The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome Read online

  “And further be it enacted by the queen’s highness, with the assent of the Lords and Commons in this present Parliament assembled, and by authority of the same, that all and singular ministers in any cathedral or parish church, or other place within this realm of England, Wales…or other the queen’s dominions, shall…be bounden to say and use the Matins, Evensong, celebration of the Lord’s Supper and administration of each of the sacraments, and all their common and open prayer, in such order and form as is mentioned in the said book (the Book of Common Prayer).”

  The penalty for the failure of a clergyman to conform to the Book of Common Prayer, or to adhere to the liturgical services in England as they had existed for eleven centuries and offer the Mass, rather than the official Anglican service, was the loss of office and income, and imprisonment for six months (for a second offense one year imprisonment was stipulated; for a third offense the penalty was imprisonment for life). If any English man or woman were to speak against the Book of Common Prayer or in favor of the Catholic Mass, for a third offense the penalty was also life in prison. Anyone who sought to stay at home on Sunday and “having no lawful or reasonable excuse to be absent,” refuse to attend the Protestant-Anglican service on Sunday, was subject to a fine. 5

  Life imprisonment for speaking against the Book of Common Prayer was “moderation”? This coercion of the consciences of her subjects was enacted by the authority of Queen Elizabeth, that reputed Protestant free-spirit so vastly superior to the repressive Catholic Queen Mary. What a farce. When the chasm between fact and fiction is as gaping as this, one wonders how the historians who peddle the legend of Elizabeth’s religious tolerance can live with themselves. Twenty-fours years after Johnson, the agit-prop was maintained by another author of consequence, Alison Weir, in Elizabeth the Queen (1998; p. 335), who writes that in 1581, “Both Parliament and the Council had repeatedly urged the Queen to take stern punitive measures against the Catholic recusants…Although…she had hitherto preferred to act with moderation…she now recognized…that harsher sanctions were called for.”

  Elizabeth’s murder of the Jesuit poet Rev. Fr. Edmund Campion, who had not at any time engaged in any conspiracy against her, is an indelible proof of her harrowing inquisitorial cruelty. 6 Campion was no Jew however, and does not seem to have elicited the sympathy and indignation toward his plight from Spurgeon and reformers like him, concerning the horrible abuse Campion suffered under a Protestant English government which, with the poet Edmund Spenser, viewed Queen Elizabeth I as the “New Isis.”

  Where, pray tell, came this Protestant-Elizabethan identification of the female head of the Church of England with Isis? Papists will imagine it came from some Protestant source. The cult of Isis was in fact transmitted into Christendom by the Neoplatonic-Hermetic papacy which, from Pope Alexander VI onward, adored the “cunning one,” she “who tricked Ra by sending a serpent.” 7 What was this serpent? At the time that Pope Alexander established the cult of Isis in his private papal apartment, the Catholic school of nominalism was replacing the warrant of Scripture with the aggiornomento of equity.

  The troubadour of the cult of Queen Elizabeth I was Spenser. In his Faerie Queen he associated Elizabeth’s cultus with Isis, and in particular with a certain attribute of the cunning one:

  “His wife was Isis, whom they likewise made

  A goddess of great power and sovereignty,

  And in her person cunningly did shade

  That part of justice which is equity.” 8

  Equity is situation ethics by another name. By equity law, God’s Word is “made of none effect” through the circumstances of the particular era in which man finds himself in history. Convoluted pretexts are put forth to justify this nullification. Equity has always bedeviled the Church, but it came boldly into its own with the rise of the Catholic nominalist school of theology. 9 Before John Calvin became a Protestant he was a precocious Catholic youth at the papist Collége de Montaigu, where he came under “the influence of the celebrated nominalist theologian, John Mair, regent at Montaigu from 1525-31.” 10 After his father’s death in 1528, Calvin was admitted to the Catholic law school at Orléans: “Calvin came to embrace the humanist approach to legal studies at Orléans. His circle of friends remained those sympathetic to humanism.”11He subsequently transferred to the Collége Fortet, where he studied under the Catholic nominalists Francois Vatable and Pierre Danés, and encountered the leading law tome of French jurisprudence, the Annotationes in quattuor et viginti Pandectarum libros (1508) of Guillaume Budé, who: “deals with equity in Annotationes in Pandectarum libros. The fundamental principle of legal interpretation is that equity…is that which remits from the law.” 12

  “The function of Equity is the correction of the (civil or common) law where it is deficient by reason of its…tendency to establish rules without exceptions.”13 Equity may be applicable and desirable in those cases entailing upon the laws of man; when applied to the laws of God however, equity is rebellion.

