The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  Liguori is the ultimate author of the nullification of the laws against contraception. Why wouldn’t modernists follow his lead when he was cited by Pope Pius XII a few years before the onset of the Second Vatican Council as the supreme clerical authority on the shepherding of the conscience of penitents? Imagine the smirks of the modernist theologians when “traditional” Catholics charge them with heresy for permitting artificial birth control. Gales of clandestine laughter must surely be the response in the chanceries of the dioceses. “Your own patron Saint Liguori is the author of our innovations!” is very likely the private thought of the liberal prelatical insiders and theologians that causes them so much mirth in the face of the pitifully gullible “traditionalists” who imagine they fight for Christ while following Liguori. Once again we observe that “traditional” Catholics, burdened with ignorance and a terminal case of the double mind, are hopelessly outclassed by their enemies.

  “In Liguori the decline of the old Augustinian position on non-procreative intercourse is evident. As he customarily did in his Moral Theology, he used as his text the seventeenthcentury German Jesuit, Herman Busenbaum (1600-1668), and he quoted Busenbaum’s opinion that there is no sin in intercourse ‘to avoid danger of incontinence in oneself or one’s partner.” 97

  “In the Augustinian tradition the norm of the actual openness of sexual intercourse to creation was an absolute norm…St. Alphonsus Liguori taught that even in questions of the natural law there is room for epikeia98…he applies the possibility of epikeia explicitly to coitus interruptus, 99which at that time was the only…method of birth control, and the cooperation of the wife who knows her husband is going to use this method…he explicitly mentions cases in which couples have good reason to want the marriage act not to lead to conception…such refinements of moral theology…justify the refusal of the faithful in their perceived circumstances to follow Humanae Vitae…” 100

  Liguori advised confessors to permit birth control for some married couples in certain cases: “Ligouri proposed this course of action. If a priest thought that the penitent, after being informed of the sinfulness of coitus interruptus, still might not cease performing that act, then the priest was not to disturb the conscience of the penitent. The confessor should not put his penitent ‘in bad faith.” 101

  There will be diehards who, even after acknowledging the probable veracity of our documentation concerning Liguori, will nevertheless insist that by disclosing his teaching we have irreparably harmed the reputation of a saint of the Catholic Church, and therefore of the Church itself.

  We reply that it was not the Catholic Church that canonized this scoundrel in 1839. It was the post-Renaissance, Neoplatonic-Hermetic-Kabbalistic Church of Rome that did so, led by the thieves who stole the holy name of Catholic and appended it, mala fide, to their robber Church.

  We further reply that the name and reputation of the Catholic Church is degraded and soiled not by truth-divulgers, but by those “Holy Fathers,” and prelatical “Eminences” and “Excellencies” who maintain that Alphonsus Liguori is an authentic saint of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, and that his doctrines are free of error.

  The Irrational Principle in Orthodox Judaic

  Hermeneutics and the Church of Rome’s Probabilism

  Though it would require an additional volume to document all of the correspondences between rabbinic-Talmudic-Zoharic theology and the theology of the Church of Rome, at least one of these parallels is worth noting here.

  A hermeneutic principle of Orthodox Judaism employed for allegedly divining the authentic meaning of the Old Testament, is termed Gezara shava, by which two Scripture passages often having nothing more in common than a single, inconsequential word, are said to be inter-dependent and linked by a common significance. 102 So that, for example, the word “guilty” in Deuteronomy 25:2 is linked by the rabbis to the same word occurring in Numbers 35:31, in support of expanding the passage in Deuteronomy concerning corporal punishment, to include capital punishment, which is, quite frankly, incoherent and demented, since there is no connection between the two citations, except that both are the word of God.

  In the Church of Rome’s Probabilism, as we have seen it employed, where two conflicting theological views are advanced, the perspective that has the least amount of support in the Bible, and was thus the least “probable,” could indeed be accepted as grounds for Catholic judgment, direction, and action.

  Each of these methodologies is clearly irrational, yet each enjoys acceptance from among some of the most esteemed and authoritative theologians in both religious traditions. Some will say that this is a coincidence. In fact, it is one among many instances in which the Satanically deranged Talmudic and Kabbalistic mentality is mirrored in Rome’s own Renaissance and post-Renaissance theology.

