Men judge by the complexion of the sky, the state and inclination of the day (1). Yet, to the perplexed observer it was difficult, in 2013, to guess what Pope Bergoglio was up to. For one, the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI was puzzling. After all, the last Pope to resign, 719 years earlier, was Celestine V, five months after his election, in 1294 AD
Celestine V was a monk who disliked publicity and crowds, and there is evidence that he did not want to be elected in the first place. For, after his election, he promptly issued an edict confirming the right of a Pope to abdicate. His successor, Boniface VIII, annulled all Celestine’s other edicts but the one about abdication. He then imprisoned Celestine in a castle, to prevent him from being elected by others as an anti-pope.
It was a time when competing clerical parties elected a different pope, each calling the other the anti-pope. Eventually there were simultaneously three of them, an issue finally resolved by the Council of Konstanz in 1414-1418. Those interested may watch the related video I produced https://tinyurl.com/ybk23rgs
Historically, the multi-pope emergency mirrors the US Cabal declaring the puppet Juan Guaido’ as ‘legitimate’ president of Venezuela, and biting their lips for having failed, so far, to carry out their coup in Caracas.
In his ”Divine Comedy”, Dante Alighieri positions Celestine V in an anti-chamber of Hell, and refers to him as “he who made for cowardice, the great refusal.” (“Colui che fece per viltate il gran rifiuto!”).
Dante is actually even more unkind towards Celestine’s successor Pope Boniface VIII, a Dante’s contemporary. He anticipates Boniface ending up in the eighth circle of Hell, among the avaricious and the practitioners of simony. They – each of them – live head-down in a hole, unable to see what is happening outside. Their feet burn in eternity, thanks to a type of high-performance, high-temperature, long-lasting cooking oil.
One such hole hosts a previous simonizing Pope, Nicholas III, who, hearing noises but unable to see, thinks that Dante is someone else and asks, “Are you here already, Boniface (VIII) ?” Dante used this escamotage to predict the after-life destiny of the simonizing Boniface, still alive when Dante wrote the Comedy.
By the way, Boniface VIII also launched the first Holy Year (Annus Sanctus) in 1300 AD, seen by apologists as an instrument to fortify the Church, and by critics as a marketing tool to extract fees from pilgrims, in exchange for a plenary indulgence.
As for Benedict XVI, there is a consensus that he did not resign out of cowardice or physical impairment. In fact, he still active and regularly writes articles on various theological, ethical and church-related issues. More on this later, using information recently gleaned by some Catholics, dismayed at the current directions and mutations in the Catholic Church.
Many consider the transition from Pope Ratzinger to Pope Bergoglio as a watershed in the Catholic world. Namely, the conversion of the Church from a bastion of resistance against the antichristian powers of capitalist globalism, into an organization that embraces it.
Bergoglio’s message seems to exclude, or at best to marginalize, the sense of the transcendent, which is at the root of Christianity and of Greek inspired philosophy, while opening the church to the nihilistic mentality and mode of being of the current globalist, hyper-capitalistic, market-driven civilization – founded on the principle that there is no happiness but in opulence.
Pope Bergoglio has admitted to have doubted at times the existence of God. It is a doubt that many may have or may have had. But pronouncements by authority influence millions. His words are not likely to ease the doubts of the cautious and the terrors of the fearful. Therefore making both the cautious and the fearful suffer the whips and scorn of time, and rather bear the ills they have than fly to others that they know not of.(2)
Along the same line of thought, I heard some nihilists waiting for a Pope to declare, from St. Peter’s balcony, something like this, “Ladies and Gentlemen, it was all wrong. From now on, see which way things go and adapt yourselves to the rough torrent of occasion.” (3)
Bergoglio hasn’t gone that far, but given, for example, his undisguised acceptance of what until recently was called sodomy, it would seem that a Catholic can be morally corrupt as long as he is politically correct.
