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.”

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.

In Rome, Germany, Austria, and Brescia (1921 – 1922)

In the same year in which Father Montini began his friendship with his physician, Roberto Zorza, he attended a series of lectures on Canon Law at the Lateran Palace being given by Alfredo Ottaviani, who was then a young priest like Montini, but several years older, and widely considered one of the most promising clerics of the new generation.  He was a prodigy in jurisprudence, philosophy, and ecclesiology.

In many respects, one finds Ottaviani (the scrappy son of a humble baker from Trastevere, one of thirteen children, blind in one eye, and who rose to prominence entirely on the merits of his own uncompromising intellect) preferable to Montini (as there can be little doubt that the influence of Montini’s father—the editor of a Catholic newspaper and a member of the haute bourgeoisie as well as the Italian Parliament—had something to do with the ease of his son’s journey up the steps of the ecclesiastical ladder).  Ottaviani had a talent for ruthless clarity and precision, whereas Montini could be deliberate almost to a fault; his ability to appreciate both sides of an argument sometimes led him to taking wishy-washy and noncommittal stances when a firmer hand was demanded.  Also, Ottaviani was said to have had a caustic wit and a certain waspish charm, while Montini appears to have been somewhat bland (the curse of the moderate).  Ottaviani was overall better-suited to his time and environment.  The Catholic Church in the twentieth century needed principled and doctrinaire leaders, not milquetoast compromisers.  With his smarts and gravitas, Cardinal Ottaviani was considered a front-runner among the papabile in 1958, but the conclave chose the unserious Angelo Roncalli instead, and so the Church got John XXIII, the bringer of jollity.  Such is life.  As St. Vincent of Lerins famously put it: “God gives some Popes, God tolerates some Popes, and God inflicts some Popes.”  And in 1963, it would be Cardinal Ottaviani who placed the tiara on the head of Pope Paul VI at his coronation, and not the other way around.  (It should be remembered, however, as was summarized in this post, that Paul VI was not culpable for the ruin and wreckage caused during his papacy.  As can be inferred from his attendance at Ottaviani’s lectures, he was at the very least not a liberal).

He was being actively recruited, in 1921, for a position in the Vatican Secretariat of State by the foreign ministry sostituto, Monsignor Giuseppe Pizzardo.  This recruitment itself hints at Father Montini’s religiously conservative bona fides, for Pizzardo was a staunch anti-modernist, and the Secretariat was known for attracting the more traditional-mined young curialists of the time, including the aforementioned Ottaviani, as well as Fr. Antonio Bacci, who would be his co-signatory in the Ottaviani intervention in 1969.  But that is to get ahead of things.

Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani (1890 – 1979).  His motto was “Semper Idem”—“Always the Same.”

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The following year dawned drearily.  January of 1922 was a frigid and wet one.  Montini caught the flu.  The pope did as well.  Benedict XV took ill from standing too long in the winter rain outside of Saint Martha’s Hospice in the Vatican, where he had celebrated Mass for the nuns there.  He had been waiting on the papal limousine; unfortunately, his driver ran late.  On the seventeenth of January, the pope’s flu had progressed to pneumonia, and he lay down in his bed for the very last time.  He departed this life five days afterwards.  He was sixty-seven years old.  While the body was lying in repose at St. Peter’s, Father Montini went with his doctor, Roberto Zorza, to offer his prayers for the deceased.  It was a truly funereal day: a louring gray sky, a persistent rain, and a square crowded with public mourners, all dressed in black, holding black umbrellas.

The death of a pope: the body of Benedict XV, 1922.

