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St. Ignatius of Antioch, Ora pro nobis.
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You maniac! You're blowing up! Ah, save you. God save you from hell!!! Robert Sungenis recently wrote an article entitled, "I'm mad, and I'm not going to take it anymore" in response to my previous defense of Roy Schoeman against his scurrilous charges. One wonders how incredibly angry Sungenis must be if he feels the need to draw attention to the special intensity of his anger at present, given that he has been quite mad for a very, very long time. In fact, for one who has read some of the nastygrams he has been periodically sending to Michael Forrest and David Palm for the past several months, it is hard to imagine how someone could make him even angrier. But apparently I have managed, as Sungenis now announces to anyone who will listen that I have made him especially angry. Moreover, unfortunately, I suppose the present essay will make him even angrier. Sungenis begins his response by claiming that I exploited a private e-mail of his concerning a sensitive subject, when I made it publicly known that he had inquired whether I had Jewish ancestry. However, this is a rather silly argument, since the reason he wanted to know whether I had Jewish ancestry is so that he could call my objectivity into question, and publicly suggest that I was letting my family bias cloud my judgment and compete with Catholic truth for the loyalty of my heart. In this very essay, he publicly, openly states that the reason people like Jim Scott IV, Sandra Miesel, and Bill Cork are so critical of him is because they have Jewish family relations, and therefore have a conflict of interest between their Jewish heritage and their Catholicism. He has also openly suggested that the reason Michael Forrest, David Palm, and Jacob Michael have attacked him is because they might have Jewish ancestry. So, I have every reason to believe that, had I answered Sungenis' inquiry in the affirmative, he would have exploited his newfound knowledge publicly. He would be able to claim that I was putting tribal loyalty ahead of the Tradition of the Church, represented of course by Sungenis himself. For that matter, this is not the only reason it is silly of Sungenis to fault me for publishing his private correspondence: later in this essay he does the exact same thing to me. And this is not the first time he has published my private correspondence against my will and over my objections. Incidentally, Sungenis is even wildly wrong about Scott, Miesel, and Cork. Jim Scott IV is half Italian, a quarter English, and a quarter Scottish. He is a cradle Catholic, not a convert. His wife is entirely Italian and also born and raised a Catholic. Sandra Miesel does have significant Jewish ancestry, but she is not a convert either. Again, she is a cradle Catholic. Lastly, Bill Cork's wife has a grandmother surnamed Levi, but her last ancestor who was Jewish by religion was baptized in 1758. None of these people are converts from Judaism, and only one has significant Jewish heritage. Sungenis also faults me for using a harsh tone with him, and not phrasing my thoughts in a more discrete and inoffensive manner. However, the passion of ire is supposed to be aroused when one sees justice being violated (cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, par. II-II, q. 158, art. 8). If Sungenis detects ire in my writing, that is because I am irate, and it would be a "vice" if I were not so. Next, Sungenis tries once again to claim that he is the innocent prophet who is merely pointing out the theological errors of Judaism and the Talmud, and that his critics are just berating him because they don't want to admit that the Talmud is blasphemous and anti-Christian. This is manifestly not the case. Jim Scott IV admits that the Talmud contains several blasphemous statements against Our Lord and Our Lady. For that matter, Roy Schoeman points some of these out on pp. 132-134 of Salvation is from the Jews. What these people object to most strongly is the way Sungenis has uncritically latched onto (and regurgitated on his website) every salacious claim he could find on the internet or in print about Talmudic iniquity. This is part of a pattern of Robert's deep-seated bias, animus, and suspicion against anything and anyone Jewish, and too-eager willingness to believe and to repeat anything evil he reads of them. In fact much of what he has posted on his website about the Talmud is false. What he has done is akin to spreading around the accusation that Bill Clinton strangled his second child; that Bill Clinton has done a number of quite evil things for which he may legitimately be criticized by no means justifies propagating such unfounded claims. Calumny is calumny, whether its victim is Christ or Balaam. It is sinful to propagate falsities about the Talmud regardless whether it is an anti-Christian document, and legitimately awful in other ways as well. Sungenis has exhibited none of the due devotion to fairness and charity in his attacks on the Talmud. In fact, I'm not even sure he has actually spent any significant amount of time reading the Talmud. That is certainly the impression he has given me in all our voluminous correspondence. On occasion he also gives public expression to extreme ignorance of Judaism, such as in his recent response to Michael Forrest in which he suggests that if Forrest wants to know the real scoop about the Jews, he ought to "read the Talmud, the Kabbalah, the Zohar and other such Jewish literature..." Of course, Kabbalah is not a book; it is an ideology. The Zohar is a book of Kabbalah. Thus, to someone who knows what he is talking about, Sungenis' statement above sounds about as goofy as saying "people who want to know what Christians believe should read the Bible, Lutheranism, the Augsburg Confession, and other such Christian literature." Furthermore, Sungenis' criticisms of the Talmud have always relied entirely on secondary or tertiary sources. For example, back in 2002 he plagiarized 4 pages from a book on the Talmud by Jack Mohr. He has also