20. Vatican II

Novus Ordo Missae

Pope John XXIII (1881 – 1963) and Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI  (1897 – 1978).

Pope John XXIII (1881 – 1963) and Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI (1897 – 1978).

The infiltration of the Vatican, as prescribed in the Alta Vendita, which began under Mazzini and the OTO’s Cardinal Rampolla, took full force with the advent of the Second Vatican Council, known as Vatican II, and flourished into a full-blown “unholy alliance” between the Vatican, Catholic Traditionalists, the Mafia and the CIA. As reported by Dr. P. Rama Coomaraswamy—the son of Ananda Coomaraswamy, who was one of the founders of the Traditionalist School, following René Guénon—Mark Winckler, an interpreter working at the Vatican, tells of a meeting he had with Msgr. Sergio Pignedoli (1910 – 1980), a man strongly suspected of connections to the Freemasons. Considered a towering figure in the Catholic Church, Pignedoli was the closest ally and confidant of Cardinal Montini (1897 – 1978). Pignedoli told Winckler in 1944 that the failed Masonic plan to have Cardinal Rampolla elected pope in 1903 would be corrected when they elected Montini, who would become Pope Paul VI, and who would bring the Church into the “modern age.” As Montini had once stated, with regard to the Freemasons, that “another generation will not pass before peace is established between these two religious societies.”[1]

Taking place in a series of gatherings until 1965, when it was concluded under Paul VI, Vatican II had over two thousand attendees, including Protestant, Orthodox, and other Christian observers. Of those who took part in the council’s opening session, four have become popes: in addition to Pope Paul VI were Bishop Albino Luciani, the future John Paul I; Bishop Karol Wojtyla, who became John Paul II; and Joseph Ratzinger, who became Benedict XVI. Several changes resulted from the council, including ecumenical efforts towards dialogue with other religions. Vatican II was officially convened by Pope John XXIII (1881 – 1963) in 1962, and implementing its numerous reforms, including the easing of the Church’s stance towards Freemasonry. Born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, John XXIII, had been interested in Rudolf Steiner and was reported to have visited the Masonic Grand Lodge in Paris every Thursday.[2] Roncalli believed in the need to eliminate factional conflicts of mankind in order to bring the various races, political groups and religious creeds into some kind of working unity. Only in this way could the world be assured of any permanent peace. Yves Marsaudon, Knight of Malta and State Master, Supreme Council of France, which supported the Martinist-originated Rectified Scottish Rite, was close to John XXIII and said of him, “The Sense of universalism that is rampant in Rome these days is very close to our purpose of existence… With all our hearts we support the ‘Revolution of John XXIII.’”[3] Marsaudon dedicated his book Ecumenism as seen by a Traditionalist Freemason to Pope John XXIII and his advisor and successor Pope Paul VI.

Pope Paul VI’s reputed lover Paolo Carlini (1922 – 1979)

Pope Paul VI’s reputed lover Paolo Carlini (1922 – 1979)

According to Alexis Bugnolo, Paul VI belonged to a network of consecrations that could be traced back to Cardinal Rampolla, and who served as Leo XIII’s secretary of state.[4] Paul VI was born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini, of the Montini family who were listed as Jewish in the Golden Book of Noble Italian Heritage.[5] Montini was said to be “close to James [Jesus] Angleton,” the CIA’s counter-intelligence chief. When Montini was archbishop of Milan, Angleton was able to “infiltrate and pretty much co-opt the Italian security services.” In turn, the CIA also supported Montini’s particular interest in orphanages.[6] Montini was widely reputed to be a homosexual, and his long-time lover was suspected to have been the Italian actor, Paolo Carlini. Some clerics even suspected that the took the Pontifical name of Paul as a secret tribute to Carlini, who was a frequent visitor to the Papal apartment.[7]

Pope Paul VI made extensive contributions to Mariology during his pontificate. He spoke repeatedly to Marian conventions and mariological meetings, visited Marian shrines and issued three Marian encyclicals. In his inaugural encyclical Ecclesiam suam (section below), the pope called Mary the ideal of Christian perfection. He regards “devotion to the Mother of God as of paramount importance in living the life of the Gospel.”[8] Following his famous predecessor Saint Ambrose of Milan, he named Mary as the Mother of the Church during the Second Vatican Council. In 1970, he named the Marrano nun Teresa of Avila a “Doctor of the Church.”

