The Truth About The SSPX, The SSPX-MC, And Similar Groups
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"On March 19, 2015 former SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson consecrated another former member of the SSPX, named Fr. Faure, a bishop.
This obviously an effort to ensure that those who hold the theological position Richard Williamson does will have access to a bishop going forward.
Now, what the SSPX and similar groups do is not nearly as significant as some people think it is, however, since there are many people who still sadly take the theological position of the SSPX or a similar recognized and resist position, it is important to comment on their theological views when mentioning the news of this consecration.
The fact of the matter is that neither the SSPX nor Williamson's group is Catholic. Both hold the complete public heretic and apostate antipope Francis who openly rejects converting atheists and Jews is a Catholic, has the Catholic faith and professes the true faith.
That's what it means when you recognize someone as the pope. It means, that according to you that person is Catholic, has the Catholic faith and professes the true faith.
Thus the position of the SSPX and similar groups is false - it's heretical.
The SSPX and similar groups also do not operate in communion with the hierarchy they consider Catholic. Since they have done this obstinately for decades, their position is schismatic, and it's important to emphasize their position is schismatic from the standpoint of traditional Catholic principles.
You will hear some frankly foolish defenders of the SSPX in our day cite a few modernists "cardinals' in the Vatican II sect who might say on occasion that the SSPX is not schismatic.
For instance, some people cite "Cardinal" Cassidy, the man who signed the Joint Declaration on Relations with the Lutherans on Justification, a man who therefore doesn't even believe the Canons of the Council of Trent are binding and that Lutherans need to accept them.
Numerous false traditionalists argue that the SSPX is not schismatic because Cassidy or someone similar doesn't think they are schismatic, that is outside the Church ... that's ridiculous ... Cassidy's word is worthless.
In order to assess whether the position of the SSPX and similar groups, such as a group Williamson might work with is schismatic, one must assess the issue from the standpoint of traditional Catholic principles and authorities, not from the standpoint of selective statements of modernists.
And, by the way, there are many "Cardinals" who do think the SSPX is schismatic. But a Catholic must assess the question and base his conclusion on what God thinks as reflected in traditional Catholic teaching, not on what certain modernists think.
Before the Judgement Seat of God a statement from a modernist isn't going to help you, since those who choose to adhere to or defend the position of the SSPX at this point in the face of the facts, are without any doubt obstinate in their refusal of operational or notional communion with hierarchy they consider Catholic, and they stubbornly remain independent of that hierarchy.
From the standpoint of traditional Catholic principles, their position is definitely schismatic.
Now, decades ago, when the Vatican II apostasy first broke out and there was much confusion about what was transpiring as well as comparatively little knowledge of what the antipopes really taught and what Vatican II sect was all about.
There was much more room for confusion in good faith among those who simply wanted to resist the novelties being imposed, and adhere to aspects of tradition even if they didn't have a completely consistent position vis a vis the Vatican II hierarchy and the men imposing the new religion.
However, that time has passed.
After decades the SSPX and similar groups still hold their ridiculous position according to which the Vatican II sect's hierarchy is Catholic and others must recognize it as Catholic, but they don't operate in communion with it.
They persist stubbornly in a completely untenable position remaining separate and outside communion with the authentic and hierarchy they deem Catholic. From the standpoint of traditional Catholic principles therefore, they are certainly schismatic.
So the next time you hear some fake traditionalist attempt to exonerate the SSPX by citing a few modernist "Cardinals" with whom they would not even agree on almost any controversial theological issue, know that you are being misled and misdirected. What matters is what God thinks and the Church traditionally teaches about schism, not what a few modernists think.
The fact that those who obstinately adhere to the positions of the SSPX and similar groups, are, and at this point, sadly schismatics, manifests itself in the absurd and heretical position they have adopted as a result of their false and schismatic position.
For example many people in the SSPX and similar groups essentially repeating the words of Marcel Lefebvre, will explicitly condemn the organization under the man they consider to be the pope as a non-Catholic Church or sect.
For example, in a talk posted on YouTube, Fr. David Hugo of the SSPX Marian Corps, which includes priests who left the SSPX, say the following - and we should note we like some of the things Hugo has to say against the Vatican II sect, but among other things, even though he correctly denounced the sect that Francis leads as false and non-Catholic, since he obstinately acknowledges Francis to be the Catholic pope at the same time, he adheres to a heretical schismatic and non-Catholic position - "this union with Rome is from the Devil ... we are in schism with the Vatican II sect..." (Fr. David Hugo)
The members of the regular SSPX have likewise and explicitly declared that they are not in communion with the church under the man they regard as the pope.
For example, on SSPX's website there is a 1988 open letter signed by by more than 20 priests with important positions in the SSPX, including the former Superior Fr. Schmidberger.
The open letter declares: "we have never wished to belong to this system which calls itself the Conciliar Church, and defines itself with the Novus Ordo Missae ... we ask for nothing other than to be declared out of communion with this impious communion of the ungodly ... the faithful have a strict right to know that priests who serve them are not in communion with a counterfeit church."
The Angelus, the official publication of the SSPX, likewise declared in May, 2000, ..."this current of renewal has given birth to a new church within the bosum of the Catholic Church, to that which Msgr. benelli himself called 'the conciliar church' ... it is against this conciliar church that our resistance stands. We do not refuse our adherence to the pope as such, but to this conciliar church."
Since "Where Peter is, there is the Church." That means by definition, that the body or organization in communion with the man you regard as the pope, is the true Church.
-Where Peter is, there is the true Church -
Therefore the Resistence Groups, by acknowledging Francis or Benedict XVI as the pope are by definition professing that the organization or body in communion with Francis or Benedict XVI is the true Church. That's what it means when you say that he's the pope, yet at the very same time they state that the Church, in communion with with Francis or Benedict XVI is non-Catholic, false and heretical, and that no one can hold communion with it.
So their position literally means that the true Church, the one in communion with the man they regard as Peter, is false and that the Catholic Church, the one in communion with the men they regard as Peter, is non-Catholic.
According to them, the true Church is false and the Catholic Church is non-Catholic. Their position is literally nonsense, it's heretical and absurd.
The Church under a true pope cannot be false. It cannot be non-Catholic. Someone cannot be the head of the true Church and the head of a false Church at the same time.
If someone is the head of a non-Catholic and false Church as they say, then he's a false claimant and antipope. People should have realized that by now in the light of the information available and the stupidities of their position only multiply as you further examine what they believe.
They reject the "canonizations" of the men they regard as popes, but only starting some point after Vatican II.
So, according to them, even though the recent "canonizations" are pronounced with the exact same solemn formula as the canonizations proclaimed before Vatican II, the "canonizations' after Vatican II have ceased to be infallible and binding.
Shouldn't that tell them that the men proclaiming these "canonizations" after Vatican II are not true popes. Of course it should, but they're sadly obstinate and they assert instead that a "canonization" by a man they claim to be a true pope, can now be false and perhaps evil.
It's ridiculous and inconsistent, and anyone who adheres to it calls into question every canonization in history.
On this point, Fr. Chazelle, a former priest of the SSPX, who is now part of the SSPX Marian Corp group, actually stated in a talk posted on YouTube, that the post-Vatican II popes have lost the exercise of their teaching and governing authority but remain popes.
Question addressed to Fr. Chazelle: "First funnies. They often say canonizations are part of the infallible Magisterium of the Church, so therefore these are infallible ... then the pope must not be the pope, because he's obviously making a grave mistake in canonizing guys like Paul VI and JPII? ... Your answer?"
Fr. Chazelle: "Jonathon Thomas. The pope is impounded.."
Q. ... 'so he loses all jurisdiction?' ....
Fr. Chazelle: ... "Well, yeah, he keeps his office but he cannot exercise it, he's impounded. We are bound to ignore all his actions."
Such a statement is a denial of papal infallibility, the papacy, and Vatican I.
A pope cannot be separated from his Supreme authority. If someone is a valid pope, he has by definition the power to teach infallibly under certain conditions, and he is by definition, in possession of the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the Church, not only in matters of faith and morals, but also in matters of Church government.
Vatican I specifically anathematized anyone who said a Roman Pontiff does not possess the full and supreme power of jurisdiction in matters of faith and morals, as well as in discipline and Church government.
Chazelle holds that Francis and the other post Vatican II claimants to the papacy are valid popes, but that they cannot exercise their authority.
That is totally heretical and schismatic. Someone who adopts such a position has rejected and lost faith in papal infallibility, the papacy and the dogmatic teaching of Vatican I.
The same denial of the papacy and Vatican I was actually taught by the SSPX itself in the most asked question about the SSPX, quoting Marcel Lefebvre himself, the SSPX boldly asserted that as a result of their modernism the post-Vatican II "popes' cannot teach infallibly.
Regarding whether the post-Vatican II "popes' even have the ability to teach infallibly, the SSPX stated, "They do not and in fact they cannot."
That rejects papal infallibility.
Those who adopt such a position are not Catholic. As our material proves, the SSPX and similar groups also reject numerous teachings on faith and morals that were promulgated to the universal Church by their "popes" in a fashion that would definitely be Magisterial and binding if the men were indeed true popes.
By rejecting those teachings as false or in some cases as heretical, the SSPX and similar groups hold that the Catholic Church and true popes can officially teach error and heresy in proclamations of the Magisterium.
That is heresy! It's contrary to papal infallibility and the Church's teaching that the official teachings of the Magisterium are immune from error.
In this regard, Fr. Joseph Pfeiffer's SSPX "Resistence Group, the SSPX Marian Corp of which Fr. Hugo is a member is noteworthy.
That group, which is sadly schismatic and heretical, actually issued a declaration in which they state that the Magisterium of the Conciliar Church, which is exercised by men they regard as true popes and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church which is also exercised by men they regard as true popes, are "two opposite Magisteria."
So according to them the Magisterium of the Catholic Church has been officially contradicted by the Magisterium of the Conciliar Church, and those who wield the power of the Conciliar Church's Magisterium according to them, not only are true popes but must be considered true popes.
There position is heretical. While, of course, it is true that not everything that a valid pope says or teaches is in fact a teaching of the Magisterium, it's contrary to Catholic teaching to hold or believe that the Magisterium can in any way teach what is false.
Here's the teaching of the Catholic Church as set forth in numerous papal encyclicals that the Magisterium cannot teach error:
Pope Gregory XVI, 1896..."The Church has by its divine institution, the power of the Magisterium to teach and define matters of faith and morals and to interpret the Holy Scriptures without danger of error."
Pope Leo XIII, 1896, who said that the Church has always considered "as banished from the Church whoever had departed in even the least way from the doctrine proposed by the authentic magisterium,"
Notice here that Pope Leo XIII teaches that one cannot reject a teaching of the authentic magisterium without being separated from the Church. That proves that the teaching of the authentic magisterium is also infallible and binding.
That's important because some false traditionalists will say wrongly that the teaching of the authentic magisterium can contain error.
For example, one false traditionalist named John Salza, whose writings contain dozens of serious errors and contradictions on these issues, holds that the "authentic magisterium can teach falsely and contain error."
He says that the authentic magisterium of his so-called Pope Francis has taught errors.
He wrote: "Francis has engaged his authentic magisterium to teach error concerning the Jews."
However, his position and understanding of these matters is completely wrong. The idea that the authentic magisterium can contain or teach error contradicts and denies the Church's teaching.
In Latin, Leo XIII, used the word "authentico magisterio" literally to say by means of the authentic magisterium.
"Authentico magisterio" in the Latin here, is an ablative of means connected with"proposita', a perfect participle meaning having been proposed, or simply proposed.
"Proposita," the perfect passive participle modified by "authentico magisterio," the ablative of means, itself modifies "doctrina", meaning doctrine or teaching.
So Pope Leo XIII is directly stating and teaching to the entire church, that to depart in even the least way from a doctrine proposed or taught by the authentic magisterium is to be considered separated from the communion of the catholic Church, that's because the teaching of the authentic magisterium is, of course, infallible, free from error and binding on everyone.
Nevertheless, misleading many, the SSPX has also repeatedly taught the false doctrine that the authentic magisterium is not infallible, and as a result the doctrines taught by the "authentic magisterium" of their so-called popes can be rejected or resisted.
The SSPX's repeated promotion of their completely false teaching is perhaps why it has been regurgitated with disastrous effects by numerous false traditionalists such as the one previously cited.
False teachings circulated by people who aren't actually familiar with and faithful to Catholic teaching do tremendous damage to souls. They contribute to the loss of faith in many people as they lead people into the heretical views about the Church and its teaching.
The SSPX states on their website, "to claim that all this authentic magisterium is infallible, is not traditional teaching."
That's completely wrong as we've seen!
The SSPX also states, "This guarantee does not exist in the case of the authentic magisterium because it does not enjoy the charism of infallibility."
That's completely wrong, as we've seen!
The SSPX also state, that re our times ... , "it would be a fatal error to equate the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff with his infallible magisterium."
Since the Church does equate the authentic magisterium with the infallible magisterium, this statement just proves again that their false position according to which the post Vatican II claimants to the papacy are true popes is incompatible with the facts and the Church's teaching, for as already quoted, the Church teaches that to depart in even the least way from a doctrine taught by the authentic magisterium is to be considered banished from the Church, that's because the authentic magisterium is infallible.
The teaching of the Church is if something has actually been taught by the authentic magisterium, the ordinary and universal magisterium, the solemn magisterium or simply by the magisterium, it is infallible, free fom error and binding on everyone in the Church.
The teaching of the magisterium cannot contain error.
In 1898, Pope leo XIII, also taught that the magisterium "could be no means commit itself to erroneous teaching."
Pope Pius X, 1910, "only a miracle of the divine power could preserve the Church from blemish in the holiness of her doctrine."
Pope Pius XI, 1929. "To this magisterium Christ the Lord imparted immunity from error."
He also says in the encyclical repeating Pope Leo XIII's teaching in the encyclical "Libertas" "God Himself made the Church a sharer in the divine magisterium and by His divine benefit, unable to be mistaken."
As we can see, the Catholic Church infallibly teaches that the magisterium is free from error, but the SSPX, the SSPX Marian Corp and similar groups falsely teach that the magisterium has taught error and contradicts itself.
Their position is heretical, it denies the teaching of the Catholic Church.
Fr. Chazell: "Well, the question of the universal magisterium. They are impounded, so I'm not worried about it."
In their heretical declaration, the SSPX schismatics also speak of the Conciliar Church as a different non-Catholic entity. They urge people to remain separate from it lest they fall prey to the wolves. Yet, as stated already, by recognizing its leader as the pope, they officially profess that where he is, the organization he's in communion with, is the true Church.
So according to them the true Church is a non-Catholic entity that must be avoided lest people be lost.
It's false, it's heretical schismatic, and it's schismatic, and one could go on and on exposing the positions of these "resistant groups." There position is untenable, and the fact that anyone holds such an absurd position at this point in the light of the information available, in the light of the evidence available, in the light of the presentations that have been made demonstrating the true position, is really a sad commentary on how widespread the bad-will is, even in the traditionalist movement.
It's also important to emphasize that the dogma which these groups deny in particular with regard to their false position on the Vatican II "church," is that the Catholic Church is one in faith.
There is a unity of faith in the Catholic Church. Everyone in the Church must have the same faith.
That dogma is completely trashed, denied and thrown out the window by the SSPX and with a special emphasis by the breakaway SSPX type groups that takes a harder line vis a vis the Vatican II sect.
Those groups will directly and repeatedly state things such as 'we don't have the same faith as those in the Vatican II church or they aren't Catholic or they adhere to a false religion, and yet at the very same time they profess that those people are in the Church'.
So according to them, people who do not have the Catholic faith, and are not Catholic and are heretics, are in the Church.
For instance, the aforementioned Fr. Chazelle, who rejects the true position, that Francis and the other post Vatican II claimants to the papacy are not true popes, but antipopes, and promotes many blatant and easily refuted errors, in the process nevertheless, is forced to admit "the actions of Pope Francis are more and more scandalous. Pope Francis is showing himself to be like his predecessors, in a very clear way as the public notorious heretic. He is an open and a public heretic. But we do grant that this pope is a manifest and public heretic ....
We see the heresy and we conceded that this Pope Francis is a public heretic. If you don't have enough evidence now is beyond any doubt ... I don't want to argue with sedevacantists on that ( public heretic) because I think it would be ridiculous for me to deny that."
Since they teach that heretics, people who don't have the Catholic faith are inside the Church, they completely deny defined Catholic dogma on the unity of faith in the Catholic Church, and that heretics are outside the Catholic Church.
A prime example of the denial of this dogma comes from the heretical SSPX MC group and Fr. Joseph Pfeiffer, its leader
He actually gave a talk recently that was posted on YouTube that left me stunned for about 30 minutes after it.
I was stunned because the level of evil in Pfeiffer and the bad-will exhibited by his absurd position at this point in time with all the facts that are available now was truly astounding!
In his heretical talk, Pfeiffer, while condemning the Vatican II sect as non-Catholic, simultaneously stated that sedevacantism is "one of the greatest evils of the present era."
Think about that! Even though he holds that the Vatican II sect under Francis is not the Catholic Church, you can't be part of it. It's one of the 'great evils of the era," according to him.
To conclude that the man that leads that non-Catholic and false church is also non-Catholic - incredible!
In his heretical talk, Pfeiffer also argued that St. Peter became a heretic when he denied Our Lord three times, yet remained pope. That was one of his arguments for the position that people can deny the Catholic faith, become heretics, and remain leaders in the Church.
