SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
June 2002
Volume 9, No. 6
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Moving Picture
-> My Faith: A Brief Defense
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
The Moving Picture
(pages 1-2)
Writing in the NEW YORK TIMES, Garry Wills argues
that the Catholic hierarchy owes the faithful and the
world an honest accounting of their handling of "the
sexual abuse of minors." He's absolutely right. But the
sexual liberalizers -- including Wills himself -- should
come clean too. This scandal is not just about a vague
"sexual abuse of minors"; it's about the *homosexual*
abuse of young *males.* It has resulted from the
appallingly lax enforcement of Catholic morals,
particularly in the seminaries, one of which has become
notorious as "the Pink Palace."
* * *
After a few days of pretending to waver, the Israeli
government of Ariel Sharon has decided to ban a United
Nations investigation of its attack on West Bank
Palestinians. Sharon charges that the inquiry would be
prejudiced against Israel -- so prejudiced, apparently,
as to invent atrocity stories out of thin air. Even if
so, why doesn't Sharon invite truly neutral investigators
who might prove Israel's innocence of such charges? The
aging Butcher of Beirut knows very well what any honest
inquiry would find. Even the few witnesses who have
gotten to the scene report the overpowering stench of
corpses from beneath the rubble.
* * *
Not all of Sharon's American support comes from the
powerful Jewish lobby; much of it comes from
conservatives -- not only the hireling conservatives in
the media, but from fundamentalist Protestants who hope,
quite literally, that the battle of Armageddon is at hand
and want to bring it on. This isn't exactly the sort of
foreign policy George Washington recommended. But what's
really scandalous is the total indifference of these
Christians to the suffering of their defenseless, pacific
fellow Christians in the Holy Land, even in Bethlehem
itself.
* * *
The latest theme of Zionist propaganda is that
Europe has reverted to anti-Semitism. Evidence? European
sympathy for the Palestinian cause and dislike of Israel;
scattered burnings of synagogues; a few beatings of Jews
by street thugs; criticisms of Israel by the French
ambassador to England at a London dinner party; and the
strong showing of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round of
France's presidential election. Since most of the
criminal violence seems to be the doing of Arab
immigrants, and none of it has the support of any
European government, the "proof" is pretty thin. (Haven't
Jewish groups always pushed for open immigration?) As for
Le Pen, who got less than 20 per cent of the vote, his
chief targets are those very immigrants; and the "anti-
Semitic" government has fined him heavily for his mild
remarks about Jews. In sum, "anti-Semitic" means
insufficiently pro-Israel.
* * *
Which reminds me. Abe Rosenthal, you'll recall,
recently surmised that the French are already planning
concentration camps for the Jews. He has rather
mysteriously dropped the subject. It seems to me that so
serious a charge should be pursued. Of course it wasn't
serious, in the sense that Rosenthal didn't really mean
it and takes no responsibility for making it. So casual
are imputations of deadly anti-Semitism nowadays. So
casual, and so meaningless.
* * *
Speaking of Le Pen, the Socialists he edged out
rallied behind the corrupt "conservative" Jacques Chirac
to defeat the "extremist." Which tells you all you need
to know about the principles of "mainstream" parties in
modern democracy. (As if you didn't already know.) The
chameleons always unite against men who keep their true
colors.
* * *
Overdue but welcome is Kenneth R. Timmerman's new
book, SHAKEDOWN: EXPOSING THE REAL JESSE JACKSON
(Regnery). The title says it all: it's an examination of
Jackson's lucrative career as a racial blackmail artist.
Though his fraudulence has always been visible to the
naked eye, Kimmerman has unearthed the bodies and found
the witnesses, prominent among whom is Jackson's
impenitently criminal half-brother Noah Robinson Jr. The
conservative and neoconservative media are boosting the
book; the liberal media are ignoring it. But it may at
last put a crimp in Jackson's sordid and aggressive
operations. By now this veteran jive artist -- excuse me,
"civil rights leader" -- can afford to retire anyway.
