Catholics Will Betray Other Catholics for Fear of Offending the Jews

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ warned us very specifically that we will be hated by members of our own household and, indeed, by the members of His household that is His Holy Catholic Church:

The brother also shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the son: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and shall put them to death. And you shall be hated by all men for my name’s sake: but he that shall persevere unto the end, he shall be saved. And when they shall persecute you in this city, flee into another. Amen I say to you, you shall not finish all the cities of Israel, till the Son of man come.

The disciple is not above the master, nor the servant above his lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they have called the goodman of the house Beelzebub, how much more them of his household?

Therefore fear them not. For nothing is covered that shall not be revealed: nor hid, that shall not be known. That which I tell you in the dark, speak ye in the light: and that which you hear in the ear, preach ye upon the housetops. And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.

Fear not therefore: better are you than many sparrows. Every one therefore that shall confess me before men, I will also confess him before my Father who is in heaven. But he that shall deny me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven. Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

And a man’s enemies shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not up his cross, and followeth me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it. He that receiveth you, receiveth me: and he that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent me. (Matthew 10: 21-40.)

We have been told by Our Lord Himself, in whose breast beats His Most Sacred Heart, that others will hate us. We must note hate in return. We must never be bitter. We must never hold onto or nurse grudges. Nothing anyone says to us or does to us is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Our Lord to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death and caused His Most Blessed Mother to suffer as those Seven Swords of Sorrow were thrust through and through into her Immaculate Heart.

It was nothing other than the love that beats for us in the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, aflame with a desire for our sanctification and salvation, that caused these words to issue forth from the mouth of Our Divine Redeemer during the Sermon on the Mount:

Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for my sake: Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is very great in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets that were before you.. . .

You have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thy enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust.

For if you love them that love you, what reward shall you have? do not even the publicans this? And if you salute your brethren only, what do you more? do not also the heathens this? Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5: 10-12; 43-48.) 

Although it is a well-established fact that President Donald John Trump, who has said that is very proud of his daughter Ivanka Trump Kushner’s conversion to Judaism, is a firm supporter of the Zionist State of Israel, I, for one, am a bit slack-jawed over the inability of prominent Catholics to recognize that, though the State of Israel, is an accomplished fact and that it has a right of legitimate self-defense to defend its own citizens, Israel’s existence is in defiance of God’s Holy Will as He personally chastised the Biblical Jews by expelling them from the Holy Land in 70 A.D. for refusing to respond to the preaching of the Apostles after He had given them a thirty-seven year period of mercy.

Moreover, the established of the State of Israel in 1948 was effected by the forcible, violent removal of Palestinians, many of them Maronite Rite Catholics, whose families had lived in the Holy Land for centuries, and then displaced into “relocation centers,” which was a euphemism for concentration camps. The Israeli brutality towards non-Jews, both Christians and Mohammedans, was noted by Pope Pius XII contemporaneously with the Zionist invasion of the Holy Land:

Among the multiple preoccupations which beset us in this period of time, so full of decisive consequences for the life of the great human family, and which make Us feel so seriously the burden of the Supreme Pontificate, Palestine occupies a particular place on account of the war which harasses it. In all truth We can tell you, Venerable Brethren, that neither joyous nor sad events diminish the sorrow which is kept alive in Our soul by the thought that, in the land in which our Lord Jesus Christ shed His blood to bring redemption and salvation to all mankind, the blood of man continues to flow; and that beneath the skies which echoed on that fateful night with the Gospel tidings of peace, men continue to fight and to increase the distress of the unfortunate and the fear of the terrorized, while thousands of refugees, homeless and driven, wander from their fatherland in search of shelter and food.

2. To make Our sorrow more grievous, there is not only the news which continually reaches Us of the destruction and damage of sacred buildings and charitable places built around the Holy Places, but there is also the fear that this inspires in Us for the fate of the Holy Places themselves scattered throughout Palestine, and more especially within the Holy City.

3. We must assure you, Venerable Brethren, that confronted with the spectacle of many evils and the forecast of worse to come, We have not withdrawn into Our sorrow, but have done all in Our power to provide a remedy. Even before the armed conflict began, speaking to a delegation of Arab dignitaries who came to pay homage to Us, We manifested our lifelong solicitude for peace in Palestine, and, condemning any recourse to violence, We declared that peace could only be realized in truth and justice; that is to say by respecting the rights of acquired traditions, especially in the religious field, as well as by the strict fulfillment of the duties and obligations of each group of inhabitants.

4. When war was declared, without abandoning the attitude of impartiality which was imposed by Our apostolic duty, which places Us above the conflicts which agitate human society, We did not fail to do Our utmost, in the measure which depended upon Us, and according to the possibilities offered to Us, for the triumph of justice and peace in Palestine and for the respect and protection of the Holy Places.

5. At the same time, although numerous and urgent appeals are received daily by the Holy See, We have sought as much as possible to come to the aid of the unhappy victims of the war, sending the means at Our disposal to Our representatives in Palestine, the Lebanon, and Egypt for this purpose, and encouraging the formation among Catholics in various countries of undertakings organized for the same purpose.

6. Convinced, however, of the insufficiency of human means for the adequate solution of a question the complexity of which no one can fail to see, We have, above all, had constant recourse to prayer, and in Our recent Encyclical Letter, Auspicia Quaedam, We invited you, Venerable Brethren, to pray, and to have the faithful entrusted to your pastoral care pray, in order that, under the auspices of the Blessed Virgin, matters may be settled in justice and peace, and concord may be happily restored in Palestine. As We said on June 2nd to members of the Sacred College of Cardinals, informing them of Our anxieties for Palestine, We do not believe that the Christian world could contemplate indifferently, or in sterile indignation, the spectacle of the sacred land (which everyone approached with the deepest respect to kiss with most ardent love) trampled over again by troops and stricken by aerial bombardments. We do not believe that it could permit the devastation of the Holy Places, the destruction of the great sepulcher of Christ.

7. We are full of faith that the fervent prayers raised to Almighty and Merciful God by the Christians throughout the world who, together with the aspirations of so many noble hearts, are ardently inspired by truth and good, will render less arduous to the men who hold the destinies of peoples the task of making justice and peace in Palestine a beneficial reality and of creating, with the efficient co-operation of all those interested, an order that may guarantee security of existence and, at the same time, the moral and physical conditions of life conducive to spiritual and material well-being, to each of the parties at present in conflict.

8. We are full of faith that these prayers and these hopes, an indication of the value that the Holy Places have for so great a part of the human family, will strengthen the conviction in the high quarters in which the problems of peace are discussed that it would be opportune to give Jerusalem and its outskirts, where are found so many and such precious memories of the life and death of the Savior, an international character which, in the present circumstances, seems to offer a better guarantee for the protection of the sanctuaries. It would also be necessary to assure, with international guarantees, both free access to Holy Places scattered throughout Palestine, and the freedom of worship and the respect of customs and religious traditions.

9. And God grant that the day may soon dawn when Christians may resume their pilgrimages to the Holy Places, there to see more clearly revealed, as they contemplate the evidence of the love of Jesus Christ, Who gave His life for His brethren, how men and nations may live harmoniously together, at peace with their world and themselves.

10. With reliance, then, on this hope, as a pledge of heavenly favors and in token of our affection, gladly in the Lord do we impart to you, Venerable Brethren, and to your flocks, as to all who will take this appeal of Ours to heart, Our Apostolic Benediction. (Pope Pius XII, In Multiplicibus Curis, October 24, 1948.)

Pope Pius XII’s papal heart was filled with sorrow at how native Palestinians were driven out of their homes for the establishment of a “Jewish homeland” by Talmudists, most of whom were not descended from the Biblical Jews, who not only disbelieved in the Most Holy Trinity and the Sacred Divinity of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ but who had worked actively in Europe for the established of secular, Judeo-Masonic states that eradicated the last vestiges of the Holy Roman Empire after World War I.

Once again, Catholics will the good of all men, but the ultimate expression of that good is the salvation of their immortal souls, and it is thus no more anti-Semitic to seek the conversion of Jews to the Catholic Church than it was for Saint Stephen the Protomartyr to have sought the conversion of the Jews, including Saul, who stoned him to death for exhorting them to recognize Our Lord as the long-awaited Messias and thus to convert to His Holy Church, the new ecclesia that superseded Judaism as the true religion when Our Divine Redeemer took His last breath on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday as the earth shook and the curtain in the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom, signifying the end of the salvific power of the Old Covenant and the ratification of the New and Eternal Covenant that Our Lord instituted at the Last Supper:

28.That He completed His work on the gibbet of the Cross is the unanimous teaching of the holy Fathers who assert that the Church was born from the side of our Savior on the Cross like a new Eve, mother of all the living. [28] "And it is now," says the great St. Ambrose, speaking of the pierced side of Christ, "that it is built, it is now that it is formed, it is now that is .... molded, it is now that it is created . . . Now it is that arises a spiritual house, a holy priesthood." [29] One who reverently examines this venerable teaching will easily discover the reasons on which it is based.

29. And first of all, by the death of our Redeemer, the New Testament took the place of the Old Law which had been abolished; then the Law of Christ together with its mysteries, enactments, institutions, and sacred rites was ratified for the whole world in the blood of Jesus Christ. For, while our Divine Savior was preaching in a restricted area -- He was not sent but to the sheep that were lost of the house of Israel [30] -the Law and the Gospel were together in force; [31] but on the gibbet of his death Jesus made void the Law with its decrees, [32] fastened the handwriting of the Old Testament to the Cross, [33] establishing the New Testament in His blood shed for the whole human race. [34] "To such an extent, then," says St. Leo the Great, speaking of the Cross of our Lord, "was there effected a transfer from the Law to the Gospel, from the Synagogue to the Church, from many sacrifices to one Victim, that, as our Lord expired, that mystical veil which shut off the innermost part of the temple and its sacred secret was rent violently from top to bottom." [35]

30. On the Cross then the Old Law died, soon to be buried and to be a bearer of death, [36] in order to give way to the New Testament of which Christ had chosen the Apostles as qualified ministers; [37] and although He had been constituted the Head of the whole human family in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, it is by the power of the Cross that our Savior exercises fully the office itself of Head in His Church. "For it was through His triumph on the Cross," according to the teaching of the Angelic and Common Doctor, "that He won power and dominion over the gentiles"; [38] by that same victory He increased the immense treasure of graces, which, as He reigns in glory in heaven, He lavishes continually on His mortal members it was by His blood shed on the Cross that God's anger was averted and that all the heavenly gifts, especially the spiritual graces of the New and Eternal Testament, could then flow from the fountains of our Savior for the salvation of men, of the faithful above all; it was on the tree of the Cross, finally, that He entered into possession of His Church, that is, of all the members of His Mystical Body; for they would not have been united to this Mystical Body. (Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943.)

