The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  When it comes to making a promise, Liguori furnishes a Kol Nidrei-type of exit strategy: “We must mark here as certain that no promise binds although it has been accepted by the other party, if afterwards it becomes impossible, or very harmful, or unlawful, or inexpedient, and, generally speaking, whenever any notable change of circumstance takes place, so that if it had been foreseen, the promise would not have been made; because a promise is always supposed to be made under such a tacit condition.”

  If a promise can be broken because it is “inexpedient” or “whenever any notable change of circumstance takes place,” what good is it? How can it be called a promise?

  “Saint” Alphonsus has theologized an evil and iniquitous teaching for the direction of priests and prelates in the Confessional, revealing of the perverted nature of his disordered mind and soul: whereby, promises of marriage by Catholic noblemen to women who are commoners may be freely broken, if it is to the advantage of the aristocrat to do so. It was Protestant scholars who discovered and published this authenticated teaching after intensive investigation of Liguori’s writings. No official of the Church of Rome had been forthcoming in this regard. The popes after the eighteenth century were content to keep Liguori’s reprehensible teaching in the Latin language and made known only inside the Church to tens of thousands of Catholic priest-Confessors who resorted to Liguori in these matters, or who were instructed second hand, by seminary professors and the theology faculty of Catholic universities. This morally diseased doctrine about women, reflecting the double standard of a pagan potentate in ancient Babylon, was defended in pages of convoluted lawyer’s casuistry in the leading Catholic publication in Britain at the time, Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman’s Dublin Review (published in London, Edinburgh, Paris and New York,) after it had been exposed in the Protestant journal, The Christian Remembrancer, to nation-wide revulsion and disgust in Britain. 74 It is not a simple matter to ascertain which is more perverse, Liguori’s warrant for seduction and abandonment of women who are not aristocrats, by Catholic men who are, or the Dublin Review’s attempt at defending it, as follows:

  “But suppose the man is very far superior to the woman in rank and condition, is he still bound to marriage? The question must be considered under the further supposition of whether the promise was real or feigned…what shall be said if the marriage must almost necessarily be crowned with social and moral disorders of the gravest character?…the whole character of a nation (is) dependent upon the due observance of grade in the structure of society, and regard(s) the interchange of marriage between high and low as the very source of corruption of a whole people. Rightly then, as it seems to us, do theologians make exceptions to the general rule in favor of cases where nothing but the worst results, ‘pessimus exitus,’ could be expected from the marriage.” 75

  Liguori’s depraved theology is reflected in this defense, published more than six decades after his death. The defense, such as it is, adds qualifications which Liguori never made; that is its first fallacy. Liguori stated baldly that aristocrats need not keep promises of marriage to women of a lower social class. His apologist in The Dublin Review insinuates that Catholic men of the upper class are usually morally superior to women of the lower class, whether Catholic or not. On no grounds whatever, she is assumed to be the potential “source of corruption.” Cardinal Wiseman’s theological journal then proceeds to traduce these girls even further, placing the onus of blame for a broken promise of marriage on them, because “the woman could easily have detected the fraud, either from the man’s words, or other circumstances, or according to some theologians, from the fact of very great disparity in rank….” 76

  In other words, a beautiful young Catholic girl, when courted by a Catholic aristocrat, must possess the selfrealization that she is very inferior compared to him, and on that basis should rebuff his attempts at courtship almost immediately in order to free herself from the likelihood that he will callously break his promise to her — in which case it will be her fault that he does so! Is it any wonder that hundreds of thousands of the peasants of nineteenth century Italy fled the country of their birth for Protestant America, where the Church of Rome dared not exact so heavy a toll of injustice upon the daughters of the poor and middle classes?

