Tupper Saussy: Abiding Religious War #5

Abiding in Religious War / 5
by Tupper Saussy

9. Muslims: Rome's designer villains

“Ishmael will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.” —Genesis 16:11

“Islam did not arise in a backwater from some obscure Judaic-Christian sect, but arose in the full stream of religious life in Asia.”—R. Bell, Origins of Islam in Christian Environment, London: Macmillan & Co., 1926

It is not very widely known how deeply rooted in Roman Catholicism is the religion of Islam. Recognizing the nature of this relationship will help considerably in understanding the present religious war.

When Mohammad (c570-632) founded Islam, Christianity ruled an evildoing world under full authority of the mark of Cain, the double-cross now separated into sword and +.

Coin depicting Emperor Phocas bearing sword, crowned with cross

It was the Emperor Constantine (c 285-337) who had given the mark to the Christian bishops, and Augustine of Hippo (354-420) who developed the theological system under which the mark would be enforced by the masters of the Roman Church until today and perhaps beyond.

During the lives of the apostles and for several generations afterward, the Christian churches had lived and preached straight from the original Greek Scriptures the gospel of a loving and accessible God, all in a joyous spirit of reconciliation and intellectual freedom.

With Augustine, who in his own words “hated Greek” and “was not competent to read and understand” the language, came an approach to Scripture that suffered from his insensitivity to it. Important meanings were overlooked or denied, resulting in a majestic, Saturnian indifference to mankind, the promotion of priestcraft, and a nasty impatience with any opinion that disagreed with his own. According to Farrar, “Augustine was the first and ablest asserter of the principle which led to Albigensian crusades, Spanish armadas, Netherlands butcheries, St. Bartholomew massacres, the accursed infamies of the Inquisition, the vile espionage, the hideous large fires of Seville and Smithfield, the racks, the gallows, the thumbscrews, and the subterranean torture-chambers used by churchly torturers.” [Frederic Farrar, Lives of the Fathers]

On the strength of Augustinian dynamics, the Emperor Justinian (“the Lawgiver,” 483-565) declared the Bishop of Rome first among the bishops of the other great churches. When the bishops of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem disputed Rome’s primacy, the Emperor Phocas, in 606, decreed from Constantinople that the Bishop of Rome was sovereign over the other churches. For this significant economic and spiritual boon, and for his zealous enforcement of Roman Catholicism with the gallows, the rack, and systematic mutilation, Phocas was commemorated by Pope Boniface III with an obelisk which stands in the Roman Forum to this day.

Phocas was easily overthrown in 610 by Heraclius, who loved war so much that in his spare time he would go to the empty circus alone and kill lions with his bare hands – imitating the first labor of his mythological namesake, Hercules.

Under the Emperor Heraclius, Arabia was little more than a desert dominated by fierce Ishmaelite tribesmen, who herded camels and caravaned incense and other commodities between Yemen and the Fertile Crescent. Heraclius’ wars with Persia stimulated commerce, making Arabs prosperous as mercenaries and suppliers. The Arabs’ open boast that they were entitled to recover by fraud or force the Abrahamic inheritance of which Ishmael had been unjustly deprived led Pliny to conclude that “Arabs were equally addicted to theft and merchandise.” (That Arabs failed to realize that the Abrahamic inheritance consists solely of Jesus Christ reflects an indifference to Scripture among Christian missionaries, particularly to the epistles of Paul.)

Mohammad, the Prophet of Islam, was born about 570 in a sanctuary for itinerant merchants called Mecca, to the Quraysh tribe – quraysh meaning “shark.” Mecca was home to the Qa’aba, a black meteorite believed to be of divine origin. Idols were lodged with the Qa’aba by the hundreds from pagan denominations all over the middle east.

Before Mohammad was nine, he lost both parents and came under the protection of his uncle Abu-Talib.

Arabia was steeped in spiritism. Most tribes had their visionaries called “kahins”(probably from the Hebrew kohen, “priest”). Covering themselves with their cloaks, the kahins would release the voices of familiar spirits called companions or friends or seers. The spirits would manifest in the form of a vague mumbling or of short, staccato rhymed phrases, with repeated oaths which called freely on the names of the morning and evening stars, plants and animals – all delivered in a breathless, rapturous style which made a great impression on audiences. Highly respected, the kahins were consulted as oracles and advisers in both public and private matters.

Although Mohammad was not a kahin, his contemporaries couldn’t help noticing the many traits he had in common with them – frequent emotional attacks, and a tendency to see, hear and feel things beyond ordinary capacity. Nor did Mohammad aspire to become a kahin. He wanted more out of life than telling fortunes and interpreting dreams.

Abu-Talib took Mohammad on a caravan to Syria, where they met a Catholic monk named Bahira. Bahira discerned from a birthmark below Mohammad’s shoulder that the 12-year-old lad bore the Seal of Prophethood. He cautioned Abu-Talib to guard his nephew’s life. Mohammad was sent back to Mecca, where he became a shepherd.

