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Category: Roman Catholic popes

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Destruction of Germanic paganism Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s Criminal History, 143

 

Brunhilda, Chlothar II and Dagobert I
or ‘the Christianisation of the idea of king’.

‘… a wild political animal’. —J. Richards referring to Brunhilda.

‘Precisely under this sovereign, as can be clearly demonstrated, the Christianisation of the idea of the king reached one of its first peaks’. —H.H. Anton, concerning Chlothar II.

‘… God gracious above all measure… he heard him above all in the advice of St. Arnulf, bishop of the city of Metz… He heard him also in the warnings of his steward Pipinus and Kunibert, bishop of Cologne’. —Fredegar, alluding to Dagobert I.

‘He filled with fear and terror all the kingdoms around him’. —Liber Historiae Francorum.

 

Pope Gregory I gallivanting with ‘a wild political animal’

In the year 592, the oldest of the Merovingian kings, Guntram, died in the Frankish kingdom after a series of threats and attacks, and he died without leaving any descendants. But after the death of his own sons he had adopted his eldest grandson, still a minor, Childebert II (575-596), leaving him part of his kingdom. He thus ruled two partial kingdoms: Austrasia and Burgundy. Childebert, who in the last period of his life subdued the rebellious Bretons in the west and a Thuringian people between the Saale and Elbe in the east, soon came under the full influence of his mother.

The powerful Brunhilda, the most prominent figure in the Frankish kingdom, had in 575 imposed her five-year-old son’s rule in Austrasia and settled the ensuing power struggle with the Austrian nobles of Guntram’s camp in her favour, and in favour of the kingship.

In his letters, the holy father completely ignores Brunhilda’s dreadful family discord. He sees her, her son, her kingdom and all the other kingdoms won for the right faith ‘as bright lamps shining and illuminating amidst the night darkness of unbelief’. He repeatedly thanks her for the support she has given to his English missionaries on their journey through the Frankish kingdom. He extols her ‘love for the prince of the apostles, Peter, to whom you are wholeheartedly devoted, as I know’. And he asks for her help, often in vain, against simony, schismatic groups and ‘pagan’ cults.

Gregory exhorts Brunhilda to forcibly prevent the worship of sacred trees and other idolatries and recommends the use of scourging, torture and imprisonment to obtain the conversion of rebellious ‘pagans’. And, of course, the pope also sent relics to the queen.

Gregory I wrote to the powerful queen, who supposedly ruled the Church, about a dozen letters, usually in a tone of syrupy flattery, which he also used with the imperial house, both with the (later) victim and the murderer. With some restraint he began the first papal epistle: ‘Your Excellency’s character, praiseworthy and pleasing to God, is to be seen both in your government and in the education of your son’, but it soon got louder. And while ‘Gregorian chant’ had nothing to do with Gregory, here he could sing in higher and higher tones:

How great are the gifts which God has bestowed on you, and with what clemency the grace of heaven swells your heart, not only do your many other merits attest, but they are especially recognised in the fact that you rule the coarse hearts of heathen peoples with the art of cautious prudence, what is still more meritorious, the regal power is accompanied by the adornment of wisdom.

Brunhilda was not only powerful but also useful to the Church. She made numerous donations and built abbeys, and the pope even asked for her support for the reform of the Frankish Church and the protection of ecclesiastical property.

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Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Roman Catholic popes

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’?

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Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Pederasty Roman Catholic popes 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.

 

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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’!
 

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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?

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Destruction of Greco-Roman world George Lincoln Rockwell Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s Criminal History, 140

– For the context of these translations click here –

(Left, Pope Gregory in the great window at
the Church of the Good Shepherd (Rosemont, Pennsylvania).)

Modern research attributes to this pope regular studies and very solid instruction, ‘an eminent cultural and moral training’ (RAC XII 1983). However, precise data on Gregory’s scientific culture are lacking. In that blessed Christian age, it did not actually exist. ‘Criticism and judgment fade’, wrote Ferdinand Gregorovius in the middle of the 19th century. We no longer hear from schools of rhetoric, dialectics and jurisprudence in Rome. Instead, he discovers that ‘more room than ever has been made for mystical enthusiasm and material worship’. And in much more recent times Jeffrey Richards confirms: ‘The philosophical and scientific training had long since disappeared’. Gregory had probably only studied Roman law, having reached the last remnant of classical training …

At that time there was hardly anyone in Rome who knew Greek. And the papal biographers of the Liber Pontificalis show how badly Latin was written… For Gregory the only relevant philosophy is in the Bible, ‘his supreme authority’ (Evans). And all the wisdom in the world, ‘science, the beauty of literature, the liberal arts’ are things that only serve for the intelligence ‘of Scripture’, that is, for a life of constant repentance and penance. But everything that does not directly serves religion is rejected by Gregory. He eliminates it completely.

