The writings of ex-Jesuit priest, writer, and former Vatican
insider Malachi Martin, who died in New York last month, reveal a devastating
critique of the R.C. Church which he left in disillusionment after ten years
(1954-64) on the inside. [See The Independent, August 6, 1999: The
Friday Review, p. 7.]
Malachi Martin was born in Co. Kerry in 1921, ordained priest
in 1954, laicised in 1964 and died on July 27, 1999. During his service in Rome
between 1958 and 1964 he was reportedly close to Pope John XXIII and claimed to
have been initiated into the weightiest of the Vatican's secrets. His Rome years
also co-incided with the start of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).
Thoroughly disillusioned with the Church and the Jesuits, he requested a release
from his vows in 1964, left Rome suddenly that June and worked as a dish-washer
and taxi-driver in New York, becoming an American citizen in 1970.
His succession of books on Roman Catholic themes became more
and more extravagant. In The Pilgrim (1964) he divulged Vatican efforts
to block Pope John's intention to retract the Church's doctrine that blamed the
Jews for Christ's death. Hostage to the Devil (1976) was a lurid account
of possession and exorcism. In The Final Conclave (1978) he dealt with
alleged Soviet spies in the Vatican. In The Keys of this Blood (1990) he
laid out Pope John Paul II's dream of controlling the New World Order
(vindicating our claim that the Vatican is the driving force behind the New
Europe). Windswept House (1996) featured a fictionalised version of an
actual murder. In all his writings the "decline and fall" of the Church remained
his constant obsession.
In 1981 Martin lambasted the Roman Church as "a church with
depopulated seminaries, politico bishops, lipsticked and mini-skirted nuns,
bewildered lay people, plus a Vatican that housed Communist moles, clerical
financial wizards, career diplomats, Marxist prelates, a brothel, overworked
exorcists, hostile bureaucrats, some silent good people, and a hard-core 37 per
cent of clerics and people who yearned for the church Paul VI had
smothered". By 1997 he had come to the conclusion: "Lucifer, the biggest
archangel, the leader of the revolt against God, has a big 'in' with certain
Vatican officials."
Martin is yet another example of the increasing number of those
who have witnessed the filth of the 'Babylonian whore' from within and decided
to shout about it from the housetops. What more sinister material might he have
discovered if he had stayed inside? As reviewer Felix Corley put it: "The
Vatican can be thankful he left when he did."
