The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  “The ‘world without women’ of the high and late medieval religious community, school, friary or university continued a homosocial ethos favorable to homoeroticism.” 28 There is some validity to this thesis, but it risks succumbing to a Freudian distortion of the state of celibate men in community, about which there is nothing necessarily pathological or sinful, assuming that rigorous safeguards are in place.

  The larger question of homoeroticism with regard to liturgical vestments has not been addressed inside the Church, as well as other possible ecclesiastical trappings of the homoerotic aesthetic.

  One is struck by the fact that Pope Francis visited the U.S. for several days in September of 2015, and gave a huge gift to the American homosexual culture (it is no longer a “subculture”), by refusing to say a word about the recent legalization of sodomite marriage in the U.S.

  Yet at the same time much was made of his finger-wagging platitudes against the molestation of Catholic boys by priests. Can his gestures be serious when the pontiff, by his silence, uttered absolutely nothing concerning the newly legitimate marital arrangement, whereby men may “marry” other men? Is the pope’s double-mind a product of modern post-Vatican II perversion alone, or an outward sign of an underground clerical current with a pedigree of many centuries?

  The homosexual orientation of the Church of Rome since the Renaissance is no longer the deep secret that it once was.

  A hoax has been put forth in the name of Christ’s True Catholic Church; that hoax emanates from the top-down. It is long overdue for it to receive its comeuppance, particularly so in light of the canonization on April 27, 2014, of Pope John-Paul II on whose watch the epidemic of molestations of defenseless children occurred. Pope John-Paul II granted to Cardinal Bernard Law, a notorious facilitator of childmolesting priests in Massachusetts, safe haven in Vatican City from criminal prosecution. Cardinal Law was honored by the “saint” with the administration of a basilica in Rome. He officiated at the public funeral of John-Paul II. Any church that would raise to sainthood a pope like this individual whose criminal indifference toward molestation, and outright collusion with child-molestation facilitators such as Father Marcial Maciel, of the Legionaries of Christ, Cardinal Roger Mahony, Bishop William Skylstad (named during John Paul’s pontificate as head of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops after his facilitation of child-molester priests came to the attention of the courts and the media), the aforementioned Bernard Law, and dozens of other bishops and some cardinals, who constitute the corrupt of the earth, is a Judas church that will increasingly incur the wrath of God.

  The child molestations perpetrated by “Money bags Maciel” were repeatedly reported to Pope “Saint” John Paul II, yet the pontiff “led massive celebrations to mark both the fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries of Father Maciel’s priestly ordination.”

  In light of the canonization of the patron saint of molesters, Pope John Paul II, the thought of Catholics praying to this criminal in front of a statue of him, evokes the starkest Protestant portrayals of Catholics sunk in a swamp of credulity and idolatry. 29

  1 Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, p. 154.

  2 St Peter Damian, “The Letters of Peter Damian,” (Letter 31), in The Fathers of the Church: Medieval Continuation, transl. Owen J. Blum, 0.F.M.(1990). Leo IX responded to Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus with his own Ad splendidum nitentis, excommunicating priests and prelates who engaged in sodomy in the form of anal sex: “…there may be no hope of recovering their rank for those who are tainted with…what is horrible to mention as well as to hear—who have fallen into anal relations.” Leo’s excommunication of anal sodomite priests and prelates is cited in Catholic University of America Professor Uta-Renate Blumenthal’s work, Papal Reform and Canon Law in the 11th and 12th Centuries (1998). The excommunication was presumably issued at the 1049 Council of Reims.

  3 Robert Hale, “St. Peter Damian” in Encyclopedia of Monasticism (2000), p. 357.

  4 American Historical Review, February, 2013, p. 234. Leo IX seems to have been a sincere campaigner against simony (the sale of ecclesiastic offices). It was on his watch that the Eastern Church at Constantinople was lost to Rome. For an account of the bungling in this regard cf. John Julius Norwich, Absolute Monarchs (2011), 97-99.

  5 An earlier translation is by P.S. Payer, Peter Damian: Book of Gomorrah, An Eleventh-Century Treatise Against Clerical Homosexuality (1982). The Payer volume is a censored edition and is not recommended, except, as it so happens, for Payer’s invaluable introduction (also cf. Payer’s 1985 study, Sex and the Penitentials: Formation of a Sexual Code 550-1150). Two pro-“gay” treatises nevertheless offer a wealth of documentation, despite the extent to which their interpretations elide traditional morality: Derrick Sherwin Bailey’s Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (1975), and Louis Crompton’s Homosexuality and Civilization (2006).

