The Passion of Mad Pat

With his own history of distorting the statements of others for rhetorical gain, it's fittingly ironic that Dr. Charles Quackhammer is being subjected to similar abuse by Pat Buchanan.

In a column in The American Conservative, Pat asks: "Speaking of blood libel, has there been one greater than Krauthammer's accusation that the Gospel of Jesus Christ paved the way to Auschwitz?" In an article mostly taking on Jewish critics of Mad Mel's Cruciflix, The Passion of The Christ, Buchanan writes:

In a Washington Post column titled "Gibson’s Blood Libel," Charles Krauthammer links the crucifixion story to "a history of centuries of relentless, and at times savage, persecution of Jews in Christian lands." For 2000 years, he says, the Catholic Church taught that "the Jews were Christ killers." Only at Vatican II did Rome take responsibility for the "baleful history" that came out of the "central story" of the Gospels.

The blood libel that this story [of the crucifixion] affixed upon the Jewish people had led to countless Christian massacres of Jews and prepared Europe for the ultimate massacre—6 million Jews systematically murdered in six years—in the heart, alas, of a Christian continent. It is no accident Vatican II occurred just two decades after the Holocaust, indeed in its shadow.

But Krauthammer stands truth on its head. Not until the ideas of Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud had poisoned the soul of Europe and Christianity had lost the continent did Hitler and Stalin come to power to work their evil will upon Christians and Jews. Hitler learned his hatreds in Viennese gutters, not Catholic schools.

Actually, Quackhammer is suggesting not that the Gospels led to anti-semitic horrors, but that the pre-Vatican II teaching of the Passion story with a clear anti-semitic moral led to those horrors.

And Mad Pat insinuates that anti-semitic violence throughout the ages was the product not of Catholic teaching, but of the Enlightenment and liberal, "non-Christian" ideas such as evolution, communism and psychotherapy. Because anti-semitism didn't exist before 1760, as we all know.

Mad Pat's thesis is basically that millions of Christians loved the Passion -- as demonstrated by the fact that they paid nine bucks to see it, and there was a longer line at confession recently -- so if you criticize the film, you're guilty of a "hate crime" against those Christians. (Pat's words.) Plus no one at Pat's grade school ever called Jews "Christ killers." So bite me.

Pat then quotes himself as saying, "There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America," and says that those who hated The Passion "are, almost all, on the other side in that war." (Or: Judeo has always been at war with Christiania.) He also paraphrases Irving Kristol as stating that if American Jews know what's good for them -- if they wish "to maintain their separate and unique religious and ethnic character"-- they'll clam up and "not be in the vanguard of those seeking to prevent Christians from maintaining the Christian character of their country."

Anyway, Krauthammer can take care of himself, and Mad Pat surely would never "punch his lights out," as he imagines someone doing to Frank Rich. Maybe Pat's essay will help Chuck learn the consequences of misquoting and distorting. At least, we'd imagine, those Tribute to Saint Ronnie dinners in D.C. will be a bit livelier for the forseeable future.

(Link courtesy of Roy Edroso at alicublog.)