Author: Daniel Castellano

Perfidious Journalists Need a Latin Lesson

Pope Benedict’s motu proprio authorizing wider use of the Tridentine Rite has evoked predictable outrage from the liberal media, a product of their ignorance and malice. Rather than address the usual calumnies against the Catholic Church hurled by the historically ill-informed, I will focus on a particular accusation regarding the Good Friday prayer for the Jews in the traditional Latin Rite.

It is a telling measure of the irrational hatred against traditional Catholicism that an objection should be raised against a prayer that is said only once a year in a language that few understand. Moreover the prayer is said for the Jews, not against them, unlike the litany of curses still uttered in some orthodox Jewish liturgies. The real crime, of course, is that it is a prayer for their conversion to Christianity, a sentiment that is intolerable to those who do not wish to see the Church grow at the expense of others. Failing to see how ludicrous it is to expect the Church to renounce evangelism and adopt a platform of religious indifferentism, liberals are astonishingly narrow-minded in their expectation that everyone else should share their ideological assumptions, or be banished to the dustbin of history. The more independent thinkers have learned not to expect intellectual coherence in mainstream liberalism, so let us proceed to hard facts rather than ideology.

A more concrete accusation against the Good Friday prayer is that it slanders the Jews as “perfidious,” which in English means “treacherous” or “lying”. This misunderstanding is based on an inadequate understanding of medieval Latin. In classical Latin, perfidus did have a meaning similar to its present English analogue, derived as it was from the phrase per fidem decipere, “to deceive through trust.” However, by late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, perfides and perfidia simply meant the opposite of fides and fidelis. (K.P. Harrington, Mediaeval Latin (1925), p. 181) Thus perfides in medieval Latin is best translated as “faithless” or “unbelieving”, meaning lacking the Christian faith.

An example of such matter-of-fact usage can be seen in St. Bede the Venerable’s account of the life and martyrdom of St. Alban, with my translation:

Qui videlicet Albanus paganus adhuc, cum perfidorum principum mandata adversum Christianos, saevirent, clericum quendam persecutores fugientem hospitio recepit.

Alban, who was clearly still a pagan, with mandates of the unbelieving rulers taking violent action against Christians, received a certain cleric fleeing persecutors into his hospitality.

Here the phrase perfidorum principum mandata is best translated “mandates of the unbelieving rulers,” and the context shows there is no implication that the rulers were treacherous or dishonest. Perfidus simply refers to the state of unbelief with respect to the Christian faith. Such usage is in fact typical of medieval Latin writers.

With this understanding, we see that the Church prayed for the perfidus Iudaeus as part of the Good Friday prayer for all the various groups of non-believers: first the heretics and schismatics, then the unbelieving Jews, then the pagans. It is necessary to specify the unbelieving Jews, since these prayers do not apply to those Jews who have already converted to Christianity. The Church does not accept the position of some Jews that those who convert to Christianity are somehow less authentically Jewish or not Jewish at all. On the contrary, the Church sees Christianity as the perfection and fulfillment of Judaism.

Of course, it is unacceptable to liberals for Christians to portray the New Covenant as supplanting the Old, or to suggest that the Jews lack the light which is Christ, as the Good Friday prayer states. As no one denies that the non-Christian Jews do not believe in Christ, the only possible source of objection to the Good Friday prayer, once clarified linguistically, is its clear implication that Jesus is the light of the whole world, not only for Christians, but for Jews and pagans. It is that sentiment that is the essence of the Good Friday prayer, and what makes the adversaries of Christianity seethe with rage, for they would rather be let alone and have Christianity renounce its historic claims. More absurdly, with respect to liberal notions of tolerance, they expect Christians to renounce such claims even when praying amongst themselves.

The West Lied About Kosovo

It should be obvious by now that the idealistic rhetoric of American and Western European hegemonists is a whitewash of their neo-imperialist ambitions, as evidenced by their reversal over the sovereignty of Kosovo. Prior to the 1999 NATO invasion of Yugoslavia, the Western allies agreed to UN Security Council Resolution 1160, which affirmed “the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” During the bombing, the G-8 countries agreed to “an interim administration for Kosovo … under which the people of Kosovo can enjoy substantial autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.”

As the Russians and Serbs recognized, these assurances were empty lies, as the West in practice has shown little regard for Serbian sovereignty over the province, which dates back to the Middle Ages. After the NATO bombing, the Yugoslav army was forced to withdraw from Kosovo, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of 250,000 Serbs from the province under the intimidation of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a Muslim guerrilla organization with a history of kidnappings and reprisal killings. Historic Orthodox churches and monasteries were vandalized or destroyed, erasing much of Kosovo’s cultural legacy.

The aftermath of the war revealed that NATO accusations of Serbian war crimes were greatly inflated, but nonetheless the West relentlessly pursued the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, while neglecting similar crimes committed by Croats and Muslims during the Yugoslav wars. This ploy of magnifying the threat posed by a weak adversary is a common imperialist tactic used to justify lopsided military interventions.

