Historical notes on Protestantism

Historical notes on Protestantism

by Horacio Bonfiglioli

Taken from: http://lascadenasdeobligado.blogspot.mx/2016/09/apuntes-historicossobre-el.html

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

The events that began towards the end of the Fifteenth Century are quite transcendental, as in just a few decades the World was entirely unsettled, with the Catholic City gradually disintegrating, giving birth to the Contemporary Age, or however it may be called, the age of utopic and unreal fantasies, the age of usury, of the age of the contract overruling the word of honor, the age of Judeo- Calvinist predominance which is culminating in the modernist heresy and in the ever clearer theological confrontation between Christianity and Judaism.

The Catholic Kings, eminent characters of that time, instituted the Holy Inquisition and expelled the recalcitrant Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, to preserve the integrity of their kingdom and of other European cities; the Marranos ending up in the Netherlands; then the Kings reconquered Spain, ending the predominance of the moors, and thanks to its discovery, they evangelized and civilized America.

In 1499 ends the marvelous mystical art of Brugge and begins the one of Antwerp, imitating the Italian Rennaissance, losing its spirituality (José Pijoan, “Summa Artis” t. XV), to finally, inspiring itself in the Judeo-Calvinist spirit, degrading itself in Amsterdam portraying rabbis and prosperous burghers, paradigms of the new anti-Catholic ideas. In those Amsterdam pictures “there is no act in the life of that country which is not explained. Everything is there except what, in the end, matters to man, that is: God; the battle for knowledge,  the passion, and death”. (Basin, quoted by Pijoan); this was what art was reduced to, and consequently religion, in Holland: the search for gold against the Christian values. The degradation of art under the mundane inspiration of the new artists, witnesses, as it runs in parallel with it, the economic, political and religious degradation of Judeo-Calvinism.

At the end of the second decade of the Sixteenth Century, Luther's arrogance breaks out, and a few years later, the lust of  Henry VIII. In 1531 our Mother of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego, rescuing America from the clutches of the devil. In 1534 Calvin abjures and apostatizes. In 1540, Paul III confirms the Society of Jesus, admirable missionaries in America. One year later, Calvin instituted in Geneva the most savage totalitarian theocracy one can imagine, for it to become rooted in the United States years later.

Masonic Origins of the Reformation

E. Comin Colomer in “Lo que España debe a la Masonería” (Editora Nacional) [What Spain owes to Freemasonry”] wrote that Freemasonry, such as that we suffer from now, was founded in 1717 by two Protestant pastors and some other characters, had its roots in several, secret, mystical, philosophical sects of previous centuries, such as the “Bohemian Brethren”, etc. Because, just as Protestantism, Freemasonry picked up the doctrines and the principles of numerous sects ― from the Ebionites, the Esenians, and the Pythagoreans, to the most modern ones ― without prejudice of the contributions of 'Rosicrucianism' and other esoteric factions”. The existence of masonic lodges prior to 1717 is irrefutable. By the end of the Sixteenth Century, the Great Lodge of York had already been established. The Society of the Enlightened or the Illuminated already existed in France, which would later have an extraordinary influence in the Lodges of the Great Orient of France.

And Comin Colomer goes on: “Those who are curious about the historical origins of Masonry will be astonished at Luther's relation with the 'mystics' of his time, and particularly at the fact that, as his main collaborator, he had Melanchthon, who was a member of the Masonic fraternity of Salzburg”...Sometime later, in 1662, now in Protestant England, the Royal Society is born, from which the principal characters, founders of Freemasonry, would come later. Thomas Walsh, in 'Phillip II' (an indispensable book of extraordinary importance) uncovers the Lutheran relationships with secret sects and lodges. Walsh also makes note of the Lutheran relationships with the secret sects “Was it not the Lutheran theory of salvation by grace alone ― he says ― a re-apparition, with some different emphasis, of the ancient, desperate dogma of the Illuminated, the Manichaeans, the Gnostics, and the Buddhists?”