The primary accomplishment of Paul VI was to have continued Vatican II, and implementing its numerous reforms, including the easing of the Church’s stance towards Freemasonry. Archbishop Annibale Bugnini (1912 – 1982) was appointed by Paul VI to create a new liturgy. In a bold reference to the Masonic dictum found on the reverse side of the American dollar bill, the name of his new liturgy was the Novus Ordo Missae, Latin for “New Order of Mass.” After the New Order worship service was formulated, Dr. Smith, the Lutheran representative, publicly boasted, “We have finished the work that Martin Luther began.”[9] Bugnini explained his aim as being to redesign the New Mass so as “to strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren, that is, for the Protestants.”[10]

Bugnini was eventually exiled to Iran by Paul VI due to allegations that he was a Freemason.[11] But Paul VI himself hinted at a similar allegiance in a speech to the UN assembly in New York, March 6, 1967:

 

Your vocation is to bring not just some people, but all people together as brothers. Who can fail to see the need and importance of thus gradually coming to the establishment of a ‘world authority’ capable of taking effective action on the juridical and political plane. Delegates to international organization, public officials, gentlemen of the press, teachers and educators, all of you, must realize that you have your part to play in the construction of a New World Order.

 

Paul VI surrounded himself with Freemasons, including Secretary of State Cardinal Jean Villot; Pasquale Macchi, who was Pope Paul’s Prelate of Honour and Private Secretary until he was excommunicated for heresy but reinstated by Villot and made a cardinal; and Cardinal Augustin Bea.[12] Cardinal Bea was a German Jesuit priest and scholar who served as the personal confessor of Pius XII, “the most Marian Pope in Church history,” who had been consecrated a bishop by Cardinal Rampolla’s close friend Benedict XV, in 1917, the very day of the first reported apparitions at Fatima.[13] In 1959, John XXIII made him a cardinal of the Catholic Church.

Nostra aetate

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel with New York Cardinal Augustine Bea.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel with New York Cardinal Augustine Bea.

Cardinal Francis Spellman

Cardinal Francis Spellman

Cardinal Bea, who was the author of The Church and the Jewish People (1966), which greatly influenced Christian-Jewish relations during Vatican II in the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions,” Nostra aetate, which repudiated anti-Semitism. The Nostra aetate was the result of Bea’s extensive discussions with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and representatives of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Rabbi Heschel was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century. Heschel was a professor of Jewish Kabbalah and Hasidism of the Sabbatean-influenced Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA), which was founded with the help of an endowment and building from Jacob Schiff, and headed by Solomon Schechter, a Frankist and founder of the American Conservative Movement. Heschel was actively participated in the Civil Rights movement, and walked with Dr. Martin Luther King in the third Selma to Montgomery march in 1965.

Also founded with the assistance of Jacob Schiff, the AJC is one of the oldest Jewish advocacy organizations and, according to The New York Times, is “widely regarded as the dean of American Jewish organizations.”[14] The AJC’s flagship publication was Commentary Magazine, founded in 1945, and then under the editorship of Norman Podhoretz, a protégé of Lionel Trilling, who was one of the “non-communist left” agents implicated by Frances Stonor Saunders as part of the CIA’s “Cultural Cold War.” Historian Richard Pells concludes, that “no other journal of the past half century has been so consistently influential, or so central to the major debates that have transformed the political and intellectual life of the United States.”[15] Also contributing to Commentary were Hannah Arendt, as well as Sidney Hook and Irving Kristol, both members of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Kristol was the editor Encounter magazine, which was outed as a CIA front in Ramparts in 1967.

The AJC and Rabbi Heschel as its leading figure entered a period of extensive discussions with Bea, as head of the head of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, a working relationship which was to continue through throughout the sessions of Vatican II. Bea invited the AJC to submit detailed research documentation on the presence of anti-Jewish elements in Catholic teachings. That such documentation would be useful was established through consultations with numerous advisors in Americas, Europe, and Israel, involving Jewish scholars representing Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative Judaism. Bea met with Heschel and Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School in November 1961, and draw up a set of recommendations for their adoption by his secretariat.[16] On October 17, 1963, a front-page article in the New York Times stated that the draft of a document to acknowledge the Jewish roots of the Church, reject the idea that the Jews were responsible for death of Jesus, and that the covenant between God and the Jews as the Chosen People is still in binding. In 1963, Paul VI held secret talks with Heschel to convince him to accept the recommendations. The Nostra aetate was approved on October 28, 1965, and Pope Paul VI promulgated the text immediately as official church doctrine.[17]

