Question 183 - Michael Forrest talking to Mark Shea
Dear Robert,
Mark Shea posted some comments by Michael Forrest that I thought you might be interested to see. Do you care to comment? Forrest’s comments are below, and then Mark Shea adds something.
John D.
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Shea: Helping Michael Forrest Finish His Act of Reparation
He writes:
Forrest: FYI, we just posted two final articles at the blog then we're closing it down (not adding anything new).
R. Sungenis: Perhaps when Mr. Forrest read in my recent FAQ that support for me has increased over the last four years (not decreased as he was expecting), he decided that his efforts against me were having little effect. If you are not aware, Mr. Forrest and his cohorts engineered an Internet smear campaign against me for the last four years, which included telling people to boycott our apostolate and our products. They also told everyone to treat me as an excommunicant, based on their idiosyncratic interpretation of Matthew 18:15-18. Their goal was to get me out of the business of Catholic apologetics by hoping to ruin me financially. Fortunately, God had other plans. Apparently, He was setting up Forrest and his gang for a big fall, which only recently occurred, about which you will read below.
Forrest: After Bishop Rhoades' letter was published at CUF and in Lay Witness, we wanted to put up a final piece making clear that he is not a dual covenant guy. And then we finished with a summary piece.
R. Sungenis: Mr. Forrest still lives in the land of illusion. I have met few men in my life who can sound so convincing yet twist the truth so well to suit their own agenda. In the letter that Bishop Rhoades wrote on February 7, 2008 in answer to Forrest’s mailed-in questions, never once did Forrest ask the bishop the $64,000 question: “Bishop Rhoades, do you believe that the Jews still possess the Old Covenant, the Mosaic covenant, and that it is still valid for them?” Instead, Mr. Forrest lobbed theological softballs to Bishop Rhoades, questions that the bishop could easily get around without admitting his belief in dual covenant theology.
Further, I posted in the same FAQ the fact that Bishop Rhoades’ vicar general, Fr. William King (the very person Rhoades commissioned to communicate with me and who said that he “speaks for the bishop” on these matters) wrote a confidential email on July 15, 2008 to all the priests and deacons of his diocese which admitted the fact that the Harrisburg chancery, under the direction of Bishop Rhoades, believes and teaches dual covenant theology. Since Mr. Forrest still has trouble either believing it or accepting that it really exists, let me reproduce that email right here:
So there you have it. Fr. King, who in his own words is “a representative of the Diocese of Harrisburg,” is secretly slandering Robert Sungenis to all the priests and deacons of Harrisburg, while stating that the traditional doctrine of “supercessionism [sic] of the Old Testament Covenant stands apart from and in discord with authentic Catholic teaching.” How much clearer could it be that everything I’ve been saying about the Harrisburg diocese is true? Obviously, these people cannot be trusted. In public, Bishop Rhoades gave one impression to Mr. Forrest but in secret he and his vicar general were doing precisely the opposite.
Now, my guess is that Mr. Forrest will try to wiggle out of this problem by claiming that the email was written by the vicar general, not Bishop Rhoades. So let’s deal with that presumption. The first problem is that Fr. King told me in his July 2007 meeting that he “speaks for the bishop” on this matter. Second, we know that Bishop Rhoades would certainly not let Fr. King write an email from the chancery affirming dual covenant theology if Bishop Rhoades did not hold to the same theology. As soon as I received Fr. King’s above email from a friend in Harrisburg, I immediately wrote to both Bishop Rhoades and Fr. King, asking them to retract the slander; apologize to me and write another letter to the priests and deacons publicizing the apology; and relinquish their support of dual covenant theology. The only response I received was a letter from Fr. King saying that he wasn’t going to respond, making up some excuse that he feared I was going to sue him over the issue. Third, if Bishop Rhoades did allow Fr. King to write the above email supporting dual covenant theology but disagreed with Fr. King’s view, then the bishop would be guilty of allowing Fr. King to disseminate a heresy to all the priests and deacons of Harrisburg, not to mention the parishioners under their care.
