Introduction
The Point was a Catholic monthly published from 1952 to 1959 by the Saint Benedict Center in Cambridge, Massachussetts. The Point was originally named The Catholic Observer. The Catholic Observer had its premiere issue in October 1951. The name change to The Point occurred with the February 1952 issue.
The Point tackled the problems confronting Catholicism in the modern world by Americanism, Communism, Ecumenism, Freemasonry, Judaism, Protestantism, and Zionism.
Note:
Photostatic images (samples follow) of The Point — mostly supplied to the FBI by the Anti-Defamation League and B'nai B'rith — can be found in the FBI's Freedom of Information Act file on Father Leonard Feeney, which can be downloaded at the following link: https://archive.org/details/LeonardFeeney/page/n6
The Point – February 1952
POINTERS
With this issue, The Catholic Observer changes name to The Point. It is a name we feel is wonderfully fitting. If there is any adjective that describes American life today, it is “pointless.” What are we here for? where are we going? what is the point of it all? are questions that are left unanswered. Our particular concern, though, is that Catholics are sharing in this general regime of pointlessness. And for them it is especially tragic, for they have been entrusted with keeping the one true Faith, and today they are losing sight of the point of that Faith. They treat it as an efficient organization for the suppression of Communism, as a fund-raising, enterprise — as almost everything, except what it is, the Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ for our salvation.
If you want to get The Point, send us your name and address, and we will put you on our mailing list. We can promise you a monthly [edition] of notes and comment in which all of the remarks will be pointed, pointed in the direction of the Catholic Faith.
Christmas has passed for another year, and the Infant God and His Mother were no more noticeable in this Christmas than in any of the past few. It was once again a day of Seasons Greetings, Santa Claus, department store gifts, and package-store spirits. Boston Catholics, however, were given the privilege of observing Christmas in the traditional Catholic manner. They were thoughtfully provided with Midnight Mass on television, enabling them to witness the real absence of the Real Presence in the comfort of their living rooms.
The boys and girls of Saint Benedict Center have in the past month been going around Boston selling Catherine Goddard Clarke’s new book, Gate of Heaven. In the course of doing this, they have spoken with some 70,000 Boston Catholics. Needless to say, their experiences have been many and diverse. Some of these experiences we will tell you of in future issues. But, in general, they have this to report: While there remains a large number of those unworthy Catholics who are ashamed of their faith or indifferent to it, yet there is unmistakably a new vitality among Boston Catholics — a kind of waking up — a growing concern for the state of the Faith and determination that it be not lost. These are the people who have been responsible for making Gate of Heaven the most widely read and discussed book in all of Boston.
Incidentally, Gate of Heaven will soon be available through bookstores, in a clothbound edition coming out March 3.
To say “regardless of race, color, or creed” is like saying “regardless of butcher, baker, or murderer.” The people who want us to disregard our creed are usually people who have no creed of their own worth regarding.
The following question appeared, so help us, in a Harvard Philosophy Exam: “7. Prove that when an irresistible force meets an immovable body, Hell freezes over. (This can be done by pure logic.)”
Which shows what you can get away with when you have ivy on your walls.
Archbishop Cushing, in a recent address: “One-half of the world today is anti-God.”
Father Keller, of the Christophers, in a recent pamphlet: “Less than one percent of the world is causing all the world’s troubles.”
Things seem to be a lot better in the New York diocese.
THE CENTER OF INTEREST IN CAMBRIDGE
Saint Benedict Center is the third point of a triangle whose other two points are St. Paul’s Church, pastored by Msgr. Hickey, Vicar General of the Archdiocese, and Adams House, one of the Harvard dormitories. The arrangement is an extremely interesting one, as the occupants of each of the three points can testify. It is also a much-visited one. There are undoubtedly many places in greater Boston with more mossy traditions than the Center, but there seems to be no place currently so fascinating or notorious. For instance, there is a woman we know who was visited recently by a friend from California. Since it was her first trip to Boston, the woman asked her friend what she would like to see first in the historic old city. “Take me to Cambridge,” the friend replied. “I want to see Saint Benedict Center.”
The reason for all this interest and excitement is, of course, Father Leonard Feeney, the Center’s spiritual director, the priest who dared to decry the carefully-established methods of expediency and to proclaim the Catholic Faith in its traditional purity. By doing this, Father has disturbed the peace of mind of more people than any other man in the United States. Many people are quite prepared to be charmed by Father, who made his first reputation as a poet and lecturer, until they find he is really saying what rumors have reported him as saying — that without the Catholic Faith you cannot save your soul. People who never had any interest in salvation, who laughed at Hell as a medieval superstition, become suddenly alarmed when they find that this priest says that, unless they change, they are going there. They gasp in horror, step back, and cry that Father is “preaching hate.” In this land of religious freedom, there seems to be only one thing that must not be said, and that is that Jesus Christ is God and that He founded one Church for the salvation of all men.
Harvard College has been particularly upset by Father’s Christian challenge. This stems not only from the proximity of the Center to Harvard, but also from the fact that almost half of the Center boys are ex-Harvard, most of whom resigned before receiving their diplomas, giving as their reason that attendance at an anti-Christian institution was incompatible with their Faith. This won for Father early recognition among the Harvard deans as a man of dangerous ideas. Then, too, Father has never pulled his punches when attacking Harvard’s teachings or its teachers. He has openly and strongly denounced J. B. Conant, the self-styled “skeptical chemist” who is Harvard’s president, for his answer to someone who asked him if he thought we were right in dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. Conant’s reply was, “I think we should have dropped ten atomic bombs.” He has also attacked such professors as F. O. Matthiessen, the Harvard English teacher who eventually jumped from a hotel window and thereby won for himself the veneration of all loyal Harvard men. (It is a Harvard custom always to refer to its own suicides as “martyrs.”)
As far as the doctrine of “No salvation outside the Church” goes, Harvard would be quite willing to admit as an academic point that this is the traditional teaching of the Church. But Father’s insistence on its application to every single individual, even those with a Harvard degree, has made it a little too personal for Harvard’s comfort.
The latest evidence of Harvard’s hostility is an article in the Harvard Crimson, a nervous, two-page diatribe against Father. Although the article is somewhat in the nature of an “expose,” its exact purpose is a little vague. The reporter seemed to be torn between trying to fit Father into one of the categories he had learned about in sociology class and trying to dramatize himself as a sort of counter-spy, like the ones he’d seen in the movies. The article resulted in typical Crimson repercussions (someone broke the window of the St. Benedict Center).
Finally, and worthy of special mention, there are the Harvard Catholics, that self-conscious, apologetic little group of misfits, who are constantly trying to convince Catholics that a Harvard education doesn’t hinder their Faith and to convince Harvard that their Faith doesn’t hinder their being Harvard men. Among these Harvard Catholics there has been each year a large number of priests, sent there to give their education the finesse of the atheistic point of view. When Father attacked Matthiessen, three Jesuits who were studying under him retaliated by attacking Father. Matthiessen’s leap left these three Jesuits sitting in his classroom. As evidence of their faithful discipleship, they could offer, besides the prestige of a Harvard degree, their notebooks, in which were carefully recorded all of the suicide’s ideas.
BY FATHER FEENEY
The generic religion of the United States of America is meeting-house Christianity. Its ritual requires three items: a pew, a pulpit, and a preacher. Add to that a small organ, to assist in its single devotional indulgence: a hymn.
The meeting-house itself is a sacred edifice which looks something like a church, partly like a library, and a little like a bank. It is often covered with ivy, and in more cultivated sections of our country, as in New England, is usually rich in historical reminiscences.
Meeting-house Christianity discourages an intellectual outlook on the subject of salvation, and thrives on sincerities rather than on certitudes. Its theories in the field of Christian Doctrine are so diverse that its disciples have fairly run out of hyphens trying to link them all together. This program leaves it with a confused Christology, and even with a theology which is sometimes a matter of conjecture. The lifework of a devout meeting-house parishioner is to be a perpetual seeker after truth, whose proper chastisement comes from never being permitted to find it …
Lacking system, even in its morals, meeting-house Christianity was bound to have an explosion of pride somewhere in its ranks, and it had one about a hundred years ago in the State of Massachusetts, by way of an eccentric doctrine known as Unitarianism. The Unitarians, many of whom were men of abstemious habits and great wealth, finding the Christianity they were experiencing too complex to be a reflection of God, delved into Deism and discovered a God too fastidious to become man. As a result, the divinity of Christ went overboard in Boston as lightly as tea had gone overboard in an earlier revolt. But the genius of Christ, like the excellence of the flavor of tea, has never been questioned there. In Boston, Christ continues to be quoted by Unitarians, more at tea parties than in church, and not for what He said, but for what He “put so well.”
(from The Leonard Feeney Omnibus)
SAINT AGNES
Three hundred years after the first Christmas, there were still numbers of people who believed in it with the freshness of Bethlehem’s Shepherds. Many of them lived at Rome; and, of these, one was Agnes. Agnes was a child and a Christian, and Rome was a bad place to be either. Beyond being a child, Agnes was a girl, in a city where that was discouraged. Beyond being a Christian, Agnes was a Catholic, in a time before such a distinction was needed. For Agnes was born in the catacombs, when the Rome overhead was still an Empire. And it was twelve years before the Empire would be obliged, regretfully, to require Agnes’ head.
In those twelve years, she learned, in its simplicity, the Catholic Faith. That there was once a girl so loved of God that God’s delight was to be born of her. That God as man had lived in our world and, before He died for us, had devised a way in which man might become God. Indeed, this Way was God — the Flesh and Blood of Jesus. Having received this Divine Flesh and Blood into her body, Agnes vowed her virginity to the Jesus with Whom she was so one. This vow, and the Faith that prompted it, were Agnes’ transgressions against the Empire.
The removal of a head by a sword is a process that varies little with individual performances. In this sense, Agnes’ martyrdom was, if not routine, regular. But, as St. Ambrose says of the twelve-year-old Agnes, “Behold! a strange martyr! She is not grown of stature to fight the battle, but she is ripe for the triumph; too weak to run in the race, she is still clearly entitled to the prize; unable from her age to be other than a learner, she is found a teacher.”
For years after the death of Agnes in 304, Rome pretended to be still an Empire, and perhaps this is why St. Agnes is seldom called “of Rome,” lifting her city to her sanctity, in the way a Teresa would one day elevate Avila. As if to compensate for this lack of length in her name, Holy Mother the Church gives to St. Agnes the liturgical length of an “octave-day.” On January 28th we have the “little feast” of St. Agnes, exactly one week after her “great feast” of January 21st, giving us a double dose of her annual love to warm our Januaries.
God’s saints are abundantly remembered. The truth of this is realized in learning that St. Agnes has not only taken over two feast-day Masses, but that she has established herself in the middle of each Mass of the year. Secure in the Canon, between St. Lucy and St. Cecilia, St. Agnes is every Mass’ reminder that an Empire is no match for a girl, when that girl is out to win God’s heart. The Point – March 1952
POINTERS
Now that Elizabeth is the ruler of England, she will have to find time in between her many governmental duties for a few of the functions of her other hereditary office, that of being the visible head of the Anglican Church.
Here in New England, our only experience with lady heads-of-churches has been in the person of Mrs. Eddy, risible head of the Christian Science Church. In their respectively old and New Englands, however, neither Queen Elizabeth nor Mrs. Eddy has much chance of survival in anyone’s religious love. Elizabeth will probably one day be only an item in a history book. A newspaper has already supplanted Mrs. Eddy.
The University of Chicago Press has recently published a book by Joseph H. Fichter, sociologist, S. J. We gather that it is a book in which Fr. Fichter applies to a Catholic parish the kind of questionnaire he learned about in a Harvard classroom.
Father Fichter reports that the Catholic masses are not too well-informed on Catholic matters. His findings are not, however, to be confused with Blanshard’s babblings on the same theme. Mr. Blanshard is a loyal Protestant protecting Americans against the menace of the Blessed Sacrament. Fr. Fichter is merely a loyal Harvard-man using Catholics as guinea pigs for a sociological survey.
One of the faces that lately appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review Section was that of Mr. Graham Greene of England. Beneath the photograph, the New York Times explained that it was indebted to Life magazine for this likeness of the English author. In the text which surrounded the picture, it was made clear that Mr. Greene is the kind of “Catholic” writer who can win the favor of both Life magazine and the Times. Combining an Oxford manner with a brothel interest, his books are sufficiently literary for the Times, and lustful enough for Life. We have lately come across a book giving an account of the “apostolate” of Father Vincent McNabb, O. P., who was one of the speakers in a series of outdoor talks sponsored by England’s Catholic Evidence Guild. Father McNabb was in a position to do for London’s Hyde Park what Father Leonard Feeney is doing for Boston’s Common. How miserably the Dominican failed, with his namby-pamby presentation of the truths of the Faith, may be seen from the following dialogue, reproduced from the book:
Heckler: “You say that a man must follow his conscience?”
Fr. McNabb: “I do.”
Heckler: “Then if my conscience tells me that the Catholic Church is wrong, I am right in keeping out of it?”
Fr. McNabb: “That’s right, you are.”
Heckler: “Then if I am right in keeping out of it, you must be wrong in keeping in it. So you’d better come out of it.”
During the month of February, the Harvard chapter of the Ku Klux Klan burned a large cross in Harvard Yard. When news of the episode finally leaked out to Boston newspapers, eleven days after it happened. Harvard’s way of dismissing the whole affair was to laugh it off as the kind of good- natured Harvard prank that everyone ought to expect and no one ought to be shocked at.
At the same time as the cross-burning, Harvard’s president, J. B. Conant, announced plans to spend seven million dollars on the Harvard Divinity School, the purpose being to instruct the rest of the world in the kind of religion Harvard men practice.
THE THREAT OF A NATIONAL CHURCH
In a recent speech in Worcester, Mass., Bishop John Wesley Lord of the Methodist Church predicted that soon Catholics in this country would disavow all loyalty to the Pope in Rome and form an American Catholic Church. Most Catholics reading this statement were probably amused at what they considered Lord’s ignorance of the Faith. “As though we could ever give up the Pope!” they probably exclaimed. “He just doesn’t realize what he’s suggesting.”
The fact of the matter is, however, Lord is not at all ignorant of the Faith, and he did realize exactly what he was suggesting. He knows that Catholics in this country could never be persuaded to give up all vestiges of their Faith and go over wholesale to one of the Protestant sects, but he knows that, given the proper provocation and encouragement, they might well form themselves into a national church — a church which, though still calling itself Catholic and preserving all the prayers and devotions and other externals, would no longer require submission to the Pope as its Head.
There is, furthermore, in Lord’s statement a thinly-veiled threat: “We give you an ultimatum. You must be either American Catholics or Roman Catholics. If you decide to become American Catholics, we’ll give you a big pat on the back and congratulate you on your loyalty. But if you decide to go on being Roman Catholics — with allegiance to that foreign power, the Pope — then we’ll really start to bear down in our accusations of you as a subversive, disloyal group.”
There used to be a time when hatred of the Church expressed itself in such things as Maria Monk fables and in denunciations of Catholic devotional practices. But now anti-Catholicism in this country — which is becoming every day more widespread, open, and intense — has a new line. It is that there is something about the Church that is fundamentally undemocratic — that it is impossible to be both a good Catholic and a good American. This is the line that Blanshard uses, and his success is proof enough of its effectiveness and popularity.
And how are these attacks answered by Catholics? They are answered — at least by the official Catholic spokesmen, the newspapers and magazines and speech-makers — not by insisting on the truth and the necessity of the Faith, which would be the only effective answer, but rather by trying to prove that Catholics really are good Americans. Instead of defending the Faith, they defend their patriotism. They accept the charge that the Church is un-American as an honest objection, instead of treating it as simply another manifestation of anti-Catholic bigotry. The louder the bigots protest against the Faith, the more antics these official Catholic spokesmen go through to prove what Yankee Doodle Americans they are.
This reaction is just what Bp. Lord and his fellow Protestants want. They are delighted at the way Catholics become much more upset by slurs against their patriotism than by slurs against their Faith. They think this clearly shows that if Catholics in this country are ever asked to decide between being good Catholics and good Americans, they will choose to be good Americans. And this is the decision that Lord and the Protestants hope to bring about. Their intention is to keep rubbing it in that as long as Catholics take their orders from Rome, their loyalty as Americans is suspect. By doing this, they think they can make it so uncomfortable for the Catholics that it will be comparatively easy to maneuver them into forming an American Catholic Church — a church in which they could be good Americans, according to Protestant standards of Americanism, and at the same time still pretend to be Catholics (they could have everything but the Pope). These Protestants rejoice in the many signs already present that point to the formation of just such a national church: the growing independence of Catholic American bishops, as shown by such things as their defiance of the Pope in his ban on Rotary Clubs; the general watering down of Catholic doctrine so as so make it “inoffensive”; the preaching, by Catholics, that it does not matter what church a person belongs to as long as he is sincere.
In the midst of all this Protestant encouragement of Catholic weakness, there has been heard one clear voice, that of Father Leonard Feeney, professing the Faith in its purity: “There is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, nor without personal submission to our Holy Father the Pope.”
This challenge of the Church’s absolute necessity makes charges of un- Americanism look pretty ineffectual (is it un-American to have certitude in the matter of salvation?); and the possibility of forming a national church becomes absurd. When other priests and bishops have the courage to follow Fr. Feeney’s lead in proclaiming the Faith purely and strongly, then, and only then, will the idea of a national church cease to exist, both for Protestants as a hope and for Catholics as a refuge.
BY FATHER FEENEY The British Empire is a collection of disunited lands and nations, dominated by taking swift advantage of every dissension. The overt act by which Henry VIII indicated to the world the pattern of England’s apostasy, was a divorce of his throne from the Chair of Peter, with a divorce of himself from his lawful Queen. With both its spiritual and its secular interests the fruit of unwedded allegiances, it is no wonder there is no unity in what London does. It has lost all sense of the unity of a bridegroom and a bride.
Yet something still stays in England, which I do not know what to call. By way of showing how full of promise and emptiness it is, I call it “London Spring.” It is spring without summer; promise without fulfillment: style without substance; manners without meaning.
Every English sailor salutes the quartermaster’s deck when he passes it, aboard ship. On it there used to be a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. No sailor would pass it without acknowledging it. The Mary images have been removed from English ships. But the empty salutes still go on.
I once heard John Galsworthy lecture in the refectory of one of Oxford’s colleges. He entered, dressed in clerical robe and hat, and stood at one end of the refectory, in the manner of a visiting abbot. He saluted an empty niche in the wall. This again was a place where a statue of the Blessed Virgin used to be kept, and is kept no longer.
The Oxford and Cambridge colors are blue. Oxford has dark blue. Cambridge has light blue. This is in honor of the colors in Mary’s mantle. God’s Mother has departed. Nothing remains, but the color of her dress.
And so, on and on we could go, through all the English emptiness, through all the haunted places. A sweet odor still lingers everywhere, but a death and a departure have most surely occurred.
(from London Is a Place, The Ravengate Press, Boston)
THE CHRISTOPHERS — Change the world to what?
Perhaps you are one of the “nearly 500,000 individuals” who receive the Christopher News Notes every month. This incredible single sheet of paper is the official contact between Father James Keller of Maryknoll, a Roman Catholic “missionary” priest, and his many followers (nearly 500,000, as his News Notes states.)
We have often wondered what kind of shape “religion” would have to assume in order to comply with the American idea that “one religion is as good as another.” With his Christopher movement, Fr. Keller seems to have hit on the ideal solution. Here at last is the leveling of all creeds to a common-denominator “religion.” No matter what you believe about God or man, YOU can be a Christopher. Fr. Keller goes to great etymological pains to let you know that being a Christopher means being a “Christ-bearer.” You take your idea of what Christ means and bear it about, thereby effecting something which Fr. Keller hopes will be comparable to lighting a match in a dark room. As a matter of fact, Fr. Keller is given just such incendiary encouragement in a current “News Note” from Stratford, Connecticut. It runs: “Please keep up your good work and inspire more to ‘light a match.’ ” This may pass as good “Christ-bearing” with Fr. Keller, but it strikes us as little more than good business for the match companies.
Although the Christopher movement is headed and guided by a Catholic priest, the work of a Christopher is to counteract those who “hate the basic truth upon which this nation is founded.” It is, therefore, purely a patriotic movement, and not a Catholic one. As head of the Christophers, Fr. Keller joins that vast parade of priests and prelates who are so persistently waving a flag — to let people know that being a Roman Catholic does not mean being a disloyal American.
In his monthly communication, Fr. Keller states that the “basic truth” upon which this nation (and the Christophers) is founded is: “every human being is a child of God, deriving his rights from God, not the State.” Every Catholic who learned his penny catechism knows that this statement is in direct opposition to Catholic teaching. Fr. Keller must know it too! Fr. Keller must remember learning that people are not born into the world as children of God. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons why Fr. Keller is a priest is because people have to be made children of God at Baptism. And after Baptism there begins the struggle to keep one’s childhood with God by remaining in the state of Sanctifying Grace. Fr. Keller wears a Roman collar precisely because God has equipped him to dispense the Sacraments and thereby to keep baptized people the Children of God.
Americans are thus presented with the paradox of a Catholic priest whose message to them is to defend the “basic truth” that they are already children of God. Their need for Fr. Keller is not in his Sacrament of Holy Orders but in his unlimited ability to “change the world” by lighting matches. The initial success of Fr. Keller’s panacea books and his Farmers’ Almanac theology indicates that he is just what America wants by way of a Catholic priest. He will probably continue, successfully, until some new Keller — perhaps a rabbi this time — introduces a more advanced development of the “inter-faith” scheme of things. We suggest a rabbi because from where we stand, it sounds as though Fr. Keller will have some difficulty in accustoming his Jewish friends to “bear Christ” in other than profanity.
“It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” This is the ultimate in Christopher dogma, as deemed by Fr. Keller and consented to by all faithful Christophers. To encourage this liturgical version of “Brighten the Corner Where You Are,” Fr. Keller supplies 500,000 monthly reports on the progress of candle-lighters throughout the nation. We do not object to a Catholic priest’s having such quantitative influence; we grieve that a Catholic priest should be in such a position and not be using it for God’s glory and the fulfillment of his priestly obligations.
Fr. Keller will one day have to face Our Lord in Judgment and account for that Light which was hidden in all of his Christopherisms … the Lumen de Lumine, the Light of Light, which Fr. Keller called GOD at Communion time every morning and then forgot for the rest of the day. The Point – July 1952
POINTERS
The past few weeks were great ones for the Interfaithers. From everywhere came reports of Catholic willingness to compromise the Faith for the sake of some common interest with heretics and Jews.
In the mid-west, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference decided that Interfaith was being neglected down on the farm. The decision resulted in a union of the NCRLC with the non-Catholic Rural Life Association. From now on, the two groups will have one name (The National Committee on Religion and Rural Life) and one head — this year a Protestant, next year a Catholic.
This inter-creedal agriculturalism should produce some interesting religious hybrids. In such an arrangement, the opportunities for a new Luther Burbank are exceeded only by those for a new Martin (Luther).
In The Catholic World last month the Paulists gave Interfaith a boost by printing an article which described an unbaptized Jewish girl’s “true mystic union with the God she so genuinely loved.” With all sympathy and respect, The Catholic World explained how Simone Weil, a Jewish mystic, could fulfill God’s Holy Will by spurning baptism and stoutly refusing to join the Church. The article does not explain just how Simone Weil got into Heaven without baptism, but the clear impression is that she did.
When speaking infallibly, the Catholic Church tells Catholic mothers that their children who die without baptism can never go to Heaven.
When speaking interfaithfully, The Catholic World tells Jewish mothers that their unbaptized children can.
In Grand Rapids, Michigan, Bishop Francis J. Haas was chosen to receive the B’nai B’rith Interfaith award. While thanking the Jewish assembly for liking him regardless of his creed, Bishop Haas got off some choice Interfaithery.
Speaking on the great dangers facing our United States culture, the Bishop, like a true orator, touched upon those concerns which were nearest the Hebrew hearts of his listeners — “the high cost of living, prices, wages, rents … the entire economy.” Then, as any gentile must, when addressing a Jewish audience, Bishop Haas launched into an attack against “discrimination.”
His Excellency had the usual condemnations for those who “look down upon others.” Notably missing from Bishop Haas’ talk was any reference to the Divine Person Who, two thousand years ago, looked down upon B’nai B’rith’s ancestors, a howling Jerusalem mob who accepted the consequences of murdering God when they shouted, “His blood be upon us and upon our children.”
In Boston, Interfaith went collegiate when the Jesuit priest who heads Boston College paid a visit to Temple Israel Meeting House and stayed long enough to give the baccalaureate address for a Protestant girls’ school.
In contrast, at the Eucharistic Congress in Barcelona, Generalissimo Franco reaffirmed the policy that has made him an ogre to American Protestants and an embarrassment to American Catholics: “We are not a bellicose people, but if the hour of need should come, Spain, without any doubt, would once again be in the vanguard of those in the service of God. With the humility fitting in a good Christian, I proclaim the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Faith of the Spanish nation and its love for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and for Pope Pius XII. By loving God, Spaniards love peace, and they unite their prayers for peace to those of the Holy Father and of Catholics everywhere at this time. The history of our nation is inseparably linked with the history of the Catholic Church. Its glories are our glories, its enemies are our enemies.”
THOUGHTS TO ADD TO A HARVARD COMMENCEMENT On June 19, Harvard College held its annual commencement exercises. On that day, the graduating class of 1952, having been presented with diplomas in testimony of four years of faithful discipleship, was spewed out into the world, to put into practice the lessons it had learned at Harvard.
A large part of this class of ’52, like all Harvard classes, will end up as alcoholics, drug-addicts, and suicides; but another large part, to some extent overlapping the first, will end up in the most influential positions in the country: as the officials and policy-makers in our government, as the writers of our books, and the editors of our newspapers, as the teachers of our children. All of these Harvard graduates, whoever and wherever they may be, can be relied upon to have this in common: they will all think, feel and act according to the prescribed Harvard pattern, which they will attempt to impose upon the rest of the world.
Harvard makes a great commotion about how it encourages freedom of opinions; and while it is true that Harvard allows its students the kind of freedom in choosing their intellectual diet that a farmer allows his hogs, still, no matter what variety of swill a student may feed his mind on during his four years, he comes out unmistakably branded with the same mark as every other Harvard student.
The reason for this is that Harvard is fundamentally mediocre. The only thing that distinguishes it from the rest of mediocrity is the influence it commands by reason of its wealth, power, and prestige. It is mediocrity organized and made effective. But it is mediocrity nonetheless. That is Harvard’s milieu, its climate, and it cannot get away from it. For the doctrines that Harvard has committed itself to teach are the doctrines that mediocrity has made and that it thrives on.
Whatever might lift a man out of the class of the mediocre Harvard teaches its students to avoid, by making it appear ridiculous or unimportant. It teaches them to be suspicious of greatness, fearful of courage, scornful of holiness. It teaches its students to revel in their second-rateness; it teaches them to be smug, complacent, and self-satisfied. It pretends to foster individuality, but the individuality of Harvard is the same in every individual. If a boy were ever to realize himself as a person, unique and to endure forever, he might revolt against this mediocrity, and so Harvard teaches him his insignificance. It tells him he is in existence by sheerest chance, helplessly determined by his environment, a descendant of apes, one of billions who have lived over billions of years on an unimportant planet of an unimportant universe, a structure of atoms accidentally gotten together, likely to be destroyed at any moment by the explosion of other atoms, and then to be gone forever.
Harvard is just as cheap and vulgar as any daily tabloid. It has a more refined vocabulary, but its interests are exactly the same. What the newspaper presents as a sensational bit of scandal, Harvard presents as a case history in psychology. As for Harvard’s pretenses to culture, they are as fraudulent as Hollywood’s. Harvard will teach its students to laugh at American millionaires who import castles from Italy in which to have their cocktail parties, or who hang Renaissance paintings on their walls to give their homes an air of refinement. But Harvard itself will import anything it has read about in history, in an effort to give the place a tone, and is blissfully unaware, as only an American bourgeois can be, of the grotesque contrasts that result. For instance, Soldier’s Field, where the Harvard band forms itself into big H’s while blaring “Wintergreen for President” and where the Harvard football team gets trounced by Yale, is modeled on the Roman Colosseum, where Christians once were martyred for their Faith.
The courses at Harvard, which the students refer to familiarly as ec, gov, phil, lit, etc., present either a hopelessly superficial survey of some subject, or else encourage the student to blind, intense specialization. “Sorry, that’s not my field,” is a frequently heard Harvard expression, offered as excuse for anything from not knowing the chemical structure of coal to not knowing that God has become man. The Harvard faculty includes such men as Pitirim Sorokin, a mad Russian who periodically, and in scarcely understandable English, assails the rest of the faculty and the world in general for their failure to adopt his sociological theories. Ernest Hooton is another Harvard teacher who receives great kudos. He is a somewhat simian anthropologist who, to amuse his friends, named his son Newton. Hooton’s task is to convince his students that all men originally descended from creatures like himself. Probably the most representative of all Harvard teachers is the late F. O. Matthiessen, who was professor of History and Literature. He exemplified perfectly the kind of man Harvard likes to boast of and to hold up to its students for their admiration and imitation: he was literate, liberal, agnostic, and successful. But one night he took a room in a Boston hotel, wrote a note telling of his pique at the state of the world, and then stepped from his twelfth floor window.
Harvard had considered Matthiessen’s brains one of its most valuable assets, and it was upset to find them splashed vulgarly across a Boston pavement. To cover up for this disgrace, Harvard organized an association that would give perpetual honor to Matthiessen’s name and his ideas. The ultimate comment, however, the summing-up of both Matthiessen and Harvard, was provided by John Ciardi, an Italian apostate in the Harvard English department. Asked for a statement by the Boston newspapers the morning after Matthiessen’s suicide leap, Ciardi, striking a literary pose, remarked, “At times like these, one finds oneself on the edge of things.”
BY FATHER FEENEY
There is a Holy House of Bread Where friends may feast and foes are fed, And none is starved, none surfeited;
Where souls can relish the ideal And bodies revel in the real Where mind and mouth can make a meal;
Where simpletons who suck their thumbs Can share the carvings and the crumbs With Constantines and Chrysostoms.
Within this Fortress I was brought, A little thing without a thought, And given all for giving nought. I was anointed with a Sign, And someone’s promise, made for mine, Attached my branch unto a Vine
Of Immortality and Love, With Intimations from above That Wordsworth was not thinking of.
Arriving at the age of two, I found the faith I held as true Enhanced my infant point of view.
I could believe a rubber ball, Although somewhat phenomenal, Would really bounce against a wall;
A jumping-jack when squeezed would squeak, As though unwilling, so to speak, To wait for reason’s pure critique.
When toys were trunked and school begun, I was, among a many, one Entrusted to a wimpled nun:
A virgin vestaled with three vows Who had the Holy Ghost for spouse, And tried devoutly to arouse
An aptitude for long divisions Involving cerebral collisions With theological precisions.
This gentle girl in cape and coif With softest silver in her laugh, Prepared me for my epitaph:
“Here lies a Lad whose sins were sins, Not streptococcic orange skins; Nor were his virtues vitamins.
He learned the rules and knew the game; If Hell or Heaven hold the same — Himself, not spinach, was to blame.”
(from Songs for Listeners, Macmillan)
Good Night, Sweet Princeton!
Maritainism is a system of thought which allows Catholics to be both Catholic and acceptable in the drawing rooms of Protestant and Jewish philosophers. Maritainism is not a seeking and a finding of the Word made flesh. It is a perpetual seeking for un-fleshed truth in an abstract scheme called Christianity. Maritainism is the scrapping of the Incarnation in favor of a God Whose overtures to us never get more personal or loving than the five rational proofs for His existence. This plot to encourage only pre- Bethlehem interest in God takes its name from its perpetrator, that highly respected religious opportunist, Jacques Maritain.
The slightest acquaintance with Maritain’s history is sufficient to indicate how awry he must be in his Catholicism. He is a former Huguenot who married a Jewish girl named Raïssa. During their student days in Paris, both Jacques and Raïssa felt a double pull in the general direction of belief. Intellectually they were attracted to the religious self-sufficiency of a Jewish intuitionist named Henri Bergson. Sociologically they were attracted to the spurious Catholicism of Leon Bloy, a French exhibitionist who made a liturgy of his own crudeness and uncleaness and tried to attach it to the liturgy of the Church. At some point in their association with an unbaptized Bergson and an unwashed Bloy, the Maritains figured out that there was a promising future ahead of them in Catholicism.
Jacques Maritain is noted for his solemn-high, holier-than-thou appearance. For this reason, more than one priest reports that by the time a Maintain lecture is over, any priest who is present has been made to feel that the Roman collar is around the wrong neck and that perhaps he, the priest, ought to put on a necktie and kneel for Maritain’s blessing. One explanation of Maritain’s distant expression is that he fancies himself to be the Drew Pearson of the Christian social order. Judging by Maritain’s passion for the abstract, the fulfillment of all his prophecies will come in an era when mothers can sing such songs as “Rock-a-bye Baby, on the Dendrological Zenith,” and children recite such bedtime prayers as “The Hail Mariology.”
Jacques Maritain prefers Thomism to Saint Thomas Aquinas and, similarly, he much prefers the notion of the papacy to the person of the Pope. He could not, however, turn down the prestige of an appointment as French ambassador to the Vatican. Maritain went to Rome, but he protected himself against over exposure to Italian faith by visits to Dr. George Santayana. In Maritain, Santayana recognized a brother, the kind of European intellectual cast-off that is annually being grabbed-up by American Universities.
That Jacques Maritain should now be found preaching at Princeton University is not so strange. It did not require too much insight on Princeton’s part to see that a Catholic who hates Franco, speaks at Jewish seminaries, and favors “theocentricity” in place of Jesus, would be a bizarre, but harmless, addition to anybody’s faculty club.
Perhaps Princeton realized also that a Catholic’s admirers are a good measure of his militancy. Among Maritain’s more prominent sympathizers are John Wild, Charles Malik and Mortimer Adler, who are, respectively, an Anglican, a Greek schismatic, and a Jew. Naturally Maritain could not insult intellectuals like these by telling them that although they are outside the Church they can get into Heaven because of their “invincible ignorance.” It was necessary that Maritain concoct a new way of getting around the dogma, “No Salvation Outside the Catholic Church.”
After a lot of abstract deliberation, Maritain decided that a man could be “invisibly, and by a motion of his heart, a member of the Church, and partake of her life, which is eternal life.” According to Maritain’s new covenant, the important salvation-actions in our world are no longer a head bowed to the waters of Baptism, a hand raised in Absolution, a tongue outstretched to receive Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. “A motion of his heart,” says Maritain, is all that is required before a man may partake of eternal life. The Sacred Heart might have saved Himself a lot of inconvenience had He only known this, one Friday afternoon on Calvary. The Point – August 1952
POINTERS
Periodically the question and answer columns of the Catholic press turn up with some fine tightrope walking. During the month of July, The Pilot, Boston’s archdiocesan newspaper, printed a question from one of its readers asking if church-going Protestants and Jews are better than the non-church- going kind. In answer, The Pilot said that if the statement means “that a false religion, though less desirable than the true religion, is nevertheless acceptable in itself, and people who are unwilling to become Catholics should nevertheless be urged to attend some church, it cannot be accepted … If only one religion is true, it follows that all others are false; and if they are false, they cannot be recommended even as substitutes for the true religion.”
Lest anyone think, however, that The Pilot has gone overboard for orthodoxy, it quickly corrects the impression by assuring its readers that Protestants and Jews, “whose religious life is sincere and practical must inevitably be closer to God and more helpful to their fellow man than those who do not belong to any church … We can and must recognize the objective goodness of non-Catholics who are faithful to their religious convictions.”
The Pilot knows that the unforgivable sin in the American Catholic Church is not to gainsay a doctrine of the Faith. It is to discourage America’s heretics and infidels from practicing their heresy and infidelity.
“The future of America and of the world hinges upon the ability of men and women to rise above differences of race, creed, and class and live together in peace, friendship and brotherhood. This is the supreme problem facing mankind today. In comparison with it, all others fade into insignificance.”
The above statement was not made by a vote-seeking politician, or an agnostic sociology professor, or the chairlady of a suburban bridge club. It is the considered and published sentiment of the Reverend John A. O’ Brien of the University of Notre Dame, and it may be found in his recent pamphlet, “The American Dream.”
Father O’ Brien feels that “brotherhood” with Protestants and Jews is a Catholic’s most imperative mission on this earth. Father O’ Brien wants Catholics, who are by Sacrament the children of God the Father and Our Blessed Mother, to greet as “brothers” Jews who despise the Our Father and Protestants who snub the Hail Mary. As a solution to the supreme problem facing mankind, Father O’ Brien proposes a “brotherhood” apart from any father and mother, a coast-to-coast sheep-fold apart from any shepherd.
Distributed by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Father O’ Brien’s “American Dream” will provide quite an awakening for some of his brother priests. The program advocated by Father O’ Brien calls for Americans to “rise above” differences of creed, and what minister of what sect has more creedal differences for people to rise above than a Catholic priest, with his confessional box, his Blessed Sacrament and his un- American loyalty to the Bishop of Rome?
In conjunction with our article on Bishop Sheen, we print the following extract from St. John Chrysostom: “I do not speak rashly, but as I feel and think. I do not think that many bishops are saved, but that those who perish are far more numerous. The reason is that the office requires a great soul … Do you not perceive how many qualities a bishop must have that he may be strong in his teaching, patient, and hold fast to the faithful word which is according to doctrine? What care and pains does this require! Moreover, he is answerable for the sins of others. To pass over everything else: If but one soul dies without baptism, does it not entirely endanger his own salvation? For the loss of one soul is so great an evil that it is impossible to express it in words. For if the salvation of that soul was of such value that the Son of God became man and suffered so much, think of how great a punishment must the losing of it bring.”
HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE
When Our Lord gave His last instructions to His Apostles, He commissioned them to go forth into every nation, preaching the Gospel and baptizing those who believed. He did not ask of them that they be successful, as the world measures success. But if He had, the man who would be best fulfilling Our Lord’s commission would be Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.
Bishop Sheen has done what no other priest has been able to do, though some notable ones have tried: he has made himself a hit with Americans. And what is more, he has done this, not on the Church’s terms, as a preacher of the Catholic Faith; he has done it on America’s terms, as an entertainer on television, in free competition with other television entertainers.
While it is true that the Bishop’s amazing popularity is largely due to the applause of Catholics, still, the ease with which he has become familiar as Uncle Fultie and the Face on the Barroom Screen shows that he has made a hit with Protestants and Jews as well. Indeed, so general has the Bishop’s popularity been, and so overwhelming, that he can well serve as a model for other priests who might want to become successful. As a service for such readers, as well as for those who are merely curious to know what Bishop Sheen has done and how he has done it, The Point has taken advantage of the lull provided by his summer vacation to make a careful analysis of his technique; and herewith it makes its report.
The first thing that strikes you about Bishop Sheen’s message is that he never allows himself to be tied down by any narrow sectarianism. He is never too specifically Catholic. He is not so much a proponent of the one, true Faith as a proponent of Religion. Here is the way he has summarized the world’s spiritual ills, as they have grown worse through the centuries: “In the sixteenth century,” he says, “we denied belief in the Church; in the seventeenth, the inspiration of Sacred Scripture; in the eighteenth, the Divinity of Christ; in the nineteenth, the existence of God; and in the twentieth, the necessity of Religion.”
Being not merely an apt student of history, but a very perceptive philosopher as well, Bishop Sheen has been quick to sense that in trying to restore these values priority must be given to those most recently lost. The modern world must be convinced first of the necessity of Religion, and after that of the existence of God, etc. The farthest the Bishop generally gets in this journey toward Faith and the Middle Ages, is the nineteenth century. Once he has succeeded in exposing the position of the atheist as being theoretically absurd and practically impossible, Bishop Sheen is inclined to let up. As long as a man gives evidence of being somehow for God, the Bishop will not press him to tell how he feels about Christ.
Protestants and Jews enjoy listening to Bishop Sheen because they can always relax when doing so. They know they will never hear anything from him to upset them — no insinuations that his religion is any better than theirs, no remarks calculated to make them feel that they ought to become Catholics. Rather, he gives them a new appreciation of their own faith and fires them with a determination to be better Protestants and better Jews than ever. He even tells them how to do this. For instance, in a pamphlet he wrote, entitled “What Can I Do?”, Bishop Sheen tells everyone how to practice better his own faith and thus unite all Americans in “a common love of God.” He tells Protestants to practice fidelity to the marriage bond and give their children instruction in their Protestant religion. He urges Jews to do their bit by keeping the Ten Commandments. And he asks Catholics to show that they do not belong to this world by giving good example.
The effect of such appeals is to make Protestants and Jews feel delighted to find that a Catholic bishop approves of their Protestantism and Judaism and wants to strengthen them in it, while at the same time it lets Catholics know, by a certain added intimacy that only they will notice, that they are really his special favorites.
Despite the publicity he has received as a convert-maker, Bishop Sheen would never suggest on radio or television that his non-Catholic listeners ought to come into the Church. The Bishop has had long experience speaking on the air, and he knows that such suggestions are not allowed. That is why he prefers to make his appeal more for a return to generic religion than for a return to the Catholic Faith. On those occasions when he is forced to become organizationally specific and refer to the Church, he is very careful to present it in such a way that no one could possibly consider his remarks offensive to other religions. The mission of the Church, as presented by Bishop Sheen, is not so much to save souls — he seldom mentions eternal salvation at all — as to eliminate the need for a psychoanalyst and to provide a consistent philosophy of life. He is not so much concerned with those aspects of truth that belong to the Faith alone as with those that have a larger heritage. It is the morals, the ethics, and the logic of the Faith that he prefers to emphasize — those things that came to Christianity from the pagan Greeks rather than those things that came to it from Christ.
In an article in Cosmopolitan magazine, Bob Considine tells how he asked Bishop Sheen if he ever eliminated certain Catholic dogmas that might scare off Protestant and Jewish viewers of his television program. The Bishop’s answer illustrates perfectly the attitude he takes in presenting the Faith: “There is nothing in my television sermons,” he replied, “that one cannot find in Aristotle.” This pre-Christian outlook on Christianity accounts for the fact that, although Bishop Sheen holds the title of U. S. director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, there is only one thing that ever gets propagated to the U. S. Protestants and Jews who watch the Bishop on television, and that is his own personality.
BY FATHER FEENEY
There happens to be in this world of strange social conventions, one friendship that transcends all conventions and knows no rules. It is the brotherhood of Catholic priests. There is not, I swear it, under the stars, an intimacy more reckless or more profound than the bond between one Catholic levite and another. It needs no coaxing, no prelude, no ritual. It is subject to no formality. We meet and possess one another instantly. There is not the shadow of a barrier between us, neither age, nor antecedents, nor nationality, nor climate, nor color of skin. Ours is a blunt, rough-hewn affection. It almost forgets to be polite. I can dine at his table without invitation, sit in his study, and read his books before I have ever met him; borrow his money or his clothes without bail; his home is my home; his fireside, my fireside; his altar, my altar. I can give him my confidences promptly and without reserve. I can neither edify nor scandalize him. We can quarrel without offence, praise each other without flattery, or sit silently and say nothing, and be mutually circumvented. How and why all this can happen is our own precious secret. It is the secret of men who climb a lonely drawbridge, mount a narrow stair, and sleep in a lofty citadel that floats a white flag. Singly we go, independent and unpossessed, establishing no generation, each a conclusion of his race and name; yet always companioning one another with a strange sympathy, too tender to be called love, but which God will find a name for when He searches our hearts in Eternity.
(from Fish on Friday)
Saints for the New York Times
Americans are spectators, supervisors, reviewers, observers, analysts, critics, and, at best, fans. America is a country where one well-hit baseball can standardize the dinner conversation of fifty million people. It is a country that works hard all day and spends its evenings in front of a television screen, hoping that a few highly-paid faces will keep America laughing a lot, crying a little, but, in any event, distracted.
Americans love to be an audience, and therefore they turn up with a good performer only about once every decade. This spectatorial disposition has a parallel application among Americans who are Catholics: they abound in hagiographers, but have only once been able to claim an American canonized saint.
America’s biographers of the saints are not writing for a country that is falling away from God, nostalgic with a tradition of sanctity and the Faith, preserving in its places the remembrance of holy people, keeping in its customs a love for the saints. America began as a departure from God, from sixteen centuries of Christianity. America was a haven for those who wanted to escape the tradition of a Catholic Europe, who wanted the right to choose their own kind of worship of their own kind of God, for they had become discontented with the God of Saint Augustine of Hippo, and Saint Francis of Assisi, and Saint Teresa of Avila. American writers of the lives of the saints must therefore use their spectator-manner to preside over the canonized and prayed-to non-Americans who are the subjects of their books. The problem of tempering Catholic hagiography to Protestant America has had few solutions as successful as that most obvious one: get some Protestants, or former Protestants, to write the lives of the saints. Typical of the Protestants who have found employment as Catholic hagiographers are a lady and two gentlemen, whose names are Frances Keyes, Theodore Maynard, and Daniel Sargent. All of this trio have made the required abjurations of the heresies which they inherited from parents who were, respectively, Calvinists, Salvation Army officers, and Boston Unitarians.
For many years an avid party-giver, political hostess and salon-keeper, Frances Keyes one day determined to give up gloomy Calvinism in exchange for gay Catholicism. Two years before she came into the Church, Mrs. Keyes published her life of the Little Flower, modestly entitled Written in Heaven. Probably her best known “Catholic” book, Written in Heaven is an evaluation of Saint Theresa of Lisieux, from which the Saint emerges as one of those fascinating people whom Mrs. Keyes would be only too delighted to have at one of her less bibulous soirees.
Theodore Maynard was an alert child, and quick to see that the Salvation Army is hardly a fashionable sort of heresy. Thus, he abandoned the faith of his drumbeating parents and started preaching in Unitarian pulpits. Maynard came into the Catholic Church from a very liberal variety of Unitarianism, but his fellow-hagiographer, Daniel Sargent, is a convert from that rigid Unitarianism which insists on Boston birth, Harvard breeding, and a religious respect for usury.
By the very titles of their books, Maynard and Mr. Sargent have tried to convince their former co-religionists that interest in the saints need not be just a lot of relic-kissing. Both gentlemen have produced a life of the English martyr, Saint Thomas More. Maynard stripped the holy man of his holy title and gave him an air of academic respectability by calling his book, Humanist as Hero: The Life of Sir Thomas More. Mr. Sargent, with characteristic frugality, left the saint quite naked of any title, not even Blessed, and published Thomas More.
Mrs. Keyes, Maynard and Mr. Sargent are Americans observing, and therefore do not represent Americans at their best. For Americans at their best are fans, and the word fan is derived from fanatic, and a fanatic, when his fanaticism is for the Faith, will always become a saint, and often a martyr, and maybe someday Jesus and Mary will have some fans among Americans, and these Americans will become Saints, and, just like European Saints, their motives will be doubted, their hearts will be broken, and, when they die, their biographies will be written by Mrs. Keyes, Maynard and Mr. Sargent. The Point – September 1952
POINTERS
Some months ago, Father Francis J. Connell, C. Ss. R., associate editor of The American Ecclesiastical Review, made a play for public recognition as a theologian, by denouncing boxing as an immoral sport. Now he has continued his headline-directed theology, by doing some speculation for publication on “flying saucers.”
Fr. Connell says that, although science might have some objections, there would be nothing at all against theology in assuming that the “saucers” indicate the existence of rational creatures on other planets. He even proposes how, if these creatures sinned, God might have arranged for their redemption. “It is possible,” he says, “that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity assumed the nature of rational beings of another world … or one of the other Divine Persons could have become Incarnate.”
We can imagine Fr. Connell at Christmas-time, lost in meditation of some other Bethlehem that might have occurred on some other planet, where some equally Blessed Virgin (having been told by an angel nine months before that she, too, is to be the Mother of God) kneels in adoration before her new-born Baby, who is the re-Incarnate God — perhaps God the Father, this time, or God the Holy Ghost.
Another priest who thinks that Our Lady is not nearly so singular as she has been made out is Bishop Fulton Sheen. In his latest book, The World’s First Love, Bishop Sheen says of Our Lady: “She is the one whom every man loves when he loves a woman — whether he knows it or not.”
It would probably surprise, among others, a lot of inmates of Moslem harems, to hear a Catholic bishop assuring them that it was not the Sultan’s lust but his unconscious love for the Blessed Virgin Mary that put them where they are. Catholic Bible Week will be observed from September 28th to October 4th. In anticipation, Sheed & Ward has been plugging a publication called The Knox Bible. Here is one of Sheed’s plugs: “The Knox Bible is the first Catholic Bible since Gutenberg (now having its 500th anniversary) to be praised alike by Catholics and Protestants. 500 years is a long time to wait, but still it’s nice it’s finally happened.”
True, Frank Sheed, 500 years is a long time to wait. But aren’t you getting too little credit for the fact that “it’s finally happened”? It takes an awful lot of publishing know-how to get out a Bible that will be praised by both Catholics and Protestants, both papists and Baptists, both Hail Mary sayers and Blessed Virgin despisers.
Bar-Mitzvah is a Jewish religious term which means “one who is bound to obey the commandments.” Bar-Mitzvah is also the name of a book published by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. The declared purpose of the book is to make young American Hebrews take pride in their prominent noses. It bears the imprimatur of the Rabbinical Council of America, and from their long experience in snubbing Jesus and Mary, the Council members offer Bar-Mitzvah ’s readers some strictly kosher advice for the 25th of December: “Let there be no Christmas tree in the home, because the Christmas tree is symbolical of a religion in many ways contradictory to ours. To have that tree, the symbol of Christianity, in a Jewish home, stamps that home as disloyal and false to our religion, to our duty, and to our God. He who is proud to be a Jew will scorn to be a servile imitator of Christians.”
When Archbishop Richard J. Cushing addressed a meeting of Jewish rabbis in Boston a while ago, the Rabbinical Council was pleased to learn that His Excellency made no mention of Christmas trees.
PORTRAIT OF A PIOUS FRAUD
America is a land dedicated to the proposition that all that glitters is gold. It is a land where sham is the standard, where phonies flourish and pretenses go unquestioned, a land of drug-store literature and dime-store art, of trumpet kings and grapefruit queens, of simulated leather and mahogany veneer, of imitation flavoring and “color added.” It is a land where advertisers flatter you into buying something you do not want by pretending that you are something you are not — young or rich or good-looking or intelligent, where movies have made themselves the number-one industry by offering as entertainment vicarious adventure and romance. It is a land that likes to call itself Christian, but neither follows Christ nor has any intention of following Him. It is the land of the whitened sepulchre, where bright lights and gaudy colors hide misery and filth, and age conceals itself behind a mask of cosmetics.
America is the land of the fraud. And somehow this spirit of fraudulence — the spirit that has made this a nation of four-flushers, windbags, and impostors, a nation unable, or unwilling, to distinguish gold from dross, truth from lies — has found its way into the Church. For the pride of American Catholicism, its fairest flower, its choicest fruit, is a fraud. He is the Pious Fraud — the Catholic who pretends to have the Faith, is assumed to have it, but who hasn’t a glimmer of it.
It is not numerical superiority that makes the Pious Fraud the most prominent member of the Church in America, for he is not the common garden-variety of American Catholic. But what he lacks in numbers, the Pious Fraud more than makes up for (1) in influence (he is the type and exemplar of American Catholicism; he has stamped it, molded it, and made it what it is), and (2) in ubiquity.
The Pious Fraud is everywhere. He is in every office, every neighborhood, every parish. You can hear his voice on the radio, read his books in the library, and see his picture in the newspaper. He is always the most conspicuous Catholic in whatever place you find him. He represents both sanctity and intellectuality in American Catholicism. You will hear him variously referred to as “the best Catholic we have,” “a living saint,” “a man who really knows his Faith,” and “the person to ask.”
A fraud — whether male or female, clerical or lay — is a person with Catholic devotions, but with Protestant and Jewish sympathies. He is always anxious to apologize for anything Catholic that anyone might care to attack, but he gets terribly indignant if you suggest that the Protestants and Jews of America are anything but sincere, God-loving people. He will tell you, often and loudly, of his daily attendance at Mass, his frequent Communions, his novenas, his family rosary. But he will never insinuate to the Protestants and Jews he knows that they suffer any essential lack in not having these things. He will never urge them to come into the Church, or hint that the devotions he claims to cherish so highly might be needful for them, too. Rather, he modestly allows that the Protestants are doing as much, in their way, by attending their churches, and the Jews, in their way, by attending their synagogues, as he is doing, in his way, by attending Mass and receiving Holy Communion.
You must not assume from this behavior, however, that the Pious Fraud is uninterested in having America become Catholic. Indeed, if you can get him alone, he will assure you that there is no interest closer or dearer to his heart. The Pious Fraud realizes that in order to justify his annual contributions to foreign missions he must take some stand on the 120 million non-Catholic Americans. Consequently, he has manufactured a theology to go with his lack of apostolic zeal. This allows him to pose as one who is very interested in making conversions, and at the same time excuses him for not telling the Protestants and Jews of America that they ought to be Catholics. Here are some of his utterances:
1. “You can do much more by prayer and good example than you can by forcing it down their throats.” (This is the Pious Fraud’s favorite. It not only excuses his not mentioning the Faith to non-Catholics, but it also emphasizes his own piety: How could anyone be unmoved in the face of such holiness? How could such prayers go unheard?)
2. “Don’t you think it is very uncharitable and unkind to criticize a person’s religion to his face, and tell him that your church is true and his isn’t? How would you like it if he said that to you? You will never win him that way. All you will do is drive him farther away from the Church than ever.”
3. “Of course America must eventually be converted. But I am afraid that it is not for our times. We have a humbler job to do. We have the job of preparing the people — teaching them to lead moral lives and to have a reverence for spiritual values — so that when the Faith is finally preached in America, the people will be ready to receive it.” 4. “After all, you know it does require a certain amount of intelligence to understand the subtleties of the Faith; and, frankly, most people just don’t have that intelligence. I think the best thing is just to leave them to the mercy of God.”
5. “Whoever said you have to be a Catholic to save your soul, anyway?”
Whenever you hear a person talking this way, you can be pretty sure that you are listening to a Pious Fraud. No matter how great a reputation he may have for holiness and learning, no matter how much display he may make of his devotional practices, no matter how many allusions he may make to his hair shirt, if he is, in addition, inventing reasons to avoid telling Protestants and Jews that they ought to be Catholics, if he is making them think, in any way, that he approves of their religion — then he is, clearly and unmistakably, a Pious Fraud.
But perhaps you, reading this, do not agree with what I say. Perhaps you think the reasons enumerated above are good reasons for not preaching the Faith … Perhaps you, too, are a Pious Fraud.
BY FATHER FEENEY
Monsignor Ronald Knox is the son of an Anglican bishop and the brother of an Anglican minister. He severed his own connections with Anglicanism so as to acquire the central assurances and valid orders of Rome. His change of religious allegiance was managed without any apparent ruffling of his relatives, and he entered the Church, pipe in hand. That pipe he has not since put down, not even in photographs. Nor has he put aside any of his former canniness and nimble ability to amuse …
Ronald Knox is a great one for knowing the boundaries of things, both in behavior and in thought. And he has a shrewd way of keeping the apostle and the apologete in a priest, distinct. One is in doubt at times as to whether he wants England to come back to the Church, or the Church to come back to England. I once heard him say, when he was the Catholic chaplain at Oxford, that his purpose there was not to make conversions, but only to minister to those who already had the Faith. His own reasons for becoming a Catholic — his previous wide reading and proficiency in the humanities, his spiritual indebtedness to Virgil’s Aeneid — most of the students were familiar with, thanks to his many books and articles on the subject. Some of the students, however, thought Monsignor Knox’s logic too tactful to be innocently true, and they felt that if he stopped his affirmative arguments for a moment, and polished up his negative premises, he might easily win on the other side.
Monsignor Knox, by way of revising the bad English of the Church he entered, recently loaned it his vocabulary, and issued an edition of Holy Scripture known as “The Knox Bible.” In this Bible, Ronald Knox figuratively puts wrist-watches on all the Evangelists, and invites them to dinner in a don’s refectory, where, in the midst of revelation and refreshment, they may be colloquially introduced, and may receive academic credit for being the excellent and inspired authors they are.
(from London is a Place, The Ravengate Press, Boston)
OUR VANISHING SEMINARIANS
A Catholic priest and a Protestant minister have certain things in common. These things are: the “Reverend” in front of their respective names, the clerical discount on their monthly bills, and the Jewish rabbi who insists on being mentioned every time a priest and a minister are. Apart from these accidentals — their mode of address, their 10% off, and their vocational classification with bearded Hebrews — a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister are necessarily unlike.
A Catholic priest is a teacher of dogmas; a Protestant minister is an expresser of opinions.
A Catholic priest can forgive your sins; a Protestant minister must excuse them.
For heritage, a priest has Christendom’s saints, its cathedrals, and its glorious crusades. A minister is left with the Reformation’s pillage, some hymns, and the Ku Klux Klan. A minister’s success can be measured by his ability to maintain his reputation in the community. A priest’s greatest achievement lies in losing his reputation, and, ultimately, his life, for Jesus.
The majority of American Catholics, however, will not agree that there is any basic unlikeness between a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister. It is the loudly protested opinion of most American Catholics that a priest and a minister are both equipped to serve God and save souls. The only differences they will admit are those of equipment. To do his job well, a priest requires an altar, vestments, candles, Latin, and the power to turn bread and wine into God. To do his job, and the assumption is that it is done equally well, a minister needs none of these.
This lack of faith among American Catholics, this depredation of the Sacraments of Holy Orders, is beginning to have its logical effect on vocations to the priesthood. Vocations are everywhere taking a drop. Everyone has a theory about why this is so, yet no one has mentioned the fundamental reasons for our vanishing seminarians: the prevalent Americatholic teaching that there are people who can reach Heaven without the aid of a priest.
The call to the priesthood is no longer an imperative and zealous awareness. It is no longer an impetuous abandoning of family, wealth and self; no longer an alert eagerness to defend the honor of God and His Blessed Mother. An American boy’s decision to be a priest is now too often determined by (a) an attraction to the courtesies accorded to a Roman collar, or, (b) the double lure of a room at the rectory and a locker at the country club, or, (c) the expectation that the sacerdotal “glamour jobs” will soon need some new Bishop Sheens and Father Kellers.
America’s seminaries are turning out not apostles but apologetes; not pastors, but business men; not lovers of Jesus and Mary, but proponents of “divinity” and “religion.” A young priest is not encouraged to “preach in the highways and the byways,” and win America to the Faith. He is asked to study under atheists at heretical universities, to let everybody know how American and how intellectual a man can be, despite the fact that he is, at the same time, a Catholic priest. The Catholic Faith did not come blazingly to our country the way Saint Patrick brought it to Ireland, or Saint James to Spain. The Faith disembarked here timidly, as an immigrant. It filled out all the forms, complied with all the regulations, and, after a couple of generations, lost all of its objectionable European qualities. The seminaries have been the chief instruments for this Americanization of the Faith. Now that it has been accomplished, a priest can walk down Main Street, America, and feel as much a part of the milieu as any Protestant minister might. Still, vocations to the priesthood are falling off.
Each year it is becoming more difficult for seminaries to interest young boys in a One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church which is just one of many ways to Heaven, and in a priesthood which has only advantages of liturgy over Billy Graham.
Our concern is not prompted solely by the prospect of empty confessionals, vacant tabernacles, and unanointed deaths. For the tragedy of America’s vocation problem is not just the shortage of laborers for the harvest. It is the belief that, even without laborers, the harvest can come in by itself. The Point – October 1952
POINTERS
A diocese in Africa and a diocese of equal size in the United States have been compared statistically by Mission magazine. The U. S. diocese, with 383 priests, made 438 conversions in one year. The African diocese, with only 38 priests, converted 19,129 during the same period.
There are two possible reasons for such totally different diocesan convert figures. (1) African natives have much more good will toward Jesus and Mary than American Protestants do, or, (2) African natives are being told to come into the Church and American Protestants are not.
We feel that it’s a combination of both.
Father Karl Adam is one of the European “authorities” most often quoted by our compromising theologians when they are out to prove that just about everybody can and does get into Heaven. Lately, Father Adam has been endorsing the Moral Rearmament movement of Dr. Frank Buchman, a movement that has been condemned by every vigilant Catholic Bishop in Europe.
If Father Adam goes Buchmanite (adding Buchman inter-morality to Adam inter-faith), our Americatholic theologians will be in the market for a new quotable “authority.” To qualify for the job, one must be a contemporary non-saint, preferably European, who can think up adaptable schemes that will oblige Catholics to remain in the One True Church, while excusing Protestants for staying out of it.
One day last month, Catholic religious houses throughout the world heard the following commemoration read from the Roman Martyrology: “At Saragossa in Spain, of Saint Peter of Arbues, first Inquisitor of the Faith of the Kingdom of Aragon who was cruelly butchered by relapsed Jews for the sake of that Catholic Faith which he had so zealously protected by virtue of his office. Pope Pius IX added him to the list of Martyr Saints.” To America’s soft-peddlers of the Faith, the Spanish Inquisition is a chronic headache. And every September 17th the ache is intensified as Holy Mother Church celebrates the feast of the first Inquisitor, a man who carried on in such a way that the Jews killed him and the Pope canonized him.
St. Peter of Arbues, pray for us.
Many American Catholic priests shifted uneasily on their Interfaith platforms when Spain’s Cardinal Segura, addressing his diocese a few weeks ago, said: “It causes one real pain to see the tolerance shown toward non-Catholic sects among us and the indifference of the Catholics toward this question.”
King Henry VIII’s spiritual descendants congregated recently in Boston to reaffirm their allegiance to Protestant Episcopalianism. In episcopacies all over the country, gray-flanneled bishops packed up the kids and the crozier and headed east, or north, for the festivities. From across the ocean came Archbishop and Mrs. Fisher of Canterbury.
The Boston press, well trained in catering to the publicity whims of local church leaders, gave the convening Episcopalians broad (and high and low) news coverage. Caught up in this journalistic good will toward heretics, The Pilot, Boston’s weakly Catholic paper, had an editorial suggestion. Noting that the current Episcopalian trend is toward the Low Church, The Pilot hoped that some of the more liturgical Episcopalians would see fit to transfer their liturgizing to the Catholic Church. In an almost apostolic mood, The Pilot carried its suggestion to the point of coaxing — reminding the high Episcopalians that although there is, outside the Catholic Church, plenty of salvation, there is very little genuflection and practically no incense.
THE APOSTLE OF INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE
If you ask most Americans what the term “Boston Irish” means to them, they will tell you that it makes them think of strong, vigorous Catholicism. That this notion should prevail despite all evidences to the contrary, is due partly to the Boston Irish themselves, who like to create the impression, “Whatever we say, that’s the Faith,” and partly to the non-Catholics of the country, who feel that if this blustering, red-faced, unattractive thing can be passed off as Catholicism at its best, then they are well-excused in staying out of the Church.
The fact is, the Boston Irish have long since lost the Faith as the kind of bright, burning presence that fills the soul with joy and zeal. It has become for them merely a kind of national tradition, and they hold it not because it is true, but because that is what they were taught in Ireland.
There once was a time when the faith of the Boston Irish was strong, and they were persecuted for it — their convents were burned; they were told they need not apply for preferred jobs. But now the Boston Irish have ceased to make their Faith a challenge to those who hate it. They keep it to themselves, and try to conform to Protestant manners and Jewish morals. They are happy to take to their bosom any Yankee heretic who will agree to put on a green tie for St. Patrick’s Day and to attend a banquet given in his honor by the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. And they can aspire to nothing higher than to send their sons to Harvard, where, they imagine, they may hobnob with the sons of rich Protestants and Jews.
The leader of the Boston Irish is His Excellency Richard J. Cushing, Archbishop of Boston. He is the official representative of Boston Irish Catholicism, its product and its pride, and the Boston Irish feel about him the way other Catholics feel about the Pope.
As spiritual shepherd of the Boston Irish, Archbishop Cushing is famous for two talents: fund-raising, and getting his picture in the newspapers. So successful has he been in the former endeavor, that salesmen and rival fund- raisers study his technique to see how he does it, and so successful has he been in the latter, that he has found it necessary, in order to provide the photographers with some variety in his pictures, to strike such unepiscopal poses as riding on a merry-go-round and playing baseball in a T-shirt. He has also staged publicity stunts like persuading a young Boston couple to be married by him at a Nuptial Mass in front of a television camera.
Besides making money and getting his picture taken, Archbishop Cushing is famous for one other thing. He is famous for denying that membership in the Catholic Church is necessary for salvation. There are others who agree with the Archbishop in this denial, but he has been obliged to carry it further and to make it more conspicuously evident than anyone else. It has become the guiding principal of his episcopate.
Archbishop Cushing is known as a person who is willing to go anywhere, address any group, praise anyone. He has appeared at conventions of Jewish rabbis, at vaudeville shows, at testimonial dinners for pillars of the Protestant church. His invariable message at these gatherings, delivered with wide-spread arms and booming voice, is to assure his audience of his deep personal affection for them all, and to let them know, once again, that they can count on him not to regard differences of creed. That is all. He never mentions the divine privileges and prerogatives of the Catholic Church; never indicates that what Our Lord said about the necessity of Baptism applies to the Jews he is talking to; never indicates that what Our Lord said about the necessity of receiving His Body and Blood applies to the Protestants he is talking to.
Archbishop Cushing thinks that the kingdom of heaven is taken not by violence, but by ignorance. He thinks that the Protestants and Jews of Boston, where there is a Catholic church on every fourth or fifth street corner, will be saved either because they are unaware of the Faith, or else because they are too thick to understand it. In his largesse, the gate of heaven is open to all — both to those who die with the sacraments and to those who die hating Christ and His Church. Here is how he puts it: “When I die and go to Heaven, if I don’t find you there, I’ll know it’s because you’re not dead yet.”
In his published statements, Archbishop Cushing sounds more like a vote- coaxing politician than like a spokesman for the Church. Here are some of them:
To the Jews, who have for 2,000 years proclaimed their rejection of the Christ he professes to love, the Archbishop offers this expression of muddled charity: “No man could have my faith concerning Christ … without loving Him and the people who produced Him, the Jews.” To the Protestants, he presents this modest message, letting them know that the mission of the Catholic Church in America is merely to carry on the work begun by the nation’s Protestant founders: “Catholics are standing just as and where the Protestants did when they had complete moral leadership of the community.”
To non-Catholics generally, here is his assurance that they shouldn’t give a thought to changing their religion: “In the last analysis people will learn morality best within the household of their own spiritual families.”
And, ultimately, to his clergy, here is his modernization of the Gospel admonition about the narrow path and the strait way that leadeth to life: “No priest can be content today with serving God or saving people in a circumscribed or narrow path.”
Why Archbishop Cushing should have chosen as his episcopal motto Ut cognoscant Te, an apostrophe to God which means “that they may know Thee,” is a question only the Boston Irish can answer. For it is evident that the great intention of his episcopate is not that everyone may know God, as He is revealed in the Catholic Church, but, rather, that those who are ignorant of Him should have an archbishop’s assurance that what they don’t know won’t hurt them.
BY FATHER FEENEY
John Henry Newman was constantly praised for the clarity of his English prose and the limpid lucidity of his style. That he possesses these qualities, no one can deny. But his is the cold clarity of clear water in a fish bowl, in which one looks in vain for the fish.
The more you read Newman, the less you remember what he says. He is an author whom it is impossible to quote. What you recall, after you have finished reading him, is never what the clarity of his style was revealing, but some small, unwarranted queerness that it was almost concealing. You remember that Newman said that a chandelier “depends” from a ceiling; and if you look up “depends” in the dictionary, you will find that “hangs from” is exactly what it means. You remember that Newman felt entitled to mispronounce deliberately one English word to show his proprietorship over the language. He pronounced “soldier” as sol—dee—err. You remember that Newman was perpetually fussing about Reverend E. B. Pusey, who seems, in some refined way, to have gotten under his skin.
You remember Newman was shocked that Catholics were giving Protestants the grounds for declaring that “the honor of Our Lady is dearer to Catholics than the conversion of England,” as though anything else could be the childlike truth. You remember that Newman particularly disliked the Marian writings of St. Alfonso Liguori, a Doctor of the Universal Church, and said of these writings, “They are suitable for Italy, but they are not suitable for England.” You remember that, with regard to the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Newman insisted, in scholarly fashion, that “her case is essentially the same as St. John the Baptist, save for a difference of six months” — which is precisely the difference this dogma demands. You remember that, though Newman was in favor of Papal Infallibility, he was not in favor of its being infallibly defined by the Pope.
(from London is a Place, The Ravengate Press, Boston)
The Birds I View
European visitors to America traditionally comment on the vastness of our country, the variety of our landscape, and the bizarre assortment of inhabitants which, for purposes of quick dismissal, are called Americans. It is only through extreme generosity on their part that trans-Atlantic visitors submit their precise vocabularies to the flagrant laxity of giving just one name, American, to such diversified U.S.A. fauna as the debutante, the cowboy, the crooner, the hobo, the revivalist, the disc jockey and the soda jerk.
And when the European visitor is also a Catholic, even more generosity is required. For Catholicism in America has, out of convenience, made itself as plastic as possible, not by way of being “all things to all men,” but in an effort to be one thing to this man and another to that. Generally, the European Catholic comes to America well-reminded ahead of time that, despite what he finds here, it is of the Faith that the Gates of Hell will never prevail against the Church.
At first glance, the visitor from a Catholic country will be impressed by the material plant, the layout, the perpetual building fund which is American Catholicism. In among the hospitals, the colleges, and the retreat houses, however, the visitor will discover that the Catholic dwellers in these places are, like other Americans, people of many varieties.
American Catholics are not birds of a feather. The truth of this is obvious enough when a few of them are flocked together. Take these birds, for example:
The Converted Cocktailer. This species is a very exalted one. The ordinary specimen is a former Protestant, from one of the better families, who comes into the Church in Paris, reduces somewhat his alcohol consumption, has a private audience with the Pope, and then writes a book about the state of the Faith.
He is often favorably compared with Saint Augustine, and for the rest of his life is referred to, not as a Catholic, but as a “noted convert.”
The Black-Suited Back-Slapper. A clerical counterpart of the Rotarian layman, he has his greatest popularity among those of television intelligence.
Golf balls and highballs are an integral part of his week, and on Sunday morning he brings his best eighteen-hole manner to the pulpit. His “Dear Brethren” sounds much more like “Hi, Gang,” and is followed by some good, hearty, common sense reasons why the parish should all pitch in and buy a jukebox for the Catholic Youth Organization.
The Left Wing Lack-Bird. The subscription list of the Catholic Worker is a likely habitat for this variety. It is quite probable that he bears degrees from several colleges, and wears debris from several ash barrels. Among his more ardent devotions are “Our Lady of the Bread Lines,” “Saint Joseph the Proletarian” and a brief litany of obscure saints who, it is said, didn’t wash too frequently. By combining his economic theories and his Christian dogmas, he has arrived at a Christ who is equally present in the Sacrifice of the Mass and the sacrifices of the masses.
The Liturgy Loon. Armed with an unabridged missal and a course in Gregorian chant, this migratory species travels from parish to pariah in search of a properly said Mass.
When he enters a church, his purpose is not to make a visit, but to go on a tour of inspection. And by a few liturgical scowls at the surplus statuary, he can dismiss the devotion of generations of simple Catholics. For the Liturgy Loon’s concern is not prayer, but performance; not dogma, but rubrics; not the Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, but the absence of lace on the altar boy’s surplice.
The Red, White and Blue Jay. This patriotic bird is often an S. J. He feels that the great Italian Jesuit, Saint Robert Bellarmine, made good not as a Doctor of the Universal Church but as a remote author of the United States Constitution.
Back at the start of the century, we had a visitor from Europe who wanted to turn this American aviary into an apostolate. The visitor’s name was Frances Xavier Cabrini, and she set out to find here some rare birds, indeed. She prayed she would find some Saints.
Mother Cabrini died In Chicago, in 1917, still very much a visitor, with herself the only answer to her prayers. The Point – November 1952
POINTERS
During the month of October, a revised version of the Protestant Bible was published. To ensure its sale to the already Bible-laden Protestants, the editors threw in a revision they were sure would delight all Protestant hearts and make them glad to pay out $6 to have a copy of this one on the parlor table. In Isaias 7:14, where it says, “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son,” the new Protestant Bible has changed it to read, “Behold a young woman … ”
The Catholic press commenting on this was notable, as always, for its lack of resentment. It showed great eagerness to defend the “scholarship” of the Protestants, but none at all to defend the virginity of the Mother of God.
In the Rome to which he never returned religiously, Professor George Santayana recently ended a brief illness and a lifetime of skepticism. For the past eleven years, Santayana had lived in Rome among the Blue Sisters, Catholic nuns of the Little Company of Mary, and it was in their hospital that he died.
From Harvard, there came all the official sympathy appropriate to the demise of a former employee. At Princeton, there was a perceptible dampness in the eyes of Dr. Maritain. In Rome, there were ever-so-slight qualms of conscience on the part of the Blue Sisters, who had required of Santayana much pill-taking, but no Hail Marys.
In case you thought a few months ago that the Catholic book situation couldn’t get any worse, here are a few current reasons why you were wrong. From Confucius to Christ, three dollars worth of confusion resulting from the admission that Confucius is to Dr. Paul Sih’s Catholicism what Saint John the Baptist ought to be; Walls Are Crumbling, in which convert Father Oesterreicher, nostalgic for the delicatessens of his childhood, writes on three Jews who came into the Church and four who didn’t, finds all seven equally Christian; Life of Baron Von Hugel, portrait of a modernist who never left the Church, drawn by that friend of liberalism and of the Catholic World, M. de la Bedoyere; Just for Today, the latest Christopher perpetration, a kind of spiritual, but interdenominational, Farmer’s Almanac, which includes 365 Father-Keller-prayers, all of them addressed to a pre-Bethlehem deity.
On the 19th of April back in the year 1602, there was a little more hope for the Catholic book situation. On that day, a London bookseller, Blessed James Duckett, was martyred for the Catholic Faith. Here is the way his biographer describes the martyr’s last moments: “James Duckett showed great alacrity in his mind, and spoke boldly and cheerfully, to the astonishment of many beholders. He said of how he professed that he died a Catholic, and that so he had lived; … telling the people in general that he was most willing to die for that cause, and that it was as impossible for any to be saved outside of the Catholic Church as for any to avoid the deluge that was outside of Noah’s Ark.”
With roasted turkeys and warmed-over platitudes, Protestant America will observe this month its one religious feast day. Called Thanksgiving, it is the annual commemoration of a Plymouth Rock picnic, at which refugee Puritans and barbarian Indians abandoned their respective deities and diets and thanked a common god for their common gluttony.
In an effort to spread the “Thanksgiving” spirit, the November issue of Maryknoll magazine has gone out of its way to find a suitable infidel with whom it can share a general outlook on divinity. Beneath a snapshot of a Christ-and-Mary-hating Mohammedan, the priests of Maryknoll protest, “ … we hold a common faith in God.”
THE CHURCH MILITANT AND THE CHURCH DILETTANTE
On October 7, the Church commemorates in her liturgy the Battle of Lepanto. It was on this date, in the year 1571, that a small Christian fleet under the command of Don John of Austria halted and destroyed the powerful Turkish forces that were threatening to invade and overrun Europe. To secure this miraculous victory, Pope St. Pius V, who then reigned, asked the faithful to storm Heaven with the Rosary, beseeching Our Lady to crush these enemies of her and her Son and to save Europe from their scourge. That is why, on October 7, to commemorate the glorious victory of the Christians over the Mohammedans at Lepanto, the Church celebrates the feast of the Most Holy Rosary.
Lepanto was the last, late impulse of that great movement known as the Crusades, a movement which had begun in the final years of the eleventh century and which had as its purpose to rescue the Holy Sepulchre, the tomb in which the precious body of Christ had lain, from the hands of the infidels. It was for this that millions of Christians left homes and lands and families, to journey to a strange country, and there to shed their blood fighting a strange people, a people who rejected and despised their God, and who thereby made themselves the enemies of those who loved Him.
The Holy Sepulchre is today in the hands of the infidels, just as it was at the time of the Crusades. (It has, indeed, been turned into a giant Interfaith temple, with Mohammedans holding the keys to the place, and Catholics, Orthodox, Monophysites and others holding services there.) But if a Catholic of our day were to suggest going off to the Holy Land to fight for possession of the Holy Sepulchre, he would be immediately labeled, by his pastor and everyone who heard of him, “out of his mind.” For there is no group in the history of the Church with whom modern, successful American Catholics have less in common than the Crusaders. There is nothing so remote from their interests and aspirations as trying to recapture the Holy Sepulchre.
But it is not merely in their unwillingness to fight for the Holy Sepulchre that American Catholics show their estrangement from the Crusaders. For the Crusades were more than a particular war for a particular objective at a particular time. They were motivated by a spirit, and that spirit has been shared by all faithful Christians at all times. It is a spirit that thinks the salvation of one’s soul is the most important task one has to accomplish, and is ready to sacrifice any lesser good to that end. It is a spirit that thinks the kingdom of Heaven is taken by violence, and that only the violent bear it away. It is a spirit that is sensitive to blasphemy, zealous to defend holy things, and wrathful when it sees them profaned. It is a spirit that thinks the enemies of Jesus and Mary ought to be the enemies of all Christians. It is a spirit that looks on life itself as a continual warfare: a warfare of right against wrong, of good against evil, of the seed of Our Lady against the seed of Satan; a warfare we must wage both within ourselves, to root out the evil that is there, and in the world outside; a warfare we must wage to save our souls, with the Cross as our shield and our standard.
There is nothing of this spirit among American Catholics. To them, life is not a warfare, but a pursuit for peace. They want to be peaceful both toward the evil that is in themselves and toward the evil that is in the world. They look on the Church as a kind of spiritual Rotary Club that has a slap on the back and a good word for everyone.
Despite the blasphemy, the lust, the greed and degeneracy that are accepted and expected commonplaces in American life, American Catholics still refuse to believe that this is a country opposed to Jesus and Mary. Despite this country’s continual and blatant profanation of the Holy Name of Jesus, despite its sniggering filth that constantly affronts the spotless purity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, American Catholics still give no indication that the Faith has any enemies closer than J. Stalin. They show neither by their words nor by their actions any determination to stop these things or to separate and distinguish themselves from the people responsible for them. Instead, it seems that their main concern is to befriend these non-Catholic fellow-Americans of theirs, and to assure them that, whether they know it or not, and whether they like it or not, they have by their innate goodness and sincerity established themselves as members of the soul of the Church, on which account they are going to spend eternity in the Beatific Vision.
Every Catholic boy longs somehow for a crusade. He knows that that is what the Faith is meant to be — a glorious campaign for the love and honor of Jesus and Mary. And its fruits should be zeal, and courage, and sanctity, and greatness. But a Catholic boy in America does not find these things. Instead of the Faith being the most important thing in his life, something to give himself to wholeheartedly, something to fight for and to die for, the Faith is made to seem to him humdrum, and routine, and not nearly as exciting as most other things. He is told that the Faith is something that he is required to hold, but that others are not. He is told that people who are plainly enemies of Christ and His Church are fundamentally good-willed and are trying to serve God according to their lights. He is told that his primary duty is not preaching and protecting the sacred dogmas of the Faith, but is rather some cause like “brotherhood” that he has in common with those who reject such dogmas.
To an American Catholic boy, there seems to be no reason, no incentive for a crusade. The Church in America does not seem to need him to fight for it, or to want him to. It seems to be an organization that is politically powerful, wealthy, successful — and religiously unnecessary. It fights no battles and wins no victories. It produces no saints and inspires no heroes. It has no Don Johns, no St. Pius V’s, no Lepantos.
BY FATHER FEENEY
GUESS WHERE Now Our Lord came down and was born below, In a what would you say if you didn’t know? Wrong! … No, there wasn’t much shelter, but lots of song. It was altogether unorthodox: For instance, an ass, and, for instance, an ox, Who were lacking in minds of the right precision, And who made the view while they missed the vision. But other attendants were called at once: — Creatures, I mean, with intelligent eyes: A distant sage and a nearby dunce, For a shepherd, as well as a king, is wise: And you had to have wisdom to get invited, When the Wordling of God by the moon was lighted.
But where were the others, the in-betweens, Who measure Madonnas by merely means, Who make their Messiahs of potentates, Of would-be giants and would-be greats? They were idling in inns with the door shut tight, Where they’ve stayed for two thousand years, not quite, Night after Night-Before-Christmas Night. AVE VERUM CORPUS NATUM What little lambs and ewes Went running to peruse … What baby calves and goats And chickens out of shells And heifers with their bells And fillies lately born Espied among their oats …
What dull-eyed oxen saw Commingling with their corn, Strewn over with their straw …
What donkeys with dismay Found hiding in their hay …
Abiding in our wheat, In mystery complete, At a far stranger manger Is given us to eat.
THE NEW SOCIETY OF JESUS
Saint Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus in the year 1534. This society preached the Catholic Faith, fought heretics, converted pagans, and produced twenty-six canonized saints during its two hundred thirty-nine year existence. In 1773, a bull of suppression, issued by Pope Clement XIV, marked the end of the Society of Jesus.
There is, in the minds of contemporary Catholics, an understandable confusion with regard to the designation, “Society of Jesus.” This confusion dates from the year 1814. In that year, Pope Pius VII attempted to revive the original Society of Jesus, the one founded by Saint Ignatius. Worthy as the project was, and with all respect for the Pope’s efforts, the order which Pius VII got back was, unhappily, the wrong one. What could be more confusing, therefore, than to believe, however sincerely, that the present- day Society of Jesus is the same Society founded by Saint Ignatius in the sixteenth century!
To eliminate any further difficulty with these two religious orders, The Point presents, below, a review of the New Society of Jesus. Any student of history, and all lovers of Saint Ignatius, will see that there can be no more than a nominal connection between this 1814 order and the one that produced Saint Francis Xavier, Saint Francis Borgia, and Saint John Francis Regis.
The New Society of Jesus has nowhere produced a canonized saint. It has contented itself with begetting the “Jesuit,” a type which, though recognizable the world over, allows of variation according to nation. In England, the Jesuit is often a convert and invariably odd — which may be demonstrated even from his most considered English statements, his published ones. This is the way Father C. C. Martindale, looking back on his conversion, sums up: “Hence, became a Catholic, hating it.” And here is how Father Gerard Hopkins, looking ahead to his resurrection, prophesies:
“I am all at once what Christ is, since He was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.”
The French Jesuit is much more articulate, but in much foggier pursuits. One of his specialties is discursive theology, a kind of mental ju-jitsu which enables him to be loyal to both Evolution and Genesis, without being accused of talking through his beret. It is the French-style Jesuit which prompted Mr. Webster to list “jesuit” (with a small j) as meaning, “a casuist; a crafty person; an intriguer.”
In close-by Belgium, the Jesuit truly makes the grade when he is invited to become a “Bollandist,” a member of that patient group of researchers who can cast doubts on the hagiology of almost any saint since the time of, and including, the Apostles. If he can’t be a Bollandist, the Belgian Jesuit would just as soon leave the country. Few non-Bollandists, however, have left as gracefully as Father J. B. Janssens, who went to Rome and became the present General of the New Society. In Italy, the General has made a hit by fostering such local Jesuit talent as Father R. Lombardi, the itinerant peddler of lots-more-love-for-whatever-God-you-believe-in.
Education is the chief assignment of the American Jesuit. His teaching is done in schools with rest-home names (Shadowbrook, Fairfield, Spring Hill, Rockhurst), schools where a Catholic boy can lay in a supply of rote and rational answers to Alexander VI, chained bibles, and indulgences.
Found apart from his chalk-and-blackboard setting, the American Jesuit is of no predictable pattern. He may be Father Edmund Walsh, living in Washington, wearing a cape, and giving the government sacerdotal go- aheads on deadlier atomic bombs. He may be Father Daniel Lord, the apostle of musical-comedy Christianity, whose sustained levitical levity makes the Catholic Church about as inviting as a midwestern clambake. He may even be Father Robert Hartnert, who puts out a magazine in which he protects his fellow-Americans against Colombian Catholics and Spanish Cardinals.
In no case will an American member of the New Society of Jesus be mistaken for a priest like Saint Isaac Jogues, an original Jesuit who kept telling the original Americans that they had to love Jesus and Mary, until, one day, he literally lost his head. The Point – December 1952
THE AMERICAN CHRISTMAS STORY
Christmas used to be celebrated by Catholics as the day when God came into our world as a Baby. But Christmas in the U. S. has no such limited significance. It is, instead, the great democratic festival that means all things to all men, the day when everyone celebrates and displays whatever religious feeling, or lack of it, he has, or pretends to have. Christmas, as it is observed in the U. S., is not the day when the Word became flesh, it is the day when the Word becomes anything that anyone wants Him to be.
Christmas in the U. S. is a day composed of, and characterized by, such miscellaneous items as Santa Claus, eggnog, mistletoe, candy canes, scotty dogs, snowfalls, and fruit cake. It is a day presided over by Protestant sentimentalism and by Jewish commercialism. It is a day that provides Americans with an opportunity for re-calling their Thanksgiving gluttony and for anticipating their New Year’s drunkenness. It is a day when the Protestants, who refuse to believe that the Baby whose birthday they are observing is true God and true man, and that His mother is the true Mother of God, try to turn Him into a symbol. They make Him stand for peace, or goodwill, or some other high-sounding Protestant abstraction, and they enthrone in His place, as the child of Christmas, that obnoxious little Protestant brat, Tiny Tim.
Christmas in the U. S. is a day when the Jews, who have rejected the Baby as their King, their God, and their Messias, re-affirm their belief in the divinity of the dollar. Christmas is not so much a day they care to celebrate themselves as one that they urge others to celebrate by exchanging the gifts that they sell and the cards that they write.
Christmas in the U. S. has been made what it is by the Protestants and by the Jews. But it is the Catholics — and especially the Catholic priests — who have allowed them to make it so. Because of the neglect, the equivocation, and the infidelity of too many American priests, the significance and the challenge are gone from Christmas, and it has been turned into the kind of day that the Protestants and the Jews have been able to take over and pervert to their own interests. And this has happened not because of what the priests have said and done on Christmas Day, only, but because of what they have said and done all through the year.
Too many American priests have failed to insist on the meaning and the necessity of the Incarnation; they have been careful, when in the presence of non-Catholics, always to talk about “God,” rather than about Jesus, the God-man; they have given the impression that all they ask of non-Catholics is belief in some common un-incarnated deity rather than in the God Who became a Baby at Bethlehem. They have pretended to the Jews that there is some other way to the Father than through this Baby; they have pretended to the Protestants that there is some other way to this Baby than through His Mother; they have pretended to all that there is some other way to Heaven than the single way He ordained. By equivalating the love and knowledge of this Baby with whatever belief one might sincerely hold, they have made Him seem vague and unreal. They have made His message vague, his Church vague, the Way to salvation vague.
Christmas in the U. S. will be the same in 1952 as it has been in other years. There will be the usual decorations, the usual revels, the usual songs. The Protestants will go on filling their mouths with plum pudding and talking about the spirit of the day; the Jews will go on hanging signs saying “Seasons Greetings” over their shops and hiring fat men to wear red suits and frighten the children. And, in the Catholic churches, Midnight Mass will be said; priests will bring God down upon their altars, in a presence as real and intimate as when He lay in the crib of Bethlehem.
But when Mass is over, and the door of the tabernacle has been locked, these American priests will go on talking and acting as though it does not matter, for those who choose to ignore it, that God has become a Baby.
POINTERS
The Confraternity of Christian Doctrine hopes to have the first installment of its new translation of the Bible out in time for Christmas. The translation is notable chiefly for its treatment of Genesis 3:15, the famous and crucial text in which God the Father, speaking to the serpent (the Devil), establishes enmity between him and Our Lady. In former versions, it read: “She shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.” The Confraternity has decided, for the instruction and edification of American Catholics, that Our Lady does not belong in the text, and has changed it to read: “He shall crush thy head … ”
If Our Lady could have had the benefit of the Confraternity’s scholarship in time, she would surely not have made the mistake of appearing at Lourdes with her heel crushing the serpent’s head.
For centuries, Catholics have believed that the world was created the way Genesis says it was, and that, therefore, the age of the world is a knowable, and not too large, number. Not until the “anthropology-priests” of our day have Catholics defied the Church’s clear tradition on the age of the world. Each Christmas, however, the priests’ Breviary contains a decided kick in the shin-bones for those excavating clerics who prefer to think that the ancestors of the Infant Jesus were the baboons of a few million years ago.
Says the Martyrology for the 25th of December: “In the 5,199th year of the creation of the world, from the time when God in the beginning created the heavens and the earth, in the 2,957th year after the flood; in the 2,015th year from the birth of Abraham; … in the 42nd year of the rule of Octavian Augustus, all the earth being at peace, Jesus Christ, the Eternal God, and the Son of the Eternal Father, … was born in Bethlehem of Juda of the Virgin Mary, made Man.”
Our page three prose selection by Fr. Leonard Feeney is from his new book, Bread of Life. Just published by St. Benedict Center, Bread of Life is Fr. Feeney in twelve Faith-full talks on the Holy Eucharist, Our Lady, and Salvation Inside the Church.
BY FATHER FEENEY
St. Joseph’s Christmas Not envied, not desired, Only admired: — A girl on this will thrive As on no thing alive. And such was God’s rare plan For Mary’s man. He watched his loved one flower Hour after hour, With footstep caused no fear In angel-anxious ear, Gave her his husband’s praise In nought but gaze: The exquisite adulation Of contemplation That lets a fact reveal Itself as real, And, in Our Lady’s case, As full of grace. He must have marveled most When of the Holy Ghost Her little Son who shivered, At dawn was delivered. He must have feared and feared And hid behind his beard When what was not his life He welcomed from his wife And his bride’s Babe and Lord Adored and adored. At Christ’s Nativity, St. Joseph, I love thee.
BREAD OF LIFE (excerpt)
At Bethlehem, in the crib, is a loving, warm, exquisite Baby. In order to find that little Charity, that bundle of Love lying in the straw, you have got to walk down the hills, over the rocks, across the brooks, into the dark, in your hunt for the cave. You have got to sacrifice other things in order to find it, even the brightness of the stars. The songs of the angels have to be put away, or, if you are a shepherd, your sheep. That is how chaste you have to be to find this Baby …
A Child is given unto us! A Child is born to us, Who is Christ the Lord! Our Lord’s life was, in its simplicity, the life of a child. He did not have too many friends. I do not think you would call seventy-two disciples too many followers — or twelve apostles too many close friends. …
We all stay a child as we go through life — the best part of us does. We are a child when we eat, when we sleep, when we are sick, when we are old. When we are lonely, we are a child; when we are hurt, we are a child. If we only would let that child in us become interested in Jesus, you would be surprised how easily we could find Him!
Jesus of Bethlehem is given all over the world in the simple, complete value of Christmas, in all the traditions we know — in the kind of story one tells to a child. The inspired record of His life in Holy Scripture is there, in case a child is looking. If you are looking as a child this Christmas, it is child’s play to find it. And Still …
And still … though maybe not one-tenth the town Believes what boon this birthday brought us down, We go on keeping Christmas just the same With tinsel tricks, pretenses, and a name. Whatever else one could or could not say, (And who but God could deal us such a day?), There must have come to notice, less or more, That blinds are drawn in the department store.
And having soared in sales of Christmas cards Inscribed with Christ-less rhymes by Christ-less bards, Proprietor Mazuma sends the season’s Best greetings round to all for Christ-less reasons;
Bravely endures a one-day profit pause, Appeased with turkey and cranberry sauce, Then snoozes sweetly as a buttercup, Or boozes indiscreetly, woken up. And still … and still … the marvel Mother-Maiden Is of her infant Lad and Lord unladen; Emmanuel, grown little for our sakes, Into our world His baby-entrance makes.
And still … above the Cave the stars are bright, Some sheep and shepherds run with all their might; And kings and camels from the Orient come, While angels sing: Let there be Peace, for some!
DIM LIGHTS ON A CHRISTMAS TREE
Every December twenty-fifth, in liturgical generosity, the Church gives us three distinct Masses: the Midnight Mass, the Mass at Dawn, and the Mass of Christmas Day. In the midst of the middle Mass, the Mass at Dawn, the Church presents us with the memory of a girl 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, which means that her birth into Eternity occurred on the same day, 304 years later, as Jesus’ birth in Time. Among all the Christmas Day occurrences of nineteen hundred years, the Church has chosen to remember this fourth-century girl who defeated the flames that consumed her by becoming a new kind of Christmas star, burning in martyrdom to light us the way back to Bethlehem.
And it is doubtful, in this year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and fifty-two, that we should even recall the first Christmas, were it not for Anastasia and the girls of her Catholic courage whose professions of Faith still echo at Christmas time for men of good will. It is because we are assured of this echo in our world that Saint Paul tells us that “faith comes from hearing” a truth which is more often rendered in Latin, and was once put poetically this way: And shepherds knew that Christmas was A glory to agree to. For angels were provided speech, And fides ex auditu!
Thus, Christmas has traveled down to us by a route that is both audible and feminine. Christmas is a spoken invitation to hurry to Bethlehem and wonder at God in His Mother’s arms. And, to the Catholic children of America, that invitation has been most audible, and most feminine, when it has come from the dedicated lips of a Catholic nun.
We, who have been the Catholic children of America, retain whatever we have left of Christmas because of our early acquaintance with a wimpled lady in black. She talked of mangers and magi as if it were her custom to encounter them often; although we knew that day after day her one excursion into the world was a silent triangular trip which took her from the convent to the church, from the church to the school, and from the school back home to the convent.
Sister Imelda (or Agnes Joseph, or M. Theodosia) would each year conduct the school’s Christmas pageant. With much faith and a few yards of crepe paper, she annually transformed Jack (or Tom, or Joe) into a herald angel, complete with gilded trumpet and a well rehearsed declamation of “Glory to God in the highest.” And, when the pageant was over, Sister would return to the convent, grateful to Jesus that in her singleness she had been made fruitful with children who adored Him as God at Christmas time.
Because we love our sisters, we who have been the Hail Mary-reciters in their classrooms, and the paper angels in their plays, we are concerned about them this December. We have had, lately, some disturbing reports on America’s Sisters, associating them with things foreign and hostile to them. Only after much investigation did we accept the report that Sisters who teach in our schools are now getting instructions on how to do it from nun- smearing professors at secular universities. Regretfully, we have read in recent public print the dissatisfaction of some of our nuns with their traditional clothing — how they hoped that they could be allowed berets instead of veils: how they would be pleased to look more like Red Cross nurses; how black was a depressing color, and long skirts an encumbrance. While a best-selling Catholic book is exploiting the cartoon potentialities of America’s nuns, the Catholic Press, ever anxious to prove that Catholics can meet Protestant standards of achievement, has taken to publicizing a hyphenated series of nun-poets, nun-chemists, nun-physicists and nun-jeep drivers.
Hopefully, we who have been the Catholic children of America are praying for the one nun in every convent who will be a little sad this Christmas, wishing there were someone around to say, “Dear Sister, throw away your test-tubes, burn up all your degrees, and come and tell your children about Jesus and His Mother. Don’t leave us at Christmas time with a Bethlehem and no Baby, a manger and no Mary, plenty of crepe paper and no angels.” The Point - 1953 The Point – January 1953
POINTERS
John Foster Dulles, our newly-appointed Presbyterian Secretary of State, has lately been photographed with his Roman-collared son, thus revealing that the Dulles family and the Catholic Church have something in common: a member named Avery. Under the spiritual direction of his prominently Protestant father, Avery Dulles had grown up to be an atheist. Then, by involved intellectual processes which he wrote a book about, Avery abdicated to the overtures of “Omniscient Love” and became a Catholic and a Jesuit.
Included also in the photograph were Presbyterian Mrs. Dulles and daughter, the total pictorial effect being a splendid Interfaith testimonial to the wisdom of Father Keller’s dictum, “The family that votes together, gloats together.”
Some months ago, Archbishop Cushing surprised the firemen of Boston by telling them that, according to his latest theological theory, anyone who is killed while trying to put out a fire goes straight to Heaven. This past month, the Archbishop spoke to the mothers of boys killed in the Korean war. Still seeking to provide more generous ways into Heaven than the single way Our Lord ordained, Archbishop Cushing told these mothers that their sons were “genuine martyrs,” that all soldiers who die in Korea go immediately to Heaven, and prayers for them are unnecessary.
After defining this new dogma, Archbishop Cushing established a new devotion. Fancying that the bereaved mothers of Boston would find comfort in his willingness to violate the singularity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the archbishop bestowed on Our Lady the title, “First Gold Star Mother.”
While Boston’s flashbulb Archbishop was getting local newspaper applause for his patriotic heresies, another American prelate was getting nationwide publicity for his words of encouragement to infidels. In Washington, D. C., Archbishop Patrick O’ Boyle sent his warmest greetings to Rabbi Norman Gerstenfeld, rejoicing with the rabbi that Judaism has become successful enough in the nation’s capitol to build a new temple.
