My pleasure.

And I’m hearing an awful lot about Martin Luther. I went down to the seminary here in Philadelphia, and there was his book prominently displayed. I went to Washington, D.C. on one of the life marches, and in their little bookstore, the Immaculate Conception, there were pictures of Martin Luther, little halo in the back. And I kind of think that someone’s trying to move us into thinking that Martin Luther should be a saint of the Catholic Church.

I have read a little bit about Martin Luther from the Protestant angle. And of course, they say that he was trying to show the Church was in error, and sort of morally bankrupt when it came to taking money. And he was really silenced by the Church, so he couldn’t get his information out. Was he a holy man, Father?

(laughs) That’s about the last thing you could ever say about the man. Sometimes even in a criminal, you will find the spark of holiness. Not in Martin Luther, you will see. Well, in 1974, they tried for the first time to start some movement going on for the canonization of the großer Herr Doktor Martin Luther. Let me tell you a few things about the man.

At the same time, there’s a story of some murder going on, also about his father. There is enough evidence that his father was a murderer and for that reason had to change his life position. He had to leave the original town, I forgot where it was, somewhere in Thuringia, and move over to where Martin Luther was born in Eisleben. But the point is, at that moment when he was, as he claims, miraculously saved from the flashlight and the thunderstorm, he decided to become a monk. He was never chosen. Nobody ever told him. He said, „I will be a monk.‟ Later on, he claimed that he forcefully was pushed into monkhood. So he applied with the local Augustinian monastery and became a novice.

A novice… to become a novice in the monastery means you’re under no obligation whatsoever to stay in the monastery. Any time you’re kind of fed up with it, any time you feel like you can’t go on living this life, you can, without sin, without punishment, without any bad consequence to your state of life, leave the monastery.

Question: At this point, he was a lawyer, he was not a religious at this point. So he becomes a lawyer. Now he decides he wants to become a religious or a monk. Right. Is that correct?

Answer: And it was his own decision. It never happened, according to recorded history, that anyone would have told him, „You should really become a priest,‟ or, „You should really be in a monastery,‟ which is very often a sign of vocation. Long before I wanted to become a priest, another priest in Rome, of all places, told me, „You should become a priest.‟ I didn’t realize at the time that that was a kind of vocation, but you always get this. You either have the constant urge to celebrate mass. When I was five years old, I celebrated, quote-unquote, like children do, I celebrated mass. There was no hint whatsoever to a vocation in Martin Luther. But Martin Luther was a sort of level-headed and very stubborn character. Once he had decided, „I’m going to be a monk,‟ he would do everything, move everything just to become a monk.

And so he celebrated his first mass, and then he became known as a scrupulant. He was very scrupulous. Now, scruples, beg your pardon for giving you my definition of scruples. Scruples is the sort of moody, gloomy thinking that you will undergo once your conscience is not in the right place anymore. When your conscience is not in the right place anymore, the devil will substitute your conscience with scruples. Instead of fighting the real sin, you will create your own type of sin that you have to fight. That means instead of pursuing to live holy according to the rules of the order and the Ten Commandments, you will look and go into the details. You will get stuck with the details, hung up with the details, and instead of fighting your sins, you will only fight those minor things, which is very often serious too, but in no way to be compared with, let’s say, mortal sin. And he was known as a scrupulant. No penance was bad enough for him. No fasting was strict enough for him.

And the result was… this is very important to understand. People who allow scruples to grow and bloom in themselves will damage their own conscience. They will destroy their own conscience with time passing, because you base your life instead of the rules of life, be it in a monastery, the rules of the monastery, be it in a family, the rules of papal teaching on family life, on the duties of a family father or a mother or children. And if you focus your attention instead of focusing it on the real sins against the Ten Commandments, the real breach of one of the commandments, you focus it too much on details, then you become a scrupulant. It is the scrupulants that, as you very well know, that always tell me, „Father Hess must not drink wine.‟ They blaspheme Christ. He drank wine every day. He not only drank wine. His first miracle was to make wine. No, Martin Luther would not have it. „I’m a monk, I’m never allowed to do that.‟ When he fasted, he fasted to the point of excessive pain. When he made penance, he did penance to the point of excessive pain. Very few people are called to live that life. Saint Teresa of Avila, whom I consider most probably the greatest female mystic in church history said, „Leave these things to the saints. You have to be called to do this.‟

However, Martin Luther, who never was called to the priesthood, who called himself to the priesthood, who called himself to the religious state of life, called himself to penance. Excessive penance. The effect was he got caught up in all kinds of activities. Penance will take time. Fasting even will take time. You think it takes time eating, start to fast, fast rigorously, and still try to do your duties. Monks have to do manual labor, too. And a Carthusian friend of mine told me that once Lent is over, they’re not allowed any kind of meat, eggs, fish or cheese in Lent. And he says by the time it’s Holy Week, he’s hardly able to cut his own firewood anymore. It takes time. And the result was almost, I would say, logical, almost a necessary result of being a scrupulant, overdoing your religious duties. He ended up by not saying the breviary. He’d be so much involved in this or that and other things, whatever it was, like saying mass in the parish, preaching a two-hour sermon, dealing with people who were asking questions. He got so busy with everything that he had, quote-unquote, „No time anymore for the breviary.‟ The result was Martin Luther would say the breviary… For example, he would shut himself up on Saturday, shut himself up in the cell, and say the breviary of the past week Monday… say all Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, the whole breviary, including Sunday, the next day. And then he would go on with whatever he thought was his duties.