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A fortnight later there was a new pope: Achille Ratti, the Archbishop of Milan, who took the name Pius XI.  On the sixth of March, Pius granted a private audience to the students of the Pontifical Academy.  Earlier in this post it was mentioned that Montini enjoyed the benefit of influence: and indeed, on this occasion Pope Pius singled him out for a brief conversation—enquiring after his father, and expressing his admiration for Montini’s mentor in Brescia, Fr. Bevilacqua (at the time, Bevilacqua was well-regarded as a pastoral liturgist).  Father Montini’s path to the nunciature continued on.  In July of that year he toured Austria and Germany as a prospective ambassador, to acquaint himself with the customs, culture, and language.  He discovered he was not a Germanophile, writing in a letter to Roberto Zorza that the culture and the art of the region were “oppressive and incomprehensible.”  The existential gloom of Grünewald crucifixes and Doctor Faustus did not settle well with him; in Tübingen he sat through a philosophy lecture full of the weighty Teutonic concern with aesthetics and perfection; and his attendance at a showing of F.W. Murnau’s expressionist vampire film Nosferatu he deemed “a queasy waste of my time.”  He was confounded by Gothic sensibilities.  (His superiors had diagnosed him correctly: he was a natural bureaucrat, not a writer).  He did report to Zorza, however, that sauerkraut was improving his gastrointestinal troubles; he had been advised to seek out fermented foods for their benefits to gut bacteria.  He went to Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Oberammergau, Mainz, and Bonn.  He stayed for only four months, as the Weimar Republic was at this time experiencing its exponential hyperinflation.  In October of ’22 he was informed by Msgr. Pizzardo that his entry into the Secretariat of State was all but certain; it would be best if he finished his scholarship in Canon Law as soon as possible.  He returned to his parents’ home in Brescia, and from there he commuted to the Milan Seminary to study in an abbreviated program.  His administrators at the Pontifical College in Rome waived some of his requirements.  He was awarded his doctorate in December of that same year.

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A Pict Song

Following his ordination in 1920, the twenty-three-year-old Father Montini was set on a rigorous course of academic study.  He had distinguished himself as a formidable intellect during his time at seminary, and his Bishop, Giacinto Gaggia, felt the mental talents of the promising young cleric would be wasted on pastoral duties.  So he was sent to Rome, where he took up apartments on the Via del Mascherone, in a building dating to the Middle Ages which had once been the barracks of the Teutonic Knights.   He had wanted to study literature, but it was felt by his superiors that his mind would be better suited to Canon Law: he possessed an innate ability to appreciate nuance and weigh ideas carefully; he was a young man with the cautious and deliberate temperament of a seasoned jurist.   He undertook his legal studies at the Lombard Seminary at the Pontifical Colleges, and was allowed to take supplemental courses in the humanities at the Sapienza University of Rome.  He took classes there in history, philosophy, and Italian and Latin literature.  Eventually, however, the course load proved too demanding, and by 1921 he was no longer attending any Sapienza lectures.  His focus was strictly on Canon Law.

He was also bothered in 1921 by a return of the stomach maladies which had troubled him in adolescence.  His family procured the services of a prominent Roman doctor named Andrea Amici, who had once been the personal physician of Pope Pius X.  Amici assigned one of his assistants, Roberto Zorza, to the case of Father Montini.  Zorza was a devout Catholic, and only seven years older than his patient; through a shared interest in politics they became friends.  They politely debated the issues of the day during their appointments, and from time to time they would meet up for a beer.  Zorza was a monarchist; Montini was not.

As it happens, my father interviewed Roberto Zorza’s daughter, Silvia Zorza, in November of 1990.  I will publish some excerpts from that interview later, as it relates to the distinct change that came over Montini after 1935.  Interestingly, Silvia was not surprised by my father’s research into the possibility of Paul VI’s existence.  She herself believed in it, but she advised my father not to make too many waves.  As a cautionary tale, she told him about a nephew of hers, Lorenzo Zorza—an Italian-born priest who had done his graduate studies at Fordham University in New York in the late 1960s, and ended up taking citizenship in the United States.

According to Silvia Zorza, her nephew first became aware of Paul VI’s survival from her father, during a visit to her family’s house in Rome in the mid-1970s.  He found the idea intriguing, but lacked the luxury to pursue it: he returned to his rectory in Somerset, New Jersey, where he was a missionary priest with the Consolata Fathers.  His days and nights there were filled with an endless series of requests for charity from the city’s various transients—the homeless, the mentally ill, and the needy.  Which is not to say Father Zorza minded: truly, this was the good work of the Lord, the joyous toil of the gospels.  He was glad to be following his vocation, yet his schedule was unconducive to research, so he filed the thought of Paul VI’s survival into the back of his mind and pursued it no further.  Time passed.  Then, in the early 1980s, he became an administrator in the Vatican embassy to the United Nations.  He began dividing his time between Somerset and New York and Rome.  He was now working in the corridors of serious power; he was in frequent contact with people in the upper echelons of the Vatican.  In November of 1981, in New York, he was made aware of the secret history of Paul VI for the second time, and on this occasion it came from someone in a position to know: an assistant to a highly-placed cardinal.  At this point, he became convinced.

