Mi ca El !?

THE BROKEN CROSS- The Hidden Hand in the Vatican, by Piers Compton (1983)


1. Part One

What remains when Rome perishes?
When Rome falls – the world.
Virgil, Byron.


Its claims were monstrous. They passed beyond human reckoning. For it claimed to be the one divine and authoritative voice on earth; and it taught, gave judgment, and asserted, always in the same valid tone, confident that its message would outlive the transitory phenomena of doubt, change, and contradiction. It stood secure, an edifice of truth behind the ramparts of truth which defied the many and various attacks launched by its enemies. For it claimed a strength that was not of itself, a life-force and vigour imparted by a power that could not be found elsewhere; and because it could not be likened to any earthly thing it provoked fear, bewilderment, mockery, even hate.


But through the centuries it never wavered; never abandoned one item of its stupendous inheritance; never allowed the smallest rent to appear in its much derided mantle of intolerance. It inspired devotion and admiration even in those who scorned its mental discipline. It rose above conjecture, likelihood, probability; for the Word by which it had been founded was also its guarantee of permanence. It provided the one answer to the immemorial question – what is truth?


One of our essayists told, as many of our schoolboys used to know, of its place in history; how it saw the beginning, as it was likely to see the end, of our worldly systems; and how, in time to come, a broken arch of London Bridge might furnish a foothold from which a traveller ‘could sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.’


But it would still stand monumental, unique, presenting as it did the symbols of endurance in this life and admission to an eternity beyond – a Rock and a Key.


It was the Catholic Church.


But now, as even those of irreligious mind have come to realize, all that has changed. The Church has dropped its guard, surrendered its prerogatives, abandoned its fortifications; and it will be the purpose of these pages to examine how and why the transformation, hitherto regarded by its adherents – and even by some of its unfriendly critics – as impossible, could have happened.


To be continued...

2.

What follows is written, of set purpose, from the viewpoint of a traditional and still practicing Catholic. The sentiments expressed figure here in order to emphasize the heresies, novelties, and profanities that, in the name of reformed or ‘updated’ religion, have left the Church in tatters throughout the world.


There is a feeling abroad that our civilization is in deadly peril. It is a recent awareness, wholly distinct from the old evangelical fears that the world, in keeping with some Biblical prophecy, is coming to an end; fears that have lost much of their former simplicity, and have become more real, since the threat of nuclear war. But the end of our civilization has more sinister implications than has the actual destruction of a planet, whether that be brought about by an ‘act of God’ or by a frenzy of total madness on the part of man.


For civilization declines when reason is turned upside down, when the mean and the base, the ugly and corrupt, are made to appear the norms of social and cultural expressions; or, to bring it nearer to the terms of our argument, when evil, under a variety of masks, takes the place of good.


We of this generation, according to our age and temperament, have become the willing, unconscious, or resentful victims of such a convulsion. Hence the air of futility that clings about us, a feeling that man has lost faith in himself and in existence as a whole.


It is true, of course, that every age has suffered the setbacks of war, revolution, and natural disasters. But never before has man been left without guide or compass, without the assurance conveyed by the pressure of a hand in which he trusted. He is, in all too many instances, a separate being, divorced from reality, without the consolation of worthwhile art or background of tradition; and, most fatal of all as the orthodox would say, without religion.


Now it used to be an accepted part of the Catholic outlook that the Church created our civilization, with the ethical standards, and the great body of revelation, on which man’s attitude and destiny depend.


It follows therefore, once that proposition has been accepted, that any falling off on the part of the Church must be reflected by a similar decline in the civilization it fostered; and such a decline, as evidenced by the moral and cultural expressions of our time, is everywhere visible.


