WHAT HAPPENS AT THE CONSECRATION
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
On January 17 the Southern Poverty Law Center published an extensive report on anti-Semitism within Traditionalist Catholicism. As of today, that report remains the top item at the group's web site:
www.splcenter.org
The headline there reads: "'Intelligence Report' exposes anti-Semitic 'radical traditionalist Catholic' movement."
A link takes the reader to a page that gives a precis of the study:
"The growing number of 'radical traditionalist Catholics,' men and women who angrily reject many of the Vatican's core teachings, may form the single largest group of hard-core anti-Semites in America, according to a report, 'The New Crusaders,' released today in the latest issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center's 'Intelligence Report.'
"With more than 100,000 U.S. followers, famously including actor Mel Gibson's father Hutton Gibson, the radical traditionalist movement embraces a series of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, has significant financial and publishing resources, and, in a growing number of cases, is interacting with white supremacist and Holocaust denial extremist groups. Movement leaders routinely pillory the Jews as 'the perpetual enemy of Christ' and worse.
"'Most Americans know very little about the world of radical traditionalist Catholics,' said Mark Potok, editor of the 'Intelligence Report' and director of the Center's Intelligence Project. 'But the reality is that it is a grossly anti-Semitic movement that is thriving despite the fact that mainstream Catholics entirely reject its teachings and the Vatican has excommunicated many of its leading activists and ideologues.'
"The report, the result of a three-year investigation by the 'Intelligence Report,' identifies as hate groups a dozen radical traditionalist Catholic institutions in California, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington."
From that page the reader is led to the report itself, which is 11,000 words long. The first section is an introduction by Potok. Then come four sections written by Heidi Beirich, an SPLC staff member.
The first of her sections is an overview of people and groups, starting with the now-famous Mel Gibson drunk driving incident.
Her next section is a brief look at two books by Traditionalists, "We Resist You to the Face" and "The Great Facade."
Her third section is titled "Catholics and Conspiracies." It first discusses the so-called "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy" but then discusses "the Cardinal Siri thesis," the claim that Giuseppe Siri was elected to the papacy twice but each time was forced by mysterious groups to relinquish the papal throne.
Beirich's fourth section is about the Society of St. Pius X, the group established by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
After all this comes the lengthiest section of the report, "The Dirty Dozen." Among the groups profiled are Catholic Counterpoint, "Catholic Family News" newspaper, the Legion of St. Louis, the Omni Christian Book Club, and "The Remnant" newspaper.
So much for an overview of the SPLC's report. I'll return to it in a moment. First, a bit about SPLC itself.
When I first heard of the organization, years ago, I presumed from its name that it was based in the South and dealt with legal issues of particular concern to poor people, just as landlord-tenant disputes, employment problems, and access to government services.
Well, the first part is true: SPLC is located in the South--in Montgomery, Alabama. I was wrong about everything else. SPLC "was founded in 1971 as a small civil rights law firm" all right, but today "the Center is internationally known for its tolerance education programs, its legal victories against white supremacists, and its tracking of hate groups." It really has nothing to do now with the poor in the South.
SPLC's first president was Julian Bond, who remains on the board of directors. Its founders were Joseph J. Levin, Jr., who is its president emeritus, and Morris Dees, who remains its chief trial counsel. The current president is J. Richard Cohen. You might think it would be his name that usually would be in the news as representing SPLC, but the name that I tend to see is that of Dees.
In the latest tax return that is available for public inspection, SPLC reports an income of $34 million and net assets of $153 million. Not bad for a group that was a two-man operation 36 years ago.
Now back to the SPLC expose. Two things struck me when I read it.
The first was that the topic is legitimate. There really is anti-Semitism within the Traditionalist movement. It is not a problem that has been ignored by Catholics, Traditionalists included. Over the last few years several Catholic blogs, in particular, but also several orthodox Catholic publications have examined the problem at length.
It is not my intention in this E-Letter to recapitulate what others have written, but I do want to say that it is only a very small portion of Traditionalist Catholics who have succumbed to the anti-Semitism virus. (The SPLC report seems to indict every Traditionalist.)
The second thing that struck me, when I read the SPLC report, was how poorly it was done. Heidi Beirich--presumably the lead investigator--says that the report is "a three-year investigation of this subculture by the 'Intelligence Report.'" Apparently a lot of time was devoted to the project, and certainly the SPLC has an endowment large enough to have not skimped on the research, but the end result is, frankly, a mess.
Let me list some of the errors.
1. In the initial release of the report, Mark Potok wrote: "In offices in State Line, PA, an intense, bespeckled man tirelessly recounts how the 1911 'Catholic Encyclopedia' 'predicts the anti-Christ will come from Jewry.'" The "intense, bespeckled" description was taken from a photo that is part of the report.
The photo is of Christopher Ferrara, who writes extensively for "The Remnant" and "Catholic Family News" and who works with Fr. Nicholas Gruner. But the caption under his photo did not originally say "Christopher Ferrara." It said "Robert Sungenis." It is Sungenis who lives in State Line, PA, and he is not "bespeckled." (Someone informed SPLC of this error, and the caption was fixed.)
2. Heidi Beirich describes a Traditionalist conference at which Mass was celebrated in Latin by "apostate priests." Apparently she doesn't know what the term "apostate" means. Apostasy is not the same thing as being disaffected, in rebellion, or in schism.
