Doctor David Jeremiah engages in historical revisionism as he libels the Catholic Church

Dr. David Jeremiah, senior pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church in El Cajon, California, in his book entitled "I Never Thought I'd See The Day," which is listed as a "# 1 New York Times Bestseller," engages in historical revisionism as he attempts to portray William Tyndale as a "martyr" for the Bible.

On page 161 of his book, Dr. Jeremiah asserts that, "..because TYndale believed that every English-speaking person deserved to have access to the Bible in English, he labored to produce the first complete New Testament (and part of the Old Testament) in English translated directly from the original Hebrew and Greek texts.  Finding no support for his efforts in England, the Oxford and Cambridge trained scholar, fluent in no fewer than eight languages, left for Germany in 1524, never to see England again..."

What a blessing for England!  Let's begin with Dr. Jeremiah's asinine claim that William Tyndale was a "trained scholar."  Actually, Tyndale was a mediocre scholar at best.  He described himself as, "evil favoured in this world, and without grace in the sight of men, speechless and rude, dull and slow witted."  In other words, he had no special qualifications for the monumentally important task of translating God's Holy Word.  To put it mildly.

Of course this doesn't concern Doctor Jeremiah.  But then why should it?  As with many other anti-Catholic propagandists, Dr. Jeremiah cannot afford to let the truth get in his way or produce the slightest crack in his wall of conviction.  He implies in his book that the Catholic Church didn't want the people to have access to the Scriptures.

Tyndale had fallen under the influence of Martin Luther and his version of the Scriptures was full of Lutheran heresies.  Canon Dixon, an Anglican historian, referring to the fact that copies of Tyndale's Bible were burnt, says: "If the clergy had acted thus simply because they would have the people kept ignorant of the Word of God, they would have been without excuse.  But it was not so.  Every one of the little volumes, containing portions of the sacred text that was issued by Tyndale, contained also a prologue and notes written with such hot fury of vituperation against the prelates and clergy, the monks and friars, the rites and ceremonies of the Church, as was hardly likely to commend it to the favours of those who were attacked."

Bishop Tunstall of London declared that he found more than 2,000 errors in Tyndale's Bible while Saint Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor of England, wrote a treatise against the heretical translation and asserted that to "find errors in Tyndale's book were like studying to find water in the sea."

The Church had to condemn Tyndale's Bible because it was not a true or correct version of the Scriptures.  The Catholic Church had copies of Tyndale's Bible burned.  But it was not the Word of God which Church authorities were destroying but instead a corrupted version of the Scriptures.

In 1531, King Henry VIII, acting upon the advice of his Council and prelates, published an edict ordering that, "the translation of the Scripture corrupted by William Tyndale should be utterly expelled, rejected, and put away out of the hands of the people, and not be suffered to go abroad among his subjects."

Years later, the Royal Defender of the Faith issued another Act entitled "For the advancement of true religion and for the abolishment of the contrary" which said that, "all manner of books of the Old and New Testament in English, being of the crafty, false, and untrue translation of Tyndale....shall be clearly and utterly abolished, extinguished, and forbidden to be kept or used in this realm."

The Catholic Church did not oppose William Tyndale's Bible because he thought people "deserved to have access to the Bible in English."  The Church had to oppose this heretical translation because it is her duty to safeguard the Deposit of Faith.

Dr. Jeremiah needs to apologize for his libel.

More bad news for Clark University's historical revisionist Deborah Dwork (and others like her)

Recently released documents from the so-called "closed period" of the Vatican Archives are once again revealing the heroism of Pope Pius XII and his care for Jewish people who were persecuted during the Second World War.  The Telegraph's Nick Squires writes, "The document to cast Pius in the most flattering light is a letter from October 1944, after Italy signed an armistice with the Allies and switched sides, in which former inmates expressed their gratitude for his support during their imprisonment. 'While in nearly all the countries of Europe we were persecuted, imprisoned and threatened with death because we belong to the Jewish people and profess the Jewish faith, Your Holiness not only sent notable and generous gifts to our camp through the apostolic nuncio...but also showed your fatherly interest in our physical and spiritual well-being,' they wrote in German.

'(You) intrepidly raised your universally venerated voice against our enemies – still so powerful at that time – to openly support our rights to human dignity. When in 1942 we were under the threat of deportation to Poland, Your Holiness extended your fatherly hand to protect us and prevented the deportation of the Jews imprisoned in Italy, thereby saving us from almost certain death.'

