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Category: Catholic Church

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Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s Criminal History, 146

 

The Church in the Merovingian Period

‘The Frankish reign of the Merovingians… was an age bathed in blood and murder, full of the most dreadful tragedies, at the same time replete with believing zeal and holiness’. —Franz Zach, Catholic

‘No one in history ever founded so many monasteries again…’ —P. Lasko

‘… a bloody period of the Frankish Church’. —A. Huack

‘Naked violence reigned everywhere… the continually renewed spectacle of almost unspeakable crimes’. —Daniel Rops, Catholic

 
In the Merovingian period Gaul was already fundamentally Christian, and became increasingly Christianised.

It is true that its oldest inscription, certainly Christian, only dates from the year 334 and Lyon; but today it has been lost. And, indeed, at that time Christians were still a minority, even in the cities where the Christian emperors, and of course their Christian collaborators too, lived.

In any case, the spread of Christianity in Gaul had already made rapid progress, and it seems that by 250 there were already bishops there: in Toulouse Saint Saturninus, Arles Marcianus, Paris Saint Dionysius and Narbonne, where a few decades later there is evidence of a Christian cemetery. And in any case, these bishops, like those of Tours, Clermont and Limoges, were in no way delegates of Rome. The alleged Roman mission is undoubtedly a falsehood of the 5th or 6th century: an attempt by the papacy to assert its authority. And, naturally, such a falsehood also had to ensure the apostolic origin of these Gallic bishoprics. The same motif is also found in Spain.

But in the 4th century, episcopal sees already swarmed Gaul. In the Belgian-Germanic territories, too, there are more and more bishoprics: in Orléans, Verdun, Amiens, Strasbourg, Speyer, Worms, Basel, Besançon, and Chalon-sur-Saone. Not to mention older ones, such as those of Trier, Metz and Cologne, all of which—like those of Tongeren and Mainz—falsely claimed to be foundations of disciples of the apostles.

At the end of the 5th century, when Gaul became the epicentre of Western history, some 115 bishops ministered there, almost exclusively in cities. And by the end of the 6th century, Gaul was occupied by 11 metropolitan sees with 128 dioceses: Arles had 24 bishoprics, Bordeaux 17 and Bourges 9, Lyon 10, Narbonne 7, Reims 12, Rouen 9, Sens 7, Tours 8, Trier 9 and Vienne 5.
 

A kind of holy cancerous ulcer

This period, in which Christianity infected the Germanic world, the dominance of the Frankish nobility was forged and the typical medieval society of royalty, church and nobility emerged from the 5th century, was an era characterised, as few others had been, by unbridled passions and bloody atrocities, betrayals and untold crimes.

Palace intrigues, dynastic quarrels, incessant betrayals, the unscrupulous elimination of kings and princes (the average lifespan of the Merovingians was 24.5 years) and the bestial campaigns to wipe out entire families were as commonplace as drunkenness and epidemics, famines and plundering. The history of Gaul in the Merovingian period is a unique chronicle of barbarism. Administration, trade and agriculture all collapsed to a greater or lesser extent, and crime triumphed to the full.

There has hardly ever been a more anarchic period in Europe than these early centuries of the Middle Ages. And yet the clergy didn’t think of forbidding intervention. The prelates were not overly incited by the desire for martyrdom. And the Church itself came to enjoy all the plundering and pillaging. Its real estate, which had already increased in the 4th century, then increased immeasurably.

Already in the 6th century its wealth grew ‘to infinity’ (Dopsch). ‘During the Merovingian period no memorable rebellion of ecclesiastical authority ever broke out, simply because the Church was not in opposition to the civil power, but collaborated closely with it’ (Bodmer). Indeed, the Frankish bishops participated in the power struggles between kings and grandees, ‘albeit with material and not spiritual weapons’ (Bund), going so far as ‘the de facto usurpation… of instruments of state and military power’ (Prinz).

In reality the high clergy and the first nobility are the driving forces of that immense confusion. In the imperium, they set up semi-independent powers, causing it to lurch either to one side or the other in permanent crises, which led to chaos.

There have never been so many saints, perhaps except for the martyrial era with its squadrons of so-called blood witnesses. In the 7th century alone, no fewer than eight hundred have been counted. Moreover, ‘that Merovingian century, so decisive for the development of the West’, found ‘a spiritual expression appropriate to the age in the lives of saints’, hagiography having experienced ‘an undoubted increase’.

The saints enjoyed high prestige. They built great monasteries with pompous churches. Like their biographers, they had an unmistakably positive attitude towards the monarchy and the nobility, most of them coming from aristocratic families. One could almost have the impression that ‘nobility was the anteroom to sainthood’, and one could speak of the ‘self-sanctification’ of Merovingian noble society (Prinz).

This was just as beneficial to the Church as the caste of the lords. Its desire for political-charismatic domination, which had been damaged by the apostasy of the old faith, was strengthened by the resources of the new faith providing Christian legitimisation. At the same time, however, the epoch, and especially the 7th century, was characterised by a ‘flowering’ of hagiography and a taste for the miraculous, which amounted to ‘the greatest falsification of historicity’, and consequently led to ‘the state of prostration of Western historiography’. All in all, this ‘was the result of a barbarisation, after the ancient stream had dried up’ (Scheibelreiter).

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 142

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
Catholic Church historians of the 20th century celebrate Pope Gregory as ‘one of the most important pastors among the popes’ (Baus), as ‘one of the most remarkable and cleanest figures on the chair of Peter’ (Seppelt/Schwaiger) and have long seen him occupying a ‘place among the great ones in the kingdom of heaven’ (Stratmann). Harnack, on the other hand, undoubtedly wiser than all the above and certainly more honest, rightly calls Gregory pater superstitionum, the father of (medieval) superstition.

Gregory I often failed to intervene effectively against recalcitrant bishops or even lost the battle. He had no influence on the course of events in Spain and the conversion of the Visigoths to Catholicism. Among the Merovingians, with whom he tried to establish a dialogue with every possible concession and warning, he failed completely, without achieving the reform of the Frankish church or the synod he so desired. The Merovingian imperial church became even more independent than it already was. Even against the Longobards it had little lasting success. And even his greatest mark of honour, the conversion of England to Catholicism, soon fizzled out, although only after his death. His successors had to start afresh and built up what is falsely attributed to him.

Gregorian chant, ‘that jewel of the Church’ (Daniel-Rops), known at least by name to many who know nothing of Gregory, in no way comes from him, even if it displeases certain sentimental Christians. In reality, the liturgical changes he introduced are few and insignificant. Even so, throughout the Middle Ages the Gregorian Sacramentary, the Missal, the Gregorian Antiphonary, the sung Missal and Gregorian chant all came to be the work of Gregory, who would have reordered, corrected and expanded the traditional chants of the Church. Recent research is unanimous in denying him such merits; the evidence is compelling.

When Gregory I died on 12 March 604, the world was covered in the thickest darkness in his eyes. He was ill, in his last years he could no longer walk, lying almost always in bed, harassed and exhausted by pain. The Longobards, whom he had not tamed, were threatening Rome, whose famine-stricken population was cursing the pope. And while in the North Gregory was venerated after his death, in Rome itself he was almost forgotten for centuries: a probable consequence of the triumph of the diocesan clergy over his monastic rule.

