Faithful Answers and the Inquisitors’ Anti-Charism of Discernment

As the internet continues to facilitate the fractaling of the Catholic Church, what happens over time is that smaller and smaller enclaves of specialized groups find more and more petty things to get upset about and declare other Catholics “not really Catholic”.

So, for instance, witness the fate of poor Karl Keating, Jimmy Akin, and all the good people at Catholic Answers, who have striven with might and main to faithfully defend and bear witness to the Faith for 20 odd years. As their reward for countless hours of tireless service, what do they get? A kick in the teeth. Take it away, Harvey Dent!

And so some guy named Chad Arneson decides they are Impure Enemies of the Faith and sets up something called Faithful Answers (get it, CA isn’t “faithful” and is in fact riddled with “dens of modernist misinformationSo they are hailed as a “More Traditional Alternative to Catholic Answers”/a> by a fanboy and Arneson does not correct that assessment in the slightest.

What’s ironic is how deeply Protestant this sort of Truly True Purely Pure stuff is. Instead of the Catholic model, which sees other apostolates as different expressions of the Catholic Faith and which work together to build up the body of Christ, Arneson’s group of angry Traditionalists treats CA (and EWTN, and, frankly, almost every Catholic in the world) as rivals and enemies and, thereby, re-enacts the worst of Protestant fissiparousness. They are, of course, aided and abetted by such sites as Angelqueen and Pewsitter, who likewise regard almost the entirety of the Catholic Church’s members as enemies of the Faith except for themselves and a few like-minded Catholics. Indeed, it’s a problem that tends to plague that subculture of Catholics whose gravest concern is kicking out other Catholics deemed to be impure.

Yr Obdt. Svt., naturally, failed to make the grade long ago and has indeed scandalously declared that I not only refuse to kick out any Catholic a bishop has not kicked out, but I am loathe to tell even the most heretical or immoral Christian that they cannot call themselves “Christian”. I know from personal experience that Jesus takes us where he finds us and does not wait around until our knowledge and morals are perfect before showing us his grace. The apostles learned the same thing when some guy who was “not one of us” was doing exorcisms in Jesus’ name. They wanted Jesus to stop him. Jesus said, “He who is not against you is for you.” Lots of impure and incorrect people are, if they but knew it. for the Church. But outfits like “Faithful Answers” can’t even accept organizations like Catholic Answers that are *obviously* for the Church. Not pure enough.

Me: I think C.S. Lewis’s advice is sound here. Rather than perpetually squinting at others and yearning to keep as many people from contact with Christ as possible, I think the proper question is, “If I, being what I am, can consider myself a Christian and a Catholic, why can’t the people that I run into on the Web — including those Catholics I think desperately wrong about something and even those who don’t want to associate with the grubby-handed hoi polloi like me at the contemptible Paul VI Mass?” So while Pewsitter and Angelqueen and Faithful Answers may have concluded that me and my ilk (that is, 99% of the Church) are a blight and a plague on the Purely Pure Church and need to be purged, I think them members of the Body of Christ who are, to be sure, massively wrong on a number of things, but still my brothers and sisters in Christ. They may kick me and folks like Catholics Answers out. But I’m not kicking out Angelqueen, Pewsitters and Faithful Answers and similar self-appointed inquisitors. I’m not even kicking Nancy Pelosi out. That’s her bishop’s job, not mine.

And that’s the crowning irony: those who believe themselves charged by God with cleansing the Church of the Impure seem to consistently demonstrate just about the worst anti-charism of discernment on the planet. So with unerring instinct for making exactly the wrong choices in defending Pure Truly True Catholic Faith, not from actual enemies of the Faith, but from other faithful Catholics, Faithful Answers manages to bring on board as their superstar quarterback none other than “Dr.” Robert Sungenis, whose “degree” is from Calamus University, an unaccredited boxtop diploma mill in the Republic of Vanatu that took seriously as his “dissertation” the quackery that later became Galileo Was Wrong (an impassioned defense of geocentrism and a non-rotational earth). That would be embarrassing enough, but Sungenis is, far more poisonously, the author of such stuff as:

