Luther was never an agent of the banks or the Money Power. It should be conceded that Luther did not traffic in papal and Vatican doubletalk and duplicity on the subject of usury. There is no clever wordplay in his writing and sermons on the subject. He spoke his mind plainly and boldly.
“Luther…was led by his keen sense of justice to a vigorous assertion of the (medieval) canonical determinations on usury in opposition to the casuists’ hair-splitting attempts to circumvent the very laws they were pledged to uphold.” 20
Catholics on the Right tend to overlook the papal accommodation of usurers which eventually led to the Church of Rome’s overthrow of the divine, true Catholic Church proscription on profit on loans.
Calvin and Luther are branded the originators of miserly shylock banking in Christendom. It’s ludicrous, but the Big Lie has stuck. The degree of denial and myopia is a wonder to behold. In the summer of 2016 a group of prominent “traditional Catholics” issued their “Lake Garda Statement Regarding the ‘Catholic’ Apotheosis of Luther”:
“… a massive attempt to masquerade the truth regarding their real character and practical alliance is being mounted in conjunction with the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s devastating appearance on the public scene in 1517…to masquerade what Luther and his ‘freedom’ wrought. For what they truly wrought was ultimately nothing other than what Richard Gawthrop identifies as that ‘Promethean lust for material power that serves as the deepest common drive behind all modern Western culture’…it did not take long for the freedom of depraved man in depraved nature from the restraints of a supposedly impossible Law—in the name of an openness to unmerited grace—to be seen as the providential tool for molding unbridled human thoughts and actions into the building blocks of a new Age of Gold.” 21
Luther is scapegoated for the acts of the Catholic usury bankers, the Catholic Augsburg Diet of 1500 and the popes of usury, all of whom in their betrayal of the true Catholic Church, pioneered in Christendom the “new Age of Gold.”
Many “Conservative” and “traditional” Catholics of the twentieth-first century are nothing of the kind. They ally with renegade, Renaissance proto-modernist bishops of Rome who were popes not of Catholicism but of the cash nexus. The Right-wing “Catholic” idolatry of these men has supplanted the loyalty due to the Catholic Church of the previous fourteen hundred fifty years. Luther suffered a spiritual crisis when he finally became cognizant (and it took him some time to do so; his evaluation was not rash), that the papacy in the Renaissance was no longer the guarantor of Catholic orthodoxy, but its gravedigger. This shock of recognition led to a psychological crisis which produced in Luther a disfigurement that led him into excesses and distortions, and an abiding pride. It is distressing however, that in reflecting upon Lutheranism, the history of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic-Kabbalistic takeover of Rome is whisked away and it is Luther who is stigmatized as money’s prophet.
If there actually were traditional Catholics on earth today (and surely there is a remnant), they would believe as the Roman Catholic Church had always believed until the Renaissance usurpation:
“Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell in thy holy hill?…He that does not ask interest on loans, and cannot be bribed to victimize the innocent.” 22
St. Clement of Alexandria (second century A.D.): “taking profit from loans to fellow Christians partaking of the Logos, is a transgression against the law of God.”
The Council of Elvira, circa 300 A.D., decreed that lay and clerical usurers are to be excommunicated.
St. Jerome (fourth century) quotes Ezekiel 18:13, “Hath given forth upon usury, and hath taken increase: shall he then live? He shall not live: he hath done all these abominations; he shall surely die; his blood shall be upon him.”
St. Basil (fourth century): “Whenever you have the intention of providing for a poor man for the Lord’s sake, the same thing is both a gift and a loan, a gift because of the expectation of no repayment, but a loan because of the great gift of the Master who pays in his place, and who, receiving trifling things through a poor man, will give great things in return for them. ‘He that hath mercy on the poor, lendeth to God.’ Do you not wish to have the Lord of the universe answerable to you for payment?”
St. Ambrose (fourth century): “Si quis usuram accipit, rapinam facit, vita non vivit.” (“If someone takes usury, he commits robbery, he shall not live”).
