Leo X: The Bankers' Pope

As explained by Dennis A Smith, on the 4th May, 1515, Pope Leo X lifted a centuries-long ban and approved the charging of “moderate” interest loans, which has since become “the mechanism by which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and enslavement can occur.”^[1] Interest-banking is the ruse by which to create money from nothing, and to finance the new world order plan of the bankers. And Pope Leo X was a leading member of one of the great banking families of history, the Medici, who bankrolled the Renaissance, a cultural plot against Catholicism.

Usury, or the charging of interest on loans, has otherwise been forbidden by all the world’s major religions, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Even among the pagan Greeks, Aristotle mentioned, for example: “the most hated sort (of wealth getting) and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest.”^[2]

Thomas Aquinas argued that usury was a violation of natural moral law. All things are created for their natural end (Aristotle). Money is not an end but a means of buying goods and services. Putting money out for the generation of more money is an evil unto itself. The formal value of money is the face value. In other words, usury is like lending someone a twelve-inch ruler, asking for a thirteenth-inch ruler in return.

In the middle of the thirteenth century, groups of Italian Christians invented legal fictions to get around the ban on Christian usury, such as offering money without interest but also requiring that the debt to be insured against possible loss, injury or delays in repayment. Thus, banking in the modern sense can be traced to medieval and early Renaissance Italy, to the rich cities in the north such as Florence, Venice and Genoa. The Bardi and Peruzzi families dominated banking in fourteenth century Florence, establishing branches in many other parts of Europe. Perhaps the most famous Italian bank was the Medici bank, established by Giovanni Medici in 1397.

The Medicis’ patronage of the arts represented a direct assault on Christianity, aiming to supplant it with the influence of the occult, or more accurately, the Kabbalah. Lorenzo de Medici, also known as “Lorenzo the Magnificent,” was responsible for an enormous amount of arts patronage, encouraging the commission of works from Florence's leading artists. Including Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, and Michelangelo, their works often featured pagan themes that challenged the tolerance of the Church.

While the Medici struggled for decades from the growing opposition to their paganizing program, they finally exacted their revenge by installing one of their own in the Vatican, the son of Lorenzo de Medici, who became Pope Leo X in 1513 AD. But Leo X, who had been educated by Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, the leading occultists of the period, exhibited a profligacy that was characteristically un-Christian. As he was described by Crises in the History of the Papacy:

Leo gathered about him a company of gross men: flatterers, purveyors of indecent jokes and stories, and writers of obscene comedies which were often performed in the Vatican with cardinals as actors. His chief friend was Cardinal Bimmiena, whose comedies were more obscene than any of ancient Athens or Rome and who was one of the most immoral men of his time. Leo had to eat temperately for he was morbidly fat, but his banquets were as costly as they were vulgar and the coarsest jesters and loosest courtesans sat with him and the cardinals. Since these things are not disputed, the Church does not deny the evidence of his vices. In public affairs he was the most notoriously dishonourable Vicar of Christ of the Renaissance period, but it is not possible here to tell the extraordinary story of his alliances, wars and cynical treacheries. His nepotism was as corrupt as that of any pope, and when some of the cardinals conspired to kill him he had the flesh of their servants ripped off with red-hot pincers to extract information.^[3]

Leo X’s propensity for extravagant expenditure finally depleted the Vatican’s finances and he turned to selling indulgences to raise funds. It was mainly under this pretext that Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Nine Theses in 1517, which set off the Protestant Reformation.

As I have detailed in Black Terror White Soldiers, Luther’s Catholic enemies accused him of being a crypto-Jew trying to destroy the papacy.^[4] After 1540, many secret Jews coming from Spain, known as Marranos, fled to England, Holland, France, the Ottoman Empire, Brazil and other places in South and Central America. In places like England and Germany, Marranos began their existence as nominal Catholics and secret Jews before the Reformation. They continued in this secret guise long after those areas had broken with Catholicism, since the Protestant authorities did not grant official acknowledgment to the Jews.

At first, Luther’s challenge to Roman Catholicism was welcomed by Jews who had been victimized by the Inquisition, and who hoped that breaking the power of the Church would lead to greater tolerance of other forms of worship. There were even some, like Abraham Farissol, who regarded Luther as a Crypto-Jew, a reformer bent on upholding religious truth and justice, and whose iconoclastic reforms were directed toward a return to Judaism.^[5] Some scholars, particularly of the Sephardi diaspora, such as Joseph ha-Kohen (1496-c. 1575), were strongly pro-Reformation.^[6]

About 1524, Jews coming from Europe described with joy to the Kabbalist Abraham ben Eliezer ha-Levi in Jerusalem the anti-clerical tendencies of the Protestant reformers. On the basis of this report, the Kabbalists regarded Luther as a kind of crypto-Jew who would educate Christians away from the bad elements of their faith.^[7] Abraham ben Eliezer related that a great astrologer in Spain, named R. Joseph, wrote in a forecast on the significance of the sun's eclipse in the year 1478, as prophesying a man who would reform religion and rebuild Jerusalem. Abraham b. Eliezer adds that "at first glance we believed that the man foreshadowed by the stars was Messiah b. Joseph [Messiah]. But now it is evident that he is none other than the man mentioned [by all; i.e., Luther], who is exceedingly noble in all his undertakings and all these forecasts are realized in his person.”^[8]