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Showing posts with label Medici Pope Leo X. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Medici Pope Leo X. Show all posts

Monday, April 15, 2019

Buchanan, Buttigieg and Forbidden Love

Buchanan, Buttigieg and Forbidden Love

By Michael Hoffman
www.RevisionistHistory.org

The root of both usury and sodomy is situation ethics, which so-called “Conservatives” have not the vision to discern. Hence, they pen requiems for the past rather than manifestos for the future. 

"Are, for example, the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament, Christian teaching and natural law unchangeable and applicable to all men at all times? Or can some of the ten be consigned to the dumpster of antiquated moral prohibitions? This question has been brought straight into the presidential primaries by Pete Buttigieg, breakout star of the spring of 2019.what Buttigieg is saying is that either God changes his moral law to conform to the changing behavior of mankind or that, for 2,000 years, Christian preaching and practice toward homosexuals has been bigoted, injurious and morally indefensible….In the lifetime of many Americans, homosexuality and abortion were still scandalous crimes. They are now cherished constitutional rights. 

 Pat Buchanan, Mayor Pete and the Crackup of Christianity"

In a red meat column this week by Patrick J. Buchanan, he asserts the “unchangeable law” of “Christian teaching” against the spirit of our age.

The big hole in Pat’s thinking is his positing a good old days picture of the past, when abortion and sodomy were illegal. 

But those were not the "good old days” and hadn’t been for centuries. What he means to say is that they were good times in comparison to 2019; relatively speaking.

The crater that Buchanan has fallen through is his failure to address first things, rather than symptoms of the dystopian eschatology that follows from the corruption of original law.

Mr. Buchanan appeals to the law of God with half-measures that ensure more of the same decay and decline. God's law admits of no exceptions, no escape clauses and no situation ethics.

Way back yonder in 1515, when the Italian banking mafia grabbed the Catholic Church by the throat in the pontificate of Medici Pope Leo X, they used the alibi of Monte di pietá (charity toward the poor) to launch a Medici shylock operation. As a result, the immemorial Catholic dogmatic prohibition against taking one penny above the principal as rent for a loan, gradually was diminished and derogated to the point when, in 1830, any sleazy loan shark could be admitted to Communion in the Catholic Church, notwithstanding his “antiquated” mortal sin of usury.

If Patrick J. Buchanan will turn to the First Book of Timothy, at chapter six, verse ten, he will see that according to God’s word, the love of money is the root of all evil.  The permission of the Church for the renting of money (accompanied by the usual Machiavellian feints and double-talk ), marks the original weaponization of that forbidden love.

The permission of the United States government for “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg's forbidden love is a derivative of the Church’s permission for the situation ethics that made it possible for money-renters to receive Catholic Communion in good standing. 

Evil proceeds from the nullification of God’s law, a nullification which is accomplished on the basis that, “The-times-they-are-a-changin’.” 

Dante Alighieri, driven into exile from the medieval mafia fiefdom of Florence, made the connection between these two forms of forbidden love in his Inferno. Dante wrote that usury is as the sin of Sodom. 800 years later and the “Great Books” aficionados on the Right are still clueless. 

Pat can moan his requiem for the good old days, but in fact those days were rotten with the stench of money love and the supremacy of hedge fund operators and other usury parasites who up to this day continue to place the people Jesus bought for a price on that Cross on Calvary, into debt slavery.

So-called “Conservatives" are incapable of getting to the actual root of anything, whether it is the Talmudic nature of the subversion of the West, or the Renaissance papal situation ethics which, long before there was a U.S. Supreme Court or a New York media, turned the loan sharks loose on the people of God. That sodomites were eventually also turned loose is a shock only to “Conservatives."

 Until we have the grace and vision to penetrate clouds of misdirection, we will continue to inhabit the sad, stoop-shouldered ranks of history’s losers, consoling ourselves with the knowledge that wordsmiths such as Mr. Buchanan have crafted for us an eloquent obituary.  