Fr. Pfeiffer: "Simon Peter, in the time of the great crisis on Good Friday morning, was asked, 'Are you one of His disciples?' 'I do not know the man.' "He denied the divinity of Christ. What does that mean? it means Simon Peter was a heretic, one with Francis. How could I be one with Francis? How could Peter be one with Judas? How would Christ be one with Peter, who denied Christ three times?
In the good old days he denied Christ three times, that was St. Peter. The new popes have done it more than that!"
The problem with that argument however, is that St. Peter was not the pope until after the Resurrection. St. Peter didn't become the pope until the Lord entrusted him with the flock in John 2:15 -17.
Our Lord's statement to Peter in Matthew 16:18-19, were a promise about what he would confer upon him in the future after the Resurrection. Thus St. Peter was not the pope when he denied Our Lord. The fact that St. Peter did not become the pope until after the Resurrection was defined by the First Vatican Council.
If the heretic, Pfeiffer read and viewed our material he would have learned that many years ago, but he's so blind and content in his schismatic position that he hasn't learned almost anything about these issues in 15 or 20 years.
And what needs to be understood is that the reason he hasn't learned almost anything about these matters and conformed his position to the facts of Catholic teaching, is that he doesn't care about what the Church teaches.
That's the truth!
In fact, in the very same heretical talk, the blind guide Pfeiffer compared membership in the Catholic Church to the indissolubility of marriage.
He taught that people can become heretics, deny the Catholic faith, and still be in the Catholic Church, just like people remain married until death.
Pfeiffer: "But he's still the pope, just like in marriage, if the wife leaves the husband ....gets a divorce, whatever she does." ... 'What God has joined together, let no man put asunder...' "And the government cannot put that marriage asunder, and her wickedness cannot put the marriage asunder, and if the husband does the same, it cannot put the marriage asunder. What God has joined together..." Who can be joined more closely to the Church than our 'Holy Father, the pope?'"
But that's completely wrong!
While marriage remains valid until death, a person who denies Catholic teaching, loses membership in the Church of Christ automatically. The two are not comparable in that regard.
The loss of membership in the Church for heresy is a dogma and is repeated in numerous encyclicals including, 'Satis Cognitum' and 'Mysterii Corporis.
For example, Pope Leo XIII referring to heresies taught that if anyone holds to a single one of these, he is not a Catholic."'
Mystici Corporis also taught that the offence of heresy by its very nature severs one from the body of the Church.
Pope Leo XIII also explained the Church teaching on this issue by declaring "Can it be lawful for any one to reject anyone of these truths without thereby sending himself headlong into open heresy, without thereby separating himself from the Church, and in one sweeping act repudiating the entirety of Christian Doctrine? He who dissents in even one point from divinely received truths has most truly cast off the faith, since he refuses to revere God as the supreme truth and proper motive of faith."
Notice, that the Church teaches that anyone who dissents from the Catholic teaching sends or delivers himself by that dissent into open heresy and separates himself from the Church and in one sweeping act.
Therefore a Catholic who denies a teaching of the Church doesn't remain Catholic or part of the Church. He is separated automatically from the Church as a consequence of him embracing heresy.
Pope Innocent III in Eius Exemplo, 1208. Also taught "By the heart we believe and by the mouth we confess the one Church, not of heretics, but the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, outside of which we believe no one is saved."
The Catholic Church is not of heretics. That's what the Church teaches.
Since it has been infallibly taught that heretics are not inside the Church but outside the Church, it's therefore certain that a heretic cannot hold office in the Church.
That's why Pope Leo XIII declared that "it is absurd to imagine that he who is outside can command in the Church.
It's therefore a settled issue. It's not an open question whether a heretic can be pope. A heretic cannot be pope, for a heretic, by definition, is outside the Catholic Church, and someone who is outside the Catholic Church, cannot be the head of the Church.
On this point also be aware of certain false traditionalist deceivers who will confuse this issue by pointing out that someone who is outside the Church, for example, a heretic can be supplied jurisdiction by the Church for specific acts that benefit the faithful, such as the jurisdiction needed for a Sacramental confession.
That's true.
That's different from someone holding the ofice and having a right to command such as a pope does.
Someone who is a heretic, who is outside the Church, cannot hold office or command in the Church by right, since he is not even in the Church.
As Leo XIII taught, it's absurd to imagine that such a person can command in the Church.
So, the next time you hear someone say it's not certain whether a heretic can be pope, know that they are contradicting the teaching of the Church. It's absurd to assert that someone who is outside the Church and a heretic by definition, is outside the Church can command in the Church as the pope.
[to be continued .....]
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
February, 1955
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE JEWS
Traditional Policy Toward the Haters of Christ
Every day there are new reports of friendly relations between the Catholic and Jewish communities here in the United States.
In support of Brotherhood Week, Archbishop Cushing of Boston has been photographed holding hands with a local rabbi. His Excellency, as a further gesture of good-will to the Jews, made a thousand-dollar contribution to World Zionism ... The noted Jewish propagandist, Dr. Mortimer Adler, has been listed as a guest speaker at every kind of Catholic meeting from a women’s bridge club to a seminary conference ... Jewish converts to Catholicism have been widely publicized for their efforts to bridge the gap between Talmudic Judaism and the Catholic Faith ... There have been several recent reports of joint Catholic-Jewish festivities to mark the Christmas-Hanukkah season ... The Catholic Biblical Association has publicly thanked the American Jewish Committee for its “assistance in the preparation of material on Jews and Judaism” for use in American Catholic schools ... The National Conference of Christians and Jews has intensified its activities, with many presentations of awards to Catholic and Jewish members for their promotion of “inter-group harmony” ... From Chicago have come news-stories of a series of lectures given there to Catholic teaching nuns by Mr. Hans Adler, prominent Jewish Mason of the B’nai B’rith Lodge ... And also from Chicago there have been lengthy accounts of the pro-Semitism of His Excellency, Bishop Bernard J. Sheil. It was he who established the $50,000 scholarship fund to send Catholic boys to study at Brandeis, America’s new Jewish university. Bishop Sheil has likewise received newspaper acclaim for his participation in Jewish religious festivals in Chicago and for his appearance as an honorary pallbearer at the funeral of the late Rabbi Goldman.
Reports like these faithfully reflect the attitude of American Catholics toward the Jews. And though few would dare to challenge or question this attitude, or submit it to any kind of examination, the incontestable fact is that this attitude is flagrantly un-Catholic. It is a shrieking contradiction of all that the Church has ever taught, counseled, or decreed in the mater of Catholic dealings with the Jews.
One of the most ancient and basic principles of traditional, normal Christian society has been violated and cast aside. For nineteen centuries it has been the Catholic Church’s constant and deliberate policy to keep leashed, muzzled, and set apart, that people which she has universally taught is a cursed race — cursed for its crucifixion and rejection of Jesus Christ. Throughout the Christian ages, the Popes, the Saints, and all Catholics in civil authority, have taken upon themselves, as one of the necessary burdens of Catholic allegiance, the responsibility of holding back the Jew — of keeping him well distinguished from the rest of the community, with no opportunity to carry out the treacheries he was planning against the Church of Christ.
For anyone who may be doubtful as to the Church’s authentic and unswerving attitude toward the Jewish people, we are presenting the following itemization, taken from the decrees and practices of the Popes, Bishops, Saints, Councils, and civil rulers of our glorious Catholic history.
1. His Holiness, Pope Alexander III, in his decree forbidding Catholics to work for Jewish employers, made the following summary statement of the dangers of Catholic-Jewish intermingling: “Our ways of life and those of the Jews are utterly different, and Jews will easily pervert the souls of simple folk to their superstitions and unbelief if such folk are living in continual and intimate converse with them.”
2. The Church’s Council of Elvira, held in Spain early in the fourth century, passed several censures aimed at the Jews, including an absolute prohibition against marriage with them (Canon 16), and a decree against all close association with them (Canon 50).
3. Christians were at all times prohibited from praying for the salvation of Jews who had died unconverted. Saint Gregory the Great, who was Pope from 590 to 604, wrote in this regard, “We can no more pray for a deceased infidel than we can for the devil, since they are condemned to the same eternal and irrevocable damnation.”
4. One of the most successful means for segregating the Jews was found in the institution of the ghettos. These were not formally ordered by the Papacy until the sixteenth century, though they had been adopted earlier in many Catholic localities. In Spain, for example, the Castilian Ghetto Edict was passed in the year 1412.
5. Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) warned Christians against the perfidy of the Jews in his decree, Etsi Judaeos. His Holiness wrote, “They repay their hosts, as the proverb says, after the fashion of the rat hidden in the sack, or the snake in the bosom, or the burning brand in one’s lap.”
6. There were general laws, enforced throughout Christendom, which prevented any Jew from appearing in public during the forenoon of Sundays, during all feastdays, and during the entire Easter Season. Such laws were revived in Poland by the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century. This Society, founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in 1534, long ago set down in its requirements for admission that Jewish lineage in an applicant is to be considered an impediment.
7. Just one hundred years ago in Italy, in the much-publicized Mortara case, the Holy See reaffirmed that ancient segregation principle. “Any Jewish baby that is discovered to be baptized must be taken from his unbaptized Jewish parents and brought up in a Catholic family.”
8. Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori (1696-1787), the founder of the Redemptorist Order, states explicitly in the section De Judaismo of his classic work, Theologia Moralis, that it is a mortal sin for a Catholic to mix socially with Jews, to go to their doctors, to work for them, to allow them to hold public offices, or to attend any of their festivals, weddings or synagogue meetings.
9. The Church has repeatedly legislated against the printing and distribution of the Jewish Talmud. In the year 1264, Pope Clement IV issued a bull ordering the confiscation and burning of all copies of the Talmud. A similar edict was promulgated by Pope Benedict XIII in the year 1415. Many other Popes have lashed out against the book, including Paul IV, Gregory IX, and Innocent IV, who condemned the Talmud as “containing every kind of vileness and blasphemy against Christian truth.”
10. Popes Gregory IX and Nicholas III, and the ecclesiastical synods of Breslau and Vienna, issued warnings that it is “incompatible with Christian practice” to allow the building of Jewish synagogues in Christian localities.
11. The famous papal decree of the Middle Ages, Cum Sit Nimis, reads in part, “We forbid the giving of public appointments to Jews because they profit by the opportunities thus afforded them to show themselves bitterly hostile to Christians.”
12. Jews were customarily taxed in all Catholic kingdoms. In Portugal, for example, there was a traditional tax, levied with the approval of the Bishops, whereby all Jews were required to pay an annual fee of thirty pieces of silver, “to remind them of their relation to the traitorous Judas.”
13. In the ninth century, the Bishops of the Council of Lyons protested the “weakness” of Charlemagne’s son who had advocated that certain privileges granted only to Christian citizens should be extended to the Jews in his kingdom.
14. Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic Church’s honored theologian, in his instruction, De Regimine Judaeorum, gives the following principle to Christian rulers who have Jews among their subjects: “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.”
15. The following general ordinances were enforced throughout Christendom, in order to guarantee that intercourse between Christians and Jews be kept at an absolute minimum: Jews were denied citizenship. They were forbidden to serve in the army, possess weapons, and attend the universities. They were excluded from public baths while Christians were there and were forbidden to frequent public pleasure places. Jews were never to give testimony as witnesses in court, and they were denied membership in all trade corporations and guilds of artisans.
16. By official decree, His Holiness, Pope Innocent III (1198-1216), extended to the whole Church the practice, then common in so many areas, of requiring the Jews to wear some distinctive dress so that Christians might easily recognize and avoid them. Catholic rulers everywhere adopted the custom. It was put into effect in Hungary, for example, in the year 1222 by King Andrew II. And the Catholic Empress Maria Theresa of Austria required in the eighteenth century that any Jew who did not wear a conspicuous beard must pin a large yellow badge on the left sleeve of his outer garment.
17. Pope Innocent IV (1243-1254) issued in his own hand the following directive to the King of France: “We who long with all our heart for the salvation of souls, grant you full authority by these present letters to banish the Jews, either in your own person or through the agency of others, especially since, as we have been informed, they do not abide by the regulations drawn up for them by this Holy See.”
18. Banishment of the Jews is a remedy which Catholic rulers have always hesitated to use. Yet, at some time, and often more than once, every Catholic state in Europe has been forced to ask all Jews within its borders to leave. Here are a few examples: The Jews were expelled from Spain, by order of the Spanish Bishops, in the seventh century, and they were again expelled by the Spanish rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492. From France they were expelled in 1182, again in 1306, again in 1394 and again, from southern France, in 1682. In accordance with a decree of Pope Leo VII, the Jews were exiled from Germany in the tenth century; they were again expelled in the eleventh century, and once again in the year 1349. They were made to leave Hungary twice in 1360 and again in 1582. From England, they were expelled in the year 1290. From Belgium, in 1370. From Austria, in 1420 and again in 1670. From Lithuania, in 1495. From Portugal, in 1498. From Prussia, in 1510. From the Kingdom of Naples, in 1540. From Bavaria, in 1551. From the Genoese Republic, in 1567. And from the Papal States, the Pope’s personal domains, the Jews were expelled in 1569 and, once again, in 1593.
19. It was to combat the perfidy of Jews who were pretending to be Catholics that the famous tribunal of the Inquisition was established by the Church. Every year on the seventeenth day of September Catholics still honor this glorious institution by celebrating the feast of Saint Peter Arbues, the first Chief Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, who was martyred by the Jews for performing the duties of his office.
20. Other Saints who are especially remembered by the Church for their part in holding back the Jews include: Saint Thomas of Hereford, who was instrumental in having them exiled from England; Saint Henry II, King of Germany, who expelled them from his domains; Saint Louis IX, King of France, who did the same; Saint Cyril of Alexandria, who, upon becoming Bishop of that city, forced all the Jews to leave; Saint Pius V, who required that all Jews in Rome wear bright-colored hats to set them apart from Christians; Saint Virgilius of Arles, whose legislations against the Jews were adopted throughout most of the dioceses of France; and Saint Ambrose of Milan, who severely reprimanded the Emperor for rebuilding a Jewish synagogue which his soldiers had destroyed. Three of our Catholic Saints — Saint Vincent Ferrer, Saint John Capistrano, and Blessed Bernardine of Feltre — have been especially distinguished for their work in protecting the Church from the Jews. The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia (New York, 1944) has included these three Saints in its summary list of the fifteen greatest “anti-semites” of all time!
Universally, throughout the Christian ages, on both the civil and ecclesiastical levels, the Jews were a constant preoccupation to those whose desire and whose duty it was to protect the Church of Christ. This Catholic vigilance grew out of the Church’s repeated warning that the Jews are a cursed race, whose very presence is a fearsome thing in Christian society.
That the traditional Catholic attitude toward the Jews, and the vigilance which stems from it, should now be abandoned in America, is cause for grave concern. But there is this encouragement: the principle which guided the Church in all her decrees against the Jews is still being presented as authentic Catholic teaching in America’s Catholic schools.
On page 209 of the standard Bible History written by the late Bishop Richard Gilmore of Cleveland, published by Benziger Brothers, and used by parochial schools throughout the country, American Catholic children are still being taught:
“For 1800 years has the blood of Christ been upon the Jews. Driven from Judea — without country, without home — strangers amongst strangers — hated, yet feared — have they wandered from nation to nation bearing with them the visible signs of God’s curse. Like Cain marked with a mysterious sign, they shall continue to wander till the end of the world.”
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
March, 1955
MORE NEWS ABOUT JEWS AND OTHERS
Some Current Threats to Our Faith and Country
Last month The Point observed its third birthday, and, standing back to take a good look at ourselves, we resolved that our next issue should pay tribute to that invention of ours which has served us so faithfully these many months, that most obliging of literary forms, the Pointer. It was not long ago that a subscriber from Notre Dame, a chemist by vocation, wrote to us that our Pointers column never failed to stagger him. “My mind fairly quakes” he said, “at the thought of what forces of energy are required to compress so much venom into so few words.” At the risk of irreparable mental harm to our quivering correspondent, we are printing this month an entire issue of Pointers, which, by our own definition, are: individual items of brief length, single message and evident meaning, designed for use as weapons in that ancient Christian enterprise of “fighting the good fight and keeping the Faith.”
The Vatican has caused a healthy furor by its recent demand that Catholics in England withdraw immediately from the Council of Christians and Jews. It is to the credit of English Catholics that they have withdrawn, albeit under protest. And it was with sympathy that we read the statement of one Catholic leader in England who, while agreeing to leave the Council, boldly pointed a finger at the U. S. A., and inquired of the Vatican, “But what about them?”
The Holy See has been notably silent on America’s National Conference of Christians and Jews, a counterpart of the Council of Christians and Jews of England. Thus far, Rome has not explicitly demanded that American Catholics get out of the N.C.C.J. Vatican delay in this regard is not edifying, but it is a bit understandable. Back in 1951, when the Vatican ordered all Catholic priests to get out of Rotary Clubs, and “advised” laymen to do the same, Church authorities in this country (“the most Rotary Club nation on earth”) conspicuously ignored the order. In withholding its ban against America’s National Conference of Christians and Jews, Rome perhaps wants to spare itself the embarrassment of once again being snubbed by the American hierarchy.
In the eyes of compromising Catholics, The Point ’s irremissible sin has been to assume that when Our Holy Father the Pope defines something infallibly, he means what he says. We insist, for example, that the following three popes, in the three following definitions, have said exactly what they mean to say, and mean exactly what they have said.
Pope Innocent Ill, at the Fourth Lateran Ecumenical Council, in the year 1215, speaking infallibly, “There is only one universal Church of the faithful and outside of it none at all can be saved.”
Pope Boniface VIII, in his bull, Unam Sanctam, dated 1302, speaking infallibly, “We declare, say, define and pronounce that it is wholly necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”
Pope Eugene IV, in his bull Cantate Domino, dated 1441, speaking infallibly, “The Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes and teaches that none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life eternal; but that they will go into eternal fire, ‘which was prepared for the devil and his angels,’ unless before death they are joined with Her; and that so important is the unity of this ecclesiastical body that only those remaining within this unity can profit by the Sacraments of the Church unto salvation, and they alone can receive an eternal recompense for their fasts, their almsgiving, their other works of Christian piety, and the duties of a Christian soldier. No one, let his almsgiving be as great as it may, no one, even if he pour out his blood for the name of Christ, can be saved, unless he remain within the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church.”
The Archdiocese of Boston has a new Auxiliary Bishop, Most Reverend Jeremiah Minihan, and he was lately honored by Boston’s Jewish community at a much-publicized reception in Temple Ohabei Shalom. We have every reason to predict that this is but the beginning of a long and intimate association. Those close to Bishop Minihan have even hinted that His Excellency would like to do for the Jews of Boston what his senior in the episcopacy, Bishop Bernard Sheil, has done for the Jews of Chicago. If our new Auxiliary has indeed set himself such a goal, may we respectfully remind him of the enormity of the task which lies ahead.
To begin with, Bishop Sheil of Chicago has been willing to devote his full time to the Jews. Will Bishop Minihan be that attentive? Boston’s sensitive Jewish community will be quick to detect any half-heartedness on the new Bishop’s part. Further, Bishop Sheil has a familiar knowledge of Jewish religious ritual and synagogue procedure. He has high-level connections with world Jewry. Henry Morgenthau made him an official government “consultant.” Chaim Weizmann, Felix Frankfurter, Stephen Wise, and Harry Dexter White have been his close friends. Has Boston’s new Auxiliary Bishop, for all his good will toward the Jews, such qualifications as these?
And beyond these considerations, Bishop Minihan has the added handicap of living in a city whose Catholic traditions in the matter of Jews are much more rigid than those of Chicago. Bishop Sheil, for example, could get away with being the honorary pallbearer at the funeral of a Chicago rabbi who publicly called Jesus Christ an illegitimate child “forced to look to Heaven for a Father.” But will the Catholics of Boston allow Bishop Miniban to go that far in his program of kindness to the Jews?
Pedro Cardinal Segura, Archbishop of Seville in Spain, has long been a favorite target for the sneers and smears of the American press. This has been the fruit of his stubborn Catholicity — a quality indicated in a letter written by Cardinal Segura early this year to a friend of ours, a concerned American Catholic mother. It concludes thus:
“What you tell me about that priest being condemned for defending the Dogma of the Faith, that ‘outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation,’ is very strange indeed, since that has always been taught in the Catholic Schools and the most authoritative Catholic theologians of the past hold the very same thing.
“I am deeply grateful for the cards of Our Lady you sent me, and very affectionately I bless you ... ”
The letter is signed, simply, “The Cardinal.” And for the beleaguered Catholics of Seville, we pray that the fury of American Masons and Jews will not prevail, and that Pedro Segura will remain, in the fullness of his authority, “The Cardinal.”
It is not without cause that the Jews of America are still bewailing the rise and rule of Adolph Hitler. The late German dictator played upon the Jews a most malicious trick. Right from under their noses, Hitler stole the Jews’ we-have-been-chosen-to-rule-the-world ideology and applied it to the Aryan Germans, who took it up with remarkable gusto, and with tragic results.
Yet, to Hitler, the Jews of America are indebted for a particular phase of their super-race tactics which they had never before fully developed. Hitler’s effectiveness was in large part due to his maintenance of an undercover police force, the dreaded Gestapo. Sensing the value of such an organization, American Jews determined to expand one of their already existing agencies, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, giving it all the force of Hitler’s secret police.
This expansion began in 1941, when the Anti-Defamation League’s annual budget of $125,000 was increased to $800,000. With additional budget boosts in the years that followed, the ADL now supports a network of more than 2,000 active agents, who carry out, in every major American community, the League’s nervous program of snooping and intimidation. The ADL keeps dossiers on tens of thousands of American citizens, and the present extent of its Gestapo activities may be judged by the following alarming discovery: Over the coming twelve-month period, the ADL will have at its disposal a sum which is nearly twice the amount allotted to the U. S. Government’s F.B.I. during an average peacetime year.
Harvard University managed to survive and thrive from the year 1636 until our own day, mainly by taking care that, no matter what fashions or fads it observed on the surface, it was always guided ultimately by a set of shrewd Yankee maxims. Among these, none was so carefully heeded as a salutary admonition to guard against the encroachments of the Jews (“Who would keep his place, should beware of that race”). Accordingly, Harvard ordained a policy, and quietly but effectively carried it out, of admitting each year only as many of this rapacious people as could be kept well under control.
Today, however, such restrictions are no more. Because the Jews realized they were not wanted at Harvard, they determined to force themselves in. With threats of bad publicity and legal prosecution, they kept hammering at the university’s locked doors, and eventually battered them down.
What few vestiges still remain of pre-Hebrew Harvard are steadily disappearing. For despite the Jewish students’ sporting of white shoes and gray flannels (by way of going “Ivy League”), their racial characteristics have remained firmly intact. Harvard, on the other hand, has undergone a most thorough and amazing transformation. In a recent article on religion among the students, the Harvard Crimson, the university’s undergraduate daily, remarked that “today Harvard is Episcopalian and Jewish run.”
That such a statement can now be publicly made is probably the most striking evidence of the Jews’ achievement. As for the Episcopalians: to be thus yoked to the despised invaders of their household is a fitting fate for these tea-sippers, who long ago renounced the Vicar of Christ, and decided that their own resources would be quite sufficient for coping with the affairs of God and man.
To American newspaper-readers, flashy young Roy Cohn seemed to be a rare find. Here, at long last, was a Jew who was not true to type. While openly professing his Jewishness, Cohn was, apparently, a fervent anti-communist, a loyal and devoted American, a server of other causes than the single one of fostering and promoting Jewry.
Cohn’s record, said his enthusiastic admirers, was clear and impeccable. Nor, they pointed out, was there any difficulty in examining that record. For even the Jewish press, which had gone so hard on Senator McCarthy himself, seemed to sense Roy’s worth, and had given his speeches full and friendly coverage.
Lately, however, there has come some disquieting news for those who had thought slick-haired Roy Cohn was “not like other Jews.” Is seems he belonged to something called the American Jewish League Against Communism, and it was at the urgent recommendation of this group that he had been forced on the McCarthy Committee. The purpose of AJLAC is to present an array of prominent Jews (Rabbi Benjamin Schultz, columnist George Sokolsky, et al.) who are “violently anti-communist.” It hopes thereby to dislodge the notion, now looming large in Gentile minds, that Communism is a Jewish movement; for it was this notion, and not Communism itself, that the AJLAC was established to destroy.
But the most startling revelation concerning the AJLAC, and member Roy Cohn, was the news that a certain powerful and sinister old man is its guiding spirit and financial mainstay. This hoary Jew has long been recognized as the prime mover in the United States — if not in the world — for extending Jewish domination. It is also known that whatever cause he may support, he does so ultimately for the attainment of this end. Thus, not many years ago, in Spain, he was supporting and financing the notoriously Communist-controlled Abraham Lincoln Brigade. His name: Bernard Baruch.
The letters POAU are the identifying initials of an organization which calls itself, “Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.” The “Church” referred to in this title is, of course, the Catholic Church. And the group indefinitely lumped together as “Other Americans” is, we are not surprised to learn, the Jews.
One of the principal pushers of POAU’s anti-Catholic program is the high-strung and aggressive American Jewish Congress. In charge of POAU’s written propaganda department is a descendent of Talmudic rabbis, whose name is Lichtenstein. From top to bottom, the POAU set-up is a faithful reflection of the tactics of the Jews in their ancient assault on the Church of Christ. Since the times of the earliest heresies, through the successive attacks of the Arians, the Mohammedans, the Schismatic Greeks, the Albigensians, the Lutherans, and the Freemasons, the part played by Jews is clear and consistent. The Jews will encourage, finance, sharpen the pencils and empty the wastebaskets for any Gentile movement which shows promise of doing damage to the Catholic Church.
The Point is confident, however, that the Jewish impetus behind Protestantism — the drive to promote an heretical, divided Christianity — may one day, soon, boomerang and be the Jews’ undoing. American Protestants are coming to see that the refuge and the restorative for their crippled Christian nation, and their vanished Christian culture, does not lie in a revival of the Jew-encouraged “protestings” of the so-called Reformation. Is takes little deliberation to conclude that the way to dislodge the Jews is not by rallying to a movement which was, at its very Outset, engineered by them.
The Catholic Church (traditional restrainer of the Jews, establisher of the ghettos and the glorious Inquisition) alone has the answer that American Protestants are seeking. And at the conclusion of this search of theirs, there awaits, paradoxically, a Jewish Maiden despised by the Jews, the Blessed Mother of God, to whose Holy and Immaculate Conception this should-be Christian nation was long ago dedicated.
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
April, 1955
THE HOLY LAND AND THE JEWS
“That land in which the light of truth first shone, where the Son of God, in human guise, deigned to walk as man among men, where the Lord taught and suffered, died and rose again, where the work of man’s redemption was consummated — this land, consecrated by so many holy memories, has passed into the hands of the impious!”
Blessed Pope Urban II spoke these words in the year 1095 and, by the time he had finished speaking, all of Europe was rallying to do battle with the Turk. Christian knights hailed the Pope’s resounding order: “Mark out a path all the way to the Holy Sepulchre and snatch the Holy Land from that abominable people.”
This month, with Urban II and the Crusades nearly nine centuries behind us, Catholics will be asked to recall once again those sacred Palestine places where Jesus spent His Holy Week of suffering and death, and triumphed on His Easter Sunday morning. But this time there will be no talk of “snatching” the Holy Land. Indeed, we have been quite content, of late, to settle back and watch someone else grab it up. Nor have we been even slightly jarred from our lethargy by the fact that the Holy Land’s new occupants make Pope Urban’s “abominable” Mohammedans almost bearable by contrast.
That the state of Israel is now a reality, that the Holy Land has fallen into the hands of the Jews, that the crucifiers of Christ have been restored with honor to the scene of their crime, should be provocation enough for all of Christendom to descend in battle array and obliterate the cursed invaders. But nothing happens. In fact, this tragic betrayal of the Holy Places has been allowed to develop far beyond the mere physical presence of Jews in Palestine. For every day it is becoming clearer just what the Jews have done, and will continue to do, to Catholic churches, shrines, schools, hospitals, seminaries, and even the Catholic faithful, in the land which they have usurped.
We know that there will be no twentieth-century Crusade, for we know that Christendom has all but died. Still, we are heartened by those few Catholic voices who have made protest: the half-dozen bishops, the handful of priests, and the one courageous Franciscan brother. From the documented, on-the-scene reports which these men have made (and which have been so notably ignored by America’s Jewish-controlled press) The Point hopes to indicate, this Eastertime, just what has been going on in Our Lord’s Holy Land since His enemies took it over.
CHURCH OF THE DORMITION
On the slope of Mount Zion, not far from the site of the Last Supper, is a magnificent Romanesque rotunda called the Church of the Dormition (the “falling asleep”). And of all the shrines in Jerusalem, this one has always been especially, poignantly dear; for on this spot Our Blessed Lady spent her last years on earth, and here she died.
During the morning of May 18, 1948, Israeli troops, fighting to take Jerusalem from the Arabs, rushed upon the Church of the Dormition, crashed down the barricaded door, and entered in. The Benedictine monks in charge of the church were already aware of the Israelis’ reputation as despoilers of holy places, and they gathered in the sanctuary, hoping that their presence would serve to dampen Jewish ardor. Professing amusement at the monks’ concern, the Jewish officers assured them there was nothing to fear: they had not the slightest intention of using the Dormition for military purposes; they would merely like to be shown to the church’s towers, so as to observe Arab positions.
By sunset of that day, the Jews had set up artillery in the church, and were using it as their base of operations. After two weeks — during which they poured an incessant stream of mortar fire at the Arabs, and the Arabs answered in kind — the Israeli officers decided that the monks, “for their own safety,” should retire to another part of the city. Reluctantly, they allowed three monks to remain behind as custodians of the church.
Almost immediately, these three were informed that they could go out of their underground rooms only with the permission, and under the surveillance, of an armed guard. When the monks protested against such restrictions, and demanded the Jews withdraw from the church immediately, to prevent further damage, the Jewish officers calmly assured them they would depart as soon as practicable. Meantime, they were told, they could put their minds at rest: orders had been given to the soldiers to guard carefully property belonging to the church, particularly the sacred objects.
Suddenly, on July 15, two months after the Jews first entered the Dormition, the three monks who remained there were instructed by Israeli officers to leave at once. All money was taken from them, and when they asked to make a listing of items being left in the church, they were told they could not.
Shortly after the last monks moved out, the Church of the Dormition became a Jewish dance hall, where each night the young men and women of Hagannah, weary from the day’s fighting, met for recreation.
It was September before any priests were again able to enter the church. What they found when they looked inside stunned them. The statues, the pictures, the crucifixes, the altars, the whole interior, had been thoroughly, painstakingly desecrated and destroyed.
These priests issued a report for the Catholic press of all they had witnessed, “lest responsible persons be deceived by propaganda.” And their summary of what had happened to the cherished and once-beautiful shrine of the Mother of God, after four months of Jewish occupation, was the following stark announcement: “the Church of the Dormition is now a heap of rubble.”
Throughout the Holy Land, the remnants of churches, chapels, and shrines give eloquent testimony of the Jews’ vengeful, ferocious hatred of their rejected Messias. Among these remnants are the great Church of Saint Peter, at Tiberias; the Church of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, at Am Karim; the Church of the Beatitudes, at Capharnaum; the Church of Mensa Christi, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee; and in Jerusalem, close by the Church of the Dormition, the Cenacle — where, the night before He was betrayed into the hands of the Jews, Jesus, at the Last Supper, gave us His Body and Blood to be our Sacrifice, our Sacrament and our Food.
CONVENT OF NOTRE DAME
Just outside the walled inner city of Jerusalem, at New Gate, there stands the Convent and Hospice of Notre Dame. This consecrated building was one of the first pieces of Church property seized by the new Israeli government. Jewish officials had determined that the structure was ideally suited for use as a barracks to house Israeli soldiers. The convent’s chapel became a kind of general recreation room for the new occupants and, when members of the Franciscan Commissariat of the Holy Land finally managed to visit the confiscated building, they found the chapel in total desecration. The chief objects for the hatred of the Jewish soldiers had been the large brass crucifixes used for Mass. A report issued from Jerusalem states that the representations of Our Lord’s Holy Body had been pried loose from all the crucifixes and that “the bare crosses were scattered about the chapel, covered with human excrement.”
This early-established policy toward religious houses continued with the Jewish seizure and desecration of the Sisters’ convent at Am Karim, the Franciscan convent at Tiberias, the Sisters’ residence at Capharnaum, the Salesian houses at Cremisan, the convent of the Sisters of Saint Ann at Haifa, the home of the Fathers of the Italian Institute at Capharnaum, the Patriarchal Seminary at Beit-Jala, and the Convent of Mary Reparatrix at Jerusalem, which was blasted by dynamite in the middle of the night while six Sisters were known to be still inside.
SCHOOL AT KATAMON
Shortly after the first Israeli troops arrived in the little town of Kasamon, near Jerusalem, some of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Sion, who conducted the English High School there, were looking out the school windows with their students. Suddenly they saw Israeli soldiers in the streets outside raise their rifles. Aghast, Sisters and students dropped to the floor. A moment later, the windows where they had been standing were spattered with bullet holes.
The Sister Superior’s anxious protests to the local Israeli commander were met with his unctuous assurances that no more such episodes would occur. Soon afterwards, a detachment of Jewish soldiers, looking for amusement, shot up the school bus.
Finally, after three harrowing months of trying to live in an area ruled by Jews, the Sisters sent their pupils home and closed the school. Before leaving for Jerusalem, they nailed a large Papal flag across the front door, as notice to the Israelis that this building belonged to the Catholic Church.
The next word the Sisters received from Katamon informed them that a band of soldiers, Israeli regulars, had broken into the school, defiled its sacred objects, and left it ruined.
“I wish to protest with all possible energy against this complete lack of honor,” wrote the Sister Superior to the government of Israel. “The commander of the area of Katamon gave me his word that nothing would be touched ... I do not know when the pillage was committed, for I have not been in Katamon since May 3. However, it proves to me that your repeated promises are only empty words, which one cannot believe.”
Catholic authorities have estimated that the Jews have destroyed Church property in the Holy Land at the rate of more than two million dollars’ worth a year. To mention only French Catholic institutions, they have demolished four hospitals, sixteen dispensaries, two hospices, four seminaries, thirty-two schools and orphanages, seven retreat houses. And what the Jews have not destroyed outright they have gotten rid of in other ways. Thus, they have commandeered the four principal Catholic schools in Jerusalem, turning them into a Jewish food control office, a Jewish refugee home, a Jewish hospital, and a barracks for Jewish soldiers.
So extensive is the damage inflicted by the Jews, that two American Franciscan priests, sent to Jerusalem as official Catholic observers, reported, “There seems to be an over-all plan gradually to replace Catholic institutions.”
