When Tom Brammer was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, he was handed a death sentence. During Holy Week, his struggle continued against all odds into a period when he should have been long dead. As he lay there in bed, he asked me what movies we should watch, and I recommended Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. “It’s the Garden of Gethsemane,” he said recognizing the first scenes of the movie depicting the beginning of Christ’s Passion.

Gibson’s Passion of the Christ is a work of art based on both the passion narratives and private revelations. It is a powerful devotional aid much like the paintings of Gospel scenes which began in Italy when Giotto broke with Greek models and reached unprecedented heights of mimesis allowing subsequent generations of Italians to experience the Gospels in ways previous generations could only dream of in both painting and sculpture, as evidenced in Michelangelo’s Pieta and paintings too numerous to name. Gibson is a Catholic who has an irregular relationship with the Church but because his artistic consciousness is rooted in an acceptance of the passion narrative, he can improvise on that narrative in a way that does not falsify it.

The best example of this is his portrayal of Judas and the Jewish high priests. In Jesus of Nazareth (1977), Franco Zeffirelli, by way of comparison, gave us a phony portrayal of Judas, confected in the early days of Catholic Jewish dialogue following Vatican II. According to Zeffirelli’s rendering, Judas was trying to broker a deal between two good-hearted groups—the Jews and the followers of Christ—leading to a tragic misunderstanding in which no one was at fault.

Mel Gibson gives us a much more realistic view of Judas’s motivation by graphically portraying the greed which was the main factor motivating his behavior toward Christ. Instead of handing Judas the 30 pieces of silver he earned for betraying Christ, Annas throws the bag of money at Judas, who fails to catch it, spilling the 30 pieces of silver over the temple floor. Nothing epitomized Judas’s motivation in betraying Christ better than his frantic attempt to pick up those coins while groveling on the floor at the behest of his greed, earning the contempt of the Jews who gave him the money. That incident alone was enough to display Gibson’s cinematic genius and his ability to make the Gospel alive for us as an aid to our meditation on Christ’s suffering during Holy Week.

But at the very moment we were feeling good about being Catholics by entering into the spirit of Holy Week, the bishops of both the United States and Australia entered the picture to throw cold water on our devotion. In a long rambling statement entitled Walking Together, which recapitulates every error begotten by Catholic-Jewish dialogue over the past 60 years, the Australian bishops get to the heart of the matter when they claim: “Later portraits of the Pharisees by the Gospel evangelists are not historically accurate.”[i]

Jim Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ

As we have come to expect, the Australian bishops invoked Vatican II as justification for their document, but in their haste to exonerate the Jews for their responsibility for the death of Christ, they forgot to consult Dei verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, also promulgated by the Second Vatican Council, which tells us that: “we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully and without error, teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures”[ii] (my emphasis).

The Australian bishops then claim that St. John is a liar when he tells the Jews in John 8:44 that their father is Satan because when St. John “says that their father is the devil (Jn 8:44), this negative Gospel portrait of the Pharisees does not reflect their actual situation in the time of Jesus.”[iii]

First of all, John tells “the Jews,” not just the Pharisees, that their father is Satan, but it gets worse. In reading Walking Together, we learn that both Jesus, who was willing to die to redeem the Jews from their sins, and the Pharisees, who paid Judas 30 piece of silver to betray Jesus so that they could murder him, “were committed to renewing the Jewish people in their relationship with God.”[iv]

So, the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ at the hands of the Jews comes down to a difference of opinion on how to “renew the Jewish people in their relationship with God.” The Pharisees felt that it was better for one man to die than for the people to perish, and who are we to say that killing Christ wasn’t seen as a good thing in their eyes? And if the testimony of John’s Gospel on the Pharisees is inaccurate, why should we believe John’s claim that Christ rose from the dead after John and St. Peter contemplated the empty tomb? Didn’t the Pharisees come up with a much more plausible explanation when they claimed that Jesus’s followers stole His body?

After making Jewish fables normative for the Catholic faithful, the Australian bishops claim that “With faith in the one God and Creator of all, Catholics and Jews can walk together and work together to strengthen mutual bonds of friendship and enrich the social fabric of our nation.” The idea that Jews and Catholics could collaborate “to enrich the social fabric of our nation” was a delusion that finally died in the spring of 2022 when 400 Jewish organizations announced that abortion was a fundamental Jewish value.

