Chapter 10 DEFINITIONS: Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy

 

Chapter 10 DEFINITIONS: Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy in HTML Web Format

Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy in HTML Web Format

August 14, 2018 James Arendt

 

Chapter 10 DEFINITIONS

THE TERM “Jesuit” was first used to describe a member of the Society of Jesus in 1559. It did not originate from within the Society, but from outsiders. Whether intended derisively or respectfully, “Jesuit” does appear to have been inspired.

We find in the Bible (Numbers 26:44) the mention of “Jesuites.” These Jesuites were the progeny of Jesui, whose name in Hebrew, Yishviy, means “level.” The Jesuits certainly levelled the Protestant menace.
Jesui was a great-grandson of Abraham. His father was the Israelite tribal chieftan Asher (Asher,
“happy”). At Genesis 49:20, Asher’s posterity is divinely prophesied to “yield

royal dainties (ma-adanim, ‘delights’).” Their uniquely privileged access to the minds and wills of kings has certainly enabled the Jesuits to yield copious harvests of royal delights.
But in fulfilling their scriptural prophecy, the Jesuits seem to have alienated themselves from people who use the English language. This does not disappoint St. Ignatius. “Let us hope,” he once wrote, “that the Society may never be left untroubled by the hostility of the world for very long.”
America’s first indigenous dictionary was compiled by Noah Webster and published in 1828. His American Dictionary of the English Language reflects the place held by Jesuits in the opinion of a public whose senior citizens had brought forth the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (Webster himself was forty- one when the Constitution was ratified):
Jesuit.One of the society of Jesus, so called, founded by Ignatius Loyola; a society remarkable for their cunning in propagating their principles.
Jesuited.Conforming to the principles of the Jesuits.
Jesuitess. A female Jesuit in principle.
Jesuitic, jesuitical. Pertaining to the Jesuits or their principles and arts. 2. Designing; cunning; deceitful; prevaricating.
Jesuitically. Craftily.
Jesuitism. The arts, principles and practices of the Jesuits. 2. Cunning; deceit; hypocrisy; prevarication; deceptive practices to effect a purpose.
One hundred seventy-eight years later, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1986) informs us that the language has not repented:
Jesuit: 1: a member of a religious society for men founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in 1534. 2: one given to intrigue or equivocation: a crafty person: CASUIST
Jesuited: jesuitic Jesuitic or jesuitical: 1: of or relating to the Jesuits, Jesuitism, or Jesuitry. 2: having qualities thought to resemble those of a Jesuit – usu. used disparagingly
Jesuitize: to act or teach in the actual or ascribed manner of a Jesuit: to indoctrinate with actual or ascribed Jesuit principles Jesuitry: principles or practices ascribed to the Jesuits, as the practice of mental reservation, casuistry, and equivocation
Webster’s online dictionary, WWWebster (1999), is particularly revealing. Here we read that “Jesuit” means “a member of the Roman Catholic Society of Jesus founded by Saint Ignatius Loyola in 1534 and devoted to missionary and educational work,” and that a Jesuit is “one given to intrigue or equivocation.” WWWebster defines “to intrigue” as meaning “to cheat, trick, plot, and scheme,” and “to equivocate” as “to use equivocal language especially with intent to deceive; to avoid committing oneself in what one says.” “Equivocal” language, according to the same source, is language “subject to two or more interpretations and usually used to mislead or confuse; of uncertain nature or disposition toward a person or thing; of doubtful advantage, genuineness, or moral rectitude.”
The Jesuit discipline has elevated mental reservation, casuistry, and equivocation to high arts – you will not find a more hilarious defense of these arts than Blaise Pascal’s classic “Pastoral Letters”(1657), freely available on the internet. Purportedly written to a friend, the “Letters” report conversations Pascal is having with a Jesuit casuist. The Jesuit defends his arts thusly:
Men have arrived at such a pitch of corruption nowadays that, unable to make them come to us, we must e’en go to them, otherwise they would cast us off altogether; and, what is worse, they would become perfect castaways. It is to retain such characters as these that our casuists have taken under consideration the vices to which people of various conditions are most addicted, with the view of laying down maxims which, while they cannot be said to violate the truth, are so gentle that he must be a very impracticable subject indeed who is not pleased with them. The grand project of our Society, for the good of religion, is never to repulse any one, let him be what he may, and so avoid driving people to despair.
Jesuit moral theology hardly needs a satirist. Its humor is self- contained. Consider Hermann Busenbaum, one of the Society’s most venerated moral theologians. Busenbaum literally wrote the book on self-serving logic. His celebrated Medulla theologiae moralis (“The Marrow of Moral Theology,” 1645) enjoyed more than two hundred printings and was required ethics reading in all the Jesuit colleges. A man of stout appetites, Busenbaum constructed an equivocation to relieve himself of the obligation to eat fish on Fridays: “On Fridays every good Catholic must eat only creatures that live in the water, which justifies ordering a nice roast duck!”
Busenbaum demonstrated how mental reservation could enable a criminal to escape a charge of breaking and entering:

“Did you force the window to gain felonious entry into these premises?” asks the judge. “Certainly not!” replies the accused, qualifying his denial with the mental reservation “I entered through the skylight.”

