“If anti-Semitism is truly the oldest hatred, the hallmark of this noxious ideology is the enduring nature of its bigoted beliefs.”
That’s Liberal Senator Michael Ronaldson, in response to the now notorious Age column published by Michael Backman.
Ronaldson’s remarks have now been spectacularly confirmed by a much more overt manifestation of anti-Semitism.
Meet Richard Williamson:
Williamson argues that women should not wear trousers and that “almost no girl should go to any university” because doing so contributes to the “the unwomaning of woman”. He blames modernism for causing the Rwandan massacre, he describes pluralism as the major threat to the Faith and salvation of Catholics today, and he decries religious liberty as a substitute religion.
He has even criticised the movie The Sound of Music because of how it portrays those “nasty Nazis” and elevates “self-centered” romantic love. His views on gay people, engaging in a sin “crying to Heaven for vengeance,” are all too predictable.
Williamson’s an admirer of former Klan leader David Duke, he’s a 9/11 Truther who thinks that the Unabomber might have been onto something — and he’s a virulent, Protocols-of-Zion-quoting anti-Semite who thinks that the Holocaust didn’t happen.
He’s also just been welcomed by Pope Benedict back into the Catholic fold.
Bishop Williamson belongs, you see, to the Society of St Pius X, the biggest organisation of the Catholic Traditionalist movement, the milieu which Mel Gibson’s mad (and anti-Semitic) dad also emerged. The SSPX follows the teachings of the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre — rejecting the Second Vatican Council’s abolition of the traditional Latin mass, as well as more or less any social or political manifestations of modernity.
Benedict’s reversal of the Vatican’s 1988 ex-communication of four Lefebvrian bishops has mostly been spun as a generous gesture of reconciliation, albeit ruined by the buffoonish, loose-cannon Williamson. Time magazine explains that the Pope wants to make the SSPX into “a personal prelature of the papacy, the same special status that conservative lay group Opus Dei was granted by John Paul II”.
But there’s an obvious question, isn’t there! Given Williamson’s long history of anti-Semitism, what kind of organisation would maintain him as a bishop? What’s the SSPX attitude to bigotry?
The Southern Poverty Law Centre, an organisation monitoring American hate groups, puts it bluntly: “The Society of St. Pius X, which has chapels and schools across the United States, remains a font of anti-Semitic propaganda.”
It’s not difficult to find examples.
The Angelus Press, the SSPX’s publishing house, distributes, for instance, Hilaire Beloc’s anti-Semitic text The Jews (“If this isn’t pertinent reading for today, then we don’t know what is!”), alongside a tract entitled Mystery Of Freemasonry Unveiled which “covers all aspects of Masonry, Satanic societies [and] the use of Masonry as an Instrument of Judaism.” The press also advertises Neo-Conned by one J. Forrest Sharpe, a notorious anti-Semite whose news bulleting, according to the SPLC, “brims with anti-Semitic materials from the likes of Ernst Zundel, the neo-Nazi author of The Hitler We Loved and Why”.
But the SSPX goes beyond disseminating the anti-Semitism of others. You’ll recall that Michael Backman’s Age piece contained the line: “The historical persecutors of the Jews have been Christians — their punishment for the death of Jesus”. In that case, the phrasing left the question ambiguous as to whether Backman himself endorsed that ancient canard.
The SSPX is more straightforward. On its website, its ‘Catholic FAQ’ section explains:
The Jews were consequently directly responsible for the crucifixion. Deicide is the name given to the crime of killing the person who is God, namely the Son of God in His human nature. It is those persons who brought about the crucifixion who are guilty of deicide, namely the Jews.
That’s about as clearcut as hate speech gets – and yet it’s presented as a FAQ on the SSPX’s core tenets.
