No statement of that tenor came from Cardinal Newman. With the hindsight of nearly one hundred fifty years, no similar statement has emanated from Newman’s prominent supporters and enthusiasts who have erected and maintained the Newmanite legend. Prof. Meyrick was the author of some seventy books and pamphlets on theology and history. He was a specialist on the moral theology of Alphonsus Liguori and no bigot, being an admirer of Innocent XI. In a pamphlet dated March 18, 1864 entitled, “But Isn’t Kingsley Right After All?” Meyrick, who had met Newman years before, took the battle to him:
“…is not Mr. Kingsley substantially right?…is he wrong in stating that you—Dr. Newman the individual man, and Dr. Newman the representative of a school—are unable to declare what we in England mean by untruthfulness to be immoral?”
Meyrick then quoted profusely from Liguori on equivocation. As previously observed, Newman would not reply in public to Meyrick. Prof. Meyrick and his challenge to Newman constitute a virtual cipher in mainstream biographies of Cardinal Newman and accounts of his defense of Liguori. It is the memory hole all the way for Meyrick. Newman’s reputation is sustained only when Meyrick is made to disappear. How dishonest is that? Late in 1864, Meyrick again challenged Newman with his study, On Dr. Newman’s Rejection of Liguori’s Doctrine of Equivocation (an intentionally ironic title), which Wilberforce, the Anglican Bishop of Oxford, considered “unanswerable.” Meyrick put forth an analogy which deflates Newman’s own equivocation: “Dr. Newman holds very much the same relation towards S. Alfonso and Equivocation as a monogamist Mormon would hold towards Polygamy…He has amply vindicated for himself the character of an honest and truthful Englishman…but by that vindication he has the more deeply (in)criminated his Church, which sanctions what he rejects, and which will not allow him to condemn as a Roman Catholic what he scornfully refuses to practice as a man.”
The only Catholic scholar writing in English (of whom we are aware), who has taken any significant notice of Meyrick’s challenge to Newman, is Joseph L. Altholz, who wrote, “Meyrick was a controversialist of greater substance than Kingsley; but his pamphlet went virtually unnoticed in the glow of Newman’s triumph with the Apologia. Newman does not appear to have taken any cognizance of him, and his unanswered pamphlet was the last blow of the controversy.” 55
And so it goes—the familiar furrow is plowed and the seeds by which posterity judges a controversy are planted; one undeserving celebrity is crowned king, while the man with truth slowly sinks into the shadows like a sputtering twenty watt bulb, leaving the celebrity’s partisans to crow, “Twas a famous victory.” 56
Newman has been accused by his Right-wing Romanist critics of not being sufficiently Catholic, i.e. in not supporting the Ultramontane party; as well as in some instances (and here we think his Roman critics were on firmer ground)—for his unfortunate theory of the development of doctrine. 57 One thing he was not, was an ecumenist; that is, assuming that he was not equivocating when, in 1862, he called Protestantism “the dreariest of possible religions…the city of confusion and the house of bondage.” Newman’s understanding of papal infallibility was of interest for its marketing brilliance, contrasted with the inept marketing by the adherents of Ultramontanism. Newman wrote attractively that, “the Holy See has no magical power of teaching new truth infallibly, but represents the conservative element which preserves the original deposit of faith.” (It was by the advancement of this claim that the First Vatican Council’s doctrine was sold to the sheeple). But whether the pope’s power is magical or not, it is power nonetheless; the power of an absolute monarch. It was that power which was used from the Renaissance forward in a mission to derogate or nullify ancient truths from the Deposit of Faith, while elevating heresies. This is a diabolic process, which, believe it or not, was praised by Newman in later editions of the Apologia, in this manner: “Heretical questionings have been transmuted by the living power of the Church into salutary truths.”
This is a statement of an extraordinary candor concerning the effect of the power of the “sovereign pontiff” to transmute, for example, usury, from a mortal to sin to something that need not even be confessed for reception of the Eucharist.58
(To his credit, and though in our opinion he was resoundingly confuted, English Cardinal Henry Manning, Rome’s “Lord Archbishop of Westminster,” did not evade a debate with Meyrick over Liguori. It took the form of a public exchange of nineteen letters, which Meyrick subsequently published in Moral and Devotional Theology of the Church of Rome).
