Medieval ‘Social Justice’ With a Contemporary Twist

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Can one impeach a witch, a sorcerer or a dead person? In the Middle Ages, such “impeachments” were a fact of the “social justice” mindset of the time. When one considers “the level to which alchemy and pagan superstition (climate change, DEI, etc.) have become predominant” in today’s cultural and political milieu, writes panoptic scholar Robert Orr (personal communication), it might be appropriate to revive the tradition, this time with just cause. There are a myriad of candidates on the political stage ripe for impeachment and arraignment, including those at the very top of the hierarchy. As Orr puts it, “maybe impeaching the corpse fronting for the Demsheviks isn’t that strange an idea.” 

One thinks of the famous, or infamous, Cadaver Synod held in 897 in which the corpse of Pope Formosus, who had been dead for over half a year, was exhumed from its sarcophagus and brought to the Basilica of St John Lateran in Rome to be put on trial. According to Joseph Dispenza’s fascinating The Death and Trial of Pope Formosus, the cadaver was clad in papal vestments, seated on a throne,  provided with a church officer to speak on his behalf, and forced to answer the charges—as best he could—of perjury, defilement of church doctrine, and illegal accession to the pontifical throne. This latter was a crucial accusation, the assumption by apostolic fraud of a position to which he was not entitled. Formosus was declared guilty on all counts, all his judgments, appointments and decretals annulled, the papal vestments stripped from the body, and the corpse flung into the Tiber. 

Of course, the accused in the current hypothetical case is in a condition of terminal decrepitude and is regarded as “dead” only metaphorically. He may be depicted as evil, malevolent, nasty, corrupt, a practitioner of the black arts and a master of necromantic ritual, a champion of the pishogue, and thus morally “dead.”  In any event, many believe he should be lashed to the Constitutional stake. 

Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution states that “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion,” a phrase known as the “Guarantee Clause.” As Orr explains, the meaning is clear: the federal government must intervene if a state is attacked by another country. The federal government is legally and constitutionally bound to keep invaders out, not allow—and certainly not invite—them in. Ten to twenty million illegal migrants overwhelming a nation’s borders is clearly an invasion, a cataclysm such as was foretold in Jean Raspail’s harrowing 1987 The Camp of the Saints, which should have alerted us to what was coming. Those who have permitted such an onslaught to happen have surely committed an impeachable offense—no less than General Mark Milley confabulating against Trump with his Chinese counterpart General Li Zuocheng, according to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s blockbuster Peril. If true, such an act would constitute treason and its perpetrator would have to be indicted.

Orr also points to the Third Amendment, which states: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” The settling of vast numbers of migrants, which Trump has called a “crisis,” a “war,” and an “invasion,” in places like Springfield, Ohio, critically burdening and often terrifying the local population, may qualify as impeachable as well. These interlopers may be viewed as “soldiers” in terms of their gradually spreading and severely destabilizing effect on the nation, precisely as Jean Raspail recognized. (One must be skeptical of the usual run of suborned media “fact-checkers” who deny or downplay the urgency of the situation.) One thinks, too, of the immense surge of illegals crossing the Canadian border into small towns like Swanton, Vermont and Champlain, New York—an invasion in everything but name. Orr compellingly argues that If Americans took their Constitution seriously, several recent presidents—Bush fils, Obama and Biden—would all have been impeached and cashiered.

The “social justice” protocol of the Middle Ages that saw witches and heretics tried in ecclesiastical courts and burned at the stake for consorting with the devil, and ostensibly for the purification of their immortal souls, is rightly understood as a perversion of actual justice. Impeachment, however, again rightly understood, may be conceived as the political displacement and secular equivalent of the medieval auto-da-fe, with reference to the corrupt, transgressive and destructive behavior of select members of the political elite, the witches and warlocks of the administrative state, in particular the Carters, Clintons, Obamas and Bidens of the progressivist sodality who must be held to account for their nation-killing spells, policies, enactments, and antics. 

True, as Michael Frassetto writes in The Great Medieval Heretics, the actions of the “great heretics” transformed the religious intolerance of medieval Europe and gradually prepared the way for a more enlightened and compassionate dispensation to come. By contrast, the political establishment in the West today is deeply heretical in the pejorative sense, disrupting public order, abusing the spirit of the oath of office, engaging in serial barratry, ruthlessly persecuting and imprisoning perceived enemies, and imposing a regime of censorship, poverty, social control and punitive legislation upon the citizenry it is supposed to serve.

The social justice of the Middle Ages needs to be updated and redefined as the political justice of the current scene, sparing the innocent, as it should go without saying (read: Donald Trump), and focusing on those who should be justifiably purged, whether with effective censure, removal of privileges, or merited jail sentences. Mutatis mutandis, the iniquities of Formosus are pervasive in contemporary form and should be decisively dealt with. This, we might say, is what is now at stake.