The pope, one of the four ‘great’ fathers of the Latin Church and patron of educated people, ordered the burning of the imperial library on the Palatine (where the western emperors, their Germanic heirs and the Byzantine rulers continued to reside) as well as the library of the Capitol. In any case, the English scholar John of Salisbury, bishop of Chartres, affirms that the pope had had manuscripts of classical authors destroyed in Roman libraries.
 

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Editor’s Note:

See what Catherine Nixey says in this section of her book about the destruction of old libraries by Christians. Even if he had not been assassinated, I believe that George Lincoln Rockwell would have failed because he never saw that it was not yet time to do any activism, but to spend long and painful years in the temple of ‘Delphi’, so to speak.

For those who survived him after the attack that took his life, the correct tactic would have been to follow what Rockwell had started with the journal National Socialist World, but this time bringing out the true history of our parents’ religion. Himmler and his gang had already done something similar with their pamphlets for the members of the SS, since they already contemplated the CQ although in a more embryonic way than we do in The West’s Darkest Hour. And the German psyche had already been prepared by 19th-century philosophers like Schelling and Hegel, who spoke of a more pantheistic conception of ‘God’ than the crude theism of Judeo-Christians.

Jumping directly into activism in 1960s America, as Rockwell did, tacitly implied that the masses of Americans were already awake and that they only needed a good guide. But they weren’t. And not even the pundits of white nationalism today are. Otherwise, by now they would have said something about the climax of the essay considered the masthead of this site:

435 CE: In this year occurs the most significant action on the part of Emperor Theodosius II: He openly proclaims that the only legal religion in Rome apart from Christianity is Judaism! Through a bizarre, subterranean and astonishing struggle, Judaism has not only persecuted the old culture, and Rome, its mortal archenemy, adopts a Jewish creed—but the Jewish religion itself, so despised and insulted by the old Romans, is now elevated as the only official religion of Rome along with Christianity!

Using the metaphors of Savitri, there can be no ‘lightning’ (action) without ‘sun’ (wisdom), and the fact is that in white nationalism the blackest darkness reigns just before the dawn, as they are still allergic to Delphi’s wisdom by ignoring Christianity’s history. Karlheinz Deschner continues:
 

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Around 600 Gregory lectured harshly in a letter to the Gallic bishop Desiderius of Vienne, because he taught classical grammar and literature. Filled with shame and ‘great disgust’ he attributes to his ‘grave iniquity’ a blasphemous occupation, as if the same mouth could not ‘sing the praises of Jupiter and the praises of Christ’.

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Catholic Church England Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Roman Catholic popes

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.

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Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Roman Catholic popes

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.

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Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s Criminal History, 137

– For the context of these translations click here –

Saint Gregory the Great
by Francisco Goya.

‘The property of the poor’

The same man who prophesied the calamitous end of the world and the impending divine judgment carried out an ecclesiastical property policy as intense as if that divine judgment were never to come.

The pope had a series of well-organised patrimonies, about fifteen at the beginning of his pontificate, and territory of many hundreds of square kilometres, called the patrimony of St. Peter. This meant that all this did not belong to the pope, the clergy or the Church, but actually belonged to the blessed prince of the Apostles. And that property of Peter extended from North Africa, where to Gregory’s great joy the almost depopulated territories were worked by prisoners of war (the cheapest ‘labour’), passing through Italy, the urban territory of Rome (Patrimonium urbanum), to Corsica, Sardinia, Dalmatia, Istria and Provence: a property of enormous extension and certainly the largest in Italy. Much of it came from imperial foundations. Perhaps the last gigantic increase was due to the estates of the Arian Church, which was plundered after the destruction of the Ostrogoth kingdom. And while private property diminished more and more, the riches of the Church were always increasing.