Pope Pius XII's Mystici Corporis was inserted into the Acta Apostolicae Sedis in 1943. Although it was nothing new whatsoever, Pope Pius XII reaffirmed an irreformable teaching that is part of the Sacred Deposit of Faith. The fact that the late Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose to insert a contrary teaching, expressed in Evangelii Gaudium, November 24, 2013, into the Acta Apostlicae Sedis shows that he was in perfect communion of mind and heart with his five immediate predecessors, a heretic who was outside of the bosom of the Catholic Church, an imposter on the Throne of Saint Peter.

Yet it is that almost everyone in the “conservative” and semi-traditional blogosphere ignored the simple fact that it is heretical to contend that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ did not abrogate the Mosaic Covenant, rendering Judaism a dead, superseded religion when Our Divine Redeemer breathed His last breath on the gibbet of the Holy Cross on Good Friday and the curtain in the Temple was torn in torn from top to bottom as the earth quaked to signify the end of Judaism. Although Our Lord gave the Jews another thirty-seven years of mercy to respond to the preaching of the Apostles prior to punishing them for their obstinacy by using the pagan Romans to drive them out of Jerusalem, Judaism has the power to sanctify and save no one. It is not of the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Holy Trinity.

However, the fear of being labeled as an “antisemite” paralyzes many Catholics into doing summersaults and twisting themselves into all kinds of intellectual pretzels to denounce anyone who dares to state the truth without fear of the consequences for love of God and for the love of souls, including the souls of today’s Jews, who need to convert to the Holy Faith in order to be saved.

Such is the case with Carrie Prejean Boller, who was removed from the White House’s religious liberty commission President Donald John Trump himself because she spoke as a Catholic without fear of the consequences:

The Trump administration swiftly removed Carrie Prejean Boller, a former Miss California winner, from a White House religious council amid accusations she worked to "hijack" a hearing on antisemitism, earning applause from religious leaders and conservatives. 

"Carrie Prejean was thrown off the Religious Liberty Commission, and thank God," a former Trump White House official told Fox News Digital in reaction to the ouster. "These commissions exist to advance the President’s agenda, not to serve as a personal Jew-hating platform." 

Interjection Number One:

It is not to “hate Jews” to call the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by its proper name unless, that even the late Jorge Mario Bergoglio himself was an “anti-Semite” when he said the following:

Some of his [Jorge’s] most explicit criticism of Israel came late last year when excerpts of an upcoming book were published.

"According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide," Pope Francis wrote.

"It should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies."

Israel firmly rejects allegations of genocide in Gaza and says its war goal is to defeat Hamas.

As a conclave gets under way in Rome this week to decide Pope Francis's successor, Palestinians and Israelis will be watching closely to see what the next Pope has to say about their intractable conflict. (We're orphans now, say Gaza Catholics the Pope called daily.)

Carrie Prejean Boller, however, is considered an “anti-Semite” even by some Catholics:

Prejean Boller was ousted from the White House Religious Liberty Commission after she worked to "hijack a hearing" held Monday regarding antisemitism in the U.S. to promote her "own personal and political agenda on any issue," according to chair of the commission, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. 

Prejean Boller is the 2009 Miss California USA winner who was stripped of her crown over allegations of breaching contract. She gained nationwide attention in 2009 for speaking out against legalizing gay marriage from the pageant's stage. 

Trump owned the Miss Universe Organization at the time and defended Prejean Boller, then Carrie Prejean. 

Trump established the religious liberty commission in May via an executive order directing the Department of Justice to provide support to the newly formed body focused on upholding "Federal laws that protect all citizens’ full participation in a pluralistic democracy, and protect the free exercise of religion."

The commission held a hearing Monday at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., on combating antisemitism and upholding religious freedom, where Prejean Boller wore a Palestinian flag pin and got into tense exchanges. 

Prejean Boller converted to Catholicism from evangelical Christianity in April and invoked her Catholic faith in comments rejecting Zionism during the hearing. 

"I am a Catholic, and Catholics don’t embrace Zionism," she said. 

Catholic League President Bill Donohue swiftly called for her ouster in an opinion piece published on his organization's website, underscoring that she did not represent Catholics in her remarks. 

"Prejean Boller is a former Miss California and a convert to Catholicism," he wrote Wednesday. "She does not run a Catholic organization, has no Catholic credentials as an author or instructor, and indeed represents no one but herself. For her to say, without qualification, that ‘Catholics do not embrace Zionism,’ is presumptuous and arrogant."

"Zionism is a movement that promotes Jewish self-determination in a homeland," he said. "There are millions of Catholics like myself who, even if they do not identify themselves as Zionists, recognize the Jewish state of Israel. Prejean Boller apparently does not—she is more comfortable showing up at the Religious Liberty Commission wearing a Palestinian flag pin. So telling." (Carrie Prejean Boller accused of hijacking antisemitism hearing with Palestinian flag.)

Drawing upon the fact that I first met Dr. Donohue around 1988 or so when we were doing separate radio programs for Father Kennth Baker’s Views of the News and the fact we had seen each other at various professional conferences in the 1990s, I am going to make a personal plea to him even though the last time our paths had crossed was at the Fox News Studios in 1999 when I was calling out Cable News Network founder Ted Turner for his anti-Semitism:

Bill, you cannot be serious.

You simply cannot be serious to call a Catholic rejection of Zionism to be “presumptuous and arrogant.”

Pope Saint Pius X decisively rejected Theodore Herzl’s efforts to endorse Zionism when the two met on January 25, 1904, the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle:

HERZL: Yesterday I was with the Pope [Pius X]. . . . I arrived ten minutes ahead of time, and without having to wait I was conducted through a number of small reception rooms to the Pope. He received me standing and held out his hand, which I did not kiss. Lippay had told me I had to do it, but I didn’t. I believe this spoiled my chances with him, for everyone who visits him kneels and at least kisses his hand. This hand kiss had worried me a great deal and I was glad when it was out of the way.

He seated himself in an armchair, a throne for minor affairs, and invited me to sit by his side. He smiled in kindly anticipation. I began:

HERZL: I thank Your Holiness for the favor of granting me this audience. [I begged him to excuse my miserable Italian, but he said:

POPE: No, Signor Commander, you speak very well.

HERZL: [He is an honest, rough-hewn village priest, to whom Christianity has remained a living thing even in the Vatican. I briefly laid my request before him. But annoyed perhaps by my refusal to kiss his hand, he answered in a stern categorical manner.

POPE: We are unable to favor this movement [of Zionism]. We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem—but we could never sanction it. The ground of Jerusalem, if it were not always sacred, has been sanctified by the life of Jesus Christ. As the head of the Church I cannot answer you otherwise. The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.

HERZL: [The conflict between Rome and Jerusalem, represented by the one and the other of us, was once again under way. At the outset I tried to be conciliatory. I said my little piece. . . . It didn’t greatly impress him. Jerusalem was not to be placed in Jewish hands.] And its present status, Holy Father?

POPE: I know, it is disagreeable to see the Turks in possession of our Holy Places. We simply have to put up with it. But to sanction the Jewish wish to occupy these sites, that we cannot do.

HERZL: [I said that we based our movement solely on the sufferings of the Jews, and wished to put aside all religious issues].

POPE: Yes, but we, but I as the head of the Catholic Church, cannot do this. One of two things will likely happen. Either the Jews will retain their ancient faith and continue to await the Messiah whom we believe has already appeared—in which case they are denying the divinity of Jesus and we cannot assist them. Or else they will go there with no religion whatever, and then we can have nothing at all to do with them. The Jewish faith was the foundation of our own, but it has been superceded by the teachings of Christ, and we cannot admit that it still enjoys any validity. The Jews who should have been the first to acknowledge Jesus Christ have not done so to this day.

HERZL: [It was on the tip of my tongue to remark, “It happens in every family: no one believes in his own relative.” But, instead, I said:] Terror and persecution were not precisely the best means for converting the Jews. [His reply had an element of grandeur in its simplicity:]

POPE: Our Lord came without power. He came in peace. He persecuted no one. He was abandoned even by his apostles. It was only later that he attained stature. It took three centuries for the Church to evolve. The Jews therefore had plenty of time in which to accept his divinity without duress or pressure. But they chose not to do so, and they have not done it yet.

HERZL: But, Holy Father, the Jews are in a terrible plight. I do not know if Your Holiness is aware of the full extent of their tragedy. We need a land for these harried people.

POPE: Must it be Jerusalem?

HERZL: We are not asking for Jerusalem, but for Palestine—for only the secular land.

POPE: We cannot be in favor of it.

[Editor Lowenthal interjects here] Here unrelenting replacement theology is plainly upheld as the norm of the Roman Catholic Church. Further, this confession, along with the whole tone of the Pope in his meeting with Herzl, indicates the perpetuation of a doctrinal emphasis that has resulted in centuries of degrading behavior toward the Jews. However, this response has the “grandeur” of total avoidance of that which Herzl had intimated, namely that the abusive reputation of Roman Catholicism toward the Jews was unlikely to foster conversion. Further, if, “It took three centuries for the Church to evolve,” it was that very same period of time that it took for the Church to consolidate and launch its thrust of anti-Semitism through the following centuries.

HERZL: Does Your Holiness know the situation of the Jews?