So it is that the mere mention of religion calls forth an automatic rejection on the part of men who have never given a thought to the Church’s teaching or practice, but who feel that it should somehow remedy or control the widespread erosion. They feel contempt (and contempt is a more deadly virus than skepticism) for the Church’s failure to cope with conditions that call for vital action; for its readiness to go with the stream by not speaking out against, or for even giving encouragement to, subversion; for its preachment of a watered-down version of Humanism in the name of Christian charity; for the way in which, from having been the inflexible enemy of Communism, clerical leaders at the highest level have taken part in what is called ‘dialogue’ with those who seek, not only the Church’s downfall, but the ruin of society as a whole; for the way in which it has surrendered its once proudly defined credo by admitting that there are more Gods in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in its Founder’s philosophy.


This summary of misgivings brings us back to the question posed at the start of our inquiry – what has caused the changes in the Church?



To be continued...

3.

Any revolution, such as the French and the Russian, must come into headlong collision with two institutions – the monarchy and the Church. The former, however deeply it may be rooted in lineage and sacramental rite, can be totally disposed of by a single blow. But a people’s religion, however defective it may have become, cannot be so easily suppressed by any force exerted from without.


Monarchy lives by acceptance, custom, and a process of recognition that can be brought to an end by the fall of a knife or the discharge of a rifle. But religion, and especially the Christian, although it may have become discredited and subject to scorn, has so far carried within itself the seeds of resurrection. Time and again a sentence of death has gone out against it; time and again it has outlived the executioner. That it will continue to do so may be taken for granted, though whether it will survive in its old untrammelled form, with its stature, infallible voice, and stamp of authority, is another matter.


Some will reject that suggestion as unthinkable. Others, while agreeing that the Church has sanctioned a change of emphasis here and there, will see it as part of the divine plan; and only a few, since it has become a characteristic of our people to reject the mere mention of a conspiracy, will see in it the working out of an age-long and deliberate scheme to destroy the Church from within. Yet there is more proof of every kind for the existence of such a conspiracy than there is for some of the commonly accepted facts of history.


Because of what follows it needs to be repeated that the average British mind does not take kindly to the idea of a ‘plot.’ The very word savours of a theatrical setting, with heavily cloaked men meeting in a darkened room to plan the destruction of their enemies. But secret scheming, hidden for the most part from the academic as from the public mind, has been the background or driving force of much world history.


The world of politics is bedevilled by cliques working one against another, as becomes evident when we take note of the flaws that occur in official versions of the Gunpowder Plot, the murder of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, that of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria at Sarajevo in 1914, the drowning of Kitchener in 1916, the shooting of President Kennedy in 1963, and even nearer to our own time, the mysterious end of Pope John Paul I, to be dealt with later in this volume.


To be continued...

4.

The Church has always been the target of anti-religious men who see in its existence a threat to their progress and designs. And I use the word ‘always’ advisedly, for plotting against the Church occurs as early as the year A.D. 58. in words spoken by St. Paul to the people of Ephesus (and Paul, a trained Pharisee, when it came to warning against subversion knew what he was saying): ‘After my departure, grievous wolves shall come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves shall issue men speaking perverse things in order to draw away the disciples after them.’


The urge for world domination whether by force of arms, culture, or religion, is as old as history. The earliest records, without considering myth or even legend, give proof of it. Egypt, which first dominated the thought and outlook of the East, was never a purely military State. But a warlike era emerged (we may date it from about 910 B.C.) with ‘Assyria the Terrible.’ The rise of Babylon, short-lived, was followed by that of Persia, under Cyrus the Great. Then came a name that has never ceased to be synonymous with that of a vast empire and lordship of the known world, Rome. But all such powers, apart from being concerned with territorial gain, aimed also at imposing some political or social creed, the overthrowing of one standard belief and the elevation of another, a process that the ancients used to associate with the influence of the gods.


The spread of the Arian heresy, that split Christendom throughout the fourth century, becomes a landmark. It involved all the symptoms of revolution, anarchy, treachery, and intrigue. But the underlying cause was not political. Its mainspring was religious, even theological, since it turned upon a phrase coined by Arius, the Alexandrian priest whose name was given to the movement: ‘There must have been a time when Christ was not.’


