The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  Anyone who can glean from the preceding words a warrant for equivocation or mental reservation is intellectually this writer’s superior, since we can see nothing of the kind. Do Christians abide in the truth when they equivocate, or allow other persons with whom they are conversing to “deceive themselves”? Are the survival tactics of clever lawyers the Way of Christ? Was it as lawyers that the early Christians went forth to the lions? Did they conquer pagan Rome by cunning speech, or was it their complete innocence and vulnerability that disarmed their enemies?

  “It is evident from all this that by the end of the sixteenth century there was impending a total change in the doctrines and practice of the Church with regard to sin and the means of its avoidance and cure.” 15

  Studying the layers of bureaucracy that began to erupt from casuistry during the Renaissance, we encounter a hair-splitting lawyer’s maze of subtle craft that came to be known as “probabilism,” which took the morally depraved and indeed diabolic position that where two conflicting theological views were advanced, the perspective that had the least amount of support in the Bible, and was thus the least “probable,” could be accepted as grounds for Catholic judgment, direction, and action. The theological impetus for probabilism seems to have originated with Spanish Jesuit priests, among them Tomás Sanchez (1550-1610, cf. his Opus Morale), and Gabriel Vazquez (1551-1604), as outlined in the latter’s 1597 treatise on St. Thomas Aquinas, Prima Secundae.

  The renowned Francisco Suarez (1548-1617) was professor at the Jesuit College in Rome and then at Coimbra. In his Tractatus Quintus de Juramento et Adjuratione 16 he offered various rationales for employing “ambiguous language” to swear an oath without committing perjury. He explained that a lie is that which is contrary to one’s own mind, rather than contrary to the minds of one’s interlocutors. He has a reputation for being conservative in the application of mental reservation, however on closer examination it appears that he mainly hedged the practice with lofty rhetoric, calling it allowable only when someone was unjustly compelled to swear an oath or divulge a fact. When it was not used for just cause he warned that it constituted a grave sin. The expansive hole in that statement is the license that mental reservation extended to the potential perjurer who was the ultimate decider of whether his judges and interrogators were deserving of a correct answer from him, or were even in a position to judge him. Human nature being what it is, an accused person will be prone to a subjective view of his accusers and judges. One of the methods of restriction which Suarez recommended to those believed they were being unfairly oppressed by police and judges, was to answer out loud the question of whether one did or did not commit a crime as follows: “I did not do it.” This was to be followed by the whispered word “today.”

  Lest we imagine that this despicable trickery could some how be confined to a legal setting, young Catholic men who wanted to gain sexual favor from a young women would tell her audibly, “I love you,” and then inaudibly mumble, “for tonight.” Suarez would have denounced the practice, but how is the barn door of mental reservation closed in one instance when it has been opened in another? A culture of deceit inevitably spreads its contagion when immoral acts are condoned by religious authorities. In a society ensnared thus, the lie told in court before an “unjust judge” may be seen to justify, in the eyes of a young man, a lie told to an “impure” woman.

  The mental reservation allowed by certain of Rome’s early modern theologians is an end-justifies-the-means practice which is unscriptural and ungodly. A lie does not stop being a lie because of a just end. To surmount this objection, Suarez, like many of his brother Renaissance-era theologians, implicated Jesus in the justification of lying. Suarez wrote that when Jesus stated concerning Judgment Day, “But of that day and that hour no man knows, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only” (Mark 13:32)—He was using mental reservation. Suarez proposes that Our Lord actually knew the day and the hour but the disciples did not deserve to know that, so he lied to them—or rather He “mentally restricted” His statement.

  The defenders of Suarez will reply that he wrote many hundreds of pages of very edifying teachings. This is true. But ten thousand such tomes cannot cancel the disastrous consequences of teaching that the Son of God was a deceiver.

  Another key figure was a member of the Augustinian Order, Martin de Azpilcueta, the Renaissance Catholic canon lawyer (1493-1586, nicknamed “the Navarrus” after his native land, Navarre), who was the author, in 1553, of the wildly popular Enchiridion sive Manuale Confessariorum et Paenitentium (“Handbook for Confessors and Penitents”), eighty-one editions of which were published in less than seventy-five years. Azpilcueta had powerful allies in Rome, among them Pope St. Pius V and Charles Borromeo, the Counter-Reformation dynamo who would be canonized a saint. Borromeo gave Azpilcueta a pivotal appointment as lead canonist in the Apostolic Penitentiary, charged with oversight of the theology of the Confessional and the Sacrament of Penance. Like Liguori’s impact in the eighteenth century, this signified that Azpilcueta’s probabilism would be directed toward the theology of the Confessional, and through that sacrament to the masses of the Catholic world.

