Over at InsideCatholic.com I celebrate Ash Wednesday by offering my own crackpot ideas on how to govern the Universal Church. Specifically, I address the recent scandal afflicting the Legionaries of Christ, and the prospects for reconciliation between the Latin Mass traditionalists of the Society of St. Pius X and the Vatican. Check it out….

I love this site. Thanks to the generosity of its namesake, it’s fully funded, and not going anyplace—unlike, as Richard noted with some delight, the likes of Culture11, or Pajamas Media. But there’s another site I love just as much and it’s in some danger: Antiwar.com. That site, which I’ve used as my personal home page for the past seven years, is suffering from the economy and from the delusional thinking afflicting some antiwar folks on the Left, which tells them that Great Father Obama will make all things well under heaven. Now that the Frat Boy in Chief has given way to Obama Christ Superstar (O-bama-hey, bama, bama, bama-ho! Bama-hey, bama-Ho-sanna!) there is nothing more to fear from the gi-normous war machine our declining country continues, incomprehensibly, to “fund.” (By borrowing from China.)

In fact, as his cabinet picks made clear, Obama had neither the means nor the will to challenge the Wall Street insiders who deregulated their own industry (under Clinton) in the name of the “free market,” and are now using the bayonets of the State to pay off their rotten debts. Likewise, Obama turned to the “centrists” (i.e., the left wing of the unitary War Party that runs America with only minimal, derisive dissent) to lead his imperial… oops, “foreign” policy.

Which means we need Antiwar.com now more than ever—just as we needed Pat Buchanan more than ever while Bush was squatting in the White House. Dissent from within the “same” political movement is effective in a different, perhaps more important way, than external attacks. So PLEASE, folks, open up your wallets and send something to Antiwar.com. I’ve already put my money where my mouth is: Apart from my local parish and a dog rescue shelter, Antiwar.com is one of the only charities to which I send money every month—handily deducted via credit card. I urge you all to sign up as regular donors ($10, $20 per month). For the price of a few cigars or copies of The Economist, you can help save American lives and liberty, and keep the scourge of unjust war off the next hapless nation targeted on the neocon’s Risk board.

I have returned. One month and 1,000 edited pages later, I’m back on the horse writing columns and it feels great. I’ll have something for this site tomorrow, but for now, check out my coverage of the recent, tragic news concerning the conservative, Mexican-founded order the Legionaries of Christ.

Andrew Bacevich displays his customary wisdom and civic-mindedness in his latest piece in Commonweal, pronouncing a post-mortem on the Colonel Blimps who’ve contributed most of the hot air inflating the War Party since 1989. As he aptly observes:

Ideas have consequences. Post-cold war triumphalism produced consequences that are nothing less than disastrous. Historians will remember the past two decades not as a unipolar moment, but as an interval in which America succumbed to excessive self-regard. That moment is now ending with our economy in shambles and our country facing the prospect of permanent war.

Don’t expect triumphalists to recant or apologize. Yet their time has passed. The Age of Triumphalism has ended. The Age of Muddling Through has commenced.

America, in short, stands where Great Britain stood circa 1932. Having poured its lifeblood and treasure into a titanic struggle for dominance against a foreign rival it came to see as evil incarnate, it found itself saddled with vast and sprawling commitments it could not afford—an empire that bled red ink. Its economy stagnant, it couldn’t afford the military might required to keep pith helmets bobbing from Bombay to Bingo-Bango, and even its Bertie Woosters were starting to feel the pinch. It feared, but knew it couldn’t really restrain, rising powers that challenged its dominance—but the national ideology with which it had saddled itself (in place of a sane love for Little England) forced it to meddle and muddle along, pretending to a Great Power status incommensurate with its powers. Happily for England, and for all of us, there was the U.S. waiting in the wings—a friendly junior cousin that spoke the lingo and prayed to the same household gods. Absent the hope of American intervention, it’s hard to see how Britain would have held out in 1940; as it was (according to Ian Kershaw) the Brits came perilously close to proposing terms of peace with Hitler in the time between the Fall of France and the miracle of Dunkirk. It was mainly the prospect of American rearmament and intervention that convinced Churchill’s war cabinet not to cut a deal.

As China rises without restraint and Islam continues to send its spies and saboteurs (unrestrained) into our cities—all goaded by our delusions of unending Empire—we’ll find ourselves alone… wishing that we had, somewhere, a mighty American cousin.

