The Best Column on Ted Kennedy

A lot has been written on Ted Kennedy, but nothing compares to Mark Steyn:

We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its "mainstream" media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's passing, America's TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there's a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.

In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine:

"Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life …"

That's the way to do it! An "accident," "ugly" in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted's the star, and there's no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was … a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

"Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse."

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than "betrayed" him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let's face it, he doesn't have Ted's tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it's kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of "tremendous moral collapse." When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it's usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy's biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy's "achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne."

You can't make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don't know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo's – but you're struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy's Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo "would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history … Who knows – maybe she'd feel it was worth it." What true-believing liberal lass wouldn't be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second's notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you'll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain's comparatively very minor "Profumo scandal," the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen's Privy Council and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children's playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.

Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the "Kennedy curse," a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim – and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn't, he made all of us complicit in what he'd done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.

His defenders would argue that he redeemed himself with his "progressive" agenda, up to and including health care "reform." It was an odd kind of "redemption": In a cooing paean to the senator on a cringe-makingly obsequious edition of NPR's "Diane Rehm Show," Edward Klein of Newsweek fondly recalled that one of Ted's "favorite topics of humor was, indeed, Chappaquiddick itself. He would ask people, 'Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?'"

Terrific! Who was that lady I saw you with last night?

Beats me!

Why did the Last Lion cross the road?

To sleep it off!

What do you call 200 Kennedy sycophants at the bottom of a Chappaquiddick pond? A great start, but bad news for NPR guest-bookers! "He was a guy's guy," chortled Edward Klein. Which is one way of putting it.

When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterward, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the senator's passing marked "the end of civility in the U.S. Congress." Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost "civility" of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution."

Whoa! "Liberals" (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored resegregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked "the end of civility" in American politics, that's a shoo-in.

If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy's comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay. And, for Ted himself, who knows? He buried three brothers, and as many nephews, and, as the years took their toll, it looked sometimes as if the only Kennedy son to grow old had had to grow old for all of them. Did he truly believe, as surely as Melissa Lafsky and Co. do, that his indispensability to the republic trumped all else? That Camelot – that "fleeting wisp of glory," that "one brief shining moment" – must run forever, even if "How To Handle A Woman" gets dropped from the score. The senator's actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.

©MARK STEYN

Death of a Lie

It is a testament to the power of the media-academic complex that Capa's photograph supposedly capturing the death of a soldier has gone all these years with no challenge to what is obviously a staged photograph. It's hard to know where to start with this photograph. Firstly, what sort of competent soldier charges a line by himself? Did you notice the good fortune that the sun was in the perfect place from a photographer's perspective? How convenient. Capa's defenders claim that the bullet was supposed to have come from a sniper, but that leads to two problems: Again, why would a soldier be walking upright when there is a sniper about and, two, why would a photographer be looking backwards? Was he hoping for a hit? God forbid, though Capa was a nasty human being and such a scenario is not out of the question.

My biggest complaint about the picture is the Hollywood aspect of it. It's quite dramatic, and just the sort of thing that the Left could make into some sort of symbol to show the world how bad Franco was. The sniper aspect is the most absurd part of the story. The Spanish fought the war with weapons of the era, meaning weapons that were in many cases decades old. Orwell writes in Homage to Catalonia how awful the shooting was from so-called snipers. We're not talking about high-powered, technologically sophisticated weaponry here. And that leads me to my last point, namely, that in order for a man to be knocked back on his heels by a shot, the bullet must come from a short range (did not happen) or from a high powered rifle. But if it came from a high powered rifle, we would expect to see blood, skin, bones, clothing, something, anything leaving his body. You can go right now to YouTube and watch videos of Iraquis being shot by American soldiers with the most technologically advanced and high powered weaponry in world history, and they fall the way nearly everyone who has been shot falls: forward. If today's waeponry can't knock a man back, it surely was not happening 70 years ago.

Now comes word that a Spanish scholar has used geographical evidence to prove what we already knew: That Capa was a liar and a fraud.