  Borromeo may have been the patron saint of the Counter-Reformation, but Azpilcueta was the patron saint of perjury. In the Enchiridion he ruled that a Catholic witness who is being questioned by a judge who the witness regards as having “exceeded his competence,” or “proceeded unlawfully,” in that case is fully warranted in swearing an oath that is not true. The self-serving nature of permitting a Catholic witness or defendant to personally determine to his own decidedly partisan satisfaction, that his judge is incompetent or unlawful, and therefore undeserving of the truth, renders the courtroom a theatre of falsehood and destroys the basis of jurisprudence. These are the tactics of the synagogue and the masonic lodge. They have no place in any theology bearing the name of Jesus Christ, although Our Lord is dragged into these sordid deceptions through refinement of Azpilcueta’s recommended courtroom tactics. He suggests that one way to lie under oath to a judge and not commit perjury is to respond with “mixed speech” that is part verbal and part mental. It’s true overall even though the verbal part is a lie, but since Jesus can hear the mental part, the Catholic is therefore speaking the truth before God.

  The Jesuit casuists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were coining a Newspeak lexicon in which black was white; in which lies were not-lies—they were legitimate means of withholding truth. The degradation of the language through redefinition would become one of the principal engines for the legalization of usury: it was redefined as not-usury, a legitimate means of earning a living.

  Due to their prestige, Suarez and Azpilcueta’s doctrines achieved an unparalleled renown in the Catholic world and inspired Jesuits such as English Father Robert Persons/Parsons (A Treatise tending to Mitigation towardes Catholicke-Subjectes in England, 1607); Louvain Prof. Leonard Lessius (De Justitia et Jure, 1605); Ingolstadt Prof. Gregory de Valencia (Commentariorum Theologicarum, 1619); Théophile Raynaud’s Disputatio de Veritate Morali cum Mendacio & Locutionibus Aequivocis ac Mente Restrictis Comparata, 1665; and the moral theology of the Redemptorist “Saint” Alphonsus Liguori in Italy.

  While dozens of tomes have been written to explain it and justify it, probabilism is just a fancy word for relieving the Catholic’s obligation to obey the law of God. According to probabilism, a single “Catholic authority” (such as Alphonsus Liguori), is adequate for rendering a theological opinion “probable,” and therefore worthy of being taught in seminaries and imparted to penitents in the confessional. Here is the lawlessness which Martin Luther with his “Sin boldly” comment on God’s mercy, has been branded. If a Catholic wants to commit a sin of lust, of lying, thievery, etc., and he can locate a recognized theological authority who will furnish him with ingenious grounds for indulging in that sin, then he has the liberty to proceed. This is probabilism. Predicated on a probable opinion, the Catholic taking the lenient
view on the sin he wishes to commit, cannot be condemned. After all, his moral agency is not part of the equation. He is acting not by the light of Scripture, or even his own conscience, but through obedience to the guidance of a Catholic authority. This distinction is termed in Rome’s theology, probabilitas extrinseca.

  While it would be wrong to describe as the “new art of lying,” the sewer stream from hell which erupted on earth from Rome’s casuistic probabilism—since Satan has been the Father of Lies from Genesis 3 onward—it was most certainly a recrudescence of perjury and false witness which was now rendered the integral core of the West’s most dominant institution.

  In light of the extent of lying in our 21st century world, where one is considered a fool not to pad one’s resumé, exactly how does deceptive speech harm the well-being of our culture and commonweal? Does it not compound the evil of our times? St. Augustine raised the spectre of the double heart, “When regard for truth has been broken down or slightly weakened, all things will remain doubtful.” What happens to us as a people when we catch the virus of deviousness and think, “everyone else deceives when the circumstances call for it, why shouldn’t I?”

  Within the Church a hue and cry was raised against the moral theology of the Jesuits, in particular their probabilism, mental reservation (also called “mental restriction”), and equivocation. Among the leaders of this protest was the French theologian Rev. Fr. Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694). His argument was made in his study, Théologie morale des Jesuites. The Catholic mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) preceded Arnauld’s attack, with his Provincial Letters, which took the Jesuits to task for the same reasons. Pascal’s book was translated into English by Henry Hammond. It corroborated the suspicion among the English that the Church of Rome was synonymous with underhanded tactics of deceit. Despite the “Jansenist” cloud that hung over the reputations of both individuals, Pascal and Arnauld were Catholics of rectitude.

  The Oxford Professor, Anglican priest, and commissioner of education for England,17 Rev. Frederick Meyrick (1827-1906), wrote:

  “In his books De Mendacio and Contra Mendacium, St. Augustine enumerates eight sorts of lying. Every one of these he rejects uncompromisingly. He denies that we may at any time be guilty of moral falsehood under whatever temptation we may be. The sin of the tongue in violating veracity is as great, he says, as the sin of the hand in theft or in murder, or, at least, we are no more justified in committing the former than the latter. He discusses all the examples of apparent falsehood in the Old and New Testaments, to which those who had a theory of lying appealed in his days as they do now, and concludes that ‘for the examples which are brought forward out of the Holy Scriptures, either they are not falsehoods or, if they are falsehoods they are not proposed as objects of imitation…

  “Now we can conceive the possibility of a case arising in which the two virtues of veracity and charity might so clash as to make it at least pardonable to deflect somewhat from the rigid observance of the former. St. Augustine does not admit of such a possibility. ‘You must not destroy your own soul,’ he replies, ‘for any supposed good of your neighbor, spiritual or temporal.”