That denigration of the divine being and nature of Christ, if carried to its logical conclusion, would have rendered the world that was centred on Rome to a negative state in which Europe, as we know it, would have had no future. But Rome survived, as a place of reverence for some, as a target for others; and what we now look back upon as the medieval world was filled with repercussions of the same struggle.


With the consolidation of Rome as a Papal power the objective became a more definite reality, with its purpose never in doubt and always the same, whatever temporal or domestic interpretation was placed upon it.

For the eyes of men, whether in France, Italy or Spain, England or Germany, were on Peter’s Chair, an object of controversy that has proved more potent than gold in bearing on the mind.


That was the situation in Rome during the first quarter of the twelfth century, when two rival families, the Pierleoni and the Frangipani, were angling for power. Both were rich, the Pierleoni immensely so; neither was over-scrupulous; and when the Pope, Callistus II, died in 1124, both families put up a candidate for the Papal throne. The Pierleoni’s man, Anacletus, was ‘not thought well of, even by his friends.’ But he managed to outvote his rival who was backed by the Frangipani.

Anacletus’s reign was short and unpopular, but he clung perilously to power until his death in 1138, when he was declared anti-pope in favour of Innocent II. So it came about that an organised clique, if only briefly, took over the Vatican where they installed ‘their man’, a looked-for consummation that figured in the minds of international plotters until, in our own time, it came to be realised.

It is a curious fact that man will suffer more readily for ideas, however crude, than he will for positive causes that affect his way of life; and when the perennial heresy of Gnosticism raised its head at the little town of Albi, in southern France, at the start of the thirteenth century, men flocked to it as once they had to join a crusade. But this time its principles were more extreme than those of any Christian warrior. Matter was declared to be evil; so death, which meant the ending of matter, became more desirable than life. Suicide, often brought about by men starving themselves and their families, was a privilege and a blessing; and the very foundations of the Church, with the Papal throne, were shaken as hundreds of clergy, with as many nuns, came out on the side that had more political and philosophic undertones than appear in many stories of the period.


To be continued...

It was a life and death struggle in which the Church, under Pope Innocent III, reacted violently by setting up the Inquisition. Its purpose was to examine Albigensians who, purporting to be orthodox, had entered the Church, and occupied some of its most exalted places in order to undermine authority and set up, in every sphere, a system of common ownership. The capture of the Papacy was, of course, their main objective, although most histories of the time are more concerned with the fate of those who failed to recite the ‘Our Father’ correctly before their questioners.

The violence and cruelty of the war that set in has left a permanent mark on history. The terms Albigensian and Inquisition are often employed as useful steps to an argument. Few realise the true significance of the struggle which left the Papal throne still secure, so far invulnerable, but always, under several guises and from any part of Europe, the object of attack.

From this time on that attack was more concentrated. It gathered strength. In 1482, at Strasbourg, it gained a new intensity as the enemies of the Pope declared their intention of waging war against him. A document dated 1535, and known as the Charter of Cologne, is evidence of the same hostility, and equally violent. Echoes of the Albigensian campaign, still insisting that non-existence was preferable to what its followers called the Satanic ordering of earthly life, lingered on in a traditionally orthodox and never thickly populated country like Portugal, where the continued activity of the Inquisition was such that, among the dozens of those sentenced to death between the years 1619 and 1627, were fifty-nine priests and nuns.

During the latter years of the eighteenth century a young man was pacing the streets of Ingolstadt, Bavaria, with hatred in his heart and a fixed determination in his mind. His hatred was directed against the Jesuits, the religious Society which had trained him and made him a Professor of Canon Law at the local university, a Society which has, incidentally, always been a successful breeding ground for nearly every type of saint and assassin.

