Part 6: Rulers of Evil...The Stimulating Effects of Tea...The Death & Resurrection of Lorenzo Ricci

Rulers of Evil; Useful Knowledge 
about Governing Bodies
By F.Tupper Saussy

Chapter 18 

THE STIMULATING EFFECTS OF TEA 

THE EAST INDIA COMPANY was a major subsidizer of the Jesuit mission to Beijing. 1 The Jesuits, in turn, interceded with oriental monarchs to secure lucrative commercial favors for the Company, including monopolies on tea, spices, saltpeter (for explosives), silks, and the world’s opium trade. Indeed, according to Reid’s Commerce and Conquest: The Story of the Honourable East India Company, the Company appears to owe its very existence to the Society of Jesus. How this came to be is worth a digression. 

Briefly, in 1583, four young commercial travelers – Fitch, Newbery, Leeds, and Storey – set out from London with letters of introduction from Queen Elizabeth to the Emperor of China . Somewhere east of the Persian Gulf, they were arrested by the Portuguese for illegally crossing the “line of demarcation.” Pope Alessandro VI (whose mistress, we recall, was Giulia Farnese, Paul III’s beautiful sister) had drawn the line in 1493 from the North Pole through the Azores to the South Pole. All lands west of the line he granted to Spain and those east to Portugal. 

The four violators were sent in chains to the Portuguese colony of Goa on the western coast of India. In Goa, they were rescued by a fellow countryman, Thomas Stevens. Stevens had influence. He was Rector of the University of Goa, and he was a Jesuit priest. Father Stevens arranged their release, but apparently not without certain conditions. Storey joined the Society of Jesus. Newbery and Leedes accepted posts in the Goan colonial government. Ralph Fitch proceeded on to China, evidently under an Ignatian oath, otherwise the Portuguese Viceroy would not have permitted him to carry on. 

In 1591, Fitch returned to England and, like Marco Polo before him, tantalized adventurers with the lucrative possibilities of transporting to the western hemisphere all the oriental splendors he’d seen. Eight years later, on September 24, 1599, with a subscription of a little more than £30, Fitch and several others formed the East India Company. 

And now, in 1773 , the East India Company was governed by Freemasons, whose Grand Master since 1772 was the ninth Lord Petre (his mastery would continue until 1777). Related to the Stourtons, Norfolks, and Arundells , the Petre family (pronounced “Peter” ) was highly esteemed by the Society of Jesus. It was the Petres who, back in the sixteenth century, bankrolled the original Jesuit missions to England. 

The East India Company’s most powerful political attaché was Robert Petty, Lord Shelburne. We recall Shelburne as “The Jesuit of Berkeley Square” who worked in 1763 with Lord Bute to conclude the French and Indian Wars with the Treaty of Paris, which isolated England from European alliances and angered the Americans over the western lands. Acting on East India Company’s behalf, Shelburne colluded with the King’s Friends on a scheme designed to disturb the relative peace which had existed between American merchants and England since the repeal of the Townshend Acts in 1770. It went like this. 

Stored in the Company’s dockside British warehouses were seventeen million pounds of surplus tea. This tea could not be released for sale until a duty of one shilling per pound was paid to the Crown . If the King would exempt the Company from paying the shilling duty, the Company would sell the tea through special consignees to Americans at prices lower than the colonists were paying for either the duties English tea or the smuggled Dutch tea. Everyone would win. The American tea-drinkers, still suffering from the depressive effects of the British banking crisis of July 1772, would win. East India Company would win. And with a windfall duty of not one but three shillings a pound, the Crown would win. The only loser would be the colonial tea merchants, who had been enjoying nice profits on both duties and smuggled tea. The King’s Friends directed Parliament to put the scheme into law, and on May 10, 1773, the “Tea Act ” went into effect. 

Predictably, the tea merchants reacted in fury. Over the next six months, they pressed the intercolonial network of dissident propagandists to help them mount a protest. What began as an injustice against tea merchants was amplified by the propagandists into a widely-felt injustice against the colonies generally.... 

THEN, on July 21, 1773, Ganganelli, Clement XIV, abolished the Jesuits “for all eternity.” His brief of disestablishment is entitled Dominus ac Redemptor noster, which is usually translated “God and Our Redeemer.” We should note that “redemptor” also means “revenue agent.” Considering that the brief’s real effect in the long term was a dramatic increase in papal revenues from a new Febronian America, perhaps “God and Our Revenue Agent” would be a more appropriate translation, if not the intended one. 

Although Catholic history calls the Disestablishment “a supreme tragedy,” John Carroll more accurately appraised it as the “secularisation” of the Society of Jesus. Thousands of Jesuits now rose to secular prominence throughout the western world, in the arts, sciences, and government. Raimondo Ximenes became a radical Freemason. Alessandro Zorzi from Venice joined the editors of the Italian Encyclopedia. Dr. Boscovich arrived in Paris where his scientific reputation secured him the post of Director of Optics of the French Navy. Esteban Arteaga became a music critic and published a book in Paris entitled The Revolution in the Italian Musical Theatre. We’ve already seen how Professor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin of the Bordeaux College became the physician who gave France the beheading machine named after him. Adam Weishaupt, dismissed from the Jesuit college at Ingolstadt, attracted the fiercer elements of European Rosicrucian Freemasonry into a new secret cult in Bavaria. His “Illuminati,” whose cover was eventually blown in order to convince public opinion that evil secret societies were being diligently unmasked when in fact they were not, was another instance of “blown cover as cover.” Countless other members of the greatest clandestine intelligence agency the world has ever known, now secularized with the jeering approval of its enemies, crossed the Atlantic to help guide Americans through the pains of becoming the first nation expressly designed to be a Febronian, Bellarmine democratic republican Church-State. What an amazing production, all the more impressive for the complete invisibility of its means! 

We’ve seen how the Brief of Disestablishment was served upon Lorenzo Ricci in mid-August, and how the General was removed to the English College a few blocks away, where he remained for five weeks , until late September. Interestingly, the Dean of the English College at that time was a thirty-two-year-old Jesuit professor of controversial theology named John Mattingly. Mattingly was an American, said to be the lone American Jesuit in Rome. He was a native of Maryland, a graduate of St. Omer’s, and a dear friend of John Carroll, who (as we know) had departed Rome five months before Ricci’s arrest. Within fifteen years, Carroll would invite Mattingly to become the first president of Georgetown University, an offer Mattingly would decline. 

What might Lorenzo Ricci be likely to discuss for five weeks (a) under a British roof, (b) in the custody of a young American Jesuit, (c) at a time when American merchants were incensed at being cheated out of their tea profits by a new law (d) sponsored by British Freemasons, (e) whose Grand Master happened to be Ricci’s secret servant?

