The King with a Pope in His Belly

By Bella d'Abrera

In this work, the author covers the beginning of the so-called Reformation in England during the first 20 years of Henry VIII's destructive reign. In 1521 he was awarded the title of 'Defender of the Faith', but by 1540 the schismatic king had rejected Catholic Order through the adoption of Martin Luther's heretical notion of the 'Divine Right of Kings.' Henry was indeed a 'king with a Pope in his belly.' Readers are introduced to Brother Martin Luther, the rebel Catholic monk who, in a delusional attempt to escape from his own perception of Divine Judgement, invented his own heretical creed and set himself and numerous followers adrift from the Barque of Peter and the Mystical Body of Christ. Appearing at a time in the history of the Catholic Church when the morality of the clergy and occupiers of the See of Peter, such as the 'war-lord' Pope Julius II and grotesque Leo X was highly questionable, Luther employed the abuse of the doctrine of Indulgences to rebel against the Church to which he belonged. Luther's novelties were literally smuggled into England by such men and women as Anne Boleyn and her brother, Lord George Rochford, and the ubiquitous Thomas Cranmer, who found in Luther's novelties an escape from Divine Retribution. Henry broke away from Rome and agreed to Thomas Cromwell's scheme to make him the richest and most powerful prince in Christendom through the wholesale dissolution, destruction and looting of England's great Monasteries and Shrines. By the end of his reign, Henry VIII had not only deprived English Catholics of their rightful cultural heritage, but had led them into a state of schism by separating them from communion with Rome. Henry had permitted the corrupt heresies of Luther to fatally to infect his country, and prepared the way for the Protestant revolution of the brutal regime of Elizabeth I, when Luther's novelties were formalised, codified and forced upon the English populace under the guise of 'Anglicanism.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bella d'Abrera
• Release date: Apr 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9780947352509

Bella d'Abrera

Bella Wyborn d’Abrera, who is based in London, is a graduate of Monash University in Melbourne. She completed her Masters degree at the University of St. Andrews, and was awarded a Doctorate of Philosophy by the University of Cambridge in 2003. She is also the author of The Tribunal of Zaragoza and Crypto-Judaism 1484-1515

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The King with the Pope in his Belly

Bella Wyborn d'Abrera

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Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Bella Wyborn d'Abrera

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Chapter One

Monk Marries Nun

Now, my friends, a fair and honest inquiry will teach us that this [Reformation] was an alteration greatly for the worse; that the Reformation, as it is called, was engendered in lust, brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherished and fed by plunder, devastation, and by rivers of innocent English and Irish blood; and that as to its more remote consequences, they are, some of them, now before us, that misery, that beggary, that nakedness, that hunger, that everlasting wrangling and spite, which now stare us in the face, and stun our ears at every turn, and which the Reformation has given us in exchange for the ease, and happiness, and harmony, and Christian charity, enjoyed so abundantly and for so many ages by our Catholic forefathers.

William Cobbett, Protestant journalist, reformer and satirist in A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (1827), pp. 2-3

The so-called Reformation in England was a terrible thing. It was terrible because it cut England off from a millennium and a half of spiritual and cultural equipoise with such severity, that four hundred and fifty years later, the country has yet to recover from its spiritual torpor. This momentous and violent revolution which swept indiscriminately through town and country began in 1534 when the Tudor King Henry VIII thumbed his nose at the papacy and arbitrarily seized the Vicar of Christ’s authority over all English Christians. It was continued by his illegitimate children, the sickly Edward VI and then by Elizabeth I, whose anti-Catholic propaganda campaign and reign -of- terror almost completely obliterated ancient Catholicism from England. By the time of the reign of the Stuart King Charles I (1649-1685), England’s Catholic past was all but a distant memory. The Revolutionaries’ labours had certainly paid off. The fact that the English populace had been on the whole, happily Catholic for over one thousand years was erased from its collective memory. Even in this day and age of free speech, to confess that one is both English and a Catholic is somewhat akin to admitting culpable treason.

This revolution was remarkable for two reasons: Firstly, it was conceived within the highest strata of English society and was a State-sponsored and State-imposed revolution. Secondly, it had no support from the English populace at large who by all accounts, were perfectly content with the status quo ante. There was no popular uprising which demanded that the King declare himself ‘Supreme Head of the Church in England.’ There was never a call to Englishmen to rally against the Church. What the Tudors did therefore was gratuitous, arbitrary and despicable. Henry VIII forcibly tore his loyal subjects from their Catholic communion with Rome, and less than thirty years later, his daughter Elizabeth I compounded this heinous act by taking away from them their entire precious and ancient faith. She violently imposed upon them a nationalised version of fatally fissiparous Protestantism which had been newly imported from Germany. Thus was established the State religion of Anglicanism.

The ‘Father of Protestantism’ was none other than the renegade Catholic Augustinian friar and priest, Martin Luther. Most readers will no doubt be familiar with the Martin Luther of popular legend, the ‘courageous and brilliant reformer’, the ‘shining light and fearless crusader’ who ‘bravely stood up to the corruption of the Church’ and selflessly ‘restored Her’ to a fondly imagined pristine state. There is however, a vast chasm in this case between this fantastical myth and the wretched reality of the historical Martin Luther. He was in truth an apostate and a heretic, an irascible, intolerant and immoral individual who set himself up in opposition to Jesus Christ in a supreme act of defiance and disobedience. He might well have begun his public career under the guise of a reformer, but he ended up a contumacious rebel who set into motion a social and religious revolution which rent the Catholic world permanently asunder, and whose effects are painfully evident even today in the morally defunct, post-Christian societies of the modern world.

