Continued from Repudiating the Reformation in America Today

Medieval Theocracy

Some theonomists like to sing the praises of medieval times. Their ideal is to return to that golden time when the papacy governed Europe and the “church” ruled the nations. Malachi Martin likes to sing the praises of the Middle Ages also. He rejoices in the papal theocracy of that era:

During the centuries when European unity was at its height and vibrant, Europeans housed their hopes and found their believing trust beneath the domes and Gothic spires of the churches they built. They called that whole territory by a kind of family name: Christendom (Luther rightly called it Popedom) and in the span of just a hundred years –between 1170 and 1270 they built eighty cathedrals and major churches, the living symbols of the reality in their lives: the Catholic faith.

Europe’s protection was centered on its faith. Its identity was provided in the papacy. The unifying principle of its civilization lay in its common acknowledgement of the primacy of the Pope.¹

David Chilton, a theonomist, also rejoices in the cathedrals Martin praises. So let us look in detail at what the medieval Papal theocracy really produced.

In 1214 Innocent III launched his army of bloodthirsty routiers in his crusade against the Albigenses, whom he believed to be heretical. He addressed himself to all the faithful crusaders, exhorting them to “fight strenuously against the ministers of the old serpent.” Meaning, of course, all dissenters from the papacy, many of whom were true Christians. The murderous band of crusaders certainly heeded his call, for at Béziers, they massacred “30,000 individuals of every age, sex, and condition.”³

Innocent III was one of the most ambitious Popes who ever served the papacy. He was also one of the most successful and ambitious theonomists in the history of Popedom. He founded the Dominicans, the Dogs of God as they were called in derision, to help extirpate “heresy,” which meant, of course, to kill “heretics.”

He was very active in promoting his idea of the “Church.” He launched fresh anathemas all the time against “heretics,” upheld the abominable practice of auricular confession, and actually worked himself to death to try to stop the rise of independence from the Papacy.⁴

His chief goal in life was to establish the absolute supremacy of the Papacy. His pontificate culminated “in the temporal as well as the spiritual supremacy of the Roman See.”⁵

He asserted without let-up that the Papacy was God’s ordained theocracy. Innocent the Third actually attained to a theonomy, and what a horrendous theonomy it was! May God save us from such a theonomy in our time!

He took Britain and Ireland away from King John and placed John under the Interdict. When John tried to defend himself, he was faced with assassination and war. He had to capitulate to the Pope’s demands and he had to deliver a “charter** testifying that he surrendered the kingdom of England and the Lordship of Ireland to be held as fiefs of the Holy See.”⁶

** The Papacy, is at this very writing, trying to undermine the Protestant monarchy in England and to reclaim Britain from Protestantism, and the Protestant Succession, and so fulfill the stipulations of this ancient charter.

He subdued Constantinople in what the Roman Catholic writer Ffoulkes called: “one of the foulest acts ever perpetrated under the garb of religion in Christian times.” ⁷ But his all-encompassing ambition was to establish the UNIVERSAL and ABSOLUTE SUPREMACY of the Holy See of Rome. To this end he spent his life. And to this end he perpetrated some of the worst crimes and massacres in recorded history. Zoe Oldenburg describes Pope Innocent III’s campaign in Béziers in gruesome detail. We merely give excerpts here and there from her description from pages 115 to 121.

The extreme violence of the assault transformed a comparatively peaceful town into a city of the damned, all in a few minutes… In a few short hours the wealthy city of Beziers was a city of bleeding mutilated corpses, and nothing else… Kill them all; God will look after His own,’ The famous, too famous, remark, attributed to Arnald-Amalric… Whether Arnald had sufficient imagination to coin a phrase of this sort… it remains true that the Crusaders’ instructions at the sacking of Béziers do indeed seem to have been kill them all.’

After this, we read in the Chanson- ‘this’ being a really quite amazing outburst of sheer unbridled bloodlust, since in order to kill ALL the inhabitants of a major city even the routiers and the most hardened fanatics must have had their hearts in the business to a phenomenal degree… These Crusaders wasted no time singing a Te Deum as had been done at the sack of Jerusalem, and still less in horrified regret at the spectacle of corpses piled up in their thousands: old men, young girls, babies, mothers, boys, all mingled together… to treat this brutal episode as just another of those atrocities which crop up in war is a critical mistake… *Massacres such as that at Beziers are extremely rare… Even among the worst atrocities which history has to show us through the centuries, massacres of this sort stand out as exceptions… and yet it is the head of one of the leading monastic Orders in Catholic Christendom… Pierre des Vaux de Cernay (who) sees this collective punishment of an heretical city as a PERFECTLY JUST ACT. He rejoices that God willed the town’s chastisement -confirmed by the fact that the tragedy had taken place on the feast of St. Mary Magdalene.⁸ (emphasis added)

* Moody Press, in a recent book, numbers Innocent III with other great Christian leaders! How far have we gotten from the truth today?

