The Point

Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

December, 1954

POINTERS

From all over America, representing millions of Catholic mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, maiden aunts, and nieces, there arrived in Boston last month the delegates to the twenty-seventh nationwide convention of the National Council of Catholic Women. Of all the people who, in so many varied capacities, attended this sizeable gathering, the following are remembered by The Point ’s convention observers.

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Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States, speaker at a morning session of the convention in Boston’s Symphony Hall. This was Eisenhower’s second visit to Boston since his election to the Presidency and his conversion to Presbyterianism. He read, without color, but with a certain earnestness, the speech prepared for him, and then appeared alternately embarrassed and incredulous as Boston’s Archbishop Cushing said of him that it was not his ability as a president or a general that made Dwight Eisenhower great. It was, rather, his “love of God!”

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Mr. Rabb, adviser to Eisenhower, who accompanied the President, held his coat, and whispered instructions. On the Symphony Hall stage, Rabb sat directly behind an impressive row of Bishops, none of whom seem to have been warned that the slick-haired Mr. Rabb (real name, Rabinowitz) was to be there.

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His Excellency, Henry Cabot Lodge, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, a man’s speaker, who spoke at an evening session of the convention. He pleased the delegates by promising that the next time the U. N. runs a war, the burden of supplying an army will be shared by a larger number of countries, and thereby American mothers will stand to lose fewer sons than they did in Korea.

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His Excellency, John J. Wright, Bishop of Worcester, Massachusetts, who gave a talk endorsing the United Nations, after Ambassador Lodge had left the stage. Bishop Wright is a ladies’ speaker.

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An enthusiastic, unidentified, but unmistakably Catholic young lady, from the International Catholic Truth Society, in Brooklyn. She stood in the outer lobby of Symphony Hall prior to the pro-U. N. speeches of Lodge and Bishop Wright, and handed out some extremely damaging anti-U. N. literature.

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Liberace, a manicured piano player in grey silk suit, who arrived at Boston’s Hotel Statler, headquarters of the convention, and promptly received a phone-call from Boston’s Archbishop Cushing. Would Liberace please play for the ladies of the convention, asked the Archbishop? No, said Liberace. Well, then, said the Archbishop, could Liberace pay a visit to the Archi-episcopal residence some time during his Boston stay? Yes, said the piano-player. Newsmen received ample warning of the proposed visit and were plentifully on hand when the Archbishop put his arm around Liberace’s shoulder and called him an “exemplary Catholic.”

The forces which control Boston’s press were delighted, two days later, to quote Archbishop Cushing’s exemplary Catholic as saying, to a concert hall audience, “I don’t talk loud. I’m the sexy type.”

THE BUYERS AND SELLERS AT CHRISTMAS

The Jews would like to get rid of Christmas. But so far they have not succeeded. For reasons of Faith (the Catholics), or motives of sentiment (the Protestants), certain Americans have refused to shrug the day off. And so, the Jews have been obliged to fall hack on that well-tried principle of theirs, “When you can’t beat a movement, join it.”

Today, in America, the Jews have become Christmas boosters. But their acceptance of the day, like their acceptance of any non-Jewish thing, is for the purpose of making it over to their own image and likeness. Accordingly, the Jews are trying to establish a Judaized Christmas. They want a Christmas stripped of all commemoration of the Birth of our Saviour, and reduced to a purely secular festival.

To ensure that no Christian meaning of Christmas will be perpetuated through civic recognition of it, the Jews protest loudly against such practices as community-sponsored Christmas carols. They demand that no Nativity plays be presented in public schools. “Christological expressions” (the Jews’ phrase for dismissing any reference to their rejected Messias) must be banned from the holiday messages of public officials. “We want all this Christmas propaganda stopped!” shrilled the New York Jewish newspaper, The Day. “Public schools must be kept clear of Christmas carols and other Christmas influence. The educational system of New York City — and other cities with large Jewish populations — please take notice!”

But common though this kind of agitation has been, it is not the main Jewish attack on Christmas. The Jews well realize that in making these direct, naked demands there is always the risk that some day they will arouse Christian wrath. Consequently, they rely chiefly on a less obvious weapon, but one which is far more deadly. The Jews are saturating the American atmosphere with their infidel slant on Christmas.

By magazine articles, department store displays, newspaper advertisements, by radio and television and moving picture entertainments, by the popular songs which they write and publish, and by a thousand other subtle and insidious means, the Jews are conveying the impression that Christmas is nothing more than a happy holiday — a time for tinsel and mistletoe and big red ribbons; a time for hilarity and handouts, stimulated by bottled spirits.

Furthermore, by their perfect coordination of press, entertainment, and commerce, the Jews are creating the illusion that their version of Christmas is universally accepted — that “everybody but everybody” agrees that this is the way the feast should be celebrated.

In the event the modicum of Christian observance still clinging to Christmas in America should grow, or become dangerous, the Jews have a final weapon. This weapon they have already begun to use. It is an appeal to the “Americanism” of the stubborn Christians. In the name of democracy, they (who are congenitally incapable of any loyalty other than to Judaism) ask that Christmas be taken from the realm of sectarianism and made a day for all Americans, regardless of race, color, or creed. They argue that the day has too much national importance to commemorate merely the Birth of Jesus. They say it should stand for some program of their own Jewish devising, some large and deliberately un-Christian concept, such as “Brotherhood.”

