    Father Richard’s Choice

    By Dan Elpenor

    Neocons love to cite Father Richard John Neuhaus as a fellow neocon: a
    full-fledged player and supporter of Judeo-America’s predatory wars who
    is not himself actually "Jewish, at least in terms of his DNA." Max
    ("What the Heck is a Neocon?") Boot enthused:

    "When Buchananites toss around "neoconservative" -- and cite names like
    Wolfowitz and Cohen -- it sometimes sounds as if what they really mean
    is "Jewish conservative. " This is a malicious slur on two levels.
    First, many of the leading neocons aren't Jewish; Jeanne Kirkpatrick,
    Bill Bennett, Father John Neuhaus and Michael Novak aren't exactly
    menorah lighters. Second, support for Israel -- a key tenet of
    neo-conservatism -- is hardly confined to Jews; its strongest
    constituency in America happens to be among evangelical Christians."

    Neuhaus’s neocon bonafides extend back to his 60’s leftist activism when
    he marched in Selma , got his ass arrested in a State Department sit-in,
    and rambunctiously protested war and racism. He thus passes the crucial
    neocon hypocrisy test with flying colors. See the amazing difference! A
    few decades after the circulation of elites effected by the 60’s, Father
    Neuhaus counsels obedience to civil authority and deference to the
    exquisite etiquette of "civil discourse" to insure a respectful audience
    in "the public square" for neocon lies and bullshit. Neuhaus, in all
    other respects a critic of "a la carte Catholicism," emerged as the
    leading, indeed, the only warmonger Catholic priest with indecent haste
    after his very opportune switch from Lutheranism to Catholicism. Today
    the former protestor pastor celebrates American "national greatness" and
    "the Christian West."

    As Neuhaus surveys what Pope Benedict XVI and Michel Houellebecq
    envision in that "Christian West" as "the widening deserts without that
    reflect the widening deserts within, " the war booster and eulogist
    waxes well content with the fine vistas viewed from the top. With a more
    measured and sonorous tone than the high-pitched triumphant kvells of
    his fellows, Neuhaus invokes America as "an almost chosen nation." This
    epithet and what Saint Paul would call "the different gospel" that
    follows from it sharply contradicts the horrifying view from the ground
    as America withers in the new imperium: debt, usury, materialism,
    pornography and drug addiction, soaring rates of divorce and abortion,
    violence, perpetual war, mass media that beggars description for its
    vulgarity and inanity, corporate and political corruption and crime,
    burgeoning privatized prisons, dumbed-down schools, a cynical snarky
    youth culture, and epidemic isolation and anomie. And you wonder why so
    many are so eager to get "raptured away" from it all and get really
    chosen once and for all.

    And now with the recent Military Commissions Act, the American Republic,
    founded to secure rights and prohibit arbitrary power and torture, has
    ended with barely a whimper. The circulation of elites that began in
    1968 has been completed; a strange new American anthropology has
    prevailed; and the plagues above have been encased in that carapace of
    authoritarianism and militarism Israel Shahak identified as essential
    characteristics of Judaism. This rough beast, a ramshackle high tech
    Leviathan of poor old stock rural Americans, new immigrants, and the
    descendents of previous urban immigrants, considered as expendable as
    Orcs by the Ivy League sissies who cheer them on, now slouches towards
    Jerusalem to be born. And the world gapes with horror at this "almost
    chosen "auxiliary of the Agenda for Domination.

    The phrase "almost chosen" is an acoustic oxymoron, logically absurd
    according to the rational standards of the Hellenic "Christian West."
    One is chosen or not; there is no "almost" about it. And similarly
    irrational was Neuhaus’s dismissal of the self-evident causality of
    9/11. Like the parishioner who told him that morning: "This is what we
    get for unconditionally supporting Israel," everyone in Manhattan that
    day had one word to sum up a logical cause and effect relationship:
    Israel. And all Americans were forbidden to voice this truth when the
    Chad Lubavitcher White House Press Secretary, Ari Fleischer ordered us
    to abjure logical sequential thought: "Be careful about what you say."

