Dawn Eden Speaks Sanity

As she writes of, “An evil not even tolerated among the pagans”

She warns:

I would like to continue to urge other concerned lovers of the Extraordinary Form (traditional Latin) Mass to speak out so that the world does not judge us by those who spew hatred against Judaism and the Jewish people.

In that, she says from *within* the ranks of Traditionalists exactly the same thing I was trying to say from outside those ranks yesterday when I concluded a post about the umpteenth eruption of anti-semitic nuttery from self-styled Traditionalists by saying:

Sane and healthy Traditionalists have far far more to fear from the public scandal created by these people than they have from anybody singing “Anthem” at some suburban OF Mass.

To be sure, *some* of the readers responded to my words in the vein that Dawn does: they simply and plainly agree that, yes, Jew-hatred is evil, belittlement and denial of mass murder is wrong, and… period. Nothing else, because nothing else needs to be said. Some of them can be seen in other fora simply and plainly making war on this filth. They can tell from the fact that Dawn is herself a lover of the EF and that I make an extremely clear distinction between “sane and healthy Traditionalists” and the Jew-hating lunatics flying under cover of Traditionalism that neither of us are saying “Traditionalism = anti-semitism.”

But, an *awful* lot of the responses to the denunciation of anti-semites poisoning the image of Traditionalism consisted, not of denunciations of anti-semitism, but of stuff like this:

Mark Shea, I don’t understand why you attack Catholics wanting to respect, glorify, & revere the Sacramental presence of our Lord Jesus at His Holy Mass Sacrifice (as our ancestors of our faith did before us). Why don’t you instead expose those who want to use Holy Church for their own selfish political ends (like “Catholic” supporters of women “priests”, liberation theology socialism, pro-War, pro-Abortion, etc.)? Traditionalists aren’t anti-Semitic.

Multiply responses like this by a factor of a hundred and you get *most* of the responses to the filthy spectacle of Holocaust Denialism on display from Rorate Coeli’s “cherished friend”. Instead of seeing the filthy spectacle of rationalization for Jew-hatred as the problem, lots of respondents declare the person pointing out the Jew-hatred to be “sowing division”. In other words, “don’t make us look bad by commenting on the lunatics in our ranks” is more important than denouncing the lunatics.

Add to this are such head-shake-inducing responses as:

There are two sides to this fight. Jews get all upset when holocaust deniers come along and shout out their BS and rightly so, but why is it a sin to point out that the Talmud says Jesus was a demon possessed sorcerer who is boiling in his own feces and that Mary was a whore? I have never understood why Catholics are supposed to change our beliefs yet the Jews can keep their anti-Christian trash. double standard much…?

To which the sane reply is: “Do feel free to let me know where, in this entire discussion–except for anti-semites themselves–-any person at all has said, “Well, we *do* have to consider the reality that medieval Jewish polemicists really have a point about Jesus being a demon possessed sorcerer who is boiling in his own feces and that Mary was a whore.” In short, *nobody* is citing medieval Talmudic polemics except people looking for excuses to hate modern Jews and justify or belittle murdering them.” It’s *only* Catholic anti-semites who are paying attention to these footnotes from obscure medieval sources. It’s like the mentality of anti-Catholic fundamentalists who believe that all Catholics are carefully poring over the salacious details of the Malleus Maleficarum, searching for rationales for burning witches. It tells us much more about the mentality of the anti-Catholic than it tells us about how the average Catholic lives his life.  Incredibly, the vast majority of Jews do not pore over obscure Talmud passages so they can spit in Catholic eyes and call Jesus a sorcerer and Mary a whore, just as Catholics don’t ruminate on the best ways to dismember suspected witches.

Again and again, I am told that anti-semitism is a fringe phenomenon in Traditional circles. And at the parish level, I have no doubt this is true. Hence my reference to “sane and healthy Traditionalists.” But the pretense that Traditionalism is not profoundly rooted in and enabled by the Internet is just that, a pretense. The truth is that, on the Internet, Jew-hatred and self-identified Traditionalist Catholics are like peas and carrots and it is leaching out into the bloodstream of Internet Catholicism.

Again, not *all* Traditionalists subscribe to this filth. But on the internet, if you meet a Jew-hating Catholic, odds are in the high 90th percentile that he will tell you he is a Traditionalist. Odds are also very high that he is a warmly welcomed (“cherished” is the word Rorate Coeli used to describe their Holocaust Denier) contributor to a Traditionalist web.community. You *constantly* run into it all over the place all the time. And the absolutely worst way to deal with it is to shout “Stop talking about it” at their opponents when these people invade your comboxes, or get mainstreamed by puff piece interviews conducted by massively-popular-with-Traditionalists Real Catholics[TM] in which we are encouraged to roll our eyes about those silly “liberals” who think your interviewee’s conspiracy theories about Jews are toxic and dangerous. That’s called “mainstreaming” and it’s the dead opposite of keeping this filth on the fringe.

Nobody is asking sane and healthy Traditionalists to “rid the Internet” of anti-semitic nutjobs who run around spewing this stuff in the name of Authentic Catholic Tradition. I’m just saying that when such nutjobs turn up and somebody tells them they are enemies of the Faith, a scandal who disgrace the Church, and in grave danger of their souls–it would really help if Traditionalists would not choose that moment to throw a pity party and denounce the person opposing the anti-semite as “divisive” but would instead tell the anti-semite to repent. Neither Dawn, nor I, nor Fr. Anthony, nor any other faithful Catholic who opposes the infestation of anti-semites in Traditionalism is your enemy. The Jew-haters are your enemy and they do more to damage and destroy the Benedictine reforms than anyone on planet earth.