The Church as late as 2019 preserved the Biblical understanding of homosexuality and did so with a welcome compassion for the afflicted. The Catechism of the Catholic Church: “The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible…They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and if they are Christians, to unite the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter with from their condition. Homosexual persons are called to chastity.” (Sections 2358 and 2359, p. 566).
Unfortunately, this teaching has been tossed in the garbage, like a clock hand stuck in a spoiled hunk of fat.
I’m experiencing déjà vu in the wake of Fiducia Supplicans (“Supplicating trust”), the ruling promulgated December 18 by Francis, the anti-Biblical rebel, and pope of Rome. The pontiff has instituted the blessing of homosexuals, many of whom routinely engage in sex. His decree is accompanied by the disingenuous assurance that this is not an incremental move toward a qualified acceptance of the licitness of sodomy.
I have seen this before in my study of the papacy’s gradual abolition of the mortal sinfulness of usury.
In a 2013 Mark Anderson interviewed conservative Catholic intellectual E. Michael Jones, PhD. As of this writing the interview remains online (search YouTube for: E. Michael Jones – Barren Metal – Preview. Then go to 31 minutes 10 seconds into the interview).
Here is a transcript of one section of that conversation:
Mark Anderson to Dr. Jones: “As Michael Hoffman has noted too, for so long usury was illegal, a sin, a disgrace —“
Jones interrupts: “First of all it has never ceased being a sin. The Catholic Church has never declared that usury is not sinful. It’s still a sin. It’s a mistake to think that the Church has changed its teaching on usury. That is not the case.”
Anderson: “Yeah, maybe they don’t emphasize it like they should.”
Jones: “Of course they don’t emphasize it, but it is still the teaching of the Church. Vix Pervenit is an infallible encyclical of the Catholic Church. That is the Church teaching, so we need to lay this illusion to rest.”
Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco has, like E. Michael Jones, a reputation as a staunch conservative. Archbishop Cordileone insists that Fiducia Supplicans does not change Catholic doctrine:
“I encourage those who have questions to read the Vatican declaration closely, and in continuity with the church’s unchanging teaching. Doing so will enable one to understand how it encourages pastoral solicitude while maintaining fidelity to the Lord Jesus Christ.”
If Pope Francis in Fiducia Supplicans has not overthrown Biblical law and immemorial patristic dogma on sodomy, as the “conservative” archbishop alleges, why are those engaged in it going to be blessed by Catholic priests, rather than admonished to confess their sin, repent and resolve to desist from henceforth?
In a similar vein, “the new rule was issued in a declaration…by the church’s office on doctrine and introduced by its head, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, who said that the declaration did not amend ‘the traditional doctrine of the church about marriage,’ because it allowed no liturgical rite that could be confused with the sacrament of marriage. It is precisely in this context, Cardinal Fernández wrote, “that one can understand the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples without officially validating their status or changing in any way the church’s perennial teaching on marriage.”
From Inter multiplices to Fiducia Supplicans a pattern of papal subversion of the Word of God is rendered visible
Machiavellian doublespeak has been part of the pontifical DNA since May 4, 1515 when Leo X (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici), promulgated his papal bull, Inter multiplices (Concilii in decima sessione super materia Montis Pietati) granting, for the first time in the history of the Church, formal pontifical approval for the renting of money.
Renaissance Catholics were reassured that this usury revolution was 1. not a revolution, and 2. was for a good cause, charity for the poor, “Monte di Pietà” (“Mountain of compassion”). Pope Leo, in awarding usurers his approval (among whom were members of his own family), piously added a caveat—he “declared it ‘much more perfect and holy’ to make no (interest) charge at all…” (Cf. Brian Pullan, “Charity and Usury,” in Proceedings of the British Academy: 2003 Lectures (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 33.
If Pope Leo X in Inter multiplices did not overthrow God’s Biblical law and the irreformable patristic dogma on usury, and usury remains condemned by the Church as a grievous transgression, as the “conservative” Dr. Jones claims, why are usurers permitted to receive Holy Communion without first confessing their mortal sin, repenting, and resolving to desist from the renting of money henceforth?
