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Category: Catholic Church

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Catholic Church Gaedhal (commenter)

Christianity

Christianing Christianly,
as the late Alex would say

by Gaedhal

 
Archbishop Eamon Martin says that we must not merely welcome the invader, we must integrate them, i.e. interbreed with them. This is Christ-cuckery cranked up to eleven.

According to Catholic doctrine, that Sudanese invader who tried to behead that fellow has infinite dignity; he possesses a soul with infinite worth, that is made in the image and likeness of the Jewish god.

Ireland will either be Christian or it will be white. Christianity will be the death of us.

And the Irish News, let us remember, has the tagline pro patria et fide, i.e. for the country/Ireland and the [Catholic] faith… even though the Catholic Faith is utterly destroying the country. The Irish News—which, I maintain, must be part-owned by the Catholic Church—has a severe lack of journalistic skepticism when it comes to platforming Catholic priests, and repeating Catholic legends, like the ghastly scrap, the “relic” of “Saint Brigid”, which was recently transferred to Kildare.

The term patria, in Latin, comes from pater, i.e., we the country are the posterity of those Irishmen who came before us. They are our ethnic fathers. However, the subversive Christian New Testament tells us not to squabble about our gentile genealogies. No, being an adopted child of Abraham, “spiritually” is all that matters. Of course, the fictional character, Jesus, told us to love our enemies and welcome the Xenos or stranger, because he was invented to destroy us.

Christianity hasn’t been subverted: it is the subversion.

P.S.

The Bible verse about genealogies is: “Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do” (1st Timothy 1:4 KJV).

The word for fable here is: muthois, i.e. ‘myths’. We are to abandon our gentile myths for the gruesome circumcision myths of the Old Testament, like Abraham slicing up Isaac’s foreskin, or David harvesting 200 foreskins so as to purchase his wife Michal from Saul. Our gentile genealogies do not matter… however the fictional genealogies of the Bible matter. All of this was covered in A Real Case Against the Jews. A country so barren in the middle east that trees find it hard to grow—which is why we know that the “Palm Sunday” myth never happened—has now become “the Holy Land” instead of the forested lands of Europe: our homelands.

And, as I said before: the otherworldliness of Christianity is antithetical to what we believe in; what you might call, poetically, “the priesthood of the 14 words”. If you believe that there is a “better country even a heavenly”, then this diminishes the value of this country, this side of the grave, in the here and now.

As I said before: a big part of my deconversion was when my political beliefs began to clash with my religious beliefs.

Categories
Catholic Church Reinhard Heydrich Third Reich

The Catholic Church

is an enemy to NS Germany

Below we can read a passage from a letter from Reinhard Heydrich to Lammers on August 17, 1940:

With the request for information, I am submitting in the appendix a report on a brochure that was published for mass distribution by the Catholic press centre in France, the Maison de la Bonne Presse.

This brochure, La Hierarchie Catholique et la Guerre, shows with unequivocal clarity how the Catholic hierarchy, with the Pope at the top, sided with the enemy powers in its statements on the current war and agitated against National Socialist Germany.

Never have the leading representatives of the Catholic Church expressed their true opinion about National Socialist Germany more clearly than in their encyclicals, pastoral letters, etc., which are compiled in this brochure and which they published at the beginning of this war, when they still believed in a victory for the Western powers.

The source is cited in the image above, in large letters.

Categories
Adolf Hitler Catholic Church Exterminationism

Church enemy

Editor’s note: Although the author of this post on X is a Christian, and therefore an enemy, what he says is true except for the 6 million holocausted Jews. (Even in the famous David Irving trial, both the defence and the prosecution had to acknowledge that the number of Jews who died in WWII was no more than 4 million.)

Remember that this year I made a pilgrimage to Dachau because I not only approve of what Himmler did there, but because I want us to found an archipelago of Dachaus throughout the West after the holy racial wars bring us to power.

The Christian posted:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Catholics who find themselves defending or downplaying Hitler should read this to the end.

It’s time to put it to rest.

Adolf Hitler was not a misguided patriot. He was one of the Church’s most determined enemies.

He personally authorized the annihilation of six million Jews.

He ordered the gassing of the disabled, the sterilization of those he judged defective, and the deliberate starvation of prisoners in a program that began with children and never truly ended.

He filled Dachau with Catholic clergy; hundreds were worked to death or died under medical experiments.

Bishops who preached against euthanasia faced arrest.

The Gestapo dissolved every independent Catholic youth organization in Germany. Catholic newspapers were banned, publishing houses seized, confessional schools closed or converted to state use.

The Concordat he signed in 1933 was violated before the ink dried.

In his own recorded words he called Christianity “an invention of the Jew” and “the heaviest blow that ever struck humanity,” declaring that the Church would be eradicated once the war was won. His inner circle confirmed the plan was total.

Pius XI answered with Mit brennender Sorge, the only encyclical in history smuggled into a country and read from every Catholic pulpit on the same Sunday, condemning the idolatry of race and blood, and National Socialism itself, by name.

Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein, Franz Jägerstätter, and thousands of others laid down their lives rather than accommodate that regime for a single moment.

There is no Catholic path that passes through admiration for Hitler, sympathy for his movement, or silence about what he did.

