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Post by hibernicus on Dec 1, 2008 17:34:01 GMT
Since Fr. Fahey and his shenanigans keep coming up on this board (and this issue has also figured in the thread on Pius XII and elsewhere) I thought it would be a good idea to start a thread to deal specifically with the subject. I was also inspired by the fact that on Catholic-perspective recently Credo quoted the Catholic convert from communism Douglas Hyde to the effect that communists often tried to smear Catholic groups with accusations of anti-semitism. Credo then declared that this meant all criticisms of traditionalist Catholics as anti-semitic were communist propaganda. Sorry, Credo. Just because some people are falsely accused doesn't mean that everyone who is accused is innocent. Just because communists make an accusation for their own purposes doesn't mean that accusation is not justified.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 1, 2008 17:51:26 GMT
Let me make a couple of suggestions to get started about what anti-semitism is or is not. (1) Criticism of individual Jews for their ideas and actions is not anti-semitic. It is anti-semitic to suggest that all Jews are collectively responsible for these individuals, or that they somehow speak for a hidden Jewish conspiracy. (2) It is not anti-semitic to criticise the behaviour of the Israeli government or its treatment of the Palestinians (which is frequently appalling). It is anti-semitic to apply a double standard whereby Israeli actions are denounced in isolation from those of Palestinian militants or the Arab/Islamic/other adversaries of Israel, as if Israel were somehow uniquely evil. (3) In my opinion it is not anti-semitic to say the state of Israel should never have been established in the first place (a view held by many Jews) provided the person who argues this is prepared to acknowledge the right of Jews to equal citizenship in other states, a right which they were so often and shamefully denied at the time of the Holocaust - and, though it pains me to say it, with large and influential sections of Catholic opinion amongst those who denied it to them. On the other hand, I believe it is anti-semitic to call for the destruction of Israel because this would involve massive loss of life and ethnic cleansing. If anyone is prepared to argue that the destruction of Israel would not have these consequences, let him argue it and we will see how convincing his views are. (4) I repudiate the view that to attempt to convert Jews to Christianity - to offer them the Good News proclaimed by fellow Jews to them as well as to us Gentiles, the branches of wild olive grafted onto the olive stem of Israel - is inherently antisemitic. At the same time we Catholics and Christains should realise that the belief of many Jews that this is indeed antisemitic dervies from a long and shameful record of persecution, misrepresentation and forced conversion which we should all repudiate and for which we are called upon to offer repentance. It was wrong that under the Papal States the Jews of Rome were shut up in a ghetto, wrong that they were taxed to pay for preachers to attempt their conversion, wrong that they were ritually humiliated at Papal coronation processions, wrong that when one parent converted they were allowed to have the children baptised unilaterally and face their spouse with the prospect of forced conversion or permanent separation from their children, wrong that children who had been clandestinely baptised could be forcibly taken from their parents to be brought up as Catholics. These things were violations of natural law concerning the rights of parents over their children and the freedom of conscience. The record of Jewish-Christian relations is not all black, but we must first acknowledge these black spots as recent Popes have done before we can continue this discussion.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Dec 1, 2008 22:47:39 GMT
I support Hibernicus completely. Any Catholic who disparages a Jew because he or she is a Jew (whether by race alone, or by race and also by faith) is a disgrace.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Dec 2, 2008 11:05:50 GMT
I am totally with Hibernicus on the above. In a specifically Irish Catholic context, there are two Irish priests that need attention - Father Creagh CSsR who was allegedly responsible for the 'Limerick Pogrom' and Father Denis Fahey CSSp.
Father Fahey tried to create a category of 'anti-judaism' which he said was different from 'anti-semitism', but the problem with Father Fahey was that he applied his anti-judaism to all Jews.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Dec 2, 2008 15:01:30 GMT
I heard Fr Creagh had mental problems and that he responded to approaches made by Limerick shopkeepers who felt threatened by the Jewish peddlers in the city.