In his twenties, Mohammad began working for a rich and savvy businesswoman by the name of Khadija ibn Yshaq. Khadija was twice his age and had been twice married. She is said to have studied in a convent and contributed much money to the bishop of Rome.

Khadija’s business was equipping caravans that traveled into Syria and brought back Byzantine merchandise for sale on the Mecca market. Caravaning in Khadija’s service kept Mohammad in contact with Bahira and his Catholic brethren.

In about 596, Khadija proposed marriage to Mohammad through an intermediary. Mohammad consented and began devoting himself exclusively to developing himself as a prophet in Mecca. Of course, what resulted were the visitation of the angel Gabriel in 610, Allah’s commandment that Mohammad preach Islam in 613, and the gradual compilation of the centerpiece of Muslim religion, the Koran.

Scholars have identified numerous sources from which the Koran is drawn, among them Zoroastrianism, Hanifism, Judaism; Yemenite, Abyssinian, Ghassanite, and Syrian Christianity; Sabaism (a combination of Judaism, Manicheism, and old disfigured Babylonian heathenism); and native ancient and contemporary Arabian beliefs and practices, such as polygamy and slavery (which Mohammad incorporated into Islam).

The Koran is sourced in all these disciplines not because Mohammad was conversant in them but because of the way the Koran evolved. It began with the retention in memory by Mohammad’s hearers, each of whom understood in the context of his peculiar religious conditioning. Hearers who could write traced the Prophet’s sayings in ancient characters on palm leaves, tanned hides, or dry bones. After Mohammad’s death in 632, all these fragments were collected by Zaid ibn Thabit, Mohammed’s disciple, and placed in a single volume believed miraculous. The chapters were then arranged according to their length and without regard to historical sequence.

Muslims preach the Koran as an “improvement” on Christianity. The Koran improves on Christianity, indeed, the only Christianity known to Zaid and Mohammad and the Syrian monk Bahira and another of his teachers, a Catholic cousin of Khadija’s, a man named Waraqah. The Koran gloriously supersedes and improves upon the Christianity of the Prophet’s Christian mentors, enemies, and auditors because they knew only seventh-century Roman Catholicism, which Edward Gibbon wrote had insensibly relapsed into a semblance of Paganism: their public and private vows were addressed to the relics and images that disgraced the temples of the East: the throne of the Almighty was darkened by a cloud of martyrs, and saints, and angels, the objects of popular veneration; and heretics flourished in the fruitful soil of Arabia, investing the Virgin Mary with the name and honours of a goddess.

Yes, the fiercely monotheistic Koran is a refreshing improvement upon the Christianity that had placed the Scriptures under the same forbidding keys that had anciently locked the Babylonian Mysteries to all but the licensed priests.

The true Christian “faith once delivered to the saints,” however, is not improved upon by Mohammad, the Koran, or Islam because there’s no evidence that the Prophet ever came into contact with that faith, the apostolic faith held, for example, by the Hebrew Bereans in Paul’s day “who received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” [Acts 17:10-11] In a word, there were no “scriptures” to search. How, then, could Mohammad or his mentors or transcribers or disciples ever have heard the true Gospel, ever have known a true Christian, ever have seen Christianity being practiced? Considering the Prophet’s intense spiritual awareness, if he had experienced authentic Christianity – which promises a lot more than eternally-satisfied appetites in a perfumed paradise – he might even have preached it!

Since it doesn’t contemplate the Bible, Mohammad’s miraculous Koran doesn’t judge the Bible. What it does judge is “another Gospel, another Jesus” (as the apostle Paul put it), a tradition which excluded from common access “all scripture given by inspiration of God, and profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.”[2 Timothy 3:16]

The Koran judges seventh-century Roman Catholicism and its socio-economic effects on Ishmaelite non-believers. It judges the bearer of the mark of Cain, finds guilt, and calls for the judgment to be executed — to Cain’s immense pleasure, for he is divinely ordained to avenge sevenfold all who would attempt to rid the earth of him.

And that has been the history of Islam: executing judgment upon the mark of Cain, successfully at times but mostly under a stultifying backlash of sevenfold vengeance. A conspiracy theorist could handily conclude from Islamic history that Rome had carefully nurtured Mohammad to create a religious discipline that solidified his fellow Ishmaelites into a systematized form of evildoing which the papacy could employ or punish according to its needs in solidifying world order under itself.

Wise military strategy always prefers a malleable enemy to a disobedient friend.

Students of biblical prophecy also see a symbiosis, especially regarding Rome’s need to punish the disobedient Byzantine churches after 606. “Mohammad is that star that fell from the profession of Christianity,” wrote Calvinist scholar Thomas Goodwin.

Unto him came an innumerable company of Arabs – who in Rev. 9 are called ‘locusts’ for their multitudes... Wringing Arabia, Egypt, Assyria, Armenia, and much of Asia the Less from out of the hands of the Eastern Empire – and extending their dominion further over Persia, East India and a great part of Africa and Spain – they became almost as great an empire as that of Rome had been.

