March 2024
Freemasonry in the Life and Times of Pope Pius IX : 1
In the year 1792, on May thirteenth, in the ancient Italian seaport town of Sinigaglia, high up on its perch overhanging the Adriatic Sea, there was born to the Mayor of the city, Count Girolamo Mastai-Ferretti and his wife, the Countess Caterina, their seventh child, Giovanni-Maria Giovanni-Battista Pietro Isidoro. The year 1792 was an ominous one, as far as the world outside the castle of the Mastai-Ferretti’s was concerned, and it would forever overshadow the life of little John Mary Mastai-Ferretti, one day to become the great Pope Pius IX and to rule the Church of Jesus Christ from the throne of Peter for thirty-two years, the longest pontificate of any Pope except Peter.
He would, this boy born in the tragic year of 1792 — gently nurtured, sensitive, generous, gay, loving, pure, true-hearted, possessing great charm and great good looks, taught as a child to revere the poor, deeply devoted to the Church and known for his constant and absorbing love of the Blessed Virgin Mary — live all his days surrounded by revolution; revolution diabolically planned and sustained, the like of which never before was seen. The unbelievably horrible French Revolution, the first in the satanic plan to tear down the thrones and altars of Christendom, was already three years old in the year 1792, when John Mary Mastai-Ferretti was born.
Traitorous France
It is not at all surprising that the French Revolution, about which we in America, as if by a gigantic conspiracy, have been taught so little of the real truth, should be visited upon the land which had allowed its king — in his mad passion to place himself above and beyond the jurisdiction of the Vicar of Christ — to cause the death of Pope Boniface VIII. It is true that France remained nominally Catholic both during and after the Protestant revolt, but it never as a nation quite returned, even in the periods of Catholic revival, to its old purity of Faith and its old filial devotion to the Popes, which had been its crowning mark before the outrage and death of Pope Boniface VIII in 1303.
It was France’s voice which, in the fifteenth century, through the University of Paris and its sons, John Gerson and Peter d’Ailly, was loudest in proclaiming the Pope inferior to, and therefore subject to, a general council of the Church! It was France’s “Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges” which not only insisted on the supremacy of a council over the Pope, but practically deprived the Pope of any jurisdiction over the French Church. “Gallicanism,” or the equivalent of what would amount to a French National Church, independent of the Holy See, was not very far off, after that.
It was the traitorous political ambition of France which set up Protestantism permanently in Europe. It was France’s Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642), Prime Minister and real ruler of the country under Louis XIII, who, to ensure the political victory of France in Europe, took the side of the Protestant Princes of Germany against the Catholic Emperor, Ferdinand II, at the most critical moment of the Thirty Years’ War between the forces of Protestantism and Catholicism. Cardinal Richelieu hired the Protestant military genius, Gustavus Adolphus, for five tubs of gold (approximately two million dollars), to enter the war against the Catholics. The defeat of Ferdinand made forever impossible his dream of a Europe united again as one family by the Faith, so close to realisation but for the treachery of the French Cardinal.
It was France who, in 1682, under its absolute monarch, Louis XIV and his subservient clergy, more loyal to their King than to their God, passed the famous Four Gallican Articles, which again not only practically withdrew France from the jurisdiction of the Pope, but declared in effect that Christ’s Vicar was not infallible. And even though Louis XIV withdrew the articles after two Popes had condemned them and his country had been interdicted, Gallicanism was by then deeply and firmly established in the thought of the people. It would, along with the Jansenist heresy (a species of Calvinism within the Church) — and the shocking looseness of morals both of Louis XIV and his great-grandson and successor, Louis XV, of their courts and of French society generally — disastrously weaken the Faith and prepare France for the religious scepticism and free thought already prevailing in England and Germany.
In the literary hands of the Freemason Voltaire and the equally anti-Christian writer Rousseau, along with the French Encyclopedists who were in the pay of Frederick the Great of Prussia, also a Freemason, this “free thought” would usher in the “Age of Enlightenment” in France and lead straight to the sheer atheism and diabolical mockery of God of the terrible French Revolution.
Modern Freemasonry
It was precisely at the hour in history when France, now the leading nation of the world, was giving to that world the spectacle of a dissolute Catholic King, Louis XV, who with his court lived lives of such shameless corruption that they rivalled in depravity even the notoriously wicked courts of Catherine of Russia and Frederick of Prussia — when the vices of royalty had passed down through the nobles and bourgeoisie even to the poor, and the seed of Lucifer gave every appearance of triumphing over the seed of Mary — that God allowed a scourge to come upon Europe, just as He had permitted the scourge of Mohammedanism to ravage the heretical and sinful East in the seventh and succeeding centuries.
Indeed, the scourge which brought about the temporary chastisement of Europe in the eighteenth century, although it crossed the Channel and entered the Continent decked out in new clothes carefully refashioned and tailored in London, had its origins very definitely in the East. Its symbols, its ceremonies, its dress, its traditions, its rituals, all were Eastern. William Thomas Walsh, writing in his book, Philip II, said of the degrees and rituals of Freemasonry that they “are shot through with Jewish symbolism: the candidate is going to the East, towards Jerusalem, he is going to rebuild the Temple, destroyed in fulfillment of the prophecy of Christ … The official coat of arms of the English Grand Lodge, even to this day, is the one made in 1675 by Rabbi Jacob Jehuda Leon, known as Templo, who went from Holland to England that year.”
Modern Freemasonry — for such is the scourge — came into being in England in 1717, when the ancient Catholic guild of working masons, Protestantised long since in England, but existing in Great Britain and Europe for many centuries, was revised. Its professional, labouring character was dropped, and it emerged a philosophical, pseudo-religious secret society, its formulas, ceremonies and traditions all pointing to a Jewish origin, although its new constitutions and ritual were drawn up by a Scotch Presbyterian minister, James Anderson, and a Huguenot refugee minister, John T. Desaguliers, and its Grand Master, in 1722, was the profligate, thoroughly immoral Duke of Wharton who everywhere was reputed to be “from no vice exempt.”