    Neuhaus also delved deep into solipsism and irrationality when he
    endorsed the American appropriation of the absurd anti-anti-Semitism
    paradigm: "they hate us for who we are." He predicted a closer alliance
    of the "Christian West" with Israel as a result of 9/11. This
    magic-thinking non sequitur was an appropriately illogical conclusion to
    his acoustic free association. The graft of Israel and the "Christian
    West" can only be achieved at the expense of the West and its sanity and
    rationality. On 9/11, like an alcoholic after a binge, Neuhaus opts for
    "a hair of the dog that bit him," rather than self-examination. He
    rationalizes rather than reasons. But unlike the addict’s denial of
    reality, his rationalizations form a rivulet in a massive flow of
    sludge. They contribute to a discourse that flows from all directions in
    every conceivable media. The sludge discourse turns people into idiots.
    Do we wonder why the mantra of the TV-addled and de-Hellenized young
    today is "whatever"?

    After 9/11 Jewish acoustic percussion (i.e., TV), irrationality, and
    authoritarianism erupted and inundated Hellenic Christian rationality
    and thought: "Ignorance is strength, War is peace, Freedom is slavery,"
    "2+2=5," just what Orwell predicted in his novelistic gloss of The
    Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And the spiritual vision was also
    distorted and perverted when Neuhaus peered through the wrong end of a
    telescope to gloat over the panorama of his "almost chosen nation." So
    let me try to be helpful and take the inverted telescope from his hands
    and turn it right side around and take a look at Father Neuhaus himself.
    Then we may examine how he himself is "almost chosen" and scrutinize
    some the extremely equivocal choices this ardent Zionist and American
    nationalist has made. Oh, did you know that he’s from Canada ?

    "Father Richard," as George Bush calls his consigliere, teaches the boy
    emperor "how to speak Catholic," to consolidate his "conservative
    Catholic" support. To "speak Catholic" entails paying lip service to
    issues like abortion and tuition tax credits to gull the voters at
    election time. It is a shell game. But despite his role as White House
    Catholic adjutant of the "religious right," Neuhaus fans invariably
    rebut any suggestion that he is anything so predictable as a
    "conservative." He’s just an unpredictable open-minded "liberal": "Oh,
    did you know that Father Neuhaus is a registered Democrat?"

    Neuhaus is a macher: a manager of public discourse, an arbiter of
    permissible thought, a circuit breaker between Rome and Manhattan . With
    big foundation funding, a "princely salary," and a rich rum fruitcake
    prose style, this "sapient sutler of the Lord" started the journal First
    Things after his attempt to take over Chronicles and The Rockford
    Institute failed. Strange that a "liberal" would truck with the
    paleo-conservative mugwumps at Chronicles in the first place but his
    departing malediction was entirely in character as a neocon when he
    anathematized those grumpy Treebeards with the ever-handy epithet of
    "anti-Semites."

    In First Things, neocons like Gertrude Himmelfarb and the Podhoretzim
    (already the incubi of the wretchedly abject philo-Semite, William F.
    Buckley Jr.) joined neo-Catholicons like George Weigel and Michael Novak
    to broker a new consensus about the role of religion in public life. And
    Neuhaus announced the unexpected advent of what he called "the Catholic
    moment." Far more at home in Manhattan than in corn country, Neuhaus
    conveyed remarkable authority, poise, and self-confidence as he
    schmoozed and brokered, and was interviewed and quoted. He was welcomed
    with open arms as an interlocutor by the New York Times and even by
    bitter "dissident Catholics" such as the novelist Mary Gordon (who calls
    herself a "Jew" even as she keeps a Catholic persona for professional
    purposes and to lurk around to surveil and kvetch). The New York Times,
    owned by the Episcopalian Sulzberger family and edited by Bill
    "collapsed Catholic" Keller, has its own Agenda for the Catholic Church.
    The Times Catholic policy is an odd form of sedevacantism: the last
    legitimate pope was John XXIII. This perpetually indulgent old gourmand
    miraculously appears to the editorial board like Santa Claus in a
    pontifical sleigh loaded with liberal hobbyhorses. From beyond the
    grave, he advocates abortion and birth control, Gnostic gospels, women
    priests and popes, Arianism, gay marriage, gay marriage for gay priests,
    non-sexist liturgical language, struggles against patriarchy, abject
    philo-Semitism, and reviews Mary Gordon novels.