  1 New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967), vol. 9, p. 662.

  2 “…with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” Matthew 7:2.

  3 Ann Jefferson, Times Literary Supplement, June 3, 2016, p. 5.

  4 Mishneh Torah, Sefer Haflaah, Hilkhot Shevuot 6:2.

  5 BT Nedarim 23a and 23b.

  6 Cf. Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, pp. 593-612; also cf. 149-152, and 169-174.

  7 “In this modern period of moral theology the sufficiency of attrition without any strictly so-called initial charity on the part of the penitent as a proximate disposition for the remission of sin in the sacrament of Penance may be considered as established. The changed conditions in our modern capitalist society have had their effect on moral questions, for morality must always take account of altered circumstances. Perhaps the chief result in this direction is that a practical solution has been attained of the long controversy about the lawfulness of taking interest for a loan of money. The lawfulness of the practice is now admitted; the only moral question is concerning the amount which may be exacted.” Rev. Thomas Slater, S.J., A Short History Of Moral Theology, (1909), sec. III: The Modern Period.

  8 A Treatise tending to Mitigation towardes Catholicke-Subjectes in England (1607).

  9 Antonia Fraser, Faith and Treason (Doubleday, 1996), p. 241.

  10 A Christian Directory: or a sum of practical theologie and cases of conscience (London, 1673), p. 430. Baxter was one of the earliest Puritan advocates of redefining what constitutes usury (cf. Usury in Christendom, p. 49). The legacy of this Renaissance sophistry continues: Ted R. Weiland is a contemporary Protestant exegete in Nebraska. He writes: “No one who is seeking to do us evil…is entitled to the truth. More than that, it can with scriptural grounds be called an evil to tell the truth to evil men…people who do not distinguish between righteous and unrighteous lying fall under the Apostle Paul’s description of people who use Yahweh’s laws unlawfully…” (“Righteous Lying,” in The 9th Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness).

  11 http://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/encyc/encyc09/htm/iv.iv.liv.htm

  12 Elizabeth Scalia, “Defending Christine O’Donnell,” First Things, September 21, 2010.

  13 Some people use as their alibi for rejecting Scripture, the claim that God’s war in the Old Testament on hostile aliens (nokri) who employed sex magic in the course of their idolization of demon gods, was barbaric in its violence, and consequently, the God of the Bible cannot be the true God. Douglas Wilson, writing in the wake of the Jan. 21, 2017 “women’s marches” protesting against the newly-inaugurated President Donald Trump, which had as their principal theme, “reproductive rights” (i.e. abortion on demand), addressed the issue as follows: “These are the people who, if you were talking to them about the authority of the Scriptures, would protest that the Bible cannot be taken as the Word of God because it required the extermination of Canaanite men, women and children. These are the same people who, just two days ago, were out there marching in the defense of their own right to slaughter their own children. In short, they do not object to taking of human life, but rather they object to the taking of Canaanite life by the God of Scripture. They object to t
his because they are obviously Canaanites, and so the whole set up makes them nervous. They do agree that the deity has the right to take life as the deity wills it—they just insist on the right to be the deity.” (“Nasty Canaanite Women,” Blog and Mablog, January 23, 2017, https://dougwils.com/s7-engaging-the-culture/nasty-canaanite-women.html).

  14 “Deception is Impermissible,” in Antithesis, vol. I, no. 3; May/June 1990.

  15 Henry Charles Lea, History of Auricular Confession (1968), vol. 2, p. 301 (emphasis supplied).

  16 Book 3, chapters 9-11 in Opera Omnia, 24 vols. (Paris, 1859), vol. 14.

  17 His official title was, “Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools.” Meyrick served in that capacity from 1859-1869.

  18 Frederick Meyrick, Moral and Devotional Theology of the Church of Rome (London, 1857), pp. 39-41.

  19 For St. Augustine’s writings on this subject, De mendacio and Contra mendacium, cf. “Lying” and “Against Lying” in The Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine: Treatises on Various Subjects (1952), especially pp. 51-107.

