Paul VI and the Church’s Paradigm Shift on Homosexuality

By: Randy Engel

[NOTE: With the so-called “canonization” of Pope Paul VI looming, investigative journalist Randy Engel has kindly granted us permission to publish in full the following chapter taken from her magnum opus Rite of Sodomy. I am certain that akaCatholic readers will find this work facinating and highly informative. If you have yet to obtain the complete five volumes of Rite of Sodomy, I strongly encourage you to do so as the information contained therein is as relevant today as ever. – Louie Verrecchio]

Pope John XXIII – The Interim Pope

 Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, known to the world as Pope John XXIII, served as the critical interim link between the pontificates of the two great framers and implementers of the Revolution in the Catholic Church – Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) and Pope Paul VI (Giovanni Battista Montini). Roncalli’s powerful Roman patronage from the Rampolla crowd, his “progressivist” leanings and his advanced age were sufficient to qualify him as an apprentice pope, but not a leader of the Revolution.

A Lombard, like Battista Montini, Roncalli was born on November 25, 1881 in Sotto il Monte, Italy, in the Diocese of Bergamo. He was the fourth child in a family of 14. The extended Roncalli family headed by his great-uncle Zaverio were poor – sharecroppers with a heavy dependency on the goodwill of their landlord. Life was difficult.[1]

Roncalli was attracted to the priesthood at a very early age. In his memoirs, he said that he never knew a time when he did not want to be a priest. He began as a day student at the tender age of nine at the episcopal college at Celana, but after a trying year he returned home where he was tutored by his parish priest, Don Francesco Rebuzzini.[2] He entered the junior seminary at Bergamo at age 11 in November 1893.

Thereafter, his training for the priesthood progressed in an ordinary manner until a chance meeting on September 17, 1899 with Msgr. Giacomo Maria Radini-Tedeschi.

Msgr. Radini-Tedeschi, a canon at St. Peter’s in Rome with important Curial connections, would later become Roncalli’s lifelong patron and protector. The 42-year-old Radini-Tedeschi extended a general invitation to the aspiring cleric to come to Rome to study, but the acceptance was delayed until Roncalli won a scholarship to the Pontifical Seminary in Rome.[3]

From January 1901 to 1905, with a singular interruption of one year to complete compulsory military service, Roncalli remained at the Roman College. Following his ordination as a priest of the Diocese of Bergamo on August 10, 1904, he stayed in Rome to complete his degree in canon law. Once again, Providence intervened.

In 1905, Pope Pius X embarked upon a program to defang Cardinal Rampolla’s Modernist allies. He made Radini-Tedeschi a bishop and kicked him upstairs. Bishop Radini-Tedeschi selected Roncalli to accompany him to the Diocese of Bergamo as his secretary.

As a member of Radini-Tedeschi’s official entourage, Roncalli began to absorb the “progressive” spirit of his wealthy and influential patron and mentor. Other members of the exclusive circle included Cardinal Rampolla and his secretary Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pius XII), Giacomo della Chiesa (the future Benedict XV) who worked at the Vatican’s Department of State, and Cardinal Andrea Carlo Ferrari, Archbishop of Milan.

In addition to his diocesan duties, in 1906, Roncalli accepted a position at the diocesan seminary where he taught history and apologetics. Rumors that Roncalli’s lectures contained seeds of Modernism were of little concern to him. He continued to be well protected until the death of Radini-Tedeschi in 1914. With the installation of a new Ordinary, Bishop Luigi Maria Marelli, who had a reputation for orthodoxy and little patience for novelty, theological or otherwise, Roncalli’s chances for ecclesiastical advancement looked bleak.

In May 1915, Roncalli was called out for active duty as an army chaplain to serve in the Great War. Upon his return from the horrific and sobering experience of trench warfare, his superior, Bishop Marelli, appointed him Director of the House of Studies at Bergamo and later spiritual director of the diocesan seminary. He was also assigned as chaplain to the Union of Catholic Women (UCW). According to Mary Martínez, it was in connection with the UCW’s factory workers strike that Roncalli met a kindred spirit in the person of strike organizer and Christian Democrat political activist, Giuditta Montini, the mother of the future Pope Paul VI.[4]

The year 1921 brought a sharp change in fortune for Roncalli. Pius X had forced the Modernists underground, but with Giacomo della Chiesa now sitting on the papal throne as Pope Benedict XV, they emerged as virulent a strain as ever.

Pope Benedict XV summoned Roncalli to Rome and made him Chairman of the Central Council of the Propagation of the Faith in Italy with an office in the Curia.

Unfortunately for Roncalli, one year later, Pope Benedict XV was dead. His successor was Achille Ratti who became Pope Pius XI. For the visionaries of NewChurch his election was another temporary setback.

While working at the Propaganda Fide, Msgr. Roncalli developed important political contacts with Giorgio Montini, editor of Il Cittadino de Brescia and an activist in the anti-Fascist Partita Popolare Italiana (PPI) led by Don Luigi Sturzo. It was about this time, that Roncalli met the elder Montini’s middle son, the up-and-coming diplomat Msgr. Giovanni Battista, who had returned from Poland. The two men struck up a close friendship that lasted a lifetime.[5]

In 1924, Msgr. Roncalli secured a teaching position at the Pontifical Lateran University as Professor of Theology and Ecclesiastical History.

Martínez reports that it was during his tenure at the Lateran that Roncalli began to “spice up” his lectures with the writings of anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, the ex-adept of the occult sect Ordo Templi Orientis that claimed the late Cardinal Rampolla as a leading light.[6] She states that word of Roncalli’s imprudent remarks reached the ear of Pius XI. This incident would have been the cause of an immediate dismissal from his post at the Pontifical University were it not for the intercession of Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Gasparri who secured for his friend, Roncalli, a bishopric and a diplomatic post in the Balkans to await better times.[7]

On the other hand, Roncalli’s biographer Peter Hebblethwaite suggests that the cleric’s banishment from Rome was triggered by some inopportune pro-PPI, pro-Christian Democratic, anti-Fascist remarks in a sermon delivered at Bergamo Cathedral on September 1, 1924 on the occasion of the 10^th anniversary of the death of Bishop Radini-Tedeschi.[8]

Msgr. Roncalli served as Apostolic Visitor and then Apostolic Delegate to Bulgaria from March 1925 to January 1935 at which time Pius XI made him Papal Nuncio to Turkey and Greece where the worlds of Greek Orthodoxy and Islam dominated the religious landscape.[9]

During the Second World War, most of Roncalli’s time was taken up with humanitarian concerns especially the plight of the Jews. Pope Pius XII ordered Roncalli to issue false baptismal certificates to Jews in order that they might resettle in Palestine that was under the control of the British. Roncalli balked.

Roncalli informed the pope that it was madness to give into Zionist demands for a Jewish homeland in Palestine that could not be justified on either historical or political grounds. Roncalli was against driving the Arabs, including a significant number of Christian Arabs, from their land to make way for the Zionists. Roncalli’s opinions were shared by Luigi Cardinal Maglione, the Vatican Secretary of State, but Pius XII would not be dissuaded. Roncalli set to writing out the false baptismal documents.[10]

The Christmas of 1944 saw Roncalli in Paris as Papal Nuncio to the Fourth French Republic. He succeeded in rescuing the French bishops who had sided with the Vichy government (1940-1944) against the Free French Forces. The victor, General Charles de Gaulle, was now demanding his pound of flesh.[11]

In May 1952, the 71-year-old Roncalli received word from Msgr. Montini, the Substitute of the Vatican Secretariat of State, that Pius XII had appointed Roncalli as the Vatican’s first Permanent Observer to the newly established United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris. Jacques Maritain, the French Ambassador to the Holy See, was credited with the diplomatic coup.[12]

There is evidence to suggest that during his years away from Rome, Roncalli was initiated into Freemasonry even though Canon 2335 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law strictly prohibited such membership.

Veteran Vatican reporter Martínez states that Milanese journalist, Pier Carpi (a pseudonym) claims to have absolute proof that while in Istanbul, Roncalli was initiated into the Brotherhood reaching the 18^th or Rosicrucian Degree.[13]

After his posting to Paris, members of the Presidential Garde Republicaine reported that Roncalli regularly attended the Thursday evening meetings of the Grand Orient Masonic Lodge.[14]

Years after the death of Pope John XXIII, favorable obituaries were issued by high level Freemasons who applauded Roncalli as a brother who imparted “his benediction, his understanding, and his protection” to the Craft.[15]

On November 14, 1952, Msgr. Roncalli received a confidential letter from Montini at the Secretariat of State asking Archbishop Roncalli if he would accept the position of Patriarch of Venice as the See was about to be vacated with the imminent death of Archbishop Carlo Agostini.[16] It was an audacious offer considering the fact that Roncalli was nearing the age of retirement.

Roncalli, anxious to return home, expressed his willingness to accept Pope Pius XII’s offer. Roncalli was elevated to the cardinalate on January 12, 1953 and was appointed Patriarch of Venice three days later.

On November 4, 1958, Cardinal Roncalli ascended the Chair of Peter as Pope John XXIII.[17] He was almost 77-years-old, but then again, he was intended to be an interim pope. His pontificate lasted less than five years, but he managed to complete his two-fold mission to set up the apparatus for the implementation of the Revolution in the form of a General Council and to prepare the way for his successor, Giovanni Battista Montini.

Pope John XXIII’s Consistories

At the Consistory of December 15, 1958, Giovanni Battista Montini, Archbishop of Milan was the first cardinal created by Pope John XXIII. In the four Consistories that followed, Roncalli brought the College of Cardinals well past its full complement of 70.[18] Archbishop Montini supplied the list of candidates.[19]

It was a Vatican rendition of “pack the College of Cardinals,” reminiscent of the 1930s when President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court. The big difference, however, was that FDR got caught.

In the naming of new cardinals, two factors predominated – the need to continue the internationalization, that is, the de-Romanization of the Curia begun under Pius XII and the need to line up votes for a pro-Montini conclave.

Among those framers of NewChurch who received the red hat from the hands of Pope John XXIII were:

• Augustine Bea, SJ
• Leo-Jozef Suenens, Archbishop of Malines-Brussels, Belgium
• Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, Apostolic Delegate in the United States
• Carlo Confalonieri, Secretary of the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities
• Franziskus König, Archbishop of Vienna, Austria
• Paolo Giobbe, , Nuncio-internuncio in Holland
• Julius Döpfner, Bishop of Berlin, Germany
• Arcadio María Larraona, CMF, Secretary of the Sacred Congregation of Religious
• Bernard Jan Alfrink, Archbishop of Utrecht, Holland

Less than three months after becoming pope,  John XXIII consecrated Albino Luciani, the future Pope John Paul I, Bishop of Vittorio Veneto (Italy). Pope Paul VI made Luciani, Patriarch of Venice. Archbishop Luciani’s name topped Pope Paul VI’s list for the red hat at the Consistory of March 5, 1973. Cardinal Luciani shared the distinction of being one of the very few Italians admitted to the Montini circle.[20]

Pope John XXIII Calls for a General Council

Historically speaking, there are four reasons for a pope to call an Ecumenical (“Universal”) or General Council of all the bishops of the world: 1) to end a schism; 2) to condemn heresies; 3) for dogmatic purposes; and 4) to institute reform in the traditional sense, that is, to attack laxity in matters of Church discipline or morals.[21]

Pope John XXIII’s Ecumenical Council (1962-1965) was not called for any of these reasons. It was called for the ostensible purpose of aggiornamento or “updating” the Church and bringing the Church into the “modern world.”

The Council was declared to be a “pastoral” as opposed to a “dogmatic” Council. This verbal distinction, however, set up a false dichotomy for revealed Truth is never opposed to genuine pastoral considerations.

