Catholic Church

On Europe and “the Faith”

/308 Comments/in , , /by

PopeFrancis

“Too often you have not been welcomed…Forgive the closed-mindedness and indifference of our societies, which fear the change of lifestyle and mentality that your presence requires.”
Pope Francis, 2016.

“Europe is the faith, and the faith is Europe…I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is The Church.”
Hillaire Belloc, 1920. 

Over the years my attitudes towards race and religion have unfortunately brought me into conflict with many Christians, some of whom have been very close to me. Closest to home, my wife is an evangelical Christian. Like many of her co-religionists, she believes much of what she is told in church, not only in terms of what is written in the Bible, but also in the social instructions her church issues in order to steer its flock towards a “good” and “moral” Christian life.

My wife and I are opposites in many respects. She is fully aware of my own agnosticism, and is equally aware of my positions on racial, religious and political matters. Possessing an abundance of good qualities as a wife and mother, I don’t think I am doing her a terrible injustice by stating that she doesn’t completely understand the complexities of the subject matter I routinely explore. To her, the thing that matters most is that my attitudes are “good.” It is the “moral” merit of my positions that she is most interested in, and because she is a Christian the question of how “moral” my opinions are is entirely dependent on how closely they fit with the Christian moral worldview  —  as taught to her by her church. Thus, when we discuss this or that aspect of the news she will often ask of my opinions: “Yes, but is that a good attitude to have? Is that displaying forgiveness? Isn’t your heart too hard?” If the discussion continues, it frequently evolves into a debate between (my) facts and (her) moral feelings. Read more

Christianity and the Ethnic Suicide of the West

/85 Comments/in , , , /by

Several comments on my post “What’s wrong with the Swedes?” mention Christianity as a problem in the dispossession of Whites. I agree that Christianity is part of the problem, but I think there are several difficulties with supposing that it is a root cause of the problem.

  • First and foremost, Christianity was the religion of the West during its expansion around the world. A century ago, with the exception of China, Japan, Siam, Korea, Ethiopia, and Liberia, the rest of the planet was dominated by Christian Europeans. Christianity was at least consistent with this incredible expansion and with the very large increase in the European population that occurred during this period of expansion. If anything, the decline of the West has co-occurred with the decline of religion among Western elites. If the world had stayed the way it was in 1960, no one would be talking about the suicide of the West.
  • Christianity has been many things throughout the centuries—an ideology of ethnic defense during the Iberian Reconquista, a pillar of exploitative monarchies and aristocracies in Europe and Latin America, a force for ethnic defense against usurious exploitation of peasants by ethnic outsiders at times during the Middle Ages, supporting slavery and segregation in the American South and apartheid in South Africa. Christianity has not had a consistent message of ethnic suicide or moral universalism. People on both sides of the slave trade in 17th–18th-century Britain were Christian. Both sides of the American Civil War were Christian.
  • Throughout history, Christianity has been quite adept at rendering unto Caesar—accommodating to the powers that be. In the U.S. and I suppose elsewhere in the West, Christians had much more influence on culture prior to the 1960s and the rise of the secular left — e.g., spearheading the successful drive to rein in Hollywood depictions of sex and Christianity beginning in the 1920s. But all that ended with the cultural revolution of the 1960s which was certainly not Christian in inspiration. Right now, the powers that be are the secular, multi-cultural, pro-non-White-immigration left, and one of their main goals is the eradication of public displays of Christianity and traditional Christian views on marriage and the family. Christianity itself has been corrupted by the secular left, most obviously in the case of the Second Vatican Council but also including the mainline Protestant sects. The Church had stood for cultural conservatism and had been a bulwark against Jewish influence for centuries.

Read more

St. John Chrysostom on the Jews: Creating an Anti-Jewish Group Strategy

/45 Comments/in , , /by
Body of St. John Chrysostom (Chapel of the Choir – Basilica of St. Peter – Vatican City)

Body of St. John Chrysostom (Chapel of the Choir – Basilica of St. Peter – Vatican City)

A correspondent just notified me of a blog post from 2010 on St. John Chrysostom by Roger Pearse, a scholar of Christianity in the ancient world (“Some remarks about John Chrysostom’s homilies against the Jews“). Pearse quotes from a 1935 summary of Chrysostom’s writings whose author, A. L. Williams, notes that Chrysostom was motivated by the fact that many Christians were

frequenting Jewish synagogues,  were attracted to the synagogal Fasts and Feasts, sometimes by the claims to superior sanctity made by the followers of the earlier religion, so that an oath taken in a synagogue was more binding than in a church,  and sometimes by the offer of charms and amulets in which Jews of the lower class dealt freely.