From 1515 to 1830 is the space of 315 years. It took slightly more than three centuries for the revolutionary popes to completely lift the stain of mortal sin from the renting of money. They couldn’t do it faster because it would have exposed the radical change afoot. What began in 1515 as permission for money renting operations strictly limited to “charity banks” (all other forms of usury being proscribed), by 1830, in the pontificate of Pius VIII, mortally sinful unrepentant usurers were admitted to reception of the Holy Eucharist without having confessed or repented.
Our digital age moves faster. The pope’s December 18 Christmas gift to the Church’s powerful “gay” faction occurred over the course of years, not centuries, accompanied by implausible denials proffered by prelates like Cordileone. As Chico Marx said to Mrs. Teasdale, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes”? We believe our own eyes, Archbishop Cordileone, not you.
It wasn’t long after 1515 that Leo X’s Medici family of shysters took over administration of the Montis Pietati banks and began renting money to gangsters and buccaneer capitalists whose “poverty” was confined to their morals.
Dr. Jones promotes Vix Pervenit as the “infallible encyclical of the Catholic Church” upholding the sinfulness of usury. “That is the Church teaching.” Let’s see if he knows what he’s talking about.
In Vix Pervenit, issued November 1, 1745, Benedict XIV expanded Leo X’s “infallible” 1515 Inter multiplices to include the lawfulness of interest on investment credit capital. While Vix Pervenit is often cited as a reaffirmation of the magisterial pre-Renaissance dogma on usury, such claims represent a failure to note and comprehend Vix Pervenit’s “fine print.”
Jones seems to be awed by the many rhetorical, anti-usury flourishes throughout Vix Pervenit of 1745. One observes the same tactic by Pope Francis in Fiducia Supplicans in 2023. According to Cardinal Victor Fernández, the head of the the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith which issued the document, Fiducia Supplicans offers priests the ability to bless same-sex couples “without officially validating their status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage.”
This is the papist version of the Talmud’s escape clauses. We’re supposed to believe there’s nothing theologically incorrect in the actual document. It does not affirm the state of sin in which homosexually active persons may be living; that’s the cover story.
Fiducia Supplicans does affirm however, that “this request should, in every way, be valued, accompanied, and received with gratitude. People who come spontaneously to ask for a blessing show by this request their sincere openness to transcendence, the confidence of their hearts that they do not trust in their own strength alone, their need for God, and their desire to break out of the narrow confines of this world, enclosed in its limitations.”
The preceding word salad is weaponized ambiguity. It’s the ancient Adversary speaking in two tongues. In many cases in Germany (where the practice has been in effect for more than a year), men are coming to the Church for a blessing of a union that is sexual in nature. Pope Francis attempts to cover himself by saying that these “blessings” are “not to be confused with the Sacrament of marriage.”
Yet the pope’s directive is almost universally understood as the validation of sex acts between two men, when those men are intimate only with each other; that’s the unspoken subtext. “Loving commitment” is defined sub-rosa as their non-promiscuous, “self-sacrificing” monogamous sodomy. You can’t make this stuff up.
500 years ago Leo X’s papal bull was “not to be confused with permission for the sin of usury,” yet it was understood as exactly that by Nominalist theologians and the dynastic banking houses (Fugger, Strozzi and Medici), who welcomed it (after having lobbied for it), as a validation by the highest authority in the Church of the morality of renting of money, however initially restricted it had to be, as a sop to Catholic Conservatives (who privately referred to it as the Montis Im pietati).
The Situation Ethics Revolution
In the case of the situation ethics revolution of Pope Francis, “blessings” have typically been requested not by penitent persons but rather by those who defiantly refuse to distance themselves from the proximate occasion of grave sin, and who view the blessing of their sexual relationship as a bold and triumphant victory over the teaching of the Bible and the true Church.
Jesuit James Martin is a confidant of Francis and one of the architects of Fiducia Supplican. In the Jesuit magazine America, he writes:
“The declaration…cautions that the blessings for same-sex couples and others in ‘irregular’ unions should be done in a way that does not confuse these blessings with sacramental marriage or suggest a liturgical rite.
“But even with those provisions, this is a major step forward for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics…Why is this a major step? It marks a dramatic shift from the dicastery’s ‘responsum’ two years ago, which said that priests and deacons could under no circumstances bless same-sex couples because ‘God cannot and does not bless sin’ …
“L.G.B.T.Q. people and their friends and families felt that the focus on such relationships as sinful ignored or rejected their experience of loving, committed and self-sacrificing same-sex relationships.”
