The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  According to the Spanish Jesuit Gregorius de Valentia (1549-1603), in his Commentarium Theologicorum Tomus Tertius (Venice, 1598), there was a “general precept obliging men to tell the truth, combined with a precept in which certain circumstances permitted or even obliged men to say what they believed to be deceptive falsehoods.” We are here approaching an approximation of the rabbinic theology behind the Kol Nidrei nullification of vows:

  “Mental reservation undermined traditional ideas not only on intentionally deceptive statements, but also on promises and oaths. By including a mental reservation in a promise, a man could evade the obligation to perform that which in spoken words he undertook to perform….Of course, if we follow Valentia in holding that there is a positive precept of truthfulness, we will regard a man who unjustifiably uses mental reservation in a promise, as guilty of infringing the precept. But it looks as though such a man would still evade the obligation to perform in spoken words what he said he would perform. Suppose that I borrow $1,000…promising to repay it on the first day of next month….In making my promise I mentally reserve some such clause as ‘provided that I choose to repay the money.’ I ought not to make this reservation, but having done so I am under no obligation to return the money unless I choose to….The point about promises was well-made by Henry Mason in The New Art of Lying, covered by the Jesuits under the Vaile of Equivocation (London, 1624), pp. 105-106: ‘And if he promises to me a sum of money, how can I tell that he keepeth not a reservation behind, that may disannull his promises aforehand…?” 22

  The Benedictine monk John Barnes, in his Dissertatio contra Aequivocationes (Paris, 1625), wrote, “You should not lie, even to save your life.” A direct command from God would be the sole exception. Biblical liars had either obeyed a divine compulsion or had acted wrongly. Prior to the judicial murder of Jesuit priests in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, equivocation and mental reservation were largely unknown to lay people. Knowledge of the practice had been maintained as something of a clerical secret, though it was present in various arcane volumes of Latin theology, yet these would have been indigestible to all but the most enterprising laymen. Elizabeth’s regime refined torture to an art form and in order not to divulge the identity of fugitive priests or those who harbored them, the hunted Jesuits resorted to equivocation and mental reservation when under interrogation. Since show trials of these persecuted priests were another feature of Elizabethan policy, equivocation and mental reservation on the priests’ part were exposed and came into public view. Inspired by Martin Azpilcueta (recall that he termed his volume on permissible dissimulation, “novus modus’’ [new measure]), Father Robert Southwell “…used this practice (and ingenious theory) of equivocation, though unsuccessfully, when he was tried for treason in London in 1595….Henry Garnet, superior of the English Jesuits from 1586 until his arrest in 1605, sought to explain Southwell’s use of equivocation in the large treatise on the topic that he probably wrote in the late 1590s. Writing to his fellow Jesuit Robert Persons, Garnet explains that he ‘wrote a treatise of equivocation to defend Father Southwell’s assertion, which was much wondered at by Catholics and heretics…

  “For Azpilcueta, Garnet and Robert Persons, who also wrote (the aforementioned) treatise on equivocation (A Treatise tending to Mitigation towardes Catholicke-Subjectes in England), first published in 1602 and reissued in 1607, an equivocal statement can be distinguished from a lie because in the former type of discourse, the whole truth is present in the discourser’s mind and is indeed communicated to the primary audience of all discourse, God.” 23

  This is similar to the rabbinic rationale for mental reservation used by a “revered sage” in the Babylonian Talmud, in its account of how Rabbi Eliezer supposedly tricked Blessed Mary into admitting that she conceived Jesus while she was menstruating. Eliezer uses mental reservation to falsely promise Mary that he will guarantee her a future life in heaven if she will tell him the truth about the circumstances of Christ’s conception. Concerning his offer of a guarantee, Mary in the Talmud allegedly tells him, “Swear it to me.” The Talmud states that Rabbi Akiba, “took the oath (to her) with his lips but annulled it in his heart.” 24

  In accord with Renaissance Church of Rome theology, the oath is a lie only if taken in isolation. The rabbi’s equivocation is not a deception if viewed within the entire context of the expression: the whole that was heard and supposedly approved by God, but not by Mary. It is no coincidence that Renaissance Christians were weaving a corresponding web of Talmudic deceit commensurate with the unprecedented rise of the prestige of the Talmud and the Kabbalah within Catholic intelligentsia of that time.

