Wednesday, January 28, 2009

The Crunchy Con continues: Anti-Semitism and SSPX

He cites a piece by John Allen:

A troubled history with Judaism has long been part of the Catholic traditionalist movement associated with the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre — beginning with Lefebvre himself, who spoke approvingly of both the World War II-era Vichy Regime in France and the far-right National Front, and who identified the contemporary enemies of the faith as “Jews, Communists and Freemasons” in an Aug. 31, 1985, letter to Pope John Paul II.
Is a blog really the place to do justice to the details and history of Catholic-Jewish controversies? Shall we start going after Chesterton, Belloc, and Fr. Fahey as well? Some may believe in a conspiracy among certain Jews for world domination and such. Is such speculation due only to the sin of hate? Or is it due to a sincere recognition of the profound religious differences and views about the identity of God's "chosen people"? Who is the Messiah for whom the Jews are waiting? As for the support of the Vichy Regime--the Vichy Regime was not the same as Nazi Germany, though it did cooperate with it. There are Catholics who believe Pétain was a patriot (and even representative of the old Catholic France?). I believe the Abbé Georges de Nantes holds this opinion. Is he an anti-Semite? Archbishop Lefebvre?

Is traditional European culture exclusively Christian (and ultimately Catholic)? Is there such a thing as Judeo-Christian culture? Once Europe had converted to the Faith, was there any way for it to revert back to its pagan roots and remain European? I do not think so--in order to be non-Christian once more it would have to apostasize and become anti-Christian.

Did Jews consider themselves to be citizens of the various European polities? Or outsiders? Did they have a better understanding of what it means to have a culture and to be a people than we deracinated moderns, who can think only in terms of abstract principles and loyalties?

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