POPE: Yes, from my days in Mantua, where there are Jews. I have always been in friendly relations with Jews. Only the other evening two Jews were here to see me. There are other bonds than those of religion: social intercourse, for example, and philanthropy. Such bonds we do not refuse to maintain with the Jews. Indeed we also pray for them, that their spirit see the light. This very day the Church is celebrating the feast of an unbeliever who became converted in a miraculous manner—on the road to Damascus. And so if you come to Palestine and settle your people there, we will be ready with churches and priests to baptize all of you.

HERZL: [At this point Conte Lippay had himself announced. The Pope bade him be admitted. The Conte kneeled, kissed his hand, and joined in the conversation by telling of our “miraculous” meeting in the Bauer beerhall at Venice. The miracle was that he had originally intended to stay overnight in Padua, and instead, it turned out that he was given to hear me express the wish to kiss the Holy Father’s foot. At this the Pope made no movement, for I hadn’t even kissed his hand. Lippay proceeded to tell how I had expiated on the noble qualities of Jesus Christ. The Pope listened, and now and then took a pinch of snuff and sneezed into a big red cotton handkerchief. It is these peasant touches which I like about him best and which most of all compel my respect. Lippay, it would appear, wanted to account for his introducing me, and perhaps ward off a word of reproach. But the Pope said:

POPE: On the contrary, I am glad you brought me the Signor Commendatore.

HERZL: [As to the real business, he repeated what he had told me, until he dismissed us:]

POPE: Not possible!

HERZL: [Lippay stayed on his knees for an unconscionable time and never seemed to tire of kissing his hand. It was apparent that this was what the Pope liked. But on taking leave, I contented myself with shaking his hand warmly and bowing deeply. The audience lasted about twenty-five minutes. While spending the last hour in the Raphael gallery, I saw a picture of an Emperor kneeling before a seated Pope and receiving the crown from his hands. That’s how Rome wants it.]   (Marvin Lowenthal, Diaries of Theodore Herzl, pp. 427- 430.)

No one can contend that Pope Saint Pius X did not understand Catholic teaching the conversion of some of the Jews in end times and that such a convention is not premised upon their being located physically in the land from which Our Lord Himself expelled them by using the pagan Romans to disperse them as a punishment for their refusal to respond to the preaching of the Gospel by the Apostles after He had granted them a thirty-seven year period to do so.

Pope Saint Pius X opposed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine as he knew this to be opposed to the very will of God. Judaism became a false religion after Our Lord breathed his last breath on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday and the public pronouncement of this fact was made by virtue of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in fulfillment of His own prophecy. 

The widespread belief that the establishment of a Jewish state is the fulfillment of God's will was engineered personally by Theodore Herzl and the Zionists who continued his work after his death by influencing Protestants to produce a commentary on Sacred Scripture that contained interpretations favorable to Zionism. Once again, let me provide you the words of the late Father Louis J. Campbell, the pastor of Saint Jude Shrine, Stafford, Texas, between 2001 and the time o of his death on December 18, 2023, that demonstrate any interpretation of Sacred Scripture favorable to Zionism and to the State of Israel is of Zionist-influence Protestant origin, not of authentic Catholic Scriptural exegesis or doctrine:

Since the time of the Apostles, the Holy Catholic Church has preached the Gospel by the authority granted it by Jesus Christ. The Church was preaching the Gospel years before the Four Gospels were written down, and has continued to this day to fulfill Our Lord’s command to “preach the gospel to every creature” (Mk.16:15). 

The Church collected the Scriptures that make up the Bible. But the heretic, Martin Luther (1483-1546), weeded out some of the books of the Bible he didn’t like, and the Protestant version of the Bible was born. The Bible itself was then touted as the sole authority subject to the “private interpretation” of the believer, thus denying the Church’s authority to preach the Gospel and interpret the Scriptures. However, it seems “the believers” are willing to believe much that is not to be found in the Bible.

No doubt many of us are puzzled by the strange phenomenon of Christian Zionism. Many Evangelical Christians, like the Baptists, the Pentecostals and the Charismatics, are enthusiastic supporters of Jewish Zionism, although not all Jews are Zionists, and many of them dispute the Zionist claims.

The Jewish Zionist Movement was founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897. Its chief aim was the creation of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the “Land of Israel” in the Bible. The Temple would eventually be rebuilt, and the ancient religious rites resumed. Since they believe they have a right to the lands promised to Abraham by God, the Zionists have little sympathy for the Palestinians, who were squeezed into the West Bank and the Gaza strip after the creation of the Jewish State of Israel in 1948. Misusing Old Testament Scriptures, the Jewish Zionists believe they are destined to rule the world.

So what could have turned famous Protestant preachers like Billy Graham, Hal Lindsay, John Hagee and Pat Robertson, into Christian Zionists, enthusiastic supporters of the aims of Jewish Zionism? Could it have been – the Scofield Bible?

The Scofield Reference Bible is widely used in Protestant seminaries, especially among Evangelicals, such as Baptists, Pentecostals and Charismatics. Recently someone sent me an article by a Mr. C.E. Carlson about the Scofield Bible, which seems to get to the root of the problem. Much of what follows is from Mr. Carlson (http://www.serendipity.li/zionism/carlson01.htm). 

One of the schemes of the Jewish Zionists was to alter the Christian view of Zionism by creating and promoting a pro-Zionist subculture within Christianity. One Cyrus I. Scofield (1843-1921) was funded by Zionist agents to re-write the King James Version of the Bible by inserting Zionist-friendly notes in the margins, between verses and chapters, and on the bottoms of the pages. It was first published in 1909 by Oxford University Press, which still holds the copyright. 

 Scofield produced a revolutionary book that radically changed the context of the King James Version. Oxford's promoters made the Scofield Bible, with its Christian Zionist footnotes, a standard for interpreting scripture in Christian churches, seminaries, and Bible study groups. And they all followed like sheep – even Hagee, Lindsay, Robertson, Van Impe, and the revered Billy Graham. So much for private interpretation!

After Scofield’s death, the Oxford University Press turned the Scofield Bible into a manual for the Christian worship of the State of Israel. Scofields’s un-Christian anti-Arab theology has permitted the theft of Palestine and 54 years of death and destruction against the Palestinians, with hardly a complaint from the Judeo-Christian mass media evangelists or most other American church leaders, including the so-called U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

In his Epistle to the Galatians, St. Paul contradicts the claims of the Scofield Bible:

“The promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. He does not say, ‘And to his offsprings,’ as of many; but as of one, ‘And to his offspring,’ who is Christ… For you are all the children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all who have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor freeman; there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are the offspring of Abraham, heirs according to promise” (Gal.3:15b,16;26-29).

This makes it clear that to be a blood relative descended from Abraham is of no advantage to those who do not have faith in Jesus Christ. And Scofield and the Oxford University Press are liars when they try to prove that those who are known today as “Jews” are the heirs to the promises of Abraham. We read this whopper on page 1136 of the 1967 edition: “All Jews are natural descendants of Abraham…”  

This is absolutely false and absurd. The great majority of the so-called Jews who control Israel today are not descendants of Abraham at all. They are the Ashkenazi Jews, descendants of the Khazars of Eastern Europe. They are imposters, with no right to the lands of the Bible! Although known as “Jews” they are such neither by blood nor by religion, because the Jewish religion their ancestors adopted in the eighth century is not the true religion of the ancient Jews of the time of Christ, but the false Talmudic Judaism which blasphemes Jesus Christ and deifies the Jewish race.

And on page 19 we find this blatant lie: “God made an unconditional promise of blessings through Abram’s seed… to the Nation of Israel to inherit a specific territory forever.

What a deception! The televangelists and their huge following have accepted this abominable lie, and have led the whole country into vassalage to the Godless modern State of Israel. Jesus Christ is Abraham’s heir, not the State of Israel. The promises God made to Abraham are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. The Jewish Zionists have no true understanding of the Scriptures. And who would have thought that the “Bible believing Christians” would have stumbled after them into the darkness? 

“Did you never read in the Scriptures,” said Our Lord to the Pharisees: “‘The stone which the builders rejected, has become the corner stone; by the Lord this has been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes’? Therefore I say to you, that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and will be given to a people yielding its fruits” (Mt.21:42,43).

St. Paul understood it well:

“You are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the chief corner stone. In him the whole structure is closely fitted together and grows into a temple holy in the Lord, in him you too are being built together into a dwelling place for God in the Spirit” (Eph.2:20-22).  (Father Louis J. Campbell, Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, July 17, 2006.)

Father Campbell's sermon should help disabuse some of you in the readership from using any Protestant "minister" as an "authority" on anything other than how to offend the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Blessed Trinity. The American evangelical movement is a wholly owned enterprise of Zionism. Then again, so is the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

Obviously, it is not only Protestants who have fallen prey to the lies of the Scofield Reference Bible. Most Catholics, influenced by the religious indifferentism that has characterized social life in the United States of American since its founding and by the counterfeit church of conciliarism’s celebration of false ecumenism, accept “support for Israel” and its policies as a “duty” in order render assistance to “America’s only ally” in the Middle East.

The New Zion is the Catholic Church, not the Zionist State of Israel.

As noted above, God Himself took the Holy Land away from the Jews when He used the pagan Romans to expel them in the year 70 A.D.

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ prophesied the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, a destruction that is symbolic of the of the salvific power of Judaism, which has belonged to the kingdom of satan ever since (see the passages from Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton's The Catholic Church and Salvation contained in the appendix below):

And Jesus being come out of the temple, went away. And his disciples came to shew him the buildings of the temple. [2] And he answering, said to them: Do you see all these things? Amen I say to you there shall not be left here a stone upon a stone that shall not be destroyed. (Matthew 24: 1-2.)

Our Lord prophesied that there “shall not be left here a stone upon a stone that shall not be destroyed,” which should teach us that the so-called Western Wall is not part of Solomon’s Temple as modern Jews contend (it is a retaining wall for the courtyard on the Temple mount, not for the Temple itself, which was destroyed, stone upon stone) but another false representation made by those who believe that they remain the Chosen People, which they do not.

So much angst over a wall that was never part of Solomon’s Temple!

