Quis Custodiet Traditionis Custodes?
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Who watches over the guardians of tradition? (Full Article)
On July 16, 2021, the Vatican issued a motu proprio on the Latin Mass under the title of Traditionis Custodes which effectively revoked Pope Benedict’s motu proprio Summorum Pontificium, which made the Latin Mass more readily available to the faithful. That story began in 1988 when Pope John Paul II issued his own motu proprio Ecclesia Dei in the wake of the Lefebvrite schism of that same year. Worried that the Lefebvrites would follow the Latin Mass out of the Church, Pope John Paul II made the Tridentine rite available on a limited basis. As part of his efforts to end the Lefebvrite schism, Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications of the four bishops Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated and expanded access to the Tridentine rite, by issuing his own motu proprio. Both Summorum Potificium and Ecclesia Dei were, in Pope Francis’s words, “motivated by the desire to foster the healing of the schism with the movement of Mons. Lefebvre. With the ecclesial intention of restoring the unity of the Church, the Bishops were thus asked to accept with generosity the ‘just aspirations’ of the faithful who requested the use of that Missal.”1
In his motu proprio withdrawing those privileges, Pope Francis maintains that the permission which Pope John Paul II granted in 1988 was issued conditionally, and that Pope Benedict’s renewal of the mandate in 2007 reinforced this conditionality by intending to introduce “a clearer juridical regulation” in this area. Claiming that his understanding of the current situation is clearer than Ratzinger’s in 2007, Bergoglio is claiming that “serious difficulties came to light” in the implementation of the norms “once the Motu proprio came into effect,” which require drastic action on his part because toleration of two separate rites has led to disunity in the Church.
After sending a questionnaire to the world’s bishops, Francis “regrettably” discovered that Ratzinger’s desire “to do everything possible to ensure that all those who truly possessed the desire for unity would find it possible to remain in this unity or to rediscover it anew” had “been seriously disregarded,” prompting Francis to take action. Contrary to Ratzinger’s intentions, the Latin Mass had become a source of division in the Church. Instead of consoling those who missed the old rite, the Latin Mass has been “exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division.” The Latin Mass has been instrumentalized to authorize “a rejection not only of the liturgical reform, but of the Vatican Council II itself, claiming, with unfounded and unsustainable assertions, that it betrayed the Tradition and the ‘true Church.’”
This is a serious problem because “to doubt the Council is to doubt the intentions of those very Fathers who exercised their collegial power in a solemn manner cum Petro et sub Petro in an ecumenical council and, in the final analysis, to doubt the Holy Spirit himself who guides the Church.” By abusing the privilege previous popes had granted them, the Traditionalists forced the pope’s hand, leaving him “constrained to revoke the faculty granted by my Predecessors.” Acting as the principal of unity who is in charge of the “sacrament of unity,” Pope Francis made “the firm decision to abrogate all the norms, instructions, permissions and customs that precede the present Motu proprio, and declare that the liturgical books promulgated by the saintly Pontiffs Paul VI and John Paul II, in conformity with the decrees of Vatican Council II, constitute the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite.
Initial reports were confusing because even though the official translation was published in English on the Vatican website, it did not include the eight articles of implementation which were included in the Catholic News Agency article. Those include an instruction to the bishops to ban all celebrations of the Latin Mass from “parochial churches” as well as a ban on “the erection of new personal parishes.”2 The articles of implementation contained a tone which was guaranteed to generate animosity and did. The reaction was predictable. Here is one of the tamer responses I received:
I have now received several emails about the Francis attack on the true Mass. One of them included a recent article telling [sic] that young people given a choice are overwhelmingly choosing the true Mass of antiquity. No wonder this anti-Pope – or maybe even anti-Christ – is at his worst. Note well that this announcement, in the middle of July, fits into the new, tougher, phase of world genocide, especially in nations where Christian civilization once ruled, closing in with constantly greater force and restriction. The devil never misses a beat. He knows that his ONLY earthly enemy is THE TRUE CATHOLIC CHURCH and that it is the Virgin Mary who crushes his head. Has anyone noticed that, now also in the U.S., antifa type destroyers, whenever they have done their destruction in Catholic Churches, always make it a point to destroy any image or picture of Mary? Doesn’t get much press, does it? This is all the same war, that supernatural war described by St. Paul. The “reset” which the highest satanists are pursuing, hiding behind the false pandemic, amounts to the open rule of Satan even to the total destruction of God’s double-edged gift to all humanity, FREE WILL. Full enslavement of any non-satanic people who might escape the genocide. Well, it’s a very good sign that the TRUE CATHOLIC RELIGION, TRUE ADORATION OF GOD, is the one the young are drawn to, not the satanic/talmudic/masonic/wholly protestant false-humanism hatred of it in Catholic drag, called “Vatican II” or “novus ordo.”
Here is on of the less tame responses:
I penned a very polite letter to Pope Francis. I’m sure you’d love it. Ahaha. Actually it’s not polite at all … Hey Pope Francis, I just went to a Traditional Latin Mass in St. Louis. No one is listening to your Motu Proprio. Every single parish that was doing it is still doing it. Literally everyone is ignoring you
This diatribe then descends into language associating the Pope with pedophilia that I would rather not repeat. Both responses could have been written by a liturgist who wanted to prove that everything Pope Francis said about the traditionalists in his motu proprio was true. After reading a number of responses, I began to discern a pattern that I had noticed long ago. The furor surrounding the Latin Mass is not about the Latin Mass. As before the Latin Mass has been claimed by various protest groups. The Latin Mass in the first instance cited above is the standard bearer for those protesting the Church’s inadequate response to the COVID pandemic. The following letter makes equally clear that the Latin Mass has been co-opted by those protesting the pedophile crisis. After the Lefebvrite schism, the Latin Mass became the symbol of a protest movement organized by people who were either intellectually incapable of understanding the chaos which followed the Second Vatican Council or unwilling to confront the Church’s real enemies.
Neo-Conservative-co-optation of Traditionalism in America was always a New York-based operation. In the decade before it went into formal schism, the headquarters of the American branch of the SSPX was in Oyster Bay, Long Island until Clarence Kelly succeeded in stealing that operation from Lefebvre in the 1970s and forming his own Society of Pius V. The Kellyite operation quickly devolved into a predatory cult before it shattered, and parents who fled the horrors of the Novus Ordo Church soon understood that they had jumped from the frying pan into the fire as they sought to remove their children from Kellyite convents and have them reprogrammed as I pointed out in “The Kidnapping of Sister Mary Cecelia,” an article I published in Fidelity in 1989.
In what must have been the early 1980s, not long after founding Fidelity magazine, I had dinner with Howard Walsh, creator of Keep the Faith, which produced audio cassettes of the sermons of Archbishop Fulton Sheen and others. Walsh was at that point a mover and shaker in the New York area Traditionalist world. During that dinner, Howard told me that nothing was going to get better until we returned to the Latin Mass. Howard always treated me well. I spoke at two of his symposia in New Jersey, giving one talk on the Dangers of Private Revelations and engaging in a debate with the late Michael Davies on whether the SSPX was in schism or not. But his claim about the Latin Mass struck me as the expression of an attitude which I had created Fidelity to oppose. At this point in time, no one knew anything about the real history of the Church after Vatican II because the liberal academic faction in the Church, epitomized best by Notre Dame, was bent on suppressing what had really happened. No one knew about the series of secret birth control conferences which the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored at Notre Dame because they were meant to remain secret. And no one would know about them today, or the meeting which Father Hesburgh arranged between Pope Paul VI and John D. Rockefeller, 3rd, if I had followed Howard Walsh’s advice.