Unfortunately, it became the cause of much ruin in his life, and this is why Silvia Lorza counseled my father to watch his step.  In the winter of 1982, Father Zorza privately confided to several friends in Rome that the truth about Paul VI should be made publicly known, on the dogmatic grounds that it is “absolutely necessary for the salvation of all human beings that they submit to the Roman Pontiff” (Pope Boniface VII, Unam Sanctam, 1302).  Since Paul VI was still the pope, he reasoned, it was important that people know this, in order that they may submit themselves to the true pope and not a pretender.  (Surely, invincible ignorance would excuse believers of good will, but nevertheless, vincit veritas: it was important for this fact to come out).  Apparently, however, Fr. Zorza confided in the wrong friends.  One of them must have been a turncoat, because before he returns to the United States, his directors give him two Renaissance paintings, which he is told are from the Vatican’s private collection: a portrait of a lady by Il Bronzino (1503 – 1572), and a painting of John the Baptist by Andrea del Sarto (1486 – 1530).  He is requested to deliver them to an archivist who works for the Archdiocese of New York.  He accepts unquestioningly, as this kind of thing is a matter of course—in the pre-9/11 days, it is not uncommon for diplomats to carry valuables through customs, as shipping them independently is a bureaucratic hassle.  He has them wrapped and securely sheathed; he even registers them with the airline, providing them with an insurance certificate.  The reader will observe that none of this is the behavior of a man trafficking in stolen goods, but two days after he gave the paintings and the insurance paperwork to the diocesan archivist in New York, he was arrested by U.S. customs agents on charges of smuggling stolen artwork.

Il Bronzino: Portait of Laura Battiferri, oil on canvas, c. 1560.  One of two paintings given to Fr. Lorenzo Zorza by Vatican officials to take to New York in 1982; it now hangs in a gallery in Florence.  It was probably just a random coincidence that the subject of the other painting was St. John the Baptist, the namesake of Giovanni Battista Montini.

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The paintings, it turned out, did not belong to the Vatican at all, but had been stolen from wealthy Italians.  The “archivist” did not work for the archdiocese either, but was a forger and stolen art dealer for an organized crime syndicate in Yonkers.  Father Zorza intuited the message, loud and clear: he was to keep utter silence on the matter of Pope Paul VI.  He considered telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth since, after all, “fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul” (Matthew x, 28), but the charges were impossible to refute, and the scandal of the matter ensured that he would never be taken seriously.  He reluctantly pled guilty and made sure to name no one in the Vatican.  He was sentenced to only three months’ probation, but his reputation was sufficiently besmirched: the Archdiocese of New York suspended his faculties, the Consolata Fathers dropped him from their rolls, and his position at the U.N. was terminated.  Even with all this notorious disgrace, Silvia Zorza said her nephew was arrested twice more by American authorities over the following few years on charges that always turned out to be fabricated—a continuous series of legal headaches.  “It was like,” she said, “the men at the Vatican kept flicking his ears with their fingers, as if to say, ‘we haven’t forgotten about you.  You be quiet and stay quiet.’  They were taunting him, reminding him of the influence they had.”  Lesson learned.  (I will add, as an aside, that one of the odder aspects of Silvia Zorza’s story is her description of the “men at the Vatican” as “men with big noses who wear eyeliner.”  I’m unsure if this was just a descriptive flourish, since it evokes a caricatured image of an Alan Rickman movie villain, or whether it was a suggestion of something more devious.  It does, however, match an account of certain clandestine goings-on at the Vatican given by Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua in his interviews, in which he spoke of an atmosphere tinged with gender-bending and Luciferianism).

