Jews Are Not Israel Or The Chosen People
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
January-February, 1958
SOLDIERS OF THE CHURCH MILITANT
Our Canonized Saints At War
“You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do you also. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? And they have slain them who foretold of the coming of the Just One; of whom you have been now the betrayers and the murderers.”
When he had concluded these words, the speaker was led away and stoned to death by his audience.
Now, before anyone seizes upon this episode as an argument for always speaking politely, we had better note that, although the above utterance did anger the Jews of Jerusalem to the point of murder, it won for its author, Saint Stephen, the glorious and eternal recompense of being Christ’s Protomartyr: the first to shed his blood for the Catholic Faith.
Since Saint Stephen’s time, speeches like his have been no rarity in the annals of the Church. For it has become increasingly clear through the centuries that the kind of talk that gets you into trouble may also get you canonized.
Despite representations made by the modern school of hagiographers, the saints are not always smiling, are not always mild-mannered and consoling, do not have a good word for everyone. The saints find this world a far-from-rosy place, and are breathtakingly blunt in announcing their findings. Whether they are berating the enemies of Christ, or giving Christians a needed prodding, or simply insisting on the truths of the Catholic Faith, they leave no doubt that one requirement for being an exemplary member of the Church Militant is a measure of militancy.
A notion of the impact that the saints have made as preachers can be inferred from the titles that have been both popularly and officially bestowed on them: Saint Anthony of Padua, “Hammer of Heretics”; Saint John Capistrano, “Scourge of the Jews”; and Saint Gaspar del Bufalo, “Hammer of Freemasons.”
Of these three, Saint John Capistrano has undoubtedly had the most competitors for his title. During two thousand years, the Jews have remained the most tenacious, dangerous foes of Christ and His Church; and saints in every age have lashed out against them. A typical expression of this saintly anti-Jewishness are the following unminced words of Saint John Chrysostom, fourth century Bishop of Constantinople and Doctor of the Universal Church: “The synagogue is worse than a brothel ... it is the den of scoundrels, and the repair of wild beasts, the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults ... a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ ... a den of thieves, a house of ill fame, a dwelling of iniquity, a refuge of devils, a gulf and abyss of perdition ... Whatever name even more horrible could be found will never be worse than the synagogue deserves.”
Earlier in the fourth century, an eighteen-year-old girl of Alexandria had taken it on herself to do some equally straightforward preaching. Summoned before the Emperor of the East, Catherine of Alexandria had won for herself a martyr’s crown by announcing to the enraged tyrant: “Furthermore, it is necessary for you to believe the Catholic Faith and to be baptized, as must every man to save his soul!”
The sad realization that courage like Saint Catherine’s was vanishing from the world moved Saint Gregory VII, just before his death in 1085, to excoriate Christendom with this appraisal: “There are in the world thousands of men who risk death every day at the summons of their lords. Yet, when the interests of the King of Heaven, our Redeemer, are at stake, how many Christians shrink, not from death only, but even from the hatred of other men! And the few — thanks be to God for those few — who dare to resist the wicked openly, and to face death, are not only unsupported by their brethren, but are accused by them of imprudence, and indiscretion, and are treated as fools.”
It was, in large part, the strength of Saint Gregory VII that made it possible for another pope, Blessed Urban II, to organize the First Crusade in 1095. Blessed Urban’s rallying-cry to the Catholic world (“Mark out a path all the way to the Holy Sepulchre, and snatch the Holy Land from that abominable people.”) has a doubly-sharp significance in our day, when the Land of Christ has been given over to His Crucifiers. Likewise meaningful today, are the fiery words of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached the Second Crusade: “Will you allow the infidels to contemplate in peace the ravages they have committed? The living God has charged me to declare to you that He will punish them who will not avenge Him against His enemies.”
Blessed Bernardine of Feltre, fifteenth century Franciscan friar, besides perpetuating the name of the great Saint Bernard, continued also the high tradition of Catholic preaching. Here is a part of one of his discourses, on a perennial theme: “Canon law prohibits all intercourse with Jews, especially their employment as physicians. The presence of Christians at Jewish feasts is expressly indicted. Yet the Jew Leo celebrated the wedding of his son with a feast that lasted eight days, and how many crowded to his banquets, to his balls! In the present day, nearly everyone who is suffering from illness openly calls in a Jewish doctor.”
Perhaps the most outstanding holy preacher of modern times is Saint John Mary Vianney, the beloved Cure of Ars. The following extract from a sermon delivered by this heavenly patron of all parish priests will indicate that, among the saints, soft talk and watered doctrine are still anathema: “My children, why are there no Sacraments in other religions? Because there is no salvation there. We have the Sacraments at our disposal because we belong to the religion of salvation.”
If anyone should object that the militancy of the saints is not fairly proved by quoting from their sermons — since preaching is a rather rough and tumble business, anyway — we can offer more striking evidence. It is contained in what the saints say when they are, by anyone’s standards, polemically off-guard — in the fragments that have been preserved from their prayers. The following, for instance, is from the Revelations of Divine Love by fourteenth-century mystic, Blessed Juliana of Norwich: “ ... I saw not so properly specified the Jews that did Him to death. Notwithstanding, I knew in my Faith that they were accursed and condemned without end, saving those that were converted by grace.”
The great Jesuit missionary, Saint Francis Xavier, has left us a sample of the way he stormed Heaven, in his famous “Prayer for Infidels.” Lately, non-saints have taken to editing this prayer, so as to minimize its contrast with their own emasculated professions of Faith. Here is the uncensored version, as Saint Francis Xavier wrote it, and as it used to be said by millions of Catholics during the annual Novena of Grace: “O Eternal God, Creator of all things, remember that the souls of infidels have been created by Thee out of nothing, and formed after Thine image and likeness. Behold, O Lord, how, to the dishonor of Thy name, Hell is being filled with these souls ... ”
The year 1958 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Bernadette Soubirous, a fourteen-year-old peasant girl of Lourdes, in France. After her visitation from the Queen of Heaven, Bernadette entered a convent of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers. There she spent the remaining years of her short life, and offered convincing demonstrations that her spiritual fiber was that virile variety from which saints are made. “My gentle Jesus,” she prayed, “give me a great love of the Cross; and if I do not die through the cruelty of the Jews, I will die by the violence of my love.”
As a final and, we hope, clinching instance of prayerful militancy, we offer the following death-bed exclamation of Saint Therese, the Little Flower of Jesus — probably the most loved saint of modern times: “How happy I would have been to fight at the time of the Crusades or, later on, to fight against the heretics. Be assured that I should not have been afraid of the fire. Oh, is it possible that I should die in bed!”
There is certainly no body of writing or tradition in the world which is more confident, direct, and incisive than the doctrinal teachings of the Church’s saints. And this clarity of style extends to their pronouncements on every phase of Catholic belief. Here, for example, is the way a saint, the fourth-century Doctor of the Church, Saint Gregory Nazianzen, writes about the Blessed Virgin Mary: “If anyone does not believe that Holy Mary is the Mother of God, he is outside the divine order. If anyone shall say that Christ flowed through the Virgin as through a channel and was not formed in her both in divine and human fashion — ‘divine’ because without the cooperation of man, ‘human’ because conceived in accordance with human law — such a one, too, is an atheist.”
Called by the Church the “Angelic Doctor,” Saint Thomas Aquinas is among the most celebrated of our holy teachers. The celestial qualities of his work, however, do not commit him to ethereal matters, nebulously discussed. To the embarrassment of so many contemporary theologians, Saint Thomas teaches, in a representative passage, that Christian states would be doing a service to God and man if they were to put to death all those whom the Church condemns for spreading heretical doctrines.
And, in his letter, De Regimine Judaeorum, Saint Thomas gives detailed instructions for Catholic rulers who must deal with Jews. He cites as Christian “Law” the principle that “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 what is necessary to sustain life.” Saint Thomas’ concluding advice: “And to your last question: whether it is correct that all Jews in your realm should be obliged to wear some special sign to distinguish them from the Christians. To this the answer is plain and in conformity with the decision given by the General Council. Jews of both sexes and in all Christian lands should on all occasions be distinguished from other people by some particular dress.”
Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Franciscan contemporary and friend, Saint Bonaventure, enjoyed the unique honor of being the first child to take the part of the Infant Jesus in a public representation of the Holy Crib of Bethlehem. Saint Bonaventure, at the age of two, was placed in a village “manger scene” by Saint Francis of Assisi. And when Bonaventure grew to young manhood and joined Saint Francis’ order, he retained always in his learned teaching the guileless-ness of a child and a sharp Christmas Crib clarity. In his Breviloquium we find this sample: “Because outside the unity of faith and love which makes us sons and members of the Church, no one can be saved, hence if the Sacraments are received outside the Church, they are not effective for salvation, although they are true sacraments. However, they can become useful if one returns to Holy Mother the Church, the only Spouse of Christ, whose sons alone Christ the Spouse deems worthy of inheritance.”
One of the most familiar forms for presenting Christian doctrine is the question-and-answer pattern of the catechism. And of all the compilers of catechisms, none has been more honored by the Church than the Jesuit theologian, Saint Peter Canisius. Writing at the time of the Protestant Revolt, when the unity of Christendom was being sundered, Saint Peter Canisius swept aside all cloudy notions of just who in Europe was still entitled to the Christian name. In his Catechism, he asks: “Who is a Christian?” And answers: “He who confesses the salutary doctrine of Jesus Christ, true God and true man, in His Church. Hence, he who is truly a Christian condemns and detests thoroughly all cults and sects which are found outside the doctrine and Church of Christ everywhere, and among all peoples, as for example, the Jewish, the Mohammedan, and the heretical cults and sects; and he firmly assents to the same doctrine of Christ.”
Beyond the teaching tradition of the great fathers and doctors of the Church, there lies a further and broader field of Christian instruction. Is it that “teaching by example” which makes every one of the saints’ lives a lesson to be studied and learned. Again, as in their writings, sermons, and prayers, it is the sharpness and clarity, the strength and intransigence of their actions which distinguish the life-stories of the saints.
Although there is small likelihood that any of our readers will ever be in a position to expel an entire community of infidel Jews from the limits of a given Christian nation, still, the fact that the Church’s saints in the past have done this (as Saint Louis IX of France did in 1254) is a valuable lesson for Catholics — and in an infidel-ridden country like our own, a consoling one.
More practically (and the examples could be multiplied by thousands) we might learn fortitude in the Faith from Saint Thomas More, who stood out for the true religion against, as he thought, every Catholic bishop in England; we might learn integrity from Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, who threw the gifts of a Calvinist admirer into the flames and told him that in such a manner will heretics burn in Hell; we might learn courage from an apostle like the North American martyr, Saint Isaac Jogues, who escaped once from his savage Indian captors only to beg permission to return to his work among them, and to certain martyrdom.
But from a later American apostle, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, the tireless nun who died at Chicago in 1917, we can learn that most important lesson for contemporary Catholics. It has been preserved for us in Mother Cabrini’s own words: “We let ourselves be overcome by human respect, and cease to show ourselves true followers of Our Lord before the world ... We see truth trodden underfoot, and we remain silent. Why? Because we are cowards. Oh, how we need to renew our faith, to rekindle our hearts in the sublime principles of our holy religion.”
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
March, 1958
ON MAKING THE UNITED STATES CATHOLIC
Reasons For Our Failure
Why is it that the Catholic Church in America, so replete with plant and apparatus, does not bring in enough converts each year to fill up the number of Catholics who leave?
Why is it that the Catholic Church in America still grows only through births and immigration — and not through conversions?
Where are the successors of the Apostles to preach on Main Street, America, the good news of the Gospel?
Where has our zeal for souls gone?
And how did it disappear?
These are questions which the full-grown, able-bodied American Catholic Church cannot ignore much longer. And to begin to answer them honestly, American Catholics will have to go back to certain events of one hundred years ago, where there starts a story which unfolds as follows.
Exactly one century ago this year, on July 7, 1858, Father Isaac Thomas Hecker founded the first natively-American religious congregation. Called the Missionary Society of Saint Paul the Apostle (more commonly, “the Paulists”), Father Hecker’s new order had, as its avowed purpose, the conversion of the United States to the Catholic Faith. It seemed a magnificent objective. But Isaac Thomas Hecker was a strange man, with a strange understanding of the term “conversion.”
Born of Protestant, German-speaking parents, Isaac Hecker spent his early years in New York’s lower East Side. As a young man he became converted to the fashionable tenets of Transcendentalism, then being evangelized by the Concord divines, Emerson and Thoreau. To demonstrate his fidelity to this new religion, young Isaac moved out of the family’s Hester Street home and joined the experiments in communal living being conducted at Brook Farm and, later, at Fruitlands.
It was during this period that Isaac Hecker had his visions. The first of these, of “an angelic something I cannot describe,” so ravished the young seer that he fell desperately in love with it and resolved never to marry. Subsequent visions, Hecker noted in his diary, indicated the future course of his life.
In 1844, Isaac Hecker entered the Catholic Church, averring that “I had been a Catholic in heart all my life, and didn’t know it!” Convinced that he had been chosen as the special instrument of the Holy Ghost for converting America, Hecker applied for admission to the Redemptorists. He was received into the order and — though his seminary superiors were dismayed at his gross inability to grasp the principles of theology, or even to learn the simplest Latin prayers — he was eventually ordained.
Eight years later, the General of the Redemptorists summarily expelled Father Hecker from the order; whereupon the dogged reformer founded the Paulists, and set out in earnest to convert America.
Isaac Hecker never made any secret of what he was up to. He proclaimed boldly that America must not be preached to as Europe had been, but by a “new method.” Bringing America to the Faith would be accomplished not by changing America, but by changing the Faith. He gleefully accepted and justified the title which his Paulist colleagues bestowed on him, “the apostle of reconciliation of the Church with the age.” With his help, Americans would become Catholics “with no spiritual convulsions” (as the Paulists put it), without altering their ways or, substantially, their beliefs.
Father Hecker thought that the Church should appear to Americans as a bustling, up-to-date business corporation; its priests, a staff of resourceful salesmen. “If we wish to attract Americans to the Church,” he asserted, “we must present Catholicism to them as affirming in super-abundance those qualities of character which are distinctively American.”
“Individual initiative” became the angelic virtue in Paulist theology, replacing such apparently outmoded, European virtues as humility, poverty, and obedience. Likewise, any Catholic dogmas that Father Hecker deemed too severe for the American temperament he conveniently ignored, or else tamed through “interpretation.”
Now, if these doctrinal aberrations had been merely the brainstorms of Isaac Thomas Hecker, they would be of small importance in American Catholic history. What makes them of great, and tragic, significance is that they found support in a faction of powerful, liberal American Churchmen. These included Bishop John Keane, rector of Catholic University, who presided over Catholic participation in the notorious World Parliament of Religions; Archbishop John Ireland of Saint Paul, who had advocated sending all the Catholic children of America to public schools; James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, dean of the American hierarchy, who was known to have preached in Protestant churches, even in Masonic Lodges, and to have opposed steadfastly any papal condemnation of American Masonry. These, and others like them, hailed Father Hecker as their champion. “The ideal American priest,” Archbishop Ireland called him; while Cardinal Gibbons appointed him as his personal theologian at the Vatican Council (where Hecker was a leader of the forces opposed to the definition of papal infallibility).
Intoxicated with all this applause, Isaac Hecker got farther and farther from theological home-base. And the liberals watched anxiously to see just how far he would be allowed to go.