In contrast, and in answer, to Archbishops Cushing and O’ Boyle, we print the kind of uncompromising statement that marks a bishop as a saint. Says the Bishop of Hippo, Saint Augustine: “No man can find salvation save in the Catholic Church. Outside the Church he can find all except salvation. He can have dignities, Sacraments, can sing ‘Alleluia,’ answer ‘Amen,’ accept the Gospels, have faith in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and preach it, too, but never except in the Catholic Church can he find salvation.”
THE INTERFAITH OF OUR FATHERS
“Americanism” is the name given by Pope Leo XIII to the heresy that was born in this country toward the end of the nineteenth century and that has been growing and fattening itself here ever since.
It is safe to say that nothing in Leo XIII’s reign was more difficult for him to cope with than this American heresy. Being a European, he was accustomed to seeing theological error that took the shape of intellectual speculation, and allowed itself to be formulated in neat, condemnable propositions. But this sprawling, raucous, back-slapping movement could not be so easily pinned down. It was a theological maverick that defied any attempt to brand it with conventional categories and terms. Consequently, when Pope Leo XIII tried to describe and condemn Americanism with his precise theological vocabulary, the American hierarchy was able to deny indignantly that they had ever heard of such a thing. The Pope felt obliged to accept this denial, and so Americanism was free to continue unhampered on its merry, convivial way.
Had Leo XIII been an American rather than an Italian, the heresy of Americanism might not have been such an enigma to him. For actually it is nothing else than the adoption into theological territory of that same national temperament that Europeans find so unintelligible in its secular manifestations. It is the temperament of standardization, of uniformity, of mass production; the temperament that makes every American want to be like every other American and every American want every other American to be like him. It is the temperament that always seeks and adopts the lowest common denominator, as a basis for friendship, for culture, and for intelligence; that is suspicious and resentful of whatever does not conform to the mores of mediocrity; that calls it freedom when everyone shares the same slavery. It is the temperament that boasts of its undiscriminating and unrelenting joviality; that feeds its mind and stirs its emotions chiefly by platitudes; and that is constantly striving for platitudes that are large enough and grins that are broad enough for the attainment of national unity.
The heresy of Americanism consists in trying to adapt the Catholic Faith to this temperament. It consists in trying to give the impression that Catholics are in no way different from other Americans; that priests are just good fellows — likeable, broadminded, and unchallenging; that the message of the Catholic Faith is the same as that of democracy and Interfaith; that the Church honors and respects other religions and encourages the members of those religions to be faithful to their observances; that, though securing our democratic privileges might require constant vigilance and labor, securing salvation is easy; that heaven is not a kingdom, but a democracy; that it plays no favorites and is open to all, regardless of race, color, or creed.
The secret in discovering the doctrines of Americanism is this: to pay attention not to what its preachers say, but to the impressions that they give. This is necessary partly because their democratic jargon and Rotary Club inanities usually make it impossible to extract any coherent meaning from what they say, and partly because they are reluctant to state, in so many words, what they really believe. They prefer to get their message across by suggestion, insinuation, implication, leaving it to their listeners to infer their meaning and to state the heresies outright.
The heresy of Americanism is fostered and advanced mainly by a few highly conspicuous and successful American priests, who have made their reputations on their ability to display their own sparkling personalities and good citizenship, while obscuring the Catholic Faith. One such priest is Fulton J. Sheen, who presents us with the spectacle and the scandal of a Catholic bishop, sworn to preach and defend the Faith even to the shedding of his blood, offering to the millions of Americans who see him on television, a “non-sectarian” program. Bishop Sheen never indicates that he is worried about, or even interested in, the eternal salvation of his audience; nor does he ever tell them anything that they would need to know in order to achieve that salvation.
Another promoter of Americanism is Father James Keller, M. M., founder and director of the Christophers. He has, by way of reducing the Church to the standard of American religion, shown that a Catholic priest can make Christ just as vague and just as meaningless as any Protestant can. Through his Christophers, Father Keller invites “Catholics, Protestants, Jews, as well as those who profess no formal religion,” to join with him in being “Christ- bearers.”
Still another priest who has devoted his life to the practice and preaching of Americanism is Father John A. O’ Brien, or, as he prefers to be called, John A. O’ Brien, Ph.D. Like Bishop Sheen, Father O’ Brien is a midwesterner; in fact, they both grew up in the same midwestern town and attended the same midwestern college. For many years, Father O’ Brien was chaplain at the University of Illinois, where, in evidence of his easy-going disposition and lack of faith, he was presented with a gold pin by a Masonic fraternity and was called “Jack” by all the Protestant ministers on the campus.
Recently, Father O’ Brien has emerged from his milieu to achieve a kind of national prominence. This has come about by reason of a pamphlet he has written entitled, “The American Dream,” which has just been published by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. This pamphlet has received wide circulation. Extracts from it have appeared in many secular papers and magazines, and the U. S. government is having it reprinted for distribution overseas — presumably to let those Europeans know the kind of Catholicism we can produce in the good old U. S. A.
The tone of the pamphlet is established in the very first sentence, in which Father O’ Brien hitches up his cassock and makes the following midwestern declaration: “I am a Catholic priest, and I like Protestants.” Having thus unburdened himself, Father O’ Brien goes on to tell us who else he likes (Jews, naturally). He tells how all Americans are his brothers (a distinction they seem to have achieved either through their nationality or their existence, it is not clear which), and avers his eagerness to die for their constitutional rights. He concludes by saying that we ought to be grateful that there are so many different churches and sects in America, because it gives us the opportunity to turn our religious differences into “shining pearls of understanding and brotherhood.”
The message that Father O’ Brien, and Father Keller, and Bishop Sheen, were ordained to preach is the message of a kingdom. By trying to make it the message of a democracy, by preaching Americanism instead of Catholicism, they have been true neither to their country nor to their God. They have betrayed Christ the King, and they have kept the Catholic Faith from America.
BY FATHER FEENEY
There are three kinds of Communists: economic Communists, cultural Communists, and religious Communists. The least dangerous of these three is the economic Communist, the man who has no money. Then comes the cultural Communist, the man who has no values.
And finally, the most dangerous of all, is the religious Communist, the man who has no Faith and who wishes to share that lack of Faith with everybody.
It is this last form of Communism which has given rise to the movement known as Interfaith, which consists of a common-denominator belief that leaves a Jew delighted, a Protestant contented, and a Catholic without an Apostles’ Creed.
We priests were not put in Sacrament to take care of the temporal needs of our flocks. Our assignment is to the spiritual welfare of our people. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: “Christ allowed one of His Apostles to take charge of all the money — the traitorous Apostle — because He wanted to teach prelates readily to entrust the managing of temporal affairs to anyone, but to keep the managing of spiritual things to themselves; though many do the contrary.” The hungry whom we must feed, and the naked whom we must clothe, are those who hunger for the Bread of Life and thirst for communion with the Blood of Christ. The Blessed Eucharist is a priest’s great gift to man: that Divine Food and Drink which makes him con-corporeal with Jesus and induces the Blessed Virgin Mary to take him as her child. Saint Paul tells us that we could give all our goods to the poor and still not have charity. (I Cor. 13:3) Unless a priest makes the Blessed Eucharist his first and foremost charity, how can he say, or ask anyone else to say, what Saint Paul once shouted: “And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me.” (Gal. 2:20)
Priests should be poor men. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, insisted that all his sons be poor. A poor priest is free to talk all the time about man’s eternal salvation.
(from Bread of Life, published by St. Benedict Center)
The Starving Children of America
The United States of America is dedicated to the sublime realization that, two thousand years ago, a child was Immaculately Conceived in the womb of Saint Anne. The United States of America is aware that Saint Anne’s child became the Mother of God, when God became a child. Yet, the United States of America is not a good place in which to be a child.
Our nation was established by European Protestants who did not want an Old World kind of childhood for their children. Consequently, the boys and girls of early America were of a kind all their own. They were the children of log cabin and covered wagon, who never saw a French child’s cathedral. They were the sons of buckskin and bronco, who never knew the wonder of a Spanish boy’s Christmas. They were the daughters of home-spun and calico, who never could have dreamed of the First Communion lace on a little Italian girl’s veil.
As America and her children grew up, there was a corresponding growth in the number of Protestant sects. For, in hopes of keeping her offspring away from all “Roman” practices, Protestant America has made available an abundant variety of heresies. Here in Boston, for example, a Protestant child can now aspire to Christian Science, a system in which Christ survives as an anesthetic, and whose founder had a telephone installed in her mausoleum, so confident was she that she would not be dead when she died.
To the more fastidious young Protestant, one who feels that God is much too fine for a Bethlehem manger, Boston offers Unitarianism, allegiance to which consists in denials of belief in the Divinity of Christ, and professions of faith in the fertility of the dollar.
If Christian Science and Unitarianism are not to his fancy, the youthful untruth-seeker has an alternative in Congregationalism, Boston-style. This is bare, raw Protestantism, the kind that has kept America so militantly Protestant, and has muzzled Catholicism in this 70 per cent Catholic city. The current impetus behind Boston Congregationalism is Doctor Ockenga, whose newspaper and pulpit anathemas against the Virginity of the Mother of God have long since established him as Protestantism’s most valuable local voice.
America is a Protestant country, and its regional religions, like the three foregoing Boston ones, are calculated to keep America just that way. Religiously, America is not a good place for a child, and whenever a Protestant child revolts, that is his message to the nation. He may imply it in his novel or shriek it in his suicide. Once a Boston boy put it in his poetry, and got a Pulitzer Prize for complaining in the following way about Boston (while invoking a strictly literary Blessed Lady):
“Mother, for these three hundred years and more Neither our clippers nor our slavers reached The haven of your peace in this Bay State: Neither my father nor his father. Beached On these dry flats of fishy real estate … ” Protestant America is a land where children are either pampered or prevented, and grow up to be either divorced or mercy-killed. It is a land which, having many religions and no certitudes, demands that a child get dogmatic about democracy and make a creed out of the slogan that creeds are of no importance. A determination to protect the Italian-Catholic children of America from this kind of enslavement was what forged our only American saint, Mother Cabrini. She said, “I shall have no peace until I have wrested every last infant from Protestant hands.”
From the beginnings of our country, Mother Cabrini’s purpose had been anticipated by Our Blessed Lady. In her mercy toward America, Our Lady arranged that most of the Protestantism of our land should be the Baptizing kind. Thus, in thousands of water-pourings, validly administered, New World babies with Protestant parents became members of the Church and subjects of the Pope. And countless of these infants were soon after taken up to heaven by Our Lady — where they remain happy hostages for the conversion of the land they, happily, never grew up in. The Point – February 1953
An Open Letter to President Eisenhower
Saint Benedict Center 23 Arrow Street Cambridge, Massachusetts
Dear President Eisenhower:
I am writing this letter in the week of your inauguration to the great dignity which our people have bestowed on you. By the time you are permitted to read this letter, the ceremonies of inauguration will be completed and you will be President Eisenhower, indeed.
I am writing to you as a Roman Catholic priest, living in the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts. I am the Superior of a little American Catholic Religious Order, recently founded, and called The Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I promise to Your Excellency, as President of our great nation, my respect, my allegiance, and my loyalty — in all the things which God has permitted to be put under your charge, which are many indeed, and are endowed with God’s own authority to the extent to which He permits you to share it.
As President of our great nation, you are somehow a function; but you are also irrevocably a person, responsible both to God and to your nation for what you do. It is with regard to your personal responsibility to God that I wish to appeal, as one of Jesus Christ’s Catholic priests, privileged to be able to speak to you freely, in a free country, at this great time of your installation. And here is what I have to tell you, Dwight Eisenhower, Mr. President, head of our great nation:
Unless you become a Catholic, a Roman Catholic, before you die and unless you give your spiritual allegiance to Christ’s Vicar upon earth; unless you become an adopted son of God the Father, by the incorporate requirements of Baptism, and a child of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, by the incorporate fulfilments of the Blessed Eucharist, you will never save your soul.
You cannot plead ignorance of this great challenge where twenty-six million of your subjects are Roman Catholics, where nearly fifty thousand of your subjects are Catholic priests, where one hundred and fifty thousand of your subjects are Catholic nuns — in a nation dedicated to the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, where the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is in every town, abundantly and super-abundantly in every great city of our nation, in the Catholic churches you have so frequently passed.
This Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, living and breathing in all His adorability in the Catholic churches of your nation, can use the humblest instrument through which to speak to you. I am a beleaguered Catholic priest, whom some are denying the privilege of speaking freely to the President of this nation, in a land that boasts that it favors the practice of freedom of religion.
I do believe that, as a Catholic priest in a free America, dedicated to the Mother of God, I am free to say to you what I now say: Unless your “Our Fathers” are appeals for the Blessed Eucharist, unless you learn the beautiful “Hail Mary,” and call Christ’s Mother the Mother of God, you will never save your soul.
The end of some of our past Presidents has been sad, indeed. President Harding’s, for instance, and President Wilson’s, and very much, indeed, President Roosevelt’s. I do not want your end to be such a one, and I do not want to have to stand before the Judgment Seat of God, as a Roman Catholic priest in a free nation, who has been afraid to tell our President what are his obligations to God and to God’s only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, Our Lord, the Word Who became flesh and dwelt amongst us.
Respectfully yours in the Immaculate Heart of Mary,
Leonard Feeney, S. I. H. M.
Pointers We have been reminded by a subscriber that this year will mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Orestes Brownson, a local Yankee who came into the Faith with much gusto, trying to drag in with him such unspirited souls as Emerson and Thoreau. This reminder has reminded us to re-appreciate our position as Catholics in a country where courage and conversion can still go together.
The urgent message of the Catholic Faith demands a quick and total response. With the East of Europe under Communist domination, and the West of it frightened by the prospect, America remains as our one large hope for such responses. And we are the more hopeful because we have known Americans to be generous and eager for much lesser causes than the one to which we call them — the cause of the Queen of Heaven and Earth, the Mother of God, who long ago saw to it that America was dedicated to her Immaculate Conception.
Blessed Pius X, the one saint we have had in the papacy since the sixteenth century, would hardly be sympathetic with those flag-waving American Catholics who feel that the Vatican will have made the grade when it gets an ambassador from the United States. Blessed Pius X realized that his dignity and his power in no way depended upon hours of consultation with freemasons of the Myron Taylor vintage. On one occasion, when a representative of a foreign power threatened to withdraw if certain concessions were not made to his government, Blessed Pius X answered: “Let him go, and all the others with him if they like; they are here in their own interests, not in ours.”
Monsignor Matthew Smith, editor of the Denver Register, is one of this country’s most zealous armchair missionaries. Having little inclination to go out and preach the Faith in order to win converts to it, Msgr. Smith makes such preaching unnecessary, by staying close to his typewriter and thinking up theological innovations whereby those who had thought they were well outside the Church are discovered to have been members of it all the time.
The Monsignor’s latest theory, as announced in his Register column, is that many Protestant ministers are really Catholics “without realizing this,” and that what they are teaching is not Protestantism, as they thought, but the Catholic Faith, and that “such Catholicity as they unwittingly teach is saving many souls.”
We feel we ought to warn Msgr. Smith that, if he continues this sort of thing much longer, the Protestants are going eventually to get on to him and realize that two can play this game. They are going to conclude that Msgr. Smith, and priests like him, are really unwitting Protestants, and that what they are teaching is not the Catholic Faith at all, but sheer, unadulterated Protestantism.
Allison Peers and Thomas Sugrue, the one a spiritual descendant of Henry VIII, the other a nominal Catholic, have both lately died. Peers, who made milktoast translations of the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila, persisted to the end in his belief that Saint Teresa’s allegiance to the Pope was just so much nonsense. Sugrue, who wrote articles against the Church for Protestant magazines, finished his career as the right-hand man of Paul “I hate the Vatican” Blanshard.
As a further sad proof that Catholic America is fast abandoning even its lipservice loyalty to Our Holy Father, the burials of these two anti-papists were accompanied by eulogies in our Catholic press.
The television performances of Milton Berle have lately received conflicting appraisals. The first came from the editorial page of the properly Bostonian Boston Traveler. The second was from the well-known television star, Bishop Fulton Sheen.
Says the Traveler: “It’s time for television to clean itself up and stay clean. The Milton Berle show, for example. Thousands of parents must have watched it with their children, suffering indignation and embarrassment … ”
Says Bishop Sheen: “Milton Berle is a good friend of mine, and we’ve had conversations about our programs … Yes, I bear the deepest affection for Milton Berle and I love his program intensely.”
Of special interest to our Jesuit subscribers are the following points for meditation taken from the writings of the founder of the Jesuits, Saint Ignatius of Loyola.
Saint Ignatius: “Outside the Church there is nothing good. Whoever is not united with this mystical body will not receive from its Head, Jesus Christ, Divine grace which vivifies the soul and prepares it for everlasting life.”
Comment: Would this pass for good editorial policy in current Jesuit periodicals?
Saint Ignatius: “All that proceeds from heretics should be suspected, especially books, however good they may be. ”
Comment: And what would Saint Ignatius have to say about those Jesuits who of late are studying under heretics at heretical universities?
Archbishop Cushing has announced that in addition to the 18 seminarians who will be ordained at the Cathedral this month, three others will receive the Sacrament of Holy Orders in a special ceremony a day earlier, while prostrate before a battery of television cameras.
A television ordination is a fitting beginning for the kind of ecclesiastical career that some of our priests have aspired to, and a few have achieved. But the survival of the Faith in America must depend on priests who are willing to let their “light shine before men” without the aid of footlights. There is great inspiration for such priests as are willing to work simply for the salvation of souls, as well as a terrible warning to those who are busy about other things, in the words of the Cure of Ars: “Next to God, the priest is everything. Leave a parish without a priest for twenty years, and it will worship the brutes.”
The Point of The Point
With this issue, The Point begins its second year of publication. But before going on, we thought to pause and take a look at ourselves, partly to make sure we are still recognizable and partly to answer some of the questions we have received, asking us why we say the things that we say in the way that we say them. Here, then, is our declaration: We believe that the Catholic Faith is not being preached in its purity and strength here in the United States. We believe that this is a cheated country — a country cheated of the one important and necessary thing: the knowledge of what a man must do to attain eternal life. We believe that this has happened because certain conspicuous Catholics, knowing neither America nor the Faith, have taken it upon themselves to make the Faith more agreeable to America — by putting it on a par with other religions and denying the point of its existence, which is to be the single divinely- ordained way to salvation.
It is at these distorters of the Faith, no matter who they may be, that The Point is aimed: and if it sometimes seems barbed, it is barbed with a reason. Whatever methods we can most effectively use to combat and expose these men, those are the methods we will use. If we can do it by satire, we will satirize them. If we can do it by making them look ridiculous, we will ridicule them. If we can do it by contrasting them with the saints, we will contrast them.
We would like to see our country become Catholic, and we know this can never be done by watering the Faith down in order to make it more palatable. We think Americans will be brought into the Faith by open, vigorous preaching of it, by the kind of appeal Father Leonard Feeney makes to President Eisenhower on the front page of this issue. We think Americans are tired of Catholic pussyfooting on the subject of their eternal salvation. They want to be told the Truth clearly, simply, and challengingly. We think, too, that American Catholics are beginning to wake up to this and to realize that there is something terribly wrong and out of line about the way the Faith is being preached in this country. And we think that is the significance of the tremendous and overwhelming response to The Point in its first year.
American Catholics and Ex-Protestants
However else it may have distinguished itself, the year lately ended will not go down in American ecclesiastical history as an illustrious one for the Catholic Faith. 1952 will be remembered as the year in which Cardinal Spellman liked Ike, and in which Catholic Canada dared to dislike Bishop Sheen. It will be remembered as the year in which our last vestiges of Catholic dogma went up in smoke, after Father Keller’s continued insistence that “It is better to light a Camel than to curse the darkness.”
And it will be remembered that during 1952 the zeal of American priests was responsible for our customary quota of converts: 0.001 per cent of non- Catholic America was persuaded to join the True Faith.
From the arrival in America of the first timid Catholics, the spirit of American Catholicism has never been apostolic. The Faith has been content in America merely to “get along,” hoping that the time might one day come when a Catholic would be thought just as “acceptable” as a Congregationalist or a Baptist. After one hundred and fifty years of watering down our doctrines and playing up our Americanism, we are finally approaching our goal. By now, Catholicism’s American evolution has won for Catholics a nation-wide toleration, which in many localities might even pass for respect.
While they were still striving for this toleration, the Catholics of America could never risk becoming apostolic. Their growth in numbers was caused not by their zeal to convert Protestants, but by the willingness of European Catholics to abandon the “old country” in exchange for whatever livelihood was available in the mills and factories of American freemasons. The resulting dependence upon Protestant pay-rolls served to keep Catholic mouths well-closed on the subject of conversions.
After a couple of generations of closed mouths, American Catholics came to feel that maybe conversions were not so important after all. Maybe the old folks got it wrong in Ireland, or Poland, or Italy; maybe the way to Heaven is not quite so narrow as Our Lord seemed to indicate; maybe the Blessed Virgin Mary is just the Catholics’ Gate of Heaven and there are other, less devotional entrances for Protestants and Jews.
The tragedy of the American Church is that these maybe’s have now replaced the dogmas which they contradict. Thus, American Catholics have not become merely apathetic about the conversion of their country; they have talked themselves out of the one and imperative reason why their country needs to be converted. This relaxed outlook on conversions explains the current “wasn’t-it-good-of-you-to-join-us” attitude of Catholics toward converts. It also helps to explain that contemporary religious phenomenon, the “noted convert” — whose fanfared entrance into the Church immediately establishes him, he feels, as a spokesman on all matters Catholic.
Perhaps the two who have assumed their role of spokesman most successfully of late are Clare “Kiss the Boys Goodbye” Luce, and Thomas “Seven Story” Merton. By becoming Catholics, the ex-congresswoman, Clare Luce, and the pseudo-mystic, Thomas Merton, have found new opportunities for advancement in their respective fields of endeavor.
Mrs. Luce’s Catholicism has lately made her the central figure in one of the shrewdest diplomatic deals of the century: General Eisenhower’s appointment of a prominent Catholic as Ambassador to Italy, a move which both smoothes over the “Vatican representative” row and rewards the conspicuous political support of New York’s Archbishop.
Thomas Merton’s Catholicism has provided him a long-sought try at literary self-expression. He discovered that an excellent way of having people publish what you say is to join the Trappists and vow never to say anything.
For those loyal Catholics who have been concerned over the American collapse of Catholic doctrine, and the subsequent influx of Mertons and Luces, there is one dogmatic consolation in all of this convert chaos. There has, as yet, been no tampering with the Profession of Faith required of every convert. He must enter the Church, the Priest’s Ritual still says, “Knowing that no one can he saved without that faith which the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Roman Church holds, believes, and teaches … ” The Point – March 1953
POINTERS
All of our official Catholic protest-makers have registered their justified complaints over the appointment of Harvard’s J. B. Conant to the post of German High Commissioner. The principal objection has been that Conant is no man to have anything to do with the educational rehabilitation of Christian Germany. We agree.
Catholic spokesmen, however, have been notably silent on the number of Catholic priests who, of late, have been going to school to Dr. Conant at Harvard. No one made the embarrassing observation that the same Conant who is unsuited to provide education for German laymen has long been the head of a university where American priests feel it is a privilege to study.
Boston’s Protestant Episcopal Bishop, Norman B. Nash, is one of the country’s most prominent clerical supporters of Planned Parenthood. He is also a specialist at re-planning the Bible. Nash maintains that American parents have too many children and that Holy Scripture has too many “contradictory texts.”
You can imagine our astonishment, therefore, when Nash appeared in a “planned” newspaper photograph affectionately holding hands with the Catholic Archbishop of Boston, Richard J. Cushing. To bewildered Boston, Archbishop Cushing justified his presence in the picture by explaining that the platitudes upon which he and Nash agree are vastly more important than the dogmas upon which they differ.
In Washington, D. C., late this year, Americans will be able for the first time to view a Mohammedan mosque that meets every Islamic requirement. The new mosque is being erected a few doors down from the Apostolic Delegation, across the street from the National Catholic Welfare Council, and in the vicinity of the Catholic University of America. The presence of Moslem worshippers in such a responsibly Catholic area prompts us the indicate the kind of procedure adopted in the past by those saints of the Church who have been associated with Mohammedans. “Saint Peter Mavimenus,” says the Roman Martyrology, “proclaimed to certain Arabs who came to him in his sickness: Every man who holdeth not the Catholic Christian faith is damned like unto Mohammed, your false prophet. Whereupon he was slain by them.”
In the Atlantic Monthly, a local literary sheet not usually given to the publicizing of inter-monastic squabbles, British Benedictine, Dom Aelred Graham, a middle-aged man who is slowing down, has accused American Trappist, Thomas Merton, of being a “young man in a hurry.”
Of Merton’s best-seller mysticism, Dom Aelred feels that “no religious propaganda could be more in harmony with the Marxist book … ” By way of condemning Merton’s head-in-the-sand philosophy, Dom Aelred seems to recommend that we patronize “ … the achievements and the noise and the baseness of men … read their newspapers … [sing] their unearthly songs.”
Thomas Merton has had it coming to him for a long time. But we feel that the spectacle of one priest smacking another under Protestant auspices is a strange price for Dom Aelred Graham to be willing to pay for the sake of getting into the Atlantic Monthly.
When the National Conference of Christians and Jews held its anniversary dinner in Boston last month, the question arose, “Just what are the qualifications for being a Christian?” — and there seemed to be no proper answer from anyone at the dinner. As a public service, therefore, we decided to print the following question and answer from the Catechism of St. Peter Canisius, S. J., one of the 29 Doctors of the Church.
Saint Peter Canisius asks, “Who is to be called a Christian?”
And he 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 formed outside the doctrine and Church of Christ, everywhere, and among all peoples, as for example, the Jewish, and Mohammedans, and the heretical cults and sects.”
Monsignor Ronald Knox’s British lack of faith is suspected by everyone who meets him. It ought as well be suspected by everyone who reads him. Often, though, as he writes, he has a way of concealing just what exactly is his meaning. If you squeeze Knox hard enough for copy, as his publishers, Sheed & Ward, seem to do, you will ultimately get him to reveal the shallowness that lies at the bottom of his thinking and the heresy at the bottom of his beliefs.
Having previously rephrased the Bible to suit his own doubts, and reduced the Holy Sacrifice to the Hollywood speed of The Mass in Slow Motion, just published by Sheed & Ward, Monsignor Knox innovates as follows: “We all know that a spiritual Communion, faithfully made, produces all the effects of sacramental Communion; God might have decreed that no Communions be made at all except spiritual ones.”
This statement marks the end of belief in our incorporation into the Body and Blood of Jesus, and makes the eatable reality of the Fruit of Mary’s Womb merely a ritualistic luxury. Just whom Knox means by the “we” in his “We all know … ” is hard to say. Possibly he means his Anglican friends and himself. For these friends are sure to be delighted by this statement and will make it to mean that as far as Knox is concerned, whether you have the Real Presence in your tabernacles or the “real absence,” it all amounts to the same thing.
THE ORACLE AT ADELPHI
The Most Reverend Fulton J. Sheen, D. D., star of the Du Mont television program Life is Worth Living, and winner of the award “TV Man of the Year,” is the inevitable outcome, the ultimate fruit, of teaching that there is salvation outside the Catholic Church. He has taken the belief that Heaven belongs to the ignorant and the sincere as surely as to the lovers of Our Lady and the receivers of Our Lord in Holy Communion, and has pushed it to its final, fantastic conclusion. For Bishop Sheen, who first won renown by his fashionable instruction of fashionable converts, has now decided to try a new line. He has abandoned preaching the Catholic Faith, and, to the five million people who wait expectantly for his message as it is broadcast from the Adelphi Theater each Tuesday night, he expounds something he feels is more needful and more consoling: his own philosophy.
This rejection of the dogmas of the Church in favor of his own ideas has been purposeful and assiduous, and Bishop Sheen wants there to be no misunderstanding about it. He has seen to it that no matter what magazine a person might pick up, he is certain to find in it an interview with the Bishop. And the recurrent theme in all these interviews, the one point about which Bishop Sheen is most anxious, is to dissociate himself, as far as his program goes, from any tinge of Catholicism. “Mine is not a religious program,” he proclaims, in his own imitable way: “I am speaking merely as a university lecturer.”
There is no denying, of course, that as a television message, Bishop Sheen’s has it all over the Catholic Faith. The mere fact that he is the most popular performer on television, whereas if he were preaching the Faith he would be off the air in two weeks, is proof enough of that. As to just what his message is, however, it is not easy to say. He seems to be concerned mainly with fighting such evils as “boredom” and “internal conflict;” in warning his listeners against psychoanalysis, while at the same time he diagnoses their ills in psychoanalytic terms; in urging his listeners to stop reading “Nietzsche one day and Freud the next and Sartre the next” (and some other writer they have never heard of the next), and to get themselves “an abiding philosophy of life.”
The purpose of his program, he says, is to make people “think.” And this might well be the secret of his popularity. For there is undoubtedly a certain scintillation in having the whole family sit around the television screen, thinking. And the Bishop’s style of presentation is exactly suited to the thinking of America’s television watchers. “If Christ is not God, then He is Anti-Christ.” This, though taken from his religious days, is a fair sample of the kind of cogent aphorism he gives his listeners to mull over.
But it is not so much what the Bishop says that makes his listeners sit up and take notice as his manner of saying it. For every utterance he makes, from the most dire warning of what will happen to the world if it does not let itself be healed by him, to the most inane description of the kind of paper he uses to make his notes on, is delivered in the manner of an over- done Hamlet reading from the Apocalypse.
Then, too, there are the well-publicized rumors of the Bishop’s asceticism — talk of hair shirts and holy hours and hot water for breakfast — all of which gives him an unmistakable glamour and manages to make him somehow as attractive as the more lusty entertainers in whose midst he appears.
It is ironical that, in addition to his television duties, Bishop Sheen also holds the office of National Director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. The purpose of this Society is to send missionaries into the farthest corners of the world so that everyone might hear the saving message of the Catholic Faith — the very message that Bishop Sheen, speaking each week to five million people, has discarded in favor of an utterly Faith-less message of his own.
BY FATHER FEENEY
It will never be defined that Saint Joseph was immaculately conceived, for he was not. He was conceived and born in original sin. He is a little son — our beautiful fallen-race boy — who was great and beautiful enough to be the father of Jesus when he needed a father’s care, and the virginal spouse of Our Lady when she needed the protection of a husband. He gave this protection with marvelous tenderness and purity. He is pictured, as you know, with a lily in his hand. We can move over and stand with Saint Joseph, we who were born in original sin, in a way we could not with our august Lord and our august Lady.
There are only two relics of Saint Joseph which have been left to us. The marriage ring he gave to the Blessed Virgin is at Perugia, in Italy. His cincture is at Joinville, in France.
Saint Joseph died before Our Lord did. I am prepared to believe, and so may you, although the Church has not yet infallibly so defined, that Saint Joseph’s body rose with Christ and that he is in Heaven body and soul, crowned with glory and honor — because, next to Our Lord and Our Lady, he is the highest of all the saints.
How do we know, in loving Christian faith, that Saint Joseph’s body is in Heaven? Well, because he and Jesus and Mary make up the Holy Family. Just imagine the Holy Family in Heaven, with one body missing! When we pray for a happy death, we pray to Jesus, Mary and Joseph to be with us in our last agony, and Mary and Jesus having bodies and being able to be with us, and Saint Joseph alone left in the order of sheer soul!
Saint Bernardine of Siena and Saint Francis de Sales both proclaimed their belief in the resurrection of the body of Saint Joseph from the dead, and his ascension into Heaven along with Our Lord, Jesus Christ. No Holy Father ever scolded them for so speaking, and Our Holy Mother the Church canonized them despite this utterance.
(from The Bread of Life, published by St. Benedict Center)
THE ANTI-SEMITISM OF THE JEWS
We, as Catholics, love Jews — not abstractly, not sociologically, not for the relaxation of ethnic tensions, not for the improvement of race relations. We, as Catholics, love Jews for religious reasons. And since love must be of persons, not of groups, we Catholics can name the Jews whom we love. They are Jesus, Mary and Joseph; Elizabeth, Zachary, and John the Baptist; Simeon, Anna and the Twelve Apostles. They are the King of the Jews and the handful of Jewish subjects who remained loyal to Him when mobs of Jews demanded His crucifixion in a wild prophetic shout of, “His blood be upon us and upon our children.”
For two thousand years now, we gentile Catholics have been eager subjects of the King of the Jews. We have enthroned Him in our chapels and cathedrals. We have taken His virginal mother to be our Queen. We have sent our missionaries to remote gentile lands so that the Kingdom of Jesus, King of the Jews, might cover the entire Earth. One whole chapter of history is the record of our zeal for the return of Jesus to the Holy Land of His royal Jewish ancestors. At the cost of our children’s prayers and our widows’ tears, we sent our young men to die before the walls of Jerusalem, in those glorious spectacles of faith and folly called the Crusades.
Out of wood and stone we gave structure to our loyalties. We built the universities of Europe as places where our scholars could train our minds in allegiance to the eternal truths of Jesus and His Kingdom. We built the monasteries and convents of Christendom as havens where our hearts might be pledged in singular fidelity to the King of the Jews.
As the Gospel was spread, we welcomed new gentile nations, encouraging them to give over to the service of Jesus all they had that was good and beautiful. From our solicitude there grew murals and frescoes, hymns and poetry, Italian madonnas, Spanish crucifixes, and French carols.
In times of trial and adversity, we are able to present to Christ the King the most royal of our saints for His consolation. Out of the Roman persecutions came the twelve-year-old Agnes, offering her patrician head to the executioner. Out of the Protestant revolt came the nobleman Francis Borgia, spending his final strength for the unity of Christ’s Kingdom.
Still, as we look back over the centuries of our labors, we are struck by a glaring paradox: the most sustained and ubiquitous opposition we have had to the spreading of the Kingdom of the King of the Jews has come from the Jews themselves. History books are full of the many measures we have had to take in order to guard ourselves against the hatred of Jesus by His own people. Pope Saint Pius V, for the protection of Christians, at one time ordered that all Jews in Rome were to wear bright orange hats, so they might be easily recognizable and, therefore, easily avoidable. The Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, made it an impediment to joining their order that an applicant should be of Jewish blood. The situation got so bad in Spain once that the King had to order every Jew who would not become a Catholic to quit the country.
Because we hold out for Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and try to protect them against other Jews who hate them, we Catholics have left ourselves wide open for that much-wielded present-day stigma, “anti-semitism.” And, indeed, if “anti-semitism” means not loving those who blaspheme the Divinity of Jesus, we plead guilty. If, however, “anti-semitism” means a religious contempt for the King of the Jews and His subjects, then we might well accuse the Jews of it.
In all the tabernacles of our Catholic churches, there is truly present the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ. Thus, Jesus remains among us, a constant challenge to the Jews who will not take Him for their King and have chosen rather to take Him for their one profanity. “Jesus Christ!”, in blasphemous ejaculation, echoes through the ghettoes of the world. “Jesus!” — the designated name of the messias — a Jewish name to haunt each Jewish generation — a name waiting to be a grace for the dark- eyed girl or boy who will dare to acknowledge his King, who will kneel at our altar-rails and receive into his heart the Fruit of Mary’s Womb, the New Manna, the Emmanuel. The Point – April 1953
POINTERS
Among the monthly outlets available to American theological innovators is a magazine called Integrity. This magazine says of itself that it is “published by lay Catholics and dedicated to the task of discovering the new synthesis of Religion and Life for our times.” Each month the several articles are so many attempts toward completing “the task.”
After much preoccupation with the soul of the Church, the invisible Church, and other such phantom arrangements, Integrity now proposes that, “The entire Church may suffer persecution and become the Church of desire, where would-be Christians will hunt for the revealed and the unrevealed (to them).”
In this Integrity “synthesis” there would be no more popes, no more bishops, no more priests, no more sacraments, no remnant of the Church which Our Lord promised would never be prevailed against by the gates of Hell! In fact, there could be nothing left of things as we know them — nothing, that is, but Integrity, through whose pages would-be Christians could still hunt, in vain, for the Catholic faith.
In 1947, our present Holy Father canonized the French priest who promoted the devotion of Slavery to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The priest was Saint-Louis Marie de Montfort and, during his lifetime, his outspoken zeal for Our Blessed Lady had gotten him kicked out of nearly every diocese in France.
On the twenty-eighth of this month, the Church celebrates the feast of Saint Louis-Marie. To indicate to our readers why his orthodox message isn’t finding any honor in twentieth-century America than it did in eighteenth- century France, we print the following extract from Saint Louis-Marie’s Letter to the Friends of the Cross. Speaking of the fewness of the saved, he says, “The number of the elect is so small — so small — that were we to know how small it is, we should faint away with grief. The number of the elect is so small that were God to assemble them together, He would cry to them, as He did of old, by the mouth of His prophet, ‘Gather yourselves together, one by one’ — one from this province, one from that kingdom.”
Since the time of the Protestant Revolt, we have had only two saints in the papacy, and both were named Pius. Two issues ago, we quoted the independent attitude of Blessed Pius X toward the representatives of foreign powers assigned to the Vatican. In the same spirit of papal dignity and authority is the bull, Regnans in Excelsis, of Saint Pius V, which excommunicated England’s heretic-queen, Elizabeth.
Saint Pius V: “He that reigns in the highest, to Whom has been given all power in Heaven and Earth, entrusted the government of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, outside of which there is no salvation, to one man alone on the Earth, namely to Peter, the chief of the Apostles, and to Peter’s successor, the Roman pontiff, in fullness of power. This one man He set up as chief over all nations and kingdoms, to pluck up, destroy, scatter, dispose, plant and build …
“Resting, then, upon the authority of Him Who has willed to place us, albeit unequal to such a burden, in this supreme throne of justice, we declare the aforesaid Elizabeth a heretic and an abettor of heretics, and those that cleave to her in the aforesaid matters to have incurred the sentence of anathema, and to be cut off from the unity of Christ’s body. Moreover, we declare her to be deprived of her pretended right to the aforesaid realm, and from all dominion, dignity and privilege whatsoever. …
“And we enjoin and forbid all the nobles of said realm that they presume not to obey her and her admonitions, commands and laws. All who disobey our commands we involve in the same sentence of anathema.”
FRAUDS: PIOUS AND OTHERWISE “I think I can do more for my non-Catholic friends by my prayers and good example than by making them feel that their religion isn’t as good as mine.”
“You can’t tell me that a native on a desert island who never even heard about the Faith isn’t going to save his soul.”
“We can best show our Christian charity by working to improve general living conditions without asking that others believe as we do.”
“The time has come for us to put aside our petty doctrinal differences and all work together as good Americans.”
The above statements have one thing in common: they all come out of the mouths of friends. The fact that such statements are commonplace American Catholic utterances merely indicates, what everyone with the Faith has known all along, that the Church in this country is infested with frauds.
A fraud (specifically, a religious fraud; but since he is the prime fraud, he deserves the title without qualification) is a person who poses as a model Catholic, an exemplar of holiness and learning, but who does not have the Faith. He is a person who tries to make you believe that the Catholic Faith, as it exists here and now in the United States of America, is somehow essentially different from the Faith as it existed elsewhere in ages past, that it is not quite the same as the Faith that the saints of the Middle Ages held and the martyrs of Rome died for, that it has changed and adjusted itself to keep up with the times.
A fraud is a person who, because of his own fears, ignorance, and ambitions tries to deceive non-Catholic Americans on the subject of their eternal salvation, telling them or letting them think that he has told them, that the Church does not teach, at least not any more, that it is necessary for them to become Catholics to save their souls, but that they need only to follow faithfully the precepts of their own religions. The frauds want to destroy the impression of the Church as the single, clear, unequivocal way to salvation and to substitute for it the impression of a good-natured, democratic, successful organization, a beneficent influence on community morals, a strong bulwark against Communism, something staid, harmless, and acceptable, something that would never be so presumptuous as to set itself above other religions or to claim for itself exclusive custodianship of the gate of Heaven.
Although all frauds have the same general intention, there are as many different varieties of them as there are different excuses for being ashamed of the Faith in the presence of non-Catholics. For example, there is the pious fraud, the archetype of them all, who boasts of his daily attendance at Mass, but who is equally anxious to tell you that those who do not have, or do not want, this Mass, can please God just as much in other ways; there is the intellectual fraud, who has a difficulty about the ignorant native that just has to be solved before he can see his way clear to evangelize the Protestant next door; there is the sociological fraud, who perceives that his first duty to non-Catholics is to give them a higher standard of living, and not the Body and Blood of Our Lord; and there is the patriotic fraud, to whom the Bill of Rights and the Apostles’ Creed are all one thing and who tries to make it appear that God, like America, regards neither race, color, nor creed.
It does not require a lot of study recognize a fraud or a reasoned argument to prove that that is what he is. The Faith is wonderfully simple and uninvolved, being for children and the childlike and providing not merely reasons but insights. It equips you to make judgments that are swift, sure, and just; and there is nothing so easy to spot, for the pure of heart who truly have the Faith, as a fraud.
Take Bishop Sheen, for instance, dressing up in his episcopal robes to present to the five million Faith-hungry Americans who listen to him on television a “non-sectarian” message that he himself has devised. Every Catholic knows that he is not speaking as a true bishop should.
To detect a fraud, there is no surer way than this: If a man says he believes that the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ are really and truly present in the Blessed Eucharist and, yet, does not tell non-Catholics about this Eucharist, he is a fraud. If a man pretends that he loves non-Catholics and — as evidence of this love — offers them some other gift, like social improvements or assurances of his own goodwill toward them, rather than the great Gift of the Bread of Life, he is a fraud. If a man pretends to love the Eucharist and at the same time defends those who scoff at it and blaspheme it and says they are good and sincere people who are on the way to saving their souls, he is a fraud. It does not matter who he is, or what prestige and dignity he might have either in the world or in the Church, or what reasons and excuses he might be able to offer for his behavior, if he acts in this way, you can know, without any doubt, that he is a fraud. It is that simple.
IN MEMORIAM
After many years of loyal service to American theologians anxious to include Protestants and Jews in the fold of the One True Faith, death has finally come to that favorite loophole phrase, “the Soul of the Church.” The demise was noted in a dry-eyed announcement last month by Monsignor Matthew Smith in his Denver newspaper. From now on, Msgr. Smith declared, “the real Soul of the Church is the Holy Ghost.”
To the American theologians, who will now have to look elsewhere for a device for getting non-Catholics into Heaven, The Point extends its heartfelt, etc.
BY FATHER FEENEY
If a man will, he can look around the world to see where God has signatured the guardianship and protection of the road to Heaven. As the head of it, he will find the Pope, visible and singular, clear and unconfused.
It is child’s play to see the Pope, if one wants visibility. It is child’s play to find Rome! Rome is the most conspicuous city in the world, in geography and everything else. Land and sea are all woven around it with such beautiful conformation of design. If you are not there, you are always going there in one way or another, in interest or reference. All paths almost naturally lead there. Sweet winds blow there, and foods grow there — wine, and oil, and wheat.
The Church does not change its Eternal City from year to year, or shift it around to make it more popular to international outlooks! There is Rome! There it stands! The Eternal City, never to be changed! The same Jesus who declared that He was the Son of the Eternal Father, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity — the one Mediator between God and man and the Judge of the living and the dead — also declared to Saint Peter, the Prince of the Apostles: “And I will give to thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matt. 16:19) Imagine, in the face of that, our indicating to people that there are other ways into heaven than through the gate, and other ways of opening the door than by going to the keeper of the keys!
A man can become a martyr in the Catholic Church by dying for one dogma of it. The dogma for which we, in Saint Benedict Center, most hope to die — because it is the dogma most under attack in our day — is that no one can possibly enter the Kingdom of Heaven without personal submission to our Holy Father the Pope. I dare any Liberal theologian to turn this challenge aside by one of his skeptical terms! I dare him to tell me how to “belong to the soul” of Pope Pius XII, a flesh and blood pontiff, living and breathing in the Vatican, at Rome!
(from Bread of Life, published by Saint Benedict Center)
THE PRIEST, THE MINISTER, AND THE RABBI
A Catholic priest’s vocation is one of slavery to Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. In the morning, he must approach the altar where he alone, as priest, can offer the one Sacrifice that is fitting worship of God. With the words of consecration, the priest places God as a prisoner in the chalice, binds Him in the likeness of a wafer of bread. And for the rest of the day, the priest must be all things to this helpless Divinity. He must be the voice of the Gospel, preaching in the place of the mute Jesus in the tabernacle. He must be the healer, the consoler, the forgiver of sins in the place of the imprisoned Jesus. He must be the very feet of Jesus when the static, motionless God of the Eucharist wants to rush to the side of a dying loved one and become his Viaticum.
The Point is concerned this month with the Eucharistic dignity of our priests, because there is now under way in our country a great conspiracy against Jesus in the Holy Sacrament of the Altar. And the attack is being shrewdly aimed at Jesus’ priests. When Boston’s reigning Protestant minister published his latest insults to the Holy Eucharist, calling the Mass an “idolatry,” we asked God to punish such blasphemy — realizing, though, that this was not the main attack. When the Rabbinical Council of America came out against the observance of Christmas, we protested — but looked elsewhere for the real Jewish threat.
These overt demonstrations of hatred for Jesus are of the traditional, the predictable, Protestant and Jewish patterns. They are quite apart from the conspiracy which is the present danger to the Holy Eucharist and which, briefly, is this: a movement known as Interfaith, whose one objective is to reduce the priest of the Eucharist to the level of the minister and the rabbi. Interfaith hopes to accomplish this by creating the impression that the priest, the minister, and the rabbi who share the same lecture platform and dais at the annual banquet table are, also, believers in the same God.
Interfaith is establishing itself in America as a kind of state religion. That is why it has become a mortal sin against Democracy to suggest that Catholics belong to the only true Church. Interfaith does not want to make America a free place for religion. It wants to free America of the dogmatic religion of Catholics by imposing such dogmas of its own as:
1. It does not matter what a man believes.
2. One religion is as good as another.
3. Religious differences can be tolerated only if people will admit that such differences do not make any difference.
Lately, for reasons of politics, power, and prestige, certain priests have been willing to forget the Eucharistic nature of their priesthood and join in this new religion of Interfaith. With only their Roman collars and black suits to distinguish them from the ministers and rabbis, numbers of priests now make a daily practice of leaving Jesus behind them after their Mass is over and never mentioning Him once for the rest of the day — never once telling the Protestants and Jews with whom they are having lunch that GOD was their first food that morning. Who are these priests who have grown ashamed of the Jesus on their altars? They are political prelates in high places, more anxious to be patriotically American than doctrinally Catholic. They are ambitious prelates, financial men who will dine at Anglican monasteries, and speak Christ-less prayers at conventions of Jewish rabbis, in order to guarantee non-Catholic donations to “charity” drives. They are petty, vain men to whom the Catholic Church has been merely a springboard to secular successes. They are gentlemen in Holy Orders who have made their way into the glamorous world of the television star. They are foreign-mission priests who have left the missions far afield, to become founders of new inter-creedal sects, inviting Protestants and Jews to join them.
In the face of these scandals, we are praying that American priests will be loyal to their God. For to any priest who accepts the overture of Interfaith, who abandons his slavery to the Eucharist by allying himself with a minister who says that Jesus is not God, and a rabbi who says that God is not Jesus, there awaits the warning of St. Paul: “Whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.” The Point – May 1953
POINTERS
Speaking in Cleveland recently, Harvard’s professor of anthropology, E. A. Hooton, reaffirmed his belief in the inhumanity of man. Dr. Hooton reported that man is merely a “super-ape,” that he is “savage, predatory, acquisitive, primarily interested in himself.” To an approving audience of fellow scientists, Dr. Hooton explained how advantageous it would be if men could adopt for themselves the breeding methods currently being used on domestic animals.
Dr. Hooton is his own rebuttal. The Point ’s concern is for those Hootonites with Roman collars who have become a familiar sight in our neighborhood. Once more this month we want to register our protest against members of the Society of Jesus who are willing to sit in a Harvard classroom and listen politely while Dr. Hooton establishes the simian ancestry of the Sacred Humanity of Jesus.
Publisher F. J. Sheed, a disappointed lawyer from Australia, who wandered into New York by way of London and an English wife (whom he affectionately calls “Ward”), has finally decided to go all out for the salvation of any Protestant who likes Sheed & Ward books. Even a Protestant minister can make the grade, as Mr. Sheed affirms in the following announcement:
“We were very sad indeed to hear that Dr. Hobart McKeehan, a Protestant minister who loved books and gave Sheed & Ward many excellent reviews, died last month in a car accident. Although we’re sure he spent Easter in Heaven, we had a Mass said for him.” Among other poses, Archbishop Cushing was photographed for the Boston newspapers this past month wearing a large smile and the habit of a Franciscan friar. The occasion was his being made an honorary member of the friars’ First Order. After the ceremony, which took place in the auditorium of a local insurance company, the Archbishop had this to say: “I have always done my humble best to follow in the footsteps of Saint Francis of Assisi.”
This should be enough of a cue to all members of the Archdiocese that, from now on, Archbishop Cushing will expect to be referred to as “the little poor man.”
Suppose you were Pope and you wanted to say, in a way that no one could squirm out of, that there is absolutely no salvation outside the Church. Could you put it more clearly, more strongly than it is in these statements?
Pope Innocent III, at the Fourth Lateran Ecumenical Council, in the year 1215, speaking infallibly, “There is only one universal Church of the faithful and outside of it none at all can be saved.”
Pope Boniface VIII, in his bull, Unam Sanctam, dated 1302, speaking infallibly, “We declare, say, define and pronounce that it is wholly necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”
Pope Eugene IV, in his bull, Cantate Domino, dated 1441, speaking infallibly, “The Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes, and teaches that none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life eternal; but that they will go into the eternal fire, ‘which was prepared for the Devil and his angels,’ unless before death they are joined with Her; and that so important is the unity of this ecclesiastical body that only those remaining within this unity can profit by the Sacraments of the Church unto salvation, and they alone can receive an eternal recompense for their fasts, their almsgiving, their other works of Christian piety, and the duties of a Christian soldier. No one, let his almsgiving be as great as it may, no one, even if he pour out his blood for the name of Christ, can be saved, unless he remain within the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church.”
THE OVERSEERS OF AMERICAN THEOLOGY
Americans like to boast that they live in the land of opportunity, where the son of poor immigrants can grow up to have a diamond-studded swimming pool and an ermine-wrapped wife. This boast expresses what Americans refer to as “the pursuit of happiness,” a pursuit to which they were dedicated at their country’s founding and in which they have been furiously engaged ever since.
Yet, it is glaringly evident that, for all the devices they have contrived to help them snare it, happiness remains for Americans something perpetually out of reach and out of sight. And the franticness of their pursuit merely emphasizes the pathos of their failure.
But what about the 29 million Americans who are Catholics? Are they not sufficient to leaven their society, and to show their fellow countrymen that happiness is not something to be overtaken in high-powered convertibles on superhighways, but is to be sought in the quiet adoration of a white wafer that is God? Yes, American Catholics could do this — except that they are wholeheartedly engrossed in the same kind of pursuit of the same kind of happiness as all other Americans; and are just as unhappy as they. Far from leavening their society, they have made themselves, in their conversations, their interests, and their ambitions, indistinguishable from Protestants and Jews.
This thoroughly unhappy state is due partially to the fact that American Catholics have let other interests take precedence for them over the Faith. But there is another reason even more significant: They do not tell their fellow countrymen how to find happiness in the Faith because they do not themselves know the Faith; and they do not know it because they have never been taught it. It has never been presented to them as the vital, exciting, joyful and beautiful thing it is, but only as a kind of not-too- interesting required routine, something they are neither encouraged nor expected to know much about. Instead of being instructed by their own parish priests, patiently and lovingly, they have been made to feel — as have the parish priests also — that there are only a few men qualified to speak on doctrinal matters, a few theological know-it-alls who tell the rest of the Catholics, clerical and lay, what the Faith is all about.
Of these doctrinal dictators, the three outstanding are Father Francis J. Connell, C. Ss. R., Monsignor Joseph C. Fenton, and Monsignor Matthew Smith. These three priests have emerged from nowhere to set themselves up as the official and unquestioned American theologians. Not even the Pope is able to speak to American Catholics without their mediation. His pronouncements require their interpretations, which infallibly follow, in order to make them clear and to show what he was really trying to say.
The opinions and interpretations of Fathers Connell, Fenton, and Smith are disseminated by means of one journal, one university, and many newspapers. These are, respectively, The American Ecclesiastical Review, of which Fenton is the editor and Connell the associate editor; the Catholic University of America, at which Fenton was, and Connell is, Dean of the School of Theology; and the newspapers that print articles issued by the National Catholic Welfare Conference, of which Connell is the star performer, together with the Denver Register, of which Smith is the editor and featured columnist.
Properly speaking, Monsignor Smith is not a professional theologian at all, but only a journalist with a flair for theological dabbling. Connell and Fenton are really the original thinkers, issuing their proclamations from the nation’s capital. Smith is merely their parrot, the voice out of the West. His job is to see to it, by means of his newspaper, that American Catholics are informed of the opinions Connell and Fenton have decided they ought to have. However, he does his job so faithfully and so well — besides which he often adds bright touches and anecdotes of his own — that he deserves to rank with the other two.
Father Connell specializes in giving the “Catholic position” on the latest newspaper headlines. There is not a single curiosity or scandal that he fails to notice and to comment on for the edification of American Catholics. Typical of his unholy interests and faithless comments is the article he wrote last year during the “flying saucer” ruckus. Asking himself the question, how could men on other planets be redeemed, he casually elaborated a scheme of multiple Incarnations and reincarnations of the Persons of the Blessed Trinity, a scheme which turns Our Lady from Virgo Singularis into just one of the mothers of one of the Divine Persons who became man.
Monsignor Fenton likes to make it appear that he is terribly strong and intransigent on the matter of dogma, and that he is persecuted on account of this by those with more liberal ideas. However, as is plainly evident to any long-term reader of Fenton’s Ecclesiastical Review, there is no lasting difference between him and the liberals; he merely says what they say two years later.
In his interpretations of the doctrine “no salvation outside the Church,” his prize interpretations, Fenton lays down conditions for non-Catholic salvation that are so rigid and far-fetched that practically no one can meet them. (This is to show his “terrible strength.”) However, it does not bother him that those who want to go all out for getting non-Catholics into Heaven, do so using his reasons and his authority. All the liberals need is one little loophole, which Fenton gives. Through that loophole, the liberals are able, in their need, to squeeze every Protestant and Jew in America.
The Faith is meant to be something clear and simple, which the Holy Father can teach us in innocent terms, and every man can and must know for his salvation and his happiness. But as long as Fathers Fenton, Connell and Smith are running the show, the Faith is going to be presented as something obscure and esoteric — something that can be known by no one but these priests, and those to whom it shall please them to reveal it.
BY FATHER FEENEY
This is chastity: to keep central things central, to keep the Holy of Holies holy. The one central thing in the temple of the Jews was the Holy of Holies. The courts outside it had significance and meaning because the central thing was kept sacrosanct. Into the Holy of Holies, the High Priest went but once a year. He was the only one who could enter in. The faithful remained outside, watching. We have a Holy of Holies far more sacred than that of the Jews. And when a priest walks into the sanctuary of our Holy of Holies, there should be no other interest in his heart or in his thoughts except that Blessed Eucharist.
Our Bread of Life looks like the frailest little thing in the world. The Host is the least like stone that anything could possibly be. It is the most perishable little substance. Each morning it has to be renewed. But it is infinitely more abiding than the stones in the Ark of the Covenant — as long as the words of Jesus Christ are spoken, as long as there are priests somewhere in the world.
The Blessed Eucharist will never be lost, as were the Tablets of stone in the Ark of the Covenant. You can lose the Faith, if you are a priest, but another priest will come — there will be another altar, another vineyard, another wheat field. The Sacrifice of the Mass will always be in the world, from the rising of the sun to its going down.
We have not just one Ark of the Covenant. We have thousands and thousands of tabernacles, housing that little Frailty, whose whiteness and roundness are now the wrappings of the Flesh and Blood of God, once structured in Nazareth out of the pure substance of Mary’s body. Jesus in the Blessed Eucharist is the Gift of God, and of her who for nine months was the tabernacle of God.
The Blessed Eucharist will never be lost. Jesus visibly said only one Mass. He forgave only a few sins directly. But His priests fill the confessionals and the sanctuaries of the world with absolving and with consecrating hands.
(from Bread of Life, published by St. Benedict Center)
Dear Catholic Priests of America
Saint Benedict Center 23 Arrow Street Cambridge, Massachusetts
Dear Catholic Priests of America, In the early years of the eighteenth century, there was in France a very holy and very much alone priest whose name was Louis-Marie de Montfort, Slave of Mary. His mission was to prepare the world for what he called the “Age of Mary,” and as he wandered through northern France, being silenced by this bishop and misunderstood by that one, he spoke constantly of that time when the Mother of God would shine forth in all her dogmatic challenge, and when those “Slaves of hers, the apostles of the latter times,” would secure the triumph of Mary over the army of Satan.
But there was no one to hear Louis-Marie, the priest from Montfort, and so he wrote all these things in a little book and called it True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. And he died in 1716, with the vision still before him of those valiant slaves of Mary, of whom he had written in his book:
“They shall be little and poor in the world’s esteem, and abased before all, like the heel, trodden underfoot and persecuted as the heel is by the other members of the body.“They shall be like sharp arrows in the hand of the powerful Mary to pierce her enemies.
“They shall be true disciples of Jesus Christ, treading the narrow way of God in pure truth; sparing, fearing, and listening to no mortal, however influential he may be. … They shall carry on their shoulders the bloody standard of the Cross, the Crucifix in their right hand and the Rosary in their left, the sacred names of Jesus and Mary in their hearts.”
We write you all this, dear Catholic priests of America, because we have an American postscript to add to the story of Saint Louis-Marie de Montfort and his True Devotion. It goes this way.
At the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, three winters ago, an American boy named Eddie Cunningham knelt before a statue of Our Blessed Lady and gave himself to her for keeps. Never outdone in generosity, Our Lady promptly began to give things to Eddie. Within two weeks she had given him a brand new religious vow, under the patronage of Saint Louis-Marie; a new title, Slave of the Immaculate Heart of Mary; and, under the leadership of Father Leonard Feeney, a share in a very old battle, that constant one for the preservation of the Faith. Last month, after three years in the hassle, and after countless new gifts from his Queen, including her very name to add to his own, Edward Maria Cunningham charmed Our Blessed Lady into presenting him with that infinite gift, the Beatific Vision. When he died, with every sacramental comfort one could pray for, his last word was “Jesus,” his last gesture was the Sign of the Cross.
But this letter to you, dear fathers, is not intended as an obituary notice. It is, rather, a warning — a warning that Edward Maria is out to get you! In all the spirit of one of Saint Louis-Marie’s apostles of the latter times, “Sparing, fearing and listening to no mortal, … ” Edward Maria is launching a holy blitz to get you to tell America about the Catholic Faith, to get you off your Interfaith platforms and into the highways and the byways.
In three years time, Edward Maria had a chance to visit an awful lot of your parishes. From Maine to Maryland, from Boston to Chicago, in the Main Street shops and the factories and mills, he saw thousands of people whom you never see. He saw the Catholics who don’t have a son at Georgetown and who never read the diocesan newspaper. They liked what Edward Maria told them; that without Our Blessed Mother you can’t save your soul, that outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation. For Edward Maria brought them an echo of the Faith they once heard from their parents.
Knowing that he wants all of you to talk the way he did, and knowing that Our Blessed Lady is not through answering his requests, we just had to warn you this month, Catholic priests of America, to watch out for Edward Maria, Slave of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Faithfully,
The Editors of The Point. The Point – June 1953
POINTERS
All spring long, the anticipated coronation of Queen Elizabeth II has provoked a multitude of ecstatic articles in our Catholic press. There has been glowing talk about the “Catholicity” of the coronation — the Te Deum, the holy oils, the Veni Creator Spiritus, the Queen’s reception of holy communion. Minimized or unmentioned in all these reports is the Coronation Oath, that supreme profession of “no-popery,” in which the Queen must swear to “maintain and preserve inviolably … the doctrines, worship, discipline, and government of the Protestant Reformed Religion.”
When Queen Elizabeth I confected and subscribed to this oath, the reigning Pope, Saint Pius V, excommunicated her and dispensed all English Catholics from the allegiance due her as Queen.
When Catholics in America reflect that only a hundred years ago the Protestants were burning our churches in Philadelphia, slaughtering the Irish in Louisville, and marching on the Cathedral in Cincinnati in hopes of hanging a papal nuncio; and when they recall that only a hundred years ago half the members of the House of Representatives won their seats on an out- and-out anti-Catholic ticket, they, as Catholics in a Protestant country, are inclined to assume that Protestantism has grown decidedly more benevolent in our enlightened day.
The fact is not that Protestants have become less “protestant,” but that Catholics, knowing the price that orthodoxy cost the Catholics of a hundred years ago, have ever since then been watering down their Faith. For striking evidence of this watering down, compare any current pamphlet on “Salvation” with the hundred-year-old one we recently saw which quotes Saint Augustine’s stand on salvation outside the Church as the accepted Catholic teaching. Saint Augustine says, “Whoever is separated from this Catholic Church, however innocently he may think he lives, for this crime alone, that he is separated from the unity of Christ, will not have life, but the anger of God remains upon him.”
THE HOLY GHOST
Love whose brooding brings Wind and warmth and wings, Flame and flight And feather-fright And soft-note throat that sings, — Love is now at rest, God is in my breast; As a Love- Delighted Dove, My God is now my Guest.
OUR THIRTY-THIRD DEGREE ENEMIES
Communism is a great enemy of the Catholic Church in the world at large, but it is not the Church’s greatest enemy in America. Communism in this country is kept too much on-the-run to take a front-line part in the war between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan. Far more menacing as an enemy of the Church, far more powerful than Communism, is that firmly established, rich, reputable, and unsuspected foe, American Masonry.
The strongest shield that Masonry has in its struggle against the Church is the wool that it pulls over the eyes of American Catholics and their clergy. That the Catholics do not see Masonry’s hostility, is partly due to their own defective vision, but it is also due to the craftiness of the Masons. For American Masons have carefully avoided the kind of shrill anti-Catholicism associated with the Lodges of Continental Europe, and use instead tactics that are more quiet, more subtle, and much more effective. Rather than attack the Church openly, or even directly, they seek to destroy her by destroying the premises on which she is grounded, the climate in which she thrives. To this end, they have conducted a thorough and calculated propaganda campaign.
Realizing that the Church’s strength and very life is in her singularity, her unique indispensability, the Masons hope by dragging her down to the level of the sects to cripple her. Accordingly, they demand that all religions be put on a par; that no one proclaim his faith to be better than anyone else’s; that differences of creed be considered of no importance. Because of the power and prestige of the Masons, and because of the thoroughness of their campaign, American Catholics have been given the impression that these Masonic causes are the causes of democracy, and that if they do not support them they will be disloyal to their country.
But how is American Masonry organized, that it has such power? Who is its head? (For it clearly could not have so much direction, determination, and drive, if it were the loosely-knit association it pretends to be.) Of course, you are not going to find out who is the head of American Masonry simply by asking some casual Mason you might encounter on the street; because, in the first place, Masonry lives by secrecy, and besides — and this is most important — not every Mason is fully aware of what Masonry is up to. Its ultimate purposes and plans are known only to the very top, Thirty-third Degree Masons. It is they who give Masonry its impetus and strength. They are the country’s bank presidents, its newspaper owners, its corporation executives, its chairmen-of-the-boards; and they have ways of seeing that what they want done, gets done.
Only these supreme Masons, and probably not more than a dozen of them, know who the head of American Masonry is; and they aren’t telling. However, we can surmise. And adding everything up, the most likely candidate is Henry R. Luce, founder and editor of Time, Life, and Fortune, and husband of the United States Ambassador to Italy. In fact, so perfectly does Luce meet all the qualifications, that if he is not the head of the Masons, he ought to be.
The thing that Masonry strives for is control. And control is precisely what Luce has. Through his magazines, he controls the thoughts and opinions, the values and attitudes, of most of the American people. He controls, either directly or indirectly, everything from how they dress to how they feel about the miracles of Fatima. And in the best Masonic tradition, he controls them so subtly and unobtrusively that they never seem to realize they are being controlled.
The combined circulation of the Luce publications is reported to be around seven million copies. But actually they have many times that number of readers. Life, for instance, is read, or looked-at, by practically everyone in America who gets his hair cut or his teeth filled. Time, which claims a circulation of a million and a half, is read mainly by those who fancy themselves as belonging to the social, financial, or intellectual elite. Unless they were to undergo their weekly ordeal of reading Time, they would not feel they could honestly give an affirmative answer to the crucial question, “Are you well-informed?”
Fortune has a comparatively small circulation, and is used less for control purposes than the other two, being read almost exclusively by the Thirty- third Degree Masons possessed of the commodity indicated in the magazine’s title.
Luce pretends that the purpose of his magazines, particularly Time and Life, is to give unbiased, informative reports of news and events. But this is clearly not so. News for Luce is merely a vehicle to be used in conveying his messages. Every article, every picture, every squib and caption that he prints has some definite job of indoctrination to do, some point that he means for his readers to get.
As is the strategy of American Masons, Luce does not attack the Church openly. Rather, he insinuates attitudes and notions that either oppose the Church in principle, or else aim at degrading or ridiculing her. And he has a hundred ways of achieving his effects: for instance, he can do it by pictures (the technique of taking dozens of shots of a single person or scene, in the sure hope of finding among them one picture that seems to indicate what you want to indicate). Or he can do it by the way he juxtaposes items (an article on the Assumption of Our Lady next to one on a Broadway show girl); or by the way he plays up, or omits, details (“At the Eucharistic Congress, where five hundred people fainted from the heat … ”). He can do it by his adjectives, by his general diction and tone, so that while ostensibly giving his readers a factual report, he leaves them with a clear, fixed impression, though the readers will never quite know from where the impression came.
Normally, Luce rules his empire from his New York office, strategically located on the thirty-third floor of the Time and Life Building in Rockefeller Center. But recently he has moved his headquarters to Rome. For his wife, Clare, has rounded off her varied career by becoming her country’s official representative in Italy; and Luce has decided to go abroad with her. We had thought the former location of his office a significant one, but it doesn’t hold a candle to this new address.
Remembering that the Masons’ consuming desire is the destruction of the Church, and that the method they propose to use is secrecy and stealth, could you imagine a more favorable location, a more sinister set-up than this: for the head of the Masons to be married to a blithe, blind, and eminently successful American Catholic, to have at his disposal the most powerful journalistic enterprise in the world, and to be presently nestled, smiling and unsuspected, in the very heart of the Church, in Rome, the Eternal City?
If Henry Luce is not the head of the Masons, then the Masons are missing the greatest opportunity they have ever had — and it will be the first opportunity they have ever missed.
BY FATHER FEENEY
Jesus came to tell Saint Margaret Mary that His Heart had been hurt, not by neglect during the slow three hours on Calvary on Good Friday afternoon, but by the long, long neglect of centuries in the tabernacles of our churches: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and every day of the week, week of the month, month of the year.
If you sometimes wonder why the Sacred Heart was so daring as to unbare His breast at Paray-le-Monial to Margaret Mary, a little nun who came to visit Him in prayer, and to let her see, through the bones and the flesh, the beat of His heart; — and if you sometimes wonder why He asked that a picture of Himself with heart exposed be placed in every Catholic home — know that Jesus wished to show the one part of Him that the ropes had not reached in the scourging, or the crown of thorns had not pierced when He was exposed to ridicule and mocked as King. The one part of Him the nails did not penetrate. The one part of Him they forgot to wound when He was alive, and which the soldier’s spear pierced when the mind and soul of Jesus had gone, and the heart of Jesus was left to the silent entombment of His breast.
Saint Margaret Mary saw the incessant centuries of heartbeat of the Sacred Heart of Jesus — not in Galilee, not in Judea, not even in His glory in Heaven — but in the hiddenness and the lowliness of our tabernacles.
Do you wish to let me tell you in one final and doctrinal affirmation, what it was that forged the Eucharist? The Blessed Eucharist, which was to be God’s atonement to God in the Mass. God’s Presence in our tabernacles, God’s divinization of our spirits in the Blessed Sacrament, and God’s incorporation into Himself of us in Holy Communion? If you wish to know what it was in Jesus that thought to plunge Himself, in His divine and human majesty, into the semblance of wheat and wine and leave Himself there for us to adore and love until His second coming on the last day, I will tell you it was — the Sacred Heart of Jesus. From the shedding of His blood came our redemption. From the beating of His heart in love for us, came the Blessed Eucharist.
(from Bread of Life)
Calling All Protestants!
With all the publicity currently being given to the Church of England and its newly installed head, we have decided to speak this month to that momentarily forgotten group, our nation’s religious majority, the American Protestants. This decision, however, has presented many problems, the chief of which is our inability to know just which variations and voids of Christianity we will encounter in the Protestants to whom we speak. However limply it is surviving in the U. S. A. at the moment, the Catholic Church is still the sole fulfillment of Christ’s promise to build His Church upon Peter. As a result, every Catholic is, religiously, a known quantity. The lowliest parishioner and the pastor with a D. D. from Rome are both committed to the same Apostles’ Creed, are both receivers of the same Blessed Sacrament, and are both called upon to answer for the entire Church whenever a Protestant gets worried lest the Mother of God should become too highly thought of.
Conversely, it is impossible to predict what any Protestant’s stand will be on any Christian doctrine. And realizing that a common belief could never be the principle of their unity, American Protestants, since the days of their Salem witch-hunts, have devised a succession of schemes for giving their heresies the desired adhesive qualities.
Determined that the “popish feast” of Christmas should be replaced by an observance more in keeping with their Mother-of-God-less theology, the primitive New England sects decided to jump the gun on December 25th by instituting an annual November “Thanksgiving Day.” The religious success of a yearly turkey dinner encouraged local Protestants to supply further culinary come-ons in the form of Sunday School picnics for the young folks and baked bean suppers for the elders. The religious indigestion that inevitably followed touched off a local revolt which scoffed at medication and terminated in a dogmatic prohibition against all future stomach aches. An enterprising Boston girl assumed the leadership of this reactionary movement, added to its popular appeal by outlawing both the divinity of Christ and the actuality of death, and then called the whole thing Christian Science.
In the southern part of our country, staunch, militant, established Protestantism was possessed of a unique problem. A product of the world’s most purely Protestant culture, the Southern hillbilly had nothing in his make-up that would attract him to the theological niceties of a system like Christian Science. And everyone was agreed that it would take more than a plate of baked beans to sustain his interest in prayer meetings. Thanks to the initiative of alert Freemasons, however, Southern Protestantism offered even the hillbilly a satisfactory religious expression, wrapping him in a bed sheet and welcoming him to the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan.
As America moved west, there were accompanying religious expansions, introducing new local liturgies to complement the Christian Science nirvanas of the North and the Ku Klux Klan lynchings of the South. Most of these innovations, however, were finally merged into that serviceable mid- western combination of Rotary Club dogma and Farmers’ Almanac morality, with, occasionally, some hog calling and hymn-singing on the side.
Given the impossibility of knowing just which Christian values we can appeal to in speaking to American Protestants, we will, after all this geographical isolation of them, say what we have to say to them. And perhaps we might best start with an apology.
For a number of generations, now, we Catholics in America have been content in our knowledge that we have the One, True Faith and that we are in a country where, if we are quiet enough about it, we will very likely be left unmolested in that Faith. For this selfish attitude of “leave the Protestants in their religious despair rather than jeopardize our Catholic necks,” we apologize. And to indicate the extent of our apology, we have a promise to make.
In this month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, we promise the Protestants of America a crusade, in the full, medieval sense of the word; a crusade to complete the work of those American Catholic bishops who met in Baltimore a hundred years ago, dedicated their country to the Immaculate Mother of God, and then left it totally unconverted. The Point – July 1953
POINTERS
Speaking at Boston College’s commencement exercises last month, Archbishop Cushing astounded everyone who knows him by declaring that no Catholic student should attend Harvard, Boston University or Northeastern. This momentary show of strength did not sound as though it ought to come from the same Archbishop who had sent his Superintendent of Parochial Schools to Harvard, and his nuns to Boston University.
In the excitement, no one had noticed that a notable Boston secular college had been omitted from the Archbishop’s proscription. But the next day it all became clear, and everyone relaxed as things bounced back to normal in the archdiocese. It was announced that Archbishop Cushing would deliver the invocation at the commencement exercises for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Another collegiate event which occurred locally last month was the announcement by the Harvard Corporation that it had appointed a new President of the University. He replaces James Bryant Conant, the self- styled “skeptical chemist,” who resigned last January in order to assume the more imposing title of High Commissioner of Germany. The new man was born in Iowa, worked in Wisconsin, and answers to the name of Nathan M. Pusey (rhymes with “Who’s he?”).
According to Harvard press releases, when Pusey comes to town he is going to bring lots of changes with him. Instead of skepticism and chemistry, the students are going to be offered Episcopalianism and the classics. Whether or not such changes will really result in a fewer number of student suicides, everyone at Harvard, from the janitors to the Jesuits, is waiting anxiously to see. WARNING! Official diocesan figures show that one-third of our American Catholic boys and girls now marry non-Catholics. Two out of three children born of such marriages turn out non-Catholic. In six out of ten mixed marriages, the Catholic partner leaves the Church. In the past ten years, 165,000 young Catholics who married Protestants and Jews before their parish priests have abandoned their Catholic Faith!
Last month, on the Octave of the Feast of Corpus Christi, Fr. James Keller of the Christophers took up his breviary and found, as required reading for the day, the following excerpt from a sermon by Saint Cyril of Jerusalem:
“Under the appearance of bread He gives us His Body, and under the appearance of wine, His blood: and when you shall come to receive, it is on the body and Blood of Christ you shall feed, being made a partaker of His Body and of His Blood. Thus, indeed, it is that we become Christophers, namely, by carrying about Christ in our bodies, when we receive His Body and Blood into our own. Thus, as the Blessed Peter has said, we are ‘partakers of the Divine nature.’ ”
God, not government, is your business, Father Keller. We suggest you spend “three minutes a day” considering just how many of your “Chrisrophers” would back you up if your message to them was switched from “you can change the world, wherever you are,” to “you can be changed into God, at my altar rail.”
MORE STATISTICS AND LESS FAITH
American Catholics are beginning to believe that one religion is as good as another. They are beginning to believe that it does not matter what church you belong to as long as you are sincere. Their views on salvation are beginning to sound like a syllabus of the errors condemned by Popes and Councils. And the effects of their holding such errors are becoming every day more noticeable. The impression used to be given that the Church in this country could not possibly be better off. It was supposed to be riding the crest of a great wave of conversions. Now it is coming to light that things are not really going so well. A national Catholic magazine recently published the results of a survey it had taken, which revealed that the Church in America trails far behind the Protestant sects as regards convert-making. American Catholics, the survey showed, almost never try to get anyone to join the Church: and even when they do, the try is so half-hearted and uninformed that it seldom succeeds.
This same magazine has, by its cowardly refusal to profess the Faith, and its friendly encouragement of heretics and their ideas, played no small part in bringing about this decline in conversions. It calls itself the Catholic Digest, hoping to be favorably compared with, and possibly mistaken for, the Reader’s Digest. This same ambition to be secularly successful also prevented it from stating the reason why American Catholics are not trying to spread the Faith. Nevertheless, the reason is plain to see. Most American Catholics believe that membership in the Catholic Church is not absolutely necessary for salvation. And that is why they do not try to make converts. They do not see why they should risk disfavor, humiliation, even abuse, for the sake of such an unnecessary cause.
And the reason that American Catholics hold such destructive and heretical beliefs on salvation is not simply that they have been uninstructed or misinstructed in this one point. It is that they have been uninstructed or misinstructed in the whole Faith. They have not been taught the most basic truths and mysteries of their religion; and it is that, even more than direct teaching on salvation itself, which is responsible for their erroneous beliefs on who goes to Heaven and how. If they had really been taught the sacraments, and especially the Holy Eucharist, its meaning and its preciousness, then it would be impossible ever to fool them on the subject of salvation. If they had been taught what Heaven really means — being with Jesus and Mary for all eternity — they would know that it is only for those who love Jesus and Mary, and who would want to spend eternity loving them. St. John Marie Vianney, the beloved Cure of Ars, said that more Catholics lose their souls on account of ignorance of the Faith, caused by lack of instruction, than on account of any other sin — not on account of the conspicuous, disgraceful sins, as one might suppose, but on account of this thing, ignorance, which is so prevalent among American Catholics, and so disregarded.
For the sake of these American souls that are being lost for lack of instruction, we make this appeal to Our Holy Father, the Pope:
Most Holy Father, we come to you as to the Father of Christendom and the only hope of the world, to plead that our country, the United States of America, be taught the Catholic Faith. We plead for teachers who will instruct us not in their own programs and ideas, as so many do now, but in the Faith as the Church has taught it and held it throughout its history. We want to be told what the attainment of eternal life means, and what we must do to attain it. We promise you, Most Holy Father, that if we are taught the Faith strongly, lovingly, and courageously, we will respond to it. We are a young and vital people, we Americans, with the enthusiasm and eagerness of youth. We promise you that with your help and your care, we can produce saints in our country. We promise you that we can produce martyrs, that if the need should come we will shed our blood for you and for Jesus and Mary. And, we think, Most Holy Father, that the time might soon come when you will need our blood.
BY FATHER FEENEY
We in Boston often ask ourselves the question: What is a Unitarian? I shall give the answer in the form of a questionnaire. And I shall inflict it on a modern Bostonian, and in the best Unitarian manner.
Q. What is a Unitarian?
A. A Unitarian is one who believes in the unity of God and the trinity of enterprise. Q. Can you give examples?
A. Shreve Crump and Low. Jones McDuffee and Stratton. Choate Hall and Stewart. New York New Haven and Hartford.
Q. Who and what are these?
A. Three prices in one pearl. Three stewards in one master. Three clients in one lawyer. Three journeys in one direction.
Q. What else are they?
A. An inevitable and rhythmic arrangement of names so proper as to make even commas between them superfluous …
Q. In?
A. Decoration Utensilization Litigation Transportation …
Q. Entitled?
A. Shreve Crump and Low. Jones McDuffee and Stratton. Choate Hall and Stewart. New York New Haven and Hartford.
Q. Are all these, Unitarians?
A. Unitarianism is not a synthesis.
Q. What is it?
A. An interpretation.
Q. Weren’t its ancestors farmers, fishermen, and hunters?
A. Seed Weed and Feed. Hook Line and Sinker. Lock Stock and Barrel.
Q. In Boston, today, incorporated — what would they be called?
A. Farmsworth Fish and Huntington. Q. You mentioned Jones McDuffee and Stratton.
A. Yes.
Q. It is hard to remember what they sell.
A. Plates Cups and Saucers.
Q. And the Shreve people jewellers …
A. And the Choate crowd are lawyers …
Q. And the rest is a railroad.
A. Exactly.
Q. The Gospel doesn’t make things quite so elemental.
A. Nothing is more elemental than sentimentality.
Q. But why such a blasphemous rejection of the beautiful processions in the Godhead? And why such a passion for partnerships that will blow to blazes on the Day of Doom?
A. These are extremely difficult questions to answer.
Q. Is Unitarianism a Revelation of its own? Is it an Illumination twirling all by itself in mid-ocean, like a solitary lighthouse, showing nothing, but itself, where to come, or go? Is it its own efficacious Grace?
A. These are extremely difficult questions to answer.
Q. Partnership is the weirdness of Anglicanism: High Broad and Low. Partnership is trying to sunder Catholicism: one root in three trees called The Branch Theory. Partnership is the horror of recent pray-as-you-enter projects: Dispersion Immersion and Conversion.
A. That is why a Unitarian prefers to remain … Q. What?
A. Transcendental.
Q. Like Emerson?
A. Like Shreve Crump and Low. Jones McDuffee and Stratton. Choate Hall and Stewart. New York New Haven and Hartford.
Q. You mean: minding his own kind of God?
A. Yes, and finding and founding his own kind of business.
(from London Is a Place, Ravengate Press, Boston)
There Are Only Eleven Million
A Jew will never ask you to be a Jew. The Sunday supplements carry no announcement of home-study courses for prospective Hebrews. The missionary lands get no influx of predatory rabbis trying to win the natives to the Jewish fold. A Jew, in fact, defies you to be a Jew: still, the Jew, mysteriously, goes on.
For two thousand years, the spectacle of his wanderings has challenged the gentile world. Living everywhere, at home nowhere, the Jew from Warsaw and Vienna and Budapest, from Antwerp and London and the Bronx, is the same ubiquitous Jew who provoked a Catholic girl in remote New Zealand to write:
“Discountried and diskinged And watched from pole to pole, A Jew at heart remains a Jew — His nation is his soul.”
In his successive migrations, the Jew has made little pretense at belonging to wherever he is. Rather, and shrewdly, he has sought to make himself necessary to wherever he is. At his shrewdest, he has identified himself with money. That is how be made himself necessary to, without belonging to, Christian Europe. And that is how he happened to be still very much on the scene when the break-up of Christian Europe occurred — when the revolting Protestants discovered a most obliging ally in the Jewish moneylender.
It was about this same time that the Jew, who never asks you to become a Jew, relaxed just a little his exclusive hold on things Jewish. By some occult interplay of symbolism and ritual, the Protestant-Jewish alliance of the Reformation era found an abiding religious expression in Freemasonry. For the Protestant Mason, traveling to the East in his abbreviated apron, equipped with Talmudic names and signs, is, at the peak of his liturgy, rebuilding the Jewish Temple of Solomon. And, in feminine counterpart, Masonry’s Protestant wives are guided back through the centuries by their “Eastern Star” until they become, in their fifth and highest degree, the Jewish Judith, slaughtering the enemy, Holofernes.
Yet, after all the observations about him have been made — the migratory, monetary, Masonic, and numberless other ones — the Jew is still unexplained. For the Jew is not a movement, or a cycle, or a complex. The Jew is a blood stream: an uninterrupted flow back to Jerusalem, and back to the Holy Week clamor of the Jews, “His Blood be upon us and upon our children!”
The hatred of the Jew for the Blood of Jesus explains the first Good Friday. The sustained hatred of the Jew for this Precious Blood explains his subsequent behavior, Good Friday and every Friday for nineteen hundred years — his uncanny genius for turning up, anywhere in the world, to lend a helping hand any time the Precious Blood of Jesus is under attack.
And how is the Blood of Jesus, so availably left in the world, protected? By sublime paradox, its protection is established in the prophetic canticle of a Jewish girl from Nazareth. As the Blessed Virgin Mary concluded her “Magnificat,” mindful of the newly conceived Jesus in her womb, her final apostrophe was, “to Abraham and to his seed, forever:” to the great father of the Jews and to those gentile children of his who, in their sacramental reception of the Blood of Jesus, would be incorporated with the Jewish blood of Jesus’ Old Testament ancestors, with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. This is Jesus’ protection and the Jew’s consternation: the centuries of First Communion children, kneeling at Catholic altar rails, who have welcomed into their mouths and hearts the Body and Blood of Mary’s Child.
A Jew will never ask you to become a Jew. A Catholic will ask you to believe that a Jew is what God once became. In this month of the Precious Blood, we are daring to ask that the Jews believe that, too. We are bold enough to declare that the problem of the Jew (and problem he has been in every country he has entered) is not a political or a social, but a religious one. Its solution will not be found in Israeli bonds, Einstein theories, Anti- Defamation Leagues, or Hillel Houses. It will be found only in the acknowledgement by the Jew that the one reason for his being “discountried and diskinged” is his rejection of Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews, God in the royal blood of David, present on our Catholic altars. The Point – August 1953
POINTERS
To anyone interested in preserving the singularity and necessity of Our Blessed Lady, in this month of her glorious Assumption, we recommend Saint Louis-Marie de Montfort’s challenging writings about her. A fair example of why the French peasants loved him, and the Calvinists tried to murder him, is the following statement from Saint Louis-Marie’s True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin:
“All the true children of God, the predestinate, have God for their Father and Mary for their Mother. He who has not Mary for his Mother has not God for his Father. This is the reason why the reprobate, such as heretics, schismatics and others, who hate Our Blessed Lady or regard her with contempt and indifference, have not God for their Father, however much they boast of it, simply because they have not Mary for their Mother.”
In the January, 1953, issue of The Point we protested against Archbishop Cushing’s statement that all American soldiers who die fighting in Korea are “genuine martyrs,” and that there is no need even of praying for them.
This month, Boston’s diocesan newspaper made an attempt to rectify the Archbishop’s theological blundering. In a front-page article, it admitted that soldiers who die in modern wars should not be called martyrs, because they do not die for the Faith. But in trying to haul the Archbishop out of the frying pan, the newspaper got one of its own theological fingers burned. Referring to the Holy Innocents, it said they were “brought by their death to the state of sanctifying grace.” The truth is, the Holy Innocents were Jewish boys of two years and under. They had been circumcised, according to the strict Jewish code, at the age of eight days. It was by circumcision that they were brought to the state of sanctifying grace; by their death they were brought to the Limbo of the Just. Boston’s diocesan paper has changed its editor many times in the past few years. And if Archbishop Cushing reads the paper, we expect that the present editor (a priest who was recently advertised as lecturing in a Protestant church) may soon be changed, too. The Archbishop may not resent having his theology corrected, but not by someone who knows no more about it than himself.
The appreciation of Hilaire Belloc which Father Leonard Feeney wrote two years ago in his book, London Is A Place, appears in Father Feeney’s column this month. It was written about the Belloc who was then waiting for his “summons to the Particular Judgment,” and is the more touching now that this summons has come.
NEW VERSIONS AND PERVERSIONS OF THE BIBLE
When the Protestants broke away from the Church in the sixteenth century, one of the chief reasons they gave for doing so was that they thought the Bible, all by itself, should be enough to teach a man what he ought to believe and how he ought to act; and that there should be no need of any Church to interpret the Bible or to supplement its teachings.
It was apparent from the beginning, however, that the Protestants were not going to get along any better with the Bible divorced from the Church than they had gotten along with the Bible and the Church together. Thus, they found that when they tried to preserve the Bible’s literal sense, they were always getting bitten by the snakes they were supposed to be able to pick up; and when they tried to pass off the whole Scripture as figurative and symbolic, they were always running up against texts, the clarity of whose dogma would confound them. Still, for all the hardship it caused them, the Protestants never quite gave up the Bible; and whenever they felt called upon to make a profession of their faith, they always did so by pounding the book vigorously or waving it aloft.
But, last September, Protestantism reached the turning point. The event was marked by the official publication of a new Scripture translation, called the Revised Standard Version. In this book, which is meant to supersede all previous English Bibles, the Protestants finally, and convincingly, have let it be known how far from Christianity they have come in their 400 years. They have at last dropped all pretense of getting their faith from the Bible just as God wrote it, and, by way of offering a “new translation,” they have re-written the Bible so as to make it fit their preconceived Protestant notions. No longer will Protestants have to skip pages in their Bible-reading in order to miss religiously embarrassing passages; all such passages have been altered so that they are no longer embarrassing.
The Revised Standard Version is a perfect Protestant document, having no certitude, no integrity, no authority. It contains nothing to offend the skeptic sensibilities of Protestants or to shake them in their disbelief. It turns Our Lord in the Gospels from the Son of God preaching the Kingdom of Heaven into a mawkish, ineffectual do-gooder, patterned according to the familiar Protestant type. And Our Lady, long the Protestants’ foremost resentment, it turns from the Virgin, foretold by Isaias, who would conceive and bear a son, into just “a young woman.”
Yet, anxious as the Protestants might be to twist the Bible to their heretical ends, they would never dare do so were there not some Catholic sanction for the act. The Church is the donor and protector of the Bible, and every Bible-tamperer fears her wrath. The reason that the Protestants have dared to publish such a flagrant distortion as the Revised Standard Version is that the stage was already set for them, the precedent established by a Catholic priest. That priest is the Right Reverend Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, author of The Knox Bible.
When Ronald Knox gave up his Anglican ministry to become a Catholic (in 1919, having waited two years to make sure the pull he seemed to feel toward the Church wasn’t just a case of “war-nerves”), he brought with him two gifts. These gifts were: a deep devotion to, and sympathy for, the pagan classics; and a kind of fluency and unctuousness in the use of the English language that passed for an elegant prose style. Knox presented these two talents to the Church as his dowry, and received from the Church in exchange for them the gift of Holy Orders, validly administered. These same two talents have been Knox’s chief assets, his stock-in-trade ever since. By advertising his love of the pagans and familiarity with their languages, he got himself appointed Chaplain at his alma mater, Oxford; and by squirting his oily prose at impressionable Catholics, he has kept them blinded to his almost total lack of Faith.
But it was not till 1939 that Monsignor Knox found an exercise that would enable him to display his talents to the fullest. In that year he retired to the manor house of a friend and began to translate the entire Bible into English from the Latin Vulgate. This virtuoso performance was meant to replace the traditional, and faithful, Douai-Rheims version, which had been used by English-speaking Catholics since the time of the Reformation.
Despite the terrible presumption of the title, there is ample justification for calling this book The Knox Bible, as his publisher and practically everyone does. For it is much more Knox’s work than God’s. It is dominated by Knox’s vocabulary, his sentence structure, his phrases. If he thinks something is not sufficiently clear the way the original, inspired writer put it — if it does not mean what Knox thinks it ought to mean — then he redoes the passage, adding words, leaving words out, and substituting phrases of his own (the Oxford equivalent) for the phrases used by the inspired writers. The cumulative effect of this is devastating. Thus, the fiery and overflowing Saint Paul, after being subjected to the School of Knox, sounds likes a secretary in the British Foreign Office. Example: at the end of his life, Saint Paul, having fought the good fight, writing to his disciple Timothy, boasts of his great achievement: “ … I have kept the Faith.” Knox decided this should have been less enthusiastically rendered: “ … I have redeemed my pledge.”
Knox treats the authors of Holy Scripture not as inspired writers but as hacks like himself, who are trying to find the best way of saying what it is they have to say, and who do not always succeed as well as he himself might have. You get the impression that the Evangelists were just interim instruments the Holy Spirit, used while He was waiting for Knox to come along. As a specimen of his attitude toward the Bible and the men who wrote it, here is one of his patronizing paragraphs, commenting on the Gospels. Referring to the place in the last chapter of the Gospel according to Saint John, where Our Lord asks Saint Peter: “Do you love (diligis) me? … Do you love (diligis) me? … Do you love (amas) me?” Knox says: “The probability is that Our Lord used the same word for love, and Saint Peter answered Him in the same word, three times over, but John (or his Greek amanuensis) introduced a second word in the Greek, from a natural (though mistaken) desire to avoid monotony. ”
It is almost impossible for a Catholic to read the whole of The Knox Bible, unsuspectingly, and keep his Faith. He would be almost better off reading the Revised Standard Version. The perversions of that book are so monstrous and overt that every Catholic would immediately recognize them, and be on his guard; but The Knox Bible gets him unawares. It does its damage not so much by clear, specific distortions as by its faithless British slant. There is an unholy attitude that pervades the book, a kind of atmosphere that hangs over it, like a London fog, and that, quietly but thoroughly, obscures God’s Word and stifles the Catholic Faith.
BY FATHER FEENEY
Hilaire Belloc is a Londoner in looks, a Londoner in walk and talk, and a Londoner in stubbornness. But he is the only London writer I know — with the possible exception of Philip Guedalla — who is not a Londoner in soul. Belloc has a Continental soul — a perfect sympathy with things French, Austrian and Italian, and a perfect shrewdness for everything that is German. Belloc never lost his Continental kinship with soldiers (he once served in the army of France), nor did he ever lose his sense of comradeship with the spirits of Continental saints, nearly every one of whose shrines he has at some time visited, making the journey on foot. His is also a Continental thirst for wine.
Belloc refuses to drink any liquor discovered or invented since the Protestant Reformation. The odors of brandy, sherry and port delight his Catholic sense of smell, but whiskey is a word one must never utter in his presence. I am almost afraid to put it in a paragraph where the name of Belloc is mentioned. … He is now an old man, older, as he once remarked, than the Little Flower of Jesus would be were she still alive. Belloc has now a bent back, is helpless, is unshaven, is unreliable in all his remembrances, and faithful only to his memories. He sits by the fireside in some hidden country place, and waits for the tap on the shoulder that is to be his summons to the Particular Judgment.
When Belloc goes to Purgatory — I am positive Our Lord will never send him to Hell — I know he will be required to purge his soul of some of the interests collected there during life, by reason of too much association, even in the heat of conflict, with some of the heretics of his time. But I also believe he will be promised high rewards in Heaven for the clear courage with which he proclaimed all central Catholic truths, fearless of what would be the consequence to himself.
(from London Is A Place, Ravengate Press, Boston)
The Finalys and Baptism Betrayed
Q. What is Baptism?
A. Baptism is a Sacrament which cleanses us from original sin, makes us Christians, children of God, heirs of Heaven, and subjects of the Pope.
It is by this kind of summary that a Catholic child first learns the supernatural difference which spoken words and poured water can make in someone, and did make in him, long before his catechism days.
Christianity’s initial overture, or better still, its initial threat, is made in terms of Baptism. “Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he shall not enter the Kingdom of God.” And it was in terms a threat set to rhyme that Baptism once got called:
That pouring to producing a loosening of Grace, Divinity imparted at the pourer’s pace, When a trickle with the Trinity will negatively tell Of the dryer way to Hell!
Because Baptism makes all the difference in the world (and in the next world) between Christians and not, Heaven and Hell, saved and damned, we want to tell you this month two stories about it. The first, and the happy one for Baptism, goes this way.
One hundred years ago, in Italy, there was a servant girl named Anna Morisi, employed in the household of the Mortara family of Bologna. Now, Anna was a devout Catholic, while the Mortaras were Jews, and parents to a Jewish child named Edgar. One night, as Edgar lay sick, and close to dying, Anna Morisi poured water on his head, saying, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”
Seven years later, the civic authorities of Bologna found out that the child, Edgar Mortara, long since recovered, was a Christian. In a matter of hours, Edgar was taken from his Jewish parents and dispatched to Rome, there to be brought up in the home of a Catholic family. For this was necessarily the law in a place where the Sacrament of Baptism was valued for what it is.
And no amount of Jewish wailing, at which Mrs. Mortara was most accomplished, could persuade the authorities otherwise. Appeals to the local clergy were useless. The priests of Bologna held the law to be quite in accord with their Catholic belief in the effects of Baptism. In Rome, Cardinals agreed with the Bologna priests, and the Holy Father himself, Pope Pius IX, could not be prompted to indicate even the least displeasure with the affair of the Mortara child.
Here is the second, the recent, and, for Baptism, the very sad story.
In 1944, shortly before they were killed by the Nazis, Dr. and Mrs. Fritz Finaly left their two Jewish sons in the protection of a French Catholic lady, Miss Antoinette Brun. Four years later, under Miss Brun’s auspices, Robert and Gerald Finaly were baptized in the Catholic Faith. It was after this that certain of their Jewish relatives became solicitous for the welfare of the Finaly boys and anxious to gain custody of them. When it appeared that the French courts would require Robert and Gerald to leave Miss Brun and their Catholic home and move to Israeli with a Jewish aunt, plans were made. The boys must be taken across the border into Catholic Spain and hidden there. The hiding began last February, and involved in this holy plot to guard the Sacrament of Baptism were eight French priests and nuns.
Last month, the Finaly boys were found and returned to France. Previously found, and jailed, were the eight French religious. By an agreement between the Grand Rabbi of France and a prominent French Archbishop, the boys were to be turned over to their Jewish relatives, and the kidnapping charges against the priests and nuns were to be dropped. This seemed so eminently fair that the highest court in France labeled the agreement “justice” and closed the Finaly case.
To international Jewry, this was good news to hear. Baptism had come off as expendable. To restless Europe, the Finaly decision came as a kind of symbol. Here was the obituary for a European thing which was long suspected of having died. In the press, spokesmen for the people suggested that the “thing” was provincialism, or perhaps conservatism. Eight French priests and nuns thought it was the Faith. The Point – September 1953
WHAT HAPPENED IN CHICAGO
Six Catholic Brothers were sent to jail in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. They were Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary from Saint Benedict Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the charge against them was “disorderly conduct.” All over the country their story was reprinted, supplemented by tabloid photographs and “serves-them-right” editorials. The Chicago incident got its start in South Bend, Indiana — the whole story in the press sounding somewhat as follows:
On Tuesday, July 28th, six clerically garbed young men from Saint Benedict Censer, headquarters of the controversial Father Leonard Feeney, appeared on the Notre Dame campus at South Bend and managed to stir up the whole University summer school. Their apparent purpose was the conversion of Notre Dame to their own “peculiar” beliefs.
Two days later, the group of six presented themselves at the Chicago Chancery Building and demanded an appointment with Samuel Cardinal Stritch. The “rumpus” raised by them forced Chancery officials to call in Chicago police and have the noisy sextet locked up. On the following morning in a local courtroom, the young men insisted that their case was a matter for the Church, not the civil courts. They were fined. They refused to pay. They were sentenced to five days in jail. Next day, fines for the six were paid by a Chicago Catholic who did not agree with the boys doctrinally, but thought that they ought to be allowed to “go back to Massachusetts.”
