SSPX to send spiritual bouquet and encouragement to Pope

SSPX to send spiritual bouquet and encouragement to Pope
Bishop Fellay calls expected Latin Mass document "a grand gesture"

Following an hour-plus long press conference in Paris October 14 by Bishop Bernard Fellay, the Superior General for the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), Reuters and the French Le Figaro reported that Bishop Fellay said the expected motu proprio easing current restrictions on the celebration of the Classical Roman rite of Holy Mass (Traditional Latin Mass) would fulfill one of the two criteria established by the SSPX in 2001 for continuing discussions on the path to possible full canonical regularization. In fact, Bishop Fellay called the expected document "a grand gesture" on the part of the Church.

"Things are going in the right direction," Bishop Fellay said. "I think we'll get an agreement," he said according to the Reuters account. "Things could speed up and come faster than expected," he said. Bishop Fellay was not available for a follow-up interview for The Wanderer by deadline, but the SSPX news service, DICI, said he would be available as soon as the expected document is promulgated by the Pope.

The SSPX has 470 priests, four bishops and claims 1 million Catholics who frequent their chapels worldwide. In 1988, Pope John Paul II, in the motu proprio, Ecclesia Dei Adflicta, declared that the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and Campos, Brazil's Bishop Castro de Mayer excommunicated themselves by ordaining four bishops, including Bishop Fellay, against the express will of the Holy Father. Pope John Paul II immediately created a new Society of Apostolic Right, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP), for those bishops and priests who wanted to maintain full communion with the Holy See while continuing to administer all the sacraments according to the liturgical books in force in 1962.

Then Cardinal Ratzinger was in the heart of the discussions at the time with Archbishop Lefebvre, as well as the current Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone. Cardinal Ratzinger was also instrumental in the establishment and encouragement of the erection of the FSSP.

Ever since 2000, when thousands of SSPX-sympathetic Catholics made a pilgrimage to Rome led by SSPX priests and bishops, a gradual thaw in relations between the group and the Holy See has occurred. In fact, Bishop Fellay and two other SSPX priests met with Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos on August 29, 2005, to discuss the possible path of reconciliation. Since the widely reported existence of a motu proprio relaxing restrictions on the celebration of the Traditional liturgy, it appears that communications between the SSPX and the Holy See may quicken and intensify.

Shortly after the General Chapter of the SSPX concluded in July, re-electing Msgr. Fellay to another 12-year term, the SSPX announced they would present Pope Benedict XVI a spiritual bouquet of 1 million rosaries at the end of October, customarily the month of the Holy Rosary. The SSPX previously announced they would send this spiritual bouquet to the Pope with a letter from Bishop Fellay requesting his acknowledgement that the Traditional rite has never been abolished by the Church and that every Latin rite priest has the right to offer it. "This letter, which is also a letter of support for the Pope in face of current and future adversities, should be sent before the end of the month," Fellay said.

While Fellay would not speculate on the expected contents nor the timing of the expected document on the Traditional rite, he has reportedly told U.S. audiences at SSPX chapels since earlier in the year that "the battle for the Mass is almost won."

The conservative and respected French newspaper Le Figaro reports that four months ago Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos communicated to the SSPX leadership that all that was necessary for the SSPX's return to full communion was a letter from Bishop Fellay requesting the Pope lift the decrees declaring the excommunications, with permission granted for the SSPX to interpret the documents of the Second Vatican Council according to proper theological method — "in light of Tradition." The SSPX disputes some conclusions drawn by the Le Figaro reporter in its October 16 account.

In other words, similar to the recent creation of the Institute of the Good Shepherd in Bordeaux, France, where five formerly highly placed SSPX priests were reconciled to the Holy See, there were no doctrinal retractions or corrections required by the Holy See for those priests reconciling, especially regarding the much-disputed interpretations of religious liberty, ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue from the Second Vatican Council. Cardinal Hoyos has previously said in multiple public interviews within the past year that the status of the SSPX is not one of "formal schism," but of imperfect communion.

Bishop Fellay seemed to agree with that previously stated assessment at the press conference where he said that if and when the Traditional rite is freed, the next step the SSPX awaits would be the lifting of the declarations of excommunication against the four bishops. According to Fellay, a process of theological discussions regarding the intricacies and theological weight of what the SSPX considers to be the problematical documents of the Second Vatican Council then would begin.

"There could be a relationship between Rome and us, but it would not yet be a juridical relationship," Bishop Fellay told reporters.

"We don't want a practical solution before these doctrinal questions are resolved," he said. "The focus should be on these discussions."

Canonist Pete Vere, a Catholic convert and former adherent of the SSPX, agreed that the process outlined by Bishop Fellay "from a canonical perspetive it makes sense."

"The reconciliation will probably come about in stages, that there will be an agreement in principle to recognize certain things, as well as a restoration of sacramental communion," Vere said, along with the juridical and canonical issues following later.

Vere noted there has been canonical precedence for this approach with how the eastern-rite Melkites were eventually reconciled, as well as many of Fr. Leonard Feeney's followers, particularly those in Still River, Massachusetts.

And following upon Bishop Fellay's comments comparing how the situation with the SSPX would be an intermediate canonical step toward regularization similar to the China Patriotic Catholic Church, Vere said, "This is also the process Rome appears to be following with certain segments of the China Patriotic Church."

Bishop Fellay also predicted that when the document freeing the Traditional rite is promulgated, it will be followed "by a war within the Church," resulting in a spiritual war being ignited "identical to that of an atomic bomb," he said. Indeed, the increasingly persistent and mounting public opposition from the French episcopate to the newly-created Institute of the Good Shepherd is perhaps just one battle that signifies the possible war that will occur within the Church at large within parishes and dioceses, including bishops, priests and laymen.