Certainly, Pope John XXIII was not into condemnations and anathemas that, in the past, were precursors of legitimate reforms in the life of the Church. He made this point quite clear in a speech that was drafted by Montini, to the more than 2000 Council Fathers gathered for the solemn opening of the Council in St. Peter’s Basilica on October 11, 1962.[22]

As noted by Amerio in Iota Unum, Pope Paul VI later reformulated the objectives of the Council to include 1) the Church’s taking account of itself ; 2) “reform” in terms of self-correction; 3) the causa unionis, that is, the issue of Christian unity; and, 4) “to throw out a bridge to the modern world.”[23]

The inspiration for the Council was said to have struck Pope John XXIII like a “flash of lightening from heaven.” The reality, it appears, was a bit more mundane.

Pope Pius XI had interrogated his Cardinals on the timeliness of a General Council at a secret consistory on May 23, 1923, and they advised against it on the grounds that it would likely open the door to the architects of Revolution within the Church.[24]

Pius XII also considered convening a General Council early in his pontificate, and went so far as to instruct the Holy Office to draw up a preliminary prospectus.[25] The First Secretary of the secret Preparatory Commission was Father Pierre Charles, a Belgium Jesuit.[26] Unfortunately for the revolutionaries, the contingencies of the Second World War followed by the Cold War and the lack of funds militated against the calling of an Ecumenical Council at that time.[27]

As noted by Martínez, by the time Pope John XXIII took office, Archbishop Montini in conjunction with the Rhine Group that included such revolutionary luminaries as the Swiss theologian Hans Küng, Leo-Jozef Suenens, Julius Döpfner, Franziskus König, Augustin Bea and Albino Luciani, had already reworked Pope Pius XII’s plans for a General Council in a series of secret high-level meetings held in Munich.[28]

Roncalli was not present at these meetings.

While Pope John XXIII had the Curia and Preparatory Commission for the Council feverishly preoccupied with the drafting of orthodox schemas that were ostensibly intended to serve as the basis for deliberation by the Council Fathers, Montini and Company were busy drawing up parallel schemas that would be substituted when the order came down to discard the Curia-approved drafts and begin again.[29]

As for the members of the Loyal Opposition, they were largely unorganized and weak and they made the fatal error of grossly underestimating the abilities of the enemy. Midway through the Council, they fell into a state of utter collapse. This was not surprising as both Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, who ultimately held the keys to power in the Church, were against them.

The Plot Against the Church by Maurice Pinay, printed originally in Italian, was distributed in the fall of 1962 during the opening days of the Council. The book was one indication that not everyone was clueless concerning the political and theological intrigue generated by the framers of the Council.[30]

However, the early warning signs that grave mischief was afoot were easily dismissed by the majority of Church Fathers in the euphoric atmosphere and hyper media glitz that greeted the opening of the Second Vatican Council. Nevertheless, the fact that the enemies of the Church, including the Liberal Establishment, Communists, Freemasons and Zionists universally hailed the event as a monumental step forward for humanity, should have given the Church Fathers cause for concern.

Cardinal Montini – The Hidden Hand

Today, it is freely acknowledged by both opponents and supporters of the Revolution that has swept through the Catholic Church, that Cardinal Montini controlled the direction and agenda of the early days of the Council from behind the scenes in Milan. After the Council opened, Montini moved the center of his operation to his suite of rooms at the Vatican, rooms traditionally reserved for resident cardinals.

On January 26, 1959, only one day after Pope John XXIII had publicly announced the convening of a General Council for the Universal Church, Archbishop Montini addressed a Messaggio to the faithful of Milan. His musings on the upcoming Council suggests he either had a crystal ball or he was in on the ground floor of the elite shakers and movers of the Council.

According to Amerio, on the eve of the Council, L’Osservatore Romano carried portions of the text of a book written by Cardinal Montini on the future Council that was published by the University of Milan.  Montini stated that the Council’s mission was to rearrange the Faith so as to minimize its supernatural elements, in order to render it more acceptable to the modern world and modern man.[31]

In a similar vein, Martínez reports that four days before Pope John’s “flash of lightening” experience that allegedly inspired the Council, Küng told an astonished lecture hall audience in the Hofkirche (Abbey Court Church) in Luzern, Switzerland, not only would there be a General Council, but he also outlined its direction and agenda.[32]

With the publication of The Council, Reform and Reunion one year before the opening of the Council, Küng demonstrated that he knew more about the upcoming Council than did Pope John.[33]

Betrayal

In preparation for the Council, Catholic bishops around the world were polled by mail by the Office of the Secretariat to learn their opinions on topics to be considered at the Council. Communism topped the list.

However, as documented in the previous chapter, at the instigation of Cardinal Montini, two months before the opening of the Council, Pope John XXIII approved the signing of the Metz Accord with Moscow officials, whereby the Soviets would permit two representatives from the Russian State Church to attend the Council in exchange for absolute and total silence at the Council on the subject of Communism/Marxism.

With the exceptions of Cardinal Montini, who instructed Pope John to enter into negotiations with the Soviets, Cardinal Eugène Tisserant who signed the Accord, and Bishop Jan Willebrands who made the final contacts with the representatives of the Russian State Church, the Church Fathers at the Council were ignorant of the existence and nature of the Metz Agreement and the horrendous betrayal that it represented.[34]

The degree of deception and duplicity surrounding the terms of the Metz Accord is clear when we read Father Ralph Wiligen’s popular commentary on the Council, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, written in 1966, in which the author assures his readers that there were no obstacles to a debate on Communism at the Council:

The matter of Communism did not come up directly at either the Paris or the Moscow meetings. No request was made by the Russian Orthodox Church that the subject should not be treated at the Council, and no assurance was given by Monsignor Willebrands that it would not. In explaining the Council agenda, Monsignor Willebrands simply stated that the problem was treated positively in the Council program. However he made it clear that, once the Council opened, the Council Fathers were free to alter the program and introduce any topic they wished.[35]

The Soviets, however, did not have everything their way at the Council.

Prior to the arrival of the Russian State Church Observers on October 12, 1962, the Ukrainian Bishops of emigration issued a public statement in which they expressed their “bitterness” that Bishop Josyf Ivanovycè Slipiy, the only survivor of eleven Ukrainian bishops, who spent 18 years in Stalinist prisons, labor camps and Siberian exile, was not at the Council. Yet, Church officials had arranged for officials of the Russian State Church to be represented at the Council.[36]

The Ukrainian press release stated that the presence of the two Russian State Church Observers at the Second Vatican Council “has perturbed the believers…an ecumenical act is accomplished and the suffering of the Ukrainian Church is forgotten?”[37] The press release pointed out that the presence of the Russians at the Council “is not able to be considered a fact of a religious and ecclesiastical character, but an act contaminated by a purpose alien to religion, conducted by the Soviet regime in order to spread confusion.”[38]

We know, today, that the Church Fathers were, in fact, not free agents in regard to the issue of Communism/Marxism at the Second Vatican Council, and that it was Cardinal Tisserant’s duty as the First President of the Council to insure their silence on the matter and to make sure that the issue was never made a subject of formal debate or discussion at the Council.

That took some doing in light of the determination of many prelates to press for a separate schema devoted to a comprehensive refutation of Communism. Cardinal Tisserant was able to pull it off because of Pope Paul VI’s ability to control the agenda of the Council. When the dust had settled, the only reference to Communism was a footnote citing past declarations by former popes against Communism. The betrayal was complete. In the coming age of Ostpolitik condemnation of Communism no longer had a predominant place in the Roman Magisterium.

A paradigm shift in the Church’s historic condemnation of Communism is but one of the many sea changes that occurred in the Church under the relatively brief pontificate of Pope John XXIII.

Pope John was also responsible for important changes in the Sacred Liturgy as well as the introduction of numerous liturgical novelties.

These included the promotion of the so-called “Dialogue Mass” begun under Pius XII, in which the congregation recites much of the Mass along with the responses in unison with the priest. Pope John ordered the suppression of the Leonine Prayers at the end of Mass that included the Hail Holy Queen and the prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel. He also suppressed the Last Gospel, the Gospel of Saint John. In 1960, he removed the adjective perfidi (unfaithful) from the solemn intercession for the Jews on Good Friday.[39] In 1962, Pope John directed that Saint Joseph’s name be inserted in the Canon of the Mass, a critically symbolic action since the text of the Canon was held to be inviolate.

Pope John XXIII was not what traditionalists would call, a “Marian pope.”[40]

According to Frere Michel de la Sainte-Trinite, author of the famous four-volume work on Fatima, Toute la verite sur Fatima, on September 13, 1959, all the Bishops of Italy solemnly consecrated their nation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. However, “the movement was so little encouraged by Pope John XXIII, that his silence and reserve could not pass unnoticed,” said Frere Michel.[41]

On August 17, 1959, Pope John had the envelope containing the Third Secret of Fatima brought to him at Castelgandolfo, the first two Secrets having been revealed in 1942 with the permission of Pope Pius XII. Years later, Cardinal Ottaviani, Prefect for the Holy Office, who was present at the historic event, said that Pope John XXIII placed the Secret “in one of those archives which are like a very deep, dark well, to the bottom of which papers fall and no one is able to see them anymore.”[42] Pope John dismissed the Third Secret with the comment that it was “not for our time.”[43]

In March 1963, only three months before his death, Pope John, most certainly under directions from Cardinal Montini, established a six-member Commission to study the subjects of birth control (no births and no control) and population (people) control. This early Commission laid the groundwork for the Humanae Vitae debacle in 1968 and the crisis of authority that accompanied it. We will return to this sorry chapter in the history of the Church later in this chapter.

With the death of Pope John XXIII on June 3, 1963 at the age of 81, the eyes of the world turned to his successor, Giovanni Battista Cardinal Montini, who ascended the Chair of Peter as Pope Paul VI.[44]

Pope Paul VI – The Early Years

Having already touched upon certain aspects of the early life of young Giovanni Battista Montini in the form of short anecdotes that are found scattered through this text, a brief recollection of his early years will suffice.

Montini was born on September 26, 1897 in the family’s country home in the village of Concesio, five miles north of Brescia in Lombardy.[45] At birth, the matriarch of the family, Francesca Buffali Montini, his fraternal grandmother, determined that the infant’s mother, Giuditta, was too weak to nurse, and the child was shipped off to Peretti with a wetnurse for the first 14 months of his life.[46]

The young Battista lived a cosseted life of ease and comfort as the “frail,” “whining” middle child wedged between two apparently healthy brothers, Lodovico, the elder and Francesco, the younger.

Giorgio Montini, Battista’s father was a successful journalist, editor of the local Catholic paper Il Cittadino and a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Both Giorgio and Giuditta Montini shared a passion for the politics of the Left, a passion that was passed down to all their sons.

At the age of six, Battista was enrolled at the Jesuit Collegio Cesare Arici in Brescia. He remained here until he was 14, at which time his parents removed him for health reasons.[47]

Like Pacelli, Battista’s secondary education was carried out in private with tutors selected by his parents including priests from the Oratory at the nearby Church of Santa Maria della Pace. The Oratorians represented the clerical avant-garde of the day. They were more politically attuned to the anti-Fascist politics of Giorgio Montini and his wife than the traditionalist Jesuit priests at Arici. The Oratorians remained one of the most important influences on Battista throughout his life. Even after Battista entered the service of the Holy See, he retained an Oratorian confessor.

Again, as was the case with Eugenio Pacelli, after their son’s ordination as a priest of Brescia on May 29, 1920, the Montinis used their influence with the Vatican’s Old Boys’ Network to get Battista out of a parish assignment and to Rome in order that he might begin his diplomatic career in the service of the Holy See. I use the word “career” as opposed to “vocation” advisedly.

Montini’s somewhat toady biographer, Peter Hebblethwaite, was at least honest enough to assert that much.

Battista was not particularly religious – politics and the piano were his forte. Aside from saying Mass and performing various sacramental rites, the young priest appeared to have little in the way of a spiritual life. The young Father Battista also displayed an aversion for Marianist devotions particularly the Rosary. He said he preferred more Christ-centered approach to Mariology.[48]

On November 18, 1921 Father Montini entered the Accademia dei Nobili Ecclesiastici to study diplomacy. His entrance into the Academy was facilitated by Rampolla’s long-time ally, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, now Secretary of State. An excellent politician-priest, but a poor scholar, Montini whizzed through his diplomatic courses, but barely managed to earn his degree in canon law from the Gregorian.