  Calvin never repudiated the epikeia he imbibed from the Church of Rome’s lawyers and theologians in France. After Protestants had been schooled in Catholic nominalist equity, some of them established their own version of it, supposedly “independent of popery,” after which equity could be openly embraced by Protestants while concealing its papist roots, just as Isis had been imported from Rome to London. When Spurgeon and Hislop and their innumerable followers hold aloft their “Reformed faith,” derived from Calvinism, as the preeminent godly antidote and polar opposite to Rome’s theology, they are perpetrating a fraud on the public, which is only exceeded in the depths of its brazen disregard for the facts of history, by the Right-wing Catholic campaign to brand equity-nominalism’s situation ethics as a uniquely Protestant abomination, free of any Catholic origin or culpability.

  The application of equity in both papal and Protestant theology arose mainly from the devil’s desire to unchain the Money Power, previously bound in law and practice by the Catholic Church. This diabolic objective succeeded, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, first by its rise within the papacy, over the strenuous protests of Martin Luther at a time when John Calvin was a child — and then, following suit, within the Reformed Church itself in so far as it heeded Calvin (and since he was not a pontiff, many Calvinists ignored or defied his nullification of the Biblical law against usury). Calvin had grudgingly permitted usury on grounds similar to those of the nominalist Catholic Johann Eck, Luther’s theological nemesis, who had justified it on behalf of the Catholic usury bank of Fugger, although Calvin did not admit of this antecedent.

  It may come as a shock to conservative Reformed Christians that Calvin, the celebrated champion of sola Scriptura, is: “not a Biblical literalist…Calvin’s response is that the prohibitions against usury in the Old Testament are part of the civil legislation of the Jews. These laws were binding on the Jews in their society, but they are not for us today…(Calvin wrote), ‘it follows that usury is not unlawful, except in so far as it contravenes equity…I therefore conclude that usury must be judged, not by any particular passage of Scripture, but simply by the rules of equity.” 14

  What bragging rights do Protestants possess over papist Catholics when the former resort to John Calvin as a faithful guide in the application of God’s Biblical commands and standards on usury, when he permits lawyers’ rules of equity to trump the statutes and commands in the Word of God? Some conservative pastors of Reformed churches have derogated the exigent question of how the love of money has come to be weaponized in Christendom, on the basis that the provenance of the weaponization is not clear, or that the law of God in the matter of profit on loans is a source of some confusion. What is confusing about Luke 6:30-36? Since the Word of God proclaims that the love of money is the root of all evil (I Timothy 6:10), should there not be a greater sense of urgency among the Reformed in resolving this alleged “confusion”?

  It is important to make note of the fact that Calvin’s statements on his permiss
ion for usury were put forth unadorned by duplicity, however. His equity was a fact he stated plainly and without circumlocution. He wrote of his preference for epikeia above the Logos, though not in those terms. His candor is found in all of his writings which we have reviewed, public and private. He had nothing to hide because he was so steeped in the Church of Rome’s modernizing legal philosophy that he could not see the Scriptural nullification at the heart of it (we are not excusing his faith in Catholic nominalist economic theory). Truly he was blind in this matter. But since he concealed nothing, then the case, pro or contra his position, can be argued on its merits and demerits without begging the question.

