By Jude Duffy
December 7, 2015 Anno Domini
Michael Hoffman’s infatuation with Protestantism – Part II
Part I | Part III
C.S. Lewis, no philo-Catholic, acknowledged that in so far as the Reformation was a struggle between rigour and laxity, the Catholics were the rigorists, the Protestants the liberals.
Calvin’s own radical departure from traditional Christian views on economic and financial matters couldn’t be clearer: he explicitly endorsed usury and thus broke completely with the traditional Christian teaching on money (9). Hoffman attempts, quite absurdly, to muddy the waters by citing the Catholic Fuggers’ usurious activities, and certain Catholic theologians’ partial endorsement of usury. In so doing he ignores the crucial fact that neither the Fuggers nor such theologians formed the Magisterium of the Catholic Church – whereas Calvin very obviously defined the spirit and letter of Calvinism. The clue is surely in the name.
Hoffman argues that the Pope Leo X bull permitting limited interest on loans for charitable purposes, not Calvin’s teaching, was what really opened the floodgates to usury (10), though he never gets around to explaining why, if this is so, it was the great Protestant powers, Britain, Holland, Geneva, and latterly the U.S., where usurious capitalism really took off.
Regardless, of how one, with hindsight, views Leo’s bull on a prudential level, it was anything but a ringing endorsement of usury, but rather a partial and very tentative derogation in response to special circumstances. It may have been a foolish compromise with the usurious spirit, but the unpleasant truth is that most of us compromise in some way or other with the usurious spirit every day. Hoffman himself accepts donations through usurious financial institutions – in fairness he might not be able to carry on his work if he did not.
In fact, the rise of “Anglo-Saxon Protestant” supremacism resembled Jewish racial supremacism in many ways – the very term White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” having its roots in crypto-Judaic national exceptionalism. The “Anglo-Saxons” were not especially Anglo-Saxon – recent DNA studies of the indigenous English population confirm what many serious historians and genealogists have known for years: that the English share more genetic heritage with the French than with the Germans (13). But like Zionists and German National Socialists, British Protestants invented an ersatz form of racial jingoism to justify genocide, enslavement, and persecution.
Like other philo-Puritans, Hoffman acknowledges that the Puritans were much more concerned with activity in the world than with contemplation, but he fails to see the implications of this fact for his attempt to portray these radical Protestant sects as at least partial inheritors of the true spirit of medieval Christianity. No medieval Catholic would exalt work and action over contemplation. The Catholic Church has always taught that prayer and contemplation are far more vital for salvation than economic activity in the world. When that order of priorities is reversed, as it was in much of Europe and the “Anglo-sphere”, in the centuries after Reformation, the stage is set for the triumph of vulgar materialism. One of Mrs. Thatcher’s economic gurus, the former Communist Sir Alfred Sherman, poured scorn on the large number of Spaniards in monasteries and convents during the Counter-Reformation era, in contrast to the “economic dynamism” of Protestant Europe.
This notion, that Protestantism brings in its wake dynamic modern progress, and commercial and industrial enterprise – as opposed to the rural reactionary stagnation of Catholicism – has been a recurring theme of Whiggish Protestant historians for centuries (the Whiggish philo-Judaic Victorian historian, Lord Macaulay being a famous example). Some corporate media commentators have even suggested that it is not coincidence that four of the five countries at the centre of the E.U. financial “crisis” were Catholic – Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal (the other one being Orthodox Greece). They may have a point: it may be no accident that Catholic countries should be the first on the hit list of larcenous City of London and Wall Street bankers.
It might sound like a curious thing to say about a holocaust revisionist, but Hoffman is in some ways quite a conventional thinker, all too happy to accept corporate mainstream media versions of events if they can be made to dovetail with his own prejudices. In this, ironically enough, he resembles the Traditionalist Catholic movement – a recurring target of his ire. Just as Traditionalist Catholics in general accept the media version of the Catholic abuse scandals without investigation, Hoffman does likewise, albeit for very different reasons. Whereas “Trads” embrace the media scandal narrative because they foolishly believe it can be made to vindicate their own critique of the corruption of the post-Vatican II Chruch, Hoffman does so because he thinks this narrative vindicates his own philo-Protestant dislike of post-Renaissance Catholicism.