It was not until 1899, ten years after Isaac Hecker’s death, that his theories were finally condemned. In an Apostolic Letter (Testem Benevolentiae), addressed to Cardinal Gibbons and the American hierarchy, Pope Leo XIII systematically reproved the errors of Father Hecker. The Church, Pope Leo says, and not individual Catholics, should judge how the Faith is to be presented. “That sense of the sacred dogmas is to be faithfully kept which Holy Mother Church has once declared, and is not to be departed from under the specious pretext of a more profound understanding.” Nor are dogmas ever to be suppressed ... “whosoever would do so would rather wish to alienate Catholics from the Church than to bring over to the Church those who dissent from it.”
The reaction of the Catholic liberals to Pope Leo XIII’s letter was (1) to try to prevent its publication; (2) to issue it in faulty translation; (3) to deny that such doctrines had ever been held by any responsible American Catholic; (4) to declare that the Pope was the victim of anti-American intriguers.
But there was also another, and gratifying, reaction to the papal message. It came from those American priests and bishops who were not liberals, who attested that the Hecker errors were indeed being taught in America, and who thanked the Pope for his letter of condemnation. These anti-Heckerites were men like Archbishop Corrigan of New York, Bishop McQuaid of Rochester, Bishop Messmer of Green Bay, and a host of others, in and out of the hierarchy; for as one Catholic paper remarked, the liberals “in truth were never very numerous in the United States but, being restless and noisy, they always professed to be the only true Americans and the only genuine representatives of the Church.”
Pope Leo XIII’s intervention should certainly have ended it all. The message of his letter was unequivocal. Civilta Cattolica, the Roman Jesuit journal which was the champion and comfort of the papacy through all the turbulence of nineteenth-century Masonic Italy, summarized Testem Benevolentiae in 1899: “The practical lesson which we must all draw from Leo XIII’s Apostolic Letter is that Catholic principles do not change whether through the passing of years, or the changing of countries, or new discoveries, or motives of utility. They are always the principles that Christ taught, that the Church made known, that Popes and Councils defended, that the Saints loved, that the Doctors demonstrated. As they are, they must be taken or left. Whoever accepts them in all their fullness and strictness is a Catholic; whoever hesitates, staggers, adapts himself to the times, makes compromises, may call himself by what name he will, but before God and the Church he is a rebel and a traitor.”
As the twentieth century succeeded upon the nineteenth, however, it became clear that the liberals had no fear of being called names, and no notion of mending their ways. Testem Benevolentiae was followed by Saint Pius X’s condemnation of Modernism. Again, liberal theologians were pointed out and reproved by the Holy See for ignoring the fact that “Catholic principles do not change”; again, the liberals assured their ever-increasing flock of friends that the Pope meant someone else, and continued blithely about their business.
By the 1930’s, the shape of the liberal movement in America had changed considerably from the days of its Heckerite beginning. Still operating, the Paulists had branched out from their New York head-quarters, establishing mission centers in several American dioceses, and a novitiate and house of studies under the protective shadow of Bishop Keane’s Catholic University; their pamphlets filled the literature racks in many American parishes; but their comparatively small numbers (right now, about 200 priests) necessarily limited their activities.
Hecker’s order, however, had come to be almost superfluous as a means of spreading his spirit. The liberalism which he occasioned was settling into every corner of the American Church. The fact that no group of American prelates was now trying to match the flashy teamwork of Keane-to-Ireland-to-Gibbons, worked even more in the favor of the liberal cause. Individual bishops and independent theologians, compromising bit by bit the Church’s beliefs and practices, putting aside their commission to be apostles in order to “get along” better in their own immediate circumstances, gave no appearance of a formidable movement of the sort which might call down anew the wrath of Rome.
But a ferment was working, and the result, as it faces us today, might startle even Father Hecker.
What gave Isaac Hecker’s undertaking such honorable status as he started off was that it professed to be a crusade to make Americans Catholics. The Church would never, initially, have suspected a program like that. Father Hecker, it turned out, did not care what Americans believed once he got them into the Church — but he did plead that they should enter.
On this most basic point, the evolved liberalism of the present moment has far out-Heckered Father Isaac. It has built up an elaborate system of seesaw theology which relieves Americans of any obligation to become Catholics. While assuring them in paragraph A that the Catholic Church still believes it is the only True One, our current liberal pats his American neighbors on the back in paragraph B with the more vigorous assurance that their getting into Heaven in no sense requires that they should also get out of bed and into a pew for Sunday morning Mass.
There is no problem here of veiling the Church’s doctrine on indulgences, or minimizing its devotion to Our Blessed Lady, because the present-day liberal, unlike Father Hecker, need not mention Catholic teaching at all. He merely tells non-Catholic Americans to go on as they are going, to be true to their ideals, to live up to their lights, and thus, mysteriously, invisibly, subjectively, implicitly, invincibly-ignorantly, they will wake up on the other side of the grave as full-fledged Roman Catholics, members of the One True Church, subjects of the Pope, and partakers of Eternal Beatitude.
Presented with the above salvational arrangement (which is a scrupulously fair digest of all the current liberal theories), it is not difficult to conclude where apostolic life in the American Church has gone. It has disappeared down the commodious drains of liberal theology. If non-Catholic Americans are as universally hell-bent for Heaven as the question-and-answer columns of the liberal Catholic press maintain, then it is small wonder that Reverend Father Junior Curate suppresses his missionary urges with multiple rounds of golf and frequent trips to the ballpark. Why should he risk offending the general community with his Romish proselytizing if the general community is sanctifying and saving itself quite nicely, thanks, without his priestly ministrations?
Were we to stop at this point, it would appear that the decline of apostolic spirit in the American Church has been a strictly intramural affair, with all the impetus coming from clerical compromisers who have sought to wear their Roman collars in liberal comfort, avoiding the tangles and thickets of an active, practical apostolate. Such an explanation might be convincing, but it would certainly he incomplete. For we could devote a dozen more issues to those outside pressures which have closed in on the apostolic mission of the Church.
These enemies from without are the numerous offspring (both men and movements) of the French Revolution — the progeny of that Judaeo-Masonic union which has been so fatal to the Church in every country. And the most successful of them, in terms of headway made against the Catholic apostolate, is assuredly the interfaith “Brotherhood” campaign.
Through the press, radio, television, motion pictures, through every public means of persuasion, Americans, and perforce American Catholics, have been bombarded with the Brotherhood propaganda. “It’s not his religion that counts” ... “One belief is as good as another” ... ” “We’re all headed in the same direction, anyway” ... etc. Incessant talk like this puts the predatory Catholic convert-maker in practically a criminal class. And figures published in 1955 indicate that the Church’s should-be apostles are going right along with the Brotherhood act. A national poll showed that nearly eighty per cent of America’s Catholic bishops had authorized diocesan participation in that overt Judaeo-Masonic combine, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the country’s chief Brotherhood promoters. We may be certain that the percentage has not lately decreased.
Consequently, we have the sad assurance that America, and the American Catholic Church with it, is fast being subjected to the interfaith religion of Brotherhood — the Christ-less naturalism of the Masons and the Jews. And we are faced with the even sadder reality that Americans are still being denied the clear and salutary challenge of the Catholic Faith — a challenge which we know they can meet with a generosity and a vitality which would bring new blessings to our country, and new saints to our Catholic altars.
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
April, 1958
NEWSPAPERS AND THE NEW YORK TIMES
Other Jews And Minister Sulzberger
The homespun humorist who said, “All I know is what I read in the newspapers,” spoke not as a unique American, being funny, but as a typical one, being frank. Nearly 1,800 English-language dailies, having a combined circulation of fifty-seven million copies a day, are currently being published in the United States. And this tidal wave of newsprint, washing into the minds of American readers, has become, for most of them, the sustaining source of entertainment, of information, of opinion, of ideas. What newspapers affirm, readers believe; what newspapers deny, they discredit; what newspapers don’t mention, they ignore.
And this is a national calamity. For America’s daily press is — except for a few oases — an encompassing desert, hostile to the growth of both intelligence and morality. It offers as its chief attraction a day-to-day chronicle of the blunders and stupidities, the crimes and depravities of the human race. And in those columns not immediately concerned with recording the depths to which men have fallen during the previous twenty-four hours, most papers are a welter of misinformation and gross distortion of world events. “The popular Press as we have it today,” Hilaire Belloc once wrote, “thrusts the ‘Modern Mind’ lower than it would otherwise have fallen, swells its imbecility, and confirms it in its incapacity for civilization and therefore for the Faith.”
Since American newspapers are a typical product of that unholy ferment which has been agitating the western world since the time of the French Revolution, it is quite easy to isolate one cause of their being the way they are; namely: the influence of the Jews.
Essential to the understanding of our chaotic times is the knowledge that the Jewish race constitutes a united anti-Christian bloc within Christian society, and is working for the overthrow of that society by every means at its disposal. And because the daily press, as we know it, is the child of the Masonic era — the era which thinks it meet and just that the Jews should be allowed to subvert Christianity if they can — newspapers have had no sure ground for combating the Jewish take-over. Difficult Gentile journalists have been brought into line simply by being reminded of the Liberal, Masonically-inspired principles which all newspaperdom takes for granted. For example, the Jews have had no difficulty in getting yards of publicity and loud editorial acclaim for their Interfaith and Brotherhood endeavors. The premise underlying these movements — that to adore Christ as God and to reject Him as an impostor are both commendable, brotherly forms of religious activity — is never questioned. And this lack of protest has plainly unnerved Christian resistance to the encroachments of the Jews.
As for the large, distracting doses of smut and scandal which most papers regularly serve up, Jewish interests have done their best to encourage this poisonous diet in a number of ways — perhaps most effectively by waging incessant war against censorship and anti-obscenity regulations, wherever they may be found.
One further, and most necessary, aspect of the Jews’ press campaign has been to make sure that, as their anti-Christian purposes and activities proceed, nothing gets into the papers that would expose them to public view. To this end, they have found that what they cannot achieve by persuasion they can usually get by intimidation.
Because few newspapermen have the fortitude to stand up against high-pressure tactics, even those editors not intellectually convinced of the supremacy of the Jewish race are inclined to print articles favorable to the Jews, or else to keep quiet about them. So effective have Jewry’s organized intimidations proven that many overly-timid or flaccid-willed editors have decided to play safe by turning over to the Jews as many of their news columns as they might require, to be filled with whatever material the Jews might suggest. Thus, in a confidential report to its members, the American Jewish Committee has revealed that it regularly supplies 1,700 American newspapers with what it calls “canned editorials” — free commentaries on current affairs, prepared to Jewish specifications, all to serve up to local readers.
Again, in its annual budget message, the American Jewish Committee outlines as follows the objectives of its Public Information and Education Department: “To place in the magazines, the wire services and newspaper columns material which will aid in the development of positive intergroup attitudes ... To instill in editors and writers ... an understanding of certain types of material, with a view to keeping the number of objectionable articles to a minimum.”
After several pages of instances, detailing how it has “cooperated” with editors in determining what should and should not go into the papers, the American Jewish Committee concludes the report of its press activities with the straight-faced announcement: “During the year we were active in combating repression and censorship ... ”
To give our readers a more particular view of the Jews-and-the-news picture, we determined to focus the rest of this month’s attention on one of those public news enterprises which the Jews operate directly, through immediate ownership and personal administration. We lined up all the possible candidates, with the Pulitzer empire (dilutedly-Jewish) at one end, and the radio-wailings of Walter Winchell at the far other. We chose for our purpose the one newspaper which overshadowed all its neighbors. Its publisher is probably the least rabbinical-looking Hebrew ever to receive a degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary. His name is Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and his particular Jewish news enterprise is called The New York Times.
Unlike some Jewish papers, The New York Times appears daily and in English. Unlike many Jewish papers, the Times employs quantities of non-Jews in all its departments. And like no other Jewish paper (or magazine, or broadcast or news service), Mr. Sulzberger’s is an eminently assimilated one. It travels agreeably in the most rarefied Gentile company. Partisan newsmen look to it as America’s great neutral daily, the nation’s one “newspaper of record.” Scholars the world over cite it as an accepted, standard reference.
Through all these unlikely achievements, the Times has moved with gravity and balance. Cloaked in a conservatism which might have been tailored by the Brooks Brothers themselves, Mr. Sulzberger’s paper gives witness, in print if not in person, to the venerable virtues of that classic individual: the White, the very White, Jew.
But, as happens to the Whitest of them, every once in a while Mr. Sulzberger’s paper forgets itself. The Jewishness comes through. Often, we must say, it is no more than an airy suggestion — like a gentle breeze out of distant delicatessens.
At other times, however, it is close to overwhelming.
There is no news subject which will bring out the Jew in The New York Times more surely than the five-letter word, Spain — unless it be the six-letter word, Franco. Spain, ever since 1492, when it expelled all the Jews within its Catholic borders, has been a favorite target for harangues in the ghettos of every nation. The Times’ Spanish policy is a Manhattan version of the same. And when a Catholic employee of the Times had the integrity to report the truth about Spain during that country’s fight against Communism twenty years ago, he soon found himself out of a job.
The Times’ editorials never tire of warning against the dangers of friendship with Franco. He should not get one cent of our money, the paper said, when the United States Senate voted to give the Generalissimo a loan in 1950. It was around this same time that Franco was charged (by the scholarly, reliable The New York Times) with having provided refueling stations for Nazi submarines. A resentful American naval attache in Spain demanded that the Times prove its charge. An embarrassed Mr. Sulzberger had no proof to offer.
In a statement issued by Sign magazine in May of 1950, the Passionist Fathers made perhaps the most pithy published summary of The New York Times’ attitude toward Franco. “It has a special brand of distilled venom for him,” they said. “This venom spills over into every line of reporting that comes from its Spanish correspondents, reporting which is scandalously colored even by tawny standards.”
There is little ground for assuming that because The New York Times has consistently detested Franco, the most successful anti-Communist in Europe, it must therefore be a pro-Communist paper. The Times’ position on Communism is that of so many other wealthy White Jews. Being wealthy and White, they automatically go on record as opposed to Communism. But, being Jewish, they invariably find there are Party members right in their own household. In the case of the Times, it took a full Congressional investigation to turn up the Reds on the payroll. When the Senate’s Internal Security Subcommittee was identifying Communists in the newspaper field, 14 out of the 18 subpoenaed to its public session were, or had lately been, employees of The New York Times.
The investigation brought to light the previous existence of a Red monthly called Better Times, published by “Communist Party units of The New York Times.” Testimony did not disclose where the Better Times staff had got their supplies of paper stock, but they might confidently have expected that Mr. Sulzberger himself would have supplied it, had they ever run low. Sulzberger had done as much for that most noted of party publications, the Daily Worker. In an editorial on March 11, 1947, The New York Times boasted that it had delivered 16 tons of its own newsprint to the Daily Worker staff in order to keep those needy Communists in business. The Times justified its action with a hearty rendering of that popular Masonic hymn, “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Which any thinking reader must have taken to mean: Mr. Sulzberger would rather be shot down on Forty-second Street than deny the Communists a chance to win over New Yorkers to the Moscow Line.
The Christian line, however, has a way of upsetting The New York Times particularly when there is a movement afoot to protect some Christian value. A campaign to boycott an obscene or blasphemous motion picture, for example, will bring the Times rushing to the defense of the poor, persecuted movie industry. Cardinal Spellman found this out not so long ago when he went to war against that notorious, Jewish-backed film, The Miracle.
