blackisthelight

Fountainhead of Irish antisemitism

Father Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp., was born in Golden Co. Tipperary in 1883 and attended secondary school at Rockwell College from 1895 to 1900. Rockwell is a prestigious Spiritan college closely linked with Blackrock College in Dublin. After leaving Rockwell Fahey trained as a priest for a year at the Holy Ghost Seminary near Paris coinciding with the height of the Dreyfus affair which polarised France between secular anti-clerical republicans and Catholic nationalists with strong antisemitic tendencies. The French revolution had granted rights to Jews not seen in European monarchies, and the struggle over France’s system of government since then was relevant to the status of Jewish people living in the state and was tied up in Catholic and royalist (often one and the same) attitudes towards the Republique. By 1900, Jews in France were being blamed by nationalists for the country’s problems far beyond the false allegations against Dreyfus. Themes of Jews as alien infiltrators and traitors were commonly aired in the right wing press. It’s likely that the atmosphere had an effect on the young novitiate. Fahey returned to Ireland to complete a degree in Dublin in 1906 before returning to France where he made his vows as a Holy Ghost Father in 1907. He spent the years 1908 to 1912 studying in Rome during a period of intense anti-modernism under Pope Pius X who continued the work of his predecessor Leo XIII. Fahey’s French language skills and the associations he had with France and the Holy Ghosts led him to be influenced by a seminarian named Henri Le Floch who was the Superior of the Collège Français in Rome while Fahey stayed there. Le Floch had a significant impact on Fahey, and another notable student of Le Floch’s around this time was Marcel Lefebvre who would go on become Holy Ghost Superior General and found the Society of Saint Pius X. Fahey returned home to Ireland in 1912 as an ordained priest with two PhDs in philosophy and divinity and started teaching at the new seminary in Kimmage.

Fahey was prone to health problems and spent some time during the first world war in Switzerland recuperating and attending to injured soldiers, leading him to miss many of the crucial events in Ireland from 1916-1919. After this period he lived in Ireland until his death in 1954. As professor of Philosophy and Church History, Fahey had a great deal of influence over the many seminarians that passed through Kimmage at a time of unprecedented Church power in Ireland, including the future Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid. The Holy Ghost Fathers were heavily involved in education in Ireland and abroad. Fahey and Father Edward Cahill at the Jesuit college in Milltown frequently exchanged books and ideas. Fahey also became a distant supporter of the French proto-fascist antisemitic political group Action Française before it was denounced by Pope Pius XI in 1926. Another French Catholic influence was the writer Father Ernest Jouin and his journal Revue International des Sociétés Secrètes. This paper, along with the journal of Action Française, were the main antisemitic papers in France in the interwar period. Jouin was endorsed by several popes and was a major contributor to antisemitic literature in the 1920s, promoting the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion and coining the term ‘Judeomasonic’. Pope Pius XI praised Jouin for ‘combating our mortal enemy’. Fahey became quite paranoid of Jewish influence and seemed to fear assassination or assault from Jewish spies.

Fahey established himself as an author and theologian. His main work was contained in a small book published in 1931 titled The Kingship of Christ according to the Principles of St. Thomas Aquinas. In addition to theological attacks on Jews, Fahey indulged himself in more materialistic attacks as well. Reflecting the anti-modernist stance common in the Church, the main themes of Fahey’s writing revolve around diabolical forces attempting to destroy the earth and the Church. Fahey stated he did not know if the Protocols were fake, but used them extensively as part of his discussions. He identified his writing as part of Christ’s work and was unable to take criticism, viewing any critique as an attack on Christ himself. Fahey’s philosophical ideas included viewing the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ, and Satan as the head of the forces organised against Christ. Anything that opposed the Church, became by definition, Satanic, which included any left-wing, socialist or communist movements dedicated to material gain for the working classes but also any attempt at liberalising or secularising social institutions. Behind all these movements, which included the Reformation, the French Revolution and the rise of liberalism were hidden Jewish forces, controlling the direction they took, and attempting to damage and destroy the Holy Roman Catholic Church. In this he was influenced by Nesta Webster, an English writer who promoted theories of Jewish involvement in secret societies advocating for revolution. Webster promoted the Protocols, was involved in British fascist groups in the 1930s and influenced the later John Birch Society and many other anti-communist and antisemitic groups. Even Hillaire Beloc described her writing as ‘lunatic’, but Fahey enthusiastically promoted her work to this students.

