The looming expiry of Title 42 is expected to bring an influx of migrants to the southern US border.
Your land, strangers devour it in your presence.
Isaiah 1:7
When I was a kid, I remember going on a snipe hunt. A snipe, we were told, was this somewhat mysterious beast that came out at night, and it was our job to catch one. The problem was nobody seemed to really know what a snipe looked like. That’s a bit of a problem. Because if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you can’t recognize it, even if it’s standing right in front of you. Unsurprisingly, our search for the mythical snipe, while it was a lot of fun, ultimately proved fruitless.
The contemporary Protestant church is much like we kids were on our snipe hunt. Books are written about Antichrist and some people seem to know who he is or was. The preterists will tell you Antichrist has long since come and gone in the person of the emperor Nero. We have nothing to fear from him in the 21st century. The futurist school, which dominates in our own time, sees Antichrist as having not yet come. While preterism and futurism come to very different conclusions about the identity of Antichrist, they have this one thing in common, there is no current Antichrist.
Actually, preterism and futurism have something else in common: They were both developed by the Jesuits during the counterreformation to take the heat off the pope, whom the reformers almost to a man had identified as the Antichrist, man of sin, and son of perdition of the Scriptures. This stance, identifying the office of the papacy as the Antichrist, is one facet of the Protestant school of prophetic interpretation known as historicism.
Nancy Pelosi pays a visit to her boss, Pope Francis, for a private audience, on October 9, 2021. (CNS/Vatican Media)
And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming: Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders.
2 Thessalonians 2:8-9
It was on March 13, 2013, that Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina was elected Pope, taking the name Francis I. Francis’s election was notable for several reasons. First, his predecessor, Benedict the XVI, had just left office, becoming the first Pope in 600 years to resign.
Second, Bergoglio was the first Pope to take the name Francis, after St. Francis of Assisi. Assisi, according to Pope Francis, “‘was the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation, the same created world ‘with which we don’t have such a good relationship.’” This is significant because Francis has aggressively pushed globalism under the aegis of care for the environment. An example of this can be seen in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Siˊ. In this letter, Francis, “commands the nations to confess their collective sins of exploiting the environment with capitalism.” He also noted, “there is an urgent need of a true world political authority,” to ensure conformity with his call for globalist environmentalism.
Third, Francis is the first Jesuit Pope. This is not a small thing, as the Jesuits have a well-earned reputation for dishonesty, subversion, and murder that has gotten the order kicked out of many nations over the centuries and even officially suppressed by Pope Clement XIV. It was Bergoglio’s Jesuit background that caused former Roman Catholic Priest turned Protestant Evangelist Richard Bennett to call Francis the most dangerous Pope we’ve faced in our lifetime.
Many people, both Christian and non-Christian, would agree that the past several years have seen a rise in many dangerous, anti-liberty trends and that those trends seem to be intensifying and not abating. While these trends did not begin with Francis’s pontificate, they have certainly grown stronger since he took office. Is it possible that there is a connection between the pernicious social, political, and economic trends we’ve seen over the past 10 years and the rise of this Jesuit Pope? In my opinion, I believe there is a connection. Let’s look at the evidence.
In Genesis chapter 11, we read about sinful man’s first attempt to build a global empire in disobedience to God in the form of the Tower of Babel. Here, we read, “And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”
This was in contradiction to the command of God, who reiterated to Noah the same order given to Adam, namely, to be fruitful and to fill the earth (see Genesis 9:1). Rather than obeying God, these men of Babel preferred to “make a name for themselves” by building a city and a tower. We tend to focus on the tower but note well that the plan was to build a city as well as a tower “whose top may reach unto heaven.” The city, of course, implies a permanent dwelling. In this case, a permanent dwelling “of the whole earth,” which is to say the entire population of the earth. This was the world’s first idolatrous, global empire. An empire that God quickly brought to an end, scattering the people “abroad from there over the face of all the earth.” After this, the men of Babel “ceased building the city.”
In his sermon on Mars Hill, the Apostle Paul tells gives us additional information related to why God scattered the men of Babel. He wrote that God “preappointed” the time and boundaries of men’s dwellings. He did this, Paul tells us, “so that they should seek the Lord.” Rather than taking solace and pride in their own achievements, as men of great empires are wont to do, God has decreed that men are to dwell in nations, mind their own business, and seek him.
But sinful man did not learn his lesson at Babel. Over the following millennia, man would make other attempts to constitute a global empire. Some of these attempts are recorded for us in the pages of Scripture. Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, and Rome all took their shots.
