Antisemitism

 Antisemitism                Gerry OShea

Peter Hayes, a history professor in Northwestern University who specializes in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, is amazed and shocked that celebrities with massive followings are spewing antisemitic tropes that have been considered taboo for decades. Police records reveal a substantial and disturbing increase in hate crimes against Blacks, gays, Asians and Jews.

A few months ago, former President Donald Trump welcomed Kanye West, now known as the rapper Ye, to Mar-a-Lago.  In a recent interview Mr. West expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler. Also present at that gathering was Nick Fuentes, a belligerent racist leader of white nationalism. He has publicly bemoaned the prominence of Jewish leaders in America and suggested that they should be replaced by Catholics.

This brings to mind the rabble-rousing preaching of Fr. Charles Coughlin who hosted a huge radio audience in the late 1930’s. He enlisted the help of a well-known Irish theologian, Denis Fahey, a Spiritan priest, in spreading his murky tale of hatred and defamation.

These two “experts” gave credence to the notorious antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, presenting that book as the credible work of a cabal of Jewish leaders who gathered secretly at the end of the 19^th century to devise a plot to take over the world.

Both men knew of the bogus origin of the book. A series of articles in the Times of London in 1921 showed clearly that the Protocols, as it was widely known, was a propaganda tool of the Tsar’s forces. Shamefully, Coughlin spread these falsehoods knowing that he had a receptive Depression-era audience searching for villains to blame for economic hardship and the looming war.

Fr. Coughlin was the political crusader using Fahey, the so-called scientific expert, to buttress his arguments. He loved to quote his fellow-priest’s claims that the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 was an instrument used by clever Jewish strategists to enhance the creation of a future ideal kingdom.

Fahey liked to wrap his ideas in pietistic Catholic imagery. In his words, Bolshevism was simply “the most recent development in the age-old struggle waged by the Jewish Nation against the supernatural Messiah, our Lord Jesus Christ and His Mystical Body, the Catholic Church.”

This kind of pseudo-theology has a long history in the Catholic Church. Up to 1959 when Pope John XX111 intervened Catholics worldwide prayed every Good Friday for the conversion of “perfidious Jews,” terms of insulting belittlement. All of Pope John’s successors up to the present day have shown proper respect for Judaism as an ancient esteemed religion.

New York City, a place with strong Catholic and Jewish populations, showed this ecumenical spirit in a distinct way in 1989 when Mayor Edward Koch, the first Jewish mayor of the city, and Cardinal John O’Connor, a devout traditional Catholic leader, collaborated in a book with a long title that honored both traditions: His Eminence and Hizzoner: A Candid Exchange: Mayor Edward Koch and John Cardinal OConnor.

Back to the poisoned tongue of radio host Coughlin. According to his tripe, the solution to ending Nazi persecution of German Jews was for the Jewish leaders in finance, synagogues and the media to stand up to the supposedly atheistic Jews and to “attack the cause; attack forthright the errors and the spread of Communism together with their co-nationals who support it.”

The incomprehensible logic of this statement was typical of the emanations from many priests, bishops and popes for centuries. Hatred of Jews goes back to the early days of Christianity. The central rationale offered entailed a belief that Jews were guilty of deicide, killing god – a preposterous allegation recognized for its destructive imbecility by all serious contemporary scholars.

What does it mean to kill god? Is that the god of Abraham and Moses? Is this the god that created the world? Among most Christian sects there is a strong belief in what theologians call the Hypostatic Union, that Jesus somehow was mysteriously imbued with both natures – human and divine. Full respect for such beliefs.

We know that from beginning to end Christ was very human. Many modern theologians stress the fact that he was a Jewish man who made his way in the Jewish community of his time, following the laws and customs of that period in history. He did not, for instance, condemn slavery, seemingly accepted in those times but surely the greatest moral evil ever perpetrated by powerful people. No, he was a man of his time and, according to St. Paul, acted like his contemporaries except he did not sin.

This factual statement about his humanity offers no explanation about the ways that Christ was touched by divinity. Such deliberations are outside human comprehension in the realm of faith and religious belief.

The bottom line of antisemitism which claims that Jews killed Jesus is wrong for two reasons. First, it was Roman rulers who conducted a trial and punished him with crucifixion. Second, a small cadre of Jews cried out for his blood; surely, blaming all Jews for that terrible injustice would be akin to blaming all cowboys for murdering indigenous communities in parts of the American west.

The Christian priority in past centuries focused on converting Jews to the “truth.” In the early years of the 16^th century Reformation Martin Luther ascribed the failure of the Catholic efforts to convert Jews to the inadequate and outmoded methods they used. He set out to find a more humane approach to entice them to his church.

When this strategy failed because very few Jews were interested, he threw up his hands in disgust and launched virulent attacks against them that made the Catholic propaganda modest by comparison.

The Nazis used Luther’s book On the Jews and their Lies to justify their claim that their obnoxious ideology was morally righteous. Luther, a respected figure in many German households, went so far as to advocate the murder of Jews who refused to convert to Christianity by asserting that “we are at fault for not slaying them.”

In 1938 at a major church conference Cardinal Pacelli, later Pius X11, delivered a deplorable sermon about Jews “whose lips curse (Christ) and whose hearts reject him even today.” This language is very different from a 1937 letter from Pius X1, ironically drafted by Pacelli,  condemning the Nazi ideology, which was read in all churches in Germany.

Hitler found receptive ears in a country where the Sunday sermons preached in some Christian churches included spiteful claims of Jewish intransigence. The Shoah, the murder of six million European Jews, in a Christian European country, raises questions about complicity by some church leaders. They certainly did not give the Holocaust their benediction, but they played a significant role in creating the culture that allowed the poison to mature.

Back to Denis Fahey and his ongoing malevolent influence. His most famous book, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, has been reprinted along with fourteen more of his writings. The company responsible for the re-publication has ties to the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary at the St. Benedict Center in Richmond, New Hampshire. Promoting his books, they describe him as “such a great man” and their site got 242,300 hits in three months from May of this year. The local bishop has pronounced that this group should no longer be considered Catholic.

Gerry OShea blogs at wemustbetalking