repeatedly imbibed and regurgitated salacious little tracts on the Talmud by Ted Pike and Michael Hoffman II. It is not difficult to demonstrate that these men are exegetically incompetent, and that their critiques of the Talmud consist in large part of tendentious, agenda-driven interpretations of passages which they do not understand. I told Sungenis repeatedly not to use these men, and showed him instances of their blatant falsity. For example, in Ted Pike's article "The Talmud: Wellspring of Jewish Pornography Industry" he claims that the Talmud teaches that Jews are exempt from punishment for sodomizing a beast (Sanhedrin 55a). However, this is merely the expressed opinion of one rabbi, and the Talmud immediately rejects his opinion by quoting a Baraita to the effect that bestiality is forbidden by means of any orifice. Granted, it does not reflect well on the Talmud that its sages seriously debated such strange opinions at all, but nevertheless it is still slanderous to attribute this position to the Talmud. Similarly, Michael Hoffman II claims that in Sanhedrin 74B the Talmud teaches that Gentiles are non-human animals. As Sungenis regurgitated the charge: "Gentiles were considered 'non-human' and 'animals' (Sanhedrin 74b, Yebamoth 98a), and 'the best of them should be killed' (Abhodah Zarah 26b)." However, Sanhedrin 74a says nothing of the sort. The passage is talking about the distinction between public and private acts. In private, there are only three sins a Jew is supposed to refuse even under pain of death (idolatry, forbidden sexual relations, and murder). In public, on the other hand, a Jew is supposed to die rather than consent to anything a Gentile wants him to do, if the Gentile's intent is specifically to make him violate or appear to violate his religion (e.g. tie his shoes in front of an idol, cut grass on the sabbath). The sages define "public" as being in the presence of at least 10 Jews. The reason the 10 people must be Jews is supposedly because of Lev 22:32, which says "My name will be sanctified among the children of Israel." The rabbis conclude that it is unacceptable to have God's name profaned in the presence of 10 Jews, but it is acceptable to have God's name profaned (e.g. by a Jew tying his shoes in front of an idol, thus appearing to bow to it) if only Gentiles and maybe a few Jews can see it. Or, at least it is acceptable when the only alternative is death. This is why the rabbis say that the 10 people quorum for a "public" act must be Jewish, not because Gentiles are not human, as Hoffman concludes. The Talmud's point is that it is worse to cause scandal in the presence of Jews than in the presence of Gentiles; this passage is far from claiming that goyim are "animals." To use this passage as Hoffman has, and Sungenis has quoted him, is wildly slanderous. The fact of the matter is that there is not a single clear, unambiguous passage in the Talmud which teaches that Gentiles are sub-humans, and in fact there are many which express or seem to express the contrary idea. Incidentally, after much belabored argumentation, I did finally convince Sungenis to stop using Pike. The way I did it was I sent Pike an e-mail taking him to task for his affiliation with National Vanguard, which is a neo-pagan, naturalistic, pseudo-scientific racist organization. Pike never responded, so that finally convinced Sungenis that he should not be trusted. On the other hand, in spite of all my remonstrations, Sungenis is still an avid reader and propagator of Hoffman. While we are on the subject of Sungenis' propensity to uncritically imbibe salacious material on Judaism, it is worthwhile to note that in 2002, in addition to copy-pasting Mohr, he also plagiarized from a Nazi propaganda tract (about a third of the way down the page) by Dr. Robert Ley, Labor Minister for the third Reich, about Roosevelt's Jewish ancestry. He didn't know that it was a Nazi propaganda tract at the time, and only found this out later, much to his embarrassment and chagrin. So, he is indeed correct in denying that he deliberately plagiarized a Nazi propaganda tract. But that's not really the point. Neither is it relevant to the present point whether some of what Dr. Ley was saying might be factual. The point is that Sungenis regurgitates denigrating claims which he finds about Jews and Judaism, without first making sure they are accurate. He just found something salacious about Jews on the Calvin College website, so he copy-pasted it without attribution, without fact-checking, and without even knowing who wrote it. Following the same pattern, more recently Robert copy-pasted two articles without attribution from National Vanguard, which as noted above is in fact racist in the strictest, biological definition of the term (though for what it's worth, once again Robert did not know who wrote these articles; he just passed them along after someone e-mailed them to him). National Vanguard wants to kick all the blacks and Jews out of America, and even turns eugenics into a religion, advocating a secular apotheosis through the manipulation of DNA. And I don't think Robert even read one of these articles completely before he posted it, since the headline he slapped on it contradicted the contents of the article (Robert called it, "Jerry Falwell says Jews don't need to believe in Christ," but the article was about how 2 prominent figures claimed Falwell said this, but Falwell himself denied it). I prodded Sungenis to take these articles down; I sent him a note objecting to the way one of them talked about White people a capital W, which is a red flag and usually indicates a white supremacist author. Robert let Jason Corsetti take out the word "White", but left the article up. I also copied Robert on an e-mail to Stephan Trottel acknowledging that NV was a racist source. What it took to finally get these articles to come down was Matt Anger publicly taking Sungenis to task, and me sending him a long, belabored e-mail arguing why he shouldn't be uncritically regurgitating articles by racists. Yet more, Sungenis has obstinately defended the use of fraudulent quotes of Albert Einstein and