The Young and Future Pope (1897–1920)

This blog has thus far been following two separate timelines: first, the chronicle supplied by Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua (which I have summarized up to his encounter with the occultist and papal chamberlain Evan Morgan in 1917), and second, that of Baltasar Fuentes Ramos (whose account has been provided up to the point of his meeting with Borges in 1966.  I am attempting to persuade Señor Fuentes to permit me the publication of more chapters from his short story, The Wandering Jew, but he is currently incommunicado.  He has told me he has no interest in reading this blog, so an appeal to him here would probably be futile).  Today, then, will commence a third timeline, much belated but rather essential, concerning the very subject of this blog, Pope Paul VI.

Over the years following his conversations with Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua, my father undertook some research into the life of the current pope.  (For newcomers to this blog, the current pope is Paul VI, and not the Argentine antipope calling himself Francis, who reigns with a liberal fist at Rome).  My father’s notes from this endeavor are sufficient enough to provide a basic biographical sketch of Paul VI covering the period prior to his elevation to the papacy.  Truth be told, this is not a terribly fascinating life to recount.  He was more or less ordinary: a child of his mediocre era, born into a post-Risorgimento Italy, one where the ancient kingdoms and traditional politics had been supplanted by post-Enlightenment ideals, and one where influence of the Catholic Church and the old nobility were beginning to wane.  (My father, always the cinephile, makes a passing reference in his notes to Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film The Leopard, which is about the painful transition in Sicily, from a mannered society of custom and virtue to a new order of egalitarianism and personal liberty.  The title character is an aging aristocrat unable to adjust to the sweeping societal changes: he is a leopard who cannot change his spots).

Giovanni Battista Montini came of age long after this transition.  He studied for the priesthood at a time when Scholastic theology was still being taught in the seminaries, but also when the ideas of modernism were pervasive enough for Pope Pius X to attempt a purge of its cancer from the among the clergy.  He worked in the Roman Curia during a period when the Church was suffering from an existential identity crisis: whether to hide her light under a bushel and conform herself to the world, or to shine as a lone beacon of truth and tradition in a world gone mad.  Before he lost his autonomy in 1935, Montini tended to be a fence-sitter in this crisis, but he usually erred on the side of caution.  It will be shown that he was mostly a moderate.  “Moderate” is almost a pejorative these days, but the man who would be pope was neither lukewarm nor unprincipled in his faith.  He was simply able to see both sides of an issue.  In this sense, he passed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s test for true intelligence: “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”  Perhaps that sums him up best: ordinary and uninteresting in many respects, but with a keen intellectual curiosity, and a natural enough instinct toward conservatism to keep him prudent.  Lastly, it might even be useful to consider his life in all its normalcy, as a tonic against the collective shrieks of invective and calumny that have been heaped upon him over the years: that he is a modernist heretic, a homosexual, a Freemason, and various other slanders.  None of that is the truth about him.  The truth is quite mundane.

CHILDHOOD

He was born on the 26^th of September in 1897 into a family of upper-middle-class means, and was christened Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini.  The father, Giorgio Montini, came from a respected Brescian line of doctors, lawyers, and writers.  He made his living as the editor of a Catholic newspaper, Il Cittadino di Brescia.  The mother, Giuditta Alghisi Montini, hailed from a notable and wealthy family, but her parents had died when she was young.  Her guardian was the mayor of Brescia: a leftist and known Freemason named Giuseppe Bonardi.  (It might be added that the teenaged Guiditta had, blessedly, spent most of her time away from this loathsome person, being schooled by French nuns in a convent in Milan).  It is sometimes alleged that his mother’s family was Jewish, which would be interesting if true, but this appears to have no basis in fact.  The Alghisi of his mother’s line were Catholic aristocrats of some antiquity, and were distantly related to the Renaissance architect Galasso Alghisi.

Throughout his youth, he went by the nickname Battista.  He had an older brother named Lodovico (b. 1896) and younger brother named Francesco (b. 1900).  From their mother, the boys learned French.  They took their primary schooling from the Jesuits at the Collegio Cesare Arici, and played their sports at a boys’ club at the church of Santa Maria della Pace, administered by Oratorians.  Two of the Oratorian priests there became mentors to Lodovico and Battista.  Their names were Fr. Giulio Bevilacqua (no apparent relation to Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua) and Fr. Paolo Caresana.

Famiglia Montini, circa 1904.  From left: Giorgio, Giovanni Battista, Guiditta, Lodovico, and Francesco.

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The household was multi-generational: it included the boys’ paternal grandmother, Francesca Buffali Montini, and a spinster aunt, their father’s sister, Maria.  Both women strove to infuse the children with a love of the Catholic faith, but Battista seems to have preferred adventure tales instead, particularly those with a nautical theme—“danger on the waves,” for some reason, appealed to the child.  His favorite bible stories were Noah’s ark and Jonah in the belly of the whale.  An illustrated compendium of sea monsters was a mainstay on his nightstand; his favorite leviathan was the giant Norse octopus known as the Kraken.  He was an avid reader of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and much later in life, when he visited the United States in 1965, an interviewer asked his opinion on American culture.  He confessed that he was not well-acquainted with it, but added that he owned an Italian translation of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, which he called “a magnificent story.”  His personal assistant when he was the pope, Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua, remarked that Paul VI frequently used the nautical references to the papacy and the Church, such as “the fisherman’s chair” or “the barque of Peter.”  (It might be presumptuous to read too much into a childhood fascination, but one wonders whether perhaps the boy, amidst his grandmother’s exhortations to piety and his storybook tales of the sea, was drawn subconsciously to the symbolic notion of the Catholic Church as the ark outside of which there is no salvation, being tossed about on the tempestuous ocean of sin, enmity, and worldliness.  That would probably be too Jungian.  In any case, he would one day become the boat’s captain).

In other respects, there was little to suggest his later becoming a priest.  He enjoyed card games, particularly whist, which was the favorite of his brothers as well.   Together they needed only a single friend or a willing adult to make the foursome required to play.  When Battista was nine years old he told his aunt he wanted to become either a sailor or a writer.  When he was eleven, he had eliminated the sailor option out of pragmatism, for lack of knowing how to swim.  Becoming a writer was now his sole ambition; his interests were in poetry and, following after his father, journalism.  His favorite sports were cycling and soccer—although doctors asked him to limit his participation in both of these activities in 1910, which is the year when he began to experience a chronic heart flutter.  Added to this, he also came down with gastrointestinal troubles.  This period would prove a significant turning point.  The once normal and healthy youngster became an invalid.

ADOLESCENCE

Owing to his illnesses, he was pulled out of school for months at a time, and given his education by private tutors.  He also began to stay, for reasons of convalescence, at the bucolic family villa in Verolavecchia, one of the ancestral homes of his mother’s family.  He was typically accompanied by his Aunt Maria during these stays.  For the heart issues, his doctors prescribed rest and relaxation; for the gastric problems, he was put on a diet of strictly cold foods, and advised to snack only on yogurt.  He was allowed to take a walk once a day, which he sometimes took with his tutor, Durante, as well as the villa’s caretaker, an elderly man named Michele, and Michele’s two Irish wolfhounds.

Villa Montini, where Battista spent much of his adolescent and teenage years due to illness.  Anyone who knew him from the period of 1910 to 1920 would probably have found it incredulous to think that the sickly boy would one day live to be a hundred and nineteen years old.