ENTER THE POINT
This month’s issue of The Point is the twentieth. In past months, there have been many incidents which, like the Chicago one, have made Saint Benedict Center, and its director, Father Leonard Feeney, subject matter for headlines in the newspapers and for feature articles in the news magazines. Great numbers of these write-ups have been of malicious intent, deliberately disregarding the actual situation. “Hit Feeney again,” has become a popular policy with news publishers, since they are assured that none of their readers would dare or care to come right out in the open and demand a fair hearing for Father Feeney.
Even more vicious, and less solicitous for the truth, have been the Father Feeney smear-jobs in the nation’s Catholic press. With them there has been no pretense at objective reporting. Hundreds of pages of “He’s insane,” “He’s proud,” “He studied too much,” have been foisted upon the Catholic public in the hope that the sheer quantity of the calumny will cover up the fact that no one has given a dogmatic answer to Father Feeney’s charge that heresy is being taught in the American Church, that the infallibly defined dogma of no salvation outside the Catholic Church is being reduced to a meaningless formula.
Father Leonard Feeney has come off in the Catholic periodicals as the one man in the country with dangerous doctrines. In such magazines, an article praising the religious outlooks of Christian Scientists, Mohammedans or Jews is the accepted and common accompaniment to a diatribe against the “ideas” of Father Feeney. And while Catholic students in Catholic colleges delve with “permission” into every forbidden hook on the Index, the one volume that is absolutely prohibited to them is Father Feeney’s recently published Bread of Life.
In all this, The Point has consistently refrained from rushing to Father Feeney’s personal defense. For we know that his first interest has always been the defense of the dogmas of the Faith, not the rectifying of misimpressions about himself, however maliciously and widely they may have been spread. To our faithful subscribers, the great majority of them priests, we need make no apology this month for departing from our usual practice. The truth is, this Chicago issue of The Point was prompted by the most dogmatic of reasons and, for our priest readers, the most sacramentally personal of reasons. The events in Chicago have cast doubt and confusion on the inviolable dogma that a priest is a priest forever.
This is our heartache, and our privilege: that we should now have to defend, along with the Church’s doctrine on salvation, the Church’s equally sacred doctrine on the eternal character of the priesthood. It is likewise our privilege that, in defending the priesthood, and its very nature, we cannot defend it apart from the priest in whom priesthood has been lately attacked, Father Leonard Feeney of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It is in this spirit that we are telling the Chicago story.
NOTRE DAME
The whole thing might very well have ended just where it began, at Notre Dame, had it not been for what appeared in the newspapers as a result of the Notre Dame incident. All that the six Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary had originally intended to do was to go out to South Bend, talk to as many of the students and teachers as they could, and then come home again.
The message that they brought to Notre Dame was a simple, straightforward one: that no one can get into Heaven who does not love the Blessed Virgin Mary. Later, the newspapers scoffingly reported that the six Brothers had come to “convert” the Notre Dame students. This was the strange doctrine to which they wanted to convert them.
The Brothers talked to more than three hundred Notre Dame students and priests. They told them that Notre Dame was letting Our Lady down. They said that there had once been a time when every Catholic American boy had thought of the Notre Dame football team as somehow representing Our Lady; but now, they said, it had turned into an eleven-man Interfaith meeting, many of whose members would refuse even to say the Hail Mary.
It was this attack on the sacred Notre Dame football team that really aroused the press. There was hardly a newspaper in the country that did not print the Brothers’ statement. Of course, it was twisted to try and make it sound queer and absurd: “The first sign of your approaching damnation is that you have Protestants on your football team.” But people could see through the way the papers had put it to what the Brothers had said, and they could see that a very telling point had been scored against Notre Dame. The University was officially upset enough to issue a statement on its policy regarding Protestants in the athletic department.
HEADLINES An hour from the time the six Brothers left the Notre Dame campus, they were on the front page of the South Bend newspaper. And by that evening their story and pictures were all over the country. On the whole, the reports of what happened at Notre Dame were good. Despite distortions and misquotations, enough of the truth had got out for anyone to see that the Brothers had gone to Notre Dame in Our Lady’s interests.
It was in identifying the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Order to which the Brothers belonged, that the damage was done. Father Leonard Feeney, the superior of the Order, was referred to as everything from a “former priest” and an “ex-priest” to “Mr. Feeney.” This was a clear, overt attack on the Sacrament of Holy Orders, and the Brothers could not overlook it. Since the Chicago newspapers had been the most frequent offenders, the Brothers decided to go to Chicago.
As soon as they arrived in the city, the Brothers went directly to the editor of Chicago’s largest newspaper, and told him their grievance. The editor told them that he had honestly been led to believe — from reports he had read in the Catholic press — that Father Feeney was no longer a priest. However, he assured them that if they could get some sort of statement from Cardinal Stritch’s office saying that Father Feeney was still a priest, he would be glad to print a retraction, and would never make the mistake again.
HIS EMINENCE
The Brothers arrived at the Chancery of the Archdiocese of Chicago about noon on Thursday, July 30th. They were directed by the receptionist to Cardinal Stritch’s secretary, whom they asked for an appointment with the Cardinal. The secretary was about to make an appointment for them, when a door beside his desk opened and out stepped a priest whom the secretary identified as Monsignor Burke, Chancellor of the Archdiocese.
“Who are you?” the Monsignor demanded.
“We are six Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, with Father Leonard Feeney,” one of the Brothers answered. “The first appointment you are going to get,” the Monsignor snapped, “is with the police. Now get out of here!”
Stunned at this treatment, the Brothers for a moment did not know what to do. Then, as by a single inspiration, they turned and walked into the Cardinal’s office.
Cardinal Stritch was seated at his desk. He looked up, smiled, and nodded as the Brothers came in. “Your Eminence,” said Brother Hugh, one of the six, “we are Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and we would like an appointment to speak with you about a very grave matter.”
“I will be glad to give you an appointment, if you will make it properly,” the Cardinal said.
“That’s not what Monsignor Burke told us, Your Eminence,” Brother Hugh said. “He told us that the only appointment we would get would be with the police department. Your Eminence, could Brother Francis speak to you?”
The Cardinal nodded his assent.
Brother Francis told the Cardinal what a terrible scandal it was for Father Feeney to be called an ex-priest; he told him that millions of people were being made to think that the priesthood was not something abiding, but something that a priest could have one day and which could be taken away from him the next. He beseeched the Cardinal to put an end to this scandal and to give a statement to the newspapers affirming with finality that the Sacrament of Holy Orders, once administered, can never be taken away.
The Cardinal said he could do nothing.
“But don’t you see, Your Eminence,” Brother Francis protested, “that this is more than an attack on Father Feeney? It is an attack on the priesthood of every priest. If you do not want to issue a formal statement, have someone in the Chancery call up the newspapers and tell them unofficially, just so they will know.”
The Cardinal said he could do nothing. Brother Francis then asked, “Your Eminence, do you believe that a priest is a priest forever?”
The Cardinal looked away, and did not answer.
While Brother Francis had been speaking to Cardinal Stritch, members of the Chancery staff kept coming into the office. But no one spoke, no one interrupted Brother Francis. Now, all of a sudden, someone tried to grab hold of him. The Brothers all dropped to their knees and said a prayer, in the hope of avoiding a scuffle. Cardinal Stritch then went into a more quiet office, and Brother Hugh went with him.
“Your Eminence,” Brother Hugh said, “I want to talk to you as a son to a father. Will you listen to me?”
“Yes,” said the Cardinal, “what can I do for you?”
“Your Eminence, I plead with you to stop this terrible scandal. Defend the Sacrament of Holy Orders. Tell the newspapers that Father Feeney is still a priest. Don’t you believe, Your Eminence, that a priest is a priest forever?”
The Cardinal did not answer. At this point, three laymen came into the room. Brother Hugh turned and spoke to them: “You can see that I am speaking to the Cardinal as a son to a father. I am asking you in the name of Our Blessed Mother not to hinder me.”
The men stepped back. Brother Hugh turned to the Cardinal and asked him again if he would do something to stop the scandal being given.
“Rome has spoken,” the Cardinal said, “There is nothing I can do.”
“Rome has always referred to Father Leonard Feeney as a priest,” Brother Hugh said.
“Well, in common parlance around here, we sometimes call a priest an ex- priest,” the Cardinal answered.
“Your Eminence,” Brother Hugh asked one last time, “do you yourself believe that a priest is a priest forever?” Suddenly, two policemen seized Brother Hugh from behind. They held his arms and pulled him from the room. When Brother Hugh turned around, he saw that the policemen were acting at the direction of a priest. He realized, too, that Cardinal Stritch must have seen what was about to happen, yet he had made no motion to stop the policemen; he had given no indication that they were approaching; he had not even changed his expression.
JAIL
Each year on the first day of August, the Church celebrates the feast of Saint Peter in Chains, the commemoration of Saint Peter’s deliverance from prison by an angel. This year’s August first, a Saturday, found the six Brothers from Saint Benedict Center quite as thoroughly in jail as Saint Peter had been. It was on Thursday that they were arrested in Cardinal Stritch’s office. On Friday their case came up in the Chicago Municipal Court. The judge decided that the Brothers must admit, by paying a five dollar fine, that their request to see Cardinal Stritch was “disorderly conduct.” The judge’s alternative was a five day trip to one of the local penal institutions, and the Brothers chose the trip.
Were it not for a certain Mrs. Thomason, Saturday August first would have been for them the first of five willing days behind bars. On that morning, however, the said Midwestern lady appeared with purse in hand, paid all six fines, and then made statements to the press about how delighted she was that Senator Robert Taft was in Heaven and the Brothers from Massachusetts were on their way back home.
Mrs. Thomason’s neighbors were not all so blithe about the whole affair. Alert Chicago Catholics began to realize just how far our bishops are prepared to go to discredit any priest who will not fall into the American pattern of compromised Catholicism.
And in Boston, Father Leonard Feeney had an answer for those who would “de-priest” him. It was to affirm more loudly than ever that defined dogma of the Faith which his enemies had hoped to disgrace by disgracing him: there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, nor without personal submission to our Holy Father, the Pope. The Point – October 1953
POINTERS
Last month’s issue of the Catholic Digest went all out for a money-making real estate deal in Florida called “Holy Land, Inc.” Conceived by Broadway Catholic Eddie Dowling, “Holy Land, Inc.” plans to reproduce the Palestine holy places over a square mile of Florida, and then stage annual Nativity and Passion plays which will be “non-sectarian” and offensive to no one, including the Jews who are among the project’s financiers.
These were the plans, that is, until the Bishop of Saint Augustine, Florida, came out against the whole thing. The official diocesan statement said, “The Catholic mind shrinks from the concept of a ‘non-sectarian’ Christ as it does from other aspects of the plan set forward in the Catholic Digest.”
Every time the Catholic Digest departs from its customary fare and tries to go a little theological, it gets into trouble. We hope this Florida rebuke will help it to re-see its vocation as a second-rate Reader’s Digest and to stick to the kind of thing it knows, articles like, “How to Tan Gloriously Without the Aid of Grease.”
On the third of this month, the Church celebrates the feast of Saint Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower of Jesus. Because of her great zeal for the Faith, this young French nun, who died at twenty-four in a Carmelite cloister, has been appointed the Patroness of all the Church’s missions.
Here is the way she spoke during her last illness. “Oh, how happy I would have been to fight at the time of the Crusades, or later on to fight against the heretics. Be assured, I would not have been afraid of the fire! Oh, is it possible that I should die in bed?” This desire of the Little Flower’s to fight the Crusades was in the courageous spirit of an earlier French saint, the King of France, Saint Louis IX. That holiest of the Crusaders once wrote to the Sultan of Egypt, whose lands he was about to invade, “The soldiers who march under my standard cover the plains, and my cavalry is no less formidable. You have but one means to avoid the tempest that threatens you. Receive priests who will teach you the Christian religion; embrace it and adore the Cross; otherwise I will pursue you everywhere … ”
THE MASONS AND THE JEWS
The United States of America is the most Masonic country in the world. Three and a half million Masons, more than 75 per cent of the world’s total, live here.
American Catholics persist in regarding these Masons who surround them as nothing more than a bunch of harmless, fun-loving fellows, who like to sponsor football games to aid aged widows. Yet, in all the history of the Church, there is no organization that the Popes have condemned so insistently, urgently, and severely as Freemasonry. It has been anathematized seventeen different times, and has in some way been warned against by almost every Pope of the last two centuries.
The fact that Masons in this country have such an innocuous reputation is the result of deliberate and prudent Masonic planning. Instead of attacking the Church frontally, which would reveal them as enemies, and would enable the Church to defend herself, the Masons launch their attack obliquely, sinisterly, as it were by night. They rarely declare themselves as being anti-Catholic — particularly among the Thirty-third Degree members, by whom Masonic policy is established and understood. Rather, they always have some apparently innocent program they want to put into effect, like Interfaith, or universal public school education. It is by such programs that they achieve their ends.
The Masons pretend they are concerned with political reforms; but their real objectives are not political, they are religious. They talk loftily of wanting to establish “progress” and “freedom” and democracy.” But if you probe deep enough, or wait long enough, you will discover what they mean by these terms. For the Masons have but one goal: the utter destruction of the Catholic Church throughout the world; and whatever else they may seem to be for or against, as is ultimately for the sake of achieving that goal. Since the time of the French Revolution, when they marched against the Church under the specious banner of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, the Masons have been active wherever there has been a chance to assail Christ the King and His Mystical Body.
Though the Masons will pose as great patriots when it suits their designs, the Masons are really loyal to no country. In its war against the Church, Masonry transcends all national boundaries, all forms of government, all economic systems. That alone explains such a strange league as the capitalistic Masons of the United States supporting and encouraging avowed Communists in Mexico and aiding them to take over the government there. They did so because the Communists had declared war on Christ the King and had sworn to crush the Faith of the Mexican people.
But of all the schemes the Masons have devised against the Church, of all their weapons, the most terrible, the one that makes them such a dangerous and desperate enemy, is this: they have unleashed on Christendom the fury of the Jews.
Until the Masons came to power, the ancient, bitter hatred that the Jews have for their King and for those who are loyal to Him, was kept in check. They were obliged to live in ghettos, and the Christians were well-warned against them. But as the Masons took over the nations of Europe, they invited the Jews to leave their ghettos and to mingle freely with the rest of society. Like Pilate befriending Herod, the Masons overcame their natural abhorrence of the Jews and, for the sake of their common foe, took them as an ally.
Once out of their ghettos, the Jews found that, by the alert practice of usury, they were soon able to control the finances of whatever countries they were in. They then proceeded to take over, thoroughly and securely, all those media by which the thoughts and opinions, the sympathies and emotions, the values and attitudes of men and of nations are ruled. Today, in the countries which the Masons dominate, notably the United States, the Jews control the book publishing industry, they control the press, they control the news agencies, they control the movies and radio and television and entertainment. They control what information, under the guise of “news,” shall be given to the people, and what shall be withheld. By their command of the news agencies, especially the international ones, they can determine what slant the news shall have at its very origin. Witness their vicious propaganda campaign against Catholic Franco and for the Communists during the Spanish Civil War.
Those newspapers that the Jews do not shape positively, by writing, editing, or publishing them, they regulate quite effectively in another way — by threatening to stop advertising their department stores in the papers, if they print anything detrimental to Jewish interests.
Thus, the Jews are able to spread the Masonic principles and programs, which they, for their own Judaic reasons, share. They can make it look as though a person is against public opinion, against democracy, against America who does not hold, for instance, that one religion is as good as another.
But important as this work of indoctrination is in combating the Faith, the Masons have given the Jews another assignment which is even more important. It is to subject Christians to the evil influence of Jewish morals. This task the Jews perform with delighted thoroughness. By their movies, their television programs, their advertisements, their books and magazines, the Jews saturate society with their sensualism and filth, their what’s-in-it- for-me outlooks. No one can withstand long exposure to this Jewish influence without becoming completely demoralized.
Traditionally, the Masons’ final step is to foment a revolution, overthrowing by violence the existing government and setting up one based on anti- Catholic, Masonic principles. But here, in our time, the Masons are going to try and destroy the Faith in a nation of 30 million Catholics without violence, or bloodshed, quietly and legally.
However, there is one condition necessary for the accomplishment of this Masonic scheme: American Catholics must continue on the same merry, unguarded, unsuspecting way they have been going. They must continue to believe they have nothing to fight in the power of the Masons, nothing to fear in the influence of the Jews.
* * * * * “Tear away the mask from Freemasonry, and let it be seen as it really is.” — Pope Leo XIII
“Let us remember that Christianity and Freemasonry are, by their nature, irreconcilable.” — Pope Leo XIII
“The Masons blasphemously profane and defile the Passion of Jesus Christ by their sacrilegious ceremonies … They cherish a very special hatred against the Apostolic See, which they are striving to overthrow.” — Pope Pius VII
“It is not alone the Masonic body in Europe that is referred to, but also the Masonic associations in America and in whatsoever part of the world they may be.” — Pope Pius IX
* * * * *
BY FATHER FEENEY
Our Lord, in the few observational remarks he made about children, never commented on a child’s good looks, soft hair, or bright utterance. He blessed and canonized their innocence in a single pronouncement: “Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of God.”
A child offers Christianity all it needs on which to build by way of value. It is on what a child can readily know about a lamb, a pearl, a field of wheat, a leper, a fisherman, a lamp, the taste of salt, the odor of wine, a gift of gold, frankincense and myrrh, that the entire Gospel story is written. Christianity seeks to win the approval of the child, knowing that the best way to know how to be great is to let children teach us value. A child’s questions, problems and delights are the poetry, philosophy, theology and mysticism of Catholic life in one little blue-eyed inquiry. If Our Lord has set such importance on a child’s interests in order to make Revelation fruitful, it must follow that a continued childhood — a perennial let-the-dead-bury-the-dead, take-no-heed-for-tomorrow outlook — is the very best manner in which to let the seed of faith, once given, take root in fruitful soil. As Catholics, we must preserve — or, if lost, re-establish — the child in us, in order to be saved. …
Little Jesus did not enter this world to give us the privilege of condescension toward something inferior to us. He came to be our King, issuing commands by His small silences, His tiny fingers and His great need. God could easily have entered the world by some thunderous and impressive route. He is well-known for His power to split the sky with lightning, tear the air with a tornado, spill a mountain into an avalanche, or unsettle a continent with an earthquake. By way of any of these cosmic overtures, He could have made His entrance into our world, led by twelve legions of Angels. But, no. The road He chose to travel to us was the innocent portal of a mother’s womb, garlanded with the no-hurries and long delays of love.
(first printed in The Messenger of the Sacred Heart)
The Newman Clubs
Amid the ordered barbarism which the late Dr. Roosevelt was wont to call “our American way of life,” there is established a pattern which may be identified by the name of “our club culture.” For the levels of American sociability lend themselves admirably to a breakdown by “clubs” — beginning at the top with the polo club, the yacht club, the country club, descending through the women’s club, the bridge club, the Lions Club, and terminating inelegantly at “Mike’s Club — Beer Ten Cents a Glass.”
Distributed up and down this vertical hierarchy (generously in the middle, sparsely at either end) are the subsidiary clubs — aggregations of button collectors, bird watchers, and the offspring of American Revolutionaries. With pompous Mesdames President and dutiful sub-chairmen, the members of the clubs sustain themselves in that one interest which provides their common unity — to wit, bizarre buttons, odd birds, or rabble-rousing ancestors.
In the midst of these lesser gatherings, and willing to be taken for one of them, is the Newman Club Federation, that appraisal of the Catholic Faith as “something to have a doubt about.”
Newman Clubs are now about fifty years old. Their members are those tragically misplaced persons, Catholic students at non-Catholic colleges. And their very name, Newman, gives them away.
It was the spirit of Newman’s writings, quite as much as his over-esteemed clarity, which made him so fit the purposes of American Catholics at non- Catholic colleges. For in everything that Newman said in print, after he rationalized his way into the Church, there is a clear determination to dissociate himself from all that he considered vulgar (that is, not English) in his new-found religion. He felt, for example, that devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary was being carried too far, and that the infallibility of the Pope was something to keep quiet about!
As they started off, the Newman Clubs selected John Henry Cardinal Newman as their patron for many reasons, one of which was their certainty that he would never embarrass them by getting canonized and turning into a patron-saint. Newman, they decided, was an eminently acceptable variety of Catholic to bring to the attention of our secular universities. To begin with, he was not a noisy Irish-American Catholic, but an ex-Anglican English one. And he was not only literate, he was even literary.
The establishers of the Newman Clubs must have realized, however, that in importing his spirit, much of Newman’s Oxford refinement and Anglican propriety would be lost in transit. For when it is found on a Midwestern university campus, clad in blue-jeans at a Newman Club weenie roast, the spirit of John Henry Cardinal Newman as stripped of all but its most basic elements: compromise of and apology for the Faith.
The Newman Club maintains that a Catholic student can “stick it out” at a secular college and preserve his Faith by means of weekly teas, monthly dances and an occasional festive breakfast, preceded by a hasty Holy Communion. In fact, Newman Club bulletins point proudly to recent surveys which report that although the percentage of Catholic students who leave the Faith at secular colleges is very high, the number is considerably lower among those students who are Newman Clubbers.
The Newman policy is blithely and blindly to assume that the student who does not openly break with the Faith must therefore still have it. And this policy explains the Newman Club alumni, those secularly-educated thousands who are, in name, Catholic, but who are, in sympathy, outlook, judgment, appreciation, manner, in their very impulse, non-Catholic, and what is worse, unconcerned that this is the case.
The declared purpose of the Newman Club movement is, “the religious, intellectual, and social betterment of its members.” Understood, is the qualification, “provided such betterment in no way interferes with that primary consideration, the Catholic student’s acquisition of a secular college degree.” Thus, the effectiveness of a Newman Club as a secular college is the effectiveness of the boy who held his finger in the leaking dike, hoping to keep back the flood which was pouring in over the top.
Our necessary conclusion? We prefer degree-less Catholics to drowned ones. The Point – November 1953
POINTERS
The attack on Freemasonry in last month’s issue of The Point brought forth many comments. Masons were particularly upset. To keep them in this state, we are printing the following pronouncement by Pope Clement XII.
“Wherefore, to each and all of the faithful of Christ, of whatever state, grade, condition or order, We ordain stringently and in virtue of holy obedience, that they shall not, under any pretext, enter, propagate, or support the aforesaid societies, known as Freemasons, or otherwise named; that they shall not be enrolled in them, affiliated with them, or take part in their proceedings, assist them, or afford them in any way counsel, aid, or favor, publicly or privately, directly or indirectly, by themselves or by others in any way whatever, under pain of excommunication, to be incurred by the very act, without further declaration, from which absolution shall not be obtainable through anyone except Ourselves, or Our successor, the Roman Pontiff … ”
The American liberal-Catholic solution for getting infidels and others into Heaven has always been the phrase, “the soul of the Church.” All the theologians now admit that this was an “unfortunate” bit of theologizing. For, in truth, the soul of the Church is none other than the Holy Ghost! This admission, however, provoked no contrite retractions from American theologians, nor did it send them back to the Church’s true teaching regarding the salvation of those who die as infidels.
For the enlightenment of the Catechism revisers down in Baltimore, who seem to consult only uncanonized contemporaries, we will repeat what Pope Saint Gregory the Great had to say about the salvation of infidels. (He had in mind especially the Jews.) “We can no more pray for a deceased infidel than we can for the devil, since they are condemned to the same eternal and irrevocable damnation.”
In case you wonder why The Point sometimes sounds so alarmed, it is because of alarming befoulings of the Faith by some of our Catholic competitors.
The magazine, Novena Notes, published in Chicago, has allowed a priest to come out with the assertion that Our Blessed Lady never died!
The Pilot, published in Boston, whose priest-editor is a guest preacher in Protestant churches, has recently declared that one can apostatize from the Catholic Faith, if one’s conscience so directs, without any sin!
The Catholic Digest, published in Saint Paul, has featured the account of a Catholic chaplain whose apostolic duty during the past war was to tell dying non-Catholic soldiers how they could enter the Church by Baptism of Desire.
The Catholic monthly, Jubilee, published in New York, invited Christopher Morley to contribute to its columns (and printed his contribution) even though Morley’s insulting reply accused them of being “papists” whose interest in himself as a contributor to Catholic literature he could not quite understand.
The Register, published in Denver, has continued to issue its weekly “ex cathedra” pronouncements from the fallible chair of Monsignor Matthew Smith, the so-called “Pope of the Middle West.”
Our many other reasons for being alarmed will be stated candidly in future issues.
LAMBS WITHOUT SHEPHERDS The outstanding example of American youth is neither Huckleberry Finn, Shirley Temple, nor Little Orphan Annie. He is, rather, a youngster who, in just a short time, and by the sheer impact of his personality, has soared to unprecedented fame. He is that familiar figure on the American scene, the juvenile delinquent.
Admittedly, his name is fantastic. It was given by his elders early in his career, in the hope that he could be gotten rid of by ridicule, or, failing that, could be made to sound like some strange social phenomenon that could best be handled by the academicians.
But no one considers the juvenile delinquent a laughing matter any more. He is presently America’s biggest headache, and is becoming daily more of a menace. He is the subject of newspaper editorials, of police campaigns, of Congressional investigations. And the more attention he receives, the more he thrives. Numerically, he represents one out of twenty youths between the ages of ten and seventeen. That was the number arrested and brought to court last year.
Nothing reveals a culture so vividly and sensitively as the way it affects the children who live in it. Thus, if you want to see the beauty and nobility of a Catholic culture shining most clearly, look at the children such a culture produces — at their innocence, their sense of wonder, their holy interests, their joy.
And likewise, if you want to see the rottenness of our own American culture, look at the mark that culture has made upon our children. For the juvenile delinquent is merely the ultimate, inevitable reaction to a prolonged siege of Masonic ideas and Jewish morals. He is the product of our culture as it outrages the innocence of a child.
Nowhere is this cultural assault so violent as in The Point ’s own city, Boston. Besides having whatever the rest of the country has, Boston has given birth to, or provided a home for, some peculiar barbarities and perversities of its own — among them, Unitarians, Christian Science, and Harvard University. It is not surprising, therefore, that Boston should be a hotbed of juvenile delinquency; but, what is surprising, and frightening, is that most of its heat is being generated by Catholic boys and girls. To show why this is so, we need to make a few observations on the spiritual environment of the Catholic children of Boston — not by way of excusing the juvenile delinquents, for they are inexcusable, but only by way of explaining them.
When Richard J. Cushing was appointed Archbishop of Boston, everyone breathed a great sigh of relief. The long cold days of William Cardinal O’ Connell seemed definitely past. Here was a man who was the Cardinal’s very antithesis. The Cardinal had shone with Protestant polish; Archbishop Cushing had none of it. The Cardinal had kept his money and invested it wisely; Archbishop Cushing was a lavish spender. The Cardinal had considered himself a man of culture, and collected masterpieces of art; Archbishop Cushing had no use for the stuff.
Yet Archbishop Cushing has failed the Catholics of his city, particularly the children, as Cardinal O’ Connell never did. He has left the children entrusted to him completely defenseless against the ravages of the world. He has given them no indication that they ought to keep themselves guarded, or that they have any enemies who want to destroy their Faith. Rather, he has determinedly pursued a good-word-for-everyone policy, which has led him, among other things, to be photographed holding hands with a Jewish rabbi and a notoriously anti-Catholic Protestant bishop.
Archbishop Cushing has appeared to the children in his care as a hospital- builder, a money-raiser, a celebrity-greeter; but he has not been their Father, he has not been their priest. He has not made it his first interest to teach them the way to eternal life and exhort them to its attainment. Neither by his words nor his actions has he given them the impression that their Faith is any more precious than the faith of Protestants or Jews.
Nor has he appealed to them as you would expect a priest to, asking them to be noble for the take of their Mother, the Queen of Heaven, urging them to find in her cause the adventure and excitement they seek. Never has he called upon them for a crusade to protect the Holy Name of Jesus or to convert Boston into a strong, truly Catholic city. Instead, when a local Protestant minister bought full pages in the Boston newspapers to advertise that Our Lady was not ever-Virgin, nor immaculately conceived, nor assumed into Heaven, Archbishop Cushing, as an example to the Catholic children of the city, showed not the slightest indignation, or even interest.
The secret and the summary of juvenile delinquency in Boston is contained in this terrible premonition of Saint John-Marie Vianney, the Cure of Ars: “Leave a parish without a priest for twenty years, and it will worship the brutes.”
That is the story of Boston. It has not been left without a priest, but it has been left in the episcopal care of a priest who will not teach and lead his people as a priest is meant to; and its children have become like a litter of brutes, roaming its streets in savage packs.
BY FATHER FEENEY
The earth does God a great favor by supplying Him with the materials of trans-substantiation, with the vestiges He uses in the Eucharist. Have you ever stopped to realize that if the fields yielded no more wheat, or the vineyards stopped distilling the liquids that become wine, there would be no more Holy Sacrifice of the Mass? And, without the Mass, there would be no Church!
When you realize the elemental innocences out of which God gives us the Bread of Life in the Holy Eucharist, rains have a new meaning, vines acquire fresh value as their grapes ripen in the sun, wheat fields assume a sudden significance, and clouds and foliage and silt and soil are all supersubstantially associated when we see them as necessities for the accoutrements, the wrappings, of this great Gift which makes our Holy Sacrifice, and which is the Flesh and Blood of Jesus under the eye- likenesses of bread and wine.
Bread is a product of fields and hands. Wine is the product of hills and feet. If Jesus did not have bread, there would be no Blessed Eucharist. No other food could serve Christ’s sacrificial purpose with the lightness and clarity and brilliance of wheat become bread. And it was the sun-charged grape bunches on the sides of villages that lured His generosity to pour Himself out in the guise of wine. This wheat and wine came to God the Son from God the Father. The Son thanks His Eternal Father for them at the Offertory of the Mass. He thanks Him for all the hosts and all the wheat fields until the end of time! What a harvest Christ requires for His sacrificial Suppers of Love, and what a wheat bill if God the Father were to charge the Son.
(from Bread of Life, published by St. Benedict Center)
CATHOLIC MEXICO AND CATHOLIC CANADA
When sixteenth century Spanish explorers discovered the southern end of our Mississippi River, they called it, the “River of the Holy Spirit.” A hundred years later, when the French found the Mississippi at its northern beginnings, they called it, the “River of the Immaculate Conception.” As the Spaniards were sailing up our Atlantic coastline, they came upon Chesapeake Bay and gave it its first name, “Bay of the Mother of God.” As the French sailed down the same coast, they beat the Pilgrims to Plymouth by a dozen years and named the place, “Saint Louis.”
The job of assigning names in our country, names for the rivers and hills and towns, fell first, in the South and the West, to the Spanish, and first in the North to the French. With Catholic liberality, they named everything that was namable, and with Catholic sensitiveness to the value of place, they took most of the names from their Faith. But in proportion as Spain and then France declined in Europe, so New Spain and New France diminished in America. They withdrew, one to the far Southwest, the other to the North, and into the area thus left empty of all but its Catholic names, there moved the U. S. A., young, boisterous, and Protestant.
And though vestige-names like Corpus Christi and Sault Sainte Marie have been of little effect in promoting a continuance of America’s Catholic foundations, a clear challenge has remained in the New World survival of Spain and France at America’s borders — with Spanish-Catholic Mexico to the south of us, and French-Catholic Canada to the North.
The Mexican is a blend of what the Spaniards brought to the New World and what they found here. For the Spanish colonials, unlike their English or Dutch counterparts, had no policy of “drive the natives out and we’ll take over.” They gave the Indians their Faith and presently welcomed them into their families, as the husbands of their daughters and the wives of their sons. And it was to one such native of Mexico, baptized with the Spanish name of Juan Diego, that the Mother of God long ago was pleased to appear — so that ever since, as Our Lady of Guadalupe, she has been in their songs and in their prayers, “The Mother of the Mexicans.”
If Mexico is the country of the Mother of God, then French Canada, from its long identification with “Good Saint Ann,” is as surely the land of the Mother of God’s Mother. Fittingly, the struggles of Mexico and Canada to stay Catholic have been much in the spirit of a mother and a grandmother — a Spanish mother defiant before the outrages financed in Mexico by American Masons, and a French grandmother praying, patient, and immovable before the brutalities of imperial England.
Out of the Faith which has thus been kept alive in them, Mexico and Canada have given us, within our lifetime, this grace: a young priest and a white-haired brother. The priest was Father Miguel Pro, whose determination to say his daily Mass and shout, “Long live Christ the King!” got him death from a government firing squad. The brother was Frère André, “Saint Joseph’s little dog” (as be called himself), whose child-like faith made him the worker of many miracles.
At the start, it was names that the Spanish and French brought to us. And now, the last articulations of New Spain and New France, there are these names, Father Pro and Brother André. Certainly they are going to intercede for their Mexico and their Canada, these two: and in this is our hope. For, looking down from Heaven, they will see, north of Father Pro’s martyrdom and south of Brother André’s miracles, the “Bay of the Mother of God,” and the “River of the Immaculate Conception,” and perhaps they will be convinced that something ought to be done about all the unfulfilled promise in names like San Antonio and Saint Louis and Saint Paul and Santa Fe. The Point – December 1953
GLORY TO GOD IN THE MANGER
Nineteen hundred and fifty-three years ago, we were confronted with something new. We had never seen its like before: nor have we since. Angels deserted their heavens to shout and sing about it. Shepherds abandoned their sheep on the hillside because of it. Kings left their kingdoms behind to journey in search of it. For, nineteen hundred and fifty- three years ago, God became man, and was born in Bethlehem of a Blessed Virginal Mother.
Since the coming of God-made-man was something unprecedented in our midst, we could never have predicted what its consequences would be. Certainly, we could never have reasoned to the fact that it would mean bloodshed — that seventy-two holy and innocent babies would immediately be put to death as a result of such a birth. And certainly, we had no idea that if God were to be born into His own world, that world would demand the shedding of even His Blood, thirty or so years later.
Because we were totally inexperienced in the matter of an Emmanuel, a God-with-us, we had no way of telling, left to ourselves, that the memory of Bethlehem would go on more securely than ever, after the disgrace of Calvary. Nor, indeed, could we have guessed that by a perpetuation of this very Calvary, in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. God was arranging to abide with us as our Emmanuel, in the consecrated hands of His Catholic priests.
Fittingly, the Holy Sacrifice that is offered on the twenty-fifth of December, during which God comes to our altars on the anniversary of His coming to Bethlehem, has long been regarded as especially “Christ’s Mass” — which has abbreviatedly come to be Christmas.
The Christmas we are about to celebrate will be the nineteen hundred and fifty-third. And although its survival is ultimately secure, its challenging truth will suffer countless attacks. Here in Boston (a town reputed to be well-disposed toward such considerations as birth and Divinity), Christmas will come as a foreign extravagance to our primeval Puritans, whose grandelders could recall how the December twenty-fifths of their childhood were dismissed as “popish feasts.”
From the more recent denominations of Boston Protestantism, Christmas will get a varied reception. The followers of Mrs. Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy, for example, who believe there is no such thing as death, will be quietly disturbed — realizing that if they allow Jesus to be truly born at Christmas, He will grow up to be a serious threat to their theology when He truly dies on Good Friday.
And we can count on local manifestations of the older, more artful rebukes to Christmas: those of the Masons and of the Jews.
Still — however much it will be scoffed at as the Birthday of God-incarnate from the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, this year’s Christmas will not be a failure. It will be a nineteen hundred and fifty-third commemoration of a Happy Birthday for Jesus.
For at “Christ’s Mass” this December twenty-fifth, Jesus, welcomed anew at the words of Consecration, will be wrapped in the swaddling clothes of bread-appearances, and laid in that most precious of mangers, a Catholic child’s Holy Communion heart.
POINTERS
Martin Luther, a diabolical apostate priest, now in Hell, has been made the hero of a movie put out by the Lutheran Church. Catholics are being induced to attend this movie even by editors of Catholic magazines, whose movie reviewers report that although there are a few disappointing spots in the film, it is not, on the whole, a bad movie for Catholics to see.
If it is not an unqualified mortal sin for Catholics to attend a showing of Martin Luther, then it is utterly foolish for the Church to continue to demand that Catholics avoid occasions of sin and stay away from books on the Index.
This month marks the beginning of a Marian year, proclaimed by Pope Pius XII to honor the one hundredth anniversary of the definition of the dogma of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception. We are therefore printing below a prayer addressed to Our Lady by His Holiness, Pope Pius IX, the Pope who defined the dogma.
“O Mary, mother of mercy and refuge of sinners! we beseech thee to look with pitying eyes on heretical and schismatical nations. Do thou, who art the seat of wisdom, illumine their minds, wretchedly involved in the darkness of ignorance and sin, that they may know the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church to be the only true Church of Jesus Christ, outside of which no sanctity or salvation can be found. Finally, complete their conversion by obtaining for them the grace to believe every truth of our Holy Faith, and to submit to the Sovereign Roman Pontiff, the Vicar of Jesus Christ on Earth, that thus, being soon united to us by the bonds of divine charity, they may make with us but one fold under one and the same pastor, and that we may thus, O glorious Virgin! all sing exultingly forever: ‘Rejoice, O Virgin Mary! alone thou hast destroyed all heresies in the whole world.’ Amen.”
BY FATHER FEENEY
O LOVE
O Love, and have you come to share Our bones, our breath, our lungs, our air? O Weightless, shall Your burden be Our leaden Law of Gravity? Within our fetters dare You, Fleet, Go groping with our hands and feet? And must our senses be assigned You! Ears to deafen, eyes to blind You? If I were God, I swear I’d loathe Myself in measurements to clothe. Were I the Father’s Word, no earth Would straw and stable me at birth, My tale would run — I must be honest — Et Verbum caro factum non est.
VIRGIN MOTHER Christianity is not the religion which holds that God exists. Every religion holds this dogma, whether it conceives God to be one or many. Christianity is the religion which holds that God became man, that He entered our ranks, assumed our nature, translated Himself into our idiom, “sifted Himself to suit our sight,” and was born in Bethlehem in a temporal generation, Who was born in eternity in an eternal generation.
When we betake ourselves to the crib on Christmas morning, it is not to see just another baby, nor even to see just another mother. This is the most different child and the most different mother who have ever existed. Nobody like them ever was before, or ever will be again. Take the mother.
Her child was born of the love of the Holy Ghost: sheer Love made her fruitful. She is the fulfillment of a thousand prophecies uttered in the Old Testament. As a special preparation for this most holy prerogative, she was herself conceived free from Original Sin, never tainted by the evil that beset our nature when Adam spoiled us all in Paradise …
The Immaculate Conception has nothing to do, as is commonly supposed, with Our Lady’s chastity, nor with the chastity of her father and mother. The Immaculate Conception refers to Our Lady’s Christianity. Its meaning is best studied, not in connection with the Nativity or the Annunciation, but in connection with the third chapter of Genesis and with the discourse of Our Lord at the Last Supper; for there is a world of difference between the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and that of the Virgin Birth. The Immaculate Conception refers to Our Lady at her own birth and the sanctified condition of her soul in the nine months that preceded it. The Virgin Birth refers to her at Our Lord’s birth, and to the fact that she conceived Him without the aid of man. The Immaculate Conception refers to Our Lady as a child: the Virgin Birth has to do with her as a mother. The Immaculate Conception has reference to the condition of Our Lady’s soul at the instant of its creation; the Virgin Birth to the condition of her body before, during, and after the time that she became fruitful with the Divine Child. This is the woman, the miracle woman of all the centuries, who stands so quietly by her Infant in the cold of the first Christmas Eve, and at whose side stands meekly her husband, Saint Joseph, marveling at the Child of predilection which was not his own.
NOEL When I said Mass at midnight, And candles were aglow, I saw a white old woman, Two thousands years ago, My very great grandmother, Who spun me flesh and bone, Who felt my fingers aching, In the atoms of her own,
In whom my eyes were shining, However far away, When Christ was in His cradle And it was Christmas Day.
THE NATIVE — A TRACT IN ONE ACT
The Curtain rises on what is plainly meant to be a Desert Island setting. A kangaroo scurries across the stage and some exotic bird-calls are heard in the distance, just to drive the thing home. Suddenly, emerging through a dense vine, a man appears. On his head is a pith helmet, around his neck a Roman collar, and under his arm a copy of the Denver Register. He is a missionary; and he is looking for the Ignorant Native.
As he stands staring about him, there is a sudden shout overhead. A figure comes hurtling down through the trees and lands upright in front of the Missionary. Missionary (greatly excited) — Can it be? Look at me. Do you know what I am? Have you ever seen anyone like me?
Ignorant Native (emphatically) — I should say not.
M. — The Ignorant Native! At last have found you! And just in time. Come, we must hurry.
I. N. — Where are we going?
M. — I have been sent to bring you to America, to a huge celebration being given in your honor. A plane is waiting in the lagoon to fly us to New York.
I. N. — What did I do?
M. — What did you do? My dear man, as though you didn’t know. You have the distinction of being the very first person in all the world ever to have received Baptism of Desire.
I. N. (impressed) — You don’t say!
M. — Why, you are the very foundation of Baptism of Desire. It was invented in order to answer the question, “How is a native on a desert island, who is completely ignorant of the Catholic Faith, going to be saved?” Today, millions of people have Baptism of Desire, including almost every Jew in America. But it all rests on you. You were the first, and you opened the way to the others.
I. N. — And so you’re going to have a celebration for me?
M. — The greatest celebration we have ever had. As soon as we arrive in New York, there will be a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue. There will be banquets and ceremonies in your honor all over the country. The week of your arrival is being declared National Native Week. Bishop Sheen is going to have you as guest of honor on his television program, and simultaneously he will begin a new series of talks, “Ignorance is Worth Having.” You are to be invited by Father Francis Connell to give a course of lectures at Catholic University on “Living Up to the Natural Law.” Father Keller wants to make a Christopher film short of you playing golf with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. And, oh, I could go on and on.
I. N. — Will I be asked to make many speeches? I’m not too good at that.
M. — No, people will expect you only to affirm a few of the basic principles which the theologians agree are responsible for your having received Baptism of Desire. For instance, if you are asked to say something, you might simply declare your belief in the fact that God is, and is a remunerator.
I. N. — Oh, yes. I might simply do that … (confidentially) What’s a remunerator?
M. — Never mind. Perhaps we had better just ask you questions. Try this one — it expresses Baptism of Desire in a nutshell: Do you feel an inchoate longing to be implicitly united to whatever it is you would want to be united to if you knew what it was?
I. N. — Awww, now you’re teasing me.
M. — I most certainly am not teasing you. This is a very serious matter. Why, I’m beginning to wonder if you have Baptism of Desire at all!
I. N. — Of course I have Baptism of Desire. That’s why you’re going to have a celebration for me. Of course I have it … Except, there’s just one question I would like to ask.
M. — Yes?
I. N. — What is Baptism of Desire?
The Missionary hurries off, mumbling to himself; he is obviously in a state of great agitation. The Ignorant Native turns and climbs back into his tree. A kangaroo scurries across the stage. And the curtain falls. The Point - 1954 The Point – February 1954
POINTERS
In the October, 1953, issue of The Point, we reported how the Catholic Digest had been rebuked by the Bishop of Saint Augustine, Florida, for some bad theology in one of its articles. We advised the Digest to stay away from anything theological in the future and to stick to its usual features in the fields of medicine, sociology, and household hints.
But our advice went unheeded. Last month the Catholic Digest published another religious article, this time in the field of moral theology, and, sure enough, it had to be slapped down again. The piece was a contribution from the English Dominican, Gerald Vann. The archdiocese of Detroit issued an official protest against Father Vann’s religious ethics, saying that his article contained “several errors,” and “flaws that tend to be dangerous to a high degree.”
The Point neither subscribes to, nor purchases, the Catholic Digest. We see it only when someone in the neighborhood calls one of its erroneous articles to our attention. Of late, there is someone at our door nearly every month.
Recent reports from Paris, and the very welcome statement by Cardinal Lienart of Lille, indicate that the French priest-worker movement is now just about over. Deo Gratias!
And what Cardinal Lienart says about the priest-workers (“To be a priest and to be a worker are different functions, two different states of life, and it is not possible to unite them in the same person without changing the idea of the priesthood”) applies quite as much to those functions which are currently being hyphenated with the priesthood of our American priests.
How about priest-sociologists, priest-television stars, priest-financiers? Or how about our American priest-anthropologists whose “two different states of life,” the sacerdotal and the scientific, lead them to abandon cassocks for overalls, sanctuaries for silt deposits, and Catholic colleges for secular universities, so as to discredit the account of creation given us in the inspired Book of Genesis?
HELL-BENT FOR HEAVEN
If there is one thing the spokesmen for American Catholicism are convinced of, it is that the present state of this country is thoroughly and flagrantly hellish. And, from Cardinal Spellman to Joe Breig, they proclaim this conviction constantly, insistently, and with endless variety.
They write books on our national insanity; they launch diocesan-newspaper attacks against our filthy literature; they issue official statements deploring the condition of family life in America; they give sermons and lectures on our unrestrained selfishness and greed.
Each week Bishop Sheen speaks to fifteen million people, who presumably are in the depths of despair — if not actually contemplating suicide — and tries to persuade them that life is worth living. Even smiling Father James Keller, urging his Christophers to light candles rather than curse the darkness, manages to convey the impression that there is a lot of darkness to curse.
The most notable thing in the statements of these Catholic spokesmen, however, is not what they say; — the existence of the evils they describe is a matter of universal observation and acknowledgment — rather, it is what they leave unsaid. For there is one strange, glaring omission in all their accusations, one inescapable conclusion which they are determined to escape.
They will call the American people drunken, divorced, delinquent, debauched; but they will not say that unless the American people amend their ways they are going to lose their souls. They will denounce, deplore, reprehend, rail against the iniquity of our country; but they will not say the one thing that might shock, frighten the country out of its iniquity: they will not say that it is headed for Hell. And not only will they not say this, but they become terribly upset if anyone else says it. “Judge not,” they snap, not bothering that they have already judged, and you are just making the necessary conclusion from their judgment.
These Catholic complainers have drawn a sharp, impassable line between matters which they think concern only the temporal, social sphere, and those which they think concern the Faith. And they keep their discussion of American iniquity determinedly in the former category. This arrangement accounts for the fact that the same people who are painted as being so horrible and degenerate in one article, become suddenly, when the subject of salvation is brought up, “fundamentally good and sincere people whom God in His mercy would not permit to be lost.” They act on the principle that it is all right to say anything you please about the American people, just so long as you are careful to preserve for them a place in Heaven.
The barrier between what belongs to man’s social and what belongs to his spiritual welfare, also explains why it is that so many prominent Catholics are willing to condemn, say, Harvard for being Communistic. But they would never condemn Harvard for being against Jesus and Mary. That, they are afraid, would be considered bigotry and religious fanaticism.
Though these spokesmen for temporized Catholicism decry the present state of the nation and say they want a change, it is hard to see why they should. As long as people like their present way of life, and as long as they are assured that everything will work out fine in the end as far as their salvation is concerned, what difference should it make what state things are in?
Bishop Sheen complains that no one knows how to think, and says he is going to teach them how. But why should people bother thinking when he gives them nothing worthwhile to think about? (It is his firm policy to stay off the subject of the Faith and to talk only of large, inoffensive generalities.) How is thinking an improvement over non-thinking, unless you have the right thoughts?
Father Keller wants his Christophers to change the world, but it is not at all clear what he wants them to change it to, or what advantage his new world will have over the present one. The remedies that these priests prescribe for getting rid of the evils of the world will never be effective, or even be tried, because they have no strength in them, no value, no purpose. (How much influence has Father Keller’s friendship had on Bing Crosby, who has just had to be reprimanded by the Catholic press for the filthiness of his television program?)
All these temporizers vitiate their own accusations against America by their refusal to back them up with the threat of eternal damnation. And consequently, no one takes them seriously. For all their frantic yelling, the situation keeps getting worse and worse. And it will continue to get worse as long as America is dominated by priests like Bishop Sheen and Father Keller.
Let us pray, then, for courageous priests who will tell America that the cause of its wholesale iniquity is its wholesale rejection of the Catholic Faith, and that the only way it can be saved is to accept the Faith. And let us pray that these priests will be listened to, so that our country may at last become in fact what it has long been in dedication — the land of the Immaculate Conception.
BY FATHER FEENEY
Catholicism is not only a matter: a truth to be told; it is also a manner: a way of telling it. Manner makes meaning quite as much as matter does. To say what Christ said, but not in the way He said it, (that is to say: without enthusiasm, determination, excitement, wonder, challenge, indignation, summons and alarm) is an evasion and an apostasy. The Christian Gospel is good news, but with an emphasis on the news. It is exciting enough to have had the Heavens open at Our Lord’s birth for its sake, and to have had angels in the sky shouting and singing it to shepherds.
There is also a Protestant manner. If it cannot be defined or described, at least it may be identified. It is the manner in which it is utterly impossible to profess any clear or vital Christian certitude. Its credentials in academic circles (which will vouch for its kindred behavior everywhere) are: the subdued voice, the indefinite reference, the qualified statement, the sustained smile. There is not a single Scripture Text that can survive on the support of such a symposium.
The Protestant manner in religious discussion never has anything revelational to disclose, only something unrevealed to protect. Its cult is that of personal integrity. In the midst of controversy, when it is not saying, “ Please don’t argue!”, its constant incantation is: “I hope you do not think I am insincere!”
The Protestant manner has no dogma to disclose, but it is capable of a liturgy of sorts. Its liturgical urges range all the way from the static repose of the Quaker to the dynamic ubiquity of the Holy Roller. The happy mean between these extremes in contemplative and active performance, is the unhappy Anglo-Catholic: the superstitious Protestant with good taste.
MEET DOCTOR LIVERMORE
Meet Doctor Grosvenor Livermore, That most discreet psychopathic M. D.; Greet him and tell him what you most abhor, And let him look at you suspiciously.
He’ll be unsurprised as anything; He will always have known you of yore; And a nice little vice, disguised as anything: Well, that’s what Doctor Livermore is for.
So sit down, and listen to him chatter, While he tells you what to tell him is the matter; And if you fear what he’s afraid that you have got: If you’re a split personality nut; A completely unmotivated mutt; If your innate decency is everything but —
There is no need to shiver more, Once you meet Doctor Livermore. THE HAMMER OF FREEMASONS
The Catholics of the United States of America need never fear a Mason- inspired revolution of the kind that French Catholics suffered in the eighteenth century, or that Italian Catholics suffered in the nineteenth century, or that Mexican Catholics have just now in our own day suffered. This is because, unlike France, Italy, Mexico, or any place else, the United States of America was under strong Masonic influence from the start.
There was in attendance, as America was born, an eminently versatile group of lodge-members. Among them, there were capable rousers of the people, like Brother Thomas Paine and Grand Master Paul Revere. And there were coarse men with only their muskets and their aprons to recommend them, like Brother Ethan Allen. But, most important, there were Masons of the international variety, of the highest councils of Masonry, control-men like Brother Benjamin Franklin, the publisher of Masonic handbooks, the bargainer who had access to every Masonic gathering on the Continent, the delight of the Illuminati, and of Talleyrand, Mirabeau, and Lafayette.
From the days of these men to the present, American Masonry has never lost the share of power it so well secured at the outset. Half of our Presidents have openly admitted they were Freemasons. The Great Seal of the United States is composed of Masonic symbols and embellished with a motto which is Masonry’s supreme goal, “Novus Ordo Seclorum.” (This plea in Latin for a “new world order” may be found on all current one- dollar bills.) Given the opportunity, the controlling Masons will always involve our country in the intrigues of their Brothers throughout the world. Usually, the aid they offer takes the form of the aforesaid dollars, though in cases like the Mexican revolt, it can be extended to include guns, food, and pats-on-the-back from President Wilson.
To Catholics who love their country, and therefore want to see it become Catholic, the realization of this Masonic hold on America is often discouraging, for there is no other one group so ably intent on keeping America not Catholic as are the American Masons. This year, however, American Catholics who want a Catholic America are getting some encouragement in their necessary battle against the Masons. It has been announced that, during the Marian Year, His Holiness, Pope Pius XII, will canonize Blessed Gaspar del Bufalo, the Italian priest who is known by the glorious title, “Hammer of Freemasons.”
At Rome, in the year 1810, Blessed Gaspar del Bufalo was sentenced to the dungeons at Imola for refusing, out of obedience to the Pope, to take an oath of allegiance to Napoleon. After four years of imprisonment, Blessed Gaspar returned to Rome and founded his order, “The Missionaries of the Most Precious Blood.” By every device, the Italian Masons tried to undo his work. They first tried to get Pope Leo XII to suspend him. Ultimately, this failed. The next plot of his enemies was defeated by Blessed Gaspar’s holy shrewdness. He saw that in securing for him an appointment as papal nuncio to Brazil, they were easing both him and his attacks on Masonry out of the country. Blessed Gaspar refused to go. But the final plan of his enemies did succeed. In the year 1830, the “Hammer of Freemasons” was silenced by Pope Pius VIII, his faculties were taken away from him, and his order was all but abolished. When he died, seven years later, he had been allowed to say Mass again, but his order was still not functioning with full papal approval.
Blessed Gaspar, after all these misfortunes, is in for some successes this year. Not the least of them will be the countless invocations from hopeful American Catholics: “Hammer of Freemasons, pray for us!” The Point – March 1954
POINTERS
Nearly a hundred years ago, His Holiness, Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Modern Errors, condemned the three following statements, and also any theologian in the Church who believed them.
a) In the observance of any religion, men can find the way of eternal salvation and attain eternal salvation.
b) One can at least have good hope for the eternal salvation of all those who do not at all dwell in the true Church of Christ.
c) Protestantism is nothing else than a different form of the same Christian religion, in which, equally as in the Catholic Church, it is given to please God.
If you were searching for statements which would indicate the tenor of current Liberal Catholic theology in the United States, it would be difficult to find more representative ones than these.
Saint Thomas Aquinas has many and varied admirers. Few of them, however, have strayed beyond the Summa Theologica. Because this represents only a small portion of the saint’s complete writings, we are this month printing, in the interests of a wider knowledge of Saint Thomas, the following extract from his letter to the Duchess of Brabant:
“And is it correct that all Jews in your realm should be obliged to bear some special sign to distinguish them from the Christians? To this the answer is easy 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.” In the light of this, we can suggest an excellent gift for some fellow Thomist to present to Mr. Mortimer Adler, of the University of Chicago; namely, an orange hat. It could be worn by Adler during his lectures on Saint Thomas, as his silent Jewish tribute to the thought of his master.
President Eisenhower recently attended a Red Mass sponsored by Washington, D. C., lawyers in a Washington Catholic Church. Monsignor Cartwright, who spoke at the Mass, never once urged the President to adore the Blessed Sacrament, in Whose Divine Presence it was our President’s privilege to be. Instead, the monsignor congratulated President Eisenhower for being such a good church-goer — even though he knew that there is no Blessed Sacrament in the churches that our Chief Executive attends each Sunday.
We do not excuse President Eisenhower for failing to see the challenge of the Real Presence of Our Lord in a Catholic Church. And we do not believe Our Lord will excuse Monsignor Cartwright for failing to mention it.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOHN BULL
When the Reformation came to England, it cut like a knife, severing the country cleanly from the Faith, from the traditions and culture of Europe, and from its own past. In the space of just a few lifetimes, the England that had been — that carefree, joyous country with its tender love for the Mother of God — was obliterated. And in its place there arose something new: Protestant England — mistress of the seas, merchant of the world, mother of the Empire.
What had once been called Our Lady’s Dowry became, in apostasy, the most un-Mary-like of nations. It became cold, haughty, ambitious and, when necessary, officially ruthless. It developed a lust for empire, a passion to impose its government, its culture, its ideas on the rest of the world. It became, in its interests and aspirations, no longer merely English, but British. Among the products which this Protestant empire has been responsible for is British Catholicism. Though this is not the Faith of all English Catholics, it is the official, By-appointment-to-Her-Majesty version. It is represented mainly in the writings of certain articulate Britons who, for reasons of their own, decided to join the Church.
The fact that these writers should be the spokesmen, self-appointed or otherwise, of the Faith in England is the most conclusive evidence of how the Reformation has triumphed in that country. An examination of some of them, therefore, ought to be instructive for more than just what it reveals about themselves.
The outstanding Catholic novelists writing in the English language today are, by the consensus of all unbelieving critics, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. These two have developed a convenient technique: they deny that they are writing as Catholics when they see that such a commitment would hamper their free expression, but advertise their Faith when they are trying to get the Catholic public to buy their books. In the latter case they assure their readers that what they are writing is not simply pornography, but pornography with a point; that it has a very moral and Catholic purpose, and will probably lead thousands to the truth.
The Bible in England comes clothed in the vocabulary and the manner of Monsignor Ronald A. Knox. “Ronnie,” as the Oxford students used to call him, is otherwise known for his clever quips and his superficiality in theology. He is known as a man who is willing to sacrifice any value, any truth for the sake of scoring a point against an intellectual adversary. Here is a typical instance, in which it happens to be the singularity of Our Lady’s sinlessness that falls by the way. In refutation of a noted blasphemer who says he does not believe in the Immaculate Conception, Knox remarks: “Does he believe in original sin? I imagine not; and if he does not believe in original sin, then he believes in the Immaculate Conception; not merely in the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, but in the immaculate conception of everybody else.”
We should like to point out to Monsignor Knox that it is the preservation from original sin, not the non-existence of original sin, that accounts for the Immaculate Conception. If one does not believe in original sin, one does not believe that anyone, not even Our Lady, was immaculately conceived.
Ronald Knox’s British reply to this correction would probably be: “I was only pulling his leg”; to which we add our American reply: “And you were also pulling a bone.”
Another outstanding English apologist, and a disciple of Monsignor Knox, is Mr. Arnold Lunn. His little vagary is a predilection toward certain Modernists, particularly the condemned English priest, George Tyrrell. Lunn quotes Tyrrell approvingly and at length in his books. But Lunn is far too cagey to go on record as openly favoring a Modernist; and so, by way of excusing Tyrrell and exonerating himself, he offers this: “Tyrrell’s poor tortured diseased liver was largely responsible for his Modernism.”
Alfred Noyes has the distinction of being the only one of these British writers to have a book of his condemned by the Holy Office during his lifetime. The book is Voltaire, Noyes’ friendly account of that notorious hater of Christ and His Church.
Some British government office lost an excellent clerk when Donald Attwater entered the Church and found a lucrative occupation in compiling various sorts of Catholic dictionaries. Despite his conversion, however, his heart has always remained true to the realm. Here is what he has to say on the subject of Pope Saint Pius V: “By the Regnans in excelsis, he excommunicated Elizabeth of England, declaring her deposed and releasing her subjects from their allegiance. It was a great error of judgment.”
Having thus surveyed the authors of British Catholicism — though there are others, these are sufficient to delineate the type — we have just one further thing to note. Indeed, for us in America, it is the most significant thing: the fact that these writers’ influence is not confined to England, or even to the Empire, but extends to this country. Consequently, to all the peculiarly American expressions of lack of faith, we have the added burden of this imported mongrelism. (A good deal of which is brought to this country by an ad hoc little outfit in New York, named Sheed & Ward, founded by a disgruntled lawyer from Australia, in partnership with an English wife.) There is a long road to travel before America will ever become a Catholic country. However, the first clear sign that we have begun will be when we see America rid of British Catholicism, its authors and its advocates. That ought to be the first step. And, considering our national traditions, it ought to be the easiest.
BY FATHER FEENEY
I should like to protest against the proposed project for the fluoridation of our water. My reason for protesting is a religious one. I want to protect water in its prime purpose, its religious purpose, as the material agent for Christian regeneration in the Sacrament of Baptism.
In the administration of the Sacrament of Baptism, it is required that the water used be natural water, the aqua naturalis spoken of by Catholic theologians. The amount of chlorine already put in natural water is not sufficient to invalidate it for sacramental purposes. Neither will the amount of fluorine to be put in, if this present project is voted through, be sufficient to do so. But it is quite clear to everyone that a positive tampering with natural water has now begun. The chlorine already added to water is intended to rid it of germs. The fluorine now proposed is intended to rid us of tooth decay.
If fluorine can be put in water to stop tooth decay, more and more chemicals and drugs can be added to suit the phobias or the whim of the latest scientific experimenter. If fluorine is needed to take care of our teeth, why not keep adding medicines of one kind or another, until water ceases to have a purpose all its own, but must be given drug-store value through additions of new substances needed for our health? Why not add vitamins, cough syrup, sedatives — to our reservoirs?
A great number of our legislators, being men with no sound Christian belief — for example, Jews and Unitarians — would not in the least be averse to the character of water being spoiled for the religious purpose to which a true Christian, a true Catholic, wants to put it. Therefore, as a Catholic priest, I protest. BROTHERHOOD AND MOTHERHOOD
When the world was a whole world, sustained in its wholeness by the Catholic Faith, the men of one nation could look upon the men of another nation as their brothers, sharing, as they did, the common Blessed Mother who was given them by the Jesus Whom they both knew to be God.
Over all the rulers of Europe (and Europe meant the world), there was once a “Holy Father,” who saw to it that Christian kings remained the children of their Mother in Heaven. It was he who settled their quarrels, reproved, counseled, and blessed them. It was he who sent them to the East to reclaim the Holy Land; he who apportioned among them the New World they found to the West.
The New World is, now, only an historical reference, and so is the “whole” world of the ages of Faith. When the Faith went out, its by-product, unity, went with it. We are left with a split world which has decided that for survival it must adopt the Masonic-Jewish proposal, “Internationalism” — forming leagues, writing charters, building buildings, hoping that, thereby, men of different countries will believe they are brothers, and will act that way.
That world leaders in a divided world are trying to do what will certainly fail — build a united world upon a fiction like Internationalism — is not The Point ’s concern right now. Our concern is rather this: that there are men of the Catholic Faith, prelates even, who are actually promoting Masonic-Jewish Internationalism. Witness the manner in which they are willing, these past few years, to adulterate in public utterances that sacred principle which formed the supernatural (and supranational) brotherhood of the Ages of Faith, namely, the Motherhood of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
In all the world, there is nothing held to be so singular as the Motherhood of Mary. She is the Mother of God, and so much is she literally Mother that we count it the greatest praise of her to proclaim incessantly in our Hail Marys, “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb.”
This virginal Mother has but one child from her womb. Only in so far as we are incorporated into the single fruit of Mary’s womb, Jesus, do we Catholics dare to say that Mary is our Mother. It was only after the beloved Saint John had received into his own body, in Holy Communion, the fruit of Mary’s womb, that Jesus could say to him from the Cross, “Behold thy mother.” It was only because of the God in the Eucharist, consumed by Saint John, that the Mother of God could ever look toward someone who was not of himself God, and hear God say to her, “Woman, behold thy son.” This is the sacrosanctity of the Motherhood of Mary as it has been guarded by her Eucharistic children for twenty centuries. And this is the chastity which is being violated.
Most outspoken of those Catholics who would hand over Mary’s Motherhood, to the use of the Internationalists, is the Bishop of Worcester, Massachusetts, John J. Wright. It is his plan that now, in what he calls “The Age of Internationalism,” the Mother of God should be passed off as the “Mother of Mankind” — that the singular character of her Motherhood should be promiscuously extended to make her the mother of Christ-haters, the mother of infidels, the mother, indeed, of the seed of Satan!
There is probably no nation on earth, now, where the Blessed Virgin does not have children, through mystical incorporation into the Body and Blood of her Divine Child. And the Catholic Faith calls them truly her children. But to say, with Bishop Wright, that every man, in every nation of the world, is a child of Mary, thus to impute to Mary children who are not hers, is the supreme unchastity, in what we might name, “The Age of Lust.” The Point – April 1954
POINTERS
Brotherhood, the religion of it-makes-no-difference-what-you-believe, continues to receive more and more public praise from public people. Brotherhood’s parent, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and its grand-parent, the Jewish Masons of B’nai B’rith, are of course delighted.
To familiarize our readers with the attitude of the Catholic Church toward Brotherhood, Interfaith, inter-creedalism, etc., we print the following courageous pronouncement by His Holiness, Pope Pius VII.
“By the fact that freedom of all forms of worship is proclaimed, truth is confused with error, and the Holy and Immaculate Spouse of Christ, outside of which there is no salvation, is placed on the same level as heretical sects and even as Jewish perfidy!”
It might surprise our readers to learn that they could go to any current copy of Who’s Who in American Jewry and find listed there the names of some Catholic priests. The willingness of converted Jews (even those with Holy Orders) to remain part of the Jewish scene has always been a worry to our Holy Mother the Church. And perhaps this explains why, since the days of the Apostles, the Church has never found a converted Jew it could canonize.
Speaking of converted Jews, we hear that Eugenio Zolli, former Grand Rabbi of Rome, is to teach at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. We would feel more at ease about Zolli’s presence there if, before assuming his duties, he would do one thing: become the first Jewish convert of modern times to denounce the unspeakable anti-Christian blasphemies contained in the Jewish Talmud. Ever since six Catholic Brothers from Saint Benedict Center visited the University of Notre Dame last summer, and told the University that it was letting down Our Blessed Lady, there have emanated from South Bend repeated attempts at self-exoneration.
The latest of these comes in the midst of a “farewell” article written by Notre Dame’s departing football coach, Frank Leahy. With obvious coaching from Notre Dame’s department of Apologetics, Leahy says proudly, “Since 1941, I think there have been 167 conversions at school, six of them football players.”
Some very elementary mathematics would reveal that Leahy’s figures mean a disgraceful conversion-rate of one convert and a half per priest every thirteen years at the University of Notre Dame.
TIME OUT FOR HARVARD
Except for a small segment who are impressed by its wealth, or its age, or its influence, most people in this country have for Harvard College nothing but contempt. They think of it as a place filled with sissies and psychotics, a breeding ground of depravity, disloyalty, and despair. And though they have come to their conclusions not through any direct dealings with Harvard, but only through a kind of canny intuition, it does not require much probing to discover that their conclusions are correct.
Even its most superficial aspects somehow symbolize or reveal what Harvard is. Take, for example, its physical plant, which provides the setting for whatever goes on at the college. Most Harvard buildings, you will notice, are covered with ivy — mercifully so; for they are monuments to ugliness. Not even Harvard’s million-dollar front, the Georgian-style houses arrogantly arrayed along the Charles River, can create a lasting impression of beauty. For Harvard is set in the midst of slums — squalid, miserable, Harvard-owned slums. And wherever these slums get the chance, they poke their crude fingers into Harvard’s sanctuary, destroying its composure, and rendering its classes in sociology uncomfortably vivid. If you want an unforgettable picture of what the courses taught at Harvard can do to one’s expression, simply take a walk through Harvard Square and observe the faces of the students there. Even the beards which certain individualists affect are unable to conceal their dull, glazed Harvard look; the beards on the faces being far less effective cover-ups than the ivy on the buildings. A walk through the Square will also enable you to get glimpses of the Harvard faculty, a congenial fraternity, some of whose members incline toward scholarship, and others toward suicide.
During the past few months, everyone at Harvard has been noticeably on edge. The cause is some sharp and steady needling Senator Joseph McCarthy has been giving the university for not firing certain teachers who admitted they had been Communists and who have refused to aid the government in its investigations. Harvard, however, has been adamant; it is determined that it will not be told what to do by any Irish-Catholic junior senator from Wisconsin.
This McCarthy attack, and the widespread criticism that has come to Harvard as a result of it, last month prompted Time magazine to come to the university’s support. It put a picture of Harvard’s President Pusey on its cover and, on the inside, devoted five fortissimo pages to singing the praises of the place.
Why Time should have made this awkward leap to the defense of Harvard is anybody’s guess. Perhaps it is due to the fact that Time ’s number-two man, Roy Larsen, was one of the half-dozen finalists in the race for Harvard President; and he chose this way to assure Pusey he didn’t hold any grudge for having been nosed out. Or perhaps, and more probably, it was inspired by those purely Masonic considerations which Time and Harvard share.
But whatever the reason, Time was certainly willing to clamber way out on a limb to try and make Harvard look good. Here is its statement on the teachers who admitted they held Communist party cards: “If a scholar is to operate effectively on the frontiers of his field, he must also be accorded the rights of any other citizen to differ and dissent outside that field.”
That Time should indulge in exactly the kind of double-talk that the fellow- traveler defenders of American Communists use, indicates at least one thing clearly: its advertised opposition to Communism is a much less compelling motive than its secret loyalty to Harvard.
However, there is one predicament which the Masons who run Harvard have gotten into, and which not even the Masons who run Time can get them out of. Menacing though McCarthy is, there is an enemy far more dangerous to Harvard than he: an enemy attacking the college not from the outside, but gnawing at it from within — namely, the Jews in attendance there.
Up till a decade or so ago, Harvard kept the number of its Jews carefully and determinedly low. Then, somehow, by someone, its tight semitic quota was relaxed, and out of the high schools of New York, the Jews started pouring in. Today, they dominate the student body and have made great inroads into the faculty. And Masonic Harvard, which is official Harvard, is at a loss to know what to do about Jewish Harvard. But it knows that unless it does something quick, Jewish Harvard will become official Harvard.
The Harvard Masons do not dare show strength in trying to get rid of the Jews, for fear of the charge of “anti-semitism” with which the Jewish press would blast them. And the Jews will not be persuaded to budge by moderate measures. Pusey, who hails from such an unsemitic place as Iowa, was imported to see if he could pry them loose gently. But there were more Jewish applications for admission to the college this year than ever before.
This is the Harvard dilemma. The Jews are corrupting the place; official Harvard knows that they are; but it is, by its principles, helpless to do anything about it. What the future holds for Harvard, possibly Time will tell.
BY FATHER FEENEY
It is a mortal sin for a Catholic priest to participate in an Interfaith meeting. Any Catholic priest who has participated in an Interfaith meeting should go to confession at once, and should accuse himself of a mortal sin, and should promise to amend the scandal he has given, and should assure his confessor that he will never take part in an Interfaith meeting again. If, as a penitent in confession, he does not give this promise and this assurance, the priest who hears his confession should refuse him absolution, or else he, himself, will commit a mortal sin.
It is impossible for any Catholic priest to assist at an Interfaith meeting and not know that it is a mortal sin to do so. A priest who would not know this to be a mortal sin, would simply not know what a mortal sin was at all, either among his own faults or those of his penitents. If participation by a Catholic priest in an Interfaith meeting is not an occasion of sin to be avoided under pain of mortal sin, by reason of the compromise of the Faith, the scandal, and the occasion of sin to others it affords, then nothing in a Catholic’s life could ever be called an occasion of sin, nor could anyone ever be commanded to avoid an occasion of sin.
No bishop can give a priest permission to participate in an Interfaith meeting. Any bishop who does so commits a mortal sin himself, and his permission should not be accepted. It is not lawful in the Catholic Church to commit mortal sin “with permission.” Nor is it lawful for any bishop to command a priest to commit a mortal sin, or to give a scandal.
Every Catholic priest who reads what I now say knows I am telling the truth. I know a priest’s mind. In matters of such fundamental moral observance, a priest needs only to be told the truth in order to see it. I also know the fastidiousness of a priest’s heart in matters connected with sin. Any priest who will pretend to himself, or to others, that what I am now saying is not sound Catholic moral theology will later repent of this. And he will accuse himself in confession of having done wrong. And he should be given a penance proportionate to the heinousness of what he does when he either participates in, or says one may participate in, for any reason whatsoever, an Interfaith meeting, which is the joint presentation of religious beliefs by a Catholic priest, a Protestant minister, and a Jewish rabbi.
LETTER TO REVEREND FATHER JAMES G. KELLER
Saint Benedict Center 23 Arrow Street Cambridge, Massachusetts Dear Father Keller,
We have delayed this letter for a long while, hoping that as time went by we would hear the welcome news that would make a letter like this unnecessary. But that news has not yet come, and so at last we are writing to say to you what has been in our hearts, and in the hearts of so many of the Catholic people you used to know.
Please, dear Father, before it is too late, please, come back!
There are those who say smugly that our appeal will be useless; that in founding your new Christopher religion you are another Martin Luther. We know that is not true. We know, Father, and this gives us hope, that you have never publicly attacked, as did Luther, our Catholic devotions, or our Holy Father the Pope. Never have you ranted against indulgences. Nor have you ever descended to the moral degeneracy, the complete dissipation of the priest who founded Lutheranism.
As the months go by, dear Father, and we hear of all the new books, new awards, new movies being sponsored by you and your busy followers, we sometimes wonder if what you really need isn’t just a good rest — a chance to sit back and take a leisurely look at yourself.
If you could only do that, the whole picture might come clear. You might be able to see the “Father Keller case” as it has unfolded before concerned American Catholics: How you first got popular attention by quoting Confucius, urging people to light candles and to seek new careers. How your ideas developed into a sect known as the Christophers, “the Christ- bearers,” and how you accommodated the Protestants and Jews who wanted to join you by allowing that Christ could be God, or not God, or mere man, or just a general good feeling — depending on the preference of the individual Christopher. And then came the pressure of Jewish contributions, forcing you to abandon your Catholic belief in Original Sin and to state that, “We are all born Children of God,” making Baptism therefore quite unnecessary. And, finally, came the realization of how very much the Jewish element in your sect is prevailing when we heard that you were giving a television show with your Jewish follower, Jack Benny, at three O’ Clock on Good Friday afternoon. Somewhere inside you, Father, beyond the range of flash bulbs and spotlights, is the Catholic boy who one day decided to enter Maryknoll, to dedicate his life to the work of the missions, and change the pagan world into a Catholic one. And we still want you to do that, Father. Just think of the work for conversions you still could do. More now, we might say, than you ever could before.
You would be in a position to understand, more than many another priest, the problems of those who are not within the fold. For you have actually known what it is to wander from the Faith of one’s childhood days. You have experienced the restlessness of those who look to new beliefs for consolation. And is it not likely that some of the same people whom you have made Christophers would follow you back to Holy Mother Church and let you make Catholics of them?
We are sending along to you, dear Father, a green scapular. If you would rather not wear it, place it in your wallet or your pocket. Let it serve as a reminder that still, no matter how far you have strayed, we Catholics want you back.
Please, Father Keller, while there time, come back home.
Hopefully,
The Editors of The Point The Point – May 1954
POINTERS
Auxiliary Bishop Bernard Sheil of Chicago was recently photographed receiving a “blessing” from a rabbi. Not long ago, he established a scholarship fund to send Catholic boys to study at Brandeis, New England’s Jewish university.
This month the Bishop was still at it. Recognizing the fact that most uncovered Communists turn out to be Jews, he delivered a bitter blast against his fellow-Catholic, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. By hampering or discrediting McCarthy’s investigations, Bishop Sheil hoped to render still another valuable service to Judaism.
In a recent issue of The Listener, the official magazine of the British Broadcasting Corporation, occurs an echo of a blast heard here in Boston five years ago. It is by way of a letter, and then a reply, and a second letter, in subsequent issues of that London paper:
Sir. — Mr. Hodgson, commenting on Dr. Gilbert Murray’s reminiscences, is, I think, mistaken about the famous dogma that outside the Church there is no salvation. Here in England, in partibus infidelium, the dogma has been explained away and watered down to meaninglessness; but a whole catena of papal and conciliar decrees could be quoted to prove that the words mean exactly what they say.To mention only a few: in the year 1215, the fourth Lateran Council, cap. l, De Fide Catholica, decreed that, ‘there is one universal Church of the faithful outside which absolutely no one is saved.’ Boniface VIII, in the bull, Unam Sanctam (1302), speaking, if ever a Pope spoke, ex cathedra, made this solemn utterance: ‘Furthermore, we declare, say, define, and pronounce that it is wholly necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.’ And, within living memory, Leo XIII, in his encyclical, Satis cognitum, used these words: ‘The Church of Christ is, then, the only one and the perpetual one; whosoever are outside it depart from the will and commands of Christ the Lord; they have left the way of salvation and gone aside to destruction.’
— Yours, etc., Harold Binns Bournemouth
Sir. — I am sure that most Catholics are grateful to Mr. Harold Binns for showing us so clearly what the Catholic Church really teaches concerning the salvation of those who will not accept the authority of the Church. It is salutary to be reminded occasionally that the Catholic Church really does mean what she says. Even so, these Papal pronouncements must be viewed in their proper context, and in the light of the circumstances in which they were uttered; also they are de jure and directive. And when a Catholic says that this does not mean that particular souls are condemned to Hell he is offending no doctrine of his Church — on this aspect we have no need of Mr. Binns’ directives. No squaring of the circle is necessary — only a little common sense, and perhaps a little tolerance!
The position is quite clear even to the average Catholic: does Mr. Binns imagine that all the attempts on the part of Catholics, both here and abroad, to solve the differences that divide the churches are based on the assumption that ‘our separated brethren’ are de facto damned? The present Pope has even permitted that in certain circumstances prayers may be said in common. Perhaps Mr. Binns would like to lecture the Pope now?
— Yours, etc., Catholicus
Sir, — I should like to thank ‘Catholicus’ for bringing out my meaning so clearly. He has put my point better than I could put it myself. I quoted papal and conciliar decrees to prove that the words of the famous dogma, extra ecclesiam nulla salus, though taken quite literally in medieval times and regarded as de fide, are now, for propaganda purposes, whittled away to meaninglessness. ‘Catholicus’ very obligingly confirms this. Such papal pronouncements, he says, are merely ‘directive.’
Let us see what this means. More than one hundred years after Boniface VIII had declared, ex cathedra, that ‘submission to the Roman Pontiff is for every human creature an absolute necessity of salvation,’ Eugenius IV, in his bull, Cantate Domino (1441), gave a fierce fire-and-brimstone ‘directive’ interpretation of the dogma:
‘The Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes, and teaches that none of those who are not within the Catholic Church can ever be partakers of eternal life, but are to go into the eternal fire “prepared for the devil and his angels” unless before the close of their lives they shall have entered into that Church.’
The fact, of course, is that this rigid sheep-and-goat dichotomy between Roman Catholics and the overwhelming majority of the human race is so repugnant to common sense that papal declarations, however ‘infallible’, have to be explained away, and the ‘fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse’ watered down to its very thinnest and pinkest tint.— Yours, etc., Harold Binns Bournemouth
We do not know who Mr. Harold Binns is, or what his motives were in writing his letters. We only know that he has stated the true Catholic doctrine on salvation. And he had better believe it if he wants to save his own soul.
SIGNS OF SPRING IN BOSTON
In addition to the bean and the cod, Boston is also the home of several hundred thousand Catholics. Despite the fact, however, that these are by far the city’s largest religious group, they have never, except in a numerical or political sense, been able to make Boston a Catholic city. The reason for this is a simple one. Because the Catholics of Boston did not make their Faith the central, primary issue in their lives, they were not able to withstand the assault of those who were determined that Boston remain essentially un-Catholic.
The assault began the moment the first timid Catholics reared their heads in Boston, around the year 1700. Immediately, the city’s primal squatters, the Puritans, slapped a statute into the books declaring that any priest who set foot in the territory of Massachusetts would be confined to life imprisonment. In 1834, the heretics of Boston met the challenge of the Catholic immigrants who were pouring into the city, by burning down a sisters’ convent; and in 1855, the Massachusetts Legislature, still in the grand old Protestant tradition, established a Committee for the Inspection of Nunneries.
Yet none of these strong-arm tactics worked. Catholic immigrants continued flooding Boston, and before long outnumbered the Protestant aborigines. And so, instead of the purely Protestant device of active persecution, a more subtle, Masonic scheme — designed especially for controlling Catholic majorities — was henceforth employed. The scheme was to keep the Catholics divided against each other, so that they would never act with their full, united strength. And the principle of division was to be nationality.
There is a warm, beautiful love of one’s country and its traditions that the Faith encourages and brings to flower. But there is also a selfish, suspicious, belligerent kind of nationalism that sets Irish against Italians, Italians against French, French against Poles, causing each group to distrust and despise the other. This was the nationalism the Masons promoted and the Catholics of Boston sinfully submitted to.
The strategy consisted in never giving Catholics that status of unqualified “American” which the heretics attained the moment they stepped off the boat. No matter how long they had been in this country, Catholics were always referred to as aliens. Their Americanism was always hyphenated; they were Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Polish-Americans. Eventually, the Catholics of Boston came to feel, from having it so incessantly drummed into them, that the thing that set them apart from other Bostonians was not their Faith, but simply their nationality. Having achieved this, the Masons then played one national group against another, encouraging antagonisms, with the net effect that instead of all the Catholics being united by their common reception of the Body and Blood of Jesus, they were divided by reason of their disparate origins.
A prime example of this program in action is the way, with Masonic encouragement and Irish thick-headedness, Saint Patrick’s Day was turned from a religious celebration into a national one. The outsiders invited to take part in it became not the non-Irish Catholics, but the non-Catholic Irish. An Italian had no place in South Boston on Saint Patrick’s Day, but any Yankee heretic who would put on a green tie and become Irish for a day was welcomed to the festivities.
Finally, to ensure Boston’s remaining un-Catholic, there has been the latter- day assault by the Jews. Their role has been the old and eagerly-undertaken one of corruption: propagating their impurity, undermining every Christian value, trying to obscure every Christian feast-day.
We have put this discussion of what has happened in Boston in the past tense. And with good reason. For the Catholic people of Boston are at last beginning to arise. There is an undercurrent, a surging wave of discontent, and anger, and resentment at what Boston has become under the influence of Masonic schemes and Jewish filth. The signs become more clear and manifold every day. There are signs of growing impatience — like the fact that in Boston’s latest city elections not a single Jew was put in office; and of growing courage — like the way a Catholic city official this month called upon Catholic parents to keep their children home from school on Holy Thursday, so that they might commemorate and honor the institution of the Holy Eucharist.
But the greatest and surest sign that Boston is on the upgrade is that there is in Boston, at long last, a voice preaching the Catholic Faith without fear or qualification, in all its beauty and challenge and excitement. That voice is Father Leonard Feeney, speaking to crowds of thousands each Sunday afternoon on Boston Common. It is such a voice that the Masons and Jews have always dreaded and always tried to prevent. For they have realized, with a kind of diabolic instinct for survival, what we can realize through our Faith: If the Catholic people of Boston ever make the Mother of God and Her Son the great interest and crusade of their lives, then they will be united; and Boston will become, in its heart, in its culture, in its warmth and gaiety and love, a Catholic city.
A PHILADELPHIA STORY
In the year 1787, when the delegates were met in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention, Mr. Benjamin Franklin addressed that distinguished assembly in the following words:
“In whatever country Jews have settled in any great numbers, they have lowered its moral tone, depreciated its commercial integrity, have segregated themselves and have not been assimilated, have sneered at and tried to undermine the Christian religion, have built up a state within a state, and have, when opposed, tried to strangle that country financially …“If you do not exclude them, in less than two hundred years our descendants will be working in the fields to furnish the substance while they will be in the counting house rubbing their hands. I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude the Jews for all time, your children will curse you in your graves.”
At the time he made these remarks, Mr. Benjamin Franklin was not yet the well-commemorated gentleman on postage stamps and U. S. currency, whose name is attached to so many of our streets, parks and schools; not to mention stoves, the Saturday Evening Post, and all of Philadelphia, Pa. In 1787 Mr. Franklin was a Protestant and, most devotedly, a Freemason. And his near-hysteria about things Jewish arose from intimate knowledge of how far the Jews had advanced since the Protestant revolt set them up, and of how much they were gaining control of Freemasonry — which was his own (and he felt ought to be America’s) secret power in public affairs.
Mr. Franklin’s Protestant-Masonic anti-semitism has found abundant survival in America. Though not always manifesting itself in such bed- sheeted boldness as the Ku Klux Klan, Mr. Franklin’s kind of anti-semitism always bears the same message at its core. Kick out the kikes before they grab up all the money and leave none for us! Whether it is enunciated over cocktails at Harvard’s Porcellian Club, or over a barrel of corn whiskey in the hills of Tennessee, Protestant anti-semitism is just that little removed from the jungle.
At this point, some eager Protestant history student would probably like to interject, “Yah! but you Catholics hated Jews long before the Protestants did!”
We answer: In every page of Catholic history there is certainly evidence to conclude that Catholicism and Jews don’t go together. Saint Pius V, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Edward the Confessor, Saint Louis of France, Saint Henry of Germany (the list is endless) could all be easily accused of having no affection for Jews. Public burning of the Talmud, the outlawing of synagogues, the demand that Jews be at all times distinguished by their dress, and a hundred other such practices, are standard procedure for any Catholic kingdom in the history books.
But to conclude from this that we are going to rally to Mr. Franklin’s crusade, is to miss the point entirely. Catholic anti-semitism, and that is a poor word for it, is traditionally a religious matter. It has never offered a “Hitler solution” for the Jew problem. Its consistent remedy has been ghettos and, perhaps surprisingly, a frequent willingness to have Jews around, in controllable numbers. For Jews (Mr. Franklin is very much out of this now) have a decided theological value. As Saint Bernard says, they are dispersed by God in Christian lands to be a constant reminder to us of the treachery of the first Good Friday, which treachery they are cursed to keep repeating, through their children.
One morning last month we were especially struck by the theological value of the Jew-at-hand. Precisely because we were living in an America that has not excluded Jews, we Catholics truly appreciated, on last Good Friday, the Church’s annual prayer “for the perfidious Jews.” History indicates that Mr. Franklin never prayed for them — and would have been even less inclined to had he known that Catholics did! The Point – June 1954
RECENT HALO IN THE VATICAN
From the time of Saint Peter until the beginning of the sixth century, every Pope was a saint. During the next thousand years, twenty-eight more saints, and seven blesseds, ruled the Church. But the last was Saint Pius V, who died in 1572. After him came a long pause.
Last month the pause was finally broken. On May 29, at Saint Peter’s in Rome, Pope Pius XII proclaimed, urbi et orbi, that his predecessor, Pope Pius X, had been raised to the altars of the Church.
For anyone, anywhere in the Church to be a saint is a great and edifying thing; but when the Supreme Pontiff is a saint — he who holds the keys of the kingdom, who feeds Christ’s flock, who has the power to build up and cast down — the whole Church shines in his light. And, just as inevitably, when a Pope fails to be holy, he casts a shadow over all his people.
The four hundred years between the death of Saint Pius V and the coming of Saint Pius X — an interval of non-saint Popes — caused a decline in the Church. It was four hundred years during which many Catholics, high and low, grew apologetic for the Faith which had made and been the glory of Europe, and sought to accommodate it to the scientific, cultural and social vagaries of the times.
It was a period when the Church was reduced to making repeated concordats with strutting little tyrants who were puffed up for a day, then burst like balloons; and when Catholics throughout the western world tried, by every concession and cordiality, to get along smoothly in a society dominated by Protestants and Jews. It was four hundred years during which, in many areas, the well of Catholic devotion dried up into Jansenistic scrupulosity; when theology became an esoteric affair relegated to a small clique of experts, and the clear, blazing teachings of Christ and the Apostles were reduced to a dull, dreary welter of cautious qualifications that sapped much of the apostolic zeal from seminarians and sent congregations to sleep in their pews.
Such was the state of the Catholic world when, in August, 1903, Giuseppe Sarto, Archbishop of Venice, became the Vicar of Christ and took the name Pope Pius X. Such was the mire out of which he arose, against which he struggled, above which he shone. And the thing that distinguished his pontificate and made him a saint was this: Pius X was thoroughly, dedicatedly, and undistractedly, a priest. Everything he said during the eleven years that he reigned was grounded in and motivated by his priesthood. Not diplomacy, nor social betterment, nor philanthropy, but the salvation and sanctification of his people were his perpetual concerns. He ruled the Church as though he were a simple pastor and Christendom were his parish.
Nowhere did Pius X exhibit his priestliness so abundantly and perfectly as in his desire to feed his people with the Bread of Life. With sure, decisive measures he cleared away the dead wood of Jansenism and decreed that everyone in the state of grace should be allowed and encouraged to receive Holy Communion daily. He further decreed that children, who previously had had to wait until they were thirteen or fourteen years old, should be allowed to make their First Communions as soon as they were able to have “some knowledge” of Whom they were receiving.
And having given the Holy Eucharist to his people, he told them: “Holy Communion is the shortest way to Heaven. There are others, innocence for instance, but that is for little children; penance, but we are afraid of it; generous endurance of the trials of life, but when they approach us, we weep and pray to be delivered. Once for all, beloved children, the surest, easiest, shortest way is by the Holy Eucharist.”
And yet, though we have all that Pope Pius X bequeathed to us — the Holy Eucharist as our daily Bread and the Bread of our children, all his words and pontifical acts — still it is plain to see that the state of the Church is even worse today than it was fifty years ago. Nothing shows this so conclusively as the survival of the heresy of Modernism, against which Pius X waged his greatest combat, and which has reappeared in the form of religious Liberalism. As Modernism was a heresy which tried to conform the doctrines of the Church to the dictates of modern science, so Liberalism tries to conform her doctrines to the prescripts and taboos of modern society. As Modernism particularly attacked such scientifically unacceptable dogmas as the Creation, the inspiration of Holy Scripture, the nature of faith, etc., so Liberalism attacks the socially unacceptable dogma that it does matter what a man’s religion is, that there is only one true Church, ruled by Our Holy Father the Pope, and all those remaining outside it are reprobate.
One of the most important things that the canonization of Pope Pius X will compel us to remember is the firm, determined way in which he dealt with the heresy of Modernism. He not only condemned it and forbade further speculation as to its merits, be also required every priest thenceforth to take an oath against Modernism. And anyone who does not know that, were he ruling the Church today, Pius X would deal in the same swift, strong, fearless way with the heresy of Liberalism, knows neither Modernism, Liberalism, nor Pope Saint Pius X.
POINTERS
Periodically, a prospective convert expresses surprise that his “Protestant” Baptism and (if he is married to a baptized wife) his “Protestant” marriage are treated by the Church as Sacraments. As a point of information for our readers, here is Saint Bonaventure, the great Franciscan Doctor, speaking in his Breviloquium on this matter of Catholic Sacraments in non-Catholic churches.
“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 deems worthy of eternal inheritance.” Harvard’s chief anthropologist, E. A. Hooton, died last month after a long career of protesting that he, his students, and people in general, were all (however much removed from the tree-tops) displaced monkeys. But alas, at his death, the time when he would want most to be remembered for what he was, a spokesman for Harvard threw Hooton’s life-long efforts out the window and said of the would-be simian professor, “He was a real human being.”
The Unitarians, America’s leading proponents of liturgical atheism, met here in Boston last month for a convention. During their stay, they came out against the current mention of “God” found on U. S. postage stamps and coins. The motive behind this action was explained later by Dr. J. G. MacKinnon, Unitarian minister. He confessed that what really was worrying his sect was the recent proposal that the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, should be honored on an American postage stamp commemorating the Marian Year!
BY FATHER FEENEY
A Jew-promoted, Mason-approved organization for the liquidation of the Catholic Faith in the United States is known as the “National Conference of Christians and Jews.” Its headquarters are in Washington, D. C.
Subordinate versions of the above, somewhat more loosely organized, are found in the various sections of the country. The one here in Boston is known as “The Massachusetts Committee of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews.” Though it was not organized by, it has the approval of, our ailing Archbishop. Its publicity agent and local promoter is Boston’s leading racial and social sycophant, Mr. Michael T. Kelleher.
The Kelleher group of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews recently held a Brotherhood banquet at Boston’s largest hotel. Rabbis and Monsignors, Christian Scientists and Jesuits, Unitarians and Catholic Seminary Professors, Anglicans and Franciscans, were judiciously intermingled and photographed. They wined and dined and listened to uninterrupted and impassioned orations on the religious theme of “Brotherhood.”
There were strong attacks made on dissenters and on dividers of religious unity. There were strong scorings of intolerance and bigotry, of the kind, for instance, that would be judged to have occurred should one of the Monsignors, Jesuits, Seminary Professors or Friars Minor have stood up at the Hotel Statler and declared dogmatically, “There is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, or without personal submission to our Holy Father the Pope.”
I forgot to mention that there was also present a Greek Schismatic priest. He was one of Mr. Michael Kelleher’s special guests. He dressed like a Catholic, talked like a Protestant, and looked like a Jew.
A REPLY TO LADY ABRAHAMS
We have lately received a note from a reader in London, a Jewish lady, who, by the grace of God and the politics of empire, now finds herself a Catholic and a member of the lesser peerage. Lady Abrahams, as our correspondent signs herself, spoke out against The Point ’s “virulent anti- Semitism.” Her Ladyship bade us be mindful of “the charity of Jesus Christ,” Whom she called, in a rhetorical finale meant to wither us, “the greatest Jew of all time!”
Lady Abrahams’ evaluation of the adorable Word-made-flesh is, we cannot deny, arresting. We wonder just how such a judgment was arrived at, and we are tempted to envision her Ladyship lining up the contenders for her title of “greatest Jew.” One by one, with much deliberation, Philo Judaeus, Rabbi Hillel, Benjamin Disraeli, and Bernard Baruch, all get eliminated — and Jesus of Nazareth wins the contest.
In justice to our Catholic reader, in England, we must make it clear that by no means does The Point find Lady Abrahams guilty of originality in this matter; we do not accuse English Catholics of harboring a new Judaeo- heresiarch in their midst. Her Ladyship is but following the fashion, so tragically unprotested of late, by which converts from Judaism try to give the impression that their previous attendance at the synagogue is an enhancement to their current Christianity, since, after all, Christ was a Jew, too.
Christ, indeed, was a Jew. But anyone who is making an appeal to Christians to go all out for the Jews, would do well to leave Christ out of the argument. Christ was a Jew Who claimed to be God, and thereby so outraged His fellow-Jews that they had Him put to death. Christ was the rightful King of the Jews, Who dared to defy the religious tyrannies of the Jewish Pharisees. Christ was the Divine Jew Who got spat upon by His own people, and was labeled a “blasphemer” by the Jewish high priest.
In introducing the fact that Christ was a Jew, Lady Abrahams’ chief purpose was, clearly, to imply that Christ was the kind of Jew she knew, a fact which would bear with it such religious consequences as: going to Sabbath services and reading, not from the Old Testament, but from the Talmud; scoffing at the idea of a Jewish virgin being the Mother of God; believing that the Messias-to-come was not a Divine Person, but an era of Jewish prosperity.
Without further illustration, we may conclude that, in the matter of belief, Christ was a Jew of the kind that ceased to exist nineteen hundred years ago.
The unanswered question in all of the foregoing is, of course, how about Lady Abrahams’ indisputably Jewish blood? Doesn’t that give her, through race and ancestry, a privileged relationship to Our Lord?
The sacredness of Jewish blood throughout the Old Testament, and its jealous preservation, was for the one sublime purpose of keeping clear the human route by which the Word of God was to “become flesh and dwell amongst us.” That is why the Gospel writers take such care to present to us the genealogical blood-line of Our Lord — Saint Matthew recording it from Abraham down to Joseph, and Saint Luke retracing it from Bethlehem back to Eden. Once Good Friday has occurred, however, and Our Lord’s Precious Blood has been shed to its redemptive purpose, Jewish blood, as a Divine interest, is finished. All that was promised to the House of David, all that was awaited from the tribe of Juda, is gathered in the Precious Eucharistic Blood on our Catholic altars. It is not Lady Abrahams’ ancestral connection with the Temple of Jerusalem that counts now with God. It is her Ladyship’s proximity to an altar rail in London, where she, and the gentiles kneeling beside her, become, through Holy Communion, the true fulfillment of Our Blessed Lady’s Magnificat prophecy, “To Abraham and to his seed forever.” The Point – July 1954
POINTERS
It is a matter of clear record that the Freemasons in power in America’s government and business ten to thirty years ago allowed Communists to infiltrate the State Department, shipped war materials to Communist countries, supported Communist revolutionaries in Mexico and Communist rulers in Spain.
Today, America’s ruling Masons — in many cases, the identical men cited above — are posing as fierce foes of Communism. We hope no American Catholics will be fooled by this turnabout and suppose the Masons now to be their friends and allies. To guard against such notions, we print a point for meditation from the encyclical Humanum Genus of Pope Leo XIII:
“Freemasonry is not only not opposed to the plans of Socialists and Communists, but it looks upon them with the greatest favor, as its leading principles are identical with theirs.”
Some weeks ago, the Harvard Crimson, the university’s Jew-staffed daily, reported that at this year’s commencement exercises an honorary degree would be presented to the late Doctor Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor. Assuming it to be an “inside scoop,” Boston papers and the national news agencies picked up the Crimson story and published it widely.
Last month, however, as commencement grew nearer, it became quite clear that Harvard had no intention of comforting a poor widow’s declining years with one of its sheepskin handouts. Unruffled, the local Hebrew element told Mrs. Roosevelt to come up to Boston just the same.
Upon arrival, she was escorted out to Waltham, Massachusetts, and presented with her consolation prize — an honorary degree from Jew- owned-and-operated Brandeis University. During the pontificate of lately-canonized Pope Pius X, a dispute arose as to whether Confucius, the Chinese philosopher, saved his soul when he died. In the year 1907, the matter was brought to the attention of the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith. Under the direction of Saint Pius X, the Congregation ruled:
“It is not allowed to affirm that Confucius was saved. Christians, when interrogated, must answer that those who die as infidels are damned!”
