The Williamson Affair: what rational Jews say

I decided to wait until the furore had died down a bit before commenting on the Williamson affair and the lifting of the excommunications on the SSPX bishops.

I'm glad I did. What a lot of nonsense has been spewed forth by journals such as The Times of London and The Tablet.

Read these and marvel at the sheer asininity of the commentary:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article5614137.ece

and this:

http://www.thetablet.co.uk/pdf/2767/bookmarks/#pagemode=bookmarks

The arrogance displayed in these 2 articles, particularly that of The Times is pretty laughable. Who is the leader writer at The Times to tell the Pope what excommunication in the Catholic Church means? What is his/her authority to determine issues of Roman canon law? What is his/her authority even to comment on them, given the chasm-like lack of knowledge he/she demonstrates? It is so silly as to be no more than risible.

It is as absurd as if the Pope were to excommunicate the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem - or, for that matter, the non-Catholic Editor of The Times.

Consider how much more asinine those 2 articles appear when compared with the following much more sober and balanced commentary by 2 Jewish writers.

I will let their comments stand on their own since they speak for themselves eloquently.

This from Rabbi Irwin Kula on the Washington Post/Newsweek website:

Rabbi Irwin Kula

Jewish Reaction to Pope Disproportionate
newsweek.washingtonpost.com
Jan. 30, 2009
Rabbi Irwin Kula

The official Jewish response to Pope Benedict XVI's recent decision to reach out to the St Pius X Society and to revoke the excommunication (though not yet determining the status) of four bishops says a great deal about the psycho-social state of American Jewish leadership or at least the leadership that claims to speak for American Jews.

The admittedly unnerving if not hurtful Holocaust denying views of one of those bishops, British born Richard Williamson, an obscure, irrelevant, cranky old man, offered on Swedish television, evoked the wrath of no less than the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the B'nai B'rith International, the International Jewish Commission on Interreligious Consultations and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. "The decision undermines the strong relationship between Catholics and Jews", they protested. "We are stunned that the Vatican has ignored our concerns", they proclaimed.

This will have "serious implications for Catholic-Jewish relations" and there will be a "political cost for the Vatican" they threatened. And from Israel, the Chief Rabbinate in Israel, one of the most corrupt religious establishments in Western democracies, entered the fray calling into doubt the Pope's impending visit to Israel. All this hubbub and anxious lashing out about an internal Church matter regarding the sort of crabby, crotchety, trivial, unknown sort of jerk - the ratty uncle who embarrasses you every time he is in public -- who we all recognize exists in our communities.

As an eighth generation rabbi and someone who lost much family in the Holocaust, it could just be me, but this official Jewish response seems outrageously over the top. Do millions of American Jews sufficiently care that the Pope revoked the excommunication of this unheard-of bishop such that major Jewish organizations should devote so much energy and attention to this and turn it into a cause célèbre worthy of front page attention? And is this the way we speak to each other after decades of successful interfaith work on improving our relationship?

How is it that the view of some cranky bishop who has no power evokes calls of a crisis in Catholic - Jewish relations despite the revolutionary changes in Church teachings regarding Jews since Vatican II? Where is the "proportionality", where is the giving the benefit of the doubt - a central religious and spiritual imperative - in response to something that is admittedly upsetting but in the scheme of things is less than trivial especially given this Pope's historic visit to Auschwitz in which he unambiguously recognized the evil perpetrated upon Jews in the Holocaust and in his way "repented" for any contribution distorted Church teachings made to create the ground for such evil to erupt.

Something is off-kilter here. Is it possible that the leadership of Jewish defense agencies, people with the best of motivation who have historically done critical work in fighting anti-Semitism, have become so possessed by their roles as monitors of anti-Semitism, so haunted by unresolved fears, guilt, and even shame regarding the Holocaust, and perhaps so unconsciously driven by how these issues literally keep their institutions afloat, that they have become incapable of distinguishing between a bishop's ridiculous, loopy, discredited views about the Holocaust and a Church from the Pope down which has clearly and repeatedly recognized the evil done to Jews in the Holocaust and called for that evil to never be forgotten?

