The Protocols of Satan, Part 20: The Jewish Peril and the Catholic Church

The Protocols of Satan, Part 20: The Jewish Peril and the Catholic Church

Here once again we have a lengthy digression, and before proceeding with our commentary on the text of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, we are going to present and discuss an article titled The Jewish Peril and The Catholic Church, which was published in a periodical called The Catholic Gazette in February of 1936. So far, we have not located a complete copy from any issue of this periodical, however we have found a few rather informative references which will add to our understanding of this article, I hope, and also of the understanding of the Jewish world conspiracy and resistance to the Jewish Peril in the 1930’s.

The Catholic Gazette has been connected by some online sources, such as Metapedia, to one Archibishop Richard Joseph Downey, who was once the Archbishop of Liverpool. Investigating this connection, Downey seems to be an interesting character, but, as we shall see, Metapedia is wrong to connect him to The Catholic Gazette, which for a want of better information may have caused us to credit Downey with the opinions expressed by that periodical in a February, 1936 article which we will present here.

At least some of Downey’s papers are cataloged at the National Archives of the United Kingdom, but evidently they are not actually available via the Internet. He is mentioned in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the National Portrait Gallery, and as the Archbishop of Liverpool at the Catholic Hierarchy website which catalogs Roman Catholic officials. However except for a decree he made on Catholic-Anglican relations which is available at Cambridge.org, we could not locate any of his writing online. We did find mentions of Downey in the same context as that decree in several books on the same subject, but they are not of interest to us here.

We also located a used edition of a 1933 book by Archbishop Downey titled Pulpit & Platform Addresses, and since the price requested was quite reasonable, we can expect delivery in a few weeks. At first we were inspired to purchase that book because in an obituary for Downey that appeared in the Chicago Tribune on June 17th, 1953 we read “Thruout [sic] his life he campaigned against communism. In 1932 he urged ‘the isolation of the Red plague’ by a boycott on Russian goods. Dr. Downey held a strong opinion about matters and voiced them vigorously….”

Then we found another mention of Downey, along with a quotation, in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats Volume II: The Plays, published by Scribner in 2001, on pages 753-754. There it says that “Richard Joseph Downey (1881-1953) became archbishop of Liverpool in 1928.” The mention is in the notes to one of the appendixes to the volume, because in the notes to one of his plays, The Resurrection, Yeats had quoted Downey in reference to a perceived struggle for world control between the Roman Catholic Church and the Communists. Here is what Yeats had written:

In 1894 Gorky [the writer] and Lunacharsky [who was a Bolshevik, but both men were supposedly Russian and atheists] tried to correct the philosophy of Marxian socialism by the best German philosophy of their time, founding 723 schools at Capri and Bologna for the purpose, but Lenin founded a rival school at Paris and brought Marxian socialism back to orthodoxy: ‘we remain materialist, anything else would lead to religion.’ Four or five years later Pius X saw a Commission of Catholic scholars considering the text of the Bible and its attribution to certain authors and dissolved the Commission: ‘Moses and the Four Evangelists wrote the Books that are called by their names; any other conclusion would lead to scepticism.’ In this way did two great men [referring to Lenin and Pius X] prepare two great movements, purified of modernism, for a crisis when, in the words of Archbishop Downey, they must dispute the mastery of the world.

Now along with the description of Downey found in the Chicago Tribune, this seems to fit the profile of someone who might have produced an article such as the one which we are about to present from The Catholic Gazette, however we shall see that there is no connection in that manner. In fact, Downey was actually beckoned by the Jews in order to discourage such publications in Catholic periodicals, and he made at least some attempt to do so, although it may have been half-hearted. So first we shall present the article itself, and then we shall present a record of reactions both to it and to similar articles which appeared regularly in Catholic periodicals in Britain throughout the 1930’s, which demonstrates that Catholics and National Socialists had common concerns in regard to the Jews in the decades between the two world wars. It also demonstrates that Catholics were indeed among the most vociferous heralds announcing the Jewish conspiracy to rule the world, at least in the early decades of the 20th century.

The Jewish Peril and The Catholic Church, from The Catholic Gazette, February, 1936.

Editorial Note

That there has been and still is a Jewish problem, no one can deny. Since the rejection of Israel [or actually, the rejection of Esau] 1,900 years ago, the Jews have scattered in every direction and in spite of difficulties and even persecution, they have established themselves as a power in nearly every nation of Europe. Jacobs, in his "Jewish Contributions to Civilisation" glories in the fact that without detriment to their own racial unity and international character, the Jews have been able to spread their doctrines and increase their political, social and economic influence among the nations.

In view of this Jewish problem, which affects the Catholic Church in a special way, we publish the following amazing extracts from a number of speeches recently made under the auspices of a Jewish society in Paris. The name of our informant must remain concealed. He is personally known to us but by reason of his peculiar relations with the Jews at the present time, we have agreed not to disclose his identity nor to give any further details of the Paris meeting beyond the following extracts which, though sometimes freely translated, nevertheless substantially convey the meaning of the original statements.

* * * *

“As long as there remains among the Gentiles any moral conception of the social order, and until all faith, patriotism, and dignity are uprooted, our reign over the world shall not come... ”

“We have already fulfilled part of our work, but we cannot yet claim that the whole of our work is done. We have still a long way to go before we can overthrow our main opponent: the Catholic Church...”

“We must always bear in mind that the Catholic Church is the only institution which has stood, and which will, as long as it remains in existence, stand in our way. The Catholic Church, with her methodical work and her edifying and moral teachings, will always keep her children in such a state of mind, as to make them too self-respecting to yield to our domination, and to bow before our future King of Israel...”