In 1923, Pope Pius XI sent the young diplomat to Warsaw as an attaché of the Papal Nunciature, but Msgr. Montini’s delicate health could not abide the severe Polish winters and he returned to Rome where he was assigned to the Secretariat of State headed by Cardinal Gasparri.

Life in the Roman Curia

Fr. Montini’s immediate superior at the Secretariat was none other than Msgr. Francesco Borgongini-Duca, soon to be made Archbishop. Msgr. Borgongini-Duca was the Vatican’s first Nuncio to Italy after the signing of the Lateran Treaties. The reader will recall that Borgongini-Duca was young Father Francis Spellman’s patron and a close associate of Angelo Roncalli. He now took young Montini under his wing and became both the young cleric’s patron and protector.

In addition to his work at the Curia, Pope Pius XI assigned Father Montini to the chaplaincy of the Federation of Italian Catholic University Students (FUCI) where the young priest was able to vent his anti-Fascist spleen. Through the FUCI, Montini developed a lasting personal friendship with Aldo Moro, one of the founders of a post-war political anomaly known as the Christian Democratic Party (CDP) to which Montini and his entire family religiously committed themselves.

Montini also struck up a friendship with the CDP leader Giulio Andreotti who went on to become Italy’s seven-time Prime Minister. During his long political career, Andreotti carved out Party alliances with the Communists, Freemasons and the Sicilian Mafia.[49] It is a well-known fact that the Mafia could never have grown into the colossus it was without the collusion of certain Christian Democratic leaders and the backing of Freemasonry.[50] To be in bed with one was to be in bed with the all three, a truth Montini came to appreciate as Pope Paul VI.

For the 30 years that he worked at the Holy Office, Msgr. Montini was never well liked by Curial officials or their staff. The pro-Fascist Nicola Cardinal Canali, head of the Vatican Administration, did not disguise his intense dislike for the young diplomat. Msgr. (later Cardinal) Alfredo Ottaviani, who tended to be apolitical, also despised the young Montini.

During the Abyssinian War, Father Montini voiced his support for the League of Nations, a position contrary to official Vatican policy. Pope Pius XI believed that the newly created international organization would usurp the Holy See’s role as mediator in international disputes, which it did, and that the League was a den of Freemasons and Communists, which it was.[51]

Some members of the Italian hierarchy deplored Father Montini’s rabid anti-Fascist, pro-Communist sentiments, which the young diplomat never bothered to hide. Some Italian bishops were distressed by what they perceived as his total lack of patriotism for his native country, indeed Montini never appeared to have any scruples about betraying his country and his countrymen to the British, Soviets and Americans during the Second World War.[52] Fascist hero Roberto Farinacci claimed that it was well known that Montini was the friend of the enemies of Italy.[53]  He had a point.

In 1934, Montini took a rare break from his work at the Secretariat to visit England and Scotland with his Sicilian traveling companion, Mariano Rampolla da Tindaro, grand nephew of Cardinal Rampolla.[54]

Three years later, Cardinal Pacelli, now Secretary of State, promoted Montini to the rank of Sostituto for Ordinary Affairs, and in 1938 he invited Montini to accompany him to Bucharest for the International Eucharistic Congress.

After Pacelli took office as Pope Pius XII on March 12, 1939, Montini continued to work at the Secretariat under Cardinal Luigi Maglione, the new Secretary of State. However, his stock had gone up considerably with the election of Eugenio Pacelli, who is said to have been like a second father to Montini.

The War Years

During the Second World War, Pius XII assigned Montini to the task of helping prepare Italy for an orderly postwar political transition including the structuring of a new Italian government based on the Christian Democratic Party model.

Montini was put in charge of running an underground network used to aid the escape of political refugees, including Jews, out of the country. At the end of the war, the Vatican “ratlines” were used for other purposes including “Operation Paperclip,” that transferred top German and Austrian scientists to the United States so they would not fall into the hands of the Soviets.[55] Montini also helped coordinate Vatican efforts to assist prisoners of war and their families through the International Red Cross.

Throughout the war, Father Battista Montini, priest-diplomat by day and intriguer by night, worked closely with Allied military and intelligence officers from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and British and Soviet Intelligence against the Fascists, Japanese and Nazis.  Montini was instrumental in gathering intelligence for the Allies from Jesuits in Japan concerning strategic bombing targets.[56] The OSS, in turn, hastened to fill the Vatican coffers with U.S. dollars and the treasuries of the Sicilian Mafia and Italian Freemasons (whom Mussolini had driven underground), in order to expedite the Allied invasion of Italy.

One of Montini’s important wartime friends was the unmarried Sir Francis Godllopin D’Arcy Osborne, the British Ambassador to the Vatican who had taken up his post in 1936. When Italy entered the war on the side of Germany, Osborne and his staff and personal male entourage of secretary, butler and footman sought refuge in the Vatican.[57]  He and Montini became close friends.

Osborne characterized Msgr. Montini as an excellent diplomat, although not of the same high caliber as his co-worker at the Secretariat, Msgr. (later Cardinal) Domenico Tardini. He said that Montini was a workaholic, always in control, and ever a gentleman. Personally he found Montini to be gentle, persuasive, but indecisive.[58] After the war, Osborne spent his last days in Rome where he sponsored a Boys’ Club operated by the Salesian Fathers.[59] A cradle Protestant who occasionally dabbled in the occult, Osborne died outside the Church, despite Montini’s alleged efforts to convert him to Catholicism.

Secret Negotiations with Communists

During the summer of 1944, as the war was drawing to an end, Msgr. Montini entered into high-level negotiations with the Italian Communists to determine the role that the Communist Party would play in post-war era. His objective was to fashion an alliance with the Christian Democratic Party, Socialists, and Communists.[60]            As reported by Martínez, a meeting took place on July 10, 1944 between Msgr. Montini, acting on behalf of Pope Pius XII, and Palmiro Togliatti, the undisputed leader of Italy’s Communist Party who had recently returned to Rome after 18 years of exile in the Soviet Union.[61]

It was the first direct contact between the Vatican and a leader of Communism. A tentative plan was drafted as the basis of an agreement between the Christian Democratic Party, the Socialists and the Communists that would give the three political parties total control in any post-war government in Italy. The plan also outlined the conditions for future cooperation between the Catholic Church and the Soviet Union.[62]

Pius XII attempted to reward Msgrs. Montini and Tardini for their years of devoted service to the Holy See by raising them to cardinalate in a secret Consistory in 1952, but both men respectfully declined the honor.[63] This meant that Montini was not a member of the College of Cardinals and therefore not considered a candidate for the papacy in the 1958 conclave that elected Roncalli as Pope John XXIII.

On November 1, 1954, Pius XII appointed Montini, Archbishop of Milan. The consecration was carried out on December 12, 1954 by Eugène Cardinal Tisserant. In Milan, Montini could gain the pastoral experience he sorely lacked while continuing to build his constituency among the College of Cardinals.

Montini in Milan

… And the first opinion which one forms of a prince, and of his

understanding, is by observing the men he has around him; and

when they are capable and faithful he may always be considered

wise, because he has known how to recognize the capable and to

keep them faithful. But when they are otherwise one cannot form

a good opinion of him, for the prime error which he made was in

choosing them.[64]

Niccolo Machiavelli

The Prince (1513)

Once in Milan, the 57-year-old Montini found himself suddenly free, after 30 years, from all Curial oversight and papal restraint. Archbishop Montini set a new course for himself that would leave an indelible mark on his bishopric and future pontificate.  He gathered about him a coterie of like-minded liberal fellow travelers, anarchists, Communists, Socialists, Mafiosi, and members of Milan’s artistic and literary avant-garde. As virtue attracts men of virtue, so vice attracts men of vice. The rumor mills of Milan began to run full throttle.

It soon became very clear that Montini was not a Marian priest. He was, in fact, a Maritainist priest, an altogether different being.[65]

From almost the first day of his arrival, the Milanese, who have a great devotion to the Mother of God, started to complain that Archbishop Montini lacked “Marian sensitivity,” a charge reinforced by the archbishop’s conspicuous absence from traditional May crowning festivities and pilgrimages to Loreto, and his non-participation in the public recitation of the Rosary.[66] Pope Paul VI’s biographer Hebblethwaite tried to soften the criticism by claiming that Montini favored a “Christ-centered mariology” instead, but even this verbal concession  fell short of the mark.

In truth, the theology of Battista Montini was anthropocentric not theocentric. It was man-centered not God-centered.

Montini was the greatest and most influential disciple of Jacques Maritain and his “Integral Humanism” aptly described by H. Caron in Le Courrier de Rome as embracing “…a universal fraternity of men of good will belonging to different religions or no religion at all. It is within this fraternity that the Church should exercise a leavening influence without imposing itself and without demanding that it be recognized as the one true Church.” [67]

The Abbé Georges de Nantes captures the spirit of Maritain’s “Intergral Humanism” in his acronym MASDU – a Movement for the Spiritual Animation of World Democracy (Mouvement d’Animation Spirituelle de la Democratie Universelle) in which the Declaration of the Rights of Man replaces the Gospel of Jesus Christ, World Democracy has become analogous to the Kingdom of God on earth, and the function of religion is to provide inspiration and Spiritual Animation for mankind thus regenerated – the end product of MASDU being the complete annihilation of Religion and “its metamorphosis into atheistic Humanism.”[68]

It was said of the new Archbishop of Milan that he didn’t hear church bells, he heard factory whistles.

It is not surprising therefore that on one of his visits to the Archbishop’s residence, Jacques Maritain, the once great Thomistic philosopher, brought with him, Saul David Alinsky, the “Apostle of Permanent Revolution.” Montini was so impressed with the man who Maritain called his “warm, personal friend” and “one of the really great men of this century,” that the archbishop invited Alinsky to be his guest for a fortnight in order to consult with him on the Church’s relationship to local Communist unions.[69]

Born in Chicago in 1909, Saul Alinsky, a non-believing Jew, was a graduate of the streets of Chicago and the University of Chicago. In 1940, he founded the Industrial Areas Foundation as a showcase for his revolutionary tactics for mass organization for power.[70] Alinsky’s closest associates were to be found among the Catholic hierarchy and clergy including Cardinal Mundelein, his protégé Bishop Bernard Sheil, and activist-priest Msgr. John Egan, a prime mover in Call to Action.[71] Alinsky’s principle source of seed money and support was the Rockefeller family, the wealthy and secret Communist Marshall Field, and the United States Catholic Conference and AmChurch. Alinsky worked closely with the Communist Party/USA until his break with the Party after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.[72]

In “Jacques Maritain and Saul David Alinsky – Fathers of the ‘Christian’ Revolution,’” Hamish Fraser, editor of Approaches wrote of Alinsky:

Alinsky himself is a product of both Freemasonic and Revolutionary Marxist naturalism both of which appreciate the necessity of elites to the seizure and the maintenance of effective power.…Alinsky was an unbeliever to whom the very idea of dogma was anathema.…Given Alinsky’s naturalism it is not surprising that there is no room in his “social ethics” for any absolutes, for anything intrinsically “good” or “evil.” …Divorced once and legally married thrice, he spoke contemptuously of “the old culture when virginity was a virtue.…Alinsky’s “church of today and tomorrow’ is to be neither Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist nor Animist, but a one-world syncretism, synaptic amalgam of all and every existing belief.[73]

As Fraser notes, what was most unique about Saul Alinsky was not “his recipe for a one-world syncretist ‘church,’ but that he was the first to have his ideas widely accepted within the Catholic Church.”[74] However, had not Jacques Maritain and his greatest disciple Pope Paul VI laid the foundation for the Revolution in the Church, Alinky’s alliance and intimacy with the Church would have been impossible, concludes Fraser.[75]

During his eight years as Archbishop of Milan, Montini’s increasingly radicalized politics brought him into conflict with other members of the Italian Episcopal Conference including Archbishop Gilla Vicenzo Gremigni of the Diocese of Novara.

