The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  In 2002, the Irish national television network RTE broadcast “Cardinal Secrets,” a report by the investigative journalist Mary Raftery exposing the archdiocese’s protection of eight priests who had sexually abused children. An independent commission was established to investigate the archdiocese’s handling of 325 claims of child molestation.

  Cardinal Connell mounted a High Court challenge to block the inquiry from gaining access to 5,500 files on priests and molestation allegations. He secured a temporary injunction, before withdrawing his action later amid public outrage.

  After retiring in 2004, Connell lived in comfort, provided by the Church. He was never prosecuted.

  In 2009 the government of Ireland mounted a commission of inquiry led by Judge Yvonne Murphy, which resulted in the 2009 Murphy Report. “The Dublin Archdiocese’s preoccupations in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse, at least until the mid-1990s, were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church and the preservation of its assets,” the commission found. “All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities.”

  Cardinal Connell’s remains were on display in state at St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, Dublin February 23rd-Feb. 24, 2017. Accompanying two archbishops in receiving the remains at the pro-cathedral were Bishop Walsh, and fellow Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin Ray Field, Bishop of Clonfert John Kirby, Vicar General in Dublin Msgr Paul Callan, Fr Damian McNeice who worked as spokesman for Cardinal Connell, and Canon Damian O’Reilly, administrator at the pro-cathedral. In the eulogy, Bishop of Dublin Eamonn Walsh spoke of the late cardinal’s “deep, deep faith” his gifts “as a philosopher, historian and lover of classical music.” Internment was in the crypt of the cathedral.

  The Murphy Report revealed that four archbishops in Dublin — John Charles McQuaid, who died in 1973, Dermot Ryan, who died in 1984, Kevin McNamara, who died in 1987, and retired Cardinal Connell — failed to report their knowledge of child sexual abuse to the Garda (Irish Police), from the 1960s to the 1980s. The report, launched by the Irish Attorney General Dermot Ahern, also concluded that the vast majority of priests and bishops turned a “blind eye” to abuse. One priest was found to have abused more than one hundred children. Another confessed under questioning that he had committed abuse every two weeks for more than 25 years.

  The Commission’s investigation disclosed that senior members of the Irish police regarded priests as being outside their investigative jurisdiction. The relationship between some senior police officers and priests and bishops was labeled a criminal coverup of “dreadful crimes.” The Murphy Report stated that rather than investigate complaints from children, the police simply reported the matter to the Dublin Catholic diocese, and that the structures and rules of the Church facilitated the conspiracy. It found that government officials participated in the cover-up by allowing the Church to exist beyond the reach of the law.

  His critics believed that Cardinal Connell had a talent for equivocation. For example, he initially denied using diocesan funds to compensate victims—but later said he had used the present tense to say that payments were not being made at that moment. He had not said that payments had not been made in the past.

  Some contemporary Catholics imagine that these facilitators, apologists and recruiters for homosexuality are mostly a product of the 1960s. Actually, the contemporary “gay” rights sympathizers are emboldened by the knowledge of the clandestine chronicle of homosexual practices and predation in the Catholic Church extending back more than a thousand years to those supposed halcyon “traditional Catholic” times, when bishops, cardinals and popes were costumed in elaborate lace, gowns and similar effeminate attire and paraphernalia resembling the outfit of a female impersonator.

  Who was there to protest when one or more of these “princes of the church” quietly selected a young Catholic male for a night of sodomy from among the ranks of those boys who had been accepted at puberty to enter pre-seminary facilities, and who grew up to be monks, friars and priests without any experience of women, or of any world other than the all-male clerical preserve? How would these activities leak out when the reputation of the prelate was held to be of greater importance than God’s justice and divine law?

