph, however, in the art of dividing Christendom by injecting new and Jewish ideas into the midst of the Church, came with the multiple revolts of the Protestant “reformers.” Each one of them is a detectable creature of the Judaizers, and Jewish commentators from Graetz down to Louis Israel Newman have been most happy to acknowledge them as such. In his Jewish Influence On Christian Reform Movements, Newman summarizes: “Protestantism made its greatest stand where the Marrano Jews were active … They helped break down the authority of the Vulgate and thereby prepared Europe for the Reformation.”

 

The reference to Saint Jerome’s “Vulgate” version, the Catholic version, of the Bible is no idle one. The entire Reformation era rocked with the “battle of the books” controversy, in which Jewish-trained Hebrew scholars were constantly pressing for the authority of Hebrew texts, and for the universal study of those numerous Jewish books which the Church had everywhere been censoring or burning — chief among them, the blasphemous Talmud.

 

                                   *   *   *   *   *

 

To indicate the scope of Judaizing influence on the Protestant revolt, we need only mention the names of such leaders among the revolutionaries as Michael Servetus, initiator of the Unitarian movement, who took his anti-Trinitarian ideas from the Marrano teachers of his native Spain; John Hus, whose followers were called “the friends of the Jews” by Saint John Capistrano, and whose sentence of condemnation by the Church branded him as, “Thou accursed Judas, who, breaking away from the counsels of peace, hast consulted with the Jews”; John Calvin, whom the rigidly-Protestant Dr. Robert Willis lumps with the other “Judaic” reformers and charges they “interspersed the religion of Christ with such an amount of Judaism that their Christianity was in many respects a relapse into the bonds of the Law”; Martin Luther, who, though later embittered against the Jews who would not worship his religious authority, started off his movement by saying, “The Jews belong to Christ more than we. I beg, therefore, my dear Papists, if you become tired of abusing me as a heretic, that you begin to revile me as a Jew.”

 

                                     *   *   *   *   *

 

Unquestionably, the Jews had taken a long gamble in promoting revolt against the Church. If Catholic Europe had been able to repel the Reformation’s assaults on its Faith, it would then, inescapably, have turned its attention to the race which had instructed, financed, and urged on the heretics.

 

But the Jews’ gamble paid off. Luther and the heretics prevailed. Christendom was sundered. And, as the Jews had foreseen, a politically exhausted and doctrinally-divided Europe provided them the most satisfying climate for living and working that they had known in 1500 years.

 

Those nations that had remained faithful did, it was true, try to stay clean of Jewish influence. In 1555, Rome ordered its Jewish population into a ghetto. In 1582, Hungary expelled all Jews from the country; as did Austria in 1670, and France in 1682. But such efforts were just so many fingers in a fast-cracking dike. The Protestant states, though petty, were numerous, and they were committed to letting the Jews plot as they pleased. Using those states as bases, the Jews pressed steadily for the downfall of all Catholic governments.

 

Suddenly, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the floods came. Forgetting the lesson of the Reformation, the Catholic nations had thought to preserve their security simply by keeping an eye on the troublesome race itself. Now, too late, they realized that the Jews had once again enlisted Gentile agents to effect their will: this time a league of backroom atheists calling themselves Freemasons. And this group was far more consciously (and ruthlessly) dedicated to serving the Jewish cause than the Reformation heretics had been. Operating through secret and highly-placed agents in every country, the Freemasons staged a series of well-timed revolutions, beginning with the barbaric dismemberment of France in 1789, and culminating in the overthrow of the Papal States, the Pope’s own domains, in 1870. In place of the traditional Faith-enforcing, Jew-restraining regimes, the Masons then set up a network of constitutional republics, modeled to their own enlightened specifications. These governments were guaranteed to perform the double function of (1) keeping the Church from ever having the main say in society, and (2) allowing the Jews the run of the land.

 

Jewish emancipation was now complete, and Judaizing entered a new era.

 

Today it is no longer necessary for Jews to feign membership in the Church in order to attain respectability and authority. In our Mason-made world, they hold that status as Jews. They are thus enabled to work for the destruction of the Church from outside her — a far more efficient arrangement than working from within, where fear of discovery constantly deterred their ambitions. Consequently, for every Father Oesterreicher gnawing at Catholic teaching in New Jersey, for every Father Klyber nibbling away in Nebraska, there are thousands of steadfastly unconverted Jews subverting the Church from the outside — and with staggering success. For Judaizing is proceeding at a faster pace than ever in history. Objectives that a Marrano bishop in Medieval Spain would have considered fantastic are now being tidily accomplished by assistant directors of your local Jewish Community Center.

 

The following items — of a sort that can be plentifully culled from any newspaper — indicate how American Judaizers have been able to make a shambles of Catholic doctrine and tradition (themselves, meanwhile, climbing ever higher on the ruins).

 

— In one of our major east-coast cities, the Jews of B’nai B’rith announced that they had chosen the city’s Catholic Archbishop as their “man of the year,” and had a plaque they would like to give him. The Archbishop accepted gratefully, then, plaque in hand, repaid his Jewish benefactors by lavishing praise not only on themselves but on their Jewish Talmud (thereby, presumably, repairing the injury done by men of the Catholic past, like Saint Louis of France, who ordered the Talmud burned, and Pope Gregory IX who condemned it as “containing every kind of vileness and blasphemy”).

 

— In the same archdiocese, an auxiliary bishop recently urged the women of his parish to enlarge their scope by paying a visit to a local synagogue.

 

— In the Great Lakes area, a Catholic summer school attended by teaching-nuns has been put under the direction of a Jewish representative of the Anti-Defamation League.

 

— In the Midwest, one of the largest American Catholic universities has invited the Israeli Ambassador to the U. S. to deliver a major address to its student body, informing them of the reasons why Jews (not Catholics) should possess the Holy Land.

 

— In New England, a zealous member of the American Jewish Committee has been allowed to listen in on parochial school classes, just to make sure the students aren’t being taught anything detrimental to his race.

 

— In a popular weekly column, syndicated to diocesan newspapers all over the country, the author, a Paulist priest, has made this declaration of dependence: “We depend upon the Jewish religion just as much as we depend upon Jesus Christ.”

 

                                     *   *   *   *   *

 

The main gain the Judaizers have thus far achieved, however, and the one ultimately responsible for such aberrations as the above, has been persuading Catholics to accept the Jewish cult of “Brotherhood.” This infidel innovation holds that all men, by some undefined lineage, are brothers. Moreover, in a strange interpretation of family life, the Jews insist that every brother (e. g., a Catholic) is bound to praise, honor, and glorify whatever opinions or creeds any other brother (e. g., a Jew) might happen to hold.

 

To see how effectively the Church in this country has been muzzled by submitting to this gibberish, we need look no farther than the recent, notorious “Hildy Case.”

 

Catholic spokesmen made it plain that they wanted the child, Hildy McCoy, to be taken from the Jewish Ellises and returned to the custody of her Catholic mother. (The mother had originally agreed to let the Ellises adopt Hildy, thinking they were Catholics; discovering she had been deceived, she had been trying, for six years, with the support of the Massachusetts courts, to get the child back.) The Jews of America, on the other hand, wanted Hildy to stay with the Ellises, and made their plans accordingly.

 

The Jews well knew that by accepting the terms of Jewish Brotherhood, Catholic ecclesiastics had effectively removed themselves from the fight. The strongest arguments they could offer for Hildy’s return were some rather stuffy, totally unavailing exhortations to the Jews to “respect the law.” These churchmen were obliged to iterate and reiterate that “there is no religious issue involved.” And so, when the governor of Florida, eyeing Miami’s heavy Jewish vote, decided the Ellises would not be extradited to face trial in Massachusetts, the jubilant Jews flaunted their victory over the Church in banner headlines.

 

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In the face of the new and even graver “Hildy Cases” which are bound to follow, The Point will continue to remind American Catholics of the Church’s historical and unchangeable position against the Judaizing menace.

 

Yet more than for our own work, we ask the prayers of our readers for that one American bishop, wherever he may be, who will be the first to speak out against the Jewish threat; who in the ignominy of some future “Hildy” episode will decide that the time at last has come to turn the Judaizing tide.

 

It has always happened elsewhere. It will happen here.

