A former student of SSPX Bishop Williamson speaks about anti-Semitism in the Traditionalist Catholic far-right

The schismatic Catholic order SSPX (Society of St. Pius X), the largest organized group within the so-called traditionalist Catholic movement, has a long record of promoting anti-Semitism and extreme far-right politics while portraying itself as merely restoring traditional theology and values.  The SSPX, while formed in reaction to the religious reforms of the Second Vatican Council,  has for many years played a significant role in the far-right politics of a number of predominantly Catholic nations in South America and Europe. The connections between the SSPX leadership and the far-right is longstanding and significant, going back (in the pre-Vatican II era) to ideological roots in Charles Maurras'  Action Française, and its founder's support for the Vichy regime.  The SSPX aided and abetted the fugitive Nazi war criminal Paul Touvier, whom they hid from justice within their priory in Nice.  They have close associations with the leadership of the French National Front Party and the International Third Position, among other neo-fascist parties.  Their support for the Argentine junta during the Dirty War included providing theological justification for torturing those deemed by the regime to be subversive.  Works by Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of SSPX, were taught in Argentine military academies and distributed by the military and church hierarchy to indoctrinate those operating the torture chambers of the Dirty War.  (Read here and here and here.) In a nutshell, the SSPX's connections to the far-right and anti-Semitism comprise a very long and sordid history which has never been fully told.

Kansas Attorney J. Christopher Pryor used to belong to the SSPX.  Pryor, who was raised in a conservative Catholic home in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge neighborhood and on Long Island, became affiliated with the traditionalist Catholic movement under the impression that it merely promoted a conservative brand of Catholicism including the traditional Latin Mass.  His experiences studying for the priesthood within a SSPX seminary gave him an intimate view of the organization and led him to believe that it represents something more sinister.  In fact, Mr. Pryor studied at the largest American seminary of the SSPX, located in Winona, Minnesota, a school which was at that time run by the infamous Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson.  (Williamson was given the title of Bishop by the order after it broke away from the Vatican so the legitimacy of that title may be questioned.)  Williamson gained notoriety after his November, 2008 interview on Swedish TV, during which he denied the Holocaust.  The ensuing uproar led to the SSPX firing him from his position as the leader of their Latin American operation, which, not coincidentally, is headquartered in Buenos Aires.  Williamson fled Argentina for London, where he received assistance from his ideological comrades Michelle Renouf and David Irving.  (More here.)  Although Williamson has become a lightning rod, embarrassing the order by drawing public attention to his outrageously bigoted statements and associations, the attention given him has not done enough to bring to to light the anti-Semitism, paranoia and political extremism at the ideological core of the traditionalist Catholic movement.

Christopher Pryor has, in recent years, made an effort to inform the public about Williamson and the SSPX in particular, and the traditionalist Catholic movement in general.  In October, 2010, he participated in the annual conference of the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism (JSA), where he gave a brief talk on the subject.  Nine minutes isn't nearly enough time to hear all he has to say about this, but it's a good start.  I strongly recommend that those interested in this subject read Pryor's article, "Traditional Catholicism and the Teachings of Bishop Richard Williamson", in Vol. 1, Issue #2 of the JSA.  It can be downloaded in pdf here.  I also recommend reading the blog Fringe Watch, which covers this subject on an ongoing basis.




(More video of the conference is available here.)

The Southern Poverty Law Center has published a number of useful articles about the traditionalist Catholic movement. Check them out here and here and here and here.  More here.

Here's video of Williamson's infamous interview:




Bishop Richard Williamson (left, background) with David Irving (foreground)

Mel Gibson's priest opposes "Holocaust myth", alleges Jews undermine Catholic Church

Over the years, the question of whether Mel Gibson is a bigot has been raised in several contexts. First, when he made his film version of the Passion Play, he and his defenders portrayed this as merely the act of a devout Catholic, not an act of anti-Semitism.  Next, when he spewed anti-Semitic statements ("the Jews are responsible for starting every war") at a Jewish police officer who was arresting him for drunk driving, his defenders claimed that he was so drunk that he didn't know what he was saying. Now, with the publication of extensive audio apparently of Gibson using abusive, misogynist and racist language, threatening his girlfriend with death and defending his having punched her in the face as being justified, those prior defenses are wearing pretty thin. (Of all these offenses, his alleged punching of his girlfriend is by far the worst, so I am reluctant to list it in the same category as the others. A violent attack on a woman holding a child is a crime of a much high order than hate speech.)

With respect to his views concerning Jews, I have doubted Gibson's good intentions from the time of his Passion of the Christ, first because of the Jewish-Christian conflict its release and publicity campaign deliberately set up, second, because of the contents of the film, and third, because I know a bit about the traditionalist Catholic movement.  That movement, in spite of its name, does not advocate a return to a familiar Catholicism (at least to those old enough) of Latin masses and fish dinner on Friday.  In fact, it is a cult-like reactionary group which opposes the Vatican, promotes bizarre conspiracy theories and has ties to extremist, sometimes violent, political movements.

One important clue as to Mel Gibson's world view in general and his feelings about Jews in particular is provided by who he chose to serve as the priest of the traditionalist church he had built in Agoura Hills, near his home in Malibu.  (That church, which is private and not associated in any way with the Roman Catholic archdiocese or any other recognized Catholic denomination, has been funded extravagantly by Gibson , reportedly to the tune of $64 million dollars [read here and here.]  Gibson is solely in charge of what takes place within it.).  Gibson chose a priest named Louis Campbell (read here), an activist within the far-right traditionalist movement who had previously served as priest at Hutton Gibson's church in Stafford, Texas.  Father Campbell advocates extreme anti-Jewish and anti-modernist views, as evidenced by his "Sunday Sermons", which are published on a traditionalist website called DailyCatholic.org.  These sermons are presumably of the same sort as the ones he gave at Mel Gibson's church.

In one outrageous sermon (read here), Campbell goes so far as to state his opinion that the Holocaust is a myth promoted by Zionists and an absurd list of "prominent Jews", designed to undermine the church, negate the message of Christ and absolve the Jewish people for deicide.  ("Zionist interests have flooded the world with the concept that the real holocaust took place in the 1940's.")  Campbell contends that the antidote for this myth was provided by Mel Gibson:

   "The Holocaust myth is now being challenged mightily by the movie 'The Passion of the Christ.' The Jews (and we do not speak of all Jews, but of many influential Jews such as Abe Foxman and the ADL, Rabbi Schmuley Boteach and Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Museum, and those who have control of the media) had almost succeeded in blotting out the name of Jesus from the consciousness of the people. The public had been carefully programmed through a relentless round of movies, documentaries and books, so as to have the guilt of the Holocaust constantly in mind. 'Schindler's List' and the abominable book "Hitler's Pope" in so demeaning and desecrating Pius XII's good name, are perfect examples of this. They had turned the tables on us. Rather than the Jews being reputedly responsible for the death of Jesus Christ, we now had Christians, especially the Roman Catholic Church, bearing the guilt for the Holocaust.

    "But with one fell swoop, this marvelous movie struck a nearly fatal blow to their carefully executed plan of convincing the world that the Holocaust is the pivotal event, the defining moment in human history, thus displacing the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ from that exalted position. This is the real explanation for their rage against Christ, and against this movie. They are afraid that Christians will begin to realize once again that the true Holocaust, the one perfect and acceptable sacrifice to God our Father, took place two thousand years ago on Calvary's hill, when Jesus Christ shed His Precious Blood for the sins of the world. All human beings, whether Jews or Gentiles, of every place and of every time, must go to the foot of the Cross of Jesus and acknowledge Him as the Messiah, if they are to be saved.

