How the Charge of Anti-Semitism Changed Catholic Liturgy: Part I
/Changed Catholic Liturgy: Part I, Round One, Amici Israel
Op zoek naar de blauwe ruiter Sophie van Leer een leven tussen avant-garde, jodendom en christendom by Marcel Poorthuis and Theo Salemink, Valkhof Pers: Nijmegen, 2000, ISBN 9789056250737, 551 pages
“Now, about this charge, anti-Semitism. The word has several meanings. One is an embedded hatred of Jewish people . . . As such, it is a grave sin, a disease of the heart, a variant of racism. Which brings us to a second definition . . . And that is a word to describe the branding iron wielded by a tiny clique, to burn horribly heretics from their political orthodoxy. It is used to frighten, intimidate, censor and silence; to cut off debate; to so smear a man’s reputation that no one will listen to him again; to scar men so indelibly that no one will ever look at them again without saying, ‘Say, isn’t he an anti- Semite?’”[1]
– Pat Buchanan, 1990
On Friday February 9, 2024, Bishop Strickland had to clear his conscience and disassociate from any connection to Dr. E. Michael Jones. Patrick Coffin was planning a pilgrimage to Europe for May, and asked Bishop Strickland to be the group’s spiritual director. Strickland first agreed, but then decided that in order to make the pilgrimage a “spiritually uplifting journey” he first had to settle some scores. As Strickland stumbled and fumbled over names he didn’t recognize and couldn’t pronounce, it became clear that Bishop Strickland’s Traditional Latin Mass handlers were taking the opportunity to condemn Catholic intellectual Dr. E. Michael Jones as an Anti-Semite and to publicly punish Coffin for giving an anti-Semite a platform to speak during the Hope is Fuel conference:
I have, had become greatly concerned about a speaker who was included in Patrick Coffin’s recent Hope is Fuel course. Since I had agreed to be the spiritual director of a pilgrimage Patrick was planning, I found it necessary to make my concerns public before I could continue with those plans. This speaker I am referring to is Dr. E. Michael Jones. Many would characterize Dr. Jones as anti-semitic, a term to which he would object. However, at a time when building bridges is extremely important and remembering the catalyst to crossing those bridges is love, I must therefore speak out.[2]
Bishop Strickland explained that the “poison” of anti-Semitism “has long been present in the Catholic Church.” This accusation has long been wielded by Her enemies as well. In contrast, Dr. Jones teaches that the Church has always defended the Jews from being harmed, and Sicut Judeis non is a prime example. Nevertheless, we learn that one of Bishop Strickland’s Latin Mass handlers, Janet Smith, gets to determine if Jones is in good standing in the Church. Bishop Strickland said he trusts this woman. I recall sitting in the main auditorium of McKenna Hall during a Notre Dame conference when Dr. Janet Smith proclaimed from the podium that she joined the Church out of “hierarchy envy.” Everyone laughed, but apparently, she wasn’t kidding. If Strickland is the new Bishop of the TLM movement, Janet Smith is the new Pope with the power to excommunicate. Strickland explained:
Although Jones disavows the label of anti-semitic, I would like to quote someone I greatly respect, Dr. Janet Smith, from her remarks in Crisis magazine, in which she explained why she felt it necessary to withdraw from the Hope is Fuel course. She said, “He, Dr. Jones, speaks always in terms of the Jews who in his view because of their part in leading to the Crucifixion of Christ have thereby rejected the Logos by which he means objective Universal Truth, especially moral truth. He attaches no qualifiers to the term the Jews, but [what] he refuses to acknowledge is that there are Jews who remain committed to Judaism...
Bishop Joseph E. Strickland
Nobody denies this, just see John Henry Weston’s video on the religion of the Antichrist.[3] (Has Strickland condemned LifeSite News?) It’s the whole sticking point of anti-Judaism because the source of Jewish ethos is their religion. Something the Jew Karl Marx also pointed out, “We therefore recognize in Judaism … a contemporary anti-social element whose historical evolution … has arrived at its present peak.”[4] Dr. Jones covers the anti-Judaism debate extensively in the first chapter of the first volume of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit in which he says the Gospels are intrinsically anti-Jewish, and if Christianity takes the Gospels as normative, the Catholic Church is essentially anti-Jewish. When the Church says, “the Jews,” or hoi Iudaioi, She means those Jews who have rejected and do reject Christ, and not all men who are racially Jewish. To this day those Jews keep Catholics cowering: “Yet no one spoke of him openly for fear of the Jews.”[5] Unlike traditional Church teaching and the New Testament, Janet Smith is not anti-Jewish. Strickland rebuked Jones for not going along with the one good fruit produced by Vatican II, a Council most traditionalists argue was a break with tradition:
It is extremely important to realize that one cannot follow Jesus and at the same time follow an ideology that is based in hatred. A lot of things changed in the Church in the middle of the 20th Century. Certainly not all the changes were good changes, however, a good change that occurred was the Church’s improved attitude towards Jews.
How this improvement came about is the topic of this article, which requires following the life of a Jewish convert, which story we will begin promptly, but for now we repeat journalist Vicomte Léon de Poncins’ observation that Nostra Aetate was a “weapon designed to overthrow traditional Catholicism, which [the Jews] consider the chief enemy.”[6] The fuel for Nostra Aetate and for the dismantling of the liturgy was the accusation of anti-Semitism, as we will see. Strickland, then, attempted to soften his attack against Holy Mother Church, “Although the Church never taught anti-Semitism, it was often re-, regec-, reflected in attitudes. There were always those though who tried to eradicate it.” Alarmingly, Bishop Strickland then quoted a supposed address Pope Pius XI made to some pilgrims from Belgian Catholic Radio in 1938, but left out a key sentence:
Pope Pius XI in September 1938 said, “Mark well that in the Catholic Mass, Abraham is our part, patriarch and forefather. Anti-Semitism is incompatible with the lofty thought which that fact expresses. It is a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No, no, I say to you. It is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible. Through Christ and in Christ, we’re all the spiritual progeny of Abraham. Spiritually, we are all semites.”
The supposed speech of the Pope was transcribed by the news station’s president Msgr. Picard and leaked to France, but it was not reported by any other Catholic or Italian press source. Strickland did not repeat what Msgr. Picard transcribed between anti-Semitism is inadmissible and we are the spiritual progeny of Abraham, which was, “We recognize that everyone has a right to self-defense and can undertake those actions necessary to protect his legitimate interests.”[7] The Pope’s speech was confirming that the Church allows nations and individuals to defend themselves against the various types of Jewish warfare. The speech was prompted by the Pope’s debate with Mussolini with regards to Italy’s and Germany’s developing policies to attenuate the Jews’ moral and economic corruption of their nations. After so much trial and error, (and so many tragic marriages, an example of which we will examine), Italy was ready to take back its civil permissions allowing converted Jews to marry Catholics, which distressed and angered the Pope. The Italian government argued that, like the Catholic Church, it had an obligation to regulate the sexual relations and marriages between whites and blacks”[8] to avoid the creation of “half-castes,” who tended to combine “the worst of both races,” to thus avoid the creation of unhappy revolutionaries. In addition, Italy had an obligation to protect herself from Jewish influence:
Dr. E. Michael Jones
Along with the question of the blacks, we must also deal with that of the Jews, for two reasons: 1. because they are being expelled everywhere and we don’t want those expellees to think that Italy is some sort of promised land; 2. because it is in their doctrine, consecrated in the Talmud, that the Jew must mix with other races like oil with water, namely staying on top, in a position of power. And we seek to prevent that in Italy they take control.[9]
Mussolini or il Duce, assured the Pope, that he “would treat the Jews better than the Church had.”[10] The Pope sent Mussolini a message saying he was ‘killing him off’ by his refusal to obey. Gone are the days when a Pope could appeal to his health to get a Catholic leader to obey.