Significantly neither he nor the Trads seem remotely interested in independently investigating (A) the reliability of the many allegations made against Catholic priests or religious, or (B) the context of the scandals. For example, in a recent piece on his blog Hoffman cites one of the many anti-Catholic books published about Catholic clerical abuse in Ireland, and suggests that the horrific revelations contained therein “apparently drove the Irish people mad” and led them to the ignominy of being the first nation to vote for sodomitic “marriage”. This piece encapsulates Hoffman at his worst: unbalanced diatribes based on uncritical regurgitation of highly dubious “facts” from ideologically tainted sources. Moreover, like the Trads, he never seems to consider the possibility that the pattern of cause and effect he identifies is far from happenstance.
Or to put it another way: an unbiased commentator would surely recognise that it is highly far-fetched to suppose that the anti-Christian media and media class suddenly discovered a selective horror of clerical paedophilia just at the time they planned to unleash an extraordinary intensification of their onslaught on vestigial Catholic culture. There is a familiar pattern here which every reflective person should recognise. Just as western media attacks on Saddam, Milosevic, Assad, and Ghaddafi preceded massive military attacks on these regimes, the relentless media blitz against the Catholic Church preceded a cultural Marxist version of Shock and Awe, whereby rabidly anti-Christian propositions, that a few short years previously had been confined to the outer fringes of the far left, were targeted successfully at the mainstream of respectable society.
Unbiased investigation quickly reveals that that many – although by no means all – of the allegations of sexual crime made against Catholic priests and religious remain to this day completely unproven. This is because, contrary to the corporate media line that Hoffman faithfully echoes, Church authorities, for reasons best known to themselves, handed over many billions of dollars/sterling/Euros, without any proper investigations of allegations – often in cases where priests and religious had been deceased for many years, and were therefore in no position to defend their good name (18). Furthermore, both Church and State authorities deemed accusations “credible” on the very flimsiest of circumstantial evidence, e.g., an accuser having lived in the same town as the accused at the time of the alleged offences.
But in the simplistic crypto-punk outlook of Hoffman and the Trads, the undeniable corruption of the modern Church makes every allegation against a Catholic priest credible, and therefore in no need of unbiased investigation – even when there were and are compelling religious (or anti-religious), political, financial, and cultural motives for blackening the name of Catholic clergy.
It should be noted that when it comes to World War II, Hoffman abhors his own logic. In that context he freely admits that Hitler was indeed a war criminal and “one of history’s prize fools” but argues that these facts in no way vindicate all the charges of systematic genocide laid at his door.
Incidentally, while we’re on the subject of revisionism, one of the ironies of the on-going anti-Catholic feeding frenzy is that Protestants like Dr. David Duke recognise it for the co-ordinated Zionist psy-op that it is, whereas the Catholic Hoffman – not to mention the Catholic Trads – refuse to see what’s staring them in the face.
It would be remiss to write on this subject without noting how the Zio-masonic media and political establishment treat genuinely credible allegations of paedophile rings in their own milieu. Since 2012, many senior public figures in Britain, living and deceased, have been accused of paedophilia. Some have already been sent to prison for such offences. Very recently, allegations of child abuse against former British Prime Minister Ted Heath made it into the mainstream media. Most of that media, including the BBC, implied that these were completely new allegations, and that Heath’s accusers were cynically taking advantage of the fact that he was no longer around to defend himself.
As anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the so-called alternative media can testify, this is complete bunkum. Regardless of one’s view of David Icke, it is a matter of public record that he publicly challenged Heath (in the Guardian newspaper) to sue him over precisely the allegations that many in the media are now dismissing as cowardly posthumous attacks on the reputation of the “asexual” former Prime Minister. Strangely the notoriously combative Heath declined to take up Icke’s gauntlet. The point here is that the same media which accepted without any reservation every allegation made against Catholic priests and religious, living or deceased, seem far less eager to form lynch mobs where pillars of the secular masonic establishment are concerned. Indeed many media outlets have viciously character-assassinated the alleged victims of establishment paedophile rings.
By the same token, many of the media that have obsessively pursued the Church on the issue of paedophile clergy, have themselves been deeply and very directly implicated in the cover-up of paedophile networks. The BBC, a deeply corrupt organisation that has broadcast endless hit pieces on the Church, not only covered up paedophilia in its own organisation, but actively facilitated the notorious child predator Jimmy Savile, by continuing to employ him as host of audience-based children’s TV shows long after his criminal proclivities were widely known.
(Editor’s note: Footnotes to come)