“Pope Leo spoke of Nicholas of Cusa in a most positive way. Nicholas of Cusa was a Cardinal in the Church, when there were challenges like we are facing today in Europe particularly. Nicholas of Cusa was a catalyst of beginning the Renaissance; and it’s my opinion that Nicholas of Cusa was for the 15th Century what Lyndon LaRouche was and is for the 20th and 21st Centuries. Lyn LaRouche was also a renaissance man. Both he and Nicholas of Cusa were geniuses and contributed to the world’s intellectual, financial, and human development of us humans. Both believed in the unity of humanity; that we are all one. That means that what’s good for you needs to be good for me and vice versa, or it’s not any good.”
These were the opening words of an extraordinary presentation given by Rev. Dr. Harry J. Bury, for 70 years a Roman Catholic priest and a lifelong peace activist, to the 126th consecutive weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition on Friday, Oct. 31.
One week earlier, on Oct. 25, Pope Leo XIV had stunned the Catholic world—and many knowledgeable circles beyond—by delivering a five-minute allocution before tens of thousands of pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican for the Jubilee Audience, in which he brought Cardinal Nicholas Cusa back to life. Cusa, one of the towering intellectual giants who ushered in the Renaissance and the era of modern science, has been maligned literally for centuries, within the Catholic Church and without, cast aside by the oligarchical Aristotelian currents who fear the power of his key breakthroughs, especially the method of the Coincidence of Opposites for overcoming apparent contradictions with a higher-order concept of the One which embraces the Many.
Nothing more urgently requires such an approach than the terrifying strategic danger posed by the drive of the bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system and its NATO arm, for nuclear showdown against Russia. Today, the only thing standing between Mankind and our looming self-annihilation is the insane, defective doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), in which one side is deterred from attacking the other, only by the knowledge that it, too, will be fully destroyed by the enemy. Lyndon LaRouche elaborated a totally different approach, that of Mutually Assured Survival, built around a new international security and development architecture in which the welfare of each depends on the welfare of all. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche has repeatedly insisted, we must all think and act, first and foremost, as the One Humanity.
This is Cusa’s method of the Coincidence of Opposites.
Father Bury explained: “Nicholas of Cusa and Lyndon LaRouche were saying: We can all learn; we can all grow; we can all change. There is hope for the human race.
“Both of them [Cusa and LaRouche] encouraged people to think outside the box; to think differently. And so, they had enemies. The enemies spoke up and convinced people that Nicholas of Cusa, a Cardinal, was really not a good person. They slandered him. So, he was never canonized a saint by the Church. And Lyndon LaRouche experienced the same thing. He was slandered and they lied about him. It led people to believe that he was evil. So, he went to prison. They both suffered a great deal, but they weren’t discouraged. Despite what they went through, both of them had hope. Both of them saw that humanity could make changes for the good.
“So, they bring hope to the world, and we’re to carry that on, now that both Nicholas of Cusa and Lyndon LaRouche have passed on,” the 95-year-old Bury told the gathering of hundreds from more than 30 nations around the world.
The time has indeed come to exonerate both Nicholas of Cusa and Lyndon LaRouche, the men and their ideas. The future will thank us for it.