Zoe Oldenburg, who is a Roman Catholic writer, also tells of the work of the Inquisition in her book, Massacre at Montségur. Certainly, after reading her carefully documented work, few could praise the 100 years that Malachi Martin lauds with anything approaching his enthusiasm.

In her chapter on the Inquisition, she tells that the suppression of heresy became a lot more vigorous from 1233 on. She recounts the General Inquisition which took place on Good Friday at Toulouse in 1235, with many confessions and many arrests. She acknowledges that at Moissac there was an Auto De Fe where 210 victims were executed. She tells of an old lady who was seriously ill and almost blind who was tricked into giving her testimony to a Roman Catholic bishop, Raymond du Fauga, thinking she was giving it to a Cathar Bishop. He even encouraged her to be steadfast in her beliefs. When she answered that she would not renounce her faith for that little portion of her life remaining to her, the Roman Catholic bishop revealed his true identity and pronounced her a heretic. Summary judgment was passed upon the old woman who, unable to walk, was thus carried in her bed to Pre-du-Comte, or Count’s Field, and burned at the stake. Oldenburg then states:

This done, Pelhisson tells us, the Bishop, together with the monks and their attendants, returned to the refrectory and after giving thanks to God and St. Dominic, fell cheerfully upon the food set before them.’⁹

She then continues:

This story might well have passed for a piece of slander invented by those who disliked the Inquisition. Yet it cannot be doubted, for Pelhisson, as a Dominican, could have had no possible motive for inventing it. All the same, it is so odd that it might have come from a madhouse. The harshness of contemporary ethics cannot wholly explain it, and in any case the principal actor was not a brigand-knight but a bishop. Not even fanaticism can account for a whole group of monks and clergy behaving quite so savagely towards a helpless old woman. Surely, despite her condemnation, she could at least have been left to die in peace, and burnt after her death?… Yet the chronicler rather congratulates the Bishop for his craftiness, and is not, one feels, lying when he refers to the monks’ cheerfulness as they returned to the refectory to consume the meal so providentially interrupted.¹⁰

Here is a 20th-century Roman Catholic writer trying to come to grips with the Inquisition of her own church. She cannot fathom the sheer depth of fanaticism which motivated them to such acts of cruelty and barbarism.

She later recounts the horrendous massacre at Montségur of the Perfecti. A massacre which culminated in the mass burning of hundreds of the Cathari in a common fire, the smoke of which blotted out the surrounding hillsides, and sent the stench of burning human flesh right up through the entire valley.

We have by no means exhausted the wonders of this century. At the Synod of Verona in 1184, the Inquisition was formally organized. This was an organization which burned thousands during the first years of its founding. Many innocent people were burned at the stake on the terrified testimonies of others who named them to escape themselves. Oldenburg recounts this in her chapter on the Inquisition.

Still in this glorious century of the building of all those wonderful cathedrals (which David Chilton loves because they have stood for centuries), Innocent IV issued his infamous Bull De Extirpanda in 1252 in which he stated that accused persons under the questioning of the “holy” inquisitors “should be tortured, not merely to induce them to confess their own heresy, but also to compel them to accuse others.”¹¹

When one studies the history of the Waldenses, he again runs into that wonderful century of Martin’s and that golden age of Innocent III. The doctrines of the Waldenses were spreading throughout Europe when Innocent (never was a name so badly chosen except perhaps by Loyola when he called his outfit the Society of Jesus), the most bigoted of all popes, determined to crush out the Waldenses — exterminate the whole pestilential race were his kind and Christian words. The commission he gave to the authorities was “to burn the chiefs of the Vaudois (Waldenses), to scatter the heretics themselves, confiscating property, and consigning to perdition every soul who dared to oppose the mandate.”¹²

Joining with him was Dominic, the father of the Inquisition, who came up with that inexecrable dictum of Rome that “it was a crime against God and the Church to keep faith with heretics.”¹³ Two greater rascals have never had so much power in this world, with perhaps the exception of Hitler and Mussolini. But then these two also were regarded by the Popes as defenders of the faith.

Peter Waldo was hounded from post to pillar and finally ended up in Bohemia, where he died in 1179. That was the same year in which his beliefs were denounced at an ecumenical council of Rome.

