The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  “Thomas’s economic teachings reflect an assumption that justice in exchange depends on commensurating the terms of exchange with the shape of the provision God unfolds for human beings.

  “When Thomas says, ‘one man cannot overbound in external riches without another man lacking them,’ we are tempted to read it as a mere pious assertion to shame the rich. But it is firmly rooted in Thomas’s assumptions about how God provides for human beings through fruitfulness of nature…To make a claim to wealth that outstrips that provision, as usury does, is to produce injustice.

  “…Thomas’s centerpiece argument attacks the very notion of usury, but he supports it with other arguments about a variety of possible titles to interest. In both cases his arguments are meant to preserve justice by rejecting inordinate claims to wealth…

  “Thomas’s centerpiece argument does not hinge on an antiquated understanding of money. Thomas sees in the very notion of an abstracted exchange value the possibility of economic activity that obscures the primacy of use values….

  “What all of Thomas’s positions on titles to income from money show is an insistence that profit can only come from nature’s goods, which always requires the patience and vulnerability that waits to see what nature offers. Thomas refuses the presumption against God’s providence that would seek to secure a claim to wealth that outpaces that provision.

  “…to contract a price for the use of money in addition to the principal is to sell a use that does not and cannot exist…Thomas’s arguments, by uncovering the most basic reason against usury (that it sells a metaphysical impossibility), confirm the rationale of the usury prohibition even in productive loans where the borrower is not needy. Thomas is concerned not only for charity, but for keeping all exchanges answerable to the contours of real wealth…

  “The consumptibility argument is not meant to destroy all possible arguments for a return on one’s money…The lender at interest presumes by staking a claim to wealth — possible future wealth — that is not disciplined by any receptivity to what God’s providence may actually end up providing.

  “The investor does not presume, but takes the risk of waiting to see what comes of it. He does not hold the title to the return of all his money, but rather makes himself vulnerable to the contingencies of how God’s provision may or may not smile on the efforts of the merchant or craftsman to whom the money is entrusted…

  “What if the borrower is an incompetent businessman, while the lender could quite reliably have turned a profit with his money somewhere else? This argument Thomas rejects, again because of its presumption. This is the notion of lucrum cessans, the notion that a lender has a title to compensation beyond the principal for forgoing the gain he might have otherwise made with his money…The reason Thomas finds it presumptive is that, unlike a risky investment, a loan involves a contract obliging the borrower in advance to compensate the lender for a potential gain the actual realization of which could only be determined by waiting to see…However reliable the alternative investment, it would involve vulnerability to the contingencies of the unfolding of God’s provision, a vulnerability that lucrum cessans circumvents. To establish a title to such wealth irrespective of the actual possibilities and provisions the future may turn out to hold, is to set up an artificial invulnerability…One contemporary manifestation of this drive toward invulnerability is the imperative ‘to convert wealth into debt in order to derive a permanent future income from it — to convert wealth that perishes, into debt that endures, debt that does not rot, costs nothing to maintain, and brings in perennial interest.” 3

  Because of the penchant of the Church of Rome for word games, subterfuge and doubletalk, the strictest, clearest and best definition of the sin of usury as originally understood by the Biblically-based Early Church (not the Romans, Greeks or other pagan nations), is any loan in which more than the principal is returned to the lender. An elementary expression of this process is “money breeding money.”

  There is nothing inherently inaccurate with calling money gained by a lender from a borrower which exceeds the principal, interest. The Oxford English Dictionary defines interest as: “Money paid for the use of money lent (the principal).” Webster’s Third International Dictionary (1971), denotes it as: “the price paid for borrowing money.”

  But to make black into white and papal usury not usury, games with words must be played, otherwise the stage magic cannot operate, and the situation ethic that made the mortal sin of usury not mortally sinful, cannot be made to vanish, and the papacy of the sixteenth and following centuries cannot be exonerated of the charge of incrementally rendering profit on loans not sinful.