Might the General have been conferring with members of the British East India Company, one of the English College’s major patrons? Might their discussions have involved to which American ports their tea might be most advantageously shipped, and when? Apparently so, for while Ricci was residing at the English College, Parliament authorized the East India Company to ship half a million pounds of tea to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, consigned to a group of specially-chosen merchants. 

Might Ricci have been formulating with Carroll’s friend Mattingly plans for a demonstration intended to climax the agitations that had been fomented in the colonies since the beginning of his generalate, in 1758? Might he have suggested a spectacular event to occur in, say, Boston Harbor, symbolizing the colonists’ frustrations with England? And might not Parliament respond to this event with vengeful measures designed to push the colonists over the brink of rebellion? Aren’t five weeks sufficient time to script such a “Boston Tea Party,” along with the harsh legal measures with which it might be punished? As well as how the colonists’ violent reaction to the punishment might be coordinated? Outcome suggests that Ricci did more in his five weeks at the English College than languish in custody. 

We have seen how the General was taken from the English College to Castel Sant’Angelo , with its secret tunnel to the papal apartments in the Vatican. For many months after his “imprisonment, ” Lorenzo Ricci was “questioned by the Inquisition,” according to traditional Church history. But the Inquisition had been administered by Jesuits since 1542. Not surprisingly, the inquisitors pried absolutely no useful information out of Lorenzo Ricci.... 

IN October of 1773, Austrian officials with drawn bayonets descended upon the Jesuit College in Bruges, the officials were Austrian because Bruges was under the jurisdiction of the Austrian government. They arrested John Carroll and the rest of the college faculty and students. Stripped of his possessions and papers, Carroll was spared further humiliation by the timely intercession of his erstwhile traveling companion Charles Philippe Stourton’s cousin, Henry Howard, Lord Arundell of Wiltshire. The Catholic nobleman escorted Carroll across the English Channel to Wiltshire’s lushly rolling hills. On his family estate near Tisbury, Howard had been constructing a Palladian mansion, New Wardour Castle. One of Carroll’s duties was to write his version of the closing of Bruges College in order to help Henry Howard and other English sponsors of the college win damages from the Austrian government. His principal chore, however, was to administer the Chapel occupying New Wardour Castle’ s west wing. In this way Carroll established a connection with Henry Howard’ s art agent in Rome, a Jesuit named Francis Thorpe.2 Thorpe was a renowned intelligence-broker, a man whose knowledge of Rome, its happenings and resources, was legendary. His apartment was a favorite meeting place for visiting English nobility, and his favorite English nobleman was Henry Howard. 3 Howard had put Father Thorpe in charge of “every detail, every aspect of the Chapel’ s design.” Father Thorpe and John Carroll needed no introduction to one another. From the editor’s notes to Carroll’s letters, we learn that Thorpe taught at St. Omer’s during the years John was a student there. Moreover, he was Carroll’s favorite instructor. 

These remarkable facts suggest interesting probabilities. From Tisbury, in less than a day, Carroll could reach Benjamin Franklin’s residence in London by stagecoach. Franklin, for his scientific achievements and enlightened egalitarianism, had long been the toast of Europe, a darling of Jesuit intellectuals. He was the exclusive colonial agent now, representing the commercial interests of all thirteen colonies before the Crown. Franklin knew more about America than anyone else living in England, and more about England than any other American. Francis Thorpe knew more about England than anyone else living in Rome, and more about Rome than any other Englishman. 

And both men knew John Carroll well. 

And there Carroll was, for the six months during which time the Tea Act erupted into the most explosive scandal of the revolutionary epoch, poised in Tisbury to facilitate information between these two personal friends of his, geniuses, institutions. But where is the evidence that anything bearing on the American Revolution transpired between Ricci and Thorpe and Carroll and Franklin and Howard and the entire Anglo-American Masonic system? We are left with nothing but clues and outcome, which nonetheless emphatically point to a fruitful collaboration. 

During the night of December 16, 1773, a gang of Indians climbed aboard certain ships in Boston Harbor, ripped open three hundred forty-two of the East India Company’s tea-chests and threw overboard their contents, valued at $90,000. Well, they looked like Indians, and witnesses thought they were Indians, but the big open secret was that they were Freemasons in disguise. Perhaps the most succinct statement on the subject appears in respected Masonic historian Arthur Edward Waite’s New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry: “The Boston Tea Party was entirely Masonic, carried out by members of the St. John’s Lodge during an adjourned meeting.” 

Parliament reacted to the Boston Tea Party in a way calculated to increase dozens of rolling boulders into a devastating landslide. Without seriously inquiring into who was responsible, and wholly disregarding the offer of more than a hundred Boston merchants to make restitution, Parliament rushed into law a mass of unreasonably punitive legislation – closing the port of Boston to trade, forbidding town meetings without the consent of the governor, denying the Massachusetts legislature the right to choose the governor’s council, providing for the quartering of British and Hessian troops in the colony, and ordering that any officer or soldier of the Crown accused of an act of violence in the performance of his duty should be sent to another colony or to England for what would surely be a sweetheart trial. 

To complete the overkill, Parliament passed the Quebec Act, which cut off the claims of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and New York to their western lands, and placed these lands, to add insult to injury, under the French Catholic jurisdiction of Quebec. 

So exaggeratedly out of proportion to the offense they were framed to punish, these notorious “Intolerable Acts ” caused every class of American to sympathize with the Tea Partiers. Suddenly, independence was no longer a radical alternative. The Intolerables rendered independence the subject of sensible, serious conversation as never before. 

Governor Hutchinson was recalled to England and was replaced by General Thomas Gage, who brought an army of four thousand men to quarter in Boston. Gage vowed severe discipline. The colonists vowed severe resistance. “The die is cast,” George III wrote to Lord North. “The colonies must either triumph or submit.” 

JOHN Carroll left Wardour Castle in May 1774 and sailed for Maryland to reunite with his aged and widowed mother, the former Eleanor Darnall, whom he had not seen in twenty-five years. The history of Eleanor Darnall is the history of Maryland, which bears some reflection here. 

In 1625, at about the time young Charles Stuart was inheriting the throne of England from his father, King James I, the Jesuits converted a high government official to Roman Catholicism. That official was Secretary of State George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore. For the sake of appearances, it was deemed inappropriate for a Catholic to serve a Calvinist monarch, Baltimore resigned his post. Meanwhile, behind the scenes the Jesuits perfected an audacious marriage arrangement between Charles, now King Charles I, and a Roman Catholic princess, Henriette-Marie, sister of Louis XIII of France. The marriage purported to be good for Charles’ economic interests. He went out of his way to accommodate the Jesuits. Although a Scottish Calvinist, Charles conducted his monarchy in many respects as though it were Roman Catholic. He systematically weakened England’s foreign policy toward Catholic France, the country of his Queen. He promoted to the highest levels in the Church of England members of the High Church Party, clergymen sympathetic with Roman Catholic ritual and traditions. And he squandered England’s resources in a pointless, Jesuit-engineered war with Spain.