Walsh’s Latin Mass Know Nothing crowd was, in this regard, the perfect complement to the sexual revolutionaries who had taken over Catholic higher education in this country. The Latin Massers were similar to the Bayside Know Nothings who showed up en masse to heckle me at the talk Howard sponsored on the dangers of private revelations. They shared significant overlap with the Grunerite faction of the Fatima Know Nothings, who demanded that the pope consecrate Russia according to Father Gruner’s specifications. Because of their addiction to private revelations, the Grunerites resembled the Medjugorje Know Nothings, who were charismatics and loathed everything to do with the Latin Mass. The lunatics who supported Medjugorje felt comfortable with the heretics who ran Notre Dame, where the Medjugorje Know Nothings held their conferences, because the one thing both groups shared was contempt for Church authority. Each group was in sole possession of the secret of the universe, which they planned to impose on the Catholic Church as dogma if given the chance. When the Church balked, they left in a huff, taking with them their respective stashes of religious opium, wanting nothing more than to be left alone to savor it in peace.
Howard worked closely with Roger McCaffrey, son of Neil McCaffrey, founder of the Conservative Book Club and a mover and shaker in the world of direct mail and conservative causes. Traditionalism was a New York operation, and as such it was a subset of New York conservatism whose main commissar was William F. Buckley, who used his police powers to excommunicate anyone who deviated from the conservative party line. As National Review writer, Joe Sobran, found out to his chagrin, the third rail of American conservatism was criticism of Jews. Because of the influence of the McCaffreys, this taboo got imposed on Traditionalism as well.
Latin Mass Atendees
Roger was closely associated with the late William Marra, a professor from Fordham who was a student of Dietrich von Hildebrand. Together with Roger and the late Vincent Miceli, S.J., Marra ran an anti-modernist operation known as the Roman Forum, which invited me to a number of interviews for its radio program. The story of my getting fired from St. Mary’s College for opposing abortion was a popular show, but when I told Bill during another show, in the early summer of 1988, that Medjugorje was “a joke which got out of hand,” I remember a cloud passing over his face. Bill was no supporter of phony apparitions, but having been present when I was almost lynched by irate Baysiders at my talk on the dangers of private revelations, he knew that there were certain opinions which were left better unsaid.
In the studio during that interview was a young man by the name of John Rao, who eventually took over the Roman Forum after Marra’s sudden death. Rao ran a series of Traditionalist themed seminars in Gardone in northern Italy every summer which became an important forum for the discussion of ideas dear to Traditionalist hearts. I often met John in Switzerland after the conclusion of those seminars because I was regularly attending a German conference for which opposition to the new world order provided a thin patch of common ground. It was during one of those meetings that the idea of my attending the Traditionalist conferences in Gardone was first broached. Because John and I had always had a meeting of the minds, the invitation got repeated at various times, until one summer I was sitting by the phone with my bags packed when I got the call from John informing me that someone of influence in his organization (which meant a donor, I suspect) pressured John into reneging on my invitation at the last minute, thus aborting an opportunity to discuss the thesis of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit in the Traditionalist circles who had gone out of their way to avoid the issue.
Not long after that, I got a call from Chris Ferrara challenging me to a debate. Chris was the son of Joe Ferrara, who worked for Howard Walsh. Joe asked me to do an exposé on Tradition, Family, Property (TFP), the cult from Brazil which was actively recruiting Chris at the time. The exposé I published in Fidelity broke TFP’s hold over Chris’s mind but at the price of turning Paul Weyrich, who was promoting that cult at the time, into a very nasty and determined enemy, who did everything within his power to destroy me. Joe was grateful, but Chris never thanked me for springing him from the Brazilian cult. In fact, I had the impression that Chris saw me as a foe of Traditionalism ever after, and maybe he had reason to be mad at me because it was because of me that he ended up on the SPLC’s dirty dozen list of Catholic “anti-Semites.” The “dirty dozen” had nothing in common other than the SPLC’s decision to go after Catholics because I had written The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. Chris was rightly outraged at his inclusion on that list because Latin Mass Traditionalism as practiced by the New York crowd avoided talking about Jews. Chris had been present at the debate in which I trounced Michael Davies, and I suspect that he wanted a chance to have a rematch to repair the damage I had done to Traditionalism, and so I readily agreed. “Sure,” I said, “let’s do it in Gardone.” At which point Ferrara smirked and said, “In your dreams” and went on to suggest Minneapolis in February as an alternative venue. Needless to say, I had no burning desire to visit Minneapolis in February, and the debate never took place. Ferrara’s hostility was palpable and justified, because I was the reason he ended up on the SPLC’s list of anti-Semitic Catholics, but also because idiots at the SPLC, who informed us that Logos was the Latin word for reason, didn’t know that the New York-based Traditionalist movement was an elaborate scheme which allowed its politically conservative members to let off steam safely without ever mentioning the word Jew.
During the early 1990s, Roger was feeling ambitious and, wanting to expand his reach among “conservative Catholics,” offered to buy Fidelity magazine from me. After entertaining his ridiculously low offer for about three seconds, I decided not to sell, and Roger, undeterred, decided to start his own magazine, which he called significantly Latin Mass Magazine. This happened in the early 1990s when Pat Buchanan upset the Republican Party by defeating the incumbent George Bush in the New Hampshire primary. It was clear that the Latin Mass was being weaponized once again, this time to serve as a siege cannon in the culture wars.
I remember wondering at the time how the Latin Mass could possibly serve as the basis for a monthly magazine. I remember the terror I felt when I realized, after months of preparation to bring out the first number of Fidelity, that I was faced with the deadline for the second issue, and then a series of unrelenting deadlines after that. Fidelity was based on a premise which allowed discussion of a wide range of topics, but what was the second issue of Latin Mass Magazine going to talk about? The Latin Mass and Gas Deregulation? Eventually, Latin Mass became a clone of Culture Wars, with writers like my good friend Bob Reilly regularly appropriating my material and publishing it in unattributed form.
My point is that the Latin Mass was being weaponized here to fight the culture wars in a way that was completely inappropriate and counter-productive. The Latin Mass wasn’t the magic key which could unlock the mysteries of social engineering or sexual liberation and the effect they had on Catholics after World War II or Vatican II. The Latin Mass was the Latin Mass. If anything, it was, like Baroque art, a response to the Protestant Reformation, and a vehicle of the logos and sacramental grace necessary to do battle in the culture wars of the 16th century. If the Latin Massers listened closely they might hear references to the perfidious Jews in its texts, but it was precisely any mention of the Jews which the neo-conservative Traditionalists wanted to suppress. In this regard, the Latin Massers were in perfect agreement which the liberal liturgists who gave us the Novus Ordo Mass. Ratzinger facilitated that weaponization with his motu proprio, and that led to Bergoglio’s reaction. Then as now, however, the real issue was Catholic unity.