“That is why we have been striving to discover the best way of shaking the Catholic Church to her very foundations. We have spread the spirit of revolt and false liberalism among the nations of the Gentiles so as to persuade them away from their faith and even to make them ashamed of professing the precepts of their Religion and obeying the Commandments of their Church. We have brought many of them to boast of being atheists, and more than that, to glory in being descendants of the ape! We have given them new theories, impossible of realisation, such as Communism, Anarchism, and Socialism, which are now serving our purpose... The stupid Gentiles have accepted them with the greatest enthusiasm, without realising that those theories are ours, and that they constitute our most powerful instrument against themselves...”

“We have blackened the Catholic Church with the most ignominious calumnies, we have stained her history and disgraced even her noblest activities. We have imputed to her the wrongs of her enemies, and have thus brought these latter to stand more closely by our side... So much so, that we are now witnessing, to our greatest satisfaction, rebellions against the Church in several countries... We have turned her Clergy into objects of hatred and ridicule. we have subjected them to the contempt of the crowd... We have caused the practice of the Catholic Religion to be considered out of date and a mere waste of time...”

“And the Gentiles, in their stupidity, have proved easier dupes than we expected them to be. One would expect mere intelligence and more practical common-sense, but they are no better than a herd of sheep. Let them graze in our fields till they become fat enough to be worthy of being immolated to our future King of the World...”

“We have founded many secret associations, which all work for our purpose, under our orders and our direction. We have made it an honour, a great honour, for the Gentiles to join us in our organisations, which are, thanks to our gold, flourishing now more than ever. Yet it remains our secret that those Gentiles who betray their own and most precious interests, by joining us in our plot, should never know that those associations are of our creation, and that they serve our purpose...”

“One of the many triumphs of our Freemasonry is that those Gentiles who become members of our Lodges, should never suspect that we are using them to build their own jails, upon whose terraces we shall erect the throne of our Universal King of Israel; and should never know that we are commanding them to forge the chains of their own servility to our future King of the World.”

“So far, we have considered our strategy in our attacks upon the Catholic Church from the outside. But this is not all. Let us now explain how we have gone further in our work, to hasten the ruin of the Catholic Church, and how we have penetrated into her most intimate circles, and brought even some of her Clergy to become pioneers of our cause.”

Actually the converso process became significant in the 13th and 14th centuries, where supposedly converted Jews were obtaining high offices and influence in the Church. Many of Martin Luther’s own opinions of doctrine came from Nicholas of Lyra, Paul of Burgos, and other converted Jews, as he himself admitted in On the Jews and Their Lies.

“Apart altogether from the influence of our philosophy we have taken other steps to secure a breach in the Catholic Church. Let me explain how this has been done.”

“We have induced some of our children to join the Catholic body, with the explicit intimation that they should work in a still more efficient way for the disintegration of the Catholic Church, by creating scandals within her. We have thus followed the advice of our Prince of the Jews who so wisely said: ‘Let some of your children become canons, so that they may destroy the Church.’ Unfortunately, not all among the 'convert' Jews have proved faithful to their mission. Many of them have even betrayed us! But, on the other hand, others have kept their promise and honoured their word. Thus the counsel of our Elders has proved successful.”

“We are the Fathers of all Revolutions – even of those which sometimes happen to turn against us. We are the supreme Masters of Peace and War. We can boast of being the Creators of the REFORMATlON! Calvin was one of our Children: he was of Jewish descent, and was entrusted by Jewish authority and encouraged with Jewish finance to draft his scheme in the Reformation.”

“Martin Luther yielded to the influence of his Jewish friends, and again, by Jewish authority and with Jewish finance, his plot against the Catholic Church met with Success...”

Calvin may well have been a Jew, and he should have been, as his doctrines are very favorable to the perpetuation of many Jewish lies, and he was favorable to Jewish usury. It is also true that Luther was deceived by Jews, and Jews and their Humanist dupes did indeed figure heavily in Luther’s success. The Roman Catholic Church more than deserved to go into perdition for its policies, but the Jews certainly took every opportunity to exploit the divisions for their own gain.

“Thanks to our propaganda, to our theories of Liberalism and to our misrepresentations of Freedom, the minds of many among the Gentiles were ready to welcome the Reformation. They separated from the Church to fall into our snare. And thus the Catholic Church has been very sensibly weakened and her authority over the Kings of the Gentiles has been reduced almost to naught...”

“We are grateful to Protestants for their loyalty to our wishes – although most of them are, in the sincerity of their faith, unaware of their loyalty to us. We are grateful to them for the wonderful help they are giving us in our fight against the stronghold of Christian Civilisation, and in our preparations for the advent of our supremacy over the whole world and over the Kingdoms of the Gentiles.”

The Protestant churches were handicapped with their own naivete concerning the Jews, right from their very inception. Breaking from the Roman Church over things such as the liberty of worship according to conscience and intellectual freedoms, they could not disparage the Jews who claimed to be practicing those same things. So the Protestants and the Jews were in league together against the Church, and the Jews took full advantage of the divisions.

“So far we have succeeded in overthrowing most of the Thrones of Europe. The rest will follow in the near future. Russia has already worshipped our rule. France, with her Masonic Government, is under our thumb. England, in her dependence upon our finance, is under our heel; and in her Protestantism is our hope for the destruction of the Catholic Church. Spain and Mexico are but toys in our hands. And many other countries, including the U.S.A., have already fallen before our scheming.”

“But the Catholic Church is still alive...”