The Lost Encyclical
The date of September 1938 when the Pope’s private speech to the Belgian Press supposedly took place is suspicious because a draft encyclical, now called “The Hidden Encyclical” and the “Lost Encyclical,” was supposedly completed in September 1938. It was originally prepared at the request of Pope Pius XI, but the spirit of its contents were radically different from “we are all semites.” It was called Humani Generis Unitas. According to an American Jesuit John LaFarge, the Pope had read his book Interracial Justice and had been “deeply impressed by the fact that racialism and nationalism were fundamentally the same.”[11] As the Israelis themselves strongly affirm today, race is tied to nationality. Even though the American Jesuit was “a complete outsider relative to the Curia and to Italian and German issues,” and “holding open and democratic ideas,” the Pope told “the stunned American Jesuit” to “Say simply” what he “would say if you yourself were pope” condemning racism. The Pope was at the time of his request in Castelgandolfo hopeful that Mussolini would protect him from Hitler after the Pope, with the help of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Munich and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge on March 1937, condemning the idolatry and paganism involved in Nazism. It was not, however, a condemnation of Germany, as Cardinal Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) made clear:
The religious purpose is clear and far from any political tendency . . . The Holy See does not fail to recognize the great importance of those intrinsically healthy and vital political formations that defend against the threat of atheist Bolshevism ... It has never missed an opportunity to consolidate the spiritual front against Bolshevism ... but that cannot constitute a tolerance without limits. Nothing could be more false than the idea that Bolshevism can be fought with a force that is not spiritual ...[12]
Mit brenneder Sorge, however, did not condemn anti-Semitism, which was itself a novel concept and “had not appeared in the official documents of the Holy See, with the exception of the decree of the Holy Office from March 25, 1928 dissolving the ‘Friends of Israel,’”[13] or Amici Israel. When the accusation was first wielded by Amici Israel in 1928, the Church made a distinction between “an evil anti-Semitism linked to the idea of race” and “focused more on hatred” and “a good one relating to Jewish practices,” otherwise called anti-Judaism,[14] which would uphold Jones’s position and condemn Janet Smith’s. This article will later examine the purpose of Amici Israel in greater detail.
Fr. LaFarge felt inadequate for the task of writing the encyclical and asked for assistance. His Jesuit Superior-General Wlodimir Ledóchowski assigned two more Jesuits to the task: Fr. Gustav Gundlach and Fr. Gustave Desbuquois. Gundlach was a German who had harshly condemned Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna on Vatican Radio for encouraging the Austrians to support Hitler after Austria was annexed on March 13, 1938. This abuse may have been what prompted Cardinal Innitzer to later undermine Rome’s dealings with Germany for which he was punished by Rome.[15] The three “worked in strict secrecy in Paris” to create drafts in English, French and German.[16] The draft was completed in August. In September, Ledóchowski sent the draft of Humani Generis Unitas to Jesuit Enrico Rosa and sent Fr. LaFarge back to America. LaFarge, however, first took himself to Rome to tell the Pope that the encyclical was complete. At this point, according to a very angry Fr. Gundlach in The Hidden Encyclical, his superior Ledóchowski sabotaged the entire project.
Ledóchowski “had been a strenuous supporter of the encyclical against communism, Divini Redemptoris.” As a Polish Jesuit, he was “fiercely anti-communist” and consequently “harbored scant sympathy for the Jews.” Father Rosa was a Jesuit who had “for twenty years published in Civilta Cattolica articles on Jews” that were so instructive and condemning that they were used to defend “Mussolini’s racial laws against Vatican criticism.”[17] Although the encyclical made it to the Pope, who Gundlach calls “Mr Fisher,” by January 21, 1939, His Holiness did not publish it before he died. According to the lore around “The Lost Encyclical,” Cardinal Tisserant said the draft was on Pius XI’s desk the night he died of a heart attack, February 10, 1939.[18] Pope Pius XII also decided not to “promulgate the draft as an encyclical. Critics of Pius XII,” like John Cornwell in Hitler’s Pope, “cited this decision as evidence of his alleged silence toward anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.”[19]
In view of Bishop Strickland’s condemnation of Jones as an anti-Semite, despite Jones’s protests, let’s look briefly at what the document-that-was-never-published said. According to the historian Emma Fattorini, the planned encyclical was not found anywhere in the Vatican’s recently opened archives,[20] but we do have access to the book The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI which includes the drafts and letters by American Jesuits and Gundlach that were sent to LaFarge.”[21] First of all the draft of Humani Generis Unitas quoted an Acta Apostolicae Sedis which suppressed the group Amici Israel and condemned the groups goals and theology:
144. That such persecutory methods are totally at variance with the true spirit of the Catholic Church is shown by the decree of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office for March 25, 1928: “The Catholic Church habitually prays for the Jewish people who were the bearers of the Divine revelation up to the time of Christ; this, despite, indeed, on account of their spiritual blindness. Actuated by this love, the Apostolic See has protected this people against unjust oppression and, just as every kind of envy and jealousy among the nations must be disapproved of, so in an especial manner must be that hatred which is generally termed anti-Semitism” (Acta Ap. Sedis, 20, 1928).[22]
Just like Dr. Jones, the “Lost Encyclical” solidly linked hatred, jealousy, and envy of the Jews to the term anti-Semitism. Like Jones, Humani Generis Unitas did not simultaneously condemn anti-Judaism, on the contrary, like Jones, and unlike Janet Smith, it stood behind the tradition of the early Church:
We find that in her history the Church has never failed to warn her children against the teaching of the Jews, when such teaching has been directed against the Faith. The Church has never sought to minimize the terrific force of the reproaches addressed by the protomartyr Saint Stephen against those of the Jewish people who knowingly resisted the call of grace: “Stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ear...” (Acts 7:50). The Church has warned likewise against an over-familiarity with the Jewish community that might lead to customs and ways of thinking contrary to the standards of Christian life.[23]