Biblical scholars have also carefully stipulated that Islam’s evildoing nevertheless performs God’s will. Consider Puritan scholar James Durham:

Mohammad is against all idols and images, and allegeth himself to be specially commissioned against idol-worship. And it may be that God purposed him indeed to scourge that sin thus to make him the more instrumental in pursuing that sin, partly more to convince and shame Christians addicted to it. [Durham, Complete Commentary upon the Book of Revelation, 1657]

10. Rome's use of Islam as a weapon

Rome masterfully deployed Islam to increase the material wealth of the papacy at the expense of the Byzantine churches. An emergency created by Islamic leaders served as a magnet to draw out of Europe its able-bodied men, who entrusted their properties to Rome so that they might risk their own lives recovering eastern Christianity from the Infidel, and rescuing holy relics – while providing safety for pilgrims adoring them – in Palestine. We’re talking, of course, about the Crusades.

An interesting way of looking at the Crusades begins with the Great Schism of 1054, conditions precedent to which are explained by The Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, Washington, D.C,, as follows:

While Rome was strengthening its juridical hold over the Spanish and Gallic churches in the 9th century, an authoritative Spanish priest named Isadore compiled a collection of ecclesiastical acts later known as the ‘Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals.' The collection consists of three parts. In the first part, there are fifty Apostolic Canons and sixty decretals of the Roman popes. Of these sixty decretals, two are partly falsified, while fifty-eight are altogether spurious. In the second part, among other spurious material, there is the spurious donation of the city of Rome by the Emperor Constantine to the Roman Pope Silvester.

The collection was first published only at the end of the 16th century, and then scholars proved without difficulty the spuriousness of the documents that were in it. At the present time, even Catholic scholars do not recognize their authenticity. But at that time, the collection served as an authoritative basis for the development of ecclesiastical relations in the West, inasmuch as it was accepted on faith, and in the course of all the Middle Ages enjoyed the authority of authenticity. The popes began categorically to cite the decretals of the collection in substantiation of their rights to supremacy in the whole Church.

Pope Nicholas I (858­876) began first to cite the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, since he first formulated sharply and decisively the idea of papal omnipotence in the Church. But the East, naturally, did not recognize this omnipotence. Nicholas I tried to subordinate the East to himself in a swoop. But he did not succeed in this. As a consequence of this failure, the Church schism appeared: for the first time in the ninth century, and definitively in 1054.

The Crusades began in the years following the Great Schism in response to a plea from Alexios I Komnenos, the Byzantine emperor, to Pope Urban II for aid in retrieving nearly all of Asia Minor, which the Seljuq Turks had taken by conquest.

Urban addressing the Council of Clermont

At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Urban – “by the permission of God chief bishop and prelate over the whole world” – informed subjects that

Your brethren who live in the east are in urgent need of your help, and you must hasten to give them the aid which has often been promised them. For, as the most of you have heard, the Turks and Arabs have attacked them... They have occupied more and more of the lands of those Christians, and have overcome them in seven battles. They have killed and captured many, and have destroyed the churches and devastated the empire. If you permit them to continue thus for awhile with impunity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them. On this account I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ's heralds to publish this everywhere and to persuade all people of whatever rank, foot-soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends. Christ commands it. [Where Christ commands Christians to destroy any race will not be found in the Scriptures.] All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested. O what a disgrace if such a despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the faith of omnipotent God and is made glorious with the name of Christ!

To become a crusader, a man underwent a specific ceremony. First, with his wife’s consent, he sought out a priest, bishop or higher cleric and swore to carry out an armed pilgrimage in support of the Holy Places. He then usually received a cloth cross – the mark, signifying sevenfold vengeance – which he could place on his clothes to signify his new status. The novice crusader then placed his property and human resources under the protection of the Church. He risked excommunication if he didn’t leave within a certain period of time.

Just 23 years into Urban’s dispatch, Hugh de Payen and Godfroi de St. Omer founded the Knights Templar, which were extolled by the papacy’s leading propagandist, Bernard of Clairvaux, as “the epitome and apotheosis of Christian values.” Within a few years, Pope Honorius II ordained the Templars the most highly esteemed religious order in Christendom, and called upon noblemen in England, Scotland, Flanders, Spain, and Portugal to shower them with donations of land and money. Honorius’ successor, Innocent II, then placed the Templars under an exclusive vow of papal obedience, effectively bringing their vast resources under the immediate disposal of the Holy See.

Convinced they were building a new world, the Templars called each other frère maçon, later anglicized to “freemason.” With the definitive negotiating advantage made possible by their immense wealth, combined with a diligent communications network spanning east and west, the Templars evolved the monetized debt banking system on which the world still operates today.