Williams concluded:

We gather from these Homilies that the Jews were a great social, and even a great religious, power in Antioch.

Exactly. As discussed in Chapter 3 of Separation and Its Discontents, the phenomenon of Judaizing Christians in the ancient world is a marker of Jewish power at the time. For example, the rather limited anti-Jewish actions of the government during the 150 years following the Edict of Toleration of 313, which included many attempts to ban the common practice of Jews enslaving non-Jews, are interpreted by historian Bernard S. Bachrach “as attempts to protect Christians from a vigorous, powerful, and often aggressive Jewish gens.”  Jews as a powerful group were looked up to and emulated by many non-Jews, just as today we see the same phenomenon, not only Bush-yarmulkaamong many Evangelical Christians, but also Hollywood celebrities who dabble in kabbalah and pretty much the entire non-Jewish political class which we see making pilgrimages to Israel and proudly wearing yarmulkes and displaying menorahs during photo-ops. Read more

The Catholic League on the Weinstein Brothers

/in , , /by

As part of our Christmas program here at TOO we highlighted Bad Santa, a film by the Weinstein brothers. The Catholic League has a number of posts on another Weinstein film, Philomena, which is currently in release. This brief comment notes several other anti-Christian movies by the Weinsteins:

[An ad for Philomena in the New York Times] gives high profile to a review by the Times’ Stephen Holden, which says, in part, that the film’s “political subtext” is its “comparison of the church’s oppression and punishment of unmarried sex…with homophobia and the United States government’s reluctance to deal with the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.”

This is a straightforward pitch to anti-Catholic bigots. The Weinsteins are no strangers to Catholic bashing, having made a good living off of it. In 1995, they offered “Priest,” a film featuring nothing but miscreant priests; I succeeded in getting the movie’s opening date moved from Good Friday. In 1998, they gave us “The Butcher Boy,” which starred Sinead O’Connor as a foul-mouthed Virgin Mary. In 1999, we were treated to “Dogma,” where the audience learned of a descendant of Mary and Joseph who works in an abortion clinic. In 2002, they released “40 Days and 40 Nights,” a film that ridiculed a Catholic for giving up sex for Lent. Also opening in 2002 was “The Magdalene Sisters,” a movie that smeared nuns. In 2003, “Bad Santa” opened for the holidays; Santa was cast as a chain-smoking, drunken, foul-mouthed, suicidal, sexual predator. In 2006, “Black Christmas” made a predictably dark statement about the holiday.

In 2013, the Weinsteins released “Philomena,” a tale about an Irish teenager who abandoned her out-of-wedlock son, and who, because of the good efforts of nuns, was adopted by an American couple. Of course, the movie maligns the nuns, as well as Catholic teachings.

It is the sexual maniacs in Hollywood who nurture a debased culture, one that breeds illegitimacy and AIDS. Yet the Weinsteins, and the Times, never stop blaming the Catholic Church, which counsels restraint. Thus have they inverted the victim and the victimizer. Read more

Léon de Poncins: The Problem with the Jews at the Council, Part IV

/1 Comment/in , , /by

Go to Part I

Go to Part II

Go to Part III

X: ISRAEL AND THE REVOLTS OF THE MIND[1] 

The Jewish antagonism has been manifested in a continuous—even if underhanded—manner in the two thousand year course of the Judeo-Christian clash. “The Jew—James Darmesteter tells us—was the champion of reason against the mythical mind; in the intellectual night of the Middle Ages, only in it did he think that he could find asylum. Provoked by the Church which wants to persuade him, after having tried in vain to convert him by force, he undermines with irony and perspicacity some of her controversies, and, like no one else, knows how to find the vulnerabilities of her doctrine. The understanding of the Sacred Books, and even more the terrible sagacity of the oppressed, are his means to discover those points. He is the doctor of the incredulous; all the revolts of the mind are presented to him in the shade or under an open sky. He worked in the immense forge of curses of the great Emperor Frederick and of the princes of Swabia or Aragon; he fashions together this deadly arsenal of reasoning and irony that he offered then to the skeptical of the Renaissance and the libertines of the Seventeenth Century. And the sarcasm of Voltaire is none other than the heavy echo of a word murmured six centuries earlier, in the shade of the ghetto, or, even earlier, (in the Counter-Gospel of the I and II Century) at the time of Celsus and Origen, and at the very origins of the religion of Christ.”[2]

For his part, Elie Faure (1873-1937), whose works were recently reprinted and highly publicized, talks about “this sarcastic snickering (Heine, Offenbach) towards all that is not Jewish […]. His ruthless analysis and his irresistible sarcasm acted as vitriol.” Following the course of our history, “it is easy to follow the trail, and although it is not possible to quantify the dissemination of Jewish thought, after its passage we can take note of its destructive power. Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Marcel Proust, Charlie Chaplin opened up to us, in all senses, the prodigious streets which demolish the narrow lanes of the Classic Greco-Latin and Catholic edifice in which for five or six centuries the burning doubt of the Jewish soul was waiting for opportunities to destroy it. For it is necessary to note that its [sc. that of the Jewish soul] own skeptical pole appears to emerge for the first time from the complete silence that surrounds the action of the Jewish mind in the Middle Ages, silence in the middle of which, from the Renaissance onwards, some voices burst forth, and which [sc. silence] today is annihilated by a great din.”