3. She writes that "several" conferences put on by "radical traditionalists" "attract thousands upon thousands of people." Then she mentions that one of the largest such conferences, sponsored by the St. Joseph Forum of South Bend, Indiana, attracted only 250 people. Other conferences that are cited elsewhere in the report had even smaller turnouts.
In fact, most years there is only a handful of "national" conferences sponsored by the Traditionalist organizations profiled by Beirich. Some years their total attendance might struggle to reach even 1,000. Where are the conferences that "attract thousands upon thousands of people"?
4. Beirich writes about the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, an offshoot of the group founded by the late Fr. Leonard Feeney. She mentions a talk given by Brother Anthony Mary, one of the members of the group. Each of the male brothers takes a double religious name, with the second one being "Mary" or a variant of it, such as "Marie." Beirich doesn't understand this and refers to Brother Anthony Mary as "Brother Mary," as though "Mary" were his surname.
5. When writing about the Society of St. Pius X, Beirich says that Pope John Paul II "excommunicated all SSPX priests" and that "all of the [SSPX] priests were excommunicated in the late 1980s," but this is untrue.
First of all, the Pope excommunicated no one. Those who were excommunicated were excommunicated automatically under canon law and without direct papal intervention. They included not a single SSPX priest. The excommunications affected only Lefebvre, a bishop who assisted him as co-consecrator, and the four men whom the two consecrated as bishops--six men in total and all of them bishops.
6. At one point Beirich quotes Stephen Hand and describes him as "a respected Catholic theologian." He is not a theologian at all but a blogger and sometime book author.
7. When writing about the proclivity that some Traditionalists have for conspiracy theories, Beirich says that "the Roman Catholic Church has always been an attractive target for conspiracy theorists, due in large part to its elaborate and sometimes-mysterious rituals, its associations with secret societies such as the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucians ..."
The Rosicrucians? A quick look at Wikipedia would have shown Beirich that the Rosicrucians not only have no relation at all to Catholicism but hardly any to Christianity. The Rosicrucians are best understood as "early New Agers" rather than as Christians of any stripe.
8. EWTN--which is mentioned in passing as not as one of the groups profiled--is described as "a Catholic television station." This is wrong. It is a television network. There is a difference.
9. Walter Matt, the founder of "The Remnant" newspaper, is described as "recently deceased." He died in 2002. That was five years ago--hardly recent.
There are lots of other errors in the SPLC report, so many that one is led to believe that not only did the people writing the report have no pre-existing familiarity with the Traditionalist movement but that, in all likelihood, not a single one of them was a Catholic. After all, a practicing Catholic, even one not associated with the Traditionalist movement, would have caught several of these errors.
The greatest fault of the SPLC report is its lumping all Traditionalists into the anti-Semitism category. I know that there are some authentically anti-Semitic people within Catholic Traditionalism, but I also know that they are not representative of the movement.
Yes, some of the individuals and groups discussed in the SPLC report truly are anti-Semitic, and only a disingenuous person could deny that. But not everyone and not every group discussed in the report is anti-Semitic. And, what is more important, those that are discussed comprise only a subsection of the Traditionalist movement.
SPLC claims that there are more than 100,000 Catholic Traditionalists in the U.S. and implies that most of them imbibe from the spring of anti-Semitism. The number 100,000 may not be far off from the real number of Traditionalists in this country, but anyone having familiarity with the people who attend, for example, indult Latin Masses will see in short order that almost no one there harbors prejudice against Jews, just as almost no one attending vernacular Masses harbors such prejudice.
To the extent there is anti-Semitism within the Traditionalist movement, it resides almost exclusively within a few groups and publications that, collectively, probably don't exceed 20,000 members and readers, and even then only a minority of those people properly could be termed anti-Semitic.
The SPLC report says that "these Catholic extremists ... may well represent the largest population of anti-Semites in the United States. Organized into a network of more than a dozen organizations, scores of web sites, and several extremists churches and monasteries, radical traditionalists in the U.S. are preaching anti-Semitism to as many as 100,000 followers." Well, even if 100,000 people are being preached to, the numbers doing the actual preaching are far smaller, numbering perhaps only in the hundreds, and certainly most of the "preachees" have not adopted any element of anti-Semitism.
How many true anti-Semites are there within the Traditionalist movement? I don't know for sure, and neither do Mark Potok or Heidi Beirich, but I'd estimate that there are a few thousand anti-Semites at most. That is still a distressingly large number, but it is a far cry from what the SPLC report suggests, and it is a number that cannot be used to indict the whole of the Traditionalist movement.
Much more could be said, not just about the SPLC report but about the groups mentioned in it. Perhaps another time. Today it is sufficient to note that the SPLC took on a legitimate topic, made a hash of it, and ended up with a report full of errors large and small. The group has not aided the discussion but has muddied it.
I have a suggestion. Perhaps the SPLC could use a small portion of its substantial endowment to fund an investigatory team consisting of Catholics who know the Church, its history, and the faith and who know how to conduct an investigation that will end up being factually correct. The issue of anti-Semitism within the Traditionalist movement does need to be discussed, but it should be discussed by people who know what they're doing.
p.s., If you have a comment about anything appearing in this E-Letter, please do not hit your Reply button. Instead, go to Catholic Answers' discussion forums at
http://forums.catholic.com
where you may post your comment in the forum dedicated to the E-Letter. You will find a thread devoted to this issue of the E-Letter. Feel free to add your comment in the form of a reply to that thread.
|
[TOP]
C A T H O L I C A N S W E R S :
of
Discuss
Index
Prior issue
Next issue
Sign up