* * *
Still on Lyndon Johnson's case is Robert Caro. Knopf
has just published the third volume of his huge biography
of LBJ, MASTER OF THE SENATE: THE YEARS OF LYNDON
JOHNSON. It's 1,167 pages long and leaves one volume to
go. I have no intention of reading the whole thing, but
according to the reviews, Caro has softened on his
subject. Sure, he shows us the same vividly boorish bully
we met in the first two volumes -- humiliating his
underlings, forcing his secretaries to take dictation
from his toilet seat, cheating flagrantly on his devoted
wife -- but, after all, the larger-than-life Texan, in a
heroic act of self-transcendence (which, however,
dovetails with his presidential ambitions), finally
forces a "historic civil rights bill" through Congress!
To Caro, it's apparently a paradox that a nasty customer
like Johnson should be in the end an instrument of the
holy cause of expanding the Federal Government. Progress
sure works in mysterious ways, don't it?
* * *
Back in the Sixties, my mild dislike of the squalid
actor Robert Blake was intensified when I saw him on the
TONIGHT show scolding Bishop Fulton Sheen for the sins
and hypocrisies of the Catholic Church. Even then I
suspected that Blake was not quite the man to be talking
down to the Church, or to Bishop Sheen. Now Blake has
been arrested for the murder of his trampish wife. I'm
unable to work up much sympathy for him.
* * *
Congressman Dick Armey of Texas, champion of low
taxes and property rights, has told HARDBALL's Chris
Matthews that he favors expelling all Arabs from the West
Bank. There is plenty of room for a Palestinian state in
the Arab countries, he explains. That's right: this
principled Republican affirms the Jewish state's
prerogative to drive people out of their homes.
* * *
Press reports that Bill Clinton wanted his own TV
talk show challenged the imagination. How could he bring
it off? After all, the format of such shows is pretty
rigid: the host begins with a ten-minute monologue of
off-color Clinton jokes. He'd be up against his own
legacy.
My Faith: A Brief Defense
(pages 3-6)
In 1960, when I was 14, I decided to become a
Catholic. Both of my parents and my stepfather were
lapsed Catholics, many of my relatives and neighbors were
active Catholics, and the atmosphere I lived in was very
Catholic; so my conversion wasn't the long and difficult
journey many converts have undergone. For me it was more
nearly a homecoming.
I never thought of Catholicism as an immigrant
religion and didn't even realize that anyone ever had. We
were all normal Americans; my male relatives had all
fought in World War II or Korea, and nobody doubted their
patriotism. They never felt they had anything to prove in
that respect.
Their confidence was bolstered, I now understand, by
the hospitality of the native Protestants, who by then
were disposed to be friendly to Catholics. In fact the
Catholic Church in those days was making many converts
among Protestants. (Hollywood had also discovered that
Catholicism was a picturesque religion; and that
Catholics bought a lot of tickets.) It was easy for a boy
my age to get the strong impression that Protestantism
was an anteroom to Catholicism; the Catholic Church's
claim to be the fulfillment of Christianity seemed very
plausible. Everything that was strong and convincing in
Protestantism seemed even stronger and more convincing in
Catholicism; the weak or "liberal" side of Protestantism,
as far as I could see, simply didn't exist in
Catholicism.
During my conversion, I encountered only one
exception to this interfaith goodwill: in my best friend,
Bruce Hays. He was a wonderful companion, intelligent,
hilarious, and utterly decent. But Bruce was undergoing
his own conversion at the time: raised a tepid Methodist,
he was becoming an ardent Baptist, and he took a dim view
of the Catholic Church, which, like most serious
Protestants, he saw as un-Scriptural. We argued
incessantly and sometimes bitterly. Whenever he raised an
objection I couldn't answer, I went to the local parish
priests, or to the seminarians who taught me catechism,
or to my own growing collection of books on the Catholic
faith, including a Bible with annotations explaining the
Scriptural foundations of Catholic doctrine. (I recently
got in touch with Bruce for the first time since high
school; we are both grandfathers now, and he is a
minister.)