Other fourth century Fathers: St. Gregory of Nicea, St. Leo the Great, and St. John Chrysostom, all condemned taking profit on loans; that is to say all profit (even a penny) on any kind of loan.
St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.): “Homo miser, cur foenearis homini? Foenerare Deo et centuplum accipes vitam aeternam possidebis.” (Miserly man, why do you lend compound interest to men? Lend to God a hundred-fold you will have eternal life”).
In the eleventh century, St. Edward the Confessor, the Anglo-Saxon Catholic King of England, declared, “Usura radix omnia malorum.” (“Usury is the root of all evil”).
Gratian’s Decretum (circa 1140), the oldest and most extensive cornerstone of the Corpus iuris canonici (body of Canon Law): “Usurae arte nequissima ex ipso auro aurum nascitur.” (“By the detestable art of usury gold gives birth to gold”).
The Fourth Lateran Council of 1179, decreed that those who gain profit from loans are to be excommunicated and denied Christian burial.
Pope Urban III (1185-1187) quotes Luke 6:35: “Lend, expecting nothing in return.”
Pope Gregory IX in 1234 commanded all Christian rulers to expel all usurers and to nullify all wills and testaments of unrepentant usurers.
Pope Innocent IV (1200-1254): “Usury is generally prohibited because if it were allowed all manner of evils would ensue…It is clear that practically every evil follows from usury.” (Commentaria super libros quinque Decretalium).
The Council of Lyons (1274) extended the restrictions on lenders-for-profit based on the Decree on Usury of Pope Gregory X (1210-1272):
“Although manifest usurers may have commanded that satisfaction be made for the usury they received in express quantity or indistinctly in their final will, nonetheless, they are to be denied ecclesiastical burial until full satisfaction has been made for the very usury (as their faculties permit) or to those to whom restitution must be made, if they are on hand, or to others for whom they can acquire it, or in their absence the local ordinary or his vicar, whether the rector of the parish in which the testator lives, in the presence of some trustworthy members of the parish (for whom it is permissible for the ordinary, vicar, and rector in the aforementioned way to accept this warning in their name by the authority of this current constitution in such a way that action is gained for them), or that it be properly entrusted to a public servant at the command of the same ordinary concerning the making of restitution. For the rest, if the quantity of the usury received is clear we want that to be always expressed in the aforesaid warranty, otherwise we want another warranty of the receiver to be controlled according to such a will; the same person, however, knowingly controls not less than is reasonably believed, and should he do otherwise, let him be obliged to make satisfaction for the rest.
“We decree that all the religious and others who have dared to admit manifest usurers to ecclesiastical burial against the form of present sanctions are subject to the punishments of the Lateran Council promulgated against usurers. No one is to take part in the wills of manifest usurers, or admit them to confession or absolve them unless the have made restitution for usury, or afford a fitting warranty about making restitution according to the strength of their faculties.”
The Council of Vienne (1311) ordered the excommunication of any ruler who condoned profits on loans or who forced debtors to pay usury. It presciently warned of those who seek to open cracks in the laws against usury by camouflaged contracts that hid usury under “diverse colors.”
Contra the Money Power in The Arena Chapel
High Catholic art before the Re
naissance was often a glory to God, and among the artists who personified the medieval aesthetic at the masterpiece level were the virtuosos Giotto di Bondone, known to history by his first name, and the master stone carvers Arnolfo Pisano, his chief assistant Arnolfo di Cambio, and his son Giovanni Pisano. The Christian who would seek edification, sobering reflection and a sermon in paint will visit and ponder the Arena Chapel in Padua, a city in Italy that had been the base, seventy-two years earlier, of St. Anthony of Padua, the hammer of usury heretics who was one of the most phenomenal preachers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the post-apostolic history of Christianity. 23
The chapel is a sacred edifice founded on a plea for forgiveness as a means of making restitution. The Dominican Pope Benedict XI (Niccolo Boccasino) named it the “Chapel of Santa Maria della Caritá.” It was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary on the feast of her Annunciation,24 March 25, 1303.
