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Category: So-called saints

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Dominion (book) Inquisition So-called saints

Dominion, 12

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

Before quoting the book, we should recall the pride shown in the Greco-Roman world for the Aryan nude in the form of public statuary, something that both Jews and Christians abhorred. The so-called Catholic saints only show a monstrous reversal of these values, as can be seen in the hagiographies rephrased by Tom Holland in his chapter ‘Persecution: 1229 Marburg’:

The Lady Elizabeth had been born to greatness. Descended from a cousin of Stephen, Hungary’s first truly Christian king, she had been sent as a child to the court of Thuringia, in central Germany, and groomed there for marriage. At the age of fourteen, she had joined Louis, its twenty-year-old ruler, on the throne. The couple had been very happy. Elizabeth had borne her husband three children; Louis had gloried in his wife’s demonstrable closeness to God. Even when he was woken in the night by a maid tugging on his foot, he had borne it patiently, knowing that the servant had mistaken him for his wife, whose custom it was to get up in the early hours to pray. Elizabeth’s insistence on giving away her jewellery to the poor; her mopping up of mucus and saliva from the faces of the sick; her making of shrouds for paupers out of her finest linen veils: here were gestures that had prefigured her far more spectacular self-abasement in the wake of her husband’s death. Her only regret was that it did not go far enough. ‘If there were a life that was more despised, I would choose it.’ When Count Paviam urged Elizabeth to abandon the rigours and humiliations of her existence in Marburg, and return with him to her father’s court, she refused point blank…

Clerks in the service of the papal bureaucracy and scholars learned in canon law had long been toiling to strengthen the foundations of the Church’s authority. They understood the awful responsibility that weighed upon their shoulders. Their task was to bring the Christian people to God. ‘There is one Catholic Church of the faithful, and outside of it there is absolutely no salvation.’ So it had been formally declared during Elizabeth’s childhood, in 1215, at the fourth of a series of councils convened at the Lateran. To defy this canon, to reject the structures of authority that served to uphold it, to disobey the clergy whose solemn prerogative it was to shepherd souls, was to follow the path to hell. [pages 247-249]

One thing that is completely absent on the intellectual right today is the historical memory of what the doctrine of eternal damnation meant for the mental health of medieval Europeans. I touched on the subject in my books on family tragedy; and more succinctly in ‘On Erasmus’, collected in one of the books of the featured post.

In 1206, a one-time playboy by the name of Francis, a native of the Italian city of Assisi, had spectacularly renounced his patrimony. Taking off his clothes, he had handed them over to his father. ‘Moreover he did not even keep his drawers, but stripped himself naked before all the bystanders.’ The local bishop, impressed rather than appalled by this display, had tenderly covered him with his own cloak, and sent him on his way with a blessing. Here, with this episode, had been set the pattern of Francis’ career. His genius for taking Christ’s teachings literally, for dramatising their paradoxes and complexities, for combining simplicity and profundity in a single memorable gesture, would never leave him. [page 251]

Above, St Francis’ renunciation of worldy goods by Giotto.

He served lepers; preached to birds; rescued lambs from butchers. Rare were those immune to his charisma. Admiration for his mission reached to the very summit of the Church. Innocent III, the pope who in 1215 had convened the Fourth Lateran Council, was not a man easily impressed. Imperious, daring and brilliant, he gave way to no one, overthrowing emperors, excommunicating kings. Unsurprisingly, then, when Francis, at the head of twelve ragged ‘brothers’, or ‘friars’, first arrived in Rome, Innocent had refused to see him. The whiff of heresy, not to mention blasphemy, had seemed altogether too rank. Francis, though, unlike Waldes, never stinted in his respect for the Church, in his obedience to its authority. Innocent’s doubts were eased. Imaginative as well as domineering, he had come to see in Francis and his followers not a danger, but an opportunity. Rather than treating them as his predecessors had treated the Waldensians, he ordained them a legally constituted order of the Church. ‘Go, and the Lord be with you, brethren, and as He shall deign to inspire you, preach repentance to all.’ [pages 251-252]

