The Faith of Europe

K R Bolton

“The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.” – Hilaire Belloc.1

Pope Benedict XVI on the second day of his pilgrimage to the Czech Republic, a ‘highly secular country’ after decades of communist rule, has declared that all of Europe must acknowledge its Christian heritage in facing the problems arising from the multiplicity of religious and ethical ideas that accompany multiculturalism and globalisation. “As Europe listens to the story of Christianity, she hears her own,” said the Pontiff, urging the crowd not to forget their “rich heritage of faith.”2

The message of Pope Benedict is one for all Europeans, for those that is, not defined by hair and skin colour and skull measurement, but by inward conviction and ethos, who see Europe, regardless of the part of the world in which they might reside, as their ‘spiritual and cultural homeland’, though they might never have even so much as visited the Occident3.

Europe is an Idea and a Faith, inexorably bound to the Catholic Church, a reality for those who uphold the rebirth of Europe whether they be Catholic or not. The necessity to realise the Catholic foundation of “Europe” is of crucial importance, not only from the perspective of history, but as a necessity for the future of Europe. This is because there is a European dichotomy that has been at work for centuries: that of the Europe of Faith, and that of the Europe of Mammon. The question for Europe is one of: God or Mammon?4

This essay examines the spiritual and ethical foundations of “Europe”, the way those foundations have been eroded, and the foundations of the counterfeit-Europe that is now being formed around the European Union.

“I have no means of knowing whether you are a Christian or an atheist. That, however, will not matter, so long as we talk about facts and not wishes.” Dr Revilo P Oliver5.

1 Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith, (London: Constable, 1920), Introduction. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/84422 “Pope calls to Europe”, Dominion Post, September 29, 2009, B2.3 Comparisons might be drawn to the Jewish devotion to Jerusalem or to the Islamic devotion to Mecca.4 I Timothy 6: 10: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” While the first part of this passage is relatively well known and cited, the second part gives food for further thought. The preceding passage also should be carefully considered in conjunction: “But they that will be rich fall into a temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in perdition and destruction.” (I Timothy 6:9). I believe these passages contain the key to understanding the majority of historical processes at work. Our money-centred civilisation, which can be traced most clearly since the Reformation, has and is driving the whole world into perdition and destruction.5 Revilo P Oliver, Christianity & the Survival of the West (Cape Canaveral: Howard Allen Enterprises, 1978), p. 1. Oliver was a professor of Classics at the University of Illinois, and wrote from the viewpoint of a pro-Western, scholarly non-Believer.

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“Europe” Emergent

“Europe” is a Catholic conception. It is concomitant with theories on the division of mankind from the Biblical account: the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham and Japheth6; Asia, Africa and Europe, respectively, according to St Jerome (AD 346-420) in Liber hebraicarum questionum; and to St Ambrose (born AD 3400). St Augustine interpreted the prophesy of Genesis 9: 27 as referring to the “tents of Shem” being the Church which would be enlarged by Japheth. The name Japheth or Yaptheth (phatah) means to enlarge, to spread”.7 “Europe” per se had a religious definition from its conceptionalisation.8

Belloc stated that the very essence of Europe is Catholic:‘There is a Protestant aspect, a Jewish aspect, a Mohammedan aspect, a

Japanese aspect, and so forth. For all of these look on Europe from without. The Catholic sees Europe from within. There is no more a Catholic "aspect" of European history than there is a man's "aspect" of himself.’9

The impetus for Europe came vis-à-vis the recognition of the “outer enemy”, that awareness of the ‘other’ generally being the cause of the self-realisation of a culture and a folk. In describing the Battle of Poitiers against the Arabs in AD 732 the Chronicle of Isidore of Spain refers to the Christian armies of Charles Martel as the “Europeans”. The empire of Charlemagne (AD 768-814) is named “Europe” by the contemporary chroniclers. In 755 the priest Cathwulf praises Charlemagne as chosen by God, and ruling over “the glory of the empire of Europe.”10 In 799 Angilbert, Charlemagne’s son-in-law and the Court poet, described the Emperor as “the father of Europe” – “Rex, pater Europae.”11 The “Kingdom of Charles” was called “Europa” in the Annals of Fuld. Alcuin (735-804), master of the palace school, theologian and Court rhetorician, called this “the continent of faith”. During the era of Charlemagne, his Empire was “Europe” and to paraphrase Belloc, “Europe was the faith”.

Belloc described the self-awareness that invigorated the High Culture of the Medieval Age with its distinctly “European” – Catholic – style:

“In the next period--the Dark Ages--the Catholic proceeds to see Europe saved against a universal attack of the Mohammedan, the Hun, the Scandinavian: he notes that the fierceness of the attack was such that anything save something divinely instituted would have broken down. The Mohammedan came within three days' march of Tours, the Mongol was seen from the walls of Tournus on the Sâone: right in France. The Scandinavian savage poured into the mouths of all the rivers of Gaul, and almost overwhelmed the whole island of Britain. There was nothing left of Europe but a central core. Nevertheless Europe survived.

6 Genesis 9:18. 7 Denis de Rougemont, The Idea of Europe (New York: Macmillan Co., 1966), p. 20. Also referred to as such in Genesis 9:27. 8 Denis de Rougemont, Ibid, p. 20.9 Hilaire Belloc, op.cit .Introduction. 10 Denis de Rougemont, ibid., p. 46.11 Angilbert, Monumenta germ.Poet.Carol. I, 368. Quoted by Denis de Rougemont, ibid., p. 46.

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“In the refloresence which followed that dark time--in the Middle Ages--the Catholic notes not hypotheses but documents and facts; he sees the Parliaments arising not from some imaginary "Teutonic" root--a figment of the academies--but from the very real and present great monastic orders, in Spain, in Britain, in Gaul--never outside the old limits of Christendom. He sees the Gothic architecture spring high, spontaneous and autochthonic, first in the territory of Paris and thence spread outwards in a ring to the Scotch Highlands and to the Rhine. He sees the new Universities, a product of the soul of Europe, re-awakened—he sees the marvellous new civilization of the Middle Ages rising as a transformation of the old Roman society, a transformation wholly from within, and motived by the Faith.”12

The Europe that arose during this blossoming of Western Civilization had a thoroughly Catholic impress pervading its entire being. Belloc wrote of the institutions that arose from out of the Catholic social ethos, which predated capitalism, industrialism and materialism, but which has been obscured and forgotten, or slandered, due to the injustices and inequities of a later, degraded society.

“Our property in land and instruments was well divided among many or all; we produced the peasant; we maintained the independent craftsman; we founded coöperative industry. In arms that military type arose which lives upon the virtues proper to arms and detests the vices arms may breed. Above all, an intense and living appetite for truth, a perception of reality, invigorated these generations. They saw what was before them, they called things by their names. Never was political or social formula less divorced from fact, never was the mass of our civilization better welded--and in spite of all this the thing did not endure.”13

The basis of the Catholic social ethos that would come to be known as Catholic social doctrine includes: widespread property ownership, craftsmanship, cooperative economy, and knightly chivalry. These were the foundations of a civilisation based on justice proceeding from Faith. These were what Belloc and others such as G K Chesterton wished to see revived as an answer to the Depression, Marxism and

12 Hilaire Belloc, op.cit., I.13 Hilaire Belloc, ibid., IV.

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Capitalism14, according to the real social teachings of the Church15, which could reawaken Western Civilisation in our own time.

The foundation of the social and economic order was based around the guilds, which upheld ethical Christian principles in trade. The American historian and theologian Rev. Dr. W D P Bliss16, wrote of the guilds in Medieval Europe that:

“These guilds of one kind or another, extended all over Germanic Europe and endured in most countries till the time of the Reformation17 and in a few instances to the nineteenth century.