Yet, when fellow-Jews are involved, the Times can blithely abandon its crusade for uncensored entertainment. It had not a syllable of criticism for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith when those Jewish terrorists conducted a nation-wide boycott of the film based on Dickens’ Oliver Twist. And it clapped loud approval when the Jews of West Germany picketed a theater which was showing a movie produced by a man with alleged anti-Jewish leanings.
Like most Jews, The New York Times has had to defend itself from the apprehensions of those wiser Americans who doubt whether any Jew, White or Red, can ever take a serious interest in our country and in the preservation of its institutions. On several occasions, the Times has protested that it can and does. But in this matter, as in so many others, it sometimes forgets.
An editorial dated April 8, 1953, revealed just how little The New York Times is concerned about America as we have known it, and citizenship as we have enjoyed it under the Constitution. In pointing out what it said were the dangers of the proposed “Bricker Amendment” — a resolution which purports to safeguard our country against foreign control by the United Nations — the Times wrote the following astounding paragraph: “The resolution is dangerous because it forbids any treaty that would allow any foreign power or any international organization (meaning the U. N. or one of its agencies) to control the constitutional rights of American citizens within the United States ‘or any other matter essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the United States.’ ”
Going back over this statement, the patient reader will confirm that what the Times has so awkwardly said is that (1) it is “dangerous” to keep the U. N. from interfering with our rights as Americans; (2) it is “dangerous” to leave matters of domestic jurisdiction in the hands of our own locally-known and locally-elected representatives.
This casual proposal of revolution certainly puts the Times in the non-nationalist camp; but, here again, an accommodation in policy will be made where the Jews are concerned. Jewish nationalism (the Zionist plan for the rape of the Holy Land) comes off in the Times as a lofty and laudable venture — one which the paper, in its measured fashion, has been only too happy to promote.
Last November 17, the Times carried a typical promotion item. An editorial was devised in which all the Times-reading world was at last supposed to be given the inside story on why the Arab leaders do not like the Israeli Jews. The “real opposition,” said the Times, “is to the democratic and economic features of Israel. These groups simply do not want an efficient western-style economy in Arabia.”
The Times presented this pat little summary as though the Arabs were resentful of some hypothetical Utopia off on the dunes of the Sahara. The “western-style economy” which is currently driving the Arabs mad is, of course, the one which the Jews have already set up — on Arab-owned farms and in Arab-owned towns — and out of which the “efficient” Israelis have already expelled over 900,000 rightful Arab residents.
There remains a further unmentioned reason why Israel through Arab eyes is such a loathsome prospect. Scattered throughout the Middle East, in the Arab countries, in the refugee camps, in the State of Israel itself, there live tens of thousands of that once-proud community, the Catholics of Palestine. With them, the issue is much more resolved than the Times could possibly imagine: Our Lord’s Holy Land has been betrayed into the hands of His crucifiers; there will be divine vengeance for this betrayal; it will not be long in coming.
And, we might add, in the spirit of Catholic Palestine, that when this pending vengeance finally falls, the crash will be a resounding one indeed, in all of Israel — and in Times Square.
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
May, 1958
MONSIGNOR ELLIS IN WONDERLAND
Chapter I —
It is quite reasonable to assume that there are some of our readers who have never heard of the Right Reverend Monsignor John Tracy Ellis. This tri-nominated cleric makes his home at Caldwell Hall, Catholic University, Washington, D. C., and from a comfortable history chair at that address issues scholarly attacks on fellow Catholics.
To date, his most publicized assault has been one aimed at the American Catholic educational system. “The weakest aspect of the Church in this country,” says Monsignor Ellis, “lies in its failure to produce national leaders and to exercise commanding influence in intellectual circles.” This statement was first made three years ago and, in subsequent talks and articles, Monsignor Ellis has further indicted our schools and colleges; so that, now, nearly every Catholic educator in the country has taken sides on the matter.
Monsignor Ellis’ most outspoken allies have been Father Gustave Weigel, S. J., of Woodstock College (“The general Catholic community in America does not know what scholarship is.”) and Father John Cavanaugh, C. S. C. , lately president of Notre Dame (“Where are the Catholic Salks, Oppenheimers, Einsteins?”).
Aroused for a variety of motives, and in varying degrees of intensity, the opponents of Monsignor Ellis have far outnumbered his champions. The Archbishop of Saint Paul, for one, is quite content to forego a few Einsteins and Oppenheimers and rejoice in the knowledge that “our schools have never turned out an Alger Hiss or a Julius Rosenberg.” While, down in Manhattan, the chronically charming Park Avenue pastor, Father Robert I. Gannon, S. J., former head of Fordham, complains that his moneyed parishioners have seized upon the Ellis arguments with glee, and are now preparing, with whitened consciences, to send their boys to Saint Paul’s and Yale. Father Gannon further conjectures that “What Monsignor Ellis apparently feels we need is more Monsignor Ellises.”
An added impetus hit the controversy when Father Cavanaugh, who measures the success of Notre Dame pedagogy by the number of alumni who hit the five-figure salary brackets, complained that we do not have enough Catholics listed in Who’s Who. (Of the Big Three — Ellis, Weigel, Cavanaugh — Father Cavanaugh is himself the only one who gets a listing.)
An answer to this came from Father Hugh Halton, O. P. , the beleaguered Catholic chaplain at Princeton, who countered that, “The criticism itself reveals an appalling ignorance of the nature and administration of Who’s Who in America ... ” Furthermore, Father Halton added, we should be working to turn out Catholic intellectuals — who will set their sights not so much on Who’s Who in America, but rather on Who’s Who in Heaven.”
Mindful of the query from the lady in Duluth who wrote, “Why is it that The Point is never for either side, but for some third position?” we hasten to concur that Father Halton has here begun to put the issue — Catholic education — in its true perspective.
Back in 1929, Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical on The Christian Education of Youth, wrote, “Since education consists essentially in preparing man for what he must be and what he must do here below in order to attain the sublime end for which he was created, it is clear that there can be no true education which is not wholly directed to man’s last end ... ” If this unanswerable reasoning of the Holy Father were ever adopted by Monsignor Ellis, and ever truly adhered to by his critics, there would indeed be some changes forthcoming in American Catholic education. The “last end” of Catholic scholarship would cease to be the admission of Catholics to learned academic societies and the acceptance of Catholic college graduates on an equal plane with those from the secular universities. We could stand free, to be a standard unto ourselves — with a two-thousand-year tradition to live up to.
To inaugurate this new program with some resounding bangs here in New England, we could promptly pull all the priests out of Harvard and Yale classrooms. We could dispatch a contingent of canonical companions to the corridors of Boston University and gather up all the Catholic Sisters who are studying there under Methodist ministers, Zionist sociologists, and Laskiite economists. We could slam our grade school doors in the face of those Anti-defamation League agents who are always turning up on the front steps, wondering how Jewish themes — and particularly the accounts of the Crucifixion — are being handled in our parochial school text-books. And if we really meant business, we could give back our federal education subsidies and our private foundation grants, thus freeing ourselves from the tangle of Masonic and Jewish strings that are attached to such hand-outs.
All these would be surface things, and just beginnings; but the spirit would be wildly contagious. We could make Catholic education the most compelling, exciting, attractive enterprise in the country. It would mean an end to the present frustration of educating for Cadillacs and winding up with Fords. We could educate for sanctity, as we are meant and equipped to, and present the Church and the nation with a New World crop of Augustines and Bedes and Bellarmines, who would be studied, and prayed to, long after Harvard has folded and Who’s Who has dropped out of print.
Chapter II —
The pique of Monsignor Ellis and his allies over the present state of Catholic mental development prompts us to have a look at the non-Catholic “intellectual leaders” whom the American faithful are being encouraged to imitate. Since these mutually acclaimed potentates are mainly men of science (“Salks, Oppenheimers, Einsteins”), we shall limit ourselves to a study of the ways and habits of this sect.
To begin with, it should be noted that modern scientists, by and large, are men of gross unintelligence. In view of the prodigies lately wrought by them, this judgment may seem a little outrageous. We can hear someone snapping at us: “Let’s see you shoot a ten-pound hunk of aluminum into outer space!” The unexpected truth, however, is that shooting a ten-pound hunk of aluminum into outer space, or devising an explosive force that could pulverize New York, or transmitting the likeness of a human face, in color, across a continent, are not necessarily the achievements of great intellects. They are the results of experimentation, of hundreds and thousands and millions of tests and re-tests. And it is not brilliance of mind that is required to produce them, but dogged patience; plus the ability to observe carefully, to measure, to count, to note what causes produce what effects, and to link one usable discovery to another, till gradually, finally, the Great Thing is arrived at.
“The conquests of physical science,” the indomitable Hilaire Belloc has written, “were due to minute and extensive observation conducted by vast numbers of men and, therefore, for the most part, by the unintelligent. Science attracted some few men of high culture and some even (much fewer) of strong reasoning power; but in themselves, mere observation and comparison, the framing of hypotheses and the testing of them by experiment, need no intellectual qualities above the lowest and are therefore an obvious occupation for those who despise or do not grasp the use of reason. It has even been maintained that the ceaseless practice of exact measurement dulls the brain.”
The scientists might have kept their intellectual deficiencies a secret, had they stayed within the protective covering of their laboratories. But the public lured them out. Dazzled by the magnitude of scientific achievement, Americans have decided that the men who can produce such marvels as atom bombs and striped toothpaste must surely be the wisest and cleverest of all men, and supremely qualified to speak on every subject. The scientists have modestly agreed, and proceeded to do so. Ranging freely over the affairs of God and man, they have regaled us with their notions on everything from United States foreign policy to the miracles at Lourdes. In most instances, when those opinions are not flagrantly anti-Christian, they are notoriously anti-American.
But still, bad as they are when prattling their opinions on matters of religion or philosophy or politics or art, the scientists are at their impossible worst when they invade such territories with the methods and tools of their profession. We are smilingly assured, for instance, by a tin-eared physicist, that the “only” difference between Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony and the Third Avenue El is in the length and frequency of the sound waves that strike the ear. Or, not content with a gratuitous denial of the Virgin Birth of Our Lord, a biologist announces that “careful and extended scientific observation” has proven that the event was impossible.
In the light of all this, no one should be surprised at the consequences suffered by those Catholics who have tried to temper their Faith and intelligence to the demands of science. For the most part, such Catholics are not scientists themselves, but scholars. That is, they do not formulate scientific hypotheses but, once formulated, they accept them gratefully. Moreover, their studies of Scripture, history, etc. are built strictly upon the scientific method.
“Science does not bow down before precedent, nor custom, nor dogma,” a University of Chicago professor has declared. Anxious to merit the regard of such men, the Catholic scholars of the moment have likewise been unbending in the face of Catholic tradition. They will not, they want it understood, be swept off their feet by the mere fact that a belief has been held or a devotion cherished in the past. If their researches turn up an adverse “authority,” nothing less than a Papal mandate can keep them from denying the belief or disparaging the devotion.
The following is a sobering instance of this scholarship. It is from the account of the Holy House of Loreto (Our Lady’s home in Nazareth; miraculously transported to Italy in 1294) given in Donald Attwater’s A Catholic Dictionary: “The tradition has been approved by many popes and saints and numerous miracles are recorded there; but the most recent research tends to show that the tradition is mistaken and rests on some unexplained misunderstanding.”
Catholic scholars have been especially zealous of late to show that the recent exposures of fake fossils (e.g., “the Piltdown Man”) have not shaken their belief in the bestial ancestry of man. These Catholic friends of evolution were recently given a calling down by His Eminence Ernesto Cardinal Ruffini, in a front-page article in L’Osservatore Romano. Asking whether the evidences of science have given any good reason for abandoning the “traditional conviction” about the origin of the human body, narrated in the book of Genesis, the Cardinal answered, “We do not think so.” He asked all Catholics to hold firm to their belief in the creation of Adam from the slime of the earth, which is “the obvious sense of the Bible.”
The Bible’s “obvious sense” has no more determined American adversary than the Very Reverend Francis Connell, C.Ss.R., of Catholic University. In the modest tones of the scholarship jargon, Father Connell is currently developing an outer space “theology” which blasphemously allows for other Divine Births from other Blessed Virgins. Defiant of all previous Catholic teaching, and of an explicit condemnation by Pope Saint Zachary, Father Connell teaches the possibility of numbers of other man-inhabited worlds. And for good measure, he throws in his theories about additional races of men that may have occurred here in this world, before Adam.
Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, the founder of Father Connell’s own Redemptorist Order, has condemned at length this theory of Pre-Adamites in chapter thirteen of his History of the Heresies. And in speaking of a heretic who espoused the notion, Saint Alphonsus tells us: “He fell into this error because he rejected tradition.”
When some future saintly historian is reviewing the errors of the twentieth century, we trust that Father Connell will be dealt with as neatly and decisively.
Chapter III —
Beneath all the discussions of science and scholarship and intellectual inferiority that Monsignor Ellis and his friends have occasioned, there lies a more basic problem. It is this: that American Catholics need a clear view of their proper relation to the non-Catholic society around them.
Whenever the subject threatens, the Ellisites step forward with a loud chorus of “Let’s liberate ourselves from the Catholic ghetto we are in!” As it is well calculated to do, this cry leaves all the conservatives standing in the back row, burdened with the impossible label, “ghetto-Catholics.”
In this situation, the best answer is the disarming declaration, “Yes, we do want a Catholic ghetto.” And while the liberals are catching their breath, we will have time to explain that the kind of ghetto we want ought really to have a brand new name. For ghettos, historically speaking, are areas of enforced confinement, however extended or comfortable they may become. They were, and still would be, invaluable for keeping the Jew in his proper place in a Christian state. But they are hardly adequate situations for a community of Christians who are bound by the Gospel charge to be the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world.” It is Our Lord Himself, in fact, who defines for us what the Catholic community must be. He tells us in chapter five of Saint Matthew that we must stand out and apart like a “city built upon a mountain peak” and that from such a prominence we must let our “light shine before men.”
Clearly, this ideal was the one that set up the struggling young Church of the catacombs and saw it established on the ruins of decadent Rome. It was from this height that the Catholic community won the barbarians and lifted them to itself by preaching and example. It was a full realization of this “city on a mountain” that gave us the high Middle Ages. And it was a relaxation of our ideal, a coming down halfway to meet the pagan values of the Renaissance, that unsettled us so generally at the time of the Protestant Revolt. And we have been going downhill ever since.
We agree with Monsignor Ellis, Father Weigel, and Father Cavanaugh that our schools and colleges have fallen upon dark days. They are sharing a fate which has hit the Catholic community in every department. But the solution does not lie outside us. Association with the pitch-blackness of secular education, its norms and its methods, will not enhance our present dim achievement. We, not they, have the commission to be the light of the world. And when we begin once more to act as though we think so, we will be on our way back up the mountain.
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
June, 1958
ANTI-CHRISTIANS IN CAPITAL LETTERS
To be literately informed about America’s Jewish problem, it is not necessary to know Hebrew or Yiddish. All that is required, initially, is a familiarity with the English alphabet. The following primer of English letters with Jewish meanings will serve for illustration.
A.J.C.