In Sicily, the granary of Rome since ancient times, the patrimony of ‘Saint Peter’ was so great that Gregory divided it into two administrative centres (rectories): Palermo and Syracuse, with about 400 tenants in total (conductores). And he personally was informed that for years ‘many people suffered violence and injustice by the administrators of Roman ecclesiastical property’, from whom he had deprived them by taking away their slaves. In the exploitation of the territories, the pope had the support of some of his closest associates as well as the rectors of different patrimonies (obliged with an oath before the supposed tomb of Peter, covered by him with 100 pounds of gold).

Gregory, who ordered the deacons of Catania to wear sandals (compagi) because it was the only thing allowed to Roman deacons, despite his gloomy penitential sermons and his corrosive expectation of the destruction of the world, still found time, surprisingly long, to take care of the fields, the belly mares, the old oxen, the useless cows and the slaves, who had to be naturally baptised members of the holy Church whenever possible. The methods of the holy father do not seem to have been too scrupulous. The main reason was to increase revenue before the impending doomsday and to present the boss with a perfect balance sheet. It has been written that his slogan was: ‘Prestige, efficiency and discipline’. Today, that could be the creed of any American marketing scholar…

Papal real estate continually provided Gregory with large amounts of merchandise and money, making the Catholic Church the leading economic power in Italy… The miserable peasants who were already being deprived with the taxes on the land (burdatio) that were collected three times a year, in addition to the leases and deliveries to the Holy Catholic Church, saw themselves oppressed… But Gregory called himself ‘treasurer of the poor’, describing the immense pontifical riches as ‘the property of the poor’: one ‘of the most beautiful expressions of him’, sings the Church History Manual.

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Catholic Church Italy Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s Criminal History, 136

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

The altar of Gregory in St. Peter’s Basilica
contains the remains of Pope Gregory.

 
‘Thinking different from most—almost a crime worthy of death’

Soon this pope, like most of his predecessors and especially those who followed him, intervened harshly against those who thought differently, against all non-Catholics. His great goal was propagatio fidei, the planned extension of papal power, at almost any cost.

For this reason he interfered in the affairs of England and in the Frank-Merovingian kingdom, whose kings he vainly sought to win over to ecclesiastical reform. He recommended torture and imprisonment as coercive means, and occasionally also the peaceful transformation of pagan places of worship or Gentile customs, ‘so that people thus confidently go to the usual places’, always following the circumstances. He also advised, on occasion, promising converts a tax cut and ‘converting’ the stubborn with higher taxes. To the Sardinians, who still persisted in their paganism, their bishop had to Christianise them by force, as if they were slaves!

But not only did Gregory propagate the conversion of the ‘pagans’ in Sardinia, Sicily, Corsica, and elsewhere. He also tirelessly fought ‘heresy’ and intervened with great zeal in the war against heretics within the missionary war for the expansion of the faith outward, gladly called ‘defence of the Roman Church’ or ‘the pastoral care of the pope’. Not even those who were simply outsiders or disagreed could remain unmolested. ‘Thinking differently than most, leading a different way of life from that led by people in general, increasingly meant a direct questioning of the doctrines and practices of the common people, already constituting almost a crime worthy of death’ (Herrmann)…

Gregory was a propagandist convinced of the virtue of humility. And humble, of course, it is only he who is where the pope is and obeys him with the greatest submission. Conversely, in Gregory’s mind a ‘heretic’ could in no way be humble. The ‘heresy’ was a priori the opposite, a division of hearts, the ruin of souls, a service to Baal and the devil; it was apostasy, rebellion and pride. ‘The place of heretics is pride itself… the place of the wicked is pride, as conversely humility is the place of good’. Tolerance towards ‘heretics’ was unthinkable from the beginning, from New Testament times. The ‘heretics’ were already fought in the primitive Church as ‘antichrists’, as ‘firstborn of Satan’, ‘animals in human form’, ‘beasts’, ‘devils’, ‘slaughter cattle for hell’ and so on. All of this was, indeed, an old and accepted tradition in the Church, which a worthy predecessor of Gregory, Pope Gelasius I (492-496), had summed up in this sentence: ‘Tolerance towards heretics is more pernicious than the most terrible destructions of the provinces by the barbarians’.

