.. the gods themselves struggle in vain. (Schiller)
Bishop Richard Williamson of the schismatic ultra-catholic Society of St. Pius X has deservedly got into trouble for declarations of Holocaust denial in an interview with Swedish TV:
I believe there were no gas chambers.
The protests go well beyond the usual Jewish organisations and Israeli spokesmen, who I’m glad to say have been joined by Catholic US Congressmen and the German Catholic bishops.
The Vatican has lifted the excommunication of the Lefebvrists very cheaply. They have apparently not been required to accept the rulings of the Second Vatican Council as a condition of their reintegration into the Roman Church. They naturally see the move as a papal license to propagandize their views, which include the ever-popular doctrine of Jewish deicide condemned by Vatican II in Nostra aetate. Their tepid apologies for the outrage are not a withdrawal.
Williamson is a bigot and a fool. For a sampler of his thinking from his weekly blog, see below the jump. But what kind of bigot? Holocaust denial comes in two flavours. One is adolescent contrarian exhibitionism: it’s a way of getting into the papers and épater les bourgeois, as with climate change denialism. Robert Faurisson and David Irving offer probable examples. The other is hardcore antisemitism, as with Jean-Marie Le Pen. These are men who know the Jews were murdered and are glad of it. Denying the fact is for them a way to insult and wound living Jews and especially the survivors. It’s hard to think of any speech more wicked and disgusting. Not only Jews, but all civilised people, are right to respond very strongly: and Israeli hawks feel justified in their laager.
Both flavours of falsity may coexist in one mind. I thought that when President Ahmadinejad of Iran was invited to Columbia University in 2007, Lee Bollinger should have concentrated on Holocaust denial, which (unlike Zionism) directly challenges a university’s mission to seek and disseminate the truth. He should have confronted the reckless Ahmadinejad with the dilemma: are you a fool or a knave?
I’m tentatively inclined to put Williamson in the fool category. His blog – which is not pastoral instruction to the faithful, for example on how to hold a chalice or respond to importunate Jehovah’s Witnesses or liberal Catholics at the door, but informal jottings – is unbelievably narrow-minded. He travels the world, from Chennai to Munich to Buenos Aires – the man has the carbon footprint of a rock star – seeing nothing of interest outside his seminaries. He appears to have no opinions on the Iraq war, climate change, Israel and Palestine, development and poverty, nature, language, history, Islam, the Internet, Jesus’ message and the Bible, except as a source of selective polemical quotations, naturally taken from the obsolete Douai translation. I didn’t even detect much interest in God, whose main purpose in the world seems to have been to create the Tridentine Latin Mass.
The Society’s aims are to defend this rite and oppose the evils of modernism, i.e. the cautious efforts of Catholic thinkers to come to terms with the Enlightenment. The Lefebvrists admire Pius X (Pope 1903-1914) only because he was a fierce anti-modernist, selecting precisely the most questionable part of his legacy. Unlike Williamson, the very conservative Giuseppe Sarto was a rounded man who preached every Sunday, reformed the catechism and the Curia, organised disaster relief, revived Gregorian chant, defended the religious freedom of Polish Catholics, tried and failed to prevent the First World War, and so on.
Pope Benedict has also promoted to auxiliary bishop of Linz a pastor who claimed at the time that Hurricane Katrina was “divine retribution” on New Orleans for sexual permissiveness, homosexuality and abortion – which of course accounts for the fact that Bourbon Street (Sodom and Gomorrah) was spared.
Must have been an awful lot of abortion clinics in Lakeview.
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A Bishop Williamson sampler
Extracts from his weekly blog.
Now ever since the Jews were responsible for the crucifying of Our Lord Jesus Christ — “His blood be upon us and upon our children”, Mt.XXVII,25 — they have as a race and as a religion, always with noble exceptions, continued to reject him down to our day….Closer to our own time, it is a matter of historical record that the designing and launching of, for instance, Communism, to wrest mankind away from God and to replace his Heaven with a man-made paradise, was largely their achievement.
But honest ignorance presents a particular difficulty for the Jews who had all the privileges of the Old Testament to prepare them for the coming of their Messiah, Jesus Christ, and who ever since have had to put “the veil over their hearts” in order not to recognize him in the multiple prophecies of their Old Testament, notably Isaiah LIII…..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” ?
The kingdoms of the West are being taken from the natives and given to peoples that at least have babies (cf. Mt. XXI, 43). But without Jesus Christ as the uniting corner-stone (Eph. II,20), it means — blood in the streets.
In fact, without God, the Masonic governments must be making plans for population control: either a foreign war — WWIII ? — to distract the people from their woes at home; or the National Guard(s), food rationing and concentration camps for all “dissidents”.
Here is the key to womanīs nature as woman: she is designed to be mother. Do we not observe, and does not St. Thomas Aquinas suggest, that in everything involved in motherhood — which is no less than the future of the human race – she is manīs superior, whereas in everything else she is his inferior?
The womanliness of woman, tied to her natural destiny as mother, is so deep-seated in human nature that it is one of the last bastions to come under assault by the enemies of mankind. If the good German lady follows up their trail behind the scenes, she will stumble upon that massive plot against God and man which reaches back many centuries, and of which today’s onslaught on womanhood is all the more furious for being, as the plotters sense, one of the last battles they must win to achieve their final victory, as they think.
Whether non-Lefebvrist Catholic priests are the real thing:
Thus the new rite of Ordination may omit many features of the Catholic ordination, but it introduces nothing that positively excludes a true ordination. If only it did! Then it could no longer deceive so many souls into thinking that it presents no problem for Catholics. Here is the problem: its text may still be used validly (2+2=4), but its drift is to invalidate the true priesthood (2+2=5)! “Diabolical disorientation”.
Even today one cannot truthfully say that all Novus Ordo sacraments are automatically invalid.
I have never believed any of the Conciliar Popes not to be truly popes. Modern thinking turns minds into mush, and I have always held the Conciliar Popes to be too modern to be capable of the clear firm thinking in matters of Faith necessary to make them such clear firm heretics as could no longer hold their high office in the Church.
Freedom of religion:
The Catholic Church always used to teach that the prime worth of a human being so consists in his getting closer to the true God that a State may — wherever it will not be counter-productive for the salvation of souls — forbid the public practice of false religions, i.e. all non-Catholic religions.
9/11:
That is why it makes complete sense that 9/11 was organised to make possible (amongst other things) the invasion of countries where military bases could be built amongst and all around the present most important sources of world oil.
It is possible that this reader has seriously studied the massive arguments in favor of 9/11 having been other than what our vile media continue to pretend.
WW III has still been postponed, but it is surely not cancelled. “The justice of God grinds slow”, says the old proverb, “but it grinds exceeding small”. … The year 2008 has seen only the stepping up of the offences against him – indifference, blasphemy, immorality, etc, etc.. At a given moment he is going to say, “Enough!” In 2009?
There is much evidence that both collapse and war have long been planned by enemies of God to give them control of the entire world.
In this threat of a worldwide conflagration hanging over our heads, we must recognize the justice of a merciful God. If men choose to make the storm break, it will be terrible, but it will also cleanse.
And finally on the economic theory of time preference:
The government had set households the example (taught by the Englander John Maynard Keynes – “Tomorrow we are all dead anyway”) of living beyond one’s means.
[JW: This slur is comparatively trivial but very annoying. What Keynes, who found the time in 1930(!) to write an essay on Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, actually wrote about a particular line of argument in classical economics was: "In the long run we are all dead."]