“We must destroy her without the least delay and without the slightest mercy. Most of the Press in the world is under our Control; let us therefore encourage in a still more violent way the hatred of the world against the Catholic Church. Let us intensify our activities in poisoning the morality of the Gentiles. Let us spread the spirit of revolution in the minds of the people. They must be made to despise Patriotism and the love of their family, to consider their faith as a humbug, their obedience to their Church as a degrading servility, so that they may become deaf to the appeal of the Church and blind to her warnings against us. Let us, above all, make it impossible for Christians outside the Catholic Church to be reunited with that Church, or for non-Christians to join that Church; otherwise the greatest obstruction to our domination will be strengthened and all our work undone. Our plot will be unveiled, the Gentiles will turn against us, in the spirit of revenge, and our domination over them will never be realised.”

“Let us remember that as long as there still remain active enemies of the Catholic Church, we may hope to become Masters of the World... And let us remember always that the future Jewish King will never reign in the world before the Pope in Rome is dethroned, as well as all the other reigning Monarchs of the Gentiles upon earth.”

Author’s Note

Before these facts came to my knowledge, I was rather careless in the fulfilment of my religious duties, but since then, my faith, thank God, has grown stronger and stronger, and my belief in the Catholic Church as being the only bulwark against the enemies of our Christian Civilisation, has become firmer than ever. That is why I pray that every Christian be warned against the impending danger of the Jewish plot, so that the whole Christian World may rally under the banner of the Catholic Church, and thus be united against our common, powerful foe.

G. G.

We do not know who “G.G.” is, or even if, as we suspect, the humble signature isn’t merely a typographical error for “C.G.”, or Catholic Gazette. However in any case, the tenor of these alleged boasts of this Jewish society which were presented in this article certainly accords with that of the Protocols of Zion and many other sources which published very similar information in this same era. Evidently, several other Catholic publications were doing the very same thing. So here we shall make a rather long citation from a book titled Church, Nation and Race: Catholics and Antisemitism in Germany and England, 1918-45, by Ulrike Ehret, published at Manchester University in 2011. We do not have our own copy of the book, but here we rely on Google Books, which has provided us with a liberal portion of the material we require in order to clarify what we have just read from The Catholic Gazette, while also corroborating its publication and more accurately describing how Archbishop Downey was involved in this matter. So this chapter serves us to show that this article from the Catholic Gazette is indeed what it is claimed to be, an article from a Catholic publication in Britain in the 1930’s, which was actually only one of many such articles published over several years leading up to the Second World War.

But before we begin, we must state that Ulrike Ehret is not our friend. She (we only found out at the last minute that the name was feminine) seems to be very sympathetic to the Jews, dismissive of the fact that the Jews have indeed conspired against Christendom for many centuries, and apathetic to any real historical information which indicates the existence of a Jewish-masonic conspiracy. And since Ehret’s book is informative to us for other reasons besides the fact that it corroborates the legitimacy of our article from the Catholic Gazette, we will begin from a quotation from a chapter on Antisemitism in Roman Catholic newspapers of the early 20th century that betrays her ignorance of the Jewish problem in many respects, as she cannot seem to understand how a supposedly Catholic publication called The Catholic Worker would not be critical of Jewry:

Among the Catholic newspapers and periodicals in England there was one weekly that not only refrained from publishing antisemitic articles but also stood up against the antisemitic slander prevalent in the late 1930s. The Catholic Worker did not acknowledge the existence of a ‘Jewish question’, Its articles maintained that Jews were not different from other British citizens and that allegations of a Jewish conspiracy or their strong hostility towards Christianity were nonsense. Although contributions to the Catholic Worker shared the theological definition of the Jews as a ‘witness-people’ who would ultimately convert to Christianity to prove Christian theology right, they strongly rejected the claim of the Jews’ anti-Christian attitude. With this dismissal the Catholic Worker stood out from all other Catholic publications. As the Catholic Worker did not see the existence of a ‘Jewish question’ there was no need to offer a ‘solution’, but only to emphasise the equality of Jews. In a Catholic conception of a state, according to the Catholic Worker, any minority had a right to ‘develop their own culture, and the State has the duty to enable them to do so’. And with particular reference to the Jews it continued: ‘There is a Catholic programme for the Jews. Then if a Jew breaks the law treat him as a law-breaker. But do not presume that a Jew must break the law…. Strict laws regulating trade would safeguard this without the extreme measure of prohibiting immigration as Mosley suggests.

The reference to Mosley is, inevitably, to Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists. There should be no doubt that a supposedly Catholic publication with a Marxist-leaning name such as The Catholic Worker would at this time be little but a tool of the Bolshevik Jews designed to subvert the minds of unsuspecting Catholics to its own cause.

Furthermore, if the Jews converted to Christianity, it would not prove Christian Theology to be correct, but rather whenever Jews are allowed or encouraged to do so it represents a betrayal of Christ by Christians. Christian theology is proven to be correct over and again as Jews have attempted to destroy it, or subvert it in order to permanently corrupt it from the will of its Author.

This false idea, that the Jews would somehow miraculously convert and be saved at the final moments before Christ returned, has also been around since before the days of Martin Luther. We have previously established, in our presentations on Luther, that the Jews themselves invented it, so that they would be left alone and be able to deceive Christians. Here we see it was also a Catholic belief, and it is a Protestant belief until this very day. However, in truth, Christ told the Jews that they could not believe Him (i.e. John 10:26) and He never wanted them to be converted (i.e. Luke 19:27).

Continuing with Ulrike Ehret:

Antisemitism over time

It is instructive to look at the distribution of antisemitic articles in the [Catholic] papers over time, as it allows interpretations of the motive and purpose of these articles (see Figure 2.1).