His determination, shared at one time or another by many serious-minded young men, but all too often without dedication, was to work for the overthrow of Church and State. But his determination had roots, and Adam Weishaupt (for that was his name), was now reaping the benefit of the Society he had come to despise.

For the spirit of the first Jesuit, Ignatius Loyola, had come down to even the apostates among his followers. Ignatius had been, as was then not uncommon in his native Spain, a gentleman soldier. He had stood fire and known the shock of enemy metal. And Adam Weishaupt could view the prospect before him with a military mind. He had thrust and vision. He knew the value of surprise, which is grounded in secrecy. And he was single-minded. All around him was strife of some sort and contradiction. He would blend mankind into one whole, eliminate tradition, which differs from people to people, and suppress dogma, which invites more untruths than the one it sets out to establish.

Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, a man set himself apart from his fellows in the name of universal brotherhood. The ideal state that Weishaupt had in mind was, of course, founded on the impossible dream of human perfection; hence his first followers went by the arrogantly priggish name of Perfectibilists.

But it soon became clear that moral impeccability was less conducive to his ends than mental enlightenment; and on the 1st day of May, 1776, the secret society that was to profoundly affect much subsequent history came into existence as the Illuminati. The date and certain of its implications are noteworthy. For on May the 1st the great Celtic pagan festival of Beltane was celebrated on hills that, wherever possible, were pyramidal in shape.

The Illuminati had by then, according to a plan they had made known in Munich in the previous year, decided on a most ambitious line of conduct. It would form and control public opinion. It would amalgamate religions by dissolving all the differences of belief and ritual that had kept them apart; and it would take over the Papacy and place an agent of its own in the Chair of Peter.

A further project was to bring down the French monarchy, which had long been a powerful influence, second only to the Papacy, in maintaining the existing European order. To that end a most efficient go-between was found in the person of one Joseph Balsamo, better known as Cagliostro, one of the world’s most agile performers on the make-believe stage.

He was backed financially, as are most if not all anarchistic leaders, by a group of bankers under the House of Rothschild. It was under their direction that the long-range and world-wide plans of the Illuminati were drawn up.


To be continued...

Cagliostro’s excursions in the realm of the occult have earned him a variety of epithets. He was a charlatan, an astrologer, the possessor of the secret of eternal youth and of the great universal medicine. But his claim to be possessed of an other-world influence may not have been wholly false. For, after having survived the tests that made him a full-blooded Illuminatus (the ceremony took place at night, in an underground vault near Frankfurt), he journeyed from country to country, in a black varnished coach that was decorated with magic symbols, imposing his arts upon the most influential circles, yet always with an eye on the French Court where he soon picked on Marie Antoinette as its most valuable and susceptible member.

How he finally over-reached himself, in perpetrating the swindle of the diamond necklace, is part of the preparatory process that led to the outbreak of the French Revolution. He died most miserably in Rome, but not without leaving a reputation that still poses questions, and which is typical of the formidable effects derived from contact with the Illuminati.

As part of the secrecy that masked its strength, and also perhaps from a juvenile wish to claim classical connections, the leaders of the Society adopted classical names, mostly from Greek or Roman myth and history. Adam Weishaupt became Spartacus, the name of the Thracian slave who led a revolt against Rome. His second-in-command, Baron Knigge, chose Philo, after the neo-Platonic philosopher. The uncouth sounding Franz Zwackh elected to be Cato, the Roman statesman. The Marquis Costanzo (for the Illuminati made free with titles) became Diomedes, one of the Greek leaders in the Trojan War; while a certain Francis Mary Arouet, undersized, warped, and wizened, coined a name for himself that was destined to sound through the popular consciousness like a miniature thunder-clap – Voltaire.

It is a common enough procedure for the casual reader to glance at, or even study, the names of those who directed the anti-Bourbon fury that swept over Paris, and most of France, without realising that much of it stemmed from the Illuminati, whose members were prominent in the short-lived committees and assemblies spawned by the Revolution.