Is it a credit to Europe that this ambitious, intolerant and poor-spirited pope could be called the ‘father of Europe’?

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Pederasty Theology

Christianity’s Criminal History, 141

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

Pope Gregory’s books

The triumphs of the abstruse, not to say of foolishness, in no less than thirty-five books, which the author himself described as libri morales and that in the Middle Ages, to which they served as a compendium of morals, were called Magna Moralia, with incessant summaries, compilations, commentaries and enormous diffusion. And that creation of Gregory, the most ancient and vast, founded his fame as an expositor of Scripture (deifluus, radiator of God) and a moral theologian: the product of a mind that contemporaries and posterity placed above Augustine and exalted as incomparable, whose works in copies or epitomes and summaries flooded all medieval libraries and for centuries obscured the West!…

The famous papal book, which, like everything else written by Gregory, lacked any originality, summarised, it was said, what had already been formulated by the three ‘great Latin fathers’—Tertullian, Ambrose and Augustine—and at the same time transmitted to the Middle Ages the ancient exegesis of the Catholic coryphaeus. No doubt this great work deserves consideration.

The imposing and grandiose work Dialogues on the Life and Miracles of the Italic Fathers soon became extraordinarily popular with the help of God and the Church, exerting ‘the widest influence’ on posterity (H.J. Vogt). It contributed through the Longobard Queen Theudelinde to the conversion of her people to Catholicism. It was translated into Arabic, Anglo-Saxon, Old Icelandic, Old French and Italian. Pope Zacharias (741-752), a Greek who was characterised above all by ‘prudence’, translated it into Greek. It was to be found in all libraries and greatly broadened the spiritual horizons of the religious. It was ‘read by all learned monks’ and with its ideas about the afterlife, which created a school, and especially with its numerous miraculous claims, it gave rise to ‘a new type of religious pedagogy’ (Gerwing)…

There is nothing crude or superstitious here, which goes by the name of virtues: healings of the blind, resurrections of the dead, expulsions of unclean spirits, miraculous multiplications of wine and oil, apparitions of Mary and Peter, apparitions of demons of all kinds. In general, punitive miracles enjoy special preference. Creating fear was—and is—the great speciality of the parish priests.

It is no coincidence that the fourth and last book ‘for the edification of many’ (Gregory) revolves dramatically around death, the so-called afterlife and the reward and punishment in the beyond: extra mundum, extra carnem. During the plague of 590, Gregory says that in Rome ‘one could see with one’s bodily eyes how arrows were shot from the sky, which seemed to pierce people’. A boy, who, out of homesickness and a desire to see his parents, escaped from the monastery for one night, died on the very day of his return. But when he was buried, the earth refused to receive ‘such a shameless criminal’ and repeatedly expelled him, until St. Benedict placed the sacrament in the boy’s breast. Criminals were naturally those who, even as children, were locked up for life in the monastery exclusively for the ecclesiastical ambition of power and profit.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s Note: And also for the asses of the ephebes, insofar the vow of celibacy of the monks burned them (and continues to burn them). Without such a vow, they could be able to have a normal outlet for their lust. In the country where I live there is an obscene saying: “En tiempos de guerra cualquier agujero es trinchera” — ‘In times of war [burning celibacy] any hole is a trench’!
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Pope Gregory ‘the Great’ records a whole series of resurrections of the dead, carried out by the priest Severus, St. Benedict, a monk of Monte Argentario, and Bishop Fortunatus of Todi, the famous conjurer of spirits, who also immediately restored sight to a blind man with the simple sign of the cross. On the other hand, an Arrian bishop was punished with blindness. And among the Longobards there is a demon who was dragged out of a church by monks.

Gregory tells us of the multiplication of wine by Bishop Boniface of Ferentino, who with a few bunches of grapes filled whole barrels to overflowing. And the Prior Nonnoso of the monastery of Mt. Soracte, in Etruria, with his prayer alone moved a stone which ‘fifty pairs of oxen’ had not been able to move. Gregory reports that Maurus, a disciple of St. Benedict, walked on water. ‘O miracle unheard of since the time of the Apostle Peter’ and that a ‘brother gardener’ tamed a snake, which stopped a thief; that a raven carried away bread that was poisoned (‘In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ take this bread and carry it to a place where no man can find it! And then the crow opened its beak’).

Gregory the Great! A nun forgets to ‘bless with the sign of the cross’ a head of lettuce before eating it, and so gobbles up Satan, who snarls out of his mouth: ‘But what have I done, what have I done? I was sitting quietly on the head of lettuce, and she came and bit me’. Bad woman but blessed be God: a saint expels Satan from her, Gregory the Great!

But there are also altruistic and helpful devils; devils who even, and precisely, render their services to the clergy and obey their word. ‘Come here, devil, and take off my shoe!’ a priest orders his servant, and the devil promptly serves him personally. Oh, and Gregory knew the devil in many of his forms: as a snake, a blackbird, a young black man and a foul monster. Only as pope he didn’t know him. Indeed, caution and enlightenment were called for.

According to Gregory, the holy bishop Boniface performed one miracle after another. Once, when he was in urgent need of twelve gold coins, he prayed to St. Mary, and immediately found in his pocket what he needed: in the folds of his tunic appeared ‘suddenly twelve gold coins, glittering as if they had just come out of the fire’. St. Boniface gives a glass of wine, the contents of which don’t run out, although one constantly drinks from it. And what about the miracle of the caterpillars, or the miracle of the wheat? No, Gregory ‘cannot pass them by in silence’. Indeed, when St Boniface ‘saw how all the vegetables withered, he went to the caterpillars and said to them: “I adjure you in the name of the Lord and our God, Jesus Christ, get out of here and don’t destroy these vegetables”. Immediately they all obeyed the words of the man of God, so not one of them was left in the garden’…

But for this doctor of the Church, ‘the Great’, not even all this gross nonsense—which whole generations of Christians have believed, they had to believe—didn’t exclude him from the supreme honours of a Church.

The miracles of punishment have always been preferred. Sometimes a fox falls dead, sometimes a minstrel. The important thing is that the power of the priests is seen! Even the most believing churchman cannot believe (and not only today) that the ‘great’ pope would have been so gullible. But Karl Baus, for whom the ‘greatness of Gregory’ lies precisely ‘in his vast pastoral action’, doesn’t say a single word about the very pastoral Dialogues in the four-volume Catholic Handbook of Church History. And Vogt opens the chapter on Gregory with a grandiosely comic sentence about his greatness: ‘Gregory the Great, the last of the four great doctors of the Latin Church, lived in an age which neither demanded nor permitted great achievements’. Á la bonne heure! Well said, indeed.