This is more bad news for historical revisionists such as Deborah Dwork, Director of Clark University's Strassler Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies.  In a previous post I refuted her asinine assertion that that Pope Pius XII "failed Europe's Jews miserably, unconscionably."  And I explained here why her accusation is so damnable.

I would ask Ms. Dwork to apologize for her slander of Pius XII.  But what would be the point?  Some people are prisoners of their own deeply-held bias.  And no amount of historical proof will ever penetrate her wall of conviction.  But honest people will be moved at Pius XII's efforts on behalf of the Jewish People.

Deborah Dwork, Pope Pius XII and the "Voyage of the Damned."

While historical revisionists like Deborah Dwork of Clark University's Strassler Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies like to slander Pope Pius XII, whose heroic efforts saved somewhere between 850,000 and 1.5 million Jewish lives, they often have little if anything to say about others who were in a position to save Jewish lives but decided not to.  One example is President Roosevelt's response to the plight of the St. Louis, a German transatlantic liner which sailed from Hamburg, Germany on May 13, 1939 carrying 938 passengers, most of whom were Jews fleeing from the Third Reich.

As this article from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum relates,  "..sailing so close to Florida that they could see the lights of Miami, some passengers on the St. Louis cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for refuge. Roosevelt never responded. The State Department and the White House had decided not to take extraordinary measures to permit the refugees to enter the United States. A State Department telegram sent to a passenger stated that the passengers must "await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States...


Quotas established in the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1924 strictly limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted to the United States each year. In 1939, the annual combined German-Austrian immigration quota was 27,370 and was quickly filled. In fact, there was a waiting list of at least several years. U.S. officials could only have granted visas to the St. Louis passengers by denying them to the thousands of German Jews placed further up on the waiting list. Public opinion in the United States, although ostensibly sympathetic to the plight of refugees and critical of Hitler's policies, continued to favor immigration restrictions. The Great Depression had left millions of people in the United States unemployed and fearful of competition for the scarce few jobs available. It also fueled antisemitism, xenophobia, nativism, and isolationism. A Fortune Magazine poll at the time indicated that 83 percent of Americans opposed relaxing restrictions on immigration. President Roosevelt could have issued an executive order to admit the St. Louis refugees, but this general hostility to immigrants, the gains of isolationist Republicans in the Congressional elections of 1938, and Roosevelt's consideration of running for an unprecedented third term as president were among the political considerations that militated against taking this extraordinary step in an unpopular cause.

Roosevelt was not alone in his reluctance to challenge the mood of the nation on the immigration issue. Three months before the St. Louis sailed, Congressional leaders in both U.S. houses allowed to die in committee a bill sponsored by Senator Robert Wagner (D-N.Y.) and Representative Edith Rogers (R-Mass.). This bill would have admitted 20,000 Jewish children from Germany above the existing quota. ...

Following the U.S. government's refusal to permit the passengers to disembark, the St. Louis sailed back to Europe on June 6, 1939. The passengers did not return to Germany, however. Jewish organizations (particularly the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) negotiated with four European governments to secure entry visas for the passengers: Great Britain took 288 passengers; the Netherlands admitted 181 passengers, Belgium took in 214 passengers; and 224 passengers found at least temporary refuge in France. Of the 288 passengers admitted by Great Britain, all survived World War II save one, who was killed during an air raid in 1940. Of the 620 passengers who returned to continent, 87 (14%) managed to emigrate before the German invasion of Western Europe in May 1940. 532 St. Louis passengers were trapped when Germany conquered Western Europe. Just over half, 278 survived the Holocaust. 254 died: 84 who had been in Belgium; 84 who had found refuge in Holland, and 86 who had been admitted to France."

But while President Roosevelt and Congressional leaders in both U.S. houses were refusing to allow Jewish refugees into the United States (think of the 20,000 Jewish children denied entry to the United States because a Bill was allowed to die), and while other countries such as Great Britain were doing the same, the Vatican was issuing tens of thousands of false documents to allow Jews to pass secretly as Christians so they could escape the Nazis. In addition, the financial aid Pope Pius XII helped provide the Jews was very real. Lichten, Lapide, and other Jewish chroniclers record those funds as being in the millions of dollars -dollars even more valuable then than they are now.

