The British Monarchy in Rome, May 1923

We come now to an important episode in the early history of Giovanni Battista Montini.  In January of 1923 he returned to his apartments in Rome to await his appointment to the Vatican Secretariat.  While he waited, he occupied his time with a light regimen of studies at the Pontifical Academy of Noble Ecclesiastics, and with composing some wishy-washy political pieces for the student newspaper he had founded back in Brescia, La Fionda.  This period of limbo lasted for five months: from January until his appointment to the papal nuncio in Warsaw, Poland in June.  On the surface, it may seem an inconsequential stretch of time in the life of the young priest.  But on the contrary: there was a significant incident.  It occurred in early May, when King George V and Queen Mary of England made a state visit to Rome as the guests of Victor Emmanuel III, the penultimate King of Italy.

Archival footage.  (This video has no sound).

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The visit lasted for five days and was known as “English Week” by the Italian public, who welcomed the royal couple warmly.  Arriving along with the king and queen was an unofficial contingent of various English Royalists as well as English Catholics, including the papal chamberlain Evan Morgan, the 2^nd Viscount Tredegar.  (Any readers unfamiliar with this demented personage are advised to kindly acquaint themselves with the short biography which was posted earlier on the blog).

On Thursday of that week, Father Montini was invited by his physician and friend Roberto Zorza to attend a dinner at the Roman residence of Prince Francesco Massimo, a prominent member of the so-called “Black Nobility”—those among the Italian aristocracy who continued to remain loyal to the Church, and who were appalled by both the fascist and people’s movements.  Father Montini was able to feel vaguely sympathetic to the Black Nobility.  Typical of him, his politics at the time were riddled with uncertainty and fence-sitting.  His brother Lodovico was a staunch opponent of the ascendant fascism of Mussolini’s party, and his father was a supporter of Don Luigi Sturzo’s Italian People’s Party (in Italian, Partito Popolare Italiano, or PPI).  But Montini had been in heady discussions of political theory with his friend Zorza, a monarchist of some conviction.  Montini was never quite converted to the monarchist stance himself, though he was coming to appreciate it: God alone was the source and font of morality, and if the Church was removed from the political equation, then morality would descend into the hands of the populace—and this would mean morality by the consensus of the mob.  One of his essays in La Fionda was critical of a rabble-rousing speech Sturzo had given at a PPI convention in April of that year.  Montini did not mention monarchism as an alternative, but he did wonder whether Sturzo’s uncompromising advocacy of popular sovereignty would be favorable to the Church in an increasingly secularized era.

At the dinner, Montini and Zorza shared a table with several members of the English delegation.  Among them was a dapper twenty-four year old named Hollander Zea, a British national of Peruvian descent who had been disowned by his family at age nineteen after a public conviction for homosexuality.  He was supported financially by a wealthy great-aunt in Peru, and moved with ease among the more dissolute circles of the English aristocracy.  Eventually his path had crossed with Evan Morgan’s, and they became friends until Morgan’s death in 1949.  Zea was not, however, a participant in Morgan’s occult activities.  He was an avowed atheist, and considered the existence of the devil as unlikely as the existence of God, and in his diaries he expresses an ongoing befuddlement with Morgan’s religious pursuits.  In one passage he described attending one of Morgan’s Luciferian rituals in Paris, remarking: “a man of Evan’s intelligence has no excuse for indulging in this nonsense, but I confess I find this sort of lunacy amusing.  Do they really think they will conjure the devil with candles and runes and backwards Latin?  I could barely suppress my laughter when the old woman started shrieking.”  (The “old woman” mentioned in this passage is Myriam MacKellar, since he uses the name “Myriam” interchangeably with “old woman” in many of his entries).  Zea was a prolific diarist, believing his own life to be of the utmost importance, and he chronicled his thoughts and misadventures in great detail.  His journal entry is the only known record of the events at Prince Massimo’s palace that particular Thursday.