The initials A.J.C. mean the American Jewish Committee. By reason of wealth, prestige, and a degree of antiquity, the American Jewish Committee, and not the American Jewish Congress, has the prior and proper claim to these three identifying letters. The American Jewish Committee has always included in its membership the top Jews of the country. The American Jewish Congress is a late arrival that attracts the coarser element and takes the bolder public stands. The consuming preoccupation of American Jewish Congress members is endless courtroom activity aimed at ridding the public schools of Christmas observances, keeping business places open on Sunday, forcing prominent resort owners to take in Jews, repealing laws which keep Christian babies away from Jewish foster parents — in general, supplying all the close-range, bare-fisted pummeling that a Christian society must get before the infidel can take over that society with confidence.
The American Jewish Committee stands a little apart from these American Jewish Congress activities, but not disinterestedly so. The American Jewish Committee works for the same ends on a higher level. Typical of the Committee’s projects is the one outlined on page 57 of the 1954 A.J.C. Budget Report. “New efforts will be made during the coming year to seek the publication of revised editions of Catholic textbooks through the good offices of the Catholic Biblical Association.”
Although the American Jewish Committee’s first complaint upon examining parochial school texts is always aimed at the Church’s teaching that the Jews killed Christ, A.J.C. had no intention of stopping there. Its magazine, Commentary, in May of 1956, indicated an even more basic “revision” which the American Jewish Committee is building up to. Clearly, from the following statement, the determined members of the American Jewish Committee will not rest until the Blessed Trinity, no less, has been blotted out of our school books. Says the A.J.C.: “The synagogue will not conceal its conviction that, necessary as the spread of Christianity may have been, it presents in its traditional formulations but an intermediate step between paganism and the ultimate acceptance of Jewish monotheism.”
Z.O.A.
The letters Z.O.A. stand for the Zionist Organization of America — that powerhouse for energizing the patriotic potential of American Jews. There is, however, one peculiarity about this endeavor, one respect in which it differs from nationalism of the George Washington variety: though flourishing in America, it is inspired by loyalty not to this nation, but to another. Clamorous and irrepressible, the Zionist Organization of America has stormed through the country demanding that American Jews go all out for the new Jewish State in Palestine.
Sir Leon Simon, late chairman of the Board of Governors of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, trying to answer the question, “What is a Jew?” indicates the premise on which the Zionist Organization of America bases its operations. “To be a Jew,” he says, “is not to be a member of a Church; it is primarily to stand in a certain psychological and emotional relationship to the Jewish collectivity — call it people, brotherhood, clan, or what you will.” And, from America, Jewish Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis gives the more pointed information: “Jews are a distinctive nationality, of which every Jew, whatever his country, his station, or his shade of belief, is necessarily a member.”
Because they are a nation apart, reserving their loyalty to themselves, American Jews have fallen in heartily with the Zionist Organization of America a plan to make them defenders and promoters of a political Jewish State. Nevertheless, Z.O.A. feels that still more ought to be done. “We must expand our educational activities,” cries Louis Falk, Vice-President of the Organization. “We must strengthen the youth movement and spread Hebrew education throughout the land; support institutions in which the teaching is carried out in our spirit; improve the existing Zionist Summer Camps and build new ones under ZOA’s auspices; organize a net of evening courses throughout the country, headed by professional (Zionistically-speaking) pedagogues ... ”
And while the business of turning the United States into a vast Zionist training center is proceeding, the Zionist Organization of America Bulletin offers its readers this interim reminder: “Only an alert and militant Zionist Organization can swing American public opinion to come to Israel’s aid and exert pressure on our Administration of the kind which proved successful in 1947 and 1948, and without which the State would not have come into being ... ”
U.J.A.
U.J.A. means United Jewish Appeal. There is no gesture by which American Jews so feelingly pledge their allegiance to the Jewish State as when each year they reach into their pockets and hand over a portion of their finances to the United Jewish Appeal. With the help of full-page advertisements in the principal American newspapers and garish banners fluttering over the streets of our largest cities, U.J.A. has managed to persuade Jews and some others to reach in and pull out, since 1949, the staggering sum of one billion dollars. The United Jewish Appeal keeps it no secret that 90 per cent of its donations are used for supporting and aggrandizing the Jewish State. These American funds currently provide more than one-third of the State’s annual income (with other free hand-outs, like the $715,000,000 in “reparations” from West Germany supplying most of the rest). Since all contributions to the United Jewish Appeal are deductible from federal income tax, this means that the billion dollars sent to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem has been diverted from the United States Treasury. (Besides accepting this loss cheerily, Washington has also been talked into giving the Jewish State outright several hundred million dollars.)
It is not likely that the near future will see any relaxation of the United Jewish Appeal’s money-grabbing efforts. The Jewish State still needs, and badly, the financial support of its American citizens-in-exile; it has some projects in mind that will be costly. Any American Jew who does not know what these projects are, is out of touch with his brothers across the sea; for as the influential New York rabbi, Dr. Louis Israel Newman says: “There is scarcely an intelligent Israeli today who believes that the present boundary lines are permanent, or that the hill country of Cis-Jordania is to be forever separated from Israeli territory.”
A.D.L
When it first saw the light of day, nearly a half century ago in Chicago, the Anti-Defamation League publicly promised itself a long and fruitful career. And this cockiness in the cradle has been more than justified through the years that followed. Fawning American Jews have no rosier tale to pass down to posterity than the story of the rise and rule of the A.D.L.
Actually, there was no marvel about it. The Anti-Defamation League had to succeed. Its parent was the wealthy and world-wide Order of B’nai B’rith, the exclusively Jewish branch of Freemasonry. All of B’nai B’rith’s extensive operational set-up was at the Anti-Defamation League’s disposal. Every local lodge established a special A.D.L. committee. And every individual lodge-member became a spare-time A.D.L. agent. It was not that he was forced to. He was delighted to. For the Anti-Defamation League was the answer to every American Jew’s dream. Here at last was an organization that would take the curse off the Jews. Here was an organization that would fight for the little Jew and free him from the stigma of being a “Hebe” and a “Yid”; that would get his son into the Gentile colleges, his wife into the Gentile summer resorts, and himself into the “exclusive” Gentile country clubs. The Anti-Defamation League meant dynamite to blast away the last remaining Christian barriers — and every Jew was chafing to light some local fuses.
Assured of this wholesale support, the Anti-Defamation League pursued its campaign with swift vengeance. Immediately, public men and public officials felt the pressure. Congressmen and newspaper editors were forced into line. Soon, the A.D.L. was pushing its way confidently into every traditional American sanctuary. The class-room, the living room, even the parish pulpit came under the scrutiny of Anti-Defamation League investigators. Any hint, anywhere, that Jews were being treated the way Jews have always been treated in Christian society brought down the mighty wrath of Jewish Masonry. Snooping, threats, libel, blackmail, boycott, and the masterful smear technique leveled the few recalcitrants.
As a pledge of their success in breaking down our country’s healthy and Christian aloofness to Jews, the Anti-Defamation League has expanded its program in late years to fight for other Jewish objectives. It has exerted its gestapo energies in promoting the United Nations, in panning Senator McCarthy, in pushing the Christ-less Brotherhood religion, in protesting the prosecution of Communists, in propagandizing for the State of Israel, in penetrating and polluting anti-Communist groups, and, most effectively, in plotting the present “civil rights” agitation in the South.
Working elbow-to-elbow with the N.A.A.C.P. (the Jew-headed, Jew-financed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), the Anti-Defamation League has had a part in every phase of the program to rob the South of States’ Rights and set black man against white man in areas where, for generations, they have lived in harmony.
N.C.C.J.
The N.C.C.J., the National Conference of Christians and Jews, is one Jewish agency that does invite Gentiles to join. But calling it the National Conference of Christians and Jews is putting the cart before the horse. For it is the latter-named members that make the wheels go round, and the former that get taken for a ride.
At its start, some thirty years ago, the National Conference of Christians and Jews directed all its energies to snuffing out one particularly flagrant Catholic belief. Dr. George Lamsa, one of the founders, says (in a recent B’nai B’rith Messenger), “the group was organized originally to clear up the Christian misconception that the Jews were responsible for the Crucifixion of Jesus ... ”
“Clearing up” this plain fact of New Testament teaching is still a National Conference of Christians and Jews goal — but not an exclusive or explicit one. The avowed purpose of the agency today is simply to discourage prejudice, to promote Brotherhood, “to build better relationships among men of all religions, races, and nationalities.” This sweetness-and-light approach has beguiled American Catholic support in a way the anti-New Testament campaign would never have done. Priests and parishioners alike have set out with a vengeance to “get along” with non-Catholics and to persuade non-Catholics to “get along” with them.
Under the spell of N.C.C.J. applause (any stuttering statement of the approved platitudes gets hailed as a masterpiece of cogent thought and brilliant expression), these cooperating Catholics have trampled recklessly over the dogmas of the Faith. They have agreed to call all men sons of God, whether baptized or not. They have conceded that true charity for non-Catholics is not to invite them into the Church, but to assure them that they have the affection of Catholics while they remain outside.
Father John A. O’ Brien, who is a co-chairman of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, has recently voiced concern at the “enormous leakage” of Catholics going out of the Church and at the mere trickle of new converts coming in. He advised that a program be initiated “with the utmost urgency” to remedy the situation.
We should like to suggest such a program. It is the one enacted in England in 1955, when the Holy See ordered all Catholics in that country to withdraw at once from the Council of Christians and Jews, N.C.C.J.’s British counterpart. (The response of English Catholics to the Holy Father’s wishes was immediate and heartening. Led by His Eminence, the late Cardinal Griffin, clergy and laity alike severed all ties with the British interfaith Council.)
We propose that American Catholics anticipate a Vatican mandate by quitting, voluntarily and at once, all National Conference of Christians and Jews affiliations and activities. We think Father O’ Brien will be pleased to discover that when life outside the Church is not being lavished with priestly praise, Catholics may be less inclined to leak out, and non-Catholics more inclined to pour in.
— U —
The single letter U, enclosed in a small circle, is the most frequently used, but least publicized, of the Jews’ alphabetical formulas. It appears on the labels of food-store items and means that the product is Kosher. A list of these U-stamped commodities is published by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, who advise that products so listed “receive the constant inspection of and are passed upon by the Rabbinical Council of America. Consumers are cautioned,” the advice continues, “to make sure that the U seal is on the label of every food product.”
The rabbis have a long way to go before “every” food package in the land will bear their Kosher code-mark. But they have made a strong beginning. The current list of nearly 500 items runs from apple sauce to wine, and includes forty kinds of Kosher baby food. It includes all of the following detergents and cleansers: Super Suds, Ad, Glim, Fab, Dash, All, Cheer, Vel, Kirkmans, Dreft, Joy, Oxydol, Tide, Blue Duz, Trend, Brillo products, Comet, Spic & Span, Old Dutch Cleanser, Cameo Cleanser, Soilax, Bab-O, Ajax, New Octagon Cleanser. And the H. J. Heinz Company, makers of the famous “57 Varieties,” boasts that “There are more than forty Heinz foods that bear on their labels the U seal of endorsement.”
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
July, 1958
THE PROBLEM OF MONSIGNOR RONALD KNOX
A Painful Post-Mortem
The Times of London is not normally given to eulogies of Catholic priests. But when Monsignor Ronald Arbuthnot Knox died last August, at the age of 69, The Times paid its respects in 1,500 words of deeply-touched obituary (“one of the individually great in his generation ... wittiest Churchman in England since Sydney Smith ... ”). The American Time of Henry Luce is likewise no friend of Catholic convictions. But when Monsignor Knox died, Time offered a glowing, misty-eyed tribute (“Britain’s outstanding Roman Catholic scholar, most versatile writer, and gentlest man ... ”)
With such extravagances the Masonic world saluted the memory of a man who, through a long and busy life, had served it well.
It might be argued that Ronald Knox did not always know what grave damage he was doing to the Church when he sat down to his typewriter; but there is no disputing the reality of that damage — or its lasting effect. For despite his recent passing, Monsignor Knox as an influence is still very much alive. Wherever English is spoken and the Catholic Faith held, from London to Los Angeles, there the cold touch of his prose is still being felt.
With all the gusto of a British imperialist, Monsignor Knox has sallied into every field of Catholic utterance, declaring his supremacy in the name of the Queen’s English. He has discoursed on apologetics to Oxford students (In Soft Garments); he has analyzed the Holy Sacrifice for schoolgirls (The Mass in Slow Motion); he has developed a theology from his newspaper readings (God and the Atom); he has translated and commented on the Holy Bible. And the effect of all this has been everywhere the same. When the tide of Knoxious eloquence has receded, Catholics who have left themselves exposed to it find their footing in the Faith less sure than it had been. They are amused — perhaps — but troubled. They are beset with doubts and indecisions. They are, ultimately, left in that confused state that the Masonic enemies of the Church (and their Jewish progenitors) rejoice to see: when they are ready to surrender the uniqueness and certitude of Catholic doctrine in favor of some anti-Christian inter-faith creed.
When the Apostles preached to the crowds of Jerusalem on the first Pentecost, they spoke with such fervor and excitement that some of their listeners accused them of being “full of new wine.” That first Apostolic utterance, on the birthday of the Church, set a precedent. The news of the Gospel has been spread ever since by men with tongues of fire.
Ronald Knox finds this tradition of ardor most distasteful. He himself has never been able to get worked up about the Faith, and he wishes that others wouldn’t. A few years before his death, Oxford University Press published a history of the heresies that was written by Monsignor Knox to support his let’s-be-gentlemen ideas. This volume, the fruit of a lifetime’s study and composition, is titled Enthusiasm — after the villain of the piece.
It is the Monsignor’s novel contention that heresies are fostered not by those least anxious to lead Catholic lives, but by those most anxious. “You have a clique, an elite, of Christian men and (more importantly) women, who are trying to live a less worldly life than their neighbors ... ” That, he says, is how the trouble begins. In discussing the heretics, however, Monsignor Knox is characteristically careful to express no enthusiasm for orthodoxy. He was, as he puts it, “more concerned to find out why they thought as they did than to prove it was wrong ... there is so much right on both sides.”
There is, in Ronald Knox’s unenthusiastic writing, a tireless determination to be off-handedly clever — as though he were perpetually trying out for the role of chaplain in a Noel Coward play. Actually, such mannerism is necessary to Monsignor Knox. He hopes it will cover a multitude of deficiencies in his training (less than two years in the seminary) and the conspicuous flaws in his faith. For illustration, we propose the following excerpts from one Knox volume, Off the Record.
Here is his attitude toward the Holy See: “The (papal) pronouncements are the expression of that (inner) life, and an inadequate expression of it — perhaps particularly so when they are compiled by Italians, with their vice for the superlative ...” And he adds: “Don’t let piety cheat us out of the reflection that Roman documents are always meant to be interpreted in the most liberal sense.”
Here is his studied burlesque of Indulgences: “I can’t see why Almighty God shouldn’t indulgence all sorts of pious practices which aren’t indulgenced by the Church; shouldn’t give you or me the equivalent of a seven years indulgence when we get up to make room for an old lady in a bus.”
This is his adroit depreciation of the Church’s belief in the resurrection of the body: “I do not see why God should not give me a Resurrection Body which is continuous with the body in which I write now, without having to search round for bits and pieces of the multitudinous matter which has, in my time, gone to the making of me.”
Here is his account of Judas’ betrayal: “O felix culpa, the Church says of it; it was a blessed crime — the paradox reflects the mystery.” (Which anyone familiar with the Missal knows is ponderous ignorance. The Church says felix culpa, happy fault, of the Fall of Adam, which necessitated Our Lord’s coming. She never says it of the sin of Judas, which effected Our Lord’s death on the cross.)
