Debate online over “Usury in Christendom"

The new book, Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not, is being debated online here:

 http://www.cathinfo.com/catholic.php?a=topic&t=21959&min=0&num=5

Sample contemporary text cited by those opposed to the book:

The following is allegedly written by Fr. Peter Scott of the SSPX:

"If, however, usury is always a grave sin, this does not mean that there cannot be legitimate interest, provided that it is not charged for the value of the money itself, for it is a pure means of exchange and has no producing power on its own, as does man's labor, or real property. Fr. Walter Farrell, O.P. sums this up quite well in A Companion to the Summa, Vol. III p. 239: 

"When we demand, over and above the return of the original sum of money loaned, an added amount for the use of the money, our act is the same as selling a man a glass of wine and then charging him for the privilege of drinking it. If we keep this simple statement of usury in mind, it will not be difficult to understand the absolutely necessary distinction between usury and legitimate interest. The latter is charged not for the mere use of the money as in usury, but on some extrinsic title.  Extrinsic titles for legitimate interest could include such things as the risk of losing one's money altogether, the positive damage caused to the creditor by such outside factors as inflation, or the human productivity which becomes possible if money is invested to purchase stock in a business enterprise, thus producing dividends." 

Author Michael Hoffman responds:

“Loophole locutionists and escape clause casuists use tricks with words to change usury into “legitimate interest”

By Michael Hoffman

Copyright ©2012 www.revisionisthistory.org

Assuming Fr. Scott really wrote the preceding, as attributed by cathinfo.com, his endorsement of Fr. Farrell represents advocacy of some of the main loopholes that began to emerge on the part of heretical/modernist canonists and theologians who were beginning to push the envelope on the eve of the Renaissance, in order to impose situation ethics as a means of modifying and ultimately abolishing the total usury prohibition of interest on debt of the True Catholic Church. None of Farrell’s qualifications and stipulations apply today: any legal rate of interest on debt may be charged by a Roman Catholic. Farrell is merely outlining the innovations employed in times past by which God’s Law against usury was gradually evaded and derogated over time, leading to the complete abolition of His Law. From this root of evil comes the template for revolutionary change by which God’s other Laws and statutes have been gradually derogated and then overthrown by the Renaissance and post-Renaissance Church. 

Under the escape clause, "Extrinsic titles for legitimate interest” we discover that the dogma prohibiting all interest on debt can be overthrown by the modernist revolutionaries on various mitigating pretexts which had been rejected and condemned by the Church for more than a thousand years, as I demonstrate in my book, Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now Is Not.

Another argument used by opponents is that if I dare to say that St. Alphonsus Liguori permitted certain forms of interest on debt, thereby overthrowing the magisterial dogma prohibiting it, I am “a snake.” There is no arguing with a mindset that proceeds a priori from the conviction that Alphonsus Liguori could not possibly have advocated mortal sin. Alas, he did. Am I a “snake" for retailing a truth from the documentary record? What sort of totalitarian mentality proclaims it so? Was this not the mentality that St. Paul faced when he asked of the Galatians, “Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?” (Galatians 4:16).

There are two problems with the debate over my book as it has unfolded at Cathinfo.com. First, many of the opponents at Cathinfo.com of the book Usury in Christendom, have not read its 416 pages wherein most of their objections are answered. Some of the critics at Cathinfo.com say it is enough to glance at my book’s advertising copy to understand it sufficiently. Is it really necessary to state that a back-cover blurb will only describe the general tenor of a book? To fully understand specific data contrary to the received consensus, one has to take the time to actually read the data, rather than seeking to counter a straw man. 

Second, some of the book’s opponents have a one-track mind that runs thus: the popes of the past 500 years and saints like Liguori cannot be wrong; therefore Hoffman is wrong.

To gain credibility for this enormity, they must hypnotize themselves into thinking that the revolutionary post-Renaissance Church of the past 500 years did not depart from the truth, which the Magisterium of the True Church had faithfully and dogmatically promulgated for the nearly one thousand five hundred years preceding the Renaissance. To sustain their argument they have to engage in a denial of reality by maintaining that there is no contradiction between the Church as it existed from the first century for more than a millennia, and the modern Church of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance. I don’t see how they can maintain this fallacy, given the history and theology I present, which testifies to the magisterial dogmatic prohibition on all forms of interest on debt prior to the modernist revolution. 

The problem from the point of view of debate, is that there is little actual debate transpiring at Cathinfo.com -- i.e. opposers have not furnished authoritative statements, documents or texts from popes and councils prior to the Renaissance contradicting the data that this writer has marshaled. 