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During one of his prolonged stays at Verolavecchia, he had a juvenile encounter with romance.  A property adjacent to the Montini residence was being rented in 1910 by a Greek family named Xenakis, from the island of Spetses.  On one of his afternoon walks, Battista (then twelve) met the Xenakis’ fourteen-year-old daughter Nina: she was seated calmly on a gravel path, stacking stones into a small cairn.  On the day they met, he was traveling alone, with only Michele’s dogs for his company.  Whatever conversation he had with Nina Xenakis is lost to history, but for him it must have been a magical encounter.  My father’s notes contain a passage from Durante’s diary.  Durante was twenty-one.  Apparently Nina was smitten with the tutor and not the student.  A pathetic love triangle ensued.  Wrote Durante:

“There is nothing in my life more annoying at this time than the combined lunacy of these two children.  Not even the infernal bird whose screeching wakes me up at night or startles me in the middle of the day.  (I must find out what species of bird this is.  Its call is the shrillest and most startling noise I have ever heard.  Several times I have gone into the woods with Michele’s rifle, ready to stalk and shoot the creature as soon it starts up.  But it never shrieks when I’m out there.  Yet if I go back inside, not ten minutes later it returns to its noisemaking.  I have read and re-read, several times now, Schopenhauer’s great essay On Noise.  Commiserating with the German master through his sublimely cantankerous writing is my only consolation).  The children are even worse than the bird, however.  My student, who harbors aspirations to be a writer, composes overwrought love poems daily, which I am obliged to read and comment on.  The object of his poetical delirium is a bookish Hellene, pudgy yet somewhat cute, with freckles covering the bridge of her nose, and crystal green eyes.  But she is an impossible bore.  She is wholly obsessed with the stone structures built by prehistoric peoples: dolmens, stone circles, and the great megalith on the Salisbury plain in England called Stonehenge.  Her aspiration in life is to be an archaeologist and study these ancient phenomena—but, she tells me, she would be happy to give it all up if I were to make her a marriage proposal.  Unfortunately, she has developed an affection for me.  I find myself on the unwanted receiving end of a schoolgirl crush.  Her Italian is very poor; the family is from some forgettable Greek isle, and the brazenness with which she flirts with me is almost as irritating as the unintelligibility of her speech.  If I stay inside, I am in the company of the besotted boy and his wretched poetry.  He imagines himself a Petrarch, and the dull Greek lass is his Laura.  Yet if I venture outside, it is not long before the barefoot girl in the floral dress conveniently strays onto the villa grounds to make tedious and grammatically terrible conversation.  And always—always—there is the bird.”

FORMATION

He earned highest honors when he took his exams at a state school in 1913, aged sixteen years old.  He would spend the next three years preparing for his maturità classica, being tutored by Durante as well as a friend of his father’s, a retired professor named Labriola.  During this period his health was improving, and he was living more often with his family in Brescia, and also spending time with his Oratorian priest friends, Fathers Bevilacqua and Caresana.  At this point he seems to have begun discerning his call to the priesthood.  An entry in Durante’s diary describes the tension in his reading habits.  Montini was alternating between religious books (such as The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, and Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales) and the works of secular writers, such as the 19^th century Italian poet Vittorio Alfieri and the 17^th century Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza.  Spinoza had been the recommendation of Durante, but Fr. Caresana disapproved of the selection.  “Spinoza was deemed unacceptable by his spiritual director, due to his constant reliance on classical pagans instead of the Church’s great doctors and saints, as well as the fact that his books were on the Index, condemned for containing pantheism, and coming, no less, from an apostate Hebrew.  Even the Jews had disowned him.  So into the trash he went.”  (It is unclear whether Durante was being literal or figurative when he says Spinoza went into the trash.  It doesn’t seem in keeping with the young Montini’s character to throw books into the garbage.  In any event, it would be Pope Paul VI himself, in 1966, who would formally abolish the Index Librorum Prohibitorum—though not, it must be noted, of his own volition.  But more on that later).

His inclinations toward the priesthood did not diminish his desire to become a poet or journalist.  With the outbreak of World War I, his Catholicism became infused with a youthful activism and political bent.   He and a friend, Andrea Trebeschi, founded an independent periodical in 1914 entitled Numero Unico.  Labriola oversaw and guided their efforts; Montini’s father allowed them the use of his newspaper presses for publication, and Fathers Bevilacqua and Caresana contributed short pieces.  In the end, however, the journal received a poor reception and quickly folded.  In 1915, Italy entered the war.  Montini enlisted for military service, but (unsurprisingly) was turned down after failing his medical inspection.  His brother Lodovico joined the 16^th Artillery Regiment; Father Bevilacqua became a chaplain to the 5^th Alpine Regiment.  A year later, Montini had finalized his decision to become a priest, and in 1916 he formally enrolled at the Brescia Seminary, in a small class of little more than a dozen students, consisting mainly of young men whose physical disabilities rendered them unfit for service in the war, including Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua with his shortened leg, and Alessandro Falchi with his poor eyesight.  Durante wrote in his diary that when he finally parted with his pupil of nearly nine years, he shook his hand warmly, and told him how impressed he was with his “maturity, intelligence, poise, and good sense.”  Apparently the boy who had once written desperate poetry for Nina Xenakis had grown into a thoughtful and serious young man.

While at seminary, he remained on his doctor’s orders to keep to a special diet and get plenty of rest, so he lived at home rather than on campus.  Father Caresana supplemented his theological studies, and his friend Andrea Trebeschi continued to assist him in his writing endeavors.  Together they would make a second attempt at a Catholic political journal.  This one would prove more successful.  It was called La Fionda (in English, “the Sling”—a reference to David’s weapon against Goliath), and it gained a respectable popularity, particularly among the membership of the Catholic Student Union, FUCI (Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana), and one of its early supporters was Pier Giorgio Frassati, who seems to have been something like the Italian version of Dorothy Day.  Montini articulated his politico-religious vision in La Fionda: that Europe in the midst of the war was a continent on a sure path to self-destruction unless it recovered its Christian roots.  But he stopped well short of advocating for traditionalism; he argued for more of a return to the gospels than to the Church.  His thinking was possibly influenced by Vladimir Solovyov, a Russian Orthodox writer, two of whose books Durante had gifted to Montini upon their parting (“I gave him a pair of books by Solovyov, telling him that if he would not have Spinoza or Schopenhauer, then this Russian mystic was the closest thing Christianity had to offer”).  In any respect, he saw himself and his Fionda colleagues as taking on the establishment.  In a typically tendentious editorial he declared, “no, we will not pay heed to the aging and irrelevant pedagogues, with their doctorate degrees and their empty bluster.  We will instead make a fresh start with the Master, the Rabbi, Jesus Christ.  Yes, a fresh start!—however difficult, and on our own, if needs be.”  This reads like the idealism of the young, but it is fairly representative of Montini, as he had actually settled on a moderate course.  He rejected on one hand the nihilism of the radical left as well as the rising fascism of Mussolini; but neither did he exhort a full-hearted return to the throne-&-altar scheme.  He kept his Catholicism orthodox, but in his politics he was not exactly influenced by Joseph de Maistre or Chateaubriand.  His political thinking during his years in seminary was mostly along the lines of the Sicilian cleric Don Luigi Sturzo, who founded the Italian People’s Party, based on the Catholic economic philosophy contained in Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, as well as a firm commitment to social reform.  But it should be noted that in doctrinal matters, no liberalism crept into Montini’s thought.  He wrote an article on the question of a reunion between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox, and he made no ecumenical concessions.  He cited Solovyov as well as St. Maximus the Confessor, and catalogued the many aspects of Orthodoxy which he admired, but in the final analysis he insisted that unfortunately no return of the schismatics to the bosom of Rome could be possible without their contrite capitulation on the filioque or papal infallibility.