Public lectures with titles such as ‘Opposition to God’s Plan in the Jewish Nation and Roman Empire’ were symbolic of Fahey’s views on Jews and their role in modern society. Fahey used the term Organised Naturalism as a synonym for Jewish and Freemason attempts to destroy traditional society in league with Satan. Fahey’s theory of Naturalism was juxtaposed with Supernaturalism, which basically meant a belief in God and heaven, whereas Naturalism rejected God and the supernatural in preference to worldly experiences. This was understood to mean materialistic concerns of goods and property that formed the basis for both capitalist and communist economic theory. In Fahey’s view, as Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah, they rejected God, and embraced materialism. This theological rationale can be seen as providing excuses for wide-ranging antisemitic conspiracy theories blaming Jews for any economic problems encountered in the world. Central to this theology was also the concept of Order as exemplified by the followers of Christ, who were under attack from non-followers who risked plunging the world into disorder, and again these forces were exemplified by Jews. The root cause of this antagonism towards Jews came from a theological understanding of the rejection of Christ by the Jews as their messiah as central to their role in combatting the divine order or God’s plan for the world. In Fahey’s mind a second major historical split occurred with the rise of individualism in the Reformation, as Protestant monarchs rejected the supremacy of the pope in favour of more localised power. Unsurprisingly, Fahey saw Jewish influence as being central to the Reformation and the challenges to Rome.

The 1937 Constitution of the Republic of Ireland was the first in the world to mention inclusion of Jewish people as part of the state. Fahey’s response to this attempt at religious pluralism was to warn of a Jewish takeover of the country:

Thus it is to be feared that conflict lies ahead of us in Ireland, for the installation of the Natural Messias aimed at by the Jewish nation inevitably leads not only to the elimination of the Supernatural Messias, Our Lord Jesus Christ, but the subjection of all nations to the Jewish nation. Citizenship of the Irish State can be for the Jews only a means for the attainment of their own national ideal.

Writing in 1943’s The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism Fahey claimed that allowing Jews to have citizenship was an important step in Satan’s plan to destroy God’s work on Earth:

The first step towards this is to get all religions, including the Jewish religion, put on the same level as the Catholic church. The granting of full citizenship to the Jews, who, as a nation, are engaged in preparing for the Natural Messiah (by which he means Satan), tends in the same direction.

In further argumentation against permitting Jewish people to be welcome in his vison of an Irish society, or indeed any society:

The Jews, as a nation, are objectively aiming at giving society a direction which is in complete opposition to the order God wants...Where the Jews are powerful they openly attack the Supernatural Messias and the Supernatural Life of Grace which comes from Him. In countries where they are only advancing to power, they content themselves with desupernaturalizing the observances and customs which have sprung from acceptance from acceptance of the Supernatural Messias. When the latter process has been carried on for a sufficiently long time and Catholics have grown weak, the open attack can begin.

Fahey makes the argument that Jews remain concerned with the advancement of Jewish interests despite what nationality or citizenship they might obtain, and will use any position of power to destroy their ‘host’ nation and usurp power in the name of worldwide Jewish supremacy, and that this is required of any Jew due to their beliefs. Writing at the height of the Holocaust, Fahey approvingly quoted an antisemitic French theologian, Henri Delassus:

The Jews must cease to be officers, magistrates, professors, civil servants, barristers, attorneys, doctors in the public service… Jewish functionaries must be obliged to resign from government positions.

And again quoting approvingly from the Jesuit journal Civiltà Cattolica:

If the Jews are not rendered harmless by means of special laws depriving them of that civil equality to which they have no right, nothing useful or lasting will be accomplished.

While this language of scapegoating, ghettoization and expulsion is readily associated in the minds of a modern reader with the Nazis, similar language has been used for centuries by Catholic teachings, and it is in this tradition that Fahey firmly situates himself. If his views should overlap with fascism, then so be it. Fahey exhorts Catholics to fight against any advance of Jewish power:

We must combat Jewish attempts to bring under their domination individual Catholics and Catholic countries, even more vigorously than we must struggle against Freemasonry, because Jews form a more strongly organized and more cohesive naturalistic force than Freemasonry.

In opposition to the Holy Trinity, Fahey sees three prongs of Naturalism attacking the Church:

The invisible host is that of Satan and the other fallen angels, while the visible forces are those of the Jewish Nation and Freemasonry.

Eamon DeValera was very familiar with Fahey. They had played schoolboy rugby together, and consulted with him on matters relating to constitutional history and law. They met and walked together on the grounds of Blackrock College during the years leading up to the new constitution and it is likely that was a significant part of their conversations.

