Books, Catholic, Eschatology, Fatima

Blessed Pope Paul VI on the ‘tail of the devil’ and ‘Smoke of Satan’ and the disintegration of the ‘Catholic world’

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“The tail of the devil is functioning in the disintegration of the Catholic world,” said Blessed Pope Paul VI on Oct. 13, 1977 in a formal address marking the 60th anniversary of the sixth and final Fatima apparition – the “Miracle of the Sun” – at Fatima, Portugal on Oct. 13, 1917. “The darkness of Satan has entered and spread throughout the Catholic Church even to its summit. Apostasy, the loss of the faith, is spreading throughout the world and into the highest levels within the Church.” Blessed Pope Paul VI’s remarks on Satan indwelling even the highest levels of the Catholic Church were reported on the following day – Oct. 14, 1977 – in the Milan-based daily Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

It was not the first time Blessed Pope Paul VI had sounded such a warning. More than five years earlier, in what is now known as his “Smoke of Satan” homily delivered on June 29, 1972 on the ninth anniversary of his coronation, the Pope gave the sermon that remains perhaps the most famous and most-argued about in terms of meaning sermons the Holy Father delivered during his 15-year-plus pontificate.

The are several difficulties in analyzing the homily, delivered by Blessed Pope Paul VI, as he celebrated the mass and the beginning of the tenth year of his pontificate as successor of Saint Peter, with 30  “porporati” (cardinals) present, including  Lord Cardinal Amleto Giovanni Cicognani,  dean of the sacred college; Lord Cardinal Luigi Traglia, the sub-dean; Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, substitute of the secretary of state; and Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, secretary of the council for the public affairs of the church.

The homily was  delivered in Italian, so it must be faithfully translated into English for many analysts to tackle it.

The translation here was provided by Father Stephanos Pedrano, O.S.B.,  a Benedictine monk and priest at Prince of Peace Abbey, a Benedictine monastery founded in 1958 in Oceanside, California, near San Diego. Pedrano was educated at the International Benedictine Athenaeum of St. Anselm in Rome and is fluent in Italian and the translation was rendered in 2006 at the request of Jimmy Akin, the Texas-born self-described nominal Protestant, who converted to Catholicism in 1992, and is now the senior apologist at Catholic Answers, the  El Cajon, California apostolate started in 1979 by attorney Karl Keating. You can read the English translation by Pedrano of the papal homily here from Akin’s Nov. 13, 2006 blog posting at http://jimmyakin.typepad.com/defensor_fidei/2006/11/the_smoke_of_sa.html

Aside from any translation challenges, Akin quite rightly points out the Vatican-issued Italian homily (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/homilies/1972/documents/hf_p-vi_hom_19720629_it.html) is by no means a verbatim account of Blessed Pope Paul VI’s words that day, as we might expect in such a document today, but rather for the most part a “narrative summary” of the Holy Father’s homily by an anonymous narrator, although certain statements are attributed with quotation marks as direct quotes from the Pope, the most famous being “from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.” Akin argues that even if the reporting is accurate, Blessed Pope Paul VI’s 1972 remark should not be interpreted as a literal assertion “claiming that there were Satanists in the Vatican,” but rather as symbolic representation of  the “cultural crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s” and secular influences among Catholics.

The enigmatic Malachi Martin had a more literal take, suggesting the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurred exactly nine years to the day earlier – on the day Blessed Pope Paul VI was coronated ­­on June 29, 1963 – on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived.

In The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the novel for children published in October 1950, the Anglican writer C.S. Lewis, one of the leading Christian apologists of the 20th century wrote, “There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.” Catholic writer Robert Hugh Benson, author of the 1907 apocalyptic and dystopian novel Lord of the World, (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/spiritual-warfare/) , who has been quoted approvingly by Pope Francis, would have agreed with Lewis.

There is perhaps no more mysterious figure in the Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century than Malachi Brendan Martin, born on July 23, 1921 in Ballylongford in County Kerry, Ireland, who we remember today mainly as a best-selling New York City writer of fiction and non-fiction, where in typical Martin style, the two genres were separated, if at all, by a very blurred line at times.