Two observations can be made. Firstly, the intensity of antisemitic articles oscillates with peaks around 1923, 1933 and 1938-39. This suggests that these antisemitic outbursts were motivated by particular events rather than being a constant Catholic obsession. Secondly, the outburst in 1938-39 occurred anticyclically to the national concern with a ‘Jewish question’, when most broadsheet English newspapers made only moderate use of antisemitism. [We must wonder where she found evidence for this statement, as we could not access all of the footnotes.] On the other side, antisemitism in Catholic newspapers was comparatively restrained when the general public was overcome by ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ scaremongering or by the phantom of Jewish world conspiracy. When in 1920 the Morning Post and The Times printed the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, stirring up a wave of antisemitic feelings over the following two years, the Catholic Times ignored it altogether and The Month maintained that the ‘Protocols‘ were just ‘bogus documents’ which endangered religious peace. Only Charles Diamond of the Catholic Herald commented on the ‘Protocols’ in a review article and admitted that the accusation of the ‘Protocols’ seemed deranged, but accepted its basic assumption, namely the struggle between Jewry and Christianity.

In relation to the secular papers, the author fails to note that it was The Times which had gone to great lengths to discredit the Protocols when it published the articles by Philip Graves in 1921, where they were claimed to be a forgery of Alexander Joly’s Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.

The reason for this disparity becomes evident when looking at the occasions that triggered these antisemitic outbursts: they were most intense when Catholic interests collided with national British concerns. Tolerance and benevolence towards Jews ceased as soon as Catholic interests were thought to be violated. [It does not light upon the author that there may have been just reason for the protests. She does not imagine that perhaps the Church understood that it was the Jews behind the promotion of the interests that opposed it.] In the early 1920s antisemitism arose around topics such as Bolshevik Russia, the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine, current affairs in Catholic countries such as France, Poland, Ireland or Italy, or the Jews’ conversion to Catholicism. In the years between 1924 and 1929 it was mainly the Catholic mission to the Jews – the Catholic Guild of Israel – that kept the discussion on the ‘Jewish question’ alive.

Throughout his career, Martin Luther naively thought he could convert the Jews apart from the Catholic Church. When he failed, he felt betrayed, and finally awoke to the treachery of the lies of the Jews, 25 years after he started the Reformation. But the traditional Catholics, especially the Dominicans who opposed Luther, also thought that they could convert the Jews. This idea of converting the devils that Christ Himself could not, and would not convert, is arguably the biggest stain on traditional Catholic theology, as well as upon the Protestants. Continuing with Ulrike Ehret:

Reports on communist Russia are examples of this defence mechanism. From 1921 onwards, Catholic newspapers highlighted the suppression of religion in Soviet Russia. The already latent equation of Jews with Bolsheviks gradually became a constant rhetorical feature in articles on Russia and brought the intensity of antisemitic articles to an unprecedentedly high level with the execution of Bishop Budkiewicz in Moscow in 1923. Yet Bolshevik Russia had not always been such an emotional topic.

The author ignores countless definitive lists which prove that most of the Bolsheviks were Jews, and both Lenin and Trotsky, as well as 80% of the original Soviet officials, were Jews. There can no longer be an honest denial of this, except that the author is bogged down repeating some very tired arguments. Back to Ulrike Ehret:

During the war and until the early 1920s antisemitism in Britain (coupled will anti-German sentiments) was widespread and at times violent. From 1917 the USA and Western Europe was swept by a ‘red scare’ that merged with the ‘German Menace’ originating before the First World War. In Britain, antisemitism spread to various sections of society including political, military and diplomatic circles and the press. This anti-Bolshevism was closely linked with a preoccupation with an overrepresentation of Jews on the more extreme fringes of European socialism. The result was a reworking of the Jewish conspiracy myth, which was given a tremendous boost by the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. While the Morning Post and The Times exposed the alleged evil of Russian Bolshevism engineered by Jews, Catholic newspapers initially called for a more considered coverage. For example, Joseph Keating writing in The Month: ‘Generalisation is largely an automatic function of the intellect: we think in classes and categories and, under the spur of fear, the unbalanced mind is apt to see Jews or Jesuits or Bolsheviks everywhere. The remedy is to go by evidence and to make sure that it is real.’

The author will note the about-face on the Jewish question made by the Catholic Herald, but not so much the about-face which will be made by The Month. However The Month seems to be not much better than the Catholic Worker, a tool of Jewry. Here the editor has employed Freudian psychology to explain antisemitism, rather than imagining that hatred of Jews stems from Jewish behaviour. Our author seems to find this explanation to be quite fitting of her own estimation as well.

We had discussed the publication of the Protocols by the Morning Post in part 3 of this series. But the author’s assertions concerning The Times are quite contrary to information which we had presented in our assessment of the Jewish control of the British press, in part 12 of this series. Returning to Ulrike Ehret:

Charles Diamond of the Catholic Herald likewise did not yet link Bolshevism with Jewish influence. He was more interested in disclosing ‘conspiracies’ closer to home: Jewish financiers together with ‘Huns and Junkers’ were perceived to be in an alliance to exploit the poor. Diamond’s real target was the ‘establishment’. He initially supported Lenin as ‘the greatest man’, welcomed the land redistribution, and the attempt to educate the lower classes by providing cheap books and cultural events. He interpreted the anti-Bolshevik hysteria of the Tory press from a communist point of view as a ploy to distract public opinion from capitalist crimes:

Meantime the cry about the Jew is a last desperate resort of the Huns in the press, and in Parliament and elsewhere, to divert attention from their own crimes and to distract the public mind by dishonest irrelevancies... We infinitely prefer to stand beside the revolutionary in his assaults upon the evils that obtain rather than on the platform with the authors and defenders of these infamies.

This reflects the lack of critical, outside-the-box thinking prevalent in our own people. The dichotomies we are caught in, Protestant vs. Catholic, Calvin vs. Arminius, Democrat vs. Nazi, Capitalist vs. Communist, have always benefitted the Jew, because we are always willing to fall into these false dichotomies and choose a side, rather than examine them for what they are.