“TAMMANY HALL is simply the political organization of the ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH, with a Bishop Hughes or a Cardinal McCloskey or Archbishop Corrigan at its head and a Fernando Wood, a William Tweed, or a John Kelly for his fugleman [mouthpiece, author]. The proper name for it is JESUIT HALL. By this name it should be called, and by none other; for name and nature should correspond, so that when the one is called the other should be understood, and that would help to guide both the mind and the action of the American people.”
I hope that paragraph got your attention. It’s a quote from a book that I just received titled Romanism and Politics: Tammany Hall The Stronghold of Romeby Joseph Hartwell. Published in 1887 in New York City, this book is representative of an entire body of literature produced in the 19th century by American Christian authors warning their fellow Americans about the dangers of what some of them called “political Romanism.” Their warnings were largely ignored; today, most of these authors and their works have been largely forgotten. But here in 2023, with an openly Romanist presidential administration and a government largely committed to furthering the policies of political and economic Romanism, it is imperative for Christians to read and understand the warnings of these authors, both to understand the source of the dangerous and tyrannical doctrines being implemented all around us in place of the liberties guaranteed to us in our Constitution and to effectively fight back against them. For fight back we must.
Just consider the disastrous situation on our southern border. One doesn’t need to do a deep statistical dive to know that what’s going on – with millions of illegal aliens flooding across our southern border as a direct result of the policies of the Biden Regime – is unsustainable and represents an existential threat to the United States as a nation. That this is being done deliberately as a matter of policy should shock every American and prompt him to ask, in whose service is this being done. Certainly, it’s not in the service of the American people. But someone wants this to happen and wants it to happen badly enough to open wide the welfare immigration spigots even though most Americans don’t want this to happen.
There are, in my opinion, a number of different interests promoting our current disastrous immigration policy. But the leader of the group is the Roman Catholic Church-State (RCCS), and in particular its lobbying wing in America, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Working principally through the Democrat party, the USCCB has been able to effect changes in American immigration law that advantage it and the globalist goals of the RCCS to the harm of the American nation. Yet while the Biden Regime works 24/7 to implement the Antichrist RCCS’s immigration policies, almost no one seems to understand that these policies are, in fact, the immigration policies of the Vatican.
One can find video after video, article after article, showing massive lawlessness on our border and decrying the woeful situation. But these reports never talk about where the policies that are the source of this disaster come from. They come straight from the Vatican. That is, their source is the Antichrist system of Rome. But you will never learn this from watching the new reports.
This is where reading 19th-century Christian authors, authors who lived and wrote at the time of the inception of political and economic Romanism in the United States, can be helpful. One such author is Joseph Hartwell, a Protestant minister and author of the book that is the subject of this week’s post, and likely those of the next few weeks.
It has long been the opinion of this author that growing socialism in the United States is substantially the work of the RCCS. After watching the obviously fraudulent 2020 presidential election, one that saw the ouster of a nominally Presbyterian president and the installation of the Roman Catholic Joe Biden, it seemed even more important than before to establish the link between the manifestly evil policies of the Democrats and the work of the RCCS in America. My working idea has been this: the theft of the 2020 presidential election was just a scaled-up version of the 19th-century thug politics of Tammany Hall and other big city, Roman Catholic-controlled Democrat political machines. But while the fraud – election and otherwise – of Tammany Hall mainly affected those unfortunate enough to live in New York City, the thug politics as practiced by the Democrats in the 21st century harms all Americans.
Yet as is the case with the disaster on our southern border, while there are many good articles detailing the election fraud in 2020 and 2022, the source of that fraud, namely, the Antichrist RCCS working through the Democrats, is never discussed. Truly, Rome has done a masterful job hiding its evil activities from the eyes of the public, even from Christians who otherwise should be alert to the evils of Rome. It seems as if in 2023, even the elect are blind to the ravages of Antichrist being conducted right under their noses.
This is why it’s critical for Christians to read and understand the warnings of 19th-century authors such as Joseph Harwell, who lived when political Romanism was just beginning to be felt in America and had the liberty and courage to speak out against it. It is this author’s hope that this post will be the first of many posts covering these forgotten authors. I suppose that this will be a years-long process, perhaps one ending in the publication of a book on the subject. One certainly is needed. Lord willing, it is my goal to produce such a book. Now with that said, let’s begin our look at Hartwell’s piece.
Lux Lucet 