In those days Catholic apologetics were assured and
aggressive. I was soon convinced that the Church would
have an answer for every criticism. For me, the clinching
argument was simply that the authority of the Bible
itself rested on the Church. It was the Church herself
that had established the Scriptural canon, long before
Luther. Unless she was divinely guided, how could
Protestants be sure that she had chosen the right books
out of the welter of gospels, epistles, and other early
Christian literature? And if she was divinely guided, by
what authority did the Protestant reformers reject
several books of the Old Testament that had been accepted
by all Christians until the sixteenth century? (Luther
also wanted to reject the Epistle of James!) Even today,
most Christians, including the Eastern Orthodox, accept
the old canon.
Besides, the Bible as we know it hardly existed
until the invention of the printing press and the spread
of literacy (one of the great Protestant achievements, by
the way). It was several centuries before the canon was
even defined; the Scriptures had to be copied by hand;
personal ownership of a Bible, now routine even among
Catholics, was nearly impossible before Gutenberg. The
daily life of most Christians had been sacramental, not
Scriptural.
In fact the Protestant exaltation of the Scriptures
was somewhat un-Scriptural. The principle "sola
Scriptura" is not to be found in them. St. Paul assures
us that the Scriptures (in the plural; he never calls
them "the Bible") are divinely inspired, but he doesn't
suggest that they negate the authority of the Apostles as
given by Christ, much less that reading the Scriptures is
on a par with receiving the Sacraments in Christian life.
Moreover, St. Paul seems to be referring to the Old
Testament; he may not have realized that other inspired
books (including the Gospels) were yet to come, and he
doesn't seem to claim inspiration even for his own
epistles.
As far as we know, Christ never told the Apostles to
write anything. He directed them to *preach* the Gospel,
to baptize, and above all to commemorate him by
reenacting the Last Supper. He said, "Take and eat; this
is my body," not "Take and read: this is my book." If he
had meant a book to be the decisive authority for the
Church, surely he would have written it himself!
All this is not to belittle the Scriptures, holy and
precious as they are, but only to say that until fairly
late in Christian history, they could never have had the
central place in Christian worship the Protestants have
given them. I won't dwell here on other problems
Protestantism raises, except to note, as Catholic critics
have often noted, that the principle of private
interpretation, uncorrected by the authority of the
Church, could only lead to endless division among
Christians. And of course most Protestants today are
hardly aware that what they call "the Bible" -- a neatly
printed and packaged object -- excludes seven books still
accepted by the great mass of the world's Christians.
While Bruce and I were having our debate, I read a
wonderful little book which I have often reread since
then: AN AMERICAN DIALOGUE: A PROTESTANT LOOKS AT
CATHOLICISM, AND A CATHOLIC LOOKS AT PROTESTANTISM, by
Robert McAfee Brown and Gustave Weigel, S.J. The book is
long out of print, but worth digging up. Both men were
theologians, and both wrote with extreme courtesy and
charity; but Father Weigel's searching criticism of
Protestantism still seems to me entirely persuasive and
even prophetic.
Writing in the early days of the ecumenical
movement, when "dialogue" had not yet become a cliche
(let alone a verb!), Father Weigel was candid enough to
say that a Catholic can't join in the kind of dialogue
the Protestant hopes for; because, if he accepts the
infallibility of his Church, he is simply not available
to conversion. But the Protestant is under no such
limitation; and Father Weigel goes on to explain, with
great eloquence, that this is indeed the fatal weakness
of the Protestant position. In the end, it cedes
everything.
Of course we have to distinguish between the
Protestant culture, which has no center of gravity, and
certain specific and well-defined versions of
Protestantism, such as the fundamentalist creeds. The
latter do hold their ground; but for that very reason
they aren't interested in ecumenical dialogue. They
believe in changeless truths and they see nothing to
negotiate. And at least they have the right idea: Christ
wasn't into dialogue and he didn't urge his disciples to
dialogue either. The Christian may be, *must* be, meek
and humble of heart; but he must never compromise the
divine truth he is commanded to share with all the world.