Already in the reign of Elizabeth Tudor, manifestations of masonic activities with a strong political influence can be discovered. Walsh wrote, from which I extracted these facts: “From Queen Elizabeth's court exhales something similar to the odor of Freemasonry... Queen Elizabeth herself was a bit masonic...”; affiliated with the secret society of the Mercers, she would draw masonic symbols on her letters, such as the star of David surrounded by serpents crossed by a diagonal line... Even her court dress was decorated, from top to bottom with sequins bearing drawings of the vigilant eye, a masonic symbol which currently appears in the Yankee dollar: she would sport her very luxurious attire showing stamped masonic eyes and ears; even serpents and sea monsters, which repeat themselves in her portraits, demonstrating her masonic affiliation. [...] the problem that would have to be resolved now is whether those symbols were then already, as they are today, the signs of an international, secret anti-Catholic society, pretending to retain certain Christian characteristics, but with a political activity the end of which is to destroy Christianity”. In his 'Letters on Tolerance', the Protestant mason, Locke, advises tolerating all but the Catholic religion, because, he affirmed, it is subjected to a foreign power "tyrannical and enemy of the peace” ('Historia de la Filosofía',G.Fraile, O.P. T III), the origin of the famous demo-liberal masonic principle: We tolerate all, except for those who do not think as we do!

Hugonote Coligny, William Cecil (an uncle of mason Francis Bacon), and most of the Protestant characters were Freemasons, even the British kings, all of them were masons and Protestant. Luther himself, upon abandoning his monk's cell opted for the seal of the Rose and the Cross. But the masonic intentions of getting rid of the king of Spain and of the Church, in colluding with Protestants and Jews, were driven by “a violent hatred of Rome” (357) making Queen Elizabeth the likely head of a universal Protestant state”. No questions remain about the fact that all of the English imperialist policy has been inspired ever since by Protestants, Freemasons, and Jews.

“Freemasonry could have existed, and probably did exist in one or another form, since the Reformation. It could have been the secret political instrument through which the Reformation became established, if not its cause itself, or it could have grown simultaneously with the Reformation, to sever itself later as a distinct form of heresy, or finally, it could have developed as a consequence of the intrigues taken place during the Reformation period” (Walsh, 349)

Additionally, “The doubtless affinity between freemasonry and the Jewish Talmud has been commented many times. It is not up for discussion as, even if the false Jewish chiefs did not create the secret societies to disguise their own anti-Christian activities, and to better influence the credulous members of the Christian communities, they did involve themselves much in those masonic activities. The masonic degrees and rites are full of Jewish symbolism...The lodges of the Grand Orient and of the Scottish Rite, originators of so many modern revolutions, are more militant, of quicker action and seemingly more violent than the rest; their activity tends to bring little by little into existence a One World Organization. The highest degrees of certain Continental lodges express plainly the ancient hatred of Christ, the hatred manifested by those who cried for His crucifixion, those who, as time went by, would murder His priests and profane the blessed Host” (Walsh, 342)

The Dutch Jerusalem

The itinerary of the Jews, after emigrating from Spain towards the North, is easy to tell, as the places where they arrived, with their bags crammed with gold and political ambition, grew economically and financially. Simultaneously, the local authorities would yield to the Reformation, seeing in it the possibility of sating their avarice, and behind them, the peoples, aroused by the Talmudists, would apostatize from the Church.

In the middle of the Sixteenth Century, Antwerp was still loyal to Catholicism, but the settling of Marranos began at the beginning of that same century (Roth 163). As a consequence, an anti-Catholic agitation began, except among the Jews and Marranos, but the town later transformed itself into a center of all the intrigues against the faith, where an international conspiration was planned with the support of Cecil..., and of William of Orange. Marcus Pérez, a Spanish Jew, was the Calvinist minister and chief, and a great agitator in Antwerp” (T.Walsh, Phillip II”, 377/381).

But “the most important member of the colony of new Christians was Diego Mendes, who headed the Antwerp branch of the great banking firm founded by his family in Lisbon, and which now enjoyed the coveted monopoly of pepper. In 1532, severe measures were adopted against the group. Mendes and twelve other were arrested and processed for Judaizing; finally, the cause was superseded by virtue of the payment of onerous fines, partly thanks to the intercession of England's Henry VIII, who used the Mendes bank as a financial agent...In 1537, emperor Charles V formally allowed them to establish themselves in Antwerp, keeping all of their rights.” (Cecil Roth, a Jew, former Oxford professor, in “The secret Jews: History of the Marranos” Spanish edition by Altalena, pg 164. This is a very interesting book, save for the enormous exaggerations regarding the importance of the Jews in the history of those centuries.)