In the February 1993 issue of Fidelity magazine, I published an article on “Why Bishop Sullivan Supports Both Homosexuals and the Latin Mass and Why this is not surprising” based on an article which had appeared in that month’s issue of Latin Mass Magazine praising Bishop Walter Sullivan of Richmond, Virginia for allowing two indult Masses, then permitted by Ecclesia Dei, for people interested in the Tridentine Mass in his diocese. Jeffry Rubin, the author of the article, found this fact “paradoxical” because the same bishop signed a dissent from the Vatican statement defending the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. Upon closer examination, there was neither contradiction nor paradox involved in the move because Sullivan’s decision was based on an ecclesiology which reduced Church attendance to a consumerist choice between the Latin and vernacular rites, as if they were the religious equivalents of choosing Coke over Pepsi or vice versa. The same was true of the competing “sexualities” Bishop Sullivan endorsed when he signed the protest against the Church’s then recent condemnation of homosexuality. Bishop Sullivan simply wanted to keep everybody happy. His desire to keep both homosexuals and Latin Massers happy had serious consequences, however, for Church unity. Unity, I argued, was an all or nothing proposition. As I pointed out then:
Promoting the Latin Mass as an option is something fundamentally different than instituting it as the universal norm in the Church. This is a fact that proponents of the Latin Mass seem to have missed, and in their zeal for promoting the Latin Mass as the summum bonum, they seem willing to admit principles that undermine both conservatism and the whole notion of Catholicity in Catholic worship. They adopt the tactics of the political pressure group, and then are bewildered to find that the liberal bishop of Richmond is so accommodating. This should come as no mystery. Liberalism or consumerism is the underlying philosophy which allows Bishop Sullivan to accommodate both groups, which want liturgical as well as sexual norms changed more to their liking.3
When questioned about his policy, Bishop Sullivan opined, “I feel that everyone has the right to worship in an expression that best fulfills their spiritual needs,” which is precisely the attitude which Pope Francis abrogated in Traditionis Custodes. By expanding the indult which Pope John Paul II introduced to keep the SSPXers, who were using the Latin Mass to justify going into schism, in the Church, Ratzinger unwittingly set into motion a movement which would become a challenge to Church unity. I say unwittingly because in Summorum Pontificum, Ratzinger specifically stated that: “It is not appropriate to speak of these two versions of the Roman Missal as if they were ‘two Rites.’ Rather, it is a matter of a twofold use of one and the same rite.”
Ratzinger’s theological clarification, however, did not correspond to the understanding of the people who were most avid in their support of the Tridentine Rite. The fact that they clearly saw it as a separate rite was obvious to me in 1993, and it was just as obvious to Pope Francis twenty-eight years later. If that were not the case, there would be no reason to issue Traditionis Custodes as a course correction for Summorum Pontificum. Ratzinger himself admits a distinction between his own interpretation and that of those who applauded Summorum Pontificum when he writes:
Fidelity to the old Missal became an external mark of identity; the reasons for the break which arose over this, however, were at a deeper level…This occurred above all because in many places celebrations were not faithful to the prescriptions of the new Missal, but the latter actually was understood as authorizing or even requiring creativity, which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear. I am speaking from experience, since I too lived through that period with all its hopes and its confusion.4
It is certainly true that liturgical abuse in the wake of Vatican II led to a desire for a more stable, dependable rendition of the Mass, but this is only part of the story. Another part is schism, which saw the abuses as a justification for breaking Church unity. I dealt with this attitude in a way that was up close and personal during the hours-long discussion I had with Bishop Williamson when I met with him at Wimbledon. Sitting on his desk was a letter from Rome which stated “I accept Vatican II in light of tradition” which would have ended the schism if he had signed it. After explaining to me that Archbishop Lefebvre would in fact have signed that document, Bishop Williamson spent the next three hours explaining to me why he would not. The answer is the sin of schism, refusal to accept communion out of fear of contamination, and ultimately lack of charity, all of which could be summed up as part of the mystery of iniquity.
If the SSPXers were not going to sign a document ending the schism which Archbishop Lefebvre would have signed, they are certainly not going to accept Ratzinger’s metaphysical distinction between two forms and one rite. At that point the metaphysical exigencies that necessarily determine choice take over. Synderesis specifies that we can only choose what we perceive to be the good. If Catholics are faced with a choice between what they perceive as two contradictory rites, no matter how much Ratzinger argues to the contrary, they have to choose one or the other. If they choose one, they affirm that it is true or truer than its alternative and therefore good or better, and this necessarily leads to division in the Church.
In the 13 years since the implementation of Summorum Pontificium, those who have persisted in attending the Latin Mass have become convinced of its superiority, or they would have stopped attending it. Conviction of its superiority leads inexorably to the invidious conclusion that the vernacular Mass is inferior per se, which then leads the Latin Masser to question Vatican II, which then leads to doubt about the role of the Holy Spirit in guiding the Church, as Pope Francis pointed out in his motu proprio. All of these consequences flowed inexorably from Ratzinger’s expansion of accessibility to the Latin Mass, even if they did not correspond to his intentions. Ideas have consequences, as Richard Weaver pointed out, and most of them are unintended. Even if they thought of it as a standard and a unifying force, the Traditionalists had weaponized the Latin Mass, and their opponents in the intramural culture wars in the Catholic Church weren’t going to let them get away with it.
Missing from Pope Francis’s motu proprio or the immediate reactions to it was any mention of an article on liturgical reform by Rev. Thomas Reese, SJ., which appeared in America, the Jesuits’ magazine, and subsequently on the Religious News Service website in April of this year. Reese provoked outrage when he stated in no uncertain terms that “The church [sic] needs to be clear that it wants the unreformed liturgy to disappear and will only allow it out of pastoral kindness to older people who do not understand the need for change. Children and young people should not be allowed to attend such Masses.”5
Reese is a Senior Analyst for the National Catholic Reporter, where he has worked since 2013. He was Editor-in-Chief of America magazine from 1998 to 2005, when he got fired for being so heterodox that even the Jesuits couldn’t defend him. On May 12, 2016, President Barack Obama appointed him to serve on the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, USCIRF, where he worked with Dr. Robert P. George, the Princeton professor who inhabits the other end of the political spectrum. Both Reese and George are active participants in the Catholic version of Kabuki theater, an art form “characterized more by showmanship than by content,”6 in which liberals go through the motions of fighting conservatives, while both groups remain silent about real issues like the Jewish Question. So, USCIRF member Robbie George will endorse the views of his friend Rabbi Meir Solveichik, who claimed in First Things that hatred was a Jewish virtue without telling us that the magazine which promoted that form of hate speech was created and funded by Midge Dector and Norman Podhoretz, the power couple of Jewish neoconservatism. Similarly, a close reading of Father Reese’s proposals for liturgical reform which appeared in America in April of 2021 shows that the Jesuits were behind the motu proprio of Pope Francis, but it doesn’t tell us who is behind the Jesuits. The answer to that question must be sought elsewhere, but it was answered in part when we learned that George Soros’s Open Society Foundation has lavished $1.7 million on Jesuit NGOs over the past few years.7
The furor surrounding Traditionis Custodes shed light on the forces which have been involved in a decades-long manipulation of the Latin Mass for political purposes, and it also brought to light the fault lines that had appeared in the movement during this period. In his article on Traditionis Custodes, Erik Striker indicated that the forces behind the Jesuits might not be limited to Jews like George Soros. He also indicated why the Jews are upset with the Latin Mass, and why they think their Jesuit proxy warriors needed to take immediate action against it:
A Catholic intellectual who insisted on not being named told National Justice that works by E. Michael Jones and Father Denis Fahey are influential among young traditional Catholics, something that has even caused them to clash behind the scenes with the neo-conservative “old guard” in the Latin Mass movement. This has started to attract heat from Jewish organizations. Occasionally, the backroom fights become public, such as the incident last year where Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades in South Bend, Indiana launched a nasty public attack against E. Michael Jones for his “anti-Semitism.”8
The Miraculous Mass of St. Gregory, 6th century by Hans Baldung, Strassburg, Germany 1511
Aside from the fact that I was not named in Bishop Rhoades’ pastoral letter on anti-Semitism, Striker’s comment corresponds to my experience as an observer who has found himself on the fringe of Traditionalism for almost 40 years now. Traditionalism had become a hideout for people who were afraid to say the word Jew. That fact has now become obvious to the younger generation of Latin Massers. One day after the motu proprio was promulgated, I posted a comment “Traditionalism has always been a way of avoiding the Jewish Question. Now it looks as if a younger generation of Latin Massers has made that impossible. This may be the real cause of the crackdown.”