He who was to be the guide of the centuries to come also enriches the topography of hell. Its entrances, he declares, are mountains that spew fire. And as in Sicily the craters were getting bigger and bigger, he declared once again the imminent end of the world: due to the agglomeration of the damned, wider and wider accesses to hell were required. Whoever enters there will never return. But Gregory knew that some of the dead were released from purgatory after thirty masses. This was the case with a monk who had broken his vow of poverty. Gregory also knew that not all are freed from limbo, and that even children who die without baptism burn in eternal fire.

The modern progressives, who are now rushing to extinguish hellfire—because it seems incredible to them—have against them not only the great pope and doctor of the Church, but also Jesus himself and countless other coryphaei of the Church. For Gregory, the eternity of the pains of hell ‘are true with all certainty’, and yet he teaches that ‘the torment of his fire is for something good’…

Isn’t this a magnificent religion, the religion of love?

Categories
Autobiography Catholic Church Feminism Liberalism

On Alberto Athié

How Christianity is transmuted
into liberalism: a textbook case

In my post the day before yesterday I tried to see liberalism as a movement heretical to traditional Christianity. These days I have also been watching many YouTube videos where we can see the Mexican Alberto Athié (pictured above) speaking.

After twenty years of priestly ministry, Athié resigned in 2003 when he discovered that the Catholic Church not only had no interest in curbing cases of sexual abuse, but also had an internal mechanism to cover up the perpetrators, silence the victims and protect its image. What I said recently about Spotlight in the US can be compared to what is happening in Latin America.

My mother used to see Athié at religious celebrations when he was still a priest because Athié’s brother married one of my close aunts. When Alberto Athié began to denounce in the media the paedophile worm can that was the Catholic Church in his country, the two brothers stopped talking to each other.

In the first post of this month I mentioned, in grey letters, an anecdote told to me, very close to where I’m writing this entry, by Athié’s buddy: José Barba, one of the victims of the paedophile priest Marcial Maciel. But I didn’t tell everything that happened when Barba visited me with a friend.

When the subject of women came up, I expressed my views on feminism (see our book On Beth’s Cute Tits). Barba, then in his late seventies, sided with feminism in such a way that I even felt his gestures were rude when he heard me speak: he started yawning, signalling that he didn’t want to hear what I was saying. I was surprised by his rudeness, as Barba continues to go to mass despite his activism against paedophiles in the church. Why did the old wise man who speaks fluent Latin, reads the New Testament in the original Greek, and had been a seminarian react like that? The slew of videos of his buddy Athié that I have seen these days revealed the mystery.

The now secularized Athié, who still believes in the gospel message, says in one of his videos that feminists helped them enormously in the cause of bringing paedophile priest cases to light. Hearing him speak in various televised interviews over the years, one discovers how Christianity began to transmute. Once he hung up his habits he began to sympathise more openly with liberation theology, so-called women’s rights, a Manichean vision where there are exploited poor and exploiters in a nation, third world countries whose underdevelopment is caused by the prosperity in first world countries, and so on: the typical toxic cocktail of Latin American leftism.

The Athié family has a reputation of mocha (goody-goody) in the country, of a very traditional and recalcitrant Catholicism. It is fascinating to see how, after an Athié priest hung up his habits, it didn’t take long for his Catholic programming to metamorphose into the typical liberalism we see in countries that had practised traditional Christianity. In the specific case of Latin America, as the anti-Aryan crossbreeding has already been consummated (see my comment yesterday in the comments section of The Occidental Observer), what it is now all about is achieving the long-awaited equity between men and women. Athié completely and utterly endorses this Orwellian agenda in Latin America. So from an extremely traditional family we now have, when you leave the church, a typical modern-day liberal.

The racial right in North America, so obsessed with Jews, doesn’t want to see the elephant in the room: only the countries that used to profess traditional Christianity have become ethno-suicidal. Even the Asian copycat countries that now worship Mammon are not so imbecilic as to invite masses of Blacks or Muslims to immigrate while devising shut-up neologisms like ‘racist’ for those who rebel, and even hate-speech laws to punish dissent. Likewise, feminism, taken to the point of hating men, is a phenomenon that only affects once-Christian countries as is now the case not only of Spain but Latin America, which has also embraced gender ideology, and the Athié case illustrates this wonderfully.

For those who know Spanish, I suggest you watch some of the videos with Athié. The former priest speaks in a very good-natured, cordial, charismatic and empathetic way: a true spiritual heir of the mythical Jesus.

Categories
Catholic Church Child abuse Film

Spotlight

or

Antichristianity for beginners

These days I’ve really gotten into the movie Spotlight filmed in 2015, winner of the Oscar for Best Picture, and directed by Thomas McCarthy. The film tells a real-life story: how the investigative unit of The Boston Globe newspaper, called ‘Spotlight’, brought to public light a scandal in which the highest authorities of the Catholic Church concealed a huge amount of sexual abuse perpetrated by different priests (no: McCarthy is not a Jew).

Artistically, the film is a true marvel. Furthermore, inside the window of discourse, or Overton window, it represents the first baby step in crossing the psychological Rubicon. (Remember that on this site we blame the artificial Jews—the Christians—more than the common Jews since the traitor is worse than the subversive of an alien group.)

If we have a loved one who is a normie, I can think of nothing better than giving him a movie that won the top Oscar to see if he can take his first step across the river. Even to my 2013 list of the ten films I most recommend, I would add an eleventh: Spotlight. (If I were asked why I included Disney’s Sleeping Beauty on that list my answer is that, although it is for children, it gives its due to the enormous beauty of the Aryan woman; Tchaikovsky’s music is extraordinarily well handled, and Eyvind Earle’s drawings are superb.)

Of my list of 50 films I suggested for entertainment in the early months of the Covid quarantine, I can hardly watch most of them. The situation in the West depresses me so much that I can only think of my priesthood of the sacred words.

But Spotlight is the exception! I can still watch it, and even the YouTube interviews with the actors and real-life reporters from The Boston Globe for the simple fact that it represents the first step that a normie can take, a move toward my side of the river.

Categories
Catholic Church Music NS booklets Racial right Reformation Schutzstaffel (SS)

National Socialist booklets, 2

On the sidebar, yesterday I replaced Savitri’s photo with a video showing a beautiful parade in Munich in 1939. If there is one thing white nationalists still don’t understand, it is that before a Semitic cult took over their culture, for the Aryan mind the visual and plastic arts, including architecture, took precedence over the written word. Even Homer was recited in special houses orally, with speakers memorising the Iliad.

The sites of white nationalism are children of the Reformation, which, unlike the Renaissance, emphasised the written word following the theologians who rebelled against the revival in Italy: a light on a potential revival of the Aryan spirit.

Judeo-Christianity, with its emphasis on the written word, eclipsed the Renaissance in the subsequent centuries as the Reformation imposed, once again, the cult of holy writ, and this time introducing the Old Testament into the psyche of Aryan man.

Having once again inverted the values, centuries later National Socialism attempted to reverse the process using public arts—just as it was done in ancient Rome and even in Greece. That’s why what happened in Munich and elsewhere in Germany is so important.