As the Jews arrived in Antwerp, which was a major post in Europe, they began transforming it into an “international market, where the typical figure was the payor of princes, the international financier” (L. Dujovne, “Spinoza”.)

And C. Roth further on wrote (pg 165): “The Jews in Holland, towards the middle of the Sixteenth Century, were already less attached to the Talmud, for which reason “many of them, raised in the ignorance of Judaism, leaned apparently towards the reformed church, which was gaining ground fast. The change was not abrupt, as we know the high degree of Hebraism professed by Calvinists. Thus, for instance, a certain Marco Peres (a Jew) was at the head of the Calvinist consistory in Antwerp. It was even commented that the Marranos of Flanders were deliberately introducing Lutheran literature in Spain.

The brief prosperity of Antwerp as a business center and as the center of the world financial transactions began with the arrival of the Marranos and ended with their departure” (W. Sombard, “The Jews and the Economic Life”, pg. 37)... “If Antwerp was the lens of the microcosm which reflected the soul of commercial Europe, the heart of Antwerp was the Exchange” (Tawney,”Religion in the origin of capitalism” pg 80)

Continuing reading Roth, once Amsterdam, which would become the New Jerusalem of the Jews, began gaining supremacy over Antwerp, at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, the Marranos began moving to that city, (since they let themselves be seduced by the glitter of gold). In 1615, jurist H. Grotius, by mandate of the civil power, authorized the settlement of Jews in Holland, without any significant restrictions. In a short time, Amsterdam reached the pinnacle of its fame, upon formalization of the alliance between Jews and Protestants, which still subsists in our times.

“Amsterdam was then the most important trade center in the World. The ships coming from India, loaded with silks and spices would transship their goods at the port to other ships coming from France or England. The Dutch would get rich with that profitable and safe trade more than the Spaniards with their galleons who managed to escape the British piracy, always stalking in the Atlantic, and they celebrated their prosperity” (José Pijoan. “Summa Artis”, t XV 434)

The Jews raised Holland to the pinnacle of commerce and finance, Puritan executives “were also those who lead the commercial and industrial enterprises, intensely accepting the laws and morals of the Old Testament” (R.H. Tawney, 2015). In those times, “in no part was Jewish prosperity as great as in Holland and England” (B. Lazare, “Antisemitism” 126)

This picturesque town (Amsterdam) reached then the height of its fame... They controlled a great part of the maritime trade between the city and the Peninsula, the East and West Indies. They established important industries... introduced vast capitals with them ... the wealth of some of them was legendary...” (C.Roth, “The Secret Jews” 167)

“The ports of the Netherlands did not reach any great splendor until the arrival of large groups of Marranos, fleeing from Portugal and Spain during all of the Sixteenth Century... where those that still appeared as Catholics, Judaized freely. The Jews favored Dutch trade and smuggling and piracy against the Spanish and the Portuguese colonies... The Dutch used Jewish intermediaries to obtain information about the Spanish naval activities. With this, Amsterdam Jews not only got rich in greater measure but also acquired enormous political importance... The importance of the Synagogue of
Amsterdam was, thus, enormous” (“Historia de los Judíos” Vicente Risco)

Years later, they abandoned Amsterdam, leaving the city for England, with Cromwell, and by the decisive influence of Menasseh Ben Israel (alias Manoel Dias Soeiro) began the massive invasion of England; until lastly, and up until our own times, they established themselves in New York, the Jewish capital of the World. Will they stay there or will they move with their bags, taking their business, financial and political center to some other part of the World?

The English Jerusalem (the Judeo-Protestant Alliance consolidates itself)

There were always Jews in England, even after their expulsion, remnants were left there. But “at the middle of the Sixteenth Century”, writes Roth (“The Secret Jews” p 175) “in the notable period of the expansion to England, which coincided with the reign of Elizabeth, the [Jewish] foreign colony grew naturally.”