By ‘undisguised acceptance’ I mean and apply the principle that a picture is worth a thousand words. Among various instances, the Pope’s hearty welcome to a homosexual ‘married’ couple, his walk hand in hand with a notorious homosexual, and his frequent hints at the need of ‘modernization.’
I referred to the church as opening to a nihilistic mentality. There are various degrees and types of nihilism (from the Latin ‘nothing’). The philosopher most associated with nihilism is Friedrich Nietzsche, for he helped shape and define the concept – namely that nothing in the universe can actually be known or communicated.
The idea leads to a cosmic pessimism, where all is nothing and nothing is all. Consequently nihilism acts as a corrosive force, destroying eventually all religious and metaphysical convictions and moral constructs. Oswald Spengler described the problem in his “The Decline of the West.”
In some ways, and I owe the association to Italian philosopher Diego Fusaro, Bergoglio is for the Church what Gorbachev was for Communism. Gorbachev thought that ‘Perestroika’ would restructure Communism, whereas it killed it – ensuring, at least for a while, the transition from the old communist world to an individualistic, nihilistic civilization of American-style consumerism.
There are extant symbolic images of this remarkable transformation. In 1990, in the Red Square and surrounded by the party’s and army’s nomenklatura, Gorbachev watched the military parade commemorating the October Revolution. Not long later he appeared as a comic consumer protagonist in a TV advertisement of the Pizza-Hut franchise.
On the other hand, already in 1990, Gorbachev’s economists had forged the “400-day Plan,” aimed at massive privatization of the Soviet economy, eventually ending in the pre-Putin-era apotheosis of Russian chaos.
In summary, Gorbachev took up the mission of burying, on behalf of anglo-zionist capitalism, the old historical Communism – and his task of destruction, Gorbachev orwellianly called reconstruction (Perestroika).
Like Gorbachev with Russia, Pope Bergoglio’s Perestroika aimed at reconstructing the Catholic Church, after Pope Benedict’s puzzling resignation. But Perestroika, for Bergoglio, meant making Catholicism compliant and consonant with the times, by a program of massive de-sacralization, the spiritual equivalent of privatization in the lay world of economy and business. In practice, he turned the Church into a servant of the new Masonic world-order in stars and stripes.
Readers may know of the recent Amazonian Synod during which various ‘Pachamama’ idols of Amazonian tribes were introduced in Roman churches, to signify a uniformity of purpose in all religions. What is the connection? The new world order aims at converting the world into a unified border-less plain, where goods and merchandize flow seamlessly, along with men turned into merchandize. That is, men looking for goods with the lowest cost, and goods looking for men willing to produce them at the lowest pay.
Sounding the bottom of the earlier times (4), it is worth observing that both the Communists and the Vatican – though nominally enemies – acted as a brake against the Thatcher-Reagan, ostensively-pioneered new-world order, and as a restraint against the nihilism and the pan-merchandizing of souls, which is the essence of neo-liberal globalism.
And with the easy knowledge of the aftertimes, Pope Woityla, the predecessor of Benedict XVI, only saw in Russia the ideological and concrete embodiment of materialism. That is, Woityla’s notorious hatred of Russia overwhelmed his possible perception that, in different but complementary ways, both Russia and the Vatican acted as a defence line against the nihilistic, hyper-materialistic, currently-extant new world-order.
Bergoglio is a relentless promoter of human trans-migration from third world countries into Western Europe and America. And he actively promotes massive miscegenation of European women with third-world males.
In fact, according to very recent information, the Italian Episcopal Conference has just allocated 30-million Euros for a campaign called “Free to Leave,” financed out of the tax Italians pay, since 1984, for the maintenance of the Church.
The agency SIR (Religious Information Service), which launched the initiative, calls the campaign “a window on the world, the mirror of a commitment to defy indifference”. The project aims at sensitizing the Italian population on the topic. And, at the same time, to implement concrete projects in the countries of departure, “to facilitate migration (into Italy) from countries where women and children flee from wars and hunger.”