Early in their two-century sojourn in the east, the Templars appear to have been indoctrinated into a Byzantine “Jesus” more like the Koran’s than the Bible’s, more like Cain than Abel. After their cataclysmic absorption into the papacy in 1307 [see Chapter 6, Rulers of Evil], the documents of the Templars underwent extensive judicial probity. It was discovered that the Knights had been initiated into a secret branch of eastern Christianity who called themselves Johannites because their apostolic succession flowed not from Peter but from John. The Johannites believed that Jesus may have done miracles “since God can do things incomprehensible to human intelligence,” but he could not possibly have risen from the dead. Therefore, his claims to oneness with God made him “nothing, a false prophet and of no value.” [Michelet, Procès du Templiers]

To the Johannites, the One High God was wholly removed from humanity, like the God of Cain (“from thy face I shall be hid”). Therefore, lordship over the material world belonged to the evil brother of Jesus, Satanael – a name and position that powerfully suggests a Cain-Saturn overlay. Since Satanael alone could enrich mankind, Templar wisdom consisted in neglecting Jesus, the false prophet of no value, and acquiring as much learning from the lord of the material world as time and effort allowed. This learning, which has reached the contemporary world through the medium of Augustinian theology, we call secular humanism.

When the Templars were abolished in 1312, their Grand Master Jacques de Molay established a broad network of lodges in which Satanaellian wisdom formed the basis of social order, while the Pope secretly transferred the extensive Templar properties to the Knights Hospitaller of St. John. De Molay’s network would blossom in the Enlightenment into modern Freemasonry, which would eventually become the “secret bridge” across which the Superior Generals of the Society of Jesus would anonymously transmit orders to Protestant leaders directing them to social processes (such as the American Revolution) ultimately serving the Roman Pontiff.

An often overlooked mission of the Knights Templar was to repair the Great Schism of 1054 by subjugating the eastern churches to Roman sovereignty. This was begun in 1204, when the Crusaders – an army organized to fight Islam – plundered Constantinople and forced the eastern Orthodox communities to accept a doctrine known as “Uniatism.” Defined as “the union of Orthodox Christian communities with Rome through acknowledgment of the Pope’s claim to universal primacy,” Uniatism was made official policy by Pope Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and confirmed in a Bull of 1254 by Innocent IV.

“Far from being a method of union,” writes Rev. George Dragas, professor at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, MA, “Uniatism is simply a method of Orthodox capitulation to papal supremacy.” According to Dragas, Uniatism was entrusted to the Jesuits as part of their responsibility for the Congregation for the Eastern Church. In 1577, the Society established the College of Saint Athanasios in Rome to train Orthodox priests for free. “But the Jesuits used the College primarily,” writes Dragas, “as a political arm to impose Uniatism.”

Violence was usually involved, especially upon the Orthodox Slavs in Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine by the royal family of the Sigismunds, a supreme arm of the Jesuits. Dragas tells us that “Uniatism continued its divisive work in the East during the 17th and 18th centuries, [and] was expanded in Capatho-Russia in 1646, Slovakia (1649), Transylvania (1698) and the Balkans (Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece), as well as Constantinople and the Near East – not only among the Orthodox, but also among the Armenians, Copts, Ethiopians, Syro-Jacobites and Malabar Indians.”

The “destructive and unethical principle of ‘divide and conquer’” remains Jesuit policy toward Eastern Orthodox Christianity today, explains Rev. Dragas. “The question the Orthodox must ask is, How can Orthodox and Roman Catholics engage in meaningful and constructive dialogue on the basis of common faith and tradition when the Vatican does not abandon Uniate intrusion?”

Americans know little or nothing of Uniate politics. So what if George Tenet, formerly White House aide in the profoundly Jesuited Bill Clinton administration and now Director of the CIA is a graduate of Georgetown University and a Uniate member of the Greek Orthodox Church? Here’s what. Mr. Tenet has been endowed since 1997 with billions of American taxpayers’ money to fight the clandestine side of what September 11, 2001 made an officially-declared “Crusade ”in the land of Muslims and non-Uniate Christians. As a Jesuit-educated head of a secret army founded by a fellow Catholic who was honored by Hitler’s Pope, Pius XII, for his secret service to the Church, how could Mr. Tenet even dream of going against the will of the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, whose mission is to subjugate non-Uniate Christians and Muslims alike to the same papal jurisdiction, the same rulership of evil, that binds Protestant Americans?

Just as the Knights Templar would have had no business in Muslim and Orthodox regions had the infidels not moved against Christians in 1089, the CIA would have had no business there a thousand years later had not the elder Bush’s clients moved Kuwait against Iraq, initializing the resentment that has resulted in the Al-Qaeda’s hatred for America, of which September 11th has become emblematic.

Osama bin Laden appears in every way to be a nurtured enemy, a human being designed, in the way Adolf Hitler was designed by the hand of Jesuits, to precipitate definitive societal and economic change. In addition to the reams of paper documenting how the bin Laden family’s extensive fortunes intertwine with those of the Bushes, we have that remarkable story in Le Figaro last October 31st. Here was eyewitness “authorized source” testimony that, although Osama was wanted by the United States for terrorism since the attacks against the American embassies of Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, a high CIA official visited him in a Dubai hospital over a 10-day period between July 4th and 14th, eight weeks before the attack on America, and even “bragged in front of some friends that he had visited the billionaire Saudi” before being recalled to Washington on the 15th.