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, all of the sects persecuted by the Church because they fostered social anarchy took refuge in Flanders and Holland (Pijoan, t VII); beginning fierce fights between the various sects: Socinians, Arminians, Calvinists, etc. in the midst of which the Jews profited, and so did all together against Rome. The common enemy grouped them together, but only to attack Rome, as the peaceful coexistence among the sects is another falsity, since not even they respect the “free examination” of each other.

All of them are similar in spirit and in purpose; all of them disguise, with almost Christian allegories, an inevitable hatred towards the Church of Christ; all of them are linked in their tactics – be it in the causes, be it in the results, be it in both – to the heretical activities... The principle which united that body with the head of the Hydra was an ancient and implacable hatred, hatred of something they continuously proclaimed as dead, but which they feared as terribly vital things are hated. It was the odium Christi directed against the Church” (Walsh Phillip II, page 355)

C. Roth wrote in “The European Age” (t. V. Paidos), even though in his judgment the Jewish support and stimulus favoring the Protestant sects cannot be documented “something had to do with those movements, as it can be evidently deduced from the fact that, in many cases, the reformists would go to the Jewish ghettos to study Hebrew and learn the Jewish interpretation of one or another point of controversy in the Scripture” (in other words, they would interpret the Old Testament with a Pharisaical spirit). And Belloc, on the same topic, says “in the eve of the Reformation the Hebrew books, not only the Old Testament but also the Talmud, were familiar to many, as were the Jewish arguments against the faith” (“How the Reformation Happened”, p 43)

The Jewish preponderance grew in such a degree in those times, that Alexander VI, Borgia, declared himself a  protector of the Jews, to such an extreme that His Holiness Jules II called him a Marrano and a circumcised (“Historia de la Iglesia”, BAC, p. 54). He protected them, but did not make them his relatives by calling them his “elder brothers”, ¡what would the integrity of Jules II not say of the Vatican II Popes!

“All of the Protestant traditions of the North, for more than three hundred years,” wrote Belloc in 'The Jews', (ed. La Espiga de Oro pp 273 and subs.) “leaned in favor of the Jews, in part certainly because of the faith they would place on Jewish scripture, of their fascination with the inspired Jewish folklore, but in a greater measure because their alliance with the Jews was an alliance against the Catholic Church”, a sentiment still subsisting in “rustic England”. It was, additionally, a business and financial alliance, of such importance –considering that, for both of them, money is a synonym of 'holiness!' – that the interests of Israel and England got to identify themselves to a point that “in proportion to their number, they retained a degree of power in this country as had never been seen in any other country in the entire world.”

Another interesting aspect analyzed by Belloc relates to the sentimental and political affinity between Israel and England, assumed in novels and journalism, “considering the Jew impeccable, favoring the Jewish type in a form previously unseen..." And when the struggle came to be between Jews and non-Jews in other countries, the historian exceeded every limit: the European who was hostile to the Jew was a monster, but the Jew who was hostile to the European was a victim. ¡Woe to he who dared denounce such maneuver!

Belloc continues in the same book, asserting that 'they enjoyed a privileged position in England as in no other part of the world, opening to them the doors of all of the public institutions, including the British Executive (Disraeli was First Minister in the Victorian era). After two generations, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the great landowning families that were free of Jewish blood were an exception. In almost all of them, the Jewish traits were noticeable to a greater or lesser extent, and in some of them they were so strong that the physical appearance and the character had become entirely Jewish, even though the name continued to be English, and the traditions were of a purely English lineage, and their members passed for Jews whenever they traveled through countries that had not yet suffered or enjoyed such mixture. (To what extent certain Jewish mores are being acquired in Argentina, under the auspices of the Catholic hierarchy?)

And in page 286, Belloc writes ”The Jewish institutions, especially those like Freemasonry (which the Jews had inaugurated in the Seventeenth Century as a sort of bridge between them and their hosts) were particularly strong in Great Britain, and in such way, an active political tradition of great importance was developed, the great importance of which was finally demonstrated, by means of which the English State was recognized by foreign governments as the official protector of the Jews in the rest of the countries. Each time a persecution arose against the Jews in the Eastern zone of Christendom, the eyes turned towards England, expecting her to intervene, to the extent of her possibilities, to undergird the Jewish financial energies around the world, and, in payment, receive the benefits of such connection” (developing this topic of the English support of Judaism you may wish to read Salvador Borrego's “Derrota Mundial”)  “the same as it happened in 1940, the British and the French fought the battles of the Jews”.Arnold Leese in “The Rothschilds”,ed Nuevo Orden pp 130,80)

