The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  Savonarola returned to Florence for good in the spring of 1490, at the invitation of Lorenzo, but the honeymoon was short-lived. He preached that men in holy orders were wrong to seek out gran maestri (great lords) because of the opportunities for being compromised by the relationship. In his Advent sermons of 1490 (which spilled over into the Christmas season through January 1491), he tore into fraudulent financial transactions and the greedy rich. An embassy by five leading citizens of Florence descended on Savonarola urging him to preach in a more traditional and flattering manner. Savonarola answered with fifty Lenten sermons, beginning Ash Wednesday, February 16, 1491.

  “The opening sermon stresses the idea that ceremonial externals in religion may betoken an inner void: a people without true faith and commitment…The succeeding sermons introduced a wealth of themes…the doctrinal ignorance of the laity, thieving priests and their cupidity for lucrative posts (benefices), the purchase and sale of Church offices (simony), the lechery of clerics, sodomy and the oppression of the poor, such as by unjust taxation. The last of these claims is strongly enunciated in the Sunday sermon of 27 February when the friar also remembered that the rich in Florence expect to collect interest on their taxes—a customary Florentine practice. God’s justice will come down on this, he declared.” 2

  His fiftieth sermon on the Wednesday after Easter (April 6) turned from the clergy and admonished the ruling class for their pride, tyranny, greed and oppression.

  “The Savonarolan struggle…provoked venomous resistance, and this reminds us of the vital links between Church and society, clerics and patrons. Owing to the enormous scale of ecclesiastical rights and properties, of profitable office and income-paying benefices, local families and politicians had, as it were, too much invested in neighboring religious houses to keep politics out of the Church, or the Church out of politics. Ambitious clerics with the right connections routinely borrowed money from bankers in order to buy lucrative Church offices…and bishoprics were sometimes passed on, if not indeed willed, to family members.” 3

  The “Carnival” season in Florence was a scandal to Savonarola as it would be to any Christian. “…to him these were pagan antics and the quintessence of the Medici’s poisonous legacy. By substituting acts of piety, charity and reverence Florentines would transform Carnival into a fitting prelude to holy Lent.” 4

  In 1496 during the vile pagan Carnival revels which featured obscene antics and bonfires, Savonarola’s youth auxiliary, the fanciulli, and Savonarola’s lieutenant, Fra Domenico da Pescia purged the city of all “dirty and vain paintings” and blasphemy. The boys reversed the carnival: where there had been rock fights they erected barriers for collecting alms for the “shame-faced poor.” They erected altars with crucifixes with candles burning before them and they made the bonfires into the most famous conflagration of the age, the “Bonfire of the Vanities,” wherein people were encouraged to toss objects of evil or luxury. A mountain of cosmetics, pornographic books, statuettes of naked women, dice and other gambling paraphernalia were tossed into the flames. These ceremonies were marked by processions of young people, estimated to number upwards of eight thousand in a city of 40,000, marching behind giant crucifixes and images of the Blessed Mother and shouting, “Long live Christ!”

  “…in the last year of Savonarola’s life, as his Florentine enemies, with the backing of Rome and the cardinal clergy, increased in the city’s governing councils and intensified their attacks…Now the marching and scouting boys’ groups confronted a growing resistance, including abuse, threats and outright assaults. Gamblers might reach for knives or even swords if San Marco’s children (named after Savonarola’s monastery) happened to come on the scene…” 5

  Now came Savonarola’s contest with Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia). “Savonarola’s leading Florentine enemies…needed all the help they could summon to get the Florence they longed for…so as to bring back carnival, gambling, horse races and—the Piagnoni alleged—untroubled anal sex…Alexander was the natural and obvious prince to turn to for help….” 6

  Savonarola was threatened by the pope’s agent with “excommunication latae sententiae,” i.e. automatic excommunication for disobedience. The effectiveness of the harbinger of excommunication was vitiated somewhat by the fact that Pope Alexander had last used this threat on one of his mistresses, Giulia Farnese, after she had returned to her husband. If she did not come back to the papal bedchamber she was informed that she would incur latae sententiae. Nonetheless, a papal order silencing Savonarola was observed by the monk from October 1495 to February 17, 1496 when he launched his Lenten sermons with more warnings and admonishment of usurers, blasphemers and sodomites, and the aristocrats of the Roman Curia who were “happily ensconced” in a city with “10,000 whores.”

