Hexæmeron

During the early stages of my research for this blog, I told Baltasar Fuentes Ramos about the aforementioned episode in Rome in 1923, when poor “Don Battista” was left on the losing side of a geocentrism discussion.  Fuentes found that one interesting, because currently, he said, Pope Paul VI holds the opposite view on the subject: nowadays he would agree with Jerome Fitzgerald (were he alive, that is.  Fitzgerald, who was described as “middle-aged” in 1923, is almost certainly deceased by now).  This got Fuentes to talking about what he knows of the pope’s reading habits and intellectual life, which I was naturally fascinated to hear of.  In one of the first entries on this blog, I published what Fuentes told me about the pope’s lifestyle and diet.  The following, then, is some of what he has come to know about the pope insofar as his views on doctrine, theology, and ecclesiology.

It is helpful, in understanding the progress of Paul VI’s thought, to appreciate that his worldview can be roughly divided into three distinct phases of his life: there is early, middle, and late Pauline.  The first phase dates from 1917 – 1935, where he was neither a liberal modernist nor a stalwart traditionalist; he was essentially a theological moderate.  His attitudes were mostly aligned with one of his dearest mentors during this period, Eugenio Pacelli, who would later become Pope Pius XII (regnum: 1939 – 1958).  The two became friends during their tenure together at the Vatican Secretariat of State.  Much like Pacelli, Montini believed the faith could be reconciled with modern science.  He believed that the Church had been mistaken to condemn Galileo, and he believed that the ascendant theory of evolution might somehow be harmonized with sacred scripture.  He was cautious on this, of course.  He was by no means certain.  He would’ve agreed with Pacelli’s delicate approach to evolution in the 1950 encyclical Humani Generis: that theologians and scientists should carefully and thoughtfully search into how evolution could be reconciled with creation, so long as they preserved the doctrine of the first pair, Adam & Eve.  Although he did not endorse evolution outright with Humani Generis, Pacelli failed to condemn it.  He left it open as a possibility: and this was a lamentable instance of neglect which brought on decades of Catholic unbelief in the true and scriptural account of creation.

The second period of Montini’s thought would be from 1935 – 1972, when he was brought low by a demonic oppression.  A recent headline on gloria.tv proclaimed that antipope Benedict XVI’s “head ‘does not work entirely’ anymore”—and sadly, the same thing could be said of Montini during this terrible stretch of nearly four decades.  (A brief aside: I have been contacted by some secular readers of this blog who find the subject matter intriguing, but they have told me that some of the terminology is confusing or arcane.  It is especially strange, they have told me, to see Francis and Benedict XVI and John Paul II labeled “antipopes” when the whole world knows them as “Pope Francis” or “Pope Benedict.”  It is imperative for this blog, however, that these men be considered antipopes.  For clarity’s sake, then, I have decided to create a Glossary of Terms that I can link to for words or phrases that might be perplexing for those unfamiliar with traditional Catholicism or the theory of Pope Paul VI’s survival.  I will add to it as I make new posts.  The first entry is “antipope.”  I will also try to go back and create links to it from certain words used in my earlier posts).  At any rate, Montini during this time was confined to a mental prison, constantly harassed by demons to an extent where nearly anyone else would probably have gone mad.  I briefly sketched out in an earlier post how “an unspeakable goetic malignancy had taken hold of Montini’s soul and oppressed him.”  Truly, his head did not work entirely.  His outward self was for the most part a charade—he was like a puppet dangling from strings, and he could only but observe the dreadful machinations going on around him; he was impotent to stop them.  The only thing he possessed was the awful awareness that his earlier views had been completely wrong-headed.  There could be no such thing as sitting on the fence and being a moderate.  There could be no compromise between the Church and her enemies, for “what concord hath Christ with Belial?”  When he began to emerge from his accursed state, he asserted himself firmly as a traditionalist: when he issued Humanae Vitae in 1968, and when he declared that “the smoke of Satan has entered the Church” in 1972.  Fuentes once told me: “when this pope finally comes out of hiding and takes up his chair in Rome, the Church is going to have a pope the likes of which no one has seen since St. Leo the Great.   (Pope Leo, of course, is known for his famous standard: “innovate nothing; be content with tradition”).