Ah, angst, anger, confusion and even violence must follow in the wake of the adversary’s plan to spread falsehood to take place of the Gospel of the Christ the King as It has been entrusted to and taught infallibly by the authority of the Catholic Church.

Father George Leo Haydock’s commentary on verse two of the twenty-fourth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew explains the falsity of the Jewish contention that the Western (Wailing) Wall has anything to do with Solomon’s Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans.  in its entirety. It was, to use a favorite phrase of a friend of ours, leveled. Ironically, it was the Jews themselves who destroyed a few remnants of the Temple’s wall in the Fourth Century as they did the bidding of Julian the Apostate to try to produce false archeological evidence to debunk Our Lord’s prophecy:

Ver. 2. Do you see all these things? Examine again and again all this magnificence, that the sentence of heaven may appear more striking. --- A stone upon a stone. We need not look on this as an hyperbole. The temple burnt by the Romans, and afterwards even ploughed up. See Gregory of Nazianzus, orat. ii. cont. Julianum; Theodoret, lib. iii. Histor. chap. xx. &c. (Witham) --- Julian the apostate, wishing to falsify the predictions of Daniel and of Jesus Christ, attempted to rebuild the temple. For this purpose, he assembled the chief among the Jews, and asking them why they neglected the prescribed sacrifices, was answered, that they could not offer any where else but in the temple of Jerusalem. Upon this he ordered them to repair to Jerusalem, to rebuild their temple, and restore their ancient worship, promising them his concurrence in carrying on the work. This filled the Jews with inexpressible joy. Hence flocking to Jerusalem, they began with scorn and triumph to insult over the Christians. Contributions came in from all parts. The Jewish women stripped themselves of their most costly ornaments. The emperor opened his treasures to furnish every thing necessary for the building. The most able workmen were convened from all parts; persons of the greatest distinction were appointed to direct the work; and the emperor's friend, Alipius, was set over the whole, with orders to carry on the work without ceasing, and to spare no expense. All materials were laid in to an immense quantity. The Jews of both sexes bore a share in the labour; the women helping to dig the ground, and carry away the rubbish in their aprons and gowns. It is even said that the Jews appointed some pick-axes, spades, and baskets, to be made of silver, for the honour of the work. Till this time the foundations and some ruins of the walls had remained, as appears from St. Cyril, in his catechism xv. n. 15, and Eusebius, Dem. Evang. lib. viii. p. 406. These ruins the Jews first demolished with their own hands, thus concurring to the accomplishment of our Saviour's prediction. They next began to dig a new foundation, in which many thousands were employed. But what they had thrown up in the day, was, by repeated earthquakes, the night following cast back again into the trench. When Alipius the next day was earnestly pressing on the work, with the assistance of the governor of the province, there issued, says Ammianus Marcellinus, such horrible balls of fire out of the earth near the foundations, as to render the place inaccessible from time to time to the scorched workmen. And the victorious element continuing in this manner obstinately bent, as it were, to drive them to a distance, Alipius, thought proper to abandon, though reluctantly, the enterprise. This great event happened in the beginning of the year 363, and with many very astonishing circumstances is recorded both by Jews and Christians. See the proofs and a much fuller account of this astonishing event, which all the ancient fathers describe as indubitable, in Alban Butler's life of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, March 18th. Thus they so completely destroyed whatever remained of the ancient temple, that there was not left one stone upon another; nor were they permitted by heaven even to begin the new one. (Maldonatus) (Haydock Commntary.)

So much for the “fake news” and absolute hoax that is the “Western Wall” as being anything other than yet another means for the contemporary practitioners of a dead, superseded religion to lay claim to that which belongs to Christ the King and His true Church that He Himself founded upon the Rock of Saint Peter, the Pope, and to force the conciliar “popes” and dupes such as Donald John Trump and so-called “Christian leaders” to do their obeisance in front of this hoax.

Alas, it should come as no surprise there is a phenomenon as “Christian Zionists” as Talmudists were in the vanguard of undermining the Faith throughout the Middle Ages and played a particularly important role in bringing about Martin Luther’s revolution against the Divine Plan that Our Lord Himself instituted to effect man’s return to Him through His true Church that is responsible, proximately speaking, for the triumph, although only transitory, of Judeo-Masonic naturalism in the world.

Sorry, Bill, but you are wrong as Zionism is not of God.  Our Lord’s explanations as to why the Jewish leaders who confronted Him belonged to the devil:

At that time, Jesus said to the crowds of the Jews: Which of you can convict Me of sin? If I speak the truth, why do you not believe Me? He who is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear is that you are not of God. The Jews therefore in answer said to Him, Are we not right in saying that You are a Samaritan, and have a devil? Jesus answered, I have not a devil, but I honor My Father, and you dishonor Me. Yet, I do not seek My own glory; there is One Who seeks and Who judges. Amen, amen, I say to you, if anyone keep My word, he will never see death. The Jews therefore said, Now we know that You have a devil. Abraham is dead, and the prophets, and You say, ‘If anyone keep My word he will never taste death.’ Are You greater than our father Abraham, who is dead? And the prophets are dead. Whom do You make Yourself? Jesus answered, If I glorify Myself, My glory is nothing. It is My Father Who glorifies Me, of Whom you say that He is your God. And you do not know Him, but I know Him. And if I say that I do not know Him, I shall be like you, a liar. But I know Him, and I keep His word. Abraham your father rejoiced that he was to see My day. He saw it and was glad. The Jews therefore said to Him, You are not yet fifty years old, and have You seen Abraham? Jesus said to them, Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I am. They therefore took up stones to cast at Him; but Jesus hid Himself, and went out from the temple. (John 8: 46-49.)

Our Lord clearly proclaimed Himself to be God to the Jews in this discourse, and they did not believe Him. Well, it is perhaps more accurate to say that they did not want to believe Him as they, mere mortals, knew that believing in Him would mean an end their pretentiously cruel use of the Mosaic laws to lord it over others without regard for the spirit of those laws, which is why that they had to accuse Him of blasphemy. The leaders of the Jews refused to bend their knees before their very God, Whom they knew full well had said the following to Moses when charging him with the responsibility to liberate the Hebrew people from their captivity to the Egyptians:

[11] And Moses said to God: Who am I that I should go to Pharao, and should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt? [12] And he said to him: I will be with thee: and this thou shalt have for a sign, that I have sent thee: When thou shalt have brought my people out of Egypt, thou shalt offer sacrifice to God upon this mountain. [13] Moses said to God: Lo, I shall go to the children of Israel, and say to them: The God of your fathers hath sent me to you. If they should say to me: What is his name? what shall I say to them? [14] God said to Moses: I AM WHO AM. He said: Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: HE WHO IS, hath sent me to you. [15] And God said again to Moses: Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me to you: This is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations. (Exodus 3: 1-15.)

The Jews knew that Our Lord was proclaiming Himself to be God. They knew also that He had performed miracles and had taught more authoritatively than anyone before Him. Blinded by their pride and their obstinacy, they, presaging the high priests and priestesses of the Judeo-Masonic world of Modernity, were constitutionally incapable of bowing down to acknowledge their very God when He appeared and spoke to them in the very Flesh.

Father Maurice Meschler explained the encounter as follows:

In proportion as He reveals Himself more fully, the Jews grow more bitter in their rage and hatred. We see their increasing irritation in their more and more frequent and excited contradiction; in the scorn and derision which now marks their retorts and with which they respond to our Lord’s prediction with regard to His decease (John viii. 22), here with far more malevolence than on the Feast of the Tabernacles (John vii. 35); lastly, in the open affront and curse which they hurl in His face before all the people, calling Him a Samaritan and a demoniac (John viii. 48, 52, vii. 20), Our Lord a more severe in His language, and upbraids them with very bitter truths, predicting their impatient death and temporal and eternal ruin (John vii. 34; viii. 44). The severe and humiliating defeat in connection with the adulterers must already have excited and exasperated these perverse hearts to the very utmost, and now that our Lord so unsparingly castigates their national and personal pride, their hatred and fury breaks out into a wild act of violence, and they wish to stone Him in the Temple. Our Saviour’s divine power alone frustrates their attempt. It is as though we see the combat between light and darkness actually before our eyes, and as if the word of St. John: “The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (i. 5) were here enacted in a living scene (Keppler). The Jews are not only the real adulterers, by their violation of the covenant with their God, but also His persecutors and murderers; they wish to stone their Messias in the midst of His Temple, and thus to extinguish the Light of the World with their own hands. How marvelouslly beautiful and majestic the figure of our Saviour appears against this dark background, in His calmness and self-possession, His childlike fidelity and love to His Father; in His pure zeal for the honour and mandate of His Heavenly Father; and lastly, in the courage He displays in the midst of the infuriated people, and in His divine power, since He does not flee or bend down to avoid the stones cast at Him, but simply withdraws from them like the light, which cannot be seized and stoned! The Godhead was His shield and refuge. But the situation had become so strained by the preceding events that a crisis was unavoidable. (Father Maurice Meschler, S.J., The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, The Son of God, in Meditations, Volume I, Freiburg Im Breisgau, 1928 Herder & Co., Publishers to the Holy Apostolic See, pp. 599-600.)

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has proclaimed Himself to be what He is, God in the very Flesh, and they did not want to believe Him. Instead, of course, much like the Talmudists, Kabbalists, Zionists and other naturalists and rationalists of our day, the Jews who were denounced by Our Lord used epithets to try to distract the people from the fact that Truth Himself was announcing to them all that the time of the Old Covenant was coming to an end.

The Jews preferred the blindness.

So do most people, including most Catholics today, which is why career politicians, civil servant apparatchiks, lawyers, educators, talking heads and the other blathering, babbling naturalists of the commentariat class, scientists, medical “professionals,” leaders of multinational corporations and other businesses, bankers and others who become wealthy from charging usurious rates of interest to keep the peons who must purchase automobiles and other major expenses on credit in states of perpetual slave bondage and poverty can never see the truth about anything, especially on matters of life and death. Merchants of lies can never see the Divine impress in others, and they can never admit that there are truths that exist in the nature of things that do not depend upon human acceptance for their binding force and validity and that bind the consciences of all people at a times in all circumstances and in all places.

Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., explained that Our Lord came to redeem us from our sins, not to restore a political state of Israel as He told the Jews to their face that their time was coming to an end:

The fury of the Jews is evidently at its height, and Jesus is obliged to hide Himself from them. But He is to fall into their hands before many days are over; then will they triumph and put Him to death. They triumph, and Jesus is their victim; but how different is to be His lot from theirs! In obedience to the decree of His heavenly Father, and out of love for men. He will deliver Himself into the hands of His enemies, and they will put Him to death; but He will rise victorious from the tomb, He will ascend into heaven. He will enthroned on the right hand of His Father. His enemies, on the contrary, after venting all their rage, will live on without remorse, until the terrible day come for their chastisement. That day is not far off, for observe the severity wherewith our Lord speaks to them: ‘You hear not the words of God, because you are not of God.’ Yet there was a time when they were of God, for the Lord gives His grace to all men; but they have rendered this grace useless; they are now in darkness, and the light they have rejected will not return.

You say that my Father is your God, and you have not known Him; but I know Him. Their obstinacy in refusing to acknowledge Jesus as the Messias, has led them to ignore that very God, whom they boast of honouring; for if they knew the Father, they would not reject His Son. Moses, and the Psalms, and the Prophets, are a dead letter to them; these sacred Books are soon to pass into the hands of the Gentiles, who will both read and understand them. If, continues Jesus, I should say that I know Him not, I should be like you, a liar. This strong language is that of the angry Judge who is come down, at the last day, to destroy sinners. Jerusalem has not known the time of her visitation: the Son of God has visited her, He is with her, and she dares to say to Him: Thou hast a devil! She says to the eternal Word, who proves Himself to be God by the most astonishing hat miracles, that Abraham and prophets are greater than He! Strange blindness, that comes from pride and hardness of heart! The feast of the Pasch is at hand; these men are going to eat, and with much parade of religion, the flesh of the figurative lamb; they know full well that this lamb is a symbol, or a figure, which is to have its fulfillment. The true Lamb is to be sacrificed by their hands, and they will not know Him. He will shed His Blood for them, and it will not save them. How this reminds us of those sinners, for whom this Easter promises to be as fruitless as those of the past years! Let us redouble our prayers for them, and beseech our Lord to soften their hearts, lest trampling the Blood of Jesus under their feet, they should have it to cry vengeance against them before the throne of the heavenly Father. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B, The Liturgical Year: Volume 6—Passiontide, pp. 114-115.)

Judaism belongs to the kingdom of satan, which is why is it completely diabolical for anyone to contend that it has any authority from God to occupy the very places where Our Blessed Lord and Saviour sanctified with His own Most Precious Blood as He suffered and died at the hands of the unbelieving Jews, motivated in large part by our sins having transcended time, who even refused the thirty-seven year period mercy that the Divine Victim had extended to them to respond to the preaching of the Apostles. Alas, they refused to listen to the Apostles, and they persecuted them just as they had to Our Lord, Who had prophesied their persecution—and those of all anti-Catholics until the end of time—as follows:

[16] You have not chosen me: but I have chosen you; and have appointed you, that you should go, and should bring forth fruit; and your fruit should remain: that whatsoever you shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. [17] These things I command you, that you love one another. [18] If the world hate you, know ye, that it hath hated me before you. [19] If you had been of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. [20] Remember my word that I said to you: The servant is not greater than his master. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you: if they have kept my word, they will keep yours also.

[21] But all these things they will do to you for my name's sake: because they know not him who sent me. [22] If I had not come, and spoken to them, they would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin. [23] He that hateth me, hateth my Father also. [24] If I had not done among them the works that no other man hath done, they would not have sin; but now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father. [25] But that the word may be fulfilled which is written in their law: They hated me without cause. (John 15: 16-24.)

There is no middle ground. All must be darkness when the Light of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ does not penetrate deep into the souls of the baptized and when the unbaptized, whose souls are captive to the devil by means of Original Sin, persist in their unbelief and, to be sure, their hatred all truth, supernatural and natural, starting with the very Holy Name of Jesus and all that He has entrusted to Holy Mother Church, including His teaching and the sacraments He instituted for our sanctification and salvation to apply the fruits of His Redemptive Act to men until the end of time.

Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton, the editor of the prestigious American Ecclesiastical Review from 1943 to 1963, explained Judaism, which was once the true religion, became the false religion and thus part of the kingdom of satan after Our Lord’s Redemptive Act on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday:

This intrinsically social aspect of salvation is brought out in the account, in the Acts of the Apostles, of the end of St. Peter's sermon on the first Christian Pentecost and of the results of that sermon.

Now when they had heard these things, they had compunction in their hearts and said to Peter and to the rest of the apostles: What shall we do, men and brethren?

But Peter said to them: Do penance: and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of your sins. And you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.

For the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are far off, whomsoever the Lord our God shall call.

And with very many other words did he testify and exhort them, saying: Save yourselves from this perverse generation.

They therefore that receive his word were baptized: and there were added in that day about three thousand souls.

And they were persevering in the doctrine of the apostles and in the communication of the breaking of bread and in prayers. [Acts, 2: 37-42]

According to the inspired word of God in the Acts of the Apostles, St. Peter exhorted the men who listened to him of that first Christian Pentecost to “save themselves from this perverse generation.” Furthermore, we are told that the individuals who “received his word” received the sacrament of baptism, and that they were “added” to the number of the disciples of Christ who had been with St. Peter and the other disciples before he delivered his sermon. The society of the disciples of Jesus Christ, the organization which we know now as the Catholic Church, continued with this great number of new members, to do exactly what it had been doing since the day of Our Lord's ascension into heaven.

We read that the group, composed as it was of these new converts who had come into the Church as a result of St. Peter's Pentecost sermon and of the disciples who had entered the group during Our Lord's public life, was “persevering in the doctrine of the apostles and in the communication of the breaking of bread and in prayers.” And we read the same sort of account of the activity of the original band of disciples that returned to Jerusalem immediately after the Ascension.

Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount that is called Olivet, which is nigh Jerusalem, within a sabbath day's journey.

And when they were come in they went up into an upper room, where abode Peter and John, James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Batholomew and Matthew, James of Alpheus and Simon Zelotes and Jude the brother of James.

All these were persevering with one mind in prayer, with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren. [Acts 1. 12-14]

Both the text and the context of the Acts of the Apostles assure us that the people who heeded St. Peter's injunction to save themselves from this perverse generation entered the true Church of God, the kingdom of God on earth. They entered the Catholic Church.

Now, if St. Peter's words on this occasion meant anything at all, they signified that the individuals to whom he was speaking were in a situation which would lead them to eternal ruin if they continued in it. They were described as belonging to a “perverse generation.” They were told to save themselves by getting out of it. The institution into which they would enter by the very fact of leaving “this perverse generation” was none other that the society of Our Lord's disciples, the Catholic Church itself.

The clear implication of St. Peter's statement is that the Church, the kingdom of God, was the only institution or social unit of salvation. Not to be within this society was to be in the perverse generation within which a man was faced with eternal and entire spiritual ruin. To leave the perverse generation was to enter the Church.

In other words, the clear teaching of this section of the Acts of the Apostles is precisely that given by Pope Leo XIII in the opening passages of his encyclical Humanum genus. The central point of this teaching is that the entire human race is divided between the kingdom of God, the ecclesia, and the kingdom of Satan. To be saved from the kingdom of Satan is to enter the kingdom of God. In this context it is not difficult to see how, by God's institution, the Catholic Church, the one and only supernatural kingdom of God on earth, is presented as a necessary means for the attainment of salvation. By God's institution the process of salvation itself involves a passage from the kingdom of Satan into the ecclesia.

Now, for the proper understanding of this doctrine, especially in view of the teaching on this subject contained in some recent books and articles, it is imperative to understand the religious condition of the people to whom St. Peter delivered his sermon on that first Christian Pentecost. Again, the Acts of the Apostles contains essentially important information.

This book describes them in general with the statement that “there were dwelling at Jerusalem, Jews, devout men out of every nation under heaven.” The homelands of these men are enumerated in the statement attributed to the multitude itself.

And they were all amazed and wondered saying: Behold, are not all these that speak, Galileans?

And how have we heard, every man, our own tongue wherein we were born?

Parthinians and Medes and Elamites and inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,

Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers from Rome,

Jews also and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians: we have heard them speak in our own tongues the wonderful works of God. [Acts 2: 7-11.]

According to the text of the Acts, a great many of these people were pilgrims, men and women who had come to Jerusalem to celebrate the great Jewish feast of Pentecost. Our Lord had died on the Cross only a little over seven weeks before St. Peter delivered that sermon, and many of the people who listened to St. Peter must have been on their way to Jerusalem at the very time Our Lord died. They had begun their pilgrimage as an act of worship in the Jewish religion at the very time when the Jewish religion was the one approved especially by God and when the Jewish politico-religious commonwealth was actually the supernatural kingdom of God on earth, the ecclesia of the Old Testament.

These people as individuals probably had nothing whatsoever to do with the persecution and the murder of the Incarnate Word of God. They had started on their journey as members of God's chosen people, the people of His covenant. Their journey to Jerusalem was made precisely in order to worship and honor God. They were truly devout individuals.

Yes, seven weeks before, the religious body to which they belonged had ceased to be God's ecclesia. The Jewish politico-religious social unit had definitively rejected Our Lord, the Messias promised in the Old Testament. This company had hitherto enjoyed its position as God's ecclesias or His congregatio fidelium by virtue of the fact this it had accepted and professed its acceptance of the divine message about the promised Redeemer. In rejecting the Redeemer Himself, this social unit had automatically rejected the teaching God had given about Him. The rejection of this message constituted an abandonment of the divine faith itself. By manifesting this rejection of the faith, the Jewish religious unit fell from its position as the company of the chosen people. It was no longer God's ecclesia, His supernatural kingdom on earth. It became part of the kingdom of Satan.