It’s almost like reading news in print from a plausible Vatican CNN. For in our times of post-truthfulness, even the seventh commandment has gone the way of all flesh. Any observer of the boats steeped with migrants, landing in Sicily and elsewhere, will notice among them an overwhelming majority of lusty and apparently very well-fed young males.
So far, Bergoglio has stopped short of validating forced inter-racial-marriages, as advocated (or threatened) by the Talmudist Sarkozy, who, when president of France, declared that French people must change, that there will be dire consequences if they don’t, and that not to racially intermarry threatens the survival of France.
Here are his actual words, which may be wise to remember, should we in time forget them, under the onslaught of media rumor, on whose tongue fake news and slanders ride, stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
“What is the final goal? – asked Sarkozy – it is going to be controversial. The goal is to meet the challenge of racial interbreeding – the challenge of racial interbreeding that faces us in the 21st century. It’s not a choice it’s an obligation. It’s imperative. We cannot do otherwise. Or we risk finding ourselves confronted with insurmountable problems. We must change, we will change.”
Supporting Sarkozy’s not-so-hidden threatening message, are/were the words of Ms. Barbara Spectre, a big wig among European Jewry, who said as follows,
“At this point in time Europe has not yet learned how to be multicultural, and I think we’re going to be part of the throes of that transformation which must take place. Europe is not going to be the monolithic society that they were. Jews are going to be at the center of that. It’s a huge transformation for Europe to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode and Jews will be resented because of our leading role. But without that leading role and without that transformation Europe will not survive.”
A naive reader may ask Ms. Spectre whether the same principles should or should not apply to the Jews. But I would advise him not to pose the question, to avoid being labeled as an anti-something.
All this, by the way, also precisely fits with the predictions of the founder of the European Union Coudeneuve-Kalergi. Whose yearly Kalergi Prize was conferred on Pope Bergoglio in 2016 – honoring “Europeans who have excelled in promoting European integration” – read mass illegal immigration.
In this context, it is worth mentioning again some key predicting sentences from Kalergi’s major opus, “Practischer Idealismus.” Where he says that, “The man of the future will be a mixed breed. Today’s races and castes will fall victim to the increased overcoming of space, time and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its features to the ancient Egyptians, will replace the nations (that have) a diversity of personalities.”
And he added that to govern this Eurasian-Negroid race would be the best of the Jews, who, in turn would intermarry with the best of the European nobility. For the Jews – Kalergi says – are “consanguineous individuals, whose strength of character and acuteness of mind” (page 28) predestines them to become “the race of the spiritual leaders of Europe,” the “emissaries of spiritual nobility,” holders of a “superior spirit, a race of masters (Herrenstrasse, pages 49 to 41), the “chosen people”.
Finally, on pages 55->57 we find that “The union of men and women, holders of noble titles, will be free. Inversely, people of inferior worth will content themselves with mates who are their match. Therefore, the erotic style of lower grade people will be free love – that of the elect will be free matrimony. The nobility of the future will emerge from the divine laws of erotic eugenics (sic). And here, in social eugenics, lies the highest historic mission of the European new nobility.” (The quotes were a literal translation of the German original, found in a book by Italian Writer, Matteo Simonetti, titled,“Kalergi – The imminent disappearance of the Europeans”)
An insurmountable problem
To be fair to Pope Bergoglio, the Catholic Church and the world are facing – and readers may agree – an almost insurmountable problem, the unrestrained world population growth, notably in third world countries.
To promote restraint in reproduction violates (or violated) Catholic principles. To promote unlimited reproduction fuels an unquenchable fire that will consume itself, though only after having consumed the world.
Nevertheless, unlimited population growth dovetails with the myth of endless capitalistic expansion, with the annexed idolatry of the invisible hand of the market, and with the very visible promotion of unrestrained consumerism.
Many believe that consumerism is the son of advertising – it actually isn’t. The explosion of advertising follows from a value system in which man identifies himself with the objects he owns – though, in reality, these objects own him.