  Pope Alexander was determined to crush Savonarola but on many occasions he was thwarted by the influential Neopolitian Cardinal Oliveriero Carafa, who was in sympathy with Savonarola. Finally, it has been alleged by historian Lauro Martines7 that it was “even likely…that in the summer of 1496, the General Procuator of the Dominicans, Ludovico da Ferrara, in Florence on a mission for the pope, sought to tempt Savonarola with the secret offer of a red hat, a cardinalate, on the understanding that he accept certain conditions. This alone makes sense of one of Savonarola’s asservations, uttered in a sermon of 20 August 1496 in the Hall of the Great Council and cast directly at the Signory (the ruling body of Florence): ‘My Lord God I want only you. It is not my habit to seek human glory. Away with that! I seek no glory but in you, my Lord. I want no hats, no mitres large or small. I want nothing, unless it be what you have given to your saints: death. A red hat of blood: this I desire.” 8

  In November 1496 Pope Alexander announced a reorganization of the Dominican monasteries of Italy aimed at placing new superiors over Savonarola. Cardinal Carafa had by this time caved in, and yet another attack, this one bureaucratic, had been tailored to nullify and depose the Dominican friar.

  On May 12 (1497)…the pope (Alexander VI) issued his longgestating breve of excommunication. His Holiness complained that a ‘certain friar’ Girolamo Savonarola of Ferrara of the Order of Preachers and at present so-called vicar of San Marco of Florence had continued to disseminate ‘pernicious dogma’ to the detriment of the Florentine people…On June 18, 1497, the order of excommunication arrived and was read out, with bell, book and candle, in five Florentine churches…Savonarola responded…’It is unreasonable to believe that we are obligated to obey our superiors in everything; rather we ought to be obedient to a superior only insofar as he represents God, but he who commands what is contrary to God does not represent God and is not our superior. So, it is not only just but necessary that he disobey the papal order…Marshaling opinions of theologians, jurists, papal decretals and decisions of church councils he demonstrates the limits of papal power, ‘the power of the keys,’ to impose an unjust sentence. When such a sentence is null, as in the present case, it is his duty to proclaim this publicly, come what may.” 9

  The “most serious attacks on Savonarola and his supporters came from the pulpit and the pens of other friars.” These included Franciscan Fr. Domenico da Ponzo, an agent of the Duke of Milan (Ludovico Sforza), and the monk Angelo de Vallombrosa who offered to strangle Savonarola with his bare hands. “In a letter to the friars of San Marco (11 July 1497), Vallombrosa denounces him as “the most bitter enemy and detractor of the clergy, prelates and the Roman See…” Vallombrosa is “outraged by the heretical claim that the excommunication should not be obeyed because Alexander VI is alleged to be a simonist, not the true pope.” This Borgia pontiff was indeed a simonist: he had purchased his papal office. Furthermore, “Under Pope Alexander, cardinalships were sold for a minimum of 15,000 gold ducats; a few years later, the Medici Pope, Leo X, sold them for not less than 25,000 ducats…” 10

  Papist allegations against Savonarola ran the gamut from the laughable (that he had dared to advocate radical monastic poverty), to formidable, as issue
d by Girolamo Porcari, Bishop of Andria, governor in papal territory, and one of the twelve judges of the Rota, (the papal court). In his Dialogus Tusci et Remi adversus Savonarolam, Porcari asserted that to refuse to obey the pope results in damnation.

  The machinery of papal usury, simony, sex depravity and corrupt bureaucracy was now engaged in arranging for the torture and execution of the Dominican friar who had interfered to so great an extent with the traditional rackets and occultism of the Florentine and Roman Catholic ruling class. In February, 1497, Pope Alexander admonished the priors in Florence to send Savonarola to Rome in chains. They demurred and merely demoted him from preaching in the huge Cathedral of Florence to the confines of the church of San Marco. At this time the reverence for Savonarola among the people of Florence was undiminished. His problems were entirely with the hierarchy of the Church and armed gangs dispatched by the entrenched gangsters, aristocrats, occultists and sodomites. For years it was necessary that Savonarola be accompanied by bodyguards to protect against the gangs. One such gang, the Compagnacci (“rowdy companions”), led by the Florentine nobleman 11 Doffo Spini, when they could not assault Savonarola’s person, smeared excrement on the altar and pulpit of the Cathedral of Florence when he was regularly preaching and offering Mass. Spini was a frontman. Behind him were the Medici.