And here is his summary statement on Our Lady: “ ... most of the literature about her and the popular devotions connected with her leave me cold.”
In 1912, at the age of twenty-four, Ronald Knox became a full-fledged Protestant minister, and chaplain to the Church of England students at Oxford. Five years later, he entered the Catholic Church; two years after that, he was ordained a priest. In 1926, he was back at Oxford, this time as the Catholic chaplain. During the next thirteen years, Father Knox produced a bulk of jaunty literature, both sacred and profane; established a reputation for proficiency in polemics and shorter verse forms; and received the title of Right Reverend Monsignor.
Monsignor Knox’s departure from Oxford, in 1939, was the successful culmination of a well-laid plot — not on Oxford’s part, but on the Monsignor’s. For years, the dream had possessed him of making a new translation of the Bible into English. Such a text might well have a revolutionary effect, coming from Oxford’s limerick and detective story writing chaplain, and thus the project could not be rushed into.
To prepare the ground, there appeared, in 1936, The Holy Bible, Abridged and Re-Arranged, by Ronald A. Knox, which, while using the traditional English of the Douai-Rheims version, set a sizeable precedent for innovation. Monsignor Knox carved up the Bible to fit a pattern that, he explained, made the Holy Scriptures, “more brief, more connected, and more intelligible.” The Monsignor’s proposal that God had run a bit low on continuity and intelligibility when He inspired the Bible found surprisingly little opposition. The Knoxian “feeler” served its master well. It was really only a matter of months before the Catholic hierarchy of England and Wales had been apprised of Monsignor Knox’s further biblical ambitions, had approached him on the subject, and had, to no one’s astonishment, received his modest assent to put the whole Bible, Saint Jerome’s Vulgate, into whatever sort of English he might care to choose.
Lord Acton’s estate, Aldenham Park, in Shropshire, was offered as a suitably cloistered and comfortable site for Monsignor Knox’s undertaking. There, with typewriter in hand, pipe in jaw, and Oxford very much in mind, he turned out an average of twenty-four translated verses a day. The New Testament was completed first and appeared in print in 1944; the Old Testament, two volumes, followed in 1949 and 1950. Subsequent editions have put all the Knox translation into a conventional single volume: Genesis to Apocalypse, the whole gamut of Divine revelation, Knoxized, in one flip-through-able book.
And just in case you miss the spirit of the work (if Job still seems to you more patient than bored, Saint Peter more loveable than laughable), Monsignor Knox has provided ample notes in the margins of the text and three additional volumes of depreciatory comment.
In a previous issue, The Point has decried Monsignor Knox’s malicious and willful attack on the Blessed Virgin Mary, in his translation of the sacred text from Isaias, Ecce Virgo concipiet et pariet filium: which can only mean, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and shall bear a son.” In a complete sell-out to a centuries-old Talmudic tradition, Monsignor Knox refused to use Saint Jerome’s Latin or even the Greek texts for this verse. He went to the post-Crucifixion Babylonian rabbis for their version, and came up with, “Maid shall be brought to bed of a son.” This rendering, which takes all portent out of the prophesied event — meant to be a wondrous sign from God — completely discredits the inviolate virginity of Our Lord’s Mother and the virginal manner of His birth.
There is further abuse waiting for Our Blessed Lady in Monsignor Knox’s marginal note on chapter two, verse four of Saint John’s Gospel. In that place, where the marriage feast at Cana is told, the Monsignor has Our Lord rebuke His Mother (after she informs Him that their host has run out of wine) with the haughty rejoinder, “Woman, leave me alone, do not interfere with me.” There is no grammatical justification for this. But there is a well-known heretical precedent. Tyndale did it in his Reformation Bible, and Cranmer copied it in his. They thus established the pattern which all of Protestant England, and Monsignor Knox, it appears, afterwards followed.
Writing on chapter twenty-two of Saint Luke’s Gospel, Monsignor Knox says, “Luke omits the story of Mary annointing our Lord’s feet, presumably because he was not certain that he had not already told it.” An indefinite number of such quotes, from Monsignor Knox’s Bible commentaries, might be strung out to display every shade of Knoxian cynicism, smartness, snobbery, derision and doubt. But that would leave no room to introduce the Monsignor’s particularly burning malice toward the Gospel of Saint John.
It is the Church’s clear teaching, codified in the Councils of Florence, Trent, and Vatican, that God is the true author of all that Saint John, or any of the Bible’s human writers, has recorded. Pope Leo XIII summarizes this teaching by saying that the books of the Bible, “with all their parts, have been written under the dictation of the Holy Ghost.” This in no way deters Monsignor Knox from the following description of Saint John at work on his inspired Gospel: “He will recall, as if conjuring them up with difficulty, details about names and places and relationships which have nothing much to do with the story. He will give us little footnotes, as if to make sure we are following; often unnecessary, often delayed instead of being put in their proper place. He will remember fragments of a conversation, passing on from this utterance to that by mere association of memory, instead of giving us a reasoned precis of the whole. He will alternately assume that we know the story already, and narrate it in meticulous detail ... Probably no author but John could have begun his story in this topsy-turvy fashion ... But, as we have seen, this is the way in which John’s memory works.”
As the above comments are phrased, one might get the impression that Monsignor Knox thinks that Saint John (despite all the doting senility he ascribes to the Saint) actually wrote the Holy Gospel according to Saint John. Not so. “Saint John,” writes Knox, “never really sat down and wrote a Gospel; what we’ve got is the result of a series of Press Conferences, at which his disciples were plying him with questions all the time.” The series of reminiscences that were thus “elicited from him piecemeal” were later shuffled together, the Monsignor says, and made into the Fourth Gospel. And so it happens that Monsignor Knox, when he encounters something disagreeable to Monsignor Knox in the Gospel of Saint John, readily and without scruple blames those unknown disciples: “It looks as if their notes got muddled.”
A few weeks before his death, Monsignor Knox completed work on a new English translation of the autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower of Jesus. The book has just been published in this country and has been hailed as witness to the “abiding influence” of the late Monsignor.
Nothing, however, could be better calculated to show him up and finish him off than his current literary association with the Little Flower. For if ever there were antipodal personalities, they are Therese of the Child Jesus and Ronald Knox of Oxford. In clothing her thoughts with his words — adjusting her style to his standards, dressing up her images, enlarging her vocabulary — he has done his best to transform her into a stuffy, British, slightly less masculine, more pious version of himself. Typical example: Saint Therese writes, “I laugh now at some things I did” (Je ris maintenant de certaines choses.) Monsignor Knox elaborates this into, “It makes me laugh now to think what heavy weather I made over nothing at all.”
But in the end it is Therese, her brightness and clarity, who prevails, and Monsignor Knox who gets snowed under — as in his miserable attempt to portray her as an inferior theologian for having called Our Lady the “Divine Mother” of Our Lord. After correcting the text to read, “his own Mother,” Monsignor Knox adds the footnote: “The Saint by a slip of the pen has written ‘his Divine Mother.’ It is evident that she never revised these last few paragraphs.”
Among the scores of Saints who gave Our Lady that most fitting title, Divine Mother, and who showed no inclination to revise their paragraphs, were the following Doctors of the Universal Church: Saint Gregory the Great, Saint Bernard, Saint Ephrem, Saint Peter Damian, and Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori.
The Point ’s battle against the influence of Ronald Knox is a long-standing one. But we have lately determined to entrust its outcome to Saint Therese. During her last illness, this gentle French Carmelite exclaimed: “How happy I would have been to fight at the time of the Crusades, or later on to fight against the heretics.” Taking her at her word, and knowing her present influence at the court of Heaven, we confidently leave the problem of Monsignor Knox in her hands.
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
August, 1958
HE FOUGHT OUR ENEMIES AND KEPT THE FAITH
Tribute to a Courageous Contemporary
Last month’s issue will have driven home the fact that The Point does not care for the writings of Monsignor Ronald Arbuthnot Knox. But it might also have raised a question: Whose writings does The Point care for? Who is a Catholic — of our own day, not the Middle Ages — of whom The Point would say, “There is an authentic voice. There is a man with the Faith.”
This summer marks the fifth anniversary of the death of one such man: Monsignor Knox’s compatriot and contemporary, Hilaire Belloc.
From his first entrance into the public arena, Belloc made it clear where his allegiance lay. Standing for election to Parliament in 1906, he opened his campaign by announcing to the mainly-Protestant voters: “Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative.”
Belloc was elected, and re-elected, in 1910. But when a cabinet crisis necessitated an additional balloting that year, Belloc decided to leave Parliament for more fruitful fields. He had learned some valuable lessons during his four years as a legislator, and left a memorial of his stay in the form of a Sonnet Written in Dejection in the House of Commons. It concludes with the following sestet:
No question, issue, principle, or right;
No wit, no argument, nor no disdain:
No hearty quarrel: morning, noon, and night,
The old, dead, vulgar fossil drags its train;
The while three journalists and twenty Jews
Do with the country anything they choose.
Hilaire Belloc, in his role of defender of the Faith, had one genius in particular. It was his full, piercing realization of what it means to be a Catholic: of having fellowship not just with those who knelt beside him in his parish church but, equally, with Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas More and Charlemagne and the Crusaders. He saw the great sweep from Saint Peter to the present; the Church overriding the centuries; besieged but invincible; supreme; the mother of civilization; the Bride of Christ.
“The fiction that the Catholic Church is a sect,” he wrote, “like any of the various bodies around it in nations of Protestant culture, that She is a sect, like the Mormons, or the Baptists, or the Quakers, is nourished by a score of conventions; by that false phrase ‘the Churches’; by the offensive adjunct, ‘Roman’ — as though the Faith were but one fashion in a hundred Catholicisms, or as if Catholicism were a thing split into numerous factions, of Rome, Canterbury, Boston, and Timbuctoo! Yet the falsehood is so firmly fixed and so long established here that it has recently begun to affect the Catholic body itself. The position is half accepted by them, though in their hearts they know it is a lie. For the line of cleavage does not fall between the various groups, Catholic, Agnostic, Evangelical, or what not, but between the Catholic Church and all else. She is unique, and at issue with the world.”
Yet for all his sense of unity with the Catholic past, Belloc was no remote figure, withdrawn in dreams of lost triumphs. He was in the thick of the present, with interests as large as Christendom itself. The topics dealt with in his more than 150 published books give an idea of his range: history, travel, warfare, poetry, road-building, wine-making, farming, sailing. He knew every peak and plain of Europe almost as well as he knew his beloved southern England. He had journeyed on foot through Spain and France and Italy, across the Pyrenees and the Alps, visiting shrines and battlefields. When he was twenty-one, he had trekked from Philadelphia to San Francisco, making sketches of the American countryside as he went and exchanging these for his meals and nights’ lodging.
In college days, he had been president of the Oxford Union, almost legendary for his brilliance as a speaker; and though Oxford had assailed his Faith, as he mournfully owned, it had not entirely crushed it (once he had infuriated the dons giving an examination by placing prominently on his desk a statue of Our Lady). Later, with the encouragement of Elodie Hogan, the California girl who became his bride, he regained his Catholic loyalties full strength, and never lost them again. He was radically Catholic and incorrigibly human; ardent and enthusiastic; with strong enmities and fierce loves. (After Elodie died in 1914, he wore black for the rest of his life, never let her room be used again, and always traced a Sign of the Cross upon her door when he passed it.)
Belloc wrote with the swaggering confidence of a man who knows he is on the right side. His way of championing the Church was to stay on the offensive. “Thus, if you wish to undermine the false authority of false history,” he wrote, “it is not enough to expose particular misconceptions which have arisen from some ignorance of detail in the matter of Faith; if the man is an enemy of the Faith, then let his whole body of work be battered. Let him be fallen upon. Let it be argued from his bad judgment in particular affairs that his judgment in the main affair is also bad. If there is a lack of good faith in his method, let that be proved, not only by examples pertinent to religion, but also by examples which have nothing to do with the main quarrel in themselves, but which are pertinent to the general thesis that the enemies of the chief truth are the enemies of all truth ... ”
Belloc had no romantic conception of the task he had set for himself. His “method” was a fighting one, and could lead only to head-long collisions. “We must expose the confusion of thought in the opposing camp,” he wrote, “its ignorance of the world and of the past, its absurd idols. And in doing so we must face, not only ideas — which is easy — but men, the defenders of those ideas — which is difficult ... You will be despised or disapproved if you practice your religion quietly with no effort to oppose its organized enemies, but if you overtly attack these enemies you will get something much worse than disapproval.”
Writing to a priest friend in Ireland, Elodie Belloc put the case even more straight-forwardly: “It is almost impossible for anyone to whom God has not given it to suffer, to know what it is for two militant and convinced Catholics to live in our world in England.”
Nonetheless, the Bellocs’ seventeen years of married life were far from gloomy and resigned ones. Both of them were heartily capable of laughing the whole world off — as Belloc often did in verses like:
Heretics all, whoever you be,
In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea,
You never shall have good words from me.
Caritas non conturbat me.
But Catholic men that live upon wine
Are deep in the water, and frank, and fine;
Wherever I travel I find it so.
Benedicamus Domino.
Inevitably, Hilaire Belloc’s published pre-occupations with the enemies of the Church led beyond the heretics to the Jews. He summarized: “Wherever the Catholic Church is powerful, and in proportion as it is powerful, the traditional principles of the civilization of which it is the soul and guardian will always be upheld. One of these principles is the sharp distinction between the Jews and ourselves ... The Catholic Church is the conservator of an age-long European tradition, and that tradition will never compromise with the fiction that a Jew can be other than a Jew. Wherever the Catholic Church has power, and in proportion to its power, the Jewish problem will be recognized to the full.”
And on specific aspects of the Jewish problem, Belloc was equally outspoken: “As for anyone who does not know that the present revolutionary Bolshevist movement in Russia is Jewish, I can only say that he must be a man who is taken in by the suppressions of our deplorable Press.”
Belloc’s battling years, roughly the first forty of our century, did not see the full flower of the organized Interfaith conspiracy as we know it now. But his writings anticipated it, and sternly provided against it. On the singularity of the Catholic Church, he says: “Her corporate unity is not one of which others are tolerant, or which is itself tolerant of others. She has no borderland of partial agreement with error, nor is there a flux or common meeting place between Herself and things more or less similar, more or less neighborly. She has frontiers rigidly defined: not only in Her doctrine and its claim to divinity, but in Her very stuff and savor. Within Her walls, all is of one kind; without, all is of another.”
One would hesitate to judge that Belloc’s prolific militancy was entirely wasted on an unmoved, unaroused Catholic body. Belloc’s courage, in example as well as utterance, no doubt begot lesser courage in uncountable places. But the program which he outlined for himself — indeed, for the Church in his time — has, with tragic consequences, gone unrealized. He had defined the program as this: “ ... to arrest, if it still be possible, the decline of civilization, to revive culture, to form of the Catholic body an army of leaders in the preservation and possibly the extension of our old glories, now so grievously imperiled. We are the true heirs and guardians of civilization in the modern race to barbarism, and to reverse the current should be our privilege, as well as our duty.”
