Thursday, January 18, 2007
THE PROBLEMS WITH RADICAL TRADITIONALISM
NOR has linked this report:
The 'Synagogue of Satan'
by Mark Potok
From a makeshift pulpit inside an Indiana Quality Inn, a baby-faced priest angrily denounces the Jews, saying they mean to "destroy all Christian nations."
In offices in State Line, Pa., an intense, bespectacled man tirelessly recounts how the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia "predicts the anti-Christ will come from Jewry" and warns of the Jews' role in the coming "New World Order."
At a gathering near the Philadelphia airport, men in priests' collars and brown monk's robes rage against the "Judeo-Masonic" conspiracy to destroy the Catholic Church, the "Marxist-Jewish" scheme to wreck American schools, and even an elaborate 9/11 plot, "predicted by the Blessed Virgin Mary 84 years ago."
For most Americans, the world of "radical traditionalist Catholicism" is so remote and little-known -- it entered the nation's consciousness, just barely, with revelations about the strident anti-Semitism of actor Mel Gibson and his father, Hutton -- that it may seem wholly irrelevant to the modern world. Is it really important what a group of people, many excommunicated and most gathered behind the walls of their monasteries and other institutions, think about the Jews? That many believe there was no Holocaust? That some say every pope since 1958 has been illegitimate, and a few even insist the real pope has been kidnapped?
The fact is, it does matter. As explained in a remarkable and sweeping story by the Intelligence Report's Heidi Beirich, the best estimates suggest there are 100,000 radical traditionalists in America, a number that appears to be growing. And while the size of this movement is dwarfed by the 70 million mainstream Catholics in this country, these energetic men and women are having an influence.
Continue reading...
There are as many problems on the Catholic right as there are on the Catholic left.