“The Middle Ages were a period of customary not of competitive prices, and the idea of permitting agreements to be decided by the ‘higgling of the market’ was an impossibility, because other laws of the market were not left to the free arbitrament of contracting partiers.” 18

Bliss stated that this was an era in which craftsmanship dominated over capital ‘and the master worked besides the artisan’. 19 Bliss described the organic, social nature of Catholic Europe, taking as his reference the German city of Nuremberg:

14 Both Belloc and G K Chesterton were leading spokesmen and theorists for the Distributist movement, aiming to provide an alternative to the injustices of capitalism not by the abolition of private property as per socialism, but by the wider distribution of private property among all classes, and the prevention of economic concentration. Other movements of the time included guild socialism, and social credit, the later receiving widespread Catholic support because of it being fundamentally in accord with traditional Church prohibitions against usury. The famous American Depression era “radio priest”, Father Charles Coughlin founded his popular movement, the National Union for Social Justice, largely around the demand for the creation of a central bank that would remove the power of the bankers, whom he condemned as the modern-day money changers. Possibly the longest running and most vibrant social credit movement still existing is the Canadian based Catholic movement, the Pilgrims of St. Michael. (See: http://www.michaeljournal.org/folder.htm). In 1745 Pope Benedict XIV reiterated the Church’s opposition to usury in his Encyclical On Usury and Dishonest Profit: “One cannot condone the sin of usury…” IHS Press is dedicated to publishing literature on Catholic social teachings. (http://www.ihspress.com/9781932528107.php).15 In particular, Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum : Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour, 1891. Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 1930. It is lamentable that the traditional social teachings have in recent years often been obscured by liberal ideas and ‘liberation theogology’, often hard to distinguish from Marxism. 16 Bliss was an Episcopalian and a leading American theorist of Christian Socialism, which however originated from Catholicism out of Frederick Denison Maurice’s The Kingdom of Christ, published in 1837.  (Revd. Robert Rea, Was Father Field a Christian Socialist? “Christian Socialism”, Project Canterbury, http://anglicanhistory.org/essays/field/field2.html (accessed 16 October 2009). 17 An allusion to the Reformation ushering in what became capitalism and the Free Market. Marx saw Free Trade capitalism as part of a dialectical process, a stage in history as an essential prelude to socialism and ultimately to communism:

“Generally speaking, the protectionist system today is conservative, whereas the Free Trade system has a destructive effect. It destroys the former nationalities, and renders the contrasts between workers and middle class more acute. In a word, the Free Trade system is precipitating the social revolution. And only in this revolutionary sense to I vote for Free Trade.” Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, “Speech on the question of free trade delivered to the Democratic Association of Brussels at it public meeting of January 9, 1848”, Collected Works, Volume 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976).

18 W D P Bliss, New Encyclopaedia of Social Reform, (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1908), pp. 544-545.19 W D P Bliss, ibid., p. 546.

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“No Nuremberger even seriously dreamed of leaving trade or art or manufacture, or indeed any portion of life, to the accident and incident of unrestricted competition. ‘Competition,’ the Nuremberger would have said, ‘is the death of trade, the subverter of freedom, above all, the destroyer of quality.’ Every Nuremberger, like every medieval man, thought of himself not as an independent unit, but as a dependent, although component, part of a larger organism, church or empire or city or guild. This was the very essence of medieval life.”20

Bliss explained that a trade held the right to practice trades as a tenure from the emperor who held it from God. The guild determined what raw materials would be used in a manufacture, how much to buy, the number of apprentices a master might employ, the wages, and the methods of production, and fixed prices.21

“The guild did not allow the untrained workman or the mean-spirited trader to cut prices to spoil or steal the market. The guilds measured and weighed and tested all materials, and determined how much each producer could have. … They equally measured or counted, weighed and tested the finished product…. As late as 1456 two men were burned alive at Nuremberg for having sold adulterated wines…. Nuremberg thus saw very well that competition only served the rich and the strong. That collective trading was the hope of the poor and the plain people. …. Money was not to be lent on usury (interest)…. Extortion, false measures, adulation of goods, were abominations in a trading town and punished usually by death.”22

It might be seen then that this social and economic order was one based on ethics as distinct from personal gain to the detriment of the wider social organism or community. That is why this social order was anathema to the newly emerging merchant classes who were the fomenters of revolution under the guise of ‘freedom’, which it soon transpired, was merely ‘freedom’ for commerce; who used the masses as cannon fodder and with utopian promises. Hence, in contrast to the ethos described by Bliss, the new economic order – under which most of the world now lives – treats everything including the arts as a tradable commodity. The quality in both arts and produce that the social ethos of the guild ensured has for centuries now been replaced by the rise of quantity, i.e. of mass production and consumption. The individual has for centuries ceased to be part of a social organism, and has become an alienated economic unit without roots to anything beyond himself, or at most his immediate family. Even that family bond, such as it continues to exist, has been increasingly undermined by the demands of the economic treadmill which – despite the advances in technology –compels more and more time from the individual; which offers, like the old USSR in its initial, years, the option of the state to raise the child while the parents’ first commitment is to the production and consumption process23. This is

20 W D P Bliss, ibid., p. 842. 21 W D P Bliss, ibid.22 W D P Bliss, ibid. 23 The eight hour day has increasingly become something of the past, and it is significant that the economic demands on the time of the individual are in no small measure imposed due to increasing debt on nearly every household which has especially spiralled thanks to credit cards) the result of a banking system that was once called usury and was considered a crime and is now regarded as

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where the ‘progressive revolutions’, for ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ have taken us, whether one calls it liberalism, capitalism, democracy, socialism or communism. All have emerged from a rejection of the kingdom of God on earth, nurtured by secret societies and manifesting as bloody revolutions, including the Cromwellian revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the liberal-democratic revolutions of the 18th Century, and all the socialist and communist revolutions.

Europe in Decay

From the high point of the Western Civilisation reached during the 13 th Century, according to Belloc, at the time of England’s Edward I24, the following century saw the rot of money-values begin to penetrate even the religious instructions.

“By the middle of the fourteenth century the decaying of the flower was tragically apparent. New elements of cruelty tolerated, of mere intrigue successful, of emptiness in philosophical phrase and of sophistry in philosophical argument, marked the turn of the tide. Not an institution of the thirteenth but the fourteenth debased it; the Papacy professional and a prisoner, the parliaments tending to oligarchy, the popular ideals dimmed in the minds of the rulers, the new and vigorous and democratic monastic orders already touched with mere wealth and beginning also to change—but these last can always, and do always, restore themselves.”25

As described in the next section, this period of the 14 th Century coincides with that of the rebellion of Philip the Fair of France against the temporal authority of the Holy Empire and the spiritual authority of the Papacy.

Europe Divided

The spiritual and cultural organic unity called “Europe” broke into kingdoms and into princely federations after Charlemagne. The temporal unity was undermined; the spiritual unity was maintained by the Papacy.26 However even in the 11th Century the mantel of (Saint) Henry II could still be embroidered with the legend: “O blessed Caesar Henry, honour of Europe – may the king who reigns in eternity increase thy empire.” After Henry’s death a funeral chant had the refrain: “Europe, now beheaded, weeps.”27

Further schism was caused by Philip the Fair of France during the 14 th Century when he challenged both the temporal power of the Holy Empire and the spiritual power of Pope Boniface VIII. This was the first manifestation of the “sovereign rights” which was to eventually result in the emergence of the nation-states and the disintegration of the spiritual-cultural-political unity of Europe. The Age of Discovery leading to the colonial empires placed the focus on the Atlantic and to trade rivalry between states. The Reformation undermined the spiritual unity, while the instigators

conventional banking practice. 24 Hilaire Belloc, ibid., VI.25 Hilaire Belloc, ibid. VII. One is reminded again of the (prophetic) statement of Paul in I Timothy 6: 10, op.cit.26 Denis de Rougemont, op.cit., p. 47. 27 Ibid., pp. 48- 49.

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such as Luther and Calvin did not speak of Europe.28 The Protestants sought to replace the Holy Empire and the Papacy with federated states29, ultimately giving rise to what is familiar in our own times as schemes for federated and regional combines in the interests of trade and other economic factors. The proponents of European federation started talking of this as the prelude to world unity during the 17 th Century in conjunction with religious ecumenicalism.30

The Reformation brought not only schism to Europe from which Europe has never recovered, but inaugurated the present era of capitalism, of the rule of Mammon (Plutocracy) over Faith. Belloc comments:

“When we come to deal with the story of the Reformation in Britain, we shall see how the strong popular resistance to the Reformation nearly overcame that small wealthy class which used the religious excitement of an active minority as an engine to obtain material advantage for themselves. But as a fact in Britain the popular resistance to the Reformation failed. A violent and almost universal persecution directed, in the main by the wealthier classes, against the religion of the English populace and the wealth which endowed it just happened to succeed. In little more than a hundred years the newly enriched had won the battle. By the year 1600 the Faith of the British masses had been stamped out from the Highlands to the Channel.”31

Belloc makes it plain that it was plutocratic interests that instigated the revolt against Church, as the Church stood as a bulwark against the abuses of newly emerging merchant interests, just as the Papacy had stood against the abuses of princes and kings. The befuddled masses under the guise of ‘freedom’ substituted the fatherly authority and protection of the Papacy for the brutal taskmasters of wealth. This process has been repeated throughout history, with demagogues claiming to speak for “the people” and leading them against those institutions and beliefs that had stood between them and tyranny. The same process Belloc refers to regarding the Reformation was repeated during the French Revolution, the liberal (Masonic) 1848 Revolutions throughout Europe, and the socialist revolutions of the early 20 th Century. Each time a moneyed interest assumed power in the name of “the people”.32

Victory of Mammon

The focus for the Christian social order was the monastery, which as the owner of the surrounding lands, leased property to farmers who tithed when times were good and gave little of nothing when times were poorer. In England prior to the usurpation of Henry VIII there were no rapacious landlords. The monasteries and convents were based on works of charity and on vows of personal poverty. From the 6 th to the 15th centuries this was a society that assured freedom from want and tyranny. The traditional social order was destroyed by Henry VIII with the pillaging and closure of the Religious Houses, which had provided free education to neighbourhood youth, and food and shelter to those in need.28 Ibid., p. 76.29 Ibid., p. 90.30 Ibid., p. 90.31 Hilaire Belloc, op.cit., V. 32 This historical process will be considered later.