THE REFUGEES
As part of a program to find “accommodations” for its influx of Jewish colonizers, the government of Israel has managed to bring about the dismemberment and evacuation of all Catholic regions in the Holy Land. Before the formation of the Israeli state, Palestine was in no sense a Christian-populated country. And yet, because the chief targets for Jewish aggression have been so consistently the Catholic towns and villages, nearly twenty per cent of the Arabs kicked out of their ancient homes have been Christians.
To date, close to a million Arab refugees have been stripped of everything they possess by way of home, land, savings, business, and, often, even family. Reports from Catholics in Lebanon, just north of the Holy Land, tell of dusty roads choked with the exodus of Galilee Arabs, mothers with breast-fed babies, orphaned children, dazed fathers, many of whom were carrying cherished crucifixes and other holy objects which, at great risk, they had rescued from Jewish desecration as they left their looted homes.
A communique from Brother Anthony Bruya, O. F. M., on the plight of the town of Rameh, bears vivid witness to the special hatred which has been shown to Catholics in the Holy Land. Israeli forces occupied Rameh, a two-thirds Christian community, and while permitting the Mohammedan Arabs to stay, ordered all Catholics to “leave within half an hour.” To back up the order, the Israeli commander reminded the Christian townspeople of what had happened to the residents of Deir Assin and Tireh — who were massacred in the streets for daring to question the authority of a Jewish army leader.
Similar atrocities have taken place in Haifa, Sheframr, Maslia, Tarshiha, and a hundred other places. But perhaps the most touching and tragic report is the one dated January 15, 1952, in which Archbishop George Hakim of Galilee protested in vain to the Israeli government over the mass destruction of the totally Catholic village of Ikret. Church, schools, rectory, homes — everything was in shambles. And what is more, wrote the Archbishop, the Jews perpetrated all this on Christmas Day itself.
The assault on Ikret, like all the rest of Israel’s anti-Catholic outrages, was in no sense an “unavoidable casualty” of the recent Jewish-Arab warfare. All of the first-hand Catholic observers are quick to make this point. Indeed, in his summary report on the Holy Land situation, the Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Hughes, has very plainly charged that there is now in operation a “deliberate Jewish effort to decimate the Arabs and to destroy Christianity in Palestine.”
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
May, 1955
THE JEWS AND THEIR NEW UNIVERSITY
For the past seven years a new university has been asserting itself on the borders of Boston, Massachusetts. Its name is Brandeis; and, though situated in the most college-crammed area in the nation, this new one is already recognized as something quite out of the ordinary and worthy of special regard. It is, for instance, the only enterprise in existence calling itself a Liberal Arts college which offers just three high-school courses in Latin, three in Greek, and twenty-two courses in Hebrew.
Named for the late Jewish jurist who combined a mighty zeal for Zionism with his Supreme Court duties, Brandeis is the first “non-sectarian” college to be organized, owned, and operated by American Jewry. There are, of course, other universities which the Jews control, but they have got these only by arduous years of shoving and scrambling their way to the top; and they hold their places of power in the worried, anxious manner of usurpers whose underlings are plotting to overthrow them.
At Brandeis, it is different. There, the Jews can throw their weight around without restriction, and at the same time be as free from phobias as it is possible for Jews to be. For Brandeis is their handiwork and their domain — from its garish, glass-fronted classrooms down to the last kosher frankfurter in its dietary kitchen. It means to the Jews scholastically what the state of Israel means to them politically. No longer will their influence on American education have to be exerted by inhabitation and control of other peoples’ colleges. Now they have an abode, a rallying point, a center of operations — now they have a college of their own.
As with all peculiarly Jewish things, some aspects of Brandeis are farcically funny, others are terrifyingly grim. The first derive, in the present case, from the Jews’ frantic efforts to build a successful university, and the inevitable frustration of those efforts by the habits and traits ingrained in their race.
The initial, most vivid evidence of this clash appears with the Jews’ maneuverings to lure Christian students to Brandeis. For, it should be noted, the college authorities would rather not have a preponderance of their own Semitic sort in attendance there. They do not want this promising project of theirs to come off in the American mind as just a slightly more assimilated version of the Hebrew National College. If Brandeis is going to bring other schools around to its way of thinking, quickly and painlessly, it must appear as one of them — solidly, reliably, indigenously American. And to have a student body that looks like the clientele of a Bronx delicatessen adds nothing to that illusion.
The rulers of the Brandeis roost have, accordingly, spared no effort, and very little expense, in order to surround themselves with bright, wholesome, un-Semitic faces. The Dean of Admissions estimates that at present 25 to 30 per cent of the total enrollment is composed of Gentiles (“Of course, we can’t be absolutely sure, because we don’t ask such questions”). A drive through the Brandeis campus, however, emphatically reveals this figure to be nothing but promotional propaganda.
The principal reason why, despite the attractive come-ons, most non-Jews have steered clear of Brandeis is a simple and compelling one: the place is plainly, overpoweringly, irremediably Jewish. To choose it as one’s college is comparable to choosing the beach at Tel Aviv as one’s vacation-spot.
With their fanatic, stupefying absorption in themselves, the Jews are either oblivious to how flagrant is the character of Brandeis, or else they hope gullible Gentiles will not notice it. For the college abounds in distinctively Jewish touches, like the reiterated, shrill insistence of the Brandeis catalog that “the University has no doctrinal slant”; and the listing in the same catalog, without explanation or apology, of the names of the Brandeis teaching Professors — all of whom, save one possible Swede, turn out to be Jews.
The Applauders
Since first opening its doors in 1948, Brandeis has been able to secure the support, monetary and otherwise, of a varied group of “patrons.” These, quite at random, include:
Joseph N. Proskauer, Brandeis Trustee and powerful leader in the American Jewish Committee, whose magazine, Commentary, highly approves of Brandeis, finds fault with other things. Sample: “The division of the divinity into ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ splits the divine essence; it was and is regarded by the synagogue quite simply as blasphemy.”
The Widow Roosevelt, the Gentile member of the Board of Trustees. To aging Mrs. R., Brandeis is yet another “fascinating group of young people.” Her previous groups have been notably ill-fated, most of them having ended up on the black-list of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Most Reverend Bernard Sheil, auxiliary bishop of Chicago, who gave Brandeis a $50,000 CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) scholarship fund. We are pleased to report, however, that as part of Bishop Sheil’s general demise (some call it silencing) this grant to Brandeis has now been “withdrawn.”
The Performers
Although they are reliable indicators of just which way Brandeis is heading, the foregoing peripheral people are not the ultimate formulators of Brandeis policy, and not the sustained indoctrinators of Brandeis students.
The university’s policy and doctrine were determined by its initial and deliberate employment of three men. With the selection of these three, Brandeis committed itself to an atmosphere which the current university catalog archly describes as the Brandeis “climate.” This localized inclemency can be best studied by making an appraisal, out in the open Christian air, of the trio who are responsible for it. Their names, in ascending importance, are Abram Sachar, Max Lerner, and Ludwig Lewisohn; and their respective contributions to the “climate” of Brandeis are herewith set in order.
Abram Sachar is the President of Brandeis, who came to the job after twenty successful years as chief agent for Jewish Masonry’s “Hillel House” program. A capable strategist, Dr. Sachar early saw the proselytizing possibilities of the Hillel movement, which is ostensibly a social, devotional, and loan-granting agency for Jewish students at secular universities. Thus it happened that in 1943, Dr. Sachar was prominently cited on “the impact he had made on Christian students ... who had been influenced by his Hillel courses.”
This propensity for Judaizing young Gentiles was one of Dr. Sachar’s principal recommendations for the Brandeis presidency. The other was a repeated declaration, following necessarily from his Zionist loyalty, that America is not a “melting pot,” and that Jews must not only stick to being Jews, they must even rejoice in their Jewishness.
In order to attract Gentile students, for processing under his experienced direction, Dr. Sachar has allowed a Newman Club and a Student Christian Association to take their places beside Brandeis University’s lively Hillel chapter. Profoundly touched by the limitless opportunities thus afforded him, Dr. Sachar has resolved upon a rededication of himself to the spirit and ideals of that Rabbi Hillel for whom the Hillel movement was named — the rabbi who, until his death in 10 A.D., was head of the Jerusalem sanhedrin and who was, as such, the chief promoter of King Herod’s “slaughter of the Holy Innocents,” the first of the Jewish attempts to get rid of Jesus.
Max Lerner is Chairman of the Brandeis Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, a position for which he qualified by a career of banging out columns for papers like the Nation, New Republic, and PM. Not for an instant during his embattled years as a newspaperman did Lerner’s political complexion ever pale from its bright ruddy glow. Even during the exposures of A. Hiss and company, when mere parlor pinks were withdrawing into chastened silence, Lerner stood his ground defiantly, dismissed the trials as “a show for political neurotics by political neurotics.”
At Brandeis, Lerner has the students coming and going, teaching one course required of all freshmen, another required of all seniors. But what he teaches them is not entirely political. Besides the trick of having his own “independent opinions” always coincide with the twistings and turnings of the official Communist line, Lerner has another Jewish talent: It is his ability to spice his lectures with passing sneers at things Christian — for instance his disposal of Christmas as “the myth-laden version of the nativity of a child in the Middle East.”
Ludwig Lewisohn is Brandeis’ Jacob Kaplan Professor of Comparative Literature and, by far, its most articulate, prominent and sought-after personality. The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia ’s biographical account of Dr. Lewisohn summarizes his unique achievement by declaring that he has become “the symbol of Jews preoccupied with the problem of existence and not merely with the problem of living.”
The existence problem with which Dr. Lewisohn has been most preoccupied, of course, is the problem of the co-existence of Christianity and Judaism. After a lifetime of investigating the matter, Dr. Lewisohn has come to some pointed conclusions. Among them are these.
1) Jews must never try to imitate Christian standards, culture, or traditions.
2) Jews must be steadfastly themselves, and Judaize their Christian neighbors.
3) Jews owe it to the Western world to replace Christianity with a modern presentation of Hebraism.
To bolster these principles of action, Dr. Lewisohn has prepared for his disciples some dogmatic comments, samples of which follow.
On Jesus Christ: “A teacher neither original nor important.”
On the Catholic Church: “The militant and triumphant Church, an empire with prisons and engines of war, is even amid the grandeur of Saint Peter’s a thing that evokes in me both horror and disdain — horror at its long cruelties toward those whom it still calls “perfidious Jews,” though not to be sure toward them alone, disdain at that extreme of changeless superstition which has worn away by the kisses of innumerable pilgrims the brazen feet of the gigantic statue of the Church’s tutelary saint.”
On Catholic Marriage: “A metaphysical trap.”
On Catholic love of the saints: “A happy devout polytheism.”
On the Crucifix: “That we crucified Christ is an old wives’ tale. For Christ is a myth.”
On Catholic Europe: “The history of Christendom is a history of warring sects and warring nations, of cruelty, of hatred, and of slaughter.”
On the marks of a Catholic culture: “Repression, cruelty, belligerent patriotism, darkness of mind, and corruption of heart.”
On Saint Paul: “Christian Rome hated and feared us because we could not follow the morbid Hellenizing of Paul of Tarsus nor endure the paganization of the religion he had unwittingly brought forth.”
From this summary of the three men who have made Brandeis (the one who is its president and the two who are its only notable teachers) there follows a single inevitable judgment about the university’s “climate.” It is neither, as some have claimed, a “new educational setting” nor a “novel atmosphere of learning.” It is not even a fleeting “intellectual experiment.” For what is going on at Brandeis is old. It has sprung, however awkward and unsteady, from a long, long tradition — that ubiquitous tradition which must answer for the Loyalists in Spain, the Marxists in Russia, the Carbonari in Italy, the Freemasons in France, the Illuminati in Germany; that unbroken tradition which reaches back nineteen hundred years to find its root and sustenance in a howling Jerusalem mob which cried, “His blood be upon us and upon our children!”
The Three Chapels
It is difficult to estimate just how much success Drs. Sachar, Lerner, and Lewisohn will enjoy in their bold undertaking. They are currently chuckling, however, over a victory which will be securely theirs in a very few weeks, if all goes as planned.
The ailing Archbishop of Boston, whether through ignorance (which would be culpable) or malice (which is hard to believe) has agreed to the dedication, this June, of a building which will be directly on the Brandeis campus and which will serve as a Catholic church. What is more, this proposed church will have for companions a Protestant meeting house and a Jewish synagogue — all three to be of equal capacity, and so designed that the passerby will be quite unable to tell which creed goes with which building.
In the ultimate scheme of Drs. Sachar, Lerner, and Lewisobn, the three chapels are only a beginning. But they are an eloquent one. Forcefully, in hard gray stone, these three buildings will testify that a Catholic Archbishop has been persuaded to place the One True Faith, the Mass, and the Holy Eucharist, on a par with heretical perversions and even with Jewish perfidy.
Anxiously, we ask the prayers of our readers that somehow, by some unforseeable intervention, this plan will be frustrated, and that our Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament will be spared the desecration of dwelling in sanctuary on the campus of Brandeis, as the tenant and the target of the Jews.
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
June, 1955
THE PLANS OF THE JEWS FOR WORLD CONTROL
When the Bishops of the United States met in council at Baltimore, in the year 1846, they placed our country under the patronage of the Mother of God, invoking her protection as the “Blessed Virgin Mary Conceived Without Sin.” These Bishops of a century ago had abundant reason to expect that America would some day become, in fact as well as in dedication, Our Blessed Lady’s land. And they made no secret of their intention.
Archbishop Hughes of New York declared, during a sermon delivered at his cathedral in 1850, “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.”
Archbishop Hughes and his episcopal contemporaries were agreed that, if the conversion of America were not soon forthcoming, they might perhaps blame their own lack of zeal, or the Protestants’ lack of good will, but in no case could they complain of a lack of authorized, un-hampered opportunity. For at its very outset, the United States of America had provided that if men like Archbishop Hughes should come along, they must be left free to say what they have to say — free, that is, to go out and convince the whole nation that the Catholic Church is the only true one.
Thus far, 109 years after its dedication to Our Lady, the United States has not been notably convinced. That it still can be, and will be, is The Point ’s confident purpose. And to facilitate our designs upon the American people (to help us to help them become Children of Mary) we are anxious to keep that same missionizing privilege which Archbishop Hughes enjoyed in the days when America was a young assertive republic, jealous of its independence, sacrificing its sovereignty to no one.
This, very briefly, is our self-interested motive in joining the current battle against the United Nations, an organization which demands the scrapping of our country’s sovereignty, the undermining of our Constitution, and the “ultimate halting of all sectarian proselytism,” a recently coined phrase, of Semitic origin, which means that once the U. N. fully takes over, Catholic priests will have to stop insisting to their neighbors that Baptism, the Blessed Sacrament, Our Lady, and the Pope are necessary salvational concerns.
Though the U. N. demands are Jewish ones, patently and exclusively of benefit to those of the Jewish community, promotion of the U. N. is not an end in itself to the Jews. It is a means of helping them to arrive at that “Messianic Age” which has now, in all Jewish anticipation, taken the place of a personal “Messias.” The Jews are no longer waiting for the birth of a Jewish Savior. They are sighing after and plotting for the day when the Jewish race will at last come into its own, lording it over the world from the new world-capital, Jerusalem. It is as an Instrument toward achieving this Zionistic goal that the Jews promote both the U. N. and its complementary international movement, Communism.
CHARTER REVISION
The founding of the United Nations was an objective sought in common by those two most agreeable of companions — those admitted Zionists — Premier Josef Stalin and President Franklin Roosevelt. It was this compatible pair who selected Stalin’s American lieutenant, Alger Hiss, to preside over the preliminary drafting of the U. N. Charter at Dumbarton Oaks, and to have charge of the Charter’s completion during the conference in San Francisco. At this latter meeting it was decided that by 1955 the Hiss Charter might need “revising” to make it stronger and more binding, and so provision was made for a future “Charter review conference.”
Accordingly, within a very few months, the U. N. will decide whether it should give the Charter more teeth. And this pending vote has revived, all over the nation, the pro and con U. N. arguments. On the side of Charter revision — aiming at just one federal government for the whole world — there can be found every Semitic organization in the land, from the Central Conference of American Rabbis to the National Council of Jewish Women. Opposed to a stronger Charter, and so any movement that will lead to the swallowing up of our country, are a growing number of patriotic groups (like the American Legion), religious groups (like the Diocese of Brooklyn’s International Catholic Truth Society), and political groups (like the numerous pushers of the Bricker Amendment).
Because the battle-lines are thus so clearly drawn, there is an immediate temptation to conclude that all we must do is defeat the strengthening of the U. N. Charter and everything will be fine — our national sovereignty and our individual rights will be secure. Unhappily, this is not the case. For without any deviation from its original wording, the U. N. Charter contains right now sufficient powers to scuttle us forever as a nation, to silence the message of the Christian Faith, and to see the Jews well along the road to their dream of world domination.
If Charter revision fails, the Jews will, therefore, continue their present, more roundabout, but no less deadly U. N. maneuverings — the variety and current extent of which are indicated by what follows.
GENOCIDE CONVENTION
There has been a lot of publicity given lately to a U. N. project called the Genocide Convention. Unless you are taken aside and instructed in the matter, this “convention” will logically come off in your mind as a gathering of delegates who are going all out for “genocide,” — whatever that is. Actually, in this particular, deliberately obscure, Jewish usage, “convention” means an international pact or agreement, and “genocide” (a word thought up just for the occasion by a Jew named Raphael Lemkin) means “race-killing.”