Copyright ©2019 by RevisionistHistory.org

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Wednesday, August 08, 2018

E. Michael Jones and Usury in the Church

The Rothschild bank and the popes of usury
On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 E. Michael Jones <jones@culturewars.com> wrote:  

"Garrick Small weighs in on the usury issue, including Mr. Hoffman's claims, in the letters column of the September 2018 issue of Culture Wars.  I stand by my claim that the Church has not changed her position."
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Ignoring the role of the Rothschild bank in the papacy's revolutionary ruling admitting usurers to Communion

(This established the precedent for the later admission of abortion-enablers to Communion — Satanic situation ethics are lethal to the Gospel!)

Copyrighted material ©2017

In addition to hundreds of pages in my book Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not, my most recent “reply" to disinformation about Rome’s Money Power, such as Dr. Jones appears to be promoting, will be found on pp. 594-631 of The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome (consisting of the chapter, “The Breeders of Money Gain Dominion Over the Church of Rome"). 
Printed editions of Martin Luther’s thunderous sermons against renting money. These anti-usury pamphlets were banned by the Medici pope and circulated only in areas not controlled by Rome. 

Dr. John Rao of “The Roman Forum” held a symposium recently on how Martin Luther was supposedly the source of the rise of greed in Christendom, when in fact, a substantial part of Luther’s revolt against the papacy was his rage over the incremental papal permission for renting money, most notably by the detested papalist banking house of Fugger in Germany, and in Italy, the Medici bank, on whose behalf Medici Pope Leo X, on May 4, 1515, loosened some of the strictures against usury for the sake of alleged "charity-lending to the poor.” Papal situation ethics were employed for the accumulation of filthy lucre by Leo X's family’s banking house and that of others like them, using the alibi of the Monte di Pietá

The gradual steps initiated by the Renaissance and post-Renaissance pontiffs, evolving from covert incremental loosening to full overt permission for usury, took a little more than three centuries, culminating on August 18, 1830 in Pope Pius VIII’s directive to the effect that those Catholics who take interest on money to the rate permitted by law are free to receive Holy Communion and need not confess what had been a mortal sin for the first millennium of Christ’s Church. This remains the situation for contemporary church-goers

Perhaps it was a coincidence, but two years later, in 1832, the Rothschild bank of Paris extended a loan to keep the papacy afloat. In July 1849 the pope (Pius IX) cast lines anew to the Rothschild bank. In January 1850 Rothschild approved a loan of 50 million francs. In 1857 Vatican Secretary of State Giacomo Antonelli used Peter’s Pence as collateral in negotiating a new loan with Rothschild (cf. Usury in Christendom, p. 265).

“The Rothschilds…are the guardians of the papal treasure.” Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 2, p. 497 (Click on the image to enlarge it).

If Drs. E. Michael Jones, John Rao and other Romanist leaders like them, along with their supporters, will not study the evidence in my two books and attempt to refute it, what would be the point of any engagement with them on my part? 

As we have noted numerous times since its publication in May of 2017, the vast majority of “conservative Catholic” and “traditional Catholic” editors, bloggers and podcasters have given The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome the silent treatment. This is a technique well-known to victims of the Zionist media; that it is employed by the Romanists comes as no surprise to this writer.  When partisans have no credible answer to new discoveries in history which seriously undercut their belief systems, they suppress them. The similarity to rabbinic tactics of evasion and avoidance is striking.

Michael Hoffman
“A voice crying in the wilderness"

For Further Research

Index (free) to Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not

Prequel (free) to The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome



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Saturday, October 22, 2016

Pope Leo X: Occult Father of Luther’s movement


Pope Leo X: Occult Father of Luther’s movement 
A commentary on Roberto de Mattei’s, “To Which Church does Pope Bergoglio belong?” 
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To which Church does Pope Bergoglio belong? 