    So the Times’ warm embrace of the newly ordained Catholic priest and new
    spokesman for orthodoxy and conservatism was totally "gubu": grotesque,
    unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. The intellectual socialite was
    as ubiquitous as Evelyn Waugh’s Father Rothschild in Vile Bodies,
    equipped with a passe-partout, and to double business bound. With the
    liberals piled up on the bedrock of his neocon alliance and
    warmongering, it was as if Neuhaus had succeeded in negotiating a new
    synthesis for a Judeo-Christian civil religion in which religion, money,
    and war would fly on board the angels of McDonnell Douglas through the
    Golden Arches of McDonalds with a stopover at something he called "the
    Catholic moment." Once the Catholics were on board, the air fortresses
    would head out to the sweet hereafter of the nexus of Hegelian
    Judeo-Protestant eschatons: the dark humor of the punchlines of comedic
    messianic history. The Catholics however were excluded from this inside
    joke.

    Many modest Catholics were delighted with this unexpected annunciation
    of their prospect for election, however momentary: "Gee whiz! Thanks,
    Father! Do we need reservations?" Catholics, already poor enough in
    spirit at least in cultural and political terms, had since 1968 been
    further dispirited and demoralized by relentless critique and ridicule
    from the media magisterium and academia. They were grateful for even
    this remote event of an invitation someplace nice like the "public
    square," where they might arrive with more dignity and proper vesture
    than so many of their own priests who had been drawn there in flagrante
    delicto naked on their knees praying to the wrong god.

    The clueless Catholics, innocent of "moments" and the cunning
    lubricities of either Hegelian dialectics or the high-flying comedies of
    Judeo-Protestant eschatological juggernauts were like Network’s Howard
    Beale, the TV star whose nervous breakdown on the air leads to high
    ratings that inadvertently establish him as the cynosure of the "public
    square." Still perplexed by his sudden election to national prophet,
    Howard meets with the network producer: "Why me?" he asks. The producer
    thunders like the voice of God: "because you’re on TV, dummy." The
    Catholics might have asked, "Why us?" Because you join the army and
    vote, dummies! "The Catholic moment" was a summons to arms: electoral
    and cannon fodder for the wars both geopolitical and cultural for which
    Father Neuhaus so eagerly mongered.

    Neocons, unlike most other atheist Jewish intellectuals, think religion,
    like war, is both necessary and useful for public order and a sense of
    national purpose. But even with that permission, Neuhaus seemed to be
    playing with fire when he proclaimed America "an overwhelmingly
    Christian nation." This idea is big taboo imposed by Jews for whom
    America is strictly a selectively secular "proposition nation" devoted
    to "oligarchic collectivism" enhanced multi-culturally by the Joy of
    Jewish Supremacy. Even more inflammatory was his apparently bizarre
    assertion that one could not be a good American citizen without
    believing in God. How did Neuhaus evade the fury that would certainly
    assail anyone who broke this taboo? Who else managed to say this and
    avoid being turded to death?

    Examined from an exoteric viewpoint, these provocations served as fire
    breakers for successful discourse management. Like a clever poker player
    who pretends to be drunk, Neuhaus would overplay hands and raise the
    stakes to absurdly dramatic levels to attract attention and then manage
    the 52 pickup logomachies that ensued within very defined boundaries.
    Reams of verbiage then followed determined parameters and terminology
    that established the grounds of the discourse and, most crucially, the
    esoteric discernment of intentions. It was World Championship Wrestling
    version of the culture wars conducted in the "public square": in this
    corner, the liberal conservative Canadian Lutheran Pastor registered
    Democrat civil rights anti-Vietnam war protestor Catholic moment war
    monger Bush tutor American nationalist non-Jewish neocon Catholic priest
    Father Richard John Neuhaus, in the other corner, well, they were lined
    up. Who’s next? Stanley Fish? Gertrude Himmelfarb? Rushdooney?