    "The Holocaust myth and the Sacrifice of Christ on Calvary are unalterably opposed to one another. If the Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross is the one perfect Sacrifice acceptable to God, the true Holocaust, and the one defining moment in human history, the Jewish Holocaust cannot be the unique event they claim it to be. It was a terrible atrocity, a great human tragedy, but not a perfect sacrifice offered to God; it was not redemptive; it cannot save anyone; it was not a holocaust, certainly not The Holocaust.

    "But even the Vatican II church cooperates, resulting in its own demolition. John Paul II has apologized to the Jews for the sins of Christians against them, and has absolved them from the necessity of believing in Jesus Christ. Much was made of his "historic" trip to Jerusalem where his visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum was celebrated by the media. 'The awful truth is this--that John Paul II and the New Vatican accept the myth of the Holocaust, thus denying the uniqueness and efficacy of the Sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, and of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.'"

In this sermon, Campbell cites a column on the Lew Rockwell website written by Christopher Manion (read here) as the source of his thinking on this subject.  (Manion is a paleo-conservative blogger associated with a group called Catholics for Ron Paul.  Read here.)  After reading both, I see why he cites Manion.  Campbell was essentially restating Manion's idea of comparing the Holocaust to Christ's death in terms more suited to a fire and brimstone sermon than an opinion column, and taking Manion's idea of Jews denying "Christ's Holocaust" to a higher level of hate.  Here's Manion, purportedly warning Jews not to do what Campbell, after reading this, accuses them of doing:

"(E)very Jew who does not proclaim Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior is denying the Christian view of the Holocaust – in other words, Jews might fear that Christians view them with the same virulent scorn that many Jews heap on "Holocaust Deniers" like Gibson’s father.  

"Hence, when Gibson, the son of a modern Holocaust denier, makes a film about the perfect Holocaust of Christ’s Passion and death, contemporary observers – and not only Jews – might be tempted to consider "The Passion of the Christ" a blasphemous affront to the modern Holocaust and an insult to the suffering and death of six million Jews under Hitler.

"If Jews think we Christians hate them for not loving Jesus, no wonder they’re upset! That would mean that we want to punish them as the perpetrators of the perfect Holocaust – Christ’s Passion and death on the cross."

So Campbell, after reading that, actually does call Jews Holocaust deniers for their disbelief in Christ's "Holocaust", then complains that Jews are using the "myth" of the Nazi Holocaust to negate their collective guilt for killing Christ.  Campbell uses this rationale as a way to praise Gibson's Passion as an effective counter to this Jewish conspiracy.  He then goes on to somehow connect this bizarre conspiracy theory to the promotion of both Communism and abortion:

Why is the death of the Jews a uniquely horrible event, an unspeakable atrocity beyond all others throughout human history? Why will they not allow the term "holocaust" to be applied to the deaths of millions of innocent children who die in their mothers' wombs as victims of abortion? Why do we not see museums dedicated to the Ukrainians, or to the tens of millions of Christians and others who died in the Soviet Union?

Even when attempting to strike a moderate, compassionate tone with respect to Holocaust victims, Campbell can't help but add a disquieting note of uncertainty as to the actual historicity of their fate:

If six million Jews died in the death camps under the Nazis we must have compassion for them.

If Campbell doesn't know that the Holocaust occurred, I must conclude that he doesn't want to know.

Reading some of his other "Sunday sermons" on the Daily Catholic website, one finds Campbell promoting bizarre conspiracy theories alleging Jewish interference in the Catholic Church. In one, he actually claims that Cardinal Augustin Bea, who was one of the church leaders responsible for liberalizing church teachings at Vatican II, was secretly a Jew himself. (Read here.)  Campbell absurdly cites (via another source) an obscure Egyptian newspaper called Al Gomhuria which made this claim and alleged that Bea's true family name was "Behar".

Another of Campbell's sermons lashes out against the very idea of religious freedom, one of the fundamental principles of the U.S. Constitution, implying that the nefarious unseen hand of the Masons is behind its promotion, and that it intrinsically opposed to Christianity (read here):

"Religious freedom as a fundamental human right - it sounds like something from the Declaration of the Rights of Man of the French Revolution, something you would expect from the U.N., and not from the Vatican. Actually it is a Masonic doctrine, which has overtaken the true Catholic doctrine on religious freedom. But it is one of the most important pillars of the pontificate of our putative pope, John Paul II, without which his ambitious ecumenical and inter-faith program would collapse."

In his sermons, Campbell repeatedly promotes an ardent anti-Zionism rooted in an opposition to the existence of Israel in particular, and to Jewish power in general.  He considers both to be part of an anti-Christian holy war.  Even while using sometimes violent imagery, he connects his anti-Zionism to his purported desire for peace, which he differentiates from  John Paul II's peace activism:

(A)lthough he never fails to promote his famous "civilization of peace and love," John Paul II supports the false claims of Jewish Zionism, thus contributing to the cause of war in the Middle East. For if, as the Church has always taught, the Scriptures say that the promises were fulfilled in Jesus Christ and His Church, how can it be said at the same time that God promised Jerusalem to the Jews? To affirm one interpretation is to deny the other. To support the false claims of the Jewish Zionists is to deny the Church its inheritance and to scandalize the little ones-faithful Catholics.

He follows this odd plea for peace with a prayer to bring on Armegeddon and punish Zionists and their supporters, who he depicts as defying God's will:

Yes, God has something to say to presidents, prime ministers and potentates who ignore His laws and have an exaggerated sense of their own power and importance:

"And now, O kings, give heed; take warning, you rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice before Him; with trembling pay homage to Him, lest He be angry and you perish from the way, when His anger blazes suddenly. Happy are all who take refuge in Him!" (Ps.2:10-12).

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in the day of battle!

Campbell's peace activism seems to have its limits. In a sermon he gave on Passion Sunday, 2004, Campbell predicted a holy war in which Jews would be violently punished for rejecting Christianity:

"Israel's ultimate act of defiance against God was its rejection of Jesus Christ as the promised Messiah, which broke their Covenant with God and merited for them the seven-fold covenant curses. Jesus Himself foretold this when He thundered woes against the Scribes and the Pharisees, declaring that upon them would come "all the just blood that has been shed on the earth" and that "all these things will come upon this generation" (Mt.23:33-36).

"The Apocalypse of St. John, the last book of the Bible, gives us an account of the struggle between those who hold to the Old Covenant, symbolized by the harlot dressed in purple and scarlet, riding upon the scarlet beast, and the holy and immaculate Bride of Christ, the Church of the New Covenant. The Old Covenant fails as the covenant curses described in Leviticus fall upon unfaithful Israel, initiated by the opening of seven seals by the Lamb, the sounding of seven trumpets by the angels, the roar of seven thunders (although St. John is commanded not to write what they spoke), and the pouring out of seven bowls of wrath upon the earth by the angels. Jerusalem, called Babylon in the Apocalypse, is utterly destroyed. St. John echoes the words of Jesus: "And in her was found blood of prophets and of saints, and of all who have been slain upon the earth:" (Apoc.18:24)."

Campbell connects this prophecy to the post-Vatican II Catholic church, alleging that it is largely illegitimate because of its acceptance of the legitimacy of Judaism:

"(B)ecause of widespread infidelity and apostasy within the Church, the bowls of God's wrath are already being poured out anew upon the earth, in particular because the Modernists who have taken over the Vatican have nullified God's judgments by recognizing the apostate Jews as "the people of the covenant," and "our elder brothers in the faith." They tell them that there are two valid Covenants, theirs and the Christian Covenant. Thus they deny Jesus Christ and make Him out to be a liar..."