_______________________________

The Point

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

August, 1957

 

A SURE DEFENCE AGAINST THE JEWS

 

What Our Catholic Bishops Can Do For US

The other day we received, in the mail, a bundle from Brazil. It contained copies of the English translation of a Pastoral Letter written by the Bishop of Campos, Dom Antonio de Castro Mayer. Its arrival could not have been more timely.

 

Just last month, we concluded our article on Judaizing by urging readers of The Point to pray that a bishop would soon be heard fearlessly and fully proclaiming the undiluted Catholic Faith, this being the one sure message that can stem the flood of Jewish influence presently engulfing us.

 

And now, for our encouragement, we have the Pastoral Letter of Bishop de Castro Mayer of Brazil.

 

We do not know how many Jews there are in the diocese of Campos, nor what Judaic inroads have been made into Catholic life there, but the things Bishop de Castro Mayer says in his Pastoral Letter (“On Problems of the Modern Apostolate”) are, pre-eminently, the sort of thing that needs to be said in the U. S. The Letter is priestly, it is paternal, it is precise. The errors it condemns are the very ones which the Jews and their abettors are now most busily propagating. It sets forth the Catholic position clearly and emphatically, with none of the usual obeisances to contemporary notions. Its conclusions on all matters, from liturgy and the spiritual life to politics and modesty in dress, are grounded, not in the slogans of Jewish Brotherhood, but in firm Catholic doctrine.

 

The following are sample extracts from Bishop de Castro Mayer’s Letter — after which we offer further items concerning Catholic bishops and their certain ability to preserve the Christian world if they but rise to the full measure of their vocation.

 

“What matters above all is the maintenance of the integrity of Faith, without which no one can please God. (Saint Paul to the Hebrews, ii, 6). If we admit something more fundamental than Faith, we necessarily come to the conclusion that the difference of religions is secondary, a whole intercreedal behavior being therefore justifiable.

 

“Faith without intransigence is either already dead or lives only externally, for it has lost its spirit. Faith being the foundation of supernatural life, tolerance in matters of Faith is the starting point for all evil, especially for heresies.

 

“Collaboration of the faithful with non-Catholics so as to attain common objectives is only occasionally allowed by the Church … The Church looks at these associations with apprehension, and bans them. When, under some exceptional circumstances, she feels as if she were forced to tolerate such collaborations, so as to prevent greater evils, she does it fearfully and full of sorrow.

 

“The interpretation of pontifical acts belongs to the Holy See only. No other interpretation, however respectable and learned it may be, can impose itself as official and as the only one.

 

“Every Catholic who faces a doctrine already condemned has the right, and often the duty, to combat it. If he is confronted with a doctrine not yet expressly condemned, but incompatible with the precepts of the Church, he may, and often must, under his personal responsibility, point out such incompatibility, opposing himself as far as possible to the propagation of that doctrine.

 

“The Morality of the Church is unchangedable, and what yesterday was vanity, an occasion of scandal or sin, is still the same today and will be still the same tomorrow.

 

“The legislation of the Church obliges priests to refuse the Sacraments to people who present themselves (dressed) in an immodest way.

 

“In this atmosphere of increasing corruption, we must adhere to our principles and traditions with redoubled fervor … Purity supposes a whole environment of dignity, gravity, and modesty so that it can be fully and stably practiced.

 

“In the last centuries, the spirit of revolution has produced constant transformations aiming at the overthrow of legitimate powers, degrading the political, social, or economic authority, and leveling all legitimate inequalities. The Church has opposed this historical process, and will continue to do so.

 

“The French Revolution, as far as it tended to complete political, social, and economic equality, in the ideal society dreamed of by its creators, was a satanic movement, inspired by pride.

 

“The Church … has the right to see her laws and doctrines respected by temporal public powers. The State must declare itself officially Catholic; it must offer all its resources for the preservation and expansion of the Faith.

 

“And when in a country the disgrace of circumstances is so deep that separation constitutes a lesser evil than union, which would perforce be deformed, then we should fear for such a country. For everything we separate from God and His Church has no possibility of surviving for a long time.

 

“In the selection of immigrants, we must consider their creed first, and not merely conveniences of the economic, ethnic, and political orders.

 

“We must not appear as soldiers of any cause but our own, nor give the impression of a unilaterality which would be incompatible with the sanctity of our mission.

 

“In or out of the presbytery, the priest must be entirely and exclusively a priest …

 

“As to the necessary role of Mary in our sanctification, Blessed Pius X wrote: ‘All of us, therefore, who are united with Christ, who are, as the Apostle says, the limbs of his body, made out of His flesh and bones (Ephesians 5:30), have come forth out of the Blessed Virgin’s bosom, like a body united to its head … if, then, the Blessed Virgin is at the same time the Mother of God and of men, who can possibly doubt that she directs all her efforts to Jesus Christ, Who is the Head of the Church’s Body.’ ”

 

                                   *   *   *   *   *

 

Every day, at every Mass said within his diocese, the bishop is prayed for, by name. And the Church conceives of this as no mere liturgical courtesy. These are urgent prayers. For successors of the Apostles, with tragic frequency throughout history, have been known to identify themselves not with the lineage of Our Lord’s faithful eleven, but with the line of the twelfth, the Bishop Judas who left the Supper Room seeking the convenient hour to betray his Master.

 

The illustrious Bishop of Constantinople, Saint John Chrysostom, whose episcopal achievements are celebrated in the ancient liturgy which bears his name, had a sober warning in this matter of bishops and their need for our prayers. He said: “I do not speak rashly, but as I feel and think. I do not think that many bishops are saved, but that those who perish are far more numerous. The reason is that the office requires a great soul. For there are many things to make a priest swerve from rectitude, and he requires great vigilance on every side.”

 

The Saint continues, “Do you not perceive how many qualities a bishop must have that he may be strong in his teaching, patient, and hold fast to the faithful word which is according to doctrine? What care and pains does this require! Moreover, he is answerable for the sins of others. To pass over everything else: If but one soul dies without Baptism, does it not entirely endanger his own salvation? For the loss of one soul is so great an evil that it is impossible to express it in words. For if the salvation of that soul was of such value that the Son of God became man and suffered so much, think of how great a punishment must the losing of it bring.”

 

                                     *   *   *   *   *

 

To meet Saint John Chrysostom’s requirements for a bishop “strong in his teaching,” we might find a contemporary example in Jose Maria Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez. Like Bishop de Castro Mayer of Campos, Cardinal Caro is a South American. His archiepiscopal see is Santiago, Chile, and his venerable age is ninety-one years. Trained at the Gregorian in Rome, Cardinal Caro was elevated to his present dignity by Pope Pius XII in 1946. And the elevation was looked upon as most significant by those who had followed the Cardinal’s career. For Jose Maria Caro y Rodriguez had won the enmity of world-wide Freemasonry by his repeated attacks and exposures of Masonic activities — most notably in his detailed study, The Mystery of Freemasonry Unveiled.

 

Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez has, in recent years, authorized an English edition, revised version, of this valuable book. Though the entire treatise is worth reprinting, we propose to our readers the following sample from Chapter III of the text. This chapter bears the title, “Is Masonry the Instrument of Judaism — The Most Important Question of the Day.”

 

The Cardinal writes, “Since my youth, there have resounded together in my ears the names of Masonry and Judaism, of Masons and Hebrews in the attacks upon the Catholic Church. Was it simple coincidence or is it in reality an effective union, and perhaps dependence, between these two entities … There is no doubt that Masonic activity against the Catholic Church is no more than the continuation of the war against Christ practiced by Judaism for the last 1900 years … Read the Gospel and you will see, in Jewish espionage, in their captious questions, in their hypocritical attacks, clothed with the veil of pretended piety of the Pharisees; in their efforts to make Him hated before the people, Christ, Who was their greatest Glory and their wonderful Benefactor; in the use of gold to corrupt an Apostle; in the formation of public opinion against Christ; in the preference for Barabbas; in the fury and false accusations with which they tried to bury the memory of Christ in shame; in the constant opposition, many times bloody, against the preaching of the Apostles, etc.; — in all this you will see the same things that Masonry practices today, at times in very subtle form and at other times in more violent form. Judaism was anti-Christianism; and Masonry, in the service of the same Judaism, is still anti-Christianism.”