By 1217, less than a decade after this proclamation, a Franciscan mission had reached Germany. Elizabeth would grow up profoundly inspired by its example. By dressing in secret as a beggar, she had been paying tribute to Francis. Other demonstrations of her enthusiasm for his teachings were more public. In 1225, she provided the Franciscans with a base at the foot of the Wartburg, in the town of Eisenach. Three years later, following the death of her husband, she made her way there and formally renounced her ties to the world. Yet no matter how desperately she longed to do so, she did not then go begging from door to door. Elizabeth had properly absorbed the lessons of Francis’ example. She understood that to embrace poverty without obedience was to risk the fate of Waldes. [page-252]

While Waldes was very similar to Elizabeth and Francis in terms of mortifications of the flesh (which today would be considered a mental disorder, self-harm), in the eyes of the Church he was reprehensible because, unlike Elizabeth and Francis, he didn’t faithfully obey his ecclesiastical superiors: enough for him to be considered a heretic.

No mortification, no gesture of abasement, could possibly be undertaken unless at the command of a superior. Here, for a princess, the mistress of many servants, was a realisation that was itself a form of submission. So Elizabeth, even as she sat enthroned by her husband’s side, had employed a magister disciplinae spiritualis: a ‘master of spiritual discipline’. Not just any master, either. ‘I could have sworn obedience to a bishop or an abbot who had possessions, but I thought it better to swear obedience to one who has nothing and relies totally on begging. And so I submitted to Master Conrad’…

Even before Louis’ death, he had punished her for missing one of his sermons with a beating so violent that the stripes were still visible three weeks later… To suffer was to gain redemption. In 1231, when Elizabeth died of her austerities at the tender age of twenty-four, Conrad did not hesitate to hail her as a saint. As gold is purified by fire, so had she been purged of sin. The same strictness that had brought her to an early grave had brought her to heaven. [pages 252-253]

Elizabeth of Hungary submits to her master of spiritual discipline. This image appears in Holland’s book. Conrad was tireless in his defence of the Church and its authority:

In 1231, there came a fresh refinement. A new pope, Gregory IX, authorised Conrad not merely to preach against heresy, but to devote himself to the search for it—the inquisitio. No longer was it the responsibility of a bishop to bring heretics to trial, and sit in judgement on them, but rather that of a cleric especially appointed to the task. Even though, as a priest, Conrad could not himself ‘decree or pronounce a sentence involving the shedding of blood’, he was licensed by Gregory to compel the secular authorities to impose it. Never before had power of this order been given to a campaigner against heresy. Now, when Conrad rode on his mule from village to village, summoning the locals to answer his interrogation of their beliefs, he did so not merely as a preacher, but as a whole new breed of official: an inquisitor.

‘In all things he broke her will, to ensure that the merit of her obedience to him would increase.’ So Conrad had justified his handling of Elizabeth. Now, with all of Germany his to discipline, he could not afford to soften. The truest kindness was cruelty; the truest mercy harshness. The swarm of heretics that confronted Conrad were not readily to be redeemed from damnation. Only fire could smoke them out. Pyres needed to be stoked as they had never been stoked before. The burning of heretics—hitherto a rare and sporadic expedient, only ever reluctantly licensed, if at all—was the very mark of Conrad’s inquisition. In towns and villages along the Rhine, the stench of blackened flesh hung in the air. ‘So many heretics were burned throughout Germany that their number could not be comprehended.’ Conrad’s critics, unsurprisingly, accused him of a killing spree. They charged him with believing every accusation that was brought before him; of rushing the process of law; of sentencing the innocent to the flames. No one, though, was innocent. All were fallen. Better to suffer as Christ had suffered, tortured in a place of public execution for a crime that he had not committed, than to suffer eternal damnation. Better to suffer for a few fleeting moments than to burn for all eternity.

With Master Conrad, the yearning to cleanse the world of sin, to heal it of its leprosy, had turned murderous. That made it no less revolutionary. The suspicion of the worldly order that had brought Gregory VII to humble an anointed king before the gates of Canossa was one that Conrad more than shared. As Elizabeth’s master, he had forbidden her to eat food ‘about which she did not have a clear conscience’. Anything on her husband’s table that might have derived from exploitation of the poor, that might have been extracted from peasants as a tribute or a tax, she had dutifully spurned. ‘As a result, she often suffered great penury, eating nothing but rolls spread with honey.’ The Lady Elizabeth had been a saint. Her peers were not. In the summer of 1233, Conrad dared to accuse one of them, the Count of Sayn, of heresy. A frantically convened synod of bishops, in the presence of the German king himself, threw out the case. Conrad, nothing daunted, began to prepare charges against further noblemen.