As this article makes clear, "The papacy rescued Jews by channeling money to those in need, issuing countless baptismal certificates for their protection, negotiating with Latin American countries to grant them visas, and keeping in touch with their relatives through the Vatican Information Office. News of Pius XII's acts of charity spread. Nuncios, apostolic delegates, bishops, pastors, and priests offered their assistance and comfort to prisoners, to internees, to families.."

So here we are.  Pope Pius XII saved, even by the most conservative accounts, 860,000 Jews.  Some argue that the figure is closer to 1.5 million.  And this at a time when President Roosevelt and Congressional leaders in the United States were refusing refuge to Jews from Europe thereby ensuring the death of many - including children.

But for professor Dwork, it is Pius XII who "failed Europe's Jews miserably, unconscionably."

The voyage of the St. Louis has been, in my opinion, inappropriately described as the "voyage of the damned."  Many of those poor people may have gone to their deaths.  But if anything about that tragic voyage was damnable, it was the refusal of the Roosevelt administration to do the right thing by allowing those refugees entry into the United States. 

While the U.S. turned its back on innocent men, women and children, Pope Pius XII did not.  The Catholic Church did not.  And anyone who refuses to acknowledge this is not a real student of history.  Such a person is not interested in historical facts.  Only in anti-Catholic propaganda.

Clark University not only promotes radical homosexual agitprop but seems to embrace historical revisionism

During the Second World War, the Nazis had a special hatred for Pope Pius XII.  The Reich Central Security Office had no doubts about where this great Pontiff stood with regard to the Jewish People. They considered him "the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals."


Following Pope Pius XII's sermon at Christmas, 1942, the Reich Central Security Office prepared a detailed analysis of the Pope's address for Reinhard Heydrich which was submitted on January 22, 1943:

"In a manner never known before, the Pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order. His radio allocution was a masterpiece of clerical falsification of the National Socialist Weltanschauung. It is true, the Pope does not refer to the National Socialists in Germany by name, but his speech is one long attack on everything we stand for....God, he says, regards all peoples and races as worthy of the same consideration. Here he is clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews...That this speech is directed exclusively against the New Order in Europe as seen in National Socialism is clear in the Papal statement that mankind owes a debt to 'all who during the war have lost their Fatherland and who, although personally blameless have, simply on account of their nationality and origin, been killed or reduced to utter destitution.' Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice towards the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals."

But Deborah Dwork, Director of Clark University's Strassler Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, doesn't see it that way.  Speaking of the fact that Pope Benedict XVI named Pope Pius XII as Venerable, Ms. Dwork replied, "Who the Church elevates is its business, but history is MY business, and Pius XII failed Europe's Jews miserably, unconscionably."  See page 21 of this pdf file.

I think Ms. Dwork needs to find another line of business.


The Israeli consul, Pinchas E. Lapide, in his book, Three Popes and the Jews (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1967) critically examines Pope Pius XII. According to his research, the Catholic Church under Pius XII was instrumental in saving 860,000 Jews from Nazi death camps (p. 214). Could Pius have saved more lives by speaking out more forcefully? According to Lapide, the concentration camp prisoners did not want Pius to speak out openly (p. 247). As one jurist from the Nuremberg Trials said on WNBC in New York (Feb. 28, 1964), "Any words of Pius XII, directed against a madman like Hitler, would have brought on an even worse catastrophe... [and] accelerated the massacre of Jews and priests." (Ibid.)

Yet Pius was not totally silent either. Lapide notes a book by the Jewish historian, Jenoe Levai, entitled, The Church Did Not Keep Silent (p. 256). He admits that everyone, including himself, could have done more. If we condemn Pius, then justice would demand condemning everyone else. He concludes by quoting from the Talmud that "whosoever preserves one life, it is accounted to him by Scripture as if he had preserved a whole world." With this he claims that Pius XII deserves a memorial forest of 860,000 trees in the Judean hills (pp. 268-9). It should be noted that six million Jews and three million Catholics were killed in the Holocaust.


We must remember that the Holocaust was also anti-Christian. After Hitler revealed his true intentions, the Catholic Church opposed him. Even the famous Albert Einstein testified to that. According to the December 23, 1940 issue of Time magazine on page 38, Einstein said:

Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks...Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.