 

                                    *   *   *   *   *

 

If Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez of Chile exemplifies a bishop teaching strongly, Saint Cyril of Alexandria, fifth century Patriarch of that Egyptian city, shows us a bishop strong in action.

 

In the year 432, when Saint Cyril was raised to the patriarchate, Alexandria was the home of a Jewish community that was large, prosperous, and deeply embedded in the city’s life — having enjoyed special privileges there since the days of Alexander the Great. But almost immediately (in the words of the haughty-heretical Encyclopedia Britannica) Cyril “made himself known by the violence of his zeal against Jews, pagans, and heretics … ”

 

This zeal reached a peak when the Jews, outraged at Saint Cyril’s lack of deference, began to riot in the streets and massacre Christians. Thereupon, the holy Patriarch rallied a taskforce of his subjects and, proceeding systematically from synagogue to synagogue, from Jewish house to house, drove the Jews out of Alexandria.

 

Besides his opposition to Jewry, Saint Cyril is famous also for his bitter struggle against his fellow-bishop, Nestorius, the heretical Patriarch of Constantinople, who denied that Mary is the Mother of God. This struggle culminated in the year 431, when the Pope summoned a General Council of bishops from the whole Catholic world, to meet at Ephesus. There, Saint Cyril championed Our Lady’s Divine Maternity so surely and magnificently that his name has become inseparably linked not only with every Catholic’s belief, but with his devotion. For it was at Ephesus, in witness and in celebration of Saint Cyril’s victory over Nestorius, that there first thundered that invocation which has resounded through all the Catholic centuries: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

 

                                    *   *   *   *   *

 

When the Basilian Fathers opened their new college for men at Rochester, New York, in 1951, they focused attention on one of the most courageous bishops in the Church’s history. They named their school in honor of King Henry VIII’s arch-opponent, the martyred Bishop of Rochester, England, Saint John Fisher.

 

By all worldly standards, John Fisher had been a successful man. At an early age, he became chaplain to Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of King Henry VII. He was a tutor to the young Prince Henry, who succeeded as Henry VIII. He was named to attend the General Council (the Fifth Lateran Council) at Rome in 1512. After his advancement to the see of Rochester, he was appointed for life as Chancellor of Cambridge University. The Pope made him a Cardinal a month before his death.

 

Yet it was for none of these reasons that the Bishop of Rochester, England, survives in the memory of grateful Catholics. There have been any number of glittering ecclesiastics, court chaplains, and university chancellors among the English hierarchy. But, in his day, there was only one John Fisher. He was the only bishop in all of Catholic England who chose to die for Truth over heresy, and the Pope over the King. Thus, when Pope Pius XI added his name to the roster of the saints in 1935, it was in reward of this singular spectacle: For the supremacy of the One True Faith, Bishop John Fisher literally lost his head.

 

                                    *   *   *   *   *

 

Many New England Catholics have taken courage from the recent and successful conclusion of a battle, in one of our states, to secure bus rides for parochial-school children. The Point ’s regrets in the matter are the same which we have felt so often before: Why not spend some of this zeal on fundamental issues? Why not a state-wide lobby for conversions? Why not a little pressure on the state’s legislators to have them learn the Hail Mary, say the Rosary, receive their first Holy Communion? The results might well be surprising.

 

And if our bishops would like a bit of episcopal precedent, we suggest that they read over a famous sermon by the first Archbishop of New York, John Hughes. It was a hundred years ago that Archbishop Hughes stood up in his cathedral and gave forth with this inevitable Catholic manifesto: “Everybody should know that we have as our mission to convert the world — including the inhabitants of the United States — the people of the cities and the people of the country, the officers of the Navy and the Marines, the commanders of the Army, the Legislators, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President, and all.”

 

Only when this apostolic spirit prevails will we be able to offer to Our Blessed Lady in Heaven an America which is in deed, quite as much as in dedication, the Land of the Immaculate Conception.

 

_________________________________

The Point

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

September, 1957

 

AN UNHOLY PEOPLE IN THE HOLY LAND

 

I — Action of the Jews

It is not yet ten years since Missouri Jew Eddie Jacobson saw his former clothing-store partner, Harry Truman, commit the United States of America to formal recognition of a Jewish State in Palestine. In less than a decade, we have watched the bloody beginning and aggressive growth of the Jewish nation’s first politically sovereign ghetto in nineteen centuries. And although our effort at keeping contemporary track of developments in the Holy Land is necessarily a choppy and piecemeal performance — still, the choppings do fall into a general pattern; and the pieces, like those which follow, will make a discernible picture.

 

The long list of Jewish desecration and destruction of Catholic Church property in the Holy Land ought well to be supplemented by the considerable enumeration of Church buildings left intact by the Jews and converted by them into Jewish facilities. Chief among such would be Terra Sancta College, the former focal point of Franciscan education in Jerusalem’s New City. The college has been appropriated for Jewish university classes and does service as the seat of the National Library of Israel.

 

To accompany a nine page report on similar Jewish injustices, Archbishop George Hakim, most outspoken leader of the 25,000 Catholics who still remain within the borders of the Jewish State, wrote in April of this year: “Unless something is done to improve this situation … we would be faced with the extinction of the Christian flock in the Holy Land.”

 

The civil strictures imposed upon those Catholics who have been allowed to continue their ancient residence in the land of Our Lord’s birth, leave them, along with the rest of the Arab population, second-class citizens, at best. A rigid curfew is imposed on non-Jews. Free movement is curtailed by interminable military “pass” requirements. Eighty-five per cent of the Arab populace is confined to specified non-Jewish residence areas — always the poorest and least desirable sections. Arab workers are paid consistently lower wages than Jews. All government and public business is conducted in Hebrew, which few Arabs know or understand. Government offices (which abound in every settlement) defer answering letters written in Arabic, and any ultimate reply is sent in Hebrew. No Catholic religious mission may be introduced into the Jewish State. Those which survived the terrorism of the “war of independence” are allowed to remain, subject to government regulation, with an iron rule that the personnel of any given convent or monastery is in no way to be increased. Most strictly limited is display of Christian symbols. So extreme is this prohibition that even the Judaeophile Red Cross organization is excluded. In its stead, the Jewish State maintains the Red Star of David (Magen David Adom), which is affiliated with Red Cross international headquarters, but operates free of that hated name and symbol, the Cross.

 

Last year, when Jewish professor Melford Spiro prevailed upon Harvard University to publish his summary of life in the kibbutzim (the Jewish State’s communal farms), he made available to the public some very frank insights into present Palestine. On page 185, he summarizes: “The importance of the Soviet Union in the belief system of the kibbutz cannot be exaggerated. It is a combination of the Vatican and of heaven: from it come authoritative pronouncements on important social, political, and intellectual matters: toward it are directed the aspirations of all the downtrodden of the earth. Not only is the Soviet Union the center of peace, justice, and freedom, but everything in the Soviet Union is superior — its art, literature, science, technology are all superior to their counterparts in the rest of the world.”

 

Loud rejoicing was heard in the kibbutzim after the 1954 Jewish elections, when it was announced that the bustling town of Nazareth, childhood home of both Our Lord and His Blessed Mother, had voted 38 per cent Communist — with six out of fifteen council seats going to local Communist Jews.

 

There were many kibbutz young people among the Jewish State’s national delegation of 250 who attended the Communist International Youth Festival in Moscow this summer. And as the Communist youth of Palestine passed through the Iron Curtain countries into Russia, they undoubtedly crossed paths with that body of East European Jewish delegates who were headed for the Second World Congress of Jewish Studies recently held at Jerusalem. The Jewish Telegraph Agency dispatch on the Congress gave top billing to the delegation of Jewish scholars who arrived, with Communist blessing, from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria.

 

Another and more fluid interchange between Russia and the Jewish State is one of oil for orange juice. Last year, the U. S.&nsbp;S.&nsbp;R. was the big customer (600,000 cases) for the Jews’ export citrus crop. In return, Premier Ben-Gurion helped keep his war machine on the road with tankerfuls of Russian petroleum.