But Fr Fahey had no such excuse. And I believe his personal letters is like a catalogue of contemporary anti-semites.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 2, 2008 16:53:40 GMT
Sister Marie-Christine Athans has a very interesting book on Fahey discussing the extent of his anti-semitic contacts and the way in which his worldview derived from elements in fin de siecle French Catholicism which blamed Jews for the crackdown on the Church under the Third Republic (because of the conflicts triggered by the Dreyfus Affair.) This was also the context in which Fr. Creagh operated. Fr. Creagh may have had genuine concerns about moneylending (there were controversies over this issue in Irish Jewish congregations during this period) but he scapegoated all Jews without exception and threw in accusations about Jewish ritual murder of gentile children. (I am sorry to say that this belief was widespread in the mediaeval and early modern Church. Pope Benedict XIV - one of the greatest scholars ever to occupy the Papal chair - disproved its existence in the eighteenth century - I believe his work was cited during the notorious trial of Mendel Beiliss in Kiev just before the first World War - but many Catholics still clung to it.) Jews, of course, were not the only moneylenders in Limerick. I tend to pay more attention to Fr. Fahey than Fr. Creagh because he has left a significant ideological legacy which is still being invoked at the present day.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 2, 2008 17:22:40 GMT
A recent case which really frightens me on this issue is that of E. Michael Jones. For those of you who have not heard of him, Jones is quite a well-known Catholic apologist in America, who returned to the faith after a period of lapsation and got refused tenure at a Catholic college because of the vehemence with which he denounced contraception. HE ran a magazine called FIDELITY (now CULTURE WARS) and wrote a range of books on Catholicism and popular culture. He did some good work in exposing dodgy apparitions and revealing the seamier side of the SSPX. Unfortunately Jones had two big flaws. The first is that he tends to treat heresy as a rationalisation of personal vice, particularly sexual misbehaviour. This is sometimes true, but the trouble with this attitude is that if you assume that everyone who disagrees with you is consciously dishonest you close down the possibility of dialogue or or self-examination. The second and related flaw is that like many autodidacts he has no self-edit facility - when he gets a bright idea he becomes emotionally attached to it and refuses to consider the possibility that he might be mistaken. (An earlier example of this is the claim in his book DIONYSIUS RISING on the evils of contemporary music that Africa is somehow uniquely given over to Satan and African-influenced syncopathic music, which forms the basis of jazz, rock and many other forms of current popular music, is therefore the devil's work. I get a nasty feeling that he picked this up from some of the segregationist fundamentalists writing in the American South in the 1960s and liked it so much he ran with it without considering its racist implications.) From about the mid-1990s these traits have led Jones into some very murky waters. He began by pointing out that much Cold War Liberalism expressed suspicion of Catholics (especially the blue-collar urban ethnic variety) as natural fascists, and that some of the same people advocated town-planning schemes which had the effect of breaking up white ethnic urban neighbourhoods. (He treated any criticism of the culture of such neighbourhoods - e.g. the presence of corrupt party machines and organised crime- as expressions of anti-Catholic prejudice, which they sometimes were; but that doesn't mean there was no truth in the criticisms). Then he highlighted that the people who advocated these things were mostly WASPS and Jews (incidentally suggesting that housing desegregation - i.e. the striking down by American courts of measures which kept blacks from moving into white neighbourhoods - was a form of anti-Catholic ethnic cleansing). Then he moved on to claiming that it was a Jewish conspiracy. I have loooked in on his site from time to time over the alst few years and watched with horror as he sinks deeper and deeper into the tar sands of Jew-hatred. NOw he publishes material in his journal which is tantamount to Holocaust denial (I am thinking particularly of an article - not by him - which inter alia claimed that Elie Wiesel's account of his concentration camp experiences, and by extension, all such memoirs by Jewish survivors, was phony, and that Francois Mauriac got the Nobel Prize for helping Wiesel to fabricate it. I had to read that article twice before I grasped the full depth of its malevolence and even to think of it makes me shudder.) Jones has declared that Willis Carto, the most notorious neo-nazi and holocaust denier in America, is a man with whom he can have an honest conversation on whether the Jewish problem is racial or religious. (At the same time he says that anyone who thinks capitalism and Catholicism can be reconciled is not just mistaken - which is arguable - but deliberately corrupt and dishonest.) Jones has just produced a 1200-page tome called THE REVOLUTIONARY JEW, extracts from which I have seen online. Its intellectual level may be gauged from its