The Cryptocracy often makes certain that Church of Rome modernizers and change agents become renowned as the Blessed Virgin Mary’s champion on earth. When Pope John Paul II’s liberal innovations emerged early in his papacy, it was floated by the Vatican and their assets in the Establishment media that the pope was Mary’s special defender, “the Blessed Virgin’s own pontiff,” whose personal motto with regard to her was, “Totus tuus” (“totally yours”). Liguori’s dreadful doctrines are rendered nearly invulnerable among the pious by the same ruse. He wrote the book The Glories of Mary, therefore he is untouchable in the eyes of those Catholics for whom conformity to the truth of Jesus Christ is second to the exaltation of Mary. In stating this unvarnished fact about mariolatry in the ranks of the papists, we do not intend by any means to diminish, as very many Protestants do, the proper honor paid her by the true Catholic Church as ever-virgin, and the most noble human in the history of the human race, whose faith, obedience to the will of God, and long suffering, are worthy of emulation and the highest commemoration, thanks and praise. She was the new Eve, God’s best and most faithful servant on earth.
Some Protestants suffer from an emotionally constrained aridity because they have no significant mother figure in their theology. Here we do not speak of anything approaching a goddess, or “co-redemptrix.” The Russian and Greek Eastern Orthodox Church guards against any such error by most often only depicting a Hodegetria image of Mary, i.e. a portrait of her embracing—or accompanied—by Jesus, thereby symbolically demonstrating that He is the source of her redemption and ours; her importance being subsidiary, and dependent on her relationship with Her Divine Son.36
It is not our purpose to enter the lists of the controversy which has raged among learned theologians Catholic and Protestant, concerning the subject of proper reverence for Blessed Mary, as opposed to mariolatry. The heat of that debate has disquieted the Church and the lack of moderation on both sides begets ill blood in the body of Christ. Let us recall and heed Jesus’ explicit instruction, that any Christian may be said to be the most blessed of all, by becoming one of those “who hear the word of God and observe it” (Luke 11: 27-28). Before the Renaissance, few Catholic theologians sought to make of the humble Israelite Mary a goddess or “co-redeemer”; nor did they seek to level her down to a vague personage whose life and example is less often invoked by Christians than that of Protestant heroines such as Susanna Wesley or England’s “New Isis,” Elizabeth I.
Blessed Mary has also been distorted into an Isis figure by New Age initiates. We have seen American converts to Buddhism pray the rosary and maintain images of both the Dalai Lama and “Mother Mary” together on an altar or mantlepiece, as a veiled propitiation of the mother goddess in one of her thousand forms. This pagan perversion of the holy image of the Blessed Virgin Mary is also found in Voodoo and Santeria. These perversions, whether Buddhist/New Age or the Voodoo manifestions, subvert the First Commandment, and the Scriptural principle of Patriarchy. The perversion of her image however, in no way obviates its legitimate display, or justifies the iconoclastic vandalism which accompanied the Protestant Reformation in places such as Scotland, England and the Huguenot regions of France. A Christian is not required to possess depictions of Mary, or even of Jesus for that matter; though clearly the authentic Catholic Church taught that in their proper place, reverent artistic depictions can be an aid to contemplation and sanctification. On the other hand, neither is it required that true worship be conducted in a church that resembles a warehouse, stripped of all reverent artistic depictions of the sacred. It is most unfortunate that man-made “requirements” issued from both extremes have resulted in discord, hatred and bloodshed, causing the Gospel to be held in disrepute, as all violence between Christians tends to do.
