Ebrei e società cristiana nel pensiero tradizionalista cattolico

According to traditionalist catholic thinkers, the French revolution abruptly and violently substituted a political and social order based upon the will of God for an arbitrary order founded on the will of man. All the evils of the Revolution, i.e. modernity and secularism, come from the inspiring principles of the Enlightment philosophy. Only the Church has access to God's revelation and consequently, only the Church can verify and sanction the legitimacy of political power. Traditionalists were convinced that the urgent and paramount task after the Revolution was to restore the old Christian society. In the traditional order, the Jews had a role and a place assigned to them by theology: even though they had rejected and killed Jesus Christ, they had to be physically preserved and tolerated as witnesses to the Christian faith. However, because of their sins, they had to be isolated and kept in a servile, degraded and despised condition. The only way for them to escape from such condition was conversion. But the French revolution, irrespective of theological rules, emancipated the Jews and turned them from pariah to citizens. The struggle of the Church against political and cultural modernity implied a relentless effort to re-ghettoize the Jews, "to put them back in their place". The traditional anti-Judaism of the Church evolved to a new form of antisemitism which charged the Jewish people with promoting those elements of modernity that were seen to be harmful to the catholic faith and the Christian society. Liberalism, bolshevism, atheism, rationalism, materialism. were all, at one point or another, ascribed to a Jewish conspiracy, often referred to as Freemasonry.