  With Rome the obstinacy of its true believers seriously impedes clarity on the subject of papal usury, in that the denial of the fact of papal permission for profit from loans curtails an analysis of the consequences of that permission. Usurious Catholic banking is wrapped in dissimulation and sly euphemism; notably when profit gained from loans was explained away with the lucrum cessans escape clause, rather than terming it what it was: interest on loans. The papacy profited from the maintenance of dishonest, veiled forms of usury as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, for instance in the traffic between Catholic bankers in the French city of Lyons, and the Vatican:

  “The ability of the bankers to play with the exchange rates allowed them to loan money…and thus make a profit. Naturally each transaction necessitated two bills exchange: one that transferred the money to Lyons and the other that from Lyons transferred the money back to a beneficiary in Rome. These operations, moreover, allowed the bankers to avoid running afoul of the anti-usury laws, because the eventual profit was not a fixed sum as a percentage, but rather a recompense for risk, which varied from day to day. The interest rate was by this time an accepted part of financial dealings (and was attached to all the loans conceded to the Apostolic Chamber), but it was always specified that it was due to lucri cessantis.” 15

  There is no evidence that John Calvin earned a dime from any form of usury operation. All evidence is that he forbade it in Geneva, Switzerland and drove usurers from the congregations in which he exercised oversight. Pope Pius IV: “The strength of that heretic (Calvin) consisted in this, that money never had the slightest charm for him.” 16

  Spurgeon on “the Jews”:

  “Israel would never worship images, saints and virgins! Blessed were they as a nation for this thing, at least, that they utterly rejected the idolatry of which Rome is shamelessly guilty! It were far better to not be a Christian than to think Popery to be Christianity, for it is one of the vilest forms of idolatry that ever came from the polluted heart of man!”

  Where is this racial Israel of which Rev. Spurgeon writes, which would “never worship images” and “utterly rejected…idolatry”? Has he heard of a book called the Old Testament, which contains a rather extensive record of Israel’s episodic idolatry of every conceivable type? When, pray tell, did this cease? At the time in which Israel demanded of the Roman government the crucifixion of their Messiah? In the centuries afterward, when their religious masters residing in Babylon committed the spurious “Oral Law of Moses” to writing, comprising the Talmud and Kabbalah?

  Of that “glorious Israel” that “utterly rejected…idolatry,” it is said in the Old Testament, at Ezekiel 16:23-25: “To crown your wickedness…declares the Lord God…At the entry to every alley…you opened your legs to all comers in countless acts of fornication. You have also fornicated with your big-membered neighbors, the Egyptians…you do not act like a proper prostitute because you disdain to take a fee…you bribe them to fornicate with you.”

  What is the supposed righteousness of the race-obsessed Rev. Spurgeon’s Christ-less Jews and Judaism, but the rags and tatters of perdition?

  Rev. Spurgeon said of Jews: “Some are devout—devout men with some of whom it has been our privilege to have hearty fellowship in matters of common interest touching the things of God. When we have spoken together of the Providence of God and of faith in the Divine Mercy, we have been much of the same mind…we were able, in comparing notes, to feel the same zeal for the value of the Old Testament and for the Glory of the ever-blessed God!… I marvel not that Jews are not Christians when I know what sort of Christianity, for the most part, they have seen. When I have walked through Rome and countries under Rome’s sway—and have seen thousands bow before the image of a woman carried through the streets—when I have seen the churches crammed with people bowing down before pieces of bone, hair and teeth of dead saints, and such like things—I have said to myself, ‘If I were a worshipper of the One true God, I would look with scorn upon those who bow before these cast clouts, moldy rags, pieces of rotten timber and I know not what besides!’ No, no, good Jew! Join not with this idolatrous rabble! Remain a Jew rather than degrade yourself with this superstition!” 17

  These so-called “Jews” (we are not sure how Mr. Spurgeon has ascertained for certain they are indeed the direct descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob), congregate in graveyards and hold in awe and as material generators of spiritual power, the bodies of their deceased rabbis. Amulets are crafted by Orthodox rabbis for a fee of money (we possess a two volume set of a magic amulet-making manual recently published by Israeli rabbis). Either curses or protection are to be dispensed to those who wear those amulets.