Seven years into his marriage with Henriette-Marie, Charles found himself stuck between personal indebtedness to Ignatian creditors and a stingy Parliament. In hopes of generating tax revenues abroad, he carved a feudal barony out of northern Virginia and granted it to Lord Baltimore. But Baltimore died before developing the grant. The charter passed down to his son, Cecilius Calvert. 

Calvert, the new Lord Baltimore, called persecuted emigrants desiring religious and tax freedom to participate in a voyage to a place bearing a name dear to Catholics “Maryland,” after the Blessed Virgin. Baltimore did not neglect appealing to the irreligious niche as well. A number of his advertisements spoke of the limitless opportunities from settling in “Merrie Land.” 

On November 22, 1633, two ships, the Ark and the Dove, set sail from London. The passenger list included three Jesuits, sixteen to twenty Roman Catholic gentlemen, several hundred predominantly Protestant slaves and laborers, and Cecilius Calvert’s brother Leonard. Leonard Calvert had been appointed Maryland’s first governor. The voyage of the Ark and the Dove was spiritually directed by a Jesuit priest named Andrew White. Educated at both St. Omer’s and Douai, a professor for twenty years in Portugal, Spain, and Flanders, Andrew White is remembered by the Church as “the Apostle to Maryland.” 

Choosing an Andrew for the task was good liturgical cabalah on the part of the Gesu. Andrew was the brother of the apostle Peter, the first Pope, the Rock upon whom Roman Catholicism claims to be established. Andrew is the Patron Saint of Scotland; King Charles I was a Scot. A personal representative of the king’s brotherly attitude toward Rome could not be more eloquently identified than by the simple name “Andrew.” Andrew White consecrated the Maryland voyage to two Catholic saints: the Virgin Mary, Protectress of the Jesuits, and Ignatius Loyola, only recently decreed Patron Saint of Maryland by Urban VIII, the second pupil of Jesuits to be elected Pope. 

The ships were at sea nearly four months. Finally, one hundred twenty-three days from England, on March 25, 1634, the parties reached St. Clements Island in the mouth of the Potomac River. It was an auspicious day. Not only was March 25 the first day of spring, but also it was the first day of the Julian calendar. (In 1752 the colonies would adopt the Gregorian calendar, which we follow today.) On March 25, Andrew White read the first Roman Mass ever held in any of the original thirteen colonies. Then he formally took possession of the land “for our Saviour and for our Sovereign Lord King of England.” 

Maryland historians trace the juridical origins of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States to a Patuxent Indian chieftain’s wigwam, which Andrew White denoted in his diary “the first chapel of Maryland.” White introduced Roman Catholicism to the Patuxents , Anacostics , and Piscataways on real estate that today comprises the District of Columbia . It’s quite probable that the District of Columbia’s executive mansion was termed “White House” less because of a color of exterior paint than out of reverence for the Apostle to Maryland. Every utterance of “White House” should fill the historically knowledgeable Jesuit with pride in his Society’s achievements. 

Conversions among the Indians ran high, but the Society enjoyed greater profits evangelizing Protestants. For every Protestant settler converted, the Jesuits won a land grant from Cecilius Calvert. Other lands Calvert retained and passed on to his descendants. Over the generations, Rock Creek Farm with its “Rome,” on which the U.S. Capitol was erected, devolved to the Calvert heiress Eleanor Darnall and her husband, an Irish immigrant whose marriage and abilities had earned enough money to make him a prosperous merchant-planter. It was to this couple, and on this land, that the first American bishop was born in 1735. 

Like his older brother Daniel, Jacky Carroll did his earliest schooling at Bohemia Manor, a secret Jesuit academy just down the road. Bohemia Manor had to be run secretly because of anti-Catholic laws resulting from the abdication of Catholic James II and the succession of Protestants William and Mary to the British throne in 1689. The Penal Period in Maryland, which would extend up to the American Revolution, served the black papacy well by inclining affluent Catholic families to send their sons across the Atlantic to take the Jesuit ratio studiorum at St. Omer’s. Indeed, more Americans went to St. Omer’s College in the eighteenth century than to Oxford and Cambridge combined. 4 

At the tender age of thirteen, Jacky sailed to Europe with his even younger cousin, Charles Carroll, for schooling at St. Omer’s. Daniel returned home from there to help manage the family interests he stood to inherit. In 1753, Jacky entered the novitiate of the Jesuits at Watten in the Netherlands. Charles went on to study pre-law at Voltaire’s alma mater, the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris. In 1758, Jacky returned to St. Omer’s to teach, while Charles crossed the Channel to England, enrolling in London’s premier school for barristers, the Inner Temple, founded in the fourteenth century by the Knights Templar. 5 

Jacky was ordained to the Jesuit priesthood in 1761 . When he learned that St. Omer’s was about to be seized by the French government in preparation for the royal edict suppressing the Jesuits in France, he with other teachers and their pupils moved to Bruges. In 1769, he renounced his Calvert inheritance, sloughed off his nickname, took the extreme Jesuit vow of papal obedience, and began teaching philosophy and theology at the English college in Liège. It was here that he befriended Charles Philippe Stourton, his Grand Tour companion. 

JOHN Carroll’s arrival at his mother’s home in Maryland coincided with Paul Revere’s ride to Philadelphia bearing letters from the Boston Committee of Correspondence seeking aid from Charles Thomson’ s group in protesting the closing of Boston Harbor. From his mother’s estate at Rock Creek, Carroll dealt with the aftermath of the Tea Act by exercising his “secularised” priestly authority as Prefect of the Sodality. He integrated the Catholics of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and northern Virginia into the movement for independence. 

Charles Thomson’s Philadelphia committee sent Boston a letter of support. The committee additionally proposed a congress of deputies from the colonies to (a) consider measures to restore harmony with Great Britain and (b) prevent the dispute from advancing to “an undesirable end. ” Thomson then notified all the colonies south of Pennsylvania of his committee’s action. He suggested the necessity of calling a general congress to consider the problem. Combined with a similar call from the Virginia House of Burgesses, his suggestion was approved throughout the colonies. Plans were laid for the First Continental Congress to meet at Philadelphia in September. 

On June 1, 1774, the bill closing Boston Harbor went into effect. Thomson’s radicals led Philadelphia in observing a day of mourning. Shops closed, churches held services, the people remained quietly in their homes. On June 8, Thomson and more than nine hundred freeholders petitioned Governor Richard Penn to convene the Pennsylvania Assembly so that it might consider sending delegates to an all-colony congress to explore ways of restoring harmony and peace to the British Empire. The Governor refused their request, which justified Thomson’s taking action outside the established order. 

