Can a Pro-Life Activist Defend The Inquisition?

By Julio Severo

The answer to the title of this article is: Of course not! I, for example, have never defended any kind of Inquisition, and if I ever do it, obviously I will have to abandon the pro-life fight, because it makes no sense selectively to condemn a genocide and support another.

Pope John Paul II, author of the encyclical “The Gospel of Life,” was a pro-life champion and he did not defend the Inquisition. On the contrary, he had the honesty to ask forgiveness for what the Inquisition and its agents did.

The defense of the Inquisition, for any Christian who considers himself pro-life, is so shameful that the only option left to its defenders is to deflect the debate to other details that flee from the essential question.

Three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift, in his “Gulliver’s Travels,” used the example of a cow, and how a malicious neighbor might, with the help of a dishonest lawyer, say that the animal belonged to him, not to Gulliver. The method is simple: instead of focusing on the central topic of who the cow really belongs to, the lawyer will make the judge digress into details consuming time and energy: the cow’s age, the nature of its pasture is, its size is, etc.

In the end, victory comes by fatigue and a heap of digressions.

There have been a number of digressions in response to my Portuguese article “A inquisição, o papa e o suspiro de alguns católicos conservadores” (The Inquisition, the Pope and the Yearn of Some Conservative Catholics).

The major digression in the issue of the Inquisition and a pro-life identity came with this comment:

In the subject of the history of the Inquisition, Julio is completely illiterate. The Protestant Reformation, in England, killed in a few months more people than the Inquisition did in four centuries.

Obviously, this comment did not respond to the main question in my article: How can those who defend the Inquisition fight against abortion?

Or, to be more precise: How do they want to fight the culture of death of socialism, homosexuality and feminism when they feel comfortable with the culture of torture and death of the Inquisition?

I do not mention the identity of the comment author in order to make it clear that I am attacking stances and ideas, not people. Moreover, the author is a man I respect, in spite of differences. I respect greatly his wife too, a very considerate woman. Yet, for literary convenience, I will call him in this text just Jack Man.

Sometimes, it is preferable not to mention real names to avoid embarrassment and personal attacks. In the case of his comment, Jack Man did not show this consideration, and many of his followers have interpreted his comment as a carte blanche to post aggressive messages both in my Facebook and in other forums, not sparing expletives and names such as “antichrist.” Some said, “The master has spoken, so shut up!” At least, the axes, sickles and hammers were only in very heavy and ugly words. (I’m already accustomed to this, coming from the Protestant Left, whose more frequent weapons are expletives.)

It is in a moment such as this that I give thanks to God that there is no more the Inquisition, because if there were, this rabid pro-Inquisition mob would come up to me with real axes, sickles and hammers to lynch me much before the tribunal of the holy office were able to pick me, judge me and condemn me to death by burning.

One of the strong Catholic reactions to my questioning if the pro-life identity can join the defense of the Inquisition was:

Seeing Julio Severo defaming and denigrating the Inquisition, I notice that he is an ignorant or acts in bad faith. If he is ignorant, he may still learn. If he acts in bad faith, he deserves to be execrated. Anyway, what he said does not offend me. I think that what is much more serious is that those who have an obligation to defend the Inquisition are shamed of it.

This explicitly pro-Inquisition Facebook comment could be seen as an isolated case, but it was “liked” (or signed) by some Midia Sem Mascara columnists.

If they want to accuse me of “defaming” and “denigrating” communism and its atrocities, I humbly accept this “shame” — which for me is a great joy.

If they want to accuse me of “defaming” and “denigrating” Nazism and its crime of the Holocaust, I humbly accept this “shame” — which for me is a great joy.

In a similar way, if they want to accuse me of “defaming” and “denigrating” the Inquisition, I humbly accept this “shame” — which for me is a great joy.

They can also add that I “defame” and “denigrate” the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). This is the largest organization of contraception, abortion and sex education in the world. Its founder, Margaret Sanger, came from an Irish Catholic family, and before the rise of the Soviet Union, she already preached feminism, socialism, abortion and anarchy. Her strongest opponent was evangelical Anthony Comstock.

