At the Botanical Garden in Buenos Aires, January 1966

When Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the man who would one day be “Pope Francis,” got in touch with Baltasar Fuentes Ramos during the summer break between school terms, he informed his former student that he was cordially invited to a second meeting with Borges, the famous writer.  Bergoglio also filled Fuentes in on some events of the previous month.  When Borges had been in Santa Fe for the student writing contest, he and Bergoglio had struck up something of a friendship.  Borges had been considering writing a story about Catholicism for several years, and upon meeting the well-read, intelligent, and free-thinking seminarian, he felt as if he had finally found his consultant.  They had bonded, in particular, over a shared morbid interest in the apostle Judas Iscariot.  Borges had written a provocative story in 1944 called Three Versions of Judas, and Bergoglio had been reading the gnostic scriptures contained in the Nag Hammadi codices: that library of gnostic texts which had been unearthed in Egypt in 1945, and which were still somewhat rare at the time, and difficult to acquire in a good Spanish translation.  Bergoglio was especially interested in the idea that there was a gnostic text known as the “Gospel of Judas,” which had been mentioned by a few Christian writers as one of the most heretical texts of all.  Did it actually exist, or was it just a legend?  Judas, decided the seminarian and the writer, should be the basis for their collaboration.

In order to facilitate his work with Borges, Bergoglio had asked the Jesuits to transfer him back to his home city of Buenos Aires.  They had complied with his request, and he was now going to teach at the Colegio del Salvador there.  He told Fuentes the Jesuits in Buenos Aires were amazingly progressive and ecumenical—“but it’s an atmosphere you would likely despise,” he wrote.  “I was disappointed when you condemned me so harshly for being a modernist.  You should understand that the Church has changed for the better now with the Second Vatican Council.  The future is not to be feared, Baltasar.  Ours is a living faith, not one stuck in the past.  We have to open ourselves to new ideas.  Even St. Thomas Aquinas took many of his principles from the philosopher Aristotle, who was not only a pagan, but someone whom few Europeans at the time had ever heard of.  St. Thomas was not afraid of the strange or the unknown: he knew that Christianity can absorb almost anything.  My own particular interest is in the gnostics of the Early Church.  But I know you will not approve.  Perhaps our friendship has been severed for good over these differences.  Nevertheless, our mutual acquaintance Borges would like to see you.”

The meeting was set to take place in the Botanical Garden, not too far from where Fuentes was staying at his uncle’s rectory.  It was also a favorite haunt of Borges’, who liked the fact that a small colony of stray cats had been allowed to make the gardens their home.  Borges was an inveterate lover of cats, tigers especially, and enjoyed cats for being the miniature cousins of the majestic beasts.  He agreed with Théophile Gautier that “God created the cat so that man might caress the tiger.”  Borges told Fuentes this much when they met at the gardens.  He loved not only the hazy atmosphere of the lush greenery and the fecund smells, but also the feline ambience of the free-roaming cats.

Borges maintained a lifelong fondness for cats, tigers in particular.  “The tiger addressed in my poem / Is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols / And scraps picked up at random out of books, / A string of labored tropes that have no life, / And not the fated tiger, the deadly jewel / That under sun or stars or changing moon / Goes on in Bengal or Sumatra fulfilling / Its rounds of love and indolence and death.”

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On the afternoon of the meeting, Fuentes excused himself from his duties at his uncle’s parish and showed up at the designated meeting spot on Santa Fe Avenue.  He remembers Borges looking dapper in a beige seersucker suit and a dark paisley tie.  Borges’ secretary Jana Filippovna was with him, as was Bergoglio, and there was also a peculiar man named Desmando Ruiz, who Fuentes remembers as a grubby, sinister-looking fellow in a raggedy janitorial jumpsuit, eating salted and habanero-spiced nuts from a paper bag with the words “El Fuego del Diablo” emblazoned on it, with the logo of a grinning little cartoon devil astride a blazing habanero pepper.

Ruiz was introduced to Fuentes as a handyman and plumber whom Bergoglio had worked with in one of his jobs as a teenager before deciding to study for the priesthood.  Fuentes remembers Ruiz as looking every bit like a plumber: “it was easy to imagine him somewhere deep in the dank subterranean bowels of a building, with wrenches and pliers hanging from his belt, tinkering with leaky pipes.  He was lanky, with long sinewy limbs, and he had a pasty, hideous, pock-marked face with the flat, puffy, broken-looking nose of a boxer.  His fingers were calloused and dirty.  But he had a definite intelligence about him.  I can imagine him in a custodian’s closet, lying on a cot and reading philosophy, lazily leeching paid time from his employer.  He was very much enamored with Hegel.  Ruiz believed that everything in the world was progressing toward an ultimate end, that history was a long Hegelian process of ‘becoming,’ at the completion of which would be a true and perfect enlightenment—where all distinctions would be obliterated and all opposites would be resolved.   Ruiz imagined that this would be a Marxist paradise on earth.”

During the time they worked together, Desmando Ruiz had pointed the young Bergoglio in the direction of the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.  Ruiz himself had long since ceased to be a practicing Catholic, but he liked that Teilhard was applying Hegelian principles to Catholic thought.  Teilhard had been enraptured with the works of Darwin, and he had attempted to meld Darwin’s evolutionary system with Catholicism.  He held a heretical opinion that mankind was poised near the final stages of a process of God-guided evolution, and that the next phase in human development was that everyone’s consciousness would soon be subsumed into a single mass consciousness—a collective awareness of the elusive istigkeit spoken of in Eckhart’s philosophy.  All human thought would exist in an omnipresent Oneness.  Teilhard called this the Omega Point, and he claimed that the Omega Point itself would be the Second Coming of Christ, the parousia, since every soul would be drawn into and united with the Mind of God.