Prior to taking his minor orders, he made a pilgrimage with some other students in 1919 to the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino.  He wrote home to his grandmother and aunt: “I find this place an inspiration.  It is the solemn and beating heart of a civilization which we must not allow to disappear.  Rather its ideals must be rekindled, turning men’s minds to the things that are above, and restoring to the nation its Catholic culture, its ancient faith, its ora et labora.”  His conservatism was beginning to shine through.

He took the cassock on the 21^st of November of that year, and received the tonsure on November 30^th.  He became porter and lector on the 14^th of December, and a subdeacon on the 28^th of February in 1920.  He completed his studies in the spring of that year.  On Sunday, May 30^th, in the church of Santa Maria belle Grazie, he celebrated his first Mass.  He had been ordained a priest the previous day, in a class of only thirteen, due to the war’s depletion of seminarian ranks.  It is probably the only noteworthy aspect of this otherwise mundane biography to mention that Alessandro Falchi was included in the remaining dozen.  Lying prostrate on the floor of the church that Saturday afternoon were two men who would both eventually occupy the fisherman’s chair.  One of them would be the last pope of the twentieth century: the last pope to celebrate the Tridentine Mass in St. Peter’s and the last pope to receive a coronation with the papal tiara.  The other would be the first antipope of the modern era.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

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“But the heathens sacrifice to devils, and not to God.”

Evan Morgan was less than a fortnight away from his 24^th birthday when he arrived in Rome in July of 1917.  His birthday fell on the thirteenth of the month; he shared it with Julius Caesar, but also with one of his personal heroes: the notorious sixteenth-century English alchemist and occultist, John Dee.  In the back room of a Glasgow antiquarian book store one year beforehand, Morgan had gotten himself a copy of the extremely rare codex called the Book of Soyga, one of John Dee’s primary resources for his occult work.  He had gotten the book from a woman named Myriam MacKellar.  Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua met them both.  From his interview:

CGB: When I went to Rome, I stayed in a small but elegant hotel in the old Borgo district, on a cobblestone avenue.  Did you know, much of the Borgo was torn down a few years later, by Il Duce?  The hotel is now gone; a victim of Mussolini.  But it was a lovely building: four tall brown-brick stories.  The outside was mildewed and dreary, with moss and vines, but inside it was pleasant.  High ceilings, marble floors, potted plants, crisp white linens.  When I arrived there on my first day, I opened up the windows and breathed in the Roman summer air.  It was wonderful.  I was a young man in the eternal city, about to undertake a two-week study at the Vatican.  The world seemed full of promise.

It was a week or so later when I met the strange guests who were staying on the second floor.  It was late afternoon.  I had finished up my class with Monsignor Gallo and—oh yes, I almost forgot to mention something.  My roommate, Falchi, who was supposed to be taking the class with me: well, he suddenly stopped showing up.  He had been there for the first three or four days, and then he just disappeared all of a sudden.  It didn’t bother me, though.  I had already grown sick of him after a whole year back at the seminary.  I thought to myself, “let that devil go and do whatever he wants.  The less I see of him, the better.”  I assumed he had gone off and lost himself among the lowest of the classes in the most degraded parts of the city, to do some carousing and probably worse.  Good riddance!  Even if I had wanted to get in contact with him, I had no idea where he was staying.  He did not come from a well-off family, I don’t think.  He was staying at some cheap place.  He’d told me the name, but I’d promptly forgotten it.  Why would I want to get in touch with that creep anyway?  He was a terrible roommate.

RM: You mentioned some strange guests.

CGB:  Yes.  As I was saying: this was in the afternoon, after I had finished my studies with Monsignor Gallo.  I was hungry, and there was a little café off the hotel lobby.  So there I was, you see, having my tea and biscotti, when I noticed someone staring at me from a table nearby.  Lo and behold, it was Falchi.  He was sitting with five well-dressed people, conversing in English from what I could hear.  I gave him the slightest of nods.  Just the tiniest acknowledgement of his presence.  I did not care to find out what he was up to, or why he was at my hotel with these people.  But he smiled at me.  He said, “come over here and join us, little man.”  I hated that: whenever he called me “little man.”  He knew it got on my nerves. 

One of Falchi’s companions cut a very imposing figure.  He was a tall, skinny, slim-shouldered, and pale man, with bird-like features and icy eyes.  I did not care for him—not even to look at him.  There was no warmth about him, you see.  He seemed like a cruel, cold, and inscrutable personality.  But this man asked Falchi, “who is your friend?”  And Falchi explained that I was his roommate at seminary.  Then a middle-aged woman who was with them spoke up.  She was prim and corpse-like: with taut, wrinkled, leathery skin.  Her hair was bobbed and dyed.  She had a pinched, skeletal face, and wore too much makeup.  But her manner was gregarious.  She had this high-pitched, keening, sing-song voice.  She was full of affectation.  The word you Americans would use is “phony.”

RM: I’m Canadian, but I take your meaning.

CGB: You told me you were from Massachusetts.

At this point in the transcript, the interview veers off-topic.  Roger Morgan explains his Canadian citizenship, having been born in Toronto, and then his marriage in 1970 to an American woman, and thus his sixteen-year period of current residency in the United States.  Gagne-Bevilacqua then recalls his own time spent in America, visiting an aunt and uncle on his mother’s side who had settled in the town of Susquehanna, Pennsylvania.  I have omitted this material, as it is irrelevant.  Finally they returned to the topic of the woman with the “pinched, skeletal face” who wore an excess of makeup:

CGB: I remember she was constantly smoking, waving around this long wand of a cigarette holder while she spoke, making grandiose gestures.  She lowered her eyes at me and said, “oh yes, darling, you must come and join us.”  Do you know what I mean?  How some people talk like this?

RM:  I do.  It’s common among upper crust matriarchs in New England.

CGB:  “Darling.”  How I detest such insincerity!  I did join them, though.  This woman introduced herself as Myriam.  I should also mention, there was a beautiful young girl at their table, about the same age as me and Falchi.  I learned her name was Lorraine.  She was a quarter-caste Afro-Caribbean girl.  Her father, I was informed, was the illegitimate son of an English baron and a mother from Saint Vincent.  They told me so right in front of her.  But this Lorraine never said a word.  She was mute the whole time, serene and collected.  I could tell she wasn’t deaf, though.  She was attentive, following everything with her calm and dispassionate eyes.  She seemed to be aloof from it all.  She had amazing eyes and thick, jet black hair.  She was dressed very conservatively, I noticed.  Almost too conservatively.  It was the middle of summer, but she wore tweeds and long sleeves.  Her collar was high and constrictive; it covered her entire neck.  She had gloves on her hands.  The whole party was very odd: this beautiful young girl, this haughty affected woman, and the tall, off-putting man. 

There were also two other men.  Nondescript men; perhaps they were in their thirties or forties.  One of them had a mustache.  They didn’t say much at all, these men, but they would laugh at things the middle-aged woman said, and mutter flatteries at her.  For some reason they seemed to find her intelligent and witty.  I don’t remember the names of these two.  But the girl was called Lorraine; the woman was named Myriam MacKellar; and the younger man was named Evan Morgan.  I did not sit with them for long—just long enough to make our introductions and some pointless chit-chat.  They were staying on the second floor of the hotel; my own room was on the fourth.  As I was excusing myself, Myriam pointed out that Evan had a birthday coming up in a few days.  I bowed politely and I told him: “happy birthday to you in advance.”  He thanked me in a cold tone.  And then I headed back to my room.