Perhaps, this called for a little understanding of what it must be like to actually run a 1.2 billion person spiritual community (one with which I disagree on many issues) and to be trying to create some sense of unity from right to left, from extreme liberalism to extreme traditionalism - sort of like the liberal Barack Obama inviting Rick Warren, despite his hurtful views on homosexuality, to give the invocation at the inauguration. How about cutting a Pope, who we know along with the previous Pope is probably amongst the most historically sensitive Popes to the issues of anti-Semitism, Holocaust, and the relationship to Judaism and Jews, a little slack given how he is trying to heal his own community. And is it possible that the Pope's desire/hope/need to reintegrate the Church (he has also reached out to Liberal theologian Hans Kung) may be of more importance both to the Church and actually to religion on this planet than whether we Jews are upset about the lifting of excommunication of one irrelevant bishop.

Would we Jews like to be judged by the crankiest, most outlandish, hurtful, and stupid thing any rabbi in the world said about Catholics or Christians? We Jews are no longer organized to excommunicate and a rabbi can't be defrocked the way the Church does with its clergy but surely there are individual rabbis who say things so abhorrent about the "other" that though we still call the person rabbi we would not want to be taken to task for doing so.

And isn't it possible that bringing Richard Williamson back inside the Church may actually influence him to see how wrong he is on this issue given how clear the Church is regarding the Holocaust and its commitment to Catholic -Jewish relations? After all the Pope himself said, "I hope my gesture is followed by the hoped-for commitment on their part to take the further steps necessary to realize full communion with the Church, thus witnessing true fidelity, and true recognition of the magisterium and the authority of the pope and of the Second Vatican Council."

There is no way to read this other than to conclude that to be fully reinstated in the Catholic Church, all those who have passed the first test must now clear the big hurdle: either accept what the Catholic Church teaches or remain on the sidelines. And what the Church teaches, among other things, is the necessity of respecting Jews.

Moreover, shouldn't the Jewish defense agency leadership, which to its credit is probably the most effective at its work of any ethnic and religious group in this country, try to understand the inner categories of the other, especially after decades of inter-faith and inter-group work? In this case, that there is a difference between heresy - an accusation from which the Pope is trying to heal part of his community- and stupidity. And what is the cost of not seeing the difference between heresy and stupidity?

Finally, when the Pope as well as key Vatican officials said within a day that Williamson's views are "absolutely indefensible" and that in the Pope's own words, the Church feels "full and indispensable solidarity with Jews against any Holocaust denial" where was a little humility in response? Wouldn't it have been interesting, yet alone ethically compelling, for those who initially lashed out to have acknowledged that perhaps they did overreact and that they do know that the Church and specifically this Pope are very sensitive to these issues. But that we ask the Pope and church hierarchy to please understand that, whether fully justified or not, we are still very very raw and very vulnerable regarding the Holocaust and so we are sorry if we did over react and we are deeply grateful for the Pope's unambiguous reiteration of that which we do know is his view and is contemporary Catholic teachings.

And this from the Jerusalem Post:

David Klinghoffer

The wages of whining
The Jerusalem Post
Jan. 29, 2009
David Klinghoffer

A point I try to impress on my children is one that the Jewish community would do well to consider. If you spend a day continually whining about trivia, by the end of the day, even if you've got something legitimate to complain about, mommy and daddy aren't going to be in a frame of mind to listen to you very seriously. This lesson can be difficult for a little kid to grasp.