  We regret to say that there is more of this disgusting theology: “Some theologians also say that she cannot, by the strict letter of the law, claim any compensation because, says St. Liguori, she ought to look upon the injury she has received as a just punishment for her own carelessness and levity of conduct.” 77

  Protestant theologian Frederick Meyrick observed with indignation, “We hope that the aristocratic parents will, for their sons’ sake, duly appreciate these novel privileges of the nobility. For ourselves we are well content that the right of seducing maidens on promise of marriage, and then refusing to keep the promise, should remain a privilege of the nobles of those countries alone where Rome’s religion is professed and Rome’s teachers have sway.”

  “Saint” Liguori also furnishes the moral theology of perjury—how Catholics can be justified in committing it in a court of law: “A witness or defendant when not legitimately questioned by the judge, may swear he does not know a crime that he really does know, understanding to himself that he does not know a crime about which he can be legitimately questioned, or that he does not know it so as to give evidence about it…

  “When, however, the witness or defendant is legitimately questioned by the judge, he must not use any equivocation, because he is bound to obey the rightful precept of his superior.

  “…Even when legitimately and juridically interrogated you are not bound to give evidence in the following cases…If notable harm will result to yourself or any belonging to you from your testimony…

  “If the man (the defendant) probably did not commit sin in what he did, owing to ignorance, or because he took something by way of compensation for a debt, and for doing so was charged with theft.

  Liguori on bribery: “…Does a man commit sin who offers a bribe to a judge or to his ministers?…If he gives without good reason, he commits sin by cooperating in an unlawful receiving, but not if he gives with a reason, namely, to free himself from annoyance which he does not deserve…what the laws intend is to provide against men giving money, and so corrupting the judges by bribes, not to prevent them from getting a just sentence.” 78

  The Pope of Rome made Alphonsus Liguori a canonized saint, and one of only thirty-three formally declared “Doctors of the Church,” an exalted theological rank which Liguori shares with Saints Ambrose, Augustine, Basil, Jerome, Cyril of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom and Thomas Aquinas.79 Liguori’s sainthood and “Doctor of the Church” status are a pathological joke worthy of the “Franciscans of Medmenham” (i.e. the Hell-Fire Club). 80

  Liguori’s Moral Theology is so crammed with nostrums for lying and dissembling in the guise of equivocations, mental restrictions and a multitude of distinctions and qualifying factors, as well as ecclesiastical permission to lie classed under the headings of dispensations, commutations and remissions, that one does not know where to begin or end in quoting, in context, this despicable liar’s “theology.” When studying “Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Doctor of the Church,” one feels as though one has been studying the Talmud.

  Recall that Newman, in distancing himself from Liguori, made reference to preferring English over Italian ways. Between Machiavelli and Liguori, Italy in general and Rome in particular became synonymous in the English-speaking world with “Arte,” in the sense of the intrigue of the diabolist. The early English essayist William Harrison protested that in Italy a man is “accounted most wise and politic that can most of all dissemble.”

  “Insofar as Catholics were said to lie for Rome, it might be concluded that their integrity and freedom of action were compromised…a number of ethical tracts…vigorously criticized…the effect of Italian manners and mores. Italian culture and society were said to be debased by papism and cour
t intrigue…Italian influence was seen as corrupting honest English manners, including plainness, sincerity, directness, simplicity and openness. An ‘English man Italianated’ was putting at risk the authentic moral basis of his gentility….The earl of Cork sent his sons on the standard Continental grand tour in the 1630 and 1640s, while expressing an increasing Protestant wariness about the possibility of infection by the ‘Roman disease’ (lying)…In much English commentary Italian and French deceitfulness was associated with the Roman Catholic Church…” 81

  Concerning the Moral Theology of Liguori, Prof. Meyrick wrote, “It is strange that the courts of justice are what they are in Spain, in Rome, in Naples? Look at the case of witnesses. The distinction between legitimate and non-legitimate interrogation is enough to destroy all hopes of arriving at the truth. If a man is anxious to conceal the truth, he has only to say to himself that the judge is questioning illegitimately, and then he has no obligation to speak the truth.”