Msgr. Ignacio Barreiro, head of Human Life International in Rome, and affiliated with Una Voce America, said that he thought it to be unlikely that the excommunications would be lifted prior to the expected document easing restrictions on the celebration of the Traditional Missal. He also thinks that the sanctions will be lifted only ". . . when some sort of juridical status is granted to the SSPX."

"This is evident because if the sanctions are lifted, but the SSPX continues to function without receiving even a temporary juridical status, they would again incur canonical sanctions," Msgr. Barreiro said.

In the just released September e-version of 30 Days, a well-respected Italian monthly dealing with ecclesiastical news and theology, the current Secretary of Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments, Archbishop Albert Malcolm Ranjith, again conveys his, and presumably the Holy See's, current perspective of the liturgical reform following the Second Vatican Council. In response to a question on this very issue, Archbishop Rajinth said that the expected positive results expected to appear as a result of the liturgical reform have not appeared.

And in a theme that has been repeated multiple times recently by Archbishop Ranjith in several recent interviews, as well as Cardinal Arinze and Pope Benedict XVI in his books on the liturgy, Archbishop Ranjith decried the attempt "to lower the divine mysteries to a banal level." Indeed, Cardinal Ratzinger warned against the "banal rationalism" that typified much of the attempted liturgical reform. Cardinal Arinze, the Prefect for the Office of Divine Worship and the Sacraments, has decried the "banal music" and "banal words" that accompanies much of the current liturgical orientation.

A quick word search finds the definition of "banal" to be "hackneyed," "trite," "drearily commonplace." In other words, there is no way the consistent use of this word can be perceived by anyone as a positive or glowing assessment of what too often is offered at many churches in the rite of Pope Paul VI.

In response to a question implying that Archbishop Ranjith had "good relations with the Lefebvrist world" (SSPX), he responded that he had never met Archbishop Lefebvre, but has had some contact with "some of his followers."

While Archbishop Ranjith declared he was "not particularly passionate about the Lefebvrists," he emphasized that some of their criticisms about the liturgy were perhaps beneficial to the Church. "And for that, they are a thorn that should make us reflect on what we are doing," he said.

Archbishop Ranjith also said that the fact the Holy See recently approved the Institute of the Good Shepherd [Ed. Note: The establishment of the traditionalist Apostolic Administration of St. John Marie Vianney in Campos, Brazil, headed by Bishop Fernando Rifan is another example.] displays in a very clear and direct manner that "the Mass of Saint Pius V cannot be considered as abolished by the new Missal of Paul VI."

Archbishop Ranjith reaffirmed what he has said recently in at least three other interviews, that is ". . . the Tridentine Mass is not a private property of the Lefebvrists. It is a treasure of the Church and of all of us," he said.

It might be surprising for most Catholics to find out that this very point is identical to the reasoning behind the SSPX's insistence that the Classical Roman rite be acknowledged to be free for all Latin-rite priests to celebrate. Bishop Fellay has repeatedly said that it is "for the good of the Church" that the SSPX makes this request. In other words, the SSPX has repeatedly acknowledged continuously over the years that the Traditional rite is not for their exclusive use.

The 30 Days interview continues with the Secretary of Divine Worship saying: "As the Pope said to the Roman Curia last year [December 22, 2005: See The Wanderer's January 26 edition, "Bishop Bruskewitz says . . . Para-Council Distorted Vatican II,"] the Second Vatican Council is not a moment of rupture, but of renewal in continuity," repeating almost directly this part of the Holy Father's address.

Archbishop Ranjith echoes the primary theme of Cardinal Ratzinger's 1988 Address to the Bishops of Chile in his explanation of the situation of Archbishop Lefebvre, the SSPX and its Catholic lay followers shortly after the illicit consecrations of four bishops. Cardinal Ratzinger told the Chilean bishops at the time:

"Certainly there is a mentality of narrow views that isolate Vatican II and which has provoked this opposition. There are many accounts of it which give the impression that, from Vatican II onward, everything has been changed, and that what preceded it has no value or, at best, has value only in the light of Vatican II.

"The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero. The truth is that this particular Council defined no dogma at all, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat it as though it had made itself into a sort of superdogma which takes away the importance of all the rest.

"This idea is made stronger by things that are now happening. That which previously was considered most holy — the form in which the liturgy was handed down — suddenly appears as the most forbidden of all things, the one thing that can safely be prohibited. It is intolerable to criticize decisions which have been taken since the Council; on the other hand, if men make question of ancient rules, or even of the great truths of the Faith — for instance, the corporal virginity of Mary, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the immortality of the soul, etc. — nobody complains or only does so with the greatest moderation....

"All this leads a great number of people to ask themselves if the Church of today is really the same as that of yesterday, or if they have changed it for something else without telling people. The one way in which Vatican II can be made plausible is to present it as it is; one part of the unbroken, the unique Tradition of the Church and of her faith."

(A special word of thanks again to http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/ for its timely partial unofficial English translation of the 30 Days interview with Archbishop Rajinth.)