Fahey’s 1935 book The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World contains a lengthy description of his views on the Jewish influence behind the 1917 Russian revolution. This chapter, titled ‘The Agents of Revolution’ was reprinted by Father Coughlin as ‘The Rulers of Russia’ and widely distributed in the US. The 1938 Edition starts with the lines:

In this pamphlet I present to my readers a number of serious documents which go to show that the real forces behind Bolshevism in Russia are Jewish forces, and that Bolshevism is really an instrument in the hands of the Jews for the establishment of their future Messianic kingdom.

Fahey goes on to produce lists of Jews that were involved in communist movements as proof of their attempts to destroy western civilisation and included quotations from various rabidly antisemitic ‘sources’. One of these, later parroted by Coughlin, claimed suppression of a 1919 British Foreign Office report on the Bolshevik revolution, part of which stated ‘it is organised and worked by Jews who have no nationality and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things.’ All these sources amount to a conspiracy by European powers who were at war with each other collaborating to install a Jewish dictatorship in Russia. Many of these dubious sources were reused by Coughlin in his most controversial radio broadcasts in 1938-39. The book also regurgitates excuses for Nazi oppression of German Jews:

The movement which centres round the figure of Hitler has reacted against the state of affairs outlined by Dr. Eberle. The Jewish claim to be the race and nation destined by God to mould other nations—this is the necessary significance of their looking forward to another Messias—has led to a partial conflict.

After his Kristallnacht broadcasts, Father Coughlin began to heavily promote Father Fahey’s work, naming him as an important researcher and source of information on Jewish conspiracies. Fahey’s books were sold in their thousands at Coughlin’s megachurch in Royal Oak, and his philosophical literature was used to portray a veneer of intellectual legitimacy on Coughlin’s antisemitic broadcasts. 350,000 copies of Fahey’s Rulers of Russia were distributed by Coughlin but royalties were not paid to Fahey, only a cheque for $100 to offset costs. Fahey’s influence on Coughlin appears to have been strong. Although Coughlin had long indulged in antisemitic conspiracies, the tone shifted to a much darker place around 1938 as he discovered Fahey’s writings which added more varied source materials from Europe and crucially provided a theological justification for his anti-Jewish broadcasts and writing. Fahey was first mentioned in Social Justice in August 1938, with a lengthy introduction to his views on Jews and the Russian Revolution, and became a regular figure in Coughlin’s paper after that. Both Coughlin and Fahey had devised forms of a ‘third way’ between unrestrained capitalism and atheistic communism, essentially Catholic forms of fascism that advocated for programs for alleviating the worst social deprivation and married them with authoritarianism fuelled by bigotry and hatred. Coughlin made use of Fahey’s lists of Jews and promoted them to his millions of listeners, vastly amplifying the writings of the Dublin based professor, who he labelled ‘one of the most outstanding scholars in Ireland’ and repeatedly leaned on him as an authoritative source for information on Jewish wrongdoing. A December 1938 issue of Social Justice promoted The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World on the front cover and praised it as ‘almost indispensable’, and Coughlin’s weekly column was handed over to Fahey for an article titled ‘The International Bankers’. This was a level of promotion not afforded by Coughlin to any other author. Coughlin made extensive use of Fahey’s writings on banking, communism and Jews over the following years, and the two men corresponded for many years. Fahey acted as a conduit and translator for French and Latin language writing that conferred a sense of legitimacy upon brutal anti-Jewish hatred in the American far-right of the 30s and 40s, while his Irishness helped appeal to a large contingent of Irish-Americans seeking the same sense of righteousness. In this, his influence on the larger American far-right movement should not be understated.

Many of Coughlin’s supporters wrote to Fahey and he gained a significant following in North America. Fahey’s international connections can be seen in his influence on the self-proclaimed ‘Canadian führer’ Adrien Arcand and his various associated fascist parties. Arcand translated and distributed various works of Fahey’s. Fahey also had a correspondence with Rev. Gerald L.K. Smith who inherited Huey Long’s populist organisation, and collaborated with Coughlin for a period in the Union Party. The two exchanged material, with Smith sending 1200 copies of Red Stars In Hollywood to Fahey after the war. It’s likely this book, which mostly accused Jewish actors of being communists, played a part in the activities of Fahey’s organisation Maria Duce which targeted Hollywood cinema as a sources of degeneracy. Smith thanked Fahey for his work which he said had ‘lead me to a deeper spiritual life as well as a realization of the evil forces of International Jewry.’ In turn, Fahey furnished Smith with hundreds of copies of The Rulers of Russia which was used by McCarthy-era far-right groups. Its contents have been reproduced innumerable times in other formats. Another notable correspondent of Fahey’s was Senator Jack Tenney of California who was involved in McCarthyite investigations and provided Fahey with further information on his probing of Jewish and communist influence in Hollywood. Tenney was General Douglas MacArthur’s running mate for the presidency in 1952. Fahey also corresponded with Gertrude Coogan, Coughlin’s economics advisor whose work he had cited in Money Manipulation and the Social Order.