Why do I say all this in an entry devoted to the second booklet that came to me among those booklets that portrayed the spirit, now in the written word, during the most glorious times of the Third Reich? Because since the American publishers of those booklets were deprived of almost all forms of payment, the presentation of their translated booklets is too rustic. What better than to quote what on 22 July this year I wrote, in the form of a soliloquy, on the white pages of the booklet The SS Calls You! (translated from the SS original, Dich ruft die SS!):

These translations are not made with love. Just compare them with Casanova’s small book [a superb edition of a biography of an Austrian author I acquired in Manchester]: just the font and book size that the translated German booklet would deserve. It is unfortunate that there are no artists like me in the publishing industry of racialists. Therefore, I will just skim through it (the tiny font size is very uncomfortable to read…).

That said, just looking at the first page [actually page 7, after the opening credits] I can’t help but think that I shouldn’t revisit the WN sites, which are rubbish compared to this fighting spirit.

It is precisely because the US relies on that materialistic phrase containing the misleading word ‘happiness’ that makes Americans the antithesis of the Aryan hero. But there is a problem, page 10 mentions the word ‘God’.

Page 64 announces the career ‘SS music officer’ at the Berlin Conservatory, and continues the information about that SS career on the next page.

Non-degenerate music, obviously. Then, on page 66, comes a phrase I have already spoken about a couple of times on this site addressing German parents: ‘Sooner or later your son will become a soldier’.

Perhaps it is worth closing this post with an image of how the Roman church bewitches its faithful precisely with super-aesthetic editions of its liturgy: the most aesthetic editions I have ever seen in a publishing house! If with money it is possible to publish this kind of little books to instil evil, won’t it be possible to found a new publishing house that collects all these little jewels of the Third Reich in editions as elegant as those of Ediciones Cristiandad, whose publishing house resides in Madrid?

Categories
Catholic Church Martin Luther Nicolaus Copernicus Protestantism Swastika

Rosenberg on Christian subversion of NS

Translated from the original
Foreword of Blut und Ehre:

Born on January 12, 1893 in Reval, Alfred Rosenberg experienced as Baltic-German all the severe suffering of ethnic Germans and the Russian Revolution. To enlighten Germany about this and to help protect her against communism, at the end of 1918 Rosenberg went to Germany, was introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart and joined him in 1919.

In 1921 he took over the Völkischer Beobachter [Folkish Observer]. Rosenberg marched with the Führer in Coburg in 1922 and the Feldherrnhalle in 1923. After November 9, 1923 he tried to hold together the movement’s remnants. When the Führer returned from Landsbergand he took over management of the Völkischer Beobachter and expanded it more and more in the following period until, after the victory, it became Germany’s largest newspaper.

When in 1930 the wish for an official NSDAP magazine became even stronger, Rosenberg created the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte [The National Socialist Monthly]. In 1929 he founded the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur [Fighting Federation for German Culture]. In 1930 Rosenberg became a member of the Reichstag and a representative of his faction for foreign affairs. Through trips and work, he became more and more immersed in questions of foreign affairs and presented the new foundations in this area. He was appointed in April 1933 chief of the Foreign Affairs Office of the NSDAP by Adolf Hitler and shortly thereafter Reichsleiter.

Alfred Rosenberg, in a certain sense, is the father of National Socialist literature. Already in 1919/20 he had published several writings about Bolshevism, Freemasonry and the Jewish Question and made the fight against international powers one of his main tasks. We find him as a domestic fighter in his little-noted book Thirty November Heads, which appeared in 1927. His 1930 fighting work The Swamp, one of the most valuable documents against the cultural decline of the post-war years, was on a similar level. Already in 1922 Rosenberg had published Nature: Principles and Goals of the NSDAP, the movement’s first publication! Later, he gave the movement two of its most basic writings: Future Path of German Foreign Policy and The Structure of National Socialism.

His main work, however, is The Myth of the Twentieth Century, which in 1923 experienced huge press popularity. Hanns Johst wrote: ‘I am often asked about the principles of National Socialism. Here is the work in which the manifestation of these principles is achieved…’ [Pages 7-8. The following is taken from pages 36-43 of the English translation.]

 

The ‘Centre’ and ‘Christian Folk Service’ parties

Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte [The National Socialist Monthly], April 1931:

The relationship between National Socialism and religion has been an issue since the appearance of the NSDAP. Adolf Hitler took the standpoint of a statesman from the beginning. He views the existence of various religious denominations as given and wants to keep the political movement out of the religious fighting. One should think that it would be agreeable to every Christian denomination to see the emergence of a worker movement that energetically combats soul-killing, atheistic Marxism and takes up an idealistic idea against our time’s rule by Mammon and, like Jesus, swings the whip against the money-changers and traders.

But the opposite has happened. Precisely the party that has claimed to practice Christian politics picked up a fight against National Socialism and put itself on the side of a Social Democracy hostile to any religion. That party formed coalitions with the purpose to annihilate the German workers’ movement and supported those powers that, for years, have financed the leave-the-church movement. After such a coalition this propaganda has not ceased.

Something was just as hated by Marxism as by the Centre: the conscious folk-feeling and the call to a Germanic morality-feeling, as can be read in our party program, paragraph 24. At Catholic Days, which represent Centre meetings (Contance 1923), German nationalism was presented as ‘the greatest heresy’ and bishop Mainz and cardinal Faulhaber competed in the condemnation of this ‘new heathenism’. As church princes, they banned membership in the NSDAP; yes, sometimes even excluded Catholic National Socialists from the sacraments.

In the process they referred to the Catholic doctrine. What is bizarre is that, in strictly Catholic Italy, the most extreme nationalism has become a state government and the Pope, who for decades has refused any reconciliation with liberalism, is now in peace with the leader of this growing nationalism. The Pope even called Mussolini a ‘man of Providence’ after the signing of the Lateran Pact. From Italy’s church organs we can now hear, even more frequently, the king’s hymn. And of the cardinals of Italian descent it is said that, under the purple, they wear the black-shirt of fascism.

The German folk now claims nothing more than it should be granted the same right to national pride; the right to erect a real national state based on its character. If, in face of the no longer contested Italian facts, this is contested based on the ‘Catholic doctrine’ by church princes there are two possibilities: either there are two Catholic doctrines, or the faith of the Catholic masses is being intentionally misled for the achievement of political goals.

______ 卐 ______

Editor’s Note: Since this article of The National Socialist Monthly was addressed to the Christian masses, Rosenberg fails to say the obvious. Remember Hitler’s words in Mein Kampf:

We have to distinguish between the state as a vessel and the race as the content. This vessel only makes sense if it is able to preserve and protect its contents; otherwise it is worthless.

This week, commenting on the above quotable quote, Krist Krusher said: ‘This is why all self-proclaimed National Socialists should never think of Hitlerism as being nothing more than “German Fascism”. As Fascism is built entirely from the State, it always thought of race as secondary. It is about as removed from us as Marxism in this regard’.

______ 卐 ______

Since we can dismiss the first possibility (the Roman church has only one leader), only the second remains. The Centre accepts Zionists and chairmen of Jewish cultural communities as Reichstag candidates. It even allows Protestants as members without influence, but is nonetheless a strictly Catholic denomination party. Just as Marxism wants to eternalise the nation’s split through the doctrine of social class struggle, has the Centre declared against the German nation the denominational class struggle and has carried the spiritual, religious struggle into the sphere of power politics. And just as the Social Democrat only has an eye on his class, so does the Centre leader only has his denomination’s interests.