A) Sungenis: “the figure of six million Jews dying under Hitler’s regime is even admitted by informed Jews to be mere propaganda.” (link)

B) Sungenis: “95% of the Jews today still despise Jesus Christ.” [link]

D) Sungenis: “As we have noted in previous articles, it is no secret to the well-informed that it is the goal of world politics and finance, which is run in large part by wealthy Jews behind the scenes, to secure the Middle East for Israel.” [link]

E) Sungenis: “Other Catholic organizations are also becoming fronts for Zionism. Catholic Answers in San Diego and the Eternal World Television Network seem to be the two mainstays. They are enamored with Jewish converts, but do very little to censor the erroneous theology being propagated by them.” [link]

F) Sungenis: “In fact, the concentration camps and genocide instigated by the Jewish communists in Russia against Christians and other groups dwarf those against the Jews in Nazi Germany. Hitler was merely modeling what was already practiced in Russia, a fact ignored by such Jewish authors as Daniel Goldhagen. Contrasted to the dozens of concentration camps in Hilter’s regime, the Russian Jews had thousands of such camps…but evidence of these camps have been systematically destroyed and their existence denied by the Jewish controlled media in Russia and the United States.” [link]

G) Sungenis: “A telltale sign in the movie industry of the shift in mores was demonstrated no better than in the Walt Disney Corporation. Founder Walter Disney was well-known in the 50s and 60s for wholesome family entertainment. Interestingly enough, Walt had a policy of not hiring Jewish people.” [link]

H) Sungenis: “Often the Zionist agenda of Hollywood’s elite subtly but effectively misdirects the public. Stephen Speilberg is one such example. While inoculating movie-goers with fantasy films such as Jurassic Park, E. T., Jaws and War of the Worlds, at the same time Spielberg promotes his own political sympathies, such as the four-hour long Shindler’s List, which, among other things, depicts scenes of Jewish people jammed in cattle cars. Spielberg would never consider making a film of his ancestors from Russia packing millions of Christians and Muslims in the same cattle cars which were sent by Jewish communists to the Gulag, where most were raped, tortured and killed. The “Holocaust” is all we are allowed to see by the Jewish-controlled media.” [link]

I) Sungenis: “We also know through the exhaustive effort of Michael Collins Piper’s new 738- page book, Final Judgment, how Bronfman (note: a Jew) is implicated in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The story begins when Kennedy refused to capitulate to Israel’s demand for nuclear weapons, and you can probably guess the rest of the story.” [link]

J) Sungenis: “Today we get deviant sexual advice from such Jewish matrons as Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and questionable behavioral advice from Dr. Laura Schlesinger, Ann Landers (formerly Esther Friedman Lederer) and her sister Abigail van Buren (Pauline Esther Friedman Phillips).” [link]

K) Below, note the manner in which Bob at least affirms his belief that it is likely FDR was effectively a Zionist agent who purposely allowed Pearl Harbor to occur (from his 2002 article and a subsequent article in response to Bill Cork): [link , link]

1) (Sungenis): “President Roosevelt had a part in (the Zionist conspiracy) himself. Being of Jewish ancestry, he was sympathetic to their cause….”

2) (Sungenis): “To him (Bill Cork) it doesn’t matter whether Roosevelt was hiding his possible Zionist ties or whether he had a hand in Pearl Harbor.”

4) (Sungenis): “It wasn’t until he was cornered by a reporter from the Detroit Jewish Chronicle that Roosevelt could not deny it any longer. And why is that important? Because if Mr. Roosevelt would conceal the possible Zionist influences in his life from those voting for him, then he might also conceal other things.”

