Ratzinger and the Judensau
/A Review of Che cos’è il Cristianesimo
Pope Benedict XVI is determined to have the last word, even if it’s from the grave. Less than a month after his death on December 31, 2022, the ghost of Ratzinger past emerged with the publication of Che cos’è il Cristianesimo, a posthumous memoir whose sole purpose seemed to be a desire to vindicate his life and policies from the safe confines of the grave. Embittered by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune which drove him from the chair of Peter, Ratzinger tells us paradoxically that “I don’t want to publish anything anymore,” in the very act of issuing another publication. What he actually said was that he did not want to publish anything more “in life,” (Da parte mia, in vita, non voglio più pubblicare nulla.) because “the fury of the circles against me in Germany is so strong that the appearance of my every word immediately causes a murderous shout from them. I want to spare myself and Christendom that.”1
Initial reaction in the press (insofar as there was any) focused on his sensational revelations that the sexual revolution had infiltrated large segments of the Catholic Church. “In several seminaries,” his holiness tells us:
homosexual “clubs” were formed which acted more or less openly and which clearly changed the atmosphere in the seminaries. In a seminary in southern Germany, candidates for the priesthood and candidates for the lay office of pastoral contact lived together. During the common meals, the seminarians were together with the married pastoral representatives, partly accompanied by their wife and children and in some cases by their girlfriends. The atmosphere in the seminary could not help priestly formation. The Holy See knew about these problems, without being informed of them in detail. As a first step, an apostolic visit to seminaries in the United States was arranged.
A bishop, who had previously served as rector, had allowed seminarians to be shown pornographic films, presumably with the intention of thereby enabling them to resist unfaithful behavior. There were individual bishops – and not only in the United States – who rejected the Catholic tradition as a whole, aiming in their dioceses to develop a kind of new, modern “catholicity.”
Personal resentment colors his memory. Ratzinger cannot recount this catastrophe without telling us that “in quite a few seminaries, students caught reading my books were considered unsuitable for the priesthood. My books were disguised as harmful literature and were read only on the sly, so to speak.”2
Ratzinger arrived late to the sex party. He dates his own personal awakening to the reality of sexual liberation to Good Friday 1970, when he arrived in Regensburg and “saw all the advertising columns covered with posters presenting in large format two completely naked people, tightly embraced.”3
The Church’s response came even later, after “the crisis of the foundations and presentation of Catholic morality” reached dramatic form in the late 1980s and 1990s.4 Four years after 15 Catholic theology professors published “a cry of protest against the magisterium of the Church,”5 Pope John Paul II attempted to “put these points back in place,” by issuing his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, which asserted that “there are actions that always and in all circumstances must be considered evil”6 on August 6, 1993, but it only succeeded in “arousing violent reactions from moral theologians.”7
This protest was done, of course, in the name of the Second Vatican Council, which was understood as manifesting “a critical or negative attitude towards the tradition in force up to that moment, which now had to be replaced by a new, radically open relationship with the world.”8 In his attempt to explain how he was blindsided by the sexual revolution, Ratzinger failed to tell us that he himself introduced “a new, radically open relationship with the world,” when he commandeered the Second Vatican Council by persuading Cardinal Frings, whose peritus he was, and the other council fathers to discard Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani’s preliminary documents.
By the time he wrote his posthumous memoir, the “new, radically open relationship with the world” which was the spiritus movens behind Vatican II had been replaced by the Holocaust. “Since the days of Auschwitz, it has been clear that the Church must rethink the question of the nature of Judaism. Vatican II with the declaration Nostra Aetate gave the first, fundamental indications in this regard.”9
Tragically, Ratzinger sees no connection between Nostra Aetate’s purported endorsement of Auschwitz, which led to a radical subversion of the Church’s traditional teaching on the Jews, and the subsequent world-wide erosion of sexual morality. Ratzinger is unaware that, when it comes to the statement on the Jews and the subversion of sexual morality, we are dealing with two sides of the same coin. By claiming that the Church opposed “all forms of anti-Semitism” without defining the term, Nostra Aetate opened the door to Jewish moral subversion. Ratzinger talked about Jews as if they were the Hebrews Moses led out of Egypt when in fact they were the driving force behind prostitution, pornography, abortion, and homosexuality, as well as the subversion of obscenity laws in both Germany and the United States. Worse, when the battle over sexual morality was raging in Germany during the 1950s, Ratzinger diverted Frings’ attention away from the obscenity issue at home and made him a spokesman for the same “new, radically open relationship with the world” which he would criticize from the grave in his posthumous memoir.