While couched in the language of biblical texts and traditional Catholic teachings, Campbell's views, and those of the Gibsons and many other traditionalists, are actually a thing apart from what most would think of as traditional Catholicism. The traditionalist movement, which is entirely a reaction to external threats which they believe to have infiltrated the church to destroy it from within, devotes itself to a very great extent to promoting conspiracy theories about this perceived attack. Thus, in the name of promoting traditional Catholicism, traditionalist Catholics instead promote a sort of cult designed to counter Jewish and Masonic conspiracies, crypto-Jewish cardinals and secretly Communist popes. To call that "traditional" is a stretch. The stuff that the Gibsons believe is not a return to an earlier form of Catholicism, but a descent into pseudo-religious paranoia.

In a sermon called "The New Judaizers", Campbell writes (read here):

"The Modernists at the Vatican have denied their heritage as the true heirs of Abraham by pretending that Catholics have some kind of spiritual relationship with the Jews and the Muslims because we are all 'children of Abraham.' This is deceitful and scandalous, confusing Catholics, and leading the conciliar church deeper into the darkness 'where there will be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth' (Mt.8:12). "

The Gibsons and their brand of traditionalism pray for the destruction of the modern Catholic Church with its acceptance of Jews and rejection of Jewish collective guilt. They not only pray for the "perfidious Jews" to be converted, they also pray for those who refuse conversion to be destroyed among other agents of the Antichrist.  They glorify the Crusades and Spanish Inquisition, and await something comparable, only much much larger, to finish the job.

That these horrible, hateful views have the seal of approval of his father, his priest and his faith must play a role in Mel Gibson's belief that his expressions of hate are acceptable.

Hutton Gibson: John Paul II was Soviet agent, Vatican and world governments are controlled by the Antichrist

Mel Gibson's father Hutton Gibson has given an interview on the white supremacist radio program "Political Cesspool" in which he accused Pope John Paul II of being a Soviet agent, and charged that the Catholic Church is under the control of a conspiracy led by the Antichrist. He went on to state that the same conspiracy had taken over

"every legitimate government in the world from the top. It's the same plot. Why would they vary the method? It seems to work."

When asked to assess the current pope, Benedict XVI, Gibson said:

The whole bunch at the top, if they're not queer, they're supportive of it.

With respect to the current political situation in the United States, Gibson charged that the Obama administration

"does not have the country's welfare at heart -- or any part of it. They're out to destroy it, the same as the people in Rome are out to destroy the church."

Gibson went on to express support for Ron Paul, saying that he was the "only (candidate) worth voting for" in the 2008 presidential election.

When asked what the average American can do to prevent the Obama administration from destroying the country, Gibson said that there isn't much they can do, stating:

"It gets harder and harder all the time. One thing they shouldn't do is give up their guns."

He went on to advocate that citizens create "alarm systems" to notify the public in the event of a federal government crackdown on gun ownership.

The Political Cesspool program is devoted to racist, anti-Semitic and far right propaganda, and is said to be the most popular white supremacist radio show in the United States. The hourlong interview with Gibson took place on Saturday, January 9 and was broadcast on a network of local stations and via the internet.

An archived version of the interview is available here (click on the 1/9/2010, hour two link): Liberty News Radio - Show Archives; direct link to mp3 here.

Schismatic Catholic leader: Vatican shows 'excessive sensibility' towards Jews

from the guardian:

Bishop accuses Vatican of 'excessive sensibility' towards Jews

Head of ultra-conservative Catholic sect says he is 'embarrassed' by Holy See's reaction to Holocaust comments

The head of an ultra-conservative Catholic sect has attacked the Vatican for the "excessive sensibility" shown to the Jewish world following comments made by a Holocaust-denying priest.

Bishop Bernard Fellay, superior general of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X (SSPX), told the Italian news agency Apcom that he felt "embarrassed" about the Holy See's behaviour when it emerged last January that Richard Williamson, a member of the conservative sect, denied that millions of Jews were murdered in Nazi concentration camps, as well as denying the existence of Nazi gas chambers.

Fellay also said Jews should not concern themselves with church affairs, referring to an outcry over a prayer that called for their conversion to Roman Catholicism.

In the wide-ranging interview, given last Friday, he said: "It is not their religion. Leave us alone. They are matters which concern the Catholic church. If we wish to pray for the Jews, we will pray for the Jews in the manner we see fit. I do not know if they pray for us, but I would say that this is their problem."

Read the rest...

My coverage of this radical anti-Semitic group is available here. I'm working on an extended piece outlining the background of the so-called "traditionalist Catholics" and their extensive ties to fascism and anti-Semitism. These are people with a long history of putting their ideas into action with horrific results.

SSPX anti-Semitism is a large cross for Bernard Fellay to bear

SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson carrying the cross to the tomb of Pope St Pius X, St. Peter's Basilica, Rome

*The NY Times, John Birch Society and Father Feeney

Last week, the Times ran an article on the John Birch Society which was brief but good. It's especially vital reading for people who hear about the conspiracy theories driving a lot of far-right politics without knowing their historical context. The John Birch Society invented a number of these theories, and they're still going strong in promoting them. By the way, their national convention this year featured a keynote address by a John Birch supporter named Ron Paul, whose presidential campaign got some of these crackpot theories more attention than they've had in years.

Readers of this blog will find the following quote concerning John McManus, president of the John Birch Society, interesting.

from NYTimes.com:Holding Firm Against Plots by Evildoers by Dan Barry

In late 2005 . . . (Arthur) Thompson became chief executive (of the John Birch Society) after staging a coup with the help of John McManus, the society’s most prominent member, its longtime president and an ultraconservative Roman Catholic. This prompted some ousted Birchers to disseminate recorded snippets of Mr. McManus lecturing to Catholic groups that Judaism became a dead and deadly religion after the establishment of the Catholic Church.

Mr. McManus is also heard to say that militant Jews have influenced the Freemasons, who are “Satan’s agents,” “the enemies of Christ Church” — and, in the view of the John Birch Society, part of the Illuminati conspiracy to cause world upheaval.

Mr. Thompson said that he was initially outraged by these comments, but that he now understands they were made in the context of Mr. McManus’s belief in Catholicism as the one true faith. He said the John Birch Society has Jewish and black members and has never tolerated anti-Semitism or racism, notwithstanding its notorious opposition to much of the civil rights movement.

So McManus' Birch Society conspiracy mongering has roots in radical traditionalist Catholic thinking, which promotes the idea that a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons works covertly to destroy the Catholic church. Read here for an example of this line of thinking -- an example which praises McManus by name.

Better yet, try this website which features the anti-Jewish writings of the notorious bigot Father Leonard Feeney, founder in 1949 of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. This group runs facilities known as the St. Benedict Center of Still River, Massachusetts and Richmond, New Hampshire. Before founding his radical order, Feeney made a habit of espousing extreme hatred of Jews from atop a soap box in Boston Common, as well as from church pulpits and in college classrooms. The church condemned these activities. When Feeney responded with even more provocative activism, he was excommunicated. (Read here. More on this below.)

Three weeks ago, John McManus gave the commencement speech at the Feeneyites' Immaculate Heart of Mary School. According to that school's website (read here), McManus has been

" a friend of the Center and Third Order member of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary since the 1970's."

McManus, as a Third Order member of the Feeneyites, follows the order's teachings to the letter. Although they do not take all of a monk's vows, such as celibacy or renunciation of possessions, Third Order members literally live under the instruction of the leadership of the order, as if they were monks, and are obliged to serve the order to a much greater degree than ordinary laymen. (In the words of another schismatic tradionalist order, the SSPX, the"Third Order is a state of life midway between the cloister and the world". Read here.)