Then, on 30 July, as he was returning from the Rhine to Marburg, he was ambushed by a group of knights and cut down. The news of his death was greeted with rejoicing throughout Germany. In the Lateran, though, there was indignation. As Conrad was laid to rest in Marburg, by the side of the Lady Elizabeth, Gregory mourned him in sombre terms. The murderers, so the Pope warned, were harbingers of a rising darkness. All of heaven and earth had shuddered at their crime. Their patron was literally hellish: none other than the Devil himself. [pages 254-256]

Categories
Dominion (book) Emperor Julian So-called saints

Dominion, 4

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

For previous instalments of this series, see here, here and here.

When I first read Nietzsche when I was seventeen, I was very confused. At the time I wanted to rebel against my father’s traumatic Catholicism the way normies did and still do: through modern freethinker thought. I didn’t understand why Nietzsche fulminated against believers and non-believers alike. As a teenager, I never imagined that even the most militant atheists were still, axiologically, Christian.

I didn’t start to understand Nietzsche until, alarmed by the Islamisation of Europe, I read the aggregations of a Swede that I would eventually collect in the entry ‘The red giant’ (to honour Nietzsche, since 2021 this article has been available in German). The following quotes from Holland’s Dominion are taken from the chapter ‘Charity: AD 362’:

The shock of this cut Flavius Claudius Julianus [Emperor Julian] to the quick. The nephew of Constantine, he had been raised a Christian, with eunuchs set over him to keep him constant in his faith. As a young man, though, he had repudiated Christianity—and then, after becoming emperor in 361, had committed himself to claiming back from it those who had ‘abandoned the ever-living gods for the corpse of the Jew’. A brilliant scholar, a dashing general, Julian was also a man as devout in his beliefs as any of those he dismissively termed ‘Galileans’. Cybele was a particular object of his devotions. It was she, he believed, who had rescued him from the darkness of his childhood beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, heading eastwards to prepare for war with Persia, he had paused in his journey to make a diversion to Pessinus. What he found there appalled him. Even after he had made sacrifice, and honoured those who had stayed constant in their worship of the city’s gods, he could not help but dwell in mingled anger and despondency on the neglect shown Cybele. Clearly, the people of Pessinus were unworthy of her patronage. Leaving the Galatians behind, he did as Paul had done three centuries before: he wrote them a letter.

‘My orders are that a fifth be given to the poor who serve the priests, and that the remainder be distributed to travellers and to beggars.’ Julian, in committing himself to this programme of welfare, took for granted that Cybele would approve. Caring for the weak and unfortunate, so the emperor insisted, had always been a prime concern of the gods. [pages 137-138]

One of the problems with us apostates from the Christian faith is that we fail to realise that this mania for helping the dispossessed is also Christian, even in non-Christian contexts. On this site, I have generally spoken well of Emperor Julian, but like all apostates, he probably never realised that, axiologically, he was still a Christian…

The heroes of the Iliad, favourites of the gods, golden and predatory, had scorned the weak and downtrodden. So too, for all the honour that Julian paid them, had philosophers. The starving deserved no sympathy… The young emperor, sincere though he was in his hatred of ‘Galilean’ teachings, and in regretting their impact upon all that he held most dear, was blind to the irony of his plan for combating them: that it was itself irredeemably Christian. ‘How apparent to everyone it is, and how shameful, that our own people lack support from us, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans support not only their own poor, but ours as well.’ [page 139]

The reversal of Greco-Roman values was already taking place at the time of the reign of the house of Constantine, i.e. the descendants or relatives of the first Christian emperor.