By Roberto de Mattei  

Corrispondenza Romana (Italian newspaper) October 19, 2016

Translated by Francesca Romana



[Commentary by Michael Hoffman added in boldface]

Two anniversaries overlap each other in 2017: the 100 years of the Fatima apparitions, occurring between May 13th  and October 13th 1917, and the 500 years of Luther’s revolt, beginning in Wittenberg, Germany, October 31st 1517. However, there are two other much less discussed anniversaries which also fall next year: the 300 years of the official foundation of Freemasonry (London, June 24th 1717) and the 100 years of the Russian Revolution of October 26th 1917 (the Julian calendar  in use in the Russian Empire: November 8th according to the Gregorian calendar). Yet, between the Protestant Revolution and the Communist Revolution through to the French Revolution, the daughter of Freemasonry, there runs an indissoluble red thread which Pius XII, in his famous discourse Nel contemplare of October 12th 1952, summed up in three historic phrases, corresponding to Protestantism, the Age of Enlightenment and Marxist atheism: Christ – yes, Church – no. God – yes, Christ – no. Finally the impious cry: God is dead; in fact: God has never been.” [Hoffman: The “indissoluble” thread is not, since it has managed to dissolve part of the fabric of the conspiracy against God and man which Mattei’s tired old Church of Rome propaganda tale omits. 1. Luther’s protest (“revolt”) was fueled in large part by the rise of the Money Power inside the Church and with it Medici Pope Leo X’s permission for gradual usury under cover of “monte” banking house of “compassion;” and 2. Leo X and his hierarchy having approved for years the Talmudic-Kabbalistic Judaization of the revolutionary Hermetic-Catholic change agent Johannes Reuchlin, who was defended and advanced by a proto-Rosicrucian movement that would eventually become the basis for Freemasonry. Hence, these crimes are laid beginning at the door of the pontificate of Leo X who initiated them, not with Luther who reacted to them].

The anarchic yearnings of Communism were already implicitly present in the first Protestant negations – observed Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira: “Whether from the point of view of Luther’s explicit formation, all of the tendencies, all of the mind-set, all of the imponderable elements of the Lutheran explosion, carried already in itself, in a very authentic and full way, even if implicit, the spirit of Voltaire and Robespierre, Marx and Lenin” (Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Sugarco, Milan, 2009, pp.61-62).

[Here we have on display the rank ignorance of the Italian and Spanish papalolaters. Voltaire despised the Old Testament which Luther venerated. Robespierre was a Jesuit-educated revolutionary who imbibed from post-Renaissance Jesuit papalolatry the doctrine that “error has no rights.” He applied it to his enemies as had the Church of Rome. Marx and Lenin despised the Christian faith and Luther was most certainly a Christian who had denounced violence in the service of ideological coercion. Lutherans were severely persecuted under Communism]

In this respect, the errors the Soviet Russia spread, starting from 1917, were a chain of ideological aberrations from Marx and Lenin which went back to the first Protestant heresiarchs. The 1517 Lutheran Revolution can therefore be considered one of the most nefarious events in the history of humanity, on par with the Masonic revolution in 1789, and the Communist one in 1917. Further, the message of Fatima, which foresaw the spreading of Communist errors throughout the world, contains implicitly the rejection  of the errors of Protestantism and the French Revolution. [The Italian author imagines that his authority is sufficient to have these absurdly didactic statements believed; here he is only preaching to his own choir].

The start of the centenary of the Fatima apparitions on October 13th 2016 was buried under a blanket of silence. That same day, Pope Francis received in the Paul VI Audience Hall, a thousand Lutheran “pilgrims” and in the Vatican a statue of Martin Luther was honored, as appears in the images Antonio Socci published on his Facebook page. 

Next October 31st, moreover, Pope Francis will go to Lund in Sweden, where he will take part in a joint Catholic-Lutheran ceremony commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. As can be read in the communiqué drawn up by the World Lutheran Federation and the Papal Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, the aim of the event is “to express the gifts of the Reform and ask forgiveness for the division perpetuated by Christians of the two traditions.