  Since we have conceded that there are Protestant theories countenancing equivocation and mendacity, what is there to distinguish between the two, that of the Romanists and that of the “Reformers”? First, in that there is no Protestant theologian so hallowed and authorized as Liguori, among the pro-equivocation and mental reservation Protestant advocates. Second, while Anglicans invested their monarchs with divine right and absolute or near absolute authority, they were not viewed in a dogmatic ecclesiastical sense either as “the Vicar of Christ on earth,” or infallible interpreters of the Word of God, as is the Pope of Rome. Here is where Protestants differed with Catholics: “…it was very widely understood in sixteenth and seventeenth-century English society that the possession of great power and responsibility might compromise integrity and that places of power were places where truth could thrive only with greatest difficulty. The (English) court was, therefore, the major target of claims that the early modern period was an ‘age of dissimulation.” 82

  From the Renaissance onward, the Church of Rome promoted a hierarchical reversal of this wisdom which amounted to its overthrow, reverting to the ancient Pharaonic leadership pyramid, where error is believed to be more likely found among the people at the bottom, and truth and rectitude among those at the top. The elite Pharisees of Jerusalem mirrored this Egyptian dichotomy with their disparagement of the lowly Israelite am ha’aretz who valued the words of Jesus.

  It was Newman’s erstwhile friend Lord Acton who famously said, in the wake of the First Vatican Council decree on papal infallibility that “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Catholics responded that the pope has resorted to “infallible” declarations only sparingly. This may itself be an argument from equivocation since it so blatantly ignores the corollary to papal infallibility—that the Bishop of Rome invested with it is assumed to have a much greater likelihood of inspiration from the Holy Spirit.

  It is only very recently, prior to the ascent of Pope Francis, after some of the most appalling outrages committed by Popes Paul VI and “Saint” John Paul II, that one heard Catholics begin to question the pope in any serious manner, and these few were quickly taken to task by the majority. Moreover, it is taught that the Pope is the earthly representative of God Himself, “the Vicar of Christ on earth.” From the Renaissance through to the 1960s, the popes of Rome exerted a cult-like hold over Catholics who stood in awe of them as personifications of the teaching authority of God Almighty. To be highly suspicious and wary of the seductive danger posed by the pontiffs’ monarchial power in the realm of the spiritual was regarded as little more than a Protestant heresy. As a result, usury crept up on Catholics unawares. Had not the popes always condemned it? Sodomy in rectories, monasteries and chanceries flourished undetected and unguessed at. Today Catholics attempt to put a start date for the wave of predation against children, claiming that it was a product of the hippie Sixties, or the Second Vatican Council or modernism. Where is there any evidentiary grounds for limiting the child predation epidemic to modern times, or the time during and after Vatican II? In western Montana, in the Diocese of Helena, priests as well as the Ursuline Sisters of the Western Province have been implicated in the molestation of dozens or perhaps even hundreds of American Indian children and other youngsters in their care at the Ursuline Academy in St. Ignatius, dating from the 1940s and the pontificate of Pope Pius XII. Between 1950 and 2010, almost half—more than forty percent—of all the religious who were members Australia’s St. John of God Brothers’ Order, were child molesters.

  In Catholic Ireland, widespread clerical pederasty and sadism has been found to have occurred as early as the 1920s.83 Why is it difficult to believe that these crimes occurred in “traditional times” when the thought of daring to question the integrity or morality of a “Prince of the Church” was nearly unthinkable? The degree to which Catholics, like Mormons under Joseph Smith, Chinese under Mao Tse Tung or Germans under Adolf Hitler, failed to dispute, question, investigate, overrule and prosecute the criminals among their leaders and rulers, they are complicit in the destruction of the souls of the defenseless molested children of many generations and centuries. The ineluctable product of Alphonsus Liguori’s Moral Theology of cozening, dissembling and flat-out lying, was the shield it fashioned for guilty perpetrators of molestation and sodomy to outwit both secular authorities and credulous Catholics, so as to remain immune from detection, apprehension and prosecution.