EVENING OF 10 MAY

The prince’s mansion.  In a vast dining room, beneath crystal chandeliers, and among tall potted ferns.  We were seated with a middle-aged insurance clerk from Surrey named Jerome Fitzgerald, who was tall, solemn, and horse-faced.  In the course of Fitzgerald’s conversation with Evan it became clear that he was devout in his Catholicism.  At one point he began speaking of the several scapulars he wore underneath his shirt.  We were then joined by a pair of Italians, a young Roman doctor with his hair prematurely graying, surname of Zorzo, and a gentle, big-eared priest from Milan whom Zorzo introduced as Don Battista.  (Montini was from Brescia, obviously, but he had recently finished his canon law studies in Milan, which was probably the cause of Zea’s misunderstanding here.  “Don Battista” was possibly an instance of Zorza making a good-natured reference to Montini’s recent admission to the Academy of Noble Ecclesiastics, as by all accounts he preferred to be called simply “Father Montini.”  And “Zorzo” was obviously misheard.—WJQSM).  The priest’s English was abysmal, whereas Dr Zorzo’s was quite good.  The doctor became a translator for the priest after a most fascinating argument ensued. 

Fitzgerald expressed a desire to attend on Sunday the beatification ceremony of the famous Jesuit Cardinal, Robert Bellarmine.  Fitzgerald said that in his opinion, Bellarmine was the most important figure of the sixteenth century.  The doctor then commented, saying he had been given his Christian name after Bellarmine (“Roberto Bellarmino,” as he put it in his euphonious Italian).  Fitzgerald declared Bellarmine to have been more important to the Catholic Church than Pius V or Leo X or Charles Borromeo, even though a crucial part of Bellarmine’s legacy had been obscured and defamed.  “And what part was this?” asked the priest.

“His defense of the scriptural doctrine of geocentrism,” said Fitzgerald, and suddenly the debate was on.  The priest was visibly taken aback by this, but then he chuckled and shook his head in dismay.  “No, no, no,” he chided, “Bellarmino was wrong on that.  In fact, we must admit the Church was wrong.” 

The whole table was then treated to a history lesson on the Galileo controversy.  I confess to being surprised by Fitzgerald’s position.  I was unaware there were Catholics in existence who still clung to the ridiculous view that the sun revolves around the earth.  But he defended himself with eloquence and erudition.  In fact, I fear he bested the poor young priest.

The priest’s first line of defense was to say that Bellarmine had made a simple mistake in judgement.  He had failed to realize that the geocentric passages in the bible were supposed to be taken figuratively, not literally.  Fitzgerald replied: “but it was not just Cardinal Bellarmine who concluded this.  The Early Church Fathers unanimously believed in and taught a geocentric cosmos.  Were they mistaken also?”

Don Battista said that the Fathers were simply innocent of the science.  They accepted the Ptolemaic model like everyone else did at the time, as the astronomy to prove it incorrect did not yet exist.  Fitzgerald countered: “they were not taking their beliefs from Ptolemy.  They were taking them from Holy Writ.”

The priest softly smiled.  “A common misunderstanding.  I know the passage.  We studied this in seminary.  The Psalmist says, ‘the Earth will not be moved.’  But this only means that the Earth will not be moved from its course.  If you have studied Hebrew, you will recognize that the mowt of the niphal stem in that passage means that nothing will deter the earth on its orbit.  It does not indicate geocentrism.”

“I have not studied Hebrew myself,” Fitzgerald conceded, “but with all due politeness I must defer to the Jewish philosopher Maimonides over your own study of Hebrew.  Surely a learned Jewish scholar is a greater authority on the Hebrew language than a Catholic priest?  Maimonides studied the Hebrew bible extensively, and he contended that the bible described the sun as revolving around the earth.  I will assume that he, an eminent Jew, did not make a bald-faced error in basic Hebrew grammar.  Unless, perhaps, biblical Hebrew is your particular area of expertise?”

Don Battista at this point was beginning to show signs of wearying.  He was no longer chuckling and smiling so much.  His adversary was giving him a harder fight than he expected.  He sighed.  “What we must conclude from the geocentric descriptions in the bible is that God, in speaking to mankind, was speaking to them in terms they would be familiar with.  It appeared to the naked eye as if the sun was rotating around the earth.  No one had telescopes in those days.  So the bible was simply communicating in a manner which the people of the time could understand.”