His beliefs demonstrate that the powers that be in 1179, contrary to Malachi Martin’s opinion, were far removed from the gospel. Here is a brief summary of Waldo’s beliefs for which he and his followers were persecuted and massacred by Rome for 7 centuries.

1. The Holy Scriptures are the source of faith and religion without regard to the authority of the fathers and tradition.
2. They hold to all the articles of the Apostles’ Creed.
3. They reject all temples, vestments, images, crosses, pilgrimages, worship of holy relics, and the Roman sacraments.
4. They reject the papal doctrine of purgatory and prayers for the dead.
5. They admit no indulgences, nor confessions.
6. They deny the real presence of Christ in the bread and the wine.
7. They denounce Rome as the “whore of Babylon,” and deny obedience to the papal domination and vehemently repudiate the notion that the pope has any authority over other churches, or has any civil or ecclesiastical sword.¹⁴

Is it not wonderful to discover these true believers who would have nothing whatsoever to do with that murderous papal theonomy? But who were hunted, burned, massacred, and persecuted because they would not recognize the dominion of the papacy.

The persecutions of the Waldenses continued for hundreds of years. Even when certain Protestant nations after the Reformation appealed to the Dukes of Savoy to stop their persecution, they did not.

In 1655, the persecutions raged again, and this time the Protestant powers of Europe intervened otherwise, a “complete annihilation of the Waldenses would have been the result.”¹⁵ John Milton was stirred by the cruel treatment these Christian people received at the hands of the Pope. He got Oliver Cromwell to issue a warning to the bloody persecutors, which made them pull back from their gory task of decimating the Waldenses. Europe has certainly had many holocausts, carried out by Rome, but you would never know it by reading modern history books.

The peaceful century of Malachi Martin was also shattered in Ireland. In 1291, when the Provincial Chapter met in June in Cork, tension between two factions exploded into violence. Of this incident, the Worcester annalist, the best source, narrates baldly, according to J. A. Watt, “that the Irish friars came armed with a papal bull (unspecified and not traced); a dispute having arisen concerning this, they fought against the English friars; and after many had been killed and wounded, the English at length gained the victory.”¹⁶

The scandal of the battle of the friars brought the English Minister-General to Ireland, but he solved nothing. Conflict was to break out again in “particularly virulent form later.”¹⁷

It is not only in the persecutions and massacres, which dominated the European scene in the Middle Ages, but also in the pathetic religion of the times that the real darkness of these times is seen in all its stark reality. Religion was little more than a hideous nightmare throughout most of Europe before the Reformation.

Bishop J. C. Ryle describes the spiritual condition of England before the Reformation with these words:

John Hooper was born in 1495 and died in 1555…The sixty years of his life take in one of the most eventful periods of English history. It would be IMPOSSIBLE TO EXAGGERATE the difference there was between England in 1495 and the same England in 1555. In a religious and moral view, the country was turned upside down. When Hooper was born, the English Reformation had not begun, and the Church of Rome ruled England undisturbed. When he died, the Reformation had struck such deep root that neither argument nor persecution could overthrow it. (emphasis added)

Ryle then gives several proofs for this conclusion.

(a) Before the Reformation, one leading feature of English religion was DENSE IGNORANCE. There was among all classes a conspicuous absence of all knowledge of true Christianity. A gross darkness overspread the land, a darkness that might be felt. Not one in a hundred could have told you as much about the gospel as we could now learn from any intelligent Sunday School child…

(b) But this is not all. Before the Reformation, another leading feature of English religion was SUPERSTITION OF THE LOWEST AND MOST DEGRADING DESCRIPTION. Of the extent to which this was carried out, few, I suspect, have the smallest idea… The blind led the blind, and both fell into the ditch. In a word, the religion of our ancestors, before Hooper’s time, was little better than an organized system of Virgin Mary worship, saint worship, image worship, relic worship, pilgrimages, alms-giving, formalism, ceremonialism, processions, prostrations, bowings, crossings, fastings, confessions, absolutions, masses, penances and blind obedience to the priests. It was a grand higgledy-piggledy of ignorance and idolatry, and service done to God by deputy. (emphasis his)¹⁹

Ryle then gives several examples of the gross impostures by which the ignorant and superstitious people were bilked out of their money by the trickery of the priests. According to him, the vial of blood which was supposed to be Christ’s was actually the blood of a duck which was changed every week to keep it fresh. The face of a statue which was supposed to change miraculously from stern to relaxed to smiling according to the offering which was given, whether copper, silver, or gold, was found to have been manipulated by wires from behind, by the priest.

