The
Williamson Affair
Part V
15 August 2009
Back to: (Part I) (Part II)
(Part III) (Part IV)
In surveying the impact of the
Williamson affair, we should note that the wrath of the media has
been directed not just at the bishop himself and the SSPX, but also
at ordinary Catholics striving to preserve the integrity of their
Faith. After decades of being ignored at all levels, we followers
of tradition have found ourselves being targeted in a way that
defies all logic. Not that anyone in the regular press has sought
us out for questioning — or brought up the real religious issues
concerning us. No, by and large their methods have been grossly
unfair, flagrantly so. Furthermore, the tactics employed by certain
celebrity “pundits” have betrayed a profound vapidity, if not
stupidity.
Take the article in the February 9
issue of Newsweek entitled “The Pope’s Denial Problem” by
Christopher Hitchens, an avowed God-denier who reportedly claims
Jewish ancestry through his mother. Far from having suffered media
censure over his denial, he has won rave reviews for books entitled
God is Not Great, and The Portable Atheist. Readers
of this series may recall that during a 1986 Firing Line
episode he also evinced a singular lack of concern for the victims
of the Ukrainian famine. So should we expect him now to write
fairly about traditional Catholics? Hardly. For starters, look at
the subtitle to his piece:
“By
reconciling with extremist bishops, Benedict embraces the far-right
fringe.”
So what’s the
hitch?
Simply put, the hitch entails how
Hitchens includes in this group all “lonely, cranky outsiders,” i.e.
“schismatics,” who, having strayed from the conciliar fold, are not
in good standing with Benedict. That means us, folks. Considering his own extreme state of denial, we might
wonder why he should care, or dare to pontificate, but he explains
that the Williamson debacle is much more than an “internal affair of
the Roman Catholic Church.” Here is why. According to him, the
changes wrought by Vatican II fall into two categories: the
replacing of the Latin Mass with “services in the vernacular,” and
the “abandonment by the church of the charge of ‘deicide’ against
the Jewish people as a whole.” The two are related, he says,
because the old Latin form of the Mass “included a specific Good
Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews, who were in some
version of the ritual described as ‘perfidious.’”
Ironically, the “ritual” in this case
is not really a Mass, Good Friday being the one day in the year when
none is said. His point is clear, however. Because once a year the
Church has traditionally included the “faithless (in Latin,
perfidis) Jews” in a list of those to be prayed for, Hitchens
thinks the Latin liturgy as a whole is suspect, especially when one
of those still saying it, namely Richard Williamson, has been
exposed as being a flagrant denier. I mean, it’s one thing to deny
God — that’s Hitchens’ God-given right, right? — but quite another
to deny any aspect of the Holocaust as officially defined and
endorsed by the experts. As for a solution to the problem, Hitchens
offers none. Would he prefer the faithful cease praying for the
Jews on Good Friday? Or could that, too, be interpreted as being
negative and discriminatory?
The brunt of his ire, however, is
directed not at Williamson, but at Mel Gibson and his father Hutton,
who seem to epitomize for him all that is nasty in Catholic
tradition. Not that our atheist gets into the essence of what is at
stake, i.e. their thoughts on the validity of the Novus Ordo Mass
and ordinations, or the legitimacy of the papacy — indeed of the
hierarchy as a whole. No, all that matters to Hitchens is their
attitude towards the Jews, since he views this as both negative and
indicative of the general trend underlying the “increasing
restoration of the Latin service.”
He claims Hutton Gibson is “bitterly
hostile to all the liturgical and doctrinal changes of the past half
century,” especially “Rome’s attempt to ‘reach out’ to Jews.” This
includes Ratzinger’s efforts “to modify the charge that all [sic]
Jews demanded the crucifixion of Jesus.” Though we must wonder: has
Hitchens read the gospel accounts telling how some Jews, including
Mary and the apostles, sided with Christ at the time, and how many
more converted afterwards? Not even Ratzinger would refute that.
Hitchens must be uninformed. Otherwise how can he think this long
established fact to be an idea that was newly hatched during Vatican
II and is now in danger of being euthanized?
And how can our God-denier suggest
Hutton Gibson’s book The Enemy Is Still Here is a fount of
anti-semitism? How many of its 391 pages has he actually read?