  “Traditional” Catholics seek no reform of the Pharaonic model of papal and prelatical power. Rather, they pray for a Right-wing pope after their own liking who would once again wield the absolute dictatorial power of the papacy concentrated in one man, and launch a new inquisition against modernizers and liberals. The terrible potential of frail and fallen human nature—from the occupant of the papal throne on downward, as elucidated in Lord Acton’s maxim—to abuse power, would once again be ignored.

  These supposed conservatives and traditionalists do not see that it was papal power that cast aside God’s law against the love of money as practiced in the charging of interest on loans; that it was papal power that cast aside their beloved Tridentine Mass and sent its worshippers into a liturgical desert. They do not see that it was the sovereignty of the pope and the total secrecy by which he and his minions operated, that robbed hundreds of thousands of innocent and largely helpless Catholic souls of their childhoods.

  The continuation of absolute monarchial power in the Bishop of Rome ensures more of the same. The notion that only after the Second Vatican Council did the popes work to nullify the Word of God and install the situation ethics that extruded Biblical and Patristic doctrine, ensures more of the same crimes crying unto heaven for vengeance. The continuation of belief in the myth that the Renaissance Church of Rome was the faithful and orthodox representative of the Gospel of Christ until subverted in the eighteenth century by the forces of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, also guarantees more of the same.

  Superiority and inferiority of position, deference and condescension, mastery and subjection, are constituent factors in the system that nurtures the crimes of the papalolaters. Inferiors are not entitled to know the minds of their superiors or the acts of their superiors, much less that of the mind or the hidden deeds of “The Vicar of Christ on earth.” This attitude is appropriate to the Egyptians under the Pharaohs, not the followers of Christ who, ultimately, are to be under no one but God, as represented by those men who acknowledge their fallibility and submit to examination and correction by their fellow Christians, and whose rights are seen to be no more nor less than that of any other believer.

  The post-Renaissance Catholic Church enshrined as its doctor of moral theology a so-called “saint” who gave permission for theft, under particular conditions. This should not surprise us in the least since the Renaissance and later popes had given permission for interest on loans of money, which was always defined as theft by the true Catholic Church.

  Much of the Liguorian Moral Theology has striking similarities and paral
lels with the Babylonian Talmud. For instance, Liguori taught that a servant may steal from his master under the following circumstances: “A servant can, according to his own judgment, compensate himself for his labor if he without doubt judges that he was deserving of a larger stipend. Which indeed appears sufficiently probable to me and to other more modern learned men, if the servant or any other hired person be prudent and capable of forming a correct judgment and be certain concerning the justice of the compensation.” 84

  Liguori gives moral consent to aristocrats who steal: “What if a nobleman is very much ashamed to beg or to work, can he provide for himself out of other people’s goods?…Viva says yes, and Roncaglia and Mazzotta, as well as Lessius, Palao and Diocastillo in Croix; so do Bannez and Serra. This seems to me to be the ‘more probable,’ if he is so ashamed of begging he would rather die.” (Theologia Moralis iv. 520). 85

  “Six times in the course of three pages in his Homo Apostolicus, sixteen times in the course of his Theologia Moralis, Liguori lays down the principle that, as soon as a man is reduced to extreme necessity, all goods become common and, more than this, that the thief has a right to what belongs to others…The ingenuity which he has contrived to bring the distressed nobleman into the category of those laboring under extreme necessity, is as commendable as the Unjust Steward’s own cleverness.” 86

  Liguori states, “If a man, on an occasion arising, only steals a little, whether from one or from more, not intending to acquire much himself, nor to do great harm to his neighbor by his several thefts, he does not sin gravely, nor do all these taken together constitute one mortal sin…” (Theologia Moralis, iv. 533).