Catholics As The New Jews

We have an allegiance which cannot always be reconciled in practice, and cannot be reconciled at all in principle, to the historically aberrant absolutist claims of the State and the market, which we see as properly existing only to serve, once an uncontested view.

We insistently set aside one day in seven, and a number of other days through the year.

Our opposition to usury is as hateful to the world now as Jewish engagement in money-lending, whatever the historical reasons for it, was once.

We see sexual relations as only for the marital union of one man and one woman, and we promote their organisation in a way inseparable from the wife's reproductive cycle, so that only a faithful married couple can engage in it. We therefore identify sex between men and teenage boys as a transgression, and it is that identification, not the acts themselves, that is the problem.

And we have an unfashionable view of a certain piece of land in the Levant, based on naming people whom the world would rather forget, in our case the Catholics and other Christians of, especially, East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank, and southern Lebanon, though also elsewhere, not least including Nazareth.

No wonder that they hate us. We are in very good historical company. And a very particular shame attaches to those who lead that hatred from Hollywood, or the BBC, or the New York Times, or the governing institutions of the State of Israel, or even the likes of Harry's Place.