Consisting of newsletter items dating from 1994 to 2003, the book is
not, to be sure, easily digested by those not familiar with topics
like geocentrism vs. heliocentrism, creationism vs. Darwinism, and
sedevacantism. Also: heretical clerics; invalid ordinations; and
the perils of Arianism, Averroism, modernism, communism,
contraception and usury: hot stuff, to be sure. The likes of
Archbishop Lefebvre, Richard Ibranyi and Michael Davies come under
scrutiny, while heroes include Saints Ambrose, Polycarp, Athanasius,
Robert Bellarmine, and Clement of Alexandria: not one a modern Jew.
Should this be construed as an insult? Hardly, considering that the
nastiest of Gibson’s epithets are reserved for prelates like “His
Ignorance Cardinal Knox of Melbourne” –– and John Paul II, who is
dubbed repeatedly as “Garrulous Karolus the Koran Kisser.”
Gibson does indeed take jabs at
ecumenical idiocy –– and those he considers responsible for it. His
list of top offenders fails to include Jews for the simple reason
that, as Bishop Fellay finally put it recently in an interview, it’s
not their Church! They may have been in charge way back in
Judea, but not now. Today’s traitors are, rather, those who have
usurped true authority and captured the Church from within.
Hitchens’ problem is that he views the situation solely from the
outside, from what he sees as the proper Jewish perspective.
To all other considerations he is
blind.
Here I am reminded of a colorful sign
in a doughnut shop my family frequented when I was four to five
years of age. Its message went: “Watch the doughnut, not the
hole.” My father would remind me of this whenever I whined and
griped, and I suggest the moral still applies, especially here.
Comparing the stuff of Christianity to a giant doughnut, we see the
Bread of Life, a source of light and holiness. Jews, in contrast,
see only a gigantic black hole extending back through the
centuries. Dark and forbidding though this is, they nevertheless
insist on trying to put themselves into the picture. Since they can
do so only in a negative way, the result is a bottomless pit of
complaints.
Thus we come to The Hebrew People
and Their Holy Scriptures in the Christian Bible, published in
2001 by the Pontifical Biblical Commission. At the time Cardinal
Ratzinger acted as president for this and wrote the preface to the
document, parts of which Gibson includes towards the ends of his
book. Interspersed by his own brief comments in brackets, the
quotes are obviously what Hitchens is referring to when he mentions
the attempts by Rome, and Ratzinger in particular, to “reach out” to
Jews. Hutton allegedly rejects these out of hostility towards that
people. But is this actually so?
Or does Hitchens, quoting out of
context, distort the picture?
Upon examination we find this to be
the case, Gibson’s main purpose here being not to criticize the
Jews, but rather, to maintain the integrity of the Catholic Faith.
For this is exactly what is at stake. The document in question
says that the “extermination [sic] of the Jews” has caused all
Churches to “re-think their interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, the
Old Testament. Some have asked themselves whether Christians should
repent for their appropriation of the Hebrew Bible and an
interpretation that no Jew could accept.” (But is this attitude of
theirs surprising? As Hutton comments, “Of course not! That is why
they are Jews!”)
The document goes on to say:
Christians can and should
admit that the Hebrew reading of the Bible is a possible
reading, which finds itself in continuity with the Hebrew
sacred Scriptures of the time. . . And it is similar to the
Christian reading, which developed parallel to theirs. . .
From the concrete plane of exegesis, Christians can still
learn from the Hebrew exegesis practiced for more than two
thousand years.
So the new word coming from on high
is that we should listen and learn from Jewish exegetes who not only
deny Christ but find no hint of him in the Old Testament! Talk
about opening a can of worms! What are the implications of all
this? Let us turn back to the book The Continuing Agony,
quoted previously in this series. In one of the essays, Rabbi Jacob
Neusner quotes the prophet Isaiah (54:7-8):
He was oppressed and he
was afflicted yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that
is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its
shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.
By oppression and
judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who
considered that he was cut off out of the land of the
living, stricken for the transgression of my people.