The main cause for that change was my book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, whose fame spread among a generation of younger Traditionalists, whose numbers have grown internationally in recent years at seminaries, convents, and parishes like the FSSP parish where I had the pleasure of meeting a seminarian who was writing a book on the most important symbolic and theological aspects of the Traditional Roman Liturgy. His research showed that the move to the vernacular served as a cover for removing any passages which Jews might find offensive, something which seemed perfectly plausible to a group of people who were familiar with the thesis of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. As the word spread, the older generation of neoconservative Traditionalists faced a serious challenge. The re-emergence of the Jewish Question, over 100 years after its appearance in the pages of Civilta Cattolica and 50 years after its suppression at Vatican II, was a classic example of the return of the repressed. The younger generation of Traditionalists had broken the Jew Taboo imposed on them by the Neocon commissars from New York.
Any doubts about the real reason for the suppression of the Latin Mass disappeared a few days after the issuance of Traditionis Custodes when the Times of Israel announced that Pope Francis had restricted the use of the Latin Mass because it “calls for the conversion of the Jews” and referred to “Jewish ‘blindness.’” What Francis referred to as Vatican II comes down to Nostra Aetate, which comes down to the claim, unsupported by that document, that “the Jews were not guilty of killing Jesus.”9 The Jews had determined that the suppression of the Latin Mass was necessary because, according to the same unsupported source, “Accusations that the Jews killed Jesus have long motivated antisemitic attacks.”10
Every player in this story, from Pope Francis on down, is a pawn of Jewish interests. The Latin Mass has become weaponized once again, this time by the Jews and their Jesuit proxy warriors. The second weaponization of the Latin Mass by the liberals was simply a function of the first weaponization which the neoconservatives perpetrated in the wake of Ecclesia Dei. The one canceled out the other in a way that manifested the Holy Spirit’s determination to guide the Church in spite of the imperfect intentions of His ministers. Pope Francis chose unity as a higher good but for the wrong reasons, because of Jewish pressure exerted on the Jesuits, the Jews’ main group of proxy warriors in the Church of our day, bringing to light in a way that can only be described as the cunning of reason the real issue, which is the Jewish Question. Traditionis Custodes could be seen as an example of God countermanding the intentions of the actors in this drama in a way that not only preserves the Church from error but also focuses our attention on the real cause of disunity in the Church, which has gone unmentioned for far too long.
Germany 1947, "We are Starving," "We don't want calories, we want bread."
The main issue which remains unresolved in the wake of Traditionis Custodes is the suppression of what people like Abe Foxman, who thanked the pope for suppressing the Latin Mass, would consider anti-Semitic texts in the liturgy. In the traditional rite for Tenebrae or Matins on Good Friday, the faithful listened to this passage taken from St. Augustine:
Nostis qui convéntus erat malignántium Iudæórum, et quæ multitúdo erat operántium iniquitátem. Quam iniquitátem? Quia voluérunt occídere Dóminum Iesum Christum. Tanta ópera bona, inquit, osténdi vobis: propter quod horum me vultis occídere? Pértulit omnes infírmos eórum, curávit omnes lánguidos eórum, prædicávit regnum cælórum, non tácuit vítia eórum, ut ipsa pótius eis displicérent, non médicus, a quo sanabántur. His ómnibus curatiónibus eius ingráti, tamquam multa febre phrenétici, insaniéntes in médicum, qui vénerat curáre eos, excogitavérunt consílium perdéndi eum: tamquam ibi voléntes probáre, utrum vere homo sit, qui mori possit, an áliquid super hómines sit, et mori se non permíttat. Verbum ipsórum agnóscimus in Sapiéntia Salomónis: Morte turpíssima, ínquiunt, condemnémus eum. Interrogémus eum: erit enim respéctus in sermónibus illíus. Si enim vere Fílius Dei est, líberet eum.
Reading Five should have been translated into the vernacular as:
We know what secret counsel was that of the wicked Jews, and what insurrection was that of the workers of iniquity. Of what iniquity were they the workers? The murder of our Lord Jesus Christ. Many good works, saith He, have I showed you for which of those works go ye about to kill Me? He had borne with all their weaknesses: He had healed all their diseases: He had preached unto them the kingdom of heaven: He had discovered to them their iniquities, that they might rather hate them, than the Phydom of Solomon we recognize their words, Let us condemn Him with a shameful death. Let us examine Him; for, by His own saying, He shall be respected. If He be the Son of God, let Him help Him.
The response which follows has the congregation say:
R. The Jews crucified Jesus: and there was darkness (over all the land, unto the ninth hour): and about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, (saying): My God, (My God,) why hast Thou forsaken Me?
Reading 6 continues in the same vein:
They whetted their tongue like a sword. The Jews cannot say: We did not murder Christ, albeit they gave Him over to Pilate His judge, that they themselves might seem free of His death. For when Pilate said unto them, Take ye Him: and kill Him, they answered, It is not lawful for us to put any man to death. They could throw the blame of their sin upon a human judge: but did they deceive God, the Great Judge? In that which Pilate did, he was their accomplice, but in comparison with them, he had far the lesser sin. John xix. 11. Pilate strove as far as he could, to deliver Him out of their hands; for which reason also he scourged Him, John xix. 1, and brought Him forth to them He scourged not the Lord for cruelty’s sake, but in the hope that; he might so slake their wild thirst for blood: that, perchance, even they might be touched with compassion, and cease to lust for His death, when they saw What He was after the flagellation. Even this effort he made! But when Pilate saw that he could not prevail, but that rather a tumult was made, Matth. xxvii. 24, ye know how that he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying: I am innocent of the blood of this Just Person. And yet he delivered Him to be crucified! But if he were guilty who did it against his will, were they innocent; who goaded him on to it? No. Pilate gave sentence against Him. and commanded Him to be crucified. But ye, O ye Jews, ye also are His murderers! Wherewith? With your tongue, whetted like a sword. And when? But when ye cried, Crucify Him! Crucify Him!
The seminarian, now a priest, maintains that:
the Novus Ordo Missae was never merely a translation of the Traditional Latin Mass. If it were merely a matter of language, then it would not be so controversial right now. Please do not take merely anecdotal evidence of rad trads to oversimplify what is a twisted tale in history and needs reiteration in a one-stop-shop format. The story of the many attempts to subvert Vatican 2 are now well-documented in books like The Rhine Flows into the Tiber and John Courtney Murray, Time, Life, and the CIA and many others.11 What must be made clear though is that over 2,000 bishops never called for the end of the traditional rite and the composition of a new one. You will find in Sacrosanctum Concilium rather things like: “in faithful obedience to tradition, the sacred Council declares that holy Mother Church holds all lawfully acknowledged rites to be of equal right and dignity; that she wishes to preserve them in the future and to foster them in every way” (emphasis in original).