He was ordained a priest for the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1954. Was he an insider at the Second Vatican Council from 1962, as peritus (expert advisor) for German Jesuit Cardinal Augustin Bea, or more accurately a somewhat lesser figure, albeit a highly skilled linguist, translator and Semitic paleographer? Did he act as a shadowy agent or advocate for certain Jewish interests during the council? Did he read the Third Secret of Fatima? Was he a liberal or a conservative? An agent provocateur? A double agent? Was he a valid exorcist? Secretly ordained a bishop by Pope Pius XII? Was he laicized at his own request by Blessed Pope Paul VI in 1965, or just given dispensation from his vows of poverty and obedience, but not chastity? Was he chaste or a serial womanizer who seduced a string of women, including Susan Kaiser in 1964, as alleged by former TIME magazine Vatican correspondent Robert Blair Kaiser in his 2002 book Clerical Error: A True Story, published three years after Martin’s death? And speaking of Martin’s death, even that is somewhat shrouded in mystery. Martin died of a cerebral hemorrhage on July 27, 1999 due to a fall in his apartment in Manhattan, four days after his 78th birthday. More than one conspiracy theorist has argued Martin was pushed by an unseen hand.

Martin first made his claim about the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurring  on the day Blessed Pope Paul VI was coronated ­­on June 29, 1963 – on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived – in his 1990 purportedly non-fiction work, The Keys of This Blood: Pope John Paul II Versus Russia and the West for Control of the New World Order, where he wrote St. Pope John Paul II came “up against the irremovable presence of a malign strength in his own Vatican and in certain bishops’ chanceries. It was what knowledgeable Churchmen called the ‘superforce.’ Rumors, always difficult to verify, tied its installation to the beginning of [Blessed] Pope Paul VI’s reign in 1963. Indeed Paul had alluded somberly to ‘the smoke of Satan which has entered the Sanctuary’. . . an oblique reference to an enthronement ceremony by Satanists in the Vatican.”

He revisited the theme in his 1996 blockbuster fictional novel, Wind Swept House, where Martin wrote at length near the opening of the book about it:

“The Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer was effected within the Roman Catholic Citadel on June 29, 1963; a fitting date for the historic promise about to be fulfilled. As the principal agents of this Ceremonial  well knew, Satanist tradition had long predicted that the Time of the Prince would be ushered in at the moment when a Pope would take the name of the Apostle Paul. That requirement – the signal that the Availing Time had begun – had been accomplished just eight days before with the election of the latest Peter-in-the-Line.

“There had barely been time since the papal conclave had ended for the complex arrangements to be readied; but the Supreme Tribunal had decided there could be no more perfect date for the Enthronement of the Prince than this feast day of rhe twin princes of the Citadel, SS. Peter and Paul. And there could be no more perfect place than the Chapel of St. Paul itself, situated as it was so near to the Apostolic Palace.

“The complexity of the arrangements were dictated mainly by the nature of the Ceremonial Event to be enacted. Security was so tight in the grouping of Vatican buildings within which this gem of a Chapel lay that the full  panoply of the Ceremonial could not possibly escape detection here. If the aim was to be achieved – if the Ascent of the Prince was actually to be accomplished in the Availing Time – then every element of the Celebration of the Calvary Sacrifice must be turned on its head by the other and opposite Celebration. The sacred must be profaned. The profane must be adored. The unbloody representation of the Sacrifice of the Nameless Weakling on the Cross must be replaced by the supreme and bloody violation of the dignity of the Nameless One. Guilt must be accepted as innocence. Pain must give joy. Grace, repentance, pardon must all be drowned in an orgy of opposites. And it must all be done without mistakes. The sequence of events, the meaning of the words, the significance of the actions must all comprise the perfect enactment of sacrilege, the ultimate ritual of treachery. ”

 You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

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Catholicism, Pope Francis

Pope Francis in Bolivia: Crucifix, Communism and Controversy

sicklehammerPope Francis, since his election as supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church in March 2013, has always kept both his supporters and critics alike guessing by his flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants pastoral style. While doctrinally the Catholic theology he teaches is consistent with what occupants of the Cathedra Petri have taught, well, all the way back to St. Peter, his pastoral style as the shepherd of the flock of one billion-plus Catholics worldwide, is one-of-a-kind.

Pope Francis, of course, rocketed into the media stratosphere on July 28, 2013, little more than four months after being elected pope, when returning on his first foreign papal trip from Rio de Janeiro on the Alitalia flight to Rome July 28, at the end of his seven days in Brazil, wandered back to the press compartment in the rear of the plane and took questions from 21 reporters travelling aboard the papal aircraft for 81 minutes with nothing off the record. Francis stood for the entire time, answering in Italian and Spanish without notes and never refusing to take a question. The Pope’s answer to the last question became the worldwide take-away quote: “If a gay person is in eager search of God, who am I to judge them?” While Pope Francis’ answer shot around the world – for the most part without benefit of being prefaced by the question or contextually situated – it didn’t break any new Catholic theological ground or offer up a new heresy. What it did represent was a change in tone.

