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Decries Effect of Murphy Talk

August 31, 1934
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those of any anti-Semitic movement.

“I realize perfectly how the Jews must feel on this matter,” Father Parsons said. “I carefully follow the Jewish Daily Bulletin and other Jewish publications, and I am aware that the Jews are their own frankest and most honest critics. They naturally accept criticism from outsiders less willingly than from members of their own group.

“We Catholics, I have no doubt, would feel the same way, were the tables to be turned. Frequently our spiritual leaders are forced to express disapproval of Catholics, as such, for one reason or another. If similar unfriendly estimates were to issue from an outside source, I am quite sure we’d resent it, just as the Jews do in this case.”

Among Father Murphy’s statements in his South Norwalk paper, which aroused a nation-wide storm of protest, was one to the effect that Jews who have lost connection with their own religion “do harm by their lack of morals in their influence on the stage the motion pictures and above all the daily press.”

“The Jew’s ideal,” he declared at one point, “is that of the Talmud, not that of Christ, and is expressed in the statement of a rabbi who referred to ‘the sane selfishness of the Jew.'”

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