The Anti-Defamation League has a hard time with it, too, otherwise the group wouldn't profess to be "stunned" that the Vatican had "ignored our concerns" and reversed the excommunication of four previously outlawed rebel bishops, leaders of the reactionary Society of St. Pius X. The Pius X organization opposes the reforms of Vatican II, including its olive branch to the Jews and Judaism. One of the bishops is a flagrant anti-Semite, Holocaust denier and conspiracy theorist.
Bishop Richard Williamson remains in hot water with the Catholic Church for having accepted ordination in 1988 in the first place, against the wishes of Pope John Paul II. Williamson still cannot minister officially as a bishop. Yet the title and at least some of the influence that goes with it are now his, unsullied by the sinister status associated with excommunication. The combination of malignant views and lofty office are why this case matters.

A priest friend in Rome whom I trust assures me there are sound technical reasons for Pope Benedict's act of mercy to Williamson and the other SSPX bishops: "Being a nut, even a pernicious one, is simply not a justification for maintaining an excommunication, which, from the Church's point of view, is the ultimate punishment. The guy could have been an unrepentant murderer and the excommunication - for the specific offense of illicit ordination - would have still been lifted. It is a technical thing, not a sign of personal approval or rehabilitation."

But as Jews know well from our own religious tradition, well acquainted with legal arcana, such technicalities usually carry the day only when unopposed by urgent real-world considerations.
Before Williamson's forgiveness was announced but after it was known to be a likely prospect, the ADL sought to dissuade Benedict from extending public mercy to a man who argues that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a gift that "God put into men's hands." Yet the Pope went ahead anyway, leaving ADL national director Abraham Foxman "stunned." When the news came out, my wife and I watched Williamson's video on YouTube in which he allows that maybe 200,000 or 300,000 Jews died in Nazi concentration camps, but not one in a gas chamber.

I was disturbed but not stunned.

No one should minimize the good that the ADL and other Jewish anti-defamation groups have accomplished in publicizing Muslim anti-Semitism. But they have also done great damage to Jewish-Christian relations by making a habit of attacking Catholics and Protestants, sometimes in hysterical terms, on matters about which Jews have no business complaining.

Thus for example the ADL and its allies remain publicly unapologetic, as far as I know, for their role in hyping the supposed anti-Semitic menace posed by Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ. Before the film was released, the ADL harped on supposed parallels between Gibson's movie and medieval Passion plays. The latter led to pogroms, so the obvious implication was that the former could also.

Others went further. In an article in The New Republic - Jewish-owned and edited - a Jewish scholar, Paula Fredriksen, stated not as speculation but as a certainty that when the film appeared in countries like Poland, Spain, France and Russia, savagery would erupt: "When violence breaks out, Mel Gibson will have a much higher authority than professors and bishops to answer to."

Of course no such thing came to pass.

Meanwhile, Jewish groups continue to pillory the Christian churches for their alleged guilt in fomenting the Holocaust. That's despite the fact that Hitler himself clearly dismissed as ineffective any fancied strategy to try to whip up Germans with appeals to punish the Christ-killers. In Mein Kampf, an influential best-seller, he relied on the language of Darwinian biology to declare a race war against the Jews.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the liberal Union for Reform Judaism, America's largest Jewish denomination, has called conservative Christians "zealots" and "bigots." Harshly attacking opposition to gay marriage, Yoffie remarked: "We cannot forget that when Hitler came to power in 1933, one of the first things he did was ban gay organizations." And so on and on. By now, as far as anti-defamation activism is concerned, our community has squandered much of its credibility. Therefore when a real issue of concern arises, as in the Williamson affair, we have little on which to draw. Under circumstances like these, some Christians will listen politely but then turn away, citing technicalities.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and the author of Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History and other books.

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The Pope will undoubtedly treat the hysterical reaction of some Catholics - even bishops - with the same degree of mild regret and paternal solicitude as is his habitual manner.

The rest of us might just remember that the very same Catholics who are now berating the Pope and even calling for his resignation include many who spewed forth vitriol and venomous hatred against traditionalists for the alleged reason that...wait for it...yes, you've guessed it..."they were disloyal to the Pope"!.

Yes, really!

Come back ye Pharisees and whited sepulchres! Your time is not yet up, apparently.

Some people still think that Catholics have always blamed present-day Jews for crucifying Christ.