It was in 1725 that the new Freemasonry spread to Paris, in 1728 to Madrid, in 1729 to Ireland, in 1731 to the Hague, in 1733 to Hamburg, in 1736 to Germany, and so on, to Italy.
Voltaire became a Freemason in England, around 1727, and on his return to France did everything in his power to spread it among the nobility and intellectuals. Unspeakably immoral, both in his life and in his writings, the intimate of Frederick the Great, because of the use Frederick could make of his extraordinary ability to write, Voltaire shared the Prussian King’s consuming hatred of Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. It was their constant cry that the “Christian religion is an infamous religion. It must be destroyed by a hundred invisible [sic] hands. It is necessary that the philosophers should course through the streets to destroy it as missionaries course over the earth and sea to propagate it. They ought to dare all things, risk all things, even to be burned, in order to destroy it. Let us crush the wretch! Crush the wretch! Écrasez l’infâme!”
Satanic Spirit of Revolt
Freemasonry spread like wildfire over Europe. It became the rage in Paris. The nobility and some members of the higher clergy — especially in France where Gallicanism and Jansenism had, in the century before, as we have seen, prepared the ground for the perpetual ridicule of religion and all its institutions, including even holy matrimony, which, in the 1700’s, was the order of the day — were perversely fascinated by the doctrines of Freemasonry, and they entered its lodges in great numbers. Later, many of them, when all their theoretical dreams were come true, at the height of the Revolution found themselves mounting the bloody steps to the guillotine, ruefully facing at last the bitter truth that they had, along with the downfall of the Pope and the existing order, plotted their own destruction.
The teachings of Freemasonry spread far and wide the spirit of revolt not only against the authority of the Vicar of Christ, but against the authority of the State, as well. In the third quarter of the 1700’s, a new and even more sinister element was added. This was the “Illuminism,” so-called, of Adam Weishaupt, a professor of canon law in the University of Ingolstadt, in Bavaria, which gave to Masonry the mould and lasting form by which it has, despite all opposition, come down to us today and by which “it will advance until its final conflict with Christianity must determine whether Christ or Satan shall reign on this earth to the end.”
Systemic Deceit
Weishaupt’s way, which is still the way of the Masonic lodges today, was first to entice men into his organisation through its lowest degrees. As Monsignor Dillon explained in his famous Edinburgh lectures:
A man, though in Masonry, may not be willing to become an atheist or a Socialist, for some time at least. He may have in his heart a profound conviction that God exists, and some hope left of returning to that God at or before his death. He may have entered Masonry for purposes of ambition, for motives of vanity, from mere lightness of character. He may continue his prayers and refuse, if a Catholic, to give up the Mother of God and some practice of piety loved by him from his youth. But Masonry is a capital system to wean a man gradually away from all these things. It does not at once deny the existence of God, nor at once attack the Christian dispensation. It commences by giving the Christian idea of God an easy and, under semblance of respect, an almost imperceptible shake. It swears by the name of God in all its oaths. It calls Him, however, not a Creator, only an architect — the great Architect of the universe. It carefully avoids all mention of Christ, of the Adorable Trinity, of the unity of Faith, or of any faith. It protests a respect for the convictions of every man, for the idolatrous Parsee, for the Mohammedan, the heretic, the Jew, the schismatic, the Catholic. By and by, in higher degrees, it gives a ruder shock to the belief in the Deity, and a gradual inducement to favour Naturalism.
As time goes on, the man who manifests any real religious depth or signs of conscience never goes beyond the lower degrees. He remains instead a member of the rank and file of Masonry, of the respectable front presented to the world, but he and his kind are never trusted with the real secret. On the other hand, those who meet the Masonic requirements, who are possessed of no fine moral sensibilities, proceed in the ways of irreligion, immorality, espionage and occult science until they arrive at the advanced degrees and are let in on more and more of the frightfully guarded secrets of the Order.
But, and this is more than ever true in our day, the visible leaders of Masonry — and of all the secret societies which are but subsidiary to it — are never the real leaders! For beyond the visible leaders there is an inner circle, organised on Masonic lines, whose members are hidden and unknown to the public. Beyond this inner circle, there is another and still more secret ring. At last, at the very top, there sits the lone head and his small — six at most — carefully chosen coterie of advisers, who direct the invisible government, not only of Masonry, but of the world. These men are known to but very few on Earth.
Luciferian Reality
At the great coming together of the Masonic bodies from all over the world at the so-called Congress of Wilhelmsbad on July 16, 1782, Adam Weishaupt gained control of all the secret societies of the Congress, which at that time — only sixty-five years after Masonry’s modern revision — represented the amazing total, of three million members! Weishaupt next succeeded in allying Illuminism and Freemasonry, an alliance which has been of the darkest significance for the world. It is impossible to exaggerate the depths of its power for evil. For the face which has looked out upon the world from behind the mask of Illuminised Freemasonry, from that day to this, is none other than the face of Lucifer himself.
This is the enemy whom Pope Leo XIII saw in the vision which caused him to faint in terror for the world. This is the enemy whom he named in his encyclical, Humanum Genus, in which he wrote to his sons, the Bishops:
We wish it to be your rule first of all to tear away the mask from Freemasonry, and to let it be seen as it really is, and by sermons and pastoral letters to instruct the people as to the artifices used by societies of this kind in seducing men and enticing them into their ranks …
This it was which caused Pope Saint Pius X to cry out in his very first encyclical:
So extreme is the general perversion that there is room to fear that we are experiencing the foretaste and beginnings of the evils which are to come at the end of time, and that the Son of Perdition, of whom the Apostle speaks, has already arrived upon Earth.