It is extraordinary for being the most prominent monument in Christendom to the Catholic belief in the divine dogma that profit on loans is a sin that imperils the soul and requires, after confession, expiation. The chapel was founded, designed and dedicated while Dante Aligheri, the preeminent poet of the Gospel over the Money Power, walked the earth.
In Usury in Christendom (pp. 344-350), we give an account of a seldom remarked upon miracle of St. Anthony of Padua and reproduce a photograph of Tullio Lombardo’s harrowing sculpture depicting it:
“It is not an easy matter to find a full account of St. Anthony’s ‘Miracle of the Usurer’s Heart,’ since it is a huge embarrassment to ‘Christian’ usurers and a devastating rebuke to the contemporary Church which permits their trade. Consequently, the miracle has been classed as too parochial and dated, and has been renamed. When it is presented to the public it is no longer a parable about a money-lender who grew wealthy from charging interest on debt. It has been rewritten as “The Miracle of the Miser’s Heart,” and the dead man’s sin is not specifically usury, but the more generic theme of parsimony. By means of this falsification, the people do not learn of the degree of hostility which medieval Catholic culture—and one of the most esteemed of all saints of the Church—harbored for the sin of charging interest on loans of money.
“…long after the Renaissance, Catholic culture at the folk level persisted in execrating usury. St. Anthony’s example of righteous wrath against the den of thieves who sought a place in the Church in spite of their intractable addiction to money breeding, resonated among the lay people down through the centuries, commemorated in magnificent art works by Francesco Pesellino, Domenico Campagnola and Tullio Lombardo, and contributing to a living culture of revulsion toward the sin of usury among the Catholic people for hundreds of years, even while their cardinals and popes trafficked in and profited from partnering with capitalism’s immensely powerful banking houses.
“What the old Church had believed and taught left deep traces in the cultural memory of the Catholic people for many centuries during the time that usury was being rehabilitated from on high. This holy memory persisted long after the theology itself had decayed. Lowly parish priests and laymen preserved indignation over income derived from interest into the nineteenth and even the twentieth century. Many were outraged to discover, in the 1800s, that when impenitent usurers complained to the Catholic hierarchy about priests who refused to grant them absolution in the confessional, the hierarchy stood with the unrepentant sinners against the confessors. 25
The miracle God worked through St. Anthony has for its scripture text Matthew 6:2: “It happened that while blessed Anthony was preaching the Word of God, a murmur spread through the assembly that a great moneylender had passed away. Seeing the agitation in the crowd and hearing the murmur, Anthony questioned them. They answered that a rich usurer had just died. All murmured to one another, and he said to them: ‘Behold how the word of the Lord is revealed as true; for He said, ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ Then Anthony said, ‘Go to his strongbox and in the largest moneybag his heart will be found.’ So it was done. And proving true the prediction of the holy man, they then cut open the corpse and, not finding the heart, they all praised God and His servant, blessed Anthony.” 26
The Ten Sermons of Saint Anthony of Padua
“…some of the most scathing sermons against usury that survive were authored by Saint Anthony. Unsurprisingly, Saint Anthony defines usury strictly: in a sermon for the first Sunday of Lent, he writes, quoting (the canonist) Gratian: ‘To take any return over and above the principal is called usury.’ But his sermons are often far more vivid than this statement suggests. In another sermon, he writes: ‘Just as birds and beasts will scatter the cadaver, so demons will scatter the heart of the miser and the usurer.’ In another, his sermon for Sexagesima Sunday, he fulminates:
“The accursed race of usurers has multiplied upon the earth, with teeth like the teeth of a lion. The lion has two characteristics: a stiff neck containing only one bone, and stinking teeth. The usurer is likewise inflexible, neither fearing God nor regarding man. His teeth stink because the dirt of money and the dung of usury are always in his mouth.’
“We may observe three kinds of usurers: those who lend money privately, who may be described as creeping things without number; those who do so openly, but only in a small way, so as to seem merciful—these are the small beasts—and the faithless, hopeless and open usurers who, as openly as in a marketplace, take interest from all and sundry.
