I had no participation or connection with the e-mail discussion which produced this.
Nevertheless, it might be of interest to some of you.
[written by an Australian Lefebvr*te]
Re: Williamson dismisses 'neo-nαzι' legal counsel
24 November 2010
it is quite evident that Williamson is a morally scabrous αnтι-ѕємιтє.
That is why he denies the existence of the h0Ɩ0cαųst. The only reason
why people deny this well-established fact is because of antisemitism;
the denial serves to whitewash an antisemitic regime and to deny an
event that made antisemitism beyond the pale. It is not because of a
disinterested spirit of historical inquiry, because there is nothing
in the historical record that can prompt such a denial. For those of
you who complain that this statement is judging him without hearing
his case, or begging the question; you are missing the point. There
are some facts that are obvious on the face of them, and this is one
of them. With such facts, argument is not only not necessary, but not
appropriate, because giving such arguments implicitly concedes that
they are needed. You may complain that this implies that some of you
are being accused of folly and wilful blindness to evil when it come
to Williamson. Well, that's right.
On the numbers of people killed; upwards of three million six hundred
thousand individual names of Jєωs who were killed have been collected
(see
http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/remembrance/names/why_collect_names.asp).
This worthy project is not of course necessary to establish the
approximate number of Jєωs killed, because that can be done by
comparing the number of Jєωs living before the Second World War in
areas that were occupied by the Germans (about 6 million) and after
the second world war (a few hundred thousand). The differences between
these two figures is not accounted for by Jєωs who popped up somewhere
else in the world, as very few Jєωs managed to emigrate from
German-occupied areas during the war.
On the idea that because nαzιsm is an exploded philosophy, there is no
reason for taking sympathy with its goal of exterminating the Jєωs
seriously; this is not true. The desire and expressed purpose of many
Muslim groups and states is the total extermination of the Jєωs. The
current president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is now building
nuclear weapons for just that purpose. I note that these same groups
also intend to extirpate Christianity (Ahmadinejad, by the way, has
pushed a law through making death the sole available penalty for men
who convert to Christianity). This is a specific reason for Christians
to sympathise with the Jєωs on this issue; the people who want to
destroy them want to destroy us.
Williamson was in fact notorious as an αnтι-ѕємιтє even
before this scandal. I had myself heard about this fact; it is
chronicled in the paper by an alumnus of his seminary, J. Christopher
Pryor, 'Cathoilcism and the Teachings of Bishop Williamson', that can
be found at this website -
http://www.jsantisemitism.org/pdf/jsa_1-2.pdf. The paper is
fascinating in a number of ways.
There is a broader interest to this Williamson affair, which
is why I am writing on it at this length. His views on the Jєωs were
at one time respectable and widely held within the Church. For
evidence of this, one can look at a book I came across recently by Fr.
Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World (Dublin:
Browne and Nolan, 1935). The book has an imprimatur and Fr. Fahey was
quite influential in Ireland in his day, and indeed worked for good
causes such as the recognition by the Irish State of Catholicism as a
divinely revealed religion. Much of the book's content is good - until
it reaches the topic of the Jєωs, who, Fr. Fahey tells us, are in fact
behind a giant world conspiracy to destroy Christianity that is
responsible for all the evils that have befallen the Church since the
Middle Ages. This kind of stuff was promoted at the highest level of
the Church in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it
was often put forward by the Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica and the
French Catholic journal La Croix.
These kinds of views are important for two reasons.The first
is their morally corrupting effect. The Jєωs are not in fact operating
a giant world conspiracy to destroy Christianity. Secular Jєωs accept
and promote secularism, an idea developed by ex-Christians (Voltaire
etc.) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Religious Jєωs
mind their own business and do no concern themselves with the Gentile
world around them - an important fact, as the anti-semitic conspiracy
theorists base their claims on the tenets they assert are found in
Rabbinic Judaism. Asserting that the Jєωs are operating such a
conspiracy is thus a grave slander. Those who do assert it use these
beliefs to justify hatred and malice towards Jєωs. Lying, hatred and
malice are the vilest passions of human nature. The legitimisation of
conspiracy theories about Jєωs in the Church fostered these passions,
and thus had a terribly morally corrupting effect. This corruption has
a lot to do directly with the parlous state of the Church today. The
current state of the Society of Jesus is I believe explained by a
great extent by its antisemitic past: directly, as sapping the moral
fibre of members of the Society; and indirectly, as providing a motive
to whitewash themselves by embracing progressive causes after the
h0Ɩ0cαųst made their past views unrespectable. We can call this last
phenomenon the 'Gunter Grass' effect. Grass. you may remember, is a
German novelist who distinguished himself for his moralising left-wing
pieties throught his public career - and admitted, late in life, to
having met a young man, Joseph Ratzinger, when they were both
prisoners of war of the Americans; Ratzinger, an anti-nαzι, having
deserted from the Army, but Grass having been captured after
volunteering for the Waffen SS. The connection between his voluntary
SS membership and his subsequent progressive views is too obvious to
need labouring. The journal La Croix still exists -and is the main
organ of French modernism; this also is connected to the Grass effect.
The conversion of Cardinal Suhard in France to modernism after the
Second World War, an event with big repercussions, had a similar
motive (de Gaulle refused to allow Suhard to take part in the mass of
thanksgiving for the liberation at Notre Dame in 1944 because he had
been so friendly with the German occupiers).
These facts about the history of Catholic antisemitism are
difficult I find for many cradle Catholics to look in the face,
because many of the people they love and respect - priests and
relatives of the older generation - will have shared and expressed
antisemitic views of this kind. In some cases as well these people
will have been largely innocent in their views, because they were
simply repeating, without knowing any better, what had been told to
them by people they in turn looked up to and trusted. But in other
cases, there will have been the secret pleasure of being excused from
the very onerous Christian duties of love, and being seemingly given
official permission to hate and despise. You can still unfortunately
see indulgence and pleasure in these bad passions on the faces of some
traditionalist Catholics today when the topic of the Jєωs comes up.
That is why Williamson is not simply dismissed as the vile old fool he
is; his views touch a sensitive nerve.
I must note however one very positive aspect of the affair; a bishop
is actually being held responsible for his actions and subject to
discipline, an event unknown in the Novus Ordo wing of the church
(consider Law, Weakland, not to mention others closer to home).
Topic: Bishop Williamson a "Morally Scabrous αnтι-ѕємιтє". (Read 16335 times)