Jones maintains this tradition. Before condemning anti-Semitism, Humani Generis Unitas, explained that “however unjust and pitiless” the current “campaign against the Jews” instigated by Hitler and Mussolini’s racist ideologies, it had the advantage of bringing to light the Church’s teaching and:
the true nature, the authentic basis of the social separation of the Jews from the rest of humanity. This basis is directly religious in character. Essentially, the so-called Jewish question is not one of race, or nation, or territorial nationality, or citizenship in the state. It is a question of religion and, since the coming of Christ, a question of Christianity.[24]
The Church is anti-Jewish, not anti-Semitic. It is a question of religion, not race, that Christians should stay away from Jews. The unpublished document repeated that although “the Jewish people,” who “put to death their Savior and King,” this “unhappy people, destroyers of their own nation, whose misguided leaders had called down upon their own heads a Divine malediction, doomed, as it were, to perpetually wander over the face of the earth,” the Church “holds out still the possibility of salvation to the Jews, once they are converted from their sins...” Let us compare this with Strickland’s condemnation of E. Michael Jones:
However, despite these words, and the words of many others who have spoken since, there’s still present in the Church today a tolerance for anti-semitism. We often overlook the fact that it was the Judean leadership that put Jesus to death, not the Jews. ... returning to the issue of Dr. Jones, although he does not accept the term anti-semitic, his words tend to demonize a whole group of people, the Jews. And he talks about a Jewish problem.[25]
While Strickland may often overlook the fact, Dr. Jones does not, nor that Saint Peter cut the Jews to the heart when he accused them of crucifying and slaying their Christ. Jones would point out that the Jews label themselves the Jews when they want reparation money. Bishop Strickland is practically quoting Janet Smith verbatim in his condemnation, when she explained why she would not be part of the Hope is Fuel course. Strickland continued: “Dr. Jones himself weighing in on [the] Hope is Fuel controversy, spoke of his book in which he spoke of all Jews who didn’t accept Jesus over the centuries as the mystical body of [the] anti-Christ. However, what is particularly troubling is remarks he has made about the Holocaust.” At this point, Strickland revealed that the Church’s TLM leaders exist to protect the Holocaust Narrative and the Jews, not the Catholic Church or Her Liturgy. In fact, the Church is now the enemy, while the Jews get off the hook or become invisible through a story they developed. To defend the narrative, Janet Smith and Strickland were willing to condemn Jones, but found themselves in opposition to traditional Church teaching. His Excellency’s argument of “Janet Smith said so” quickly devolved into a defense of Hollywood’s Holocaust Narrative. The new definition of anti-Semitism is anyone Jews don’t like, especially those who question their power and the story which absolves them from every sin. Only with this new definition can Jones be called anti-Semitic. Strickland quoted Jones’ argument that “Hollywood sustains the Holocaust Narrative,” which is really, according to Jones, a “conflation of facts.” Quoting text from a speech Jones gave, which text can also be found in Jones’s latest 608 page tome The Holocaust Narrative, Strickland naively explained the main idea while leaving out the following key date in the text that “As early as 1910, the Germans shaved the heads, showered, and fumigated the clothes of the Jews who reached their border in order to save their lives and prevent the [deadly] typhus epidemics that inevitably occurred along their migratory path from the shetles in the Pale of the Settlement.”[26]
Oblivious to the fact that Jones’ Fidelity Press just published a second edition of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (JRS) in three volumes, and two hefty and well-researched books on the subject of the “Holocaust Narrative” including the typhus epidemic, court trials and forensic evidence proving what actually took place[27] in The Truth Will Set You Free: The Case for Holocaust Revisionism by John Beaumont, Strickland responded to this one quote and another regarding swimming pools found at Auschwitz by saying that anyone who dares to “undercut” the degradation that happened during the Holocaust or reduces “it to an accusation of exaggerated propaganda” is lacking in “basic human solidarity.” What about the degradation of being shot while leaving Holy Mass in Gaza? Should Catholics demand the death of millions of Jews via abortion, as the Jews do, to achieve human solidarity? In any case, Strickland will use the term the Jews when demanding obeisance to them.
In his February 9 condemnation, Bishop Strickland noted there is “widespread division and disharmony within the Church, this is tragic because the Church is universal.” All of the Church’s internal-warring parties would agree this is true. His Excellency added, the Church is universal because “She has been sent to proclaim Christ to the entire human race.”[28] Here I would ask, “Are Jews not part of the human race?” Strickland continued, “What is needed in these times is a call to the faithful to gather under the banner of Christ which is of course the banner of Truth...” Completely ignoring that Jones’ statements may be facts and therefore “truth” Strickland condemned Jones and equated him to “those who would seek to deny the Holocaust,” and turn it into a “made-up fairytale.” Despite his protests, Jones is anti-Semitic; despite his extensive research a “Holocaust denier,” despite his attempt to convert the Jews to Catholicism, “hard-hearted.” And that because Janet Smith said so, Bishop Strickland admitted he trusted this woman. Bishop Strickland said Janet Smith argues that Jones places religious Jews under the same category as “powerful ethnic Jews,” thereby aiding and abetting “those who are fully anti-semitic.” Here Dr. Smith returned to the 1928 distinction between good and evil anti-Semitism, and yet condemned Jones along with evil anti-Semites. If she does this, she must also condemn the Catholic Church. One angry commentator noted that if EMJ is anti-Semitic, as Strickland said, so were Christ and the Apostles. It turns out that the Church has been anti-semitic for 2,000 years ... if, like Strickland, you use the right definition. The most popular online sites would also condemn the Catholic Church when they state that there is “racial antisemitism,” and “religious antisemitism,” which means hostility “driven” by their “religious perception of Jews and Judaism,” or anti-Judaism, which typically encompasses “doctrines of supersession that expect or demand Jews to turn away from Judaism and submit to the religion presenting itself as Judaism’s successor faith.”[29] That religion with high expectations is Catholicism, because as St. Peter told the thousands of Jews who immediately converted, they must “repent and be baptized.” And as Our Lord (who descended from the tribe of Judah) told his racially Jewish Apostles: teach all nations and baptize them in the name of the Trinity.
