A persistent myth, promoted by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, accused Jews of draining the blood of Christian children in order to make matzoh.
Jew-Bashing at the Holiday Inn
The Philadelphia airport Holiday Inn is an odd place to celebrate a Catholic mass, especially in a city filled with lovely churches and an extraordinary, century-old Romanesque cathedral. But the inn is where the radical traditionalist Catholic outfit, (CFN), held its annual conference in 2003, dressing up one end of a drab conference room with an altar, incense, and a statue of the Virgin Mary, and transforming it into a church.
The rest of the hall looked rather different. Vendors set up folding tables along almost every inch of the remaining walls, piling them high with books, videotapes and Catholic accessories. The stacks were notable for the prominence of anti-Semitic and extremist materials, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Hutton Gibson's Is the Pope Catholic? to CFN head John Vennari's popular anti-Semitic conspiracy tract, The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita. Priests in Roman collars staffed many tables; brown-cloaked monks manned others.
CFN conferences hearken back to the era before the Roman Catholic Church enacted the liberalizing Vatican II reforms, which removed from the weekly Mass prayers for the conversion of the Jews and also ended the centuries-old practice of celebrating the Mass in Latin, the Vatican's official language. At the Holiday Inn in 2003, Sunday's religious activities started with a now rarely celebrated hour-long recitation of the rosary. After that, apostate priests conducted a rendition of the Latin Mass, a format dating to the Middle Ages, before an audience remarkable for the veils that covered every woman's hair and the time it spent on its knees.
Vatican II did not ban these time-honored celebrations, and many Catholics who call themselves "traditionalists" continue to worship in this manner in churches that remain an official part of the Holy See (these churches are awarded an "indult" that allows them to continue celebrating the Latin Mass). The vast majority of those who practice Catholicism in this older form are unrelated to the radical traditionalist Catholics who gathered in Philadelphia. Indeed, the groups that gave presentations at the CFN conference preach a theology specifically rejected by the Vatican, and many have been declared schismatic, or officially separated from the church.
The participants at the CFN conference spent most of their time bashing Jews and, in particular, dwelling on the perils of the much-feared "Judeo-Masonic" plot. As preached from the pulpit that day, the alleged conspiracy involves ancient, shadowy fraternities such as the Masons and the Illuminati, who are seen as puppets in a Jewish master plan aimed at destroying the Catholic Church. The theory is laid out in great detail in Venarri's Alta Vendita, which has been compared to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous tract also alleging a global plot by the Jews.
But the "Judeo-Masonic" plot wasn't the only fearful conspiracy that was described that day. There was also the "Marxist-Jewish" scheme that is ruining our schools, the "Jewish-homosexual" alliance that is destroying the priesthood, and, naturally, the 9/11 conspiracy, which has to do with the fact that the 2001 terrorist attacks were actually "predicted by the Blessed Virgin Mary 84 years ago."
Jew-Bashing at the Holiday Inn
The Philadelphia airport Holiday Inn is an odd place to celebrate a Catholic mass, especially in a city filled with lovely churches and an extraordinary, century-old Romanesque cathedral. But the inn is where the radical traditionalist Catholic outfit, (CFN), held its annual conference in 2003, dressing up one end of a drab conference room with an altar, incense, and a statue of the Virgin Mary, and transforming it into a church.
The rest of the hall looked rather different. Vendors set up folding tables along almost every inch of the remaining walls, piling them high with books, videotapes and Catholic accessories. The stacks were notable for the prominence of anti-Semitic and extremist materials, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Hutton Gibson's Is the Pope Catholic? to CFN head John Vennari's popular anti-Semitic conspiracy tract, The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita. Priests in Roman collars staffed many tables; brown-cloaked monks manned others.
CFN conferences hearken back to the era before the Roman Catholic Church enacted the liberalizing Vatican II reforms, which removed from the weekly Mass prayers for the conversion of the Jews and also ended the centuries-old practice of celebrating the Mass in Latin, the Vatican's official language. At the Holiday Inn in 2003, Sunday's religious activities started with a now rarely celebrated hour-long recitation of the rosary. After that, apostate priests conducted a rendition of the Latin Mass, a format dating to the Middle Ages, before an audience remarkable for the veils that covered every woman's hair and the time it spent on its knees.
Vatican II did not ban these time-honored celebrations, and many Catholics who call themselves "traditionalists" continue to worship in this manner in churches that remain an official part of the Holy See (these churches are awarded an "indult" that allows them to continue celebrating the Latin Mass). The vast majority of those who practice Catholicism in this older form are unrelated to the radical traditionalist Catholics who gathered in Philadelphia. Indeed, the groups that gave presentations at the CFN conference preach a theology specifically rejected by the Vatican, and many have been declared schismatic, or officially separated from the church.
The participants at the CFN conference spent most of their time bashing Jews and, in particular, dwelling on the perils of the much-feared "Judeo-Masonic" plot. As preached from the pulpit that day, the alleged conspiracy involves ancient, shadowy fraternities such as the Masons and the Illuminati, who are seen as puppets in a Jewish master plan aimed at destroying the Catholic Church. The theory is laid out in great detail in Venarri's Alta Vendita, which has been compared to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous tract also alleging a global plot by the Jews.
But the "Judeo-Masonic" plot wasn't the only fearful conspiracy that was described that day. There was also the "Marxist-Jewish" scheme that is ruining our schools, the "Jewish-homosexual" alliance that is destroying the priesthood, and, naturally, the 9/11 conspiracy, which has to do with the fact that the 2001 terrorist attacks were actually "predicted by the Blessed Virgin Mary 84 years ago."