The third period is his life in exile, from 1972 until the present.  While he was being sheltered by a group of Greek Orthodox monks at a Cretan monastery called Godia Odigitria, he spent much of his time in the library there, an eager autodidact, re-educating himself.  The scales had long since fallen from his eyes: more than anyone else in the world, he had witnessed first-hand the presence of the enemies of the Church inside the Church: in the Vatican itself, from the lowest priests to the highest prelates, seeking to bring the Church to ruination from within.  He knew that the crisis of tradition was older than Vatican II.  It was older, even, than the modernism of the early twentieth century.  It went as far back as St. Robert Bellarmine, Galileo, and Pope Alexander VII in the sixteenth century, and the attempts of later popes to overturn the condemnation— trying to cozy up to modern science.  (“Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do”).  Jerome Fitzgerald had been correct: the Church was right about heliocentrism the first time.  It was nothing but heresy.

The Godia library offered Pope Paul a wealth of patristic works, and he surveyed the Early Church Fathers on the subject of creation:  St.Basil the Great, St. Ambrose, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Ephrem the Syrian, finding that every last one of these brilliant theologians were what today would be called “creationists.”  The pope was also able to read some of the nineteenth and twentieth century Orthodox commentators on the issue: St. Theophan the Recluse, St. John of Kronstadt, and St. Justin Popovich, all whom argued that the ancient tradition of the creation narrative could not be overruled by the consensus of secular atheists who claimed to be working under the banner of science.  According to Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua, Pope Paul’s research on creation and geocentrism was extensive.  In the 1980s, he claimed, the pope began a correspondence with an Athonite monk known as Elder Paisios, an outspoken critic of evolution.  (My father’s notes indicate that he was trying to get copies of Elder Paisios’ letters from an archivist at Koutloumousiou Monastery on Mount Athos, a monk named Brother Ionáthan, but he does not appear to have succeeded.  His last contact with Brother Ionáthan was in 1994.  His notes indicate that Pope Paul’s letters were transcribed into Greek by a young rassaphore at the Godia monastery, and were signed merely as “Pávlos, a seeker”—so they may have been preserved, as the true identity of the writer was not known to Elder Paisios).

Elder Paisios of Mount Athos in an undated photo.  He was declared a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church in 2015. 

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The pope and Elder Paisios shared with each other their thoughts on creation and geocentrism and the senses of scripture, and also on how the schism had adversely affected the Church, both East and West.  They found themselves in agreement that it was a tragedy how, in the centuries since 1054, both sides had become infected with the disease of private judgement—a disease which blights all religion, philosophy, and politics, and which leads ultimately to atheism and spiritual death.  In the West, private judgement was heralded most fiercely by Martin Luther at the Reformation, followed by Leibniz and Spinoza during the Enlightenment, and then Voltaire and Jefferson in birthing the twin Revolutions that tossed off monarchy.  In the East, there was no longer a final religious authority to appeal to, and so their ranks became riddled with internal schisms and perpetual disagreements; in some cases there was disagreement over even which councils to accept.  Both Pope Paul and Elder Paisios agreed that man’s fallen nature rendered him wholly unfit for private judgement, and that the only solution for everything that plagued him spiritually was to humbly submit to the ultimate authority.  Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua said, “it was a fruitful exchange of ideas.”

The issue of private judgement is crucial to the current problems with traditional Catholicism.  Most traditional Catholics have painted themselves into a corner by acknowledging Francis as the pope but refusing to obey him.  They rely on their private judgement as to what they will accept; they are their own final authority.  In an especially obscene arrangement, they reject, in all their pride, the exhortation of Pope St. Pius X:

Love the Pope!  And how must the Pope be loved?  Non verbo neque lingua, sed opere et veritate—not in word, nor in tongue, but in deed, and in truth (1 John iii, 18).  When one loves a person, one tries to adhere in everything to his thoughts, to fulfill his will, to perform his wishes.  And Our Lord Jesus Christ said of Himself, “si quis diligit me, sermonem meum servabit”—“if any one love me, he will keep my word” (John xiv, 23).  Therefore, in order to demonstrate our love for the Pope, it is necessary to obey him.

