CHAPTER III. THE STRANGE CASE OF LEO TAXIL

THE PRIME MOTIVATION of Catholic Action is its escatological complex that the Vatican, as God’s designated champion, must do open battle with the forces of Satan before the world ends. Present world trends have convinced Catholic leaders that the time for that Armageddon is fast approaching. In their minds there is not the slightest doubt but that ultimate and complete victory will be theirs. Neither have they any doubt as to who comprise these forces of Satan. They now name communism as the generic term for the objective at which the various forces aim who are on Satan’s side against the Catholic Church. And since they hold that all who are not 100 per cent with the Catholic Church are against it, liberals of all kinds are placed under the banner of communism. Leadership of these combined forces of evil is accredited to world Jewry and Freemasonry.

“The Protocols of Zion,” preceded by the like forgery of “The Secrets of the Elders of Bourg Fontaine,” have spread this belief among Catholics everywhere. Obvious forgeries though they are admitted to be, it is safe to say that nothing contributed more to the rapid victories of Fascism over the forces of liberty and tolerance than these alleged Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As has been pointed out, they insidiously picture world Jewry and Freemasonry as conspiring to establish the reign of Satan on earth and, by contrast, the Catholic Church as the sole bulwark and only certain triumphant force against it. As employed by Nazi-Fascism in the past ten years, this fantastic but clever fraud has already succeeded in discrediting democratic institutions of government, even in the United States, and in glorifying the authoritarian rule of force and brutality.

No one can deny the chief role which the Catholic Church has played in these events and all that has led up to them during the past half century. Pope Pius IX1 calls Freemasonry “. . . the Synagogue of Satan … whose object is to blot out the Church of Christ, were it possible, from the face of the earth.” Pius X2 says:

1 Cf. Brief of Nov. 1865. These and other quotations have been published time and again in Father Coughlin’s Social Justice magazine, and in other printed and mimeographed brochures sent out from his Shrine at Royal Oak, Mich. One of these is called The Malist—For the Honest and Honorable, published at Meriden, Conn.

“So extreme is the general perversion that there is room to fear that we are experiencing the foretaste and beginnings of the evils which are to come at the end of time, and that the Son of Perdition, of whom the Apostle speaks, has already arrived upon the earth.”

As has been shown in a previous chapter, the popes of Rome condemn Masonry as in alliance with Judaism chiefly because it teaches tolerance of all religions and works for the establishment of popular government, secular education and international brotherhood. There is nothing too fantastic that the popes and Catholic authorities have not believed and propagated against Judaic- Masonic aims and activities. The most astounding and outrageous were the alleged revelations of the arch-imposter Leo Taxil towards the end of the last century. So successful was his deception of the pope himself and the whole Catholic world, that Father Herbert Thurston, S. J., is forced to deplore the fact that examples of “excessive credulity have been too lamentably brought home to our generation by the outrageous impostures of Leo Taxil.”3

Taxil’s real name was Jogand Pages, and he is described by Father Thurston (loc. cit.) as “the most blasphemous and obscene of anti-clerical writers in France.” He was once jailed for having published a book entitled Les Amours de Pie IX (“The Love Affairs of Pope Pius IX”). That was all before his conversion to the Catholic Church. It was then that he began to make alleged revelations about the Freemasons, and published a large number of books about them, each more astounding than the other. Sensing the Catholic Church’s demon complex, Taxil played this up with consummate art. In his many novels, which were published by the Catholic press all over the world, Taxil stressed the cult of Demonism, or what he called Satanisme. He pictured the Freemasons as practising this worship of the devil, and accused them of assassinations, sexual orgies and white slavery. He recounted that the Freemasons tried to get women into their power to the point of forcing them to have intercourse with the devil. As proof that Freemasonry was secretly controlled by the Jews, he revealed their alleged practices of Jewish rituals.

2 Cf. Supremo Apostolatus, 1903.
3 Cf. Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. VII, pp. 701-703.

The Catholic clergy everywhere were especially delighted with Taxil’s sinister novel Palladismus, the story of Diana Vaughan who, according to him, was the result of the union of her mother with a devil named Bitron. These fantastic revelations convinced many that the Catholic hierarchy were in direct contact with this daughter of the devil through the intermediary of Leo Taxil, now their protege. Pope Leo XIII received Taxil in private audience, gave him his blessing, assured him that he had read his books against the Freemasons with intense interest, and that his writings were of great benefit to the cause of the Catholic Church. I pass over the question many will ask as to how an infallible pope could be so completely deceived by one of the most outrageous imposters who ever lived. It was one time that the Jesuits too were outdone.

For a long time Leo Taxil enjoyed the easy success he had obtained by playing upon the credulity of the Catholic clergy and laity. Then came the great denouement—planned and carried out by himself, as it were, for the fun of it. In order to enjoy his victory over the Jesuits to the very last, he called a public meeting in Paris on April 10, 1894, and announced, to the consternation of his hearers, that all his activities, his books and pamphlets, as well as the story of Diana Vaughan, the daughter of the devil who had been converted to the Catholic Church, were nothing but a huge joke dispassionately concocted and executed by him. He quietly told them that Diana Vaughan was merely the name of his typist!

The interesting, and serious, point in the whole affair is the fact that it was the Jesuits who translated Taxil’s novels into German. The Jesuit Father Gruber, whose article on Freemasonry in The Catholic Encyclopedia is nothing but a rehash of what Taxil says about it, widely publicized all his books. And they continued to reassert that what he had written was perfectly in accord with actual facts, even after they had broken with him because of his dramatic expose of himself.4

4 Cf. Hoensbroech, Der Jesuitenorden, Vol. II, page 504.

And even to this day, in the United States, the Catholic Church continues to publish and broadcast Taxil’s frauds about Freemasonry and its alliance with world Jewry. The New World, official organ of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, in its issue of March 26, 1910, published an article entitled Freemasonry— The Open Door To Damnation, as defamatory and fantastic as anything Leo Taxil ever wrote. It was reproduced, as a sample of Catholic animus towards Masons and Jews, in the Souvenir edition of Life and Action during the Knights-Templar Conclave in August that same year. It states that “Jews are the master spirits of the Masonic craft,” that “Freemasonry was founded and organized by Jews in the vain hope of destroying Christianity,” that they plot assassinations of prominent men, even in America, and corrupt the judiciary to set murderers free. Reminiscent of Pope Leo’s condemnation of Freemasonry in his Bull Humanum Genus, is the following:

“A society that admits to membership Christians, Turks, Jews, Chinese, and every other species of barbarian, and amalgamates them— or the majority of them—into an army of infidels and atheists, must be animated and controlled by the malevolence and malice of the evil spirit. . . . There is no reason to doubt that a Christ-hating Jew is the head of the Masonic craft at this time—and at all times.”

There is no need here to stress the fact that, when it comes to attacks on Judaism and Freemasonry, Leo Taxil has nothing on Father Coughlin. This priest and his powerful supporters among the Catholic clergy and laity in America are copying the methods of Hitler and the other dictators who have ruthlessly obliterated Freemasonry and Judaism from all of Central Europe. In reality they are not so much imitators of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco as the successors of the Popes, the Jesuits and the Taxils who initiated the campaign half a century before Nazi-Fascism came into being. Its objective was, and is still, to destroy the effects of the Reformation and to re-establish the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

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