Palestine

Avenging God?

Avenging God? on August 2, 2014

The latest horrible onslaught let loose against the virtually defenceless Palestinians in Gaza can raise in many people’s minds an obstacle to the true worship of the true God, because it is well known that many of today’s Israelis claim that they have from the Old Testament a God-given right to take all the land occupied by the Palestinians, by force if necessary. A reasonable person might ask two questions: what kind of a God can even remotely be pulled in to ‘justify’ such barbarous cruelty, together with such utter contempt for any world opinion condemning that barbarity? And what kind of a ‘Chosen People’ are these? The answer to both questions turns around Our Lord Jesus Christ, around whom of course all human history turns.

The Old Testament tells the story of mankind before Christ, especially the story of the Israelites, the people that God chose out from the rest of the human race to act as the cradle for the coming down from Heaven of the Incarnate God, Jesus Christ. About a thousand years after Adam, mankind had grown so corrupt that God had to wash it out and start again with the eight souls saved on Noah’s Ark. About another thousand years later, mankind is again so corrupt that God has to pull Abraham out of the degenerate city Ur to be the founder of a race that must stay clear of all surrounding human contamination in order to be clean enough to act as that cradle. Here is the origin of that racial exclusivity observable in Jews ever since. It began with God, but it has fallen into the hands of men.

The Jews were indeed once, for the sake of Jesus Christ, the Chosen People. Thus St Thomas Aquinas has a tremendous article in his Summa Theologiae where he shows how every single detail in the furnishing of the Israelites’ exclusive Temple in Jerusalem pointed forward to Jesus Christ (Ia IIae, 102, 4). However, to clear the Promised Land for the Israelites to take over, there is no question that Almighty God gave them more than once the command to exterminate utterly the pagans occupying the land, and He punished King Saul severely for not observing this command to the letter (I Sam XV). What could justify such a command?

It is the same as what explains God’s exterminating all mankind (except eight souls) in Noah’s time. Firstly men’s sins. God creates men for Heaven, they choose sin that deserves Hell. For indeed sin offends God first of all. So the sense of God and the sense of sin get lost together, as all around us today. A godless generation like ours cannot possibly understand the justice of God. Secondly, God’s mercy, which goes hand in hand with His justice, and is today equally misunderstood. But given the reality of Hell, is it not a mercy of God if he cuts men off so that they can repent before they die, or at least be stopped from sinning so as not to deserve to go any deeper in Hell?

That is how it will have been with the pagan enemies of the Israelites between Abraham and Jesus Christ. To read the Old Testament is to see how often the Israelites were tempted to abandon the true God and to worship devils by the pagans all around them. As the Curé of Ars once said, ‘Get rid of the priest, and within 25 years men will be worshipping beasts.’ It is to the eternal credit of the Israelites that they did succeed in providing the cradle for the Messiah, for instance St Joachim and St Anne, especially their child, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the twelve Apostles and all other good Israelites who helped to launch their Messiah’s Catholic Church. For today’s Israelis see next week.

Kyrie eleison.

More Encouragement

More Encouragement on May 11, 2013

The news from a one-week visit to Germany, France and Switzerland is encouraging. Certain leaders might do well to remember the famous words of Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool some of the people all the time, all the people some of the time, but not all the people all the time.” Fewer people all the time are being fooled by what is happening within the Newsociety of St Pius X.

The journey began in Germany where some people feared I might run into difficulties, but for four days I was not troubled in any way. A good young layman picked me up at Frankfurt’s huge railway station and drove me north to Brilon Wald to meet the half dozen Carmelite Sisters who have become famous throughout the world of Catholic Tradition for having separated themselves, for all the right reasons, from the SSPX in its present state. They are clear in mind, resolute and cheerful. As Mother Superior told me, their greatest sorrow is that for over 20 years no novice has persevered with them. The Carmelite Sisters are not being expelled from their present convent, as has been feared, but they are hoping to move south for greater local support. May God be with them. Their prayers are precious to all of us.

Then I was driven back south of Frankfurt to address a private meeting of some two dozen adults, mostly men, in a countryside setting. They listened attentively in the afternoon to an in-depth analysis of the background crisis of the New World Order and the Newchurch, and on the following morning to a presentation of the foreground problems in the Newsociety. There were plenty of good questions and a good deal of hearty singing from the compatriots of Beethoven. The springtime birds in the German trees were given a good run for their money!