Now, President Bush’s statement that Kosovo should be independent is nothing more than a logical culmination of Western policy designed to weaken Serbia to the point of irrelevance. Since the bogeyman of Milosevic can no longer be invoked, it is clear that the real crime of Yugoslavia was its strength and independence of the West. With its dismemberment, the West can easily impose its interests throughout the Balkans as it has done in the rest of Eastern Europe.

Putin knows better than to trust the West, which is why he had the prudence to send troops into Pristina ahead of the NATO forces. He also knows that the U.S. claim that Eastern Europe needs a missile shield against North Korea and Iran is a clumsy lie, so he has sought to defuse this claim with a counterproposal for a shield based in Azerbaijan. The destruction of Yugoslavia and expansion of NATO are an affront to Russian ambitions that will not pass without firm resistance.

Apart from exacerbating tensions with Russia, the West’s reversal on the independence of Kosovo undermines the credibility of claims to support a unified Iraq. Once again, the real goal of invasion was to squash the regional ambitions of a second-tier power, in this case rendering Iraq militarily impotent. With the systematic destruction of the Baath regime down to its lowest levels, economic chaos and sectarian violence were the inevitable results. Finally, some U.S. presidential candidates are recognizing the consequences of this destructive policy, and calling for a partition of Iraq, contrary to the long-standing assurances of the current administration. The moral of the story: when the West pretends to help your nation, prepare to be dismembered.

The Leyenda Negra Rears Its Head

Historical objectivity has never been a strong point among leftist ideologues, as Pope Benedict recently discovered when he ventured to contradict the anti-Catholic myth of a genocidal evangelization in the Americas.  Like most good myths, this is a confused mixture of facts and half-truths linked in an implausible chain of causality and intentions.  The brutalities committed by the conquistadores are conflated with the commendable actions of Catholic missionaries, and the term “genocide” is abused to refer to the effects of diseases on the indigenous population.  The falsity of this myth is amply demonstrated by the visible presence of people of indigenous and mixed races throughout Latin America, often seamlessly integrated into the population, whereas in condescending North America, the Indians are almost all either dead or on reservations.

The Pope’s offending statement was that “The proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.”  To accuse this erudite pontiff of a gross historical error is to reveal one’s own ignorance, but few leftists could resist the opportunity to trot out the tired old trope of an old man supposedly out of touch with reality.  We are to ignore the fact that their supposed genocide rests on the implausible assumption of a pre-Columbian indigenous population many times greater than that of Europe, and also plays fast and loose with causality.  It is a clumsy error indeed to say that because missionaries were later followed by opportunistic conquistadores that the former endorsed the actions of the latter.  Even if that were the case, it would not affect the truth of the Pope’s statement, lost on careless minds, that evangelization itself did not involve the alienation of pre-Columbian cultures.

A fair-minded person can hardly avoid the conclusion that Catholic missionaries showed tremendous respect for indigenous cultures, in fact to the point that they were sometimes faulted with being too indulgent toward Indian traditions.  The leftists ought to be red with shame for their display of historical ignorance, as evidenced by the career of Mexico’s first Archbishop Juan de Zumarraga, who lived among the Indians in friendly communion, as did many of his successors in the secular and regular clergy.  Catholic missionaries learned Nahuatl and other indigenous languages, composing grammars and publishing histories in the indigenous tongues.  Far from suppressing the indigenous cultures, they gave them a voice through the printed word.  At times, they would even appeal on behalf of the Indians to the government, over matters such as relief from obligatory labor in the building of churches, or more famously, against more heinous crimes such as those related by the Jesuit Bartolome de Las Casas.  Almost everything we know about crimes against the Indians in Latin America are related by outraged Catholic clerics.

In a twist of cruel hypocrisy, the accounts of Las Casas and others were used by the English as propaganda against their Spanish rivals, even as English pirates raided Spanish galleons with Crown’s blessing, privateers trafficked millions of Africans into slavery, and colonists warred with the Indians, who often sided with French Catholics.  To this day, the accounts of Las Casas are cited for rhetorical purposes, without embedding them in the broader historical reality of ordinary relations between the Spanish and Indians, which, if even a tenth as bad as they are portrayed by the left, would never have resulted in a racially integrated Latin America.  There would be hardly any mestizos and mulattos, but demographic reality unmistakably proclaims the contrary.  In contrast, there was virtually no racial mixing in North America; the Indians practically vanished, and mulattos are such a rarity that there is no word for it in English.  Many hand-wringing Caucasians fret over insubstantial disputes over terms like “Indian” or “mulatto”, but a non-bigoted society has no need for sensitivity over arbitrary labels.

Meanwhile, Hugo Chavez tries to appeal to impoverished indigenous peoples by repeating the myth of genocide, while he cynically consolidates his own power and suppresses dissent.  We could hardly ask for a better illustration of the insincerity of supposed concern for indigenous peoples, when the real motivation is poorly disguised hatred of the Church.  The Church has no army, so it is an easy target for weak-kneed revolutionaries who would certainly lack the temerity of those missionaries who went unarmed among the fiercest Indians of South America to preach the Gospel, even to be killed by their catechumens after years of living among them.  For all the modern talk of respecting other cultures, few would have the courage to live this principle to that degree, once again showing how “tolerance” is grounded more in rhetoric than in action.