The Valdese theologian and pastor, Paolo Ricca, involved for decades in ecumenical dialogue, voiced his satisfaction “seeing as it is the first time a Pope commemorates the Reform. This, in my opinion, constitutes a step forward with regard to the important aims that have been achieved with the Second Vatican Council, which -  by including in its texts and so giving value to some fundamental principles and themes of the Reform – marked a decisive turning point in the relationships between Catholics and Protestants. By taking part in the commemoration, as the highest representative of the Catholic Church is prepared to do, means, in my view, to consider the Reform as a positive event in the history of the Church which also did some good for Catholicism. The participation at the commemoration is a gesture of great relevance also because the Pope is going to Lund, to the home of the Lutherans; as if he were one of the family.  My impression is, in a way I wouldn’t know how to define, that he also feels part of that portion of Christianity born of the Reform.”

According to Ricca, the main contribution offered by Pope Francis is “his effort to reinvent the papacy, that is, the search for a new and different way of understanding and living the ministry of the Bishop of Rome. This search – presuming my interpretation somewhat hits the mark  - might take us a long way, since the papacy – because of the way it has been understood and lived over the last 1000 years – is one of the great obstacles to Christian Unity. It seems to me Pope Francis is moving towards a model of the papacy different to the traditional one, with respect to which the other Christian Churches might take on new positions. If it were so, this theme might be completely reconsidered in ecumenical circles.”

The fact that this interview was published on October 9th by Vatican Insider, considered a semi-official Vatican site, makes one think that this interpretation of the Lund trip as well as the papal intentions, have been authorized and are agreeable to Pope Francis.

During his audience with the Lutherans on October 13th, Pope Bergoglio also said that proselytism, is “the strongest poison” against ecumenism. “The greatest reformers are the saints – he added -  and the Church is always in need of reform”. These words contain simultaneously, as is frequent in his discourses, a truth and a deception. The truth is that the saints, from St Gregory VII to St. Pius X, have [indeed] been the greatest reformers. The deception consists in insinuating that the pseudo-reformers, like Luther, are to be considered saints.  The statement that proselytism or the missionary spirit, is “the strongest poison against ecumenism” must, instead, be reversed: ecumenism, as it is understood today, is the greatest poison against the Church’s missionary spirit. [Ecumenism, more appropriately and accurately religious syncretism, was pioneered and promulgated by Catholic heretics who were protected by the Renaissance popes: Rev. Fr. Marsilio Ficino and that favorite of Saint John Paul II and Cardinal Henri de Lubac: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Both of these two Renaissance occult syncretists were creatures of the Medici dynasty. Their theology was transmitted to the hierarchy of the Church by papal conspiracy; the aforementioned Reuchlin was Giovanni Pico’s student. All three, Ficino, Pico and Reuchlin, had Judaic handlers who directed their path of infiltration of the Church upward and onward]

The Saints have always been moved by this spirit, beginning with the Jesuits who landed in Brazil, the Congo and the Indies in the XVI century, while their confreres Diego Lainez,  Alfonso Salmeron and Peter Canisio, at the Council of Trent, fought against the errors of Lutheranism and Calvinism.

Yet, according to Pope Francis those outside the Church do not have to be converted. At the audience on October 13th, in an off-the-cuff response to questions from some young people, he said: “I like good Lutherans a lot, Lutherans who truly follow the faith of Jesus Christ. On the contrary, I don’t like lukewarm Catholics and lukewarm Lutherans.” [Why this special objection concerning Lutherans when the pope believes publicly that “Jews” do not have to be converted to Catholicism? Where was the outrage when Pope Saint John Paul and the “conservative” Pope Benedict XVI and their successor Francis, all decreed (or insinuated) that “Jews” do not need to be converted to Catholicism? Lutherans are an easy target compared to rabbis. The papal non-proselyte pledge was first made on behalf of the Talmudic blasphemers of Jesus. It only follows from that papal perversity that Lutherans would not be subject to proselytism if Judaics are not. Always this obsession with symptoms rather than root causes]

With another deformation in language, Pope Bergoglio calls “good Lutherans” those Protestants who do not follow the faith of Jesus Christ, but its deformation and “lukewarm Catholics” those fervent sons and daughters of the Church who reject the equalizing of the truth of the Catholic religion with the error of Lutheranism.