  Augustine “nowhere makes a distinction between lying and equivocating. Equivocating is in his estimation lying…The ‘double heart’ is, according to his teaching, the source of the accursed thing and any man ‘who has one thing in his mind, and enunciates another by words or any sort of signs,’ is guilty of sin. Word-jugglery is a thing unknown to him, for the sage of Hippo was…too honest to deceive others by such a transparent fallacy as that which lies at the bottom of the justification of equivocation….And yet it is to St. Augustine that (Catholic “Saint” Alphonsus) Liguori refers in justification of his Equivocation and non-pure Mental Reservation, which, according to St. Augustine’s definition, are merely forms of expressing a lie.” 18

  What happened to our moral fibre as a nation after it was revealed that we went to war in Iraq in 2003 with assurances from our highest leaders that the Iraqis threatened the world with weapons of mass destruction? Since then it has been insinuated that we shouldn’t anguish over the consequences of this serious breach of the nation’s trust, since we were deceived for a good cause, the liberation of Iraq from the tyrant, Saddam Hussein. This type of thinking breeds a corrosive cynicism, the effects of which are difficult to gauge but are most certainly destructive of the virtue of integrity as a non-negotiable standard.

  What is your opinion of the man or woman in your neighborhood who has a sterling reputation for strict adherence to the truth? Can you do otherwise than to admire and have faith in such a person? The erosion of mutual trust—the old-fashioned business deal that is closed with a handshake—is a barometer of our nation’s decline. St. Augustine put his finger on it sixteen hundred years ago when he wrote: “Every liar breaks his faith by lying, since he wishes the person to whom he lies to have faith in him, and yet he does not keep faith with that person when he lies to him. Whoever breaks faith in this manner is guilty of iniquity.”

  The sly equivocator will here attempt to inject a loophole by alleging that Augustine was referring to boldface lying, not to “mild” types of deception such as equivocation. Wrong. Augustine did include the tactic of intending to deceive in his definition of lying. One of his definitions of what constitutes lying is “a false signification told with a desire to deceive.” He forbids any equivocation and quashes any rationale for such tactics: “He who says that there are some just lies must be regarded as saying nothing else than that there are some just sins.”

  The Priscillianists were a heretical sect which justified lying as a form of concealment and self-protection. An orthodox Christian heresy-hunter, Consentius, advocated lying to these liars — in order to identify them and snare them in their heresy. Augustine addresses himself to Consentius concerning the consequences of becoming a knave to catch a knave — “Do you not see how your argument in favor of lying to the Priscillianists supports their views concerning the permissibility of lying?…They must be refuted, not imitated.”

  Augustine’s main teachings concerning lying are: Lying is sinful; it brings death to the soul and must not be indulged in for the temporal safety of anyone. One must not lie for the sake of preserving bodily chastity. It is not permissible to lie even to secure eternal salvation for others. The emphasis is on the Scripture: “The son that keeps the word shall be free from destruction.” 19 The corollary to strictly truthful speech in a Christian society is respect for the right to silence. For truth to prevail in our hearts and on our lips, we should respect the right to be silent in the face of questions that invade privacy and answers that are not owed to gossips—or an intrusive and oppressive government, for that matter: “And the high priest stood up in the midst and asked Jesus, ‘Have you no answer to make? What is it that these men testify against you?’ But He remained silent and made no answer.” (Mark 14: 60-61; for the silence of Jesus before Herod, cf. Luke 23: 8-9).

  From the founding of the Church to the time of the Renaissance, nothing more was permitted to Christians who did not wish to answer other than silence. We can find no Christian justification for any other response; neither could the Church, until the coming of the Renaissance. 20

  Mental Reservation

  Mental reservation proceeds from equivocation and represents a more grievous transgression of the obligation to be truthful. On the positive side, it is not so well camouflaged in its moral failing as is equivocation, and can be better seen for what it is, and therefore, it is a somewhat more easily discerned indictment of those who advocate it.

  There are two types of mental reservation advocated by two different schools of theologians. “Pure” mental reservationistcasuists placed few strictures on the practice. On the other hand, “conservative” or “broad” exponents of mental reservation hedged it with qualifications they believed rendered it morally permissible. The latter appears more hypocritical than the former. 21

  Mental reservation is such an odious
example of lying that it is problematic to distinguish any significant difference between these two schools of thought. In mental reservation a false statement is supposedly made true by the addition of words that are “reserved” within one’s own mind and which thereby serve to cancel the spoken or written lie. Once again, as a kind of marketing strategy, seemingly benign case histories of selfprotection were put forth to show that lying verbally and then adding an escape clause mentally, was morally permissible, at least in certain circumstances. A “benign” example was given of a man who had been waylaid by robbers. They take all the possessions he has on his person and then make him promise that he will open his storehouse that evening if they release him immediately. The victim agrees to meet the robbers and promises to give them his remaining possessions later that night. He then mentally adds the reserved clause, “If I lawfully owe it to you.” Most people, when faced with this man’s predicament, would agree that his mental reservation was appropriate and sensible. Once the principle of mental reservation was established in this extreme case, however, it was then extrapolated to many others.