Better that Dario Cardinal Castrillon de Hoyos, Cardinal Medina Estevez, and Archbishop Ranjith submit to the papal authority of John Paul the Great who promoted each of them, get some reading lessons and a copy of Ecclesia Dei Afflicta, admit that it has never been modified, reversed, withdrawn or altered IN THE SLIGHTEST DEGREE by any papal act of John Paul the Great or of Benedict XVI and that the decree AND its punishments are still in force and have been since that day in 1988 when Ecclesia Dei Afflicta was issued, followed by decrees consistent by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on behalf of the Holy Office and by Bernard Cardinal Gantin of the Congregation for Bishops. Neither Castrillon de Hoyos, nor Estevez, nor Ranjith, nor any wing of the Matt family, nor Tisserant de Mallerais, nor Fellay, nor Williamson have, to the best of my knowledge the keys of Peter nor any other authority to countermand Ecclesia Dei Afflicta or the judgments of John Paul the Great contained therein.

Ironically, the schismatic excommunicati would have it that even any pope after Pope St. Pius V of happy memory lacked any authority whatsoever to modify in the slightest his Quo Primum purporting to calcify the catechism issued by him and to excommunicate anyone whomsoever dared to alter or modify it in any way.

Benedict XVI has the authority as will each of his successors to modify or withdraw or alter Ecclesia Dei Afflicta in the exercise of his discretion and judgment because popes (even one as brilliant as John Paul the Great) lack the authority to limit the authority of their successors (each of whom is or will be the Vicar of Christ on earth) even if the exercise may clash with the tastes of any group of the laity in the pews or with the judgmental preferences of any group of laity in the pews. We are the Roman Catholic Church----not an anarchy, not a democracy (which is what the actual Americanist ecclesiastical deviants wanted), not a republic, not an oligarchy or an aristocracy but an absolute monarchy under Christ's Vicar.

You are therefore wise to stick with the status quo which is that SSPX leaders and adherents are schismatic and excommunicated until further papal notice. You cannot very well "respectfully await" papal action while accepting the utterly non-authoritative modifications of subordinates of the papacy who apparently want to persuade us of what they want us to think John Paul the Great said when he said the precise opposite. No one authorized any of them to sit in judgment on his motu proprio or upon him or to contradict his rulings. Benedict XVI or any of his papal successors are the sole authorities who may do that.

Just as you may find renegade bishops who will claim that condoms may be used by Catholics because of AIDS whatever Paul VI said in Humanae Vitae to the absolute contrary, you can find those entrusted with positions of trust who dissent on other subjects. Nonetheless, as to papal rulings and injunctions, it is not every Bishop Tom, Cardinal Rick, Father Harry, Theologian Eddie or layman Larry for that matter, each his own personal teaching magisterium du jour respectively but actual papal authority which counts.

The term Americanist is customarily used in discussions of Church matters to reference a heresy that was a concern of Pope Leo XIII. It seems that Bishop or Archbishop John Ireland and some other 1890s Church officials presiding in the United States at that time thought that it was just awful that Rome insisted on a monarchical Church ruled by the pope from the top down with no referenda of the liberals in the American hierarchy of the time required before Rome made theological demands or doctrinal pronouncements. Leo slapped that heresy down when he discovered it but it simmers to this day (which is a quite respectable reason for the existence of The Wanderer) although it has finally been besieged by John Paul the Great and Benedict XVI.

I see where I went wrong here in reading the references to Americanism in your writing since you are actually defending the isolationist political creed of the Sobrans and the Buchanans and not the old Americanist heresy which I should have realized would be alien territory for any Wanderer writer and rightly so. You were instead referencing the opposition of normal patriotic Americans and actual conservatives to the paleopantywaist political theories of such as Solange Hertz, John Rao, Joe Sobran, Pat Buchanan, the Rockford Institute, Lewellyn Rockwell and even Justin Raimondo (who, most charitably speaking, may be Pat Buchanan's Minister of Knee-Jerk surrendermonkeyism but is, ummmm, no more Catholic than Boy George for verrrrry similar reasons). One may not sum up the foreign policy of Catholics by joining with Cain in saying: "I am not my brother's keeper." No doubt the aforementioned "paleos" will have some adequate explanation to give to the relatives of the future victims of the North Korean Chiapet or of Ahmahdinejad and the "Bring Back the Twelfth Imam" squad as to just why it was imperative to let these nutcases be armed with atomic weapons.

Sobran is phenomenal all right. So was Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally and Jane Fonda and so was the implosion of stars in other systems. He is a colossal waste of talent. Writing on social issues, he has been brilliant. On foreign and military policy, did his last column before illness not reveal his admission of being the turd in the punchbowl at a recent Sobran family reunion because Sobran's admired father was a naval hero in World War II and Sobran is, well, rather the opposite as the Joseph Sobran we have come to know as an opponent of our country's interests in favor of a Neville Chamberlain-like "peace at any price." Even the America First Committee folded its tent on the day after Pearl Harbor. At least Buchanan does not oppose the Iraq War with troops in the field. During actual wartime, he resists the arrival of Catholic immigrants from our south. In his non-opposition to wars once begun, he is not unlike Colonel Lindbergh, Colonel McCormack, and John Flynn, who having been tragically mistaken in their isolationism, quit that isolationism. They never looked back. Pat probably will when the war is over.

What does backing Father Neuhaus while rejecting Sobran evidence or reveal other than common sense, patriotism and a preference for wisdom over back-biting bitterness and bilge. If you want to side with the "paleos," fine, but do not expect respect. The Wanderer has weathered many storms but it likely will not survive its current drift back to the bad old days of 1930s demilitarization any more than Brent Bozell's Triumph (and its nuclear nervous nellyism and disarmament obsession) magazine did. Soon enough, the fans who were contemporaries of the old 1930s Chamberlains will be gone. Not one American in ten thousand has a clue as to who John Rao or Solange Hertz or the foreign policy anti-American moonbats of SSPX at St. Mary's, Kansas, who publish anti-American history texts, may be.