Ratzinger’s mentor and patron Cardinal Frings was a valiant crusader against what he and the Volkswartbund (the German Legion of Decency) were calling “Schumtz und Schund” (filth and smut). Unfortunately, his eyes were distracted from the German Church’s opposition to obscenity by the call to come to Rome to take part in Vatican II. The crucial year for both the campaign against Schmutz und Schund and the new direction which the council was going to take was 1964.
According to Joseph Ratzinger, November 20, 1964 proved to be “a real turning point”10 in the history of the Council, because on that day, “the great majority of the Council opted for the positive position and had made up its mind to abandon an outmoded negative defensiveness.”11 On November 20, 1964, the “Council had resolutely set itself against perpetuating a one-sided anti-Modernism and so had chosen a new and positive approach.”12 As a result, Ratzinger considered “November 20 or November 21, 1964, as a real turning point. It was a turning point, too, in the sense that, in contrast to Trent and Vatican Council I, the pope had rejected curial dominance and sided with the Council.”13
As the Second Vatican Council deliberated in Rome on the future of the Church, the Jews who had returned to Germany after the war to avenge themselves on the German people launched a concerted attack on Sittlichkeit in Germany. In November 1964, the war on Schmutz und Schund which began when the Allies flooded Germany with pornography under the “benign” Marshall Plan reached another sort of turning point, unbeknownst to Cardinal Frings, whose failing eyes were focused on the Council, largely because of his ambitious assistant. In 1964, Ingmar Bergman, in collaboration with Harry Schein, the Swedish Jew who was Bergman’s link to Hollywood, released his film The Silence in a calculated attempt to break obscenity laws in Germany and the United States.
Despite winning an Oscar nomination for best foreign film of 1964, The Silence did not succeed in breaking the Hollywood Production Code. Yet it did overturn the obscenity laws in Germany, underscoring the international scope of the Jewish-led war on obscenity laws. That campaign was based in Hollywood, unsurprisingly, but Schein was the link to Swedish directors like Bergman, whose cinematic skills were essential in giving what Calmes and Frings were calling pornography the patina of art.
The term “Schwedenfilm” signifies in Germany not “Swedish films” but rather “soft-core pornography,”14 largely because of the role which Ingmar Bergman’s film The Silence played in overturning censorship laws in Germany. In Germany as in the United States, an art film broke the production code. In America, that honor went to the Holocaust porn film The Pawnbroker. In Germany, the honor went to Bergman’s film The Silence. The rank and file in Germany were outraged by the film and organized protests at theaters wherever it was shown. The film censorship board, however, considered the film a work of art and allowed young people over 18 to attend. Catholic film critics were equally taken with the film.15 The film review board awarded The Silence its “especially valuable” rating, the highest rating it had ever granted. Yet while the professional film critics were singing the film’s praises, all hell broke loose among the public at large, who were claiming that it was a cultural scandal calculated to poison the moral fiber of the German people. The depiction of the film’s scandalous content led to collective moral outrage. The federal republic, then headquartered in Bonn, was in the middle of a cultural scandal which would keep it preoccupied for over a year. One thing was clear, however. Bonn did not feel called upon to act on the obscenity issue.16 The film scandal was taking place at the same time as the Auschwitz trials, putting wind in the sails of the decency crusaders. The Frankfurter Rundschau claimed: “The degradation of the human being is nowhere so clear as in this trial. This degradation finds its sequel in the sexual acrobatics of the Swedish director. We have the same spiritual world view in both instances.”17
Eventually, the state was asked to intervene. Bundeskanzler Ludwig Erhard wrote back to a women who had written to him demanding action saying that he shared her outrage, but the government had no influence over the decisions of freely chosen self-control. Organizations were formed and resolutions composed that often contained the signatures of 95 percent of the local population expressing opposition to the film, but the government was powerless to overturn the Allied proconsuls, who were the real powers in determining policy in the American vassal state which came into being in 1945.18
In March 1965, the Duesseldorf court declared Bergman’s film “objectively obscene” because according to the opinion of the judge, artistic freedom provides no justification for shameless presentations. Shortly thereafter, the court in Koblenz declared that Bergman’s film was a work of art. Then the court in Trier declared that the film was viewable because, according to its ruling, artistic freedom was guaranteed in the constitution.19 Unable to come up with a consensus because of the combined power of the Allied occupying forces and their lapdogs in the licensed press, the defenders of decency were unable to take control of the debate.
