What's the point of the Jews?

The big theme of Roy Schoeman's apostolate (and indeed the title of his website) is that 'salus ex Iudaeis est salvation if of the Jews'.

non enim ad populum profundi sermonis et ignotae linguae tu mitteris ad domum Israhel, 

neque ad populos multos profundi sermonis et ignotae linguae quorum non possis audire sermones et si ad illos mittereris ipsi audirent te. 

For thou art not sent to a people of a profound speech, and of an unknown tongue, but to the house of Israel: 

Nor to many nations of a strange speech, and of an unknown tongue, whose words thou canst not understand: and if thou wert sent to them, they would hearken to thee 

[Ezechiel 3:5-6]

The Jews themselves, of course, must first acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Messias. Indeed, they have no Messias other than Jesus. In modern Jewish "theology", the remission of man's sins even today comes only from Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac on Calvary (Mount Moriah). The Jews themselves have no other sacrifice, since they no longer have either a priesthood or the Temple. According to the Talmud, the red thread on Yom Kippur stopped turning white at the time of the Crucifixion.

That's not to say that the Jews aren't a remarkable people. They maintained their identity for 2,000 years - which was very unusual! And for what? Well, St Paul seems to imply that when the Jews have accepted Jesus Christ - and of course the Church, which He founded - they will have a special role to play at the End of the World:

quid ergo quod quaerebat Israhel hoc non est consecutus electio autem consecuta est ceteri vero excaecati sunt 

sicut scriptum est dedit illis Deus spiritum conpunctionis oculos ut non videant et aures ut non audiant usque in hodiernum diem 

et David dicit fiat mensa eorum in laqueum et in captionem et in scandalum et in retributionem illis 

obscurentur oculi eorum ne videant et dorsum illorum semper incurva 

dico ergo numquid sic offenderunt ut caderent absit sed illorum delicto salus gentibus ut illos aemulentur 

quod si delictum illorum divitiae sunt mundi et deminutio eorum divitiae gentium quanto magis plenitudo eorum 

What then? That which Israel sought, he hath not obtained: but the election hath obtained it. And the rest have been blinded. 

As it is written: God hath given them the spirit of insensibility; eyes that they should not see and ears that they should not hear, until this present day. 

And David saith: Let their table be made a snare and a trap and a stumbling block and a recompense unto them. 

Let their eyes be darkened, that they may not see: and bow down their back always. 

I say then: Have they so stumbled, that they should fall? God forbid! But by their offence salvation is come to the Gentiles, that they may be emulous of them. 

Now if the offence of them be the riches of the world and the diminution of them the riches of the Gentiles: how much more the fulness of them?

[Romans 11:7-12]

Indeed, "Messianism" is a growing phenomenon in modern religious Judaism - albeit of a strongly protestant variety. Jonatham Bernis is a TV Messianic Rabbi, who interviewed Schoeman (see above) without quite realising his position.

Unfortunately, one modern saecular form of Messianism is a Jewish version of Socialism. It was this messianic socialism that became one of the roots of Marxism, via Karl Marx's friend Moses Hess. Hess also introduced Friedrich Engels to socialism, though Marx and Engels later had a falling out with Hess after Engels had an affair with Hess's wife.

Most interestingly, Schoeman takes the view that the state of Israel's early victories against the Arabs were literally miraculous (not figuratively or hyperbolically!), but Israel then once again failed to acknowledge this and became proud. He also believes that the conversion of the Jews is necessary for the Second Coming.

The Christian Virtue of Patriotism

Patriotism is a great virtue. To be a patriot is to love one’s fatherland. This means that it is to love the land of the people that sired you. Patriotism is a natural overflow of the virtue of piety — that is, the virtue of the home. As piety would have us rendering what is due in justice to parents and other family members, patriotism would have us render the same to our nation, its government, and our fellow citizens. Both of these are a matter of justice, for the virtues of piety and patriotism are parts of that cardinal virtue. Over and above justice is the theological virtue of charity, which also enters into a consideration of Catholic piety and patriotism. After God, we love our neighbors, that is, those who are “nigh” to us, meaning near us. Those most near to us are our parents and our siblings.

