by Rev. John MacLeod, M.A., Stornoway
(Continued from page 119)
In recent times much Press publicity has been given to the evils, especially the brain-washing techniques, of the so-called Unification Church or “Moonites” — a sect which has attracted well-deserved and almost universal condemnation. But are such techniques much different from those laid down in Ignatius Loyola’s “Spiritual Exercises” which has been described as probably the most famous and effective of all training manuals “cleverly designed to hallucinate the personality into submission”? The effects of devil-inspired religious fanaticism have been clearly evident in recent times in Iran. The ruthless blood-letting was horrific and anything resembling the Christian rule of law was conspicuous by its absence, as the revolutionary forces went about their grisly work. It may surprise us, but the view has been expressed, and not without reason, that “the real inspiration of the Society of Jesus was Muslim”. One writer of last century compared the technique and imagery of the “Spiritual Exercises” with those of the Koran. “Loyola,” the writer observed, “endeavours to work upon the five senses, or upon the mind’s power of repeating their impressions but Mahomet has done this in a far more effective style”. At the time of the foundation of the Order there appears to have been extant a fanatical Islamic sect called the Assassins and which was well known for its cult of absolute obedience. Loyola, it is thought, would have been familiar with it and the Society founded by him was in essence a Popish counterpart. It is not without reason, we believe, that a more recent investigator of the Jesuit order concludes that “with the entry of the Jesuits upon the stage of history a new science was born: the science of counter-revolution . . . It was not until our own century that Lenin adopted the essential Jesuit principles of super-centralization and the corps of professional revolutionaries. And no revolutionary movement has ever remotely approached, let alone equalled, the marvellous Jesuit organisation”.
As already noted with the founding of the Jesuit order the work of the Counter-reformation really began. Its success was noted thus by Lord MacAulay: “Fifty years after the Lutheran separation Catholicism could scarcely maintain itself on the shores of the Mediterranean. A hundred years after the separation, Protestantism could scarcely maintain itself on the shores of the Baltic”. The fearful Thirty Years War (1618-1648) was, at the time, and since, known as “The Jesuits War” and one has only to read Wylie’s account of the Sack of Magdeburg by the Imperial forces to get an impression of the bloodshed and carnage involved. Maximilian of Bavaria and Ferdinand of Austria had been educated by the Jesuits and were, for the purposes of this war, but mere puppets in their hands. Were it not, humanly speaking, for the timely intervention of the godly King Gustavus Adolphus and his gallant, magnificent leadership the Jesuit objective of the eradication of Protestantism in Germany would have been realised. In more modern times the two great wars of this century claimed millions of lives and to such people as Edmond Paris there was absolutely no doubt as to Jesuit involvement in the causes leading to both wars and some of the appalling events which occurred during their course. The silence of Pius XII in the face of the “exterminations en masse of ethnic minorities, prisoners and deported civilians” indicated complicity and connivance on his part. In a celebrated book “The Silence of Pius XII” published in 1965, the author Carlo Falconi wrote: “Pius XII never expressed a direct and explicit condemnation of the war of aggression, even less about the unspeakable crimes committed by the Germans or their accomplices during that war”. Far from being ignorant of what was happening the Pope gave a helping hand by lending some of his prelates to be pro-Nazi agents and to help in the extermination of multitudes as the following extract from a book published in 1980 (“The Jesuits“, by David Mitchell — in the foreword of which the author acknowledges help received from almost twenty members of the Order, some of them very high-ranking) shows:
“How many divisions has the Pope?” asked Stalin sarcastically. None of his own to be sure, but that did not prevent him or Ledochowski (the “Black Pope” of the time) from using any force that seemed likely to open the way to catholicization, above all at the expense of the Orthodox Church. A Jesuit had been linked with the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1934, and the Jesuits were involved in the frightful pogroms of Orthodox Serbs in Croatia. After the invasion of 1941 Yugoslavia had been partitioned: Serbia under German occupation, Croatia an Italian puppet state ruled by Ante Pavelic, whose nationalist organization, the Ustase, had since 1919 been agitating for independence from Orthodox Serbia. A fanatical Catholic-Fascist, Pavelic offered the two and a quarter million Serbs in Croatia the choice of expulsion, conversion, or death. In the next four years the papacy stayed silent while three hundred thousand Serbs, including Jews, were deported, more than half a million massacred and a quarter of a million forcibly converted. Pius XII received Pavelic and members of the Croatian SS, and in Civiltà Cattolica a Croatian Jesuit glorified ‘Catholic crusaders’ whose victims were fortunate if they had their throats slit rather than being axe-hacked into mass graves or bound with barbed wire and buried alive.
Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb failed to indict the crusaders. A papal observer, Abbot Marcone, failed to restrain their zeal. Though the Franciscans were particularly prominent as terrorist leaders, marching crucifix in hand at the head of the columns, Jesuit chaplains too slaughtered and sacked their way through Bosnia with Ustase bands. During one of the most appalling civilian massacres on record Ustase representatives from ‘Holy Croatia’ were careful to keep in touch with the Jesuit curia, which, as one of them reported in June 1942, “faithfully reflects the Vatican!” While the activities described in the foregoing quotation were at their height Pope Pius XII on the 18th May, 1941, gladly welcomed Pavelic to Rome where he was given a private audience. Only the ‘Man of Sin’ would then go on to include in what has been described as one of his “nauseating” Christmas radio broadcasts the following: “We love all peoples without exception and with equal affection . . . We have imposed the maximum reserve on Ourselves so as to avoid even the appearance of being contaminated with the party spirit”.
We should not forget that Hitler was a Roman Catholic and one who was ready to confess that he had “learned much from the Jesuits”. Of one of his henchmen, the notorious Himmler (who saw in the SS the Nazi equivalent of the Society of Jesus and organised it accordingly), he was heard to remark, “I can see him as our Ignatius Loyola”. Goebbels was educated at a Jesuit college and every line of his writings, it is said, recalls the teaching of his masters including that of blind obedience and contempt for truth. Edmond Paris in “The Secret History of the Jesuits” maintains that Mein Kampf was “written by the Jesuit Father Staempfle and signed by Hitler. It was the Society of Jesus which perfected the Pan German programme and the Fuhrer endorsed it”. The same author proves with the aid of documentary evidence, that the help of the Vatican and its Jesuits was the main force behind the lightning rise of Hitler and that he, together with Mussolini and Franco, were, in spite of appearances, but war pawns manipulated by them.
Papal involvement in wars and atrocities may now be denied and it is to be feared that attempts to cover up past misdeeds and to falsify history are proving to be all too successful. Scripture, however, depicts Papal Rome as “the woman drunken with the blood of the saints” and that cannot be erased of falsified. In connection with the Massacre of St Bartholomew she has, under her own hand and seal, furnished indisputable evidence of her guilt. Estimates vary as to the number that were murdered in cold blood in Paris and throughout France but the likelihood is, according to Wylie, that about 70,000 died. “The Seine,” Wylie records, “as it rolled through Paris seemed but a river of blood; and the corpses which it was bearing to the ocean were so numerous that the bridges had difficulty in giving them passage, and were in some danger of becoming choked and turning back the stream, and drowning Paris in the blood of its own shedding. How did Rome and Pope John-Paul II’s predecessor in the Papal chair react to the news? ‘The joy was boundless’, Wylie relates. ‘The news was thundered forth to the inhabitants of the Seven-Hilled City by the Cannon of St Angelo, and at night bonfires blazed on the street . . . Through the streets of the Eternal City swept, in the full blaze of Pontifical pomp, Gregory and his attendant train of cardinals, bishops and monks, to the Church of St Mark, there to offer prayers and thanksgivings to the God of Heaven for this great blessing to the See of Rome and the Roman Catholic Church. Over the portico of the Church was hung a cloth of purple, on which was a Latin inscription most elegantly embroidered in letters of gold, in which it was distinctly stated that the massacre had occurred after “counsels had been given”. On the following day the Pontiff went in procession to the Church of Minerva, where, after mass, a jubilee was published to all Christendom, “that they might thank God for the slaughter of the enemies of the Church, lately executed in France”. A third time did the Pope go in procession, with his cardinals and all the foreign ambassadors then resident at his court, and after mass in the Church of St Louis, he accepted homage from the Cardinal of Lorraine, and thanks in the name of the King of France “for the counsel and help he had given him by his prayers, of which he had found the most wonderful effects”.
The better to perpetuate the memory of the massacre, Gregory caused a medal to be struck . . . On the one side is a profile of the Pope, surrounded by the words “GREGORIVS. XIII. PONT. MAX. AN. I”. On the obverse is seen an “angel” bearing in the one hand a cross, in the other a drawn sword, with which he is smiting a prostrate host of Protestants; and to make all clear, above is the motto — VGNOTOTRUM STRAGES (i.e. The Slaughter of the Huguenots) and the date.
‘The group before the exterminating “angel” consists of six figures: of which two are dead warriors, the third is dying, the fourth is trying to make his escape, a woman in the background is holding up her hands in the attitude of horror, and a figure draped as a priest is looking on’ (Wylie).
Thus has Rome passed judgment on herself and the medal is there as someone has said, “to remind us that, as Rome has never repented of this wickedness, but attempts still to deny or palliate it, we may lay our account, as soon as power and opportunity is granted, with another St Bartholomew”.