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| Notes on the History of the Order |
Historically, St. Jerome (San Girolamo in Italian) was a Church Father from the 4th century, an extremely strict and learned man, a polemist and Church historian, responsible for the revision of the Latin translation of the Gospels and for the actual official Latin translation of the Old Testament. He also promoted female monasteries to moralize the lax (in his opinion at least) society of the time. Was an hermit in the Near Orient for a part of his life.
Tipical
iconographic elements of the saint are: the dove (symbolizing inspiration),
the tame lion, the skull and the hourglass. a classic depiction of the saint
is the man himself, naked in the desert, as he beats his breast with a stone
in act of repentance in the shadow of the Cross.
All this symbols will turn in handy when detailing the Order.
We now know what the Sword of St. Jerome looks like - a chunk of rock.
The saint was the inspirator of many hermit-oriented orders in both Italy and Spain during the 14th century.
Spanish
Hermits of St. Jerome - a Spanish order founded in 1373 in Lupiana (Spain),
disbanded in the 15th century.
Important Note: an attempt was made in 1957 to restore the Order in Segovia.
Poor
Hermits of St. Jerome of the Pisa Congregation - founded in 1377 in Pisa
(Italy), and approved in 1567. Disbanded in 1933
Hermits
of St. Jerome of the Fiesole Congregation - founded in 1360 in Fiesole
(Italy), suppressed by Clemente IX in 1668
Jeromites
of the Observation, or of Lombardy - founded 1424, died out after 1595.
The Order of the Sword was, according to the Compendium, disbanded in the 19th century - most probably after 1861, the year of Italian Unification, which caused among other things, an order of cancellation of all monastic orders, under pope Pius IX - and survived afterwards as a secret society drawing its members from the Catholic (?) Church ranks. The Pisa congregation, being the only with an official imprimatur and the longest-surviving of the real-life groups, looks like the best prospect for fitting the bill.
A few decades discrepancy from disbanding act to actual shutting down of the operation is not so unlikely - the organization being large and complex, they probably needed time for wrapping up the whole thing: filing all the material into the Z Collection, verifying funds and possessions and all the rest.
They were also gearing the whole organization for underground operativity, so they bought time.
Now, note that 1933 was a strange year.
The Vatican signed a few years before a concordate with the Italian Fascist Regime, and as we saw in past documents (please refer to the Emerald Mirror data for more info) the Regime had its own agenda as far as the occult was concerned.
And the Regime had also a very hard to handle Ally: 1933 is the year of the great opening towards Hitler's Germany, the first sign that Mussolini is falling under the spell of the German dictator.
Any well prepared Church member with eyes to see could have been able to predict, in the early '30s, the fact that the wind was changing: in a few years, the Spanish Civil War (1936) would show that a priest's habit is not a guarantee of immunity.
One man probably did it.
If the Order of St. Jerome shuts down definitively in 1933, then it shuts down under pope Pius XI.
This marks an uncanny abundance of Piuses in the Order's history, as already Pius V, VII and IX have been mentioned in these documents and played, in one way or the other, their part in the history of the Order.
Pope Pius XI was born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti, in Desio, in the Lombardic Alps, in 1857, a man of humble origins.
holding
a Law degree and one in Philosophy
member
of the Saint Thomas Aquinas Academy (Dominicans)
former
teacher
researcher
(1907) and then director of the Ambrosian Library (the Catholic Library of
Milan), and deputy-director of the Vatican Library
the
man that opens the Ambrosian Library to extramural researchers and
orders
the re-cataloguing of the major religious libraries in Northern Italy
Vatican
man in the Poland-Russia face-off of 1919
as
bishop of Milan founds there a Catholic University
And as a hobby, he goes mountaneering in the Alps, exploring many previously unmapped areas and opening a few ways that still carry his name.
By comparison with data available somewhere else in this archive, Cardinal Ratti is clearly a St. Jerome man.
Head-hunted when he joined the Academy, probably, his curriculum of researches, travels and "adventuring" fits perfectly and makes perfect sense if we see him as a Pilgrim, probably one of the last generation of the Order's "cowboy" period; one of the men that are working to collect and save all that can be found before the order goes to ground.
As a pope, he is the right man, in the right place, at the right moment.
Historically, Pius XI disbanded a number of religious groups for no apparent reasons. It is today an accepted fact that he disbanded the Azione Cattolica (a politically-active lay movement) to save its members from the attacks (=phisical violence, arrest) of the Fascists.
The same he probably did with the Order, enforcing the Pius IX act, to keep them out of harms way as best as he could while they quietly disappeared.
Remember, the order had been working in this sense the last few decades - they were ready, and only needed a man in a high place to cover up their tracks.
At the same time, he still helped building and reinforcing the new, clandestine Order - he increased the funding of catholic research institutes, he promoted the missionary movement, creating missions in Africa, Asia, South America - the largest missionary expansion in the Church's history - and including the veterans of the Benedectine order in the initiative.
Everything fits perfectly.
The question of how much the Vatican knows today is still open, though.
It's pretty sure that if really Pius XI was part of the conspiracy, the tracks leading to St. Jerome from the Curch's side are a minimum and covered real well.
On the other hand, the Order has to have someone pretty high up in the power structure to operate at best.
What if each pontifex is informed of the Order's existance as he gets the job, all part of a big fat folder including details on the Third Secret of Fatima and about that monastery in Washington State that Tom Robbins wrote about?
The Order is supposedly commanded by a monk living somewhere in an Alpine monastery. If we use St. Michael here in the Susa Valley, the guy's probably a Dominican or a Rosminian.
Both orders are perfect for the job - both rules are based on hard work and study, both orders share a history of library building and preservations (Dominicans) and teaching (Rosminians).
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