The Ninth Commandment
"You shall not covet your neighbor's wife". The ninth commandment states that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
"You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor's.298
Every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.299
St. John distinguishes three kinds of covetousness or concupiscence: lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride of life. 300 . . . The heart is the seat of moral personality: "Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication . . ."304 Baptism confers on its recipient the grace of purification from all sins ...
"The Good News of Christ continually renews the life and culture of fallen man; it combats and removes the error and evil which flow from the ever-present attraction of sin. It never ceases to purify and elevate the morality of peoples. It takes the spiritual qualities and endowments of every age and nation, and with supernatural riches it causes them to blossom, as it were, from within; it fortifies, completes, and restores them in Christ." "315
(298. Ex 20:17; 299. Mt 5:28; 304. Mt 15:19; 315. GS 58. 4.)
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Catechism of the Catholic Church, USSC Inc,. 1994, p. 601-5.
Beatissimus Pater (Most Blessed Father), Urban VI "one of the most spiteful and vile-tempered of pontiffs" had three passions — drink, religion and revenge. The combination of three proved lethal to his foes, who met agonizing deaths in his torture chambers. Pope Alexander V also had three passions — food, servants and money. He was excessive in two and astounding in the other, namely servants. He kept more than four hundred of them — all female.
John Gratian, Archpriest of St John and godfather, advised Pope Benedict IX, that he was entitled to pursue his beautiful cousin and even took the trouble to find a suitable successor — himself.
His Holiness Sylvester was no saint. After divorcing his first wife he sired six children by the second. When she became jaded he dumped her and married a third from whom he had two daughters. In between he had another daughter by a concubine. "Childless by his fourth wife, when she died he kept four concubines — twelve was his life-long tally — and had at least one child by each."
It was indeed an ungodly union. Rome, already steeped in a history of gluttony, lust and barbarism, was indeed a warm womb for the Prince of Darkness. The Beast repeatedly mounted the insatiable, wanton Vatican Whore and impregnated deep inside her the seed of Evil!
Women "were warned not to enter St John Lateran if they prized their honour." Our Blessed Father John XII was always on the prowl.
Sanctissimus dominus noster (Our Most Holy Lord) John XII became pope at sixteen. He invented sins "not known since the beginning of the world, including sleeping with his mother." He "even toasted the Devil."
"God likes to fool us: Catholics are forbidden to doubt "the legitimacy of papal elections" — in which fallible mortals choose an infallible Pope. The copious historical evidence that the chain of Apostolic succession was broken more than once during the Middle Ages is just one of those tricks, like fossil evidence of evolution, that God sometimes uses to tempt the evil ones — the rational — in revealing themselves."
The Globe and Mail
July 6, 1998 (Spider Robinson, The Crazy Years)
"The Popes at (1309-77) Avignon
Historians who repeat the Catholic claim that the thirteenth century is the greatest in history fail to explain why it closed with and was followed by a long period of degradation of the Papacy and ruin of the city of Rome. Boniface VIII (1294-1303), one of the most depraved and sceptical of the Popes , was soon followed by Clement V, who secured the tiara by a corrupt deal with Philip of France and was obliged to transfer his Court to that country. In order to evade paying the price he had promised — public exposure of the vices of Boniface VIII and of the Knights Templars — he fled to Avignon. The principality of Avignon had until that time belonged to the Queen of Naples, but the Pope bought it from her for the ridiculous sum of £40,000 — it contained several towns besides the rich city of Avignon — and, which was the real price, a promise of absolution for her notorious crimes and vices. The sojourn of the Popes in the city for more than sixty years is called by the older Catholic historians "the Babylonian Captivity," though it was voluntary, and they admit that it was one of the very corrupt periods of Papal history. The famous Italian scholar Petrarch, one of the most respected men of the age, then lived in exile near Avignon, and he has left us a shuddering indictment of its vices, natural and unnatural, in his Latin Letters Without a Title. This is one of the hundreds of documents of great interest which tell the true character of the Middle Ages that have never been translated into English. Few pictures in the history of morals are more repellent. Even when fairly respectable Popes were on the throne the Papal Court remained sordid. See also Les Papes d'Avignon (1914), by O. Mollat (Catholic), and La prostitution du XIII au XVII siècle (1908), by Dr. L. Le Pileur (who reproduces amazing documents from the city archives). It is a Catholic fable that the prayers of St. Catherine of Siena drew the Popes back to Italy. Rome, stung by the progress and prosperity of North Italy while it remained on the level of a village, threatened again to reject their authority if they did not return."