This party lives from conflict. Hence the NSDAP was hated most deeply from the first day because religious tolerance inside the party was practically carried out in an exemplary manner. Religious differences of opinion and philosophical competitions had to be carried out outside the party organisation. As soon as it assembled, as soon as the SA put on its brown-shirt, they were no longer any Catholics and Protestants but Germans fighting for the existence and honour of their folk. No co-worker of the NSDAP is asked whether he belongs to the Deutsch Kirche [German Church] or if he is Reformierter [a member of the Evangelical Reformed Church in Germany]. Only the achievement in the service of German freedom is pivotal. The deep wounds of the Thirty Years War were finally healed in the National Socialist movement, just like the wounds of the Marxist and bourgeois class conflict began to scar. Then there arose the concentrated struggle of all those political upstarts who want to suck the blood for their parasitic existence from the wounds of their folk. The Marxists screamed ‘capitalist lackeys’; the bourgeois leaders lamented ‘National-Bolsheviks’, and the Centre cried ‘enemies of any religion’.

Never have religious feelings been treated so unscrupulously by the Centre and the political prelates directing it, and it was one issue at which the zealous dialecticians aimed. As stated above, it is claimed that National Socialism is not a common political party, rather a worldview (emphasis by Editor. Remember Savitri Devi’s words: ‘it is the enemies of Hitlerism, and in particular the Jews, and intelligent Christians, who have understood this best). To solidify the struggle against German nationalism, the Centre points to our worldview and declares it a ‘heathen, anti-Catholic race idolization’. We can reply that race science determined the diverseness and diverse value of the races, similar to how one makes discoveries in the field of chemistry. Such a discovery cannot be combated by any kinds of dogmas and excommunications, and many times the church has had to bow to the facts.

When Copernicus presented the heliocentric doctrine, when the flat Earth with heaven above and hell below suddenly became a sphere hovering in space, the whole world of dogma rebelled against this new doctrine. Until 1827 (!) all works that taught this solar system stood in the Index. Copernicus’ worldview also produced a different worldview than the biblical one, a different look at the world, but this discovery in no way damaged genuine religion, which stems from man’s soul. The Roman and Protestant churches (Martin Luther called Copernicus a swindler and deceiver) needed three hundred years to adapt to the new world image, and they had to bow before it despite everything.

Another example is provided by the treatment of our mother tongue. Someone demanded exclusive use of the heathen Latin (here the expression is appropriate). Meister Eckart encountered much hostility when he preferred the German language, but the whole German folk owe to the ‘heretic’ Luther the High German language uniting the nation. But it stood in the statutes of the Jesuit Order that use of the mother tongue in all matters relating to school would be never allowed. In 1830 the order saw itself compelled to at least allow the mother tongue for poetry, when Goethe stood at the end of his life’s work! And the very well known Jesuit Father Duhr affirmed: ‘This remains a principle: the practice of the mother tongue is recommendable, but it should not be turned into its school subject’. The persecution of the dearest thing that a folk calls its own has been overcome; today the Catholic Church often stands up for the mother tongue in upholding the interests of its faithful.

It is now quite similar to race science regarding religion. The verdict of a bishop or cardinal or even the Pope on race is, in this case, a completely private opinion about the biological problem or the political problem based on it, which stands outside purely religious authority that the devote Catholic grants him. A dogmatic excommunication can no longer nullify a natural scientific discovery.

In the Middles Ages, researchers were burned as sorcerers. Today, the Vatican builds a radio station that Torquemada would have certainly cursed as devil’s work. Thus the struggle against race science is not religious, rather a struggle of the politically interested that previously gathered their followers around themselves on a different basis. An anathema against blood consciousness will be overcome for the same reason that one had to acknowledge Copernicus, and it represents a historical irony that one of the finest researchers of the laws of genetics was the Catholic Father Gregor Mendel.

We can conclude that worldview and religion are not the same. A worldview can exist outside religion (atomic world explanation, naturalist monism), but it can also include religion. The National Socialist movement is a folk movement about a new and yet ancient, firmly founded worldview of the value of blood. It wants to protect healthy, good blood. Regardless of whether one wants to call this God’s creation or Nature’s iron rule, in both cases National Socialism serves a constructive principle under a fundamental religious disposition. The political battle movement leaves the most thorny questions about God and immortality, fate and mercy to the individual personality for decision. They may seek their comforters and spiritual counsellors, whom they require for the development of their inner life. (Editor’s Note: On this point the Christians, not Rosenberg, were right. NS is, in fact, the new paradigm that comes to replace the old one. This is why American white nationalists, more Christian than Nazis, don’t honour the memory of the Führer every April 20th.)

The opponents of the German essence in Bavaria, Silesia and the Rhine lower themselves in their hatred when criticising paragraph 24 of the National Socialist program by claiming that no special ‘Germanic moral feeling’ exists that could be viewed as the measure of action. This means a quite intentional denial of German cultural awareness and a terrible disregard of the value of our ancestors. For without the characteristic prerequisites of the Germanic man for the creation of state and society, Germany as a life form would not have emerged at all. Without her energy and her will the soil itself would not have been conquered, upon which today live those who have been the beneficiaries of this colonising but are inwardly alienated from the founders of their prosperity, and the freedom of the state structure.

And if the state-building character has already been a part of Germanic morality, that has so mightily revealed itself in life and the art, a brazenness without equal would be necessary to equate the Hottentot or Jew with Germanic essence. When, for example, the Vandal Stilicho became Rome’s regent, one of his first acts consisted of banning the gladiator fighting: that most terrible symbol of a decadent, animalised world, which had adopted those horrible games from the Middle Eastern Etruscans. Later, the Eastern Goth Theodorich did the same, replacing the gladiator massacre with knight tournaments. And without falling into a one-sided deification of Germanic man one may probably say that the Gudrunlied, the high song of a proud woman, corresponds to the most beautiful emotional yearning, as well as Siegfried’s generous figure. Even in Hagen it sparkles reconciliation from the depth of something unconditional, the loyalty to the king.

Germanic morality that was true to itself wanted to account for nature and the cosmos. From this yearning were born the mystics and the great researchers of nature down to Immanuel Kant’s noble doctrine of duty. (Editor’s Note: This is another mistake common among German nationalists. Kant’s influence—sneaking in the house the Jewish god through the back door after the French Enlightenment expelled it from the front door—was terrible for the German Enlightenment.) And in German music the same world-overcoming life developed, so that the denial of this Germanic-German [germanisch-deutsche] value means an attack to annihilate the world-shaping German soul. That such a denial could be openly expressed shows the deep decline that Germany as folk has suffered. It also shows the necessity of a general folk resistance, without difference of religious denomination, against a dynamics at whose end stands race chaos: psychological decline and then political decline of the German nation.