IN SHEPHERDS’ CLOTHING
Early in the seventeenth century, just a hundred years after Luther’s revolt, there were unmistakable signs that all Europe might again become Catholic. One after another, those German states which had been the staunch backbone of Protestantism were abandoning their heresies and, with the encouragement and protection of the Emperor of Austria, returning to the Church.
But suddenly, at its height, the movement was stopped. Because one man feared and envied the Austrian Emperor’s growing influence, he paid five tubs of gold to the King of Sweden, a Protestant and a military genius, to persuade him to war against Austria. As a result of this plot, the Emperor’s conquests, which had been gathering nation after nation back into the Church, were abruptly checked; and a firm, inimical Protestant bloc was thenceforth established in Europe. And the man who by his gold and political intrigue was responsible for accomplishing all this was Armand Jean Cardinal de Richelieu, First Minister of France and Bishop of the Catholic Church.
Since the time when Jesus chose His twelve Apostles, His first Bishops, and one of them betrayed Him, He has suffered continuously and bitterly at the hands of those in His Church most empowered to protect Him. For let no one suppose that Cardinal Richelieu was unique. Prominent though his perfidy may have been, he remains but one member of a great unhallowed host. He was but observing an ancient precedent: the precedent of Judas. And in every age, in every place where the Church has established herself, this precedent has had abundant followers.
There was Nestorius, fifth century Bishop of Constantinople, who stood up in his Cathedral and proclaimed that Our Lady was not the Mother of God; and Sergius, Bishop of that same troubled city two centuries later, who taught his flock that Our Lord had no human will, and so was not truly man.
There was Bishop Cauchon of France, who, for the sake of gratifying his political friends, declared that Joan of Arc, whom God had sent to save France for the Faith, was a heretic and a witch, and had her burned at the stake. There was Cardinal Wolsey of England, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor of the Realm, who spent his life rendering unto Caesar (in this case, King Henry VIII) the things that were God’s. And less than a decade after Wolsey, there was every Bishop in England, except Saint John Fisher, willing to allow that the King and not the Vicar of Christ was the head of the Church.
The catalogue of such Bishops is endless. They have been in the East and in the West, in the ages of Faith and the ages of infidelity; they have been men who won the praise and glory of the world and men who lived in loneliness and frustration; they have been proud men and ambitious men and vain, worldly men. But wherever and whenever these Bishops have been, whatever has been their motive, or manner, or provocation, the essential fact remains the same: Judas-wise, they have betrayed Jesus.
It is true that with other men betrayal is not so sure and discernible as with a Bishop. But a Bishop is not like other men; he is a successor of the Apostles. He has the primary responsibility for teaching and spreading the Faith, and is divinely guaranteed that he will be given whatever grace he needs to perform his task with absolute singleness of purpose. He is constituted a shepherd, and, for better or for worse, culpably or not, his people are inclined to believe, to trust, and to follow him. Saint John Chrysostom says, “He (a Bishop) is answerable for the sins of others. To pass over everything else: if but one soul dies without Baptism, does it not entirely endanger his own salvation?”
And this leads us inevitably to the subject of here and now. That the state of the Faith in America today is at a subterranean level — with wholesale ignorance, indifference, and apostasy — is a fact only a spiritual moron could miss. Certainly the American Bishops have not missed it. Periodically they issue broadsides against “secularism,” and “the disintegration of family life,” and kindred abstractions, which they earnestly assure us are the root of the evil. Despite this frantic pointing elsewhere, however, it is plain to see that the chief responsibility for the loss of the Faith in this country belongs to no one or nothing but the American Bishops themselves. And, however reluctant they or we might be to admit it, it seems fairly certain that future generations of Catholics are going to read in the history books that there were in the middle of the twentieth century certain Bishops ruling the Church in America who, by compromise and concealment of the dogmas they were consecrated to teach, wounded the Church just as grievously and betrayed Jesus just as surely as Richelieu or anyone else before them.
Yet, there is this hope and consolation. If just one Bishop would own frankly that the collapse in this country is due primarily to the failure of the hierarchy; if he would risk making himself unpopular with Masons and Jews, and with other Bishops as well; if he would work purely and entirely to increase love for Jesus and to teach men the way of salvation — then the story of what those other American Bishops, the bad ones, have wrought would not have to be the last chapter in the history of the Church in America.
BY FATHER FEENEY
The Liberal Catholics of our country are now making another concession to Interfaith charity and Brotherhood benevolence. They are saying, “It was not the Jews who crucified Christ; it was the Romans.”
I should like to ask these Liberal Catholics a few pointed and direct questions on the subject of Our Lord’s death.
Was it the Romans who came out to seize Him in the Garden of Olives with swords and clubs on the night of His Passion, and who brought Him bound to the High Priest, and then to Pontius Pilate, demanding that He should be killed?
Was it a Roman who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, and was it to Romans He was sold for thirty pieces of silver?
Was the High Priest a Roman, who rent his garments and accused Our Lord of blasphemy when He declared Himself to be the Eternal Son of God?
Was it a Roman crowd which stood before the tribunal of Pontius Pilate and shouted: “If this man were not a malefactor we would not have handed Him over to you … His blood be upon us and upon our children!”
Was it the Romans who disowned Jesus as the King of the Jews, and did not want the inscription placed over His head on the Cross when He hung, crowned with thorns, and with nails in His hands and His feet?
Was it God’s judgment in Heaven that the Romans had killed Christ, and was that why the Power of the Almighty some thirty years later razed the Temple of Jerusalem to the ground, and left not a stone upon a stone, and has never allowed it to be rebuilt from that day to this?
In the prayers of the Mass for Good Friday of Holy Week, the priest refers to the “perfidious Jews” as the ones who betrayed and crucified Christ. Should he be saying the “perfidious Romans”? And has it been wrong for the Church to put it the first way for as long as her history?
When Our Lord hung upon the Cross His first reported words were, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Do the Liberal Catholics really think Our Lord was referring to the Jews when He said, “They know not what they do”? Was it the Jewish Chief Priests, the Scribes and the Ancients, with whom He sat daily teaching in the Temple and who, when He was crucified, wagged their heads and mocked Him and shouted: “He saved others; Himself He cannot save” — was it these who knew not what they did, and whom Our Lord asked the Father to forgive? Saint Luke tells us clearly that Jesus said this of the Roman soldiers who “dividing his garments, cast lots.” And Saint Matthew tells us that these same Romans, after Jesus expired on the Cross, cried out in one voice with their Centurion, “Indeed, this was the Son of God!”
THE MENACE OF MAGAZINES
Everyone agrees that magazines are a menace.
There is hardly a hamlet in the nation where a public-spirited committee of one kind or another has not loudly protested the evils of local periodical racks. Editorials have “exposed” the problem. Parents have bemoaned it. Politicians have promised to solve it. Repeatedly, educators, social workers, and members of the clergy have warned against the obscene publications which are on public sale in every American neighborhood.
To the many Catholics who have been leaders in alarming the country about the magazine menace, we have this to say: Because you are Catholics, you realize that purity and chastity are virtues to be guarded and fought for. But also, because you are Catholics, you know that even more precious and more to be defended than purity in the moral order, is the Apostolic purity of the Catholic Faith — that chastity of doctrine which owes its survival to twenty centuries of vigilant popes, zealous preachers, and martyrs shedding their blood.
The next time, therefore, you feel a crusading urge to go clean up the news- stands, head for one that carries the better-known Catholic periodicals. A swift glance through them will convince you that the current magazine menace is no longer threatening only the morals of Catholics.
To prepare you for what you will find, here is advance information on a few of the magazines which are now doing for Catholic dogma what the “drugstore publishers” have done of late for morality.
Commonweal — a weekly publication which has intellectual aspirations, scant circulation, and a layman editor named John Cogley. Realizing the ineffectiveness of his position, Mr. Cogley, when he feels he really has something to say, submits articles to the brassier picture-magazines, where he is assured of an audience for his favorite theme: American Catholics have much more in common with their Protestant compatriots than with their European co-religionists.
America — a journal which airs the political and social speculations of a misrepresentative group of American Jesuits. Chief man behind its policies is a Roman-collared Harvard graduate who has been heard to declare that, “The Catholic Church is not in the business to make converts. The Catholic Church is in the business to save souls.” Novelties like this “salvation without conversion,” however, are far too religious in theme to qualify as regular America fare. Recently, much publicity was given to the magazine’s “McCarthy episode,” in which the priests on America decided to attack the Catholic Senator, and hired a Protestant to do the job for them.
Catholic Digest — a derived monthly edited by Father Paul Bussard, whose effective way of nullifying Catholic teaching is to discredit the Divine Author of it. Current example: the Digest investigations of American anti- Catholicism, in which Father Bussard has spent several thousand dollars hoping to prove that when Our Lord said to Catholics, “You shall be hated by all men for My name’s sake,” He was speaking only to non-American members of the Church.
In partnership with a layman, Father Bussard has lately exercised his magazine influence beyond the Catholic Digest by bringing out a picture book on the Mass. With its front-cover photograph of the Sacred Host, this publication is being sold (with Father Bussard’s consent) at all of the lewdest newsstands in the country. Anyone who recovers from the shock of seeing such a booklet displayed in the midst of pictorial filth and suggestive captions, is in for further abuse when he opens the thing and begins to read. Typical statement from the text is Father Bussard’s reference to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as, “the farewell banquet of an unmarried Jew in his early thirties.” The Point – August 1954
POINTERS
In recent years, the Jesuit residence on Mount Street in London has provided comfortable shelter for a variously notable group of English priests. Among the present occupants is one Father James Brodrick, S. J., who has somewhat made his mark in the English-reading world as a biographer of canonized Jesuit saints.
Father Brodrick’s latest work in this field has been a life of St. Francis Xavier. Under Father Brodrick’s auspices, we learn that Saint Francis was “a man of few nuances, intransigent, authoritative, in a way even merciless, very Iberian … We also learn, in a treacherous string of adjectives, that the saint was “devout, selfless, chivalrous, and ruthless.”
As we read further, it becomes painfully clear that Father Brodrick has no use for Saint Francis Xavier on any score. He deplores the saint’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.
Most especially deplorable to Father Brodrick is Saint Francis Xavier’s orthodox belief that all pagans who are not brought into the Church are certainly going to Hell.
Father Brodrick’s treatment of the greatest apostle since the time of Saint Paul is an alarming commentary on the state of the Faith in Mount Street. It is likewise a partial explanation of why, in the year of Our Lord 1954, England has half the percentage of Catholics that the Belgian Congo does.
To illustrate the difference between a Mount Street Jesuit and a canonized one, we are printing this month the doctrinal statement of Saint Peter Canisius, S. J., on the matter of salvation for those who are not members of the Catholic Church. In his famous Catechism, the learned Jesuit Doctor declares, “Outside of this communion (as outside the Ark of Noe) there is absolutely no salvation for mortals; not to Jews or Pagans, who never received the faith of the Church; not to heretics who, having received it, forsook or corrupted it; not to schismatics who left the peace and unity of the Church … For the rule of Cyprian and Augustine is certain: he will not have God for his Father who would not have the Church for his Mother.”
AMERICAN GENTILES AND THE JEWS
There are, at present, more Jews in the United States than in any other nation in the world. According to official Jewish statistics, there are five million of them, and however minimized this figure may be, it is still more than twice the number of Jews acknowledged to be now in Russia, four times the number in Israel, and ten times the number in pre-Hitler Germany.
Yet even without such statistics, there is ample indication that the United States has become the new Jewish homeland. The presence of five million Jews in a country is not a fact that might pass unnoticed, as the presence of, say, five million Swedes might. For the Jews are a people who inspire definite, apparent reactions in all who come in contact with them.
One might suppose that the reaction of Protestants to the Jewish invasion of America would be a feeling of kindly approval, inasmuch as it was Protestantism, in the form of Freemasonry, that originally granted the Jews unrestricted freedom to move through and corrupt Christian society. It was done partly as a slap at the Pope, who throughout history had striven to keep the Jews and their influence in check, and partly because, though the Protestants neither possessed nor understood the courage of Catholics, they were rather intrigued by the inbred audacity of the Jews. Those inclinations and interests, which they themselves always felt obliged to palliate, the Jews catered to in open, raw display; and the Protestants took a certain sniggering delight in seeing just how far the Jews would dare to go.
Despite these considerations, however, Jew-hating-and-baiting — to which the Jews have attached the nervous label “anti-semitism” — has always been a familiar part of Protestant American life. And today, with the dawning realization of just how Judaized this country has become, it is on its way to reaching a new peak. Its manifestations, though varied in intensity, bear a common stamp: whether it be the suburban anti-semitism of those who publicly parrot the Jewish slogans of Brotherhood and non- discrimination, but keep their country clubs invariably restricted and their friends invariably Gentile, or, the “Anglo-Saxon” anti-semites who hold that the Jews could never have been the chosen people because they themselves are.
Against this Protestant attitude, the Catholic position on the Jews stands out sharply. For the Church’s opposition to the Jews — and opposition it has most emphatically always been — is based on one decisive fact: the Jews’ opposition to Jesus.
To a Catholic, guided by his Faith, the presence of five million Jews in America has not primarily a sociological, or a political, or a financial significance, but a theological one. It means there are in America five million determinedly unbaptized individuals — five million people, each one of whom is not only not a son of God, but is forbidden by his creed to become one.
Nor are the Jews significant merely as individuals. They have made themselves equally significant as a group. They have insisted that membership in the Jewish nation is each Jew’s most important function, and that loyalty to that nation and its interests is his single, transcendent responsibility. And the thing that has so welded the Jews together is their rejection of Jesus, whom they crucified when He came to redeem them, and whom they have opposed ever since. That is their heritage, their mark; and it is a mark the Protestants are unable to discern.
This, then, is the crux of the matter. Protestants oppose the Jews not because of what the Jews do to Jesus, but simply because of what the Jews do to Protestants. They see the Jewish menace, but only restrictedly and in terms of themselves. They see it only in the Jews’ demonstrated ability to take the Protestants’ government and businesses and colleges and seaside resorts away from them. What the Protestants do not and, as long as they remain Protestants, cannot comprehend, is this: because the Jews, as a people, killed God, shouting, “His Blood be upon us and upon our children,” and because they have, as a people, never repudiated or asked forgiveness for this crime, the Jews are, as a people, cursed. And all they do, is under the onus of this curse.
It is the Jews’ enmity to Jesus, their lust to destroy His Kingdom and supplant it with their own, that is the deep, almost instinctive motive behind their calculated control of all media by which the thought and morals of the nation may be molded. Radio, television, movies, fashions, the press — all have become part of a well-knit, unpublicized Jewish design.
But the question still must be asked, how has it been possible for a few million Jews to take over a nation of more than a hundred million Christians? To which the only possible answer is, of course, that the Christians have let them. With Protestants, absence of Faith has left them incapable of seeing the true danger of the Jews. And with Catholics, fear and lack of instruction have rendered them helpless to protect themselves from the Jews, as the Church has traditionally urged they should.
It is unthinkable that a nation with strong and vital Faith could ever succumb to Jewish control. This, therefore, is something for Protestants to ponder and Catholics to take resolution in: ten Catholics who truly have the Faith can overcome ten thousand Jews.
BY FATHER FEENEY
No Catholic should believe in the evolution of the human body.
There is no accepted theory of the evolution of the human body from any lower form of life which will allow that only one man evolved, and that the whole human race originated from the body of that one man. Hence, evolution, basically and completely, denies defined Catholic Faith.
There is not a single evolutionist who will allow that the body of the first woman was formed from the body of the first man. But it is of the Faith, from clear Scripture, that this is so. Were the evolution of the human body to be effected from the body of an ape, it would be required of a human soul that it fulfill the double function of “de-aping” the animal and establishing the man. No Catholic thinker of any sanity could possibly explain a substantial form in such a performance.
The theory that the human body might have evolved from the body of an ape vitiates and destroys all true notion of Original Sin. There is no allowance in it for the preternatural gifts of immortality, impassibility, and integrity with which the first man was endowed.
A belief of any kind in the evolution of the human body from a lower animal makes one completely skeptical of the narrative of the first chapter of Genesis. It immediately drives one to speculate on the age of the world in terms of millions and even billions of years.
The theory of evolution gives Our Blessed Lord and Our Blessed Lady, both, a simian ancestry.
Any Catholic who believes in the evolution of the human body does not have the Catholic Faith. His heresy will some day be anathematized by a courageous pope.
MASONIC INROADS IN ITALY
On the fourteenth of last month, the French Revolution received its annual Bastile Day commemoration. Fittingly, last month’s 165th observance of the Bastile attack was not restricted to any one nation. For the French Revolution, as a spirit extending to our own day, has become world property — a symbol of the purpose and achievement of international Freemasonry.
Coming as it did at the close of the 1700s, the French Revolution was a timely protocol for all that Freemasonry set out to accomplish in the century that followed. By means of their willing military instrument, Napoleon, the leaders of Masonry found they were able, as the 1800s began, to plant a potent Masonic germ in every quarter of Europe. And it was not long after the withdrawal of Napoleon’s troops that the Masons beheld, abundantly, the fruit of their enterprise. Simultaneously, there began in each Catholic country on the continent the unrest and revolutions which have so distinguished the nineteenth century as a victorious one for “the enemies of the altar and the throne.” At one signal, the lodges, the sectaries, the secret societies (they are variously named) began their now familiar program of “enlightenment and progress”: desecrating the Blessed Sacrament, pillaging monasteries, burning down convents, over-throwing monarchy, secularizing the schools, legalizing divorce and prostitution, legislating in their rabble parliaments against every tradition and observance made sacred by centuries of Christian rulers.
As the nineteenth century revolutions got under way, it was the will of World Masonry’s high command (at that time the Weishaupt clique in Germany) that an especially thorough job be done in Italy. The pope, his ancient lands, and, indeed, his very person, were the first objectives of Masonry’s Italian campaign. In the “Permanent Instruction” of the Alta Vendita, the control-group of Italian Masonry, this is made indisputably clear. Said the Masons, “Our final end is that of Voltaire and of the French Revolution, the destruction forever of Catholicism and even of the Christian idea, which, if left standing on the ruins of Rome, would be the resuscitation of Christianity later on.”
How did the Masons propose to effect their plan? The Alta Vendita’s “Instruction” continues, in part, “It is to the youth we must go.” And the youth were most successfully gone to, notably by a Jewish Mason named Mazzini who, with the intensity native to his kind, organized a junior branch of Masonry called, “Young Italy.”
It was with the co-operation of Italian youth that Freemasonry, before the end of the 1800s, felt it could boast: “The papacy has been mortally wounded. We are about to witness the death of Peter.” All of the extensive temporal power of the Holy Father had vanished with the permanent seizure of the Papal States. And his spiritual power was counted for little, in an Italy so patently losing its Faith.
Yet, in one thing, Masonry and Mazzini miscalculated. They failed to make sufficient allowance for that most consistent and unique of all local virtues, that power which is so nearly identical with the Church’s Divine guarantee of abiding holiness, namely: the unfailing ability of Italy to beget a saint. Within the past few months, our present Holy Father has reminded the world how decidedly, through a saint, Italy had her triumph over Mazzini. Pope Pius XII has lately raised to the altars of the Church a boy named Dominic Savio, the fifteen-year-old disciple of Saint John Bosco who died in dedicated innocence at the very height of “Young Italy’s” intrigues.
Saint Dominic Savio is Catholic Italy’s answer to Freemasonry — an answer as guileless as a Hail Mary or a sprinkling of Holy Water, and an answer quite as effective. The Point – September 1954
POINTERS
Early this autumn, the first permanent church building for New England’s Armenian Catholics will be dedicated, and present in Boston for the dedication will be His Eminence, the Cardinal-Patriarch of the Armenians. In anticipating the arrival of such a distinguished visitor, The Point is reminded that it was to a predecessor of this same Armenian Patriarch that His Holiness Pope Clement VI addressed one of the clearest of all papal pronouncements on the subject of salvation outside the Church. The Holy Father wrote to the Patriarch insisting, in part, that he and all the Armenians subject to him must believe, unequivocally, that “No man traveling outside the faith of the Catholic Church and the obedience to the Roman Pontiff can finally be saved,” and that, “All those who set themselves up against the faith of the Roman Church and die in final impenitence will be damned and descend to the perpetual torments of Hell.”
As America’s secular universities re-open this month, there will re-open along with them the numerous student centers sponsored by the Hillel Foundation. Ostensibly nothing more than Jewish equivalents of our Catholic Newman Clubs, Hillel Houses are fast becoming an accepted part of the American college scene.
Those interested in discovering the true function of the Hillel movement, however, need not search beyond its name. America’s Hillel Houses are so called in honor of the rabbi who was for years, until his death in 10 A. D., the leader of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin. As a religious adviser to King Herod, Rabbi Hillel was one of the chief promoters of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents — that mass-murder scheme which was devised in hopes of killing Our Blessed Lord when He was a newborn baby at Bethlehem. In an address before the Archdiocesan Teachers’ Institute held in Boston this month, it was predicted that, before long, Mass in the United States will be said in English.
That such a prediction could be made matter-of-factly, even approvingly, indicates not merely a colossal provincialism, but also a loss of Faith.
In the second issue of The Point, dated March, 1952, we warned of the possibility of a national schismatical church being formed in this country. We are not sure of the motives of those who advocate Mass in the vernacular, but we are sure that one of the first, necessary steps toward establishing this schismatical American Catholic Church would be to substitute English, the language of the nation, for Latin, the language of the Church.
IN SEARCH OF A CATHOLIC EDUCATION
Across the nation this month, America’s great secular universities will resume production. Once more their doors will open and hundreds of thousands of eager young Americans will come flocking in, fervently convinced that to be processed by these universities, to cheer at their football games, and, ultimately, to receive their Degrees, is all one could ask by way of Higher Education.
But some young Americans will disagree with this multitude. Some, because they are Catholics, will feel that to attend the aforesaid universities would be gravely dangerous. And so, both to safeguard their Faith from the perils of secular education, and in the hope of nourishing it by a Catholic one, they will enroll themselves at those American colleges which were established in the name of the Church.
Though such motivation by no means accounts for the entire enrollment at Catholic colleges, the fact that it should account even for part of it is cause for annual September solicitude. For these students are not going to get the Catholic education they seek, but a secular education under Catholic auspices. A Catholic education, as it was once given in those great universities that graced Europe’s past, is an education in which the Faith animates and permeates all that is taught. It is an education of which Our Lady is Queen — not in any soft, pietistic sense, but in the sense that all studies are undertaken for the supreme purpose of increasing love and knowledge of Her and Her Son.
This kind of education is the birthright of the American Catholic colleges. But it is a birthright they have sold, becoming instead the mimics and toadies of colleges set up precisely in defiance of Catholic education.
The American Catholic colleges ape secular colleges both in the kinds of subjects they teach, trying to match them course for course, and in the way they teach those subjects. Whatever their secular models consider important and inviolable, they consider so, too. Thus, if they are informed that “science” disagrees with Genesis, the Catholic colleges meekly set to work to make Genesis toe the mark.
Even the classes in religion which the Catholic colleges require for their Catholic students are given with an eye to secular standards. They are devoted mainly to the study of Apologetics — i. e., not what the Faith is, but how to answer heretical and infidel objections to it. The students leave these classes outfitted with a humble apology for everything from the Crusades to Cardinal Segura.
Nothing is so indicative of the state of American Catholic colleges as the fact that they have produced not a single teacher of the kind and the caliber that once abounded in Catholic colleges. They have, for instance, produced no great teacher of Holy Scripture, one who would know the subject thoroughly and inspire his students with a feeling and love for it. Nor have they produced a great Catholic historian, who instead of timidly and blindly following the anti-Catholic line taught in American schools, would lead his students to see history through the eyes of the Church. Nor a great theologian, who could teach the basic dogmas of the Faith in a way to make his students both understand and cherish them. These deficiencies in colleges calling themselves Catholic are at once remarkable, disgraceful, and pathetic. Yet not only have they produced no great teachers in these fields, these are not even the fields the American Catholic colleges are interested in. They do not want to set themselves apart as distinctively Catholic. They want to make the grade with secular colleges, and are willing to perform any apostasy to do so. For example, they boast of the Protestants and Jews they have in attendance, and of the fact they never “proselytize” them — implying thereby that they have another, equally valuable truth to give their students, quite apart from the Truth of the Faith.
Still, despite all their efforts, the American Catholic colleges remain, in the eyes of their secular idols, hopelessly second-rate. And though this is glaringly evident, the Catholic colleges continue doggedly to follow the same futile path. They continue to hustle their promising young instructors off to places like Harvard and Yale, and try not to notice that places like Harvard and Yale never reciprocate.
But suppose suddenly, miraculously, the Catholic colleges were to change? Suppose when the students come back this month they were to be told that there would be no more aping of secular colleges; that from now on they would be taught thoroughly Catholic subjects in a thoroughly Catholic way? What would happen?
For one thing, it would cause more excitement in the country than an atom bomb dropped on New York City.
It would also mean that at last the Catholic colleges had stopped being the blind, though culpable, dupes of the Masons and the Jews. For, long ago, those twin enemies of the Church formulated and announced a scheme: they would rob Catholic youth of their Faith and render them submissive, by denying them a Catholic education and giving them instead one deliberately and subtly calculated to achieve Masonic and Jewish ends. This is the kind of education called in America “secular” — the kind of education now being given in America’s Catholic colleges.
BY FATHER FEENEY There is nothing more misleading a Catholic can do than to call Christianity “the religion of love.”
Christianity is not, unqualifiedly, the religion of love. There are thousands of loves with which Christianity can have no part: love of wealth, for instance, love of honors, love of the pleasures of this world; also love of one’s neighbor, in the provincial, colloquial, community sense (that it required Our Lord’s parable of the Good Samaritan to explode); also, love of one’s family, in the possessive, selfish sense (which drove Our Lord to declare that anyone who does not hate father and mother and his own life also, cannot be His disciple.)
Christianity is not even, in the abstract sense, the religion of the love of God. It is not the religion of the love of the God we arrive at by reason. It is the religion of the love of the God Who is revealed to us.
It is the religion of the love of God-made-man, Whom we must first accept through Faith, and then must love with our whole heart, our whole soul, our whole mind, and our whole strength: efforts of love we never could make toward God had He not become Incarnate; efforts of love we now must make toward Him, as to a baby in one of our stables, as to a teacher on one of our mountains, as to a victim on one of our crosses, as to a lifeless body in one of our graves; and, finally, as to a triumphant victor over our death, and a hostage in our tabernacles until the end of time.
Christianity is the love of the Word-made-flesh Who dwelt amongst us. It is a love of Him so intense that we are willing to share it with anyone who will take it, even with our enemies.
This love of Jesus, with our whole heart, our whole soul, our whole mind, and our whole strength, is the love we are called upon to share with others. It is when a stranger has become our friend through his love of Jesus, that he then deserves to be called the “neighbor” whom we are to “love as ourselves.”
On the last day, one vast horde of human beings, who are going to be labeled “the goats,” when separated from “the sheep,” will hear our loving Jesus shout to them: “Depart from me ye cursed into everlasting fire.” I hope that on that occasion our sentimental evangelicals, our Community- Chest Christians, our American proponents of “Preach love, brother” will not be too disappointed at the astringency of Our Lord’s words.
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND JEWISH CONVERTS
It was not many months ago that the public press carried a news release from Tel Aviv which stated that a certain Portuguese Jew, by the name of Jacob Amalak, was currently visiting the state of Israel in order to hire rabbis whom he would bring back to the Jewish communities in Portugal. The article explained that in the last few years several thousands of Portuguese Marranos (Jews who have become Catholics) have reverted to Judaism. What is more, at least three thousand of these Marranos are from families which have been formally Catholic for the past four centuries, but have perpetuated, in secret, their Jewish doctrine and rituals.
For nineteen hundred years, now, the Jew has been to the Church a conscious and sustained cause of anxiety. And, ultimately considered, the worry has been less for the obstinate, Talmudic, controllable-in-a-ghetto Jew, than for the baptized one, the Jew whom the Church has established as a Christian, and set free in the Christians’ world.
Only by realizing that the Church has had, equivalently, to adopt a “fingers- crossed” attitude toward most Jewish converts, is it possible to understand her historic inertia in the matter of apostolate to the Jews. Indeed, our traditions have, in the past, led not merely to hesitancy in evangelizing the Jews, they have discouraged all but the most guarded contact with them. His Holiness, Pope Innocent III, was thus echoing the common sentiment of Christendom when, in speaking about the Jews, he warned, “They repay their hosts, as the proverb says, after the fashion of the rat hidden in the sack, or the snake in the bosom, or the burning brand in one’s lap.”
If the Portuguese Jews we mentioned at the outset are rather a remote illustration of what Pope Innocent meant, we propose to our readers the recent and devastatingly apropos case of the American Jewish convert, Leon Paul. Writing last month in Columbia, the official publication of the Knights of Columbus, Mr. Paul seems almost to have anticipated us and to have reasoned that the surest way to escape being called “a snake in the bosom” is to establish, ahead of time, that the bosom is a snake, too. To accomplish this, he proceeds to explain that the Blessed Virgin, the Mother of God, is a Jewish convert, just like Leon Paul!
Mr. Paul leaves it to his readers to resolve the serpentine innuendoes in his statement. He fails to tell us, for example, at just which point in her life the Virginal Mother of God, chosen from all eternity as the bride of the Holy Ghost, immaculately conceived in the womb of Saint Ann, could be said to be without the Faith, and at just which point she received it.
Ultimately, in any discussion of the Church’s astringent outlook on the Jews and their conversion, there are these two questions: Isn’t it possible for a Jew to be sincerely converted and save his soul? Isn’t the Jewish nation going to be converted toward the end of the world?
To neither question does the Church answer with a rousingly affirmative, “Of course!” To both questions, her answer is a deliberate, thoughtful, “Yes.”
We have seen what gives the Church pause with regard to the individual Jewish convert, as she has known him down the centuries. Here, briefly, is why the Church has never been over-enthusiastic about the pending conversion of the Jewish nation. She has traditionally taught that (1) the conversion of the Jews will take place at the very end of the world; that (2) its primary purpose will be for a triumph over the Jews, the triumph of Christ, their rightful and long-rejected king; and that (3) to bring about this conversion, God will have to send Saint Elias, who will find it necessary to preach, die, and resurrect (to the accompaniment of some very persuasive earthquakes) before the Jews finally accept the Catholic Faith.
The Point – October 1954
POINTERS
It is approaching election time all across the nation and doubtless there are many of our readers who are faced with a situation like the one we have here in Massachusetts: a Thirty-third Degree Freemason, Christian A. Herter, is asking Catholic voters to grant him another term as governor.
From an official Catholic handbook on Freemasonry, published with the Imprimatur of the Archbishop of Dublin, we are warned that every Mason of Governor Herter’s Scottish Rite goes through the following ceremony on his way up to the Thirty-third Degree.
The candidate is placed before a coffin, at the foot of which are arranged three skulls. The central skull, representing the Masonic hero, Jacques de Molay, is crowned with laurel. The other two skulls bear, respectively, a king’s crown and a papal tiara. Before the skull of de Molay, the candidate genuflects. Then, raising a knife and chanting, “Hatred and death to despotism,” he stabs, first, the skull of the king, and then the skull of the Pope!
It has been the consistent policy of the Catholic Church to counsel her children in political matters whenever there is a danger to Catholic Faith or Morals. Thus it happened, for example, that the Fourth Lateran Council (Cap. 69) issued this decree, which is binding on all Catholics:
“Jews should not be placed in public offices, since it is most absurd that a blasphemer of Christ should exercise power over Christians.”
UNCLE SAM AND ANTI-SEMITISM
Ever since Columbus returned to Spain and told his news, America — and specifically the United States of America — has been looked on as the land of opportunity. Though this title has been variously interpreted, according to the various ambitions of men, always, for those with the Faith, it has had the basic signification of a vast new land waiting to be won to Christ and His Church.
In the beginning, while America was still being explored by the French and the Spaniards, it looked as though the country was going to become Catholic as a matter of course. But between the time America was explored and the time it was colonized, Europe was split by a revolt from the True Church; and it was the revolters, the heretics, who first came to establish themselves in what was to be the United States.
That explains why this country was not Catholic from the start. But there are other, later causes to explain why it has never become so. And among such causes none is more decisive than this: the gullibility of American Catholics in being taken in by the enemies of their Faith.
The natural tendency of Catholics to be unsuspicious and unskeptical has in this country been carried to the most fantastic, disastrous extremes. Living in a society fiercely anti-Christian, American Catholics have behaved like children in the care of a group of saintly nuns. They have scorned the notion that there could be any determined enemies of the Church among their fellow citizens, much more agents of a conspiracy set on its utter destruction. Credulous and trusting, they have been prey both to the Masons and, even more devastatingly, to the Jews.
The great, essential fact about the Jews, patent not only in their everyday utterances and activities, but in their official documents as well, is that they are the sworn enemies of Christianity, and are constantly driven with the wild, frenzied aim of destroying it. To this fact American Catholics (not all, indeed, but enough to warrant the generalization) have been oblivious. They have fallen head over heels for those subterfuges by which the Jews shield themselves. Examples: (1) the Jewish slogan “regardless of race, color, or creed,” which implies that a man is no more responsible for the last item than for the first two, and which protects the Jews to practice their hatred of Jesus without reproach; (2) the familiar cry of “anti-semitism,” the Jews’ proclamation of “Hands off!” to any who would expose or thwart their endeavors. Because the Jews are religiously forbidden to put any interest or loyalty above their race, they are, irremediably, a nation apart. They may inhabit a country, may be called its citizens, but they never consider themselves as belonging to it. Yet American Catholics, by virtue of their staggering gullibility, have allowed the Jews not only to pursue their Judaic ends, but to do so under the guise of being good Americans.
If, for instance, there is an important case before the courts involving a matter such as the censorship of blasphemous and obscene literature, the Jews will be found frantically concerned. Top Jewish lawyers from all over the country will appear in the courtroom, retained by no one, but there simply as “friends of the court,” to write their briefs and offer their counsel, by way of showing that censorship ought to be removed. When the Jews protest that their interest in the case is merely to preserve the American principle of “freedom of expression,” American Catholics take them at their word — unaware that the Jews’ real concern is just to drive in one more wedge to separate America from Christianity.
By being so totally off-guard, American Catholics have left themselves open to the assaults of the Jews in a hundred different ways. The clothes that Jews design, Catholics have accepted as being merely modern and American, not suspecting that these clothes have been foisted on the country for the purpose of demoralizing and degrading it. The moving picture and television shows that the Jews present, Catholics have taken to be merely entertainment, not suspecting that these shows serve the purpose of indoctrination. The newspapers that the Jews control, Catholics have trusted to report the straight news, not suspecting that these newspapers slant the news in order to create the impressions and the interests and the attitudes that the Jews want created.
It is obvious to American Catholics that the state of their country is becoming daily more foul and corrupt. It is, or ought to be, equally obvious that the Jewish grip on the country is becoming daily tighter and more secure. So far, American Catholics have not put these two things together. But because they are becoming worried, and anxious to do something about the state of their country, the possibility looms that American Catholics might soon come to the clear, glaring conclusion implied in these premises. And if that day comes, and American Catholics once and for all remove the wool from their eyes and set out resolutely to combat the purposes and influences of the Jews, they might succeed in converting America at last. For there is something in the character of this country that the Jews have not yet been able to reach, something that is young, and innocent, and hungry for the Faith. This is still, if we hurry, the land of opportunity.
BY FATHER FEENEY
One of the leading clerical proponents of Liberalism in this country is Monsignor Matthew Smith, Editor of the Denver Register, published in Colorado.
In a recent issue of the Denver Register under the heading: “Everybody Who Is Saved Does It In The Catholic Way,” Monsignor Smith lets his readers be assured that those who live and die outside the Catholic Church can attain salvation. The defined dogmas of the Church on this subject he makes mean the very opposite of what they say.
Here are some of the statements Monsignor Smith allows to be printed in his paper, to each of which I shall give a reply.
Monsignor Smith: “If a man through no fault of his own remains outside the Church, he may be saved if he leads a God-fearing life.”
Reply: This is not true. Nor is it possible for one to lead a God-fearing life rightly outside the Catholic Church. Jesus Christ is the God now to be feared in order to save one’s soul. He is our Emmanuel, our God-with-us, and must be feared in the manner He has commanded. No other so-called fear of God will do. Jesus, Our Savior, has said of Himself: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” His justices and mercies in the matter of salvation must be left to His Wisdom, and not tampered with by our own sentimentalities. An infant who dies unbaptized remains outside the Church through no fault of his own, and is not saved.
Monsignor Smith: “Such a one to all intents and purposes wishes to believe and do what God has taught.” Reply: Faith is not a wish to believe. Faith is an act of belief arising out of a Divinely infused virtue. Nor does one get to Heaven by wishing to do what Christ commanded. One gets there by doing it.
Monsignor Smith: “The majority of men who have been brought up in heresy think they belong to the true Church.”
Reply: The majority of men who have been brought up in heresy do not think they belong to the true Church. All heretics maintain that there is no such thing as one true Church to which all should belong. This is quintessential American Protestantism, and the reason for its two hundred and sixty or more sects.
Monsignor Smith: “Their error is not due to hatred of God.”
Reply: Their error is due to hatred of what God has revealed, in such essentials as the supreme jurisdiction and infallibility of our Holy Father, the Pope, and the Divine Maternity of the ever-Blessed Virgin Mary. Protestants hate these two, and therefore hate the God who revealed them.
Monsignor Smith: “A man who leads a good life and has a love of God in his heart and dies repentant is saved, but he is a Catholic in desire, if not in fact.”
Reply: Every Protestant will resent Monsignor Smith’s calling him a Catholic either in desire or in fact. Imagine dragging into the Catholic Church those who loathe the very notion of it!
Monsignor Smith: “Saint Peter said, ‘In every nation he that feareth God and worketh justice is acceptable to Him.’ (Acts 10:35)”
Reply: Saint Peter, in Acts 10:35, was speaking about those who are acceptable for Baptism, and thereby for membership in the Catholic Church, as anyone can clearly see who will take the time to read the chapter Monsignor refers to.
Monsignor Smith: “Those outside the Church, however, no matter how good, are deprived of many graces obtainable only through the Church.” Reply: Among the “many graces” of which those outside the Church are deprived, I might mention: the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Father, and Mary, the Mediatrix of All Graces, the Holy Mother of God who prays “for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
THE MONKEYS AND THE JEWS
Across the street from us, here at Saint Benedict Center, Harvard University has settled down for another academic year. And for the first time in many such years, Harvard’s faculty is minus one of its most notorious members — that supreme potentate of anthropology, the late Professor Earnest A. Hooton.
It was Dr. Hooton’s fashion, each year at this time, to open the anthropology lectures with one of his stories. These varied little in their slant, and the following, by virtue of repetition, was quite likely his favorite.
With a suggestion of Oxford in his accent, Dr. Hooton would say, “I had best start, perhaps, by telling you about a conversation I had, a few years back, with a sweet young thing from our sister institution, Radcliffe. This girl — an Irish girl, I believe — approached me on the opening day of the semester and somewhat flusteredly announced that she had signed up for my course. ‘But I do hope, Professor Hooton,’ she went on, ‘I do hope that you’re not going to tell me in your anthropology lectures that my soul evolved!’ Mustering what I imagined might sound like a father-confessor’s most comforting tone, I reassured the red-faced young lady by saying, ‘Now, now, my child, don’t you fret. I’m going to tell you that you have no soul at all!’ ”
With the stage thus set, Earnest Hooton was launched on another season of instructing young men and women that their remote grandfathers were all soulless, simian tree-dwellers.
Who, you may well ask, is ultimately responsible for men like Hooton? Who fosters them, builds them up, and encourages the public to listen while they speak any absurdity and blasphemy that enters their heads? To whose advantage is it that Christian society be so corrupted, Christian values debunked? Whose policy is it that Christian men be made to believe they are merely animals?
Back in February of 1936, the Catholic Gazette of London, a monthly published by England’s Catholic Missionary Society, printed an article which contains a very conclusive answer to these questions, particularly as they apply to Dr. Hooton. The article was entitled “The Jewish Peril and the Catholic Church,” and it consisted of extracts from speeches made as a convention in Paris of B’nai B’rith, the exclusively Jewish branch of Freemasonry. In one of these speeches an exultant Jew went on record as saying: “We Jews have spread the spirit of revolt and false liberalism among the nations of the gentiles so as to persuade them away from their faith and even to make them ashamed of professing the precepts of their religion and obeying the commandments of their Church. We have brought many of them to boast of being atheists, and more than that, to glory in being descendants of the ape!”
Whether or not Earnest Hooton was a Jew (and there are arguments on both sides) is irrelevant. The historical fact is that he well served the cause of International Jewry in its effort to dupe the gentiles with that basic tenet of Talmudic Judaism: “We are the human beings. The gentiles are animals.”
As a fitting postscript to Dr. Hooton, right after his death one of the principal Jewish hoaxes for establishing the authenticity of anthropology, was exposed. At a meeting of the Geological Society in London, it was announced that the famous “Piltdown Man,” for forty years a foundation of anthropological theory, the hero of scores of high-school “science” books, the trusted friend of hundreds of Hooton disciples, was a complete fraud! The sham was explained in detail by the director of the British Museum, who described how the skull had been “doctored up and planted,” how the teeth had been artificially colored with oil paint, and how the bone implements found with the Piltdown remains had clearly been carved with a twentieth century kitchen knife. The Point – November 1954
THE SECRET STRENGTH OF COMMUNISM
When the Communists first came to power in Russia, back in 1917, it was generally known, both in Europe and America, that the men who had brought about the revolution, and were then ruling in Russia, were Jews. Before long, however, wealthy and influential Jews in this country determined that such an awareness might well prove disastrous to the cause of Judaism. And thus it happened that Jewish pressure forced all intelligent appraisal of Communism to go underground. Nevermore was it mentioned in our press, our books, our pulpits, or even in our fiery soapbox warnings against the Communist menace, that Communism was a movement fostered and vitalized by the Jews.
The burying of this fact was the opportunity for Communism’s spread. The Christian world was deceived into regarding it as simply a bad philosophy, or an undesirable economic system. The result? In less than forty years, Communism, by political conquest, has become the ruler of half the people of the world, and as an intellectual force, has insinuated itself into the policies and programs that govern most of the other half.
All of the conventional, facile explanations, such as the persuasiveness of Karl Marx’s writings, or the military potential of the Russian people, or the general discontent of the working classes, fail to explain the dynamic and immediate filtering of Communism into every quarter of the globe. The only sufficient explanation, and the true one, is this: Communism was diffused by means of that ancient, international network, the Jewish people.
No one should be tempted to conclude, however, that the Jews adopted Communism because they themselves wanted to live under its regime. Communism was to the Jews an opportune weapon in their centuries-old battle against Christ and His Church. It was a chance to set up that kingdom of this world which they have sought since the time they rejected the spiritual kingdom offered them by their Messias, Jesus, the Crucified King of the Jews. Communism can never be defeated until we recognize it for what it is. This month, therefore, The Point is printing a portion of the overwhelming, factual indictment of the Jews as the motivating and sustaining force behind the Communist movement.
1. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the authors of the Communist Manifesto, and the codifiers of all previous Communist thought, were both Jews.
2. Concerning the “trial revolution” which was staged by the Communists in Russia in 1905, as a preliminary to the successful one of 1917, the New York Zionist paper, The Machabee, wrote, “Revolution in Russia is a Jewish revolution … Jews are the most active revolutionists in the Tsar’s Empire.”
3. Of the fifty-nine members of the Central Committee of the Politburo, which ruled Russia immediately after the Revolution of 1917, fifty-six were Jews.
4. The British White Paper on Bolshevism, presented to Parliament in April, 1919, by order of King George V, contained the following statement: “The immediate suppression of Bolshevism is the greatest issue now before the world … Unless Bolshevism is nipped in the bud immediately, it is bound to spread in one form or another over Europe and the whole world, as it is organized and worked by Jews who have no nationality and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things.”
5. The American Jew, Jacob Schiff, senior partner in the Jewish banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, financed the printing of Communist propaganda leaflets and arranged for their distribution throughout the Russian Army immediately before the “trial revolution” of 1905. This same American Jew openly boasted, in 1917, that without his financial support, the Communist revolution could never have succeeded in Russia.
6. One of the first official acts of the Communist government of Russia, just one week after it came to power, was to declare anti-semitism a punishable offense against the state, on the grounds that it was “counter-revolution.” 7. American Jewry’s celebrated leader, the late Rabbi Stephen Wise, remarked before his death, “Some, call it Communism. I call it Judaism.”
8. Previous to the 1917 revolution, the Jew, Leon Trotsky (real name, Bronstein) had been delivering speeches in Yiddish on the street corners of New York’s lower East Side, advocating the overthrow of the American government. Just before the Russian Revolution broke out, Trotsky arrived in Moscow with 276 of his East Side disciples.
9. The London Times for March 29, 1919 reported: “One of the most curious features of the Bolshevist movement is the high percentage of non- Russian elements among its leaders. Not less than seventy-five per cent are Jews … Among the minor officials, the number is legion.”
10. In January of 1933, the Jewish Chronicle of London boasted that, “More than one third of all the Jews in Russia have become Soviet Officials.” And two months later the Jewish B’nai B’rith Magazine of New York applauded conditions in the Soviet Union with the statement, “Under the new regime (Bolshevism) it is at last possible to be a real Jew.”
11. In 1935-36, the Communist government’s ambassadors to the following capitals were all Jews: Paris, London, Madrid, Istanbul, Athens, Brussels, Vienna, Tokyo, Oslo, Montevideo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Berlin, Riga and Prague.
12. The Jew, Bela Kun (real name, Cohen) led the Communist revolution in Hungary in the spring of 1919. He murdered twenty thousand Hungarians and crucified sixty-seven Catholic priests. Said Bishop Prohaszka, veteran of the Communist domination in Hungary, “We proclaim to the world that we cannot endure the indefinite Jewish usurpation, and we shall get rid of it.”
13. In the February 4, 1937 issue of G. K.’s Weekly, the noted Catholic historian, Hilaire Belloc, wrote, “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.” 14. The most recent admitted-editor of the American Communist paper, the Daily Worker, is the Jew, John Gates (real name, Israel Ragenstreif).
15. With even more readers than the Daily Worker is the Morgen Freiheit of New York City, a Communist paper printed entirely in Yiddish.
16. In the Spanish civil war of the mid-thirties, the anti-Franco “Loyalists” were organized and directed by Communist Jews, under the leadership of Moses Rosenberg and Bela Kun. An editorial printed in the Morgen Freiheit states quite clearly that, “The war that is fought today in Spain is wider than the Spanish territory. It is of life and death significance for the Jews of the world.”
17. The New York Jew, Alexander Bittelman, said in his book, The Jewish People Face the Post-War World, published in 1945, “If not for the Red Army, there would be no Jews in Europe today, nor in Palestine, nor in Africa; and in the United States the length of our existence would be counted in days …. The Soviet Union has saved the Jewish people.”
18. Every time our government uncovers a nest of subversive Communists, the majority of those apprehended are invariably Jews. Examples: Eleven Communists, who formed what was called the “American Politburo,” were arrested in the much-publicized “Eugene Dennis Case”; six of these eleven were Jews. Later taken into custody was the twenty-one man organization which had been formed to replace the previously arrested eleven. Of these twenty-one Communists, fourteen were Jews.
19. Of the famous “Hollywood Ten,” who were convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to explain their Communist connections, nine were Jews. Additional Hollywood Jews who have been cited as Communist- sympathizers include: Charlie Chaplin (real name, Thonstein), Edward G. Robinson (real name, Rosenberg), Melvyn Douglas (real name, Hesselberg), Douglas Fairbanks (real name, Ullman), Judy Holiday (real name, Tuvim), Danny Kaye (real name, Kaminsky).
20. The supreme leader of the Communist party in the United States (the boss behind Earl Browder, Eugene Dennis, etc.) was the Jew, Gerhardt Eisler. Chief assistant to Eisler was the Jew, J. Peters (real name, Goldherger).
21. Since World War II, eleven Communists have been convicted of espionage activities in the United States. Ten of these were Jews.
22. The Report of the Canadian Royal Commission on Communist activities, in 1946, read, in part, “It is significant that a number of documents from the Russian Embassy specifically note ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewess’ in entries on their relevant Canadian agents or prospective agents, showing that the Russian Fifth Column leaders attach particular significance to this matter.”
23. A raid by Federal agents on the Pittsburgh Jewish Cultural Center in July of 1953 revealed that the place was the Communist training headquarters for western Pennsylvania. And in April of this year, another such raid uncovered the fact that the Miami Jewish Cultural Center was actually a front for the distribution of Communist propaganda.
24. The Jews can always be counted on to oppose any curbs or restrictions which are directed against Communists or Communism. Example: When the present Jewish Senator from New York, Herbert Lehman, was Governor of the State, a bill was passed resoundingly by the legislature prohibiting any Communist to hold office in the State government. This was not hypothetical legislation. The bill was aimed at known Communists then holding high positions in New York State. When the bill arrived at Governor Lehman’s desk, he promptly vetoed it.
25. Similarly, the Jews will always attack any man who shows himself to be a true and determined enemy of Communists. This is done not only by individual Jews, but with equal dependability by the powerful Jewish organizations, whose attacks on anti-Communism are always by way of saving the public from “Hysteria!” or “Demagoguery!” or “Witch hunts!”
Occasionally, when a man has been particularly effective in fighting Communists, the Jews will even label him as “anti-semitic” — thereby revealing the Communist-Jewish tie-up which for so many years it has been their policy to keep well hidden. Example: Recently, when forty-two employees at Fort Monmouth were fired as loyalty risks, and thirty-eight of the forty-two turned out to be Jews, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League screamed, “Anti-semitism!” at the American Army in general and at the responsible officer in particular.
The foregoing twenty-five items are but a sampling of the irrefutable case against the Jews. But in one final matter we must caution our readers. Though the Jews are behind Communism, they are not committed to it. The cause to which they are essentially bound is not pro-Communism. It is, rather, anti-Christianity. Communism is merely their weapon of the moment.
Therefore, it is possible that Jews will be seen opposing Communism. Should this happen, it may be that such opposition is only a diversional move, calculated to throw the Gentiles off the track. It may be, however, that the Jews will have found that Communism has lost its effectiveness, and they are dropping it in favor of some new, more useful tool. In that event, Communism would decline into being just another political- economic movement, an abandoned child obliged to fend for itself.
As long as Communism remains an international menace, however, totally unexplainable by political or economic standards, an insidious, rapacious enemy, more terrible to the Church even than to the state, then we may be sure that the Jews are still behind the Communist movement. The Point – December 1954
POINTERS
From all over America, representing millions of Catholic mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, maiden aunts, and nieces, there arrived in Boston last month the delegates to the twenty-seventh nationwide convention of the National Council of Catholic Women. Of all the people who, in so many varied capacities, attended this sizeable gathering, the following are remembered by The Point ’s convention observers.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States, speaker at a morning session of the convention in Boston’s Symphony Hall. This was Eisenhower’s second visit to Boston since his election to the Presidency and his conversion to Presbyterianism. He read, without color, but with a certain earnestness, the speech prepared for him, and then appeared alternately embarrassed and incredulous as Boston’s Archbishop Cushing said of him that it was not his ability as a president or a general that made Dwight Eisenhower great. It was, rather, his “love of God!”
Mr. Rabb, adviser to Eisenhower, who accompanied the President, held his coat, and whispered instructions. On the Symphony Hall stage, Rabb sat directly behind an impressive row of Bishops, none of whom seem to have been warned that the slick-haired Mr. Rabb (real name, Rabinowitz) was to be there.
His Excellency, Henry Cabot Lodge, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, a man’s speaker, who spoke at an evening session of the convention. He pleased the delegates by promising that the next time the U. N. runs a war, the burden of supplying an army will be shared by a larger number of countries, and thereby American mothers will stand to lose fewer sons than they did in Korea.
His Excellency, John J. Wright, Bishop of Worcester, Massachusetts, who gave a talk endorsing the United Nations, after Ambassador Lodge had left the stage. Bishop Wright is a ladies’ speaker.
An enthusiastic, unidentified, but unmistakably Catholic young lady, from the International Catholic Truth Society, in Brooklyn. She stood in the outer lobby of Symphony Hall prior to the pro-U. N. speeches of Lodge and Bishop Wright, and handed out some extremely damaging anti-U. N. literature.
Liberace, a manicured piano player in grey silk suit, who arrived at Boston’s Hotel Statler, headquarters of the convention, and promptly received a phone-call from Boston’s Archbishop Cushing. Would Liberace please play for the ladies of the convention, asked the Archbishop? No, said Liberace. Well, then, said the Archbishop, could Liberace pay a visit to the Archi-episcopal residence some time during his Boston stay? Yes, said the piano-player. Newsmen received ample warning of the proposed visit and were plentifully on hand when the Archbishop put his arm around Liberace’s shoulder and called him an “exemplary Catholic.”
The forces which control Boston’s press were delighted, two days later, to quote Archbishop Cushing’s exemplary Catholic as saying, to a concert hall audience, “I don’t talk loud. I’m the sexy type.”
THE BUYERS AND SELLERS AT CHRISTMAS
The Jews would like to get rid of Christmas. But so far they have not succeeded. For reasons of Faith (the Catholics), or motives of sentiment (the Protestants), certain Americans have refused to shrug the day off. And so, the Jews have been obliged to fall hack on that well-tried principle of theirs, “When you can’t beat a movement, join it.”
Today, in America, the Jews have become Christmas boosters. But their acceptance of the day, like their acceptance of any non-Jewish thing, is for the purpose of making it over to their own image and likeness. Accordingly, the Jews are trying to establish a Judaized Christmas. They want a Christmas stripped of all commemoration of the Birth of our Saviour, and reduced to a purely secular festival.
To ensure that no Christian meaning of Christmas will be perpetuated through civic recognition of it, the Jews protest loudly against such practices as community-sponsored Christmas carols. They demand that no Nativity plays be presented in public schools. “Christological expressions” (the Jews’ phrase for dismissing any reference to their rejected Messias) must be banned from the holiday messages of public officials. “We want all this Christmas propaganda stopped!” shrilled the New York Jewish newspaper, The Day. “Public schools must be kept clear of Christmas carols and other Christmas influence. The educational system of New York City — and other cities with large Jewish populations — please take notice!”
But common though this kind of agitation has been, it is not the main Jewish attack on Christmas. The Jews well realize that in making these direct, naked demands there is always the risk that some day they will arouse Christian wrath. Consequently, they rely chiefly on a less obvious weapon, but one which is far more deadly. The Jews are saturating the American atmosphere with their infidel slant on Christmas.
By magazine articles, department store displays, newspaper advertisements, by radio and television and moving picture entertainments, by the popular songs which they write and publish, and by a thousand other subtle and insidious means, the Jews are conveying the impression that Christmas is nothing more than a happy holiday — a time for tinsel and mistletoe and big red ribbons; a time for hilarity and handouts, stimulated by bottled spirits.
Furthermore, by their perfect coordination of press, entertainment, and commerce, the Jews are creating the illusion that their version of Christmas is universally accepted — that “everybody but everybody” agrees that this is the way the feast should be celebrated.
In the event the modicum of Christian observance still clinging to Christmas in America should grow, or become dangerous, the Jews have a final weapon. This weapon they have already begun to use. It is an appeal to the “Americanism” of the stubborn Christians. In the name of democracy, they (who are congenitally incapable of any loyalty other than to Judaism) ask that Christmas be taken from the realm of sectarianism and made a day for all Americans, regardless of race, color, or creed. They argue that the day has too much national importance to commemorate merely the Birth of Jesus. They say it should stand for some program of their own Jewish devising, some large and deliberately un-Christian concept, such as “Brotherhood.”
One postscript: Touring the country this December will be a moving picture entitled White Christmas. It was written by three Jews named Krasna, Panama, and Frank. Its music was composed by a Jew named Balin, who calls himself Berlin. It stars a Jew named Kaminsky, who calls himself Kaye. It is this year’s main single effort to divert Christians from the true significance of Christmas. And the Jews expect it to be especially successful; for, to co-star in the movie, they have procured the services of an aging crooner, the one-time darling of American Catholicism. In exchange for his endorsement and abetting of their anti-Christmas purposes, the Jews may toss this pitiful Catholic a little conscience salve. Perhaps they will allow him to sing Adeste Fideles or “Silent Night” in the movie. The Jews know they can well afford to make such a concession, since any Christian sentiment expressed in the song will be quite blotted out in the welter of Jewish vulgarity.
LIGHT IN THE NIGHT
Cold, it is told, did our world enfold The night that Our Lord was born; Our sheep who were deep in a midnight sleep Awoke and believed it morn. Our hay, so they say, in a manger lay To make Him a warm, soft bed: When close to the earth at the hour of His birth Our Saviour reclined His head.
Light in the night that was clear and bright Drew westward three Eastern kings; And royal the way that they knelt to pray, All covered with crowns and rings.
Archangels in throngs with celestial songs Proclaimed ere the dawn began, In valley, on hill, unto men of good will, Their joy in our God made man.
BY FATHER FEENEY
At the request of our readers — who have now come to know the things for which I stand — I shall put down a few of the things which I am very much against.
I am very much against a Catholic’s attending an Interfaith meeting of any kind.
I think it is a sin for priests to become workers and try to enter the life of a nation in overalls instead of in cassocks and surplices.
I think that ninety percent of the writings of recently converted Catholic authors should be put on the Index or burned.
I think the U. N. is a movement for setting up in the secular order a rival to the Catholic Church in the spiritual order, and for eventually effecting the end of all Faith (Church) and all patriotisms (State).
I think the National Conference of Christians and Jews is the kind of sodality that every Catholic should be forbidden to attend, support, or sympathize with, under pain of mortal sin. I am one of the leading opponents of the Anti-Defamation League. I am one of the chief people the Anti-Defamation League has gone out of its way to abuse. I think it is an honor to be defamed by the Anti-Defamation League.
I am very much against the underground war that is daily going on against the police forces in our leading cities, especially those in which so many fine and handsome Catholic policemen are found. I am against the efforts of petty gossip and petty scandal to demoralize some of the finest groups of men I have ever met, and I am very much against those who have not the courage to stop it.
I think that the United States is in a worse condition, spiritually and politically, than the nations of Europe were before the war. I think that the reasons for this are the same as they were in Europe, and that these same reasons have arrived in America recently by way of immigration.
THE PRESENT POSITION OF CARDINAL NEWMAN
Q. What is it about John Henry Newman, English convert and Cardinal, that Catholics chiefly remember?
A. His mastery of English prose.
Q. What is it about John Henry Newman that Catholics of our day generally forget?
A. They forget, or never have been told of, his Jewish descent.
Q. If we Catholics were to bear in mind Newman’s real ancestry when we are appraising his literary ability, could we not then boast that we have had in our fold the greatest Jewish writer in the English language?
A. We could — except for the fact that there have been in the English language other Jewish writers, like Robert Browning, Max Beerbohm, and Philip Guedalla, who never once thought of joining the Catholic Church.
Q. Apart from his literary abilities, did not Newman make a good conversion to the Catholic Church? A. He made a nostalgic conversion.
Q. What sort of conversion is that?
A. It is a conversion effected in a typical Old Testament manner, in which one is always sighing after the “flesh-pots” of things one has abandoned, and which in Newman’s case required an Apologia Pro Vita Sua, an apology for his own life, to justify.
Q. After his conversion, and his ordination to the priesthood, is it really true that Newman used often to forego theological studies and pastoral pursuits in order to devote more time to reading from the pagan Greeks?
A. Biographers disagree. Newman’s only comment in the matter was his repeated remark, “I shall never be a saint, for I love the pagan classics too intensely.”
Q. Did not the blood which he inherited, from the Jewish moneylender who was his father, allow Newman to bring to the Faith some of those same racial qualities possessed by the very earliest Christians, by Our Lord’s own Apostles and disciples?
A. The Jewish qualities which Newman brought to the Faith have been very tidily set in order by Canon William Barry, S. T. D., the eminent English authority on Newman. Canon Barry reports that to Newman’s “Hebrew affinities” the following qualities are attributed: “ … his cast of features, his remarkable skill in music and mathematics, his dislike of metaphysical speculations, his grasp of the concrete, and his nervous temperament.”
Q. What was it that Newman called those fellow Catholics of his who, at the time of the Vatican Council, were in favor of having the Pope’s personal infallibility defined?
A. Newman nervously called them, “an aggressive and insolent faction.”
Q. Was this attitude toward the definition of Papal infallibility the reason why Pope Pius IX so totally mistrusted Newman? A. It was one of the reasons.
Q. If Pope Pius IX so frowned upon him, why was Newman made a Cardinal?
A. Newman was made a Cardinal after Pope Pius IX died, when the Catholic Duke of Norfolk prevailed upon the newly installed Leo XIII to brighten the aged Newman’s final years with a red hat.
Q. Is it in England that Cardinal Newman’s spirit best survives today?
A. It is not. Modern Catholic Englishmen, without analyzing it, sense that Cardinal Newman was, religiously, the kind of interloper in their midst that Prime Minister Disraeli was politically.
Q. Where then have Newman’s name and fame been most perpetuated?
A. In America, in the form of clubs. Newman Clubs, they are called.
Q. What is a Newman Club?
A. It is an organized excuse for the presence, the sinful presence, of Catholic students at secular universities founded and fostered by Masons and, lately, indoctrinated by Jews. The Point - 1955 The Point – January 1955
WORLD GOVERNMENT BY THE JEWS
Of the 1,800 executives employed at United Nations headquarters in New York City, over 1,200 are Jews.
In its current report in the American Jewish Yearbook, the American Jewish Committee labels opposition to the United Nations as anti-semitism.
David Ben-Gurion, first Prime Minister of the State of Israel, told American newsmen in an interview in 1948, “The United Nations ideal is a Jewish ideal.”
Every day there is new evidence that the American people are waking up to the fact that World Communism is a movement fostered and run by Jews. But, even more urgent for Americans to know, and much less publicized, is the fact that the Jews are likewise the promoters of the United Nations.
Whatever the apparent differences between these two Jewish projects, the U. N. and Communism (and the differences are only apparent), one similarity is overwhelmingly evident. Both the U. N. and Communism are means to the establishment of a central and absolute world control — which control is precisely what the Jews want.
For twenty centuries the Jewish nation has toiled to destroy in the world the Kingship of Jesus Christ. And to seal this destruction, the Jews have plotted a world Jewish empire, dominating all the nations of the earth, so that the message of Christ the King will be forever stifled.
To this silencing of Christian apostles, all Jews are urged in their prime source of religious counsel, the Talmud. And, concerning this Jewish determination, Saint Paul warns in his First Epistle to the Thessalonians, Chapter 2: “The Jews, who both killed the Lord Jesus, and the prophets, and have persecuted us, and please not God, and are adversaries to all men; prohibiting us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved.”
The Obstacle
In order to make the U. N. work for their purpose, the Jews knew from the start that the United States of America would be a chief obstacle. America’s traditional wariness of foreign entanglements (which accounted for the failure of the old League of Nations) would have to be eliminated. And there was a deeper reason for concentrating on America.
When the smoke of World War II cleared away, the Jews rejoiced to see how much they had accomplished in their ancient battle against Christ and His Church. In all of the leading nations of the earth, the Catholic Faith had been tragically devitalized, or had disappeared entirely. In only one of the strong nations of the world was there any chance that the Faith might take hold of the people. America, with its 50,000 Catholic priests, its 150,000 nuns, and its abundance of Catholic churches and schools, needed only the spark of a few zealous apostles to be set ablaze with Catholic belief. If the U. N. Jews were to bring America into line, they would have to work quickly. And they did.
Selling the U. S. the U. N.
One of the surest ways of getting the U. S. into the U. N. was to get the U. N. into America. The Jews realized that it would be difficult for America suddenly to pull out of the U. N. once the organization was firmly established on the banks of New York’s East River.
And quite as effectively, the Jews prepared the way for the U. N.’s “one world” idea by a long and concentrated indoctrination of the American people with purposeful Jewish slogans. Through all public media, Americans were told that everyone ought to be like everyone else, that nationality, race, and religion have no real significance and should be set aside for the sake of achieving what the Jews called “Brotherhood.” Thus, it happened that when the U. N. came into being, the American people were quite prepared to accept an organization that was nation-less, race-less, and creed-less. And the Jews turned their publicizing energies to an all-out, pro-U. N. campaign. Professor Mortimer Adler, noted Jewish intellectual, voiced the official Jewish line when he said, “We must do everything we can to abolish the United States. The only answer to the threat of atomic war is world government.” (Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct. 23, 1945).
Propaganda for the U. N. was an openly Jewish enterprise, and every Jew, whether officially attached to the U. N. or not, was on call to lend his propagandizing talents. A member of the American Jewish Committee was given by UNESCO the express job of developing a “nation-wide educational program” for promoting U. N. aims and principles. And supervising all phases of the effort to win America to the U. N. was the Jew, Benjamin Cohen, head of the United Nations Department of Public Information.
The Deception
The ultimate appeal in all this Jewish propaganda was that the U. N., and only the U. N., could guarantee peace to America. War-weary Americans, even those who were unmoved by the Jews’ earlier “Brotherhood” slogans, turned eagerly to the U. N., trusting that it was, as advertised, an organization “determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
After nine years of U. N. peace-promotion, however, during which billions of American dollars have been spent in arming the world, and tens of thousands of American boys have been wounded and killed on foreign battlefields, the American people are coming to realize that they have been the victims of a colossal deceit.
The true nature of this deceit is yet to be grasped by most Americans. For the U. N. is not, as might be supposed, a peace movement which failed. The U. N. is a sinister design for governing the day-to-day activities of the peoples of all nations. The U. N. is a world revolution.
The Threat
Peacefully, without firing a shot, the U. N. is now poised to accomplish the ancient Talmudic purposes of the Jewish nation: the crushing of the Catholic Church and the establishment of a central Jewish world control. Although the real intent of the U. N. has been most deliberately hidden, Americans are becoming daily more alerted to this intent and to the peril which threatens their country.
Even more urgent, however, is the necessity that American Catholics be made aware of all that will befall their Church, if the U. N. plot is successful. To its readers, therefore, The Point offers a summary of what the U. N. intends for them — as Americans and, more intimately, as Catholics.
The U. N. Versus Americans
The only way for the U. N. to conduct a bloodless revolution in America is to get the American Government to consent, somehow, to its own destruction. By taking advantage of a vulnerable clause in our Constitution, the Jews have found a way of obtaining such consent, through the instrumentality of U. N. Covenants. These are ordinances which would inflict upon America a whole new way of life, and which are proposed to our country under the guise of treaties.
The American Constitution contains the express provision that any treaty which is ratified by the United States Senate becomes a part of the internal law of the country. Indeed, it becomes, in effect, superior to the Constitution itself — so that rights guaranteed to Americans by their Constitution could be taken away from them by properly ratified treaties. And for a treaty to be ratified and become the law of the land, not even a quorum of voting Senators is necessary. All that is required is that two-thirds of the Senators present in the Senate Chamber, at any given time, vote in its favor. On June 13, 1952, for example, three treaties were ratified with only two Senators present in the Senate. Thus, if a U. N. Covenant-treaty were introduced on a quiet summer afternoon, when only three members were present in the Senate, it would require the assenting vote of only two of the Senators to impose upon the American people some major portion of the Jews’ unbloody revolution.
Here are some representative examples of what will happen if the U. N. Covenant-treaties — many of which are now pending before the U. S. Senate — should be ratified.
1. The Bill of Rights in our American Constitution will be supplanted by the U. N. Covenant of Human Rights. This means that our present unqualified guarantees of free speech, press, and assembly will be, according to the terms of the Covenant, “subject to certain penalties, liabilities, and restrictions.”
2. Judges in American courts will be forced to make their decisions in conformity with U. N.-dictated principles. A preview of this came in the recent Fuji case, when a California court overrode a state law on the grounds that it seemed to conflict with the United Nations Charter.
3. American citizens will be obliged to obey laws imposed upon them by the U. N. and, for violating these laws, will be liable to trial by international courts. By way of preparing the people for this situation, certain internationalists in our government have lately arranged that American troops stationed in foreign countries should be subject both to the laws of those countries and to legal prosecution in their courts.
4. All American gold resources will be taken over by a central monetary control. The U. N. has already demonstrated how generous it can be with the money of American taxpayers. Under the auspices of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association, U. S. currency plates, plus supplies of Treasury Department ink and paper, were handed over to the Russians, with no control over the amount of American-backed money which they could print. This project was the brain-child of the Treasury Department Jews, Harry Dexter White and Harold Glasser, and received the quiet blessing of Jewish UNRRA head, Herbert Lehman. 5. American soldiers will be part of an international military pool. They will be obliged to fight under the leadership of U. N. Generals, against whatever enemy the U. N. may designate, even if that enemy be the U. S. A.
6. The U. N. will reserve the right, under its “full employment” program, to tell a man what job he must work at, what wages he must receive, and in what part of what country he must find employment.
7. Under the U. N.’s World Health Program, there will be mandatory, standardized Government care for everyone suffering from “any morbid condition, whatever its cause, from birth to death.” This program of socialized medicine further provides for mass inoculations, the killing of incurables, and a system for “planned populations,” which will mean birth control in some areas, and baby-bonuses in others.
8. The U. N. will establish a universal and compulsory system of education designed to safeguard and perpetuate its own regime. By provision of the U. N. Charter, education shall “promote understanding … and further the activities of the United Nations.” Illustrative of what tone this mental regimentation will take was the announcement that the U. N.’s official history of the world was to be entrusted to the celebrated atheist, Julian Huxley.
Thus, by American adoption of U. N. Covenant-treaties, American citizens will become citizens of the world, and the Jews will have triumphed in their bloodless revolution.
The U. N. Versus Catholics
Just as the U. N. will require that America be stripped of her individuality and sovereignty, and permitted to keep only those political and cultural features which she might have in common with Communists and Zulus, so also will the U. N. demand that the Catholic Church be purged of her singular and intransigent doctrines and allowed only those basic expressions of religion which she might appear to share with Mohammedans and Holy Rollers. For, in the coming revolution, the religious effect of the U. N. Covenant-treaties will be to enforce, as rigid law, those “Brotherhood” slogans which the Jews have so widely propagated in our country.
No longer will the Jews merely suggest that “It makes no difference what a man believes.” They will insist that this is so, and establish proper penalties for any Catholic priest who, convinced that what a man believes makes all the difference in the world, is determined to convert his fellow Americans to the Catholic Faith.
“One religion is as good as another” will cease to be a glib, billboard sentiment. It will become a stern, inflexible law. To administer this law, the Jews will have to suppress our parochial schools, not only because they teach that the Catholic Church is the only true one, but because by their very existence, they proclaim that the religion of a Catholic child is something so precious and unique that it justifies his being guarded and set apart from other children.
And for the legal enforcement of the Jews’ “tolerance” slogans, U. N. Covenant-treaties make clear provision that no religious utterances, ceremonies, or symbols shall discriminate against, or cause “mental harm” to, members of other religious groups. Already the Jews have indicated what they mean by this. Abundantly they have protested that Crucifixes, New Testaments, and public mentions of Jesus Christ are incitements to anti-semitism and slights to the Jewish community.
Here are two recent, frightening examples of how far the “one world” Jews intend to go:
1. They have filed an international protest against the traditional, Catholic Passion Play of Oberammergau, charging that it “leads to anti-semitism.”
2. They have succeeded in removing the white crosses which marked the graves of American war dead in the National Memorial Cemetery in Hawaii. Our Defense Department explained that this removal of Christian symbols was “a trend of the times.” The Jews’ bloodless revolution is imminent. They are about to do away with our nation and our Faith. And yet, to stay the onslaught, we need only alerted American Catholics, re-determined to convert their country to the cause of Christ the King, Who, in patient majesty, is waiting in the tabernacles of Catholic Churches all across our land. The Point – February 1955
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE JEWS
Traditional Policy Toward the Haters of Christ
Every day there are new reports of friendly relations between the Catholic and Jewish communities here in the United States.
In support of Brotherhood Week, Archbishop Cushing of Boston has been photographed holding hands with a local rabbi. His Excellency, as a further gesture of good-will to the Jews, made a thousand-dollar contribution to World Zionism … The noted Jewish propagandist, Dr. Mortimer Adler, has been listed as a guest speaker at every kind of Catholic meeting from a women’s bridge club to a seminary conference … Jewish converts to Catholicism have been widely publicized for their efforts to bridge the gap between Talmudic Judaism and the Catholic Faith … There have been several recent reports of joint Catholic-Jewish festivities to mark the Christmas-Hanukkah season … The Catholic Biblical Association has publicly thanked the American Jewish Committee for its “assistance in the preparation of material on Jews and Judaism” for use in American Catholic schools … The National Conference of Christians and Jews has intensified its activities, with many presentations of awards to Catholic and Jewish members for their promotion of “inter-group harmony” … From Chicago have come news-stories of a series of lectures given there to Catholic teaching nuns by Mr. Hans Adler, prominent Jewish Mason of the B’nai B’rith Lodge … And also from Chicago there have been lengthy accounts of the pro-Semitism of His Excellency, Bishop Bernard J. Sheil. It was he who established the $50,000 scholarship fund to send Catholic boys to study at Brandeis, America’s new Jewish university. Bishop Sheil has likewise received newspaper acclaim for his participation in Jewish religious festivals in Chicago and for his appearance as an honorary pallbearer at the funeral of the late Rabbi Goldman.
Reports like these faithfully reflect the attitude of American Catholics toward the Jews. And though few would dare to challenge or question this attitude, or submit it to any kind of examination, the incontestable fact is that this attitude is flagrantly un-Catholic. It is a shrieking contradiction of all that the Church has ever taught, counseled, or decreed in the mater of Catholic dealings with the Jews.
One of the most ancient and basic principles of traditional, normal Christian society has been violated and cast aside. For nineteen centuries it has been the Catholic Church’s constant and deliberate policy to keep leashed, muzzled, and set apart, that people which she has universally taught is a cursed race — cursed for its crucifixion and rejection of Jesus Christ. Throughout the Christian ages, the Popes, the Saints, and all Catholics in civil authority, have taken upon themselves, as one of the necessary burdens of Catholic allegiance, the responsibility of holding back the Jew — of keeping him well distinguished from the rest of the community, with no opportunity to carry out the treacheries he was planning against the Church of Christ.
For anyone who may be doubtful as to the Church’s authentic and unswerving attitude toward the Jewish people, we are presenting the following itemization, taken from the decrees and practices of the Popes, Bishops, Saints, Councils, and civil rulers of our glorious Catholic history.
1. His Holiness, Pope Alexander III, in his decree forbidding Catholics to work for Jewish employers, made the following summary statement of the dangers of Catholic-Jewish intermingling: “Our ways of life and those of the Jews are utterly different, and Jews will easily pervert the souls of simple folk to their superstitions and unbelief if such folk are living in continual and intimate converse with them.”
2. The Church’s Council of Elvira, held in Spain early in the fourth century, passed several censures aimed at the Jews, including an absolute prohibition against marriage with them (Canon 16), and a decree against all close association with them (Canon 50).
3. Christians were at all times prohibited from praying for the salvation of Jews who had died unconverted. Saint Gregory the Great, who was Pope from 590 to 604, wrote in this regard, “We can no more pray for a deceased infidel than we can for the devil, since they are condemned to the same eternal and irrevocable damnation.”
4. One of the most successful means for segregating the Jews was found in the institution of the ghettos. These were not formally ordered by the Papacy until the sixteenth century, though they had been adopted earlier in many Catholic localities. In Spain, for example, the Castilian Ghetto Edict was passed in the year 1412.
5. Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) warned Christians against the perfidy of the Jews in his decree, Etsi Judaeos. His Holiness wrote, “They repay their hosts, as the proverb says, after the fashion of the rat hidden in the sack, or the snake in the bosom, or the burning brand in one’s lap.”
6. There were general laws, enforced throughout Christendom, which prevented any Jew from appearing in public during the forenoon of Sundays, during all feastdays, and during the entire Easter Season. Such laws were revived in Poland by the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century. This Society, founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in 1534, long ago set down in its requirements for admission that Jewish lineage in an applicant is to be considered an impediment.
7. Just one hundred years ago in Italy, in the much-publicized Mortara case, the Holy See reaffirmed that ancient segregation principle. “Any Jewish baby that is discovered to be baptized must be taken from his unbaptized Jewish parents and brought up in a Catholic family.”
8. Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori (1696-1787), the founder of the Redemptorist Order, states explicitly in the section De Judaismo of his classic work, Theologia Moralis, that it is a mortal sin for a Catholic to mix socially with Jews, to go to their doctors, to work for them, to allow them to hold public offices, or to attend any of their festivals, weddings or synagogue meetings.
9. The Church has repeatedly legislated against the printing and distribution of the Jewish Talmud. In the year 1264, Pope Clement IV issued a bull ordering the confiscation and burning of all copies of the Talmud. A similar edict was promulgated by Pope Benedict XIII in the year 1415. Many other Popes have lashed out against the book, including Paul IV, Gregory IX, and Innocent IV, who condemned the Talmud as “containing every kind of vileness and blasphemy against Christian truth.”
10. Popes Gregory IX and Nicholas III, and the ecclesiastical synods of Breslau and Vienna, issued warnings that it is “incompatible with Christian practice” to allow the building of Jewish synagogues in Christian localities.
11. The famous papal decree of the Middle Ages, Cum Sit Nimis, reads in part, “We forbid the giving of public appointments to Jews because they profit by the opportunities thus afforded them to show themselves bitterly hostile to Christians.”
12. Jews were customarily taxed in all Catholic kingdoms. In Portugal, for example, there was a traditional tax, levied with the approval of the Bishops, whereby all Jews were required to pay an annual fee of thirty pieces of silver, “to remind them of their relation to the traitorous Judas.”
13. In the ninth century, the Bishops of the Council of Lyons protested the “weakness” of Charlemagne’s son who had advocated that certain privileges granted only to Christian citizens should be extended to the Jews in his kingdom.
14. Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic Church’s honored theologian, in his instruction, De Regimine Judaeorum, gives the following principle to Christian rulers who have Jews among their subjects: “Jews, in consequence of their sin, are or were destined to perpetual slavery; so that sovereigns of states may treat their goods as their own property; with the sole proviso that they do not deprive them of all that is necessary to sustain life.”
15. The following general ordinances were enforced throughout Christendom, in order to guarantee that intercourse between Christians and Jews be kept at an absolute minimum: Jews were denied citizenship. They were forbidden to serve in the army, possess weapons, and attend the universities. They were excluded from public baths while Christians were there and were forbidden to frequent public pleasure places. Jews were never to give testimony as witnesses in court, and they were denied membership in all trade corporations and guilds of artisans.
16. By official decree, His Holiness, Pope Innocent III (1198-1216), extended to the whole Church the practice, then common in so many areas, of requiring the Jews to wear some distinctive dress so that Christians might easily recognize and avoid them. Catholic rulers everywhere adopted the custom. It was put into effect in Hungary, for example, in the year 1222 by King Andrew II. And the Catholic Empress Maria Theresa of Austria required in the eighteenth century that any Jew who did not wear a conspicuous beard must pin a large yellow badge on the left sleeve of his outer garment.
17. Pope Innocent IV (1243-1254) issued in his own hand the following directive to the King of France: “We who long with all our heart for the salvation of souls, grant you full authority by these present letters to banish the Jews, either in your own person or through the agency of others, especially since, as we have been informed, they do not abide by the regulations drawn up for them by this Holy See.”
18. Banishment of the Jews is a remedy which Catholic rulers have always hesitated to use. Yet, at some time, and often more than once, every Catholic state in Europe has been forced to ask all Jews within its borders to leave. Here are a few examples: The Jews were expelled from Spain, by order of the Spanish Bishops, in the seventh century, and they were again expelled by the Spanish rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492. From France they were expelled in 1182, again in 1306, again in 1394 and again, from southern France, in 1682. In accordance with a decree of Pope Leo VII, the Jews were exiled from Germany in the tenth century; they were again expelled in the eleventh century, and once again in the year 1349. They were made to leave Hungary twice in 1360 and again in 1582. From England, they were expelled in the year 1290. From Belgium, in 1370. From Austria, in 1420 and again in 1670. From Lithuania, in 1495. From Portugal, in 1498. From Prussia, in 1510. From the Kingdom of Naples, in 1540. From Bavaria, in 1551. From the Genoese Republic, in 1567. And from the Papal States, the Pope’s personal domains, the Jews were expelled in 1569 and, once again, in 1593. 19. It was to combat the perfidy of Jews who were pretending to be Catholics that the famous tribunal of the Inquisition was established by the Church. Every year on the seventeenth day of September Catholics still honor this glorious institution by celebrating the feast of Saint Peter Arbues, the first Chief Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, who was martyred by the Jews for performing the duties of his office.
20. Other Saints who are especially remembered by the Church for their part in holding back the Jews include: Saint Thomas of Hereford, who was instrumental in having them exiled from England; Saint Henry II, King of Germany, who expelled them from his domains; Saint Louis IX, King of France, who did the same; Saint Cyril of Alexandria, who, upon becoming Bishop of that city, forced all the Jews to leave; Saint Pius V, who required that all Jews in Rome wear bright-colored hats to set them apart from Christians; Saint Virgilius of Arles, whose legislations against the Jews were adopted throughout most of the dioceses of France; and Saint Ambrose of Milan, who severely reprimanded the Emperor for rebuilding a Jewish synagogue which his soldiers had destroyed. Three of our Catholic Saints — Saint Vincent Ferrer, Saint John Capistrano, and Blessed Bernardine of Feltre — have been especially distinguished for their work in protecting the Church from the Jews. The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia (New York, 1944) has included these three Saints in its summary list of the fifteen greatest “anti-semites” of all time!
Universally, throughout the Christian ages, on both the civil and ecclesiastical levels, the Jews were a constant preoccupation to those whose desire and whose duty it was to protect the Church of Christ. This Catholic vigilance grew out of the Church’s repeated warning that the Jews are a cursed race, whose very presence is a fearsome thing in Christian society.
That the traditional Catholic attitude toward the Jews, and the vigilance which stems from it, should now be abandoned in America, is cause for grave concern. But there is this encouragement: the principle which guided the Church in all her decrees against the Jews is still being presented as authentic Catholic teaching in America’s Catholic schools. On page 209 of the standard Bible History written by the late Bishop Richard Gilmore of Cleveland, published by Benziger Brothers, and used by parochial schools throughout the country, American Catholic children are still being taught:
“For 1800 years has the blood of Christ been upon the Jews. Driven from Judea — without country, without home — strangers amongst strangers — hated, yet feared — have they wandered from nation to nation bearing with them the visible signs of God’s curse. Like Cain marked with a mysterious sign, they shall continue to wander till the end of the world.” The Point – March 1955
MORE NEWS ABOUT JEWS AND OTHERS
Some Current Threats to Our Faith and Country
Last month The Point observed its third birthday, and, standing back to take a good look at ourselves, we resolved that our next issue should pay tribute to that invention of ours which has served us so faithfully these many months, that most obliging of literary forms, the Pointer. It was not long ago that a subscriber from Notre Dame, a chemist by vocation, wrote to us that our Pointers column never failed to stagger him. “My mind fairly quakes” he said, “at the thought of what forces of energy are required to compress so much venom into so few words.” At the risk of irreparable mental harm to our quivering correspondent, we are printing this month an entire issue of Pointers, which, by our own definition, are: individual items of brief length, single message and evident meaning, designed for use as weapons in that ancient Christian enterprise of “fighting the good fight and keeping the Faith.”
The Vatican has caused a healthy furor by its recent demand that Catholics in England withdraw immediately from the Council of Christians and Jews. It is to the credit of English Catholics that they have withdrawn, albeit under protest. And it was with sympathy that we read the statement of one Catholic leader in England who, while agreeing to leave the Council, boldly pointed a finger at the U. S. A., and inquired of the Vatican, “But what about them?”
The Holy See has been notably silent on America’s National Conference of Christians and Jews, a counterpart of the Council of Christians and Jews of England. Thus far, Rome has not explicitly demanded that American Catholics get out of the N.C.C.J. Vatican delay in this regard is not edifying, but it is a bit understandable. Back in 1951, when the Vatican ordered all Catholic priests to get out of Rotary Clubs, and “advised” laymen to do the same, Church authorities in this country (“the most Rotary Club nation on earth”) conspicuously ignored the order. In withholding its ban against America’s National Conference of Christians and Jews, Rome perhaps wants to spare itself the embarrassment of once again being snubbed by the American hierarchy.
In the eyes of compromising Catholics, The Point ’s irremissible sin has been to assume that when Our Holy Father the Pope defines something infallibly, he means what he says. We insist, for example, that the following three popes, in the three following definitions, have said exactly what they mean to say, and mean exactly what they have said.
Pope Innocent Ill, at the Fourth Lateran Ecumenical Council, in the year 1215, speaking infallibly, “There is only one universal Church of the faithful and outside of it none at all can be saved.”
Pope Boniface VIII, in his bull, Unam Sanctam, dated 1302, speaking infallibly, “We declare, say, define and pronounce that it is wholly necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”
Pope Eugene IV, in his bull Cantate Domino, dated 1441, speaking infallibly, “The Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes and teaches that none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life eternal; but that they will go into eternal fire, ‘which was prepared for the devil and his angels,’ unless before death they are joined with Her; and that so important is the unity of this ecclesiastical body that only those remaining within this unity can profit by the Sacraments of the Church unto salvation, and they alone can receive an eternal recompense for their fasts, their almsgiving, their other works of Christian piety, and the duties of a Christian soldier. No one, let his almsgiving be as great as it may, no one, even if he pour out his blood for the name of Christ, can be saved, unless he remain within the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church.” The Archdiocese of Boston has a new Auxiliary Bishop, Most Reverend Jeremiah Minihan, and he was lately honored by Boston’s Jewish community at a much-publicized reception in Temple Ohabei Shalom. We have every reason to predict that this is but the beginning of a long and intimate association. Those close to Bishop Minihan have even hinted that His Excellency would like to do for the Jews of Boston what his senior in the episcopacy, Bishop Bernard Sheil, has done for the Jews of Chicago. If our new Auxiliary has indeed set himself such a goal, may we respectfully remind him of the enormity of the task which lies ahead.
To begin with, Bishop Sheil of Chicago has been willing to devote his full time to the Jews. Will Bishop Minihan be that attentive? Boston’s sensitive Jewish community will be quick to detect any half-heartedness on the new Bishop’s part. Further, Bishop Sheil has a familiar knowledge of Jewish religious ritual and synagogue procedure. He has high-level connections with world Jewry. Henry Morgenthau made him an official government “consultant.” Chaim Weizmann, Felix Frankfurter, Stephen Wise, and Harry Dexter White have been his close friends. Has Boston’s new Auxiliary Bishop, for all his good will toward the Jews, such qualifications as these?
And beyond these considerations, Bishop Minihan has the added handicap of living in a city whose Catholic traditions in the matter of Jews are much more rigid than those of Chicago. Bishop Sheil, for example, could get away with being the honorary pallbearer at the funeral of a Chicago rabbi who publicly called Jesus Christ an illegitimate child “forced to look to Heaven for a Father.” But will the Catholics of Boston allow Bishop Miniban to go that far in his program of kindness to the Jews?
Pedro Cardinal Segura, Archbishop of Seville in Spain, has long been a favorite target for the sneers and smears of the American press. This has been the fruit of his stubborn Catholicity — a quality indicated in a letter written by Cardinal Segura early this year to a friend of ours, a concerned American Catholic mother. It concludes thus:
“What you tell me about that priest being condemned for defending the Dogma of the Faith, that ‘outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation,’ is very strange indeed, since that has always been taught in the Catholic Schools and the most authoritative Catholic theologians of the past hold the very same thing.“I am deeply grateful for the cards of Our Lady you sent me, and very affectionately I bless you … ”
The letter is signed, simply, “The Cardinal.” And for the beleaguered Catholics of Seville, we pray that the fury of American Masons and Jews will not prevail, and that Pedro Segura will remain, in the fullness of his authority, “The Cardinal.”
It is not without cause that the Jews of America are still bewailing the rise and rule of Adolph Hitler. The late German dictator played upon the Jews a most malicious trick. Right from under their noses, Hitler stole the Jews’ we-have-been-chosen-to-rule-the-world ideology and applied it to the Aryan Germans, who took it up with remarkable gusto, and with tragic results.
Yet, to Hitler, the Jews of America are indebted for a particular phase of their super-race tactics which they had never before fully developed. Hitler’s effectiveness was in large part due to his maintenance of an undercover police force, the dreaded Gestapo. Sensing the value of such an organization, American Jews determined to expand one of their already existing agencies, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, giving it all the force of Hitler’s secret police.
This expansion began in 1941, when the Anti-Defamation League’s annual budget of $125,000 was increased to $800,000. With additional budget boosts in the years that followed, the ADL now supports a network of more than 2,000 active agents, who carry out, in every major American community, the League’s nervous program of snooping and intimidation. The ADL keeps dossiers on tens of thousands of American citizens, and the present extent of its Gestapo activities may be judged by the following alarming discovery: Over the coming twelve-month period, the ADL will have at its disposal a sum which is nearly twice the amount allotted to the U. S. Government’s F.B.I. during an average peacetime year. Harvard University managed to survive and thrive from the year 1636 until our own day, mainly by taking care that, no matter what fashions or fads it observed on the surface, it was always guided ultimately by a set of shrewd Yankee maxims. Among these, none was so carefully heeded as a salutary admonition to guard against the encroachments of the Jews (“Who would keep his place, should beware of that race”). Accordingly, Harvard ordained a policy, and quietly but effectively carried it out, of admitting each year only as many of this rapacious people as could be kept well under control.
Today, however, such restrictions are no more. Because the Jews realized they were not wanted at Harvard, they determined to force themselves in. With threats of bad publicity and legal prosecution, they kept hammering at the university’s locked doors, and eventually battered them down.
What few vestiges still remain of pre-Hebrew Harvard are steadily disappearing. For despite the Jewish students’ sporting of white shoes and gray flannels (by way of going “Ivy League”), their racial characteristics have remained firmly intact. Harvard, on the other hand, has undergone a most thorough and amazing transformation. In a recent article on religion among the students, the Harvard Crimson, the university’s undergraduate daily, remarked that “today Harvard is Episcopalian and Jewish run.”
That such a statement can now be publicly made is probably the most striking evidence of the Jews’ achievement. As for the Episcopalians: to be thus yoked to the despised invaders of their household is a fitting fate for these tea-sippers, who long ago renounced the Vicar of Christ, and decided that their own resources would be quite sufficient for coping with the affairs of God and man.
To American newspaper-readers, flashy young Roy Cohn seemed to be a rare find. Here, at long last, was a Jew who was not true to type. While openly professing his Jewishness, Cohn was, apparently, a fervent anti- communist, a loyal and devoted American, a server of other causes than the single one of fostering and promoting Jewry. Cohn’s record, said his enthusiastic admirers, was clear and impeccable. Nor, they pointed out, was there any difficulty in examining that record. For even the Jewish press, which had gone so hard on Senator McCarthy himself, seemed to sense Roy’s worth, and had given his speeches full and friendly coverage.
Lately, however, there has come some disquieting news for those who had thought slick-haired Roy Cohn was “not like other Jews.” Is seems he belonged to something called the American Jewish League Against Communism, and it was at the urgent recommendation of this group that he had been forced on the McCarthy Committee. The purpose of AJLAC is to present an array of prominent Jews (Rabbi Benjamin Schultz, columnist George Sokolsky, et al.) who are “violently anti-communist.” It hopes thereby to dislodge the notion, now looming large in Gentile minds, that Communism is a Jewish movement; for it was this notion, and not Communism itself, that the AJLAC was established to destroy.
But the most startling revelation concerning the AJLAC, and member Roy Cohn, was the news that a certain powerful and sinister old man is its guiding spirit and financial mainstay. This hoary Jew has long been recognized as the prime mover in the United States — if not in the world — for extending Jewish domination. It is also known that whatever cause he may support, he does so ultimately for the attainment of this end. Thus, not many years ago, in Spain, he was supporting and financing the notoriously Communist-controlled Abraham Lincoln Brigade. His name: Bernard Baruch.
The letters POAU are the identifying initials of an organization which calls itself, “Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.” The “Church” referred to in this title is, of course, the Catholic Church. And the group indefinitely lumped together as “Other Americans” is, we are not surprised to learn, the Jews.
One of the principal pushers of POAU’s anti-Catholic program is the high- strung and aggressive American Jewish Congress. In charge of POAU’s written propaganda department is a descendent of Talmudic rabbis, whose name is Lichtenstein. From top to bottom, the POAU set-up is a faithful reflection of the tactics of the Jews in their ancient assault on the Church of Christ. Since the times of the earliest heresies, through the successive attacks of the Arians, the Mohammedans, the Schismatic Greeks, the Albigensians, the Lutherans, and the Freemasons, the part played by Jews is clear and consistent. The Jews will encourage, finance, sharpen the pencils and empty the wastebaskets for any Gentile movement which shows promise of doing damage to the Catholic Church.
The Point is confident, however, that the Jewish impetus behind Protestantism — the drive to promote an heretical, divided Christianity — may one day, soon, boomerang and be the Jews’ undoing. American Protestants are coming to see that the refuge and the restorative for their crippled Christian nation, and their vanished Christian culture, does not lie in a revival of the Jew-encouraged “protestings” of the so-called Reformation. Is takes little deliberation to conclude that the way to dislodge the Jews is not by rallying to a movement which was, at its very Outset, engineered by them.
The Catholic Church (traditional restrainer of the Jews, establisher of the ghettos and the glorious Inquisition) alone has the answer that American Protestants are seeking. And at the conclusion of this search of theirs, there awaits, paradoxically, a Jewish Maiden despised by the Jews, the Blessed Mother of God, to whose Holy and Immaculate Conception this should-be Christian nation was long ago dedicated. The Point – April 1955
THE HOLY LAND AND THE JEWS
“That land in which the light of truth first shone, where the Son of God, in human guise, deigned to walk as man among men, where the Lord taught and suffered, died and rose again, where the work of man’s redemption was consummated — this land, consecrated by so many holy memories, has passed into the hands of the impious!”
Blessed Pope Urban II spoke these words in the year 1095 and, by the time he had finished speaking, all of Europe was rallying to do battle with the Turk. Christian knights hailed the Pope’s resounding order: “Mark out a path all the way to the Holy Sepulchre and snatch the Holy Land from that abominable people.”
This month, with Urban II and the Crusades nearly nine centuries behind us, Catholics will be asked to recall once again those sacred Palestine places where Jesus spent His Holy Week of suffering and death, and triumphed on His Easter Sunday morning. But this time there will be no talk of “snatching” the Holy Land. Indeed, we have been quite content, of late, to settle back and watch someone else grab it up. Nor have we been even slightly jarred from our lethargy by the fact that the Holy Land’s new occupants make Pope Urban’s “abominable” Mohammedans almost bearable by contrast.
That the state of Israel is now a reality, that the Holy Land has fallen into the hands of the Jews, that the crucifiers of Christ have been restored with honor to the scene of their crime, should be provocation enough for all of Christendom to descend in battle array and obliterate the cursed invaders. But nothing happens. In fact, this tragic betrayal of the Holy Places has been allowed to develop far beyond the mere physical presence of Jews in Palestine. For every day it is becoming clearer just what the Jews have done, and will continue to do, to Catholic churches, shrines, schools, hospitals, seminaries, and even the Catholic faithful, in the land which they have usurped. We know that there will be no twentieth-century Crusade, for we know that Christendom has all but died. Still, we are heartened by those few Catholic voices who have made protest: the half-dozen bishops, the handful of priests, and the one courageous Franciscan brother. From the documented, on-the-scene reports which these men have made (and which have been so notably ignored by America’s Jewish-controlled press) The Point hopes to indicate, this Eastertime, just what has been going on in Our Lord’s Holy Land since His enemies took it over.
CHURCH OF THE DORMITION
On the slope of Mount Zion, not far from the site of the Last Supper, is a magnificent Romanesque rotunda called the Church of the Dormition (the “falling asleep”). And of all the shrines in Jerusalem, this one has always been especially, poignantly dear; for on this spot Our Blessed Lady spent her last years on earth, and here she died.
During the morning of May 18, 1948, Israeli troops, fighting to take Jerusalem from the Arabs, rushed upon the Church of the Dormition, crashed down the barricaded door, and entered in. The Benedictine monks in charge of the church were already aware of the Israelis’ reputation as despoilers of holy places, and they gathered in the sanctuary, hoping that their presence would serve to dampen Jewish ardor. Professing amusement at the monks’ concern, the Jewish officers assured them there was nothing to fear: they had not the slightest intention of using the Dormition for military purposes; they would merely like to be shown to the church’s towers, so as to observe Arab positions.
By sunset of that day, the Jews had set up artillery in the church, and were using it as their base of operations. After two weeks — during which they poured an incessant stream of mortar fire at the Arabs, and the Arabs answered in kind — the Israeli officers decided that the monks, “for their own safety,” should retire to another part of the city. Reluctantly, they allowed three monks to remain behind as custodians of the church.
