Culture Wars Magazine has been reporting from the front lines of the social, political and cultural battles in America and the West for over 35 years. Culture Wars seeks to educate people on modern systems of Cultural Warfare and how this new kind of warfare has advanced the interests of the American Empire and its systems of political control.
In mid-July 2017, the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, SJ, rocked the Catholic world by publishing an attack in Civilta Cattolica, the official journal of the Vatican, on Integralist Catholics in the United States. Spadaro gets off to a bad start by accusing American Catholics of holding a proposition that is foreign to religious thought in the United States. Catholic Integralism, according to Edmund Waldstein, O. Cist.:
Read MoreRandy Engel recently posted a lengthy column on at least two websites, here and here, addressing publication of my e-book The Man Behind the Curtain: Michael Voris and the Homosexual Vortex. What follows is the response that I sent to her on April 20, 2017.
Read MoreOn Tuesday, June 16, Mayor Pete Buttigieg announced in an op ed piece in the South Bend Tribune that he was a practicing homosexual. One day later, Peter Helland and I did a show on the mayor’s announcement on Israel, a local cable access TV program. After seeing this program, the South Bend Leadership Coalition, a local group of Black clergymen, met to express their outrage at the mayor’s announcement and at the end of the meeting asked me to speak in their name at the press conference which they held at Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church at 10:00 AM on the morning of Friday, June 24, 2015.
Read MoreKerry Noonan is 50 years old and the father of eight children. He grew up in and around New York City, and then after living in various other places, including Steubenville, where he met his wife, he moved to Grand Haven, a resort town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. His wife grew up there, the daughter of three generations of pharmacists, and Kerry started working for his father-in-law, and then for the firm that bought out his father-in-law’s institutional pharmacy. The job involved a lot of driving, and the driving began to take a toll on Kerry’s hip. The long drives and low pay allowed Kerry to meditate on economic matters.
Read MoreA priest friend of mine was just suspended for child abuse. I wasn’t planning to write about it, but the God who is the Lord of History put Woody Allen on the front page for the same crime, and suddenly it felt as if I were committing a sin of omission if I didn’t write about it. The “it” in question is the double standard.
Read MoreThe recent shootings in Connecticut, now known as the Sandy Hook Massacre, spawned a series of reports which were both confusing and predictable. This should come as no surprise because the phenomenon of mass murder in our day is both confusing and predictable as well.
Read MoreAs some indication of the intellectual bankruptcy of what passes for conservative commentary these days, Rush Limbaugh accused Dark Knight Rises director Christopher Nolan of turning the third and final installment of his Batman trilogy into a covert attack on Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney by naming the film’s villain “Bane.”1 Limbaugh claims that Bane the Villain will remind moviegoers that Romney once worked for Bain Capital; these same mindless zombies will then go to the polls in November and re-elect Obama for a second term. Quod Erat Demonstratum, as we used to say in sophomore geometry class.
Read MoreCrossing the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan on a sunny fall day is one of life’s pleasures that only New York City can provide. The view of the harbor includes the statue of liberty, Ellis Island and the skyscrapers of the financial district. The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the few bridges in New York built with pedestrians in mind, and on this sunny Sunday the entire walkway was one continuous stream of humanity stretching unbroken from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
Read MoreIn an article which appeared just before Christmas, David D. Kirkpatrick of the New York Times anointed Princeton Professor Robert P. George as “this country’s most influential conservative Christian thinker.” The proximate reason for the anointing was a manifesto known as The Manhattan Declaration, which George launched in September in the library of the Metropolitan Club. According to Kirkpatrick, George in collaboration with “conservative evangelicals like the born-again Watergate felon Chuck Colson,” Metropolitan Jonah, the primate of the Orthodox Church in America, and “more than half a dozen of this country’s most influential Roman Catholic bishops, including Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, Archbishop John Myers of Newark, and Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia . . . drafted a 4,700 word manifesto that promised resistance to the point of civil disobedience against any legislation that might implicate their churches or charities in abortion, embryo-destructive research or same-sex marriage.”