Continuing with Ulrike Ehret where Charles Diamond is further discussed:

However, this generous mood soon changed. By April 1921, the Catholic Herald was alarmed by antireligious measures in Russia and the continued suppression of the peasantry. This was also the moment when the paper discovered the ‘Jewish Bolshevik’ – a label that would from now on accompany almost every article on communist Russia:

The author misses the fact that this discovery may have easily had something to do with the observation that the Bolsheviks had closed all of the Churches, and left the synagogues unmolested.

[F]rom the upheaval of the war emerged the opportunity of the Communists to put their theories into practice on a large scale. They have tried to do so. Now the theories are not really Russian. They are those of the German Jew, Karl Marx. The Bolshevik leaders are his disciples to some extent only, for they have had to abandon pure Marxism. Nor are all the theorists themselves Russians. Trotzky and a great many others are Jews... Upon Russia and the Russian peasantry they have imposed their authority, having exterminated whole hecatombs [groups of hundreds] of opponents – socialists, anarchists, capitalists, ruling classes, traders, and revolting peasantry also.

As in 1919, there was an explosion of antisemitic articles in Catholic newspapers after Bishop Budkiewicz was imprisoned and executed in Moscow in spring 1923. This came at a time when, according to Sharman Kadish, the myth of a Jewish conspiracy had moved to the extreme fringe of society due to the strength of the liberal tradition in Britain. However, in 1923 even the more considerate The Month was enraged: ‘[I]n Soviet Russia Manning’s prophecy has actually been realized. Antichrist, in the person of those apostate Jews, is already in power. Marx, another apostate Jew, is his evangelist and Christianity, especially the Catholicism of Rome is the object of bitterest hatred.

It seems to us as if Manning must have simply read Sergei Nilus, who understood the Jewish would-be conquerors of Russia to be the anti-Christs as early as 1905. Note that the author downplayed the about-face of The Month on the Jewish issue.

Sharman Kadish is a Russian Jewess and a so-called “British-Jewish historian”. She is hardly an unbiased source regarding the Jewish conspiracy, as she is clearly an agent for it. Continuing with Ulrike Ehret:

The Blackfriars, too, took the phrase that ‘two out of three of Russia’s leaders are Jews’ as a fact and concluded: ‘Evil is enthroned in Moscow.’

Actually we now know that it was three out of three. Even Wikipedia now has to admit that Lenin was a Jew, on the side of his mother.

Responses to Hitler’s Germany

Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor hardly created huge headlines in Catholic Britain. It was yet another new government of a German republic that had been struggling with the effects of a deep economic crisis since 1929. Only the April boycott of Jewish shops in Germany brought the first indignant protests. The Leeds Labour Party expressed its ‘abhorrence at... the persecution of Jews, Socialists and Communists’. [As if they are unbiased critics, where all of the labor parties of the West were either Jewish-controlled or overly sympathetic to Marxists and uncritical of Jews, much like the Catholic Worker.] Even Belloc and G.K. Chesterton joined the voices of protest, albeit with an ambiguous twist. In a booklet published in 1933 Chesterton wrote: ‘To-day, although I still think there is a Jewish problem, and that what I understand by the expression “the Jewish spirit" is a spirit foreign in Western countries, I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities in Germany. I am quite ready to believe now that Belloc and myself will die defending the last Jew in Europe. Thus does history play ironical jokes upon us.

Until the boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933, National Socialism had mostly been discussed in passing notes, which hardly mentioned its fierce antisemitism. After the boycott, Catholic newspapers frequently reported on the fate of the Jews in Germany and condemned the antisemitism displayed there:

The boycott and the measure associated with it have been openly directed against the Jews as a race, even against those Jews who have become Christian. Such an attitude is not only in acute conflict with all modern ideas of civilised government; it is a flagrant repudiation of the whole teaching of the New Testament.

Our author conveniently ignores the worldwide Jewish boycott of German goods and businesses which was announced in March of 1933, a month before the Germans partially reciprocated.

Furthermore, the Catholics were wrong. A boycott of Jewish businesses is actually in keeping with the New Testament, for instance 2 John 9-11 where Christians are told not even to speak to those who deny Christ.

Continuing with Ulrike Ehret:

Nevertheless, in 1933 most articles in Catholic newspapers ended on the note that the Jews owed their treatment to their own misbehaviour. A journalist of The Tablet condemned the violence that accompanied the boycott of Jewish businesses in April. However, he also acknowledged that he could understand the Germans’ reaction. They had the same problem: too many rich Jews. Only one objection was raised: Germany should respond to this problem with judicial measures such as a numerus clausus [a fixed number, perhaps of residents] for Jews.

We must note, that there is a difference between rich Jews and Jewish thieves, Jews who operate clandestinely as a parasitical crime ring for the advancement of themselves at the expense of all others, while naive Christians treat Jews as equals, imagining them to have the same values.

Continuing with Ulrike Ehret:

Out of eighteen recorded articles on the Jews in Germany (in 1933) in the Catholic Herald, only seven wholly deplored their persecution (the majority were reports on the bishops’ public denunciation of the Jewish persecution), and eleven ended on an antisemitic note, not dissimilar to that mentioned above. Out of twenty-one articles on Germany and the Jews in the Catholic Times, fourteen were antisemitic, only five spoke in favour of the Jews (these were mainly comments by readers), and two found equal arguments in favour of or against the Jews. To some extent this attitude can be seen as a continuation of the anti-German hostility and violence during the First World War that often targeted German Jews in particular. The naivety with respect to the events and policies inside Hitler’s Germany was not just a characteristic of Catholic newspapers. According to Richard Griffiths, the British media and therefore public opinion did not show any particular interests in German affairs until 1936 when German affairs became British foreign affairs after Hitler had occupied the Rhineland.