Almost immediately, these three were informed that they could go out of their underground rooms only with the permission, and under the surveillance, of an armed guard. When the monks protested against such restrictions, and demanded the Jews withdraw from the church immediately, to prevent further damage, the Jewish officers calmly assured them they would depart as soon as practicable. Meantime, they were told, they could put their minds at rest: orders had been given to the soldiers to guard carefully property belonging to the church, particularly the sacred objects.
Suddenly, on July 15, two months after the Jews first entered the Dormition, the three monks who remained there were instructed by Israeli officers to leave at once. All money was taken from them, and when they asked to make a listing of items being left in the church, they were told they could not.
Shortly after the last monks moved out, the Church of the Dormition became a Jewish dance hall, where each night the young men and women of Hagannah, weary from the day’s fighting, met for recreation.
It was September before any priests were again able to enter the church. What they found when they looked inside stunned them. The statues, the pictures, the crucifixes, the altars, the whole interior, had been thoroughly, painstakingly desecrated and destroyed.
These priests issued a report for the Catholic press of all they had witnessed, “lest responsible persons be deceived by propaganda.” And their summary of what had happened to the cherished and once-beautiful shrine of the Mother of God, after four months of Jewish occupation, was the following stark announcement: “the Church of the Dormition is now a heap of rubble.”
Throughout the Holy Land, the remnants of churches, chapels, and shrines give eloquent testimony of the Jews’ vengeful, ferocious hatred of their rejected Messias. Among these remnants are the great Church of Saint Peter, at Tiberias; the Church of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, at Am Karim; the Church of the Beatitudes, at Capharnaum; the Church of Mensa Christi, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee; and in Jerusalem, close by the Church of the Dormition, the Cenacle — where, the night before He was betrayed into the hands of the Jews, Jesus, at the Last Supper, gave us His Body and Blood to be our Sacrifice, our Sacrament and our Food. CONVENT OF NOTRE DAME
Just outside the walled inner city of Jerusalem, at New Gate, there stands the Convent and Hospice of Notre Dame. This consecrated building was one of the first pieces of Church property seized by the new Israeli government. Jewish officials had determined that the structure was ideally suited for use as a barracks to house Israeli soldiers. The convent’s chapel became a kind of general recreation room for the new occupants and, when members of the Franciscan Commissariat of the Holy Land finally managed to visit the confiscated building, they found the chapel in total desecration. The chief objects for the hatred of the Jewish soldiers had been the large brass crucifixes used for Mass. A report issued from Jerusalem states that the representations of Our Lord’s Holy Body had been pried loose from all the crucifixes and that “the bare crosses were scattered about the chapel, covered with human excrement.”
This early-established policy toward religious houses continued with the Jewish seizure and desecration of the Sisters’ convent at Am Karim, the Franciscan convent at Tiberias, the Sisters’ residence at Capharnaum, the Salesian houses at Cremisan, the convent of the Sisters of Saint Ann at Haifa, the home of the Fathers of the Italian Institute at Capharnaum, the Patriarchal Seminary at Beit-Jala, and the Convent of Mary Reparatrix at Jerusalem, which was blasted by dynamite in the middle of the night while six Sisters were known to be still inside.
SCHOOL AT KATAMON
Shortly after the first Israeli troops arrived in the little town of Kasamon, near Jerusalem, some of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Sion, who conducted the English High School there, were looking out the school windows with their students. Suddenly they saw Israeli soldiers in the streets outside raise their rifles. Aghast, Sisters and students dropped to the floor. A moment later, the windows where they had been standing were spattered with bullet holes.
The Sister Superior’s anxious protests to the local Israeli commander were met with his unctuous assurances that no more such episodes would occur. Soon afterwards, a detachment of Jewish soldiers, looking for amusement, shot up the school bus.
Finally, after three harrowing months of trying to live in an area ruled by Jews, the Sisters sent their pupils home and closed the school. Before leaving for Jerusalem, they nailed a large Papal flag across the front door, as notice to the Israelis that this building belonged to the Catholic Church.
The next word the Sisters received from Katamon informed them that a band of soldiers, Israeli regulars, had broken into the school, defiled its sacred objects, and left it ruined.
“I wish to protest with all possible energy against this complete lack of honor,” wrote the Sister Superior to the government of Israel. “The commander of the area of Katamon gave me his word that nothing would be touched … I do not know when the pillage was committed, for I have not been in Katamon since May 3. However, it proves to me that your repeated promises are only empty words, which one cannot believe.”
Catholic authorities have estimated that the Jews have destroyed Church property in the Holy Land at the rate of more than two million dollars’ worth a year. To mention only French Catholic institutions, they have demolished four hospitals, sixteen dispensaries, two hospices, four seminaries, thirty-two schools and orphanages, seven retreat houses. And what the Jews have not destroyed outright they have gotten rid of in other ways. Thus, they have commandeered the four principal Catholic schools in Jerusalem, turning them into a Jewish food control office, a Jewish refugee home, a Jewish hospital, and a barracks for Jewish soldiers.
So extensive is the damage inflicted by the Jews, that two American Franciscan priests, sent to Jerusalem as official Catholic observers, reported, “There seems to be an over-all plan gradually to replace Catholic institutions.”
THE REFUGEES As part of a program to find “accommodations” for its influx of Jewish colonizers, the government of Israel has managed to bring about the dismemberment and evacuation of all Catholic regions in the Holy Land. Before the formation of the Israeli state, Palestine was in no sense a Christian-populated country. And yet, because the chief targets for Jewish aggression have been so consistently the Catholic towns and villages, nearly twenty per cent of the Arabs kicked out of their ancient homes have been Christians.
To date, close to a million Arab refugees have been stripped of everything they possess by way of home, land, savings, business, and, often, even family. Reports from Catholics in Lebanon, just north of the Holy Land, tell of dusty roads choked with the exodus of Galilee Arabs, mothers with breast-fed babies, orphaned children, dazed fathers, many of whom were carrying cherished crucifixes and other holy objects which, at great risk, they had rescued from Jewish desecration as they left their looted homes.
A communique from Brother Anthony Bruya, O. F. M., on the plight of the town of Rameh, bears vivid witness to the special hatred which has been shown to Catholics in the Holy Land. Israeli forces occupied Rameh, a two- thirds Christian community, and while permitting the Mohammedan Arabs to stay, ordered all Catholics to “leave within half an hour.” To back up the order, the Israeli commander reminded the Christian townspeople of what had happened to the residents of Deir Assin and Tireh — who were massacred in the streets for daring to question the authority of a Jewish army leader.
Similar atrocities have taken place in Haifa, Sheframr, Maslia, Tarshiha, and a hundred other places. But perhaps the most touching and tragic report is the one dated January 15, 1952, in which Archbishop George Hakim of Galilee protested in vain to the Israeli government over the mass destruction of the totally Catholic village of Ikret. Church, schools, rectory, homes — everything was in shambles. And what is more, wrote the Archbishop, the Jews perpetrated all this on Christmas Day itself.
The assault on Ikret, like all the rest of Israel’s anti-Catholic outrages, was in no sense an “unavoidable casualty” of the recent Jewish-Arab warfare. All of the first-hand Catholic observers are quick to make this point. Indeed, in his summary report on the Holy Land situation, the Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Hughes, has very plainly charged that there is now in operation a “deliberate Jewish effort to decimate the Arabs and to destroy Christianity in Palestine.” The Point – May 1955
THE JEWS AND THEIR NEW UNIVERSITY
For the past seven years a new university has been asserting itself on the borders of Boston, Massachusetts. Its name is Brandeis; and, though situated in the most college-crammed area in the nation, this new one is already recognized as something quite out of the ordinary and worthy of special regard. It is, for instance, the only enterprise in existence calling itself a Liberal Arts college which offers just three high-school courses in Latin, three in Greek, and twenty-two courses in Hebrew.
Named for the late Jewish jurist who combined a mighty zeal for Zionism with his Supreme Court duties, Brandeis is the first “non-sectarian” college to be organized, owned, and operated by American Jewry. There are, of course, other universities which the Jews control, but they have got these only by arduous years of shoving and scrambling their way to the top; and they hold their places of power in the worried, anxious manner of usurpers whose underlings are plotting to overthrow them.
At Brandeis, it is different. There, the Jews can throw their weight around without restriction, and at the same time be as free from phobias as it is possible for Jews to be. For Brandeis is their handiwork and their domain — from its garish, glass-fronted classrooms down to the last kosher frankfurter in its dietary kitchen. It means to the Jews scholastically what the state of Israel means to them politically. No longer will their influence on American education have to be exerted by inhabitation and control of other peoples’ colleges. Now they have an abode, a rallying point, a center of operations — now they have a college of their own.
As with all peculiarly Jewish things, some aspects of Brandeis are farcically funny, others are terrifyingly grim. The first derive, in the present case, from the Jews’ frantic efforts to build a successful university, and the inevitable frustration of those efforts by the habits and traits ingrained in their race. The initial, most vivid evidence of this clash appears with the Jews’ maneuverings to lure Christian students to Brandeis. For, it should be noted, the college authorities would rather not have a preponderance of their own Semitic sort in attendance there. They do not want this promising project of theirs to come off in the American mind as just a slightly more assimilated version of the Hebrew National College. If Brandeis is going to bring other schools around to its way of thinking, quickly and painlessly, it must appear as one of them — solidly, reliably, indigenously American. And to have a student body that looks like the clientele of a Bronx delicatessen adds nothing to that illusion.
The rulers of the Brandeis roost have, accordingly, spared no effort, and very little expense, in order to surround themselves with bright, wholesome, un-Semitic faces. The Dean of Admissions estimates that at present 25 to 30 per cent of the total enrollment is composed of Gentiles (“Of course, we can’t be absolutely sure, because we don’t ask such questions”). A drive through the Brandeis campus, however, emphatically reveals this figure to be nothing but promotional propaganda.
The principal reason why, despite the attractive come-ons, most non-Jews have steered clear of Brandeis is a simple and compelling one: the place is plainly, overpoweringly, irremediably Jewish. To choose it as one’s college is comparable to choosing the beach at Tel Aviv as one’s vacation-spot.
With their fanatic, stupefying absorption in themselves, the Jews are either oblivious to how flagrant is the character of Brandeis, or else they hope gullible Gentiles will not notice it. For the college abounds in distinctively Jewish touches, like the reiterated, shrill insistence of the Brandeis catalog that “the University has no doctrinal slant”; and the listing in the same catalog, without explanation or apology, of the names of the Brandeis teaching Professors — all of whom, save one possible Swede, turn out to be Jews.
The Applauders
Since first opening its doors in 1948, Brandeis has been able to secure the support, monetary and otherwise, of a varied group of “patrons.” These, quite at random, include:
Joseph N. Proskauer, Brandeis Trustee and powerful leader in the American Jewish Committee, whose magazine, Commentary, highly approves of Brandeis, finds fault with other things. Sample: “The division of the divinity into ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ splits the divine essence; it was and is regarded by the synagogue quite simply as blasphemy.”
The Widow Roosevelt, the Gentile member of the Board of Trustees. To aging Mrs. R., Brandeis is yet another “fascinating group of young people.” Her previous groups have been notably ill-fated, most of them having ended up on the black-list of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Most Reverend Bernard Sheil, auxiliary bishop of Chicago, who gave Brandeis a $50,000 CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) scholarship fund. We are pleased to report, however, that as part of Bishop Sheil’s general demise (some call it silencing) this grant to Brandeis has now been “withdrawn.”
The Performers
Although they are reliable indicators of just which way Brandeis is heading, the foregoing peripheral people are not the ultimate formulators of Brandeis policy, and not the sustained indoctrinators of Brandeis students.
The university’s policy and doctrine were determined by its initial and deliberate employment of three men. With the selection of these three, Brandeis committed itself to an atmosphere which the current university catalog archly describes as the Brandeis “climate.” This localized inclemency can be best studied by making an appraisal, out in the open Christian air, of the trio who are responsible for it. Their names, in ascending importance, are Abram Sachar, Max Lerner, and Ludwig Lewisohn; and their respective contributions to the “climate” of Brandeis are herewith set in order.
Abram Sachar is the President of Brandeis, who came to the job after twenty successful years as chief agent for Jewish Masonry’s “Hillel House” program. A capable strategist, Dr. Sachar early saw the proselytizing possibilities of the Hillel movement, which is ostensibly a social, devotional, and loan-granting agency for Jewish students at secular universities. Thus it happened that in 1943, Dr. Sachar was prominently cited on “the impact he had made on Christian students … who had been influenced by his Hillel courses.”
This propensity for Judaizing young Gentiles was one of Dr. Sachar’s principal recommendations for the Brandeis presidency. The other was a repeated declaration, following necessarily from his Zionist loyalty, that America is not a “melting pot,” and that Jews must not only stick to being Jews, they must even rejoice in their Jewishness.
In order to attract Gentile students, for processing under his experienced direction, Dr. Sachar has allowed a Newman Club and a Student Christian Association to take their places beside Brandeis University’s lively Hillel chapter. Profoundly touched by the limitless opportunities thus afforded him, Dr. Sachar has resolved upon a rededication of himself to the spirit and ideals of that Rabbi Hillel for whom the Hillel movement was named — the rabbi who, until his death in 10 A.D., was head of the Jerusalem sanhedrin and who was, as such, the chief promoter of King Herod’s “slaughter of the Holy Innocents,” the first of the Jewish attempts to get rid of Jesus.
Max Lerner is Chairman of the Brandeis Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, a position for which he qualified by a career of banging out columns for papers like the Nation, New Republic, and PM. Not for an instant during his embattled years as a newspaperman did Lerner’s political complexion ever pale from its bright ruddy glow. Even during the exposures of A. Hiss and company, when mere parlor pinks were withdrawing into chastened silence, Lerner stood his ground defiantly, dismissed the trials as “a show for political neurotics by political neurotics.”
At Brandeis, Lerner has the students coming and going, teaching one course required of all freshmen, another required of all seniors. But what he teaches them is not entirely political. Besides the trick of having his own “independent opinions” always coincide with the twistings and turnings of the official Communist line, Lerner has another Jewish talent: It is his ability to spice his lectures with passing sneers at things Christian — for instance his disposal of Christmas as “the myth-laden version of the nativity of a child in the Middle East.”
Ludwig Lewisohn is Brandeis’ Jacob Kaplan Professor of Comparative Literature and, by far, its most articulate, prominent and sought-after personality. The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia ’s biographical account of Dr. Lewisohn summarizes his unique achievement by declaring that he has become “the symbol of Jews preoccupied with the problem of existence and not merely with the problem of living.”
The existence problem with which Dr. Lewisohn has been most preoccupied, of course, is the problem of the co-existence of Christianity and Judaism. After a lifetime of investigating the matter, Dr. Lewisohn has come to some pointed conclusions. Among them are these.
1) Jews must never try to imitate Christian standards, culture, or traditions.
2) Jews must be steadfastly themselves, and Judaize their Christian neighbors.
3) Jews owe it to the Western world to replace Christianity with a modern presentation of Hebraism.
To bolster these principles of action, Dr. Lewisohn has prepared for his disciples some dogmatic comments, samples of which follow.
On Jesus Christ: “A teacher neither original nor important.”
On the Catholic Church: “The militant and triumphant Church, an empire with prisons and engines of war, is even amid the grandeur of Saint Peter’s a thing that evokes in me both horror and disdain — horror at its long cruelties toward those whom it still calls “perfidious Jews,” though not to be sure toward them alone, disdain at that extreme of changeless superstition which has worn away by the kisses of innumerable pilgrims the brazen feet of the gigantic statue of the Church’s tutelary saint.”
On Catholic Marriage: “A metaphysical trap.” On Catholic love of the saints: “A happy devout polytheism.”
On the Crucifix: “That we crucified Christ is an old wives’ tale. For Christ is a myth.”
On Catholic Europe: “The history of Christendom is a history of warring sects and warring nations, of cruelty, of hatred, and of slaughter.”
On the marks of a Catholic culture: “Repression, cruelty, belligerent patriotism, darkness of mind, and corruption of heart.”
On Saint Paul: “Christian Rome hated and feared us because we could not follow the morbid Hellenizing of Paul of Tarsus nor endure the paganization of the religion he had unwittingly brought forth.”
From this summary of the three men who have made Brandeis (the one who is its president and the two who are its only notable teachers) there follows a single inevitable judgment about the university’s “climate.” It is neither, as some have claimed, a “new educational setting” nor a “novel atmosphere of learning.” It is not even a fleeting “intellectual experiment.” For what is going on at Brandeis is old. It has sprung, however awkward and unsteady, from a long, long tradition — that ubiquitous tradition which must answer for the Loyalists in Spain, the Marxists in Russia, the Carbonari in Italy, the Freemasons in France, the Illuminati in Germany; that unbroken tradition which reaches back nineteen hundred years to find its root and sustenance in a howling Jerusalem mob which cried, “His blood be upon us and upon our children!”
The Three Chapels
It is difficult to estimate just how much success Drs. Sachar, Lerner, and Lewisohn will enjoy in their bold undertaking. They are currently chuckling, however, over a victory which will be securely theirs in a very few weeks, if all goes as planned.
The ailing Archbishop of Boston, whether through ignorance (which would be culpable) or malice (which is hard to believe) has agreed to the dedication, this June, of a building which will be directly on the Brandeis campus and which will serve as a Catholic church. What is more, this proposed church will have for companions a Protestant meeting house and a Jewish synagogue — all three to be of equal capacity, and so designed that the passerby will be quite unable to tell which creed goes with which building.
In the ultimate scheme of Drs. Sachar, Lerner, and Lewisobn, the three chapels are only a beginning. But they are an eloquent one. Forcefully, in hard gray stone, these three buildings will testify that a Catholic Archbishop has been persuaded to place the One True Faith, the Mass, and the Holy Eucharist, on a par with heretical perversions and even with Jewish perfidy.
Anxiously, we ask the prayers of our readers that somehow, by some unforseeable intervention, this plan will be frustrated, and that our Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament will be spared the desecration of dwelling in sanctuary on the campus of Brandeis, as the tenant and the target of the Jews. The Point – June 1955
THE PLANS OF THE JEWS FOR WORLD CONTROL
When the Bishops of the United States met in council at Baltimore, in the year 1846, they placed our country under the patronage of the Mother of God, invoking her protection as the “Blessed Virgin Mary Conceived Without Sin.” These Bishops of a century ago had abundant reason to expect that America would some day become, in fact as well as in dedication, Our Blessed Lady’s land. And they made no secret of their intention.
Archbishop Hughes of New York declared, during a sermon delivered at his cathedral in 1850, “Everybody should know that we have as our mission to convert the world — including the inhabitants of the United States — the people of the cities and the people of the country, the officers of the Navy and the Marines, the commanders of the Army, the Legislators, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President, and all.”
Archbishop Hughes and his episcopal contemporaries were agreed that, if the conversion of America were not soon forthcoming, they might perhaps blame their own lack of zeal, or the Protestants’ lack of good will, but in no case could they complain of a lack of authorized, un-hampered opportunity. For at its very outset, the United States of America had provided that if men like Archbishop Hughes should come along, they must be left free to say what they have to say — free, that is, to go out and convince the whole nation that the Catholic Church is the only true one.
Thus far, 109 years after its dedication to Our Lady, the United States has not been notably convinced. That it still can be, and will be, is The Point ’s confident purpose. And to facilitate our designs upon the American people (to help us to help them become Children of Mary) we are anxious to keep that same missionizing privilege which Archbishop Hughes enjoyed in the days when America was a young assertive republic, jealous of its independence, sacrificing its sovereignty to no one. This, very briefly, is our self-interested motive in joining the current battle against the United Nations, an organization which demands the scrapping of our country’s sovereignty, the undermining of our Constitution, and the “ultimate halting of all sectarian proselytism,” a recently coined phrase, of Semitic origin, which means that once the U. N. fully takes over, Catholic priests will have to stop insisting to their neighbors that Baptism, the Blessed Sacrament, Our Lady, and the Pope are necessary salvational concerns.
Though the U. N. demands are Jewish ones, patently and exclusively of benefit to those of the Jewish community, promotion of the U. N. is not an end in itself to the Jews. It is a means of helping them to arrive at that “Messianic Age” which has now, in all Jewish anticipation, taken the place of a personal “Messias.” The Jews are no longer waiting for the birth of a Jewish Savior. They are sighing after and plotting for the day when the Jewish race will at last come into its own, lording it over the world from the new world-capital, Jerusalem. It is as an Instrument toward achieving this Zionistic goal that the Jews promote both the U. N. and its complementary international movement, Communism.
CHARTER REVISION
The founding of the United Nations was an objective sought in common by those two most agreeable of companions — those admitted Zionists — Premier Josef Stalin and President Franklin Roosevelt. It was this compatible pair who selected Stalin’s American lieutenant, Alger Hiss, to preside over the preliminary drafting of the U. N. Charter at Dumbarton Oaks, and to have charge of the Charter’s completion during the conference in San Francisco. At this latter meeting it was decided that by 1955 the Hiss Charter might need “revising” to make it stronger and more binding, and so provision was made for a future “Charter review conference.”
Accordingly, within a very few months, the U. N. will decide whether it should give the Charter more teeth. And this pending vote has revived, all over the nation, the pro and con U. N. arguments. On the side of Charter revision — aiming at just one federal government for the whole world — there can be found every Semitic organization in the land, from the Central Conference of American Rabbis to the National Council of Jewish Women. Opposed to a stronger Charter, and so any movement that will lead to the swallowing up of our country, are a growing number of patriotic groups (like the American Legion), religious groups (like the Diocese of Brooklyn’s International Catholic Truth Society), and political groups (like the numerous pushers of the Bricker Amendment).
Because the battle-lines are thus so clearly drawn, there is an immediate temptation to conclude that all we must do is defeat the strengthening of the U. N. Charter and everything will be fine — our national sovereignty and our individual rights will be secure. Unhappily, this is not the case. For without any deviation from its original wording, the U. N. Charter contains right now sufficient powers to scuttle us forever as a nation, to silence the message of the Christian Faith, and to see the Jews well along the road to their dream of world domination.
If Charter revision fails, the Jews will, therefore, continue their present, more roundabout, but no less deadly U. N. maneuverings — the variety and current extent of which are indicated by what follows.
GENOCIDE CONVENTION
There has been a lot of publicity given lately to a U. N. project called the Genocide Convention. Unless you are taken aside and instructed in the matter, this “convention” will logically come off in your mind as a gathering of delegates who are going all out for “genocide,” — whatever that is. Actually, in this particular, deliberately obscure, Jewish usage, “convention” means an international pact or agreement, and “genocide” (a word thought up just for the occasion by a Jew named Raphael Lemkin) means “race-killing.”
As this point, you imagine that you have it all straightened out: a Genocide Convention must be a race-killing agreement. But, no. A quick glance at the text of the Genocide Convention will establish that it is an anti-race-killing agreement. It is something therefore to stop the killing-off of a race. But once again you have not really grasped it, because the Genocide Convention does not prohibit just the killing of a man on account of his race, it forbids “any action,” or any “incitement” to any action, or any “complicity” in any action which will in any way cause a man of a particular race the least bit of anxiety or discomfort because of his race.
Finally, therefore, it becomes clear what the U. N.’s Genocide Convention is all about. It is an international pact, which the U. N. wants every nation to sign, saying that anyone who criticizes a Jew in public — in fact, anyone who calls a Jew, a Jew — will be guilty of Genocide and punishable by law.
And the Jews do not plan to use Genocide solely as a negative protection. They are counting on it as a positive weapon in their continual struggle against the Church. For by means of Genocide restrictions, the Jews will be able to get rid of much that is essential Christianity, on the score that it leads to, or is openly, “anti-semitism.” For example: Crucifixes, with their reminder to Christians that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ, will be done away with as “incitements” to Genocide. Classed as even more offensive will be the New Testament, which records such overt anti-semitic sentiments as those of Our Lord when He calls the Jews the children of the devil (Jn. 8:44), and of Saint Paul when he says about the Jews that they are not pleasing to God and are the enemies of all men (I Thess. 2:15).
If these seem to be remote eventualities, witness what the Jews are doing right now about such things. From the American Jewish Yearbook, Vol. 52, we learn that the Jews are presently worried about, “the need for revising certain elements of the Crucifixion story … The evangelists distorted the original Gospel account of the Crucifixion.” And from the University of British Columbia, in Canada, we learn how all the current Jewish lobbying against “discrimination” has lately been pushed to its fantastic but logical extreme. The University’s Newman Club, a religious and social group for Catholic students, was actually forced to suspend operations because of its “bigoted” policy of allowing membership to Catholics only!
U. N. AGENCIES
Besides belonging to the main body of the U. N., the United States is also enmeshed in a score of subsidiary U. N. agencies. Typical of these, and of the policies they advocate, is the International Labor Organization and its program to promote world-wide “health.”
Measures called for by this blatantly Talmudic program include “population planning” (a scheme whereby birth-control will be encouraged in some locales, fecundity rewarded in others); mass inoculations (shots for all, whether the people want them or not, whether the disease is prevalent or not, and whether the serum is harmful or not); the inducing of “painless death” in incurables and the aged; and a vast plan for conducting Jewish investigations and prescribing Jewish remedies, with a view to attaining a Jewish conception of “mental health.”
A characteristic U. N. queerness, arising from its Semitic background, is the fact that the International Labor Organization is pushing a plan for universal health, while the World Health Organization, another U. N. agency, is busying itself with financial affairs.
By a provision in its by-laws, to which our government is committed, the World Health Organization has the right to assess member-nations for whatever funds it may need. A recent exercise of this prerogative is reported in the Congressional Record for May 25, 1954.
At a plenary session of the World Health Organization in Geneva, delegates from the various nations decided that the United States had not been sufficiently generous in financing WHO activities during the preceding year; the delegates voted, therefore, that besides the nearly two million dollars our government had already contributed to the Organization, there would be an additional assessment on the U. S. of 350 thousand dollars.
Thus, as the fruit of our U. N. involvement, an international assembly now has the power to appropriate the money of American taxpayers — a power which the authors of our Constitution, in Gentile innocence, thought they had reserved to Congress.
KOREA There is no consequence of our participation in the United Nations which has touched America more intimately or more tragically than the U. N.- sponsored war in Korea. And, at the same time, there is no undertaking of the U. N. which more clearly illustrates how the two world forces fostered by international Jewry — the U. N and Communism — work in ultimate harmony.
Here is the significant story of the U. N.’s war in Korea.
Communist Russia could have vetoed U. N. military action against Communist Korea when that action was first proposed in the U. N. Security Council. Russia deliberately chose to withhold her veto. Russia wanted the U. N. to fight in Korea.
By an arrangement made shortly after the San Francisco Conference, the assistant secretary-general in charge of United Nations military affairs must always be a Soviet citizen. This post has been held successively by Arkady Sobolev, Konstantin Zinchenko, and Ilya Tchernychev. Thus, Russia was confident that the U. N.’s fight against Communists in Korea would be under the constant and watchful control of a Communist at U. N. headquarters in New York.
It was to Communist Arkady Sobolev that General Douglas MacArthur, the U. N. field commander in Korea, had to submit his plans for defeating the Korean Communists. General MacArthur was finally relieved of his post for consistently refusing to go full way with the suicidal course of action advocated by the U. N. in the Korean engagement.
Although government spokesmen, particularly our U. N. Ambassador, Mr. Lodge, have done their best to minimize the military control which was exercised by Sobolev, and his successor Zinchenko, none of them has attempted to explain why the Korean war was such a colossal defeat. Ostensibly, a fight between one remote corner of Asia and all of the free world, the Communist-run U. N. war in Korea resulted in:
1. the depletion and demoralization of the American Army, which provided nearly the entire U. N. fighting force in Korea. and which suffered 150,000 casualties, with 500 American prisoners still in foreign hands;2. the crippling of U. S. prestige by involving us in “the first war America ever lost”; and
3. the confirmation of all of Asia as prey for the forces of Communism.
To continue participating in the United Nations is the easiest course for Americans to follow. It requires no effort, no strength, and no thought. All that will be asked of us is that, sooner or later, we pay the established price — the devouring of our nation, the silencing of the Gospel, and the ultimate triumph of the Jews. The Point – July 1955
SHOULD HATE BE OUTLAWED?
Most Americans, hearing this question, would answer promptly, “Yes, by all means, hate should be outlawed!” Their eagerness to reply can be accounted for all too easily. During the last decade and a half, they have been pounded with a propaganda barrage calculated to leave them in a state of dazed affability toward the whole world. Those advertising techniques that are normally used to encourage Americans to be choosy in matters of soap and toothpaste are now being enlisted to persuade them that there is no such thing as a superior product in matters of culture and creed. On billboards, on bus and subway posters, in newspapers and magazines, through radio and television broadcasts, Americans are being assured and reassured, both subtly and boldly, that “Bigotry is fascism … Only Brotherhood can save our nation … We must be tolerant of all!”
The long-range effects of this campaign are even now evident. It is producing the “spineless citizen”: the man who has no cultural sensibilities; who is incapable of indignation; whose sole mental activity is merely an extension of what he reads in the newspaper or sees on the television screen; who faces moral disaster in his neighborhood, political disaster in his country, and an impending world catastrophe with a blank and smiling countenance. He has only understanding for the enemies of his country. He has nothing but kind sentiments for those who would destroy his home and family. He has an earnest sympathy for anyone who would obliterate his faith. He is universally tolerant. He is totally unprejudiced. If he has any principles, he keeps them well concealed, lest in advocating them he should seem to indicate that contrary principles might be inferior. He is, to the extent of his abilities, exactly like the next citizen, who, he trusts, is trying to be exactly like him: a faceless, characterless putty-man.
Along with everyone else, American Catholics have been hammered with the slogans of the “anti-hate” campaign. Additionally, they remember the stories of how prejudice against Catholics oftentimes made America a very uncomfortable place for their immigrant Catholic grandparents. And so, they too, if asked, would declare unhesitatingly that hate should be outlawed.
What American Catholics do not stop to reflect on is that the Catholic Faith, by its very nature, fosters indignation, intolerant positions, and strong utterance. The Church is set up to continue the divine ministry of Jesus Christ, Who avowed that He had come on Earth, “Not to send peace, but the sword … to cast fire on the Earth, and what will I but that it be kindled.”
In accepting their vocation to be “other Christs,” Catholics are faced with the countless examples of Gospel astringency. They are reminded that the same Jesus Who said, “Learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart,” likewise said, “I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in- law. And a man’s enemies shall be they of his own house-hold.” Nor can they forget that the same Jesus, Who submitted Himself to the Jewish mob in the garden of Gethsemani, had previously overturned the tables of the buyers and sellers and driven them from the temple with a whip.
In accepting their position as contemporary members of the Church, American Catholics must take as their heritage the outlooks, attitudes, and purposes of their older brothers and sisters in the Faith — those Catholics who have gone before them and have preserved the Church to our own day. For the Catholic Church is One. The Church that called on its sons to take up the Cross and the sword and drive the infidel from the Holy Land, the Church that isolated the Jews of Christendom with rigid laws and ghetto walls, the Church that has repeatedly condemned the doctrines of those who disagree with her, is the same Catholic Church that claims the loyalty of 35,000,000 twentieth-century Americans.
Along with the Mass, the Sacraments, and all the spiritual treasures that are a Catholic’s baptismal birthright, these American Catholics must also assume the rest of their legacy. As members of the Church Militant — raised by the Sacrament of Confirmation to be Soldiers of Jesus Christ — they are heirs of a tradition that has been marked through the centuries by sustained and unashamed militancy. Examples of the clash between traditional Catholic observance and the current “anti-hate” campaign could be multiplied indefinitely. Every chapter in every age of the Church’s history will provide them, because the ultimate issue involved is an abiding one, a doctrinal one. It is the Catholic Church’s uncompromising claim to be the One True Church established by God. It is this conviction of Catholics throughout the centuries that leaves our greatest heroes and saints and the very constitution of the Church itself open to the charges of bigotry and intolerance.
The Catholic Church does not believe that all religions are on a common plane. It does not subscribe to the popular notion that, “We’re all headed for the same place, you in your way and we in ours.” The Catholic Church believes that Christianity is the world’s only chance for salvation, and it further insists that true Christians are found only within its fold, under the Supreme Shepherd, the Vicar of Christ, Our Holy Father at Rome.
Inevitably, this belief, when translated into practical action, makes for some intolerant arrangements: Catholics are admonished not to marry heretics and Jews; they may not attend a non-Catholic religious service; Catholic children must be sent to the Church’s schools. The motive behind these bigoted practices is the preservation of the Faith — not as an antique curiosity, but as a vital necessity. And not as a necessity for a chosen few, but as a necessity for all men, everywhere.
It is this terrible urgency about the Faith that explains both the Church’s rigidity in matters of doctrine an her encompassing love in matters of apostolate. For the note of absolute necessity that attaches to Catholic Truth, and makes the Church so intolerant and unbending, is, at the same time, the push and the drive behind every apostle. It is precisely because they are intolerant enough to believe that all men need the Catholic Faith in order to be saved, that the Church’s missionaries, from the time of Saint Paul, have given the world its most heroic example of zealous, consuming, constant, sweating, bleeding, dying but undying, love.
It is this love, this apostolic fervor, that the “anti-hate” program means to eliminate. For the ultimate outcome of the propaganda barrage that is now incessantly pounding the nation will be not only a spineless American citizen, but a spineless American Catholicism — a Catholicism that will be afraid to assert its own singularity and importance, a Catholicism that will try to become more like its neighbor religions, doing nothing to annoy, nothing to criticize, nothing that would in any way cause it to be accused of intolerance, bigotry, or hate.
Certainly no one will suppose that the promoters of the “anti-hate” campaign are just a bunch of well-meaning meddlers who launched the thing in all innocence and who would be dismayed to hear that it might discomfit the Catholic Church. The truth of the matter is much to the contrary. Just as the fast-talking soap commercials play on the gullibility of American housewives to make money for the big soap manufacturers, so the anti-hate slogans are selling Americans a bill of goods that will make rich profits for the Catholic Church’s enterprising enemies.
This deliberate and calculated program is a lineal descendant of that eighteenth-century campaign that clamored for “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” and ended up by wrecking Catholic France. It is akin to all those freethinking, freely-named, anti-Catholic ventures that have been plaguing the Church since the time of the Protestant Revolt — Humanism, Jacobinism, Freemasonry, Liberalism, Secularism, Communism, etc. For however much these movements may differ from one another in the means they advocate, they are all working for the same ultimate end. They are intent on building the City of Man — to the inevitable detriment of the City of God. They are enraged against the Church because of her calm insistence that the one thing that really matters is eternal salvation, and that she is the one divinely-commissioned ark of salvation. They are determined to show that the Church is not that important: if not by destroying her violently, then by reducing her to the level of the sects.
It was this latter expedient that appealed to Jean Jacques Rousseau, herald of the French Revolution and avowed evangelist of the Brotherhood crowd. Rousseau maintained (in The Social Contract, Book IV) that the worship of God should be allowed to continue, provided it did not become an end in itself. Theology must not usurp the superior place of politics; the interests of religion must be subordinate to those of the state. Accordingly, he felt the civil power should decide what articles of belief citizens might hold. And among these articles, Rousseau urged just one prohibition: anyone daring to say, “There is no salvation outside the Church,” should be banished.
All the followers of Rousseau, in their various guises — as well as his like- minded antecedents — are the Courtiers of the Prince of this World. But there is one group among them that is particularly of the household of Satan. They are the children of Satan, as Our Lord Himself calls them, the Jews. They, pre-eminently, are fired by the earthly, anti-Christian animus; and they have taken an active part, during twenty centuries, in all its manifestations. (This alone can explain the Church’s unique attitude toward the Jews: her traditional determination that this one people must be kept in check.)
As surely and securely as the Jews have been behind Freemasonry, or Secularism, or Communism, they are behind the “anti-hate” drive. Not that this movement represents the fruition of Talmudic doctrine. The Jews are advocating tolerance only for its destructive value — destructive, that is, of the Catholic Church. On their part, they still keep alive their racial rancors and antipathies. Their Talmud, for example, still teaches that Christ was a brazen impostor, and gives an unprintably blasphemous account of his parentage and birth. And as the Christmas season just past should have taught us, the Jews, for all their Brotherhood talk, have not in the least abandoned their resolute program to make all acknowledgments of Christmas disappear from the public and social life of the nation.
The secret of the Jews’ success is, of course, that they can practice such private hate while promoting public “love,” and not be accused of inconsistency. For, as always, they are running the show mainly from behind the scenes. They get their message across by means of co-operative Gentiles. And there are probably more such Gentiles now available — both the willing kind and the kind willing to be duped — than ever before in history. As a further good fortune, the Jewish directors of America’s entertainment industry can now guarantee that one Brotherhood spokesman, well-placed (e.g., behind a microphone or before a television camera), is able to influence Americans by the millions. And the Jews’ campaign is succeeding. We have every reason to be alarmed at its success. American Catholics, even those not actively taking part in the tolerance talk, are now kept in line by the omnipresent threat of being accused of hate, bigotry, and intolerance.
In the face of a new year that will be the biggest one yet for the Brotherhood promoters, The Point pleads with American Catholics to realign themselves with the militant traditions of their grandfathers. No threat of “bigotry,” no accusation of “intolerance” should temper our zeal or silence our message. We must preserve our commission to “Go forth and teach all nations…;” to “Reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine.”
Unworthy as we are, we American Catholics must protect for ourselves the duty of naming God’s enemies and the privilege of carrying God’s revealed Truth to the people of our country, who, we pray, will hear it, with generosity and gratitude, and who will repeat that intolerant Profession of Faith which the Church requires of all new converts: “ … At the same time, I condemn and reprove all that the Church has condemned and reproved. This same Catholic Faith, outside of which nobody can be saved, which I now freely profess and to which I truly adhere, the same I promise and swear to maintain and profess, with the help of God, entire, inviolate and with firm constancy until the last breath of life; and I shall strive as far as possible that this same Faith shall be held, taught and publicly professed by all those who depend on me, and by those of whom I shall have charge.”
(from the Rituale Romanum, published in 1947 with the Imprimatur of the Cardinal Archbishop of New York.)
A Militant Example
A recent Vatican news release has stated that Saint Lawrence of Brindisi may soon be declared a Doctor of the universal Church. Should he receive that title, the Italian Franciscan, who died in 1619, would thus become the thirtieth saint whom the Church has especially singled out as a teacher of the Faith to all Catholics everywhere.
Born at Brindisi in 1559, Saint Lawrence early demonstrated the singular gifts that would make him a brilliant preacher. As a Capuchin friar, with a personal commission from Pope Clement VIII, the saint delivered vigorous sermons in the principal Italian ghettos, thus incurring a bitter resentment among the Jews that has persisted to this day.
For our age of cowering Catholics, Lawrence of Brindisi supplies a reproving example. Not only did he work tirelessly to challenge the perfidy of the Jews, but he brought back to the Faith many who had gone over to the Protestant Revolt, and, most spectacular of all, he led an army against the Turks. It was in Hungary, in the year 1601, that Saint Lawrence, armed with nothing more than his cowl and his Crucifix, led a Christian army, outnumbered four to one, to an astounding victory over the infidels. The Point – August 1955
SOME NEEDED INFORMATION ABOUT THE JEWS
I — IN BACK OF THE HEADLINES
By some happy providence of our seldom musical English language, there is an immediately detectable harmony in the words, “the Jews” and “the news.” For many years now this accidental rhyme has become an increasingly faithful reflection of a more and more solid alliance. For the Jews now have unquestioned control over the American public’s chief source of ideas — the news in the daily paper.
They have arrived at this control by a variety of means — shrewdly avoiding exploitation of any one. While it is true that they own and operate the most important single newspaper in the country, The New York Times, the day-to-day bible of American journalism — while it is true that they have so bought-out the newspapers in our nation’s capital that it is impossible for a congressman to pick up a Washington morning paper that is not published by a Jew — and while it is true that from Philadelphia to Los Angeles they are continuing to gain ownership of many of the big dailies, — still, outright editor-and-publisher control is not always necessary, or even prudent, for promoting the interests of the Jews.
The professional Jewish pressure groups in every large community have long become artists at suavely intimidating any too-emphatically-Gentile city editor. And even more persuasive are the “Main Street Jews” — the department, clothing, and specialty store owners who brandish the big stick of advertising revenue. It stands to reason that the unwary editor who tells the truth about the Jews will ultimately find himself excluded from the fabulous money hand-outs of the Jewish retail advertisers. Few papers can survive a boycott like this.
For those smaller American cities where there are still advertisement- buying Main Street businesses which are not in the hands of the Jews, and where the scant Jewish community is much less eloquent, the American Jewish Committee has come up with a special, necessarily more direct, plan. The newspapers in these places can be controlled on their policy pages, the editorial ones, by direct pipeline from the American Jewish Committee offices in New York. The Committee boasts (to its own members, not the general public) that it regularly provides 1700 small American newspapers with what it calls, “canned editorials.” These are ready-to-print commentaries on public issues which embody the complete Jewish line, but which come as a God-send to the unsuspecting and overworked small town editor, who is told that he should insert them in his paper as his own editorials — no acknowledgements wanted by his well- wishing friends on the American Jewish Committee.
Apart from the individual publications, there are those great fountainheads of information, the news-gathering agencies. The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia boasts that Jews were “the pioneers” in the formation of these agencies. In the field of international news exchange, the most illustrious name has been the Jewish name of Paul Reuter, founder of the famous Reuters agency. Within our own country, the United Press has a long record of collaboration with all the Jewish lobbyists; the Associated Press has gone so far as to guarantee to the Jewish Anti-Defamation League that there will never be an AP release in which a Jewish wrong-doer is identified as a Jew; and the International News Service has faithfully followed the aggressive pro-Jewish policies of its late Jewish president, Moses Koenigsberg — one time head of another far-flung news empire, King Features Syndicate. In addition, all UP, AP, and INS dispatches are subject to the constant scrutiny of the news systems of American radio-television, whose three greatest broadcasting chains (CBS, NBC, and ABC) are, respectively, in the Jewish hands of William Paley, David Sarnoff, and Barney Balaban.
Add to these multiple opportunities for control the names of such prominent Jewish news-people as Joseph Pulitzer, Adolph Ochs, Paul Block, Herbert Bayard Swope, David Lawrence, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, Franklin P. Adams, Walter Lippman, Julius Ochs Adler, Eugene Lyons, J. David Stern, George Sokolsky, Walter Winchell, etc., and you can glean some small realization of the extent to which “the Jews” and “the news” are now so thoroughly entangled. II — IN FRONT OF THE NEEDLE
“By their fruits you shall know them” — and American newspapers can be no better known than by that very latest of their fruits, that gigantic laboratory lemon, Jonas Salk.
Jewish Jonas is a symbol of all that the Jew-controlled press can do for a man. It can build him up overnight as the nation’s number one hero. It can make what he has to offer (in Jonas’ case a serum of infected monkey kidneys) the most appealing and necessary item in the land.
And when this artificial alliance (Salk, the kidneys, and the clamoring public) begins to back-fire, the versatile press can save its face (and Jonas’) by suggesting innumerable culprits. “Salk Not at Fault,” say the headlines. And down below we can read all about the negligence of Mrs. Hobby, the miscalculations of Dr. Scheele, the slovenliness of the Cutter firm.
Here in Boston, the press has had a notably tough time of it trying to perpetuate the aura of greatness with which it initially surrounded Doctor Salk. As we write, the city health commissioner has announced that up until last month (when the first Salk injections were given in this area) Boston’s record for the whole year was only six cases of polio. In the past month (since the injections) that total of six has risen to one hundred and sixty.
What defense have we? Saint Alphonsus Maria de Ligouri, founder of the Redemptorist Order, long ago announced a foolproof solution — a permanent immunization against all future Doctor Salks. In his book, Theologia Moralis, Saint Alphonsus states that Catholics are obliged to avoid all Jewish doctors and their remedies, adding that to give oneself over to their care is to commit “a mortal sin.”
III — BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
The very choicest fruit of our “free press” is not, however, the Jew whom it builds up, but the Gentile whom it takes in. Hopeful of rescuing one such, we are directing the following sentences to the Honorable Wayne Morse, the Jew-championing solon from Oregon who recently remarked, “I am amazed at the number of my colleagues who in private meetings closed to the press, and in cloak room sessions that go unreported, fight viciously to refuse aid and haven to millions of human beings because they are Jews.”
It is inconceivable to you, Senator Morse, how anyone could take exception to your Jewish friends — friends who expect of a Senator certain attentions, but who amply repay him for these by lauding him in their newspapers, on their radio, and over their television, and when the chips are down, by coming right into his home state to stump for his re-election.
Now, Senator, to clarify for you this mystery of anti-Semitism in your midst, we must point out that your friends are not opposed simply “because they are Jews,” in the way that Republicans might be opposed simply because they are Republicans. Your friends provoke animosities for reasons that are not only numerous but are thoroughly substantial, ranging from personal grievances to international ones.
The sore point which is particularly suited for arousing members of Congress, however, and which probably accounts for most of the cloak room confabs you have been so startled by, is the Jews’ sustained, intensive campaign of promoting Communism.
The Jew-Communist tie-up is, of course, no longer as blatantly asserted as it was in 1917 — when New York newspapers announced the Russian Revolution with front page headlines proclaiming, “East Side Jews Go Wild With Joy;” when Rabbi Stephen Wise hailed the Revolution, at a huge Carnegie Hall rally, as the “noblest accomplishment of the sons and daughters of Israel;” and when Jewish financier Jacob Schiff boasted of the millions of dollars he had contributed as a propaganda fund for the insurrectionists.
Still, legislators today have evidence quite as cogent as the above for knowing that Communism is a Jewish movement. Perhaps you have observed yourself, Senator, that whenever the government indicts a number of Communists, 90 percent of them turn out to be your friends? For instance, of the eleven Communists who have been convicted of espionage since World War II, ten have been Jews. Or, to take the latest case, of the nine Communists recently convicted in Philadelphia (not of espionage, but just of being Communists), eight were Jews. And only last month, when the names of 23 Communists who had infiltrated the newspaper industry were disclosed, 20 turned out to be — do you see what we mean, Senator?
We hope we have given you an inkling of why it is that many of your colleagues have a slant on your Jewish friends slightly different from your own. At the very least, such an inkling would serve to keep you unamazed as you wander through the halls of Congress. At best, it could lead you into an entirely new way of thinking. Spurred on by your patriotic zeal, you might conclude that, despite all they have done for you, it is really not to the highest interests of the country to hand it over to the Jews.
Perhaps, Senator, in a few months, you might even provide a new voice in the cloak rooms.
IV — BEYOND THE CARDINAL
For a long time now we have known that the apprehensive Jews of America are working night and day to try to alter those basic doctrines which Catholics are taught about Jews — namely, that the Jews are the crucifiers of Christ, the victims of a divine curse, and, as Our Lord insisted, the children of the Devil.
We have seen how the American Jewish Committee has openly launched a program to censor such teachings in American parochial schools, stating that one of the chief A. J. C. objectives is “changing what is said about Jews and Judaism in the literature of Christian education.”
Invariably the Jewish attack on what Catholic children are taught ends up in an attack upon that foundational rock of Catholic belief — the New Testament. Recent example: The Jewish Freemasons of California, in their publication, the B’nai B’rith Messenger, have lately published an open letter to Cardinal Spellman. The subject of the letter is the Catholic monthly, The Point. B’nai B’rith’s frantic plea is that Cardinal Spellman suppress all future issues of The Point, which gets branded in the letter as a “vicious anti-Semitic sheet.” The Jewish complaint winds up with the following paragraph: “Here we are faced with an acknowledged Catholic publication that appeals to violent action against Jews, telling its readers that, ‘The Jews, who both killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and have persecuted us, and please not God, and are adversaries to all men, prohibiting us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved.’ There is no greater authority in American Catholicism than Cardinal Spellman. We therefore appeal to him to put a stop to this outrage.”
The Jewish Masons of B’nai B’rith fail to mention that the passage which they reprint from The Point (“The Jews who both killed the Lord Jesus, etc.”) is not of The Point ’s invention. It is a direct quotation from Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians — an integral part of the inspired New Testament!
Lest anyone think, however, that this Jewish failure to attack Saint Paul by name might indicate good will toward the New Testament, the Jews of the B’nai B’rith Messenger followed up their complaint to Cardinal Spellman with a boldtype editorial calling for a revision of the Christian Bible! The Messenger summarized: “There must be a rewriting of the Christ story for Christians which will for all time eradicate the myth that ‘the Jews killed Christ.’ ”
V — BACK TO TRADITION
It will very much disturb the Jewish Masons of B’nai B’rith to learn that every year on Good Friday, in the fifth responsory of Matins, a Catholic priest reads in his Breviary, “The Jews crucified Jesus; and there was darkness … ”
Realizing full well that this is hardly the amount of attention that the subject deserves, Our Holy Mother Church requires that every priest also read, during the same Office of Good Friday, an instruction by that eminent Catholic authority, Saint Augustine of Hippo.
The Point concludes this month with Saint Augustine’s lengthy answer to the question “Did the Jews Crucify Jesus?” “Ye know what secret counsel was that of the wicked Jews, and what instruction was that of the workers of iniquity. Of what iniquity were they the workers? The murder of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. ‘Many good works,’ saith He, ‘have I showed you — for which of those works go ye about to kill me?’ He had borne with all their weaknesses: He had healed all their diseases; He had preached unto them the kingdom of Heaven; He had discovered to them their iniquities, that they might rather hate them, than the Physician that came to cure them. And now at last, without gratitude for all the tenderness of His healing love, like men raging in a high delirium, throwing themselves madly on the Physician Who had come to cure them, they took counsel how they might kill Him.“The Jews cannot say, ‘We did not murder Christ’ — albeit they gave Him over to Pilate, His judge, that they themselves might seem free of His death. They could throw the blame of their sin upon a human judge; but did they deceive God, the Great Judge? In that which Pilate did he was their accomplice, but in comparison with them, he had far the lesser sin. (John XIX, 11) Pilate strove as far as he could to deliver Him out of their hands; for which reason also he scourged Him, and brought Him forth to them. He scourged not the Lord for cruelty’s sake, but in the hope that he might so slake the Jews’ wild thirst for blood; that, perchance, even they might be touched with compassion, and cease to lust for His death, when they saw what He was after the flagellation.
“Even this effort he made: ‘But when Pilate saw that he could not prevail, but that rather a tumult was made,’ ye know how that ‘he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying: I am innocent of the Blood of this Just Person.’ And yet, ‘he delivered Him to be crucified!’ But if he were guilty who did it against his will, were they innocent who goaded him on to it? No. Pilate gave sentence against Him, and commanded Him to be crucified, but ye, O ye Jews, ye also are His murderers! Wherewith? With your tongue, whetted like a sword. And when? When ye cried, ‘Crucify Him! Crucify Him!’ ”
(From the Roman Breviary) The Point – September 1955
CATHOLIC POWER AND THE PLOTS OF THE JEWS
Do you know that there are 23 Catholic bishops in the state of New York?
Do you know that the city of Chicago has 244 Catholic churches?
Do you know that in California alone the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is offered 2,500 times every morning?
Do you know that the Archdiocese of Boston has 295,666 students enrolled in Catholic education?
We could go on for several more pages with an abundance of such figures. [In the United States, there are 4 cardinals, 34 archbishops, 170 bishops, 22,818 churches, 46,970 priests, 8,752 lay brothers, 158,069 sisters, 247 colleges, and 11,784 elementary and high schools.] And, by sheer force of statistics, we could surely strike mortal terror into the hearts of those Ku- Klux-Klan Americans who periodically holler about a “Popish plot” to take over the good old U. S. A.!
Actually, we Catholics are plotting. We do have predatory designs on our country: we intend to make it a Catholic one. Our present, pressing headache, however, is that despite the awesome strength of our numbers, despite our copious canonical equipment — buildings and birettas and baptismal fonts — our plans are not going forward. Indeed, the alarming fact remains that every day America is becoming less and less Christian.
That this collapse is our responsibility, we admit. That it is due solely to our lack of zeal, we qualify with the following consideration: While we are sleeping, there is a wide-awake force hard at work. While we are failing to repair and expand those structures of our country which are Christian, other hands are setting out to smash and scatter them.
In a very real sense, of course, the current onslaught of the Jews, against anything American that is also Christian, can be blamed on our country’s initial and short-sighted generosity to the Jews. Ignoring the example of all Christendom before it, young and trustful America decided that, in its Christian midst, Jews should be allowed to have that which all the Western World had previously denied to them — citizenship, and an equal standing before the law.
We American Catholics do not need that learned bishop and theologian, Saint Hilary of Poitiers, to warn us (as he does in his Tractatus Mysteriorum) that “The Jews are always seething to slaughter the Christian people.” Every day we are coming to see more clearly for ourselves how the Jews are maneuvering to destroy all trace of what is Christian in our land. In the campaign to strip us of our New Testament sense of purity, for example, the Jews are boldly battling right out in public. Through their iron grip on such industries as clothing, entertainment, and pulp magazines, they are bombarding us with nakedness in dress, lewdness in movies, stage, and television shows, and unashamed filthiness in the fare of every corner newsstand.
For the vital task of de-Christianizing America, the Jews are not, however, relying solely on such hit-or-miss devices as clothing styles and entertainments. If the assault on Christian morals should leave them still short of their goal, the Jews count on bringing America into line by the simple expedient of rewriting the nation’s laws.
This is the motive behind the hordes of sharpfaced, briefcased Semites who have been storming our courtrooms from Tampa to Tacoma, besieging the judges with opinions and advice — which they are pleased to offer gratuitously, “in the interests of community welfare.”
As a lever for directing society, the law is, of course, perfectly suited to Jewish needs and temperament. It enables the Jews to advance their Talmudic objectives by sure, unimpedable strides, and at the same time lets them remain safely secure from the scrutiny of the public.
Too, once they get their proposals on the statute-books, the Jews can retire quietly to the sidelines, leaving to others the obligation of enforcing the laws.
But if the Jews are less discernible in their legal skirmishings than in their peddling of impurity, their purposes are no less obscure. The cases in which they are interested — keenly, aggressively interested — and into which they unfailingly put their noses, requiring neither fee nor invitation to do so, are those cases in which some law based on Christian principle or tradition is being challenged. And if Jewish lawyers are unable to find a sufficient number of such cases ready-made, they are perfectly content to manufacture them. For, some years ago, the United States Supreme Court declared this to be a Christian nation, and it is the Jews’ resolute intention to oblige the Court to change its mind.
Perhaps no law in our land has aroused Jewish wrath so sharply as the seemingly innocent one ordaining that the Christian Sabbath shall be a mandatory day of rest from buying and selling. Until recently this was enforced in every one of our forty-eight states, but today the Jews can point to substantial gains as a result of their ceaseless, tireless efforts to make Sunday, the sacrosanct day of the New Testament, just another twenty-four hours.
In Connecticut, for instance, a predominantly Catholic state, now presided over by a Jewish governor, a law has been put through the legislature providing that anyone who “believes that the Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday night and ends at sundown on Saturday night” may close his shop on Saturday and remain open all day Sunday. While in the Midwest, Sunday- selling has reached such a peak that the Ford Motor Company has found it necessary to print up large announcements to be placed in the windows of its Midwestern dealers, apologizing for the fact that despite the trend of the times, they are for the present continuing to take Sunday off.
One of the most rousing legal victories the Jews have thus far secured came with the recent Supreme Court decision in the so-called “Miracle Case.” This decision not only authorizes the Jews to keep the censor at arm’s length while they display their wares on stage and screen, but, even more importantly, it effectively removes two fundamental Christian concepts from the realm of American law — the traditional concepts of “blasphemy” and “sacrilege.”
The Miracle was a movie, made in Italy and purveyed by Jews in this country, which opened in New York in December, 1950. The pre-Christmas date, it turned out, had been chosen with care, for the film was nothing but a raucous guffaw at the notion that Our Blessed Lord had been born of a Virgin. Forced by public Catholic resentment, Cardinal Spellman trained his guns on the film and, a few weeks from the time it opened, the film was closed down by the censors of the New York Board of Education.
The Miracle ’s Jewish distributor, Joseph Burstyn, immediately launched a law suit against the censors, and the case went up to the U. S. Supreme Court. It was met at the door by Jewish Justice Felix Frankfurter, who greeted it as a quaint medieval visitor, not to be taken too seriously.
That The Miracle should be outlawed for being “sacrilegious” and “blasphemous” (which is what the New York censors said it was) met with Jewish Justice Frankfurter’s measured contempt. He agreed that back in the Catholic days of Saint Thomas Aquinas the words “blasphemy” and “sacrilege” may have had a precise meaning, but today, he said, there is no definition on which we can agree. In his long written opinion, Jewish Justice Frankfurter concluded, with Talmudic logic, that one man’s blasphemy might well be another man’s art. Therefore, he said, not only could The Miracle be shown in New York theatres, but henceforth the terms “blasphemy” and “sacrilege” could not be considered legitimate charges in American courtrooms.
Here in Massachusetts, where local police officials still recall the days when Jewish Justice Frankfurter was the top-indoctrinator at the meetings of Harvard University’s communist cell, we have had more than our share of Jewish attacks on Christian-based laws. In a series of bitterly-fought cases, Boston Jews have been making war on a state adoption statute which, in effect, forbids the handing over of Christian children to Jewish foster- parents. How long the law will survive may be gauged by the fact that, of late, reinforcements have been sent up by the American Jewish Congress, whose New York lawyers are here for the express purpose of “getting results!”
The American Jewish Congress’ more domesticated companion, the American Jewish Committee, is likewise conducting a local campaign. Led by Herbert Ehrman, Boston’s ranking member of the Committee, the Jews want to pass legislation which will put a psychiatrist on duty in every Massachusetts courtroom. In line with the Jews’ nation-wide mania for “mental health,” and in the hope of creating more jobs for our inundation of Jewish psychiatrists, Mr. Ehrman is currently arguing that every Catholic boy who goes wrong needs the courtroom assistance of a Freudian Jew to set him on the right track.
Although they were granted political equality by the United States Constitution, the Jews have long been keenly aware that equality on a cultural and social level is quite another thing. Those early Americans who agreed that Jews should be allowed to vote in our elections, by no means indicated, either by example or legislation, that they also felt that Jews should be encouraged to sit in our parlors, eat at our tables, marry our children, or otherwise penetrate behind that “Christian curtain” which has always instinctively separated the lovers of Christ from His crucifiers.
Since the drafting of the Constitution, there has been little change in the average American’s Semitic outlook. New York Rabbi, Mordecai Kaplan, in his recent book, The Future of the American Jew, has valiantly attempted to overcome his Hebraic jitters and evaluate the situation. “Almost ten percent of the American people,” he writes on page 95, “declare themselves anti-Semites, and harbor the criminally insane sentiment of wishing to destroy us. Twice that number are ready to join them on the flimsiest provocation. In the country as a whole, Jews are at best tolerated, but neither desired nor welcomed. Our best friends will forgive us our being Jews, but can seldom forget it.” If Rabbi Kaplan is frankly pessimistic about the state of the nation’s anti- Semitism, his associates in the American Jewish Congress are quite as frankly determined that the situation can be remedied. These aggressive Jews have decided that the one sure way to get Americans to like them, to want them around, and to take them to their hearts, is to make any kind of discrimination against them a criminal offence, punishable by law! They are working night and day to push legislation that will forever crush a Christian American’s right to avoid the Jews — laws that will forbid a Christian to exclude from his hotel, his payroll, or his neighborhood club, any member of that deicide race which God has so emphatically rejected and cursed.
The American Jewish Congress’ chief legal concoction for furthering their program of “equality by statute” is a device called the Anti-Discrimination Commission. This bit of legalized Jewish elbowing is the pet project of Mr. Will Maslow, one of the Jewish Congress’ full-time lawyers, who has recently been plugging his Anti-Discrimination ideas before the United Nations at Geneva.
The effect of Mr. Maslow’s scheme is that anytime a Jew presents himself for a job in your company, a locker in your country club, a place in your school or college, etc., you must give it to him or suffer the consequences of fining and imprisonment. So far, Mr. Maslow has succeeded in getting versions of his Anti-Discrimination legislation adopted by the Federal government’s contract-granting agency and by a few of the individual state legislatures.
The current Jewish rush to remake our Christian laws is prompted by a vivid memory and a well-founded fear. The memory is of those countless regulations which every Catholic society, down through the ages of Faith, has imposed on the Jews to keep them well watched, well restrained, and very well segregated. The fear is of 32,000,000 American Catholics and of what would happen to the lately-won freedom of the Jews if this great block of Americans should suddenly decide that things had gone far enough — if American Catholics should conclude that, after all, the saints had a lot on their side when they said (as Saint Gregory of Nyssa did in his famous sermon on the Resurrection) that the Jews are nothing more than, “Slayers of the Lord, murderers of the prophets, adversaries of God, haters of God, men who show contempt for the law, foes of grace, enemies of their fathers’ faith, advocates of the devil, brood of vipers, slanderers, scoffers, men whose minds are in darkness, leaven of the Pharisees, assemblies of demons, sinners, wicked men, stoners and haters of righteousness.” The Point – October 1955
RECENT PROTEST IN THE STREETS OF BOSTON
Christian Defense of the Blessed Sacrament
On three successive days during the past month, thousands of Boston Catholics found themselves the object of a public appeal. It was not just another of the common billboard pleas, begging them to be generous with their money or their blood. The Catholics of Boston were asked, on the sixth, seventh, and eighth days of September, to protect the sanctity of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.
Catholic religious, of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, from Saint Benedict Center in Cambridge, had invaded Boston to distribute thousands of handbills and to carry several large placards through the downtown streets, urging Catholics to “Stop the Jews from Dishonoring and Desecrating the Blessed Sacrament at Brandeis University!”
Reaction to this electric message was, of course, immediate.
Catholics were sympathetically indignant at the very thought of the Blessed Sacrament’s being dishonored. Jews were beside themselves with rage that such “anti-Semitism” should be allowed in the streets of the city. Even Boston’s lethargic newsmen felt stirred into comment, although their evaluations of the total performance were considerably at variance.
Arthur Stratton of the Boston Herald thought the whole affair had served to strengthen the cause of local Interfaith and wrote for his paper that the public’s reaction to Saint Benedict Center’s “misguided” crusade was “more poignant than a hundred goodwill dinners.”
Donald Guy, of the Boston office of the Associated Press saw a different picture. He exploded in the following censored statement: “You [deleted] troublemakers have revived more race hatred in three days than we’ve seen around here in twenty years.” I — THE ACTION
By liberal promises of full-tuition scholarships, Jewish Brandeis University has managed, during its seven-year history, to lure a few Christian students to its suburban-Boston campus. Last year, the university announced that it had a “unique Interfaith plan” in the offing. Brandeis was going to construct three chapels, right on its own premises, one each for its Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish students. Architect Max Abramovitz would design the buildings in his finest Talmudic style and the three “conventicles of worship” would be ready in June of 1955.
The thought of a Catholic chapel on Jewish property, with the Blessed Sacrament reserved in the midst of Our Lord’s crucifiers, filled Saint Benedict Center with righteous horror. Immediately a campaign was launched to keep the Blessed Sacrament from being placed within the grasp of the Brandeis Jews. The issue of The Point for May, 1955, was devoted entirely to the matter — exposing, by direct quotation from Brandeis professors, the University’s unashamed anti-Christian program. Publication of these facts was followed by a Brandeis announcement that the June dedication had been called off — no chapel ceremonies until the Fall.
Saint Benedict Center relaxed a bit at that, and even more when the Jews announced in late August that the chapel dedications would not be held until the end of October. With two full months to go, it was decided to present the worry directly to the Catholics of Boston, confident that, although higher Church authorities had indicated that it would be suicide for them to refuse the Jews anything, the Catholic laity might have the courage to raise a voice of protest.
The handbill-and-placard demonstration began early on Tuesday morning, September 6th, and as the day progressed, both Saint Benedict Center and the Boston police noted the increasing likelihood of an “incident.” It became more and more probable that some Jew or other would lose his head, take an enraged aim, and let fly a few body-blows at the placard- carriers. When the “incident” finally came, it was not at all as expected. For when the determined Jewish aggressors made their appearance, they were not one Jew but fifty. And though they were foaming at the mouth, they were a unit, highly organized and working according to plan.
As the Jews assembled on Boston’s Tremont Street, the six Brothers from Saint Benedict Center who were carrying placards in that area recognized a number of them. They were from the Young Men’s Hebrew Association and from a local ghetto-gang called the “Hipsters” — groups which had often turned up as hecklers at Saint Benedict Center’s Sunday afternoon talks on Boston Common, where they sounded forth with remarks like the one by YMHA’s Bill Klein: “Bring on Christ again and we’ll crucify Him again.”
The gathering of Yiddish-shouting youths naturally attracted a curious crowd, and by the time the regiment of young Jews descended upon the six Tremont Street Brothers, more than two thousand people were on hand to view the excitement. Alert Boston police quickly pushed the Jews aside and transported the slightly bruised Brothers, and the remnants of their placards, across the Charles River and into Cambridge.
By late Tuesday afternoon, thirty other members of Saint Benedict Center had reported back from their day in Boston — lacking the glory of a ride home in a police car, but excited with tales of eager Catholics who wanted to know more about the Brandeis affair. The plan to reach the laity was beginning to look successful.
Overwhelming testimony of just how successsful it was came with the next morning’s newspapers. After one day of Saint Benedict Center’s downtown campaign. Brandeis University’s president had put in a nervous call to the newsmen and announced that he would not wait until October to dedicate the Catholic chapel. He would not even wait until the university reopened in mid-September. He would have the Archbishop of Boston come out and dedicate the place right away. A Mass would be said there at nine O’ Clock Friday morning!
This, of course, meant that Saint Benedict Center had lost its two-month opportunity. There were only forty-eight hours left in which to challenge Catholics with the imperative message of the handbills: “ … You are thus being asked to approve a scheme whereby Our Lord will be turned over to that people which for 2,000 years has rejected, sneered at, reviled, and desecrated Him in the Blessed Sacrament. Catholics of Boston: In the name of the Immaculate Mother of God, this must not happen! Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament must not be betrayed again into the hands of that people who cried out, ‘Crucify Him! Crucify Him! … His blood be upon us and upon our children.’ “
The Boston campaign continued during Wednesday and Thursday, which were, respectively, the vigil and the feast of Our Blessed Lady’s Nativity. Twice on Wednesday the now familiar hordes of young Jews assaulted the Brothers and their placards, succeeding, at one point, in tying up Boston’s downtown traffic for one hour. But at the end of the afternoon, thanks in no small part to the vigilance of the Boston police force, the placards were still intact. And young Israel’s blitzkrieg had been openly frustrated before hundreds of sympathetic bystanders.
On Thursday a record number of handbills were distributed. On Thursday night there was nothing to do but wait for Friday morning.
Shortly after 10 AM on Friday, the telephone rang at Saint Benedict Center. On the other end of the line a mockingly musical voice said, “We have your Jesus now!”
The dedication and Mass were apparently over.
The next few days brought contented cacklings from the Boston press, and gloating public statements by Brandeis officials. The following Sunday brought more than 300 young Jews to Boston Commons, where they attempted to break up the Center’s outdoor meeting, shouting foul obscenities in the midst of the prayers, spitting on the life-size crucifix and the picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe — all of which served only to sharpen and sustain the bitter realization of that Friday (that day which was so fittingly Friday) when Our Lord was again placed within the grasp of His crucifiers.
II — THE REACTION
In only one hour after the placards and handbills first appeared in downtown Boston. every Jewish organization in the city was alerted. Out of the welter of hastily-called conferences, anxious investigations, and frenzied reports, there emerged, by mid-afternoon of that first day, a statement, concocted by the New England office of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Around this statement, Boston Jewry was content to rally.
Relying on those broad-handed brush-offs which had served Jewish needs so well in the past, the Conference of Christians and Jews termed Saint Benedict Center’s appeal to Boston Catholics, “hate literature.” As though trying to convince itself, the Jew-founded committee offered assurances that “the majority of people who received the handbill know that its scurrilous and untrue statements in no way represent the Catholic Church.” What those “scurrilous and untrue statements” were, the Conference prudently declined to say.
Armed with the Conference statement, the Boston newspapers were ready to swing into action. These local specimens of our national “free press” promptly determined that there were two possible ways of handling the story of what had recently occurred in the streets of Boston. They could print (1) nothing; (2) what the National Conference of Christians and Jews had said.
Half the Boston dailies chose the former alternative, insisting that a series of events which involved, among other things, three major anti-Catholic demonstrations and an hour-long traffic tie-up in the heart of the city, just didn’t fit into the category of “news.” The rest of the papers told parts of the story, but always with one eye cocked on their sensitive Jewish advertisers. Not one of the newspapers gave any indication of what the placards or the handbills actually said. The word “Jew” was scarcely whispered in any of the accounts. The mobs of young Hebrews who had attacked the Brothers carrying placards were variously identified in Boston papers as “bystanders,” “pedestrians,” “angry crowds,” “indignant witnesses,” “untold thousands,” “God-fearing people,” “youths,” “a minority group,” and “others.”
Most loose-tongued of the Boston sheets was the enterprising Herald, which seemed to be worried that a simple news-story might not make its position sufficiently clear to its Jewish friends. The Herald, accordingly, gave one of its reporters a by-line and two columns in which to run on about how “Boston kept its head yesterday.”
Dizzy with the praise this journalistic coup won from the local Jewish community, the Herald next day had its evening version, the Traveler, blossom forth with a Brandeis-lauding editorial. This move proved disastrous. For in the course of acclaiming the Catholic-chapel-on-Jewish- campus idea, the editorial suddenly launched into some reminiscences — offered in the same pro-Judaic spirit — of the time when “it was the custom in most grade schools to begin the day with recitation of the Lord’s Prayer …” “That custom certainly did a lot of good,” the editorial observed in Yankee summary, “and no harm worth mentioning.”
By virtue of these unfortunate remarks, the Herald Traveler ceased to be the object of Boston Jewry’s admiration and became the object of its contempt. The Jews considered it an unforgivable asininity that a newspaper, setting out to plead the Jewish cause, should be ignorant of the basic proposition that the Lord’s Prayer is no longer said in American public schools precisely because Jews demanded its withdrawal.
Ultimately, two newspapers did tell what Saint Benedict Center was saying on its signs and handbills. But they were not Gentile papers. They printed the messages purely to satisfy that universal Jewish urge to know every word ever uttered against the Jews. The two newspapers were the Jewish Advocate of Boston and The Daily Worker of New York [Communist Party USA’s newspaper].
Despite their excellent intentions, there was a limit to what the newspapers could accomplish for the Jews. The tens of thousands of Boston Catholics who had seen Saint Benedict Center’s placards and read its handbills could not be thrown off by the distortions, or the silence, of the press. For them, the central issue was imperishably clear: Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament was about to be put in the keeping of His crucifiers. And however liberal might be the personal viewpoints of the Catholics of Boston, they were agreed that such an act was assuredly a violent departure from Church tradition. The Jews, too, were well aware that to have the Mass and the Blessed Sacrament under their jurisdiction was an accomplishment which their forebears, living in Catholic Europe, would have considered a wild, impossible dream. To “stop the Jews” had been the Church’s vigilant concern throughout the centuries — and she had stopped them long before they were within reach of the sacred altar. Confining them in ghettos, depriving them of citizenship, forbidding them to move freely in Christian society, the Church had shown abundantly in practice and teaching that Jews were to be looked on as outcast, perfidious, and cursed.
If Catholic leaders were not now waging war as their predecessors had, the Jews regarded the change as merely a fortunate interval and not an abiding state of things. If there was a truce, it was a tenuous, uneasy, and half- hearted one. (Had not the Vatican recently condemned the English edition of the same National Conference of Christians and Jews which had been Jewry’s foremost champion in Boston?)
The Jews knew that those basic doctrines which had given rise to and sustained the Church’s anti-Jewish policies were still held, still taught. And they knew, consequently, that whatever surface cordiality might presently appear, at heart the Church believes as she believed in the time of Saint John Chrysostom, who is called “golden-mouthed” on account of the doctrinal purity of his preaching, and who said: “The Jews have crucified the Son and rejected the Holy Ghost, and their souls are the abode of the Devil … It is not insignificant controversies which separate us, but the death of Christ.”
Innovation has arisen in the Church before. It is always a passing thing. There is nothing in the Faith, the prayers, or the traditions of Boston Catholics which will long sustain a “Brotherhood Week” attitude toward the Jews. There is bound to be a change: and the evidence of the past few weeks is that the change will not be long delayed.
The placing of the Blessed Sacrament on the campus of Brandeis University was a victory which the Jews of Boston could not afford. The Point – November 1955
POINTERS
Now that Mass is being celebrated in front of television cameras, Catholics find they have to cope with problems of liturgy in their living rooms. Tuning in on the Holy Sacrifice, Catholics are faced with such considerations as: Should we go on smoking? Should we stop the card game? Should we get out our missals? Should we all get down on our knees at the Consecration?
In the earlier days of the Church, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was thought so sacred that it was kept entirely concealed from unbelievers, lest it be blasphemed. Even catechumens were not allowed to witness its most solemn parts.
The American hierarchy, however, are so remote from this kind of zeal for guarding holy things that they have abandoned the Mass to the barroom blasphemies and drawing room dismissals of the nation’s television viewers.
There is cause for much rejoicing among Interfaith Catholics who have been embarrassed by the fact that canonized saints are an exclusively Catholic concern. By next fall, publisher Frank Sheed will have on the market an interdenominational treatment of the lives of the saints appropriately entitled Saints for Now.
Edited by that eminent authority on sanctity, Mrs. Henry Luce, the book will contain evaluations of well known saints by prominent English and American, Catholic and otherwise, authors.
Saints for Now should have a good sale. A great many people will be curious to read about Whittaker Chambers’ ardent devotion to Saint Benedict; and Bruce Marshall’s “world, the flesh, and Fr. Vianney” treatment of the Cure of Ars; and most curious to learn from Mortimer Adler just how a Jewish Thomist feels about the Catholic Saint he has been making his living on.
Congratulations to Sheed & Luce for sensing that this kind of text must have a few illustrations by Salvador Dali.
The Spanish magazine Ecclesia has come to the defense of Spain’s primate, Cardinal Segura, who recently condemned the adoption of any attitude of “benevolence” toward Protestants, and as a result of it was taken over the coals by the Catholic Press of the U. S. To the Indiana Catholic, which said that Spain was “calling the cops on the Protestants four centuries late,” Ecclesia replied, with devastating forthrightness, that far from being four centuries late, Spain had immediately realized the dangers of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, and had organized the Inquisition to combat them. And to Fr. Robert Hartnett, S. J., editor of America, who had attacked the Cardinal on the score that his “theology leaves political philosophy out of account,” Ecclesia replied by saying that in their opinion it was more important for Catholics to “conform with theology and papal encyclicals than with political philosophy.” They declared, also, that in his article Fr. Hartnett had proclaimed “real doctrinal errors contrary to papal encyclicals.”
Fr. Hartnett, grinning broadly to show how calm he could remain in the face of this Spanish fury, decided, inappropriately, that this was the time to put into practice the Jesuit principle: When confounded, distinguish. In answer to the charge that he was uttering heresy, Fr. Hartnett mumbled, “That is only one of two tenable positions.”
AMERICAN POWER AND CATHOLIC FREEDOM
The Catholic Church in the United States is, slowly but inevitably, making itself completely unnecessary. By missing the point of its existence — to be the one Divinely-ordained way in which men may work out their salvation — the Church is putting itself in a gravely perilous position. It is turning itself into just another sect. It is letting itself be swept up in the new American super-religion: Interfaith.
Interfaith is that unchaste union of creeds that is fast becoming the state religion of the United States. It has the great advantage for this purpose of not being restricted by any sectarian commitments. It transcends all previous religions, and then offers a synthesis of them that is tailor-made for democracy. Democracy has a passion for making everything be just like everything else, for dragging everything down to the same mediocre level. Interfaith is the religious manifestation of that passion. It eliminates all religious differences, and provides one standard, die-stamped faith that is suited to all. Interfaith makes no demands in the way of positive doctrine; it offers only vague aspirations as to how everyone ought to love everyone. It aims to remove any possibility of discord or unpleasantness over such an unimportant thing as religion, by making it completely innocuous. The tenets of Interfaith, usually presented in the form of slogans, are these: that every belief is worthy of respect; that no one should ever say anything against another’s faith; that it does not matter what you hold as long as you are sincere; that such things as “good will” and “brotherhood” are more important than dogmas. Although it has not yet gone so far, we may expect that before long Interfaith will outlaw saying that Jesus is God, for fear of giving offense to those who think He is not, and do not want Him called so.
Interfaith is clearly bent on the destruction of all dogma and certitude, which it plans to accomplish under the banner of freedom of religion. To ask us to respect every belief, no matter how fantastic, is to ask us to respect none. To ask a Catholic, committed to certain clear and definite dogmas, to respect a religion that categorically denies these dogmas, is to ask him to give up the Faith. And that is what Interfaith asks.
The only way the Church could keep from being destroyed by such a powerful and insidious enemy as Interfaith would be constantly to guard against it, constantly to fight its influence. But the Church is so anxious to be liked in America, and Interfaith is so obviously America’s religious darling, that the Church does not dare oppose it. Every day there are pictures in the newspapers of Catholic priests posing with Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis at Interfaith rallies. There is an almost frantic eagerness on the part of Catholics to show their liberality toward other religions.
“The things on which we agree are vastly more important than the things on which we differ,” is not the statement of an American diplomat urging England to put aside petty differences and join in the fight against Russia; it is the statement of an American Catholic priest assuring non-Catholics of his conformity to the Interfaith code; and the less-important “things on which we differ,” are such things as the Holy Eucharist and Our Lady.
So engulfed in Interfaith has the Church in America become, that most Catholics no longer know what are the true doctrines of the Church. Most of them seem to be firmly convinced that the slogans of Interfaith are articles of the Creed. “I don’t think it matters what church you belong to,” they tell you, “as long as you lead a good life.”
The fact that such a statement is heresy apparently interests no one. Certainly not the priests. It is impossible that the priests are unaware of this wholesale ignorance of the Faith; it is impossible that they are unaware of the heresies their parishoners are holding; but still they do nothing about it. Either they must feel that they do not know enough theology themselves to correct the situation, or else they do not think it is important enough to bother about.
You almost never hear of an American priest or bishop who is publicly and openly exhorting non-Catholics to come into the Church, telling them of the Church’s singular prerogatives and possessions. Any general appeals they make are that men of all faiths get together to fight against materialism or atheism or gambling or corruption in government, or some other such agreeable Interfaith endeavor. There is never any insistence on the strong, central Catholic truths, never any mention of the fact that the Church is the sole custodian of the one true Faith given by Our Lord to His Apostles, and that it alone possesses the means for attaining eternal life. One would think, listening to these clerics, that the Church had nothing more valuable to give than its money, for the building of non-denominational hospitals.
There is no doubt but that the temptation to seek the approval and respect of non-Catholic Americans is a potent one; and the Church here seems to have succumbed to it. The only condition that has been asked for this approval is that the Church play down those challenging, disturbing dogmas that set it apart from all other religions, and substitute for them the inoffensive slogans of Interfaith. As evidence of the American clergy’s willingness to do this, here is a statement by Archbishop Cushing of Boston:
“There must be an end of feuding over religious dogmas and a resurgence of tolerance and magnanimity. We cannot any longer afford the luxury of fighting one another over doctrines concerning the next world …”
However much this kind of statement might increase the Archbishop’s popularity, however much it might win him applause from Interfaithers, it is clearly a denial of that Catholic Faith which, as a bishop, he is pledged to preserve, even to the shedding of his blood.
BY FATHER FEENEY
The London Jew is, in points, identical with the Jew from all great capital cities. But comparisons of him come clearest when he is contrasted with the Jew from Berlin. The Jew from London is an idealist. The Jew from Berlin is an ideologist. The Berlin Jew has hopes for his thoughts. The London Jew has hopes for his investments. Neither is the original Jew from Jerusalem. And their defections can be put most neatly in a deliberate play on words. The one has stopped studying the Law and the Prophets. The other has started studying the Profit and the Loss.
One may ask who is responsible for what is known as the London Jew — is it London, or is it the Jew? I say it is London. I admit that London’s Jew is responsible for his own unrest — as a despiser of the Old and New Testaments for the sake of his old and new investments. But the Bank of England was not the escape the Rothschilds were looking for. It was the escape that London’s Calvinism provided. For though London’s liturgies are supported by Anglicanism, its morals are founded in Calvinism. And Calvinism is the Christian support of usury. Lutheranism is the Christian support of totalitarianism; which is the obsession of the Jew from Berlin. When the Jew from the Holy Land went to the Rhineland, he found Christian corruptions there to ease his conscience and soothe his religious nostalgias. He found the Christian mind overplaying itself at the expense of Christian values. He found Luther’s super-theology — his “Faith without good works” — his belief in belief — his fat-headedness without performance — his frenzy without finesse. This gave the Jew from Jerusalem his chance to be a mental Messiah, and to start a procession of prophetic intellectualism that has lasted down to our day; and has included: Kant the super-philosopher; Hegel the super-ontologist; Heine the super-poet; Wagner the super-musician; Nietzsche the super- sociologist; Marx the super-economist; Freud the super-psychologist; Mann the super-Romanticist; Einstein the super-mathematician. All these Jewish versions of the Lutheran lead have contributed to the development of German intellectualism, and the collapse of German intelligence. The climax came when an apostate Catholic from Austria ran into Germany with a queer mustache, took over the militia, and out-Jewed the Jews. He became the super-German. And that was the end of Germany.
(from London is a Place, Ravengate Press)
Varieties of Religious Experience III — The Yankee Clippers
In Boston, one Sunday morning in 1785, the Episcopalian parishioners of King’s Chapel showed up for services with their Books of Common Prayer in one hand and well-inked quills in the other. Systematically they deleted from their liturgy any reference to the Three Persons in God. This rebuke to centuries of Christmases, this disdain for the Word made Flesh, marked the beginning of the Unitarian Church.
Trusting that God-the-Father would survive in King’s Chapel, after they had annihilated God-the-Son and God-the-Holy Ghost, these resourceful Bostonians decided that an appropriate inscription should be placed on the walls of their meeting house, to indicate the kind of divinity that was currently being worshipped there. A bigoted papist of that day was tarred and feathered for suggesting that the following might go very well on the walls of King’s Chapel: Here God and manger were estranged, When our discrete barbarians Twice murdered Him, and then arranged Themselves as Unitarians.
From its start, Unitarianism was well received in Boston. Its repudiation of the Blessed Trinity and its contempt for “Romanism” made the movement a most acceptable Boston institution. The principal credit for this success belongs rightfully to that man who was pledged to defend Christ against “the superstitious abuses of Catholic priests,” that Doctor of Unitarian Divinity, William Ellery Channing.
Bill Channing, as he was never called, brought to Unitarianism all the advantages of a Harvard education. In his many speeches and public writings, the Unitarian message is presented with cultivated manner and flawless grammar. The American Unitarian Association has proudly preserved the doctrinal pronouncements of Channing, hoping thus to further his “beneficent influence.”
For the benefit of those who are unacquainted with the tenor of William Ellery Channing’s “beneficence,” here are a few examples.
Having deplored those great world tyrannies, “heathenism, Mohammedanism, and Roman Catholicism,” Dr. Channing adds, “Do you ask me how I think Catholicism may be successfully opposed? I know but one way. Lift men above Catholicism.” Of the union of two natures in the one adorable Person of Jesus, Channing says, “Such a being is certainly the most puzzling and distracting object ever presented to human thought.” To Our Blessed Mother, Dr. Channing extends this bit of Harvard chivalry, “A superstitious priesthood and people imagine that they honor the Virgin Mary by loading her image with sparkling jewels.” His detached appraisal of Our Lord’s death on Calvary has been recorded this way, “Infinite Divinity dying on a cross, a doctrine which in earthliness reminds us of the mythology of the rudest pagans.”
Such neatly phrased blasphemy does not go unrewarded in Boston. For remarks like these, William Ellery Channing soon found himself at the head of the Unitarian Church. Lest people should think, however, that Unitarianism was merely a synthesis of good taste and anti-Catholicism, Channing and his associates shrewdly acquired for their new sect two very useful items of religious equipment. These were (1) a theological seminary, called Harvard Divinity School, and (2) a semi-theologian, called Ralph Waldo Emerson. The effects of these two were, respectively, to depreciate faith in the Divinity of Christ, and to advocate reliance on the divinity of self. Through them, Unitarianism hoped to extend its influence beyond the borders of Boston; but after a brief success for Emerson as the philosopher of abstemious thinkers and for Harvard as the goal of midwestern ministers’ sons, Unitarianism was finally obliged to return to its proper home. For only Bostonians with proper accents were equal to its proper doubts.
The religion of William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and their tradition of three names in one Unitarian, is continued now in Boston by the Reverend Dana McLean Greeley. From his pulpit in Channing’s old Arlington Street Church, Dr. Greeley exhorts Unitarians to persevere in their belief that mothers are much too inferior for God to have had one. The Point – December 1955
There will be much talk this December about “putting Christ back into Christmas. Tragically, in all the holy commotion which will accompany this talk, not one person will speak up and ask that most pertinent question: “But who took Him out in the first place?”
The answer is in no sense a seasonal one. For the attack that threatens Christmas each December is part of an all-out, full-time offensive — which will be striking at our parochial schools next March, at our New Testament next May, and at the basic Christian structure of our country next October. It is born of an enmity as old as our Faith. And it is sustained, from father to son, by that curse which a Jerusalem mob called down upon itself when it cried, “Crucify Him! His Blood be upon us and upon our children!”
The drive to “put Christ back into Christmas” makes the ancient enemy only half worried — for, at best, it leaves our shattered word “Christmas” only half restored. It is The Point ’s lonely battle cry this December that Christmas be entirely salvaged — that, purged of the tinsel and the trappings, it may become, for all our readers, the Holy and Joyous celebration of “Christ’s Mass.”
Israeli Inquiry
Q. What will be one of the main objectives of the Jews in America during 1956?
A. They will be striving, with accelerated fervor, to maneuver America into the role of big brother to the State of Israel, the protector of its interests and the conqueror of its foes.
Q. What led the Jews to choose the year 1956 for this campaign?
A. The presidential elections in November — an event which causes politicians to cast greedy eyes upon the fat bloc of Jewish votes, ready to fall into the lap of whatever candidate makes the most enticing offers. Q. Have the Jews published any announcement of their election-year plans?
A. As outlined in the Bulletin of the Zionist Organization of America, their intention is “to swing American public opinion to come to Israel’s aid and exert pressure on the Administration of the kind which proved successful in 1947 and 1948, without which the State of Israel would not have come into being.”
Q. Under what guise are the Jews trying to win American opinion to their side?
A. They are portraying Israel as a beleaguered little democracy, America’s one friend in the Middle East, struggling for existence against hordes of Communist-dominated Arab neighbors.
Q. Is there evidence that this portrayal is not quite accurate?
A. Much, three samples of which follow:
1) The official report on immigration to Israel, published by the U. S. Department of Commerce, reveals that most Israelis come from (and necessarily with the blessings of) Soviet Russia and her satellites.
2) As a result of the August elections, the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) is composed of the following elements. Of the Knesset’s 120 seats, forty belong to the Socialist Labor Party (Mapai), an affiliate of the Second International; fifteen belong to the Freedom Party (Herut), political arm of those reportedly-outlawed terrorist gangs whose atrocities shocked the civilized world; ten belong to the Unity of Labor (Ahdut Avoda), an avowedly Marxist group; nine belong to the United Workers Party (Mapam), which advocates “the revolutionary class struggle” and “a firm bond between the workers of the world and the Soviet Union”; and six belong to the Communist Party of Israel — making a total of eighty seats for these extremist factions, or two- thirds of the parliament’s membership.
3) In June of 1950, an American journalist was told by an official at the Vatican’s Department for Extraordinary Affairs, that the state of Israel is “obviously an outpost of the Soviet Union in the Middle East.” When the journalist objected that the major Israeli party is Socialist and not Communist, he was told, “It is all camouflage. These people are of one mind when it comes to the Christian religion. They are out to de-Christianize the Levant as part of a world-wide plot to destroy what is left of Christian morality.”
Q. If Zionism and Communism are, then, so closely akin why is Israel presently scorning Russia and turning to the U. S. for help?
A. This is a move not of necessity, but of prudence. The large quantities of planes, tanks, and guns Israel has already amassed have come to her mainly from behind the Iron Curtain, and Russia is still willing to keep Israel fortified, as she made clear immediately upon announcement of her arms- deal with Egypt. The Jews, however, are genuinely alarmed about the Arab nations, whose lands they have usurped, whose villages they have ravaged and destroyed, whose people they have slaughtered.
Fearful lest the pent-up rage of the Arab world should finally burst upon them, the Jews want to see the Arabs knocked out once and for all, leaving Israel undisputed mistress of the Middle East. If Russia were to take on the assignment, there would be a danger of the U. S. stepping in on the side of the Arabs. Consequently, the Jews are creating the illusion that Israel is herself a victim of Communist aggression — hopeful that the U. S. can thereby be induced to come to her “defense.”
Q. Is there no chance that this Jewish scheme will be frustrated?
A. There is an excellent chance that Americans, weary of fighting fruitless wars, will take the trouble to discover that they are now being invited to do and die for no other purpose than to exalt the Jewish nation — whereupon the Jews are likely to find their boldness met with an unexpectedly formidable reaction.
Q. Is this the only hope of defeating the Jews?
A. There is another and better one. It is the wan but still-living hope that the remnants of Christendom, struck with the terrible realization that the land hallowed by the Birth and Death of Christ is now in the hands of His implacable enemies, will arise and rally to that now-more-pertinent call which Pope Urban II issued to the first Crusaders: “Mark out a path all the way to the Holy Sepulcher and snatch the Holy Land from that abominable people!”
Christian Reminder
For anyone who wonders whether there is provocation for a present-day Catholic Crusade to rescue the Holy Land, we are concluding this issue with a partial list of the atrocities and desecrations which the Jews have committed in Palestine since 1948. (We make no attempt to indicate here the loss in lives and property suffered by the nearly one million Arabs who have been evicted from their ancient homes during the past seven years.)
The Jews have defiled and destroyed the following Church buildings: the Church of Saint John the Baptist at Am Karim, the Church of the Beatitudes at Capharnaum, the Church of Mensa Christi on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, the Church of Saint Peter at Tiberias, the Cenacle (the place of the Last Supper) at Jerusalem, the Convent of Mary Reparatrix at Jerusalem, the Convent and Hospice of Notre Dame at Jerusalem, the Convent of the Sisters of Saint Ann at Haifa, the Franciscan Convent at Tiberias, the Patriarchal Seminary at Beit-Jala, the Salesian houses at Cremisan, the Sisters’ Convent at Am Karim, the School of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Sion at Katamon, the Sisters’ residence at Capharnaum, the church and rectory at Ikret. Catholic authorities have estimated that the Jews have destroyed Church property in the Holy Land at the rate of more than two million dollars’ worth a year. To enumerate only French Catholic institutions, they have demolished four hospitals, sixteen dispensaries, two hospices, four seminaries, thirty-two schools and orphanages, and seven retreat houses.
Among the countless other desecrations we might mention, none is more heart-rending than that of Jerusalem’s Church of the Dormition — the magnificent Romanesque shrine to the Mother of God which was pillaged by Israeli soldiers and then turned into a Jewish dance hall for the young men and women of Haganah. It was only after a hundred such incidents that the Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Hughes, unequivocally charged that there is now in operation a “deliberate Jewish effort to decimate the Arabs and to destroy Christianity in Palestine.” The Point - 1956 The Point – January 1956
THE JEWISH GANGS OF BOSTON
The Siege
It has been the repeated warning of a local rabbi named Joseph Shubow that, “Boston, Massachusetts, is a pivotal city for United States’ Jewry.” In plain American, what the rabbi means is that, “Unless we Jews can control the Catholic city of Boston, it will stand as a serious threat to our grip on the rest of the country.”
With this in mind, The Point has decided to start off the new year by sharing with its out-of-town readers some on-the-spot information about the full-scale Jewish siege of Boston Catholics. And siege it most decidedly has become, for Joseph Shubow’s spiritual children have taken his message to heart. They are fighting the “Battle of Boston” with dedicated zest, and if, as Shubow complains, some of the less zealous ones do occasionally sleep, we have yet to discover them at it.
An outland observer might well conclude to Boston’s Semitic beleaguerment merely from knowing the high concentration of Jews in the place. For, apart from the five-borough ghetto of New York, there is not one city among America’s forty largest which can surpass Boston’s nearly twenty-per-cent Jewish population.
To the vanishing Boston Brahmin, and the multiplying Boston Catholic, the Jewish assault is every day becoming more evident. Brandeis University, elbowing its way into Boston’s ivy-covered college clique, is a front-line division in the current Hebrew campaign. At the outset, Brandeis was scheduled to be “Einstein University,” until that frankly-Communist mathematician went into a pout over the appointment of a president. Einstein wanted bright-Red Harold Lasky to get the job, the directors thought the choice “imprudent.” Still, the latest appointment to Brandeis’ Jewish faculty is Dr. Felix Browder, son of Earl, the late head of the American Communist Party. This appointment got rave notices in the Boston press, as do all Brandeis activities. Recent sample: a photograph of Archbishop Richard J. Cushing eagerly attentive to the Semitic jesting of Brandeis Trustee Joseph Linsey, a local Jewish racketeer and racetrack owner.
A considerable weapon in the fight to gain control of the city has been an Interfaith organization called the Massachusetts Committee of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, founded by Boston Jew Ben Shapiro. This gentleman’s success came vividly home to The Point when a prominent pastor explained to us that he was obliged to attend a synagogue service because, “Ben Shapiro asked me to!”
On Boston’s chief downtown street, the Jews have lately dedicated the “Associated Synagogues Building,” whose street-level, store-front window boldly flaunts copies of the Talmud, the Jewish book so repeatedly condemned by the popes for containing, as Pope Innocent IV said, “every kind of vileness and blasphemy against Christian truth.”
Because of the deeply Catholic nature of present Boston, the Jewish besiegers have naturally led with attacks which are designed to neutralize, and ultimately nullify, Catholic influence in public places. At the same time, they have not neglected that work so important to their purposes: national subversion. Boston Jews have played a prominent, and often exclusive, part in the operation of such black-listed outfits as the Boston School for Marxist Studies, the League for Democratic Control, the Progressive Labor School, and the Boston School of Social Science. The House Un-American Activities Committee, which has condemned all the foregoing, also exposed the local Chelsea Jewish Children’s School, branding it as, “A place where Marxism is combined with instruction in the racial tongue.”
The overtly-Communist Samuel Adams School of Boston was likewise heavily Jewish-staffed, and last summer a Congressional investigation in New York turned up the fact that a former Adams School instructor, Boston Jew Sol Vail, was a key man in the New York State network of Communist- Jewish summer camps. Zionist summer camps in the Boston area are now known to be the hatching-place of those terrorist gangs which were unleashed in the Boston streets last Fall to crush Saint Benedict Center’s protest against Brandeis University. The headquarters for all Zionist activity in Boston is at Number 17 Commonwealth Avenue, from which there radiate all over the city those Hebrew hawkers who have made Boston Jews the country’s most prolific buyers of Israeli Bonds. Back into this same headquarters (which loyal Boston Israelis call “the little embassy”) there pour gesticulated reports on the progress of the “siege.”
The following are The Point ’s own reports on three of the many phases of the current Jewish attack on Boston.
The Peddlers’ Gang
There was one inevitable consequence of the Jews’ rush on Boston. As their numbers increased, the city’s Jewish merchants sallied forth from their jewelry stores and furniture exchanges to lay siege to every corner of the downtown shopping district. With Jewish retailers buying only from Jewish wholesalers, and Jewish wholesalers giving special prices to Jewish retailers, it was only a matter of time before Gentile owners, surrendering to the “squeeze,” announced that henceforth their stores would be “under new management.”
Though Bostonians are generally aware that all commodities from lampshades to limousines are presently purveyed to them by Jews, few realize how zealous the Jews have been to keep the true limits of their influence concealed. Like department store owner Abe Filehne (who became A. Lincoln Filene, and then dropped even the “A”) Jewish dealers have tried to mask their identity by giving their names a Gentile bob. Greenspan has become “Green”; Lubinski has become “Luby”; Rabinovitz has become “Rabb.” (This last alteration inspired the comment that the super-successful chain of supermarkets owned by the “Rabb” family should really be called “Stopinovitz & Shopinovitz.”)
Another faction of Jewish peddlers, having dispossessed Yankee merchants of their stores, decided that those stores by any other names might not be so profitable. Consequently, many of Boston’s Jew-run emporiums bear some deceptively un-Judaic appellations: R. H. White’s, Gilchrist’s, the Charles B. Perkins Cigar Stores, Wethern’s, Leeds, E. B. Horn, etc.
Into this category, too, fit such unlikely Jewish properties as the Kenmore, Somerset, Vendome, Sherry Biltmore, Lenox and Braemore hotels; the Little Building; and the United States Trust Company.
The most striking specimen in this exhibit, however, is assuredly the firm of Brooks Brothers, through whose proper doors legions of proper Bostonians have trudged, content in the knowledge that here they would be outfitted by their own sort of people in their own sort of way. According to the latest edition of Moody’s business directory, Brooks Brothers has in recent days been transferred into the hands of Julius Garfinckel, Inc.