In the midst of the muck and mire of equivocation and mental reservation, let us restate the doctrine of the ancient, True Catholic Church. Scott M. Sullivan, of the University of St. Thomas: “But let your speech be yea, yea: no, no: and that which is over and above these, is of evil. (Matthew 5:37) (St.) Augustine’s position on this matter is well known and needs little elaboration. Lying is always a sin. Purity of soul is preferable to bodily purity and this holds without exception….Augustine does not change his mind in the Contra Mendacium, written decades later. A lie is still not allowable even if to save one from injury. Biblical examples to the contrary, like that of Jacob, Augustine maintains are not lies, but mysteries. Augustine remains constant in this position through the Enchiridion. There are no lies that are not sins…every lie must be called a sin…
“Aquinas prohibits truthful speech spoken with intent to deceive. A good thing can be done for the wrong intention, and just like one who goes to Church in order to steal, likewise, speaking truthfully with the intention to deceive is a form of lying. Even though the speech is true, the intent to deceive renders it as a species of lying.”59
There are surely numerous truthful adherents of the Church of Rome. The catastrophe is this: as long “Saint” Liguori’s revival of the Renaissance doctrine of permissible deceit and falsehood is a theological legacy for leaders of the hierarchy of the Church of Rome, who put it into practice in their own criminal careers, while transmitting it to penitents in the confessional, and to criminal clergy involved in facilitating or actually perpetrating child molestation—this circumstance goes a long way toward explaining the stubborn survival of the epidemic molestation of children which has been shrouded in the deepest institutional secrecy, protected by equivocation and mental reservation.
Some will say it is an anti-Catholic act to call so eminent a “saint” as Alphonsus Liguori to task for his counsels on this head. On the contrary, let it be said that it is a profoundly antiCatholic act to do as the equivocators and mental reservationists do and proceed to approve of deception and double-dealing in the name of the Church, thus defaming her and giving powerful ammunition to Talmudists, those Protestants who are bigots, and other enemies of the authentic Catholicism that existed for fourteen hundred years.
The system of moral theology which would later become Liguori’s specialty first gained prominence during the Renaissance, almost two centuries before his birth. According to Redemptorist theologian Rev. Théodule Ray-Mermet, CSsR., “The phenomena of moral systems appeared during the sixteenth century to face the complexity of a new world whose problems agonized consciences and divided scholars.”60 Fr. Ray-Mermet’s preceding words constitute a modernist statement. He implies that times change in “the complexity of a new world.” What actually happened was that the zeitgeist embraced the sophistry of lawyers with strong similarities to the Talmudic and Kabbalistic system. In the Talmudic system, stringent and less stringent are represented by the zugot pairs, one of the earliest of which was represented by the “schools of Shammai and Hillel” (supposedly contemporary with Christ), which in turn personified a rabbinic dialectic, represented symbolically by the two “pillars of the Temple,” gevurah (severity) and chesed (mercy). In the predominant moral theology of the post-Renaissance Church of Rome these antipodes are designated as rigorist and laxist. They were definitively demarcated and explicated in a dense work that has the heft and prolixity of the Talmud—the Theologia Moralis of Alphonsus Liguori, the sixth edi
tion of which was completed in 1767 when he was seventy-years of-age. Between 1791 and 1905 sixty complete editions were published.
Liguori, who had been a lawyer before he became a priest, created a theological system that approximated the Jesuitdominated theology of probabilism,61 but which, for purposes of camouflage, he named “Equiprobabilism.” 62 The Catholic Encyclopedia states, “Equiprobabilism opposed to either a lax or rigorous moral position, was not a compromise between the two, but a higher equilibrium.” 63 In Kabbalistic Judaism the mean between the two pillars of gevurah and chesed is known as “the knowledge of the higher equilibrium.”
