On the other hand...

Chris Ferrara points out:

...there is only one thing we need to know about the revised prayer in order to assess whether it is good or bad for the cause of the Gospel: Abe Foxman hates it.

Heh. I always liked that joke:

"What's an anti-semite?"
"Someone the ADL hates."

He really hates it. In my article of January 21, 2008 I wrote: “We can only hope the reports are false, or that the Pope, if he does alter the prayer, does so in a way that leaves intact the Church’s unambiguous call for the conversion of the Jewish people, no less than the other peoples of the earth.” The Pope has done the latter quite resoundingly, and Foxman knows it.

Collective Guilt

The following by email from a faithful reader, explores the question, "Well, who said the Jews alive today are responsible for the death of Christ?" Some points rarely raised about corporate responsibility. (For what reason might they be raised so rarely, I wonder?)

Thought I'd throw this up, if for no other reason than that I think there may be one last designated victim group I haven't yet managed to offend in these pages. One doesn't like to leave a job half done.

You can't blame all the Jews of all times and places for the crucifixion of our Lord, they say, and with reason. Mary ? Joseph ? Peter ? Matthew ? They were obviously perfectly innocent, and in fact opposed to the crime in question. They were and are Jews.

But, what about the Jewish nation as such ? By the decision of its actual leaders at the time it ordered or at least arranged, as far as in it lay, the execution of its own Messiah. The Sanhedrin etc. acted in the name of the Nation.

Have we moved beyond such ideas of corporate responsibility which allow nevertheless for personal, individual innocence?

No. The concept rightly remains.

Canada, for example, the Crown, must keep promises and pay debts connected with treaties made hundreds of years ago. This is a distinct thing from the fact that I personally never did any harm to our Native People.

Japan had to pay damages after World War II. This did not mean that little Japanese children were *personally* guilty of anything. But the Nation as such...

So with the Jews.

I Love this guy!

Especially the "kisskisskiss" part. See, people don't think Trads can be funny, but they're a laugh-riot, in my experience.

It reminds me of something Dinesh D'Souza wrote once, that the most common characteristic of the liberal is to be "shocked and outraged"; the most common characteristic of the conservative is the horselaugh.

Jeepers! getting pretty Catholic around here lately.

I'll try to get back to some English recipes and wildlife and reactionary nationalist politics soon.

Funny, that crocodile still seems to be hungry

no matter what we throw in its maw.

"Rabbi Rosen, while saying he was pleased that language he found offensive was removed, objected to the new prayer because it specified that Jews should find redemption specifically in Christ."

Really?! You mean appeasement doesn't work?

Who knew?

Y'see, it's not actually the whole "perfidis" or "veil from their hearts" thing that bugs them. It's that the Church dares really to believe what we profess to believe, and out loud and in public. Horrors!

As long as we keep believing that we're right, the world is going to hate us.

Don't we get it?

We're supposed to be good dhimis and hang our heads in shame for our wicked exclusivist ideas.

Meanwhile,

Kenneth J. Wolfe, a columnist for the traditionalist Catholic newspaper The Remnant, said traditionalists would have preferred no change at all.

Mr. Wolfe said that the change “rattles the cage of traditionalists” and that it would probably make more difficult any rapprochement with traditionalist groups like the Society of St. Pius X, which rejects the Second Vatican Council and has appointed its own bishops.

Well, it is the New York Times, after all. That bastion of objectivity and devotion to the un-spun truth.

Problems problems - sorry, it's Lent, time for some Traddie Obsessing

Bear with me. For those who are new to this site, don't panic, it's an annual thing.

Just in case Fr. Blake does not choose to publish my comment, I'll put it up here.
(What is it with these nervous nellie British bloggers and their comment moderation? Sheesh, if someone is rude to you in the commbox, just kick him out! Comment moderation is like driving with the hand brake on.)

Fr. Blake wrote,

The Ordinary Form, which most of the Church will use this Good Friday, says nothing of conversion or of encounter with Christ, it expresses the new teaching of the Second Vatican Council that the Old Covenants of the the Old Testament have not be replaced by the New and Everlasting Covenant of Christ but they are still in force. It strikes me that up until the Council exactly the opposite was universal teaching of the Church.

He calls the Bugnini intercessions part of the "slow organic development" of the liturgy. But I believe this is untrue. I believe that it is part of the rather rapid capitulation of the Church to the world's demand that we abandon the Faith, in favour of making friends with the world. It is certainly clear that Benedict has not done this because of any real theological growth in understanding, but under political pressure. I had thought better of him, but there it is.

Fr. Blake goes on to say, rather vaguely, I thought,

which expresses more accurately the Church's current teaching? Is it the one I will use this Good Friday or the new one in the Extraordinary Form?

It might well be that we just have live with ambiguity for a few years but the different expressions of theology highlight a significant problem.

Yeah, I'd say that a contradiction and denial of a tenet of the Faith by an ecumenical council is "a significant problem" all right.