Viewed outside the context of religious war, this appears to be a typical example of political ineptness – like the CIA’s failure to see September 11th taking shape from its constant stream of intelligence data from inside Al-Qaeda and surveillance of its far-flung operatives; like President Bush's refusal to investigate this; like the absence of a news-hawk to prosecute its fishiness. However, viewed in the context of religious war, in which all the decision-makers’ understanding is bound by obedience to a transcendent rulership of evil striving for a newly-ordered world economy and social system, it shows consummate responsibility.

11. Is Cain his brother's keeper?

In 1995, the Society of Jesus held its 34th International Congress (GC34) in Rome. A series of decrees issued, No. 3 of which stated: “Working together with our colleagues, every Jesuit in his ministry can and should promote justice [by] participating in social mobilization for the creation of a more just social order.” Decree 5 niched the mobilization in the Arab world:

The relations of the Society of Jesus with Muslims go back to St. Ignatius himself, from the time he discerned his vocation at Manresa as the call to go to Jerusalem and remain there among Muslims. The experience of Jesuits who have approached Muslims with preparation, knowledge, and respect has often shown that a fruitful dialogue is indeed possible. However, in some places Jesuits have found it difficult to dialogue with Muslims, especially in states based on Islamic law. In such situations they feel apprehensive about possible violations of religious rights and even of basic human rights. To face such situations, Jesuits need great faith, courage, and the support of the rest of the Society.

GC34 then heard a homily delivered by Superior General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, who is a noted Arabic scholar, having labored among the Arab peoples, principally in Beirut, Lebanon, for two decades before his unanimous first-ballot election to Superior General in 1983. General Kolvenbach made it clear that the Jesuit mission to Muslims is not merely to have “fruitful dialogue” with them.

“Why try to delude ourselves?” the General asked bluntly. “It is conversion or the absence of conversion which is the deciding factor for the living-out of this congregation, for the future of all that this general congregation has elaborated, clarified, and decided.” Conversion, exactly as the mission of the original Crusades had been, the conversion of all Muslims and non-Roman Christians to papal obedience. This is indeed the deciding factor, the great end of religious war: conversion, by all necessary means including the sacrifice of human flesh and liberty and property, the conversion of Rome's enemies into its rank and file.

Human energies can be seduced into any cause, any operation. With sufficient psychological conditioning, any youngster can be trained to spray his schoolmates with hot bullets or strap on a bomb and detonate inside a disco or synagogue.

Psychological conditioning is the peculiar genius of the Jesuits.

The beginning of Jesuit mind-transformation is the Spiritual Exercises, a month-long reformatting of the imagination developed by Ignatius Loyola during his lengthy, painful, and often hallucinatory recovery from cannon wounds at about the time Martin Luther was translating the Bible into German.

Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises manual is a religious bestseller, having been reprinted more than 4,500 times.

The Exercises take anywhere from three to four weeks to experience, usually at a retreat and always under the supervision of a Jesuit spiritual director. Self-mortification is induced, with vivid imaginings of “hell in all its breadth and depth.” The Blessed Virgin Mary is asked to “get me grace from her Son.” And in the end the mind is reduced to a void craving substance from above. “Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my intellect, and all my will – all that I have and possess...”

The Exercises purify the psyche and dedicate it to conquering “the evil one” in the company of an army whose commander is the Lord Jesus Christ. As we saw earlier in this essay, the Lord Jesus of the Exercises is subtly different from that of the Bible. Loyola’s Constitutions provide that the Superior General must be “obeyed and reverenced” always as the one who holds His place. Five hundred times the Constitutions repeat that one must see Jesus Christ in the person of the Superior General. When all’s said and done, the Spiritual Exercises are about obedience to a man posing as Christ.

German historian Manfred Barthel has observed that Jesuit obedience exceeds mere obedience of the will. Obedience of the will is exemplified by one’s obeying against one’s better judgment – “I shouldn’t do this, but I must because I’ve been ordered.” Jesuit obedience is the work of a consciousness altered by spiritual exercise, a perfect suspension of disbelief which Dr. Barthel calls “obedience of the understanding.” This is an obedience that stems from Section 365.13 of the Exercises, which states, “We must hold fast to the following principle: What seems to me white, I will believe black if the hierarchical Church so defines.” In other words, if the Superior General says white is black, one does not overcome one’s inclination to believe white is white, one actually perceives white as black. What I believe is irrelevant; all that matters is THAT I believe. Obedience of the understanding is the basis of the fantastic postmodern affirmation “You have your truth, I have mine.”

Francisco Xavier, who was personally trained in the Exercises by Loyola himself, clarified obedience of the understanding for all time with his famous unintended irony, “I would not even believe in the Gospels were the Holy Church to forbid it.”