He also has a penchant for giving interviews to prominent atheist journalists, talking about and with atheists, picking up the phone to cold-call folks he wants to talk to, and meeting with Protestant evangelicals, with a special fondness it seems for Pentecostals and other charismatics.

And Pope Francis also misses going out for pizza. In an interview earlier this year, to mark the second anniversary of his election to the papacy March 13, with Valentina Alazraki, the veteran Vatican correspondent for Mexico’s Noticieros Televisa at Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican hotel where he has lived since his election as pope, he said the only thing he really misses about his old life pre-March 13, 2013 is the ability “to go out to a pizzeria and eat a pizza,” adding that even as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires he was free to roam the streets, particularly to visit parishes.

Almost half the population of Buenos Aires can rightfully claim  Italian heritage, so it is little surprise the Argentinian capital is so well-known for its Napoletana pizza. “The only thing I would like is to go out one day, without being recognized, and go to a pizzeria for a pizza,” Pope Francis said, comparing his life now to how it was when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. “In Buenos Aires I was a rover. I moved between parishes and certainly this habit has changed. It has been hard work to change. But you get used to it,”  Pope Francis told Alazraki.

But #coolpope also talks about the devil and dystopia. A lot. In his Monday homily at a mass at Casa Santa Marta on  Nov. 18, 2013, Pope Francis, made reference to the 1907 apocalyptic and dystopian novel Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury Edward White Benson and himself a former Anglican clergyman, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1903 and was ordained a priest in 1904, in which he writes of an imagined future where, in the words of Father Robert Barron, rector of University of Saint Mary of the Lake, also known as Mundelein Seminary, in Chicago, “Europe and America are dominated by a rationalist regime bent on making life as technologically convenient and politically harmonious as possible.” Sound familiar?

Of course for all those who think Pope Francis is #coolpope, there are no shortage of those who think he is Petrus Romanus (Peter the Roman). In that eschatological end times vision of unfolding history,  U.S. President Barack Obama often cast as the “Antichrist” and Pope Francis the “False Prophet.” This is the kind of thing you are not likely to hear discussed in polite company, except maybe in a dismissive fashion or to be held up to scorn and ridicule. Yet millions of people around the world believe in just such a scenario.

Within hours of Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI announcing his resignation Feb. 11, 2013, becoming the first pope to resign in almost 600 years (the last having been Pope Gregory XII, who resigned at the request of the Council of Constance on July 4, 1415 to help end the Great Western Schism) some folks were talking excitedly about “Petrus Romanus” (Peter the Roman) who would be history’s last pope, according to the Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes from 1139.

The fact Pope Francis was formerly Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina, and the name Peter appears nowhere in his former or current appellations, hasn’t much fazed Petrus Romanus true believers, who happily point out the first Pope to take the name Francis did so after St. Francis of Assisi, an Italian whose original name was Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, but nicknamed Francesco (“the Frenchman”) by his father. Pietro in Italian translates to Peter in English. Is this “Francesco di Pietro (Peter) di Bernardone, literally, ‘Peter the Roman,’” as Tom Horn and Cris Putnam, co-authors of the 2012 book Petrus Romanus: The Final Pope is Here, have argued? While their research was prodigious, in a sense, the result falls pretty far short of anything approaching coherent scholarship in any true academic sense. The strategy much of the time seems to be to dig up what you can and if you throw enough of these scattered historical documents against the wall of the “Romanists” something will stick.

You don’t have to be anti-Catholic, pro-Catholic, neutral or even much of a scholar to know the historical record has lots of less than flattering documents when it comes to the Catholic Church, many of them quite authentic. Marshaling such disparate sources into a coherent and convincing argument to support something approaching a thesis is something else again. Horn and Putnam are also stuck with the problem of time. Inconveniently for them, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI  resigned in February 2013 – just after their book was published – rather than slightly earlier in 2012 – before Petrus Romanus was printed – which would have fit on their timeline a bit better. The longer out in time Pope Francis’ pontificate runs, the farther removed it is from their graphic images of Rome burning.