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In 1536 by Act of Parliament the monasteries and convents were closed and their properties confiscated for the benefit of Henry and his favourites. The social commentator William Cobbett (1763-1835) asserted that with this Act, striking at the very basis of the local social and economic life of the people,

“…[B]egan the ruin and degradation of the main body of the people of England and Ireland; as it was the first step taken, in legal form, for robbing the people under pretence of reforming their religion; as it was the precedent on which the future plunderers proceeded, until they had completely impoverished the country; as it was the first of that series of deeds of rapine, by which this formerly well-fed and well-clothed people have, in the end, been reduced to rags and to a worse than gaol- allowance of food, I will insert its lying and villanous preamble at full length. Englishmen in general suppose, that there were always poor-laws and paupers in England. They ought to remember, that, for nine hundred years, under the Catholic religion, there were neither.”33

The authority of the Church far from being a pillar of tyranny, a partner with the nobility in the suppression of the commoner, was an obstacle in the way of any tyranny by prince or king. The Magna Charta was drawn up by the then Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury to assure a balance of power.

Cobbett, a more insightful writer than Karl Marx34, wrote that:“The Reformation despoiled the working classes of their patrimony, it

tore from them that which nature had assigned them; it robbed them of that relief for the necessitous which was theirs by right imprescrible, and which had been confirmed to them by the Law of God and the Law of the Land. It brought to them a compulsory, a grudging, an unnatural mode of relief, calculated to make the poor and the rich hate each other, instead of binding them together as the Catholic mode did, by the bonds of Christian charity.”35

Thus was born the seeds of class warfare, and the proletarianisation of the peasant, the despoliation of the country and the replacing of the monastery with the Work House, the Church with the Counting-house.

Cobbett, a Protestant, was nonetheless scathing in his condemnation of the consequences of the Reformation and the destruction of the old Catholic social order, stating that the Reformation had, under the guise of liberty, done nothing but brought the liberty of plunder for parsons and plutocrats and the devastation of the ordinary folk:

33 William Cobbett, The History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, showing how that event has impoverished the main body of the people in those countries in a series of letters addressed to all sensible and just Englishmen (Kensington, 1824), p. 166. The book is online at: http://www.wattpad.com/171334-History-of-the-protestant-Reformation-by-William-CobbettThe page numbers are cited from this online version. (Accessed 16 October 2009).34 Unlike Marx, Cobbett knew the land and the people, and again unlike Marx upheld rural values, spending years riding through the countryside and recording his observations on the destitution of the country folk in his Rural Rides. He saw the Industrial Revolution, again in contrast to Marx, not as part of an historical dialectic but as a tragedy.35 William Cobbett, op.cit.

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“…That the "Reformation," as it is called, was engendered in beastly lust, brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherished and fed by plunder, devastation, and by rivers of innocent English and Irish blood; and that, as to its more remote consequences, they are, some of them, now before a in that misery, that beggary, that nakedness, that hunger, that everlasting wrangling and spite, which now stare us in the face and stun our ears at every turn, and which the "Reformation " has given us in exchange for the ease and happiness and harmony and Christian charity, enjoyed so abundantly, and for so many ages, by our Catholic forefathers”.36

Cobbett, using sound sociological methodology marshalled as evidence for the degraded state of contemporary England statistics comparing the livelihoods of the ordinary folk under the old order and those of his own times, showing that the commoner was now worse off by far:

‘…Go, and read this to the poor souls, who are now eating sea-weed in Ireland; who are detected in robbing the pig-troughs in Yorkshire; who are eating horse-flesh and grains (draff) in Lancashire and Cheshire; who are harnessed like horses and drawing gravel in Hampshire and Sussex; who have 3d. a day allowed them by the Magistrates in Norfolk; who are, all over England, worse fed than the felons in the gaols. Go, and tell them, when they raise their hands from the pig-trough, or from the grains-tub, and, with their dirty tongues, cry "No popery;" go, read to the degraded and deluded wretches, this account of the state of their Catholic forefathers, who lived under what is impudently called "popish superstition and tyranny," and in those times, which we have the audacity to call "the dark ages."’37

Cobbett compares the state of the commoner in his own day to that of those in Catholic England, showing to what extent the conditions had degraded:

“But, let us come to Acts of Parliament, and, first, to the Act above quoted, in paragraph 454, which see. That Act fixes the price of meat. After naming the four sorts of meat, beef, pork, mutton and veal, the preamble has these words: ‘These being THE FOOD OF THE POORER SORT.’ This is conclusive. It is an incidental mention of a fact. It is in an Act of Parliament. It must have been true; and, it is a fact that we know well, that even the Judges have declared, from the Bench, that bread alone is now the food of the poorer sort. What do we want more than this to convince us, that the main body of the people have been impoverished by the ‘Reformation’?”38

In Cobbett’s time the common folk were held by the ruling classes to subsist generally on bread and water. Centuries previously, the usual fare of the common folk was listed as beef, pork, mutton and veal. Cobbett made a telling comparison of the earnings of a ‘dung-cart man’ during the pre-Reformation with the earnings of labourers of his own time under the ‘progressive’ Protestant economic doctrine of the free market, which obsesses economists and governments again today:

36 William Cobbett, op.cit., pp. 1-2. 37 William Cobbett, ibid., p. 161. 38 William Cobbett, ibid., p. 162.

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“The dung-cart man would earn very nearly a pair of shoes every day! This dung-cart filler would earn a fat shorn sheep in four days; he would earn a fat hog, two years old, in twelve days; he would earn a grass-fed ox in twenty days; so that we may easily believe, that "beef, pork, veal and mutton," were "the food of the poorer sort." And, mind, this was "a priest-ridden people"; a people "buried in popish superstition"! In our days of "Protestant light" and of "mental enjoyment" the "poorer sort" are allowed by the Magistrates of Norfolk 3d. a day for a single man able to work. That is to say, a halfpenny less than a Catholic dung-cart man had; and that 3d. will get the "No Popery" gentlemen about six ounces of old ewe mutton, while the popish dung-cart man got, for his day, rather more than the quarter of a fat sheep.”39

Belloc, like Cobbett, states that the Reformation set in motion that line of historical processes which inaugurated the era of materialism and Mammon under which we continued to live, to which we might add the emergence of communism, liberalism and humanism, promoted by secret societies, which themselves originated with religious apostasy.

“A true answer to the question: "What was the Reformation?" is of such vast importance, because it is only when we grasp - what the Reformation was - that we understand its consequences. Then only do we know how the united body of European civilization has been cut asunder and by what a wound. The abomination of industrialism; the loss of land and capital by the people in great districts of Europe; the failure of modern discovery to serve the end of man; the series of larger and still larger wars following in a rapidly rising scale of severity and destruction--till the dead are now counted in tens of millions; the increasing chaos and misfortune of society--all these attach one to the other, each falls into its place, and a hundred smaller phenomena as well, when we appreciate, as today we can, the nature and the magnitude of that fundamental catastrophe.”40

From the Protestant ethos arose the present money ethic, in tandem with the Jewish,41the speculator, and the usurer, historically opposed by the Church as intrinsically anti-Christian, came to be the norm in commerce. We can hence understand that the ‘modern’ predicament’ so far from being the result of recent trends, or even those going back decades, are centuries in the making, and as we shall consider next, had active agents to ensure that the traditional ethos would not be reasserted.

The Reformation, like subsequent revolutions, was backed by the emerging money interests which sought to destroy the traditional order and usher in a new society not encumbered by a social ethos being imposed by Papal authority upon the freedom of trade. Belloc described the effects upon the traditional socio-economic order as it emerged in England:

“Let me not be misunderstood; the England of the fifteenth century, the England of the generation just before the Reformation, was not an England of

39 William Cobbett, ibid., p. 163. 40 Hilaire Belloc,op.cit.., VIII.41 Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1982).

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Squires; it was not an England of landlords; it was still an England of Englishmen. The towns were quite free. To this day old boroughs nearly always show a great number of freeholds. The process by which the later English aristocracy (now a plutocracy) had grown up, was but in germ before the Reformation. Nor had that germ sprouted. But for the Reformation it would not have matured. Sooner or later a popular revolt (had the Faith revived) would have killed the growing usurpation of the wealthy. But the germ was there; and the Reformation coming just as it did, both was helped by the rich and helped them.”42

The process was one of continuing concentration of wealth and property. The peasant and the craftsman were debased into a nebulous mass, uprooted from the village and from the soil, from familial and village bonds, and urbanised, eventually tied to the machine and the factory. This was what Marx was to call “the proletariat”. The new ruling class replacing the balance of Throne and Altar was a merchant class, what Marx would call “the bourgeoisie” – which was not restrained by any civil or religious authority, any ethos or sense of duty beyond making money. The Puritan Revolution of Cromwell in England was a predecessor of the French Revolution and the 1848 Revolutions that usurped traditional authorities to empower the merchant class – in the name of “the people”.

