We are currently carrying a new book about Malachi Martin for your cautious inspection [click here for it or at bottom].
We fully acknowledge that Malachi (once a Jesuit priest, then a bestselling author) is highly controversial and often made claims, especially on the late Art Bell’s highly popular radio show, that in some instances may have challenged credulity. Detractors call him a conspiracy fabulist; supporters call him courageous.
Of Martin’s most sensational allegations during those radio interviews and in another book (this one a novel): That there once had been a “Satanic enthronement” at the Vatican.
First, let’s get this out of the way: In 1965, Martin, who died in 1999, requested and received a release from some of his Jesuit vows of poverty and obedience. He was given permission to live as a priest outside the Jesuit order and later was granted a form of “release” that allowed him to function as a priest but not as a Jesuit. He was referred to in interviews as “Father Malachi Martin,” “Dr. Martin,” or simply “Malachi,” depending on the interviewer. The New York Times preferred “Dr.”
He continued to say Mass privately and considered himself a priest until the end. He was not laicized (defrocked) but also not in active public ministry. Ten years before his death, he asked for and was granted permission to again celebrate public Mass. His insight into the Vatican came mainly as a close aide and scholar under Cardinal Augustin Bea, S.J. He also worked during the time of the Second Vatican Council as a translator and researcher (he held a doctoral degree in archaeology and translation).
What Father Martin asseverated was that the alleged “enthronement” took place in the Pauline chapel at the Vatican on July 1, 1963 while a similar one was conducted in the U.S.
The Pauline Chapel is the Pope’s private chapel in the Apostolic Palace, alongside the Sistine Chapel. It is generally not open to the public for regular viewing or scheduled Masses.
That July night, as the clocks in Rome struck midnight, Malachi Martin claimed that the satanic ceremony included extremely high-ranking members of the Catholic Church in the Vatican attempting to hand the Catholic Church over to Satan.
“…In an atmosphere of darkness and fire, the Chief Celebrant in each Chapel intoned a series of Invocations to the Prince [of darkness],” wrote Father Martin in his novel Windswept House. “The Participants in both Chapels chanted a response. Then, and only in America’s Targeting Chapel, each Response was followed by a Convenient Action—a ritually determined acting-out of the spirit and the meaning of the words.”
One of the most famous scenes in Martin’s novel was the alleged parallel satanic enthronement ritual in the American South involving the abuse of a young girl Martin called “Agnes” (eleven years of age) at “a small chapel in South Carolina”).<[scroll for more:]
Whether Martin directly used that particular woman’s testimony, whether it simply influenced his tone, or whether the woman later imagined herself in the scene is not documented, but the parallel to what he wrote and what we were told is undeniable.
Even commentators close to Martin have said: “It is clear that Martin based disturbing parts of the novel on real testimony that reached him.” Father Martin purposefully wrote about it as “faction,” where there is some or a lot of truth but names and dates are changed for safety, though he claimed “90 percent” of events in his books were true, as were “85 percent” of the people.
No one could prove the alleged Vatican event was an actual satanic ritual, one that (supposedly) opened the Church to the winds of the world and spiritually diminished—”tanked”—the powers of exorcists across the world (of which Martin was one).
The parallel fictionalized (or “factionalized’) enthronement in the U.S. involved several clerics (two of whom would be elevated beyond the priesthood).
Was it a true claim?
Many years ago we spoke to a woman who exactly fit the description of “Agnes.” We withheld her name for obvious reasons. Her mother joined her in the conversation, during which she claimed that when she was a girl, she was taken into the basement of the church her family attended and made to participate in a satanic/sexual act with these clerics, one that involved a severe profanation of the Eucharist in a sexual act. We won’t get more explicit than that.
We never did verify what she told us. We know above all that Christ wins at the end, and that He sent His mother to spots like Guadalupe in Mexico to defend His Church, against which, in the end, the gates of hell can’t repvail.
As far as the Vatican, we do recall Paul VI–who was enthroned on June 30, 1963 (basically the date of Martin’s depiction)–and the Pontiff famously saying that “the smoke of Satan has found its way into the Church through the fissures.”