Thomson called for a town meeting to be held on June 18. Nearly 8,000 Philadelphians attended. Boisterously, they resolved that the closing of Boston Harbor was tyrannical, and that a Continental Congress to secure the rights and liberties of the colonies must be convened in Philadelphia. 

In July, the Pennsylvania Assembly yielded to Thomson’ s popular pressure and agreed to name a delegation to this First Continental Congress. Thomson, however, was not named. 

Thanks to the publicity from his “First Citizen/Second Citizen” media production during the first half of 1773 , Charles Carroll was named by the Annapolis Committee of Correspondence to be a delegate to the First Continental Congress. But he declined the nomination. He said that his usefulness might be restricted by anti-Catholic sentiment engendered by the Quebec Ac t (with which Parliament had avenged the Boston Tea Party by giving the western lands of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and New York to Catholic Quebec). He attended the Congress, however, but as an “unofficial consultant” to the Marylanders. Charles Thomson accompanied the Pennsylvanians in the same capacity. 

To prepare for the September 5th opening session, delegates began arriving in Philadelphia in late August. They congregated at a well-known radical meeting-place, the elegant mansion of Thomas Mifflin. Mifflin had studied classics under Charles Thom - son at Benjamin Franklin’s Academy (later to become University of Pennsylvania). They were close friends. As Mifflin’s houseguest, Thomson was on hand round the clock to greet and confer with the arriving leaders, most of whom already knew him by name. John Adams’ diary entry for August 30th speaks of “much conversation” he and his fellow delegates had with the learned Thomson. He called Thomson “the Sam Adams of Philadelphia,” and “the life of the cause of liberty.” 

Thomson and the Carrolls – Charles, Daniel, and John – spent these critical preliminary days lobbying for the inevitability of war. Thomson was already heavily invested in New Jersey’s Batso Furnace. Batso would furnish cannon balls, shot, kettles, spikes and nails to the army through the War Commissioner, who controlled all the executive duties of the military department. The War Commissioner was just the man Lorenzo Ricci needed for the job: Charles Carroll. 

Thomson was elected Secretary of the First Continental Congress, an office he held under the title “Perpetual Secretary” until the Unite d States Constitution was ratified in 1789. He led the delegates through an itemized statement of the America n theory of rebellion that culminated in the critical Declaration and Resolves of October 14, 1774. 

IT was while the First Continental Congress was deliberating America’s future under British tyranny that Ganganelli, Pope Clement XIV, died his agonizing death (September 22, 1774). When the papacy is vacant, says New Catholic Encyclopedia, the administration and guardianship of the Holy See’s temporal rights – that is, its business affairs – are routinely taken over by the Treasurer of the Apostolic Chamber. The Apostolic Treasurer on the day of Ganganelli passing was Cardinal Giovanni Braschi. A fifty-seven-year-old aristocrat of impoverished parentage, Cardinal  Braschi was a sterling product of the Jesuit colleges. The ratio studiorum had made of him a distinguished lawyer and diplomat. He had been Apostolic Treasurer when Rothschild began serving the Catholic principality of Hesse-Hanover in 1769. This interesting fact awakens the possibility that the Cardinal and Rothschild had been involved in Ricci’s American project for years. But that is only conjecture. What is beyond conjecture, however, is that until a new pope could be elected, the whole fiscal wealth of the Roman Catholic Church belonged to Braschi and to no one else. Although lacking formal entitlement, Cardinal Braschi would rule as a kind of “virtual” Pontifex Maximus for one of the longest periods of papal vacancy on record. 

Day after day after day, the conclave haggled over a single issue. What would the candidates do about the Jesuits? Should Ganganelli’s brief of Disestablishment continue to be enforced or not? 

Although Lorenzo Ricci was in detention at Castel Sant’Angelo, we know he could easily hop a tunnel carriage to the Vatican for covert meetings with the Virtual Pope. In a very real way, Braschi was a creation of Ricci’s. Braschi had been made a Cardinal under the sponsorship of Ganganelli, whose own cardinalate was sponsored, as we recall, by Ricci. These two most powerful men on earth, Ricci and Braschi, had been secretly allied for years. And now the turn of events had made them invisible and inaudible. These last precious days in the final bursting-forth of Ricci’s grand strategy afforded ideal conditions for Braschi and Ricci to determine face-to-face with the Rothschild emissaries, out of public sight and mind, how the Vatican’s immense resources, money, men, supplies, would be deployed in the coming months and years. (In October 1774, for example, colonial agent Benjamin Franklin sent England’s most enlightened copywriter, Tom Paine, to beef up the pamphleteers in Philadelphia.) 

The days of papal vacancy wore on, thirty, fifty, sixty, seventy-five, a hundred days, a hundred and ten. Finally, after nearly five months of confusion, on February 15, 1775 , the one hundred thirty-fourth day, it was announced that Rome had a new Pope. The new pope was a man acceptable to both sides of the Jesuit question. He had tacitly assured the anti-Jesuits that he would continue to enforce Disestablishment, yet the pro-Jesuits knew he would enforce it tenderly because of the great intellectual, political, and spiritual debts he owed the Society. The new pope was best qualified for the papacy because he’d been running the Holy See with Lorenzo Ricci for the past hundred thirty-four days – Giovanni Braschi! Braschi took the papal name Pius VI. 

And now plummeted the great avalanche. 

ON February 9, 1775 the British Parliament declared Massachusetts to be “in a state of rebellion.” 

On March 23, Patrick Henry delivered his famous “GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH” oration. 

On April 19, at a tense daybreak confrontation on Lexington Green between a group of angry colonists and some eight hundred redcoats, an unseen and unidentified shootist fired on the redcoats from behind a nearby meeting-house. This was the “shot heard ’round the world” – although Ralph Waldo Emerson coined that phrase in his Concord Hymn (1836) to describe a skirmish at Concord Bridge, seven miles away and a few hours later. The air on Lexington Green crackled with exploding gunpowder, and when the smoke cleared, eight colonists lay dead. 6 

As the redcoats returned to Boston, they were attacked by ever-increasing colonial militiamen. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress mobilized 13,600 colonial soldiers and placed Boston under a siege that lasted for almost a year. 

To prevent the spread of the Boston carnage to the Quaker province, the Pennsylvania Assembly named Charles Thomson and twelve others to a committee to purchase explosives and munitions, the leading manufacturers of which happened to be Thomson and Charles Carroll. 

On May 10, the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia and named George Washington commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. 

On June 22, Congress voted to issue a continental currency,two million dollars in unsecured bills of credit, to be used in paying the costs of war. 