(c) One thing more yet remains behind. Before the Reformation another leading feature of English religion was WIDESPREAD UNHOLINESS AND IMMORALITY. The lives of the clergy, as a general rule, were simply scandalous, and the moral tone of the laity was naturally at its lowest ebb… The consequences of shutting up herds of men and women in the prime of life, in monasteries and nunneries, were such that I will not defile my reader’s minds by dwelling upon them. (emphasis his)²⁰

Ryle then concludes this section in his work by stating:

I want English people to understand from what the Reformation delivered us. Before we make up our minds to give up Protestantism and receive back Popery and monasticism, let us thoroughly understand what was the state of England when Popery had its own way. My own belief is that never was a change so loudly demanded as the Reformation, and that never did men do such good service to England as Hooper and his fellow labourers, the Reformers. In short, unless a man can disprove the plain historical facts recorded in the pages of Fox, Fuller, Strype, Burnet, Soames, and Blunt, he must either admit that the Pre-Reformation times were bad times, or be content to be regarded AS A LUNATIC! (emphasis added)²¹

But Ryle is certainly not alone. Some dismiss his observations because they regard him as biased toward the Protestant Reformation. So it is instructive then to read the modern Harvard scholar as he describes the religion in France in the Middle Ages. A. N. Galpern writes as follows:

The importance that most men and women attached to their own funeral rites helps to show that (Roman) Catholicism at the end of the Middle Ages was in large part a cult of the living in the service of the dead.²²

He then spends eight pages telling of the prayers for the dead, the masses that were to be said for the dead, the lighting of candles for the dead, and the involved instructions that were to be followed for days, months, and even years if the dead person had been rich enough to buy such services from the church. He recounts how the saints and the Virgin Mary were called upon continually for help.

The saints’ superabundance of merit enabled them to intercede with God for the living and the dead, and filled the treasury from which the Pope drew indulgences… All the attributes of the saints were united in the person of the Virgin. Every testator invoked her by formula, as “the glorious Virgin Mary,” but some were more precise and intimate. To the squire Nicolas Goujon, who used the chivalric idiom, she was “his well-beloved mother Mary dame and mistress.”… Even if a Christian could not be certain of an immediate welcome to the community of saints on high, he could have faith that Mary’s gentle hand would guide him through purgatory and toward the ultimate goal.²³

He also recounts one of the pilgrimages which were undertaken periodically by the faithful in these days.

A company of men who had gone on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1532 made their last stop of the return trip at Voulton, fulfilling a vow. Everywhere, townspeople venerated small statues of the Virgin in niches of buildings and on street corners. One Pieta stood at the end of the alley in Troyes known as the rue de la Chausson. According to a Protestant observer the statue was ordinarily dressed in silk clothes. Especially on Sundays, a lamp burned before it. “Great and enormous idolatries were committed there daily.” Truly every (Roman) Catholic was a ward of the Virgin.²⁴

When one reads this catalogue of ritualism and idolatry, and the gross darkness of the people, how could he not be thankful for the Reformation? Yet there are multitudes of ministers, scholars, and church leaders who want to return us to this hideous spiritual darkness and to these unscriptural and antiscriptural practices in America today. May God deliver us from a return to medievalism. May He deliver North America from the primacy of the Pope, from the reconstructionism of the Jesuits, and from the renewal of the charismatics; this is our pietistic prayer!

References

1. Martin, Op.cit., p. 354.
2. McClintock and Strong, Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature Reprint Vol. IV., p. 591.
3. Loc.cit.
4. Loc.cit.
5. Loc.cit.
6. Loc.cit.
7. Loc.cit.
8. Oldenburg, Zoe, Massacre at Montsegur, Dorset Press, N.Y., N.Y., 1959. pp. 115-121.
9. Ibid., p. 291.
10. Ibid., pp. 291-292.
11. McClintock and Strong, op.cit., p. 598.
12. Ibid., Vol. 10, p. 855.
13. Loc.cit.
14. Loc.cit.
15. Ibid., p. 856
16. Watt, J. A., The Church in Two Nations, Cambridge University Press, London, England, 1970, p. 182.
17. Ibid., p. 183.
18. Ryle, op.cit., p. 41.
19. Ibid., pp. 42-43.
20. Ibid., p. 44.
21. Ibid., pp. 46-47.
22. Galpern, A. N., The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1976, p. 20.
23. Ibid., p. 43 ff. 24. Ibid., p. 51.

(To be continued.)