  “As a central figure in the English Catholic community and a proponent of equivocation, Garnet was one of the Crown’s most important prisoners, even though he played a minor role in the Gunpowder Plot itself…Scholars cite the equivocation jokes within the Porter scene (of Shakespeare’s Macbeth) as topical references to Father Garnet’s infamous equivocation when questioned about his role in the Gunpowder Plot.” 25

  Fr. Garnet’s A Treatise of Equivocation, which was circulated secretly in manuscript but not published until 1851 (under the editorship of David Jardine), was political dynamite. Until recently, authorities in the Church of Rome issued what appeared to be plausible denials of Fr. Garnet’s authorship. As much as we wish to show respect to martyred priests who were victims of cruel, hypocritical Protestants, we are duty-bound to mention the sad fact that A Treatise of Equivocation bears Talmudic-like aspersions on the character of Jesus Christ. Fr. Garnet’s situation was so desperate in terms of the intensity of the hunt for him, and Judaism’s arcane teachings having circulated and radiated from Renaissance Italy as never before, it appears that the combination of the two led him to pen a how-to manual of deceit that also manages to libel Our Lord, as related by Margaret W. Ferguson:

  “Garnet, himself executed for treason after his (ambiguous) role in the Gunpowder Plot was discovered, made an important contribution to the evolving arena of contest around equivocation. This area dealt with the philosophy and politics of language as much as with issues of religious doctrine. Garnet adapts Azpilcueta’s formulations about equivocation in ways particularly suited to the situation of Catholics in England. Garnet defends equivocation as a verbal practice of legitimately ‘hiding’ the (whole) truth, and insists that this practice was authorized and illustrated by Christ himself in various New Testament passages of great hermeneutic difficulty. Such passages come to be the model for what counts as a ‘literary’ language of irony, indirection and ‘dark conceit.”26

  Here the plot thickens for, as was previously noted, Garnet’s first motive in writing A Treatise of Equivocation was to “defend Father Southwell’s assertion.” According to a theory advanced by historians Clare Asquith and Peter Milward, William Shakespeare was Robert Southwell’s clandestine Catholic disciple. 27 Milward writes:

  “We may do well to remember that Shakespeare was no innocent bystander in all the events leading from the Essex Rebellion to the Gunpowder Plot, nor was he likely to have been deceived by the elaborate working of the government propaganda machine to cast discredit on the English Catholics. ‘Not only was Robert Catesby (accused Gunpowder plotter) his (Shakespeare’s) cousin on his mother’s side, but it is also surprising to see how many of Essex’s supporters as of the gunpowder plotters came from the same part of the English Midlands and met not infrequently at the same Mermaid Tavern in London….when it came to the Jesuit theory and practice of equivocation, we may safely say that not only did the dramatist feel no horror at it, but he even commended its use, even in terms beyond what the Jesuits themselves would have acknowledged…when he professes horror, with Macbeth, at ‘the equivocation of the fiend’ he can hardly be thinking of the Jesuits, whom he would have known as innocent victims, but of their persecutors in those ‘cunning times’…” 28

  Religiously authorized deception came as a shock to the Christian yeomanry in England, Protestant a
nd Catholic alike:

  “Hitherto most laymen, Catholic as well as Protestant, had been ignorant of mental reservation. Now they reacted to it with horror. Catholic vernacular writings, aimed at a lay audience, had inculcated virtues of honesty and truthfulness, claiming that it was heretics who lied. To unsophisticated laymen, however, mental reservation itself seemed no more than downright lying or, worse still, lying of a new and devious variety…