  20 On the American guarantee of the right to remain silent, cf. Leonard W. Levy, Origins of the Fifth Amendment: The Right Against Self-incrimination (1986). For a survey of the permission to lie as specified in the sacred books of Judaism, cf. this writer’s Judaism’s Strange Gods (2011), pp. 146-163, 256, 300-302, 335-343.

  21 One of the most eloquent jeremiads against mental reservation was issued by the Catholic mathematician Pascal in his Pensees.

  22 Johann P. Sommerville, Conscience and Casuistry (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 176.

  23 Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters (University of Chicago, 2003) p. 277. “Persons cleverly insists that it is not the producer of the utterance but rather the recipient, whether reader or auditor, who is ultimately responsible for making it conform to a ‘truth’…” (Ferguson, p. 281). This is the attitude of the Talmudic rabbi toward the goy.

  24 Babylonian Talmud, Kallah 51a. Also cf. Judaism Discovered (2008), p. 383.

  25 Rebecca Lemon, Treason By Words: Literature, Law and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (2006), p. 186. Readers are also referred to the oath of office administered by the U.S. government which specifically names and forbids “mental reservation.”

  26 Ferguson, op.cit., p. 227.

  27 Cf. Asquith, Shadow Play: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York, 2005), pp. 65, 72, 114-115, 291, 294; Peter Milward, S.J., Shakespeare the Papist (Sapientia Press, 2005), pp. 101-102, 106, 110, 186-187, 204-205, 210, 233. Milward writes: “…the theme of equivocation is taken up not only by the Porter but by Macbeth himself, as when he later complains of ‘the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth’ (act 5),’ his use of the word was no chance phenomenon…it may have found its way into the mouth of Hamlet, speaking of the cosmic gravedigger…It even looks…as if the Jesuits were responsible…for the vein of indignation that seems to enter deeply into the composition of Macbeth” (p. 204).

  28 Ibid., Milward, p. 205.

  29 Sommerville, op. cit., p. 177.

  30 Ferguson, op. cit., p. 282.

  31 Innocent XI was strenuously opposed by the French monarchy in its Gallican period. For an informative analysis of Gallicanism, cf. Joseph Bergin, “Introduction,” in The Politics of Religion in Early Modern France, (Yale University, 2014). Pope Innocent “worked tirelessly to unite Christian princes both Catholic and Protestant” against the growing threat of the Muslim-Turk invasion of Europe. The crushing victory of Christian forces over the Turks at the Gates of Vienna, Austria on Sept. 11, 1683, was attributed to the leadership and financial support of this pope. After Vienna, Muslim conquerors would not imperil Europe again until the immigration invasion which began in the late 20th century.

  32 Stefania Tutino, Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic Culture (2014) p. 35.

  33 Ecclesiastic History Ancient and Modern, transl. Archibald MacLaine (London, 1782), vol. 5, pp. 101-103.

  34 Cf. Meg Lota Brown, Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England, (1995) p. 42. n. 22; quoting Kenneth E. Kirk, Conscience and Its Problems (1927), p. 118.

  35 The Christian Remembrancer, January, 1854, pp. 41-42.

  36 This type of image is not unknown in the Western Church, under the title Madonna Della Strada (“Our Lady of the Way”).

  37 Anton Koch, A Handbook of Moral Theology (1918), vol. 1, pp. 232-233).

  38 Theodule Ray-Mermet, Moral Choices: The Moral Theology of Saint Alphonsus Liguori (Liguori Publications, 1998), pp. 142-143.

  39 Cf. St. Alphonsus Liguori, De juramento, Lib. iv., cap. 2.

  40 Meyrick, Moral Theology of the Church of Rome: No. II Certain Points in S. Alfonso de’ Liguori’s Moral Theology Considered in Nineteen Letters (London, 1855), p. 61.

  41 William N. Grimstad, Talk About Hate (1999); emphasis supplied.

  42 Cf. Usury in Christendom, pp. 392-393.

  43 St. Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium, (II, 5, PL 64, 149).

  44 Belloc’s “histories” of the anti-Puritan Stuart monarchs are a palimpsest of fraud amounting to little more than pedestrian propaganda indifferent to facts. Belloc traffics in cliches and is ignorant of the authentic diplomatic history and legislation of the era. His “histories” are avidly published and parroted by contemporary “conservative and traditional Catholics.” Cf. Hoffman, “Right Wing Myths with an Endless Shelf Life,” in Revisionist History, no. 74.