Roy Schoeman (though he eventually gave in over the Schoeman quote). And similar to the incident with the National Vanguard articles, he recently posted an article by Israel Shamir without even reading the whole thing. Again, much to his embarrassment and chagrin, it turned out that the article expressed racist and Marcionite ideas. It did not belong on a Catholic website. Finally, just this month, Sungenis saw fit to take another cheap, slanderous swipe at Jews by posting an article about James Cameron's documentary "The Lost Tomb of Christ," and calling it "Jewish Scholars Claim They Found Christ's Bones." The only problem is that, in this article, no Jewish scholars claim they found Christ's bones; rather, every scholar cited in the article belittles the idea. But to return to Sungenis' present article, he next says of Bill Cork that he "claimed I would have put his kids in a gas chamber!" Having read Cork's article, he says nothing of the sort. He warns against the dangers of anti-Semitism in general, and persecutions against Jews throughout history. He does specifically mention the Holocaust and the Nazis, but he does not say that Sungenis would take part in their murder of Jews, merely that he expresses ideas which have led to this and other persecutions. (Mind you, I'm not endorsing what Cork said, merely pointing out that Sungenis has blatantly misrepresented it.) In summary, it is false for Sungenis to claim that Scott, Miesel, and Cork are merely reacting hysterically out of a deep-seated allegiance to their Jewish ancestry. Continuing on, Sungenis claims that Michael Forrest, Jacob Michael, David Palm, and Mark Shea have an overweening bias towards Jews and Israel which they have imported from their Protestant Zionist backgrounds, and that this bias renders them incapable of rationally and objectively criticizing Jewish errors, or tolerating Sungenis' allegedly rational and objective writings on this theme. He goes so far as to say "most of them have never published a criticism of the Jews, Zionism, modern Judaism, the Talmud or the Kabbalah." A few facts render this accusation quite silly: Michael Forrest thinks the Antichrist will be a Jew, and he told me something in private which would really put him in the Anti-Defamation League's dog house. Further, he has published two articles, which Sungenis has kept up at CAI against his will, criticizing Jews. Next, Jacob Michael says in his book Never Revoked by God that he thinks the beast of the Apocalypse is institutional Judaism. Next, during the recent war in Lebanon, Mark Shea favorably quoted Pat Buchanan accusing Israel of war crimes, and took neoconservative warmongers like Rod Dreher to task over their rejection of Catholic just war doctrine. And lastly, all of the men whom Sungenis mentions have reacted favorably to my review of Salvation is from the Jews and my previous defense of Schoeman, both of which essays express ideas which would make me an anti-Semite according to the ADL, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and quite possibly the Bush administration. In the eyes of Abraham Foxman, we're all anti-Semites here. Sungenis goes on to emphatically deny the charge of anti-Semitism. Let me say up front that Sungenis is not an anti-Semite in the strictest, biological sense of the term, such that he will claim there is something wrong with Jewish chromosomes which causes the Jews to be degenerate. Sungenis' anti-Semitism is not that principled, rational, and explicitly, consciously articulated. Neither do I think Sungenis hates the Jews in a sense exclusive of a Christian love which wills their conversion, sanctification and salvation. But in the sense I have articulated above, namely that Sungenis has a deep-seated and irrational bias, animus, and suspicion against anything and anyone Jewish, and a too-eager willingness to believe and to repeat anything evil he reads or hears of them, I think it is fair to say that he is materially anti-Semitic. (I do not accuse him of being culpable for anti-Semitism because I am unsure of his mental health.) Next, Sungenis refers to his enemies as a bunch of "Jewish critics and Neo-conservative patriots." Again, a few facts stand in the way of Sungenis' charge, namely, of all the people he has mentioned, only one of them is even ethnically Jewish, and few if any could possibly qualify as neoconservatives. And personally, I would think that I have sufficiently established my anti-neocon credentials with a subscription to New Oxford Review, a publication in Culture Wars, and the following sonnet entitled "Neoconservatism": Hark, ye blinded fools, I bring you freedom So, it is absurd for Sungenis to claim that his critics are just pursuing a smear campaign against him and trying to destroy him in order to remove the obstacle he poses to their Judaizing agenda. I for one think that Judaizing is a serious problem in today's Church, and hope to be an effective opponent of it. The reason I don't want Sungenis writing about Jews and Judaism is not because I oppose any and all criticism of them, but because after such and so many egregious violations of justice and charity, Sungenis has disqualified himself from engaging these issues. He ought to go back to the deal I proposed to him when Michael Forrest first published "Sungenis and the Jews": back off of these issues and let me handle them. Because right now, he is gravely damaging the credibility of the cause of opposition to Judaizing; to recuse himself from these issues is by far the best thing that he could do for it. Also, based on my experience over the past several months, I'd like to add a further stipulation to the deal: Robert, see a Catholic psychiatrist. I hear nothing but good things about Fr. Tom Acklin (my spiritual director's spiritual director). Moving on, what follows is one of the strangest and most paranoid things that Sungenis has ever said: The above Jewish critics and Neo-conservative patriots seek for nothing less than to get me entirely out the way so that they can proceed with their agenda. Sandra Miesel was bold enough to say it in her above email, and Mark Shea wrote