E. Michael Jones: Well-supported Advocate of New Church
Dr.
Chojnowski: I am publishing the last installment of Randy Engel's
fascinating article on the E. Michael Jones, Michael Voris, and Opus Dei
by dividing it up into two parts. The first, below, comes from the
"Here we go again!" file dealing with E. Michael Jones' seemingly
profitable on-going antagonism to the SSPX.
The
second part, to be published shortly, deals with the incredible wealth
and surreptitious activities of Opus Dei. I personally remember, some 28
years ago, an attempt to recruit me for Opus Dei by a young man
operating at Fordham University where I was studying for my doctorate in
philosophy. The Manhattan house spoken of below --- with some $50
million dollars in assets --- was host to many impressive individuals, I
remember hearing the brother of the Polish finance minister from the
newly democratic government of Poland. At that get-together, I was told
by this "friend" trying to recruit me that the SSPX were
"Satan-worshippers." Sounds too much, I can assure you that it was said.
The point where the recruiting measures were amp up was when the Opus
Dei members encouraged me to take as my confessor a priest who had been a
former Spanish admiral! Now that was impressive.
Now
here is the first part of Randy Engel's article on E. Michael Jones.
Note that the letter that she is sighting is not from her own hand but
from that of journalist Rosemary Fielding.
“Postscripts to the
Jones/Voris Affair”
By Randy Engel
Introduction
This
is the third and final installment to my first two articles, “All the Men
Behind the Opus Dei Curtain,” and “On the First Anniversary of the Jones/Voris
Affair - A Response to E. Michael Jones with Follow-Up Questions.”
My
thanks to the over 400 readers who responded via e-mails to the Opus
Dei/Jones/Voris Affair, including many former Opus Dei members and cooperators.
In
this last segment of the series, I’m including some important postscripts I
received from readers in the U.S. and abroad. They included important comments
and attachments primarily on Opus Dei and one on E. Michael Jones, the author
of The Man Behind the Curtain: Michael
Voris and the Homosexual Vortex.
I’ll
begin with the singular commentary on Dr. Jones sent to me by Catholic journalist, Rosemary Fielding. It
is printed verbatim below in a separate font and needs no additional comments.
Rosemary
Fielding’s Letter on The Truth Behind the Quotation
In the April 20, 2017 letter of E. Michael
Jones to Randy Engel (following Mike’s request, Randy posted it in July of
2017), Mike refers to Bishop Bernard Fellay, superior general of the Society of
St. Pius X (SSPX). Mike quotes him as saying, “the church has cancer. We can’t associate with the church because
then we would get cancer.” Jones gives
no citation for this quotation. I think
I know what Mike would cite as the source of Bishop Fellay’s
alleged quotation. If I am right in my
identification of the source, however, this is not a quotation from Bishop
Fellay, but a quotation fabricated by Mike Jones that would prove to be as
false as a paraphrase or a summary as it is as a quotation.
In April 2009, on Palm Sunday, Bishop Fellay
gave an interview from St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Winona, Minnesota, that
was broadcast by Gloria T.V. in which was included a discussion of the
then-recent controversy around Bishop Williamson and the SSPX’s relationship
with the Vatican. For reasons I will
explain later, I believe this broadcast is the source that Mike has failed to
cite in his letter to Randy. Because the
exact words, as well as the context, are important, below is a transcript of
that part of Bishop Fellay’s interview that Mike (I believe) reduced to two
simple sentences. All the quotation is from Bishop Fellay. The cancer-analogy is in bold.
“The Church for once [i.e. for the first time]
is not only attacked from the outside, like persecutions, but you have
insiders, inside attacks. St. Pius X has already said, ‘The enemy is
within.’.... ideas which may have confusedly spread within the Church… The
Church is suffering heavy, heavy diseases.
It is not only we who are saying that. You have the popes [Paul VI, John
Paul II, Benedict XVI]… They all say that the Church is sick. Well, Paul VI, he
said, he spoke of ‘auto-demolition’… He
used the words ‘smoke of Satan’ within the temple of God. … John Paul II, he spoke
of heresies which are spread with full
hands, and he spoke of happenings within the Church. So that means that
even the present popes, they do acknowledge from time to time that there is a
very, very serious crisis in the Church.
