Envoy Magazine joins St. Blog’s
Well folks, I thought I would break the news. Envoy Magazine has now joined St. Blog’s, and it promises to be as much fun as the magazine. The name of the blog is Envoy Encore and with a team of Pat, Caroline, Carl, Steve Ray, Tim Staples, Mary Beth Bonacci and Catholic Light’s crazy canuck canonist, it looks the be pretty good! No, I won’t be giving up Catholic Light, the Petra Pundit, or Gratian’s Commentary to take on this team blog, but it pretty much kills what’s left of CLOG. Which reminds me, I’ve now got an email address just for blogging going at petevere@msn.com. How do I add it to everyone else’s in the upper left-hand corner?
I usually don’t comment over movies that I have not even seen for myself (heck, I haven’t even seen “Charlie’s Angels:Full Throttle” yet) , but Mel Gibson’s “Passion”, if the controversy over its alleged “Anti-Semitic” content is anything to go by, is one of those times that i feel I should break this rule (or at least bend it-until I see it for myself when it is formally released next year-probably into the run up to Good Friday).
Frank Rich in today’s International Herald Tribune (Aug2/3, 2003) notes that according those insiders (largely but not exclusively Jewish as is Mr. Rich himself) it virtually reinstates the old canard of “the Jews” as Christ’s killers ( a concept discarded by mainstream Catholic teaching with Vatican II) Mr Rich makes much of alleged anti Semitic comments attributed to Gibson’s father,( like his son a supporter of Traditional “Lefebrvrist”(after its chief spokesman, excommunicated Belgian Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre ), and of the fact that some of the film’s supporters included rightwing Catholic commentators such as Peggy Noonan, Ann Coulter ( who in her recent book”Treason” spent an inordinate amount of time dwelling on singer Bob Dylan’s real name “Robert Zimmmerman”- a not so subtle dig at his Jewishness).
By coincidence, yesterday I read “Unholy War”, by David Kertesz, a book detailing the alleged role of the Holy See and successive popes in fomenting anti-Semitism.
Even making allowance for the fact that the worst persecutors of Jewry in the 20th Century were not religious zealots but atheistical regimes such as the Third Reich or Stalin’s ( and to a lesser extent his successors from Khrushchev to Gorbachev)Soviet Union, Kertesz puts forward a disturbing thesis. Forcible baptismal and kidnapping of Jewish children ( although Kertesz dwells longest on the 1858 case of Edgardo Mortara, he details several other
similar cases), forced sermons, degrading spectacles such as forcing the fattest forty Jews to run a race(after having being fed heavily) in the run up to Lent, known as Carnival and others such as being forced to wear yellow stars -centuries for the Nazi era-either condoned or explicitly approved by successive Popes- , accusations of “ritual murder” or “blood libels” (to be fair, several Popes explicitly repudiated such beliefs),and of course imprisonment in the ghettos all indicate that we Catholics have much to regret in our past treatment of the “Children of Abraham”. Individual Pops may very well have been kindly, decent or humane towards individual ( or even as a group)Jews, but the “Christ-killer” view tended to cloud the judgement of more than a few.
Lastly, I should concede that ndividual Catholic and clergy (with or without the tacit apporval of the higher clergy) saced many Jews from the Shoah (Holocaust) such as the “Assisi Underground” which hid them in monasteries or convents.