Once he had established himself in the diocese, Archbishop Montini made a decision to dissolve and relocate Il Popolo d’Italia, a well-established newspaper published in the Diocese of Novara. Bishop Gremigni, the Ordinary of Novara, protested, and rightly so, that the matter lay outside of Montini’s jurisdiction.

In early January 1963, only six months before his election to the Chair of Peter, Montini was reported to have sent the Archbishop of Novara a letter of such a nature that Gremigni experienced a fatal heart attack upon readings its contents. The letter was found by Gremigni’s Auxiliary Bishop, Msgr. Ugo Poletti, and kept in his possession. When Montini departed from Milan for Rome the ghost of Archbishop Gremigni followed him in the person of Msgr. Poletti. In 1967, the Italian media received a tip that the pope was somehow connected to Archbishop Gremigni’s death. Shortly thereafter, Pope Paul VI appointed Poletti to head the Diocese of Spoleto. It was the first of a seemingly miraculous series of spontaneous papal promotions for the ambitious prelate that included the post of Vicar of Rome and a red hat awarded by Pope Paul VI on March 5, 1973.[76]

The Archbishop’s Milan Mafia

Two of Montini’s closest aides in Milan were Msgr. Giovanni Benelli and Msgr. Pasquale Macchi.

Montini had recruited Benelli at the age of 26 only a few years after his ordination, to serve as his secretary at the Secretariat of State. When Montini went to Milan, Benelli followed. After Montini’s election to the papacy, Benelli followed him back to Rome. In 1966, the 45-year-old cleric served for a year as Papal Nuncio to Senegal, and then returned to Rome as Paul VI’s representative to the Roman Curia. One year before his death, Pope Paul VI made his faithful servant a Cardinal and installed him as Archbishop of Florence.[77] One of Benelli’s most famous protégés was American priest Father (later Cardinal) Justin Rigali.

Benelli’s rival for Montini’s attention and affection was the Archbishop’s private secretary, Msgr. Pasquale Macchi, dubbed “Montini’s Mother Pasqualina.” A native of Varese about 34 miles north of Milan, Macchi, was a seminary teacher and he knew his way around the city of Milan and its underworld. Macchi had an affinity for French philosophy and modern art and he brought many of his artistic friends to meet Archbishop Montini.

After Montini’s election to the papacy, Macchi followed his master to Rome where he became the pope’s advisor on all things esthetic and the keeper of dark secrets.[78] Macchi, who Peter Hebblethwaite claimed was “well connected in the world of high finance” was on intimate terms with four of Pope Paul’s top financial advisors Michele Sindona, Msgr. Paul Marcinkus, Roberto Calvi and Bishop Donato DeBonis – crooks all.[79]

Although dissimilar in personality and temperament, Macchi and Benelli did have at least one thing in common – Freemasonry.

In 1976, the names (along with code names and date of initiation) of Msgr. (later Archbishop) Pasquale Macchi and Msgr. (later Cardinal and Secretary of State) Giovanni Benelli, appeared on a list of highly placed Vatican officials belonging to secret societies. The list was published in the journal Il Borghese. However, the charges that both men, intimates of the Holy Father, were Freemasons appeared to have no effect on their future advancement under the pontificates of Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II.

Archbishop Montini Meets “the Shark”

Michele Sindona, aka, “the Shark” was an underworld financial fixture in Milan long before Montini became Archbishop.[80]

Born in Messina at the eastern end of Sicily in 1917, the Jesuit educated Sindona was studying law when the British and American troops invaded Italy during World War II. The enterprising Sindona decided to take advantage of the lucrative black market and went into the lemon and wheat business. Since the Sicilian Mafia controlled the produce trade, Sindona cut a deal with Mafioso head, Vito Genovese, whereby he would turn over a certain percentage of his earnings for protection from the mob for his business and his person.

In 1948, Sindona left the poorer war-ravaged southern boot of Italy and migrated north to the richer industrialized city of Milan where he became a “financial advisor” to a number of influential and wealthy Milanese. His Mafia credentials traveled north with him.

In 1954, when Sindona learned that Pius XII had appointed Msgr. Montini to the See of Milan, he secured a letter of introduction to the new Archbishop from the Archbishop of Messina, his home diocese. Sindona soon had a new client in Montini and the Milanese Church.

Archbishop Montini was so grateful to Sindona, that he took the Sicilian to Rome and introduced him to Pope Pius XII and Prince Massimo Spada, a senior official at the Istituto per le Opere de Religioni (the Institute for Religious Works). The IOR, which is popularly known as the Vatican Bank functions as a depository for the Church’s patrimony earmarked for charitable works.[81] Sindona became “a man of confidence” and was given virtually full control over the IOR’s foreign investment program.

The gross assets of the IOR at the time were over $1 billion, but money was secondary to the IOR’s tax-free status and its potential as a laundry for washing dirty money, specifically, Mafiosi earnings from heroin trade, prostitution and illegal political contributions from underground sources including Freemasons.[82]

In 1960, Sindona, operating under the old adage “the best way to steal from a bank is to own one,” purchased his own bank, the Banca Privata, and within a very short time was receiving deposits from the IOR. He used these funds to pyramid his own financial investments and started to launder illegal funds through the Vatican Bank.

After the election of Pope Paul VI, Sindona followed Montini to Rome and became a major player at the IOR. His operations and financial portfolio grew exponentially. In 1964, Sindona formed an international currency brokerage firm called Moneyrex with 850 client banks and annual financial dealings of $200 billion. Many members of the Palazzo, the rich and famous of Rome, used the firm to shield their fortunes from taxation through illegal offshore accounts. Sindona kept a secret ledger of his clients’ transactions with Moneyrex as insurance for a rainy day. The Vatican and Pope Paul VI, along with the name and numbers of the secret accounts of high ranking members of the Christian Democratic Party as well the Socialist and Social-Democratic Parties were all in Sindona’s little black book.

By the late 1960s, the “Gruppo Sindona” included six (later nine) banks in Italy and abroad and more than 500 giant corporations and conglomerates. One of the banks, the Franklin National Bank of New York, the 18^th largest bank in the United States with assets of more than $5 billion, was purchased in part with money Sindona had skimmed off from his Italian banks.[83] He also skimmed off funds from his secret masters, that is, the Sicilian Mafia and, after 1971, from the Propaganda Duo (P2), a Mafia-inspired Masonic Lodge catering to Italy’s elite headed by Grandmaster Licio Gelli. In addition, Sindona was handling financial transactions for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which during the post-war period was pouring large sums of money into Italy, some of which made its way to the Vatican Bank.[84]

Meanwhile Sindona’s friend, Pope Paul VI was the recipient of bad tidings from the State. The Italian government was threatening to remove the fiscal tax exemption on the Church and Church properties and investments that the Holy See had enjoyed since the days of Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Under the revised tax-code, the Vatican State would be taxed like any other corporate entity. Sindona proposed a scheme to hide Vatican money in offshore investments and the pope agreed.

One of Sindona’s prominent protégés was a native Milanese by the name of Roberto Calvi.

Calvi was the central manager of the Banco Ambrosiano, Italy’s most prominent Catholic bank as distinguished from the lay or secular banking institutions operated by the Jews and Freemasons. Calvi was a man after Sindona’s own heart, which spelled disaster ahead not only for the Banco Ambrosiano, but also for its major depositor, the Holy See. Calvi had his own connections to the IOR through Msgr. Macchi, Montini’s personal secretary. He was also on excellent terms with an American priest at the Secretariat of State, Msgr. Paul Marcinkus.

Pope Paul VI and “the Gorilla” 

Paul Casimir Marcinkus came from humble but sturdy Lithuanian immigrant stock. He was born on January 15, 1922 in Cicero, Ill. made infamous in the 1920’s by mobster Al Capone. Soon after his graduation from St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein and ordination as a priest of the Chicago Archdiocese, Father Marcinkus attracted the patronage of Samuel Cardinal Stritch. The young priest served Cardinal Stritch until 1952 when he was appointed to an administrative post at the Vatican Secretariat.

In 1958, Cardinal Stritch joined Marcinkus in Rome as Pro-Prefect of Propagation of the Faith, but died after only three months in office. After this, little was heard of Msgr. Marcinkus in the Roman Curia other than he enjoyed the continued favor of Stritch’s successors Cardinal Albert Meyer and Cardinal Patrick Cody. It was not long after the election of Pope Paul VI in June 1963 that Marcinkus’s career took off.

Marcinkus’ six-feet-four burly physique earned him the name “the Gorrilla” from his Italian friends at the Secretariat. Pope Paul VI first used him as a body guard and security agent on his trips abroad.[85]

In 1968, Paul VI appointed Marcinkus Secretary of the IOR. He ordained him a bishop on January 6, 1969. In 1971, Marcinkus became the President of the IOR. By this time, he had forged a strong bond with Sindona, and through Sindona, Calvi, and through them to Gelli. In other words, the Vatican Bank now shared a joint bank account with two of the Church’s traditional enemies, the Sicilian Mafia and International Freemasonry.

The successive international scandals that followed in the wake of this unholy union – the collapse of the Franklin National Bank, and the Banco Ambrosiano, the exposure of Propaganda Duo (P2) Lodge and the release of its membership list, the murders of Sindona and Calvi – are a grim reminder of a pontificate fraught with corruption.[86]

The Montinian Pontificate

There was no question in the minds of the Cardinals of the Church gathered in Rome on June 19, 1963, for the purpose of electing a new pope, that upon his death, Pope John XXIII wanted Archbishop Montini to succeed him. And so it happened.[87] It is significant, however, that even after Montini had secured the votes necessary for his election, between 22 to 25 cardinals, mainly Italians and members of the Curia, men who knew him best, refused to cast their final vote for him.[88]

Following his installation on June 30, 1963, Pope Paul VI pledged to complete the work of the Second Vatican Council begun by Pope John XXIII under his (Montini’s) instruction and guidance. And so he did.

The 15-year pontificate of Paul VI was marked by a series of unprecedented crises and betrayals as has rarely been seen in the Roman Catholic Church at any point in its 2000 year-old history.

The betrayals associated with the Second Vatican Council were put into motion by Pope John XXIII, who used his authority to facilitate the restructuring of the ten Conciliar Commissions. Pope John jettisoned all the original schemas drawn up by the Council’s Preparatory Commission over a three-year period, save one, the schema on the Sacred Liturgy.[89] Under Paul VI, the original schemas were replaced by new texts in keeping with the planned agenda that had been worked out by Archbishop Montini and the Rhine Group before the opening of the Council.

The Post-Conciliar Church of Pope Paul VI will be remembered for the following:

• The Rape of the Liturgy

The financial ravaging and pillaging by Montini’s friends Sindona, Calvi and Marcinkus pale into insignificance when compared to the rape of the Sacred Liturgy orchestrated by Pope Paul VI and carried out before the whole world.[90] Of all the disasters to befall the Church in the post-Conciliar era, none was more deadly than the destruction of the Roman rite Mass that comes down to us from the Apostles.[91] The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the foundation of Catholic worship. It is in the Mass that the central act of Transubstantiation, that is the changing of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, takes place. The Mass is the font of grace. It is in the Mass that the priest realizes his true identity as High Priest and intermediary between God and man.

In was an act of inexplicable audacity for Pope Paul VI to replace the Mass of the Roman rite with a bastardized and Protestantized service called the Novus Ordo Missae (New Order of the Mass) and to impose it on priests and faithful alike.[92]

The liturgical “reforms” of Pope Paul VI included not only the wholesale destruction of the traditional Mass, but the tampering with every aspect of liturgical life including the Liturgy of the Hours (Psalter, Biblical Readings, Hymns, Chants, Intercessions), the Litany of the Saints, the Sacraments (Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Communion, Penance, Extreme Unction, Marriage, and Holy Orders), Blessings, Pontifical Rites, the Church Calendar and Sacred Music.[93]  By a miracle of grace, only the devotional of the Rosary was spared from mutilation.