Without reviewing this thread, I would be quite surprised if I threw the "anti-Semitic label out there (to see) how many people it slanders." I think I actually made a point of saying that I do not know if Fellay is or is not anti-Semitic. I don't know and I tend to give the benefit of the doubt. If he and de Mallerais and dead Marcel and de Castro Meyer had a preference for Lenten rituals referencing "perfidious Jews," I regard those as rituals with unfortunate verbiage in the context of the post-Holocaust world but not as anti-Semitism per se. I am afraid that Williamson is a bit too enthusiastic in his Holocaust denial which has less ecclesiastical justification than does utilization of approved liturgies of Holy Mother the Church.

Do I have to apologize to you and your generation for being a totally enraged (at the changes) teenager at the time of the Council and only a bit older at the time of the changes in liturgy???? Was I supposed to be in charge of the Church at that (or any other) age? I have certainly passed the Faith, handed down by my Fathers, to my children and it is quite intact, thanks very much to the priests and nuns of my youth and the predecessors of the current management at The Wanderer who were more dedicated to handing on the Catholic Faith and less inclined to the political errors and failings of the neo-Chamberlain fringe who include Sobran, Buchanan, Likoudis, Roeser and, apparently, some who are similarly inclined and younger. Actual traditionalists (not excommunicated SSPX schismatics) ARE the Church militant. The "pilgrim church" crapola was one of the most aggravating aspects of the pathetic V-II draftsmanship. I don't think you can point to a single sentence I have ever posted here suggesting agreement with the notion of Catholicism as a "pilgrim Church." That single term was a serious impetus to my looking at Eastern Orthodoxy as an alternative until brought back from that brink to Catholicism.

If opposng a schism of excommunicated schismatics such as SSPX on the authority of Pope John Paul the Great's Ecclesia Dei Afflicta makes me an adherent of "the Gypsy Church or the church of the warm fuzzy pet doggie," how many moons are there in the sky on your planet????

Forty years ago, I was younger than you are now. I plead guilty today of having seen and experienced far more than you have. What, other than spinning for the excommunicated schismatics and serving as an apologist for the Solange Hertz/John Rao school of anti-"Americanist" history and foreign policy, have you done?

Oh, BTW, it is not MY assessment of things traditional OR (not and) SSPX (which is about as "traditional" as Martin Luther and just as excommunicated) but John Paul the Great's assessment with which you say Cardinal Castrillon de Hoyos, Cardinal Estevez and Archbishop Ranjith are disagreeing.

Swinging at Windmills

A Close Look at Catholic Conspiracy Theories

By Sandra Miesel

Question: Who’s afraid of Jews in the boardroom? Freemasons in the basement? Reds under the bed? Black helicopters in the sky? Answer: A surprising number of otherwise sensible people. Even under the new shadow of terrorism, old fears live on, breeding bogeys that knot together in a vipers’ tangle of menace.

Regrettably, Catholics do their share of worrying about the Judeo-Masonic-Communist conspiracy and/or the imminent arrival of the Antichrist to rule over the New World Order. Their anxieties are often fueled by anti-Semitic screeds, polemical histories, eccentric economics, and even heavenly messages. Fear-mongering is standard fare in the pages of radical traditionalist publications such as The Remnant, Catholic Family News, and The Fatima Crusader. The principal Catholic publisher of such conspiracy theories is Omni/Christian Book Club of Palmdale, California. Books and tapes of this sort are routinely featured in the mail-order catalogs of Catholic Treasures of Monrovia, California, and Our Lady’s Book Service of Constable, New York, but they may also find their way into local religious bookstores.

To be sure, conspiracy junkies are a tiny subculture in the midst of 63 million American Catholics. (The Remnant’s circulation is about 7,000.) But the wily ones are learning to use the Internet, and what they lack in numbers, they more than make up for in fervor.

The Protocols of Paranoia

Anti-Semitism is the fundamental fear, the longest hatred. Historian Leonard Dinnerstein defines it as "hostile expressions toward or negative behavior against individuals or groups because of their Jewish faith or heritage." Although antagonism toward Jews predated the Christian era, it fed—and in some places still feeds—on Christian attitudes of contempt toward the "Christ-killers." But what’s of particular interest here is modern anti-Semitism and the hardening of conspiracy theories in the 19th and 20th centuries.

France was a major catalyst. Some French Catholics couldn’t forgive Jews for getting full citizenship—an unprecedented privilege in Europe—from the anti-Catholic Revolutionary government in 1790. Jews compounded their sin by prospering.

Accused of having too much money and power, although they constituted only 0.02 percent of the population, 19th-century French Jews were caught between feuding White Monarchists and Red Republicans. Reactionary Catholics identified Jews with the hated forces of modernity and secularization, Freemasonry and socialism. Even the early promotion of Lourdes became a vehicle for ugly anti-Semitic propaganda.

In the 1890s, the decade of the Dreyfus Affair, czarist Russian secret agents adapted a French satire on Napoleon III into the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Made public in 1902, this document purports to be notes from a meeting of leaders in the 2,000-year Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. The protocols provided the foundation for many of the worst anti-Semitic theories in the 20th century, influencing even Hitler.

Within a decade (1912), Msgr. Ernest Jouin of France had founded the International Revue of Secret Societies for conspiracy connoisseurs. Its outrage appealed to Irish Holy Ghost Rev. Denis Fahey, whose imagination had been captured by Jesuit priest Mathieu Deschamps’s Secret Societies and Society. (The Roman Jesuit publication Civiltà Cattolica had been a font of anti-Semitism in the previous generation; it had even suggested that all Jews be stripped of citizenship.)