To get a sense of the nature of this group, read the following excerpt from the Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report concerning this group's facility in Richmond, New Hampshire (read here):

Paul Anthony Melanson, a Catholic writer who lives in nearby Manchester, has been warning of the SBC's extremist rhetoric on his blog for years. In an interview with the Intelligence Report, Melanson said he first became aware of the SBC in 1990. What bothered him most, he said, was the SBC's wholehearted embrace of the thinking of the late Father Leonard Feeney, the founder of the Slaves. Melanson described Feeney as "a tremendously gifted writer and talented man, but also an individual who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and began to say and do strange things."

Feeney founded the Slaves in Cambridge, Mass., in 1949, long before the Vatican sought to begin a reconciliation with Jews in the 1960s, during the liberalizing Vatican II reforms. He became known for the Jew-bashing sermons he delivered regularly on the Boston Common, like this 1953 rant: "Every Protestant hates the Jews. Harvard loathes Jews. That is why they got a new president — to keep the Jews away! I don't hate Jews for the reason he hates them. I hate them because they hate Jesus. They hate Jesus because they are Jews!"

Feeney was excommunicated that same year, and although he reconciled with the church shortly before his 1979 death, the Diocese of Manchester states that it "has no relationship" with the current Saint Benedict Center (neither does the official Roman Catholic Church). "Therefore," a diocesan official said recently, "faithful Roman Catholics are urged to not participate."

Yet the Slaves hotly defend Feeney and his beliefs from any criticism, echoing the anti-Semitism of their founder as they do.

In 2004, SBC prior Louis Villarrubia, who goes by the name of Brother Andre Marie, put it like this: "If anti-Semitism means opposing the Jews on religious matters, opposing the Zionist state in Palestine (as St. Pius X did), or opposing the Jewish tendency to undermine public morals (widely acknowledged by Catholic writers before the present age of PC [political correctness]), then we could rightly be considered such."

That same year, The Boston Globe quoted Brother Anthony Mary, whose real name is Douglas Bersaw, blaming the Jews for the murder of Christ and denying the World War II Holocaust: "There's a lot of controversy among people who study the so-called Holocaust. There's a misperception that Hitler had a position to kill all the Jews. It's all a fraud. Six million people… it didn't occur."

In 2005, at a radical conference hosted by a group called St. Joseph's Forum, Bersaw added that "the perpetual enemy of Christ is the Jewish nation" and said Jews should be dealt with using "blood and terror if it's required."

McManus not only knows about the Feeneyites bigotry against Jews, he supports these views wholeheartedly and has a history of espousing them. And Father Feeney's views dovetail perfectly with those of the Birchers. Take Feeney's loony 1958 essay on how the Jews used the New York Times to promote communism in Spain and promote what he called the "rape" of "Catholic Palestine" (read here). Here are are two excerpts:

"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.

and...

(The New York Times') 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."

Now that the Times has accurately represented the Birchers as nutty for a multitude of far out conspiracy theories, and has also accurately represented McManus as a religious bigot, I wonder if McManus believes the report to be part of the same imaginary Jewish conspiracy decried by his spiritual master Leonard Feeney. If not, he might simply believe as Birch Society founder Robert Welch did, that the Times' criticism of the Birchers was evidence that the Times is an instrument of a non-sectarian international communist conspiracy.

UPDATE: The Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary website runs a disclaimer that they do not endorse anti-Semitism (read here [NOTE: this document has been deleted from the Slaves website, but a document containing some of the same text is still available via a third-party archive here.]); however, the disclaimer itself is filled with it. In fact, it goes so far as to recommend a notorious book by Father Denis Fahey which alleged that a conspiracy of Jews and communists sought to destroy the church. This book was an inspiration for the anti-Semitic broadcasts of Father Coughlin. Here's a quote:

Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews. We love Jews because we want them to convert so that they can live the life of grace and go to heaven. Like many saints (e.g., Sts. Augustine, John Chrysostom, Thomas Aquinas, Maximilian Maria Kolbe and many others), popes (e.g., Pope Benedict XIV) and other great Catholic thinkers (e.g., Hilaire Belloc, Father Dennis Fahey), we realize that the 'organized naturalism' of the Jewish Nation is at enmity with Our Lord’s plan, and this manifests itself in numerous ways. This is not racism, bigotry, or prejudice. It is a fact of history which is very documented. Father Dennis Fahey's balanced and intelligent work, The Kingship of Christ and the Conversion of the Jewish Nation, which bears the imprimatur, is must reading on this subject."

It seems that these people are followers of Fahey's brand of mystical bigotry. (Read here and here.) Fahey is the fountainhead from which much of radical traditionalism's extreme anti-Jewish philosophy springs. I can't do it justice in this space, but here's a one sentence explanation. Fahey believed that the Catholic church was the "Mystical Body of Christ" and that modern Jews seek to kill that body just as, he said, Jews killed the physical body of Christ. In a nutshell, that's the blend of hate and religion espoused by Fahey, Feeney and their followers.

UPDATE 2: Here's a brief 1953 article on Feeney from Time magazine. Its title quotes Feeney himself: "I preach hate".

Thousands Of Children Stolen During Franco Rule

I've been away from blogging for the most part in recent weeks.  I'm working on an extended article on the connections between traditionalist Catholicism and fascism.  Part of the article deals with Argentina.  I heard something on NPR Morning Edition this morning that fits right in with what I've been researching and I thought I'd share it.  During the Dirty War in Argentina the Videla junta kidnapped many hundreds of children of their victims, the "disappeared".  These children were treated in a similar fashion to those discussed in the following story.  The ideological background was also similarly connected to traditionalist Catholicism and very extreme anti-communism.

from NPR Morning Edition:  Thousands Of Children Stolen During Franco Rule (by Jerome Socolovsky)

In recent years, there's been a movement in Spain to dig up the dark secrets of the Franco dictatorship — but there's one atrocity that is only now coming to light.

It involved the stealing of thousands of children from leftist parents so they could be indoctrinated in fascism and archconservative Catholicism.

Ushenu Ablana, 79, was one of those children. He is still afraid to talk about his childhood because it evokes a part of Spain's past that many people in the country would rather forget.

The Fate Of The Children

On one particular day, Ablana sits in the corner of a restaurant, away from the other diners, in the northwestern city of Santiago de Compostela. He takes out a faded photo album and begins his story.

In the 1930s, during the Spanish Civil War, the town where Ablana was growing up was overrun by right-wing insurgents seeking to topple the Spanish Republic. How his mother died remains a mystery.

"First they told me it was in childbirth," he says. "But that was one of their many lies. Later, I found out from old folks in the town that the rebels had tortured her to find out where my father was."

Ablana says his father was suspected of being a leftist and was imprisoned until long after the war ended. Ablana was shuttled between orphanages, where he got tuberculosis. He says the priests starved him, sexually abused him and indoctrinated him in fascism.

"I am a Falangist, and will be a Falangist 'til I die," are words to one of the songs that he says still echo in his head. "They ruined me," he says. "They stole my youth and my life."

Ablana and thousands of other children were stolen in the early years of the dictatorship, when Francisco Franco's victorious forces were killing, imprisoning and sending thousands of people to labor camps.

Stumbling Upon Forgotten Times

But the stolen children were forgotten until around a decade ago. A historian, studying the plight of female political prisoners, stumbled onto evidence that more than 12,000 of their children had been taken and sent to orphanages or given to families that supported the regime.

That historian is Ricard Vinyes, who was himself jailed by the Franco dictatorship. He says the regime was alarmed at how Spanish women had broken out of their traditional domestic roles under the prewar Republican government. So a state psychiatrist came up with a theory that politically active women were by definition morally degenerate, and should not be allowed to raise children.

"It was amazing to see all the letters and telegrams of congratulations he got from the senior military brass," the historian says.

Vinyes helped make a documentary called The Lost Children of Francoism. In it, a voice reads from the diary of a prison chaplain who was troubled by what he saw. He recorded the mothers' despair as their children were stolen, often just before their executions.