John Courtney Murray.jpg

Cardinal Spellman pledged to the AJC that “the Catholic Church in this country will do everything it possibly can to implement the spirit as well as the letter” of the Nostra aetate.[18] Vatican II’s epochal Decree on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis humanae) was largely drafted by John Courtney Murray (1904 – 1967), an American Jesuit and theologian, brought in by Spellman. Murray was described in Newsweek as representing a “new kind of American Catholicism.”[19] Murray was also close friends with Clare Boothe Luce, the US ambassador to Italy and second wife of Skull and Bones member Henry Luce, founder and publisher of enormously influential magazines like Time and Life. A close friend of John Foster and Allen Dulles, Luce was also and key agent of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird. David A. Wemhoff has argued that the CIA was using Murray as part of their doctrinal warfare program to turn the Catholic Church into a promoter of American ideas.[20] As summarized by John F. Quinn, Murray “believed that the traditional teaching that Catholicism should be the established religion in countries where Catholics were in the majority was not applicable to the United States, arguing that when Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII had condemned church-state separation, they had European contexts in mind.”[21] Murray’s best-known book, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (1960), which was hailed by political conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr, who had gotten to know Murray at Yale.[22] The book was favorably reviewed in a wide range of religious and secular periodicals, including Time, which featured Murray on its cover.

In April 1963, Spellman brought Murray to Vatican II as a peritus (expert), despite Cardinal Ottaviani’s well-known animosity towards him. As pressure continued on Murray, with Apostolic Delegate to the U.S. Archbishop Egidio Vagnozzi attempting to silence him, Spellman, along with Murray’s Jesuit superiors, continued to shield him from most attempts at Curial interference.[23] After his death in 1967, Murray’s obituary in Time declared that,  With deep insight and patient scholarship, Father Murray incorporated the U.S. secular doctrines of church-state separation and freedom of conscience into the spiritual tradition of Roman Catholicism” despite the efforts of the “ultra conservative” faction in the Church.[24]

Catholic Personalism

Synarchist Jacques Maritain and Paul VI.

Synarchist Jacques Maritain and Paul VI.

Paul VI’s long-time friend and mentor was Jacques Maritain, the former member of Action française and friend of René Guénon and Jean Cocteau. After World War II, Maritain served three years as France’s ambassador to the Vatican. The many books that Maritain wrote, spanning a period of more than half a century and translated into every major language, earned him the distinction of being hailed "the greatest living Catholic philosopher.''[25] Although the 1950s did not witness the mass conversions that some expected, the Church nevertheless enjoyed exceptional prestige, and in many parts of Western Europe, Christian social-democratic parties came to power, many of which were influenced by the thought of Maritain.[26] Moreover, following the 1949 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Catholic intellectuals such as Maritain played a significant role in drafting, the language of rights quickly entered into international law and documents, and influenced increasing numbers of judicial institutions.[27] In 1956, Maritain went to Princeton University where he became professor emeritus. For several years Maritain was an honorary chairman of the CIA-front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), appearing as a keynote speaker at its 1960 conference in Berlin.[28] In 1963, the French government honored him with its National Grand Prize for Letters.

Maritain was one of the founders of modern Catholic personalism.[29] A first principle of Christian personalism is that persons are not to be exploited, but to be respected and loved. The primary document from the Vatican II concerning social catholic teachings is Gaudium et spes, the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church and the Modern World,” which is considered one of the chief accomplishments of the Council. In Gaudium et spes, the Council formulated what has come to be considered the key expression of this personalism: “man is the only creature on earth that God willed for its own sake and he cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”[30]

In 1967, Pope Paul VI cited Integral Humanism in his first social encyclical, Populorum Progressio. “Development… cannot be restricted to economic growth alone. To be authentic, it must be well rounded; it must foster the development of each man and of the whole man,” which expresses the essence of Maritain’s personalism.[31] Paul VI presented his “Message to Men of Thought and of Science” at the close of Vatican II to Maritain. The same pope had seriously considered making him a lay Cardinal, but Maritain rejected it.[32] When he died there in 1973, Pope Paul VI described Maritain publicly as a “master of the art of thinking, of living, and of praying.”[33]

It is widely acknowledged that Maritain significantly influenced the Nostra Aetate, especially its statements about relations with the Jews. Having a Jewish wife, Maritain engaged with the “Jewish Question” as a religious mystery through his many writings on the topic.[34] Maritain’s views on religious liberty and America contributed considerably to the climate of thought within the Catholic Church that led from earlier denunciations of “Americanism” and religious “indifferentism” to the acceptance of Vatican II’s Dignitatis humanae drafted by Murray.[35] The document declares the Council’s intention “to develop the doctrine of recent popes on the inviolable rights of the human person and the constitutional order of society.”