There is a parallel between the Inquisition and IPPF. Both have varied torture tools. While the Catholic Inquisition tortured and killed presumably only adults, IPPF uses medical instruments to torture and kill babies: saline injection, partial abortion, dismemberment and decapitation.

Tony Man (not his real name, because he is a friend of Jack Man and wants to remain unnamed), calls IPPF “Planned Parenthood Inquisition.” He has this to ask to those who love and defend the Inquisition: They want babies Protestants to be aborted or merely tortured and killed after birth?

Following the excellent reasoning of Tony Man, I wonder: What about if IPPF had Vatican approval, as the Inquisition had, then it could kill only Protestant babies and other “heretical” babies?

For Tony Man and for me, it is very simple: if you can excuse or defend the Catholic Inquisition, what prevents you from condoning or defending the IPPF Inquisition?

The pro-abortion guy can coolly upbraid you: “Your Catholic Church had the Inquisition and we have IPPF. Leave us with our genocide and you stay with yours.” But, on both sides, there is denial, although on the Catholic side the pope has already asked for forgiveness. So the insistence of defending the Inquisition only exposes its defenders to ridicule.

The only difference between the Inquisition and IPPF is that one has a Catholic title and the other does not. Is this then the reason that those who defend the Inquisition condemn IPPF? But what moral ethics have the Inquisition defenders to attack IPPF?

The fact that there are Catholics today defending the Inquisition indicates only a reality: apostasy.

Tony Man brought to my knowledge that Malachi Martin, the well-known late Catholic theologian, was an adviser to two popes. Martin said in mid-1990s:

* The smoke of Satan is in the Vatican.

* The Catholic Church has come under the control of Satan.

* That the situation is irreversible.

* That both Pope Paul VI (in the mid-1970s!) and later John Paul II said that it cannot be reversed or even halted by anything man can do.

* That the only way to understand the Third Secret of Fatima, which Malachi Martin was allowed to read (most Catholics trust and revere that apparition) is to accept that the Vatican, the Roman Catholic hierarchy and almost all the Catholic laity in the world, are apostate.

* That Catholicism as we know it, as a religious institution, is spiritually dead and that this is God's will!

These comments by the late Rev. Malachi Martin, gathered by Tony Man through a Martin’s sermon, might explain perfectly why some Catholics who attack a genocide (abortion) are comfortable with another (the Inquisition).

According to Tony Man, looking carefully at the Protestant churches and their institutions in the Western countries, Rev. Martin also said that all of them are apostate. The exception is Protestant churches in the poorest nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

It is healthy to face reality, as Martin did. As an evangelical, I often go in the opposite direction of other Protestants, who see Vatican as the Great Babylon described in Revelation 17. Rev. David Wilkerson, an Assembly of God minister and the author of the best-selling “The Cross and the Switchblade,” said that Babylon the Great is America. I agree with him.

Encyclopedia Britannica, in its 11^th edition which I used as the source for the Inquisition in my Portuguese article, is rejected by pro-Inquisition Catholics, because they prefer their own baseless books to an encyclopedia of one hundred years considered by pro-family groups as more reliable than modern encyclopedias. Even so, the pro-Inquisition Catholics close themselves in their denial, even after the pope had already asked for forgiveness. Encyclopedia Britannica also correctly describes the Holocaust. Do we have to accept the Nazi version only because the side guilty of crimes does not accept the official version?

Catholic denial, with its pro-Inquisition supporters, is no different from other historical denials, including Nazi and communist.

Is there a revolutionary mindset operating in these affinities? Deniers should answer it.

If I were an evangelical denier, I never would denounce what America, formerly a Protestant power, has been doing to impose abortion and the gay agenda on the world. In addition, I have also denounced the major role of America in the strengthening and funding of the persecution of Christians around the world. It is a sad reality, but truth is truth and it cannot be concealed. To deny, hide, varnish and cripple information about persecution of Christians is a practice of revisionists and other revolutionary mindset agents.

In the Catholic case, Pope John Paul II has already asked for forgiveness. Why then insist on denials and defense of religious genocide?

It makes no sense Catholics attacking a genocide (abortion) and being comfortable with another (the Inquisition).

