Over the past week America has become the focus of great turmoil following the riots in Charlottesville Virginia. White supremacist and others marched to protest the planned removal of a statue commemorating Confederate General Robert E Lee. Several states have been removing statues over the past year, and this has been raising the ire of the of some of their citizens.

What are we to make of all this?

During the past few years there has been a growing movement to remove Confederate monuments throughout the southern United States. There are estimated to be 718 Confederate statues and monuments across the US, of which around 300 are in the southern states of Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina.

A number of other US towns and cities have plans to take down their Confederate statues. One was removed in the Florida town of Gainesville on Monday, while Lexington in Kentucky also has plans to move two monuments. Some towns have covered up the monuments while they decide what to do with them.

New Orleans Mayor, Mitch Landrieu addressed his city in May, hours after a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was removed from Lee Circle on, where it stood over the black-majority city for 133 years. In his speech he described New Orleans past:

America was the place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp….

As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History & Culture, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.”

The historic record is clear: the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honour these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.

The controversy that has erupted, the riots, the murder, the violence has sprung out of a generations long struggle with America’s past. What was behind the American Civil war?  What were the core issues? Who were the core players?

There was much more going on than what is portrayed in the media today. A s Bible believers we should expect this, because we are told in the prophetic word of a system that would involve itself with all the rulers of the world:

“For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, And the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, And the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.” (Revelation 18:3)

There is a connection between the Catholic Church and the Confederate struggle that is an inconvenient truth which revisionists have taken great effort write out of history.

The American Civil War was a struggle between the Unionists who wanted to unite all of America under one federal government and the Confederates who wanted to secede from the Union and form their own independent nation that protected their “way of life” and values.  One of the institutions the south fought to protect, perhaps the most infamous, was the slave industry. Its institutions and industry depended on the slave industry to maintain itself.  

Current Event: The End of Temporal Papal Power

The events in America didn’t happen in a bubble. While the American Civil War was coming to the boil, another war of unification was raging in Italy. Liberal Republicans were attempting to unite the country, and break up the age-old divisions which had separated the country since the fall of the Roman Empire. Garibaldi and his red-shirt republicans were fighting against the conservative despotism of the institutions of Italy, headquartered in Rome with the Pope and the Catholic Church, undergirded by both Austrian and French governments at different times.

The time of Catholic despotism, and the temporal power of the Papacy was coming to an end. The 1260 years of persecution where drawing to a close. Daniel had prophesied of the Papal little horn, which would replace three of the 10 horns of the 4th beast:

“I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots: and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things.” (Daniel 7:8)

 This blaspheming little horn, reflected on by Paul in 2 Thessalonians, where he titles it the Man of Sin who would be a “falling away” or “apostasy” (2 Thessalonians 2:3-12). He would blaspheme God and exalt himself:

“Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.” (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4)

Daniel relates that this system would have the power to persecute the saints, or the believers:

“I beheld, and the same horn made war with the saints, and prevailed against them;” (Daniel 7:21)

However, this power would be for a limited time:

“And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time. But the judgment shall sit, and they shall take away his dominion, to consume and to destroy it unto the end.” (Daniel 7:25–26)

The period of a time given by Daniel is a time (360 days), times (360 days x 2) and the dividing of time (360/2), would total 1260 prophetic day/years. This commenced in 607 with the decree of Phocas enshrining the papacy as the head of all churches and ending around the era of 1867. The Papacy ruled over the Papal states in central Italy from the time of the donation of Pepin around 758.

Prophetic writer Rev. Robert Fleming Jr,  in his book The Rise and Fall of the Papacy, 1701 reflected on these time periods, stating:

“Therefore, we may justly reckon that the Papal head took its first rise from the remarkable year 606, when Phocas did in a manner devolve the government of the West upon him, by giving him the title of Universal Bishop. From which period if we date the twelve hundred and sixty years, they lead us down (as I said already) to the year 1866…”  (Robert Fleming, The Rise and Fall of the Papacy, p70-71).