 

The Jews’ military superiority over the neighboring Arab countries has been ascribed by the analysts to a long list of causes, chief among which is the Jewish State’s “preparedness program.” This is an inoffensive way of referring to a perpetual armed-to-the-teeth mode of living. At the age of 14, Jewish boys are training with man-size guns and live ammunition. And not only are Jewish men subject to a universal draft law — the women also, before they are twenty, must fulfill two years of compulsory military training. Upon release from the army, they continue to be “on call” until they reach the age of thirty-four, and each year they must return for a month-long “refresher” course.

 

On July 4, 1955, the Jewish State’s prime minister announced that, in less than five years’ time, his government had received in outright gifts from the government of the United States, $396,150,000 — a sum of more than $1,000 per Jewish family in the Holy Land. And these figures are modest beside the tally of funds poured into Jewish national projects by the Jews of America through their United Jewish Appeal. From 1939 through the present year, the total approaches one and one-half billion dollars!

 

Perhaps the cleverest scheme devised for steering American money into Palestine was the German reparations agreement. It was decided that a split-up and exhausted Germany ought to pay to the Jewish government a series of reimbursements to compensate for German ill-treatment of Jews. To make the deal look thoroughly above-board, Germany was also assessed to make reparations to our own government. When the impoverished Germans pleaded inability to pay, the U. S. claims were waived, and American money and manufactures were advanced to ensure a satisfactory settlement of all that the Jews said they deserved. Net result for the Jewish treasury: $715,000,000.

 

According to the Zionists’ own evaluation, “one of the most important” Jewish agencies in Palestine is the Institute for Instructors Abroad. Located in suburban Jerusalem, this processing center gathers in young Jewish leaders from thirty-seven countries, trains them as “apostles” of Jewish nationalism, and then returns them to preach the Zionist word to all the Jewish State’s citizens-in-exile. Particular emphasis is placed on indoctrinating Jewish young people, and trainees of the Instructors Institute are required, upon return home, to spend two years at full-time Zionist youth work.

 

In a plea for the furtherance of such activity, Premier Ben-Gurion formulated his provocative Credo of a Jew — delivered this summer upon the 53rd anniversary of the death of Theodore Herzl. Ben-Gurion said, in part, “Every Jew, wherever he may be, belongs to the Jewish people. There is a national unity of the Jews of the world … The State (of Israel) must endeavor,” he continues, “to train Jewish youth in Israel and the Diaspora for bold pioneering enterprise that will implement in practice all the values of the vision of Messianic redemption.”

 

II — Reaction

 

The nearly ten years that have passed since Eddie Jacobson’s clothing-store partner agreed to put the Jews on the map have bristled with items like the above. But such news is seldom printed, never emphasized in our Jewishly-intimidated daily newspapers. And Americans believe what they read in the newspapers. Consequently, the Jewish State stands in the popular imagination as an honest, hard-working, democratic nation; a bright little slice of U. S. A. transplanted to the dark shores of the Middle East.

 

So far, the main challenge to this national delusion has been the occasional unrosied reports on Jewry contained in the Catholic press. Beginning with the first stirrings of Zionist ambition, and paralleling its growth, these reports have seen three phases.

 

To Catholic observers living in the early part of this century, political Zionism seemed hardly worth noticing. Hadn’t Theodore Herzl, the author of the thing, visited Pope Pius X in 1904, and hadn’t the Pope emphatically vetoed any plan for a Jewish state in Palestine? The Jews — so it seemed — would not dare move into the Holy Land if the Church didn’t want them there.

 

Then, too, there were other persistent reasons why a Jewish state looked unlikely. As late as 1921 — even after the Zionists had wheedled the Balfour Declaration from the British government — Father Bede Jarrett, O. P., founder of Blackfriars magazine, wrote: “The Jew has always specialized in money. Industrial labor has no interest for him, and agricultural labor even less. Therefore he will never go back to Palestine, where the wealth is almost entirely in agriculture. Indeed, why should he worry over Palestine, when he has the whole world at his feet? Yes, the world is at his feet, for he controls the complete social scale, ruling at one end of it and revolting at the other.”

 

The big factor that Father Bede Jarrett overlooked, of course, was that agriculture would be made agreeable for Jews in Palestine by the generous subsidies of non-Palestinian Jews who “specialized in money.” So ample were these compensations, in fact, that in the mid-twenties there was hardly one Jewish “pioneer” in all the Holy Land who had not hired Arab laborers to work his farm.

 

But however they were managing it, the vital concern was that the Jews, contrary to Catholic expectations, were moving into the Holy Land. “It seems an intolerable lapse from pietas,” wrote the English Jesuit magazine, The Month (October, 1926), “that the Jews, of all people, should be encouraged to overrun the country which to Christians is holy beyond words.”

 

The most colorful Catholic reaction to Zionism’s progress was G. K. Chesterton’s announcement that he had become a Zionist. It was hardly the kind of support the Jews had been hoping for. Chesterton arguing for a Jewish State was like a mountain-dweller urging that all Jews be given vacations at the beach. His concern was simply to get the Jews out of the country where he lived, and where he was convinced they did not belong. “Jews are Jews,” he wrote, “and as a logical consequence … they are not Russians or Romanians or Italians or Frenchmen or Englishmen … If the advantage of the (Zionist) ideal to the Jews is to gain the promised land, the advantage to the Gentiles is to get rid of the Jewish problem.”

 

Today, with the Jewish State a rude reality, literary somersaults of the kind Chesterton performed are no longer appropriate. Typical of current comment is a recent editorial in Our Sunday Visitor (which has more readers than any other single Catholic paper). “Israel,” says the editorial flatly, “is a state that should not exist.” Pursuing this thought, the Passionist Fathers’ Sign magazine, largest of the Catholic monthlies, writes: “The Jewish people had no ‘natural and historic right’ in Palestine. They had lost their sovereignty in the year 70 B.C. … If the Jewish people of today have a right to Palestine, then the Indians have an infinitely greater right to Manhattan. Furthermore, the U. N. decision leaves us quite cold. The U. N. has no right to transfer the ownership of a country from its inhabitants to an alien people. If the U. N. can do such a thing for Palestine, why can’t it do it for New York or Texas?”

 

This sort of talk distresses the Jews. So much so, that lately they have tried to put a stop to it by complaining publicly. It is unnerving for them to see spokesmen of their traditional shackler, the Catholic Church, once again making menacing gestures. The one thing that tempers their fears is the timidity of this current Catholic assault. For it is directed exclusively against political Zionism; and every charge lands well within the borders of Palestine.

 

The main accusation is that the Zionists have built their government on fraud and injustice and are perpetuating it by terror. Which is of course true. But it is not the whole truth. The evils which the Catholic editors see in the Zionists are not peculiar to Jews in Palestine. They were not suddenly and mysteriously assumed by them when they stepped ashore at Tel Aviv. Those traits are the common property of all Jews — Jews in Jerusalem, in London, in Moscow, in Antwerp, in Johannesburg, in New York.

 

Realizing this, we have a suggestion for Our Sunday Visitor, the Sign, and any other Catholic papers that want to join in the chase. It is guaranteed to make their articles sky-rocket in effectiveness. Instead of attacking Zionists who are in the Holy Land only, why not open fire on the equally fervent and much more potent Zionists who are in the Dispersion — who whole-heartedly endorse every act of injustice, terror, and desecration that the Jewish State commits; who support it with their money, protect it with their propaganda, get favors for it with their pressuring of politicians; who were the midwives at its birth and have been its doting nursemaids ever since. In short, why not for a few months try attacking the Jews of America? We can promise some spectacular results.

  _____________________________

The Point

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

October, 1957

 

THE JEWISH LIE ABOUT BROTHERHOOD

 

I — What the Jews Propose

When Francois Marie Arouet, writing in the mid-1700s, called for the establishment of a social order based on Universal Brotherhood, he was less concerned with building a new thing than destroying an old one. For Francois Marie Arouet — called by the pen-name, Voltaire — was possessed by a consuming hatred. “Écrasons l’infâme!” — “Let us crush the infamous thing!” — was the motto blazoned on all his writings. And the “infamous thing” that Voltaire meant to crush was the Catholic Church.