Ultimate globalization is the natural and inevitable sister of unrestrained competition for ultimate power, in which all is allowed, beyond all ethics, let alone morals. And before the world-wise skeptics say that this is taking bird bolts for cannon bullets (5), I would invite them to meditate on the exploits of US foreign policy in the last 30 years.
Equally, if a certified nihilist says, with an air of wisdom, that “it has always been this way,” and that human nature cannot be changed, he may ask himself why there was a Greek philosophy and why Christianity developed. Indeed, many consider Christianity but a footnote to Plato’s intuitions and an extension of Plato’s thought, made popular by the Church by making it understandable by the masses.
On the subject of population explosion, Italian writer Italo Calvino said, “Bringing a child into the world makes sense if this child is consciously and freely wanted by the two parents. If not, it’s an animalistic and criminal act. A human being becomes such not by the random occurrence of certain biological conditions, but by an act of will and love on the part of others. If not, humanity becomes – as to a large extent already is – a stable of rabbits. But it is no longer the “rural” stable, but a “battery” breeding in the conditions of artificiality, in which it lives on artificial light and with chemical feed.
Only those – man and woman – who are one hundred percent convinced that they have the moral and material possibility not only to raise a child but to welcome him as a welcome and beloved presence, have the right to procreate.”
Calvino wrote this in the early 1980s. In the meantime the world has added at least 2 more billion humans and the growth curve is almost vertical.
Calvino’s reference to battery breeding and artificiality frightfully mirrors the consequences of overpopulation in agriculture, which follow from the need to feed the growing billions. Namely GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and battery grown (actually tortured) animals, kept alive under artificial light and stuffed with antibiotics.
In these circumstances, it would seem that Bergoglio’s solution of the dilemma is to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Or rather, flooding the Christian world with billions of third-world humans implies or suggests Bergoglio’s questionable expectation that the (human explosion) problem will spontaneously resolve itself.
He said deprecatingly, “When the desire for communion, inscribed in man and in the history of peoples, is denied, the process of unification of the human family is opposed, which is irresistibly progressing through a thousand adversities. The Mediterranean has a particular vocation in this sense: (it is) the sea of the mixed-breed. The purity of the races has no future”.
It’s no surprise then that Bergoglio is bitter against those whom he calls “populists” and “sovereignists.”
In a very recent speech he compared populists to “those who lived in Germany in the 1930s.” It’s actually a lively current idea, whereby anyone who airs views opposite to the neo-liberal ideology and to the Bergoglio-inspired new Catholic Church is actually a neo-Nazi, a fascist, or both.
The principle has been given a Latin name, “Reductio ad Hitlerium,” [amalgamation to Hitlerism] by a brilliant Italian philosopher, Diego Fusaro, to whom I am also indebted for having brought to popular attention the parallel between Gorbachev and Pope Bergoglio.
Bergoglio and the Council of Florence of 1494
There is a curious historical resonance between Bergoglio’s ‘modernization’ of the Catholic Church, and the events that occurred in Florence, Italy in 1439. When the Council of Florence, however fleetingly, ended the schism of 1154 AD, between the Catholic and the Orthodox Church.
Actually the Byzantine emperor John VIII Paleologo came to Florence to solicit an alliance with the European Christian powers, to help him fend off the advancing and threatening Turks. He failed in his quest and Byzantium capitulated to the Turks in 1452, bringing the Eastern Roman Empire to an inglorious end.
John VIII brought with him to Florence an interesting coalition of curious characters, one of whom was George Gemistus, the greatest scholar in the Byzantine delegation. Another was Scholarius, a scholar, as his name implies, who wrote about the Council.
Ruling Florence at the time was the Medici family, via its head, Cosimo de Medici, son of the founder of the Medici Bank. With the resurgence of trade and manufacturing, the Medicis had to face the same quintessential challenges of expanded trade, namely competition. To confront which, the first immediate expedience (like then, like now), was to reduce the cost of labor.