In Africa, where after the total annihilation of the Arian vandals the Catholic imperial house prevailed again, the pope was annoyed by the Manicheans, some remains of the Arians, and to a great extent also the Donatists. Once again, as in Augustine’s time, domination was the champion of the impoverished! But soon Gregory forced the repression of the ‘heretics’. In a letter to the African prefect in 593, he is extremely surprised that the state does not act energetically against the sectarians. He later protested also by sending three bishops as delegates to Constantinople before the emperor, for the violation of the imperial laws in Africa. But the truth is that in the second half of his pontificate there is no longer any talk of the Donatists at all.

The ‘great’ pope hated anything that wasn’t Catholic, otherwise he wouldn’t have been ‘great’…

For Gregory the pagans had neither divine nor human rights. And messing it all up—as has been done in his circles to this day—he presented the pagans as persecutors of the Catholics! It is true that he did not advocate outright violence, lashing, torture and jail at any cost for the Gentiles, who according to him ‘live like wild animals’. Nothing of that! Magnanimous and good-natured as he was, he cordially encouraged to wipe out the pagan tenants from ecclesiastical lands by financial imposition. The stubborn and hard-headed peasant who refused ‘to return to the Lord God’ had to ‘be burdened with so many taxes that this punishment would push him to enter the right path as quickly as possible’.

And if even with the most unbearable tax pressure someone was reluctant to enter ‘the right path’, the Holy Father was a little tougher. He then ordered a rigorous prison and, in the case of slaves, even torture which Augustine, the preacher of the mansuetudo catholica or ecclesial meekness, already allowed. And he allowed it not only with slaves but also with all schismatics (Donatists). The clever Numidian thinker twists the words and calls torture emendatio, as if it were a kind of baptismal cure and preparation, a trifle compared to hell.

Gregory thus Christianised the sad remains of Sardinian paganism in the light of doctor Augustine. In 599 he exhorted by letter ‘with the greatest fervour’ to Archbishop Januarius of Cagliari ‘to pastoral vigilance against idolaters’. He first recommended conversion through ‘a convincing exhortation’ and not without evoking ‘divine judgment’. Then he wrote clearly:

But if you find that they are not willing to change their way of life, we wish that you arrest them with all zeal. If they are slaves, punish them with whipping and torment, seeking their correction. But if they are free people, they must be led to repentance employing severe prison, as it should be, so that those who despise hearing the words of redemption, which save them from the danger of death, may in any case be returned by bodily torments to the desired healthy faith.

Through bodily torments a healthy Catholic mentality is achieved…

At that time, ‘pagans’ still existed in many regions, not only where Archbishop Januarius himself tolerated them among his tenants. There were pagans in Corsica, in Sicily, in Campania, let alone in Gaul and even in Great Britain. Everywhere Gregory pushed for their disappearance.

For this he not only set in motion his clergy but the nobility, the landowners and the civil arm too. He had to strike everywhere in union with the ecclesiastical arm. Thus, in 593 he ordered the praetor of Sicily to render all his assistance to the bishop of Tyndaris in his work of annihilating the ‘pagans’. And in 598 he ordered Agnelo of Terracina to seek out the tree worshipers and punish them so that ‘paganism’ would not be passed on to others. He also required the assistance of Mauro, the local military commander. And of course all of this happened, to put it in the words of John the Deacon, ‘through the application of legitimate authority’.

Pope Gregory accepted and even openly sanctioned the religious war to subdue the Gentiles… They had to submit by force without further ado and then more or less smoothly seek conversion: a rule that the Catholic historian Friedrich Heer defines as ‘the Christian policy of conquest and expansion until the eve of the First World War’. In this regard Gregory worked, as we see in his letter to the emperor, with the old Ambrosian idea that ‘the peace of the res publica depends on the peace of the universal Church’. He consequently kept his military commanders and even his own soldiery, which repeatedly prevailed victorious… In the eyes of the Catholic historian of the popes, all this happened ‘in an absolutely natural way’ as by himself Pope Gregory was ‘the bulwark and leader’, the ‘consul of God’, who took in his hands ‘in an autonomous way the history of Italy, the history of his country’.

Categories
Catholic religious orders Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s Criminal History, 135

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
Left, Mass of St. Gregory, c. 1490, attributed to Diego de la Cruz, oil and gold on panel (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

From Gregory I, the humble servant of servants, until the 20th century it is well known that the popes had their feet kissed. The peculiarities were regulated by the ceremonial books. But, as we also know, the one who was actually being kissed was not his foot, but God’s. That is why all the emperors, including Charles V, also regularly performed this ugly rite on the portico of St. Peter’s basilica.