Leone Lins, a Brazilian who read my original Portuguese article, understood this point. She said, “Until now, I don’t understand the fuss about this article. As I see it, Julio Severo says that those who defend the atrocities perpetrated by the Catholic Inquisition over the centuries have no moral ethics to say that they are against communist genocides. I agree with him.”

Let us return now to the comment by Jack Man, which shunned this central problem:

In the subject of the history of The Inquisition, Julio is completely illiterate. The Protestant Reformation, in England, killed in a few months more people than The Inquisition did in four centuries.

I will not try to respond to this comment which fled from the vital subject, because Jack Man judged me “completely illiterate.” The answer then comes from my friend Michael Carl, an Anglican Episcopal priest and WND journalist.  His response to me was as follows:

Your Catholic critic is confusing the English Reformation with the English Civil War, much of which was between the Protestant Roundheads (Parliamentarians) and the mostly Catholic Cavaliers who supported the king, mostly Catholic because the kings were the Scottish Catholic Stuarts.

There were more Anglicans killed during the brief reign of Catholic Mary Tudor, after the death of the puny Edward. This is the one nicknamed “Bloody Mary” (which is the origin of the cocktail of the same name) because she had Lady Jane Gray and other Protestant Anglicans executed.

There were also other deviations from the central topic. Some Catholics have tried to refute my Portuguese “A inquisição, o papa e o suspiro de alguns católicos conservadores” by appealing to a supposed “Protestant Inquisition.” Such “Protestant Inquisition” exists only in Catholic books. Searching Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911 edition, I have found nothing on “Protestant Inquisition.” But I have found abundant material on the “Catholic Inquisition.” Anyway, even if there were a “Protestant Inquisition,” never in my blog or in my Facebook I have praised or suggested such Inquisition against Catholics.

This article was written in response to some Catholics who have for a long time, under my silence and the silence of many other evangelicals, been praising the Inquisition and, worse, implying that we, evangelicals, deserve it. Do these Catholics want to praise the Inquisition? They are free to do so. They want to say it publicly (as a Mídia Sem Máscara columnist did) that evangelicals are modern “Cathars,” who were considered by the Catholic Inquisition as worthy of torture and death? They are free to do so.

However, they can never say they are fighting the culture of death, because within the culture of death is not only communism. It is also, whether they accept or not, the Inquisition. Do they want to defend life? They cannot then defend the Inquisition. It is not impossible to do so. I have Catholic friends who do not defend the Inquisition. By defending the Inquisition, there is nothing that separates them from defenders of IPPF, the Holocaust and communism. What unites them — the slaughter of the innocents — is stronger than what divides them.

There is no difference between defending IPPF and the Holocaust and defending the Inquisition. But there is a vast difference between fighting against abortion and defending the Inquisition.

Having reaffirmed the main point of my anti-Inquisition and antiabortion stance, let me explain that the Catholic Church does not save. The Evangelical Church also does not save. Who saves? Only Jesus Christ.

But according to Tony Man, Jack Man thinks that the only salvation for Latin America is the Catholic Church. So his involvement in pro-life coalitions with Protestants has only one objective: to help the Catholic Church in a supreme role of spiritual and social salvation for all.

Unfortunately for Jack Man, the Catholic Church in Brazil and other Latin American nations is deeply involved in the Marxist Liberation Theology. Especially in Brazil, the largest Catholic nation in the world, no church has been so involved in the establishment of socialism than the Catholic Church has, because of massive apostasy through the Liberation Theology. So it has no salvation, even for itself, and you do not need to be a Malachi Martin to see it.

It is no wonder: any church, Catholic or Protestant, which thinks that it can bring salvation to this world, will commit atrocities. The Inquisition and pervasive socialism in Brazil are just two examples.

Don Hank has said, “This article points to an important reason why that is happening: sheer blind fanaticism. Any Catholic in this day and age who defends the Inquisition is helping to tear down what is left of the Church. I would also wonder if such a person is not a bit mentally unbalanced. I personally am thankful to God that I do not need a fallible human to intercede for me in the place of my personal Savior Jesus Christ.”

To save people, not apostate Catholic or Protestant institutions, God is pouring out His Spirit in these last days.