In Orthodox Judaism, among the Ten Commandmants, the command, “Thou shalt not steal,” is not applied mechanically, that is to say, in every case equally. In certain instances, Judaic persons may steal from gentiles without incurring sin.64 The New Catholic Encyclopedia writes, “In Alphonsian moral theory the study of the concrete circumstances of action rules out the mechanical application of a system, however sound it may be.” Liguori was “(a)lways disposed to prefer reason to the authority of moralists.”65 Here is a succinct summation of the modernist mentality of Liguori which nullifies the Ten Commandments (“mechanical application of a system”) and prefers “reason” to the authority of “moralists.” Who are these denigrated “moralists”? Are they not Jesus, St. Paul, St. Peter, et. al? Alphonsian moral theory is the theology of Renaissance, post-Renaissance and modern popes from John XXIII onward. Hence, when “traditional” Catholics approach the Vatican and demand the restoration of the faith “in line with the teachings of St. Alphonsus Liguori” they perform a ceremony of ignorant self-mockery which identifies them to the hierarchy of the Church of Rome as infants babbling about matters of which they know nothing. “Traditional Catholics” defend a pre-1960s Catholicism which, being “Renaissance-Catholicism” is the essence of the forked tongue and the double cross, and they wonder why they can’t win their battles and must resort to apocalyptic prophecies from obscure nuns and hoaxed papal chronologies about the “Glory of the Olive” (Benedict XVI) and “Peter Romanus” (Pope Francis). The Overlords in Rome are more than happy to watch them retreat to this ghettoized playpen for, after all, according to the equivocator’s motto, “they have deceived themselves.”
As previously noted, Liguori perpetrated his swindle on the Catholic world by making himself known as a supreme champion of Mary. His book The Glories of Mary is far better known among the common people than his Moral Theology (Glories of Mary “has been translated into over eighty different languages and 800 known editions”). 66 As we pointed out earlier with regard to the pious Marian front mounted by John Paul II, some Catholics are convinced that any reputedly dedicated advocate of Mary must be theologically sound.
Liguori’s extensively argued theology of equivocation and mental reservation will be found only in the uncensored, complete edition of his Moral Theology. Excerpts in English appear in the Blakeney and Meyrick translations. We believe that these two individuals accurately and scrupulously translated the portions of Moral Theology containing the approval by Liguori, “under certain circumstances,” of trickery, dissimulation, mendacity, misdirection and almost every species of duplicity. In Meyrick’s case he was not a bigot. He seems to have been a seeker after Christ’s truth wherever it might be found. If it could be found in a pope of Rome, so much the better. He esteemed Pope Innocent XI as an enemy of equivocation and mental reservation. Meyrick wrote concerning him:
“Innocent XI of the house of Odescalchi, was a pope meek and mild in manner, but firm and high in purpose…A man of uncompromising and inflexible integrity, he naturally leaned toward the Jansenist codes of morality and had little sympathy for the system…However…Jansenism has always been worsted in its conflicts with Jesuitism. The Moral Theologians set to work…(g)iven the problem how to retain a certain practice, and at the same time pay an outward respect to a papal decree forbidding it, the method to be adopted is the following—Take the thing condemned and divide it into two species, distinguished from each other by a distinction without a difference. Assume that the papal condemnation applies to either one of these species, but not to the other. Range everything which you wish to do under the uncondemned head; whatever you have no temptation towards under the other. The result will be the conclusion desired. Thus, the Pope (Innocent XI) condemned mental restriction (and) immediately afterward mental restriction is divided into two kinds (by theologians like Liguori), pure mental restriction and non-pure mental restriction. There is no moral difference between them, but the papal condemnation is declared to be confined to the former and so the old practice goes on as securely and merrily as ever.”67
“Thou shalt not steal.” — God, Exodus 20:15.
“What is theft? It is the secret and unjust taking-away of a thing belonging to another, when the owner is reasonably unwilling.”
—“Saint” Alphonsus Liguori, Theologia Moralis, iv, 518.
Notice the chasm-like loophole provided for a thief by Liguori. If the thief can convince himself that the rightful owner is reasonably willing to having his property stolen, then the Catholic thief is free to take it.
