The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  “Enrico’s absolution must have taken place shortly before the start of the decoration of the Chapel, because Pope Benedict reigned from October 1303 until July 1304. We do not know the conditions of Enrico’s absolution. The erection of the church, however, and its particularly resplendent decoration must have been one of them…” 30

  “He had it built with his own money in compensation for the many usurious deeds of his father, doing so at the command of Pope Benedict XI.” 31 It was this pontiff in his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, who emphasized a particular insight into the nature of the betrayal of Jesus, when he stated that Judas was “cupiditate pecuniae ductus” (led by his passion for money). 32

  Concerning the Chapel’s art, Schlegel writes, “Judas hangs in Giotto’s Hell, and behind him we see three other damned men who must atone for their sins in the same way; their torture, however, seems to be increased, since they have been hanged with the strings of their own money purses. In a particularly prominent place, to the right, below the cross and above the curve of the door arch, a usurious peasant with a fat money bag on his back is led into the abyss of hell by a devil who holds the peasant’s promissory notes in his claw. Another of the damned who likewise cannot separate himself from his money bag, despite the fact that a devil pulls on it vigorously, must go the way down to the abyss behind the peasant.

  “The depiction of the hanged Judas in the Last Judgment is rare…in Padua, Judas is in the middle of Hell in a very conspicuous place: he hangs exactly in the center, between the cross and the jaws of Hell…Horizontally, there is a straight line leading, at the right, from the head of Judas to the jaws of Hell, and at the left, through the cross and the model of the Chapel, to the head of Enrico.

  This allows us to place (the figure of) Enrico, even though he kneels with the Blessed, in a very special relationship to Judas, for it is no less obvious that the misers and usurers populating the part of Hell around Judas correspond to the group with Enrico Scrovegni below the Blessed on the other side of the cross, and that the misers and usurers suffer the same punishment as Judas.

  “We assume that Enrico wished to atone for his father’s sin of usury, the price of which is Hell. For this reason he joined the lay order of the Cavalieri di Santa Maria, whose aspiration it was to lead a model life and whose most significant duty was to combat usury, and for this reason he built the Chapel and gave it to the order as its church.33

  “The basis for atonement, however, is the confession of the sin, for every sin is a betrayal of Christ. And here the confession is made through the representation of the greatest betrayal of all, the betrayal by Judas. And since it happened that Enrico’s father Reginaldo betrayed Christ for money just as Judas did, The Betrayal of Judas is located on the triumphal arch wall in the consciousness of guilt and as its confession. We should, therefore, not look at this representation as the criticism of the father by the son, but only as the confession of guilt of his own — rendered in a language equal in its pitiless candor to Dante’s in the Inferno.” 34

  In the Chronica Patavina (Vatican library MS5290), circa 1335, we find this description of Enrico: “He built a temple in the Arena to the honor of the Virgin Mary and for the salvation of his family and especially for the soul of his father Reginaldo who, since he was of common status occupied himself with infinite usuries…”

  In Enrico’s Last Will and Testament, written a few months before his death in 1336, we find these words commanding that restitution be made: “I wish, order and command that all of my ill-gotten gains (male ablata), if it should be that such be found, and these were not restored, and all the ill-gotten gains of my grandfather Ugolino, my father Reginaldo, by brother Manfredo, and his son Manfredo the Younger, for the one-third part that I am legally held to restore—these ought to be restored and paid with any expenses incurred at that time, to all petitioners without any lawsuit, controversy, trial, condition or pact.” 35

  Many other usurers, under severe pressure from their confessors or from their own consciences (often as they neared death), made restitution for their thieving, including as in some cases, as Enrico had, by constructing and donating a church, school, hospital or monastery. Among Enrico’s penitent contemporaries and countrymen who constructed religious edifices we find former captains of banking such as Pietro da Marano, Guglielmo Castelbarco and Marsilio da Carrara. Among lesser fry, the whole of their estates were simply divided among those who could be found to have paid them anything above the principal loaned. Penance and restitution by usurers was public. 36

  The medieval Paduan Arena Chapel is a sermon in paint and sculpture, and the explication of its elaborate symbolism would require a book solely dedicated to that end. 37 Suffice it to say for our purposes, that Derbes and Sandona point to a central theme in the iconography of the Chapel, that of Judas contrasted with the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our Lady’s exemplification of charity diametrically opposed to the greed of Judas, occupies “extraordinary prominence” in the Arena.