Yes, “is it possible to consider the Jew as anything other than a demolisher armed with corrosive doubts who, since the time of the Greeks, has always opposed Israel to the sentimental idealism of Europe? […] His historic mission is clearly defined, and perhaps forever. It will be the main factor of each apocalyptic period, as it was at the end of the ancient world, and as it will be at the end of the Christian world in which we live.”[3] Read more

Léon de Poncins: The Problem with the Jews at the Council, Part III

/in , , /by

Go to Part I

Go to Part II

VII: JUDAISM’S STRUGGLE AGAINST THE CATHOLIC TRADITION

In fact, behind the appearance of an ecumenical search for a reconciliation between religions and other equally seductive words, it was a matter of demolishing the bulwark of Catholic Tradition, defined by Josué Jéhouda as “the ancient fortress of Christian obscurantism.” According to Jéhouda, there were three attempts at the “straightening out of Christianity,” which “sought to cleanse the Christian conscience of the miasmata of hatred”; three attempts at the straightening out of Christian theology which had become suffocating and paralyzing; “three open breaches in the old fortress of Christian obscurantism.” In fact, three important stages in the destruction of traditional Christianity:

– The Renaissance
– The Protestant Reformation
– The French Revolution

In these three major movements, Jéhouda perceives the wonderful work of dechristianization to which each of them, in various forms, has powerfully contributed. He does not tell us this so brutally, since he is very skillful at handling the artifices of language, but that bursts forth clearly from his writings, as we will show with some quotes extracted from his works:

“The Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the French Revolution represent the three attempts at straightening out the Christian mentality to put it in tune with the progressive development of reason and science, and while dogmatic Christianity continued to make itself obscure, the Jews were gradually emancipating themselves.”

Speaking of the Renaissance, he maintains:

“We can affirm that if the Renaissance had not deviated from its original course in favor of the dualized Greek world, we would have had without a doubt a world unified by the creative thought and doctrine of the Kabbalah.”[1] Read more

Léon de Poncins: The Problem with the Jews at the Council, Part II

/in , , /by

IV. Jules Isaac and the Church Fathers

In the second of these works—Genèse de l’antisémitisme—published in 1956, Jules Isaac strove to discredit the Fathers of the Church. It is impossible to summarize in a few words a volume of 350 pages. Let us limit ourselves to mentioning some of its most characteristic passages:

It is true that in the pagan world there was a strong current of anti-Semitism, much earlier than Christian anti-Semitism; it is equally true that this anti-Semitism has at times sparked bloody conflicts or ‘pogroms.’ Just as there was a pagan anti-Semitism, whose origin dates back to the divine commandment, in what would Christianity find its justification for having inherited it (after having been itself a victim of it for a long time), and even more, after having pushed to paroxysm its virulence, malignity, calumnies and mortal hatreds? Against Judaism and its followers, no weapon has been more fearful than the ‘teaching of contempt,’ especially inculcated by the Fathers of the Church of the fourth century; and in this teaching no thesis was more harmful than the ‘deicide people.’ The Christian mentality is still steeped in the depths of its subconscious. . . . To fail to recognize this and not to stress it is equivalent to ignoring or disguising the largest source of Christian anti-Semitism.”[1] . . .

The ‘teaching of contempt’ is a theological creation.[2]

The blind violence of the ignorant masses is intimately linked to the cold science of the theologians. A fundamental accusation to which is linked the theme of capital punishment, of the terrible curse that rests on the shoulders of Israel, explaining (and justifying in advance) its unfortunate fate, its most cruel trials, the worst violence committed against it, torrents of blood flowing continually from its open and living wounds. . . .

So that through a skilful manipulation, alternately, of doctrinal judgments and popular anger one makes fall back on God what, when viewed from the terrestrial sphere, is without doubt the result of human wickedness, this perversity, skillfully exploited in different ways from century to century, from generation to generation, and which culminated in Auschwitz, in the gas chambers and crematory ovens of Nazi Germany.[3] Read more