Television: The Freemason’s Greatest Achievement
By Skye Dolphin
Every guilty American knows that the more television he watches out of laziness or boredom, the more unhealthy he becomes. His brain begins to dull as his body begins to soften strangely, growing in size and blubber. However, how many viewers of television know the darker, more subtle effect of television: the complete corruption of the soul caused by spiritual apathy? The enemies of the Catholic Church, especially the Freemasons, have used the television to project messages of relaxed morality and anti-Catholicism.
Father Peter R. Scott of the SSPX clarifies why television viewing is dangerous:
It is equally obvious, and every traditional Catholic will admit it, that the regular watching of television for children is an occasion of sin, and this not just because of the obvious sins of impurity, but especially of materialism, concupiscence of the eyes, the loss of the Faith and the perversion of the mind by the parading of the false ideals of subjectivism and liberalism continually before the eyes of the young.
Many children have grown up on television. The television has replaced quality family time. When the child is unpleased with something in his environment, he cries, trying to gain the attention of his mother or father. In times before television, either the parents would scold him for his angry temper or would comfort him or maybe even play a game with him. However, in these most modern times, the parents will simply do the easy thing: they will set the child before the television screen, which instantly captures his attention and renders him senseless for as long as he is captivated by the bright, flashing images before him. The parents are satisfied; no work had to be done. The child is satisfied; whatever was bothering him before is completely forgotten.
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As Father Scott has written, it is an occasion of sin to expose one’s self to the evil messages of the television. And to deliberately expose one’s self to an occasion of sin is actually a sin. So every time one watches the television, he is sinning. And if the occasion of sin is mortal, the viewing itself becomes a mortal sin. But the viewing of television is not only sinful because of the perverted ideals, the materialism, the liberalism and the subtle anti-Catholic messages; it is sinful because it is an addiction to laziness; it is no more than a poisonous drug, the opiate of the masses. The more one watches television, the more one begins to crave it more. When someone is watching television, he is watching millions of tiny, tiny images that a constantly flashing, so that his brain must put the images together to form one, unified image. In order to do this, the brain enters a state called the “alpha” state, in which the left side becomes completely inactive, in a zombie-like mode of consciousness. The left side of the brain is the logical, well-tempered, mathematical portion. Needless to say, television is probably the cause of today’s children’s inability to solve math problems without a calculator.
Because one needs not use his logical side of the brain while viewing television, he becomes incredibly relaxed and open to everything he hears and sees on the screen. He needs not do anything, he becomes no more than a beast, filling his belly, filling his mind with nothing but dust. He becomes completely passive, doing nothing but laying down, completely enthralled by what he is watching. In this state, any group (the government, the Freemasons, the Neo-Nazis) can inject into the world’s consciousness anything it wants to.
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Watching the television dulls the mind and also opens the mind to sinful refuse such as immodesty and sexual abuses. The more and more one exposes himself to such negative views on Catholic morality, the more he begins to question his own morals and the more he becomes used to the evil morals of the world. He watches millions of women wearing tight jeans and low cut shirts and eventually begins to think this sinful style of dress is acceptable and commonplace. Women begin to think this way as well. They think that they must follow the trends of the modern era so that they will not “stick out” in a crowd or be the subject of someone’s ridicule. Soon enough, television has brainwashed every woman to wear immodest clothing because--it is simply the social rule.
Sex is also exploited on television. It seems that one cannot possibly watch a single sitcom these days without hearing a dirty reference to a sinful sexual relationship. “Typical teen fare contains heavy doses of sexual content, ranging from touching, kissing, jokes, and innuendo to conversations about sexual activity and portrayals of intercourse. Sex is often presented as a casual activity without risk or consequences. Conventional wisdom holds that the messages young viewers absorb from television promote sexual activity in this group” (Collins).
Marriage is also attacked fiercely. The role of the woman, as portrayed on most modern television shows, is that of either a single “mom,” the “boss” of the house or just a hard-working (outside of the house) wife. These women are considered heroes, no matter how morally relaxed they are. According to Saint Paul, a woman is not supposed to be a single “mom” or the head of the household, rather, she is to be meek and gentle, in submission to her husband at all times. “In like manner also let wives be subject to their
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husbands: that if any believe not the word, they may be won without the word, by the conversation of the wives. Considering your chaste conversation with fear.”
Therefore, television should be eschewed by all Catholics. It is clearly an evil device that the Freemasons have manipulated to spread their evil values. Let us be the Church Militant, fighting ever valiantly against the evils of the world, including the most evil infection of modern times: the flashing box of sin!
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Luther, Exposing the Myth
LUTHER-AS HE WAS
(Death Mask by Lucas Fortnagel – Leipzig, University Library)*
“Among you there will be lying teachers who will bring in destructive sects . . . And many will follow their wanton conduct, and because of them the way of truth will be maligned.” - II Peter 2:1-2
By Fr. Raymond Taouk
Luther speaks for himself;
With the New Movie on Luther having recently come out I think it would be good to get a real insight to the true Character of Luther and expose “legend” of “Luther Reformer”. Luther is undoubtedly the father of the Protestant rebellion and spiritual father of the Modern Apostasy from God. The object of this article on Martin Luther is not to give his history, which is easily researched, but rather to give direct quotes from a man called a “great religious reformer” and to whom many non-Catholics trace back real origin of their respective churches.
Who will doubt that the best judge of Luther’s true character is Luther himself? And so from Luther’s own words we shall see him for what he really was, that is a rebellious apostate, who abandoned the faith and led many into apostasy from God under the guise of “reformation” in order to follow his perverse inclinations.[1] Keeping in mind that none of the following statements of Luther, which I will quote, were ever retracted by him, and so they may still be considered as part of his “religious thought”. This should show the aspect of Martin Luther which Protestants and all alike so conveniently overlooked in these days of false ecumenism and intellectual dishonesty.
With the New Movie on Luther having recently come out I think it would be good to get a real insight to the true Character of Luther and expose “legend” of “Luther Reformer”. Luther is undoubtedly the father of the Protestant rebellion and spiritual father of the Modern Apostasy from God. The object of this article on Martin Luther is not to give his history, which is easily researched, but rather to give direct quotes from a man called a “great religious reformer” and to whom many non-Catholics trace back real origin of their respective churches.
Who will doubt that the best judge of Luther’s true character is Luther himself? And so from Luther’s own words we shall see him for what he really was, that is a rebellious apostate, who abandoned the faith and led many into apostasy from God under the guise of “reformation” in order to follow his perverse inclinations.[1] Keeping in mind that none of the following statements of Luther, which I will quote, were ever retracted by him, and so they may still be considered as part of his “religious thought”. This should show the aspect of Martin Luther which Protestants and all alike so conveniently overlooked in these days of false ecumenism and intellectual dishonesty.
The Commandments
Christ taught: “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.”[2]
Luther in speaking of the commandments teaches: "Their only purpose is to show man his impotence to do good and to teach him to despair of himself"[3]
“Thou shalt not covet,’ is a commandment which proves us all to be sinners; since it is not in man’s power not to covet, and the same is the drift of all the commandments, for they are all equally impossible to us.”
"Moses is an executioner, a cruel lictor, a torturer a torturer who tears our flesh out with pincers and makes us suffer martyrdom . . . Whoever, in the name of Christ, terrifies and troubles consciences, is not the messenger of Christ, but of the devil . . . Let us therefore send Moses packing and for ever." [4]
“We must remove the Decalogue out of sight and heart” (De Wette 4, 188).
“If we allow them - the Commandments - any influence in our conscience, they become the cloak of all evil, heresies and blasphemies” (Comm. ad Galat, p.310).
What is more is that scripture constantly declares the greatness of the commandments and the importance of keeping them:
Ps. 19 :7 : “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is clear, enlightening the eyes.”
