Hippies, Jews, Lafferty

In thinking about Lafferty's denial of the Jewish Holocaust, one of the more curious items in the Tulsa archive is a letter sent to Lafferty by a founding member of the Remnant of Israel. At the time Lafferty received the letter, the small Jewish group was based in central Kentucky. It opens a window onto an interesting corner of religious life: the world of Jewish converts to Catholicism.

The Catholic Church has long described itself as Israel or the Israel of God. Yet it’s worth remembering that it approached the modern State of Israel cautiously. Diplomatic recognition by the Holy See came only on December 20, 1993, leading soon after to the establishment of a Vatican Nunciature in Israel and an Israeli embassy in Rome.

While this development was civic and political, it was not without drama. Behind it lay centuries of theological debate, and more recently, Lumen Gentium (promulgated on November 21, 1964), the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. There, the Church declares that Christ “instituted this new covenant, the New Testament, that is to say, in His Blood; calling together a people made up of Jew and Gentile . . . this messianic people has as its head Christ . . . and finally reaches its perfection in the glory of heaven. The people, therefore, is the new Israel.”

This is the context in which I read parts of Nostra Aetate (promulgated October 28, 1965) that, for good and ill, reflect the time in which it was written, as the Church moved toward clarity. Here, one thinks of passages that might now be written differently while transmitting the same Magisterial authority, ones such as

“True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; (13) still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.”

So how did Lafferty come to donate money to the Remnant of Israel? To answer that, one must look to the 1960s and a Bay Area hippie commune where Lafferty’s writing was being read. The commune was led by a man named Hal Barton, who eventually concluded that the commune should formally convert to Catholicism. Some of the hippies took the step of becoming third-order Dominicans. From this transformation came several significant developments, including the creation of Catholics United for Life.

Without getting too much into the weeds, among Hal Barton's commune were several Jewish members. The commune's chaplain was Father Arthur B. Klyber, a gifted Jewish Catholic priest who was not part of the commune. Father Klyber would also play an important role in the separate life of The Remnant of Israel, which included several people who had been a part of the commune. Klyber founded the apostolate Remnant of Israel in 1975.

In thanking Lafferty for his donation, the letter from The Remnant of Israel includes the following lines: "The person who wrote to you was asked to leave our group in 1987. We have changed much since then." The most likely author of the original letter to Lafferty was Barton himself.

For anyone trying to understand Lafferty’s views on Jews and Judaism, it is another data point, one of the more unusual episodes recorded in the archive, and a reminder of how complicated the relationship between Jews and Catholics can be, with Jewish Catholics themselves being a central part of the story. A new friend introduced me to the term universal Judaism as being a synonym for Roman Catholicism. That sounds exactly right.