While admitting that Christians see
in this their suffering Christ, Neusner asserts: “There is scarcely
a Jew in the world who reads these words without understanding,
beyond all doubt, that when Isaiah spoke, he told us about the
Holocaust.” He writes further:
To me Isaiah describes my
life and the life of my people; it is with me when I wake up
in the morning and when I go to sleep at night. Can
Christians tell our story in their way, so that they may
find sympathy for us? Clearly, they can, and may do. That
is why I do not doubt that Christians can find in the story
of Christ resources for telling themselves, also, the story
of Israel in our times. And in reading the suffering
servant as we do, they will discover in that conviction of
ours that we are Israel, after the flesh, after the spirit,
alike, the resources not for assent, but only for
sympathetic hearing.
It is all too clear.
Returning to the analogy of doughnut
versus unholy hole, we can see how Jews like Neusner have at long
last found a substitute for the divine presence they failed to find
in Christ. In place of His agony they see theirs. Into the vacuum
of the dark pit extending through the ages they have projected
Israel, their people. Collectively, they emerge as the suffering
Messiah foretold by Isaiah –– and also by Baruch Levy, who in a
letter to Karl Marx predicted the Jews as a group would become just
that: their own messiah. It seems the Holocaust — and the
remembrance thereof — has made this finally come to pass in a
strange kind of religious reversal. While the event is glorified
constantly in books, movies and TV, museums, and school curricula,
the image of Christ’s crucifixion seems ever to recede, along with
the celebration of the true Mass. In place of the Real Presence,
the memory of the “Shoah” is reverenced, as though to fill the void
left by our own apparently dying faith.
There is, to be sure, a big problem
here. As Christians we have to defend our traditional way of
looking at scripture. How can that quote from Isaiah, for instance,
refer not to Christ’s Crucifixion but to the Holocaust — or to both
at once? Surely it has to be one or the other, since the Catholic
and neo-Jewish interpretations of scripture are here mutually
exclusive. Could their view now be replacing ours in the eyes of
the modern world? Would this not be supercessionism in reverse?
Or, as some suggest, do we instead have, two parallel covenants in
operation at once, one for the Jews, another for gentile Christians?
Can this be orthodox? It hardly seems so. Yet the document
endorsed by Ratzinger that we quoted above encourages Catholics to
read, and to respect such a prophetic spin. And, since ascending
the papal throne, Ratzinger has gone even further to encourage it!
Take the Time article for May
24, 2007 featuring “The Pope’s Favorite Rabbi,” who turns out to be
our friend Jacob Neusner. It seems that in his new book Jesus of
Nazareth Benedict devoted 20 pages to a book by Neusner
published in 1993 called A Rabbi Talks with Jesus. In this
the rabbi projects himself back into gospel times in order to “quiz
Jesus on the Jewish law.” Not surprisingly he found “the Nazarene’s
interpretation irredeemably faulty.” Yet 14 years later, Benedict
“not only compliments Neusner as a ‘great Jewish scholar’ but also
recapitulates the thesis of A Rabbi Talks and spends a third
of one of his 10 chapters answering it.”
And he calls himself the pope?
Even Novus Ordo gurus like Eugene
Fisher, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ liaison for
Catholic-Jewish relations were taken aback by his unprecedented
adulation for a rabbi. Reportedly Fisher said: “Wow! This is new.”
And indeed it is, considering what Neusner said in his own book.
According to Time, the rabbi asserted that by preaching “he
who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me”,
Jesus defied the fourth commandment, and that by taking “liberties”
with Sabbath restrictions, he also flouted divine orders to keep
that day holy, etc. Hence Neusner concludes Jesus elevated Himself
“above the Torah and hence God.”
The possibility that He might have
been God, and therefore the supreme Judge in all such cases, of
course, is beyond Neusner’s feeble grasp. Nor does he admit there
might be any more subtle applications of the law itself. Such
nuances elude him. I mean, there are limits to honoring and obeying
one’s parents, especially for an adult. Even a dimwit should know
it’s not right to elevate them above God or the moral code as a
whole. If my dad, for instance, should tell me filch every doughnut
in sight, I could not in all good conscience obey him. Nor could I
obey a Novus Ordo “bishop” who tells me to avow heresy.
Yet Benedict praises this rabbi and
encourages Catholics to read him!
Considering the situation, can we be
blamed for joining the opposition? Should we not all stand up for
orthodoxy? Does it not violate our basic beliefs to say that these
should have been transformed by Vatican II? Ironically, even
Hitchens admits there has been such a radical break with the past.