An important point to keep in mind in any discussion of this wretched anti-Catholic and immoral revolution is the fact that its fomenter was himself a baptised and professed Catholic. This may come as a surprise to people who might still be labouring under the delusion that Luther had always been a crypto-Protestant, and was simply waiting for the right opportunity to come out of his monkish cell. But before Luther, there were neither crypto-Protestants nor crypto-Lutherans nor crypto-Episcopalians because the only Christians were Catholics, either Latin or Oriental. Neither the Catholic nor Byzantine worlds were by any means perfect, but Catholic nonetheless (and therefore Universal). In 1478 Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand had revived the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Spain as the only means by which to extirpate the crypto-Jewish threat from Castile and Aragon. Later, on January 2 1492, while Luther was still a schoolboy, Spain finally freed herself from the yoke of seven centuries of Islamic occupation when Boabdil surrendered Granada to Los Reyes Católicos. Just eight months later, those remarkable monarchs took a chance on an enigmatic sailor of disputed nationality named Christopher Columbus and financed his now famous westward voyage of expedition. With Columbus, Catholicism arrived in the New World. Meanwhile, in Italy, the fiercely ascetic but unbalanced Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola, launched a fire-and-brimstone assault upon what he perceived to be the widespread depravity of the curia and the worldliness of the popes. Savonarola managed to inveigle the citizens of Florence into throwing their pornographic and pagan books into his ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ in the Piazza della Signoria, but those same Florentines soon tired of Savonarola and in 1493, burnt him as well in that very Piazza.

Into this tumultuous world was Martin Luther born. And, like every other Christian since the apostles, Luther was born and bred a Catholic. In 1483, his parents had taken him, mewling and puking to the local baptismal-font, where he was made a life-member of the only Divinely Instituted Society on this earth. As a young man, and with his Free Will perfectly intact, he took off his shoes and imprudently demanded to be made a friar at the Augustinian Monastery in the local town of Augsburg.[1] Not content with the friary, Luther was ordained into the priesthood in 1507, later enrolling at the University of Wittenberg where he completed a doctorate in Theology. Luther’s obligations, therefore, were in keeping with his ‘life-choices’- as a monk and priest. As a doctor of theology, he was obliged to teach, uphold and defend the Church’s Doctrines, all of which he knew and formally accepted as being Objectively True.

However, somewhere along his ambitious journey, Luther began to regret his decision to become a monk and the rigorous obligations that the enclosed life entailed. His monastic vows were becoming unpalatable as it appeared that monastic existence was not all that it was vaunted to be. Serious fault lines had begun to appear in the façade of what was already an unstable vocation and he began to manifest signs of mental instability, swinging wildly from one extreme to another while abandoning the safe harbour of the obligatory recitation of his daily Office (the deliberate neglect of which he knew to be a mortal sin) for weeks. Then, wracked with the ensuing guilt and consumed by paroxysms of remorse, he would lock himself in his cell and deprive himself of food and sleep for weeks on end. During this period of unhealthy introspection, Brother Martin began to develop some very peculiar ideas about basic Catholic teaching on Sin, Forgiveness, Redemption and Salvation.

Beneath the surface of this friar, there simmered an unstable amalgam of self-loathing, irrationality and morbid scrupulosity waiting to erupt. In Luther’s mind, God became a vengeful Old-Testament God, a God who delighted in pitilessly smiting down His children with a lightening rod. In his reminiscences, Luther wrote ‘From misplaced reliance on my righteousness, my heart became full of distrust, doubt, fear, hatred and blasphemy of God. I was such an enemy of Christ that whenever I saw an image or a picture of Him hanging on His Cross, I loathed the sight and I shut my eyes and felt that I would rather have seen the devil.’[2] Luther became a victim his own scrupulosity, regarding himself above all as a miserable sinner and believing that the only way to appease this wrathful God was by his own ‘righteousness’ or ‘servile works.’ Characteristically of this apparent schizophreniac, Luther then changed his mind saying that if one whipped oneself a hundred times a day with an appropriate scourge, such a deity would still remain eternally in a state of apoplectic rage. Man, he proclaimed, should cease trying to be good because it would not help save him from the fires of hell. ‘Be a sinner if you like and sin boldly,’ he pontificated;

But believe still more boldly and rejoice in Christ who is the conqueror of sin. From the lamb who takes away the sins of the world, sin will not separate men, even though they commit impurity a thousand times a day and murder as often.[3]

Thus it comes as no surprise that this liberal license, in Christ’s name, allowing one to do whatever one wanted or with anyone, at any time, would be met with much rejoicing.

Luther was later to further develop his early delusional attempt to escape from his erroneous perception of Divine Judgement and Retribution by formulating one of three fundamental principles of his new religion which he entitled ‘Justification by Faith Alone.’ Little by little, as his confidence grew, Luther took the fundamental doctrines of Catholicism and turned them on their heads, and in 1520 was formally excommunicated from the Church and declared a heretic on the grounds of forty-one scandalous errors with which he opposed Catholic Truth.[4] Spurred on by a rapturous audience of liberals, Luther’s reaction was to burn the papal bull of excommunication, as well as to consign the works