I invite readers of this Blog to visit the website of The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights to read the extensive documentation on Pope Pius XII which shows clearly that this saintly Pontiff was nothing less than heroic.  My father had an audience with Pope Pius XII in April of 1958, just six months before the Holy Father died.  It was an experience he would always cherish. 

All too often, the record of history is clouded with the prejudices and presumptions of those who are commenting and reporting on it.  Often history is twisted and reinterpreted for ideological purposes.  We have seen that Clark University has embraced the radical homosexual agenda. It would appear that the university also embraces historical revisionism.  Is this an attempt to discredit the Catholic Church because of its moral opposition toward homosexuality and same-sex "marriage"?

More intellectual dishonesty from the Cohen Center at Keene State College

Readers of this Blog will recall how the Cohen Center for Holocaust Studies at Keene State College has engaged in revisionist history with regard to the Catholic Church and the Holocaust. See my previous posts here, here and here. The Cohen Center is at it again, posting an article which unfairly criticizes Pope Benedict XVI over the Bishop Williamson affair. See here.

Driven by what is obviously an anti-Catholic agenda, the Cohen Center is anxious to portray the Holy Father as hard-hearted and callous. But as Catholic League president Bill Donohue explained in a statement which may be found here: "This is a man who as Cardinal Ratzinger unequivocally condemned the Holocaust at a Jerusalem conference in 1994 and wrote a book about it, Many Religions, One Covenant: Israel, the Church and the World."

In the same statement, Bill Donohue noted how, "..the Vatican announced that Williamson must 'unequivocally and publicly distance himself from his positions on the Shoah' if he is to be reinstated (he is still not in full communion with the Church, and may never be). The pope, the Vatican statement said, was unaware of this bishop's views when he lifted his excommunication." This shouldn't come as a total surprise since there are roughly 3,500 Bishops throughout the world.

If the Cohen Center for Holocaust Studies at Keene State College really wants to contribute something positive to Catholic-Jewish relations, it must refrain from engaging in historical revisionism and from politicizing the Holocaust to advance an anti-Catholic agenda.

What's going on at Wikipedia?

I received an email from Mr. Roger Vaste this morning which read:


I just wrote this to an Administrator at Wikipedia where I have attempted to contribute to the biography on Father Feeney. Each time I added my editorial comment, it was promptly deleted by a supporter of Father Feeney. Now I have been banned from participation in the editorial process virtually ensuring that historical revisionism will rule the day when it comes to Leonard Feeney and his hate-filled anti-Semitic legacy.

Here is my response to the Administrator who banned me:

I am saddened to see that you have banned me from participation in the Wikipedia editorial process and have decided to cater to the anti-Semitic agenda of the Saint Benedict Center in Richmond, New Hampshire which has absolutely no relationship with the Roman Catholic Church.

Father Feeney was popularly known as "The Hate Priest." By removing all reference to this hate-filled legacy within his biography, you do a profound disservice to the wider community and fail to remain objective.

The Saint Benedict Center in Richmond, New Hampshire has engaged in Holocaust denial and has issued extremely virulent and hate-filled attacks against the Jewish People. For example, "Brother" Anthony Mary (aka Douglas Bersaw) has referred to them as the "Synagogue of Satan" and "Brother" Andre Marie (aka Louis Villarrubia) has said that the Jewish People have a "tendency to undermine public morals."

Since you are determined to whitewash the hateful legacy of Father Feeney and many of his followers, I will be reporting you and Wikipedia to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ADL.

Good day,
Roger Vaste
rvaste@yahoo.com


Related reading: http://lasalettejourney.blogspot.com/2007/10/im-not-historian.html

And: http://lasalettejourney.blogspot.com/2008/02/still-no-answer-from-saint-benedict.html

And: http://lasalettejourney.blogspot.com/2008/04/real-status-of-father-feeneys-doctrinal.html

On a related note, is there a growing anti-Semitic movement in the Monadnock area of New Hampshire? Mr. Russell Provost has already documented at his Blog (http://sbcwatch.blogspot.com) the fact that several hate groups (which are known for their anti-Semitism and belief in "white supremacy") are located in Cheshire County. In an article published in The Union Leader, which may be found here, authorities speculate as to whether or not anti-Semitic literature left throughout the town of Rindge, New Hampshire is the work of an organized anti-Semitic organization or movement.

I'll say it again: When is the State of New Hampshire going to treat anti-Semitism within its borders with the seriousness it deserves?