In order to condemn Dr. Jones, Strickland had to judge Jones’s heart because both racial and religious anti-Semitism require hatred and hostility. If Strickland took Jones at his word, Jones loves the Jews because they are his enemies and the “enemies of the entire human race.” Despite his words, many, like Janet Smith, point to what they consider a hostile and bitter tone in Jones’s speech, and the fact that he openly criticizes the Jews. Jones argues that they should not be in leadership positions over Christians because they do not represent a Christian constituency and they oppose Christian morality.[30] The reality is that there are types of hatred. One sort aims directly at the person and desires him evil. This type is always sinful because it violates the “precept of charity.” But to hate what is itself evil is not a sin and may be required in a well-ordered soul. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, he “who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust.” For this reason, intense dislike, loathing, hate may be concentrated on the “qualities or attributes of a person.” As Spanish martyrs declared to the Moors in the ninth century: “We love our faith, and abhor every other religion.”[31] In addition, the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia teaches that one “may without sin go so far in the detestation of wrongdoing as to wish that which for its perpetrator is a very well-defined evil, yet under another aspect is a much more signal good.”[32]
Radical Traditionalist Catholics
Professor Janet Smith had made a scene before the May 2023 conference by first saying she would participate despite Jones’ appearance, but after Facebook pressured her, she called Patrick Coffin and pressured him to kick Jones off the conference. When Coffin refused, Janet leaned into the other 49 presenters. The end result was that Janet withdrew from a course that was purely on hope and took with her a third of the speakers, mostly academics. Although Dr. Smith admitted she once regularly met with Dr. Jones after Sunday Mass over an enjoyable meal of pancakes and bacon at his home for brunch, she could no longer give legitimacy to an anti-Semite.[33] Dr. Smith thought she had wiped her mouth clean when Jones rebuked her on his Friday May 19, 2023 weekly podcast, and more recently in the January 2024 issue of Culture Wars, when he ousted her, along with the new TLM leaders for defending Michael Voris who was once again caught practicing sodomy and denying his employees a just wage. The top villains in this story were the SSPX and Taylor Marshall who are leading those who love the Latin Mass away from finding real solutions to the problems which plague the Church, primarily by leading traditionally minded Catholics outside of the Church’s jurisdiction where there is no salvation. Jones said Strickland “demeans the office of bishop by collaborating with Marshall’s attempt to control him.”[34] If this seems too harsh of a character evaluation, the reader should recall the information Marshall appropriated in unattributed form for his “cash cow” book Infiltration, which has been thoroughly exposed by Researchers Kevin Symonds (an aggrieved party), Michael Lofton, and Riverrun in Reason & Theology.[35] When Symonds asked Marshall to footnote the source for his work, Marshall doubled-down instead and made a video about the information he stole from Symonds, again without attributing the research to him.[36]
In the same article on Voris and Strickland, Jones quoted an RTF Mike Parrott fan who pointed out Janet Smith’s “Neocon” status: “Janet E. Smith is presently cautioning people to be nice, if not actually Christian. Did she extend this kind of charity to E. Michael Jones when she called Jones an anti-Semite? One wonders if there’s another allegiance Smith is loyal to beyond the appearance of Catholicism.”[37] The TLM leaders are doing our Israeli-run government a favor by leading Catholics away from one of the Church’s leading intellectuals. In the Richmond FBI’s leaked January 23, 2023 report, Jones’ “Culture Wars/Fidelity Press of South Bend, Indiana” was prominent on the short list of radical-traditionalist Catholics (RTC), but he was also the cause of the list’s creation.[38] According to the FBI, Nick Fuentes’ groypers and RTC frequently share language and symbolism, such as “crusader references or anti-Semitic discourses” leading to “a growing overlap between [the] far-right white nationalist movement and RTCs” (let us pause to recall the purpose of the Crusades was to protect and recover the Holy Land). FBI Richmond believed the “next 12 to 24 months” would see an alarming increase in dialogue between anti-Semites and Latin Mass Catholics due to “disaffection with mainline Catholic churches” over abortion rights, immigration, and LGBTQ protections as Catholics identified the Jewish influence behind these activities. The FBI did not bring up the attack on Gaza or Russia, but it was insinuated in the unspecified event which the FBI predicted would be the catalyst for the union between RTC and anti-Semites. The January 23, 2023, FBI report identified the Traditional Latin Mass movement as problematic because it was returning to traditional Church teaching on the Jews. Our Jewish Federal Attorney Merrick Garland had to answer for the contents of the leaked document.
As Bishop Strickland noted, disharmony within the Church is tragic because She is universal. In an effort to unite the faithful under the one banner of Christ and build bridges of love between the Latin Mass Catholics, traditional Church teaching, and the Church’s leading intellectual, I will attempt to prove that the changes in the liturgy were instigated by Jews who were accusing the Church of anti-Semitism. I will do this by reviewing the biography of a Dutch Jewess Sophie van Leer. This information has become available through Marcel Poorthuis and Theo Salemink, the biographers of Sophie, who have done extensive original archival research. Most of the following information will come from Sophie van Leer’s biography published in 2000, Op zeok naar de blauwe ruiter (Looking for the Blue Rider: Sophie Van Leer, a Life Between the Avant-garde, Judaism and Christianity).[39] The biographers argue that on top of Sophie’s revolutionary work in the Church, the Van Leer family “certainly belong[s] to the history of Judaism” [40] including the establishment of the State of Israel. Her story will help us identify the methods Jews use to undermine Christendom to the point of its complete collapse. Part One of the review will end with the condemnation of Amici Israel and Part Two will take us into Vatican II.
Amici Israel's Scandalous History
Returning to “The Hidden Encyclical,” the supposed draft admitted the newness in the history of the Church of the term “anti-Semitism.” The term came up for the first time in official Church documents in 1928 with the suppression of the group called Clerical Association of Friends of Israel or Opus Sacerdotal Amici Israel. The group was accusing the Catholic Church of anti-Semitism. In Her condemnation of Amici Israel the Church once again protected the Jews and condemned racial anti-Semitism. But as Fr. Enrico Rosa asserted in Civilta Cattolica”: “condemned, yes, but in its Christian form and spirit.” Fr. Rosa “returned in fact to the usual distinction between a good and a bad anti-Semitism.”[41]
The personal lives of the group promoting Amici Israel give us a hint as to the extremely scandalous and directly Jewish origins of the attack on Catholic liturgy and theology. The same group’s network and activities led the reform of the liturgy during the Second Vatican Council, and even before the council when on March 21, 1959, Pope John XXIII removed the word “faithless” or perfidis from the prayer for the conversion of the Jews, something Pope Pius XII refused to do when he was being pressured to do so, although kneeling was instituted at that time.
It should come as a surprise that the founder of a clerical movement, Amici Israel, was Sophie van Leer, a Jewess born in Amsterdam in February 1892 to a strictly observing mother and a liberal Jewish father who was a “messianic idealist.”[42] Her father, Willem van Leer was a well-known businessman, “Freemason and utopian socialist,”[43] but also a writer.[44] Among his favorite topics were the “wretched circumstances of the Jewish proletariat, especially in Amsterdam.”[45] The Jews in the Netherlands found themselves debating which identity to take on: Orthodoxy, socialism, communism and/or Zionism. Soon after Sophie’s birth, the family moved inland to the impoverished Catholic city of Nijmegen near the German border.[46] The small Jewish community made up the leading members of the town – shopkeepers, retailers and butchers, etc. Sophie remembered the portraits of the revolutionaries August Bebel, Karl Liebknecht and Karl Marx hung on the walls of her house. Ultimately, the Van Leers’ thoughts, interests, and activities were an embodiment of the revolutionary movements of their times. The oldest son of the Van Leer family became a Social Democrat in a Worker’s Party. Another brother, Bernard van Leer, was a “famous manufacturer” Jewish millionaire, founder of the Van Leer empire, who would later start the Van Leer Foundation in Jerusalem, although it remained based in the Netherlands. Bernard would fund much of Sophie’s activities after she joined the Catholic Church, despite (or because of) his hostility to Catholicism. One of Sophie’s sisters, Henrietta, would focus on “the revolutionary impetus of the proletariat” and would be imprisoned with her husband for her revolutionary political activities. Another sister, and the one Sophie was closest to, Clara, was “one of the first Dutch Zionists in Palestine.” Ellen, a niece, would become a prominent Lutheran theologian in the Reformed Church and her sister Irmgard (baptized Mirjam) would carry forward Sophie’s plans and lead her clerical followers into the climactic religious battle known as the Second Vatican Council.
