Since the publication of Brendan Whitaker’s article on the Mark Houck trial and my article on how I ended up on the FBI hit list for traditional Catholics in the March issue of Culture Wars, both stories have not only taken on legs; they have merged into a narrative that made national news after it became the basis of Senate hearings on prosecutorial bias in the Justice Department.
In his interrogation of Attorney General Merrick Garland, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas stated that “You agree with Roe v. Wade. You disagree with the Dobbs decision”[1] was the fundamental principle which determined how the law was going to be enforced under Garland’s leadership at the Justice Department. Garland was clearly embarrassed by the charge but unable to refute the claim leveled by Cruz that the protesters demonstrating in front of the homes of the justices who voted in favor of the Dobbs decision would not be prosecuted, even though they clearly broke federal law because, as Cruz put it, the Justice Department decided “that this law doesn’t apply to harassing justices for an opinion [Garland’s lawyers] don’t like.” Cruz tried in vain to get Garland to answer a simple yes or no to his question, “Have you brought a single case against these protesters?”[2]
After failing to get a simple yes or no answer, Cruz brought up the case of Mark Houck, in which between 20 and 30 armed FBI officers showed up at this Catholic prolifer’s home with drawn guns in a predawn raid which both endangered and terrorized Houck’s entire family. After Garland repeatedly refused to answer Cruz’s question about “How do you decide which statutes you enforce and which statutes you don’t,” Cruz said.
“We’ve also seen violent attacks on pregnancy centers by left wing groups There have been attacks all over the country, and yet the Department of Justice had not brought these violent criminals to justice. Contrast that to Mark Houck. If you’re a prolife activist, what can you expect? Well in this instance, according to Mr. Houck’s wife, two dozen agents clad in body armor and ballistic helmets and shields and a battering ram showed up at his house pointing rifles at his family Why do you send two dozen agents in body armor to arrest a sidewalk counselor who happens to be prolife when you don’t dedicate resources to prosecute people who are violently firebombing crisis pregnancy centers?”[3]
After Cruz’s time ran out, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri continued his line of questioning by bringing up the leaked memo from the FBI field office in Richmond, Virginia, which “advocated the use of trip wire and source development against traditionalist Catholics, including those who favor the Latin Mass. Attorney General are you cultivating sources and spies in Latin Mass parishes and other Catholic parishes around the country?”[4]
Garland: I saw the document you sent. It was appalling. I am in complete agreement with you. I understand that the FBI has withdrawn it. And is now looking into how this could have happened.
Hawley: How did it happen?
Garland: That’s what they are looking into. But I’m totally in agreement with you.
Hawley: I’ll tell you how it happened. This memorandum which is supposed to be intelligence cites extensively the Southern Poverty Law Center which identifies these groups as hate groups. Is this how the FBI under your direction and leadership does intelligence, they look at left wing advocacy groups to target Catholics? Is this what’s going on? It clearly is. How is this happening?
Both Cruz and Hawley were exasperated by Garland’s refusal to answer their questions. “You don’t know the specifics of anything it seems,” Hawley said, “but on your watch the Justice Department is targeting Catholics, targeting people of faith, and I’ll just tell you this is a disgrace.”
Instead of calling him a disgrace and badgering Garland in vain on the number of agents he deployed in Catholic parishes, Hawley should have brought up the most significant development in the abortion struggle since the overthrow of Roe v. Wade by reminding Garland that 400 Jewish organizations have claimed that abortion is a fundamental Jewish value.
Hawley had no hesitation in telling Garland, “You’re happy to deploy them [FBI agents] against Catholics and innocent children,”[5] but he failed to explain Garland’s motivation because he refused to identify him as a Jew who uses his religion as the guide to how law gets enforced during his tenure as Attorney General. Merrick Garland has turned the FBI into the long arm of Jewish vengeance which gets deployed against anyone who has the temerity to challenge the legitimacy of the Jewish sacrament of abortion, but no one was willing to bring up his Jewishness as relevant to the discussion, even though Hawley had no hesitation in identifying Catholic prolifers as the victims. The subsequent equation—Catholics vs. FBI agents—was lopsided and ultimately mystifying—the FBI has long been a career path for Catholics—because the Jewish motivation and participation in this conflict remained absent from the discussion.
This deliberate erasure of Jewish involvement in moral subversion has conferred the cultural equivalent of invisibility—symbolized by the Tarnkappe, the hat which made Alberich, also a Jew, invisible in Richard Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold—on all Jewish participation in the abortion saga from its very beginning in the late 1960s, when Bernard Nathanson was portrayed as a disinterested gynecologist by the equally Jewish New York Times, which lost no opportunity to identify anti-abortion activists as Catholics. Catholics were accused of wanting to impose their religion on everyone else at the very moment that the Jews succeeded in imposing the Jewish sacrament of abortion on the entire nation when the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade. Nathanson knew that abortion was a fundamental Jewish value but would never say something this revealing in public. When he converted to Catholicism, he wrote a memoir in which he claimed that Americans would never have accepted abortion if they knew that it was being promoted by “the spawn of a cadre of wild-eyed Jewish radicals in New York City.”[6]
The results of this erasure have been devastating. The Jews have won every single battle in the culture wars, from abolishing school prayer to enshrining gay marriage in the constitution, because no one is allowed to identify them as a group which acts in its own interest, much less describe what they are doing as essentially imposing their religion on the American people in the name of progress. The Catholic Church, the Jews’ main opponent in the culture wars, has been crippled in its efforts to uphold the moral order because it cannot address the Jewish Question.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the battle over abortion. Catholic politicians could strive to ban abortion, but they were held back in their efforts by American bishops who crippled politicians in their effort to identify the enemy by claiming in their catechism that the Mosaic covenant is eternally valid, until Robert Sungenis, in an article in Culture Wars, reminded them that this claim was heretical, and they removed it. Like Wiley Coyote running off a cliff, the doctrine remains in place long after the doctrinal foundation supporting it has disappeared.