 

Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX)

Marcel Lefebvre (1905 – 1991) founder of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX).

Marcel Lefebvre (1905 – 1991) founder of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX).

According to John Vennari, founder of Catholic Family News (CFN), a Traditionalist Catholic monthly publication of Catholic Family Ministries, Vatican II was the fulfillment of the plan of Masonic infiltration of the Church outlined in the Alta Vendita, and the prophesy of the “diabolic disorientation of the upper hierarchy,” of the Secrets of Fatima reported by Sister Lucia.[36] An associate and collaborator of Nicholas Gruner, and a frequent contributor to Gruner’s Fatima Crusader. Catholic Family News has a close relationship with Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), established in 1970 and named after Pope Pius X, who according to the genealogical studies of one researcher, was of Frankist origin.[37]

Lefebvre, the founder of Traditional Catholicism, cited the Dignitatis humanae as one of the fundamental reasons for his difficulties with the Vatican II.[38] Traditionalist Catholicism was a protest movement that emerged in the wake of Vatican II, and which by the mid-1970s grew into a worldwide phenomenon. Lefebvre, along with the American professor of theology Gommar De Pauw, and American Father Francis Fenton were leading figures of the movement. Some traditionalists practice their faith outside the official structures of the Church, though they affirm their loyalty to the Church. The largest priestly society to fit this description is the SSPX. The Vatican’s position that the SSPX must acknowledge Dignitatis humanae and Nostra aetate as authoritative remains a key point of difference between the two.[39]

On September 13, 1972, Izvestia, an organ of the Soviet Communist Party, called Lefebvre a “member of the former OAS” and the “pastor of the European neo-fascists.” Lefebvre was a disciple of his professor P. Henri Le Floch, who was forced out of his post as rector of the Pontifical French Seminary in Rome for his association with Maurrasism and the pseudo-Catholic Action française, which had just been condemned by Pius XI in 1926. According to Julius Evola, “Based on his conviction that if the West has had a tradition, it was in Catholicism,” Guénon, who was also a member of Action française, “believed that the starting point of such a rectification would have to be in an integration of ‘traditional’ Catholicism, not ruling out the advantageousness of contacts with oriental elements.”[40] Lefebvre spent most of the period from the 1930s to the early 1960s in colonial West Africa, from where he enthusiastically endorsed Marshall Pétain’s Vichy regime for what he termed its “Catholic order.” He would later also voice approval of fascist dictators like Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, Videla in Argentina and Pinochet in Chile.[41]

Lefebvre was also a member of Cité catholique, a traditionalist Catholic organization with links to Opus Dei. Cité catholique was created by Jean Ousset, an activist of the Action française and former secretary of Charles Maurras. Under the Vichy regime during World War II, Ousset became the chief of the research bureau of Jeune légion, under Xavier Vallat, and was sentenced after World War II to ten years in prison for his part in the persecution of French Jews. Like the Cagoule, the Cité catholique had as aim to infiltrate the Republic’s elites in order to form a National Catholic state, on the model of Francoist Spain. Ousset published in 1949 Pour qu’Il règne, a title which was chosen by the Belgian section of the SSPX as title of its newspaper. The preface of the book was signed by Lefebvre.

Jean Ousset (1914 – 1994), an activist of the Action française, former secretary of Charles Maurras and founder of Cité catholique,

Jean Ousset (1914 – 1994), an activist of the Action française, former secretary of Charles Maurras and founder of Cité catholique,

Lefebvre’s influence extends well beyond the francophone world. There are Lefebvrist seminaries in the US, Germany, Australia and several countries in Latin America. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists SSPX as part of the “radical traditionalist Catholic” movement who may make up the largest single group of ardent anti-Semites in America, who blame the Jews for conspiring to destroy the Catholic Church.[42] “Integrism” is a term used to describe traditionalist Catholicism especially in a social and political context. The term is the equivalent of “fundamentalism” in English. It is both anti-Masonic and anti-Communist and represented in the right-wing press.