Therefore, when we love the Pope, there are no discussions regarding what he orders or demands, or up to what point obedience must go, and in what things he is to be obeyed; when we love the Pope, we do not say that he has not spoken clearly enough, almost as if he were forced to repeat to the ear of each one the will clearly expressed so many times not only in person, but with letters and other public documents; we do not place his orders in doubt, adding the facile pretext of those unwilling to obey—that it is not the Pope who commands, but those who surround him; we do not limit the field in which he might and must exercise his authority; we do not set above the authority of the Pope that of other persons, however learned, who dissent from the Pope, who, even though learned, are not holy, because whoever is holy cannot dissent from the Pope.

And this is the paradox of traditional Catholicism: it accepts John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis as popes, but it refuses them the obedience which a Catholic is properly expected to give to the pope.  The paradox can only be resolved if these men are in fact not popes in the first place.  (No obedience, after all, need be given to an antipope).

According to Baltasar Fuentes Ramos, Pope Paul VI is a frequent reader of the Eastern Church Fathers.  He told me this: “one of the most miraculous and incredible things about the coming restoration is that Pope Paul VI will finally reunite the schismatic Orthodox churches with Rome.  This will happen after he consecrates Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.  The East will be converted and there will be a period of peace, as promised by Our Lady of Fátima.  The ‘peace’ will not only be a period free of war, but it will also be a period of religious peace, where the two original spheres of Christianity, East and West, will once more be in harmony.  And dissent and heresy will be quashed: the errors of evolution and heliocentrism will be solemnly and infallibly condemned.  One of the most richly symbolic aspects of Fátima to keep in mind is that the Miracle of the Sun was an indicator, to everyone with eyes to see, that the sun is the orb which moves.  Not the earth.  The sun moves, and the earth is stationary.   Just as the sun came to a halt in its circuit at the battle of Jericho, to demonstrate the Lord’s power (Joshua, x.13), so the sun danced at Fátima, to demonstrate the order of the heavens.”  Fuentes said that much of the pope’s reading material pertains to Genesis, creation, the cosmos, and Revelation.  He said, “it is a matter of the Alpha and the Omega.  The beginning of time and the end of time are mystically connected.  You cannot understand one without the other.  Soon all things will be fulfilled.”

Ave Maria

Today is the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima: the centenary of the first apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary there, and a day on which Francis, to mark the occasion, has canonized two of the child visionaries, Francisco and Jacinta.  I did not watch the ceremonies.  Although I have a deep devotion to Our Lady of Fatima, I must remain doubtful of the validity of these canonizations, as I believe Francis to be an antipope (as well as John Paul II, who beatified them).  Any devotee of Fatima, however, does not need these vile deceivers to well know that those pure and holy children, Jacinta and Francisco, are surely among the saints in heaven.  As for Francis, I will have more to say on him shortly.  But for now, a blessed Saturday to the readers of this blog.

Our Lady of Fatima, ora pro nobis.

“For she is the brightness of eternal light, and the unspotted mirror of God’s majesty, and the image of his goodness.  She reneweth all things, and through nations conveyeth herself into holy souls, she maketh the friends of God and prophets.  For she is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the order of the stars: being compared with the light, she is found before it.”  (Wisdom vii, 26-29)

Next post

“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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La Nuit Américaine

Before I commenced this blog, I was aware that there were several discrepancies between my source material and the more commonly-accepted chronology of Pope Paul VI’s survival.  I have been graciously contacted by several readers in the Francophone world who have pointed these out—and the contradictions are more dire than I first realized.  This poses a problem.  There appear to be two serious differences between the versions, and they are differences which do not reconcile.

The first difference is that the mainstream narrative claims Pope Paul and his double were switched out interchangeably all the way up until 1975, when the double took over entirely.  Meanwhile it says that Pope Paul stayed at the Vatican and did not go into exile until 1981.  My material (mostly the testimony of Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua) claims Pope Paul left the Vatican in 1972 shortly after declaring “the smoke of Satan has entered the Catholic Church,” and never returned.  My material says he was being sheltered in a Cretan monastery as early as the mid-1970s, having spent a brief period in the city of Alexandria in Egypt.