M) Sungenis: “Christianity is certainly not inherently violent, but unfortunately, Judaism tends to be, because real Judaism considers all non-Jews goyim that are less than animals, and this precipitates a loathing and violence against non-Jews.” From Question #8, January 2006

P) Sungenis: “The Jews…do intend to rule the world. And now the problem is that they want to rule the Catholic Church, too.” From Question #47, November 2006

Q) Sungenis: “Are the Protocols (of the Elders of Zion) forged? I don’t know. What I do know is that there is a lot of reason to believe that there are certain people, yes, the Jews, who would like us all to believe that they are forged.” Article, p. 16

S) Sungenis: “You know, the thing about Bill Clinton was, you know, he tried to secure this peace accord between Israel and the Arabs and wasn’t successful with that, and he did some other things that the Jews didn’t like, because he got some power under him and he thought he could, you know, do whatever he wanted and then they, you know, they sent Monica Lewinski in there after him, you know, and brought him down.” Radio interview with RBN: Segment 1, Segment 2, Segment 3

T) Sungenis Radio Interview:

Caller:

To take this slightly away from religion, or, mostly away from religion for a little bit, I think the whole thing can best be explained by Benjamin Franklin’s statement to the Continental Congress in 1789, when he warned them, “Gentleman, if you let them in, in 200 years your children – your descendants, they will be in the fields as slaves, while the ones you let in” – and we know who they’re talking about – “will be in the counting houses rubbing their hands.”

That was Benjamin Franklin’s statement, and I think it explains the whole thing. Because the man knew, he was a student of history – and he wasn’t the only one – but he was a student of history who knew – he knew what they’d done in Europe, and all the countries in Europe that they’d been kicked out of, over and over again, because it’s the same game plan for these people, no matter where they are, where they go, it’s always the same game plan – has been for 2,000 years.

Bob:

Yeah, as a matter of fact, just to add to what you’re saying – we’ve been quoting Benjamin Ginzberg a lot on this program, and here’s what he says,along those same lines – he says, “to make matters worse, Jews often, secretly or not so secretly, conceive themselves to be morally and intellectually superior to their neighbors. Indeed, Jews are extremely successful outsiders who sometimes have the temerity to rub it in.”

That comes from *The Fatal Embrace*, page Roman numeral nine. Now, and on the other side of this coin, you know, we’ve got to be very cautious, because these are human beings too. Jews are human beings, and God loves them just like He loves you and I —

Caller:

According to the Talmud, they are the *only* human beings. The rest of us are cattle.

Bob:

Well, yeah, and that’s where the problem comes in. Caller:

Absolutely, so that’s exactly what you’re saying, but in a different way.

Bob:

Right, right, and what I find in, especially today, is this idea that has been resurgent since after World War II, and that is that the Jews are the Chosen People – that this somehow has come to the fore again, that all of a sudden, 2,000 years has gone by and God has resurrected them as the Chosen People above everybody else – and this is where institutions like EWTN, or the liberal Catholics, or the Zionists, or the Evangelical Protestants, or whatever – this is all what they’re feeding off of, that the Jews are the Chosen People and now we have to restore them to their rightful place – and it’s causing a lot of problems, because once you do that, you’re gonna push other people out of the way!

(Use same links to radio interview in item “Q”, directly above)

Also, as Sungenis has done with fraudulent quotes (attributed to Albert Einstein, Roy Schoeman and others), his “caller” attributed a fraudulent quote to Benjamin Franklin which Bob accepted without question.

U) Sungenis: “James Petras gives us the full blown story that you won’t hear on ABC News, CNN or in the Washington Post, dominated as they are by the Jewish-owned media conglomerates.”

“The Jews are godless and getting more ungodly with each passing day.” Article, page 1

V) From: Adventures in Blogland:

1) Sungenis: “I am merely doing the same thing Jesus did when he confronted the sins of the Jews…Unfortunately, the Jews haven’t changed in our day. They are still the same godless racists they were in Jesus’ day. Few of them have repented of their sins.” (page 10)

2) Sungenis: “The nation of Israel has control of AMDOCS, the central telephone operation in the United States. It’s one way the Mossad spies on American citizens, including you and those you talk to.” (page 30)

3) Sungenis: “Do I need to say more? I have the whole history of Catholicism behind me, and these Fathers, Doctors, Saints and the God-Man himself said much worse things about the Jews than I ever have. What is really happening today folks is that we have been taken over by Jewish propaganda, and there are a few Catholic/Jewish ideologues…Many of them are paid handsomely by Zionist groups to say whatever they can to silence people like me. They are bent on promoting the godless state of Israel for some pie-in-the-sky dream they have, even against their own Catholic religion (at least that’s the religion they claim to have), and they will smear anyone who gets in their way. The Jews have done this for centuries against good people, and it continues today.” (page 19)