On July 3, George Washington formally assumed command of the Continental Army, about seventeen thousand men gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

On July 5, Congress adopted its last humble plea for peace with England, the “Olive Branch Petition,” written by Charles Thomson and John Dickinson. Governor Penn of Pennsylvania personally delivered the Petition to London, but the King’s Friends prevented George III from seeing Penn or even acknowledging the Petition. 

On July 6, Congress adopted the Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking Up Arms, which fell short of asserting independence, but vowed a holy war of liberation from slavery. 

On August 23, George III issued a proclamation declaring that all thirteen America n colonies were in a state of open rebellion. Two months later, in October, British forces burned Falmouth, what is presently Portland, Maine. 

The war was on. But from Lorenzo Ricci’s vantage point, the war was won. There remained only opportunities now for his enemies, the British Crown and the American colonials, to engage in blood-letting hostilities that would eventually separate and exhaust them both. Divide et impera, divide and conquer. What to the British was “the War of American Rebellion, ” and to the Americans “the War for Independence, ” was to General Ricci “the War of Reunification with Protestant Dissidents.” From it would rise the first Febronian government on earth, a constellation of secular churches called states led by an electorate of laymen properly enlightened by the ratio studiorum and united under the spiritual guidance of Pontifex Maximus, and paying tribute to Rome for the privilege. United ... States. 

The real war over, there began now the unraveling, which was the historical war, the theatrical war. This would consist of a series of bloody battles mounted by Congress and Crown for the people’s participation, observation, and commemoration. These events would produce Caesarean Rome’s essential emotional cornerstone. Like Virgil’s Aeneid, epic national heroes would forge a fictitious national legacy. We must not forget Charles Thomson’s candid assessment that the Revolution’ s leaders were largely deceptions , men of “supposed wisdom and valor” who were far inferior to “the qualities that have been ascribed to them.” 

And there is evidence – admittedly the faintest hint of evidence (as is so often the case with clandestine warriors), that Lorenzo Ricci communed with these American heroes, and gave them instruction, on their own soil. This evidence is presented in our next chapter.

Chapter 19 

THE DEATH & RESURRECTION 

OF LORENZO RICCI 

ON NOVEMBER 19, 1775 officials at Castel Sant’Angelo were presented the following deposition, given under oath and signed by Lorenzo Ricci: “The Society of Jesus that is dissolved offered no reason or pretext whatsoever for its dissolution.” 

This, Ricci’s last official statement, is a masterpiece of mental reservation, for indeed the Society had not offered a pretext or reason for its dissolution, and indeed Lorenzo Ricci had not furnished a pretext or reason for his incarceration. The Jesuits had been dissolved and Ricci imprisoned for no offered reasons whatsoever; ergo, their dissolution for all eternity was null and void. Outcome would prove this fact: the Society of Jesus would be officially restored in 1814. Since the Disestablishment was a nullity from the beginning, it must follow that the Jesuits were still technically alive as the world’s largest clandestine milice du Christ. Legally, thousands of Jesuits were still bound to their oath of obedience to the black papacy. They were free now to expand Roman Catholicism with perfect invisibility, end justifying means, dedicating their encyclopedic skills in the useful arts, law, religion, medicine, philosophy, the humanities, finance, commerce, communications, diplomacy, banking, finance, espionage, and intrigue – dedicating all to both sides of the self-extirpating Protestant belligerents. “Now, whether he kill Cassio or Cassio him, or each do kill the other, every way makes my gain!” 

If the Society of Jesus could conquer though believed dead, could not its Superior General do the same? When Lorenzo Ricci “died” in his cell at Castel Sant’Angelo on November 24, 1775 , what if his “death” was no more physical than the supposed disestablishment of his army? Lesser mystics than Ricci, who secretly commanded the Rosicrucians, were known to die and resurrect at the threshold of important endeavors: 

According to material available, the supreme council of the Fraternity of the Rose Croix [Rosicrucians] were composed of a certain number of individuals who had died what is known as the “philosophic death.” When the time came for an initiate to enter upon his labors for the Order, he conveniently “died” under somewhat mysterious circumstances. In reality he changed his name and place of residence, and a box of rocks or a body secured for the purpose was buried in his stead. It is believed that this happened in the case of Sir Francis Bacon who, like all servants of the Mysteries, renounced all personal credit and permitted others to be considered as the authors of the documents which he wrote or inspired.1 

Was it really Ricci’s body lying in state at the cathedral of San Giovanni Fiorentini during the elaborate funeral mass that Pius VI arranged for him? Was it really Lorenzo Ricci who was entombed beneath the Church of the Gesu a week later, in the vault reserved for Generals of the Society? Or was it a wax effigy sculpted by artisans upon a corpse of Ricci’s dimensions under the direction of John Carroll’s collaborator, man-about-Rome and art agent extraordinaire Francis Thorpe? 

Of course, Lorenzo Ricci would have covered his tracks in sublimely Sun-Tzuan fashion, so we can never be sure. But is it not consistent with his authority, resources, motives, and modus operandi, as well as the verifiable outcome of American Independence, that the General would feign death at precisely this opportunity and sail to America in order to conduct his orchestrations personally? Reflect on his counsel in The Thirteen Articles of Sun Tzu, particularly: 

The great art of a General is to arrange for the enemy never to know the place where he will have to fight & to carefully withhold from him knowledge of which posts he must guard. If he manages that & can also hide the slightest of his movements, then he is not only a clever General, he is an extraordinary man, a prodigy. Without being seen, he sees. He hears without being heard. 

Go to places where the enemy would never suspect that you intended to go.... Do not think of gathering the fruits of your victory until his entire defeat has put you in a position where you can yourself reconnoitre surely, tranquilly & with leisure. 

If the General did sail to America rather than lie in state, he would arrive not as a conquering hero but as a gentle, harmless, nameless, scholarly old man who spent most of his time reading. And during the course of his stay, inevitably, someone would observe his subtle power over great patriots and write about it. Just such a person was observed and written about. 

DURING the fall of 1775, Congress authorized a committee made up of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Lynch, Benjamin Harrison and George Washington to consider and recommend a design for the first united colonial flag. The so-called “Flag Committee” traveled to Cambridge , Massachusetts. There, according to the only known account of its proceedings, given in Robert Allen Campbell’s book, Our Flag (Chicago , 1890), the Committee mysteriously shared its authority with a total stranger. This stranger was an elderly European transient known only as “the Professor.”  

He had arrived from parts unknown at summer’s end. (The prisoner of Castel Sant’Angelo had not been publicly seen in two years, ample time to manage Braschi’s election to the papacy, relax, pack important things, die the philosopher’s death, and take a three-month voyage to Boston Harbor). Since his arrival, the Professor had occupied a guestroom in a private Cambridge home whose hostess, “one of his earnest and intelligent disciples,” would remember him in her diary (cited in Campbell’ s book) as “a quiet and very interesting member of the family.” 

