Bursting Triumphalism

Back when I was a Protestant, it infuriated me when some of my family or friends would sniffily dismiss a brilliant piece of work because, “It is Catholic.” I am equally annoyed when my Catholic friends sometimes dismiss a brilliant piece of work because, “It is Protestant.” I wonder how many Catholic theologians initially dismissed St. Thomas Aquinas’ masterful work because so much of it was dependent on the pagan philosophy of Aristotle. As Jesus says in both Matthew and Luke, “Wisdom is justified by her children.” Other translations read that, “Wisdom is justified by her deeds.” The message is the same – that wisdom stands on its own results and effects.

When I was a teenager I spent a lot of time in libraries. (Even so, I was at the top of the social aristocracy in high school. My high school principal once mused that I should have been a twink like most of the other supersmart kids, but somehow I had become the biggest man on campus he had ever seen. He answered his own question by observing once that I just didn’t give a…hoot – not his word. Altogether true. I was just a guy who liked to have fun with my buddies, a guy who happened to be smart but wore it with all the concern that a guy who happened to own a Mustang did.) I just wanted to know how things came to be, and I wanted to trace them back to credible sources.

My family was of a Pentecostal Protestant religion and my Mom insisted (at that time) that only people who subscribed to that particular sect could ever go to heaven. I was offended by that. At one point, I got obsessed with studying the origins of every religious denomination. I laughed when I found that the sect was founded in the early 1800’s in the Carolinas. So if Mom’s and her relatives’ claims were true, nobody born before about 1830 could go to heaven, including the Apostles. This was obvious nonsense, but I both loved and liked Mom a lot – and even some of her relatives. So I didn’t press the issue – but knew it was completely false, even by their own logic. (This was also when I got my first real tickle about Catholicism, though still 20 years before I even seriously considered converting. I discovered, in my studies, that the Catholic Church was the only Church that had a legitimate historical claim to have been founded by Jesus Christ, Himself, while maintaining through the millennia, the essential unity He commanded.)

It cemented in my mind that there is a human proclivity towards errant triumphant tribalism – to elevate your own group as if it is the summit of all virtue and wisdom, while simultaneously (and with greater malice) denigrating others. I have enthusiastically indulged this proclivity when rooting for sports teams, but I have disdain – even contempt – for it in serious matters. It has the effect of deforming reality. If persisted in, it destroys your very capacity to understand what is true and what is beautiful. It is a very dangerous proclivity beyond matters of mere entertainment and amusement.

Metaphorically, I view religions (including my own) as a set of golf clubs. Duffers the world over convince themselves that if they just get the latest, newest, shiniest, most expensive set of clubs they suddenly will become world-beaters on the links. Ideally, superior golfers will equip themselves with the best clubs to get the best performance they can, but it is their skill and work ethic that most determines outcomes. In his prime, Tiger Woods, with a garage sale set of clubs, would have trounced anyone with even the most sophisticated set.

I believe, as anyone should, that my Catholic faith is altogether true in its formal doctrinal precepts. In effect, that means I believe I have the best set of clubs to achieve holiness and do God’s will. That means, further, that I am obligated to produce with those clubs. To him whom more has been given, more will be expected. If I lay around admiring my clubs, thinking that alone makes me superior, I am the most pitiable of men – and will face a severe accounting. If I further seek to denigrate the guy who is producing astonishing results with a set of garage sale clubs, not only am I pitiable; I become malicious and am doing the devil’s work, blasphemously using what is objectively good as my bludgeon for the purpose.

Almost two years ago, at a CORAC event I attended, a woman surprised me by denigrating the Jews and asserting there was no Holocaust. At first, I politely disagreed with her, but then she asked me why Dwight Eisenhower hadn’t mentioned it in his memoirs. I was utterly flabbergasted. Not only HAD Eisenhower spoken of it in his memoirs, it was Eisenhower who ordered soldiers to film the liberation of the extermination camps so no one could deny that this atrocity had happened. Turned out she had not read his memoirs, just took the word of someone who made that provocative, idiot assertion. It fit something she was inclined to believe, so she ran with it. In doing so, she revealed a blind malice that most assuredly did not come from God.

In the ensuing two years I have discovered (to my horror) that there is a small, but growing, strain of antisemitism among orthodox Catholics. Some of it is downright virulent. I have listened to absurdities and assertions that do not hold up under the least scrutiny advocated by otherwise serious people. Some have taken genuine offenses, committed by Jews in the midst of conflict, and cited it as evidence of their genocidal intent.

An iron rule of armed conflict is that some of the people on the most righteous side are going to commit horrific offenses in the heat of battle. In the Crusades, the genuine offenses Crusaders committed in the process of defending Christianity from the war of extermination Islam had launched did not make them genocidal. So it is with Israel in defending against the two overt wars of extermination launched by Islam against it and the ongoing shadow war of extinction by Islamic Jihadists. There must be honest, consistent standards of analysis. You cannot call offenses committed by your tribe, “regrettable, but understandable,” actions in the heat of battle, and call the same offense under almost identical duress “genocidal” when committed by a competing tribe.

I have had highly intelligent people who I admire tell me they support Jews, but not Zionists. Say what?! That is a distinction with little difference. A Zionist is simply a Jew who believes Jews should have a defensible homeland. There are always dark insinuations that Zionism is some form of advocacy for Jewish supremacy, but it is not. To be sure, there are some members of any group that push for the supremacy of their own tribe at the expense of all others. But that is not what the Zionist movement was or ever has been.

Then there are those who tell me that a huge percentage of Jews are not real Jews anymore. On this, I concede that Jewishness is both a religion and an ethnicity – and ethnic Jews who have effectively abandoned their faith have the most amazing penchant for partnering with those who overly want to destroy them. Then again, there are a huge number of cultural Catholics who have effectively abandoned the faith while holding tight to its cultural trappings.

Some quote popes from a century or more prior, who at times, spoke of the “perfidious Jews.” Yes, that has happened – all too frequently in Church history. It was a failure of faith, though, and is not doctrinal. I prefer the formulation of St. John Paul, who called the Jews our “elder brothers in the faith,” and put prayers in the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem – while noting, that that, too, is not doctrinal.

Over 30 years ago, Emory University historian Deborah E. Lipstadt published a seminal book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. It had a big impact on me, as I had been bombarded with and was bewildered by the detailed frauds with charts and maps that were being sent to me. (I was in media at the time, with some little prominence). I was puzzled at the detail being created for these frauds – and alarmed that even the historically literate, if this was not an area of specialty, could be easily taken in by them. I was even more shaken by how eagerly some very intelligent people were to be taken in by them.

St. Paul preached that it pleased God to maintain a remnant of the Jews until after the fullness of the Gentiles had been evangelized and they, last of all, will recognize Christ as the Messiah. They are, indeed, our elder brothers in the faith, no matter how detailed and intricate the modern versions of the fraudulent blood libels and Protocols of the Elders of Zion are crafted.

I need to make clear where I stand. I would not dismiss anyone if I found they had become prey to these intricate instances of bearing false witness. But my esteem cannot help but drop. If you are denigrating anyone based on sloppy or maliciously twisted work, you are doing work, but it is not God’s work. Take great care.