Not surprisingly, the task of minding Boston’s business has proved profitable to the Jews in more ways than one. Their bulging purses have enabled them to put into effect whatever ventures seem currently likely to further the Jewish cause, whether it be staging a Chanukkah festival or setting up a slush fund for pushing bills through the legislature. Through large outlays for advertising, without which most Boston newspapers would collapse overnight, they have acquired a sure and sinister power over the press. By dominating both the wholesale and retail phases of Boston business, they can largely determine such matters as how Bostonians will dress, how they will furnish their homes, what books they will read.
Lately, the Jews have been using their hold on business as a beachhead from which to assault Boston morality. Most valuable in this campaign have been the city’s movie theaters, all of which belong to Jews. Seizing the chance afforded by relaxations in the censorship code, Jewish owners have recently dedicated a number of expensively-located theaters to the sole work of exhibiting — with graphic advertisements — films which are distinguished only for their obscenity.
As a final and thoroughly characteristic gesture, the Jews call these theaters by names like the Beacon, the Exeter, and the Mayflower — apparently in the hope that Bostonians will blame the Brahmins for the city’s avalanche of filth. The Political Gang
Quite the most ambitious Jewish plan for the conquest of Boston by political means was the one put forward by a Jew named Jerome Rappaport, who descended upon the city a few years ago with ideas about capturing the “young people’s” vote. Before long, Rappaport had captured for himself one of our local Catholic girls (the daughter of the head of the Massachusetts Democratic Committee), whom he married at a candle-light ceremony on Boston’s T-Wharf.
Knowing that one lone Jew would never make the grade as a political force in Boston, Rappaport kept his Jewishness shrewdly under cover and organized a Gentile front — the New Boston Committee. At the head of the NBC (as his project came to be called) Rappaport placed a local doctor named Murphy. Hiding behind a score of such non-Jews, Rappaport made his bid to create a “New Boston” by endorsing candidates for a municipal election. Long before all the ballots were counted, it became apparent that Rappaport’s NBC had won a great victory.
But between this election and the following one something happened. Boston Catholics began to wake up to the Jewishness of the “Committee” and they began to resent very much having their names used all over town as “letter-head patrons” for whatever scheme might enter the mind of Rappaport. The next time the voters of Boston went to the polls, not one NBC-controlled candidate was elected. It was received as decidedly happy news when the press finally disclosed that Rappaport’s figurehead, Doctor Murphy, had officially resigned months before, and that the Jewish political vision of a “New Boston” had now fatally faded.
Last Fall, in Boston’s primary elections, twenty-seven men entered the race for the nine seats on the City Council. Among all Boston’s 140,000 Jews, only one (not Rappaport) was bold enough to run. He finished next to last, in twenty-sixth place, with twenty-five Catholic candidates ahead of him.
The more realistic members of the Jewish political gang have ceased to look upon polling booths as the means of cracking Catholic Boston’s politics. They have taken to “black-washing,” and, by enlisting the aid of every Jew in anything that sounds like an official position, they have launched a smear-campaign against the city.
Led by Jewish Judge Adlow of the Municipal Court, they have made wholesale attacks on “district attorneys and prosecuting officers,” and on “corrupt police and friendly prosecuting attorneys.” Jewish Judge Reuben Lurie, who in a term as penal commissioner was accused by a former governor of ruining the local prison system (getting himself roundly and soundly referred to as a “penological crackpot”) has been joined in the fight to discredit our jails by State Attorney-General George Fingold. This latter Jewish office-holder finds much pleasure in orating about the “rotten disgrace” of police departments, and has assigned a detective to Boston’s well-loved City Hospital, a favorite Jewish target, in the hope of discovering a wrongly-open window or an ill-washed baby-bottle.
With Doctor Maurice Victor’s widely-publicized charges that Boston has the nation’s number one “alcoholic” problem, the smear-campaign has been lately intensified. Many conclude that the current near-panic among local political Jews has been occasioned by the November defeat of Jewish Jackson Holtz. A Democratic candidate for Congress, Holtz was defeated when the Irish-Catholic Democrats in the West Roxbury section of Boston went against him. Rather than vote for Jewish Mr. Holtz, the West Roxburyites put aside party allegiance, jumped over a high traditional wall of separation, and approved a Yankee Republican as their representative in Washington.
The Harvard Gang
With apologies for leaving whole areas of Jewish activity uncommented-on, and hosts of local gang-leaders unexposed, we would like to conclude with a word to those readers who think of Boston as that proper Puritan place where “the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God.”
The traditional citadel of Boston’s “Cabot culture” has always been that sprawling next-door neighbor of The Point, Harvard University. An examination of the University’s latest listing of teachers and students, however, reveals that the Jewish besiegers have in no sense passed the place by. This year, in all of Harvard’s student body, only six decorous Cabots can be found to balance the aggressive presence of thirty-three shoving Cohens! And on the faculty, one lone Cabot (who comes in from town for an occasional lecture) has left a clear field for eleven ubiquitous Cohens!
Everywhere there is evidence of surrender. A local lodge of B’nai B’rith meets in the Harvard faculty building. The head of the University’s Board of Overseers is Jewish Charles Wyzanski. At the Law School, a Jew named Katz (of the Marshall Plan and the Ford Foundation) has lately been assigned to continue the tradition of such conspiring Harvard Jews as Felix Frankfurter, Lee Pressman, and Harry Dexter White. In recognition of how well things are going, New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary has awarded young President Pusey of Harvard an honorary degree.
After much diligent searching, The Point has been able to discover just one corner of Harvard that is holding out — and that is the southeast corner of the University’s Memorial Hall. There, in stony witness to Harvard’s Gentile past, a visitor will note, high on the outside wall, the busts of two Christian orators: Saint John Chrysostom and Bishop Jacques Bossuet. These two, who had eloquence and the episcopacy in common, were likewise the sharers of a common sentiment toward the Jews. Saint Chrysostom, in a homily to his people, and Bossuet in an instruction to the Dauphin, both made the Church’s position imperishably clear with the statement, “Jews, God hates you!”
The imminent removal of these two bits of statuary will mark the final capitulation of the Cabots’ Boston.
For Catholic Boston, we have yet some hope. The Point – February 1956
PROFILES OF TWO WHITE JEWS
Everybody knows at least one White Jew: one assimilated, non- gesticulating, clean-shaven Hebrew whose distinction — indeed, whose bright shining virtue — is that, “He’s not like other Jews!”
White Jews may be found in nearly every field of endeavor and The Point receives a constant influx of letters protesting that, “I know what you say is true of most Jews, but how about N.? He’s really different.”
In an effort to shed some light on this matter, we herewith examine two men, of widely divergent careers, who seem most to have impressed our readers by overcoming their innate Jewishness and achieving a universally- acknowledged status of “not like the rest of them.”
I — The Adviser
When Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov visited the United States a few months back, he called one day at the home of a prominent, but private, American citizen. After conventional pleasantries and cocktails, Molotov and his friend told reporters to go away, then closeted themselves for a leisurely luncheon and conference.
Ordinarily, news of such goings-on would have had Americans dithering with demands for an explanation. But this time it caused scarcely a ruffle. For the man on whom Molotov called is one whom Americans have long been trained never to question or suspect. He is that ancient and honorable Hebrew, Bernard Mannes Baruch.
It was in 1912 that Bernard Baruch resigned his seat on the New York Stock Exchange to devote his full energies to ordering the affairs of government. Having given his financial and racial endorsement to the candidacy of Woodrow Wilson, Baruch was rewarded by the new President with a series of jobs, culminating, in 1918, with the chairmanship of the War Industries Board. This assignment Baruch carried off with remarkable zest. It gave him, by his own testimony, “more power than perhaps any other man in the war,” and when the Armistice intervened he had plans all drawn up for clothing every adult civilian in the U. S. in “a cheap but serviceable sort of uniform.”
Meantime, Wilson invited Baruch into his Cabinet, as Secretary of the Treasury. Baruch declined, as he was to decline the same offer when it was made in the mid-thirties by President Roosevelt. To formulate his policies in public view, to be spotlighted with responsibility for them, was for Baruch a horrifying prospect. He found that by whispering his ideas into important ears, not only could he disseminate them with more telling effectiveness — and through more departments of the government — but could weather whatever political squalls might arise and sail smoothly from one Administration to the next. The Baruch-beholden Washington Post, trying to be nice, summarized the situation this way: “Bernard M. Baruch aspires to be known as the perpetual adviser to all Presidents, of all parties, at all times, and upon all subjects.”
By revealing his innermost thoughts to none but the privileged few, Baruch kept the public uncertain as to his true intentions. But, encouraged by the press, Americans took these intentions to be benevolent. As one gaga biographer put it. “The guiding impulse of Bernie’s life … is pure, unselfish and self-effacing public service.”
Once, this reputation almost got spoiled. President Hoover strongly suspected that the stock market crash during his Administration had been brought on by the financial finaglings of Baruch. The President ordered an investigation, but at the last minute, for reasons known to himself, called it off.
There were occasions, too, when Baruch was almost his own undoing — as when he sponsored publication of the book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and wrote for it an enthusiastic preface. So viciously anti- Catholic was this work that after it first appeared, the publisher, L.C. Page & Co., was descended upon by outraged Boston Catholics and forced to expurgate future editions. By and large, though, Baruch has kept his impulses submerged and adhered faithfully to his whispering campaign, the effectiveness of which can be gauged by the following comment from Fortune magazine: “Bernard M. Baruch is called into frequent conferences with the President. He has financed many a Congressional campaign; and is surrounded by a praetorian guard of Senators, who hang on his every word. The figure of Baruch is swelling into enormous dimensions on the horizon of public life. … He is the Mystery Man of Washington and Wall Street.”
So powerful was Baruch in the Roosevelt administration, having lunch each week at the White House, holding court for lesser New Dealers twice weekly at the Carlton Hotel, and presiding between times from his bench in Lafayette Park, that he was generally acclaimed “Assistant President.” He was the supreme, infallible authority on all matters from conserving rubber to remaking the postwar world. And though he himself stayed at the rear, he saw to it that the men he had trained reached the front lines. Two of these, Hugh Johnson and George Peek, headed, respectively, the NRA and the AAA — both of which schemes Baruch himself had conceived, and both of which were ultimately declared unconstitutional.
Baruch enjoyed the rare distinction of being one man who was in good favor with Roosevelt from the beginning of his reign until its end. In the spring of 1944, one year before he died, the President took time out from his war-duties for a secluded four-week vacation with Baruch at the latter’s 20,000-acre estate in South Carolina. (Baruch’s own part in the war-effort was well prognosticated by Winston Churchill, who, in 1939, told Baruch, “War is coming very soon … You will be running the show over there.”)
When Roosevelt was succeeded by Harry Truman, Baruch was appointed American delegate to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, in which capacity he drew up and presented, as official U. S. policy, “the Baruch Plan,” recommending that all formulas and materials needed for the manufacture of Atom Bombs be put in the keeping of an international “Atomic Development Authority.” This absolute, anonymously-staffed bureau would also be empowered to deal “immediate, swift, and sure punishment to those (nations) who violate the agreements.” After the Republican victory of 1952, Baruch lost little time in demonstrating to the nation that his own position was unshakably secure. On the 5th and 7th of January, 1953, two weeks before his formal inauguration as President, Dwight Eisenhower met and conferred with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The place of their rendezvous: the New York apartment of Bernard Baruch.
But it was during the Truman tenure that there occurred that incident which, more than numbers of others, has left us a picture of Baruch with all his “Whiteness” laid aside. In those days, before the state of Israel was established, when gangs of Jewish terrorists sacked the Holy Land in a wild, vengeful orgy of destruction and death, a prosperous Hollywood Jew named Ben Hecht ran a full-page ad in some two dozen of the largest newspapers across the country. It was addressed “To the Terrorists of Palestine” and read in part as follows:
“The Jews of America are for you. You are their champions. …“Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.”
The Jews of America, of course, denied that they did any such thing. Every big Jewish organization in the country issued hurried statements repudiating Hecht, saying the sentiments he expressed were his own and not those of American Jewry.
In his recent autobiography, Hecht tells the aftermath of his advertisement: “One day the door of my room opened and a tall white-haired man entered. It was Bernard Baruch, my first Jewish social visitor. He sat down, observed me for a moment and then spoke. ‘I am on your side,’ said Baruch. ‘The only way the Jews will ever get anything is by fighting for it. I’d like you to think of me as one of your Jewish fighters in the tall grass with a long gun. I’ve always done my best work that way, out of sight.’ ”
Coming from the man whose ideas and influence have dominated American life for half a century, this statement, like a sudden light in a dark room, reveals a picture of recent history that is new, ugly, and glaringly plain. It clarifies some gigantic coincidences: during the era when Baruch has been the constant and intimate adviser to our Presidents, America has been ravaged with wars; has been hitched to an economic roller-coaster riding between boom and bust; has been brought to the brink of cultural and moral disaster; has been established as the foremost champion of World Jewry, the chief instigator in setting up and perpetuating the Jewish State of Israel.
At 85, Bernard Baruch can look back on a life in which he has served his race devotedly and with unprecedented success. Soon he, the Supreme Commander, will have to retire from the fight, but before he does we can be sure he will try to choose his successor, another White Jew who will lie in the tall grass, armed with a long gun.
II — The Refugee
The Point ’s second White Jew is drawn from the religious rather than the secular world, but he has been no less a problem to our readers than Mr. Baruch. He is a refugee from Austria who now conducts, at a Catholic college in New Jersey, a one-man propaganda agency called the Institute of Judaeo-Christian Studies. So “White” is this Jew that at the age of twenty he submitted himself to the ritual of Christian Baptism, and then went on to become a Catholic priest. His name is Father John M. Oesterreicher.
Before Baptism, John Oesterreicher had been a student of medicine. Three years and a few theology books later, he was ordained a Catholic priest. Even his most prostrate apologists have wondered at such a speeded-up process. And more thoughtful observers have concluded that in the Church which harbors such painful and multiple memories of deceitfully converted “Marrano” Jews, there is something most unusual, to say the least, about the urgency with which John Osterreicher was rushed from Baptism to Holy Orders.
Whether by deliberate design or not, the historical fact is that, for hundreds of thousands of German-speaking Jews, Father Oesterreicher’s sudden priesthood became an immediate weapon against the rising anti-Jewishness of Adolph Hitler. With the weight of the Catholic Church presumably behind him, and the passion of his Jewish blood clearly pushing him on, Father Oesterreicher began a frenzied crusade of writing and speaking. He invoked, as authorities, both saints and sociologists, popes and psychiatrists. He devised arguments from demonology and anthropology, from scholastics and rationalists — all to prove to the Catholics of Austria and Germany that anyone who speaks ill of a Jew is actually blaspheming Jesus Christ Himself!
The same Catholics who well knew that the program proposed by Hitler was hardly the Church’s solution to the Jewish question, knew quite as well that Father Oesterreicher did not have the answer either.
As Hitler proceeded across Europe, Father Oesterreicher managed to keep several towns ahead of him, and finally, in 1941, turned up as a curate in New York City. Since there were in our whole country only about a dozen Jewish-convert priests, Father Oesterreicher proved to be a popular novelty. He was the object of much parochial curiosity and found no difficulty in gathering an inquisitive crowd for the lectures he started to give within six months of his arrival here. His message was invariably of one theme. Always there was the appeal to respect, to admire, to love, to fall down in the mud and worship the Jewish race. And always the appeal was subtly charged with what Father Oesterreicher hoped would pass for the binding authority of the Catholic Church.
But Father Oesterreicher did not have to depend solely upon his own initiative. He had a number of American boosters, of whom perhaps the most zealous was Professor Jacques Maritain. Professor Maritain is the French-born, Protestant-reared, Catholic philosopher who married a Russian Jewess named Raïssa Oumansoff. Although known in this country as a speaker at Jewish seminaries and teacher at Masonic universities, Maritain did try to get a position at a Catholic school. Some years ago, he was interviewed for a job at Fordham University, and stipulated in the course of the discussion that he would expect to be given free rein in all his classes to criticize the pope. Fordham’s Jesuit president turned him down, and Maritain took a job at Princeton, no holds barred.
When Professor Maritain received an honorary degree a few months ago from Jewish Brandeis University, his support of Father Oesterreicher accounted for much of the genuine applause he received from the assembled representatives of American Jewry. For Father Oesterreicher, in every point of his Judaeo-Christian program, has complied exactly with the publicized objectives of the powerful American Jewish Committee. In his books, Walls Are Crumbling and The Bridge, Father Oesterreicher’s glorification of the Jews would erase forever from Catholic minds those New Testament texts which the Jewish Committee has so repeatedly attacked as “anti-Semitic.” Saint Peter’s accusation in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 5, that the Jews are the murderers of Christ; Saint Stephen’s vehement repetition of this charge in chapter 7; Saint Paul’s elaboration on the guilt and curse of the Jews in I Thessalonians, 2:15 — these and all other biblical indictments of the Jewish people are blotted out and replaced by Father Oesterreicher’s devotion to such unbaptized “saints” as Jewish logician Edmund Husserl and Jewish intuitionist Henri Bergson.
In his compliance with the American Jewish Committee’s declared aim, “to revise Christian religious teaching,” Father Oesterreicher has consistently depreciated the tall stacks of papal legislation against the Jews. And, even more boldly, he has demanded a rewording of the Church’s liturgy, proposing that our annual Good Friday reference to the “perfidious Jews” be changed in meaning! The American Jewish Committee followed up Father Oesterreicher’s proposal by pulling every string within its grasp from here to Rome. The result? The following half-hearted, much-guarded statement by the Vatican’s Congregation of Rites: “This Sacred Congregation, having been consulted about the matter, has deemed it advisable to make the following declaration only: That, in translations into the vernacular, phrases are not disapproved of which the meaning (for ‘perfidious Jews’) is ‘infidels without belief.’ ”
Although we may be assured from our Faith that nineteen hundred years of Church policy toward the crucifiers of Christ will never be undone by one strategically-placed Jew, still, it is encouraging to be presented with clear evidence of just how little pro-Jewish residue Father Oesterreicher leaves behind him. When President Truman’s Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine held its hearings in Vienna, the center of Father Oesterreicher’s “apostolate” during the thirties, there was not the least hint that Austrian Catholics had retained even a remembrance of the Oesterreicher “doctrines.” Indeed, the outlook of Austrian Catholics toward Jews was summarized most orthodoxly by His Excellency, Francis Kamprath, Vienna’s Auxiliary Bishop. As a gauge of the previous effectiveness of Father Oesterreicher’s Judaeo-Christian program, and a pledge of its ultimate failure, we conclude with the statement by Bishop Kamprath, taken from recorded testimony before the Anglo-American Committee:
“During the war and in the time of the Nazis there was a great deal of mistaken racial anti-Semitism. Today all anti-Semitism in Austria is religious anti-Semitism. That is justified.” The Point – March 1956
FOREIGN ALLEGIANCE OF AMERICAN JEWS
The Problem
On the night of May 14, 1948, the Jews of America staged a celebration. From New York to Los Angeles, great roaring throngs of them, waving strange flags and bellowing strange anthems, shoved and shouted their way through city streets. By-standers who had seen the headlines of late-edition newspapers were well aware of the cause of this Jewish rejoicing. For at 6:11 P.M. of that spring evening, President Harry Truman, tossing diplomatic precedent to the winds, had accorded official U. S. recognition to a foreign power established just eleven minutes before: the brash, brawling, Jewish State of Israel.
The complacency with which Americans accepted this event was the final flowering of an attitude that had prevailed here ever since the Jews revealed their intention of snatching up the Holy Land as their own domain. It was not, however, an attitude prompted by a single motive. Many Americans smiled upon Zionist ambitions by way of expressing their condolence for the sufferings the Jews said they had endured under the Nazis. But for other Americans, the acquiescence to Jewish schemes was inspired by the wild, desperate fancy that setting up the State of Israel would somehow spell an end to America’s own increasingly-urgent Jewish problem.
The root of this problem lay in the familiar axiom that Jews everywhere are part of a single, inseparable nation, living in many Gentile lands but belonging to none of them. “Jews are a distinctive nationality,” said Jewish Justice Louis Brandeis, “of which every Jew, whatever his country, his station, or his shade of belief, is necessarily a member.” During the twentieth century, as hordes of Jewish immigrants swarmed into America, the truth of Brandeis’ statement came painfully home. The Jews were a people apart, bristling and intransigent. The notion of America as a great melting pot, blending together all peoples and cultures, thus had to be modified with the significant exemption, “But Jews don’t melt.” With the establishment of the Jewish state, hope surged that America’s “Jewish problem” would be departing as soon as there were boats enough to accommodate it. “We want to go home … home … home. We must go home,” Rabbi Stephen Wise had wailed in the days when Israel was still just a gleam in Jewish eyes. It was improbable that all Jews would turn their backs on the fat life in America in order to pioneer a meager, unmechanized land. Still, it did seem reasonable that those Jews most burningly aware of their Jewishness, their separateness, would head for Israel, where their ardor would be not only in place but most welcome; and that those Jews who wanted to remain here would consent to become less noisy, less aggressive, less of “a nation within a nation.”
This naive hope has by now been thoroughly blasted. With the State of Israel about to enter its ninth year of impassioned existence, there are more Jews in America than ever before, and more Jewish nationalism. Besides, it is Israel itself, the country to which the Jews of America have deliberately chosen not to go, that excites and benefits most from their labors. Every day come fresh reports of Jewish demands, ranging from indignant cries for American arms to exploratory requests for American troops.
The Jews of America were once instructed by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s Prime Minister, that they must have “neither friendship nor sympathy but love of Israel, of the State of Israel … . It must be an unconditional love. There must be complete solidarity with the State and the people of Israel.” This admonition has been taken fervently to heart. Though nearly half the world’s Jews live in the U. S., their loyalty is to Israel, the political expression of that fierce and blood-bound thing: the Jewish nation.
The Pressure
In a bulletin put out by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association of Washington Heights, N. Y., there is contained the following bold statement of Jewish allegiance. “Here is Our Pledge, Israel: I pledge my loyalty to God, to the Torah and to the Jewish people and to the Jewish state.”
The young pretended-Americans who take this vow of loyalty to a foreign nation owe an enormous debt of gratitude to a top-notch Mason from Missouri. This benefactor is, of course, Harry S. Truman, and the immediate story of how American Jews got him to build the Jewish state starts early in 1948.
At that time, United States policy-makers were becoming just a bit wary of carving up the Holy Land into two explosive political divisions, one Arab and one Jewish. Although they had agreed to this so-called “partition,” after every Jew in America had screamed that they should, the U. S. State Department — and even the U. S. delegation to the Jewish-minded United Nations — were coming to feel that the setting-up of a Jewish government on property belonging to Arabs, with Arab governments surrounding it on all sides, would be much more likely to succeed if a period of “U. N. Trusteeship” came first.
But when the Trusteeship plan was announced (as the only feasible one which would give the Jews the country they were demanding, and yet forestall U. S. involvement in a Middle East war) the Jews of America began to wail. And then they began to push, shove, and employ all their considerable arts of political pressure.
The British occupation of the Holy Land was to cease on May 14, 1948. And the Jews were determined that as soon as the British pulled out, a Jewish government would take over. Every Jewish organization was loudly lobbying for the immediate establishment of such a state. Judge Proskauer of the American Jewish Committee even proposed that we sell U. S. arms to the Jewish gangs of Palestine, thus equipping them to force their will on the Arabs at the moment of British departure. On the 8th of April, 8,000 synagogues all across the nation held special “services” to demand that our government recognize the Jewish state right away, regardless of the consequences to ourselves.
Here enters Truman. It was at him that the Jews determined to aim the major pressure. For while the State Department might be hesitating, the President, said the Jews, could solve the whole Jewish-state problem by one swift grant of “official recognition.”
1948 was election year, and the fact that three-fourths of America’s Jews are concentrated in 14 key political cities, plus the fact that the Jews can always control New York State’s big bundle of 45 electoral votes, has a terrorizing effect on American politicians. In Truman’s case the pressure was further increased by the fact, later attested to by Jewish columnist David Lawrence, that without Jewish contributions Truman could never have financed his 1948 campaign.
Just how the Jews felt, vote-wise, in the matter of the Holy Land was no secret. In the off-year Congressional elections in the Bronx in 1947, a Jewish Labor Party candidate had carried a “solidly Democratic” district by telling the Jews that we should send American troops to Palestine to enforce the partition and protect the new Jewish state!
At the insistence of Jew Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s ex-partner in the clothing business, the President allowed himself to be closeted in a secret session with Jewry’s arch-intimidator, the ubiquitous Dr. Chaim Weizmann. As May 14 approached, party advisers let Truman know that his victory in the Fall depended entirely upon the Jewish issue. Finally, on the fateful day, Truman had a persuasive private visit from the President of the Jewish Masonic lodges in America, Frank Goldman of B’nai B’rith. Later that morning, Truman held a conference with his full-time Jewish adviser, David K. Niles, and a certain Mr. Epstein from the Jewish Agency in Washington. It was decided then, irrevocably, that as soon as the British Mandate in Palestine should run out (6 P. M. that evening, Washington time) Truman must officially recognize the government of the State of Israel. As a precautionary measure, care was taken that neither the State Department nor our U. N. Delegation should be advised of what the President intended to do.
It all came about as the Jews had planned. Mr. Truman granted official recognition at 6:11 P. M., May 14, 1948. And the Jews kept their part of the bargain. The President was returned to office the following November.
American Jews have been gloating over their success ever since, and in the February 5, 1953 issue of The American Zionist, Dr. Emmanuel Neumann made a summary statement of Mr. Truman’s role in the creation of the Jewish state. As head of the Zionist Organization of America, Dr. Neumann wrote that the President, “accepted the Zionist line reluctantly and under pressure, at first, but having accepted it, he followed through honestly and firmly.” The Price
There is no political figure in the nation who cannot match Truman’s “pressure” story with one of his own. But even more bold than the constant intimidation of America’s public men, is the high-handed, brassy campaign to support the government of the State of Israel with a steady flow of American dollars. Since 1939, the Jews who live in the U. S. have contributed $l,100,000,000 to what they call the United Jewish Appeal. To get some small idea of just how successful the U. J. A. has been, we call attention to the relative receipts of that most familiar of all solicitors, the American Red Cross. In the year 1954, drawing upon a Jewish population which the Jews say is only five million, the United Jewish Appeal was able to set a goal that exceeded by $35,000,000 the amount sought by the entire Red Cross organization, which draws upon one hundred and fifty million Americans!
From these arresting figures, it is clear that American Jews look upon the United Jewish Appeal as much more than an ordinary community relief fund. By the Jews’ own boast, we are assured that millions of these dollars, wooed from Gentile pocketbooks on the Jewish-owned Main Streets of America, have gone into the building of their new country in Palestine. So much is this the case that on November 18, 1954, in a speech before the 23rd general assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, U. J. A.’s Dr. Schwartz told American Jews that their “local” spending must be entirely “subordinated” to “allocations for overseas needs through the United Jewish Appeal.”
Thus, in obedience to an edict from Israel’s chief rabbi, Halevi Herzog, American synagogues, during the high holy days” of September, 1952, made the auctioning of Israeli government bonds the feature of all their services — a most lucrative form of devotion which has since been repeated. In 1954, besides the regular gifts and bond investments, a hastily- collected $65,000,000 was made available to Israel in order to meet the payments due on the national debt. And only a few months ago, no less a personage than Israel’s Foreign Minister himself landed in America with a trunk full of his government’s bonds and a predatory gleam in his eye. Again, American Jews came through for the “homeland,” sending the Foreign Minister back to Jerusalem richer by several millions.
A frightening sidelight on this matter of steady income from Israel’s nonresident citizens came in September of 1952, when a special “Reparations” fee of $715,000,000 was extorted by Israel from the government of West Germany. Fantastic as it sounds, this money (being paid in installments of $60,000,000 per annum) is to compensate for the fact that several years before the State of Israel even existed, German citizens mistreated some fellow-German citizens of Jewish blood. The clear claim of the State of Israel in all this is that the German Jews who suffered under Hitler were not Germans at all, but citizens of the Jewish State. And the only conclusion to draw from such a precedent is that, if the Jews have their way, anyone who offends any Jew, in any country, will be responsible to the government of the State of Israel, and liable for whatever “reparations” the Israelis may demand!
The Prospect
At a news conference in New York a few weeks ago, Yaacov Liberman, a member of the executive committee of Israel’s powerful Herut party, announced that Jews must soon seize by force the strategic coastal strip near Gaza and the entire Arab kingdom of Jordan. Liberman’s apparent excuse for declaring such a war is that the Jews had actually intended to conquer these additional Arab lands anyway, back in the 1948-49 fighting — when Jewish “regulars” on the Jerusalem front, using Communist arms purchased from Czechoslovakia with American dollars, were under the military command of American citizen, and West Point officer, Colonel David Marcus.
American Jews have been indicating of late that when their war in the Holy Land is resumed, they want everyone in the American Army to take part, not just the Jewish officers. For, encouraged by the U. S. Government’s past financial generosity to the new State of Israel ($400,000,000 in outright gifts, as of last summer) the Jews are confident that Uncle Sam can be high- pressured into being equally generous with his armed forces. If such help materializes, Mr. Liberman will have no difficulty with his modest proposal to annex Gaza and the Jordan kingdom. Indeed, the Jews will unquestionably make the most of the opportunity and grab up much more — all in the spirit of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s frank “war policy” statement in January of this year: “We have come a long way without peace. We can go a long way in the future without it.”
The prospect of American boys dying for the cause of Jewish imperialism is hardly a comforting one. It is eclipsed in the minds of American Catholics only by the more devastating prospect of what will happen to the Holy Land’s churches and shrines in those not-yet-Jewish areas which, in a future war, would pass into Jewish hands.
Readers of The Point are familiar with the previous Jewish desecrations of the Dormition Abbey, the Convent of Mary Reparatrix, the parish churches of Galilee, and countless others — sacrileges financed and approved by Israel’s citizens-in-exile, the Jews of America.
The story of the Crucifixion comes to us with new and stark clarity this Lenten season, in the knowledge that the immediate path of Israeli expansion takes in all the sacred shrines of Our Lord’s Passion and Death, the Holy Places of the First Good Friday. The Point – April 1956
THE STORY OF GOD AND THE JEWS:
Nineteen Hundred Years of Rejection
“However divided the Gentile nations may be in their instincts and aspirations, they unite in their common aversion to the Jew; it is the one point on which they establish immediate agreement.”
When Jewish leader Leon Pinsker made the above statement, in the year 1882, the pogroms of Russia, in which tens of thousands of Jews were massacred, had only just begun; Adolph Hitler of Germany was not yet born; the Dreyfus Case of France was still twelve years away. Yet the truth of Pinsker’s statement was as strikingly evident when he made it as it is today.
For nineteen hundred years the pattern has been the same — relentlessly, incredibly, almost monotonously the same. Wherever in the world numbers of Jews have appeared, in that place antipathy to Jews has arisen. It is a phenomenon without precedent or parallel in human experience. The hostilities that have grown against other peoples, in particular places, at particular times, cannot be compared with this stupendous, world-filling hatred. Its outbreaks punctuate history like an insistent, recurring theme. So universal is it, that if a colony of Jews should settle in a country where their race had never before been known, it could be predicted, unequivocally, that sooner or later the people of that country would turn against the Jews. It has never failed. And the longer the inevitable reaction is delayed, the more furiously does it eventually burst forth. “The growth of anti-Semitism is proportionate to the number of Jews per square kilometer,” Chaim Weizmann, first President of the State of Israel, once said. “We carry the germs of anti-Semitism in a knapsack on our backs.”
In the following paragraphs, The Point presents a summary of what has happened to the Jews as they have wandered through the world with their knapsacks. It is a grim, violent story — concerning a people who, in the words of Saint Paul, “please not God and are adversaries to all men.”
Perhaps the most striking evidence of the world’s antipathy toward Jews lies in the well-kept record of Jewish expulsions. Nearly every land which the Jews have entered has, at some point, lost all patience with them and demanded that they pack up and leave. This has been going on, without interruption, ever since the Roman armies turned the Jews out of Jerusalem in the year 70 A. D. Successive Roman emperors continued the suppression, and after the break-up of the Empire, Jews came to be looked upon as the “property” of the many feudal princes, who tolerated or expelled them at their pleasure.
With the rise of centralized governments, the Jews incurred far more inclusive edicts of banishment. Thus, they were barred from all of Spain in the seventh century, and again in 1492. The Moorish kingdom of Granada expelled them in 1066, and they were forced out of France in 1182, again in 1306, again in 1394, and again, out of Southern France, in 1682. In accordance with a decree of Pope Leo VII, the Jews were exiled from Germany in the tenth century; they were expelled again one hundred years later, and once again in the year 1349. England ordered them to leave in 1290, preventing their return for 350 years. The Jews were forced out of Hungary twice: in 1360 and again in 1582. From Belgium, they were expelled in 1370. From Austria in 1420 and again in 1670. From Lithuania, in 1495. From Portugal, in 1498. From Prussia, in 1510. From the Kingdom of Naples, in 1540. From Bavaria, in 1551. From the Genoese Republic, in 1567. And from the Papal States, the Pope’s personal domains, the Jews were expelled in 1569 and, once again, thirty years later.
The usual history text which sets out to tell the story of the Jews over the past 2,000 years becomes, in effect, a repetitious catalogue of one mass slaughter after another. For, since the dispersion of the year 70, when more than a million Jews were left dead in the streets of Jerusalem, wholesale death — the riot and then the pogrom — has followed the Jew down each new path of his wanderings.
The total number of Jews put to death under the authority of the later Roman Empire has never been tabulated to the Jews’ satisfaction. In one three-year period (132-135) 500,000 Middle East Jews fell before Roman swords. And each succeeding age, down to our own day, has left a similar record behind it.
The year 523 saw thousands of Jews slaughtered by Christian Abyssinians in Yemen. The Mohammedan Caliph of Damascus took a comparable toll in the early 700’s. The first days of the Crusades brought death to numberless Jewish communities in Central Europe, and when Jerusalem was finally taken by the Christian armies in 1099, the city’s Jewish inhabitants died in the flames of the principal synagogue. The century following saw pogroms in many countries, the most extensive being those of Mohammedan Spain, of France, and of England.
Christian Spain and England both started off the next century with slaughters of the Jews, and Germany concluded it with the pogroms of 1283 and 1298. The year 1321 brought anti-Jewish riots in France, which were surpassed in intensity by those of Spain in 1355. During the fourteenth century, in Germany alone, 300 entire communities of Jews were destroyed. Early in the fifteenth century, all the Jews of Salzburg were burned alive and, shortly after, the riots in Rome provoked by the preaching of Saint John Capistrano forced all the Jews in the city to barricade themselves in their houses.
The most notable Jewish slaughters of the l600’s were those in Poland, where more than 200,000 were slain under the Cossack leader, Chmielnicki. Such treatment for the Jews of Eastern Europe (over half the world’s number at that time) continued into the present century. During Russia’s anti-Jewish demonstrations of 1905, there were 690 separate pogroms within one eleven-day period. And in the years that followed, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Romania all conducted extensive slaughters of their respective Jews — until these countries became incorporated into that potent anti-Jewish machine which the Jews claim was the bloodiest of all time: the National-Socialist Government of Germany.
Behind the expulsions and mass exterminations of the Jews there has been, of course, an ordered and unquestioned tradition of social, political, and religious legislation against them. In the year 315, the first law of Imperial Rome passed under direct Christian influence demanded the death penalty for any gentile who should join himself to a synagogue. Saint Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan (397), instructed his people on the need for avoiding the Jews by saying that, “The very conversation with them is a pollution.” In 418, Jews in the Empire were forever excluded from the Roman army and from all public offices. In 537, they were prohibited from receiving dignities or honors of any kind, and in 553 the Emperor Justinian interdicted their Talmud. Around 650 the Mohammedan Caliph Omar ordered that Jews in his territories must wear a distinctive dress that would make them at all times recognizable. Similar strictures were imposed in 723 by the Byzantine Emperor Leo III. Charlemagne’s son was severely reprimanded in 829 by the ecclesiastical Council of Lyons for advocating the softening of certain anti-Jewish laws, and all during the rest of the ninth and tenth centuries both the feudal states of Europe and the Byzantine Empire in the East kept detailed legislation against Jews strictly enforced.
By the year 1006, ghettos had already been established in Bavaria, and the special “Jew tax” was everywhere exacted. This followed upon the universally accepted principle (later taught by the Church’s eminent theologian, Saint Thomas Aquinas) that all property of the Jews belongs by right to the temporal ruler who suffers them in his domains. The year 1155 saw the accession of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who referred to Jews as “belonging to the royal treasury,” and expended them accordingly. The Church’s Fourth Lateran Council, whose decrees are binding on all Catholics, codified and reasserted in 1215 many traditional pronouncements on Jewish segregation. Most emphatically urged were the exclusion of Jews from all public offices and the demand that they wear the “Jew badge.” In some sections this bright-colored badge came to be required not only of unconverted Jews, but also of all Jewish converts. During the next three centuries, in those countries where Jews were still legally allowed to remain, there was vigorous enforcement of further anti- Jewish legislation, including compulsory attendance at “conversionist” sermons, prohibitions against Jews appearing in the streets on Sundays and great Church feast days, more rigorous ghetto edicts, and public burnings of the Talmud. By 1550, there were no Jews lawfully resident in England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries or Russia. Pope Paul IV, in 1555, re-decreed much of the previous papal legislation against the Jews, emphasizing that they must not practice medicine or own real estate in Christian communities. In 1615, King Louis XIII bolstered the “Jew laws” of France by forbidding the Christians, under pain of death and confiscation, to shelter Jews or even to converse with them. Between 1649 and 1882, the Russian government issued over a thousand distinct anti-Jewish measures, The first Jews who arrived in what was to be the United States were asked to leave by Peter Stuyvesant at New Amsterdam; and even Lord Baltimore’s Catholic colony of Maryland, famed for its “tolerance,” would not grant citizenship to Jews. Indeed, it was not until 1826 that Jews in Maryland were given full “emancipation” by the state legislature; while in nearby North Carolina comparable recognition did not come until after the War Between the States.
The right of citizenship, withheld from Jews in every country during all the Christian ages, was not allowed to them until the triumph of the Judaeo- Masonic, anti-Christian principles of the French Revolution in 1789. Thus, Jews were not granted citizenship in France until 1791, in Holland until 1796, in Belgium until 1815, in Denmark until 1849, in England until 1858, in Switzerland until 1865, in Austria-Hungary until 1867, in Germany until 1870, and in Russia until 1917.
With their new-won citizenship, and the freedom of operation that it brought, the Jews devised spectacular reprisals against the nations which had so long held them in check. And yet, “liberation” of the Jews has in no sense meant immunization from further anti-Jewish outbreaks. Our own century, which has seen the unrivalled height of Jewish power, has already known unprecedented slaughters of the Jews. Europe, wasted by Jewish wars, beleaguered by Jewish Marxism, still, even now, gives indication of resistance — with 53 deputies in the present French Assembly elected on an anti-Jewish platform.
Even America, most docile of hosts to the Jews, is not for a moment regarded by them as a lasting, sure asylum. That leading molder of Jewish opinion, the Jewish Examiner of Brooklyn, put the issue very clearly just a couple of years ago with its hold-type warning, “We have no faith in the future security of American Jewry.”
The history of the Jews, as they have wandered from nation to nation, inevitably leads one to ask: But why have these people been singled out for universal abhorrence? What have they done to make themselves so despised? What is wrong with the Jews?
This question has its answer in an event that happened long ago, when a frenzied Jerusalem mob, standing in the courtyard of the city’s Roman governor, hurled at the heavens its defiant shout, “His Blood be upon us and upon our children!”
That is what is wrong with the Jews. They have assumed, as a nation, guilt for the death of God They, once God’s chosen people, have called on themselves a curse, which as Saint Jerome says, “rests on them to this very day, for the Blood of the Lord is not taken from them.”
The curse which the Jews invoked in the year 33 A. D., and which descended on them with manifest finality in the year 70, had been prophesied 1,500 years before by Moses, who warned the Jews of what would happen if they dared ever to turn away from God (Deuteronomy, Chapter 28): — ”Cursed shalt thou be in the city, cursed in the field … Cursed shalt thou be coming in, and cursed going out … And mayst thou always suffer oppression, and be crushed at all times … And thou shalt he lost, as a proverb and a byword to all people, among whom the Lord shall bring thee in … The Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the farthest parts of the earth to the ends thereof … Neither shalt thou be quiet, even in those nations, nor shall there be any rest for the sole of thy foot. For the Lord will give thee a fearful heart, and languishing eyes, and a soul consumed with pensiveness: and thy life shall be as it were hanging before thee.”
The bitter hatred flung at the Jews by all the world can be accounted for only in terms of this divine judgment. The Jews’ baseness and sensuality and perpetual intrigue, their insatiable ambition, their open contempt for all standards of decency and order — all these malignities, these natural reasons for their being hated, spring from and are sustained by the central and supernatural fact that they are cursed.
That such has been the teaching of the Catholic Church — openly, vigorously, and abundantly proclaimed — is a circumstance of which the Jews are keenly aware. Mordecai Kaplan, of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, wrote recently, “It is unfortunately true that in the Christian religious tradition the Jews are assumed to be the accursed of God. There is no use evading the fact or prevaricating about it. There is only one way to deal with it; it must cease to be a fact. The judgment on the Jews must be expunged from Christian tradition.”
Audacious as this campaign is, however, it is quite futile. Even if Rabbi Kaplan and his cohorts should be completely successful in their undertaking — even if all references to the Jews as “perfidious” and “rejected by God” were to be stricken from parochial school textbooks, from the writings of the saints and decrees of the popes, from the prayers of the Church, and from Holy Scripture itself — the Jews would find their lot still no better than it has been for the last nineteen centuries. For the curse upon them is a reality, divinely-imposed and irrevocable, whether anyone talks about it or not. As Saint John Chrysostom declares, ”The Jews say it is men who have brought on their misfortunes; but in fact it is God who has brought them about.”
Though the Jews may become powerful for a time in some particular countries, as they once were in Moorish Spain, as they once were in modern Germany, as they now are in the United States, even then, in their hours of triumph, they will be always restless and fearful, knowing from deep experience that at any moment the Gentiles among whom they live may rise up against them. The Jews have fixed their course. Till the end they shall remain a spectacle before all the world of a wicked and unrepentant people — a people who have called on their heads the abiding wrath of God. The Point – May 1956
MASONS, JEWS, AND CATHOLIC SCHOOLS
I — The Front Line
During the next few weeks, the four million American children enrolled in Catholic schools will close their textbooks, stand for a final classroom Hail Mary, and embark upon that jubilant season called Summer Vacation.
As the last parochial school door clicks shut behind the last departing child, another group of four million Americans, an insistently adult group, will be dedicating itself to the task of preventing any child in this country from ever attending a Catholic school again. And at first blush this group would seem bound to succeed, for among its members are Senators, Congressmen, Cabinet Officers, corporation executives, bank presidents, newspaper publishers — the moneyed and the mighty of the nation. The group is, of course, that crafty, fanatic assembly, the American Freemasons.
For two centuries, in whatever country Masonic governments have been established, war has been declared against Catholic education. Though Masons are quite willing to appropriate the Church’s buildings, they are careful first to strip the crucifixes from class-room walls, to replace the nuns, brothers, and priests with teachers of their own choosing, to re-write the textbooks and adjust the curricula, and, finally, when all is in readiness, to make it mandatory for all children to attend these new, state-directed schools. Accordingly, the Masons banished Catholic instruction from France in the 1790s, from Italy in 1873, from Portugal in 1910, from Mexico in the 1920s, from Spain in the 1930s, and, save for the decisive protesting of an aroused nation, they would have banished it from the Catholic country of Belgium just last year.
The most casual reading of the literature of American Masons is sufficient to show that they have the same designs on parochial schools as have their brothers in Europe and the countries to the south of us. “The American public school, nonpartisan, nonsectarian, efficient, democratic, for all the children of all the people,” has been proclaimed by American Masonry’s Supreme Council as the first goal which all lodges must strive for. And lest there should be any doubt as to what the Masons mean by this directive, the New Age, official journal of the higher Masonic echelons, recently urged that steps be taken “to disabuse every mind of the thought that the convent or the system supporting it have any rightful place in a free America.”
Thus far, the strongest bid Masons have made to get their kind of “free America” came in Oregon, where, in 1922, a law was passed — admittedly at Masonic instigation — requiring that all children be enrolled in the state’s public school system. The law was to be rigidly enforced beginning in 1926, but when it was brought to a test the U. S. Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional.
Since that time, American Masonry has taken to playing octopus, maintaining at headquarters an air of detachment from the hurly-burly of battle, but lashing out furiously and incessantly with its multiple, well- directed arms. Chief of these for imposing Masonic school policies is the pompous, meddling National Education Association. Currently this organization is coiled about Congress, pressing for approval of large-scale Federal Aid to Education. This program would provide for financial hand- outs to state school departments amounting to three and a half billion dollars — to be used, the NEA insists, for the benefit of public schools only. By necessitating a sharp increase in the taxes paid for school support, the program is calculated to discourage Catholics from continuing to finance an independent school system of their own.
The NEA has also lately a report entitled “Public Education and the Future of America,” indicating that unless the former is soon made compulsory for all children, the latter is going to be impossibly bleak.
In all these well-laid plans, however, there is, for the Masons, one hitch. The Church is on to them. Even American Catholics, adamantly easy-going though they are, have become increasingly alert to the fact that their parochial schools are under siege. That has been one consequence of the Masons’ direct, open assault. Then, too, being on guard against Masonic maneuverings is a deep-rooted Catholic habit. Since the establishment of modern Masonry in 1717, the cult has been roundly denounced no less than twenty different times, by thirteen popes. Speaking particularly of the Masons and education, Pope Leo XIII warned, “Do not think that any precaution can be great enough in keeping the young from masters and schools where the pestilent breath of the Masonic Society is to be feared.” And Pope Pius XI, who affirmed unequivocally that, “the frequenting of non-Catholic schools … is forbidden for Catholic children,” also declared, “Masonry is our mortal enemy!”
Prompted by such precedents, American Catholic spokesmen have shown a growing willingness to stand toe-to-toe with the Masons and fight it out. In recent months, for instance, the National Education Association has been resoundingly blasted by Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles, Bishop Shehan of Bridgeport, the Education Division of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and the head of the Knights of Columbus. Even Monsignor Matthew Smith, editor of the far-flung and faint-hearted Denver Register, is reported to have lately given over his front page to an attack on the NEA and the Masons, accusing them of working in conspiracy to abolish Catholic education.
In the light of this general awakening, why should Catholics have anything to fear? For the obvious reason that awareness of peril does not cause peril to disappear. There is still a very real and imminent danger that Masonic proposals will be jammed through Congress or state legislatures and seriously cripple parochial schools. But even more threatening is the fact that the Mason is by no means alone in his hatred for Catholic education. For he has, as his companion, his gleeful prompter, that inevitable enemy of all things Christian, the ever-lurking Jew.
When Pope Pius IX called the Masonic Lodges “the Synagogues of Satan,” he was choosing no idle metaphor. From the beginning, the Masons have been directed by, urged on by, inflamed by, the Jews. Their very ritual is shot through with Jewish symbolism. Indeed, it is in their own occult liturgy that the true nature and function of the Masons is most unerringly portrayed. They are, they say, the descendants and counterparts of those Gentile workmen of King Hiram the Tyrian (III Kings, 5), who were engaged by Solomon to have complete charge of building the Temple in Jerusalem where the Jews would worship. Thus in symbol do the Masons reveal what they are in fact: Gentiles doing the work of Jews. But, ironically enough, like the workmen of Hiram, the Masons can expect no part in the spoils, once the edifice of Jewish power reaches completion. For it has been long decreed that “secret societies,” now so vital to the plans of the Jews, will be jealously outlawed and trampled upon when the awaited King of Jerusalem, Anti-Christ himself, mounts his throne.
II — Headquarters
The assault of the Jews on our Catholic parochial schools might easily, and not untruly, be chalked up to the general Jewish hatred for things Christian. But to see exactly why the “Catholic school attack” has such a high place in the overall battle plans of American Jewry, we need only be reminded that Catholic schools are the preservers and spreaders of that thunderous information which the Jews are so bent on silencing: (1) The Jews killed Christ. (2)God has cursed them for doing it.
Throughout the Christian centuries, the Jews have never once lost sight of the fact that it is Christian doctrine itself which has established the firm foundation of the world’s antipathy toward Jews. Writing for the American Association for Jewish Education in 1954, Rabbi Horace Kallen put it this way: “In sum, all anti-Semitism, either old or new, roots in a philosophy of life, a scheme of salvation, whose soil is the emotion imparted by Christian theology.”
How, therefore, do the Jews plan to be rid of our doctrine-disseminating Catholic schools? Well, the “direct attack,” we repeat, has long since been delegated by the Jewish policy-makers to their Masonic menials. And although it is possible that at any time the Masons’ frontal blitz may end the whole war in one crashing victory, the concurrent Jewish strategy is purposely less ambitious and, for the moment, more effective.
The basic plan is this: to leave the parochial school intact right now, but methodically, patiently, to purge it of its anti-Jewish sting by censoring and changing the story of the Jews and the Crucifixion as it is presented to parochial school children.
Among the Jews, agitation for this censorship has become increasingly widespread and frank. Back in 1941, in his book World Crisis and Jewish Survival, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver put the problem before the “thinking” Jews of America when he lobbied against “the manner in which the Christ story is taught to Christian children in many Christian schools.” The Jewish-controlled International Conference of Christians and Jews filed a bolder complaint at its very first organizational meeting (Switzerland, 1947) demanding “a revision of Christian religious teaching by eliminating concepts hostile to Jews.” Volume 50 of the American Jewish Yearbook later carried the identically same demand. And only a few months ago, the official bulletin of the Jewish Masons of B’nai B’rith, January, 1956, fanned the flames of this campaign, in lodges all over the country, by reminding members that the changes in Christian doctrine have not yet been made, and that, still, “Despite its demand that evil be repaid with good, Christianity has for almost 2,000 years taught — and in former centuries backed up that teaching with action — that the Jews must bear the punishment for their ancestors’ rejection of Jesus … that the children of the Jews who crucified Jesus are visited for their fathers’ sin.”
And how are the Jews making out with their changing of the Crucifixion story? Perhaps the most striking evidence of their success is that the Catholic parochial schoolroom is the only assured place left where people will still say, still dare to say, that the Jews killed Christ. Just about everywhere else the Romans are being blamed; and this universal swallowing of the Jewish propaganda line has left it a simple matter to bring pressure upon the “narrow, bigoted, behind-the-times” Catholic schools.
Working in cooperation with all the major Jewish agencies in the country (through the exclusively Jewish National Community Relations Advisory Council) the American Jewish Committee has been issuing annual reports on how and where the “pressure” is being applied. In its 1954 summary, the Committee boasted that the work was going well and that, “The Catholic Biblical Association, which is responsible for parochial school texts, has expressed appreciation for our assistance in the preparation of materials on Jews and Judaism. And the National Catholic Welfare Conference continues to consult with us frequently.”
Having previously worked on an Intercultural Education Syllabus for use in parochial school classes of the Archdiocese of New York, the AJC last year reported that in the Catholic school systems of Boston, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D. C., Jewish Committee censors had made their way right into the classrooms and registered on-the-spot complaints about course material dealing with Jews and the Crucifixion.
Yet, for all their boldness, the Jews realize that there lies ahead of them still one enormous obstacle in “rewriting the Christ story for Christians.” Any number of Catholic textbook writers may be bought-off or scared-off by the Jewish book-burners, but where will there be found a Catholic editor, publisher, or parochial school superintendent to assume responsibility for changing that supreme Catholic text, the New Testament?
To those several members of the American Jewish Committee who faithfully read The Point each month, we should like to direct a closing request. We invite you, gentlemen, to announce in your next report, just how you propose to go about displacing and rewriting such New Testament messages as that, let us say, of Saint Paul to the Thessalonians, in which you and your children are imperishably identified as, “the Jews who both killed the Lord Jesus, and the prophets, and have persecuted us, and please not God, and are adversaries to all men.”
FORBIDDEN BOOKS
Below are excerpts from some of the many Catholic textbooks which the Jews are trying to remove from our parochial schools.
From Compendium of Bible and Church History, by Brother Eugene, N.Y., 1931.
“And ever since, the Jews have wandered about; a people without a flag, a country, a priest, an altar, or a sacrifice; a living testimony that indeed the vengeance of God fell upon them and their children.” From The Triumph of the Faith, the Catholic High School Religion Series, Book Two, N. Y., 1945, Imprimatur of Cardinal Spellman.
The text tells (page 36) how, through Jewish lies, Saint Stephen was betrayed to the Sanhedrin of the Jews, where “he turned on them and boldly declared that they had not lived up to the truth but had betrayed and murdered the Messias. Their sinful pride could not withstand these charges. The Jews rushed upon this brave young man … ”
From Religion: Doctrine and Practice, For Use in Catholic High Schools, by Fr. Francis Cassilly, S. J., Chicago, 1942, Imprimatur of Cardinal Mundelein.
“The Jews as a nation refused to accept Christ, and since His time they have been wanderers on the face of the earth without a temple or a sacrifice, and without the Messias … The kingdom He founded — the Church — was a spiritual one, not a temporal one such as the carnal Jews were hoping for.”
From Bible History by the late Bishop Richard Gilmour, N. Y, 1936.
“For 1,800 years has the blood of Christ been upon the Jews. Driven from Judea — without country, without home — strangers amongst strangers — hated, yet feared — have they wandered from nation to nation bearing with them the visible signs of God’s curse.” The Point – June 1956
THE WAR BETWEEN THE BIBLE AND THE JEWS
I — The Issue
There has been no bigger hoax put forward in the name of religion than the current propaganda which proposes that Jews and Catholics are sharers of a common Biblical faith — that Jews have the Old Testament, and Catholics have the New.
The truth of the matter, as preserved by the guardian of Holy Scripture, the Catholic Church, is, of course, that the Bible stands as one integral book, the treasured property of those who believe in that One, True Faith of which the Bible is the revelation and the record. For just as God is One, and the Faith which He has revealed is One, so God’s Book is inviolably One. And the refutation of those who would split the Bible in two, giving one part to present-day Jews and the other to Catholics, is contained within the Bible itself.
Back in 1898, His Holiness, Pope Leo XIII, granted an indulgence of 300 days to anyone of the faithful who would simply sit down with the Bible and read it for fifteen minutes. Our proposal this month is that Catholics do just that. We guarantee that it will take very few sittings to discover what God wants men to know about the religious relationship of Jews and Christians. All of the Old and New Testament is concerned with precisely this relationship, as it figures in the story of God’s plan to become man, to “dwell amongst us” as the Christ, the Anointed Savior.
It was promised to the people of the Jews that the Christ would be born from a virginal mother of their own blood, in the city of David their king. Thus, it happened that the Jews came so rightly to be called the people whom God had “chosen.” But how did the Jews accept this favored status? The Church’s illustrious martyr-bishop, Saint Cyprian, has tersely summarized for us the Bible’s story of the Jewish people as they awaited the birth of the Savior. He wrote: “Moses the Jews cursed because he proclaimed Christ. Dathan they loved because he did not proclaim Him. Aaron they rejected because he offered the image of Christ. Abiron they set up because he opposed Him. David they hated because he sang of Christ. Saul they magnified because he did not speak of Him. Samuel they cast out because he foretold of Christ. Cham they served because he said nothing of Christ. Jeremias they stoned because he was praising Christ. Ananias they loved while he was opposing Him. Isaias they sawed asunder shouting Christ’s glories. Manasses they glorified persecuting Christ. John they slew revealing Christ. Zachary they slaughtered loving Christ. And Judas they loved betraying Him.”
To Saint Cyprian’s summary of the Old-Testament Jews, we need add only this: that God, all the while the Jews were violating His law and killing His prophets, kept warning the “chosen people” that they were headed toward a fearful perdition, that a divine curse would descend upon them and their children, and that God’s blessing and election would pass to a new and faithful people which He would call out of the nations of the Gentiles. Isaias told them this over and over again; so did Jeremias, and Baruch, and Ezechiel, and Daniel; so did Osee and all the lesser prophets. The warning of this curse overshadows every page of the Old Testament, and when the Messias, the promised Christ, finally arrives, He tells them quite as plainly that there will come upon the ungrateful Jews, “all the just blood that hath been shed upon the earth, from the blood of Abel the Just, even to the blood of Zacharias, the son of Barachias, whom you killed between the temple and the altar. Amen I say to you, all these things shall come upon this generation. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee … behold, your house shall be left to you, desolate.”
This judgment of Our Lord is announced to the Jews in the very first book of the New Testament. And throughout the remainder of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse, the Jews are revealed, in all their spiritual desolation, as the universal enemy of the Christians; they call down upon their heads the Blood of Christ. They crucify Him. They kill Saint Stephen and Saint James, persecute Saint Paul in every city where he preaches, obstruct the Gospel message by every means, and are at last identified by Saint John in the final book of the Bible as those, “that say they are Jews and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.”
In this way does the Bible complete the story of God’s rejection of the Jewish people. The True Faith in the Christ to come was scorned by the Jews, and that same True Faith, fulfilled now in the Christ Who has arrived, is given over in its entirety, root and flower, Old Testament and New, to another chosen people, gathered out of the lands of the Gentiles, nourished at the altars of Christendom, and guarded by the one who is the Vicar of Christ.
II — Counter-attack
If copies of the Old Testament — even expurgated ones — are occasionally to be found lying on lecterns in Jewish synagogues, they are being preserved there only as a kind of racial heirloom. For plainly this is not the Jews’ book. Its prophecies concerning the Messias are too plentiful and detailed, its history of Jewish infidelity is too vivid, its foretelling of God’s rejection of the Jews in favor of the Gentiles is too insistent a theme for the Jews to read more than a few scattered verses of the Bible in comfort.
Still, that title by which the Jews like to be known — “the people of the book” — is a fitting one. For they do have a book of their own: one perfectly tuned to their temperament and aspirations: one which they cannot merely read, but revel in. That book is the Talmud.
Unlike the Old Testament, the Talmud meets the initial requirement for being the book of modern Jewry, by having been composed in post- Crucifixion times. The Palestinian Talmud was completed about the year 300 A. D., and the Babylonian Talmud (the longer, more used version), about 200 years later. Both editions are built on the same scheme. There is a text, called “Mishna,” consisting of non-Biblical maxims and regulations, embracing in minutest detail every aspect of Jewish life. Enlarging upon the Mishna, interpreting and illustrating it, is the “Gemara,” the commentaries of the rabbis.
Concerning the place which this strange, contrived work has in their affections, the Jews have a saying: “The Bible is like water, the Mishna like wine, the Gemara like aromatic liqueur.” And another: “Jehovah himself studies the Talmud, standing out of respect.”
The full significance of such statements strikes home only when one realizes what the Talmud is. For in its fourteen folio volumes and 6,000 crowded pages, this monument of Judaism is compounded of three principal elements: stark, shrieking anti-Christian blasphemy; rank obscenity; and a driving, irrepressible contempt for the people and customs of the Gentile world.
Thus is constructed the world’s most characteristically, quintessentially Jewish hook. No Christian — no matter how far he had strayed from grace — could ever have conceived it. It belongs to the Jews and to no other people. The Jews belong to it and to no other book. They have made it, and it in turn has nurtured and sustained them. For 1,500 years they have been steeped in it — in its foul vocabulary, its sordid, blasphemous anecdotes, its depraved, anti-social principles. And it belongs not just to one faction or sect of Jews but to all the race. Even those Jews who do not regard the Talmud as “divine,” as the Orthodox Jews do, consider it “the supreme guide.” In a recent article published by the American Jewish Congress, Rabbi Simon Federbush declared, “The Talmud is unique among the classics of world literature. No other book has exercised such an over- whelming influence upon the spirit of men as the Talmud upon the Jewish people.”
Yet, it must not be thought that the Jews derive their perfidy simply from perusal of the Talmud, or that destruction of the Talmud would put an end to the Jewish problem. For the Talmud is more than just the molder of the Jewish mind. It is its mirror.
Perhaps the most striking way to indicate the horror of the Talmud, to show that it is “really that bad,” is to cite some of Christendom’s reactions to it. On May 3, 1240, Pope Gregory IX gave orders that while the Jews of France were in their synagogues, their homes were to be searched and all copies of the Talmud confiscated. Additional copies were rounded up and burned in Paris, by order of King Saint Louis IX in 1244 and 1248, and, after his death, in 1299 and again in 1309. Rome had a public Talmud burning, at the direction of Pope Innocent IV, in 1244, and Spain held one, at Barcelona, in 1263. Pope Honorius IV, in 1286, wrote to the Archbishops of England, calling the Talmud “that damnable book” and enjoining them “vehemently to see that it be not read by anyone, since all evils flow from it.”
Pope Clement IV decreed death for any Jew in the Papal States found with a Talmud in his house, and during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries such Popes as John XXII, Martin V, Julius III, and Saint Pius V added their own particular condemnations to the lengthy canon of anti- Talmudic legislation.
Volume III of the Jewish Encyclopedia contains a “black-list” of sixty-nine censors of the Roman Inquisition who at various times have been assigned to delete from the Talmud its immoral and blasphemous passages. Such censorship came to be regulated by the Church’s Index Expurgatorius, and for several years after its initial appearance, this Index was aimed exclusively at Talmudic and related texts.
Better known than the Index Expurgatorius is the Church’s more inclusive Index of Prohibited Books, whose very first listing condemned not only the Talmud, but also all of its “glosses, annotations, interpretations, and expositions.” So thorough and emphatic was the Church’s ban of the Talmud that in 1939 the Jews complained that only one original copy from the High Middle Ages was known to be still in existence.
The invention of printing in the fifteenth century eventually brought more wide-spread distribution of the Talmud, causing such a furor that in 1631 the Jewish Synod of Poland, in an effort to take the heat off, sent the following decree to all synagogues: “We order you in all future editions (of the Talmud) to leave blank the passages treating of Jesus of Nazareth and to put in place of them a circle like this: 9675;. This will be an indication to the rabbis and teachers to acquaint their pupils with these passages only orally. By this precaution the learned among the Nazarenes will have no excuse for attacking us on this point.”
On October 4, 1890 some of the “learned among the Nazarenes” — the Jesuit priests at Rome — published in their magazine, Civilta Cattolica, the following: “That the sinister Talmudic code, in addition to horribly immoral rules of conduct, enjoins hatred of all who are not of Jewish blood, and especially of Christians, and allows them to be plundered and maltreated as noxious brutes, are no longer matters of controversy.” And the late Bishop Landrieux of Dijon, France, in agreement with the Jesuit fathers, had this shrewd observation to make: “In our day the Talmud does not provoke either astonishment or anger among Catholics, because it is no longer known.”
The following excerpts from the Talmud, and its summary, the Shulkan Aruk, are representative of the many passages which the Church has explicitly complained about in condemnations of Talmudic literature:
“The world was created only for Israel; none are called children of God but Israel; none are beloved before God but Israel.”
“If an ox of an Israelite bruise an ox of a Gentile, the Israelite is exempt from paying damages.”
“A Jew may rob a Gentile, that is, he may cheat him in a bill — provided he is unlikely to be perceived; otherwise the name of God might be dishonored.”
“To communicate anything to a Gentile about our religious relations would be equal to killing all the Jews; for if the Gentiles knew what we teach about them, they would kill us all openly.”
“If you must go to war, then do not march in the front ranks, but rather in the rear ranks, that you may be the first to return.”
“Cursed be those who calculate the time of the Messias.”
The most vile of all the Talmud’s passages are those which deal with Our Lord Himself and His Ever-Virginal Mother. We could never reprint the filthy allegations leveled against the spotless Mother of God, but we will leave our readers with a very real impression of just how bitterly foul the Talmud is in this matter. Commenting on the Jewish teaching concerning the birth of Jesus, the Jewish Encyclopedia (Funk & Wagnalls, N. Y., 1906), in its article on “Jesus,” boldly justifies the Talmud’s unprintable details by saying, “For polemical purposes it was necessary for the Jews to insist on the illegitimacy of Jesus as against the Davidic descent claimed by the Christian Church.”
There is a saying popular among Catholics which goes: “The poor Jews are like expectant travelers waiting in a railroad station for a train which went by 2,000 years ago.”
The saying is, assuredly, some sort of tribute to the dogmatic fact that the Incarnation, and the birth of Our Lady’s Divine Child, have long since occurred. But the patronizing naivete of such a remark is a further argument for the proposal we made at the outset of this issue: that Catholics should take to heart what the Old and New Testaments have to say about the present condition of the Jews.
When Our Lord, in Saint Matthew’s Gospel, wanted to indicate the rejected and dejected status of New Testament Jewry, He gave us a much more astringent picture than the above “railroad station” scene. Emphasizing that the Gentiles would become the children and heirs of the Old Testament patriarchs, and that the Jews would be disowned and cursed, Our Lord said, “Many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven: But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into the exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
This is Our Lord’s own summary of the “Judaeo-Christian” situation. We could hardly presume to add to it. The Point – July 1956
CHRISTMAS IN JULY
To all the readers of The Point, we, the Editors, extend our earnest and prayerful wishes for a happy and holy Christmas. May the joy of the shepherds and the reverence of the Magi fill your hearts, as, in Christian remembrance, the Most Blessed Virgin, who is the Most Blessed Mother, brings forth the Man-child Who is God.
And if our greeting startles you — if sultry mid-July seems worlds-apart from Christmas Eve and the frosty walk to Midnight Mass; if the annual parish lawn-party has put to flight all recollection of last December’s Nativity play; if, in brief, the magic of Christmas lies packed away in some seasonal corner of your mind — then, we beg you, pull it out immediately!
Muster whatever you can of candles and carols. Dust off the Christmas crib figures. Find some fresh straw for the manger. Then call in the children from all the distractions of summer and tell them again the Bethlehem story: of the angels, the star, the oxen, the stable. And when the happy part is finished, tell them how it happened that Christmas resolved in a warfare. How the enemies of Christmas slaughtered the Holy Innocents. How the Christ-Child of Christmas had to be hurried away by night and off into Egypt, far from the grasp of those who demanded that Christmas be over and done with and put out of mind.
And if they should ask how it all turned out — whether Christmas won, or its enemies — you can tell them that the battle is still going on. That, in fact, Christmas needs their prayers this very summer, because …
Then tell them, in a child’s fashion, this thing which we herein report to you, adultly, forthwith, as follows.
One day last January, at the bright, bustling headquarters of the American Jewish Committee, in New York, a worried conference was held. The topic: the recent celebration by Americans of the 1955th anniversary of a Birth in Bethlehem. As the principal nerve-center directing the energies of Jews in the U. S., the American Jewish Committee felt particularly concerned that this annually-recurring celebration should once again be observed. For the AJC and its associates had been warring against it, tirelessly, aggressively, year in and year out, for well onto half a century.
It was true that the Jewish siege had not been entirely without effect. Indeed, in its outward aspects, the festival of Christmas had become debased almost beyond recognition. Yet beneath the tinsel and the Tin Pan Alley blare, there still lay the prime, insistent reality that this was a day of jubilation because on it Christians celebrated the Birth of the Incarnate God. That this should stand as our foremost national holiday, marked America — vestigially, at least — as a Christian country. And so, one cold, troubled day last January, the Jews of the American Jewish Committee met together to analyze, with Jewish deliberation, the problem of Christmas. And, after much discussion, the Jews of the American Jewish Committee came to some conclusions, which, with Jewish anxiety, they formulated into a program and promulgated in the next issue of their paper, the Committee Reporter.
Underlying this program is a simple, forthright proposition: If Christmas celebrations still endure in America, despite all the Jews have done to combat them, then the Jews must do more. If thus far Jewish warfare on Christmas has consisted mainly of sniping and skirmishes, this year, the AJC declares, there must be a blitz. Moreover, the Jews must strike not when the signs of the holiday are already upon us, in November or December, but while Christmas is still out of sight and, for most Americans, out of mind. This year the Jews must launch their attack in July.
The fatal fallacy of holding back their fire too long had been strikingly demonstrated to the Jews in an incident of Christmas, 1955. The Superintendent of Schools of Sayreville, New Jersey, one R. S. Pollack, had sent the following letter to all public school principals in town, directing them to abolish from their planned Christmas programs any indications whatsoever of the day’s religious significance. In its purpose and tone, its appeal to the law and the changing times, the letter seemed to the Jews a masterpiece. Yet it failed in its goal. Before Pollack’s “suggestions” could be put into effect, the Board of Education of Sayreville demanded the letter’s withdrawal.
Office of the Superintendent Sayreville Public Schools 425 Main Street December 6, 1955Superintendent’s Bulletin 14 Subject: Christmas and the New Jersey Department of Education. Anti-discrimination Division
To: All Principals
The purpose of this bulletin is advisory. We are told, by the State department in charge of enforcing the anti-discrimination statutes, that there is a growing feeling, in various parts of the state, with respect to the celebration of Christmas by special observances and exercises in public schools. While this is not yet a situation which could be characterized as a problem, it is one that is growing and which will require our attention in the near future. It might, therefore, be wise to be somewhat beforehand in this respect with the end in view of lessening the impact in this community if, when and as the situation becomes critical.
At this time, no specific action is indicated but it may be wise to consider, beginning at once, how the Christmas Program to be offered in your school could be re-planned so as to de-emphasize the sectarian religious aspect thereof and to emphasize instead the folklore values. As an illustration, it may be possible to substitute such folksongs as “Deck the Halls with Holly” for one of the more religious type songs which are generally used. It is the opinion of your Superintendent that within the foreseeable future, say the next three to ten years, it will be required by the courts that the specifically religious aspect of the celebration be deleted from public school programs and that it will become illegal to use some of the hymns and anthems that are now quite common and that it will become necessary to avoid pageants involving the nativity, angels and similar props. It is suggested that it might be well to begin to replan this program in this direction so that the change-over is so gradual as to be unnoticeable to the general public over a period of years.
Signed: R. S. Pollack, Superintendent
For the high-tensioned American Jewish Committee, this and similar incidents added up to a lesson. “Holidays spur emotions to a high pitch,” observed the Committee Reporter. “The man who objects to some aspect of a Christmas observance at Christmas-time is unlikely to get anything accomplished — with the possible exception of incensing his neighbors against the interloper who seems to be threatening their deepest social and religious value.”
Thus, as this mid-summer issue of The Point is published, as Catholics are concerning themselves with matters like suntans and sailboats, the Jews of America are turning their thoughts to Christmas. Briefed by the American Jewish Committee, they are at this moment beginning their drive for a beach-head, confident that the seasonal psychology of Christians will result in their being unopposed.
The procedure called for by the AJC is cautious, thorough, and painfully Jewish. It involves such measures as a quiet “reconnaissance” before battle begins, to determine where and how Christmas is observed. This is to be followed by “intensive discussions among representative local Jewish leaders and rabbis,” at which it is imperative that “the possible consequence of any course of action be clearly spelled out” (“otherwise, the first heavy winds of community conflict may sweep away supporters who simply do not appreciate the implications”). Finally, when all preliminary steps have been taken, the entire Jewish population in each community is to move against Christmas as a single, coordinated body. (“It should never be a one- man foray,” warns the AJC).
There is, however, one group of Jews who are likely to be coordinated with difficulty — namely, the merchants. In past years, these enterprising hucksters have enthusiastically taken part in the annual anti-Christmas drives of their co-racists — when the object of those drives was simply to strip Christmas, by any means available, of its Christian meaning. As their contribution, the Jewish shopkeepers managed to transform the festival into a commercial heyday, dedicated to the swapping of unreadable books for unwearable ties. By this endeavor they not only rendered a handsome service to their race, but pulled in their richest profits of the year.
But the strategy for 1956 may find the Jewish merchants less eager to participate. For this year official Jewry will not be satisfied with seeing Christmas reduced to a money-making interfaith “folk festival.” The American Jewish Committee has finally decided that, no matter what trappings are hung on it, Christmas can never become a Jewish holiday. It is at root unalterably Christian. And therefore, concludes the AJC, the Jews of America will never know peace or happiness till Christmas is utterly banished from American public life. If Christians care to continue observing the feast in the privacy of their homes, that is their own affair; but there must be no official recognition of the day by way of civic or public school programs.
That is the goal which American Jews, this very summer, are striving for.
In the American Jewish Committee’s summary report for the years 1954 and 1955, its executive vice-president describes the Committee’s work as “our long range efforts to cope with the problem that has been with us for 2,000 years.” That problem is, of course, Christmas — and all that has followed upon it. Saint Matthew’s Gospel tells us, in fact, that from the very first hint of a Christmas the Jews began to worry. At the mere rumor that the Messias might have been born, “Herod the King was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.”
Through centuries of dispersion, the Jews carried this anxiety in their hearts. In Babylon, and Spain, and Turkey, and Poland, and Russia. In the ghettos of Rome and Antwerp, Vienna and Prague, they watched each succeeding Christian December, and saw in each new Christmas Day the starting again of their troubles. Bethlehem is the beginning of the changeless Gospel story. And Christ in the arms of His Virginal Mother is a fleeting prelude to Christ in the outstretched arms of the Cross — to Christ put to death by the mobs of Jerusalem — to Christ of the Crucifix, Whose Precious Blood is fallen as a curse upon the children of the Jews.
That this anxiety about Christmas fills Jewish hearts in America, we have long since known. The American Jewish Committee’s Christmas-in-July plan is notable in its boldness and daring, but not in its ultimate objective: that Jewish proposal desired down the centuries: the outlawing of Christmas everywhere. Such a proposal may not be forthcoming from the American Jewish Committee this year — or even next — but individual Jewish leaders have been lately, however indiscreetly, tipping their hand on the matter.
We are grateful to a reader in Portland, Oregon, who mailed us several weeks ago the most forthright “tip” we have yet seen. It was in the form of a news-clipping from the local paper, the Portland Oregonian. The clipping was dated Sunday, April 1, 1956 and the caption in bold type read: “New Testament Branded as Libel by Rabbi Nodel.” Under the signature of Oregonian staff writer, Gerry Pratt, the article began: “Rabbi Julius J. Nodel in the role of defense attorney for the Jews of the world Friday night branded the New Testament a work of malicious libel and the story of events leading to the trial of Jesus and crucifixion, a dragon seed from which has come misery, bloodshed and suspicion. ”
The Oregonian is the largest newspaper in the state and Nodel is the principal Rabbi. This blasphemous explosion against Our Lord and the Gospels cannot be dismissed as idle ghetto-raving.
For the Catholic priests of America the issue is unescapably clear: Christmas, Christ’s Mass, their Mass, is in danger. The protection can come only from themselves, in their Sacrament. The Point – August 1956
SOME JEWS IN GENTILE CLOTHING
I — Dublin’s Lord Mayor
By now, there is no household in all the forty-eight states which is not abundantly aware of the fact that the new Lord Mayor of Dublin, Ireland, is a Jew. The Jewish-controlled public press of America has out-done itself in presenting every detail of the unlikely story of Robert Briscoe — fighter for Ireland’s freedom, intimate friend of de Valera, long-time representative of the Irish people in their parliament.
And for the “little” Jews of America, lest they be tempted to take too seriously this fiction of a patriotic Jew, there has been equal coverage in the strictly Jewish publications. A typical account may be found in the National Jewish Monthly, current issue. Robert Briscoe is therein revealed to be one of the founders of the Dublin Lodge of B’nai B’rith and an “active supporter” of the infamous Irgun.
This is all the tip-off an American Jew needs. Robert Briscoe has in no sense abandoned the objectives of his own kind by becoming the Mayor of Dublin. Membership in the B’nai B’rith means a total and conscious dedication to the highest goal of Judaeo-Masonry: the complete destruction of the Christian world and the establishment of the kingdom of Anti-Christ himself. Briscoe’s support of the Irgun is equally telling. It was this band of Jewish marauders which took chief credit for desecrating the Catholic churches and shrines of Palestine, destroying Catholic hospitals, shooting at Catholic schools and convents, and generally wrecking and defiling Catholic property in the Holy Land at the rate of two million dollars worth a year.
It matters little whether Mayor Briscoe has been able to keep these facts about himself suppressed in 95-per cent Catholic Dublin. For what is troubling Dublin’s Catholic conscience right now is the bare, incontestable information that the city’s chief magistrate is a Jew, who will not make the Sign of the Cross, who will not say the Our Father or the Hail Mary, who denies that the Ever-Blessed Virgin is the Mother of God, and who thinks that the adorable Jesus present in all the Catholic tabernacles of Dublin is not the Messias promised by God, but is rather a brazen impostor.
II — Barney’s Career
As every man knows, the one part of a newspaper where shots of Jewish profiles seldom appear is the sports section. Somehow, when it comes to walloping a baseball, or plunging through tackle, or even paddling a tennis ball over a net, Jews exhibit a remarkable lack of ability. Consequently, that supreme adulation which Americans bestow on good athletes — the unqualified American Heroes — has thus far been reserved for Gentiles.
The only game crowded with Jewish players is basketball. But this is a special case. In his book Farewell to Sport, former sportswriter Paul Gallico accounts for it as follows: “The reason, I suspect, that it (basketball) appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging, and general smart-aleckness.”
Inasmuch as the American public has never found such traits particularly endearing, the fact that lots of Jews play basketball does not affect the rule: Jews do not become Heroes.
Once, however, there was a Jew who almost broke the rule. He was a boxer, and he almost became a Hero.
His name was Barney Ross, and at one time (1935-1938) he held the welterweight boxing championship of the world. Now, boxing is a sport whose top men are, or were, freely idolized. Yet, for some reason, the public restrained itself with Barney. Perhaps they were bothered by the still- vivid memories of another star Jewish boxer, Max Baer — Maxie the Clown — who, having sampled the right hand of a young aspirant named Joe Louis, abruptly terminated his clowning and his career by squatting ingloriously on the canvas while the referee counted ten. And so, Barney Ross won his championship title, held it for three years, and finally lost it, without once having the public really warm up to him. But then, just when it seemed he had lost all hope of becoming a Hero, Barney got a second chance.
When the hostilities known as World War II commenced, Barney Ross discovered with dismay that he was at the awkward age which made a call from his local draft hoard imminent. It would be unseemly for him to seek a “4-F” status; nor would the public be likely to countenance his trotting off with the rest of the Jewish soldiers to language, or radar, or cooks-and- bakers school. Unable to find a neutral corner, Barney, in wild desperation, signed up with the Marines.
It was a fortunate move. For, though he had to spend some miserable days and nights crouched in a foxhole while his Marine Division fought for Guadalcanal, still, after the battle was over, Barney was sent back home. He arrived to a fanfare of publicity, and in short order found himself presented with a Silver Star for “heroism under fire,” invited to the White House for a personal citation from the President, awarded a plaque as boxing’s Man of the Year, honored at banquets and celebrations all over the country — and, to top it all, promised a medical discharge as soon as things would quiet down a little.
At last, Barney was a Hero. And not just a Sports Hero, but that most exalted of all American specimens, a War Hero. He was one Jew who had finally made good — that is, in the newspapers.
But for some reason Americans weren’t believing all they read in the papers that year, and the high-powered campaign to present the nation with a glorified Jew slowly ground to a stop. The cause of this failure we don’t know. Maybe too many of the Marines who had fought on Guadalcanal had been writing letters home, telling on Barney. We do know that when he came to Boston in the early summer of 1943, shortly after his return to the States, he was hooted and hissed out of town by a large and eloquent delegation of servicemen, including several hundred Marines from the barracks in Chelsea. After a few hapless months touring the country, Barney Ross disappeared from public view. He was not heard from again until 1946, when he was admitted to the government hospital at Lexington, Kentucky. For Barney had become a drug addict, and was in need of extended medical treatment.
The last chapter in the saga of the Jew who almost became a Hero appeared in the New York Times of March 31, 1948. Released from the hospital, Ross had applied for a passport that he might go to Palestine and fight in the Jewish army which was then terrorizing the countryside in its efforts to establish a Jewish state. When our State Department refused his request, Barney announced that although he didn’t want to lose his U. S. citizenship, still, he was going so Palestine anyway, because, he said, he was determined “to be a private in that army.”
For the career of such an unlikely Jew, it made a likely finale.
III — Boston’s Inferno
Back in the 1880’s, when Boston, Massachusetts still cherished its dream of being the “Athens of America,” and when many Bostonians remained convinced that their home-town was indeed the “Hub of the Universe,” it came to pass that Boston acquired for itself a permanent symphony orchestra. The job of conducting this precious cultural acquisition could, of course, be entrusted only to someone of integral Boston lineage and impeccable Harvard training — or so the Brahmins thought. When the Symphony’s first concert season opened, however, Bostonians were confronted with a most unseemly gentleman who had but lately stepped off the boat. He bore the suspicious name of Henschel, and, once he appeared on the stage, even the farthest reaches of the second balcony could only conclude that the Boston Symphony’s first conductor was an unashamed, full-blooded Jew.
Boston was thus the more prepared, several seasons later, for the news that its first permanent opera company was likewise in the hands of a Jew, one Henry Russell.
With the passing years, local Puritan concert-goers have watched the Jewish grip on their music tighten. And the process has been facilitated by the fact that Boston’s musical taste is of the sort which the Jews are most able to satisfy. For the city likes virtuosos — the kind of high-strung, high-paid soloist that every Jewish parent is planning on when he first straps his three- year-old offspring to a piano stool.
Example: Boston is much taken with keyboard performers like Artur Rubenstein, Myra Hess, Rudolph Serkin, Wanda Landowska, Artur Schnabel, William Kapell, Alexander Brailowsky, Leopold Godowsky, Vladimir Horowitz — all Jews. And with concert-violinists like Fritz Kreisler, Isaac Stern, Nathan Milstein, Mischa Mischakoff, Joseph Szigeti, Efrem Zimbalist, Joseph Fuchs, Mischa Elman, Michel Piastro, Erica Morini, Yehudi Menuhin, Jascha Heifitz — Jews who lend support to the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia ’s boast that “The entire history of violin- playing is virtually a Jewish art.”
Beyond this, Boston is a “symphony” rather than an “opera” town. Russell’s Boston Opera Company quickly faded, but Henschel’s Boston Symphony became world-famous. Among the Yankees, in fact, going to the Symphony took on all the aspects of a new form of worship. As one astute, out-of-town observer remarked: when a Boston lady walks down the center aisle of Symphony Hall, you fully expect a profound genuflection before she enters her seat.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra a few years ago sustained the loss of its most long-lived Jewish conductor, Serge Koussevitzky, the despot of local music for twenty-five years. And when devoted Bostonians were not actually in the presence of Koussevitzky (or his Jewish colleague, Arthur Fiedler) at Symphony Hall, they were home listening to recorded performances of the rest of the country’s symphony orchestras, directed by the rest of the country’s Jewish conductors. For, with about three notable exceptions, the men who gesticulate before the chief orchestras of the nation are all Jews.
The following is a partial list: Artur Rodzinski, Alfred Wallenstein, Leonard Bernstein, George Szell, Erich Leinsdorf, Otto Klemperer, Efrem Kurtz, Bruno Walter, Vladimir Golschmann, Walter Damrosch, Eugene Ormandy, Alexander Smallens, Fritz Reiner, Pierre Monteux, Josef Pasternak, Erich Kleiber, Max Reiter, Fabien Sevitzky, Andre Kostelanetz. And what, in the face of all this, does The Point propose for a remedy? The situation is obviously critical. What do we recommend as a course of effective action for Bostonians? Shall we start a crusade to rescue the holy precincts of Symphony Hall from the sacrilegious hands of the Jews? Shall we picket the box-office? Shall we assault the place? Storm it in mid- season? Shall we sweat and bleed and die for the right to hear Beethoven conducted by a Mayflower descendant?
After proper consideration, we think not. We think that perhaps this time we will restrain our wrath, run the risk of being labeled “above it all,” and just contemplate with medieval, Romish satisfaction, the prospect of a stuffy hall-full of heretics being serenaded by a pit-full of infidels — for all eternity.
Dante himself might envy us such a vision.
IV — Elmer’s Dilemma
While it is surprising to find a Jew who has made himself acceptable to Dublin’s politics, New York’s prizefights, or Boston’s polite society, it is closer to sensational to discover a Jew who has been attacked by the B’nai B’rith, who thinks the big Jewish money-drives are a fraud, and who says that the State of Israel is an aggregation of aggressive “kikes” looking for trouble!
There does exist such a Jew. And, what is more, he is a full-fledged rabbi. His name is Elmer Berger.
Rabbi Berger is such an unusual Jew that a few months ago, when his latest anti-Zionist book appeared, the publishers mailed a complimentary review copy to the editors of The Point. They apparently felt that here, at last, was one Jew that we could find no quarrel with. Here was a Jew who agrees with us that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to America; that the leaders of Zionism in our country have been forcing the hand, and thus forging the policy, of the U. S. State Department; that American Jews are promoting by every means possible the nationalist program of a foreign state (Israel) and that, therefore, they will not “melt” into the stream of American life. We do understand Rabbi Berger. He stems from a tradition in Jewry which has been all but blotted out by the incredible triumph of Zionism during the past fifty years. Rabbi Berger is the more cautious Jew; the Jew who likes the good life which comes with being only a moderate parasite among the Goyim; the Jew who willingly takes on the protective coloring of cultural assimilation; who feels that a Christmas tree in his living-room is very little compromise for all the security it will bring to his children.
Berger long ago scoured the country for other Jews who might be ill- disposed toward Zionism. Such dregs as he found were subsequently organized as the American Council for Judaism, chief member: Mr. Lessing Rosenwald, retired head of Sears, Roebuck and Co.
With this straggling band of cautious Jews behind him, Berger has become official publicist for the wishful theory that Jews can really be normal citizens. And it is in the course of this publicizing, in the heat of his anti- Zionist fervor, that the rabbi truly reveals himself. For in his effort to be against Zionism but for Judaism, Rabbi Berger seasons his argument with all the standard Jewish sneers at the Catholic Church. He brands the Church’s influence in Western society as “the iron ring of medievalism”; he describes the flowering of Catholic life in the Middle Ages as “a generally decadent society”; he charges that “Paul of Tarsus” started the Catholic Church which Jesus Christ (a mere “human personality”) had no notion of founding. And much more.
Rabbi Berger’s message to the Zionists of America is that they are headed for pogroms, because Americans will not tolerate their allegiance to a foreign Jewish state. The Zionists might well remind the rabbi that, long before Zionism ever existed, Catholic men were placing the likes of Elmer Berger in well-defined ghettos, with conspicuous badges, compulsory sermons, and not one glimmer of “citizenship.” The Point – September 1956
ANOTHER CHALLENGE TO JEWS AND MASONS
The Point is against the Jews. It is against the Masons. It is against Interfaith. The Point maintains that the Catholic Church is against the Jews, against the Masons, and against Interfaith. And, by way of proving its contention, The Point quotes freely from Catholic saints and popes, who are unmistakably against the Jews, against the Masons, and against Interfaith.
Occasionally someone objects to this Point procedure. How do we know, snips our critic, that the Church hasn’t modernized her ideas since the time of the saints and popes whom we quote in our favor? Or, at least, how do we know she won’t?
Last month, our objector got his answer. It was in the form of a news bulletin from Rome, announcing that Catholics can soon expect to have a new saint; for the cause has been introduced and the first steps successfully completed in the canonization of Giovanni-Maria Mastai-Ferretti, His Holiness, Pope Pius IX.
For those with eyes to see, this announcement is clear and cogent evidence that the Catholic Church, when she acts officially, is most emphatically not “modernizing her ideas,” regarding either herself, her mission, or her enemies.
Pope Pius IX, who shepherded the Church through thirty-two embattled years — next to Saint Peter’s, the longest pontificate in history — was hated by the Jews and Masons during his lifetime and has been remembered by them ever since. He was their enemy, deliberately and implacably; and so abidingly forceful were his utterances against them, so decisive his actions, that he has stood to this day as a symbol of opposition to all that Judaeo-Masonry strives to achieve.
And now this man is about to be presented to the Catholic world as a model: a supreme and shining exemplar of orthodoxy in teaching and holiness in conduct. And as salt for their wounds, the Jews and Masons will note that this celebrated foe of theirs has been carefully and singularly chosen for the dignity he is to be given. For of all the popes of the last three centuries, only he and his admiring successor, Saint Pius X, have been singled out by the Church for sainthood.
By way of introducing “Pio Nono” and of indicating the reasons for the Jewish-Masonic rancor against him, we invite you to consider the following propositions:
“Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall believe true.”
“Men may, in any religion, find the way of eternal salvation and attain eternal salvation.”
“In our times it is no longer necessary that the Catholic religion should be the only religion of the State to the exclusion of all others whatsoever.”
“Hence it has been wisely provided by law that in certain regions, Catholic in name, immigrants shall be allowed the public exercise of their own forms of religion.”
Any faithful reader of America’s Jew-dominated press will be quick to endorse these four statements as self-evidently true. They are the very foundation of the Interfaith movement. Without them, “Brotherhood” is inconceivable. The National Conference of Christians and Jews stakes its whole future on their affirmation.
Which is just one of the reasons that the canonization of Pope Pius IX is a wonderful and delightful thing to contemplate. For Pius IX sets down the above propositions in his famous Syllabus of Modern Errors (1864), and flatly condemns all four of them as flagrant and untenable heresy!
Against Freemasonry, rife in nineteenth-century Europe, Pius IX waged an equally fierce warfare. He referred to the ever-plotting, many-faced society as “that perverse sect, popularly called Masonic, which, hidden at first in dark alleys, has finally come to light, to ruin religion and civil society.” And by way of confirming the Pope’s judgment against them, the Masons, led by the vile, viciously anti-Catholic Mazzini and his eager colleague Garibaldi, stole from Pius IX that swath of lands in mid-Italy called the Papal States — the Patrimony of Saint Peter — which had been given to the Vicars of Christ, for their welfare and protection, since the time of the Emperor Constantine.
Even more than for his anti-Masonic stand, however, Pius IX is today remembered for his iron determination to hold back the Jews. There has yet to be published a Jewish evaluation of the nineteenth century which fails to mention how Pius IX, so “tolerant” toward the Jews during his first two years in the papacy, turned completely about-face, and held adamantly to the Church’s long-established policy of keeping all Jews very well in hand.
The remainder of our issue is devoted to the most-publicized incident, and the ultimate summary, of Pope Pius IX’s courageous fight to protect the Church of Christ from His crucifiers.
The Mortara Case
During the early 1850’s, the Italian city of Bologna was still under the temporal rule of the Pope, a portion of the traditional Papal States. There was resident in Bologna at this time a certain Mortara family, Jews who, while excluded by the Pope from the privileges of citizenship, managed to make a very comfortable living among their Catholic neighbors. Encouraged by the growing revolutionary spirit of the city (which was soon to be out of Papal hands and annexed by the Masonic government of Italy), the Mortaras had lately defied the very explicit Papal law which forbids Jews to have Christian servants. A young Catholic girl of Bologna, Anna Morisi, had been hired as a domestic in the Mortara household.
One day in November of 1857, Anna was describing to a friend the highly serious illness of one of the Mortara children. At the friend’s suggestion that perhaps the child should be baptized, discreetly, before it died, Anna protested that under no circumstances could she do that. She then proceeded to unburden her Catholic conscience by revealing that once before, in a similar circumstance, she had baptized a dying Mortara baby, and the child had afterward recovered — was now, in fact, a healthy six-year-old, and being raised as a Jew!
News of the Mortaras’ baptized boy ultimately reached the Archbishop of Bologna. The sacred integrity of Baptism, and the Church’s obligation to provide for the Christian upbringing of baptized children, left only one course of action to the prelate. Under orders approved by the Holy Office, Anna Morisi, protected by Papal guards, left her Jewish employer’s house, and with her there went the baptized child, Edgar Mortara.
The arrival of Edgar in Rome, where he was to be raised as a ward of Pius IX, made hotly-protested news in every major city of Europe and America. There were cries of “Medievalism!” “Inquisition.” “Popish Tyranny!” Immediately, mass meetings of protest were organized in England and the United States. The powerful alliance of German rabbis sent a formal petition to Pius IX, demanding the Mortara child’s immediate release. Sir Moses Montefiore, the Rothschilds’ roving ambassador, rushed to the Papal Palace at Rome to deliver a personal protest to the Pope. Unmoved, His Holiness dispatched Cardinal Antonelli to tell Sir Moses about the Church’s ancient position in the matter of baptized children, adding that by their boldness in employing a Catholic servant, the Mortaras themselves must take full responsibility for any unpleasantness that had resulted. Other indignant callers, and many appeared, got similar receptions.
Within two years of Edgar Mortara’s arrival at Rome, the city of Bologna was seized by the Italian Kingdom. Under this new and anti-papal government, the Jews attempted to institute criminal proceedings against the servant-girl, Anna Morisi, charging her with kidnapping. Anna, however, had since entered a convent, and when it became known that the Jews were proposing to violate the sacredness of the cloister and drag a nun into the civil courts, popular indignation forced them to abandon the cause, and to consider the whole Mortara Case ended.
Actually, the end did not come until 1940. In March of that year, a white- haired Augustinian priest died at Liege in Belgium. He was nearly ninety years old and all during his priestly life he had been known as Father Pius, O.S.A., a name which he had taken in honor of his beloved guardian, Pope Pius IX. There were few who took notice of Father Pius’ death, and fewer who realized that he was the same Edgar Mortara who close to a century before had so electrified the world.
Cut off from the cursed blood of the Jews, fed upon the Precious Blood of the Altar, Father Pius Mortara, we have good reason to hope, is even now, in the Beatific Vision, a happy symbol of the sacredness of Holy Baptism, a witness to the courageous faith of a holy Holy Father.
Summary
Throughout the heat of the Mortara controversy, the official position of Pope Pius IX was entrusted, for defense and exposition, to the Jesuit fathers of the magazine Civiltà Cattolica. Pius IX had himself established these priests in their special status as a papal “college of writers, constituted in perpetuity.” And they became his most insistent and outspoken champions.
It was only a few years after Pius IX’s death that Civiltà Cattolica published a series of three articles which attempted to isolate and identify those forces which had so beset Catholic Europe in the wake of the French Revolution; which had warred incessantly against the Pope; and which had gained the enormous triumph of seeing Pius IX end his days as a prisoner in the Vatican, dispossessed of the ancient temporal domains of the papacy.
This series of Civiltà Cattolica articles, dated October, November, and December, 1890, is entitled “The Jewish Question in Europe.” The magazine’s summary statement, faithfully reflecting the mature and saintly judgment of Pope Pius IX, is reprinted below. It is the Church’s traditional position, and, therefore, as our readers will recognize, The Point ’s.
“In order that the Christian nations may be delivered from the yoke of Judaism and Freemasonry, which is daily growing more oppressive, the only way open to them is to go back along the road they have traversed, to the point where they took the wrong turning. If the Jews are not rendered harmless by means of special laws depriving them of that civil equality to which they have no right, nothing useful or lasting will be accomplished. In view of their presence in different countries and their unchangeable character of foreigners in every nation, of enemies of the people in every country that supports them, and of a society segregated from the societies amongst which they live; in view of the Talmudic moral code which they follow and the fundamental dogma of their religion which spurs them on to get hold of the possessions of all peoples by any means in their power, as, according to it, they are entitled to rule the world; in view of the fact that the experience of many centuries and our present experience have proved conclusively that the equality of civil rights with Christians, granted them in Christian states, has had for effect the oppression of Christians by them, it follows as a necessary consequence that the only way to safeguard the rights of Christians, where the Jews are permitted to dwell, is to regulate their sojourn by laws such that it will be impossible for them to injure Christians.
“This is what has been done in the past. This is what the Jews have been seeking to undo for the last hundred years. This is what will have to be done over again, sooner or later, whether one likes it or not. The position of power to which the laws inspired by the Revolution have raised them in our day is digging under their feet an abyss just as deep as the height to which they have ascended.
“It is certain that one of the signs of the end of the world foretold in Holy Scripture is the entrance of Israel into the One True Fold. But we are not convinced that there are indications of that conversion visible at present. This people scattered over the face of the earth … is today what it became after the destruction of Jerusalem, without a king, without a priesthood, without a temple, without a native land, and, at the same time, a most bitter enemy of the Name and of the Church of Jesus Christ, True God and True Man, crucified by their ancestors. We see no proofs, evident or otherwise, that it is likely to change for the better and welcome as its Saviour that Jesus Whom it put to death.”
— Civiltà Cattolica, Rome, 1890 The Point – October 1956
THE CHURCH MILITANT AND THE JEWS
Some Front-line Reports
Late last month, Harvard University settled down to its academic year number three hundred and twenty. Although statistics are not yet available on the student body, we have it from an exceptionally reliable source that the University’s faculty is still more than fifty per cent Gentile.
This measured majority of non-Jewish instructors, however, is in no sense calculated to make the Jewish student uneasy — nor does it. For all of Harvard’s Gentile faculty members are well-schooled and long-practiced in giving their annual courses the anti-Christian, and thus inevitably the Jewish, slant.