Lefebvre condemned the French Revolution of 1789 and what he called its “Masonic and anti-Catholic principles.”[43] He saw similar forces at work in the left-wing liberalism behind Vatican II. Lefebvre noted in 1965:

This very year, Yves Marsaudon, the Freemason, has published the book L’oecumenisme vu par un franc-macon de tradition (Ecumenism as Seen by a Traditional Freemason). In it the author expresses hope of Freemasons that our Council will solemnly proclaim religious liberty… What more information do we need?[44]

 

In January 1965, Gommar DePauw incorporated an organization called the Catholic Traditionalist Movement in New York State, purportedly with the support of Cardinal Francis Spellman. In 1967, DePauw entered into an alliance with the Shickshinny Knights, who also opposed Vatican II and the new Mass, and claimed that the Catholic Church was “infiltrated by Freemasons, Jews, Marxists, homosexuals and radical feminists.” Based in Benton, Tennessee, the Shickshinny Knights operate about fifty chapels or traditionalist Mass enters, and three elementary schools across the country.[45]

 

Malachi Martin

American Jewish Committee (AJC) agent Malachi Martin (1921 – 1999)

American Jewish Committee (AJC) agent Malachi Martin (1921 – 1999)

Léon de Poncins (1897 – 1975)

Léon de Poncins (1897 – 1975)

In an intellectual contribution to the new traditionalist agenda, Julius Evola republished his translation of Léon de Poncins’s La Guerra occulta (“The Occult War”) with an appendix in which he also rebuked the movement toward reform.[46] Léon de Poncins was a French aristocrat and devout Catholic and counter-revolutionary who authored numerous books and articles advancing a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory. Léon de Poncins believed that the major revolutionary political upheavals of modern times drew from the influence of secret societies with an anti-Christian agenda, as well as an “occult war” waged by those possessing a diabolical kind of “faith.” During the Second Vatican Council, de Poncins wrote a pamphlet, Le Problème juif face au Concile (“The Jewish Question Facing the Council”). In Freemasonry and the Vatican (1968), de Poncins warned:

 

There is at present in Catholic circles a constant, subtle and determined campaign in favour of Freemasonry. It is directed by the progressive brigade, currently enjoying so great an influence in France, and is assisted by pressures (whether open or secret) on the part of a considerable number of the clergy-pressures also exerted by the Catholic Press, and even by prelates among the French bishops and cardinals.

Its avowed object is to obtain from the Vatican, and from the Council while it was in session, the revision or, better still, the annulment of the various condemnations pronounced by the Popes upon Freemasonry since 1738.[47]

 

De Poncins’ advice had a significant effect in supporting opposing views within Vatican II, and helped moderate some of the language of the Nostra aetate.[48] In Judaism and the Vatican (1967), de Poncins discussed how the Nostra aetate was the result of the collaboration between Heschel and Cardinal Bea. Both Bea and his mysterious private secretary Malachi Martin had become well acquainted with Heschel prior to the Council. Martin was an Irish Catholic priest originally ordained by the Jesuits. He started postgraduate studies at both the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the University of Oxford, specializing in knowledge of Jesus Christ and of Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts. Martin took part in the research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and published a work in two volumes, The Scribal Character of The Dead Sea Scrolls (1958). Rumors appearing on various Catholic or sedevacantist websites and magazines alleged that Martin had Jewish ancestry, descended from Iberian Jews who migrated to Ireland and Great Britain in the fifteenth century, and accused him of being an Israeli spy.[49] According to Martin, some of his work involved intelligence gathering behind the Iron Curtain and throughout the Middle East, and at times threatening cardinals with blackmail if they didn’t want to do what Cardinal Bea and the Pope John XXIII wanted from them at the council. “I saw cardinals sweating in front of me,” Martin recalled, “And I began to enjoy it.”[50]

Apparently disillusioned by Vatican II, Martin asked to be released from certain aspects of his Jesuit vows in 1964 and moved to New York City, where he worked for the AJC and its Commentary Magazine. In his 2007 book Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, Edward K. Kaplan confirmed that Martin cooperated with the ACJ during the Council “for a mixture of motives, both lofty and ignoble… [He] primarily advised the committee on theological issues, but he also provided logistical intelligence and copies of restricted documents.”[51] Heschel arranged for Farrar, Straus and Giroux printing company to publish a “kiss and tell” book by Martin under pseudonym Michael Serafian, titled The Pilgrim, about the internal workings of Vatican II and an apologia for the Jews, in hopes that it would influence the deliberations.[52] Journalist Joseph Roddy, in a 1966 Look Magazine, identified Serafian as one of  that under three different pseudonyms who acted on behalf of Jewish interests such as the AJC to influence the outcome of the debates. Roddy wrote that two timely articles were written in 1965 under the pseudonym F.E. Cartus, one for Harper’s Magazine and another for the AJC’s magazine Commentary. Roddy further alleged that information on the gatherings was leaked to the New York press under the pseudonym of Pushkin. Two unidentified persons, Roddy claimed, were “young cleric-turned-journalist” and a “Jesuit of Irish descent working for Cardinal Bea… who was active in the Biblical Institute.”[53]