He looked for the destruction of the temporal power of the Pope around this period of time, but beginning around the time period of the French Revolution:

“The fifth vial (Rev. xvi. 10, 11), which is to be poured out on the seat of the Beast, or the dominions that more immediately belong to, and depend upon, the Roman See—that, I say, this judgment will probably begin about the year 1794, and expire about the year 1848; so that the duration of it, upon this supposition, will be the space of fifty-four years; for I do suppose, that seeing the Pope received the title of Supreme Bishop no sooner than the year 606, he cannot be supposed to have any vial poured out upon his seat immediately (so as to ruin his authority so signally as this judgment must be supposed to do) until the year 1848, which is the date of the twelve hundred and sixty years in prophetical account, when they are reckoned from the year 606. But yet we are not to imagine that this vial will totally destroy the Papacy (though it will exceedingly weaken it), for we find this still in being and alive when the next vial is poured out.” (Robert Fleming, The Rise and Fall of the Papacy, p139-140).

Amazingly, the prophetic time periods worked out so that the French Revolution, beginning in 1789 saw the limiting of the power of the Pope. Rome fell to the rebellion in 1848, as the Republicans tried to unite Italy, and the pope fled from the Vatican. The French remained loyal to the Papacy and restored the Papacy to Rome. On July 3, 1849, the French Army entered Rome; on April 12, 1850, Pius IX entered Rome as a restored leader. In 1868 he eventually lost control of the Papal states and his temporal power.

The Papacy & the Civil War

So what has this got to do with the Confederate States? All the controversy about statues celebrating men enshrining slavery are closely related to the decaying Papal temporal power of the times.

The rise of the Republic in Italy sparked a response from the American consul Nicholas Brown:

“He immediately told the revolutionary government that “so deeply rooted in every American heart (is) the love of liberty” that the American people “will at once hail with joy the Independence of the Roman Republic long before their diplomatic agents can have time in due official form to give expression to the generous sentiments of their constituency.” (Leo Francis Stock, “The United States at the Court of Pius IX,” The Catholic Historical Review 9, 1 (April 1923): 108.)

The Northern States of America had supplied moral and military support to the Unionists of Italy, selling them ironclad warships to aid in their conquest against the Papal States and their French protectors. This no doubt had a negative impact on the relationship between the Americans and the Papacy.

According to the revisionist Catholic historian Robert Attilio Matteucci,

“Liberalism encouraged the uprising that drove Pope Pius from Rome, so the Pope opposed liberalism and a united Italy at every turn. As efforts for unification gained greater popular support throughout the peninsula, in Rome the Pope became increasingly conservative and autocratic in his opposition. After the rebellion, the Pope retaliated by opposing everything related to the failed Roman Republic. America had shown some degree of support for the Roman Republic and its liberal ideology, so the Papacy’s relationship with the United States suffered as a result. As long as the French expressed willingness to militarily uphold the Pope’s secular control of Rome, the Pope was free to continue in his opposition to liberalism.” (Robert Attilio Matteucci, Jr., The Pope and the Presidents: The Italian Unification and the American Civil War, 2015, p11)

The northern States in America were considered by the Southern Confederates to be infected by liberal Republicanism – just as the Southern Italian States being united by Garibaldi were viewed by the Catholic Church.

Both the Confederates and the Catholics saw themselves as defenders of a way of life that they wanted to hold onto. The Southern Confederates wanted their own laws and to maintain the oppression of men through slavery. The Pope wanted to maintain his despotic temporal power over the Papal states and keep them locked into the mediaeval feudalistic system that had served the Papacy well for so long. The scriptures talk of the Catholic system as being traders in souls of men:

“And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; For no man buyeth their merchandise any more: The merchandise of gold, and silver, And precious stones, and of pearls, And fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, And all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, And all manner vessels of most precious wood, And of brass, and iron, and marble, And cinnamon, and odours, And ointments, and frankincense, And wine, and oil, And fine flour, and wheat, And beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, And slaves, and souls of men.” (Revelation 18:11–13)

The church has traded in slaves and souls of men for many years. Both through the slave trade, but also through the selling of indulgencies to desperate widows who were told that their husbands, sons and parents would not be delivered from the imaginary purgatory with out paying the priests of the church for prayers for the departed.

On December 20, 1860, the State of South Carolina announced it would secede from the Union and become a separate republic. The Federal Government responded by calling on other States to send troops to suppress South Carolina. Six Southern states refused to comply and joined with South Carolina to form the Confederate States of America, with Jefferson Davis as their President.

When the liberal Republican Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president, the South saw it as the end of the their way of life.

Igniting the Civil War: Catholic Chief Justice Roger Taney (Statue Removed)

Most historians agree, that it was the decision by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (a Roman Catholic) that was the pretext for the Southern Confederacy’s igniting of the Great American Civil War. Taney decision in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case stated:

(blacks) "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it."