statement that a far larger proportion of male than female porn "actors" are Jewish and that this represents a Jewish desire to defile gentile women. The last time I saw CHRISTIAN ORDER I was horrified to discover that they had published an ad for this foul work which they should not have touched with a bargepole. Catholics should have nothing to do with this muck - I don't want anyone else to sink into the same corruption as Jones if I can do anything to warn them. The first link is to an open letter by a former associate who saw which way Jones was heading and broke with him - well before Jones reached his present depths - www.johnreilly.info/olem.htm The second is linked to a website cataloguing the errors of another Catholic apologist who has gone off the rails, Robert Sungenis. Sungenis started to go dotty by advocating geocentrism. Now he has teamed up with Jones and hails THE REVOLUTIONARY JEW as a third Testament continuing the story of the Jews' conflict with God. sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/ What worries me is that because we stand at an angle to the mainstream by our adherence to the Faith, some of us may tend to think that any idea rejected by the mainstream and which can claim some sort of a Catholic pedigree must also have something to be said for it. NOSTRA AETATE was one of the best things Vatican II did - agreed?
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Dec 2, 2008 22:41:05 GMT
What worries me is that because we stand at an angle to the mainstream by our adherence to the Faith, some of us may tend to think that any idea rejected by the mainstream and which can claim some sort of a Catholic pedigree must also have something to be said for it. NOSTRA AETATE was one of the best things Vatican II did - agreed? Agreed, absolutely.
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Post by Harris on Dec 3, 2008 10:51:28 GMT
Accusations coupled with judgment is where humans of any sort overstep their boundary into the realm of Christ's Kingdom with Christ as the Judge of mankind. But this is what happens in the courts in everyday life. Are courts of justice overstepping their boundaries as you see it?
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Dec 3, 2008 14:14:37 GMT
I think Gabriel is equating judgement and condemnation here. Gabriel, when you were confirmed, did you learn the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost. Wisdom, Understanding and Counsel were numbered among them, which seem to me to be precisely the faculties used in the act of judgement.
Anyway, Gabriel is pulling us away from the point of this discussion - that some Catholics, including highly influential ones like the late Father Denis Fahey, led many others along the road of anti-semitism.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Dec 3, 2008 14:31:29 GMT
A recent case which really frightens me on this issue is that of E. Michael Jones. For those of you who have not heard of him, Jones is quite a well-known Catholic apologist in America, who returned to the faith after a period of lapsation and got refused tenure at a Catholic college because of the vehemence with which he denounced contraception. HE ran a magazine called FIDELITY (now CULTURE WARS) and wrote a range of books on Catholicism and popular culture. He did some good work in exposing dodgy apparitions and revealing the seamier side of the SSPX. At the risk of sounding like a hackneyed politician, Hibernicus, I am glad you brought the subject up. I am all too familiar with the egregious views of Dr Jones, which I know came from good beginnings. You might have seen the lengthy exchange that Monkeyman and I had on the topic of the SSPX elsewhere in this forum (I am not thinking of Guillaume, I am thinking of McAllister and Secusia) and I know you have talked to Faithful and Sceilg on the same topic. But Monkeyman and I talked a lot about Bishop Richard Williamson with a few other members chipping in. If I remember the Fidelity exposé correctly, it was alleged all too plausibly that the SSPX was devolving into to a neo-nazi cult and Bishop Williamson and Father Ramon Angles (then head of St Mary's College in Kansas, now SSPX District Superior in Ireland and key member of the SSPX involved in negotiations with Rome) were picked out for special mention. Williamson, for his statements on the Jews and the Holocaust is excluded from Canada and had his Green Card to the United States pulled (for those unfamiliar with the case - Williamson is an Englishman). Now, the point of irony, Dr Jones has of late struck up a tactical alliance of sorts with his former adversary Bishop Williamson. This is weird. But it seems the world view of alienated traditional Catholics is to reject everything mainstream - this includes conventional views on the Holocaust and Hitler and goes into areas seen on this board - the non-debate over geocentricity versus heliocentricity. I have even seen someone argue for Atlantis in rad trad circles. There are more. But, ad rem, to use the traditional Latin. Anti-semitism is wrong. The Holocaust didn't make it wrong: it was always wrong. Catholics need to see this and use their judgemental faculties to absorb this truth and if the need arises act on it. The Williamson line SSPX and cranks like E Michael Jones show us that the need to be vigilant in relation to distorted Catholic anti-semitism still exists.