Martin concludes with a frank acknowledgement of the part that situation ethics plays in determining papal doctrine: “The declaration is also in line with the letter that Pope Francis wrote to Cardinal Fernández when he was installed as the new prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, in which the pope encouraged him to support the ‘harmonious growth’ in theology and, quoting from ‘Evangelii Gaudium,’ noted that the church itself ‘grow[s] in her interpretation of the revealed word and in her understanding of truth.”
In the papal Church the part played by situation ethics (“harmonious growth”) in subverting God’s Word is nothing new, as contemporary “traditionalists” and “conservatives” falsely claim. The misdirection which they disseminate is to the detriment of their followers. Willful ignorance of church history is prevalent in the ranks of traditional Catholics. In our experience they refuse to study the impact of the occult Renaissance on the Church, or of the long record of the permission the popes granted to the mortal sin of renting money —rent which Dante in the Inferno prophetically likened in magnitude to the iniquity of sodomy.
Here’s the “fine print” in the Vix Pervenit encyclical which E. Michael Jones imagines reaffirmed the sinfulness the practice of usury—Pope Benedict XIV declared: “We do not deny that at times together with the loan contract certain other titles—which are not intrinsic to the contract—may run parallel with it. From these other titles, entirely just and legitimate reasons arise to demand something over and above the amount due on the contract.”
Pope Francis is indeed a traditionalist in the centuries-old tradition of the papal usurers who applied Talmudic-style loopholes to sneak their usury past the eyes of gullible Catholics.
Vix Pervenit consists of 98% stirring, anti-usury rhetoric. Naive people believe that this sort of palaver signifies something. The 2% of the encyclical which consists of escape clauses by which usury could continue to operate, are ignored.
Furthermore, in Vix Pervenit Benedict XIV declined to apply the general prohibition to the specific usury contracts which gave rise for the need for his encyclical in the first place.
Vix Pervenit was by no means the last word of the post-Renaissance Church on usury. Dr. Jones should explain to his audience the Catholic Code of Canon Law of 1917 approved interest on loans. One definition of usury is the charging of a profit on a loan of a consumable fungible good. The 1917 Code of Canon Law declares, “…in the loan of a fungible thing, it is not by itself illicit to reap a legal profit…”
The Catholic Code of Canon Law of 1983 actually requires clerics in charge of church funds to obtain interest on money. The pontifical usury bank, the IOR (Istituto per le Opere di Religione), has operated for decades in Vatican City, with the knowledge and cooperation of the popes.
Deceptive pontifical platitudes, whether concerning the renting of money or same sex eros, function as disguises which mask the reality of the papal overthrow by devious incremental steps, of the dogma of the mortal sinfulness of usury, and now sodomy.
Denying these facts obstructs the advance of the Gospel of Jesus and the True Church of All Time. The Church of Jesus Christ is based on Truth and formed by believers possessed of the vision and courage to proclaim that Truth, however much it dismays gullible believers in religious rackets put forth by sanctimonious mountebanks.
Situation ethics began to rule the Church of Rome five centuries ago, not 50 years ago. Until Catholics learn to accept this historical fact they will be unable to overcome the enemies of God, and will continue to be misdirected into impotent activism based on half truths. This is a question of history and facts.
Fact: usurpers do not constitute the True Catholic Church.
Fact: The Catholic Church exists where there is adherence to truth.
Fact: From the Renaissance onward, an occult Money Power seized the papacy; that power’s hold has been demonstrated by the datum that all the flowery verbiage of all the subsequent popes such as Leo XIII, did not reverse the progress of usury acceptance inside the Church, or result in the restoration of the pre-Renaissance dogma of the True Catholic Church on interest on loans of money.
Fact: To cite Vix Pervenit as evidence of a restoration or affirmation is to be seduced by the lingo which Benedict XIV uttered on his path to further extending permission for usury, through the construction of loopholes on the incremental road to the complete ecclesiastical legalization of usury, which we have in our time. Vix Pervenit is one among many post-Renaisance papal paving stones on that highway to hell.
Where there is Truth there is Jesus Christ. Anyone who places the reputation of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance Church of Rome above the Truth of Jesus Christ is no friend of God.
I am not a modern person or situation ethicist. My mentality is medieval Catholic as it existed before Rome was captured by the early modernists. The Catholic (medieval) mentality has been almost (but not quite) extirpated by the depraved Neo-Platonists who have occupied the Vatican since the mid-15th century Council of Florence. From then until now they have manipulated minds and corroded the human spirit with the alchemical processing for which they ought to be infamous.