"They cried, 'Please don't take my daughter,' or 'Kill her along with me,' " he says.

Tyranny Of Silence

After Franco died in 1975, Spaniards decided not to rake over the past. But in recent years, volunteers have been digging up mass graves from the Civil War, and the last statues of Franco are now being torn down. A few months ago, an investigating magistrate called on the judiciary to investigate the stolen children.

Back at the restaurant, Ablana says he thinks the investigation won't go far, because most people would rather forget about the dictatorship.

"The young, none of them know what happened. Even my own children who are in their 40s and 50s don't want to talk about it," he says.

The dictatorship may have ended more than 30 years ago, but for many Spaniards, the tyranny of silence endures.

ADDENDUM:   Mercedes Sanz Bachillar, widow of a falangist leader and founder of Auxilio Social, Spain's largest social service organizion under Franco (which was based on Hitler's Winterhilfe) had this to say when asked about this issue:

 "These reds of today are without faith, they change and distort history with poison ... that is what they are doing. This crowd is orchestrated by the devil ... they are putting their finger in the wounds ... they are spoiling everything."

(Read pdf here at page 3.)

Jerome Socolovsky for NPR

Ushenu Ablana, 79, was one of thousands of children stolen from leftist parents during the Franco era so that they could be indoctrinated in fascism and archconservative Catholicism.

SSPX and "traditionalist Catholics": fundamentally anti-Jewish

Recently, there has been an air of scandal surrounding Richard Williamson, a so-called "bishop" of the Catholic schismatic group called the Society of Saint Pius X or SSPX. Williamson denied the Holocaust in a television interview, and, shortly thereafter, had his excommunication from the Catholic church rescinded by the Pope. It has since come out that Williamson has written and spoken extensively of conpiracy theories accusing Jews and Freemasons of destroying Catholicism in particular and western society in general. People are asking why the Pope would welcome such opinions into his church. In response, there's been some effort on the part of both the SSPX and Vatican to spin the opinions expressed by this "bishop" as somehow anomalous -- uncharacteristic of "traditionalist Catholicism". This spin is patently false.

The opinions of Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the Society of Saint Pius X can hardly be called anomalous or uncharacteristic of "traditionalist Catholicism". His opinions defined that belief system; they are the rule, not the exception. Toward the end of his life, he wrote of his "Spiritual Journey", which he defined as opposing a conspiracy of Jews, Freemasons, Communists and liberals to undermine the Catholic Church. He also referred (without apparent irony) to the Second Vatican Council as a third world war, one worse than the previous two. (Read his piece here.)

At the close of a long life (for I was born in 1905 and I now see the year 1990), I can say that it has been marked by exceptional world events: three world wars, that which took place from 1914 to 1918, that which took place from 1939 to 1945, and that of the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965.

The disasters caused by these three wars, and especially by the last of them, are incalculable in the domain of material ruins, but even more so in the spiritual realm. The first two paved the way for the war inside the Church, by facilitating the ruin of Christian institutions and the domination of Freemasonry, which has become so powerful that it has deeply infiltrated the governing body of the Church with its Liberal, Modernist doctrine.

By the grace of God, instructed as early as my seminary days in Rome of the mortal danger of these influences by the Rector of the French Seminary, the venerated Father Le Floch, and by the professors, Reverend Fathers Voetgli, Frey and Le Rohellec, I was able to verify, during my entire priestly life, how their calls to vigilance, based on the teachings of the Popes and, above all, of St. Pius X, were justified. I was able to verify at my own expense how this vigilance was justified, not only doctrinally, but also by the hatred which it provoked in the Liberal laity and clerics - a diabolical hatred.

The innumerable contacts, brought upon me by the duties conferred upon me, with the highest civil and ec- clesiastical authorities in numerous countries, particularly in France and in Rome, have preciously confirmed for me that opinion was generally favorable to all those who were disposed to compromising with the Liberal, Masonic ideas, and unfavorable towards those determined to remain firm in traditional doctrine.

I believe I can say that few persons in the Church have been able to become as well informed as I have been able myself, not by my own will, but by the will of Providence.

He then goes on, at some length, to describe the Second Vatican Council as literally a resurgence of the French Revolution's reign of terror. The original should be read for it's sheer absurdity, but it's too lengthy, and too rich with obscure personal references, to quote here.

In the following passage, Lefebvre argues in favor of the Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime and against the forces led by Charles DeGaulle, calling Vichy "the Catholic order" and the Allies part of an atheist, Masonic conspiracy!

As a missionary in Gabon, contact with civil authorities was obviously more frequent than as Vicar at Le Marais-de-Lomme in the Diocese of Lille. This time of mission was marked by the Gaullist invasion; we were able to witness the victory of Freemasomy (sic) against the Catholic order of Petain. It was the invasion of the barbarians without faith or law!

Perhaps one day, my memoirs will give some details on these years from 1945 to 1960, and will illustrate this war inside the Church. Read the books of M. Marteaux on this period; they are revealing. The rupture between Liberalism and the doctrine of the Church was growing both in Rome, and outside Rome.

The Liberals were able to choose Popes like John XXIII and Paul VI, causing their doctrine to triumph in the Council, a marvelous means to obligate all of the Church to adopt their errors.

He goes on to say...

John XXIII and Paul VI, have made themselves active collaborators of international Jewish Freemasonry and of world socialism. John Paul II is above all a communist-loving politician at the service of a world communism retaining a hint of religion. He openly attacks all of the anti-communist governments and does not bring, by his travels, any Catholic revival.

Yes, you read that correctly. The founder of SSPX believed to his dying day that Pope John XXII, Pope Paul XI and Pope John Paul II were part of a Jewish/Masonic conspiracy and that they promoted Communism.

Such conspiracy theories are the basis for the entire belief system of the "traditionalist". Lefebvre goes on to write, based on the above, that:

(t)he current Pope and bishops no longer hand down Our Lord Jesus Christ, but rather a sentimental, superficial, charismatic religiosity, through which, as a general rule, the true grace of the Holy Ghost no longer passes. This new religion is not the Catholic religion; it is sterile, incapable of sanctifying society and the family.

These beliefs, far from being uncharacteristic of the "traditionalist Catholicism" movement, are its fundament.

SSPX Leader Franz Schmidberger: 'Today's Jews Guilty of Deicide'

Werner Cohn, on his blog FringeGroups, posts the following excerpts from a letter written by Franz Schmidberger, the head of Germany's SSPX group.  The letter was written in October 2008 and posted to the SSPX website.  

SSPX's Father Franz Schmidberger: Today's Jews are Guilty of Deicide

Mit dem Kreuzestod Christi ist der Vorhang des Tempels zerrissen, der Alte Bund abgeschafft, wird die Kirche, die alle Völker, Kulturen, Rassen und sozialen Unterschiede umfasst, aus der durchbohrten Seite des Erlösers geboren. Damit sind aber die Juden unserer Tage nicht nur nicht unsere älteren Brüder im Glauben, wie der Papst bei seinem Synagogenbesuch in Rom 1986 behauptete; sie sind vielmehr des Gottesmordes mitschuldig, so lange sie sich nicht durch das Bekenntnis der Gottheit Christi und die Taufe von der Schuld ihrer Vorväter distanzieren. Im Gegensatz dazu behauptet das II. Vatikanum, man könne die Ereignisse des Leidens Christi weder allen damals lebenden Juden ohne Unterschied noch den heutigen Juden zur Last legen (§ 4).