While the great Jewish social unit was rejecting Our Lord and thus repudiating its acceptance of the divinely revealed message about Him, the little company of the disciples, organized by Our Lord around Himself, retained its faith. It continued to accept and to obey Our Lord and to believe the divinely revealed that centered around Him. Thus at the moment of Our Lord's death on Calvary, the moment when the old dispensation was ended and the Jewish religious association ceased to be the supernatural kingdom of God on earth, this recently organized society of Our Lord's disciples began to exist as the ecclesia or the kingdom.

This society was the true continuation of Israel. The men who were within it were the true sons of Abraham, in that they had the genuine faith of Abraham. This society was the new association of the chosen people. Its members were, as St. Paul called them, the elect or the chosen of God.

It must be understood, incidentally, that this society was actually God's supernatural kingdom on earth in a much more complete and perfect sense than the old Jewish commonwealth had ever been. The old Israel had constituted the pople of the covenant. According to God's unfailing promise, the Redeemer was to be born within that company. Yet conditions had never been such that a man had to be within this company in order to attain to eternal salvation. (Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton, The Catholic Church and Salvation In Light of the Recent Pronouncements of the Holy See, published in 1958 and reprinted in 2006 by Seminary Press, Round Top, New York, pp, 136-139.)

It cannot get any clearer than the following sentence in the selection from Monsignor Fenton's masterpiece of Catholic theology just quoted:

By manifesting this rejection of the faith, the Jewish religious unit fell from its position as the company of the chosen people. It was no longer God's ecclesia, His supernatural kingdom on earth. It became part of the kingdom of Satan. (Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton, The Catholic Church and Salvation In Light of the Recent Pronouncements of the Holy See, published in 1958 and reprinted in 2006 by Seminary Press, Round Top, New York, p. 139.)

The true Israel has nothing to do with the territory of the Holy Land.

The true Israel is supranational. It is Holy Mother Church, the Catholic Church. Catholics must not permit themselves to be in error on this point.

While some number of the Jews will be grafted onto the vine of Our Lord that is the Church in end times, they do not have to be located in a particular country, no less one that is founded in direct opposition to God's definitive decree, which has never been revoked, that expelled them from Jerusalem in the year 70 A.D. Jerusalem belongs to Christ the King and His true Church, not to the Zionist State of Israel. Catholics are the true spiritual children of Abraham. No one else is, and it is not in the least anti-Semitic to state these truths clearly.

No human efforts can restore peace among nations when men themselves are in state of war with Christ the King by means of their unrepented, unabsolved sins. Men whose immortal souls are captive to the devil by means of Original Sin as well as the Moral Sins in the objective order of things they commit and thus increase their spiritual blindness and their propensity to commit further sins will always be inclined to be at war with other men.

While there are only a very small minority of Catholics remain in the Holy Land, those who remain can be a powerful force for true peace—the Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ—by their faithful prayerful recitation of Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary. Believing Catholics do want to turn Gaza in a riviera style resort. Believing Catholics want everyone in the Holy Land—Mohammedan and Jew alike—to convert to the true Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true order within nations or peace among them.

Thus it is, good readers, that we, as always, must redouble our own efforts to quit our sins, be reconciled unto God through the ministration of a true priest in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance as he applies to us the merits of Our Blessed Saviour Jesus Christ’s Redemptive Act upon our immortal souls, seek to be converted more and more to the image and likeness of High Priest and King, and never cease in our tender, filial devotion to His Most Blessed Mother by means of her Most Holy Rosary and of our total consecration to her Divine Son through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits.

Appendix

The Talmudic Influence on the Protestant Revolution Against the Divine Plan that God Himself Instituted to Effect Man’s Return to Him through His Catholic Church

William Thomas Walsh’s Characters of the Inquistion summarized the decisive role of Talmudists in bringing about and then propagating the Protestant Revolution to overthrow the Social Reign of Christ the King an eradicate the Holy Name of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ from public view:

During the spectacular and fateful reign of Charles the Fifth, the Spanish Inquisition became so inactive that its enemies began to take its early death for granted. Charles, who was elected German Emperor soon after becoming King of Spain, and while still a youth crowned an extraordinary good fortune by marrying the most beautiful woman in Europe, seemed too powerful a monarch to have to worry about a few heretics here and there; moreover, he was by nature trusting, tolerant and magnanimous to such a degree that Cervantes has been suspected of drawing a sublime caricature of him in Don Quixote. Masters of the new World, whose gold came by galleons to Sevilla, he was always in need of money and dependent upon the favors of usurers. Lover of peace, he was always fighting, now defeating Francis I at Marignano, now performing the prodigies of a paladin in Africa, now warring against traitorous barons in Germany and Austria. Lover of Christ and of the Catholic Faith, he saw through the fallacies of Luther; yet he made fatal compromises (his famous Interim, for example) which permitted Lutheranism to pass from the sectarian to the political plane, and so to destroy the unity of Christian Europe for centuries; and he heard with shame, in 1527, that his armies composed in great measure of German Lutherans and of secret Mohammedans (Moriscoes) from eastern Spain, had sacked Rome, besieged and all but killed the Pope, and filled the capital of Christendom with the horrors of butchery, rape, and desecration even of the Blessed Sacrament. Charles considered himself the great champion of the Church, and was sincerely anxious for the reform of existing abuses against which the Lutherans in the north were clamoring, yet he allowed his aunt, Catherine of Aragon, to be cast aside for a royal concubine by Henry VIII, as a prelude to the crafty destruction of the Catholic Faith in England; and he saw his rivalry with Francis I constantly prevent and finally interrupt, the deliberations of the Council of Trent, which alone could restore health and discipline to the human organization of the Church. A cool and skillful statesman, a keen judge of men and motives, and on the whole, a better man than either Francis or Henry, he was in the main outwitted from first to last by more subtle and unscrupulous individuals. At a time when Europe needed a man of single purpose, a Saint Fernando, a Saint Louis, a Catholic Moses, to insist always that the soul of western civilization was the Christian Faith, on which, in the nature of things no compromise was possible, there were two conflicting men in this Habsburg potentate: an ascetic and a sensualist. During the lifetime of his wife, to whom he was faithful apparently until her death, he promised her that when their son Philip was old enough to rule, they would retire from the world, to a monastery, she to a convent, to meditate and pray. After the death of the Empress Isabel, however, circumstances seemed to demand that he retain his power; and the animal in him, which had always manifested itself in his huge feeding and drinking, gained the ascendance for a time. By one of his mistresses, the blond termagant singer Barbara Blomberg, he begot Don Juan of Austria, about the time when he was advising his legitimate son and heir, Philip, to live chastely, and to beware of politicians who would seek to gain influence over him through the wiles of women. The contrast was characteristic, and it continued to the end. An old man at forty-nine, he handed over the government of Spain to Philip, and retired to the monastery at Yuste to prepare for death, to flagellate himself for his sins, to curse at choristers who sang off key, to gorge himself with meat and wine and then to pay with spasms of the gout, as the dregs of his earthly life seeped miserably away.

Charles seemed unaware, most of his life, that he was surrounded by the agents of an international conspiracy to destroy everything that his heart loved and revered. Most of his councillors were Catholics in name only, or very lax Catholics; many of them, in key positions, were of Jewish descent. Charles saw no danger in this. His favorite chaplain was doctor Constantino Ponce de la Fuente, an eloquent preacher whose voice is said to have had something like the effect of music on his congregations, and whose book on Christian doctrine (dedicated to the Emperor, who read it faithfully) gained him a great reputation as a theologian – though at the very time her was in secret communication with Lutherans in Germany, and had two wives living. The chief minister of Charles, the wily Gattinara, had adopted principles of Erasmian heretics then industriously undermining Catholicism in Spain, while Erasmus himself, alarmed at the turn events were taking, was denouncing Luther. Even Alonso Marique, the Inquisitor General, was said to have Erasmian tendencies. The Emperor intervened to save Juan Gil, who was secretly propagating anti-Catholic doctrines at Alcala, from the Inquisition; and he wanted to make him bishop of Tortosa. Another court preacher in high favor was the secret Protestant, Father Augustin Cazalla. Michael Servetus was secretary to the Emperor's confessor, Juan de Quintana. Propagandists were at work to draw the whole Imperial family away from the Church Catholic. Charles's brother Fernando remained faithful in his rather stupid way; but their sister Mary of Hungary was a Lutheran for a time; and Fernando's son Maximillian (who later became Emperor) was notoriously Protestant in his views and in his friends. Even the children of Charles were in grave danger of perversion. Some one skilfully suggested that young Philip II take as his confessor the great Doctor Constantino; but Philip, warned against the man, chose some one else. Philip's sister Maria (later Empress) was not so wary. Her confessor was Fray Vincente de Rocamoro, who later threw off the mask of Catholicism and joined the Hebrew community at Amsterdam as Isaac of Rocamoro.

The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain had been only a temporary misfortune for that energetic and resourceful race. Already, in various parts of the world, they had built up new political and commercial empires. Even before the Spanish calamity, their control of international trade, and of almost the entire economic life of Europe, had been broken by the organization of the medieval Catholic workmen's guilds: but they had gone a long way toward repairing the misfortune, and scattered from Spain and Portugal, were soon controlling the overland trade between the West and Indies, at Ferrrar, Venice, Ancona, Salonika, Constaninople, Cairo and Suez. A Portuguese Jewish family names Mendes, with relatives in Spain, the Netherlands and England, formed a powerful syndicate which became known as the Spice Trust, whose owners collected toll on goods consumed in every country in Europe, maintained an elaborate intelligence or spy system, indulged in usury on a vast scale, gradually pushed into the background such Catholic bankers as the Fuggers, and threw the huge weight of their wealth and influence on the side of any movement aimed against the Church of Christ. Joseph Mendes, one of the spice magnates, went to Constantinople and there became virtually master of the policy of the Sultan; it was he, for example, who instigated the great threat to Christendom which was stopped by the fleet of Don Juan of Austria at Lepanto. All the powers of international Jewry were allied with, if not actually the motive power of, the vast conspiracy which produced the Protestant revolt. In fact, it was the famous Battle of the Books, a dispute over the Jewish Talmud and Kabbala, which set the stage for Luther. Erasmus's friend Reuchlin, the defender of the Jewish books, assembled around his a party of revolutionaries without whose instant support the Augustinian monk’s voice might have had no more effect than Huss's or Segarelli's. Once the landslide began, the wide-spread wealth and power of Talmudic Jewry was organized behind the new movements in England, Germany, and France, and probably gave them their permanence. International finance gave the Protestant Revolt a world capital at London. Many good things came to an end: medieval hospitals and charities; the unity of Europe; the Catholic guilds of workmen, from which the modern labor movement still has much to learn.