Hence, because of the July 2008 email from Fr. King we have all the evidence we need that the diocese of Harrisburg is teaching the heresy of dual covenant theology, that the Old Covenant is still valid for the Jews. There has been absolutely no statement from either Bishop Rhoades or Fr. King to the contrary, and Mr. Forrest has failed to follow up with another query to Bishop Rhoades in order to ask him the $64,000 question.
So why can’t Mr. Forrest see this? Because Mr. Forrest has shown himself to be a blind ideologue who will not allow the faintest impression to reach the public (after his four years of slander against me on his blog) that he has been wrong about the central issue of this controversy. For two solid years after my meeting with Fr. King, Mr. Forrest and his gang of theological thugs plastered my name all over the Internet claiming that Bishop Rhoades and the Harrisburg chancery were completely innocent of my charges. They then used this presumption to further denigrate me and claim that I was “continuing to defy the bishop,” which then led them, as I said earlier, to tell everyone to treat me as an excommunicant; to ignore me, and to boycott my books and other products. But I hope you can see clearly by the admission in Fr. King’s email why Mr. Forrest and his crew were always on the wrong track.
Forrest can’t see any of this, even when it is made plain to him, because from the beginning he and his cohorts have had an overriding goal – to rid me from the landscape of Catholic apologetics. Beginning in 2005, Mr. Forrest was on the phone to dozens of prominent Catholics over the last four years convincing them that I was a menace to Catholic apologetics because of my outspokenness on Jewish matters. Of course, it was easy to make me a piñata, for I had already defied the Catholic consensus by being one of the only apologists to take on the Jewish issues when the infamous Reflections on Covenant and Missions document was published in 2002. Mr. Forrest’s co-author on the blog, David Palm, called me one day in 2005 and said he was going to start a public campaign against me because of my “writings on the Jews and geocentrism.” Imagine that. (Despite the fact that Mr. Forrest also supports geocentrism – and I know so because Mr. Forrest told me and Dale Vree at the New Oxford Review – that small fact doesn’t seem to bother Mr. Palm). As for the Jewish issues, take it for what it’s worth, but David Palm, a convert from Protestantism, graduated from Trinity Evangelical Seminary, one of the leading Protestant Zionist institutions in America.
Despite the machinations of Forrest and company, God, slowly but surely, vindicated me in several ways.
First, the article I wrote in 2002 which started the whole controversy and made my name mud in Catholic circles, i.e., my 50-page critique of the Reflections on Covenant and Missions document (a document which advocated dual covenant theology and further stated that the Jews do not need Christian salvation to get to heaven) was critiqued in 2009 by a USCCB committee and published worldwide. Although it took seven years for the USCCB to act, it confirmed my original critique of the Reflections document.
Second, God vindicated me by having the same USCCB vote by an overwhelming majority to eliminate the very sentence on page 131 of its United States Catholic Catechism for Adults that for two whole years I had been saying was heretical (The sentence on page 131 reads: “Thus the covenant that God made with the Jewish people through Moses remains eternally valid for them”). I was the only Catholic in the world who pointed out this heretical statement. Recently, the Vatican issued a “Recognitio” to the USCCB’s decision to excise that heretical sentence, thus affirming from the Church’s highest authority that the Mosaic covenant is no longer valid for the Jews – the very doctrine I have been preaching for the last seven years.
Third, God vindicated me when Fr. King’s July 2008 “confidential” email espousing dual covenant theology was exposed. This was the final proof that the Harrisburg diocese was playing a cat and mouse game with the public. When it came, Forrest’s party was over. With the admission from the Harrisburg diocese that it is promoting dual covenant theology, Mr. Forrest and his infamous bloggers have completely lost their credibility, and the letter that Bishop Rhoades wrote to Forrest which Forrest interpreted as Rhoades’ denial of dual covenant theology has been exposed as the deceptive farce I claimed it to be from the moment it was publicized in February 2008. But this is what the truth does. It turns a lie on its head, although sometimes we have to wait a long time before it does its work.