If it is now brazenly declared by the Centre that National Socialism is preparing a new ‘cultural struggle’, a government persecution of the Catholic church, that is an agitation lie of the worst sort. Whatever a National Socialist may think about this or that religious dogma, it has always rejected any political intercession against a denomination and will hold to that in the future. And it has proven that policy through the deed. The Centre has done the opposite. It has given lip-service support to Catholic dogmas but through its alliances with the Marxists it accepts the possibility of uninhibited atheist propaganda and thereby assistance to overall Bolshevization. The prerequisite for a religious renewal is hence the annihilation of Marxism and the beating down of the Centre as long as in practice it broadly nurtures Marxism.

On the Protestant side, similarly oriented political opportunities have watched the anti-Marxist movement grow. The Protestants have now founded a denominational party similar to the Centre: the Christian Folk Service. National Socialism takes the same position toward this ‘evangelical’ foundation as to the ‘Catholic’ Centre. The success of the Folk Service will degrade the Germans’ struggle for liberation to a denominational quarrel, and force the struggle to a level that must stand outside the great political battle of all. The first thing, by the way, that the Reichstag delegates of these ‘evangelicals’ did, was to vote against the candidate of the Nationalist opposition for the post of Reichstag President. They preferred, together with the Centre, to give their vote to the champion of conscientious objectors, the leftist Social Democrat Paul Loebe. Here, once more, we see a downright betrayal to both the Nationalist and the Christian idea.

Given this treasonous bearing, influenced by Marxist thought and political representatives of both denominations, it is no wonder, if the movement that leaves the church grows, that the sects of Adventists, First Bible Researchers, and the Communist International of the godless prepares the organised destruction of all religious values. The NSDAP has acted against these folk-destructive forces as well (in Munich rallies of the ‘Bible Researchers’ were only banned after clear words on our side by the government of the Bavarian Folk Party). But the the spread of all these currents shows the weakness of the inner persuasiveness of both the Catholic as well as the Protestant church.

To evaluate the deeper worldview causes that may exist here lies outside the NSDAP’s area of competency. Some believe it is imperative duty to push the clerics into the political party fight. Already Bismarck scolded Stoecker that he, as an active preacher, wanted to be a political leader based on the instinct that invariably a national policy would become subjected to denominational considerations, especially since the psyche of the spiritual counsellor and the political leader cannot be organically united. Today in Germany we stand anew before the fact that a party, the whole Centre, stands under purely clerical leadership. The party chairman of the Centre and its Foreign Affairs Politician (with the Prelate Ulitzka) is the Papal House Prelate Dr Kaas. The actual chief of the Bavarian Folk Party is the leader of the Landtag faction in the Bavarian Cathedral, the Provost Wohlmuth: leader of the Reichstag faction of this party and also its foreign affairs spokesman, Prelate Leicht. Thus, Catholic priests work in the foremost battle-line for the Centre (they simply forbid patriotic clerics such as Abbott Schachleitner, Doctor of Theology, from speaking). And if, in opposition to the folk-destructive Centre policy, one also fights in the form of rejection of the leaders, they call it insulting priests.

The folk see this everywhere and here lies a reason why antireligious criticism falls on fertile soil. The task of the gentlemen of the Centre clerics does not lie in giving Catholic lip service in folk assemblies to share the political spoils with atheist Marxist partners; rather, to leave the political arena and become again spiritual counsellors. Today the nation needs comforters of the human soul more than ever, but it must be noted that the hate-filled Centre spirit has penetrated even those circles that do not stand out politically. For example, a Bavarian pastor from the pulpit openly defamed Adolf Hitler saying he had spat out a consecrated wafer. Indicted and convicted of defamation, the pastor was nonetheless acquitted. In the confessional, children are forbidden under threat of harsh punishments and the torments of hell to visit National Socialist meetings or reading the Völkischer Beobachter. Women are told they must deny their husbands marital rights in the event they do not vote for the Centre, etcetera. All that—in connection with terrible harassment against clerics who do not agitate for the Centre—outrages the healthy folk, which increasingly slips away from the spiritual counsellor.

A recovery in religious life will not come until the priest reflects on his actual office and obeys the decree of his chief leader, and the same is true about the evangelicals. The most beautiful cultural blossoming of Protestantism was doubtlessly the evangelical pastor’s house in small towns and villages. But here, too, the metropolis intervened, agitating nerves, and awakened wishes which would have otherwise turned the energies away from the direction of a purely spiritual counsellor. Here, too, the cleric, as long as he works as such, should disappear from the parliament tribunes and the political folk assembly.

We wish hereby to restrict neither the Evangelical nor the Catholic cleric in his life energy. But he should treat the common national culture from the pulpit and in a form such as his office is intended. Here lie the great possibilities for effectiveness; here alone lies the lever to deepen and renew religious life. It is as unnatural if the cleric becomes parliamentarian as if a statesman wanted to set himself on the confessional seat. In the organically based separation of these social spheres lies the prerequisite of a new, spiritually healthy construction of Germany.

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Editor’s Note: But the Christians triumphed after the war. The first time in my life I visited Germany, in 1982, I was truly shocked to see handsome Aryans bending the knee before the Jewish god in a big church.

I never saw a swastika.

White nationalists still ignore that the JQ and the CQ are the same.

Categories
Catholic Church Evil Inquisition Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Theology Third Reich Turin Shroud Welfare of animals

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 3

Chapter III: Anthropocentrism and intolerance

I have told you, and will repeat it—for it cannot be repeated too often: Get rid of the superstition of ‘man’, or give thanks to the immortal Gods if you are by nature free; if ‘man’ as such is not of interest to you; if only Perfection interests you and if you love man only to the extent that he approaches—individually and collectively—the ideal type of the Race; insofar as, being of one day, he reflects that which is eternal.

Have you meditated enough on the history of the world to have noticed a puzzling fact, namely that few people have sinned more odiously against men than those who loved them the most, and wanted, with the most obstinacy, ‘to make them happy’ (even against their will) either in this world or in a Hereafter in which they firmly believed? Nietzsche, perhaps the only great master of thought that the West has produced on the fringes of Christianity, noticed it. ‘Christians no longer love us enough’, he said, ‘to burn us alive in public places’.[1]

Much has been said about the horrors committed by the Church of Rome in the name of defending Christian orthodoxy. What has almost always been forgotten is that the Holy Inquisition, the organ of this Church, acted out of love. It believed—like all good Catholics of the twelfth, thirteenth, or even seventeenth centuries—that outside the Church there was no salvation; that the individual who left the rigid path of dogma, and thereby ceased to be faithful, went, at his death, straight to hell.

The Church knew that men, inclined to sin since Adam’s disobedience, follow bad examples much more readily than good ones; that the heretic was therefore a public danger: a black sheep that was necessary, in case he refused the offered cure—that is to recant, the penance and the return to the bosom of the blessed flock—to cut him off at all costs from the whole population. And the most spectacular and terrible the aftermath of the heresy trial, the less likely it would be that the simple souls, who are the majority, would be tempted to rebel in their turn against the authority of the Church; the less likely they would be separated from God forever. The fear of God, which is said to be the beginning of wisdom, would be confused here with the fear of visible fire, with the fear of physical pain in the person who has, at least once, witnessed the burning of a heretic and saw and heard the man struggling in his bonds and screaming amid the flames.