The wealthy, men who in previous generations might have boosted their status by endowing their cities with theatres, or temples, or bath-houses, had begun to find in the Church a new vent for their ambitions. This was why Julian, in a quixotic attempt to endow the worship of the ancient gods with a similar appeal, had installed a high priest over Galatia and urged his subordinates to practise poor relief. Christians did not merely inspire in Julian a profound contempt; they filled him with envy as well. [page 140]

There was no human existence so wretched, none so despised or vulnerable, that it did not bear witness to the image of God. Divine love for the outcast and derelict demanded that mortals love them too… ‘The bread in your board belongs to the hungry; the cloak in your wardrobe to the naked; the shoes you let rot to the barefoot; the money in your vaults to the destitute.’ The days when a wealthy man had only to sponsor a self-aggrandising piece of architecture to be hailed a public benefactor were well and truly gone. [pages 140-141]

In the following pages, Holland informs us that the quixotic Emperor Julian perished fighting the Persians, and gives us further evidence of how values were reversed:

And if so, then Martin—judged by the venerable standards of the aristocracy in Gaul—represented a new and disconcerting breed of hero: a Christian one. Such was the very essence of his magnetism. He was admired by his followers not despite but because of his rejection of worldly norms. Rather than accept a donative from Julian, he had publicly demanded release from the army altogether. ‘Until now it is you I have served; from this moment on I am a servant of Christ.’ Whether indeed Martin had truly said this, his followers found it easy to believe that he had… By choosing to live as a beggar, he had won a fame greater than that of any other Christian in Gaul… [pages 146-147]

No longer was Greco-Roman statuary, which so beautifully displayed the superb Aryan beauty, the benchmark for honouring the Aryan Gods. Now that the god of the Jews was in charge, it was necessary to admire their antithesis:

The first monk in Gaul ever to become a bishop, he was a figure of rare authority: elevated to the heights precisely because he had not wanted to be. Here, for anyone bred to the snobbery that had always been a characteristic of Roman society, was shock enough. Yet it was not only the spectacle of a smelly and shabbily dressed former soldier presiding as the most powerful man in Tours that had provoked a sense of a world turned upside down, of the last becoming first… As a soldier, though, he did have his heavy military cloak; and so, taking out his sword, he cut it in two, and gave one half to the beggar. No other story about Martin would be more cherished; no other story more repeated. This was hardly surprising. The echo was of a parable told by Jesus himself. The setting, as recorded in Luke’s gospel… [pages 147-149]

This image in a museum in Bamberg, Germany, which also appears in full colour in Holland’s book, shows Christ watching Martin sharing his cloak with a beggar. Holland then takes us to the year 394 to discuss the conduct of a billionaire, Meropius Pontius Paulinus:

Paulinus would present himself as a visual reproach to their extravagance. Pale from his sparse diet of beans, and with his hair roughly cropped like a slave’s, his appearance was calculated to shock. His body odour too. In an age when there existed no surer marker of wealth than to be freshly bathed and scented, Paulinus hailed the stench of the unwashed as ‘the smell of Christ’. [page 151]

As Hitler saw, Christianity was a religion that introduced spiritual terror into the Aryan soul. In the following paragraphs Holland explains the causes of such behaviour in a Roman who would once have used his wealth to honour Aryan beauty:

…he [Paulinus] far preferred another passage from the gospels. The story had been told by Jesus of a rich man, Dives, who refused to feed a beggar at his gates named Lazarus. The two men died. Dives found himself in fire, while Lazarus stood far above him, by Abraham’s side… Such was the fate that haunted Paulinus—and that he was resolved at all costs to avoid. [page 153]

In the final pages of the chapter, Holland informs us how the church reacted, thanks to the rationalisations of its African theologian, St Augustine, to reconcile the church’s love of riches with these Gospel passages. Yet Holland informs us that Clovis, the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, used to pray to St Martin: something which shows that even the most powerful warlord was already bowing down to a so-called saint.

Categories
Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) So-called saints

Christianity’s Criminal History, 154

On 5 June 754, after twenty-five years of ministry, Boniface together with his choral bishop of Utrecht, and fifty companions were killed by the Frisians of Dokkum on the Doorn, fiercely defended by his men, in the fight of ‘arms against arms’ (Vita Bonifatii), as befits the Christians. Uselessly he held over his head ‘the holy book of the gospels’ against the deadly blow.

And in a genuinely Christian manner, in ‘the land of the infidels’ burst ‘at once the swift warriors of future vengeance, well-kept but unsatisfied guests’ (sospites sed indevoti hospites), as the priest Willibald of Mainz wittily puts it, inflicting ‘an annihilating defeat on the pagans who confronted them’. The Frisians fled, ‘were beaten down in a huge mass, and turning their backs they lost their goods, estates and heirs with their lives. But the Christians returned home with the spoils of women, children, servants and handmaids of the idolaters’ (Vita Bonifatii).