  What is sorriest about the macabre comedy that comprises Rev. Spurgeon’s homily, is his ignorance of the role of Judaic agents in transforming the Catholic Church from that of Christ to that of the occult, by embracing the superstitious doctrines of the very Judaism which he extols and imagines is entirely separate from post-Renaissance Catholicism. In this regard he is as bamboozled as the Right-wing Catholics who are gulled by the Renaissance Church’s outbursts against certain Jews, most of which were theatrical. Both the New Age occultist, the Protestant Fundamentalist, and the “conservative” Catholic believe that the Church of Rome in the Renaissance period under study, was the nemesis of all that Judaism represented, when in truth it was the vessel into which Judaism poured its Talmudic and Kabbalistic sorceries and iniquities. After these had been fully absorbed into the corpus of the Church at the highest levels, only then did the Renaissance and post-Renaissance pontiffs mount their theatre of ostentatious “persecution” of Judaics, which was still so much of a charade that when Pope Leo XIII issued his encyclical contra Freemasonry (Humanum Genus, 1884), he scrupulously omitted all mention of the Brotherhood’s most virulent source of inspiration and direction, the rabbinic Kabbalah.18

  Returning to Rev. Hislop and his Two Babylons, we note the degree to which Hislop was in revolt against the original classical Protestantism of the sixteenth and seventeenth century which identified the Roman Constantine as a Biblical hero, and the Church prior to the Renaissance as not generally stricken by corruption and defection.

  In his acclaimed 1685 Annotation Upon the Holy Bible, the English Calvinist Matthew Pool (also spelled Poole), in his commentary on Revelation 13:6, wrote: “…for ‘till the year 1260, when the Inquisition was set up, (the Doctrine of Transubstantiation having been about that time decreed by Innocent the Third, and confirmed by the Council of Lateran), the persecution was not great…the Doctrine of Transubstantiation, though it might be broached one hundred years before, yet was made no doctrine of their Church of Six Hundred Years after the first beginning of the papacy, and therefore cannot well be reckoned among Antichrist’s first blasphemies.”

  In his introduction to Revelation 13, Pool places the rise of Antichrist in Rome three centuries after Constantine: “…we must distinguish between the rise and reign of Antichrist. It doth not seem to me reasonable to make his reign to commence higher (sooner) than 600 or 606, when he (the bishop of Rome) arrogated to himself the Primacy…”

  Targeted toward lay consumption and commissioned by the Puritan Parliament of England at the time in which the Westminster Assembly sat (1643-1649), another Protestant commentary, the monumental Annotations Upon All the Books
of the Old and New Testaments, 19 had a heroic view of Constantine, free of Hislop’s frenzies and in keeping with the early Christian perspective on this renowned protector of Christ’s people. In the annotations upon Revelation 12, “Constantine and his successors” are referred to as “God’s deputies.” His troops are equated with “Michael and his angels,” and as subduers of paganism. 20

  Hislop’s other contention is that the Blessed Virgin Mary, who, according to Catholic theology, was conceived without sin (since Jesus was the New Adam who could incarnate only in the uncontaminated “soil” of another Eden), and who is sometimes referred to as the “Queen of Heaven,” is actually a barely concealed personification of a pagan goddess.

  Who else should be Queen of Heaven other than the Mother of God? Who would dare depose this humble ever-Virgin Israelite who is the most blessed woman in all creation, having been chosen to bear the veritable flesh of God Himself? It is a tragedy that the radical Protestant reaction to her disproportionate status within the papist cult of mariolatry, is to depose her of the rightful and proportionate honor due her. There is nothing occult about such appropriate honor. In fact, it is the occult that dethrones Mary, and where she is dethroned, into the vacuum rushes either a New Age or Judaic (“Shekhinah”) goddess, or its polar opposite, the sterile, empty quarter of a Protestantism that is often, in some churches, nearly blind to the most blessed woman in all creation, has no female figure of abiding holiness in its art or liturgy, and often only grudgingly acknowledges her in the most niggardly terms of recognition.