Martin also served as religious editor for William F. Buckley’s National Review.[54] In 1967, Martin had received his first Guggenheim Fellowship. Among his most significant works were Hostage To The Devil (1976), which dealt with Satanism, demonic possession, and exorcism. The Final Conclave (1978) was a warning against alleged Soviet spies in the Vatican. His novels and non-fiction books were frequently critical of the Catholic Church, which he believed had failed to act on the third prophecy revealed by the Virgin Mary at Fatima.

Rama P. Coomaraswamy explains what he believes are the key contributions of René Guénon, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, Marco Pallis and Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

Martin described himself in an interview with the Chicago Tribune as “a fuddy-duddy, dyed-in-the-wool, traditionalist conservative.”[55] Martin was a close friend of Rama Coomaraswamy, whose father, Ananda Coomaraswamy, was also a friend Aleister Crowley, who introduced himself to him, according to Crowley, “knowing my reputation on Asiatic religions and Magick.”[56] Crowley also helped advance the career in New York of Ananda’s wife, Ratan Devi, a musician from Yorkshire, with whom he had an affair, all with Ananda’s consent.[57] Rama was of mixed Tamil, English and Jewish ancestry, was the son of Ananda and of his fourth wife Luisa Runstein, an Argentine-born woman of Jewish descent. Although raised in the Hindu tradition, after the death of his father, Rama would convert to Catholicism. Following his disagreements with Vatican II, Coomaraswamy was drawn to the Traditionalist Catholics. When his wife was displeased with this conversion, she sought the intervention of Mother Teresa, thus beginning a series of polemics between them. Lefebvre appointed Coomaraswamy Professor of Church History at the St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary of the SSPX, in Ridgefield, Connecticut, a position he held for about five years until 1983. Along with the Traditionalist Catholic movement, Coomaraswamy remained involved with Traditionalism, and a member of the Foundation for Traditional Studies and was a regular contributor to the foundation’s journal Sophia.

Rama’s father, Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877 − 1947), a friend of Aleister Crowley.

Rama’s father, Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877 − 1947), a friend of Aleister Crowley.

Continuing his efforts in disinformation, Martin claimed that Popes John XXIII and Paul VI were Freemasons during a certain period and that photographs and other detailed documents proving this were in the possession of the Vatican State Secretariat. He claimed Archbishop Annibale Bugnini was a Freemason and that Agostino Casaroli, long-time Cardinal Secretary of State, was an atheist.[58] In an article for The Fatima Crusader, Martin wrote, “Anybody who is acquainted with the state of affairs in the Vatican in the last 35 years is well aware that the prince of darkness has had and still has his surrogates in the court of St. Peter in Rome.”[59] Martin had first made reference to a diabolic rite held in Rome in his 1990 non-fiction best-seller about geopolitics and the Vatican, The Keys of This Blood: Pope John Paul II Versus Russia and the West for Control of the New World Order, in which he wrote:

 

Most frighteningly for [Pope] John Paul [II], he had come 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 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. Besides, the incidence of Satanic pedophilia—rites and practices—was already documented among certain bishops and priests as widely dispersed as Turin, in Italy, and South Carolina, in the United States. The cultic acts of Satanic pedophilia are considered by professionals to be the culmination of the Fallen Archangel’s rites.[60]

 

Martin revealed still more about this purported ritual in one of his last works, Windswept House: A Vatican Novel (1996). In this novel, he described a ceremony called “The Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer” supposedly held in St. Paul’s Chapel in the Vatican, but linked with concurrent satanic rites in the US, on June 29, 1963, barely a week after the election of Paul VI. The ceremony was supposedly linked with concurrent satanic rites in South Carolina, in evident reference to Albert Pike’s Scottish Rite of the Southern Jurisdiction. According to The New American, Martin confirmed that the ceremony did indeed occur as he had described. “Oh yes, it is true; very much so,” the magazine reported him saying. “But the only way I could put that down into print is in novelistic form.”[61] As Martin details:

 