  “As early as the 1590s, a manual of casuistry written for the use of Catholic priests on the mission to Protestant England warned that deceptive statements should not be made to Protestant interrogators in the presence of ‘rude and simple’ Catholic laymen who, ‘being ignorant of the difference between pretense and lying…will immediately think that the priest is denying the faith if he uses pretense and…will be confused and inwardly despair if they see a priest do such a thing.’ Mental reservation might be justifiable, but it should not be used if it led to bad publicity for the church and its priests. When priests responded to Protestant criticisms of the doctrine, their posture was defensive…The Jesuit Parsons…claim(ed) that Catholic thinkers permitted but did not recommend the use of mental reservation: they ‘do allow and like far better of simple, plain and resolute speech in all Catholics,’ but tolerated mental reservation in a few cases since ‘perfection is one thing, and obligation another.” 29

  Parsing “the difference between pretense and lying,” and “perfection and obligation,” is a Talmudic enterprise which brought disrepute upon the Church that bore the name Catholic, even as Protestant equivocators such as Richard Baxter and William Perkins, who developed the concept of dolus bonus (“good deceit”), and mental reservationists like Elizabeth I and her chief co-adjutant, William Cecil, who engaged in that very practice when they were at the mercy of Queen Mary, escaped the opprobrium associated with it and bear no stigma even unto our own time, while Jesuits and Catholics generally bear the brunt of it. Public relations, it seems, is everything. Or as Ronald Reagan told the Governor of New Hampshire, “Image prevails over reality.”

  We would like to be able to say that since the hunted Catholic priests labored daily under the threat of capture and death by torture, that some amount of equivocating word play, while a moral failure, would be understandable, though not condoned. This may have been true of rank-and-file priests. It does not deserve to be offered in defense of their leaders, Garnet and Persons/Parsons, both of whom wrote manuals of equivocation which dared to implicate Jesus Christ as the father of equivocation, which is an inexcusable act of character assassination.

  Having said that, the feigned horror of the Elizabethan regime and the indignation of their Anglican clergymen and Puritan supporters over the means by which some fugitive Catholics fleeing execution may have shaded the truth, is the height of chutzpah. At the time the pirate queen’s crew were railing in high dudgeon against “Jesuit deceit and mendacity,” Sir Francis Walsingham’s English Secret Service had carved a niche for itself as the supreme masters of disinformation, covert operations, treachery and deviousness; a reputation well-deserved three hundred fifty years later when the British Secret Intelligence Service tricked America into entering the fratricidal First World War on behalf of “the Crown.” While the Jesuits became a byword for dishonesty in the Protestant world, that same world came to adulate Elizabeth and her coruscating cronies of corruption, as a fine new paradigm of Christian rule and rectitude. Eventually, the vertiginous interpretations and equivocating strategies of the casuists, which were strikingly similar to the convoluted hermeneutic gymnastics of the Talmud, entered Protestantism itself: “In a fine irony of history, a ‘science’ developed by the Roman Catholic Church to resolve problems of moral choice ‘that arose from the ‘equal poise’ of conflicting laws, obligations and loyalties’ was appropriated by both the government and the church of Tudor England, and hence assumed a central place in the legal, political and theological documents of a Protestant realm.” 30

  Mental reservation, in the form of the propositions of Rome’s Renaissance theologian Tomás Sanchez, were finally and formally condemned in 1679, by Pope Innocent XI (Benedict Odeschalchi, 1611-1689; pontiff from 1676-1689). 31 Innocent was flawed, and compromised by having done, like his Renaissance predecessors and his post-Renaissance successors, nothing to restore the de fide laws against profit on loans, a root of all evil. We cannot, therefore, say, ‘this was a great pope,’ or even ‘this was a good pope.’ Taking the New Testament at its word forbids us from granting our Catholic readers respite from our relentless exposé of the popes. It would be a relief to grant it, if only to relieve the monotony. Yet we would be guilty of overturning the truthful thesis of this book if we were to opine that ‘with the exception of his tolerance for usury, Innocent XI was in many respects a pontiff worthy of admiration.’ We wish we could say so, if it were not an offense against truth.

  Would it be better to draw a phrase from nineteenth century literature and refer to Innocent XI as a prostitute with a heart of gold? The appellation would probably satisfy very few, and needlessly antagonize very many, so we will refrain from it and state instead: this was a bad pontiff who did good things on many occasions. His life is a complexity and mystery and we leave the unraveling of it to the Almighty.