  Child Oblation

  “In the early Middle Ages, the practice known as child oblation had been common in Benedictine monasteries in western Europe for six hundred years. Oblation, which properly means the giving of a child in permanent (irrevocable) gift to a monastic community, could provide vicariously for the donors’ own spiritual welfare…by the beginning of the seventh century both ecclesiastical and secular law in Europe stipulated that children given in infancy were not to leave the cloister in maturity.” 11

  According to historian Sarah Foot, the scripture text quoted to justify the practice of a child’s involuntary lifetime obligation to a monastery was I Samuel: the dedication in the Temple “of the infant Samuel to the priesthood soon after his birth.” Of course, the ancient temple of Israel was not a cloistered monastery. In 726 Pope Gregory II ruled that a child-oblate was effectively a slave, bound for life. Neither departure nor marriage was permitted to the oblate, even after reaching adulthood: “This we absolutely forbid, since it is an impious thing that the restraints of desire should be relaxed for children given to God.” 12

  “Children as young as five would be placed in cloistered communities…But by the twelfth century…the tide was turning and the practice of oblation became much less common. Part of the problem may have been that sexual relations were taking place between boys and monks…In England, the Regularis concordia, a code of monastic observance approved by the Synod of Winchester ca. 970-973, had ruled against physical contact between older and younger monks…” 13

  “In the monastery moreover let neither monks nor abbott embrace or kiss, as it were, youths or boys (adolescents uel puerulos); let their affection for them be spiritual, let them keep from words of flattery, and let them love the children reverently and with the greatest circumspection. Not even on the excuse of some spiritual matter shall any monk presume to take with him a young boy alone for any private purpose but, as the Rule commands, let the boys always remain under the care of their master.” 14 This was “a statement echoing earlier warnings against the temptations offered by the residence of young males in monastic environments: De renuntiatione saeculi attributed to Basil the Great (ca. 330-79) and remarks by Pope Gregory III (690-731) on sodomitic practices among the ordained…” 15

  Another grave threat to the modesty of boys in the care of clergy or prelates: an offending pontiff, cardinal, bishop or abbott had the power to absolve the one he seduced (or raped) of the sin of passive cooperation with sodomy, just as a coconspirator among the hierarchy could immunize the man who was the active sodomite: the prelate himself. This was a common tactic in 1049, as St. Peter Damian testified:

  “…some of those who were shot through with the poison of this crime, when their conscience began to trouble them, confess to one another…they themselves become judges and each happily grants to the other blanket forgiveness that he aspires to acquire for himself.” 16

  In this explication of sodomite priests confessing to other sodomite priests there is an intimation of a network of sodomites. This network would seem to extend beyond circles of individual priests to the principal authors of ecclesiastical laws. Some canon laws at the time of Damian were written and published for the purpose of enacting leniency for clerics engaged in sodomy. The saint exposes these: he cites canon laws that permit priests to be punished lightly and laymen to be punished more stringently for the same sodomite crimes. 17Here again we encounter the clandestine Church of Rome doctrine of two types of souls, that of the higher dimension-soul of the priest (in Judaism: “ruchniyus”) and that of the layman, which is the equivalent to the Pharisaic doctrine of shnei minim nifradim, regarding the superiority of Judaic souls compared with the souls of t
he goyim. Countless souls have been sent to ruin in this life and perdition in the next so as to protect the clergy from exposure.

  There is evidence that in medieval society sodomy was viewed as a mortal sin prevalent among priests and monks. This extends as far back as 969 A.D. and the suspicion by Rather of Verona of institutionalized sodomy among clerics. 18 This was a view also expounded by William the Conquerer’s chaplain, Serlo of Bayeux (ca. 1036-1104) and other medieval advocates of an option for married clergy.