But Falchi followed after me.  He was very pleased to have made these new friends.  He was elated, I could tell.  I suppose he wanted to contain himself in their presence, but now that he was with me, he wanted to gush out all his excitement.  I allowed him to sit with me in my lodgings for a short time.  I hoped he wouldn’t stay long.  I asked him what he was doing with the group down in the café.  He told me these were the most religious people he’d ever met.  “Falchi,” I said, “you have been at seminary for almost the past whole year, and yet this odd group of Britons are suddenly the most religious people you’ve ever met?”  He said yes.  He said they were members of a religion that went deeper than he could ever have possibly imagined.

A pause.

RM: Which religion was this?

Another pause.

Prompted to answer, Gagne-Bevilacqua found himself unable to say, precisely.  Eventually he hazarded his best guess: “I suppose it does not have a formal name.  But it was clearly that same religion of darkness which has sprouted up in different forms over the centuries like persistent weeds: the Gnostics, the Bogomils, the Manicheans—and all of those other strange religions that ooze out of the miasma of the east.  It takes on different names and assumes different forms, but it all originates from the same diabolical source.  It does not surprise me that Islam spread like a virus across Persia and India.  Mohammedans worship a demon called Mahound, you see, and those people of Central Asia had been worshiping various devils since almost the earliest days after Noah.  Falchi and his friends seemed to have borrowed from all of these eastern cults: they were practicing some sort of demonic syncretism.  I suppose that’s what the occult is, is it not?  The most nefarious aspects of all the false cults, cobbled together into one.”

He then related how Falchi informed him of Morgan’s prowess as an occult magician, and his association with Aleister Crowley.  He also told of how Morgan had met Myriam MacKellar.  Apparently she had placed a cipher puzzle in the classified section of The Times (of London), containing clues requiring an adept’s knowledge of the Zohar, the Rig Veda, the Corpus Hermeticum, and various other books of iniquity.  Her idea was that if anyone was able to correctly decode the cipher, they must surely be a person accomplished enough to borrow or buy her cherished copy of the Book of Soyga, one of the rarest and most sought-after occult manuscripts.

Mere approximations: “a beautiful quarter-caste Afro-Caribbean girl named Lorraine,” and an esoteric cryptograph published in the back of a newspaper.

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Morgan solved the cipher: it promised him the long-lost manuscript, and it offered the contact information for its owner.  He traveled to Glasgow to meet her; their friendship blossomed instantly.  Myriam MacKellar saw in him a genuine prodigy, and he considered her a mentor even greater than Crowley.  She especially impressed him by telling a story which revealed who Jack the Ripper was.  Together they decided to undertake a long-term project known as an “Aldaraian spiritual operation.”  Morgan told her he had received “supernatural messages” from “a great deity.”  They decided to use a series of rites from the Book of Soyga to contact this deity.  From the transcript:

CGB:  It was the twelfth of July, I remember, a Thursday, our last day of classes with Msgr. Gallo.  Falchi had completely dropped out, as I told you.  He never returned after those first few days.  So anyway, our seminar was over, and we said our good-byes thanked the monsignor.  Afterwards a few of us seminarians went out to dinner.  It was one of those long endless conversational dinners—you know how it is, I’m sure, Mr. Morgan, when you’re young and you think you have all these great ideas worth debating for hours and hours, but in truth you’re full of nonsense, and only age and experience can give you wisdom.  Well, we were young.  We debated our philosophies all evening.  We ate our meal, and then we ordered some more wine, and then we had dessert, and then coffee, and then we ordered cognac, and all the while we kept on debating.  I, of course, was arguing for Stoicism.  Most of the others were Thomists.  There was one fellow who was unabashedly liberal and progressive.  He was a modernist, but I don’t think he even realized it.  We all asked him, “how are you going to swear the Oath Against Modernism at your ordination?”  He took offense to that.  He was convinced he was orthodox.

RM: Pardon me, Signore.  But you were saying about Falchi and Morgan and the Book of Soyga …

CGB: Yes, well.  Okay: it was past eleven o’clock by the time we finally wrapped it up.  I went back to my hotel.  As I was ascending the stairs from the lobby, I saw a bizarre group of people coming down.  It was the English group, and with them was Falchi.  But they were dressed like Benedectine monks: with long black robes, and hoods pulled over their heads.  They were silent and solemn.  I let them pass without a word.  There was something unsettling about their procession.  I noticed the two men with them; they had instrument cases strapped to their backs.  Then I saw Falchi bringing up the rear, and I put my arm on his to stop him.  “Falchi,” I whispered, “what’s going on?”  He looked at me intently.  He said, “this is the concluding rite of the Aldaraian spiritual operation I told you about.  The thirteenth commences at midnight.  It’ll be Evan’s birthday, and the anniversary of the birthday of John Dee, the magician who discovered this secret rite in the Book of Soyga.”  Falchi was holding the book in his hands.  It was a thick, dusty, worm-eaten, leather-bound thing.  It really did look about a thousand years old.

His companions were waiting for him at the bottom of the steps.  Myriam, the woman, looked up at us.  Her taut face looked repulsive beneath the cover of her hood.  In her affected tone of voice she asked, “will your friend be joining us, Alessandro?”  Falchi looked at me.  Unfortunately, I was still a small bit tipsy from the drinks I’d had at dinner.  And I confess, I was inquisitive as to what these people were up to.  It’s true, they were off-putting and strange, but at the same time I couldn’t help my curiosity.  I was like a kitten confronting a crab.  I couldn’t help myself; I had to stick my nose in closer to investigate.  I was young, remember.  And also there was the captivating girl, Lorraine.  Unlike Myriam, she looked beautiful beneath her hood.  Her face, half-shrouded in shadow, was full of mystery and the unknown.  So I followed Falchi as he continued down the stairs.  It was the gravest mistake of my life.

Silence.

RM:  What happened next?

CGB: I followed them down a hallway which was off-limits to guests.  But no one spied us.  We arrived at a door to the basement.  It was padlocked, but one of the two nameless men picked the lock with a skewer.  And we went down among the dust and the cobwebs.  Our way was lit by a lantern Evan Morgan was carrying.  We went through the hotel’s cellar, past their broken furniture and racks of wine, and came to a square wooden door, also padlocked.

At this point, Gagne-Bevilacqua relates (with some tedium) a labyrinthine journey through underground Rome.  The group eventually arrived in a large, cavernous room of ancient clay bricks with a vaulted ceiling.  In the center of this room stood a monolithic rectangular structure, about eight feet high and two feet wide.  It was draped in a crimson sheet.  Some of the clay bricks which had fallen from the walls had been used to erect four short pillars around the monolith, each one about three fee high.  Atop each pillar sat a dozen or so white votive candles, which Evan Morgan and Alessandro Falchi proceeded to light.  Meanwhile the two “nondescript men” removed their instruments from their backpacks: one had a small hand-pumped harmonium; the other one had, according to Gagne-Bevilacqua, “the peculiar Indian lute that plays only a drone, which I think is called a sitar.”  (Research indicates that this may actually have been a tampoura).

When the candles were lit and the musicians were seated, the other four members of the party removed their black robes.  Morgan and Falchi were wearing finely-tailored double-breasted dark suits beneath theirs.  The women, Myriam and Lorraine, were wearing short, coarse, crudely-woven gray tunics.  Gagne-Bevilacqua describes the spindly wrinkled legs and arms of Myriam MacKellar as rendering her “resembling nothing so much as a plucked chicken,” whereas Lorraine’s shapely limbs, he noticed, were covered in an elaborate network of tattoos of a runic and hieroglyphic nature.  These tattoos, he reckoned, were the reason for her conservative mode of dress when he first met her in the café—even her neck, hands, and feet were covered in the intricate scripts and designs.  And then the odd ceremony commenced.