While Horn and Putnam are careful not to fall into the trap personally of being “date setters,” which can cause one’s reputation to evaporate quite literally in a second if you’re wrong, they’re not above conveniently quoting other writers to make those kind of points at times, such as the ersatz Ronald L. Conte Jr., a self-described “Roman Catholic lay theologian and Bible translator” who publishes something called Catholic Planet. Conte, as Horn and Putnam noted in 2012, predicted that by “July 2013, Rome is destroyed when it is struck by a nuclear missile.” Conte also predicted, again parroted by Horn and Putnam, that after Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, the next pope would be Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze and that he would take the name Pius XIII. Wrong and wrong again. As prognosticators on the papacy, Horn and Putnam are no better than Conte. Their 2012 Top 10 list in Petrus Romanus to succeed Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI included Arinze; followed by Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who was dumped as secretary of state by Pope Francis in October 2013, seven months after he took office.

Rounding out their list in descending order for “Final Pope” were Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson; Italian Cardinal Angelo Scola; Italian Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi; Argentinian Cardinal Leonardo Sandri; Italian cardinal Ennio Antonelli; French Cardinal Jean-Louis Pierre Tauran; Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schönborn; and Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet.  While they did have an Argentinian cardinal on their list, unfortunately for Horn and Putnam it wasn’t Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

Maelmhaedhoc O’Morgair, born in Armagh in 1094, later to be known as St. Malachy, was canonized as a Roman Catholic saint on July 6, 1199 by Pope Clement III, and was the former archbishop of the Irish Archdiocese of Armagh and Diocese of Connor, and while in Rome in 1139 reportedly experienced what is considered by the Catholic Church to be an unapproved private revelation – if the incident even happened – in the form of an apparition of the 112 popes following Pope Celestine II, who died March 8, 1144. Malachy was said to have recorded his Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes (and antipopes) as a sequence of 112 cryptic Latin oracles or mottoes ending with the 112th and final Pope, Petrus Romanus, who in Malachy’s vision, is said to be on the Throne of the Apostle as history’s 112th and last pope. “In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will sit, Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations, and when these things are finished, the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge his people. The End.”

Malachy’s manuscript was supposedly deposited in what is now known as the Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum before he returned to Ireland as the papal legate. And there the manuscript is said to have sat, forgotten and gathering dust until re-discovered more than 400 years later by Arnold Wion, a Benedictine monk, who published them in 1595 as Lignum Vitae (Tree of Life). Or not. Given the very accurate description of popes up to 1590 and lack of accuracy after that year, “modern scholars have unanimously noted, in the 37 subsequent mottoes, a radical departure from the unfailing precision and appropriateness of the previous 74, and they are agreed that the Prophecy of Malachy is a counterfeit,” wrote John J. Driscoll in the Roman Catholic theological scholarship journal American Ecclesiastical Review in June 1944.

Historians generally conclude that the alleged prophecies are a fabrication written shortly before they were published, perhaps in a failed bid to see Italian Cardinal Girolamo Simoncelli elected Pope during the second conclave of Oct. 8, 1590 to Dec. 5, 1590 where Pope Gregory XIV was eventually elected as the successor of Pope Urban VII.

Pope Francis was in Bolivia yesterday, as part of his second papal trip to South America. A crucifix sculpted in the shape of a carved wooden hammer and sickle, combining Catholic and communist symbols, was presented to him during an official gift-exchange ceremony in La Paz by Bolivian President Evo Morales and lit up the blogosphere among Catholic commentators and reignited the Petrus Romanus crowd on the other end of the continuum. Morales also draped a medallion around over the pope’s neck that bore the hammer and sickle.

“No esta bien eso,” Pope Francis is said to have responded in Spanish to Morales, which translates to “that’s not right.” However, both Vatican and Bolivian officials played down the incident, saying no offence was intended.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi, himself a Jesuit, said later Pope Francis didn’t know the history behind the crucifix and that he was surprised to receive it. The crucifix was a replica of a similar crucifix based on a design by Luis Espinal, a Jesuit priest tortured and killed by Bolivia’s right-wing militia paramilitary death squads in 1980 to whom Pope Francis paid tribute to earlier in this trip, stopping to deliver a prayer at the site of his assassination, in remembrance of “a brother of ours, the victim of those who did not want him to fight for freedom in Bolivia.”

Bolivia’s communications minister, Marianela Paco, told Bolivian radio: “The sickle evokes the peasant, the hammer the carpenter, representing humble workers, God’s people,” adding there was “no other” motive behind the gift.