This it was which caused the Editor of the Acta Sanctae Sedis (Acts of the Holy See), writing for the July 13, 1865 issue, to say:
If one takes into consideration the immense development which these secret societies have attained; the length of time they are persevering in their vigour; their furious aggressiveness; the tenacity with which their members cling to the association and to the false principles it professes; the persevering mutual cooperation of so many different types of men in the promotion of evil; one can hardly deny that the Supreme Architect of these associations (seeing that the cause must be proportioned to the effect) can be none other than he who in the sacred writings is styled the Prince of the World; and that Satan himself, even by his physical cooperation, directs and inspires at least the leaders of these bodies, physically cooperating with them.
It was at the Congress of Wilhelmsbad that Masonry became “one organised atheistic mass, while being permitted to assume many fantastic shapes.” The Knights Rosicrucian, the Templars, the Knights of Beneficence, the Brothers of Amity, and many, many others, subversive and irreligious as each was in its own right, now were united to the body of Illuminised Freemasonry. All would have, under whatever name and whatever form they chose, the same counterfeit respect for religion, the same apparent acceptance of the Bible, the same outward zeal for the care of widows and orphans, the ill and the destitute. All would have the same terrible oaths of secrecy; all would have some variety of the same fantastic, Asiatic, Hebrew and Turkish ceremonial, “to which any meaning from the most silly to the deepest and darkest could be given.” All would have the same ascending degrees, although the number might vary, and all would have the same fearful death penalty for the violation of secrets, for indiscretion, and for treason.
All the high initiates would have, unknown to their brothers of lower degrees, the same program for the annihilation of all religion, of all love of country and all loyalty to sovereigns. All would strive for the abolition of monarchy and ordered government, the abolition of private property and inheritance, the abolition of marriage and morality, and the institution of required government education of children. (This plan, as we know, is being fully worked out in our time.)
Judeo-Masonry
It was at the Congress of Wilhelmsbad that the Jews were emancipated, as the result of a carefully produced wave of pro-Semitism which broke over Europe in the wake of a book, Upon the Civil Amelioration of the Condition of the Jews, written by a man named Dohrn under the direction of Moses Mendelssohn and brought out in August of 1781. “This book,” we are told, “had a considerable influence on the revolutionary movement. It is the trumpet call of the Jewish cause, the signal for the step forward.”
The Jews, whose function of abettor and overseer at the births of Freemasonry and Illuminism had been performed in the role of privileged servant, were now, at the Congress of Wilhelmsbad, admitted on full equality to the family circle. And the Jewish influence, as Father Edward Cahill, S. J., brings out in his book, Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement, soon became one of the main driving forces behind Masonry. It is the influence which today dominates the whole organisation.
At Wilhelmsbad, it was decided to move the headquarters of Illuminised Freemasonry to Frankfurt, significantly at that time the headquarters of Jewish finance, with the familiar name of Rothschild already well in the lead. It was at Frankfurt that the incredible plans for world revolution were perfected, with France chosen to be first on the list and Italy soon to follow. It was at Frankfurt that the deaths of Louis XVI of France and Gustavus III of Sweden were resolved upon.
Litany of Demonic Revolutions
The diabolical certainty with which all these schemes of the enemies of Christianity came off, exactly on schedule, is startling! They did achieve the French Revolution, and it was the most atrocious, cruel and bloody massacre the world had ever seen up to that time. In 1792, the year in which Pope Pius IX was born, in the “September Massacres,” three hundred assassins from the Paris underworld and Paris jails, mad with dope and drink and lust for blood, massacred, amidst indescribable orgies and satanic abandon, the Archbishop of Arles, two bishops, four hundred priests and monks, one thousand Catholic nobles, and eight thousand citizens, in Paris alone. At Meaux, Châlons, Rennes and Lyons, similar scenes were taking place.
They did, these enemies of Jesus Christ, during all of the next century — particularly in 1830, 1848 and 1870 — cause revolutions all over Europe and the world. They did attack Italy. They did seize the Papal States and conquer Rome. They boasted that the papacy was no more, and in that they were, and always will be, devastatingly wrong, but they did bring off their scheduled revolution in Russia, in 1917, and the unparalleled revolution of the First World War, in 1914, when twenty-seven nations were joined in bloody combat and 37,508,686 men were killed, wounded, crippled and taken prisoner; when the Masonically conceived League of Nations was foisted on the world by the President of the United States, the Freemason Woodrow Wilson, under the influence of his fellow Masons, Colonel E. M. House and Mr. Bernard Baruch. Mr. Baruch ever since, as the publicised “Elder Statesman and Adviser to Presidents,” has directed from behind the scenes the government of the United States, whether Democratic or Republican.
They did, these terrible enemies of the Church, achieve the revolution of the Second World War, in 1939, and its carefully directed outcome, that twin sister of the League of Nations, the even more sinister United Nations, through which every country of the world lies now in imminent danger of losing its sovereignty and becoming part of the long planned, diabolically schemed, One World Government, whose aim is finally to enslave the whole Earth!
1789: Masonic Dechristianisation
That the French Revolution of 1789 was plotted and carried out by the Illuminised Freemasons, there is no need to establish since the Masons openly boast about it themselves. All of the Revolution’s apostles and leaders were Masons: Voltaire, Rousseau, Lafayette — the American Revolutionary War hero of whom Marie Antoinette, after many betrayals of the King at his hands, cried out, “Better perish than be saved by Lafayette!” Talleyrand — the apostate Catholic bishop who consecrated the first constitutional bishops of the Revolution in spite of the decree of Pope Pius VI in 1791 declaring the automatic suspension of any priest or bishop who took the oath to maintain the civil constitution drawn up for the Church in France by the Revolutionary government, for the sole purpose of completely subjecting the Church to the domination of the State. “Separation of Church and State” has ever meant but one thing to the revolutionaries: Control of the Church by the State, and to that end they have, successfully, popularised their slogan, “Separation of Church and State,” until Catholics look upon it almost as a dogma.