Here is one of the most important characteristics of Martin Luther. He was incredibly proud. He was determined to know everything without help. He was the one who knew what he had to do, not his superiors. He needed to tell himself what penance to do, not his superiors. He was the one who would decide when to fast as hard as can be, not his superiors. So from the outset, from the moment he had said his first mass, and from the moment he had done his vows, he was, in a way, disobedient. He was disobedient in the sense that he would not ask his superior, he would not ask the prior or the spiritual director… they had no such thing, but a similar thing in those days. He would not ask his confessor. He would be the one, like he decided to become a monk, he would decide that he needed to do this penance or that penance, and that much of penance or that little of penance. He was the one who would decide. Don’t forget that original sin was a result of Eve deciding to try the famous apple. Eve went into what Paul VI wanted all of us to do, into dialogue. Eve went into dialogue with a snake, and Eve started to decide on her own. When the Bible says that Lucifer wanted to be like God, this is to be understood in the following sense. Literally, he wanted to be God, yes, but of course, the most intelligent being ever created by God was not stupid enough to think that he really could be God. So Lucifer knew perfectly well, with the perfection of a pure spirit, that he could not be God. What does it mean when the Bible says he wanted to be like God? He wanted to be what he was without God. He wanted to be what he was, what he still is, because of himself. He was the one who was going to decide what he was, how he was, and what he was going to do. The prophet Jeremiah quotes it, and he says, „I will not serve.‟ Instead of saying „We give you thanks, almighty God.‟ He didn’t want to thank God in all eternity. He didn’t want to depend on gratitude for the rest of his existence. He didn’t want to depend on humility for the rest of his… that was exactly the root of all evil in Luther. He decided, „I am going to be a monk.‟ He decided, „I’m going to be an Augustinian.‟ He decided, „I’m going to celebrate mass cost it whatever it costs.‟ He decided what penance he’s going to do when, where, and how, and he decided what was right and what was wrong.

Then there was another secret, dark, very, very dark spot in Martin Luther. Martin Luther was, as we know, very temperamental, quite temperamental. He was short-tempered. He would have fits of anger, and like many vivacious people at that time, he had a deep, deep problem with the sixth commandment, a very deep problem. He fought it originally when he was doing his rigorous penance instead of listening to his superiors and doing the right thing that you always do when you’re in the state of priesthood or when you’re in the monastery or even as a father of a family. You’ll always need your spiritual director. You will need your confessor. You will need your advisors. You will need priests that help you overcome all vices, all temptations. Again, Martin Luther knew best what to do and the result was he totally and utterly failed. He was absolutely not capable of getting rid of certain horrible things against the sixth commandment. That deeply bothered him. Much less in the sense of the deep sense of guilt in offending God, but it sort of drove him crazy not to be able to dominate the vice. Proud as he was, to him it was more important to dominate the vice rather than to be the humble sinner. And there was the first spark of heresy in him when he started to think, and soon later on to say, that we are not capable of dominating our vices. Not capable.

The Protestant Reformation, something that has to be understood, did not start, and I will go into this, the Protestant Reformation did not start with indulgences. It did not start with wicked popes in Renaissance Rome. It did not start with the corruption of the Church. It started with one man who was admittedly incapable of dominating his vices. He went into something that is all too common in the 20th and now in the 21st century. He went into despair. Hope means… What does hope mean? Hope means, „I want to go to heaven. I cannot do it alone. I need Christ, who said without me you can do nothing. And my hope is that I will make it as long as I try my best and as long as I try hard to be worthy.‟ Despair means, „No matter what I do‟… absolutely no way to succeed. That’s the explanation for all the suicides in our days. That’s the explanation for all the terrible destruction in family life and in religious life nowadays. He realized that he had a real cause to fight for, his own vices. His own pride, his own temper, his own lust, his own obscenity. He realized he had to fight it with all his force. He did not realize that you cannot do it without spiritual guidance. He was very convinced, very much convinced, that he would be the remedy to his own problems. If he had listened to superiors, if he had read the right books. He was not as learned as you think in theology. Of course, the Augustinians made him study theology before they made him a monk. But we have reports, and he himself admits it on another occasion, that his knowledge in theology was anything but profound. Again, he was satisfied of being the Herr Doktor in law. He was satisfied with that, and he did not go in too deeply into the studies. I will have to come back to that point speaking about Luther and the Bible. Again, he did not trust his superiors, spiritual directors, spiritual guiders. He himself was convinced he would be his own remedy. Necessarily in that case, he failed. He was not able to dominate his vice, and that drove him into despair. And in his despair, he came to the firm conviction, „I cannot do it.‟

What does someone do who realizes, now realizes that the way he’s acting, the way he is deciding, he will not be able to dominate something? What do you do if you don’t reach the ideal? Either you convert, you ask for help, not professional help in the United States, but (laughs) I’m talking about real help, spiritual help. Or you lower the ideal. As Chesterton says, „The most horrible thing one can do when he’s not capable of reaching the ideal, is lowering the ideal.‟ Lower the standard, so sort of, „I lower the standard, then I will be up to it.‟ That’s what he did. That was one of the roots of the Reformation.

There was… In 1510, Pope Alexander VI was dead seven years. The great pope, Julius II, who was not exactly leading a moral life before he became pope, but who reversed his ways once he was pope and led a very virtuous and good life once he was pope. Julius II was pope seven years in 1510 when Luther came to Rome. Now, in 1503, Julius II was elected to the papacy with bribery. Simony, you call that. The moment he got elected, he published a law against simony because he was scandalized himself. I mean, he didn’t say no, but he was scandalized. And he rightly believed that after Alexander VI was dead, even he could be much better than that one, and he was.