  Remedies according to St. Peter Damian: priests who engage in anal intercourse “for even a short period” have lost “all hope of recovering their priesthood” and are to be defrocked. It is “utterly preposterous for those who are habituated to the filth of this festering disease to present themselves for (holy) orders or to remain in them if they are already ordained.” Damian stipulated a remedy for priests who stop short of anal intercourse in sexual dalliance with men or boys:

  “Of Clerics or Monks Who Are Seducers of Men: any cleric or monk who seduces young men or boys, or who is apprehended in kissing or in any shameful situation, shall be publicly flogged and shall lose his clerical tonsure…bound in iron chains…(for) six months of close confinement…Following this period, he shall spend a further six months living in a small segregated courtyard in the custody of a spiritual elder, kept busy with manual labor and prayer, subjected to vigils and prayers, forced to walk at all times in the company of two spiritual brothers, and never again allowed to associate with young men for purposes of improper conversation or advice.”

  Sodomy, Contraception and the Natural Law

  St. Peter Damian’s definition of sodomy was derived from the consensus of the early medieval Church, which was reflected even in the theology of Luther and Calvin, both of whom declared contraception to be a type of sodomy. 19 For Peter Damian, sodomy consisted of both anal intercourse and any act, including masturbation, which resulted in the squandering of semen.

  Rather than being some far-out stipulation from the moral manual of a Catholic fanatic, this doctrine was common to the natural law (not Neoplatonic creeds) 20 taught by certain Greeks who prized fertility (as did even pagan societies in antiquity).

  “The Preambles to the Laws, a Hellenistic treatise penned under the pseudonym ‘Charondas’ advocates procreationism in an unambiguously strict sense. This work was in circulation prior to the mid-first century B.C…Cicero (106-43 B.C.) mentions it…Charondas assumes that each man has or should have a wife and that the married couple should reproduce…He stipulates in no uncertain terms that the man must climax with his penis located nowhere else besides in his wife’s vagina and for the purpose of reproduction alone…’Each man must love his legitimate wife and procreate with her. Into nothing else should he ejaculate…Nature made seed for the sake of producing children, not licentiousness…Only deliberately procreative sex acts in marriage remain permissible….Semen is the ‘seed of a man’s children’ and as such must be used strictly to reproduce them.

  “… This solemnity about semen comes to the fore particularly…(when) Charondas deplores its misdirected use. A man who misdirects his semen ‘kills’ and ‘wastes’ both ‘his children’ and even the entire ‘human race.” 21

  Scripture-Twisting

  One of the oft-quoted leaders in the sodomite denial movement is Prof. Michael Carden of the University of Queensland. In his influential book, Sodomy: A History of a Christian Myth, he twists the Genesis 19 account of the city of Sodom in a manner pleasing to those who wish to engage in anal intercourse without the burden of Biblical transgression being attached to it.

  We can find no other motive for his writing, which makes no sense as an interpretation of the text, but a great deal of sense from the vantage of an apologia for buggery.

  The traditional orthodox Catholic understanding of the Biblical account of Sodom in Genesis is as follows: 19:1-3: “Two of the ‘men’ who visited Abraham are now called angels.

  19:5: Know them. Have sex with them. Sodom was guilty of unnatural sexual lust, highlighted here in its homosexual violence.

  19:9 Pressed sore. Pressed hard. The wicked Sodomites responded to Lot’s rebuke by accusing him of presuming to be their judge. Nothing but men would satisfy their lusts.

  19:29: God remembered Abraham. The Lord answered Abraham’s prayer not by saving the city of Sodom, which did not have ten righteous people within it (Genesis 18:32), but by having mercy on its only righteous man.” 22

  The modernist falsification of Genesis 19 has many sources. We will begin with the Rev. Dr. Derrick Sherwin Bailey’s 1955 spin on Sodom in Genesis, in his book Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition. Here one will find one of the most enduring of all the sodomite-exculpatory shibboleths which liberal church-goers continue to parrot: that what was punished by God in Sodom was a breach of etiquette, a refusal of hospitality to strangers, absent a sexual dimension.

  To accept this notion one must ignore the sexually charged statement in Genesis 19:5, “And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them.” The Hebrew denotation of the English rendering of the words “know them” is a direct reference to having sex with them, as a comparison of the use of the term in Genesis 4:1 (“And Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived”), 24:16 (“And the damsel was very fair to look upon, a virgin, neither had any man known her”), and 38:26, will readily demonstrate.