Judas Hangs Himself
by Nicholas Toruń, 1480-1490

To be true to their commitment to “Walking Together” on the broad way, the Catholic bishops of Australia now need to affirm that abortion is a fundamental Catholic value, followed by affirmation of the Jewish sacraments of sodomy, usury, pornography, and transgenderism because that affirmation only follows logically from their affirmation of “interreligious relations,” which occur “when Catholics and Jews meet, converse and cooperate in the course of everyday activities—in neighbourly circumstances, shopping centres, sporting fields, workplace settings, and elsewhere.”[v] Following the logic of Walking Together, Catholics could volunteer to work “in neighbourly circumstances” as escorts at the local abortion clinic. As part of their commitment to “enriching the social fabric of our nation,” Canadian bishops should offer their assistance to Rabbi Solomon Friedman so that they can work “shoulder to shoulder” with him in his crusade to save Pornhub.[vi]

The Australian bishops’ mission to impose Jewish degeneracy on their nation in the name of “interreligious relations” flows naturally from their preposterous claim that “Jews and Catholics share a commitment to justice as we walk together for peace and harmony in society.” Justice and harmony in this instance involves a supine acceptance of the entire agenda of Jewish subversion, which means that Catholics “can also continue working, shoulder to shoulder, in supporting government policies which enhance the lives of all people and help make Australia an open and welcoming society” by helping Jews like Barbara Lerner Spector flood the shores of Australia and Europe with illegal immigrants, in conjunction with her efforts to destroy Catholic countries like Ireland with weaponized migration.

The possibilities for interreligious dialogue are almost infinite, as long as Catholics docilely accept Jewish leadership in setting the agenda. This means that:

Jews and Catholics study Scripture together, where this is possible. It is a wonderful opportunity to widen and deepen knowledge of the Scriptures and to become friends. It can also help Catholics become aware of where our catechetical texts and liturgical celebrations can avoid negative attitudes towards Jews and Judaism.

But not evidently where Jews can learn to correct their negative attitudes toward Christians and Christianity. As a step in that direction, I would propose the following syllabus, which would begin with an analysis of John 8 where Jesus Christ calls Jews the children of Satan, followed by the Acts of the Apostles account of the Jews stoning St. Stephen to death, followed by I Thess 2, in which Paul describes the Jews as the people who killed Christ and “enemies of the entire human race.” We can follow this up by studying the passages in the Talmud which describe Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as a bastard son of a whore who is now buried up to his neck in hell in burning excrement.

After “Walking Together” for almost 60 years, Catholics and Jews have now come to a fork in the road. The Australian bishops can now affirm Catholic morality, or they can continue to follow the illusion that Jews share Catholic values, but they can’t do both. I have said something similar on the question of unity in the Church. The Church can have unity, or it can have good relations with the Jews, but it can’t have both. During the period following the Second Vatican Council, Catholic-Jewish dialogue went from a gesture of good will to a failed experiment which the Church refused to acknowledge. As of Holy Week 2023, it has become a religion unto itself which now gets used to correct, i.e., deny the Gospels which have been handed on to us by the Apostles. How else is it possible to construe the statement that “supersessionism,” which is to say the teaching that the Church is the new Israel as rooted in the parable of the wicked tenants (Matthew 21:33-43), “is a theological expression of antisemitism”? Supersessionism:

envisions Judaism as being replaced by the teachings of Jesus and of the Church. It comes from a false understanding of the New Testament and a lack of appreciation of the Jewishness of Jesus. The Catholic Church no longer teaches or even suggests that Israel has been superseded by the Church; it acknowledges the continuation of the vibrant life of Judaism today and recognises that God’s covenant with Israel continues to be strong and life-giving.

Thanks to the efforts of Robert Sungenis and Culture Wars magazine, the bishops of the United States no longer claim that the Mosaic covenant is eternally valid, but the memo apparently hasn’t reached Australia…

[…] This is just an excerpt from the Oct 2023 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

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Culture of Death Watch

Warning: Reading the Gospel May Cause Anti-Semitism by E. Michael Jones

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Oppenheimer: Applied Jewish Science by E. Michael Jones

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Moving on Skiffle by Van Morrison by Sean Naughton

(Endnotes)

[i] Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Walking Together: Catholics with Jews in the Australian Context, 2023, PDF, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yRFeH5BDXBje1A8zNqz5ajBKRfyMZS5e/view

[ii] Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents, Austin Flannery, O.P. general editor (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press,1980), p. 757.

[iii] Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Walking Together: Catholics with Jews in the Australian Context, 2023.

[iv] Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Walking Together: Catholics with Jews in the Australian Context, 2023.

[v] Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Walking Together: Catholics with Jews in the Australian Context, 2023.

[vi] Andrew Duffy, “Solomon Friedman is on a mission to save Pornhub,” Ottawa Citizen, April 3, 2023, https://ottawacitizen.com/feature/solomon-friedman-is-on-a-mission-to-save-pornhub#:~:text=The%20high%2Dprofile%20criminal%20defence,site%20a%20force%20for%20good.

[vii] United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “2023 04 02 Reflection 37:38,” YouTube, March 30, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL-pFVhj5F4

[viii] United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “2023 04 02 Reflection 37:38,” YouTube, March 30, 2023.

[ix] vic975, “Sarah Silverman says ‘I would kill Christ again,’” YouTube, April 24, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSrhJGGDqx0

[x] Kim LaCapria, “Sarah Silverman: Killing Jesus,” Snopes, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sarah-silverman-killing-jesus/

[xi] Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Walking Together: Catholics with Jews in the Australian Context, 2023.

[xii]