What the hostess records about the Professor matches remarkably what is known about the character of Lorenzo Ricci. For example, the Professor is perceived to be “more than three-score and ten” years of age; Lorenzo Ricci was seventy-two. The Professor spoke many languages fluently, displayed an encyclopedic knowledge of history, and was “seemingly at home upon any and every topic coming up in conversation.” We might expect the very same of Lorenzo Ricci, a distinguished professor of literature, philosophy and theology at the Roman College and a well-established confidant of Europe’s leading intellectuals, philosophes, and mystics. The Professor kept “locked away in a large, old fashioned, cubically shaped, iron bound, heavy, oaken chest, a number of very rare old books and ancient manuscripts,” which he spent much of his time “deciphering, translating, or rewriting.” We might expect as much of Lorenzo Ricci, the voracious scholar and publisher of oriental masterworks. 

On the morning of December 13, 1775, the committeemen arrived in Cambridge for a midday feast. The Professor greeted them as we might expect Lorenzo Ricci would, “with an ease, grace and dignity [evidencing] his superior ability, experience and attainments, and ... with a courtly bow that left no room to doubt that he had habitually associated with those in acknowledged authority.” When Benjamin Franklin was presented to him, the hostess watched the patriarchal Doctor lock hands with the patriarchal Professor, “and as fingers closed upon fingers, their eyes also met, and there was an instantaneous, a very apparent and a mutually gratified recognition.” What had the woman witnessed? The Ultimate Summit? Unknown Superior revealing himself to America’s Grandest Freemason? 

The table talk soon focused on subjects that had occupied Lorenzo Ricci’s attention since the beginning of his generalate. The hostess witnessed them discussing “the relation of the Colonies to each other and to the Mother Country.” She saw them discuss “the related question of one’s duty to the Colony, as related to his allegiance to Great Britain.” She saw the Professor take “a noticeable, though not at all an obtrusive, part in the conversation, himself possessed of a wonderful fund of varied and accurate information concerning the Colonies, an understanding of their progress, condition and needs, and a familiarity with the principles and operations of British and European statesmanship.” Wouldn’t we expect as much from the Superior Genera l of the world’s best intelligence agency? 

After lunch, General Washington and the committeemen held a “brief, undertone conversation.” Then Dr. Franklin rose and stated: “As the chairman of this committee , speaking for my associates, with their consent, and with the approval of General Washington, I respectfully invite the Professor to meet with the Committee as one of its members; and we, each one, personally and urgently, request him to accept the responsibility, and to give us, and the American Colonies , the benefit of his counsel.” 

Taking the floor, the Professor accepted the responsibility. Then , startlingly, he proposed that his disciple, the hostess, be placed on the committee “because she is our hostess, because she is a woman, and above all, because she is a superior woman.” (The committee considered this an innovation; yet the Jesuits had been employing female coadjutors for centuries.) The proposal was “immediately and unanimously adopted.” Luncheon was adjourned. The committee would reconvene at seven in the evening, “in the guest chamber usually occupied by the Professor.” 

Franklin and the Professor spent the afternoon together walking about Cambridge. When they returned, the hostess noted that “both of them wore the relieved and confident look of earnest and determined men who had, in a satisfactory way, solved a perplexing problem, and of victors who had successfully mastered a difficult and dangerous situation.” 

At the evening session, Franklin turned the meeting over to “his new-found and abundantly honored friend.” The subject was a flag. Addressing the committee as “Comrade Americans,” the Professor explained that, since the colonies were still dependent upon Great Britain, “we are not expected to design or recommend a flag which will represent a new government or an independent nation,” but instead one “that will testify our present loyalty as English Subjects,” a flag that was “already in use,” a flag that had been recognized by the British government for “half a century,” a flag having a field of alternate horizontal red and white stripes with the Grand Union Flag of Great Britain in the upper left corner. 

“I refer,” he said, “to the flag of the East India Company.” 

To hide the fact that Americans would be fighting under the private flag of an international mercantile corporation controlled by Jesuits, the Professor provided a plausible cover whereby the flag could be “explained to the masses:” 

“The Union Flag of the Mother Country is retained as the union [upper left corner] of our new flag to announce that the Colonies are loyal to the just and legitimate sovereignty of the British Government. The thirteen stripes will at once be understood to represent the thirteen Colonies; their equal width will type the equal rank, rights and responsibilities of the Colonies. The union of the stripes in the field of our flag will announce the unity of interests and the cooperative union of efforts, which the Colonies recognize and put forth in their common cause. The white stripes will signify that we consider our demands just and reasonable; and that we will seek to secure our rights through peaceable, intelligent and statesmanlike means, if they prove at all possible; and the red stripes at the top and bottom of our flag will declare that first and last, and always, we have the determination, the enthusiasm, and the power to use force, whenever we deem force necessary. The alternation of the red and white stripes will suggest that our reasons for all demands will be intelligent and forcible, and that our force in securing our rights will be just and reasonable.”   

The Professor reminded the committee that “the masses of the people, and a large majority of the leaders of public opinion, desire a removal of grievances, and a rectification of wrongs , through a fuller recognition of their rights as British Subjects and few of them desire and very few of them expect at this time, any complete severance of their present political and dependent relations with the English Government.” That severance would occur “before the sun in its next summer’s strength”, indicating that the Professor foreknew, as Lorenzo Ricci would have foreknown, a July declaration of independence. At that time, the East India Company flag could be “easily modified” by replacing the Union Jack with stars against a blue background, “to make it announce and represent the new and independent nation.” 

Washington and Franklin lavished the Professor’s idea with “especial approval and unstinted praise.” The committee formally and unanimously adopted the East India Company’s banner, known as “The Thirteen Stripes,” as the “general flag and recognized standard of the Colonial Army and Navy.” Just before midnight, they adjourned. 

On January 2, 1776, at a formal ceremony attended by the Flag Committee, George Washington personally hoisted the East India Company flag “upon a towering and specially raised pine tree liberty pole,” unfurling it to the breeze and displaying it for the first time “to his army, the citizens of the vicinity, and the British forces in Boston.” The British officers at Charlestown Heights perceived the event 

to mean that General Washington had thus announced his surrender to them. At once, they saluted “The Thirteen Stripes” with thirteen hearty cheers. They immediately followed this spontaneous outburst of British Enthusiasm with the grander and more dignified official salute of thirteen guns, the thirteen gun salute being the highest compliment in gunpowder, the military “God speed you.” 