Glory to Christ! the pyres shine, howling torches;
The flesh splits, sets fire to the bones of heretics,
And red streams on the hot coals
Smoke under black skies to the sound of holy hymns! [2]

As for me, I sincerely believe that the Inquisitor Fathers were not monsters. They struggled, in the face of a formal refusal to recant, to deliver a human being ‘to the secular arm’, knowing what torment the said ‘secular arm’ had in store for him. This decision, which today seems to so many people to be so ‘contrary to Christian love’, was nevertheless inspired by Christian love as they understood it, taking into account their interpretation of passages of the Scriptures concerning the Hereafter. They loved men, i.e. human souls, so much to accept the risk of knowing that they were in danger of perdition, in contact with the ‘teachers of error’.

If there is anything against which you should revolt at the thought of the horrors of the Holy Inquisition (unless one agrees entirely with it; why not, if you subscribe such faith?) it is certainly not the ‘wickedness’ of the inquisitor fathers, but that unconditional love of all men, including heretics and unbelievers to be brought back, brought to Jesus Christ. This was a love of all men for the sole reason that they are considered the only living creatures ‘having an immortal soul created in the image of God’, a love of which the members of the Holy Office were, along with all, or almost all, Christians of their time, the first victims.

______ 卐 ______

Editor’s Note: To those unfamiliar with theology this issue may seem anachronistic but it is not. As the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) said in his autobiography, ‘I was born in the Middle Ages’: something that I could also say.

When investigating the Turin shroud and visiting the Archdiocese of Mexico, I discovered the theological essays of Antonio Brambila (see my criticism: here, in Spanish), who died a month before radiocarbon tests dated the Turin cloth as a medieval product (not as a 1st-century miraculous cloth!). This Brambila priest explained in several articles what Savitri sums up in the passage above. He claimed that only the human being is eternal and that Jesus had shown it to us with his Resurrection (a Resurrection that left its mark, by the way, on the Turin sheet). The implication of Brambila’s theology was: either you believe in Christ or you are forever damned.

When I lived in the US, I was greatly surprised that many gringos, whom I previously viewed as non-Neanderthals, believed exactly the same shit through Protestantism. So what Savitri wrote decades ago is not outdated: Catholic fundamentalists like Brambila (who published his own Latin-Spanish translation of Augustine’s Confessions) and today’s last-ditch fundamentalist Protestants are still with us.

______ 卐 ______

To those who do not particularly love men, their destiny—salvation or perdition, in a hypothetical Hereafter—is a matter of indifference. The so-called ‘tolerance’ of the people of our time is, in reality, a complete disinterest in questions of dogma in particular, and metaphysical questions in general; a deep scepticism of the Hereafter and an increasingly widespread (though less and less avowed) indifference towards men. All in all, men are no worse off. Not only are there no longer any pyres in public places in countries of Christian, Catholic or Reformed civilisation (in Christian countries subject to the Eastern Orthodox Church there never were any). But a major excommunication, launched against an individual by any Church would have, in the West, no social consequences: the excommunicated would continue to live the next day as he lived the day before. No one would notice that he was excommunicated (except perhaps devotees in his parish).

______ 卐 ______

Editor’s Note: Exactly what happened to the priest of my family, Joaquín Sáenz y Arriaga, excommunicated for having dared to criticise the Second Vatican Council.

______ 卐 ______

If, as recently as 1853—a little over a century ago—an excommunicated monk, Théophile Kaïris, could have been imprisoned by order of the Greek government, and died in prison, it is not that the Greeks were, at that time, ‘less tolerant’ than their brothers in France or Germany. It was only that Greece was not then (as it is not today) the West, and that the teaching of the Eastern Orthodox Church was there (as is still today) held to be ‘national religion’, like that of the Roman Church is in Spain, Free Ireland, or Poland, despite the Communism imposed on the people: a living contradiction, given the largely human and ‘not of this world’ character of all true Christianity.

______ 卐 ______

Editor’s Note: If I manage to reproduce the entire translation of this chapter I will divide it, of nearly 14,000 words in the original French, into several entries.

I do it just out of curiosity to know exactly what Savitri was thinking. Some passages from the previous instalments of this new series suggest that Savitri was in line with what, at the end of my eleven books, I call the religion of the four words (‘eliminate all unnecessary suffering’). If to this we add that Savitri also subscribed to what from David Lane is known as the fourteen words she would be, together with Hitler and others from the Nazi leadership, the only ones whom I resemble. (Recall that Hitler wanted to close the slaughterhouses after the war; Göring forbade vivisection, Himmler disapproved of hunting animals for sport, etcetera.)

___________

[1 ] In Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.

[2] Leconte de Lisle, ‘The Agony of a Saint’, Poèmes Barbares.

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 139

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

Gregory I, work of the Danish sculptor
Christian Carl Peters (1883-1884).
Frederik’s Church, Copenhagen.

We can thus consider Gregory as the founder of the temporal power of the papacy. Without yet existing a Church-State there was already a kind of State, or at least an important factor of power. Gregory elected the bishops, together with the large landowners, the provincial governors and defined their powers, especially the judicial power. The pope also influenced commerce and controlled, in conjunction with the senate, measures and weights. And to him they belonged—this being perhaps what increased his power the most—enormous territorial extensions, great agricultural estates throughout Italy and beyond.

Despite everything Gregory remained, like his predecessors, the subject of the emperor, his superior. The imperial person and government were considered sacred. The monarch of Byzantium also fought ‘heresies’, promulgated ecclesiastical edicts and convened councils…

Between the exarch of Ravenna and the pope there were no good relations. Italy, and especially the territorial chaos of its middle part, was a focus of small, almost continuous wars. That is why the exarch wanted to protect the corridor of land between Ravenna and Rome, and the pope himself wanted to protect Rome; but there were no longer enough troops for it. The Roman garrison, considerably depleted by the plague and without receiving soldiers, was on the brink of a mutiny.

Gregory assumed command. He took charge of the city, intervening decisively in all military actions, from the appointment of officers to the operations of the generals or the negotiation of armistice conditions. He took care that no one evaded the service of arms under the pretext of service to the Church. Furthermore, he recruited people from the monasteries to guard the city walls, although he avoided putting soldiers in the nunnery monasteries. He even designed military installations for Campania, Corsica and Sardinia. He took care to reinforce the weak points of the imperial enclaves with reinforcement troops and fortifications. He appointed a commander for Naples, whose population he threatened: ‘Whoever opposes his just orders will be considered as a rebel against Us, and whoever obeys him obeys Us…’

 
The beginning of papal propaganda in England

The beginnings of Christianity in Britain remains in the dark. Early Northern Christians had been Scandinavian merchants. In the year 314 there is a testimony of three British bishops who participated in the synod of Arles.