Joseph Ratzinger, as I pointed out in my review of his posthumous book which appeared in last month’s Culture Wars, hectored us from the grave by claiming that Jews and Catholics shared the same morality. Ratzinger’s error became obvious in the wake of the Dobbs decision, but the damage he inflicted on the Church by prohibiting any discussion of the Jewish question continued to trouble the Church, not only in her defense of the moral law but in the even more fundamental issue of evangelization as well.
One day after Cruz and Hawley grilled Merrick Garland in the Senate, Bishop Robert Barron gave a speech at Notre Dame University on the role which evangelization played in the mission of the Catholic university. Evangelization is good, his excellency opined, but it is different than proselytization, which is bad. Just what his excellency meant by these terms became clear in an exchange on that topic with the conservative Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro. Cutting to the chase, Shapiro opened the discussion by posing what he termed “the most awkward of the awkward questions,” which is whether Bishop Barron felt that Ben was going to hell.
Shapiro: So, let’s begin with the most awkward of the awkward questions. I don’t really care about this question, but I get this question a lot. As a Jew how does it feel that other religions don’t think you’re getting into heaven? So, what’s the Catholic view, I’m asking you on who gets into heaven and who doesn’t? I spend a lot of my time promulgating what I think are Judeo-Christian virtues. So, what’s the Catholic view of me? Am I basically screwed here?
Barron: “No, the Catholic view, go back to the Second Vatican Council. It says it very clearly. I mean Christ is the privileged road to salvation . . . . However, Vatican II clearly teaches that someone outside the explicit Christian faith can be saved. Now they’re saved through the grace of Christ indirectly received. The grace is coming from Christ, but it might be received according to your conscience. So, if you’re following your conscience sincerely or you think you’re following the commands of the law sincerely, yeah, you can be saved. Now that doesn’t mean complete relativism. We still would say that the privileged route and the route that God has offered humanity, is the route of His Son. But, no, you can be saved. Vatican II says that even an atheist of good will can be saved by following his conscience because following his conscience, if he does, John Henry Newman says that conscience is the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul. It is in fact the voice of Christ. He is the logos made flesh. He is the divine reason made flesh. [By] following my conscience I’m following Him whether I know it explicitly or not. So even the atheist of good will, Vatican II teaches us, can be saved.”[7]
Conspicuous by its absence from Barron’s response was any mention of the sacrament of Baptism, which the Catholic Catechism defines as “necessary for salvation.” Instead of bloviating about Vatican II, Bishop Barron should have responded with a question of his own along the lines of “Ben, are you baptized?” To which, Shapiro would have answered “No,” at which point Barron should have responded by saying that “If you refuse to be baptized, you cannot be saved.”
This is the essence of evangelization, and there is no way around it. When Peter addressed the Jews after the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles at Pentecost, the first words out of his mouth in addressing the Jews were “You killed Christ.” “Cut to the heart” by Peter’s rebuke, the Jews asked, “What must we do to be saved?” and Peter told them “You must be baptized.”
As some indication that the gospel message can be preached effectively to the Jews, I got the following “letter of gratitude”:
Dear Dr. E Michael Jones,
Just over a year ago, I was a hapless Jewish bachelor living in my step-mother’s basement. However, now, I am a well-to-do married man, confirmed in the RCC. My conversion can be attributed in part to your assertion that the prescriptions of the Old Covenant can no longer be fulfilled, and yet, that they are fulfilled in the Eucharist as administered by ordained priests of the Holy Catholic Church. Your social commentary too, allowed me to make sense of world that as a dual US/Israeli citizen seemed to crumble before my eyes in the spring of 2020. My wife and I thank you for the benefit of your tireless evangelization of the Jews. May we continue to labor as one in the rescue of all the “lost sheep of the House of Israel.”
Faithfully, truthfully, and lovingly,
Mr. and Mrs. Asher Wiseman
Bruce Fingerhut, the publisher of St. Augustine’s Press and a Jewish convert to Catholicism, used to say that the worst form of anti-Semitism was exhibited by those who said that Jews did not have to convert to be saved. By proposing Christianity as the “privileged” way to salvation, Bishop Barron is implying that there are numerous salvific alternatives, implying that gaining eternal life is analogous to driving to Chicago, which can be reached by either the Indiana toll road or Rt. 94. In making this claim, Bishop Barron betrayed Ben Shapiro by conforming the gospel which states that Baptism is necessary for salvation to America’s civic religion. At the judgment day, God will hold Bishop Barron accountable for his cowardice. We can only hope that he sees the error of his ways before he is faced with that terrible moment of truth by reminding him, as St. Athanasius pointed out, that the floor of hell is paved with the skulls of bishops.[8]
Notes
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnZ6x3J0v40
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnZ6x3J0v40
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnZ6x3J0v40
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnZ6x3J0v40
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnZ6x3J0v40
[6] E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit (South Bend, IN: Fidelity Press, 2015 ) p. 921
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EevRrWyBllY
[8] https://tradcatfem.com/2018/08/17/the-floor-of-hell-is-paved-with-the-skulls-of-bishops/