The musicians began playing a mournful drone.  And Lorraine began singing: an unearthly, wordless, monosyllabic moan that filled the whole cavern.  There was something almost trance-like and haunting in Lorraine’s resonant thrum, according to Gagne-Bevilacqua, but then Myriam MacKellar began accompanying her with occasional high-pitched shrieks, which the observer described as “abrasive and hellish.”  Meanwhile Morgan and Falchi began making a series of versicle-and-response chants which they read out of the Book of Soyga, in a language which sounded as if it should never be uttered aloud.  “It all amounted to a terrible cacophony,” said Gagne-Bevilacqua, “but nevertheless I could tell what was being done.  It was obvious what all of this was.  All of these sounds and words were being addressed to someone, or something.  The whole ceremony was an orison—a prayer, a summons, an invocation.  I shuddered to think of whatever entity would be pleased with this awful sort of praise.  It went on for what seemed like an eternity, but I was frozen in place.  I began to wonder to myself, ‘am I in hell?’  Finally, the whole cavern reverberated with the ringing of church bells from a tower somewhere above.  It was midnight.”

At the chiming of the hour, the hideous liturgy drew to a close.  A heavy silence lay like a fog in the vaulted chamber.  Morgan then spoke something aloud in the ancient language he had been chanting in; Falchi stepped forward and pulled the crimson sheet from the tall structure they were gathered around.  Beneath it was an old and crumbling stone sarcophagus with runes carved into it, stood up on its feet.  According to Gagne-Bevilacqua, there were three different scripts represented.  The first was Hebrew, which he recognized immediately.  Years later, he would come across Sanskrit, and be reminded that it had been the second text on the sarcophagus.  The third, he said, he was “unable to identify, even to this day.”  Morgan and Falchi then began to push the lid aside.  “I knew I had to leave,” Gagne-Bevilacqua recalled.  From the transcript:

CGB: I had seen and heard enough already.  Whatever lay behind that stone slab, I knew it was something I did not want to see.  I knew it was something no human should ever behold.  But still I remained frozen, anchored in place.  And then the slab was removed, and I saw it.

RM:  What was it?

CGB:  The most awful thing.  You would not believe me.

RM:  At least give me the chance.

CGB:  Very well.  This is what it was: it was the head of a monkey on the torso of a man.  With six arms.  And then the legs of a monkey.  The skin of the human torso was covered with a chalky, pale-green, glowing substance, like phosphorescence.  It was the most sickening and unnatural thing I have ever looked upon.

The creature was Hanuman, a god from the pantheon of the Hindus.  This was the “great deity” from whom Evan Morgan had been receiving “supernatural messages.”  (Later in the course of their interviews, Gagne-Bevilacqua would tell of Alessandro Falchi’s continued devotion to Hanuman—a devotion which persisted all the way to his death).  Gagne-Bevilacqua did not stay in the underground chamber much longer.  He told of how he watched as Lorraine, in her bare feet, gingerly approached the monkey-human chimera, and how it reached out one of its lower arms and slowly anointed her forehead with its thumb, leaving a mark of greenish paste.  The demon then climbed, like a spider with its eight limbs, to the top of the sarcophagus, and from its perch surveyed its small crowd of adorers.  It noticed Gagne-Bevilacqua standing off from afar, and it fixed its piercing gaze upon him.  Gagne-Bevilacqua looked into its eyes: “it was like I was looking,” he said, “into the apertures of hell.”  And that, finally, was enough to make him leave.  He turned around and groped his way through the maze of darkness in desperation, until he clambered up the basement steps into the hotel.  He stuffed his things into his trunk in haste and left the hotel, camping out on a bench at the train station until he could get the next train—any train—heading north.

Returning to the seminary the following afternoon, he cleaned out his side of his dormitory room.  He had already realized the priesthood was not his vocation, but that day he decided to make his break immediately.  He cabled his family to send a car and packed up his books and belongings.  “I noticed,” he said, “that Falchi’s tarantula had died.  I suppose he neglected to ask anyone to feed it while he was away in Rome.  I felt a small tinge of pity for the ugly thing.  It was turned over on its back with its legs curled up into its belly.  And I did a strange thing then.  I suppose I wanted to occupy myself with anything I could, rather than having my mind remember the awful sights of the night before.  So I took the dead tarantula outside and dug a little hole in the ground and buried it, like a child giving a funeral for a pet.  That is how I spent my afternoon of the thirteenth of July in 1917.  It was not until a few years later that I came to realize a certain coincidence: it was the very same day on which the children at Fatima were given a vision of hell.  I was staying with my aunt and uncle in Pennsylvania, a very pious couple as I already told you, and the only things they had for reading were pieces of religious literature.  I was casually reading a pamphlet on Fatima when I came to Sister Lucia’s description of the vision of hell—and it contained a line that made me sit up and take notice.   ‘The demons were distinguished by their terrifying and repellent likeness to frightful and unknown animals.’  I shuddered at reading this.  My recollections of that horrible night flooded back to me.  I do not think it was mere chance that on the same day Evan Morgan summoned up a demon with an animal likeness, Our Lady made her visionaries aware of the corporeal forms of demons.  My faith had grown lukewarm after I left the seminary, but when I read about Fatima that day, it was rekindled.  That very same evening, I went down to the nearest church and sought out the priest there and made a confession.  I had seen first-hand the forces of darkness at work in the world—I had witnessed it that night beneath Rome.  But that Fatima pamphlet, you see, it reminded me of the forces of light.  After my confession, I knelt in the church beneath the statue of Our Lady, and I prayed the Hail Mary and I prayed the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel.  I remembered a passage from Ephesians, the one about putting on the armor of god and taking up the shield of faith, for the devil comes with fiery arrows.  When I walked out of the church that evening, I was a changed man.”

The child seers of Fatima, 1917: Lucia Santos and Francisco and Jacinta Marto.  “Make sacrifices for sinners, and say often, especially while making a sacrifice: O Jesus, this is for love of Thee, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for offenses committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”

Next post

At the Brescia Seminary, 1916-17

Claudio Cesare Gagne-Bevilacqua was born to a moneyed family in Iseo in 1898, in a third-story bedroom in one of the city’s stateliest mansions.  His father was a railway executive for a private line owned by a Lombard Marquis.  The Gagne-Bevilacquas had profited handsomely from the 19^th century industrial boom in northern Italy, and the consequent expansion in rail.  (It was a fortuitous time to be a railway executive).  The baby’s Christian name was given to him after the Roman emperor Claudius Caesar: the boy had been born with unequal leg lengths; his left leg was a full four centimeters shorter than his right.  It was clear that the child would eventually walk with a distinct limp; the emperor, who was club-footed, had also limped.  “My father was very fond of Roman Antiquity, and he had a morbid sense of humor also,” recalled Gagne-Bevilacqua of his papà.  “And therefore I was Claudio Cesare.  Besides, I was the ninth child, and I was the runt.  At that point, I suppose, my parents could be cavalier with names.”

Roger Morgan (the father of this blogger) met with Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua in January of 1986 in Turin.  The following is excerpted from his notes and transcripts of his first visit to Gagne-Bevilacqua’s apartment.

He is a short man, and squat; coarse-looking and swarthy—almost dwarfishly short, in fact, perhaps five feet tall.  My first impression is of Toulouse-Lautrec (had Toulouse-Lautrec, perhaps, lived into old age).  He walks with a distinct hobble owing to a birth defect in his left femur.  His left shoe has a modified sole to correct for this, but it helps only so much.  Nevertheless he has an elfin agility and sprightliness, even for a man of his advanced years (he is eighty-seven).