As this point, you imagine that you have it all straightened out: a Genocide Convention must be a race-killing agreement. But, no. A quick glance at the text of the Genocide Convention will establish that it is an anti-race-killing agreement. It is something therefore to stop the killing-off of a race. But once again you have not really grasped it, because the Genocide Convention does not prohibit just the killing of a man on account of his race, it forbids “any action,” or any “incitement” to any action, or any “complicity” in any action which will in any way cause a man of a particular race the least bit of anxiety or discomfort because of his race.
Finally, therefore, it becomes clear what the U. N.’s Genocide Convention is all about. It is an international pact, which the U. N. wants every nation to sign, saying that anyone who criticizes a Jew in public — in fact, anyone who calls a Jew, a Jew — will be guilty of Genocide and punishable by law.
And the Jews do not plan to use Genocide solely as a negative protection. They are counting on it as a positive weapon in their continual struggle against the Church. For by means of Genocide restrictions, the Jews will be able to get rid of much that is essential Christianity, on the score that it leads to, or is openly, “anti-semitism.” For example: Crucifixes, with their reminder to Christians that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ, will be done away with as “incitements” to Genocide. Classed as even more offensive will be the New Testament, which records such overt anti-semitic sentiments as those of Our Lord when He calls the Jews the children of the devil (Jn. 8:44), and of Saint Paul when he says about the Jews that they are not pleasing to God and are the enemies of all men (I Thess. 2:15).
If these seem to be remote eventualities, witness what the Jews are doing right now about such things. From the American Jewish Yearbook, Vol. 52, we learn that the Jews are presently worried about, “the need for revising certain elements of the Crucifixion story ... The evangelists distorted the original Gospel account of the Crucifixion.” And from the University of British Columbia, in Canada, we learn how all the current Jewish lobbying against “discrimination” has lately been pushed to its fantastic but logical extreme. The University’s Newman Club, a religious and social group for Catholic students, was actually forced to suspend operations because of its “bigoted” policy of allowing membership to Catholics only!
U. N. AGENCIES
Besides belonging to the main body of the U. N., the United States is also enmeshed in a score of subsidiary U. N. agencies. Typical of these, and of the policies they advocate, is the International Labor Organization and its program to promote world-wide “health.”
Measures called for by this blatantly Talmudic program include “population planning” (a scheme whereby birth-control will be encouraged in some locales, fecundity rewarded in others); mass inoculations (shots for all, whether the people want them or not, whether the disease is prevalent or not, and whether the serum is harmful or not); the inducing of “painless death” in incurables and the aged; and a vast plan for conducting Jewish investigations and prescribing Jewish remedies, with a view to attaining a Jewish conception of “mental health.”
A characteristic U. N. queerness, arising from its Semitic background, is the fact that the International Labor Organization is pushing a plan for universal health, while the World Health Organization, another U. N. agency, is busying itself with financial affairs.
By a provision in its by-laws, to which our government is committed, the World Health Organization has the right to assess member-nations for whatever funds it may need. A recent exercise of this prerogative is reported in the Congressional Record for May 25, 1954.
At a plenary session of the World Health Organization in Geneva, delegates from the various nations decided that the United States had not been sufficiently generous in financing WHO activities during the preceding year; the delegates voted, therefore, that besides the nearly two million dollars our government had already contributed to the Organization, there would be an additional assessment on the U. S. of 350 thousand dollars.
Thus, as the fruit of our U. N. involvement, an international assembly now has the power to appropriate the money of American taxpayers — a power which the authors of our Constitution, in Gentile innocence, thought they had reserved to Congress.
KOREA
There is no consequence of our participation in the United Nations which has touched America more intimately or more tragically than the U. N.-sponsored war in Korea. And, at the same time, there is no undertaking of the U. N. which more clearly illustrates how the two world forces fostered by international Jewry — the U. N and Communism — work in ultimate harmony.
Here is the significant story of the U. N.’s war in Korea.
Communist Russia could have vetoed U. N. military action against Communist Korea when that action was first proposed in the U. N. Security Council. Russia deliberately chose to withhold her veto. Russia wanted the U. N. to fight in Korea.
By an arrangement made shortly after the San Francisco Conference, the assistant secretary-general in charge of United Nations military affairs must always be a Soviet citizen. This post has been held successively by Arkady Sobolev, Konstantin Zinchenko, and Ilya Tchernychev. Thus, Russia was confident that the U. N.’s fight against Communists in Korea would be under the constant and watchful control of a Communist at U. N. headquarters in New York.
It was to Communist Arkady Sobolev that General Douglas MacArthur, the U. N. field commander in Korea, had to submit his plans for defeating the Korean Communists. General MacArthur was finally relieved of his post for consistently refusing to go full way with the suicidal course of action advocated by the U. N. in the Korean engagement.
Although government spokesmen, particularly our U. N. Ambassador, Mr. Lodge, have done their best to minimize the military control which was exercised by Sobolev, and his successor Zinchenko, none of them has attempted to explain why the Korean war was such a colossal defeat. Ostensibly, a fight between one remote corner of Asia and all of the free world, the Communist-run U. N. war in Korea resulted in:
1. the depletion and demoralization of the American Army, which provided nearly the entire U. N. fighting force in Korea. and which suffered 150,000 casualties, with 500 American prisoners still in foreign hands;
2. the crippling of U. S. prestige by involving us in “the first war America ever lost”; and
3. the confirmation of all of Asia as prey for the forces of Communism.
To continue participating in the United Nations is the easiest course for Americans to follow. It requires no effort, no strength, and no thought. All that will be asked of us is that, sooner or later, we pay the established price — the devouring of our nation, the silencing of the Gospel, and the ultimate triumph of the Jews.
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
July, 1955
SHOULD HATE BE OUTLAWED?
Most Americans, hearing this question, would answer promptly, “Yes, by all means, hate should be outlawed!” Their eagerness to reply can be accounted for all too easily. During the last decade and a half, they have been pounded with a propaganda barrage calculated to leave them in a state of dazed affability toward the whole world. Those advertising techniques that are normally used to encourage Americans to be choosy in matters of soap and toothpaste are now being enlisted to persuade them that there is no such thing as a superior product in matters of culture and creed. On billboards, on bus and subway posters, in newspapers and magazines, through radio and television broadcasts, Americans are being assured and reassured, both subtly and boldly, that “Bigotry is fascism ... Only Brotherhood can save our nation ... We must be tolerant of all!”
The long-range effects of this campaign are even now evident. It is producing the “spineless citizen”: the man who has no cultural sensibilities; who is incapable of indignation; whose sole mental activity is merely an extension of what he reads in the newspaper or sees on the television screen; who faces moral disaster in his neighborhood, political disaster in his country, and an impending world catastrophe with a blank and smiling countenance. He has only understanding for the enemies of his country. He has nothing but kind sentiments for those who would destroy his home and family. He has an earnest sympathy for anyone who would obliterate his faith. He is universally tolerant. He is totally unprejudiced. If he has any principles, he keeps them well concealed, lest in advocating them he should seem to indicate that contrary principles might be inferior. He is, to the extent of his abilities, exactly like the next citizen, who, he trusts, is trying to be exactly like him: a faceless, characterless putty-man.
Along with everyone else, American Catholics have been hammered with the slogans of the “anti-hate” campaign. Additionally, they remember the stories of how prejudice against Catholics oftentimes made America a very uncomfortable place for their immigrant Catholic grandparents. And so, they too, if asked, would declare unhesitatingly that hate should be outlawed.
What American Catholics do not stop to reflect on is that the Catholic Faith, by its very nature, fosters indignation, intolerant positions, and strong utterance. The Church is set up to continue the divine ministry of Jesus Christ, Who avowed that He had come on Earth, “Not to send peace, but the sword ... to cast fire on the Earth, and what will I but that it be kindled.”
In accepting their vocation to be “other Christs,” Catholics are faced with the countless examples of Gospel astringency. They are reminded that the same Jesus Who said, “Learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart,” likewise said, “I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s enemies shall be they of his own house-hold.” Nor can they forget that the same Jesus, Who submitted Himself to the Jewish mob in the garden of Gethsemani, had previously overturned the tables of the buyers and sellers and driven them from the temple with a whip.
In accepting their position as contemporary members of the Church, American Catholics must take as their heritage the outlooks, attitudes, and purposes of their older brothers and sisters in the Faith — those Catholics who have gone before them and have preserved the Church to our own day. For the Catholic Church is One. The Church that called on its sons to take up the Cross and the sword and drive the infidel from the Holy Land, the Church that isolated the Jews of Christendom with rigid laws and ghetto walls, the Church that has repeatedly condemned the doctrines of those who disagree with her, is the same Catholic Church that claims the loyalty of 35,000,000 twentieth-century Americans.
Along with the Mass, the Sacraments, and all the spiritual treasures that are a Catholic’s baptismal birthright, these American Catholics must also assume the rest of their legacy. As members of the Church Militant — raised by the Sacrament of Confirmation to be Soldiers of Jesus Christ — they are heirs of a tradition that has been marked through the centuries by sustained and unashamed militancy.
Examples of the clash between traditional Catholic observance and the current “anti-hate” campaign could be multiplied indefinitely. Every chapter in every age of the Church’s history will provide them, because the ultimate issue involved is an abiding one, a doctrinal one. It is the Catholic Church’s uncompromising claim to be the One True Church established by God. It is this conviction of Catholics throughout the centuries that leaves our greatest heroes and saints and the very constitution of the Church itself open to the charges of bigotry and intolerance.
The Catholic Church does not believe that all religions are on a common plane. It does not subscribe to the popular notion that, “We’re all headed for the same place, you in your way and we in ours.” The Catholic Church believes that Christianity is the world’s only chance for salvation, and it further insists that true Christians are found only within its fold, under the Supreme Shepherd, the Vicar of Christ, Our Holy Father at Rome.
Inevitably, this belief, when translated into practical action, makes for some intolerant arrangements: Catholics are admonished not to marry heretics and Jews; they may not attend a non-Catholic religious service; Catholic children must be sent to the Church’s schools. The motive behind these bigoted practices is the preservation of the Faith — not as an antique curiosity, but as a vital necessity. And not as a necessity for a chosen few, but as a necessity for all men, everywhere.
It is this terrible urgency about the Faith that explains both the Church’s rigidity in matters of doctrine an her encompassing love in matters of apostolate. For the note of absolute necessity that attaches to Catholic Truth, and makes the Church so intolerant and unbending, is, at the same time, the push and the drive behind every apostle. It is precisely because they are intolerant enough to believe that all men need the Catholic Faith in order to be saved, that the Church’s missionaries, from the time of Saint Paul, have given the world its most heroic example of zealous, consuming, constant, sweating, bleeding, dying but undying, love.
It is this love, this apostolic fervor, that the “anti-hate” program means to eliminate. For the ultimate outcome of the propaganda barrage that is now incessantly pounding the nation will be not only a spineless American citizen, but a spineless American Catholicism — a Catholicism that will be afraid to assert its own singularity and importance, a Catholicism that will try to become more like its neighbor religions, doing nothing to annoy, nothing to criticize, nothing that would in any way cause it to be accused of intolerance, bigotry, or hate.
Certainly no one will suppose that the promoters of the “anti-hate” campaign are just a bunch of well-meaning meddlers who launched the thing in all innocence and who would be dismayed to hear that it might discomfit the Catholic Church. The truth of the matter is much to the contrary. Just as the fast-talking soap commercials play on the gullibility of American housewives to make money for the big soap manufacturers, so the anti-hate slogans are selling Americans a bill of goods that will make rich profits for the Catholic Church’s enterprising enemies.
This deliberate and calculated program is a lineal descendant of that eighteenth-century campaign that clamored for “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” and ended up by wrecking Catholic France. It is akin to all those freethinking, freely-named, anti-Catholic ventures that have been plaguing the Church since the time of the Protestant Revolt — Humanism, Jacobinism, Freemasonry, Liberalism, Secularism, Communism, etc. For however much these movements may differ from one another in the means they advocate, they are all working for the same ultimate end. They are intent on building the City of Man — to the inevitable detriment of the City of God. They are enraged against the Church because of her calm insistence that the one thing that really matters is eternal salvation, and that she is the one divinely-commissioned ark of salvation. They are determined to show that the Church is not that important: if not by destroying her violently, then by reducing her to the level of the sects.
It was this latter expedient that appealed to Jean Jacques Rousseau, herald of the French Revolution and avowed evangelist of the Brotherhood crowd. Rousseau maintained (in The Social Contract, Book IV) that the worship of God should be allowed to continue, provided it did not become an end in itself. Theology must not usurp the superior place of politics; the interests of religion must be subordinate to those of the state. Accordingly, he felt the civil power should decide what articles of belief citizens might hold. And among these articles, Rousseau urged just one prohibition: anyone daring to say, “There is no salvation outside the Church,” should be banished.
All the followers of Rousseau, in their various guises — as well as his like-minded antecedents — are the Courtiers of the Prince of this World. But there is one group among them that is particularly of the household of Satan. They are the children of Satan, as Our Lord Himself calls them, the Jews. They, pre-eminently, are fired by the earthly, anti-Christian animus; and they have taken an active part, during twenty centuries, in all its manifestations. (This alone can explain the Church’s unique attitude toward the Jews: her traditional determination that this one people must be kept in check.)
As surely and securely as the Jews have been behind Freemasonry, or Secularism, or Communism, they are behind the “anti-hate” drive. Not that this movement represents the fruition of Talmudic doctrine. The Jews are advocating tolerance only for its destructive value — destructive, that is, of the Catholic Church. On their part, they still keep alive their racial rancors and antipathies. Their Talmud, for example, still teaches that Christ was a brazen impostor, and gives an unprintably blasphemous account of his parentage and birth. And as the Christmas season just past should have taught us, the Jews, for all their Brotherhood talk, have not in the least abandoned their resolute program to make all acknowledgments of Christmas disappear from the public and social life of the nation.
The secret of the Jews’ success is, of course, that they can practice such private hate while promoting public “love,” and not be accused of inconsistency. For, as always, they are running the show mainly from behind the scenes. They get their message across by means of co-operative Gentiles. And there are probably more such Gentiles now available — both the willing kind and the kind willing to be duped — than ever before in history. As a further good fortune, the Jewish directors of America’s entertainment industry can now guarantee that one Brotherhood spokesman, well-placed (e.g., behind a microphone or before a television camera), is able to influence Americans by the millions.
And the Jews’ campaign is succeeding. We have every reason to be alarmed at its success. American Catholics, even those not actively taking part in the tolerance talk, are now kept in line by the omnipresent threat of being accused of hate, bigotry, and intolerance.
In the face of a new year that will be the biggest one yet for the Brotherhood promoters, The Point pleads with American Catholics to realign themselves with the militant traditions of their grandfathers. No threat of “bigotry,” no accusation of “intolerance” should temper our zeal or silence our message. We must preserve our commission to “Go forth and teach all nations...;” to “Reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine.”
Unworthy as we are, we American Catholics must protect for ourselves the duty of naming God’s enemies and the privilege of carrying God’s revealed Truth to the people of our country, who, we pray, will hear it, with generosity and gratitude, and who will repeat that intolerant Profession of Faith which the Church requires of all new converts: “ ... At the same time, I condemn and reprove all that the Church has condemned and reproved. This same Catholic Faith, outside of which nobody can be saved, which I now freely profess and to which I truly adhere, the same I promise and swear to maintain and profess, with the help of God, entire, inviolate and with firm constancy until the last breath of life; and I shall strive as far as possible that this same Faith shall be held, taught and publicly professed by all those who depend on me, and by those of whom I shall have charge.”
(from the Rituale Romanum, published in 1947 with the Imprimatur of the Cardinal Archbishop of New York.)
A Militant Example
A recent Vatican news release has stated that Saint Lawrence of Brindisi may soon be declared a Doctor of the universal Church. Should he receive that title, the Italian Franciscan, who died in 1619, would thus become the thirtieth saint whom the Church has especially singled out as a teacher of the Faith to all Catholics everywhere.
Born at Brindisi in 1559, Saint Lawrence early demonstrated the singular gifts that would make him a brilliant preacher. As a Capuchin friar, with a personal commission from Pope Clement VIII, the saint delivered vigorous sermons in the principal Italian ghettos, thus incurring a bitter resentment among the Jews that has persisted to this day.
For our age of cowering Catholics, Lawrence of Brindisi supplies a reproving example. Not only did he work tirelessly to challenge the perfidy of the Jews, but he brought back to the Faith many who had gone over to the Protestant Revolt, and, most spectacular of all, he led an army against the Turks. It was in Hungary, in the year 1601, that Saint Lawrence, armed with nothing more than his cowl and his Crucifix, led a Christian army, outnumbered four to one, to an astounding victory over the infidels.
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
August, 1955
SOME NEEDED INFORMATION ABOUT THE JEWS
I — IN BACK OF THE HEADLINES
By some happy providence of our seldom musical English language, there is an immediately detectable harmony in the words, “the Jews” and “the news.” For many years now this accidental rhyme has become an increasingly faithful reflection of a more and more solid alliance. For the Jews now have unquestioned control over the American public’s chief source of ideas — the news in the daily paper.
They have arrived at this control by a variety of means — shrewdly avoiding exploitation of any one. While it is true that they own and operate the most important single newspaper in the country, The New York Times, the day-to-day bible of American journalism — while it is true that they have so bought-out the newspapers in our nation’s capital that it is impossible for a congressman to pick up a Washington morning paper that is not published by a Jew — and while it is true that from Philadelphia to Los Angeles they are continuing to gain ownership of many of the big dailies, — still, outright editor-and-publisher control is not always necessary, or even prudent, for promoting the interests of the Jews.