In his article he says that what makes the current “concessions” to
traditionalists so alarming is that “this is not a departure from
‘original intent’ Catholicism but rather part of a return to
traditional and old-established preachments.” In other words,
God-denier that he is, he likes the changes, and to hell with
Catholics who do not.
How dare we object!
This then is the background for
Hitchens’ jabs at Hutton, whose criticisms of Ratzinger, in context,
seem quite mild. Recall that in his book, Gibson includes excerpts
from The Hebrew People and Their Scriptures in the Christian
Bible, a project headed by Ratzinger when a “cardinal”. One of
the quotes goes as follows:
At the end of the trial
before Pilate, the high priests worked up the people who
were present into a state of excitement and made them decide
in favor of Barabbas (Mk 15:11) and, therefore, against
Jesus (Mk 15:15). The final decision of Pilate, powerless
to calm the multitude, was that of ‘seconding it,’ which for
Jesus signified crucifixion (Mk. 15:15). Now, that
occasional multitude cannot be confused with the Hebrew
people of that time, and still less with the Hebrew People
and Their Holy Scriptures in the Christian Bible of all
times. Instead of this it must be said that this multitude
would represent the sinner world (Mk 14:41), of which we all
make up part.
Truly this represents the height — or
should we say depths — of absurdity. The text appears to deny the
presence of real live human beings in the crowd, in order, no doubt,
to absolve them of guilt for demanding Christ die in place of
Barabbas. Instead it says all humanity in abstract, i.e. “the
sinner world” was there.
Talk about surreal!
Remember how Hitchens credits
Ratzinger with attempts to “modify the charge that all Jews demanded
the crucifixion of Jesus” –– and how he blames Hutton for rejecting
these. Theological considerations aside, all our atheist worries
about is anti-Semitism, however that might be defined. While not
Jewish in any religious sense of the word, he is incensed by
Hutton’s comment that “all the Jews on hand publicly and
vociferously assumed the guilt. ‘His blood be upon us, and upon our
children.’” Gibson also said:
This crime certainly
outranks Original Sin, and the Tower of Babel; the
punishment for both sins of pride was also inflicted upon
all future generation. In accordance with history’s record
of massive disasters suffered by the Jews, the Church has
always held this position. And why may not the ‘holocaust’
have been due to the same curse which they called down upon
themselves?
For Hitchens such a conclusion
reflects Hutton’s “coarse and nasty manner.” So does the latter’s
response to John Paul II’s suggestion that the Jews are in a certain
way our elder brothers. Hitchens reports: “Gibson snorts: ‘Abel had
an older brother!’” Or so he is quoted in Hitchens’ article.
Actually, these words in Hutton’s book are in brackets, which
constitute more of an aside than a snort. The message,
nevertheless, is clear: Hitchens, too, knows his Old Testament! Not
to be outdone by such crudity as Hutton’s, he hurls a low blow:
When Mel Gibson, who has
funded a special Latin Mass church in Malibu, Calif., was
arrested by a police officer upon whom he then up-ended a
great potty of Jew-hating paranoid drivel, he tried to
defend himself by saying that it was the drink talking. No,
it wasn’t the drink talking: it was his revered father
talking and, through him, a strain of reactionary Catholic
dogma that we hoped had been left behind.
Hitchens fails to mention how Jewish
groups had hounded the movie star throughout the filming of The
Passion and that the stress from this might have triggered the
tirade. For our God-denier none of that counts. His own ranting
and raving does tell us something, however, because, as noted above,
in the process he admits that the current “concessions” being made
by Rome to “Holocaust-deniers and anti-Semites” represent nothing
new, but rather, “a return to tradition and old-established
preachments.” Only since Vatican II, he says, has the church
attempted “to acknowledge its historic responsibility for defaming
the Jewish people.”
Now, though, with the concessions to
the SSPX, he fears Rome could be regressing.