No one is likely to suggest Hilaire Belloc as a subject for Canonization, not even those who admire him most. His writing, taken in whole, certainly falls short of that singleness and integrity that makes Doctors of the Church. He had regrettable unfamiliarities with Holy Scripture; he perhaps never learned the significance of the Old Testament. The miracle is that, alone, virtually unsupported either by laity or by clergy, he should have achieved as much as he did.
He was impatient that the Faith be more talked about — more thrust in people’s faces, if need be. Writing to his close friend, John Phillimore, Belloc complains that “ ... though there is not the least chance yet of England’s conversion — many disasters must come upon her first — still the immediate future is going to be a chaos of opinion, and in that chaos the order, the civility of the Faith will make a deep impression if it is presented, but it has to be presented. The difficulty just now is that English Catholics do not present it at all. They fiddle about with unimportant things of detail or fill the air with their hymns of praise of Protestants for being allowed to live.”
It is in another letter, to this same John Phillimore, that Belloc’s aloneness, and realization of it, is most poignantly brought out. Writing from France shortly after Elodie Belloc’s death, Belloc asks for prayers and Masses, explaining, “I write you this brief line because I know no one else intimately on earth who is fully possessed of the Faith.”
What sustained Belloc? He himself would be the last to make explicit broadcast of it, but we may well conclude that a soldierly love for Our Blessed Lady figured predominantly in all that he tried to do for the Faith. He once wrote of Our Lady to Gilbert Chesterton: “She never fails us. She has never failed me in any demand.”
And in one of his poems addressed to Our Lady, he says:
Help of the half-defeated, House of Gold,
Shrine of the Sword, and Tower of Ivory;
Splendor apart, supreme and aureoled,
The Battler’s vision and the world’s reply.
You shall restore me, O my last Ally,
To vengeance and the glories of the bold.
This is the faith that I have held and hold,
And this is that in which I mean to die.
When death did come, in 1953, it was not like sudden night to a brilliant career. There had been a long twilight. There was a note of divine favor about the last years of Hilaire Belloc — as though this battling public man, this prosecuting attorney for Christendom, had been granted a well-earned leave of absence. In the care of a devoted daughter and son-in-law, in the air of Sussex, up from the sea, Belloc’s boundless energies settled to the pace of country gardens and a chair by the fire.
It was on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, five years ago last month, that the Catholic soul of Hilaire Belloc passed to the Particular Judgment. The funeral Mass in the village Church of Our Lady of Consolation was, in detail, that kind of rooted Catholic thing that was Belloc himself. His ordinary, the Bishop of Southwark, was the celebrant. The ancient tones of the Requiem were chanted by monks of a Benedictine Abbey. And seated in the midst of the choir, in the habit of a Benedictine novice, was Hilaire Belloc’s grandson.
The anti-climax came within a month, when an “official” Requiem was sung at Westminster Cathedral, during which a panegyric was dutifully preached. The preacher, selected not because of his known love for Belloc, but for the sake of his own well-known name, was, ironically, Ronald Knox.
Monsignor Knox had, of course, been acquainted with Belloc. They had both been notable Oxford men; they were both prominent English Catholics. They had some interests that were mutual, and some friends. But it would be impossible to imagine two twentieth-century Englishmen more separated in their approach, their witness, and their devotion to the things of the Faith.
If new verses may now be put, with propriety, into Hilaire Belloc’s mouth and manner, there is a species of refreshment for the sympathetic reader in the following rough parody of Belloc’s Lines to a Don — that boisterous piece in which he obliterated an Oxford professor “that dared attack my Chesterton.” These would be, perhaps, Lines to a Monsignor:
And then there’s Knox, R. Arbuthnott,
The drudge, the poky scholar;
The chap you’d like to stick with pins
Until you make him holler.
Knox nauseating, know-it-all,
Knox unenthusiastic;
Knox nosy, nebulous, inane,
Knox nasty and sarcastic.
Knox wily, sneaky, weak and soft,
Knox never on the level.
Knox so unlike those good hard knocks
Saint Michael gives the devil.
Chaotic Knox, Knox noxious, Knox
Unorthodox and saucy.
And toxic Knox, Knox noctis, Knox
Impossible and bossy.
O, blear-eyed Knox, Knox bent of nose,
With hair like uncombed shoddy,
You preached my eulogy, but it
Was over my dead body!
_____________________________
The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
September, 1958
HOW THE JEWS INVADED THE HOLY LAND
Four Men Who Built The Zionist State
It is a peculiarity of history that the farther back we stand to get a look at it, the better we see it. And thus, with the smoke lifted and the rubble swept aside, those two increasingly distant calamities, World Wars I and II, are every day making a clearer picture.
It may be argued that the abiding effects of a war are not always the precise effects intended by the war’s planners. But when two international conflicts, fought within twenty-five years of each other, have both resulted in the establishment and extension of the same two world powers (to the detriment of all others), then there is more than mere chance to be reckoned with.
Those two powers, the chief two in the world today, are Communism and Zionism. The First World War gave them both a solid footing: the tracts of land they needed if they were to continue. The Communists announced a claim to all of Russia; the Zionists were granted one to Palestine. And World War II more than made good these claims. It gave the Communists the largest empire the world has ever known — stretching from Berlin to the China Sea. More unlikely, it gave the Zionists a sovereign Jewish state in the Holy Land.
That the fortunes of Zionism and Communism have been complementary, that world events of the past several decades have been to their common advantage, is obvious. That both movements are avowedly anti-Christian, and that both are in origin and direction Jewish, is a matter of record. But although the Jewish power of Communism has been quantitatively a greater oppressor of the Church — having killed more priests and desecrated more altars — the Jewish power of Zionism has hit the Church at the very core by seizing and profaning the one land which above all others is the Holy Land.
As an organized program of racism and revenge, fulfilling centuries of thwarted Jewish dreams, Zionism is larger than any one of the men who have been its leaders. Out of the last hundred years, however, there are four of these men who stand as symbols of Zionist progress. Considered in sequence, these leaders of Zionism will tell all of the story that must so urgently be known.
Moses Hess
In the year 1862, a German Jew named Moses Hess published at Paris a book called Rome and Jerusalem. If modern Zionism must be assigned a specific starting point, this was it. Hess’s message was straightforward. “Papal Rome,” he writes, “symbolizes to the Jews an inexhaustible well of poison.” But the Jews should not be discouraged, Hess continues. A “regeneration” of the world has been going on since the “great” French Revolution. Rome is already on the way down, he declares, and the job of the Jew is to establish Jerusalem in place of it. Christianity will be “finally replaced among the regenerated nations by a new historical cult. To this coming cult, Judaism alone holds the key.”
Hess nailed the whole argument in with the resounding blasphemy: “Every Jew has within him the potentiality of a Messiah and every Jewess that of a Mater Dolorosa ... The Messianic Era is the present age.”
There was no Jew in Europe that was not interested. But, for many, Hess’s call to arms was too dangerous. There would be Christian resentment, they said. There would be a reaction, and all those new liberties so lately acquired by the Jews, as a result of the Masonic revolutions, would be revoked. To these “assimilated” Jews of Western Europe, Hess was a stab of bad conscience. He was telling them that, despite their white gloves and tall hats and changed names, they were still, and irrevocably, Jewish.
On the other hand, to the Jews of Eastern Europe, still confined in the Polish and Russian ghettos, Moses Hess was a prophet. His book begot a dozen secret societies dedicated to a revived Jewish nationalism. And it set the stage for a more versatile Jewish leader.
Theodore Herzl
If Moses Hess was the violent revolutionist that Zionism needed to start it off, Theodore Herzl was the capable calculator who brought order to the Zionist frenzy, won for Zionism the support of Western Jews, and gave permanent direction to the Jewish resurgence by advocating the immediate establishment of a self-governing Jewish state.
With diabolical doggedness, Herzl peddled his plan for a Jewish homeland on every important doorstep in Europe. The Kaiser listened to him. And so did the King of Italy and the Sultan of Turkey. England offered him a piece of her own property in Uganda. But the Zionists were determined against second-class handouts. They wanted Palestine or nothing for their nation, and Jerusalem for their capital.
Herzl dared approach even the Pope, Saint Pius X, to ask support for a Jewish settlement in Palestine. To so fantastic a proposal, the Holy Father (says Herzl’s Diaries): “answered in a stern and categorical manner: ‘We are unable to favor this movement. We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem — but we could never sanction it. The ground of Jerusalem, if it were not always sacred, has been sanctified by the life of Jesus Christ. As the head of the Church, I cannot answer you otherwise. The Jews have not recognized Our Lord; therefore, we cannot recognize the Jewish people.’ ”
The Pope did not discount the possibility of some measure of success for Zionism. Himself the virtual prisoner of Italy’s Masonic administrators, Saint Pius X held no illusory view of “Catholic Europe.” The men who were then running Europe’s governments were the offspring of those same Freemasons who had gloried in tearing down the ghetto walls while they sacked the churches. For Freemasonry had set the Jews up; and now that the Masons were in unchallenged power, the Jews could expect great things. But could they really expect Palestine? Besides being the Holy Land of the Christians, the territory of Palestine was the guarded property of the Turkish Empire, the centuries-old home of an established people. It seemed unlikely to the Pope that great numbers of Jews could ever settle there — and unthinkable that circumstances would ever permit the Jews to set up their own government in the place.
The Zionists, on their part, were confident that when desired circumstances do not present themselves on their own, they can be made to order. In a speech before the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, Herzl’s colleague, Max Nordau, said (and we repeat that the year was 1903): “Let me tell you the following words as if I were showing you the rungs of a ladder leading upward and upward: Herzl, the Zionist Congress, the English Uganda proposition, the future World War, the peace conference where, with the help of England, a free and Jewish Palestine will be created.”
Chaim Weizmann
When the World War that Nordau had foretold eventually came, in 1914, Herzl was ten years dead. But a new Zionist leader was on hand to oversee the expected Jewish triumph. This was Chaim Weizmann, an itinerant chemist who had moved from his native Russia to Manchester, England, sometime before the outbreak of the War. It was Weizmann’s task to acquaint the British government with Jewish designs on the Holy Land. In exchange for an official smile on these Zionist ambitions, Weizmann could promise that his race — its financiers, presidential advisors, newspaper publishers and all — would join whole-heartedly in helping Britain win the war. Consequently, on Nov. 2, 1917, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, addressed a letter to Lord Rothschild, English representative of the powerful Jewish banking house.
“His Majesty’s Government,” wrote Balfour, “view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people ... ” Though the letter further specified that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” the Jews assumed this clause was meaningless. The Balfour Declaration, as this letter came to be called, gave the Jews a foot in the Holy Land, and they set out with determination to wriggle the rest of their bulk through the door.
To direct this operation, Chaim Weizmann went to Palestine in 1918, as head of the Zionist Commission. Under Weizmann’s supervision, armies of Jewish immigrants pushed into Palestine (made a British Mandate in 1922) till eventually they had swollen their numbers to one-half the total inhabitants. (Their land-purchases were less prodigal; by 1948 they owned only six per cent of the available property.)
Through all this, the Church remained adamantly anti-Zionist. In a 1921 allocution, Pope Benedict XV expressed his fear that “the Jews should come to take in Palestine a preponderant and privileged position.” Most Catholic observers, however, thought such a possibility remote. Father Bede Jarrett, noted English Dominican, gave the majority opinion when he wrote, also in 1921: “The Jew has always specialized in money. Industrial labor has no interest for him, and agricultural labor even less. Therefore, he will never go back to Palestine, where the wealth is almost entirely in agriculture. Indeed, why should he worry over Palestine when he has the whole world at his feet?”
What Father Jarrett did not realize was that “the Jew” intended to demonstrate just how abjectly at his feet the world was — and precisely by taking over Palestine.
World War I, as Nordau revealed, had been the scheduled means for setting up a Jewish state. But it did not quite do the trick. A second World War was needed to bring the Jews’ otherwise unthinkable scheme to perfection. At the conclusion of World War II, Chaim Weizmann came to America to claim the spoils. Spurred on by him and fellow-Zionists, the United Nations obediently decreed that at the expiration of the British Mandate, the Holy Land should be partitioned into two areas; the smaller to be governed by Arabs, the larger by Jews.
The British were to withdraw on May 15, 1948. At midnight of May 14, Zionist leaders announced the formation of a Jewish State. Ten minutes after their announcement, President Harry Truman, defying all protocol, accorded this infant monstrosity official United States recognition. Later, Mr. Truman was to write in his published memoirs: “I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders — actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats — disturbed me and annoyed me.”
Even if it were not known otherwise, events of the last decade would bear stern witness that the Masonic Mr. Truman overcame his annoyance.
David Ben-Gurion
Though Chaim Weizmann was duly named President of the Jewish State, and held that office until his death in 1952, it was a position of honor only. The Jews were grateful for all Weizmann had done, but they were confident they had come to a new season: the full flowering of that “Messianic Era” that Moses Hess had proclaimed. And they had a new leader: their Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion.
As effective head of the Jewish State, Ben-Gurion represents the fulfillment of Hess, Herzl, and Weizmann; the achievement of Zionist victory. He is the symbol of Jewry on its own — the crucifiers of Christ free at last of Christian standards and surveillance. How alien the Jews are to those standards, their ten years of sovereignty have enabled them to show.
The acts of Jewish terrorism that had marked the final months of the British Mandate (when Jews were blowing up British buildings in Palestine, hanging British soldiers, mailing time-bombs to members of the British cabinet) seemed like mere schoolboy pranks when the Jews went to work on the Arabs. One million Arab residents of Palestine were forced to flee their ancestral homes — the orchards, pastures, and farms their people had worked for centuries. And as Archbishop George Hakim of Galilee insisted: “They were terrorized out.” The persuasive device employed by the Jews was simple: they massacred one whole Arab village; then they sent a sound-truck through all the neighboring villages, promising each one the same fate unless the people evacuated their homes immediately.
All this was apart from the military aggression, when Jewish soldiers, with arms supplied by Communist Czechoslovakia, invaded the Arab-assigned regions of Palestine and increased their national holdings by forty per cent. Feats like this thrilled the Jews who were watching from afar, swelled the fantastic sums being poured into Palestine by World Jewry, and provoked statements like this one by New York’s Jewish Congressman, Emmanuel Celler: “Maybe the Israelis may have to give the Arabs another lesson and cut through their forces again like a hot knife through butter. Only this time the pleas of the United Nations will not deter them. They will shoot their way clear into Beirut, Amman, and Alexandria.”
When Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s plans for the further expansion of the Jewish state are realized (when international circumstances have been ordered to that end), there will be a fresh field open to the Jews. And it will be open not only for additional confiscation of Arab property, but for further desecration of Christian shrines and churches in those parts of the Holy Land that the Jews do not yet control. Bethlehem, for example, can expect a repetition of the profanity and sacrilege that the Jews have already perpetrated in Mount Carmel, Ain-Karim, Haifa, Capharnaum, Tiberias, Beit-Jala, Katamon, in all of Galilee, and in Jerusalem, the Holy City itself. These previous desecrations, so well calculated by Mr. Ben-Gurion, prompted the well-known but little-heeded warning of the late Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Hughes, who stated that there is in operation a “deliberate Jewish effort to decimate the Arabs and to destroy Christianity in Palestine.”
The consequences of this “deliberate Jewish effort” will spread in our time far beyond the borders of Palestine. For the once-Christian West has betrayed Our Lord’s Holy Land into the hands of His crucifiers, and already the price of the betrayal is being paid, in kind. It has cost England her empire. And it has put that other chief Zionist supporter, the United States of America, face to face with a Third World War — one that looms like a terror out of the Apocalypse, and that will provide the most fantastic chapter yet in the unfinished story of Zionism.