    What greased the palms in these negotiations? Like Leo Strauss’s twofold
    and duplicitous reading of texts: the exoteric level appropriate for
    clueless "gentlemen" and the esoteric level reserved for Strauss’s
    Nietzschean "initiates," Neuhaus had two pitches: exoterically, the
    Catholic "gentlemen" (i.e., useful idiots) could feel redeemed and
    useful as participants in America’s nationalist "civil religion" while
    to the darker esoteric side of the table he brought biddable clergy
    programmed to "American" civil religion, docile cannon fodder, voters,
    and a monopoly on discourse about religion and politics. As a bonus
    there were new neocon commissions for officers to help administer the
    inert gormless herd of Catholics who waited in the "public square" for
    orders. Not real officers in real battle of course (let us not
    exaggerate!) but speaking engagements and emoluments for momma boy
    cheerleaders like Max Boot, William Kristol, and the Podhoretzim. Under
    the tutelage of "Father Richard", these blood-thirsty sissies had also
    learned how to "speak Catholic." What would have been impossible for any
    other Catholic, much less a Catholic priest, to pull off, Neuhaus
    achieved with just a few quick twists of the hyphen in
    "Judeo-Christian." (Ouch!) Catholics were represented as useful to The
    Agenda by a trustworthy source.

    The Podhoretzim had detonated in 1991 when Pat Buchanan seemed merely to
    implicitly contrast "Israel’s Amen Corner" with a representative roll
    of names who would make up the war’s casualties: "Murphy, McAllister,
    Gonzalez, and Leroy Brown." Neuhaus stepped in to defuse and manage the
    volatile sociological and ethnic discrepancy between those who monger
    and those who die. Neuhaus made the case that "Murphy" and "Gonzalez"
    (if not also "McAllister" and "Leroy Brown" for we Catholics are a big
    mixed bag) might be permitted to believe in God and might say The Lord’s
    Prayer and receive last rites on their deathbeds in a United States Army
    hospital without the threat of an ACLU or ADL lawsuit. The goys could be
    granted this largesse (on top of the gift of the Noahide Laws to which
    they were subject - the mind boggles!) in consideration of their service.
    It was negotiated gratitude for a "moment": "For what we are about to
    receive, let us take a 'Catholic moment' to give thanks for all these
    Catholics."

    Another successful Neuhaus negotiation was the "vexed issue" of
    proselytizing. This is also a matter of deep anxiety for Jews since
    Christianity, despite relentless attack and pathologization from
    academia and the media, is still a much more attractive proposition than
    Judaism, despite relentless self-celebration, self-hype, and
    self-congratulation from the same self-sources. It’s still a lot more
    fun to be Catholic than it is to be Jewish because the Kingdom of Heaven
    is within us every day rather than in some future after everybody else
    in the world is enslaved or killed or poleaxed by a crowbar and forced
    to kiss our ass and bring us jewelry and gold all the time. By and large
    we don’t make big demands on others and we don’t have a grandiose agenda
    of world domination and destruction so we’re less pissed off and
    frustrated than many Jews who torment themselves with their own demands,
    envy and insatiability. But Neuhaus’s "Catholic moment" would have
    nothing to do with the salvation of individual souls (Gott in Himmelfarb
    forfend!) and would instead set up a stall for currency trading in
    cultural and political influence in the temple of the Dominations.

    While disinclined to press the confessional spiritual issue of
    conversion for non-Catholics, Neuhaus has been an eager proselytizer for
    neo-conversion of the Catholics. It was Neuhaus who brokered all the
    bilge about "Catholic just war theory." He advocated for the First Gulf
    War and for the sequel he had the chutzpah to send his own delegates of
    his own American "Catholic" state department, Weigel and Novak to the
    Vatican to make the case for the attack on Iraq as a "just war" in terms
    of that humane and rational philosophical tradition. Of course that
    tradition is completely antithetical to the ransacked grab bag of verbal
    jujus and pilpul fodder Neuhaus and his affiliates like Jean Bethke
    Elstain seized upon in their hand-to-mouth feeding frenzy to foment and
    condone mass murder. In the event, John Paul II declined to receive the
    neocon delegation and they cooled their hotspur heels until an assistant
    secretary of state came to say goodbye. Our Holy Mother Church still has
    her own moments!