The professional Jewish pressure groups in every large community have long become artists at suavely intimidating any too-emphatically-Gentile city editor. And even more persuasive are the “Main Street Jews” — the department, clothing, and specialty store owners who brandish the big stick of advertising revenue. It stands to reason that the unwary editor who tells the truth about the Jews will ultimately find himself excluded from the fabulous money hand-outs of the Jewish retail advertisers. Few papers can survive a boycott like this.
For those smaller American cities where there are still advertisement-buying Main Street businesses which are not in the hands of the Jews, and where the scant Jewish community is much less eloquent, the American Jewish Committee has come up with a special, necessarily more direct, plan. The newspapers in these places can be controlled on their policy pages, the editorial ones, by direct pipeline from the American Jewish Committee offices in New York. The Committee boasts (to its own members, not the general public) that it regularly provides 1700 small American newspapers with what it calls, “canned editorials.” These are ready-to-print commentaries on public issues which embody the complete Jewish line, but which come as a God-send to the unsuspecting and overworked small town editor, who is told that he should insert them in his paper as his own editorials — no acknowledgements wanted by his well-wishing friends on the American Jewish Committee.
Apart from the individual publications, there are those great fountainheads of information, the news-gathering agencies. The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia boasts that Jews were “the pioneers” in the formation of these agencies. In the field of international news exchange, the most illustrious name has been the Jewish name of Paul Reuter, founder of the famous Reuters agency. Within our own country, the United Press has a long record of collaboration with all the Jewish lobbyists; the Associated Press has gone so far as to guarantee to the Jewish Anti-Defamation League that there will never be an AP release in which a Jewish wrong-doer is identified as a Jew; and the International News Service has faithfully followed the aggressive pro-Jewish policies of its late Jewish president, Moses Koenigsberg — one time head of another far-flung news empire, King Features Syndicate. In addition, all UP, AP, and INS dispatches are subject to the constant scrutiny of the news systems of American radio-television, whose three greatest broadcasting chains (CBS, NBC, and ABC) are, respectively, in the Jewish hands of William Paley, David Sarnoff, and Barney Balaban.
Add to these multiple opportunities for control the names of such prominent Jewish news-people as Joseph Pulitzer, Adolph Ochs, Paul Block, Herbert Bayard Swope, David Lawrence, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, Franklin P. Adams, Walter Lippman, Julius Ochs Adler, Eugene Lyons, J. David Stern, George Sokolsky, Walter Winchell, etc., and you can glean some small realization of the extent to which “the Jews” and “the news” are now so thoroughly entangled.
II — IN FRONT OF THE NEEDLE
“By their fruits you shall know them” — and American newspapers can be no better known than by that very latest of their fruits, that gigantic laboratory lemon, Jonas Salk.
Jewish Jonas is a symbol of all that the Jew-controlled press can do for a man. It can build him up overnight as the nation’s number one hero. It can make what he has to offer (in Jonas’ case a serum of infected monkey kidneys) the most appealing and necessary item in the land.
And when this artificial alliance (Salk, the kidneys, and the clamoring public) begins to back-fire, the versatile press can save its face (and Jonas’) by suggesting innumerable culprits. “Salk Not at Fault,” say the headlines. And down below we can read all about the negligence of Mrs. Hobby, the miscalculations of Dr. Scheele, the slovenliness of the Cutter firm.
Here in Boston, the press has had a notably tough time of it trying to perpetuate the aura of greatness with which it initially surrounded Doctor Salk. As we write, the city health commissioner has announced that up until last month (when the first Salk injections were given in this area) Boston’s record for the whole year was only six cases of polio. In the past month (since the injections) that total of six has risen to one hundred and sixty.
What defense have we? Saint Alphonsus Maria de Ligouri, founder of the Redemptorist Order, long ago announced a foolproof solution — a permanent immunization against all future Doctor Salks. In his book, Theologia Moralis, Saint Alphonsus states that Catholics are obliged to avoid all Jewish doctors and their remedies, adding that to give oneself over to their care is to commit “a mortal sin.”
III — BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
The very choicest fruit of our “free press” is not, however, the Jew whom it builds up, but the Gentile whom it takes in. Hopeful of rescuing one such, we are directing the following sentences to the Honorable Wayne Morse, the Jew-championing solon from Oregon who recently remarked, “I am amazed at the number of my colleagues who in private meetings closed to the press, and in cloak room sessions that go unreported, fight viciously to refuse aid and haven to millions of human beings because they are Jews.”
It is inconceivable to you, Senator Morse, how anyone could take exception to your Jewish friends — friends who expect of a Senator certain attentions, but who amply repay him for these by lauding him in their newspapers, on their radio, and over their television, and when the chips are down, by coming right into his home state to stump for his re-election.
Now, Senator, to clarify for you this mystery of anti-Semitism in your midst, we must point out that your friends are not opposed simply “because they are Jews,” in the way that Republicans might be opposed simply because they are Republicans. Your friends provoke animosities for reasons that are not only numerous but are thoroughly substantial, ranging from personal grievances to international ones.
The sore point which is particularly suited for arousing members of Congress, however, and which probably accounts for most of the cloak room confabs you have been so startled by, is the Jews’ sustained, intensive campaign of promoting Communism.
The Jew-Communist tie-up is, of course, no longer as blatantly asserted as it was in 1917 — when New York newspapers announced the Russian Revolution with front page headlines proclaiming, “East Side Jews Go Wild With Joy;” when Rabbi Stephen Wise hailed the Revolution, at a huge Carnegie Hall rally, as the “noblest accomplishment of the sons and daughters of Israel;” and when Jewish financier Jacob Schiff boasted of the millions of dollars he had contributed as a propaganda fund for the insurrectionists.
Still, legislators today have evidence quite as cogent as the above for knowing that Communism is a Jewish movement. Perhaps you have observed yourself, Senator, that whenever the government indicts a number of Communists, 90 percent of them turn out to be your friends? For instance, of the eleven Communists who have been convicted of espionage since World War II, ten have been Jews. Or, to take the latest case, of the nine Communists recently convicted in Philadelphia (not of espionage, but just of being Communists), eight were Jews. And only last month, when the names of 23 Communists who had infiltrated the newspaper industry were disclosed, 20 turned out to be — do you see what we mean, Senator?
We hope we have given you an inkling of why it is that many of your colleagues have a slant on your Jewish friends slightly different from your own. At the very least, such an inkling would serve to keep you unamazed as you wander through the halls of Congress. At best, it could lead you into an entirely new way of thinking. Spurred on by your patriotic zeal, you might conclude that, despite all they have done for you, it is really not to the highest interests of the country to hand it over to the Jews.
Perhaps, Senator, in a few months, you might even provide a new voice in the cloak rooms.
IV — BEYOND THE CARDINAL
For a long time now we have known that the apprehensive Jews of America are working night and day to try to alter those basic doctrines which Catholics are taught about Jews — namely, that the Jews are the crucifiers of Christ, the victims of a divine curse, and, as Our Lord insisted, the children of the Devil.
We have seen how the American Jewish Committee has openly launched a program to censor such teachings in American parochial schools, stating that one of the chief A. J. C. objectives is “changing what is said about Jews and Judaism in the literature of Christian education.”
Invariably the Jewish attack on what Catholic children are taught ends up in an attack upon that foundational rock of Catholic belief — the New Testament. Recent example: The Jewish Freemasons of California, in their publication, the B’nai B’rith Messenger, have lately published an open letter to Cardinal Spellman. The subject of the letter is the Catholic monthly, The Point. B’nai B’rith’s frantic plea is that Cardinal Spellman suppress all future issues of The Point, which gets branded in the letter as a “vicious anti-Semitic sheet.” The Jewish complaint winds up with the following paragraph:
“Here we are faced with an acknowledged Catholic publication that appeals to violent action against Jews, telling its readers that, ‘The Jews, who both killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and have persecuted us, and please not God, and are adversaries to all men, prohibiting us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved.’ There is no greater authority in American Catholicism than Cardinal Spellman. We therefore appeal to him to put a stop to this outrage.”
The Jewish Masons of B’nai B’rith fail to mention that the passage which they reprint from The Point (“The Jews who both killed the Lord Jesus, etc.”) is not of The Point ’s invention. It is a direct quotation from Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians — an integral part of the inspired New Testament!
Lest anyone think, however, that this Jewish failure to attack Saint Paul by name might indicate good will toward the New Testament, the Jews of the B’nai B’rith Messenger followed up their complaint to Cardinal Spellman with a boldtype editorial calling for a revision of the Christian Bible! The Messenger summarized: “There must be a rewriting of the Christ story for Christians which will for all time eradicate the myth that ‘the Jews killed Christ.’ ”
V — BACK TO TRADITION
It will very much disturb the Jewish Masons of B’nai B’rith to learn that every year on Good Friday, in the fifth responsory of Matins, a Catholic priest reads in his Breviary, “The Jews crucified Jesus; and there was darkness ... ”
Realizing full well that this is hardly the amount of attention that the subject deserves, Our Holy Mother Church requires that every priest also read, during the same Office of Good Friday, an instruction by that eminent Catholic authority, Saint Augustine of Hippo.
The Point concludes this month with Saint Augustine’s lengthy answer to the question “Did the Jews Crucify Jesus?”
“Ye know what secret counsel was that of the wicked Jews, and what instruction was that of the workers of iniquity. Of what iniquity were they the workers? The murder of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. ‘Many good works,’ saith He, ‘have I showed you — for which of those works go ye about to kill me?’ He had borne with all their weaknesses: He had healed all their diseases; He had preached unto them the kingdom of Heaven; He had discovered to them their iniquities, that they might rather hate them, than the Physician that came to cure them. And now at last, without gratitude for all the tenderness of His healing love, like men raging in a high delirium, throwing themselves madly on the Physician Who had come to cure them, they took counsel how they might kill Him.
“The Jews cannot say, ‘We did not murder Christ’ — albeit they gave Him over to Pilate, His judge, that they themselves might seem free of His death. They could throw the blame of their sin upon a human judge; but did they deceive God, the Great Judge? In that which Pilate did he was their accomplice, but in comparison with them, he had far the lesser sin. (John XIX, 11) Pilate strove as far as he could to deliver Him out of their hands; for which reason also he scourged Him, and brought Him forth to them. He scourged not the Lord for cruelty’s sake, but in the hope that he might so slake the Jews’ wild thirst for blood; that, perchance, even they might be touched with compassion, and cease to lust for His death, when they saw what He was after the flagellation.
“Even this effort he made: ‘But when Pilate saw that he could not prevail, but that rather a tumult was made,’ ye know how that ‘he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying: I am innocent of the Blood of this Just Person.’ And yet, ‘he delivered Him to be crucified!’ But if he were guilty who did it against his will, were they innocent who goaded him on to it? No. Pilate gave sentence against Him, and commanded Him to be crucified, but ye, O ye Jews, ye also are His murderers! Wherewith? With your tongue, whetted like a sword. And when? When ye cried, ‘Crucify Him! Crucify Him!’ ”
(From the Roman Breviary)
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
September, 1955
CATHOLIC POWER AND THE PLOTS OF THE JEWS
Do you know that there are 23 Catholic bishops in the state of New York?
Do you know that the city of Chicago has 244 Catholic churches?
Do you know that in California alone the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is offered 2,500 times every morning?
Do you know that the Archdiocese of Boston has 295,666 students enrolled in Catholic education?
We could go on for several more pages with an abundance of such figures. [In the United States, there are 4 cardinals, 34 archbishops, 170 bishops, 22,818 churches, 46,970 priests, 8,752 lay brothers, 158,069 sisters, 247 colleges, and 11,784 elementary and high schools.] And, by sheer force of statistics, we could surely strike mortal terror into the hearts of those Ku-Klux-Klan Americans who periodically holler about a “Popish plot” to take over the good old U. S. A.!
Actually, we Catholics are plotting. We do have predatory designs on our country: we intend to make it a Catholic one. Our present, pressing headache, however, is that despite the awesome strength of our numbers, despite our copious canonical equipment — buildings and birettas and baptismal fonts — our plans are not going forward. Indeed, the alarming fact remains that every day America is becoming less and less Christian.
That this collapse is our responsibility, we admit. That it is due solely to our lack of zeal, we qualify with the following consideration: While we are sleeping, there is a wide-awake force hard at work. While we are failing to repair and expand those structures of our country which are Christian, other hands are setting out to smash and scatter them.
In a very real sense, of course, the current onslaught of the Jews, against anything American that is also Christian, can be blamed on our country’s initial and short-sighted generosity to the Jews. Ignoring the example of all Christendom before it, young and trustful America decided that, in its Christian midst, Jews should be allowed to have that which all the Western World had previously denied to them — citizenship, and an equal standing before the law.
* * * * *
We American Catholics do not need that learned bishop and theologian, Saint Hilary of Poitiers, to warn us (as he does in his Tractatus Mysteriorum) that “The Jews are always seething to slaughter the Christian people.” Every day we are coming to see more clearly for ourselves how the Jews are maneuvering to destroy all trace of what is Christian in our land. In the campaign to strip us of our New Testament sense of purity, for example, the Jews are boldly battling right out in public. Through their iron grip on such industries as clothing, entertainment, and pulp magazines, they are bombarding us with nakedness in dress, lewdness in movies, stage, and television shows, and unashamed filthiness in the fare of every corner newsstand.
For the vital task of de-Christianizing America, the Jews are not, however, relying solely on such hit-or-miss devices as clothing styles and entertainments. If the assault on Christian morals should leave them still short of their goal, the Jews count on bringing America into line by the simple expedient of rewriting the nation’s laws.
This is the motive behind the hordes of sharpfaced, briefcased Semites who have been storming our courtrooms from Tampa to Tacoma, besieging the judges with opinions and advice — which they are pleased to offer gratuitously, “in the interests of community welfare.”
As a lever for directing society, the law is, of course, perfectly suited to Jewish needs and temperament. It enables the Jews to advance their Talmudic objectives by sure, unimpedable strides, and at the same time lets them remain safely secure from the scrutiny of the public.
Too, once they get their proposals on the statute-books, the Jews can retire quietly to the sidelines, leaving to others the obligation of enforcing the laws.
But if the Jews are less discernible in their legal skirmishings than in their peddling of impurity, their purposes are no less obscure. The cases in which they are interested — keenly, aggressively interested — and into which they unfailingly put their noses, requiring neither fee nor invitation to do so, are those cases in which some law based on Christian principle or tradition is being challenged. And if Jewish lawyers are unable to find a sufficient number of such cases ready-made, they are perfectly content to manufacture them. For, some years ago, the United States Supreme Court declared this to be a Christian nation, and it is the Jews’ resolute intention to oblige the Court to change its mind.
* * * * *
Perhaps no law in our land has aroused Jewish wrath so sharply as the seemingly innocent one ordaining that the Christian Sabbath shall be a mandatory day of rest from buying and selling. Until recently this was enforced in every one of our forty-eight states, but today the Jews can point to substantial gains as a result of their ceaseless, tireless efforts to make Sunday, the sacrosanct day of the New Testament, just another twenty-four hours.
In Connecticut, for instance, a predominantly Catholic state, now presided over by a Jewish governor, a law has been put through the legislature providing that anyone who “believes that the Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday night and ends at sundown on Saturday night” may close his shop on Saturday and remain open all day Sunday. While in the Midwest, Sunday-selling has reached such a peak that the Ford Motor Company has found it necessary to print up large announcements to be placed in the windows of its Midwestern dealers, apologizing for the fact that despite the trend of the times, they are for the present continuing to take Sunday off.
* * * * *
One of the most rousing legal victories the Jews have thus far secured came with the recent Supreme Court decision in the so-called “Miracle Case.” This decision not only authorizes the Jews to keep the censor at arm’s length while they display their wares on stage and screen, but, even more importantly, it effectively removes two fundamental Christian concepts from the realm of American law — the traditional concepts of “blasphemy” and “sacrilege.”
The Miracle was a movie, made in Italy and purveyed by Jews in this country, which opened in New York in December, 1950. The pre-Christmas date, it turned out, had been chosen with care, for the film was nothing but a raucous guffaw at the notion that Our Blessed Lord had been born of a Virgin. Forced by public Catholic resentment, Cardinal Spellman trained his guns on the film and, a few weeks from the time it opened, the film was closed down by the censors of the New York Board of Education.
The Miracle ’s Jewish distributor, Joseph Burstyn, immediately launched a law suit against the censors, and the case went up to the U. S. Supreme Court. It was met at the door by Jewish Justice Felix Frankfurter, who greeted it as a quaint medieval visitor, not to be taken too seriously.
That The Miracle should be outlawed for being “sacrilegious” and “blasphemous” (which is what the New York censors said it was) met with Jewish Justice Frankfurter’s measured contempt. He agreed that back in the Catholic days of Saint Thomas Aquinas the words “blasphemy” and “sacrilege” may have had a precise meaning, but today, he said, there is no definition on which we can agree. In his long written opinion, Jewish Justice Frankfurter concluded, with Talmudic logic, that one man’s blasphemy might well be another man’s art. Therefore, he said, not only could The Miracle be shown in New York theatres, but henceforth the terms “blasphemy” and “sacrilege” could not be considered legitimate charges in American courtrooms.
* * * * *
Here in Massachusetts, where local police officials still recall the days when Jewish Justice Frankfurter was the top-indoctrinator at the meetings of Harvard University’s communist cell, we have had more than our share of Jewish attacks on Christian-based laws. In a series of bitterly-fought cases, Boston Jews have been making war on a state adoption statute which, in effect, forbids the handing over of Christian children to Jewish foster-parents. How long the law will survive may be gauged by the fact that, of late, reinforcements have been sent up by the American Jewish Congress, whose New York lawyers are here for the express purpose of “getting results!”
