OUR LADY OF FATIMA  CATHOLIC CHURCH

"Every Catholic with his head screwed
 on should be an anti-Semite."

February 25, 2008

Menzingen (SSPX HQ in Switzerland)

Do I have your attention, now ? Please don't fall off your chair in disbelief. The title above is in quotation marks ("") and the quotation is NOT my own. So who said it, then ? In actual fact I heard these words with my own ears; the speaker was the author of another recent diatribe against Pope Benedict XVI with which I shall deal below. My last column contained the text of Pope Benedict's new prayer for the Jews which I had conveniently set to music for the Good Friday afternoon liturgy. Only today other versions surfaced in PDF form - great minds think alike !

Indeed, the Pope's new prayer for the Jews has upset just about everybody, Trads and Jews alike. It seems the Bavarian Pope can please nobody. Cardinal Kasper was sent out to bat for the Pope and he testily argued that the liturgy of the Catholic Church was an internal affair and that the Jews should mind their own business and that the Jews have prayers in their liturgy which the Catholic Church finds offensive. (Bravo Your Eminence !) There is just a "little" red flag here... if the Jews should mind their own business, why was the prayer changed in the first place ? It was the pressure of Jewish special interests' groups that have led the Society of St. Pius X to completely reject the new prayer in favor of the older and more traditional one. Is this the case, in fact ? Let us examine the question:

It can be readily seen that the prayer for the Jews in the Good Friday liturgy has undergone various changes and curiously enough all of them since the 1950s. Except for raddie traddies (sedes et al) nobody had a beef about any of the changes until now. So what's the problem ?

However, the prayer for the Jews was not the only prayer that was changed by Pius XII in 1956. The prayer for the Emperor (which was never said since there was no Holy Roman Emperor) was suppressed in favor of a prayer "For all civil authorities" which was the Church's recognition that times have changed and many countries are now elective democracies. 

In the 1965 revisions there were far more changes than in 1956:

1/ The "Prayer for the Church" was modified to reflect the sensibilities of ecumenism and to avoid the idea that the expression the "Church of Christ" refers exclusively to the Catholic Church. (I merely state changes were made - I am not agreeing with the changes or with the sentiments the changes express !)

2/ The 7th prayer named "For the Unity of the Church" was renamed "For the Unity of Christians".

3/ The 8th prayer - now simply named: "For the Jews" is given in the table above.

4/ The 9th prayer named "For the Conversion of Pagans" was renamed: "For Those not Believing in Christ".

The point, again, was that there were no complaints about these changes that I have detected.

Then in the preparation of the Novus Ordo 1969/70 the prayers for Good Friday were revamped again. The reformulation of the "Prayer for the Jews" is given above. The point here, is that there have been 5 changes to the "Prayer for the Jews" in 52 years. With 4 of the changes nobody squawked, so why are they squawking now ?

Joseph Ratzinger an "anti-Semite" ?

Bishop Williamson is the latest in a series of Trad figures rising up to reject this "Ratzingerian interference" in the liturgy. Williamson suggests in his latest blog column that Pope Benedict is not a real friend of the Jews, that he does them a disservice by hiding the truth about their spiritual condition by refusing to accept Our Lord as the Messiah:

The difference is quite simply the difference between our brief life here below, and life everlasting: For purposes of this life, lasting for each of us, let us say, 70 years, he has been their friend, because by, for instance, taking out of the 1962 text the references to the Jews’ “blindness”, “darkness” and “the veil over their hearts”, he has softened the Church’s solemn criticism of their condition.. On the other hand by the same softening he will also have diminished Catholics’ awareness of how especially Jews need the charity of Catholics’ prayers.

(...)Therefore the recent Good Friday liturgy change, by diminishing Catholics’ awareness of that real “veil”, etc, has done a disservice to Jews’ eternal salvation. In this respect of the Catholic Faith, Benedict XVI has, objectively, shown himself to be against the Jews purely as Jews. Is there any other possible true definition of the expression “anti-semite” ?

Quite apart from the fact that this is yet another demonstration of the Bishop's increasing "loopiness" as Brian Sudlow (a compatriot and former fellow seminarian in the Society of St. Pius X back in the early 1990s) wrote over on his excllent Blog "The Sensible Bond", the fact that Williamson alleges the Pope is an anti-Semite is a comment I find disgusting and thoroughly morally reprehensible. Disgusting, because he is writing about the Successor of St. Peter, and morally reprehensible because if we compare the two texts (1962 and 2008) the new text effectively says the same as (if not more than) the older one but formulates the prayer in a positive way rather than in the traditionally negative way viz:

Williamson, again, says the old prayers are denuded of the phrases: “blindness”, “darkness” and “the veil over their hearts” but what does the expression "may illuminate their hearts" in the new prayer mean ? It means "bring light where there is darkness". The old prayer emphasizes the absence of light = "darkness" (i.e. negatively), the new prayer calls for the shedding of light...where there is currently darkness (i.e. positively). Williamson is straining at a gnat it seems to me !

But notice this: In the old prayer we pray that the Jews "acknowledge" Jesus, but as what ? Pope Benedict tells us in the new prayer as "Savior of all men". In the old prayer we asked that the Jews "acknowledge the light of thy truth, which is Christ", but in the new prayer, Pope Benedict wants us to pray "that all men be saved and come to the recognition of the truth"  not just the Jews but all men - (why haven't the feminists raised heck over this sexist term, I wonder ?) and also we pray for "the fullness of the peoples" to enter the Church and that "all Israel may be saved". The new prayer says way more than the older prayer says and no wonder the Jews are up-in-arms about the new prayer because they clearly get the message but La Reja and all other would-be fuzzy thinkers do not !

Will the real "anti-Semite" please stand up ?

