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Martyrs of Japan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyrs_of_Japan

History or Halloween

History of All Hallows' Eve

The Solemnity of All Saints is celebrated on November 1. It is a holyday of obligation, and it is the day that the Church honors all of God's saints, even those who have not been canonized by the Church. It is a family day of celebration — we celebrate the memory of our family members (members of the Mystical Body, the communion of saints) now sharing eternal happiness in the presence of God. We rejoice that they have reached their eternal goal and ask their prayers on our behalf so that we, too, may join them in heaven and praise God through all eternity.

The honoring of all Christian martyrs of the Faith was originally celebrated on May 13, the date established by the fourth century. Pope Boniface IV in 615 established it as the "Feast of All Martyrs" commemorating the dedication of the Pantheon, an ancient Roman temple, into a Christian church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the martyrs. In 844, Pope Gregory IV transferred the feast to November 1st. Some scholars believe this was to substitute a feast for the pagan celebrations during that time of year.

By 741, the feast included not only martyrs, but all the saints in heaven as well, with the title changing to "Feast of All Saints" by 840. Pope Sixtus IV in 1484 established November 1 as a holyday of obligation and gave it both a vigil (known today as "All Hallows' Eve" or "Hallowe'en") and an eight-day period or octave to celebrate the feast. By 1955, the octave of All Saints was removed.
Since Vatican II, some liturgical observances have been altered, one example being "fast before the feast" is no longer required. Originally, the days preceding great solemnities, like Christmas and All Saints Day, had a penitential nature, requiring abstinence from meat and fasting and prayer. Although not required by the Church, it is a good practice to prepare before great feast days, spiritually and physically.

Feastday Customs

 

In England, saints or holy people are called "hallowed", hence the name "All Hallow's Day" or "Hallowmas". The evening, or "e'en" before the feast became popularly known as "All Hallows' Eve," or even shorter, "Hallowe'en."
Since the night before All Saints Day, "All Hallows Eve" (now known as Hallowe'en or Halloween), was the vigil and required fasting, many recipes and traditions have come down for this evening, such as pancakes, boxty bread and boxty pancakes (the boxty made from potatoes), barmbrack (Irish fruit bread with hidden charms), and colcannon (combination of cabbage and boiled potatoes). This was also known as "Nutcrack Night" in England, where the family gathered around the hearth to enjoy cider and nuts and apples. In England "soul cakes" are another traditional food. People would go begging for a "soul cake" and promise to pray for the donor's departed friends and family in exchange for the treat, an early version of today's "Trick or Treat."

November 2 was the date designated to pray for all the departed souls in Purgatory, the Feast of All Souls. In many countries this is an important day. Families cook special foods and make a special day's outing to cemeteries to tend to the graves, pray for the family dead.
The feasts of All Saints and All Souls fall back to back to express the Christian belief of the "Communion of Saints." The Communion of Saints is the union of all the faithful on earth (the Church Militant), the saints in Heaven (the Church Triumphant) and the Poor Souls in Purgatory (the Church Suffering), with Christ as the Head. They are bound together by a supernatural bond, and can help one another. The Church Militant (those on earth still engaged in the struggle to save their souls) can venerate the Church Triumphant, and those saints can intercede with God for those still on earth. Both the faithful on earth and the saints in heaven can pray for the souls in Purgatory.
On All Souls Day and throughout November, especially November 1-8, one can gain plenary indulgences for the Poor Souls. See Praying for the Dead and Gaining Indulgences for more details.

 

Exploring the Christian Roots of Halloween

Throughout the centuries man has struggled to keep his focus on the one true Faith and its practices. So many times, though, the pagan superstitions creep back into practice. Although now with a holier purpose, when preparing for the huge feast of All Saints some pagan "cult of the dead" practices seeped into the mainstream.
In our modern times it is getting harder to be "in" the world but not "of" the world. How are we to explain to our children about the top money-making over-commercialized "holiday" of the year after Christmas? We have an onslaught of Halloween witches, ghosts, ghouls, goblins, vampires, etc. everywhere we turn. How do we bring a message to our children to say that being a Christian does not mean that we cannot have fun? How do we convey that we must not constantly be negative and condemn everything?

To answer this, we must put on the mind of the Church. All through the centuries the Church has taken secular feasts and tried to "sanctify" or "Christianize" them. The feastday of All Saints itself came from the dedication of the Pantheon, a pagan temple, into a Christian church. This is undoubtedly another way of sanctifying the secular and pagan. Missionaries have to get to know the culture and religion of the country before they can convert the native people of that country. The missionaries have to be able to find some elements in their culture that can help these people identify and understand Christianity at their level. St. Paul tried it with the Greeks. Seeing their altar to the Unknown God, he saw that through their own pagan altar, he was going to bring them to Christianity!

Instead of just suppressing the whole celebration of Halloween and leaving a gaping hole, the Church gives a replacement focus. The Church has the mindset of "How can this be turned into good, with the focus on the one true God and His Church?" Since All Saints and All Souls feasts are together, we can shift the focus of Halloween to a focus on the Communion of Saints in action. We combine honoring the saints in heaven, remembering our loved ones and then directing the destiny of our own souls by prayer and actions. Through this we see the Mystical Body all in action.

There are many writings to help one explore the Christian roots of the Halloween festivities. In the activities section there are ideas for an All Hallows' Eve Party to present a fun atmosphere for children living a "Catholic culture." See also other ideas from Florence Berger's Cooking for Christ and Mary Reed Newland's The Year and Our Children. These ideas help use every opportunity as a moment of grace, and a teaching lesson, not a spirit of avoidance because of the pagan background of Halloween. To return to the "sanctified" traditions of Hallowe'en, one can use the opportunity to honor the saints, pray for the Poor Souls and prepare oneself spiritually for two great feastdays of the Catholic Church, All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day.

By Jennifer Gregory Miller, ©2003.

 

DU Ignored

DU Ignored

Sungenis Right on Assisi

To My Readers

Sorry dear readers for my lack of posts, but this new format the site owners are using makes it almost impossible to post anything. Try as I can, I mostly get this message:

Anfrage fehlgeschlagen: 1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use.

 

 As I do NOT have any manual, never got one-I cannot refer to it anywhere. I have no idea what a SQL syntax is nor what the server is. I have tried to correct the noted errors, even erasingthem from the posts-to no avail.

I left Blogger due to changes in format that allowed me little ability to post and apparently, this is an issue here as well. WIl ltry occasionally, but apparently, little from now on will be successful (I acannot even guarantee this post will be posted).

 

8/1/06- UPDATE, still no luck copying/pasting most articles.

 

 

 

Church to Celebrate Luther

Chapter 9 of the Apocalypse opens with Saint John’s terrifying vision:
“And the fifth Angel sounded the trumpet; and I saw a star fall from Heaven upon the earth, and to him was given the key to the bottomless pit.
“And he opened the bottomless pit: and the smoke of the pit ascended as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun was darkened, and the air with the smoke of the pit:
“And from the smoke of the pit, there came out locusts upon the earth, and power was given to them, as the scorpions of the earth have power.” (Apoc: 9:1-3)
Devout Catholic Scriptural commentators for the past 500 years have seen in this vision a prediction of Luther and his Protestant Revolt. 
 
    

Martin Luther inaugeratess his Protestant Revolt in 1517, nailing his 95 theses to the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany 
Father Herman Bernard Kramer, in The Book of Destiny, explains, “Luther did truly open the pit and let loose against the Church all the fury of hell. Therefore modern interpreters almost universally see in this fallen star, Luther.”[1] Father Kramer references the eminent Scriptural commentator, Cornelius a Lapide as making this point.[2]
“The whole description of the locusts”, Father Kramer explains, “fits down to the last detail the kings and princes who established by force the heresy of the 16th Century.” He continues:
“When Luther propounded his heretical and immoral doctrine, the sky became as it were obscured by smoke. It spread very rapidly over some regions of the earth, and it brought forth princes and kings who were eager to despoil the Church of her possessions. They compelled the people of their domains and in the territories robbed from the Church to accept the doctrines of Luther. The proponents of Protestantism made false translations of the Bible and misled the people into their errors by apparently proving from the ‘Bible’ (their own translations) the correctness of their doctrines. It was all deceit, lying and hypocrisy. Bad and weak, lax and lukewarm, indifferent and non-practicing Catholics and those who had neglected to get thorough instruction were thus misled; and these, seeing the Catholic Church now through this smoke of error from the abyss and beholding a distorted caricature of the true Church, began both to fear and hate her.”[3]
As for Luther, he did “eve

rything to instill hatred of the [Catholic] Church into the hearts of his followers.”[4] Father Kramer explains:
“The princes of Germany eagerly took up Lutheranism to become the spiritual heads of the churches in their domains and to plunder the Church. Their assumed jurisdiction in spiritual matters was usurpation ... In Den-mark, Norway and Sweden the Kings imposed Lutheranism upon the people by the power of the sword and by lying, deceit and hypocrisy. They left the altars in the churches and had apostate priests use vestments and external trappings of the Catholic Church to mislead the people. They crushed out the Catholic faith by terrorism, by making it a felony and treason to remain a Catholic. Each monarch made himself the spiritual head of the church in his kingdom. They had so-called historians falsify history to arouse hatred against the Church in the hearts of the people. They pretended to prove the truth of Lutheranism by false translations of the Bible made by Luther and by others and by still falser interpretations of it. Those princes and kings were the locusts appearing in the vision of St. John. They had the teeth of lions to terrify lukewarm Catholics into submission.”[5]

The Haydock Commentary of the Douay Rheims contains a similar explanation of Apocalypse 9:2:
“Luther and his followers propagated and de-fended their new doctrines with such heat and violence as to occasion everywhere seditions and insurrections which they seemed to glory in. Luther openly boasted of it. ‘You complain,’ said he, ‘that by our gospel the world is become more tumultuous; I answer, God be thanked for it; these things I would have so to be, and woe to me if such things were not’.”[6]

The Commentary further explains that indeed the sun was darkened since the light of faith was darkened by the widespread heresy of Protestantism. The revered Redemptorist Father Michael Müller elucidates how these Protestant “re-forms” snuffed out the light of true Faith:

“... they dissected the Catholic faith till they reduced it to a mere skeleton; they lopped off the reality of the body and blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, the divine Christian sacrifice offered in the Mass, confession of sins, most of the sacraments, penitential exercises, several of the canonical books of Scripture, the invocations of saints, celibacy, most of the General Councils of the Church, and all present Church authority; they perverted the nature of jurisdiction, asserting that faith alone justifies man; they made God the author of sin, and maintained the observance of the commandments to be impossible.”[7]

Msgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton, the eminent American theologian, rightly observed that Martin Luther’s alleged Reformation of the Church “consisted in an effort to have people abandon the Catholic Faith, and relinquish their membership in the one true Church militant of the New Testament, so as to follow his teaching and enter into his organization.”[8]

This is what the Lutheran revolt was, the tearing away of millions of souls from the one true Church of Christ, and probable consignment of millions to eternal hellfire. The Protestant revolt is nothing to celebrate!