Charles apparently had no insight into the real significance of all this revolution that was going on around him and in his very household. For many years he retained a pathetic belief in the efficacy of physical force and, even more, of political intrigue. As he had compromised with the Lutheran movement in Germany, so he attempted to outflank the Anglican position by compromise and finesse. He arranged for Philip (whose Portuguese wife had died) to marry Mary Tudor, with the hope that they would have a son who would inherit both England and Spain, and thus bring England back into the Catholic fold. This in part was to be Philip's recompense for having lost the Empire. The whole international anti-catholic ring had seen to it that the Imperial succession would pass not to the Spanish prince, whose unyielding devotions to the Catholic Church was well know, but to his cousin Maximillian, whose lukewarm Catholicism was believed to mask a Protestant heart. Philip, however, would still be the most powerful ruler in Christendom: he would have, besides England and Spain, the control of Italy through Milan and Naples; Burgundy, the Low Countries, and the New World. The recovery of England would make the victory over Protestantism decisive.

This beautiful dream dissolved in the light of actuality. Charles and his obedient son made the fatal mistake of not following the advice of the Pope and Cardinal Pole on the restoration of the immense properties of the English Church, stolen by Henry VIII and passed on by him to crafty upstarts who supplanted the ancient nobility. These men, under the skillful and unscrupulous leadership of William Cecil, were resolved at all costs to suppress the Catholic worship in England, for the sake of the loot they held. They were so cowed at the accession of Mary that a bold stoke then might have forced them to restore the monastery lands and other properties to the rightful owners. But Charles and Philip advised Mary not to insist too much on the point; counting, of course, on the birth of a Catholic heir, and the healing effects of time. The heir was not born, however, and time proved unfaithful. When Mary died without issue, Philip felt sure that her bastard sister Elizabeth would keep her oath to be a good Catholic if crowned. It had been within his power to exclude her; he even toyed with the idea, doubtless with encouragement by Elizabeth, that he could marry her if he chose, and thus keep England within his hand. Philip  did not know that William Cecil had secretly arranged matters with Ann Boleyn's daughter, and would control her by his powerful will, and the weapon of fear, for nearly all her life. She had hardly been crowned when she broke her oath, revealed herself a Protestant, and made Cecil her chief minister. Thus Philip, with the best of intentions, and it must be admitted, as victim of his father's opportunist policies, had set up a power which would become the rallying point of the new Protestant world, shield the ancient hatred of the Catholic Church, and plague him to the day of his death. Thanks to his father's political advisers, too, he had been drawn into a costly and foolish war with Pope Paul IV, who on his side was deceived by a scoundrelly nephew; and it was a sorry satisfaction when the Spanish troops under the Duke of Alba, took Rome.

Charles, meanwhile, on returning to Spain to prepare his soul for death, had had more than one rude awakening. With no Ximenes beside him to give wise and disinterested advice, the prematurely old Emperor was shocked especially to learn that while he had been neglecting the Inquisition founded by his ancestors, and making clever compromises with the heretics of Germany and England, Lutheranism had not only appeared, but had made considerable headway, in Spain.

Even after the reforms of Ximenes, there was some danger that an anti-Catholic movement might take hold in Spain. The reforms of the great Cardinal had not yet permeated the secular clergy. Also, among the large population of Catholic Jews there were still some who were waiting for any opportunity to embrace a cause which called itself Christian (without demand the Christian test of sincerity in the confessional) and yet was a solvent of true Christianity. Finally Erasmus had sown the seeds of dissidence. This Voltairian individual, this versatile mediocre man with far more knowledge than wisdom, this sickly misbegotten dispeptic who had an almost irrational hatred of monks because his uncle had forced him to enter an Augustinian monastery, and jeered at Crusaders among whom his puny limbs could never have taken a place, became immensely popular in Spain at the beginning of the siglo de oro. He had done some good works on pagan and Christian antiquities, and in patrology; he was ski;lful in polemics; above all, he attacked clerical abuses at a time when it was fashionable all over Europe to do so. He went even further: he ridiculed rites and ceremonies of the Church, and scoffed at some of her sacred dogmas. He despised such warrior Popes as Julius II (whom Moses would have understood better) and could not find words enough to flatter the Medici Popes, Leo X and Clement VII, under whose pontificates occurred two of the greatest calamities that had befallen the Church: the loss of Germany and the loss of England. His Praise of Folly contained in embryo all of Luther's subsequent attack, and even ridiculed texts of Holy Scripture. Good men were taken in by him, believing him to be a sincere Catholic seeking needed reforms. Saint Ignatius began reading his works on the advice of his confessor: but on noticing his fervor and devotion began to ebb away in proportion, he cast away the book he was reading, and thereafter held all the writings of Erasmus in abhorrence. Juan de Vergaro, thought he had been a secretary to Cardinal Ximenes, was less sensitive to spiritual odors; he obtained a Spanish pension for Erasmus. Neither wholly Catholic or wholly Protestant, this mean-spirited scholar withdrew from the abyss in which Luther had walked, while his disciples became pioneers of the New Religion in England, and even in Spain.

To understand the shock of horror with which the Emperor Charles discovered all this in 1558, just before his death, one must consider circumstances often omitted or overlooked in the modern conspiracy (When I use “conspiracy” in this sense, I do not mean necessarily a plot controlled by one man, or a small group: it suffices to notice that men of the same spiritual affinity tend toward a common end) against truth which has poisoned the records of the English-speaking world, but painfully real to men of the time. England, more than ninety per cent Catholic, was quietly taken in hand by a small rich minority of enemies of the Catholic church, many of them, like Cecil, of very obscure origin. In France, leagued with the English Protestants, another small but rich minority of Calvinists, chiefly nobles and usurers, were beginning the formidable plots which were to lead to the eight bloody Huguenot Wars. These two groups had very intimate connections with the Lutheran princes of Germany, and with William of Orange, who was already laying the groundwork for the Protestant revolt in the Low Countries, and urging the Turks, through Jewish bankers friends who were his heavy creditors, to attack Catholic Spain from the Mediterranean. Not all of this was evident in 1558, but enough of it had come to light to make the last nights of the Emperor very restless indeed. And then to find out that a Lutheran plot was well advanced in Spain – !

Perhaps the Spanish, having fought the battles of Christendom against unbelief so many centuries, had a keener awareness that some of their northern neighbors of the significance of such movements. They had learned that in this world appearances are often deceptive. A Dominican theologian, familiar with the recent activities of the Alumbrados, discovered by the agents of [Cardinal] Ximenes [de Cisernos], and aware of the ideas of the medieval Manichee heretics from which they derived, would not be long in stripping the gospel of Luther of its accidents, which gave it the superficial appearance of something new, and fining in its essentials the same old enemy that the Catholic Church had been fighting so many centuries. Luther professed to be appealing from the Middle Ages to the virgin purity of the first Christian centuries. In reality he was leading the minds of his victims even further back in time, back, in the labyrinth of ideas, to the gospel of despair so elaborately disguised by the bhikkus of India, and so craftily revived by the Beghards, Beguins and other secret societies of the thirteenth century.

“Escape from the evils of life (Karma), from desire and action, into nothingness,” said the Buddhists in effect. “Join us, look within, and sink into pure contemplation. Once desire is dead, you shall be free from sin, rebirth and misery.”

“Life is evil, the work of the devil,” said the medieval Manichees. “Do not listen to Pope or priest, but join our sect of the Pure and the Perfect: then, no matter what you do, you are free from sin, from the torment of conscience, from the evil of living.”

“Be illuminated by a divine feeling from within,” said the Alumbrados. “Obey no one but God, Once you have become perfect and left desire behind, no carnal act you happen to perform can be sinful.”

“No human works are of any avail,” said Luther. “Only faith can save you. If you have faith, it does not matter how much you sin; in fact, the more you sin the more you prove your faith. Therefor be a sinner, sin strongly, sin a thousand times a day.”

Was not Luther's doctrine of salvation by grace alone a restatement, with a somewhat different emphasis, of the old despairing dogma of the Alumbrados, the Manichees, the Gnostics, the Buddhists? Did not he and Melancthon, in the name of reform revive that other heresy of Fraticelli: the detestable error that the state had absolute power over the individual and the Church that the State was the supreme judge and master of human affairs: there was a familiar Manichean smell about all this Lutheran business, and in the nostrils of the Dominicans it was not good.

Spain had a reminder of the implications of Illuminism in 1544, when the Inquisition, in one of its few moments of activity under Charles V, astonished the country by arresting the famous beata, Sister Magdalena de la Cruz, who had been a nun for forty years at the convent of Saint Isabel of the Angels in Cordoba, and had had such a reputation for holiness that even members of the royal family went to solicit her prayers, while the Empress Isabel, wife of Charles V, gave her in gratitude the robe in which her son, Philip II, had been baptized. It was said that the saintly woman performed dreadful penances and vigils, that she lived only on the Host received in Holy Communion, and that she had received the stigmata of Our Lord on hands, feet and side.

Under examination by the Dominican inquisitors, however, Sister Magdalena made some very different revelations. She admitted that she was not a Catholic at all, but one of the sect of the Alumbrados; that when seven years old, she had been persuaded by the devil to pretend sanctity; that at eleven she had made a pact with two demonios incubos, named Balban and Pitonio, who used to have intercourse with her by night, disguised in various ways – now as a Jeronymite friar, now as a Franciscan, now as a black bull, now as a camel. In obedience to them she made wounds on her hands, feet and side so cleverly that even holy persons were deceived; she went into “trances” in which she seemed insensible even to the prick of needles, she imposed even upon princesses and the Empress.