In an article which appeared in First Things, Martin Mosebach claims that:
Pope Francis was mistaken in his assessment of both the canonical reality and the intent of Pope Benedict XVI in issuing Summorum Pontificum. Pope Benedict XVI, in his Last Testament, was asked directly whether or not he issued Summorum Pontificum primarily as a concession to the SSPX to heal their schism. To that question, the Pope Emeritus responded: “No, no, no! That is just absolutely false! It was important for me that the Church is one with herself inwardly, with her own past; that what was previously holy to her is not somehow wrong now... my intentions were not of a tactical nature, they were about the substance of the matter itself” (emphasis in original).
Ratzinger then reiterated what he had told the founders of the FSSP back in 1988 when he said that the Lefebvrite Schism was:
the kairos (opportune time) to begin the clarification that the traditional Roman Catholic Liturgy was never and could never be abrogated since it is of immemorial tradition. The SSPX is gleefully repeating the lie that Summorum Pontificum was merely a concession granted to them. It was an opportunity to make it clear in law
that the Mass of the Ages was never abrogated and therefore every priest of the Roman Rite has the right to offer that Mass. Pope Francis was incorrect in stating that SP granted a faculty. That is simply not true. Pope Benedict XVI was clarifying that priests do not need special permission to offer the Mass of the Ages. So that is a canonical concern.12
Our source in the FSSP then cites this quote from Cardinal Ratzinger in the introduction to Dom Alcuin Reid’s The Organic Development of the Liturgy as particularly important for understanding the real crisis of the recent document regardless of the external factors that led to its promulgation:
From my own personal point of view I should like to give further particular emphasis to some of the criteria for liturgical renewal thus briefly indicated. I will begin with those last two main criteria. It seems to me most important that the Catechism, in mentioning the limitation of the powers of the supreme authority in the Church with regard to reform, recalls to mind what is the essence of the primacy as outlined by the First and Second Vatican Councils: The pope is not an absolute monarch whose will is law; rather, he is the guardian of the authentic Tradition and, thereby, premier guarantor of obedience. He cannot do as he likes, and he is thereby able to oppose those people who, for their part, want to do whatever comes into their head. His rule is not that of arbitrary power, but that of obedience in faith. That is why, with respect to the Liturgy, he has the task of a gardener, not that of a technician who builds new machines and throw the old ones on the junk-pile. The “rite,” that form of celebration and prayer which has ripened in the faith and the life of the Church, is a condensed form of living Tradition in which the sphere using that rite expresses the whole of its faith and its prayer, and thus at the same time the fellowship of generations one with another becomes something we can experience, fellowship
with the people who pray before us and after us. Thus the rite is something of benefit that is given to the Church, a living form of paradosis, the handing-on of Tradition. (My emphasis.)
The FSSP priest’s response to Traditionis Custodes rightly places Pope Benedict XVI at the center of this drama. But the situation is more complicated than he allows. Even if we grant the argument that Ratzinger was trying to reform the vernacular liturgy rather than just allow, as Ecclesia Dei claimed, the indult to keep the Lefebvrites from following the Latin Mass into schism, questions remain. If the vernacular liturgy was radically flawed, why didn’t Ratzinger make use of the opportunity which Summorum Pontificium provided to abolish it completely and return to the old rite? If, on the other hand, the vernacular liturgy was reformable, why didn’t he reform it by restoring the “anti-Semitic” texts which got banned under the subterfuge of translation?
The answer, I fear, lies in the depths of Pope Benedict XVI’s passive aggressive personality, a trait which came to the fore when he resigned. Like suicide, which is an act of violence against the living, resigning from the papacy was an act of violence against the Body of the Church. Joseph Ratzinger was a teenager who had been conscripted into the Heimwehr just before World War II ended. After their defeat, the German people were subjected to nothing short of genocide at the hands of the Jews who sought to starve the German people to death under the guise of the Morgenthau Plan, named after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Jewish Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were starved to death in the notorious Rheinwiesenlager13 because General Eisenhower refused to treat them as prisoners of war so that he would not have to follow the Geneva conventions guaranteeing humane treatment. “During the first months of 1947, according to James Bacque, daily rations for the German population were ‘often less than 1,000 calories.’14
Joseph Ratzinger lived through the winter of 1946-7, which came to be known as the Hungerjahr, when Cardinal Frings of Cologne told the German people that they had a right to appropriate food from Allied warehouses and coal from Allied trains as a way of defending themselves from Jewish aggression. He did not mention the Jews, but every German alive at that time knew that Morgenthau was a Jew, and every German knew that what he intended for the German people was nothing less than their extinction. Germania delenda est! Theodor N. Kaufman wrote a book before the war entitled Germany Must Perish, which called for the biological destruction of the German people, and Morgenthau’s attempt to starve the Germans to death was the first stage in its implementation.15
POPE BENEDICT'S GREAT UNCLE
As I wrote in the second edition of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, Catholicism as practiced in the wake of Vatican II was not an unclouded mirror of Catholic tradition, it had its inconsistencies and self-contradictions. A coherent position on the Jews had to be mined from the deposit of faith and the writing of the evangelists and the Church Fathers. As early as 1892, Georg Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI’s great uncle, had not only carried the teaching of the Church on the Jews known as Sicut Judaeis non into the present, he had applied it to the economic crisis that was gripping Europe at that time:
The great medieval popes Innocent III and Gregory IX as well as the ecclesial synods and councils felt themselves called to take legal measures against the excesses of the Jews. They protected the life and existence of the Jews, but …. the Jews had to recognize the Christian social order The answer, I fear, lies in the depths of Pope Benedict XVI's passive aggressive personality, a trait which came to the fore when he resigned. September 2021 / 29 and had to submit themselves to it. Whatever they had appropriated through usury and exploitation, they had to pay back to their victims. They were not allowed to occupy the choke points in the culture … Jews were in no way allowed to undermine the Christian social order. Jews who defamed Christ or Christians were punished. They were not allowed to do business on Christian holidays . . . and were not allowed to make usurious loans. During Holy Week they had to remain in their homes.
Traditional Catholicism provides the only coherent explanation of what came to be known in Georg Ratzinger’s day as the Jewish Question. The explanation is fairly simple. Following Napoleon’s emancipation of the Jews, they took over the economies of one nation after another in Europe because of their sharp business practices. What Ratzinger calls “Juedisches Erwerbsleben” allowed them to cheat the Christian natives, who had been taught to work hard, be trusting, and love their neighbor.16 Jewish immorality, in other words, gave the Jews an unfair economic advantage in Catholic countries. According to Georg Ratzinger:
The emancipation of the Jews, whose views and concepts contradicted the laws and customs of the Christian nations, could not help but have a destructive and corrupting effect on the entire Christian society…. This fact alone explains why Jews were able to accumulate riches so quickly…. The example of moral corruption has a contagious effect, and that explains the corrupting effect of Jewish influence on commerce.