Father Fahey (1883-1954) undertook a one-man crusade against what he called Jewish naturalism, which was supposedly the guiding philosophy of the Jewish nation since it rejected Our Lord. The theory goes like this: Since spurning the Bible for the Talmud and the Kabala, Jews no longer believe in God. Century after century, they systematically attack the kingship and high priesthood of Christ in a relentless drive to enthrone their race as collective messiahs over the rest of mankind.

Father Fahey offers no evidence of a universal Jewish antitheism or exaltation of Talmud over Torah. (Opposing "Talmudic Jews" to biblical Jews is like contrasting "Canonical Catholics" with Gospel Catholics.) No matter. On his premise of Jewish naturalism, Father Fahey erected ominous theories embellished with questionable facts from fascistic writers such as Nesta Webster, A.N. Field, and Léon de Poncins (all radical traditionalist favorites). His repetitive books—all with imprimaturs—include The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World (1935) and The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism (1943), expanded as The Kingship of Christ and the Conversion of the Jewish Nation (1953).

Even Hilaire Belloc, whose distasteful book The Jews (1937) describes Jews as unassimilable aliens, scoffed at Father Fahey’s Jewish conspiracy theories: "The thing is nonsense on the face of it." Father Fahey retorted that Belloc just didn’t understand naturalism. (Father Fahey’s nose for Jewish naturalism was so sensitive he could detect it in the silent film classics Ben-Hur and King of Kings.)

Although fond of counting Jewish noses in Hollywood, the Politburo, and the United Nations, as well as sniffing out people with Jewish blood, Father Fahey denied that he was an anti-Semite because he honored pre-Christian Jews. Nevertheless, he enjoyed quoting papal policy statements against Jews, coyly refused to reject the long-debunked Protocols, praised the anti-Semitic activities of Henry Ford, and denied the death toll from the Holocaust.

Father Fahey, dead for five decades, may seem an obscure figure to belabor, but his influence is still very much alive on the Catholic right. He has a larger current audience than the more famous Irish-American figure he inspired—Rev. Charles Coughlin. (Omni/Christian Book Club, a publisher of the Protocols, offers 14 titles by Father Fahey versus two by Father Coughlin.)

According to Leonard Dinnerstein, Father Coughlin "developed the largest following of any demagogue in American history." Starting in 1933, Father Coughlin’s honey-tongued tirades against bankers, Communists, Roosevelt, and other enemies focused ever more sharply on Jews until he was actually recycling Nazi propaganda to his 3.5 million radio listeners, his one million weekly newspaper subscribers, and the legions in his political party, the Christian Front. He shared Father Fahey’s false belief that Jews provided the manpower and money power for the Bolshevik Revolution. Rome and the U.S. postmaster general finally silenced Coughlin in 1942.

Anti-Semitism ebbed among Catholics and other Americans after World War II. Only extremists still fear cabals of Jewish financiers or question Jews’ rights in society.

The Church in America has worked hard to achieve these goals, but progress hasn’t been uniform throughout the world. In 1962, a singularly vicious specimen of Catholic anti-Semitism was published just before Vatican II, reportedly by a team of twelve clerics—probably Latin Americans and one said to be a bishop—under the pen name "Maurice Pinay." They were attempting to forestall any concessions to the Jews, such as would occur in the council’s declaration on non-Christian religions, Nostra Aetate, which "deplores all hatreds, persecutions, displays of antisemitism leveled at any time or from any source against the Jews."

"The Plot Against the Church" spews venom like a geyser of hot sewage. For them, "the damned Jews" are literally a "Synagogue of Satan" and their ubiquitous iniquity is responsible for every evil that has befallen the Church—persecutions, heresies, barbarian invasions, the Reformation, revolutions—from Roman times to the present. Moreover these adepts of black magic and Satanism are the "wirepullers" behind Freemasonry and communism, ever conspiring to destroy the Church and rule the world.

Father Fahey, Father Coughlin, and their forebears are among "Pinay’s" sources, and like them, "Pinay" denies being anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, "The Plot Against the Church" proposes that Jews be expelled or enslaved, despoiled of their property, segregated, and forced to wear visible marks—all in accordance with ancient Church canons and papal bulls. "Pinay" especially wants to root out Catholics of Jewish descent who are a secret fifth column subverting the Church.

With this sort of vileness in the recent past, is it any wonder that some Roman clerics whisper that powerful Jews are behind America’s priest scandals? Or that the Anti-Defamation League detects "hardcore anti-Semitic beliefs" in 44 percent of our foreign-born Hispanics? Fear of Jewish plots will not entirely die.

It’s the Freemasons—Again!

An important thread in the all-encompassing cloak of Jewish conspiracy is Freemasonry. The "Judeo-Masonic plot" remains a shibboleth among radical traditionalists because they are unshakably certain that Jews founded the Craft and use it to undermine Christianity. Some authors who push this theory include: Deschamps, Jouin, Fahey, Webster, de Poncins, Chilean cardinal José Maria Caro y Rodriguez, and Irish-Australian monsignor George Dillon, who expected that the Masonic Antichrist "will find the Jews the most inveterate haters of Christianity, the deepest plotters, and the fittest to establish his reign."

These vigilants note that the central Masonic myth is the rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple, point to cabalistic symbolism and Hebrew terminology in their rituals, and pronounce the enterprise Jewish. They never consider that the Old Testament–oriented Protestants who founded Masonry could have used Hebraic references, and they seem to know very little about the mystic fads that incubated the minds of early modern Europe. (The original Rosicrucians and similar crazes have been richly analyzed by Frances Yates.) Finally, the purveyors of this theory fail to ask what—aside from conspiring—Masons got from the Craft. Using actual lodge records, Margaret Jacob’s Living the Enlightenment shows that the appeal lay in civic sociability outside the limits of class and station.