But it has always seemed to me that even the
fundamentalist does compromise the truth on one vital
point: the Eucharist. I don't see how anyone can deny
that Christ meant the words "This is my body ... This is
my blood" literally; and that his disciples took them
literally. The Last Supper was the most solemn moment of
his life, the very moment at which we would expect of him
a stupendous revelation, not a mere metaphor or figure of
speech. And it came. Here was the body that would be
sacrificed, the blood that would be shed in redemption,
under the appearances of bread and wine (foreshadowed in
his miracles with bread and wine). For him to have
demanded a merely symbolic memorial of himself would have
been wholly inadequate to the occasion.
This was the fulfillment and explanation of the
"hard saying" which, according to chapter 6 of John's
Gospel, caused many disciples, quite understandably, to
fall away. On that occasion Christ didn't call them back,
explaining that he was only giving another parable or
symbol. He let them leave. Their shocked impression that
he was speaking literally was quite correct.
St. Paul likewise warns that if we eat this Bread
and drink this Chalice unworthily, we are "eating and
drinking damnation" to ourselves, because they are in
fact the very Body and Blood of Christ. This hardly makes
sense if we are taking only ordinary bread and wine.
This is why the early Christians were accused of
practising a cannibalistic ritual. If they had been
Protestants, they could easily have defended themselves
by pleading that the bread was only symbolic. Evidently
they didn't.
Those early Christians were very tough. Thousands of
them endured the most horrible tortures the Roman
authorities could think up, rather than commit the
slightest act of hypocritical idolatry to the emperor. Is
it even conceivable that they would have quietly accepted
the introduction of idolatry *in their own worship?* If
they had regarded the Eucharist as mere bread, they would
have raised a storm of protest at any attempt to pretend
that it was the very Body of the Lord. The "idolatry of
the Mass" would have been condemned long before the
Protestants came along. No greater sacrilege could have
been imagined. The Church would have split violently. Yet
nowhere in the history of the early Church do we find the
slightest demurral. For centuries all Christians accepted
the divinity of the Eucharist.
There are other indications. An early bishop of
Alexandria decreed that no menstruating woman might
receive the Eucharist; Garry Wills, who denies the
doctrine of transubstantiation, unwisely cites this fact
as proof of the early Church's misogyny. Be that as it
may, it certainly proves that the early Church regarded
the Eucharist not as a mere symbol, but as something that
must be zealously protected from any form of physical
defilement. To us the bishop's position may seem a rude
superstition; but then, that is exactly how Catholic
belief in the Eucharist seems to Protestants.
We might almost say that denial of that belief,
universally shared by the early Church, is the only thing
nearly all Protestants (except a few Anglicans who don't
consider themselves Protestants) still have in common. No
positive belief unites them; this negation does.
Finally, we may recall that the early Christians
received Communion far more rarely, and after far more
rigorous fasting, than today (when frequent Communion is
encouraged) -- another eloquent testimony to how
sacrosanct the primitive Church considered the Eucharist.
This is further confirmed by the care taken to avoid
dropping eucharistic fragments during the Communion rite.
It would be impossible to profane mere bread.
Over the centuries, Protestant worship moved further
and further from the Mass. Though it has recently begun
to restore parts of the old liturgy here and there, it
no longer even speaks of "the priesthood of all
believers"; without the Eucharist, there is no need of
any priesthood or liturgy, let alone bishops, apostolic
succession, teaching authority, papacy, and all the other
developments that proceed from the institution of the
Eucharist. Even at its best -- at its most faithful to
such original doctrines as it retains -- Protestantism
has always seemed to me sadly dated, while at its worst
it has always seemed faddishly up to date.
At any rate, Protestantism as a whole is so
fragmented that if any part of it has maintained full
fidelity to Christ's teaching, it must be such a small
and elusive part as to make a mockery of Christ's promise
to be with his Church even unto the end of the world. And
just where was his true Church during the centuries when
all Christians believed that he was physically present in
the Eucharist? I could never escape the conviction that
if his Church still exists, it must be something like the
Catholic Church; and the only church like the Catholic
Church is the Catholic Church itself. The only churches
that resemble the Catholic Church even superficially are
too local and schismatic for the resemblance to be
compelling. Everything I found beautiful in Protestantism
I found complete and perfected in Catholicism.