Silvia Zorza is now deceased, but her nephew is still among the living.  An archived 1982 article from the New York Times bears out the fact of his initial arrest: Priest arrested in smuggling of art is suspended from his UN duties; and a Getty images photo from 1987 shows him during a later court case, where he had been set up to be accused of scalping tickets.  But he is now in his seventies and keeps a low profile, occasionally celebrating the Tridentine Mass at Holy Innocents church in New York, but spending the bulk of his year doing missionary work in a rural diocese in Brazil, where he helps to evangelize the pagan natives who live in some of the most remote areas of the Amazon—people who have had almost no contact with Christianity whatsoever.  In the early stages of my attempts to corroborate my father’s research (back when I was considering compiling it in book form), I was able to speak briefly with Father Zorza over the telephone during one of his stays in New York.  For legal reasons, he said, he could neither confirm nor deny his aunt’s version of the events.  But he did not mind if I published it.  I gathered from his tone that was he no longer too concerned with retribution from the Vatican.  Perhaps that has something to do with it now being the age of the internet.   Thirty-five years ago, the Vatican cabal could arrange for a potential truth-teller to be arrested on art theft, in order to silence him before he could even make a peep about a pope.  Nowadays the emperor’s nudity is more easily declared: any number of blogs might be devoted to the subject.  The internet, to be sure, is full of many temptations and spiritual dangers (not the least of which are rampant pornography and atheist propaganda, and one certainly feels sorry for the child growing up in this age—“save yourselves from this perverse generation” indeed).  But for all the internet’s evils, one of its shining positives is that it has empowered the little folk to cut through the clouds of secrecy and to amputate some of the tentacles which formerly extended from the halls of high power.  The situation is a diabolical inversion of what used to be the Catholic paradigm: Rome is now the seat of the Antichrist, and the governments of Europe are all secular, while the monarchists and traditional Catholics languish in obscurity.  But at least we have the internet.  We are like the seemingly inconsequential resisters in the Kipling poem:

Rome never looks where she treads.
Always her heavy hooves fall
On our stomachs, our hearts or our heads;
And Rome never heeds when we bawl.
Her sentries pass on—that is all,
And we gather behind them in hordes,
And plot to reconquer the Wall,
With only our tongues for our swords.

We are the Little Folk—we!
Too little to love or to hate.
Leave us alone and you’ll see
How we can drag down the State!
We are the worm in the wood!
We are the rot at the root!
We are the taint in the blood!
We are the thorn in the foot!

Mistletoe killing an oak—
Rats gnawing cables in two—
Moths making holes in a cloak—
How they must love what they do!
Yes—and we Little Folk too,
We are busy as they—
Working our works out of view—
Watch, and you’ll see it some day!

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The Young and Future Pope (1897–1920)

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

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

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

CHILDHOOD

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

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

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

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

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

ADOLESCENCE

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

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

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

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

FORMATION

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

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

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

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

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

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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).

At the Brescia Seminary, 1916-17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RM: Carducci?

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

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

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

RM: Scholasticism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RM: What brought you to Rome?

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

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

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

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

Next post in the chronology of events

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

Surrexit Dominus vere, alleluia!

Today, of course, is Easter, when the Catholic Church celebrates the Resurrection of Our Lord.  The pope, every Easter Sunday, gives one of his biannual Urbi et Orbi addresses at St. Peter’s square.  Francis has already given his.  He issued a fine condemnation of Saturday’s suicide bombing of refugees in Syria.  Francis is an interesting person; he will be discussed later, and in great detail, as I attempt to fully unspool this long history I’m calling “the Saga of Pope Paul VI.”  For now it need only be said that Francis is one of the two popes (or antipopes, more correctly) out of the four since 1978 who were actually aware of Paul VI’s survival and exile.  The other one was John Paul I (Albino Luciani), who died after only thirty-three days in office.  But more on that, also, in the future.

One of the more surreal pieces of trivia surrounding Francis and Pope Paul VI is the fact that on October 19^th 2014, Francis presided over the solemn beatification of Paul VI.  He publicly and formally decreed a man to be in heaven whom he knew to be alive.  It is a fantastic charade that recognizes no bounds.  And with that, a Happy Easter to all.