J. McCabe, Rationalists Encyclopaedia
ADDITIONAL QUOTES
Part IX - Death Be Not Dignified
"A Lot Off The Top"
Marie Antoinette’s enduring reputation for decadent extravagance is not entirely unearned. Even if she never actually dismissed reports of widespread bread shortages with the infamous line, “Let them eat cake,” her lavish lifestyle nevertheless flew smack in the face of the abject poverty and hunger that surrounded her. The puffed and powdered queen blithely ignored the misery, immersing herself instead in a cycle of elaborate ceremony, obsessive spending, and absurd fashion.
“The queen is a pretty woman,” her brother, the Austrian emperor Joseph II, wrote during a visit to France in 1777, “but she is empty-headed, unable as yet to find her advantage, and wastes her days running from dissipation to dissipation, some of which are perfectly allowable but nonetheless dangerous because they prevent her from having the thoughts she needs so badly.”
Maybe it was the big hair. Piles and piles of it. The enormous coiffures the queen so fancied—hours spent in their construction, reaching several feet high, and elaborately decorated with fruits, feathers, jewels, and figurines— seemed to sum up her entire vacuous existence. The head that carried this frivolous mass would eventually be lopped off amid the screeches of revolutionary madness, but it was the degrading existence Marie Antoinette was forced to endure just prior to her public execution that offered the starkest contrast to her former life as France’s over-pampered queen.
Whereas she once amused herself amid the glitter and luxury of Versailles with hundreds of fawning nobles eagerly competing to attend to her every whim, she was now held in a blackened prison cell that dripped with moisture and was kept frigid in the absence of a fireplace. The rich gowns and adornments were all gone, replaced by a single frayed black dress. Deprived of her children, or even the comfort of a single candle at night, the former queen—now known as prisoner number 280—suffered illness and severe anxiety all alone on a narrow, filthy cot.
She was taken from her cell to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal, which was an utter travesty. Absurd accusations of murder, treason, and even incest with her own son were hurled at “the Austrian Bitch,” as she was called, without any consideration for the truth. It was here, however, that the once flighty and spoiled queen proved her mettle. She addressed the court with dignity and honor, seeming to transcend the deadly spectacle that engulfed her.
“One saw sadness in the faces of the honest spectators,” an eyewitness of the trial recorded, “and madness in the eyes of the crowd of men and women placed in the room by design—madness which, more than once, gave way to emotions of pity and admiration. The accusers and judges did not succeed in hiding their anger, or the involuntary confusion they felt at the Queen’s noble firmness.”
The preordained verdict was death—the same fate her husband Louis XVI had met nine months earlier.1 The ex-queen was brought back to her miserable cell to await the guillotine. On the appointed day, October 16, 1793, she sent farewells to her children and in her prayer book wrote, “My God have pity on me! My eyes have no more tears to shed for you, my poor children. Adieu. Adieu!”
She then had to prepare herself for the execution scheduled for midday. When she was queen, Marie Antoinette always had a giddy coterie on hand as she picked out the day’s wardrobe and took her luxurious bath behind a screen for modesty. Now there was only one woman assigned to her. Bleeding heavily, she asked the maid to stand in front of her while she undressed and changed her soiled undergarments. “The [guard] came up to us at once,” the woman recalled, “and, standing by the headrest, watched her change. She put her fichu up to cover her shoulders, and with great sweetness said to the young man, ‘In the name of decency, monsieur, let me change my linen in private.’” The guard, claiming he had orders to watch the prisoner’s every movement, refused to look away, so the former queen was forced to take off her stained petticoat with as much modesty as she could manage and stuff it into a chink in the wall.