The members of the terrible Jacobin Club of Paris and the leaders of the Reign of Terror, Danton, Marat and Robespierre, all were Masons. The throne was betrayed by Philip, Duke of Orléans, the first Grand Master of the Grand Orient Lodge of France, and blood relative of King Louis XVI.
It was well known in every country of Europe that the cause of the French Revolution could not be attributed to the abuses of the ancient regime. In Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette — despite the tower of calumnies raised against the beautiful Queen of France by the powerful Masonic enemies who plotted the country’s downfall through this lively and charming daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, calumnies perpetuated by the biased and silly English literature through which the story of her life has come to Americans — France had at last a thoroughly good King and Queen. They were good Catholics, this tragic husband and wife, good sovereigns, and good parents to their beloved children. And they had worked hard, the King to wipe out abuses and the Queen to dispense charity to the poor, whom she loved. She did not, at any time, ever say of the poor those foolish words which are, in America, a byword whenever her name is mentioned, “Let them eat cake!”
The Revolution’s purpose was not to uproot abuses, but to destroy the monarchy and overthrow Christian society. And it accomplished both. The Revolution took the lives of the King and Queen of France, both of whom died nobly. “I forgive the authors of my death,” Louis said, “may my blood never be avenged upon France.” And it is told of Marie Antoinette that she carried herself, during the last days of her life and during the terrible hours before her execution, with the heroic fortitude of a martyr and the calm dignity of a saint. Their little son, Louis XVII, died miserably later, in a cobbler’s shop.
America knew, in 1798 at least, the cause of the French Revolution. After the Terror had spent itself — after the terrible de-Christianising of France, when its churches had been desecrated and closed, the adorable Sacrament of the Altar blasphemed, a notorious prostitute adored on the main altar of Notre Dame as the Goddess of Reason, when “streetwalkers dressed in chasubles, and donkeys laden with sacred relics had passed through the streets,” when the rivers and roads ran red with the blood of the guillotined, when Danton, and Marat and Robespierre, at last had followed each other to the death they had so mercilessly dealt out day after day to countless poor victims, when the National Convention had given way to the Directory, and the Directory was about to give way to the Consulate of Napoleon — Timothy Dwight, President of Yale, addressed the people of New Haven:
No personal or national interest of man has been uninvaded [in the French Revolution]; no impious sentiment of action against God has been spared; no malignant hostility against Christ and His religion has been unattempted. Justice, truth, kindness, piety, and moral obligation universally have been not merely trodden underfoot … but ridiculed, spurned and insulted. … For what end shall we be connected with men of whom this is the character and conduct? … Is it that our churches may become temples of reason, our Sabbath a decade, and our psalms of praise Marseillaise hymns? … Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat, or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?
Passion of the Popes
It was in such a world of revolution that Pope Pius IX grew to manhood. In 1798, when he was but six years old, a French army, for the third time in two years, marched into Italy. It entered Rome, pronounced Pope Pius VI deposed as temporal sovereign, and proclaimed the Papal States a Republic! While the Pope was pleading with his captors to be allowed to remain and die in Rome — he was then eighty years old — and his enemies, having insolently refused him, were plundering his room and tearing from his finger his episcopal ring, outside in the Roman streets a statue, of the goddess of liberty trampling underfoot the papal tiara and the sacred symbols of the Faith, was being set up at an entrance to the Bridge of Sant’ Angelo; the papal coat of arms was being painted, amid howls of lewd laughter, on the drop curtain of a popular Roman theatre; the sacred vessels which had been stolen from the altars of churches were being used in the wild orgies which were going on all over Rome to celebrate the Republic. The Revolution, indeed, had moved on, according to plan, from Paris to Rome!
Pope Pius VI died, in 1799, at Valence, on the Rhone River, a prisoner of the French. And hearts were heavy with sorrow and foreboding in the castle of the Mastai-Ferretti’s, high up in Sinigaglia, on the Adriatic Sea, in the Papal State of the Marches.
Pope Pius VII, whose pontificate opened on March 14, 1800, and closed with his death on August 20, 1823, when he was eighty-three years old, was to prove the greatly loved father and friend of Giovanni-Maria Mastai-Ferretti. Pope Pius VII, like his predecessor whose name he had taken, would also suffer exile and imprisonment at the hands of the masters of revolution. And for all of the long and weary twenty-three years of Pius’ pontificate, Giovanni-Maria Mastai-Ferretti — as a schoolboy of thirteen in the college of Volterra, in Tuscany, as a lad of seventeen stricken with epilepsy at the height of all his young promise — would be poignantly aware of his Holy Father’s suffering, humiliation and trial, little realising that he was to follow upon the same road, bearing the same burdens, occupying even the same bishopric of Imola, on his way to the bishopric of Rome.
Pope Pius VII was to suffer, as had Pope Pius VI, and as would Pope Pius IX, the loss of the patrimony which for fifteen centuries had belonged to the Popes, the saviours of Rome and the founders of Western Civilisation. But to Pio Nono, as Pope Pius IX was affectionately called by the whole world, the patrimony of Saint Peter would not be given back.