“And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; even on my male servants and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.” (Acts 2:17-18 ESV)

With this Spirit, Jesus’ followers will be able to be victorious over the homosexualist, pro-abortion, socialist Beast, its image, and the number of its name (see Revelation 15:2).

Reviewed by Don Hank.

Portuguese version of this article: Um ativista pró-vida pode defender a Inquisição?

Source: Julio Severo in English: www.lastdayswatchman.blogspot.com

Recommended Reading:

United States: between Gayland and Mohammedland

A Charismatic Response to “The Growing Crisis Behind Brazil’s Evangelical Success Story”

Anthony Comstock: the first pro-life activist in the modern history

OLAVO DE CARVALHO AND THE INQUISITION

Blood in the Rivers: the Contraceptive Culture and Prophecies in Revelation

By Julio Severo

In the early times of the human race, Cain killed Abel and buried him, and the Bible tells that Abel’s blood cried out from the ground. The murder of Abel would not go unpunished or forgotten.             

In the end times, the Bible tells that rivers, seas and the fountains of water would “become blood as of a dead man” (Revelation 16:3-4), explaining that because of the shedding of innocent blood (see Revelation 16:5-6) judgment shall come.

From the beginning to the end, the Bible makes it clear that no murder of innocents goes unpunished, because blood cries out for justice.

Regardless the kind of interpretation one chooses to apply to the Revelation account for blood in rivers, the fact is if Abel’s blood meant a life unjustly annihilated, then blood in rivers represents a multitude of unjustly annihilated lives.

Even if the Bible had no prophecy about blood in rivers, the reality is that there is much blood in the rivers. Life has been discarded in rivers, and no one cares. Innocent blood has been discarded in rivers, and no one pays attention.

Today, rivers became not only latrine, but also deposits of annihilated lives. Hundreds of millions of women use pills and other birth-control devices that provoke micro-abortions that end flushed in toilets, into rivers.

Micro-aborted children: Who cares?

How many users of “the pill” know that hormonal contraception not only prevents conception, but also prevents a newly-conceived embryo from implanting in the mother’s uterus? A new human being, too tiny to see, dies of hunger, and is flushed out of his mother’s body with her next menstrual cycle. The contraceptive pill not only represents the refusal of God’s gift of new life, but it actively destroys it.

The current generation was conditioned not to know or care that one of the functions of contraception is to provoke imperceptible micro-abortions. (To understand the way IUD and hormonal methods annihilate recently-conceived lives in the womb, see here: http://www.epm.org/artman2/publish/prolife_birth_control_pill/A_Longer_Condensation_of_Does_The_Birth_Control_Pill_Cause_Abortions.shtml)

The current generation lives a planned and conditioned life, where the priority is material comfort and pleasure. In that reality, children become burdens and hindrances. With contraception, they become options and disposable items, where governments and individuals impose controls and limitations.

In an age of planning, it is easy to discard human life. Even those that are called Christians use the same worldly means spilling innocent blood into rivers.

Is not the Bible correct when it says that the people of God suffer destruction because they lack knowledge? How many, among the people of God, know that Margaret Sanger (1879-1966), who coined the term “birth control”, had strong connections to New Age, socialism and sexual depravity? Sanger was behind the invention of the modern birth-control pill.

In her first essay, The Woman Rebel, she confessed, “Birth control appeals to the advanced radical because it is calculated to undermine the authority of the Christian churches. I look forward to seeing humanity free someday of the tyranny of Christianity no less than Capitalism”. [1]

Human reproduction aimed by esotericism and Nazism

Before World War 2, Sanger had close contacts with Nazi Germany officials, because the Nazi system of total planning and control was much more open to her ideas of total control over human reproduction. While Sanger struggled to promote the controversial conceit of birth control in the US, in Germany there was no opposition. Nazism welcomed the family-planning ideology promoted by Sanger. With its vision brutally based on the evolution theory, the Nazi government saw birth control as a normal component of its policy of planning and control over the human “animal”.

In Nazi Germany, medicine was at the service of the “collective well-being” ideology. Any measure was acceptable to reach a greater benefit. “Unfit” lives could be sacrificed, if the result was to improve the life quality of productive human beings… So Nazism was not different from Communism in that it helped to inspire the modern materialistic culture, where so-called science and technological advance ignore ethics or the intrinsic value of human life.