Suddenly it became unarguable that now during this papacy, the Roman Catholic organization carried a permanent presence of clerics who worshipped Satan and liked it; of bishops and priests who sodomized boys and each other; of nuns who performed the “Black Rites” of Wicca, and who lived in lesbian relationships… every day, including Sundays and Holy Days, acts of heresy and blasphemy and outrage and indifference were committed and permitted at holy Altars by men who had been called to be priests. Sacrilegious actions and rites were not only performed on Christ’s Altars, but had the connivance or at least the tacit permission of certain Cardinals, archbishops, and bishops… In total number they were a minority—anything from one to ten percent of Church personnel. But of that minority, many occupied astoundingly high positions or rank… The facts that brought the Pope to a new level of suffering were mainly two: The systematic organizational links—the network, in other words that had been established between certain clerical homosexual groups and Satanist covens. And the inordinate power and influence of that network.[62]

 

 

 


[1] Rama P. Coomaraswamy. “The Destruction of the Christian Tradition.” (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2006) p. 146.

[2] Ibid., p. 136.

[3] Ibid., p. 128.

[4] Alexis Bugnolo. “‘Team Bergoglio’ and the legacy of Cardinal Mariano Rampolla del Tindaro” From Rome (January 10, 2015).

[5] (1962-1964), p. 994; Fr. Joaquin Arriaga, The New Montinian Church (Edgar A. Lucidi. MD, 1985) p. 391.

[6] Michael Holzman. James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), p. 90.

[7] Gerald Posner. God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican (Simon and Schuster, 2015), p. 174 f.

[8] Ecclesiam suam, 58.

[9] L’Osservatore Romano (March 19, 1965), as cited in Marian T. Horvat. “The New Mass: A Flavor of Protestantism.” Tradition in Action (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.traditioninaction.org/religious/m002rpMisunderstandingMass.htm

[10] L’Osservatore Romano (March 19, 1965)

[11] Michael Davies. Liturgical Time Bombs in Vatican II: Destruction of the Faith through Changes in Catholic Worship (Tan Books, 2003).

[12] Bulletin de l’Occident Chrétien Nr.12, July, 1976, (Directeur Pierre Fautrad a Fye - 72490 Bourg Le Roi).

[13] Remigius Bäumer. Leo Scheffczyk (ed.). Marienlexikon (EOS-Verlag, 1989).

[14] Ari Goldman. “Jewish Group Faces Reorganization.” New York Times (February 13, 1990).

[15] Quoted from Murray Friedman (ed.), Commentary in American Life, (Philadelphia 2005, Temple UP).

[16] “Anti-Jewish Elements in Catholic Liturgy.” American Jewish Committee (1961). Retrieved from http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/6A2.PDF

[17] Rabbi Marc. H. Tanenbaum. “Heschel and Vatican II: Jewish-Christian Relations.” Memorial Symposium in Honor of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Department of Philosophy of the Jewish Theological Seminary (New York: February 21, 1983).

[18] “Cardinal Spellman Pledges to Implement Vatican Declaration on Jews.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (November 14, 1966).

[19] “The Voice of Reason.” Newsweek (August 28, 1967).

[20] David A. Wemhoff. John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition (Fidelity Press, 2015).

[21] John F. Quinn. “‘We Hold These Truths’ at Fifty: John Courtney Murray's Contested Legacy.” American Catholic Studies, Vol. 122, No. 3 (Fall 2011), p. 33.

[22] John F. Quinn. “‘We Hold These Truths’ at Fifty: John Courtney Murray's Contested Legacy.” American Catholic Studies, Vol. 122, No. 3 (Fall 2011), p. 39.

[23] Pat McNamara. “The Powerhouse: Cardinal Francis Spellman.” Catholic. Patheos (December 17, 2012).

[24] “Religion: Man of the City.” Time (August 25,1967). Retrieved from http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,841042,00.html

[25] Donald DeMarco. “The Christian Personalism of Jacques Maritain.” Faith & Reason, Summer 1991.

[26] Alan Fimister. “Robert Schuman: Neo Scholastic Humanism and the Reunification of Europe.” (Brussels 2008).

[27] Dr. Samuel Gregg. “Dignitatis Humanae and the Catholic Human Rights 'Revolutuion’.” Retrieved from https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=2876

[28] Hilton Kramer. “What was the Congress for Cultural Freedom?” The New Criterion, (Volume 8, January 1990), p. 7.

[29] Piotr H. Kosicki. Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution,” 1891-1956 (Yale University Press, 2018), p. xxiii.

[30] Gaudium et spes, no. 24.

[31] Jiji Philip. The Human Rights Discourse between Liberty and Welfare: A Dialogue with Jacques Maritain and Amartya Sen (Nomos Verlag, 2017), p. 158.