One such Harvard Gentile is Doctor Gordon Allport, professor of psychology, champion of UNESCO, and pride of the University’s recent and bulging Social Relations Department. Among Doctor Allport’s more eloquent classroom lectures is the one which deals with the “anti-Semitism of the Saints.” In 1954, he incorporated this material in his book, The Nature of Prejudice, and got Paul Blanshard’s publisher to distribute it for him.
At the risk of minor scandal, we shall be bold enough to say that in one aspect of his argument, Doctor Allport is not entirely wrong. He points out that it is in no sense exceptional with the Catholic Church’s Saints to “slip from piety into prejudice.” Since by prejudice Doctor Allport here means anti-Jewishness, we are bound to agree. In fact we have determined to illustrate the matter at some length this month, with pertinent stories and quotes from our files. The miscellaneous items which now follow, expanding the theme of “our anti-Jewish Saints,” may reveal even to Doctor Allport the enormity of the truth which, however clumsily, he managed to stumble upon. The most exalted of the Church’s Saints are, of course, her martyrs. And the very first martyr, as every parochial school student knows, was the deacon Saint Stephen.
After hearing Stephen’s denunciation of the Jews in Chapter Seven of the Acts of the Apostles, and after seeing the vengeful Jews stone him to death in the same chapter, a Catholic child is hardly surprised to learn that the chief of the Apostles, Saint Peter, was constantly preaching against the Jews, reprimanding them for killing Our Lord, and that Saint Paul, who gloried in his title “The Apostle to the Gentiles,” complained in his First Epistle to the Thessalonians that the Jews “both killed the Lord Jesus, and the prophets, and have persecuted us, and please not God, and are adversaries to all men; prohibiting us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved, to fill up their sins always: for the wrath of God is come upon them to the end.”
Similarly, Saint John, Our Lord’s favorite Apostle, refers to the Jews as those “that say they are Jews and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan” — a statement which echoes the words of Our Lord Himself Who, in Saint John’s Gospel, tells the Jews they are the children of the devil.
Knowing that such precedents have been set by the Church’s very first Saints, Catholic children (and those who have become as little Catholic children) are prepared for what follows: the example of canonized Catholics, all down the Christian centuries, whose lives further illustrate, with an overwhelming variety of detail, that Saints and Jews just don’t mix!
California’s mission church of San Juan Capistrano — dear to American folklore as a romantic haven to which the swallows annually and melodiously come back — is dedicated to a fifteenth century Franciscan friar known during his life and since as “the scourge of the Jews.”
How Saint John Capistran came by his admiring title is a record of fiery sermons, assiduous labors, and incidental remarks — for instance, his unfollowed but unforgotten suggestion to the city of Rome that it round up all its Jews, herd them aboard ships, and deport them overseas.
When a Sacred Host was desecrated in the Polish city of Breslau, Saint John Capistran persuaded the King of Poland to revoke the pro-Jewish ordinances he had allowed and to order all Jews in Breslau imprisoned until the culprits be identified. Ultimately, 58 Jews were found guilty of the Host desecration and executed; whereupon the local rabbi hanged himself.
The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia (a work concocted at the expense of the U. S. Government, as a project of the WPA) pays a tribute to Saint John Capistran’s efforts by including him in its select list of the greatest anti- Semites of all time.
The teachings and preachings of Saint Ambrose, fourth century Bishop of Milan, have so impressed the Church with their holy brilliance that he has been long designated one of the four Great Latin Doctors.
Among the utterances of this most learned teacher there are, not surprisingly, some stringent words concerning the Jews. “The very conversation with them is a great pollution,” is one of the Ambrosian aphorisms.
Once, in a sermon at Milan, Saint Ambrose thundered so mightily against the synagogue, calling it “a house of impiety, a receptacle of folly which God Himself has condemned,” that his Milanese parishoners, on leaving the Cathedral, hurried over to the nearest Jewish temple and burned it to the ground. When a delegation of the city’s Jews and their friends protested the deed to Saint Ambrose, he brought them up short with the following notice:
“I declare that I set fire to the synagogue, or at least that I ordered those that did it, that there might not be a place where Christ was denied. If it be objected to me that I did not actually set the synagogue on fire here, I answer that it began to be burnt by the judgment of God.” On another occasion, when the Emperor Theodosius ordered a Bishop in the East to pay for the rebuilding of a demolished synagogue, Saint Ambrose, seeing Theodosius present in his Cathedral, refused to start Mass until the Emperor had promised to rescind the order.
If any of our current candidates for public office would like to know what qualities the Church thinks a ruler should have, he will find them exemplified in the canonized king for whom the city of Saint Louis, Missouri, is named.
Ruling France from 1226 to 1270, King Louis IX stood as a beacon in the brightest of all Catholic centuries. The wisdom and justice of his public acts, together with his personal valor and devotion (he led the armies of the last two Crusades) are the legacy and legend of his country.
In his solicitude for both the earthly and eternal welfare of his subjects, Saint Louis was, of course, a confirmed enemy of the Jews. His first recorded act against them was a decree, in 1230, prohibiting Jewish usurers from pursuing their lucrative occupation. Later he followed this up by prescribing that all French Christians who were indebted to Jews should slice one-third from the amount they owed.
In June of 1242, Saint Louis set the style for other Catholic monarchs by ordering, at Paris, Europe’s first official public burning of the Talmud. Additional copies of the Jewish book were confiscated and burned by order of the King in 1244 and in 1248.
Even more blazingly expressive than his Talmud-fueled fires, however, is Saint Louis’ forthright advice to the laity of France regarding disputations with Jews: “I say to you,” he told them, “that no one, unless he be a very good cleric, should argue with them; but the layman, when he heareth the Christian law reviled, should not defend it but by his sword, wherewith he should pierce the body of the reviler as far as it will go.” The Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Boston, the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Detroit, and Saint Alphonsus Church in New Orleans are three of the more than one hundred beautiful churches throughout the country which are staffed by the priests of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. These Redemptorist Fathers, as they are popularly called, belong to an order which was founded in Italy in the eighteenth century by an Italian Bishop and Doctor of the Church, Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori. And to the embarrassment of the more liberal Redemptorists, Saint Alphonsus Maria is true to traditional form on the question of the Jews.
In previous issues we have cited Saint Alphonsus’ prohibitions against Catholic patronage of Jewish physicians, and against Catholic support of Jewish candidates for public office. But like all the Church’s official theologians, Saint Alphonsus lashes out against the Jews for that supernatural, New-Testament reason: their betrayal and crucifixion of Our Lord. The Saint treats extensively of this betrayal in his book, The Passion and Death of Jesus Christ, and we quote the following passage from page 198 of Father Eugene Grimm’s authorized translation, bearing the Imprimatur of the late Cardinal Hayes, Archbishop of New York.
“Saint Luke says that Pilate delivered Jesus into the hands of the Jews that they might treat Him as they pleased. Jesus was delivered up to their will. (Luke xxiii, 25). This is what really happens when an innocent man is condemned. He is given over to the hands of his enemies, that they may take away his life by the death which is most pleasing to them. Unhappy Jews! you then said, His blood be upon us and upon our children. (Matthew xxvii, 25). You have prayed for the chastisement; it has already come. Your nation bears, and shall bear to the end of the world, the punishment due to the shedding of that innocent blood!”
“Marrano” is a Spanish word meaning swine. It is also a word used to identify that familiar figure of the Spanish Middle Ages: the Jew who had held his head over a Baptismal font and was pretending to be a Christian while remaining at heart a dedicated enemy of Christ. So many were there of this breed, that during the early fifteenth century the professedly Jewish population of Spain dwindled from 5,000,000 members to 200,000. Except for the handful who were genuinely converted, the bulk of the four million-odd missing Jews had become Marranos. In the guise of Catholics, they crowded into, and crowded Gentiles out of, every phase of Spanish life. Not only were they the merchants and money-lenders of the country, its lawyers and physicians and apothecaries, they had finally come to dominate the royal court. Even the Church was beginning to buckle under the influence they exerted as monks, as priests, and, in ever- increasing numbers, as bishops.
Inevitably, Christian Spain awoke to the stark realization that the “converted Jews” in their midst had not been converted at all: that, indeed, they still hated the Catholic Church with the congenital fury of their race and longed to see her devastated — a work they were now terrifyingly equipped to accomplish.
In 1478, Queen Isabella of Spain (the same who later sent Columbus on his voyage to the New World), shaking off her Jewish councillors, petitioned Pope Sixtus IV to authorize the establishment of an Inquisition for the purpose of exposing secret Jews. The effectiveness of this Spanish Inquisition may be gauged by the frenzy with which the Jews have been denouncing it ever since.
Though the anti-Jewish Queen Isabella (who was eventually obliged, in 1492, to expel all Jews from Spain) has not been canonized, one of the first Inquisitors has been. He is Saint Peter Arbues, and so notably well did he do his job of finding and foiling the Marranos that they murdered him. A few weeks ago, on September 17, Catholic religious all over the world heard this commemoration read from the Roman Martyrology: “At Saragossa in Spain, of Saint Peter Arbues, first Inquisitor of the Faith in the Kingdom of Aragon, who was cruelly butchered by relapsed Jews for the sake of that Catholic Faith which he had so zealously protected by virtue of his office. Pope Pius IX added him to the list of martyr saints.” Four hundred years before the brutal attack on Saint Peter Arbues, another Saint, Pope Gregory VII, had been forced into action against the Jews of Spain. In 1081, Saint Gregory wrote to King Alphonso VI of Castile, “You must cease to allow Jews to rule over Christians … For to allow Christians to be subordinate to Jews, and to be subject to their judgment, is the same as to oppress God’s Church and to exalt the Synagogue of Satan. To wish to please the enemies of Christ means to treat Christ Himself with contempt.”
We neglected to say at the outset of this issue that when Harvard’s Doctor Allport was looking around for a particular saint to illustrate his “piety and prejudice” theme, he chose that giant among the Church’s theologians, Saint John Chrysostom.
Ever since the early fifth century, John Chrysostom has been a name to terrorize the very boldest Jew in the ghetto. The Jewish Encyclopedia includes a special article on him, accusing him, among so many other things, of saying that the “holy ark” which Jews now have in their synagogue is “no better than any wooden box offered for sale in the market.”
The quotation from Saint Chrysostom which Doctor Allport selected for his book is a more famous one. It is taken from the Saint’s Six Homilies Against the Jews, as found in Migne’s Greek Patrology.
From this work we reprint the passage on “the synagogue” — a striking summary of the Catholic position, and a fitting conclusion for our miscellany of “holy bigotry.”
“The synagogue is worse than a brothel … it is the den of scoundrels, and the repair of wild beasts, the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults … a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ … a den of thieves, a house of ill fame, a dwelling of iniquity, a refuge of devils, a gulf and abyss of perdition … Whatever name even more horrible could be found, will never be worse than the synagogue deserves.” The Point – November 1956
THE JEWISH PLAN TO DESTROY CHRISTIANITY
The Real Purpose of Interfaith
For nineteen hundred years Jewish spokesmen have been wrestling with an insistent and galling question: Why is it that wherever in the world Jews are found, there is also found distrust and hatred and loathing of Jews?
The Church’s explanation of this phenomenon is, of course, that it springs, directly and inevitably, from the curse which the Jews called down on their race when they rejected and crucified Christ. Unwilling to accept this solution, the Jews have given it a reverse twist and come forth with the accusation that, by telling people about the curse, the Church herself has brought on Jewish misery. This neat analysis constitutes the Jews’ definitive answer to their perennial question, Why are we hated? Thus, in January, 1944, the official organ of the American Jewish Congress, posing the query “Where is anti-Semitism spawned?” coyly replied, “In a denomination other than Protestant.”
Having furnished themselves with cause for shunning all things Catholic, however, it now appears that the Jews will not throw us aside entirely. For they are currently on view wrapping American Catholicism in a most fervent embrace — copiously illustrated in the daily press with prints of Jews shaking hands with Catholic priests, giving picnics for Catholic children, presenting plaques to Catholic bishops.
And what is the reason for this strange behavior? Is it some gross oversight on the part of American Jews? Are they abandoning their traditions? Or have they made a re-evaluation of the Church’s history and decided that she is not really so black as they once painted her?
No, the reason is none of these. It is simply that, along with their other schemes for wrecking the Church, the Jews are presently trying to see if they might not stifle her with affection. They are well aware that submission to Jewish attentions has a marvelously enfeebling effect upon Catholics. It makes them grow languid and doctrinally dissolute. It makes them lose all resemblance to those virile Catholics of history who forged Christian culture and preserved the Christian Faith. It makes them, in summary, willing and able participants in the activities of Interfaith — which, for a Catholic, is the final gesture of surrender to the Jewish embrace.
And herein the Jews exhibit a wiliness that marks them as true children of their father, who was, after all, an angel of light. For when they devised the cult of Interfaith, for the purpose of subverting the Church, the Jews did not set as its goal the condemnation of Talmud-burning or ghetto-building or other such apparent vexations of the Catholic past. Instead, they leveled their guns at a seemingly harmless, seemingly irrelevant principle of theology. Yet this principle is the bedrock upon which the entire structure of the Faith is laid: the dogma that the Church is the one divinely established way leading to eternal life.
Any participation in Interfaith involves a tacit but clear denial of this belief in the Church’s singularity. It involves the assumption that there exists a supreme, transcendent “Religion” with three aspects, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism, which are all three on a par, both naturally and supernaturally. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, as dean of New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, states the Jewish position with gratifying forthrightness. The very first obstacle in the way of “intergroup goodwill,” says the Rabbi, is the mistaken belief that, “There can be only one true method of salvation for all human beings, regardless of their group affiliations.” Driving this point home, Kaplan then continues, “As the United Nations should call for the surrender of absoluteness in national sovereignty, so should the World Parliament of Religions call for the renunciation by every religious communion of any claim to exclusive possession of salvation.”
The following resume of Church teaching will indicate just how thoroughly Catholics are committed to this doctrine of one-way-to-heaven, which Jewish Interfaith is so determined to destroy. To begin with, the Catholic Church’s “claim to exclusive possession of salvation” is not some lately and lightly adopted fancy. From the moment that Our Lord founded it upon Saint Peter, the Church has proclaimed, through all of Peter’s successsors, that it is the one fold, the single ark, the only salvational refuge. Take, for example, the three following pronouncements, infallible teaching from three of our Holy Fathers. These unequivocal statements are binding upon every Catholic, and denial of them incurs the Church’s most resounding anathemas.
Pope Innocent III, with the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215: “There is but one universal Church of the faithful, outside of which no one at all can be saved.”
Pope Boniface VIII, in his bull Unam Sanctam, November 18, 1302: “Urged by Faith, we are obliged to believe and to hold that the Church is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. We firmly believe in her, and We confess that outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins … Furthermore, We declare, say, define, and pronounce, that it is wholly necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”
Pope Eugene IV, in his bull, Cantate Domino, February 4, 1441: “The most Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes, and preaches that none of those existing outside the Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life eternal; but that they will go into the eternal fire ‘which was prepared for the devil and his angels,’ unless before death they are joined with her; and that so important is the unity of this ecclesiastical body that only those remaining within this unity can profit by the sacraments of the Church unto salvation, and they alone can receive an eternal recompense for their fasts, their almsgiving, their other works of Christian piety, and the duties of a Christian soldier. No one, let his almsgiving he as great as it may, no one, even if he pour out his blood for the name of Christ, can be saved, unless he remain within the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church.”
When Pope Eugene IV issued the above decree in the fifteenth century, he was speaking in such accord with the traditions of the Church that we can go back one thousand years to the fifth century’s brilliant Saint Augustine and read the identical message in one of his sermons to the people of Caesarea: “No man can find salvation save in the Catholic Church. Outside the Catholic Church he can find everything except salvation. He can have dignities, he can have the Sacraments, can sing ‘Alleluia,’ answer ‘Amen,’ accept the Gospels, have faith in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and preach it, too, but never, except in the Catholic Church, can he find salvation.”
In the face of the Protestant Revolt, the saints of the sixteenth century were constantly called upon to profess the doctrine of “No Salvation Outside the Catholic Church.” Here is how one of them, Saint Peter Canisius, of the Society of Jesus, phrased it in his famous Catechism: “Outside this communion (as outside the ark of Noe) there is absolutely no salvation for mortals: not to Jews or pagans, who never received the Faith of the Church; not to heretics who, having received it, forsook or corrupted it; not to schismatics who left the peace and unity of the Church; finally neither to excommunicates who for any other serious cause deserve to be put away and separated from the body of the Church, like pernicious members … For the rule of Cyprian and Augustine is certain: he will not have God for his Father who would not have the Church for his Mother.”
To keep an explicit statement of the Catholic teaching on salvation always before her priests, the Church has relied not merely upon theology textbooks and bulky volumes of papal decrees. She has carefully placed the doctrine among the priests’ compulsory devotions. Thus, in the Roman Breviary, “the priest’s prayerbook,” we find the Athanasian Creed, that ancient profession of the Catholic Faith which begins: “Whosoever wishes to be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith, except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish eternally.”
After proclaiming the articles of the Creed, the prayer concludes: “This is the Catholic Faith, which except a man believe faithfully and firmly, he cannot be saved.”
For the Catholic laity, the Church’s “claim to exclusive possession of salvation” is the dogmatic underpinning of countless everyday observances. It is thus that Catholics are so strictly forbidden to attend non-Catholic religious services, to join and encourage any of the Freemasonic organizations, to read the proscribed works of non-Catholic writers, to marry someone who is not a member of the Church. And, to elaborate one such point, it is thus that a Catholic parent must keep his child away from the non-Catholic school, for, as Pope Pius XI decreed in his encyclical letter on the Christian Education of Youth: “We renew and confirm these declarations, as well as the Sacred Canons in which the frequenting of non- Catholic schools, whether neutral or mixed, those namely which are open to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, is forbidden for Catholic children, and can be at most tolerated, on the approval of the Ordinary alone, under determined circumstances of place and time, and with special precautions.”
The Catholically-schooled Catholic child is given a firm foundation in the unique necessity and singularity of his Faith. He learns, for example, that supreme lesson about Christian Baptism: even the helpless, new-born child of a devout Catholic mother will never see God in Heaven, if he dies unbaptized. With this norm of Divine justice in mind, the Catholic child is hardly taken aback when he later learns that a convert to the Catholic Faith, upon being received into the Church, makes the following “Abjuration of Heresy” (English text from The Priest’s Ritual).
“I, _____, having before me the holy Gospels which I touch with my hand, and knowing that no one can be saved without that Faith which the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Roman Church holds, believes and teaches, against which I grieve that I have greatly erred, inasmuch as I have held and believed doctrines opposed to her teaching, I, now, with sorrow and contrition for my past errors, profess that I believe the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Roman Church to be the only and true Church established on earth by Jesus Christ, to which I submit myself with my whole soul. I believe all the articles of Faith that she proposes to my belief and I reject and condemn all that she rejects and condemns, and I am ready to observe all that she commands me. And I make the following profession of Faith.”
The express objects of Catholic belief follow, and then the convert concludes:
“With a sincere heart, therefore, and with unfeigned faith, I detest and abjure every error, heresy, and sect opposed to the said Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Roman Church. So help me God, and these Holy Gospels, which I touch with my hand.”
These examples of the Church’s “exclusive” mission in the world might be multiplied for pages, but perhaps no further pronouncement could be quite as pertinent as the words of Pope Pius VII when he deplored the presence in Catholic countries of propagandists who were bent on destroying the Faith of Catholics: “By the fact that freedom of all forms of worship is proclaimed, truth is confused with error, and the Holy and Immaculate Spouse of Christ, outside of which there is no salvation, is placed on the same level as heretical sects and even as Jewish perfidy!”
This is the Church’s answer to the Jewish proposal of Interfaith: Truth cannot share the platform with error, God’s one Faith must not be placed on a level with the devisings of men. It was precisely this message which the Vatican last year transmitted to the Bishops of England, ordering all Catholics to withdraw immediately from the Council of Christians and Jews, England’s number one Interfaith organization.
The prompt and publicized resignation of His Eminence, Cardinal Griffin, so lately deceased, was a great comfort to those in Rome who had condemned the Interfaith movement “on the ground that it was preaching a doctrine unacceptable to Catholics: that all religions are equal.”
The present campaign of the Jews to make the Church say that it is not a necessary item, that men can attain Heaven without it, should never be interpreted as the final goal of Interfaith. For even a debilitated Church body, even the most pliant hierarchical relic, would be still, by its very existence, a threat to Jewish security. The ultimate aim of the Jews’ program is the dissolution of the Catholic Church — an aim which long ago appeared in public print, wrapped, of course, in the soft garments of “brotherhood.”
In the Jewish World of London, for February 9, 1883, there appeared this benevolent message: “The dispersion of the Jews has rendered them a cosmopolitan people. They are the only cosmopolitan people, and in this capacity must act and are acting as a solvent of national and racial differences. The great ideal of Judaism is not that Jews shall be allowed to flock together one day in some hole-in-the-corner fashion, for, if not tribal, at any rate separatist objects, but that the whole world shall be imbued with Jewish teachings, and that in a universal Brotherhood of Nations — a greater Judaism, in fact — all the separate races and religions shall disappear.”
To the Catholic prelates and priests of America, The Point cannot overemphasize the urgency of this situation — nor yet, on the other hand, do we faint in despair at the enormity of the counter-blow which is needed.
One bishop can do it. One strong voice, raised in episcopal authority against the babble of “brotherhood” would be enough to electrify the whole nation, smash the Jewish Interfaith edifice, and preserve the Faith for this land which all the bishops of America so long ago dedicated to the Mother of God. The Point – December 1956
This Christmas men are looking to the Holy Land, and they are listening — not for the strains of “Glory to God in the Highest,” but for the sounds of war upon earth. And we might say: It is just. God long ago crashed the Temple of Jerusalem to the ground, and cursed its people, the Jews, to be forever homeless and wandering. If the world has defied this Divine judgment and supported a Jewish return to Palestine, then let the world bear the consequences of God’s righteous anger.
But this leaves a greater part unsaid. For the Holy Land is infinitely more than a geographical locality which God has forbidden to the Jews. It is, for all time, the precious countryside where God became the Child of a Virginal Mother, and where God as Man walked and taught and died for us. It is, indeed, God’s Land.
If, therefore, we are anxious this Christmas, our concern is this: The leaders of our nation have proposed that Christian boys be ready to shed their blood in order to make the Jews secure within the borders of the Holy Land. But should this happen, should Christian lives be spent to keep God’s Land in the hands of His crucifiers, the price of such betrayal will not be confined to the deserts of the East. We will be paying, in kind, on bloody Main Street, U. S. A.
THE ENEMIES OF CHRIST AT CHRISTMAS
Soon, the Jews of America will be trying once more to jostle Christmas from its place as the nation’s chief interest in late December. As elbow for this endeavor, the Jews will rely again on their festival of Chanukah — once a minor holiday but recently seized on because of its timely Yuletide occurrence and now celebrated with all the blare and bluster the Jews can produce.
Though originally set up in 165 B. C., the observance of Chanukah (Hebrew for “Dedication”) has long since lost its holy, Old Testament meaning. Thus, when Jewish leaders decided a few years back to revive and exalt the holiday, they found it expedient also to invest it with a fresh and acceptable significance. They have, accordingly, made it an annual practice to hire the principal halls in the principal cities of the country for the staging of special Chanukah pageants. These loudly-trumpeted extravaganzas (“Inspiring — Breathtaking — Spectacular”) oppose the Birth of the true Messias by dramatizing, with the solemnity of religious ritual, the birth of their own messianic empire: the Jewish state of Israel.
It is, of course, true that the Jews would have been eager to exploit any one of their festivals that was opportune in order to affront the beauty and singularity of Christmas. Yet Chanukah is especially suited for such a use — because it was on that day that Our Lord revealed Himself to the Jews as the Messias, and, for doing so, was almost stoned. The story is told in the Holy Gospel of Saint John (Chap. 10, v. 22-39):
“And the Dedication was in Jerusalem: and it was winter. And Jesus walked in the temple, in Salomon’s porch. The Jews therefore compassed him round about, and said to him, How long doest thou hold our soul in suspense? If thou be Christ, tell us openly. Jesus answered them, I speak to you: and you believe not, the works that I do in the name of my Father, they give testimony of me, but you do not believe, because you are not of my sheep. My sheep hear my voice: and I know them, and they follow me. And I give them life everlasting: and they shall not perish for ever, and no man shall pluck them out of my hand. My father, that which he hath given me, is greater than all: and no man can pluck them out of the hand of my father. I and the Father are one. The Jews took up stones, to stone him. Jesus answered them, Many good works I have showed you from my father, for which of those works do you stone me? The Jews answered him, For a good work we stone thee not, but for blasphemy, and because thou being a man, makest thyself God. Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, that I said, you are God’s? If he called them God’s, to whom the word of God was made, and the scripture can not be broken: whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world, say you, That thou blasphemest, because I said I am the son of God? If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. But if I do, and if you will not believe me, believe the works: that you may know and believe that the Father is in me, and I in the Father. They sought therefore to apprehend him: and he went forth out of their hands.”
Because it is reckoned by the Jewish calendar, the day on which Chanukah falls may vary from year to year by as much as a month. This year it is due to fall on its earliest possible date. But Jews have never been ones to let liturgical niceties stand in the way of more vital considerations, and so, the Jews of Boston (the only segment of whose plans we have heard) are making an adroit adjustment in their schedule. Their annual Chanukah pageant at the Boston Garden will be held this year, not when the calendar says Chanukah should occur, but some three weeks later, on December the twenty-third — just a stone’s throw from Christmas.
The pride of Jewish rural life is the “kibbutz,” a sort of collective farm settlement, of which there are presently some 250 well-populated examples in the state of Israel. A recent volume to swell the praises of these communes is Harvard University Press’ Kibbutz, Venture in Utopia. The following two extracts from this book provide a raw, startling picture of the Jews who today inhabit the Land of Christ’s Birth:
“In its attempt to create a better world, the kibbutz has found that it faces considerable opposition, and it has come to view this opposition with an intense hatred. Indeed, it is not unfair to say the kibbutz hates almost everybody, since it views almost everybody as an opponent. Outside of Israel, all the ‘bourgeois’ countries are hated, and only the Soviet Union and ‘People’s Democracies’ are ‘loved.’
“As for marriage, they believed — and still believe — that a union between a man and woman was their own affair, to be entered into on the basis of love and to be broken at the termination of love; neither the union nor the separation were to require the permission or the sanction of the community. Today, for example, if a couple wishes to marry, the partners merely ask for a joint room; if they wish a divorce, they return to separate rooms.” Each year when the Church commemorates the arrival of the Magi at Bethlehem, on the Feast of the Epiphany, our priests are required to read, as an integral part of their Breviary prayers, the following homily by Pope Saint Gregory the Great:
“All things which He had made, bore witness that their Maker was come … And yet, up to this very hour, the hearts of the unbelieving Jews will not acknowledge that He, to Whom all nature gave testimony, is their God. Being more hardened than the rocks, the Jews refuse to be rent by repentance.”
This is but one instance of what the Jews would term the “anti-Semitism” of the Church’s Advent and Christmas Season liturgy. With the possible exception of Holy Week in Lent, there is no period in the whole liturgical year which more emphasizes the bridgeless chasm separating Christian faith and Jewish infidelity.
From Advent through the Epiphany Octave, the texts of the Mass and the Divine Office resound repeatedly with that theme which is at once the fulfilled expectation of the Jews of the Old Law, and the indictment of the deicide Jews of today:
“Behold, O Israel, your king … Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, for the day of the Lord is nigh … It is the birth of the Christ, O Jerusalem … The Savior of the world will be our King … He shall sit upon the throne of David His father.”
These are the tidings of great joy which plague the Jews as sorely this December as they did more than nineteen hundred years ago. And among these tidings there is, for the Jews, no more hateful information than the exultant shouts that the Baby of Bethlehem is the true Son of David, inheriting a royal title from His foster father, Saint Joseph, and royal blood from His Spotless Mother, the Virgin Mary. It was precisely to attack this central truth of Christmas that the rabbis of the early Christian centuries concocted that unprintably-filthy version of the Birth of Christ which is now found in the Jews’ “holy” book, the Talmud. We have determined never to reprint, in direct quotation, these blasphemous assaults against the purity of the Mother of God. But that they were invented by the rabbis, for the express purpose of challenging Our Lord’s title to the Throne of David, is abundantly admitted by Jewish authorities. The Jewish Encyclopedia, for example, blithely states, in its article on “Jesus,” that, “For polemical purposes it was necessary for the Jews to insist on the illegitimacy of Jesus as against the Davidic descent claimed by the Christian Church.”
At no point in the Christmas liturgy, however, does the Church’s consciousness of Jewish perfidy becloud her joy at the Birth of the Messias. In this spirit, therefore, we anticipate the coming gladness, and leave our readers with that jubilant exhortation from the Third Mass of Christmas:
“Come ye Gentiles and adore the Lord, for this day a great light hath descended upon the earth!” The Point - 1957 The Point – January 1957
JEWISH INVASION OF OUR COUNTRY
Our Culture Under Siege
On the last day of December, 1955, there died at Miami Beach, Florida, an aged Jew named Ludwig Lewisohn. The event was notable; for by it American Jewry was relieved of its most eloquent spokesman — and most incorrigible beans-spiller. Lewisohn had dedicated his mature years and ripe literary talent unstintingly to the work of rhapsodizing his race; but he never made an effort to camouflage the true Jewish character for the sake of appeasing the Gentiles. The creature he celebrated, and dangled defiantly before the eyes of the world, was the naked, unvarnished article: the Jew as he is.
For Lewisohn, it is the Jews’ glory, never to be concealed, that they are the enemies of Christ (“a teacher neither original nor important”) and of His Church (“a new Paganism with its thousand altars to its hundred gods”). Moreover, in a fever of racial revelation, he presents his people as unshakeable foes of the very culture, the civilization which Christianity has begotten. “We are a different folk,” he blurts out in one book; “we do remain eternally ourselves … So soon as I express the inmost me — not the economic man or the mere man of knowledge — I come into collision with folk-ways and beliefs and laws … Civilizations express in their totality an ethos which is definite, however hard to sum up in a formula … And the ethos which from within outward built Christian civilization is not ours.”
Though many Jews chewed their nails over Lewisohn’s disclosures, a greater number felt it was high time for this frank statement of their position. As a tribute to him, Lewisohn was invited to bellow out his final years as the star of new, Jewish Brandeis University. The general feeling was well-expressed by one rabbi, who said of the book from which the above quotations are taken, “The soul of Israel is revealed in its glorious pages.” And this brings us to the grim consideration: what will be the result of the ever-growing influence of Jews in the United States? Clearly and inescapably, unless this influence is checked it will mean the end of our society. Our traditions, our standards, our ways are not the Jews’ — who neither approve them nor understand them, and who will destroy them if they can. On this point, too, Lewisohn is emphatic. Example: “The laws of the state of New York are based on the Christian assumption that marriage is a sacrament.” The disgrace of New York Jewry, he continues, is that it has not yet demanded “exemption from laws which have no relation to its instincts, its tradition, or its reason.”
Inasmuch, then, as Jews have had no part in shaping the culture of Christendom, how can they, Lewisohn wonders, become “culturally creative”? And he answers: “Only by being steadfastly themselves and Judaizing the civilizations of their homelands.”
Some random aspects of what this “Judaizing” means, and is going to mean, are indicated in the following paragraphs.
The swarm of Jewish jurists who have overrun American courtrooms, and who plainly intend to be “steadfastly themselves,” makes our legal system a likely spot to look for evidence of the Judaizing process. Probably the most striking example of such evidence is the recent change of law regarding insanity cases. Formerly these were judged on an old and firm principle. Unless it could be shown that the defendant’s consciousness and free will were warped to the extent that he did not know he was doing wrong when he committed the crime, he would have to take the full consequences of his act and could not have his sentence mitigated “by reason of insanity.”
For years the Jews kept hammering at this criterion, and at the Christian belief underlying it: that man has normally the ability to distinguish and choose between a right deed and a wrong one. This concept, the Jews argued, was a medieval hold-over with no place in a modern court of law — where it should be recognized that right and wrong are, at best, relative notions, since “what is right for me may be wrong for you.” In 1954, in the now-famous “Durham Case,” the Jews got what they wanted. The Durham decision, written by Jewish Federal Judge David Bazelon, finally and flatly rejects the “right-wrong test and puts a new code in its place. From now on, decreed Jewish Judge Bazelon, the question of criminal responsibility will hinge simply on whether or not the “unlawful act was the product of mental disease or mental defect.”
And who is qualified to say if it was so? Why, the Jewish psychiatrist, of course! He is the one who can determine the mental state of the accused and decide whether or not the crime was the “product” of that mental state.
At present, this represents the Jews’ main penetration into our legal structure. But they’re not resting. They are anxious to pursue their present advantage to its logical conclusion. The book Psychiatry and the Law, the Jews’ classic work on the subject, outlines the ultimate goal: “After the defendant has been found guilty … the decision as to what kind of treatment is needed calls for … the psychiatrist … Fixing the sentence should therefore either be taken from the judge entirely and vested in a tribunal of experts … or … the sentence should be a wholly indeterminate one, under which the person would be held as long as necessary, whether that be for a few days or for the rest of his life.”
It should be noted that this sentence is to be imposed regardless of the crime committed — so that, at the whim of an anti-Christian quack, a murderer may be turned loose on the public after a week’s confinement, whereas an uncooperative petty thief may be held till he dies, whether of old age or of “treatments.”
Other courtroom activities of the Jews include agitation to abolish capital punishment. Though they have been assisted in this by a number of soft- hearted, soft-headed Catholics, it remains a solidly Jewish venture. Locally, for instance, heading the small but shrill Massachusetts Council for the Abolition of the Death Penalty is Mrs. Herbert Ehrman, wife of the top New England official of the American Jewish Committee. While as far away as England, the recent bill for ending capital punishment in the realm was authored and introduced by one Sydney Silverman, M.P. One immediate effect of getting rid of the death sentence will be to increase sharply the dangers of being a policeman. Many desperate criminals, already facing life terms, would be willing to shoot it out with the police or kill a prison guard in a nothing-to-lose gamble for freedom. And this, too, would seem to fit in quite nicely with Jewish purposes. For American “entertainment” — that most effective instrument of Jewish propaganda — has been ardently engaged of late in portraying our police officers as a collection of clowns, dunderheads, and racketeering brutes whom we would be much better off without. The Jews apparently feel that a police force — the non-U. N. variety — is a hindrance to the Judaizing of our culture.
Undoubtedly, they are right.
Over the past months, our Catholic hierarchy of the United States have been waging a battle. In the words of Cardinal Spellman, American Catholics have an imperative mission to “resist the growing and alarming disrespect for the reverent observance of Sunday.” Yet, in this admirable concern for the preservation of Our Lord’s Day, there has been a conspicuous omission. No one ever mentions just who is behind the anti-Sabbath agitation. This is the more remarkable because there has been no aspect of the current Jewish program half so blatant, open and admitted as the attack on Sunday. For of all the traditional values which are foreign to the profaners of our Christian culture, none is more remote than Our Lord’s Day — that weekly reminder of Jesus’ triumph over death and the Jews, when He arose from the tomb on the first Christian Sunday, the bright morning of Easter.
Although there have been notable successes for the Jews in other localities, New York City, quite understandably, remains the headquarters for the Jewish anti-Sunday war. All battle plans are there cleared through an organization called the “Joint Committee for a Fair Sabbath Law,” which represents at least 25 Jewish groups. At the strategy-helm of the “Joint Committee” is Mr. Leo Pfeffer, of the ubiquitous trio of Pfeffer, Polier, and Maslow, top lawyers for the American Jewish Congress. It is Pfeffer’s dream that some Sunday in the near future, America’s Jewish-owned Main Streets will be bustling with all the commercial activity of “any ordinary day” — and that “business as usual” will smother all public witness to the sanctity of our Christian day of rest.
That New York’s Cardinal-Archbishop should have been stirred to any kind of defense of Sunday is, of course, a tribute to the extreme effectiveness of the Jewish “Joint Committee.” Unquestionably, one of the occasions of His Eminence’s anxiety was the report which appeared in the New York Sunday News for last April 8.
It seems that one Sol Sacks, a Manhattan Certified Public Accountant, had hit upon the idea of having his staff hired out on Sunday — allowing his clients to have their business affairs checked and put in order, with no interruption in the regular work week. Before long, the city’s police department got wind of Mr. Sack’s scheme, and one Sunday morning as Sol had just unleashed a force of 25 workers at Number 40 Wall Street, a New York patrolman presented him with a summons charging violation of the Sabbath Law.
Sacks, accompanied by his attorney, Jacob Shientag, was brought to trial before a fellow-Jew, Magistrate Charles Solomon, in Lower Manhattan Court. The proceedings were quite brief, and very much to the point — to the Jewish point that “the Sunday Blue Law is a statutory crazy-quilt” (as the News put it). Magistrate Solomon concluded the “trial” with one final Jewish sneer at all that Sunday represents: “Nonsense! Case Dismissed!”
The contrast between Christian and Jewish values has never been more strikingly evident than in the founding and furthering of the Jewish State of Israel. The tragedy is that most Americans who read the Zionist propaganda reports (“Israel is as American as your home town”) will never investigate further. Few will take the trouble to learn, for example, that very much unlike your hometown, Israel is a state where 85 per cent of the land is the outright property of the central government. However, there is little need for our American system of “a backyard of your own” because family life is all but eliminated by Israeli social legislation. In the Jewish farm communities (whose marriage irregularities we reported last month) children are taken from their parents after birth and raised in separate areas. At determined intervals, parents are invited to visit the children’s barracks to watch the communal progress of their offspring. When they reach the age of 14, most of the young Jews are through with school, and all, both girls and boys, spend their next, most formative years (until they are 20) in the Israeli Army. The sight of a truck-load of 15-year-olds with guns and live ammunition strapped to their shoulders — an everyday scene in Israel — would hardly remind the average American of the high-school pastimes of his youth. Yet the hoax continues!
In conjunction with the Israel-can-do-no-wrong propaganda, there has been a determined program to keep Americans unaware of the gross injustices, by our standards, which Israel, with Jewish standards, has perpetrated in the Middle East. When the United Nations, that town meeting of world Jewry, first decided to hand over the Holy Land as an autonomous state for the Jews, there was no time lost in dispossessing and expelling every indigenous Arab who was in the way. So messy did the affair become that even a small group of U. N. people (Gentiles, of course) thought that something should be done for the unfortunate Arab “refugees.” The gentleman who dared propose this plan, Count Bernadotte of Sweden, was promptly shot by the Israelis.
The number of new Arab refugees resulting from the Zionist police state’s latest aggressions, in Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, has not yet been calculated. But we are assured that there will be no Jewish remorse over the situation. Speaking recently in Boston, Russian-born Golda Meir, Israel’s Foreign Ministress, said very plainly that if the decision to invade Egypt were once more hers to make, then, “As I did it before, I would do it again!”
A few days after Mrs. Meir’s speech, Monsignor Peter Tuohy, head of the Pontifical Mission for Palestine, called upon the Christian nations to work immediately for the “repatriation of the Arab refugees and internationalization of Jerusalem.” Although there were few sympathetic ears to hear his plea, Monsignor Tuohy was merely repeating the unswerving position of the Holy See in the matter of Israel: (1) Jerusalem with its Holy Places must not be in the possession of the Jews, and (2) the ousted Arabs, a surprising number of whom are Catholics, must not be left homeless and starving in the deserts beyond the Israeli borders.
To emphasize this position, the Vatican has consistently turned down the bold Jewish proposals that diplomatic relations be maintained between the Holy See and Israel. Taking a lead from this, American Catholics might follow The Point ’s example of severing all relations with Israel’s citizens- in-exile, the Jews of America. Such decisive action could well be the beginning of justice for the victims of Zionism, and protection for the sacred shrines of the Holy Land.
Examples of the Christian-Jewish cleavage might be multiplied indefinitely, but a true understanding of them comes only with the foundational knowledge that, all moral and social arguments aside, the abyss which divides us is religious. And the nature of this division has never been more succinctly defined than by the learned bishop whose feast will be celebrated throughout the Church on the twenty-seventh of this month, Saint John Chrysostom. He wrote: “The Jews have crucified the Son and rejected the Holy Ghost, and their souls are the abode of the devil … It is not insignificant controversies which separate us, but the death of Christ.” The Point – February 1957
WHEN EVERYONE WAS CATHOLIC
Courage of the Faith in the Thirteenth Century
For five full years now, The Point has considered its most urgent work to be that of alerting Catholics to the dangers which threaten their Faith. Our monthly articles have thus been, purposefully, more “anti” than “pro.” And it was in the midst of exposing the workings of what we might call the “accepted” enemies of American Catholics — the pope-hating, birth- controlling, lodge-going heretics — that we made a discovery. Our readers were quite prepared to learn that Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Scientists and Billy Channing’s Unitarians were ill-disposed toward those of Romish persuasion. But the information that the Jews were also, and more so, enemies of the Faith, left many a bit skeptical.
We have, therefore, spent several months in discussions of the Jewish threat to the Church, which even our most cautious readers now recognize as infinitely more deep-rooted and far-reaching than anything which American Protestantism could contrive. Looking ahead to future issues, we have one regret: A Catholic understanding of the entire Jewish problem presupposes a familiarity with the Church’s traditional position on the Jewish people, and her repeated legislations in their regard. Our readers are still hazy about this all-important matter, and so …
There is no fairer way of determining the Church’s official attitude toward that people whom Saint Paul calls the “adversaries of all men,” than to study what the teaching body of the Church has had to say about Jews when it was most free to speak. In short: In the days when the Catholic Church was on top, where were the Jews to be found?
Now, the most scrupulous historian would have to agree that the Church was never more exalted as a world influence than it was in the thirteenth century. During all the twelve hundreds, from the reign of Pope Innocent III to the pontificate of Boniface VIII, the Catholic Church was spectacularly and indisputably “on top”!
The thirteenth was a century of holiness. It was the age of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Saint Louis of France, Saint Ferdinand of Castile, Saint Edmund of Canterbury, Saint Simon Stock, Saint Peter Nolasco, Saint Raymond of Peñafort, Saint Thomas of Hereford, Saint Hugh of Lincoln, Saint Gertrude the Great, Saint Mechtilde, and Saint Philip Benizi. It was the glorious age of Saint Clare, Saint Francis, and Saint Dominic, and it saw them establish the religious orders which today bear their names: the Poor Clares, the Franciscans, and the Dominicans. It heard the teaching of four of the Church’s twenty-nine brilliant Doctors: Saint Anthony of Padua, Saint Bonaventure, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Albertus Magnus. It witnessed the spread of the Christian guilds and the rise of the Gothic cathedrals. It was the century when Our Blessed Lady’s Rosary was first recited, and her Brown Scapular first worn. It gave our liturgy the Stabat Mater, the Dies Irae, and the entire Office and Mass of Corpus Christi, including the benediction hymn, Tantum Ergo Sacramentum. Three General Councils of the Church were held during the thirteenth century, at one of which cardinals were for the first time given their familiar insignia, the red hat. It was the century of the final Crusade, of the first Inquisition, of England’s Magna Carta, and Marco Polo’s explorations. And in all this activity of the faithful, there was everywhere the maternal hand of the Church, guarding, reproving, encouraging, and guiding.
With all of Christendom thus ordered and disposed toward a full Christian life, the Church had the time, and the recognized authority, to look beyond its flock to the unbaptized Jews. The result was a detailed program governing the presence of Jews in all the Catholic nations of Europe. Below, we have pieced together a quick chronology of the development of this program.
On July 15, 1205, Pope Innocent III wrote a letter to the hierarchy of France to remind them that the Crucifiers of Christ ought to be held in continual subjection. And if the Jews of France would not accept this rightful state — if they would not abide by the regulations drawn up for them by the Holy See — then, the Pope instructed his bishops, “We give you our authority to forbid any Christian in the district from entering into commercial relations with them, under pain of excommunication.”
Three years later, in a letter to the Count of Nevers, this same Holy Father set forth Catholic teaching even more plainly: “The Jews, against whom the blood of Jesus Christ calls out, although they should not be killed, lest Christian people forget the Divine Law, yet as wanderers ought they to remain upon the earth, until their countenance be filled with shame.”
Spurred by the Pope’s words and example, a council of French bishops, meeting at Avignon in 1209, enacted a severe code of anti-Jewish restrictions. And in 1212, another council, at Paris, added to these measures by forbidding any Christian mid-wife from assisting at the birth of a Jewish child.
In 1215, Pope Innocent III convoked a general council of all the bishops of Christendom, the decrees of which would be ratified by him personally and be binding on the whole Catholic world. Canon 68 of this assembly, known as the Fourth Lateran Council, prescribes that “Jews of either sex, in every Christian province, and at all times, be distinguished in public from other people by a difference of dress.” And Canon 69 declares, “It is most absurd that a blasphemer of Christ should exercise power over Christians … and we renew the decree forbidding that the Jews be given public offices.”
Pope Honorius III, who succeeded Innocent III in 1216, got his pontificate off to a decisive start by ordering that the new synagogue built by the Jews in Rome should be immediately demolished.
In 1219, papal authorities ruled that any Jew buying a house from a Christian must pay property taxes to the Church. The same year, the Archbishop of Toledo in Spain established an annual tribute to be paid by every adult Jew in his diocese.
The year 1222 saw the English Council of Oxford imposing general strictures on the Jews and the Golden Bull of Hungary forbidding them to hold public office. The first quarter-century was rounded off by the Council of Paris, which ordained in 1223 that Christians must not be employed in Jewish households.
The anti-Jewish code of the Fourth Lateran Council was re-enacted in 1227 by the bishops of France meeting at Narbonne; while the city of Marseilles, to implement Lateran’s Canon 68, ruled that every Jew in the area who had reached his seventh year must wear on his chest a large, bright-colored disc.
In 1228, the newly-elected Pope Gregory IX decreed that all Crusaders indebted to Jews were to be free from paying interest. And in December of 1230, King Louis IX (Saint Louis) of France declared that Jews could not make legal contracts nor leave the estates of their lords.
In 1233, Pope Gregory wrote to the hierarchy of Germany: “Ungrateful for favors and forgetful of benefits, the Jews return insult for kindness and impious contempt for goodness … they who ought to know the yoke of perpetual enslavement because of their guilt.” The Pope also wrote to Saint Ferdinand, King of Castile, charging him to see “that the perfidious Jews never in the future grow insolent, but that, in servile fear, they shall ever publicly suffer the shame of their sin.”
The year 1240 marks the beginning of open war on the Jewish Talmud. In early Lent of that year, Pope Gregory IX instructed Saint Louis and Saint Ferdinand that, while the Jews of France and Castile were at their synagogues, their homes should be searched and copies of the Talmud confiscated. Saint Louis followed this search by ordering, in June of 1242, Europe’s first official public burning of the Jewish book.
In 1244, Pope Innocent IV, continuing Gregory IX’s tradition, issued the famous Impia Gens. In it, he assailed the Talmud as “containing every kind of vileness and blasphemy against Christian truth,” and ordered the book seized, wherever it might be found, and destroyed. Accordingly, Saint Louis held another Talmud-burning at Paris in 1244, and still another in 1248.
Meanwhile, in distant Dublin, a law had been passed in 1241, prohibiting the selling of any Irish land to Jews. And, back in France, Pope Innocent IV convened the General Council of Lyons in 1245, which reaffirmed all the Church’s anti-Jewish enactments. The following year, a local council of French bishops, meeting at Beziers, forbade Jews to practice medicine.
Shortly after the Council of Lyons closed, Archbishop Philip of Savoy demanded that the Jews get out of the city entirely. Thereafter, no Jew lived in Lyons for a century, and any who passed through had to pay a toll, the same as was paid for cattle, both entering the city and leaving it.
Apparently hoping that they would be more fortunate in the second half- century than they had been in the first, the Jews petitioned Pope Innocent IV, in April of 1250, to let them build a new synagogue at Cordova, Spain. The petition was refused.
In December of 1254, Saint Louis of France, with the blessing of the Holy See, expelled all Jews from his kingdom. Seven years later, they were banished from Brabant, in Germany, and the year after that, from Treves.
The year 1263 saw a public burning of the Talmud at Barcelona, Spain. And in 1265, Pope Clement IV ordered death for any Jew in the Papal States found with a Talmud in his house.
In 1266, the Council of Breslau cautioned Christians not to buy meat or other provisions from Jewish dealers. It also prescribed putting the Jews in a ghetto, to be “divided from the section inhabited by Christians by a fence, wall, or ditch.” The following year, the Council of Vienna forbade Jewish doctors to treat Christian patients and, in conformity with the Fourth Lateran Council, decreed that, whenever a Viennese Jew appeared in public, he must wear a pointed hat.
In July of 1267, Pope Clement IV issued the bull, Turbato Corde, extending the Inquisition begun by Gregory IX, so that it could deal not only with heretics, but also with Jews who had seduced Catholics from the Faith. The city of London was aroused in 1271 to prohibit Jews from acquiring any more property there. And, in 1274, occurred the death of the great Saint Thomas Aquinas, who in his De Regimine Judaeorum told Christian rulers: “Jews, in consequence of their sin, are or were destined to perpetual slavery; so that sovereigns of states may treat their goods as their own property; with the sole proviso that they do not deprive them of all that is necessary to sustain life.”
The year 1275 opened with the Jews being expelled from Marlborough, Gloucester, Worcester, and Cambridge in England and, in 1276, from Bavaria.
In August of 1278, Pope Nicholas III directed the Jews of Lombardy to attend weekly sermons given for them by Dominican preachers. The Pope further stated that Jews “who, through fear, though not absolutely coerced, had received Baptism and had returned to their Jewish blindness, should be handed over to the secular power.”
The Council of Ofen, held in Hungary in 1279 and presided over by a papal legate, decreed that any Christian responsible for putting a Jew in public office was to be excommunicated.
In 1280, England adopted Lombardy’s practice by obliging all Jews in the kingdom to attend weekly sermons. This same year, King Alphonso X of Leon and Castile imprisoned his entire Jewish population until it had paid a special levy, plus an additional fine for each day of delay.
Archbishop Peckham of London, a city growing acutely uncomfortable for the Jews, gave orders in 1283 that all the synagogues in his diocese must be closed. And the same year, King Pedro of Aragon decreed that no Jew could hold a position that would give him jurisdiction, power, or authority over Christians.
In November of 1286, Pope Honorius IV wrote to the English Archbishops of Canterbury and York, calling the Talmud “that damnable book” and urging them “vehemently to see that it be not read by anyone, since all evils flow from it.” A few months later, in May of 1287, King Edward I had the Jews of England thrown into prison. And finally, on November 1, 1290, Edward ordered all Jews to be deported from the country — to which they were not allowed to return till the time of the Protestant Cromwell, almost four centuries later.
Two events mark the final year of the thirteenth century: On June 13, Pope Boniface VIII issued his bull Exhibita Nobis, ordaining that Jews could be denounced to the Inquisition without the name of the accuser being revealed, so as to protect Christians against Jewish reprisals. And, to bring the century to a blazing conclusion, the city of Paris held, in 1299, one more public burning of the Jewish Talmud.
Some months ago, the American Jewish Committee’s magazine, Commentary, carried an article which gave details of the anti-Jewishness of the Church in France during the Middle Ages. One of the items which most annoyed the A.J.C. spokesman was an inscription placed over the gate of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris. In bold letters, it read, “Beware of a Jew, a madman, and a leper.”
This French inscription makes a pithy summary of all that the Church, at its height of power, tried to indicate concerning the Jewish people. Jews were to be avoided, quite as one would avoid the mad and the leprous. They were to be restrained and quarantined, lest their perfidy and filth infect Christian society. The Church’s prudent devices (ghettos, badges, and the rest) were thus the fruit of a mother’s solicitude for her children. It was only when Europe turned against its mother that these safeguards vanished and the Jewish infection spread abroad in the land — leaving the once-Christian West in its present, unspeakable state of misery. The Point – March 1957
DUBLIN’S BRISCOE COMES TO BOSTON
The city of Boston is not planning a Saint Patrick’s Day Parade for March 17, this year. The reason is not merely that the day is a Sunday. It seems there is a Jew headed for Boston who cannot conveniently get here until the day after Saint Patrick’s Day, and this has been proposed by certain Boston Jews as a fine reason for delaying the March 17 festivities. Some highly- placed Hibernians have been found to agree. Thus, the Catholics of Boston have been instructed to hold off on their tributes to Saint Patrick until said anticipated Jew arrives to witness the proceedings.
The advent of this visitor was disclosed on the front page of the Boston Herald: “The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Robert Briscoe, will arrive in Boston, March 18, be welcomed by a band of Irish pipers and be seen by all of South Boston, which postponed its annual Saint Patrick’s Day parade one day so he could be in it.”
To those angry, but less highly-placed Hibernians who have protested to us that the guilt for this whole affair lies with the Irish in Ireland for having set up a Jewish Mayor in the first place, we offer the following considerations.
Ireland has little notion of that general world distress which we label the “Jewish problem.” The earliest authentic record of Hebrew proximity to Hibernia is dated one thousand years after the Crucifixion. An ancient log recounts that in the year 1079 A.D., “Five Jews came over the sea bearing gifts to Fairdelbach (Hua Brian) and were sent back over the sea.” The Gaelic restraint of this narrative only heightens its eloquence. And we are thus quite prepared to learn that a couple of centuries later, in 1290, it became a universal law in Ireland that no Jew should ever be allowed within the borders. This law was tempered only at the subsequent insistence of Irish-dominating English Protestants — who even succeeded, in the year 1846, in removing from the law books the ancient statute De Judaismo. In compliance with papal teaching, this law required that any Jew who appeared in public in Ireland must wear a distinctive dress to distinguish him from the Christians.
As late as 1880, however, there were less than 400 Jews in all of Ireland. Indeed, despite the relaxed regulations, the Jews today constitute but one tenth of one percent of the Irish population (1954 Irish Catholic Directory).
The glaring historical truth of the matter is that only lately have the Irish ever seen a Jew. And although instructed by their Faith that the Jews are a perfidious and deicide race, the Irish have never had the lesson driven home for them the way the Poles and the French and the Italians and the Germans and the Spaniards have.
Therefore, the “blame” for Briscoe’s current eclipsing of Saint Patrick falls more heavily upon those, on this side of the Atlantic, who are exploiting for their own ends the spectacle of a Jewish Mayor running a Catholic city. These opportunists are, of course, our local Jews, and their purpose, according to our unanimous local press, is the emphasizing of “the intrinsic unity of our Judaeo-Christian heritage.” Briscoe is apparently the best possible symbol they could devise at the moment for perpetuating that most fantastic of twentieth century myths: the notion that Jew and Christian can be hyphenated, that Christianity and Judaism are common foundations of a common culture, that they are two forms of a same belief.
Since the press pictures of Mr. Briscoe’s well-defined physiognomy are presently accompanied by much loose verbiage about how being a Christian and being a Jew are, after all, really the same thing, The Point hopes to shed some light this month on what it chooses to call the “Judaeo-Christian- hoax.”
That we Catholics are somehow spiritually bound to Jews of the Old Testament is a reality none of us can miss. The God of Abraham is our God; the prayers of David are our prayers; the Faith of Moses is, in its fullness, our Faith. But it is not to the ancient Jews that advocates of Judaeo- Christianity would link us; it is to the Jews of today. And that switch makes the joining impossible. As surely as there is continuity between Old Testament belief and our own, there is none between Old Testament belief and modern Judaism. For the Messias whom the patriarchs and prophets awaited — whose promised birth was the core of their faith and of their hope — has come. And the Jews, as a people, have witnessed His coming. They have seen the Jewish prophecies blazingly fulfilled. Yet they have, as a people, scorned the Messias, and crucified Him, and called down His Blood as a curse on their race. That curse is the chasm which divides Jews like Abraham from Jews like Briscoe.
No one is more keenly aware that there is a religious abyss separating them from their ancestors than are present-day Jews themselves. The American Jewish Committee, principal mouthpiece of U. S. Jewry, recently published an article to point out “the absurdity of regarding Judaism as something that was frozen into an unchangeable pattern some time before the birth of Jesus.” Christians must realize, the argument continued, that they are “no longer dealing with a pre-Herodian people of Palestine whose enthusiasm could be enlisted for a scion of the Davidic dynasty or for an apocalyptic savior ‘coming with the clouds of heaven.’ ”
And as the Judaism participating in Judaeo-Christianity differs from the Old Testament variety, so, the Jews feel, the “Christianity” should be unlike the New Testament sort. To provoke such an evolution is, indeed, their only purpose in coupling themselves to the religion of Christ. For Christianity in its orthodox form — as set forth in the New Testament, defined by the popes, and preached by the saints — is a thing which, above all other things, the Jews hate and contemn.
Unfortunately, however, some Catholics are still unconvinced that this is the Jewish attitude. They join merrily in the babble about “Judaeo-Christian principles” and assure you that the Jews have nothing but respect for the Christian Faith. The following utterances, as typical as they are bold, should help to disabuse these naive ones of their notions.
“In sum, all anti-Semitism, either old or new, roots in a philosophy of life, a scheme of salvation, whose soil is the emotion imparted by Christian theology.” (Rabbi Horace Kallen, in a book published by the American Association for Jewish Education) “It is unfortunately true that in the Christian religious tradition the Jews are assumed to be the accursed of God. There is no use evading the fact or prevaricating about it. There is only one way to deal with it; it must cease to be a fact. That judgment on the Jews must be expunged from the Christian tradition.” (Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, Dean of the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary)
“The Conference unanimously agreed on the necessity for a permanent organization and on a proposal to revise Christian religious teaching, particularly the story of the Crucifixion.” (The American Jewish Yearbook, Vol. 50, reporting on the International Conference of Christians and Jews)
“The Christ of Christianity must yield to Yeshua ben Yossef. The God must die and be re-risen as a man. That will be the true resurrection!” (Rabbi Joel Blau, writing in the B’nai B’rith Magazine)
“The teachings of the New Testament are in complete and profound conflict with what Judaism teaches. They are in complete and utter conflict with what we teach, for we teach the oneness of God, which to — and in accordance with — our belief, excludes the existence of a Son of God.” (Rabbi Joachim Prinz, speaking in a New Jersey courtroom, as recognized witness for the Jewish community — Tudor vs. Board of Education)
“The Synagogue will not conceal its conviction that … Christianity presents in its traditional formulations but an intermediate step between paganism and the ultimate acceptance of Jewish monotheism.” (Commentary, official journal of the American Jewish Committee)
It is with these reservations that the Jews are proposing to share with us a “Judaeo-Christian” union.
Any Catholic who has the least acquaintance with the story of Saint Patrick would be quick to agree that the Apostle of Ireland was no proponent of a common-denominator, Jewish-Christian creed. And the saint worked abundant miracles to prove the point. One of the most familiar incidents is that of the wizard at Inver Boinde. Although this pagan magician was assuredly no Jew, he was spreading about the countryside the most orthodox Talmudic teaching about the Blessed Virgin Mary. His filthy rantings against the virginity of Our Lady were called to Saint Patrick’s attention. Patrick sought out the wizard, made the Sign of the Cross on the ground beneath him, and the earth promptly opened, swallowing the pagan and his blasphemies; hardly a good tale for Brotherhood Week, but typical of Saint Patrick’s zeal for the truth.
As our regular readers well know, we could quote interminably from the writings of the saints and the popes, and the decrees of Church councils, to prove that from the Catholic side there is no foundation whatever for a common cause with post-Crucifixion Jewry. But since action against the Jews is perhaps more memorable (and since Irish action against them would especially fit this issue) we will limit ourselves to the famous story of Father Creagh from Limerick.
Back at the turn of the century, there was not to be found in all of Limerick city a more effective or beloved preacher than Father Creagh of the Redemptorists. And nothing made him more esteemed by his congregation than the sermon which he delivered, in his very finest style, on the morning of January 11, 1904.
Taking as his theme the general perfidy of the Jews, Father Creagh reviewed, with much gusto, the centuries of Jewish hatred for the Cross, the Jews’ cruel murder of Christian children, their continual blasphemies against Our Lord, and their heartless extortions from any Christian people who befriend them.
Father Creagh’s sermon resulted in a city-wide boycott of Limerick’s few dozen Jewish merchants. 6,000 members of the local Catholic Confraternity pledged that they would avoid all commercial contact with Jews. The effect was immediate and lasting. In retaliation, the Jews wrote endlessly in their periodicals against Father Creagh, and accorded him a species of international fame by giving the “Limerick incident” a special entry of its own in the Jewish Encyclopedia. Over thirteen hundred years ago, that giant of Irish monasticism, Saint Columbanus, was able to write with understandable pride to Pope Boniface IV: “All we Irish, living at the uttermost ends of the earth, are the disciples of Saints Peter and Paul, and of all the disciples who wrote the sacred canon under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit: receiving nothing outside the evangelical and apostolic doctrine; no heretic, no Jew, no schismatic was ever amongst us; but the Catholic Faith as it was first delivered to us from you, the successors, that is, of the Holy Apostles, is retained amongst us unchanged.”
It was the rooted tradition of men like Columbanus, continuing the work of the apostle Patrick, which saw the flowering of Ireland as the “Island of Saints and Scholars.” And in the midst of the Briscoe fanfare this month, there will no doubt be oratorical reference to Ireland’s holy and learned past. But it may be safely wagered that none of our local scholars will dare sound off with a text from one of the Irish saints. It would make such uncomfortable listening for a Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin.
St. Patrick, Bishop of Armagh
Born in 387, Saint Patrick lived to be one hundred and six years old. The final sixty years of his life were spent in those famous missionary labors which won him the title of Apostle of Ireland. Universally honored by the Irish, he is given an annual liturgical remembrance by the Church on the seventeenth day of March.
Prayer of Saint Patrick
At Tara, today, I place between me and harm the virtues of the Birth of Christ with His Baptism; the virtue of His Crucifixion with His burial; the virtue of His Resurrection with His Ascension; the virtue of the coming of the Eternal Judgment … Christ be with me, Christ before me, Christ after me, Christ in me, Christ under me, Christ over me … May Christ be in the heart of each person to whom I speak, Christ in the mouth of each person who speaks to me, Christ in each eye which sees me, Christ in each ear which hears me. The Point – April 1957
THE FIGHT FOR THE HOLY CITY
Efforts of the Jews to Control Jerusalem
As we move this month through the sorrowful climax of the Lenten season, and into the joy of a new Easter, the Church’s liturgy takes on its most appealing richness. And it does so by a poverty of place, a limit of locale, which barely allows our meditations to stray beyond the gateways of the city of Jerusalem.
Our inseparable Lenten devotion is the Stations of the Cross — fourteen remembrances of Our Lord’s bleeding progress through the streets of Jerusalem and out to the hill of Calvary. And as the Passion time yields to the Paschal time, Jerusalem becomes the site of our triumphs: the Resurrection, the Descent of the Holy Ghost, and the Apostles’ first preaching and miracles.
Throughout the remainder of the year, the official prayer of the Church offers us Jerusalem as a most versatile symbol — now of the just soul, now of the Church itself, now of that celestial city which will be the eternal home of the saints. And so also with our private prayers — in the most beloved of which, the Rosary, eleven of the fifteen commemorated mysteries are Jerusalem occurrences. Indeed, two of them, the Ascension and the Assumption, begin in Jerusalem and terminate only in Heaven.
This prayerful preoccupation of Catholics with the city of Jerusalem is a key to the most potent geography lesson that the world has ever been taught. The lesson started with Our Lord’s own prophecy that the obstinate Jews to whom He was speaking would “fall by the edge of the sword and be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down by the Gentiles … ”
It was less than forty years after the Crucifixion that Jerusalem quaked and collapsed under the force of Jesus’ fulfilled words. Roman armies under Titus slaughtered over a million Jews, dispersed the Jewish nation and demolished the Temple, in explicit resolution of Our Lord’s threat that “there shall not be left here a stone upon a stone.”
A couple of generations later, around the year 132 A.D., the Jews tried hard to regain their rule over Jerusalem. This time the destruction extended even to the name of the city. For years, Jerusalem was known as the strictly Roman town of Aelia. A law was enforced which prohibited all Jews from residing in this capital which God had once given them, and which God had now irrevocably taken away.
With the ascendancy of the Christians, there came a restoration of Jerusalem’s name, and a reclaiming of its Catholic Holy Places. Just once, in the mid-fourth century, under an apostate Emperor, was there a movement to de-Christianize Jerusalem in favor of Christ’s crucifiers. An attempt was made to rebuild the Jewish Temple — an attempt which was quickly abandoned at the miraculous intervention of earthquakes and fires. And no one has tried since.
By the middle of the fifth century, the Bishop of Jerusalem had gained the title of Patriarch, and the city itself had become a center of pilgrimage for Catholics in the remotest corners of Christendom. And so it remained to our own day, despite the intermittent changeovers in its political control: despite the fall of the kingdom of the Crusaders to the Saracens at the end of the thirteenth century; despite the Turkish Empire’s seizure of Jerusalem at the time of the Protestant revolt; despite the continual persecutions of the official Franciscan custodians of the Holy Land, who have protected our Catholic claims there, uninterruptedly, for over six centuries.
Thus, tragic as the details have often been, this Jerusalem geography lesson has taught a stark truth — that God has turned aside from the people who rejected His Divine Son, that He has blotted their name out of the book of the living (as King David foretold He would) and that He has given over the holy city of the Old Testament to the love and prayers of His New Testament, Gentile faithful. Throughout the past nineteen hundred years of Jewish expulsion from Palestine, the Jews have kept a vengeful memory of Our Lord’s triumph in the city of His first Easter Sunday. “Next year in Jerusalem!” has been the cry at centuries of Jewish festivals, echoing from the plains of the Pale of Settlement to the ghettos of Rome. It has been reserved to our own day however — the post-French Revolution, Freemasonic era — to see the progress of a vast Jewish movement to regain a hold on Jerusalem. And significantly enough, this bold restatement of a national Jewishness, as we now know it, can be traced to the middle of the 1800’s, to a book which bears the antipodal title, Rome and Jerusalem.
In any historical study of Zionism (the name the Jews give to their nationalist movement), Rome and Jerusalem must be accorded the position of a new Torah, a formularization at last of that unwritten law which has guided the nation of the Jews during all of Christian times.
The book was written in Paris by a Jew named Moses Hess, who aimed it principally at the assimilationist Jews of his native Germany. A long-time disciple of Karl Marx, Hess had a revolutionist’s bent for explosive ideas. On the very first page of his frank preface, he bursts into that basic Jewish thesis which gives Rome and Jerusalem its title. “Papal Rome,” writes Hess, “symbolizes to the Jews an Inexhaustible well of poison. It is only with the drying up of this source that Christian German anti-Semitism will die from lack of nourishment.”
As the text unfolds, he adds such refinements as: “It is true that Christianity shed a certain glow during the dark ages of history … but its light only revealed the graves of the nations of antiquity. Christianity is, after all, a religion of death.”
Hess then proceeds to the positive means by which Catholic Rome could be defeated. That means, he says, is the building up of Jerusalem — an undefined job which Hess apparently feels must start with each individual Jew. “Every Jew,” he proposes in casual blasphemy, “has within him the potentiality of a Messiah and every Jewess that of a Mater Dolorosa.” In Hess’ dispensation, no Jew could plead for exemption from service to the Jewish nation, because “A Jew belongs to his race and consequently also to Judaism, in spite of the fact that he or his ancestors have become apostates … A converted Jew remains a Jew no matter how much he objects to it.”
By the time he gets to page 138, Hess is confidently telling his Jewish patriots that “The Messianic Era is the present age.” A “regeneration” of the world has been going on since the “great” French Revolution. Rome is already on the way down, he declares, and the job of the loyal Jew is to establish Jerusalem in its place. Christianity will be “finally replaced among the regenerated nations by a new historical cult. To this coming cult, Judaism alone holds the key.”
It has been the mission of present-day Zionists, who regard Moses Hess as their prophet, to grasp that key securely, and start it turning.
By publicly venting those notions and emotions which his people had for centuries been forced to stifle in themselves, Moses Hess showed that the era of Jewish resurgence was at hand. Daring and indispensable as his work was, however, Hess had not done enough for the Jews. His anti-Christian rantings still had to be translated into a practical plan of action. A leader was needed who could point the way to make Jerusalem the Rome-rivaling capital of Jewry not just in symbol, but in fact.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Jews found their needed leader, in the person of an obscure, obsessed Jewish journalist named Theodore Herzl. With fanatic energy, Herzl hurtled from one end of Europe to the other, arguing, writing, organizing, preaching a gospel that entranced wealthy Jews into opening their checkbooks, and fired millions of down- trodden delicatessen-keepers with a vision of triumph.
In the early 1900’s, shortly before his death, Herzl set forth upon a final grand tour of the European capitals. Having captivated his own people, he now hoped to win the Gentile heads of state to the Zionist cause. To no one’s surprise, the Masonic coterie then ruling Europe received Herzl and his plans with wide-open arms. Whereupon, enflamed with success, he decided to call on the Pope. Perhaps Herzl fancied that with the changing times the Vatican might have tempered its traditional anti-Jewishness. Perhaps he was carried away with the thought of what a magnificent plum it would make if he could coax a pontifical blessing on his ideas. But whatever high-flying hopes prompted his visit, Herzl was about to see them dashed to the ground. For the year was 1904; and the Pope on whom he called was Saint Pius X.
In his Diaries, Herzl describes the visit. After listening quietly to the Zionist plan for restoring the Holy Land to the Jews, Pius X “answered in a stern and categorical manner: ‘We are unable to favor this movement. We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem — but we could never sanction it. The ground of Jerusalem, if it were not always sacred, has been sanctified by the life of Jesus Christ. As the head of the Church, I cannot answer you otherwise. The Jews have not recognized Our Lord; therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.’ ”
And to the Pope’s pointed words, Herzl adds in his Diaries the pointed comment: “The conflict between Rome and Jerusalem, represented by the one and the other of us, was once again under way.”
During the half-century following Herzl’s death, this “conflict” heightened steadily, and on May 15, 1948, reached its climax. On that date world Jewry announced the establishment of a new state in the Holy Land.
At first the Holy City itself was not touched. The Jewish state — which the Jews dubbed “Israel” — had set up its capital at Tel Aviv, on the Mediterranean coast; for Jerusalem lay beyond its reach, some thirty miles into Arab territory. But almost immediately the Jews started hammering at their Arab neighbors, and before long had bulged out the borders of their state in every direction, and had thrust a finger into Jerusalem.
At Vatican insistence, enforced by the votes of Catholic countries, the United Nations decreed in December, 1949, that Jerusalem should be governed by neither Jews nor Arabs but by an international council. This administration, the Vatican hoped, would be able to safeguard the Holy Places. In response to this decision, the Jewish state promptly announced that it was moving its capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. When the United Nations (after much hemming and hawing) and the U. S. State Department issued timorous protests against such rank defiance, Jewish Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion snarled back, “That city’s future is settled.” Jerusalem, he said, was and would remain his capital. Wild with delight, the Jews of America shrilled their approval of Ben-Gurion’s behavior with full-page advertisements in the daily press and a gloating article in the National Jewish Monthly entitled, “Jerusalem: Now and Forever, Capital of Israel.”
Though at present the Jews control only half the Holy City, it is plain they want it all. Itching for a final take-over, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion has called on his compatriots to “show the world that Jerusalem is a Jewish city” — a suggestion that has been carried out with a thoroughness and ferocity only Jews could have conceived.
The few hundred Arabs who have remained in the Jewish sector of the city have been subjected to an ordeal of hardship and horror calculated to drive them from the Holy Land, and to discourage previously-evicted Arabs from returning. They are hired for jobs only when no Jews apply, and are paid reduced wages; they are harassed with travel restrictions and nightly curfews; they are given continual and vivid reminders that they may be at any time arrested as enemies of the state, dispossessed of their houses and lands, even murdered in official “reprisal” for some affront of an Arab national against the Jews. As Archbishop Hakim of Galilee recently insisted, the main reason why one million Arabs have fled from their life- long homes in the Holy Land is that they “were terrorized out by the Israelis.”
Even more forceful as a way of showing the world who is running Jerusalem, has been the Jews’ deliberate, wholesale destruction of Catholic shrines, churches, and institutions. Trying to calculate an incalculable loss, the Vatican has charged the Jews with ravaging Church property in the Holy Land at the rate of two million dollars’ worth a year. Targets of Jewish attack in Jerusalem have included the Cenacle, where Our Lord celebrated His Last Supper; the Convent of Mary Reparatrix, which was dynamited during the night while six nuns were known to be still inside; and the Church of the Dormition, which marks the venerated place of Our Lady’s Death, and which the Jews turned first into an artillery post and then into a dance hall for the Jewish army.
The words that Saint Pius X spoke to Theodore Herzl — “We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem … ” — have been manifestly, tragically prophetic. Every Pope of this century has followed Pius X’s example of denouncing and warning against the Jews’ ambition to usurp the Holy Land. But the Jews have not been stopped. The pleadings of twentieth-century Popes have gone out into a world vastly removed from the world that rallied to the Crusades. “Will you allow the infidels to contemplate in peace the ravages they have committed?” Saint Bernard of Clairvaux had asked that world in the twelfth century. “The Living God has charged me to declare to you that He will punish them who will not avenge Him against His enemies.”
As a symbol, a liturgical remembrance, Jerusalem will be once again the center of Catholic attention this Lent. But as a place, a living, sacred, bled- for city, Jerusalem will remain, at our peril, abandoned to the enemies of God. The Point – May 1957
OUR LADY OF FATIMA WARNED US
By 1917, the Catholic country of Portugal stood just where the forces of Freemasonry wanted it. After an assault which lasted more than one hundred years, Portugal’s king had been shot down in the street, and Portugal’s Faith, the binding strength of its people, had been legislated back into the catacombs.
The inevitable Masonic “republic” had been declared, which in turn declared many unheard of things in Portugal. Jews, for example, were now to be considered full-dress citizens. Priests and nuns, for example, were now to be arrested for wearing their religious habits.
It was to this Portugal that the Mother of God appeared in 1917 as Our Lady of the Rosary. Forty years ago this month, she first spoke to the ten- year-old peasant girl, Lucy dos Santos, and Lucy’s two younger cousins, Jacinta and Francis. Considering the weightiness of what she had to say, the Mother of God could not have picked a more unlikely trio of confidants. They were the children of shepherd-farmers, whose concern with whatever world lay beyond their village extended only as far as a rocky stretch of upland pasture. And the younger two were about to die of influenza in a matter of months. Yet they were to share with the Queen of Heaven her most universal worries; and the surviving one of them, Lucy, was to be the voice of a divine mercy and a divine justice, more tender and more awful than our century could have imagined.
The mercy which Lucy dos Santos of Fatima was instructed to tell about consisted in this: Sinful and apostate as men had become, they could still ward off God’s wrath by returning devoutly to Our Lord in Holy Communion, saying the Rosary, doing acts of penance and sacrifice, and dedicating themselves to a little-known and challenging Catholic devotion, the Immaculate Heart of Mary. There was one further condition. Russia must also be consecrated, simultaneously by the Pope and all the bishops of the world, to the Immaculate Heart. This May thirteenth marks the fortieth anniversary of Our Lady of Fatima’s coming. And her conditions of mercy, all of them, are yet to be met. It is therefore not surprising that her consequent justice is so oppressively upon us.
That justice, says Lucy, was explained to her in Our Blessed Mother’s following words. “If my requests are heard, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. If not, she will spread her errors throughout the entire world, fomenting wars and persecutions of the Church. ”
Were Lucy, at the age of ten, puzzled at what Our Lady meant by the “errors” of Russia, there would have been few in all of Europe to whom she could have turned in 1917 for an explanation. The Russian errors were then only beginning to assert themselves on the world’s stage. 1917 was, indeed, to be the big year for them — the big year for both of them, for they were two.
And while these two were familiarly and conveniently called Russian errors, it must be remembered that they were Russian with reservation. By no means were they errors of the Russian people, propagated by them and bearing endemic Russian birthmarks. They were, rather, locationally Russian. Russia was the place where, predictably, they first held forth. For Russia, at the time, was the chief populational home of world Jewry — and these two were errors of the Jews, preached by Jews, and everywhere taken to be Jewish. Their 1917 names were Bolshevism and Zionism, though the former, as is the fashion with Jews, was pleased to be known by more than one name, and has made its subsequent reputation as Communism.
A recent book by a former London Times correspondent provides this neat summary of the pair. “These two beanstalks, though neither is Russian, sprang from a common root in Russia. Before the first war they germinated in the cellars and ghettos of Russia. They appeared above ground in 1917, when the alien Communists were helped to usurp power in Russia and the Zionist ambition was espoused by the British government.” (Somewhere South of Suez, Devin-Adair, New York, 1951) A report by another London Times correspondent, published less than two years after the Fatima apparitions, bore further witness to the ghetto origins of Communism. In the issue of March 29, 1919, the third of a series of Times’ “Bolshevist Portraits” began: “One of the most curious features of the Bolshevist movement is the high percentage of non-Russian elements amongst its leaders. Of the twenty or thirty commissaries who provide the central machinery of the Bolshevist movement, not less than seventy-five per cent are Jews … while amongst the minor Soviet officials the number is legion.”
To cite a further, and Catholic, statement of the Jewishness of Russia’s Communism, we quote briefly from that late giant of English Catholic letters, Hilaire Belloc. One of his most telling broadsides against Communism was the following which appeared in his book, The Jews (Houghton Mifflin and Company, Boston, 1923): “The Bolshevist movement was a Jewish movement … its agents, directors and masters were seen to be a close corporation of Jews with only a few non-Jewish hangers-on (each of these controlled by Jews through one influence or another).”
From the very moment that the sixth and final apparition at Fatima faded into the October sky, the twin errors of Communism and Zionism leaped forward, as it were, unleashed. Within a month, the government of the proud Russian Empire had effectively fallen before the plots of a roomful of Communist revolutionaries. And at the other end of Europe, the Holy Land itself was being promised to the Russian Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, by no less an authority than His Majesty’s Government at London. This English promise, called the Balfour Declaration, was dated November 2, 1917. The final message at Fatima was not yet three weeks old.
Forty years later, the fantastic picture is this: Communism sits as the absolute lord of the East, with an empire stretching from Berlin to the China Sea, dominating one quarter of the land area of the world, and a third of the world’s people. Zionism, on the Western hand, stands arrogantly astride the remainder of the world’s powers, with every major head-of-state a self- professed defender of Zionism, every major city a Zionist fund-raising headquarters, and every major Western nation in sustained peril of seeing the cream of its youth killed-off to perpetuate the Zionist state in Palestine.
Spectacular as these political considerations are, however, they have been eclipsed in Catholic minds by the horrors which have beset the Church since Fatima. Nothing more pointedly reflects the Jewish inspiration of Communism and Zionism than the vengeance with which they have attacked Our Lord in His Mystical Body.
The number of Catholics slaughtered, altars desecrated, priests imprisoned and nuns violated by the Communists, extends into millions. The mere words Mexico, Spain, Poland, and Hungary are labels for the blackest memories of the past forty years. Even now, the Catholics of Eastern Europe, as many as remain, live a sustained crucifixion. In Czechoslovakia, for just one example, there are thirteen archbishops and bishops in Communist jails; seminaries and schools are boarded up; convents and monasteries have been confiscated; 5,000 Czech priests, nuns, and brothers who refused to compromise their Faith now serve as slave-laborers in mines and factories.
Zionism’s attack has been even more bold. It set its sights on no less a target than Our Lord’s own Holy Land. And once it got a foothold, the most ancient of Catholic shrines were splintered into trophies for the Jewish marauders. Desecrations of the most unprintably obscene kind were devised for such hallowed places as the Cenacle, the upper room where Our Lord, on the first Holy Thursday, instituted the Blessed Sacrament.
And at no time was the enmity between Zionism and the Mother of God made more dramatically unforgettable than when the Benedictine Church of the Dormition, built on the spot where Our Blessed Lady died, was converted by the vengeful Jews into a dance hall for the soldiers of the Zionist state. Still, for all its ferocity, the clash between the Mother of God and the Jewish twins, Communism and Zionism, is but one campaign in a greater, deeper, and more abiding struggle. “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed,” God said to Satan after Adam’s fall (Gen. 3:1 5). And at the same time as He declared war between His Mother and the Devil, and between her children and his agents, God also disclosed how the war would end: “She shall crush thy head,” He told Satan, “and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.”
Eventually, Our Lady must tread upon Communism and Zionism as she must prevail over every stratagem of the Devil and his army. Indeed, this final victory was plainly promised at Fatima. “In the end,” Our Lady told the three children, “my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, which will be converted, and some time of peace will be given to the world.”
But before anyone relaxes into a state of blissful stagnation, he should note that this assurance of Russia’s turning away from the Jews and into the Catholic Church is an ultimate prospect: “In the end … ” Our Lady said.
As to what storms we can expect before this concluding calm, the Mother of God has given a severe forecast. Unless her requests are heeded, she told the Fatima children, Russia “will spread its errors throughout the entire world, fomenting wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have to suffer much, various nations will be annihilated.”
It is evident, from the religious, cultural, and moral chaos which the world has embraced, that the warnings of Fatima are being ignored. It is also evident that the world now has weapons with which it may scourge itself out of existence. The stark terror induced by these weapons is accentuated for many by the knowledge that there is in the keeping of the Bishop of Leiria, in Portugal, a sealed letter, given him by Lucy dos Santos, which is to be opened in 1960. This letter contains the final “secret” of Fatima — the one part of the apparition still to be revealed.
But whatever this last word from Our Lady of Fatima may be (who, in previously-published words foretold the coming of World War II), we have already been shown what is our one refuge.
“God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.” That was the thunderous ultimatum which the Queen of Heaven entrusted, just forty years ago, to three quiet children on a quiet hill in Portugal. Only by complying with it can we smash the Communist-Zionist machine. Diplomatic conferences cannot do it; nor guided-missile defenses; nor billion-dollar programs of foreign aid and propaganda. Only one remedy can save the world from the hell it is facing both here and hereafter: devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary: true devotion, flowering in the one true Faith.
Red Sidelight
The recent national convention of the Communist Party of America, held in New York, achieved at least one thing. It provided an eloquent answer to the following favorite objection: Granted that Communism is authored and motivated by Jews, doesn’t its wildfire dispersion through all the world warrant its now being called a Gentile movement?
As reported in the public press, the roster of delegates to the Communist conclave — the first since 1950 — reads like the guest register of a Miami Beach hotel. Public Relations chief was Simon Gerson. Chairman of the Resolutions Committee was Sidney Stein. National Educational Director was Max Weiss. Submitting majority and minority reports recommending Party policy were, respectively, William Schneiderman and Esther Cantor. Leading the faction whose ideas ultimately prevailed was the editor of the Daily Worker, John Gates (known to his childhood chums as Israel Ragenstreif).
Shortly before the convention opened, three likely delegates were prevented from attending when the F.B.I. arrested them as Soviet spies. It was the most notable such arrest since the Rosenbergs. Race of the three: same as the Rosenbergs. The Point – June 1957
THE REJECTED PEOPLE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE
Why the Jews Fear the Bible
With the coming of summer and those languid days traditionally given to resting and reading, The Point would like to make a suggestion. We recommend that this year you ignore all the frothy tomes which have been specially confected for your beach-chair entertainment, and read instead that most substantial and engrossing of all books, the Holy Bible.
The prime incentive for reading God’s word is always, of course, just that: it is God’s word — the thundering, inspired account of man’s long climb from Genesis to Apocalypse; how he fell from grace, how he was redeemed, what he must do to be saved.
But there is another reason also why now, particularly, we ought to take our Scriptures off the shelves. The notion has got around (at whose prompting, we will let you guess) that the Bible is a book which celebrates the Jews; and that since we Catholics are supposed to reverence the Bible, we ought also to honor the race to whom it is devoted.
The number of people who have been deceived by this artful dodge indicates one thing: how crass and colossal is our present-day ignorance of Holy Scripture.
No one could possibly read the seventy-two books which constitute God’s revelation and conclude that Jews deserve the esteem of Catholics. For albeit the Bible presents Jewish history, it is not the sort of history the Anti- Defamation League would approve. It is the story of how a few faithful Jews in each generation championed God against the rest of their race — a proud, stubborn, ungrateful, and unbelieving multitude. Far from promoting love for the Jews, the Bible is thus the font of Christian anti-Jewishness. No other book gives such a strong, sure taste of their perfidy. It is in the New Testament that the Jews are shown at their ultimate worst — when they are confronted with the Messias, reject Him, crucify Him, call down His Blood as a curse upon them, and then do their utmost to prevent His gospel from being spread through the world. A partial report on this New-Testament portrayal of the Jews appears below. But even under the Old Law it is evident what the Jews are coming to. Prophet after prophet castigates them for their wickedness and warns them that they are going to be rejected by God in favor of the Gentiles; and prophet after prophet is killed by the Jews in defiant retort. As early as the book of Exodus, God has said to Moses: “See that this people is stiff-necked. Let me alone, that my wrath may be kindled against them, and that I may destroy them: and I will make of thee a great nation.” (Exodus 32:9)
Plainly, it is not for their own sakes, or for any goodness inherent in the race, that the Jews are kept at the center of the Old-Testament stage. It is, rather, because through some Jews — a holy, beleaguered handful, like Moses and Joshua and David and the prophets — the true Faith is kept alive down to the time of Our Lord. And the other reason for God’s sustained interest in the Jews is that eventually from their thorny midst there will blossom His one perfect creature, the Virginal Mother of His Son.
But if the Jews make such a poor showing in the Old Testament, how do they bear to read it? The answer is, they don’t. Their religious reading time is devoted to a post-Crucifixion book of their own devising, the Talmud. The Jews have rejected the first part of Holy Scripture as surely and as violently as they have rejected the second. Nor is it merely the treatment of their ancestors that the Jews object to; it is equally the Old Testament’s prophecies of the coming Messias, so blazingly and unmistakably fulfilled in Jesus.
Yet it should not be assumed that in shunning the Faith of Moses and David the Jews have abandoned all religious doctrine. Everyone familiar with Jewish practices knows that they still do believe most fervently in a Messias. And they profess this belief constantly — when they force Gentile merchants out of business and take over a city’s shopping district; when they take control of a nation’s newspapers and other means of disseminating ideas; when they demand that laws be passed forbidding anyone to speak against the Jews; when they drive a million Arabs from their homes and appropriate the land for themselves; when they insist that Western nations not only allow this outrage, but support it with their wealth and the blood of their youth — in all these ways and in hundreds of others, the Jews testify to their belief in a Messias.
And if anyone is still wondering who the Jews think the Messias is, Dr. Joseph Klausner, internationally recognized Jewish spokesman, supplies the answer. In his book, The Messianic Idea In Israel (Macmillan, 1955), Dr. Klausner declares that a personal savior has long since been an old- fashioned notion with the Jews and that, “Thus the whole people Israel, in the form of the elect of the nations, gradually became the Messiah of the world, the redeemer of mankind.”
It is a common complaint of public Jews that the most anti-Jewish book in the New Testament is the Fourth Gospel. The Point would venture to propose, however, that the Fourth — Saint John’s — Gospel has a close rival in the book which is placed immediately after it in every edition of the New Testament. That book is the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Luke’s inspired account of what happened to Saint Peter and, at greater length, to Saint Paul from the time the Church was born at Pentecost until the year of Saint Paul’s imprisonment at Rome, A. D. 62.
In chapter one of the Acts (there are twenty-eight chapters in all), Saint Peter establishes the anti-Jewish theme with a resounding speech about the traitor Judas, who “being hanged, burst asunder in the midst: and all his bowels gushed out.” By the time you reach the fifth chapter, Saint Peter has five times pontifically berated the Jews for crucifying Jesus. And, not surprisingly, he and the rest of the Apostles have made their first of many trips to jail.
The deacon, Saint Stephen, the first martyr of the Church, is the hero of chapters six and seven. Just before the Jews take up their stones to silence him, Stephen concludes his summary of the Jewish situation by addressing his executioners as, “You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do you also. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? And they have slain them who foretold of the coming of the Just One; of whom you have been now the betrayers and the murderers!”
The Acts of the Apostles’ ninth chapter introduces us to Saint Paul, who after his miraculous conversion, tries to convert the Jews at Damascus, who in turn try to kill him. Paul escapes their rage only by the most stealthy resourcefulness, being lowered over the city walls in a basket.
Paul’s flight from the Jews serves as a likely prelude to the events of the next chapter, when Saint Peter beholds the great vision in which God signifies to him that he must work for the conversion of the Gentiles to the infant Church. And in his catechism instructions to the Roman Cornelius, immediately after, Peter repeats once more that the Jews have murdered Our Lord. Back at Jerusalem, Peter explains the Church’s mission to the Gentiles, while Saint Paul, up in Antioch, has the distinction of hearing himself and his converts called, for the first time, Christians.
This brings us to chapter twelve, which begins with the information that King Herod “killed James, the brother of John, with the sword, and seeing that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to take Peter up also.” Peter is delivered from the designs of his Jerusalem enemies, and from chapter thirteen until the end of the book, the Acts tells the story of the mission work of Saint Paul. Everywhere the pattern is the same: Paul preaches, many are converted, the local Jews are aroused, and the Apostle is forced to flee for his life.
In Pisidia, for example, “The Jews stirred up religious and honorable women, and the chief men of the city and raised persecution of Paul and Barnabas: and cast them out of their coasts.” Again, in chapter fourteen, we read about the near-stoning of Saint Paul at Iconium, and the Jews’ pursuit of him throughout Lycaonia, until finally he is mercilessly beaten, dragged out into a country place, and abandoned as dead.
Restored to his work, he is, of course, re-exposed to the Jewish plots against him. In the city of Thessalonica, “The Jews, moved with envy, and taking unto them men of the vulgar sort, and making a tumult, set the city in an uproar.” Paul survives this onslaught also, and when we arrive at chapter eighteen, he even sees a temporary victory over the Jews. The Gentiles of Achaia soundly trample upon the ruler of the synagogue who was there plotting against Paul.
From chapters twenty-one to twenty-eight, Saint Paul is a prisoner of the government, with new and bitter complaints constantly being brought against him by the Jews. The local authorities are at last most grateful to be rid of their controversial charge when Saint Paul, under appeal to Caesar himself, is dispatched to Rome. It is at Rome, shortly after Paul’s arrival, that the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles is terminated.
The final verses of the last chapter give us Saint Paul’s electric speech to the Jews of Rome. Reproving them with the words of Isaias, he says, “The heart of this people is grown gross, and with their ears they have heard heavily, and their eyes they have shut; lest perhaps they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted.” And the Apostle prophetically concludes: “Be it known to you, therefore, that this salvation of God is sent to the Gentiles, and they will hear it!”
* * * * * The examples set by Saints Peter and Paul, and preserved in the pages of Holy Scripture, have of course had the precise effect which God intended when He inspired them. They have been a source of edification, and a prod to imitation, for the Christian leaders of all the Christian centuries. Thus, the saints of every age, in aspiring to be “other Christs,” have contracted to assume not only the sunlight of Christ’s meekness but, quite as much, the thunders of His indignation.
The resultant warfare between the canonized children of the Church and the crucifiers of Jesus has left an abundant literature of its own; which is most sublime when it takes the form of Biblical commentaries, and most authoritative when written by that select group of Catholic theologians, the twenty-nine Doctors of the Universal Church. From the writings of two of these saints, we have chosen passages which will indicate the intensity (though, regrettably, not the extensiveness) of the anti-Jewish sentiments provoked by the Bible. Among the works of the fourth-century Doctor, Saint Ephrem the Deacon, there is no selection more representative in style and content than his poetical “Rhythm Against the Jews, Delivered on Palm Sunday.” Anticipating the Jewish treacheries of Holy Week, Saint Ephrem comments upon the Gospel story of Our Lord’s betrayal and crucifixion at the hands of the Jewish people, whom he calls “that asp that loveth adulterers.”
“What is thine iniquity, O daughter of Jacob,” he asks, “that thy chastisement is so severe? Thou hast dishonored the King and the King’s Son, thou shameless one and harlot … The Jews, then, not only made themselves strangers to the covenants, but dishonored the Father and killed the Son in envy. The Prophet invites the congregation of the house of Israel to praise Him, but it went about to kill Him, and hastened to do evil.”
Our second Doctor, the great Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, has often been cited by Jewish apologists as “the saint who liked the Jews.” Bernard’s qualification for this title rests upon the sole circumstance of his plea to twelfth-century Catholics that they must find some other means than annihilation for resolving the Jewish problem.
In commenting upon the book of the prophet Isaias, Saint Bernard places himself staunchly within the ranks of the Church’s anti-Jewish Scriptural commentators. He says, “O intelligence coarse, dense and, as it were, bovine, which did not recognize God, even in His own works! Perhaps the Jew will complain, as of a deep injury, that I call his intelligence bovine. But let him read what is said by the prophet Isaias, and he will find that it is even less than bovine. For he says, ‘The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib; but Israel hath not known me, and my people hath not understood.’ (Isaias 1:3) You see, O Jew, I am milder than your own prophet. I have compared you to the brute beasts; but he sets you even below these.”
Warning!
Readers who are determined on a re-look at the Bible should be wary of an English version, available at many Catholic book-stores, advertised as the Knox Bible. This appropriative title derives from the name of the translator: ex-Protestant minister, Monsignor Ronald Knox.
Had he not taken up with the Catholic Church, Ronald Knox might be presently remembered among readers of English as the author of two first- rate murder mysteries and of several uncommonly clever limericks. This kind of literary endeavor, however (even when supplemented by innumerable witty sermons), would leave any Englishman tragically ill- equipped for the prayerful, reverent, anything-but-clever vocation of translating the revealed Word of God.
And we were prepared to believe that it was chiefly this secular smartness which made Monsignor Knox’s translation of the Bible so repugnant; until we happened upon his rendering of Isaias, 7:14, that portentous prophecy of Our Blessed Lady: “Behold a Virgin shall conceive and bear a son.” Monsignor Knox’s presentation of this text not only fails to call Our Lady a Virgin, but gives the Virgin Birth all the clinical air of a maternity-ward delivery. He writes: “A Maid shall be brought to bed of a son.”
By Christian standards, such a statement is neither clever nor orthodox. What further worries us is that, by Jewish standards, it is both. The Point – July 1957
THE JUDAISING OF CHRISTIANS BY JEWS
Tactics of the Church’s Leading Enemies
The recent death of Spain’s Cardinal Segura, Archbishop of Seville, offered our Judaeo-Masonic press an opportunity of the sort which it will always pounce upon, with gusto. His late Eminence provided a timely “for instance” for that legion of editors whose favorite national aversion is Spain, and whose notion of all that is black, backward, and evil remains epitomized in the words, Spanish Catholicism — or (in quick descent from genus to species) Spanish Inquisition.
Apace with this secular attack, explanations and apologies for Spain and the Inquisition fill the question-and-answer columns of our Catholic press, and the Spanish chapters of our Catholic history texts. And, as if by some eerie pre-arrangement, neither the offense nor the defense in this chronic war dares a frank discussion of that urgent problem which made the Inquisition necessary in the first place.
Actually, it is no secret that the Spanish Inquisition was somehow concerned with Jews. Least of all, do the Jews try to hide the fact. Any Jewish discussion of the Inquisition will invariably and boldly lay the historical cards on the table. With their incomprehensible eagerness to boast about anything that any Jew has ever done, current Jewish spokesmen will give detailed reasons why the Inquisition and the Jews are inseparable. Those reasons are the key to centuries of history on either side of the Spanish Inquisition. And they are best summarized in that one eloquent word, Judaizing.
Generally defined, Judaizing is a term for any activity which aims at softening the attitude of Christendom toward Jews, or which results in the overthrow of Christian doctrines in favor of Jewish ones. The Inquisition was Spain’s answer to Judaizing. And it was the most effective answer the Jews have ever been given. The particular, though not peculiar, tactic of the Spanish Judaizers was infiltration. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of Jews entered the Church’s ranks in Spain. They were recognized as a problem almost immediately. But by the time the remedy of the Inquisition was introduced, these “New Christians” were firmly established in all the higher levels of Spanish society, including, in pronounced numbers, the clergy. Representative of the kind of clerical case brought to the attention of the Inquisitors was that of Andres Gomalz, a Jewish parish priest who, on trial at Toledo in 1486, confessed that for fourteen years as a Jewish infiltrator he had said his parish Mass having expressly no intention to consecrate, and that during the same period he had, secretly, never given absolution to the penitents who came to him for Confession.
It is small wonder that the word applied to these Jewish Christians was “Marranos,” a vivid colloquialism derived from the Spanish word for swine. In its article on the Marranos, the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia acknowledges this unsavory etymology and continues, quite defiantly, “The Inquisition, which was newly organized in 1481, was intended to suppress the remnants of the old Faith (Judaism) among the Marranos. However, the proceedings of the Inquisition showed clearly, for the first time, the strong attachment of the Marranos to Judaism, how deeply the Jewish religion and traditions were rooted in their hearts.”
Spain’s vigorous handling of the Judaizing problem kept the evil effects of Jewish influence at a minimum. The Church in other nations, under other Judaizing pressures, has been less fortunate. The Apostles themselves suffered much from the wiles of Judaizers. Saint Paul had constantly to battle them, saying finally, in his Epistle to the Galatians, that anyone who now supports the Old Law against the New is under a curse directly imposed by God. Despite this warning, however, great numbers of the early Church heretics (Theodotus, Neotus, Paul of Samosata, Sabellius, Arius, etc.) were “sprung from the Jews,” as Bishop Challoner puts it.