  It is a testimony to the esteem of the grassroots for Savonarola that even under enormous pressure, both religious and political, from the pope and the elites, the Republican leaders of Florence withstood, as late as March 1497, the calls for his arrest. One motive for their loyalty to the Dominican reformer was their fear of civil war should he be seized. Another view, among the priors, was that Savonarola had not committed any heresy and was guilty of nothing more that fighting for a renewal of fidelity to Jesus Christ and His Gospel against entrenched pockets of corruption that led all the way to the Vatican.

  Savonarola was not Luther. He held to the Mass and all Catholic dogma, but he believed that the papacy as it had devolved in the Renaissance, was predicated on blind faith in a mere man who happened to hold the Petrine office. If that man was leading souls to hell, did he have to be obeyed? What was the highest law of the Church, if not the salvation of souls?

  “Savonarola had intensified his assault on Rome and the Curia in late February and March, not only by scorning the validity of the excommunication, but also by proposing and insisting that the men behind it were ‘heretics’…He also hit out at Pope Alexander by introducing the example of a notorious earlier pontiff, the ‘wicked pope’ Boniface VIII (1294-1303), ‘who began as a fox and died like a dog.” 12 Boniface is noted for having reversed the safe haven Pope Celestine V had granted to the most faithful followers of St. Francis of Assisi, the socalled “Fraticelli” or “Spirituals.” (Fraticelli later became a catch-all term for any far-out Catholic fraternity suspected of rigorist tendencies).

  The papists see in Savonarola’s defiance of the Borgia pope an unpardonable transgression that merited, or at least understandably led to, the fires to which he was eventually consigned. We define papism as the heresy of the ultramontane who place a man on a throne above the salvation of souls or the preaching of the truth. If Savonarola was justifiably killed for embracing the latter over the former there is no hope for anyone who seeks to live and act as Jesus did and who was killed for defying the “legitimate” religious authority of his time. The Protestant Reformation was a revolt that began in defiance of papalolatry and which might have been dampened had Savonarola been accorded a Gospel-standard and treated fairly.

  Getting nowhere doctrinally, the pope and the curia now threatened the Signory of Florence with an interdiction on the goods of Florence which would obstruct their sale in Europe. The interdict would be tantamount to classifying the Republican leaders of Florence as outlaws, signifying that any force could pillage the city or kill them with impunity.

  Not everything was perfect about Savonarola or his doctrines; he could be as fallible as the Borgia pope, or any man. His most grievous error was having accepted the Renaissance “Monte” system of gradual permission for low interest usury “on behalf of the poor,” which had yet to gain papal approval (that would come in 1515), but which was in practice in banking redoubts like Florence. Because of this, among his staunchest supporters were the directors of this alleged “charity” bank, led by Lorenzo Lenzi.

  Savonarola also allowed himself to be drawn into a theatrical tempting of God through “ordeal by fire,” which he did not undergo and which turned the Florentine mob against him after four years of strong support from the people. The enemies of Savonarola were formidable politicians and intriguers. They appear to have persuaded Savonarola to engage in a primitive trial-by-fire initiated by the Franciscan friar Francesco di Puglia who offered to prove that Savonarola deserved to be excommunicated by walking through fire. He demanded that Savonarola walk with him to determine who would be burned and who would be spared. Savonarola would have none of it. Surely the devil, as well as God, had power to preserve his servants from flames.

  But the prospect of such a fiery test was a spectacle too great for the pagan-minded of Florence and it became a highly anticipated contest and one the masses felt that Savonarola was certain to win. Because he would not participate, a proxy was appointed who would walk through the flames on his behalf. Savonarola should not have allowed this representation. It only instigated the large crowd massed in the Piazza della Signoria to a frenzy of impatience and near riot in the expectation of the vending of a miracle on demand.When heavy rain fell with lightning, and the fiery trial was canceled, the proceedings had approached the level of farce. Somehow the day’s activities were spun so that Savonarola would take the blame for allegedly not allowing his proxy to walk into the non-existent flames (due to the rain, the fire had not been lit). The crazed masses had been cheated of their entertainment and through some still opaque process, Savonarola was charged with responsibility for the debacle and made the scapegoat. This was the first point at which his popularity began to wane. A mob formed and rampaged through the sectors filled with supporters of Savonarola. Some were killed. The aristocrat-led gangs besieged his San Marco monastery without fear of reprisal from the Republican government. Savonarola was taken on April 8, 1498.