The French revolution opened the doors of finance and politics to the Jews. Arnold Leese says that Anthony Rothschild was, in 1836, the first Jew having received a nobility title in Great Britain; from then on, there would be many, using their money to acquire titles and political preponderance, to the point that the Rothschilds converted London into the center of international finance,

Father Julio Meinvielle, in his eminent book “El Judío” (Cruz y Fierro, editores, pg.63) wrote: “On the other hand, Werner Sombart, the qualified historian of Capitalism. Who is neither a Catholic nor an anti-semite, in his well-documented book “The Jews in Economic Life”, demonstrates how some Protestant sects, and especially Puritanism, are Judaic... On the other hand, the intimate relationships which had been established between Judaism and certain Christian sects during the Protestant Reformation, as well as the enthusiasm then declared for the Hebrew language and Hebraic studies, are well known; it is also known that in the England of the Seventeenth Century, the Puritans demonstrated an almost fanatical cult for the Jews and that the 'Levellers', who would call themselves Jews, had demanded the promulgation of a law to have the Jewish Torah become the English code; additionally, it is a well-known fact, that officers of Cromwell proposed to form a State Council made up of 70 members, following the example of the Jewish Sanhedrin, and that in the year 1629, it was proposed to Parliament to replace the Sunday holiday with one on Saturday. In other words, to rule the English nation in accordance with the Old Testament, interpreted Pharisaically, predestining themselves to dominate the world."

In “The Decadence of the West” (Espasa t II, pg. 355), O. Spengler stated “The grandiose flight that the Old Testament acquired in Parliaments and in camps of the independents, has left in many English families, still in the Nineteenth Century, the belief that the English are the successors of the ten tribes of Israel, a nation of saints, to whom the ruling of the world has been conferred. That same sentiment dominated the emigrations to America which began with the Pilgrims in 1620. That same sentiment has created what could be called today the American Religion, and has nurtured the evidence with which the English practices politics, evidence founded in the certitude of their predestination."

In his book “Zionism”, (Ed.Federación Sionista Argentina, 1937) Max Nordau, the modern Zionist prophet of Israel, who ripened his anti-Christian venom in ancestral Talmudic conventicles, says that, in a speech he delivered at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, in 1897, when England, the prostituted queen of the world, urgently needed to count with the Jews as trustworthy allies in the Mediterranean to protect the route to India through the Suez Canal, he expressed that ”Zionists were interested in Great Britain acquiring control over the Canal because the greater the power Great Britain would have, the greater the strength the Jews who dominated it would also have”.  Also, Arnold Leese wrote: “It was an object of interest to the Jews to make Great Britain stronger and keep it in a powerful condition to work for them” (pg 40). As Zionists also needed English support to invade Palestine, displacing the Arabs. Then Nordau adulated that emulous of Chamberlain´s, Rudyard Kipling's imperialist work sealing the alliance of indissoluble love between the Jews and the English Protestants, saying “Jewish emancipation in England has a stamp of sincerity, it is not only a written matter but has penetrated life. She matured and existed in the hearts before it was confirmed by the legislator.i

As a corollary to this enormous Jewish influence in Protestant England, where little remained of authentic Christianity in her. I transcribe these words of Mr. Luis Bertrán (published in the journal “Estudios”, before Vatican II.) “Everything in that country has been controlled by the savage selfishness of the race. Because the Englishman has lived for centuries oppressed by the ferocious individualism of Anglicanism, he has been transformed into a true beast of prey... But, as it seems, the days of Anglicanism as a dominant force are counted. Many wish to unite themselves in some way to Catholicism... Catholicism cannot be united – per what has been declared by Rome – with others but its own of all times. The rest cannot be united. They have to abandon all their errors and enter the House of God cleansed of all guilt, and for these, the doors of the temple will always be wide open.”

This blogger's note: My translation from the Spanish of texts which had originated in English but are quoted in Spanish in the source from which I took them may differ in style and accuracy from the Engish originals, for which I sincerely apologize. Additionally, the page number references are to those of the Spanish editions cited.