The only response compatible with the Catholic faith is this: remember it exactly as it was, and reject it entirely.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s note: Let’s rephrase: The only response compatible with the faith of the priest of the sacred words, the Hitlerist, is this: remember it exactly as it was and accept it entirely.

Categories
Catholic Church Gaedhal (commenter)

Sin

by Gaedhal

Eradica used to have a saying: the daily outrage. Grifters such as Sargon of Akkad have found a way to monetise the daily outrage. Similarly with redpill and manosphere content: they have found a way to monetize the daily outrage. This is why I cut outrage-bait from my feed. However, new sources of outrage bait continually crop up, as baiting outrage is an extremely lucrative endeavour.

What is missed in all of this is that the Christian Churches in Ireland, North and South—when we subtract the Levantine Hocus Pocus and blood-magic Voodoo from them—are simply just government funded NGOs who advance the Great Replacement. It was the Roman Catholic Church and Sister Stan who set up the Irish Immigrants’ council. The Catholic angle in all of this is conveniently ignored by Catholic Nationalists such as John McGuirk and Niamh Nic Mathúna.

GRIPT has links to Roman Catholic Youth Defence and the Catholic Nationalist family the McMahons—or, unpronounceably, the Mac Mathúnas. But the Roman Catholic Church is the biggest NGO, in Ireland, that is behind the plantation.

I personally, do not agree with “debates” such as this, as it sends out the signal that the 14 words are up to debate, that we can only advance the 14 words, if we “win” debates such as these. Similarly, I don’t agree with electioneering, as the 14 words does not depend upon a majority of the mob, in a rigged system, agreeing with us.

One of the reasons why I am not a democrat is just the effeminacy of the thing. Genocides—population displacement is genocide—and invasions such as these are not repelled by debates and electioneering. Voting harder has never once repelled a genocide or an invasion. Muh debates has never once repelled a genocide or an invasion. And if the white Irish are too stupid cowardly and effeminate to realise this then they deserve to go extinct. Ultimately nature is fair. Nature might be so cruel that it is impossible for any Classically theistic gods to exist, however Nature is fair.

Nature has given white men several opportunities in the past to adhere to the laws of nature and to dominate the entire planet. White men have squandered every single one of these opportunities. The white race has committed this sin against the Holy Ghost countless times, against nature, and yet nature is more forgiving than Rabbi Jesus, and instead of consigning us to the flames of total societal destruction, has forgiven us and given us more and more chances.

But even Nature’s patience will, one day, eventually wear out. Eventually White men will sin away their days of grace as far as nature is concerned, and nature will condemn Homo Sapiens Candidus to be one of the 99.9% of the species that went extinct… and do you know what? This will be fair. Nature, after consigning whites to extinction will then turn to the Jews, or the Chinese, and they will inherit the earth. As Dr. Robert Morgan points out: it is impossible to save a race that does not want to be saved. The white race has contracted toxoplasmosis—I argue that it contracted this toxoplasmosis from Christianity—and is doing everything in its power to bring about its own destruction.

We all know what has to be done.

Perhaps the reason why I feel such an affinity with Loyalism, these days, is because I recognise that Rome Rule is destroying the country. Carson, Craig et al. were correct to reject the Rome Rule of Ireland. The Roman Church is the primary instigator of population displacement in Ireland, and thus it is the primary genocider of the Irish.

P.S. Some of the sins against the Holy Ghost are obduracy in sin, presumption and opposing the known truth. All three of these sins against the Holy Ghost have been committed by the white race. Another sin against the Holy Ghost in preconciliar Catholicism is despair, but our Führer told us never to despair and to praise victory.

Categories
Catholic Church Christendom

Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 3

by Alain de Benoist

 
Christianity, ‘an Eastern religion by its origins and fundamental characteristics’ (Guignebert), infiltrated ancient Europe almost surreptitiously. The Roman Empire, tolerant by nature, paid no attention to it for a long time. In Suetonius’ Life of the Twelve Caesars, we read of an act of Claudius: ‘He expelled from Rome the Jews, who were in continual ferment at the instigation of a certain Chrestos’. On the whole, the Greco-Latin world remained at first closed to preaching. The praise of weakness, poverty, and ‘madness’, seemed to them foolish. Consequently, the first centres of Christian propaganda were set up in Antioch, Ephesus, Thessalonica and Corinth. It was in these great cities, where slaves, artisans and immigrants mingled with merchants, where everything was bought and sold, and where preachers and enlightened men, in ever-increasing numbers, vied to seduce motley and restless crowds, that the first apostles found fertile ground.

Causse, who was a professor at the Protestant theology faculty of the University of Strasbourg, writes: ‘If the apostles preached the Gospel in the village squares, it was not only because of a wise missionary policy, but because the new religion was more favourably received in these new surroundings than by the old races attached to their past and their soil. The true Greeks were to remain alien and hostile to Christianity for a long time. The Athenians had greeted Paul with ironical indifference: “You will tell us another day!” it was to be many years before the old Romans would abandon their aristocratic contempt for that detestable superstition. The early Church of Rome was very little Latin, and Greek was scarcely spoken in it. But the Syrians, the Asiatics and the whole crowd of the Graeculi received the Christian message with enthusiasm’ (Essai sur le conflit du christianisme primitif et de la civilisation, Ernest Leroux, 1920).