  6 Peter Damian: Book of Gomorrah, p. 5.

  7 St. Peter Damian, The Fathers of the Church, op. cit., p. 4.

  8 Damian, ibid., p. 6.

  9 Ibid., pp. 7-8.

  10 Cf. http://elpais.com/elpais/2017/01/21/inenglish/1485026427_223988.html (emphasis supplied).

  11 Cf. Sarah Foot, Monastic Life in Anglo-Saxon England, c. 600-900, p. 141. On the practice of child oblation cf. Patricia A. Quinn, Better Than the Sons of Kings: Boys and Monks in the Early Middle Ages (1989), and Mayke De Jong, In Samuel’s Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West (1996). De Jong argues that parents viewed their oblate children as a holocaustum, a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire, i.e. completely given to God. De Jong argues against John Boswell’s abandonment thesis in his book, The Kindness of Strangers (1989), as well as the common idea that oblates were a family’s supernumerary offspring. The most famous bound-for-life English oblate was Venerable Bede.

  12 Sarah Foot, ibid., p. 142. Gregory II was in this respect abrogating the Rule of St. Benedict as well as St. Basil’s teaching. Benedict required consent from a self-determining adolescent. Basil specified the age of consent at 16 or 17 years.

  13 Regularis concordia Anglicae nationis monachorum sanctimonialiumque, 7-8.

  14 Robert Mills, Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (2015), pp. 215-216 and 339. Mills cites Payer’s bowdlerized text of Damian’s letter 31.

  15 Mills, ibid.

  16 Damian, op. cit., pp. 16-17.

  17 Ibid., pp. 26-27.

  18 Peter L.D. Reid, The Complete Works of Rather of Verona (1991).

  19 Cf. Charles D. Provan, The Bible and Birth Control (1989).

  20 For instance, usury was generally viewed as a foul deed by ancient Roman statesmen and poets, who were in turn admired in the Christian West for the stance they took, consonant with their alignment with the Natural Law, which is not derived from pagan religion. What distinguishes acknowledgement of the flicker of Natural Law in some pre-Christian people from the heresy of the prisca theologia of the syncretists, is this: a person in antiquity living before knowledge of Christ and the gospel, is certain to have a distorted vision, even of the Natural Law, because “the stance and vision of the unregenerate” is a fault related to their existing in Original Sin, which “distorts whatever reality they apprehend.” God dispenses “common grace,” of which an inclination to adhere to the Natural Law is a part, in conjunction with “God’s work of preserving order and limiting the damage that accrues from the worst consequences of human folly.” (Cf. Stephen J. Grabill’s discussion of Henry Stob’s theology in Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics [2006]).

  21 Kathy L. Gaca, The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (2003), pp. 108-109. Typical of the situation ethics of the pre-Christians, Plato lent only qualified support to this view: his support was contingent on the period of time it takes a couple to conceive the required number of children, after which Plato wrote that they were free to do as they pleased (in other words, to waste semen as they p
leased, which reduces the argument against contraception to situation ethics.)

  22 Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible (2014), pp. 36-37.

  23 Carden, pp. 27 and 117.

  24 A similar tactic has been used with regard to Purgatory, to suggest it too was an invention of “late medieval popery.” Isabel Moreira observes to the contrary: “It was Bede (writing in the early 700s) who first provides purgatory with an orthodox, theological justification…In Bede’s work we encounter the culmination of centuries of purgatorial thinking.” Cf. Heaven’s Purge: Purgatory in Late Antiquity (2010), p. 16. On p. 40 of her study, Moreira traces articulation of Purgatory as far back as Clement of Alexandria (200 A.D.). Before Protestants dismiss this out of hand due to the indulgencemoney racket that grew up around it hundreds of years later, consider the sheol (not “hell”), into which Jesus descended after His resurrection. It was neither heaven nor gehenna (hell), but an intermediate stage. This interim state was referred to in the Early Church as refrigerium, a term that appears on “numerous Christian grave inscriptions in the Roman empire.” (Eliezer Gonzalez, The Fate of the Dead in Early Third Century North African Christianity [2014], p. 139).