All of this brings us to the question: what will happen in Lund on October 31st?  We know that the commemoration will include a joint celebration based on the Liturgical Catholic-Lutheran guide, Common Prayer, elaborated from the document From Conflict to Communion. The Common Catholic-Lutheran Commemoration of the Reformation in 2017, drawn-up by the Catholic-Lutheran Commission for the unity of Christians. There are those who rightly fear an “intercommunion” between Catholic and Lutherans, which would be sacrilegious, since the Lutherans do not believe in Transubstantiation. Above all, that it will be said Luther was not a heresiarch, but a reformer unjustly persecuted and that the Church has to rehabilitate the “gifts of the Reform.”  Those who persist in considering the condemnation of Luther proper and think his followers heretics and schismatics, must be harshly criticized and excluded from the Church of Pope Francis. But then again, to what Church does Jorge Mario Begoglio belong?

[End quote from Mr. Mattei]

Hoffman: Mattei’s is the language of the Inquisition: “heretics and schismatics.” To employ these explosive and potentially wounding brands however, is not ipso facto wrong, as long as the employment is without the stain of the sin of omission, is made in historical context, and is scrupulously accurate. 

The Talmud publisher, mortal-sin-of-usury enabler and simonaic Pope Leo X (he staged a plot against his own life so he could rake in more shekels), a scion of the Medici dynasty’s citadel of banking and sodomy in Florence, was a far greater heretic than Luther; moreover he was the father of Luther’s revolt: for the way in which Leo colluded with the evil Catholic banking house of Fugger in collecting the shekels from the sale of indulgences, which mortally wounded the young Luther’s faith in the papacy. 

Without citing these truths, Mattei’s verbiage is not much more than shopworn, 19th century Vatican boilerplate. In consideration of his omissions, and the fact that his dumbed-down Catholic readership is ignorant of the true history of Pope Leo X, his thesis is gravely fallacious and fatally warped.

Dear Mr. Mattei: please begin your autopsy of the roots of Freemasonry, the 18th century French terror and the Marxist-Leninist Communist gulag, with the occult-Catholicism which was the harlot-mother of it. Neoplatonic-Hermetic-Kabbalistic Catholicism infiltrated the highest echelon of the Church of Rome in the wake of the Council of Florence, and Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Florentine Academy. Not one of the occult Catholic heretics in this timeline was ever long imprisoned, much less executed; meanwhile the leading opponent of it, the Servant of God Girolamo Savonarola, was quickly burned to death.

The Catholic Church had stood for 1400 years as Christ’s ecclesia, and a bulwark of the Gospel, until the coming of the Renaissance and the revolutionary popes of that era. 

For “traditional” Catholics to regurgitate cartoon versions of history only serves the Cryptocracy’s agenda of sowing confusion and misdirection. 

In view of the authentic, suppressed history of the Renaissance papacy, the pontificate of Pope Francis is not surprising or anomalous; it represents the fulfillment of the fertile seeds of syncretism planted by popes of the Renaissance. Until Catholics have the courage and independence of mind to learn these truths and act upon them, the great task of restoration will come to nothing.

Michael Hoffman is the author of the The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome, forthcoming in 2017 from Independent History and Research, America’s leading publisher of revisionist history.  To browse an online catalog: U.S. residents see here
Canada and overseas: here


Independent History and Research Box 849, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho 83816 USA 
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Thursday, August 11, 2016

Secret History of the Protestant Reformation

The Secret History of the Protestant Reformation

A Revolt Against Papal-Fugger Usury 
and Catholic Nominalism

Michael Hoffman

“The heathen were able, by the light of reason, to conclude that a usurer is a double-dyed thief and murderer. We Christians, however, hold them in such honor, that we fairly worship them for the sake of their moneyWhoever eats up, robs and steals the nourishment of another, that man commits as great a murder...as he who starves a man or utterly undoes him. Such does a usurer, and sits the while safe on his stool, when he ought rather to be hanging on the gallows, and be eaten by as many ravens as he has stolen guilders
"Meanwhile, we hang the small thieves...Little thieves are put in the stocks, great thieves go flaunting gold and silks...there is, on this earth, no greater enemy of man (after the devil), than a gripe-money and usurer, for he wants to be god over all men...a usurer and money gluttonsuch a one would would have the whole world perish from hunger and thirst, misery and want...so that he may have all to himself and every one may receive from him as from a god, and be his serf forever. 
"To wear fine cloaks, golden chains...to be deemed and taken for a worthy, pious man...Usury is a great huge monster, like a werewolf, who lays waste all...and yet decks himself out and would be thought pious...”
 Martin Luther