• The Attack on Thomistic Philosophy

Under Paul VI, Thomistic Scholasticism and the Natural Law Tradition were discarded in favor of a “Scripture-based” ethic and other new scientific, theological and ecclesiastical modes of thinking such as Phenomenology and Existentialism.

• The Undermining of the Priesthood and Religious Life

 In sharp contrast to the image of the pre-Conciliar priest as being virile, masculine and celibate, the    perception of NewPriest of NewChurch is decidedly effeminate and often unchaste.

As noted by Rev. Fr. James McLucas in his essay “The Emasculation of the Priesthood,” the “expansive absorption of many sacred functions by the laity that were formerly reserved to the ordained …is inherently hostile to a healthy masculinity…”[94]

The perception of the Vatican II priest is one of softness and sentimentalism. NewPriest is charming and accommodating. He is ecumenical. He neither condemns error or those teaching error. He is everything and anything but manly. He is, in the words of Dr. Conrad Baars, incapable of doing battle “against evil for the sake of the good, ready to be hurt, but also, if need be, ready to hurt!”[95]

Fr. McLucas states that Pope Paul VI acted to weaken a mandatory celibate priesthood by opening the permanent diaconate to non-celibates, that is to married men, even though “there has never been a Holy “Order” that was non-celibate since the mandating of celibacy in the Western Church.”[96] The practice of admitting married Protestant minister converts to the priesthood has also contributed to breaking down resistance to mandatory celibacy, says McLucas.[97]

The Montinian Church eliminated “minor orders,” thus opening the door for “layministers” to take over the roles of lector and acolyte that were once reserved for men entering the ordained priesthood, says McLucas.[98] This novel practice paved the way for the “laypresider Communion rite,” he states. [99]

“ … The assumption of sacred functions by the laity, reserved to the ordained for at least fifteen hundred years,” says McLucas, “is poisoning the priesthood.”[100] “The contention proceeds from a simple premise: if the priesthood is reserved to men, as has been taught by the Church, then what does harm to the masculine nature of the ordained weakens the priesthood itself,” McLucas argues.[101]

Pope Paul VI also weakened the priesthood in other ways.

He presided over the wholesale laicization (reduction to the lay state) of thousands of validly ordained priests granting them dispensations pro gratia.[102] According to Amerio, the overall effect of these habitual dispensations was to reduce the onus of defection and to change the moral and juridical character of the breaking of vows and the abandonment of vocations.[103] The deemphasis of the sacerdotal and sublime dignity of the priesthood implicit in the Novus Ordro service and the laxity of discipline and morals that characterized seminary life and the priesthood in the Post-Conciliar period contributed to the overall decline of the priesthood and religious life.

• The Abolition of the Oath Against Modernism

The action speaks for itself.

• The Gutting of the Roman Curia

The destruction of the Roman Curia, despised by Montini from his earliest years at the Secretariat of State, was another “accomplishment” of the Montinian pontificate. Pope Paul VI mandated the retirement of bishops at the age of 75 and removed their right to vote at a conclave after the age of 80. In doing so, Montini cleared the Holy Office (renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) of “dead wood,” that is, prelates who were highly esteemed as men of faith, honor, character, experience and wisdom. He replaced them with men of less merit, but more to his own liking and inclinations.

As Amerio notes, in the Montinian Church there was a “decline in the formal and technical working of the Curia.”[104] The use of Latin, which permitted the members of the Curia to express statements with “nobility, lucidity, and precision in Curial style,” fell into greater disuse.[105] Even Pope Paul himself was haunted by his lack of scholarship and precision in his speeches and written works, says Amerio.[106] With the decline of the Curia came the rise in power of national episcopal conferences where the collective borg decides who shall and who shall not be awarded a bishopric depending on the candidate’s willingness to cooperate with the leaders of the Church bureaucracy.

• The Unprecedented Fraternization of the Church with heretics, schismatic and other traditional enemies of the Church including Communists, Freemasons, Zionists and functionaries of the so-called New World Order.

The “spirit” of Vatican II hailed by all the enemies of the Church as a sure sign of divine approbation was the same “spirit” that inspired the French Revolution and its Masonic motto – égalité, liberté and fraternité.

• The Proliferation of Ecumenical Misadventures

Especially ominous to the welfare of the Church and the faithful was the increased support and contacts Paul VI made with the Soviet-dominated World Council of Churches notorious for its funding of terrorists and “wars of liberation” in Latin America and Africa. To borrow a phrase from the late Archbishop Lefebvre, Pope Paul VI’s inter-faith activities were an exercise in “public blasphemy.”[107]

• The Betrayal of Josyf Ivanovycè Cardinal Slipiy of the Ukraine and József Cardinal Mindszenty, Primate of Hungary, and the countless millions of victims of International Communism throughout the world most especially in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, South Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique and Uganda.

•  The Humanae Vitae Debacle or a lesson on how to undermine Church doctrine and morals without changing Church doctrine and morals.                

As has already been noted, a short time before his death, Pope John XXIII, at the prompting of  Archbishop Montini, established a special Vatican Commission to study the issue of the regulation of births and demographic considerations with special emphasis on the reexamination of the Church’s traditional ban on contraception in light of new scientific means of hormonal-induced sterility.

The formation of a commission responsible only to the pope effectively bypassed the guardians of the faith at the Roman Curia. Once in office, Paul VI established a new and expanded three-tiered Commission  to study and make recommendations to him on the question of the “Pill” and related issues. A period of six years elapsed between the founding of the original Commission in 1963 and the issuance of Humanae Vita in 1968. This was more than sufficient time to create a state of doubt as to whether or not the Church would continue to uphold the ban against contraception. The old adage “lex dubia non obligat” (a doubtful law does not bind) gained currency among many Catholics. By the time Humane Vitae was issued, it was, for many Catholics, a “dead letter.” The whole exercise had been a lesson in how to undermine dogma and morals without changing dogma and morals.[108]

The crisis was further complicated by Paul VI’s unwillingness to enforce the ban on contraception in the face of organized and public opposition of Catholic priests and religious and professors in Catholic universities and colleges to Humane Vitae. The total effect of the long-delayed affirmation of the ban on contraception, combined with the failure to discipline those in positions of authority in the Church who were in a state of rebellion against the teaching and the teacher, was to cast a long shadow over the Church’s ability to speak infallibly on matter of faith and morals.[109]

All of the above mentioned actions associated with the reign of Pope Paul VI had catastrophic repercussions for the Church.

Also, each in its own way benefited the rapidly expanding Homosexual Collective both within and without the Church during the Post-Conciliar era and each played a role in the paradigm shift in the Church’s position on the vice of homosexuality that flowed out of the Second Vatican Council.

Yet there still remains one further factor that needs to be considered when examining the Homosexual Collective’s extraordinary success in colonizing the Catholic Church in the United States and abroad, and that is the matter of Pope Paul VI’s alleged own habituation to the vice of homosexuality.

The Case of Homosexuality Against Pope Paul VI

We begin with statements that emanate from the Homosexual Collective itself.

Pope Paul VI is identified as a homosexual in numerous homosexual publications and his name appears on virtually all lists of prominent homosexuals found on various Homosexual Collective websites.

Are these references infallible? Definitely not, especially when dealing with historical figures.

The tendency for the Homosexual Collective is to label a person as “gay,” even though little is known about his personal life. The assumption is that if there is no evidence that the individual was heterosexual he is ipso facto a homosexual. No room is left for other possibilities. For example, the individual in question may simply have been asexual or had a low sex drive. It may be that he sublimated his normal sexual urges for the sake of his art, or his profession, or in case of a celibate priest, for the love of God.

In other cases, the Collective may be correct in its historical assessment that the individual was habituated to a particular sexual vice, but that vice may not have been homosexuality.

Here the name of Hans Christian Andersen, the writer of fairy tales, comes to mind.

His name appears on a number of contemporary lists of prominent “gays” of the past. The famed sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld publicly identified Andersen as a homosexual or at the least a “latent” homosexual.[110]

More recent biographical data, however, suggests that Andersen possessed a highly narcissistic temperament, and that he was habitually and incurably addicted to the practice of solitary masturbation. As Elias Bredsdorff of Cambridge University notes in his biography of the writer, there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that Andersen was by nature heterosexual, but with feelings of inferiority that made any relationship with a mature woman impossible for him.[111] Autoeroticism permitted him to love the one person whom Hans Christian Andersen loved best from his youth – himself.[112]

In the case of Pope Paul VI these errors do not appear to factor in the equation.

It is significant that the Homosexual Collective’s identification of Pope Paul VI as a homosexual took place long before the subject of homosexuality became part of the American consciousness. In other words, the rumor that Montini was sexually attracted to young men was part of the gossip-line of the Collective long before charges of homosexuality were publicly brought against the pope.

In the United States, the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) at its organizational meeting held on December 2, 1978 at Boston’s Unitarian Community Church, claimed: “…The Church condemns sexual deviance, but it is hypocritical, i.e., tolerating and even rewarding personal sexual hypocrisy at the highest levels as long as outward fealty is displayed to central control: Cardinal Spellman and Paul the Sixth (sic) are recent examples.”[113]

The Testimony of Robin Bryans

As revealed in the concluding segment on the Cambridge Spies, Robin Bryans, aka Robert Harbinson, the Irish writer and self-confessed homosexual, in his 1992 autobiography, The Dust Never Settles, claims that his friend Hugh Montgomery told him that he (Montgomery) and the young Montini had been lovers.

To reiterate, Hugh Montgomery was the brother of the well-known artist Peter Montgomery, the long-time sex partner of Cambridge spy Anthony Blunt. Bryans says that Hugh Montgomery was also a one-time lover of the powerful and well-known homosexual diplomat Sir Gilbert Laithwaite.[114]

During the mid-1930s, Hugh Montgomery was assigned a diplomatic post at the Vatican as the Chargé d’Affaires under Sir Alec Randall, the British representative to the Holy See. It was here that Hugh met an equally up and coming Italian junior diplomat, Msgr. Battista Montini, who allegedly shared Hugh’s sexual proclivities and the two men allegedly engaged in an affair.

According to Bryans, Hugh Montgomery and his friend Battista Montini fraternized with some pretty eccentric characters during those days including Viscount Evan Tredegar, an aristocratic convert to Catholicism who served as a Privy Chamberlain to Pope Benedict XV.[115]

The Viscount enjoyed titillating his friends with tales of his sexual exploits and the occult including his first-hand experiences with the Black Mass using human blood, urine and semen.[116] After the death of Pope Benedict XV and the election of a new pope, Pius XI, Tredegar automatically lost his honorary position of Privy Chamberlain. He abandoned his dream of being a priest and returned to his ancestral home in Wales and married. According to a close friend, Tredegar kept a picture of the young Montini “cheek by jowl with that of an ‘able-bodied’ sailor” on his bedside table along with other photographs of royalty.[117]

In an interview with British writer Stephen Dorril, co-author of Honeytrap -The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, Bryans repeated the story of Hugh Montgomery’s affair with Montini. Dorril said he found Bryans to be pretty much on the money when it came to his recollections of his early days as a member of the London’s elite homosexual clique.

Hugh Montgomery eventually converted to Catholicism, entered Beta College, and was ordained a Catholic priest. Little more is known about the controversial churchman.

If it is true that Montini engaged in a homosexual affair as a junior diplomat at the Vatican, it is almost certain that at least some members of the Roman Curia would have heard the rumors. However, since the young Battista was well protected by his politically powerful family and by other influential prelates  including Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, there is little that could have been done to remove Montini from his diplomatic post.

The Claims of Roger Peyrefitte

Roger Peyrefitte, French novelist and former ambassador was born in 1907. He is an avowed a homosexual and known for his outspoken views in defense of “gay rights.”