The title of this column was "Every Catholic with his head screwed on should be an anti-Semite." That was part of a larger quotation from the lips of Bishop Williamson in my seminary first year class in 1990 or 1991 in which he was discussing the supposed concentration camp "myth" during World War II. He finished his harangue with the words: "...and that is why every Catholic with his head  screwed on should be an anti-Semite." I was totally shocked that he had said such a thing. But then the Bishop is no stranger to anti-Semitic remarks. A perusal of this article on Wikipedia will tell you the rest of the story in this regards. However, I take great offense that a supposedly Catholic Bishop would say such untrue and intentionally defamatory things about the Holy Father even for rhetorical effect ! How truly scandalous, that a spiritual son of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who used to say in reference to resisting the excesses of the reforms: "We are the Pope's most loyal Sons !", should so falsely and so cruelly misrepresent the current Sovereign Pontiff !

Pope Benedict enters the gates at Auschwitz
The grim motto: "Work makes (you) free"

I remember in May of 2006 watching the Pope walking quietly along the memorials to the victims at Auschwitz and thinking that it must take singular courage to walk in a place where his fellow countrymen had butchered thousands of people from all religious and ethnic backgrounds.

The problem with every Tom Dick and Traddy Harry filtering what they will and what they won't accept from post Vatican II Rome is that it savors of Protestantism - namely the principle of "private interpretation" I am the judge of what's Catholic or not. Both Bishop Williamson and I as two former Anglican converts should know all about that ! In addition to this, however, Vatican I in defining the role of the Sovereign Pontiff in matters of faith, morals and discipline (which means liturgical modifications as well) has this to say:

If anyone therefore should say that the Roman Pontiff has only the office of inspecting or directing, and not the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, not only in matters of faith and morals, but also in matters concerning the discipline and rule of the Church throughout the world; or that he has merely the principal part and not the full plenitude of this supreme power; or that his power is not ordinary and immediate, whether over each and all the churches, or over each and all the pastors and faithful: let him be anathema. (De Ecclesia Christi, can. 3.)

The irony is that I "lifted" this quotation from this SSPX page on the US District website ! Yes the Pope can make changes whether we like it or not. More recently, however, Pope Pius XII writing in the 1947 encyclical Mediator dei had this to say:

58. It follows from this that the Sovereign Pontiff alone enjoys the right to recognize and establish any practice touching the worship of God, to introduce and approve new rites, as also to modify those he judges to require modification. (...) Private individuals, therefore, even though they be clerics, may not be left to decide for themselves in these holy and venerable matters, involving as they do the religious life of Christian society along with the exercise of the priesthood of Jesus Christ and worship of God; concerned as they are with the honor due to the Blessed Trinity, the Word Incarnate and His august mother and the other saints, and with the salvation of souls as well. For the same reason no private person has any authority to regulate external practices of this kind, which are intimately bound up with Church discipline and with the order, unity and concord of the Mystical Body and frequently even with the integrity of Catholic faith itself.

(...)

65. In every measure taken, then, let proper contact with the ecclesiastical hierarchy be maintained. Let no one arrogate to himself the right to make regulations and impose them on others at will. Only the Sovereign Pontiff, as the successor of Saint Peter, charged by the divine Redeemer with the feeding of His entire flock, and with him, in obedience to the Apostolic See, the bishops "whom the Holy Ghost has placed . . . to rule the Church of God," have the right and the duty to govern the Christian people.

These passages ought to be very much on my mind right now, since I am in the process of preaching a series of sermons on this encyclical on Sundays. Pius XII was writing against the excesses of the liturgical experimentations being enacted on the private will of individual priests in the 1930s and 40s. Are we any different from them if we reject the legitimate right of the Holy Father to make modifications to a text of the 1962 Roman Missal as he sees fit ?

Let each Catholic, then, ask him or herself this one question: Whom do we follow: Menzingen (the seat of Bernard Fellay, head of the Society of St Pius X) or Rome (the see of Peter, the visible Head of the Church) ? A Catholic knows the answer !

+TF

P.S. Objection answered (before you make it !)

Objection: If every Pope can make liturgical changes then why resist the NOM ? 

Answer: from Card. Ratzinger: 

"The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose will is law, but is the guardian of the authentic Tradition, and thereby the premier guarantor of obedience. He cannot do as he likes, and is thereby able to oppose those people who for their part want to do what has come into their head. His rule is not that of arbitrary power, but that of obedience in faith. That is why, with respect to the Liturgy, he has the task of a gardener, not that of a technician who builds new machines and throws the old ones on the junk-pile. Anyone like myself, who was moved by... the Liturgical Movement on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, can only stand, deeply sorrowing, before the ruins of the very things they were concerned for."

26th July 2004 
Preface to the second edition of "The Organic Development of the Liturgy", Dom Alcuin Reid 

Answer from Pope Benedict XVI:

As for the use of the 1962 Missal as a Forma extraordinaria of the liturgy of the Mass, I would like to draw attention to the fact that this Missal was never juridically abrogated and, consequently, in principle, was always permitted. 

Letter to the Bishops July 7th, 2007

Art 1: (...) It is, therefore, permissible to celebrate the Sacrifice of the Mass following the typical edition of the Roman Missal promulgated by Bl. John XXIII in 1962 and never abrogated, as an extraordinary form of the Liturgy of the Church. 

Art. 2. In Masses celebrated without the people, each Catholic priest of the Latin rite, whether secular or regular, may use the Roman Missal published by Bl. Pope John XXIII in 1962, or the Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970, and may do so on any day with the exception of the Easter Triduum. For such celebrations, with either one Missal or the other, the priest has no need for permission from the Apostolic See or from his Ordinary. 

Motu Proprio: Summorum pontificum, July 7, 2007

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