It was an act of supreme foolishness when in the years following 1789 the necessary protections for the social order were lifted immediately and universally. Once this happened it was only a matter of time before the Jews with their attitude toward business and commerce would gain the upper hand. This was particularly the case among the benevolent peoples who made up the population of Catholic nations…. Others fell into the hands of the usurers and in spite of their frugality could not extricate themselves from its tentacles. Just about everyone was impoverished; and only the Jews got rich.17
Rev. Joseph Ratzinger at a mountain site near the Bavarian town of Ruhpolding, Germany, 1952
Ratzinger’s book on economics appeared in 1892, around the same time as Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical on the condition of the working classes, and the three-part series in Civiltà Cattolica which warned Catholics about “the voracious octopus of Judaism.”18 The anger at Jewish business practices had reached the boiling point:
The situation of the lucrative professions is totally different. In a few years, riches are amassed but at the cost of others. This form of profit is obscene, and the hatred and revulsion which the working classes feel toward these practices is fully justified. Envy isn’t the cause of this hatred, but rather indignation at the unjust appropriation of value; that and the perception that this unjust appropriation constitutes an assault on the foundations of social life, evokes in the breast of the honest working man, bitter feelings. When the industrious and skilled worker, the honest civil servant, and the circumspect merchant in spite of all out exertion can’t earn a living, when on the other hand this or that speculator, without any effort, can earn thousands or hundreds of thousands through the issuing of government bonds, then this is a sign that the economic organism is so diseased that society is in urgent need of medicine and reform.19
“The solution to the Jewish question” lies in the application of the traditional Catholic teachings like Sicut Judaeis non. That means “not in allowing Christians in general to sink to the level of the lucrative occupations, but rather in raising the Jews to a higher sense of productive work, in higher numbers than is the present case, to the level of Christian mores as propounded by Christian teaching on commerce and property.” And that means rejecting anti-Semitism. Georg Ratzinger “totally” rejected:
the anti-Semitism that is now being proposed . . . in Austria and by a number of the exalted German nationalists. Anti-Semitism understood as a matter of race stands in total contradiction to the Commandment of love of neighbor, without regard to race or national origin. On the other hand, it is the duty of every true Christian and patriot to take a stand against the dangerous errors of numerous Jews in the business world and to warn their fellow Christians about the dangerous illusions of the philosemites who predominate among the ruling elites.20
Those who today accuse Georg Ratzinger of anti-Semitism ignore the fact that Jews from Heinrich Graetz to Samuel Roth have said far worse things about the Jewish business ethics which the Ashkenazi have learned from the Talmud. According to Roth, the Jews are taught that they are “the salt of the earth” and that everything they:
see before them . . . is only to be won away with the superior brain with which God has endowed his chosen ones? Each of them, when he grows up, becomes an agency of cunning to defeat the civil law. The Polish Jew does not remain in Poland. He migrates. Eventually he finds himself a rich nest in England, in France, in Germany, in America, in one of the South American countries. To each of the counties of his invasion the Jew brings the whole bag of commercial tricks and statutory maneuvers with which he poisons the arteries of the civilized world.21
their internalization of Talmudic culture had allowed them to become “skilled in the deceptions of economic warfare”:
It was to be expected that the Jews, who with centuries of practice became skilled in the deceptions of economic warfare and acquired the arts of exploitation to perfection, it was to be expected that they would take center stage under the regime of free competition.
Jewish commerce can be characterized by two manifestations: it is based on the exploitation of the work of others without any productive activity of its own and it is characterized by gambling and speculation on the differentials in exchange as the way to achieve riches. The Christian view is the opposite. Christianity ensures decency in commerce by promoting honest toil or by promoting honest inheritance. Christianity forbids the exploitation of one’s neighbor through excessive economic power and insists on the subordination of the good of the individual to the common good, as well as concern for the economically vulnerable. There is a direct contradiction between Christianity and Judaism, and any Christian community which allows the unrestrained exercise of Jewish business practices is committing suicide.22 Jewish business practices are totally antithetical to the economy of a Christian culture, which is based on an understanding and appreciation of the value of work:
In the instruction manuals from the Middle Ages, the people were taught that “Man is born to work, as the bird is created to fly.” The Catholic Church raised the nations under her care to be workers and made earning by work the foundation of our civilization. There is only one way of earning a living which is worthy of respect and esteem, and that is earning a living by toil, whether that entails labor of a physical or an intellectual sort. It makes no difference whether this labor takes place on the lowest rung of the economic ladder among day-laborers or among the professions of the elite. In doing this the Church erected civilization upon an entirely new foundation. The pagan world proposed a life lived at the expense of others (slavery); Judaism preached preferential treatment for its own people but permitted the exploitation and practicing usury on alien nations. And until this day Jewish business practices exhibit this dual nature. On the one hand, we see concern for the family and for his fellow Jew, but on the other a totally heartless exploitation via usury of the goyim, which becomes the source of the wealth accumulated by Jewish billionaires. . . . The ancient principle of the Catholic Church, which only honors commerce when it is based on honest work, is drowned out by the Jewish screeching which encourages speculation and gambling on the stock market.23
The emancipation of the Jews dealt a fatal blow to the Christian social order. That is another way of saying that the social question (the exploitation of the worker, usury’s appropriation of land, etc.) can only be solved by dealing with the Jewish Question, which can only be solved by bringing about the conversion of the Jews, either completely through baptism, or formally by forcing their behavior to conform to Christian custom, as specified by Sicut Judaeis non. There is no point, according to Ratzinger, in dealing with an economic factor like state credit in isolation, especially
when private persons determine the terms of credit. Jewish banks are now in the process of using state credit as a way of taking control of all industrial production. Herein lies the secret of the omnipotence of modern capitalist hegemony with all of its cancerous growth. Any social reform has to begin with the state establishing its independence from private equity firms as its source of credit. Only then will the source of capitalism’s debilitating excesses be contained. To call anything else social reform is a waste of time.
By the last decade of the 19th century, it had become clear to thinkers like Georg Ratzinger that the laws enacted in the wake of the Enlightenment and its concomitant revolutions spelled economic disaster for Europe. The only solution to the economic crisis was a return to Christian-inspired state regulation of the economy. “The Jews,” Ratzinger opined,
must once again learn to subordinate themselves to Christian social reform and to conform their business practices to Christian norms. All of the money which they have earned through state-sanctioned usury and the exploitation of the worker must be returned to the people. The legislatures must now criminalize all of the fraud and exploitation which now has established itself under the rubric of free enterprise. The state needs to prosecute in a public manner all forms of usury and fraudulent exploitation. The current laws against usury and fraud are much too one-sided, and they do not correspond either to the experience or the plain sense of Christian jurisprudence.
Georg Ratzinger was especially prophetic when he wrote in 1892:
A reaction against the jewification of our culture is now building momentum among the common man. That movement is hardly perceptible today, but it is going to grow like an avalanche. That movement would be irresistible at this very moment if it weren’t lacking a leader. [Ratzinger’s word was, of course the German word “Fuehrer,” which took on a new dimension some 40 years later.]
Joseph Ratzinger lived to see the terrifying realizations of his great uncle’s prophecies. Joseph Ratzinger turned 20 in April of 1947, just as the Hungerjahr was ending and at around the same time that the WASP elite, which was still in charge of American Foreign policy at the time, dumped the Morgenthau Plan and replaced it with the Marshall Plan as belated recognition that America needed the Germans as a bulwark against Communism in the newly inaugurated Cold War. The social engineering which followed the abandoned Morgenthau plan was even more ruthless because it was based on the systematic subversion of German morals through the introduction of pornography, as I documented in the “Werner Heisenberg and Jewish Science” chapter of Logos Rising. Jews like the New York psychiatrist David Mardechai Levy were in charge of this newer more “benign” form of social engineering as well. American social engineering led to the campaign against the Volkswartbund, which was the German version of the Legion of Decency, and the collapse of that organization was followed by a wave of pornography which severely damaged German morals.