The New Republic peeks into the content of David Frumbag’s burgeoning “new majority”—which promises to be a well-funded attempt to turn the U.S. conservative movement into a pallid imitation of… the Canadian Progressive Conservative party, circa Brian Mulroney. Here’s the scoop: There will be no more room for social conservatives who want to preserve traditional marriage, the sanctity of life, or the cultural characteristics of our nation. Those rubes can stay out in the parking lot smoking Marlboros, to run errands when they’re summoned. The smooth-skinned patrician insiders will, between canapes and games of Risk (played with real American soldiers) make wise and prudent decisions for the Common Good. For instance, they will do something about the plague of obesity….

Which leads me to ask: What about baldness, David? When are you going to solve that one? Will you take on ugliness next? When you come up with a cure for smugness and opportunism, I’ll be real interested to hear about it.

And NBC while you’re at it. That network is censoring a tasteful prolife Superbowl ad it had initially accepted:

Yeah, America’s babykillers are all about freedom of speech.

Andrew Sullivan is throwing a hissy-fit over the fact that Pope Benedict is lifting the excommunications on Catholic traditionalists—including the dull-witted and bilious bishop Richard Williamson. If the pope can make nice to a bad, bad man like Williamson, Sullivan bleats, why’s he so mean to me? That guy is practically a Nazi, while I’m just… musical.”

Commenters on his and other sites are reviving the old canard that alleges widespread sympathies for the Nazis among Catholics of the past century. Leave aside some embittered, Anglophobe Irishmen like Fr. Coughlin, and there was in fact almost none of this. An excellent blogger, Verilyprosaic, turns up some handy maps, showing the districts where the Nazis did the worst in one of Germany’s last free elections, and the Catholic districts of Germany. They pretty much coincide.

Real historians know this. But to puling postmoderns who use the word “fascist” to describe everything from school uniforms to airport security, the spectacle of a Christian religious leader paying attention to the details of Christian theology and Canon Law, and trying to govern and unify his Church, induces hysteria. Never mind those flea-bitten dogmas and catmas. They’re all so… 1500 years ago. Look at me. Hey, you in the Prada loafers and the pope hat. My lips are moving, but I don’t see you listening!

A new tempest has blown up in the teapot of Catholic/Jewish relations: Pope Benedict XVI, attempting to heal an ugly schism, has lifted the excommunications of four traditionalist bishops appointed by the late Abp. Marcel Lefebvre. The four men were subject to this punishment because they accepted ordination in defiance of papal authority—and for no other reason. The Church has decided to lift these censures in the hope of healing an internal wound—and for no other reason. Other religious organizations have as little stake in this Church decision as the Church does in the internal machinations of the Shi’ite Islamic or Orthodox Jewish hierarchies. It’s nobody’s business but ours. There are cranks in every creed, and unless they advocate terrorism, outsiders have no business poking around inside other people’s houses of worship, trying to rearrange the candlesticks.

That said, one of the bishops now reconciled, Richard Williamson, is an unspeakable horse’s ass. I’ve read his public statements, questioned seminarians whom he advised, and spoken to the man himself over drinks at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Not bright enough to teach at a decent Catholic high school—I know firsthand that he cannot follow a straightforward theological argument— Williamson wields extremist rhetoric as a means of playing the prophet and browbeating the more intelligent. And now, by way of welcoming the Vatican’s attempt to heal the schism he helped create, he’s running around denying the Holocaust—giving the Church’s enemies the chance to run headlines like “Pope Rehabilitates Holocaust Denier.” This is part of his long-term strategy of keeping Lefebvre’s organization from ever healing its breach with the papacy; if that ever happened, Williamson would lose his celebrity status, and become just another dim-witted bishop with ill-informed opinions, like… Los Angeles’ Cardinal Mahony.

The fact that Abp. Lefebvre selected Williamson in the first place may someday prove the single strongest argument against ever canonizing Lefebvre—a brave and saintly man who (whatever his flaws) stood almost alone through the 1970s in resisting the demolition of the Catholic Church by the appointees of the worst pope in history, Paul VI. The very existence of the traditional Roman liturgy—now celebrated again all over the world with Church approval—can be traced to Lefebvre’s defiance of bishops who banned the traditional Mass while enabling Marxist theology, feminist heresy, and general apostasy. Every Catholic owes this rebel archbishop a debt of gratitude. But good and evil come tightly wrapped in our fallen world, and a fair supply of crackpots, haters, and fools will attach themselves to every movement. Some of St. Francis’ early associates ended up as heretics. Joan of Arc’s right-hand man, Gilles de Rais, went on to become a Satanist, sadistic serial killer of children. And one of the bishops ordained by Jesus Himself was the apostle Judas.

Had I the money, I would hire a team of ninjas to kidnap Bishop Williamson and drop him off on some Pacific atoll, there to live in isolation and meditate on eternity. His half-baked arguments against the historicity of the Nazi attempts to exterminate the Jews have been examined and rejected by historians right and left—and they’re clearly motivated by something other than Christian love, or the love of truth. The things Williamson says in private are even worse—but I won’t help the NY Times (and Bishop Williamson) to harm the Church by repeating them.