With the death of Jesus on the cross, the old covenant is abolished. The Church now encompasses all peoples, cultures, races, social classes. With that, not only are the Jews of our days not "our elder brethren in faith," as the Pope maintained in a visit to a Rome synagogue in 1986. They are, rather, guilty of the murder of God, insofar as they do not embrace the divinity of Christ and accept baptism, the only actions that would distance them from the guilt of their forebears. But Vatican II maintains, wrongfully, that the sufferings of Jesus cannot be attributed either to the Jews of His days nor to the Jews of our days (§ 4).

This is an excerpt from a letter sent by Fr. Franz Schmidberger to the Roman Catholic bishops of Germany in October 2008. Fr. Schmidberger is the German head of that very Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) whose members have now been re-admitted to full communion in the Roman Catholic church by Pope Benedict.

(NOTE: For those of you not following this news story, the SSPX is a so-called "traditionalist Catholic" group which rejects the innovations of Vatican II.  It has a long history of promoting anti-Semitism in the form of Christ-killer imagery and conspiracy theories involving Jews and Freemasons.  Mel Gibson is the most famous adherent of "traditionalist Catholicism".  A.H.)

German Far-Right Hails SSPX Holocaust Denier Williamson

More about the anti-Semitic "Bishop" Richard Williamson of the "traditionalist Catholic" SSPX.

from der SPIEGEL ONLINE :

Germany's far right has welcomed the move by German Pope Benedict XVI to lift the excommunication of British bishop Richard Williamson, who denied the Holocaust in an interview last week. German Jewish leaders are appalled at the decision.

In the churches and chapels of the Society of Saint Pius X, the incense burners at the holy masses have been swung with even greater vigor since the weekend in joy over the decision by Pope Benedict XVI to lift the excommunication of their founding father, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the bishops he ordained, among them Archbishop Richard Williamson.

Germany's far right is equally pleased with the decision and is hailing Williamson as a hero -- because he has denied the Holocaust.

. . . and . . .

"A bishop is saying what he believes," said one far-right supporter in the Internet blog German Wehrmacht which featured the transcript of the interview along with a video clip of it. "One must distance oneself from the content of the video if one wants to avoid any kind of trouble," the author goes on to warn, in reference to the fact that denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany. Nevertheless, he adds, "thoughts are free."

Another far-right site, Störtebeker-Network, also celebrates the Society of Saint Pius X. Williamson, says an editorial posed on the site, has shown "how one should position oneself as a true Christian these days against general materialistic decay and decadence, by holding on to the original values of one's faith."

One commentator writes: "His Excellency Williamson: after David Irving there's a further Briton who has given us Germans a big reconciliation gift."

The closing of ranks between the German pope and the right fringe of his church is threatening to turn into the biggest mistake of his term.

The head of the Society of Saint Pius, Bernard Fellay, knows why Benedict XVI announced the lifting of the excommunication of Williamson and other brethren of the society: "1,703,000 rosaries were said to Our Dear Lady to bring about the end of this disgrace," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Meanwhile the head of the German arm of the Society of Saint Pius, Pastor Franz Schmidberger, is attempting damage control in the wake of Williamson's comments on the Holocaust. "It's clear that the comments Bishop Williamson is reported to have made don't mirror the stance of the Society of Saint Pius X and only the author himself is responsible," he declared in a statement.
Williamson himself has made no further comment and is believed to be in Argentina. If he were to travel to Germany he would very soon have to contend with the Regensburg public prosecutor's office, which has opened an enquiry into his remarks, which constitute an illegal offense in Germany.

Schmidberger's argument that the Society of Saint Pius isn't anti-Semitic despite the comments of its senior bishop Williamson isn't especially convincing given that Schmidberger merely states: "Our Lord Jesus Christ in his human nature is Jewish, his sacred mother is Jewish, all the apostles are Jewish. For that reason no upstanding Christian can be anti-Semitic."

The Central Council of Jews in Germany begs to differ. It had pointed out what it said was an anti-Semitic passage in a letter written by Schmidberger and his brethren before Christmas. The letter was sent to all bishops of the 27 Catholic dioceses in Germany, and none of the Roman Catholic bishops protested against it.

In the letter, Schmidberger stated: "We look on with sorrow as Pope John Paul II and now Pope Benedict XVI go into a Jewish synagogue." Another passage reads: "The Jews of our days (are) not only our older brothers in faith as the pope claimed during his visit to the synagogue in Rome in 1986; rather they are complicit in the murder of Christ as long as they do not distance themselves from the guilt of their forefathers by acknowledging the divinity of Christ and through baptism."

Schmidberger now says: "The statement that today's Jews bear the guilt of their fathers" only refers to "those Jews who welcome the killing of Jesus Christ."

.

SSPX "Bishop" Williamson's Letters reveal pathological anti-Semitism

A great deal has already been written about Pope Benedict's decision to rehabilitate four excommunicated followers of Marcel Lefebvre's "traditionalist Catholic" Society of St. Pius X ("SSPX"). These four are called "bishops" by the SSPX although not recognized as such by the church. One of these four, "Bishop" Richard Williamson, has drawn considerable attention by stating in a Swedish television interview that he does not believe the Holocaust occurred. In that interview (viewable here), Williamson has a bit of logical trouble, vacillating between stating that six million Jews were not gassed in concentration camps and stating that no Jews were gassed at all. Suffice it to say that the confused Mr. Williamson believes that only between 200,000 and 300,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis, a figure which he apparently pulled from his mitre.

Williamson has provided us with a tremendous service, however, by encapsulating in one sentence the fundamental belief of the SSPX in particular and "traditionalist Catholics" in general (read here):

Just as the chief priests and ancients hated Jesus unto death, but they needed an Apostle to betray him, so we may blame Jews and Freemasons and others like them for engineering the destruction of the Church, but it has taken churchmen from within to do the actual betraying and destroying.

The belief that the Vatican is under the sway of a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons, far from being incidental to this group, is absolutely essential to "traditionalist Catholic" theology. They believe it to be part of God's plan for humanity.

Lefebvre used to say that we have little idea of all that the Freemasons and their collaborators inside the Vatican are plotting and contriving in order to deliver the Catholic Church bound hand and foot into the power of Christ's enemies, but God has obviously known every detail from all eternity.

They also believe that this the existence of this conspiracy is being concealed by an even larger conspiracy. Williamson states (here) his belief that:

in Western democracies today a politician dares to breathe a word, for instance, against welfare or against the Jews, he knows he will be shouted down and voted out at the next election. In other words, the politicians are virtually controlled by public opinion, which is fabricated by the media, which are tightly controlled by a handful of Judeo-masons (sic), the people who also control finance and the governments.

He also writes (here):

Well over a century ago Judeo-Masonry is known to have been envisaging three World Wars to achieve its unified global domination.

By lies, Judeo-Masonry brought about the first two World Wars. To get Americans to enter the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson told them that it would be the "war to end all wars." In fact, WWI established the Masonic League of Nations in Geneva and the Communist Revolution in Russia, and crushed numerous Christian monarchies, in particular the Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the Masonic Treaty of Versailles ending WWI deliberately paved the way for WWII, of which President F.D. Roosevelt promised it would "make the world safe for democracy." In fact, WWII established the Masonic United Nations, hugely promoted socialism in the USA and in the Western "democracies," and crushed the Eastern "democracies" under Communism.

By lies, Judeo-Masonry is preparing for the Third World War. As the Depression of the 1930's necessitated WWII, triggered for the US by the supposed treachery of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, so we see all the conditions created for another much worse Depression in the US, with the supposed treachery of Arabs last year against the Twin Towers in New York already igniting American public opinion to go to war against Afghanistan and now Iraq. And as we now in 2002 know with certainty that our governments and media told us far from the complete truth in 1941 as to who was truly responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor, so we will eventually know that those truly responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers were certainly not those primarily held up as being responsible by our governments and media.