The Schmutz und Schund law finally died in the fall of 1966 when the Social Democrats, who would eventually ride the Sexwelle into power in 1972, made it clear that the 2/3rds majority needed to change the law wasn’t there.20 When the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) representative Suesterhenn lamely tried to defend the law in an interview with Der Spiegel, the Church distanced itself from the interview. Bundesfamilienminister Heck finally announced in the fall of 1966 that there was no chance that the law would pass. “Sittlichkeit,” according to Steinbacher, had lost its relevance as a social norm and could not be reactivated. Five years before his death, the aged Cardinal Frings found himself hors de combat in the German culture wars because the Council had diverted his attention from the war on Schmutz und Schund, which reached its critical phase at the same time the Council did, in late 1964.21
In the mind of the clerics who used Vatican II concepts like synodality to make a separate peace with the modern world, the Volkswartbund typified the Church’s failed attempt to use condemnation to uphold the moral and social order. Moral reform based on authority was supposed to take a back seat to the “medicine of mercy” in reforming the culture even if no one knew how this applied to Jews promoting pornography. For the Catholic Church, which was worried about losing more of the faithful, Calmes’s Cologne-based and often-mocked legion of decency had become an unwanted burden. The Volkswartbund no longer had any supporters in the government after Wuermeling stepped down from his cabinet post as a result of the Spiegel Affair,22 during which then Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss tried to punish Der Spiegel for publishing state secrets.23 When the 82-year-old Cardinal Frings retired from his position as archbishop of Cologne in February 1969 because of old age, the Volkswartbund lost its most influential clerical supporter. Worse than that, the Volkswartbund had even become an object of ridicule in the Cologne chancery as it became less and less successful. It was only a matter of time before the Church abandoned it.
In August 1969, six months after Frings’ retirement, the time had come. “The Volkswartbund should close its doors,” wrote Secretary General Weyer in a hand-written note. His five-page letter to the organization’s members was an expression of the crisis mentality which pervaded the Church’s attempt to restructure the organization. “With your help we can re-structure the Volkswartbund into a new organization, from one which is perceived as a relic of more inhibited times into one which can become an instrument which has spiritual and cultural power in a transformed society to serve the needs of his neighbor and bring about new opportunities for self-fulfillment.”24 Weyer’s pathetic call for help betrayed how isolated the Volkswartbund had become. He put into words what was rumored in many clerical circles. The German Bishops Conference was distancing itself from its own legion of decency. As a first step, the organization was re-named the “Central Committee for Sexual Ethics and Social Hygiene” and was merged with the government agency Operation Protect Our Youth. The Volkswartbund continued for a while under that different name, but it was now unnoticed by the public. Then in May 1975 it disappeared completely when it became part of the youth ministry known as the Catholic Social Ethics Workshop in Hamm.
After the death of Cardinal Frings, the Catholic Church in Germany, like its counterpart in the United States, hoisted the white flag of surrender in the culture wars and left the faithful defenseless and alone in their battle to maintain Sittlichkeit against an unprecedented wave of technologically driven Schmutz and Schund which swept away sexual morality and left behind the scum of guilt, which the Jews who had overturned Germany’s obscenity laws then transposed to the Holocaust. Any exercise of synodality in Germany was going to tap into that aquifer of perversion and guilt among the walking wounded.
During the period when the Jews were engaged in a conspiracy to undermine obscenity laws in both the United States and Germany, Ratzinger was trying to explain how Jews and Catholics shared a common faith, or as Ratzinger puts in his memoir:
the Church of Rome has made it clear that Christians and Jews worship the same God and the holy books of Israel are also the holy books of Christendom. Abraham’s faith is also the faith of Christians, Abraham is also for them “father in faith.”25
Ratzinger’s claim is based on the unspoken assumption that the Jews of his day are identical with the Hebrews of the Old Testament, and that their “covenant” is eternally valid. He bases this claim not on Nostra Aetate but on a speech Pope John Paul II made at a synagogue in Mainz on November 17, 1980. In making this completely novel claim, Pope John Paul II referred to the “old covenant” without specifying whether it was the Abrahamic covenant which included all mankind and not just the Jews, or the Mosaic covenant, which became obsolete the moment the Temple was destroyed in 70 AD. Ignoring the deliberate ambiguity, Ratzinger applied what his predecessor claimed to the Mosaic covenant and then declared that the Church never believed in the “theory of substitution,” otherwise known as supersessionism…
[…] This is just an excerpt from the March 2023 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!