In 1976, Peyrefitte gave an interview to D.W. Gunn and J. Murat representing the Gay Sunshine Press on the subject of Pope Paul VI’s alleged homosexuality.[118]

Peyrefitte said that in January 1976, the pope gave a public speech in which he condemned homosexuality, masturbation and premarital sex. Peyrefitte said he was incensed by the pope’s hypocrisy since it was known in certain circles that while Montini was Archbishop of Milan he had a homosexual affair with a young movie actor, whose name Peyrefitte knew. The French writer said that he did not get this information from “communists or doormen” but from members of the Italian nobility with whom he was well acquainted. His Milanese sources indicated that it was a political secret in certain circles that Montini went to a “discreet house” to meet boys and that he had a particular favorite whose first name was Paul.

Following Paul VI’s condemnation of homosexuality, a French reporter from Lui came to interview Peyrefitte. That is when Peyrefitte exposed Montini’s homosexual background in Milan.

The Lui interview was picked up and reproduced by the Italian weekly newsmagazine Tempo in Rome on April 26, 1976. Peyrefitte said it was as if a time bomb had gone off.

The Vicar of Rome and the Italian Episcopal Conference called for a universal “Day of Consolation” for calumny against the Holy Father. On Palm Sunday, the pope issued a statement from his balcony at the Vatican, “….Delle cose orribili e calunniose…”[119] Peyrefitte said that his accusations against the pope went everywhere in the world.[120]

In O Vatican! A Slightly Wicked View of the Holy See, former N. Y. Times Rome Bureau correspondent Paul Hofmann repeats the Peyrefitte charges against Montini.[121] He names the well-known Italian actor, Paolo Carlini, whom Montini was alleged to have met in Milan when he was Archbishop and who later became a frequent visitor to Pope Paul VI’s private quarters at the Vatican.[122]

More Charges by the Abbé de Nantes

In the summer of 1993, the Abbé Georges de Nantes, founder of the League of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in Troyes, France in 1969, expounded on the charges of homosexuality against Pope Paul VI in the June-July issue of The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the XXth Century.[123]

The Abbé said that his comments were in response to the announcement of Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1993, the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, that the canonization process for Pope Paul VI was going forward following the preliminary diocesan proceedings carried out in Milan in 1992.

“I have received the news of the opening of the canonization process of my predecessor Paul VI. For me, he was a father in a personal sense. That is why I cannot express my great joy and gratitude,” declared Pope John Paul II.[124]

The charge of homosexuality against Pope Paul VI in Counter-Reformation begins with the Abbé recalling the charges of Paul Hofmann’s concerning la Mafia Milanese, that is, Archbishop Montini’s notorious connections to the Mafia and Freemasonry syndicate in Milan.[125]

Abbé de Nantes then makes a reference to a quote taken from an unnamed paperback in his possession that refers to a non-Italian Cardinal, “a big man, affable and keen eyed,” whom Pope Paul VI had appointed to a key Vatican post and who had a reputation for pederasty with the ragazzi, the boys in the quarter behind the Vatican.[126] He says that he was aware that after the election of Montini to the Chair of Peter there was an inordinate rise in the numbers of homosexual seminarians and priests in the United States and the Netherlands. Yet Rome did nothing, he says.[127]

Finally the Abbé recalls an incident that occurred on the eve of the 1963 conclave that elected Montini pope. He said, Reverend Father de Saint-Avit of St. Paul-Outside-The-Walls Basilica informed him the evening that the conclave opened that the morality section of the Milan police had a file on Montini. Therefore, the new pope could not and would not be Montini. But it was Montini![128]

The Abbé de Nantes then addresses Pope John Paul II:

So, after the scandal of the election of an avowed homosexual to the Throne of Saint Peter having poisoned the Church, You, Most Holy Father, would have him relive and gain strength by having this same wretch of a Paul VI raised to the altars, and his bones offered as relics to the faithful for their pious kisses, and his tormented face presented to their fervent gaze in Bernini’s Gloria? Ah no, that is impossible. It will not be![129]

The Revelations of Franco Bellegrandi

Atila Sinke Guimarães in his latest work Vatican II, Homosexuality & Pedophilia, raises the issue of  Paul VI’s homosexuality.[130] Guimarães quotes Franco Bellegrandi, a former member of the Vatican Noble Guard, part of the papal military corps, who witnessed the unfortunate changes that occurred at the Vatican after Pope Paul VI took office.

Bellegrandi repeats the charge that while Archbishop of Milan, Montini, dressed in civilian clothes, was picked up by the local police on one of the archbishop’s nocturnal visits to the male brothels of the city.

[NOTE: Click link to download PDF of Franco Bellegrandi’s exposé Nikita Roncalli.]

The former Vatican guard describes the homosexual colonization process that he says began under Pope John XXIII, but which accelerated under Montini’s rule – a process with which the reader should by now be thoroughly familiar. Bellegrandi says that old employees were turned out of their jobs at the Vatican to make room for Montini’s favored brethren afflicted with the same vice. They in turn brought along their favorite catamites – “effeminate young men wearing elegant uniforms and make up on their faces to dissimulate their beards,” says Bellegrandi.[131]

Bellegrandi says that he was told by an official of the Vatican security service that Montini’s actor-friend was permitted free access to the pontifical apartments and was seen taking the papal elevator at night.[132]

The Issue of Blackmail

One of the statements made by Bellegrandi that attracted my attention was that Montini no sooner took office than he was subject to blackmail by Italian Freemasons. In exchange for their silence regarding Archbishop Montini’s furtive sojourns to Switzerland to rendezvous with his actor-lover, who appears to have been quite open about his relationship with the prelate, the Masons demanded that the pope eliminate the Church’s traditional ban on cremation after death. The pope complied.[133]

This is not the first time that Montini’s sexual perversions made him a likely target of blackmailers.

In my correspondence with a British writer known for his familiarity with the operations of MI6, England’s foreign intelligence service, this writer inquired as to whether or not he believed that Montini’s homosexuality laid him open to blackmail by British or Soviet intelligence agents during the Second World War. He said that he believed that the British (MI6) and the Americans (OSS) knew about Montini’s homosexuality and used it against him to gain his cooperation in running the Vatican-Allied ratlines after the war. He said he had no corresponding knowledge concerning the Soviets.[134]

Information on the possible blackmail of Montini by the Soviet KGB and GRU after the war came from another source.

An elderly gentleman from Paris who worked as an official interpreter for high-level clerics at the Vatican in the early 1950s told this writer that the Soviets blackmailed Montini into revealing the names of priests whom the Vatican had clandestinely sent behind the Iron Curtain to minister to Catholics in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Soviet secret police were on hand as soon as the priests crossed over the Russian border and the priest infiltrators were either shot or sent to the gulag.[135]

The extent to which Pope Paul VI was subject to blackmail by the enemies of the Church will probably never be known. It may be that, in so far as the Communists and Socialists were concerned, blackmail was entirely unnecessary given Montini’s cradle-to-grave fascination and affinity for the Left. On the other hand, the Italian Freemasons, MI6, the OSS and later the CIA and the Mafia were likely to have used blackmail and extortion against Montini beginning early in his career as a junior diplomat, then as Archbishop of Milan and finally as Pope Paul VI.

The File of Cardinal Pietro Palazzini

Born on May 19, 1912, in Piobicco, Italy, the great scholar and theologian Pietro Cardinal Palazzini served as Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints from 1980 to 1988. He died on October 11, 2000.

In May 1992, the beatification cause of Paul VI was introduced by the Vicar of the Pope for Rome, Cardinal Camillo Ruini and all seemed to be proceeding well until 1997. According to Father Luigi Villa, editor of Chiesa viva, “Card. Pietro Palazzini had sent a letter to the Postulator for the “cause of beatification” of Paul VI that contained three names of the last homosexual lovers of Paul VI.”[136] Villa stated that Cardinal Palazzini was in possession of “two binders of documents that demonstrated, unequivocally , the impure and unnatural vice  of Paul VI.”[137] [add endnote 137]

The Curtain Comes Down

There can be no question that Pope Paul VI’s homosexuality was instrumental in the paradigm shift that saw the rise of the Homosexual Collective in the Catholic Church in the United States, at the Vatican and around the world in the mid-20^th century.

Pope Paul VI played a decisive role in the selection and advancement of many homosexual members of the American hierarchy including Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, Terence Cardinal Cooke, John Cardinal Wright and Archbishop Rembert Weakland and Bishops George H. Guifoyle, Francis Mugavero, Joseph Hart, Joseph Ferrario, James Rausch and their heirs.

The knowledge that a homosexual sat in the Chair of Peter – knowledge that spread like wild-fire on the  “gay” gossip circuit – would certainly have served as an inducement for homosexual men to aspire to the priesthood and even prompt them to contemplate the unthinkable – a religious order or community composed exclusively of sodomites.

Most importantly, the long-guarded quasi-secret of Paul VI’s homosexual life has, for decades, contributed to the silence and cover-up by the American hierarchy on the issue of homosexuality in general and the criminal activities of pederast priests in particular.

But it is a secret no longer.

The final piece of the puzzle has been put in place.

“Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.”

FOOTNOTES

[1] Biographical material on Pope John XXII is selected from Peter Hebblethwaite, John XXIII – Pope of the Century, (New York: Continuum, 1984). Hebblethwaite, a former Jesuit, left the priesthood in 1974 to marry. He served as the staff writer on Vatican Affairs for the National Catholic Reporter for more than 16 years. He died at his Oxford, England home on December 18, 1994.

[2] Ibid., 7-8.

[3] Ibid., 14.

[4] See Hebblethwaite, John XXIII, 45 and Martínez, The Undermining of the Catholic Church, 116.

[5] Hebblethwaite, 53.

[6] Martínez, 58.

[7] Ibid., 117.

[8] Hebblethwaite, John XXIII, 53.

[9] See Barry Rubin, Istambul Intrigues- Espionage, Sabotage, and Diplomatic Treachery in the Spy Capital of World War II, (New York: Pharos Books, 1991).

[10] Martínez, 76-77.

[11] Ibid., 70.

[12] UNESCO was the most successfully Soviet-penetrated of all United Nations agencies. The KGB and GRU used the organization to disseminate disinformation and for pro-Communist propaganda purposes. By December 1971, the French Secret Service estimated that approximately 1/3 of the Soviet officials assigned to UNESCO were either Soviet secret service or military intelligence agents. The senior officers of UNESCO were openly pro-Soviet. At no time has the Holy See publicly acknowledged UNESCO as a living hive of Soviet agents.  See Richard Deacon, The French Secret Service , 229-230.

[13] Martínez, 117.

[14] Ibid.

[15] See Piers Compton, The Broken Cross (Cranbrook, Western Australia: Veritas Publishing Co., 1984), 49-50.

[16] Hebblethwaite, John XXIII, 114.

[17] In the conclave of October 1958 there were 51 electors. Cardinal Roncalli was papabile. There were eleven votes taken. Roncalli was elected on the third day, October 28, 1958. The Archbishop was prepared. According to Martínez, Roncalli’s secretary Msgr. Bruno Heim had been working on John’s heraldry-papal coat of arms for weeks before the election.

[18] The names of cardinals elected at Consistories from 1903 to 2001 can be found at:

http://www.stjohnxxiii.com/Cardinals/The_Cardinals_of_the_Church/consistories-xx.htm.

[19] Martínez, 119. See also Komonchak, ed., History of Vatican II, 325.

[20] Martínez, 131. Not all the cardinals created by John XXIII were from the “progressive” or “liberal” wing dominated by the Rhine group. Among the exceptions were Antonio Bacci, Secretary of Briefs to the Princes, who was elected at the March 28, 1960 Consistory. An excellent Latinist, Cardinal Bacci sided with Cardinal Ottaviani in the battle against the Novus Ordo Missae.

[21] Komonchak, 71-72.

[22] The October 11, 1962 speech of Pope John XXIII opening the Second Vatican Council is available at http://www.papalencyclicals.net/vatican2.htm. This site also carries all of the documents of the Council. For an excellent critique of Pope John’s opening speech see Amerio, Iota Unum, 73-79.

[23] Amerio, 62-63.

[24] Fr. Paul Kramer, The Devil’s Final Battle (New York: Good Counsel Publications Inc., 2002), 45.

[25] Komonchak, 15.

[26] Ibid., 64.