Pope Francis may have thought Morales’ overtly linking the crucifix to communism an inappropriate over-the-top grandstanding  gesture, but within hours of the crucifix incident, “Pope Francis Declares Lucifer as God,” a three-minute and 15-second YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcpVrtv2t-M) , published July 4 by “Souldier4Christ” was showing up on my Facebook news feed with the controversial crucifix story. The introduction of the short video spells declaration as “decleration,” happened as “happend,” exactly as “exaclty” and Corinthians as “Corinthains.” All in the first 2:15. Spelling apparently is not Soldier’s forte. Call me old fashioned, but I’m not inclined to put much store in the theology or Latin translation of those who can’t spell much less think clearly. Thanks, anyway Facebook.

Mind you, none other than Blessed Pope Paul VI himself delivered his now famous “Smoke of Satan” homily on June 29, 1972 on the ninth anniversary of his coronation, which remains perhaps the most famous and most-argued about in terms of meaning sermons the Holy Father delivered during his 15-year-plus pontificate, while the enigmatic Malachi Martin, a Jesuit priest and best-selling author suggested the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurred exactly nine years to the day earlier – on the day Blessed Pope Paul VI was coronated ­­on June 29, 1963 – on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived. But however controversial and debatable Blessed Pope Paul VI and Father Martin’s musings on Lucifer and the Vatican were and remain, no one is likely to suggest they were anything but clear thinkers who could spell correctly and that spiritual warfare is always a very real and clear and present danger for the Church.

As the Anglican writer C.S. Lewis, one of the leading Christian apologists of the 20th century, wrote in The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the novel for children published in October 1950,“There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.” Catholic writer Robert Hugh Benson, author of the 1907 apocalyptic and dystopian novel Lord of the World, (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/spiritual-warfare/) , who has been quoted approvingly by Pope Francis, would have agreed with Lewis.

Pope Francis is now in Paraguay, the third and final country on his second tour of Latin America since becoming Pope, which ends on Monday. The eight-day tour began in Ecuador July 5.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

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Books, Catholicism, Eschatology

Blessed Pope Paul VI’s famous ‘Smoke of Satan’ homily of June 29, 1972: The enigmatic Malachi Martin would later suggest the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurred exactly nine years to the day earlier on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived on June 29, 1963

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More than 42 years after it was delivered on June 29, 1972, the “Smoke of Satan” homily given by Blessed Pope Paul VI on the ninth anniversary of his coronation remains perhaps the most famous and most-argued about in terms of meaning sermons the Holy Father delivered during his 15-year-plus pontificate.

The are several difficulties in analyzing the homily, delivered by Blessed Pope Paul VI, as he celebrated the mass and the beginning of the tenth year of his pontificate as successor of Saint Peter, with 30  “porporati” (cardinals) present, including  Lord Cardinal Amleto Giovanni Cicognani,  dean of the sacred college; Lord Cardinal Luigi Traglia, the sub-dean; Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, substitute of the secretary of state; and Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, secretary of the council for the public affairs of the church.

The homily was  delivered in Italian, so it must be faithfully translated into English for many analysts to tackle it.

The translation here was provided by Father Stephanos Pedrano, O.S.B.,  a Benedictine monk and priest at Prince of Peace Abbey, a Benedictine monastery founded in 1958 in Oceanside, California, near San Diego. Pedrano was educated at the International Benedictine Athenaeum of St. Anselm in Rome and is fluent in Italian and the translation was rendered in 2006 at the request of Jimmy Akin, the Texas-born self-described nominal Protestant, who converted to Catholicism in 1992, and is now the senior apologist at Catholic Answers, the  El Cajon, California apostolate started in 1979 by attorney Karl Keating. You can read the English translation by Pedrano of the papal homily here from Akin’s Nov. 13, 2006 blog posting at http://jimmyakin.typepad.com/defensor_fidei/2006/11/the_smoke_of_sa.html

Aside from any translation challenges, Akin quite rightly points out the Vatican-issued Italian homily (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/homilies/1972/documents/hf_p-vi_hom_19720629_it.html) is by no means a verbatim account of Blessed Pope Paul VI’s words that day, as we might expect in such a document today, but rather for the most part a “narrative summary” of the Holy Father’s homily by an anonymous narrator, although certain statements are attributed with quotation marks as direct quotes from the Pope, the most famous being “from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.” Akin argues that even if the reporting is accurate, Blessed Pope Paul VI’s 1972 remark should not be interpreted as a literal assertion “claiming that there were Satanists in the Vatican,” but rather as symbolic representation of  the “cultural crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s” and secular influences among Catholics.

The enigmatic Malachi Martin had a more literal take, suggesting the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurred exactly nine years to the day earlier – on the day Blessed Pope Paul VI was coronated ­­on June 29, 1963 – on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived.