By so colorfully equivocating both his enemies, the Professor had made himself God of Confusion. Th e redcoats were toasting the good health of the rebels, who in turn were fighting for the East India Company. One of the few places in the world where such ludicrous phenomena are considered standard and routine is in the pages of Lorenzo Ricci’s Thirteen Articles: “The General decides everything; he knows how to shape, at will, not only the army he is commanding but also that of his enemies.” 

LORENZO Ricci’s post-mortem attendance in America is strongly suggested in yet another pivotal episode, the famous “mission to Canada.” This strange exercise is normally regarded by historians as a colossal failure. It began on February 15, 1776, when the Second Continental Congress resolved to send Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll to Montreal with full authority “to promote or form a union” with Canada against England. 

Just before the committee left Philadelphia, John Adams proposed a curious last-minute resolution. On the record, he requested “that Charles Carroll prevail on Mr. John Carroll to accompany the committee to Canada, to assist them in such matters as they shall think useful.” Congress adopted the resolution. 

How might a priest have assisted the committee in promoting or forming a union with Canada? The answer lies in demographics. Canada then was largely Quebec, and Quebec, though ruled despotically by the British since 1763, was mostly Roman Catholic. A Jesuit priest, armed with the right Vatican paperwork or password, could exert powerful influence on Canadian foreign policy. The same priest, if accompanied by the combined head of the black papacy and international Freemasonry, could make that policy. 

The mission arrived in Montreal only to learn that Bishop Briand of Quebec had ordered Pierre Floquet, the Jesuit superior in Montreal, to consider John Carroll persona non grata. Floquet, however, defied his bishop and invited Carroll to say a mass in his home anyway, for which Floquet was immediately suspended from his priestly functions. The incident colored the mission with disaster (although Floquet was restored, according to Walsh’s American Jesuits, after a simple apology). Disaster was verified when the committee returned to Philadelphia with no prospect for any union whatsoever with Canada. Congress lamented that America’s first diplomatic legation had failed. 

But America’ s first diplomatic legation was Sun-Tzuan and Jesuitic, and Jesuit diplomacy can be expected to conceal victory behind mishap. As the Thirteen Articles put it, “You must have a real advantage when the enemy believes you have sustained some losses.” So we examine the Canadian mishap for a real advantage and discover something far more valuable than the originally sought union. While Bishop Briand was outwardly demeaning John Carroll, the mission was obtaining from Canada a position of neutrality. This was a significant achievement, considering Canada’s good relationship with Great Britain on the one hand and two centuries of hostilities toward New England on the other. For the colonists, Canadian neutrality removed the threat of a powerful northwestern enemy and cleared the way for a declaration of independence. At Montreal, as at Cambridge, I sense the presence of someone infinitely more commanding than mere committeemen appointed by Congress. I sense the presence of the “honorary” committeeman unlisted in any record – the Professor, the fugitive Vicar of Christ. 

Returning from Canada, Benjamin Franklin fell ill. It was John Carroll who escorted him to Philadelphia. At Franklin’s invitation, Carroll moved into his home. Franklin acknowledged the fact in a letter dated May 27,1776, mentioning “Mr. Carroll’s friendly assistance and tender care of me.” These were critical weeks of countdown to the Declaration of Independence. I wonder who else might have been found under the Franklin roof? Perhaps the Professor, with his dynamic oaken chest? 

Philadelphia was crawling just now with social activists from all over, the very people Lorenzo Ricci had appointed John Carroll, as Prefect of the Sodality, to organize. The home of America’s preeminent Freemason, with Carroll and perhaps even Ricci in residence, would have become the main clearinghouse for sub rosa congressional business. 

ON July 3, 1776, John Adams took pen in hand and dashed off a letter to his wife Abigail. Adams was a writer of Mozartean facility, concentration, and confidence. Everything he ever wrote was first-draft and good. He never struck through words, never edited. His moving hand, having writ, just moved on. “Yesterday,” he scribbled, 

the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America, and a greater, perhaps, never was nor will be decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to have, full power to make war, conclude peace, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which other States may rightfully do. The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable date in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forevermore. 

If the black papacy truly had orchestrated America’s breakaway from England, we would expect to find the second day of July to be rich in kabbalah and in Roman Catholic liturgical color. The Liturgical Calendar is a process, authorized nowhere in the Bible, through which faithful Catholics may plead with Almighty God for favors through the merits of ascended saints on special feast days. Supposedly, the prayerful performance of an act on a date the Church has consecrated to a saint endows the act with the mystique of the saint as well as the saint’s intercessory prayers to God for success. 

Maryland history, for example, is grounded in the Liturgical Calendar. We recall how the original settlers of Maryland, many of whom were Roman Catholics, set sail from England, under the spiritual direction of Jesuit father Andrew White, on November 22, 1633. November 22 is the Feast Day of St. Cecilia, a third century Roman martyr and traditional patroness of musicians. Did Cecilia’s spirit bless the voyage with musicality to cheer up an otherwise oppressive boredom? The voyagers reached landfall the following year on March 25, Annunciation Day, feast of the angel Gabriel’s announcement to the Virgin Mary that she is pregnant with the Son of God. Annunciation Day contains the joyful mystery of an angel’s announcing the planting of the divine seed within a virgin matrix. Did the settlers imagine themselves planting the seed of a new social order in a strange wilderness, the whole enterprise blessed by God through the merits of the Virgin Mary’s unique relationship to Him? Then, exactly one year later, on Annunciation Day 1634, Father White consecrated the colony of Maryland to the Virgin Mary. 

The second day of July in the year 1776 was Visitation Day, commemorating the event recorded in the first chapter of Luke wherein the Virgin, pregnant with the Messiah, visits her cousin Elizabeth, who is pregnant with John the Baptist. (Nowadays Visitation Day is celebrated on May 31 , but in the year 1776 it was celebrated on July second, as it had been celebrated, according to the New Catholic Encyclopedia’s article entitled “Visitation of Mary,” every year since the Council of Basel in 1441.) 

No day in the Liturgical Calendar is more suited to Bellarminian liberation theology than Visitation Day. Ste. Margaret-Marie Alacoque, whose visions inspired the Jesuit social-action cult of Sacred Heart, was a member of the Visitandines, an order of nuns devoted to the Visitation. Visitation Day’s scriptural basis is the Virgin Mary’s ecstatic sermon to Elizabeth at Luke 1:46-55. This famous ejaculation, known as the Magnificat (the opening word in the Latin Vulgate’s rendering of the passage, meaning “it magnifies”), literally defines the social action called for by Sacred Heart in Philadelphia on the second day of July, 1776: 

My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name. And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation. He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.... 