I wish that other religious groups would look to their own extremists: Hindu fanatics who murder nuns, and Moslems… well, where to start?

Jewish organizations in America, who are rightly disgusted by Williamson, should take action to rein in the worst members of their own community. How about the “settlers’ movement,” composed largely of American ultra-Zionists who have gone to Israel to squat on stolen land, and make impossible the establishment of a Palestinian state? On a more intellectual plane, consider the Jewish counterpart to Bishop Williamson, Hyam Maccoby. If I might quote an essay I wrote on Mel Gibson’s The Passion:

“Interviewed for Ron Rosenbaum’s fascinating book, Explaining Hitler, Maccoby blames Christianity itself, its central doctrine of the divinity of Christ and His sacrificial death, for subsequent anti-Semitism and for the Holocaust. Maccoby asserts in his various writings that the core narrative of Christ’s death on the cross led directly and inevitably to Jews being sacrificed, en masse, in Nazi death camps. ‘Christians say the Holocaust is part of the evil of humanity,’ he told Rosenbaum. ‘It isn’t the evil of humanity. It’s the evil of Christendom.’ For this reason, Maccoby considers that the only forms of Christianity that are not intrinsically anti-Semitic are those that reject Christ’s divinity and redemption. On the same page, Maccoby insists that for him, ‘Christmas is a sinister festival,’ since it points ahead to Easter.”

While Maccoby lived, he was not some excommunicate outlaw, awaiting rehabilitation by Jewish authorities. He taught at the Centre for Jewish Studies in Leeds, U.K. Best-selling Rabbi Shmuley Boteach quotes Maccoby without embarrassment. Maccoby never backed down from his embittered opinions—nor are Jewish authorities raked over the coals for failing to denounce him adequately. But by most, he is written off as kind of a crank—as Williamson should be.

The NY Times has taken this opportunity to rake up the dying controversy over Pope Pius XII—whom everyone agrees saved hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust—and his decision to criticize Nazi persecutions in a guarded way.

Well, I’d like to turn the tables: How forthright were Jewish organizations in the 1920s in denouncing Stalin’s genocide in the Ukraine? Where are the statements by Zionist groups decrying the persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico in the 1920s, in Spain in the 1930s? Can anyone point to action by Jewish groups that saved hundreds of thousands of Catholic lives? I’d be happy to hear of them.

But in their absence, I’m not going to blame “the Jews” for Bolshevism any more than they should blame the Catholic Church for the Nazis. And I won’t hold a grudge against Jews or Jewish groups because they didn’t risk their own necks to help save ours. We are none of us perfect. We all have our crackpots, and must learn to forgive each other.

I know I’m on hiatus, but today is different. Every year it’s different, a day marked out from the others, as Good Friday is, by the innocent blood that drips from the lintel. But Calvary marks a Passover, the purging of sin through willing self-sacrifice by the Son of Man. Today marks our own sacrifice of the sons of men, to no purpose all, to no god but Moloch. And the Supreme Court is his prophet, (peace be upon them).

For more reflections on this dark day, see my post from one year ago.

A friend once asked me to rank political issues. So I told him: “Immigration determines whether or not we save our country. Abortion determines whether or not it deserves to be saved.” 

Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth; and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.  Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying:  In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning: Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.

For the immigration reform movement: Run Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean for Congress—preferably against pro-abortion, pro-gay, liberal white opponents. Just a thought.

By the way, what was all that hubbub down in D.C. today—another Million Man March?

“Oh, you’re just saying that because Obama is black.” No, I’m saying it because like Louis Farrakhan, he’s a snake-oil salesman—although I find Farrakhan’s Calypso-singer charm a little less obnoxious than Obama’s pomposity and messianic bombast. President Obama shed his crackpot connections when it became convenient (Jeremiah Wright, his long-time spiritual director), and became the new Chauncey Gardiner: The blank, ambiguous figure on whom each of us can project his private fantasies—of racial redemption, historical transformation, bold new leadership, blah blah blah.

President Obama does have principles of course. Abortion as a fundamental right; a massive, centralized government that confiscates and redistributes our wealth; and a slicker, savvier retread of the Bush interventionist jihad across the world. In other words, he’s Teddy Kennedy with a tan.

And the departure of President Bush leaves me just a little bit disappointed. Watching him in office, listening to his speeches, and following his policies, I’ve realized that all along there was something I expected to hear him say: “Live from New York, it’s SATURDAY NIGHT!!!”

Then they’d bring out the real president.