So What Are They Celebrating?

In the present ecumenical climate, the above-mentioned facts receive little press, since ecumenical Catholics regard these truths as an embarrassment. Much of what saints, theologians and the Church herself taught regarding the errors and dangers of Protestantism are either not mentioned, or explained away as pathetic ignorance of a bygone era. Thanks to Vatican II, the Church has allegedly outgrown its juvenile counter-reformation stance that was based on the ghetto mentality of “no salvation outside the Catholic Church”. The ecumenical Catholic has effectively abandoned the true God of Catholicism to serve the false god of ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue. He incinerates the Church’s anti-Protestant doctrines as burnt offerings to his new deity.
Thus, it is no surprise that a Lutheran-Catholic celebration is being planned for 2017, the fifth centenary of the Protestant Revolt. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (www.ecla.org) filed the following report from the Vatican on November 16, 2005:

“Lutherans and Roman Catholics began planning for 2017 with recognition of their movement toward reconciliation during the past 500 years and with a renewed commitment to continue in that direction. 2017 will be the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, which traditionally began October 31, 1517, when Dr. Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany.”[9]
This report followed a meeting of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity held on November 7-8, 2005 at the Vatican. The meeting was called a “Fourth Round” of dialogue, and a seven-member Lutheran delegation was warmly received by Pope Benedict XVI.

Here, the Pope praised the 1999 Lutheran-Catholic Accord and urged further ecumenical dialogue. Yet tragically, this dialogue is not meant to convert non-Catholics to the one true Church of Christ, but to form a pan-Christian co-op of unity and peaceful coexistence. Anyone who believes otherwise ignores the statements of post-Conciliar Catholic leaders who have made clear that the goal of ecumenism is not a “return of dissidents to the one true Church of Christ.”[10] Today’s ecumenism is thus a betrayal of the authentic Catholic Magisterium on the necessity of membership in the Catholic Church for salvation.

At the November Vatican meeting of Lutherans and Catholics, participants were heartened by Pope Benedict’s ecumenical encouragement. Plans are now underway for the “Fifth Round” of international dialogues, and also for organizing a commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation with international events.

The fourth round of talks took 10 years to develop the final document “The Apostolicity of the Church,” which will be issued in the fall of 2006, said the Rev. Ishmael Noko, LWF general secretary, Geneva. The conclusion of the fifth round, said the LWF, will probably coincide with the 500th anniversary in 2017.

Archbishop Brian Farrell, Secretary to the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said “Our idea is that the commission would take up at the beginning of its mandate a deep, profound study of what the Reformation meant and what it has meant down the centuries and what it actually means today for both of us.”
We have already seen what the Protestant Revolt has meant to Catholics: a massive attack on the faith so severe that the holiest Catholic commentators identify Luther and his revolt with apocalyptic pestilence.

 

Luther, the Man

Take for example what faithful Catholics have observed about Luther.
David Goldstein, the zealous Catholic convert from Judaism who was called “a 20th Century Saint Paul,” rightly remarked:
“The father of the first Protestant Church [Luther] changed the 28th verse of the 3rd chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans to make it fit his doctrine that Christian faith minus Christian works is sufficient for salvation: ‘We hold that man is justified without works by the law of faith alone’. To one of his followers who complained that objection was being made to this perversion of the sacred text, Luther gave the cold comfort: ‘If any Papist annoys you with the word (alone) tell him straightway: Dr. Martin Luther will have it so: Papist and ass are one and the same thing.’ (Amic. Discussion, I, 127).”[11]
Goldstein goes on to explain the brutality of the Lutheran revolt: “The soldiers of the princes slaughtered the peasants, pillaged the churches and prevented Catholic worship in public. In this way Lutheranism was made the doctrine of the first Protestant Church — the State Church of Germany (1520).”[12]

Goldstein further points out that Luther denied the binding force of the moral law: “We must remove the Decalogue out of sight and heart” (De Wette, IV, 188), and again, “If Moses should attempt to intimidate you with his stupid Ten Commandments, tell him right out: ‘Chase yourselves to the Jews’ (Works, Wittenberg, ed. V 1573).”[13]
Luther, an ordained priest and consecrated religious, wantonly broke his vow of celibacy to God, and married a nun, also under a vow of celibacy. Of Luther’s debased teachings, Goldstein observed:
“Luther’s writings regarding matters of sex are the opposite of things decent. Only in Socialist free-love writings have we seen commendation of them. There Luther’s lewd writings have won for him distinction as the ‘classic exponent’ of ‘healthful sensualism’ (Bebel, Woman, p. 78, NY, 1910). Too many times through the centuries, immoralities have disgraced the Christian ministry, but Luther has the unenviable distinction of having defended sex sins as ‘necessary’.”[14]

One of Luther’s ultimate disgraces was his giving permission to Phillip Land-grave of Hesse to have two wives at once. The license was signed by Luther, Melancthon, Bauer and five other Protestant preachers.[15]
Thus it is lunacy for our Church leaders to plan to celebrate the 500th anniversary of a man who spent his life debasing Christian revelation. Yet it is not surprising. We saw similar madness in 1983, when a high Catholic Churchmen praised Luther for his “deep religiousness,”[16] thus voicing unqualified public esteem for a man whose warped religious views led him to reject the true Church, deny his priesthood, and teach that the Mass was an abomination worse than the most loathsome brothel.[17]

Where There is No Hatred of Heresy, There is No Holiness

 

Forgotten in this ecumenical maelstrom is the fact that Protestantism is heresy, and heresy is a sin. In the objective order, it is a mortal sin against Faith that sends souls to hell for eternity. The revered Father Frederick Faber explained that heresy is “the sin of sins, the very loathsomest of things which God looks down upon in this malignant world. ... It is the polluting of God’s truth, which is the worst of all impurities.”
Thus, Father Faber observed, “where there is no hatred of heresy, there is no holiness.”[18]

Likewise, Saint Alphonsus Liguori spoke of the duty to fight heresy because it kills our souls and the souls of others:
“Heresy has been called a canker: ‘It spreadeth like a canker.’ (2 Tim. 2:17) As a canker infects the whole body, so heresy infects the whole soul — the mind, the heart, the intellect and the will. It is also called a plague; for it not only infects the one contaminated with it, but others who associate with him. Truly the spread of this plague in the world has injured the Church more than idolatry.”[19]

But for today’s Catholic leaders, the heresy of Protestantism is no longer a problem. Have these leaders no love of Catholic doctrine? If they did, they would publicly oppose the Protestant heresies that disfigure it. Have they no love of souls? If they did, they would not pretend that a Protestant can be saved by remaining in his own man-made religion that teems with errors against the express teaching of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
None of this matters to ecumenists like the Vatican’s Bishop Brian Farrell who looks ahead misty-eyed to 2017, and requests profound study of “what the Reformation meant and what it has meant down the centuries and what it actually means today ...” Yet he need not embark on yet another profound study, since one of the greatest Popes in history made it clear what the Reformation means. Blessed Pope Pius IX rightly recognized Protestantism in all its forms as “a revolt against God, it being an attempt to substitute a human for a divine authority, a declaration of the creature’s independence from God.”[20]
This revolt against God has had profound consequences.

 

Consequences of the Lutheran Revolt

The great Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc points out that heresy does not only affect the individual, but has a negative social impact.[21] Belloc reminds us that man has to live and arrange his life according to a Creed, some system of beliefs. And if his creed be distorted away from the truth revealed by God, he will pattern his life accordingly. Thus when large masses of people fall into heresy, and live accordingly, it will change the entire structure of their society away from the Divine Program of Our Lord. It will create an environment that is not conducive to live the life of sanctifying grace, a society where evil is institutionalized.

For example, thanks to the Protestant heresy, we have legalized divorce in society. Thanks to the Anglicans at Lambert in the 1930s, we have legalized contraception.

Thanks to Protestantism in general, as the eminent Father Denis Fahey points out, we have the inordinate rise of the power of the State. This is because the Protestant does not look at his “church” as an authority established by Christ to teach and govern all men. According to the Protestant, Christ never founded such a Church. Thus, for the Protestant, the highest authority on earth is the State. This had the immediate result of increasing the power of princes and rulers in Protestant countries, which gave rise to State Absolutism, and even what was called “the Divine Right of Kings”.[22]
As the secular Kings and leaders gained temporal power due to Protestantism, the Social Kingship of Christ went into decline.

Protestantism: The Death Knell of Christendom

 

When we pray in the Our Father, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven”, we pray for the establishment of the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ, wherein States, governments and social institutions base their laws of right and wrong on what the Gospel teaches is right and wrong and on what Our Lord’s Catholic Church teaches is right and wrong. This is what is called “Christendom”.
The organization of Europe in the 13th Century, despite its various defects due to human foibles, effected the concrete realization of this Divine Plan. Father writes, “The formal principles of ordered social government in the world, the supremacy of the Mystical Body, was grasped and, in the main, accepted.”

However, Father Fahey explains, “The Lutheran revolt, prepared by the cult of pagan antiquity at the Renaissance ... led to the rupture of that order.”[23]
This is the true legacy of Protestantism, the shattering of the Social Kingship of Christ.

First of all, Protestantism rejects the entire notion of a visible Church established by Christ to teach, govern, sanctify and offer worship to the Father in His name. For the Protestant, there is no visible Church, there is only the lone Protestant and his Bible. There is no external ecclesiastical authority that the Protestant must obey for salvation. If the individual Protestant disagrees with his minister’s interpretation of Scripture, he is free to adopt one of his own, and even start his own sect to propagate his Biblical elucidations.

This, in effect, is how all Protestant sects began. Thus, Protestants do not have a Divine Faith received from Heaven through a teaching Church established by Our Lord. Rather, Protestantism is simply rationalism. The individual decides for himself how he will interpret the Bible, or what denomination’s interpretation he fancies the most.