Father Gury, who taught moral theology at the Roman College from his book Casus Conscientire (1875), approved of the way an adulterous wife, having just received absolution for her sin from a priest, used mental reservation to mislead her husband:
To the entreaties of her husband, she absolutely denied the fault: “I have not committed it,” she said; meaning “adultery such as I am obliged to reveal;” in other words, “I have not committed an adultery.” She could deny her sin as a culprit may say to a judge who does not question him legitimately: “I have not committed any crime,” adding mentally, “in such a manner that I should reveal it.” This is the opinion of St. Liguori, and of many others.
The “St. Liguori” to whom Gury refers is Alphonse Liguori, declared Patron Saint of Confessors and Moralists by Pope Pius XII. St. Liguori was not a Jesuit himself, but he was devoted to them. He facilitated adultery by means of an equivocation: “An adulteress questioned by her husband, may deny her guilt by declaring that she has not committed ‘adultery,’ meaning ‘idolatry,’ for which the term ‘adultery’ is often employed in the Old Testament.” Casuistry is the process of applying moral principles falsely in deciding the rights or wrongs of a case – the word “casuistry” comes from “cases.” WWWebster equates casuistry with rationalization, “to cause something to seem reasonable; to provide plausible but untrue reasons for conduct.” (In early 1999, President Clinton’s biographer, David Maraniss, could be seen remarking on talkshows that the President owed his formidable skills as a criminal defendant to “his training in casuistry at Georgetown University.”) The great Jesuit casuist Antonio Escobar pardoned evildoing as long as it was committed in pursuit of a lofty goal. “Purity of intention,” he declared in 1627, “may justify actions which are contrary to the moral code and to human laws.” Hermann Busenbaum ratified Escobar with his own famous maxim “Cum finis est licitus, etiam media sunt licita,” “If the end is legal, the means are legal.” Escobar and Busenbaum boil down to the essential doctrine of terrorism: “The end justifies the means.”
Casuistry solved the problem of usury. Although the voice of Jesus commanded “lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward will be great” (Luke 6:35), Jesuit lenders often charged exorbitant interest. Father Gury explained the principle:
If lending one hundred francs you are losing ten francs by it, you lend really one hundred and ten francs. Then you shall receive one hundred and ten francs.
Indeed, casuistry has set the moral tone of world economics. In his Universae theologiae moralis (“Catholic Moral Theology”, 1652-66), Antonio Escobar rendered the opinion that “The giving of short weight is not to be reckoned as a sin when the official price for certain goods is so low that the merchant would be ruined thereby.” By this reasoning, the international network of central banks (beginning with the Knights Templars and sustained by the Society of Jesus) has been absolved of manipulating monetary values if doing so helps individual sovereign nation-states manage their subjects. Subjects are cyclically required to part with true value – that is, hard-earned gold and silver coinage – in exchange for intangible credit denominated in paper notes whose official promises to repay in precious coinage… are cyclically broken. As the most powerful office in Roman Catholicism, the black papacy might have promoted stable national economies by means of the divinely fair monetary system commanded in the Bible at Leviticus 19

Ye shall do no unrighteousness in measure. Just balances, just weights, shall ye have: I am the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt.

Instead, it has promoted Escobar’s casuistry, which directs merchants to survive official value manipulations by cheating one another. There are significant sociological consequences. When giving short weight becomes policy, a moral paradigm is set. That paradigm governs more than just commercial transactions. It affects human relationships, as well. Partners in friendships, marriages, and families begin giving short weight – giving less than represented. This results in one-sided, frustrating, dysfunctional emotional transactions, and ultimately an aberrant society. The ultimate beneficiary of aberrant societies, of course, is Pontifex Maximus, whose profession is their regulation.
If we depend solely on dictionary definitions, we learn that Jesuits are churchmen and teachers of a doubtful moral rectitude who are likely to cheat, trick, plot, scheme, deceive, and confuse us while avoiding to commit themselves verbally. When we study their published moralists, we sense a rather vibrant presence of The Trickster. But in the Society’s defense, it must be said these are legitimate character traits for a militia empowered by a declaration of war, and we must remember that Paul Ill’s bull ordaining the Society of Jesus, Regimini militantis ecclesiae, is just such a declaration. Human life in a declared war becomes subject to the first great rule of war, belli legum dormit, “in war the law sleeps.” When the law sleeps, the unarmed priest’s only weapons are the intrigue, deceit, equivocation, casuistry, and mental reservation with which the Jesuits have made themselves so notorious and so often despised.
In forthcoming chapters, we shall be examining how the Society of Jesus made war against Great Britain and the British colonies during the second half of the eighteenth century, and then against the sovereign American States a century later. In each instance, the warfare was of the highest sophistication. It was so subtly conceived and so masterfully executed, that neither of the major combatants could discern the presence of Jesuits in the equation. The amazing technology of Jesuit warfare – that is the subject of our next chapter.