an email to me a few months ago demanding that I get out of Catholic apologetics. In other words, they want to kill me. If they can’t do it physically, then they will do so spiritually... First off, Shea did not demand that Sungenis get out of apologetics. He told Sungenis to temporarily recuse himself, get spiritual direction, and get a formal theological education from a Catholic institution. Second, Bob, no one wants to kill you. For all of Shea's faults and erroneous ideas (some of which I have argued with him about), his recent correspondence with you was a model of Christian charity. He was kind and compassionate even in the face of your cheap insults about his weight. There is a tremendous willingness to forgive you and welcome you back in the whole Catholic apologetics community. When you wrote your "Open Letter" and people still thought you planned on abiding by it, reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Steve Ray wrote a post on his blog entitled "Welcome Back Bob!" and Bill Cork took down his article "Anti-Semitism and the Catholic Right." If you exhibit genuine repentance and make real reparation, Catholics will accept it. They will even let you disagree with them about important issues without this destroying fraternal fellowship. Sungenis continues with more expressions of paranoia about people wanting to kill him, his words now clearly evincing a serious messiah complex: The Jews did the same thing to all the prophets God sent them. They were notorious for that (Matthew 23:37). Why would they not try to do the same to me? Fortunately, my faith in God is great, and He has seen me through even worse trials than this. In fact, I believe he has been preparing me my whole life for this very moment. Along the same theme of exalting the immensity of his own virtues, Sungenis has also claimed that he loves the Jews as much as St. Paul (Q&A; 64, October 2006). Sorry, but there are only five people who have ever loved the Jews as much as St. Paul, and their names are Jesus, Mary, Joseph, John the Baptist, and Peter. Robert Sungenis doesn't even come close. Next, Sungenis goes on to propose to his readers a "you are either with me or you are against me" type decision, and implies that one's role in the drama of the eschaton will revolve around whether one sides with his critics or with him. His incredible words must be quoted at length: Today, my friends, you are going to have to make a decision. Either you follow my critics and their belief that the Jews are still God’s chosen people; that they have a special “charism” that others don’t have; that they have their own covenant with God, the Old Covenant; that the nation of Israel and the Israeli army is a God-ordained, God-favored fulfillment of prophecy; that Arabs are evil troublemakers from bad seed; that the Talmud is not so bad after all; that Jewish festivals and rites should be re-instituted for Jews and Jewish converts; that, as even many of our top cardinals have stated, the Jews don’t even need Christianity any longer in order to reach heaven; and, finally, that Robert Sungenis is a nut and an anti-semite for going against any of this; OR, you will believe me when I tell you, with the rest of the voice from the tradition of the Church, that the Jews will seek to take over and/or thoroughly weaken the Catholic religion, and perhaps someday be strong enough to place one of their own as its leader. I believe that those who follow the present trend are being deceived by the devil like he has never deceived before. I believe that he is coming as an “angel of light” (2Cor 11:14) and that he will lead many people into apostasy (2Thess 2:3) and that he will come with “power, signs and false wonders” (including being able to speak with heaven), and that he will lead the whole world astray. I believe that is happening right now and it will progress over the next few years to the point that it will become recognizable to all those who are seeking the truth, and I believe that, among other entities, various Jews and various strains of Jewish influence (Judaism, Zionism, corporate media, etc.) are being used by the devil to accomplish this goal. I believe the time will come when it will be almost impossible to escape this onslaught, and anyone who speaks out against it will be summarily silenced by any means possible (John 16:2; Apoc 11:7-9). A few reactions to these extraordinary words:
With that, leave we this discussion of Sungenis' introduction! Sungenis begins his rebuttal by stating, "The Catholic Church has been going on now for two-thousand years, and no pope, council, saint, doctor or theologian has ever suggested that there be a 'Jewish rite of Catholicism,' much less allow one to be incorporated into the Church." He completely ignores the fact that one existed in the early Church: the Church of the circumcision, headed by St. James and his successors (cf. Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, Book IV, Ch. 5). As I said before, I believe it would be imprudent to resurrect a unique particular Church for Jewish Catholics; I believe it would cause confusion. However, there is nothing intrinsically evil or impossible about the endeavor. The salvific importance of Jewish rituals and laws may have ended with Christ. However, the Jews continue to exist as an ethnic group, and in the Catholic Church, a great number of ethnic groups are represented by their own particular churches: Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Russians, Ethiopians, Copts, Armenians, and Romanians, among others. Sungenis marshals Galatians 3:28 in support of his contention that Jews may no longer have any distinct identity marker. However, I think his previous interpretation is much more plausible: all St. Paul is saying is that salvation is equally open to all. He is not excluding unique corporate identities within the Church for Jews or any other ethnicity for that matter. Sungenis also marshals St. Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Florence in support, which at least are dealing with observance of Jewish rituals. But it is doubtful whether their condemnations would apply to the thoroughly baptized version of the Seder meal which Schoeman practices. As I said before (and this is something else which Sungenis completely ignored), Schoeman drastically altered his Seder supper by adding lengthy quotations from the New Testament and repeated and explicit references to the Trinity, Christ, the Passion, and the sacrifice of the Mass. He has not merely slapped a new label onto the pre-existing Jewish ritual, as Sungenis claims. Moreover, Pope Benedict XIV explicitly teaches (Ex Quo, 74) that it is lawful to observe certain Old Testament ceremonial rites, so long as they are observed not as obligations of the old Law, but solely as a matter of custom or personal decision: But others remarked wisely that some, surely, of the ceremonial rites of the old Law could be observed under the new Law if only they were not done as obligations of the old Law, which was abrogated, but as a custom, or lawful tradition, or as a new precept issued by one enjoying the recognized and competent authority to make laws and to enforce them, as Vasquez observes (vol. 3, in the 3rd part of the Summa, disp. 210, quest. 80, art. 7). Pope Benedict XIV even repudiates, by name, Sungenis' charge that Schoeman is judaizing. He favorably quotes Leo Allatius as follows (Ibid., 67): If a man should perform acts for a different end and purpose (even with the intention of worship and as religious ceremonies), not in the spirit of that Law nor on the basis of it, but either from personal decision, from human custom, or on the instruction of the Church, he would not sin, nor could he be said to judaize. So when a man does something in the Church which resembles the ceremonies of the old Law, he must not always be said to judaize. Continuing on, Sungenis takes vehement exception to Schoeman's statement that the Jews have a blessing by nature which remains with them "despite their lack of faith in Christ." Indeed, he has repeatedly insisted that this amounts to Jewish racism in religious garb. But as Mark Shea has tried to point out to Robert, it is only another way of saying that the Jews are beloved of God for the sake of the patriarchs (Rom 11:28). The Jews remain the natural, cultivated branches of the good olive tree (Rom 11:21), even when they are cut off from it. Therefore it is especially natural and fitting that they should be grafted back into their own olive tree, unlike Gentiles for whom it is "contrary to nature" to be ingrafted into the good olive tree (Rom 11:24). Now, a while ago Sungenis let me say this exact thing on his Q&A; board, and he never accused me of being a Jewish racist. His present behavior is simply absurd. He even told Shea to "go back to school" for not understanding that only the "elect" of the Jews are "beloved" for the sake of the patriarchs, not unbelieving Jews. But the immediate context of this passage makes it clear that St. Paul is referring precisely to unbelieving Jews: "As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies on your account; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs" (Rom 11:28, NASB). Clearly, Christian Jews are not our enemies as far as the gospel is concerned. Therefore this passage is about unbelieving Jews. Incidentally, readers may find the exact same interpretation in the Haydock Bible, which Sungenis has described as the best Catholic commentary currently on the market: Ver. 28. According to the gospel, indeed, they are enemies for your sake. That is, enemies both to you, because they see the gospel preached and received by you, and enemies of God, because he has rejected them at present for their wilful blindness: yet according to election, God having once made them his elect, and because of their forefathers, the patriarchs, they are most dear for the sake of the fathers: for the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance, in as much as God is unchangeable, and his promises, made absolutely, cannot fail. (Witham) Perhaps Sungenis will tell the venerable traditional exegetes Witham and Haydock to "go back to school." As should be clear, he is the one who has committed an immense and obvious exegetical blunder. Though I do not say he should go back to school to learn exegesis, since his problem here is deeply psychological and spiritual, and no amount of learning will fix it. On this same theme of exegetical blindness when the subject is Jews, Sungenis has tried to use two passages from St. Augustine to prove that the olive tree of Romans 11 is Christ and not Israel. Incredibly, not only did these passages not deny that the olive tree is Israel, they both explicitly affirmed it! They appeared in Chris Campbell's original review of Jacob Prasch's website, which I heavily edited. Campbell confirmed that it was Sungenis who gave him these quotes. I will simply repeat here what I told Sungenis in private a few months ago: Come, then, and be grafted into the root of the olive tree, in his return to which the apostle rejoices, after by unbelief he had been among the broken branches. He speaks of himself as set free, when he made the happy transition from Judaism to Christianity. For Christ was always preached in the olive tree, and those who did not believe on Him when He came were broken off, while those who believed were grafted in. These are thus warned against pride: "Be not high-minded, but fear; for if God spared not the natural branches, neither will He spare thee." And to prevent despair of those broken off, he adds: "And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be grafted in; for God is able to graft them in again. For if thou weft cut out of the olive tree, which is wild by nature, and were grafted contrary to nature into a good olive tree, how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree." The apostle rejoices in being delivered from the condition of a broken branch, and in being restored to the fatness of the olive tree. So you who have been broken off by error should return and be grafted in again. Those who are still in the wild olive should separate themselves from its barrenness, and become partakers of fertility. (Augustine to Faustus the