This necessarily leads to indefinite multiplication of sects. “Pushed to its ultimate conclusion,” notes Father Fahey, “this would give rise to as many churches as there are individuals.”[24] Protestantism, by its very nature, begets endless fragmentation. Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who is Wisdom itself, would never establish such an unstable system.
This multiplication of sects so scandalized the learned English Protestant Dr. Walton that he applied Chapter 9 of the Apocalypse to Protestantism itself, thus, knowingly or not, agreeing with Catholic exegesis:
“The bottomless pit seems to have been opened, from whence a smoke has arisen which has darkened the heavens and the stars, and locusts have come out with stings, a numerous race of sectaires and heretics, who have renewed all the ancient heresies, and invented many monstrous opinions of their own. These have filled our cities, villages, camps, houses, nay our pulpits, too, and lead the poor deluded people with them to the pit of perdition.”[25]

Father Müller, employing the words of Saint Paul, calls these human sects the “works of the flesh”. As such, they undergo the corruption of the flesh. One of the first consequences of the doctrine of private judgment — the individual deciding for himself how to interpret Scripture — is a kind of deification of man, which is the main tenet of Freemasonry: the autonomous man decides for himself all things without reference to a teaching Church operating in God’s name

Father Fahey quotes the Protestant writer, Herman, who explains the humanistic manner in which Protestants believe:

“It matters little that we [Protestants] are in agreement with Catholics about certain points of Christian doctrine. What is distasteful to us in the Catholic Church is not what Catholics believe, but above all, the way in which they believe. The great difference between Rome and ourselves is that we cannot brook a faith which is not an autonomous conviction.”[26]
Father Fahey thus observed, “the autonomous man, who decides on his own authority what he will accept of the Gospel God Himself came to deliver to us is already well on the way to self-deification.” And, as mentioned, the deification of Man is the foundation doctrine of Freemasonry.

There is no doubt that Freemasonry is the product of Protestantism. Father Michael Müller said as much with the statement: “The main spirit of Protestantism, then, has always been to declare every man independent of the divine authority of the Roman Catholic Church and to substitute for his divine authority a human authority.”[27] On the same point, we again quote Blessed Pope Pius IX who called Protestantism “a revolt against God, it being an attempt to substitute a human for a divine authority, a declaration of the creature’s independence from God.”[28]

In short, the French Revolution, that based itself on the Masonic deification of man, is the direct result of the Protestant Revolt. The godless secularism, religious indifferentism and moral license that spawned from the French Revolution can look to Protestantism as its true father.

This is the torrid legacy our churchmen will celebrate when they uncork their best champagne at the 2017 party. I wish I could be there when they toast the star that fell from Heaven, give three cheers to the darkened sun, and drink to the health of the smoke from the bottomless pit.

“That Wretched Sect”

Saint Teresa of Avila called Lutheranism “that wretched sect,”[29] and established her first Carmelite foundation of nuns at Avila to help “cure this terrible evil” by bringing “some comfort to our Lord.”
“Thus,” said Saint Teresa, “being all of us employed in interceding for the champions of the Church and the preachers and theologians who defend her, we might, to our utmost, aid this Lord of mine Who is attacked with such cruelty ...”30
One can only imagine how Saint Teresa of Avila would react to Catholics joining with Protestants to celebrate the fifth centenary of the Lutheran revolt.
But who cares what Saint Teresa thinks. For ecumenical Catholics, dancing on the graves of the saints is a necessary ritual of their new religion.
Notes:

1. Father Herman Bernard Kramer, The Book of Destiny, (Originally published in 1955, republished by Tan Books, Rockford IL, 1975), p. 223. It is worth noting, that it took Father Kramer over 30 years to write this book. on the Apocalypse.
2. (Cor. a Lapide, p. 201, Note 1 ma), Ibid.
3. Ibid. pp. 223-4.
4. Kramer, p. 224.
5. Ibid., pp. 223-4.
6. The Douay-Rheims New Testament with a Comprehensive Catholic Commentary Compiled by Rev. Fr. Geo. Leo Haydock (Republished by Catholic Treasures, 1991), p. 1637.
7. Father Michael Müller,C.SS.R., The Catholic Dogma [New York: Ben-zinger Brothers, 1888], p. 35. The following quotes from Luther himself demonstrate Luther’s perverse doctrine: “God’s commandments are all equally impossible” (De Lib. Christ, t. ii., fol. 4). Ibid., p. 36.
8. Msgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton, “The Council and Father Kung”, American Ecclesiastical Review, September, 1962.
9. On the web at: http://mail.wfn.org/ pipermail/wfn-editors_wfn.org/2005-November/003241.html
10. Cardinal Kasper, Prefect of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said, “Today we no longer understand ecumenism in the sense of a ‘return’, by which the others would be ‘converted’ and return to being ‘Catholics.’ This was expressly abandoned at Vatican II (Adisti, February 26, 2001). English translation quoted from “Where Have They Hidden the Body?”, by Christopher Ferrara. See also Iota Unum, chap. 35, where Professor Romano Amerio demonstrates that converting non-Catholics to the one true Church is not the aim of today’s practice of ecumenism. Most troubling of all is the statement from Pope Benedict XVI: “On the other hand, this unity does not mean what could be called ecumenism of the return: that is, to deny and to reject one’s own Faith history. Absolutely not!” – Pope Benedict XVI’s Address to the Ecumenical Meeting: Cologne, August 19, 2005. (Posted on Vatican web page.)
11. David Goldstein, Campaigners for Christ Handbook, [Boston: Catholic Campaigners for Christ, 1931], p. 197-8.
12. Ibid., p. 197.
13. Ibid., p. 198.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., and also Fr. Müller, p. 37.
16. Sadly, it was Pope John Paul II who praised Luther for his “deep religiousness”. See “Pope Praises Luther in an Appeal For Unity on Protestant Anniversary”, New York Times, November 6, 1983.
17. Of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, Luther said that no sin of immorality, nay not even “manslaughter, theft, murder and adultery is so harmful as this abomination of the Popish Mass.” He said further that he would have “rather kept a bawdy house or been a robber than to have blasphemed and traduced Christ for fifteen years by saying the Masses.” Luther, by Hartman Grisar, S.J. (English translation, Herder), Vol. 2, p. 166; Vol 4. p. 525
18. From Father Faber’s The Precious Blood.
19. St. Alphonsus Liguori, The History of Heresies, English translation taken from the No. 1-2, 2000 edition of Christ to the World (Rome) in its first installment of serializing the book.
20. Quoted from Müller, p. 43-4.
21. Consult Belloc’s The Great Heresies.
22. See Father Denis Fahey, C.S.S.p, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, [first published by Regina Publication in Dublin, 1935. Republished by Christian Book Club of America, 1987]. This theme is developed in Chapter III.
23. Ibid., p. 10.
24. Ibid., p. 12.
25. Quoted from Müller, p. 33.
26. Quoted from Fahey, p. 13.(emphasis added)
27. Müller, pp. 43-4.
28. Ibid.
29. Saint Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection, English Translation by the Benedictines of Stanbrook, [First published in 1911. Republished by Tan Books, 1997] p. 5.
30. Ibid., p. 6.

(by John Vennari)

Zionism and Fundamentalists

(picture is Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, by Francesco Hayez)

BOOK REVIEW






The Once and Future Heresy


Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, The Free Press, New York, 2000, 275 pages



Reviewed by Thomas J. Herron





It was a button that only William F. Buckley in the fun days at National Review could have designed. This was the Viet Nam War era after the summer of love in San Francisco when every group seemed to have its own special button with a unique slogan. The one that National Review was making available to its subscribers was certainly unique if only because very few people besides the polyglot William F. Buckley could be sure what it meant. It read “Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton.” The truth was that, contrary to what the subscribers thought, the phrase didn’t come from Mr. Buckley but from Eric Voegelin, who coined it in a 1952 book The New Science of Politics. Those NR readers who were Catholic in the early 1970s, and that was probably the majority of us, had a head-start on deciphering the puzzling phrase because, somewhere in our education, we had heard of that division of theology called eschatology; which deals with the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell. So the eschaton in this phrase dealt with the end of the world and a quick translation of the button into plain English would be don’t try to create heaven on earth or don’t try to anticipate the New Jerusalem spoken of in the book of Revelation. What a difference three decades makes as now there are fervent National Review writers and readers who are attempting to immanentize the eschaton for a variety of political and religious reasons.



Gershon Gorenberg’s study of the eschaton immanentizers alive and well in Israel today starts by introducing us to Melody, the almost red heifer, who was born there a few years ago. The reason this cow became front page news in that country is that if she were completely red, at age three, she could have been slaughtered and used for ritual purification purposes for priests at Jerusalem’s Jewish Temple, according to the prescriptions of Numbers 19. As you probably know there hasn’t been a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem since 70 A.D., when the Romans, under Titus, burnt down the one built by Herod. The territory atop Mt. Moriah is currently occupied by a holy Muslim site, the al-Asqa mosque. However, there is a sizeable group of people who view the events of the 20th century as prologue to the construction of the third Jewish Temple on that site; not all of these people are in Israel and, as this book indicates, most of them aren’t Jewish.



The book starts off with a disappointment and chronicles a series of prior disappointments with the arrival of the End Times; Melody is not completely red, she has a few brown hairs on her tail. But Melody’s existence was enough to send Jewish society in Israel into convulsions, a fact that, if fully explored by the American media, would sharply undercut the contention of that nation’s fervent publicists in this country that it is a democratic society just like ours.



We should understand at first that this really isn’t just a study of Jews or Muslims in the Middle East. In the first chapters the author interviews Rabbi Shmaria Shore of the Temple Institute in a Jerusalem pizza parlor. Shore was one of the experts who had to make a judgment on Melody’s suitability. Gorenberg notices the rabbi’s heavily American-accented Hebrew and switches to English. It seems the rabbi was born Stephen Shore in New Haven and came to Israel on the tail end of the student radical and hippie movements of the 1970s. In this he found a ready companion in the author who followed a similar tack from the West Coast and who found post-Viet Nam America too tame compared with the messianic fervor in the Holy Land. This seems to be a common trait among a large number of the Israeli settlers on the West Bank. As Gorenberg states, his relocation to Israel showed, “Simply deciding to live in the country rather than returning to an easier life in California would be a political statement.” The American connections dominate this book with the actual landscape of the Middle East serving as a backdrop to ideas that have largely been brewing in the good, old U.S.A. for a long time. Mr. Gorenberg retains an American connection with an associate membership in Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies and he uses American scholars extensively in his review of Muslim ideas on the end of the world. Living in Israel since 1977 has not encouraged the author to get to know the Palestinians to any great degree or to learn Arabic to any depth.



