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

Queries from Eire

I was recently contacted, via my Gravatar account, by an interested reader of this blog—a very nice woman in Ireland named Fionnula.  Because her concerns seemed broad enough that they might be shared, I’ve decided to respond publicly in order to quell any similar consternation which other readers might have.  My thanks to Fionnula for allowing me to reproduce parts of her message.

Fionnula first inquired as to where I was getting my information about Alessandro Falchi, as well as the living Pope Paul VI in Portugal.  She told me frankly: “I can’t find any corroboration for these things, so I’m sorry but I’m not too inclined to believe it.”  And that is fair enough, Fionnula; I concede that the corroborating material on the internet is somewhat scarce regarding Alessandro Falchi or the living pope, although you can certainly find a portion of traditional Catholics who believe in the firmamentum of it (i.e., a succession of false popes, and an imposter Paul VI.  The overall thesis is not new by any means).  The impetus for this particular blog, however, has been to present a trove of material which has been heretofore undisclosed.  “Light will be thrown” (to paraphrase the heathen Charles Darwin) on a secret history which has languished for too long in the shadows—hence why my introductory post ended with “Fiat lux!”  So I do have sources.  To explain shall require a small amount of background material.

My father, Roger Morgan, was a Canadian-born freelance journalist who covered the Vatican, in both English and French, during the 1970s and 80s.  Most of his reporting was done for UPI.  He was not the “young journalist” mentioned in my previous post when I referred to President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (Father would’ve been in his fifties at the time), but he was present at that very same press conference.  Father is still alive, actually, but he is ninety-one years old now, rather immobile, and dealing with some serious health issues.  Due to these circumstances, he moved into a nursing home several years ago.  My siblings and I were cleaning out his apartment after the move, and the responsibility fell upon me to pack up his study and personal library.  Going through an old filing cabinet, I found two thick manila folders, overstuffed with pages both handwritten and typed.

The first folder contained transcripts of an interview Father had recorded with a man named Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua over the course of four afternoons in Gagne-Bevilacqua’s apartment in Turin in the winter of 1986.  Gagne-Bevilacqua had been the personal assistant to the pope from 1963 to 1978.  This fact is quite astounding: his tenure spanned not only the regnum of the true Paul VI, from 1963-72, but also the usurpation reign of Alessandro Falchi, from 1972 until his death in ’78.  Simply put, Gagne-Bevilacqua saw everything transpire over those fifteen years.  He knew it all.

Fionnula also expressed some skepticism as to this very person.  She wrote: “by the way, I looked up the personal assistant to Paul VI and it was either Pasquale Macchi or John Magee.”  Permit me a correction in terminology here, Fionnula: the two men you have mentioned served in the capacity of private secretary; that is, they assisted the pope in clerical matters—managing correspondence, speeches, encyclicals, and suchlike.  It’s a highly esteemed position in the papal office.  Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua, however, was the pope’s personal assistant.  A different title altogether, and generally less esteemed.  This is a position that would be similar to our notion of a valet, butler, or dedicated manservant.  The personal assistant was responsible for quotidian affairs: making sure the pope’s needs were carefully tended to in terms of clothing, meals, travel, &c.  For example, the personal assistant would see to it every evening that the pope’s outfit for the next day was laid out for him, cleaned and starched and nicely pressed.  In the morning he would bring the pope his breakfast and coffee on a tray, with several newspapers tucked under his arm.  Throughout the day he would fetch various things and contact various persons at the pope’s request.  He was, in short, the kind of man who wears a dark suit and white gloves, who is never obsequious or fawning, but rather that rare and valuable breed of companion: a practical, straightforward, and quiet man of common sense and good decorum.  I do not know if the position even exists any longer.  In the decades following Vatican II, the Catholic Church has striven to lose some of her “anachronistic” trappings.  The papal valet position may’ve been eliminated as a result.  The current pope (or antipope, actually), Francis, prefers to make a big show of how humble and impoverished he is.  At the beginning of his reign, Francis turned up his nose to the lavish papal suite in the Vatican apartments, opting instead to live in a quaint room in a boarding house.  It’s unlikely Francis would have a personal assistant.  He would probably view it as too haughty.  But the position existed as recently as 1978, when it was filled by Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua.  My father’s interview with him forms the bulk of my primary source material concerning the personal histories of Pope Paul VI and Alessandro Falchi.