By LARRY ROHTER

Published: August 17, 2009

After nearly three-quarters of a century Robert Capa’s “Falling Soldier” picture from the Spanish Civil War remains one of the most famous images of combat ever. It is also one of the most debated, with a long string of critics claiming that the photo, of a soldier seemingly at the moment of death, was faked. Now, a new book by a Spanish researcher asserts that the picture could not have been made where, when or how Capa’s admirers and heirs have claimed.
Robert Capa’s "Falling Soldier," from the Spanish Civil War has drawn both acclaim and questions over its veracity.


José Manuel Susperregui, a Spanish professor, asserts that Capa staged his famous photo.

In “Shadows of Photography,” José Manuel Susperregui, a communications professor at the Universidad del País Vasco, concludes that Capa’s picture was taken not at Cerro Muriano, just north of Córdoba, but near another town, about 35 miles away. Since that location was far from the battle lines when Capa was there, Mr. Susperregui said, it means that “the ‘Falling Soldier’ photo is staged, as are all the others in the series taken on that front.”

Experts at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, where Capa’s archive is stored, said they found some aspects of Mr. Susperregui’s investigation intriguing or even convincing. But they continue to believe that the image seen in “Falling Soldier” is genuine, and caution against jumping to conclusions. “Part of what is difficult about this is that people are saying, ‘Well if it’s not here, but there, then, good God, it’s fabricated,’ ” Willis E. Hartshorn, the center’s director, said in an interview. “That’s a leap that I think needs a lot more research and a lot more study.”

Mr. Susperregui said he began his inquiry by examining the background of other photographs from the same sequence as that of the “Falling Soldier,” pictures in which a mountain range can be seen in the distance. He then e-mailed the clearest of those images to librarians and historians in towns around Córdoba, asking if they recognized the landscape, and eventually got a positive response from a community called Espejo.

“I didn’t tell anyone that this was connected with the ‘Falling Soldier’ because that subject is just so ideologically and emotionally charged,” he explained in a telephone interview from his home east of Bilbao. “But a teacher showed his class the photo I sent, and right away one of the students knew the place.”

Picking up where Mr. Susperregui left off, the Spanish press, led by El Periódico de Catalunya, a newspaper in Barcelona, recently sent reporters to Espejo. They returned with photographs in which the current skyline seems an almost perfect match with what is seen in the background of Capa’s photographs, taken in September 1936, less than two months after the Spanish Civil War began.

Cynthia Young, curator of the Robert Capa Archive at the I.C.P., said the new evidence suggesting that “Falling Soldier” was photographed in Espejo was “compelling, even persuasive.” The confusion over the site may have arisen, she added, because Capa “captioned so few of his pictures” during the trip, his first as a war photographer, and “very possibly didn’t remember” where he took the picture, probably leaving his agents and editors back in Paris to make a guess when they developed his film. No negative of “Falling Soldier” is known to exist.

Spanish historians say that though there was intense combat in Espejo in late September, no fighting occurred there early in the month, when Capa, then 22 years old, and Gerda Taro, his colleague and companion, would have passed through. Until “the end of September, there wasn’t a single shot fired here, just some aerial bombardments,” Francisco Castro, a villager who was 9 years old at the time, told El Periódico. “The militiamen promenaded through the streets and ate the best hams in town.”

An alternative explanation of the creation of “Falling Soldier,” one which the photography center finds plausible, is that Capa’s photograph, was taken “not during the heat of battle,” as Mr. Hartshorn put it, but during maneuvers, perhaps being done for Capa’s benefit, “and that there was a moment in which the exercise became real, and this is the result of that moment.” He added: “The supposition has always been that there was a sniper” who picked off the militiaman from a distance.

But Mr. Susperregui challenges that notion too, saying it “has to be entirely dismissed.” Not only were the front lines of the opposing sides too widely separated and “the aim of gunnery too inexact” to make that hypothesis feasible, he said, but “there is no documentary reference, neither written nor visual, about the use of snipers” on the Córdoba front.

The renewed debate about “Falling Soldier” coincides with the opening of an exhibition, previously shown in New York and London, of nearly 300 of Capa and Taro’s photographs and notes at the Catalan National Museum of Art in Barcelona. The wounds of the Civil War have not yet completely healed in Spain, and the country’s Socialist government has felt compelled to defend the photograph, still a symbolic image for the left, which lost the war to Gen. Francisco Franco, against accusations that it was staged.