However, Hebrew speakers with strong American accents aren’t the only players in the Melody story, one of the key actors has a strong Mississippi drawl. The Reverend Clyde Lott was raised a Southern Baptist but became a Pentecostal minister after studying for a mail-order divinity degree. Lott noted that during the late 1980s there was a great deal of prophecy in Pentecostal circles in Mississippi dealing with when the Jews would construct the Third Temple. Lott, a dairy farmer by trade, decided to do something practical to help the eschatological process along by importing a large number of cattle into Israel so that the requisite red heifer could be genetically engineered. In his efforts to secure the Lord’s Second Coming, Rev. Lott became a close friend with the messianistic Rabbi Chaim Richman of Jerusalem’s Temple Institute and stated that he “felt closer to him than to some members of his own family.” There would again be no language problem here as the rabbi is from Massachusetts. Early on in the book we see both Jewish and Christian American hands at work in forcing the End of Days upon the world with a definite Yankee faith in the blessings of modern technology. As Gorenberg states, “Lott isn’t the only person pulled to the vision of Temple-building because it promises that a technical skill is essential to the world’s salvation. Nor is he the only one in our technological age to read the Bible itself as a tech manual, installation instructions for the final, fantastic upgrade of the universe.”



Gorenberg describes the three faiths’ approach to human history and the end of the world as the ‘divine novel’ with each group playing supporting roles in the others’ drama. As he puts it:



The theater of the End is triangular, and in the eyes of apocalyptic believers on all three sides, the great drama has begun. The sound system is hope and fear; each time an actor speaks, his words reverberate widely. Three scripts are being performed. The cast of Jewish messianists has starring roles in the Christian play; Jews and Christians alike have parts in the Muslim drama. What one sees as a flourish of rhetoric can be the other’s cue for a battle scene.



That drama, in the form of novels about the End Times, is great business these days particularly here in America. The author describes the phenomenal success of the “Left Behind” series that fleshes out premillennial dispensational theology for the masses by Jerry Jenkins and the Rev. Tim LaHaye, the latter a former protégé of such noted televangelists as Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell.



It is interesting to note that Rev. LaHaye, who was an official in Moral Majority before he commenced his career as an end-of-the-world novelist with $11 million in sales, called Catholicism “a false religion.” In popularizing the dispensationalist position among Americans, Jenkins and LaHaye can only be equaled by the modern pioneer in this genre of apocalyptic literature, a New Orleans tugboat captain who attended the premillennialist Dallas Theological Seminary, Hal Lindsey, the author of the phenomenally successful The Late Great Planet Earth of the early ‘70s. Mr. Lindsey, whose approach to Bible interpretation is to start at the end and work back to the beginning, has had to revise his bestseller a number of times. To give just one example, rather than give rise to the antichrist as early editions foretold, the Soviet Union chose to collapse. The fact that Lindsey has been proven spectacularly wrong in correct interpretation of Bible prophecies has not lessened his standing among Dispensationalist believers. He currently writes a column on Middle East affairs for Joseph Farah’s WorldNetDaily web site, a column that could be confused with press releases from the hard-line Likud Party. Mr. Farah, a noted born again Christian of Arab descent, who always supports Israel over his ethnic brethren and publishes any Zionist allegations no matter how absurd, makes us wonder what the Arabic equivalent for Uncle Tom is. But then as Gorenberg states, events in the Middle East have led “fundamentalist Christians in far parts of the globe to read news from Israel as printouts from God’s press office.” So Joseph Farah may just be God or Israel’s press officer.



History of the Future



Mr. Gorenberg calls the reading of the future by believers in the Christian, Jewish, or Muslim traditions “the history of the future.” Really, what he has given us in The End of Days is a history of heresy from at least two of those traditions. He starts with what he described as two religious revolutionaries of the era of the building and destruction of Herod’s Temple. We are all familiar with one, Jesus, but the other, Yohanan ben Zakkai, a Pharisee, may need a little introduction to most Christians; both would see the other as leading a heresy from the true Old Testament religion among the children of Israel. In the uproar over the release of Mel Gibson’s movie, people forget that Jesus Christ, as recorded in the Gospels, not only had harsh words to say about the chief priests and the Temple cult but against the scribes and Pharisees as well, telling his hearers not to follow their example. Ben Zakkai was one of the Pharisees who foresaw the destruction of the Temple during the 70 A.D. revolt and whom Jewish tradition has it was smuggled out of encircled Jerusalem in a coffin. From his new base at the Palestinian town of Yavneh, ben Zakkai created what we today would know as Orthodox Judaism centered on worship services in the local synagogue with study of the written and oral law as paramount. While there were daily prayers for the coming of the Messiah who would restore the Temple cult (it was after all one vast slaughterhouse when it was in operation), the essence of modern Judaism was study. This study was codified by the intellectual descendants of ben Zakkai into the two Talmuds (Babylonian and Palestinian, the first having precedence) containing the oral law (Mishnah) and rabbinic commentary (Gemara) with the latter having ultimate normative authority in the Jewish religion. As for these early rabbis, the openness to any type of “Judeo-Christian tradition” was slammed shut when, true to the words of Christ, his followers were expelled from the synagogue with the adoption in these first decades of the Eighteen Benedictions, a prototype Jewish creed still recited in synagogue morning prayer services, whose Twelfth Benediction was actually a curse against “slanderers,” historically interpreted as the Jewish Christians:



And for those who slander us, let there be no hope, and let all wickedness vanish in an instant. May all your enemies, the enemies of your people, be quickly cut off, and as for the insolent may you quickly trouble, shatter, overthrow and humiliate them in our time. Blessed are you, Adonai, who shatters the enemies and humiliates the insolent.



Among the petitions for the end of the exile, return of the people to Jerusalem and restoration of the Temple cult, there is no room for the ever-discussed Judeo-Christian tradition from the rabbis’ perspective.



It is the source of no little confusion to both Jews and Christians today to understand, that just as Orthodox Judaism from the time of ben Zakkai has rejected Christianity as a heresy, so must authentic Christianity reject the Jewish religion from the time of the destruction of the Temple as a heresy as well. Let us explain exactly what we mean by this so there will be no confusion. In the recent years with the renewed interest in Islam after 9/11, the words of British Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc in The Great Heresies that Islam is a Christian heresy have been recalled. Belloc meant that Muhammad’s religion was in the Old and New Testament tradition but that since he was a pagan, he didn’t really understand Christian concepts of the Trinity and the Church and so rejected Christ’s divinity and created a competing religion.



In the same vein the late convert Father Elias Friedman, O.C.D. has shown in his Jewish Identity that the true Old Testament religion died with Christ on Good Friday as its logical fulfillment and rose with him on Easter Sunday as the Church. Therefore Christianity, centered on the One, True, Catholic Church is the Old Testament religion living on today. That is why the priest in one of the Eucharistic prayers calls Abraham “our father in faith.”



Where then does this leave the Jewish religion as invented by Yohanan ben Zakkai? There is only one logical answer, although in today’s politically correct atmosphere it is a most unwelcome answer. From Belloc and Friedman we can come to the conclusion that, just as Islam is a Christian heresy that rejects Christ’s claim of divinity but honors him as a prophet, Judaism is a Christian heresy that rejects him entirely as an impostor in the vilest passages of the Talmud and other documents such as The Truth about Jesus (Toledot Yeshu) although it does retain a study of the Old Testament texts and some of the traditional feasts. It may be a contra-intuitive position, but Christianity is older than Judaism as it is the true Old Testament religion living on after the destruction of the Temple. However, neither Jews nor many Christians grasped this, so the next 20 centuries would become a map of various heresies from both religions.



Well, if the Jewish religion as we know it today is not a valid alternative approach to God, what about the people who call themselves Jewish from an ethnic or religious perspective? Aren’t they the heirs of the people who lived in the Holy Land until dispersed by the Romans in the First Century? Weren’t their ancestors the people to whom Jesus preached and who called for his death on the first Good Friday? Aren’t people who call themselves Jews today the undisputed descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? Don’t the people known as Jews at present have an undisputed title to territory in the Middle East under the terms granted to Abraham by the divine realtor as recorded in Genesis 15:18-21? Well, the answer to all these questions is, in the main, no.



What most gentiles fail to realize is that ethnically today the Jewish people are divided into two groups, one which historically dwelt in the Mediterranean basin known as the Sephardim and who spoke an early variety of Spanish known as Ladino. The other group the, today, far more numerous Ashkenazim, came from Eastern Europe and spoke a German dialect known as “juedische Deutsch,” or Yiddish. While in Hebrew the words Sephardim and Ashkenazim related to Spain and Germany respectively, it does not follow that these two groups only dwelt in those two countries. The historical explanation for the vast numbers of Yiddish speaking Jews in what was called the Pale of Settlement in the Czarist Empire was that these people were the descendants from the original exiles from the Holy Land who migrated through the Western Roman Empire and then from France into Germany during the early Middle Ages. With anti-Jewish pogroms associated with the Crusades, these Jews were pushed further east into the Slavic lands, where they prospered. As the distinguished author Arthur Koestler, himself of Ashkenazi heritage, pointed out in his book The Thirteenth Tribe, these peoples may have had a gentile rather than a Jewish ancestry.



The story of the conversion of this Turkic people to rabbinic Judaism is one of the most unknown stories of history. In apparently the eighth century A.D. their king, Bulan, desired to adopt one of the monotheistic faiths but, as his tribe dwelt in what is today southern Russia, felt that acceptance of Islam would put him under the control of the nearby Arabs and Christianity would cause him to become a vassal of the Byzantines. So he invited rabbis from Babylon to convert his people to Talmudic Judaism. The Khazar kingdom flourished for a few centuries until conquered by a Viking people, the Varangians. Over time these Vikings would intermarry with the local Slavs to create the Russian ethnic group we know today.



The descendants of the Khazars moved west into the areas that became Poland, the Ukraine, where they became the Ashkenazi Jews, who under czarist persecution at the end of the 19th century decamped in large numbers for New York City and other places in the western world. The consequences of the origins of what are, probably, 90 percent of today’s Jews are startling. It means that the quote of the crowd on the first Good Friday about the death of Jesus that “his blood be on us and our children,” applies to no one living today, as the Second Vatican Council rightly stated. It also means that most of the inhabitants of the state of Israel are not the genetic descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, although they have displaced people who probably are. It also means that opposition to Israeli policies or to the pernicious influence on American culture by Jewish groups is not correctly termed anti-Semitism, because, for the most part, today’s Jews are not Semites. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of anti-Semitism in America today, as we can see from statements from the U.S. government and the neo-conservative press; it is directed against the true Semites, the Arab peoples and in particular the Palestinians.