Here the author mistakes either apathy or indifference for naivety, which is not necessarily the case.

There was, however, a distinct Catholic motive to this attitude. The perceived need to protect Catholic interests was expressed in some cases as an open antisemitism. The question arises as to what sort of Catholic interest there was to safeguard in Germany, a country where two thirds of the population were Protestants (better known to English Catholic readers as ‘Prussians’) and at a time when the Catholic Church was not yet oppressed. By 1933 several events had happened in the Catholic world that had created a sense of persecution in some Catholics’ minds. News of religious persecution in Russia and Mexico and the revolution in Spain in 1932 had left the impression that Catholics suffered even crueler persecution than the Jews in Germany. Yet these events received far less news coverage than Jews in Nazi Germany – much to the annoyance of Catholics in Britain:

The truth is that Jewish crimes against Christians were not well reported by the Jewish controlled secular press, while alleged German crimes against Jews were magnified. Ehret, the brainwashed victim of ongoing De-Nazification in Germany, cannot possibly look at her statements from the opposing view.

Continuing with Ulrike Ehret [quoting the Catholic Herald]:

It is true, that Jews, especially the Masonic Jews... are the bitter and persistent foes of the Catholic Church... In Rome a notorious Jewish Freemason, Nathan, signalised his position as Mayor of the city by a most disgraceful and wanton insult to the Pope of the day. In Spain the recent revolution has had wholesale Jewish support, and Einstein, a Jewish agnostic, is to go to Madrid as Professor to replace and oppose Catholic influence... Whenever it can do so, Jewry is the leading and bitter enemy of the Catholic Church... But we would ask all fair minded men to contrast the callous silence or approval with which the world as a whole has looked on while... tyrants have trampled upon and plundered Catholics, and the generous outbursts that have taken place against wicked, but far less atrocious attacks on Jews in Germany.

Of course, our author ignores the well-known fact that in Spain the Marxists were raping nuns and murdering nuns and priests, while in Germany all that Hitler had done was force some Marxist Jews to work at honest labor. However for the Jews, being forced to work honest labor is indeed a holocaust.

In contrast to the Catholic Herald, where the silence of the British press towards the Catholic persecution was of central concern, the antisemitic articles of the Catholic Times continuously argued that the persecution of the Jews in Germany was justified, because they together with communism and freemasonry had caused today’s international distress. How unrelenting some authors of the Catholic Times could be in this matter is shown by an example published just after the boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany. Justifying their view against some readers’ dismayed complaints, the editor answered:

What we have pointed out was that international Jewry, as exemplified in international Masonry, was a heinous thing, and its stamping out in Germany could be not less beneficial than in Italy. With the persecution of individual law abiding and God-fearing Jews we can have no patience, but to a nationalistic thrust at an international force or ‘ring’ in Germany or elsewhere, we must adopt a different attitude.

Arguments that there are “good” Jews have plagued Christians now for two thousand years, in spite of the warnings of Paul of Tarsus, who attested that they are “contrary to all mankind”. Continuing with Ulrike Ehret:

At the same time the papers were embroiled in a discussion on a Jewish-masonic conspiracy. This allegation was not new by 1933. In the papers under consideration it repeatedly appeared since 1926, intensified by 1932 and culminated in 1938. In the earlier years of 1926 and 1932, the notion of a Jewish conspiracy sprung from publications on freemasonry by two Irish priests, Fr Cahill and Fr Fahey. [Edward Cahill was an Irish Jesuit, Denis Fahey an Irish Catholic priest.] In 1938 the Catholic Times printed long extracts of Fr Denis Fahey’s book The Mythical Body of Christ and gave him considerable space to express his idea of a Judeo-masonic conspiracy. To a number of Catholic writers, Fahey’s theory seemed eventually confirmed by the creation of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931 and later in the Spanish Civil War. F.M. de Zulueta wrote in The Month of freemasonry as the secret agent of all European revolutions, funded ‘from Moscow through the medium of Jewish financiers in America. The much-monied Israelite [sic. Edomite] figured prominently in a body devoted to de-Christianising nations.’ The Blackfriars printed a plea for ‘cleansing Spain of Freemasons and Jews’ in order to create a new nation.

By the time of Kristallnacht in November 1938 all the factors mentioned above had been repeated over and over again in the Catholic newspapers and had almost become common currency. In 1938/9 various incidents sharpened the tone in Catholic newspapers, resulting in another steep peak on the antisemitic-articles-per-month scale. These events were the Spanish Civil War (still), a Freethinkers’ congress in London and Kristallnacht in Germany. The first, especially, was accompanied by numerous articles spreading a Jewish-masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy, such as the Distributist Gregory Macdonald‘s article after Franco’s victory over the Republicans in 1939, where he claimed that Franco had won against the ‘wandering Jews’, the ‘advances of the communist hordes... That is the meaning of our victory. It is not over our brothers but a victory over the world, over the international forces, over Communism, Masonry.’

Perhaps Ulrike Ehret meant to say “spreading news of a Jewish-masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy”, since it was not the Catholics spreading the conspiracy itself. However that would be an admission that it was true!

Kristallnacht was a welcome opportunity for some to expound their antisemitic and pro-Nazi views, but the barbarism of the November pogrom met with a clearer condemnation in Catholic newspapers. Still, antisemitic articles outnumbered the columns written in sympathy for the Jews. The Tablet, the Catholic Times and the Catholic Herald did not change their view that the Jews brought their fate upon themselves, despite anger at the brutality of the pogrom: ‘now in the case of Jewry there is no doubt at it being a hostile element to certain regimes. Jews unlike Catholics, have a loyalty to their own society which is more than spiritual or moral: it is racial and physical.’