Now, by the time the Renaissance popes were in their greatest glory, quote-unquote, we’re talking about the year 1500, the old Basilica of St. Peter’s, founded by Constantine the Great, was pretty much in shambles. It was falling apart, literally, literally falling apart. Entire side chapels had to be closed because of rocks coming down. Parts of the ceiling would be coming down. Ornaments would be coming down. Very dangerous place to go in, in the year 1500. And Julius II, who was not exactly what you call a man of very modest decisions, said, „Okay, I’m gonna tear down the old basilica and build a new one.‟ He got one of the greatest geniuses as far as architecture is concerned, mind you, of his time, Michelangelo, to start off with the new basilica. He soon, not immediately, that’s important for our story, he soon started to realize that the funds of the church available in Rome would never suffice to build that new church. You have to understand if you have ever seen St. Peter’s Basilica, for those who have never been in Rome, try to look at a picture that shows you Saint… backside of St. Peter’s Basilica. A picture taken in the Vatican gardens showing you the backside of the basilica. This is more or less what Michelangelo wanted the building to look like. He wanted it built on the foundation of a Greek, not a Latin, a Greek cross. The fully symmetrical cross. And if he had done that, the basilica all around would have looked like it looks in the back now, more or less. Still, smaller than what we have now, and yet, incredibly expensive. There is no way really to compute nowadays, dollar-wise, what something like St. Peter’s cost at the time. It was immense.

Now, the church, of course, has never, so far, nowadays everything’s possible in Rome, but so far the church has never sold indulgences because that’s against the doctrine of the church. If you buy an indulgence, the indulgence is invalid. I’ll come back to that. Pope Julius II decided late in his life, we’re talking about after 1510 when Luther was back in Germany, no talk about being scandalized in Rome anymore. Julius II decided to get some money for that basilica through donations, given for alms, you call that. Donations, given for receiving indulgences. That is not selling indulgence because the point was this. First of all, what is an indulgence? The doctrine of the church says it very clearly, indulgence will neither substitute for confession, nor for absolution, nor for contrition. As a matter of fact, the rules of the church have always laid down that in order to receive an indulgence, be it a partial or a plenary indulgence, in order to be able to receive that, you first have to feel sorry for your sins, attrition or contrition. Contrition being the perfect, being sorry, quote-unquote, being sorry for your sins. The perfect remorse. Perfect remorse means you’re not sorry for your sins only because you’re afraid of hell, but you’re sorry for your sins because they offend Christ. You feel sorry for Christ much more than for yourself. That’s a plenary. That’s a real contrition, real remorse. Now, the first thing is you have to have attrition or contrition, otherwise confession will be invalid. You go to confession with the intention of committing the same sin again, you know very well the absolution is invalid. Second condition, you have to go to confession. Third condition, you have to do something in order to receive the indulgence.

Now contrary to what the most generous Pope Pius IX gave us, a short little prayer which you find in the back of the missal where the picture of the crucifix is next to it. In order to receive a plenary indulgence, in those days, that was a complicated thing. For example, in order to receive a plenary indulgence in Rome during the holy year, it was not sufficient just to cross back and forth the holy gate to the basilica. That’s only open in the holy year. No, you had to visit seven churches. That’s the tradition of the seven basilicas in Rome. The four major basilicas and the three minor. The same condition was laid down in writing and preaching in Germany when that indulgence later on under Pope Leo X was published in Germany. The conditions were, first, that was the conditions that were valid for everyone. Attrition and contrition, confession, and then visit seven churches. Usually the bishop would assign the seven churches, which ones were the seven churches you had to visit. Saying prayers for the forgiveness of your sins. That would be the major condition in order to receive an indulgence. And then you had to give an offering, like today, there are some people who will viciously tell you that you pay a mass a priest is saying. That’s not true. Of course, the diocese has made sure there’s a certain minimum amount because otherwise, I’m faced with people who give me $1 and ask me to say mass, and another one will give me $50. Now, on the day I say mass for $1, I miss the $49 that I get next day. Of course, so in order to avoid abuse, even donations have to be regulated. They were regulated. Each person who wanted the indulgence had to give a donation according to his state of life. Unlike today where everybody has to pay taxes no matter what, the sales tax. Sales tax is valid for the rich and the poor. You pay so and so many percent. In Austria it’s 20%. Hi, America. In Austria you pay 20% sales tax on everything. It doesn’t matter if you’re really poor or if you’re filthy rich. You pay 20% sales tax and that’s it. Unthinkable in Catholic times. The rich would be expected to give a lot more, and the real poor people wouldn’t give anything. They would get their plenary indulgence, they would talk to the priest, and if they made it credible to the priest, because they really want the indulgence, they’re not gonna lie about that. They say, „Father, I can’t. I don’t have any money.‟ The priest would dispense him and say, „You can receive the plenary indulgence visiting the seven churches.‟ That’s not what you call selling something. In no dictionary you would call that selling something. In no moral theology, be it ancient or new, you would call that selling something.

Now the point was, the church knew out of experience that first of all, the enemies of the church and also less intelligent people, let’s put it this way, would misunderstand indulgence. The word indulgence and the meaning of indulgence. What is an indulgence? Now the point is once you go to confession, you are restored to the life of grace, of sacramental grace. However, the punishment due to the sin committed is not taken away. The sin is forgiven and sanctifying grace is restored in the penitent. But the punishment due to the sin is not taken away. If you, for example, if you commit murder and you go to confession, you get absolution, it doesn’t mean you don’t have to go to jail anymore. Of course not. Now the indulgence, and that’s why in the old days you talked about, let’s say, 300 days indulgence or a five-month indulgence or four years indulgence or plenary indulgence. What does that mean? It means that whatever the indulgence is requiring, if you do it, if you do it well, and if you rightly receive the indulgence, you will be forgiven not only your sin but the temporal punishment due to the sin. Let’s say a 400-day indulgence would be something like the punishment is reduced as if you had offered up 400 days of disease and suffering for the sins committed. Now indulgence means that this offering, whatever it is you have to give, will take away that punishment. A plenary indulgence, therefore, means all temporal punishment is taken away. Now the point of a partial indulgence is when they talk about, let’s say you do a certain offering, you say a certain prayer, you visit seven churches, and you get a partial indulgence, for example, of 400 days as it used to be called in the old days. That is like as if you offered up the sufferings that will come with 400 days of suffering, let’s say, of a disease, which is, of course, temporal punishment. Nowadays, many people dislike the very concept of calling a disease a temporal punishment. They don’t understand that sickness, disease, suffering is something that’s, of course, not pleasing to God. It is something that He permits for our own good, and if we want to receive a partial indulgence, we can offer it up. So 400 days partial indulgence is like as if you had offered up 400 days of suffering.