I should also mention that Mr. Forrest’s unwillingness to admit what Fr. King has finally revealed about the Harrisburg chancery’s push for dual covenant theology is the same reason that Leon Suprenant of CUF (the organization that Mr. Forrest mentions above, and which Mr. Forrest had strongly encouraged to attack me beginning in 2005) had the gall to deny my two years of work in exposing the heresy on page 131 in the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults. After I wrote about a half-dozen essays on our website and a major article in Culture Wars, I also wrote to the Vatican and told the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the US catechism’s heresy. The blogs show that most people in Catholic circles knew that I was engaged in this lone crusade. About a year after I wrote to the Vatican, and just six months after I published my findings in Culture Wars, the 246 bishops of the United States voted 231-14-1 in June 2008 to eliminate the erroneous sentence from the next edition of the catechism.
So what did Leon Suprenant then claim? He claimed that I shouldn’t be given any credit for the change because “there were other reviewers of the catechism long before Bob Sungenis came along.” Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not a credit seeker. But I will not stand by and allow the president of one of the finer Catholic institutions of America (CUF) use this incident to continue his campaign of personal defamation against me. Besides, anyone with half a brain would realize that, if there were, as Mr. Suprenant claims, “other reviewers,” then it is quite obvious that these reviewers didn’t catch the heretical sentence before the catechism was published! If they did catch it, then no one at the USCCB listened to them, since the USCCB went ahead and published the heretical sentence despite the alleged review!
So why does Mr. Suprenant make such ludicrous claims? Because, as is the problem with Mr. Forrest, to admit that Robert Sungenis was right would bring their whole slanderous enterprise against me to a screeching halt.
Forrest: I don't know how it's possible at this juncture, but I was kind of shocked that Bob is now back to openly trying to prove that only a few hundred thousand Jews died in the Holocaust and that they had it comin' because of their treachery. (He got that from the notorious Benjamin Freedman).
R. Sungenis: First, I’m not trying “to prove” anything about the Holocaust. This is just another example of how Mr. Forrest twists my words for his own devious purposes. In my recent FAQ, I merely said that, like many other scholars who have recently begun to investigate this issue, it is becoming increasing difficult to believe that six million Jews were killed in Nazi internment camps. One example of this evidence is the fact that the worldwide Jewish population from 1940 to 1948 did not decrease by even a half million, much less six million. We can see the significance of this if we compare it to today. Today, some 60 years after World War II, there are only about 14 million Jews in the world. If today the Jewish population dropped by 6 million, this would leave 8 million and it would be rather noticeable, to say the least. Logically, the same would have been noticed in 1948. But the international population records show that the numbers of Jews after World War II were virtually the same as before World War II. Interestingly enough, Reader’s Digest was touting the six million figure in 1943 long before World War II was over in 1945. How could its writers know the final figure before the war was over, especially before the so-called “final solution” was even implemented? Like me, any intelligent person is going to ask questions when he sees this contradictory evidence, especially when the Jews use the figure of six million to push their political agenda, as even the Jewish author, Norman Finklestein has documented very well in his book, The Holocaust Industry.
I also said that the documented records of the International Red Cross show that there were less than a few hundred thousand Jews who died in Nazi camps, and that most of those were from disease. In my FAQ, I offered to show the Red Cross records to anyone who would want to see them. But does Mr. Forrest ask to see them? No. He doesn’t want to see them. He’s never made any in depth investigation whether there were six million Jews killed, and he probably never will. He is simply a Jewish ideologue that has decided not to tolerate any opposition to his view of the matter. Instead of admitting his own negligence, he accuses me of trying “to prove” something that I only suggested ought to be investigated by an international commission so that we can finally get to the truth of the matter. Only people who are interested in truth will want an investigation, whereas those who are interested in preserving an image will object to it. This is precisely why in Germany today the Jews in power have orchestrated a fear campaign against anyone who publically questions the six million figure, and they send people to prison who have the courage to show the contrary evidence.
As for Benjamin Freedman, please note well that Mr. Forrest calls him “notorious.” Interesting, isn’t it? Here we have a card-carrying member of the Jewish race, a former Zionist himself, who suddenly found out the truth of what the Jews did prior to World War II, but Mr. Forrest refuses to listen to Freedman for even a moment, and essentially decides to call this fine Jewish man a liar. But the only one notorious here is Mr. Forrest. You can’t reason with a person like Forrest. He has already made up his mind that the Jews did not, and do not, engage in any significant malfeasance. Any evidence you present to him to the contrary (as I did recently with Bishop Rhoades’ and Fr. King’s promotion of dual covenant theology) he will just twist and distort to make it look like he is right and you are wrong. Mr. Forrest really isn’t interested in the truth. He is only interested in protecting his agenda, and we can all see very clearly what that agenda is.