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Ratzinger and the Judensau by Dr. E. Michael Jones
Endnotes
1 https://www.amazon.it/Benedetto-XVI-Elio-Guerriero/dp/8804726806. All citations in English are AI generated and followed with the original Italian in the notes. (Da parte mia, in vita, non voglio più pubblicare nulla. La furia dei circoli a me contrari in Germania è talmente forte che l’apparizione di ogni mia parola subito provoca da parte loro un vociare assassino. Voglio risparmiare questo a me stesso e alla cristianità.)2 Un vescovo, che in precedenza era stato rettore, aveva permesso di mostrare ai seminaristi dei film pornografici, presumibilmente con l’intento di renderli in tal modo capaci di resistere contro un comportamento contrario alla fede. Vi furono singoli vescovi – e non solo negli Stati Uniti – che rifiutarono la tradizione cattolica nel suo complesso mirando nelle loro diocesi a sviluppare una specie di nuova, moderna «cattolicità». Forse vale la pena accennare al fatto che, in non pochi seminari, studenti sorpresi a leggere i miei libri venivano considerati non idonei al sacerdozio. I miei libri venivano celati come letteratura dannosa e venivano per così dire letti solo di nascosto.3 (Mi è rimasto anche impresso nella memoria quando il Venerdì Santo del 1970 arrivai in città e vidi tutte le colonnine della pubblicità tappezzate di manifesti che presentavano in grande formato due persone completamente nude, strettamente abbracciate.)4 Sul finire degli anni Ottanta e negli anni Novanta la crisi dei fondamenti e della presentazione della morale cattolica raggiunse forme drammatiche.5 Questo testo, che inizialmente non andava oltre il livello consueto delle rimostranze, crebbe tuttavia molto velocemente sino a trasformarsi in grido di protesta contro il magistero della Chiesa,6 che ci sono azioni che sempre e in ogni circostanza vanno considerate malvagie7 Fu pubblicata con il titolo Veritatis splendor il 6 agosto 1993 suscitando violente reazioni contrarie da parte dei teologi morali.8 In molte parti della Chiesa, il sentire conciliare venne di fatto inteso come un atteggiamento critico o negativo nei confronti della tradizione vigente fino a quel momento, che ora doveva essere sostituita da un nuovo rapporto, radicalmente aperto, con il mondo. Un vescovo, che in precedenza era stato rettore, aveva permesso di mostrare ai seminaristi dei film pornografici, presumibilmente con l’intento di renderli in tal modo capaci di resistere contro un comportamento contrario alla fede.9 Dai tempi di Auschwitz è chiaro che la Chiesa deve ripensare la questione della natura del giudaismo. Il Vaticano II con la dichiarazione Nostra aetate ha dato al riguardo delle prime, fondamentali indicazioni.10 Joseph Ratzinger, Highlights, Kindle edition, loc. 375.11 Ratzinger, Highlights, Kindle edition, loc. 375.12 Ratzinger, Highlights, Kindle edition, loc. 385.13 Ratzinger, Highlights, Kindle edition, loc. 386.14 Elisabet Bjorklund and Mariah Larsson, Swedish Cinema and the Sexual Revolution: Critical Essays (Amazon: Kindle), loc. 4701.15 Sybille Steinbacher, Wie der Sex nach Deutschland Kam (Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2011), p. 285.16 Steinbacher, Wie der Sex nach Deutschland Kam, p. 287.17 Steinbacher, Wie der Sex nach Deutschland Kam, p. 287.18 Steinbacher, Wie der Sex nach Deutschland Kam, p. 287.19 Steinbacher, Wie der Sex nach Deutschland Kam, p. 291.20 Steinbacher, Wie der Sex nach Deutschland Kam, p. 294.21 Steinbacher, p. 294.22 Steinbacher, Wie der Sex nach Deutschland Kam, p. 316.23 “Spiegel-Affäre,” Wikipedia: Die freie Enzyklopadie, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiegel-Aff%C3%A4re (EMJ translation).24 Steinbacher, Wie der Sex nach Deutschland Kam, p. 316.25 D’altra parte, come abbiamo già visto in precedenza, con l’esclusione di Marcione nel II secolo la Chiesa di Roma ha messo in chiaro che cristiani e giudei adorano lo stesso Dio e i libri santi di Israele sono anche i libri santi della cristianità. La fede di Abramo è anche la fede dei cristiani, Abramo è anche per loro «padre nella fede».
