THE JESUITS (1534)

" As for holy obedience, this virtue must be perfect in every point, in execution, in will, in intellect, doing what is enjoined with all celerity, spiritual joy, and perseverance; persuading ourselves that everything is just; suppressing every repugnant thought and judgment of ones own, in a certain obedience . . and let every one persuade himself that he who lives under obedience should be moved and directed, under Divine Providence, by his superior, just as if he were a corpse (perinde ac si cadaver esset) which allows itself to be moved and led in any direction (R.W. Thompson, Ex-Secretary of Navy. U.S.A., The Footprints of the Jesuits, p. 51).

"That which put an edge on the newly forged mentality was the unparalleled system of education impressed upon the pick of Catholic youth. The Pope, perforce, virtually threw open the ranks of the many millions of Catholic young men and told the Jesuits to go in and select the most intelligent.

"The initiation rites were such as to make a lifelong impression on the candidate for admission. He never would forget the first trial of his faith. Thus the youth are admitted under a test which virtually binds forever the will, if it has not already been enslaved. What matters to him? Eternal life is secure, and all is for the greater glory of God.

"Then follow the long years of intense mental training, interspersed with periods of practice. They undergo the severest methods of quick and accurate learning. They will be, let us say, shut up in a room with a heavy Latin lesson, and expected to learn it in a given period of hours."Op. cit., pp. 61-62.

"They early realized the vast importance of directing higher education as a means of gaining control of the lives of the ablest and best-connected young men and making trained intellect subservient to their purposes . . The marked ability of the Jesuit teachers, their unsurpassed knowledge of human nature, their affability of manners, and their remarkable adaptability to the idiosyncrasies and circumstances of each individual, made them practically irresistible when once they came into close relations with susceptible youth."Albert Henry Newman, Manual of Church History, Vol. 2, pp. 374, 383.

"It is probable that more time was employed in molding their religious and moral characters into complete harmony with the ideals of the [Jesuit] Society than in securing a mastery of the studies of the course . . Large numbers of the most desirable young men who entered their schools, with no intention of becoming members of the Society, were won by the patient efforts of those in charge." Op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 374.

"It is the same today. The 33,000 official members of the Society operate all over the world in the capacity of her personnel, officers of a truly secret army containing in its ranks heads of political parties, high ranking officials, generals, magistrates, physicians, faculty professors, etc.; all of them striving to bring about, in their own sphere Gods work, in reality, the plans of the papacy."Edmond Paris, Secret History of the Jesuits, p. 30.

"It is permitted to an individual to kill a tyrant in virtue of the right of self-defense; for though the community does not command it, it is always to be understood that it wishes to be defended by every one of its citizens individually, and even by a stranger . . Thus, after he has been declared to be deprived of his kingdom, it becomes legal to treat him as a real tyrant; and consequently any man has a right to kill him." Suerez, a later high-ranking Jesuit leader, quoted in Newman, Manual of Church History, Vol. 2, p. 380.

"It was in the ears of the Jesuit that the powerful, the noble, and the beautiful, breathed the secret history of their lives. It was at the feet of the Jesuit that the youth of the higher and middle classes were brought up from childhood to manhood, from the first rudiments to the courses of rhetoric and philosophy. Literature and science, lately associated with infidelity or with heresy, now became the allies of orthodoxy. Dominant in the south of Europe, the great order soon went forth conquering and to conquer. In spite of oceans and deserts, of hunger and pestilence, of spies and penal laws, of dungeons and racks, of gibbets and quartering-blocks,

This Bible never sold as well as the Jesuits planned, so only three editions of the New Testament were printed between 1582 and 1750, and the Old Testament only once.

The title page of this Bible said this:

That Latin was, of course, Jerome's Vulgate.

A relatively long Preface at the front apologized for the issuing of the Bible, declaring that it was only being done because there were so many heretical and false versions. To counteract these menaces to the Church of Rome and to vindicate the good name of Roman Catholic scholarship was given as the reason for the flood of controversial notes throughout the book.

The translation is extremely literal, even where the Latin is obscure and confused. The confusion is faithfully carried over into English. This stiff, formal, wooden style was excused in the Preface:

This Catholic Bible was heavily worked over about a century later.

If that is so, as it surely must be, the original Rheims-Douai must have, indeed, been terrible. In order to write the missionary book, The Magnificat, for Roman Catholics, the author found it necessary to use the Rheims-Douai for the books many Scripture quotations. The current Rheims-Douai is extremely difficult to read and understand, and it surely does contain Roman Catholic errors, as the examples below will demonstrate:

According to the Rheims-Douai, we need to confess our sins to fellow human beings:

All Roman Catholic Bible translations have been altered doctrinally. If you are giving Bible studies to a Catholic, you will need to use one of these Bibles. But they are somewhat difficult to work with and are based on a Latin translation (Jerome's Latin Vulgate), which itself had serious flaws.