  We took Michelangelo to task for it, so it is incumbent on us to note that Giotto also employed nudity in his work. Like Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, in the Arena Chapel Giotto executed a version of The Last Judgment in which the damned are nude. The difference between the Michelangelo Judgment and that of Giotto however, is the difference (if we may be so bold) between the spirit of the Renaissance and the spirit of the Middle Ages. With Michelangelo, whether damned or not, the naked humans often exude an eroticism. In Giotto the nudity only heightens the sense of shame and degradation, such as Adam and Eve experienced in the Garden after the Fall. Public nudity of the type displayed in the Sistine Chapel is utopian. It is a way of expressing the heresy that on earth, in this life, we can return to Eden. For Giotto, as for the Early and Medieval Catholic Church, public nudity, except when portraying prepubescent humanity, is mainly a sign of disorder and concupiscence, or damnation.

  The medieval pontiff who may have came closest to St. Anthony of Padua in spirit was the ill-fated monk-hermit, Pope Celestine V (1215-1296), who was “elected after more than two years of deadlock in the hope that a saint might transform the Church…the unworldly old man (eighty-five when elected)…was a visionary, the founder of a brotherhood of hermits with strong links to the radical Franciscans. 38 He therefore represented precisely that dimension of the thirteenth-century Church which detested the wealth, worldliness and legal and political entanglements of the papacy. His election fed apocalyptic hopes of a Papa Angelicus, a holy and unworldly pope who would cleanse the Church and prepare the world for the advent of Christ. The notion of an unworldly pope, however, was by now almost a contradiction in terms…Celestine’s election highlighted just how incompatible these two visions of the Church had become. Faced with political and financial complexities which prayer and fasting seemed powerless to untangle, Celestine resigned after six months.” 39

  His resignation appears to have been engineered by Benedetto Caetani, his successor, who would become the tyrant Pope Boniface VIII. It was Caetani who produced canon lawyers to justify Celestine’s abdication and it was Caetani who wrote Celestine’s abdication speech. After Caetani was made pope, Celestine fled. “Determined to avoid any… (resistance) from the outraged ‘spiritual’ element in the Church who had looked to Celestine to redeem the papacy, Caetani tracked down his predecessor…” 40 Benedict VIII had this holy ex-pontiff kidnapped, tortured, and imprisoned until Celestine’s death in 1296.

  A “worthy pope,” you say? Let him proclaim, ex cathedra, a declaration along the lines of the following statement. When he does so, we will know that the war of the Church contra the Money Power, engendered by the root of all evil (I Timothy 6:10), has been revived:

  All usury—any gain on a loan above the return of the principal—is a grave transgression against the law of God. In order to obtain absolution, reception of the Eucharist and a Catholic burial, all usurers must confess their mortal sin, avoid the near occasion of sin by halting their involvement in banks
and businesses lending at interest; and by lenders expiating their sin of usury through restitution of all monies paid by debtors to the lenders above the principal. Impenitent, practicing bankers (usurers) are not to receive the Eucharist and are to be refused a Catholic burial. In Catholic nations, the civil authorities are urged to seize the assets of usurers after death to restore the interest stolen from debtors. Obstinate usurers are excommunicated.

  The preceding, if pronounced ex cathedra, would be the dogmatic statement of a real alter Christus, a true Papa Angelicus and Petrine guardian of Biblical and Patristic Tradition, who does not weaken the fabric of truth by subterfuges and tricks with words, but whose yes is yes, and whose no is no. Whether such a bishop of Rome arises or not, the true Christian’s war with the Money Power is perpetual.

  The Vatican went into hock to the Rothschild bank in the the nineteenth century, when priests had to admit unrepentant practicing usurers to Communion. The Catholic laity were kept in the dark and pacified by thunderous bulls and encyclicals anathematizing Judaism, Freemasonry and avarice. Machiavelli could have devised an elementary con like this before his first cappuccino of the morning: denounce the Kings of the Deal all you like; if you permit them to control the money supply of the Church, then they are the rulers of the Church, post-Renaissance papal anathemas and the enforced ignorance of the pay-pray-and-obey sheeple, notwithstanding.