That is nonsense and never has been our theology. All sinners are to blame for he Crucifixion and bad Catholics are more to blame than bad Jews.

And we do not hesitate to blame those amongst our own bishops whose disloyalty to the Church often crucifies Christ far more obviously and openly than any other religious group or leader does.

...

And for the avoidance of any doubt...

...and for the record, I think Bishop Williamson has made some exceedingly foolish and harmful comments and he should either stop or more reasonable people in SSPX should ask him to leave.

Equally for the record, the fact that the Pope has lifted the excommunications does not (repeat not - oh ye mendacious secular media) mean that he has in any way approved any of Bishop Williamson's highly unhelpful comments.

But, of course, that will not stop the media attacking our Pope, grossly unfairly.

They will go on doing that because they have another agenda than the truth and that agenda is to attack the Catholic Church and the Catholic faith and that includes vilifying the Pope.

However, as to Bishop Williamson, I say no more since I do not think the bishop should be given any more publicity.

I prefer to speak about our great father in the Faith, the Supreme Pontiff, the Pontifex Maximus, the Supreme Pastor of God's Church, the Patriarch of the West and the Bishop of the Holy City of Rome, the one and only...

POPE BENEDICT XVI

...

SSPX: the excommunications lifted by Pope Benedict XVI

And so the news has finally come.

I am not a member of the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) and I particularly would distance myself from some of the sillier comments made by Bishop Richard Williamson but I do think the Society has been rather shabbily mistreated for the last 20 years or more.

It has become the soft target for every pusillanimous soul who thinks he can gain a few worldly "brownie points" with the fashionable modern pundits by joining in the general frenzy of vilification and venom against the Society, so reminiscent of a pack of bullies kicking a man when he is down.

Defending the underdog somehow doesn't apply when the underdog is the SSPX.

Such are the strange values of some modern liberal Catholics who have joined the unseemly rush to be first to kick those whose principal crime was to continue to worship and believe as did their Fathers in the Faith.

Many simply did not bother to take the time to find out what the SSPX actually taught and held.

Time and again falsehoods were spoken of them - they were sedevacantists (false), they rejected all of Vatican II (false), they were crypto-Protestants (false), they considered the Novus Ordo Missae invalid (false), they rejected the authority of the Pope (false), and even that they were Fascists or Nazis (false). And so on, and so on. It was as if no-one really wanted to find out what they taught and believed but rather just wanted to use them as a useful kick-butt to vent one's spleen upon.

Now read the new decree and you will see that our beloved Holy Father has a rather different, much more pastoral, charitable and compassionate view.

See also that no legal reasons are given for the lifting of the excommunications. That may, however, have been carefully planned.

Is this an act of clemency? Could be.

Is this an act of justice? Could be.

It is (deliberately?) left vague. That way no "side" can claim a victory and all must exercise caution, care and charity. Not a bad solution, that!

The Society of St Pius X long ago appealed the excommunications but it has taken 20 years to hear their appeal - a grave injustice toward anyone, let alone fellow Catholics, regardless of what they may have done or what one may think of them. Everyone should be equal before the law - not just those currently in favour.

Now the appeal has finally been heard and, mirabile dictu, upheld.

The decree of 1 July 1988 was not a decision to excommunicate but rather a declaration of a penalty automatically imposed latae sententiae. Moreover the decree was not signed and for a long time did not appear in the Acta of the Holy See.

The Society appealed the decree which, under the 1983 code, meant that the penalty was suspended until the appeal was heard (Can. 1353) but one never hears this part of the story.

The Most Rev Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre CSSSp

Archbishop Lefebvre argued that his actions had been necessary because the traditional form of the Catholic faith and sacraments might be in danger of extinction without a traditionalist clergy to pass them on to the next generation.

He called the ordinations "opération survie" - "Operation Survival", citing in his defence Can. 1323 and 1324 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law.

Can. 1323 provides that a canonical penalty is not binding when a person has acted "by reason of necessity or grave inconvenience, unless the act is intrinsically evil or tends to the harm of souls".