William Blake, Christ Appearing to His Disciples After the Resurrection (c. 1795)

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Answering another frequent objection: Paul VI was a modernist heretic

Non-Catholic readers of this blog may have some confusion over the use of the term “modernist” since, in common parlance, modernism typically denotes a literary and artistic movement in the first half of the twentieth century, evoking things like the poetry of T.S. Eliot or the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.  In Catholicism, however, modernism refers to a movement originating slightly earlier (in the late nineteenth century) and having to do with things like critical readings of the bible, or attempts to harmonize the faith with contemporary movements in philosophy and culture—to rid the Church of her reliance on antiquated dogmas, and to re-imagine the faith in purely modern terms.  It was denounced as soon as it began.  The most famous condemnation is Pascendi Dominici Gregis, an encyclical issued in 1907 by Pope St. Pius X.  “We have witnessed,” he wrote, “a notable increase in the number of the enemies of the Cross, who, by arts entirely new and full of deceit, are striving to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and to utterly subvert the Kingdom of Christ.”  He noted, too, that those who sought to destroy the Catholic Church were now doing their work from within: “the partisans of error are not only among the Church’s open enemies,” he observed, “but also—most dreaded and deplored—in her very bosom, and are all the more mischievous the less they keep in the open.”

Pascendi Dominici Gregis signaled the alarm and put up the bulwark; alas, it failed to deter the modernist beast.  There were so many dissidents in the Church, of so many different stripes, that the movement became a hydra, a many-headed monster—if you chopped off one head, two more grew back in its place.  In the end, the spiritual cancer of modernism metastasized, and nearly the entire hierarchy wound up being converted.   A half a century after Pius X denounced it, most of the prelates in the Catholic Church were unrepentant modernists—including the subject of this blog: the then-Archbishop of Milan, Giovanni Battista Montini.  When the Second Vatican Council opened in 1962, even the pope himself was a modernist: John XXIII said he wanted to “throw open the windows of the Church to the world and let the fresh air blow through.”  Out with the old, in with the new.  When the council closed, modernism was solemnly enshrined in its documents.  Religious liberty, ecumenism, tolerance, and liturgical renewal were the order of the day.  And meanwhile, Abp. Montini had been elevated to the papacy following the death of Pope John: he was Paul VI now.  He gave an enthusiastic public speech at the close of the council, heralding “a unique moment: a moment of incomparable significance and riches.”  No one gave Vatican II a greater endorsement than the pope who gift-wrapped it to the world.

So yes, Pope Paul VI was a modernist heretic.  But understand this: it was only outwardly.  It was not of his own free will.  In truth, a terrible curse was upon him.  Twenty-seven years before he became Pope Paul VI, Giovanni Battista Montini crossed paths with a dark and elemental evil.  In time it overtook him; he was helpless but to become its pawn.  Just as Satan “entered into Judas,” an unspeakable goetic malignancy had taken hold of Montini’s soul and oppressed him.  Daily he was besieged by a throng of unrelenting demons, like the riot of devils in the many renderings of the Temptation of St. Anthony.  So long as he did their bidding, they relented, and he was at ease.  The moment he tried to defy them, however, they would assail him with gruesome horrors and unendurable physical anguish.  In the following few posts I will explain.  We will have to go back, initially, to the period (1916-1920) when Montini was in seminary, where he first encountered Alessandro Falchi; and then later to his time as a member of the Roman Curia in the 1930s, where he ultimately met the daemon that would possess him for three decades.  We will have to examine some aspects of Edwardian occultism, as well as Italian communism and Freemasonry.  But the objection will be answered: Pope Paul VI was under a terrible sway, one that he did not begin to emerge from until 1968, when he shocked the Vatican and the world by issuing his encyclical Humanae Vitae, a document that boldly reaffirmed the Church’s traditional stance on birth control.  It was a surprising conservative about-face from the progressive gospel which had been proclaimed at the council.  Virtually everyone had expected Paul VI would take a softer stance.  And yet he did not.  By 1972, the pope was free of his curse completely, and he publicly and defiantly proclaimed to an audience the unalloyed truth: “the smoke of Satan has entered into the Catholic Church.”  He really did say that.  You can look it up.  And in doing so, he signed his own death warrant.  Two months later, he was in exile.

Epigraph to The Wasteland (1922).  “And when the boys used to say to her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she replied, ‘I want to die.’”

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Dispatches from Bayside

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danke, Veronika.

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