The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
October, 1958
CATHOLICS, THE BIBLE, AND THE JEWS
On the fifteenth of this month, the Church commemorates one of her most brilliant and faithful daughters: that sage among the wise virgins, Saint Teresa of Avila. Looking out over sixteenth-century Europe, from the heights of Catholic Spain, Saint Teresa saw the Protestant Revolt gaining ground. She saw the rending of Christendom and, amid the pieces, the multiplied troubles that awaited the Church. She could only conclude that the times were evil ones, indeed. And, after meditating on this conclusion, Saint Teresa made the following entry in her Autobiography: “All the evil in the world comes from ignorance of the truths of the Holy Scriptures in their simplicity, of which not one iota shall pass away.”
Taking advantage of Saint Teresa’s wisdom, American Catholics will find that no current evil in their world can be resolved so immediately in terms of the Bible as can the problem of the Jews. In the light of Holy Scripture, there is revealed, and divinely so, the complete Catholic answer to the Jewish question.
The Seed of Abraham
Realizing the power of the Bible, the Jews have consciously promoted the notion that they are the “people of the Book,” the Scriptural “chosen people.” The truth, as the Bible plainly tells it, could not be more contrary.
The Jews were the chosen people of God’s revelational plan, but it is the central theme of the Bible to explain how ungrateful a people they proved to be in their privileged position; how contemptuous and murderous they were toward the prophets God sent them; how patient God was for centuries with them, until, finally, sending His Divine Son and seeing Him mocked, rejected, and crucified by the Jews, God turned His blessing of the Jews to a curse. The seventeen prophetic books of the Old Testament had repeatedly foretold that God would do this. The entire New Testament confirms it as done.
The nature of this curse, as revealed by Our Lord’s own words in the Gospel, is twofold: it cuts the Jews off from their previous holy tradition and it establishes them in a new and hateful status. In chapter eight of Saint Matthew, Our Lord tells the Jews that all connection with the few faithful Jews of the Old Testament is now denied them. “Many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven: But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into the exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
In that exterior darkness, according to Our Lord’s further words in Saint John, the ejected Jews are not to be left fatherless. They, who were once the children of Abraham, now become the sons of the Prince of Darkness. “If you be the children of Abraham, do the works of Abraham. But now you seek to kill me,” says Jesus to the Jews. “You are of your father, the Devil, and the lusts of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and he stood not in the truth ... ”
The curse on the Jews brought the corollary election of the Gentile nations. The “many” who in fulfillment of Our Lord’s prophecy would come “from the east and the west” are the armies of responsive Gentiles who have heeded the message of the Apostles, believed that Jesus was the promised Christ, and so joined themselves to that holy tradition that God established with Abraham, two thousand years before the Incarnation.
The Christian faithful who fill and over-flow the places forfeited by the Jews, become now truly the rightful beneficiaries of the promise made to Abraham. It is in this profound sense that Pope Pius XI proposed his much-abused statement, “Spiritually, we are Semites.” The Holy Father had no intention of saying (as the Judaeophiles would have it) that Catholics are one in spirit with present-day, Christ-despising Jews. Pope Pius XI was reiterating the Scriptural truth that, by spiritual means, through Faith and the incorporation of the Holy Eucharist, Catholics have supplanted the Jews as the “chosen people,” and they now claim for their ancestry the great names of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. It is in this spirit that the Church, the new Israel, prays in all her public worship. And it was in this same spirit that Our Blessed Lady prayed in her New Testament canticle, the Magnificat, when she referred to all the faithful as “Abraham and his seed forever.”
The Gospel Under Fire
A few years ago, when Jews everywhere sat back to count the blessings that the second World War had reaped for them, a very prominent New York rabbi, Dr. Mordecai Kaplan of the Jewish Theological Seminary, wrote a book called The Future of the American Jew. Things looked good to Dr. Kaplan, but not universally. There was one area that worried him: the sizeable Christian area. “The Christian Church,” he wrote, “from its very inception, sought to justify its repudiation of Judaism by vilifying the teachings of Judaism and branding the Jews as deicides. The role of the Jewish people in history, according to orthodox Christian tradition, has been that of anti-Christ.”
Dr. Kaplan went on to blame the New Testament for much of the Jews’ troubles. And in this he joined a fashionable movement. For it has become, and remains, a smart thing with Amencan Jews to make public attacks on the New Testament — attacks that a prudent fear had heretofore kept within the bounds of synagogues and the Jews’ own, Jewish-read press. The following pair of statements are representative samples.
Mr. Leo Pfeffer, counsel for the American Jewish Congress, in his Beacon Press book, Church, State, and Freedom, writes: “To the Jewish child devoted to the religion of his fathers, the New Testament in its entirety is blasphemous for attributing divinity to a human being.”
Rabbi Julius Nodel of Portland, Oregon, in a speech reported by Portland’s leading newspaper, says: “The New Testament is a work of malicious libel and the story of events leading to the trial and crucifixion, a dragon seed from which has come misery, bloodshed, and suspicion.”
Synagogue Theology
Despite their flaunted contempt for the New Testament, the Jews have managed to sustain among the Christian majority the notion that somehow Jewish belief is still Biblical belief, that the Jews still have a Scriptural faith, and that for this reason we must respect the synagogue. “Don’t Jews still believe in a Messias to come?” asks the credulous Christian. “And don’t they believe in the same Biblical Heaven and Hell that we do?”
The answer to both these questions is — no. And it is an emphatic “No!” as the subsequent Jewish testimony will verify.
Concerning the Messias: The Jews of today reject the notion of a personal redeemer who will be born of them and lead them to the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies. The Jews believe that the whole Jewish race is to be elevated to a position of prosperity and overlordship and that, when this happy day arrives (the Messianic Age), they will have achieved all that is coming to them by way of savior and salvation. In his recent book, The Messianic Idea in Israel, Jewish theologian Dr. Joseph Klausner explains: “Thus the whole people Israel in the form of the elect of the nations gradually became the Messiah of the world, the redeemer of mankind.”
Concerning Heaven and Hell: A succinct summary of Jewish teaching on “life after death” was given in the May, 1958 issue of B’nai B’rith’s National Jewish Monthly. Under the caption, “What Can A Modern Jew Believe?” there appeared: “Judaism insists that ‘heaven’ must be established on this earth. The reward of the pious is life and happiness in this world, while the punishment of the wicked is misery on earth and premature death ... By hitching its star to the Messianic future on this earth, Israel became the eternal people.” The article goes on: “The best Jewish minds have always held that a physical hereafter is a detraction from mature belief.” And the conclusion: “There is neither hell nor paradise, God merely sends out the sun in its full strength; the wicked are consumed by its heat, while the pious find delight and healing in its rays.”
The Unholy Scripture
No one should conclude from the above paragraphs that the tenets of modern Judaism are to be found only in the occasional comments of rabbis or in chance reports of Jewish magazines. When they rejected the doctrines of the Bible, the Jews took care not to leave themselves bookless. They have enshrined their entire religious and moral code, in all its naked blasphemy and foulness, in the pages of that teeming, reeking document, the Talmud.
First published, about 500 A.D., this supreme Jewish book consists of two main parts: the Mishna, or text, and the Gemara, or commentary. And to indicate how intoxicatingly to their taste Talmudic teaching is, the Jews have fashioned a proverb: “The Bible is like water, the Mishna like wine, the Gemara like aromatic liqueur.”
It is not necessary that a militant Catholic wade through the mud of the Talmud in order to be informed of its contents. Popes of the past have published a number of condemnations which indicate the nature of the book and outline the general objections. Further, there are detailed studies of the conflict between the Bible and the Talmud, done by Catholic scholars at the request of the Church, that give a complete picture of the Jews’ unholy scripture. One such book is L’Histoire et Les Histoires dans la Bible by the late Bishop Landrieux of Dijon, which was published at Paris in 1921. Writing on the Talmud, Bishop Landrieux makes the following acute summary.
“It is a systematic deformation of the Bible ... The pride of race with the idea of universal domination is therein exalted to the height of folly ... For the Talmudist, the Jewish race alone constitutes humanity, the non-Jews are not human beings. They are of a purely animal nature. They have no rights. The moral laws which regulate the mutual relations of men, the Ten Commandments, are not of obligation in their regard. They oblige exclusively among Jews. With regard to the Goyim (non-Jews) everything is allowed: robbery, fraud, perjury, murder. When the Talmud became known, especially in the sixteenth century, thanks to the invention of printing, such indignation was aroused throughout the Catholic world that a General Jewish Assembly in 1631 gave orders that the most obnoxious passages should not be printed, but added that, ‘a little circle, O, should be put in place of the suppressed passages. This will warn the rabbis and the school-teachers that they are to teach these passages orally so that the learned among the Nazarenes (Christians) may no longer have any pretext for attacking us in this regard.’ In our day, the Talmud does not provoke either astonishment or anger among Catholics, because it is no longer known.”
The Abyss
Caught in the blazing light of Holy Scripture, the Jews thus disclose their true colors. They are, in our day, as remote in faith and tradition from believing Jews of the Old Testament as they are from believing Catholics. A gaping abyss divides them from Abraham and Moses, as surely as from St. Augustine and St. Francis Xavier. That abyss is the unrepented rejection and crucifixion of the Messias. As Saint John Chrysostom says in one of his Sermons Against the Jews, “It is not insignificant controversies that separate us, but the death of Christ.”
And because we are separated by this shattering event, we are totally separated. The Jews are strangers not only to our beliefs, but to our whole way of life. The fiction that our culture is a “Judaeo-Christian” one, and that the Jews are anxious to preserve it, has lured us to the verge of cultural collapse. The standards of justice, order, and morality that have made our civilization are rooted in Christian teaching; the Jews neither share those standards nor befriend them. “Is Western Civilization ... worth saving?” asked Rabbi Stephen Wise, in the New York Times of December 7, 1930. “Or is it not the function of the Jew to bring about the supercession of that decrepit, degenerate, and inevitably perishing civilization, so-called?”
A stern realization of this Jewish hostility to Christendom has been the main motive behind the “anti-Jewish policies” of the Catholic Church. Since the Jews are so hopelessly estranged from the ways and purposes of Christian society, the Church has advocated complete segregation of the Jews from that society. Thus, in Catholic times, Jews were isolated in ghettos and relieved of all obligations of citizenship. They were forbidden to vote, to hold public office, to serve in the army; they could not teach in the universities, nor publish their Talmud, nor otherwise disseminate their infidel ideas. And when they went outside their ghettos, they were required to wear some distinctive badge, that Christians might know of their presence, and so be on guard.
The Protestant Revolt in the sixteenth century, and the consequent rise of Free-masonry, meant an end to these Catholic practices. For the Church ceased to be the mother and counselor of the men who were making the public policy of western nations. And as the Church’s influence has declined (and in inverse proportion as its influence has declined), there has arisen the power, open and asserted, of the Jews.
Against this rising Jewish tide, the Church can offer her children no surer refuge than the high, solid ground of Holy Scripture.
Commentary
Scriptural teaching on the Jews has been grasped by no one so well as by those most attentive of all Scripture-readers, the Church’s canonized saints. Here is Saint Bernard, Doctor of the Universal Church, commenting on a text from the prophet Isaias:
“O intelligence coarse, dense and, as it were, bovine, which did not recognize God, even in His own works! Perhaps the Jew will complain, as of a deep injury, that I call his intelligence bovine. But let him read what is said by the prophet Isaias, and he will find that he is even less than bovine. For he says, ‘The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib; but Israel hath not known me, and my people hath not understood.’ (Isaias 1:3) You see, O Jew, I am milder than your own prophet. I have compared you to the brute beasts; but he sets you even below these.”
The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
November, 1958
THE JEWS AND THE SAINTS
What Our Canonized Catholics Are Lately Suffering
Ever since the explosive year, 1789, when the Judaeo-Masonic French Revolution set off the movement to knock down the walls of Europe’s ghettos, and spill their contents into every corner of Christendom, the Jews have been gaining one victory after another. As the nineteenth century progressed, the governments of Europe (whose policies were made in Europe’s lodges) even granted the Jews citizenship on an equal footing with Christians. Belgium did it in 1815, Denmark in 1849, Norway in 1851, England in 1858, Switzerland in 1865, Austria-Hungary in 1867, Germany in 1870.
But as the Jews have climbed from height to height, buying up the world’s Main Streets, and buying off its leaders, they have not lost sight of the depth from which, so lately, they have risen. Nor have they forgotten for a moment who it is that formerly kept them in such effective line. Their continuing bitter hatred for the Church bears witness to this. And since the Church is the communion of all her faithful children, gathered from every age, the Jews have reserved a special contempt for those supremely faithful among the faithful: our canonized saints.
Among the papers and periodicals that the Jews put out for their fellow Jews, it is an exceptional issue that does not contain an attack on some haloed and prayed-to Catholic whose memory is especially loathsome in Jewry. Recent victims have included: Saint Albert the Great, whom the Jews have never forgiven for sitting on an ecclesiastical commission that condemned their Talmud to be burned, over seven hundred years ago; Saint Pius X, whom the “brotherhood” Jews have indicted for his refusal to cooperate with a group of Italian officials because they had taken part in a synagogue service; and Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, whom Manhattan Jews have accused of a “disposition to bigotry” for insisting, in one of her prayers, that the Jews killed Christ.
Our Lord’s beloved disciple, Saint John the Evangelist, gets a resounding blast from the American Association for Jewish Education in its widely-discussed book, Of Them Which Say They Are Jews. Saint John, say the Jewish educators, is ultimately responsible for 2,000 years of Christian animosity toward the Jews. His gospel “makes of them utterly ‘the synagogue of Satan.’ Later events hardened the process into the classical anti-semitism of dogmatic theology and the consequent laws and customs of Christian society.”
Another recent Jewish book, Rabbi Ernest Trattner’s Understanding the Talmud, puts Pope Saint Pius V in the same list with Adolf Hitler, as an enemy of the Jewish religion!
Nor is this “publishing” attack on the saints a new strategy for the Jews. Established works of Jewish reference that have been in use for years are riddled with similar hateful accounts. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Knowledge, edited by the “scholarly” Jacob De Haas, has a gloating article telling how the Spanish marranos (fraudulent Jewish converts to the Faith) murdered Saint Peter Arbues, the Inquisitor who was exposing their perfidy. “In the crime,” boasts the article, “some of the greatest of the marranos, members of the Santangel family, participated.”
The old synagogue classic, Milman’s History of the Jews, gives vituperative space to several saints, but saves a particular venom for Blessed Bernardine of Feltre. He is the fifteenth-century Franciscan friar who hit the Jewish usurers of his day a mortal blow by establishing Catholic charitable agencies where the poor could get financial help, free of interest rates. Because of the militant preaching of Blessed Bernardine, the cities of Trent, Perugia, Gubbio, and Ravenna passed laws expelling all Jews from their territories.
In the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Blessed Bernardine is described as a “Franciscan monk and Jew-baiter,” but his account is abbreviated to make room for more famous Church “villains.”
That aging set of tomes, the Jewish Encyclopedia, is an arsenal of recriminations against the saints. They are listed individually and also under such headings as Chronology, Councils of the Church, Polemics, Popes, and Church Fathers. The Jewish complaint under this last entry is summarized: “The Church Fathers looked upon the Jews as demons, their synagogues as houses of Satan.”