  25 “Stained with the sin of the sodomite.” Gregory the Great, Registrum Epistularum, 10.2, (Norberg). This was the pope’s allusion to a sex crime that had been perpetrated by a sub-deacon.

  26 For a refutation of Prof. Mark Jordan’s thesis in this regard in his book The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, cf. Glenn W. Olsen, Of Sodomites, Effeminates, Hermaphrodites and Androgynes: Sodomy in the Age of Peter Damian, pp. 33-36. “…there was from the beginning a rhetorical excess in Jordan’s claim that sodomy was invented in the mid-eleventh century…” (Olsen, p. 36).

  27 Cf. Anthony Weir and James Jerman, Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches (1999).

  28 Cf. Glenn W. Olsen, ibid., p. 165. Also cf. David F. Noble, A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture, pp. 57 and 154-155.

  29 For documentation of these charges, cf. Jason Berry and Gerald Renner, Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II (2004). On the horrors inflicted on Irish children during the “traditional Catholic” years, cf. Mary Raftery, Suffer the Little Children (2002); and Peter Tyrrell, Founded on Fear (2006).

  Chapter XIV

  The Hermetic Prince of the Second Vatican Council

  “The theological eminence-grisé of Vatican II was Jesuit Fr. Henri de Lubac (1896-1991). Under theological interdict for many years, “The reversal of his ten years of ostracism resolved slowly and gradually, culminating in the invitation from Pope John XXIII to be a consultant for the preparatory Theological Commission of the Second Vatican Council…At the Council itself he was a peritus (theological expert) and was associated with the work on the documents Dei Verbum, Lumen Gentium, and Guadium et Spes.” 1

  The “ostracism” and “theological interdict” were strange in that De Lubac was not formally questioned by either his Jesuit superiors or any member of the curia or Holy Office. He was not asked to recant, or provide a retraction. Was the whole episode a charade calculated to burnish his reputation and create a high profile aura for him as a dissident and make a cause célebré of him and writings? Certainly he came to prominence during the time of his “ostracism.”

  Prof. Jacques Prévotat of the University of Lille-III writes:

  “From the time of his nomination as a consultor to the Preparatory Theological Commission in July, 1960, then as an expert on the Doctrinal Commission, Father de Lubac was an active participant in or witness to all the diverse aspects of the council: the general congregations, the Doctrinal Commission…meetings of the French and foreign bishops on fundamental questions, various conversations, preparation and clarification of interventions at the council at the request of numerous bishops, lectures in front of audiences of bishops…Father de Lubac was always present.” 2

  Both of these appraisals are modest ones. In truth, Henri de Lubac was the guiding theological light of the Second Vatican Council. “After the Council, Paul VI appointed him one of the original members of the International Theological Commission, where he worked with Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI.” 3 On February 2, 1983, Pope St. John-Paul II elevated Father De Lubac to Cardinal without his having first been consecrated a bishop.

  The Jesuit theologian who began his career as a Liberal ended it with the reputation of a Conservative, which is an abuse of the term when we consider that Lubac wrote books in defense of the Piltdown Man hoaxer and New Age evolutionist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., and one other miscreant who should by now be familiar to the reader: “Toward the end of his career he wrote a very favorable monograph on the Renaissance Platonist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola…His assessment of the work of the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola could fairly be applied to his own: ‘A stand for intellectual pluralism against the narrowness of the school.” 4

  Balthasar, upon whom John Paul II conferred the Paul VI Prize, was also under the influence of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola:

  “Balthasar ends his study, somewhat abruptly, with some remarks on de Lubac’s study of the Renaissance Christian-Platonist and lay Dominican Pico della Mirandola. Leaving aside the banal consideration that Pic de la Mirandole was the last of de Lubac’s books to reach Balthasar, the reason for choosing this finale was probably the—altogether admirable—way Pico combined spiritual independence with catholicity of attitude. His anthropology begins from human freedom, but this is no closed humanism: the goal of that freedom is the supreme peace of all things in union with God…Pico treats man as an essentially ecstatic being who must model himself on Thrones and Seraphim…His gleaning husks of pagan wisdom (the prisca theologia he sought among the ancients, classical and otherwise), puts one in mind of de Lubac’s raids on Asiatic wisdom as well…