The depths of the paranoia behind this world view are difficult for the uninitiated to fathom. Personally, I found what Williamson had to say on Oct. 1, 2001 (three weeks after 9/11) to be particularly helpful.

from SSPX.ca: Bishop Williamson's Letters:

On the political level, we can be virtually certain that the vile media will not tell us the full story. There is serious reason to believe--that in 1898, it was not the Spaniards who sank the "USS Maine"; that in 1917, it was not the Germans who set up the "Lusitania" as a target; that in 1941 it was not the Japanese who set up Pearl Harbor for attack; that in 1963 it was not Lee Harvey Oswald who killed President Kennedy. In 1990 it was certainly not Saddam Hussein who promised not to react if he invaded Kuwait. In 1994 it was certainly not Timothy McVeigh's van exploding outside the Alfred Murrah building in Oklahoma City which brought the front of the building down. In 2001...? Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, now Osama bin Laden, from CIA-assets to personal enemies of the American people -how many more times will the trick work?

Politically, behind the Arab terrorists are most likely the would-be architects of the New World Order, who have long been using the United States as an instrument to achieve their control of the world. Long ago they planned three World Wars to achieve their aim. It is they who provoked the sinking of the "Lusitania" and the attack on Pearl Harbor to bring the USA into the first two. Now they seem to be using the Arabs also. Humanly, they are clever. They are even diabolically clever. But little do they realize that they are in turn mere instruments of God who uses them for the salvation of souls.

For the last fourteen hundred years Mohammedans, whether Saracens or Arabs or Moors or Turks, have served God as a scourge to punish faithless Christians, or slack Christendom. When Catholics are fervent, God can grant them miraculous victories over the Mohammedans, as at the sea-battle of Lepanto in 1571. When Catholics are slack, God can allow the very survival of their nations to be threatened, as now, by birth-rates in Europe, by terrorism in the USA. When Spanish Catholics were slack in the 700's, God allowed the Jews to betray Spain to the Arabs. When Spanish Catholics were truly Catholic, God granted them by 1492 to reconquer Spain from the Arabs, and then granted them to create a Catholic empire in the Americas. Either way, God writes straight with crooked lines for the salvation of souls.

The Jews are a similar case. As early as 200 the Church author Tertullian remarked that as Catholic faith goes up, so Jewish power goes down, while as Catholic faith goes down, so Jewish power goes up. In the Catholic Middle Ages the Jews we're relatively impotent to harm Christendom, but as Catholics have grown over the centuries since then weaker and weaker in the faith, especially since Vatican II, so the Jews have come closer and closer to fulfilling their substitute-Messianic drive towards world dominion.

If we return for a moment to politics, the United States is now caught precisely between these two scourges of God. Unquestionably one main grievance of Arabs against the United States, provoking their terrorists to lash out as we have seen, is the United States' one-sided favoring of Israel over the Arabs for the last forty years. But each time the United States attempts to act even-handedly towards the Arabs, Jewish power inside the United States - e.g. virtual control of finance and the media - blocks the attempt, and the United States returns to oppressing the Arabs.

This problem of the United States is politically insoluble, because it is a religious problem! The United States is caught between these two scourges of God, because it has turned away from God. God chastises those whom He loves (Heb. XII, 6), so that if God were not now chastising the United States, it would be the proof not that He loved, but that He did not love the United States! Let us be grateful that God is using Arab and Jew to chastise us! And let us therefore, with no thought of hating Arab or Jew, because they are NOT the real problem, turn to the real problem, which is the sins by which we offend God. Let us take the Ten Commandments in reverse order, culminating in the first.

In this single document, Williamson reveals himself as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist par excellence. He proclaims his belief in a single international conspiracy which caused the Spanish-American War, both World Wars, the Kennedy assasination and the Oklahoma City bombing, as well as backing Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic andOsama bin Laden. For God's sake, he regards the Spanish Inquisition as a high point in Catholic history, and calls Arabs and Jews "scourges of God"! Here he praises the Inquistion again, stating that:

the Inquisition rendered extraordinary service to Western civilization (then called Christendom) by picking out those heretics who were its worst enemies. The condemnation of Galileo was designed to block not scientific truth but his personal arrogance in the name of science which has been giving "science" a bad name ever since. And the condemnations of the Synagogue, which is the religion not of Abraham and Moses, but of Anas and Caiphas, have been elementary self-defence on the part of the Catholic Church, because the spiritual descendants of those two judicial murderers of Jesus Christ have for 2,000 years been continuing their work of hatred against the Mystical Body of Christ, the Catholic Church.

In other of his writings, he uses the Nazi phrase "Talmudic Jews" (here), and claims that for "2,000 years Jews have repeatedly sought to undermine the Catholic Church and to take Christ out of Christendom" (here). He also states (here) that

(U)ntil they re-discover their true Messianic vocation (i.e. convert to Christianity), (the Jewish people) may be expected to continue fanatically agitating, in accordance with their false messianic vocation of Jewish world-dominion, to prepare the Anti-Christ's throne in Jerusalem. So we may fear their continuing to play their major part in the agitation of the East and in the corruption of the West. Here the wise Catholic will remember that, again, the ex-Christian nations have only their own Liberalism to blame for allowing free circulation within Christendom to the enemies of Christ. As these make society more and more oppressively anti-Christian, he will profit to raise his sights above this world and look to the things of heaven –“When these things begin to come to pass, look up, and lift up your heads, for your redemption is at hand” (Lk XXI,28). Remembering also that Anas and Caiphas induced but never obligated Judas to betray Jesus, and that the Apostle's betrayal was a crime far worse than the Jews' deicide, He will look at the state of the Catholic Church today, and see why the enemies of Christendom are being given so much power....

Deborah Lipstadt has been covering this story well on her blog (read here). Referring to a report by Sylvia Poggioli on NPR (available here), Lipstadt points out (here) that the SSPX in general, and the four rehabilitated "bishops" in particular, promote the belief that Jews alive today are collectively guilty for killing Jesus. This belief was deemed unacceptable for the Catholic Church by Vatican II. Apparently Pope Benedict is not so sure.

Mel Gibson pouring millions into anti-Semitic conspiracy cult

Mel Gibson, sometimes described as being a religious Catholic, actually belongs to an anti-Semitic cult which promotes the belief that Jews and Freemasons have taken over the Vatican. This cult, sometimes referred to as Sedevacantism, sometimes as "traditionalist Catholicism", is not recognized by the Vatican as Catholic.

Gibson reportedly believes in the "Siri Thesis", which claims that Giuseppe Siri was elected to succeed Pius XII in 1958 but denied the papacy by an occult conspiracy. Giuseppe Siri has been accused of assisting Nazi war criminals who fled justice after World War II.

Groups promoting "traditionalist Catholic" conspiracy theories tend to attract Catholics who reject the innovations started by the Second Vatican Council, including changes to the traditional mass and the Latin liturgy. They also attract those who reject Vatican II's rejection of anti-Semitism and belief in the doctrine of Jewish deicide. Certain believers in this conspiracy cult have anointed their own "Popes in exile". (For more about these groups, read here and here.)

Now comes news that Gibson has poured tens of millions of dollars into promoting these extreme beliefs. Shockingly, his private cult church, which has 70 members and provides no charitable services, has assets 12 times greater than those of the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, which provides housing and social services to tens of thousands of people, and serves over 5,000,000 meals per year to the hungry (read PDF here).

from Australia's Herald Sun: Mel Gibson's Holy Family Catholic Church full of riches

MEL Gibson has poured another $15.2 million into his controversial private church in Malibu.

US federal tax files show Gibson's Holy Family Catholic Church now has tax-free assets worth $64 million, up from $48.8 million last year.

Gibson is the single contributor to the church, which has a congregation of about 70 members and follows a 500-year-old ethos.