Contemporary historians trace Masonry to lodges of "operative" stonemasons in late 16th-century Scotland that were taken over by men interested in the symbolic possibilities of architecture. Such "speculative" masons active in England by the 1640s formed the Grand Lodge in London in 1717. The Craft reached Europe by 1721 and America by 1730 before attracting its first papal condemnation in 1738. Eight more denunciations would follow because of Masonry’s anti-supernaturalism, indifference to religion, and objectionable oaths. Catholics are still forbidden to join, although canon law doesn’t mention Freemasons by name.

In 1776, what Jacob calls "a radicalized mutation of the Masonic gene" brought forth the Illuminati, founded by canon law professor Adam Weishaupt. (Febrile minds imagine Jews having had a hand in the matter.) These mystic masterminds of Masonry were closed down by the Bavarian police in 1785 but are still imagined to lurk in the corridors of power.

Being generally liberal in politics, Masons often participated in revolutions. The Masonic affiliations of Washington, Franklin, and other founding fathers mean that, for some traditionalist Catholics, the United States has no right to exist. Or so says The Remnant’s top writer, Solange Hertz, author of The Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism and an implacable foe of the Judeo-Masonic peril. (For good measure, Hertz has denounced Mother Teresa as a New Ager.)

Other critics, such as Ted Flynn in Hope of the Wicked, ferret out Masonic symbolism in our national emblems because Masons were involved in the designs. He reads the American Eagle as a Masonic phoenix and the Statue of Liberty as a Masonic goddess. Flynn’s source, Ralph Epperson, tries to make former President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration facing the Washington Monument into Masonic sun worship.

Because the Masons claim the number 13, it must be theirs—everywhere. But units of 13 in our Great Seal refer to nothing more ominous than the 13 original colonies, which existed for 44 years before the Revolution—rather a long wait to match a Masonic timetable. The alarming All-Seeing Eye also happens to be an old sign of the Holy Trinity, found in Baroque churches. (One breathlessly awaits revelations about the AOL logo.)

But it was the French, not the American, Revolution that stamped the Masons and their Illuminati masters as experts in rebellion, according to theories separately propounded by ex-Jesuit Augustin de Barruel (1741-1820) and Scotsman John Robison (1797-1798) and still popular in paranoid circles. Contemporary histories prefer to see people with radical sympathies becoming Masons rather than Masons becoming radicals.

Masons were, of course, active in the Latin-American revolts against Spain, the revolutions of 1848, and the reunification of Italy. They did immense harm to the Church in the Mexico Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. But to blame them for uniting the German Empire and for overthrowing the Manchus is just piling on.

Continental "Grand Orient" Masons were the instigators in these conflicts. Nearly all the world’s Brethren, however, belonged to Anglo-Saxon lodges. They had no need to attack the Establishment because they were the Establishment, especially in Great Britain, where royals were their traditional protectors and the Craft was called "the Tory Party in aprons."

As for America, Behind the Lodge Door by Paul Fisher looks at the sorry record of American Masons in outbreaks of nativism, the Ku Klux Klan, and church-state relations. But Fisher, who does not link Masonry with the Jews, far exceeds his evidence to connect them with ancient cults, Illuminati plots, and the assassination of President Kennedy. William Wahlen’s Christianity and American Freemasonry is a far more sensible Catholic book on the subject.

Anglo-Saxon Masonry is fading away, no longer attracting many men to its "Light," no longer conferring advantages in business or politics. Neither U.S. Supreme Court justices nor archbishops of Canterbury are Masons these days. Relations between Church and Craft are more polite than formerly. But some Grand Orient brethren still managed to do dramatic harm in 1981 by scamming the Vatican’s bank out of millions and by conspiring against the Italian government in the P-2 Lodge scandal.

Although none of the thousand men enrolled in P-2 was a Catholic cleric, the notion that the Church, particularly the Italian Church, is packed with secret Masons lives on. Why, it was plotted out more than 150 years ago in The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita and similar documents outlining well-laid plans to pervert the Church and elect a Masonic pope. This fantasy was promoted by Malachi Martin (who claimed there were Satanists in on it, too) and preached by ex-Dominican John O’Connor (who thinks only one or two cardinals are really Catholic).

cclesiastical Masonry is a favorite radical traditionalist explanation for Vatican II and the changes it made. Paul VI’s top officials were rumored to have been Masons, and a Mason is supposed to have mutilated the Mass. Their dastardly plan calls for the next pope to be the Antichrist or his servant.

And drawing on Revelations 13, locutionist Rev. Stefano Gobbi has recorded apocalyptic messages about "the black beast," Satan-worshipping lay Masonry, and "the beast like a lamb," traitorous ecclesiastical Masonry. These were to set up a false church and a false Christ by 1998. Apparently, the End Times have since been rescheduled.

Communist Financiers

But it wasn’t enough for Jews to have one secret hand operating as Freemasonry; they needed a second hand operating publicly as Communism—or so the vigilants say. Because Karl Marx was a rabbi’s son, Communism was a Jewish invention. No matter that Marx denounced all faiths including his own; race trumps religion for anti-Semites. They pore over long lists of early Bolshevik officials matched with putative Jewish birth names and tote up the ranks of Jewish-American financiers who are said to have bankrolled the Russian Revolution. Father Fahey found this so engrossing, he even devoted a book to it, The Rulers of Russia.