The Church’s seventh Ecumenical Council, held at Nicaea in 787, was forced to enact severe legislation against Jews “who have become Christians in appearance only.” And it was, significantly enough, this same Council which condemned the widespread Eastern error, so identical with Jewish teaching, that the Faithful should not venerate images of Our Lord, Our Lady, and the Saints.
In the West, the episode of the Spanish Marranos had been preceded by the heretical disruptions of the Albigensians in Southern France. Here again, Jews boast of being the fomenters of religious discord, and it took all the preaching of a Saint Dominic and all the papal power of an Innocent III to restore order.
The Jews’ greatest triumph, however, in the art of dividing Christendom by injecting new and Jewish ideas into the midst of the Church, came with the multiple revolts of the Protestant “reformers.” Each one of them is a detectable creature of the Judaizers, and Jewish commentators from Graetz down to Louis Israel Newman have been most happy to acknowledge them as such. In his Jewish Influence On Christian Reform Movements, Newman summarizes: “Protestantism made its greatest stand where the Marrano Jews were active … They helped break down the authority of the Vulgate and thereby prepared Europe for the Reformation.”
The reference to Saint Jerome’s “Vulgate” version, the Catholic version, of the Bible is no idle one. The entire Reformation era rocked with the “battle of the books” controversy, in which Jewish-trained Hebrew scholars were constantly pressing for the authority of Hebrew texts, and for the universal study of those numerous Jewish books which the Church had everywhere been censoring or burning — chief among them, the blasphemous Talmud.
To indicate the scope of Judaizing influence on the Protestant revolt, we need only mention the names of such leaders among the revolutionaries as Michael Servetus, initiator of the Unitarian movement, who took his anti- Trinitarian ideas from the Marrano teachers of his native Spain; John Hus, whose followers were called “the friends of the Jews” by Saint John Capistrano, and whose sentence of condemnation by the Church branded him as, “Thou accursed Judas, who, breaking away from the counsels of peace, hast consulted with the Jews”; John Calvin, whom the rigidly- Protestant Dr. Robert Willis lumps with the other “Judaic” reformers and charges they “interspersed the religion of Christ with such an amount of Judaism that their Christianity was in many respects a relapse into the bonds of the Law”; Martin Luther, who, though later embittered against the Jews who would not worship his religious authority, started off his movement by saying, “The Jews belong to Christ more than we. I beg, therefore, my dear Papists, if you become tired of abusing me as a heretic, that you begin to revile me as a Jew.”
Unquestionably, the Jews had taken a long gamble in promoting revolt against the Church. If Catholic Europe had been able to repel the Reformation’s assaults on its Faith, it would then, inescapably, have turned its attention to the race which had instructed, financed, and urged on the heretics.
But the Jews’ gamble paid off. Luther and the heretics prevailed. Christendom was sundered. And, as the Jews had foreseen, a politically exhausted and doctrinally-divided Europe provided them the most satisfying climate for living and working that they had known in 1500 years.
Those nations that had remained faithful did, it was true, try to stay clean of Jewish influence. In 1555, Rome ordered its Jewish population into a ghetto. In 1582, Hungary expelled all Jews from the country; as did Austria in 1670, and France in 1682. But such efforts were just so many fingers in a fast-cracking dike. The Protestant states, though petty, were numerous, and they were committed to letting the Jews plot as they pleased. Using those states as bases, the Jews pressed steadily for the downfall of all Catholic governments.
Suddenly, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the floods came. Forgetting the lesson of the Reformation, the Catholic nations had thought to preserve their security simply by keeping an eye on the troublesome race itself. Now, too late, they realized that the Jews had once again enlisted Gentile agents to effect their will: this time a league of backroom atheists calling themselves Freemasons. And this group was far more consciously (and ruthlessly) dedicated to serving the Jewish cause than the Reformation heretics had been. Operating through secret and highly-placed agents in every country, the Freemasons staged a series of well-timed revolutions, beginning with the barbaric dismemberment of France in 1789, and culminating in the overthrow of the Papal States, the Pope’s own domains, in 1870. In place of the traditional Faith-enforcing, Jew-restraining regimes, the Masons then set up a network of constitutional republics, modeled to their own enlightened specifications. These governments were guaranteed to perform the double function of (1) keeping the Church from ever having the main say in society, and (2) allowing the Jews the run of the land.
Jewish emancipation was now complete, and Judaizing entered a new era.
Today it is no longer necessary for Jews to feign membership in the Church in order to attain respectability and authority. In our Mason-made world, they hold that status as Jews. They are thus enabled to work for the destruction of the Church from outside her — a far more efficient arrangement than working from within, where fear of discovery constantly deterred their ambitions. Consequently, for every Father Oesterreicher gnawing at Catholic teaching in New Jersey, for every Father Klyber nibbling away in Nebraska, there are thousands of steadfastly unconverted Jews subverting the Church from the outside — and with staggering success. For Judaizing is proceeding at a faster pace than ever in history. Objectives that a Marrano bishop in Medieval Spain would have considered fantastic are now being tidily accomplished by assistant directors of your local Jewish Community Center.
The following items — of a sort that can be plentifully culled from any newspaper — indicate how American Judaizers have been able to make a shambles of Catholic doctrine and tradition (themselves, meanwhile, climbing ever higher on the ruins).
— In one of our major east-coast cities, the Jews of B’nai B’rith announced that they had chosen the city’s Catholic Archbishop as their “man of the year,” and had a plaque they would like to give him. The Archbishop accepted gratefully, then, plaque in hand, repaid his Jewish benefactors by lavishing praise not only on themselves but on their Jewish Talmud (thereby, presumably, repairing the injury done by men of the Catholic past, like Saint Louis of France, who ordered the Talmud burned, and Pope Gregory IX who condemned it as “containing every kind of vileness and blasphemy”).
— In the same archdiocese, an auxiliary bishop recently urged the women of his parish to enlarge their scope by paying a visit to a local synagogue.
— In the Great Lakes area, a Catholic summer school attended by teaching- nuns has been put under the direction of a Jewish representative of the Anti- Defamation League.
— In the Midwest, one of the largest American Catholic universities has invited the Israeli Ambassador to the U. S. to deliver a major address to its student body, informing them of the reasons why Jews (not Catholics) should possess the Holy Land.
— In New England, a zealous member of the American Jewish Committee has been allowed to listen in on parochial school classes, just to make sure the students aren’t being taught anything detrimental to his race.
— In a popular weekly column, syndicated to diocesan newspapers all over the country, the author, a Paulist priest, has made this declaration of dependence: “We depend upon the Jewish religion just as much as we depend upon Jesus Christ.”
The main gain the Judaizers have thus far achieved, however, and the one ultimately responsible for such aberrations as the above, has been persuading Catholics to accept the Jewish cult of “Brotherhood.” This infidel innovation holds that all men, by some undefined lineage, are brothers. Moreover, in a strange interpretation of family life, the Jews insist that every brother (e. g., a Catholic) is bound to praise, honor, and glorify whatever opinions or creeds any other brother (e. g., a Jew) might happen to hold.
To see how effectively the Church in this country has been muzzled by submitting to this gibberish, we need look no farther than the recent, notorious “Hildy Case.” Catholic spokesmen made it plain that they wanted the child, Hildy McCoy, to be taken from the Jewish Ellises and returned to the custody of her Catholic mother. (The mother had originally agreed to let the Ellises adopt Hildy, thinking they were Catholics; discovering she had been deceived, she had been trying, for six years, with the support of the Massachusetts courts, to get the child back.) The Jews of America, on the other hand, wanted Hildy to stay with the Ellises, and made their plans accordingly.
The Jews well knew that by accepting the terms of Jewish Brotherhood, Catholic ecclesiastics had effectively removed themselves from the fight. The strongest arguments they could offer for Hildy’s return were some rather stuffy, totally unavailing exhortations to the Jews to “respect the law.” These churchmen were obliged to iterate and reiterate that “there is no religious issue involved.” And so, when the governor of Florida, eyeing Miami’s heavy Jewish vote, decided the Ellises would not be extradited to face trial in Massachusetts, the jubilant Jews flaunted their victory over the Church in banner headlines.
In the face of the new and even graver “Hildy Cases” which are bound to follow, The Point will continue to remind American Catholics of the Church’s historical and unchangeable position against the Judaizing menace.
Yet more than for our own work, we ask the prayers of our readers for that one American bishop, wherever he may be, who will be the first to speak out against the Jewish threat; who in the ignominy of some future “Hildy” episode will decide that the time at last has come to turn the Judaizing tide.
It has always happened elsewhere. It will happen here. The Point – August 1957
A SURE DEFENCE AGAINST THE JEWS
What Our Catholic Bishops Can Do For US
The other day we received, in the mail, a bundle from Brazil. It contained copies of the English translation of a Pastoral Letter written by the Bishop of Campos, Dom Antonio de Castro Mayer. Its arrival could not have been more timely.
Just last month, we concluded our article on Judaizing by urging readers of The Point to pray that a bishop would soon be heard fearlessly and fully proclaiming the undiluted Catholic Faith, this being the one sure message that can stem the flood of Jewish influence presently engulfing us.
And now, for our encouragement, we have the Pastoral Letter of Bishop de Castro Mayer of Brazil.
We do not know how many Jews there are in the diocese of Campos, nor what Judaic inroads have been made into Catholic life there, but the things Bishop de Castro Mayer says in his Pastoral Letter (“On Problems of the Modern Apostolate”) are, pre-eminently, the sort of thing that needs to be said in the U. S. The Letter is priestly, it is paternal, it is precise. The errors it condemns are the very ones which the Jews and their abettors are now most busily propagating. It sets forth the Catholic position clearly and emphatically, with none of the usual obeisances to contemporary notions. Its conclusions on all matters, from liturgy and the spiritual life to politics and modesty in dress, are grounded, not in the slogans of Jewish Brotherhood, but in firm Catholic doctrine.
The following are sample extracts from Bishop de Castro Mayer’s Letter — after which we offer further items concerning Catholic bishops and their certain ability to preserve the Christian world if they but rise to the full measure of their vocation. “What matters above all is the maintenance of the integrity of Faith, without which no one can please God. (Saint Paul to the Hebrews, ii, 6). If we admit something more fundamental than Faith, we necessarily come to the conclusion that the difference of religions is secondary, a whole intercreedal behavior being therefore justifiable.
“Faith without intransigence is either already dead or lives only externally, for it has lost its spirit. Faith being the foundation of supernatural life, tolerance in matters of Faith is the starting point for all evil, especially for heresies.
“Collaboration of the faithful with non-Catholics so as to attain common objectives is only occasionally allowed by the Church … The Church looks at these associations with apprehension, and bans them. When, under some exceptional circumstances, she feels as if she were forced to tolerate such collaborations, so as to prevent greater evils, she does it fearfully and full of sorrow.
“The interpretation of pontifical acts belongs to the Holy See only. No other interpretation, however respectable and learned it may be, can impose itself as official and as the only one.
“Every Catholic who faces a doctrine already condemned has the right, and often the duty, to combat it. If he is confronted with a doctrine not yet expressly condemned, but incompatible with the precepts of the Church, he may, and often must, under his personal responsibility, point out such incompatibility, opposing himself as far as possible to the propagation of that doctrine.
“The Morality of the Church is unchangedable, and what yesterday was vanity, an occasion of scandal or sin, is still the same today and will be still the same tomorrow.
“The legislation of the Church obliges priests to refuse the Sacraments to people who present themselves (dressed) in an immodest way.
“In this atmosphere of increasing corruption, we must adhere to our principles and traditions with redoubled fervor … Purity supposes a whole environment of dignity, gravity, and modesty so that it can be fully and stably practiced.
“In the last centuries, the spirit of revolution has produced constant transformations aiming at the overthrow of legitimate powers, degrading the political, social, or economic authority, and leveling all legitimate inequalities. The Church has opposed this historical process, and will continue to do so.
“The French Revolution, as far as it tended to complete political, social, and economic equality, in the ideal society dreamed of by its creators, was a satanic movement, inspired by pride.
“The Church … has the right to see her laws and doctrines respected by temporal public powers. The State must declare itself officially Catholic; it must offer all its resources for the preservation and expansion of the Faith.
“And when in a country the disgrace of circumstances is so deep that separation constitutes a lesser evil than union, which would perforce be deformed, then we should fear for such a country. For everything we separate from God and His Church has no possibility of surviving for a long time.
“In the selection of immigrants, we must consider their creed first, and not merely conveniences of the economic, ethnic, and political orders.
“We must not appear as soldiers of any cause but our own, nor give the impression of a unilaterality which would be incompatible with the sanctity of our mission.
“In or out of the presbytery, the priest must be entirely and exclusively a priest …
“As to the necessary role of Mary in our sanctification, Blessed Pius X wrote: ‘All of us, therefore, who are united with Christ, who are, as the Apostle says, the limbs of his body, made out of His flesh and bones (Ephesians 5:30), have come forth out of the Blessed Virgin’s bosom, like a body united to its head … if, then, the Blessed Virgin is at the same time the Mother of God and of men, who can possibly doubt that she directs all her efforts to Jesus Christ, Who is the Head of the Church’s Body.’ ”
Every day, at every Mass said within his diocese, the bishop is prayed for, by name. And the Church conceives of this as no mere liturgical courtesy. These are urgent prayers. For successors of the Apostles, with tragic frequency throughout history, have been known to identify themselves not with the lineage of Our Lord’s faithful eleven, but with the line of the twelfth, the Bishop Judas who left the Supper Room seeking the convenient hour to betray his Master.
The illustrious Bishop of Constantinople, Saint John Chrysostom, whose episcopal achievements are celebrated in the ancient liturgy which bears his name, had a sober warning in this matter of bishops and their need for our prayers. He said: “I do not speak rashly, but as I feel and think. I do not think that many bishops are saved, but that those who perish are far more numerous. The reason is that the office requires a great soul. For there are many things to make a priest swerve from rectitude, and he requires great vigilance on every side.”
The Saint continues, “Do you not perceive how many qualities a bishop must have that he may be strong in his teaching, patient, and hold fast to the faithful word which is according to doctrine? What care and pains does this require! Moreover, he is answerable for the sins of others. To pass over everything else: If but one soul dies without Baptism, does it not entirely endanger his own salvation? For the loss of one soul is so great an evil that it is impossible to express it in words. For if the salvation of that soul was of such value that the Son of God became man and suffered so much, think of how great a punishment must the losing of it bring.”
To meet Saint John Chrysostom’s requirements for a bishop “strong in his teaching,” we might find a contemporary example in Jose Maria Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez. Like Bishop de Castro Mayer of Campos, Cardinal Caro is a South American. His archiepiscopal see is Santiago, Chile, and his venerable age is ninety-one years. Trained at the Gregorian in Rome, Cardinal Caro was elevated to his present dignity by Pope Pius XII in 1946. And the elevation was looked upon as most significant by those who had followed the Cardinal’s career. For Jose Maria Caro y Rodriguez had won the enmity of world-wide Freemasonry by his repeated attacks and exposures of Masonic activities — most notably in his detailed study, The Mystery of Freemasonry Unveiled.
Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez has, in recent years, authorized an English edition, revised version, of this valuable book. Though the entire treatise is worth reprinting, we propose to our readers the following sample from Chapter III of the text. This chapter bears the title, “Is Masonry the Instrument of Judaism — The Most Important Question of the Day.”
The Cardinal writes, “Since my youth, there have resounded together in my ears the names of Masonry and Judaism, of Masons and Hebrews in the attacks upon the Catholic Church. Was it simple coincidence or is it in reality an effective union, and perhaps dependence, between these two entities … There is no doubt that Masonic activity against the Catholic Church is no more than the continuation of the war against Christ practiced by Judaism for the last 1900 years … Read the Gospel and you will see, in Jewish espionage, in their captious questions, in their hypocritical attacks, clothed with the veil of pretended piety of the Pharisees; in their efforts to make Him hated before the people, Christ, Who was their greatest Glory and their wonderful Benefactor; in the use of gold to corrupt an Apostle; in the formation of public opinion against Christ; in the preference for Barabbas; in the fury and false accusations with which they tried to bury the memory of Christ in shame; in the constant opposition, many times bloody, against the preaching of the Apostles, etc.; — in all this you will see the same things that Masonry practices today, at times in very subtle form and at other times in more violent form. Judaism was anti-Christianism; and Masonry, in the service of the same Judaism, is still anti-Christianism.”
If Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez of Chile exemplifies a bishop teaching strongly, Saint Cyril of Alexandria, fifth century Patriarch of that Egyptian city, shows us a bishop strong in action. In the year 432, when Saint Cyril was raised to the patriarchate, Alexandria was the home of a Jewish community that was large, prosperous, and deeply embedded in the city’s life — having enjoyed special privileges there since the days of Alexander the Great. But almost immediately (in the words of the haughty-heretical Encyclopedia Britannica) Cyril “made himself known by the violence of his zeal against Jews, pagans, and heretics … ”
This zeal reached a peak when the Jews, outraged at Saint Cyril’s lack of deference, began to riot in the streets and massacre Christians. Thereupon, the holy Patriarch rallied a taskforce of his subjects and, proceeding systematically from synagogue to synagogue, from Jewish house to house, drove the Jews out of Alexandria.
Besides his opposition to Jewry, Saint Cyril is famous also for his bitter struggle against his fellow-bishop, Nestorius, the heretical Patriarch of Constantinople, who denied that Mary is the Mother of God. This struggle culminated in the year 431, when the Pope summoned a General Council of bishops from the whole Catholic world, to meet at Ephesus. There, Saint Cyril championed Our Lady’s Divine Maternity so surely and magnificently that his name has become inseparably linked not only with every Catholic’s belief, but with his devotion. For it was at Ephesus, in witness and in celebration of Saint Cyril’s victory over Nestorius, that there first thundered that invocation which has resounded through all the Catholic centuries: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”
When the Basilian Fathers opened their new college for men at Rochester, New York, in 1951, they focused attention on one of the most courageous bishops in the Church’s history. They named their school in honor of King Henry VIII’s arch-opponent, the martyred Bishop of Rochester, England, Saint John Fisher.
By all worldly standards, John Fisher had been a successful man. At an early age, he became chaplain to Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of King Henry VII. He was a tutor to the young Prince Henry, who succeeded as Henry VIII. He was named to attend the General Council (the Fifth Lateran Council) at Rome in 1512. After his advancement to the see of Rochester, he was appointed for life as Chancellor of Cambridge University. The Pope made him a Cardinal a month before his death.
Yet it was for none of these reasons that the Bishop of Rochester, England, survives in the memory of grateful Catholics. There have been any number of glittering ecclesiastics, court chaplains, and university chancellors among the English hierarchy. But, in his day, there was only one John Fisher. He was the only bishop in all of Catholic England who chose to die for Truth over heresy, and the Pope over the King. Thus, when Pope Pius XI added his name to the roster of the saints in 1935, it was in reward of this singular spectacle: For the supremacy of the One True Faith, Bishop John Fisher literally lost his head.
Many New England Catholics have taken courage from the recent and successful conclusion of a battle, in one of our states, to secure bus rides for parochial-school children. The Point ’s regrets in the matter are the same which we have felt so often before: Why not spend some of this zeal on fundamental issues? Why not a state-wide lobby for conversions? Why not a little pressure on the state’s legislators to have them learn the Hail Mary, say the Rosary, receive their first Holy Communion? The results might well be surprising.
And if our bishops would like a bit of episcopal precedent, we suggest that they read over a famous sermon by the first Archbishop of New York, John Hughes. It was a hundred years ago that Archbishop Hughes stood up in his cathedral and gave forth with this inevitable Catholic manifesto: “Everybody should know that we have as our mission to convert the world — including the inhabitants of the United States — the people of the cities and the people of the country, the officers of the Navy and the Marines, the commanders of the Army, the Legislators, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President, and all.”
Only when this apostolic spirit prevails will we be able to offer to Our Blessed Lady in Heaven an America which is in deed, quite as much as in dedication, the Land of the Immaculate Conception. The Point – September 1957
AN UNHOLY PEOPLE IN THE HOLY LAND
I — Action of the Jews
It is not yet ten years since Missouri Jew Eddie Jacobson saw his former clothing-store partner, Harry Truman, commit the United States of America to formal recognition of a Jewish State in Palestine. In less than a decade, we have watched the bloody beginning and aggressive growth of the Jewish nation’s first politically sovereign ghetto in nineteen centuries. And although our effort at keeping contemporary track of developments in the Holy Land is necessarily a choppy and piecemeal performance — still, the choppings do fall into a general pattern; and the pieces, like those which follow, will make a discernible picture.
The long list of Jewish desecration and destruction of Catholic Church property in the Holy Land ought well to be supplemented by the considerable enumeration of Church buildings left intact by the Jews and converted by them into Jewish facilities. Chief among such would be Terra Sancta College, the former focal point of Franciscan education in Jerusalem’s New City. The college has been appropriated for Jewish university classes and does service as the seat of the National Library of Israel.
To accompany a nine page report on similar Jewish injustices, Archbishop George Hakim, most outspoken leader of the 25,000 Catholics who still remain within the borders of the Jewish State, wrote in April of this year: “Unless something is done to improve this situation … we would be faced with the extinction of the Christian flock in the Holy Land.”
The civil strictures imposed upon those Catholics who have been allowed to continue their ancient residence in the land of Our Lord’s birth, leave them, along with the rest of the Arab population, second-class citizens, at best. A rigid curfew is imposed on non-Jews. Free movement is curtailed by interminable military “pass” requirements. Eighty-five per cent of the Arab populace is confined to specified non-Jewish residence areas — always the poorest and least desirable sections. Arab workers are paid consistently lower wages than Jews. All government and public business is conducted in Hebrew, which few Arabs know or understand. Government offices (which abound in every settlement) defer answering letters written in Arabic, and any ultimate reply is sent in Hebrew. No Catholic religious mission may be introduced into the Jewish State. Those which survived the terrorism of the “war of independence” are allowed to remain, subject to government regulation, with an iron rule that the personnel of any given convent or monastery is in no way to be increased. Most strictly limited is display of Christian symbols. So extreme is this prohibition that even the Judaeophile Red Cross organization is excluded. In its stead, the Jewish State maintains the Red Star of David (Magen David Adom), which is affiliated with Red Cross international headquarters, but operates free of that hated name and symbol, the Cross.
Last year, when Jewish professor Melford Spiro prevailed upon Harvard University to publish his summary of life in the kibbutzim (the Jewish State’s communal farms), he made available to the public some very frank insights into present Palestine. On page 185, he summarizes: “The importance of the Soviet Union in the belief system of the kibbutz cannot be exaggerated. It is a combination of the Vatican and of heaven: from it come authoritative pronouncements on important social, political, and intellectual matters: toward it are directed the aspirations of all the downtrodden of the earth. Not only is the Soviet Union the center of peace, justice, and freedom, but everything in the Soviet Union is superior — its art, literature, science, technology are all superior to their counterparts in the rest of the world.”
Loud rejoicing was heard in the kibbutzim after the 1954 Jewish elections, when it was announced that the bustling town of Nazareth, childhood home of both Our Lord and His Blessed Mother, had voted 38 per cent Communist — with six out of fifteen council seats going to local Communist Jews.
There were many kibbutz young people among the Jewish State’s national delegation of 250 who attended the Communist International Youth Festival in Moscow this summer. And as the Communist youth of Palestine passed through the Iron Curtain countries into Russia, they undoubtedly crossed paths with that body of East European Jewish delegates who were headed for the Second World Congress of Jewish Studies recently held at Jerusalem. The Jewish Telegraph Agency dispatch on the Congress gave top billing to the delegation of Jewish scholars who arrived, with Communist blessing, from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria.
Another and more fluid interchange between Russia and the Jewish State is one of oil for orange juice. Last year, the U. S.&nsbp;S.&nsbp;R. was the big customer (600,000 cases) for the Jews’ export citrus crop. In return, Premier Ben-Gurion helped keep his war machine on the road with tankerfuls of Russian petroleum.
The Jews’ military superiority over the neighboring Arab countries has been ascribed by the analysts to a long list of causes, chief among which is the Jewish State’s “preparedness program.” This is an inoffensive way of referring to a perpetual armed-to-the-teeth mode of living. At the age of 14, Jewish boys are training with man-size guns and live ammunition. And not only are Jewish men subject to a universal draft law — the women also, before they are twenty, must fulfill two years of compulsory military training. Upon release from the army, they continue to be “on call” until they reach the age of thirty-four, and each year they must return for a month-long “refresher” course.
On July 4, 1955, the Jewish State’s prime minister announced that, in less than five years’ time, his government had received in outright gifts from the government of the United States, $396,150,000 — a sum of more than $1,000 per Jewish family in the Holy Land. And these figures are modest beside the tally of funds poured into Jewish national projects by the Jews of America through their United Jewish Appeal. From 1939 through the present year, the total approaches one and one-half billion dollars!
Perhaps the cleverest scheme devised for steering American money into Palestine was the German reparations agreement. It was decided that a split- up and exhausted Germany ought to pay to the Jewish government a series of reimbursements to compensate for German ill-treatment of Jews. To make the deal look thoroughly above-board, Germany was also assessed to make reparations to our own government. When the impoverished Germans pleaded inability to pay, the U. S. claims were waived, and American money and manufactures were advanced to ensure a satisfactory settlement of all that the Jews said they deserved. Net result for the Jewish treasury: $715,000,000.
According to the Zionists’ own evaluation, “one of the most important” Jewish agencies in Palestine is the Institute for Instructors Abroad. Located in suburban Jerusalem, this processing center gathers in young Jewish leaders from thirty-seven countries, trains them as “apostles” of Jewish nationalism, and then returns them to preach the Zionist word to all the Jewish State’s citizens-in-exile. Particular emphasis is placed on indoctrinating Jewish young people, and trainees of the Instructors Institute are required, upon return home, to spend two years at full-time Zionist youth work.
In a plea for the furtherance of such activity, Premier Ben-Gurion formulated his provocative Credo of a Jew — delivered this summer upon the 53rd anniversary of the death of Theodore Herzl. Ben-Gurion said, in part, “Every Jew, wherever he may be, belongs to the Jewish people. There is a national unity of the Jews of the world … The State (of Israel) must endeavor,” he continues, “to train Jewish youth in Israel and the Diaspora for bold pioneering enterprise that will implement in practice all the values of the vision of Messianic redemption.”
II — Reaction
The nearly ten years that have passed since Eddie Jacobson’s clothing-store partner agreed to put the Jews on the map have bristled with items like the above. But such news is seldom printed, never emphasized in our Jewishly- intimidated daily newspapers. And Americans believe what they read in the newspapers. Consequently, the Jewish State stands in the popular imagination as an honest, hard-working, democratic nation; a bright little slice of U. S. A. transplanted to the dark shores of the Middle East.
So far, the main challenge to this national delusion has been the occasional unrosied reports on Jewry contained in the Catholic press. Beginning with the first stirrings of Zionist ambition, and paralleling its growth, these reports have seen three phases.
To Catholic observers living in the early part of this century, political Zionism seemed hardly worth noticing. Hadn’t Theodore Herzl, the author of the thing, visited Pope Pius X in 1904, and hadn’t the Pope emphatically vetoed any plan for a Jewish state in Palestine? The Jews — so it seemed — would not dare move into the Holy Land if the Church didn’t want them there.
Then, too, there were other persistent reasons why a Jewish state looked unlikely. As late as 1921 — even after the Zionists had wheedled the Balfour Declaration from the British government — Father Bede Jarrett, O. P., founder of Blackfriars magazine, wrote: “The Jew has always specialized in money. Industrial labor has no interest for him, and agricultural labor even less. Therefore he will never go back to Palestine, where the wealth is almost entirely in agriculture. Indeed, why should he worry over Palestine, when he has the whole world at his feet? Yes, the world is at his feet, for he controls the complete social scale, ruling at one end of it and revolting at the other.”
The big factor that Father Bede Jarrett overlooked, of course, was that agriculture would be made agreeable for Jews in Palestine by the generous subsidies of non-Palestinian Jews who “specialized in money.” So ample were these compensations, in fact, that in the mid-twenties there was hardly one Jewish “pioneer” in all the Holy Land who had not hired Arab laborers to work his farm.
But however they were managing it, the vital concern was that the Jews, contrary to Catholic expectations, were moving into the Holy Land. “It seems an intolerable lapse from pietas,” wrote the English Jesuit magazine, The Month (October, 1926), “that the Jews, of all people, should be encouraged to overrun the country which to Christians is holy beyond words.”
The most colorful Catholic reaction to Zionism’s progress was G. K. Chesterton’s announcement that he had become a Zionist. It was hardly the kind of support the Jews had been hoping for. Chesterton arguing for a Jewish State was like a mountain-dweller urging that all Jews be given vacations at the beach. His concern was simply to get the Jews out of the country where he lived, and where he was convinced they did not belong. “Jews are Jews,” he wrote, “and as a logical consequence … they are not Russians or Romanians or Italians or Frenchmen or Englishmen … If the advantage of the (Zionist) ideal to the Jews is to gain the promised land, the advantage to the Gentiles is to get rid of the Jewish problem.”
Today, with the Jewish State a rude reality, literary somersaults of the kind Chesterton performed are no longer appropriate. Typical of current comment is a recent editorial in Our Sunday Visitor (which has more readers than any other single Catholic paper). “Israel,” says the editorial flatly, “is a state that should not exist.” Pursuing this thought, the Passionist Fathers’ Sign magazine, largest of the Catholic monthlies, writes: “The Jewish people had no ‘natural and historic right’ in Palestine. They had lost their sovereignty in the year 70 B.C. … If the Jewish people of today have a right to Palestine, then the Indians have an infinitely greater right to Manhattan. Furthermore, the U. N. decision leaves us quite cold. The U. N. has no right to transfer the ownership of a country from its inhabitants to an alien people. If the U. N. can do such a thing for Palestine, why can’t it do it for New York or Texas?”
This sort of talk distresses the Jews. So much so, that lately they have tried to put a stop to it by complaining publicly. It is unnerving for them to see spokesmen of their traditional shackler, the Catholic Church, once again making menacing gestures. The one thing that tempers their fears is the timidity of this current Catholic assault. For it is directed exclusively against political Zionism; and every charge lands well within the borders of Palestine.
The main accusation is that the Zionists have built their government on fraud and injustice and are perpetuating it by terror. Which is of course true. But it is not the whole truth. The evils which the Catholic editors see in the Zionists are not peculiar to Jews in Palestine. They were not suddenly and mysteriously assumed by them when they stepped ashore at Tel Aviv. Those traits are the common property of all Jews — Jews in Jerusalem, in London, in Moscow, in Antwerp, in Johannesburg, in New York. Realizing this, we have a suggestion for Our Sunday Visitor, the Sign, and any other Catholic papers that want to join in the chase. It is guaranteed to make their articles sky-rocket in effectiveness. Instead of attacking Zionists who are in the Holy Land only, why not open fire on the equally fervent and much more potent Zionists who are in the Dispersion — who whole- heartedly endorse every act of injustice, terror, and desecration that the Jewish State commits; who support it with their money, protect it with their propaganda, get favors for it with their pressuring of politicians; who were the midwives at its birth and have been its doting nursemaids ever since. In short, why not for a few months try attacking the Jews of America? We can promise some spectacular results. The Point – October 1957
THE JEWISH LIE ABOUT BROTHERHOOD
I — What the Jews Propose
When Francois Marie Arouet, writing in the mid-1700s, called for the establishment of a social order based on Universal Brotherhood, he was less concerned with building a new thing than destroying an old one. For Francois Marie Arouet — called by the pen-name, Voltaire — was possessed by a consuming hatred. “Écrasons l’infâme!” — “Let us crush the infamous thing!” — was the motto blazoned on all his writings. And the “infamous thing” that Voltaire meant to crush was the Catholic Church.
It is only in the light of this ruling passion that Voltaire’s espousing of “Brotherhood” becomes clear. It was not his intention merely to affirm the uncontested natural truth that all men, being descendants of Adam, belong to one human family. He was determined to transform this matter-of-fact assertion into a supernatural principle, to make it the cornerstone of a new and Godless religion. Thus, he hurled his dogma as a challenge against the Church, opposing it to the central Catholic teaching that there is a vital, transcendent brotherhood of all the faithful through the Mystical Body of Christ.
Yet, Voltaire and his fellow-Freemasons, though evangelists of the Brotherhood cult, were not to be its chief apostles. That role would be taken by a people to appear unleashed upon the Christian scene as one dread consequence of the Mason-mastered French Revolution of 1789. Within 150 years from the time they were set free of the Church’s restrictions, this people — the Jews — were to become the virtual lords of all avenues of public communication. Through these routes, they would spread the gospel of Brotherhood to every creature, and bring Masonic aspirations to a most abundant fulfillment. Today, there is hardly a man in all the U. S. who does not count belief in Brotherhood as an article of faith. Not to do so, he is persuaded, would be both impious and unpatriotic. Even President Eisenhower unhesitatingly agrees to act as Honorary Chairman of the Brotherhood Week festivities, and issues an official proclamation as evidence of his orthodoxy (“The spirit which lies behind our observance of Brotherhood Week is as old as our civilization … it is imperative that we heroically, by word and deed, give voice to our faith …”).
So nearly have the Jews established Brotherhood as the State Religion of the U. S., that it is almost unheard of that a public ceremony should be held without some recognition being paid to it. This custom is the more readily complied with since no intellectual burden whatsoever is put upon the speaker. Belief in Brotherhood can be easily and best expressed by means of pre-fabricated phrases (“our common beliefs,” “working together,” “regardless of race, color, or creed,” etc.) which may be attached to any part of any speech with uniformly pleasing effect.
The Brotherhood cult’s lack of defined theology must not, however, be taken for a weakness. In affairs of destruction, it is not the means employed, but the final result, that counts; and so far, the results produced by these seemingly inane cliches are exactly what the Masons and Jews have hoped to achieve. The Catholic Church in the U. S. is being turned into a subsidiary of the super-religion, Brotherhood. The public utterances of Catholics are becoming indistinguishable from those of non-Catholic Americans; instead of the dogmas of their Faith, they proclaim the platitudes of the Judaeo-Masonic cult. They are becoming mortally infected with the heresy of Indifferentism: the belief that one religion is as good as another; that it doesn’t matter what doctrines you hold so long as you lead a “good life.” This heresy has been warned against by Pope after Pope, beginning with the much-persecuted Pius VII (1800-1823), who, as the first to come after the French Revolution, was the first to see fully what Voltaire and his colleagues had wrought. “By the fact that freedom of all forms of worship is proclaimed,” Pius VII wrote, “truth is confused with error, and the Holy and Immaculate Spouse of Christ, outside of which there is no salvation, is placed on the same level as heretical sects and even as Jewish perfidy.” It was precisely on the charge of fostering Indifferentism that the Vatican, in 1955, ordered all English Catholics to get out of the Council of Christians and Jews, headquarters of the Brotherhood movement in England. The organization, said the Holy See, was “preaching a doctrine unacceptable to Catholics: that all religions are equal.”
Since then, the English Council’s American cousin, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, has been talking fast in an effort to save its own skin. It has not, however, been able to explain away the simple, stark coincidence that whenever Brotherhood is accepted, Indifferentism grows. Nor can any amount of pointing the other way distract the Church from noticing the statements the National Conference makes when it is not trying to placate her. Despite its protestations, for example, that Brotherhood is not a religion, the Conference By-laws call for “the establishment of a social order in which the religious ideals of brotherhood … shall become the standards of human relationships.” And in its national bill-board advertising, the Conference offers as the slogan of its “non- religious” program: “Brotherhood — Believe it! Live it! Support it!” As for assurances that the movement does not intend “modifying the distinctive beliefs of any of its members” — in 1949 there was held, in Switzerland, a World Brotherhood congress, sponsored by the International Conference of Christians and Jews (which includes the American group). The American Jewish Yearbook (Vol. 50) reports the outcome as follows: “The conference unanimously agreed on the necessity for a permanent organization and on a proposal to revise Christian religious teaching, particularly the story of the Crucifixion, in such a manner as to reduce the danger of implanting anti- semitism in the minds of the young.”
It was in consciousness of such revelations of Brotherhood’s real intent that the late Father Edward Brophy, of Long Island City, N. Y., published his booklet, “The Brotherhood Religion.” Wrote Father Brophy, “As conceived by its authors and applied by its leaders, Brotherhood is condemned by Catholic Theology, by Canon Law and by Popes Pius VII, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius XI, and Pius XII … Hence, none but ignorant and disloyal Catholics yield to the proposals of Brotherhood, notwithstanding the seductive forms in which they may be presented. Catholics are bound in conscience to abstain from Brotherhood activities. They are not permitted to remain silent. They are obliged to protest against Brotherhood’s vain pretensions to brush aside Christianism. They are required to oppose its harmful incursions upon Christianity and Christian civilization. They must repress its blasphemies against Christ and His Religion.”
Paradoxically, while the official Church stands in battle against the Brotherhood of Judaeo-Masonry, brotherhood, of quite another sort, remains a central Christian value.
II — The Catholic Answer
The brotherhood of the Catholic Church is a well-defined family arrangement. And it gains its new members by the usual family route: they are born into it — through the regenerative power of Baptism. Once baptized, they become, as the Baltimore Catechism puts it, sons of God and heirs to the kingdom of Heaven. And the intensity of this common sonship rises to fulfillment when Baptism is followed by the Divine incorporation of the Eucharist. It is then that Catholics, in addition to being sons of God the Father, become children of Mary — joined in Holy Communion to the Flesh and Blood of Jesus, the fruit of Mary’s womb.
This is the source and sustenance of the supernatural brotherhood which for nineteen hundred years has faced the enmity of the Jews. For Catholic brotherhood presupposes that truth which the great Martyr-Bishop of Carthage, Saint Cyprian, set forth in his treatise on the Our Father: “We who are Christians say, ‘Our Father,’ in reproach of the Jews because He is no longer their Father — since they have abandoned Him — and has become ours. A sinful people cannot enjoy sonship. Only those who have received remission of sins are given the name of son and promised eternity by the Lord.”
And this divinely established relationship is the same brotherhood which Saint Cyprian, and hosts of others after him, referred to with such astringency when they said: “He cannot have God for his Father who has not the Church for his Mother.” Were this a complete picture of the Catholic Church’s brotherhood; were the Church no more than a privileged fraternity turning up its nose at all outside it, then the Jews, and their legion of partisans, might appear to have a righteous case. But precisely because it is the one true brotherhood among men, the Catholic Church spends itself in a continual attitude of open arms. The story of the Church is a twenty-century history of pleading and persuading, by argument and example, to the mighty and to the lowly, that men should be born into the sonship of God and thus should become brothers in Christ.
Armies of Catholic apostles have spread this message to every race and region. They have left us Catholic brothers among the Eskimos of Alaska, the tribesmen of Australia, the Indians of Central America. They have left us, in a far richer legacy than our own country has yet given, twenty-six canonized saints from the islands of Japan.
One of the most celebrated of our Catholic apostles was that tireless priest from Catalonia, Father Peter Claver, S. J. For his work among the Negro slaves, the Church granted him the title of Saint, and keeps his memory alive with an annual feast-day commemoration on the ninth of September. It was Saint Peter Claver’s contention that the basic “problem” with the colored races is the same as the problem with other peoples. Born in original sin, they are headed for an assured Hell, unless someone reaches them with the salutary news of Our Lord and His Church.
That Saint Peter Claver’s spiritual successors, the Catholic leaders of America’s South, have long since fallen from his ideal of true brotherhood for the Negroes stands out more clearly this fall than ever. With headlong zeal, spokesmen for the Catholic South have endorsed the meddling integration program of the Brotherhood-Week Jews. They have left the clear impression that the Negro’s deficiency is not that he is deprived of the Faith and the sacraments, but that he has no non-Negro sitting beside him when he goes to a Godless public school.
Perhaps the surest sign of the Catholic Church’s earnestness in gaining new sons of God and new children of Mary, is the door which for twenty centuries she has left ajar to the Jews. In the midst of her strictest legislations — demanding that Jews live in ghettos, wear identifying badges, remain excluded from the privileges of Christian citizenship — the Church has never abandoned her absolute principle that it is possible for an individual Jew to scrap his hateful heritage, sincerely break with the synagogue, and cleanse his cursed blood with the Precious Blood of Jesus.
In retrospect, the number of Jews who have availed themselves of this generosity of the Church has been small, indeed. And of this small number, the unashamed majority have been converts seeking some personal advantage; or worse, seeking the positive disadvantage and ultimate destruction of the Church. It was such wholesale perfidy of Jewish Catholics that introduced into the familiar reference of Christian nations the saying, “Blood is thicker than water” — which originally meant, “Jewish blood is much stronger in a Jew than the waters of Baptism.” This saying has countless historical applications. Perhaps the most significant is the one which we touched on a few issues ago, when we spoke about the plague of Marrano (secret-Jew) Catholics in Spain, and the extreme means (the Inquisition) which was necessary to keep their influence from spreading. Encouragingly, the very brotherhood — Christian brotherhood — which the Spanish Jews sought to corrupt provided the strong and unified action which, in 1492, expelled them from the country.
This same Spanish integrity of Faith explains the single European victory over Communism which Spain won in the 1930s. And this Spanish devotion to the true Catholic brotherhood accounts for the nobility of that profession of Faith made by the head of Spain’s government before the Eucharistic Congress at Barcelona in 1952. General Franco’s address to the assembled clergy and faithful belongs to that tradition of brotherhood which once won Europe from the barbarians, won the Holy Land from the infidels, and has kept the Faith alive down to our own beleaguered time.
He said: “With the humility fitting in a good Christian, I proclaim the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Faith of the Spanish nation and its love for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and for Pope Pius XII. By loving God, Spaniards love peace, and they unite their prayers for peace to those of the Holy Father and of Catholics everywhere at this time. The history of our nation is inseparably linked with the history of the Catholic Church. Its glories are our glories; its enemies are our enemies.”
Israeli Brotherhood
The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, high above the Mediterranean in northern Palestine, is the spiritual home and principal shrine of the Carmelite Order. One night, in the midsummer of this year, bands of Jewish soldiers broke into the Sanctuary grounds, hacked their way through the gardens and vineyards, then dashed merrily off again. When the Carmelite Fathers protested this latest Jewish destruction of Catholic property, they were assured by Jerusalem officials that the incident was an oversight and would not be repeated. A few nights later, Jewish units again invaded and further damaged the shrine. Concluding that “a lack of respect bordering on contempt” was motivating the Jews, the Carmelites posted a conspicuous notice at the entrance to the shrine, informing the faithful of what had happened, and announcing that, for fear of further Jewish outrages, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Mount Carmel would be temporarily closed.
The Point – November 1957
SIX POINTERS ON THE JEWS
I — Lateran Council
Only twenty times in the history of the Catholic Church has a Pope convened a General or Ecumenical Council. As one would expect, therefore, the matter under discussion at such meetings is hardly trivial. With the Pope’s approval, and under his guidance and sanction, the prelates of an Ecumenical Council, assembled by the Holy Father from the whole Catholic world, may define dogmas which are infallible in point of Catholic teaching. They may also issue edicts, counsels, and decrees which are universally binding on all the faithful.
Although the problem of the infidel Jew is not foreign to the discussions of any of the Church’s twenty Councils, there is one Council in particular, the Fourth Lateran, held in the year 1215, which treats of the Jews at detailed length. Explicitly, and for all time, the Council drafted what might be called a Christian “bill of non-rights” for the Jews. As the Fourth Lateran Council’s legislations are codified and come down to us, these Jew- restraining laws comprise chapters 67, 68, 69, and 70 of the acts of the Council.
Chapter 67 hits at the heart of Jewish power in any Christian society — the bulging Jewish pocketbook. It is entitled, “Concerning the Usuries of the Jews,” and the text provides the mechanics for a total Christian boycott of any Jewish merchant or commercial agent who exacts unreasonable fees from Christians. A happy adjunct to this chapter is the provision that if any Jew should come into possession of real property once owned by a Christian, he will be required to pay taxes on this property to the local parish priest.
In the next chapter, the prelates of the Council provide a most commendable remedy for the dangers of social intercourse with the Jews. The pertinent section reads, “Lest, therefore, excesses of this often-condemned intermingling should have any further excuse for spreading, under cover of such an error, we decree that Jews of either sex, in every Christian province, and at all times, be distinguished in public from other people by a difference of dress, as we also read they were commanded to do by Moses (Lev. 19). Moreover, in the days of lamentation and of Our Lord’s Passion, let them not at all come out in public, because some of them on such days (as we are told) are not ashamed to walk around in splendid attire, and are not afraid to mock at the Christians who, commemorating the Passion, show forth signs of lamentation.”
The Fourth Lateran Council’s 69th chapter is a masterpiece of governmental discretion: “It is most absurd that a blasphemer of Christ should exercise power over Christians, and inasmuch as the Council of Toledo prudently decreed concerning this matter, we, on account of the audacity of those who have disobeyed, renew its decree in this chapter, forbidding that the Jews be given public offices, because under such a pretext they molest the Christians. But if anyone should commit to them such an office, let him, after a warning, be punished befittingly by a provincial council (which we decree should be held every year). As for the Jew who received the office, he should be denied all communion with Christians, both in commerce and other matters, until whatever he had acquired from the Christians, on the occasion of receiving the office, be converted, accordingly as the bishop of the diocese should provide, into the use of the poor among the Christians. Also, he should renounce with shame the office which he irreverently assumed … ”
Finally, that most delicate of all the Church’s Jewish problems is generally dealt with by chapter 70. It is the perpetual puzzle of the Jewish convert to Christianity. How much can we trust him? What standard can be imposed to determine his sincerity? How can we keep him from lapsing into the perfidy of Judaism?
Quoting the principle that “it is less evil not to know the way of the Lord than, having known it, to turn back,” the Council recommends, without further elaboration, that those in authority over Jewish converts may help them to become truly Catholic by “the imposition of salutary constraint.”
II — Kosher Christians A “salutary constraint” we would immediately suggest imposing on the current contingent of Jews-in-the-Church is to deny them publishing privileges.
Somewhere, even in the United States, there may be a Jewish convert who has not written a book or been interviewed for a magazine; but we have not encountered him. Most of the clan cannot wait for the waters of baptism to dry upon their heads before they scurry to their typewriters. And what is the message they are so frantic to communicate? A public renunciation of Judaism with all its works and pomps? A promise to break swiftly and cleanly with their perfidious past? Never. Their anxiety is prompted by a single consideration: they want it understood that, in becoming Catholics, they are in no sense abandoning Jewry; that they who have just accepted the Messias feel still inseparably bound to those who reject Him. Nightclub- entertainer Lillian Roth, whose conversion to the Church was so nationally exploited, puts it neatly: “I will always be a Jew, no matter what faith I follow.”
It is precisely this attitude that has made the Church always uneasy about Jewish converts: this insistence on thinking — and acting — not as members of the Mystical Body of Christ, but as members of the anti- Christian, unregenerate Jewish race. Indeed, these converts commonly justify their becoming Catholics on the score that it helps them to realize more fully their Jewishness. And the more deeply they penetrate into the Church’s life, the more Jewish they apparently become. A startling (but representative) indication of the Jewish convert’s scale of values is the statement of Father Ambrose Schaeffer, O.S.B., reported in a Catholic magazine: “I feel that I’m a better Jew now that I’m a priest.”
III — Hebrew Hatred
Jewish contempt for the Holy Name of Jesus is not restricted to the blasphemous pages of the Talmud or the closed-door sessions of Jewish Community Councils — as any Christian who has come in contact with current Jewish periodicals will agree. These two samples from leading Jewish newspapers are black-and-white “for instances.” A letter to the editor, appearing in the National Jewish Post and signed, “Mr. & Mrs. Joe Smith, Las Vegas,” reads: “Wanna hear something cute? We drove our son Jacob to camp July 1 and along the way big boulders once in a while would read ‘Jesus Saves.’ As we rode along, a big boulder suddenly flashed before us in large white letters: ‘Finklestein Saves.’ We got a big kick out of it.”
And from the Brooklyn Jewish Examiner, by columnist Albert Friedman: “Recently we attended, in the line of duty, a conference on civil rights to which delegates from many groups were invited … and we were pleased at the large turnout of Jewish delegates: the church hall was filled. Then came the minister’s invocation. As we bowed our head in honor of interfaith accord, the pastor gave forth with a long tribute to Jesus. There was a weary sigh from the Jewish members of the audience. We wondered, then, as we’ve wondered so often: why do they do such things? The minister, a man of great sincerity and dignity, unquestionably meant well. But was he in utter ignorance of Jewish beliefs and customs? Was he unconscious of Jewish sensibilities? It was a relief to hear the closing benediction by a Rabbi. His words were brief and moving and he referred to the ‘god of all mankind’ and prayed for the realization of ‘universal brotherhood in our time.’ ”
IV — Red Revenge
The mid-1930s have been characterized as the period when “American liberals sponsored luncheons against Franco.” The observation is amusing, but misleading. Such fatuous endeavors may have typified Gentile efforts to oppose Catholic Spain; but the Jews had a surer approach.
From the moment the Spanish Civil War began in July, 1936, it was evident that world Jewry was determined that the Communist forces should triumph. Every resource of Jewish wealth and propaganda was mobilized for a total assault. From every nation Jews flocked to Spain to organize and direct operations. Cardinal Baudrillart, Rector of the Catholic Institute of Paris, declared at the war’s end: “Personal sources allow me to affirm that at the beginning of the Spanish revolution, sixty Russian Jews crossed the Pyrenees to play the role of executive agents, to burn churches and convents, to pillage them, to profane sacred things, and to instruct the Spaniards, who would not have dared by themselves to put their hands on the objects of their age-old veneration.”
Commanding the notorious Abraham Lincoln Brigade (American volunteers fighting for the Reds) were the Jews Milton Wolff and John Gates (born Israel Ragenstrief) — the latter of whom is now editor of the Daily Worker. These two controlled more than 600 other Jews from the United States. Another detachment, from Eastern Europe, formed the Yiddish-speaking Botvin Brigade, named for a young Jewish Communist who had been executed in Poland. In his book, The Fighting Jew, author Ralph Nunberg concludes the account of his co-racists in Spain: “And there were many other Jews besides, who came from all over the world to fight on one side, for one idea, for one victory.”
Though ultimately the Jews did not get their victory, the tens of thousands of ruined churches, desecrated altars, demolished shrines, and violated convents left Spain with grim evidence of Jewish intent. There was also another reminder of the sort of activity Jews will advocate and applaud — in the form of a statistic released by the Spanish hierarchy: in the first seven months of fighting, Red troops murdered eleven Catholic bishops and 16,750 Catholic priests.
V — Singing Synagogues
If any of our readers happened to stray by a synagogue one night last and heard a strange, woeful melody pouring forth, he was probably listening to the Kol Nidre. For one month the Jews celebrated their most solemn religious festival, Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement); and the liturgical high- point of the Yom Kippur observance is the singing of the Kol Nidre.
What our wandering reader may not have realized is that the annual exercise of intoning this hymn performs for the Jews a most remarkable function. As that mournful wail reverberates through the synagogues of the world, the Jews are readying themselves for another strenuous year among the Gentiles. They are, then and there, dissolving all promises, oaths, and obligations that they may incur during the next twelve months. The following authorized translation of the Kol Nidre (“All Vows”) appears in a book of Jewish prayers published by the Hebrew Publishing Company of New York: “All vows, obligations, oaths or anathemas, pledges of all names, which we have vowed, sworn, devoted, or bound ourselves to, from this Day of Atonement until the next Day of Atonement (whose arrival we hope for in happiness), we repent, aforehand, of them all. They shall all be deemed absolved, forgiven, annulled, void and made of no effect; they shall not be binding, nor have any power; the vows shall not be reckoned vows, the obligations shall not be obligatory, nor the oaths considered as oaths.”
Though in spirit it is as old as the Talmud, Jewish historians trace this astonishing declaration in its present form to medieval Spain — where, before the Inquisition intervened, some four million Jews advanced themselves in Church and state by posing as Christians. Through the simple device of annually chanting the Kol Nidre formula, these secret-Jews (“Marranos”) conditioned their Jewish consciences for swearing belief in Christ while despising Him, loyalty to the Church while plotting its destruction. “Kol Nidre was no dry document to them,” says the Jewish Advocate of Boston. “Every phrase was freighted with significance, every word carried salvation.”
Eventually, in 1492, Queen Isabella got on to the “significance” with which the phrases of the Kol Nidre were freighted, and had the Jews expelled from Spain. But this action by no means put an end to the Jews’ annual singings. The Kol Nidre had proven its utility; it quickly passed into the ritual of world Jewry, as the central feature of the Yom Kippur ceremonies.
Last month, virtually every adult Jew in the United States went to his synagogue to renew his Kol Nidre disavowals. Non-Jewish Americans will be noting the effects of this visit during the coming year.
VI — Militant Monks
It was one hundred and twenty years ago this fall that Dom Prosper Gueranger commenced in earnest the revival of Benedictine monastic life in France. And, side-by-side with this revival, there went, necessarily, a restoration of the Church’s liturgy — the sublime “daily work” of the monks. Dom Gueranger’s abbey at Solesmes became the exemplar of orthodox observance in everything pertaining to the sacred liturgy. Out of gratitude, Pope St. Pius X entrusted to the monks of Solesmes his entire program for publishing the official Vatican edition of the Church’s liturgical music, the Gregorian Chant.
If the spirit of Solesmes, with its conscious sense of continuing in all fullness the life of our Catholic past, could be captured by any one author, Dom Gueranger himself has done it in his The Liturgical Year. Through forty editions and a century of use, Dom Gueranger’s work has been a treasure chest of Catholic observance and tradition.
It was with understandable confidence, therefore, that we thought to consult Dom Gueranger, preserver of things Catholic, for a few summary observations on the Jews. A re-look at The Liturgical Year rewarded us with: “For eighteen centuries Israel has been without prince or leader … After all these long ages of suffering and humiliation, the justice of the Father is not appeased … The very sight of the chastisement inflicted on the murderers proclaims to the world that they were the deicides. Their crime was an unparalleled one; its punishment is to be so, too; it is to last to the end of time — The mark of Parricide here fastens on this ungrateful and sacrilegious people; Cain-like, they shall wander, fugitives on the earth. Eighteen hundred years have passed since then: slavery, misery and contempt have been their portion: but the mark is still upon them.” The Point – December 1957
THE PRICE OF CHRISTMAS IN MEXICO
“My desire is to show myself a mother to you and to your people.”
It was in these words that the Mother of God spoke to a Mexican Indian named Juan Diego in the early winter of the year 1531. As a token of her maternal concern for Mexico, the Blessed Virgin gave to Juan Diego a miraculous picture of herself, and which Mexican Catholics still cherish under the title of Holy Mary Ever-Virgin of Guadalupe.
During the first three hundred years after the Guadalupe apparition, the Catholics of Mexico, under the eye of their Mother in Heaven, lived, as it were, the quiet life of Nazareth. They were intimate with the things of God, and blessed with a share of earthly things. Mexico had become for them the happy proving ground of a boundless life to come, beyond the limitations of their mountains and their coasts. It was an indifferent matter that the foreign people who first brought them the news of their Mother in Heaven had remained as their governors. Mexico, for the Mexicans, was birthplace and contentment.
Until, suddenly, as the nineteenth century began, a cry went echoing, “Mexico for the Mexicans!” Whereupon, birthplace gave way to battleground, contentment to contention, and the Holy Mother of Guadalupe prepared her children for an extended Passiontide, whose “long Good Friday” is still within awful memory, and whose delayed Easter Sunday we must yet pray for.
The Revolution which kicked Catholic Spain out of Mexico, and intended that the Church should go tumbling after, has been classified with those European movements of “liberation” which were sparked by the French Revolutionists of the late 1700s. The relationship is close. Mexico’s Revolt was a colonial cousin, somewhat less lettered, but schooled in the same theories and — most important — tutored by the same masters: those apt and apronned enemies of the Church, the Freemasons.
Woven through the history of Mexico’s Freemasonic era (from 1800 to the present) is a variable pattern of American Masonic intervention. Now by means of big business, now through private individuals, now through the American Government itself, the lodges of the United States have kept a firm hand on Mexican developments. Of U. S. Government interference in Mexico, for example, the Jesuit weekly, America, made this briefest of summaries in its issue of June 25, 1927.
“Always, an American hates to say it, there was the sinister shadow of the Power of the north, meddling always, officially and unofficially … Joel Poinsett, American Minister, introduced the York Rite of Masonry, and kept the Mexicans fighting over it for a dozen years. Later, President Polk made an agreement with Santa Ana to fight a fake war — which we call the ‘Mexican War’ — with our forces, in return for some millions of dollars. After our Civil War, General Sheridan allowed Juarez to ‘steal’ American army stores, and conquer his enemies with them. In our time, Bryan and Wilson, by as dark a piece of double-dealing and treachery as history can show, put Carranza into power — and we are reaping the fruits of their policy today.”
The foregoing, an American hates to say it, is a lenient summary. The names and incidents could be expanded to a thick volume. The impression would remain unchanged: never did the forces of American Freemasonry act so purposefully as when they espoused the anti-Catholic cause in Mexico.
Because the project was already one hundred years old by 1917, and the Faith was still flourishing in Mexico, the Masonic crusade in that year took on a fresh impetus. With no less an adviser than Lenin himself, the Carranza crowd (the creatures of Woodrow Wilson) drafted a new constitution. Detailed oppression of the Catholic Church became the supreme law of the land. The 1917 constitution forbade the Church to own any property, to conduct schools, to preach to the unbaptized natives, to train additional priests. It confirmed the prohibition against religious garb for priests and nuns, and further provided that the government of each Mexican state should decide how many priests it thought it needed; these would be “licensed,” and all others expelled.
After the shooting of Carranza in 1920, the American lodges took up the cause of General Obregon, gave him a $10,000,000 arms credit, and sat back contentedly while he tried to blow up the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1921, and dared to expel, bodily, the Apostolic Delegate in 1923.
Obregon was followed by General Calles, and Calles it was who decided upon a universal and rigid enforcement of the 1917 constitution. To take care of offenders, a new penal code was enacted. The Church would be brought into Masonic line, or else! The date set for the beginning of the new offensive was July 31, 1926 — dramatically enough, the feast day of Saint Ignatius Loyola, founder of the order which had so long labored in Spanish America, and which had still one great glory to give to the Mexican Church.
One week before the July decrees were to take effect, the bishops of Mexico issued a joint Pastoral Letter, their answer to Calles: “Since the conditions imposed render impossible the continuation of the sacred ministry, we have decided, after consulting our Most Holy Father, Pius XI, that from July 31 of the present year until we determine otherwise, all public worship requiring the participation of priests will be suspended in all the Churches of the Republic.”
The announcement hit like lightning, both for the people of Mexico and for its rulers. The Masons’ policy had been a gradual one of subjecting the Church to the state, depriving the people of Mass and the Sacraments, keeping the children from Catholic instruction, and thus, little by little, causing the Faith to wither and die. By the bold, desperate stroke of halting public worship, the Mexican bishops were hoping to alert all Christendom to this Masonic intent. Calles and his crew might be able to withstand the Catholics of Mexico, but not the united opposition of the whole Catholic world. When Calles saw that the Church in Mexico was going to resist his plans for destroying it by degrees, he determined to finish it off with a single enraged assault. Here are some fragments from the long martyrology of Mexican Catholics who died for their Faith between 1926 and 1929 — a handful out of the hundreds who may some day be invoked at the altars they gave their lives to protect.
Anacleto Flores: aged 23 years, lawyer, leader of the Catholic youth movement. He was hung by his thumbs, flogged, and slashed with bayonets for refusing to disclose the hiding-place of the Archbishop of Guadalajara. At last, in the presence of his young wife, he was put before a wall, with two of his companions, and shot.
Father Pablo Garcia de Jesus Maria: priest of Aguascalientes, seized by the police for giving absolution to a dying man. He was pummeled with rifles, his hands were smashed, his tongue cut out; finally he was ordered into exile and put on a train, where he died.
Seventeen priests of Mexico City: shot by a firing squad. Though many of them were not killed by the volley, their bodies were all thrown into a long trench and buried.
José Farfan: an aged shopkeeper. He was told to remove from his window a placard reading, “Christ lives! Christ reigns! Christ commands!” He refused, and was shot down in his store.
A twelve-year-old boy of Guadalajara: arrested for distributing Catholic leaflets. He was tortured to tell the name of his director; but urged on by his mother (“Say nothing, my son. Our Lord will give you heaven for your constancy.”), the boy kept silence. The soldiers twisted both his arms till they broke, and he died.
Father Sabas Reyes: parish priest of Tolatlan. He was hung by his wrists from the portico of his church and left for three days, without food or drink, exposed to the scorching sun. Then his feet were doused with gasoline and set afire. Finally, he was marched to the cemetery and shot. Forty old men and women of Jalisco: discovered going to Mass in a private house, taken to the cemetery in the middle of the night and shot.
Father Miguel Augustin Pro: Jesuit priest, most celebrated of the Mexican martyrs. This almost-legendary popular hero was arrested on a confected charge and put before the firing squad, without trial, on November 23, 1927. As a supreme bit of Masonic bravado, photographs were taken of the execution. The next day, newspapers around the world were supplied with pictures of the priest, standing erect against the stockade, his arms outstretched to form a cross. The picture was taken at the moment the command to fire was given and Father Pro spoke his last words, “Viva Cristo Rey!” — “Long live Christ the King!”
After three years of soaking the soil of Mexico with Catholic blood, Masonry was ready to call the persecution off. It had proven one thing: that the Mexican people were determined, at any cost, to hear Mass and receive the Sacraments. The Faith had been dealt a death blow and was more vigorous than ever. Exhausted, the government announced there would be no further attempts to dominate the Church; and the bishops announced that public worship would be resumed.
But the government lied. As soon as the Masons had caught their breath, they renewed their efforts to crush the Church. Even today, though there are glimmerings of a dawn in sight, many of the anti-Catholic laws are still enforced. For the victory which the Catholics of Mexico bought with their blood in 1929 did not put an end to their sufferings. The Masonic hold on the country had not been broken. That general uprising of Christendom which the Mexican bishops had confidently looked for, when they closed the churches in 1926, had never come. Most poignantly, the sufferings of the Mexican Catholics had been hardly noticed by their numerous, prosperous, next-door brothers: the Catholics of the United States.
Some Americans had tried to help certain bishops, certain priests, certain groups of laymen. But these had never been able to convince the bulk of American Catholics that the persecutions in Mexico were worth getting excited about, being angry about, losing their composure about, making nuisances of themselves about. Nor did the Masons of the United States fail to notice this lack of indignation, and to be emboldened by it. One example: Two days after Father Pro’s murder, the American Ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow, went aboard Calles’ private train for a tour of the country; the recognized purpose of this gesture was “to demonstrate to Mexican Catholics that they could look for no help from Washington.”
If American Catholics are wondering this year why it is their Christmas is losing its intimacy and significance and becoming an empty, commercialized holiday, the children of Our Lady of Guadalupe might be able to tell them. The Point - 1958 The Point – 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.” The Point – 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. The Point – 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. The Point – 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. The Point – 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.” The Point – 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. The Point – 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 – 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 – 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 – 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. The Point – 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. The Point - 1959 The Point – January 1959
SHOULD HATE BE OUTLAWED?
Most Americans, hearing this question, would answer promptly, “Yes, by all means, hate should be outlawed!” Their eagerness to reply can be accounted for all too easily. During the last decade and a half, they have been pounded with a propaganda barrage calculated to leave them in a state of dazed affability toward the whole world. Those advertising techniques that are normally used to encourage Americans to be choosy in matters of soap and toothpaste are now being enlisted to persuade them that there is no such thing as a superior product in matters of culture and creed. On billboards, on bus and subway posters, in newspapers and magazines, through radio and television broadcasts, Americans are being assured and reassured, both subtly and boldly, that “Bigotry is fascism … Only Brotherhood can save our nation … We must be tolerant of all!”
The long-range effects of this campaign are even now evident. It is producing the “spineless citizen”: the man who has no cultural sensibilities; who is incapable of indignation; whose sole mental activity is merely an extension of what he reads in the newspaper or sees on the television screen; who faces moral disaster in his neighborhood, political disaster in his country, and an impending world catastrophe with a blank and smiling countenance. He has only understanding for the enemies of his country. He has nothing but kind sentiments for those who would destroy his home and family. He has an earnest sympathy for anyone who would obliterate his faith. He is universally tolerant. He is totally unprejudiced. If he has any principles, he keeps them well concealed, lest in advocating them he should seem to indicate that contrary principles might be inferior. He is, to the extent of his abilities, exactly like the next citizen, who, he trusts, is trying to be exactly like him: a faceless, characterless putty-man.
Along with everyone else, American Catholics have been hammered with the slogans of the “anti-hate” campaign. Additionally, they remember the stories of how prejudice against Catholics oftentimes made America a very uncomfortable place for their immigrant Catholic grandparents. And so, they too, if asked, would declare unhesitatingly that hate should be outlawed.
What American Catholics do not stop to reflect on is that the Catholic Faith, by its very nature, fosters indignation, intolerant positions, and strong utterance. The Church is set up to continue the divine ministry of Jesus Christ, Who avowed that He had come on Earth, “Not to send peace, but the sword … to cast fire on the Earth, and what will I but that it be kindled.”
In accepting their vocation to be “other Christs,” Catholics are faced with the countless examples of Gospel astringency. They are reminded that the same Jesus Who said, “Learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart,” likewise said, “I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in- law. And a man’s enemies shall be they of his own house-hold.” Nor can they forget that the same Jesus, Who submitted Himself to the Jewish mob in the garden of Gethsemani, had previously overturned the tables of the buyers and sellers and driven them from the temple with a whip.
In accepting their position as contemporary members of the Church, American Catholics must take as their heritage the outlooks, attitudes, and purposes of their older brothers and sisters in the Faith — those Catholics who have gone before them and have preserved the Church to our own day. For the Catholic Church is One. The Church that called on its sons to take up the Cross and the sword and drive the infidel from the Holy Land, the Church that isolated the Jews of Christendom with rigid laws and ghetto walls, the Church that has repeatedly condemned the doctrines of those who disagree with her, is the same Catholic Church that claims the loyalty of 35,000,000 twentieth-century Americans.
Along with the Mass, the Sacraments, and all the spiritual treasures that are a Catholic’s baptismal birthright, these American Catholics must also assume the rest of their legacy. As members of the Church Militant — raised by the Sacrament of Confirmation to be Soldiers of Jesus Christ — they are heirs of a tradition that has been marked through the centuries by sustained and unashamed militancy. Examples of the clash between traditional Catholic observance and the current “anti-hate” campaign could be multiplied indefinitely. Every chapter in every age of the Church’s history will provide them, because the ultimate issue involved is an abiding one, a doctrinal one. It is the Catholic Church’s uncompromising claim to be the One True Church established by God. It is this conviction of Catholics throughout the centuries that leaves our greatest heroes and saints and the very constitution of the Church itself open to the charges of bigotry and intolerance.
The Catholic Church does not believe that all religions are on a common plane. It does not subscribe to the popular notion that, “We’re all headed for the same place, you in your way and we in ours.” The Catholic Church believes that Christianity is the world’s only chance for salvation, and it further insists that true Christians are found only within its fold, under the Supreme Shepherd, the Vicar of Christ, Our Holy Father at Rome.
Inevitably, this belief, when translated into practical action, makes for some intolerant arrangements: Catholics are admonished not to marry heretics and Jews; they may not attend a non-Catholic religious service; Catholic children must be sent to the Church’s schools. The motive behind these bigoted practices is the preservation of the Faith — not as an antique curiosity, but as a vital necessity. And not as a necessity for a chosen few, but as a necessity for all men, everywhere.
It is this terrible urgency about the Faith that explains both the Church’s rigidity in matters of doctrine an her encompassing love in matters of apostolate. For the note of absolute necessity that attaches to Catholic Truth, and makes the Church so intolerant and unbending, is, at the same time, the push and the drive behind every apostle. It is precisely because they are intolerant enough to believe that all men need the Catholic Faith in order to be saved, that the Church’s missionaries, from the time of Saint Paul, have given the world its most heroic example of zealous, consuming, constant, sweating, bleeding, dying but undying, love.
It is this love, this apostolic fervor, that the “anti-hate” program means to eliminate. For the ultimate outcome of the propaganda barrage that is now incessantly pounding the nation will be not only a spineless American citizen, but a spineless American Catholicism — a Catholicism that will be afraid to assert its own singularity and importance, a Catholicism that will try to become more like its neighbor religions, doing nothing to annoy, nothing to criticize, nothing that would in any way cause it to be accused of intolerance, bigotry, or hate.
Certainly no one will suppose that the promoters of the “anti-hate” campaign are just a bunch of well-meaning meddlers who launched the thing in all innocence and who would be dismayed to hear that it might discomfit the Catholic Church. The truth of the matter is much to the contrary. Just as the fast-talking soap commercials play on the gullibility of American housewives to make money for the big soap manufacturers, so the anti-hate slogans are selling Americans a bill of goods that will make rich profits for the Catholic Church’s enterprising enemies.
This deliberate and calculated program is a lineal descendant of that eighteenth-century campaign that clamored for “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” and ended up by wrecking Catholic France. It is akin to all those freethinking, freely-named, anti-Catholic ventures that have been plaguing the Church since the time of the Protestant Revolt — Humanism, Jacobinism, Freemasonry, Liberalism, Secularism, Communism, etc. For however much these movements may differ from one another in the means they advocate, they are all working for the same ultimate end. They are intent on building the City of Man — to the inevitable detriment of the City of God. They are enraged against the Church because of her calm insistence that the one thing that really matters is eternal salvation, and that she is the one divinely-commissioned ark of salvation. They are determined to show that the Church is not that important: if not by destroying her violently, then by reducing her to the level of the sects.
It was this latter expedient that appealed to Jean Jacques Rousseau, herald of the French Revolution and avowed evangelist of the Brotherhood crowd. Rousseau maintained (in The Social Contract, Book IV) that the worship of God should be allowed to continue, provided it did not become an end in itself. Theology must not usurp the superior place of politics; the interests of religion must be subordinate to those of the state. Accordingly, he felt the civil power should decide what articles of belief citizens might hold. And among these articles, Rousseau urged just one prohibition: anyone daring to say, “There is no salvation outside the Church,” should be banished.
All the followers of Rousseau, in their various guises — as well as his like- minded antecedents — are the Courtiers of the Prince of this World. But there is one group among them that is particularly of the household of Satan. They are the children of Satan, as Our Lord Himself calls them, the Jews. They, pre-eminently, are fired by the earthly, anti-Christian animus; and they have taken an active part, during twenty centuries, in all its manifestations. (This alone can explain the Church’s unique attitude toward the Jews: her traditional determination that this one people must be kept in check.)
As surely and securely as the Jews have been behind Freemasonry, or Secularism, or Communism, they are behind the “anti-hate” drive. Not that this movement represents the fruition of Talmudic doctrine. The Jews are advocating tolerance only for its destructive value — destructive, that is, of the Catholic Church. On their part, they still keep alive their racial rancors and antipathies. Their Talmud, for example, still teaches that Christ was a brazen impostor, and gives an unprintably blasphemous account of his parentage and birth. And as the Christmas season just past should have taught us, the Jews, for all their Brotherhood talk, have not in the least abandoned their resolute program to make all acknowledgments of Christmas disappear from the public and social life of the nation.
The secret of the Jews’ success is, of course, that they can practice such private hate while promoting public “love,” and not be accused of inconsistency. For, as always, they are running the show mainly from behind the scenes. They get their message across by means of co-operative Gentiles. And there are probably more such Gentiles now available — both the willing kind and the kind willing to be duped — than ever before in history. As a further good fortune, the Jewish directors of America’s entertainment industry can now guarantee that one Brotherhood spokesman, well-placed (e.g., behind a microphone or before a television camera), is able to influence Americans by the millions. And the Jews’ campaign is succeeding. We have every reason to be alarmed at its success. American Catholics, even those not actively taking part in the tolerance talk, are now kept in line by the omnipresent threat of being accused of hate, bigotry, and intolerance.
In the face of a new year that will be the biggest one yet for the Brotherhood promoters, The Point pleads with American Catholics to realign themselves with the militant traditions of their grandfathers. No threat of “bigotry,” no accusation of “intolerance” should temper our zeal or silence our message. We must preserve our commission to “Go forth and teach all nations…;” to “Reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine.”
Unworthy as we are, we American Catholics must protect for ourselves the duty of naming God’s enemies and the privilege of carrying God’s revealed Truth to the people of our country, who, we pray, will hear it, with generosity and gratitude, and who will repeat that intolerant Profession of Faith which the Church requires of all new converts: “ … At the same time, I condemn and reprove all that the Church has condemned and reproved. This same Catholic Faith, outside of which nobody can be saved, which I now freely profess and to which I truly adhere, the same I promise and swear to maintain and profess, with the help of God, entire, inviolate and with firm constancy until the last breath of life; and I shall strive as far as possible that this same Faith shall be held, taught and publicly professed by all those who depend on me, and by those of whom I shall have charge.”
(from the Rituale Romanum, published in 1947 with the Imprimatur of the Cardinal Archbishop of New York.)
A Militant Example
A recent Vatican news release has stated that Saint Lawrence of Brindisi may soon be declared a Doctor of the universal Church. Should he receive that title, the Italian Franciscan, who died in 1619, would thus become the thirtieth saint whom the Church has especially singled out as a teacher of the Faith to all Catholics everywhere.
Born at Brindisi in 1559, Saint Lawrence early demonstrated the singular gifts that would make him a brilliant preacher. As a Capuchin friar, with a personal commission from Pope Clement VIII, the saint delivered vigorous sermons in the principal Italian ghettos, thus incurring a bitter resentment among the Jews that has persisted to this day.
For our age of cowering Catholics, Lawrence of Brindisi supplies a reproving example. Not only did he work tirelessly to challenge the perfidy of the Jews, but he brought back to the Faith many who had gone over to the Protestant Revolt, and, most spectacular of all, he led an army against the Turks. It was in Hungary, in the year 1601, that Saint Lawrence, armed with nothing more than his cowl and his Crucifix, led a Christian army, outnumbered four to one, to an astounding victory over the infidels. The Point – February 1959
SOME SUMMARIES AFTER SEVEN YEARS
Having reached the reasonable maturity of seven years, The Point begins its eighth with a few reflections on those subjects, both men and movements, that have occupied its columns and arrested its readers during the past eighty-four months.
Although this commits us to something of a summary, we do not intend it as a catalog of our editorial interests. Indeed, some of the items here represented have already yielded place to more urgent ones. For it is The Point’s intention to speak out on any issue, old or new, that touches upon its central dedication: protecting and propagating the truths and traditions of the Catholic Faith.
COMMUNISM
Our favorite issue of The Point thus far is easily the one for May, 1957. It was entitled “Our Lady of Fatima Warned Us,” and what makes it so memorable is not any particularly fine touch it received from our pen, but the good fortune that befell it after it left us. A Virginia reader mailed a copy of it to England, to the Western European Center of the anti- Communist Russian Revolutionary Forces. She accompanied it with a letter, asking that since the message of Our Lady of Fatima, as The Point explained it, was of immediate concern to the Russian people, couldn’t the anti-Communist Russian underground somehow get the story to its agents and sympathizers behind the Iron Curtain?
The Russian Revolutionary Forces thought they could. Twice, however, “Operation Fatima” failed. But a third try, in May, 1958, a year after our Fatima issue first appeared, succeeded gloriously. By August, a courier’s message to R.R.F.’s Western European Center brought the welcome news that Russians in Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, Komsomolsk-Na-Amure, Kishinniev, Odessa, Vladivostock, and Alma-Ata were now reading “for the first time” the story of Our Lady’s apparition and her promise that “Russia will be converted.” The leaflet, still being circulated, carries in its right front column The Point ’s picture of Our Lady, drawn especially for the May, 1957, issue. Beneath the picture is the Russian text of a prayer that ends, “I have no other help nor aid but you, O Mother of God, save and protect me now and in the years to come. Amen.”
This prayer, repeated in thousands of secret places throughout Russia, is the one kind of weapon that the Communists are defenseless against. That we had some small share in forging that weapon is The Point ’s greatest consolation in seven years of battling the enemies of the Faith.
THE HOLY LAND
In April of 1955, we presented a detailed, though necessarily incomplete, account of the atrocities and desecrations perpetrated in Palestine since its seizure by the new Jewish state. We published names of convents, Catholic hospitals and orphanages, and ancient Church buildings and shrines that had been either confiscated, pillaged or demolished by the fanatic Israelis. Our principal sources for this information were the courageous reports of a few isolated diocesan newspapers and the first-hand accounts of Franciscan members of the Commissariat of the Holy Land.
Since that very popular issue was distributed, there has been an increasing interest among American Catholics to learn more of what happened in those first years of Jewish “independence” in Palestine. That interest, as reflected in certain Catholic publications, has won the Church some stern rebukes.
The latest of these appeared in New York’s Jewish Spectator for December, 1958. It was an editorial attack on Catholic periodicals that persist in exposing the activities of Jews in the Holy Land, and it concluded with this frank stand-off: “It is touching that the Catholic Church, after a thousand years of antipathy, should suddenly be so sympathetic to the needs of the Arabs, and that the Church, which has practiced some of the most hideous barbarities, should find the Israelis guilty of ‘heartless injustices.’ What conclusion is to be drawn from all this? Simply that as long as Jews remain Jews, they will be a thorn in the side of Christianity, which will seek to remove it.” TRADITION
A most formidable enemy within the Church today is that army of pseudoscholars and self-conscious apologizers who, we must conclude, have determined to debunk and overthrow any Catholic tradition that annoys or embarrasses them. Last November, The Point showed how this attack, to the delight of the Church’s external enemies, has carried over to Catholic hagiography — leaving the lives of our canonized saints open to wholesale re-assessment, based on the latest theories of post-Freudian psychology.
A related offensive has been opened out in the Iowa cornfields. A priest named Father Catich has shocked Catholics (as he intended) by demanding pictorial representations of Our Lord in modern dress. Decrying traditional Catholic art, in terms bristling with unpriestly disrespect, Father Catich summarizes,” We must fashion a Christ who will be no stranger to our time … I do not think it vulgar to suggest we give Christ a shave and a haircut.”
Father Catich and his crusade may go down in oblivion before more significant debunkers, but he has provided us with a clear anticipation of what the anti-traditionalists ultimately want: the entire length of the Christian dispensation — liturgy, dogma, and all — retailored in “modern dress.” This is that same spirit of heresy that Pope Leo XIII condemned in “Americanism,” and Saint Pius X condemned in “Modernism.” The labels have been changed, but the movements continue.
BOSTON
Since January, 1956, when The Point issued its first detailed report on the Jewish siege of Boston, Boston Jews, with the possible exception of Mr. Bernard Goldfine, have continued to augment their holdings, increase their returns, and generally tighten their grip on this (numerically) Catholic city.
The single lightsome relief in the darkening Boston picture came last Fall with the sudden demise of Massachusetts’ Attorney General, George Fingold, the Republican Party’s “sure winner” candidate in the state’s 1958 gubernatorial race. The Worcester Telegram ’s State House reporter concluded his Fingold death notice with the following ingenuous observation: “ … He wanted to be elected governor as living and final proof that the voters of this state had no bias against a Jewish candidate for that high office. By the tone of his voice, by a few of the things he said, I took it he wasn’t sure about that. Now he will never know.”
GENOCIDE
Early in 1955, we warned our readers about a United Nations brainchild called the Genocide Convention. This document was then on the verge of being introduced in the United States Senate for ratification as an international treaty. Had it been ratified, the provisions of the Genocide Convention would have become, in effect, an amendment to our Constitution and “the supreme law of the land.”
Fortunately, that harried and shrinking Senatorial band, the Conservatives, took the trouble to discover just what these provisions were. They found that although “genocide” etymologically might mean “race-killing,” the United Nations was by no means calling on the Senate for some vague denunciation of mass murder. To be guilty of genocide, as defined by the U. N.’s Genocide Convention, it is not necessary that you be caught in the act of violently and totally exterminating some race. It is quite sufficient that you be accused of “incitement” or “complicity,” and the deed itself need be only “causing serious mental harm to members of the group.”
And how is mental harm to be caused? And to what group? Plentiful and vivid answers to these questions are to be found in the columns of America’s weekly Jewish newspapers. For the Genocide Convention, though still not ratified by this country, has been adopted elsewhere. And Jewish papers each week regale their readers with accounts of its successful operation. The following item, from the Jewish Advocate of Boston, is typical: “The Hague (JTA) — A 50-year-old boat livery owner has been sentenced to ten days imprisonment for using anti-Semitic language to abuse a passer-by. A Utrecht magistrate, pronouncing sentence, said the boatman had used the word ‘Jewish’ in a manner insulting to the Jewish people … ” HARVARD
A few years back, university officials assured us, off-guardedly, that Harvard’s quota on Jewish students was a strict ten per cent. Lately, after much intervening pressure, The Harvard Crimson, the university’s daily, has published the fact that twenty-five per cent of Harvard’s student body is now professedly Jewish. Although the quota lid has not been off very long at Harvard, the percentage of non-Gentiles is climbing vertically with each new academic term.
Material previously handled under the heading of Harvard may, in the near future, be found incorporated under general news of the Jewish community.
MASONRY
This theme has been a recurring one during The Point ’s seven articulate years and, unlike Harvard, is not likely to slip from our interest in the future. If anyone feels that such perennial concern with the Masonic menace is overdoing it a bit, we have an impressive rejoinder. Since the start of modern Freemasonry, in 1717, the sect has been warned against and condemned no less than twenty different times by fourteen popes, including every one from Pius VI (1775-1799) to Pius XII.
The reason for the alarm is not hard to see. However innocent individual lodge members may be of Masonry’s real intent, that intent is plain. It is expressed by Masonry’s noted American publicist, J. S. Buck, in his book, The Genius of Freemasonry and the Twentieth Century Crusade: “Just so fast as the world is converted to the ethical principles of Freemasonry, just so fast and so far the world repudiates every principle and every claim and practice of Roman clericalism.”
Despite general, and evident, successes in the Masonic campaign, there has been recently, on the far horizon, a victory for our side. The state of California had submitted to referendum, for last November’s voting, a proposal to tax private (and, therefore, parochial) schools. This, of course, was the Masons’ meat. The Scottish Rite high command swaggered into the battle full of gusto — confident that its wealth, power, and influence would carry the day. It was the first time in modern American history that Masonry, in its own name, had entered a political contest. The final outcome: California voters rejected the school-taxing proposal by an overwhelming margin of two-to-one.
The whole episode was an eye-opener — for Masons as well as for Catholics.
MARRANOS
The term was first used in Spain as a label for those Jews who were trying to undo the Church from within. Two current arguments for its continued use are that pair of Jewish-convert priests whom The Point has several times warned against: Father Arthur Klyber, the Redemptorist pamphleteer, and Father John Oesterreicher, of Seton Hall’s Institute of Judaeo-Christian Studies.
Among non-clerical American Jewish converts, few have done so much for the Jews in so short a time as the expensively-publicized Miss Lillian Roth. In order to let New England Jews know Miss Roth’s true loyalties, the Jewish Advocate of Boston printed an interview with her in which it stated that she “considers herself a Jewess despite her conversion to Catholicism.” To clinch the point, the Advocate quoted Miss Roth directly: “I will always be a Jew no matter what faith I follow.”
ENGLISH CATHOLICS
We had no notion when we decided to do our piece on Monsignor Ronald Knox last July that so many people shared our aversion to the late literateur. It turned out to be one of the most popular issues we have ever done. Nor should anyone interpret our silence on the subject during the past few months to mean that we have written all we intend to about the Bible- embroidering Monsignor and his faithless colleagues. As Hilaire Belloc said after firing his verbal volley at the “Don that dared attack my Chesterton” — our “fires are banked, but still they burn.” About Belloc himself, we had our say in the issue subsequent to the Knox one. We presented him, by way of contrast, as an English Catholic writer who was loyal to the Faith. Some readers have asked why we didn’t take more notice in that issue of Belloc’s friend and ally, the aforesaid Gilbert Keith Chesterton. It is because, frankly, we do not think he was of the same stature as Belloc.
Still, there is no denying that Chesterton shared most of Belloc’s sympathies and antipathies, and at his best could be nearly as militant and almost as hilarious as Hilaire. He could be equally satirical — witness the following Chesterton triolet:
I am fond of Jews, Jews are fond of money — Never mind of whose. I am fond of Jews. Oh, but when they lose, Damn it all, it’s funny. I am fond of Jews, Jews are fond of money.
POINT OF THE POINT
Readers of the foregoing reflections may have observed that one topic especially has occupied The Point ’s attention during the past seven years: the problem, in its many aspects, of the Jews.
Why this emphasis? Because we think it is imperative that American Catholics wake up to the fact that the Jews, as an organized force, are the implacable, declared enemies of Christianity — of its tenets, its traditions, its moral code, its very culture. We think it is vital, too, for American Catholics to realize that the Church has always known this fact about the Jews, and, to the extent of her influence, has counseled and decreed regulations for curbing their malice. And since American Catholic publications, in general, seem determined to say little about these basic matters, we have tried to make up for their negligence by our own insistence. Our solution to the Jewish problem, however, is not merely a series of warnings and exposures to let American Catholics know what their enemies are up to. For we will be able to withstand no enemy, however well informed we are, if we are not strong from within. The ultimate point of The Point is therefore to inject American Catholics with a crusading zeal for the truths and traditions of their Faith, and thus to foster in America a strong, militant Catholicism, worthy of a country that is dedicated to the Immaculate Conception. The Point – March 1959
IN MEMORY OF WILLIAM THOMAS WALSH
Who Tried To Warn Us Before It Was Too Late
Ten years ago last month, at Saint Agnes Hospital, White Plains, New York, William Thomas Walsh died at the age of fifty-seven. His death was remarked upon, with varying degrees of sympathy, in the principal Catholic papers. Even The New York Times ran a sizeable obituary, exceptional for the mellow tone in which it summarized the life of a man whose books and beliefs had gone so unappreciated in the Times’ past.
The biographical information in all the accounts was impeccably truthful. Born in Connecticut, educated at Yale, William Thomas Walsh had been a newspaperman, teacher, historian, something of a dramatist and poet, and had retired as Professor of English at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart several months before his death. He had been awarded Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal. Twice he had been decorated by the government of Spain. In 1944, he had won the Catholic Literary Award of the Gallery of Living Catholic Authors. Death had come after a long illness.
It was all true. Yet, in not one of the accounts did the real importance of William Thomas Walsh break through the barrier of statistics. No one credited him with this: that in an age when Catholics were so generally ignorant of, and indisposed to learn of, the great dangers that face the Church from without, he understood those dangers and how they arose, and left us a record of his understanding.
If he had done no more than reassert the truth that the Church does have enemies, William Thomas Walsh would be deserving of grateful remembrance by American Catholics. But he did many times better than that. With the patience of a thorough scholar, and the zeal of a thorough Catholic, Dr. Walsh traced in several historical studies the mainstreams of present opposition to the Church, from the headwaters of the late Renaissance and the Reformation. He showed there was continuity and purpose in the plans of the Church’s enemies, who, among themselves, maintained hierarchy and chain of command. He said that if Catholics were to protect their Faith, they must acknowledge these enemies, learning from the Church’s experience with them in the past. He said that we must do this despite the inimical atmosphere in which the Church moves today, the atmosphere created by her enemies’ successes. He championed those methods by which the Church had for so many centuries held off her enemies, methods that historical critics have maliciously misrepresented, or ridiculed as “witch hunts.” He took on these critics, too — the exalted Protestant historians — and resoundingly showed them up, from Prescott and Hume to Merriman and Lea.
William Thomas Walsh’s record of the fortunes of the Faith over the past five centuries is wisely centered in Spain. In a series of books entitled Philip II, Isabella of Spain, Characters of the Inquisition, and Saint Teresa of Avila, Walsh exposes and examines every major assault that has been made against the Church since the end of the late middle ages. Spain, he points out, is the one Catholic nation that has faced all these assaults and has survived, still Catholic, to boast of it.
Spain was the first of the modern European countries to bear the full weight of the Jewish problem. Her decisive solution was the famous expulsion of the Spanish Jews in 1492. This was the same year that she overthrew the last of the Mohammedan strongholds within her boundaries, thus ending an eight-hundred-year battle with the Church’s Islamic enemies. Similarly, the recurrent threats of Freemasonry and Protestantism were put down by the staunchly Catholic policies of the government and by the dedicated persistence of the Spanish clergy.
Dr. Walsh is at his best in re-creating the atmosphere of intrigue that accompanied the religious warfare of the sixteenth century. In the pages of Philip II, he leaves an unforgettable picture of the Protestant Revolt: the fanatic ex-Catholics, the slippery university men, the avaricious upstart Protestant nobility, the ubiquitous Jewish merchants, the Marrano priests, and the expanding centers of Antwerp and Geneva and London all astir with the “new doctrines,” and restless with the plottings of an international and secret fraternity. For even in the 1500s, Freemasonry is clearly at work in the battle against the Church, and it is fixed in much of its present-day identity. There is the Talmudic symbolism, the pagan ritual, the bitter hatred of the Faith, and everywhere the influence of the Jews.
Walsh gives details of King Philip’s suppression of the Masonic Illuminati. (They were operating in Spain two centuries before their reorganization under Adam Weishaupt, their “illuminization” of the French lodges, and their bloody, blasphemous triumphs in the French Revolution.) And while Philip, the last of Europe’s strong Catholic kings, was stamping out Masonry in Spain, Elizabeth I of England was opening the way for its spread to all of the Protestant North. Building an English empire to rival and finally wreck the Catholic empire of Spain became a top Judaeo- Masonic objective, and it was not long in the achievement. It has remained for our own day to see England’s abandonment by these same international forces. And this abandonment (in favor of the New York and Moscow two- party world system) has put England back in the ranks of the second-rate powers.
Necessarily, in uncovering the origins of our present anti-Christian society, William Thomas Walsh’s books touch on a number of themes that gain new significance when studied in relation to the root issues of Judaeo-Masonry, the Protestant Revolt, and the principles of the French Revolution. Philip II contains, among so many other things, a unique study of the role of a Catholic ruler, his chances for true patriotism, for service and sacrifice in the cause of the Faith, and, contrarily, his abundant chances for falling short. In Saint Teresa of Avila, there is the forgotten lesson of the power of holiness, and Walsh’s unfeigned judgment that one woman of Catholic courage can preserve the Faith of a whole people.
Jewish ritual murders and the virtues of several Spanish Inquisitors are two of the more provocative side-studies proposed by Walsh in Isabella of Spain and Characters of the Inquisition. He tells the story of the Holy Child of Sepulveda and devotes a full chapter to the Holy Child of La Guardia. These two young victims suffered torture and crucifixion at the hands of the Jews during Queen Isabella’s reign. And following up his definition of the Inquisition as Spain’s “declaration of independence against the domination of Jews and Moors,” Walsh gives detailed accounts of the treacheries of the Marranos (the pretended converts from Judaism) as exposed by the Dominican Inquisitors.
Most exceptional of all is the discussion of the Jewish Talmud in Characters of the Inquisition. Walsh tells plainly why the Talmud became the most-burned book in Christendom, and why its commentaries were the first books to be placed on the Church’s Index. He makes a clear distinction between the divine law of the inspired Old Testament and the diabolical law of the Talmudic rabbis — quoting from both Jewish and Catholic authorities to indicate the extent of the Talmud’s blasphemous and obscene attacks on Our Lord and His Virginal Mother.
Though obliged to dig deep into the past in his search for long-buried historical truths, William Thomas Walsh never lost sight of the present scene. By scrutinizing the enemies that the Church had faced in former times, he sharpened his vision to recognize the perils confronting her today. Thus, in the summer of 1936, as he worked on the final chapters of Philip II, Walsh was painfully conscious of the news coming from contemporary Spain — news of churches being burned, convents wrecked, priests and nuns murdered. When the Spanish army, led by General Franco, rose up against the Masonic-Communistic government that had fostered these outrages, Walsh eagerly assumed the role of advocate for the insurrectionists. Whatever Franco’s defects, he and his men were defending the Mystical Body of Christ, and William Thomas Walsh, a grateful member of that Body, was willing to defend them.
When victory finally came for the Spanish Catholic forces, in 1939, William Thomas Walsh was strangely solemn. True, the three-year job of trying to make himself heard above the anti-Franco clamor of America’s Jewish and Masonic press had been exhausting. Yet, that was the sort of hard, satisfying work he would usually have thrived on. In the brooding, prophetic final chapter of Characters of the Inquisition (published in 1940), Walsh revealed what was troubling him. He had been thinking not about the victory that the Church had just secured in Spain, but about the possible defeat looming before it in America. “Here on the last edge and in the twilight of the world,” he wrote, “the stage is set for the reenactment of an ancient tragedy … Here we have most of the Freemasons of the world, many of the world’s Jews, most of the gold and its masters … and among them heirs of all the isms and heresies that the Catholic Church has denounced throughout the centuries, and some millions of good bewildered folk who have ceased to believe much in anything … The real test of our republican experiment here must ultimately be whether it accepts or opposes the Church of Christ … it must become either a Catholic state, or a slave state.”
And Walsh can point to plenty of evidence, even in the year 1940, that America is fast slipping into slavery: “Just now, there seems to be a deadly strife between international capitalism, entrenched in the United States and gradually leading this country toward a State Socialism … and, on the other side, the seemingly more godless and goldless forms of Socialism beyond the seas.” But, he asks, what is to prevent this American Socialism, “now in the making and already accepted and propagated by the dominant educational forces in this country,” from arriving at “mutually agreeable arrangements” with even the Socialism of Soviet Russia? And with clear insight, in those pre-UN days, he concludes, “As the world grows smaller in time, may not all the forms of Socialism be gathered together by skillful hands into a World State, such as many Masonic writers have advocated … ? It is not only conceivable, but probable.”
And how are American Catholics meeting this dark challenge? It is William Thomas Walsh’s great distress that, in the words of the Gospel figure, they are hiding the light of their Faith under a bushel. Unwilling to preach the strong, sundering truths of the Faith, that will make converts but will also make enemies, American Catholics have settled down to a stagnant complacency. The strong voices raised among them are those of the liberals, protesting their loyalties to the principles of Interfaith, and thus piping the listless faithful to destruction.
“Now all these gentlemen, these liberal broad-minded Catholics,” Walsh writes, “many of whom are teaching the next generation of American Catholics, no doubt think they are doing a service to God in smoothing out our differences with others, and neglecting to utter the challenge which Christianity has uttered everywhere else in the world … But if the history of Christianity teaches anything, it fairly cries out from the stones of desecrated and forsaken and stolen churches, that if they have their way … they will lead us, if we are foolish enough to follow them, to that abyss over which the English Catholics fell, one by one and family by family, in the sixteenth century. … Our one hope of winning, for their own good, the millions of unbelievers who surround us … is to speak boldly the truth God has given us, in season and out of season … This will inevitably bring persecution upon us … If we are suspected, ostracized, insulted, starved, beaten, imprisoned, misrepresented, neglected, put to death in a thousand new ways — that is what we have to expect as Christians; and it is a method that will prove as irresistible in the twentieth century as it was in the first and second. Or does anyone imagine that here in America, as an unique exception, the servant shall be greater than his Lord?”
At the end of World War II, William Thomas Walsh journeyed to the tiny village of Fatima in Portugal. He had come to learn at first hand the terrible, beautiful story of what had happened there in 1917: when the Queen of Heaven appeared to three shepherd children and entrusted them with the knowledge that unless the world were converted to her Immaculate Heart, every nation, without exception, would feel the wrath of her Divine Son.
When Walsh returned to the United States, it was with the conviction, “that nothing is so important as making known what the Mother of God asked in those apparitions of 1917, which for some reason have been so neglected, so distorted, so misunderstood.” In 1947, he saw the publication of Our Lady of Fatima, the most popular of his books, and the most popular account in English of the Fatima apparitions.
Our Lady of Fatima was no pious supplement to William Thomas Walsh’s lifework, but its logical climax. Those anti-Church movements that he had traced through five centuries to our present evil day led inexorably to Our Lady’s warnings of divine vengeance about to fall upon the world. And Walsh had even foreseen the shape of this vengeance. He had predicted One World united in Socialism, in opposition to the catholic unity of the Church. Our Lady of Fatima warned that the Communism of Russia would assuredly dominate the entire world, devastating the Church at the same time, unless her demands were heeded.
It would be false to suggest that one can read every page of William Thomas Walsh without ever encountering any weaknesses. What can be affirmed is that the back-tracking, compromising statements, though present, are not essential to his arguments, nor do they follow from them. It is as though he had descended, momentarily, from the heights of militant Catholic utterance out of sheer dismay at finding himself there all alone.
Thus, in any appreciation of William Thomas Walsh, there is inevitably bound up a contrary and stern indictment of those who by vocation and the grace of their office should have joined him — indeed, should have led him — in the battle against the Church’s enemies. That these leaders failed in their obligation is the central reality, and tragedy, of our times. It is a tragedy in which all American Catholics have accepted a role, and which seems to be moving rapidly toward its climax.