Liguori characterized his opponents as “overstrict” and “extremely rigid” theologians, but he is sly enough to make it appear as though he favors the teaching of Augustine and Innocent XI on the need for absolute truthfulness, after which he cynically proceeds to subvert them both by boring several large loopholes in their doctrine. Where, for instance, Pope Innocent XI condemned the proposition that domestic servants may, from their masters “possunt occulte heris suis surripere ad compensandam operam suam, qua majorem judicant salario quod recipiunt” (“steal secretly for the purpose of compensating themselves for their own labor which they judge to be greater than the salary they receive”),68 Liguori wrote, “the pontifical decrees are not designed to lay servants under an unjust obligation.” 69
How much does Liguori allow the servant to steal? The “saint” states that the amount is to be determined by the thieving servant himself, “according to his own judgment…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, all danger of mistake being removed.” 70
Some of Liguori’s Moral Theology descends into the realm of the ridiculous, such as when he rules that while it is a mortal sin to steal a small relic “in the district of Rome,” outside of Rome it would be only a venial sin to steal a small relic, provided that the thief does not deform or diminish it (“ipsam reliquiam non deformans, neque minuens illius aestimationem”). An exception is to be made if the relic is very rare, as for example a piece of the true cross or a hair from the head of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In both cases the theft of those relics would be considered mortally sinful no matter where they occurred.
Liguori had no scruple against blasphemy since he accused Jesus Christ of lying. Referring to mental reservation as “mental restriction,” he wrote: “…it is allowable to use non-pure mental restriction, even with an oath, if it can be discovered by circumstances. This is proved from John vii: 8, where Christ said, ‘I go not up to this feast,’ and yet Scripture says that He afterward went up.” (p. 5). 71
Here is the passage in the Gospel to which Liguori alludes, implicating Jesus in Liguori’s immoral theology: John 7: 8-10: “Go ye up unto this feast: I will not go up yet unto this feast: for my time is not yet come. These things he said unto them, and abode still in Galilee. But as soon as his brethren were gone up, then went he also up unto the feast, not openly, but as it were in private.”
Was Jesus a deceiver, as the leaders of the Jews and the Gnostics declare, and Liguori insinuates, when “Saint” Alphonsus claims Our Lord used “non-pure” mental reservation?
When Jesus’ time had come, he went up to the Feast (of Booths). He did so secretly because He and His followers were under threat (John 7:13). Liguori claims to be a follower of St. Augustine. Can he be ignorant
of St. Augustine’s own commentary on John 7: 8-10? Augustine, in a homily on this passage, rejects with indignation and horror the Liguorian-type of twisting of the words of Jesus. Augustine, with no axe to grind in favor of justifying deceit, in godly and reverent terms, would rather give Our Savior the benefit of the doubt, and believe that Our Lord was deceived by others, rather than, as Liguori blasphemously implies, that He Himself had deceived others (“falli enim pertinet ad infirmitatem, mentiri ad iniquitatem”).
When lying to a questioner about whether someone is present in a building or not, Liguori prefers the phrase “He is not here,” to “He is not at home.” Alphonsus states that the latter is a material falsehood, whereas to tell a questioner that someone “is not here” meaning not at the door, or not at the window, or not in sight, involves no deceit. 72
Under certain circumstances, when a wife who is being questioned about having broken her marriage vows and being guilty of adultery seeks to lie to her husband about the extramarital tryst which she has committed, she may do so, according to Liguori, the canonized Doctor of the Church and founder of the Redemptorist Order, under the following stipulation: “She may equivocally assert that she has not broken the marriage, for it still exists.
“If she has sacramentally confessed her adultery, she may answer, ‘I am innocent of this crime,’ because it has already been taken away by confession.” 73
How many thousands, or tens of thousands of times, were these hellish alibis which are evocative of the seediest shyster, whispered into the ears of female adulterers in the confessional, based on the Moral Theology of Liguori? How can this be of Christ, or of His Church? Is it not of Satan? And is it not put forth by an enemy of the True Catholic Church, desirous of wrecking the reputation of Christ’s Church, to say nothing of the purity, integrity and honor of its wives and mothers?
The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome Page 50