One small example is the omission of the ending of the Lords prayer in Matthew 6:13.

In the margin of older editions of the Rheims-Douai is found a note that the number, 666, refers to Martin Luther and also to the anti-christ, of whom he is the forerunner.

Did you know that Catholic teaching about Mary destroying Satan is written right into their Bible? According to their translation of Genesis 3:15, it is Mary who destroys the serpent; she, in turn, is unable to do even the slightest damage to her immaculate body:

Consider this strange translation:

The following example totally ruins the only verse in the Bible which defines sin (GC 493:0)!

The translators garbled that wonderful verse into a tautology: The definition of sin is said to be sin! I checked on this in Jerome's Latin Vulgate, and found exactly the same as in the Rheims-Douai.

It should be mentioned that, if you will read in the authors book, The Magnificat, you will occasionally find the RSV quoted. If you look up each verse quoted from the RSV in the Rheims-Douai, you will find a problem. At times we quoted the Revised Standard Version because, in the early 1970s, it was officially accepted by the Vatican as a Bible which faithful Catholics could read. From what we understand, they hardly do read it; but the commonality of a single translation has simplified post-1965 efforts, by Catholic and Protestant officials, in their ongoing meetings at Geneva (WCC headquarters), to draw closer together. Much more on joint Catholic-Protestant Bibles later.

The book, The Magnificat, deserves wide distribution among faithful Catholic believers.

All faithful Roman Catholics are required to swear allegiance to the pope and the Tridentine Profession of Faith (1564) which says, in part:

"I acknowledge the sacred Scripture according to that sense which Holy Mother Church has held and holds, to whom it belongs to decide upon the true sense and interpretation of the holy Scriptures, nor will I ever receive and interpret the Scripture except according to the unanimous consent of the fathers" quoted in Henry Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church, 2nd ed., p. 375.

Yet Roman Catholics are carefully taught to avoid the Bible. It is Mary, the Rosary, the Confessional, and the Mass that are important. Rarely does a Catholic read in any Bible.

Those people need our help.

About 1582, when this Jesuit New Testament was launched to destroy Tyndale's English Version, the Jesuits dominated 287 colleges and universities in Europe.

Later in this book we will learn that Roman Catholic Bibles continued to be translated from Jerome's inferior Latin Vulgate, until the mid-20th century, when, for the first time, one was translated from something else. And what was it translated from? A modern critical Greek Text. No Catholic Bible has ever been translated from the Majority Text! 

We earlier said that three agencies were used to destroy the Reformation and its followers: The Jesuits, the decisions of the Council of Trent, and the production of Catholic Bibles with their various mistranslations and errors.

We will now move past the earlier Reformation centuries, and into centuries closer to our own time. 

Let us now turn our attention to the efforts of the Jesuits to take over England. We viewed some of those effects at the beginning of this book. It is clear that there was a mastermind agency behind, what culminated in, the Oxford Movement and the work of Westcott and Hort. That agency was the Jesuits.

We already noted how, just six years after the end of the Council of Trent, in 1569, the Vatican agent, William Allen established a college in Douai (at that time in the Spanish Netherlands). A second school was established in Rome ten years later (1579); this one was for the training of Jesuit missionaries to Britain.

During these training sessions, the agents were not only taught every lying, diabolical method which the Jesuits could invent, but they were stirred to a heat of anger against the Protestants. Allen speaks:

"We make it our first and foremost study . . to stir up in the minds of Catholics . . zeal and just indignation against the heretics. This we do by setting before the eyes of the students the exceeding majesty of the ceremonial of the Catholic Church in the place where we live . .

"At the same time, we recall the mournful contrasts that obtains at home [in England]; the utter desolation of all things sacred which there exists . . Our friends and kinsfolk, all our dear ones, and countless souls besides, perishing in schism and godlessness; every jail and dungeon filled to overflowing, not with thieves and villains but with Christ's priests and servants, nay, with our parents and kinsmen. There is nothing, then, that we ought not to suffer, rather than to look on at the ills that affect our nation."William Allen, quoted in Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol. 7, p. 20.

Temporary confusion reigned when Calvinist troops besieged and took the town of Douai in 1578. The Jesuit college managed to carry all its translation work in Rheims until 1593, when a military reversal permitted the school to return to Douai.

By the year 1585, a total of 268 graduates had secretly infiltrated England (Manschreck, History of Christianity, p. 114).

The two leading Jesuit agents were Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion who entered England in 1580, disguised as English military officers. Their assigned objective was the overthrow of Queen Elizabeth.