Bernard van Leer’s wife, Polly came from a Jewish family of repute in Amsterdam. Like the Van Leers, she had “messianic” desires to “reform the world.”[47] Before the war, Polly financed the journal Chronicles: News of the Past, which contained the entire traumatic history of the Jews from 1726 BCE.[48] As early as October 1946 the Van Leer family would be the first to speak about the “six million” Jews murdered in the concentration camps. By 1949, Polly was publishing the Jewish history as a modern magazine in bookshops and newspaper stalls in Israel. Polly’s editor Jacob Soetendorp was a close friend of the family. Soetendorp would publish the history of Catholic anti-Semitism, the Catholic “anti-Zionist” tradition, the Holocaust narrative, and “the silence of Pope Pius XII during the war.”[49] Soetendorp was so familiar with the Van Leer family that he held it against them when they fled to the United States during World War II leaving him behind with his wife working as a servant. Soetendorp found himself obliged to ask a Catholic family to also take care of his son. Soetendorp became very influential in the life of Sophie. Near the end of her life, in a response to an aggressive or “sharp” letter by Jacob Soetendorp, Sophie told him she would defend Israel’s right to its own state, “its own ‘nation building,’ even if I were to be charged with heresy by my Catholic Church.” How did Sophie get to this point in her life where she is demanding that the Catholic Church protect Jews against secular governments?
Sophie van Leer
According to her biographers, Sophie was a strictly observing Jewess in her early years, a practice which was strongly enforced by her mother who was also very pious, coercive and cruel. Her mother harbored all the vices associated with actively rejecting her Messiah, and with having an adulterous Freemason for a husband. The same woman who enforced prayers and collected sand from the Holy Land to be buried in, rejected Sophie when she became Catholic. The best example Sophie remembered of her cruelty was when she handed her mother a bouquet for her birthday: “I don’t want flowers,” her mother had angrily responded before emptying the flowers Sophie had gathered into the trash can, “where the flowers soon withered and died” like Sophie’s little heart.
Sophie attended an Oriental school where she learned Hebrew well because, as she was taught, God only understood Hebrew. She also observed her father’s prayer life, which helped ground her identity. Sophie’s fearful, cold, and demanding relationship with her mother contrasted starkly with the relationship she had with her salient and enthusiastic father: “His remarkable vision of Jewish messianism, combined with a Freemason’s view and a deism inspired by Spinoza, had a great influence on his daughter’s emotional life.”[50] Willem also had particular aspirations for Sophie and encouraged her to carry on his frustrated literary ambitions, especially through poetry and music. He encouraged her to involve herself with theater by giving her a youth subscription. Consequently, Sophie joined theater club and participated in student plays. As part of her revolutionary training, Sophie learned how to play the piano and also translated Rabbi Meijer de Hond’s editorials from the Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad into German for another Jewish publication, Ziircher Jüdische Wochenblatt. Rabbi Meijer was part of the Kabbalah tradition, as well as Hasidism. It is important to dwell a moment on Willem van Leer on account of his considerable influence on Sophie and the rest of the family, but also due to his influence among Freemasons in the Netherlands and the effect his family would have on the wider Jewish community. Of particular interest to this story is the working of the family’s theology into Catholic thought.
Willem van Leer became a Freemason on October 12, 1881 and later belonged to Lodge Sint Lodewijk in Nijmegen, Netherlands, the third oldest lodge in the Netherlands.[51] By 1895, three years after Sophie was born, Willem encouraged the lodge to begin organizing meetings with females, and eventually he would give lectures on women’s emancipation to them. Willem was deconstructing gender roles, something the Russian revolution would successfully attempt in the early 1900s under Lenin.[52] The goal was to remove women and children from the protection of their husbands and fathers to increase the number of exploitable workers and revolutionaries.
As part of this revolutionary activity within the lodge itself, which was said to symbolize “the Solomonic House of God,” (hopefully not due to concubinage) Willem provoked unrest among families by instigating a battle between “the man, the woman, and the child.” He himself would put on the “garment of penance,” to apologize on behalf of his fellow freemasons for excluding “women from participating in the movement for so long.”[53] In 1898, six years after Sophie was born, a new lodge was built “in the Egyptian style.” The lodge “included representatives of the upper middle class: merchants, higher officials, manufacturers, officers, lawyers and engineers. In 1898 it included 51 masters, 17 journeymen and 19 apprentices.”[54]
According to Sophie’s biographers “For Willem van Leer, as for many Jews, freemasonry meant a form of emancipation, of social access to the non-Jewish world, which generally remained closed.” For Willem, this meant the ability to publish his “lurid”[55] novellas and other writings for a wider public audience. On September 18, 1892, the year Sophie was born, Willem read a novella in which a Jewish boy named Jacob becomes a Freemason after hearing an anti-Semitic comment in order to “free himself from his Jewishness as much as possible.” As it turned out in Van Leer’s tale and in the real world, Freemasonry is really Judaic. The punchline of the novella is that Jacob points out that a “brotherhood and pure love” superior to that of Freemasonry is found in the Talmud, and the character Jacob, like Willem himself, becomes once again “a Jew for the Jews.”
Sophie remembered when her father completed another work Maschiach is Coming! on June 22, 1901 because of the commotion it caused. The work would embody and inspire her own theology. It also formed her messianic ambitions, which ambitions had already been planted in her heart by her demanding mother, such as when her mother told her she would make a good rabbi. This literature would influence Sophie throughout her life. As summarized by her biographers, the text basically stated that Jesus was self-anointed. He had simply responded to his people’s need for a messiah. This idea would later prompt Sophie to believe that she too could become a self-appointed messiah to the Jews through her preaching.
The Jesus in Maschiach is Coming! attempted to lead his people to the promised land, but failed and created instead a cult that would persecute his fellow Jews for 2,000 years. Sophie’s biography makes it clear that she also saw Jesus as a failure who needed help, her help. In his story, Willem van Leer protected his blasphemies by insinuating that the Catholic Church Christ had created was accidental. According to Willem and the German Protestant literature he took as his inspiration, such as Leben Jesu Forschung, the Blood that flowed from the Crown of Thorns bred mischief, thievery, the deliberate oppression of widows and orphans, greed, murder, lust… Willem proclaims Our Lord, who is the Source of Life, the source of death: “Your people do all that, Jesus,” Willem’s fictional Jewish character tells a pitiful Christ on the Cross, “And yet, you remain silent.” Willem, here, echoes the Jews who watched the actual Crucifixion. The character in Willem’s novel asks Jesus to come down from the Cross if he is the Son of God. And then, like the Jews before him, wags his head and says “No utopia can come as long as this monster lives.”[56]
The character speaking to Christ was fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe and had arrived in the Netherlands. His children and wife were murdered by the hatred which the Catholic Church fostered, and Christ on the Cross was and remained silent. The silence trope will continue into the Holocaust era as Dr. E. Michael Jones documents in The Holocaust Narrative.