FREE WILL
Christ taught: “Not every one who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” [6]
Luther teaches: "...with regard to God, and in all that bears on salvation or damnation, (man) has no 'free-will', but is a captive, prisoner and bond slave, either to the will of God, or to the will of Satan."[7]
"...we do everything of necessity and nothing by 'free-will'; for the power of 'free-will' is nil..."[8]
"Man is like a horse. Does God leap into the saddle? The horse is obedient and accommodates itself to every movement of the rider and goes whither he wills it. Does God throw down the reins? Then Satan leaps upon the back of the animal, which bends, goes and submits to the spurs and caprices of its new rider... Therefore, necessity, not free will, is the controlling principle of our conduct. God is the author of what is evil as well as of what is good, and, as He bestows happiness on those who merit it not, so also does He damn others who deserve not their fate." [9]
“His (Judas) will was the work of God; God by His almighty power moved his will as He does all that is in this world.”[10]
On Reason
Christ taught: “ Be therefore, wise as serpents and simple as doves”[11]
“You know then how to discern the face of the sky: and can you not know the signs of the times?”[12]
Luther teaches: “No good work happens as the result of one’s own wisdom; but everything must happen in a stupor . . . Reason must be left behind for it is the enemy of faith.” [13]
“Reason is the devils handmaid and does nothing but blaspheme and dishonor all that God says or does.” [14]
“Reason is directly opposed to faith, and one ought to let it be; in believers it should be killed and buried.”[15]
“One should learn Philosophy only as one learns witchcraft, that is to destroy it; as one finds out about errors, in order to refute them”[16]
On Sin
Christ taught: “He that commits sin is of the devil: for the devil sinned from the beginning. For this purpose, the Son of God appeared that He might destroy the works of the devil.” - 1 John 3:8
Luther teaches: “A person that is baptized cannot, thou he would, lose his salvation by any sins however grievous, unless he refuses to believe. For no sins can damn him but unbelief alone.”[17]
Luther teaches: “A person that is baptized cannot, thou he would, lose his salvation by any sins however grievous, unless he refuses to believe. For no sins can damn him but unbelief alone.”[17]
"Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides... No sin can separate us from Him, even if we were to kill or commit adultery thousands of times each day."[18]
"Do not ask anything of your conscience; and if it speaks, do not listen to it; if it insists, stifle it, amuse yourself; if necessary, commit some good big sin, in order to drive it away. Conscience is the voice of Satan, and it is necessary always to do just the contrary of what Satan wishes." [19]
Faith and Good works
Christ taught: “Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your father who is in heaven.”[20]
Christ taught (in the words of St. James) “What shall it profit, my brethren, if a he has faith, but has not works? Shall faith be able to save him? So faith also, if it have not works is dead in itself.”[21]
Luther teaches: “For we account a man to be justified by faith alone, without the works of the law.” – On Translation and on the Intercession of the Saints
Christ taught (in the words of St. James) “What shall it profit, my brethren, if a he has faith, but has not works? Shall faith be able to save him? So faith also, if it have not works is dead in itself.”[21]
Luther teaches: “For we account a man to be justified by faith alone, without the works of the law.” – On Translation and on the Intercession of the Saints
“There is no scandal greater, more dangerous, more venomous, than a good outward life, manifested by good works and a pious mode of life. That is the grand portal, the highway that leads to damnation." [24]
Social Justice
Christ taught: “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.”[26]
Luther teaches [27]: “Peasants are no better than straw. They will not hear the word and they are without sense; therefore they must be compelled to hear the crack of the whip and the whiz of bullets and it is only what they deserve.” [28]
“To kill a peasant is not murder; it is helping to extinguish the conflagration. Let there be no half measures! Crush them! Cut their throats! Transfix them. Leave no stone unturned! To kill a peasant is to destroy a mad dog!” – “If they say that I am very hard and merciless, mercy be damned. Let whoever can stab, strangle, and kill them like mad dogs”[29]
“I, Martin Luther, have during the rebellion slain al the peasants, for it was I who ordered them to be struck dead. All their blood is upon my head. But I put it all on our Lord God: for he commanded me to speak thus.”[30]
“God has given the law, and nobody observes it. He has in addition instituted rod masters, drivers and urgers; so then are rulers to drive, beat, choke, hang, burn, behead, and break upon the well of the vulgar masses.”[31]
“Like the drivers of donkeys, who have to belabor the donkeys incessantly with rods and whips, or they will not obey, so must the ruler do with the people; they must drive, beat throttle, hang, burn, behead and torture, so as to make themselves feared and to keep the people in check”[32]
“Wherever the princes take their power from, it does not regard us. It is the will of God, irrespective whether they have stolen their power or assumed it by robbery”[33]
The Jews
Christ taught: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”-Matt 22:39
Luther teaches: "My advice, as I said earlier, is: First, that their synagogues be burned down, and that all who are able toss sulphur and pitch; it would be good if someone could also throw in some hellfire... Second, that all their books-- their prayer books, their Talmudic writings, also the entire Bible-- be taken from them, not leaving them one leaf, and that these be preserved for those who may be converted...Third, that they be forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country...Fourth, that they be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing. For we cannot with a good conscience listen to this or tolerate it...
Luther teaches: "My advice, as I said earlier, is: First, that their synagogues be burned down, and that all who are able toss sulphur and pitch; it would be good if someone could also throw in some hellfire... Second, that all their books-- their prayer books, their Talmudic writings, also the entire Bible-- be taken from them, not leaving them one leaf, and that these be preserved for those who may be converted...Third, that they be forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country...Fourth, that they be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing. For we cannot with a good conscience listen to this or tolerate it...
He who hears this name [God] from a Jew must inform the authorities, or else throw sow dung at him when he sees him and chase him away".[34]
"Burn their synagogues. Forbid them all that I have mentioned above. Force them to work and treat them with every kind of severity, as Moses did in the desert and slew three thousand... If that is no use, we must drive them away like mad dogs, in order that we may not be partakers of their abominable blasphemy and of all their vices, and in order that we may not deserve the anger of God and be damned with them. I have done my duty. Let everyone see how he does his. I am excused."[35]
“ If I had to baptize a Jew, I would take him to the bridge of the Elbe, hang a stone round his neck and push him over with the words I baptize thee in the name of Abraham”[36]
Marriage and Women
Christ taught: “For this reason shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be in one flesh. Therefore now they are not two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder. . . Moses by reason of the hardness of your heart permitted you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, commits adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, commits adultery.”[38]
Luther teaches: “If the husband is unwilling, there is another who is; if the wife is unwilling, then let the maid come.”[39]
“Suppose I should counsel the wife of an impotent man, with his consent, to giver herself to another, say her husband’s brother, but to keep this marriage secret and to ascribe the children to the so-called putative father. The question is: Is such a women in a saved state? I answer, certainly.”[40]
“Know that Marriage is an outward material thing like any other secular business. The body has nothing to do with God. In this respect one can never sin against God, but only against one’s neighbour.”[42]
“As to divorce, it is still a debatable question whether it is allowable. For my part I prefer bigamy to it.”[43]
“The word and work of God is quite clear, viz., that women are made to be either wives or prostitutes.”[44]
“In spite of all the good I say of married life, I will not grant so much to nature as to admit that there is no sin in it. .. no conjugal due is ever rendered without sin. The matrimonial duty is never performed without sin.”[45]
Virtue and Vice
On Lying:
Christ taught: “You are of your father the devil: and the desires of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning: and he stood not in the truth, because truth is not in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks of his own: for he is a liar, and the father thereof.”[46]
Luther teaches: “What harm could it do if a man told a good lusty lie in a worthy cause and for the sake of the Christian Churches?”[47]
“To lie in a case of necessity or for convenience or in excuse – such lying would not be against God; He was ready to take such lies on Himself”[48]
On God:
Christ taught: “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul and with your whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment.”[49]
Luther teaches: “I look upon God no better than a scoundrel”[50]
On Drunkenness:
Christ Taught (in the words of St. Paul): “Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: Neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers: Nor the effeminate nor liars with mankind nor thieves nor covetous nor drunkards” [51]
Luther teaches: “We eat and drink to kill ourselves, we eat and rink up to our last farthing.”[52]
On Pride:
Christ taught: “And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be humbled” [53]
Luther teaches: “St. Augustine or St. Ambrosius cannot be compared with me.”[54]
“What I teach and write remains true even though the whole world should fall to pieces over it” [55]
On the Person of Christ
Christ taught: “Which of you shall convince Me of sin? If I say the truth to you, why do not believe Me? He that is of God, hears the words of God. Therefore you hear them not, because you are not of God.”[56]
Luther teaches: “Christ committed adultery first of all with the women at the well about whom St. John tell’s us. Was not everybody about Him saying: ‘Whatever has He been doing with her?’ Secondly, with Mary Magdalen, and thirdly with the women taken in adultery whom He dismissed so lightly. Thus even, Christ who was so righteous, must have been guilty of fornication before He died.”[57]
“I have greater confidence in my wife and my pupils than I have in Christ”[58]
“It does not matter how Christ behaved – what He taught is all that matters”[59]
Sacred Scripture
Christ taught: " For I testify to every one that hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If any man shall add to these things, God shall add unto him the plagues written in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from these things that are written in this book.”[60]
Luther teaches: "to my mind it (the book of the Apocalypse) bears upon it no marks of an apostolic or prophetic character... Everyone may form his own judgment of this book; as for myself, I feel an aversion to it, and to me this is sufficient reason for rejecting it."[61]
"If your Papist annoys you with the word ('alone' - Rom. 3:28), tell him straightway, Dr. Martin Luther will have it so: Papist and ass are one and the same thing. Whoever will not have my translation, let him give it the go-by: the devil's thanks to him who censures it without my will and knowledge. Luther will have it so, and he is a doctor above all the doctors in Popedom."[62]
Luther had a perverse habit of freely falsifying scripture to justify his purposes.
"The history of Jonah is so monstrous that it is absolutely incredible."[63]
"The history of Jonah is so monstrous that it is absolutely incredible."[63]
"The book of Esther I toss into the Elbe. I am such an enemy to the book of Esther that I wish it did not exist, for it Judaizes too much and has in it a great deal of heathenish foolishness."[64]
"...the epistle of St. James is an epistle full of straw, because it contains nothing evangelical."[66]
It is worth noting that while Luther claimed for himself the right to interpret scripture according to his own view, and claimed that he was intelligent enough to judge anyone and everything by scripture alone yet he openly affirms that "We cannot claim to fathom completely the meaning of a single verse of Scripture; we succeed in apprehending only the A B C of it, and even that imperfectly." - Luther, Table-talk, trans. Gustave Brunet, Paris, Garnier, 1844, pg. 288.
It is worth noting that while Luther claimed for himself the right to interpret scripture according to his own view, and claimed that he was intelligent enough to judge anyone and everything by scripture alone yet he openly affirms that "We cannot claim to fathom completely the meaning of a single verse of Scripture; we succeed in apprehending only the A B C of it, and even that imperfectly." - Luther, Table-talk, trans. Gustave Brunet, Paris, Garnier, 1844, pg. 288.
And again he states: "Let no one believe himself competent to understand Holy Scripture, unless he has, for a hundred years, governed the Church with the Prophets, with Elijiah and Elisha, St. John the Baptist, Jesus Christ and the Apostles." -Luther, Table-talk, trans. Gustave Brunet, Paris, Garnier, 1844, pg. 290.
Conclusion:
While I leave to the reader to draw his own conclusions, it suffices to say that what Luther really was; and the picture that is presented of him today by modern scholars, Lutherans and Protestants alike is far from the truth. Given this fact, it’s not difficult to see how a nation like Germany was able to blindly follow a person like Hitler if it had previously so readily embrace a person like Luther.[67] Adolf Hitler himself was indeed no doubt a true (spiritual) son of Luther and in many ways was only being logical to the principles set forth by Luther in his approach to things[68]. Hitler himself declared the reality of this point in one of his speeches saying: “I do insist on the certainty that sooner or later – once we hold power – Christianity will be overcome and the German Church established. Yes, the German church, without a Pope and without the bible, and Luther, if he could be with us, would give us his blessing.”[69]
What is more is that from Luther’s own words (which I have stated above) we are able to grasp the origin of the inversion of orders in modern society, which we see has prevailed in the modern world. Luther ushered in this new era of apostasy from God in his attempt to rationalize his own perversity and make of it the foundations for civil society. The erroneous principles upon which the modern world is based undeniably come from Luther himself and can never be reconciled to the teachings of the Gospel no matter what Luther might have thought.
* The death mask as depicted above is the same as found in the book by the well known philosopher Jacques Maritain in his book "Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau" London: Sheed and Ward, 1950.
- N.B. Erlangen and Weimar refer to the different editions of Luther’s works. Luther’s literary work is very voluminous (the critical edition of Weimar, commenced in 1883, comprises many volumes), and is not easily found in libraries but when not having quoted from the original sources I have quoted from those authors who have draw from the original sources.
[1] As Luther himself stated “I am but a man prone to let himself be swept off his feet by Society, Drunkenness, the torments of the flesh.” – Weimar, Vol. 9, Pg. 215, Pg. 13. On another occasion, he states: “I burn with all the desires of my unconquered flesh” – Enders Vol. 3, Pg. 189.
[3] Denifle’s Luther et Lutheranisme, Etude Faite d’apres les sources. Translation by J. Paquier (Paris, A. Picard, 1912-13), Volume III, p. 364.
[4] D. Martini Lutheri Exegetica Opera Latina, published by Elsperger (Erlangen, Heyder, 1829-84), Vol. 18 pg. 146
[7] From the essay, 'Bondage of the Will,' 'Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings, ed. by Dillenberger, Anchor Books, 1962 p. 190.
[9] 'De Servo Arbitrio', 7, 113 seq., quoted by O'Hare, in 'The Facts About Luther, TAN Books, 1987, pp. 266-267.
[15] Erlangen, Vol. 44, Pg. 156-157. For more quotes in this regard see: “Three Reformers”, By Jacques Maritan, Pg. 34 ; Cf. also Jean Janssen, L’Allemagne et la Reforme. (Trans. E. Paris, Plon, 1887-1911), Vol VII, pg 427.
[16] Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Fol. (1516). Ficker, II, 198. Cf. Three Reformers, By Jacques Maritan, Pg. 31
[17] The Babylonian Captivity. It’s worth mentioning on this point that Luther himself had early written “Pray for me I am falling into the abyss of Sin” – Enders, Vol. 3, Pg. 193.
[18] 'Let Your Sins Be Strong, from 'The Wittenberg Project;' 'The Wartburg Segment', translated by Erika Flores, from Dr. Martin Luther's Saemmtliche Schriften, Letter No. 99, 1 Aug. 1521. - Cf. Also Denifle’s Luther et Lutheranisme, Etude Faite d’apres les sources. Translation by J. Paquier (Paris, A. Picard, 1912-13), VOl. II, pg. 404).
[19] J. Dollinger, La Reforme et les resultants qu’elle a produits. (Trans. E. Perrot, Paris, Gaume, 1848-49), Vol III, pg. 248
[20] Matt 5:16, Cf. Apoc 20:12, Gal 6:2, 1 Jn 3:18, Jas 4:17, I Cor 13:2, II Peter 1:10, Gal 6:9. There are also many warnings in scripture that warn against falling away from salvation (Gal 4:9, Col 1:23, 1 Tim 1:19, 4:1, Heb 3:12-14, 12:14-15, 2 Pet 2:20-21, Apoc 2:4-5).
[23] Denifle’s Luther et Lutheranisme, Etude Faite d’apres les sources. Translation by J. Paquier (Paris, A. Picard, 1912-13), VOl. III, pg. 47.
[24] Denifle’s Luther et Lutheranisme, Etude Faite d’apres les sources. Translation by J. Paquier (Paris, A. Picard, 1912-13), VOl. II, pg. 128.
[27] It is important to keep in mind that these peasants were actually Protestants who favoured Luther and his views, yet in order to please the German princes Luther and gain influence Luther did not hesitate to have even his own followers put to death! As one writer put it “I know of no example in history ( with the exception of Hitler’s famous, or rather infamous, June 30, 1934) where a man turned in such an inhuman, brutal, low way against his own followers – merely in order to establish his own position, without any reason.” – Peter F. Winer, Martin Luther, Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor, Pg. 57
[34] Martin Luther; On the Jews and Their Lies, translated by Martin H. Bertram, Fortress Press, 1955
[35] About the Jews and Their Lies,' quoted by O'Hare, in 'The Facts About Luther, TAN Books, 1987, p. 290.
[45] Weimar, Vol 8. Pg. 654. In other words for Luther the matrimonial act is “a sin differing in nothing from adultery and fornication.” ibid. What then is the purpose of marriage for Luther you may ask? Luther affirms that it’s simply to satisfy one’s sexual cravings “The body asks for a women and must have it” or again “To marry is a remedy for fornication” – Grisar, “Luther”, vol. iv, pg. 145.
[52] Weimar, Vo. 9. pg. 215. We can also note on this point that the opinion of Luther’s contemporaries on the subject is unmistakable. They all agree that Luther “was addicted to over-drinking.” - Th. Brieger: “Aleander and Luther”, pg. 170, 307.
[57] Trishreden, Weimer Edition, Vol. 2, Pg. 107. - What a great blasphemy from a man who is regarded as “great reformer”!
[62] Amic. Discussion, 1, 127,'The Facts About Luther,' O'Hare, TAN Books, 1987, p. 201. Cf. Also J. Dollinger, La Reforme et les resultants qu’elle a produits. (Trans. E. Perrot, Paris, Gaume, 1848-49), Vol III, pg. 138.
[66] 'Preface to the New Testament,' ed. Dillenberger, p. 19. - Cf. Also Jean Janssen, L’Allemagne et la Reforme. (Trans. E. Paris, Plon, 1887-1911). Vol II, Pg. 218.
[67] Anyone who contends this point needs simply to read views of Luther concerning the state, civil authority and war. In his writings, we find that he openly states for example “Even if the authorities are wicked and unjust, nobody is entitled to oppose them, or to riot against them.” Or again “The ass must have blows and the People must be ruled by force. God knew this well, for it was not a fox’s brush He gave to rulers, but a sword.” - Weimar, Vol 30, Pg. 1. This point is dealt with in more detail by Peter F. Wiener in his work “Martin Luther, Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor”, Published by Marian House, Powers Lake, N.D. 58773.
[68] This was undeniably recognized by the Lutherans who welcomed and supported the regime of Hitler. A point worth mentioning in this regard is that this fact is so blatantly ignored by Protestants and the Liberal media who at the same time do not hesitate to unjustly put forward attacks against Pope Pius XII and his efforts against the Nazis.
[69] Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s speeches, edited by Prof. N.H. Baynes [oxford, 1942], pg. 369.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Who was Martin Luther?
By Rev. Fr. Philippe Marcille
Luther! The name evokes a rupture never repaired in the history of Christianity, an exceptional personality. Rare talents. An astonishing impact on society. And the whole placed in service to revolt: it ravaged him within, and he spread it without. He was to die of it. Half of Europe was to remain bathed in blood, prostrate, sterile for two centuries.
1483. Birth of Luther. For more than a century, the historians who have dispassionately studied the documents have concluded that intellectual utopia alone cannot explain Luther, and that his words betray a pathological state. Some recent works (1) remove all doubt.
The man's early years saw formed in him a neurotic anxiety which, becoming paroxysmal, was to become the motor of Martin Luther.
In his writings, especially the table talks piously recorded by his disciples, excrement, urine, and the like recur with a fierceness, a delectation, a frequency that already frightened his contemporaries, even the favorably disposed. "This man vomits s... by the mouthful," wrote his contemporary, the humanist Thomas More. Luther would even compose scurrilous doggerel, like one against the poet Lemmich, for example, in which in every line the four-letter word recurs...
Chronology
With the same frequency, a growling hatred of the pope. That also recurs incessantly. Without reasoning: like the relief found in invective. It is not the indignation of a good man against impiety. In 1510, his superiors had sent him to Rome, and he had been filled with admiration at the piety, the charity and the humanity of the pontifical justice, and he compared it to the lamentable state of Germany. No; there is something mad, excessive in his hatred mixed with fear. At the time of his excommunication, the first movement was fear, then hatred: "The pontifical acts are sealed with devil's s... (reading a decretal). It is nothing but a ghastly fart of the pope. What energy, to set off such a clap of thunder. It is a miracle that he did not burst his behind and his guts."(2)
Dalbiez multiplies the examples. His theology turns round an obsession: "A child has diarrhea in his diaper or on his father's lap with impunity; he remains none the less the heir of his patrimony. Thus our justice is not in us. And if I am not pious, the Christ keeps none the less his piety."(3)
It undoubtedly began while he was still little, stemming from the way some children of strong personality have of confronting their parents. His parents were rough and brutal. Luther's revolt against the blows was expressed by dirtying his pants. He was beaten bloody for it. He ended by yielding, not from docility, but from fear - a fear as violent as his vitality. This fear of his father was projected on God. Beneath the fear, bound but quite alive, remained a grumbling hatred. Against God, the inhibition was too strong, but the day when the unstable equilibrium broke, this hatred fixed upon the pope.
His vocation? One day lightening struck near him. God was going to strike him like his father. He fled to the monastery in a reflex of terror. The terror abated, but the tension of fear and hatred developed in him a neurotic anxiety that never left him. In the monastery chapel, the Gospel of the possessed man was read. He suddenly rolled on the ground crying out, "It isn't me, it isn't me."
The religious life seemed to stabilize him, judging by the portraits of 1505, but the virus had infected his mind. Studying theology, he reread - in light of his neurotic anxiety - the epistles of St. Paul. And he clung to that like a talisman against madness and despair.
With that aspect of his personality, there were also a prodigious vitality, a memory, an intellect, a rhetorical talent that held the attention of his superiors. Five years after his entry, lo! he was a priest (he was to faint from fright during his first Mass) and professor at the University of Wittenberg.
In 1517, the Augustinians, jealous of the Dominicans who had obtained a monopoly on preaching the jubilee indulgences, charged their brilliant orator to break the Dominican Tetzel. They had no hint of the hurricane they were unleashing. Purgatory, for Luther, meant the dogma of merits and of expiation, the return of his terror and his anxieties, the phantom that must be killed. Thus he preached salvation by the merits of Christ independently of our works. His successes emboldened him, reassured him: Yes, that is indeed the doctrine of Christ! Every one listens to me!
Then came the headlong course: posters against indulgences, challenges against the pope and the emperor, the exhilaration at seeing Germany move at the sound of his voice. Luther is one of the rare cases where the neurosis does not consume vitality and energy. On the contrary, it gave him a power of incantation, an exaltation, a communicative passion, a boldness, a bellowing energy that subjugated and drew crowds.
In Germany, everything that sought to move attached its wagon to the locomotive Luther: the humanists wishing to remake the world on the model of antiquity, the high nobility no longer willing to brook submission to the ecclesiastical power, the poor petty nobility coveting the riches of the Church to profit the younger members of the family, the peasants weary of oppression, the pious folk weary of the scandals given by bad bishops. His excesses were deplored, but they needed him too much.
The excommunication (1520) occurred at the appointed moment. Hutten, a brigand, needed a prophet: he made advances. Luther, who was terrified and had just written a letter of submission, threw himself into [Hutten's] arms. Hatred then took the upper hand.
Just wait, my Lord Bishops, devil's larva, the Doctor Martin is going to have you read a bull that will offend your ears, a Lutheran bull. Whoever shall help by his arm, his fortune, his goods, to devastate the bishops and the episcopal hierarchy, is a good son of God, a true Christian who keeps the commandments of the Lord.(4)
The Catholic theologians pointed out to him the consequences of his new theory: by implication, it denies not only purgatory, but also confession, good works, the Mass as a sacrifice for our sins, the visibility of the Church. But it was too late; Luther was intoxicated by the sentiment of liberation that he experienced by shouting what he had repressed within him, and "the reproaches awaken my adversaries, and make me intelligent," he said. His doctrine was completed early on, from 1517-1520. Luther was to add to it divorce and the authorization of bigamy, once he had been domesticated by the princes. For the roaring lion was to be muzzled.
The turning point came in the midst of the Peasants' War. In 1524, he had met people crazier, more extreme, more demagogic, and fouler than he: the Anabaptists. They urged the pillaging of castles, integral communism, and the sharing of wives with the very same arguments as Luther. There was an about turn. Luther threw himself into the arms of the political power.
Come, my princes, strike! To arms! Thrust! The times have come, blessed times where with blood a prince can win heaven more easily that we can with our prayers; I, Martin Luther, I myself ordered their tortures, impalement, beheading, bludgeoning.
He was listened to: a massacre took place, 100,000 victims according to one Protestant historian, the beginning of a nightmare that was to bind Germany for two centuries.
Henceforth the outcome was fixed: since there must be a religious authority, since the Church had been rejected, it was the political power that was to decide what must be believed. The Protestant Menzel in his monumental history of Germany observes:
The most remarkable aspect of the religious pacification is undoubtedly that, once religion and the Church were wrested from the spiritual authority under whose control they had been until then, they were placed under the control of the princes and the State. The Palatine electors, by virtue of the right of reformation that the pacification had established in fact, and that the Peace of Westphalia declared to be an original right of the Empire, constrained their subjects to switch from Catholicism to Lutheranism, from Lutheranism to Calvinism, then back to Lutheranism, then to Calvinism, and finally they wanted to make them return to Catholicism.(5)
Henceforth, for Luther, it was a headlong pitch into drunkenness and debauchery. The successive portraits of the heretic testify to the progressive decline. At Wittenberg, the nuns listened to the master, left their convents, preached, and ended in loose living. Luther married one, Catherine Bora, but he had at least one child by another. His sermons describe his own morals: "My God, give us many women and few children ....[H]owever ugly the woman, one who has no water to extinguish the fire uses dung."
One is not surprised, then, that when the prince of Hesse consulted him in order to obtain a justification of his bigamy, the old lecher needed no persuasion to find for him good theological arguments.
His flight, though, did not bring Luther peace. His exaltation sometimes gave way to a terrible lucidity. One evening, Luther being in the garden with Kaliche (Catherine Bora), witnesses recorded their dialogue:
"Look, how beautiful the sky is, how the stars twinkle," murmured Catherine.
"Yes, but they do not shine for us."
"Why not?"
A silence. "We left our convents."
"Then, we must return to our vows?"
"It is too late. The wagon is stuck too deep in the mud.”(6)
The last five years of Luther's life were sinister. His celebrity, which had exhilarated him, was waning. He well knew that he had been domesticated by the powerful. Catherine Bora became bitter and tyrannical. She had no more illusions about the prophet who had enthralled her. He was bitter. He vituperated, threatened, complained, drank. In his letters from this period, there recurs like a leitmotif, under different forms, the avowal: "I am drunk from morning till night."
His theology at this time reads like a desperate autobiography:
I know it: if someone has felt the terror and the weight of death, he would rather be a pig than suffer continually from such a crushing weight. In the street or on its dungheap, the pig imagines itself to be on a soft bed: it rests peacefully, snores delicately, sleeps deliciously. It fears neither king nor master, neither death nor hell, neither devil nor divine wrath. It has no worry, and it is not even troubled about what it will eat. If it is chased, it grunts. If it could speak, it would say: Fool! see how you let yourself be carried away by anger. You haven't the least part or parcel of my happiness; and were you very much more rich and powerful, you would never spend one hour that is as secure, sweet, and peaceful as are all of mine. Yes, the pig is not worried by death: it lives in perfect security, in the sweetness of living.
"I know longer know if God is the devil, or the devil God," he says.
1546. Luther was invited by the princes of Mansfeld to mediate a quarrel. He was treated magnificently. Everyone flocked to his sermons. Feast followed feast. During one drinking session, he rose and wrote on the wall an invective against the pope, amidst laughter and joking; suddenly, the old anguish overwhelmed him. The guests saw him return to his place, sinister, not opening his mouth. Not even drunkenness restored his usual loquacity.
His valets revealed later that on this night, February 18, 1546, they had carried the master dead drunk to his bed. Having returned the next morning to dress him, they found him hanged to the posts of his bed, strangled. The devil, with whom he boasted of having slept more often than with his wife, had communicated to him, with his hatred, his despair.(7)
How can the permanence of Protestantism be explained? After Luther's death, Melanchton hastened to reject the dogma of faith without works. But they could not turn back: the hatred of the pope was henceforth too ingrained, too visceral, in the Protestants. And then, there was the pillaging, and then the divorces, and then the ambition of princes, delighted to control religion: a wall that still separates the Protestants from the truth, from life, from salvation.
Rev. Fr. Philippe Marcille, formerly a Benedictine monk of Flavigny, France, joined the Society of St. Pius X in 1986 when his monastery accepted the novus ordo. He is an experienced retreat master of the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius.
1. L'angoisse de Luther, by Dalbiez (Tequi, 1974); Luther, by Ivan Gobry (L.T.R., 1991).
2. See Gobry, p. 451.
3. Table Talks, Vol. 2, No. 1712.
4. T. IL, Witt., fol. 120.
5. Rohbacher, Histoire de l'eglise, p. 10.
6. Audin, Histoire de Luther, Vol. 3 (Paris: 1846).
7. Ivan Gobry, Luther, (Paris: Ed. L.T.R., 1991). The substance of the biography and the account of his death are taken from this work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Audin. Histoire de Luther, Paris: 1846.
"Bonum Certamen," No. 63, 1981.
Dalbiez. L'angoisse de Luther. Ed. Tequi, 1974.
Gobry, Ivan. Luther. Paris: Ed. L.T.R., 1991.
Rohbacher. Histoire de L'eglise.
Sacchi, Henri. Guerre de Trente ans. Paris: Ed. 1'Harmattan, 1991.
Some of the citations were borrowed from a tract by Fr. Moureau.
Luther! The name evokes a rupture never repaired in the history of Christianity, an exceptional personality. Rare talents. An astonishing impact on society. And the whole placed in service to revolt: it ravaged him within, and he spread it without. He was to die of it. Half of Europe was to remain bathed in blood, prostrate, sterile for two centuries.
1483. Birth of Luther. For more than a century, the historians who have dispassionately studied the documents have concluded that intellectual utopia alone cannot explain Luther, and that his words betray a pathological state. Some recent works (1) remove all doubt.
The man's early years saw formed in him a neurotic anxiety which, becoming paroxysmal, was to become the motor of Martin Luther.
In his writings, especially the table talks piously recorded by his disciples, excrement, urine, and the like recur with a fierceness, a delectation, a frequency that already frightened his contemporaries, even the favorably disposed. "This man vomits s... by the mouthful," wrote his contemporary, the humanist Thomas More. Luther would even compose scurrilous doggerel, like one against the poet Lemmich, for example, in which in every line the four-letter word recurs...
Chronology
With the same frequency, a growling hatred of the pope. That also recurs incessantly. Without reasoning: like the relief found in invective. It is not the indignation of a good man against impiety. In 1510, his superiors had sent him to Rome, and he had been filled with admiration at the piety, the charity and the humanity of the pontifical justice, and he compared it to the lamentable state of Germany. No; there is something mad, excessive in his hatred mixed with fear. At the time of his excommunication, the first movement was fear, then hatred: "The pontifical acts are sealed with devil's s... (reading a decretal). It is nothing but a ghastly fart of the pope. What energy, to set off such a clap of thunder. It is a miracle that he did not burst his behind and his guts."(2)
Dalbiez multiplies the examples. His theology turns round an obsession: "A child has diarrhea in his diaper or on his father's lap with impunity; he remains none the less the heir of his patrimony. Thus our justice is not in us. And if I am not pious, the Christ keeps none the less his piety."(3)
It undoubtedly began while he was still little, stemming from the way some children of strong personality have of confronting their parents. His parents were rough and brutal. Luther's revolt against the blows was expressed by dirtying his pants. He was beaten bloody for it. He ended by yielding, not from docility, but from fear - a fear as violent as his vitality. This fear of his father was projected on God. Beneath the fear, bound but quite alive, remained a grumbling hatred. Against God, the inhibition was too strong, but the day when the unstable equilibrium broke, this hatred fixed upon the pope.
His vocation? One day lightening struck near him. God was going to strike him like his father. He fled to the monastery in a reflex of terror. The terror abated, but the tension of fear and hatred developed in him a neurotic anxiety that never left him. In the monastery chapel, the Gospel of the possessed man was read. He suddenly rolled on the ground crying out, "It isn't me, it isn't me."
The religious life seemed to stabilize him, judging by the portraits of 1505, but the virus had infected his mind. Studying theology, he reread - in light of his neurotic anxiety - the epistles of St. Paul. And he clung to that like a talisman against madness and despair.
With that aspect of his personality, there were also a prodigious vitality, a memory, an intellect, a rhetorical talent that held the attention of his superiors. Five years after his entry, lo! he was a priest (he was to faint from fright during his first Mass) and professor at the University of Wittenberg.
In 1517, the Augustinians, jealous of the Dominicans who had obtained a monopoly on preaching the jubilee indulgences, charged their brilliant orator to break the Dominican Tetzel. They had no hint of the hurricane they were unleashing. Purgatory, for Luther, meant the dogma of merits and of expiation, the return of his terror and his anxieties, the phantom that must be killed. Thus he preached salvation by the merits of Christ independently of our works. His successes emboldened him, reassured him: Yes, that is indeed the doctrine of Christ! Every one listens to me!
Then came the headlong course: posters against indulgences, challenges against the pope and the emperor, the exhilaration at seeing Germany move at the sound of his voice. Luther is one of the rare cases where the neurosis does not consume vitality and energy. On the contrary, it gave him a power of incantation, an exaltation, a communicative passion, a boldness, a bellowing energy that subjugated and drew crowds.
In Germany, everything that sought to move attached its wagon to the locomotive Luther: the humanists wishing to remake the world on the model of antiquity, the high nobility no longer willing to brook submission to the ecclesiastical power, the poor petty nobility coveting the riches of the Church to profit the younger members of the family, the peasants weary of oppression, the pious folk weary of the scandals given by bad bishops. His excesses were deplored, but they needed him too much.
The excommunication (1520) occurred at the appointed moment. Hutten, a brigand, needed a prophet: he made advances. Luther, who was terrified and had just written a letter of submission, threw himself into [Hutten's] arms. Hatred then took the upper hand.
Just wait, my Lord Bishops, devil's larva, the Doctor Martin is going to have you read a bull that will offend your ears, a Lutheran bull. Whoever shall help by his arm, his fortune, his goods, to devastate the bishops and the episcopal hierarchy, is a good son of God, a true Christian who keeps the commandments of the Lord.(4)
The Catholic theologians pointed out to him the consequences of his new theory: by implication, it denies not only purgatory, but also confession, good works, the Mass as a sacrifice for our sins, the visibility of the Church. But it was too late; Luther was intoxicated by the sentiment of liberation that he experienced by shouting what he had repressed within him, and "the reproaches awaken my adversaries, and make me intelligent," he said. His doctrine was completed early on, from 1517-1520. Luther was to add to it divorce and the authorization of bigamy, once he had been domesticated by the princes. For the roaring lion was to be muzzled.
The turning point came in the midst of the Peasants' War. In 1524, he had met people crazier, more extreme, more demagogic, and fouler than he: the Anabaptists. They urged the pillaging of castles, integral communism, and the sharing of wives with the very same arguments as Luther. There was an about turn. Luther threw himself into the arms of the political power.
Come, my princes, strike! To arms! Thrust! The times have come, blessed times where with blood a prince can win heaven more easily that we can with our prayers; I, Martin Luther, I myself ordered their tortures, impalement, beheading, bludgeoning.
He was listened to: a massacre took place, 100,000 victims according to one Protestant historian, the beginning of a nightmare that was to bind Germany for two centuries.
Henceforth the outcome was fixed: since there must be a religious authority, since the Church had been rejected, it was the political power that was to decide what must be believed. The Protestant Menzel in his monumental history of Germany observes:
The most remarkable aspect of the religious pacification is undoubtedly that, once religion and the Church were wrested from the spiritual authority under whose control they had been until then, they were placed under the control of the princes and the State. The Palatine electors, by virtue of the right of reformation that the pacification had established in fact, and that the Peace of Westphalia declared to be an original right of the Empire, constrained their subjects to switch from Catholicism to Lutheranism, from Lutheranism to Calvinism, then back to Lutheranism, then to Calvinism, and finally they wanted to make them return to Catholicism.(5)
Henceforth, for Luther, it was a headlong pitch into drunkenness and debauchery. The successive portraits of the heretic testify to the progressive decline. At Wittenberg, the nuns listened to the master, left their convents, preached, and ended in loose living. Luther married one, Catherine Bora, but he had at least one child by another. His sermons describe his own morals: "My God, give us many women and few children ....[H]owever ugly the woman, one who has no water to extinguish the fire uses dung."
One is not surprised, then, that when the prince of Hesse consulted him in order to obtain a justification of his bigamy, the old lecher needed no persuasion to find for him good theological arguments.
His flight, though, did not bring Luther peace. His exaltation sometimes gave way to a terrible lucidity. One evening, Luther being in the garden with Kaliche (Catherine Bora), witnesses recorded their dialogue:
"Look, how beautiful the sky is, how the stars twinkle," murmured Catherine.
"Yes, but they do not shine for us."
"Why not?"
A silence. "We left our convents."
"Then, we must return to our vows?"
"It is too late. The wagon is stuck too deep in the mud.”(6)
The last five years of Luther's life were sinister. His celebrity, which had exhilarated him, was waning. He well knew that he had been domesticated by the powerful. Catherine Bora became bitter and tyrannical. She had no more illusions about the prophet who had enthralled her. He was bitter. He vituperated, threatened, complained, drank. In his letters from this period, there recurs like a leitmotif, under different forms, the avowal: "I am drunk from morning till night."
His theology at this time reads like a desperate autobiography:
I know it: if someone has felt the terror and the weight of death, he would rather be a pig than suffer continually from such a crushing weight. In the street or on its dungheap, the pig imagines itself to be on a soft bed: it rests peacefully, snores delicately, sleeps deliciously. It fears neither king nor master, neither death nor hell, neither devil nor divine wrath. It has no worry, and it is not even troubled about what it will eat. If it is chased, it grunts. If it could speak, it would say: Fool! see how you let yourself be carried away by anger. You haven't the least part or parcel of my happiness; and were you very much more rich and powerful, you would never spend one hour that is as secure, sweet, and peaceful as are all of mine. Yes, the pig is not worried by death: it lives in perfect security, in the sweetness of living.
"I know longer know if God is the devil, or the devil God," he says.
1546. Luther was invited by the princes of Mansfeld to mediate a quarrel. He was treated magnificently. Everyone flocked to his sermons. Feast followed feast. During one drinking session, he rose and wrote on the wall an invective against the pope, amidst laughter and joking; suddenly, the old anguish overwhelmed him. The guests saw him return to his place, sinister, not opening his mouth. Not even drunkenness restored his usual loquacity.
His valets revealed later that on this night, February 18, 1546, they had carried the master dead drunk to his bed. Having returned the next morning to dress him, they found him hanged to the posts of his bed, strangled. The devil, with whom he boasted of having slept more often than with his wife, had communicated to him, with his hatred, his despair.(7)
How can the permanence of Protestantism be explained? After Luther's death, Melanchton hastened to reject the dogma of faith without works. But they could not turn back: the hatred of the pope was henceforth too ingrained, too visceral, in the Protestants. And then, there was the pillaging, and then the divorces, and then the ambition of princes, delighted to control religion: a wall that still separates the Protestants from the truth, from life, from salvation.
Rev. Fr. Philippe Marcille, formerly a Benedictine monk of Flavigny, France, joined the Society of St. Pius X in 1986 when his monastery accepted the novus ordo. He is an experienced retreat master of the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius.
1. L'angoisse de Luther, by Dalbiez (Tequi, 1974); Luther, by Ivan Gobry (L.T.R., 1991).
2. See Gobry, p. 451.
3. Table Talks, Vol. 2, No. 1712.
4. T. IL, Witt., fol. 120.
5. Rohbacher, Histoire de l'eglise, p. 10.
6. Audin, Histoire de Luther, Vol. 3 (Paris: 1846).
7. Ivan Gobry, Luther, (Paris: Ed. L.T.R., 1991). The substance of the biography and the account of his death are taken from this work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Audin. Histoire de Luther, Paris: 1846.
"Bonum Certamen," No. 63, 1981.
Dalbiez. L'angoisse de Luther. Ed. Tequi, 1974.
Gobry, Ivan. Luther. Paris: Ed. L.T.R., 1991.
Rohbacher. Histoire de L'eglise.
Sacchi, Henri. Guerre de Trente ans. Paris: Ed. 1'Harmattan, 1991.
Some of the citations were borrowed from a tract by Fr. Moureau.
Papal Coronation Oath
"I vow to change nothing of the received Tradition, and nothing thereof I have found before me guarded by my God-pleasing predecessors, to encroach upon, to alter, or to permit any innovation therein;
To the contrary: with glowing affection as her truly faithful student and successor, to safeguard reverently the passed-on good, with my whole strength and utmost effort;
To cleanse all that is in contradiction to the canonical order, should such appear; to guard the Holy Canons and Decrees of our Popes as if they were the divine ordinance of Heaven, because I am conscious of Thee, whose place I take through the Grace of God, whose Vicarship I possess with Thy support, being subject to severest accounting before Thy Divine Tribunal over all that I shall confess;
I swear to God Almighty and the Savior Jesus Christ that I will keep whatever has been revealed through Christ and His Successors and whatever the first councils and my predecessors have defined and declared.
I will keep without sacrifice to itself the discipline and the rite of the Church. I will put outside the Church whoever dares to go against this oath, may it be somebody else or I.
If I should undertake to act in anything of contrary sense, or should permit that it will be executed, Thou willst not be merciful to me on the dreadful Day of Divine Justice.
Accordingly, without exclusion, We subject to severest excommunication anyone -- be it Ourselves or be it another -- who would dare to undertake anything new in contradiction to this constituted evangelic Tradition and the purity of the orthodox Faith and the Christian religion, or would seek to change anything by his opposing efforts, or would agree with those who undertake such a blasphemous venture."
[This oath was written by Pope St. Agatho, 678AD, however, it is more likely centuries older. It was taken by all pontiffs until John Paul II, who did not.]
From: http://www.traditionalcatholic.net/Tradition/Information/Papal_Coronation_Oath.html
To the contrary: with glowing affection as her truly faithful student and successor, to safeguard reverently the passed-on good, with my whole strength and utmost effort;
To cleanse all that is in contradiction to the canonical order, should such appear; to guard the Holy Canons and Decrees of our Popes as if they were the divine ordinance of Heaven, because I am conscious of Thee, whose place I take through the Grace of God, whose Vicarship I possess with Thy support, being subject to severest accounting before Thy Divine Tribunal over all that I shall confess;
I swear to God Almighty and the Savior Jesus Christ that I will keep whatever has been revealed through Christ and His Successors and whatever the first councils and my predecessors have defined and declared.
I will keep without sacrifice to itself the discipline and the rite of the Church. I will put outside the Church whoever dares to go against this oath, may it be somebody else or I.
If I should undertake to act in anything of contrary sense, or should permit that it will be executed, Thou willst not be merciful to me on the dreadful Day of Divine Justice.
Accordingly, without exclusion, We subject to severest excommunication anyone -- be it Ourselves or be it another -- who would dare to undertake anything new in contradiction to this constituted evangelic Tradition and the purity of the orthodox Faith and the Christian religion, or would seek to change anything by his opposing efforts, or would agree with those who undertake such a blasphemous venture."
[This oath was written by Pope St. Agatho, 678AD, however, it is more likely centuries older. It was taken by all pontiffs until John Paul II, who did not.]
From: http://www.traditionalcatholic.net/Tradition/Information/Papal_Coronation_Oath.html
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
What are we to think of Calvin?
Rev . Fr. Philippe Marcille
The influence of John Calvin (1509-1564) has been immense, perhaps even more so than that of Luther. Certainly, without the bellowing revolutionary Luther, Calvin would not have been able to do anything; yet without Calvin, the revolt would not have had the political impact that it did in France and especially the United States.
Origins
He was born in Picardy, France, in 1509. His parents were well-to-do people. A very gifted student, he received a benefice from the Church and continued his studies at Paris. He was not well liked by his classmates: they nicknamed him "the accusative." He readily scolded others and tattled on them, while remaining aloof and bitter. But when in public, he would lose all his reserve and stand out in debates. An anti-Lutheran, defender of authority, he approved the legal actions brought against the most strident Lutherans.
The Personal Crisis
In 1532, at the College of France, he was still Catholic. By the end of 1533, he had suddenly turned Protestant, sold his benefices, and begun the life of an itinerant preacher. What happened?
Protestant hagiography has sought to explain it by edifying conversations in his room that would have taken place between Calvin and a Protestant cousin. Recent studies, however, have shown that the two were hundreds of miles apart at the time. A key, though, was left in part by Calvin himself:
Each and every time I entered within myself, a horror so great came over me that neither purifications nor satisfactions could have effaced it. The more I considered myself the more my conscience was pricked with sharp darts, so much so that only one consolation remained, and that was to deceive myself by forgetting about myself ....bewildered by the misery into which I had fallen, and even more so by the knowledge of how close I was to eternal death (Letter to Sadolet).
It is only fair to wonder what could be the nature of such a burning self-reproach. There is one answer, based upon serious evidence, one that has always been passionately denied by the Protestants. In 1551, a Catholic controversialist revealed that the archives of the city of Noyon, Calvin's birth place, contain the record of a condemnation against Calvin, at age 18, for sodomy. He had by then already received the tonsure. His parents obtained clemency from the bishop, so that instead of being condemned to death as the law demanded, he was branded as a sign of infamy. The Catholic controversialist presented the evidence signed by all the eminent personages of the city. The English scholar Stapleton went there to examine the archives during Calvin's lifetime, and vouched for the fact. The contemporary German Lutherans spoke of it as an established fact (Schlusselburg, Théologie calvinienne).
At twenty-four, Calvin was at a crossroads. He had to choose between confession or Lutheranism. He chose: "Only believe, and you are as sure of your own eternal salvation as of the Redemption of Christ. Only believe, and despite all the crimes, not only will you remain in the grace of God, in justice, but you will always remain in grace and you will never be able to lose it" (Bossuet's summary of his doctrine in "Variations").
The Heresiarch
His career began. He wandered to Strasbourg, Basel, Ferrara, and finally settled at Geneva in 1536 as preacher. There he was to show his full worth, not only as a preacher, but also as a political virtuoso. In five years, he was able to solidify his authority over the Consistory the Council of the Ancients, a disciplinary tribunal that passed sentence on all public sinners]; first as leader of the Protestants in exterminating the Catholics (half the city fled, ruined, all their property and possessions confiscated), then as president of the Council that voted on the right interpretation of the Bible, and finally as chief of the tribunal and the army of informers and police in charge of morality and doctrine.
The Tyrant
He began obsessively multiplying laws of public morality. Death was the penalty for high treason against religion as well as for high treason against the city, and for the son who would strike or curse his father, and for the adulterer and the heretic. Children were whipped or hanged for calling their mother a devil. A mason wearily exclaimed "to the devil with the work and the master," and was denounced and condemned to three days in prison. Magicians and sorcerers were hunted down. They always confessed, of course. According to the city register, in 60 years, some 150 were burnt at the stake.
The years went by; Calvin's obsession gripped the Genevans. The number of dishes that could be served at table was regulated, as well as the shape of shoes, and the ladies' hair styles. In the registers are to be found condemnations such as these: "Three journeymen tanners were sentenced to three days on bread and water in prison for having eaten at lunch three dozen pates, which is a great immorality."
That was in 1558. Drunkenness, taverns and card games were punished by fines. The city's coffers filled up and served to pay new informers. For there were ears everywhere in the republic of evangelical liberty, and the failure to inform was itself a misdemeanor. "They are to be stationed in every quarter of the city, so that nothing can escape their eyes," wrote Calvin. Sermons were given on Thursdays and Sundays. Attendance was obligatory under pain of fine or flogging. Not even children were excused. The spies would verify that the streets and houses were empty. Every year, the controllers of orthodoxy went house-to-house to have everyone sign the profession of faith voted that year. The last Catholics disappeared by death or exile. None spoke of changing religion, for Calvin had had a law voted punishing by death anyone who would dare question the reforms of the "servant of Geneva."
Calvin's City
Outwardly Geneva become an exemplary city where an iron morality reigned. Inwardly it was rotten. The population had been augmented by refugees of all sorts: Protestants chased from France, but also delinquents seeking impunity. Calvin's law allowed divorce: people hastened to Geneva from Savoy and the province of Lyons to get remarried. The Protestant Genevan Galiffe, a genealogist, concluded from his studies that the Geneva of Calvin's time was the gutter of Europe. And Calvin knew it:
Out of ten evangelists, you will scarcely find a one who became evangelical for any other reason than to be able to abandon himself more freely to drinking and dissolute living.
Calvin humbly took the title of "servant of Geneva," but God, he held, spoke by his mouth. "Since God has deigned to make known to me what is good and what is evil, I must rule myself by this measure..." And everyone else, too! One morning the city awoke to find gallows had been erected in all the public squares, to which a placard was attached: "For whomever shall speak ill of Mr. Calvin." A letter from the dictator sums up his attitude: "It is necessary to rid the land of these damned cads who exhort the people to resist us, blacken our conduct ...such monsters must be stamped out."
Absolute Power
Calvin's life was not snow white: there are stories of seized inheritances, "spontaneous gifts" made to the great man by merchants, considerable sums sent from the queen of Navarre or the duchess of Ferrara or from other well-off foreigners destined for the poor of the city, but which disappeared into the poor pockets of the great man; marriages arranged for members of his family by threatening rich refugees with expulsion.
Lampoons were circulated: woe to whomever the evangelical police seized in possession of one of them. Some escaped from torture or death by fleeing in time. Calvin then had their wives banished and their goods confiscated. For security's sake, he had the death penalty voted for whomever would even speak of recalling the exiles from their banishment.
Daniel Berthelier, master of the Mint of Geneva, had learned at Noyon the truth about Calvin's past, and had kept written evidence at his house. He was discovered, horribly tortured, and finally beheaded.
It was the execution of Servetus that consolidated the dictator's power. Calvin had cleverly had his adversary's book sent to the hive of Protestant popes, all of whom, including Melancthon, congratulated him on instigating the condemnation of this horrible heretic. Calvin immediately exploited this fleeting prestige to have appointed as electors a multitude of the men who had taken refuge in Geneva, for reasons which were not always based on religion, whom he called "the confessors of the faith." He soon controlled an absolute majority on the Consistory. He then had his last adversaries hunted down, exiled, or educated. It was 1554: before him were ten years in which to exercise absolute power.
There was no more resistance. Even the most powerful citizens could be forced to walk bare-footed around the city, clothed in a shirt, a candle in- hand, crying out "Mercy to God," the ordeal ending by a public confession made kneeling before the Consistory.
When not consulting the spies' reports, Calvin wrote his own book of revelation entitled Institutes of the Christian Religion. He worked on it incessantly, rearranging it, augmenting and re-editing, until it reached a thousand quarto pages. Woe to the critics, whose criticism would elicit from the author a rain of invectives. His ire was as likely to inveigh against Protestants as Catholics. Of Lutherans he was provoked to say: "They are quicktempered, furious, fickle, inconstant, liars, full of canine impudence and diabolical pride."
The quality of Calvin's cold hatred was terrible indeed. It is manifested especially in the affair of Michael Servetus. This learned doctor, a closet Protestant, amused himself by picking out all the blunders and errors that he could find in Calvin's pride and joy, The Institutes. He then sent the book with his own annotations to Calvin. That was in 1546. Calvin clenched his teeth: "If he comes hither and I have any authority, I will never let him quit this place alive" (Letter to Viret, a preacher of Lausanne). He awaited the moment of vengeance for seven years. In 1553, Servetus published anonymously an anti-trinitarian treatise. Calvin, who knew all the publishing channels of Protestant books, was able to discover the author's identity. He denounced him, furnishing proof to the Inquisition, which condemned Servetus, and then helped to obtain the mitigation of his punishment in light of all the good he had done as a physician. The unfortunate Servetus fled to Geneva, where he was arrested on sight. He was made to rot in prison two months. He pleaded to be allowed to have clean clothes and linen, but Calvin opposed the request. He was condemned to be burned alive. Calvin himself arranged the pyre: the pile of faggots was disposed in a circle around the stake so as to make the condemned man be burnt slowly. Calvin remained for two hours at his window listening to the man's screams. He received the approbation of the Protestant hive.
After 1559, the spleen that he had vented on his enemies seemed to be concentrated in his own entrails: stomach aches, intestinal pains, nephritic colic, bloody coughing racked him. His successor Theodore Beza confined him to his room and maintained the legend of the great man. But he confided that his master was becoming daily more imperious and tyrannic. He had unforeseeable fits of anger. Nothing satisfied him. He scolded; he threatened; he inveighed against all the pastors. He made the members of the Consistory confess publicly before him.
He died on the 27th of May 1564 after, it seems, thanking God for his evangelical mission. Was he a prophet, as the Protestants think? Maybe, in the final analysis, the prophet of religious democracy, the Antichrist's democracy. As he lay dying, though, he never had upon his lips the final cry that graced the lips of his dying victim, Michael Servetus: "Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me."
(Translated from Le Bachais, No. 35, November-December 1999, the publication of the Priory St. Pierre Julien Eymard, France)
The influence of John Calvin (1509-1564) has been immense, perhaps even more so than that of Luther. Certainly, without the bellowing revolutionary Luther, Calvin would not have been able to do anything; yet without Calvin, the revolt would not have had the political impact that it did in France and especially the United States.
Origins
He was born in Picardy, France, in 1509. His parents were well-to-do people. A very gifted student, he received a benefice from the Church and continued his studies at Paris. He was not well liked by his classmates: they nicknamed him "the accusative." He readily scolded others and tattled on them, while remaining aloof and bitter. But when in public, he would lose all his reserve and stand out in debates. An anti-Lutheran, defender of authority, he approved the legal actions brought against the most strident Lutherans.
The Personal Crisis
In 1532, at the College of France, he was still Catholic. By the end of 1533, he had suddenly turned Protestant, sold his benefices, and begun the life of an itinerant preacher. What happened?
Protestant hagiography has sought to explain it by edifying conversations in his room that would have taken place between Calvin and a Protestant cousin. Recent studies, however, have shown that the two were hundreds of miles apart at the time. A key, though, was left in part by Calvin himself:
Each and every time I entered within myself, a horror so great came over me that neither purifications nor satisfactions could have effaced it. The more I considered myself the more my conscience was pricked with sharp darts, so much so that only one consolation remained, and that was to deceive myself by forgetting about myself ....bewildered by the misery into which I had fallen, and even more so by the knowledge of how close I was to eternal death (Letter to Sadolet).
It is only fair to wonder what could be the nature of such a burning self-reproach. There is one answer, based upon serious evidence, one that has always been passionately denied by the Protestants. In 1551, a Catholic controversialist revealed that the archives of the city of Noyon, Calvin's birth place, contain the record of a condemnation against Calvin, at age 18, for sodomy. He had by then already received the tonsure. His parents obtained clemency from the bishop, so that instead of being condemned to death as the law demanded, he was branded as a sign of infamy. The Catholic controversialist presented the evidence signed by all the eminent personages of the city. The English scholar Stapleton went there to examine the archives during Calvin's lifetime, and vouched for the fact. The contemporary German Lutherans spoke of it as an established fact (Schlusselburg, Théologie calvinienne).
At twenty-four, Calvin was at a crossroads. He had to choose between confession or Lutheranism. He chose: "Only believe, and you are as sure of your own eternal salvation as of the Redemption of Christ. Only believe, and despite all the crimes, not only will you remain in the grace of God, in justice, but you will always remain in grace and you will never be able to lose it" (Bossuet's summary of his doctrine in "Variations").
The Heresiarch
His career began. He wandered to Strasbourg, Basel, Ferrara, and finally settled at Geneva in 1536 as preacher. There he was to show his full worth, not only as a preacher, but also as a political virtuoso. In five years, he was able to solidify his authority over the Consistory the Council of the Ancients, a disciplinary tribunal that passed sentence on all public sinners]; first as leader of the Protestants in exterminating the Catholics (half the city fled, ruined, all their property and possessions confiscated), then as president of the Council that voted on the right interpretation of the Bible, and finally as chief of the tribunal and the army of informers and police in charge of morality and doctrine.
The Tyrant
He began obsessively multiplying laws of public morality. Death was the penalty for high treason against religion as well as for high treason against the city, and for the son who would strike or curse his father, and for the adulterer and the heretic. Children were whipped or hanged for calling their mother a devil. A mason wearily exclaimed "to the devil with the work and the master," and was denounced and condemned to three days in prison. Magicians and sorcerers were hunted down. They always confessed, of course. According to the city register, in 60 years, some 150 were burnt at the stake.
The years went by; Calvin's obsession gripped the Genevans. The number of dishes that could be served at table was regulated, as well as the shape of shoes, and the ladies' hair styles. In the registers are to be found condemnations such as these: "Three journeymen tanners were sentenced to three days on bread and water in prison for having eaten at lunch three dozen pates, which is a great immorality."
That was in 1558. Drunkenness, taverns and card games were punished by fines. The city's coffers filled up and served to pay new informers. For there were ears everywhere in the republic of evangelical liberty, and the failure to inform was itself a misdemeanor. "They are to be stationed in every quarter of the city, so that nothing can escape their eyes," wrote Calvin. Sermons were given on Thursdays and Sundays. Attendance was obligatory under pain of fine or flogging. Not even children were excused. The spies would verify that the streets and houses were empty. Every year, the controllers of orthodoxy went house-to-house to have everyone sign the profession of faith voted that year. The last Catholics disappeared by death or exile. None spoke of changing religion, for Calvin had had a law voted punishing by death anyone who would dare question the reforms of the "servant of Geneva."
Calvin's City
Outwardly Geneva become an exemplary city where an iron morality reigned. Inwardly it was rotten. The population had been augmented by refugees of all sorts: Protestants chased from France, but also delinquents seeking impunity. Calvin's law allowed divorce: people hastened to Geneva from Savoy and the province of Lyons to get remarried. The Protestant Genevan Galiffe, a genealogist, concluded from his studies that the Geneva of Calvin's time was the gutter of Europe. And Calvin knew it:
Out of ten evangelists, you will scarcely find a one who became evangelical for any other reason than to be able to abandon himself more freely to drinking and dissolute living.
Calvin humbly took the title of "servant of Geneva," but God, he held, spoke by his mouth. "Since God has deigned to make known to me what is good and what is evil, I must rule myself by this measure..." And everyone else, too! One morning the city awoke to find gallows had been erected in all the public squares, to which a placard was attached: "For whomever shall speak ill of Mr. Calvin." A letter from the dictator sums up his attitude: "It is necessary to rid the land of these damned cads who exhort the people to resist us, blacken our conduct ...such monsters must be stamped out."
Absolute Power
Calvin's life was not snow white: there are stories of seized inheritances, "spontaneous gifts" made to the great man by merchants, considerable sums sent from the queen of Navarre or the duchess of Ferrara or from other well-off foreigners destined for the poor of the city, but which disappeared into the poor pockets of the great man; marriages arranged for members of his family by threatening rich refugees with expulsion.
Lampoons were circulated: woe to whomever the evangelical police seized in possession of one of them. Some escaped from torture or death by fleeing in time. Calvin then had their wives banished and their goods confiscated. For security's sake, he had the death penalty voted for whomever would even speak of recalling the exiles from their banishment.
Daniel Berthelier, master of the Mint of Geneva, had learned at Noyon the truth about Calvin's past, and had kept written evidence at his house. He was discovered, horribly tortured, and finally beheaded.
It was the execution of Servetus that consolidated the dictator's power. Calvin had cleverly had his adversary's book sent to the hive of Protestant popes, all of whom, including Melancthon, congratulated him on instigating the condemnation of this horrible heretic. Calvin immediately exploited this fleeting prestige to have appointed as electors a multitude of the men who had taken refuge in Geneva, for reasons which were not always based on religion, whom he called "the confessors of the faith." He soon controlled an absolute majority on the Consistory. He then had his last adversaries hunted down, exiled, or educated. It was 1554: before him were ten years in which to exercise absolute power.
There was no more resistance. Even the most powerful citizens could be forced to walk bare-footed around the city, clothed in a shirt, a candle in- hand, crying out "Mercy to God," the ordeal ending by a public confession made kneeling before the Consistory.
When not consulting the spies' reports, Calvin wrote his own book of revelation entitled Institutes of the Christian Religion. He worked on it incessantly, rearranging it, augmenting and re-editing, until it reached a thousand quarto pages. Woe to the critics, whose criticism would elicit from the author a rain of invectives. His ire was as likely to inveigh against Protestants as Catholics. Of Lutherans he was provoked to say: "They are quicktempered, furious, fickle, inconstant, liars, full of canine impudence and diabolical pride."
The quality of Calvin's cold hatred was terrible indeed. It is manifested especially in the affair of Michael Servetus. This learned doctor, a closet Protestant, amused himself by picking out all the blunders and errors that he could find in Calvin's pride and joy, The Institutes. He then sent the book with his own annotations to Calvin. That was in 1546. Calvin clenched his teeth: "If he comes hither and I have any authority, I will never let him quit this place alive" (Letter to Viret, a preacher of Lausanne). He awaited the moment of vengeance for seven years. In 1553, Servetus published anonymously an anti-trinitarian treatise. Calvin, who knew all the publishing channels of Protestant books, was able to discover the author's identity. He denounced him, furnishing proof to the Inquisition, which condemned Servetus, and then helped to obtain the mitigation of his punishment in light of all the good he had done as a physician. The unfortunate Servetus fled to Geneva, where he was arrested on sight. He was made to rot in prison two months. He pleaded to be allowed to have clean clothes and linen, but Calvin opposed the request. He was condemned to be burned alive. Calvin himself arranged the pyre: the pile of faggots was disposed in a circle around the stake so as to make the condemned man be burnt slowly. Calvin remained for two hours at his window listening to the man's screams. He received the approbation of the Protestant hive.
After 1559, the spleen that he had vented on his enemies seemed to be concentrated in his own entrails: stomach aches, intestinal pains, nephritic colic, bloody coughing racked him. His successor Theodore Beza confined him to his room and maintained the legend of the great man. But he confided that his master was becoming daily more imperious and tyrannic. He had unforeseeable fits of anger. Nothing satisfied him. He scolded; he threatened; he inveighed against all the pastors. He made the members of the Consistory confess publicly before him.
He died on the 27th of May 1564 after, it seems, thanking God for his evangelical mission. Was he a prophet, as the Protestants think? Maybe, in the final analysis, the prophet of religious democracy, the Antichrist's democracy. As he lay dying, though, he never had upon his lips the final cry that graced the lips of his dying victim, Michael Servetus: "Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me."
(Translated from Le Bachais, No. 35, November-December 1999, the publication of the Priory St. Pierre Julien Eymard, France)
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