As Jorge Bergoglio's year of 'celebrating' Luther and his Reformation winds down, Aldo Maria Valli cites egregious historical facts about how Luther was
a fiendish hater - of peasants and Jews, among others (what he thought of the popes, and worse, of Jesus, is a bit better known). But despite all that - on top of
having split the Church in a manner far more traumatic than the Great Schism of 1054 - Bergoglio has chosen to virtually canonize this fiend, whose apostasy
and contempt for Catholicism Bergoglio is seeking to surpass and not just replicate.
Historical facts about Luther militate against
the very idea of Bergoglio's church celebrating him
Translated from
Oct. 18, 2017
“Just look at this!” When Santa Subito says that, it means she is about to ask me to do something. In this case, to read something. But actually, more than to read something, to look at it.
['Santa Subito' is Valli's endearment for his wife Serena, which says a lot of their relationship.]
It was the current issue of a Catholic weekly, the issue being completely dedicated to the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the occasion of a new edition presented by Pope Francis.
[I find this rather outrageous chutzpah on the part of someone who, if he has his way, is seeking to change many important points in the Catechism (I cling to my belief that he already has some work group preparing those changes, led by the very person who chaired the editorial committee that had prepared this Catechism in 1985-1992, the Cardinal from Vienna who has done a most spectacular act of turncoatism, in effect, from being a reputed Ratzingerian before March 13, 2013, to now being the semi-official defender of every new Bergoglian blow to Catholic teaching, from AL to abolition of the death penalty. Schoenborn simply claims that none of the Bergoglian propositions contradict the Catechism in any way!]
So then what? Santa Subito opens the magazine and shows me the dossier on the subject, in which the article “The Catechism in the life of the Church”, is illustrated with three paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, a 16th century German master who was a Lutheran. Indeed, two of the paintings have Martin Luther in the picture.
Santa Subito looks at me and says: “Really? Luther? Was that at all necessary?”
I can understand why she is disconcerted. Perhaps they might have illustrated it with something that has to do with St. Pius VI, who published the firt modern Catechism of the Church following the Council of Trent. Or with St. Pius X, who published for the Diocese of Rome a Catechism that eventually was distributed everywhere. But then, I reminded Santa Subito, Luther himself had written two catechisms - the Large Catechism and the Small Catechism – so perhaps that justified it.
[But they were not Catholic Catechisms, both having been published in 1529, the large one for clergymen to aid them in teaching their congregations, and the small one for children.]
Actually, the presence of the Cranach paintings showing Luther in the latest edition of the Catholic Catechism prompted me to reflect on something else. Which has to do with the climate of celebration in many Catholic circles in the year 2017, marking 500 years since the Protestant Reformation.
It is a climate that in certain aspects, has taken on the aspect of a canonization of Luther – at the price of distorting history.
Let us consider a subject which is very dear to this pope and what the Catechism says about it: the death penalty. Presenting the new edition of the Catechism, the pope, speaking to the officials and personnel of the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization, expressed a strong and unequivocal position against the death penalty, which the Catechism considers an ‘
extrema ratio’ – a last resort, if need be – but
this pope says that the deth penalty is always inadmissible.
Well, let’s get back to Luther and Cranach the Elder. Let’s start with the painter – who was not just an artist, but had been elected several times by the municipal council of Wittenberg as treasurer and mayor. But he was also a judge, and as such, in 1540, imposed the death penalty by beheading on several persons who had been accused of assassination, black magic, and above all, witchcraft.
At that time, in effect, members of Luther’s Reformed Church were rather zealous and even pitiless in their [literal] witch hunts, persecution of those suspected as witches being far worse in the Protestant lands than in catholic countries. Luther himself advocated without any reservations
the need to burn such women for being possessed of the devil (“For such women,” he wrote, “skip the niceties and just torture them!”). Likewise Melancthon (Luther’s premier theologian) and John Calvin.
Not surprisingly, the great number of executions of women accused of witchcraft were in Scotland, in Germany, and the Swiss canton of Vaud – all Protestant territories. And when the Puritans colonized America, they brought with them this persecution of witches, famously exemplified by Salem, Massachusetts, where 19 women were burned at the stake. The last witch execution took place in Switzerland in 1782 [after which it presumably became illegal]. Nor should we forget the brutality against prostitutes who were persecuted in Protestant lands with unparalleled cruelty.