“Art is always manipulation, from the moment you point a camera in one direction and not another,” Spain’s culture minister, the film director and screenwriter Ángeles González-Sinde, said after visiting the exposition last month. Even if the new controversy proves that the photograph is something other than what Capa and his admirers have always claimed it to be, she suggested, that does not detract from Capa’s genius.

The first sustained challenge to the authenticity of “Falling Soldier” came in the mid-1970s, in Philip Knightley’s book “The First Casualty.” But the tentative identification 20 years later of the dying militiaman as an anarchist named Federico Borrell, known to have died at Cerro Muriano on Sept. 5, 1936, seemed to quell that controversy.

Mr. Susperregui, however, visited the Cerro Muriano site and notes that it is “a wooded area, with century-old trees,” not at all like the open hillside shown in Capa’s photograph. His book also refers to an article published in 1937 in an obscure anarchist magazine as a tribute to Federico Borrell, in which a fellow combatant describes Borrell as firing “from behind a tree” when he was killed and adds that “I can still see him stretched out behind the tree that served as his barricade, with his unruly hair falling over his face and a trickle of blood dripping from his mouth.”

In 1996 Magnum Photos, the agency that Mr. Capa helped found and which was run for many years by his brother Cornell, issued a statement contending that the naming of Mr. Borrell proved beyond any doubt that the “Falling Soldier” photograph was genuine. Magnum did not respond to requests for an interview about Mr. Susperregui’s findings.

In the book Mr. Susperregui also dwells on what he regards as other contradictions in the received account. He notes, for example, that Capa spoke in various interviews of the militiaman being felled by a burst of machine-gun fire, not a sniper’s bullet, and that the photographer also offered widely varying accounts of the vantage point and technique he employed to obtain the “Falling Soldier” photograph and another, almost identical image shortly afterward.

The truth of the matter, the photography center’s Mr. Hartshorn said, is that “it’s like a detective story, the crux and core of which is that we don’t know.

“There is enormous speculation,” he added, “but there is very little to hang your hat on and say, ‘This is what we know.’ There are just too many moving parts and pieces that you can’t verify or prove.”

A Reform of the Reform of the Reform of the Reform, etc.

The Novus Ordo crowd finds itself, with respect to the Mass, engaged in the very real and deliciously paradoxical practice of stifling change to the liturgy--the exact thing the liberals charged the pre-Vatican II Church of. Of course, the charge makes no sense. How can you claim that the pre-Vatican II Church was so rigid and inflexible, yet account for the "success" of Vatican II? The NO crowd is rather confused, instead of merely confusing. It risks being outmoded, never mind popularly disdained, 50 years after the Council. I do not have the faintest idea how a 65 year-old bishop would justify any opposition to a reform of the "reform." On what grounds? That it's too soon? The new Mass is perfect? Give it time? For what? Yet this is the vulgar parody the Church has lowered itself to in the early days of the 21st century. Nearly 40 years after the introduction of what is most certainly an invalid Mass, and its unparallelled devastation amongst the faithful, it is proving difficult to get 2/3 of American bishops to approve minor changes to the language of the Mass. There is no point delving too deeply here other than to point out the folly of negotiating with bishops for whom the very idea of tradition is, dare I say it?, anathema.

The truth about our great liturgy is that it comes to us through the ages, repackaged and refurbished here and there, though supremely intact for a ritual two millennia old. Along the way, certain accretions made their way into the Mass as a matter of fact, and along the way reformers kept the good and rooted out the bad. The point here is that the Mass changed. Not abruptly, and certainly not in a way that even remotely compares with the rewrite of the 1960s, but change did occur. I share with those who lament the changes made by Pius XII their disappointment in such an otherwise saintly pope. No doubt he was trying to accommodate the "modern" world's demands on our time, and perhaps he thought that by offering relatively minor changes to the liturgy, he could keep the barbarians at the gate. We all know what happened, as barbarians are never satisfied with a little. So, I thought I would put my suggestions out there. Mine are fairly "extreme" (I prefer to say all-encompassing), so I will be interested in hearing your thoughts.

