Jews are “enemies of the Church,” the head of a radical Catholic sect said in Canada.
Bishop Bernard Fellay, superior of the traditionalist
Society of St. Pius X, made the remark during a Dec. 28 address at Our
Lady of Mount Carmel Academy in New Hamburg, Ontario, about 90 minutes’
drive west of Toronto.
He was reviewing the situation of the society,
which opposes Catholic Church reforms decided by the Second Vatican
Council and is not recognized by the Church.
According to an audio recording posted on YouTube two
days later, Fellay spoke about the society’s three years of discussions
with the Vatican over the society’s future and explained how he
interpreted behind-the-scenes communications.
Apparently speaking without a text, Fellay asked, “Who
during that time was the most opposed that the Church would recognize
the society? The enemies of the Church: the Jews, the Masons, the
modernists.”
According to the Catholic News Service, Fellay added
that Jewish leaders’ support of reforming Second Vatican Council “shows
that Vatican II is their thing, not the Church’s.”
As of Friday, there was no response from the society’s
Swiss headquarters to a Catholic News Service email request for comment,
the agency reported.
The Society of St. Pius X, , was founded in 1970 as a
reaction against the Vatican’s efforts to modernize.
In 2009, Pope
Benedict launched talks with the society and lifted excommunications
imposed on its four bishops.
One of the bishops was Richard Williamson, who has
denied that the Nazis used gas chambers and asserted that no more than
200,000 to 300,000 Jews died during World War II.
The society’s founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre,
spoke approvingly of both the World War II-era Vichy regime in France
and the far-right National Front, and in a 1985 letter to Pope John Paul
II identified the contemporary enemies of the faith as “Jews,
Communists and Freemasons.”