Analysis: Looming deal between Vatican,
Jew-hating splinter group bad news for Catholicism
Giulio Meotti
The
Catholic splinter group Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) sent a letter of
reconciliation to the Vatican, which Der Spiegel magazine defined as “the
greatest gift to the papacy of Benedict XVI.” Pope Joseph Ratzinger has long
wanted to heal the schism with the Society and bring the followers of the late
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre back into the Church.
Richard Williamson, one of four Society bishops whose excommunications
the Pope revoked, made global headlines by publicly denying the Holocaust.
Sources now say that an agreement between the Catholic Church and the
Society is “imminent” and they are closer to reconciliation. The National
Catholic Register put it this way: “Get ready for SSPX Pandemonium.” Yet hatred
for Israel and the Jews permeates not only Williamson’s fringe, but the entire
Catholic Society.
The Vatican’s unity with Lefebvre’s group would be a renovation of the
“Adversus Judeaos” teachings that spurred pogroms, burnings at the stake, the
Inquisition and the gas chambers. It’s the same medieval European hatred of the
people of Israel which was so intense that all calamities were attributed to the
Jews’ malfeasance.
The Italian branch of the Society just chose a new head, Pierpaolo
Petrucci, whose positions on the Jews are the exact copy of Williamson's.
Petrucci published an essay on the website of the Society, stating: “About the
Jews, Joseph Ratzinger calls them ‘Fathers in faith’. What does it mean?
Supporting Israel’s policy despite the Palestinian question? Supporting the
Jewish religion? If that’s the case, how can the Church approve a false religion
which rejects Jesus Christ?”
Petrucci calls the Jews “rejecters of Christ” and claims that “the
Church always condemned Judaism as a false religion, praying for the conversion
(of the Jews,) so that they will reach salvation, seriously compromised by their
superstitions.” The Society’s bulletin, La Tradizione Cattolica, calls Judaism
“a false cult” and spreads delusional material on “the Jew Karl Marx” and “the
Jews sleeping in the shadow of death.”
The Society’s US website calls
the Jews “enemy of man, whose secret weapon is the leaven of the Pharisees which
is hypocrisy.” The South African site claims that “Jews have come closer and
closer to fulfilling their substitute-Messianic drive towards world dominion.”
The Belgian site accuses Jews of “still believing they are the chosen people”
while “awaiting world domination.”
This is even
worse than the lunatic statements of Williamson denying the existence of
Auschwitz. It’s the cornerstone of the displacement Christian myth, which rings
a genocidal note. Franz Schmidberger, the right-hand man of superior Bishop
Bernard Fellay, asked for the Jews’ conversion and called them “complicit in
deicide.”Another bishop pardoned by the Pope, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, said
that “the Jews are the most active artisans for the coming of Antichrist.”
If the Vatican welcomes back the Society, Jewish rabbis should halt
their dialogue with the Church and Israeli officials should declare the
Society’s leaders “personae non grata.” Any Jewish-Christian rapprochement would
be not only futile, but extremely dangerous.
It is incumbent upon Pope Benedict to atone for what Christianity has done to
the Jewish people by recognizing the unique role of the Jews in this world and
the existence of a restored Israel as the proof that the Jewish people is not
annihilated, assimilated and withering away. Otherwise, Christian anti-Semitism
will remain an inextinguishable fire and Catholicism will be embracing, again, a
proto-Holocaust theology.
Giulio Meotti, a journalist
with Il Foglio, is the author of the book A New Shoah: The Untold Story of
Israel's Victims of Terrorism
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