J.B.S. Haldane, who considered fanaticism as one of the ‘four truly important inventions made between 3000 B.C. and 1400’ (The Inequality of Man, Famous Books, New York, 1938), attributed its paternity to Judeo-Christianity. Yahweh, the god of the Arabian deserts, is a lonely and jealous god, exclusive and cruel, who advocates intolerance and hatred. ‘Do I not hate those who hate you, O Yahweh, and do I not rage against your enemies? I hate them and regard them as my enemies’ (Psalm 139:21 and 22). Jeremiah implores: ‘You will give them their due, O LORD, and your curse will be upon them! You will pursue them in anger and exterminate them from under heaven’ (Lamentations, 111, 64-66). ‘Surely, O God, you will surely put to death the wicked’ (Psalm 139:19). ‘And in Your mercy You will dispel my enemies, and destroy all the adversaries of my soul…’ (Psalm 143:12). Wisdom, who personifies the infinitely good, threatens: ‘I too will laugh at your misfortune, I will mock when your fear comes upon you’ (Prov. I, 26). Deuteronomy speaks of the fate that must be reserved for ‘idolaters’: ‘If your brother, your mother´s son, your daughter, or the woman who lies in your bosom, or your friend, who is like yourself, should incite you in secret, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods”, whom you do not know…, you shall first kill him; your hand shall be laid upon him first to put him to death, and then the hand of all the people shall be laid upon him. When you hear that in one of the cities which Yahweh grants you to dwell, it is said that unworthy men have arisen who have seduced their fellow citizens, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods!” which you do not know, you shall inquire, and if you see that such an abomination is true, you shall smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword; you shall consecrate it to extermination, as well as all that is in it. You shall gather all its spoil amid its streets, and burn the city and all its prey in the fire to the honour of the LORD your God. Thus it shall become a perpetual heap of ruins, and shall not be rebuilt…’ (Deut. XIII).

In the Gospel, Jesus says, when they come to arrest him: ‘…for all who take the sword will perish by the sword’ (Matthew XXVI, 52). But before that he had said: ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man´s enemies will be those of his household’ (Matthew X, 34-36). He also pronounced the phrase that is the motto of all totalitarianism: ‘He who is not with me is against me’ (Matthew XII, 30).

The early Church will scrupulously apply such slogans. Unbelievers and pagans are subhumans in the eyes of the apostles. St. Peter compares them to ‘irrational animals, born to be taken and destroyed’ (2 Peter II, 12). Jerome advised the converted Christian to kick the body of his mother if she tried to prevent him from leaving her forever to follow the teachings of Christ. In 345, Fermicus Maternus made slaughter a duty: ‘The law forbids, most holy emperors, to spare either son or brother. It forces us to punish the woman we love tenderly and to plunge the iron into her breast. It puts weapons in our hands and orders us to turn them against our closest friends…’

From then on, the evangelical practice of charity will be strictly subordinated to the degree of adherence to mysteries and dogmas. Europe will be evangelized by iron and fire. Heretics, schismatics, freethinkers and pagans will be, renewing the gesture of Pontius Pilate, handed over to the secular arm to be subjected to torture and death. Denunciation will be rewarded with the attribution of the property of the victims and their families. Those who, ‘having understood the judgment of God,’ wrote St. Paul, ‘are worthy of death’ (Romans, I, 32). Thomas Aquinas specifies: ‘The heretic must be burned.’ One of the canons adopted at the Lateran Council declares: ‘They are not murderers who kill heretics’ (Homicidas non esse qui heretici trucidant). By the bull Ad extirpenda, the Church will authorize torture. And, in 1864, Pius IX proclaimed in the Syllabus: ‘Anathema be he who says that the Church has no right to use force, that it has no direct or indirect temporal power’ (XXIV).

Voltaire, who knew how to add up, had counted the victims of religious intolerance from the beginnings of Christianity to his time. Taking into account exaggerations and making a large allowance for the benefit of the doubt, he found a total of 9,718,000 people who had lost their lives ad majorem Dei gloriam. Compared to this figure, the number of Christians killed in Rome under the sign of the palm (a symbol of martyrdom and glorious resurrection in early Christianity) seems insignificant.

‘Gibbon believes he can affirm’ —writes Louis Rougier— ‘that the number of martyrs throughout the entire Roman Empire, over three centuries, did not reach that of Protestants executed in a single reign and exclusively in the provinces of the Netherlands, where, according to Grotius, more than one hundred thousand subjects of Charles V died at the hands of the executioner. However conjectural these calculations may be, it can be said that the number of Christian martyrs is small compared with the victims of the Church during the fifteen centuries: the destruction of paganism under the Christian emperors, the fight against the Arians, the Donatists, the Nestorians, the Monophysites, the Iconoclasts, the Manicheans, the Cathars and the Albigensians, the Spanish Inquisition, the wars of religion, the dragonads of Louis XIV, pogroms of the Jews… Faced with such excesses, we can ask ourselves, with Bouché-Leclercq, ‘whether the benefits of Christianity (however great) have not been more than compensated for by the religious intolerance which it borrowed from Judaism to spread throughout the world’… (Celse contre les chrétiens, Copernic, 1977).