“The Squires, twenty years after Henry's death, had come to possess, through the ruin of religion, - something like half the land of England - With the rapidity of a fungus growth the new wealth spread over the desolation of the land. The enriched captured both the Universities, all the Courts of Justice, most of the public schools. They won their great civil war against the Crown. Within a century after Henry's folly, they had established themselves in the place of what had once been the monarchy and central government of England. The impoverished Crown resisted in vain; they killed one embarrassed King--Charles I., and they set up his son, Charles II., as an insufficiently salaried puppet. Since their victory over the Crown, they and the capitalists, who have sprung from their avarice and their philosophy, and largely from their very loins, have been completely masters of England.”43

From this revolutionary upheaval beginning with the Reformation capitalism arose. Belloc provided an alternative critique of capitalism to that of Marx, one that sees the undermining of Faith not as a progressive evolutionary or dialectical process of history leading to a utopian communist society of justice and plenty, but as a retrograde step which has set in motion a path that leads to an earthly hell. Belloc also describes the rise of international banking, a globalised system of usury that was once considered anathema by all of Christendom. Now this international financial system rules the world and any nation that resists is bombed into submission in the name of a “New World Order”. Belloc wrote of the historical process leading to the world economic system now controlled by usury:

“Lastly, there is of the major consequences of the Reformation that phenomenon which we have come to call ‘Capitalism,’ and which many,

42 Hilaire Belloc, op.cit., VIII.43 Hilaire Belloc, ibid., IX.

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recognizing its universal evil, wrongly regard as the prime obstacle to right settlement of human society and to the solution of our now intolerable modern strains.” 44

Belloc stated, ‘capitalism’ is regarded by many ‘wrongly’ as the ‘prime obstacle’ to modern economic conditions; ‘wrongly because the root cause of these economic problems is not material but spiritual.45 This is beyond the understanding of both Marx and modern economic theorists, who see history only in terms of material relations between people, and are unable to see the spiritual causes behind the material façade. Hence the failure of the economic alternatives such as Marxism and Free Trade and the reason why these aggravate injustice rather than alleviate it. Belloc explains:

“What is called ‘Capitalism’ arose directly in all its branches from the isolation of the soul. That isolation permitted an unrestricted competition. It gave to superior cunning and even to superior talent an unchecked career. It gave every license to greed. And on the other side it broke down the corporate bonds whereby men maintain themselves in an economic stability. Through it there arose in England first, later throughout the more active Protestant nations, and later still in various degrees throughout the rest of Christendom, a system under which a few possessed the land and the machinery of production, and the many were gradually dispossessed. The many thus dispossessed could only exist upon doles meted out by the possessors, nor was human life a care to these.”46

Belloc was among those writers47 of the time who realised that the primary manifestation of this spiritual malaise in the economic realm was the debt finance system (the modern-day money-changers), which is in fact usury applied as the basis of modern business. Those who control the ability to create and issue credit as an interest bearing debt at interest48have the power over all economic relations, whether individual49, commercial or that of entire nations (i.e. the “National Debt”). ‘Money’ (actually ‘credit’ in most commercial transactions) has for centuries now been treated as a commodity earning a profit (interest – usury) rather than merely as a means of exchanging goods and services. From this fraudulent ability to create credit the banks exact tribute through usury from the creation of genuine wealth created through actual labour, Belloc referring to this system below as ‘draining the wealth’ from individuals and entire nations alike:

“The possessors also mastered the state and all its organs--hence the great National Debts which accompanied the system: hence even the financial hold of distant and alien men upon subject provinces of economic effort: hence

44 Hilaire Belloc, ibid., X.45 We are again reminded of Paul in I Timothy 6:10, op.cit.46 Hilaire Belloc,.op.cit. X. 47 Chesterton et al referred to in footnote 14. 48 The definition of “usury”. 49 Few households and individuals are not in debt to the banks and money lenders, in more recent years aggravated by the pervasive use of credit cards as a new and more efficient and pervasive means of securing further usurious debt.

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the draining of wealth not only from increasingly dissatisfied subjects over-seas, but from the individual producers of foreign independent states.”50

From this social upheaval engendered by industrialism, capitalism and attendant dislocations such as rural stagnation and urban drift and the proletarianisation of the craftsman and peasant, arose its antithesis amongst the stifling poverty and injustices. The despoiled folk began to turn their backs on religion, poorly served as they were by the Reformation that had created their predicament in the first place, turning to secularist doctrines rather than re-turning to the traditional Faith that had in times long forgotten secured social justice as a Christian imperative. Belloc explained the rise of Marxism from amidst this injustice:

“The true conception of property disappears under such an arrangement, and you naturally get a demand for relief through the denial of the principle of ownership altogether. Here again, as in the matter of the irrational –tabus - and of skepticism, two apparently contradictory things have one root: Capitalism, and the ideal inhuman system (not realizable) called Socialism, both spring from one type of mind and both apply to one kind of diseased society.” 51

Socialism is the mirror image of capitalism, as Belloc infers. Oswald Spengler, the philosopher-historian of cultural morphology, explained that socialism does not want to replace the money ethic; just take it over. Drawing parallels from as far back as classical Rome, Spengler cited the example of the Equites, ‘the big money party’ backing Tiberius Gracchus who appealed to the masses, and who then withdrew support once the reforms advantageous to the money interests had been put into affect, leaving the movement to collapse. Likewise in the history of the Western Civilisation, Spengler stated that, “The concepts of Liberalism and Socialism are set in effective motion only by money.”52 In the case of liberalism it was the French Revolution that overthrew Throne and Altar in the name of the Masonic slogan: “liberty, equality, fraternity”, only to inaugurate a bloody tyranny ruled over by those whose ideal of “liberty” was that of the freedom of commerce. As for the 19 th and 20th century socialist movements, Spengler stated that “their object is not to overcome the money values but to possess them.”53

Secular Europe: Masonry & Revolution

It was from the crisis created by the rise of the twin creatures of Mammon, capitalism and socialism over the ruins of Faith, that the secret societies acted to create a ‘new world order’, these covert lodges moreover specifically being directed against the Church as the prime enemy of their ambitions.54

While it might be unpalatable for many good religious people, the Reformation established the foundation for the emergence of secret societies with subversive and

50 Hilaire Belloc, op.cit.51 Hilaire Belloc, ibid., X. 52 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971) Vol. 2, p. 402. 53 Oswald Spengler, ibid., 506. 54 The Catholic Encyclopaedia Vol. IX, cites 17 Papal Encyclicals condemning Freemasonry, from Clement XII in 1738 to Leo XIII in 1890. The Catholic Encyclopaedia, (New York: Robert Appleton co., 1910). Online: http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/

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revolutionary aims. The Rosicrucian fraternity, the mother of modern secret societies including Freemasonry, was set up as a Protestant secret society during the early 17 th

Century55. According to Masonic historian Manly P Hall the Rosicrucians advocated a secular revolution against the Church and the Thrones of Europe. Hall stated that Raleigh and Francis Bacon were among those Rosicrucians dedicated to the overthrow of the Church.56The Masonic lodges arose from this, including the radically anti-Catholic Grand Orient of France and the Illuminati, which promulgated proto-communistic doctrines advocating the overturning of all thrones and altars, and the inauguration of a world state.57 The Encyclopaedists58 of the 18th Century, led by Diderot, and including Voltaire, and Rousseau, et al provided the intellectual doctrines for the subversion of the Papacy and the monarchs59, advocating in the place of Faith a naturalistic religion that would be given excessive and paradoxically irrational forms in the tumult of the French Revolution60

New impetus was given to the call for a federated Europe to act as a prelude for a federated world. Another paradox was that this internationalism was to give rise to the modern forms of extreme nationalism. France as upheld by the revolutionaries as the paragon of a virtuous nation around which all of humanity must rally as a prelude to the formation of the world state.

Jean Baptiste declared to the French National Assembly on June 13, 1790 that the “Rights of Man”61, the new law to replaced the laws of God, must be adopted by all humanity, and that there must no longer be any sovereign nations. On April 2, 1792 at the Convention he called for the creation of “La Republique Universelle.”