Here let us interject that, in
addition to bias, Hitchens displays a basic ignorance of fundamental
Catholic terms. Apparently his Oxford education failed to expose
him to what any 10-year-old would have known at my parochial grade
school. In his first paragraph, for instance, he remarks how many
Roman Catholics have regarded Vatican II as a “ghastly mistake,” and
that the “best known of these outside the church was probably Evelyn
Waugh.” The “best known inside the church” he identifies as being
the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Trouble is, British author
Evelyn Waugh, after converting to Catholicism some 36 years before
his death, remained very much inside the Church, not outside!
Indeed he died in 1966 after attending what Hitchens terms “Easter
services.” (Catholics, of course, would say “Easter Mass”.)
It would seem our pundit has confused
the state of being “inside the church” with that of being part of
the hierarchy, or of the priesthood. Though maybe not. After
reading the passage again I was struck by another possible
interpretation. Do you suppose Hitchens means that Waugh is the
“best known” traditional type known by those “outside the Church,”
while Lefebvre is the best known to those “inside the Church?” That
makes more sense, but if this is indeed what Hitchens means, he
needs to say so less ambiguously. It makes us wonder about his
editors: aren’t they paid to catch such glitches? Of course, with
all their money, wouldn’t you also think Newsweek might try
to solicit writers more familiar with their subject matter?
Wonders never cease.
Later on Hitchens announces that “it
is only in one verse of one Gospel (Matthew 27:24-25), and in the
climactic scene of Mel Gibson’s movie, that the Jewish Sanhedrin
demands to be held responsible for the coming crucifixion for all
time and through all generations.” This is not so, of course.
Gibson is not the only other one in the past two millennia to have
dealt with this scene. What about all those passion plays through
the centuries, not to mention sermons and biblical commentaries by
everyone from Thomas Aquinas to your local pastor?
Ironically, in overlooking all these,
Hitchens elevates the man he is castigating to a unique realm near
that of the evangelist himself! But in saying what he does, he also
makes another mistake. Turn to your Bible and you will find that
the Sanhedrin is not mentioned in the passage cited at all! The
verse in fact describes the crowd of Jews before Christ and Pilate
crying out “May His blood be upon us and upon our children.” While
being manipulated, to be sure, by their chief priests and other
leaders, the people at the scene did nevertheless shout those
words. Does Hitchens not check his citations, or does he simply not
care? Perhaps the New Testament is beneath him. Certainly it is
outside his realm of expertise. Did he even watch the movie? No
version of The Passion that we have seen has this quote
subtitled in English. Since the crowd is shouting in old Aramaic,
only those familiar with either that language or their Bible know
what is being said!
Reportedly Gibson gave in to pressure
by not allowing the translations of those particular words of
dialogue to be flashed across the screen in versions of the film
available to the public. Not that Hitchens would admit as much.
No, he shows Gibson the same amount of respect that he shows St.
Matthew, who, of course, was Jewish himself. As one of the twelve
apostles, he, of course, lived through the passion and death of his
Master and later wrote a gospel in Aramaic for the benefit of his
fellow Jews. We learned that in school, but Hitchens is obviously
not impressed. Whether or not he actually read the gospel, he goes
on to challenge its authenticity by saying, in reference to the
above passage: “Then there is the question, even if the rabbis [sic]
did make such a demand, of whether they could claim to speak for all
Jews then, let alone all those who have been born since.” The
implication is, of course, that the religious leaders (or the crowd
being manipulated by them) in all probability never really said what
the evangelist said they did.
According to Hitchens, St. Matthew
cannot be taken as gospel, in other words.
But can our celebrity atheist? Can
he be taken seriously as a theologian and Bible critic, given his
extreme bias and catechetical deficiencies? Proof of the latter can
also be found in the following statement: “Christian doctrine holds
that all of us were implicated in the guilt of Calvary and were, in
a mystic sense, present for it. Every time we sin or fall away, we
increase the pain and misery of the awful scene.” Now, do examine
his words closely, for we detect a misunderstanding — indeed a
misappropriation –– of the doctrine regarding the Real Presence.
According to that, Christ becomes present during the Mass under the
appearances of bread and wine. His Sacrifice recurs on the altar,
but liturgically, in an unbloody manner. The congregation is not
mystically transported back to Calvary in the process! He comes
here; we don’t go there. We don’t go backwards in time to join the
crowd of onlookers!