The Jews will have no rest while the Christian World continues to reverence the canonized heroes of Christendom who, more than any others, were responsible for keeping the Jewish people in the segregated state proper to infidels. Thus, before the collapse of present Jewish power comes, the attack on the saints is bound to be bolder. The reasonable reaction to expect from the Catholic camp is an increased devotion to the saints, a greater solicitude for their honor, a rallying of Catholic writers and publishers to counteract the Jewish offensive.
This reasonable reaction, however, has yet to materialize. Indeed, the trend of the moment could not (even by deliberate plan) be better calculated to aid the Jews. Never before have so many Catholics written and published so many biographies of the saints. Yet, never has such lamentable treatment of the saints been presented to the world in the name of Catholic hagiography.
It is true there are still some reverent lives of the saints being written. It is also true that among the objectionable ones, not all are equally so. But there is a common spirit that, more or less, they share: a condescension toward the saints, as though contemporary authors, being enlightened men of superior culture, are presenting the saints for the first time in their proper perspective; as though they are finally handing us the true picture that centuries of tradition and love had served only to obscure.
Who are the writers of these new biographies of the saints? They are anyone who has the time, the typewriter, and the publishing connections necessary. By no standard are they the people who should be telling our saints’ stories. Even when they are capable writers (and that immediately narrows the field), they are people so pathetically remote from the persecutions, the penances, and the prayers of the saints that the holy subjects of their books emerge either as exotic curiosities, or as pious “good citizens” molded to the sanctity-standards of the author. In no case will the saint appear to be the flowering and fulfillment of all Christian life — the complete successes that balance out the half-tries and total failures of the rest of the Church’s family.
For a number of years, there has been an increasing volume of “convert” hagiography. A broad background of heresy, recently and hastily painted over, is apparently considered an eminent qualification for undertaking a book on a saint. We have, thus, been treated to such unlikely performances as: the biographer of John Wesley adapting his Methodist talents to the story of Saint Peter Claver, and the son of a pair of Salvation Army officers beating the drum for Saint Thomas More.
A popular, and perhaps inevitable, innovation in this field is a book of brief biographies entitled Saints for Now, in which the convert-editor invited lifelong Catholics, fellow-converts, and very-much-unconverted heretics to contribute the life of a saint.
The current big name in Catholic hagiography is a convert from Methodist-Episcopalianism. He has achieved his eminence by re-editing and re-issuing that standard work on the saints in English, The Lives of the Saints, by Father Alban Butler. A kind of self-made scholar, Mr. Donald Attwater has revised the late Father Herbert Thurston’s revision of Father Butler’s Lives, throwing out a number of “uncertainly venerated saints” and discarding all that still remained (after Father Thurston’s axe-work) of the Butler exhortations and homilies.
But in neither of these things does Attwater’s chief vice lie. It is found, rather, in his “scholarship” — the devastating remarks that follow upon the biographical accounts of the saints, most especially the saints of the first ten centuries. Saint Sebastian, the famous Roman martyr who was shot with arrows and clubbed to death in the year 288, is a worthy example. After giving Sebastian’s full story (the way it is found in the Roman martyrology, the priest’s breviary, and all the tradition of the Church), Attwater goes on to discredit the details as merely a “pious fable.” His “scholarly” proof? Well, it seems that among the many representations of Saint Sebastian that have come down to us in art, there are two early ones (a cathedral window in Germany and a mosaic in Rome) which leave out the arrows. Therefore, concludes Attwater, we have been hoaxed by the Church these sixteen centuries. For clearly, from this antique evidence, Saint Sebastian was not shot with arrows, and if this most colorful fact of his story is wrong, well, manifestly the rest can be of no value.
Deserving of particular mention, too, is Mr. Attwater’s London colleague, the Galway-born Jesuit biographer of Jesuit saints, Father James Brodrick. The Brodrick method is more direct. He goes after one saint at a time, bare-fisted, until he levels the holy man to Brodrick-size. A representative example is his job on Saint Francis Xavier. Just once does Father Brodrick commend Saint Francis. With an insidious string of adjectives, he declares the saint was “devout, selfless, chivalrous, and ruthless.” Before he finishes, Father Brodrick has deplored Saint Francis Xavier’s noble birth, his manner of teaching, his parish methods, his “ignorance” of Buddhism, his haste in baptizing, his clothes, his friends, his “abominable” literary style, his appraisal of men, his enthusiasm for the Inquisition, and his firm belief that people who die outside the Church will not be saved.
More devilish than this style of straight-forward punching at the saints, and still new to the world of hagiography, is the psychiatric approach: the evaluation of the saints in terms of those current myths of fantasy and filth which fall under the general head of psychological studies.
Only two years ago, The American Ecclesiastical Review printed the speech delivered by a mid-western auxiliary bishop to the newly-convened Guild of Catholic Psychiatrists. In his speech, the bishop advocated the application of psychiatric principles to many phases of Church activity, but especially to studies of the lives of the saints: “The hagiographer will explore the terrain with greater skill if a capable Catholic psychiatrist be at his side.”
Cited to the assembled psychiatrists as a worthy example of what the bishop meant was a new life of Saint Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower of Jesus. This book, by a French-born English priest, won itself some space in Time magazine under the caption, “Saintly Neurotics,” and has since been hailed in other Masonic and Jewish sheets as a promising sign of new liberalism within the Church.
The influence of this kind of talk about the saints has already begun to be felt. Devotees of the saints should be prepared (as one of them lately was not) to hear nuns in their parochial grammar schools make statements like this: “Lives of the saints? Oh, no, we don’t give them to the children any more. The saints, you know, are very abnormal personalities. It’s too much for a child to assimilate at such an impressionable age.”
Nuns who talk this way, and priests who write like Saint Therese’s new biographer, do not, however, concoct these ideas all on their own. They are not innovators but parrots — repeating, with Catholic accents, doctrines and dialectics that have their origin in the camp of the saints’ pledged enemies, the Jews.
Naturally, the Jews have everything to gain by any Catholic attack on the saints. But there must be an especial satisfaction in Jewdom when a thoroughly Jewish device is adopted by Catholics as a means of depreciating and debunking the saints. The psychoanalytic method of psychiatry, born in the brain of Viennese Jew Sigmund Freud, is purebred Jewish. The Jews boast of it.
Back in 1926, the B’nai B’rith Magazine for March carried an article entitled, “Is Psychoanalysis a Jewish Movement?” The answer was resoundingly affirmative, and a subsequent issue of the magazine (July, 1926) flaunted the fact that, “The doctrines of psychology originated by Sigmund Freud were first preached by him from a B’nai B’rith platform.”
Just a year ago last February, the Hillel Society of Harvard University had a full evening on the Jewishness of psychiatry, in a talk delivered by Dr. David Bakan, Jewish psychologist of the University of Missouri. Dr. Bakan had lately done a book on the theme, saying that it is impossible to understand Freudian theory if you do not understand it is Jewish. To an appreciative Hillel audience, Dr. Bakan summarized: “Freud’s psychology and Jewish mysticism are one in spirit. ”
In past issues, when The Point has decried various Jewish inroads and influences in American Catholic life, it has singled out the Church’s saints as exemplars of resistance to, and victory over, the Jews. In ages of Faith, it has been the glory of Catholics to be on the side of the saints, battling against the seed and synagogue of Satan. It is this realization that makes the apostasy of our “psychiatric” hagiographers such an incredible one: they have entered the battle and turned on the saints, with weapons supplied them by the Jews.
Recommended Reading
Those who want orthodox and traditional handling of the stories of the Church’s saints are urged to look for an old edition, pre-revision, of Father Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints. Another valuable set of volumes, lately hard to get in English, is Dom Prosper Gueranger’s The Liturgical Year. Dom Gueranger, the tireless restorer of French monasticism in the last century, presents the saints in the light of their annual feast-day commemoration, reproducing the details of the saints’ lives which appear in the priest’s breviary.
Absolutely the best and, sadly, the hardest to find copies of, are those lives of the saints that were written by saints. Steady searching, however, will be rewarded with (for examples) Saint Gregory the Great’s life of Saint Benedict, Saint Athanasius’ life of Saint Anthony of the Desert, Saint Jerome’s life of Saint Hilarion, Saint Bonaventure’s life of Saint Francis, or the lives of Saints Malachy, Romuald, and Dominic Savio, written respectively by Saint Bernard, Saint Peter Damian, and Saint John Bosco.
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The Point
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
December, 1958
In her liturgical generosity, our Holy Mother the Church gives us three distinct Masses every December twenty-fifth. They are known as the Midnight Mass, the Mass at Dawn, and the Mass of Christmas Day. During the second Mass, the Mass at Dawn, the Church presents us with the memory of a noble widow of Rome named Anastasia, the only saint who gets a “feast day” commemoration on Jesus’ Birthday.
Saint Anastasia was martyred by burning on December twenty-fifth in the year 304. Among all the Christmas Day occurrences of nineteen hundred years, the Church has chosen to remember, in conjunction with Our Lord’s Birth, only this one event: the suffering and death of a Christian martyr whose crime before men was to insist that the Holy Infant of Bethlehem is the One, True God.
This Christmas, there are many gods being proposed to the Catholics of America. They are gods with names like Tolerance and Brotherhood, and to fail to worship them has become, in effect, a crime before men. Invoking Saint Anastasia, The Point prays this Christmas for those who will be guilty of the crime, and who will insist, publicly and persistently, that the Christ Child of Christmas is the only True God, and that His Virgin Mother is that same Mother of God who, when our last Christmas is finally behind us, will stand unique and singular as the one Gate of Heaven.
THE PROTECTION OF CHRISTMAS
Thy light is come, Jerusalem, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee, and the Gentiles shall walk in thy light. Alleluia.
In the troubled season of Christmas, 1958, as the last strongholds of our civilization falter before the Jewish siege, let all who are about to despair consider the above words. They are of an antiphon in the Christmastime liturgy of the Catholic Church, and they offer a needed reminder. Though we must not forget that the Jews have rejected the Incarnate God, we must also remember — with thanksgiving and the chanting of alleluias — that God has likewise cast off the Jews, and established His new and eternal covenant with us Gentiles.
“A Child is born to us, a Son is given to us,” is the jubilant shout of Catholics at Christmas. To the Jews, it is a taunt, notifying them that however much they might bedevil the Church with their anti-Christian onslaughts, her ultimate triumph over them is assured. The gates of Hell shall not prevail against her.
The potency of this promise that Our Lord made to Saint Peter has been realized afresh during the past weeks, with the election of Saint Peter’s 262nd successor. And it is especially fitting that, as a consequence, the attention of the Catholic world at Christmastime will be directed toward Rome. For, ever since the seventh century, the relics of the Crib in which our infant Savior lay have been in the Eternal City, at the Basilica of Saint Mary Major; there, each December 25, the Pope himself celebrates the Midnight Mass.
But besides being the “new Bethlehem,” Rome claims our Yuletide interest on another score. That note of exultation sounding through the Christmas liturgy, insisting we should rejoice even in these beleaguered days, has a resounding echo in the history of the Bishops of Rome. Through all the centuries, they have been the authors of a wise and effective resistance to the menace of the Jews — a resistance that has safeguarded Christendom in the past, and offers the best hope for rekindling it in the future.
The Catholic Church’s Jewish policy was deliberately arrived at. Centuries of contact with Jews at every level, both in and out of the Faith, taught the successors of Saint Peter some salutary lessons. The much-publicized ghetto at Rome, which the Popes maintained for centuries, was not the eccentric whim of a few conservative Holy Fathers. It represented papal teaching and papal practice that extended back through the ages of Faith to Peter himself, who made it clear in his first Epistle that the Jews were finished as God’s people, and who thus wrote to the new Christians of Asia Minor that they were now “a chosen generation and a purchased people ... who in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God.”
A compilation of papal decrees dealing with the Jews would clearly show that the Church’s legislative interest in them is twofold. First, the Jews must be constantly and enforcibly segregated from the Christian faithful, and second, they must at all times be prevented from infecting the world with their hateful and infidel doctrines. These were the two principles behind the Church’s approval of ghettos, her ban on the Talmud, her prohibitions against marriage with the Jews, her demand that Jews in Christian places be distinguished by a badge or other identifying dress, her warnings against Jews in public offices, etc.
With the final loss of papal territories in 1870, there ceased to be any Jews under the direct temporal rule of the popes. Yet, public questions involving the Jewish problem often brought the ancient Church principles into play. Thus, it is not surprising to find that the pope who was most outspoken on modern public issues, Pope Leo XIII, receives the following notice in the Jewish Encyclopedia: “He encouraged anti-Semitism by bestowing distinctions on leading anti-Semitic politicians and authors, as Lueger and Drumont; he refused to interfere in behalf of Captain Dreyfus, or to issue a statement against the blood accusation. In an official document he denounced Jews, Freemasons, and anarchists as the enemies of the Church.”
Rome’s traditional outlook on the Jews is currently reflected in its dealings with the Jewish State in Palestine. Amid a frenzied campaign of high pressure and propaganda, designed to persuade the world that Jewish usurpation of the Holy Land is the nicest thing that could have happened to the place, the Vatican has been notably unmoved. And it has been so despite the fact that vast numbers of conspicuous Catholics (Americans leading the pack) have not only swallowed but are publicly regurgitating the pro-Zionist line.
The Church’s mind has been made up on the matter since the days when Theodore Herzl, “the father of Zionism,” decided to call on Saint Pius X. Herzl hoped to get a papal blessing on his scheme for setting up a Jewish homeland. But the Holy Father told him flatly, “We are unable to favor this movement ... The Jews have not recognized Our Lord; therefore, we cannot recognize the Jewish people.”
And despite continual coaxings by Jewish leaders and their friends, the Vatican has refused to this day to give official recognition to the Jewish State in Palestine.
There have, however, been papal emissaries in the Holy Land during the last decade. They have gone, not to promote cordial relations between Rome and Tel Aviv, but simply to care for the interests of the Church and her children. They have gone to see how Catholics are harassed and discriminated against by the Jewish government. They have gone to see the wreckage and desecration of Catholic shrines and institutions by the Jewish army. And they have announced plainly to a heedless world what they have seen.
One of the earliest of these Vatican observers was Archbishop Arthur Hughes, who summarized his findings with the charge that there is a “deliberate Jewish effort to decimate the Arabs and to destroy Christianity in Palestine.”
One of the most recent observers is Monsignor Raymond Etteldorf, of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for the Oriental Church. In his book, The Catholic Church in the Middle East, which has just been published, he reports that Catholics living in the Jewish State are being gradually forced out. They find it difficult to get employment, even harder to set up their own businesses. Most important, the number of priests has been so drastically reduced through impositions of the Jewish government that almost half the parishes are now untended.
It is a troubled time, this season of Christmas, 1958. Our Lord’s Holy Land is in the keeping of His crucifiers. And that outrage is not the extent, but only the epitome, of the evil we are facing.
When Our Lady appeared to the children of Fatima, she told them that the people of all nations would have to suffer great afflictions if they did not turn to her. “But in the end,” she told the children, “My Immaculate Heart will triumph.”
Eventually, after whatever terrors and desolations may be in store for us, the world will listen, thankfully, to the message of the Catholic Faith — that Faith which looks for its ultimate protection to the Bishop of Rome, and finds its most joyful celebration in the festival of Christmas.
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