[27] Ibid., 55-57. Where the Holy See got the funds needed to support a General Council remains a secret. No budget from the Commission for the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (Vatican Bank) was ever made public. Estimates for the three sessions of the Council range from $25 million upwards to $75 million in US currency. The alterations to the Basilica alone took more than $950,000. Council Fathers who could pay their way did so while bishops from poorer nations needed to be subsidized by the Vatican. The hierarchies of the United States and Germany were reported to have been generous in lending their financial assistance. It is also likely that groups with a vested interest in a General Council designed to undermine and weaken the Roman Catholic Church such as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agencies, International Freemasonry and International Jewry, helped to finance the Council.

[28] Martínez, 108. For an analysis of the leaders and agenda of the Rhine Group and their periti see Fr. Ralph M. Wiltgen, SVD, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber (Rockville, Ill.: Tan Books, 1966). With the support from Archbishop Montini who worked from the inside to direct the course of the Council, the Rhine Group was able to control the mechanics of the Council by stacking Commissions, changing rules of procedures, and micro-managing the press.

[29] Komonchak, 426.

[30] Maurice Pinay, The Plot Against the Church (Palmdale, Calif.: Christian Book Club of America, 1967). Published in the fall of 1962 to coincided with the First Session of the Council, the 700-page book was attacked as anti-Semitic because of its references to International Jewry and International Zionism as “the synagogue of Satan.” In light of the auto-demolition of the Church that followed the close of the Second Vatican Council, The Plot is well worth the read. The English edition was translated from the German and Spanish editions in 1967.

[31] Amerio, 67-68.

[32] Martínez, 108.

[33] Ibid., See Hans Küng, The Council, Reform and Reunion, New York: Sheed And Ward, 1961).

[34] The Metz Agreement engineered by Montini with the cooperation of Pope John XXIII represented a betrayal of astounding proportions. The betrayal of trust of the Church Fathers at the Council, however, was nothing when compared to the betrayal of the Uniate hierarchy, clergy and Faithful who were rotting in Soviet gulags because they refused to become a part of a Soviet-controlled religion like the Russian Orthodox, and the betrayal of millions of Christians who languished behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains.

[35] See Wiltgen, 122.

[36] Bishop Josyf Ivanovycè Slipiy  was born on February 17, 1882 in  Zazdrist, Ternopil, in the Archdiocese of Lviv in the Ukraine. He received his education at the College of Ternopil and Lviv University and was ordained to the priesthood on September 30, 1917. He was consecrated Archbishop of Lviv on December 22, 1939. Five years later he was arrested and sent to Siberia by the Soviet regime for eighteen years. Archbishop Slipiy was freed by the Soviets in 1963 through the intervention of President John Kennedy and Pope John XXIII and sent in exile to Rome. After the protest of his countrymen, Bishop Slipiy did attend the last three sessions of the Second Vatican Council and was made a Cardinal by Pope Paul VI on Feb. 22, 1965. He died on September 7, 1984. His burial was delayed more than ten days to allow for people from around the world to attend his funeral – over one millions came to pay their respects. See the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church website at www.papalvisit.org.ua/eng/ugcc_slipiy.php.

[37] This incident is reported from Andrea Riccardi, IL Vatican a Mosca (Rome: 1993) Laterza, ed., Chap. VII, “Fine della Condanna, Inizio del Dialogo,” as reported by Rev. Fr. Michael Simoulin, “Was the ‘Good Pope’ a Good Pope?” Part I, The Angelus, September 2000, 23, no.9 at  www.sspx.ca/Angelus/2000_September/Was_Good_Pope_Good_Pope_Pt1.htm. Fr. Simoulin’s three-part series on the pontificate of Pope John XXIII is outstanding.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Komonchak, 22.

[40] Ibid., 7.

[41] The comments of Frere Michel de la Sainte-Trinite, were taken from his speech, “The Mystery of the Third Secret of Fatima,” delivered on November 24, 1985 in Rome at a conference sponsored by the International Fatima Rosary Crusade headed by the Marian priest Father Nicholas Gruner. The full text is available at

http://www.shrineofsaintjude.net/home1301.html. The four-volume set on Fatima is available from Immaculate Heart Publications, Buffalo, NY.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Komonchak, 71.

[44] Blessed Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was beatified by Pope John Paul II on September 3, 2000.

[45] Hebblethwaite, Paul VI, 19.

[46] The Church had inveighed vehemently for centuries against the use of wetnurses for mothers capable of breast feeding their own children, but the admonition was largely ignored by the upper classes.

[47] Hebblethwaite, Paul VI, 29.

[48] Ibid., 271.

[49]See James Glampe,  “Giulio Andreotti” at: http://www.uwgb.edu/galta/333/andreot.htm.

[50] See Sterling, OCTUPUS, 220. As Sterling points out, there is no proof that the Allies deliberately plotted to consign Sicily into Mafia hands, it simply worked out that way. Probably there was no single big deal the Allies had with the Mafia, but rather middle management arrangements of lesser officers, Sterling states.

[51] Hebblethwaite, Paul VI, 124.

[52] Owen Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican During the Second World War (London: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 265. According to British historian Chadwick there was no doubt that Montini was instrumental in securing a copy of the details of the Italian armistice for London. See also, Anthony Rhodes, The Vatican in the Age of Dictators.

[53] Ibid., 156.

[54] Hebblethwaite, Paul VI, 126.

[55] Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists and Project Paperclip, 1944 – 1990 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

[56] Martínez, 82.

[57] Chadwick, 22-23.

[58] Ibid., 23-24.

[59] Ibid., 232-233.

[60] Martínez, 81-82.

[61] Ibid.,

[62] Ibid. See Document JR1022 released by the OSS, Washington, D.C. Office. See Piers Compton, The Broken Cross, 51-52.

[63] The final Consistory of Pope Pius XII’s pontificate took place on January 12, 1953.

[64] Niccolo Machiavelli, Chapter XXII, “Concerning the Secretaries of Princes.” The entire text of The Prince is available online at http://www.online-literature.com/machiavelli/prince/22. The Prince was the most popular work of Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527).

[65] Giovanni Battista Montini was a patron of the French philosopher Jacques Maritain.

[66] Hebblethwaite, Paul VI, 271.

[67] See Hamish Fraser, “Jacques Maritain and Saul David Alinsky – Fathers of the ‘Christian’ Revolution,” Hamish Fraser, Supplement to Approaches, No. 71.

[68] See Abbé Georges de Nantes Essay on the “MASDU” at  “http://www.crc-internet.org/lib1masdu.htm. The Abbé de Nantes is the editor of The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the XX Century, Maison Saint-Joseph, Saint-Parres-les-Vaudes, France.

[69] Fraser, 5.

[70] Saul Alinsky’s most popular work, Rules for Radicals (New York: Random House, 1971) is dedicated to the “very first radical,” Lucifer. See also Marion K. Sanders, The Professional Radical – Conversations with Saul Alinsky (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

[71] Fraser, 49-50.

[72] Ibid., 17.

[73] Ibid., 44.

[74] Ibid.

[75] Ibid.

[76] Millenari, The Shroud of Secrecy, 137-139. The authors maintain that Poletti and Montini signed a secret pact not to reveal the contents of the letter of January 3, 1963. It is unclear from the their report whether or not the Il Popolo D’Italia of the 1960s had any relationship to a Socialist newspaper by the same name founded by Mussolini that ran from 1914 to 1943, or if it was a completely separate diocesan or secular publication.

[77] After the death of Paul VI on August 6, 1978, Cardinal Benelli was considered a top contender for the papacy, but the election went to Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice. After the death of John Paul I, Benelli was again a prominent candidate, but this time he lost out to a Pole, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla. Benelli continued as Cardinal Archbishop of Florence until he was felled by a sudden heart attack in 1982.

[78] In 1989, eleven years after his Pope Paul VI’s death, Pope John Paul II appointed Macchi Archbishop (Personal title) of Loreto. Archbishop Macchi retired in 1996 at the age of 72.

[79] Bishop Donato De Bonis is probably the least well known of the four men. Archbishop Macchi co-consecrated Bishop Donato DeBonis on April 25, 1993, despite the fact that De Bonis, an officer of the Vatican Bank, had been charged with tax-fraud conspiracy. De Bonis was also reported to be a Freemason, but then again, so was  Macchi. In the summer of 1984, De Bonis made national headlines in the U.S. by giving a $2000 donation to the March of Dimes, the nation’s number one promoter of eugenic abortion. The Vatican official’s visit to a MOD banquet held in Hartford, Conn. was coordinated by Bishop James T. McHugh of the Diocese of Camden, N.J. See Randy Engel, A March of Dimes Primer – The A-Z of Eugenic Killing (Export, Pa.: U.S. Coalition for Life, PA, 1991).

[80] This section on Vatican finances and the IOR is based on information taken from a large number of publications and web sites including Conrad Goeringer, “History of the IOR – Murder, Bank, Strategy – the Vatican,” at http://www.voxfux.com/features/vaticanmurder.html. See also David A. Yallop, In God’s Name -An Investigation Into The Murder of Pope John Paul I (New York: Bantam Books, 1984).

[81] The IOR or Vatican Bank is located in the tower of Nicholas V built onto the pope’s palazzo. Its operations are different from those of a standard banking institution. It does not issue loans nor does it issue its own checks. Its depositors are dioceses, parishes, religious orders, and fraternal orders. Its history goes back to pontificate of Pope Leo XIII who founded the Administration for Religious Works. Following the signing of the Lateran Pact of 1929, Pope Pius XI created another agency, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See to handle the settlement fee awarded to the Holy See by the Italian State as compensation for the loss of the Papal States. In 1942, Pope Pius XII started still another financial agency known as the Institute for Religious Works (IOR). Pacelli placed the IOR under the direction of Bernardino Nogara, who undertook a program of diversified investments and real estate that brought the Vatican into the modern world of international finance. For the first time, the Holy See had established direct ties to the secular financial empires of the J.P. Morgans, the Rothschilds and the like. By 1954, when Nogara retired, he had pyramided the original  $85 million dollars received from the Mussolini government in 1929 to nearly $1 billion. The Vatican now owned interest in giant pharmaceutical houses, and chemical, industrial, and construction conglomerates like Immobiliare, as well as stock in major corporations such as General Motors, Gulf Oil and IBM. See “Banca Intesa: So Catholic, So Ungrateful,” L’espresso, No. 25, June 18-24, 2004, at

http://213.92.16.98/ESW_articolo/0%2C2393%2C42171%2C00.

[82]By the 1980s, the gross assets of the IOR were in the range of $10 billion.

[83] The Franklin Bank went belly-up in October 1974. Sindona got $1.7 billion in assistance from the Federal Reserve, but the handout could not save the bank from bankruptcy. Federal agents called in on the case traced the collapse to Sindona and his associates in the Sicilian Mafia and the Vatican.

[84] See Thomas Naylor and R.T. Naylor, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt: Peekaboo Finance and the Politics of Debt, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). The Naylor book is one of several references this writer came across that links CIA funding to the Vatican.

[85] Richard Hammer, The Vatican Connection (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1982), 207.