Another indication of Mr. Forrest’s agenda is his blog’s total silence regarding any critical remarks of Jewish converts Roy Schoeman and David Moss. As I pointed out in a recent essay in Culture Wars, Dr. Ray Kavane (who was a consultant to Moss and Schoeman’s Association of Hebrew Catholics, and whose brother, Fr. Eugene Kavane, was the founder of AHC) and I have made it clear for anyone who wants to read it that Mr. Schoeman and Mr. Moss’ teaching on various Catholic and Jewish matters is heretical. Dr. Kavane is a graduate of the Lateran University in Rome, so he knows his theology. I have outlined Schoeman and Moss’ erroneous teachings time and time again, in stark detail, quoting their own words. But does Mr. Forrest or his blog cohorts say one word in concession, or do they communicate to Messers Schoeman and Moss to stop their heretical and racist teachings? No, they have never admitted that Schoeman and Moss are teaching erroneous doctrines, much less confront them. Why? Figure it out for yourself. Mr. Forrest is in this campaign to protect his Jewish ideology. If it means keeping silent about Schoeman and Moss’ heresies; if it means keeping silent about the heresy of dual covenant theology taught by the Harrisburg diocese and Bishop Rhoades’ complicity in it; if it means denying me any credit for the change in the USCCB catechism; or if it means distorting my words about the Holocaust, then Mr. Forrest will do it, because the goal here, as it has been for the last four years, is to destroy me and anyone else who criticizes or questions Jewish interests.
Forrest: For me, I've looked at it this way - I helped him by writing pro-life articles and unintentionally enabling him for about 3 years. I kind of made a promise to the Lord that I would help neutralize the damage he does for the same amount of time, as reparation. Well, this September, it makes three years since "Sungenis and the Jews" first came out. God willing, I'm done.
R. Sungenis: First of all, Mr. Forrest needs to redo his math. He started his public internet campaign against me in 2005, which makes it four years, not three. Regardless, his words here are another example of how he twists the truth. Right before he left our apostolate in early 2005 Mr. Forrest and I were working on a critical essay regarding the papacy of John Paul II. In other words, it wasn’t just “pro-life” articles that Forrest was writing for us. He was an integral part of all that we did at CAI. He was the vice-president of CAI, for goodness sake! In fact, before the Jewish issues came up that separated us, Mr. Forrest and I marveled about how well we got along and how we agreed with each other on so many things. Mr. Forrest would call me up weekly, sometimes daily, to talk for hours about theology and other things. My wife and I had a running joke that whenever Mr. Forrest called she wouldn’t see me for at least an hour. Mr. Forrest was also going to be the Godfather of my son who was born in 2005. Our families were planning a camping trip that same year. So yes, despite Mr. Forrest’s attempts to minimize his role at CAI, we were very close and it is not an exaggeration to say that Mr. Forrest was the right hand man of our apostolate. In fact, he asked me to have the authority to edit any article before it was published by CAI, and I gave him that power. So all his talk about just “writing pro-life articles” and merely “enabling him for 3 years” is just another example of Mr. Forrest’s constant penchant to twist the facts to his advantage.
Mark Shea: Sounds fair. Probably time to move on. I don't see Sungenis' nuttiness gain much purchase at this point. God willing, his Bp. will finally shut him down.
R. Sungenis: Unfortunately, Mr. Forrest and Mr. Shea can’t see their own hypocrisy. As noted above, in his attempted defense of Bishop Rhoades, Mr. Forrest condemns “dual covenant” theology. But Mark Shea, by his own admission, advocates dual covenant theology (although he insists that the Old Covenant remains in force only, as he puts it, “to condemn”). In fact, Mr. Shea wrote me an email a few months ago and chastised me for being a “supersessionist,” the very doctrine that Mr. Forrest says he believes and promotes. Obviously, when it comes to attacking Robert Sungenis, such glaring differences are brushed over. I don’t think I need to say anymore.
September 28, 2009
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