Positive articles on Jews

Positive articles on Jews or Judaism were few and far between. They increased in numbers with the onset of the Jewish persecution in Germany from 1933, but still lagged behind the number of antisemitic articles. Again, these articles mostly had a defensive purpose by refuting accusations of intolerance and antisemitism levelled at the Catholic Church. Jews funding Catholic societies, Jews grateful for Catholic assistance, Jews praising Catholic bishops – all these themes found approval in Catholic papers. Similarly, any antisemitic remarks published in the Anglican Church Times were singled out for criticism, although the real aim here was to rebuke the Protestants. [This is almost funny, supposed Christians falling over one another to please the devil.] Religious discrimination, an experience Catholics could relate to quite well, had been condemned by the church for many years. Consequently, any form of religious discrimination against Jews was criticised by Catholic papers, too. In the case at the Liverpool magistrate who refused to issue a dancing licence to celebrate a Jewish wedding on a Sunday, the Catholic Herald maintained that despite the differences between Catholics and Jews such interference in religious traditions was ‘outrageous’.

Catholics preventing religious discrimination against Jews is sort of like arguing in favor of Satan’s right to exist and do as he pleases.

Although the Catholic Herald had never really abandoned its view that Soviet Russia was ruled by ‘a band of Jews', it still regretted religious persecution that also included Jews. Catholic newspapers were generally firm that the rule of law also applied to Jews. [Naively believing that Jews would think that the rule of law applied to Jews.] With the exception of the Vilna pogrom in 1915 where they had only grudgingly criticised antisemitic violence, Catholic papers strongly condemned violent Jew-hatred as in the case of antisemitic disturbances in Dublin [in] 1926: ‘However unselfish the motive of the riots may have been they were a breach of law. It is just as wrong to force a moneylender off his books as of any other form of property… Doubtless the Irish Government will deal sharply with the incident.’

We do not understand how the Catholics could have canonized Thomas Aquinas, who told Margaret of Flanders in a letter that the Jews should not be able to keep anything which they acquired through usury.

Responses to Catholic Newspapers; Jews, Catholics

The Jewish community did not leave these antisemitic outbursts without comment. Jewish newspapers such as the Jewish Chronicle or Jewish World were renowned for their effort in pointing out antisemitism in the national press and printing rejoinders that confronted myth with fact. In the late 1930s the Jewish People’s Council against Fascism and Antisemitism (JPAFA) would actively fight against fascism by means of public demonstrations and conferences in order to disrupt BUF meetings. The Board of Deputies of British Jews (BOD), on the other hand, called for a quieter and more considerate response to antisemitism in the form of lawsuits and appeals to Parliament. This was a matter on which the BOD, who mostly represented Jewish middle-class opinion in England, and the JPAFA, who appealed to working-class Jews of London’s East End, could not agree upon. Records of the BOD shed some light on Jewish reactions to the antisemitism in Catholic newspapers. Due to their middle-class respectability, the BOD was the more likely addressee for members of the Catholic hierarchy in matters of Catholic-Jewish relations than the JPAFA, who were ignored because of their alleged communist links. Direct contacts between Catholic and Jewish communities were, however, rare. Archbishop Downey seems to have been the most accessible Catholic bishop.

The BOD set up a Defence Committee that monitored antisemitism in society and in print. The Committee's first reaction to the antisemitism in the Catholic Herald was letters to its editor, in which they refuted allegations that Jews were predominantly fraudsters, blasphemous enemies of the Church and Bolsheviks. However, these letters had no effect on the Catholic Herald's portrait of the Jews. Most of these rejoinders were not published at all or they were used ‘as peg at which to hang further arguments to the Jews’. The following letter to the Board in 1932 from the Catholic Herald merely restated the prejudices to which the Board had objected:

Whatever may be the attitude at your Board towards the statements made in the article of the 14th instant... it is unfortunately true and cannot be denied by any impartial authority that in France and indeed all over Europe the influence of Masonry and Jewish Masonry especially has been constantly exercised against the Catholic church. Does your Board remember the famous dictum of Gambetta, that ‘the day of the priest was over and the day of the Jew had come’ and that under his direction nearly every Prefect of France was of the Jewish persuasion? Unfortunately in connection with Revolution the percentage of Jews who have dominated the rule of the Soviets has been enormous. The suggestion that these have not been anti-religious does not admit of discussion. It is no pleasure to the editor to point out what are unfortunately manifest facts and he does not think that a merely religious or national prejudice should lead a representative body such as that for which you speak to make statements that are in the face of all evidence.

Since most of the Committee’s complaints to Catholic news editors went unheard, the BOD saw it necessary to bring the Catholic hierarchy’s attention to the antisemitic outburst of Catholic newspapers. Chief Rabbi Hertz was first asked in October 1929 in take up this task. Unfortunately, neither the records of the BOD nor the Westminster Diocesan Archive tell whether Hertz agreed or Cardinal Bourne received such a letter, and if so, how Bourne reacted. The documents are more conclusive for the years 1937/38, a time when the spectre of a Jewish-masonic-Bolshevlk conspiracy was again conjured up by the publications of Fr Fahey in the Catholic Times. A year earlier, the BOD had already remarked on the harmful potential of Fahey's The Mythical Body of Christ that thrived to a great extent on vicious attacks on Jews. Fahey‘s book saw the Jews as prime movers of revolutions and accused them of founding the Soviet Republic and ‘phoney’ democracies in the West – systems which they allegedly exploited to their own advantage. [As the Protocols and other documents proudly boast.] Large parts of the book dealt with current politics in Ireland, first the alleged influence of masons and Jews, second that the Irish Republic Brotherhood was inspired by Jewish banks. The BOD was, however, more concerned about the approval the book gained from Catholic Journals, bishops and the Irish hierarchy. Neville Laski contacted Archbishop Downey of Liverpool regarding Fahey’s influence among Catholics. Downey answered in July 1936: ‘[I] noted the passages marked by you. It seems to me quite uncritical, and I will write about it to the bishop who has given an “Imprimatur”. I have never heard of the author or of the book before. I do not think the publication will carry much weight.’