Alphonsus Liguori was beatified in 1816 by Pope Pius VII. On July 5, 1831, the Sacred Penitentiary of the Apostolic See reaffirmed complete approval for Liguori’s moral theology around the same time that this body, by direction of the pope, issued the revolutionary directive that no Catholic usurer was obliged to confess or seek absolution for his usury. “The followers of St. Alphonsus may point to the official declaration of the Church that…his teaching has never been censured. To these advantages must be added the great personal authority of the…founder of the Redemptorist Order.” 37
Liguori was canonized a saint in 1839 by Pope Gregory XVI, and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1871 by Pope Pius IX. After this “Doctor” status had been conferred on Liguori, English Cardinal Henry Edward Manning described in 1887 his impact on the Church: “Doctor of the just mean, his influence on hearts has ever increased…This influence has passed from one nation to another, from one church to another, from one diocese to another, from one confessional to another. The spirit of Alphonsus…(has) penetrated everywhere and…triumphed in all Catholic countries…hold(ing) sway over the entire Church of God.” 38As recently as 1950, Pope Pius XII named Liguori “Heavenly Patron of Confessors and Teachers of Moral Theology.” Pius XII explained his declaration as follows: “He (St. Alphonsus Liguori) left, both in speech and in writing, for the education and direction of confessors, a remarkable moral and pastoral teaching which has been the most highly esteemed in the whole world up to our present age…” In 1967, New Catholic Encyclopedia, published by the Catholic University of America, stated: “The influence of St. Alphonsus on moral theology has proved durable, and the practical direction traced by him has been substantially adopted by the Church.”
The papal-ecclesiastical approbation for Liguori was a notorious and scandalous fact among evangelical Protestants. Rev. A.C. Coxe, writing in his The Novelty and Nullity of the Papal Dogma (1855): The Church of Rome “openly authorizes the morals of Alphonsus Liguori, and has actually made a saint of the man who teaches that there are no less than thirty different methods of swearing falsely without guilt; and that, for what one deems good cause, it is lawful to use equivocation, and to confirm it with an oath…” 39
The papalolaters two main defense strategies are, on one hand, to say that Liguori is thoroughly orthodox, and on the other to equivocate, as Cardinal John Henry Newman did, and state that though Liguori was a great and wonderful saint, Catholics are not obliged to follow him. Notice the dissembling spirit of the double mind in this line of defense. Liguori is a saint, a Doctor of the Church and Heavenly Patron of Confessors and Teachers of Moral Theology, but “no Catholic is bound to follow him throughout.” Yet Cardinal Newman understood very well indeed that it was not up to the laymen in the pews, the pray-pay-and-obey parishioners, to reject or embrace Liguori. As the Pope declared in 1950, and the New Catholic Encyclopedia stated as recently as 1967, his moral theology “has been substantially adopted by the Church”—in other words, at the top of the hierarchy—among the teachers of moral theology and the confessors who advise, admonish and absolve penitents.
Liguori’s theology, disguised as mercy for sinners, against the Jansenist error of the time, of letter-of-the-law severity, propelled Machiavellian, post-Renaissance situation ethics to new heights undreamed of by “conservative” and “traditional” Catholics, who generally don’t have a clue as to what Liguori actually taught, since his major works have never been translated from ecclesiastic Latin.
For instance, consider the situation after Vatican Council II, in the “post-Conciliar” years, when, in spite of Paul VI’s thoroughly orthodox encyclical Humane Vitae, thousands of confessors were advising troubled husbands and wives that birth control was permissible. This betrayal of Catholic dogma on the part of lax confessors has been attributed to the bad fruits of the 1960s-era Council. In actuality however, what had occurred was that Liguori’s diabolic laxity concerning birth control for Catholic married couples, which had been part of his recommended confessional praxis for two centuries after he wrote his Church-approved Moral Theology, had finally lost its shame and brazenly emerged from the shadows and into the glare of the garish light of the late 1960s.
In terms of tha
t endorsement, let the record show that in teaching the lawfulness of Liguori’s demonic dementia, the Church of Rome approved it totally. He died in 1787. In May, 1803, the Sacred Congregation of Rites decreed “that in all the writings of Alphonsus Liguori, edited and unedited, there is not a word that could be justly found fault with.” Pope Pius VIII approved the decree. Rome proclaimed that in Liguori there is nothing to be censured:
“…that his whole teaching is altogether free from all error. That in the whole of his moral theology not one principle is disapproved of; that there is not in it any opinion contrary to faith or good morals, new, opposed to the sense of the Church, heretical erroneous, approaching to error, savoring of heresy or error, suspected of error, rash, scandalous, offensive to pious ears, ill-sounding, such as to lead the simple astray, schismatical, harmful, impious, blasphemous.”
