If I may venture a comment about the movie, The Passion, which I have not seen. It is strange that the Jews have made such a commotion about it. Evidently, they imagined their influence greater than what it is. More likely, they reacted without due deliberation. Someone told me they had temporarily succeeded in banning it in France.

Through their loud protests, the Jewish leaders did nothing more than call attention to the part of the Jews in the Passion and Death of our Lord. I may be wrong, but I imagine that, even in this Post-Christian age, few indeed are the people who do not know that it was Christ's "own nation," as Pilate put it, who handed him over to the Romans, and brought all the pressure they could upon him to impose the horrifying and ignominious sentence upon Him.

According to the Gospel writers, after our Lord's terrible scourging, Pilate brought him forth before the people (not the priests, His accusers) in the hope of eliciting some pity from them to outweigh the demands of the Jewish leaders. But "scribes and Pharisees" had anticipated this move and excited the crowd to shout for his crucifixion; in a word, they organized the mob.

When Christ was on the cross, their hatred was not satiated until He was dead. It was a Roman legionnaire who exclaimed, "Truly, this man was the Son of God," not any of the Jewish leaders.

Their first thought was to seal the tomb and post a guard to make sure they had put an end to the affair once and for all. And to this day, they blame Christ as the one Person Who has thwarted their omnivorous ambitions for world power and possession.

The Jews say they opposed this movie because they fear that it will spark some kind of Christian backlash against them. It will not, of course. Christians and other nations have never recriminated against the Jews because of what their forebears did to Christ.

Any time the Jews were made to suffer as a nation, as a foreign nation within a nation, it was always because time and again, finally, the host nation awakened to the fact that they no longer possessed their own land; that the Jews had gradually and methodically wormed their way into the places of influence and total control; or they were, as a guest people, conspiring with the enemies of their host, to bring about the downfall of that nation.

It is because the Christian people have experienced this again and again from the days of the Roman empire, that the Church has seen fit to call them "a perfidious people" in its prayers for their conversion.

All their stratagems are calculated to keep the goyim from looking deeper. They cry "Antisemitism!" at every pretext to keep us on the defensive, and always concerned about being accused of hating them.

They have taught the gentiles to believe that what they call "Antisemitism" (i.e., recognizing Jewish attempts to exploit or undermine their nation) is the worst kind of crime, much worse than blasphemy, adultery, or faithlessness. In their eyes, to oppose them, to expose them, to thwart them, not to let them have anything they demand, is to "hate" them. One nation after another has lost its identity rather than be accused of "hatred of the Jews."

In addition, in nations where the Jews have established great control, education in guilt over what they suffered or are reputed to have suffered is a dominant moral and religious theme, compared to which the existence of God, the Incarnation, the Redemption, etc., are treated as insignificant and personal opinions.

Furthermore, when the Jews have great control in a nation, in government schools, on television, in movies, in literature, in religious teaching, and in national heritage, self-accusation and self-laceration over, and atonement and compensation for, what we through others have supposedly done to the Jews becomes the central doctrine of that nation's existence, as that they should not suffer anything is the primary doctrine of Judaism.

In their eyes, because the Jews' religion is the worship of themselves, it is God's religion also! Not to believe this doctrine is viewed as an unconscionable heresy and an unforgivable crime; to be too noisy in your disbelief of this "doctrine" can bring prison and the loss of all rights in nation's where Jewish control becomes too strong.

If the American people ever move against the Jews to take back their country, it will not be because of a movie; surely not because of their devotion to Christ, which they have very little to speak of (none of any great depth, that is), but because they have come to realize that what has happened to other nations has happened to their own, and the Jews are very much a part of that Force within the vitals of their government which is bent on demoralizing and enslaving them, leaving them without liberty and without hope, as is the case with the poor people of China and North Korea, to mention two nations among many suffering such a fate.

Begging God's grace upon you, and encouraging you to make a good Lent, I remain, yours sincerely in Christ, Fr. Wathen

March 1, 2004