Among the church's assets are artworks with a listed value of almost $760,000.

Gibson lists three major expenses for last year, including an architect and a landscaper who have done work in and around the church.

He also paid a law firm $105,000 for its services.

Gibson's secretive sect is not recognised by the Catholic Church because it does not acknowledge the authority of the Pope or the Vatican and rejects the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

The church's finances are impressive, particularly compared with the funds of other US religious organisations.

The Archdiocese of New York's Catholic Charities organisation listed its assets at the end of 2006 as $5.1 million. That group gives millions away to charity every year.

The Holy Family church's tax return documents do not indicate that they give anything away to charity.

Gibson's church -- which offers a daily morning mass in Latin -- follows an antiquated ideology of Catholicism dating back to the 16th century.

Female followers of Gibson's church must abide by a strict dress code, requiring them to wear veils over their hair and long skirts, with a ban on pants for women.

The exclusive parish caters for about 70 members, with the existing chapel having seating for only 100 people.

Over the past two years, Gibson, 52, has been overseeing the building of a much bigger Spanish mission-style church, which will seat about 400 people to expand his flock of followers.

Gibson's church, launched by the actor-director in 1999, is set among lush Tuscan-style gardens and does not welcome strangers.

The exclusive community -- located on a scenic hillside on the famed Mulholland Drive in the upmarket rural area of Agoura Hills -- has high fences and heavy security to prevent outsiders from visiting.

The church has an unlisted phone number, keeps its address a secret and has asked members of the congregation not to release information.

The church preaches that Jews are responsible for the death of Christ, with many supporters, including Gibson's father Hutton, denying the Holocaust happened.

The Hungarian far right and David Irving's U.S. tour

Eva S. Balogh's blog, Hungarian Spectrum, has a very interesting post on The Hungarian far right and David Irving, about which read more below.

You may or may not be aware that Irving has been on tour in the U.S., having been hosted by the likes of the University of Oregon's Pacifica Forum, led by Professor Emeritus Orval Etter and columnist George Beres (read here and here and here). Pacifica Forum billed Irving as a "legendary British historian and martyr for free speech". (Read more about Pacifica Forum's journey through the rabbit hole from leftist peace activism to far right racism here.) Someone who heard Irving speak at Pacifica Forum said he used the term "Jewish tragedy" instead of the term "Holocaust", explaining that "he meant the tragedy was not that all those Jews were killed, but rather that 'Jews never asked themselves why they were killed … why they are hated so.' " (read letter to editor here: "Irving statements reprehensible". The Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard naively reported (read here) only that Irving called the Holocaust a tragedy, missing the point of the statement entirely.)

The logistics for Irving getting an audience can by tricky. His technique for speaking in public generally goes something like this: 1) anti-Semitic nut job sees ad for Irving appearance on racist website (like this or this); 2) nut job submits application for ticket and prepays by credit card (tickets available here or here, Hitler posters available here); 3) having been approved, nut job receives notice of the details of Irving's appearance and is told to keep them hush hush.

Before his July 16 speech in New York City, Irving's website announced the location as the Primavera Restaurant, an upscale Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. When ticket holders arrived, however, they were directed instead to the St. Stephen of Hungary Catholic Church, located nearby. (Read a news account here, Max Blumenthal's blog account with video here including a virtually identical statement to the one quoted above blaming the Jews for the Holocaust, and a brief piece on the L.A. Jewish Journal blog here.) Below is Blumenthal's video. Money quotes from Irving: "Hitler...was probably not at all anti-Semitic..." and "(t)he Jews are the architects of Auschwitz".



With that, you should read Eva Balogh's post at Hungarian Spetrum for her view of who and what was behind Irving's appearance, and also to check out the deluge of right wing lunatics in the comments. According to Balogh, Hungary's far right, including neo-fascist and neo-Nazi elements, has a significant, pernicious influence in Hungarian politics. She presents the evidence that Hungarian rightists in New York City helped set up Irving's speech. Here's her take on David Irving and the far right's New York - Hungary connection:

David Irving made several trips to Hungary where there are no laws against those who deny the Holocaust. Loránt Hegedüs, a Hungarian Reformed minister, was his host, and it was in Hegedüs's church that he spread his ideas.

...and...

New York Hungarians claim that an extreme right-wing Hungarian group headed by Ernő Hóka often uses (New York's St. Stephen of Hungary Parrish) for some of his gatherings and that Hóka has close relations with Ákos Szilágyi, the founder of the New York Polgári Kör, part of the network of civic circles of right-minded people who were supposed to rally when the call came from Viktor Orbán. These civic cells at one point seemed to be critically important vehicles of Orbán's political strategy. Orbán put Csaba Hende, formerly an MDF member of parliament, in charge of the network of cells. Hende by now is so far to the right that only a few days ago he shocked the country by suggesting that when Fidesz takes over the government they will fire all 45,000 policemen and build the force from scratch. Obviously, only those who share the values of Fidesz will be rehired. The establishment of the New York civic cell was inspired by Hende during one of his visits to New York. From the beginning the cell espoused extreme right-wing ideas and had close ties to kuruc.info.hu, a notorious neo-Nazi site advocating the overthrow of the Hungarian government. Recently the American server hosting both of these sites shut them down.

This morning Zoltán Szabó, an MSZP member of parliament, responding to the news from New York had a few choice words about Fidesz's cozy relations with extreme right-wing groups. What Szabó wanted to know was how far Fidesz is willing to go. How long can a so-called "moderate" right of center party maintain close ties with the extreme right? Szabó said that he understands that hard-core right-wing voters are important to Fidesz since they make up between 8% and 10% of the electorate, but surely, he continued, a serious party can't afford such nefarious association with neo-Nazis.

On György Bolgár's call-in show this morning Zoltán Szabó reiterated his assessment of the situation. A split second after the conversation with Szabó ended, Ákos Szilágyi, straight from New York, phoned in. He denied that he had anything to do with the invitation. That, he alleged, is the figment of the imagination of László Bartus, editor-in-chief of the Amerikai-Magyar Népszava Szabadság, who, according to Szilágyi, is a liar whom he is suing because of another article he wrote. I checked Amerikai-Magyar Népszava and there was no mention of either Szilágyi or the New York Polgári Kör. It simply said that "according to many people, the St. Stephen Parish of New York has long been a meeting place of people with Nazi sympathies." Szilágyi, by the way, also claimed that it wasn't even Hungarians who invited Irving. That is hard to believe. I became especially suspicious when ARA supporters were described as homosexuals and communists. It sounded all too familiar.

First Eva Balogh's facts, then the deluge of hate. Michael Santomauro (founder of a New York website designed to find people roommates) one of the city's most vocal anti-Semites (view his websites here and here) and also a Ron Paul supporter (read here), quickly submitted a comment defending Faurisson and Holocaust denial. Santomauro was followed in short order by Danish Holocaust denial blogger Balder (also an apparent Ron Paul supporter, his website features a portrait of Paul as its banner). (View Balder's websites here and here.) After this, a multitude of others voicing overt hatred of the sort that all too often occurs under cover of screen name. (I know I'll hear from people asking "why bother covering bigotted comments?" I understand that hate-filled blog comments are commonplace, but, in this instance, two of the commenters are bloggers, and the content and context of their comments seem notable. I also felt bad for the recipient of these comments, having received similar comments here.)

Let me give the voice of reason the last word. The pastor of St. Stephen of Hungary Parish apparently knew nothing about the nature of the talk before it began, beyond the fact that it was a talk about a book. Father Angelo Gambatese, speaking on behalf of the church, said "(w)e are outraged because we do not cater to this kind of bigotry, and we are sorry that it happened."

New Yorkers at David Irving speech, July 16, 2008

Irving greeting well-wishers after speech