Napoleon: Creature of the Lodge
Although popularly it has been said that the French Revolution and its anti-Christian programme came to a close with the rise of Napoleon and the restoration by him of the practice of the Catholic Faith, forbidden under the Directory, the Revolution, as planned for the world, was very far from ended in 1800, when the pontificate of Pope Pius VII opened and the consulate of Napoleon Bonaparte began. For Napoleon, military genius though he might be and remarkable leader of men, was a Freemason, a member of the lodge of the Templars, the extreme Illuminated Lodge of Lyons. He had been created by Masonry, and he must do its bidding. As long as he was obedient to his masters, France would be his, all Europe would be his. His armies would meet with the fabulous success which has ever since been the talk of the world, for, coupled with his own extraordinary gifts, Masonry’s all-seeing, all-knowing eye would have taken care that, as Father Dillon says:
… the resources of the enemies of Napoleon were never at hand, the designs of the Austrian and other generals opposed to him were thwarted, treason was rife in their camps, and information fatal to their designs was conveyed to the French commander. … But when Masonry had reason to fear that Napoleon’s power might be perpetuated; when his alliance with the Imperial Family of Austria, and above all, when the consequence of that alliance, an heir to his throne, caused danger to the universal republic … when, too, he began to show a coldness for the sect, and sought means to prevent it from the propagandism of its diabolical aims, then it became his enemy, and his end was not far off. … His opponents began to get that information regarding his movements, which he had obtained previously of theirs. Members of the sect urged on his mad expedition to Moscow. His resources were paralysed; and he was … sold by secret, invisible foes into the hands of his enemies.
And so we see that it was not for the honour and glory of God that Napoleon had, in 1802, made Catholic worship once more lawful in France, but rather because his appointed mission was to restore order again to the country, and he knew that it was only with the aid of the Church that he would, for the time being, be able to accomplish it. It is interesting to note that among the decrees which Napoleon added to the Concordat of 1802 between France and the Holy See (but which additions were never accepted by Pope Pius VII) there appear the old Gallican Articles of 1682, which were to be taught in the schools of theology; clergy violating these articles were to be punished by the State!
Napoleonic Pride and Fall
Actually, despite the ban of the Popes, the Gallican Articles were being taught at the time in all the French theological schools, and it is upon Gallicanism that the great French Catholic, the Count de Maistre, lays the blame for “the withering of Catholicism in France and all the evils which have befallen her, and, through her, all of Europe.” Gallicanism, indeed! Gallicanism, the old sin of Lucifer, whose “I will not serve!” is the battle cry of Hell. Gallicanism amply paved one of the great highways leading to the Judaised Freemasonry of the eighteenth and subsequent centuries.
And so it is not surprising to find that Napoleon’s whole aim, after the Concordat, was to secure for the State full control over all relations between the French Church and the Holy See. Insult to the Holy Father followed upon insult. In 1809, the troops of Napoleon — First Consul no longer, but Emperor since 1804 — occupied the Papal States, which then became part of the French Empire. Pope Pius VII excommunicated Napoleon after that, and the Emperor, enraged, wrote to his wife Josephine’s son, Eugene, whom he had made Viceroy of Italy, “Does he not know that the times are greatly changed? Does he mistake me for Louis the Mild? Or does he think that his excommunications will cause the arms to drop from the hands of my soldiers?”
Four years later, in 1813, the arms did drop from the hands of Napoleon’s soldiers, become either too weak or too frozen any longer to clasp them, as the hitter cold and gnawing famine of the terrible retreat from Moscow took toll, not only of their arms, but of their lives. And in April of 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had ill learned the wisdom of the old French proverb: “Qui mange le Pape, meurt!” (Who eats the Pope, dies!), signed his abdication in the very Castle of Fontainebleau where for so long he had held Christ’s Vicar, Pope Pius VII, a prisoner.
Rise of Pius IX and Religious Liberalism
The month following Napoleon’s abdication, Pope Pius VII returned in triumph to Rome. He had stopped on his way at Sinigaglia, where he was treated with great reverence by the Mastai-Ferretti family. Giovanni-Maria accompanied the hero-Pontiff on the remainder of his journey, and he rejoiced when the Pope’s party went out of its way to stop at the Holy House of Loreto, to pay homage to God’s Mother, for it was in her own little Nazareth house, now tenderly enshrined in the handsome basilica built at Loreto to hold it, that Our Lady had answered miraculously the prayers of Giovanni-Maria and his mother, and had cured his epilepsy.
It was Pope Pius VII who, in 1819, when Giovanni-Maria’s ordination was in question because of the impediment of epilepsy, said to him as he knelt before him awaiting his final decision, “We grant you what you ask, dear son, because it is our conviction that this disease will never again afflict you.” And never again did the dread malady trouble the life of Giovanni-Maria Mastai-Ferretti — never, through all his succeeding years, as priest in Rome, as counsellor to the Apostolic Delegate to Chile, as domestic prelate, as Archbishop of Spoleto, as Bishop of Imola, and as Cardinal-Archbishop.
He was very much beloved by his people in each of these assignments. When he was transferred from Spoleto to Imola, in February, 1833, so heartbroken were the people of Spoleto at losing him that they sent a delegation of citizens to Rome to beg Pope Gregory XVI to send some other bishop to Imola and leave with them their greatly loved shepherd. But the Holy Father was forced to refuse them, for the choice of the Archbishop of Spoleto for the see of Imola had been very carefully made. Imola, and the whole north of Italy, was seething with revolt — the backlash of the Masonically planned revolutions which had occurred throughout Europe in 1830 — and it was of the most urgent necessity that bishops be sent to the turbulent cities who would be able to win the love of the people and keep them safe from the designs of the secret societies.