 

It is only in the light of this ruling passion that Voltaire’s espousing of “Brotherhood” becomes clear. It was not his intention merely to affirm the uncontested natural truth that all men, being descendants of Adam, belong to one human family. He was determined to transform this matter-of-fact assertion into a supernatural principle, to make it the cornerstone of a new and Godless religion. Thus, he hurled his dogma as a challenge against the Church, opposing it to the central Catholic teaching that there is a vital, transcendent brotherhood of all the faithful through the Mystical Body of Christ.

 

Yet, Voltaire and his fellow-Freemasons, though evangelists of the Brotherhood cult, were not to be its chief apostles. That role would be taken by a people to appear unleashed upon the Christian scene as one dread consequence of the Mason-mastered French Revolution of 1789. Within 150 years from the time they were set free of the Church’s restrictions, this people — the Jews — were to become the virtual lords of all avenues of public communication. Through these routes, they would spread the gospel of Brotherhood to every creature, and bring Masonic aspirations to a most abundant fulfillment.

 

                                 *   *   *   *   *

 

Today, there is hardly a man in all the U. S. who does not count belief in Brotherhood as an article of faith. Not to do so, he is persuaded, would be both impious and unpatriotic. Even President Eisenhower unhesitatingly agrees to act as Honorary Chairman of the Brotherhood Week festivities, and issues an official proclamation as evidence of his orthodoxy (“The spirit which lies behind our observance of Brotherhood Week is as old as our civilization … it is imperative that we heroically, by word and deed, give voice to our faith …”).

 

So nearly have the Jews established Brotherhood as the State Religion of the U. S., that it is almost unheard of that a public ceremony should be held without some recognition being paid to it. This custom is the more readily complied with since no intellectual burden whatsoever is put upon the speaker. Belief in Brotherhood can be easily and best expressed by means of pre-fabricated phrases (“our common beliefs,” “working together,” “regardless of race, color, or creed,” etc.) which may be attached to any part of any speech with uniformly pleasing effect.

 

The Brotherhood cult’s lack of defined theology must not, however, be taken for a weakness. In affairs of destruction, it is not the means employed, but the final result, that counts; and so far, the results produced by these seemingly inane cliches are exactly what the Masons and Jews have hoped to achieve. The Catholic Church in the U. S. is being turned into a subsidiary of the super-religion, Brotherhood. The public utterances of Catholics are becoming indistinguishable from those of non-Catholic Americans; instead of the dogmas of their Faith, they proclaim the platitudes of the Judaeo-Masonic cult. They are becoming mortally infected with the heresy of Indifferentism: the belief that one religion is as good as another; that it doesn’t matter what doctrines you hold so long as you lead a “good life.” This heresy has been warned against by Pope after Pope, beginning with the much-persecuted Pius VII (1800-1823), who, as the first to come after the French Revolution, was the first to see fully what Voltaire and his colleagues had wrought. “By the fact that freedom of all forms of worship is proclaimed,” Pius VII wrote, “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.”

 

It was precisely on the charge of fostering Indifferentism that the Vatican, in 1955, ordered all English Catholics to get out of the Council of Christians and Jews, headquarters of the Brotherhood movement in England. The organization, said the Holy See, was “preaching a doctrine unacceptable to Catholics: that all religions are equal.”

 

Since then, the English Council’s American cousin, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, has been talking fast in an effort to save its own skin. It has not, however, been able to explain away the simple, stark coincidence that whenever Brotherhood is accepted, Indifferentism grows. Nor can any amount of pointing the other way distract the Church from noticing the statements the National Conference makes when it is not trying to placate her. Despite its protestations, for example, that Brotherhood is not a religion, the Conference By-laws call for “the establishment of a social order in which the religious ideals of brotherhood … shall become the standards of human relationships.” And in its national bill-board advertising, the Conference offers as the slogan of its “non-religious” program: “Brotherhood — Believe it! Live it! Support it!” As for assurances that the movement does not intend “modifying the distinctive beliefs of any of its members” — in 1949 there was held, in Switzerland, a World Brotherhood congress, sponsored by the International Conference of Christians and Jews (which includes the American group). The American Jewish Yearbook (Vol. 50) reports the outcome as follows: “The conference unanimously agreed on the necessity for a permanent organization and on a proposal to revise Christian religious teaching, particularly the story of the Crucifixion, in such a manner as to reduce the danger of implanting anti-semitism in the minds of the young.”

 

It was in consciousness of such revelations of Brotherhood’s real intent that the late Father Edward Brophy, of Long Island City, N. Y., published his booklet, “The Brotherhood Religion.” Wrote Father Brophy, “As conceived by its authors and applied by its leaders, Brotherhood is condemned by Catholic Theology, by Canon Law and by Popes Pius VII, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius XI, and Pius XII … Hence, none but ignorant and disloyal Catholics yield to the proposals of Brotherhood, notwithstanding the seductive forms in which they may be presented. Catholics are bound in conscience to abstain from Brotherhood activities. They are not permitted to remain silent. They are obliged to protest against Brotherhood’s vain pretensions to brush aside Christianism. They are required to oppose its harmful incursions upon Christianity and Christian civilization. They must repress its blasphemies against Christ and His Religion.”

 

Paradoxically, while the official Church stands in battle against the Brotherhood of Judaeo-Masonry, brotherhood, of quite another sort, remains a central Christian value.

 

II — The Catholic Answer

 

The brotherhood of the Catholic Church is a well-defined family arrangement. And it gains its new members by the usual family route: they are born into it — through the regenerative power of Baptism. Once baptized, they become, as the Baltimore Catechism puts it, sons of God and heirs to the kingdom of Heaven. And the intensity of this common sonship rises to fulfillment when Baptism is followed by the Divine incorporation of the Eucharist. It is then that Catholics, in addition to being sons of God the Father, become children of Mary — joined in Holy Communion to the Flesh and Blood of Jesus, the fruit of Mary’s womb.

 

This is the source and sustenance of the supernatural brotherhood which for nineteen hundred years has faced the enmity of the Jews. For Catholic brotherhood presupposes that truth which the great Martyr-Bishop of Carthage, Saint Cyprian, set forth in his treatise on the Our Father: “We who are Christians say, ‘Our Father,’ in reproach of the Jews because He is no longer their Father — since they have abandoned Him — and has become ours. A sinful people cannot enjoy sonship. Only those who have received remission of sins are given the name of son and promised eternity by the Lord.”

 

And this divinely established relationship is the same brotherhood which Saint Cyprian, and hosts of others after him, referred to with such astringency when they said: “He cannot have God for his Father who has not the Church for his Mother.”

 

                                       *   *   *   *   *

 

Were this a complete picture of the Catholic Church’s brotherhood; were the Church no more than a privileged fraternity turning up its nose at all outside it, then the Jews, and their legion of partisans, might appear to have a righteous case. But precisely because it is the one true brotherhood among men, the Catholic Church spends itself in a continual attitude of open arms. The story of the Church is a twenty-century history of pleading and persuading, by argument and example, to the mighty and to the lowly, that men should be born into the sonship of God and thus should become brothers in Christ.

 

Armies of Catholic apostles have spread this message to every race and region. They have left us Catholic brothers among the Eskimos of Alaska, the tribesmen of Australia, the Indians of Central America. They have left us, in a far richer legacy than our own country has yet given, twenty-six canonized saints from the islands of Japan.

 

One of the most celebrated of our Catholic apostles was that tireless priest from Catalonia, Father Peter Claver, S. J. For his work among the Negro slaves, the Church granted him the title of Saint, and keeps his memory alive with an annual feast-day commemoration on the ninth of September. It was Saint Peter Claver’s contention that the basic “problem” with the colored races is the same as the problem with other peoples. Born in original sin, they are headed for an assured Hell, unless someone reaches them with the salutary news of Our Lord and His Church.

 

That Saint Peter Claver’s spiritual successors, the Catholic leaders of America’s South, have long since fallen from his ideal of true brotherhood for the Negroes stands out more clearly this fall than ever. With headlong zeal, spokesmen for the Catholic South have endorsed the meddling integration program of the Brotherhood-Week Jews. They have left the clear impression that the Negro’s deficiency is not that he is deprived of the Faith and the sacraments, but that he has no non-Negro sitting beside him when he goes to a Godless public school.

