19 Robert Wilkinson, Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God, p. 337.
20 Robert Wilkinson, op. cit., p. 338.
21 Moreschini, op. cit., pp. 245-247; 250.
22 Leijenhorst, “Francesco Patrizi’s Hermetic Philosophy,” in Van den Broek and Hanegraaff eds., Gnosticism and Hermeticism (1998), p. 125.
23 Moreschini, op.cit. and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/patrizi/
24 Leijenhorst, op.cit., p. 125.
25 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, pp. 421-423.
26 “New Philosophy of Everything” (Ferrara, 1591).
27 Moreschini, op. cit., p. 263.
28 Leijenhorst, op.cit., pp. 133-134.
29 Ibid., p. 127 (emphasis supplied). The preceding six occult agents who were adherents of popery, Lazzarelli, Correggio, Galatino, Thenaud, Steuco and Patrizi, are but the tip of the proverbial iceberg in terms of the personnel who played a significant part in transforming the Catholic Church into the occult Church of Rome. There are of course many more listed in these pages (chapter VIII alone yields a harvest of Judases).
Chapter XII
The Moral Theology of Mental Reservation and Equivocation in the Church of Rome
With Special Reference to Alphonsus Liguori
“With St. Augustine…strong convictions were established on the subject of veracity. During the Middle Ages scholastic theologians accepted and expanded upon, but never deviated from Augustine’s definition of a lie and his teaching that to utter the opposite of what one holds to be true is intrinsically evil. In the 16th century this tradition began to weaken…” 1
There cannot be a Church that is eager to have the Neoplatonic-Hermetic doctrines, the Babylonian Talmud, and later the Kabbalah, published and distributed far and wide throughout its intellectual circles, without paying a severe and tragic price for this treachery. The measure that was meted out2 after the spread of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic, Talmudic and Kabbalistic theology, occurred within the hierarchy, and later, through the Confessional, it was transmitted to the Catholic people in general.
It is true that casuistry had been a “religious science” as far back as the Catholic Middle Ages. Yet, it had remained, in that age, largely anchored to the requirements and verities of Scripture, and the sound traditions derived from the lives of the orthodox Fathers and other holy persons. After the genie of Neoplatonic-Hermeticism and the Talmud and Kabbalah had been released from the lamp where they had been confined by the Church for centuries, casuistry became another name for a highly evolved sophistry, which concealed a method of justification for sin, by means of shrewd alibis and elaborate rationales by which the law of God could be circumvented under the direction of charlatans posing as His priests and theologians.
The reanimation of pagan Greek thought in the Renaissance brought with it a renewed appreciation for a school of sophistry centered on Protagoras (490-420 B.C.). Sophistry seems to have begun with the study of techniques of argument and persuasion, thereby constituting a branch of the classical and legitimate art of rhetoric. Under Protagoras however, the sophists became associated with techniques for making lies appear true, and crimes, virtues. Protagoras himself is reputed to have alluded to these reversals of fact with his claim to “make the weaker argument the stronger.”
Plato was far too serious a dissembler to seriously commit in public to the principles of sophistry, which he denounced. A true master of sophistry would be the last to admit it. In one illustrative case, Plato’s stirring accusation of mendacity against poets, “proves on closer analysis to be a condemnation of their failure to use their lies on behalf of the state, rather than a condemnation of lies as such.” 3
Talmudic Oath-Breaking
A Pattern for the Church of Rome
The Renaissance witnessed the rise of a theology which legitimated deception, lying and oath-breaking startlingly similar to Judaism’s notorious Kol Nidrei rite of nullification of promises, vows and oaths. Before we proceed into the Church of Rome’s theology of oath-breaking and sundry forms of deception, the reader should be acquainted with the Talmudic Kol Nidrei. On Yom Kippur Eve the promise-breaking Kol Nidrei ritual is conducted in the synagogue.