The fact that the national aspiration of a large number of Jewish people since the late 19th century have been aimed at setting up a large state in the Middle East is itself a heresy from the Jewish religion. About a generation after the death of Johanan ben Zakkai, the Jews of the Holy Land rose under Bar Kokhba against the Romans with even more disastrous results. After two political fiascos resulting in the dispersion of the Jewish people throughout the Roman Empire the rabbis imposed on their followers through the Talmud—according to Jewish researchers Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky—three oaths in which faithful Jews were 1) not to rebel against their gentile governments, 2) not massively return to the Holy Land before the coming of the Messiah and 3) not to pray too strongly for the coming of the Messiah. With the breakdown of the Jewish ghetto regime of the rabbis after the French Revolution, a secular ideology known as Zionism, the counterpart to the nationalistic movements of 19th century Europe, spread among the newly emancipated Jews.



Modern Messiah



The modern Messiah was an unbelieving Viennese journalist named Theodor Herzl, who on seeing the outbursts of anti-Jewish feelings in France with the Dreyfus affair, felt that Jews needed a state of their own and was originally willing to settle for land in Uganda. However, the more traditional Jews of Eastern Europe redirected his quest towards the Holy Land and literature started to appear showing Moses leaning out of a cloud to pass his staff to Herr Herzl, who was not fluent in Hebrew. Zionism became a project of secularized Jews to prevent their assimilation into their host nations. As Gorenberg relates,



If modernity had you, your faith, Zionism, allowed you to remain a Jew, by reframing the Jews as a nation. The Bible became national literature; Hebrew would be the nation’s vernacular, not the sacral tongue. From the start, Zionists claimed to be better Jews than the Orthodox: The Orthodox only prayed for redemption; Zionists were making it happen. Juggle both pieces of the idea: Zionism was messianism, but it was also something transformed.



Zionism was also the favorite Jewish group of another rabid nationalist group, the German Nazi Party, and the Third Reich cooperated with Zionist organizations in shipping unwilling German Jews to Palestine in the days before the start of the Second World War. Great Britain, who then occupied Palestine, and under terms of their Balfour Declaration was trying to do right by both the Jews and Arabs, was looking for an alternate colony for Jewish immigration, in places like Uganda or Madagascar. With the start of the war immigration was halted, the Nazis adopted other methods in dealing with the Jews of Eastern Europe, and Zionists occupied a disproportionate number of leadership positions in the Judenrat councils that were established in the ghettoes as part of the Final Solution. The Revisionist Zionists, who ultimately became the Likud Party, in the first years of the struggle, were writing to Adolf Hitler suggesting that they make common war on the British. The Fuehrer turned them down as he wished to maintain the British Empire as a pillar of world stability, but the Zionist underground did attack their British protectors in Palestine as soon as the war was over.



Some of the Orthodox rabbinate got on board the Zionist train. A Lithuanian rabbi Avraham Kook, whose family would play a leading role in Israeli religious affairs, moved to the Holy Land early in the twentieth century and felt, in a classic example of post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking that



the fact that Jews were returning to their homeland…. was proof that the divine redemption had actually begun. Secular Zionists pioneers who farmed the land and built new towns, he said, were carrying out God’s will-unknowingly, despite themselves-and would eventually return to religion.



What the rabbis saw in Zionism was an antidote to the socialistic and communistic ideologies that were sweeping through Eastern European Jewry. British journalist Douglas Reed pointed out many of the leading Ashkenazi families contained both important Zionists and Communists. For writing about these undesired facts, Reed, a leading Fleet Street reporter of the World War II era, got banished from the world’s press about the time of Israel’s founding in what has come to be the usual treatment of people like Joseph Sobran or Patrick Buchanan in our day who dare to openly talk of ideological tendencies among Jews.



The ways of God are mysterious indeed; by the time the number of immigrant Jews reached a critical mass in the Holy Land, around 1929, a cycle of violence by both Jews and Arabs began at the flash-point shrines of the Temple Mount and Hebron, sacred to both Islam and Judaism, and that violence has continued unabated until the present.



By the way, what were the borders of the Land of Israel that was being ‘redeemed’ by Zionism? The Likud Party under the leadership of Ariel Sharon in May 1993 committed Israel to “biblical borders.” What territory does that exactly encompass? According to Israel Shahak there are several variations, “the most far-reaching among them include the following areas within these borders: in the south, all of Sinai and a part of northern Egypt up to the environs of Cairo; in the east, all of Jordan and a large chunk of Saudi Arabia, all of Kuwait and a part of Iraq south of the Euphrates; in the north, all of Lebanon and all of Syria together with a huge part of Turkey (up to lake Van); in the west, Cyprus.” This is a formula for a constant war of conquest of the entire Fertile Crescent coupled with the expulsion of the native peoples. It is interesting to note that the U.S. military currently occupies two of these nations and dominates three others, Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, that make up greater Israel within its ‘biblical borders,’ while neocon officials within the Bush administration are currently threatening to invade Syria, another country on this list. Many of the Muslims interviewed in Gorenberg’s book appear paranoid, but when we see the ultimate dimensions of the Zionist project, their paranoia appears to have a large basis in fact. Of course the fact that the Zionist ideology is so near to total success is due in large measure to the imposition of American military might in the Middle East. To understand how that happens we have to turn from the history of Jewish heresy to the parallel track of Christian heresy.



It would appear that the basic heresy among Christians concerns the relationship of the Old Testament and its people, Israel, and the New Testament and the Church. This problem was apparent almost from the beginning when the second century figure, Marcion, saw a major disjunction between the loving Father mentioned by Jesus and the stern Yahweh of the Old Testament. Marcion solved his dilemma by discarding all of the Old Testament as well as Luke and John’s Gospels. At around the same time that Marcion was teaching his theories to the Christians of Rome, another sect, centering on Montanus, taught the imminent return of Jesus Christ, spoke in tongues, prophesied and preached a rigorous discipline. Fast forward to the 11th century where a Benedictine abbot in Sicily, Joachim of Fiore, was also taken with the supposed differences in the two Testaments and came up with what probably is the prototype of all dispensational theories. Joachim taught that there were three distinct phases of revelation to humanity tied to each Person of the Blessed Trinity. The Old Testament was the age of the stern God the Father, the New Testament era, or Church Age as it might be called today, was the period of God the Son’s loving ministry. Joachim also postulated a coming era the age of the Holy Ghost that would be the completion of the Spirit’s action on the first Pentecost. What should be noted is that the Catholic Church condemned most of the theories of Marcion, Montanus, and Joachim as heretical.



Reuchlin



Around the time of the Renaissance, not only was the study of Greek resumed in the Western world but Hebrew was studied as well. What is not well known today is that part of the Reformation was caused by the modernist scripture scholars of that day applying Jewish sources to the study of the Bible. One of the major German literary figures of the late fifteenth century, Johannes Reuchlin, started the study of Hebrew under the direction of rabbis, and not only did some more grammatically correct rendering of the psalms but dabbled in the Cabbala, the Jewish book of black magic, as well. Among all the other cries for reform of the Church in Germany during that era, people like Reuchlin were showing that the rabbis had a different method of interpreting the scriptures than that of the official Church. This scholar became involved in a prolonged battle with a sincerely converted Jew, Johann Pfefferkorn, over the anti-Christian elements in the Talmud. This debate was ultimately elevated to the pope, who decided that the rabbinic writings could be used as an aid to interpretation of scripture. By then, an alternative method of Bible interpretation as well as a novel theory of salvation by faith alone had been developed by Augustinian theologian Martin Luther, whose major assistant Melanchthon was Reuchlin’s nephew. While Reuchlin rejected the Protestant position, his dabbling into Talmudic and Cabbalistic sources lit the flame on the dry fields of the German church and found a ready audience among the German clergy. As Hilaire Belloc has noted, at that point both the Catholics and the Reformers still believed in only one Church and Luther probably felt that his reforms would help convert the Jews. When they rejected his approaches, he took time from his polemical battles with Papists and Anabaptists to pen Against the Jews and their Lies, something for which the Lutheran Churches have been doing public penance in recent decades.



Regardless of what Luther felt about the Jews, the Old Testament and things Jewish became central to a large part of Protestantism and in particular the Protestantism of the British Isles. A large minority of these people never accepted the Elizabethan compromise that resulted in the Anglican Church as a mid- point between the traditional Catholicism and the Reform and felt there were still too many popish remainders in both church and society like the horrible feast of Christmas. Early in the 17th century many of this party, the Puritans, felt that England was irreformable and decided to create a New England in the new lands across the Atlantic where they could impose the Old Testament law code on a modern society and show that God was prospering his elect by working on December 25th. These first emigrants left the mother country too soon to fight alongside the Puritan party in England, which would come to power in a few decades under Oliver Cromwell, behead the king, admit the Jews to the country, and conduct a war of ethnic cleansing against the Catholics in Ireland. The Puritans ultimately failed in their attempt to create an Old Testament theocracy in Merry Olde England, but a love of things Jewish would long remain in that society. As a way of drawing the Jewish immigrants together with the native Puritans, the medieval English stonemason’s guild was taken over and given a large body of mythology dealing with the construction of Solomon’s Temple in what the world would come to know as the Free and Accepted Masons, a long-term official enemy of the Catholic Church.



In the New World a new nation was developing, and, as G. K. Chesterton would say, America had the soul of a church. However, this famous British convert to Catholicism needs to be corrected on this point, America has the soul of a heretical church. In New England, by the year 1800, the solvent of the Enlightenment had been working away at the foundations of the Old Testament theocracy. In the generation after the Revolution, Puritan institutions like Harvard College adopted Unitarianism, and their now liberal beliefs had come to center on “the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and the neighborhood of Boston.” The Athens of America was becoming estranged from the theological theories of Jonathan Edwards but would become the center of whatever American progressive theories would be current. The older Puritan theories of the Old Testament theocracy were migrating with the frontier line to the South and West.



The first stop of the Puritans’ “psychic highway” after they migrated west of Lake Champlain was upstate New York, which, in the early decades of the 19th century, was the trend-setting center of America, to which only southern California can compare in our own day. The region got the name “the burned over district” due to the incredible number of religious and intellectual movements that got their start there. Charles Finney, a lawyer turned preacher started modern American revivalism with tent meetings throughout the area beginning in 1825. That generation’s version of the New Age movement, Spiritualism, was started with the Fox sisters’ table rapping in Newark, New York in 1848, but soon involved a huge following throughout the country. Feminism also got its start that same year in nearby Seneca Falls with the first woman’s suffrage convention.



