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).

---

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.”

---

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.

---

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.

Next post

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.

---

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!

Next post

At the Brescia Seminary, 1916-17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RM: Carducci?

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

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

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

RM: Scholasticism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RM: What brought you to Rome?

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

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

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

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

Next post in the chronology of events

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

Dispatches from Bayside

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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).

---

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.

Next post