I am impressed at the strange grace and deft with which he maneuvers around his flat.  Meeting him and observing him, one is reminded of two fictional bell-ringers: Hugo’s Quasimodo and Huysmans’ Carhaix.  He has Quasimodo’s simian dexterity in spite of his handicap (I can easily picture this old fellow swinging from the ropes of a bell tower), and he has the unassuming piety and good-sense traditionalism of Carhaix.  One imagines him excelling in his lifelong service as a valet.  This man exemplifies old-fashioned sturdiness and efficiency.

He goes to a bureau, opens a drawer, and locates an old photograph.  He hobbles back over and hands it to me.  It’s a relic of a picture, with all the scratches and speckles of a daguerreotype: it’s the entering class of first-year students at the Brescia Seminary in 1916, the order of acolyte.  He doesn’t need to point himself out—I can locate him immediately: a dwarfish little thing standing in the front row, wearing a cassock too long for him that falls onto his shoes, one of which has a lifted sole.  He’s probably the best-looking young man in the class, though.  The youthful Gagne-Bevilacqua possesses an oddball handsomeness: a darkly aristocratic look (thick brow, heavy-lidded eyes, and thin lips) tempered with a droopy hangdog tinge: a nose slightly too big and a face slightly too long.  And then I realize who he truly reminds me of: Al Pacino.  In this photo he is the early Al Pacino, circa The Panic in Needle Park.  I remark on this.

RM: Begging your pardon, Signore.  Has anyone ever told you you resemble the actor Al Pacino in this picture?

CGB: (shakes head) I do not know who this person is.

RM: He’s a famous American actor.  Surely you’ve seen, or heard of, the Godfather movies?

CGB:  No.  I am sorry.  I have not been to the cinema since the 1960s.  La Dolce Vita.  I found it scandalous.

My father was a massive cinephile, so it’s unsurprising he would steer the conversation in that direction so soon.  Two things stand out to me, however, reading these notes and transcripts more than thirty years later.  The first is that, in 1986, the Godfather movies consisted of only two installments.  A third entry in the series came out in 1990, and part of its plotline included a conspiracy to murder John Paul I.  The reasons for the assassination in the movie are purely fictional (and completely wrong), but it is interesting that the movies were mentioned here in passing since, on the fourth day of their interviews, Gagne-Bevilacqua would inform my father of the true details of the actual murder of John Paul I in 1978.  The second thing is that my father had been struck by the physical resemblance of two different men born generations apart.  What Gagne-Bevilacqua pointed out to him next, however, was even more striking: the uncanny similarities between two of the boys in the very same photo.  On the far left was Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI.  In the middle of the right side was Alessandro Falchi.

We can only surmise at what the young Montini must’ve thought upon first meeting his doppelgänger at seminary.  In mythology, the doppelgänger represents the dark half—and this aspect, indeed, would prove true: Falchi would turn out to be wicked soon enough.  And just as in Dostoevsky’s story of a man who meets his double, the evil twin in this case would eventually come to bedevil his counterpart, overtaking his life and eventually replacing him altogether.  But a doppelgänger is also said to be a portent of death (when the poet Shelley saw his double, the other Shelley pointed wordlessly to the Tyrrhenian Sea where he would eventually drown).  Not so with Montini’s counterpart, however.  Alessandro Falchi died in 1978; Pope Paul VI is yet still alive.

At the time, Gagne-Bevilacqua was not privy to how Montini himself felt about any of this.  “I knew Montini hardly at all during my year in seminary,” he said.  “He had some health problems, and he did not live on the campus.  He stayed at home, and was driven back and forth each day.  I don’t remember much about him.  He was of average intelligence, I would say.  Generally well-liked.  I’m afraid he didn’t make much of an impression at the time.  There was no indication he would one day become pope.  What I recall mostly is that he looked so much like Falchi.  Everyone was amazed at how they could almost pass for twins.  And Falchi, of course, I got to know very well.  We were assigned to share the same dormitory room.”

According to his first-year roommate, Falchi did not care for Montini.  Much of their physical similarity was remarkable: the same-shaped jawline, identical pairs of piercing eyes, and equally aquiline Roman noses.  But Falchi had poor eyesight, and wore a thick and unflattering pair of glasses.  He also wore his hair extremely short, shorn down to just a coarse stubble—because to grow it out would reveal tight kinky curls, which he hated.  “He despised his hair.  He was terribly vain,” related Gagne-Bevilacqua.  From the transcript:

CGB: He was very superficial.  Perhaps it bothered him that Montini had nicer hair and didn’t wear glasses.  I don’t know.  But for some reason he resented him.  Falchi was fixated on his own looks.  He was frequently in front of the mirror, you see: shaving his chin, tweezing his nose hairs, plucking his brow.  I was appalled he was even in seminary in the first place.  He was obsessed with his looks, and he seemed determined to commit as many sins of the flesh as he could.  I knew for a fact he was carrying on with a lower-class girl named Lia who lived in town, and that he impregnated her.  She kept the paternity of the child a secret, and she and her mother raised it on their own.  Falchi’s only contribution to the child was to name it Federico.

RM: After Engels, I presume?  You’ve told me Falchi was a communist.

CGB: No, after Nietzsche.  He became a communist much later.  Who knows what he really believed.  Falchi was simply a sieve, in my opinion, catching anything which was contrary to the faith, and letting anything that was pure slip through.  Nietzsche, modernism, Satanism, communism, Kabbalah, Hindu paganism—whatever he could get his hands on, I’m telling you, as long as it was anti-Catholic.  Years later, in the forties, he fathered two other children.  Consider their names: Benito, after Mussolini, and Giosuè, after Carducci.

RM: Carducci?

CGB:  He was an anticlerical poet of Italy.  Falchi loved his poem called Inno a Satana—“Hymn to Satan.”  I believe that poem sums up Falchi the best.  It is a simple paean to individuality and unbridled freedom.  What Falchi despised most was the authority of God and the Church.  At one point I decided I’d had enough of his impiety, and I reported his behaviors to one of the masters.  But nothing was ever done.  I thought to myself, “how is it that the rector and the administrators are letting this abomination stay on?”  But he was very intelligent, you see.  I think that’s what must’ve endeared him to the masters.  I suppose even in those early days he was quite capable of putting on a façade.  The Falchi I knew was a reader of Nietzsche and Carducci.  He even kept a pet tarantula in a small aquarium in our room.  He told me the tarantula had some important symbolism in Nietzsche.  I forget the particulars.  Do you know what it is?

RM:  In Nietzsche?  No, I’m unfamiliar.

CGB:  It does not matter, I suppose.  But here is the thing: secretly he was reading these abhorrent writers, but outwardly he was projecting the image of a keen student.  His knowledge of the scriptures was encyclopedic.  And he could recite long passages of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae verbatim.  Scholasticism, you see, was the cornerstone of seminary education at this time.  The legacy of Leo XIII and his Aeterni Patris were still reverberating throughout the Church.  This is the main reason I did not last past my first year in seminary.

RM: Scholasticism?

CGB:  Yes.  It’s very involved and analytical.  It requires an elite mental faculty.  But me—I do not have such acuity.  I am a simple man.  My mind is not suited to it.

RM: You … seem very intelligent to me, Signore.