A uniquely Protestant heresy got its start there too. Based on the alleged revelations from the angel Moroni near Rochester, Joseph Smith claimed that the American Indian tribes were actually the ten lost tribes of Israel, about whose fate generations of Old Testament readers had fixated on and that Jesus Christ had appeared to them as well. Mormonism is the Protestant heresy par excellence as it adds books of scripture to the sola scriptura faith. While Smith and his colleague Brigham Young would ultimately lead their Church of the Latter Day Saints or Mormons to what is now Utah, they were both sons of New England immigrants to upstate New York, as well as Freemasons, and their Temple ceremonies incorporate many lodge rituals, not to mention their resurrection of Old Testament polygamy. However, the Masons, whose rituals had been a major part of American public life in the Revolutionary era, suffered a setback when they murdered William Morgan in Batavia, New York in 1826 for having published a book exposing Masonic doctrine. This would give rise to the first of the modern political groups, the Anti-Masonic Party, that would later become an element in the future Republican Party.



However, the biggest spiritual event in America in the first half of the 19th century centered around a long-standing Protestant pastime of reading the prophecies of Daniel and Ezekiel together with Revelation in order to come up with the date for the Second Coming of Christ. By 1820, William Miller of upstate New York, a farmer and War of 1812 veteran, had read the scriptures and came up with the date of 1843 for Christ’s return. Over the next two decades he traveled the country and amassed a large number of followers. In 1843 he discovered that his date was off by one year but set October 22, 1844, the Jewish Day of Atonement, as the definitive date for the end of the world, and many of his followers sold all they had and prepared to meet the Lord on that day. When “the Great Disappointment” happened, many of Miller’s followers drifted back to the established churches, but a hard-core of believers under the leadership of Ellen White explained that Christ was first returning in heaven and proceeded to establish the highly Judaizing Seventh Day Adventist Church with worship on the Saturday Sabbath as well as keeping the kosher dietary laws as central elements of their beliefs. This body would also have a profound animus against the Catholic Church, something which is typical of groups that obsess on applying the Old Testament today.



In the British Isles, at about the time Prophet Miller was spreading the word of the imminent Second Coming, something similar was taking place. Around 1830 a Scottish preacher by the name of Edward Irving was preaching a premillenial rapture of the saints based on the writings of a South American Jesuit Manuel de Lacunza. His theories were also aided by a local Scottish mystic named Margaret Macdonald; their theories on the rapture also called for the return of the Jews to the Holy Land to reestablish their kingdom when the elect were caught up in the clouds to meet Jesus. The theory quickly spread to the Protestants of Ireland who were at this period going through something of an identity crisis. While the Protestant ascendancy in the Emerald Isle were a major part of the British Establishment centering around the Dublin Castle government since the period of French Revolution, the conservative governments in London were trying to avoid an uprising by the Irish peasantry by coming to a modus vivendi with the peasants’ Church through repeal of the Penal Laws and establishment of a seminary at Maynooth to train Roman priests. This created a bitter controversy among Irish Protestants with the ultimate disestablishment of the Church of Ireland coming in later decades. The word — much beloved of the spelling bees of my youth — antidisestablishmentarianism dates from this controversy. Irving’s doctrines about the rapture and the imminent Second Coming found an eager follower in John Nelson Darby, a Church of Ireland cleric whose initial ministry was in evangelizing Romanists and who ultimately founded the Plymouth Brethren sect. It isn’t clear if Darby was instrumental later in setting up the Church of Ireland’s soup kitchens for the starving Irish during the Great Famine where they would be fed if they converted to Protestantism.



In addition to their belief in the premillenial rapture of true Christians, what Irving, Darby and the latter Dispensationalists all have in common, according to Dave MacPherson, is the emphasis on “the ‘distinction’ between the church and Israel. They define ‘Israel’ as ethnic Jews or Israelites. They insist that this ‘distinction’ necessarily becomes an end-time ‘dichotomy’ (a physical separation) between the church and ethnic Jews, that God has to remove the church from earth before He can again deal with the later group.” The mindset of the premillenial dispensationalists would find expression in America in Judaizing groups such as the Adventists, through the efforts of the morally degenerate C. I. Scofield, who would import Irving and Darby’s theories in his notes to the Scofield Reference Bible and which would also be a prominent feature of The Fundamentals series of Bible commentaries funded by American petroleum magnates in the first years of the 20th century. Early in the 20th century, a Philadelphian named Clarence Larkin reduced all of Irving, Darby, and Scofield’s theology to a series of schematic diagrams. God’s dealings with humanity are shown as a discontinuous series of actions known as dispensations, not as the eternal divine plan. The Church goes up when Jesus comes down, and the Jews go back to the Holy Land; there is no way this theory can be squared with Catholic theology. Larkin’s diagrams of impending Armageddon are all black and white; what a pity they couldn’t be merged with the color coding of another Pennsylvanian, Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge so that the End Times could be mapped in living color.



The Dispensationalist message was also propagated through a series of educational institutions like Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute, the Philadelphia College of the Bible and Hal Lindsey’s alma mater, the aforementioned Dallas Theological Seminary. As the Zionist movement was gaining steam around the year 1900, the followers of Darby and Scofield would soon become these Jews’ favorite Christians.



But the basic question is just how Christian are premillenial dispensationalists? They claim to have accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior and want to spread their witness among all the unsaved, particularly Catholics. As Gorenberg relates in his book, one of the most active groups of Christian Zionists these days is Pastor Chuck Smith and his Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, California. Actually Calvary Chapel is a fast growing franchise church now spreading throughout the country like the Burger King of churches. In Philadelphia, most of the local Calvary Chapel’s pastors and congregation are former Catholics; no doubt John Nelson Darby would be proud.



Really Christians?



But are they really Christians? The answer is, despite their protestations to the contrary, no. Premillenial dispensationalism has been called “God’s Plan B” due to the fact that, with their classic emphasis on the Old Testament, Jesus Christ came to earth to become the king of Israel. The Jews rejected his claim; what was He to do now? Well according to their theory, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity and the Word through whom the universe was made, had to improvise a back-up plan known as the Church, which involved the gentiles. At some point the present dispensation, known as the church parenthesis, will come to an end and the gentile believers will be raptured to the clouds so that God can start dealing with the Jews again as He originally planned. So the answer for any Catholic to the dispensationalist’s question about trusting Jesus is, “why should you?” According to the premillenial dispensationalist theory, Jesus didn’t know what he was on earth to do. The premillenial dispensationalist Jesus isn’t worthy of belief; no wonder the Jews love the dispensationalists.



So we come back to the present, where groups of alleged Christians and Jews are actively seeking to jump-start the end times—each supremely confident that they have God’s ear. What we see is that President G. W. Bush is right; there is an axis of evil at work in the world today; only in theological terms, it is the fusion of Dispensationalists and Zionists; from a political perspective it is a Republican-Likud coalition. We can also see in the vicious attacks on Americans who oppose the current administration’s Middle East adventures by Jewish and Christian neocons in the government and the media, the outline of a heresy hunt. Does anyone really believe that, if given the power, a leading Dispensationalist like Attorney General John Ashcroft would not willingly send all dissenters to Guantanamo with the belief that he was furthering God’s kingdom here on earth? The other night I saw one of America’s leading Dispensationalist preachers, Rev. Pat Robertson, complain loudly on his television show, that American troops might be withdrawn from Iraq before they could impose “democracy” and the Muslim clergy would take over. Rev. Robertson said we should impose democracy as “we have the troops and weapons on the ground over there.” Apparently the Dispensationalist version of the Bible contains a few more verses in the Book of Proverbs than does the Catholic version like, “might makes right,” “the end justifies the means,” and “all power flows from the barrel of a gun.”



One would want to ask Rev. Pat if his vision of “democracy” in Iraq flows from Old Testament theocracy or from the “liberty, equality, fraternity” of the Paris Commune that his neocon advisers are more familiar with. We should also ask Rev. Robertson what he has against the Muslim clergy: don’t they want to influence the moral tone of their society, have women in modest public attire and have the government prohibit the sale of alcohol? Isn’t this what the American Dispensationalist clergy did when they had power several decades ago? So what’s the big difference here?



Heretical Ideas



Unfortunately American Catholics are not immune to these heretical ideas. Recently the U.S. Catholic Conference’s secretary for Jewish relations, Dr. Eugene Fisher, could tell the Jewish Week newspaper on July 23, 2002 in response to a Vatican document:



If you put off the moment that Jews will come to recognize Jesus as the Messiah until the end of time, then we don’t need to work or pray for the conversion of Jews to Christianity…. God already has the salvation of Jews figured out, and they accepted it on Sinai, so they are OK. Jews are already with the Father.... We do not have a mission to the Jews, but only a mission with the Jews to the world. The Catholic Church will never again sanction an organization devoted to the conversion of the Jews. That is over, on doctrinal, biblical and pastoral grounds. Finito.



These are interesting comments. Like the rabbis of the Talmud, Dr. Fisher is saying that the Jews have no need of the person and work of Jesus Christ. His life and death did not impact the Jewish people in the slightest. About what happened on Mt. Sinai, Fisher, like the rabbis, conveniently glosses over the Genesis story of the Israelites worshiping the golden calf and how angry Yahweh and Moses were about the incident. But never mind. Neither Jewish mass murderers like Leon Trotsky or Ariel Sharon, nor Jewish swindlers like Ivan Boesky, George Soros, or the Russian oligarchs who destroyed that country’s economy, nor Jewish Hollywood pornographers or abortionists—none of them need Jesus Christ because they’ve been saved—both individually and collectively—since Sinai. Catholics may question why the American bishops have kept Dr. Fisher in so prominent a position for so long since he clearly is using it as a basis to teach heresy. As of late Eugene Fisher has been very busy working for Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League in the yearlong “scholarly” attack on Mel Gibson’s movie.



Unfortunately Eugene Fisher has many imitators throughout the Catholic bureaucracies in this country and the lightning rod directing the fire of the proponents of “Catholic-Jewish dialogue” is The Passion of the Christ. One of the things we here at Culture Wars have been remiss at is getting our message out to young Catholics who get all their information from electrons and not dead trees. Not that I am making excuses for that, but it just is the way things are. There is a whole series of Catholic blogs (web logs) linked in a web ring known as St. Blog’s Parish written by and directed towards these young Catholics. While many of them are refreshingly orthodox, when they do stray into political commentary they seem, in the main, to have had neocon brain surgery in the recent past, and they end up sounding like Anne Coulter or David Frum.