  With respect to Pope Benedict XIV’s 1745 encyclical Vix Pervenit, which has the reputation among Catholics of being a lofty and definitive rebuke to usury, we draw the reader’s attention to the fact that the pope declined to apply any enforceable prohibition to the specific usury contracts he was addressing in the encyclical. We do not believe this was a mere oversight. Observe the methodology: the vast majority of the text of Pope Benedict XIV’s encyclical is devoted to excoriating usury, while a small portion of it, what might be described as the document’s “fine print,” contains a loophole for profit on loans large enough to accommodate Catholic usury-banking. As far as imposing enforceable penalties and obstructions on Catholic lenders at interest, Vix Pervenit was an exercise in toothless semantics. Post-Renaissance predatory capitalism on the part of the followers of the Church of Rome continued to flourish in the wake of Vix Pervenit.

  Far from being the ballyhooed bulwark against usury, Vix Pervenit was so ambiguous it generated tremendous confusion. Observe the testimony of the Bishop of Rheims as recorded in Denzinger 1609: “There is bitter dispute over the meaning of the Encyclical Letter, ‘Vix pervenit’…On both sides arguments are produced to defend the opinion each one has embraced, either favorable to such (usury) profit or against it.”

  Vix Pervenit is part of the papal lexicon of trickery, employed by Pope Benedict XIV in 1745, and Pope Francis two hundred seventy-one years later. The same stratagem at work in Benedict’s Vix Pervenit is visible in the Amoris Laetitia of Francis:

  “Amoris does not—again, let me repeat, does not—declare ministers of holy Communion bound to give the sacrament to divorced-and-remarried Catholics living as if married. Francis’ phrasing in several key passages of Amoris is, I have argued, malleable enough to allow bishops such as Chaput and Sample to reiterate the traditional Eucharistic discipline or, as the Buenos Aires bishops did, simply to pass ambiguous criteria down to local pastors to sort as best they can. But precisely because key passages of Amoris are also flexible enough to allow bishops to do as the Maltese have done and require Church ministers to distribute the Eucharist to Catholics who engage in ‘public and permanent adultery” (CCC 2384)—not to mention conferring absolution on penitents who express no purpose of amendment in regard to such conduct—all this, without doing violence to the actual text of Amoris.” 41

  Neoplatonic-Hermeticism has no fixed abode in the household of dogma. Its god is the zeitgeist. When the Church of Rome gradually changed its position on God’s immemorial laws against profit on loans in accord with “changing times,” this revolution sent an electrifying message to insiders within and without the hierarchy: since Rome changed its prohibition on usury, Rome can change its dogma on contraception, divorce, premarital and extramarital sex, women priests and homosexual behavior.

  The bane of Christian society is situation ethics, the substitution of human standards relative to the circumstances and context of the times, for immutable divine law. Let us recall that Rome continued to agitate against usury from the pulpit at the parish level, and kept the ignorant laity in the dark concerning the incremental revolution that had been put into motion in elite circles of Catholic banking; that was the genius of their process which would eventually create a legend that usury permission was a Protestant phenomenon.

  We are largely defenseless today against the ravages of situation ethics due to the nullification of the mortal sin of interest on money, from which proceeds every other evil (I Tim. 6:10). Apologists argue that the Church of Rome has not nullified this mortal sin because it has “not promulgated any doctrinal decree on the subject.” 42 Surely the papists have heard it said, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” This criterion was given by God Himself as the supreme discernment. May we dare to ask, what have been the fruits of the post-Renaissance Church with regard to the ascendance of the Money Power? Millions of Catholic usurers are free to practice their mortally sinful trade and receive the Eucharist, without either confessing or receiving absolution. “Catholic” institutions of usury have been established throughout the world, including in Vatican City. Perhaps we would better discern the degree of transgression at work here if, for usury, we were to substitute prostitution. If prostitutes, pimps and those who frequent them were to receive Holy Communion without having to confess their sin, and were given freedom, under papal auspices, to spread their moral contagion wherever it was allowed by secular law, including by establishing a brothel coram populo in Vatican City, could it still be asserted by sane persons that the Church of Rome had not, in practice, changed the dogma against fornication? Or would we salve our consciences by assuring ourselves that since no ecclesiastical edict had been pronounced in favor of it, the Church still upheld the mortal sinfulness of prostitution? At what point does a claim that theology has not been formally declared to have been altered, become little more than a double-minded alibi in the face of the massive practice of a souldestroying transgression of God’s law?