The 19th Century saw the rise of modern nationalism, the focus being Germany rather than France, culminating in revolutions across Europe in 1848, again organised by the Masonic secret societies. An unpalatable factor of history for both right-wing nationalists and left-wing and liberal internationalists, is that both movements arose

55 The Rosicrucian pedigree of Freemasonry is acknowledged by the 18th Degree: The Knight of the Pelican & the Eagle & Sovereign Prince Rose Croix of Heredam. The Rose-Cross happened to be the personal crest of Martin Luther. 56 Manly P Hall, Rosicrucian and Masonic Origins (Los Angeles: Hall Publishing Co., 1929), ch. 19. 57 K R Bolton, From Knights Templar to New World Order: Occult Influences on History, Ph.D. thesis (Paraparaumu, New Zealand: Spectrum Press, 2006), pp. 20-22. 58 The title page of the Encyclopedie, which was supposed to be a compendium of all knowledge that would replace Faith with science, is adorned with the figure of Lucifer in the centre, surrounded by the Freemasonic symbols of compass and square. For a picture of this see Bolton, ibid., p. 31a. A depiction of the title page including the image can be seen online at, for e.g.: http://images.google.co.nz/imgres?imgurl=http://www.1902encyclopedia.com/D/DID/encyclopedie-diderot.jpg&imgrefurl (accessed 16 October 2009). 59 Denis de Rougemont, op.cit. p. 181. 60 The French Revolutionary regime sought to destroy the Church in a manner similar to that of the Bolshevik Revolution, exiling and executing priests and turning Notre Dame Cathedral into a temple for the worship of a ‘naturalistic religion’ celebrated by the mass adulation of a prostitute symbolising “Goddess of Reason”. Babies were baptised in the name of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” rather than in the name of the “Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” The word Sunday was dropped, the Gregorian calendar was replaced by a Revolutionary calendar, etc. Bolton, op.cit. p. 52. 61 The Declaration of the Rights of Man & the Citizen, France, 1789, is shown as being within two tablets reminiscent of the Ten Commandments, which it is obviously intended to replace, and surrounded by the occult-Masonic symbols of the All-Seeing Eye and the Self-Devouring Serpent, also symbols of the Grand Orient of France. Bolton, op.cit., p. 52a. A reproduction of the Declaration with this symbolism can be seen online at: http://www.reprodart.com/a/french-school/declaration-of-the-rights-1.html

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form the same milieu and inspiration. The German philosophers such as Fichte, like the Jacobins of Revolutionary France, saw the sovereign rights of nations as a substitute for the temporal power of the monarchs and the spiritual power of the Papacy. Robespierre had stated to the National Assembly on May 15, 1790: “It is in the interests of all nations to protect the French nation, because it is from France that the freedom and happiness of the world must stem.” These internationalists were fervent for the most nationalistic of wars proclaiming a messianic world mission for France: “War! War! This is the cry of every patriot, the wish of every friend of freedom from one end of Europe to the other….” 62Hence, Nazism, Liberalism and communism all ultimately emerge from the same sources. A cruel irony of history is that German Jews played a major role in what became German nationalism via the Young Germany movement, in tandem with the Young Europe movement (including Young Poland, Young Switzerland, etc.) led by Masons such as Mazzini. These forces briefly captured Rome in 1849, exiling Pope Pius IX, and installing Mazzini as state leader. It is from this Masonic movement that modern nationalism arose, giving rise to the secular nation-states. Liberalism and statist nationalism are of common origin.

The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, a Mason63 and a Satanist64 declared in this same spirit of anarchist and Masonic revolt that the United States of Europe should be a revolutionary goal as a prelude to a world state:

“That there is but one way to bring about the triumph of liberty, of justice, and of peace in Europe's international relations, to make civil war impossible between the different peoples who make up the European family; and that is the formation of the United States of Europe…. having no other principle but the free federation of individuals into communes, of communes into provinces, of the provinces into nations, and, finally, of the nations into the United States of Europe first, and of the entire world eventually….”65

A European union as a prelude to world government was also the policy of the Bolsheviks, Trotsky stating in Bolsheviki and World Peace: “The task of the proletariat is to create the republican United States of Europe, as the foundation for the United States of the World.”66 It was the same Masonic conception as that of Mazzini et al.

62 Patriote francaise, December 15, 1791, cited by Denis de Rougemont, op.cit., p. 180. 63 Bakunin acknowledged the revolutionary role of Freemasonry in “Open Letters to Swiss Comrades of the International”, cited by Robert M Cutler (ed. and transl.) The Basic Bakunin, Writings 1869-1871 (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992). 64 Bakunin gave homage to Satan as the archetypal rebel in: Mikhail Bakunin, God and State, 1883 (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 112). 65 Mikhail Bakunin, Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism, “Reasoned Proposal to the Central Committee of the League for Peace and Freedom”, September 1867. http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:vTbyrrHyrNkJ:www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/reasons-of- (accessed October 3, 2009). 66 Trotsky mooted the case: “Is the time ripe for the question: ‘The United States of Europe”, Pravda, Moscow, June 30, 1923. http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/06/europe.htm (accessed October 3, 2009).

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We hear the same messianic political catchcries today: the ‘New World Order’67

of the USA. In the previous century it was Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” to remake the world in the image of American democracy, the League of Nations, and subsequent parallels to the Jacobin Rights of Man, the United Nation’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights, etc.

Dr Cornelieu Zeana, speaking as both a Masonic adept and as the president of the Romanian section of the European Movement, frankly states the role of Masonry in historical events, stating that it is a self-appointed ‘Freemasonic elite’ ‘shaping events’. If any non-Mason alludes to such matters he is ridiculed as a paranoid ‘conspiracy theorist’, not least by Masons themselves.68 Zeana writes:

“Freemasonic elite devotes praiseworthy efforts in order to shape out events and evolutions that become history due to their consummation through the irreversible passing of time. Freemasonic elite had many visionaries who were considered dreamers until their ideas became reality. They set out the blueprint of a better world according to the ideals of liberty, fraternity, dignity, justice, equity of justice and chances, moral status, prosperity and peace. It is a continuous fight against oppression, corruption, injustice, poltroonery, ignorance and lie; a perpetual searching for truth. Masons became history makers through this seeking of the ways towards a better and more righteous world.”

Among the catch-cries of Dr Zeana in assuring us of the benevolent intent of the “Masonic elite” in manipulating history, is the Masonic-inspired French Revolutionary slogan: “Liberty, equality, fraternity”. As the Church and others have contended, the real end-product of Masonic benevolence when applied politically has been for example the Revolutionary Terror, including the suppression of faith and the establishment of a new religion of “Reason” (sic) or “Nature” (sic), which as in the case of France took the form of performing blasphemous masses in Notre Dame, exalting and worshipping upon the Cathedral’s altar a prostitute, a spectacle that was nothing other than a Black Mass being given official sanction as a state religion.

Counterfeit “Europe”

67 The Great Seal of the USA indicates its origins: on the reverse side, as it appears on the American dollar bill, the Great Seal has the eye and pyramid symbol of Masonry, proclaiming a ‘new secular order’. The symbol was regarded as of much significance by Pres. F D Roosevelt and Vice President Henry Wallace, both 32nd Degree Masons, Wallace instigating the depiction of the seal on the Dollar. Bolton, op.cit. 47. Wallace regarded the Seal as signifying the USA’s mission to inaugurate “a new order of the ages.” Henry Wallace, Statesmanship and Religion (New York: Round Table Press, 1934), pp.78-79. 68 See for example a site of Grand Lodge Masonry (British Columbia and Yukon, Canada), which conveniently disposes of all such ‘conspiracy theories’ by stating that the Illuminati, Grand Orient etc. is not ‘real Masonry’. In a specific section called ‘Anti-Masonry’, the purpose of which is to repudiate all such ‘conspiracy theories’ it is stated:

“The history of anti-masonry is almost as old as that of Freemasonry itself. Anti-Masonic thought can be grouped into two broad categories: accusations of anti-Christian or satanic objectives, and accusations of political and social manipulation. Anti-Masonic thought today generally turns to the many conspiracy theories currently popular in the media. Historically, Freemasonry has ignored such attacks. The following articles contain the facts.” http://www.freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/index.html (accessed 15 October 2009).

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From this background came new calls for a federated Europe reminiscent to those of prior centuries, a Europe of secular ideology, not of the Faith that had provided the original basis for the very concept of Europe. A Europe based on commerce. This is the Anti-Europe, a reflection of the Anti-Christ, both counterfeits.

The same Masonic-inspired movement that sought to create a federated Europe as a prelude to a federated world arose, like the abortive League of Nations69, from the First World War to promote this Anti-Europe, which was to result in the EEC and today’s European Union.

Dr Corneliu Zeana, overtly appraises covert Masonic influences when he states that Masonic initiatory processes emanate from the Lodges via the Brethren out into the entire world. Freemasonry seeks to reshape the world according to the Masonic conception of the “Supreme Being”, the “light” (sic) of which has been described by Albert Pike and other Masonic authorities as “Luciferian”70.