Every year, the Good Friday intercessions, or I should say, lack of intercessions, particularly over the idea of conversion of Jews, pagans, heretics and the fallen away, are the thing the Church does that brings me closest to believing the sedevacantists are right.

That you have confirmed (again) that the Church after the Council teaches something opposed to what it did before the Council, just brings it all rushing back. The Church cannot promulgate error. Two opposed ideas cannot both be true. If the Church taught before the Council that the Old Covenant has been replaced with the New and now teaches the opposite, then we have quite a little problem, don't we?

Going with the principle of non-contradiction, there are only a few logical possibilities open to us.

1 - what was taught before the Council was wrong. this would mean that the Church, in this most fundamental area of the Faith, was wrong for 1965 years. That our Faith is, as Paul said, futile.

2 - what was taught before the Council was right and the documents of V-II have negated and denied it. This leaves us with the inescapable conclusion that V-II was wrong and that everything that has been changed to conform to it has been a deviation from the truth.

Neither of these is very nice, but I know which I think more likely.

Big lies require a lot of maintenance. I have observed in political systems that when a group or country bases its political work on a Big Lie (legal abortion, for example) the longer the lie is maintained, the greater a percentage of your resources must be diverted to maintaining it, you start, in the case of abortion, with the judiciary, then Parliament, then you co-opt the medical establishment, then the media, then education.

The same has happened in the Church. We have had the Big Vatican II, Novus Ordo lie for 40 years. In that time, nearly every aspect of Catholic life has been re-ordered to support it, liturgy, charitable works, catechesis, education, religious life, Catholic involvement in the public square. All these Catholic institutions, the very heart of Catholic life, have been dedicated to the two-fold lie that the Church does not teach what she teaches, and that the calamity that has arisen in the wake of the first lie has not actually happened. (I don't know which part of John Paul II's pontificate irritated me the most, but the constant chirpily cheerful denial that anything serious was going wrong, is a contender.)

I have long believed that Catholicism and Novus Ordoism or Vaticantooism, are different and opposed religious beliefs.

And the Good Friday intercessions have gone a long way to bolstering that belief.

I have managed thus far to withstand the tension it creates, but I have also just moved out of my Oratorian comfort zone to live in the vast and poisonous wasteland that is British Catholicism. Not sure how well it is going to hold up now.

Feeding the Crocodile

On the paying of tribute to one's enemies:

Winston Churchill:
“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.”

Overheard in the House of Commons during the debate on the Belfast Agreement:

"...as we have seen, Danegeld has been paid, and the thing about Danegeld is that one keeps on having to pay it. Concession after concession has been made. What will be the next one?"

.

And from Kipling, in the days of sterner men:

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,

For fear they should succumb and go astray;

So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,

You will find it better policy to say: --

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,

No matter how trifling the cost;

For the end of that game is oppression and shame,

And the nation that pays it is lost!"

Manifest Faithlessness

Well, one step forward,

two steps...

"Jewish leaders have welcomed Pope Benedict XVI's decision to reformulate the Catholic Church's traditional Good Friday prayers.

The removal of references to the "darkness" and "blindness" of the Jews for their refusal to recognize Jesus as the messiah was a sign the pope was "deeply committed to advancing the relationship with the Jewish Community," Rabbi David Rosen, chairman of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, told The Jerusalem Post."

because of course, the one thing the Catholics must not be allowed, under any circumstances, even in their own churches at their own holiest three days of the year, is to actually state that we believe what we believe.

~ * ~ * ~

The form used before 1955:

Let us pray also for the faithless Jews: that Almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts [2 Corinthians 3:13-16]; so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord.

Almighty and eternal God, who dost not exclude from thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

then in 1955, Pope Pius XII gave us:

Let us pray also for the faithless Jews: that almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts; so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us pray. Let us kneel.

[Levate] Almighty and eternal God, who dost not exclude from thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

In 1960, Pope John XXIII removed the word "faithless" (Latin: perfidis):

Let us pray also for the Jews: that almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts; so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord.

[Flectamus genua. Levate.] Almighty and eternal God, who dost also not exclude from thy mercy the Jews: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Two thoughts:

First, the word does not mean in the liturgy of the Church what people seem to think it means now in an English translation and the demand that the Church change it to something nicer-sounding is a result of the modern pig-ignorance that parades itself as moral righteousness in our times. The illiterates who govern us cannot tell the difference between a Latin word in its original meaning and a post-modern corruption of its English derivative and so demand that the Church cater to their ignorance.

Second: Has anyone met modern Jews? For the most part, there is not a bigger group of utterly godless people on earth. With the exception of a tiny minority of believers [for whom I have all the time in the world] the Jews of our time have radically rejected the belief that defines them. They have, in the greater majority, rejected the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who called them out of Egypt.

Can you think of a word that better fits them than "faithless"?