In The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the novel for children published in October 1950, the Anglican writer C.S. Lewis, one of the leading Christian apologists of the 20th century wrote, “There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.” Catholic writer Robert Hugh Benson, author of the 1907 apocalyptic and dystopian novel Lord of the World, (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/spiritual-warfare/) , who has been quoted approvingly by Pope Francis, would have agreed with Lewis.

There is perhaps no more mysterious figure in the Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century than Malachi Brendan Martin, born on July 23, 1921 in Ballylongford in County Kerry, Ireland, who we remember today mainly as a best-selling New York City writer of fiction and non-fiction, where in typical Martin style, the two genres were separated, if at all, by a very blurred line at times.

He was ordained a priest for the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1954. Was he an insider at the Second Vatican Council from 1962, as peritus (expert advisor) for German Jesuit Cardinal Augustin Bea, or more accurately a somewhat lesser figure, albeit a highly skilled linguist, translator and Semitic paleographer? Did he act as a shadowy agent or advocate for certain Jewish interests during the council? Did he read the Third Secret of Fatima? Was he a liberal or a conservative? An agent provocateur? A double agent? Was he a valid exorcist? Secretly ordained a bishop by Pope Pius XII? Was he laicized at his own request by Blessed Pope Paul VI in 1965, or just given  dispensation from his vows of poverty and obedience, but not chastity? Was he chaste or a serial womanizer who seduced a string of women, including Susan Kaiser in 1964, as alleged by former TIME magazine Vatican correspondent Robert Blair Kaiser in his 2002 book Clerical Error: A True Story, published three years after Martin’s death? And speaking of Martin’s death, even that is somewhat shrouded in mystery. Martin died of a cerebral hemorrhage on July 27, 1999 due to a fall in his apartment in Manhattan, four days after his 78th birthday. More than one conspiracy theorist has argued Martin was pushed by an unseen hand.

Martin first made his claim about the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurring  on the day Blessed Pope Paul VI was coronated ­­on June 29, 1963 – on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived – in his 1990 purportedly non-fiction work, The Keys of This Blood: Pope John Paul II Versus Russia and the West for Control of the New World Order, where he wrote St. Pope John Paul II came “up against the irremovable presence of a malign strength in his own Vatican and in certain bishops’ chanceries. It was what knowledgeable Churchmen called the ‘superforce.’ Rumors, always difficult to verify, tied its installation to the beginning of [Blessed] Pope Paul VI’s reign in 1963. Indeed Paul had alluded somberly to ‘the smoke of Satan which has entered the Sanctuary’. . . an oblique reference to an enthronement ceremony by Satanists in the Vatican.”

He revisited the theme in his 1996 blockbuster fictional novel, Wind Swept House, where Martin wrote at length near the opening of the book about it:

“The Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer was effected within the Roman Catholic Citadel on June 29, 1963; a fitting date for the historic promise about to be fulfilled. As the principal agents of this Ceremonial  well knew, Satanist tradition had long predicted that the Time of the Prince would be ushered in at the moment when a Pope would take the name of the Apostle Paul. That requirement – the signal that the Availing Time had begun – had been accomplished just eight days before with the election of the latest Peter-in-the-Line.

“There had barely been time since the papal Conclave had ended for the complex arrangements to be readied; but the Supreme Tribunal had decided there could be no more perfect date for the Enthronement of the Prince than this feast day of rhe twin princes of the Citadel, SS. Peter and Paul. And there could be no more perfect place than the Chapel of St. Paul itself, situated as it was so near to the Apostolic Palace.

“The complexity of the arrangements were dictated mainly by the nature of the Ceremonial Event to be enacted. Security was so tight in the grouping of Vatican buildings within which this gem of a Chapel lay that the full  panoply of the Ceremonial could not possibly escape detection here. If the aim was to be achieved – if the Ascent of the Prince was actually to be accomplished in the Availing Time – then every element of the Celebration of the Calvary Sacrifice must be turned on its head by the other and opposite Celebration. The sacred must be profaned. The profane must be adored. The unbloody representation of the Sacrifice of the Nameless Weakling on the Cross must be replaced by the supreme and bloody violation of the dignity of the Nameless One. Guilt must be accepted as innocence. Pain must give joy. Grace, repentance, pardon must all be drowned in an orgy of opposites. And it must all be done without mistakes. The sequence of events, the meaning of the words, the significance of the actions must all comprise the perfect enactment of sacrilege, the ultimate ritual of treachery. ”

 You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

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