One of the prime examples of this is the web site and blog maintained by Dr. William Cork the head of the Young Adult Ministry for the Diocese of Houston. Bill Cork is certainly a prolific web writer maintaining a site with his writings as well as a blog titled “ut unum sint…iustus ex fide vivit: an ecumenical blog.” Actually it might be better titled press releases from the ADL/AJC for Catholics, but more on that later. Dr. Cork does have an interesting background having been raised in the Judaizing Seventh Day Adventist Church, before becoming a Lutheran minister as an adult. Cork then became a chaplain, a job he truly loved, with an Army reserve unit and took the basic chaplain’s course when the school was here at Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey. He noted that the standard Protestant service was not appealing to the Lutheran and Episcopal student chaplains with their liturgical traditions, and he started to attend the Catholic Mass. Shortly after that, he was received into the Church and had to resign his chaplain’s commission, so his conversion did cost him. Apparently his wife and children remain Adventists.



Dr. Cork, as mentioned above, has a current position in Houston helping form the faith of young adult Catholics. The only problem is the faith that he’s forming them with. Bill Cork seems to be on a one-man crusade against what he calls “right-wing Catholics” who have to be constantly checked for anti-Semitism and what he calls a “replacement theology.” What he apparently means by that is the notion that the Catholic Church has replaced the Jews as God’s People and that these people. as the unquestionable descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, are true Semites and currently in a valid relationship with God. So Catholics who adopt Bill Cork’s position would definitely be in ecumenical relations with Dispensationalists and Adventists. In a very long article posted on his web site, “Anti-Semitism and the Catholic Right,” Cork aims his fire at Robert Sungenis of Catholic Apologetics International who had taken exception to a statement from the Vatican on Catholic-Jewish relations, the one that gave rise to Eugene Fisher’s comments above. Sungenis and CAI are, according to the Young Adult Minister for the Houston Diocese, the carrier of the dread anti-Semitic bacillus, as transmitted directly from people like Fathers Denis Fahey and Charles Coughlin. In fact, Cork relates, Sungenis on his web site has plagiarized from Nazi sources in stating that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was of Jewish ancestry. As his source on Father Coughlin, Cork refers to Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin the Father of Hate Radio by Donald I. Warren (New York: The Free Press, 1996). Having written an article on Father Coughlin in this magazine, I was very familiar with the book. Obviously Bill Cork hadn’t read it when he was trying to throw mud on “right-wing Catholic” Robert Sungenis. If he had he would have read on p.139 that the Roosevelt Jewish ancestry was well publicized in the American press in 1935 and that the Nazis got it from both American gentile and Jewish sources, and that it was believed by the leading rabbi of the day, Stephen S. Wise.



But that was then, and this is now. For the past year Bill Cork’s blog has been a running attack on Mel Gibson, Hutton Gibson and The Passion of the Christ. For a man with a Doctorate of Ministry degree, Cork has an amazingly simple worldview: the Gibsons and the movie are bad; Abe Foxman and the ADL are good. Dr. Cork is currently speaking at synagogues in the greater Houston area, so no doubt he has a brilliant future ahead of him; he could replace Dr. Fisher at the USCC when the latter retires. No doubt he hasn’t read Culture Wars lately, but if he does maybe, based on what we’ve discussed in this article, he can find another descriptive for those Catholics who don’t feel Jews are saved by their nature and don’t accept Israeli empire building or Jewish domination of American culture other than “anti-Semite.” Why does the bishop of Houston keep a man who feels that Jews don’t have to convert to Jesus Christ in a sensitive position with the formation of young adults in his diocese?



So the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are saddled up and ready to ride out from the Temple Mount throughout the Middle East and the world. The fact that their saddles were made in the U.S.A. by both Jewish and Christian zealots who felt they were doing God’s work is something that should cause us all to stop for a moment’s reflection. The fact is we might be living in the End Times. When zealots feel they know the mind of God and can force His hand, they might end up with a lot more than they bargained for. What a shock if at the Great White Throne Judgment, those who sincerely believed that they were establishing God’s kingdom here on earth find out they were actually working for the other side.



Thomas J. Herron is a frequent contributor to Culture Wars.



This review was published in the May, 2004 issue of Culture Wars.



Further Reading:

Robert F. Baldwin, The End of the World: A Catholic View, Our Sunday Visitor., Huntingdon, Indiana, 1984

Hilaire Belloc, Characters of the Reformation: Historical Portraits of 23 Men and Women and Their Place in the Great Religious Revolution of the 16th Century, Sheed & Ward, London, 1936, republished TAN Books and Publishers, Rockford, Illinois, 1992

Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies, Sheed & Ward, London, 1938, republished TAN Books and Publishers, Rockford, Illinois, 1991

Christianity in America, Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, George M. Marsden, David F. Wells, John D. Woodbridge, eds., William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1983

Elias Friedman, O.C.D., Jewish Identity, Miriam Press, New York, 1987

Michael A. Hoffman, II, Judaism’s Strange Gods, Independent History and Research Book, Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, 2000

Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage, Omni Publications, Palmdale, California, 1976

Dave MacPherson, The Rapture Plot, Millennium III Publishers, Simpsonville, South Carolina, second ed 2000

George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism 1870-1925, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980

Douglas Reed, Far and Wide, First Published 1951

Douglas Reed, The Controversy of Zion, Veritas Publishing Company (Ply) Ltd., Bullsbrook, Western Australia, 1985

Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, London, second edition 1997, forwards by Gore Vidal and Edward Said

Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Pluto Press, London, 1999

William Whalen, Separated Brethren, A Survey of Protestant, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox and Other Denominations in the United States, Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., Huntingdon, Indiana, Rev. Ed., 1979

Web Sites:

Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators: A Reappraisal, Laurence Hill, Westport, CT, 1983 (out of print but available on line)

On C. I. Scofield,: .Scofield: The Man behind the Myth, http://www.poweredbychrist.homestead.com/files/cyrus/scofield.htm

For Clarence Larkin’s Dispensationalist Charts: http://web.mountain.net/morton/charts.htm

John Sobieski, Catholic King

(from NewAdvent.org)

John Sobieski

Born at Olesko in 1629; died at Wilanow, 1696; son of James, Castellan of Cracow and descended by his mother from the heroic Zolkiewski, who died in battle at Cecora. His elder brother Mark was his companion in arms from the time of the great Cossack rebellion (1648), and fought at Zbaraz, Beresteczko, and lastly at Batoh where, after being taken prisoner, he was murdered by the Tatars. John, the last of all the family, accompanied Czarniecki in the expedition to Denmark; then, under George Lubomirski, he fought the Muscovites at Cudnow. Lubomirski revolting, he remained faithful to the king (John Casimir), became successively Field Hetman, Grand Marshal, and -- after Revera Potocki's death -- Grand Hetman or Commander-in-chief. His first exploit as Hetman was in Podhajce, where, besieged by an army of Cossacks and Tatars, he at his own expense raised 8000 men and stored the place with wheat, baffling the foe so completely that they retired with great loss. When, in 1672, under Michael Wisniowiecki's reign, the Turks seized Kamieniec, Sobieski beat them again and again, till at the crowning victory of Chocim they lost 20,000 men and a great many guns. This gave Poland breathing space, and Sobieski became a national hero, so that, King Michael dying at that time, he was unanimously elected king in 1674. Before his coronation he was forced to drive back the Turkish hordes, that had once more invaded the country; he beat them at Lemberg in 1675, arriving in time to raise siege of Trembowla, and to save Chrzanowski and his heroic wife, its defenders. Scarcely crowned, he hastened to fight in the Ruthenian provinces. Having too few soldiers (20,000) to attack the Turks, who were ten to one, he wore them out, entrenching himself at Zurawno, letting the enemy hem him in for a fortnight, extricating himself with marvellous skill and courage, and finally regaining by treaty a good part of the Ukraine.


For some time there was peace: the Turks had learned to dread the "Unvanquished Northern Lion", and Poland, too was exhausted. But soon the Sultan turned his arms against Austria. Passing through Hungary, a great part which had for one hundred and fifty years been in Turkish hands, and enormous army, reckoned at from 210,000 to 300,000 men (the latter figures are Sobieski's) marched forward. The Emperor Leopold fled from Vienna, and begged Sobieski's aid, which the papal nuncio also implored. Though dissuaded by Louis XIV, whose policy was always hostile to Austria, Sobieski hesitated not a instant. Meanwhile (July, 1683) the Grand Vizier Kara Mustapha, had arrived before Vienna, and laid siege to the city, defended by the valiant Imperial General Count Stahremberg, with a garrison of only 15,000 men, exposed to the horrors of disease and fire, as well as to hostile attacks. Sobieski started to the rescue in August, taking his son James with him; passing by Our Lady's sanctuary at Czefistochowa, the troops prayed for a blessing on their arms; and in the beginning of September, having crossed the Danube and joined forces with the German armies under John George, Elector of Saxony, and Prince Charles of Lorraine, they approached Vienna. On 11 Sept., Sobieski was on the heights of Kahlenberg, near the city, and the next day he gave battle in the plain below, with an army of not more than 76,000 men, the German forming the left wing and the Pole under Hetmans Jahonowski and Sieniawski, with General Katski in command of the artillery, forming the right. The hussars charged with their usual impetuosity, but the dense masses of the foe were impenetrable. Their retreat was taken for flight by the Turks, who rushed forward in pursuit; the hussars turned upon them with reinforcements and charged again, when their shouts made known that the "Northern Lion" was on the field and the Turks fled, panic-stricken, with Sobieski's horsemen still in pursuit. Still the battle raged for a time along all the line; both sides fought bravely, and the king was everywhere commanding, fighting, encouraging his men and urging them forward. He was the first to storm the camp: Kara Mustapha had escaped with his life, but he received the bow-string in Belgrade some months later. The Turks were routed, Vienna and Christendom saved, and the news sent to the pope and along with the Standard of the Prophet, taken by Sobieski, who himself had heard Mass in the morning.