The Jewish utopia Willem dreamed of was right over the horizon. The revolutions of 1848 were over. The Irish have been starved out. Catholic Mexico had been driven back and defeated. At this point, the American Civil War had consolidated the Freemason’s governing power in the United States, which they wielded in union with the Jews that surrounding Lincoln, like Karl Marx who helped from abroad. We are only a few years away from World War I (instigated by the murder of a Hapsburg heir to the throne and his wife), which ended the reign of Catholic and Protestant monarchs in Europe, as well as the Bolsheviks’ murder of Czar Nicholas II and the rest of the royal family in Russia. With the collapse of Christendom and her protectors, the reign of the Jews would finally begin. As Baruch Levy wrote to Karl Marx in 1879, the Jews would be their own collective Messiah if necessary: “It will attain mastery of the world through the union of all the other human races, through the abolition of boundaries and monarchies . . . through the erection of a universal Republic…”[57] The next step for the “collective Messiah” was to establish his own military in his own nation, which would allow him to impose his religion on the rest of the fallen world.
What the Jews were waiting for now, according to Willem in Maschiach is Coming! was a better king to establish their earthly kingdom. Willem himself would die on his way to Palestine. In Willem’s closing words to the lodge, he wondered whether the freethinkers, the eighteenth-century Freemasons should be considered better messiahs. The Freemasons, according to Willem, as well as anarchists and utopians, followed most closely the secret sect of the Essenes which they believed St. John the Baptist was a part of. It was a sect which closely resembled communism because it “abhorred wealth” and “owned communal property.” In Maschiach is Coming! Willem described how this group lived together in unity. They “flee from lust to restrain the passions; they shun marriage for fear of women’s infidelity.”[58] They hate individual property and the fruit of labor is common to all. These ideas will germinate in Sophie’s mind, and she will weave them into the fabric of the Catholic Church through false mysticism and Franciscan piety. Another important aspect of Willem Van Leer’s ethos which his children inherited is that Judaism is the bastion of culture and revolutionary activity. For this reason, he insisted on keeping intact the use of Yiddish because it was through its use that “the intimate familiarity of Jewish life” still resonated. The bastion of Judaism was the Jewish family, where the father was “king of the family” and the mother “enthroned as queen.” In view of his family’s messianic aspirations, Willem’s self-enthronement is likely in opposition to the authority of his own monarchs – Kings William II and III and Queens Sophie, niece of Alexander I and Nicholas I of Russia, and Wilhelmina.
Friar Laetus, Sophie, and Asseldonk
The Van Leer family fell apart in 1910 when Willem was caught committing adultery with one of his daughters’ girlfriends. We are not told which daughter, but the reader learns that the “idol” of Sophie’s youth fell from his pedestal. The infidelity and separation of “king” and “queen” clearly fueled the family’s revolutionary inclinations because a year later, at the age of 19, Sophie moved in with a boyfriend she was already sexually active with, and by 1914, she was deeply involved with the expressionist environment of the Berlin artists and abided within the “ethical-political environment” of Leo Tolstoy’s followers and utopian-anarchist revolutionaries.[59] The Berlin avant-garde included sculptors, painters, poets, art collectors, musicians and professors and she had “passionate affairs with a number of them.”[60] According to Sophie, these artists had trouble deciding whether they wanted to sleep with or paint the model. The artists used their art to promote their own religious movement, which one of Sophie’s boyfriends described simply as unbridled lust. Artists, like Sophie, assigned themselves the task of mediating between men and “the absolute.”[61] Art would redeem humanity. One of the principal publications of this movement was Der Sturm, which is still considered one of the most “avant-garde magazines” of the 20th century.[62] It went furthest of all expressionist movements in its emphasis on the autonomy of art and the redemption of humanity.[63] Sophie and her friends were aware of what this meant. In a letter to one of her long-term boyfriends, Sophie admitted that the goal was generally that set down by Lucifer: “Lucifer, the light bearer and angel who rebelled against God and therefore became a fallen angel, was a well-known symbol for artistry as an indication of the pursuit of self-deification and rebellion against established religions.”[64] This art cultivated by a German Jewish minority would, in the words of U.S. intelligence agent George N. Shuster, elevate the esteem the world had for Germany after losing that esteem through the First World War.[65] Shuster also admitted that because Jews were “particularly prominent in the arts and theater” they were blamed for the “excesses and vulgarity.”[66]
A significant and repetitive theme in Sophie’s biography that we have to deal with because of the influential and close relationship she will have with Catholic clergy is her sexual problems, which reflect her serious emotional and psychological problems. Sophie, we are informed, is “afraid of marriage,” and she does not enjoy submitting sexually to men. She finds it so demeaning that she admittedly withdraws her own emotions during intercourse, and in her words, turns herself into a man. She says of herself, “I couldn’t love. I was too intellectual.” She courts men she can command and influence, and she habitually tells her clingy lovers about the great men she is intrigued with, their work, and their worth. The other side of this coin, however, is that she finds dominant men with interesting ideas irresistible, and a lot of her relationships are marked by a certain attraction to masochism and suffering. Such was the relationship she had with the art collector and astrologer Franz Kluxen.
Sophie temporarily left a boyfriend to live alone with the artist Kluxen on the island of Föhr. Her biographers reveal that a “symbiotic relationship of submission and sadism developed” with Kluxen, “She was terrified of displeasing him.” Part of the tension was that Kluxen was a wizard who “regularly sang to the god Mazda,”[67] and claimed to have preternatural knowledge of their future which was predetermined. Among his esoteric ideas, Kluxen believed in reincarnation, and he revealed to Sophie that she had been his husband in an earlier life and had abused him terribly. It was time for Sophie to atone for the karma she had collected. Sophie endured everything “like a lamb” which included sexual assault. Sophie would later say that it was a “sick relationship, full of dark dependency and power.” Nevertheless, Sophie became Kluxen’s instrument.
When she returned to her boyfriend “[m]any expressionist artists around the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin came under the influence of the Mazdaznan doctrine, of which Kluxen was the source.” She was the vehicle that carried the doctrine of Dr. Otoman Zar-Adusht Hanish on behalf of Kluxen. The Mazdaznan doctrine included the idea of self-salvation and the irrelevance of all religions and philosophies in comparison to the “pure primordial doctrine” espoused by the prophets Zarathustra, Buddha, Moses, and Jesus. The saviors in this religion were the Aryans and to achieve their greatest potential its followers had to be vegans and practice special breathing techniques. This occultism had such a following that in the 1920s many artists at Bauhaus also fell under the spell of Mazdaznan teaching through the Der Sturm community…
[…] This is just an excerpt from the July-August 2024 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!