 

                                         *   *   *   *   *

 

Perhaps the surest sign of the Catholic Church’s earnestness in gaining new sons of God and new children of Mary, is the door which for twenty centuries she has left ajar to the Jews. In the midst of her strictest legislations — demanding that Jews live in ghettos, wear identifying badges, remain excluded from the privileges of Christian citizenship — the Church has never abandoned her absolute principle that it is possible for an individual Jew to scrap his hateful heritage, sincerely break with the synagogue, and cleanse his cursed blood with the Precious Blood of Jesus.

 

In retrospect, the number of Jews who have availed themselves of this generosity of the Church has been small, indeed. And of this small number, the unashamed majority have been converts seeking some personal advantage; or worse, seeking the positive disadvantage and ultimate destruction of the Church. It was such wholesale perfidy of Jewish Catholics that introduced into the familiar reference of Christian nations the saying, “Blood is thicker than water” — which originally meant, “Jewish blood is much stronger in a Jew than the waters of Baptism.” This saying has countless historical applications. Perhaps the most significant is the one which we touched on a few issues ago, when we spoke about the plague of Marrano (secret-Jew) Catholics in Spain, and the extreme means (the Inquisition) which was necessary to keep their influence from spreading. Encouragingly, the very brotherhood — Christian brotherhood — which the Spanish Jews sought to corrupt provided the strong and unified action which, in 1492, expelled them from the country.

 

This same Spanish integrity of Faith explains the single European victory over Communism which Spain won in the 1930s. And this Spanish devotion to the true Catholic brotherhood accounts for the nobility of that profession of Faith made by the head of Spain’s government before the Eucharistic Congress at Barcelona in 1952. General Franco’s address to the assembled clergy and faithful belongs to that tradition of brotherhood which once won Europe from the barbarians, won the Holy Land from the infidels, and has kept the Faith alive down to our own beleaguered time.

 

He said: “With the humility fitting in a good Christian, I proclaim the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Faith of the Spanish nation and its love for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and for Pope Pius XII. By loving God, Spaniards love peace, and they unite their prayers for peace to those of the Holy Father and of Catholics everywhere at this time. The history of our nation is inseparably linked with the history of the Catholic Church. Its glories are our glories; its enemies are our enemies.”

 

Israeli Brotherhood

 

The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, high above the Mediterranean in northern Palestine, is the spiritual home and principal shrine of the Carmelite Order. One night, in the midsummer of this year, bands of Jewish soldiers broke into the Sanctuary grounds, hacked their way through the gardens and vineyards, then dashed merrily off again. When the Carmelite Fathers protested this latest Jewish destruction of Catholic property, they were assured by Jerusalem officials that the incident was an oversight and would not be repeated. A few nights later, Jewish units again invaded and further damaged the shrine. Concluding that “a lack of respect bordering on contempt” was motivating the Jews, the Carmelites posted a conspicuous notice at the entrance to the shrine, informing the faithful of what had happened, and announcing that, for fear of further Jewish outrages, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Mount Carmel would be temporarily closed.

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The Point

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

November, 1957

 

SIX POINTERS ON THE JEWS

 

I — Lateran Council

Only twenty times in the history of the Catholic Church has a Pope convened a General or Ecumenical Council. As one would expect, therefore, the matter under discussion at such meetings is hardly trivial. With the Pope’s approval, and under his guidance and sanction, the prelates of an Ecumenical Council, assembled by the Holy Father from the whole Catholic world, may define dogmas which are infallible in point of Catholic teaching. They may also issue edicts, counsels, and decrees which are universally binding on all the faithful.

 

Although the problem of the infidel Jew is not foreign to the discussions of any of the Church’s twenty Councils, there is one Council in particular, the Fourth Lateran, held in the year 1215, which treats of the Jews at detailed length. Explicitly, and for all time, the Council drafted what might be called a Christian “bill of non-rights” for the Jews. As the Fourth Lateran Council’s legislations are codified and come down to us, these Jew-restraining laws comprise chapters 67, 68, 69, and 70 of the acts of the Council.

 

Chapter 67 hits at the heart of Jewish power in any Christian society — the bulging Jewish pocketbook. It is entitled, “Concerning the Usuries of the Jews,” and the text provides the mechanics for a total Christian boycott of any Jewish merchant or commercial agent who exacts unreasonable fees from Christians. A happy adjunct to this chapter is the provision that if any Jew should come into possession of real property once owned by a Christian, he will be required to pay taxes on this property to the local parish priest.

 

In the next chapter, the prelates of the Council provide a most commendable remedy for the dangers of social intercourse with the Jews. The pertinent section reads, “Lest, therefore, excesses of this often-condemned intermingling should have any further excuse for spreading, under cover of such an error, we decree that Jews of either sex, in every Christian province, and at all times, be distinguished in public from other people by a difference of dress, as we also read they were commanded to do by Moses (Lev. 19). Moreover, in the days of lamentation and of Our Lord’s Passion, let them not at all come out in public, because some of them on such days (as we are told) are not ashamed to walk around in splendid attire, and are not afraid to mock at the Christians who, commemorating the Passion, show forth signs of lamentation.”

 

The Fourth Lateran Council’s 69th chapter is a masterpiece of governmental discretion: “It is most absurd that a blasphemer of Christ should exercise power over Christians, and inasmuch as the Council of Toledo prudently decreed concerning this matter, we, on account of the audacity of those who have disobeyed, renew its decree in this chapter, forbidding that the Jews be given public offices, because under such a pretext they molest the Christians. But if anyone should commit to them such an office, let him, after a warning, be punished befittingly by a provincial council (which we decree should be held every year). As for the Jew who received the office, he should be denied all communion with Christians, both in commerce and other matters, until whatever he had acquired from the Christians, on the occasion of receiving the office, be converted, accordingly as the bishop of the diocese should provide, into the use of the poor among the Christians. Also, he should renounce with shame the office which he irreverently assumed … ”

 

Finally, that most delicate of all the Church’s Jewish problems is generally dealt with by chapter 70. It is the perpetual puzzle of the Jewish convert to Christianity. How much can we trust him? What standard can be imposed to determine his sincerity? How can we keep him from lapsing into the perfidy of Judaism?

 

Quoting the principle that “it is less evil not to know the way of the Lord than, having known it, to turn back,” the Council recommends, without further elaboration, that those in authority over Jewish converts may help them to become truly Catholic by “the imposition of salutary constraint.”

 

II — Kosher Christians

 

A “salutary constraint” we would immediately suggest imposing on the current contingent of Jews-in-the-Church is to deny them publishing privileges.

 

Somewhere, even in the United States, there may be a Jewish convert who has not written a book or been interviewed for a magazine; but we have not encountered him. Most of the clan cannot wait for the waters of baptism to dry upon their heads before they scurry to their typewriters. And what is the message they are so frantic to communicate? A public renunciation of Judaism with all its works and pomps? A promise to break swiftly and cleanly with their perfidious past? Never. Their anxiety is prompted by a single consideration: they want it understood that, in becoming Catholics, they are in no sense abandoning Jewry; that they who have just accepted the Messias feel still inseparably bound to those who reject Him. Nightclub-entertainer Lillian Roth, whose conversion to the Church was so nationally exploited, puts it neatly: “I will always be a Jew, no matter what faith I follow.”

 

It is precisely this attitude that has made the Church always uneasy about Jewish converts: this insistence on thinking — and acting — not as members of the Mystical Body of Christ, but as members of the anti-Christian, unregenerate Jewish race. Indeed, these converts commonly justify their becoming Catholics on the score that it helps them to realize more fully their Jewishness. And the more deeply they penetrate into the Church’s life, the more Jewish they apparently become. A startling (but representative) indication of the Jewish convert’s scale of values is the statement of Father Ambrose Schaeffer, O.S.B., reported in a Catholic magazine: “I feel that I’m a better Jew now that I’m a priest.”

 

III — Hebrew Hatred

 

Jewish contempt for the Holy Name of Jesus is not restricted to the blasphemous pages of the Talmud or the closed-door sessions of Jewish Community Councils — as any Christian who has come in contact with current Jewish periodicals will agree. These two samples from leading Jewish newspapers are black-and-white “for instances.”