Categories
Adolf Hitler Catholic Church

Heydrich, 7

Let’s be honest: Should they come to power, could you imagine American white nationalists casually talking about mass genocides, as these German hierarchs did after the buffet (in the film, from this point on)? And if they will be unable to do so, don’t you think such scruples have to do with worshipping the Jew on the cross, and regarding the Aryan Pilate who had him crucified as a wicked man?

American anti-Christians did realise this. Remember that passage in The Turner Diaries where racist revolutionaries let a Jewish community live and it caused so much trouble that those altruist revolutionaries had to be eliminated by transvalued revolutionaries?

When in the future the cold war against the Aryan man turns into a hot one, it will become clear that there is no way to save the race unless one repudiates Judeo-Christian morality. This is so true that, as we see in the film when they enjoy the buffet Heydrich offered them, it came out that the Vatican began to complain about such executions, and those present scoffed openly and uninhibitedly, laughing at Christian compassion.

Above, Cesare Orsenigo with Hitler and von Ribbentrop. In November 1943, nuncio Orsenigo spoke to the Führer on behalf of Pope Pius XII. In his conversation with Hitler, he talked about the status of persecuted peoples in the Third Reich, apparently referring to Jews. Over large parts of the conversation the Führer simply ignored the nuncio; he went to the window and didn’t listen.

Categories
Ancient Greece Autobiography Bible Catholic Church

Mental regression!

In his most recent statement, Gaedhal says the following:

I mentioned Thucydides, because, as Otto English points out in Fake History a distinction is drawn—although largely artificially—between Herodotus and Thucydides.

In my view, the Old Testament takes a Herodotian method. In Genesis, there are three competing and contradictory accounts regarding who pimped his wife to whom. Did Abraham pimp his wife to Pharaoh, or Abimelech or was it his son, Isaac?

Two competing and contradictory accounts of the creation and the flood are given. Two contradictory versions of the binding of Isaac, the Flood, and the Joseph story are poorly woven together and given.

In the main, Herodotus would recount everything he heard, whereas, in the main, Thucydides would critique his sources, and only give the version of events that he found most probable. In the main, Thucydides was willing to throw unreliable stories into the waste-paper basket.

However, as English points out: Herodotus often acts in a Thucydidean way, and Thucydides often acts in a Herodotian way.

Thucydides was an excellent Ancient Historian… however, even the best ancient historian is woefully bad when compared to modern standards. One could not publish Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War as a scholarly monograph and have it pass peer review.

I also agree with Pine Creek Doug that if God is the ultimate author of the Gospels, then we should hold him to the same standards that we would hold a modern PhD historian to. We should be able to publish the four gospels as scholarly monographs and have them pass peer review. We are not able to do this. Thus, God is a poorer historian than any modern human historian who can pass peer review. Do not lower your standards for God!

The first thing that is scraped away by Thucydides’ razor into the waste-paper can is accounts of miracles.

As I said before: Christianity was never in date. The Bible is Herodotian in what it relates, and not Thucydidean. Thucydides essentially discovered how to do modern history in the 400s BCE. One of the things that the Christian Dark Ages reversed was Thucydidean historiography. A continent that had known Thucydides, thanks to Christianity, was soon swamped with Herodotian martyr tales, i.e. unevidenced religious fantasies.

I was listening to Book 1 of History of the Peloponnesian War, last night, by Thucydides. Homer says that an impossible number of Achaeans—essentially the entire population of Ancient Achaia—went off to fight in Troy. Thucydides therefore rejects Homer’s legendary number of Achaean fighters. Similarly, in the Pentateuch, an impossible number of Israelites—essentially the entire population of Ancient Egypt—left Egypt during the Exodus.

If Europe had still been in a Thucydidean mindset, then the stupid Jewish fairytale that is the Exodus would never have been accepted by this continent’s people. Lamentably, it has really only been in relatively modern times that Thucydidean criticism has been applied to the Bible. Spinoza, Valla, Thomas Paine et al. got the ball rolling. However, the Thucydidean ball should never have been stopped. What stopped it? Christianity.

This is why I am of the opinion that the Conflict Thesis—‘systematised academic knowledge’ (i.e. ‘science’ sensu lato) and revealed religion are diametrically opposed to one another—is correct, and also that the Dark Ages were real.

In ancient times, Homer was no less divine than Moses. Indeed, like Jesus Christ, in some legends Homer was born of a virgin. And yet Thucydides contradicted this divine oracle. Lamentably, nobody contradicted Moses until the Renaissance.

The staggering regression that the white man suffered with the imposition of Christianity in the Middle Ages reminds me of what I was saying this year about the friend I knew when I was a teenager and, after decades of not treating him, found him in a state of psychosis: a regression like treating an eighteen-month-old infant! (cf. my series on malignant narcissism: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 and #6).

A sage from ancient India might say something similar if he had been long enough to see Rome before and after the imposition of Christianity by Constantine. What Gaedhal says seems to me very true, and we could even illustrate it with the subject that is my forte: the analysis of my family.

Unlike Protestantism, in Catholicism the Church of Rome claims to have proof of divine intervention through miracles. Psychically, I grew up under my father’s sky where the miracles of the Virgin of Lourdes—the French virgin of the 19th-century Tort family—were taken as absolute fact. The same can be said of my late father’s claims about the 20th-century miracles attributed to the Virgin of Fatima in Portugal. Although after two years of my life studying the Shroud of Turin I ended up sceptical of the supernatural hypothesis, my father continued to believe up to the present century that this Catholic relic proved the resurrection of Jesus. (I studied the literature on the shroud from 1988 to 1990 because I was still struggling with parental introjects—cf. my autobiography.)