Isn’t that a joyful and pious religion? Especially when the Frisian survivors of the plunder, the enslaved women and children terrified by murderers, ‘and by divine punishment’, embraced the faith of the one whom they had killed. Traces of this persist to this day in Fulda.

Of course, this is only a half-truth. The whole truth is told by the priest Willibald at the end of the eight chapter of his Vita (the ninth and last chapter is ‘a later addition’—Rau). The point is that, then, many miracles overflowed there:

Where the sacred corpse had been deposited… divine favours overflowed abundantly. And all who came there, afflicted with the most diverse diseases, found health of body and soul through the intercession of the holy man. So that some, whose bodies were almost completely dead, who were almost exanimate and seemed to be breathing their last breath, regained their former health; others, whose eyes were covered with blindness, recovered their sight, and still others who, imprisoned in the snares of the devil, had their spirits troubled and had lost their reason, obtained the primitive freshness of spirit.

And all this thanks to ‘the champion in the race of the spirit’. And, as is to be expected and as Willibald’s work concludes, ‘through the Lord, to whom be glory and honour for an eternity of eternities. Amen’.

Unfortunately, we haven’t finished with Christianity. On the contrary, by now it is developing more and more magnificently. While Boniface committed to the popes, the popes made a commitment for themselves. And for them the most important factors of power were still, above all, the Byzantines and the Longobards.

Categories
Destruction of Germanic paganism Game of Thrones Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) So-called saints Tree

Christianity’s Criminal History, 153

– For the context of these translations click here –

 The beatissimus dominus took care of women of ‘the tribe of the Angles’. His kinswoman Leoba, a whole generation younger than himself, he appointed abbess in the see of the archbishopric; Thecla, a relative of Leoba, he made abbess of Vitzingen and Ochsenfurt-on-the-Main. And all certainly for the great cause, the mission of all Germany, for the one whom Gregory III called ‘the apostle of the Germans’ (in reality: of Rome) and whom he appointed archbishop on a further journey to the Catholic capital (732), all for ‘the very advantageous business’ (talis commercii lucro) as is explicitly stated in such a context. Hence, the pope, with the whole Church, victoriously vindicated the apostle.

Of course, ‘business’ doesn’t mean the ‘pinch of silver and gold’ (argenti et auri tantillum), which Boniface occasionally donated to the holy father, but the conversion of ‘paganism and heterodoxy to the knowledge of the true faith’. From Hesse to Friesland he destroyed everywhere, ‘more as a conqueror than as a converter’ or missionary, the pagan places of worship, and on their ruins, with their very stones and timber, he erected Christian churches. He demolished the idols of Stuffo, Reto, Bil, the goddess Astaroth and so on. He tore down their altars, and felled the sacred trees in the Hessian forest, probably where, because they were under the direct protection of the Frankish fortress of Büraburg, they were in no personal danger, such as the oaks of Donar in Geismar, the tribal shrine, erecting with their wood a chapel to St. Peter, ‘his first sign of victory’ (Haller).
 

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Editor’s Note: It is these kinds of historical facts that have moved me in the past to obsess on this site about Game of Thrones. As no normie is going to study Deschner’s ten books, the most astute way to start conveying the most important facts of Aryan history is precisely novels in which these facts are alluded to fantastically, with castles, princesses and dragons. As we saw in past years with my countless entries on the TV series Game of Thrones, in the universe of novelist George R.R. Martin the fanatics of the new religion felled the sacred trees of Westeros.

This is the language the normie understands, and it’s a shame that the Jews who directed both Game of Thrones and the new prequel that has just been released betray fundamental facts of Martin’s prose. In a world where real Aryans took Martin to television, these outrages of the new religion perpetrated on the sacred trees of the old religion could be filmed in such a way that the message would be inspiring to whites.
 

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But Boniface also had to see no less than thirty churches and chapels destroyed in Thuringia. In Rome, however, the apostle didn’t only fight paganism, but at least as much, and probably even more, the sort of Christianity which wasn’t obedient to Rome, as among the Bavarians and the Alamanni. That was the second and shorter, though more important, phase of his activity.