 

A letter to the editor, appearing in the National Jewish Post and signed, “Mr. & Mrs. Joe Smith, Las Vegas,” reads: “Wanna hear something cute? We drove our son Jacob to camp July 1 and along the way big boulders once in a while would read ‘Jesus Saves.’ As we rode along, a big boulder suddenly flashed before us in large white letters: ‘Finklestein Saves.’ We got a big kick out of it.”

 

And from the Brooklyn Jewish Examiner, by columnist Albert Friedman: “Recently we attended, in the line of duty, a conference on civil rights to which delegates from many groups were invited … and we were pleased at the large turnout of Jewish delegates: the church hall was filled. Then came the minister’s invocation. As we bowed our head in honor of interfaith accord, the pastor gave forth with a long tribute to Jesus. There was a weary sigh from the Jewish members of the audience. We wondered, then, as we’ve wondered so often: why do they do such things? The minister, a man of great sincerity and dignity, unquestionably meant well. But was he in utter ignorance of Jewish beliefs and customs? Was he unconscious of Jewish sensibilities? It was a relief to hear the closing benediction by a Rabbi. His words were brief and moving and he referred to the ‘god of all mankind’ and prayed for the realization of ‘universal brotherhood in our time.’ ”

 

IV — Red Revenge

 

The mid-1930s have been characterized as the period when “American liberals sponsored luncheons against Franco.” The observation is amusing, but misleading. Such fatuous endeavors may have typified Gentile efforts to oppose Catholic Spain; but the Jews had a surer approach.

 

From the moment the Spanish Civil War began in July, 1936, it was evident that world Jewry was determined that the Communist forces should triumph. Every resource of Jewish wealth and propaganda was mobilized for a total assault. From every nation Jews flocked to Spain to organize and direct operations. Cardinal Baudrillart, Rector of the Catholic Institute of Paris, declared at the war’s end: “Personal sources allow me to affirm that at the beginning of the Spanish revolution, sixty Russian Jews crossed the Pyrenees to play the role of executive agents, to burn churches and convents, to pillage them, to profane sacred things, and to instruct the Spaniards, who would not have dared by themselves to put their hands on the objects of their age-old veneration.”

 

Commanding the notorious Abraham Lincoln Brigade (American volunteers fighting for the Reds) were the Jews Milton Wolff and John Gates (born Israel Ragenstrief) — the latter of whom is now editor of the Daily Worker. These two controlled more than 600 other Jews from the United States. Another detachment, from Eastern Europe, formed the Yiddish-speaking Botvin Brigade, named for a young Jewish Communist who had been executed in Poland. In his book, The Fighting Jew, author Ralph Nunberg concludes the account of his co-racists in Spain: “And there were many other Jews besides, who came from all over the world to fight on one side, for one idea, for one victory.”

 

Though ultimately the Jews did not get their victory, the tens of thousands of ruined churches, desecrated altars, demolished shrines, and violated convents left Spain with grim evidence of Jewish intent. There was also another reminder of the sort of activity Jews will advocate and applaud — in the form of a statistic released by the Spanish hierarchy: in the first seven months of fighting, Red troops murdered eleven Catholic bishops and 16,750 Catholic priests.

 

V — Singing Synagogues

 

If any of our readers happened to stray by a synagogue one night last and heard a strange, woeful melody pouring forth, he was probably listening to the Kol Nidre. For one month the Jews celebrated their most solemn religious festival, Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement); and the liturgical high-point of the Yom Kippur observance is the singing of the Kol Nidre.

 

What our wandering reader may not have realized is that the annual exercise of intoning this hymn performs for the Jews a most remarkable function. As that mournful wail reverberates through the synagogues of the world, the Jews are readying themselves for another strenuous year among the Gentiles. They are, then and there, dissolving all promises, oaths, and obligations that they may incur during the next twelve months.

 

The following authorized translation of the Kol Nidre (“All Vows”) appears in a book of Jewish prayers published by the Hebrew Publishing Company of New York: “All vows, obligations, oaths or anathemas, pledges of all names, which we have vowed, sworn, devoted, or bound ourselves to, from this Day of Atonement until the next Day of Atonement (whose arrival we hope for in happiness), we repent, aforehand, of them all. They shall all be deemed absolved, forgiven, annulled, void and made of no effect; they shall not be binding, nor have any power; the vows shall not be reckoned vows, the obligations shall not be obligatory, nor the oaths considered as oaths.”

 

Though in spirit it is as old as the Talmud, Jewish historians trace this astonishing declaration in its present form to medieval Spain — where, before the Inquisition intervened, some four million Jews advanced themselves in Church and state by posing as Christians. Through the simple device of annually chanting the Kol Nidre formula, these secret-Jews (“Marranos”) conditioned their Jewish consciences for swearing belief in Christ while despising Him, loyalty to the Church while plotting its destruction. “Kol Nidre was no dry document to them,” says the Jewish Advocate of Boston. “Every phrase was freighted with significance, every word carried salvation.”

 

Eventually, in 1492, Queen Isabella got on to the “significance” with which the phrases of the Kol Nidre were freighted, and had the Jews expelled from Spain. But this action by no means put an end to the Jews’ annual singings. The Kol Nidre had proven its utility; it quickly passed into the ritual of world Jewry, as the central feature of the Yom Kippur ceremonies.

 

Last month, virtually every adult Jew in the United States went to his synagogue to renew his Kol Nidre disavowals. Non-Jewish Americans will be noting the effects of this visit during the coming year.

 

VI — Militant Monks

 

It was one hundred and twenty years ago this fall that Dom Prosper Gueranger commenced in earnest the revival of Benedictine monastic life in France. And, side-by-side with this revival, there went, necessarily, a restoration of the Church’s liturgy — the sublime “daily work” of the monks. Dom Gueranger’s abbey at Solesmes became the exemplar of orthodox observance in everything pertaining to the sacred liturgy. Out of gratitude, Pope St. Pius X entrusted to the monks of Solesmes his entire program for publishing the official Vatican edition of the Church’s liturgical music, the Gregorian Chant.

 

If the spirit of Solesmes, with its conscious sense of continuing in all fullness the life of our Catholic past, could be captured by any one author, Dom Gueranger himself has done it in his The Liturgical Year. Through forty editions and a century of use, Dom Gueranger’s work has been a treasure chest of Catholic observance and tradition.

 

It was with understandable confidence, therefore, that we thought to consult Dom Gueranger, preserver of things Catholic, for a few summary observations on the Jews. A re-look at The Liturgical Year rewarded us with: “For eighteen centuries Israel has been without prince or leader … After all these long ages of suffering and humiliation, the justice of the Father is not appeased … The very sight of the chastisement inflicted on the murderers proclaims to the world that they were the deicides. Their crime was an unparalleled one; its punishment is to be so, too; it is to last to the end of time — The mark of Parricide here fastens on this ungrateful and sacrilegious people; Cain-like, they shall wander, fugitives on the earth. Eighteen hundred years have passed since then: slavery, misery and contempt have been their portion: but the mark is still upon them.”

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The Point

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

December, 1957

 

THE PRICE OF CHRISTMAS IN MEXICO

 

“My desire is to show myself a mother to you and to your people.”

 

It was in these words that the Mother of God spoke to a Mexican Indian named Juan Diego in the early winter of the year 1531. As a token of her maternal concern for Mexico, the Blessed Virgin gave to Juan Diego a miraculous picture of herself, and which Mexican Catholics still cherish under the title of Holy Mary Ever-Virgin of Guadalupe.

 

During the first three hundred years after the Guadalupe apparition, the Catholics of Mexico, under the eye of their Mother in Heaven, lived, as it were, the quiet life of Nazareth. They were intimate with the things of God, and blessed with a share of earthly things. Mexico had become for them the happy proving ground of a boundless life to come, beyond the limitations of their mountains and their coasts. It was an indifferent matter that the foreign people who first brought them the news of their Mother in Heaven had remained as their governors. Mexico, for the Mexicans, was birthplace and contentment.

 

Until, suddenly, as the nineteenth century began, a cry went echoing, “Mexico for the Mexicans!” Whereupon, birthplace gave way to battleground, contentment to contention, and the Holy Mother of Guadalupe prepared her children for an extended Passiontide, whose “long Good Friday” is still within awful memory, and whose delayed Easter Sunday we must yet pray for.

