In Defense of the Indefensible: The Excruciating Convolutions of E. Michael Jones
Solemnity for Sodomy and the Utilization of Usury in the Situation Ethics of Rome’s Apologist
Copyright© Independent History and Research • www.RevisionistHistory.org
C O N T E N T S
I. Pope Francis and Fiducia Supplicans
II. A Revisionist History of Usury in the Chronicle of the Church of Rome
E. Michael Jones (EMJ) in his January 9, 2024 column at Unz.com (“Wicked Imposters Scratching Itching Ears”), makes various claims about this writer’s December 19 essay, “Memo to Pope Francis: “God cannot and does not bless sin,” indicative of either gross inattention to what I wrote, or brazen misrepresentation.
Pope Francis and Fiducia Supplicans
I begin with his final paragraph:
“By now it should be obvious that the one thing Michael Hoffman, the Life Site News crowd and James Martin have in common is the claim that Fiducia Supplicans endorsed gay marriage in spite of the fact that FS said the exact opposite. People like this have no respect for the truth. They are, in the words of St. Paul (2 Timothy 3:1-12) ‘wicked imposters…”
One would think that to reduce a person to the degraded level of having “no respect for the truth” and a “wicked impostor” there would have to be a surfeit of evidence in support of so grave and reputation-destroying charges, otherwise they would constitute reckless calumny. Dr. Jones has furnished no such evidence.
I have not in any manner stated or implied that Fiducia Supplicans “endorsed gay marriage.” In fact, in “Memo to Pope Francis,” having discerned the papal misdirection at the heart of Fiducia Supplicans, I argued the very opposite concerning the document’s “unspoken subtext”:
“Pope Francis attempts to cover himself by saying that these ‘blessings’ are ‘not to be confused with the Sacrament of marriage.’ Yet the pope’s directive is almost universally understood as the validation of sex acts between two men, when those men are intimate only with each other; that’s the unspoken subtext. ‘Loving commitment’ is defined sub-rosa as their non-promiscuous, ‘self-sacrificing” monogamous sodomy.”
It was obvious to me that the storm of controversy over Fiducia Supplicans —the contention that it supposedly leads to a church-sponsored marriage of homosexuals —was an intentional act of distraction.
Being no stranger to the history of Renaissance papal dissimulation with regard to the incremental process of granting permission for the renting of money under a variety of pretexts, I was not beguiled by the semantic misdirection in Fiducia Supplicans. I did not succumb, as E. Michael Jones falsely alleges, to the straw man set up by papal apologists who have made the controversy a question of whether the document is a stepping stone toward the endorsement of gay marriage.
Thomas Pynchon once observed, “If they get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.”
The question is not whether the promulgation of Fiducia Supplicans changes the Church’s teaching on marriage. That’s the wrong question. The controversy that follows from it is a rabbit hole. We know indubitably that Fiducia Supplicans does not alter the teaching.
Here’s the right question: Does Fiducia Supplicans tend to overthrow Biblical law and immemorial patristic dogma on sodomy? Given that those engaged in that mortal sin are to be blessed by Catholic priests, without first having confessed their transgression, repented, and resolved to desist henceforth, the answer is — yes, it most certainly does.
Jones replies: “Well, because they are in an irregular situation. Conferring a blessing on those who are in irregular situations does preclude admonitions to repent. In fact the admonition is part of the blessing.”
(EMJ conflates same-sex couples with the category of “irregular situations.” The two are distinct, as the author of the papally-authorized text, Cardinal Victor Fernandez states: “It is precisely in this context that one can understand the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples without officially validating their status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage” (italics added). The title of Section III of the document reinforces the distinction which Jones blurs: “Blessings of Couples in Irregular Situations and of Couples of the Same Sex”).
Couples in “irregular situations” include divorced heterosexuals who have not had their Catholic marriage annulled and who have remarried nonetheless. The issue at hand is the blessing of homosexual couples.
In many if not most cases, homosexuals are coming to the Church for a blessing of a union that is sexual in nature. The key aspect obscured thus far is that these blessings solemnize sodomy.
The amnesia at work is remarkable. A mere two years ago the Vatican’s responsum correctly declared that priests and deacons could under no circumstances bless same-sex couples because “God cannot and does not bless sin.”
This has since been derogated in favor of the new line, “…a blessing may be imparted that not only has an ascending value but also involves the invocation of a blessing that descends from God upon those who—recognizing themselves to be destitute and in need of his help—do not claim a legitimation of their own status, but who beg that all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit…there is no intention to legitimize anything, but rather to open one’s life to God, to ask for his help to live better, and also to invoke the Holy Spirit so that the values of the Gospel may be lived with greater faithfulness.”