Bishop Asti, Prince Prelate of the Papal Household, published the decree “that the examination of Liguori’s work had been conducted with particular severity, that his System of Morality had been more than twenty times discussed by the Sacred Congregation, and that all had agreed voce concordi, unanimi consensu, uno voce, una mente. On July 5, 1831 the Sacred Penitentiary (charged with imparting the laws of God and the Church to priest-Confessors in their directions to penitents in the Sacrament of Penance), formally stated that Liguori’s ruling can be followed without moral qualms of any kind. No Confessor need be disturbed by anything he has written.” The Cardinal-Archbishop Rohan-Chabot soon afterward directed all of his clergy commanding that “the judgment of Rome should be fully adhered to, and that the opinions of Blessed Alphonsus de’ Liguori should be followed and reduced to practice, all doubt whatever being cast aside.”
“In the words of the Preface to his Life, edited by the Fathers of the Oratory, and approved and recommended by Cardinal Wiseman, ‘the morals of this saintly Bishop cannot be censured, without setting up as a censor authority itself; without, in fine, censoring the decision of the Holy See.” 40 It cannot be denied that Liguori is the authoritative exponent of Rome’s moral teaching.
Equivocation and mental reservation are not just sins in themselves in terms of the individual situation in which they gull and deceive the individuals to whom they are specifically addressed. Rather, they infect the hierarchy and the intellectuals of the Church. What one scholar described as the effect on Judaic persons of the Kol Nidrei rite’s sanction for cheating, applies to the use of equivocation and mental reservation among Christians, “the inevitable moral abasement that this sort of treachery fosters in its practitioners.” 41
This inevitable abasement manifests in the occlusion of the good sense and judgment of the followers of the Church of Rome, whose powers of reason have become so atrophied they are nearly incapable of seeing how the “infallible” papacy has become, since the Renaissance, the engine of the transformation of the ecclesia from the Catholic Bride of Christ to the papal Judas of Christ.
What is “traditional” about those who sacrifice the Catholic Church to the god they have made out of the Bishop of Rome? They are modernists, not traditionalists. In Catholicism’s first millennium, propitiation of this pope-idol would have looked as though it had come straight out of Antichrist’s rules for radicals (as so often it has).
The apologists for the usury permitted by the Church of Rome in our time play Talmudic games with the definition of usury. They deny that the accurate definition of usury consists in the statement that any gain by the lender that exceeds the amount of the loan to the debtor is usury. That this is the correct definition of usury from the beginning of the Christian Church to the dawn of the Renaissance is as plain as the sun at noonday, but equivocation of the papist theological species will have it otherwise. The Renaissance papists claim other escape clauses founded in part in the concept of lucrum cessans (the loss of a profit which a lender might otherwise have gained from his money if he had not loaned it to a debtor), which testifies to the spirit of mental confusion and deceit applied to the history and theology of usury. 42
So much of this justification of the nullification of what was the sensus fidei, that which had been taught always and everywhere (quod ubique, quod semper, quodo ab omnibus creditum est),43 camouflages the sophistry that is at its center. What is being obscured is the power of the “Sovereign Pontiff” to do whatever he likes with Jesus Christ’s Church, such as canceling the ban on profits on loans by calling those profits by another name, when it is expedient to do so according to the socalled economic “realities” of the situation. Christ’s Church thereby becomes subject to the whims of the Bishop of Rome. The dogma of His Church can be reworked, reformulated and remade, along with the Word of God itself, by an exalted man on a throne in Rome. For instance, according to the teaching of Benedict XIV in his encyclical Ex Quo Singulari, the question of whether the continued observance of the ceremonial precepts of the Old Law is permitted, depends, according to the pontiff, on the character and motivation of the observances in question:
“Although the ceremonial precepts of the old Law have come to an end with the promulgation of the Gospel, and the new Law does not contain any precept which distinguishes between clean and unclean foods, nevertheless the Church of Christ has the power of renewing the obligation to observe some of the old precepts for just and serious reasons, despite their abrogation by the new Law.”