The doctrine of the Church on indulgences is something that at the time, now we’re going back to 1510, 1513. Now in 1513, Pope Julius II died and Leo X, the Medici pope, became pope. He, of course, continued building St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and he continued to offer the indulgences in order also to get money for that church. Why? Well, the point is sometimes you can hear an accusation made against Leo X telling him, „Well, if he wanted that wonderful church built, why didn’t he pay it out of his own pocket?‟ But the point is, first of all, no pope ever had that kind of money, contrary to what people make you believe. Second, the accusation is groundless. Leo X didn’t build that church for himself. When Julius II started to build the new St. Peter’s Basilica, he knew that in his lifetime, he wasn’t going to see anything of it. Leo X, when he started out as pope, he knew he was never going to see the church finished. It wasn’t for himself. It was for the entire Christendom, something that, unfortunately, a concept that has been lost nowadays, to consider a church being public property. Not in the sense that the public can go around and sell it, but in the sense that what is a church built for? A priest, in order to say mass and to fulfill his daily duty, doesn’t need a church. Not a big one, at least. He needs a chapel. Like cardinals, bishops, and me too. We have our private chapels. And that’s all I need for being able to say mass. I do not need a big church, let alone St. Peter’s. A church like St. Peter’s, like all great basilicas in Rome were built for the people so the people can worship, and as everything in religion should be, it was first of all built for the greater glory of God. You weren’t talking about some luxury the pope was permitting.

So, in order to finance the church, he had to get money somewhere. The Christian way of thinking was not to have everybody pay taxes for that. Nowadays, the president wants something? Okay, invent a new tax and we’ll get the money. That’s not the Christian way of thinking, and that’s why the offerings had to be proportional to your state of life and your income.

The point now that concerns us with Martin Luther is when finally the German bishops joined in this common effort of Christendom for the new basilica, they divided Germany in sort of three districts where the indulgences would be preached. We are concerned with the one that is about to be found where you had the former German Democratic Republic and parts that are today Poland. That part of Germany was one of the three districts for preaching indulgences. The preacher that later on got trouble with Martin Luther was a certain Dominican called Tetzel, T-E-T-Z-E-L. Tetzel was a very correct, very learned man, who contrary to Martin Luther, had really studied his Saint Thomas, and he preached the indulgences absolutely according to the doctrine of the Church. As a matter of fact, there was, until Martin Luther started his business, very few problems with the indulgences. And the problems that arose were problems absolutely prototypical for all centuries in Church history. Some priests would be, let’s say, careless in their preaching. And of course, many faithful would be careless in their understanding of indulgences. It is true you would have people running around telling you, „Oh, if you pay a few dollars for the indulgence, then you can happily go on sinning,‟ as if an indulgence could ever take away the penance due to a future sin. Of course, the very thought is absurd and illogical. The Church in its former pre-Vatican II logic would have never been, let’s put it plainly, never been silly enough to preach something like a prepaid indulgence for a future sin. That’s preposterous, and very few people seriously believed it.

Now, in 1517, finally it happened, the famous publication of the thesis, the 95 Theses of Luther at the Schlosskirche zu Wittenberg. I don’t know what is all the fuss about those 95 theses. In those days, it was more than common to nail a piece of paper with certain theological thesis on your church door in order to provoke a theological discussion and to get into an academic dispute about something. There was no computer, there was no telephone, and there was very, very little of printing yet. So if somebody had a new theological theory, instead of just affirming his own errors, he would write them clearly, legibly on a piece of paper, nail that piece of paper to the next church door, and hope that somebody would come along and say, „What’s the matter with you?‟ And so they would get into a serious and interesting theological discussion, not having a telephone. They would just, after mass for example, get together and discuss theology, which is a good thing. So for the moment, there was nothing special in the Herr Doktor Martin Luther nailing the 95 thesis to the church door. The problem was what it said on that paper. First of all, most Protestant authors will confirm that the 95 thesis were incoherent, lousy theology, illogical, and some of them plain polemics. The result was that the superiors told Martin Luther to take back these thesis and to abandon the whole issue. That’s not the way you talk to Herr Doktor Martin Luther. He went on raging. Now, he not only defended these thesis, now he went much further. So to cut a long story short, the whole thing was carried to Rome, and Pope Leo X wrote a document in which he condemned the 95 thesis of Luther. Most of them, quoting the thesis… Well, most of them were condemned by quoting the thesis and adding what the church says about it. Martin Luther was a heretic long before 1517, as we have seen. Now he became a public heretic. And now, having separated himself from the church, now having gone into rebellion against the church, now having publicly disobeyed his superiors, the rest was the avalanche that had to follow.

Question: Can I interject here, Father? In my reading, the issue seemed to come down to this. Martin Luther had the right to post his thesis. If the church disagreed with that, they would have to take him to a court or tribunal and show that these were incorrect.

Answer: No. It was sufficient for his superiors not to allow the publication of these thesis. Don’t forget, Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk. He was not even a secular priest, who still has a superior called bishop. Of course you could not publish any kind of thing there. When we talk about a thesis published, we’re talking about what today is called a thesis on some issue that has not yet been settled in the church. You can always literally write a thesis and get your doctorate for that. I got my doctorate in theology for writing the following thesis. I stated that Gilbert Keith Chesterton was not only writing about theology, but that Gilbert Keith Chesterton was a theologian and a Thomistic theologian as such. That was my thesis. I proved my point and got the doctorate.