Bavaria, where Boniface reformed (739) the church with the help of duke Odilus, after his relations with Charles Martell had cooled, had already been Christianised much earlier, though not Romanised. Thus, Roman Christianity and the Scottish missionary, ‘the first ‘Von-Rom Movement’ (far from Rome!)’ (Behn), ‘clashed violently’ in Bavaria (Schieffer). But there and in Thuringia Boniface, at the behest of Gregory II, eliminated as far as possible the old Christianity which had developed without violence. He tried to wrest the communities from the successors of these ecclesiastics and, with the help of state power, to bring them unceremoniously under the pontifical yoke.

But the papal legate also and especially fought against the Frankish clergy, who had preserved their autonomy vis-à-vis Rome and whose reformer he had avoided, if not fought against. In 738 Gregory III therefore strongly recommended obedience to his man regarding the bishops of Bavaria and Swabia, and at the same time insisted: ‘You must detect, prevent and annihilate the pagan customs and doctrines of the Bretons who roam everywhere, or of false and heretical priests and all their depravities’.

Boniface, who met with the ‘fierce resistance’ of many freemen (Epperlein), who was rude in his foreign manners, had no compunction and always went about with a large retinue; he was as obliging as they could wish for in Rome and more papist than the pope. He never asked why; he simply had to obey, as he had been taught. He was in fact ‘the heir of the Roman Church in England’ (Lortz).

The ‘apostle of the Germans’ was so unsure of his faith and so imbued for life with his tendency to sin, that he continually sent real questionnaires to Rome ‘as if we were kneeling at your feet’, to receive answers to the supreme questions of conscience.

Gregory II, who on 22 November 726 calmed his apostle’s eagerness to ask questions, let him know ‘the position in our Church’. An example: if parents have already deposited their sons or daughters ‘within the walls of the monastery’ (inter septa monasterii) at an early age, under no circumstances may they later leave the monastery and marry. ‘We strictly forbid it, because it is a sin to loosen the reins of pleasure on children, who were consecrated to God by their parents’. What barbarism beats in that answer, or behind this one: ‘You have also asked the question whether, when a contagious disease or mortality invades a church or a monastery, those who haven’t yet been affected can flee from that place to avoid the danger. That seems utterly foolish, for no one can escape the hand of God’ This rhetoric has not always, but quite often in everyday practice, been a function of minimisation, discharge and beautification. Theologians and historians, thanks to their phrase ‘link to the times’, don’t need to call the crimes and criminals of the Church and the State crimes and criminals.

Those were times when some served two sides, attended the Christian liturgy and at the same time offered sacrifices to Wotan; they ‘ate bulls and goats sacrificed to the pagan gods’, which could in no way harm either Christ or Wotan.

Categories
Charles Martel Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Lloyd deMause Roman Catholic popes So-called saints

Christianity’s Criminal History, 152

 
St Boniface, ‘Apostle of the Germans’ and of Rome

The Greatest Englishman. —Title of an anthology by Timothy Reuter

‘He was an utterly devoted person, one might almost say tender, not a tempestuous personality or a force of nature. A man of utterly pure and lofty idealism’. —Wilhelm Neuss

‘Moreover, any historian—including an atheist—should recognise that Boniface opened the door wide for us, that through him the frontier of Europe was opened to the east. The same is true of Charles’s wars against the Saxons’. —K. König and K. Witte

‘Boniface, who has influenced the history of Europe more profoundly than any other Englishman after him, was not just a missionary but a statesman and a genius of administration, and above all a servant of the Roman order’. —Christopher Dawson

‘The glory of the Middle Ages rests in a good part on his work’. —Joseph Lortz, Catholic theologian

 

Around 680, probably at the age of seven, the Anglo-Saxon boy Wynfreth (Winfrid), later called Bonifatius in Rome, was given by his father to the monastery as puer oblatas.

Editor’s Note: Anyone familiar with what we have quoted on this site from historian Lloyd deMause will know that paedophilia is not a recent phenomenon in the Catholic Church. From its earliest days parents who didn’t love their young donated them to monasteries—the institution of Oblation—where they could be sexually used by the elders. Deschner continues:

‘But the boy, who had been entrusted to the monastery without consulting his will, grew up to become a man of his own free will’, writes the German scholar Schramm today. In a monastery! A man of his own free will? As if Boniface had not been a servile slave of Rome for the rest of his life! ‘Day and night he cultivated scientific studies to procure eternal happiness’, according to the priest Willibaid in his bombastic Vita, which he wrote about his monastic hero in Mainz at the end of the 8th century.