But wait — there’s more. The SSPX home site also features this document, a piece by Rev. Frs. Michael Crowdy & Kenneth Novak entitled “The Mystery of the Jews”. The long article — again, freely available to anyone with Google — methodically repeats every slur of medieval anti-Semitism:
Judaism is inimical to all nations in general, and in a special manner to Christian nations. […]
[T]he adversarial relationship of the Jewish people is not a local enmity, or one based on blood, or on conflicting interests. It is an enmity disposed by God. […] Christendom and Jewry are destined inevitably to meet everywhere without reconciliation or mixing.
It goes on to explain that “the Jewish people win control of property by usury”, that ‘Jews are known to kill Christians”, that “Jews get into posts of influence, and submit society to a high degree of corruption in ways of thinking and acting, which leads to a reaction of public opinion against them” and that “Communism was financed by Jewish money”.
This is straightforward, old school anti-Semitism.
Why, then, is the Pope palling around with such people?
The removal of the sentence of excommunication does not, in itself, mean that the SSPX crew are suddenly in good standing with Rome. The Catholic blogger Rationabile Obsequium argues:
The division between the SSPX and Rome has not been healed, and it is still a very serious matter for a Catholic to receive the sacraments from a member of the SSPX in all but emergency situations. SSPX clergy do not have the necessary permission from Rome or from local bishops to carry out their work anywhere in the world. The Pope lifting the excommunications does not mean that the separation between the SSPX and Rome has ended. However, it is a move which seems to promise a sincere effort on Rome’s behalf to bring the SSPX back into the tent of the Church.
Fair enough. But the question still remains. Why does Benedict want to bring vile racists in his tent?
After all, AFP reports: “Since assuming office in April 2005, Benedict has made great efforts to heal the schism with the more traditionalist Catholic movement, granting a private audience to [SSPX leader] Fellay in mid-2005.”
It’s one thing to try to break the rank-and-file of the SSPX from their doctrines. It’s another to have a friendly chat with someone whose group openly and unabashedly distributes the foulest anti-Semitic slanders.
Which brings us back to Michael Backman. One would like to think that the response to his piece reflected a genuine concern that his questionable phraseology opened the door to racism, rather than an attempt to shut down critics of Israel’s attack on Gaza (although this editorial does rather make you wonder).
Certainly, it’s true that the murderous history of the 20th century leaves no room for ambiguity about racism.
But, as a figure on the world stage, the Pope matters rather more than an obscure business columnist. That’s why his apparent toleration of an anti-Semitic hate group deserves the strongest possible condemnation, even if there’s no political mileage to be made from it.
Jeff, you cannot condemn the Pope on the basis of what a schismatic body says on their website, as you have done in this article. As I said before, SSPX does not recognize the legitimacy of any Pope since John XXIII, and have actively denounced all doctrinal developments extending from the Second Vatican Council.
As for Bishop Williamson, he is a convert from Anglicanism and has some pretty vituperative views about the Papacy that put his anti-Semitism in the shade. SSPX has deplored the views he expressed on television recently (which is really what all the fuss is about) and has taken steps to distance themselves from him. If that doesn’t amount to publicly denouncing the man, I don’t know what does. If the other bishops (re-)join the Church, Williamson is unlikely to follow. He will be left with a fissiparous rump of clergy who will discredit themselves soon enough — hardly a vindication of Archbishop Lefevbure’s reasons for setting up the SSPX in the first place.
The Church is not a political party. The Pope has no authority with which to rebuke Williamson. Without putting too fine a point on this, you don’t seem to have done your fact checking properly before posting this article, and none of your responses have addressed the points I have raised. Your readers (and editors) should expect better.
Without wanting to tell you how to suck eggs, I really think you should look up a few of the conservative Catholic blogs — Holy Smoke has a lot of commentary on this issue. You will see that conservatives within the Church are utterly appalled at this move, and are watching to see how the sede vacantists behave. I would also suggest that you take the effort to discover what the Catholic Church’s doctrinal views on the Jewish people are before writing such a ridiculous denunciation of the shadow of a statue.