“But the ancient Hebrews accepted the bible as the holy word of God.  If it is true that the earth revolves around the sun, then why would he confirm his chosen people in a scientific error?  I should also remind you that God’s revelation is for all people in all times.  It is truly timeless!  Why would God, in all his omnipotence, tailor scripture especially to the ancient Hebrews if he knew that it would be found troubling to people in the sixteenth century with telescopes?”  Fitzgerald’s voice was rising.  It was evident that he believed in this very passionately.  “Cardinal Bellarmine’s brilliance was to recognize that all the scientists in the world, with all their telescopes, were nothing other than mere mortal humans with fallible instruments.  The only assurance of truth we have is that which has been revealed from on high.  If inerrant scripture is at odds with human science, then the science must be wrong.  It is a heresy to claim that scripture contains any error.  That is why Galileo and Copernicus were condemned.  Geocentrism was a heresy and remains a heresy still.  Heresy is heresy.  Error can never become orthodoxy!”

The doctor named Zorzo was becoming exasperated in translating between the priest and his interlocutor.  Don Battista tried to keep his response minimal.  “The Holy Office that condemned Galileo was not infallible,” he said.  “When they pronounced geocentrism a heresy, they were unfortunately wrong.”

“It was not just the Holy Office, however,” countered Fitzgerald.  “It was Pope Alexander VII, who solemnly invoked Apostolic Authority in his bull Speculatores Domus Israel when he placed the heliocentric books on the Index and condemned them as heretical.  So think of it.  We have the geocentric descriptions in Holy Writ, the unanimous consensus of the Early Church Fathers, the condemnation of heliocentrism by the Holy Office, and finally the ratification of the Holy Office’s decision by the pope, in a formal decree which is binding on the faithful.  Nothing could be more Catholic, as we have scripture, tradition, and the magisterium, all teaching in unison!  How can anything buttressed by all three pillars of the Catholic Church possibly be overturned?”

At this point everyone at the table felt sorry for the poor priest, who was clearly being trounced.  The doctor translated Fitzgerald’s screed to him softly, robbing it of its thunder.  But the content remained.  The priest speared a scallop in lemon sauce with his fork and moved it around on his plate.  He gave Fitzgerald a kindly look.  “I am afraid we will have to agree to disagree,” he said.

“Very well,” Fitzgerald told him.  “But take caution, Father.  If you accept the notion that the Church can overturn a solemn condemnation, you set a dangerous precedent.  You make it possible for anything and everything to be overturned at some point in the future.”

Whoever Jerome Fitzgerald was, he is lost to history.  A little-known insurance clerk from Surrey: a devout Catholic who followed his Anglican king and queen to Rome, possibly in the hopes that they might somehow convert to Catholicism, and the English throne be rightfully restored to the Church.  One can only surmise about him.  He is not mentioned again in Hollander Zea’s diary.  But he seems to have been something of a prophet (for truly, “anything and everything” was overturned in the future, at Vatican II).  The table was joined next by a pair of late arrivals, an Italian socialite and her son.  The conversation then turned to gossip of no importance.  Zea’s entry has no more relevance to the history of Paul VI until later on that night, when it recounts a conversation between Zea, Morgan, and Myriam MacKellar, while they were sitting on one of the palace verandas drinking white wine after most of the guests had gone home.

Evan’s thoughts turned to the young priest who had discussed the movements of the sun and the earth with the bachelor named Fitzgerald.  He remarked, “I know of a priest who bears an eerie resemblance to that Don Battista at our table,” and Myriam nodded her head in agreement. 

But I wanted to know if Evan believed in geocentrism.  “What about you?” I asked him.  “Do you believe that the earth is the center of the universe?”

“Yes,” he said, “as surely as I believe that hell is located in the center of the earth.  As a matter of fact, this priest I know is the disciple of an exquisite demon who was once anciently worshiped as a Mesopotamian god, and whose cult migrated to India.  Hell is real.  It is populated with devils and the damned.”

I informed him for the hundredth time that I did not believe in any of this.  He said to me, “whether or not you believe it makes no difference.  It is still very real.  Catholic and Satanist eschatology are very much in agreement.  The final stage of history is upon us.  Did you know, Christ has agreed to give the devil one hundred years to see if he can bring utter destruction to the Catholic Church?  It’s quite true.  Pope Leo XIII had a vision of this while he was offering Mass.  It is now as it was in the Book of Job, Hollander, when the devil bragged that he could cause the most devout believer lose his faith.”

At this point the old woman chimed in.  She stopped puffing on her long-stemmed cigarette long enough to say, “there is an intricate numerology surrounding this.  We are working to unravel it.”