The argument of the opposers is that the modernist Church (dating it as I do, from the Renaissance onward), could not possibly have contradicted the True Church, or departed from the magisterial dogma of more than a millennia. In this regard, I say the emperor has no clothes. My opponents respond by proclaiming me an enemy of the Church. Which Church? The True Church or the modern simulacra?

How can anyone who stands for what was taught unambiguously by the Church from its inception until the Renaissance, be an enemy of the Church?

How can someone who denounces and exposes the revolutionary change that was suffused with escape clauses and justified by loopholes which led to the overthrow of magisterial dogma on usury -- be an enemy of the authentic Church of Jesus Christ?

It is the loophole locutionists and escape clause casuists who partook of the overthrow of the strict prohibition on interest on debt, or who defend the overthrow as being thoroughly consonant with Truth — these are the ones who have departed from the Faith and put forth a usurpation that is called Catholic because Renaissance and post-Renaissance popes and some “saints” are responsible for it, or implicated in it. Men, no matter how exalted their status, do not make the Truth; God does. To imply otherwise is thoroughly rabbinic. Truth is not altered because modernizing popes and those persons declared to be saints departed from it. When men have a higher claim to authority than the doctrine of the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Fathers of the Church and all popes and councils for more than a millennia, we have a personality cult, not the Church of Jesus Christ. This is one of the issues the opponents of my book will not face: the abuse of authority that has given rise to the modern ecclesiastical permission for interest on debt, for liturgical revolution, and for the nullification of Christ’s mission of converting the Jews.

There is a double-mind that decrees with circuitous monotony that the radical overthrow of the Catholic Church’s usury dogma cannot be an overthrow because the Renaissance and post-Renaissance Church endorsed it under the loophole of “extrinsic titles.” 

Jesus said, “By their fruits you will know them.” Let us assess the usury revolution by His criterion. Through the process of gradualism — the slow, steady erosion of eternal truth by means of the weapon of sundry escape clauses grouped under various headings including “extrinsic titles” — the modernist Church over the past 500 years has been responsible for the rise of usury: with the Medici "charity banks"; through nominalism and Eck’s 5% for the Fuggers; and by means of Benedict XIV’s redefinition of usury through his promulgation of extrinsic title loopholes. Then came the Pius VIII era, which decreed to confessors that usurers were to be absolved and not disturbed. All of these mortally sinful and heretical abominations were reconfirmed and enlarged by all subsequent papal administrations in the 19th century, culminating in the operation of the Vatican’s own usurious bank and the 1917 Code of Canon Law permitting whatever interest on debt the secular law of the land allows! 

The permission for interest on debt was a case of situation ethics. Once the door to that Pandora’s Box was opened, every other type of error fueled by the temporal chauvinism of the situation at hand, was unleashed, leading to the situation ethic at the core of contemporary modernism. Conservative and “traditional” Catholics exhibit symptoms of mind control when they militate against modernism while denying that the overthrow of the Church’s dogma of the mortal sin of interest on debt is any kind of modernizing change. Here again, the self-sabotaging double-mind shows itself to be a partner in the modernist destruction of God’s Law despite its declamations against modernism. 

Facts must be faced. Where there is truth there is Jesus Christ. Some “Catholics" have no trouble standing against what the Old Testament, Jesus Christ, the Fathers, and the whole Church taught, if it means they can be seen to uphold various Renaissance and post-Renaissance popes and “saints.” They fail to see that we owe allegiance to the Scriptures, the Fathers, the Councils, and the popes of the Church of All Time, against the modernizing revolutionaries. God does not change. The truth does not change. Interest on debt was, is now, and ever shall be until the Second Coming and the end of time, a soul-damning transgression against God and His Creation.  

Reviving alibis from the past ("extrinsic title”) will not extricate the opponents of God’s Law from the crisis brought about by a radical encounter with reality. The resort to these tired, Talmudic-type of distractions, which were successively confronted and fought by the True, pre-Renaissance Church, is not sufficient to nullify God’s unchanging Law. This writer is well familiar with loopholes such as damnum emergens, put forth hundreds of years ago by mouthpieces of the Money Power (cf. p. 391 of Usury in Christendom). Lawyer’s tricks with words ("the absolutely necessary distinction between usury and legitimate interest”), cannot undo the nullification which the modernizers perpetrated when they gradually abolished God’s Law against interest on debt.  There never was any “legitimate interest" on debt in the Bible or the Church of Jesus Christ. 

Illusion cannot proceed without distraction. Distraction is what is being employed and illusion is what is being generated by those who cannot bring themselves to face a harsh and terrible truth. But until we do face it, no progress can be made in combatting the root of the evil confronting mankind. 

***