The statement by the Chief Justice of America was used as a pretence for defending the southern way of life. Although from the North, he was considered one of the instigators of the Confederate South’s case. This has been tactical policy of the Jesuits from their inception – divide a nation and conquer it.

The Catholic Justice Taney’s statue was removed Friday, August 18th, 2017, from the Mount Vernon Place in Baltimore as part of the campaign to shut down glorification of the Confederate South.

The first shot in the Civil War ordered by Catholic General Pierre Beauregard (Statue Removed)

The opening shot of the confederate rebellion rang out on April 12th, 1861. One month after Lincoln was proclaimed President of the United States, the 4th of March 1861. The Papacy saw the Confederates of the south their champions on the continent and stuck their oar deep into the situation. 

Abraham Lincoln saw Catholic interference in American politics resulting in dire consequences:

“I do not pretend to be a prophet. But though not a prophet, I see a very dark cloud on the horizon. And that dark cloud is coming from Rome… a cyclone such as the world has never seen will pass over this country, spreading ruin and desolation from north to south… Neither I nor you, but our children, will see those things.” (Abraham Lincoln, cited by Charles Chiniquy, the Canadian Catholic Priest and friend of Abraham Lincoln, who authored the book 50 Years in the Church of Rome)

Lincoln is quoted by Chiniquy as stating:

“The war [Civil War of 1861-1865] would never have been possible without the sinister influence of the Jesuits.” (Abraham Lincoln, cited by Charles Chiniquy)

Who fired the first shot? General Beauregard was the first Confederate general officer, and then appointed a brigadier general in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States. He was a Roman Catholic and was the man who ordered the first gun to be fired at Union Armies at Fort Sumter, on the 12th of April, 1861 beginning the Civil War.

General Beauregard’s statue was removed from New Orleans May 17, 2017.

The President of the Confederation Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee and the Pope (Statues Removed)

According to Catholic Historian Robert Matteucci, the Southern Confederacy had more Catholic influence than the North:The President of the Confederation was Jefferson Davis. Jefferson attended the Catholic school of Saint Thomas (Aquinas) operated by the Dominican Order in Kentucky. He was the only protestant student at the school and fell under the influence of Catholicism.

Further, the anti-Catholic nativism that swept much of the United States in the decade before the Civil War was less persistent in the South and several key Southern individuals had escaped it. Confederate President Jefferson Davis, for example, despite his Episcopalian faith, attended St. Thomas College, a Catholic institution. A larger example of the influence of Catholicism on Southern politics can be seen before the war, in 1848. In that year, the legislature of Louisiana passed a resolution “commendatory of Pope Pius IX, and in favor of the establishment of diplomatic relations with the court of Rome.” (ibid, p33)

Davis sought the Popes recognition of the Confederation in a letter he wrote September 1863, and sent by the hand of Ambrose Dudley Mann, Commissioner of the Confederate States of America for Belgium and the Vatican who arrived at the Vatican in November 1863.

Pope Pius IX responded in December addressing his letter to

Illustrious and Hon. Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, Richmond

This was de facto recognition of the Confederate Government. Although revisionist historians have argued against it, prominent figures from both sides of the argument at the time give it credence. Dudley Mann was ecstatic and wrote to President Davis stating,

“this letter will grace the archives of the Executive Office in all coming time. It will live, too, forever in [hi]story as the production of the first Potentate who formally recognized your official position and accorded to one of the diplomatic representatives of the Confederate States an audience in an established Court Palace.” (Baylen, “A. Dudley Mann’s Mission in Europe, 1863-1864,” 324.)

The Times-Picayune in occupied New Orleans, the center of Southern Catholicism, recorded: 

“one of our journals asserts that the address, ‘Illustrious and Honorable President,’ is a virtual acknowledgement by that distinguished personage of the ‘Independence of the Southern Confederacy.’” (“Letter from Antelope,” Times-Picayune, New Orleans, Louisiana, January 26, 1864.)

Roman Catholics of the day attested to the letter as being recognition. Father John Bannon, a Confederate Catholic chaplain, born in Ireland and living in Missouri, was approached by the Confederate government and asked to lead a mission to Ireland to try to dissuade Irishmen from immigrating to the North and enlisting in its military. He met the Pope in October 1863. He certified across Ireland that the letter was recognition of the Confederate government by the Papacy.

