Network Gone Wrong Update

Advisor to “Association of Hebrew Catholics” Resigns,

Denouncing Moss and Schoeman for Modernism


Christopher A. Ferrara
REMNANT COLUMNIST, New Jersey
Roy Schoeman

(www.RemnantNewspaper.com) In my book EWTN: A Network Gone Wrong I devote an entire chapter to EWTN’s aggressive promotion of a new Judaizing trend in the Church, spearheaded by the Association of Hebrew Catholics (AHC) and its President David Moss, and by Roy Schoeman, author of Salvation is From the Jews. Moss and Schoeman are darlings of the neo-Catholic establishment and both have been featured on EWTN, the neo-Catholic media flagship.

As I show in my book, no fewer than five EWTN “experts” have commended AHC as a fine organization, worthy of Catholic support. But as its Manifesto states, AHC seeks nothing less than “the erection of a Hebrew Catholic Community, into which Jewish converts would be integrated at baptism and to which their descendants would belong.”  This “Hebrew Catholic Community” would have its own “paraliturgy,” observe Jewish holidays and practice other Jewish rituals.

This incredible proposal would literally establish a “Hebrew” branch of Catholicism, whose potential members are already calling themselves “Hebrew Catholics.”  By this means, the AHC Manifesto states, the Church “would correct the grave deficiencies [!] attendant on the admission of Jews to the Faith.” These “grave deficiencies” have arisen, said Moss on EWTN’s The Journey Home, because “For the last 1700-1800 years, the Church has become sociologically Gentile.” So much for the infallible teaching of St. Paul that in the Catholic Church “There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3:18).”

It impossible to explore here the nuances of the neo-Catholic Judaizing heresy—I do that in the book. Suffice it to recall the condemnation of the Fourth Lateran Council, aimed at Jewish converts who, in their prideful attachment to the old religion, did not want to be Catholics like all the other members of the Church:

Certain people who have come voluntarily to the waters of sacred baptism, as we learnt, do not wholly cast off the old person in order to put on the new more perfectly. For, in keeping remnants of their former rite, they upset the decorum of the Christian religion by such a mixing. Since it is written, cursed is he who enters the land by two paths, and a garment that is woven from linen and wool together should not be put on, we therefore decree that such people shall be wholly prevented by the prelates of churches from observing their old rite, so that those who freely offered themselves to the Christian religion may be kept to its observance by a salutary and necessary coercion. For it is a lesser evil not to know the Lord's way than to go back on it after having known it.

As for Schoeman, he is promoting, together with Moss, the idea that since Vatican II the Church has “corrected” her teaching on the Jews. As Schoeman puts it, the teaching that “the Old Covenant was entirely replaced (or superseded, hence ‘supersessionism’), made null and void, by the New” is an error that “dominated Christian theology for much of the past two thousand years. It has only recently been rejected definitively by the Church” [1]  Echoing this nonsensical (and heretical) claim, Moss declared during one of his EWTN appearances (March 7, 2005) that “The belief that “the Church replaced the people of Israel … was an erroneous theology that was taught for many, many centuries …”

Well, it seems that traditionalists are not the only ones who have had it with the new Judaizers being showcased on EWTN. In the February 2006 issue of Culture Wars, Fr. Raymond A. Kevane, a consultant to AHC, announced his resignation and denounced both Moss and Schoeman for promoting errors against the Faith.  Kevane (who obtained from Paul VI a decree of laicization with permission to marry), is the brother of Monsignor Eugene Kevane, one of the founders of AHC.

Kevane, referring to Moss’s statements on EWTN, declared that “No Catholic can say that the Church has held an erroneous theology for 2000 years and still remain a Catholic.” Kevane wrote that his late brother would condemn the ideas Moss and Schoeman are promoting—ideas “which fly in the face of Scripture and which are at variance with papal decrees, ecumenical councils and the constant teaching of the Church for 2000 years [and] could make converted Hebrew Catholics unwitting allies of the Heresy of Modernism.”

But Moss, AHC and Schoeman are the toast of EWTN.  For the neo-Catholic establishment has never met a novelty it doesn’t like.  This is why, as my book argues, EWTN, through the mesmerizing medium of television, has given Modernism a power it could never have in the hands of any mere local bishop or theologian.

And please, EWTN fans, do not write to me and tell me about all the “good things” in EWTN’s programming. Write to EWTN instead, and tell its directors to purge the network of its Modernist corruptions of the Faith.

[1]Roy H. Schoeman, Salvation is from the Jews (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), p. 352.