I would relegate the Low Mass to priests' Masses or to any other Mass, including Sunday, where there are insufficient numbers of faithful to properly complement a High Mass. Thus, all my suggestions must be seen from the perspective of the High Mass. Also, I assume that all changes prior to Vatican II were done with the best and purest of intentions.

The homily is an important part of the time spent in church on Sunday. Unfortunately, it breaks up the cadence of the Mass. Henceforth, the homily will be preached prior to the Mass. The celebrant can prepare the faithful for the various readings and overall theme of the Mass, so that their prayers may be more focused.

I love the beginning of the Gospel of St. John. Unfortunately, its present position in the liturgy does not do it justice. I decree that the beginning of the Gospel of St. John begins the Mass. The celebrant or deacon will sing the Gospel just inside the sanctuary, well short of the foot of the steps at the altar. Such reverence and fear will point out to all who hear it the beauty of this passage. This Gospel passage will further focus each mind on the very reason for the Mass and the very act of God's saving those who love him.

From there we will have the asperges, though done slowly, with reverence.

The Mass will then begin as normal with the beautiful prayer of the Judica Me from the Psalms. However, the priest no longer will appear to say a Low Mass inside of a High Mass. He no longer will crank through the Gloria and Credo and sit: He will sing with an audible voice along with the faithful.

Also, following Fortesque's lead, the prayers immediately following the Consecration, before The Commemoration of the Dead, shall be placed before the Consecration, at the beginning of the Canon of the Mass. The rest of the Mass remains the same, and thus does the celebrant, when he intones "Go, you are dismissed," actually mean it.

Prayer and its Enemies

As we begin Holy Week, I thought it would be a good idea to focus on a couple of prayers from the Good Friday liturgy. One prayer in particular, the prayer for the Jews, always seems to get people worked up, so let's take a look at it and see what could possibly be so upsetting.

Let's start with the prayer for the Jews before the revisions implemented in 1955. Here's what it looks like: Let us pray also for the faithless Jews: that Almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts; so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and eternal God, who dost not exclude from thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

From my missal by the Maryknoll Fathers, copyright 1957: Let us pray also for the unbelieving Jews, that our God and Lord will lift the veil from their hearts so that they may also acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ.

From the St. Andrew Daily Missal, copyright 1960: Let us pray also for the Jews, that the Lord our God may take the veil from their hearts and that they also may acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Novus Ordo prayer from 1970: Let us pray for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant. Almighty and eternal God, long ago you gave your promise to Abraham and his posterity. Listen to your Church as we pray that the people you first made your own may arrive at the fullness of redemption. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen

In 2008, PB16 amended the prayer for the Jews in the Latin Mass: Let us also pray for the Jews: That our God and Lord may illuminate their hearts, that they acknowledge Jesus Christ is the Savior of all men. (Let us pray. Kneel. Rise.) Almighty and eternal God, who want that all men be saved and come to the recognition of the truth, propitiously grant that even as the fullness of the peoples enters Thy Church, all Israel be saved. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

I have to say that PB16 wrote a pretty good prayer. I like it better than PJ23's prayer, and it might even be better than PP12's prayer. I know I can live with it. But why do Jews and spurious Catholics get so upset about the prayer? I mean, if a Moslem prayed a certain prayer to convert Christians, why should I be offended? The Moslem, with a religion started by a plagiarist and scam artist, is the one with the issue, not me or any other Christian. I think the Jews (and by Jews I mean authentic, believing Jews, not the secular Jews who comprise the majority of Jews) are offended because the prayer hits a nerve. I suspect that, deep down, they understand the rich historical evidence that leads to the conclusion that Jesus was in fact the Christ. And yet they remain "stiff necked" as God aptly called them.

So, what is wrong with the prayer for the Jews? We are rightly reminded of the amazing power of prayer. Prayer is the most perfect expression of love and hope. Christians would be remiss in their duties if they were not to pray for everyone, which leads me to the second prayer in the Good Friday liturgy, the prayer for the pagans. True, committed Jews must comprise something on the order of a small fraction of one percent of the world's population. Yet they are influential, quite obviously have a history that is shared with Christians, and live in the very place that Christians call the Holy Land. Thus the Jews have a voice that is vastly disproportionate to the number of their adherents.

What strikes me as odd, though, is the prayer that follows the prayer for the Jews, the one for pagans. It reads: Let us pray also for the pagans, that almighty God will dispel the blindness of their hearts, so that they may renounce their false gods and be converted to the living and true God, and his only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, our God and Lord.

Think for a moment about how many pagans there are in the world. If there are 6 billion people, then at least 5.5 billion are pagans of one stripe or another. Many people who call themselves Christians are really pagans. Yet pagans seem to wear the label as a badge of honor and mock, as do the Jews, the prayerful offerings of those who believe in the True God.

This year I will put the emphasis on the prayer for the pagans.

R. Catesby

What Will He Do?

In case you haven't heard, tolerance is a one-way street. Of course, if you're a member of the NewChurch, that's just fine. From inventing Holy Thursday ceremonies that include women to "praying" in a mosque as the head of the Church, modern Catholics have been only too happy to assist the enemies of the Church in their efforts to destroy it.

But now we have a real fight on our hands, one that cannot be spun as the product of ecumenism by Rome. Shmuel Rabinovitch, the rabbi who polices the goings-on at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, has laid down the law to PB16 on the eve of his trip to the Holy Land, declaring publicly that PB16 must not wear his pectoral cross while visiting the Wailing Wall. Here are two articles from Jewish newspapers on the controversy:

http://jta.org/news/article/2009/03/17/1003767/rabbi-no-crosses-at-western-wall
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1237114844980&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

This is not the first time Rabinovitch has demanded that such "insulting and provocative" symbols be removed. Here is a link to an article from 2007 regarding his bullying of 14 Austrian bishops and their pectoral crosses: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/124235

In his latest insult to Catholics, Rabinovitch makes the claim that PJP2 did not wear his pectoral cross when he visited the Wailing Wall in 2000. The link to this picture makes it clear that PJP2 did in fact wear his pectoral cross and that Rabinovitch is either stupid or a liar: http://www.note2god.com/uploads/news/id14/pope_kotel2.gif

But 9 years later we have an entirely different situation, not to mention pope. PB16 is still in hot water for the whole SSPX/Bishop Williamson affair. PB16 already has apostatized with his treacherous visit to the Blue Mosque in Turkey in 2006, but even the Muslims did not demand that he remove his cross. Then again, maybe the Muslims are just better at PR, for I cannot imagine how any Muslim, let alone a pagan or even a Christian, can take seriously anything PB16 says after being photographed in a mosque, praying with a "religion" that denies Christ. Anyway, here is a link to a series of pics of PB16 visiting the Blue Mosque: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/6197064.stm

I'll admit to a sort of grudging respect for Rabinovich. He's managed to "offend" Jewish women's groups who have sought to revolt against Jewish customs at the Wall. We'll see very soon whether PB16 is as generous to the Jews as he was to the Muslims.

R. Catesby

New Foreskin for an Old Penis

Through an act of charity gone horribly wrong (and being terribly busy at work) I have been unable to provide timely updates. I would apologize for the lack of activity on this blog over the last month or so, but as there is no one who reads and learns from my words, I will move on.

Much of each person's degree of success depends on the order in which he appears in the great play of life. If you are a salesman who follows in the footsteps of a mediocre predecessor, you will get high marks for your abilities; treat a woman with even the most basic respect after her encounter with a modern male and you will be hailed as the perfect gentleman. It seems few people have any "big shoes" to fill any more.