When at Easter some of the American white nationalist sites post entries commemorating the day, they have no idea that believing this Jewish fairytale is as dramatic a psychogenic regression as that of the friend whom I knew sane and, after a few decades, I found him with a psychic structure reminiscent of that of a small infant.

Categories
Catholic Church Gaedhal (commenter)

Catechetical lunacy

by Gaedhal

According to Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), paragraph 1935:

The equality of men rests essentially on their dignity as persons and the rights that flow from it: ‘Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design.’

The above statement is as woke and as DIE [Diversity Equity and Inclusion] as one can get. Absent the talk concerning a mythical Jewish god, the above statement could easily be stated by Joe Biden, Alexandria Occasio Cortez, Michelle Obama or Kamala Harris.

The above statement does not merely seek to ‘eradicate’ inequalities in opportunity, but also inequalities in outcome. If we all had identical ‘social conditions’ then that is ‘equity’. If we all had identical ‘social conditions’ then that is ‘equality of outcome’.

In my view, depopulation and eugenics are a path, eventually, to all humans having prosperous and peaceful social conditions.

It is Christian axiology that renders so much of Western Society so crime-ridden and so needlessly miserable. Christianity is a sect of ‘the least of these’, and so it is anti-eugenic i.e. dysgenic in its foundations. As Saul puts it: Christianity is a sect of the foolish—i.e. those of low IQ—and not of the wise. Christianity is a sect of ‘the off-scourings of this earth’. As the parable says: the rich, and the well-educated did not want to attend Jesus’ wedding feast, so he brought in all the tramps and misfits from ‘the highways and byways’ instead. In its foundation, Christianity is a sect for the mob; for the rout; and not for the aristocrat, the gentleman, the man who is refined in his bearing. As Richard Carrier puts it: Saul does not want you to read Euclid’s Elements lest you deconvert from Saul’s utterly foolish cult.

An absolute equality in social conditions? That is madness. That is Bolshevism. And the funny thing is that the above statement, which anticipates the DIE of modern times, was written in 1992 by the ‘conservatives’ Ratzinger—later Benedict XVI—Schönborn and Saint John Paul II. One of the reasons why I converted to traditionalist Catholicism is because I quickly found out that there was really no such thing as conservative post-conciliar Catholicism. They were all sell-outs and lunatics.

In my view, belief in human ontological equality is a superstition inherited from Christianity. If the Christian god does not exist, then there is no god up there magically making us all equal.

The virus with shoes that is destroying the planet, and swiftly rendering it uninhabitable is of ‘infinite value’ according to the Catechism. And it is not just humanity in sum that has infinite value, but each individual also! You can’t get depopulation done with beliefs like that! In my view, Christian axiology—which carries over into many forms of atheism—is the number one existential threat that humanity faces. Humanity is a petard that can hoist itself through overpopulation, the carbonisation of our atmospheres and our seas, and other threats. If Humanity is a pest, then viewing each specimen of such a pest as ‘infinitely valuable’—as the Catholic Church does—is a harmful delusion.

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s criminal history, 178

– For the context of these translations click here –
 
Frankish bishops humiliate the emperor

The bishops strove to subjugate the state and in 829 in Paris, going back to the arrogant teachings of Pope Gelasius I, they demanded that no one could judge them, that they would be responsible only to God and that the other great ones, on the other hand, would be subject to them: the bishops. Indeed, their auctoritas was even above the potestas of the king and the emperor, who would otherwise become a tyrant and any moral right would disappear with his rule.

Their arrogance, sometimes clothed in the rhetoric of apparent modesty and false humility—the notorious sanctimonious hypocrisy—could hardly be greater. They praised, and rightly so, the humility of the emperors, because they always found humility in others very praiseworthy. But they always presented themselves as those on whom the Lord bestowed the power to bind and unbind, and recalled the supposed words of Emperor Constantine to the bishops (according to Rufinus’ ominous history of the Church): ‘God has made you priests and has given you the power to judge us also. Therefore we shall be rightly judged by you, whereas you cannot be judged by men.’

Too beautiful to be true.

The Empress Ermengarde had borne three sons to the sovereign: Lothair (795), Pippin (797) and Louis (806). When she died on 3 October 818 in Angers after about twenty years of marriage, it was feared that the pious widower would shut himself away in a monastery. And, naturally, for the clergy, it was preferable to have ‘a monastic mentality on the throne… rather than an emperor in monastic habit within the walls of a monastery’ (Luden).

The first uprising of 830 against the sovereign opened a decade of continuous palace rebellions and civil wars in the pious and family-friendly West. Understandably, the emperor’s eldest sons were irritated by the course of events. Especially Lothair, whose kingdom was seriously diminished in favour of Charles, and who saw his future supremacy in jeopardy. But also the younger couple of Pippin and Louis were threatened by another loss of territory. The ecclesiastical hierarchy, concerned about the unity of the empire, also feared its idea of unity.

Bernard, a descendant of the high Frankish nobility and son of William—Count of Toulouse, who was highly regarded under Charles I and who, on the advice of his friend Benedict of Aniane, became a monk of great asceticism—had little inclination for the Emperor’s tastes. It seems that he was much more attracted, according to especially episcopalian gossip, to the bed of the young empress. And Louis the Pious had protected the man from an early age, had him baptised at his baptism and later made him Count of Barcelona.

