mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
lands, whether Protestant or Catholic, were to be returned to whomever
owned them in a year arbitrarily chosen, which happened to be
1624.
For the first time since Martin Luther questioned papal authority in
1517, European monarchs accepted that the religious divide was irreparable.
There would be no forcing the heretics back to the fold of the
Mother Church. Heretics, the treaty acknowledged, were here to stay
and were rich and powerful to boot. It was a humiliating acknowledgment
for Pope Innocent X.
When Innocent heard the terms of the peace treaty, he was furious.
He wanted heretics converted, not tolerated, in Germany. And according
to the treaty, the church had to hand over to Protestants numerous
territories it had conquered since 1624—three archbishoprics and thirteen
bishoprics, a total of sixteen huge territories including thousands of
churches, monasteries, and pious foundations.
The papal envoy to the negotiations, Monsignor Fabio Chigi, stated
that the Austrian ambassador, Count Maximilian von Trauttmansdorff,
would sign over Saint Peter’s Basilica itself to the Protestants if they
asked for it. No one at the table seemed to take the church seriously.
Chigi wrote, “To pass the time, these gentlemen play with bishoprics
and monasteries as boys play with nuts and marbles.” 15
For centuries, the Vatican had been the great negotiator, the mediator
of European wars. Not only was Innocent not invited to mediate the
treaty, it was signed over his shrieking protests. Times were changing.
Nation-states were rising even as the secular importance of the papacy
fell. The Treaty of Westphalia was a watershed event for the Vatican,
marking the end of its diplomatic hegemony and signaling the rise of
the modern state. Sadly, everyone knew that Innocent couldn’t keep his
own fractious family members from making war on one another, much
less European nations.
Innocent issued a bull dated November 20, 1648, declaring the Treaty
of Westphalia “null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate,
inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time.” 16 He was politely
ignored. The Catholic German nations, eager to clean up the debris and
move forward, didn’t want the pope making any trouble about the
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