Our charity, as well as the just demands of piety and patriotism, spread out in broadening concentric circles from the family home to the neighborhood, to the town or city, to the state, to the region, to the nation (or empire), of which we are a resident, citizen, or subject. If we see our country as “our people” — something much more possible in homogeneous, non-pluralistic societies — it is much easier to see how piety quite naturally becomes patriotism. In such societies, people are not only united by a common culture; they are also closer to each other in the gene pool.

Thus patriotism is a rootedness in the land and its people.

Many Americans, I believe, lack this Catholic and “organic” notion of patriotism. For them, patriotism is the love of loosely comprehended abstractions — “freedom,” “pluralism,” “democracy,” “our way of life,” “national greatness,” etc. Or it may be a love of a document — the Constitution. None of these are worthy of true patriotism. They are not persons, or groups of persons. And as ideas, many of them are unworthy. Pluralism in religious matters, for instance, is the equating of God’s truth with Satan’s lie and man’s distortion. It is not our national strength; it is our bane. As for freedom, the greatest freedom is “the liberty of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21) that we each receive by grace, and that broader “freedom and exultation of Holy Mother Church” that we daily pray for after every Low Mass in the traditional liturgy. As often as not, the “freedom” extolled in the civic religion of America may be reduced to freedom for sin, which is a nonsensical concept, an oxymoron in Catholic terms, since sin enslaves us. (The “ordered liberty” spoken of by many constitutionalist conservatives could be a good thing, depending on what it is ordered to. To the degree that it is ordered to God’s Eternal Law, it is good; to the degree that it is not, it is evil.)

Patriotism is not a lot of things that are passed off under its name:It is not love of the government that rules you, though it does demand respect for that government and obedience to its just laws.

• It is not an ideological commitment to the founding principles of the nation in which you were born, especially if your nation was born of a revolution. A Catholic can be — and must be — a patriot whether he were an American, a Russian enslaved by Soviet rule, a Chinese under Mao, a German under Nazi tyranny, a Frenchmen under the anti-Catholic Revolution, etc. Within the proper parameters of a just war, genuine patriots may fight the tyrannical governments that oppress their fatherlands. In such cases, they are counterrevolutionaries. With varying degrees of success, Germans rose against Hitler, Spaniards against the vicious Masonic-Communist “Republic” in Spain, Vendéens and Chouans against the French Revolution, Mexicans against the Masonic tyrant, Calles, etc.)
• It is not a feeling or conviction of the absolute superiority of your nation. (As in “American Exceptionalism” or the type of British jingoism that Gilbert and Sullivan lampooned in “He is An Englishman.”)
• It is not the nationalism that would pursue the good of one’s country at the expense of others. (It is Saint Joan of Arc, not Cardinal Richelieu.)
• It is not a detestation or contempt for other nations.
• It is not an agreement with your nation’s foreign policy, or even a particular domestic policy.

For patriotism to be genuine in a nation as large as the United States — which is a good size for an empire — we have to recover the value of the family, the local and regional, of the intermediate institutions that stand between the individual and the State, and that common thread running throughout all these, the principle of subsidiarity. These are the wholesome organic ingredients of a true patriotism.

What I said in Tradition is an Affirmation about the character of Catholic tradition may also be said of patriotism:

We receive the Faith locally. We live it in our families. We utter it in our own tongues. We practice it in this church building, with people from this community. (The Italian notion of campanilismo and the [Spanish] Carlist conception of fueros are cultural and political expressions of this.) The living out of the true Faith is what produces a Catholic culture, and that culture is what ought to impress itself on our young, forming their convictions, eliciting their actions, commanding their reactions. An identity — a genuine one, anyway — is forged in this organic fashion. We don’t put them on and take them off as an indecisive college student does his major. That is what the rootless, restless modern man does, and this is one cause of his insanity.

The patriot loves his family, his neighbors, his backyard, those local institutions that nurtured and formed him, which he visits if he has moved abroad, and whose memory he cherishes. And he detests the petty politicians, oligarchs, commercialists, and aggressive ideologues who would destroy these precious things. Love of these things justifies his going to war when his country and its people are attacked. Big government, monied interests, vague notions of “progress,” “spreading our way of life,” or “making the world safe for democracy,” are causes utterly unworthy of the blood of an American warrior — of any warrior.

