CathInfo.com

The Point February 1956

II — The Refugee

The Point ’s second White Jew is drawn from the religious rather than the secular world,
but he has been no less a problem to our readers than Mr. Baruch. He is a refugee from
Austria who now conducts, at a Catholic college in New Jersey, a one-man propaganda
agency called the Institute of Judaeo-Christian Studies. So “White” is this Jew that at
the age of twenty he submitted himself to the ritual of Christian Baptism, and then went
on to become a Catholic priest. His name is Father John M. Oesterreicher.
Before Baptism, John Oesterreicher had been a student of medicine. Three years and a
few theology books later, he was ordained a Catholic priest. Even his most prostrate
apologists have wondered at such a speeded-up process. And more thoughtful observers
have concluded that in the Church which harbors such painful and multiple memories of
deceitfully converted “Marrano” Jews, there is something most unusual, to say the least,
about the urgency with which John Osterreicher was rushed from Baptism to Holy
Orders.

Whether by deliberate design or not, the historical fact is that, for hundreds of
thousands of German-speaking Jews, Father Oesterreicher’s sudden priesthood became
an immediate weapon against the rising anti-Jєωιѕнness of Adolph Hitler. With the
weight of the Catholic Church presumably behind him, and the passion of his Jєωιѕн
blood clearly pushing him on, Father Oesterreicher began a frenzied crusade of writing
and speaking. He invoked, as authorities, both saints and sociologists, popes and
psychiatrists. He devised arguments from demonology and anthropology, from
scholastics and rationalists — all to prove to the Catholics of Austria and Germany that
anyone who speaks ill of a Jew is actually blaspheming Jesus Christ Himself!  
 
The same Catholics who well knew that the program proposed by Hitler was hardly the
Church’s solution to the Jєωιѕн question, knew quite as well that Father Oesterreicher
did not have the answer either.

As Hitler proceeded across Europe, Father Oesterreicher managed to keep several towns
ahead of him, and finally, in 1941, turned up as a curate in New York City. Since there
were in our whole country only about a dozen Jєωιѕн-convert priests, Father
Oesterreicher proved to be a popular novelty. He was the object of much parochial
curiosity and found no difficulty in gathering an inquisitive crowd for the lectures he
started to give within six months of his arrival here. His message was invariably of one
theme. Always there was the appeal to respect, to admire, to love, to fall down in the
mud and worship the Jєωιѕн race. And always the appeal was subtly charged with what
Father Oesterreicher hoped would pass for the binding authority of the Catholic Church.

But Father Oesterreicher did not have to depend solely upon his own initiative. He had a
number of American boosters, of whom perhaps the most zealous was Professor Jacques
Maritain. Professor Maritain is the French-born, Protestant-reared, Catholic
philosopher who married a Russian Jewess named Raïssa Oumansoff. Although known
in this country as a speaker at Jєωιѕн seminaries and teacher at Masonic universities,
Maritain did try to get a position at a Catholic school. Some years ago, he was
interviewed for a job at Fordham University, and stipulated in the course of the
discussion that he would expect to be given free rein in all his classes to criticize the
pope. Fordham’s Jesuit president turned him down, and Maritain took a job at
Princeton, no holds barred.

When Professor Maritain received an honorary degree a few months ago from Jєωιѕн
Brandeis University, his support of Father Oesterreicher accounted for much of the
genuine applause he received from the assembled representatives of American Jewry.
For Father Oesterreicher, in every point of his Judaeo-Christian program, has complied
exactly with the publicized objectives of the powerful American Jєωιѕн Committee. In
his books, Walls Are Crumbling and The Bridge, Father Oesterreicher’s glorification of
the Jews would erase forever from Catholic minds those New Testament texts which the
Jєωιѕн Committee has so repeatedly attacked as “anti-Semitic.” Saint Peter’s accusation
in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 5, that the Jews are the murderers of Christ; Saint
Stephen’s vehement repetition of this charge in chapter 7; Saint Paul’s elaboration on
the guilt and curse of the Jews in I Thessalonians, 2:15 — these and all other biblical
indictments of the Jєωιѕн people are blotted out and replaced by Father Oesterreicher’s
devotion to such unbaptized “saints” as Jєωιѕн logician Edmund Husserl and Jєωιѕн
intuitionist Henri Bergson.

In his compliance with the American Jєωιѕн Committee’s declared aim, “to revise
Christian religious teaching,” Father Oesterreicher has consistently depreciated the tall
stacks of papal legislation against the Jews. And, even more boldly, he has demanded a
rewording of the Church’s liturgy, proposing that our annual Good Friday reference to
the “perfidious Jews” be changed in meaning! The American Jєωιѕн Committee followed up
Father Oesterreicher’s proposal by pulling every string within its grasp from here to Rome.
The result? The following half-hearted, much-guarded statement by the Vatican’s Congregation
of Rites: “This Sacred Congregation, having been consulted about the matter, has deemed it
advisable to make the following declaration only: That, in translations into the vernacular,
phrases are not disapproved of which the meaning (for ‘perfidious Jews’) is ‘infidels without belief.’ ”

Although we may be assured from our Faith that nineteen hundred years of Church
policy toward the crucifiers of Christ will never be undone by one strategically-placed
Jew, still, it is encouraging to be presented with clear evidence of just how little pro-
Jєωιѕн residue Father Oesterreicher leaves behind him. When President Truman’s
Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine held its hearings in Vienna, the
center of Father Oesterreicher’s “apostolate” during the thirties, there was not the least
hint that Austrian Catholics had retained even a remembrance of the Oesterreicher
“doctrines.” Indeed, the outlook of Austrian Catholics toward Jews was summarized
most orthodoxly by His Excellency, Francis Kamprath, Vienna’s Auxiliary Bishop. As a
gauge of the previous effectiveness of Father Oesterreicher’s Judaeo-Christian program,
and a pledge of its ultimate failure, we conclude with the statement by Bishop
Kamprath, taken from recorded testimony before the Anglo-American Committee:

“During the war and in the time of the nαzιs there was a great deal of mistaken racial
anti-Semitism. Today all anti-Semitism in Austria is religious anti-Semitism. That is
justified.”

Do you have a link to this source?

This website has no affiliation with any religion or religious organization and Father Feeney himself, as a traditionalist Catholic and not a “racist” or nationalist, would have vehemently opposed some of its content and some of the sites to which it links.