  The first two steps in this legerdemain entail exploiting confusion over the old Roman word interesse, and to impose the mantle of St. Thomas Aquinas on the scam. Before we furnish a textbook example, let us define the Roman empire’s interesse: “that which is between.” Specifically “damages arising from a borrower’s default on the loan.”

  When papist apologists conflate interesse with usury (interest), the Renaissance and post-Renaissance popes can be indemnified against the consequences of their gradual alteration of unalterable dogma. To work this deception, all of the usury-profit on loans which the papacy incrementally permitted, must be grouped under the category of “damage or loss caused by the lending of money.”

  As a student of the Babylonian Talmud, this writer is reasonably familiar with the duplicitous lawyer’s mentality that pervades it, and which can be summarized as selfdeception coupled with the attempt to overcome God Himself, a feat which the Talmud proclaims the rabbis managed to achieve, when, in tractate Bava Metzia 59b it is reported that God gladly admitted to them, “My sons have defeated me! My sons have defeated me!” 4

  This is the rabbinic egotism and insane pride that informed the mentality of the original Sanhedrin, and the latter day Sanhedrin in the Vatican.5

  In studying the deceptions of the apologists for papal usury permissions, we are in the realm of lawyers who call themselves Catholic historians, economists, theologians, and so forth. Observe this sleight of hand: “…passages from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas can serve as representative of the development of the definition of, and rationale for usury…St. Thomas explains: ‘A lender may without sin enter an agreement with the borrower for compensation for the loss he incurs of something he ought to have, for this is not to sell the money but to avoid a loss.” 6

  Aquinas is being smeared as “representative of the development of the definition of, and rationale for usury,” because he allowed for a charge to the borrower for a loan that was not repaid in the time specified. A borrower paying a reasonable fine of some type for refusing to repay a loan according to the time-frame mutually agreed upon when the loan commenced, is not the same as the mortal sin of renting money. It is a penalty for the sin of avarice on the part of the borrower, who can be as guilty of such a transgression as a lender. A good-hearted Catholic lender may wish to privilege Bob with a loan for a certain amount of time, and when the money loaned is returned on the schedule agreed upon, he may then wish to privilege Bill with the same, or a similar loan. If Bob withholds repayment then Bill does not have access to the loaned money in the time he needs it. It does not make St. Thomas Aquinas any kind of “developer” or “rationalizer” of usury because he clarified the point that a lender, like a borrower, has rights within the laws of Christian charity. It is outrageous that for the sake of rescuing the credibility of the Church of Rome’s usury, the reputation of Aquinas is sullied.

  The next step in the prestidigitation is to enlarge the categories of losses incurred by the lender for which he should be “compensated” under the category of interest. But perish the thought that this interest is profit for renting money. Certainly not. George Orwell would have loved it: don’t call interest “profit”; call it “avoidance of loss”:

  “St. Raymond of Penafort’s explanation of interest and why it is permitted to be collected notwithstanding th
e prohibition of usury: ‘Interest is never thought of as payment on a loan; it is the ‘difference’ to be made up to a party injured by the failure of another to execute his obligations. The common distinction is between usura and interesse, id est non lucrum sed vitatio damni’ (which means ‘it is not profit but avoidance of loss’). Interest is purely compensatory. It is accidentally and extrinsically associated with a loan…’

  “Two expressions of this right to damages (or interest) were damnum emergens 7 (damage emerging) and lucrum cessans. 8 These titles arose not as a right of payment on account of making a loan from the outset, but represented compensatory expectation damages due to the actual fault of the debtor.” 9

  Woe unto the lawyers who gathered and asked among themselves, how can we gain for the lender interest on a loan that will not appear to be usury? We will term it, “compensatory expectation damages due to the actual fault of the debtor,” and we will expand the definition to include loss of the use of the money loaned during the time the borrower possessed it, when it could have been invested in something more beneficial to the lender.