Hitchens goes on to say, “Every time
we sin or fall away, we increase the pain and misery of that awful
scene. Thus the principle of collective responsibility applies to
everybody and not just to Jews.” Now, while correct in a sense,
this statement, too, is confused. It fails to note that any effect
those who were not present had on Christ’s suffering is due to the
fact that, as God, He possesses an eternal dimension outside of time
and place. It does not mean that the whole drama with its cast of
thousands is constantly replaying itself in any mystical, much less
tangible, sense; nor that His bodily suffering continues in some
ongoing state of flux. Nor are we in any way taken “mystically
there”, except, if we so desire, privately, in our imaginations, not
as part of any liturgy.
Where did Hitchens get such an idea?
Could his source for it possibly be The Hebrew People and Their
Holy Scriptures in the Christian Bible? Let us recall our
previous quote from that: in speaking of the crowd before Pilate, it
says, “that occasional multitude cannot be confused with the Hebrew
people of that time, and still less with The Hebrew People . . . of
all times. Instead of this it must be said that this multitude
would represent the sinner world . . . of which we all make up
part.” Hmm. Do you suppose this has prompted our atheist to deduce
that, as sinners, all of us are periodically, mystically transported
back there into the nameless, faceless — downright disembodied —
crowd of non-Jews shouting for Christ’s blood?
But it gets worse.
In a final effort to bring “Jewish
orthodoxy” into the picture, Hitchens writes:
In commenting on the
Christian Bible, the greatest of the sages, Maimonides,
affirmed that the rabbis of Jerusalem were to be showered
with praise for their courageous rectitude in thus disposing
of the foul impostor and heretic who dared claim to be the
adored and long-looked-for (and still-awaited) Messiah. You
can be sure that devout Catholics down the ages were as
acutely aware of this awkward fact as most of today’s
secular Jewish liberals are blissfully unaware of it. The
old-style Easter sermons, the “Passion Plays” at
Oberammergau and elsewhere, and bestselling Catholic
devotional books such as the visions of the German nun Anne
Catherine Emmerich, are replete with revolted [sic]
depictions of Jewish mobs reveling in the sufferings of the
Nazarene.
Talk about nerve!
Having bashed St. Matthew (not to
mention Christ), Hitchens goes on to praise “the greatest of the
sages”, the 12th century Sephardic philosopher Maimonides, who
reportedly not only called Jesus a “foul impostor and heretic” but
also showered praise on the rabbis of Jerusalem for having disposed
of Him! Yes, Hitchens tells us this! Yet, rather than admit that
it might in any way reflect the slightest amount of “hate” on the
part of any Jew of any age, our expert proceeds to castigate instead
all those nasty Catholics who, he suggests, reacted to Maimonides by
initiating Passion plays and other supposedly violent devotions and
prayers during the centuries before Vatican II.
Do we detect a double standard here?
The irony is that while he implies
Catholics act hatefully out of revenge for what Maimonides said, no
one I know, myself included, had ever heard of those remarks before
this article. Yet he blames us for acting violently in reaction to
them! Is this fair? Were we to take a show of hands, I would bet
that fewer than one in a hundred Catholics out there has ever even
heard of the 12th century Sephardic sage. I only did some years
ago, when I read how he considered Christians to be idolaters for
their worship of the Trinity. Moslems, in contrast, escaped his
censure in this regard, but Hitchens does not say so. The idea that
Arabs or Moors — or Persians — might think more like Jews than do
Catholics or fundamentalist Protestants is no longer cool, the
heated disputes over territory in the Middle East having altered the
old alliances.
Nor is it fair of Hitchens to suggest
mega-stars like Mel Gibson and his father typify traditional
Catholics. No way do their high profile situations compare with
ours, especially not in regards to run-ins with the police. Take,
for example, the Sunday morning years ago when the kids were small
and, preparing to load up for our 200 mile round trip to Mass, we
parked the car in our driveway with the back end sticking ever so
slightly out into the street. It was only 7 a.m. with next to no
traffic, not even foot, to be seen in our quiet neighborhood, until
a cop suddenly materialized and gave us a ticket for blocking the
sidewalk. Surprisingly, this failed to make the news, local or
otherwise, though it is true no harsh words were exchanged. It
wasn’t as though we dared complain.
No, it all went very quietly, like
most of our lives in general.
Copyright by Judith M.
Gordon 2009