Equally, however, labor practices could not (then) openly violate Christian laws, among which was the prohibition of usury. In fact, in his Divine Comedy Dante places usurers in the third circle of hell, along with blasphemers and sexual deviants. Usurers sit on burning sand, while a constant fire storm makes the sinners cry in pain, while they try to protect themselves with their hands from the raindrops of fire.
To the question ‘how does usury help workers if their earnings are not enough to survive from one payday to the next?’ the answer (then and now) can be found in the usurious industry of payday loans.
Incidentally, for many scholars usury is the theoretical and practical foundation of capitalism. To quote the German economist Werner Sombart (1963-1941), “Capitalism is the philosophical and political sanctification of usury.”
Hence, the Medici family had to invent other schemes to reduce the cost of labor, such as, for example, the gradual debasement of noble metals in the coins used to pay workers.
Some time before Cosimo, the conditions the working class had deteriorated to the point of causing the so-called ‘Ciompi’ rebellion. The rebellion was put down, but the event left lingering effects on the Florentine population. And Cosimo, a bit like Bernie Sanders today in the US, proposed himself as the “prince of the people”.
Cosimo wanted both riches and heaven too. To us, methodically exposed to theoretical religiousness and practical atheism, Cosimo’s objectives seem to blend superstition with ridicule. Still, unwilling or unable to practice usury, Cosimo called in the Jews to Florence, where they willingly took up the challenge.
However, the measure did not resolve an underlying fundamental issue, namely how to make money on money. To us, its existence, centuries after it was deemed an issue, is now unthinkable as the practice is taken for granted.
Enter George Gemistos. Though he came to Florence as a theologian, Gemistos was actually a pagan and an admirer of the late Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Gemistos had a devotion to the Sun, an admiration for alchemy and a penchant for astrology.
Gemistos greatly influenced Cosimo by suggesting to him that pagan culture was not incompatible with Christianity, including the pagan side of economics. To connect Cosimo’s conversion to pagan (capitalistic) economics with the nihilism of the new world order, we can use the modern language of Nietzsche, eager to adopt the economic side of paganism (as he was of its sexual). Meaning an unlimited license to exploit the worker. He wrote, “It is stupid that there is a worker problem in the first place, certain things one does not concern oneself about… We now propose an abiding truth: slavery is part of the essence of culture… anyone who is weak ought to be given a shove so that he will go down faster.”
In other words, Gemistos converted Cosimo into an ante-litteram Nietzsche’s follower. Nietzsche’s philosophy also explains concisely the rejection of what is/was called the moral order. For Christianity injected moral order into spheres where otherwise the stronger could exploit the weaker at his pleasure. And this the early 1400 humanists, and the capitalists of every following generation, found repugnant.
Whether Pope Bergoglio has seen a connection between the new large-scale mercification of the world and the global implementation of Nietzschean principles – thanks to third-world human deportations and miscegenation – I know not. I leave it to the readers to draw their own conclusions.
The Resignation of Pope Benedict XVI
Now – briefly returning to Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation – a frondist movement, born among some American Catholics, has made available new related and relevant information. The plot is intricate, and I must confine its description into a sketch. But the protagonists almost mirror in real life the characters of the board game Clue: Mrs. White, Mr. Green, Mrs. Peacock, Professor Plum, Miss Scarlet and Colonel Mustard, or their clerical equivalents.
The unraveling began with an open letter by Cardinal Vigano’ – earlier Ambassadors of the Vatican in Washington DC – addressed to Pope Francis about two or three years ago.
Originally, Pope Benedict XVI had appointed Cardinal Vigano’ to review the books of the Vatican Bank. Vigano’ found the books in disarray, but further to the auditing, about 50 million Euros were recovered.
In the meantime it came out that some prelates in the US were involved in, or accused of, homosexual acts or predations – the most (in)famous being Cardinal McCarrick.