Manichean, Bk 9 2) Since when has Robert Sungenis, erudite Catholic apologist and terror to Protestants who misrepresent the Church Fathers, ever been so sloppy as to take two passages, interpret them in a sense opposite to the true one, and ignore clear statements in the immediate vicinity of those texts which clearly refute his interpretation? I mean how much more obvious does it get? St. Augustine says that the olive tree is "the holy stock of the Hebrews" and "that people founded by the Patriarchs", that is to say Israel. These words are right next to the words which Sungenis quotes in order to refute to so-called "Zionist interpretation" (Chris Campbell's words, probably taken from conversations with Sungenis), that the olive tree means Israel! In a similar vein, why does Sungenis accuse Schoeman of contradicting the Fathers, who applied to the Church many of the prophecies which Schoeman applies to national Israel? Where does Schoeman ever say that the Fathers were in "error" by applying these prophecies to the Church, as Sungenis claims he says (with quotation marks, mind you)? Since when did Robert Sungenis forget that the same prophecy can have multiple applications, and that two different expositions of the same prophecy might not be contradictory but complimentary? The fact of the matter is that Schoeman never says that the Fathers were wrong to apply these passages to the Church. On the contrary, I'd be willing to bet he believes they were right. Moving on, Sungenis makes the laughable statement that Schoeman thinks that God has been basically done with the Gentiles since 1967. He bases this on the following passage: Jerusalem will return again to Jewish hands shortly before the Second Coming (Luke 21:24): "Jerusalem will be trodden down by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled." (A description of the Second Coming then follows in verses 25-28). Jerusalem was in the hands of Gentiles continuously from the fall of the Jewish nation in A.D. 70 until it was recaptured by the modern State of Israel in the 1967 war. (Salvation is from the Jews, p. 306) Clearly, when Schoeman says that the times of the Gentiles have been fulfilled, he means that the time for Gentiles to occupy Jerusalem is over. He in no way suggests, implies, or even leaves the impression that "God is basically done with the Gentiles as of 1967." What Sungenis is doing here is tendentious, agenda driven, slanderous eisegesis of Jewish texts of the kind practiced by Hoffman, Pike, and Duke. Moving on, Sungenis says that he never condoned Schoeman celebrating a Seder supper in his own home, stating "I merely said I wouldn’t bother him. There are a lot of undesirable things that Schoeman can do in his own home, but not things I would condone or practice myself, or that I think anyone else should practice." But if Schoeman's hyper-Judaizing is truly "one of the most pernicious and nefarious heresies the Church has ever faced", then shouldn't Robert be condemning it even if he pursues his practices only in the privacy of his own home? After all, Robert would never say that he wouldn't bother sodomites about their sodomy so long as they only sodomized each other in the privacy of their own homes. A little later, Sungenis takes Schoeman's very clear and intelligible passage, in which he explains his belief that Jewish Catholics will fulfill their role in salvation history by disappearing into the Church and not by preserving a unique corporate identity, and attempts to make it ambiguous and obtuse. But even if I were to grant to Sungenis that his interpretation is even possible, the fact remains that Catholics are supposed to interpret their brothers' statements as charitably and positively as possible. Sungenis sees fit rather to interpret Schoeman's statements as heretically as possible. This is entirely un-Christian of him. Continuing this tedious and exhausting study of Robert's screed, he claims at one point that Popes Innocent III and Martin V said that only a remnant of the Jews will be saved in the end times. He takes this to mean that these Popes did not believe there would be a mass conversion, but merely that a fraction of the Jews alive at the end of the world would be saved. This is evident from what he wrote in The Latin Mass in response to Schoeman's letter to the editor: "several popes did not expect it to happen" (The Latin Mass, Winter 2006, p. 5). Odd, it appears that Sungenis has decreased his number from several to two. In any case, the statements of Innocent III and Martin V could more naturally be taken as endorsing the mainstream, patristic view in favor of the mass conversion. By "remnant" they could very well mean those Jews alive in the end times, out of the subset of all Jews through all of history. Let's take a look at the texts themselves:
Innocent III, by his formula "the remnants" clearly seems to be stating that whatever Jews are still alive in the last days will be saved. Martin V could easily be taken in the same sense. How has expert textual exegete Robert Sungenis missed this? I will defer the task of refuting Sungenis' treatment of the Church Fathers, as well as answering his exegetical challenge on Romans 11, to a future project. Moving on, Sungenis makes another silly claim when he says that Pius XII tried to "put the clamps" on Catholic belief in the mass conversion of Jews in the end times. Predictably, no actual quote from Pius XII is provided. Let's move on again. Next, Sungenis refuses to let Schoeman interpret his own words, and insists once again that on page 352 of Salvation is from the Jews Schoeman must be rejecting Tradition's teaching that the New Covenant replaced the Old. Given that elsewhere in his book Schoeman explicitly states that the New Covenant did replace the Old Covenant, one wonders why Sungenis is not more open to the possibility that his interpretation is wrong. Anyway, at the risk of sounding repetitious, I will try to explain this again: when Schoeman said that it is an error to say that the New Covenant made the Old Covenant completely null and void, he meant that it is an error to say that the people of