According to Fuentes, Teilhard de Chardin was Bergoglio’s favorite Catholic writer, and was the inspiration for Bergoglio becoming a Jesuit.  “There are three important aspects of Francis’ vision for the Church,” says Fuentes.  “Two are public, one is private.  The foremost aspect is his liberalism.  The things he stresses the most are the liberation theology and social justice advocacy that emerged from the Latin American atmosphere of the 1960s.  That’s his most public side.  The second aspect of Francis’ ideology is the philosophy of Teilhard.  He believes that the Catholic Church must function as the spiritual side of a one-world government, whereby the whole of humanity can be drawn into the grand project of arriving at the Omega Point.  You can see obvious hints of this in some of his writings and speeches.”

But the third aspect, Fuentes said, “is the most secret aspect, the one which he keeps hidden.  And that aspect is his Gnosticism: a horrible set of gnostic beliefs concerning Judas.  You are a traditional Catholic,” said Fuentes (meaning me, to whom he was writing), “so you would probably say that Vatican II and the decades that followed marked a betrayal of the Church’s traditions and teachings.  But let me tell you something: Francis would agree with you.  He believes this betrayal is very necessary.  He even sees himself as a ‘second Judas,’ betraying Christ at the end of history in preparation for the Second Coming at the Omega Point.  Even if you were to accuse Francis, directly to his face, of being an Antichrist, he would not, deep in his heart, deny it.  Because he believes that the traditional ‘old Christ’ must be negated and overcome, in order to usher in the ecumenical age of a ‘New Christ’ who embraces all people and all cultures in a supremely syncretistic pan-religious version of Catholicism.  This is Francis’ belief.  I learned it that day in the Botanical Garden, as the five of us took our promenade among those tree-draped paths and humid greenhouses, listening to Bergoglio speak of these things with Borges, who was delighted with the weirdness of it all.”

Fuentes continued: “I think Borges saw Francis as a theological madman—and yet this kind of lunacy, of course, was just the sort of thing Borges found fascinating.  But know this: the subtext of every word that Francis utters or writes contains his deeply-held gnostic theology of Judas,” Fuentes told me.  “You can read it between every line.”  Fuentes would eventually become aware of even further details of this demonic Christology, which involves a “sinful Christ” and a “transfigured Judas.”  He pointed me toward an instance where Francis actually dared to weave a small bit of this material into one of his sermons, where he concluded by openly denying the faith of Chalcedon, saying that Christ on the cross “became sin” and was “completely emptied of his divinity.”

(For non-Catholic readers of this blog, it will suffice to know that the Council of Chalcedon solemnly taught that Christ was “like us in all respects but for sin”, meaning He was always sinless—thus at no point did He ever, as Francis suggests, “become sin.”  Chalcedon also taught that Christ was “fully human and fully divine”; not, as Francis preached, that He ever became “emptied of his divinity.”  Francis’ teaching is a gnostic misinterpretation of a passage of scripture, Philippians 2:7. In fact, Pope Pius XII specifically condemned this interpretation in his encyclical Sempiternus Rex Christus: “this is an opinion for which a rashly and falsely understood sentence of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians supplies a basis and a shape. This is called the kenotic doctrine, and according to it, the enemies of the faith imagine that the divinity was taken away from the Word in Christ. It is a wicked invention, equally to be condemned with the Docetism opposed to it. It reduces the whole mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption to empty the bloodless imaginations”).

Eventually their conversation shifted to the Second Vatican Council, which had concluded just the previous month.  Jana Filippovna remarked at how surprised she was at the document which effectively reversed the Catholic Church’s attitude toward Judaism and the Jewish people.  Desmando Ruiz offered how pleased he was to see the undertones of Hegelian and Marxist thought diffused through so many of the decrees.  Borges told a story of having been in Madrid the previous year to give a talk on Edgar Allan Poe; during conversation at a dinner party hosted by a Spanish academic, he caught the whiff of a merry rumor that the current pope had gone to seminary with a classmate who was nearly his own twin, so similar were they in appearance.  (Borges liked the notion of doppelgängers and doubles.  He’d written a story in 1960 called Borges & I about how his own public persona felt like a separate entity, and later, in 1969, he would author a story called The Other, about meeting his younger self on a peculiar park bench: a bench which served as a fulcrum in time—or an intersection between dreaming and reality—joining the elder Borges in Cambridge, Massachusetts with the younger Borges in Geneva, Switzerland).

The mention of doubles and twins swung the conversation back to Gnosticism, where the apostle Thomas is considered the twin of Jesus, and where in the Syriac “Gospel of Thomas,” Thomas and Judas are one and the same person: Judas himself is Jesus’ twin.  At this point, the young Baltasar Fuentes Ramos began to wonder why they had invited a fifteen-year-old student, and a faithful Catholic one, no less, to this heterodox consortium.  He had remained mostly quiet the whole time, still being in awe of Borges.  But it was just then that Borges turned his attention to him.  “There is much to speculate on in these matters,” he sighed, “but only one way to verify.”  The great man turned his half-blind eyes to Fuentes.  “We would have to interrogate someone who was actually present during the ministry of Christ.  And you,” he said, “claim just such a person exists.  Perhaps you will take us to meet him.”

The Botanical Garden of Buenos Aires. The stray cat population, which according to Baltasar Fuentes Ramos was just a “small colony” in 1966, is now a significant problem, exacerbated by uncaring people who choose to cruelly abandon their cats there.

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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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Answering another frequent objection: Paul VI was a modernist heretic

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

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

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

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

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