Category: Religion

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.

Modern Mythmaking: The Talpiot Tomb

All too often, the veneer of secular rationality is cracked by the spontaneous eruption of the most implausible beliefs. We have seen this phenomenon in the conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination and the moon landings, in Erich Von Daniken’s “ancient astronauts” and other extraterrestrial legends, and in less grandiose manifestations, such as Elvis sightings, psychics, Ouija boards, and horoscopes.

In each of these modern myths, there can be found a form of wish-fulfillment, whether by depicting a noble, democratic people opposed by an evil establishment, or by fabricating a sense of purpose in a secular cosmos, often by radically reinterpreting the traditional legends of human culture. The myths pretend to empower the people, by freeing them from the establishment’s supposed lies, and in some cases by offering them some control over the preternatural world.

Most recently, the religious establishment has been the target of such mythmaking, as shown by the commercial success of The Da Vinci Code and its derivative works. As the popularity of such works greatly exceeds their scholarly plausibility (which is nil), we must acknowledge that they appeal to a popular desire, in particular the desire to “outsmart” the religious establishment. At the same time, this modern legend would validate contemporary fascination with feminine sexuality by reinventing Christianity with a narrative that reflects 21st-century mores.

Such reinvention is obviously ahistorical, but we must understand that “critical thinking” in common parlance often means skepticism towards the establishment, rather than cold, impartial analysis. The desire to prove the establishment wrong trumps the usual rules of evidence, resulting in pseudoscientific claims. Biblical archaeology is replete with implausible claims and outright hoaxes, motivated by a desire to prove a preferred interpretation of Scripture. Those who advocate a radical reinterpretation of the Bible are no different in this regard.

An especially clumsy attempt at special pleading can be found in today’s amateur claim to have found the tomb of Jesus’ family. As the highly esteemed Israeli archaeologist Amos Kloner has noted, the claim is devoid of scientific merit, since only well-to-do families had such crypts, and the names Jeshua, Joseph, and Maryam were exceedingly common. We may further add that Jesus would have been denied burial altogether had it not been for the intercession of Joseph of Arimathea, who offered his tomb. We could also remark that the fact of the empty tomb was acknowledged even by the unbelieving Jews, as evidenced in their own writings.

This sort of argument would fall on many deaf ears, since, in the “skeptical” mentality, authority is not to be trusted, whether that authority is in the Gospels or in professional archaeologists. It is therefore of no concern that even non-Christians should refute this revisionism. The incoherence of an anti-authoritative epistemology is evident to any careful thinker, but our immediate concern is the fact that the experiment of secularism has failed in an important task. It has failed to produce a populace that values critical thinking, so that instead they synthesize new myths, revealing in this need the failure of secular philosophy to provide any sense of purpose to human destiny.

The Unsanitized Martin Luther King

The popular image of Martin Luther King, Jr. is that of a “safe,” moderate civil rights leader, as contrasted with the unseemly radicalism of Malcolm X and the black nationalist groups. This sanitized version of King, revered every January, scarcely resembles the real man, who was a revolutionary in the best and worst senses of the word. Discussing the real Martin Luther King would force us to examine the unpleasant issues of American militarism and the social consequences of capitalism.

Most hagiographies of King leave a gap between 1965 and 1968, his most radical period. It was during this time that he stridently denounced the current form of capitalism, advocating redistribution of wealth not only on the basis of race, in the form of hiring quotas and reparations for slavery, but on the basis of economic class. Had King lived through the 70s and 80s, he would have been scarcely different in his politics from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton; in fact, he probably would have stood to the left of them.

King spoke powerfully against U.S. militarism, calling his government the world’s biggest purveyor of violence. His speech “Beyond Vietnam” was widely scorned as sympathizing with Communism, a common accusation against those with insufficient nationalist bloodlust.

Contrary to popular perception, King was not of the Christian faith in any traditional sense. In his collegiate writings, he denied the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection of Christ. As St. Paul said, “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” King’s Christianity was hollow as a religion; he followed Christ only in matters of ethics, and even then very selectively. By his own confession, he pursued ministry only as a means to preach his social gospel.

If we were to judge King “by the content of his character”, we should find alongside his saintly commitment to non-violence some evils that cannot be dismissed as mere lapses of judgment. His insatiable adulterous appetites were so perverse, that even the philanderous Lyndon Johnson was shocked by the “hypocritical preacher.” While the full details of his carnal sins will not be known until FBI tapes are unsealed in 2027, we already have ample evidence of another dimension of his deep dishonesty, in the form of systematic plagiarism. His doctoral thesis contained entire pages of verbatim copying; this egregious violation of academic ethics would have resulted in a revocation of the degree if we were speaking of anyone else. Plagiarism remained a lifelong habit, and numerous writings and speeches, including the famous “I have a dream” speech, were systematically plagiarized, far beyond the innocent uncited paraphrase.

Despite these personal failings, King’s message of human dignity, racial equality, and non-violence does not lose any of its luster. Even if historical reality compels us to move beyond the false idol of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was really neither a reverend nor a doctor, nor a particularly honest man, we will nonetheless find in his works, original or otherwise, ideas that challenge the legitimacy of our social structure, and force us to address questions far more disturbing than the innocuous banalities that greet us each January.