Let me
compare it to a cancer, and even to a generalized cancer, that means a disease
which is spread in the whole body. Now
if you have someone who has a cancer, you fight the whole cancer, you disagree with the cancer,
so you are strongly against the cancer,
but this does not mean that you are going to be against the person who has the cancer. Easily, you will make like a
coincidence with both, you will say the one is the other, but that is a
simplification. As when we say ‘the modern Church…the conciliar Church
and… the official Church’--it is an easy
way to deal with the problem, it is not
very easy to say where is the cancer ..when it is generalized…when you have
metastasis…it is everywhere. So it is a simplification… to say the whole Church
is the cancer. But, precisely, very
precisely, it is wrong. If you say so, then you would have a serious
problem in saying where is the holy Church. If you just say that the whole Church is
sick…is the sickness, then the holiness is gone. And we have to maintain that the Church is
the visible body. Even if we see a great
part of this visible Church gone wrong, we do not have the right to say that
the whole thing is gone. Because if you
say so, well, there is no Church. Then
we have to make ourselves sedevacantists. So there is a tendency, there is a danger, to
just throw the whole thing,..the baby with the water, and it is linked with the
terrible situation; which we are in, which has taken great, great parts of the
Church. It is very difficult to make
that distinction; it is very easy to say I’ll have nothing to do with them [the
conciliar Church]… So when we [the SSPX]
deal with having relation with them, we
don’t want to have any kind of relation with the cancer. Of course, if you have relation with
cancer, you may receive the cancer. It is a bad example, but it is just to say,
‘No, we want to deal with the holy
Catholic Church which is still existing, under or below this appearance of
disease’…Sometimes the distinction could appear subtle. And I do agree that such relations are not without danger. It is not an easy situation. But if we do want …expect…the Church to
overcome these diseases, we are bound to do what we can, at our place,
according to our means, to help. And if by talking we can remind some people in
the Church of the right positions, of what the Church taught before, we have to
do it, with great prudence, of course…The only thing we want is that the Church
get out of the crisis and be what the Church has to be, this beautiful spouse
of Christ to whom Our Lord has entrusted His mission, which is to save souls,
to bring them to heaven. That is why we
deal with it, because we believe that it is the holy Church, we believe that we
have a duty now. We also know that it is
limited, we are not going to pretend that we are going to save the Church. We try to do what we can at our place,
remembering that little things can, in the hands of God, bring much more than
it appears…The miracle-- that is in God’s hands, not ours.”
My husband and I saw his point. How could
anyone who actually listened to it with an honest mind fail to see his point?
It was clear that Bishop Fellay believed the cancer is the doctrinal errors in
the Church, and not the Church itself.
In addition, Bishop Fellay was actually defending the SSPX’s decision to participate in talks with the Vatican;
the interviewer had asked Bishop Fellay what he would say to the critics of
this decision to enter into talks with Rome. In other words, bishop Fellay was
explaining the reason why the Society was
associating with the Vatican / Church. The true meaning of Bishop Fellay’s
interview, then, taken in context, is almost
the reverse of Mike’s summary of his interview, which summary Mike later
put into quotation marks in CW, as I will explain below.
I believe that this interview is the source of
Mike’s quotation because my husband and I were the ones who showed Mike this
interview when he and his wife visited our home in March 2010. During that visit, we suggested to Mike that
he may think better of the SSPX if he would listen to Bishop Fellay’s 2009
interview on Gloria T.V. We thought that
Bishop Fellay sounded reasonable and just in his remarks to the point that even
Mike Jones might see the reasonableness and justice of the SSPX’s position. So
we set him up with our computer to watch it (he watched part of it, not all of
it) and then went back to continue our visit with his wife. We heard exclamations from the other room
that made us realize Mike was not happy
with the interview. When he came out
complaining about what Bishop Fellay said, I thought even at the time that Mike
had misrepresented the content of Bishop Fellay’s remarks to a stunning degree,
and I said with some exasperation, “That’s not what he said!” My husband also briefly expressed his disagreement,
but being that it was a friendly visit, we let it drop.
However, the real shock came when we read Culture Wars in September 2010. “Bishop Fellay,” Mike wrote, “one of the four
bishops, had been interviewed at the SSPX seminary in Winona, Minnesota and the
interview had been posted on YouTube. Fellay began the interview by throwing
Williamson under the bus, and it went downhill from there. ‘The Church has cancer,’ Bishop Fellay
opined, ‘and if we embrace the Church we’ll get cancer.’” (My italics.)