Soon it was time to go. The executioner, who happened to be the son of the man who had beheaded Louis XVI, came in to tie up her hands and cut off her hair. She had hoped that she would be carried to the execution site in a coach, as her husband had been, but saw when she left the prison that a cart awaited her—a cart used to carry common criminals to their deaths. Feeling her bowels loosen, the former queen of France had to request that her hands be unbound so she could relieve herself against the prison wall.
Riding backwards on the cart to the Place de la Revolution, she stoically endured the jeers of the inflamed crowds that lined the route. It was a festive occasion all around. In the square where the guillotine stood, people were selling fruits and wine to the excited onlookers who closed in around the scaffold to watch “the Widow Capet” lose her head.
In the middle of this horrific circus, Marie Antoinette—looking old well beyond her years, with her white hair shorn—remained calm and dignified. Accidentally stepping on the executioner’s foot as she ascended the scaffold, she apologized gently. “Pardon, monsieur. I did not mean to do it.” She was then tied down on the beheading machine and the wooden collar was snapped around her neck. In an instant the head was severed and held aloft for all to see. The crowd roared its approval.
Part I: Read Excerpts From "The Lust Emperors"
Part II: Read Excerpts From "Six Royals Sinning"
Part III: Read Excerpts From "Unholy Matrimony"
Part IV: Read Excerpts From "Mom Was a Monster, Pop Was a Weasel"
Part V: Read Excerpts From "Royal Family Feud"
Part VI: Read Excerpts From "Strange Reigns"
Part VII: Read Excerpts From "When in Rome"
Part VIII: Read Excerpts From "Papal Vice"
Part IX: Read Excerpts From "Death Be Not Dignified"
“The Popes of the Renaissance
Against the Catholic claim that the Church promoted the recovery of Europe, history records, not only that the causes of it were purely secular and that the new civilization flagrantly defied the Christian code of conduct, but that the Papacy was an idle spectator of the recovery; and when at a late hour it began to co-operate by patronizing art and letters, the Papal Court, most of the Popes, and the majority of the Italian bishops, adopted the characteristic vices of the age. In the earlier part of the period the Popes lived in the luxurious indolence of the "Babylonian Captivity" at Avignon (1309-77) , in a palace and city which Petrarch, who lived near, describes as a sink of iniquity. From this they passed into the futile days of the Great Schism (1378-1414), when their greed excited the disgust of Christendom. When the Emperor put an end to this, and bade them reform, the new Popes disregarded the injunction; but about 1450 they began on a modest scale the secular rehabilitation of Rome — so modest, indeed, that, in 1450, cattle still browsed in the streets, and as late as 1484 the Vatican Library, which the Catholic writer who was permitted to deal with this phase in the Cambridge Modern History (Vol.1) calls "the most important library in the West in the fifteenth century," had only 2,000 manuscripts. The Alexandrian and Cordovan libraries had had half a million. Then every source of tainted wealth (sale of offices and indulgences, dispensations, etc.) was exploited, and the more powerful of the Roman families, who fought like brigands, dominated (as Cardinals or Popes) and corrupted the Papal Court. In the pagan imperial history of Rome, which brings a blush to the cheek of the preacher, twenty-one out of twenty-nine Emperors were good men, and these ruled for 245 years, while the eight disreputable Emperors held the throne for only seventy-five years. But, in the 250 years of Papal history, ten out of twenty-four Popes (omitting Pontiffs who lasted only a few months) were or had been notoriously men of immoral life, and these ruled for 100 years: three only, who ruled for fifteen years, attempted to reform the Church; all except these three permitted an extraordinary corruption in the Papal Court; and even the three reformers did not suppress the flagrant simony, graft, and judicial corruption. Nicholas V (1447-55), whom Pastor, admitting that "the reforming zeal of his early days cooled down," praises as the restorer of culture, included in his patronage the most obscene writers of the age. Calixtus III (1455-8) introduced the Borgia family and, blind to their vices, raised them to the highest offices. Pius II (1458-64), a defiant apologist for his vices in his youth, made no effort to check the growing licence. Paul