Every error leads eventually to absurdity. To take a
secular example, the U.S. Supreme Court is reluctant to
admit error; it generally pretends even that its
predecessors have never erred. Rather than correct
earlier errors, it builds on them as precedents, until it
drifts further and further from the plain and obvious
meaning of the Constitution and notoriously flouts common
sense. The whole process of judicial self-discrediting
has taken only a century of so.
If the Catholic Church had fallen into error
centuries ago, the corollaries of her first error would
have likewise become grossly obvious over time, each
error begetting more and worse errors. But, quite to the
contrary, the whole structure of her teaching remains at
least highly plausible. One may reject her stubborn
teaching on divorce or birth control, but she can hardly
be accused of either inconsistency or the sort of
consistency that finally becomes absurd. And her critics'
case against her usually boils down to nothing more than
the objection that she is out of step with the latest
opinion polls, a criterion that doesn't even pretend to
be Scriptural.
To anyone who hungers for truth, the Church's
indifference to opinion polls can only be a
recommendation, even a consolation. Christ warned his
followers to expect worldly scorn and persecution. These
are in fact the very marks of his Church. When I fell
away from the Church in the mid 1960s, embarrassingly
soon after my conversion, I was disturbed by the changes
introduced after the Second Vatican Council, which caused
me to doubt the permanence of Catholic teaching; but I
was still deeply impressed by the Church's refusal to
budge on birth control. The critics, some of them
seemingly devout Catholics, said that this teaching had
never been dogmatically defined, and that it could be
modified without injury to the central doctines of the
Church. But their real argument seemed to be that the
Church was standing alone against the whole world; which
I thought was just what the Church was supposed to do. To
that extent, at least, she was acting like Christ's
Church. If she had buckled, I probably would never have
come back.
It wasn't just that the Church was stubborn on this
point; I also suspected that she was right. After all,
the world itself, not so long ago, had regarded birth
control with disapproval and disgust. Why was that
mutable world supposed to be normative for the Church?
The longer she held out against the glib rationalists,
the more my old love for her surged back. There was
something wrong with birth control, for the same reason
that there was something beautiful about making babies.
And nobody else was willing to say so. Surely there were
at least some Protestants who still felt, as their
ancestors had felt, that contraception was at least
morally dubious and, when used as a mere convenience,
especially degrading to marriage.
Suddenly large families, which I'd always felt were
one of the great joys of life, were regarded as vulgar.
We were warned about the "population explosion" and
progressive voices murmured that birth control might have
to be made compulsory. When progressives rediscovered the
importance of "reproductive freedom," they meant only
abortion. And the liberal churches followed these ghastly
fashions. Only the more stalwart conservative Protestants
-- those who remained closest to Catholicism -- refused
to join the parade.
The more these progressive fads raged, the more I
understood what Chesterton meant when he said that only
the Catholic Church can save a man from the degrading
slavery of being a child of his time. Chesterton often
describes Catholicism in such terms as "sane" and
"healthy" -- words that exactly capture my own sense of
it. The Church held chastity, marriage, and procreation
as norms; some deviations might be tolerable at best, but
none could claim moral parity.
The current scandals in the Church, though they give
glee to the progressives, prove only that the failure of
Catholics to live by Catholic teaching can have the most
terrible consequences. In fact the scandals are a direct
consequence of following, instead of resisting, the
fashions of the world. The American bishops have become
almost unbelievably negligent since the last Council.
But, true to form, the progressives blame the horrors of
sexually predatory priests on the very rules that are no
longer enforced. If that were so, the problem would have
been more severe in the days when discipline was strict,
and the laxity of recent decades would have improved
matters. This is so obvious that only a liberal could
miss it.