“Yes,” Evan agreed.  “And we believe that I myself have a role to play.  Did you know that I was born exactly nine months and nine days after Pope Leo had his vision?  The number nine in Kabbalistic gematria has a profound significance, and two consecutive nines, such as nine months and nine days, are even more auspicious.  Myriam and I have been in contact with many messenger demons, and there is an indication that I have a certain destiny in this scheme.”

I was too tired to listen to any more of their thaumaturgical ramblings.  I dislike Evan whenever he gets in his religious moods, and I have always the old woman irritating from the day I was first introduced to her.  I excused myself from the balcony, left the mansion, and returned to my lodgings, where here I presently sit, writing this.  So ends another day.

“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.”

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Evan Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar

Evan Morgan, circa 1930s.  Poet, eccentric, and crypto-Luciferian infiltrator.

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It does not escape the notice of this blogger that the subject of today’s post shares my surname.  The subject also happens to have been a horribly iniquitous person.  Fortunately, there is no direct kinship, as Evan Morgan begat no children.  Also, my own line of Morgans have been split off from the Welsh Morgans for many generations, having been in North America since the late 18th century.  We are the descendants of a fisherman named Thomas Rhydian Morgan who, along with his wife, Christina Kent Morgan, left Wales in 1786 and settled in the town of Shelburne in the maritime province of Nova Scotia, Canada.  Therefore if I have any consanguinity with this hideous fiend, it is extremely remote.  (Ouf!)

Something I was not well aware of until I read the testimony of Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua was the surprising degree to which occultists, pagans, and devil-worshippers had infiltrated the Catholic Church.  It is often said that Freemasons, communists, and various other enemies of the Church have, for decades, been worming their way into the ranks of the clergy, wreaking their subversion from within.  And this is commonly accepted.  But when it comes to tales of “Black Masses in the Vatican,” it almost becomes too much: for many Catholics, this is just too bizarre and unbelievable.  It comes across like something out of a novel by Father Malachi Martin—and Fr. Martin was a suspicious character himself.  His loyalties seemed to be forever shifting; sometimes he was a modernist when it suited him, and other times he was a traditionalist.  He contradicted himself on many matters, and much of the time it almost seemed as if he was making things up as he went along.  So whenever something carries “a whiff of Fr. Malachi Martin,” one is tempted to dismiss it as outlandish.

Such was my original reaction when I first began reading the transcripts of the Gagne-Bevilacqua interviews.  I thought to myself: “purement fantastique.  Incroyable!”  But once I began researching his claims, to see if certain points might be corroborated, I was surprised to find that much of the people and events he mentioned adhere quite closely to recorded history.  In the next post, I will provide a summary of the two weeks he spent in Rome in the summer of 1917.  But first I would like to share what my research revealed—particularly as it regards his mention of  a certain Evan Morgan: the unsavory and ghoulish person whose last name sends shivers up my spine: to think that he and I might share a common ancestor, somewhere back among the Morgans of Wales ages ago.

Evan Frederic Morgan was the scion of a wealthy family of the English nobility.  Like many families of the aristocracy, the Morgans were what might be termed “fashionably eccentric and decadent.”  In fact, they took their eccentricity and decadence rather seriously.  His mother seemed to believe she was some sort of bird (an actual bird, that is, and nothing to do with the British slang for a good-looking girl).  His grandfather, Frederick Courtenay Morgan, stood as a so-called “Conservative” Member of Parliament—and yet he was also a good friend of Richard Monckton Milnes, who owned one of the largest collections of Victorian-era pornography and was a patron of the poet Algernon Swinburne, a man of many perversions who composed much blasphemous anti-Christian verse, including a sneering condemnation of the Catholic Church entitled “Locusta.”  Verily, the Morgan family was in the top tier of an English upper class that shewed an outward conservatism but led a secret life of terrible debaucheries.

Evan Morgan himself would continue the trend.  As a young man at university, he converted to Roman Catholicism.  But his conversion was insincere and superficial.  What Morgan liked about the Catholic Church were its regal and extravagant trappings: the sublime atmospherics of the Latin Mass, the lace surplices and gold-tinged chasubles, the Gothic architecture, and the high ceremony of the papal court.  What he did not like, however, was the Catholic faith itself.  He was an awful despiser of Christ—so much so that he became an avid occultist.  At around the same time he converted to Catholicism (the period when he was at Eton College at Oxford), Morgan also joined a Luciferian society known as the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), which is where he met and befriended the then-leader of the O.T.O, Aleister Crowley.  Crowley became Morgan’s mentor; Morgan was Crowley’s ace pupil.  Crowley deemed him “Adept of Adepts” (referring to a title which, according to my research, seems to be considered a high position in the rankings of ceremonial magicians.  I did not research the occult too extensively; a Catholic must be prudent in these matters.  The more one investigates the dark side, the more one runs the risk of coming face to face with the abyss).