[86] Sindona’s empire began to crash with the collapse of the Franklin National Bank in 1974. His irregular financial activities by the early 1960s had already attracted the attention of Interpol. To escape Italian justice Sindona made his way to New York where he was arrested in 1979, tried and indicted for 99 counts of fraud, perjury and misappropriation of bank funds and sent to prison. On August 2, 1979, his Mafia bosses with the cooperation of the New Jersey Gambino crime syndicate arranged for his “abduction” from prison and Sindona was shipped to Palermo for safe keeping. In 1980, Sindona was apprehended by the Italian police and brought to trial in Milan. Sindona sent out a financial appeal to his wealthy Italian supporters (whose names and illegal foreign bank accounts had been recorded in Sindona’s black book). When Calvi failed to put the assets of the Banco Ambrosiano at his disposal, Sindona leaked out the word that Calvi had been robbing the bank blind. Actually, the  money received from the Palazzo for Sindona’s “legal expenses” went to his Mafia overlords who by this time had figured out that Sindona had lost billions of dollars of their money in financial speculation. The Mafia could not and would not abide by a dishonest crook. Shortly after his 1986 conviction by a Milan court for the contract killing of an influential Italian magistrate, Sindona was found dead in his cell of strychnine poisoning. Calvi fared little better. Although the Banco Ambrosiano had a rule that no shareholder could accumulate more than 5% stock in the bank in order to prevent any single person or institution from gaining control of the bank, Calvi with the help of Marcinkus, Sindona and Gelli and others, established offshore dummy corporations to gain access to the bank’s assets. Many of these illegal corporations were funded with money slaked off from the IOR. The “Catholic” bank also became a major center for the laundering of Mafia funds abroad. By the time Calvi and Company’s crimes were discovered, the bank was missing $1.3 billion. In 1981, Calvi was convicted of currency fraud and given a four-year jail sentence and a $12 million fine, but he managed to escape the clutches of Italian civil law. On June 19, 1982, Calvi’s body was found hanging from Black Friars Bridge in London. Although originally identified as a “suicide” by Scotland Yard, itself notorious for its own Masonic hierarchy, subsequent investigations by the Italian Department of Justice revealed that Calvi he had been murdered by hanging by the Mafia in order to insure his silence concerning the role played by the Mafia, the Masons and the Vatican Bank in the Ambrosiano affair and other illegal financial schemes. Eventually, the Vatican agreed to pay $250 million to the creditors of the Banco Ambrosiano without having to publicly state that they were guilty of any wrong doing. This “contribution” came after the revelation that Calvi had secured official “letters of patronage” from Marcinkus guaranteeing Calvi’s loans. The P2 scandal broke on March 17, 1981. The public exposure of the link that the Mafia had established with Italian Freemasonry was a revelation of astronomical proportions. So was the list of its 962 members that was found during a police raid of Licio Gelli’s villa in Arezzo. That list included seventeen army generals, four air force generals, nine Carabinieri high officers, eight Navy admirals, all three heads of the Italian secret service, thirty-eight Italian deputies and senators, fourteen magistrates, three cabinet ministers and five Vatican prefects and other high-ranking Church officials. Grandmaster Gelli was tried and given a short prison sentence served out under house arrest. He died of natural causes. Archbishop Paul Marcinkus fared the best of all. After the death of Paul VI in 1978, Pope John Paul II kept Marcinkus on at the IOR until 1989. The pope also awarded him full title of pro-President of the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican City State. When the Italian police came after Marcinkus in connection with the criminal activities of the late Calvi, Sindona, and Gelli, crimes that included assorted currency frauds, assassination funding, arms smuggling, and trafficking in counterfeit bills, he was granted immunity by the Holy Father for seven years. Eventually Archbishop Marcinkus became even too hot for the Vatican to handle and he was sent back to the United States. Today the Archbishop resides in the Diocese of Phoenix, Ariz. where he occasionally says Mass and is a frequent visitor on the Sun City’s golf links. He continues to enjoy full diplomatic immunity granted by the Vatican City State so he is untouchable under American law. In 2003, the Italian paper Gazzetta del Sud reported that the Archbishop’s name had come up yet again in a five-hour deposition given by a Mafia informant to Italian prosecutors, but it is unlikely that he will ever be brought to justice in Italy or anywhere else on earth much less serve any time in jail.

[87] See Hebblethwaite, Paul VI, 329-332. At the 1963 conclave, the nomination of Archbishop Montini was supported by Cardinal Spellman and the American contingent, Europeans representing the Rhine Group including Cardinals Suenens, Döpfner and König and many bishops from Latin America and Africa. Archbishop Montini was elected on the sixth ballot.

[88] Ibid., 331.

[89] See Amerio, Iota Unum, 82-89.

[90] Millenari, Shroud of Secrecy, 164.

[91] The traditional Mass of the Roman rite was codified for all times by Pope Saint Pius V in his Apostolic Constitution Quo Primum of July 13, 1570. This was not a new rite in the strict sense, but rather the perfection of the authentic Mass handed down from the time of the Apostles. In accordance with the decrees of the Holy Council of Trent to preserve “incorrupt the public worship of the Church,” Pope Pius V undertook to revise and reissue the sacred books, to wit the Catechism, the Missal and the Breviary. In Quo Primum, Pope Pius V set in stone for all time the exactness of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass to be said in theMother Tongue of the Church: “We specifically command each and every patriarch, administrator, and all other persons or whatever ecclesiastical dignity they may be, be they even cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, or possessed of any other rank or pre-eminence, and We order them in virtue of holy obedience to chant or to read the Mass according to the rite and manner and norm herewith laid down by Us and, hereafter, to discontinue and completely discard all other rubrics and rites of other missals, however ancient, which they have customarily followed; and they must not in celebrating Mass presume to introduce any ceremonies or recite any prayers other than those contained in this Missal.” An exemption existed for churches “in which saying the Mass differently was granted over two hundred years ago.” The complete text of the Papal Bull is found at http://www.unavoce.org/quoprim.htm. The Novus Ordo Missae (New Order of the Mass) instituted by Pope Paul VI on November 31, 1969, obviously does not meet the criteria set forth in Quo Primum.

[92] For a basic critique of the Novus Ordo see: Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani and Antonio Cardinal Bacci, The Ottaviani Intervention (Rome: 1969); reprint, Rockville, Ill.: Tan Books,  1992). Also “The New Mass,” The Angelus, March 2000, 23, no. 3. And Rev. Anthony Cekada, “Did Paul VI ‘Illegally’ Promulgate the New Mass?” Trans Et Alia, 2, no. 7, May 2001, translation by Suzanne M. Rini of Pittsburgh, Pa. Readers are invited to contact Mrs. Rini for a more complete selection of excellent articles on liturgical “reform” from the French publication Sodalitium.

[93] See Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy, for a step-by-step description of the destruction of the Sacred Liturgy.

[94] See Rev. Fr. James McLucas, “The Emasculation of the Priesthood,” Latin Mass, Spring, 1998. The article is available at http://www.latinmassmagazine.com/artEmasculation.asp.

[95] See Paul Likoudis, “A Catholic Psychiatrist 30 Years Ago….Offered Cure for Church’s, Society’s Sexual Ills,” Wanderer, 10 April 2003, 1, 10.

[96] McLucas

[97] Ibid.

[98] Ibid.

[99] Ibid.

[100] Ibid.

[101] Ibid.

[102] Amerio, 180.

[103] Ibid., 181.

[104] Ibid., 163.

[105] Ibid.

[106] Ibid., 166.

[107] See Thomas Reese, SJ, at http://www.americamagazine.org/reese/america/a-lefev.htm.

[108] An analogous situation occurred in the late 1800s under the pontificate of Leo XIII with regard to an attempt to open up a “dialogue” between “ecumenically” minded Roman clerics and Anglicans on the question of the validity of Anglican orders.  Herbert Cardinal Vaughan, the Archbishop of Westminster, warned Pope Leo XIII against such open-ended discussions claiming that Anglican conversions to the Catholic faith would dry up if the public were to learn of such meetings. News that the Catholic Church was engaged in even informal talks, Vaughan said, was sufficient of itself to keep people in heresy, in other words to keep them from converting. Leo XIII took Vaughan’s advice and in 1896 issued the Papal Bull, Apostolicae Curae that declared Anglican orders to be “absolutely null and utterly void.” Pope Benedict XV, however, was more open to the idea of ecumenical dialogue with the Anglicans and permitted the start of what became known as the Malines Conversations in 1921. The “Conversations,” five in all, were finally killed off by Pius XI in his 1928 Encyclical Mortalium Animos. See John Jay Hughes, Absolutely Null and Utterly Void The Papal Condemnation of Anglican Orders 1896 (Washington, D.C.: Corpus Books, 1968).

[109] The failure of Humanae Vitae was more than a matter of timing. The document itself was serious flawed. The author plans to cover the history of the Birth Control Commission and Humanae Vitae in a future book.

[110] Elias Bredsdorff, Hans Christian Andersen -The Story of his Life and Work (New York: Scribner, 1975), 280. Bredsdorff is quoting from an earlier psychiatric study of Andersen by Professor Hjalmar Helweg. See also The Fairy Tale of My Life – An Autobiography issued in 1975 on the 100^th anniversary of Andersen’s death.

[111] Bredsdorff, 280.

[112] Ibid.

[113] Tsang, 95.

[114] See Summers and Dorril, Honeytrap, 38. The authors mistakenly identify Pope John Paul I as Hugh Montgomery’s lover, but correspondence with Dorril confirmed that the cleric in question was Battista Montini.

[115] In the papal household there are a large number of chamberlains whose functions are more or less ornamental. These are divided into several categories: privy chamberlains, chamberlains, assistant and honorary chamberlains. These are gentlemen of rank and belong to the highest class of the household. In the papal Curia there is the apostolic chamberlain (Latin: camerarius) who occupies a very important position. During a vacancy of the Holy See, the apostolic chamberlain or carmerlingo he is at the head of the administration of the Roman Church. See http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/eb001844.htm.

[116] Robin Bryans, The Dust Has Never Settled (London: Honeyford Press, 1992).

[117] Ibid., 60.

[118] Leyland, ed., Gay Roots, 412.

[119] Ibid.

[120] The media blackout in the United States was not complete. The Homosexual Collective knew of Peyrefitte’s  accusations against Pope Paul VI as did some American priests. In A Secret World , Richard Sipe states that in 1976, Paul VI was accused in both the French and Italian press as having engaged in a homosexual relationship. Sipe notes that the National Catholic Reporter did run an article on the charges in 1976 that included the pope’s denial of the charges.

[121] Paul Hofmann, O Vatican! A Slightly Wicked View of the Holy See (New York: Gongdon and Weed, Inc., 1984), 151.

[122] Paolo Carlini was born in 1926 (1922?) in Sant’ Arcangelo di Romagna, Italy. He had a minor role in the 1953 American film “Roman Holiday” and in the 1960 film “It Started in Naples.” He died on November 7, 1979, one year after the death of Pope Paul VI.

[123] On August 25, 1966, the Abbé Georges de Nantes was struck with a suspension a divinis for his opposition to the Second Vatican Council. His opposition continued nevertheless. In July 1996, the Abbé, who heads the religious community at Saint-Parres-lès-Vaudes in the diocese of Troyes, France, was warned by Mgr. Daucourt to stop accusing John Paul II of heresy and of schism. For a list of the charges against Pope John Paul II see The Book of Accusation at www.crc-internet.org/IER2003/ Lib2_1.htm.

[124] Speech of Pope John Paul II to the General Assembly of the Italian Episcopal Conference on May 13, 1993.

[125] Abbé Georges de Nantes, The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the XXth Century, no. 259 (June-July 1993): 10.

[126] Ibid., 13. The prelate in question may have been Bishop John Wright whom Pope Paul VI brought to Rome in April 1969 and appointed Prefect of Clergy. Wright was raised to the cardinalate on April 28, 1969.

[127] Ibid., 14.

[128] Ibid., 15.

[129] Ibid.

[130] Atila Sinke Guimarães, Vatican II, Homosexuality & Pedophilia, ed., Marian Therese Horvat, Ph.D. (Los Angeles: Tradition in Action, 2004), 159-162. Mr. Guimarães does an exceptional job in analyzing NCCB/USCC, USCCB and Vatican documents related to homosexuality. His primary source on the charges of homosexuality against Pope Paul VI was Franco Bellegrandi, Nichitaroncalli – Controvita di un Papa (Rome: Ed. Internazionale di Letteratura e Scienza, 1994), 85-86.

[131] Guimarães, 161.

[132] Ibid., 159.

[133] Ibid., 160.

[134] Private correspondence to author from London dated 2 January 1992 and 4 January 1993.

[135] Private correspondence to author from Paris (undated).

[136] Dr. Franco Adessa, Who Is Father Luigi Villa? (Oconomowoc, WI, Apostolate of Our Lady of Good Success, 2012) pp. 33-34.

[137] Ibid., p. 34.