“Masonry is a way of perfection. The man, as an individual, ascends on the path of wisdom and selflessness; he comes near the Supreme Being. A Mason discovers inside the Lodge the atmosphere of Fraternal harmony. It is herein that the Masonic demeanour is outlined and the moral values, which are to be followed in his profane life as well, are favoured. Yet Freemasonry is not limited to the individual and the group he establishes contact with. It is involved in scale projects hinting at the future of nations, their continents and the whole world as

69 The Masonic inspiration of these secular federalist schemes, including the League of Nations and the UNO, was frankly stated by the Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy, Gustavo Raffi:

“Our being outside of the parties and their dialectics, our being "religious", but, at the same time, latitudinarian respect to the single theologies, allows the creation of a cultural web of peace education and dialogue - a task that our Institution has always tried to carry out also through the promotion of great worldwide operations that have given birth to Organisms like firstly the League of Nations and then U.N.O”. MW Gustavo Raffi, Grand Master, Grande Oriente d'Italiahttp://www.masonicforum.ro/en/nr19/raffi.html

Note that when Worshipful Master Raffi describes Masonry as “religious” (sic) this should be read in conjunction with his immediately proceeding elaboration of Masonry being “latitudinarian [in] respect to the single theologies”. Masonry synthesises all theologies into a single ecumenical ‘world religion’ as an aspect of a ‘new secular world order’ in which no real spirituality will exist beyond a synthetic “Masonic religion” where man is placed above Christ. Note also that this statement comes from the Grand Master of a branch of the Grand Orient, historically the most revolutionary, subversive, atheistic and specifically anti-Catholic forms of Freemasonry.

The “venerable” Albert Pike, Grand Master of the Southern Jurisdiction, Scottish Rite, USA, in his definitive Masonic text Morals and Dogma, states in this regard that Masonry is a “religion’ that only the initiated are permitted to understand step-by-step, while the non-adepts are given a counterfeit religion suitable to their state of evolution. He described the purpose of what Grand Master Raffi calls Masonry’s “latitudinal” approach to all religions Pike stated:

“The truth must be kept secret, and the masses need a teaching proportioned to their imperfect reason…Every man's conception of God must be proportioned to his mental cultivation and intellectual powers, and moral excellence. God is, as man conceives Him, the reflected image of man himself..." Albert Pike, Morals & Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (prepared for the Supreme Council of the Thirty Third Degree for the Southern Jurisdiction of the United States: Charleston, 1871) pp. 104-105. ( Text online at: http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/apikefr.htmlMorals).

70 Albert Pike, op.cit., ch. 18. Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine ( Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1978), Vol. 1, pp. 70-71.

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an ensemble, searching for the adequate ways and means to ensure an ascending evolution towards light, more and more light.”71

Note that Dr Zeana is president of the Romanian branch of the European Movement, an important and influential movement for the reshaping of Europe, and that he blatantly described the European Union as “a Masonic accomplishment”.72

The Assistant to the Grand Master of Romanian Masonry73Dr Marian Mihaila, credits Freemasonry with the birth of the contemporary concept of a Federal Europe. Having previously alluded to a magazine founded by Victor Hugo and the Mason Garibaldi, called The United States of Europe, at the end of the 19th Century, Mihaila states in a section of an article which he called “The Masonic European Community” that it was “important European Masons who took up the concept of a federated Europe from the 19th century and brought it into the 20th century. Mihaila states that,

“Aristide Briand, the French Foreign Affairs minister, delegate to the League of Nations, proposes, on 8 August 1929, for the first time in the name of a government, the creation of a federal European structure. The Briand plan is elaborated until 1 May 1930 and after 17 days it is brought to the League of Nations for examination.”74

The father of this modern Anti-Europe is Count Richard Coundenhove-Kalergi. The Austrian Masonic magazine The Beacon enthused:

“Freemasonry, especially Austrian Freemasonry, may be eminently satisfied to have Coundenhove-Kalergi among its members. Austrian freemasonry can rightly report that Brother Coundenhove-Kalergi fights for his Pan European beliefs… Bro. Kalergi’s program is a Masonic work of the highest order, and to be able to work on it together is a lofty task for all brother Masons.”75

The Masonic affiliation of Kalergi and the Masonic foundation of his Pan-European Movement are confirmed by Dr Mihaila, who states:

“The adepts of the idea of a united Europe are grouped – as I have shown before - in the Pan-European Movement whose supporter was also a mason, Count Richard N.C. Kalergi (the son of an Austro-Hungarian diplomat and of a Japanese woman). He was encouraged and financed by a series of American masons who wanted to create thus, according to the American model (the first Masonic state in history) the United States of Europe.”76

Mihaila states a lot in the passage above:

71 Dr Corneliu Zeana, “The European Union – a Masonic Accomplishment”, Masonic Forum, http://www.masonicforum.ro/en/nr20/zeana.html (accessed 13 October 2009). 72 Note in particular that the heading of Dr Zeanu’s article in the Masonic Forum is entitled “European Unification – a Masonic Accomplishment.” 73 Re-founded in 1989 under the auspices of the Grand Orient of Italy. 74 Dr Marian Mihaila, “European Union and Freemasonry”, Masonic Forum, http://www.masonicforum.ro/en/nr27/european.html#b_22 (accessed: October 10, 2009). 75 The Beacon, Austria, March, 1925. (See Capt. Arthur Rogers OBE, “Warburg and the Kalergi Plan”, Free Britain, No. 158, July 1955).76 Dr Marian Mihaila, op.cit., 1.6, “The Masonic European Community”.

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1. “The adepts” were grouped around the Pan-European movement”2. Kalergi was a Mason. 3. American Masons financed Kalergi. (Does this imply that the Warburg bankers

were Masons? See below). 4. That the USA was a “Masonic state”.

That this Masonic-inspired Europe was to be one constructed in the service of Mammon is evident not only from Mihaila’s assertion above that Kalergi was financed by American Masons, but from Kalergi’s own statements regarding his financial patrons. Kalergi stated in his book Pan Europe:

“Early in 1924 Baron Louis Rothschild telephoned to say that a friend of his, Max Warburg, had read my book and wanted to meet me. To my great astonishment Warburg immediately offered a donation of 60,000 gold marks to see the movement through its first three years. Max Warburg was a staunch supporter of Pan-Europe all his life and we remained close friends until his death in 1946. His readiness to support it (the movement) at the outset contributed decisively to its subsequent success.”77

When Kalergi toured the USA shortly thereafter he did so by the arrangement of Max Warburg’s brothers Felix and Paul, the latter the architect of the Federal Reserve banking system in the USA.78

Celebrating the 100th Jubilee of Kalergi, a 10 Euro coin was minted in his honour in 1972, and a stamp printed in Austria. Kalergi was the founder of the Pan European Union, and was the mentor to Otto Von Hapsburg who served as President of the European Parliament (1979-1999).79

With the interruption of the Second World War to the Masonic schemes of a federal Europe, the movement was taken up again in 1946. Mihaila details those movements and people involved, again of Masonic pedigree: “Being stopped during WWII, in August 1946 the masons take up again their secular dream: they create the European Union of Federalists.”80

Note in particular that the Masonic conception of a federated Europe is described by Mihaila as “their secular dream.” This is the Anti-Europe of the Anti-Christ, which Fundamentalist and Protestant denominations and sects identify with the ‘rebirth of the Holy Roman Empire’ under the auspices of a papal ‘Anti-Christ’. The evidence we have been considering however shows to the contrary that those movements that have erected the present European Union are those historically most

77 Richard Coundenhove-Kalergi, Pan Europe (Vienna: Pan Europa Verlag, 1923). Quoted in: Kalergi, An Idea Conquers the World (London: Hutchison & Co., 1953). 78 The internationalist orientation of these banking families is indicated frankly by the statement made in 1950 by James P Warburg, son of Paul: “You will have world government whether you want it or not, if not by consent, by conquest.” (Foreign Relations Committee, US Senate, February 17, 1950). James was a co-founder in 1947 of the United World Federalists, which continues to function as a proponent of World Government. Dan Smoot, The Invisible Government (Dallas: The Dan Smoot Report, Inc., 1962), p. 124. 79 European Commission, Europäische Visionen: Der Vordenker Coudenhove-Kalergi, http://ec.europa.eu/news/around/080418_ger_de.htm, April 18, 2008 (accessed October 3, 2009). 80 Dr Marian Mihaila, op.cit.

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hostile to the Church, and in turn those which the Church has fought for several centuries, and often has been martyred as a consequence. 81

Likewise Dr Zeana describes a federal Europe as being a manifestation of the “Masonic spirit”:

“The blueprint of a new Europe was created on the basis of the great values promoted by Masonry: peace, liberty, equity, fraternity. Europe was tired because of the two World Wars during a single generation. The desire for long-lasting peace was great and justified, to say the least, by the precepts of all the great religions. (One of the conditions of joining Masonry was the faith in God. The Christian religion, predominant throughout Europe, would not become exclusive.).”