Further south, in Munich, I met with an old friend and the two lawyers who will be going to bat for me at my fifth trial for denying the “Holocaust,” due to take place in Regensburg in September. They are well aware that national politics make a just verdict at the regional level virtually impossible, but they will do their best. Precisely because the Six Million serve as a substitute Redeemer in millions of minds, I had no scruple in remunerating the lawyers from the St Marcel Initiative, but its funds are being depleted. Thank you for all and any help.

Then to the Black Forest in southwest Germany, where there is another community of half a dozen Sisters, likewise cheerful and resolved not to follow the present misdirection of the SSPX. Founded in 1988, they have recently finished building and decorating a beautiful chapel with some two dozen choir-stalls “as a sign of hope,” their chaplain told me. Girls, if you think you may have a vocation, here are two firmly anti-modern convents in Germany that you can try.

Lastly, one night in Switzerland, close but unknown to Écône, where they may have learned only afterwards that I passed by to meet a group of good layfolk. And one night in Paris where I learned to my delight that many SSPX priests in France have lost all trust in the present management of the SSPX. Let us be patient. Almighty God is fooled by none of us.

My next engagement is in London on May 19, when I should be addressing British Friends of Palestine on Hamlet. Why? In that play Shakespeare cries out with pain at the loss of England’s soul. Were England still Catholic, not only Palestine but the whole world would be better off.

Kyrie eleison.

Ancestral Pride

Ancestral Pride on October 15, 2011

In his second volume on the life of Jesus published several months ago, Pope Benedict XVI made remarks enabling journalists to jump to the conclusion that the Jews must no longer be held responsible for deicide, i.e. the killing of God. Worse, on May 17 the executive director of the US Bishops’ Conference’s Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs said that one cannot charge the Jewish people with deicide at any time in history without falling out of communion with the Catholic Church. Against what many people today want to believe, it is time to recall, however briefly, what the true Church always used to teach on the judicial murder of Jesus.

Firstly, the killing of Jesus was truly “deicide,” i.e. the killing of God, because Jesus was the one of the three divine Persons who in addition to his divine nature had taken a human nature. What was killed on the Cross? Only the human nature. But who was killed on the Cross in his human nature? None other than the second divine Person, i.e. God. So God was killed, deicide was committed.

Secondly, Jesus died on the Cross to save all of us sinful human beings from our sins, and in this sense all men were and are the purpose of his death. But only the Jews (leaders and people) were the prime agents of the deicide because it is obvious from the Gospels that the Gentile most involved, Pontius Pilate, would never have condemned Jesus to death had not the Jewish leaders roused the Jewish people to clamour for his crucifixion (Mt. XXVII, 20). Certainly the learned leaders were more guilty than the unlearned people, says St Thomas Aquinas (Summa III, 47, 5), but they all cried together for Jesus’ blood to come down upon them and their children (Mt. XXVII, 25).

Thirdly, at least Pope Leo XIII considered there to be a real solidarity between the Jews clamouring then for Jesus to be killed and the collectivity of Jews of modern times. Did he not in his Act of Consecration of the Human Race to the Sacred Heart of Jesus have the entire Church, from the end of the 19th century onwards, pray to God that he turn his “eyes of mercy towards the children of that race, once God’s chosen people: of old they called down upon themselves the Blood of the Saviour; may it now descend upon them a laver (i.e. washing) of redemption and life”?

But Leo XIII is by no means alone in observing such a continuity amongst Jews down the centuries. Do they themselves not lay claim today to the land of Palestine on the grounds that it is theirs by right from the God of the Old Testament? Has there ever been a race-people-nation on the face of the earth more proudly self-identifying as identical down the ages? Originally raised by God to cradle the Messiah, alas, when he came they refused, collectively, to recognize him. Collectively also, meaning there are always noble exceptions, they have remained faithful to that rejection, so that they changed their religion from that of Abraham and Moses and the Old Testament to that of Anas, Caiphas and the Talmud. Tragically, their very messianic training by God drives them to go on rejecting the one whom they hold to be a false messiah. Until they convert at the end of the world, as the Church has always taught they will do (cf. Rom. XI, 26–27), they seem bound to choose to go on acting, collectively, as enemies of the true Messiah. How can the Pope let go of such ancient truths?

Kyrie eleison.