Dante was a medieval Catholic and he only believed that Rome had spoken authoritatively when the pope guarded the Biblical and Patristic truths that had been handed down to him, and in turn transmitted that veritas intact to his successors. Dante put three pontiffs in Hell (and not a single pope did he place in Heaven, save St. Peter). Dante had a particular detestation of the acts of Pope Boniface VIII.
In the late nineteenth century, in the wake of the outright, full permission for usury instituted by Pope Pius VIII (see p. 383 of Usury in Christendom), more than a dozen decisions by the Congregations of the Holy Office, Propaganda Fidei and the Penitentiary (charged with the oversight of confessors) declared, often without reference to any special extrinsic title or the civil law, that the faithful, even though they are clerics and religious, who lend money at a “moderate rate of interest,” are “not to be disturbed” (non esse inquietandos). One can find a collection of these decrees as follows: Collection Lacensis, t. 6, Append. Ad Synod. Pudicher, col. 677; also: Collectan Propaganda Fidei, n. 2140 sq.; as well as in P. Buccerone’s Enchiridion Morale (2nd ed.; Rome: Franzi, 1891).
In the wake of the decisions of Pius VIII and these Roman Congregations, an overwhelming majority of Rome’s theologians agreed to the proposition that anyone is allowed to take interest on money loans, provided “the interest is not excessive, and does not cause hardship to the poor.”
Who determines what is excessive rent on money? In practice it is decided by the ethics of the times and the situation in which the borrower and lender find themselves. Should prostitution be permitted to Christians if the harlot does not charge an “excessive” fee? Once Christians are committing sin under official auspices, managed by arbitrary man-made boundaries, we have entered the devil’s kingdom, ruled by the kings of the hedge fund deals and the financialization of a once Christian society that inevitably arises when sins universally condemned for thousands of years are found to be allowable under certain “narrowly defined circumstances.” As history teaches, in time even those limits dissolve.
The Code of Canon Law of 1917 compiled on the watch of Pope Saint Pius X (though published after his death), decreed, “…it is not in itself illicit to contract for legal interest, unless this be manifestly excessive…”
What’s to debate about this blatant revolution? Have we not eyes to see the extent to which the papacy long ago sold out to situation ethics with regard to usury banking, and now with regard to buggery between males?
Moreover, the Holy See has been putting its funds at interest for quite some time, and requires ecclesiastical administrators to do likewise.
The only possible challenges to these truths are gnat-strainings at categories like Damnum emergens and Lucrum cessans, which might be diverting to a habitué of a yeshiva, but not to the followers of Jesus Christ. (Damnum emergens and Lucrum cessans are deconstructed in Usury in Christendom).
Demoralized, exhausted, outgunned and out-strategized
Barring a miracle of God, the Carlo Maria Viganos, the Raymond Burkes, the Joseph Stricklands, the leaders of the FSSP and SSPX, and the sedevacantists, all will, in the wake of the same sorcery that brought forth Inter multiplices in 1515 and Vix Pervenit in 1745, and the 1917 and 1983 Codes of Canon Law, ignore this enchanted history which is both the legacy and the intrinsic living memory in which popes and prelates have been initiated as part of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic gnosis. Determined to remain ignorant, Vigano, Burke et al. will yet again lead their demoralized, exhausted, outgunned and out-strategized followers to defeat, ghettoization and the fortress mentality of the survivalist.
By failing to summon the whole truth, this is their cul de sac destiny. But nota bene, it is not the destiny of a Christian. To the Christian the Sovereign Lord of the Universe gave the grace and power to overcome evil.
The cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches can and do choke spiritual duty (Matt. 13:22). Jesus demands of us total discipleship—the willingness to forsake everything for Him. “So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:33). This includes forsaking myths which the subverters of the Church have woven into comforting, nostalgic fairy tales about its pre-20th century past.
God does different things at different times in redemptive history. At one time, He allows His Son to be crucified by a pagan empire. But later, He has His ministers throw down principalities and powers, and every high thing that sets itself against the Word of God. And what instrument do they use? Faithful adherence to the Truth, by which we are inspired to proclaim the hidden revisionist history of Rome, and the world.
By Michael Hoffman