The Pope, like any public figure, meets with many people. This doesn’t mean he agrees with everything everyone says or writes.
only a so-so effort at deflection:
– haven’t given those nasty papists a good kicking since WYD.
– one of the pope’s advisors got a bit uppity & compared gaza to a concentration camp.
– quick, let’s call the pope a racist & bring those papists down a notch or two !
fact is i haven’t seen the pope’s swiss guards drop any bombs on women & children lately…but other groups been doing plenty of that lately though…what is the definition of “racist” again ?
I am over this sort of racist drivel. The holocaust was evil but 108 million other people died in Dresden, England, France and Vietnam in two world wars.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/20/gaza-israel-samouni-family
“They left behind their own unique detritus: bullet casings, roasted peanuts in tins with Hebrew script, a plastic bag containing a “High Quality Body Warmer”, dozens of olive-green waste disposal bags, some empty, some stinking full – the troops’ portable toilets.
But most disturbing of all was the graffiti they daubed on the walls of the ground floor. Some was in Hebrew, but much was naively written in English: “Arabs need 2 die”, “Die you all”, “Make war not peace”, “1 is down, 999,999 to go”, and scrawled on an image of a gravestone the words: “Arabs 1948-2009”.
There were several sketches of the Star of David flag. “Gaza here we are,” it said in English next to one.”
One large peace symbol had three slogans written in Hebrew in its three compartments: “Death to Arabs,” “War on Arabs–Sounds Good to Me”, and “The Only Good Arab is a Dead Arab.”
He reports that the IDF had kicked all the family out of their homes and then shelled them wherever they went but this one the home standing because the Israeli’s were living in.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090126/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflictgazareligion
Ha’aretz Magazine, 8 October 2004 – Dov Weisglass, counsel to Ariel Sharon in an interview with Ari Shavit.
I still don’t see how the disengagement plan helps here. What was the major importance of the plan from your point of view?
“The disengagement plan is the preservative of the sequence principle. It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the president’s formula so that it will be preserved for a very lengthy period. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
Err just a question. There seems to be a bit of distinction between excommunication from a religion, and being a recognised sinner still accepted within. For instance any number of murderers, rapists and yes racists will still be accepted as Catholics.
Unlike some other religions they do a busy trade in confessions for exactly these sins. There’s a good movie with Tilda Swinton in it called The Statement I think about a the French Catholic church finally marginalising a devout confessor and murderer of the Jews in WW2. Issues of Church complicity or protection run through the story and it’s supposedly loosely fact based:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Statement
Not quite sure the rules for excommunication (though my suggesting George Pell was an agent of the Devil on the environment could be getting up there) but my guess is it quite allows for sinners to stay a Catholic.
So the question really is – is there any official recognition. Suspect not much. You say he’s still a “Bishop” but my guess is you can’t unBishop people in the Church. If vague memory serves it’s a sacrament like communion and confirmation namely “Holy Orders”. I suspect you can only sack them from their job, a bit like W Bush is forever more a POTUS.
Some official Jesuit type will probably decide to buy in to this string eventually.
At the risk of flogging a dead horse, no, Kieran, you can’t condemn the Pope on the basis of what a schismatic body says on their website. But that’s not what the article does, is it? The problem lies with the Pope’s attitude to that anti-semitic schismatic body, his willingness to, as Time says, grant it ‘a personal prelature of the papacy, the same special status that conservative lay group Opus Dei was granted by John Paul II’. In other words, if Time is to be believed, the Pope, one of the world’s most significant religious leaders, is contemplating giving a special official status to a group that publicly says that Jews are usurious Christ killers who funded communism. You don’t think that’s at all problematic?
You say that the Pope regularly meets with lots of people. So do most public figures — but if we learnt that any secular leader was having private audiences with the leader of an anti-Semitic hate group, we’d condemn them for it. Wouldn’t we?
I’m glad to hear that conservative Catholic blogs are aghast at the suggestion of a reconciliation with these bigots. They should be. I don’t get why you aren’t.