Prostrate with outstretched arms, he declared that it was God's cause he was fighting for, and ascribed the victory (Veni, vidi, Deus vicit -- his letter to Innocent XI) to Him alone. Next day he entered Vienna, acclaimed by the people as their saviour. Leopold, displeased that the Polish king should have all the glory, condescended to visit and thank him, but treated his son James and the Polish hetmans with extreme and haughty coldness. Sobieski, though deeply offended, pursued the Turks into Hungary, attacked and took Ostrzyhom after the a second battle, and returned to winter in Poland, with immense spoils taken in the Turkish camp. These and the glory shed upon the nation were all the immediate advantages of the great victory. The Ottoman danger had vanished forever. The war still went on: step by step the foe was driven back, and sixteen years later Kamieniec and the whole of Podolia were restored to Poland. But Sobieski did not live to see this triumph. In vain had he again and again attempted to retake Kamieniec, and even had built a stronghold to destroy its strategic value; this fortress enabled the Tatars to raid the Ruthenian provinces upon several occasions, even to the gates of Lemberg. He was also forced by treaty to give up Kieff to Russia in 1686; nor did he succeed in securing the crown for his son James. His last days were spent in the bosom of his family, at his castle of Wilanow, where he died in 1696, broken down by political strife as much as by illness. His wife, a Frenchwoman, the widow of John Zamoyski, Marie-Casimire, though not worthy of so great a hero, was tenderly beloved by him, as his letters show: she influenced him greatly and not always wisely. His family is now extinct. Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, was his great-grandson -- his son James' daughter, Clementine, having married James Stuart in 1719.


(from Wikipedia)



Jan III Sobieski (17 August 1629 - June 17, 1696; John III Sobieski) was one of the most notable monarchs of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1674 until his death. Although his reign lasted only twenty-two years, it was marked by a period of the Commonwealth's stabilisation, much needed after the turmoil of the Deluge and Chmielnicki's Uprising. Popular among his subjects, he was also a brilliant military commander, most famous for his victory over the Turks in the 1683 Battle of Vienna. For his victories over the Ottoman Empire, he was dubbed by the Turks the "Lion of Lehistan."
•
Royal titles
• Official title was (in Latin): Joannes III, Dei Gratia rex Poloniae, magnus dux Lithuaniae, Russie, Prussiae, Masoviae, Samogitiae, Livoniae, Smolenscie, Kijoviae, Volhyniae, Podlachiae, Severiae, Czernichoviaeque, etc.
• English translation: John III, by the grace of God King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania, Ruthenia (Ukraine & Belarus), Ducal Prussia, Masovia, Samogitia, Livonia, Smolensk, Kyiv, Volhynia, Podlasie, Severia and Czernichow, etc.


Biography


Jan Sobieski was born 1629 in Olesko, a small town near Lwów (modern Lviv, Ukraine), to a notable szlachta family of Sobieski of Janina Coat of Arms. His father, Jakub Sobieski, was a voivod of the Ruthenian Voivodship and a castellan of Kraków; his mother, Zofia Teofilia neé Daniłowicz was a granddaughter of hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski. After graduating from the Nowodwory College in Kraków, young Jan Sobieski graduated from the philosophical faculty of the Jagiellonian Academy. After finishing his studies, together with his brother Marek Sobieski (1628-1652), Jan left for western Europe, where he spent more than two years travelling. During that time he learnt French, German and Italian, in addition to Latin. This proved to be vital during his later military career.


Both brothers returned to Poland in 1648 and volunteered for the army during the Chmielnicki Uprising. Jan founded his own banner of cavalry and commanded it in the rank of Rotamaster. After the Battle of Zborów, the brothers were separated and Marek died in Tatar captivity the following year. Jan was promoted to the rank of pułkownik and fought with distinction in the Battle of Beresteczko. A promising commander, Jan was sent by King John II Casimir to Ottoman Empire as an envoy. There, Sobieski learnt the Tatar language and studied the Turkish military traditions and tactics.

After the start of the Swedish invasion of Poland known there as "The Deluge", Jan Sobieski was among the Greater Polish regiments led by voivod of Poznań Krzysztof Opaliński which capitulated at Ujście, swearing allegiance to the Swedish king Charles X Gustav. However, in less than a year he returned with his unit to the Polish side, and after April of 1656 he fought for the Polish king.


Commander


During the three-day long battle of Warsaw of that year, Sobieski brilliantly commanded a 2000 men strong regiment of Tatar cavalry, for which he was promoted to the rank of standard-bearer of the Crown. A strong supporter of the French faction, Sobieski remained loyal to the king during the infamous Lubomirski Rebellion, which also helped in his military career. In 1665 he married Marie Casimire Louise de la Grange d'Arquien and was promoted to the rank of Great Marshal of the Crown and the following year to the rank of Field Hetman of the Crown. In 1667 he achieved another great victory over the Kossacks and their Tatar allies in the battle of Podhajce. A famed and much esteemed commander, in 1668 he achieved the rank of Grand Hetman of the Crown, the highest military rank in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the de facto commander-in-chief of the entire Polish Army.


On November 11, 1673 Sobieski added yet another brilliant victory to his list, this time defeating the Turks in the battle of Chocim and capturing the mighty fortress located there. The news of the battle spread across the country simultaneously to the news of the recent death of the king Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki, who had died only a day before the battle. This made Sobieski one of the most popular personalities in the state and the following year, on May 19, he was elected the new monarch of the Commonwealth. The support of his candidacy was almost complete, with only a dozen or so members of the diet opposing him. Among the most notable partisans of his candidacy was his wife. Jan Sobieski was crowned Jan III February 2, 1676
King


Although Poland-Lithuania was at that time the largest and one of the most populous states of Europe, Sobieski became a king of a country devastated by almost half a century of constant war, which brought an end to Poland's economic well-being. The treasury was almost empty and the court had little to offer for the powerful magnates, who often allied themselves with foreign courts rather than the state they lived in. Sobieski decided to stabilise the situation of the country by forcing the Ottomans to accept a peace treaty to end the constant wars on the southern border. In the autumn of 1674 he recommenced the war against the Turks and managed to recapture the mighty fortresses of Kamieniec Podolski, Bar and Reszków, which re-established a strongly-fortified line defending Poland's southern border in the Ukraine. According to Polish historian Oskar Halecki, Sobieski also planned to retake Prussia with Swedish cooperation and French support. This undertaking was doomed because of war with Turkey and opposition from the Commonwealth's magnates. The plan was torpedoed by Michał Pac, the hetman of Lithuania and a supporter of Brandenburg, who simply defected with his army and disbanded it.


In 1675 the Tartars started a counter-offensive and crossed the Dneper, but could not retake the strategic town of Żórawno and the peace treaty was signed soon afterwards. Although Kamieniec Podolski remained a part of Turkey, Poland levelled its significance by the construction of the Stronghold of the Holy Trinity and return of the town of Biała Cerkiev. With signing of the treaty a period of peace started, much needed to repair the country and strengthen the royal authority. Although constantly harassed by the magnates and foreign courts of Brandenburg and Austria (Austria even tried to oust Sobieski and replace him with Charles of Lorraine), Sobieski completely reformed the Polish military. The military was reorganised into regiments, the infantry finally dropped pikes replacing them with battle-axes and the Polish cavalry adopted the formations of hussars and dragoons. Also, Sobieski greatly increased the number of guns and developed a new tactics of artillery.

As a diplomat, Sobieski envisioned an alliance of Poland with France and the Ottomans against the aggressive [citation needed] Austrian empire and Brandenburg. However, his plans never came true and finally in 1683 had to be completely abandoned. Conscious that Poland was risking a war against most of its neighbours similar to the Deluge and was lacking allies, Sobieski allied himself with Leopold I, the Holy Roman Emperor. The alliance, although aimed directly against Turks and indirectly against France, had the advantage of gaining support for the defence of Poland's southern borders.


In the spring of that year royal spies uncovered Turkish preparations for a military campaign, and Sobieski feared that the target might be the Polish cities of Lwów and Kraków. To prevent the risk, Sobieski started the fortification of the cities and ordered universal military conscription.


Sobieski's military prowess demonstrated in war against the Ottoman Empire contributed to his election as King of Poland. One of his ambitions was to unify Christian Europe in a crusade to drive the Turks out of Europe. He made alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor and joined the Holy League initiated by Pope Innocent XI to preserve Christendom.]


Battle of Vienna

Sobieski's greatest success came on September 12, 1683 with his victory at the Battle of Vienna, in command of Polish, Austrian and German troops, against the Turks under Kara Mustafa.

Upon reaching Vienna, he joined up with the Austrians and Germans. Sobieski planned to attack on the 13th of September, but he had noticed that the Turkish resistance was weak and ordered full attack on September 12. At 4:00 a.m. a united army of about 81,000 men attacked a Turkish army that numbered about 130,000. At about five o'clock in the afternoon, four husaria cavalry groups led by Sobieski charged forward, and soon after the Turkish battle line was broken as the Turks scattered in confusion. At 5:30 p.m., Sobieski entered the deserted tent of Kara Mustafa and the battle of Vienna was over.

The Pope and other foreign dignitaries hailed Sobieski as the "Savior of Vienna and Western European civilization." In a letter to his wife he wrote, "All the common people kissed my hands, my feet, my clothes; others only touched me, saying: 'Ah, let us kiss so valiant a hand!'"



Later years and legacy

King Jan III Sobieski, nicknamed by the Turks the "Lion of Lechistan", and the last great king of Poland, died in Wilanów, Poland on June 17, 1696. His wife, Maria Kasimira, died in 1716 in Blois, France and her body was returned to Poland. They are interred together in Wawel Castle, Kraków, Poland.

King Jan III was succeeded by Augustus II who stayed in power primarily because of Russian support. On his death in 1733, a struggle for the crown of Poland ensued, referred to as the War of the Polish Succession.
After World War II, a statue of Jan III Sobieski was "repatriated" to Gdansk (now in Poland) from Lwów (now become a Ukrainian city). The statue overlooks a little park at the old Gdańsk City Hall, now a museum.
[edit]
Battles commanded by Sobieski

• Battle of Podhajce (1667)
• Battle of Bracław (1671)
• Battle of Mohylów (1671)
• Battle of Kalnik (1671)
• Battle of Krasnobród (1672)
• Battle of Niemirów (1672)
• Battle of Komarno (1672)
• Battle of Kałusz (1672)
• Battle of Chocim (1673)
• Battle of Bar (1674)
• Battle of Lwów (1675)
• Battle of Trembowla (1675)
• Battle of Wojniłów (1675)
• Battle of Żurawno (1676)
• Battle of Vienna (1683)
• Battle of Parkany (1683)
• Battle of Jazłowiec (1684)
• Battle of Żwaniec (1684)
• Battle