The American Jewish Congress’ more domesticated companion, the American Jewish Committee, is likewise conducting a local campaign. Led by Herbert Ehrman, Boston’s ranking member of the Committee, the Jews want to pass legislation which will put a psychiatrist on duty in every Massachusetts courtroom. In line with the Jews’ nation-wide mania for “mental health,” and in the hope of creating more jobs for our inundation of Jewish psychiatrists, Mr. Ehrman is currently arguing that every Catholic boy who goes wrong needs the courtroom assistance of a Freudian Jew to set him on the right track.
* * * * *
Although they were granted political equality by the United States Constitution, the Jews have long been keenly aware that equality on a cultural and social level is quite another thing. Those early Americans who agreed that Jews should be allowed to vote in our elections, by no means indicated, either by example or legislation, that they also felt that Jews should be encouraged to sit in our parlors, eat at our tables, marry our children, or otherwise penetrate behind that “Christian curtain” which has always instinctively separated the lovers of Christ from His crucifiers.
Since the drafting of the Constitution, there has been little change in the average American’s Semitic outlook. New York Rabbi, Mordecai Kaplan, in his recent book, The Future of the American Jew, has valiantly attempted to overcome his Hebraic jitters and evaluate the situation. “Almost ten percent of the American people,” he writes on page 95, “declare themselves anti-Semites, and harbor the criminally insane sentiment of wishing to destroy us. Twice that number are ready to join them on the flimsiest provocation. In the country as a whole, Jews are at best tolerated, but neither desired nor welcomed. Our best friends will forgive us our being Jews, but can seldom forget it.”
If Rabbi Kaplan is frankly pessimistic about the state of the nation’s anti-Semitism, his associates in the American Jewish Congress are quite as frankly determined that the situation can be remedied. These aggressive Jews have decided that the one sure way to get Americans to like them, to want them around, and to take them to their hearts, is to make any kind of discrimination against them a criminal offence, punishable by law! They are working night and day to push legislation that will forever crush a Christian American’s right to avoid the Jews — laws that will forbid a Christian to exclude from his hotel, his payroll, or his neighborhood club, any member of that deicide race which God has so emphatically rejected and cursed.
The American Jewish Congress’ chief legal concoction for furthering their program of “equality by statute” is a device called the Anti-Discrimination Commission. This bit of legalized Jewish elbowing is the pet project of Mr. Will Maslow, one of the Jewish Congress’ full-time lawyers, who has recently been plugging his Anti-Discrimination ideas before the United Nations at Geneva.
The effect of Mr. Maslow’s scheme is that anytime a Jew presents himself for a job in your company, a locker in your country club, a place in your school or college, etc., you must give it to him or suffer the consequences of fining and imprisonment. So far, Mr. Maslow has succeeded in getting versions of his Anti-Discrimination legislation adopted by the Federal government’s contract-granting agency and by a few of the individual state legislatures.
* * * * *
The current Jewish rush to remake our Christian laws is prompted by a vivid memory and a well-founded fear. The memory is of those countless regulations which every Catholic society, down through the ages of Faith, has imposed on the Jews to keep them well watched, well restrained, and very well segregated. The fear is of 32,000,000 American Catholics and of what would happen to the lately-won freedom of the Jews if this great block of Americans should suddenly decide that things had gone far enough — if American Catholics should conclude that, after all, the saints had a lot on their side when they said (as Saint Gregory of Nyssa did in his famous sermon on the Resurrection) that the Jews are nothing more than, “Slayers of the Lord, murderers of the prophets, adversaries of God, haters of God, men who show contempt for the law, foes of grace, enemies of their fathers’ faith, advocates of the devil, brood of vipers, slanderers, scoffers, men whose minds are in darkness, leaven of the Pharisees, assemblies of demons, sinners, wicked men, stoners and haters of righteousness.”
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
October, 1955
RECENT PROTEST IN THE STREETS OF BOSTON
Christian Defense of the Blessed Sacrament
On three successive days during the past month, thousands of Boston Catholics found themselves the object of a public appeal. It was not just another of the common billboard pleas, begging them to be generous with their money or their blood. The Catholics of Boston were asked, on the sixth, seventh, and eighth days of September, to protect the sanctity of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.
Catholic religious, of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, from Saint Benedict Center in Cambridge, had invaded Boston to distribute thousands of handbills and to carry several large placards through the downtown streets, urging Catholics to “Stop the Jews from Dishonoring and Desecrating the Blessed Sacrament at Brandeis University!”
Reaction to this electric message was, of course, immediate.
Catholics were sympathetically indignant at the very thought of the Blessed Sacrament’s being dishonored. Jews were beside themselves with rage that such “anti-Semitism” should be allowed in the streets of the city. Even Boston’s lethargic newsmen felt stirred into comment, although their evaluations of the total performance were considerably at variance.
Arthur Stratton of the Boston Herald thought the whole affair had served to strengthen the cause of local Interfaith and wrote for his paper that the public’s reaction to Saint Benedict Center’s “misguided” crusade was “more poignant than a hundred goodwill dinners.”
Donald Guy, of the Boston office of the Associated Press saw a different picture. He exploded in the following censored statement: “You [deleted] troublemakers have revived more race hatred in three days than we’ve seen around here in twenty years.”
I — THE ACTION
By liberal promises of full-tuition scholarships, Jewish Brandeis University has managed, during its seven-year history, to lure a few Christian students to its suburban-Boston campus. Last year, the university announced that it had a “unique Interfaith plan” in the offing. Brandeis was going to construct three chapels, right on its own premises, one each for its Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish students. Architect Max Abramovitz would design the buildings in his finest Talmudic style and the three “conventicles of worship” would be ready in June of 1955.
The thought of a Catholic chapel on Jewish property, with the Blessed Sacrament reserved in the midst of Our Lord’s crucifiers, filled Saint Benedict Center with righteous horror. Immediately a campaign was launched to keep the Blessed Sacrament from being placed within the grasp of the Brandeis Jews. The issue of The Point for May, 1955, was devoted entirely to the matter — exposing, by direct quotation from Brandeis professors, the University’s unashamed anti-Christian program. Publication of these facts was followed by a Brandeis announcement that the June dedication had been called off — no chapel ceremonies until the Fall.
Saint Benedict Center relaxed a bit at that, and even more when the Jews announced in late August that the chapel dedications would not be held until the end of October. With two full months to go, it was decided to present the worry directly to the Catholics of Boston, confident that, although higher Church authorities had indicated that it would be suicide for them to refuse the Jews anything, the Catholic laity might have the courage to raise a voice of protest.
* * * * *
The handbill-and-placard demonstration began early on Tuesday morning, September 6th, and as the day progressed, both Saint Benedict Center and the Boston police noted the increasing likelihood of an “incident.” It became more and more probable that some Jew or other would lose his head, take an enraged aim, and let fly a few body-blows at the placard-carriers. When the “incident” finally came, it was not at all as expected. For when the determined Jewish aggressors made their appearance, they were not one Jew but fifty. And though they were foaming at the mouth, they were a unit, highly organized and working according to plan.
As the Jews assembled on Boston’s Tremont Street, the six Brothers from Saint Benedict Center who were carrying placards in that area recognized a number of them. They were from the Young Men’s Hebrew Association and from a local ghetto-gang called the “Hipsters” — groups which had often turned up as hecklers at Saint Benedict Center’s Sunday afternoon talks on Boston Common, where they sounded forth with remarks like the one by YMHA’s Bill Klein: “Bring on Christ again and we’ll crucify Him again.”
The gathering of Yiddish-shouting youths naturally attracted a curious crowd, and by the time the regiment of young Jews descended upon the six Tremont Street Brothers, more than two thousand people were on hand to view the excitement. Alert Boston police quickly pushed the Jews aside and transported the slightly bruised Brothers, and the remnants of their placards, across the Charles River and into Cambridge.
By late Tuesday afternoon, thirty other members of Saint Benedict Center had reported back from their day in Boston — lacking the glory of a ride home in a police car, but excited with tales of eager Catholics who wanted to know more about the Brandeis affair. The plan to reach the laity was beginning to look successful.
Overwhelming testimony of just how successsful it was came with the next morning’s newspapers. After one day of Saint Benedict Center’s downtown campaign. Brandeis University’s president had put in a nervous call to the newsmen and announced that he would not wait until October to dedicate the Catholic chapel. He would not even wait until the university reopened in mid-September. He would have the Archbishop of Boston come out and dedicate the place right away. A Mass would be said there at nine O’ Clock Friday morning!
This, of course, meant that Saint Benedict Center had lost its two-month opportunity. There were only forty-eight hours left in which to challenge Catholics with the imperative message of the handbills: “ … You are thus being asked to approve a scheme whereby Our Lord will be turned over to that people which for 2,000 years has rejected, sneered at, reviled, and desecrated Him in the Blessed Sacrament. Catholics of Boston: In the name of the Immaculate Mother of God, this must not happen! Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament must not be betrayed again into the hands of that people who cried out, ‘Crucify Him! Crucify Him! … His blood be upon us and upon our children.’ “
The Boston campaign continued during Wednesday and Thursday, which were, respectively, the vigil and the feast of Our Blessed Lady’s Nativity. Twice on Wednesday the now familiar hordes of young Jews assaulted the Brothers and their placards, succeeding, at one point, in tying up Boston’s downtown traffic for one hour. But at the end of the afternoon, thanks in no small part to the vigilance of the Boston police force, the placards were still intact. And young Israel’s blitzkrieg had been openly frustrated before hundreds of sympathetic bystanders.
On Thursday a record number of handbills were distributed. On Thursday night there was nothing to do but wait for Friday morning.
Shortly after 10 AM on Friday, the telephone rang at Saint Benedict Center. On the other end of the line a mockingly musical voice said, “We have your Jesus now!”
The dedication and Mass were apparently over.
The next few days brought contented cacklings from the Boston press, and gloating public statements by Brandeis officials. The following Sunday brought more than 300 young Jews to Boston Commons, where they attempted to break up the Center’s outdoor meeting, shouting foul obscenities in the midst of the prayers, spitting on the life-size crucifix and the picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe — all of which served only to sharpen and sustain the bitter realization of that Friday (that day which was so fittingly Friday) when Our Lord was again placed within the grasp of His crucifiers.
II — THE REACTION
In only one hour after the placards and handbills first appeared in downtown Boston. every Jewish organization in the city was alerted. Out of the welter of hastily-called conferences, anxious investigations, and frenzied reports, there emerged, by mid-afternoon of that first day, a statement, concocted by the New England office of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Around this statement, Boston Jewry was content to rally.
Relying on those broad-handed brush-offs which had served Jewish needs so well in the past, the Conference of Christians and Jews termed Saint Benedict Center’s appeal to Boston Catholics, “hate literature.” As though trying to convince itself, the Jew-founded committee offered assurances that “the majority of people who received the handbill know that its scurrilous and untrue statements in no way represent the Catholic Church.” What those “scurrilous and untrue statements” were, the Conference prudently declined to say.
Armed with the Conference statement, the Boston newspapers were ready to swing into action. These local specimens of our national “free press” promptly determined that there were two possible ways of handling the story of what had recently occurred in the streets of Boston. They could print (1) nothing; (2) what the National Conference of Christians and Jews had said.
Half the Boston dailies chose the former alternative, insisting that a series of events which involved, among other things, three major anti-Catholic demonstrations and an hour-long traffic tie-up in the heart of the city, just didn’t fit into the category of “news.” The rest of the papers told parts of the story, but always with one eye cocked on their sensitive Jewish advertisers. Not one of the newspapers gave any indication of what the placards or the handbills actually said. The word “Jew” was scarcely whispered in any of the accounts. The mobs of young Hebrews who had attacked the Brothers carrying placards were variously identified in Boston papers as “bystanders,” “pedestrians,” “angry crowds,” “indignant witnesses,” “untold thousands,” “God-fearing people,” “youths,” “a minority group,” and “others.”
Most loose-tongued of the Boston sheets was the enterprising Herald, which seemed to be worried that a simple news-story might not make its position sufficiently clear to its Jewish friends. The Herald, accordingly, gave one of its reporters a by-line and two columns in which to run on about how “Boston kept its head yesterday.”
Dizzy with the praise this journalistic coup won from the local Jewish community, the Herald next day had its evening version, the Traveler, blossom forth with a Brandeis-lauding editorial. This move proved disastrous. For in the course of acclaiming the Catholic-chapel-on-Jewish-campus idea, the editorial suddenly launched into some reminiscences — offered in the same pro-Judaic spirit — of the time when “it was the custom in most grade schools to begin the day with recitation of the Lord’s Prayer …” “That custom certainly did a lot of good,” the editorial observed in Yankee summary, “and no harm worth mentioning.”
By virtue of these unfortunate remarks, the Herald Traveler ceased to be the object of Boston Jewry’s admiration and became the object of its contempt. The Jews considered it an unforgivable asininity that a newspaper, setting out to plead the Jewish cause, should be ignorant of the basic proposition that the Lord’s Prayer is no longer said in American public schools precisely because Jews demanded its withdrawal.
Ultimately, two newspapers did tell what Saint Benedict Center was saying on its signs and handbills. But they were not Gentile papers. They printed the messages purely to satisfy that universal Jewish urge to know every word ever uttered against the Jews. The two newspapers were the Jewish Advocate of Boston and The Daily Worker of New York [Communist Party USA’s newspaper].
* * * * *
Despite their excellent intentions, there was a limit to what the newspapers could accomplish for the Jews. The tens of thousands of Boston Catholics who had seen Saint Benedict Center’s placards and read its handbills could not be thrown off by the distortions, or the silence, of the press. For them, the central issue was imperishably clear: Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament was about to be put in the keeping of His crucifiers. And however liberal might be the personal viewpoints of the Catholics of Boston, they were agreed that such an act was assuredly a violent departure from Church tradition.
The Jews, too, were well aware that to have the Mass and the Blessed Sacrament under their jurisdiction was an accomplishment which their forebears, living in Catholic Europe, would have considered a wild, impossible dream. To “stop the Jews” had been the Church’s vigilant concern throughout the centuries — and she had stopped them long before they were within reach of the sacred altar. Confining them in ghettos, depriving them of citizenship, forbidding them to move freely in Christian society, the Church had shown abundantly in practice and teaching that Jews were to be looked on as outcast, perfidious, and cursed.
If Catholic leaders were not now waging war as their predecessors had, the Jews regarded the change as merely a fortunate interval and not an abiding state of things. If there was a truce, it was a tenuous, uneasy, and half-hearted one. (Had not the Vatican recently condemned the English edition of the same National Conference of Christians and Jews which had been Jewry’s foremost champion in Boston?)
The Jews knew that those basic doctrines which had given rise to and sustained the Church’s anti-Jewish policies were still held, still taught. And they knew, consequently, that whatever surface cordiality might presently appear, at heart the Church believes as she believed in the time of Saint John Chrysostom, who is called “golden-mouthed” on account of the doctrinal purity of his preaching, and who said: “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.”
* * * * *
Innovation has arisen in the Church before. It is always a passing thing. There is nothing in the Faith, the prayers, or the traditions of Boston Catholics which will long sustain a “Brotherhood Week” attitude toward the Jews. There is bound to be a change: and the evidence of the past few weeks is that the change will not be long delayed.
The placing of the Blessed Sacrament on the campus of Brandeis University was a victory which the Jews of Boston could not afford.
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
November, 1955
POINTERS
Now that Mass is being celebrated in front of television cameras, Catholics find they have to cope with problems of liturgy in their living rooms. Tuning in on the Holy Sacrifice, Catholics are faced with such considerations as: Should we go on smoking? Should we stop the card game? Should we get out our missals? Should we all get down on our knees at the Consecration?
In the earlier days of the Church, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was thought so sacred that it was kept entirely concealed from unbelievers, lest it be blasphemed. Even catechumens were not allowed to witness its most solemn parts.
The American hierarchy, however, are so remote from this kind of zeal for guarding holy things that they have abandoned the Mass to the barroom blasphemies and drawing room dismissals of the nation’s television viewers.
* * * * *
There is cause for much rejoicing among Interfaith Catholics who have been embarrassed by the fact that canonized saints are an exclusively Catholic concern. By next fall, publisher Frank Sheed will have on the market an interdenominational treatment of the lives of the saints appropriately entitled Saints for Now.
Edited by that eminent authority on sanctity, Mrs. Henry Luce, the book will contain evaluations of well known saints by prominent English and American, Catholic and otherwise, authors.
Saints for Now should have a good sale. A great many people will be curious to read about Whittaker Chambers’ ardent devotion to Saint Benedict; and Bruce Marshall’s “world, the flesh, and Fr. Vianney” treatment of the Cure of Ars; and most curious to learn from Mortimer Adler just how a Jewish Thomist feels about the Catholic Saint he has been making his living on.
Congratulations to Sheed & Luce for sensing that this kind of text must have a few illustrations by Salvador Dali.