Luther’s views were a loyal reaffirmation of the immemorial Roman Catholic dogma of all of the popes prior to the Renaissance, all of the Fathers of the Early Church, of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Anthony of Padua. After Neoplatonic-Hermeticism invaded the hierarchy of the Church of Rome it succumbed to the modernism of the neo-Catholic Nominalist school, which made 5% usury respectable and fueled the Catholic Fugger usury empire (the Fuggers were the buccaneer-capitalists who banked the Renaissance papacy's indulgence loot). 

Catholics excoriate John Calvin for supposedly pioneering the 5% interest rate in Christendom, but Calvin wasn’t even born when Nominalism and the “5% Fuggers" were first in the ascendant; and Calvin was a child when Medici Pope Leo X began the gradual derogation of the immutable Catholic law against profit on loans (which was sustained by all of his successors), beginning with his papal bull of May, 1515. 

Martin Luther’s rage against the pope's incremental permission for profit on loans is one of the most tightly suppressed motivating factors of the early Protestant Reformation

To this day, the world believes the propaganda that Rome stood against the money-gluttons, while it was the early Protestants who were the first to enable them. In fact, once the Medici put their “monte” usury banks into operation, the Money Power was in a position to buy ecclesiastical offices and choose personnel in the hierarchy of the Church. From the sixteenth century until now the Church of Rome has been under the suzerainty of money.

Many Catholics flee from these facts and our writings and videos on this subject are suppressed or ignored, eerily similar to Zionist tactics. No debate is undertaken (a lone, honorable exception was Anthony Santelli's review in Culture Wars). 

We will not be silenced! The facts presented in our work on the roots of the Money Power in western civilization are not going to go away because papist thought-cops want it to be so. Modern-Catholic “silent treatment” methods will not extinguish the truth.

For further research:

Revisionist History Newsletter No. 65: Martin Luther and Zinskauf: The German Reformation in the Struggle over Usury. Luther’s early and later positions against greed and the Money Power, documented. So many lies have been told about Luther in this regard. No bull, just facts: where he erred and where he was right. 

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"History of Catholic and Protestant Usury" DVD
In this college-level lecture in the theology of money given at Lansing, Michigan in April, 2015, historian Michael Hoffman summarizes his book Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not, and answers challenging questions from the audience. Digitally recorded in color in front of a live audience. Approx. two hours. All-region DVD.

Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not by Michael Hoffman
Softcover book, 416 pages, illustrated.

Both the book and the DVD are available for purchase here:


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Friday, March 11, 2016

Martin Luther and the “Age of Gold"

Half a Millennium of Total Depravity (1517-2017): 
 A Critique of Luther’s Impact on the Eve of His “Catholic” Apotheosis

24th Annual Roman Forum Summer Symposium
Gardone Riviera (Italy), June 27th-July 8th, 2016

(Michael Hoffman’s comment follows this statement)

         Our civilization is so sick that even the best efforts to prop up its few tottering remnants manifest the pathetic illness that has step by step brought the entire structure crumbling down. The disease in question is a willful, prideful, irrational, and ignorant obsession with “freedom”. But this is a malady that gained its initial effective entry into Christendom in union with the concept of the natural world as the realm of “total depravity”.

