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Post by hibernicus on Nov 21, 2012 21:51:51 GMT
Thank you, Youngireland. I endorse your views. If you look back at Clovis's post you will see that I have now added a comment dissociating myself from his comment, explaining why it is IMHO anti-semitic, and warning that if he produces one more comment like that he will be expelled.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 5, 2012 21:43:25 GMT
Surely Bishop Fellay would not be posting from an IP in England? Is it possible that you have been hit either by an ordinary hoaxer or by someone trying to discredit the petition?
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 6, 2012 12:36:24 GMT
One point to bear in mind is that a lot of English SSPX supporters are pro-Williamson and that there is a tradition of far-right activism in East London (including Dagenham). I wouldn't rule out malice (which might be directed at Bishop Fellay rather than you, given that the Williamsonites see him as having sold out to what they regard as "holocaustianity").
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Post by shane on Dec 6, 2012 22:47:48 GMT
Delete it immediately and delete your comment here. If it's false it could easily get you into legal difficulties.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 10, 2013 20:31:14 GMT
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Apr 11, 2013 8:01:19 GMT
I have to say one of my biggest problems in dealing with people of traditional sensibilities is the speed with which they read and absorb the type of stuff on blogs like Rorate Coeli and how difficult it is to disabuse them of the madder stuff on it (even members of the Una Voce International council rely on R-C, which is but an indication of how that organisation has diminished in stature since 1988). The expectation of the re-integration of the SSPX is but one example. It hasn't happened and since the enthronement of Pope Francis, this is less likely - especially due to this kind of thing.
And we don't need Dawn Eden to tell us what John Cleese in his Basil Fawlty persona would describe as the 'bleeding obvious'. Antisemitism is pandemic in traditional Catholic communities everywhere. I am attending EF Masses for more than two decades and it didn't take me too long to discover that there is an undercurrent of anti-semitism running right through it. At some time, this may have to be formally addressed - that is my worry. Anyone who thinks that it is confined to Dickie Williamson and his mates, or even to SSPX extremists have another thing coming.
I should say that despite the comment above, I am very grateful to Dawn Eden for pointing it out, something not very easy to do. And I am willing to bet she took tons of vitriol for her trouble (I know how a Brandsma Review writer is regarded due to a piece he wrote on the ultra-right among trads), so you might do as I am going to do and remember her in your prayers.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 11, 2013 15:17:22 GMT
We don't need Dawn Eden to tell us, but the reaction of the tinfoil hat brigade on RORATE to her revelation about the holocaust denier is a very striking exposure of what is lurking in much of the trad undergrowth. The antisemitism, like much that is nutty on the trad fringe, combines very deep mediaeval roots (the history of Catholic/Christian antisemitism is a terrifying and depressing story) with links to early modern absolute monarchism (the idea that uniformity of religion under a single absolute ruler is to be achieved by any means necessary, and that the Spanish Catholic monarchs' expulsion of the Jews and Muslims, and Louis XIV's revocation of the edict of NAntes, are to be admired) and to nineteenth and twentieth-century nationalist beliefs in ethnic homogeneity (not to mention conspiracy theory as an explanation for those features of modernity we don't like). The result is a real witches' brew which appeals to those who can't be bothered thinking for themselves. I think antisemitism is part of a wider conspiracist mentality among people who have been hurt (often really hurt) by the way the modern world has gone.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Apr 11, 2013 16:34:13 GMT
I think antisemitism is the most popular of prejudices because the existence of the Jewish people offends so many different, often contradictory, sensibilities. Radical nationalists tend towards anti-semitism because they fret that the Jewish people can never be whole-hearted nationalists outside Israel. Progressive liberals are suspicious of Jewish particularism because it offends against their own universalism. Socialists are tempted to anti-semitism because of the entrepreneurial flair that so many Jewish people and families have evinced (despite the fact that so many Jewish people have also been noted socialists).
I think hostility to circumcision will be the next guise of anti-semitism (though of course not all Jewish people practice circumcision).
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Apr 12, 2013 9:15:47 GMT
I agree with Hibernicus about the reaction of trads, some very proud trads, to Dawn Eden's statement of the obvious. It is striking to the point of being shocking.