[scroll for more:]
Notes a commentator, Martin had first made reference to a diabolic rite held in Rome in his 1990 non-fiction best-seller about geopolitics and the Vatican, The Keys of This Blood, in which he wrote:
“Most frighteningly for [Pope] John Paul [II], he had come up against the irremovable presence of a malign strength in his own Vatican and in certain bishops’ chanceries. It was what knowledgeable Churchmen called the ‘superforce.’ Rumors, always difficult to verify, tied its installation to the beginning of Pope Paul VI’s reign in 1963. Indeed Paul had alluded somberly to ‘the smoke of Satan which has entered the Sanctuary’. . . an oblique reference to an enthronement ceremony by Satanists in the Vatican. Besides, the incidence of Satanic pedophilia—rites and practices— was already documented among certain bishops and priests as widely dispersed as Turin, in Italy, and South Carolina, in the United States. The cultic acts of Satanic pedophilia are considered by professionals to be the culmination of the Fallen Archangel’s rites (p. 632).”
It was an anguished warning, was Pope Paul’s, that caused great shock and scandal, even within the Catholic world. Much of it related to the insertion, in that dark decade, of neo-paganism, non-religiosity, and scientism into the Catholic faith (and not, as many have erroneously stated, Vatican Two, though we certainly have some issues with the aftermath and application of that Council).
Was there more to it than that?
Martin presented the supposed rituals as a pivotal spiritual event that led among other things to the explosion of abuse in the Church. It was joined to the fictionalized American event via telephone.
Noted The Times: “Windswept House, published by Doubleday, employs almost every image of classic anti-Catholicism: lewd clerics who cynically manipulate the faith they no longer believe in to gain worldly power, and even the possibility, left unresolved, that something resembling the Antichrist, or his puppet, will soon reign from the papal throne.”
One traditionalist and strongly anti-Vatican Two newspaper, The Remnant, said in 2021, “Even after twenty-five years, Father Malachi Martin’s book Windswept House has lost none of its appeal. Father Martin characterized this book, as well as several of his other novels, as ‘faction,’ meaning they were based on real events, but ‘fictionalized’ by the changing of dates and names. At the end of an online version of his book is a key to the real identities of his characters. There we learn that the Church’s arch-enemies such as [a cardinal] are represented in the story, as well as St. Gallen Mafia members like Godfried Danneels.”
Please take the remark carefully; it could be slanderous. But kernels of truth?
A writer named Father Brian Harrison modified the above article in a commentary for The Remnant that said:
“Now, in column 1 on p. 5 she says that the real date of the infamous event described at the beginning of Windswept House is said to have been 1957, while in column 3 she says it took place ‘in the 1960s.’ I can clarify what Fr. Martin said was the true date of the Luciferian Enthronement inside the Vatican with the following information from a quarter-century ago that I have never made public until now.
“In the last decade of Malachi Martin’s life [he died in 1999; more on that Monday] I became a personal friend of his and would visit him in his Manhattan apartment whenever I was in New York. In the section headed ‘1963’ in the Prologue of Windswept House, we read that this shocking ceremony, enthroning ‘the Fallen Archangel Lucifer’ in the Chapel of St. Paul, took place on June 29, 1963, the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul, the eve of the coronation of the newly elected Pope Paul VI.
“It celebrated gloatingly the long-prepared-for arrival of a Pope more open to liberal changes than any of his predecessors. Around the time the book was published in 1996, Fr. Martin told me that this date was indeed “factional”, and that the true date of this blasphemous act of devilry, coordinated with a corresponding ceremony on the American side of the Atlantic, was actually one day later. That is, it took place the night after Paul’s VI’s coronation in St. Peter’s Square on the afternoon of Sunday, June 30. Malachi told me it was indeed carried out in the Chapel of St. Paul, as Windswept House says, and began at midnight on the night of June 30 / July 1, 1963.”
Midnight on the first of July in Rome would obviously be June 30 in the evening in South Carolina.
If memory serves, the woman who called us described it as being a Sunday morning. And if it was in 1957, it was not a parallel “ceremony.”
Was the Vatican chapel re-consecrated?
If there is truth to any of it, perhaps.
For the story goes that Rome was eventually notified of the occurrence.
At any rate: dangerous it is to cite specific names and places. One can also observe that the great wave of sexual abuse, at least in the U.S., began in the 1950s, not the Sixties. But the Sixties through the Eighties constituted the pivotal, diabolical stretch, and there is little question that the Church has been in crisis since 1963.
Pope Paul was right. He discerned correctly. Smoke had indeed entered, some of it by way of abuse, some by the way Vatican Two was misinterpreted or distorted, some by way of extremism (right and left), some by way of over-intellectualization of Catholicism, some by way of liturgical distortions and anti-traditionalism, some by way of disobedience to Rome, which still plagues us.
[More next week: the strange rumor around Martin’s death]
–MHB
[resources: Malachi Martin: In the Shadows of the Vatican and Windswept House]