The Babylonian Talmud in Mishnah Hagigah 1:8 (a) admits that there is no Biblical basis for the Kol Nidrei rite. Rabbi Moses Maimonides confirms that the Kol Nidrei ceremony is not in any way Biblical: “The absolution from oaths has no basis whatever in the Written Torah.” 4
The Talmudic law concerning the Kol Nidrei rite is as follows: “And he who desires that none of his vows made during the year shall be valid, let him stand at the beginning of the year and declare, ‘Every vow which I make in the future shall be null.” 5
Note that the Talmud declares that the action nullifying vows is to be taken at the beginning of the year and with regard to promises made in the future. This distinction is critical. It contradicts what the deceivers tell the public: that Kol Nidrei is a penitential service for begging forgiveness for promises broken in the past, rather than what it is: a nullification made in advance for vows and oaths yet to be made (and deliberately broken with impunity).
This “advance stipulation” is called bitul tenai and it is the basis for a Judaic person being absolved ahead of time for violating future oaths and promises, or to use the rabbinic lawyer’s jargon: “declaration of intent for the anticipatory invalidation of future vows.”
This corresponds to the Talmudic lesson that God rewards clever liars (Kallah 51a). One pities the poor people ensnared in this sordid charade of cajoling God into helping them cheat; and more so for those supposed conservative and traditional Catholics who imagine they can follow the clever liars among the Church of Rome’s popes, prelates and theologians into “Catholic” forms of oath-breaking, while priding themselves on being part of a “Catholic Faith” that is anti-Talmudic. Satan is a mocker and here is his mockery, helped along by those who have curtailed their divinely-bestowed powers of discernment in subservience to their religiose beliefs.
While officially condemned in 1679, the sanction for lying and deceit continues to form a powerful underground current among the personnel of the Church of Rome. The ascendance of the Money Power, Judaism and the occult, the Second Vatican Council, the post-conciliar Judaism adopted by the popes, and the relentless deception mounted to defend serial child molesters and their enablers among the bishops, cardinals and pontiffs, stem from the moral disease that arose during the Renaissance.
From the days of the Gospel to that of St. Augustine in the fourth century, mendacity and dissimulation were condemned as attributes of the devil. Eight hundred years later St. Thomas Aquinas and his cohort, using the analytical tools of scholasticism, affirmed the condemnation. Then, beginning with the Renaissance, a theology of lying derived from casuistry, gained purchase within the Church.
There are two types of casuistry. The first, classical casuistry, pre-dates the Renaissance. It concerns “the art or science of bringing general moral principles to bear upon particular cases.” Deception and prevarication are not intrinsic to classical casuistry, though it can become subject to hairsplitting and the lawyer’s tendency to exculpate based on procedural minutiae and special pleading. Renaissance casuistry however, is another matter altogether — the degenerate stepchild of classical casuistry, representing a brazen phenomenon centered on the question of how to avoid telling the truth without appearing to be lying.
This conundrum was solved by the employment of two Talmudic tactics: equivocation and mental reservation (also known as mental restriction). Both of these techniques exist in rabbinic texts under other names.6 Prior to the Renaissance, these were generally despised and opposed in Christendom. Commensurate with the abandonment of God’s immutable laws against usury,7 and the support for the Kabbalah and Talmud from the late 1400s onward, the Church proceeded to harbor in its inner councils and missionary precincts, equivocation and mental reservation.
Equivocation
> With verbal equivocation it is not a lie to make a statement which possesses both true and false meanings, provided that it is true according to one’s own sense and intention. In its mildest form, equivocation is little more than a lawyer’s trick, a “little white lie” as they say, centered on the principle that the equivocator does not deceive, but rather he allows his interlocutor to deceive himself. According to Jesuit seminary rector Fr. Robert Persons (1544-1610, also called “Parsons”), where a man is “unjustly questioned”…and where “the first and principal intention of the answerer is not to hurt or impugn others, but to defend and cover himself…it followeth evidently, that it can be no lie, nor deception on his part, though by his manner of answering they deceive themselves, which is not to be imputed to any fault of his.” 8 As late as 1595 among shocked Catholic lay people in England, equivocation by priests “caused general disquiet…and was much wondered at.” 9
The concept of a questioner being allowed to “deceive themselves” is a loophole that permits the deceiver to proceed with his deception by assigning responsibility for it to the victim of the ruse, predicated on the concept that the other person has no legitimate right to be told the truth. This is dangerously close to the rabbinic deprecation of the rights of the gentile, consonant with equivocation: that the gentile is not owed a candid answer.