         It is crucially important that we recognize both the ultimate responsibility of this hideous willful liberty for the destruction of our Classical and Christian culture as well as the role played by the idea that “incarnated” it historically in our midst for two reasons. The first is so that we can attempt seriously to rid ourselves of their monstrous influence over our own minds, souls, and bodies. The second is because a massive attempt to masquerade the truth regarding their real character and alliance will be mounted in conjunction with the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s devastating appearance on the public scene in 2017: and this for the sake of maintaining their nefarious impact upon believers and delivering the Faith its coup de grace as a meaningful social force.
         
Allow me to cite Philip Hughes regarding Luther and his antecedents as a means of driving home the point that I wish to make in this brief piece:

All those anti-intellectualist, anti-institutional forces that had plagued and hindered the medieval Church for centuries, whose chronic maleficent activity had, in fact, been the main cause why—as we are often tempted to say—so little was done effectively to maintain a generally higher standard of Christian life; all the forces that were the chronic distraction of the medieval papacy, were now stabilized, institutionalized in the new reformed Christian Church. Enthronement of the will as the supreme human faculty; hostility to the activity of the intelligence in spiritual matters and in doctrine; the ideal of a Christian perfection that is independent of sacraments and independent of the authoritative teaching of clerics; of sanctity attainable through one’s own self-sufficing spiritual activities; denial of the truth that Christianity, like man, is a social thing;—all the crude, backwoods, obscurantist theories bred of the degrading pride that comes with chosen ignorance, the pride of men ignorant because unable to be wise except through the wisdom of others, now have their fling. Luther’s own special contribution—over and above the key doctrines that set all this mischief loose—is the notion of life as radically evil. (Hughes, A History of the Church, Sheed & Ward, 1949, III, 529).

         Hughes eloquently stresses the central fact that our underlying problem is pre-Lutheran in origin. In other words, 1517 is not the source of our woe---any more, for that matter, than 1962 and the opening of Second Vatican Council was. All of the spiritual, intellectual, political, and social diseases that had hovered for centuries about the Camp of the Saints had gathered together, ready for injection into the lymphatic system of Catholic Christendom as one “mega malady”, already long before that date. All of these ultimately reflected a revulsion over the need for the individual and his entire environment to be corrected, perfected, and transformed under the Kingship of Christ with the aid of Faith, Grace, Reason on the one hand, and social authority, both supernatural and natural, on the other. Anyone in 1516 looking for a simple explanation for why he should reject these aids had available to him an embarrassment of arguments from a myriad of fonts indicating that the only thing that really mattered was the individual and his willful feelings; and that relying upon these alone was somehow the sole pathway to pleasing God.
         Nevertheless, the conflicted mind of the Late Middle Ages clearly needed someone with the outlook and the talented rhetorical venom of a Luther effectively to inject this mega malady into the lymph of Christendom. Christian man was too aware of the reality of sin to leap directly into an adulation of his individual willfulness. Luther’s concept of the “total depravity” of the individual and the world in which he lived after Original Sin gave Everyman the pious entry into the obsession with liberty that was required. After all, it seemed so humble to argue for each believer’s personal need to rely solely on God’s grace to save him; for his need to affirm that “freedom” from “enslavement” to “the despotism” of “the Law” that allowed him to avoid a “hopeless” and ultimately spiritually arrogant attempt to bend his individual, life long, workaday thoughts and actions to fall in line with the commands of Christ.
Still, it proved to be very easy over the course of a couple of generations for this negative definition of “liberty”---a “freedom” from the Law---to be transformed, in the Enlightenment, into the means for a positive new and redemptive order of things. In short, it did not take long for a freedom from restraints upon the lawless, individual willfulness of Luther’s totally depraved mankind to be seen as the providential tool for molding unbridled human thoughts and actions into the building blocks of a new Age of Gold. In other words, the more that a freedom from restraints actually ensured that the truly sinful passions of mankind were all released in order to allow flawed individuals truly to became totally depraved, the more that that depravity was now looked upon as something intrinsically wonderful, good, and even pleasing to God. 
It is precisely because this venomous attempt to build a civilization upon a freedom from efforts to fight Original Sin and its willful effects upon individuals is so tempting that it has infected almost all of us in some way or another. We almost all fall prey to the enticement simply to pick what “liberty” most appeals to our particular passion, declare it pleasing to God, willfully condemn whichever application of the same principle we find personally unacceptable when used by others, and ignore the innately poisonous nature of the entire concept. And, quite frankly, we almost all fall prey to the cynical temptation to mobilize the “total depravity” argument anew when we chuckle over the naïve, utopian vision of opponents who want to use law and authority to help make people virtuous in realms where we want “liberty”. But blithely making common cause with “liberty” in a world that did not have to be totally depraved but is making every effort to become so is riding on the back of a willful monster---with the current self-destructive appeal to religious liberty at the top of the list. It is only the positive liberty to use our Faith, Grace, our Reason, and the help of social authorities, both supernatural and natural, to correct and transform ourselves under the Social Kingship of Christ that can lead to a life worth living in this world and to eternal happiness in the next. 
Sad to say, it is absolutely certain that most of our ecclesiastical leaders, foot soldiers of the Zeitgeist that they are, will turn 2017 into a year long paean to the accomplishments of Luther & Company and “all those anti-intellectualist, anti-institutional forces”; “all the crude, backwoods, obscurantist theories bred of the degrading pride that comes with chosen ignorance, the pride of men ignorant because unable to be wise except through the wisdom of others” that Philip Hughes tells us lay behind them for centuries. It is our duty as Traditionalist Catholics to steel ourselves against the lies that are to come concerning the wonderful value of such hideous, willful principles that now have “had their fling” for five hundred years. It is our duty to hammer home the evil they have caused. Because that five hundred year ignorant, willful, individualist cancer has spread everywhere throughout the lymph of Christendom into every institution and everyone’s mindset, believing Catholics should spend the next two years helping those less aware among us to gird their loins. 2017---like 1517---is going to be a trial for all of us. And it is an awakening to this frightful nightmare that the 24th Annual Summer Symposium of the Roman Forum will seek to assure.
This year's lectures on "Half a Millennium of Total Depravity" will be going into a book to be published by Angelico Press. We very much intend it to serve as a means of fighting the campaign to glorify Luther which will indeed characterize 2017. 

