SOCIETY OF JESUS
The “Societas Jesu” was founded in Paris in 1534 by Basque priest Ignatius Lopez de Loyola, later canonized as Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Their original charter ordered them to “Enter upon hospital and missionary work in Jerusalem”—so far so good—but also “to go without questioning wherever the pope might direct”. The “extreme oath” of absolute fealty sworn by the Jesuits to an infallible pope, started up the earliest conspiracy theories about the order, namely that they were the white robed one’s personal political instruments. The accusation was not baseless; in Stuart Britain, the Jesuits were absolutely implicated in the most unChristian-like Gunpowder Plot to blow up James I in 1603.
Yet, even in Catholic countries the Jesuits ran foul of the authorities, who distrusted their missionary zeal, while the so-called Monita Secreta, a set of instructions from the Jesuits’ “Superior General” detailing how the ascetic Society could gain illicit wealth and power, condemned them as hypocrites and megalomaniacs. The Monita Secreta was almost certainly a forgery, but the damage was done; by 1773, half the national governments of Europe had successfully lobbied for the order to be suppressed. When the Jesuits were allowed to reform in 1814, allegations that the Jesuits under their “Black Pope” ran the Catholic Church—and not vice versa—went wild. The Black Pope nickname for the Superior General originally came from his dark vestments; in anti-Jesuit circles the “Black” referred to his dabbling in the devil’s arts. Murder, assassination, civil war, revolution, coups were all assumed to be the stock-in-trades of the Black Pope. And so, the Jesuits had their moment on the stage as the bogeymen of the Western world: in Eugene Sue’s 1844 novel
Even the Society’s enemies like Sue grudgingly acknowledged its remarkable internal cohesion. Loyola had been a soldier, and ran the Jesuits in military fashion; in their own eyes, the early Jesuits were “Soldiers of Christ” in the Counter-Reformation against the Protestantism sweeping sixteenth-century Europe.
In the twenty-first century, allegations about Catholic conspiracy have tended to shift onto Opus Dei, although voices of alarm are periodically raised over the “Jesuit Oath” taken by Society members. It is damning stuff:
I do… promise and declare that I will, when opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Masons… that I will spare neither age, sex nor condition, and that I will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush their infants’ heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race. That when the same cannot be done openly I will secretly use the poisonous cup, the strangulation cord, the steel of the poniard, or the leaden bullet.
Luckily for all heretics, Protestants and Masons—and their wives and children—the oath was a forgery by one Robert Ware, aimed at stymieing the accession of the Catholic James II in England in the seventeenth century. Today, the Society of Jesuits has 20,000 members, and announces on its website: “We are still men on the move, ready to change place, occupation, method—whatever will advance our mission in the Church of teaching Jesus Christ and preaching his Good News…” The website is a little less forthcoming about one conspiracy the Jesuits have unquestionably run: a conspiracy of silence about the paedophilia practised by the Society’s priests. The old Jesuit boast “Give us the child for seven years, and we will give you the man” took on a grim twist when child abuse by Jesuit priests was uncovered in America, Germany and Latin America. In the Pacific Northwest of the USA, the Jesuit branch was required in 2011 to pay $166.1 million in compensation to 450 victims who had been sexually abused by Jesuit priests over a fifty-year period.
Malachi Martin,
Edmond Paris,
SOCIETY OF THE ELECT
The Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission,
Born in 1853, Rhodes was the son of an English vicar who journeyed to Africa as a young man and made a mountain of money from diamond mining. He became a major force in African politics—Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was named for him.
Now, Rhodes might have found fame and fortune on the Dark Continent but his heart belonged to Blighty— and to the expansion of Victoria’s empire so the whole map of the world would be coloured pink. In 1877, Rhodes wrote in his
Rhodes seems to have put his money where his belief was. One of his wills contains a provision for
…the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.
The resultant Society of the Elect was formed in 1891, and according to the respected American historian Carroll Quigley, the Society had an inner and outer membership structure. Rhodes himself was the “General” of the Society, and sitting on its executive committee was the British High Commissioner in South Africa, the journalist William T. Stead and the banker Nathan Rothschild. Serving alongside the committee in the heart of the Society were the “initiates”. The outer circle of backers was called the Association of Helpers.
Although Rhodes died in 1902 (one of his wills, incidentally, established the Rhodes scholarships at Oxford University, the recipients of which have included Bill Clinton), his vision was carried forward by Alfred Milner who founded the Round Table groups, also known as the Rhodes–Milner Round Table groups, a.k.a. the Moot. The Round Table groups—which were the Association of Helpers under another guise—spread across the English- speaking world, and gained great influence in the period after the First World War. According to historian of secret societies, Michael Streeter “They were closely associated with the establishment of the Union of South Africa, the British Commonwealth and the League of Nations.”
The Round Tables were also likely behind the 1917 “Balfour Declaration”, written by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild (the son of Nathan Rothschild), stating Britain’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Aside from Milner, the dominant figure in the Society of the Elect/Round Tables in the decades after Rhodes’s demise was Lionel Curtis, who founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1920, known today as “Chatham House” after its premises in London. Although Chatham House advertises itself as nothing more sinister than a think tank on international affairs, to a large number of conspiracists Chatham House is a front for the