 

                                  *   *   *   *   *

 

The Revolution which kicked Catholic Spain out of Mexico, and intended that the Church should go tumbling after, has been classified with those European movements of “liberation” which were sparked by the French Revolutionists of the late 1700s. The relationship is close. Mexico’s Revolt was a colonial cousin, somewhat less lettered, but schooled in the same theories and — most important — tutored by the same masters: those apt and apronned enemies of the Church, the Freemasons.

 

Woven through the history of Mexico’s Freemasonic era (from 1800 to the present) is a variable pattern of American Masonic intervention. Now by means of big business, now through private individuals, now through the American Government itself, the lodges of the United States have kept a firm hand on Mexican developments. Of U. S. Government interference in Mexico, for example, the Jesuit weekly, America, made this briefest of summaries in its issue of June 25, 1927.

 

“Always, an American hates to say it, there was the sinister shadow of the Power of the north, meddling always, officially and unofficially … Joel Poinsett, American Minister, introduced the York Rite of Masonry, and kept the Mexicans fighting over it for a dozen years. Later, President Polk made an agreement with Santa Ana to fight a fake war — which we call the ‘Mexican War’ — with our forces, in return for some millions of dollars. After our Civil War, General Sheridan allowed Juarez to ‘steal’ American army stores, and conquer his enemies with them. In our time, Bryan and Wilson, by as dark a piece of double-dealing and treachery as history can show, put Carranza into power — and we are reaping the fruits of their policy today.”

 

The foregoing, an American hates to say it, is a lenient summary. The names and incidents could be expanded to a thick volume. The impression would remain unchanged: never did the forces of American Freemasonry act so purposefully as when they espoused the anti-Catholic cause in Mexico.

 

                                       *   *   *   *   *

 

Because the project was already one hundred years old by 1917, and the Faith was still flourishing in Mexico, the Masonic crusade in that year took on a fresh impetus. With no less an adviser than Lenin himself, the Carranza crowd (the creatures of Woodrow Wilson) drafted a new constitution. Detailed oppression of the Catholic Church became the supreme law of the land. The 1917 constitution forbade the Church to own any property, to conduct schools, to preach to the unbaptized natives, to train additional priests. It confirmed the prohibition against religious garb for priests and nuns, and further provided that the government of each Mexican state should decide how many priests it thought it needed; these would be “licensed,” and all others expelled.

 

After the shooting of Carranza in 1920, the American lodges took up the cause of General Obregon, gave him a $10,000,000 arms credit, and sat back contentedly while he tried to blow up the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1921, and dared to expel, bodily, the Apostolic Delegate in 1923.

 

Obregon was followed by General Calles, and Calles it was who decided upon a universal and rigid enforcement of the 1917 constitution. To take care of offenders, a new penal code was enacted. The Church would be brought into Masonic line, or else! The date set for the beginning of the new offensive was July 31, 1926 — dramatically enough, the feast day of Saint Ignatius Loyola, founder of the order which had so long labored in Spanish America, and which had still one great glory to give to the Mexican Church.

 

                                      *   *   *   *   *

 

One week before the July decrees were to take effect, the bishops of Mexico issued a joint Pastoral Letter, their answer to Calles: “Since the conditions imposed render impossible the continuation of the sacred ministry, we have decided, after consulting our Most Holy Father, Pius XI, that from July 31 of the present year until we determine otherwise, all public worship requiring the participation of priests will be suspended in all the Churches of the Republic.”

 

The announcement hit like lightning, both for the people of Mexico and for its rulers. The Masons’ policy had been a gradual one of subjecting the Church to the state, depriving the people of Mass and the Sacraments, keeping the children from Catholic instruction, and thus, little by little, causing the Faith to wither and die. By the bold, desperate stroke of halting public worship, the Mexican bishops were hoping to alert all Christendom to this Masonic intent. Calles and his crew might be able to withstand the Catholics of Mexico, but not the united opposition of the whole Catholic world.

 

                                      *   *   *   *   *

 

When Calles saw that the Church in Mexico was going to resist his plans for destroying it by degrees, he determined to finish it off with a single enraged assault. Here are some fragments from the long martyrology of Mexican Catholics who died for their Faith between 1926 and 1929 — a handful out of the hundreds who may some day be invoked at the altars they gave their lives to protect.

 

Anacleto Flores: aged 23 years, lawyer, leader of the Catholic youth movement. He was hung by his thumbs, flogged, and slashed with bayonets for refusing to disclose the hiding-place of the Archbishop of Guadalajara. At last, in the presence of his young wife, he was put before a wall, with two of his companions, and shot.

 

Father Pablo Garcia de Jesus Maria: priest of Aguascalientes, seized by the police for giving absolution to a dying man. He was pummeled with rifles, his hands were smashed, his tongue cut out; finally he was ordered into exile and put on a train, where he died.

 

Seventeen priests of Mexico City: shot by a firing squad. Though many of them were not killed by the volley, their bodies were all thrown into a long trench and buried.

 

José Farfan: an aged shopkeeper. He was told to remove from his window a placard reading, “Christ lives! Christ reigns! Christ commands!” He refused, and was shot down in his store.

 

A twelve-year-old boy of Guadalajara: arrested for distributing Catholic leaflets. He was tortured to tell the name of his director; but urged on by his mother (“Say nothing, my son. Our Lord will give you heaven for your constancy.”), the boy kept silence. The soldiers twisted both his arms till they broke, and he died.

 

Father Sabas Reyes: parish priest of Tolatlan. He was hung by his wrists from the portico of his church and left for three days, without food or drink, exposed to the scorching sun. Then his feet were doused with gasoline and set afire. Finally, he was marched to the cemetery and shot.

 

Forty old men and women of Jalisco: discovered going to Mass in a private house, taken to the cemetery in the middle of the night and shot.

 

Father Miguel Augustin Pro: Jesuit priest, most celebrated of the Mexican martyrs. This almost-legendary popular hero was arrested on a confected charge and put before the firing squad, without trial, on November 23, 1927. As a supreme bit of Masonic bravado, photographs were taken of the execution. The next day, newspapers around the world were supplied with pictures of the priest, standing erect against the stockade, his arms outstretched to form a cross. The picture was taken at the moment the command to fire was given and Father Pro spoke his last words, “Viva Cristo Rey!” — “Long live Christ the King!”

 

                                       *   *   *   *   *

 

After three years of soaking the soil of Mexico with Catholic blood, Masonry was ready to call the persecution off. It had proven one thing: that the Mexican people were determined, at any cost, to hear Mass and receive the Sacraments. The Faith had been dealt a death blow and was more vigorous than ever. Exhausted, the government announced there would be no further attempts to dominate the Church; and the bishops announced that public worship would be resumed.

 

But the government lied. As soon as the Masons had caught their breath, they renewed their efforts to crush the Church. Even today, though there are glimmerings of a dawn in sight, many of the anti-Catholic laws are still enforced. For the victory which the Catholics of Mexico bought with their blood in 1929 did not put an end to their sufferings. The Masonic hold on the country had not been broken. That general uprising of Christendom which the Mexican bishops had confidently looked for, when they closed the churches in 1926, had never come. Most poignantly, the sufferings of the Mexican Catholics had been hardly noticed by their numerous, prosperous, next-door brothers: the Catholics of the United States.

 

Some Americans had tried to help certain bishops, certain priests, certain groups of laymen. But these had never been able to convince the bulk of American Catholics that the persecutions in Mexico were worth getting excited about, being angry about, losing their composure about, making nuisances of themselves about. Nor did the Masons of the United States fail to notice this lack of indignation, and to be emboldened by it. One example: Two days after Father Pro’s murder, the American Ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow, went aboard Calles’ private train for a tour of the country; the recognized purpose of this gesture was “to demonstrate to Mexican Catholics that they could look for no help from Washington.”

 

If American Catholics are wondering this year why it is their Christmas is losing its intimacy and significance and becoming an empty, commercialized holiday, the children of Our Lady of Guadalupe might be able to tell them.

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Voice of Fr. Feeney ( 1942 )

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Whatever Happened To The Catholic Church After Vatican II - Audio 

 The Truth about What Really Happened to the Catholic Church after Vatican II Audio Program, Part 1, Part 2 [Audios]

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Statistics Update:

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