  In addition to the aforementioned escape clauses, the Church of Rome in its “development of doctrine” (dissolution of dogma is the more candid term), hit on another loophole in charging for loans: the excuse that the loans were to the poor, from banks named Mountain of Compassion (Monte di Pieta), and the charges were not profits accruing from the loans themselves, but the costs that came from administering the loans.

  Originally the true Catholic Church, with the compassion typical of an ecclesia that was as old as the idea of Europe and had founded great charitable institutions such as the earliest hospitals and schools, encouraged, in accordance with the spirit of the gospel, societies of mons pietatis, wherein Catholic volunteers and philanthropists offered loans to borrowers which, when repaid on time, were free of charges of any kind. The borrower repaid the principal and not a penny more, as God ordained. These arrangements operated for centuries under other names and in one form or another, to the glory of God and the testimony of His Church. With the passage of time however, situation ethicists who were at work in the bowels of the Church more than four hundred fifty years before the Second Vatican Council, “discovered” that usury had to be paid on the “charitable” loans — under the euphemism “administrative costs.” According to this line of thought, Jesus Christ’s command to lend expecting nothing in return was unworkable and required modification. What was actually afoot? The creation of the first, papally-approved Catholic usury banks. The alibi for this swindle, as issued to the gullible, is here outlined:

  “As the montes began operating it soon became apparent that they would eventually exhaust their ability to serve the poor; if they merely received back the amount loaned, their donated capital would be depleted in paying their costs of operation, including salaries to employees. It was thus proposed that those benefiting from their operation share the costs of the operation in proportion to the benefit received, that is, the amount of the loan borrowed and repaid. Said another way, those who actually benefited were bound in justice to contribute back to the mons to compensate for the loss occasioned by the benefit…In practice these charges amounted to 5% per annum, on average. The montes represent an excellent example of the application of the collection of interest merely as the right to charge the reimbursement of the cost of making the loan…” 10

  It was Medici Pope Leo X who formalized this hoodwink with a bull in May 1515, after which, entirely by coincidence no doubt, the Medici-operated mons pietatis grew into full-blown international usury banks—templates for the seventeenth century Protestant Bank of England and the Calvinist Dutch usurers who serve as stock villains in the pages of Right-wing tracts, where the names Leo X, Medici and monte are conveniently absent.

  Pope Leo X initiated a process of gradualism, whereby the Church’s immemorial dogmatic law against the charging of interest on loans of money was incrementally relaxed and diluted, leading to a papal revolution, culminating in the complete abolition of all ecclesiastical penalties for usury by Pope Pius VIII in his bull of Aug. 18, 1830, Datum in audientia, as well as the absence of all such penalties in the 1917 and 1983 Codes of Canon Law. No Renaissance or post-Renaissance pontiff from the sixteenth century to our time, restored the divine law proscribing profit from loans. All the popes from that time period either cooperated with the revolution or did nothing to halt it and left it in place. Some, like Pope Leo XIII, waxed eloquent in his encyclical Rerum Novarum, contra greed and the oppression of workers, but left untouched the root of those mortal sins — profit on loans; usury.

  We begin, as often seems inevitable in a survey of the early Renaissance, with the Medici. But first let us take note of two pernicious historical myths in this field of study. The first is the rumor, disseminated by the major usurious banking houses and later perpetually recycled by the Right-wing, that the socalled “Jews” were the major financial force implicated in this usury.

  There is not one Judaic banking house that is of overarching significance in this early period; not one. Every bank we will implicate in this epoch is primarily of the Church of Rome. Yet who gets the blame for usury in this epoch? “The Jews.” What’s behind this? It is deliberate misdirection concealing the fact that the conspiracy operates just as smoothly in the gentile Right-wing as it does from within Judaism itself.

  Notice that we state, “in this epoch.” Later, Judaic banking houses such as the Rothschild bank, will become dominant, but the initial massive profits from the Renaissance papacy’s gradual relaxation of the laws against usury were gained first by the gentile banks. The company of Vieri di Cambio de’ Medici was the original foundation of the great Medici bank of the 15th century, and papal Rome was at the center of this banking dynasty’s business empire. The papacy obtained usury loans from the Medici bank in the late 15th century by borrowing directly at stated rates of interest.

  Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, Pope Leo X, initiated a revolution that would only completely come to power some three centuries later, in 1830, under Pope Pius VIII, and confirmed in the Canon Law codes of 1917 (by omission) and in 1983 (by slightly less devious means).

  Pope Leo X’s new teaching consisted of an incremental step on the road to the permission for usury. In his Bull of 1515, Inter multiplices, Leo wrote that, “provided no profit be made,” a “moderate fee” could be charged to borrowers to cover “administrative costs” of the operation of the bank known as the Monte di Pietà.

  Medici Pope Leo, whose extended clan was deeply entrenched in Florentine banking and upon whom the pontiff had already bestowed many favors, was empowering the usury networks in Italy with his Bull. Apologists for the pope have asserted that the montes that developed in the wake of Leo X’s bull were mostly pawnshops operating on the repossession of items pawned, not in making loans. They forget, however, that under Inter multiplices, the pawnbrokers could sell unredeemed pawns at a profit. They seem to think that Leo X was so obtuse that he did not foresee the loophole in his “provided no profit be made” provision. Au contraire, such profits were inevitable and the pontiff was no ingénue when it came to worldly affairs or financial transactions.

  In practice, the pope’s bull helped to establish usurious entities operating in the name of charity but functioning as forprofit businesses. Prior to the pope’s revolutionary encyclical, truly Christ-like montes had donated their administrative costs. As a charity fund, the montes should not have been allowed to charge a middleman’s 5% for “administrative fees,” due to the obvious potential for abuse which such a “fee” represented. With the pontificate of Leo X the five percent socalled “administrative costs” were permitted. The five percent figure was ominous in that this was the rate which the Renaissance-Catholic nominalists and the usurious Catholic Fugger banking dynasty had set, through its theological mouthpiece Johann Eck, as a “moderate” rate of return on a loan.

  In submission to a Scriptural standard, no Christian lend
er may gain a profit from a loan by charging fees that substitute for an interest rate. In all cases where a borrower repays a loan on time and in full, any charge of any kind beyond the return of the principal represents a profit to the lender and a loss to the borrower and constitutes usury. The rabbinic-style loopholes are the “extrinsic” titles which, under this and other deceptive euphemisms, in most cases lead to profit on a loan at the expense of the borrower. No previous pope in the course of fifteen hundred years had ever formally permitted such “fees” (though there had been some disgraceful accommodations made informally, such as by the Apostolic Chamber in 1486).

  “Pope Leo X’s monte di pieta was a bank to be plundered by his Florentine-merchant relatives and cronies. Charity for the poor was the necessary front used to vindicate the once forbidden usury. It didn’t take long for the mask to fall, however: ‘Never did the monte’s officials recognize any irony in the fact that the monte, like the Jewish pawnbrokers it sought to replace…could sell unredeemed pawns at a profit…in the fall of 1529 the regime (in Florence) commanded the officials of the monte di pieta to assign it credits from the resources…this money amounted to an interest-free loan to the regime. There is no record that collateral was offered…By 1533 the city of Florence itself was guaranteeing the solvency of the monte di pieta and offering to pay interest of five percent on its deposits. All this in the name of poor relief (profit was guaranteed to any depositor willing to subsidize the monte’s ‘charitable activities’).

  “In 1486 the Apostolic Chamber took the first step toward regularizing the debt through an agreement with a consortium of bankers according to which they would advance loans over a number of years in return for their control over consolidated revenues…the number rose to forty-six (bankers), most of them Genoese and Florentines. A full funding of some of the debt occurred with the establishment of the Monte della Fede in 1526, and over the course of the century forty other monti were set up. These were funds raised through sales of shares that paid interest guaranteed by assignment of specific revenues for this purpose…These shares…paid interest in perpetuity and were therefore inheritable…Through the monti the papacy institutionalized its borrowing, creating a permanent funded debt…” 11