    The Catholic just war concept consists of two parts: the ius ad bellum,
    or reasons for war and the ius in bellum or means of waging war. The
    latter entails the "proportionality" of means lately mocked by the
    Israelis in Lebanon . Examined from either aspect the Iraq attack was a
    no-brainer. It is clear that Neuhaus and his cohorts had no case at all.
    But what is most astonishing is their success in establishing a
    greshamite monopoly on just war discourse, trading on the counterfeit
    notes of their aggressive and energetic word processing, intimidation,
    extortion, and networking. Here Neuhaus acted as a circuit breaker
    between Rome and America . Many bamboozled Catholics overlooked or
    hadn’t heard John Paul II’s admonition that the Iraq war would be "a
    catastrophe for humanity" and trusted Neuhaus’s dismissive pilpulism
    that questions of war were best left to the "prudential" discretion of
    national leadership rather than to the Vicar of Christ, a fortiori the
    prudent leadership of an "almost chosen" nation, his friend and pupil,
    George Bush.

    In The Nomos of the Earth, the Catholic legal theorist and political
    philosopher Carl Schmitt speaks the clear very simple truth about the
    contemporary corruption of the just war concept. Paradoxically Schmitt
    speaks a lay prophet precisely because he strips away the tawdry
    religious glitz and tinsel off the cynical deployment of just war theory
    today: "Modern tendencies do not resurrect Christian doctrines."

    "Rather they are ideological phenomena attending the industrial-technical
    development of modern means of destruction. Bombing pilots use their
    weapon against the population of an enemy country as vertically as St.
    George used his lance against the dragon. Given the fact that war has
    been transformed into a police action against troublemakers, criminals,
    and pests, justification of the methods of this "police bombing" must be
    intensified. Thus one is compelled to push the discrimination of the
    opponent into the abyss."

    The abyss full of Hitlers is bottomless even as Hitler himself is an
    unfathomed source of delusional as well as calculated egotism and
    Manichaean motives for murder in those who worship his satanic cult. A
    large part of the American civil religion is devoted to the perverse
    theology of Hitler hatred. But the dragons slain by aerial bombing are
    people. 85% of those killed in WWII were civilians and of the 655,000
    Iraqis killed only in this episode of the American aggressive war, only
    a miniscule remotely decimalized fraction could be called combatants by
    any standard.

    With Hitler of course comes the "Holocaust." Like Israel Shamir, I
    believe all Christians must agree with Claude Lanzmann’s stark choice:
    Christ or the "Holocaust." We cannot serve two masters. We must worship
    Christ rather than Claude Lanzmann and Abe Foxman and their "divine
    DNA." And there’s a bit of Lanzmann and Foxman in us all so we must
    worship Christ rather than our own delusional forms of egotism and
    Manicheanism. We all have our own Hitlers within us as well as the
    Kingdom of Heaven and at this late juncture we need not search abroad
    for Hitler avatars to destroy or yearn for the destruction of the world
    to clarify good and evil.

    Unlike Gnostics and Manicheans, Catholics believe this world is good and
    all those who live in it are, to whatever degree, good. From the origin
    of creation in "Let there be light," "All things that are, are light,"
    as Scotus Eruigena and Dante show us. In faith and hope we wait for the
    "restitution of all things" (Apokatastasis ton panton Acts 3:21), what
    Vladimir Solovyov calls "the complete manifestation of the all-one" at
    the end of our comedy. And everybody is in on the joke.

    For the Christian, evil is within us rather than outside us. We can’t
    become good by killing those we might like to designate as evil, and as
    Solovyov admonishes us, "we must not save the world by force."

    "How can Satan cast out Satan?" Christ asks. And he asks, "Do you not
    see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot defile him..?"
    For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication,
    theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness,
    envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from
    within, and they defile a man." (Mark 7:18-24) For there is nothing hid,
    which shall not be made manifest: neither was it made secret, but that
    it may come abroad. (Mark 4:22.)