Scattered the proud, put down the mighty, exalted them of low degree, filled the hungry, emptied the rich.... This is the rhetoric of Christian redemption, yes, but in the context of Lorenzo Ricci’s agenda it’s the rhetoric of rebellion-to-tyranny, the very point of the Declaration of Independence , and it’s spoken by the Virgin Mary, Patroness of the Society of Jesus, Patroness of Maryland, indeed, Patroness of Roman Catholic Conquest, on the day particular to her. 

Even the year of Independence seems divinely validated by the perfect design of sixes and sevens contained within its expression in Roman numerals, MDCCLXXVI : 

M D C = 1600 = (1+6 ) = 7 

C L X = 160 = (1+6 ) = 7 

XVI =1 6 = (1+6 ) = 7  

Particularly fascinating is the way the Latin equivalent of 1776 is structured upon 666 and 777. Swiss theologian E. W. Bullinger, in his scholarly guide to biblical arithmography, Number In Scripture, says that 6 in the Bible is always associated with humanity, 7 with divinity. The two numbers total 13, which Bullinger says is biblically associated with rebellion. 

MDCCLXXVI , 1776, really does seem to be a unique convergence of time and human rebellion in the service of a divine ordination. This is eerily corroborated by John Adams ’ letter to Abigail on July third. He confides to his wife that independence should have been declared in December of 1775: 

Had a Declaration of Independence been made seven months ago, it would have been attended with many great and glorious effects. If I could write with freedom, I could easily convince you that it would, and explain it to you the manner how. 

Adams never fully explained how the earlier declaration would have produced great and glorious effects. However , the numbers suggest it would have rather fizzled. Roman numerals for 1775 fall into the following groups: 

MDC = 1600 = (1+6 ) = 7 

CLX = 160 = (1+6 ) = 7 

XV =15 = (1+5 ) = 6 

Plain to see, December 1775 fails as kabalah. It gives no indication of divine approval to rebellious humanity. This is why, I believe, Lorenzo Ricc i held out for 1776. 

Of course, a sufficiently Gnostic Jesuit would see in MDCCLXXVI more than good numbers. He would see an encapsulation of the very origins of the Society of Jesus. MDC would give him milice du Christ (“Christian militia”), the official classification of the Knights Templar and the Society of Jesus. MDC also produces Medici, the family name of Pope Leo X, whose degeneracy provoked Martin Luther to create the Protestant movement, which in turn created the need for the Society. CLX specifies the Ignatius era, which historians have ever since called the “Century of Leo X.” And the last three numerals name the Century of Leo X, the sixteenth century, XVI. 

WHEN it came time to sign the Declaration of Independence, how could Lorenzo Ricci not be present? How could he who had labored more than seventeen years for this superbly Bellarminian ambiance not participate in the excitement? 

There is a story, usually told in conjunction with the Professor and the Flag Committee, involving another mysterious stranger, one who suddenly appeared in the legislative chamber of the old State House in Philadelphia on the night of July fourth. 

The moment was tense. Independence had been resolved, but the document lacked signatures. Some were having second thoughts about the risks. Masonic historian Manly P. Hall writes: 

It was a grave moment and not a few of those present feared that their lives would be the forfeit for their audacity. In the midst of the debate a fierce voice rang out. The debaters stopped and turned to look upon the stranger. Who was this man who had suddenly appeared in their midst and transfixed them with his oratory? They had never seen him before, none knew when he had entered, but his tall form and pale face filled them with awe. His voice ringing with a holy zeal, the stranger stirred them to their very souls. His closing words rang through the building: “God has given America to be free!” As the stranger sank into a chair exhausted, a wild enthusiasm burst forth. Name after name was placed upon the parchment: the Declaration of Independence was signed. But where was the man who had precipitated the accomplishment of this immortal task, who had lifted for a moment the veil from the eyes of the assemblage and revealed to them a part at least of the great purpose for which the new nation was conceived? He had disappeared, nor was he ever seen again or his identity established.2 

Be warned. This is only a story, unsupported by primary source material. John Adams, the most talkative of the framers, said not a word about it. But we know from Adams’ own pen that some kind of gag order had been imposed upon the signers, “if I could write with freedom” he had told Abigail in that letter dated the third of July. Could Manly Hall have received the story through Freemasonry’s well-insulated oral tradition? Could the stranger whose voice rang “with a holy zeal” have been the Professor, Lorenzo Ricci? Could the “wild enthusiasm” with which the legislators signed the declaration have resulted not from Ricci’s inspiring pep-talk but upon his disclosure of documents taken from the oaken chest, documents easy for the Vicar of Christ in his capacity as Freemasonry’s Unknown Superior to obtain, guaranteeing that the international monetary network would indemnify the signers for their action? My mind, informed by an ever-increasing knowledge of how the greatest clandestine warriors fight, has no problem whatsoever believing this to be the case. It is exquisitely consistent with the formation of a Febronian union of thirteen Protestant colonies, ordained to be ruled from a federal city named “Rome,” a city situated within the See of Baltimore, under the protection of the Patroness of the Society of Jesus. 

One of the more intriguing clues that the United States of America was established under Regimini militantis ecclesiae is the new republic’s Great Seal. As we shall see in the next chapter, the Seal is legal proof that America’s true founding fathers were indeed priests of Rome. 

next
AMERICAN GRAFFITI 


notes
Chapter 18: The Stimulating Effects of Tea 
1. As such, East India seems likely to have been the source of funding for Amiot’s translation of Sun-Tzu. Perhaps someday this connection can be investigated. 
2. Country Life, October 10, 1968 
3. Ibid. 
4. Geoffrey Holt, S.J, St. Omers and Bruges Colleges, 1593-1773: A Biographical Dictionary, London (1979) 
5. Black’s Law Dictionary, 5th edition, page 709 
6. Pat Shannan, who investigates clandestine government involvement in great public catastrophes such as the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, suggests that the mysterious shot might have been fired by Sam Adams himself. When I spoke with Shannan in July 1999, he had just returned from several weeks of sleuthing around Lexington Green. He told me the following: “Sam Adams and John Hancock had big prices on their heads and were hiding out during the early morning hours of 19 April in the home of Rev. Jonas Clarke. Clarke’s house is less than a quarter mile from Lexington Green. Adams delivered many of his rabble rousing speeches at the meeting-house near the Green. It was from behind this meeting-house shortly after daybreak that the initial shot was fired on the redcoats. As to who was responsible for firing that shot, really the first of the Revolution, my number one suspect since my first visit to Lexington years ago has always been Sam Adams. He had motive, he had access, and he, more than anyone else, had been in the King’s face for a long time with his firebrand speeches. He was always urging the people to value liberty more than life itself – which is really what that shot was about.” 

Chapter 19: The Death & Resurrection of Lorenzo Ricci 
1. Hall, The Secret Teachings,etc., p CLXVIII 
2. Ibid., CC