Roman rule over Britain, established in 43 c.e. by Emperor Claudius with four legions (barely 40,000 men), had finished around 400. In 383 Theodosius abandoned Hadrian’s Wall, and at the beginning of the 5th century the Romans, under the orders of Stilicho and Constantius III, withdrew. Faced with the attacks of Picts and Scots, the British called to their aid the Germanic tribes of Jutes and Saxons, and later also the Angles, who created a series of regional kingdoms that fought each other. Such were those of Kent, Sussex, Essex, and Wessex as well as those later of Mercia, Northumbria, and Middlesex, both rising to supremacy. But the period between 450 and 600, called Dark Ages, remains the least known period in English history.

In the time of Gregory the province of Brittany of the old Roman rule consisted of the Roman-British kingdoms in the west and the pagan kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons, who had established themselves in the rest of the island territory. In August 598, Gregory wrote to Bishop Eulogius of Alexandria that the Anglo people lived ‘in an outer corner of the world’ and that ‘they still venerate the tree and the stone…’ with a veneration that was not without sense and beauty.

Towards the end of the 6th century King Ethelbert of Kent married the Merovingian and Catholic princess Berta, great-granddaughter of Clovis, niece of Brunichilde and daughter of the Frankish King Chabert of Paris. In her entourage was Bishop Liuthard, who was supposed to celebrate the Christian liturgy, although Ethelbert was still a pagan. But upon becoming the most powerful king of England and being recognised as sovereign, Gregory hastened to send (595-596) the prior of his monastery of St. Andrew, Augustine, with some 40 monks, as emissaries to the ‘barbarians’… Unfortunately Ethelbert allowed the Roman monks to develop their propaganda in the kingdom…

The fables of the Trinity and Peter, etc., now replaced the cult of Odin and the Druids. At Pentecost 597, or more likely 601—if it really happened—the king had many Angles baptised. There are no sure testimonies of the ‘conversion’ of Ethelbert, but he was certainly the founder of three Episcopal churches in Kent and Essex: those of Canterbury, Rochester and London, which already existed in 604 when Augustine died. And with his predominantly civil laws the king protected ecclesiastical possessions as well. But at his death in 616 (or 618), and this does appear with certainty, his son and his successor Eadbald was still pagan, and so was probably his second wife.

In 602 reinforcements arrived from Rome. Abbot Mellitus, who two years later was already bishop of London, came with his troops dressed in monastic robes, carrying all kinds of ornaments, sacred vessels, relics, and various papal letters. The news of the conversion reached Constantinople. Nor was the exhortation lacking to destroy paganism and to continue the work of conversion amid the warnings and evocations of the terror of the final judgment. ‘Therefore, my most illustrious son’, Gregory wrote to the king, ‘keep carefully the grace you have received from God and hasten to spread the faith among the people who are subject to you. Increase still more your noble zeal for conversion; suppress idolatry, destroy their temples and altars…’

Thus wrote the preacher of humility. But when the occasion required it—and that was always the supreme rule of his conduct—Gregory knew how to act with greater caution and adopt an apparently more conciliatory tone, which at times may even seem comical. For example, to his ‘dearest son’, Abbot Mellitus, leader of the new troop of propagandists, he wrote that he had resolved

after long reflection on the situation of the Anglos. It is unnecessary to destroy the pagan temples of those towns, but only the idols that are in them. Then those temples must be sprinkled with holy water, altars erected and relics deposited. Because if such temples are well built, they can perfectly be transformed from a dwelling place of demons into houses of the true God, so that if the same people don’t see their temples destroyed, lay down their error from their hearts, recognise the true God and pray and go to the usual places according to their old custom…

Isn’t this a magnificent religion? If the temples are ‘well built’ there is no need to demolish the devil’s work. None of that: they can then serve the work of God. You just have to destroy the ‘idols’ and let the new ones in exclusively.

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 138

– For the context of these translations click here –

Use and abuse of slaves as livestock

From Gregory himself we know that many bishops did not care for the oppressed or the poor. On the occasion of the appointment of the defensor romanus as rector, he wrote to the coloni of Syracuse:

I therefore recommend that you obey his orders with good spirit, which he considers appropriate for the furtherance of the interests of the Church. We have authorised him to severely punish anyone who dares to be disobedient or rebellious. We have also instructed him to resume the investigations on all slaves who belong to the Church but who have escaped and to recover with all prudence, energy and promptness the lands that someone illegally occupies.

For the cultivation of his lands it is natural that Gregory needed entire armies of slaves, of settlers tied to the ground. ‘Free ecclesial peasants were scarce’ (Gontard). The pope did not confront slavery. Where else could the ‘treasurer of the poor’ have obtained the money to meet his needs? Not to mention the maintenance of ‘jobs’, which in his time was the concern of any master. Gregory certainly reminds the lords—for his Church will have to do justice to the rich and the poor simultaneously, which is perhaps the greatest of all his miracles—that slaves are people and that they have been raised equal by nature to their masters. But although men have been created equal, absolutely equal, without a doubt that circumstances have completely changed. Then it would be necessary, according to Gregory himself, to admonish the slaves ‘so that at all times they consider the baseness of their state’ and that they ‘offend God, when with their presumptuous behaviour they contravene the order established by him’. Slaves, the holy father teaches, must ‘consider themselves as servants of the lords’, and lords as ‘fellow-servants among servants’. Beautiful expression!

Isn’t this a profitable religion? By nature, Gregory teaches that ‘all men are equal’ but a ‘mysterious disposition’ places ‘some below others’, creates the ‘diversity of states’, and of course as ‘a sequel to sin’. Conclusion: ‘Since each man does not walk in the same way through life, one has to dominate over others’. God and the Church—which in practice are always identified with the high clergy!—exists for the maintenance of slavery. And from Great Britain to Italy, passing through Gaul, there was in his time a constant trade in Christian slaves.

The Roman Church needed slaves, and the monasteries needed them. Gregory himself encouraged, through the Gallic rector Candide, the purchase of Anglic boy slaves for the Roman monasteries. Everyone bought and abused slaves as if they were cattle. And even to an enemy such as Agilulf, king of the Lombards, the pope could assure him that the labour of the forced ones would be beneficial to both parties. If the most unfortunate escaped their misery, which happened frequently enough, the holy father naturally pressed to be returned to their owners. He chased the escaped slave from a Roman monastery as well as the escaped baker from his brother. But then the pope was magnanimous and instead of punishing the crime of the coloni with the deprivation of his possessions, he wanted to see them punished with a beating by ‘duly returning the slaves to his friends’ (Richards).

Gregory, who insistently proclaimed the imminent end of the world, and who with the struggle for faith made this preaching the ‘guiding idea’ of his pontificate, still had time to do great business. And he made Saint Peter an increasingly wealthy character. He greatly increased the profits of his estate and laid the foundations for the decisive and victorious territorial rule of the papacy. With his Sicilian latifundia he supplied grain to Rome, paid the imperial troops of the Roman parts, took care of supplies and defence, and in times of crisis he even commanded the Roman garrison. In this way the ‘treasurer of the poor’, as he called himself, set in motion the evolution towards the State of the Church, with a hardly imaginable sequence of failures, wars and deceptions.