Before There Were Muslims To Hate The Jews, French Catholics Did A Pretty Good Job Of It

Archbishop Lefebvre

Anti-Semitism is as French as crepes suzette—even more so—as we can see that its roots extend deep into the history of the Gallican peoples—long before there even was a France, but as we enter into the modern era the battle lines form and we will see the development of the connection between Anti-Semitism and the Catholic “Traditionalist” movement.  

The Jews had a particularly rough road in medieval France and the French Crown played a crucial role in the harassment of the Jews. There were several episodes in which this harassment peaked into persecution and even mob violence.  The Crusades triggered several waves of mass murder of Jews.  The French Crown expelled the Jews from their domains in 1182, 1306, 1322, and 1394.   Jews were forbidden to own or hold land, had to wear distinctive clothing, were restricted in where they could live, and often saw their synagogues destroyed (or converted into churches) and their sacred books burned.  But as France entered the Enlightenment, many of a philosophically liberal persuasion began to call for the emancipation of the Jews in the Kingdom of France. One of the Enlightenment figures who was notorious for his anti-Semitism, however, was Voltaire.  On the eve of the French Revolution a number of advocates of Reform including the Count de Mirabeau and the Abbé Grégoire advocated giving the Jews full citizenship.  While the government of Louis XVI did not accede to this suggestion, there were several municipalities that enfranchised Jews.  As the Revolution began to unfold, the plight of the Jews became one of the contentious issues with the advocates of Reform (from constitutional monarchy through radical revolutionaries) supporting civil rights for the Jews and the monarchists/reactionaries opposing them.  When the papal territory of Avignon was seized by the revolutionaries and incorporated into France, the Avignonese Jews were granted full citizenship in France for their support of the annexation of the formerly papal territory by France in 1791.  Their siding with the Revolutionary (though still a constitutional monarchy) government in seizing the papal territories only further alienated the Catholic party from the Jews.  As the Revolution progressed from Constitutional Monarchy to Republic, the Jews of France embraced the anti-monarchy positions and were happy to see the Church disestablished.  However, they did not support the Jacobins and the Reign of Terror and when the Cult of Reason proscribed Christian religious worship, the ban was most often applied to Jewish worship as well.  As the dust of Revolution settled and Napoleon emerged as Emperor of the French, Jews were guaranteed full and equal rights in the Empire.  They were freed from the Ghettos wherever the French Army conquered and Judaism was recognized as an official religion of the Empire along with Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism.  Napoleon further convoked an assembly of Jewish representatives from throughout his empire known as the Grand Sanhedrin to be a sort of Jewish High Council and represent the interests of the Jewish community to the Empire.  This helped draw the line with Jews in Napoleon’s favor while the Catholics tended to be Royalists who refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Empire in hopes of a restoration of the French Bourbons to the Crown.  Throughout the nineteenth century Catholics would continue to support the Bourbon/Monarchist causes while the Jews would support the various liberal governments that came intermittently along between restorations of the monarchy and the revival of the Empire under Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III). 

When the 2^nd Empire collapsed towards the end of the Franco Prussian War the monarchists held a majority in the National Assembly but were divided between the Legitimists who favored the Comte de Chambord, grandson of Charles X and a semi-absolutist monarchy, and the Orleanists who favored the Comte de Paris, the grandson of Louis Philippe, and a constitutional monarchy.  Although a compromise was finally arranged, the monarchist party was unwilling to accept the terms on which the crown was being offered and what was meant to be a temporary Republic but ended up lasting almost seventy years was established under the monarchist Marshal of France with the improbable name of Patrice de MacMahon.  Although MacMahon was a Legitimist who favored the restoration of a strong monarchy, he took his duties as President of the Republic seriously and refused to sanction a coup by the conservatives to take over the Republic.  By the time of MacMahon’s resignation in 1879 the monarchist cause had lost popular support and the Republic was pretty firmly established. 