Mirabeau and Danton were two of its nearly gigantic figures. Dapper little Robespierre supplied the consistency, and the tortuous Fouche the self-preserving cunning of ice-cold brains. Talleyrand limped his way over obstacles that proved fatal to more active men. Camille Desmoulins exhibited an adolescent faith in his fellows. Marshals Murat, Masséna, Bernadotte, and Soult followed the direction of Napoleon’s bicorne hat and drove his enemies from field after field. Kellermann, as heavy as his name, remained firmly booted and spurred, unlike Lafayette, who could change his royal uniform for the garb of a republican or a diplomat. All these were Illuminati. Some worked with open eyes, actual accomplices. Others, like Desmoulins, were enthusiasts or dupes.

Their influence did not die with them. It was passed on, long after the guillotine had gone out of common use, and could be recognised as the power behind the Directory. It lessened throughout the Consulate, but came back reinforced when Louis XVIII was hoisted on to the throne after Waterloo, and it sparked off the Revolution of 1830, which signalled the end of the Bourbons whom the Illuminati had long before marked down for ruin.

A SUIVRE...

5.

The sinister designs of Weishaupt and his Society had been made known to the Bavarian Government, as the result of a thunderstorm, in 1785.

A former priest and henchman of Weishaupt, named Joseph Lanz, had been out in the storm to deliver a message, when he was struck by lightning and killed. His body was taken to the chapel of a Benedictine convent where a nun, who prepared him for burial, found documents sewn into his clothing. Their importance, it soon became clear, reached far beyond the convent, and they were passed to the authorities who rubbed their eyes on seeing they outlined a plot for overthrowing Church and State. Weishaupt was banished from Bavaria, but he promptly fell on his feet again by being protected and pensioned by the Prince of Saxe-Gotha.

By the time of Weishaupt’s death in 1830 the hand of his Society could be detected in countries other than France, though its workings were sometimes indistinguishable from those of the more politically-minded Italian movement, the Carbonari (charcoal burners). That Society had been founded by Maghella in Naples at the time of the former Marshal Murat, who had been created King of Naples by Napoleon. Its declared object was to drive out foreigners and to set up a republican constitution.

The peculiar strength of such bodies has always been their secrecy, and this was in no way impugned by the signs and symbols they adopted. Sometimes they had an affected occult significance that was meant to be impressive, and this often led them to introduce merely puerile, absurd, or even unpleasant rites of initiation. There was, for instance, one Illuminati circle that persuaded candidates to enter a bath of water – persuaded, that is, by pulling them towards the bath by means of a piece of string that was tied to their genitals. And it was this perverted sexual obsession that made some of Weishaupt’s disciples undergo self-castration.

But some rites and symbols derived an undeniable significance from what is generally called Black Magic, or from the invocation of a Satanic power whose potency runs like a sinister streak through pages of Biblical, legendary, and historically verified writing.

‘By symbols’, said Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, ‘is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched. He everywhere finds himself surrounded with symbols, recognised as such or not recognised.’

The Illuminati made use of a shape that was probably old when Egypt reached its peak, that of a pyramid, or triangle, which has long been known to initiates as a sign of mystic or solar faith. At the top of that pyramid, or sometimes at its base, was, and in fact still is, the image of a separate human Eye, which has been variously referred to as the open eye of Lucifer, the morning star, or the eternal watcher of the world and the human scene.

The pyramid was one of the symbols that represented the unknown and nameless deity in pre-Christian cults. Centuries later it was resurrected as a symbol of the destruction of the Catholic Church; and when the first phase of that destruction had been brought about, as we shall see, by those who had infiltrated and since occupied some of the highest places in the Church, they reproduced it as a sign of their success.

It overlooked the crowds who gathered for the Philadelphia Eucharistic Congress in 1976. It was taken up by the Jesuits who edited the Society’s year book; and it appeared on a series of Vatican stamps issued in 1978.