We’ve all seen obedience of the understanding in action. It happens when a child accepts abuse delivered as punishment because it’s for his own good. It happens when you know you’ve got to have what that salesman is selling. It happens when the recipient of a death threat suffers a sudden lapse of memory before the grand jury. It happens when an officer lies confidently under oath. It happens when a candidate for Supreme Court bears his Senate examination with impeccable political correctness.

I’ve seen Jesuits practicing obedience of the understanding spontaneously, and it is awesome to behold. I once casually asked two elderly Jesuits what would happen if a brother should disagree with General Kolvenbach. Instantly, both men bellowed “Oh!”, threw their hands toward the ceiling, spun around, and nearly collapsed on the floor. They stood bent and limp, heads shaking in befuddlement. It was as if I had punched them both with cattle prods. Their answer never went beyond that head-shaking “Oh!” God only knows the price those gentlemen paid to achieve that understanding. Beginning September 11th, this scene came to mind frequently as I watched how quickly the communications gatekeepers established that the planes had been hijacked by suicidal Muslim fundamentalists on orders from Osama bin Laden as a declaration of war against the United States.

How obediently that presumption is clung to, despite good evidence to the contrary! It’s as though the media have involuntarily spun away — “Oh!”—from considering such dissident evidence as

* that Osama denies responsibility,

* that CIA officials who were so intimate with Osama prior to the attack have maintained “incomprehensible silence,”

* that technology exists for the planes to have been driven to their fate by existing Northrop-Grumman robotics,

* that none of the passenger lists released by the airlines contained Arabic names,

* that at least one of the World Trade towers seems to have collapsed from an intricate system of internally controlled demolition,

* the incriminating passport that magically appeared, and so on.

The understanding of the media seems to have been co-opted by some divinity, a divinity that is perhaps revealed in the encyclical Inter mirifica issued in 1964 by Pope Paul VI, who was educated by Jesuits and is regarded by historians as a profoundly “Jesuited” pope.

Inter mirifica stated that “It is the Church’s birthright to use and own the press, the cinema, radio, television and others of a like nature.” This encyclical assured Catholic media proprietors that they “have the power to direct mankind along a good path or an evil path by the information they impart and the pressure they exert. It will be for them to regulate the economic, political, and artistic values in a way that will not conflict with the common good.”

The encyclical seems to have been taken seriously in America. Of the many dozens of radio talk show hosts interviewing me during the month following the HarperCollins publication of Rulers of Evil, most were professing Catholics. Only two were Jews, and several had come out of Catholicism either to embrace Scriptures or to pursue some alternative spirituality. Significantly, the Catholic hosts did not advocate Catholicism, nor did they criticize me or my book as being “anti-Catholic.” In most cases, had I not asked their religious profession, they would have seemed as non-sectarian as the media generally do.

Yet there exists an obedience of the understanding between them and the masters of their faith. September 11th demonstrated that obedience more holistically than any event in recent memory. Even before Inter mirifica, the world was making macrocosmic Spiritual Exercises. The traumas following the sinking of the Lusitania, Krystallnacht, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, John F. Kennedy’s and the other famous American assassinations, Viet Nam, Waco, and Oklahoma City have all produced political development pursuant to the Vatican agenda. They mortified America’s imagination, and perhaps the world’s, with searing nightmares of “hell in all its breadth and depth,” and in the end reformatted susceptible minds into crippled, numbed, empty vessels craving direction from the Jesus of Roman Catholicism – “Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my intellect, and all my will – all that I have and possess...” Isn’t that what the frantic singing of God Bless America was all about?

Catastrophizing the imagination can be said to be Jesuit modus operandi. Jose Anchieta, the first Jesuit Provincial of Brazil, wrote, “There is no better way of preaching than with the sword and the rod of iron.” [J.C.H. Aveling, The Jesuits, page 154]

In India and Ceylon, St. Francis Xavier encouraged children in the early stages of conversion to wreck pagan shrines, smash idols, and break Buddhist holy relics. To the Governor of Goa, he proposed military expeditions against Hindu and Moslem princes, even a raid on Arabia to destroy Mecca. [Aveling, ibid]

Alessandro Valignano, a 16th-century Jesuit Visitor-General to the Far East, complained that Jesuit missions could not function properly without the sort of penal jurisdiction they enjoyed over reservations in India and South America. The hardest of all peoples to manage, Valignano wrote, were the Japanese: “The Japanese converts will not suffer being slapped or beaten, nor imprisonment, nor any similar methods used as with other Asiatic Christians. They will not obey unless they fear death. [Aveling, ibid]

Hiroshima & Nagasaki seared the Japanese mind with death as nothing had ever done before. “Little Boy,” as the first nuclear bomb deployed against humanity was called by its American developers, answered the Jesuits’ need for violent preaching. It wrecked sacred shrines, immolated holy relics, and formatted the Japanese understanding to obey an infinitely more dynamic Sun-God than the Emperor Hirohito.