At the head of the conspiracy were former supporters of the emperor, some of his advisors, the then chancellor Elisachar, the arch-chancellor and abbot Hilduin of Saint-Denis, Bishop Jesse of Amiens and, above all, Abbot Wala, the spiritual leader of the uprising and Louis’ most dangerous enemy. He coined the slogan Pro principe contra principem and his monastery in Corbie became the de facto centre and headquarters (Weinrich) of the rebels. (Over the centuries, some Catholic monasteries became the headquarters of conspirators, as happened for example during the Second World War.)

The rebels wanted not only to drive away Bernard and the young empress and her entourage, but also the old emperor, and if possible to put Lothair in his place. After various tortures Judith, the second wife of Louis the Pious, was even threatened with death and a promise was extracted from her that she would force the emperor to have her hair tonsured and enter the monastery, and she had to shave her hair and go into seclusion among the nuns of the Holy Cross (Sainte-Croix) in Poitiers.

Lothair, who was viciously persecuting the supporters of the reclusive princess, avoided depriving her father of all power at the Imperial Diet of Compiégne (May 830). He contented himself with annulling his dispositions of the last year, or that he had the upper hand. But while the great men became more and more at odds with each other, each seeking his advantage, far from improving the situation distrust of the new government grew, and the emperor succeeded in setting his two younger sons against the elder. He offered Louis and Pippin an extension of their kingdoms, which quickly attracted them to his side and divided the allies, especially since the brothers felt that the supremacy of Lothair was no less oppressive than that of their father. For all these reasons the coup d’état failed.

Since Lothair was now confined to Italy, the emperor assigned in February 831 roughly equal kingdoms (regna) to his other sons Pippin, Louis and Charles.

But in early 833 the three elder brothers allied to attack their father with greater military force, trampling on their oaths of vassalage and filial duties. They appealed to the people ‘to establish a just government.’ For even Louis the Germanic (who had already risen again and again in 838 and 839) and Pippin of Aquitaine felt themselves to be under attack and threat. With a hastily mobilised army, Lothair marched into Burgundy together with Pope Gregory IV (827-844), who had tried to win over the Frankish clergy even from Italy. The archbishops of the region, Bernard of Vienne and Agobard of Lyon, immediately went over to his camp. The latter was the rabid enemy of the Jews, who now, disregarding also the fourth commandment, published a manifesto advocating the right of the children against the father.

Lothair re-joined his brothers and once again took the lead of the rebels.

As Louis was in danger of defeat, fewer and fewer prelates stood by his side. The pope mocked his haughty and foolish writings, and especially disputed the reproach which the imperialists had everywhere levelled at him, saying that he had become a mere instrument of the sons to launch the excommunication against their enemies.

The pope had to justify the uprising in the eyes of the masses and win over the rest of the wavering rebels to his side. Just after his return to the brothers’ camp almost the whole of Louis’ army (despite his additional oath of loyalty to fight against his sons as against the enemy) treacherously switched to the latter’s side ‘like an impetuous torrent,’ writes the Astronomer, ‘partly seduced by the gifts and partly terrified by the threats.’ The clergy on Lothair’s side recognised this as a divine miracle. And then almost all the bishops, who had previously threatened Gregory IV with deposition, also changed front so that the pope, who had fulfilled his obligation, was able to return to Rome with Lothair’s approval.

But the old emperor had to surrender unconditionally that summer. He was then regarded as overthrown by the hand of God, as a ‘non-king’, as a second Saul, and the bishops and others ‘did him much harm’, as Thegan puts it.

To begin with, Lothair had taken him through the Vosges, via Metz and Verdun, to Soissons, where Louis was imprisoned in the monastery of Saint-Médard. Prince Charles, who was barely ten years old, was taken from him and placed in the monastery of Prüm in the Eifel region under a severe prison regime as if he were a great criminal, as Charles would later say, although he was not made a monk. But the brothers of the empress were tonsured and sent to Aquitaine, Pippin’s territory, while she was immediately taken with Gregory to Italy and banished to Tortona.

With papal approval, the transfer of the empire from the hands of the old emperor—now designated by the bishops as ‘the old emperor’, ‘the venerable man’ and also ‘Lord Louis’—to those of Lothair was decreed.

Stained glass depiction of
Lothair, Strasbourg Cathedral

For his part, Rabanus Maurus, abbot of Fulda and one of the champions of the unity of the empire, embraced the party of Louis the Pious and in a treatise dedicated to him wrote that it was ‘totally inadmissible for sons to rebel against their father and subjects against their sovereign’. Rabanus showed the injustice of the plot against Louis. Neither Lothair was authorised to dethrone his father, nor could the episcopate condemn and excommunicate him.

But how was Louis’ defeat interpreted by the prelates gathered at Compiègne, who with all the grandees had sworn an oath of loyalty to Lothair? The say him as a consequence, of course, of his disobedience to the exhortations of the priests. He had committed many evils against God and man and had brought his subjects to the brink of catastrophe. And so he was declared ‘tyrant,’ while his victorious son and successor was proclaimed ‘friend of Christ the Lord’. They, the ‘representatives of Christ,’ the ‘bearers of the keys of the kingdom of heaven,’ demanded from the old ruler a general confession of his sins: a renunciation of the world and presented him with a document of his crimes, so that ‘as in a mirror he might behold the abominable deeds’.