The second area of contradiction is where the mainstream narrative claims Pope Paul was drugged in order to be made compliant in carrying out the modernist program of Vatican II.  My material, however, says that rather than being drugged, Pope Paul was weighed down by a terrible demonic oppression, the result of a hex (or curse) which had been placed on him by occultists in 1935.  It was this demonic oppression which gradually harassed and coerced the young Giovanni Battista Montini into modernism: first as an influential member of the Roman Curia, and later during his tenure as Archbishop of Milan.  There would’ve been no need to drug him, as he was burdened by demons, and only very infrequently was he able (by the grace of God) to wrest himself from their awful sway.

There are also a few minor discrepancies, such as whether or not John Paul II knew of the double, and other quibbles.  But these points are less troublesome.  (In the case of JP2 being ignorant of the double, my material attests to it only via hearsay, so it doesn’t quite make or break the veracity of the testimony).  Nevertheless, the brute fact of the two major contradictions remains.  What to do with this?  Was Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua just a crazy old man, rambling on at length over four days of interviews in a senile delirium?  Or is his testimony at least partly reliable: dredging up portions of the truth insofar he could recall it, with the rest being culled from some nebulous half-dream or the vicissitudes of his mind’s whimsy?  Or are the accounts of Pope Paul’s survival like the remembrances in the movie Rashomon, where the same event is witnessed by four people who give differing versions?

Another possibility was suggested by one of my correspondents.  He remarked, “I do not know if I should believe this whole story, but if it is untrue, it is a very interesting novel.”  This comment piqued my curiosity.  I began to wonder if, somehow, the notes and transcripts and clippings I found in my father’s study were supposed have been the basis for some kind of creative writing project.  I gave it some consideration—but in the end, it doesn’t seem likely.  Firstly, I found them in a filing cabinet dedicated strictly to his journalistic endeavors.  Secondly (as I have said of him before), my father was a rabid cinephile.  He did, in fact, have some small portions of creative writing stored away in one of his desk drawers, but they were all the beginnings of screenplays—not novels or ficciones.  My father, it seems, occasionally decided he would like to write for the movies.  But shortly after starting these screenplays, he would give up on them.  None of them go past twenty pages.  And the subject matter is relatively light.  They’re rather boilerplate, with nothing of the originality or innovation of the French New Wave which he so admired.  The most “serious” of the lot is an espionage thriller about a woman in her forties in Soviet Russia named Lyudmila Trebetskaya who is a sympathizer for the West.  The description of Lyudmila reads: “a savvy and attractive Moscow socialite greatly resembling Jacqueline Bisset.”  It’s pure fluff, I’m afraid: John le Carré-derivative fluff.   Father was an excellent and intelligent man, but sadly, creative writing was not among his talents (with all due apologies to my sire.  It may also seem that I speak of him as if he’s deceased.  He is not, but unfortunately he has Alzheimer’s disease and is “no longer there,” so to speak.  I have no recourse to him in verifying the contents of the folders).

So no: Father does not seem to have focused his meager creative energies on anything nearly as extensive, intricate, or involved as the two massive manila folders documenting the long saga of Pope Paul VI.  And besides, the material dovetails rather perfectly with too many actual events and persons of the twentieth century in the Catholic Church.  The material does not present itself along the lines of, say, the sensationalized novels of Fr. Malachi Martin (which he termed “factions”—his portmanteau for blending fact and fiction), nor does it appear to be anything like an “alternative history,” such as the popular series The Man in the High Castle, or things of that nature.  On the contrary: it all seems to have taken place in the very same past as our own, a past which has duly followed time’s arrow straight up to the present day.  With that in mind, I do not believe the material to be a fiction.

I myself might be to blame for the “storytelling” quality.  The transcripts themselves are long and rambling, and much of the time they can be downright banal.  Thus far I have been attempting to trim off the tedium and give concise summaries of the history; only in the last post did I try to let the interview transcript speak more for itself.  (Perhaps I will attempt to do more of that in the future, where portions of the interview are high in content.  The first paragraph of the last post, however, where I summarized the childhood details of Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua, was necessary, as I saw fit to condense into several sentences what it took him a couple pages of inconsequential chatter to relate).