  The original transcripts of the trials of Savonarola in Florence were all “lost,” even though Florentine and Roman officials and curia members were obsessive record-keepers. Years later an account was furnished by the Vatican without the transcripts. The account read like a Stalinist show trial and has little credibility. Savonarola’s “confession” was patently scripted and out of character from his entire previous life, his sermons, writings and his speech patterns. “I did all for vain reasons” is a one-sentence distillation of the tenor of the doctored testimony. He was doomed and his verdict was decided ahead of time. Moreover, he was tortured, which was the way of many “Christians” in that age. Henceforth the propaganda machine of Rome and Florence would have its way with him. Florence has betrayed Dante. It was doing the same to Savonarola.13

  Savonarola was imprisoned under harsh conditions in April and May, while Pope Alexander demanded he be taken to Rome. The city fathers of Florence offered a compromise, if they could control the public trial and confine the monk’s execution to their own backyard they would give the pope a twenty percent cut of the new tax, the Decima, which they planned to impose on the clergy. The pope demanded twentyfive percent and then agreed to leave Savonarola in Florence. The torture of Savonarola proceeded through the third week in May. It had gone on for weeks and it appears that he lost his mind in the course of the prolonged and savage torment, including some types of homosexual molestation as performed on him by the Inquisitor Giovanni Manetti.14

  On May 22, 1498 the now defrocked Girolamo Savonarola, together with his two friends, the defrocked monks Silvestro Maruffi and Domenico da Pescia, were hanged on a high gibbett in the government square. Their bodies were burned to ashes on the spot, to preclude the
possibility of any relics being gathered, and the ashes were then thrown into the Arno River. Dozens of Savonarola’s monks were exiled. Painted sheets falsely depicting Savonarola sodomizing children were circulated in the streets. The Compagnacci hung the fetid corpse of a donkey on the doors of Savonarola’s Church of San Marco. The carnival float for St. John’s Day (June 24) featured a pig as a stand-in for “that pig of a friar,” Savonarola. His leading followers were beaten, fined or both.

  One of the chief heresiarchs of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic fraternity gloated over Savonarola’s death. The Medici’s creature, Rev. Fr. “Marsilio Ficino explained that it was no ordinary human hypocrite who had deceived the Florentines, but an astute demon, servant of malicious astral forces—Antichrist himself,” 15—i.e. “ab Antichristo Hieronymo Ferrariense hypocritarum.”

  The trial of Galileo and the burning of Giordano Bruno have been seared into the collective historical memory of the world, while Girolamo Savonarola’s memory has been reduced to a tawdry cartoon: a bigoted friar inciting the masses to an irrational puritanical frenzy which left the pope no choice other than to take punitive action against him. It’s like a slogan from Orwell’s Animal Farm: repression of Savonarola good; repression of Bruno bad. Martin Luther was fifteen-years-ofage when Savonarola was burned. John Calvin would not be born for another eleven years. Together they would take Savonarola’s rage at the occupant of the papal institution to another level. Savonarola had believed that French King Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy was a heaven-sent scourge of a corrupt land. One wonders whether he would have regarded the rise of the Protesting Catholics in a similar light.

  Papists will say that Luther and Calvin went too far and in certain respects that is true. They threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. But consider this: after Savonarola was deposed, degraded, libeled, show-tried, tortured and hanged, and his “heresy” with him, sodomy returned to Florence after having been throughly suppressed for the four years the monk held sway over the city. There was nowhere near any campaign against sodomy in Florence by the pope and his minions to match in energy or ferocity the campaign against Savonarola. Obviously, he was judged the greater threat by far. “Savonarola’s fight against the practice of anal intercourse was directed against compliant women as well. He knew that this vice was honored in marriage as well as in female prostitution. Homosexual males held no monopoly. Florence’s reputation for sodomy was so widespread in the Germany of that day, that to sodomize ‘was popularly dubbed florenzen, and a sodomite a Florenzer. Savonarola reacted by insisting, in a number of his sermons, that sodomites deserved to be stoned or burned alive in public. He was a Biblicist, determined to keep the strict letter of the Bible, and his inspiration was the Old Testament’s horror of sodomy. The act in question, in seeking sexual pleasure as a thing frankly divorced from the will to procreate, seemed to sum up carnal debauchery.” 16