II (1464-71) was "wholly given over to sensual pleasure" (Bishop Creighton). Sixtus IV (1471-84), a friar, promoted his grossly immoral friar — nephews of the Rovere family, permitted his Court to be thoroughly debauched, and connived at the murder of a Medici prince in church during solemn mass. The Papacy was now so rich that the Colonna, Borgia, Orsini, and Rovere families fought for it by colossal bribery and murder, and in the impasse they had to let the tiara go to Innocent VIII (1484-92), whose bastard children moved in the highest society in the city and the Vatican. Incredible pictures of clerical corruption are to be found even in Pastor's History of the Popes, while some of the scenes in the Vatican itself, described in the private diary of the head of the Court, Burchard , were so vicious that the publisher struck even a discreet version of them out of the present writer's historical novel The Pope's Favourite (1917). The next thirty years were covered by the pontificates of Alexander VI, Julius II, Leo X — two sodomists and one satyr and murderer — and form a unique chapter in the history of religion. [See notice of each.] Clement VII (1523-34), a bastard of the Medici House, and Paul III (1534-49), father of four well-known children (Pastor), next sustained the gaiety of the Court. This is the period of the Reformation, which we are now asked to believe had little or nothing to do with the corruption of the Church. Rome had been terribly ravaged and impoverished by a sack of the city (1527) and massacre of the Romans, by the Catholic Emperor, which threw into the shade the work of Goths and Vandals; but the gaiety of the prelates ran on, with fifteen years of partial reform [see Counter-Reformation], for another century and a quarter. Julius III (1550-5) was grosser than Leo X, and Pastor can plead only that it is not proved that a sordid youth whom he favoured was either his son or his mignon. Under Pius IV (1559-65) "the evil elements immediately awakened once more into activity" (Pastor) after one of the three short spells of reform (by a Pope, Paul IV, who loved strong wine and good cheer and was a scandalous nepotist), and after another short spell of reform, Gregory XIII (1572-85), notorious for his earlier looseness, let the Court and city return to such licence that one courtesan, chiefly ministering to prelates, made a fortune of £150,000 (Rodocanachi, Courtisanes et buffons, 1894). A few colourless Popes followed the third and last short spasm of reform, and this extraordinary series of Holy Fathers closed with the scandalous Pontificates of Urban VIII and Innocent X.”
J. McCabe, Rationalists Encyclopaedia
“Following these and other allegations made during the 1990s, the Christian Brothers, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the Sisters of Mercy have issued public apologies for abuse inflicted over the years in their institutions.
The Christian Brothers have also been implicated in sex scandals in Canada. More than 300 former pupils at Mount Cashel orphanage, Newfoundland, have alleged the lay brothers abused them.
The scandal forced the order to sell property and assets to pay legal and compensation bills”
BBC, Wednesday, 19 July, 2000
“Last October, Pope John Paul II sacked Father John Lloyd, who raped a 16-year-old girl and indecently assaulted two altar boys in south Wales - the first such dismissal of a British priest in recent history.
The Pope dismissed American three priests in 1998, and sacked two diocesan priests in Ireland in recent years.
Yet Mr Wilkins questions whether those at the top of the church hierarchy take the issue seriously enough. The Pope has twice received the former archbishop of Vienna, Hans Hermann Groer, at the Vatican, despite allegations that he had sexually molested young clergymen.”
BBC, Wednesday, 19 July, 2000
“A Roman Catholic priest has been jailed for seven years for sexually abusing boys at an orphanage.
The offences took place at the Father Hudson Society's home in Warwickshire, between 1957 and 1965. Some of the boys were as young as six.
Father Eric Taylor, 78, was convicted at Warwick Crown Court on 16 charges of indecent assault and two more serious charges on boys at the Father Hudson's home in Coleshill, Warwickshire....
Another told the BBC about a reign of terror at the home, which he called Taylor's "harem".
However, some were not around to see Taylor sent down, having committed suicide because they could not live with what the priest had done to them.”
BBC, Thursday, April 30, 1998
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