Read MoreOn January 25, 2011, on what is normally a national holiday to celebrate Egypt’s police forces, Egyptians took to the streets protesting the very thing they were supposed to celebrate. Disgusted with 30 years of corruption under the regime of Hosni Mubarak, thousands of protesters turned what turned what was supposed to be a celebration into a “day of rage” as they marched toward the headquarters of the ruling National Democratic party shouting “Down with Mubarak.” They protest finally settled in and hunkered down onto Cairo’s main square, Tahrir Square. Within hours of the first protest, the police whom the Egyptian masses were ostensibly supposed to be celebrating turned on them with tear gas and water cannons trying to disperse the crowds. The crowd remained unmoved, and within two weeks it was the regime that fell instead.
Read MoreDorothy Rabinowitz recently announced the death of multiculturalism in the Wall Street Journal. Citing the pronouncements of the prime ministers of England, France, and Germany, she crowed: “Who would have believed that in the space of a few weeks the leaders of the three major European powers would publicly denounce multiculturalism and declare in so many words that it was a proven disaster and a threat to society?”
Read MoreIn a generally thoughtful magazine from the USA, “Culture Wars”, the Editor recently took me personally to task, together with the Society of St Pius X as a whole, for wilfully cutting ourselves off from the mainstream Catholic Church. Let me present as briefly and as fairly as possible E. Michael Jones’ argument, with its main steps lettered to facilitate the answer:--
His main point is that the problem of Vatican II is not doctrinal: “(A) The Council documents are not themselves responsible for any of the craziness following the Council in the name of its “spirit”. As for the documents themselves, they are sometimes ambiguous, but (B) God is always with His Church, which is why (C) only something Catholic can gain the assent of the world’s assembled bishops, as happened at Vatican II. (D) Therefore it can and must suffice to interpret the ambiguities in the light of Tradition, as Archbishop Lefebvre himself once proposed to do.
“Therefore (E) Vatican II is Traditional, and any problem between Rome and the SSPX cannot be doctrinal. (F) Therefore the SSPX’s real problem is that it refuses communion out of a fear of contamination, (G) proceeding from its schismatic lack of charity. (H) The ensuing guilt they cover up by pretending that the Church is in an unprecedented emergency, brought on by the anti-doctrine of Vatican II. (I) Therefore the SSPX is saying that the Church has failed in its mission, and that the SSPX is the Church. Nonsense! SSPX bishops, sign over to Rome!”
REPLY: the problem of Vatican II is ESSENTIALLY doctrinal. (A) Alas, the Vatican II documents are indeed responsible for the “spirit” of Vatican II and its crazy aftermath. Their very ambiguity, recognized by E.M.J., let the craziness loose. (B) God is indeed with His Church, but He leaves His churchmen free to choose to do it great, but never fatal, damage (cf.Lk. XVIII, 8). (C) Thus the mass of Catholic bishops He let fall in the appalling Arian crisis of the fourth century. What happened once is happening again, only worse. (D) At an early stage in the post-Conciliar fight for Tradition, it may have been reasonable to appeal for Vatican II to be interpreted in the light of Tradition, but that stage is long past. The ambiguity’s bitter fruits have long since proved that the subtly poisoned Conciliar documents cannot be salvaged.
Thus (E) the Council is not Traditional, and the Rome-SSPX clash is ESSENTIALLY doctrinal, so (F) there is good reason to fear contamination, because of Vatican II’s false doctrine -- it is leading souls to Hell. (G) Nor is there a schismatic mentality amongst (non-sedevacantist) Traditionalists, even though (H) the Church is in the thick of the worst emergency of her entire history. (I) But just as in the Arian crisis the few bishops who kept the Faith proved that the Church had not absolutely failed, so today the SSPX belongs to the Church and is keeping the Faith, without remotely pretending to replace, or to be on its own, the Church.