  Among the good that Pope Innocent XI accomplished was his courageous defiance of an entire entrenched school of powerful ecclesiastics with the explicit anti-mental reservation stance which his papacy had taken. “Out of the sixty-five laxist propositions condemned by Innocent XI and the Holy Office in 1679, two concerned the doctrine of equivocation. The twentysixth concerned the right to use mental reservation under oath, and the twenty-seventh concerned the justification of such use because of a just cause…” 32

  Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, the Protestant Chancellor of the University of Göttingen, had qualified praise for Popes Innocent XI and XII:

  “This respectable pontiff acquired a very high and permanent reputation by the austerity of his morals, his uncommon courage and resolution, his dislike of the much grosser superstitions that reigned in the Romish church, his attempts to reform the Romish clergy, and to abolish a considerable number of those fictions and frauds that dishonor their ministry…But it appeared manifestly by his example, that those pontiffs who respect truth and act from virtuous and Christian principles, may indeed form noble plans, but will never be able to bring them into execution, or at least to give them that measure of stability…which is the object of their wishes. By his example and administration it appeared that the wisest institutions and the most judicious establishments will be unable to stand firm for any considerable time, against the insidious stratagems or declared opposition of a deluded multitude, who are corrupted by the prevalence of licentious morals, whose imaginations are impregnated with superstitious fictions…whose credulity is abused by pious frauds…

  “Be that as it may, all the wise and salutary regulations of Innocent XI were suffered almost to ruin by the criminal indolence of Peter Ottoboni, who was raised to the head of the Romish church in the year 1689, and assumed the name of Alexander VIII. A laudable attempt was made to revive them by Innocent XII, a man of uncommon merit and eminent talents whose name was Pignatelli, and who in the year 1691 succeeded Alexander in the papal chair; nor were his zealous efforts absolutely destitute of success. But it was also his fate to learn by experience that the most prudent and resolute pontiffs are unequal to such an arduous task, such a Herculean labor, as the reformation of the church and court of Rome; nor were the fruits of this good pope’s wide administration enjoyed long after his decease.” 33

  Prior to Innocent XI, mental reservation’s soul-rot had progressed so far that the proposition that calumniators, witnesses and unjust judges may be murdered if there is no other way of avoiding their attacks, was accepted in some quarters. 34

  Despite Pope Innocent XI’s ban however, the Renaissance scourge of mental reservation and equivocation were not eradicated from the Church, much less fro
m its very dogma as pronounced by a “saint” declared to be a “Doctor of the Church” (i.e. a theologian of unimpeachable integrity and authority).

  Alphonsus Liguori, “Doctor of the Church”

  Patron Saint of Liars and Thieves

  The preceding headline is probably sufficient to ensure this writer’s lynching, if not literally, at least rhetorically, at the hands of the devotees of “Saint” Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787), who is one of the most revered of all post-Renaissance Catholic thinkers; a canonized saint and “Doctor of the Church” esteemed as an incomparable pillar of conservative morality, and what is for many Catholics at least as important, an advocate of the Blessed Virgin Mary. To rectify the perception of this scoundrel among Catholics is a tall order.

  Liguori nullified the decree of Pope Innocent XI against pure mental reservation (“restriction”) by making a distinction, by clever word jugglery, between “pure” and “non-pure” mental reservation; yet it was a distinction without a difference. He redefines pure mental reservation as non-pure mental reservation (“restriction”) and recruits Jesus to the deceiver’s side:

  “On the contrary, it is allowable to use non-pure mental restriction, even with an oath, if it can be discovered by circumstances. This is proved by John 7:8, where Christ said, ‘I go up not to this feast,’ and yet Scripture says that He afterwards went up.” 35

  In cases where the person under interrogation decides that the individuals asking questions are “unjust questioners,” the respondent could answer audibly one way, and then inaudibly, with an unspoken thought that contradicted his verbal statement. By this and numerous other subterfuges and loopholes of escape, Pope Innocent XI’s condemnation was evaded and effectively rendered meaningless by the “saint” whose Moral Theology for confessors was accepted as the leading authority, and occupied an authoritative position in the curriculum of the seminaries of Latin Christendom.