Question: So you’re saying to me, Father, this, that Luther had no right to be judged whether he was correct or incorrect by the church. He was asking them to show where his thesis were wrong.

Answer: No, the point is that, first of all, he published his thesis without asking his superiors. In a monastery, that was never possible. I couldn’t publish my thesis without asking my superiors. I mean, that’s just the rules of the university. You don’t just write a thesis and nail it to a door, or today it means you go to the printer. The point is, first of all, you have to have the theological discussion. So what you could do was, with the agreement of your superiors, you’ll propose your theological opinion on something where theological opinions are still possible. You cannot, for example, publish a thesis against the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. That’s why it is a dogma. So in order you do not theologically discuss it anymore.

Question: Hold on. Indulgences are not that.

Answer: Say again?

Question: Indulgences are not on that category.

Answer: No, they’re not on the category of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, but again-

Question: He feels Lu- Luther now… My reading, Luther feels that they are buying… They’re only doing indulgence to get money. They have given that job to a certain bishop. And his job was to get the money. Luther says, „That’s wrong.‟

Answer: Yeah. But the point of The Ninety-Five Theses that he published was, first of all, by far not the indulgences in the first place. Second, when you bother to read those 95 theses, you will find that he just attacks the pope in a way that would never be theologically permitted in the sense of a theological discussion. What has that got to do with a theological discussion if you publish a thesis?

Question: Are you saying, Father, that there are many more things than indulgences that he proposed there?

Answer: Oh, yes, of course. Of course, of course. That’s what… That’s why I said the indulgences were one point only. Okay. Yeah. The point is, for example, he just said, „If that pope there in Rome wants that church built, why doesn’t he pay it out of his own pocket?‟ Okay, you might as well ask that question, but that’s not a theological thesis to be nailed to the schlosskirche door of Wittenberg. That’s unacceptable, and it was unacceptable, and it is unacceptable. However, once the Ninety-Five Theses were published, with the help of many enemies of the Church, these theses were widespread. There was hardly any learned men left in Europe who wouldn’t have heard about those theses. Now, Europe at the time was still Catholic, and you can imagine that the vast majority of people just rejected these things and said, „Ah, just another crackpot. Don’t pay attention.‟ Needless to say, politics are something very ancient. But Europe was not yet ready for that. The Ninety-Five Theses were published, and as I said, Pope Leo X made it clear what the Church had to say about them. He condemned all 95 theses as unacceptable church doctrine. Usually, that would settle the cause. Roma locuta, causa finita est. Once Rome has spoken, the case has ended.

And on the point of Holy Mass, this heresy was again not new with him. Because already in his theological studies he had not taken Saint Thomas Aquinas serious enough and because he indulged too much in the reading of the Bible, long before he became the rebel and long before he abandoned his priestly duties, he had grave problems in understanding mass. You see the danger in reading the Bible is… Now, the Bible’s the word of God, of course. The Old Testament is inspired by God and the New Testament is inspired by God. The greatest treasure in the Catholic Church is the fact that we do not just have the Bible, we have tradition. And the Council of Trent, which is also quoted in Vatican I, defines tradition… I made once a whole conference on this subject, which I recommend to study for that point. The whole point of tradition is, as defined in Trent and Vatican I, tradition is what we receive from Christ, what has been revealed, either written down in the Gospel and the Old Testament, in the approved books of the Bible, or which has been handed down in church tradition. Everything that the apostles heard out of the very mouth of Christ. Tradition, according to tradition, ended with the death of the last apostle, which was Saint John the Evangelist. Without tradition, the Bible is nothing. Not because the word of God would be nothing, but because the very same God who inspired the writers of the Old Testament and the New Testament, that very same God said to Peter, Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam. Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. With this, He gave the Church tradition. With the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, that tradition was explained to the apostles in one moment of light. With that tradition handed down faithfully from pope to pope, from the Church fathers, popes, the councils, and in the church teaching, only this way we can understand the Bible. There is a reason why until a few centuries ago Catholics were not allowed to read the Bible without permission. Why? Example, in the Old Testament there are many things where the New Testament will say something different. An eye for an eye, Christ said, „No.‟ He said, „Love thy enemy.‟ Does that mean we have to associate with our enemies? No. It means the moment you realize somebody’s your enemy, you gotta pray for him. Not curse him, but pray for him. That would be a conference on its own just the sermon on the mount itself. But the point is, if you read the Bible without guidance you will make up your own religion, which is exactly what happened. Luther said, „There is nothing in the Bible about the sacraments.‟ And it’s true, Christ never said baptism was a sacrament. He said, „Go in all the world and baptize the people, all the peoples in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.‟ He didn’t say that was a sacrament. When at Cana Christ made wine, he didn’t say wedding, the holy sacrament of marriage is a sacrament. He was present at a wedding, and he consecrated water and turned it into wine, which is a miracle. But he didn’t say, „Catholics ought to be married in the sacrament of marriage.‟ Or matrimony, excuse me. There is nothing in the Bible on the point of the sacrament of profession. Where do we get this? It doesn’t say in the New Testament that there are seven sacraments. The Council of Trent says there are seven sacraments. See, this is the point I’m making. The Bible is the holy word of God. Don’t forget that there is a special liturgy in a solemn high mass just for reading the Gospel, while the deacon and the subdeacon process, the priest is standing at the altar, the deacon is singing the Gospel, the subdeacon’s holding the Gospel. Such a special rite just for reading a little bit of writing shows you that we are talking about Christ Himself, the word of God. But when you read the word of God, which was not written for the everyday man out there, it was written as a part of God’s revelation, we wouldn’t need a pope. We wouldn’t need the Vicar of Christ. We wouldn’t need the Holy Spirit. We wouldn’t need the inspiration given to the pope on the very, very, very few occasions he uses his infallibility if we could just be enlightened by reading the Bible. You can be totally led into error if you read holy scripture without guidance. Many things in there can easily be misunderstood. Just think of when Christ in the gospel says, „If you do not hate your mother, your father, your brothers, your sisters and children, you’re not worthy of me.‟ Does that mean if I want to be worthy of Christ, I have to hate my mother? Of course not. And yet you could claim, excuse me, is this the word of our Lord or isn’t it? See what I mean? Now, it would be part of a sermon to explain this whole thing now. We don’t have the time to go into exegesis of the New Testament, but just to give you one example of how confusing it can be.

Now, Martin Luther being erudite in a single-minded way would easily be misled to a certain point. The tragedy with Luther is he was not just misled, but he started to lie. It has been said that Martin Luther is the father of the German language and that he translated the Bible into German. Not true. By the time Luther started his translation of the Bible, there were 17 translations circulating, German translations of the Bible. When Luther started to translate the Bible, he omitted whatever did not fit his purposes. He scratched out entire books, letters of holy scripture. Whatever he translated and left in the Bible he would either change or add comments or leave out entire sentences or words. We have evidence from the judgments of other Protestant writers like Calvin or Melanchthon, all these famous first generation Protestants, they will all agree on one point: the Martin Luther translation of the Bible is worthless.

Back to the historic happenings, Luther now had decided to be the rebel in the church and he started to show his real nature. So far, his real nature was somewhat known to his Augustinian brothers, somewhat known to the people who had closer association with him. Now it became public.

Question: Father, Father, I could stop you here. Are you saying that Luther jimmied the Bible up subjectively to cover his own sins and shortcomings?

Answer: Yes. I mentioned before that he ended up in despair over his own sins and when he thought that there was no way of fighting the vice he just declared that the vice is not a vice. He couldn’t get rid of it so he renamed… he re-baptized, he gave it a new name. He said there is no way of getting rid of your sins, therefore go on and sin boldly.

Question: So once you’re saved, you’re saved?

Answer: Yeah. And yes. Because he had started to fight his own sins in the wrong way from the very outset which I have explained, because he logically was therefore not able to win he did what many losers do: he changed the issue. That’s something that happens every day in political discussions. You can’t win the discussion, so you change the issue. You just start up with an issue where you think now you could win. It’s like playing chess, you realize you’ve got some better man against you and you change the rules of chess. And that’s exactly what he did. Before he became the real rebel, as I said, in his sermons then in the Ninety-Five Theses afterwards in open rebellion, he declared that there is only one way to get saved. Of course you save yourself, needless to say, but the only way is Sola fides, the faith alone. He called good works unnecessary to the point of saying that they are scandals, a waste of time. He said you can’t be saved by just whispering your old filthiness into a priest’s ear. That was his way of describing confession. And he radically, short-tempered as he was, like a man who is angry to the point of madness and who could commit any unspeakable, unimaginable crime right at the moment, he changed into a state of life that would remain such for the rest of his life, not just one fit of anger but one life of anger. And this is easily proven with his own words. He did not just call the pope a rascal, he called him names. If I quote them to you, nobody will ever buy a Father Hess tape again. His favorite word was, in English, S-H-I-T. That in itself doesn’t mean much. He would use it, however, on the most holy of subjects. (static hisses) One of his favorite words starts with the famous F, whatever at the time in Germany would be the correspondent word. One of his favorite, many of his favorite words would describe parts of the human anatomy that are quite necessary for survival, but that are not exactly the most ideal subject for tabletops. (static hisses) The language that Luther used, especially after the real Reformation, I mean, what’s called the Reformation, which was called the Deformation really, was unbelievable. Many people who know Father Hess know that I’m not scrupulous as far as language is concerned. I’m not one of these people who pale and faint on hearing some things. To me, it’s impossible to read more than one paragraph of Luther at the same time. That’s how disgusted I am, the way he spoke. He would call the pope names that I had to check in the dictionary. That’s how filthy his language was. He would use terms that… He used a language that you will find in the worst Hollywood movies. That was his everyday language. When somebody contradicted him, he’d be a fool, an idiot, a rascal, a criminal, to name the speakable words. Then he would call him a part of the anatomy. This is a common term also in this country. And he would use the F word, he would use the S word, he would use hundreds kind of words, some of them in itself innocent, but not if you use them for describing the papacy as such. I’m familiar with the anger that somebody can feel on things that are going on today, and I’m quite, I perfectly understand that when you’re angry about somebody or something, that you will not exactly describe it with the most poetic words. He used these terms on the Gospel, on the papacy, not just on the pope, but on the papacy, and the result was that his theology was very much alike his own language. He would say, for example, „It would be easier…‟ Uh, let me get this right. He would say, „It would be much easier for a prostitute to be saved rather than for a monk.‟ He didn’t mean in the sense that the monk had to live up to a state of life while the prostitute might have been an ignorant little girl who never was taught the truth and never knew anything. No. On the contrary, he said, „By institution.‟ He would call being a monk a greater sin than being a prostitute. He was not satisfied with abandoning his own tradition, with breaking his vows, taking on a woman as a monk, ceasing to celebrate mass, not frequenting the sacraments anymore. No. Because he still had a conscience, he would tranquilize his conscience by declaring these very things immoral. He would tell you that you are bound to go to hell if you listen to the pope. Mind you, that back then, when the pope did never touch doctrine. He would tell you that there’s no way you can escape hell if you become a monk. And of course, very soon, he had those famous words in English, popish, monkish, priestish. Nothing in the state of holiness would be good to him anymore. He would use the language of excrements for everything holy and sacred. The sacraments to him were human waste. Mind you, he didn’t use that term. He used terms that I will not quote here. With his language degenerating to an incredible filth and an incredible baseness, so was his life. He not only, as I said, abandoned the sacraments, ceased to frequent the sacraments, celebrate mass, say the breviary, he said not even his prayers, not a slight touch of religious life in him anymore. Many years before he became what he was, that monster that split Christendom, he said, and I quote Martin Luther literally now, „I cannot pray without cursing.‟

Answer: Uh, yeah, that’s already three questions now. Wait. First of all, you asked me, when did he formally? Well, that was of course the 95 Theses.

Question: But he’s still a Catholic then?

Answer: Uh, not really, no. No.

Question: But he considers himself a Catholic?

Answer: No. No, the point… No, no, no, no, no, no. You have to see this in a different light. I told you that long before he published the 95 Theses, he already started to preach many of these issues. Now, that’s… The moment you start to preach these things and your superiors tell you to stop it and you don’t, you cease to be a Catholic. The first question was Martin Luther a… when did he become a Lutheran? Well, in a certain sense, he never became a Lutheran because you could not possibly, that would be an inexcusable grave injustice. You cannot possibly say that the Lutherans are like Luther. That is grave injustice, as you will see. I’ve just come to the point where Luther said, „I cannot pray without cursing.‟ You cannot say that your neighbor over there who is a Lutheran is not able to… is not capable of praying without cursing. Impossible. You can’t say that. So in a certain sense, Martin Luther never was a Lutheran. All of his life he never was what in the English language is understood under the term Lutheran. Impossible. Was Hitler a Nazi? I don’t know. Hitler was Hitler, and Hitler said what he wanted, what he wanted to say and what he believed, and he wasn’t following anything. And here we come to your third question, who were the people behind Luther? For the points for so far, nobody. The devil. Luther said himself, „I draw my inspirations from the devil.‟ His own quotation. Luther said himself, „Many years before I started to leave the monastery, before I left the monastery, I had troubles every time I saw the crucifix or a statue of our Lord or Our Lady. I couldn’t even face a picture of our Lord anymore.‟ Why? Logically, because he had ended up in despair over the vices, that because of his pride and disobedience, he couldn’t fight anymore. I mean, successfully fight. So being oppressed by his conscience, that was much less built by doctrine and learning than by scruples. Oppressed by this conscience, he couldn’t face our Lord. It’s like, you look at yourself, you look at your inside, you say to yourself, „Oh my God, what did I do?‟ And then you see a picture of Our Lady and you look away, „I can’t even look at her the way I’m… the way I am.‟ He, by the time he went public, everything he said was deeply ingrained in him. He had lost the faith, he had lost obedience, he had lost the fight, and he drew his inspirations from the devil. That’s why I said, when you asked your questions, „I cannot pray without cursing.‟ What does he mean? He explains it himself in the Table Talks. He says, „I cannot even say ’Our Father,‚ be Our Father anymore. I will say, ’Our Father who art in heaven, why don’t you curse that damn Pope? Hallowed be thy name, curse all the monks.’‟ That’s the way he would pray. There’s witnesses to this. The Table Talks are written tradition. The Table Talks… not church tradition, written history. The Table Talks are written down, and very few Protestants have the courage to say these are not authentic, because we know they’re authentic and they know they’re authentic. Don’t ask me how they can stay Protestants once they read those Table Talks. That’s something I cannot answer you, and it’s not my purpose to speak about that.

Question: But are these available?

Answer: Yes. Especially today with that funny little thing called internet. Yes.

Question: And they would be called what, Father?

Answer: The Weimar Table Talks, I said that. And Facts About Luther will give you… the book I mentioned, Facts About Luther will give you the necessary sources. So, when I consider that Youngstown in Ohio is not exactly what you call a big city, the library of Youngstown, Ohio has one million books available, and be it only on microfilm, we haven’t touched the internet yet, so nobody could tell me that he’s not able of getting these.

Question: Yes? Now, at some point people start to follow Luther. It start to become an institution. It start to become its own religion.

Answer: We come to that, but we have to come to that in the system. At this point, he is still a renegade, but he has not formed the new religion.

Question: Oh, no, no, no. That’s something even Luther couldn’t do overnight. So he’s not a Protestant yet?

Answer: Oh, of course he’s a Protestant.

Question: No, no, no, no. I mean that, but there’s not a formal organization.

Answer: No, no, no, no. Okay. No. Now, for that, the devil gave him, as Luther himself said, two inspirations. The first one was to decry celibacy. He went to public and said, „Celibacy is a sin.‟ „As much as I am a man, as much as I cannot fly, as much as I cannot simply become something else, as much I need a woman.‟ Of course, that’s what he did. He started to preach against chastity, virginity, and celibacy. He said, „A man who is not, who has no woman is not a man.‟ If you ask me about the John Wayne of church history, then I will not name somebody who was married, but Saint Benedict. When God permitted Saint Benedict to have visible satanic apparitions that looked like beautiful girls, he threw himself (laughs) in a thorn bush to get rid of the temptation. That’s what I call a man. A man who gives in, who gives into his own lusts and desires, that’s not a man. That’s a sissy. And of course, in the logical context of Luther’s own despair about his own vices, he, quote unquote, „had to do it.‟ So he met, of course, he met a few ladies. He had quite a few, I call them ladies for the… Well, anyway, or women. He met a few, whatever, specimen of the female human species, and he had recorded quite a few adventures with them. And it is, I never read the Rainbow Press, so I’m not going to expand on the story of how he met Katherine Bora, a nun, of course, who would become his wife. If you want to read about this, you will find books, but it’s not the place and the time here to explain the Rainbow Press details of Luther’s life. He wanted a woman, he got more than one.

The result was, with the Fourth Commandment gone, he became one of the major rebels in European history. He is the arch revolutionary of all revolutionaries. „Liberté, égalité, fraternité,‟ as the French proclaimed in 1789. Nothing new. Luther said it already. He instigated the Peasants’ War at the time, the Peasants’ Rebellion in his part of Germany. By the time the peasants had lost, he put himself on the side of the princes and told the princes to punish the rebellious peasants in the most harsh possible way. Again, this is not Rainbow Press here, and I’m not going to go details what happened, but it was horrible, horrible. Luther has not just gone down in history as the founder of a new religion or let alone a reformer, which he wasn’t. He should go down into history as the one who instigated war, rebellion, and slaughter, manslaughter in Germany. By abandoning the Ten Commandments, therefore abandoning the Fourth Commandment, he logically had to tell the peasants, who were sometimes justly angry at their princes, „Well, you do away with them.‟ „It is not good for a Christian to have a superior. A Christian knows himself what he’s doing.‟ Now, you see that? The pride of Luther. He didn’t listen to his superiors when he needed to fight his own vices. He called himself to the priesthood, he called himself into the monastery. He decided what to do against the vices. He decided what penance he’s going to do, when, where, and how. So now he decided that every Christian has to decide for himself. The faith alone will save you, but what is that faith? You read the Bible. You will read the Bible and you will judge the Bible. And if you read the Bible and you judge the Bible, what is it? You found your own religion. The essence of Protestantism, as you can see still today in the sheer amount of Protestant sects, is that Protestants basically form, each one forms his own religion. You read the Bible, and whatever the Bible tells you is what you’re going to do. The old famous game, open the Bible somewhere and you will find the answer on what to do next. That’s superstition. Moral theology has to tell you what to do, and your agenda has to tell you what to do. What duties you have to fulfill, your agenda, and moral theology to decide what duty is really, can really be a duty, and what duty isn’t moral, or might be immoral. That will decide what you do next. Maybe even a phone call will decide what you do next. But to open up the Bible in any point that the Bible read aligned and decide what to do next, or what to decide in your life, that’s superstition. The Holy Spirit is not available to everyone at every hour. The Holy Spirit has guaranteed His inspiration to avoid errors if a pope promises infallibly. He hasn’t guaranteed that to you or me. Luther, however, was determined to make everybody decide on his own religion. He literally said… When one of the princes asked him and said, or one of the following priests asked him and said, „Ask the Herr Doctor Luther, please, will you, why he says that such and such a quotation in the Bible has to be interpreted in such and such a way. Where does he take his wisdom from?‟ Luther had the messenger answer, „Tell him because I say so.‟ That was the way of theological argument in Martin Luther. He deliberately falsified the translation of the Bible in order to adopt the Bible to his own thinking, not in order to prove his own thoughts in the Bible. That was only pretense. He will translate the Bible so the Bible would just say what he wanted the Bible to say. He used the Bible in order to prove his own errors.

Question: What specifically did he do to bother books that he did not include in the Bible? Am I correct?

Answer: Letter of James, for example, about chastity. He condemned chastity, so he couldn’t put in The Letter of James that is very explicit on the purpose of chastity, virginity, and celibacy, as a matter of fact. Doesn’t call it celibacy. It had to go. Letter of James had to go. The Letter of James said something that the Herr Doctor Luther was not in agreement with, so The Letter of James couldn’t have been inspired. Out it went.

Question: So he became God?

Answer: Yeah. Every heretic is his own god. That’s what I said about the sin of Lucifer. Even Luther knew he wasn’t able to be like God. He wanted to be what he was all of his own saying.

And the result was, having instigated the rebellions, of course, now the whole thing became a political issue with the emperor, Charles V. You can read about all these historic happenings in excellent books, and books that will tell you much more than I could ever remember. How was it possible that he got popular? Simple. He told the local princes to confiscate churches. If you confiscate a church, with that building comes a lot of chalices, monstrances, reliquaries, vestments, and money, donations, income. In those days, a church was not just a building used for the Sunday assembly. A church was the center of a whole community. It would have its income because some of the finest wines in Austria today are still in property of the local parish church. Vineyard, vineyards, I’m sorry. I should have said vineyards. Some of the finest wines in Austria come from wineries or vineyards that are still property of the local parish priest. So if I buy the bottle of wine, whatever they make on that bottle of wine will end up in their parish church. You can imagine, in those days, telling a local prince that property is something to be condemned, Seventh Commandment goes out the window, that no Christian needs authority, Fourth Commandment goes out the window, and then, of course, adding his own lies, Eighth Commandment goes out the window, telling these princes that they were entitled to confiscate everything a monastery owned meant money. Lots of money. That was Luther’s success. He himself said by the time this whole thing was public all over Germany, he was one of the most hated men in Europe, which in those days meant in the whole world. He was one of the most hated personalities. Sometimes he would refuse to attend a very important conference because he was dead afraid of being seen in the streets. And he said to his beloved, wonderful wife, Katherine Bora, the ex-nun, he said to her, „If they can lay handle me, they’re going to kill me.‟ His only hope was the protection of the princes that he had made rich by confiscating the goods and properties of the church.

Martin Luther died the way he lived. On the evening of February 17th, 1648, he as usual, of course, went to bed stone drunk. He was found in the early morning, and contrary to some Protestant reports, there is other reports at the time that say they tried to revive him. He was found hanging on a rope in his bedroom. Martin, the great second Saint Paul, as some call him, Martin Luther, who destroyed Christendom in Germany, who lived like what he called Christ. Look up that word in the dictionary. Who lived lying, cheating, cursing, who substituted prayer with curse, celibacy with filth, who substituted any kind of virtue with any kind of vice, died in despair. Satanists always die in despair. He died hanging himself. He took the rope, hanged himself and went to hell.