  “A Renaissance man can form the climax of a study of—and by—a modern priest-student of the Catholic tradition in all its length and breadth, height and depth, precisely because Balthasar shared the view that the Renaissance was not anti-Catholic…but simply ‘a period in which men were trying to find a new, more personal piety, and personal expressions of religious thought.’ So why not end with Pico as, like de Lubac, a wonderful homo ecclesiasticus?” 5

  Analyzing Lubac’s book-length salute to the Neoplatonic-Hermetic Kabbalist Pico, Hans Urs von Balthasar writes: “…more than four hundred pages are dedicated to Pico della Mirandola. Why Pico? Certainly not only because he needed to be vindicated of a thousand misrepresentations, restored from layer upon layer of paint, and given back to the great Christian tradition. Pico…presents a rounded image of what de Lubac stands for…he so much points the way to greater openness of spirit and indeed with the same spiritual ‘independence,’ the same instinct for the right direction that strives toward the universal, the catholic, as de Lubac himself. When Pico focuses on freedom as man’s innermost essence, he stands in the great tradition of Christian humanism…yet he keeps an accent as personal as, for example, Tielhard had, when he spoke of the creature’s elan toward God. Imperceptibly, but unerringly, Pico goes his way, which leads him out of the closed sphere of the humanism of his time. He no longer understands the desiderium naturale’ 6 naturalistically, as Ficino did, and man is more for him than a mere microcosm. He gathers up all of tradition—the four senses of Scripture—elevating it in a ‘Concordia,’ a synthesis, a universal ‘Pax’ that hovers before him…Pico knows, as does de Lubac, that all concepts and systems are indeed indispensable but limited; that their construction is due to a deeper force that also strives farther and beyond them.” 7

  Let us turn now to the words of Cardinal de Lubac himself concerning the Renaissance Pico:

  “A closer examination of the texts, of the dates and facts has shown that there never was, on Pico’s part, any intention or gesture of revolt or disloyalty; and on the part of the Holy See (and of Garcia himself), 8 no mark of any lack of est
eem toward his person, quite the contrary. The inquisitorial tribunal that was for a moment constituted seems never to have really functioned at all. The Apologia 9 that Pico presented of his theses prior to any sentence from the pope did not give rise to an examination followed by judgment…From the time the fugitive returned to Paris, a more or less tacit compromise was established, and…all was soon smoothed out by the Brief of Alexander VI.” 10

  All of the preceding is correct. Pico della Mirandola enjoyed a high-level immunity after a pro forma theatre of critical examination involving his “persecution” and dramatic “flight.” (The parallels with de Lubac are intriguing). Some otherwise ferocious inquisitors became strangely meek in the presence of the case of Giovanni Pico, for example Marco Maroldi and Gioacchino da Vinci. Pope Alexander convened a commission of investigation in 1493, staffed by three cardinalinquisitors: Giambattista Orsini, Francesco Todeschini-Piccolomini and Giorgio Costa. Acting as peritus for the commission was the illustrious Paolo Moneglia 11 The commission concluded that Pico should be fully rehabilitated and the pope concurred, issuing the “Brief” to which de Lubac referred, Ominum Catholicorum, on June 18, 1493. 12

  De Lubac:

  “…all had admired his (Pico’s) ‘Discourse on the Dignity of Man,’ as it was called, in which they thought to see a ‘manifesto,’ the ‘manifesto of the Renaissance’…This celebrated discourse…was received very favorably in religious circles. Going through the libraries and archives of Rome, Father John W. O’Malley has found a whole series of sermons dating from the last years of the fifteenth century and from the first third of the sixteenth, in which several use—let us even say plagiarize—Pico’s discourse. Some of them come from preachers at the Roman court and are not in any way worldly sermons. This discovery will contribute to restoring, for a wider circle, the true face of Pico della Mirandola.” 13

  It is somewhat remarkable that with the palaver about the theological origins of the Second Vatican Council mainly focused on 1. the late nineteenth and early twentieth century modernism denounced by Pope St. Pius X; and 2. the masonic ideas of the secularist French Enlightenment; that in spite of De Lubac and Balthasar being cited as the intellectual lodestars of the Council, almost no prominently published and heralded work has been undertaken the study of the momentous implications of the devotion of De Lubac and Balthasar to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who is among the foremost papist exponents in history of the books of the Kabbalah.