I’m haunted by what its Japanese victims named the bomb. Far more sensibly than “Little Boy,” they called it genshi bakudan, which means “Original Child Bomb.” Original Child Bomb! Get it? Anyone familiar with the book of Genesis knows exactly who the original child is. He’s the first child born of human flesh – Cain. Genshi bakudan will forever remind those who speak Japanese that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the work of Cain, who is divinely ordained to subdue and destroy, according to need, any soul who follows Babylonian moral guidance or dares rebel against him.

There’s no doubt that Hiroshima created popular consent to, even demand for the United Nations – whose insignia, as we’ve seen, bears the mark of Cain. Few world leaders and even fewer constituents cared that the UN’s basic intentions were formalized at San Francisco on June 26, 1945. But when American armed forces nuked Hiroshima 40 days later, there went up an immediate hue and cry for world peace through unity. The following October 24th, the United Nations Charter was ratified, and on January 10, 1946, the first Security Council met in London. And for the next forty years, every nation’s vital decisions were made to the frightening obbligato of that awful picture of the ascendant mushroom cloud.

Several more critical elements are missing from the world’s knowledge of the relationship of Hiroshima to Cain and Rome. Awareness of these elements can help us better understand how September 11, 2001 was merely the continuation of an ancient pattern.

First, one of the most diligent advocates of nuking Hiroshima was the official Vicar of the American Armed Forces during World War II, Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York and a pupil and special patron of the Jesuits.

For the billions in American funds he raised for the Vatican, Spellman was dubbed “Monsignor Precious” by Pope Pius XI. Indeed, it was Spellman’s generosity toward Pius that facilitated the election of his intimate friend Eugenio Pacelli to the papacy as Pius XII. Friends and critics alike recognized Spellman as “The American Pope.”

Second, on day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, President Harry S. Truman’s Secretary of War John J. McCloy, the best-informed government official on the development of nuclear weaponry against Japan, just happened be present, of all places, in Rome.

In private life, John McCloy was a Rockefeller lawyer.

Third, the head of the Jesuit mission in Hiroshima, Pedro Arrupe, was a medical doctor residing just 4 miles from the bomb’s epicenter. Although the bomb and its scorching 40-mph winds shattered mission house windows, Dr. Arrupe and his community of Jesuits were able to venture out within 30 minutes into the suburbs – the first medical team to start up in the stricken city.

“Without any doubt,” wrote the late Jesuit professor Malachi Martin, “their efforts at aiding the stricken were instrumental in the postwar success of the Jesuits in Japan.”

Made a hero by Hiroshima, Arrupe was elected 28th Superior General of the Society of Jesus at the 31st General Congregation of the Society in 1965. GC31 vowed to “foster the collaboration of the laity in our own apostolic works.” One of the Society’s apostolic works was prosecuting Cardinal Spellman’s imperative to defend against communist rebels the Catholic tyranny he had enthroned in French Indochina during the Eisenhower administration. (His Eminence would make headlines blessing the guns used against the Viet Cong.)

General Arrupe’s lay collaborators in America were the men who controlled the nation. President Lyndon Johnson was a graduate of Georgetown (the university owned and operated by the Jesuits under a mandate to develop thought harmonious with the Holy See’s). Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was a Roman Catholic, as was Gen. William C. Westmoreland, Chief of the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam.

These key collaborators brought us the legacy of Vietnam war, which to many signifies needless death, wasted resources, moral degeneracy, the evolution in the homeland of systematized drug addiction, the decimation of the family, and so many more evils — all in pursuit of a goal never reached: inoculating Vietnam against communism.

It is probable that the Kolvenbach generalate will do for the Middle East what the Arrupe generalate did for Southeast Asia. And the exorbitant price once again, as always, will be paid by those Americans who seek moral guidance from Cain.

I cannot say, as some have said, that General Kolvenbach positively commanded the events of September 11th.

Until I see convincing evidence, I will go no further than to say that the General was more responsible for September 11th than, say, James Earl Ray was for the murder of Martin Luther King. James planned no killing, shot no one, thought he was in Memphis for something totally unrelated to either murder or Dr. King. Yet his guilty plea withstood all his later attempts to withdraw it because in fact he did participate in King’s assassination by – Casuistry Alert! – making himself available to be framed for it.

I would venture that the General, on the other hand, cooperated in September 11th by first knowing – with his definitive overview of international wealth, secret international policymakers, and his innumerable plugins to every nations’ secret army – that the events would occur, and then by studiously neglecting to exert his power to prevent them from occurring.

The Pope had called for “a more just sharing in the world’s resources, and a new economic and political order that will better serve the human community at a national and international level.” The world had been unwilling to heed His Holiness. So the General went to work.

One becomes Jesuit General by mastering the Sun-Tzuan strategy of arranging circumstances so that one’s enemies react to given stimuli in the manner one desires without their being commanded; so that they act in their own self-interest without realizing that they are performing to another’s agenda. I believe that General Kolvenbach merely determined where to nudge and where to withhold, and obedience of the understanding – in whatever national intelligence agency or combination thereof – took care of the rest. In September 11th and its aftermath we bear witness to the fluidics of evildoing.