One postscript: Touring the country this December will be a moving picture entitled White Christmas. It was written by three Jews named Krasna, Panama, and Frank. Its music was composed by a Jew named Balin, who calls himself Berlin. It stars a Jew named Kaminsky, who calls himself Kaye. It is this year’s main single effort to divert Christians from the true significance of Christmas. And the Jews expect it to be especially successful; for, to co-star in the movie, they have procured the services of an aging crooner, the one-time darling of American Catholicism. In exchange for his endorsement and abetting of their anti-Christmas purposes, the Jews may toss this pitiful Catholic a little conscience salve. Perhaps they will allow him to sing Adeste Fideles or “Silent Night” in the movie. The Jews know they can well afford to make such a concession, since any Christian sentiment expressed in the song will be quite blotted out in the welter of Jewish vulgarity.

LIGHT IN THE NIGHT

Cold, it is told, did our world enfold
The night that Our Lord was born;
Our sheep who were deep in a midnight sleep
Awoke and believed it morn.

Our hay, so they say, in a manger lay
To make Him a warm, soft bed:
When close to the earth at the hour of His birth
Our Saviour reclined His head.

Light in the night that was clear and bright
Drew westward three Eastern kings;
And royal the way that they knelt to pray,
All covered with crowns and rings.

Archangels in throngs with celestial songs
Proclaimed ere the dawn began,
In valley, on hill, unto men of good will,
Their joy in our God made man.

BY FATHER FEENEY

At the request of our readers — who have now come to know the things for which I stand — I shall put down a few of the things which I am very much against.

I am very much against a Catholic’s attending an Interfaith meeting of any kind.

I think it is a sin for priests to become workers and try to enter the life of a nation in overalls instead of in cassocks and surplices.

I think that ninety percent of the writings of recently converted Catholic authors should be put on the Index or burned.

I think the U. N. is a movement for setting up in the secular order a rival to the Catholic Church in the spiritual order, and for eventually effecting the end of all Faith (Church) and all patriotisms (State).

I think the National Conference of Christians and Jews is the kind of sodality that every Catholic should be forbidden to attend, support, or sympathize with, under pain of mortal sin.

I am one of the leading opponents of the Anti-Defamation League. I am one of the chief people the Anti-Defamation League has gone out of its way to abuse. I think it is an honor to be defamed by the Anti-Defamation League.

I am very much against the underground war that is daily going on against the police forces in our leading cities, especially those in which so many fine and handsome Catholic policemen are found. I am against the efforts of petty gossip and petty scandal to demoralize some of the finest groups of men I have ever met, and I am very much against those who have not the courage to stop it.

I think that the United States is in a worse condition, spiritually and politically, than the nations of Europe were before the war. I think that the reasons for this are the same as they were in Europe, and that these same reasons have arrived in America recently by way of immigration.

THE PRESENT POSITION OF CARDINAL NEWMAN

Q. What is it about John Henry Newman, English convert and Cardinal, that Catholics chiefly remember?

A. His mastery of English prose.

Q. What is it about John Henry Newman that Catholics of our day generally forget?

A. They forget, or never have been told of, his Jewish descent.

Q. If we Catholics were to bear in mind Newman’s real ancestry when we are appraising his literary ability, could we not then boast that we have had in our fold the greatest Jewish writer in the English language?

A. We could — except for the fact that there have been in the English language other Jewish writers, like Robert Browning, Max Beerbohm, and Philip Guedalla, who never once thought of joining the Catholic Church.

Q. Apart from his literary abilities, did not Newman make a good conversion to the Catholic Church?

A. He made a nostalgic conversion.

Q. What sort of conversion is that?

A. It is a conversion effected in a typical Old Testament manner, in which one is always sighing after the “flesh-pots” of things one has abandoned, and which in Newman’s case required an Apologia Pro Vita Sua, an apology for his own life, to justify.

Q. After his conversion, and his ordination to the priesthood, is it really true that Newman used often to forego theological studies and pastoral pursuits in order to devote more time to reading from the pagan Greeks?

A. Biographers disagree. Newman’s only comment in the matter was his repeated remark, “I shall never be a saint, for I love the pagan classics too intensely.”

Q. Did not the blood which he inherited, from the Jewish moneylender who was his father, allow Newman to bring to the Faith some of those same racial qualities possessed by the very earliest Christians, by Our Lord’s own Apostles and disciples?

A. The Jewish qualities which Newman brought to the Faith have been very tidily set in order by Canon William Barry, S. T. D., the eminent English authority on Newman. Canon Barry reports that to Newman’s “Hebrew affinities” the following qualities are attributed: “ ... his cast of features, his remarkable skill in music and mathematics, his dislike of metaphysical speculations, his grasp of the concrete, and his nervous temperament.”

Q. What was it that Newman called those fellow Catholics of his who, at the time of the Vatican Council, were in favor of having the Pope’s personal infallibility defined?

A. Newman nervously called them, “an aggressive and insolent faction.”

Q. Was this attitude toward the definition of Papal infallibility the reason why Pope Pius IX so totally mistrusted Newman?

A. It was one of the reasons.

Q. If Pope Pius IX so frowned upon him, why was Newman made a Cardinal?

A. Newman was made a Cardinal after Pope Pius IX died, when the Catholic Duke of Norfolk prevailed upon the newly installed Leo XIII to brighten the aged Newman’s final years with a red hat.

Q. Is it in England that Cardinal Newman’s spirit best survives today?

A. It is not. Modern Catholic Englishmen, without analyzing it, sense that Cardinal Newman was, religiously, the kind of interloper in their midst that Prime Minister Disraeli was politically.

Q. Where then have Newman’s name and fame been most perpetuated?

A. In America, in the form of clubs. Newman Clubs, they are called.

Q. What is a Newman Club?

A. It is an organized excuse for the presence, the sinful presence, of Catholic students at secular universities founded and fostered by Masons and, lately, indoctrinated by Jews.


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