the Old Covenant, that is, fleshly Israel, has been replaced such that it no longer has any special role to play in salvation history. This is a perfectly orthodox statement, because it is an error to suppose that the Jews no longer have any special role to play in salvation history. Move we on again. Let us address the issue of the reinstitution of the Jerusalem Temple, the most egregious example of Sungenis' calumny against Schoeman. He states the following: "What is really amazing is watching Mr. Douglass do his two-step over this issue, and then pretend that he never did." Sungenis' behavior here is absolutely infuriating, un-Catholic, and execrable. He just keeps obstinately repeating an error I have probably corrected him over a half dozen times by now. The e-mail record is clear enough. Ever since I received Schoeman's messages telling me that he did not look forward to the return of the Jerusalem Temple and its cult of animal sacrifice as good things positively willed and blessed by God, I have insisted that Robert cease to attribute this heretical belief to him. I have found it utterly indefensible that Sungenis has obstinately continued to do so, and even implied that Schoeman is lying when he affirms the contrary. At the same time, I have always been open to the possibility that Schoeman is inconsistent, and constructs a premise from which this heretical conclusion necessarily, logically follows, without having realized the full implications of what he was saying. In that case, I have repeatedly informed Robert, the proper criticism of Schoeman is that is that he is inconsistent and constructs a dangerous premise. It is not to obstinately and repeatedly claim, in the face of his explicit denials, that he really does hold to the heretical conclusion. This is something I sent Sungenis several e-mails about even before that e-mail of January 15 which he quotes, in which I come to the conclusion that Schoeman is in fact inconsistent.
Then came my e-mail of January 15. On that day, basically, my position shifted from this: (1) Schoeman does not believe that reinstituted Temple worship could be licit after the sacrifice of Christ. He might construct a premise which implies the contrary proposition. If so, he is inconsistent and might unwittingly lead someone to this conclusion which he himself rejects. To this: (2) Schoeman does not believe that reinstituted Temple worship could be licit after the sacrifice of Christ. He constructs a premise which implies the contrary proposition. Therefore he is inconsistent and might unwittingly lead someone to this conclusion which he himself rejects. That Sungenis continues to call this a 180 degree turn even after I've explained the consistency to him so many times is utterly flabbergasting. Everyone else I've talked to about this issue, e.g., E. Michael Jones, has understood my distinctions immediately, so I'm pretty sure I'm not all alone in thinking they are obvious. I even tried to explain this to Sungenis two more times after the e-mail of January 15.
Sungenis just can't seem to wrap his brain around this. He is clearly not properly exercising the faculty of reason. Whether this is due to impairment or simply unwillingness I do not know. In either case, he needs help. Sungenis goes on to state, "[S]ince Mr. Schoeman’s private emails deny what Mr. Schoeman put in his book, then Mr. Schoeman is required to make a public retraction and revision of what he wrote in his book." But Schoeman's e-mails do not deny what he put in the book. Schoeman has not denied what he put in his book because he does not see the logical inference which connects the speculation in his book to the heretical conclusion which he rejects. If someone makes him see this inference, then perhaps he will publicly admit that he made a mistake. But given that he has a wildly calumnious Alexander the Coppersmith breathing down his neck, it is quite understandable why he might be hesitant to make this admission. When I imagine what Sungenis' reaction would be to such a retraction, I am disgusted by it. A while later on, Sungenis states, "I have never, and will never, classify Jews according to their race." The problem with this claim is that in the original version of his review of Mark Shea's article "Devil Talk," Sungenis stated, "John 8:44 has historically been directed to Jews as a race of people." That is to say, Jews as a race are children of the devil. It was only after I objected to this statement that he changed it to "Jews as a distinctively ideological group of people." Still later, Sungenis faults me for having a mistaken recollection of his conversion story. But as I admitted I was going based on memory, and even if I was wrong about certain things, my point about judging a tree (i.e., a supernatural occurrence) by its fruits remains. The fruit of Schoeman's encounter with Our Lady is good: a zealous Catholic evangelist. Therefore I have every reason to believe that it was genuine. I never claimed that Schoeman derived some of his more unique theological and eschatological beliefs from that encounter; Schoeman himself has never claimed this. On the contrary, Schoeman makes it abundantly clear in his book that he is proposing tentative and speculative ideas. They come from Schoeman's intellect; Catholics are under no obligation to believe them and may even freely discuss and dispute them. The only qualification is that that discussion must take place according to truth, justice, and charity. Next, Sungenis "quotes" me as saying I agree that there is "anti-Arab racism" in Schoeman's political views. The only problem here is that I have never said that. Sungenis really needs to learn to stop putting his own tendentious paraphrases of other peoples' words in quotation marks as if they were their ipsissima verba. This is a nasty habit, and it keeps getting him in trouble. For example, in this instance, Sungenis' "quote" is blatantly false. I do not agree to it at all. Sungenis dives deeper into the realms of the incomprehensible when he accuses Schoeman of attempting a "perverse resurrection of Talmudic Judaism" when he spends pages 111-132 