Michael, when, in all Church history, were her assembled bishops deliberately ambiguous? You admit the ambiguity of Vatican II. When did churchmen ever resort to ambiguity unless it was to pave the way for heresy? In Our Lord’s Church, yes is to be yes, and no is to be no (Mt.V, 37).
The assembled bishops were not deliberately ambiguous nor did they issue deliberately ambiguous statements. The assembled bishops deliberated on and called for modifications to documents that were influenced by the machinations of men whom history has shown to be double agents. I am referring to people like Malachi Martin, who was a paid agent of B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee at the council, and John Courtney Murray, who was working for Henry Luce’s Time/Life empire, which had intimate connections with the CIA. The first story has been told pretty much in full; the second will appear in the pages of Culture Wars and a forthcoming book by David Wemhoff.
To say that Malachi Martin and the Luce cabal at Time/Life, which included John Courtney Murray, tried to influence the council is a fact which is now part of the historical record. To say that they succeeded is something else again. To say that the bishops of the world were in league with Fathers Martin and Murray is nothing short of preposterous. Does this mean that Archbishop Lefebvre was in league with John Courtney Murray? Archbishop Lefebvre approved Dignitatis Humanae. Was he being “deliberately ambiguous” when he did? Did he do so “to pave the way for heresy”?
I have never claimed that the Council Fathers issued deliberately ambiguous statements. In my chapter on Malachi Martin and the Jews in The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, I explain in detail how the bishops tried to eliminate what they saw as error in the drafts that led up to Nostra Aetate. As I point out in my book, the Jews backing Malachi Martin’s efforts were not happy with the final result.
Even if the Council Fathers failed to eliminate every ambiguity from the texts they approved, that contingency can be dealt with by the formula which Archbishop Lefebvre endorsed, namely, “I accept Vatican II in the light of tradition.” This formula can resolve all doctrinal difficulties. The fact that Bishop Williamson can’t bring himself to sign it is a tragedy for the Church which I lament bitterly and which I lamented to him personally when we met. The SSPX would be more effective if it rejoined the Church, and the Church would be much more effective in dealing with the world’s problems if Bishop Williamson spent less time wasting his considerable talents on blaming the victim.
Bishop Williamson says: “At an early stage in the post-Conciliar fight for Tradition, it may have been reasonable to appeal for Vatican II to be interpreted in the light of Tradition, but that stage is long past.” If it was reasonable in the past, it remains reasonable today. And it will remain reasonable in the future. It is always Catholic to interpret in the light of tradition. Indeed, I believe it is now more necessary than ever.
Bishop Richard Williamson belongs to the Society of St Pius X. He writes from Wimbeldon, England.
E. Michael Jones is the editor of Culture Wars.
This exchange appears in the November 2010 issue of Culture Wars.
Many of your articles (which as you know I have been reading monthly for over twenty years) have been excellent. However I must say that your attack on Robert P. George and the Manhattan Declaration (MD) in the July-August issue strikes me as about the worst piece I can remember coming from your pen. (Full disclosure: I myself, like about half a million others so far, enthusiastically signed the MD as soon as I read it; and your article in no way persuades me to repent having done so.)
Read MoreNo area of contemporary life, with the possible exception of sexuality, is as surrounded by myth as economics. When it comes to Capitalism, the great mythmaker of our day is Michael Novak. After beginning his career as a Christian socialist and promoter of sexual liberation, Novak joined the staff of the American Enterprise Institute in 1978, just as the neoconservative movement was gaining steam and moving from Trotskyite to Reaganite politics.
