Current events update:
- Offshore outsourcing may start to hit home for aspiring members of the ruling class. Law firms are talking about moving junior associate functions to India.
- For those with other ambitions: About.com seems to need a guide for Conservative Politics. Anybody want to step right into a major right-wing website?
- Here’s what people who believe in live-and-let-live have been saying about Mel Gibson and The Passion.
- Public clarification is always helpful: Infanticide is justifiable in some cases, says top British medical ethicist. As the man says, it’s “not plausible to think that there is any moral change that occurs during the journey down the birth canal.” The Church Fathers and early councils would have agreed on that point.
- More tolerance news: in Belgium a cardinal is getting sued for saying that most homosexuals are “perverts” (i.e., they revel in their disorder), while in Spain another cardinal is being sued for saying that recognizing “gay marriage” would exacerbate the problems of the Spanish social security system. The big question is whether such lawsuits will bring Church officials in line or radicalize their dissent from the EU public order. I’m inclined to think the latter. That’s why it’s necessary for the Church to be a universal organization, it makes it more independent of local pressures, and why its current political support for the UN and ever-more-intrusive international human rights agreements is so perverse.
“Associated Press, August 9,
“Associated Press, August 9, 2003; Sister Mary C. Boys: ‘For too many years, Christians have accused Jews of being Christ-killers and used that charge to rationalize violence…. This is our fear.’ ”
Born and brought up in Queens, New York City, until half-way through elementary school I was raised Catholic (by a very Catholic German bourgeois father whose own mother was Jewish and an intensely anti-Catholicism, anti-Christianity Russian mother who was also part Jewish) with Catechism every Wednesday afternoon; Sunday mass which “it was a mortal sin to miss without a valid excuse such as illness”; the happy fellowship via Sunday mass and Wednesday Catechism of throngs of Catholic kids who were enrolled at the nearby Catholic school (I attended the nearby public school where all my equally happy friendships were with throngs of Jewish kids except for one Catholic kid, my next-door neighbor); etc. It was, I think, during the summer between my fourth and fifth grades that my mother—who could NOT STAND organized Christianity—defied my father, took me and my sibs out of Catholicism altogether—no mass, no Catechism, no belief, nothing—and proceeded to extract all religion out of us and raise us literally as complete atheists (which I remained until my slow, many-years-long re-discovery of Christianity which began after college). All that by way of background to this: one day, some time during childhood, I asked my mother why some people disliked Jews. She abruptly answered in a startling tone I can still “hear” in my memory, a tone as if to say, “WHAT??? You mean you DON’T KNOW??? Oh my GOOOOOOOD!!!”—in precisely this tone, with an expression of ironic bitterness on her face and a bitter little laugh, she loudly said just the words “CHRIST-KILLER!!!” in a manner that seemed to perfectly communicate an absolute HORROR of Christians who held such an unimaginably lower-than-sub-human grudge against Jews (yes, my mother could pack all that into just those three horror-stricken syllables). That was all she said as she continued vacuuming or whatever my question had interrupted.
I never forgot that, and ever since have been sort of on the look-out for these benighted Christians who “dislike or even hate Jews because they’re the Christ-killers.” But to my knowledge I’ve never run across any. To cut to the chase: do they exist? (exist to any significant degree, I mean—it happens I may have run across one a while ago on a VFR thread). Where are they all?
“The Jewish Week, March 28, 2003; Sister Mary Boys: ‘[Mel Gibson is] producing a film that will reopen wounds of history.’ ”
Despite my wondering above where all the Christians are who hold the “Christ-killer” grudge, I just don’t see why Gibson couldn’t have toned this part of the Gospels down a bit—not changed it but only de-emphasized it—if for two thousand years Jews have, it is said, been getting mistreated because of it.
When you have power such that there’s nothing others can do to stop you, and they come to you and ask sincerely that you not do a particular thing lest it harm them—a thing whose omission would cause you no harm—aren’t you solemnly morally obligated to listen to them?
The Church will not succumb
The Church will not succumb to the homosexual heresy. It is blatantly against fundamental Catholic doctrine, which never changes. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
We might see terrible tribulation, especially against individual priests, but the end result is not in question. Which is not to say Catholics can remain smugly confident. Oh no, we all are going to share in the tribulation, if it should arise. Which is why we must begin fighting beforre things get worse.
Undadorned:
I suppose they
Undadorned:
I suppose they (Christians who hate all Jews believing they are “Christ-killers”) do exist, although to my knowledge I’ve never met one either. It sounds more like a convenient mythology to keep around as a pretext for avoiding the claims of Christianity.
But orthodox Catholicism must vigorously oppose religious Judaism—even more than most other false religions —since Judaism is one of only two world religions whose legitimacy seems to rest on an explicit rejection of Christ.
Regarding the final item in
Regarding the final item in the log entry, the Spanish Cardinal is of course one hundred percent right in every single word he says in that news article, and although I didn’t understand some of the points the Belgian Cardinal made I have confidence he was completely right too. One says to oneself the elites on both sides of the Atlantic should be doing more to protect the obviously normal from the attacks of the obviously degenerate and wonders why they aren’t but are instead going along with the attacks. Then one remembers that controlling elites aren’t always all-powerful and in some cases not only can lose but can lose everything including their lives, when push comes to shove against unexpectedly strong forces, as we saw happen in France in 1789, Russia in 1917, and Communist East Germany in 1989, the start of course of the domino-collapse of European communism accomplished by 1991, two years during which beseiged Red elites could do not a thing to halt the unraveling, as absolute dictators one day became cowering criminal defendants, fugitives, or corpses the next. Maybe the bulk of our elites are afraid to go up against what they view as an intimidating post-60s left-wing tide and feel accommodation with it is the best course. After all, look what happened to the man whom the left-Tranzi alliance couldn’t silence by the usual tactics of “racist” smears, etc., Pim Fortuyn: no one wants to be next. More and more abandoned by the elites who at this stage can still cushion themselves, jockey for new position, and buy favors, protection, and privilege, we lower-downs are increasingly on our own in confronting the holocaust.
To Unadorned: At this point
To Unadorned: At this point I don’t see any reason to think Gibson didn’t just tell the Gospel story straight. So far as I can tell, the noisiest critics anyway are people who basically don’t like Christianity at least in any normal sense.
It does seem to me it that would detract from the story to play down Christ’s rejection by the people to whom he had the closest human, social and even religious ties, and present the Passion as a matter of the routine impersonal value-free functioning of an alien imperial bureaucracy. It’s as if you told the story without having one of the apostles betraying him and the rest scattering and abandoning him. I’ve always thought of the Jewish authorities and people as sort of a stand-in for all ordinary mediocre Christians. You can’t think of the Romans that way.
This Christian has never
This Christian has never accused the Jews of being Christ-killers and I do not know of one Christian who blames the Jews as a group for being responsible for Christ’s death. Many Jews were responsible, but again, many were not. Just look at Peter, our first Pope, Mary Magadelene and Simon. And a host of others. This cry of “anti-semitism” regarding Mel’s “The Passion” is old, worn-out and a pitiful attempt from Satan to detract from the truthful gospel message. I do believe that those who cry this anti-semitism garbage have not read scripture, or are in denail— Or worse yet are the underminers of the church.
“When Pilate saw that he was not succeeding at all, but that a riot was breaking out instead, he took water and washed his hands in the sight of the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood. Look to it yourselves.” And the whole people said in reply, “His blood be upon us and upon our children.” (Matthew 27)