Morgan thus began to lead a double life.  On a typical Saturday evening, Morgan and Crowley would meet up in London, to smoke opium and to cruise the city’s squalid homosexual districts (both men were sodomites).  Their night would culminate back at Crowley’s lodgings, where they would undertake “mystical” readings of the Kabbalah.  Then they would set up an altar, with hexagrams, idols, and candles, and they would try out various unspeakable satanic rituals—first at midnight (“the witching hour”), then later at three o’clock (“the hour of the wolf,” or “the devil’s hour”).   The next morning, a tired and bleary-eyed Morgan would show up for Mass at the Brompton Oratory to blasphemously receive Holy Communion.  His close association with Crowley lasted between 1912 and 1913.  During this time, Morgan informed Crowley that his ultimate goal was to summon a living demon.  Together, they never succeeded.  Crowley left the country in 1914 for Paris and then the United States.  Morgan remained in England: writing bad poetry and keeping up appearances among the London aristocracy (when Aldous Huxley satirized high society in his novel Crome Yellow, he modeled the most immoral character after Evan Morgan).  Morgan joined the Welsh Guards when the war broke out, and spent a year and half stationed in France.  Most British soldiers were expected to spend three years in service, but Morgan used family connections to weasel out of a long-term obligation.

The young Evan Morgan during World War I, with his father Courtenay Morgan, the 1^st Viscount Tredegar.  The advantages of privilege: the elder Morgan spent most of the war on his private yacht, which the Royal Navy had converted into a floating hospital.  Meanwhile the son served a shortened term in combat.

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Upon returning to England from the front, Morgan rekindled his acquaintances in occult circles.  On a visit to Glasgow, he began a friendship with a mysterious older woman named Myriam MacKellar, who claimed to be the Jewish wife of a wealthy Scot, and also to be an expert on the Hindu Vedic texts.

In 1916, Morgan made a pilgrimage to Rome, where he met up with an influential group of British-born clergy in the curia.  He presented himself as a connoisseur of the liturgy, and he managed to charm them with his personality, a false display of piety, and a smattering of acquired expertise.  Using his family’s wealth and status as leverage, he procured for himself a spot in the Vatican as a papal chamberlain.

It is important to note that no one in Rome was likely aware of his secret life as an occultist.  It was 1916.  Europe was in the midst of a catastrophic war.  The doings of the eccentric members of the English aristocracy would simply not have shown up on the Vatican’s radar.  It is also useful to consider that the pope at the time, Pope Benedict XV, was a holy pope and a staunch traditionalist.  He was the author of the prophetic encyclical Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum, in which he warned of the coming end of civilization—the natural result of Europe forgetting her Catholic roots and embracing the heedless nihilism of modern philosophy.  (Miserere nobis; his assessment was correct).  Nevertheless, the historical fact remains.  This same man who decorated his home with inverted crucifixes and was a known friend of Aleister Crowley, also happened to be an actual Chamberlain of the Sword and Cape in the very court of Pope Benedict XV.  Normally we might be able to look on this as nothing other than a tragic accident of history.  But in early July of 1917, Evan Morgan traveled to Rome to mark the newly-minted refinements which had been made to the pope’s Prefecture.  The Vatican had become a veritable convention of liturgical experts and enthusiasts.  Also in Rome at this time were two young seminarians: Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua and Alessandro Falchi.  What Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua witnessed there, he described as “the most harrowing event of my entire life.  It will haunt me to the grave.”

Evan Morgan (left) with parrot, circa 1920s.  Morgan owned a menagerie with many exotic birds, and was a trainer of carrier pigeons during World War II.  He came from a family with an avian obsession.  His mother, Lady Katherine, reportedly built bird’s nests to human scale at the family estate, Tredegar House, where she would sit in these nests like a hen.  Her son’s poetry was rank: “The birds of love with plumage rare / Sped in circles ‘bout my hair.”

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