The people who control the mainstream
publishing industry hate the Church and therefore
regularly publish and promote books that deny our
Faith. The current screed du jour is a silly book
by an ex-Roman Catholic priest named James Carroll
called Constantine's Sword, in which the author claims
that the Church fabricated the Messiahship, Divinity,
and Resurrection of Christ in order to give Herself
an excuse to persecute the Jews who rejected Christ.
From reading Carroll's book, one would think that
this was the only thing the Church every really did
- that millions upon millions of people who believed
in Christ and dedicated their lives to Him, who worked
miracles, converted untold multitudes, enlightened
countless nations, created the most humane and glorious
civilization the world has ever seen - that all these
people only seemed to care about salvation in heaven
and good works on earth, but they really had only
one thing in mind, which was to beat up on Jews.
This
is ridiculous, of course, but we have to realize
that this kind of thinking is being spread constantly
by the academic and literary establishments, for
whom the greatest sin is "anti-Semitism." I
should like to propose a key behavior we can change
in ourselves to combat this propaganda.
A
first step we can take is to refuse the popular
usage of the term "the Holocaust," by which
the "mainstream" means the killing of Jews
during WWII by the Nazis. For the Christian, there
is only one holocaust which can be called THE Holocaust,
and that is the sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus Christ
on the Cross, the One and Only Sacrifice that takes
away the sin of the world and the sins of each man
who believes in Him.
The
term "holocaust" is from the Old
Testament. It refers to the type of sacrifice for
sin in which the entire animal victim was consumed
by fire ("wholly burnt," which is what
holocaust means in Greek), completely offered to
God, and nothing was left unconsumed to be eaten
by the priest. The OT holocaust was a prefigurement,
a typos (type), that is, a prophecy in action, of
the One and True Holocaust, the Sacrifice of Our
Lord on the Cross.
Therefore,
a true Christian will never call any other event
THE Holocaust.
The only "THE Holocaust" for
us (and in reality) is Our Lord's Sacrifice of Himself
on the Cross. By brainwashing us into calling the
slaughter of modern Jews "THE Holocaust" (always
with the "the" and the capital "H"),
today's Scribes and Pharisees are teaching us that
the pivotal event in history, and the sacrifice pleasing
to God, is not Our Lord's Sacrifice on the Cross
but rather the death of their co-religionists at
the hands of "evil Christians." (And they
always claim, of course, that the Nazis were Christians,
when in fact Nazism is a form of neo-paganism, and
the Nazis killed far more Christians than Jews).
I, for one, refuse to call anything THE Holocaust,
other than Our Lord's Sacrifice on the Cross. I ask
you to join me in this, to please our Divine Savior
and to preserve our sanity and our Faith.
Christ the Redemptive Sacrifice
He,
being the true Son of the Father, later became
man for us so as
to give Himself for us as a sacrifice
to the Father and redeem us through His sacrifice
and offering (Ephesians 5:2). He was the same Who
in ancient times led the people out of Egypt, and
later redeemed all of us, or rather, the whole human
race, from death, and raised us from hell. He is
the same Who from the ages was offered as a sacrifice,
as a Lamb, and in the lamb was represented prefiguratively.
And finally He offered Himself as a sacrifice for
us. "For even Christ our Pascha is sacrificed
for us." (I Corinthians 5:7).
-
St. Athanasius the Great, Tenth Paschal Epistle
By
His death was accomplished the salvation of all,
and the whole of creation was redeemed. He is
the common Life of all, and He gave His body to death
as a sheep for a redemptive sacrifice for the salvation
of all, though the Jews do not believe this.
-
St. Athanasius the Great, On the Incarnation
Jesus,
as Zachariah says, is the Great High Priest (Zachariah
3:1), Who offered His Lamb, that is, His
flesh, in sacrifice for the sins of the world, and
for the sake of the children who partake of flesh
and blood Himself partook of blood (Hebrews 11:14).
This Jesus became High Priest after the order of
Melchizedek, not in respect of what He was before,
being the Word and God and in the form of God and
equal to God, but in respect of that fact that He
spent Himself in the form of a servant and offered
an offering and sacrifice for us.
-
St. Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius