Rulers of Evil; Useful Knowledge
about Governing Bodies
By F.Tupper Saussy
Chapter 9
about Governing Bodies
By F.Tupper Saussy
Chapter 9
SECURING
CONFIDENCE
STRENGTHENED BY Trent’s unqualified endorsement, the
Jesuits quickly became the Church’s most popular confessors.
Ignatius directed that “a Jesuit should not allow anyone to
leave the confessional entirely without comfort.” If a confessant’s
opinion on any matter could be found in the least bit defensible,
Ignatius said, “he should be permitted to adhere to it, even when
the contrary opinion can be said to be more correct.”
People relished confessing to Jesuits. “Always go to the Jesuits
for confession, ” it was said in Germany, “for they put cushions
under your knees and under your elbows, too.”
Merchants, aristocrats, courtiers, and crowned heads insisted
that Jesuit confessional direction was the best in all Christendom.
They considered the Jesuits to be the greatest converters of hardened sinners, the surest moral guides through life’s bewildering
complexities. Indeed, for two centuries, all the French kings, from
Henry III to Louis XV, would confess to Jesuits. All German emperors after the early seventeenth century would confess to
Jesuits, too. Jesuits would take the confessions of all Dukes of
Bavaria after 1579, most rulers of Poland and Portugal, the Spanish kings in the eighteenth century, and James II of England.
The sacrament of confession kept Jesuit information channel s
loaded with vital state secrets. It also furnished the Society an
ideal vehicle for influencing political action. One of the most dramatic instances is found in the famous memoir of François de la
Chaize, Jesuit confessor to the painfully diseased King of France
from 1675 until 1709. “Many a time since,” wrote La Chaize,
when I have had him [Louis XIV] at confession, I have shook
hell about his ears, and made him sigh, fear, and tremble, before
I would give him absolution. 1
By this I saw that he had still an
inclination to me, and was willing to be under my government;
so I set the baseness of the action before him by telling the
whole story, and how wicked it was, and that it could not be forgiven till he had done some good action to balance that, and
expiate the crime. Whereupon he at last asked me what he must
do. I told him that he must root out all heretics from his kingdom.
Louis obeyed his confessor by revoking the Edict of Nantes
(October 1685), which immediately resulted in:
the demolition of all the remaining Protestant temples throughout France, and the entire prohibition of even private worship
under penalty of confiscation of body and property; the banishment of all Protestant pastors from France within fifteen days;
the closing of all Protestant schools; the prohibition of parents
to instruct their children in the Protestant faith; the injunction
upon them, under a penalty of five hundred livres in each case,
to have their children baptized by the parish priest, and brought
up in the Roman Catholic religion; the confiscation of the property and goods of all Protestant refugees who failed to return to
France within four months; the penalty of the galleys for life to
all men, and of imprisonment for life to all women, detected in
the act of attempting to escape from France. 2
It was inevitable that the Council of Trent would establish the
Jesuits as the schoolmasters of Europe. With money from royalty
and commerce (and not so much as a pfennig from the Church),
the Society built an extensive system of schools and colleges. No
tuition was charged, but each prospective student was thoroughly
examined to see if he had aptitudes the Society could use. With
the founding of the first Jesuit school at Coimbra, Portugal, by the
Emperor’s youngest sister Catherina (Iñigo’s romantic interest who
had since married the King of Portugal), the principal Jesuit occupation became teaching. By 1556, three-fourths of the Society’s
membership were dedicated in 46 Jesuit colleges to “learning
against learning,” to indoctrinating minds with the learning of
illuminated humanism as opposed to the learning of Scripture.
This network would expand by 1749 to 669 colleges, 176 seminaries, 61 houses of study, and 24 universities partly or wholly under
Jesuit direction.
Many Protestant families sent their sons to Jesuit schools,
despite Martin Luther’s early warning in An Appeal to the Ruling
Class (1520) that “unless they diligently train and impress Scripture upon young students, schools will prove to be widening gates
of hell.” The Jesuit curriculum, or ratio studiorum (“method of
study”), gave Scripture significant inattention. Part IV, Section
351 of Loyola’s Constitutions prescribes courses in “the humane
letters of different languages, logic, natural and moral philosophy,
metaphysics, scholastic and positive theology,” with “Sacred Scripture” bringing up the rear. How rigorously any one of these subjects was to be studied depended upon “circumstances of times,
places, persons, and other such factors, according to what seems
expedient in our Lord to him who holds the principal charge.”
Section 366 puts Scripture at the mercy of these factors: “The
scholastics should acquire a good foundation in Latin before they
attend lectures on the arts, and in the arts before they pass on to
scholastic theology; and in it before they study positive theology.
Scripture may be studied either concomitantly or later on.” If
Scripture should be studied at all, the commentary and critical
interpretation of Protestant scholastics were to be ignored: “In the case of Christian authors, even though a work may be good it
should not be lectured on when the author is bad, lest attachment
to him be acquired.”
“The curriculum of the Jesuit colleges came to be adopted to a
great extent as the basis of the curricula in the European colleges
generally,” wrote Dr. James J. Walsh, Dean of Fordham University
Medical School. 3
Moreover, according to Dr. Walsh,
The Founding Fathers of our American Republic, that is to say
the groups of men who drew up and signed the Declaration of
Independence, who were the leaders in the American Revolution, and who formulated the Constitution of the United
States ... were, the majority of them, educated in the colonial
colleges or in corresponding colleges abroad ... which followed ... almost exactly the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum. The fact has
been missed to a great extent in our histories of American education....
Embedded in the ratio studiorum were the elements of entertainment, of dramatic production – composition, rhetoric, and eloquence. These courses interlinked with the Spiritual Exercises to
intensify the experientiality of Catholic doctrine over Scripture
and Protestantism. They resulted in a genre of spectacular plays
that won distinction as “Jesuit theatre.”
The first Jesuit theatre was performed in Vienna in 1555, nearly forty years before the emergence of Shakespeare. It was instantly
popular and quickly spread to other parts of Europe. Between 1597
and 1773 more than five hundred Jesuit theatricals were staged in
the lower Rhine regions alone. Jacob Bidermann’s play Cenodoxus
(“Newfangled Beliefs”), a point-by-point rebuttal of Luther’s
teachings, proved the power of entertainment to achieve political
reform. “Such a wholesome impression was made,” wrote Father
Bidermann recalling the 1609 opening of Cenodoxus in Munich,
“that a full fourteen persons of the highest rank of the Bavarian
court retired into solitude during the days that followed, to perform
the Spiritual Exercises and to reform their manner of living. Truly
a hundred sermons would not have done so much good.” 4
An exemplary Jesuit drama, performed in 1625 at the College
of St. Omer in honor of Belgian royalty, allegorized the glorious
end to civil war in Belgium brought by the advent of Princess
Isabella and her husband, Albert. The play, as reviewed by a contemporary official,
represented a country, long heavily oppressed under the Iron
Age, supplicating the help of Jupiter, who, after having summoned a council of the gods, sent down Saturn, lately married
to Astraea. These visitors were received with much pomp by
twelve zodiacs or princes sent by Mercury. They then dispatched
four most potent heroes, Hercules, Jason, Theseus and Perseus
from the Elysian Fields, with commands to conquer Iron Age,
War, Error, and Discord. The heroes expelled those terrible monsters from the country and substituted in their stead Golden
Age, Peace, Truth, and Concord. The Princess with the whole
assembly were highly delighted.5
The faculty of Munich College praised the way Jesuit theatre
captivated Protestants, especially the parents of school-aged
youngsters: “There is no better means of making friends out of the
heretics and the enemies of the Church, and filling up the enrollment of the school than good high-spirited playacting.” Moliere’s
Jesuit theatricals in Paris were so popular that even the dress
rehearsals were sold out. Mozart, at the age of eleven, was commissioned to write music for a play at the Jesuit college in Salzburg,
where his father was musical director to the Archbishop. Even
from the West Indies a Jesuit missionary reported that “nothing
has made a more forceful impression on the Indians than our play.”
In England, Jesuit theatre was not known as such because of
Queen Elizabeth’s statute making it a capital crime to be, or even
to assist, a Jesuit within her orbit. But if the purpose of Jesuit theatre was to capture that share of man’s spiritual attention which
might otherwise have been directed toward the Bible, then England certainly produced the greatest Jesuit playwright of them all.
Shakespeare occupies us with the human process in a way that subtly marginalizes the Bible – exactly pursuant to the Jesuit mission. Shakespearean characters do preach, and they preach a religion,
but it is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the gnostic illumination of Medici learning that Shakespeare preaches, the stuff of
Jesuit schools. Not surprisingly, the secret tradition of Templarism
claims Shakespeare, at least the writer of his plays, to have been a
Rosicrucian steeped in Medici learning:
The philosophic ideals promulgated throughout Shakespearean plays distinctly demonstrate their author to have been thoroughly familiar with certain doctrines and tenets peculiar to
Rosicrucianism; in fact, the profundity of the Shakespearean productions stamps their creator as one of the illuminati of the
ages....
Who but a Platonist, a Kabbalist, or a Pythagorean could
have written The Tempest, Macbeth, Hamlet, or The Tragedy of
Cymbeline? Who but one deeply versed in Paracelsian lore could
have conceived A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
Yet, as Garry Wills in his book Witches & Jesuits points out,
Macbeth is an elaborate condemnation of the Jesuits as satanists,
murderers, witches. Macbeth is one of many of its period’s “powder
plays,” a genre in which certain buzz words, well understood by
contemporaries , memorialize the guilt and execution of eight
Jesuits for having schemed the Gunpowder Plot of November 5,
1605. The Plot aimed to blow up the entire government of Great
Britain, including the royal family, in a single catastrophic explosion under the Houses of Parliament.
How could a play defaming Jesuits be of service to the Jesuit
agenda? As we shall see, warfare in defense of the papacy requires
extravagant measures. In fact, both the Gunpowder Plot, which
failed, and the celebration of its detection, which lives on in Macbeth, served Rome abundantly. King James I, who declared himself
the Plot’s divinely-illuminated discoverer, blamed the Plot on
“Jesuits and papists.” But at the same time, James exonerated “less
fanatical Catholics.” 6
According to Wills, “the Plot gave James his best opportunity to separate loyal and moderate Catholics from
the mad extremists of the Plot.” In short, the Plot secured England for “loyal and moderate” Roman Catholicism. In the reasoning of
a Superior General, particularly the General of the Gunpowder
Plot and Shakespearean theatre, Claudio Acquaviva, the sacrifice
of eight Jesuits was a small tactical price to pay for moving the
King of England to express confidence in the pope’s British subjects, estimated at half the population of the realm.
CERTAINLY the most elaborate single Jesuit theatrical event was
produced by Gregory XV, the first Jesuit pupil to be elected
Pope. This was the canonization of Ignatius de Loyola, the climax
of Gregory’s brief pontificate (he reigned only three years). Canonization is authorized nowhere in the Bible. Rather, it is a process
adapted from the pagan tradition of “apotheosis,” whereby the
priestly college declared a particularly effective mortal to be a god.
In Roman Catholicism, the Sacred Congregation of Rites conducts a lengthy inquisition into the works of a deceased candidate.
The inquisition can take dozens, even hundreds of years. The candidate’s works are defended before a tribunal of three judges
against a “devil’s advocate.” A final judgment is declared by the
Pope, who orders the Church to believe that the candidate’s soul
is in Heaven, and to venerate the person with the title of “Saint.”
(The Bible teaches that anyone who hears and does the commandments of Jesus is a saint. Without any hierarchical red tape, he or
she avoids judgment and goes to heaven immediately upon physical death.)
Loyola’s canonization was celebrated on March 12, 1622 in a
ceremony that was “an unprecedented display of ecclesiastical
pomp, pageantry, and extravagance.” 7
One eyewitness described
the event as “an expression of the reborn spirit of the Catholic
Church, of the triumph of the Blessed Virgin over Luther and
Calvin.” 8
RIDING the crest of humanist exuberance following Loyola’s
canonization, Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680)
contributed powerfully to Jesuit theatre as sensory experience .
With his megaphone , which enabled the voice of one to reach thousands, Kircher invented broadcasting. He also fathered modern camera theory with his perfection of the lanterna magica. The
magic lantern projected sharp images through a lens upon a screen,
giving audiences the illusion of burning cities and conflagrations.
Kircher’s work influenced the creation of the phenakistoscope
(1832), the zoetrope (1860), the kinematoscope (1861), the
kineograph (1868), the praxinoscope (1877), and finally, Thomas
Alva Edison’s kinetograph for filming action to be projected onto
a screen through his kinetoscope (1894). Edison had a pet name
for the tar-papered studio in West Orange, New Jersey, where all
his prototypical films were made. He called it “Black Maria,” a
term that aptly described the image to whom Iñigo de Loyola dedicated his life in 1522 – the Black Madonna of Montserrat.
The American cinema’s earliest subject matter to capture the
popular imagination – the “cowboy” – was a Jesuit contribution as
well. Eusebio Kino , whose statue is one of two representing Arizona in the U.S . Capitol building, was a Jesuit professor from
Ingolstadt College in Bavaria. Between 1687 and 1711 Kino introduced cattle and their management to southern Arizona. For this
he is gratefully remembered as “Father of the Cattle Business.”
Pondering the works of Kircher and Kino , we come to a rather
astonishing awareness: Kino’s cowboys , as projected through
Kircher’s magic lantern, indoctrinated America’s earliest movie
audiences with the underlying message of Jesuit theatre and
Roman Catholic theology – that knowing and obeying Scripture
is not necessary in comprehending the ways of good and evil, or in
doing justice under natural law.
Using cinema and radio to unite Catholic laypersons with the
Roman hierarchy was a main purpose of “Catholic Action.”
Catholic Action was inaugurated in 1922 by Pius XI, whose two
confessors, Fathers Alissiardi and Celebrano, were Jesuits. The first
pope to install a radio station at the Vatican (1931 ) and to establish national film review offices (1922), Pius XI ordered Catholics
into politics. In the letter Peculari quadam (“Containing the flock”)
he warned that “the men of Catholic Action would fail in their
duty if, as opportunities allow it, they did not try to direct the politics of their province and of their country.”
The men of Catholic Action did try. Their first major effort
was to employ Black Pope Vladimir Ledochowski strategy of
bringing the Catholic nations of central and eastern Europe
together into a pan-German federation. To head the federation,
Ledochowski required a charismatic leader charged with subduing
the communistic Soviet Union on the east, Protestant Prussia,
Protestant Great Britain, and republican France on the west. 9
Ledochowski chose the Catholic militarist Adolf Hitler, who told
Bishop Bernard of Osnabrück in 1936 that
there was no fundamental difference between National Socialism and the Catholic Church. Had not the church, he argued,
looked on Jews as parasites and shut them in ghettos? ’I am only
doing,’ he boasted, ’what the church has done for fifteen hundred years, only more effectively.’ Being a Catholic himself, he
told Berning, he ’admired and wanted to promote Christianity.’ 10
To promote Christianity as taught him by Roman Catholicism,
Hitler appointed Leni Riefenstahl to create the greatest fascist
films ever produced. Her deification of Hitler and romanticization
of autocracy in spectacles like Triumph of the Will are, in themselves, the history of German cinema in the thirties and early forties. In print, Ledochowski’s pan-German manifesto took the form
of Hitler’s autobiographical Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), ghostwritten by the Jesuit Father Staempfle 11
and placed beside the
Bible on the altars of German churches. 12
After World War II, during September 1957, Pope John XXIII
gave Jesuit theatre even broader horizons with his encyclical
Miranda prorsus (“Looking ahead”), saying,
Men must be brought into closer communion with one
another. They must become socially minded. These technical
arts (cinema, sound broadcasting, and television) can achieve
this aim far more easily than the printed word. [Italics mine] The
Catholic Church is keenly desirous that these means be converted to the spreading and advancement of everything that can be truly called good. Embracing, as she does, the whole of human
society within the orbit of her divinely appointed mission, she is
directly concerned with the fostering of civilization among all
peoples.
To Catholic film producers and directors, Miranda prorsus
delivered
a paternal injunction not to allow films to be made which are at
variance with the faith and Christian moral standards. Should
this happen – which God forbid – then it is for the Bishops to
rebuke them and, if necessary, to impose upon them appropriate
sanctions.
John XXIII urged that Pius XI’s national film reviewing offices
be entrusted to men who are experienced in cinema, sound
broadcasting, and television, under the guidance of a priest specially chosen by the Bishops.... At the same time We urge that
the faithful, and particularly those who are militant in the cause
of Catholic Action [Jesuits and their protégés], be suitably
instructed, so that they may appreciate the need for giving to
these offices their willing, united, and effective support.
In 1964 , Pope Paul VI amplified Miranda prorsus with the
decree Inter mirifica (“Among the Wonders”), saying “it is the
Church’ s birthright to use and own ... the press, the cinema, radio,
television and others of a like nature.” Paul cited
a special responsibility for the proper use of the means of social
communication [which] rests on journalists, writers, actors,
designers, producers, exhibitors, distributors, operators, sellers,
critics – all those, in a word, who are involved in the making and
transmission of communications in any way whatever.... They
have power to direct mankind along a good path or an evil path
by the information they impart and the pressure they exert. It
will be for them to regulate the economic, political, and artistic
values in a way that will not conflict with the common good....
The quality of entertainment’ s content was decreed in a section of Inter mirifica encouraging ”the chronicling, the description
or the representation of moral evil which can, with the help of
the means of social communication and with suitable dramatization, lead to a deeper knowledge and analysis of man and to a manifestation of the true and the good in all their splendor.” Emboldened by this papal decree, social communicators since 1965 have
pushed the constitutional guarantees of “free speech” to the limit
by chronicling, describing, and representing moral evil with such
progressively vivid, repulsive, prurient, yet often appealing detail
that entertainment has become , in the opinion of many, a veritable technological “how to” of moral evil. It clearly does not lead
audiences to a deeper appreciation of Holy Scripture. This fact
identifies entertainment today as a successful Jesuit theatrical mission.
DURING its four centuries of existence, the Jesuit educational/theatrical enterprise has produced a proud, poised, and
imaginative graduate. He or she is enlightened by the Medici
Library’s humanities , facile in worldly matters, moved by theatricality, and indifferent toward Holy Scripture. Producing Jesuitic
graduates has become the aim of modern public education, despite
the heavy price of ignoring Scripture (which, as Luther warned
and the Columbine murders attest, has indeed turned the public
schools into “widening gates of hell”). Jesuit theatre and the Spiritual Exercises, whose original purpose was to bring human understanding into papal subservience through esoteric emotional
experiences, have evolved into the full panoply of contemporary
social communication.
The great objective of obscuring Scripture has operated to discourage the formal study of the basics of which the Bible is the cornerstone – literature, science, and history. Research by the National Association of Scholars (NAS ) of U.S . News & World Report’s annual listing of “America’s Best Colleges ” (including both private and public) disclosed startling figures. 15 In 1914, nearly all of these institutions had required courses in English composition; by 1964 the figure was 86%; in 1996, 36%. In 1914, 82 % of the best colleges and universities had traditional mathematics requirements; by 1964 only 36 % did; by 1996, 12% . In 1914, 1939 and 1964 , more than 70% of the institutions required at least one course in the natural sciences; that figure fell to 34% in 1996. Literature courses were required at 75% of the institutions in 1914 , and at 50% in 1939 and 1964 . Today, not one of the “best” institutions has a literature requirement. Most colleges today are turning out graduates who have studied little or no history. In 1914, 90% of America's elite colleges required history; in 1939 and 1964 more than 50% did; by 1996 only one of the 50 best school s offered a required history course. The day is approaching, perhaps, when the only historians will be amateurs who study history as self-help, who examine the past in order to make sense of the present and not be caught unprepared by the future.
America's understanding has been systematically bent to the will of the Church Militant, while the intellectual means for sensing the capture have been disconnected. Most of the content of modern media, whether television, radio, print, film, stage, or web, is state-of-the-art Jesuit ratio studiorum. The Jesuit college is no longer just a chartered institution; it has become our entire social environment - the movies , the mall, the school, the home, the mind. Human experience has become a Spiritual Exercise managed by charismatic spiritual directors who know how to manipulate a democracy's emotions. Logic, perspective, national memory, and self-discipline are purged to the point that “unbridled emotional responses,” as economist Thomas Sowell put it, “are all we have left.”
Despite its ascendancy over American life, few Americans understand the term “Jesuit.” In our next chapter, we shall examine how this term is defined in our basic reference works. These definitions will help us to better understand the kind of character produced by Ignatian psychological technique.
We find in the Bible (Numbers 26:44 ) the mention of “Jesuites.” These Jesuites were the progeny of Jesui, whose name in Hebrew, Yishviy, means “level. ” The Jesuits certainly levelled the Protestant menace.
Jesui was a great-grandson of Abraham. His father was the Israelite tribal chieftain Asher (Asher, “happy”). At Genesis 49:20, Asher's posterity is divinely prophesied to “yield royal dainties (ma-adanim, 'delights').” Their uniquely privileged access to the minds and wills of kings has certainly enabled the Jesuits to yield copious harvests of royal delights.
But in fulfilling their scriptural prophecy, the Jesuits seem to have alienated themselves from people who use the English language. This does not disappoint St. Ignatius. “Let us hope,” he once wrote, “that the Society may never be left untroubled by the hostility of the world for very long.”
America's first indigenous dictionary was compiled by Noah Webster and published in 1828. His American Dictionary of the English Language reflects the place held by Jesuits in the opinion of a public whose senior citizens had brought forth the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (Webster himself was fortyone when the Constitution was ratified):
Jesuit. One of the society of Jesus, so called, founded by Ignatius Loyola; a society remarkable for their cunning in propagating their principles.
Jesuited. Conforming to the principles of the Jesuits.
Jesuitess. A female Jesuit in principle.
Jesuitic, jesuitical. Pertaining to the Jesuits or their principles and arts. 2. Designing; cunning; deceitful; prevaricating.
Jesuitically. Craftily.
Jesuitism. The arts, principles and practices of the Jesuits. 2. Cunning; deceit; hypocrisy; prevarication; deceptive practices to effect a purpose.
One hundred seventy-eight years later, Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1986 ) informs us that the language has not repented:
Jesuit: 1: a member of a religious society for men founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in 1534. 2: one given to intrigue or equivocation: a crafty person: CASUIST
Jesuited: jesuitic
Jesuitic or jesuitical: 1: of or relating to the Jesuits, Jesuitism, or Jesuitry. 2: having qualities thought to resemble those of a Jesuit - usu. used disparagingly
Jesuitize: to act or teach in the actual or ascribed manner of a Jesuit: to indoctrinate with actual or ascribed Jesuit principles
Jesuitry: principles or practices ascribed to the Jesuits, as the practice of mental reservation, casuistry, and equivocation
WWWebster online dictionary, WWWebster (1999) , is particularly revealing. Here we read that “Jesuit” means “a member of the Roman Catholic Society of Jesus founded by Saint Ignatius Loyola in 1534 and devoted to missionary and educational work,” and that a Jesuit is “one given to intrigue or equivocation. ”Webster defines “to intrigue” as meaning “to cheat, trick, plot, and scheme, ” and “to equivocate ” as “to use equivocal language especially with intent to deceive; to avoid committing oneself in what one says.” “Equivocal” language, according to the same source, is language “subject to two or more interpretations and usually used to mislead or confuse; of uncertain nature or disposition toward a person or thing; of doubtful advantage, genuineness, or moral rectitude.”
The Jesuit discipline has elevated mental reservation, casuistry, and equivocation to high arts - you will not find a more hilarious defense of these arts than Blaise Pascal's classic “Pastoral Letters”(1657), freely available on the internet. Purportedly written to a friend, the “Letters” report conversations Pascal is having with a Jesuit casuist. The Jesuit defends his arts thusly:
Men have arrived at such a pitch of corruption nowadays that, unable to make them come to us, we must e'en go to them, otherwise they would cast us off altogether; and, what is worse, they would become perfect castaways. It is to retain such characters as these that our casuists have taken under consideration the vices to which people of various conditions are most addicted, with the view of laying down maxims which, while they cannot be said to violate the truth, are so gentle that he must be a very impracticable subject indeed who is not pleased with them. The grand project of our Society, for the good of religion, is never to repulse any one, let him be what he may, and so avoid driving people to despair.
Jesuit moral theology hardly needs a satirist. Its humor is self contained. Consider Hermann Busenbaum, one of the Society's most venerated moral theologians. Busenbaum literally wrote the book on self-serving logic. His celebrated Medulla theologiae moralis (“The Marrow of Moral Theology,” 1645) enjoyed more than two hundred printings and was required ethics reading in all the Jesuit colleges . A man of stout appetites, Busenbaum constructed an equivocation to relieve himself of the obligation to eat fish on Fridays: “On Fridays every good Catholic must eat only creatures that live in the water, which justifies ordering a nice roast duck!”
Busenbaum demonstrated how mental reservation could enable a criminal to escape a charge of breaking and entering:
“Did you force the window to gain felonious entry into these premises?” asks the judge. “Certainly not!” replies the accused, qualifying his denial with the mental reservation “I entered through the skylight.”
Father Gury, who taught moral theology at the Roman College from his book Casus Conscientire (1875) , approved of the way an adulterous wife, having just received absolution for her sin from a priest, used mental reservation to mislead her husband:
To the entreaties of her husband, she absolutely denied the fault: “I have not committed it,” she said; meaning “adultery such as I am obliged to reveal;” in other words, “I have not committed an adultery.” She could deny her sin as a culprit may say to a judge who does not question him legitimately: “I have not committed any crime,” adding mentally, “in such a manner that I should reveal it.” This is the opinion of St. Liguori, and of many others.
The “St. Liguori ” to whom Gury refers is Alphonse Liguori, declared Patron Saint of Confessors and Moralists by Pope Pius XII. St. Liguori was not a Jesuit himself, but he was devoted to them. He facilitated adultery by means of an equivocation: “An adulteress questioned by her husband, may deny her guilt by declaring that she has not committed 'adultery,' meaning 'idolatry,' for which the term 'adultery' is often employed in the Old Testament.”
Casuistry is the process of applying moral principles falsely in deciding the rights or wrongs of a case - the word “casuistry” comes from “cases.” WWWebster equates casuistry with rationalization, “to cause something to seem reasonable; to provide plausible but untrue reasons for conduct.” (In early 1999 , President Clinton' s biographer, David Maraniss, could be seen remarking on talk shows that the President owed his formidable skills as a criminal defendant to “his training in casuistry at Georgetown University.”) The great Jesuit casuist Antonio Escobar pardoned evildoing as long as it was committed in pursuit of a lofty goal. “Purity of intention,” he declared in 1627, “may justify actions which are contrary to the moral code and to human laws.” Hermann Busenbaum ratified Escobar with his own famous maxim “Cum finis est licitus, etiam media sunt licita,” “If the end is legal, the means are legal.” Escobar and Busenbaum boil down to the essential doctrine of terrorism: “The end justifies the means.”
Casuistry solved the problem of usury. Although the voice of Jesus commanded “lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward will be great” (Luke 6:35), Jesuit lenders often charged exorbitant interest. Father Gury explained the principle:
If lending one hundred francs you are losing ten francs by it, you lend really one hundred and ten francs. Then you shall receive one hundred and ten francs.
Indeed, casuistry has set the moral tone of world economics. In his Universae theologiae moralis (“Catholic Moral Theology”, 1652-66), Antonio Escobar rendered the opinion that “The giving of short weight is not to be reckoned as a sin when the official price for certain goods is so low that the merchant would be ruined thereby.” By this reasoning, the international network of central banks (beginning with the Knights Templars and sustained by the Society of Jesus) has been absolved of manipulating monetary values if doing so helps individual sovereign nation-states manage their subjects. Subjects are cyclically required to part with true value - that is, hard-earned gold and silver coinage - in exchange for intangible credit denominated in paper notes whose official promises to repay in precious coinage... are cyclically broken. As the most powerful office in Roman Catholicism, the black papacy might have promoted stable national economies by means of the divinely fair monetary system commanded in the Bible at Leviticus 19.
Ye shall do no unrighteousness in measure. Just balances, just weights, shall ye have: I am the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt.
Instead, it has promoted Escobar's casuistry, which directs merchants to survive official value manipulations by cheating one another. There are significant sociological consequences . When giving short weight becomes policy, a moral paradigm is set. That paradigm governs more than just commercial transactions . It affects human relationships, as well. Partners in friendships, marriages, and families begin giving short weight - giving less than represented. This results in one-sided, frustrating, dysfunctional emotional transactions, and ultimately an aberrant society. The ultimate beneficiary of aberrant societies, of course, is Pontifex Maximus, whose profession is their regulation.
If we depend solely on dictionary definitions, we learn that Jesuits are churchmen and teachers of a doubtful moral rectitude who are likely to cheat, trick, plot, scheme , deceive , and confuse us while avoiding to commit themselves verbally. When we study their published moralists, we sense a rather vibrant presence of The Trickster. But in the Society's defense, it must be said these are legitimate character traits for a militia empowered by a declaration of war, and we must remember that Paul III's bull ordaining the Society of Jesus, Regimini militantis ecclesiae, is just such a declaration. Human life in a declared war becomes subject to the first great rule of war, belli legum dormit, “in war the law sleeps.” When the law sleeps, the unarmed priest's only weapons are the intrigue, deceit, equivocation, casuistry, and mental reservation with which the Jesuits have made themselves so notorious and so often despised.
In forthcoming chapters, we shall be examining how the Society of Jesus made war against Great Britain and the British colonies during the second half of the eighteenth century, and then against the sovereign American States a century later. In each instance, the warfare was of the highest sophistication. It was so subtly conceived and so masterfully executed, that neither of the major combatants could discern the presence of Jesuits in the equation. The amazing technology of Jesuit warfare - that is the subject of our next chapter.
The basis of Roman Catholic persecution was political. Catholics owed allegiance to Pontifex Maximus, the Bishop of Rome. The Bishop of Rome was a foreign ruler who, as a matter of public policy, regarded the British king and his Protestant Church as heretics to be destroyed. From the American colonists' standpoint, to allow Catholics to vote or hold office was tantamount to surrendering their colonies to a foreign conqueror. A crucial part of maintaining personal liberty in Protestant colonial America was keeping Roman Catholics out of government. But then came the Revolution. The colonial citizenry fought for and won their independence from Great Britain. They established a Constitution that amounted to... surrendering their country to a foreign conqueror. Consider the legalities. Before the Constitution was ratified, American Catholics had few civil rights; after ratification, they had them all. Article VI, section 3 provides that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the authority of the United States,” while the First Amendment denies Congress the power “to make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” With Article IV Section 3 and the First Amendment, the Constitution welcomed agents of Pontifex Maximus, the world's chief enemy of Protestantism, into the ranks of government.
Of the 2,500,000 enumerated inhabitants in 1787 America , the Roman Catholic population consisted of no more than 16,000 in Maryland, 7,000 in Pennsylvania, 1,500 in New York, and 200 in Virginia. 1 Once the Constitution was in place, a steady influx of European immigrants transformed Roman Catholicism from America's smallest to largest religious denomination. By 1850, the higher powers at Rome could view the United States as a viable tributary, if not another papal state.
This awesome result did not just happen. I submit that it was brilliantly designed and commanded by a man I am pleased to honor as the American republic's least known founding father, Lorenzo Ricci (pronounced “Richey.” ) Ricci was a Tuscan aristocrat by birth, a stoical philosopher by reputation, and a Jesuit father by profession. He was Superior General of the Society of Jesus during the formative years of the American Revolution, from 1758 until 1775. He also may be credited with having written the most celebrated treatise on war ever published, a work entitled The Thirteen Articles Concerning Military Art.
The reputed author of this work is a quasi-historical Chinese general believed to have lived in the sixth century BC named Sun-tzu. Sun-tzu was unknown to western languages until Joseph-Marie Amiot, astronomer to the Emperor of China , brought forth a French edition of the Thirteen Articles in 177. Amiot was a Jesuit priest under obedience to General Ricci. I base my inference that Ricci is the author of Amiot's Sun-tzu on a remark from today's premier Jesuit spokesman, Malachi Martin, retired professor at the Pontifical Institute in Rome, to the effect that a book written by a Jesuit, due to the obedience factor, can be presumed “in essence” to be the work of his Superior General. 2 Amiot's Sun-tzu, then, can be presumed to have been “written” by Lorenzo Ricci.
The black pope's decision to publish Sun-tzu prior to the outbreak of the Revolution he had engineered demonstrates, I believe, his confidence that divine authority had already delivered victory to him. Ricci knew that circumstances had reached the point at which there was nothing which his enemy, the forces of Protestantism on both sides of the Atlantic, could do to alter the outcome. He was like a chess master who sees the inevitability of checkmate four moves ahead and reveals his winning method out of courtesy to the imminent loser. His method was so sublimely Sun-tzuan that his opponents never even perceived his army to be an opponent, just as Protestants today are unaware that extirpating their credo is still the unrelenting Jesuit mission.
The Thirteen Articles were ignored by Americans until the nineteen-seventies, when our corporate executives discovered that their oriental counterparts were doing business according to Sun-tzuan strategies. As U.S. corporations increased their presence in the Pacific Rim, Sun-tzu became a major survival tool. Since the middle eighties, more than fifty editions of the Articles have been published in this country, mostly under the “Art of War” title. These editions represent Sun-tzu well enough, but none of them are derived from the 1772 Amiot translation into French (which itself was based on a Tartar-Manchurian version of the older Chinese manuscripts). Amiot' s Sun-tzu appears never to have been published in English, although a 199 6 commission by La Belle Église produced a very fine manuscript English translation by Hermine F. Garcia. That manuscript is the source of my citations here.
Only the Amiot edition reflects in virtually the Jesuit General's own words how he formed the United States of America by dividing the British Empire against itself, while at the same time dividing the rest of Europe against Britain, against even the General's own army! The Amiot is all the more remarkable for appearing in the very midst of the unfolding of this extraordinary process.
AMIOT begins The Thirteen Articles by noting how odd it is that the benign Chinese morality should spawn a warrior of Sun-tzu's magnitude:
If we are to judge the Chinese by their morals ... and in general by everything one can currently observe of them, we would instantly conclude that this must be the most pacifist Nation in the world, far from having the brilliant qualities necessary for Warriors. Yet, surprisingly, this very Nation, which has subsisted for nearly four thousand years in approximately the same state we see it in today, has always, or almost always, triumphed over its enemies; and when it had the misfortune of being conquered, it gave its laws to the conquerors themselves.
We know this, Amiot says, from the Annals, which contain “admirable accounts of prodigious bravery,” and lists of actions and military conduct of various founders of dynasties. He exclaims
What Heroes! What Politicians! What Warriors! No Alexander or Caesar could surpass them. Why shouldn't these great men, these powerful geniuses, who made such fine political and civil Laws, have made military laws which were just as fine?
The reference to Caesar is significant. Declaring China' s dynastic heroes to be Caesar's equals, Amiot equates Lorenzo Ricci, the reigning bearer of Caesarean authority, with the greatest oriental Warriors. Were the oriental military laws “just as fine” as Caesar's? “It is not up to me to judge this,” Amiot answers. “Our Warriors must pronounce themselves in this regard.”
If the term “Our Warriors” means “our Jesuit brethren,” as I believe it does, then we have before us Ricci's clandestine order that the book be received by the scattered members of the Society as the latest statement of the General's military Law. (Clandestine generals order clandestinely.) Amiot admits that translating a war manual was “contrary to my taste, & so far from the object of my profession.” He says that he only undertook the work in hopes that the reader might have “some pleasure conversing with these foreign Heroes and receiving some of their instructions and finding something useful.” What cannot be denied is that Rome was served by critical events in America and England during the years of Ricci's reign in ways that flow quite discernibly from the strategies, laws, and maxims set forth in the Thirteen Articles. I believe that anyone reading Amiot's Sun-tzu in 1772, knowing that its translator was a Jesuit, knowing the Jesuit mission, and knowing the nature of Jesuitic obedience, could observe world events with this knowledge, and predict that the dispute between the American colonists and the British Empire would end - as it actually did - in Roman dominance over a new, independent republic.
Before presenting the works of Sun-tzu, Amiot recounts an important legend demonstrating the severity of Sun-tzuan authority. It is a severity that empowers the General to overrule even his Sovereign in order to secure the army's perfect obedience. Hearing that the King of Oo was preparing for war and not wishing to remain idle, Sun-tzu offered his services to the King. The King had read Sun-tzu's book and liked it, but doubted its practicability. “Prince,” replied Sun-tzu, “I said nothing in my Writings that I had not already practiced in the army. What I have not yet said, but of which I presume to assure Your Majesty today, is that I am capable of transmitting these practices to anyone whomsoever & training them in military exercises when I am authorized to do so.”
“I understand,” replied the King. “You wish to say that you will easily teach your maxims to intelligent men who are already both prudent and valorous; that you will have no difficulty giving training in military exercises to men accustomed to hard work who are docile & full of good will. But the majority is not of that nature.”
“It matters not,” replied Sun-tzu. “I said anyone whomsoever and I exclude no one from my offer, including the most mutinous, the most cowardly and the weakest of men.”
“To hear you speak,” said the King, “you would even inspire women to have the feelings of Warriors; you would train them to bear arms.”
“Yes, Prince,” replied Sun-tzu in a firm voice, “and I beg Your Majesty to be assured of it.”
The King, who in the circumstances in which he found himself was no longer entertained by the customary amusements of Court, took advantage of this opportunity to find a new sort of amusement. He said, “Bring me one hundred eighty of my wives.” He was obeyed, & the Princesses appeared. Among them were two in particular whom the King loved tenderly; they were placed ahead of the others. “We will see,” said the King, smiling. “We will see, Sun-tzu, if you will be true to your word. I make you General of these new troops. All throughout my palace you need only choose the place which seems the most comfortable to give them military training. When they are sufficiently instructed you will let me know, & I will come myself to render justice to them & to your talent.”
The General sensed the ridicule of the role he was asked to play. But he did not back down, and instead appeared quite satisfied by the honor bestowed on him by the King, not only by allowing him to see his wives but also by putting them under his direction. “I will do well with them, Sire,” he said in an assured tone, “and I hope that soon Your Majesty will have cause to be satisfied with my services. At the very least, Your Majesty will be convinced that Sun-tzu is not a man who takes risks.”
Once the King had retired to his apartments, the Warrior thought only of executing his commission. He asked for weapons & all the military equipment needed for his newly created soldiers. While waiting for everything to be ready, he led his troop into one of the courtyards of the palace which seemed the best suited for his work. Soon the items he had requested were brought to him. Sun-tzu then spoke to the Princesses. “Here you are,” he said, “under my direction and my orders. You must listen to me attentively and obey me in whatever I command you to do. That is the first & most essential military law: make sure you don't break it. By tomorrow I want you to perform exercises before the King, & I intend for them to be done perfectly.”
After those words he strapped on their swords, put spears in their hands, divided them into two groups, and put one of the favorite Princesses at the head of each. Once that arrangement was made, he began his instructions in these terms: “Can you tell the difference between your chest and your back, & your right hand from your left hand? Answer me.” At first the only response he received was some bursts of laughter. But he remained silent and very serious. “Yes, of course,” the Ladies then replied in one voice. “If that is so,” resumed Sun-tzu, “then listen carefully to what I am going to say. When the drum strikes only one beat, you will remain as you are now, only paying attention to what is before your chest. When the drum strikes two beats, you must turn so that your chest is in the place where your right hand was before. If instead of two beats you hear three, you must turn so that your chest is precisely where your left hand was before. But when the drum strikes four beats, you must turn so that your chest is where your back was, & your back will be where your chest was.
“What I just said may not be clear enough; let me explain. A single drum beat means that you must not change your position & you must be on guard. Two beats means you must turn right. Three beats means you must turn left. And four beats means you make a half turn. I will explain even more.
“This is the order I shall follow. First I will strike one beat: at that signal you will be ready to receive my orders. A few moments later I will strike two beats: then, all together, you will turn to the right with gravity, after which I will not strike three beats but four, & you will make a half-turn. I will then have you return to your first position and, as before, I will strike one beat. At the first signal, be ready. Then I will strike, not two beats but three, & you will turn left; at four beats you will complete the half-turn. Have you well understood what I am saying? If you have any difficulties, you have but to speak to me of them and I shall attempt to explain the matter.”
“We have understood,” replied the Ladies.
“If that is so,” responded Sun-tzu, “I will begin. Do not forget that the sound of the drum takes the place of the General's voice, but he is the one who is giving you these orders.”
After repeating his instructions three times, Sun-tzu again aligned his small army, after which he had the drum strike one beat. At that sound, all the Ladies began to laugh. At two drum beats, they laughed even louder. Ever serious, the General spoke to them thus: “It is possible that I did not explain clearly enough the instructions I gave you. If that is so, it is my fault. I will attempt to remedy it by speaking to you in a way that is more accessible to you (& at once he repeated the lesson three times in other terms), and then we will see,” he added, “if you obey me any better.” He had the drum strike one beat, and then two. Seeing him look so serious, and given the strange situation they found themselves in, the Ladies forgot to obey him. After attempting in vain to stop the laughter that was choking them, they finally let it burst forth loudly.
Sun-tzu was in no way disconcerted, but in the same tone he had used when speaking to them before, he said: “If I had not explained myself clearly, or if you had not assured me, in unison, that you understood what I said, you would in no way be guilty. But I spoke to you clearly, as you admitted yourselves. Why did you not obey? You deserve punishment, and military punishment. Among the Makers of War, whoever does not obey the orders of his General deserves death. Therefore you will die.”
After that short preamble, Sun-tzu ordered the women who formed the two lines to kill the two who were leading them. Just then, one of the men whose job it was to guard the women, seeing that the Warrior was not joking, ran to warn the King of what was happening. The King sent someone to Sun-tzu to forbid him from going any farther, & in particular from mistreating the two women he loved the best & without whom he could not live. The General listened with respect to the words that were spoken on behalf of the King, but he refused to bow to his wishes.
“Go tell the King,” he replied, “that Sun-tzu believes him to be too reasonable & too just to think he might have changed his mind so soon, & that he truly wishes to be obeyed in what you have just told me on his behalf. The Prince is the lawmaker; he would not give orders which would sully the dignity he vested in me. He asked me to train one hundred and eighty of his Wives as soldiers, he made me their General. The rest is up to me. They disobeyed me, they will die.”
So saying, he pulled out his sword and with the same calmness he had displayed until then, he cut off the heads of the two who were leading the others. He immediately put two others in their place, and had the drum strike the various beats he had explained to his troops. And it was as if those women had been professional soldiers all their lives; they made their turns silently and impeccably. Sun-tzu spoke thus to the Envoy: “Go tell the King,” he said, “that his wives know how to drill. Now I can lead them to war, make them affront all sorts of perils, & even make them pass through water & fire.”
When the King learned what had happened, he was penetrated by the deepest sorrow. With a great sigh he said, “Thus have I lost what was dearest to me in this world.... Have that Foreigner return to his country. I do not want him, nor his services — What have you done, barbarian?... How can I go on living?” ... and so on.
As unconsolable as the King was, time and the circumstances soon made him forget his loss. His enemies were ready to descend upon him. He asked Sun-tzu to return, made him General of his armies, & with his help he destroyed the Chou Kingdom. Those of his neighbors who had formerly been the most worrisome were now penetrated by fear at the mere mention of the glorious acts of Sun-tzu, and thought only of living peacefully under the protection of a Prince who had such a man at his service.
This introduction confirms that Paul III's war declaration Regimini militantis ecclesiae is about protecting the life of the nation, which is the Roman Church. Protecting the Church may require the Superior General to sacrifice his soldiers, his citizens, and if need be, his sovereign, the pope. In a very real sense, the great General is so inscrutably alone, so omnipotent, that he is at war with... everyone. Sacrificing his own (just as Saturn, the grandfather-god of Rome devoured his own children) in order to defeat an enemy short of coming to blows, this is a great General's legitimate obligation. Sun-tzu writes:
Without giving battle, without spilling a drop of the enemy's blood, without even drawing a sword, the clever General succeeds in capturing cities. Without setting foot in a foreign Kingdom, he finds the means to conquer them. He acts in such a way that those who are inferior to him can never guess his intentions. He has them change location, even taking them to rather difficult places where they must work and suffer. When a clever General goes into action, the enemy is already defeated. When he fights, he alone must do more than his entire army, not through the strength of his arm but through his prudence, his manner of commanding, & above all his ruses.
Lorenzo Ricci's most compelling ruse was disestablishing the Society of Jesus, a campaign that mimicked the collapse of the Knights Templar four centuries earlier. With astonishing precision, the Disestablishment ran concurrently with the escalation of hostilities between the American colonies and the British Crown.
It was an amazing juggle that spanned seventeen years. It saw Ricci's secret liaisons in and around the British Parliament buy legislation that inflamed his secret liasons in and around the American colonial governments to formulate a culture of rebellion. It saw his own visible army, mute and defenseless, systematically assaulted by the European powers and eventually suppressed “for all eternity” by a 1773 papal brief. Once the stage was set and the action scripted, it saw the General slip into deeper cover to let the Protestant powers exhaust themselves in wars that within a single generation resulted in a glorious Roman presence where once England had reigned.
Clandestine military operations inspired by the ingenuity of Sun-tzu are virtually impossible to document. If strategic notes were taken, if written commands were given, they were carefully destroyed. Such that survive may have been spared in order to misinform. The mouths of covert operatives are kept shut out of a simple desire to stay alive. Sensational disclosures, too, we can presume to be misinformation.
To determine that Lorenzo Ricci did in fact mount any clandestine operation at all requires a careful evaluation of circumstantial evidence. Was there an outcome that benefited him and his Sovereign? Did he have the authority, the motive, the resources, the ability, and the opportunity to do what created the outcome?
As to outcome: English-speaking Protestantism did in fact violently divide, and the victorious party moreover invited Roman Catholic religionists to participate in its political government. As to authority for waging war against Protestantism, Regimini militantis ecclesiae authorized the General to prosecute enemies of the Roman faith.
As to motive: the Jesuit oath spiritually obligated the extirpation of Protestantism in both America and Great Britain. As to resources, the black papacy, even as its martial strategy brought its own organization to apparent oblivion, had instant call on the vast reserve of Roman Catholic wealth - as the old Spanish proverb goes, “Don Dinero es muy Católico.” Ricci's ability to direct an international covert operation was stated and defined by the momentous publication of The Thirteen Articles in what was then the language of international diplomacy. Finally, a man commanding unlimited financial resources and unlimited obedience of an unlimited supply of well trained personnel enjoys unlimited opportunity to do anything possible, and some things deemed impossible. To deny that Lorenzo Ricci orchestrated American Independence may be to ignore his talent and demean his office.
Let us move now to the next chapter, and begin our examination of how the General did it.
Next
LORENZO RICCI’S WAR
The great objective of obscuring Scripture has operated to discourage the formal study of the basics of which the Bible is the cornerstone – literature, science, and history. Research by the National Association of Scholars (NAS ) of U.S . News & World Report’s annual listing of “America’s Best Colleges ” (including both private and public) disclosed startling figures. 15 In 1914, nearly all of these institutions had required courses in English composition; by 1964 the figure was 86%; in 1996, 36%. In 1914, 82 % of the best colleges and universities had traditional mathematics requirements; by 1964 only 36 % did; by 1996, 12% . In 1914, 1939 and 1964 , more than 70% of the institutions required at least one course in the natural sciences; that figure fell to 34% in 1996. Literature courses were required at 75% of the institutions in 1914 , and at 50% in 1939 and 1964 . Today, not one of the “best” institutions has a literature requirement. Most colleges today are turning out graduates who have studied little or no history. In 1914, 90% of America's elite colleges required history; in 1939 and 1964 more than 50% did; by 1996 only one of the 50 best school s offered a required history course. The day is approaching, perhaps, when the only historians will be amateurs who study history as self-help, who examine the past in order to make sense of the present and not be caught unprepared by the future.
America's understanding has been systematically bent to the will of the Church Militant, while the intellectual means for sensing the capture have been disconnected. Most of the content of modern media, whether television, radio, print, film, stage, or web, is state-of-the-art Jesuit ratio studiorum. The Jesuit college is no longer just a chartered institution; it has become our entire social environment - the movies , the mall, the school, the home, the mind. Human experience has become a Spiritual Exercise managed by charismatic spiritual directors who know how to manipulate a democracy's emotions. Logic, perspective, national memory, and self-discipline are purged to the point that “unbridled emotional responses,” as economist Thomas Sowell put it, “are all we have left.”
Despite its ascendancy over American life, few Americans understand the term “Jesuit.” In our next chapter, we shall examine how this term is defined in our basic reference works. These definitions will help us to better understand the kind of character produced by Ignatian psychological technique.
Chapter 10
DEFINITIONS
THE TERM
“Jesuit” was first used to describe a member of the
Society of Jesus in 1559. It did not originate from within
the Society, but from outsiders. Whether intended derisively or respectfully, “Jesuit” does appear to have been inspired. We find in the Bible (Numbers 26:44 ) the mention of “Jesuites.” These Jesuites were the progeny of Jesui, whose name in Hebrew, Yishviy, means “level. ” The Jesuits certainly levelled the Protestant menace.
Jesui was a great-grandson of Abraham. His father was the Israelite tribal chieftain Asher (Asher, “happy”). At Genesis 49:20, Asher's posterity is divinely prophesied to “yield royal dainties (ma-adanim, 'delights').” Their uniquely privileged access to the minds and wills of kings has certainly enabled the Jesuits to yield copious harvests of royal delights.
But in fulfilling their scriptural prophecy, the Jesuits seem to have alienated themselves from people who use the English language. This does not disappoint St. Ignatius. “Let us hope,” he once wrote, “that the Society may never be left untroubled by the hostility of the world for very long.”
America's first indigenous dictionary was compiled by Noah Webster and published in 1828. His American Dictionary of the English Language reflects the place held by Jesuits in the opinion of a public whose senior citizens had brought forth the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (Webster himself was fortyone when the Constitution was ratified):
Jesuit. One of the society of Jesus, so called, founded by Ignatius Loyola; a society remarkable for their cunning in propagating their principles.
Jesuited. Conforming to the principles of the Jesuits.
Jesuitess. A female Jesuit in principle.
Jesuitic, jesuitical. Pertaining to the Jesuits or their principles and arts. 2. Designing; cunning; deceitful; prevaricating.
Jesuitically. Craftily.
Jesuitism. The arts, principles and practices of the Jesuits. 2. Cunning; deceit; hypocrisy; prevarication; deceptive practices to effect a purpose.
One hundred seventy-eight years later, Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1986 ) informs us that the language has not repented:
Jesuit: 1: a member of a religious society for men founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in 1534. 2: one given to intrigue or equivocation: a crafty person: CASUIST
Jesuited: jesuitic
Jesuitic or jesuitical: 1: of or relating to the Jesuits, Jesuitism, or Jesuitry. 2: having qualities thought to resemble those of a Jesuit - usu. used disparagingly
Jesuitize: to act or teach in the actual or ascribed manner of a Jesuit: to indoctrinate with actual or ascribed Jesuit principles
Jesuitry: principles or practices ascribed to the Jesuits, as the practice of mental reservation, casuistry, and equivocation
WWWebster online dictionary, WWWebster (1999) , is particularly revealing. Here we read that “Jesuit” means “a member of the Roman Catholic Society of Jesus founded by Saint Ignatius Loyola in 1534 and devoted to missionary and educational work,” and that a Jesuit is “one given to intrigue or equivocation. ”Webster defines “to intrigue” as meaning “to cheat, trick, plot, and scheme, ” and “to equivocate ” as “to use equivocal language especially with intent to deceive; to avoid committing oneself in what one says.” “Equivocal” language, according to the same source, is language “subject to two or more interpretations and usually used to mislead or confuse; of uncertain nature or disposition toward a person or thing; of doubtful advantage, genuineness, or moral rectitude.”
The Jesuit discipline has elevated mental reservation, casuistry, and equivocation to high arts - you will not find a more hilarious defense of these arts than Blaise Pascal's classic “Pastoral Letters”(1657), freely available on the internet. Purportedly written to a friend, the “Letters” report conversations Pascal is having with a Jesuit casuist. The Jesuit defends his arts thusly:
Men have arrived at such a pitch of corruption nowadays that, unable to make them come to us, we must e'en go to them, otherwise they would cast us off altogether; and, what is worse, they would become perfect castaways. It is to retain such characters as these that our casuists have taken under consideration the vices to which people of various conditions are most addicted, with the view of laying down maxims which, while they cannot be said to violate the truth, are so gentle that he must be a very impracticable subject indeed who is not pleased with them. The grand project of our Society, for the good of religion, is never to repulse any one, let him be what he may, and so avoid driving people to despair.
Jesuit moral theology hardly needs a satirist. Its humor is self contained. Consider Hermann Busenbaum, one of the Society's most venerated moral theologians. Busenbaum literally wrote the book on self-serving logic. His celebrated Medulla theologiae moralis (“The Marrow of Moral Theology,” 1645) enjoyed more than two hundred printings and was required ethics reading in all the Jesuit colleges . A man of stout appetites, Busenbaum constructed an equivocation to relieve himself of the obligation to eat fish on Fridays: “On Fridays every good Catholic must eat only creatures that live in the water, which justifies ordering a nice roast duck!”
Busenbaum demonstrated how mental reservation could enable a criminal to escape a charge of breaking and entering:
“Did you force the window to gain felonious entry into these premises?” asks the judge. “Certainly not!” replies the accused, qualifying his denial with the mental reservation “I entered through the skylight.”
Father Gury, who taught moral theology at the Roman College from his book Casus Conscientire (1875) , approved of the way an adulterous wife, having just received absolution for her sin from a priest, used mental reservation to mislead her husband:
To the entreaties of her husband, she absolutely denied the fault: “I have not committed it,” she said; meaning “adultery such as I am obliged to reveal;” in other words, “I have not committed an adultery.” She could deny her sin as a culprit may say to a judge who does not question him legitimately: “I have not committed any crime,” adding mentally, “in such a manner that I should reveal it.” This is the opinion of St. Liguori, and of many others.
The “St. Liguori ” to whom Gury refers is Alphonse Liguori, declared Patron Saint of Confessors and Moralists by Pope Pius XII. St. Liguori was not a Jesuit himself, but he was devoted to them. He facilitated adultery by means of an equivocation: “An adulteress questioned by her husband, may deny her guilt by declaring that she has not committed 'adultery,' meaning 'idolatry,' for which the term 'adultery' is often employed in the Old Testament.”
Casuistry is the process of applying moral principles falsely in deciding the rights or wrongs of a case - the word “casuistry” comes from “cases.” WWWebster equates casuistry with rationalization, “to cause something to seem reasonable; to provide plausible but untrue reasons for conduct.” (In early 1999 , President Clinton' s biographer, David Maraniss, could be seen remarking on talk shows that the President owed his formidable skills as a criminal defendant to “his training in casuistry at Georgetown University.”) The great Jesuit casuist Antonio Escobar pardoned evildoing as long as it was committed in pursuit of a lofty goal. “Purity of intention,” he declared in 1627, “may justify actions which are contrary to the moral code and to human laws.” Hermann Busenbaum ratified Escobar with his own famous maxim “Cum finis est licitus, etiam media sunt licita,” “If the end is legal, the means are legal.” Escobar and Busenbaum boil down to the essential doctrine of terrorism: “The end justifies the means.”
Casuistry solved the problem of usury. Although the voice of Jesus commanded “lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward will be great” (Luke 6:35), Jesuit lenders often charged exorbitant interest. Father Gury explained the principle:
If lending one hundred francs you are losing ten francs by it, you lend really one hundred and ten francs. Then you shall receive one hundred and ten francs.
Indeed, casuistry has set the moral tone of world economics. In his Universae theologiae moralis (“Catholic Moral Theology”, 1652-66), Antonio Escobar rendered the opinion that “The giving of short weight is not to be reckoned as a sin when the official price for certain goods is so low that the merchant would be ruined thereby.” By this reasoning, the international network of central banks (beginning with the Knights Templars and sustained by the Society of Jesus) has been absolved of manipulating monetary values if doing so helps individual sovereign nation-states manage their subjects. Subjects are cyclically required to part with true value - that is, hard-earned gold and silver coinage - in exchange for intangible credit denominated in paper notes whose official promises to repay in precious coinage... are cyclically broken. As the most powerful office in Roman Catholicism, the black papacy might have promoted stable national economies by means of the divinely fair monetary system commanded in the Bible at Leviticus 19.
Ye shall do no unrighteousness in measure. Just balances, just weights, shall ye have: I am the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt.
Instead, it has promoted Escobar's casuistry, which directs merchants to survive official value manipulations by cheating one another. There are significant sociological consequences . When giving short weight becomes policy, a moral paradigm is set. That paradigm governs more than just commercial transactions . It affects human relationships, as well. Partners in friendships, marriages, and families begin giving short weight - giving less than represented. This results in one-sided, frustrating, dysfunctional emotional transactions, and ultimately an aberrant society. The ultimate beneficiary of aberrant societies, of course, is Pontifex Maximus, whose profession is their regulation.
If we depend solely on dictionary definitions, we learn that Jesuits are churchmen and teachers of a doubtful moral rectitude who are likely to cheat, trick, plot, scheme , deceive , and confuse us while avoiding to commit themselves verbally. When we study their published moralists, we sense a rather vibrant presence of The Trickster. But in the Society's defense, it must be said these are legitimate character traits for a militia empowered by a declaration of war, and we must remember that Paul III's bull ordaining the Society of Jesus, Regimini militantis ecclesiae, is just such a declaration. Human life in a declared war becomes subject to the first great rule of war, belli legum dormit, “in war the law sleeps.” When the law sleeps, the unarmed priest's only weapons are the intrigue, deceit, equivocation, casuistry, and mental reservation with which the Jesuits have made themselves so notorious and so often despised.
In forthcoming chapters, we shall be examining how the Society of Jesus made war against Great Britain and the British colonies during the second half of the eighteenth century, and then against the sovereign American States a century later. In each instance, the warfare was of the highest sophistication. It was so subtly conceived and so masterfully executed, that neither of the major combatants could discern the presence of Jesuits in the equation. The amazing technology of Jesuit warfare - that is the subject of our next chapter.
Chapter 11
THE THIRTEEN
ARTICLES
CONCERNING
MILITARY ART
BEFORE THE American Revolution, Roman Catholics were
barred from voting or holding public office throughout the
British colonies. They were a persecuted minority everywhere but in the proprietary domain of William Penn (Pennsylvania and Delaware). Some of their most energetic persecutors, in
fact, were the very Huguenots whom the Catholics had chased out
of France in the wake of Louis XIV' s revocation of the Edict of
Nantes. The basis of Roman Catholic persecution was political. Catholics owed allegiance to Pontifex Maximus, the Bishop of Rome. The Bishop of Rome was a foreign ruler who, as a matter of public policy, regarded the British king and his Protestant Church as heretics to be destroyed. From the American colonists' standpoint, to allow Catholics to vote or hold office was tantamount to surrendering their colonies to a foreign conqueror. A crucial part of maintaining personal liberty in Protestant colonial America was keeping Roman Catholics out of government. But then came the Revolution. The colonial citizenry fought for and won their independence from Great Britain. They established a Constitution that amounted to... surrendering their country to a foreign conqueror. Consider the legalities. Before the Constitution was ratified, American Catholics had few civil rights; after ratification, they had them all. Article VI, section 3 provides that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the authority of the United States,” while the First Amendment denies Congress the power “to make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” With Article IV Section 3 and the First Amendment, the Constitution welcomed agents of Pontifex Maximus, the world's chief enemy of Protestantism, into the ranks of government.
Of the 2,500,000 enumerated inhabitants in 1787 America , the Roman Catholic population consisted of no more than 16,000 in Maryland, 7,000 in Pennsylvania, 1,500 in New York, and 200 in Virginia. 1 Once the Constitution was in place, a steady influx of European immigrants transformed Roman Catholicism from America's smallest to largest religious denomination. By 1850, the higher powers at Rome could view the United States as a viable tributary, if not another papal state.
This awesome result did not just happen. I submit that it was brilliantly designed and commanded by a man I am pleased to honor as the American republic's least known founding father, Lorenzo Ricci (pronounced “Richey.” ) Ricci was a Tuscan aristocrat by birth, a stoical philosopher by reputation, and a Jesuit father by profession. He was Superior General of the Society of Jesus during the formative years of the American Revolution, from 1758 until 1775. He also may be credited with having written the most celebrated treatise on war ever published, a work entitled The Thirteen Articles Concerning Military Art.
The reputed author of this work is a quasi-historical Chinese general believed to have lived in the sixth century BC named Sun-tzu. Sun-tzu was unknown to western languages until Joseph-Marie Amiot, astronomer to the Emperor of China , brought forth a French edition of the Thirteen Articles in 177. Amiot was a Jesuit priest under obedience to General Ricci. I base my inference that Ricci is the author of Amiot's Sun-tzu on a remark from today's premier Jesuit spokesman, Malachi Martin, retired professor at the Pontifical Institute in Rome, to the effect that a book written by a Jesuit, due to the obedience factor, can be presumed “in essence” to be the work of his Superior General. 2 Amiot's Sun-tzu, then, can be presumed to have been “written” by Lorenzo Ricci.
The black pope's decision to publish Sun-tzu prior to the outbreak of the Revolution he had engineered demonstrates, I believe, his confidence that divine authority had already delivered victory to him. Ricci knew that circumstances had reached the point at which there was nothing which his enemy, the forces of Protestantism on both sides of the Atlantic, could do to alter the outcome. He was like a chess master who sees the inevitability of checkmate four moves ahead and reveals his winning method out of courtesy to the imminent loser. His method was so sublimely Sun-tzuan that his opponents never even perceived his army to be an opponent, just as Protestants today are unaware that extirpating their credo is still the unrelenting Jesuit mission.
The Thirteen Articles were ignored by Americans until the nineteen-seventies, when our corporate executives discovered that their oriental counterparts were doing business according to Sun-tzuan strategies. As U.S. corporations increased their presence in the Pacific Rim, Sun-tzu became a major survival tool. Since the middle eighties, more than fifty editions of the Articles have been published in this country, mostly under the “Art of War” title. These editions represent Sun-tzu well enough, but none of them are derived from the 1772 Amiot translation into French (which itself was based on a Tartar-Manchurian version of the older Chinese manuscripts). Amiot' s Sun-tzu appears never to have been published in English, although a 199 6 commission by La Belle Église produced a very fine manuscript English translation by Hermine F. Garcia. That manuscript is the source of my citations here.
Only the Amiot edition reflects in virtually the Jesuit General's own words how he formed the United States of America by dividing the British Empire against itself, while at the same time dividing the rest of Europe against Britain, against even the General's own army! The Amiot is all the more remarkable for appearing in the very midst of the unfolding of this extraordinary process.
AMIOT begins The Thirteen Articles by noting how odd it is that the benign Chinese morality should spawn a warrior of Sun-tzu's magnitude:
If we are to judge the Chinese by their morals ... and in general by everything one can currently observe of them, we would instantly conclude that this must be the most pacifist Nation in the world, far from having the brilliant qualities necessary for Warriors. Yet, surprisingly, this very Nation, which has subsisted for nearly four thousand years in approximately the same state we see it in today, has always, or almost always, triumphed over its enemies; and when it had the misfortune of being conquered, it gave its laws to the conquerors themselves.
We know this, Amiot says, from the Annals, which contain “admirable accounts of prodigious bravery,” and lists of actions and military conduct of various founders of dynasties. He exclaims
What Heroes! What Politicians! What Warriors! No Alexander or Caesar could surpass them. Why shouldn't these great men, these powerful geniuses, who made such fine political and civil Laws, have made military laws which were just as fine?
The reference to Caesar is significant. Declaring China' s dynastic heroes to be Caesar's equals, Amiot equates Lorenzo Ricci, the reigning bearer of Caesarean authority, with the greatest oriental Warriors. Were the oriental military laws “just as fine” as Caesar's? “It is not up to me to judge this,” Amiot answers. “Our Warriors must pronounce themselves in this regard.”
If the term “Our Warriors” means “our Jesuit brethren,” as I believe it does, then we have before us Ricci's clandestine order that the book be received by the scattered members of the Society as the latest statement of the General's military Law. (Clandestine generals order clandestinely.) Amiot admits that translating a war manual was “contrary to my taste, & so far from the object of my profession.” He says that he only undertook the work in hopes that the reader might have “some pleasure conversing with these foreign Heroes and receiving some of their instructions and finding something useful.” What cannot be denied is that Rome was served by critical events in America and England during the years of Ricci's reign in ways that flow quite discernibly from the strategies, laws, and maxims set forth in the Thirteen Articles. I believe that anyone reading Amiot's Sun-tzu in 1772, knowing that its translator was a Jesuit, knowing the Jesuit mission, and knowing the nature of Jesuitic obedience, could observe world events with this knowledge, and predict that the dispute between the American colonists and the British Empire would end - as it actually did - in Roman dominance over a new, independent republic.
Before presenting the works of Sun-tzu, Amiot recounts an important legend demonstrating the severity of Sun-tzuan authority. It is a severity that empowers the General to overrule even his Sovereign in order to secure the army's perfect obedience. Hearing that the King of Oo was preparing for war and not wishing to remain idle, Sun-tzu offered his services to the King. The King had read Sun-tzu's book and liked it, but doubted its practicability. “Prince,” replied Sun-tzu, “I said nothing in my Writings that I had not already practiced in the army. What I have not yet said, but of which I presume to assure Your Majesty today, is that I am capable of transmitting these practices to anyone whomsoever & training them in military exercises when I am authorized to do so.”
“I understand,” replied the King. “You wish to say that you will easily teach your maxims to intelligent men who are already both prudent and valorous; that you will have no difficulty giving training in military exercises to men accustomed to hard work who are docile & full of good will. But the majority is not of that nature.”
“It matters not,” replied Sun-tzu. “I said anyone whomsoever and I exclude no one from my offer, including the most mutinous, the most cowardly and the weakest of men.”
“To hear you speak,” said the King, “you would even inspire women to have the feelings of Warriors; you would train them to bear arms.”
“Yes, Prince,” replied Sun-tzu in a firm voice, “and I beg Your Majesty to be assured of it.”
The King, who in the circumstances in which he found himself was no longer entertained by the customary amusements of Court, took advantage of this opportunity to find a new sort of amusement. He said, “Bring me one hundred eighty of my wives.” He was obeyed, & the Princesses appeared. Among them were two in particular whom the King loved tenderly; they were placed ahead of the others. “We will see,” said the King, smiling. “We will see, Sun-tzu, if you will be true to your word. I make you General of these new troops. All throughout my palace you need only choose the place which seems the most comfortable to give them military training. When they are sufficiently instructed you will let me know, & I will come myself to render justice to them & to your talent.”
The General sensed the ridicule of the role he was asked to play. But he did not back down, and instead appeared quite satisfied by the honor bestowed on him by the King, not only by allowing him to see his wives but also by putting them under his direction. “I will do well with them, Sire,” he said in an assured tone, “and I hope that soon Your Majesty will have cause to be satisfied with my services. At the very least, Your Majesty will be convinced that Sun-tzu is not a man who takes risks.”
Once the King had retired to his apartments, the Warrior thought only of executing his commission. He asked for weapons & all the military equipment needed for his newly created soldiers. While waiting for everything to be ready, he led his troop into one of the courtyards of the palace which seemed the best suited for his work. Soon the items he had requested were brought to him. Sun-tzu then spoke to the Princesses. “Here you are,” he said, “under my direction and my orders. You must listen to me attentively and obey me in whatever I command you to do. That is the first & most essential military law: make sure you don't break it. By tomorrow I want you to perform exercises before the King, & I intend for them to be done perfectly.”
After those words he strapped on their swords, put spears in their hands, divided them into two groups, and put one of the favorite Princesses at the head of each. Once that arrangement was made, he began his instructions in these terms: “Can you tell the difference between your chest and your back, & your right hand from your left hand? Answer me.” At first the only response he received was some bursts of laughter. But he remained silent and very serious. “Yes, of course,” the Ladies then replied in one voice. “If that is so,” resumed Sun-tzu, “then listen carefully to what I am going to say. When the drum strikes only one beat, you will remain as you are now, only paying attention to what is before your chest. When the drum strikes two beats, you must turn so that your chest is in the place where your right hand was before. If instead of two beats you hear three, you must turn so that your chest is precisely where your left hand was before. But when the drum strikes four beats, you must turn so that your chest is where your back was, & your back will be where your chest was.
“What I just said may not be clear enough; let me explain. A single drum beat means that you must not change your position & you must be on guard. Two beats means you must turn right. Three beats means you must turn left. And four beats means you make a half turn. I will explain even more.
“This is the order I shall follow. First I will strike one beat: at that signal you will be ready to receive my orders. A few moments later I will strike two beats: then, all together, you will turn to the right with gravity, after which I will not strike three beats but four, & you will make a half-turn. I will then have you return to your first position and, as before, I will strike one beat. At the first signal, be ready. Then I will strike, not two beats but three, & you will turn left; at four beats you will complete the half-turn. Have you well understood what I am saying? If you have any difficulties, you have but to speak to me of them and I shall attempt to explain the matter.”
“We have understood,” replied the Ladies.
“If that is so,” responded Sun-tzu, “I will begin. Do not forget that the sound of the drum takes the place of the General's voice, but he is the one who is giving you these orders.”
After repeating his instructions three times, Sun-tzu again aligned his small army, after which he had the drum strike one beat. At that sound, all the Ladies began to laugh. At two drum beats, they laughed even louder. Ever serious, the General spoke to them thus: “It is possible that I did not explain clearly enough the instructions I gave you. If that is so, it is my fault. I will attempt to remedy it by speaking to you in a way that is more accessible to you (& at once he repeated the lesson three times in other terms), and then we will see,” he added, “if you obey me any better.” He had the drum strike one beat, and then two. Seeing him look so serious, and given the strange situation they found themselves in, the Ladies forgot to obey him. After attempting in vain to stop the laughter that was choking them, they finally let it burst forth loudly.
Sun-tzu was in no way disconcerted, but in the same tone he had used when speaking to them before, he said: “If I had not explained myself clearly, or if you had not assured me, in unison, that you understood what I said, you would in no way be guilty. But I spoke to you clearly, as you admitted yourselves. Why did you not obey? You deserve punishment, and military punishment. Among the Makers of War, whoever does not obey the orders of his General deserves death. Therefore you will die.”
After that short preamble, Sun-tzu ordered the women who formed the two lines to kill the two who were leading them. Just then, one of the men whose job it was to guard the women, seeing that the Warrior was not joking, ran to warn the King of what was happening. The King sent someone to Sun-tzu to forbid him from going any farther, & in particular from mistreating the two women he loved the best & without whom he could not live. The General listened with respect to the words that were spoken on behalf of the King, but he refused to bow to his wishes.
“Go tell the King,” he replied, “that Sun-tzu believes him to be too reasonable & too just to think he might have changed his mind so soon, & that he truly wishes to be obeyed in what you have just told me on his behalf. The Prince is the lawmaker; he would not give orders which would sully the dignity he vested in me. He asked me to train one hundred and eighty of his Wives as soldiers, he made me their General. The rest is up to me. They disobeyed me, they will die.”
So saying, he pulled out his sword and with the same calmness he had displayed until then, he cut off the heads of the two who were leading the others. He immediately put two others in their place, and had the drum strike the various beats he had explained to his troops. And it was as if those women had been professional soldiers all their lives; they made their turns silently and impeccably. Sun-tzu spoke thus to the Envoy: “Go tell the King,” he said, “that his wives know how to drill. Now I can lead them to war, make them affront all sorts of perils, & even make them pass through water & fire.”
When the King learned what had happened, he was penetrated by the deepest sorrow. With a great sigh he said, “Thus have I lost what was dearest to me in this world.... Have that Foreigner return to his country. I do not want him, nor his services — What have you done, barbarian?... How can I go on living?” ... and so on.
As unconsolable as the King was, time and the circumstances soon made him forget his loss. His enemies were ready to descend upon him. He asked Sun-tzu to return, made him General of his armies, & with his help he destroyed the Chou Kingdom. Those of his neighbors who had formerly been the most worrisome were now penetrated by fear at the mere mention of the glorious acts of Sun-tzu, and thought only of living peacefully under the protection of a Prince who had such a man at his service.
This introduction confirms that Paul III's war declaration Regimini militantis ecclesiae is about protecting the life of the nation, which is the Roman Church. Protecting the Church may require the Superior General to sacrifice his soldiers, his citizens, and if need be, his sovereign, the pope. In a very real sense, the great General is so inscrutably alone, so omnipotent, that he is at war with... everyone. Sacrificing his own (just as Saturn, the grandfather-god of Rome devoured his own children) in order to defeat an enemy short of coming to blows, this is a great General's legitimate obligation. Sun-tzu writes:
Without giving battle, without spilling a drop of the enemy's blood, without even drawing a sword, the clever General succeeds in capturing cities. Without setting foot in a foreign Kingdom, he finds the means to conquer them. He acts in such a way that those who are inferior to him can never guess his intentions. He has them change location, even taking them to rather difficult places where they must work and suffer. When a clever General goes into action, the enemy is already defeated. When he fights, he alone must do more than his entire army, not through the strength of his arm but through his prudence, his manner of commanding, & above all his ruses.
Lorenzo Ricci's most compelling ruse was disestablishing the Society of Jesus, a campaign that mimicked the collapse of the Knights Templar four centuries earlier. With astonishing precision, the Disestablishment ran concurrently with the escalation of hostilities between the American colonies and the British Crown.
It was an amazing juggle that spanned seventeen years. It saw Ricci's secret liaisons in and around the British Parliament buy legislation that inflamed his secret liasons in and around the American colonial governments to formulate a culture of rebellion. It saw his own visible army, mute and defenseless, systematically assaulted by the European powers and eventually suppressed “for all eternity” by a 1773 papal brief. Once the stage was set and the action scripted, it saw the General slip into deeper cover to let the Protestant powers exhaust themselves in wars that within a single generation resulted in a glorious Roman presence where once England had reigned.
Clandestine military operations inspired by the ingenuity of Sun-tzu are virtually impossible to document. If strategic notes were taken, if written commands were given, they were carefully destroyed. Such that survive may have been spared in order to misinform. The mouths of covert operatives are kept shut out of a simple desire to stay alive. Sensational disclosures, too, we can presume to be misinformation.
To determine that Lorenzo Ricci did in fact mount any clandestine operation at all requires a careful evaluation of circumstantial evidence. Was there an outcome that benefited him and his Sovereign? Did he have the authority, the motive, the resources, the ability, and the opportunity to do what created the outcome?
As to outcome: English-speaking Protestantism did in fact violently divide, and the victorious party moreover invited Roman Catholic religionists to participate in its political government. As to authority for waging war against Protestantism, Regimini militantis ecclesiae authorized the General to prosecute enemies of the Roman faith.
As to motive: the Jesuit oath spiritually obligated the extirpation of Protestantism in both America and Great Britain. As to resources, the black papacy, even as its martial strategy brought its own organization to apparent oblivion, had instant call on the vast reserve of Roman Catholic wealth - as the old Spanish proverb goes, “Don Dinero es muy Católico.” Ricci's ability to direct an international covert operation was stated and defined by the momentous publication of The Thirteen Articles in what was then the language of international diplomacy. Finally, a man commanding unlimited financial resources and unlimited obedience of an unlimited supply of well trained personnel enjoys unlimited opportunity to do anything possible, and some things deemed impossible. To deny that Lorenzo Ricci orchestrated American Independence may be to ignore his talent and demean his office.
Let us move now to the next chapter, and begin our examination of how the General did it.
Next
LORENZO RICCI’S WAR
footnotes
Chapter 9: Securing Confidence
1. La Chaize probably directed the King through the Fifth Exercise, the famous “meditation on hell,” which became the centerpiece of Protestant “hellfire and brimstone” preaching. The Fifth Exercise, in its entirety, is as follows: “First point. This will be to see in imagination the vast fires, and the souls enclosed, as it were, in bodies of fire. Second point. To hear the wailing, the howling, cries, and blasphemies against Christ our Lord and against His saints. Third point. With the sense of smell to perceive the smoke, the sulphur, the filth, and corruption. Fourth point. To taste the bitterness of tears, sadness, and remorse of conscience. Fifth Point. With the sense of touch to feel the flames which envelop and burn the souls. Colloquy. Enter into conversation with Christ our Lord. Recall to memory that of those who are in hell, some came there because they did not believe in the coming of Christ; others, though they believed, because they did not keep the Commandments. Divide them all into three classes: 1. Those who were lost before the coming of Christ; 2. Those who were lost during His lifetime; 3. Those who were lost after His life here on earth. Thereupon, I will give thanks to God our Lord that He has not put an end to my life and permitted me to fall into any of these three classes. I shall also thank Him for this, that up to this very moment He has shown Himself so loving and merciful to me. Close with an Our Father.”
2. Samuel Smiles, The Huguenots, New York: Harper & Brothers (1869), p 153
3. James J. Walsh, MD, American Jesuits, New York: The Macmillan Company (1934), P 174
4. Manfred Barthel, The Jesuits, p 125
5. Henry Foley, SJ, Records of the English Province SJ, VII, Part 2, London (1877-1883), pp 1162ff.
6. Garry Wills, Witches & Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth, New York: Oxford University Press (1995), p 20.
7. Barthel, The Jesuits, page 42
8. Ibid.
9. Edmond Paris, The Secret History of the Jesuits (translated 1975, original publisher and publication date unknown), distributed by Chino CA : Chick Publications, pp 127-8
10. Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, p 5
11 . Ibid., p 138
12. Barthel, The Jesuits, p 260
13. Education Reporter, May 1996, published monthly by Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund, St. Louis, MO 63105
Chapter 11 : The Thirteen Articles Concerning Military Art
1. Estimation in 1784 of then Father Superior of the American Mission, John Carroll, 306 NOTES pp. 87-14 4 a Jesuit priest and brother of Daniel Carroll, upon whose land, “Rome,” the U.S. Capitol building was erected.
2. M. Martin, SJ, The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church, New York: Simon & Schuster (1987), p 490. Prof. Martin concludes that since the currently-reigning Superior General, Peter Hans Kolvenbach, “sanctions” a book by Jesuit Juan Luis Segundo, Theology and the Church (1985), the book constitutes Kolvenbach’s “ultimate answer to the continued dissatisfaction of Popes with the new Society.”
Chapter 9: Securing Confidence
1. La Chaize probably directed the King through the Fifth Exercise, the famous “meditation on hell,” which became the centerpiece of Protestant “hellfire and brimstone” preaching. The Fifth Exercise, in its entirety, is as follows: “First point. This will be to see in imagination the vast fires, and the souls enclosed, as it were, in bodies of fire. Second point. To hear the wailing, the howling, cries, and blasphemies against Christ our Lord and against His saints. Third point. With the sense of smell to perceive the smoke, the sulphur, the filth, and corruption. Fourth point. To taste the bitterness of tears, sadness, and remorse of conscience. Fifth Point. With the sense of touch to feel the flames which envelop and burn the souls. Colloquy. Enter into conversation with Christ our Lord. Recall to memory that of those who are in hell, some came there because they did not believe in the coming of Christ; others, though they believed, because they did not keep the Commandments. Divide them all into three classes: 1. Those who were lost before the coming of Christ; 2. Those who were lost during His lifetime; 3. Those who were lost after His life here on earth. Thereupon, I will give thanks to God our Lord that He has not put an end to my life and permitted me to fall into any of these three classes. I shall also thank Him for this, that up to this very moment He has shown Himself so loving and merciful to me. Close with an Our Father.”
2. Samuel Smiles, The Huguenots, New York: Harper & Brothers (1869), p 153
3. James J. Walsh, MD, American Jesuits, New York: The Macmillan Company (1934), P 174
4. Manfred Barthel, The Jesuits, p 125
5. Henry Foley, SJ, Records of the English Province SJ, VII, Part 2, London (1877-1883), pp 1162ff.
6. Garry Wills, Witches & Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth, New York: Oxford University Press (1995), p 20.
7. Barthel, The Jesuits, page 42
8. Ibid.
9. Edmond Paris, The Secret History of the Jesuits (translated 1975, original publisher and publication date unknown), distributed by Chino CA : Chick Publications, pp 127-8
10. Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, p 5
11 . Ibid., p 138
12. Barthel, The Jesuits, p 260
13. Education Reporter, May 1996, published monthly by Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund, St. Louis, MO 63105
Chapter 11 : The Thirteen Articles Concerning Military Art
1. Estimation in 1784 of then Father Superior of the American Mission, John Carroll, 306 NOTES pp. 87-14 4 a Jesuit priest and brother of Daniel Carroll, upon whose land, “Rome,” the U.S. Capitol building was erected.
2. M. Martin, SJ, The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church, New York: Simon & Schuster (1987), p 490. Prof. Martin concludes that since the currently-reigning Superior General, Peter Hans Kolvenbach, “sanctions” a book by Jesuit Juan Luis Segundo, Theology and the Church (1985), the book constitutes Kolvenbach’s “ultimate answer to the continued dissatisfaction of Popes with the new Society.”
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