Even though modern governments do not impose all the Nazi policies of social control, the role and effort by governments in the indoctrination of the masses so that they may live according to contraceptive planning is undeniable. Nazism died, but government intentions of control over reproduction have not died.

However, besides the sheer technological planning over humans and their reproduction, there is the spiritual factor. Before Margaret Sanger, Annie Besant (1847-1933), the known British theosophist, distributed leaflets teaching couples how to have fewer children. No, she did not work in pagan Africa or pagan India, but in the mostly Protestant England. With her new ideology, Besant preached that smaller families were a blessing.

Besant, whose work influenced Sanger, had come from an unsuccessful marriage with an Anglican priest, next getting involved with socialism, theosophy, New Age and lesbianism. But so-called Protestant England did not care about her lesbianism, or her occultism or that in the Bible God tells that children are blessings and that blessed is the man that has his quiver full of children.

The ideology of Besant, with all its consequences, prevailed over the superficial Christianity of the English people. The heresy of Besant did not begin in the Christian churches and it did not hit firstly the Christian churches. Besant’s aim was a place untouchable by the church pulpits: the Christian marriage bed. From this intimacy far away from pulpits an ideology was spread that eventually swallowed the truth from the pulpits, throwing into oblivion the Bible idea that bigger families are big blessings.

Blood-costing family planning

The result is that the current generation, including most Christians, trust in the technological devices of contraception the same way the German people trusted in the technology and social planning of Nazi Germany and the same way the Soviet people trusted the state planning of the communist Soviet Union. Both socialist systems preached the contraceptive “religion”.

The result is that the current generation, including most Christians, plans its families looking for material comfort and pleasure, not perceiving that its contraceptive planning produces micro-abortions, filling rivers with innocent blood.

Nazism, communism, socialism and every ideology of social control usurp the role of authority of God over societies. Birth control, also known as family planning, usurps the role of authority of God over the increase of families. The result of both types of planning is bloodshed.

Socialism, UN and IPPF take aim at human reproduction

It is no accident that Sanger founded in India (the same India venerated by esoteric mystics as Besant) the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), the largest and oldest abortion organization in the world. Today, UN and IPPF work together to implant policies of contraceptive planning in the nations. Those organizations see abortion and homosexuality not as murder and perversion, but as unalienable human rights. Such work is perfectly tuned to the goals and dispositions of the socialist ideology.

In the vision of Besant, Sanger, socialism, UN and IPPF, contraception is the rejection of the unfit and the acceptance of the theosophical, technological, Nazi and socialist planning over human reproduction. In the Bible vision, contraception is the rejection of the planning of God over the married sexual life, in a modern autonomy where individual independence is proudly preached — at the cost of God, but never at the cost of the State.

Illusory rights and freedom at the cost of blood

The contraceptive culture asserts the right of men and women to be free from all divine planning in their lives, but it is never open for them to be free from hidden state planning. At the end, with so many acquired rights — sexual rights, reproductive rights, etc. —, the individual is intoxicated by the illusion that, living under the contraceptive planning of UN, State and theosophical efforts, he is free.

The illusory freedom offered by hormonal contraception has cost lives that are technologically hindered and rejected from a natural and just refuge in the womb. The uterus of the modern woman, by the will of high social planners, became a little Nazi death camp, where the conceived life, forced into a micro-abortive contraceptive program, is immediately discarded. It is the state and theosophical planning invading the sanctuary of life and bringing destruction.

Who could imagine that in the last days he that came to rob, kill and destroy would be able to promote his offers through a propaganda defending pleasure, freedom, material comfort and even family well-being? In the altar of the technological and scientific god, wombs have been “dedicated” and lives have been sacrificed. Behind the mask, this god is nothing more than Baal and other pagan gods that always required the same sacrifices of the new generations. It is the same god, with different masks, but with the same thirst for innocent blood.

Sin always tends to lead to more sin. The countries that first welcomed birth control were also the first ones to legalize abortion. The nations today that have the highest rates of contraception are exactly the nations where abortion became a right as sacred as was considered sacred the right of the past savage pagans to sacrifice new-born babies to their gods. The difference is that the new bloodthirsty gods are respected by their cloak of scientific sophistication.