PB16 is a man who is benefiting from this weakness of our culture: To wit, his letter to Catholic bishops made public March 12, 2009. In this letter the pope alternately reassures and scolds mildly everyone involved in the debacle concerning the lifting of the excommunications of the Society of St. Pius X and the simultaneous--and irrelevant--problem of one of Bishop Williamson's comments about the Holocaust. You may check out the pope's letter here to get his words in the proper context: http://www.whotv.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-eu-vatican-holocaust-denial-text,0,7832675.story

PB16 follows four very weak popes, starting with John 23rd. More importantly, he follows John Paul II, who never met a scandal he wouldn't tolerate, except, of course, the SSPX. By any sensible standard, PJP2 was as weak a pope as could be imagined. Conservative Catholics will read this letter and be heartened that a pope actually addressed a letter to bishops and dared to criticize them (and those who think like them) for being unwilling to extend their hands in friendship with the SSPX. Some "Traditionalists" (a stupid word that serves only to marginalize authentic Catholics) might even be tempted to see PB16's words as proof and comfort that he intends to use the SSPX to help restore sanity to a Church long gone mad. But he gives away his true motive in lifting the bogus excommunications in the 6th paragraph, just far enough down so that most educated people and all journalists will by then have stopped reading. He recalls similar organizations that formerly rejected Vatican II and ultimately "changed their interior attitudes" that "enabled them to move beyond one-sided positions and [break] down rigidity." From hell, Orwell is smiling approvingly, and Rousseau giggles in the corner.

Thus the title of today's post. For all the talk, nothing has changed at Rome: For modern Catholics, Pentecost began on the date that Vatican II closed. The new Mass is the expression of their ersatz religion, and any attempt to minimize its status, not to mention having equal status with the ancient Mass, is met with a vulgar viciousness reserved for no other threat. How pathetic that the pope needs to remind Catholic bishops that Church history is 2000 years old and did not begin in 1965 (see paragraph 3)!

The allure of legitimacy trips up most people; the desire to fit in and conform at any cost kills the righteous spirit. St. Paul understood this when he rebuked St. Peter for not sitting with Gentiles, and it is instructive that PB16's Lenten letter, in which he refers to Galatians, totally omits that specific episode. It also is sad that a pope ridicules St. Paul for committing "rhetorical excesses." One wonders if he even tries to understand St. Paul. I am more convinced than ever that the journey the SSPX is taking with Rome is nothing more than a death march, and the worst part is that they will be asking for the pope's blessing at each step along the way.

R. Catesby

P.S.: The title of today's post comes by way of a dear friend who is a professor of the history of religion, with an emphasis on early Christianity. He also describes himself as a pagan and an atheist, which makes him only slightly less religious, though perhaps more informed, than, say, Cardinal Mahoney.

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

I was out of town for a few days but had been covering Benedict's debacle as closely as I could. In my weaker moments, I feel something akin to pity for the man, and then I snap back to reality. The truth is, Ratzinger's betrayal of the revolutionaries--co-conspirators during the heady days of the 1950s and 1960s--at the Council has finally caught up to him. During the last 10 days, he has been condemned publicly by self-appointed Jewish watchdog groups and Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel over the Bishop Williamson issue, and by the spokesman of a priests organization in northern Bavaria over Benedict's appointment of a conservative bishop there.

The Vatican could have used these incidents as a major teaching opportunity. Instead, the world sees a weak pope and Curia. And indeed yesterday it was announced that Bishop Williamson must recant his beliefs in order to be accepted back into the Church. For good measure, Vatican II as a non-negotiable repository of "truth" has been rubbed in the face of the SSPX.

Welcome to Rome.

I have been suspicious of this rapprochement and it appears more and more clear that this is a major mistake.

What the Jews accomplished in bullying Benedict into changing an ancient, beautiful prayer in the Good Friday service, is now flying head-long to its logical, lethal solution: Namely, changing anything in the Church that they do not like. Just to be clear here, "they" refers to anyone whose antipathy towards the Church is so great that it becomes their life's work to rid the Church of anything that makes them uncomfortable, squeamish, or otherwise account for their behavior and beliefs. Pagans, pseudo-Christians and Jews all play a part in this. Thus a bishop is judged by Rome (after consultation with "concerned" Jewish groups) to be disobedient, a rogue priest essentially. Meanwhile the millions of priests and educators who knowingly teach error under the auspices of Catholic diocese, schools and hospitals are left to poison the well.

And all the while, I keep asking myself: What is the penalty for denying Christ?

R. Catesby