Traditionalist Catholic leader calls Jewish people ‘enemies of the Church’ - VIDEO

@Commonsence hist the nail right squarely on the head. "Mr. Felley does not speak for the Roman or any other Catholic Church."

Mr. Felley does not speak for the Roman or any other Catholic Church. To give his position on Jews space in an article implying he has standing in Catholicism is bad journalism. As a practicing Catholic I have always viewed the Jewish faith like an ancestor, to be respected. Our foundation is Jewish and our original leaders were Jewish, Christianity took a different path into the future, they are no better or worse for the choice of our founders, just different in their belief. Jews are our brothers and sisters, we may disagree on many things but we are still family. We may have a common foe, but Jews are not our enemy. Fellay is a fool!

Tom, I find the current tumult in Vatican politics sad because carrying out the reforms of Vatican II would have prevented many current problems. Most pitiful is that if popes had followed the Vatican II constitution to allow lay involvement in church organization, at least some of the sexual abuse cases could have been prevented and, in any case, the cover-up scandal would never have grown to the proportions it has reached. They say it takes a century to implement all of a Council's teachings. But with 50 years of rewriting Vatican II as "tradition" and "reforming the reform," reform hasn't really begun. I hope enough Catholics understand this history to see Fellay as representing the mistakes of the past that the Church should have learned to avoid. But power is so seductive and "authority" seems so essential!

eiriamach, thank you for the excellent summary. I did a refresher yesterday on Vatican I. Fascinating reading.

The context is important: Second Vatican Council was set up to change the direction of the Church after the excesses of First Vatican Council. First Vatican, 1868-70, was the Council that declared the pope may speak infallibly on questions of faith and morals. It gave him "full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church." It centralized decision-making in the Vatican. By mid-20th century, great opposition had arisen to papal supremacy. In order to win election, John F. Kennedy had rejected papal teaching against separation of church and state, and US Catholics agreed. Popes, however, don't renounce power easily in their dealings with governments. So Second Vatican Council, 1962-65, laid out ways for Catholics to have moral influence in the world without churchmen meddling directly in politics. It brought the bishops into decision-making and made the laity responsible for advocating Christian principles in secular life. It ended Catholic 'triumphalism' and emulated Protestant moral influence on politics. Aiming at restoring Christian unity, the Council apologized for past persecutions. The Church opened itself to new knowledge from science. However, since Vatican II, popes have rejected reproductive science (humane vitae) and waged culture war battles while demanding obedience from the laity to their political and social teachings. The US bishops, loyal foot soldiers in the war, demand political power in the form of control over US health policy -- in the name of "religious liberty"! And so the great debate about worldly authority over Christians (an oxymoron) continues with Fellay's critique of Benedict's refusal to reject Vatican II while following Vatican I.

IF Jesus came back today he would abolish the Catholic Church as a Pagan Religion and not his teachings The church of today is in Decay

For a rundown of Fellay's speech, if you don't wish to listen to the one-hour-40-minute video, see "Calling Jews 'enemies' is 'unacceptable,' Vatican spokesman says," By Carol Glatz at the Catholic News Service.

The problem of SSPX cannot be conjured away with word play, Smyrnian. Bishop Fellay is a consecrated bishop with many consecrated Roman Catholic priests and many (see the list at the SSPX web site) churches (one in Dublin and others in Ireland) and retreat centers and a publishing house and other Roman Catholic institutions, videos on YouTube, etc., etc. As Tom Swinford points out, "SSPX bishops previously excommunicated have been reinstated," including troublesome Bishop Williamson, who does deny that the Nazis conducted a full-scale "holocaust" of Jews. Has the SSPX finally become a problem for conservative Catholics as well as liberal/reform Catholics? If the SSPX is finally in official schism, then MANY other trad Catholic priestly communities are also in schism because they share SSPX's objections to VCII. But then RC is no longer "one, holy, Catholic and apostolic" as Catholics claim it to be when they scorn Protestants for having so many differently organized churches. The Lesson: you cannot suppress calls for reform or calls for return to the past; you must allow the dialogue and the ultimate decisions to be made by people with their bishops. The Holy Spirit doesn't like censorship.

The Pope does not recognize him. As such he is not a Roman Catholic.

Smyrnian, you're wrong. He and all the priests and bishops in SSPX are ROMAN Catholics. He is not Eastern, not Orthodox, and certainly not Anglican Catholic. He's a practicing ordained member of the Roman Catholic Church. Visit the SSPX web site; check it out.