For Italy was honeycombed with secret societies. Masonry had done its work with amazing success. The revolutionary clubs, which sprang up every month somewhere in the Italian States during the boyhood of Giovanni-Maria, and the many planned revolutionary movements within the Papal States, had gradually but thoroughly indoctrinated the Italian people. Everywhere now, in 1833, the false ideals of Liberalism — the name by which the revolutionary anti-Christian movement was most popularly known — were become indeed the breath and bone and thought and sinew of the once gay and happy Italian people. And as the century advanced, new Liberal fronts were opened up. Intellectual, Economic, Social, Political and Religious Liberalism, all fused together to make the nineteenth century the “Age of Liberalism.”
Liberalism’s roots are, it is true, to be found in Philip the Fair’s overthrow of papal authority, in the spirit of the Renaissance, and in the Reformation, but its evil flower came to full blossom under the satanic aegis of Freemasonry. Liberty, in the Masonic sense of license to do what one wants in every territory of life — with no spiritual restrictions — in the hands of the Masonic propagandists overturned, one after the other, the ancient institutions of Christendom. In vain, did the Popes say, “Human liberty does not mean the right to do anything one desires. It means, rather, freedom from restraint in doing what one ought to do; freedom to do what is right; freedom to obey the laws of God as laid down in Divine Revelation and as interpreted by His Vicar, His voice on Earth, the Holy Roman Pontiff.”
Religious Liberalism, perhaps we should pause to say, has three forms.
The first, Absolute Religious Liberalism, stems straight from the Freemason Rousseau, and is the fulfillment of all that Gallicanism — and its counterparts in other countries — ever implied. It advocates the complete subordination of the Church to the State, the Church being permitted to exist only so long as it continues to serve the temporal prosperity of the State!
The second form is Moderate Religious Liberalism. Its slogan, “a free Church in a free State,” is the one which Pope Pius IX fought so strenuously during all the long years which followed his exile in Gaeta. Moderate Liberalism does not speak of subordinating the Church to the State. It speaks only of separating the two, a concept which has been condemned by Pope Pius IX again and again, as we shall see.
The third form of Religious Liberalism is Catholic Liberalism, condemned many times by Pope Pius IX, even in his first encyclical, Qui pluribus, written on November 9, 1846, when he said of Catholic Liberalism, “… To this end is directed the dreadful system of religious indifference … by means of which these crafty men, putting aside all distinction between virtue and vice, truth and error, honesty and baseness, deceitfully pretend that men can attain eternal salvation in the practice of any religion, just as if there could be any common part of justice with iniquity, or any fellowship of light with darkness, and an agreement of Christ with Belial … ”
Pope Pius X, when he was Patriarch of Venice, warned his clergy:
Let priests be on their guard against accepting any doctrines of that Liberalism which, under pretext of good, aims at effecting a reconciliation between right and wrong.
Liberal Catholics are the great interfaith devotees, the one-religion-is-as-good-as-another advocates, who “have good friends among the Masons, and, papal pronouncements to the contrary notwithstanding, can vouch for them individually and collectively as being above reproach.” They know many Jews who, unbaptised and infidel though they be, are sure to go to Heaven!
A Liberal Pontiff
And yet it is told about Pope Pius IX that, although appointment to the see of Imola had more often than not held for its bishop the promise of a cardinalate, Pope Gregory XVI waited for eight years before making Archbishop Mastai-Ferretti Cardinal-Archbishop (which he did in 1840), because Rome was uneasy about his reputed Liberalism. And it is true that when, on the sixteenth of June, 1846, in the fifty-fifth year of his life and the twenty-eighth of his priesthood, Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti, exceedingly handsome, gracious, kindly, smiling, and plentifully endowed with the gentle, winning courtesy of the true Italian, was elected Pope, the Liberal world — the world of revolution — rejoiced, and the truly Catholic world groaned.
The world of revolution rejoiced that at last a Liberal Pope had come to the Chair of Peter! The orthodox Catholic world groaned because it had learned from long experience the tragic lesson of which Pio Nono did not seem to be aware, namely, that there is no way of winning, by kindness in any form, the satanic hordes which, masked behind the deceptive, soothing, seductive lure of promises of progress, democracy, constitutionality, liberty, equality and fraternity, were tearing from their thrones every Catholic king in Christendom, were abolishing monarchies because monarchies had always been the support of individualism, were reducing to a low, common level every high Christian ideal, were confiscating monasteries, closing convents, legislating for government education of children, sending priests to state universities, dictating the course of studies in seminaries, filling episcopal sees without the authorisation of the Pope, while — in order eventually completely to control them — they were flattering “the people” by telling them that the world was theirs to rule by divine right, theirs apart from any influence or restriction on the part of the Church, which Church, they assured them, had always been their enemy.
And when, immediately after his election, Pio Nono gave orders that the Jews should be let out of the ghetto, when he emptied the jails of the thousands of political prisoners placed there for the safety of society and turned loose upon the world incorrigible men who, entirely given over to the revolution and the Devil, would stop at no evil — mass murder, torture, rape, sacrilege, arson, calumny, intrigue, devil-worship — to effect the downfall of the Pope and the Church and the whole Christian order, and when the mobs, in a frenzy of gratitude and entirely mistaking his full purpose, milled around at night in the square before the Quirinal awaiting Pio Nono’s blessing, filling the air with their cries of “Evviva Pio Nono!” wise heads in Europe bowed in fear and consternation.
When Pope Pius IX had made the notoriously Liberal Cardinal Gizzi his Secretary of State, when his reforms included — besides his excellent provisions for the welfare of the Papal States and the education of children — a law establishing a free press, little realising that the hundreds of newspapers which immediately sprang into being would, under Judaised Masonry’s control, be largely responsible for the downfall of his own civil authority as ruler of the Papal States and the vicious attacks made on his spiritual power; when he had relaxed the restrictions placed upon the Jews by his predecessors and had allowed them even to share in the Papal charities — the same Jews who would later join with the revolutionaries against him; when he had given in to the Liberals’ desire that laymen should replace the clergy in the Papal government posts; when he had approved a new Council of State made up of the younger prelates; when he had instituted one constitutional reform after another, into which the most inflamed revolutionaries underhandedly insinuated themselves — the Liberal and Protestant world applauded. England praised him to the skies, and he became the most fantastically acclaimed and popular man in the whole world!