One last thing: the Catholic patriot desires his fatherland to come under the Rule of Christ the King. Here in the USA, it means he wants a Catholic America.

[Brother André Marie, 'Catholic and Patriotic', Catholicism.org]

The Death of Fr Bernhard Stempfle

And now, your starter for ten! First they came for... whom, exactly?

Pace Pastor Niemöller, Hitler's first really murderous move wasn't against the Communists or the Social Democrats, let alone the Jews. It was, of course, against his own side - specifically the radical wing of the Nazi Party (i.e. even more specifically Ernst Röhm and the other gays of the SA), over which he most immediately needed to exert control. And whom, of course, no one would particularly miss!

But it wasn't just gay Nazis who died on the Night of the Long Knives. At the same time, several non-Nazi right-wingers also met their maker. As, indeed, did a certain modernist Catholic priest* by the name of Fr Bernhard Stempfle.

As with Röhm, Fr Stemfle's main real crime had been simply that he knew too much. Like Röhm, he had been a member of Hitler's inner circle. Indeed, he had helped Hitler to write Mein Kampf, and may quite possibly have written much of it himself. Unlike Röhm though, he had wanted out.

Which rather raises the question what exactly he must have known about Hitler that could have been so damaging that he ended up paying for it with his life.

And here, of course, the conspiracy theories can kick off with abandon. How close were he and Hitler really? Had he ever heard Hitler's confession? What might he have known about Hitler's sex life? Would it really have been so very damaging for Hitler if people learnt quite how little of his famous book he had actually written personally? Or was Fr Stempfle's death simply one final, symbolic, paranoiac and parricidal Oedipal repudiation of the Catholicism from which the Führer had long ago lapsed?

And, of course, was it significant that it was Emil Maurice (Hitler's Mischling - i.e. partly Jewish - driver, whom he'd sacked for seducing his niece) who personally did the deed?

No answer is entirely satisfactory, though it can be said almost for certain that the death of Fr Stempfle marked the final end of whatever vestigial or superficial Catholicism had remained within the Nazi movement.

From 2nd July 1934 onward, neither gays nor Catholics (let alone gay Catholics!) would have any place in mainstream Nazism.

*The myth that he was a Jesuit is hilariously widespread, and of course it speaks volumes not just about the anti-Catholic bigotry of those who perpetuate it but also about the lazily anti-intellectual attitude of virtually the entire political Left when dealing with either the Catholic Church or the Third Reich (let alone both!). In truth, he was of course (because Wikipedia really is just two clicks away!) a Hieronymite.

God and Country!

Austin Geswein (Petty Officer Second Class, US Navy?), looking pius

Happy St Boniface's Day

Eduard von Grützner, Drei Mönche bei der Brotzeit ("Three Monks at Bread Time") (1885) 

An English missionary who became the Apostle of Germany, not to mention the patron saint of beer!

Fronleichnam im Stift Heiligenkreuz

Fronleichnam (literally 'socage-body') is what we in England call, er, 'Corpus Christi'. In Germany though it's still quite a big thing. In the Catholic states it's a public holiday, which even the Nazis didn't dare abolish.* And in the procession you don't just get priests and monks and boys and things, you also get people wearing all sorts of funny uniforms, including (where they exist) members of Catholic student fraternities. (In one of the pictures above, they're the ones with the swords.)

Heiligenkreuz Abbey is of course the monastery when one Adolf Josef Lanz once "tried his vocation", but of course it didn't work out. According to him it was because he had a nervous indisposition, according to others it was because he fancied blokes too much.

And of course he then went on to call himself Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels and founded the Guido von List Society. But to such things I shall no doubt return later.

*The English bishops in their recent decision to scrap it (effectively, that is, by moving it to the following Sunday) showed no such qualms.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, ob 4th June 1941

Prince Wilhelm of Prussia (1906–1940), with his grandfather the Kaiser