Eireamach - be clear please. He is not a ROMAN Catholic. There are lots of "Catholics", including Roman Catholics of which he is not.

Besides, Fellay is an ordained bishop of the Catholic Church, and his priests are all ordained Catholic priests, "priests forever." Maybe some reform-minded folks would like to see the pope try to silence Fellay just as the pope has silenced Irish and German reform priests, removed liberal Vatican II theologians from universities, and excommunicated and defrocked reformers like Fr Bourgeois. But as liberal thinkers, the reformers are inclusive, they want to reignite debate, so they will not advocate censorship of anyone, even their most strident critics on the right. If the pope does not respond to Bishop Fellay's accusations, however, Vatican hypocrisy and far-right alignment will be obvious. If he does, he will alienate some of his traditionalist allies. ~~~~The anti-Semitism noted in the article's headline is nothing new: As a trad Catholic, Fellay is keeping alive the pre-Vatican II tradition of demonizing Jews for their 'deicide.' SSPX rejects Vatican II's Nostra Aetate, which acknowledged that Jews did not kill Christ, and it warned, "in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone."

According to Fellay's speech, Benedict XVI told him, "There are three points which you [SSPX] must accept to be recognized: ... the magisterium ... second, the [Second Vatican] Council is an integral part of tradition." Then Fellay comments, "Traditional! Imagine! During 40 years they themselves have said the contrary.... The third point, you must accept that the new Mass is valid and licit.... [The pope] wants to avoid a schism.... The problem is in Rome, not in us. The problem is that you have the Modernists who would like to finish the story of the Society with the condemnation.... This situation now is really blocked.... The traditional life has been made impossible in the Church.... laymen ... have a problem of conscience.... You must bring back tradition in the Church.... You cannot in the name of the faith oblige us to deny the reality.... the new Mass is bad ... leading souls into losing the faith.... It's clear; it's a fact.... this liturgy makes the priest lose faith in the Real Presence. In the Diocese of Sydney, 78% of the priests don't believe in the Real Presence ... because of the Mass.... Thousands and millions of souls get lost.... That's why we want the Church to get back to its tradition.... Those who are really sticking to the Council are ... those who are in power now." Fellay understands Vatican II and knows the pope is discarding its teachings. It's an interesting development because the pope cannot just tell Fellay to get lost; too many traditionalists agree with Fellay about Vatican II Council, and the reformers know that Fellay is right about the popes misrepresenting and changing the Council's teachings. Very interesting!

If you listen to his speech (the video), you'll see that Fellay is as Catholic as the pope. Fellay thinks the only way to save Catholicism is to return to the Latin Mass, to reject the inter-faith dialogue that Second Vatican Council called for, and to re-embrace "tradition." The irony is that the current pope has restored much tradition and broken off ecumenical dialogue, just as Fellay wants. But the pope cannot admit that he is violating Second Vatican Council, and Fellay is too thick to read the play book and just go along with the pope's back door way of restoring "tradition." In the video, Fellay claims the Vatican lied about his talks with them and changed the wording of his letters to make the SSPX position look "acceptable." He says that he'd get a letter from the CDF saying that something he wrote was not acceptable, and then the pope's secretary or other official would phone him to say that the pope really agreed with him, but couldn't allow criticisms of VC II in the written records. Of course the pope was disingenuous in calling his rollback of Vatican II reforms a "hermeneutic of continuity." A Latinate new Missal, traditional lavish vestments, censoring reform priests and forbidding them to teach or publish, prohibiting female altar servers, opposing civil laws protecting LGBT's and women's rights while protecting predatory priests -- all of that IS a rupture with Second Vatican Council, as many have said. Fellay couldn't catch on to the duplicity, so the Vatican rejected SSPX. The consummate irony is that it's the traditionalist SSPX, papal monarchists who worship papal authority, who are now on the outside criticizing the papacy! It must be so frustrating for Fellay.

Tom Swinford: I am not sure what is so hard to understand here. This group is NOT the RCC. It would be akin to arguing that because the FLDS (Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints) claim they are the true Mormons, then they are part of the mainstream LDS (Mormon) church. The only path towards reconciliation is for SSPX to reconcile with Rome. In any event, my original point was to suggest that IC, in their attempts to continue their anti-Catholic tirades, mistakenly thought this group was affiliated with Rome and therefore gladly used this crackpot’s utterances to further their agenda.