Boniface began a propagandistic pilgrimage, but with a ‘missionary authorisation’ from Rome. Pope Gregory II (715-731) commissioned him on 15 May 719 ‘to exercise the service of the kingdom of God among all peoples imprisoned in the error of unbelief’. He was to examine—again in the poetic language of the biographer Willibald—‘whether the uncultivated fields of their hearts were to be ploughed by the plough of the gospel’.

 

Deliverance from ‘all uncleanness’ among the people of Hesse, Thuringia, Saxony and some bloodshed

The inhabitants of Hesse were still largely pagan, while the Thuringians—among whom the Frankish conquerors built the first churches in their feudal castles—had been partially converted to paganism by Saxon raids and pagan reactions. In any case, despite his honey-sweet doctrine, Boniface quickly failed here, partly because of the Christian bishops and priests and partly because of the lack of military support.

Still in 719 he left Thuringia and went, ‘filled with great joy’ at the death of the Frisian Duke Radbod (according to Vita Bonifatii), to Frisia until 721, where he was placed under the command of the elderly missionary Willibrord, an ‘Oblate’ like himself, i.e. already spiritually violated as a child.

With the backing of the high Frankish nobility and the force of Frankish arms, Willibrord had, since 690, spread his knowledge among the West Frisians under Pippin II and, briefly and unsuccessfully, among the Danes and Saxons. He fled from Radbod with little apparent martyr’s vocation and only returned after his death. Only the victorious campaigns of Charles Martell in 718 and 720 (repeated in 722 and 724) against the Saxons made possible the beginning of their Christianisation, their liberation from ‘demons’, ‘error’ and ‘diabolical fraud’ (Gregory II). With the invocation of the Holy Trinity, Willibrord destroyed the ‘idols’, desecrated and reduced to ruins the sanctuaries of the Frisians, killed their sacred animals and worked astonishing miracles. To put it briefly: it was in connection with the military men Pippin and Charles Martell that he weeded out ‘the tares of unbelief’ and strove to ‘renew by baptism those who had just been subdued by force of arms’ and ‘to spread without delay all the light of the gospel’ (Alcuin).

In 721 Boniface separated from Willibrord for reasons we ignore. He had refused to be consecrated bishop by Willibrord and returned to the territory of Hesse-Thuringia, where he founded a small monastery on the Amoneburg… After the first successes Gregory II called Bonifacius back and on 30 November 722 consecrated him a missionary bishop (without a fixed see). He thus became entirely bound to Rome by oath…

Boniface benefited from the campaigns of Charles Martel and his donations to the church of Utrecht and the monastery of Echternach, which soon became the basis of gigantic Catholic propaganda that extended as far as the Meuse, the Scheldt and the mouths of the Rhine.

In 722 Gregory II had also given the ‘apostle of the Germans’ a missionary commission for the Saxons. It is true that in 718 they had been driven out of the lower Rhine and defeated by Charles, but they remained almost entirely faithful to their ancient beliefs. They were one of those Germanic tribes east of the Rhine. The planned ‘conversion’ of the Saxons with mass baptisms only came about after Charles’ long and carefully prepared campaign of 738, which was carried out in close cooperation with the clergy. Gregory III (731-741), who once called the Frankish warlord who waged war almost year after year ‘St Peter’s beloved son’, declared the following in a letter to Boniface on 29 October 739:

You have given us knowledge of the peoples of Germania, whom God has delivered from the power of the pagans, by having gathered into the bosom of the holy mother Church hundreds of thousands of souls by your efforts and those of the Frankish prince Charles (tuo conamine et Caroli principis Francoruni).

The number is certainly exaggerated. But the Saxons were ‘delivered from the power of the heathen’ only by the military expedition of Charles Martell (738) ‘with dreadful bloodshed’ (Fredegarii continuationes). And in connection with this came the mass baptisms of the Saxons. Their conversion to Christianity took place ‘in close contact with the military-political organisation’ (Steinbach). This is probably even a ‘large-scale attempt at a Saxon mission before the period of Charlemagne’ (Schieffer).