Here Dr Zeana is more specific in his use of the French Revolutionary slogan: “liberty, equity [equality], fraternity”, which also happens to be the exact same slogan of the revolutionary, atheistic Grand Orient of France82. Stating that one of the conditions for joining Masonry is a belief in God is being disingenuous: The Grand Orient is precisely noted for its inclusion of atheism as well as the type of synthetic universal religion that Dr Zeana avers to in the above passage, stating that, “the Christian religion [despite being] predominate throughout Europe, would not become exclusive.”83 The federal Europe which the Masonic authorities call a “Masonic accomplishment” is therefore not a European of Christendom, based on the traditions and foundation of “Europe”, but a counterfeit Europe founded on a synthetic universal humanistic religion, which as referred to was attempted by the revolutionary regime in France and enforce by the guillotine under the slogan that the Grand Orient continues to carry as its motto to this day: “liberty, equality, fraternity.”

I believe it relevant to note that Romanian Masonry from its foundation in the 19th Century was the creation of the Grand Orient. According to Constantin Iancu, Sovereign Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of the 33rd and Last Degree of A.A.S.R84. for Romania, “As is well known, Modern Romania owes its existence to these Masons.”85 Iancu is alluding to the formation of the modern nation-states arising from the 1848 revolutions across Europe, again of Masonic inspiration as part of a gradual process for the elimination of all thrones and altars and as a step on to the

81 E.g. the martyrdom of the Church under the Masonic inspired or influenced revolutions in Mexico, Spain, Portugal and especially Revolutionary France, and elsewhere. (See Bolton, 2006, op.cit.). 82 The Grand Orient of France specifically states in its constitution that “Its motto is: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” http://ns6745.ovh.net/~godf/foreign/uk/histoire_uk_05.html (accessed 15 October 2009). 83 The Grand Orient of France continues to specifically express its opposition to Papal authority and the role of the Church in temporal society, referring to “humanism’ as the basis of a new social order for ‘integrated Europe.’ http://ns6745.ovh.net/~godf/foreign/uk/laicite_uk.html (accessed 15 October 2009). 84 Scottish Rite Masonry, headed by Albert Pike, his Morals and Dogma (op.cit.) providing the philosophical basis for the 33 Scottish Rite degrees, which include a consideration of Lucifer and the role of revolution. Of the 18 corresponding to the 18th Chapter of Morals and Dogma, which is the Rose Croix (i.e. Rosicrucian) Degree, Pike states that the Mason’s conception of the “Supreme Being” is that of the “Deity of Light”, whose direction in the Masonic Lodge is East, which is an allusion to Lucifer.85 Constatin Iancu 33 interviewed by Claudiu Ionscu 32, Masonic Forum, http://www.masonicforum.ro/en/nr10/ci.html (accessed 15 October 2009).

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ultimate goal of a World State.86 The “Grand East of Romania” (i.e. the Grand Orient) was established in 1879, and was transformed into the National Grand Lodge in 1880. The following year the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite in Romania was founded.

Iancu states that the re-establishment of Romanian Masonry in 1990 was undertaken under the jurisdiction of the Grand Orient of Italy, of which he was a member, and which appointed him for the task, with the assistance of the Grand Lodge of France.87 This was the first Masonic association to be founded in post-Communist Eastern and central Europe. In 1992 Romanian Masonry, with the approval of the Italian Grand Orient, was brought under the jurisdiction of the Grand Lodge of California, USA.

In 1993 the Supreme Council of Scottish Rite Masonry in Washington with the “Lodge of NATO Bases” sent representatives to initiate Romanian, Portuguese and Polish Masons into the 33 establishing Scottish Rite Supreme Councils in those three countries.

This divergence into the history of Romanian Freemasonry is relevant because it shows that Romanian Masonry is part of Grand Orient and Scottish Rite Masonry, the particularly subversive forms of Masonry, and that the Romanian Masons I have been citing in regard to Masonic influences in the creation of an integrated Europe are not merely fringe sectarians but the highest initiates of an international network of Masonry that goes back centuries and has had a pivotal role in fermenting revolutions and subversion. Moreover the influence of Romanian Masonry on the politics of the country attests to the very real role Masonry plays as a political force today, and not merely as a benevolent charitable fraternity, which is the image that has been created of Masonry especially in the English-speaking countries. To a question on the present influence of Romanian Masonry, Iancu frankly asserts:

“Today, as in the past, the Romanian elite has gathered around Romanian Masonry. These include the most important politicians in all parties, leading bankers, businessmen, doctors, artists, professors and lawyers almost all of the Romanian elite.”88

Inacu, like Albert Pike for e.g., also alludes to the pedigree of Masonry from occult societies: “Scottish Rite represents an incorporation of rituals from different esoteric societies Rosicrucians, Templars etc.”89

Mihaila outlines the resumption of the Freemasonic agenda for a federal Europe directly after the Second World War, alluding to the Masonic affiliations of Winston Churchill and others, and the role of a Freemasonic pan-European group in the creation of the European union:86 Again it is an unpalatable historical reality for patriotic and right-wing nationalists that their nationalism derives from revolutionary often proto-bolshevist Masonry, the ultimate intention of which is to create a ‘new secular world order’. The resistance to this globalist scheme should logically therefore come not from chauvinistic petty nationalism but from a re-rallying of the forces of pre-revolutionary tradition, monarchy and faith. Upon such foundations a rebirth of the real “Europe” of Christendom should proceed which will be as much in contradiction to plutocracy as it will be to socialism as mirror images of Mammon.87 Constantin Ioncu, op.cit. 88 Constantin Ioncu, ibid. 89 Ibid. For the occult origins of Masonry, including associations with Templars and Rosicrucians, and the concept of a ‘new world order’ see Bolton, op.cit., 2006.

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“On 19 September, in the same year, the Mason Churchill holds a speech in which he declares himself in favour of the creation of the United States of Europe, saying it was urgent that France and Germany get together.

“Further on was Robert Schuman’s plan, (skilfully conceived by Jean Monnet), Deputy Secretary General of the League of Nations and by his close associates Etienne Hrisch, Paul Reuter and Pierre Uri.

“Many of them are members in the European Union Chain (Chaine d’Union Europeenne - C.U.E.), a Freemasons’ group with representatives especially in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and France. CUE wants to reunite the European Freemasons irrespective of nationality, obedience, religious and philosophic ideas, race and language. In order to achieve its objective it organizes meetings of the Freemasons, when the problems of future Europe are discussed.90

Note from the above passage that Mihail states that what was even then called the “European Union” (sic) by the Freemasons was centred around a specifically Masonic group. The Masonic goal was to re-create a Europe not on the basis of its Christian foundations, as we have seen, but as a secular, cosmopolitan state. Such a Europe could not fail but to usurp the spiritual authority of the Church and the ethical principles of Christianity.

Kalergi having laid the philosophical and organisational foundations for a counterfeit “Europe” since 1922 with the backing of the Warburg and Rothschild banking dynasties and his Masonic brethren over the entire Continent, the concept was implemented in the aftermath of World War Two via another secret society, the Bilderberg Group, fronted by Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands, and meeting yearly to discuss global issues by bringing together in closed conclave the leaders of industry, banking, and politics. The Polish diplomat Joseph Retinger, the motivating force behind the European League for Economic Cooperation, the European Movement and the Council of Europe, had formed the Group. 91 He was involved in secret political conspiracies ion Mexico, after having been asked to leave France in 1918, and after a shadowy existence, emerged in 1924 promoting the concept of European union, and with British MP E D Morel, established a secret organisation for the purpose. Following World War Two and having been a confidante of exiled Polish Gen. Sikorski, Retinger became a leading advocate of European union, his speech on the subject to the Royal Institute of International Affairs on May 8, 1946 giving birth to the idea of a European Movement, formed in 1949 after a tour the previous year with Belgian Prime Minister Henri Spaak and Winston Churchill92, from which had come the American Committee on a United Europe. Various ex-CIA luminaries such as William Donavan and Allen Dulles led this committee.93 Any impetus for a new “Europe” emanating from the USA – itself born as the antithesis of Europe – should be highly suspect.

90 Dr Marian Mihaila, op.cit. 91 Robert Eringer, “The Ubiquitous Dr Retinger”, The Global Manipulators, Bristol: Pentacle Books, 1980), p. 16. 92 Dr Zeana believes that Churchill’s Masonic initiation and his role in the creation of a federal Europe are of significance insofar as Zeana describes Churchill as a 33 Mason initiated “on the 24th of May 1901.” Zeana, op.cit. 93 Robert Eringer, ibid., pp. 19-20.

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The Bilderberg Group was created from this background on September 25, 1952 out of a small meeting where it was agreed that it was imperative to get the USA involved, and it was “preferable to keep it all as discreet as possible”. With Prince Bernhard, Retinger went to the USA to gain the support of Gen. Bedell Smith, director of the CIA. An American committee was formed which comprised sundry Rockefeller connected luminaries, along with David Rockefeller himself. The first conference was held at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Holland, May 29-31, 1952, 94 and has met annually in secret and high security ever since at various locations to decide upon the course of world policy.