CGB: Oh, I am not a complete dunce.  I get by well enough okay.  My masters at seminary, I think, were hoping I would be like St. John Vianney: far from a star pupil, but dedicated enough to make it through.  Well, it was not to be.  The Curé of Ars, I believe, had troubling learning Latin.  His teachers were concerned he would never learn to celebrate Mass.  My difficulties were just the opposite.  Latin was my sole advantage.  I was mastering the liturgy quicker than anyone.  I have always had a knack for languages.  My father’s library was helpful in this.  I was reading Virgil, Cicero, and Catullus in Latin when I was a boy of fourteen.  Not to brag, but it is the truth.  I was good at Latin, but poor at all else.  My deficiencies were especially theological.  I could not find my way through that Summa.  It was a labyrinth, and I was constantly getting lost in it.  With all respect to the Angelic Doctor, it gave me a headache.  Meanwhile I was finding much to love in the classical Stoics.  Their language was plain.  Their ideas were easy to grasp.  While Falchi stayed up late studying his Nietzsche in our room, I was reading Seneca and Marcus Aurelius in Latin, and Epictetus in Greek.  I realized that if there was any kind of philosophy meant for me, it was practical philosophy.  I knew I was suited for a more modest vocation.  Had I continued on at seminary, Scholasticism would’ve been my bane: I would’ve resented it, and I would’ve made a mediocre priest, at best.

(At this point, Gagne-Bevilacqua gestures to his shorter leg).

CGB: As you might guess, Epictetus in particular had a profound influence on me.  He was a kindred spirit.  First, a cripple.  Second, a Stoic.  And third, of all the Stoic philosophers, he was the one most preoccupied with God.  I wonder if he was ever preached the gospel.  Do you suppose he ever heard it?  I doubt he did, because I think he would’ve received it warmly.  He would’ve been one of the greatest early Christian philosophers.

There then followed a long meander in the conversation.  Gagne-Bevilacqua made tea, and went on at some length about the correct method & materials for brewing a proper cup of tea—having mastered it, he said, over the course of his career.  In short, his method was this: Ceylon leaves, loose (never bagged—bagged tea has “an aftertaste of paper”), steeped in a glass pot for precisely four minutes in water with a temperature of 70°C (one must use a thermometer).  My father then took the earlier mention of philosophy to segue into a digression on the Catholic philosophical themes in the films of Robert Bresson, his favorite director.  He was eager to disabuse Gagne-Bevilacqua of his contempt for the cinema, conceding that the industry was largely wretched, but insisting that it was a high art form when placed in the right competent and thoughtful hands.  They eventually returned to the subject of Gagne-Bevilacqua’s seminary year.

RM: Well, if you were a liturgical prodigy as a seminarian, then I know you must innately appreciate the language of cinema at its purest: sight, sound, and symbols.

CGB: Perhaps.  But it was my talent for the liturgy that eventually took me to Rome, which is where I received the shock of a lifetime.  It was there that I first became aware of the awful tentacles which had already, in 1916, begun to work their way into the Church.  My roommate Falchi—his brand of anti-Catholicism was rather aimless and bored.  I don’t think he had any direction or focus.  He just hated authority and bristled against God.  But when we got to Rome, I came into contact with some persons who had serious intentions indeed.  These were the real servants of hell.  I shudder to even remember it.

RM: What brought you to Rome?

CGB:  Pope Benedict XV, in a sense.  The Holy Father was very much a high churchman.  He had recently made some reformations and refinements to the college of the Magistri Caerimoniarum—the liturgical experts of the papal household, you see.  Our Pope Benedict was keen to instill, in the clergy and the seminarians, a real appreciation for the pontifical liturgy.  That summer, some of the northern seminaries were asked to send a few of their acolytes to Rome, to study for two weeks with a visiting liturgical consultant, Monsignor Matteo Gallo.  I was the obvious choice from the Brescia Seminary.  But they were supposed to send two students.  When Falchi learned of my appointment, he asked one of his masters if he might go as well.  The answer was yes.  And so we went.  And let me tell you, when I got back from Rome and returned to the seminary, it was only to collect up my things and leave.  What I saw while I was at the Vatican will haunt me forever.

At this point, Gagne-Bevilacqua became reticent to divulge more.  He attempted several times to change the subject, at one point successfully coaxing my father into another long digression about cinema.  They did finally return to the chronology of relevant events, which I will excerpt and summarize in the next post.

It will remain forever unclear what symbolism the young Alessandro Falchi discovered in Nietzsche’s tarantula.  According to Jung, “the tarantula represents one of the many aspects of the inferior man, and if the inferior man bites him, and pours his shadow into his face, it has surely gotten at him and then he becomes the shadow.  He himself now plays the role of the tarantula: he becomes poisonous, and his ressentiment is manifest even against people to whom he cannot deny a certain amount of merit.”  But this is cryptic blather, and not of much help.  Nietzsche’s own passage is equally enigmatic:

 “And then the tarantula, my old enemy, bit me.  With godlike assurance and beauty it bit my finger.  ‘Punishment there must be and justice,’ it thinks; ‘and here he shall not sing songs of enmity in vain.’  Indeed, it has avenged itself.  And alas, now it will make my soul, too, whirl with revenge.  But to keep me from whirling, my friends, tie me tight to this column.  Rather I would be a stylite even, than a whirl of revenge.  Verily, Zarathustra is no cyclone or whirlwind; and if he is a dancer, he will never dance the tarantella.  Thus spoke Zarathustra.”

Next post in the chronology of events

Next immediate post: a digression to address some questions and comments

Dispatches from Bayside

The theory that Pope Paul VI was replaced at the Vatican by an imposter is not novel.  It is by no means original to this blogger.  It is, in fact, somewhat well-attested to over the past four decades.  One of the earliest and best-known attestations in North America was made in the late 1970s by Veronica Lueken of Bayside, Queens in New York (here is her Wikipedia entry; here is a website operated by a group of her devotees called St. Michael’s World Apostolate, and here is another called These Last Days Ministries.  This blog does not endorse either organization).

Mrs. Lueken claimed to be a Marian visionary, maintaining that she had seen countless apparitions, not only of the Blessed Mother, but many saints and angels as well.  In one of her messages, Mrs. Leuken related that the Virgin Mary had appeared to her and informed her that the pope, Paul VI, had been murdered by a satanic cabal in the Vatican.  According to Mrs. Lueken, Mary told her the cabal had placed an imposter on the throne of Peter—a communist look-alike who had been worked on by the finest plastic surgeons in the world, sculpted into a remarkable replica.  “My child,” said Mary (allegedly) to Mrs. Lueken, “shout this from the rooftops!”  The result was that Mrs. Lueken received a swift condemnation from the Diocese of Brooklyn.  Her visions and revelations were deemed not credible, and harmful to the faith.

It is the opinion of this writer that the Diocese of Brooklyn was correct.  Mrs. Lueken’s visions couldn’t have come from heaven, because heaven does not make errors.  And Mrs. Lueken was flatly wrong: Paul VI had not been murdered.  He had, it was true, been replaced by an imposter.  But he was nevertheless living.  He would’ve been able to say, as Mark Twain had quipped, “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”  And like Twain’s characters, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the pope had actually watched his own funeral (not from a choir loft, however, but on a squat little portable black-&-white Brionvega television in the Milan apartment of an elderly couple he knew from his tenure as Archbishop there).  And at the time of Mrs. Leuken’s revelations, Pope Paul had fully settled in to his secret life in exile.  He was being sheltered by a group of Greek Orthodox monks on the isle of Crete, wearing the coarse cassock and skufia of Byzantine monastics, having grown out his beard to a full, bristling, and wild Rasputin length (the Italians are a hirsute race, so within a few years he was quite able to rival his Greek compatriots in their ages-old habit of growing untamed Moses beards).  Even the most careful observer would hardly have recognized him there, emerging from his cell in the morning with his head solemnly bowed, joining the slow, shuffling procession of dark robes to the chapel to chant the ancient prayers of the Psalter.  (I might be getting ahead of the story with all this.  In later posts, I will tell of how Pope Paul initially learned of the plot to murder him, how he managed to escape from the Vatican, and where he journeyed afterwards; the report comes from his personal assistant, Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua.  The salient fact is this, though: at the time of Mrs. Lueken’s revelations, Pope Paul VI was very much alive).