Yes, these people are hurt. I hate to say it, but many German people felt badly hurt by the Versailles treaty and we know where that led. Let us pray trads remember that example.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 12, 2013 17:02:49 GMT
What is striking about RORATE CAELI's reaction to Dawn Eden is that it was quite unnecessary. They could have said that they had simply used the Argentine blogger for his eyewitness report on the (non-)implementation of SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM and did not know of or endorse his other views. Instead, some of the commenters denied he was a holocaust denier because he accepts large numbers of Jews were killed by the NAzis though he denies the NAzis had a systematic plan to exterminate the Jews, while other suggested Dawn Eden herself must be a Jewish 'plant' or infiltrator - and the fact that RORATE is tightly moderated means that the moderators are responsible for allowing this stuff to appear. BTW RORATE are now muddying the waters further. They are suggesting that the fact that the Chief Rabbi of France (who recently denounced gay marriage) has now had to resign after admitting to plagiarism in his scholarly works, shows the power of the homosexual lobby, and adding as a PS that they believe recent attacks on them are due to their publication of an expose of homosexuals in the Polish Church. First of all, the insinuation as regards themselves is quite outrageous. They are being attacked because they treated a holocaust denier as a reputable source and allowed anti-semites to publish in their comboxes, and this is quite clearly true. They are implicitly smearing anyone who criticises them for this as conscious or unconscious stooges of the homosexual lobby (another conspiracy theory). Even if it were true (which it isn't) it would still be their own fault for providing them with ammunition; just as though the rabbi's resignation was the result of an organised campaign involving gay lobbyists, it was his own fault that he committed plagiarism and gave them something with which to attack him.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 12, 2013 23:11:21 GMT
One example of the sort of outlook some trads have legitimate worries about in relation to the Church's attitude to Judaism is a book I bought recently called FROM ENEMY TO BROTHER by John Connelly. This book deals with the role of several converts from Judaism to Catholicism in resisting the Third Reich and shaping the Vatican II condemnation of anti-semitism in NOSTRA AETATE. I picked up the book because I saw it had material on such figures as Dietrich von Hildebrand (BTW I didn't know he was partly of Jewish descent). There is a lot of useful incidental material on the nature and limitations of Catholic resistance to the Third Reich, and it also has some troubling analysis of how some Germanic theologians were lured into dubious attitudes by such means as over-zealous assimilation of "Volk" and "Reich" to the concept of the Mystical Body (apparently Reich, because of its association with universal rule through the memory of the Holy Roman Empire, has sacral associations that are not present, or at least not to the same extent, in "Royaume" or other equivalent terms) and by foolish and uncritical acceptance of "racial science", despite the vague and fallacious terminology on which it rested, because they (and to some extent the higher church authorities, alas) were afraid that if they condemned it they might wind up on the wrong side of another Galileo case. What makes this book very troubling, however, is a central assumption which the author presents as so self-evident that it is beyond argument. Some of his subjects came in later life to adopt the view that Jews can be saved through the Old Covenant alone without reference to the New, and that it is in fact positively undesirable that Jews who do not accept Jesus should be seen as lacking anything, or that any desire however passive should be felt for their conversion. Those of his subjects who refused to accept this view (such as the Maritains and von Hildebrand) are simply dismissed from the narrative; the author maintains that his view is the only acceptable interpretation of NOSTRA AETATE and any suggestion that Judaism is incomplete without Jesus is described as "anti-Judaism" and by implication as unacceptable as anti-semitism. Quite frankly, I do not see how this view in the strong form he presents it (as distinct from the milder form that some forms of attempted evangelisation are counter-productive in view of past Christian mistreatment of Jews, that we should be aware of and repent for certain forms of anti-Jewish phobia and stereotyping both as applied to the Jewish people and to Judaism as a religion) can be reconciled with the Great Commission. One of the more worrying aspects of this book, and of the sheer arrogance and condescension the author displays in some parts of his treatment of the subject, is that at one point he thanks a friend for going through the Gospels for him and noting the passages which could be read as implying a mandate to convert Jews. The Gospels can be read in a day, and he couldn't be bothered to do this himself?
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 15, 2013 22:40:16 GMT
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Apr 16, 2013 8:13:26 GMT
It seems the popularity of holocaust denial in present-day traditional Catholicism is the survival of Protocols of a previous generation.
Agreeing totally with Hibernicus' observation (1000% - if I could), I state that this is possibly the most egregious of all the problems with trads (though there are non-antisemitic trads with other problems too; just because a trad isn't antisemitic, doesn't mean he is problem free as there are plenty of other crank theories in circulation in the trad world).
Over several years I have tried to put across to clergy - secular and religious - that there are pastoral problems around traditionalism which require a different pastoral response than in normal parish life. Outside the trad world, waking an average parishioner out of their lukewarmness presents a challenge. Trads have to be cooled down before they auto-destruct. In one example I saw, a father of a family insisted his communion going children all fast from midnight to receive communion at a late morning Mass to which they had to travel to at some inconvenience. And they never carried sandwiches or something with them to eat after Mass, which would have been a practical solution to any problem. At some stage, these children are going to find out he had no right to do this.