Read MoreThere is something mysterious about The Nutcracker. It’s not just Drosselmayer’s character casting spells or bringing machines to life. The Nutcracker has become a Christmas tradition in the United States, but no one is sure why. “The Nutcracker,” Jack Anderson writes, “invites commentators to spin theoretical webs in an attempt to answer such questions as, ‘What does it all mean?’ or ‘Just why is it that the Nutcracker is so popular?’” People have dedicated entire books to figuring out the meaning of it all. In one of those books, Nutcracker Nation, Jennifer Fisher begins her analysis by addressing the same mystery:
Read MoreOn Wednesday, January 21, 2009, in the middle of the week which the Church has traditionally used to promote Christian unity, Pope Benedict XVI signed a letter announcing that he intended to lift the excommunications imposed on the bishops in charge of the Society of St. Pius X, taking a major step toward ending the almost 21-year old schism that began on June 30, 1988 when Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, along with Bishop Antonio Castro de Mayer, illicitly consecrated Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Alfonso de Galaretta, and Richard Williamson in a ceremony at the SSPX seminary in Econe, Switzerland. On July 1, 1988, one day after the illicit consecrations, Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, the then head of the Congregation of Bishops in Rome, announced that all six men had incurred excommunication latae sententiae, the penalty laid down in the revised Code of Canon Law, Canon 1382, for directly participating in an episcopal consecration in the absence of a papal mandate.
Read MoreAt 4:22 PM on September 12, 2008, a Metrolink passenger train ran a red light at the CP Topanga signal near the Chatsworth section of Los Angeles and plowed head on into a Union Pacific freight train, causing the deaths of the engineer and over 20 passengers. It was the nation’s deadliest train wreck in 15 years. The train wreck occurred on a curve just after the freight train had emerged from a tunnel, which meant that the engineers of the two respective trains had four seconds to react from the time the trains became visible to each other. During those four seconds the engineer of the freight train and his assistant applied the train’s emergency break and jumped from the train. Both men survived. During those four seconds, the engineer of the passenger train did nothing, allowing his train to plow into the freight train at over 40 miles per hour.
Read MoreThe trip to Estonia began in Chicago. What started out as an invitation to dinner turned into an impromptu speech when the hostess turned to me and asked me to address the other guests. At moments like this, you don’t do research; you talk about what’s on your mind, and so the fact that I chose to speak about the story of how the entire lecture series on “Building Catholic Communities” got cancelled at Catholic U because the president caved into pressure from the Southern Poverty Law Center is some indication that Catholic unity and solidarity were on my mind. In fact those two related topics have been on my mind for some time now. They are, in fact, the other side of the story of the Jewish revolutionary spirit, which is the story of division.
Read MoreIt was once said of Michael Jones that he was too radical to be a conservative and too conservative to be a radical. There is one word that always describes the man and his writing: Controversial. Jones, however, would say that a different word describes his writing: Catholic. And he would doubtless add that if one writes in the modern age as a Catholic one is necessarily controversial. However, even by these standards Michael Jones’ latest book, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World History, is his most controversial and ambitious book to date. At 1,200 pages this tour of history which shines a theological light on conflicts between Catholics, Protestants, Jews and revolutionaries though the ages is intended to provide a key to understanding the present age. I discussed the book with Dr Jones and tried to find out the thesis of the book and explore some of the difficult theological and political issues it brings up.
Read MoreIn her autobiography, Life in a Jewish Family, St. Edith Stein, the most renowned Jewish convert to Catholicism in recent history, relates a story about an observant Orthodox friend. And at the end of it, she makes a quite candid statement of her opinion of the Talmud [Heb., study].
One day, when out walking with him, I had an errand in one of the houses we passed. In the doorway I suddenly handed him my briefcase to hold while I went in. Too late, it occurred to me that it was Saturday and one ought not to carry anything on the Sabbath. I found him dutifully awaiting me at the doorway. I apologized for thoughtlessly causing him to do something forbidden. ‘I haven’t done anything forbidden,’ he replied quietly. ‘Only on the street is one not to carry anything; it is allowed in the house.’ For that reason, he had remained in the entrance-hall, taking care not to put even one foot into the street. This was an example of the talmudic sophistry which I found so repugnant. But I made no comment.1
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