So Mrs. Lueken’s story was only half right.  But it’s relevant, for our purposes here, that an obscure housewife in Bayside, Queens was already articulating the idea that the Pope Paul in Rome was not actually the real Pope Paul.  What probably happened is that Mrs. Lueken caught a whiff of a rumor which contained a nugget of truth.  And rumors were really beginning to make the rounds by the middle of the 1970s.  The imposter, whose real name was Alessandro Falchi, was exhibiting catatonic and strange behaviors.

Soon, over the span of several posts, I will provide a more detailed biographical sketch of Alessandro Falchi.  Suffice it to say for now that by the time he took up his role as “Pope Paul VI,” he was a walking casualty of a hideously sinful lifestyle.  Falchi had always been a libertine: he was a man of rapacious and indiscriminate sexual appetites.  In modern parlance, we might label him a “bisexual,” although even that might be too restricting a term.  He had relationships with women and men, mostly men, and sometimes even with those woe-begotten persons who exhibit the genitalia of both sexes, called hermaphrodites.   Falchi was an ordained Catholic priest, but privately he was an occultist; in the mid-1950s he requested a position in Bombay, India (now known as Mumbai) in order to increase his knowledge of the Sanskrit language and to study the Vedic ritual texts.  In a padlocked off-limits room in his rectory, he erected a shrine (candles, altars, flowers, and statues) to the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman, to whom he sacrificed a bowl of ghee every evening.  While in Bombay, Falchi fell in love with a hijra prostitute named Saraswati.  It is unclear whether Saraswati was a male passing for female, or a hermaphrodite, or something else.  Falchi told Gagne-Bevilacqua, “my Saraswati eluded definition.”  Fairly repulsed, Gagne-Bevilacqua did not press the issue.  What Saraswati did do, however, was to give Falchi the venereal disease syphilis, which slowly began to ravage his once-formidable mind.

After his stint in India, Falchi was laicized (details to come) and ended up in southern California in the 1960s, wearing a casual wardrobe purchased in Bombay: leather sandals, earth-toned trousers, madras shirts, and mala bead necklaces.  He fell in with the haute crowd of British expatriate intellectuals living there, including Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood.  Most of these men were Indophiles; Falchi managed to ingratiate himself among them with his competence in Hindu religious matters.  He impressed Huxley by recounting his dalliance with their late mutual friend, the poet Evan Morgan, but after a while Huxley is reported to have found Falchi distasteful.  At the time of Huxley’s death in November of 1963 (the same day JFK was assassinated), the great writer was probably at least glad to be ridding himself of the ex-priest who kept pestering him to collaborate on a literary translation of the Ramayana.  Huxley went into the ether—his doors of perception were cleansed; he gazed upon the infinite; and Alessandro Falchi was no longer even a memory.

Aldous Huxley (1894 -1963).  British author of Brave New World, Island, The Doors of Perception, and Heaven and Hell.

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Falchi stuck around Los Angeles for a few more years, growing ever more indolent and dissolute.  He became a fixture at the homosexual soirées hosted by Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and later began experimenting with psychedelic drugs.  In 1965, while Pope Paul VI was presiding over the close of the Second Vatican Council in Rome, his future replacement had become quite enamored with LSD.  Intemperate use of the lysergic would prove to severely hobble his mind; this, alongside the syphilis, ultimately sealed his fate.  By the time he first put on his papal garments in 1972, he was a rather confused and empty-headed old man who often exhibited a blank, dead-eyed gaze.  Just as ancient Rome had a deranged syphilitic sitting on the throne during the reign of the emperor Caligula, so too did modern Rome have one in the mid-1970s, seated on the chair of St. Peter in Vatican City.  But Falchi had one thing going for him: he looked the part.  The plastic surgery procedures had been going on incrementally for over four years.  It was precisely his clueless state in life which had rendered him so compliant to his handlers.  They had sculpted him very nearly to imposter perfection.

It was his behavior that began to raise hackles.  He was passable when celebrating Mass or waving to crowds, or even making brief speeches and giving blessings.   But people meeting him in private papal audiences were confounded by his bizarre non sequiturs, his uncomfortable silences, and his inability to make eye contact.  Foreign dignitaries trying to discuss serious political situations were met with vapid responses.  One of them was the President of France, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.  A young journalist covering their meeting found himself appalled at the pope’s inability to say anything of substance.  When the president asked him a detailed question about unrest in Lebanon, the supposed Pope Paul whispered the gnomic reply, “I have not found such faith in all of Israel.”  When the President politely said he appreciated the bible reference but desired to talk about the Lebanese particulars, the pope cut him off.  “It’s not just a reference,” he said softly.  “I am Jesus the Christ.  I am the Greatest I Am.  As the Lord God said to Moses, ‘I AM THAT I AM.’”  The journalist did not scruple to hide his amazement.  At a press conference afterwards, he asked Giscard d’Estaing if he thought the man he met with was really the pope.  (The president sighed and rolled his eyes, dismissing the question as “absurd”—but not without the hint of an amused smile at the suggestion.)

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing meeting with Alessandro Falchi in December 1975.  The book is the Vatican library’s copy of a rare 1922 edition of the medieval French saga The Song of Roland, illustrated by the French artist Edmund Dulac.  (“I shall never love you,” Roland cried, “for you are falsehood and evil pride.”  Stanza CXXXI).

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Other audiences passed in similar fashion.  Most people attempted to put a charitable spin on it.  The pope was getting old; it might be the onset of dementia.  The pope was a busy man; his schedule has probably worn him out.  The pope was having an “off day”; he hadn’t gotten enough sleep—meeting dozens of people at meeting after meeting was bound to make anyone confused.  But for some people, the oddball behavior was too much to ignore.  Monsignor Robert Flynn, an American priest from the Archdiocese of Newark, recalled personally meeting the pope twice: first during his papal visit to New York in 1965, and later, at the Vatican, in 1973.  He did not mince words.  “Something very diabolical is going on here,” he told a confrère during his trip to Rome.  “There is no way that man is the same person I met with eight years ago.  There is simply no way.”  Uninvited ears might’ve been listening in, because Msgr. Flynn was the victim of several violent home invasions in his rectory during the remainder of his priestly career.  In one of these incidents, an attacker broke both of his arms and four of his ribs with an aluminum baseball bat.  Police informed him the assailant would face attempted murder charges if found (though he never was).  On one hand, this might be expected: it was Newark, New Jersey.  On the other hand, there is this: upon his retirement, Msgr. Flynn went into hiding.

Doubtless it was a “something is amiss with the pope” rumor similar to the ones mentioned above that Mrs. Lueken became privy to, and she inserted it into one of her fraudulent revelations.  The fact remains that her full account was wrong.  The pope had not been murdered.  Either the story had gotten twisted and more elaborate as it travelled—as the original message gets garbled in the children’s game of “telephone”—or Mrs. Lueken added the murder as part of her own lurid whimsy.  If she did, it was almost prescient, for the original plan, indeed, was to have the pope murdered.  When he eluded the designs of his would-be assassins, they simply progressed to the next stage and proceeded with propping up his replacement double.  The details of all this will be provided later, so as to keep things chronological.  And with that, we can finally take our leave of Frau Lueken—a phony visionary, for sure, but nonetheless a recorded testimony to the imposter claim, and very early on.  Let us call her Exhibit A.

Danke, Veronika.

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