By now readers might be nodding their heads in recognition at what they regard as a proprietary Jesuit technique. Yet certain distinguished non-Jesuit Catholic theologians were no less smitten with this stratagem, which gained acceptance from the concept that certain persons do not have a right to the truth. In the Summa de casibus conscientiae, published in 1488, the Franciscan theologian Angelus de Clavasio (1411-1495) asserted that an “unjustly questioned” man could reply by saying “what is true according to his own meaning, even if it is false according to the understanding of the hearer.” This is harmless and patently ethical when an eight-year-old child asks his parents who have just emerged from their bedroom what they have been doing inside of it. It is another matter entirely when applied to an adult, particularly one in authority. Imagine a man who was speeding in his automobile justifying telling a policeman that he had not been speeding, after the officer asked him about it, because the speeder decides that the policeman is “unjustly interrogating me” or is “someone who does not have a right to the truth.”
When Church of Rome Bishop William Skylstad of Spokane, Washington, was repeatedly questioned by lawyers concerning a child-molesting priest who flagrantly raped boys in a rectory which the priest shared for years with Skylstad, when the latter was pastor, Bishop Skylstad would not give a straight answer. The repeated failure on the part of clerics and prelates around the world to straightforwardly answer questions about molester priests who they shielded and enabled, demonstrates that the legacy of equivocation and mental reservation (a false statement contradicted silently and internally in the mind of the liar, or by an inaudible whisper made by the liar), remains intact.
As someone who is not himself a cardinal or bishop, the interrogator therefore is, according to the doctrine of equivocation, not entitled to a candid answer. This type of thinking emanates from a superiority complex and is not confined to the Catholic hierarchy. The English Puritan theologian Richard Baxter wrote, “If I am unjustly interrogated by someone who has no authority to question me, I may lawfully answer him in such doubtful words as purposely are intended to deceive him, or leave him ignorant of my sense, so be it they be not lies or false in the ordinary usage of those words.” 10
First among Catholics, and later Protestants, a rabbinic type of escape clause was created during the Renaissance to justify deceptive speech. Whereas the rabbis justified deception against the goyim, the Christian cleric rationalized deception with regard to someone who, it was decided, did not have the “right” or “authority” to question them. This was a revolutionary break with Christ’s command — “Let your yes be yes, and your no be no, anything else is of the devil” (Matthew 5:37). The devil was shockingly proximate in the Renaissance, and his cunning human agents processed the clergy by first offering cases of supposedly “harmless” dissimulation that only a fanatic would denounce. One of the most famous examples circulated throughout the Church, was put forth by the Dominican theologian Dominico Soto (1494-1560) in his De Justitia et Jure libri decem. It concerns a priest-confessor who is asked a question which he can only answer from knowledge he gained in secret in the confessional, from a penitent. The priest therefore replies to the questioner, “No, I don’t know” and then, using the other deception technique, mental reservation, says mentally to himself inwardly, “not in such a way that I can reveal it.”
Notice the clever example: deception is perpetrated for the good cause of protecting both the confidence of a penitent and the integrity of the process whereby sinners reveal their transgressions to the priest. Without being fearfully cognizant of the Biblical injunctions and the church law and practice institutionalized for centuries, it is difficult to argue against the example given.
We do have from the life of Jesus Christ a warrant for the right to remain silent, as Our Lord was silent before the Jewish court, and later before Pontius Pilate, in certain parts of their exchange. As St. Augustine writes, “Although every one who tells a lie may wish to conceal what is true, yet not every one who wishes to conceal what is true tells a lie.”
These are the only options available to the Christian who does not want to hate his master who said, “If you love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). Against the truth of God is arrayed the worldly-wise Talmudic-Renaissance lawyer’s stratagems. The priest who knows the secret sins of the penitent can remain silent in the face of a question about those sins, but he cannot answer falsely, if he loves his Savior.