Such "facts," however, are unknown to historians who work from original sources. It was imperial German gold, not money from Jewish-American financiers, that bankrolled the Bolsheviks. Possibly originating as White Russian propaganda, these tales were picked up by Fascists.

Missing are discussions of why secular Jews might have hated the czars. The conspiracy theorists don’t say much about the centuries of pogroms and cruel laws, the creation of the Protocols released locally in 1902, and Europe’s last trial of a Jew for ritual murder in 1913. Neither do we hear of purges thinning the ranks of Communist Jews or strident Soviet anti-Zionism between the World Wars or repressions that led a million Jews to emigrate to Israel in the 1980s.

But where the Soviet Union is concerned, the past is never forgotten; it’s not even past. Radical traditionalists are convinced that recent changes are all illusions, that the old USSR is just as Red as ever. The Fatima Crusader claims that Russia would convert to Catholicism in a day if only the pope would wave his magic crosier and consecrate it—accept no substitutes—to the Immaculate Heart.

Such views are fed by Alexander Golitsyn’s New Lies for Old, a small-fry KGB defector’s decipherment of the Soviets’ 50-year-old master plan for conquest. Golitsyn’s failure to foresee the fall of the Iron Curtain hasn’t shaken his supporters’ confidence. The revision of his 1984 text is read as eagerly as the original.

Further evidence of faith in Communist trickiness is the persistent popularity of Anti-Apostle 1025 by Marie Carré, originally published in France in 1972. This purports to be a memoir by the 1025th Red to penetrate Catholic seminaries, but it is manifestly a feeble example of radical traditionalist propaganda that even fails to factor in the Russian purges.

The main character is a Polish orphan—the careful reader will note he’s a Jew—recruited by a Soviet spymaster between the World Wars to penetrate and subvert the Catholic Church. This is supposed to explain post-Vatican II changes, although Communist control never altered dogma or worship behind the Iron Curtain.

The fable may have been inspired by a remark attributed to a Catholic convert from Communism, Bella Dodd, in the 1950s. Dodd implausibly claimed to have sent a thousand young men into American seminaries, but she also insisted that the Communist Party of the U.S.A. secretly took its orders from American capitalists.

Other conspiratorial threads come together in the writings of Josyp Terelya, a Ukrainian Catholic Gulag survivor and visionary. Although it’s painful to criticize someone who’s suffered so much for the Faith, his 1995 book, In the Kingdom of the Spirit, is filled with groundless claims.

Terelya sees Satanists and Masons everywhere: Marx and Engels were Masons who met at a black Mass; high-ranking Reds have always been Masons; a leading curia cardinal is a Mason; Lenin was both an anti-Christ and a hermaphrodite; Yeltsin is a demon. Five million Americans are virgin-raping Satanists, and Russian Communist armies are flooding across American states. The final Antichrist, whose name is Valentine Lavrova, is already on earth and will work through the United Nations, a Zionist creation. (Terelya is anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic.) Meanwhile, Satan is coding us "through isotopes in the left hand" as Armageddon nears. Catholics who disagree with him are themselves secret Satanists.

Terelya represents an apparitionist strain now infecting alarmist Catholic literature. Protestant vigilants like Ralph Epperson, Gary Kah, and Dennis Cuddy make similar use of the Bible to back their speculations. Both approaches yield a turbulent mix of politics and eschatology.

Catholic conspiracy theorists ransack old prophecies and repackage old devotions to fit modern conditions. They have Our Lady of Good Success improbably denouncing Freemasons and the world republic—in 1610. It is safe to assume that earlier messages have been tampered with when they refer to the 20th century: No one counted by centuries before 1550.

Much attention is being given these days to the visionary Anne Katharine Emmerich (d. 1824), who foresaw a Masonic-led "false Church," and to the secrets of La Salette (1846) for predicting that "Rome will lose the faith and become the seat of Anti-Christ." American locutionist John Leary is currently getting politics-laden messages from Jesus warning against smart cards and "the chip in the hand."

These trends fuse in the career of Ted Flynn, founder of MaxKol Communications. His Thunder of Justice (1993, written with his wife, Maureen) is a melange of messages and prophecies that failed to materialize by the year 2000. His Hope of the Wicked (2000) attempts a unified field theory of conspiracies.

Hope of the Wicked’s bibliography replaces Catholic classics of paranoia with newer Protestant and conservative works, mostly from Evangelical presses or self-published. (Among such recent sources are Ralph Epperson, Gary Kah, and Richard Wurmbrand.) Yet we see the same obsessive search for coherence, the same copious but largely worthless documentation, the same faulty logic as earlier materials.

Overt anti-Semitism drops out, although Flynn likes to spotlight Jewish villains and makes the Rothschilds the root of all evil—they even fomented the American Civil War for gain. (His favorite villain, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, is a Catholic.) Flynn’s new scenario runs from Illuminati to Masons to Yale’s Order of Skull and Bones (why is it never the Harvard Fly Club?) to One-Worlders to an alphabet soup of enemies far and near (the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the National Security Agency) supported by New Agers who also derive from Masonry through Theosophy—the whole cross-linked by the mostly Jewish international bankers who secretly own our Federal Reserve System. Their goal is to transform the UN into a global New World Order prepped for Luciferic mischief.

Flynn’s mad gallop from one menace to another is no more impressive in total than his section that blames the Rothschilds for the Civil War. But like other merchants of paranoia, he evokes the Hidden Enemy memorably sketched by historian Richard Hofstader, "a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, and luxury-loving."

The Universal Foe is here, there, and everywhere. Or so the fear mongers say.