Articles:
Culture of Death Watch
Blessed Karl of Austria: The Last Father of Christendom by Mitchell Blackburn
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Star WStar Wars in the Balkans: American Myths & European MysteriesAmerican Myths & European Mysteries by Dr. E. Michael Jones
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How the Charge of Anti-Semitism Changed Catholic Liturgy: Part I by Alyssa Rangel
(Endnotes)
[1] Allan C. Brownfeld, “Defining Anti-Semtism,” Chronicles, Jan. 1991, https://chroniclesmagazine.org/vital-signs/defining-anti-semitism/
[2] Patrick Coffin, “A Clarifying Statement by Bishop Strickland,” rumble, Feb. 9, 2024. My emphasis, https://rumble.com/v4cdrkl-a-clarifying-statement-by-bishop-strickland.html
[3] LSNTV, “The Antichrist’s False Religion and Its Spread Across the World,” YouTube, May 7, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ppY_rIPy80
[4] Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question.
[5] John 7:13
[6] Vicomte Leon de Poncins, Judaism and the Vatican: An Attempt at Spiritual Subversion (London: Britons’ Publishing Company, 1967), p. 10; taken from E. Michael Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, Second Edition, Volume II, Chapter 15.
[7] Emma Fattorini, Hitler, Mussolini, and the Vatican: Pope Pius XI and the Speech that was Never Made, Trans. Carl Ipsen (Cambride: Polity Press, 2011), pp. 161, 162.
[8] Fattorini, Hitler, pp. 159, 160.
[9] Fattorini, Hitler, p. 159; a recent discussion on the contents of the Talmud can be found in Fr. Francesco Saverio Rondina, S.J., “How Jews Love Christians,” Culture Wars, Volume 43, No. 7, p. 18, the original article was published in Civilta Cattolica.
[10] Fattorini, Hitler, p. 160.
[11] Fattorini, Hitler, p. 153.
[12] Fattorini, Hitler, p. 120.
[13] Fattorini, Hitler, p. 153.
[14] Fattorini, Hitler, p. 154.
[15] Marcel Poorthuis and Theo Salemink, Op zoek naar de blauwe ruiter Sophie van Leer een leven tussen avant-garde, jodendomen christendom (Nijmegen, Netherlands: Valkhof Pers, 2000), translated Looking for the Blue Rider by Google Translate, p. 379.
[16] Fattorini, Hitler, p. 154.
[17] Fattorini, Hitler, p. 155.
[18] “Humani generis unitas,” Wikipedia, collected Feb. 17, 2024, original source: Passelecq, Georges; Suchecky, Bernard. L’Encyclique Cachée de Pie XI: Une occasion manqué de l’Église face a l’antisemitisme. Editions La Decouverte, Paris 1995. (engl) The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI, Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1997; The Holocaust Chronicle, 2002. “1937: Quiet before the Storm,” p. 112.
[19] “Humani generis unitas,” Wikipedia.
[20] Fattorini, Hitler, p. 155.
[21] Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 19970, pp. 36, 246-259.
[22] G. Desbuquois, G. Gundlach, J. LaFarge, “DRAFT ENCYCLICAL: ‘Humani Generis Unitas,’ (1938),” Primary Texts on History of Relations, Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations, https://ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/primary-texts-from-the-history-of-the-relationship/hgu1938
[23] G. Desbuquois, G. Gundlach, J. LaFarge, “DRAFT ENCYCLICAL: ‘Humani Generis Unitas,’ (1938),” Primary Texts on History of Relations, Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations, https://ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/primary-texts-from-the-history-of-the-relationship/hgu1938
[24] G. Desbuquois, G. Gundlach, J. LaFarge, “DRAFT ENCYCLICAL: ‘Humani Generis Unitas,’ (1938),” Primary Texts on History of Relations, Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations, https://ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/primary-texts-from-the-history-of-the-relationship/hgu1938
[25] Patrick Coffin, “A Clarifying Statement by Bishop Strickland,” rumble, Feb. 9, 2024. My emphasis, https://rumble.com/v4cdrkl-a-clarifying-statement-by-bishop-strickland.html
[26] Taken in this case from E. Michael Jones, Holocaust Narrative and not from Strickland’s actual speech because he leaves out the important date of 1910.
[27] John Beaumont, The Truth Will Set You Free: The Case for Holocaust Revisionism (South Bend, IN: Fidelity Press, 2023).
[28] Patrick Coffin, “A Clarifying Statement by Bishop Strickland,” rumble, Feb. 9, 2024, https://rumble.com/v4cdrkl-a-clarifying-statement-by-bishop-strickland.html
[29] “Antisemitism,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism
[30] See E. Michael Jones, Review, Culture Wars, April 2024; 2023 and 2024 podcasts.
[31] St. Alphonsus de Liguori, The Complete Works of Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, Volume IX: Victories of the Martyrs, trans. Eugene Grimm (Brooklyn: Redemptorist Fathers, 1953), p. 239.
[32] Joseph Delany, “Hatred,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07149b.htm
[33] Janet E. Smith, “Why I Withdrew from “Hope is Fuel,” Crisis Magazine, May 18, 2023, https://www.crisismagazine.com/opinion/why-i-withdrew-from-hope-is-fuel
[34] E. Michael Jones, “Voris Falls for the Second Time: The Bishops Break Up a Schismatic Coup Attempt,” Culture Wars, January 2024, Vol. 43, No. 2.
[35] Reason & Theology, “Review of Taylor Marshall’s Infiltration with Kevin J. Symonds and Riverrrun Part One,” YouTube, May 18, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/live/2iReJd_AncM?si=pIl7LLU7nPNgS79e;
Reason & Theology, “Review of Taylor Marshall’s Infiltration with Kevin J. Symonds and Riverrrun Part Two,” YouTube, May 26, 2021,: https://www.youtube.com/live/SQbRhMCR57I?si=Q-q8_Rjk7fuRPNxf
[36] Dr. Taylor Marshall, “Satan Debates God: ‘I need 50-60 more years!’ Is this vision of Pope Leo XIII in 1886 real?” YouTube, July 5, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=K9Gm28QLT5w
[37] E. Michael Jones, “Voris Falls for the Second Time: The Bishops Break Up a Schismatic Coup Attempt,” Culture Was, January 2024, Vol. 43, No. 2, p. 24.
[38] E. Michael Jones, “How I Landed on the FBI Hit List Targeting ‘Radical Traditionalist Catholics,’” Culture Wars, March 2023, Vol. 42, No. 4.
[39] The entire book was translated from Dutch to English using Google Translate.
[40] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 13.
[41] Fattorinin, Hitler, p. 110.
[42] Chaya Brasz and Yosef Kaplan, Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and By Others, Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies, Vol. 24 (Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2001), p. 117.
[43] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 13.
[44] “Sophie van Leer,” Wikipedia, Google Translation.
[45] Marcel Poorthuis and Theo Salemink, Wilem van Leere: Businessman by Profession, Writer by Vocation, Studia Rosenthaliana, Vol. 35, No. 1(2001), p. 48., https://www.jstor.org/stable/41482438
[46] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 17.
[47] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 20.
[48] Chaya Brasz and Yosef Kaplan, Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and By Others, Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies, Vol. 24 (Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2001), symposium, Polly van Leer-Rubens, Reubeni Foundation, p. 119.