In an old story, another widely disseminated sucker-bait offered to persuade Christian religious personnel of the morality of equivocation (deceptive speech), involves selfprotection. It seems that a certain Christian traveler, upon arriving at the gates of a foreign city, is interrogated by the guards concerning whether he is coming from a town believed to have the plague. Here the tale varies somewhat: in one version the traveler knows for a fact that his town does not have the plague; in another version the plague is raging in his town but he knows he has not been infected by it. If he tells the truth about coming from the town, then the sentries will bar him from their city. He has nowhere else to seek shelter, and there are wild beasts and brigands outside the gates of the city. According to the Dominican theologian Silvestro (“Sylvester”) Mazzolini da Prierio (1460-1523), who was the protégé of Pope Leo X and a director of the Inquisition in Rome, 11the traveler in the story has no obligation to answer the question correctly, but he does have an obligation to assure them that his entry will not endanger the welfare of the city. Consequently, 1. the traveler decides that the real question is not about what town he comes from, but rather, whether or not he is a carrier of contagion. 2. The traveler also decides that the guards have the right to know whether or not he is infected. Since he believes he is not carrying the plague, he is allegedly morally in the right when he states to the guards that he is not from the town in question. Rather than a lie, the theologian Prierio adduces the traveler’s answer to be an “ambiguous reply” and therefore, “truthful under the circumstances.”
The tactics on display in the preceding tangled web of deceit are inculcated into clients a hundred times a day in law offices throughout America. They are “clever” and “sophisticated” devices, yet they possess none of the vulnerability of Christ: “…power resides in a complete abandonment and surrender to the will of God and His laws, a faithful reliance that says, ‘If God is truth, he will be found only within truth, and not in a lie.’ This is the sort of heart-over-head theology that invites mockery, even as it zeroes in on Christ’s urging toward ‘childlike faith.” 12
Instilled in the practitioners of the vice of equivocation is a situation ethic whereby cheating under c
ertain circumstances is permissible, and it is the cheater who decides when the circumstances arise. A Christian society cannot function as God intended with this type of rationalization, which reflects the morals of the Babylonian Talmud (Yoma 83b; Yevamot 65b and 106a; Nedarim 62b). Jesus prayed that His Father’s Will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matt. 6:10). Is there deception in heaven? Will the Gospel gain adherents—will we convert the teeming masses of China and India—by Christians being known as sly operators who speak with a forked tongue “under the circumstances”?
Another rationale for deceptive speech and expression is a resort to those cases in the Old Testament where deceit occurred, as for example Abraham counseling Sarah to tell the Pharaoh that she was his sister and not his wife (Genesis 12: 11-20). This is classic equivocation on the rationale that Sarah was (in fact) Abraham’s half-sister. There are other Old Testament examples. First, we observe that there is nothing of deceit, equivocation or mental reservation in Jesus Christ or His Gospel. Neither are there injunctions incumbent upon the Christian, as there were in the Old Testament which were incumbent in certain circumstances upon the Israelites, to extirpate pagan peoples who, by means of magica sexualis, propitiated false gods. The Old Testament is the chronicle of fallen man in exile from Eden on the pilgrim road to the coming of the Messiah, the new Adam who regenerates man’s relationship with God. In the Christian believer’s living covenant, our regenerated relationship with the Son of God, the vengeance of old (Deuteronomy 32:35), continues to be visited upon hard-hearted wrong-doers, but that vengeance is now visited soley by Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (Hebrews 10:30). 13
With this in mind, let us take the New Testament view of an Old Testament figure often cited as a righteous liar. Rahab was a harlot in Jericho who hid Joshua’s two spies. She hid them under drying stalks of flax on her roof. Rahab deceived the pursuers of the pair by sending them off on a false trail, thereby saving the lives of Joshua’s men. Rahab is referred to in the New Testament in Hebrews 11:31 and James 2:25. “Significantly, the passages cited do not single out her deception as a praiseworthy act. Heb. 11:31, emphasizing the faith of each cited individual, refers simply to Rahab’s having ‘received the spies with peace’—no mention of the deception. Similarly, James 2:25, emphasizing the life of action which follows from regeneration, only mentions that ‘she had received the messengers, and had sent them out another way.’ Rahab, at great personal risk, sent them out by lowering them from the back window on the city wall (Joshua 2:18). For this risky act of rescue she is commended in the New Testament.” 14 There is no hint of commendation of her for any other reason. How could there be, in view of the life of Jesus which was without spot or blemish? Our Redeemer taught us to be on the watch for two characteristics of the devil: 1. He is “a murderer from the beginning, who abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.” 2. “When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.”
The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome Page 45