It is understood that Gregory’s personal conscience was marked by the origin, career and status of his character. He always made himself respected by both the clergy and the laity. In modern parlance it could be said that he was a Law-and-order type, a person of order, a former prefect of police, a judge of the criminal who strongly insisted on obedience and discipline, especially by monks and nuns, taking a special interest in their morality—or immorality—as well as in the observance of their vow of poverty.

Gregory used to call his clerics and officials, whose influence was decisive in the Roman municipal administration, ‘soldiers of Peter’ and also ‘soldiers of the Roman Church’ (milites beati Petri, milites Ecclesiae romanae). The first monk elevated to the pontifical throne administered the Lateran almost in the manner of a monastery, populating it in any case with monks, whom he elected to high offices. But he, who adopted the humble monastic catchphrase of ‘servant of the servants of God’—which after his death became an official title of the popes—naturally wanted to be ‘the first servant in the Church of God’ (Altendorf).

Gregory never used the name of St. Peter without the tag ‘prince of the apostles’. He strictly forbade subjects (subditi) to dare to pass judgment on the life of prelates or superiors (praepositi). Even if they were unworthy and justly deserved to be censured, they should not be reproached. Rather, one had to voluntarily embrace the yoke of reverence.

 
The man of double standards

Where he had power, Gregory exercised it without regard, very proud of his justice in front of his subordinates. Archdeacon Lorenzo, who for his sake was preferred in the papal succession and who could not hide his disappointment, lost his post. A year later, Gregory burned him in a solemn ceremony and in the presence of all the clergy ‘for his pride and other crimes’.

Yet more significant is the following event. The monk Justus, a doctor at the Monastery of Saint Andrew, who cared for the increasingly ill pope, confessed to brother Copious that he had hidden three gold coins. When Gregory found out, he rigorously forbade anyone to treat Justus, that no one from the monastery should visit him on his deathbed or assist him. And after his death his corpse had to be thrown with the three coins into a dunghill while the assembly shouted: ‘To hell with you and your money!’

With such severity Gregory understood the monastic vow although, personally, everything that he hadn’t given to his monasteries he sold, distributing the money among the poor. As a monk he was so wealthy that in 587 he was able to make another donation to the Monastery of Saint Andrew (to which with the expression of owner he called ‘my monastery’). Furthermore, at least thirteen years after becoming a Benedictine monk, he still possessed many rustic goods.

Undoubtedly, the pope was also a man of compromise and double standards. As hard as he was always with the defrocked monks and nuns, forcing them to return to the monastery, in the case of nobles he could make exceptions.

Venantius, a patrician of Syracuse and probably a friend of Gregory, left his monastery in contempt of the ecclesiastical precept. He took home the beautiful and dominant lady Italica who made him the father of two girls, also becoming the epicentre of a circle of anti-monastic literati. But Gregory didn’t force him to return to the monastery. He only tried with great effort to convince him to do it voluntarily, although in vain. What is more, he aided the children born of that anti-canonical marriage, proving once more—as Jeffrey Richards, his modern and often benevolent biographer says—‘that in Gregory’s image of the world was a law for the rich, and another for the poor’…

One last example about Gregory’s double standards: When Bishop Andrew beat a poor woman who lived off ecclesiastical charity so barbarically that she died shortly after, the pope simply forbade him to celebrate Mass for two months—perhaps to the satisfaction of the bishop himself. On the contrary, Gregory had ‘all carnal sinners’ locked up in the prisons of the monasteries, so that a modern researcher (Grupp) writes that this ‘evokes the old slaveholders’, taking such crowds into those monastic houses of repression that according to the monk John Climacus—a contemporary of Gregory, somewhat younger than him—they ‘could hardly take a step’.

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Editor’s note. ‘But, as we also know, the one who was actually being kissed was not his foot, but God’s’.

This means that even proud kings had to symbolically kiss the feet of the god of the Jews, since the god of the New Testament is the same as the god of the Old Testament.

When will American white nationalists see something so obvious? Or is it that they don’t realise that the Christian religion of our parents is somehow connected with the empowerment of Jewry?