[32] Donald DeMarco. “The Christian Personalism of Jacques Maritain.” Faith & Reason (Summer 1991).

[33] Ibid.

[34] Philip. The Human Rights Discourse between Liberty and Welfare, p. 158.

[35] Thomas Albert Howard. “God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide.” Oxford Scholarship Online (May 2011).

[36] John Vennari. “Freemasonry and the Subversion of the Catholic Church.” Catholic Family News (October, 2001).

[37] Athol Bloomer. “Frankists and the Catholic Church.” alternativegenhist.blogspot.ca (April 15, 2014).

[38] Philip A. Egan. Philosophy and Catholic Theology: A Primer (Liturgical Press, 2009), p. 56.

[39] Edward Pentin. “Pope Francis’ Approval of SSPX Marriages Offers Hopeful Step to Unity.” National Catholic Register (April 7, 2017).

[40] Julius Evola. Ricognizioni: uomini e problemi (Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1974).

[41] Andrew Horn. “This religious sect is steeped in racism and hatred.” The Guardian (February 19, 2009).

[42] “12 Anti-Semitic Radical Traditionalist Catholic Groups.” Southern Poverty Law Center (Winter 2006).

[43] Marcel Lefebvre. Open Letter to Confused Catholics (Kansas City, Mo.: Angelus Press, 1987) Chapter 13.

[44] Tissier de Mallarais. The Biography of Marcel Lefebvre (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 2004), p. 328.

[45] Michael W. Cuneo. The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) p. 196 n. 13.

[46] Alexander Reid Ross. “Beyond the Acid-Filled Jacuzzi: Sinister Truths About Bannon’s Fascism.” Dignitaries Humanae (March 15, 2017).

[47] Vicomte Léon de Poncins. Freemasonry and the Vatican: A Struggle for Recognition (Britons Publishing, 1968), p. 7.

[48] Michel Laurigan. “Vatican II : Du “mythe de la substitution” à la religion noachide.” Sel de la terre (46), (Autumn 2003). Retrieved from http://www.nostra-aetate.org/Bibliotheque/2003-10_SDT_Michel-LAURIGAN_Vatican%20II_Du-Mythe-de-la-substitution-a-la-religion-noachide_12p.pdf

[49] Brian Doran. “Malachi Martin: God’s Messenger – In the Words of Those Who Knew Him Best.” (cassette) (Monrovia: Catholic Treasures, 2001); “How Could ‘Cardinal Siri’ (A.K.A. Pope Gregory XVII) Have Been a Pope in Exile You Ask? Look at History.” Today’s Catholic World (TCW) (December 30, 2005).

[50] Ben L. Kaufman. “Jesus Now Author Not A Swashbuckler.” The Cincinnati Enquirer (December 22, 1973).

[51] Edward Kaplan. Spiritual Radical, Abraham Joshua Heschel in Americal, 1940-1972 (Yale University Press, 2007), p. 243.

[52] Ibid., p. 254.

[53] Joseph Roddy. “How the Jews Changed Catholic Thinking.” Look Magazine, 30, 2 (January 25, 1966).

[54] Malachi Martin. “On Human Love.” National Review (September 2, 1977).

[55] Cited in “I have smelt the breath of Satan and heard the demons’ voices…” Irish Times (August 7, 1999). Retrieved from https://www.irishtimes.com/news/i-have-smelt-the-breath-of-satan-and-heard-the-demons-voices-1.214434

[56] Richard Boyle. “The Riddle that was Crowley.” The Sunday Times (November 10, 1996). Retrieved from http://www.sundaytimes.lk/961110/plus4.html

[57] Ibid.

[58] Les Amis du Christ-Roi, L’Eglise Eclipsée? Réalisation du complot maçonnique contre l’Eglise. Témoignage inédit du père Malachi Martin, présent en qualité d’intreprète aux derniers Conclaves (Dinard: Delacroix, 1997).

[59] “Fr. Malachi Martin affirmed: Satanism has been practiced in the Vatican…” These Last Days News (August 10, 2015). Retrieved from https://www.tldm.org/news/martin.htm

[60] Malachi Martin. The Keys of This Blood: Pope John Paul II Versus Russia and the West for Control of the New World Order (New York: Touchstone Books, 1990), p. 632.

[61] “Fr. Malachi Martin affirmed: Satanism has been practiced in the Vatican…” These Last Days News (August 10, 2015). Retrieved from https://www.tldm.org/news/martin.htm

[62] Malachi Martin. Windswept House: A Vatican Novel (New York: Broadway Books, 1996), pp. 492-3.