Here is the overthrow of the Bible by the whim of Benedict XIV, who dares to accord to himself the title, “the Church of Christ.” In the New Testament however, he and all other usurping human authorities, are unmasked: “Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink…These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Let no one disqualify you…If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations—‘Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch’ (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting selfmade religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value…”(Colossians 2:16-18; 20-23; emphasis supplied).
The Word of God states that no human being can pass judgment on our choices of food and drink, and that any such judgments are human precepts and teachings of a religion that is not of God—it is a self-made religion. Only people sunk in a mentality of bipolar falsehoods can call themselves Bible believers while adhering to the “sovereign” spiritual supremacy which Pope Benedict XIV, and dozens of pontiffs like him, reserved for themselves alone.
This spirit is visible in the case of another celebrated, virtually canonized Church of Rome intellectual, Hilaire Belloc, whose prowess as a wordsmith cannot be denied and is rightly acknowledged, caeteris paribus. In the matter of his books of history 44and his writing on usury however, he is a true son of Liguori. For example, concerning usury he is an innovator and no enemy of the Money Power (unless it is a Money Power that he denominates as “Calvinist” or “Bank of Amsterdam”). Belloc was a change agent in the same vein as bankers such as Fugger. The spirit of the lawyer and the equivocator has penetrated the marrow of the latter day Church of Rome to such an extent that the former scions of Thomistic reason have degenerated into the children of sophistry. Hilaire Belloc, in line with the modernist trend of his times, redefined usury so as to qualify it as not-usury: “Usury, then, is a claiming of interest on an unproductive loan, or of interest greater than the real increment produced by a productive loan.” 45
With this statement Belloc issued a prozbul worthy of Rabbi Hillel. He is saying that usury is permitted when a loan is “productive” (when the lender loans to a business). This is the Machiavelli/Renaissance/Liguori/post-Renaissance doctrine. “Liguori’s system…neutralizes God’s law by sophistical distinctions…” 46
Because he did not go all the way into libertarian extremism concerning usury, he is mistaken, by economic reformers and “Distributists” affiliated with
the Church of Rome, for an archetypal enemy of usury. Good luck trying to wield facts of the documentary record to convince these individuals concerning the truth about Belloc. The same of fog of casuistry used to enshrine his legend is employed to deny the existence of papally-condoned Renaissance-Catholic usury. Equivocation and mental reservation have bred a rabbinic type of dialectic among some “Catholic” intellectuals which is largely impervious to truth.
One rather large problem for the post-Renaissance papist deceivers, at least in Britain anyway, was the publication of accurate English translations by two scrupulous Anglican scholars, Frederick Meyrick and R.P. Blakeney, of Liguori’s magnum opus: Moral and Devotional Theology of the Church of Rome According to the Authoritative Teaching of S. Alfonso De’ Liguori. These translations were called into action against the Anglican Church’s most troubling “apostate.”
The Cardinal Newman Controversy
“St. Alfonso certainly says that a play upon words is allowable; and, speaking under correction, I should say that he does so on the ground that lying is not a sin against justice, that is, against our neighbor, but a sin against God. God has made words the signs of ideas, and therefore if a word denotes two ideas, we are at liberty to use it in either of its senses…” John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua.
Catholic Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890), celebrated scholar and author, had been the ornament of High Church Anglicanism before becoming the most eminent English convert to Romanism in England in centuries, even though in the early years of his career as a convert in the Church of Rome he was barely visible. He made up for that initially marginal existence with an eventual celebrity that was remarkable.
The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome Page 48