Consider just a handful of General Kolvenbach’s current lay collaborators in America.

* His chief tribute collector is the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, Charles Rossotti, who is a Roman Catholic graduate of Georgetown University.

* His chief published clandestine operative is CIA Director George Tenet, a Uniate member of the Greek Orthodox Church and another graduate of Georgetown, who has thus far received some $10 billion to spend toward converting the Middle East to the new economic, social, and spiritual order scheduled by the papacy.

* His chief protector of Americans at home is another Roman Catholic, former Governor Tom Ridge, who opened his 911-inspired Homeland Security agency with a startoff budget of $8.3 billion.

* His chief warrior against the awful spectre of biological terrorism is former Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, with an annual budget of nearly $500 billion, some of which is funding an intense campaign to combat bioterrorism, which involves expanding the ability of medical officials to criminalize resisters to vaccinations and to quarantines and subject their property to forfeiture laws. Former Gov. Thompson recently donated his official papers (against the wishes of the University of Wisconsin) to Marquette University, another Catholic institution owned and operated by the Jesuits. Marquette is so pleased with Thompson's donation that funds have been raised to construct a new education department named after Thompson, whose two daughters are Marquette graduates.

* Not the least of the General’s lay collaborators is former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a charismatic Catholic who was created no less a hero by September 11th than was Pedro Arrupe by Hiroshima

* For good measure, the General enjoys the lay collaboration of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden, and I leave it to other students of the ROE to complete the list.

It’s highly unlikely that anyone named above would depart one inch from the General’s agenda of draining credulous American labor to fund the world’s conversion to Roman religious values.

So how can our Religious War be sanely lived with? Know this. The Roman Pontiff and his General are no more to be condemned for September 11th than is Yahweh, God of the Bible. After all, Yahweh, too, had power and authority to prevent the catastrophe. But He admitted it into existence. He did it so that the world might see His will with utmost clarity.

And here is His will: That the world recognize Yahweh as infinitely greater, more merciful, more just, more gracious, more loving, more accessible, and more fatherly than either Allah or the God of Rome, America, New York, the World Trade Center, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon.

Yahweh’s will is readily cognizable by receiving Scripture from the Holy Spirit. But the world has insulated itself from the Spirit in order to participate in the fascinations of evildoing. This results in cyclical September 11ths enthusiastically plotted and administered with impunity by the rulers of evil. The irony is that Scripture, so conscientiously ignored, promises exactly this consequence.

So what can a Christian do?

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever. [1John 2:15 ff]

Mourning the loss of a “once-Christian America,” blaming impaired rights and liberties on demonized persons and factions, and yearning to “take our country back” confess a love of the world and the pride of life. These attitudes minimize the effectiveness of prayer to Yahweh; they promote energies that serve Cain. Reflect on how diligently non-Catholic Christian leaders like Robertson and Falwell supported the Bush candidacy, which in victory has erected a more Catholic administration than even Ronald Reagan’s. (Similarly, during the 1920s Jesuit General Vladimir Ledochowski built a powerful Catholic and Jewish criminal underground on the energy of a Protestant determination to destroy the largely Catholic and Jewish alcoholic spirits industry. And there will always be the example of Laurence Richey’s employment of Protestant rebellion to establish a government over which Catholics could and did rise to supremacy.)

The logical effect of loving not the world is being thankful for a rulership of evil.

Yahweh answered Cain’s question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” by founding world order and making the first murderer its lord. In the most literal sense, Cain really does keep his brother. (By Cain I mean the Roman Pontiff and all the ecclesiastical and temporal power flowing from his mark. By his brother I mean the typical Christian described by the apostles, any “saint,” any believer who bears the fruit of the Holy Spirit – love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance.)

Cain keeps his brother not in the sense of imprisonment but in the sense of safeguarding him by policing the world for evildoers who might do him harm.

But there are some among even the saints whom Cain will imprison. These are the ones that fall, often by pious mistake, into innocuous forms of evildoing— uncorrected lapses in displaying the 9-faceted fruit of the Spirit, for example. The mildest of these offenders, Mr. & Ms. America, Cain keeps liable for tribute, in a state of peaceful, voluntary penal servitude.

In times when the saints grow epidemically apostate, such as these days, Cain waxes great. Many of the saints, in their ignorance, grovel at Cain’s feet. Others, out of love for the world, protest Cain and plot the impossible task of overthrowing his tyranny. A few so love the world that they seek the only begotten son of Yah, and read by His light, and discover their ignorance, confess it, repent, and commit to reconciliation.

Reconciliation eliminates the need for Cain to restrict. It dissolves anger and balances the body chemistry. Whether the saint does well or ill, Cain remains his brother’s keeper – in one case a firewall of protection, in the other, a chastening rod of iron.

This has been a very comforting awareness for me.

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake. And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved. —Matthew 24:6

Tupper Saussy: The Most Powerful Man in the World