Can. 1324 states that, if the act is intrinsically evil or tends to the harm of souls, the penalty must be diminished or replaced by a penance if the offence was committed by a person who was coerced by grave fear, even if only relative, or by reason of necessity or grave inconvenience.

In all these circumstances, Can. 1324(3) concludes, automatic penalties do not apply.

Accordingly this was an appeal with a reasonable prospect of success. But it was simply not heard. Scandalously, it seems that it was simply ignored. Justice delayed - especially for 20 years! - is justice denied, even if the final result would have been a refusal.

But now we have a new pope. And the final result has not been a refusal. On the contrary, the result has been, in effect, that the appeal of SSPX and Archbishop Lefebvre, made all those years ago, has been allowed and the excommunication lifted.

The Assisi debacle in which the Blessed Sacrament was removed from the Tabernacle and the crucifix replaced by a small statue of the Buddha: one of a number of apparent scandals that the SSPX felt moved to criticise

It is rather a shame that the Holy See allowed Archbishop Lefebvre to die with the apparent penalty of excommunication lying upon him - seemingly unjustly, as it now turns out - but at least the matter has now finally been addressed.

No retraction, nor contrition, nor apology, nor recantation has been required by the Holy See of any member of SSPX, it seems.

Indeed, in recent times the Ecclesia Dei Commission has apparently stated that members of the Faithful may fulfil their Sunday obligation by attendance at SSPX masses.

Yet this would not normally be permitted if the celebrant priest was suspended a divinis from administering the Sacrament - still less if he was excommunicate.

Catholics were therefore seemingly permitted to consider that SSPX members and priests were neither excommunicate, nor suspended, or at least that the excommunications were suspended, presumably in in accordance with Can. 1353.

Some, of course, will reject that analysis, but, either way, the precise canonical position is by no means clear, save that they are not excommunicate. That being so, why have not more people given SSPX the benefit of the doubt?

The late Michael Davies who wrote Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre at a time when the Archbishop was being most widely vilified

In any event, it is now quite clear that the policy of the present Pontiff is toward rapprochement and toward lifting penalties (if any) that exist or prevent SSPX priests from administering the Sacraments.

Even though this would seem to call into question the whole policy of purported sanctions in the first place, our holy Pope has had both the courage and the humility to lift the sanctions.

The stuff of martyrdom consists in keeping one's integrity, one's Faith and one's conscience, even in the face of the most overwhelming persecution, even if abandoned by father, mother, son, daughter, friends and superiors and still more so if unjustly attacked by them.

Is it martyrdom to attack the man whom everyone else is attacking and that unjustly? No - of course not.

But what of that man unjustly attacked? Well now, there you do indeed have a possible candidate for martyrdom.

Perhaps now some shoddy-thinking, liberal Catholics with little compassion and less sense of justice may begin to see that their all too hasty jumping onto the bandwagon of vilification of the SSPX may perhaps not have been a matter for such self-congratulation.

Perhaps they may even see the unfairness and uneven-handedness of crying out against the religious vilification of Jews, Moslems and non-Catholics whilst, at the same time, themselves religiously vilifying the SSPX and its members. They might also see that he who calls for justice - as liberal Catholics constantly are - ought to make an attempt to practice that virtue himself.

Even if I may have reservations about certain members of SSPX (and I certainly do!), I seem to hear from some of their more vociferous liberal antagonists the words of the Pharisee: "O God, I give Thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, as also is this [SSPX?] publican" (Luke 18:11).

Well, let us follow the lead of our Holy Father, hope for better things and for a spirit of reconciliation, fraternal charity and forgiveness.

Here, then is the decree and Bishop Fellay's rather moving response:

http://www.cfnews.org/SSPX-Exc-Nullified.htm

Bishop Bernard Fellay, Superior of SSPX

Gloria Olivetae:
our wonderfully humble and compassionate Pope, gloriously reigning!
God grant that he may do so for many years to come!

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