The evidence of moral corruption which I uncovered in “Werner Heisenberg and Jewish Science” was hardly news to the Ratzinger family. As early as 1892,
Pope Benedict’s great uncle, Georg Ratzinger, wrote that “seduction and crime were the main components of Jewish commerce”:
When the scions of wealthy families go astray, the easiest way to find the culprit responsible is to seek him among the Jews. ... he encourages the acting out of all base desires and the adoption of degenerate lifestyles; he is the fence and the pimp. Once he has established his influence over his rich young protégé, he encourages him to speculate on the stock market in order to win back the money he squandered on his vices. In this way the Jew brings about his complete ruin in a few years, which is when his fortune ends up in hands of his Jewish seducer. Anyone who is familiar with the realities of social life in Paris, Vienna, and Pest sees this sort of thing all the time.
According to Pope Benedict, his uncle Ratzinger was a clergyman with a doctorate in theology, and a “representative in the Bavarian state legislature and in the Reichstag,” who openly “attacked child labor,” which at the time was considered an “affront” by “many,” and “was unheard of.” Pope Benedict told Peter Seewald in an interview that he had read about this himself in congressional records. Rev. Ratzinger was also an advocate for the rights of farmers and the average man in general, “He was obviously a tough guy,” and because of “his achievements and his political stature we were all proud of him.”24
The same great uncle who risked his position and reputation for the welfare of children was concerned about the well-being of young women as well:
These seductive arts [mentioned above] are closely allied with prostitution. Every aspect of trafficking in young females is firmly in Jewish hands and organized on an international basis. It’s only a short step from this immoral trafficking to criminal activity. When it comes to embezzlement, misappropriation, fraud, usury, blackmail, etc., the Jew is involved to a much greater percentage than the Christian.
Pope Benedict knew all of this and was at the same time deeply ambivalent. Pope Benedict knew that his great uncle had proposed the only viable solution to anti-Semitism 50 years before the catastrophes associate with World War II took place. The solution to the social question can only come about when the Christian idea of commerce has vanquished the Jewish-heathen idea. According to Georg Ratzinger, true protection of the social order is only possible in the confessional state. “Business practice must be made to conform once again to Christian morals”:
clear limits on Judaism in not only necessary for the interests of the Christian nations; it is also in the interest of the Jews themselves. Only when the sane principles of Christian reform have been put in place, can we hope to disarm the specter of anti-Semitic racial hatred. It is only then that we can hope to avoid the path of the violent taking the law into their own hands. Those who think that a small minority of Jews with the help of the power of the state can solve this problem, are deceiving themselves.
To put the case another way, if reform is not forthcoming, the Jews will be the first to suffer because:
The hegemony of social corruption has ended in every age in terror. This solution is no longer plausible. Either we are going to have Christian reform in our future or we are going to have the reign of racial hatred. The Jews should God is using this crisis to expose the real problem which is, as Abe Foxman's tweet made clear, Jewish control of the Catholic Church. September 2021 / 33 be under no illusions about what they can expect from the racial hatred that is waiting for them in the near future. Their arrogance is going to turn quickly into bitter disappointment in the future.
Pope Francis shaking hands with Rabbi David Rosen
Georg Ratzinger was aware of the Darwinian notion that life involves struggle among individuals and ethnic groups, but he takes that notion of struggle out of the biological realm and situates it instead in the moral cultural arena, as when he wrote: “Any ethnic group which is totally lacking in moral restraint when it comes to economic life will end up the winner in any struggle for existence. This is the secret of Jewish success in Austria-Hungary.”25 Similarly, Ratzinger affirmed that life is a struggle:
The life of nations is like the life of individuals. He who fails to engage in battle daily to secure his position in society will soon disappear. The Catholics in Austro-Hungary have failed to engage in the daily battle for their possessions, and as a result they lose year after year one institution after another. They have been dispossessed from top to bottom, from their universities as well as their kindergartens. The Jews, who make up less than 10 percent of the population, have as a result of their energetic and unified and self-confident activity won a victory over the 90 percent of the population which is Catholic and have everywhere occupied the positions which the Catholics have abandoned.26
Pope Benedict should be proud of his great uncle. The real issue is whether the feeling would be reciprocal. Would a man who wrote that “There is nothing more repugnant than having to listen to educated Christians slandering their own people while at the same time glorifying the Jews” be proud of a great nephew who thought Catholic-Jewish dialogue was one of the great achievements of Vatican II? Or a prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith who presided over the publication of an apology to the Jews issued by his predecessor? Probably not, because Onkel Georg had written even more pointedly:
There would be no Jewish Question if the educated elites among the Christian peoples hadn’t betrayed their own principles. At a time when Jews stand by even their own criminal element, we see Christian politicians and legislators betraying their own Christian faith on a daily basis and vying with each other to see who has the privilege of harnessing himself to the triumphal car of the Jews. In Parliament no Jew need defend another Jew, when their Christian lackeys do that for them.27
Georg Ratzinger’s complaint about Christian lackeys was more fitting in 2007 than it was in 1892 because his great nephew, Pope Benedict, feeling simultaneously the guilt foisted on him by Jewish-led social engineering and the German resentment at the corruption of German morals and German economy that the Jews also brought about as part of the instrumentalization of that guilt, could only engage in passive aggressive behavior of the sort which characterized Summorum Pontificum, by resurrecting the Latin liturgy but not translating its more controversial passages into the vernacular.
Similarly, in Georg Ratzinger’s day, when the Catholic confessional state was in power in places like Bavaria and the double monarchy of Austro-Hungary, Catholic elites refused to enforce the (largely economic) laws which protected the weak in a Christian culture. Then came the Thirty Years War (1915-1945) which put the revolutionary elites in power after World War II. By 1960, farseeing church men like Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani saw that European Christian culture needed strengthening against assaults from the Jewish elites in both the East and the West, as represented by Freudianism in the West and Communism in the East. Instead of regaining the initiative, the Catholic Church used the council which Ottaviani persuaded Pope John XXIII to convoke as a way of internalizing the commands of her oppressors. The Church used Dignitatis Humanae as a pretext to abandon the confessional state (even though the document affirms the opposite) and Nostra Aetate as a pretext to abandon its efforts to preach the Gospel to the Jews and work for their conversion.
Confirmation of Pope Benedict’s ambivalence comes from a statement issued by the Discussion Group “Jews and Christians” of the Central Committee of German Catholics issued on “Easter/ Pesach 2007” entitled “The Disruption to Christian-Jewish Relations by the Re-establishment of the Tridentine Rite” which claims that “the demand for the reinstatement of the Tridentine rite . . . is not really a question about the celebration of the Mass in Latin.” It is about the “anti-Semitic” prayers in the pre-1962 rite. Restoration of that Tridentine rite, the joint German-Jewish committee inform us would bring about “a lasting disruption to the Catholic-Jewish Dialogue that began so hopefully at the Second Vatican Council. Many dedicated personal and also theological efforts on both sides would be intentionally damaged. We hope that Pope Benedict XVI will not permit this injury to Christian-Jewish relations to occur” (my emphasis). The key word in that passage is “intentionally.” The German-Jewish dialoguers were saying that Pope Benedict’s expansion of the Latin Mass was intended as an attempt to restore the historical continuity which was broken by the Jewish interpretation of Nostra Aetate. Ultimately, the question of intention is irrelevant. The fact that Ratzinger ignored this warning and re-instated the Latin Rite shows that he was fully aware of what he was doing and that the restoration of the Latin Mass was his passive-aggressive way of reopening the Jewish Question.
After Pope Benedict issued Summorum Pontificum in July 2007, the Jewish response to what Rabbi David Rosen referred to as “an internal Catholic matter” was unanimous. This wasn’t about Latin it was about Jews like Rabbi David Rosen, who was “concerned about how wider use of this Tridentine liturgy may impact upon how Jews are perceived and treated.” ADL capo Abe Foxman made a comment that was even more direct:
We are extremely disappointed and deeply offended that nearly 40 years after the Vatican rightly removed insulting anti-Jewish language from the Good Friday Mass, that it would now permit Catholics to utter such hurtful and insulting words by praying for Jews to be converted. This is a theological setback in the religious life of Catholics and a body blow to Catholic-Jewish relations. It is the wrong decision at the wrong time. It appears the Vatican has chosen to satisfy a right-wing faction in the Church that rejects change and reconciliation.
The result was a time bomb which exploded 13 years later when the Jews complained to the Jesuits. What looks like a catastrophe for the Latin Massers is really the cunning of reason. The Holy Spirit will not abandon His Church. God is using this crisis to expose the real problem which is, as Abe Foxman’s tweet made clear, Jewish control of the Catholic Church. As Georg Ratzinger pointed out, echoing the Fathers of the Church, her Popes and encyclicals, “Business practice must be made to conform once again to Christian morals” or Christians will become Jews:
Intoxicated by revolution, Christian nations have pawned their most precious jewel – the teaching and the grace of their savior – and have rejected their most precious asset, their character as redeemed children of the Lord, by abandoning the Christian basis for their culture. The Lord as a result has let the Christian nations go their own way, which has led to the debt bondage which flows from the obdurate hegemony of capital, which will end up concentrated in the hands of a small minority of Jews and their lackeys.
Christian countries must either enforce the laws (e.g. living wage, the prohibition against usury, child labor, etc.) which were erected by the state to protect Christian culture against the Jews who were the cutting edge of capitalist subversion or become like the Jews, revolutionaries themselves. As Georg Ratzinger wrote, the problem is the Talmud, which is the ultimate source of all sharp Jewish business practices. The Jew:
precisely because of the influence of the Talmud, is universally a force for corruption and destruction. Wherever one finds elements of dissatisfaction which threaten to overturn the Christian social order, Jews jump to the forefront of the movement and adopt the role of agitator.
Just as Jewish internalization of Talmudic culture causes them to become revolutionaries, Catholic counter-revolution flows from Catholic morality, Catholic teaching and an honest liturgy which incorporates the wisdom of the Church fathers even when those views cause concern in a corrupt culture. The attack on the Latin Mass is incomprehensible without an understanding of the Jewish Question as its source and hidden grammar. The Jews need to control the Mass as their way of protecting what Georg Ratzinger called Jewish business practices.
The Church, as I have said, many times before, can have unity or she can have good relations with the Jews, but she can’t have both. For the past 60 years, the hierarchy has chosen good relations with the Jews, with disastrous consequences for Church unity. Traditionis Custodes rightly points out the lack of unity in the Church today, but ascribes that lack of unity to a symptom, the Latin Mass, and not the cause, which is the all-but-universal refusal to preach the gospel as it applies to the Jews. Traditionis Custodes makes this point when it mentions the importance of the lex orandi, but it fails to trace the disastrous consequences of this manipulation of the lex orandi back to its source in embarrassment at the anti-Jewish gospel which is the fons et origo of the liturgy and the source of our current disunity.
ENDNOTES
1 https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2021/documents/20210716-lettera-vescovi-liturgia.html 2 https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/248392/breaking-pope-francis-issues-restrictions-on-extraordinary-form-masses-in-new-motu-proprio
3 E. Michael Jones, “Why Bishop Sullivan . . . ,” Fidelity, February 1993, pp. 17-8.
4 https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/motu_proprio/documents/hf_ben-xvi_motu-proprio_20070707_summorum-pontificum.html
5 https://religionnews.com/2021/04/13/the-future-of-liturgical-reform-in-the-catholic-church/
6 https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/kabuki-theater/#:~:text=Kabuki%20is%20a%20form%20of,by%20showmanship%20 than%20by%20content.
7 https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/billionaire-atheistfunnels-cash-to-jesuits
8 https://national-justice.com/pope-francis-announces-crackdown-traditional-latin-mass-because-it-becoming-more-popularvatican-ii?fbclid=IwAR0ToXXdUBLfbsIqeQKiqqRhTTwsSs_ xXCSfJLsskFs14p90R0SdLSJMWqA
9 https://www.timesofisrael.com/pope-francis-restricts-latin-mass-that-caused-controversy-with-jews/ 10 https://www.timesofisrael.com/pope-francis-restricts-latin-mass-that-caused-controversy-with-jews/
11 John Courtney Murray, Time/Life and the American Proposition:
How the CIA’s Doctrinal Warfare Program Changed the Catholic
Church by David Wemhoff
12 https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/07/mass-andmemory
13 http://rheinwiesen-lager.de/remagen-und-sinzig/
14 James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950 (London: Warner Books, 1997), p. 125.
15 Cf. E. Michael Jones, Logos Rising, pp. 569ff.
16 Robert Waldhausen (Georg Ratzinger) op. cit. The German Wikipedia page on Robert Waldhausen identifies him as Georg Ratzinger. Their explanation follows:Georg Ratzinger werden aber auch die beiden nachfolgend genannten pseudonym veröffentlichten antisemitischen Hetzschriften zugeschrieben. Zwar kann Ratzingers Identität mit deren beiden Verfasserpseudonymen nicht anhand schriftlicher Zeugnisse belegt werden, jedoch gilt sie in der Forschung auf Grund von Indizien als gesichert und wird nicht in Frage gestellt. Unter dem Pseudonym “Dr. Robert Waldhausen” erschien 1892 das Buch Jüdisches Erwerbsleben. Skizzen aus dem sozialen Leben der Gegenwart, in dessen Einleitung es z. B. heißt: Die Emanzipation der Juden […] konnte nicht anders, als zerstörend und zersetzend auf die ganze christliche Gesellschaft wirken. Und 1897 wurde unter dem Pseudonym “Dr. Gottfried Wolf” ein antisemitisches Pamphlet mit dem Titel Das Judentum in Bayern. Skizzen aus der Vergangenheit und Vorschläge für die Zukunft publiziert. Auch in anderen, nicht pseudonym veröffentlichten Schriften Ratzingers, z. B. in Die Volkswirthschaft in ihren sittlichen Grundlagen, und in seinen Parlamentsreden lassen sich antisemitische Äußerungen und Tendenzen finden. 17 Georg Ratzinger, Juedisches Erwerbsleben: Skizzen aus dem sozialen Leben der Gegenwart (Passau: Verlag von Rudolf Abt, 1892). pp. 1-2. All translations from the German are mine. 18 Cf. E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, Vol. II (South Bend, IN: Fidelity Press, 2020), pp. 152ff.
19 Georg Ratzinger, op. cit., p. 3.
20 Georg Ratzinger, op. cit., p. 5.
21 Samuel Roth, Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on all the Frontiers of Civilization (No place of publication, 1934), p. 34.
22 Georg Ratzinger, op. cit., p. 11.
23 Georg Ratzinger, op. cit., p. 38.
24 Joseph Kardinal Ratzinger, Salz der Erde: Christentum and katholische Kirch an der Jahrtausendwende (Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1996), p. 47, my translation.
25 Georg Ratzinger, op. cit., p. 53.
26 Georg Ratzinger, op. cit., p. 49.
27 Georg Ratzinger, op. cit., p. 84.
