Every year during Holy Week, a theme usually pops out in my mind whilst attending the Sacred Mysteries. This year, the theme is Pontius Pilate, and judging by current events, specifically these insane “anti-semitism laws” that are cropping up, this essay might be a felony by next year, so I had better get it written up and publicly visible while I still can.

As we have discussed in this space before, historical context is EVERYTHING when considering Pontius Pilate vis-a-vis Our Lord’s Passion and death. I learned this historical context from Dr. Mazza several years ago, and it has been a massively informative and illuminating bit of information. Right now, there seems to be a big push by ethnic Jews (almost all of whom today are militant atheists) to deny all responsibility for the death of Jesus Christ, to the point of trying to criminalize the very mention of it. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to make sure that the whole, unvarnished truth about the matter is spread far and wide. While both the Jews and Pontius Pilate (as a governing proxy for the Roman Empire) were both guilty of deicide, as Holy Mother Church has always taught, the guilt of the Jews was far greater than that of Pilate. Not only SHOULD the Perfidious Jews have recognized the Messiah, some of them actually did recognize Him, and killed Him anyway, exactly, precisely as prophesied throughout the Old Testament and by Our Lord Himself during His earthly ministry.

The Office of Tenebrae is my favorite Liturgical event of the year, and the sixth reading of the second night of Tenebrae is St. Augustine’s treatise on the question. It couldn’t be any clearer. I post it in full here, again, because this is literally going to be declared illegal at the rate we’re going in Clown World:

Reading 6
They whetted their tongue like a sword. The Jews cannot say: We did not murder Christ, albeit they gave Him over to Pilate His judge, that they themselves might seem free of His death. For when Pilate said unto them, Take ye Him: and kill Him, they answered, It is not lawful for us to put any man to death. They could throw the blame of their sin upon a human judge: but did they deceive God, the Great Judge? In that which Pilate did, he was their accomplice, but in comparison with them, he had far the lesser sin. Pilate strove as far as he could, to deliver Him out of their hands; for the which reason also he scourged Him, and brought Him forth to them. He scourged not the Lord for cruelty’s sake, but in the hope that he might so slake their wild thirst for blood: that, perchance, even they might be touched with compassion, and cease to lust for His death, when they saw What He was after the flagellation. Even this effort he made! But when Pilate saw that he could not prevail, but that rather a tumult was made, ye know how that he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying: I am innocent of the blood of this Just Person. And yet he delivered Him to be crucified! But if he were guilty who did it against his will, were they innocent; who goaded him on to it? No. Pilate gave sentence against Him. and commanded Him to be crucified. But ye, O ye Jews, ye also are His murderers! Wherewith? With your tongue, whetted like a sword. And when? But when ye cried, Crucify Him! Crucify Him!

Let’s go back to Pontius Pilate’s court.  Pilate knows Our Lord is innocent and does NOT want to execute Him, but the Jews, led by the High Priest and the Sanhedrin have threatened Pilate – they have threatened his life, and almost no one today understands this. Pilate was terrified for his life and the life of his family and all of the men serving under him, which Mel Gibson alluded to in “The Passion of The Christ” in the scene between Pilate and his wife, Claudia, in which Pilate expresses the pressure he is under from Rome. But even Gibson’s treatment doesn’t fully explain how deep Pilate’s fear was.

Did you know that there was a man named Lucius Aelius Sejanus, who was the head of the Praetorian Guard, and was essentially the number 2 to Tiberius Caesar? When Tiberius withdrew to the Isle of Capri in ARSH 26 (some of you may have been to Capri as tourists, apparently it is very beautiful), Sejanus was left to essentially administer the entire Roman Empire.  Sejanus, not Tiberius Caesar, APPOINTED PONTIUS PILATE the governor of Judea.  So Pilate was Sejanus’ boy, not Tiberius’.  Sejanus was executed by Tiberius in AD 31 – note that date, folks – because pretty much everyone suspected Sejanus of plotting to take over.  SO, when the Perfidious Jews, led by the High Priest and Sanhedrin in Pilate’s Court yelled out to Pilate…

“If thou release this man, thou art not Caesar’s friend. For whosoever maketh himself a king, speaketh against Caesar.” — John 19: 12

…what they were doing was threatening Pilate’s life – they were threatening to have Pilate and his entire family and all of Pilate’s men “canceled” and “Arkancided” by denouncing him as not loyal to Tiberius, and rather loyal to the Sejanus faction.  “Not Caesar’s friend,” but rather “Sejanus’ friend.”  Which would have meant torture and execution for Pilate, and his family, and all of Pilate’s men.