“These are the great beasts, more cruel than all the rest. They will be pursued by the demon huntsmen and slain with an eternal death, unless they restore their ill-gotten gains, and do penance. To give them the opportunity to do so, there go the ships among them, the preachers of the Church who pass among them and sow the seed of God’s word. Yet, though our sins need it, the thorns of riches and wild beasts of usury choke the word sown so devotedly, so that it does not produce the fruit of penance.” 27
“Anthony’s fiery sermons drew enormous throngs in Padua, but even after his lifetime, as we have seen, his sermons lived on, serving as sourcebooks for friars and cathedral canons alike…Clearly then, anyone earning a livelihood from moneylending (at a profit) ran the risk of enormous penalties in this life and even more horrific punishment in the next. And neither social status nor ecclesiastical connections could ensure the salvation of the usurer. The only hope for such sinners was to renounce the practice, repent, and make full, unambiguous restitution.” 28
In the contemporary Church of Rome, whether styled traditional, conservative or progressive Catholic, St. Anthony is known almost exclusively as the patron saint of the return of lost articles (“Dear St. Anthony please come around, something is lost and must be found”), and as the friar who was granted the miraculous privilege of holding the infant Jesus in his arms. The preeminent object of the saint’s preaching ministry—at least ten sermons blasting the diabolic Catholic traffic in profits from loans, and one miracle involving a usurer’s heart—are almost completely erased from the record of St. Anthony’s hagiography. This relentless campaigner for Biblical economics has been reduced in popular Catholic piety to an innocuous searcher-after lost things, and it is a grotesque irony that knowledge of the hellfire homilies he repeatedly hurled at Catholic bankers and other usurers, are, for all intents and purposes, lost.
A testimony to the degeneracy of the churches in the twentyfirst century, both papist and otherwise, is that the consciences of Protestants and Catholics are seared by the thought of the wanton woman with whom they committed adultery; the beating they administered while drunk to an innocent passerby, or the bribery they offered to a bureaucrat.
But remorse for acquiring money from profits on loans is as distant from their conscience as the GN-Z11 galaxy. A testimony to the presence of the true faith in an authentic follower of Jesus is sorrow for having benefited from the mortal sin of interest on money. Even the thought of such sorrow would be a bizarre anomaly to the hearers if it were preached from almost any pulpit t
oday. The extent to which the ungodly and unnatural predation emanating from profit on loans is mistaken for permissible “free enterprise” is all-encompassing. In our time the Church of St. Anthony of Padua has been almost, though not completely, eclipsed (Luke 18:8).
The Scrovegni Penance
In the Christendom of the Middle Ages, with all its other failings and shortcomings, the fear of God (and hence, “the beginning of wisdom,” Proverbs 9:10), was paramount, and the terror at having offended God by breeding money from money, was overwhelming. Reginaldo Scrovegni had been a notorious medieval Italian usurer who Dante, in Canto XVII of The Inferno, placed in the seventh circle of hell. 29
The heir to Reginaldo’s fortune (worth an astounding halfmillion lire), was his son, Enrico, and it was he who spent the equivalent of millions of dollars in today’s money to erect a Christian palace of repentance for his father’s financial crimes and for his own (he had taken up usury banking in his youth while serving as his father’s apprentice). Crooked churchmen had taken loans from the firm of Scrovegni and Son, and Reginaldo Scrovegni’s operations were protected by the corrupt bishops of Padua and Vicenza and certain lawyers on the faculty of the University of Padua College of Law, including Giovanni Forzaté, whose son was the beneficiary of a lucrative arranged marriage with a daughter of Reginaldo. With this background in mind, we turn to Ursula Schlegel, the principal and most astute scholar of the Arena Chapel:
“Enrico Scrovegni owed his immense fortune to his father, Reginaldo, who had acquired his riches not through honest work but through base usury, which in medieval times was considered by the Church a mortal sin.
“After the Lateran Council of 1176, whose declaration was reaffirmed in 1274, usurers were not to be permitted to receive Holy Communion or to have Christian burial if they died without atonement…Enrico, received absolution from Benedict XI…
The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome Page 70