Categories
Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s Criminal History, 134

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

CHAPTER 7

Pope Gregory I (590-604)

A 1627 interpretation of Gregorio
Magno by Francisco de Zurbarán

‘Just and loving was Gregory, both with the poor and the economically weak, as with the slaves, the heretics and the Jews.’ —F.M. Stratmann, Catholic theologian

‘The history of the Church has not produced many characters who have rightfully carried the nickname of The Great’. —Heinrich Kraft

‘Nor was it the worst that he advised proceeding against the recalcitrant with whipping, torture and jail, but with naive cynicism he recommended the increase in taxes as a means of conversion: those who converted had to be relieved of the established taxes, and those who were reluctant had to be softened with tax pressure’. —Johannes Haller
 

The flight from the world and the desire to make a career

Of the more than 260 popes, only Leo I and St. Gregory I (590-604) are the pontiffs who, in addition to the title of Doctors of the Church, bear the appellation of ‘The Great’ (San Gregorio Magno). He came from the ‘big world’. The first monk who reached the supposed chair of Peter was of the senatorial lineage of the Anicius; that is to say, of the high and rich Roman nobility, de senatoribus primis. All ecclesiastical writers emphasise the ‘noble’ or rich origin of their heroes. Even in the purely external aspect of him it was the ‘miracle of his time’ for being a man of average height, with small, yellowish eyes, a discreet aquiline nose, and four miserable little curls, and a powerful, almost bald skull: a miracle in himself, and not only in his time. Well, that truly extraordinary head multiplied and, like a holy relic, it could be in many cities at the same time: Constance, for example, possessed the head of Gregory, as did Prague, Lisbon and Sens.

By 573 Gregory was praefectus urbis, the highest civil office in Rome. Decked out in precious stones and flanked by an armed personal guard, he resided in a sumptuous palace because, although he was ‘already driven by the yearning for heaven’, as he confesses, he was interested in beautiful appearances, in their ‘external standard of living’ and without excessive disgust he served ‘the earthly world’.

The family was wealthy with possessions in and around Rome, and especially in Sicily. He even had contacts in Constantinople, and also apparently was intensely religious. Wealth and religion are not excluded in any way. Quite the contrary: whoever God loves makes him rich, and despite the camels and the needle eyes, he gets to heaven. The powerful bloodline of Gregory had already given the world two popes: Agapetus I and Felix III, whom he himself calls his ancestor (atavus). And the Church also canonised his mother Silvia…

Already between his election and consecration on September 3, 590, Gregory, who because of his weakness almost always lay in bed, had called to fight the bubonic plague from Egypt, to which even his predecessor Pelagius II had succumbed on February 8, 590.

Of course, Gregory declared the plague as punishment from God, as revenge for the sins of the Lombards, the ‘pagans’, the ‘heretics’ and demanded their conversion ‘to the true and upright Catholic faith’ through repentance, penance, prayers and songs of Psalms for three days, ‘while it is still time for tears’.

He also set in motion among the ruins of the destroyed city a spectacular seven-round procession—with it Ferdinand Gregorovius begins History of Rome in the Middle Ages—with pitiful choral songs and tedious invocations to all possible martyrs, including those who never had existed but were invented in the bloody comedy of the doctor of the Church, St. Ambrose of Milan. The success was tremendous but an eyewitness told St. Gregory of Tours that then ‘in the space of an hour, while the people raised their voices in prayer to the Lord, eighty men collapsed and fell dead’. In any case, in Constantinople, by God’s inscrutable design, between 542 and 544 the plague had claimed the lives of 300,000 people.

Amid such gloomy feelings, visions and realities of worldly decay—not only was the plague raging: ancient temples were also being razed, and even the papal granaries and churches—, Gregory, who has been called ‘the last Roman’ and ‘the first medieval pope’, surprisingly started his career knowing exactly what he wanted…

In 590 Gregory ascended the pontifical throne despite his ailments and, naturally, supposedly against his will. This was part of the etiquette and until the 20th century it has been part of clerical hypocrisy. In his time, however, even the humblest ecclesiastical offices were so coveted that in 592 or 593 Emperor Maurice forbade soldiers from entering monasteries and civil servants from embracing the clerical state. And Gregory knew very well that ‘someone who strips off his worldly garments to immediately occupy an ecclesiastical office only changes places, but doesn’t leave the world’.