The initial post-war moves from limited economic agreements between European nations, to the EEC and finally to the European Union were part of a gradual process that Dr Zeana describes. He states that the Constitution of the European Union was the work of Valery Giscard d'Estaing whom he states significantly was a Mason. Dr Zeana concludes by stating that the contemporary moves for complete integration will continue under the watchful, all-seeing eye of Masonry:

“In the actual period, the European Union needs a Constitution. The Laeken Convention (also called Convent, an adequate Masonic term for the reality of this reunion led by Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who needs no presentation for the illuminated and aware Masons) succeeded in editing it. Despite the difficulties we are sure that the endorsement of the European Constitution is not far. The realization of a United Europe can not be done at once. It needs the successive periods of an uprising evolution, far from perfection. We are the contemporaries, apprentices, fellowcrafts, masters and architects of this great edifice. We can not pass through without pointing out the evolution of the terminology. From the European Economical Community (preceded by the European communities, ECCS and the EURATOM), the European Community to the European Union and maybe this is not it. These changes point to the fact that starting with the economic, there is a tendency to unite the politics, the spirit, the concept, the moral. And maybe the United Europe must represent, above everything, a moral space. Regarding this transformation, the vigilance of Freemasonry is a mission.”95

Zeana alludes to the process in Masonic terms, as being “guided by apprentices, fellowcrafts, masters and architects of this great edifice.”

Perhaps most cogently of all, Iancu, Sovereign Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of Scottish Rite Masonry, describes the role of Masonry today in answer to the question as to his final message celebrating the 200 th anniversary of Romanian Masonry:

“As we are taught in the 32nd degree as Princes of the Royal Secret the Supreme Council of the 33rd and last degree of the A.A.S.R. in Romania, will continue to fight for the Unity of Europe, so that, together with the other Brotherhoods American, Asiatic, African, to work for the Universal Brotherhood, for the restoration and instalment of the Temple of Solomon. For

94 Robert Eringer, pp. 21-22.95 Cornelieu Zeana, op.cit.

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this creed Romanian Freemasonry has worked and suffered, has fought and is still fighting...”96

Iancu states that the “Unity of Europe” is a prelude to the Masonic ideal of a “Universal Brotherhood”, with allusions to the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon having much esoteric meaning that cannot be considered here. 97

From these manoeuvrings by plutocrats and members of secret societies, the present counterfeit “Europe” was formed. A Europe not of Christ and the Christian social ethos that had defined Europe and resulted in the flourishing of its High Culture, its Gothic architecture, its guilds, craftsmanship, philosophy, Knightly chivalry, its science, its literature, art, and music; but the Anti-Europe of Mammon and the Anti-Christ, of the bourse, and the concrete and steel towers of commerce.

A non-Catholic scholar opined:“The visible consequences of the withering of our religion are enormous,

overshadowing, frightening. Christianity was much more than a religion comparable to the religion of Osiris in early Egypt, the worship of the Olympian gods, the Orphic mysteries, or Mithraism. Unlike those cults in their time and place, Christianity for a large part of our history was the whole formal basis of our entire culture, the absolute from which were deduced our moral codes, our laws and our political systems; it largely informed our art, inspired our literature, animated our music, and sustained our men of science. The void that has been left is so great that few can peer into the dark abyss without vertigo.”98

Restoring Europe

There have been significant reactions against the cultural and spiritual retardation of Europe and Christendom. In the midst of the Masonic revolutions sweeping Europe during the 19th Century, master craftsmen in Germany, numbering about a million, organised a social movement aiming to restore the guild system in opposition to mercantile liberalism.99

96 Constantin Iancu, op.cit. 97 Such a Universal Republic as it is also called, or ‘new world order’ as presidents Bush and Masonic initiates have called it, centres on the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon would mean a world capital in Jerusalem. That the Temple site also sits on the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site in Islam, also presents ominous problems. Already the Israeli Supreme Court in Jerusalem has been erected which includes much Masonic symbolism, including a large pyramid atop the building and the All-Seeing Eye symbol of Masonry. The Rothschilds funded the building, and chose the architects. The Court building has a plaque honouring the Rothschilds , on which is a depiction of the radiating All-Seeing Eye of Masonry. See Gerry Golden, The Golden Report, February 23, 2005. On the Masonic symbolism of the architecture see Bolton, op.cit. 2006, pp. 111-114. http://www.thegoldenreport.com/asp/jerrysnewsmanager/anmviewer.asp?a=86398 Revilo P Oliver, Christian and the Survival of the West (Cape Canaveral: Howard Allen, 1978), pp. 35-36.99 Max Beer, A General History of Socialism and Social Struggles, Vol. 2,”Social Struggles and Modern Socialism” (New York: Russell & Russell, 1957), p. 109.

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This movement was described as advocating a ‘social monarchy’, and was composed of clergymen, nobles, guild masters, and literary adhering to the Romantic movement100 who:

“…Could not accept ideas and demands and economic practise which were based on individual freedom of judgement and of action – without regard to the Church, the state, and the community, and placed egoism and self-interest before subordination, commonality and social solidarity. The modern era seemed to them to be based on quicksands, to be chaos, anarchy, or an utterly unmoral and godless outburst of intellectual and economic forces, which must inevitably lead to acute social antagonisms, to extremes of wealth and poverty, and to an universal upheaval. In this frame of mind, the Middle Ages, with its firm order in Church, economic and social life, its faith in God, its feudal tenures, its cloisters, its autonomous associations and its guilds appeared to these thinkers, like a well compacted building…”101

Karl Marx railed against this movement, which he called ‘feudal socialism’, and its allied ‘clerical socialism’ in the Communist Manifesto102, recognising in these movements a potentiality that could restore social justice without recourse to materialism and class war, and centred again on faith in God and the spiritual authority of the Church. Marx saw in the movements an alliance between the “proletariat” and the vestiges of the aristocracy, which began to form against the common enemy of mercantilism and free trade103. This was the antithetical movement to that alliance which had been formed in the past and subsequent to Marx between Marxian socialism and international finance against the vestiges of nobility and faith104.

The most powerful impetus given to the formation of an alternative to and resistance against the generally aligned forces of Masonry, socialism and international finance came from the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII.105 This is a mere statement of historical observation, regardless of one’s personal religious or non-religious beliefs. To this encyclical one owes the formation of States under statesmen who attempted to revive the Christendom of Europe, including Salazar’s ‘New State’ in Portugal, Dollfuss’ Austria,106 Franquist Spain, Petain’s France, and further afield, such as Vargas’ ‘New State’ in Brazil. They gave a heroic resistance, some lasting decades 100 Max Beer, ibid., p. 88. 101 Max Beer, ibid., pp. 88-89. 102 Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, “III: Socialist and Communist Literature, 1. Reactionary Socialism: a. Feudal Socialism” (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), pp. 77-80. 103 Karl Marx, ibid., pp.77-79. 104 The philosopher -historian Oswald Spengler observed: “There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interest of money, in the directions indicated by money, and for the time permitted by money – and that, without the idealist amongst its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.” Oswald Spengler, op.cit., Vol. II, p 402. 105 Pope Leo XIII, op.cit., 1891.106 Specifically Dollfuss’ restored Christian social order was cut short by the murderous activities of the Austrian Nazis under the direction of Nazi Germany. It was an instance of a Godless national chauvinism conflicting with a revival of the traditional social ethos of Christendom, which could have reshaped Europe. Ironically and tragically, Nazi Germany, itself in deadly conflict with the same forces of Masonry, international finance and Marxism, could not act in concert with the Christian statesmen such as Dollfuss, because Nazism owed its origins to the petty national-statism that had itself been unleashed during the 19th Century by Masonry. (See Fr Johannes Messner, Dollfuss – An Austrian Patriot, Norfolk, Virginia: Gates of Vienna Books, 2004).

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longer than others, against the combined forces we have been considering, who are aiming to shape a Europe of a very different kind that would not lead to a restoration of Christendom, but rather to serve as a prelude to a Masonic Universal Republic107.

© 2009K R Bolton is an independent New Zealand researcher, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social and Political Research, Athens (http://www.academy-of-social-and-political-research.com). Published works include: Thinkers of the Right, England, 2003; Russia and China: an approaching conflict?, Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Washington, Summer 2009, The Trotskyist Conspiracy Against the New Zealand Family, Centre for Conservative Studies, Sociology Dept., Moscow State University, http://konservatizm.org/konservatizm/geopolitika/131009105304.xhtml October 14 2009. Contact: K R Bolton, P O Box 1627, Paraparaumu Beach 5252, New Zealand. E-mail: vindex@clear.net.nz.

107 The current name in vogue among political elites being the ‘New World Order’. 26