Having taken into account the conflicts that exist between the narratives, I concede that my material is lesser.  One of my correspondents informs me: “Fr. Basile Harambillet, a lawyer of the Roman Rota, maintained until his death in the early ’80s that he had been able to confirm that the true Paul VI was a prisoner in the Vatican throughout the double’s period of activity.”  Admittedly, my material does not come from an esteemed canon lawyer.  It comes from a self-described “simple man” who was essentially only the butler.  However, I have decided that I will publish my material in full because I believe it is quite compelling in certain parts.  Perhaps others will find it compelling as well.  I think the testimony of Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua contains much to recommend it.  In fact, on the two main issues where we find discrepancies, I find it to be more satisfying.  In charity, I would pose the following two questions:

1.  Why was Pope Paul VI drugged, and why was he alternated with his double? Wouldn’t the modernist conclave in 1963 simply have elected a known modernist?  It seems it would’ve been easier for them to elevate one of their own, rather than drug and incapacitate someone disloyal to the cause.  Besides, Cardinal Montini had evinced modernist tendencies long before his coronation as pope.  Was he also being drugged then?

2 .  Why was Pope Paul VI kept prisoner in the Vatican until 1981? If he was miraculously protected from Freemasonic assassins for so long, why did he have to go into exile?  The protection could’ve just been extended until the present day.

To my lights, my father’s material answers both of these questions rather pragmatically.  First, it maintains that Pope Paul VI was not drugged into submission by the Vatican cabal, but that he was accepted by them as a longtime modernist, having shown progressive tendencies for more than twenty years.  This was effected by a demonic oppression which lessened his free will and coaxed him into error and heresy.

Secondly, it says he went into exile almost as soon as his Vatican manipulus realized he could no longer be trusted to tow the progressive line.  In 1968 he issued Humanae Vitae, which went against the modernist grain.  From that point on, they lost their confidence in him, and lit upon the decision to replace him with a double, since there was already someone from his past who was known to bear a striking resemblance to him.  When Pope Paul finally freed himself from his demonic oppression and brazenly told the truth (about “the smoke of Satan”), they promptly arranged to have him killed.  He found out about the plot and went on the lam, which is when they propped up the double in his place.  In fact, it was the double who exhibited “drugged up” behavior, for the simple reason that he had been a drug addict in the mid-1960s.

Pope Paul’s survival has indeed been miraculous, but rather than being miraculously protected, my material presents it as a “synergistic” cooperation between the divine will of God and Pope Paul’s own free will, which he recovered after he freed himself from his demonic oppression.  Once he was out from under their influence, he showed himself to be, at heart, a good and holy man: faithful to tradition and hostile to modernism.  And when he returns to Rome and takes up the fisherman’s chair, the Church will at long last have a good and holy pope.

All that said, I concede that most believers in the survival of Paul VI will probably be disinclined to accept my material in toto due to the differences.  So be it.  But hopefully it will unveil, at least, some portions of the truth which have heretofore lain dormant.  Perhaps it can serve, not as an alternative, but as a modest supplement, however flawed.  The existing narrative is persuasive on many counts—particularly where it coincides with the prophecies of Fatima (my own material hints not only at Fatima, but also a perennial Catholic prophecy known as the Three Days of Darkness, which I will get to later).  I myself am grateful for being pointed to the truly exhaustive compendium of research, writing, and translations undertaken by a brilliant documentarian Français named Jean-Baptiste André.  His work forms the most comprehensive resource on the internet on this subject.  With his permission, here are several links to his websites.

Pope Paul VI’s Survival and the Secret of Fatima (English)

La Survie du Pape Paul VI (French)

Paul VI and the Mystery of Iniquity (French movie w/ English subtitles)

My original inclination still remains: to publish an entire summary of my father’s material.  I will put it all out for the consumption of anyone who might still be interested, and decidat lector—my Latin is probably garbled there, but: “let the reader decide.”  Let everyone separate the wheat from the chaff in this blog according to however they see fit.  In the words of a “tedious old fool”: “If circumstances lead me, I will find / Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed / Within the centre.” (Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2).