As for Luther, let us recall with what violence he denounced the Peasants’ War, using words that were
an exhortation fo systematic homicide:
“These rebels are proscribed by God and the emperor, therefore anyone who wishes to kill them is acting very correctly: against anyone who is manifestly seditious, every man should be both judge and executioner. Therefore, anyone can strike them, cut their throats and massacre them in public or secretly, keeping in mind that there is nothing more poisonous, harmful and diabolical than a seditious man, who must be killed like a rabid dog, because if not, he will kill you and with you, the whole nation. Therefore, dear sirs, liberate, save, aid and have mercy on poor people, but hurt, strangle and kill who you can, and if in doing so, you find death, then be happy, because you will not find a more blessed death, dying in obedience to the word and will of God and in the service of charity to save your neighbor from hell and the snares of the devil.” (Martin Luther, 1525, ‘Against the Murdering, thieving hordes of peasants”) [Yes, that was really the title of his tract!]
[Everytime I think I have read the worst of Luther – at his most sanctimonious irrational rage – there’s always something even worse. In this case, he was denouncing the peasants because he was currying favor with the princes for his new religion. I was thinking that JMB may never really have read a good biography of Luther (or done any serious study of him at all, other than superficial dabbing for something to say in his many encounters with Lutherans) or has only read saccharine pieces on him by his idolators, but imagine ignoring all of Luther’s egregious sins and faults to go as far as to thank the Lord for the ‘blessings’ Luther and his Reformation have brought to the Church!]
To disobey civilan power was, for Luther, a crime meriting the death penalty. The danger of subversion and anarchy must be repressed without pity, such that he himself would teach civil authorities the need to use the sword:
“Now is not the time to sleep or to be patient or merciful: this is the time of rage and the sword, not that of grace… Therefore, let the authorities proceed in good spirits and strike [the rebels] with good conscience for as long as a breath of life remains in them. They can then boast of taking the peasants out of their evil thinking and unjust case, and whoever among themis killed for this, is totally lost, body and soul, and eternally prey for the devil. But the authorities will have good conscience and a just cause on their side.”
[Gosh! The man was either a pervert or a lunatic or both. Bergoglio may not have gone so far in his rages against those he does not like because they do not think like him, but I can see the same streak of lunacy and/or perversion that ran through Luther running through his Argentine ‘spiritual son’.]
And could we forget Luther’s invectives against the Jews? One can only be rudely shaken by reading the words with which the former monk vents himself against them, c
alling on his followers to burn the synagogues, demolish their homes, deprive them of their religious books, prohibit the rabbis from teaching, deprive the Jews of safe-conduct passes and any juridical protection, sequester their wealth and oblige them to manual labor. [Four hundred years later, Hitler obeyed him to the letter – and beyond - to bring on the Holocaust. How does Bergoglio square all these barbaric Lutheran thoughts with his own voluble protestations of love for the poor and for the Jews? But if he has been deliberately glossing over all of Luther’s sins in order to make his case for ‘the cause of Luther’s canonization’ in the Church, then he’s an even worse hypocrite than I already think him to be.]
Of course, at that time, Luther was not alone in thinking all that, but he certainly stood out for his fervor in scapegoating peasants and Jews, so much so that Lutherans themselves acknowledge that the ‘Great Reformer’ did not change anything in this respect, but on the contrary, reinforced and disseminated these prejudices with devastating consequences.
Luther was totally a man of his time, but it cannot be ignored that he behaved like a true and proper retrograde old fogey
who never subjected his own thought to self-criticism [Hmmm, why does that remind me of someone?] and embraced the most intolerant positions.
Just to make it clear, I repeat: Lutherans subsequently distanced themselves from certain far-out ideas of their founder, and have mostly opposed the death penalty as well as Luther’s anti-Judaism.
On the other hand, regarding the death penalty, we Catholics can recall, for instance, that St. Thomas Aquinas approved of it in some cases (reasoning that
not only is it licit but also dutiful to extirpate a sick member in order to save the whole body); and that the death penalty was legitimate in the papal states until they were abolished in 1870. But that is not the point I wish to underscore on this occasion.
My point is that since, in 2017, with regard to Luther and Lutheranism, 500 years since the Reformation, we Catholics have been told, repeatedly ad nauseam, that
from Luther’s world and its ‘spirituality’, we are exhorted to purify ourselves [as if the Church does not do that constantly], and that
Luther was ‘medicine’ for the Church, [according to Bergoglio, repeatedly] looking back at historical facts is not at all a useless exercise.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/10/2017 00:45]