And up in Austria, its wise, prudent and able old Chancellor, Prince Metternich — who, practically single-handed and alone, had, ever since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, staved off the enslavement of the Catholic Church and the countries of Europe, even though he was called a “reactionary” for doing so — shook his experienced head. He issued warning after warning to his Holy Father, Pope Pius IX, all of which went unheeded, and all of which a brokenhearted Pio Nono lived later to realise would have saved the day for his Papal States.
Finally, when Pope Pius IX granted a Civic Guard for Rome, even Cardinal Gizzi resigned, realising what the Pope, in his credulous enthusiasm did not see, that putting arms in the hands of the people was tantamount, at that time, to arming the revolutionaries. Metternich completely despaired. Nor did the stories of the Pope’s angelic personal life, his purity, charity, preaching, devotions, console him. The old statesman wrote, in 1847, from the depths of his anguish:
The Pope reveals himself every day more and more lacking in practical sense. Born and nurtured in a liberal family, he has been formed in a bad school. A good priest, he has never turned his mind toward matters of government … he has allowed himself, since he has assumed the tiara, to be taken and ensnared in a net from which he does not any longer know how to disentangle himself. And if matters follow their natural course now, he will be driven out of Rome.
Doctrinal Orthodoxy Reasserted
Tragic and deplorable as all this is — for Metternich’s prophecy came true — we have the glad relief of knowing that Pio Nono’s Liberalism was political and not religious, except for two flares of unfortunate utterance which, characteristically, no one regretted more than he and no one tried harder to undo. And although, man being one and integral, life cannot ever be so departmentalised that thought in one territory does not flow over and influence another, nevertheless, in his allocution Ubi primum, given in secret consistory on the seventeenth of December, 1847, Pope Pius IX showed himself deeply distressed that he should have been declared to be Liberal in matters of the Faith:
Many enemies of the Catholic Faith direct their efforts in our time mainly to trying to bring to the same level of the doctrines of Christ any monstrous and extravagant opinions, or they try to mix these opinions with Catholic doctrine. And so they plot to propagate more and more that impious system of religious indifferentism. Finally — frightful to say — there are some who have offered such insult to our name and Apostolic dignity as not to hesitate to make us appear as sharers of their folly and as celebrated promoters of this wicked system.These people … conclude that we entertain kind feelings toward any manner of men, in such a way that we think that not only the sons of the Church, but others also, however foreign they may remain to Catholic unity, are equally on the way of salvation and can attain to eternal life. Words fail us, from very horror, in detesting and abhorring this new and horrible insult against us. … Let, therefore, those who wish to be saved come to the pillar and ground of truth … to the true Church of Christ which has, in its bishops and in the Supreme Head of all, the Roman Pontiff, a never-interrupted succession of Apostolic authority, whose first office it is to preach, to guard and to protect with all its might the doctrine preached by the Apostles in accordance with the commandment of Christ; which [Church] therefore has grown from the time of the Apostles in the midst of difficulties of every sort, and has flourished renowned through the whole Earth by the splendour of its miracles, enlarged by the blood of its martyrs, ennobled by the virtues of its confessors and virgins, strengthened by the testimonies and most wise writings of its Fathers, and will flourish in all the regions of the Earth, and will shine forth perfect in the unity of its Faith, of its Sacraments and of its sacred government. We who, though unworthy, govern in this supreme Chair of Peter the Apostle, in which Christ Our Lord placed the foundation of this His Church, shall never at any time whatsoever abstain from any pains and labours so as to bring, through the grace of Christ Himself, those who are ignorant and erring, to this one and only way of truth and salvation. Let them, moreover, who are against us remember, that Heaven and Earth shall indeed pass away, but nothing can ever pass away from the words of Christ, nor can anything be changed in the doctrine which the Catholic Church received from Christ to guard, protect and preach.
Pope Pius IX had already, in his first encyclical, Qui pluribus, of November 9, 1846, renewed the condemnations of his predecessors against “those baneful secret sects who have come forth from the darkness for the ruin and the devastation of the Church and State,” and in the same encyclical he condemned:
the dreadful doctrines … by which men pretend that they can obtain eternal salvation in the observance of any religion whatsoever.
He then exhorted his bishops to foster, with great firmness, in everyone “union with the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation, and obedience towards the Chair of Peter, on whom, as on a firm foundation, the whole Faith of our most holy religion rests.”
Palmerstone: Masonic Orchestrator
These are most reassuring proofs of orthodoxy, with no hint of religious Liberalism. As the year 1848 opened, however, Pope Pius IX was genuinely alarmed. For 1848 was again the year of Revolution, carefully dated, painstakingly planned and diabolically carried out. And the Pope, to his profound dismay, found himself everywhere acclaimed as on the side of the revolutionaries, everywhere counted as one with them, as everywhere the insurrectionists advanced to the cry of Viva Pio Nono! Throne after throne toppled, in the year 1848. Catholic ruler after Catholic ruler, whether he be the chancellor behind the throne or the president of a country, was forced to flee.
For the order had been sent out, the fuse had been lighted, by the supreme, secret head of Freemasonry, who at this time was none other than the to-all-appearances highly respectable, exquisitely appointed, last man in the world to suspect, British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston! It was Lord Palmerston who made and broke the Masonic rulers of Europe. It was he who set up and hurled down the Freemason Emperor Napoleon III of France, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was Lord Palmerston who made and broke Mazzini — he of the great sad eyes, ascetic countenance, slender frame, and mien of a mystic and visionary, but who actually was Lucifer’s able first agent, the head of the dreaded secret society of the Carbonari, the lone founder of the bitterly anti-Catholic Young Italy, and the successor of the corrupt Italian nobleman who went under the assumed name of Nubius (whom Mazzini is said to have poisoned), who was the Grand Master of the Alta Vendita, which, as Monsignor Dillon tells us, “ruled the blackest Freemasonry of France, Germany and England.”