The Inquisition imprisoned this foul impostor for life. Yet her evil mission had a certain measure of success even after her death. Her example made good people afraid of all who manifested any of the phenomenon to which she laid claim; so that when Saint Teresa of Avila experienced real raptures and visions, she was suspected by pious persons of being just one more Magdalena of the Cross, and endured unspeakable persecutions in consequence, even after the Inquisitors declared her free from heresy and deception, and a true mystic.

Whether Magdalena was an impostor, a paranoiac, a lunatic, or one possessed, is beside the point here. It was intolerable that such a person should be allowed to represent the Catholic religion and impose upon the Catholic people. It was one of the functions of the Holy Office to protect the faithful from such deceptions; and although Luther was a very different sort of person from the nun of Cordoba, there was a certain similarity between his doctrine and that of the secret society to which she belonged. They too, used Christian terminology, though with esoteric meanings; they spoke of “contrition for sin,” “the cross of the Christian,” “the warmth of the Holy Ghost” and so on; and all their emphasis was on feeling as opposed to reason, and on private judgment as opposed to the authority of an ordered Church. (William Thomas Walsh, Characters of the Inquisition, New York, P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1940 pp. 214-223.)

William Thomas Walsh’s commentary about the work courageous work of Francisco Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros, known by contemporaries as Ximens de Cisernos, to root out Jewish infiltration of the Church in Spain to spread the errors of Luther makes it very clear how Jewish saboteurs have long sought to take down Holy Mother Church and thus to discredit and supplant her role in civil society:

The Dominicans, Augustinians and Carmelites did not resist. It was his own community that gave him one of the great battles of his life. After the death of Saint Francis, as we have seen, that order passed through a hectic period, at the end of which when peace had been restored through the efforts of Saint John Capistrano, there still remained two divisions, the Conventuals, who took the easier road for human nature to follow as regarded property and other matters, and the Observatines, who sought to follow the ideal of Saint Francis in all its rigor. Ximenes himself a member by choice of the latter group, put all Franciscans in Spain under the direction of the Commissary General, and then proceeded to reform them. The Conventuals were furious; many of them, in fact, were good men sincerely convinced that their modified rule was better than the original one. The dispute reached such a stage of acrimony that an Italian Franciscan General went to Spain purposely to put an end to the reform, spoke insultingly to Queen Isabel in his anger, and evoked from her a memorable rebuke, while Gonzalo de Cetina, secretary for Aragon, threatened to hang the distinguished visitor with the cord of his habit. Such strong representations were made at the Vatican that Alexander VI, in 1496, ordered the housecleaning suspended, but the following year, being better informed, he allowed it to go on. Ximenes carried on the war to victory. He had the satisfaction of learning that a thousand bad monks had given up the struggle in Castile, and had migrated to Morocco, where they might live as they pleased – some of them taking along women with whom they had given scandal. The Church and Spain were much better, of course, for their departure; and although Ximenes never completed his task with the secular clergy, he had carried the movement so far that when he died the boast was made, with justice, that the Spanish monks were noted beyond all those of Christendom for temperance, chastity, and virtuous living in general. In the course of time, the improved state of the monasteries had its effect upon the secular priesthood. It was probable the reform of Ximenes, therefore that saved Spain from succumbing, after his death, to Protestantism. Unlike his English contemporaries, he proved that monks could be brought back to discipline without cutting off their heard, destroying their works of mercy and handing over their lands to usurers.

Every heretical movement had two important elements: (1) a protest, usually exaggerated but with more or less foundation in fact, against abuses arising from the weaknesses of human nature in the Church; and (2) a conspiracy, often cloaked by some sort of secret society, to pervert the teachings of Christ and the Church, under pretext of reform. Ximenes had forestalled the first of these conditions in Spain. He also did a great deal to expose and prevent the second. It was while he was Inquisitor General, for example, that the sect known as the Alumbrados or Illuminates was first discovered in the Peninsula.

Nothing in history is without cause and without effect. The Alumbrados were a link in the chain of causality connecting the Manichees of the Middle Ages with modern anti-Christian movements; the Inquisition of Toulouse with the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution.

The name Iluminado first appeared in Spain when a report sent to Cardinal Ximenes concerning the activities of one Fray Antonio de Patrana, who had begun to preach a revelation which he said came to him directly from God, called himself Illuminatus, and went about the countryside with certain holy women, on whom he had been instructed, by the inner voice he followed, to beget prophets. The Inquisition clapped him into prison, and scattered his sect.

Obviously, he was a spiritual descendent of those Fourteenth Century imposters Segarelli and Dulcinus. It was no new cure that he dispensed. Nor was Illuminism but a distortion of Christian mysticism, any more than it was a perversion of Judaism. True it made its way into the Christian Church under the guise of various heresies, as it deceived many of the scattered children of Moses under the covers of the Talmud; but in reality it was quite different in origin. The Law of Moses and the Law of Christ came from God, from the source of being, of good, of light, of growth; when free to do so they always produced orderly and beautiful living. And both of them were opposed, from very early times, by a totally different spirit, the spirit than denies, that hates life, that causes confusion and chaos. This dark spirit enthroned itself in the East, even before the Incarnation; and there shielded by a singularly pure and austere code of morality, it evolved systems of thought which took on the appearances of religions, but were in reality elaborate form of atheism. Is not the Nirvana of the Buddhists, the goal of all their strivings thought countless reincarnations, nothing but the death and annihilation of the individual conscience, the extinction of human personality in an All which is but a step from Nothing? Buddhism, the child of pantheistic Brahminism, is atheism in disguise; and granting all that may be said for Buddha's good intentions, the sincere and self-sacrificing lives of many of his followers, and the truth of many of their teachings, the system itself contained the seeds of intellectual and spiritual degeneration. Out of it came a pseudo-mysticism based upon such conceptions as these: life is not worth living, personality is a burden and a curse, marriage is a bed of hot coals leading to the propagation of an evil, all labor and effort are useless, the family and other forms of society therefore become pointless, anarchy thus follows logically, and man can do no better than escape from the penalties of Karma and the chains of human desire into a cold and selfless (but actually selfish) absorption into Nirvana. Pure contemplation, to these mystics, meant that the soul lost its individuality and annihilated itself as it sank into the infinite essence, until at last it arrived at a state of perfection which was soul, there could be no sin.

These ideas underwent many fantastic transmutations as they traveled from the dying East to invade the living West. But the dangerous corollary that to the pure all things are pure, that nothing a perfect soul may do in the ectasy of contemplation can be sinful, persisted in the teachings of several heresies. It was taught by the early Gnostics, by Plotinus, by the Priscillians in Galicia, by the thirteenth century Albigenses of Southern France, by thefourteenth century Beghards of Beguins in Catalonia and Leon. And now the hoary superstition of the Buddhist bkikkus (beggars) which isolated the human soul from human society, from moral good (through braking down the distinction between good and evil) and from God Himself, was reappearing under the mask of “Illuminism.” In exposing and punishing the Alhumbrados, then, Ximenes was merely resuming in Castile the battle that Eymeric had waged, more than a century before, in Aragon and Catalonia.

He was eighty years old when King Fernando died in 1516. Queen Juana was less fit than ever to reign. Her son Charles was in Flanders, where he had been brought up, and was not yet seventeen. All the old intrigues which had divided and weakened Spain in the past began to stir behind the scenes. Nobles were reaching again for power. Catholic Jews of slight orthodoxy saw a fresh opportunity to deal a blow at the Inquisition, which had fallen so heavily upon them or upon their ancestors. They offered Charles V 800,000 ducats if he would make certain “reforms” in the procedure of the Holy Office.

The young king was tempted to accept. What did the Inquisition mean to him? He had been in Spain very little, and was more of a Fleming than a Spaniard, both in looks and in training. Why not do as the Conversos suggested, and allow, among other things publication of the names of witnesses and delators?

Ximenes, who knew that the Holy Office had been the cornerstone of the resurrected Spain, the fulcrum not only of political unity and power, but of spiritual reform, wrote a memorable letter to Charles.

“Most high and mighty Catholic King, most gracious lord: The Catholic sovereigns, as your Majesty is aware, have bestowed so much care upon the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition, and examined its laws and institutions with so much prudence, wisdom and consciousness, that modifications of it are not needed, but would rather be harmful than otherwise. At the present moment such changes would fill me the more with sorrow, as they would assuredly tend to increase the defiance shown to the Inquisition by the Catalonians and the Pope. The pecuniary embarrassment of your Majesty is, I confess, very great, but certainly that of Fernando the Catholic, the grandfather of your Majesty, was greater, when the newly converted Christians offered him 600,000 gold ducats to carry on the Navarrese war. He did not accept their proposals, because he preferred the purity of the Christian religion to all the gold in the world. With all the true devotion of a loyal subject, with the zeal which I must have for the office to which your Majesty has raised me, I beseech you to open your eyes and follow the example of your Majesty's grandfather, and consent to no changes in the proceedings of the Inquisition. All the objections raised by its adversaries have before been refuted, under the Catholic kings of glorious memory. The modifications of even the most unimportant law of the Inquisition could not be made without betraying the honor of God and insulting that of your most illustrious ancestors. If this consideration has not sufficient weight with your Majesty, may it please you to recall the deplorable occurrence which has lately taken place at Talavera de la Reina, when a newly-converted Jew, who had learned the name of his accuser, searched for him and stabbed him. The hatred against these informers is indeed so great that, if the publication of their names is not prevented, they will not only be assassinated in private and public, but even at the foot of the altar. No one will be found in future willing to risk his life by similar denunciations; this would be the ruin of the Holy Tribunal, and the cause of God would be left without a defender. I live in confidence that your Majesty, my King, and Lord, will not become unfaithful to the Catholic blood which runs in your veins, but be convinced that the Inquisition is a tribunal of God, and an excellent institution of your Majesty's ancestors.” (William Thomas Walsh, Characters of the Inquisition, New York, P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1940 pp. 204-207.)