* * * * *
The Spanish magazine Ecclesia has come to the defense of Spain’s primate, Cardinal Segura, who recently condemned the adoption of any attitude of “benevolence” toward Protestants, and as a result of it was taken over the coals by the Catholic Press of the U. S. To the Indiana Catholic, which said that Spain was “calling the cops on the Protestants four centuries late,” Ecclesia replied, with devastating forthrightness, that far from being four centuries late, Spain had immediately realized the dangers of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, and had organized the Inquisition to combat them. And to Fr. Robert Hartnett, S. J., editor of America, who had attacked the Cardinal on the score that his “theology leaves political philosophy out of account,” Ecclesia replied by saying that in their opinion it was more important for Catholics to “conform with theology and papal encyclicals than with political philosophy.” They declared, also, that in his article Fr. Hartnett had proclaimed “real doctrinal errors contrary to papal encyclicals.”
Fr. Hartnett, grinning broadly to show how calm he could remain in the face of this Spanish fury, decided, inappropriately, that this was the time to put into practice the Jesuit principle: When confounded, distinguish. In answer to the charge that he was uttering heresy, Fr. Hartnett mumbled, “That is only one of two tenable positions.”
AMERICAN POWER AND CATHOLIC FREEDOM
The Catholic Church in the United States is, slowly but inevitably, making itself completely unnecessary. By missing the point of its existence — to be the one Divinely-ordained way in which men may work out their salvation — the Church is putting itself in a gravely perilous position. It is turning itself into just another sect. It is letting itself be swept up in the new American super-religion: Interfaith.
Interfaith is that unchaste union of creeds that is fast becoming the state religion of the United States. It has the great advantage for this purpose of not being restricted by any sectarian commitments. It transcends all previous religions, and then offers a synthesis of them that is tailor-made for democracy. Democracy has a passion for making everything be just like everything else, for dragging everything down to the same mediocre level. Interfaith is the religious manifestation of that passion. It eliminates all religious differences, and provides one standard, die-stamped faith that is suited to all. Interfaith makes no demands in the way of positive doctrine; it offers only vague aspirations as to how everyone ought to love everyone. It aims to remove any possibility of discord or unpleasantness over such an unimportant thing as religion, by making it completely innocuous. The tenets of Interfaith, usually presented in the form of slogans, are these: that every belief is worthy of respect; that no one should ever say anything against another’s faith; that it does not matter what you hold as long as you are sincere; that such things as “good will” and “brotherhood” are more important than dogmas. Although it has not yet gone so far, we may expect that before long Interfaith will outlaw saying that Jesus is God, for fear of giving offense to those who think He is not, and do not want Him called so.
Interfaith is clearly bent on the destruction of all dogma and certitude, which it plans to accomplish under the banner of freedom of religion. To ask us to respect every belief, no matter how fantastic, is to ask us to respect none. To ask a Catholic, committed to certain clear and definite dogmas, to respect a religion that categorically denies these dogmas, is to ask him to give up the Faith. And that is what Interfaith asks.
The only way the Church could keep from being destroyed by such a powerful and insidious enemy as Interfaith would be constantly to guard against it, constantly to fight its influence. But the Church is so anxious to be liked in America, and Interfaith is so obviously America’s religious darling, that the Church does not dare oppose it. Every day there are pictures in the newspapers of Catholic priests posing with Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis at Interfaith rallies. There is an almost frantic eagerness on the part of Catholics to show their liberality toward other religions.
“The things on which we agree are vastly more important than the things on which we differ,” is not the statement of an American diplomat urging England to put aside petty differences and join in the fight against Russia; it is the statement of an American Catholic priest assuring non-Catholics of his conformity to the Interfaith code; and the less-important “things on which we differ,” are such things as the Holy Eucharist and Our Lady.
So engulfed in Interfaith has the Church in America become, that most Catholics no longer know what are the true doctrines of the Church. Most of them seem to be firmly convinced that the slogans of Interfaith are articles of the Creed. “I don’t think it matters what church you belong to,” they tell you, “as long as you lead a good life.”
The fact that such a statement is heresy apparently interests no one. Certainly not the priests. It is impossible that the priests are unaware of this wholesale ignorance of the Faith; it is impossible that they are unaware of the heresies their parishoners are holding; but still they do nothing about it. Either they must feel that they do not know enough theology themselves to correct the situation, or else they do not think it is important enough to bother about.
You almost never hear of an American priest or bishop who is publicly and openly exhorting non-Catholics to come into the Church, telling them of the Church’s singular prerogatives and possessions. Any general appeals they make are that men of all faiths get together to fight against materialism or atheism or gambling or corruption in government, or some other such agreeable Interfaith endeavor. There is never any insistence on the strong, central Catholic truths, never any mention of the fact that the Church is the sole custodian of the one true Faith given by Our Lord to His Apostles, and that it alone possesses the means for attaining eternal life. One would think, listening to these clerics, that the Church had nothing more valuable to give than its money, for the building of non-denominational hospitals.
There is no doubt but that the temptation to seek the approval and respect of non-Catholic Americans is a potent one; and the Church here seems to have succumbed to it. The only condition that has been asked for this approval is that the Church play down those challenging, disturbing dogmas that set it apart from all other religions, and substitute for them the inoffensive slogans of Interfaith. As evidence of the American clergy’s willingness to do this, here is a statement by Archbishop Cushing of Boston:
“There must be an end of feuding over religious dogmas and a resurgence of tolerance and magnanimity. We cannot any longer afford the luxury of fighting one another over doctrines concerning the next world …”
However much this kind of statement might increase the Archbishop’s popularity, however much it might win him applause from Interfaithers, it is clearly a denial of that Catholic Faith which, as a bishop, he is pledged to preserve, even to the shedding of his blood.
BY FATHER FEENEY
The London Jew is, in points, identical with the Jew from all great capital cities. But comparisons of him come clearest when he is contrasted with the Jew from Berlin. The Jew from London is an idealist. The Jew from Berlin is an ideologist. The Berlin Jew has hopes for his thoughts. The London Jew has hopes for his investments. Neither is the original Jew from Jerusalem. And their defections can be put most neatly in a deliberate play on words. The one has stopped studying the Law and the Prophets. The other has started studying the Profit and the Loss.
One may ask who is responsible for what is known as the London Jew — is it London, or is it the Jew? I say it is London. I admit that London’s Jew is responsible for his own unrest — as a despiser of the Old and New Testaments for the sake of his old and new investments. But the Bank of England was not the escape the Rothschilds were looking for. It was the escape that London’s Calvinism provided. For though London’s liturgies are supported by Anglicanism, its morals are founded in Calvinism. And Calvinism is the Christian support of usury.
Lutheranism is the Christian support of totalitarianism; which is the obsession of the Jew from Berlin. When the Jew from the Holy Land went to the Rhineland, he found Christian corruptions there to ease his conscience and soothe his religious nostalgias. He found the Christian mind overplaying itself at the expense of Christian values. He found Luther’s super-theology — his “Faith without good works” — his belief in belief — his fat-headedness without performance — his frenzy without finesse. This gave the Jew from Jerusalem his chance to be a mental Messiah, and to start a procession of prophetic intellectualism that has lasted down to our day; and has included: Kant the super-philosopher; Hegel the super-ontologist; Heine the super-poet; Wagner the super-musician; Nietzsche the super-sociologist; Marx the super-economist; Freud the super-psychologist; Mann the super-Romanticist; Einstein the super-mathematician. All these Jewish versions of the Lutheran lead have contributed to the development of German intellectualism, and the collapse of German intelligence. The climax came when an apostate Catholic from Austria ran into Germany with a queer mustache, took over the militia, and out-Jewed the Jews. He became the super-German. And that was the end of Germany.
(from London is a Place, Ravengate Press)
Varieties of Religious Experience III — The Yankee Clippers
In Boston, one Sunday morning in 1785, the Episcopalian parishioners of King’s Chapel showed up for services with their Books of Common Prayer in one hand and well-inked quills in the other. Systematically they deleted from their liturgy any reference to the Three Persons in God. This rebuke to centuries of Christmases, this disdain for the Word made Flesh, marked the beginning of the Unitarian Church.
Trusting that God-the-Father would survive in King’s Chapel, after they had annihilated God-the-Son and God-the-Holy Ghost, these resourceful Bostonians decided that an appropriate inscription should be placed on the walls of their meeting house, to indicate the kind of divinity that was currently being worshipped there. A bigoted papist of that day was tarred and feathered for suggesting that the following might go very well on the walls of King’s Chapel:
Here God and manger were estranged,
When our discrete barbarians
Twice murdered Him, and then arranged
Themselves as Unitarians.
From its start, Unitarianism was well received in Boston. Its repudiation of the Blessed Trinity and its contempt for “Romanism” made the movement a most acceptable Boston institution. The principal credit for this success belongs rightfully to that man who was pledged to defend Christ against “the superstitious abuses of Catholic priests,” that Doctor of Unitarian Divinity, William Ellery Channing.
Bill Channing, as he was never called, brought to Unitarianism all the advantages of a Harvard education. In his many speeches and public writings, the Unitarian message is presented with cultivated manner and flawless grammar. The American Unitarian Association has proudly preserved the doctrinal pronouncements of Channing, hoping thus to further his “beneficent influence.”
For the benefit of those who are unacquainted with the tenor of William Ellery Channing’s “beneficence,” here are a few examples.
Having deplored those great world tyrannies, “heathenism, Mohammedanism, and Roman Catholicism,” Dr. Channing adds, “Do you ask me how I think Catholicism may be successfully opposed? I know but one way. Lift men above Catholicism.” Of the union of two natures in the one adorable Person of Jesus, Channing says, “Such a being is certainly the most puzzling and distracting object ever presented to human thought.” To Our Blessed Mother, Dr. Channing extends this bit of Harvard chivalry, “A superstitious priesthood and people imagine that they honor the Virgin Mary by loading her image with sparkling jewels.” His detached appraisal of Our Lord’s death on Calvary has been recorded this way, “Infinite Divinity dying on a cross, a doctrine which in earthliness reminds us of the mythology of the rudest pagans.”
Such neatly phrased blasphemy does not go unrewarded in Boston. For remarks like these, William Ellery Channing soon found himself at the head of the Unitarian Church.
Lest people should think, however, that Unitarianism was merely a synthesis of good taste and anti-Catholicism, Channing and his associates shrewdly acquired for their new sect two very useful items of religious equipment. These were (1) a theological seminary, called Harvard Divinity School, and (2) a semi-theologian, called Ralph Waldo Emerson. The effects of these two were, respectively, to depreciate faith in the Divinity of Christ, and to advocate reliance on the divinity of self. Through them, Unitarianism hoped to extend its influence beyond the borders of Boston; but after a brief success for Emerson as the philosopher of abstemious thinkers and for Harvard as the goal of midwestern ministers’ sons, Unitarianism was finally obliged to return to its proper home. For only Bostonians with proper accents were equal to its proper doubts.
The religion of William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and their tradition of three names in one Unitarian, is continued now in Boston by the Reverend Dana McLean Greeley. From his pulpit in Channing’s old Arlington Street Church, Dr. Greeley exhorts Unitarians to persevere in their belief that mothers are much too inferior for God to have had one.
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
December, 1955
There will be much talk this December about “putting Christ back into Christmas. Tragically, in all the holy commotion which will accompany this talk, not one person will speak up and ask that most pertinent question: “But who took Him out in the first place?”
The answer is in no sense a seasonal one. For the attack that threatens Christmas each December is part of an all-out, full-time offensive — which will be striking at our parochial schools next March, at our New Testament next May, and at the basic Christian structure of our country next October. It is born of an enmity as old as our Faith. And it is sustained, from father to son, by that curse which a Jerusalem mob called down upon itself when it cried, “Crucify Him! His Blood be upon us and upon our children!”
The drive to “put Christ back into Christmas” makes the ancient enemy only half worried — for, at best, it leaves our shattered word “Christmas” only half restored. It is The Point ’s lonely battle cry this December that Christmas be entirely salvaged — that, purged of the tinsel and the trappings, it may become, for all our readers, the Holy and Joyous celebration of “Christ’s Mass.”
Israeli Inquiry
Q. What will be one of the main objectives of the Jews in America during 1956?
A. They will be striving, with accelerated fervor, to maneuver America into the role of big brother to the State of Israel, the protector of its interests and the conqueror of its foes.
Q. What led the Jews to choose the year 1956 for this campaign?
A. The presidential elections in November — an event which causes politicians to cast greedy eyes upon the fat bloc of Jewish votes, ready to fall into the lap of whatever candidate makes the most enticing offers.
Q. Have the Jews published any announcement of their election-year plans?
A. As outlined in the Bulletin of the Zionist Organization of America, their intention is “to swing American public opinion to come to Israel’s aid and exert pressure on the Administration of the kind which proved successful in 1947 and 1948, without which the State of Israel would not have come into being.”
Q. Under what guise are the Jews trying to win American opinion to their side?
A. They are portraying Israel as a beleaguered little democracy, America’s one friend in the Middle East, struggling for existence against hordes of Communist-dominated Arab neighbors.
Q. Is there evidence that this portrayal is not quite accurate?
A. Much, three samples of which follow:
1) The official report on immigration to Israel, published by the U. S. Department of Commerce, reveals that most Israelis come from (and necessarily with the blessings of) Soviet Russia and her satellites.
2) As a result of the August elections, the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) is composed of the following elements. Of the Knesset’s 120 seats, forty belong to the Socialist Labor Party (Mapai), an affiliate of the Second International; fifteen belong to the Freedom Party (Herut), political arm of those reportedly-outlawed terrorist gangs whose atrocities shocked the civilized world; ten belong to the Unity of Labor (Ahdut Avoda), an avowedly Marxist group; nine belong to the United Workers Party (Mapam), which advocates “the revolutionary class struggle” and “a firm bond between the workers of the world and the Soviet Union”; and six belong to the Communist Party of Israel — making a total of eighty seats for these extremist factions, or two-thirds of the parliament’s membership.
3) In June of 1950, an American journalist was told by an official at the Vatican’s Department for Extraordinary Affairs, that the state of Israel is “obviously an outpost of the Soviet Union in the Middle East.” When the journalist objected that the major Israeli party is Socialist and not Communist, he was told, “It is all camouflage. These people are of one mind when it comes to the Christian religion. They are out to de-Christianize the Levant as part of a world-wide plot to destroy what is left of Christian morality.”
Q. If Zionism and Communism are, then, so closely akin why is Israel presently scorning Russia and turning to the U. S. for help?
A. This is a move not of necessity, but of prudence. The large quantities of planes, tanks, and guns Israel has already amassed have come to her mainly from behind the Iron Curtain, and Russia is still willing to keep Israel fortified, as she made clear immediately upon announcement of her arms-deal with Egypt. The Jews, however, are genuinely alarmed about the Arab nations, whose lands they have usurped, whose villages they have ravaged and destroyed, whose people they have slaughtered.
Fearful lest the pent-up rage of the Arab world should finally burst upon them, the Jews want to see the Arabs knocked out once and for all, leaving Israel undisputed mistress of the Middle East. If Russia were to take on the assignment, there would be a danger of the U. S. stepping in on the side of the Arabs. Consequently, the Jews are creating the illusion that Israel is herself a victim of Communist aggression — hopeful that the U. S. can thereby be induced to come to her “defense.”
Q. Is there no chance that this Jewish scheme will be frustrated?
A. There is an excellent chance that Americans, weary of fighting fruitless wars, will take the trouble to discover that they are now being invited to do and die for no other purpose than to exalt the Jewish nation — whereupon the Jews are likely to find their boldness met with an unexpectedly formidable reaction.
Q. Is this the only hope of defeating the Jews?
A. There is another and better one. It is the wan but still-living hope that the remnants of Christendom, struck with the terrible realization that the land hallowed by the Birth and Death of Christ is now in the hands of His implacable enemies, will arise and rally to that now-more-pertinent call which Pope Urban II issued to the first Crusaders: “Mark out a path all the way to the Holy Sepulcher and snatch the Holy Land from that abominable people!”
Christian Reminder
For anyone who wonders whether there is provocation for a present-day Catholic Crusade to rescue the Holy Land, we are concluding this issue with a partial list of the atrocities and desecrations which the Jews have committed in Palestine since 1948. (We make no attempt to indicate here the loss in lives and property suffered by the nearly one million Arabs who have been evicted from their ancient homes during the past seven years.)
The Jews have defiled and destroyed the following Church buildings: the Church of Saint John the Baptist at Am Karim, the Church of the Beatitudes at Capharnaum, the Church of Mensa Christi on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, the Church of Saint Peter at Tiberias, the Cenacle (the place of the Last Supper) at Jerusalem, the Convent of Mary Reparatrix at Jerusalem, the Convent and Hospice of Notre Dame at Jerusalem, the Convent of the Sisters of Saint Ann at Haifa, the Franciscan Convent at Tiberias, the Patriarchal Seminary at Beit-Jala, the Salesian houses at Cremisan, the Sisters’ Convent at Am Karim, the School of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Sion at Katamon, the Sisters’ residence at Capharnaum, the church and rectory at Ikret. Catholic authorities have estimated that the Jews have destroyed Church property in the Holy Land at the rate of more than two million dollars’ worth a year. To enumerate only French Catholic institutions, they have demolished four hospitals, sixteen dispensaries, two hospices, four seminaries, thirty-two schools and orphanages, and seven retreat houses.
Among the countless other desecrations we might mention, none is more heart-rending than that of Jerusalem’s Church of the Dormition — the magnificent Romanesque shrine to the Mother of God which was pillaged by Israeli soldiers and then turned into a Jewish dance hall for the young men and women of Haganah. It was only after a hundred such incidents that the Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Hughes, unequivocally charged that there is now in operation a “deliberate Jewish effort to decimate the Arabs and to destroy Christianity in Palestine.”
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IMPORTANT INTERMISSION: THE TRUTH ABOUT VACCINES NOW PLAYING:
