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Having given a brief overview of the 4 Jubilee cycles from 1815 to the present, I believe it would be helpful to many of you to know a few more of the historical details that feed the prophecy of Revelation 13 and explain how it is unfolding today.
As I said earlier, the Pope had abolished the Jesuit Order (officially) in 1773 after the various Catholic monarchs of Europe were on the verge of revolt. They were ready to follow England's example two centuries earlier in 1531, when King Henry VIII formed the Church of England and made himself the head of that Church.
Largely as a result of King Henry's act in splitting from the Roman Church, the Jesuit Order was founded in 1534 by Ignatius Loyola. This Order was formally confirmed by Pope Paul III in 1540. It was set up as the Pope's "personal army" and included many non-priests among the professional classes. The Order was modeled after the Templars which had been suppressed in the early 1300's. The Templar knights went underground but joined other Orders, and their descendants fought the Moors, finally expelling them from Spain in 1492.
As a reward, these knights were given lands and estates. Loyola's grandfather was among them, so when Ignatius Loyola himself established the Jesuit Order in 1531, he modeled it after the Templars with its vows of absolute obedience and subjection. The late Malachi Martin, himself a Jesuit, quoted Ignatius Loyola's maxim: "I must be as a dead man's corpse without will or judgment" (The Jesuits, p. 197).
He writes further on page 162,
"And so was born what can be rightly called Jesuitism, the complete subjugation of all a man is, thinks, feels, and does to a practical idea achievable in the world around him, in absolute obedience and submission to the mind and decisions of the Roman Pope, the Vicar of Christ."
The full Jesuit Oath (as it existed at the time) is entered into the Congressional Record of Feb. 15, 1913, House Bill 1523. Part of it states,
"I do now renounce and disown any allegiance as due to any heretical king or state named Protestant or Liberals, or obedience to any of their laws, magistrates or officers. . .
"I do further promise and declare that I will, when opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly or openly, against all heretics, Protestants, and Liberals, as I am directed to do to extirpate and exterminate them from the face of the whole earth. . ."
By the mid-1700's, many European monarchs feared the Jesuits, their influence, and their willingness to murder if the Pope should order this. And so, as Martin writes on page 215,
"Between 1759 and 1762 all Jesuits in Portugal and its overseas dominions were arrested, transported by royal navy ships, and deposited on the shores of the papal states in Italy. All Jesuit property--houses, churches, colleges--was confiscated."
In 1762, France expelled the Jesuits. In 1767 the Jesuits were expelled from Spain and the Spanish dominions in America. Then Naples, Parma, and even Austria expelled them. When Pope Clement XIII died in 1769, he was replaced by Lorenzo Ganganelli, who took the name Pope Clement IX. In this election, the Bourbon family of France made it clear they would accept a pope only if he agreed to disband his army--the Jesuit Order.
The agreement was made, and the new pope finally abolished the Jesuit Order on July 21, 1773. The Jesuit General, Lorenzo Ricci, was arrested on Sept. 22, 1773 and officially died in prison, though it is likely that he was allowed to escape, coming to America to help in the revolt against Britain.
Many Jesuits were angry with the Pope, and the Pope was angry at France for forcing his hand. The Pope died on Sept. 22, 1774, the one-year anniversary of the Jesuit General's arrest. The Catholic Encyclopedia says that he died of "scorbutic and hemorrhoidal dispositions of long standing." Yet the same article continues,
"Notwithstanding the doctors' certificate, the 'Spanish party' and historical romancers attributed death to poison administered by the Jesuits."
Their claim was based on eyewitness accounts that his lips immediately turned black, his limbs covered with violet spots, his hair stuck to the pillow, his skin detached and stuck to the clothing, and no perfume could remove the stench that pervaded the room. Nonetheless, the official cause of death was by long-standing ill health.
The Jesuit Order, though officially suppressed by Rome, enjoyed safe haven in Prussia until it was reinstated in 1814 as the Congress of Vienna opened. (The result of this Congress was the agreement known as The Holy Alliance, signed in 1815.)
A few years after the Jesuit Order was abolished, a Jesuit professor of Canon Law at Ingolstadt University in Bavaria established the Order of the Illuminati. His name was Adam Weishaupt, and his new secret organization was founded on May 1, 1776. It is celebrated each year as "May Day." The Catholic Encyclopedia itself gives us some details of his life:
"As early as 16 February 1785 Weishaupt had fled from Ingolstadt, and in 1787 he settled at Gotha... After 1787 he renounced all active connexion with secret societies, and again drew near to the Church, displaying remarkable zeal in the building of the Catholic church at Gotha. He died on 18 November 1830, 'reconciled with the Catholic Church, which as a youthful professor, he had doomed to death and destruction'--as the chronicle of the Catholic parish in Gotha relates."
Weishaupt's organization had been discovered in 1787 when lightning struck a courier, and papers were discovered on his body. The Illuminati were then declared to be subversive and illegal, and itofficially ceased to exist. Weishaupt himself renounced his Illuminati as easily as he had renounced the Jesuit Order in 1774. Nonetheless, his order was behind the French Revolution, which began in 1789, taking vengeance on both the Pope and France for their roles in suppressing the Jesuit Order.
Out of the French Revolution came Napoleon, who captured Rome and took the Pope captive in 1798. The Pope at the time was Pius VI. He was taken to Tuscany, where he remained three months in the convent of St. Augustine in Sienna. An earthquake then destroyed the convent, and he was moved again. Cormenin says in his History of the Popes, Vol. 2, p. 416,
"They placed at once at his disposal a country house called 'The Lower Regions,' which induced sarcasms of the irreligious, and made them say that the holy father was at last in his place."
A simple study of this pope's character and actions would explain the sarcasm of the people, but it is our purpose only to show how the beast from the sea in Rev. 13 came to have a deadly head wound at the end of 1260 years. A few years later, when Napoleon wanted to become Emperor, he needed a Pope to legitimize his crown, and so he reinstated the next pope who replaced the one banished to "The Lower Regions." The new pope was elected March 4, 1800. He crowned Napoleon four years later in 1804.
Thus, the deadly wound of the papacy was healed in 1800, and the Jesuits were reinstated in 1814.