By Michael Hoffman
The ideology of Neoplatonic Hermeticism gained firm purchase among members of the Catholic elite in Florence, Italy circa 1450; after that it entered the Vatican toward the end of the 15th century, and the papacy itself by 1515. It predates Hegel’s concept of thesis-antithesis-synthesis by centuries. Among its most famous early Renaissance practitioners were Cosimo and Lorenzo Medici and Nicolo Machiavelli.
But what of the pope’s victory at Lepanto and the papal burning of the Talmud? Those events were akin to Pope Paul VI issuing Humane Vitae (his encyclical condemning artificial birth control) while suppressing the Tridentine Latin Mass. The thesis is visible but not the occult antithesis, and people are deceived.
The current thesis has Pope Francis announcing that a Muslim Mayor of London with connections to Sunni Wahhabist extremists, is good for Europe, while in the same interview he poses his antithesis: praising and offering support to the anti-Muslim Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), founded by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre:
La Croix: "You received, on the past April 1st, Bp. Bernard Fellay, Superior-General of the Society of Saint Pius X. Is the reintegration of the Lefebvrists in the Church once again being considered?"
Pope Francis: "In Buenos Aires, I always spoke with them. They saluted me, they asked for [my] blessing on their knees. They consider themselves Catholic. They love the Church. Bp. Fellay is a man with whom we can dialogue. It is not the case of other somewhat strange elements, such as Bp. Williamson, or others who have radicalized. I think, as I had expressed in Argentina, that they are Catholics on the path to full communion. During this Year of Mercy, it seemed that I should authorize their confessors to pardon the sin of abortion. They thanked me for this gesture...We dialogue well, we do a good work.” (End quote).
To the Right wing of the Church he gives this approbation to the “traditional Catholic” SSPX. To the Left he lends his support to mass Sunni-Salafist migration to Europe.
Pope Francis to La Croix:
"Coming back to the migrant issue, the worst form of welcome is to ‘ghettoize’them. On the contrary, it’s necessary to integrate them. In Brussels, the terrorists were Belgians, children of migrants, but they grew up in a ghetto…. I am thinking here of Pope Gregory the Great (pope from 590 – 604), who negotiated with the people known as barbarians, who were subsequently integrated. This integration is all the more necessary today since, as a result of a selfish search for well-being, Europe is experiencing the grave problem of a declining birth rate.” (End quote).
The terrorists congregate in a ghetto because their brand of Salafism demands a ghetto. It is not the fault of Europe. Some terrorists have been shown to have attended European universities often at the taxpayer’s expense, and yet still they return to their ghetto mentality and spew blood and fire upon the hand that fed them so generously.
Furthermore, Pope Gregory did not oversee the “integration” of barbarians into Europe in the sixth century. They were already there. They were mostly indigenous. Pope Gregory helped to organize the conversion of the barbarians. Only after they were converted to Catholicism were they integrated, and not before. Don’t imagine that Francis is not familiar with these facts. He is playing a game.
In the La Croix interview he purports to lament the declining birth rate of Europeans. This is a macabre jest. The pontiff has admonished Catholics for allegedly talking too much about abortion and contraception. He refused to campaign against laws in Ireland and under his nose in Italy, conferring state recognition of marriage upon practicing homosexuals. He is on record referring disparagingly to Catholics with many children, saying they breed like rabbits. On May 19, on learning that pro-abortion politician Marco Pannella had died, the Papal spokesman, Fr. Federico Lombardi praised — in a written statement, not off the cuff — the man who helped lead Italy in the 1970s to legalize abortion. [Rorate Caeli]
This writer will not be the only one to draw attention to the duplicity of Francis in these matters. But we will be mostly alone in raising the awareness that when the Pope issues these Janus-faced pronouncements and double-talk, he is doing so consonant with the 500-year-old tradition of Neoplatonic Hermeticism inside Rome.
Because we have been sufficiently processed, the game is played now in the open, whereas in centuries past, of necessity it operated in a more clandestine context. In either case, the joke is on us.
Copyright©2016
Michael Hoffman's next book, “The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome,” is due for publication this autumn.
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