It is true that Charles Martell was not very religious, but for political reasons he was ‘extremely interested’ (Buchner) in the spread of Christianity in the east. And there is no doubt that Boniface ‘owed everything to the victorious arms and personal protection of Charles Martell’ (Zwölfer).

Already in the years 718, 720, 722 and 724 Charles had fought against the Saxons, as mentioned above. He repeatedly crushed uprisings of the Frisians and Saxons, and it was only through these bloody acts of violence that the ‘conversion’ or, as Boniface puts it, the liberation of ‘all the heathen’s filth’ depended. Gregory III attributed the missionary success as much to Charles Martell as to Boniface. And Boniface personally confesses to the English bishop Daniel of Winchester: ‘Without the protection of the prince of the Franks (sine patrocinio principis Francorum) I could neither have guided the people of the Church nor defended the priests and ecclesiastics, the monks and servants of God, nor without his command and his fear could I have eliminated the pagan customs and the horrors of idolatry in Germania’.

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Catholic Church Franks Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) So-called saints

Christianity’s Criminal History, 148

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

St. Gregory of Tours (Louvre)

When we read the History of the Franks, as amorphous as it is detailed, by Gregory of Tours, which is the main source of that period, we are surprised that the same head in which such a grotesque belief in miracles and the devil was floating around, and that seems to have no other concern than some obscure miracles and signs—for him unquestionable facts, gesta praesenti—, we are surprised, I repeat, that this same head relates with the most realistic tone and often with an almost amoral indifference the horrors of the time without admiring either the decadent displays of conscience or the most criminal heroes of the age.

He doesn’t feel the slightest scruple and knows nothing of the conflicts between loyalties, being unreservedly in favour of the brutal policy of the princes, that is, in favour of their crimes insofar as they represented the advance of the Catholic Church. This means, however, a halfway between securing for the Church a stable situation and for the high clergy’s ever-increasing riches; he belonged to that clergy. (Someone has observed that the episcopal ministry, supposedly so exhausting, left Gregory sufficient time to write his extensive works.)

No doubt civil and fratricidal wars didn’t entirely fit into the saint’s mind, for they naturally affected him and his Church. But external wars, wars aimed at the aggrandisement of the Christian kingdom—the annihilation of the ‘heretics’ and especially the Arians (four times he tells the hoax story of the fathers of the Church, according to which Arius burst in the toilet); the extinction of the pagans and other infidels—, could never be terrible enough. Thus, at the beginning of the fifth book of his History of the Franks, he confesses without a qualm: ‘Would that you too, O kings, were engaged in battles like those in which your fathers struggled, that the heathen terrified by your union might be crushed by your strength! Remember how Clovis won your great victories, how he slew opposing kings, crushed wicked peoples and subdued their lands, and left to you complete and unchallenged dominion over them!’

Fighting battles, killing enemy kings, and subjugating hostile peoples as well as his own, is what a famous Catholic saint, after more than half a millennium of Christianity, calls all this. For ‘the triumphs of the Franks are also the successes of Gregory’ (Haendler).

Even when it comes to sexually motivated murder, Gregory acts as a modern ‘progressive’. Without batting an eyelid he recounts the case of the exuberant Deoteria. While her husband was on a trip to Béziers, she sent word for King Teudebert: ‘No one can resist you, dearest lord. We know that you are our master. Come, then, and do what is pleasing in your eyes’. And Theudebert came to the castle, made Deoteria his concubine, his wife; and Bishop Gregory calls the Catholic lady (who afterwards began to fear her own daughter’s rivalry and had her killed at Verdun) ‘a skilful and clever woman’. As skilful and clever as Theudebert himself because, as Gregory himself proclaims, ‘she ruled her kingdom with justice, honoured the bishops and made donations to the churches’; and ‘all the taxes, which had hitherto reverted to the royal treasury of the churches of Auvergne, she graciously remitted to them’.

In other words, Gregory turns a blind eye to the well-known Catholic double standard.

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So-called saints

A notification


As soon as I finish reproducing Ferdinand Bardamu’s excellent series on why Europeans should abandon Christianity (I would add that Americans and Australians must also do so), I will resume Deschner’s chapter on the three assholes: Athanasius, Ambrose and Augustine.