The other manila folder I found in my father’s office contained notes, transcripts, newspaper clippings, and information pertaining to the well-known case of a young woman in Bavaria named Anneliese Michel, who underwent a series of exorcisms in 1975 and 1976.  Her possession ultimately resulted in her death.  Following a legal trial in which her parents and her priests were prosecuted for negligent homicide, the Catholic authorities in her diocese began a campaign of disinformation, attempting to spin the events as a tragic confluence of mental illness and religious hysteria.  Yet nothing could be further from the truth.  Nota bene that when Anneliese’s body was exhumed, her exorcists were not permitted to view it.  Instead it was simply announced, with no accompanying visual evidence, that the body was in a state of decomposition.  This was intended to refute the idea that Anneliese is an incorruptible—since many traditional Catholics, including this blogger, believe her to have been a martyr.  This much is undeniable, though: the Catholic diocese objectively reversed its position.  Originally it deemed Anneliese possessed, and granted official permission for the exorcisms.  Only after Anneliese’s death, and only after certain functionaries in Rome became aware of what the exorcisms revealed, did they attempt to sweep it under the rug with claims of mental illness.  But despite their efforts, the case did not go away.  It eventually formed the basis for a successful 2005 film called The Exorcism of Emily Rose.  Though highly fictionalized, the movie can be recommended, as it provides a mostly sympathetic treatment.

One of the priests who exorcised Anneliese was Father Arnold Renz.  Fr. Renz was the subject of the second folder of interview transcripts: my father spoke with him in Würzburg, Germany in April of 1986.  My father’s notes describe Fr. Renz as “thoughtful,” “pensive,” “ruminative and wise,” and “burdened with his tragedy.”  It is clear that Fr. Renz’s awful confrontation with hell never quite left him.  When my father met with this holy priest, he met a man brooding heavily on the past.   The interview reveals that when the exorcism rites began, the demons informed the two priests performing them (Fr. Renz and a Father Ernst Alt) that they could not quit Anneliese’s body until they had first made a series of revelations.  Thus began a long and torturous ordeal for Anneliese—one which she did not survive—since every time the exorcists commanded the devils to leave, they were unsuccessful.  Instead the priests were constrained into coaxing out the revelations.

The demons were frequently resistant, hostile, and uncooperative.  They wanted to maintain their possession for as long as they could.  At other times, they could be boastful and derisive.  The most significant such instance is this: at one point, they lorded it over the priests that they (the priests) were unwittingly in communion with a false pope.  They also taunted the exorcists by crowing over Satan’s perverse triumph at Vatican II: infecting the Church with modernism and foisting an ugly new liturgy on the faithful.  (Not coincidentally, Anneliese’s family were devout and conservative Catholics who attended a Latin Mass, and cared hardly a whit for the innovations of the council.  Anneliese herself mentioned that if she died, she hoped her suffering might atone, in some small part, for the willful apathy of so many young Catholics, and the wanton heresy of so many modernist clerics).  In the decade between Anneliese’s death and his interview with my father, Fr. Renz had investigated the demons’ astounding claim of a false pope.  Initially, he had been hesitant to think it was anything other than fiendish braggadocio.  When his research concluded, however, he had become wholly convinced that the satanic plot to destroy the Catholic Church had successfully set up a line of heretical antipopes.

Portions of Anneliese Michel’s exorcism tapes are available online; others are not.  Sadly, a search on YouTube yields a good many videos focused on the more lurid and horrorshow aspects of the exorcisms—and seem to carry a disrespectful sense of gawking at a poor soul in torment.  The audio is nevertheless unsettling.  Kyrie eleison.

The funeral of Anneliese Michel.  Father Renz is second from right, holding his Missale Romanum and a vial of holy water.  The antiphon for the sprinkling & incensing of the grave is the Ego sum resurrectio: “I am the resurrection and the life: she that believeth in Me although she be dead, shall live, and every one that liveth, and believeth in Me, shall not die for ever.”

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Corollary to the case of Anneliese Michel is the record of exorcisms performed on a Swiss woman known as “Rita B.” from 1975 to 1978.  (It will be of interest to traditional Catholics that the approval for these exorcisms came from Archbishop Lefebvre himself).  In this case the revelations were even more explicit: the demons unveiled that there was a plot against Pope Paul VI and that he had been replaced by a double.  Ten priests in total conducted the exorcisms, the transcripts of which have compiled into a book in French by Jean Marty, called Avertissements de l’au-delà à l’Église contemporaine (Warnings from Beyond to the Contemporary Church).  Not surprisingly, the Baysiders (the persistent cult of followers of Veronica Lueken, who we met in an earlier post) have latched onto these exorcisms.  One of the Baysider websites has an English translation up.  As I warned before, however, they have their own baffling view of the situation, so go down the rabbit hole of their conspiracy theory at your peril.  But it will be clear to anyone who researches it that the revelations in the Swiss exorcism case contradict the revelations from Bayside on several counts.  In fact, the the book’s editor, Monsieur Marty, is not a Baysider in the least.  He believes (quite correctly) that Paul VI still lives.

My apologies for the length of this response, Fionnula.  And I have still not answered your question as to the source of my information for Pope Paul’s current existence in Portugal.  Due to time constraints, that will have to be undertaken in a separate post—and a later one at that, since the chronicle of Claudio Gagne-Bevilacqua merits telling first.

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