The Catholic Church in France strongly supported the restoration of the monarchy; therefore non-Catholics: Protestants, Jews, and Secularists supported the Republic.  Consequently the Church in France became a strong force for political and social reactionism.  French Catholics felt somewhat betrayed by Pope Leo XIII’s endorsement of the Republic.  The Catholic reactionaries mounted a strong anti-Semitic campaign and were particularly intent on purging the military of Jews.  This resulted in the infamous Dreyfus case where a French officer of Jewish blood, Alfred Dreyfus, was framed and convicted of treason and then imprisoned under appalling conditions before finally being cleared.  Catholicism and anti-Semitism became deeply linked by their common affiliation to conservative French politics in the early 20^th century. 

Following the Dreyfus affair and the anti-Semitism that surrounded it, a reactionary movement arose called Action Français.   Action Français set about undoing any and all effects of the French Revolution—it was monarchist, anti-democratic, nationalistic and very, very Catholic.    In fact is was so Catholic that Pius XI condemned the movement in 1926—in other words, Pius saw the movement as using a veneer of Catholic faith for political and socio-economic objectives that were contrary to Catholic thought.  Pius XII lifted the excommunications in 1939 when he saw Action Français as a defense against Marxist-Leninism, but the Holy See never endorsed the political or sociological objectives of the movement which ran contrary to the encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI (and subsequently to the social encyclicals of John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI.) 

Despite the relative strength of Action Français in the first half of the 20^th century, monarchism never garnered enough political momentum for there to be serious consideration of restoring the French monarchy, especially in a somewhat absolutist form as advocated by the hard-line monarchists.  Action Français faded out after World War II, but its nationalistic, conservative, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic fanaticism remained in the hearts of many French reactionaries.

Among the bearers of the Action Français heritage was the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.  Lefebvre came from a monarchist family in the North of France.  Like others in the Legitimist tradition they saw the French Revolution and the end of the ancien regime as the collapse of everything Catholic.  They wanted not only to restore the Bourbons to the Throne of France, but Catholicism as the State Religion.  Lefebvre himself was an ardent supporter of the Vichy Regime during the Nazi occupation as he saw the Petain dictatorship as the womb for a reborn Monarchist France.  The Archbishop shared in the anti-immigrant, anti-Jew, anti-Muslim, anti-democratic views of Action Français and later, with the collapse of the movement as a force in French politics, shifted his political allegiance to Jean-Marie LePen and his French National Party.  Le Pen is infamous for his anti-Semitism and his skepticism about the Holocaust. 

Lefebvre’s own anti-Semitism has colored the Catholic Traditionalist movement.  Many Traditionalists have insisted on maintaining the older Good Friday Collect for the Jews, describing them as perfidis (unbelieving, but often translated perfidious).   This word had been removed from the Liturgy by John XXIII who literally stopped the Good Friday Service in 1960 and ordered the prayer recited without that word.  Benedict XVI insisted that the traditional collect be altered to avoid the word but his insistence has been ignored by many in the “Traditionalist” community and certainly by those in Lefebvre’s Society of Saint Pius X.  Among the four bishops illicitly ordained by Lefebvre, the Englishman Richard Williamson, has been a notorious Holocaust denier.  Contemporary Traditionalist literature both in France and throughout Western Europe and North America, the parts of the world where neo-Traditionalism has taken root, is often laced with anti-Semitism, sometimes subtle, sometimes virulent.  The Traditionalist communities in France are hotbeds of agitation against both Jews and Muslims.  

Papal Resignations!