[49] Chaya Brasz and Yosef Kaplan, Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and By Others, Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies, Vol. 24 (Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2001), p. 119.
[50] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 29.
[51] The First Dutch lodge was founded in The Hague in 1734 with the help of the Freemasons in England and France, the second lodge was founded in 1735, and in 1752, Lodge Sint Lodewijk in Nijmegen was founded. The history of Lodge St. Lodewijk according to “The early period of the Freemason Lodge St. Lodewijk in Nijmegen” based on data from D. van Lith, compiled by W.Binkhorst, JLBos, HCColjee (1984), taken June 18, 2024 from Lodge Sint Lodewijk, History, https://www.sintlodewijk.nl/de-loge-te-nijmegen-is-de-oudste-vereniging-in-nijmegen/geschiedenis/
[52] Kamaljit Nandra, “Feminism, Socialism, and the Struggle for New Heights,” Culture Wars, Oct. 2022, Vol. 41, No. 10.
[53] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 32.
[54] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 30.
[55] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 31.
[56] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 35.
[57] E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (Fidelity Press: South Bend, IN, 2015, Seventh Printing 2019), p. 1034.
[58] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 33.
[59] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 43.
[60] Brasz and Kaplan, Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves, p. 117.
[61] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 80.
[62] Wikipedia, Der Sturm as most avant garde.
[63] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 74.
[64] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 84.
[65] George N. Shuster, “Bruening’s Sojourn in the United States (1935-1945),” ND Archives, Folder CSHN.
ND Archives, Folder CCCV 2/12; Thomas E. Blantz, George N. Shuster: On the Side of Truth (Notre Dame: University of Ntore Dame Press, 1993).
[66] Blantz, Shuster, p. 103.
[67] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 64.
[68] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 82.
[69] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 71.
[70] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 86.
[71] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 89.
[72] Blantz, Shuster, p. 101.
[73] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 116.
[74] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 113.
[75] Henry Ford, “The International Jew – The World’s Foremost Problem,” The Noontide Press: Books On-Line, Originally from The Dearborn Independent.
[76] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 111.
[77] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 112.
[78] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 111.
[79] Michael Kardinal von Faulhaber: Rede zum 62. Deutschen Katholikentag, München (1922); Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism, Oxford, p. 104, taken from Wikipedia “Michael von Faulhaber,” on June 19, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_von_Faulhaber#cite_note-1
[80] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 116.
[81] Gordon C. Zahm, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars: A Study in Social Control, (Notre Dame: Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), copyright 1962 by Sheed and Ward, p. 109.
[82] Zahm, German Catholics, p. 109.
[83] Edgar Jaffé
[84] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 120.
[85] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 121.
[86] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 123.
[87] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 128.
[88] Charles J. Herber, “Eugenio Pacelli’s Mission to Germany and the Papal Peace Proposals of 1917,” The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 65, No. 1, Jan. 1979, pp. 20-48, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25020490
[89] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 145.
[90] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 133.
[91] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 137.
[92] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 144.
[93] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 147.
[94] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 76.
[95] Blantz, Shuster, p. 103.
[96] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 190.
[97] “November Revolution,” Wikipedia, Google Translation, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novemberrevolution
[98] Marcel Poorthuis and T. Salemink, “Chiliasme, anti-judaisme en antisemitisme : Laetus Himmelreich OFM (1886-1957),” https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Chiliasme%2C-anti-juda%C3%AFsme-en-antisemitisme-%3A-Laetus-Poorthuis-Salemink/a09d251259bcceceb673e41040dbe5edc996f1fb
[99] Marcel Poorthuis and T. Salemink, “Chiliasme, anti-judaisme en antisemitisme : Laetus Himmelreich OFM (1886-1957),” https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Chiliasme%2C-anti-juda%C3%AFsme-en-antisemitisme-%3A-Laetus-Poorthuis-Salemink/a09d251259bcceceb673e41040dbe5edc996f1fb
[100] Marcel Poorthuis and T. Salemink, “Laetus Himmelreich OFM (1886-1957), Zwischen München, Jerusalem und Dachau,” Tilburg University, https://research.tilburguniversity.edu/en/publications/laetus-himmelreich-ofm-1886-1957-zwischen-m%C3%BCnchen-jerusalem-und-d
[101] p. 116.
[102] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 158.
[103] Theo Salemink, “Strangers in a Strange Country: Catholic Views of Jews in the Netherlands, 1918-1945,” Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and by Others, Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies, Editor David S. Katz, Vol. 24 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), PDF, p. 113.
[104] Poorthuis and T. Salemink, “Chiliasme.”
[105] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 183.
[106] Benjamin Glatt, “Today in History: Pope Pius refused to support a Jewish Jerusalem,” The Jerusalem Post, Jan. 25, 2016, https://www.jpost.com/Christian-News/Today-in-History-Pope-Pius-refused-to-support-a-Jewish-Jerusalem-442696
[107] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 199.
[108] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 183.
[109] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 199.
[110] “Martin Buber,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/buber/#BioBac
[111] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 215.
[112] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 215.
[113] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 238.
[114] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 239.
[115] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 240.
[116] Blantz, Shuster, p. 99.
[117] Henry Ford, “The International Jew – The World’s Foremost Problem,” The Noontide Press: Books On-Line, Originally from The Dearborn Independent.
[118] Notre Dame archives, Folder CCCV 4/04 and Alyssa Rangel, “Walt Disney and the Jews,” Culture Wars, June 2021,
[119] Notre Dame archives, Folder CCCV 4/04.
[120] Notre Dame archives, Folder CCCV 4/04.
[121] David Rooney, “John Ireland: Inveterate Dabbler in Vatican Politics,” Fidelity, July-August 1989, pp. 55-56, Reviewing: Marvin O’Connell, “John Ireland and the American Catholic Church (Minnesota Historical Press, 1988).
[122] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 244.
[123] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 246.
[124] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 247.
[125] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 250.
[126] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 257.
[127] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 255.
[128] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 255.
[129] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 256.
[130] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 260.
[131] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 202.
[132] Notre Dame archives, Folder CCCV 4/04.
[133] Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 266.
[134] Fattorini, p. 109.
[135] Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: the Vatican’s archives and the Third Reich, pp. 89–90, Harvard University Press, 31 May 2010; Hill, Roland, A time out of joint: A journey from Nazi Germany to post-war Britain, The Radcliffe Press, 30 October 2007; taken from Wikipedia “Michael von Faulhaber,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_von_Faulhaber#cite_note-3
[136] August 6, 1926. Poorthuis and Salemink, de blauwe ruiter, p. 239.
[137] Fattorini, p. 109.
[138] Fattorini, p. 109. My emphasis.
[139] Fattorini, p. 110.
[140] Marcel Poorthuis and T. Salemink, “Chiliasme, anti-judaisme en antisemitisme : Laetus Himmelreich OFM (1886-1957),” https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Chiliasme%2C-anti-juda%C3%AFsme-en-antisemitisme-%3A-Laetus-Poorthuis-Salemink/a09d251259bcceceb673e41040dbe5edc996f1fb