Sandra Miesel, a medievalist and Catholic journalist, writes from Indianapolis.

* What we put into our minds is just as important as what we put into our mouths. Drinking polluted water will ruin our physical health. Drinking in Conspiracy Theories will poison our intellects. All around us we see the revival of Jewish Conspiracies and how they supposedly "explain" what is "really" happening in the world. We are told we cannot trust what we actually see happening. Reality, we are told by Conspiratorialists, is an illusion. What is "really" happening is The Jewish Conspiracy to take over the world and, in the process, ruin America, is coming to fruition.

*Stay away from that rank pollution. It will poison and destroy your intellect. Seriously entertaining Jewish Conspiracy Theories is no different than drinking from an unflushed toilet.

*The sspx drinks from the toilet of antisemitism and conspiracy theories.

I will do evrything in my power to publicly expose their hatred, heresies, and lunacies.

For the Jews, it is not a matter of Faith and Morals in either case.

* Of course it is. The SSPX teaches Jews can not live a moral life. It teaches all Jews are cursed. Do you actually want to be on public record favoring such Nazism? Do you think the question of antisemitism, denounced by an Ecuemnical Coucnil, is not matter of morality? If you are unable to understand that it is, in what way are you "renewing" america?

And you are not my trial judge, so why do you care?

* I am your Christian brother. It is part of Tradition I have a duty to correct you. Or, have you forgotten the Spiritual Works of Mercy?

You are no theologian, just a hack who has lots of quotes you post, as if that makes an argument.

*I am a sub-hack, but that is of little consequence. My authoritative quotes were specifically aimed at defeating your unsubstantiated, unwarranted and unTraditional personal opinions. All who read this thread can read you have nothing authoritative with which to respond and so you make it personal. That doesn't bother me. I have thick skin and I know I am fulfilling my Confirmational Duty to defend the Church.

I side with the Fathers of Church's interpretation of Sacred Scripture just like the Credo of the Council of Trent calls for.

*If you mean by that Nostra Aetate is not binding on you, then you know even less about Tradition that you have revealed up to this point

What level of authority do you believe Nostra Aetate to be? Is every since of the same theological level of authority?

*Are all dedisions, doctrines etc from Vatican Two binding upon you? Do you have a duty to accept the Council with a religious submission of will?

*If you think you can ignore or war against decisions of an Ecumenical Council, then this is a snappy quote fit for you...

Quanta Cura

"We cannot pass over in silence the audacity of those who, not enduring sound doctrine, contend that 'without sin and without any sacrifice of the Catholic profession assent and obedience may be refused to those judgments and decrees of the Apostolic See, whose object is declared to concern the Church's general good and her rights and discipline, so only it does not touch the dogmata of faith and morals.' But no one can be found not clearly and distinctly to see and understand how grievously this is opposed to the Catholic dogma of the full power given from God by Christ our Lord Himself to the Roman Pontiff of feeding, ruling and guiding the Universal Church."

*As regards your apparent acceptance of the SSPX's antisemitic "doctrine" and apparent rationalisation of it by questioning the authoritatiove level of Nostra Aetate here is Carinal Ratzinger...

It must be stated that Vatican II is upheld by the same authority as Vatican I and the Council of Trent, namely, the Pope and the College of Bishops in communion with him, and that also with regard to its contents, Vatican II is in the strictest continuity with both previous councils and incorporates their texts word for word in decisive points . . .

Whoever accepts Vatican II, as it has clearly expressed and understood itself, at the same time accepts the whole binding tradition of the Catholic Church, particularly also the two previous councils . . . It is likewise impossible to decide in favor of Trent and Vatican I but against Vatican II. Whoever denies Vatican II denies the authority that upholds the other two councils and thereby detaches them from their foundation. And this applies to the so-called 'traditionalism,' also in its extreme forms. Every partisan choice destroys the whole (the very history of the Church) which can exist only as an indivisible unity.

To defend the true tradition of the Church today means to defend the Council. It is our fault if we have at times provided a pretext (to the 'right' and 'left' alike) to view Vatican II as a 'break' and an abandonment of the tradition. There is, instead, a continuity that allows neither a return to the past nor a flight forward, neither anachronistic longings nor unjustified impatience. We must remain faithful to the today of the Church, not the yesterday or tomorrow. And this today of the Church is the documents of Vatican II, without reservations that amputate them and without arbitrariness that distorts them . . .

I see no future for a position that, out of principle, stubbornly renounces Vatican II. In fact in itself it is an illogical position. The point of departure for this tendency is, in fact, the strictest fidelity to the teaching particularly of Pius IX and Pius X and, still more fundamentally, of Vatican I and its definition of papal primacy. But why only popes up to Pius XII and not beyond? Is perhaps obedience to the Holy See divisible according to years or according to the nearness of a teaching to one's own already-established convictions?

The Ratzinger Report, San Francisco: Ignatius, 1985, 28-29, 31)

* Brother, please repudiate the SSPX's execrable "doctrine" the Jews are cursed. Please take time to think and pray about your areas of weakness and errors concerning Tradition.

*You began by asserting I really didn't know much about Tradiiton or its current movements etc. This thread is proof which one of us really knows Tradition.

* Brother, I was a trad before trad was cool. I used to exchange letters with Solange Hertz and Paula Haigh, well-known Remnant writers. Solange sent me photos of her favorite crucifix and Paula sent me TONS of mimeographed material aboubt GeoCentrism etc.

*I can spot your errors from the Moon. I know them. They used to be mine.

*The Holy Ghost changed my Will. It was only then the errors could be corrected. Please take time to think and pray about what you are doing. Take a break and get a good spiritual director.

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