Conclave that elected

Martin V 1417 at the

Council of Constance

  Well, I guess we have to interrupt our series on the origins of the Church of England to look at this currently developing topic of Papal Resignations.  Let me tell you, I was caught by surprise.  It has  been 598 years since a pope has resigned and while Benedict seems to love rooting through Vatican closets for old things to wear I had never thought he would go so far back to find such an interesting precedent for some drama.  So what I want to do in this blog and the next is talk about earlier papal resignations and then maybe in the following entry or two, tell you what I think is going on that motivated Benedict to take this step which is, like God himself, fascinans et tremendum. (That is Latin for fascinating and awesome)  
The last pope to resign office was Gregory XII in 1415 but that resignation was under a very different set of circumstances than Pope Benedict’s announcement yesterday.  Pope Gregory had promised the Cardinals of the 1406 conclave that elected him that he would resign, although once in power, he reconsidered and had to be somewhat forced to follow through.   You see, it was at the time of the great schism when you had a man in Avignon claiming to be the Pope and a man at Rome claiming to be the Pope.  Christendom was divided in allegiance.  Gregory was elected to fill the vacancy left by the death of Innocent VII, the Roman claimant.  The Cardinals who elected him—only fifteen in the conclave—made him promise that should the Avignon claimant, Benedict XIII, be persuaded to resign, Gregory too would resign.  Then a single candidate could be elected to replace the two of them, healing the schism.  It was a safe bet for Gregory that Benedict would have no intention of resigning and Gregory seems, despite the promise, to have had no intention either. 
Gregory and Benedict got into this sort of pas de deux of each trying to out maneuver each other into resigning and leaving the field to the survivor.  Each claimant had his own set of cardinals whom he had named,  but a majority of the cardinals belonging to each were disgusted at both popes by their lack of resolve to end the crisis and began to negotiate with one another behind the popes’ backs as to how to resolve the issue and bring the Church back to unity.  The Cardinals called a Council for Pisa at which they intended to depose both popes and elect a new one.  And in 1409 the Council of Pisa in fact declared both pope’s deposed and elected Alexander V.  The only problem was that neither Gregory nor Benedict accepted the Council’s verdict and so now you had three popes!!!
Sigismund, the King of Hungry and of Germany and soon to be Holy Roman Emperor pressed for another Council to resolve this dilemma.  Alexander V meanwhile had died and his successor, John XXIII—at Sigismund’s instance—called a Council for Constance in Switzerland.  It met in November 1414.   29 Cardinals, 183 bishops and archbishops, 134 abbots, and 100 theologians met.  And yes, the theologians were not simply advisors but full participants in the Council.  Sigismund himself presided over the Council.
At this point, Gregory’s conscience took over and he agreed to a plan to preserve the Church.  He appointed two legates to represent him at the Council, Carlo Malatesta—a powerful layman and military leader—and Giovanni Dominici, the Dominican Cardinal-Archbishop of Ragusa.  The legates, acting in the name of Pope Gregory, officially recognized the Council and then offered Gregory’s resignation.  The Council in turn recognized Gregory as the legitimate claimant to the papacy, accepted his resignation, deposed the other two claimants (including John XXIII who had convoked the Council) and elected Odonne Colonna (remembered Odie O. Cologne from King Leonardo and His Short Subjects?  No, probably not.  I know that I had though he was part of Rocky and Bullwinkle until I looked it up on that Sedes Sapientiae, Wikipedia. But I digress)  Colonna took the regnal name Martin V.    However—and very curiously—the Council did not elect Martin until after the death of the Gregory, two years after his resignation.   This means that there were not two popes, or a pope and a retired pope, at the same time, but rather the Apostolic See was left vacant for those two years with the sitting Council running the Church.  This too is important to note as today Councils are suspended during a papal interregnum with the claim that a Council gets its authority from the Pope and when there is no pope, a Council lacks authority.  That was not the case with Constance.  Constance broke popes (Gregory,  Benedict, and John XXIII) and Constance made popes—Martin V.  It was the height of Conciliar power. Moreover, just to demonstrate the power of the Council, the conclave that elected Martin consisted not only of Cardinals but of delegates from the Council.  On this precedent, centuries later when Pope John XXIII died between the first and second sessions of the Second Vatican Council, it was suggested that the Council Fathers, or a delegation of them, might participate in the papal election but that was not done.  In fact, Paul VI—after his election—had to re-convoke the Council as its authority was deemed to have lapsed with the death of John XXIII.  Papal power had vastly expanded in the centuries between Constance and Vatican II.