    Here Christ speaks the truth about human nature, the human heart, the
    human intestinal track, and the delusions of egotism and self-will. In
    the passage above he mocks dietary laws with the reassurance that of
    whatever you eat, that too shall pass: "Thus he declared all foods
    clean." And speaking of food as well as mass murder, is it not a tad odd
    that in the year of Our Lord 2006 you would be hard put to find anything
    in any American supermarket without a certificate of Kosher inspection:
    a U or a K or a P in addition to other more cryptic ciphers. That all
    American goyim are subject to a sales tax that goes to rabbinical
    councils rather than some interfaith extortion syndicate Neuhaus might
    call "Judeo-Christianity Inc.?" Is it less odd that we are more directly
    taxed to facilitate the dispossession and persecution of Palestinians
    and the wars against Islam? Is it any less odd that in this "almost
    chosen nation" more young Americans, Murphys, McAllisters, Gonzaleses,
    and Leroy Browns, pauperized by the predations of finance and usury and
    made morons by American public education and mass media, have only the
    military or clerking in supermarkets as career options?

    These Americans are the rising casualties of the war. Their identities
    are of no concern for the neocons who are so indefatigably obsessed and
    self-absorbed with the issue of their own identity: the interminable
    who’s-a-Jew pilpulism of their paranoia. Neuhaus’ ally Max Boot, another
    great American nationalist by way of Canada and further beyond Russia,
    and like Neuhaus funded by the Olin Foundation, expressed concern that
    the number of casualties in Afghanistan was insufficient to persuade
    Americans that their blood sacrifice had to be vindicated in total
    victory. "More American dead!" demanded this sissy moloch from his seat
    on the Council of Foreign Relations. Max Boot will not be arrested under
    the Military Commissions Act even though he calls for American soldiers
    to be killed. He’s with the Agenda after all. This brutal and
    contemptuous politique du pire-- the worse, the better-- in Boot’s case
    probably derives from his neocon Marxist-Leninist origins rather than
    some evangelical Protestant checking out "rapture" fantasy. Just taking
    a wild guess there, (but come to think of it, what the heck is a "Max
    Boot"?).

    The same Max Boot displays at least a morbid "sensitivity to Jewish
    concerns" (Abe Foxman’s demand that all goyim display all the time to
    pre-emptively absolve themselves of the Scarlet A) when he suggests that
    whenever anyone other than neoconservatives themselves use the term, the
    term is a codeword for Jews. The attempt to impose the tetragrammaton
    taboo on "neocon," a characteristically irrational and authoritarian
    example of "The Haman Syndrome," has largely failed since it reveals both
    the cynical nominalism of the Agenda and the paranoia of its discourse
    management and censorship game so clearly.

    In the end it does not matter if Richard John Neuhaus is "Jewish, at
    least in terms of his DNA" or not. His DNA doesn’t matter to God at all
    and his neocon status has been well earned through his own choices, the
    way he thinks, the lies he tells, and the company he keeps. The lady
    leaving mass five years ago spoke the truth when she told Neuhaus: "This
    is what we get for unconditionally supporting Israel." In her humble
    way she spoke for the rationality of Logos in the cause and effect
    relationship she correctly perceived (whatever other mediations might be
    involved) and in pointing out the distinction between the United States
    and Israel Neuhaus would dispel with incantations and a hyphen. In her
    small voice she practiced Christian self-examination rather than
    indignant Jewish denial and lay prophecy rather than censorship. Whoever
    she was, she resisted domination and the acoustic din of the masters of
    discourse and she embodied that Hellenism and rationality of the
    Christian West Benedict XVI recently defended at Regensburg.

    Father Neuhaus faced a choice that day and he faces the same choice
    today. He could have sided with the Holy Spirit, the Hellenic
    rationality of the Christian West, and the truth and he could have
    agreed with the lady instead of singling her out for derision. He could
    even have acknowledged his fault with befitting Christian humility. He
    could have chosen to side with Murphy, McAllister, Gonzalez, and Leroy
    Brown, the 655,000 dead Iraqis, the Palestinian descendents of those to
    whom Christ preached the Beatitudes –these the least of his brethren in
    Christ. But he chose to join the tribe and to broaden his phylacteries;
    he chose to add his oratory to the toxic sludge of the mass media to
    support lies for a criminal war and mass murder. He chose to side with
    the Podhoretzim and to trade on counterfeit currency in the temple of
    the Dominations. In the words of Saint Paul, he chose to preach "a
    different gospel."