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Post by Harris on Dec 3, 2008 16:05:20 GMT
Heres a poser for you........
Was Saint Paul Anti-Semitic?
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 3, 2008 16:28:55 GMT
No, if by this is meant that his view that after Jesus came the Old Covenant is no longer obligatory. I am sorry to say that, like certain expressions in the Gospel of St. John which should of course be read as the expressions of a Jew debating with fellow Jews, he has often been interpreted as justifying Catholic anti-semitism (by which I would mean the view that the Jews collectively are particularly wicked and singled out for condemnation). I would add that in the light of history it is quite understandable that Jews should see him (and indeed Christianity) as inherently anti-semitic. This is why it is so important to make distinctions and to be aware of past faults and make due atonement. BTW there was actually a strand of anti-semitism (and probably still is) which claimed that Jesus was not really a Jew and that all the things they didn't like about Christianity were Jewish distortions introduced by St. Paul, seen as a hidebound legalistic Pharisee. John Pentland Mahaffy, the famous late Victorian Trinity College classicist (and Church of Ireland clergyman) held this view; he delighted in shocking naive divinity students by sneering at St. Paul as "a mean little epileptic Jew" who showed his semitic narrowness by failing to take advantage of the excellent Greek educational institutions available in Tarsus. Jesus, in this view, was essentially Hellenic. The present-day emphasis on Jesus' Jewishness is partly a reaction against this sort of mindset (and the horrors to which it contributed) and partly to the fact that we know much more about first-century Judaism thanks to discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Dec 4, 2008 12:22:11 GMT
Just found this blog: communionrail.wordpress.com/Seems someone wants to resurrect Maria Duce. I quote: In Ireland in the 1940’s and 1950’s a remarkable organization called Maria Duce proposed a six point plan for the assertion of the rights of Christ the King in society. This organization based itself on the writings of the great Fr Denis Fahey. Perhaps the time is ripe for a new incarnation of Maria Duce in Ireland? No there is not - it is rather time to condemn Father Fahey, his writings which incite hatred against the Jews and the works of his crazed followers. About 13 years after the Second World War, Bobby Briscoe TD became Lord Mayor of Dublin for the first time. The editorial in Fiat, the journal of Firinne, the name Maria Duce was compelled to adopt after Fahey's death was disgusting, the type of rot one might excuse in the Volkische Beobachter (for those who don't know, that was a Nazi rag). I am finding it interesting that those who promote Fr Fahey and his work: 'Credo', 'Sceilg' and 'Communion rail' seem very reluctant to do so openly. Is this a coincidence?
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 4, 2008 14:18:56 GMT
In connection with my post today on John Reilly's Catholic blog/website and its discussion of the gnostic movement which calls itself "traditionalism" and sometimes tries to infiltrate Catholic traditionalist movements, I post a link to a 2006 item from his website which discusses the influence of the neo-nazi International Third Position group and its guru Derek Holland in Catholic traditionalist circles. (Reilly provides links to further material, including the Le Floch Report, a website run by SSPX adherents who are disturbed at this development.) I think this is relevant to this thread because some of the further links discuss how the infiltrators appeal to anti-semitism to give themselves credibility among traditionalists. Derek Holland has been linked to the SSPX Athlone congregation in the past and for some years it has been known that the ITP has been trying to fish in Irish Catholic waters, so to speak. www.johnreilly.info/18April06.htm
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