  45 Hilaire Belloc, “On Usury” in Essays of a Catholic Layman in England (1931).

  46 Frederick Meyrick, op.cit., p. xiii.

  47 Wilfrid Ward’s daughter Maisie founded, with her husband Frank Sheed, the distinguished publishing house of Sheed and Ward.

  48 As demarcated in Newman’s instructive survey of the competing Anglican factions, in the appendix to the 1866 French language edition of the Apologia, which was reprinted in the 1913 Oxford edition, pp. xxii-xxx.

  49 The Liguori controversy remains present in the 1913 edition of Apologia Pro Vita Sua, but it has been toned down and signal particulars omitted.

  50 Wilfrid Ward, “Introduction,” in Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1913), pp. vii and viii; emphasis supplied.

  51 Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a History of His Religious Opinions (Longmans, 1904), pp. 169-170.

  52 John Henry Newman, “Answer to Mr. Kingsley,” in Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1913), pp. 367-369.

  53 Ward, “Introduction,” in Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, op. cit., p. x.

  54 Samuel Wilberforce, “Dr. Newman’s Apologia,” Quarterly Review, October 1864, pp. 680-681.

  55 Altholz, “Truth and Equivocation,” in Church History, March 1975, pp. 82-83. Newman did privately correspond with Meyrick, but in public he would not respond to his challenge.

  56 This is a reference to Robert Southey’s ironic and scathing use of the term in his poem, “The Battle of Blenheim.”

  57 For example, in the course of elucidating his theology on the development of doctrine (which is actually a type of situation ethics), Newman admits that the belief in the pope’s universal jurisdiction was largely unknown in the early Church, viz. that it was “…only partially apprehended in the early age of the Church. It required time for Christians to enter into the full truth…I believe (in) whatever has been and shall be defined as revelation by the Church.” Cf. Mark D. Chapman, The Fantasy of Reunion: Anglicans, Catholics, and Ecumenism (2014), pp. 144-145.

  58 Cardinal Newman substituted the word Church for pontiff. The indefectible Catholic Church of Jesus Christ is not responsible for transmuting heresy into truth, however.

  59 Scott M. Sullivan, “In Defense Of The Falsiloquium,” University of St. Thomas (http://scottmsullivan.com/articles/Falsiloquium.pdf)

  60 Theodule Ray-Mermet, op. cit., p. 66.

  61 Probablism is a moral theology “according to which in a doubt of conscience about the morality of a particular course of conduct, a person may lawful
ly follow the opinion of liberty, provided it is truly probable, even though the opinion for law is definitely more probable.” New Catholic Encyclopedia (Catholic University of America, 1967), v. 11, p. 814. This is the convoluted thinking of lawyers and rabbis furnishing escape clauses from God’s law. This aspect was astutely detected by the Dominican theologian Servais Pinckaers in Ce qu’ on ne peut jamais faire (Fribourg, 1986): “In casuistry everything occurs as though the subject, impelled by freedom, was always seeking to escape universal laws by means of particular circumstances, or at least to loosen the hold of such laws…Within this context…it is difficult to uphold the universality of the laws in the face of a freedom that employs all its ingenuity in finding exceptions through the use of extreme cases and that is constantly tempted to appeal to them to break through the law itself. In the view of Saint Thomas, by contrast…dealing with difficult and unusual cases is an exercise in judiciously applying laws according to their spirit, rather than seeking a loophole to escape from them” (pp. 128-129).

  62 New Catholic Encyclopedia v. 1, p. 340: states, “…he was constrained to veil his thought somewhat because of anti-Jesuit persecutions.”

  63 Ibid. Emphasis supplied.

  64 Cf. BT Sanhedrin 57a; BT Sanhedrin 76a; Baba Mezia 24a; Baba Kamma 37b; Baba Kamma 113b. Also: Rabbi Ezra Basri, Ethics of Business Finance & Charity (Jerusalem: Haktav Press, 1988), vol. two, chapter 13 (“No obligation to be fair to gentiles”). Basri was chief justice of the Jerusalem district court). Also cf. Judaism Discovered, pp. 357-361.