From: Adventures in Blogland

W) Sungenis:

“the Jewish element has so infected our Catholic Church today that they have turned Catholics into Jewish apologists. The infection of Judaism and Zionism has become the number one enemy for us.” From Question #33, March 2007

Y) Sungenis:

“The whole tenor of the New Testament is that God is finally rejecting the Jews (except for a remnant)…God is giving up on the Jews. In the language of John 6:44, God is no longer going to draw them to Jesus. In fact, God will become active in keeping them in unbelief by blinding them to the truth (Romans 11:8). That is the kind of God we have; a very dynamic God…and the Jews will die in their unbelief.” Second Rebuttal to Dr. James R. White

Z) Sungenis:

“How is it that the Jews have garnered such a market on suffering that Bishop Rhoades finds it necessary to pay homage to them? Is it because they own the mortgages on the Catholic buildings erected in his and other dioceses?”

Sungenis:

“It’s time for people to wake up and stop being corralled by the Jewish slave masters.”

From: Our Response to Shea

AA) From: Radio Interview on Republic Broadcasting Network

Sungenis: “every place that [the Jews] have beeen throughout history, they have been excised. Because they do the same thing every time they go in there, they try to take over places that they go to! And every time they do, people get wise to it, just we’re doing now, and they get themselves in trouble. And then they wonder why they’re so persecuted, and vagabonds across the face of the earth for the last 2,000 years – well this is why!”

BB) Sungenis: “it is becoming increasingly difficult to believe that six million Jews were killed in Nazi internment camps.” (October, 2009)

DD) Sungenis: “The documented records of the International Red Cross show that there were less than a few hundred thousand Jews who died in Nazi camps, and that most of those were from disease.” (October, 2009)

(Click here to see a refutation of this claim often made by Holocaust deniers and “revisionists”. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross itself, this is not what these records “show.”)

EE) Sungenis: “I suggest you read the unsanitized accounts of what really happened [in the Holocaust]. When the Jews and Jewish sympathizers start showing proof that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews by gassing them, instead of jailing people for even bringing up the question, then you you can talk about Nazis and I’ll listen.” (Note how Sungenis here describes the “revisionist” version of the Holocaust as “unsanitized accounts of what really happened.”)

GG) Sungenis: “I suggest you stop blaming it on the nation who excised [the Jews] and start looking at what the Jewish people do to get themselves excised.”

HH) Sungenis: “As for Germany’s relationship with the Jews, well, the Germans treated the Jews very nicely when the Jews were excised out of Russia and migrated to Germany. Then the Jews turned on the Germans because they got a better deal from someone else.”

Yes.  You read that last link right.  The Holocaust was that reprehensible period when the Jews turned on the Germans because they got a better deal from someone else.

Now these links are from Sungenis’ old Catholic Apologetics International site, which he was ordered by his bishop to rename since his bishop said he could not use the name “Catholic”.  He (eventually) complied, renaming it “Bellarmine Theological Forum”.  But he kept all the crazy Jew-hating stuff and kept adding to it with valuable news links like:

Jim Stone shows Israel Behind Fukashima Disaster
The European Jewish Union Exonerating Everything Jewish
Jewish Child Molesters
Mossad Involvement in 9/11
Jewry’s push for War with Iran
Jewish Atzmon Says Merah Was a Mossad False Flag Agent
and, last but not least, E. Michael Jones: Who is the World’s Real Enemy? (Guess who?)
(For a full catalog of Sungenis’ vast corpus of crazy statements about the Jews, go here.)

Now Sungenis has been properly admonished multiple times over the years by all sorts of people close to him.  And while he has sometimes hidden or deleted an occasional crazy remark he has never repented and continues merrily on with his crazy Jew-hatred.  An entire website, put together by former colleagues appalled at his descent into this evil nuttiness and documenting it in exhausting detail, has been around for years.