I was so shocked when I read an obviously
ersatz quotation that I listened to the interview again and, at the same time,
transcribed some of the interview in the margin of the article in Culture Wars. In the Culture
Wars article Mike Jones had not only misquoted Bishop Fellay but had
clearly changed the meaning of his carefully presented idea. I was shocked
because I would not have thought Mike Jones would go so far as to make up
quotations and publish them in his magazine just to make his point. But that is the conclusion I had to come
to. It was a sorry conclusion to come
to, because, in my mind, this meant that all his previous published work was
put under a cloud of doubt. It is also worth noting that the quotation printed
in 2010 is different from the quotation printed in the 2017 response to Randy.
It is this same interview that I believe is
the source of Mike’s quotation in the April letter that he asked Randy to
publish. If it is the source, then he is
misquoting Bishop Fellay again. And there
should be no “if” in this kind of journalism.
I guess a little history might be of interest:
I had been a subscriber to Fidelity
since around 1993 or so; a contributor of several articles since 2001; and even
had a book review I had written of
Mike’s Libido Dominandi published in Our Sunday Visitor in November 2000, a
fact which Mike had considered a small miracle.
We had purchased and read all his books up to that time. He and his wife and their children had stayed
at our house in Pittsburgh several times (it was halfway between South Bend and
Philadelphia), and our family had visited them as well in South Bend. During 2008-2009 our family had attended an
SSPX chapel, but at the time of the Jones’ stopover, we were going to the Latin
Mass at an Ecclesia Dei Latin Mass
Community church. However, we still admired Bishop Fellay and still believed
the SSPX had made a largely correct analysis of the condition of the modern
Church. Because of our admiration for
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, we had in the past discussed with Mike the
situation of the SSPX--always ending in disagreement. I would also add that I
knew nothing about the Voris/Jones explosion until this month because we no
longer subscribe to Mike’s magazine, nor do we watch Michael Voris. I only found Randy’s article because, having
read that Iran was cracking down on Christians more forcefully, I had done an
Internet search to check out what Mike was currently saying about this country.
The search brought up the Voris/Jones news.
Finally--one of those historical footnotes--one of the articles I wrote
for Culture Wars was a review of
Randy Engel’s book The Rite of Sodomy:
Homosexuality and the Roman Catholic Church.
Our friendship with the Joneses faded to
nothing after that visit. We haven’t seen them since; nor were there any
friendly phone calls, cards or other forms of communication; in fact, all
indications were that they had decided to drop us. (And, yes, we did make some
initiatives to stay in touch; Mike responded to one this year, and we shared a
brief email exchange and trade of family news.) We often wondered if we became persona non grata because we also said
to Mike on that visit that we thought the late Michael Davies won the debate
with him, the debate on the excommunication of Msg. Lefebvre.
After that particular visit, my husband and I
concluded that Mike was never going to change his mind about what he had once
published about the SSPX, no matter what happened, and no matter what he heard
or read--and we concluded this not because Mike disagreed with Bishop Fellay,
but because we thought he had seemed so unreasonable in his disagreement and he
had inaccurately paraphrased what Bishop Fellay had said. And, so far, it appears that we were right
about that prediction. I guess if Michael Davies couldn’t do it, no one can.
Back to the matter at hand-- I thought about
writing Mike in September 2010 to point out the mis-quotation published in CW, but, in the end, for a couple of
reasons, (not the least of which is that I did not want to transcribe the
section of the interview--a time-consuming job without the right equipment) I
thought that it best to leave it to the SSPX to correct it--which I certainly
expected someone in that organization to do.
But, no one seemed to have done so.
We received CW for a few more
years after that, and I never saw a correction or a letter to the editor
pointing out the actual words of Bishop Fellay.
But now Mike is doing it again. And this time, because of the whole context
of Randy’s article on Opus Dei, Jones and Voris, I think it is pertinent to
point out that Mike is not quoting Bishop Fellay if he is quoting the same
interview of April 2009. And if Mike is
not quoting that interview, he should tell us which one he is quoting. As I
have told my students so many times, “You need a citation here.”
I gave those instructions almost as often as I
corrected with “Only exact words go into quotation marks.” Obviously, I am making the point that a
journalist of Mike’s brilliance and experience knows that the same rules apply
to him as apply to every other reputable journalist. So what gives with his
work?