The point is that the pastoral care of traditionalists needs to go beyond mere provision of the Extraordinary Form of Mass; priests involved need to engage rather than to let things pass. In the case of holocaust denial and related antisemitism; it is not enough not to preach it or even to preach it is wrong - one has to find out what disposes so many traditionalists to this worldview. It probably reflects some form of hurt alright, but Mark Shea is dead right when he says traditionalists are their own worst enemies. If Young Ireland is talking about how evangelical Y2K is, the traditionalist world is counter-evangelical. It doesn't preach. It just seems to wallow in self-righteousness. I know this is not true of all traditionalists, and I know that not everybody who goes to the Extraordinary Form is a traditionalist. But for all the confidence traditionalists have about the older form of liturgy, the fruits coming forward, while I know they are not bad, they are much sparser than what traditionalists believe them to be. They could perhaps begin in the right direction by desisting from tolerating antisemites and holocaust deniers in their midst.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 16, 2013 21:42:41 GMT
I can think of some causes which predispose trads to this view: One is the search for an explanation about why history has not gone in our direction. People who are looking back to a perceived golden age (the Middle Ages, their own youth) need a simple explanation to explain why if everything was so perfect it went so wrong. This is one of the great attractions of conspiracy theories, and for reasons to do with the history of Catholic anti-semitism the Jew conspiracy tradition is a popular one. This would be exacerbated by such factors as the writings of Fr Denis Fahey providing an Irish/Anglophone exemplar; Ireland's having gone within living memory from a relatively provincial and inward-looking society of small farms, small shops, family businesses to a much more commercialised and cosmopolitan society swayed by global financial/economic factors that are hard to understand (this last lies behind not only the Jew conspiracy theories but related conspiracy theories which are not explicitly and in some cases may not even be implicitly anti-semitic, such as belief in the Illuminati); nationalist suspicion of the subordination of the nation-state to cosmopolitan economic forces (not that this is inherently anti-semitic, but it can serve as a gateway to certain well-known anti-semitic stereotypes). Given Vatican II's condemnation of anti-semitism, Catholics who are suspicious of/hostile to Vatican II may often be inclined to think that if it came from Vatican II it must be harmful. In the American context, the fact that many Jews are prominent in liberal and secularist organisations (for understandable historical reasons; just as a disproportionate number of people from Irish Catholic backgrounds were active in twentieth-century Anglophone communist parties) seems to lend credence to the view that Jews collectively are somehow up to no good for those who are already inclined to believe it. Trads seem to import a lot from the American paranoid subculture (sometimes picking up specifically Evangelical elements like premillennialism without realising their Protestant origins/implications) Lastly, it should be borne in mind that adopting views which are rejected by the wider society is often taken up by embattled subcultures (and cults) precisely because such views function as an identity marker and a test of loyalty; in this context, the more vociferously antisemitic a Radtrad is the more hostility he will evoke from non-radtrads and the more he is seen as being "for real" (especially as such antics will make it much less likely he can ever be reintegrated into mainstream society). I suspect that for Bishop Williamson's admirers the fact that he expresses such abominable views which attract such justified denunciation is seen as evidence that he is no "sell-out". Young-earth creationism (which is implicitly conspiracist as it implies scientists are deliberately concealing the bible truth and promoting evolutionism for their own nefarious objectives) serves a similar function with some trads as well as evangelicals. These are just a few suggestions - can anyone think of others?
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Post by maolsheachlann on Apr 16, 2013 22:19:42 GMT
A perception of political correctness as being the enemy and a disposition to say the most politically incorrect thing you can think of. Recently I was typing something my father had written and I came to a reference (an entirely non-derogatory reference) to a "Jewess". I explained to my father that this usage was now considered offensive, which bewildered him. It doesn't make much sense. Even the term "Jew" is iffy now, and that doesn't make much sense either. So I think some people react to this and decide to go all the way and break taboos such as holocaust denial, to reject what they see as political correctness as definitively as possible.
There is the feeling of rupture in Catholic history, too. I use the Douay Rheims translation of the Bible, and some of the original footnotes are really eyebrow-raising, especially in their remarks regarding the Jews. (I can't remember any offhand and I don't want to go searching through it now.) And I am sure that Catholic history is full of similiar examples, which other contributors would know much better than I-- I was reading recently of Pope Pius the IX's adoption of Edgardo Mortara, a Jewish boy who was taken from his family and raised as a Catholic, eventually becoming a priest, because he had been baptised by a servant. How could such a good Pope do such a bad thing? Surely it's very tempting to reply, "Because it wasn't bad at all."
This feeling of rupture can be very unpleasant and disorientating, making traditionalists feel that orthodoxy is being stolen away sliver by sliver, almost imperceptiby.
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