And Chad Arneson, founder of so-called “Faithful Answers” is well aware of it.  How do I know?  Because his Doxa Communications now hosts Robert Sungenis’ website, including his yet-to-be-moved section on “Jewish Issues” which Sungenis has cleverly labeled “Uncategorized”. [Note: Arneson, full of wounded outrage, demands that I apologize since I initially worded the previous sentence unclearly and unwary minds might suppose that he has authored some of the content on Sungenis’. That was not my intention. Sungenis creates the content. Therefore, let the world know that I apologize: Arneson does not, of course, control or author the content on Sungenis’ site. His company just makes money off it by hosting Sungenis’ site. And he recommends Sungenis to untutored and unwary people as a reliable source of Catholic teaching on Faithful Ansswers.]

Now Arneson claims that “Faithful Answers” does not deny the Second Vatican Council and the teaching of the Church.  He defies anybody to find any problems in Sungenis’ teaching.  Apparently, he is unaware of Nostra Aetate, which says:

Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.

That would include by “Dr.” Sungenis, whom Chad Arneson promotes as “one of the best apologists we have”. You know, the guy who says the Holocaust was that reprehensible period when the Jews turned on the Germans because they got a better deal from someone else, the guy who says Jews are “godless racists” who want to take over the world and who view all Gentiles as “animals”.

“Faithful Answers” is a manifestation of the ongoing devolution of reactionary Catholicism into a sort of auto-immune disease at work in the body of Christ. Ironically, the ranks of this subculture are often filled by converts longing for an imaginary Golden Age, not by Catholics who actually have a living memory of life before the Council. A relatively new convert comes into the Church as a fundamentalist reacting strongly to his Protestant background and imagining he has finally found the Pure Church.  Then, to his horror, he discovers he has not found the Pure Church, but merely Christ’s Church: “an institute”, as Belloc described it well before the Council, “run with such knavish imbecility that if it were not the work of God it would not last a fortnight.”  The fundamentalist, aghast at what he sees, then learns the exact wrong lesson: that what the Church needs is his reactionary fundamentalism, not that he needs to abandon his reactionary fundamentalism and learn to think like a Catholic and accept human weakness with mercy and pity.  He clings to his biblical fundamentalism about Genesis. He holds fast to the notion of a Church of simple saints beseiged by smarty pants intellectuals and scientists and their atheistic philosophy. He solves the problem of the Church’s corruption by believing in shadowy conspiracies that one man and his Bible (and Catechism) can resist. He is convinced he cannot trust the Magisterium except when it speaks long ago, just as a Fundamentalist believes he cannot trust any Christian leader but the dead writers of the New Testament (and himself, of course). He then finds a few like-minded people who have Read a Thing or Two and sets about saving the Church from all the unwashed slobs he invariably describes as “Catholics”.

Result: the reactionary fundamentalist networks with other reactionary fundamentalists in the vain attempt to make the Church a home for some cocktail of kooky reactionary fundamentalist theories centering on, in this case, six day creationism, geocentrism, moon landings faked by (Jewish) Stanley Kubrick, and Jews tunnelling under our houses.  And any failure to accept this is painted as compromised heterodoxy and organizations like Catholic Answers get vilified as “modernist” by the young turk with no sense of discernment and a huge sense of messianic self-importance in his mission to save the Church, not from actual enemies, but from 99.9999% of its members.

Memo to all Protestant converts attempting to remake the Church in your image and likeness: you cannot build a life on protest. The Church is enormously resistent to the attempt to make it into your final Protestant sect and will not comply with your demand to use it as a tool for telling off your last sect and saying, “Ha! I’ve outgrown you!” The Church seems to be stubbornly and divinely instituted to be, in this world, a collection of screwups, oddballs, factory rejects, wimps, failures and slackers. The lesson to be learned from that is not, “I thank you, O Lord, that I am not like other men” but “I am no better than anybody else in this hospital for sinners and it is a miracle of grace that I get to be part of this noble company of the saints when I am so unworthy.” For you, of course, are not the Anointed One chosen by God to fix the Church. You are one of the screwups, oddballs, factory rejects, wimps, failures and slackers. Your first and last mission is to show a little gratitude (the Greek word is “eucharist”) and not imagine that God has declared you the instrument of his wrath to clean out the Church of all those you deem to be unworthy of the grace of God.