The Mighty Father Malachi Martin

Several years ago, I read Windswept House by Father Malachi Martin for the first time.  At the time I mentioned his books to some of my devout Catholic friends.  They referred to him as a conspiracy theorist.  Since that time I have decided the only accurate response to the use of ‘conspiracy theorist’ as a pejorative is, “People do conspire.”

I was shocked by the opening scenes of Windswept House.  A group of Cardinals and others arrange the enthronement of Satan in St. Peter’s Basilica on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul by holding two concurrent satanic masses, one in America, and the other in the Basilica, connected by a phone line.  It struck me as outrageous at the time.  Surely this was an exaggerated fantasy, a literary device, to emphasize the problems of the Universal Church.

But when the images of evil and destruction were projected onto Saint Peter’s this week, I felt certain that Father Martin knew more than I was willing to accept. He was one of the few allowed to read the entire Third Secret of Fatima by Saint Pope John XXIII. He once said in an interview that 85% of his novels were real events.  Every day, news coming out of the Vatican confirms that statement.  If we want to know how Catholics got to this point, we need to rehabilitate Father Martin’s writings and see him for the whistle blower he was.

In this series of articles, I will demonstrate Father Martin’s accuracy by comparing current events in the church with statements he made in his 22 lengthy interviews with Bernard Jansen.  The transcripts of these interviews are available in pamphlets from Triumph Communications.  You can also order cassette tapes and CD format.  The interviews were conducted in 1991.  I will begin with the first interview, Catholicism Overturned.

“It’s the best PR job ever done.  He (Satan) doesn’t exist, but please kill the babies before they’re born.  Please establish a third way of life.  It’s human rights.  Homosexuals have the same rights as heterosexuals.  Please make homosexual marriage acceptable.  Please use contraceptives because it will benefit all mankind if we limit population.  It doesn’t matter if the people in East Timor are being killed off by the Indonesians.  It doesn’t hurt us.  He’s everywhere!  He is producing this demand for this reason and tolerance and a non-fanatical outlook.  Every man is his own law and every conscience is its own guide.  This is the best PR job going.  But the devil, the old figure with horns, a dirty tail, yellow eyes, and dirty books under his arm, hiding behind the bushes saying, “Come on over and I’ll show you some sin,”?  Oh no, that’s myth.  That’s superstition.  It always was.” (Catholicism Overturned, 3)

Father Martin was an exorcist.  His book, Hostage to the Devil, recounts five exorcisms in which he took part.  It was published in 1975.  His knowledge of the infiltration of evil in our world, particularly the Catholic Church, was extensive.  He fought it head-on.

The single paragraph above shows the depth of infiltration into the minds of contemporary men and women.  In 1990, the number of abortions in the U.S. peaked at 1,608,600, according to the Guttmacher Institute.  The CDC reported a slightly smaller number; 1,429,247.  The abortion rate has continued to decline since that time, but a part of that must be attributed to the changing population.  Abortion had been legal since 1973, meaning that 18 year olds in 1991 had never lived in a world without abortion.  They had never known a world without the legal protection of the satanic sacrifice of the murder of children in the womb.  Abortion was normalized. 

The gradual drop in the numbers of abortions since that time can be attributed, at least in part, to the fact that there are some of those 18 year olds who we killed in the womb.  Father Martin saw this evil for what it was.  Rather than giving food to the starving, we gave them abortions and birth control.  The U.S. still had laws in place that would not allow the funding of abortions through the government until the Obama administration, but Father Martin’s view was always international.  The UN has been promoting a funding abortion since 1969 through the United Nations Fund for Population Activities.  Participants in that fund were some of the moving forces behind the abominable light show at the Vatican on the Feast o the Immaculate Conception.

This initial claim, like so many made by Father Martin reflects more on the absence of priestly leadership and denunciation of pro-abortion politicians.  Father says the reason for this is a withdrawal of sanctifying grace that comes from whole parishes, and even dioceses, that have no validly ordained priests or bishops.  If that was true in 1991, it may be truer today.

“I will lose my faith if I commit any major sin often enough.  Now many parishes do not have the sacrifice of the Mass.  They have no Mass at all.  They have a charade of a Mass.  In that case, there is no sanctifying grace.  Then they lose all light.  This parish loses its supernatural light and constantly does the wrong thing.  The parish goes in various directions, pushed by error, bad judgment, and people who have no faith.  That parish will be pushed by Satan.  That is the terrible devastation of the church.”  (The Eternal War, 54)

This brings us to his second point about the satanic problem of homosexuality.  In my experience in the 1980’s, most homosexuals were still relatively closeted.  AIDs was considered a ‘gay disease’ and the majority of the US population still considered it an aberration, even if the cultural slide had begun.  Father Martin had been seeing the cultural shift through the lens of an exorcist, one who dealt a great deal with priests.  His novels, detail the homosexual influence in the priesthood.  Any Catholic going to Mass at that time probably saw the problem, but the culture at large hadn’t completely shifted.  Yet.

In 1993, the film Philadelphia, starring Tom Hanks, helped to normalize and create sympathy for the plight of homosexuals, particularly those suffering from AIDs.  The film elevated some common LGTBQ lies; about the hospital staff who wouldn’t allow his ‘partner’ to visit, about the ‘evil’ revulsion felt by his colleagues and his own attorney at the homosexual way of life.  The character Tom Hanks played became the image of sacrificial suffering, while suing those who ‘persecuted’ him. 

In Windswept House, which really should be required reading, one of the characters is sent to uncover homosexual practices in seminaries, while another is sent to uncover satanic covens that involve priests.  I really thought that this was part of the 15% that was fantasy in the novel when I read it the first time, but that no longer seems possible.  The sexual abuse scandals have, in some respects, opened the closet, but there are more hidden inside.  In news today (12/13/2015), a parish in New York has been begging Cardinal Dolan for the removal of a homosexual priest who is known to have a lover and to host drug fueled parties.  At this writing, the New York Daily News is reporting that Rev. Peter Miquel has resigned from St. Francis de Chantel Parish.  Is he alone in this?  I doubt it.

The problem that Father Martin saw so clearly was the loss of souls who have never been part of a parish in which there was active sanctifying grace from valid Masses and other sacraments.  “We have come to the fulfillment of Our Lady’s prophecy that a period of unfaith would come and the Church would suffer.  She said that the smoke of Satan would envelope the Church and would reach into the sanctuary and right up to the altar.  This prophecy is coming true by the machinations of men and the machinations of the devil.”(The Eternal War, 55)

When Pope Paul VI spoke of the smoke of Satan, he was obviously referencing that same prophecy.  Here at the Remnant are people who know that it is hard work to keep the faith and find those parishes that still have sanctifying grace.  In the next installment, I will discuss the reasons Father Martin said the Novus Ordo Mass, at least prior to the revisions of Pope Benedict XVI, was invalid.  I will also discuss his explanation of how God allows this grave situation to continue.