In his recent History of the Councils, Wilfried Hartmann observes: ‘Such procedures were only possible because the Frankish episcopate had already formulated certain theses in Paris in 829 which envisaged a kind of control of the political sovereign by the bishops.’ Thus, canon 55 proclaimed: ‘If someone governs with piety, justice and clemency, he is deservedly called a king; but those who govern in an impious, unjust and cruel manner are not called kings but tyrants.’ But whether a king is to be called just or unjust is naturally determined by… the prelates.

Louis must have been deeply humiliated at the Abbey of Saint-Médard de Soissons, where the prelates read him the card again, having to prostrate himself three or more times before the bishops and a multitude of other clerics, having to confess all that they had instilled in him with precise words—what is still called brainwashing today—and having to ask for their forgiveness.

To savour his wickedness, the hierarchs had staged this spectacle before the altar of the monastery’s St. Mary’s Church. In the presence of a large crowd of the people, they had the confession of his sins, which they had drawn up, read three or four times to the emperor ‘aloud and amidst a copious stream of tears,’ lying in a penitential garment of manes.

The whole process was, on the one hand, intended to morally annihilate the emperor and render him incapable of returning to the throne and even of bearing arms: canon law excluded him, as Louis knew very well, after a public canonical penance. On the other hand, the unbelievable degradation had to demonstrate the total superiority of the bishops.

It was 33 years since Charlemagne had judged Pope Leo III. Now the Frankish episcopate was judging the emperor! With the deplorable ceremony, the greatest opprobrium in Louis’ life and one of the deepest humiliations that any prince could have suffered, far worse than that of Canossa, Louis the Pious was also excluded from ecclesiastical communion and henceforth could only treat and speak with a few chosen persons.

Archbishop Otgar of Mainz acted as the jailer of the deposed Louis.

The leading role in this tragedy, which triggered a series of civil wars between 833 and 843, was played by Archbishop Ebon of Rheims, a close friend of Agobard of Lyons and a true prototype of ecclesiastical ingratitude and perfidy, as well as a man of notable missionary success. Years earlier, in fact, ‘on the advice of the emperor and with the authorisation of the pope, he left for the country of the Danes to preach the gospel, having converted and baptised many.’ This prelate, appointed by Pope Paschal I as the legate of the north in the framework of the Scandinavian policy of the Carolingians, is considered to be the initiator of the Nordic mission.

Categories
Catholic Church Constantine Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 172

Constantine I (also Saint Constantine or Constantine the Great)
was a Roman emperor from 306 to 337 c.e.

 

Karlheinz Deschner responds to Prof. Maria R.-Alföldi’s review

Mrs Alföldi reviews and censures in just twelve pages (148-159), and under the title ,,Kaiser Konstantin: ein Grosser der Geschichte?”, the seventy-two pages of my chapter ‘Saint Constantine, the first Christian Emperor: Symbol of Seventeen Centuries of Ecclesiastical History’, which appears in the first volume of my Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums [pages 157-176 of our abridged translation — Ed.]

Almost at the outset, she finds it ‘difficult to give even a rough account of the content of Deschner’s explanations’ (page 149). Why’s that? No doubt because she dislikes the content itself, which is divided into ten subheadings and thus perfectly outlined, just as she dislikes the non-academic orientation, which she describes as ‘popular’ and even ‘populist’ (page 159), ‘marked by a strong tendentiousness’ (page 149), which I had already explicitly acknowledged in my General Introduction. And at the end of her report, she urges a cautious handling of historiography, which I can only agree with all my energy!

Maria R.-Alföldi’s essay appears in the book’s third part, which the editor entitles ‘Model of Concrete Criticism’. Model, pars pro toto. I now submit this rebuttal, closely following the text, to a detailed critique.

‘It is read’, writes the professor ‘that Constantine falsified his genealogy.’ And also: ‘The first years of the young emperor’s rule in the West are nothing but dreadful wars against the poor Germans, who were later taken prisoner and mercilessly slaughtered’.

It all appears as terribly exaggerated by me, as untrue, although again this isn’t said explicitly. Both ancient sources and modern research confirm that Constantine’s barbarism was already in his time something infrequent and appalling. However, the lady critic prefers discreet insinuations, and hurtful ironies, which present me as an obscurantist historian, without her openly expressing it with decent malice aforethought.

But while Mrs Alföldi reproaches me, as she often does, of misleading the reader, it’s she who does it. And while she states that I suggest that Constantine carried out the war, she suggests already with the following sentence, and again against truthfulness, ‘once again one reads extremely emotional descriptions of atrocities of all kinds’ (page 150). Such descriptions, as I wrote, come to me in their entirety from the Church Fathers Eusebius and Lactantius.

With ‘underhanded acrimony’ (page 150), that is what I am reproached for, I then comment on the universal sovereignty of him whom she labels ‘Byzantine’ rhetoric. Constantine ‘forces the Church to come under his sway; and the Church in turn, according to Deschner, willingly and opportunistically bends over backwards to get at money and power’. But that would only be ‘a certain, perfectly recognizable palace group.’