With devious rhetoric similar to that which accompanied the papacy’s gradual lifting of the sacred dogma prohibiting the renting of money, we read the preceding spin-doctoring with dismay.
Nothing in Fiducia Supplicans denotes any pre-requisite that before receiving a blessing the couples being blessed are required to state their sincere intention, without mental reservation, to give up their sinful activity and live chaste lives according to the requirements of the Holy Scriptures and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Is anyone so gullible as to imagine that proud sodomites are approaching these blessings “recognizing themselves to be destitute” and “begging” for healing?
As I noted in the “Memo,” in the case of the situation ethics revolution of Pope Francis, blessings have typically been requested not by penitent persons but rather by those who defiantly refuse to distance themselves from the proximate occasion of grave sin, and who view the blessing of their sexual relationship as a bold and triumphant victory over the teaching of the Bible and the true Church, notwithstanding the Vatican’s sonorous disavowals of the obvious symbolism.
Jones writes, “Hoffmann…attempts to rescue his case by saying that ‘the pope’s directive is almost universally understood as the validation of sex acts between two men….’ without telling us who is responsible for this universal understanding. Even if everyone in the world said what Hoffmann is saying it would have to be termed a universal misunderstanding of what is actually in the text.”
What is in the text, Dr. Jones, is a minefield of deliberately sown ambiguity and a startling cynicism which sets forth ideal conditions: the blessing of sorrowful homosexuals — while omitting any mechanism for ensuring that they are indeed 1. honestly sorry; and 2. determined to avoid the near occasion of sin which, if that were the case, would often result in their parting ways as cohabitating couples. Hence, the misunderstanding is intrinsic to the document.
Blessing sexually active male couples without requiring them as a condition of receiving the blessing to abstain from a sin that condemns them to eternal perdition, subverts the Vatican masquerade that the blessing “does not claim a legitimation of their own status.”
The document generated sufficient confusion that Cardinal Fernandez was compelled to issue a clarification on January 4 in which we read, “…the Church does not have the power to confer its liturgical blessing when that would somehow offer a form of moral legitimacy to a union that presumes to be a marriage or to an extra-marital sexual practice.”
Rome’s lawyerly escape clause centers on distinguishing between the category of “liturgical blessing” and an innovative Pope Francis-concocted category termed “spontaneous.” In his January 4 statement, Fernandez admits that this entails a new teaching (“real novelty”): “It is the invitation to distinguish between two different forms of blessings: ‘liturgical or ritualized’ and ‘spontaneous or pastoral.’ The presentation clearly explains that ‘the value of this document… is that it offers a specific and innovative contribution to the pastoral meaning of blessings, permitting a broadening and enrichment of the classical understanding of blessings…This ‘theological reflection, based on the pastoral vision of Pope Francis, implies a real development from what has been said about blessings in the Magisterium and the official texts of the Church.”
If you’re conversant with the Talmud of Mystery Babylon then you’ll be acquainted with the preceding pilpul. By calling some men who cohabitate and engage in posterior coition to a priestly blessing, Rome wants us to believe it is not offering moral legitimacy to anal sex between males. The pontiff and his chief theologian assure us that “these are blessings without a liturgical format which neither approve nor justify the situation in which these people find themselves.” If you believe that then you’ll believe that my grandmother is a defensive tackle for the Buffalo Bills.
Consider the optics: sexually active gay men are being blessed by the Church. Let us imagine that Francis, with “pastoral solicitude” were to authorize the non-liturgical blessing of Catholics who are white supremacists and neo-Nazis—accompanied by the requisite linguistic somersaults explaining that the blessings in no way amount to an endorsement of racism or Nazism. Would anyone in their right mind believe it?
But who is in their right mind these days? Many of the points I’ve raised would have been patent five years ago, without need of elaboration. The conditioning process of the post-modern occult imperium continues its solve et coagula operation of alchemical transformation to such an extent that we find ourselves obliged to undertake the correction of errors that would have, until recently, been easily recognizable.
In “Memo to Pope Francis” I endeavored to provide that rarest of birds in this polemical realm: historical memory and context, so as to equip Catholics and all interested Christians with the discernment of a pattern of revolutionary situation ethics imposed by means of guile and doubletalk, beginning in the Renaissance-era pontificates.
A Revisionist History of Usury in the Chronicle of the Church of Rome
Dr. Jones attempts to counter my thesis with a string of demonstrable falsehoods. He writes:
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