Isn’t. That. Interesting.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, non?

And just so we’re clear, as we see in the Sixth Lesson of Tenebrae of Thursday night-Friday morning, St. Augustine says that Pilate, even under intense coercion of his own torture and death and that of his family is still guilty, but less so than the Jews. Yes, succumbing to coercion, even the most severe coercion, does not absolve guilt. WE MUST DO THE RIGHT, NO MATTER THE COST.

“By the very fact of doing what he did, Pilate became a sharer in their crime; but compared with them he was much less guilty.”

But Pilate was still guilty. Because “much less guilty” is still guilty. WE are called by Our Lord to “be perfect”, that is, to not succumb to coercion AT ALL. It’s not okay to fold in fear, find an easy way out, and wash your hands of the mess, being content with being merely “much less guilty.” Pontius Pilate is NOT a moral example to anyone. In fact, he is a dire warning against the temptation to succumbing to coercion.

And so we see the reason why the Jews in this context are referred to by Holy Mother Church as the PERFIDIOUS Jews: because if what they did to leverage Pilate isn’t the definition of perfidiousness, then I don’t know what is. Perfidy is TREACHERY. The Latin word perfidy means TREACHERY. And it is essential that the qualifier PERFIDIOUS be used, because there were righteous Jews, most prominently the two Pharisees and members of the Sanhedrin, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. The qualifier “perfidious” isn’t a sloppy ethnic smear, it’s an essential distinction. No human beings are “locked-in” to moral degeneracy and “born damned” because of their DNA. Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection REDEEMED ALL OF HUMANITY. The question of each individual’s possible SALVATION is a corollary to the antecedent fact of the REDEMPTION, ACCOMPLISHED AND IRREVERSIBLE. All people with the use of reason are free to choose. Just because a large percentage of a given race choose poorly, doesn’t mean that they weren’t – every single one of them – free to make that choice.

Like I said, I’ve been thinking a lot about Pilate this year. Pious tradition holds that Pilate met his tragic end in the mountains of Central Italy. Having eventually returned to “Rome”, local tradition holds that Pilate committed suicide by drowning himself in a small, high mountain lake on the border between Umbria and the Marche region in Italy. The Lake exists to this day, and is called “The Lake of Pilate”. Not surprisingly, it was a hotspot for satanic rituals in the Middle Ages.

So the question for all of us, being that we are all sinners and falling short in our lives, are our sins like the sin of the Perfidious Jews, cold and calculated evil, or are our sins more like the sin of Pilate, the sin of allowing oneself to be coerced, willing to condemn an innocent man to death, in the case of Christ, TRUTH ITSELF, in order to save one’s own skin?

An extremely apt analogy of this today is the Perfidious sin of the BigPharma, government, corporate and media people who consciously executed the DeathJab crime against humanity – Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, Albert Bourla, Stephane Bencel, every media talking head and corporate executive that relentlessly lied and coerced people into injecting themselves with a known poison with the aim of reducing the human population through excess death and sterilization. They certainly have “the greater sin”. But every doctor, nurse, pharmacist and business owner who fell for, or accepted a de facto bribe and participated, even while bleating, “But I have no chooooooice. I’m just following oooooorders…” still have committed horrific sin, and will, like Pontius Pilate, end up at the bottom of a lake if they don’t repent. The “washing my hands of this” pose, exactly as with Pilate, is a delusion.

And, of course, there is the analogy to the Bergoglian Antipapacy. There are the Perfidious bishops and Cardinals that have infiltrated the Church and executed the usurpation of the Petrine See, Jorge Mario Bergoglio being first among them, but there are also all of the other people who are going along with the Bergoglian Antipapacy, knowing full well that Holy Mother Church is under intense and relentless attack by an obvious, observable Antipope, but exactly like Pilate make a BIG SHOW of washing their hands of the matter, declaring, exactly like Pilate, that “there’s nothing we can doooooo… we can’t say anything…” because to do so would mean that “Caesar in Rome” would destroy them.

Our model in this analogy is St. John, who stayed with Our Lord and His mother, all the way to Calvary, and interestingly, died a natural death as a very old man – the only Apostle to NOT be martyred.

So which is it? Which do you choose? Which are you striving for? To merely be Pilate, guilty of “lesser sin” and deluding yourself into believing that you can wash your hands and disclaim any responsibility, saying, “See ye to it…”, and ending up at the bottom of the eternal lake, or are you going to strive to be stalwart, brave and faithful St. John, “the Disciple that Jesus loved”?

I hope this helps, and that one and all have a grace-filled Triduum and Easter.

It didn’t work with Pilate. It certainly won’t work for us.