 — John C. Rao (D.Phil., Oxford University)
Associate Professor of History, St. John’s University
Chairman, Roman Forum 
11 Carmine St., Apt. 2C New York, NY 10014
http://www.romanforum.org/symposium/summer2016/
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Michael Hoffman’s comment: In all of John Rao’s preceding remarks there is no allusion to the Lutheran civilization that produced J.S. Bach and Johann Andreas Eisenmenger (author of the magisterial Entdecktes Judenthum), to name but two of the West’s most outstanding men. Instead, there is a resort to the all too familiar canard, insinuated here, that Luther is synonymous with the coming of a supercharged avarice ("did not take long for a freedom from restraints upon the lawless, individual willfulness of Luther’s totally depraved mankind to be seen as the providential tool for molding unbridled human thoughts and actions into the building blocks of a new Age of Gold”). Such an accusation, to have utility, must ignore the "Age of Gold’s" two notorious agents, both contemporaries of Luther: the hideous Medici Pope Leo X who sanctioned not only the sale of indulgences, but Monte-bank usury which started the gradualist erosion of the Church’s immemorial dogma against profit on loans; and Johann Eck, Luther’s nemesis, who advocated a 5% rate of usury in his role as a theological prostitute for the fabulously wealthy Catholic banking house of Fugger. These facts are elucidated in this writer’s book, Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not, which is studiously ignored by Catholics like Dr. Rao. Proceeding from Rao’s tack, the “traditional” Catholic assault on Luther will fail. There are ample grounds for criticizing and questioning Luther, but resorting to the old libel that his life’s work enhanced the "Age of Gold" is not one of them. Martin Luther is one of the most illustrious and principled opponents of profit on loans and the ruinous Money Power domination that compound interest would engender, of anyone in Renaissance Christendom. To suggest otherwise is rank ignorance and discredits whoever would preach these libels to anyone other than the members of their own anti-Lutheran choir.
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