How mistaken Downey was about Fahey’s influence is shown in Fahey’s numerous articles in Catholic publications, particularly the Catholic Times, in 1938 and the favourable responses among the lower clergy. Again, the BOD asked the Catholic hierarchy to intervene with the Catholic Times in order to moderate the paper's antisemitism. Since the Catholic Times was owned by the Catholic Missionary Society, the Catholic bishops were an obvious contact. Furthermore after a complaint by the BOD, Cardinal Archbishop Hinsley of Westminster had reprimanded another paper of the Missionary Society, the Catholic Gazette, in February 1936 for its favourable views on the ‘Protocols of Zion’. In the matter of the Catholic Times in 1937 a letter of recommendation by Archbishop Downey eventually opened the doors to Cardinal Hinsley, but had only limited success it influencing the Catholic papers’ attitude towards Jews. The response of Cardinal Hinsley’s private secretary Msgr Collings left some hope, when he assured the representatives of the BOD that the Cardinal ‘has taken steps which he hopes will prove effective to modify the attitude of that paper in the way” the Board desired. However, the delegation of the Board received by Collings left empty-handed.

Complaints about the Catholic newspapers’ journalistic practice rarely arose from the Catholic community. In a letter to Bishop Williams of Birmingham, Fr O’Hea of the Catholic Social Guild criticised the Catholic Times ‘exalted nationalism’ and the Catholic Herald's crude misinterpretation of Jewish life and its reluctance to print rejoinders. O’Hea insisted that these practices were no trivialities – quite contrary to Downey’s dismissive remarks on the importance of such articles: ‘The trouble is that one finds many Catholics, even undergraduates who believe that the Catholic weekly press is in some way official, and of course a journalist has to write in an authoritative tone... Catholics have been constantly told that the Catholic press alone is reliable.’

Catholic newspapers were not subject to the internal censorship by the Catholic hierarchy, which was imposed on all theological publications by Catholics. Since they were not the owners at these publications, apart from the Catholic Times which was owned by the Catholic Missionary Society, it would have been unmerited interference on their part. Yet in the case of the Catholic Times the hierarchy as superior to the Catholic Missionary Society was indeed responsible for the content of this newspaper. The reason why Cardinal Hinsley did not react to the petition of the BOD in this instance is not clear from the sources. One reason might be, as Thomas Moloney suggests in a similar context, that Hinsley did not like to be enlisted for ‘particularist courses’. Yet it was not the case that Catholic lay media enterprises existed in isolation from the influence of the Catholic hierarchy. On the contrary, the editors of The Tablet, The Universe, and the Catholic Times were in regular and amicable contact with members of the hierarchy and their secretaries. These relations were used on other occasions to influence which news would not go to press. These were occasions unrelated to theological questions and therefore – if the bishops’ words to the BOD were true – beyond their influence. A statement by Msgr Collings on the relationship between the press and the hierarchy is revealing:

I stated that the Cardinal had no central control over the press, but it was suggested to me that if His Eminence desired to do so it must surely be apparent to everybody that an intimation by him, or his brother Bishops that it was not their desire that certain matters should be referred to in the Catholic press, would be readily accepted by the owners of the papers.

The bishops indeed exercised their influence on the Catholic press when it suited them. For instance, while in negotiations with the government about denominational schools, the bishops of England and Wales agreed at their annual general meeting to advise the Catholic press not to permit any correspondence on the education question. In this case, the hierarchy could not have reacted through the official institutional procedures of ecclesiastical censure, but there were other paths open, which were indeed used when deemed necessary to safeguard Catholic interests.

Our author then goes on to discuss the similar situation with the Catholic press in Germany.

We believe that presenting these portions of this book has helped us in several ways. First, it has helped us to see what things the opposition has to say in regards to the so-called “conspiracy literature”, and in that manner this stands as a critical review of Ulrike Ehret’s book, portions of which we may refer to in future segments of this series of presentations on the Protocols. It has also helped us to see how sloppy some of the so-called internet researchers can be at times. Archbishop Downey obviously had nothing to do with the Catholic Gazette, which today seems to be known only from its article on The Jewish Peril, so Metapedia and all such online sources need to be checked, and never taken for granted. But of course print books can make mistakes as well.

At the same time, Ehret has confirmed for us the legitimacy of much of the anti-Jewish Catholic literature which was circulating in Britain in the 1930’s, since items such as the article on The Jewish Peril from the Catholic Gazette and the writings of Fr Denis Fahey have been circulating around patriotic Christian circles and on the Internet for quite some time. Otherwise, it seems that this material has been mostly ignored in mainstream circles. We can also see that these men were not alone, as there were several other Catholic publications in Britain which were attempting to oppose, or at least to expose, the threatened Jewish World Supremacy.

And again, it is almost comical to see Ulrike Ehret deny that a world Jewish conspiracy even existed, as today the objectives in the Protocols are so far advanced in reality that if the Jews did not have the power to execute them, then a prophet must have written them. As we hope to have demonstrated here on many occasions already, and hope to do on many more in the months to come, the Protocols are real.

It is now at the point where we can safely assume, that if one denies the reality of the Protocols, then one must be a part of the conspiracy.