General Robert E. Lee, the leader of Confederate armies confirmed the same:

“Even Robert E. Lee, pointing to his own portrait of Piux IX, told a visitor after the war that he was “the only sovereign... in Europe who recognized our poor Confederacy". (Felicity Allen, Jefferson Davis, Unconquerable Heart, 1999,  p441).

The statue General Lee was removed on May 19, 2017, the last of four Confederate monuments in New Orleans to be taken down.

Lee wasn’t the only one to see things this way. The Cincinnati Enquirer, January 19, 1864, ran a headline:

“Recognition of the Confederate Government by the Pope in Rome – Important Correspondence.”

At the end of war, President Davis was imprisoned. Pius’ affinity to the failed Confederacy and its President was further demonstrated:

Pius IX sent Jefferson Davis an autographed photo of himself while Davis was imprisoned after the war. On the photo, the Pope offered the former Confederate the words of Christ that the oppressed should turn to God and that he would give them rest, handwriting in Latin Matthew 11:28, “Venite ad me omnes qui laboratis, et ego reficiam vos, dicit Dominus.” (Robert Attilio Matteucci, Jr., The Pope and the Presidents: The Italian Unification and the American Civil War, 2015, p68)

In the New Orleans Confederate Civil War Museum there is a crown of thorns, weaved for Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, by Pope Pius IX. The Pope sent the this sign of compassion while Pius was himself a “prison of the Vatican” after the fall of the Papal States under the forces of Garibaldi.

Jefferson Davis statue was removed in New Orleans, Thursday, May 11, 2017.

Lincolns Assassination & the Papacy

Following the Civil War president Lincoln was gunned down by the Catholic John Wilkes Booth who was aided by Jesuit conspirators. The forgotten story is recorded in Charles Chiniquy’s book “50 Years in the Church of Rome.” Chiniquay, Historian Constance Head, and Booth’s own sister Asia Booth Clarke all confirm his conversion to Catholicism. Catholic Historian Robert Matteucci drew a connection between the assassination of Lincoln and Pius IX:

The Church became involved in the aftermath of the Lincoln assassination. John H. Surratt, a Catholic accused with his mother and several friends of conspiring to kidnap and assassinate President Lincoln, was pursued by Union forces in the aftermath of President Lincoln’s assassination. Rather than being captured, tried, and hung like his mother, Mary Surratt, John Surratt managed to escape with the aid of the Catholic Church. He was smuggled to Rome where he ultimately served Pope Pius in the Papal Zouaves…. While the Pope’s actions toward Jefferson Davis certainly showed personal affinity between the two figures, the acceptance of John Surratt into the Papal military fostered the belief that the Pope’s sympathy was more widespread among former Confederates than just toward the Confederate President.” (Ibid, p69) 

This is very similar to the Catholic Ratlines that smuggled Nazi war criminals out of German into South America following the fall of Nazi Germany. The travelled using Vatican issued Red Cross passports through a series of Catholic churches, monasteries and safe houses, until safely spirited away from the men trying to bring them to justice for their crimes against humanity, and specifically the Holocaust.

The Story of the Statues

While the removal of the Statues of the Confederates has caused much uproar in the United Stated today, what has been forgotten is the connection between these men  and the Vatican. They were tools of the Vatican as it tried to hold onto despotic grip over the Papal States, and maintain its influence in the world. As we read in Revelation:

“For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, And the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, And the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.” (Revelation 18:3)

While the Confederacy didn’t rise from the dead, and its monuments are being removed today, the Vatican survived by confederating itself with the fascist prime minister Benito Mussolini in 1929. The Vatican signed an accord with Mussolini whereby the Italian government agreed to give the Church financial compensation for the loss of the Papal States, and recognized the Vatican City State as an independent state.

No longer a temporal power, it became the smallest state in the world – a single city:

“And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth… And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.” (Revelation 17:18)

 The Confederation may have been destroyed long ago, and it statues are taken down today causing an uproar. However, nothing will parallel the uproar when the Great City and its statues are destroyed at Christ’s return:

“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:” (2 Thessalonians 2:8)

Or as the words of Revelation put it:

“Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, Death, and mourning, and famine; And she shall be utterly burned with fire: For strong is the Lord God who judgeth her. And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, Shall bewail her, and lament for her, When they shall see the smoke of her burning, Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, Saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour is thy judgment come.” (Revelation 18:8–10)

So keep watching the Bible in the News, for greater turmoil is to come. This has been Jonathan Bowen joining you.