of Salvation is from the Jews talking about the Messiah in the Talmud. Oy Vey. Sungenis has reached a new low in scurrilous, slanderous charges, because what Schoeman does on these pages is eminently traditional. Schoeman quotes the Talmud as saying: (1) The Messiah was supposed to have come around 0 A.D. but didn't. (2) God stopped accepting Jewish animal sacrifice in the Jerusalem Temple around the year 30 A.D. (3) God destroyed the Jerusalem Temple because the Jews hated someone without a cause. (4) The Jews expected a suffering servant Messiah who would fulfill the prophecy of Zechariah 12:10. These facts are immensely valuable, because they are devastating to Jewish anti-missionary apologetics. What Schoeman has done is similar to the approach of the great medieval Dominican Hebraist Raymund Martini, whose work Pugio Fidei Adversus Mauros et Iudaeos was for a long period of time the standard manual for Dominican missionaries to the Muslims and Jews. Martini quoted extensively from Jewish literature, because he recognized that it made certain admissions and preserved many old traditions which pointed to Christ. Like Schoeman, he culled these texts which point to Christ out of the large body of false teachings. Martini pulled the pearls out of the dung heap, to use his own terms; he documented that Jewish literature such as the Talmud unwittingly, even against its will, helps to demonstrate that Christ is the Messiah. E. Michael Jones articulated these principles quite well in his review of Schoeman's book ("Salvation and the Jews," Culture Wars, February 2004): Like Caiphas who spoke more truly than he knew when he said that it was better for one man to die than for the people to perish, the Talmud admits the central role of Jesus in salvation history in a number of significant if indirect ways. In order to ensure that the Temple sacrifice had been successful in expiating the sins of the Jews, the priests and rabbis would watch to make sure that a scarlet thread had turned white. Schoeman cites the Talmudic verse from Rosh Hashanah 31b, "For forty years before the destruction of the Temple the thread of scarlet never turned white but it remained red." According to Schoeman, the Talmud itself "unwittingly confirms" that the Temple sacrifices failed 40 years before the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD (i.e., at the time when Christ died and the veil covering the Holy of Holies was rent in two) when it "recounts that from that time on. . . the scarlet threat never again turned white." According to the Talmud, the Temple was destroyed "because therein prevailed hatred without a cause." From his vantage point as a Catholic, Schoeman can now see that the Talmud was referring in some mysterious way to Christ's own words in John 15:18-25: "They hated me without a cause." The Talmud, in other words, "is exhibiting a gift of prophecy, stating a profound truth that unknowingly confirms Jesus' identity as the Messiah, although unaware of that fact." Although suppressing that fact might have been a better formulation, but the point is clear enough. Augustine formulated the same truth in his own way: "Even those who set themselves up against you," he wrote in the Confessions, "do but copy you in a perverse way." Now, I for one would find it hilarious if Sungenis were to accuse Mike Jones of attempting a "perverse resurrection of Talmudic Judaism," because he is largely supportive of this section of Schoeman's book. Actually, Sungenis had better not say this because I think Jim Scott IV might die laughing. Moving along, Sungenis also faults Schoeman for publicizing his encounter with the Blessed Virgin Mary without episcopal approval. Here Sungenis is shooting from the hip, as he often does. It took me all of one e-mail to find out that Schoeman has the enthusiastic support of several bishops, and has been censured by none. Schoeman states:
Finally, to move backwards a bit in Sungenis' paper, he states "A few months ago Mr. Douglass even accused me of being the reason he wasn’t getting any engineering jobs from the applications he was sending out!" Well, my professors warned the graduating class that potential employers as a matter of course will google the names of their applicants in search of anything incriminating. They even gave us an article advising us to attempt to remove any drunken or otherwise compromising pictures of ourselves from the internet, because they would influence companies not to hire us. That's right, a drunken picture on facebook can cost one a job. Now, how much more damaging was my position as Vice President to a man widely regarded as a notorious anti-Semite? In fact, I went to a large number of interviews, and the persons I talked with regularly expressed the greatest enthusiasm in hiring me. One even offered to fly me to Texas to visit their offices. Yet, not surprisingly, this initial enthusiasm was repeatedly followed by dead silence. Clearly, these people were googling my name and deciding they wanted nothing to do with the Vice President of a right-wing hate group. I suppose it was too much for me to expect of Sungenis that he might care that he was potentially destroying my livelihood and ability to support a family. I should have expected his behavior, given that when Michael Forrest told him that he was going to discredit the cause of traditional marriage, his response was, "That's your problem." No Bob, the damage you have done to traditional Catholic faith and morality is everyone's problem. Repent and get help. I wish I could smoke that peace pipe with you, but there can be no reconciliation without contrition and reparation. Until then, all I can do is distance myself from you and try to contain the damage you have caused. To that end, I request that you remove my articles from CAI. I would like to make the same request on behalf of Michael Forrest, Jacob Michael, and Ed Snyder. Ben Douglass Appendix: How Sungenis Deals with Criticism
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Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, Ora pro nobis.
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