  A more sophisticated falsification is offered by the New Bible Dictionary Third Edition (Inter-Varsity Press, 1996), which states, “…the sin condemned was attempted homosexual rape, not a caring homosexual relationship between two consenting partners” (p. 479).

  Prof. Carden offers a similar alibi in his Sodomy: A History of a Christian Myth: “Pack rape at the hands of a mob would be a particularly brutal death. Pack rape of a defenseless stranger is a particularly apt symbol of injustice and abuse of the helpless, which I would argue are the real sins of Sodom…and not same-sex desire and its mutually consenting expression…the very name of Sodom and its inhabitants can be used figuratively to signify the ungodly life, resulting in sodomy’s first rehearsal—to denote not homoeroticism, but arrogant self-indulgence and luxurious living….” 23

  If the Bible intended to offer support for this conclusion that anal or oral sex (“homosexual relationship”) was condoned by God if both men consented to the act, it would have so stated. But there is no such condonation of sodomy by consent, anywhere in Scripture. The consent or lack thereof of men who play the part of a woman, serving as passive receptacles for the sex action of a man, is irrelevant in Leviticus 20:13. There is no other possible context in keeping with the spirit and intent of the text than the fact that for a man to act the part of a woman in having sex with another man is a capital offense: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”

  Moreover, male homosexual acts were intrinsically violent, whether or not the two transgressors willingly consent to being overtaken by their lust for each other. This violence is intrinsic to the waste of the male seed. This waste is not modified in the severity of its transgression by the fact of consent, because no one can give consent to a lawless act.

  The authors of the New Bible Dictionary Third Edition, and Sodomy: A History of a Christian Myth, have declared, based on their personal beliefs, that the waste of the male seed is no transgression in the eyes of God.

  This is a conclusion that requires the falsification of Leviticus 20:13; the falsification of the account of Onan’s capital crime in Genesis 38; as well as the overthrow of the Apostle Paul’s dogmatic condemnations in Romans 1:23-27, I Corinthians 6:9 and I Tim. 1:9. Prof. Carden furnishes a disquisition on rape which he terms a “queering approach,” transforming rape by homosexuals in Sodom into: “an act of homophobic…violence.” Consequently, if his “queering approach” is
accepted, then the males in the city of Sodom in Genesis 19 who desired to sodomize the other men who were not homosexuals, are perpetrating this sexual violence from a fear of homosexuals! Carden’s fantasy on Genesis is queer indeed. On the basis of imaginings like these, the “gay” lobby raises pseudo-intellectual objections to the application of the words sodomy and sodomite in Christendom, asserting that the use of these terms is little more than a late medieval prejudice. 24

  In Bishop Hincmar of Reims’s ninth century treatise on divorce, relating to the attempt of Lothair II to divorce his wife Theutberga—De divortio Lotharii regis et Theutbergae reginae,—(not to be confused with his nephew of the same name)—he employs the term scelus sodomiae for all those sexual acts ruled to be “against nature.” Hincmar’s application of the term was derived from an earlier usage by Pope Gregory the Great, in the pontiff’s letter in the sixth century containing the statement, “Sodomitae illum sceleremaculatum.” 25 The sixth century is not “the late medieval” period. 26

  The two male forms of ecclesiastic celibacy, priesthood and monasticism, faced the constant threat of auto-eroticism. Masturbation and its more extreme manifestation (autofellatio) were a problem for the Church from the beginning of the monastic orders; to what extent is debatable, though we note that pornographic images of these and other homosexual acts appear in sacred Catholic Church sculpture, on the facades of churches such as the Collegiate Church of St. Peter of Cervatos in Cantabria, Spain; the Church of Saint Pierre, Passirac, France; the Church of Semur-en-Brionnais, Saône-etLoire, also in France, and others in Europe, Britain and Ireland. 27