Benedict XVI ordered Mc Carrick to leave the seminary where he lived in Washington DC, not to celebrate Mass in public, not to participate in public meetings, not to give lectures or travel. He was advised to dedicate himself to a life of prayer and penance.
But apparently the order was not carried out, and/or it was reversed by Pope Francis. In fact Vigano’ was surprised to find McCarrick in Rome, ready to leave on a diplomatic mission to China on behalf of Pope Bergoglio. For the record, following the open letter to the Pope by Vigano’ (and associated widened public awareness), McCarrick was eventually defrocked.
Furthermore, prior to his resignations, Benedict XVI had assigned three cardinals he could trust, a Spanish, a Slovak and an Italian, to conduct a secret investigation regarding financial malfeasance and moral corruption inside the Vatican.
The cardinals compiled a 300-page dossier, and delivered it to Pope Benedict XVI on December 17th 2012. The dossier documented deep financial and moral corruption – allegedly “describing Cardinals dressed in drags, with lude details given by Roman male prostitutes.”
The conclusion of the dossier was that financial irregularities were linked to moral irregularities and homosexuality, practiced inside the walls of Vatican City. Reportedly, when Pope Benedict XVI read the dossier he felt he did not have the strength or the power to reform. Shortly later he formally announced his resignation.
Differences between Gorbachev and Pope Bergoglio
I spoke about similarities between Bergoglio and Gorbachev. But there are/were differences. Gorbachev was inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity. He uttered interminable sentences, pregnant with words and often barren of meaning – at the end of which it was difficult to make sense of what he had said, other than perceiving that it was trivial or elementary. It must have been excruciating for the interpreters, and we may forgive Gorbachev for ignoring Alexander Pope’s famous lines, “Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound, Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.”
Yet, with Gorbachev’s verbal externations, it was a case of life imitating comedy. As when, in perhaps the best among British comedies, [“Yes Minister”], Sir Humphrey Appleby, head of the Civil Service wished a Happy Christmas to Mr. Hacker, then Minister of the Interior,
“I wonder if I might crave your momentary indulgence in order to discharge a, by no means disagreeable, obligation which has over the years become, more or less established practice within government circles as we approach the terminal period of the year, calendar of course not financial. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, week 51; and submit to you, with all appropriate deference, for your consideration at a convenient juncture, a sincere and sanguine expectation, indeed, confidence; indeed one might go so far as to say hope, that the aforementioned period may be, at the end of the day, when all relevant facts have been taken into consideration, susceptible of being deemed to be such as to merit a final verdict of having being, by no means, unsatisfactory in its overall outcome and in the final analysis, to give grounds for being judged, on mature reflection, to have been conducive to generating a degree of gratification which will be seen in retrospect, to have been significantly higher than the general average…”
Conclusions
On a more serious note and to conclude… As outside observers and with our imperfect faculties, we can only wonder at the universal mystery of things. The current prevailing ideology is ferocious and practically nameless. We can call it neo-liberal, neo-liberalism, neo-capitalism, but for the average man it means nothing. For him that ideology is perceived as the actual reality – therefore, it is not recognized for what it is, the will of a few imposed on the life of all others. There is no choice but to accept as irreversible that antagonism and hostility are the defining characteristics of human relations, where citizens are consumers, disheartened and caged in an unnatural captivity, and where the market is the only possible democracy.
And on an even more somber note, Pope Bergoglio, in his drive towards ‘modernizing’ the Church, has exchanged the Gospel of St. John with the Gospel according to George Soros, while openly giving up on discretion being the tutor (6) of Catholic policies. And if with Gorbachev the revolution committed suicide, with Bergoglio we could say, on balance, that the bright day is done (7) and the Catholics are for the dark.
References:
*** (1) Richard II
*** (2) Hamlet
*** (3) King Henry IV part 1
*** (4) King Henry IV part 2
*** (5) Twelfth Night
*** (6) Hamlet
*** (7) Antony and Cleopatra