In the historic pagan religions, the male priest was predominantly homosexual. By sheer coincidence, the most contraceptive nations are also fervently pro-sodomy. The contraceptive “religion” revived, in a sophisticated and “scientific” way, paganism, where its homosexual priesthood and sacrifice of babies were sacred. The “right” to sodomy and abortion is sacred today in the contraceptive countries. Only coincidence?

The contraceptive “religion” versus the pro-life culture of the Kingdom of God

The United States, Europe and United Nations are exporting and imposing the contraceptive “religion” throughout the world. No religion today has more adherents and faithful observers than the religion of contraception. In fact, the contraceptive religion has strong presence in the mainline world religions, as Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and it has been gradually penetrating Islamism as well.

As in the case of Freemasonry, the contraceptive religion permeates world religions as a parasite, but the Masonic religion is losing in numbers and strength in relation to its contraceptive rival.

Even though they penetrate all religions, Freemasonry and the contraceptive religion are unable to make the smallest infiltration in the Kingdom of God.

The culture of the Kingdom of God is pro-life, pro-conception, pro-children and pro-family and it is totally against abortion, micro-abortion and homosexual and other sterile and perverted sex relations. Yet, those that reject that culture are not forced to resort to abortion or micro-abortive contraceptive methods. They do not need to fill rivers with blood. Those that reject children as blessings of God may choose sterilization, which does not provoke abortion or micro-abortion.

For men and women attuned to the Kingdom of God culture, children are blessings and each new birth is as if it were a Christmas, making a family bigger and richer.

Christmas, which is commemorated as the birthday of Jesus Christ, is a time of joy and happiness. The Word of God, which is light in the midst of the contraceptive darkness imposed by theosophy, UN and socialism, says that, as Mary welcomed the baby Jesus in her womb, so every woman that open herself fully to her maternal role is receiving not only a little child, but also the presence of Jesus himself. Jesus says:

“Whoever welcomes a child in my name welcomes me. Whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me”. (Mark 9:37)

The joy and happiness of Christmas are multiplied with each birth that you welcome in the name of Jesus. When a Christian woman welcomes her maternal mission in the name of Jesus, she is welcoming not only a baby that comes as a gift planned by God, but also more power from the Kingdom of God. The God that planned the sexual and reproductive life of Mary knows well how to plan the size and number of his blessings for each womb and family, whenever he is given opportunity.

The beautiful example of Mary contrasts sharply with modern examples, where wombs are closed to the full extent of the blessings of God and are open to the contraceptive illusion, with all its micro-abortive consequences filling rivers with blood.

Blood, justice and judgment

Does the bloodshed of annihilated lives by hormonal contraception and dumped in rivers have some relation with the bloody rivers told in Revelation? We do not know it.

What we know is that there is a real apocalyptic scenario of hundreds of millions women that, knowingly or not, micro-abort by contraception their recently-conceived babies. Next, with a mere flush, those tiny micro-aborted babies end in rivers, transforming them into rivers of blood.

What we know also is that Revelation makes it clear that judgment shall come. And thousands of years ago the Bible explained that the shedding of innocent blood causes the land to be polluted:

“You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it”. (Numbers 35:33 ESV)

As it happened in the phenomenal technological and scientific advance of Nazi Germany, the cost of modern progress of technology and science in human reproduction is delusion and shedding of innocent blood. Hormonal contraception has transformed modern, sexually active men and women into shedders of innocent blood, leaving society under the curse of uncountable number of murders that shall bring judgment.

Where are the prophets to warn the society about the consequences of its acts?

Where are the prophets to warn about the deceits of contraception?

Where are the prophets to warn that innocent blood spilled cries out for justice and exposes the whole society to destruction and judgment?

Source: http://www.lastdayswatchman.blogspot.com/

[1] George Grant, Grand Illusion: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood (Adroit Press: Franklin-EUA, 1992), pp. 64, 65.

A number of other English articles by Julio Severo can be read at his blog: http://www.lastdayswatchman.blogspot.com