An honest Protestant Christian, who remains faithful
to the truths the first Protestants shared with
Catholicism, may logically insist that the Reformation
was necessitated by the errors of the Church, as he
conceives them. But can he really deny that, on balance,
the chief historical result of the Reformation was a vast
dissolution of Christian culture, so that even most
Protestants today are hardly Christians at all? One after
another, the old doctrines, including the divinity of
Christ, have faded away, along with the old morality;
most nominally Christian churches have been absorbed by
the secular world.
This process of dissolution began very soon after
the first Lutheran protests; and it continues today, when
the sons of Christian Europe are casually living lives
that would have shocked their forefathers, and even their
long-term survival is in doubt. If the true Church of
Christ was liberated by the Reformation, it is hard to
identify that Church today among the myriad
denominations; but it is not at all hard to identify a
thousand evils, including countless false churches, that
were also liberated when the authority of the Catholic
Church was broken.
I am convinced that millions of Protestants are only
waiting to be invited back into the Catholic Church. All
that is missing is Catholic evangelical zeal, which was
so vigorous when I was young and has been so
conspicuously absent since the Second Vatican Council.
These Protestants aren't really heretics; they never
committed heresy themselves, they merely inherited an
abridged version of the Faith, and they have been
faithful to as much of it as they know. They would find
fulfillment and joy in Catholicism; and the worst mistake
Catholics make is to dilute the Faith in the hope of
making it more appealing. No soul full of faith, hope,
and charity is attracted to a lowest common denominator.
Christianity now stands with its back to the wall.
It desperately needs reunion. To my mind this can only
mean the return of our Protestant brothers to the
Catholic Church. We Catholics must plead: "Dear brothers,
we love you, and we want you back!"
NUGGETS
HYSTERICAL PERSPECTIVE: After I wrote in praise of Thomas
DiLorenzo's new book, THE REAL LINCOLN, in my column of
January 17, 2002 ("Lincoln's Feet of Clay"), I got an
unsigned e-mail message accusing me of "bashing a man who
has been dead for 137 years. Why don't you pick a fight
with someone who is alive and can defend himself?" I've
dropped plans to challenge Julius Caesar's historical
reputation. After all, the poor guy has been dead for
more than 2,000 years. (page 6)
CASTING AGAINST TYPE: The other day I finally saw the old
movie NORTH STAR -- one of a spate of pro-Soviet
Hollywood films made at the urging of Franklin Roosevelt
during World War II, to dispel "prejudice" against "our
Russian allies." And it certainly employed the
appropriate red and pink talents to glorify the Workers'
Paradise: Lillian Hellman wrote the script, Lewis
Milestone directed, Aaron Copland supplied the soundtrack
music. The least authentic touch (of many) is Walter
Brennan as a Russian peasant, addressed as "comrade."
(page 6)
GO FIGURE DEPT.: I'm bemused by press accounts of the
assassination of the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, an
open homosexual who was called "right-wing" because he
opposed immigration. Maybe he feared the Muslim influx
would threaten such venerable Dutch traditions as
euthanasia and same-sex marriage. (page 9)
SEMANTIC NOTES: Neoconservatives have coined the delicate
euphemism "regime change" for the policy of overthrowing
foreign governments and replacing them with American
puppet rulers. Query: Would restoring the U.S.
Constitution count as "regime change"? (page 12)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
FIDEL AND HIS FRIEND: Jimmy Carter has been taking heat
for his goodwill visit to Cuba. Frankly, I can't see why.
At least he got old Fidel Castro to don respectable
business attire, if not to shave. Like all surviving
Communist rulers, Castro is bankrupt and seems to be
looking for a decorous way to liberalize a wee bit. If
Carter's trip made any difference, it was probably for
the better.
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* Protestant America (April 11, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020411.shtml
* The Zionist Dream (April 16, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020416.shtml
* Where to Look for Evil (April 18, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020418.shtml
* Israel's Idiots (April 23, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020423.shtml
* The Catholic Ogre (April 25, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020425.shtml
* An Apocalyptic Foreign Policy (April 30, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020430.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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