  The allowance for usury and usurers in good standing in the post-Renaisance Church of Rome cannot be merely a sin of omission. This is not a matter of failure to enforce a dogma, it is the active overthrow of the dogma as shown by the rulings of the Holy Office and Penitentiary in the nineteenth century, beginning with the Pontificate of Pius VIII and his Bull Datum in audientia of Aug. 18, 1830, which granted absolution to usurers who intended to persist in their usury.

  The 1917 Code of Canon Law promulgated by Pope Benedict XV, (though composed by churchmen appointed by Pope St. Pius X), which went into effect May 19, 1918, declared, “in the loan of a fungible thing, it is not by itself illicit to reap a legal profit.” The 1983 Code of Canon Law promulgated by Pope John Paul II, in canons 1294 and 1305 repeat the permission for usury granted in the 1917 Code, and exceed it by requiring clerics in charge of church funds to invest them “profitably”—in other words by the readiest means available for doing so, whatever that might be according to the law of the land.

  The formal overthrow of usury dogma in the 19th and 20th centuries by Popes Pius VIII, Benedict XV and John-Paul II, and the founding of the Vatican Bank in the 1940s by Pius XII, did not arise out of thin air. As with the nullification in Judaism of the Old Testament Law of God by gradual Talmudic modification and evasion, the loophole for profiting from loans of money under the name “extrinsic titles” and similar escape clauses, contributed significantly to the erosion and the overthrow of the Church’s dogma against usury.

  Once the precedent for tampering with the Word of God has been established, our consciences and Christendom itself are henceforth ordered by the situation eth
ics intended to fit the occasion of our human wants and desires. Beware: our children are watching. Amid a world of exceedingly seductive sins that beckon to them on the basis that the times they are a changin,’ and that the laws decreed by God “require a new understanding,” our accommodation of the Money Power through profiting from loans of money, furnishes our young people the leeway to engage in mortal sins of their choosing, as the “situation” and the zeitgeist demand. As usual, Jesus is the antidote to this diabolical confusion. He presents us with a blessed alternative, giving direction on how we can become sons of the Most High God and receive a great reward: “Love your enemies…and lend, hoping for nothing in return.” (Luke 6:32-36).

  1 Independent History and Research, 2013; paperback, 416 pages. The book’s index is online at http://bit.ly/2fIfk0q

  2 We believe that any comprehensive analysis of Christ’s teaching on money must include a commentary on His “Parable of the Talents,” and “Parable of the Unjust Steward” and the “Mammon of Unrighteousness.” The misunderstanding of these discourses has been used to portray Our Redeemer as a usury advocate, or at the least an apologist; cf. Usury in Christendom, pp. 50-58.

  3 He Became Poor: The Poverty of Christ and Aquinas’s Economic Teachings, pp. 71-83 (emphasis supplied.) In He Became Poor Prof. Franks refutes charges by John T. Noonan (The Scholastic Analysis of Usury), of discrepancies in the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas on this subject.

  4 This brag about defeating God is not something Judaism is ashamed of, or even one that Talmudists always deny. England’s “Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks,” who is celebrated in the corporate media as a “liberal, humane, progressive of the highest moral rectitude,” announced that he positively loves this announcement that the rabbis have defeated God. In his review of Jonathan Rosen’s book The Talmud and the Internet, “Lord Sacks,” who was the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth of Britain, wrote: “Rosen loves, as do I, that extraordinary moment in the Talmud in which God is outvoted on a point of Jewish law and celebrates the fact that His children have defeated him. In the world of the rabbis, not only do men study the word of God; God studies the words of men.” (The Guardian, December 21, 2001). “The Oral Law is determined by majority rule; hence, the Sages can overrule not only Rabbi Eliezer but even God Himself.”—Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, “Halacha is not Decided in Heaven,” The Jewish Week, May 23, 2011. “God must submit to the decisions of a majority vote of the rabbis.”—BT Bava Metzia 59b.