Fahey remained steadfastly opposed to Irish Republicanism. In relation to the IRA’s stance on the public ownership of the means of production Fahey stated:

If ever a Communist Republic is set up in Ireland, we shall be trampled underfoot in another world empire ruled from Moscow – or Jerusalem.

One of Fahey’s final works was titled The Kingship of Christ and the Conversion of the Jewish Nation (1953) which had difficulty in being approved by the church hierarchy and was quietly blacklisted by Archbishop McQuaid. In it Fahey embraced an extremist view of Jewish beliefs and spends two hundred pages detailing their supposed collective crimes against humanity. He warned against offering citizenship to Jews as this would enable attacks on the one true church to take place in the form of appeals to secularism or multi-denominationalism. Part of Fahey’s response to the establishment of the state of Israel called for the removal of Jewish people from public representation:

The setting up of the Jewish State must logically lead to the elimination of Jews from the public life of England, Ireland and other countries.

In a highly confrontational and belligerent strand of Catholicism, as Fahey exemplified, it is hard to see this as anything but a call to arms for followers to attack Jews by whatever means they felt appropriate, shortly after the horrors of the Holocaust had been made widely known. Fahey tried to distinguish between an antisemitism of Jew hating and an anti-Judaism that he and the Church as a whole engaged in, a tactic that was adopted by the Church in the wake of the Holocaust and used to deflect blame for the outcomes of their teachings.

Fahey made some vague attempt at condemning the Holocaust, but downplayed the numbers of dead as Jewish propaganda. More specifically he warned that any softening of views regarding the Jews being a principal source of evil in the world would only lead to more destruction of Christian nations. He took a soft view of the massive genocidal crimes of the Third Reich viewing them as a response to Jewish provocation.

In order to understand the different currents in the German reaction against Jewish-Masonic influence, we must bear well in mind that the Jewish Nation and Freemasonry are working in the camp of Satan for the reign of Naturalism.

One of Fahey’s sources for the book was Arnold Leese, the English camel doctor turned arch-antisemite and leader of the Imperial Fascist League who at the time of writing was mentoring post-war neo-Nazi leader Colin Jordan. Fahey cites Leese in determining that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was numerically impossible. One has to wonder how familiar Fahey was with Leese’s journal Gothic Ripples to be citing it as an authority on the Holocaust. Other authors of a similar quality, such as Douglas Reed and Robert H. Williams, allowed Fahey to push Holocaust denial to his audience of Catholic intellectuals. He reiterated his assertion that Jewish investors controlled the Soviet Union and refused to accept reports of Jewish persecution there, dismissing these as Zionist propaganda designed to inspire support in the west. Fahey repeated his tactic of ‘naming the Jew’ with a list of Jewish people involved in the UN, repeating a lie that 60% of the UN staff were Jewish and claiming the first world war was started by Jews so that they could claim 5 trillion dollars worth of minerals in the Dead Sea and become masters of the world. The UN, needless to say has been started “in preparation for the setting-up of a definitely anti-Supernatural World Government, under Jewish control.”

Fahey’s political activities and his organisation Maria Duce will be discussed in Part 2.

REFERENCES

Athans, Mary Christine (1987) A New Perspective on Father Charles E. Coughlin Church History , Jun., 1987, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 224-235

Athans, Mary Christine (1991) The Coughlin – Fahey Connection New York: Peter Lang

Cooney, John (1999) John Charles McQuaid Dublin: O’Brien Press

Curtis, Maurice (2010) A Challenge to Democracy – Militant Catholicism in Modern Ireland Dublin: The History Press

Curtis, Maurice (2019) Control and Constraint – The Catholic Action Movement in Ireland in the Twentieth Century Dublin: The Old Dublin Press

Delaney, Enda (2001) 'Political Catholicism in post-war Ireland: The Revd Denis Fahey and Maria Duce, 1945-54', The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 52, No. 3, pp. 487-511.

Delaney, Enda (2011) Anti-communism in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ireland The English Historical Review , August 2011, Vol. 126, No. 521 (AUGUST 2011), pp. 878-903

Fahey, Denis (1938) The Rulers of Russia Dublin: The Trader Publishing Company

Fahey, Denis (1943) The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism Cork: The Forum Press

Fahey, Denis (1944) Money Manipulation and Social Order Dublin: Browne and Nolan

Kertzer, David I. (2001) The Popes Against the Jews – The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism New York: Vintage