No, because the Church as a whole achieved through Constantine, and his immediate successors, eminent influence and prestige. This is indisputable. Throughout the empire, the bishops exalted the dictator. Their tokens of favour were showered even on the hierarchies of distant countries, and reached the Catholic clergy as a whole—who was now a recognised and privileged caste—in the form of money, honours, titles, basilicas and other buildings; in the form of exemption from burdens and taxes, release from oath-taking and the obligation to testify, permission to use the state post, the right to admit last dispositions and bequests; moreover, the sovereign—as many others would do in the future!—delegated part of the state power to the prelates, although he also decided on matters of faith.

Quite a few prelates already imitated the style and ceremony of the imperial residence in their episcopal sees. Again and again, it is said in the sources: ‘He made them respectable and enviable in the eyes of all’, ‘with his orders and laws he brought them even greater prestige,’ and ‘with imperial munificence, he opened up all the treasures…’ Soon, precisely the greatest fathers of the Church, such as Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome and Cyril of Alexandria, will praise Constantine, who not only called himself co-bishop, ‘bishop for external interests’ (epískopos tôn ektós) but who modestly didn’t hesitate to call himself ‘our divinity’ (nostrum numen)…

The always obscene association of the throne and altar, especially in countless massacres from the 4th century to the present day, is not a product of my ‘tendentiousness’ (page 149), but something quite appalling. But as with so many conformists by profession, in her prose there is hardly any blood flowing, not a single drop; whereas it reminds me, as it seems to me, with all horror: ‘the battles are awash with blood’ (page 149) as if I had spilt it!

On the contrary, she ignores, no doubt with the bulk of the historians’ guild, the lamentable practice of hanging the little rascals and extolling the great ones. Nothing specifically Christian, no doubt. Already the African bishop Cyprian, martyr and saint, decried this practice in paganism and lamented that when blood is shed in private, the act is called a heinous crime, but if it is shed publicly it is bravery. ‘The extent of the havoc is that which leaves the crime unpunished.’

She speaks only in an aside, summarily and with the coldness of the investigator, of the ‘tragic end’ of Constantine’s relatives. Conversely, my prose narrates that the great saint had his father-in-law Maximian hanged in Marseilles, then had his brothers-in-law Licinius and Basianbus strangled; had Licinius’ son murdered at Carthage, ordered his own son Crispus poisoned (while murdering many of his friends) and had his wife Fausta, mother of five children, drowned in the bath… In addition, Constantine sent other parricides to hell using the terrible and long-gone insaculation (poena cullei, the particularly slow drowning in a leather sack).

This in no way fits in with his apologetic concept of the despot who is still highly celebrated by theologians and historians; who, ‘under the influence of Christian conceptions’, as the Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte exalts him, shows ‘a growing respect for the dignity of the human person’, the ‘Christian respect for human life’ (Baus, Catholic). That saintly usurer would, for example, have the tongues of informers cut out before their execution, would have the domestic servants who had taken part in the abduction of a bride killed, would have the slaves burnt and the wet nurses killed by pouring molten lead into their mouths, would have every slave and domestic who had accused his master executed immediately, without investigation or the production of witnesses.

On all these things and many more, the expert on Constantine doesn’t say a word. Quite the contrary: she goes on to say that I always treat the Constantinian penal legislation negatively, that I even ‘brand the emperor as anti-Semitic’, and this ‘despite the known fact that at that time the Jews were still free to practise their faith’ (page 151).

As if the Jews’ free practice of their faith were in contradiction with the anti-Semitism of the emperor, a sovereign who mocks the Jews as spiritually blind, a ‘hateful nation’ to whom he attributes an ‘innate insanity’; to whom he allows the visit to Jerusalem only one day a year. He bluntly forbids them to have Christian slaves, thus beginning their alienation from agriculture, with such grave consequences. Moreover, this is the first anti-Jewish law on conversion to Judaism (autumn 315), threatening both the Jew who converts and the Christian convert with the stake.

The specialist on the emperor silences the fact that her hero, with increasing power and freedom of movement, also attacked the pagans with increasing rigour.

This is particularly evident in the last years of Constantine’s rule, although he had no interest in opposing the vast majority of the empire. Nevertheless, Constantine forbade the rebuilding of ruined temples and even ordered their closure. In all the provinces, moreover, the temples were stolen and ‘plundered without regard’ (Tinnefeld) for him, his favourites and the churches; in fact, it came to ‘the theft of works of art such as had never occurred before’ (Kornemann). And then Constantine also arranged for their destruction. ‘He destroyed to the ground those temples which the idolaters held in the greatest veneration’ (Kornemann). ‘At a sign whole temples were lying on the ground’, Bishop Eusebius recounts in triumphant tones.

Nor did the potentate delay in ordering the burning of Porphyry’s fifteen books Against the Christians, in which he ‘advanced the entire biblical criticism of the Modern Age’ (Poulsen), which, according to the theologian Harnack, ‘has not yet been refuted’.

On all this Maria R.-Alföldi is once again completely silent…
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: I won’t abbreviate the following 4,700 words of Deschner’s retort; the above translation is enough to provide an idea. My post tomorrow Sunday will be devoted to my aspirations on how to pass on Deschner’s legacy in the English-speaking community, especially among those non-Christians who still believe in the fourteen words.