It was Lord Palmerston who aided the extraordinary rise of the Prussian Chancellor Prince Otto von Bismarck, and set the stage for his victory over Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War, the war which brought into being the German Empire of the Kaisers at the expense of the defeated Catholic Austria and France. It was Lord Palmerston who provided the Freemason Cavour, Prime Minister of Sardinia, with the money whereby that poor little Italian state, comprising Sardinia and Piedmont, would later war on Pio Nono and annex the Papal States, all Italy and finally Rome itself, and set up in the place of the Pope-King the rotund, bewhiskered little man, Victor Emmanuel, who, while claiming to be a Catholic, would, like any common thief, rob the Holy Father of the patrimony which was Saint Peter’s!
It was Palmerston’s England which would open its arms and accord a hero’s welcome to Mazzini and Garibaldi, fresh from the pillage and plunder and ravage of Italy. Garibaldi, whose face was “so like the face of the Christ of the Renaissance pictures that the students of Italy could not help but follow him,” and of whom the infamous, revolutionary 1866 Catechism in Italy uttered the following appalling blasphemy by way of diabolical parody:
Make the sign of the cross: In the name of the Father of my country, the Son of the people and the Spirit of liberty, Amen.Q. Who has created you a soldier?
A. Garibaldi has created me a soldier.
Q. Who is Garibaldi?
A. Garibaldi is a spirit most generous, blessed of Heaven and Earth.
Q. How many Garibaldis are there?
A. There is only one Garibaldi.
Q. How many persons in Garibaldi?
A. In Garibaldi there are three persons really distinct: the Father of his country, the Son of the people and the Spirit of liberty.
Q. Which of the persons became man?
A. The second, i.e., the Son of the people.
Q. How was he made man?
A. He took a body and soul as we did in the most blessed womb of a woman of the people.
1848: The Scales Fall
Some awful premonition of all this was in the heart of Pio Nono as the year 1848 began to unfold. In January, revolt broke out in Sicily, moved on from there to Naples, and finally included practically every Italian city, from Lombardy to the tip of the Peninsula. The Paris revolution, which for a while threatened to rival the days of 1789, broke out on the twenty-fourth of February. In March came the revolution in Vienna, and the flight, at last, of Metternich. One by one, the rulers of the small kingdoms and duchies and republics which comprised Italy — and upon the precarious existence of which the Supreme Directory of the Masons had placed their hopes for the eventual absorption of the Papal States in a Masonically controlled and united Italy under one carefully chosen head — were forced to grant constitutions, the first step in the whole plan. The Revolution’s leaders reasoned that once the Pope’s temporal power was over, his spiritual power soon would follow, and the institution of the papacy would be no more.
Finally, in March also, the sadly awakening, overly generous and trusting Pope found himself forced, too, to give in. On March 15, 1848, he granted a constitution to the Papal States. And the end was in sight! In April, the Piedmontese General, Durando, made a proclamation to his troops, deliberately and on his own authority placing Pope Pius IX behind a war against Austria (calculated to take advantage of the revolution going on in that country), and naming him as the leader of a crusade of all Italy against foreigners, with the end that Italy should become a united republic with the Pope as President!
All during April, matters went from bad to worse. The lay ministers of the papal government beseeched the Pope to declare war against Austria. The Cardinals in consistory opposed it. The ministry resigned, and Rome was immediately filled with armed men and milling, riotous mobs. The mobs were soon joined by the Pope’s Civic Guard! Pio Nono was virtually a prisoner in the Quirinal, and it was necessary to place a guard at the residences of the Cardinals day and night. The press and the Masonic clubs, which very much resembled the Jacobin clubs of the French Revolution, openly discussed an alliance with the Piedmontese Government and the necessity of abolishing then and there the papal rule!
It was at this moment that the scales fell from the eyes of the hitherto lavishly loved and popular “Liberal Pope,” Pio Nono. It was at this moment that the various masks fell from the face of the whole anti-Christian conspiracy, and Pope Pius IX saw beneath the Liberal, Radical, Progressive, Socialist-Communist fronts to the Thing that beneath all of them was plotting for the souls of men and the overthrow of the Church with malignant malice and consuming hatred. And the Holy Father at last realised that never could peace be made with It, never could It be converted, never could It be baptised, for the choice of the Father of Lies, the Progenitor of Evil and the Dispenser of Spiritual Deformity, in every one of its monstrous, hideous, revolting forms, is forever fixed against Him Who is All Truth, All Beauty and All Goodness.
Pio Nono was never again the same. In the thirty years which were to follow, he presented to the hordes of the ancient enemy of his beloved Blessed Virgin Mary a face of such implacable, unrelenting resistance that he became as universally hated by the Liberals, Protestants and Radicals all over the world as he had formerly been lauded by them.
FOOTNOTES:
(1) Notwithstanding the "extra ecclesiam nulla salus" controversy forever associated with Fr. Feeney, during which he was excommunicated in 1953 and only reconciled to the Church in 1974, he had much else to offer by way of the personal gifts that marked his brilliant career. After his death in 1978, even the liberal Fr. Avery Dulles S.J. called him one of the most skilled orators he had ever met, saying "he had an incomparable gift for putting the deepest mysteries in the simplest terms." In all charity, he added: “With unstinting generosity he placed all his talents and energies in the service of the Faith as he saw it.”