The Eye, which can be traced back to the Babylonian moon-worshippers or astrologers, came to represent the Egyptian trinity of Osiris, the sun; Isis, the moon goddess; and their child, Horus. Isis also appeared in Athens, Rome, Sicily, and other centres of antiquity under a variety of names including Venus, Minerva, Diana, Cybele, Ceres, Proserpine, and Bellona. The Eye came to figure among the mystic solar symbols of Jove, Baal, and Apollo.

There was nothing empty or childish in the Society’s claim that its members, as evidenced by the Eye, were under constant surveillance. ‘It is understood’, so ran a dictum of the Society, ‘that anyone who reveals our secrets, either voluntarily or involuntarily, signs his own death warrant.’

And those words have been borne out, time and again. One of the first to give an instance of this was a Frenchman, named Lescure, whose son had played a briefly prominent part in the Revolution. Lescure senior was admitted to the cult of the Eye and the pyramid. But he soon repented, refused to attend their gatherings, was looked upon as a possible danger to his erstwhile brethren, and died suddenly of poison. In his last lucid moments he blamed ‘that impious horde of the Illuminati’ for his death.


To be continued...

6.

Mention has already been made of the Carbonari, the Supreme Directory of which, known as the Alta Vendita, became a kind of nucleus for all the secret societies spread through Italy. In organization and intention it was much the same as the Illuminati. Its leaders adopted a similar brand of whimsical appellations (such as Little Tiger, Nubius, Vindex, Minos), and it exhibited the same unremitting hostility towards Church and State.

This was clearly outlined in a set of Permanent Instructions, or Code of Rules, which appeared in Italy in 1818. It was written by Nubius and was addressed to a fellow conspirator called Volpi, with suggested guide lines and news of what had so far been accomplished.

Nubius, who appears to have been a man of rank in Rome, starts with a modest appraisal of the not insignificant task that had been entrusted to him. ‘As I told you before, I have been appointed to demoralise the education of the youth of the Church.’ But he was not unaware of the most difficult obstacle he would have to encounter. One great problem remained. ‘The Papacy has always exercised a decisive influence over Italy. With the arm, the voice, the pen, of its innumerable bishops, monks, nuns, and faithful of all latitudes, the Pope finds everywhere people who are prepared for sacrifice, and even for martyrdom, friends who would die for him, or sacrifice all for his sake.

‘It is a mighty lever, the full power of which few Popes have understood, and which has yet been used but partially... Our final aim is that of Voltaire, and that of the French Revolution – the complete annihilation of Catholicism, and ultimately of Christianity. Were Christianity to survive, even upon the ruins of Rome, it would, a little later on, revive and live.

‘Take no notice of those boastful and vainglorious Frenchmen, and thick-headed Germans, and hypochondriacal Englishmen, who think it possible to end Catholicism by an obscene song or by a contemptible sarcasm. Catholicism has a vitality which survives such attacks with ease. She has seen adversaries more implacable and more terrible far, and sometimes has taken a malicious pleasure in baptising with holy water the most rabid amongst them.

‘Therefore the Papacy has been for seventeen hundred years interwoven with the history of Italy. Italy can neither breathe nor move without the leave of the Supreme Pontiff. With him, she has the hundred arms of Briareus; without him, she is condemned to a lamentable impotency. Such a state of things must not continue. It is necessary to seek a remedy.

‘Very well. The remedy is at hand. The Pope, whoever he may be, will never enter into a secret society. It therefore becomes the duty of the secret societies to make the first advance to the Church, and to the Pope, with the object of conquering both. The work for which we gird ourselves is not the work of a day, nor of a month, nor of a year. It may last for many years, perhaps a century. In our ranks the soldier dies, but the work is continued.

‘We do not at present intend to gain the Pope to our cause. That which we should await, as the Jews await a Messiah, is a Pope according to our wants. We require a Pope for ourselves, if such a Pope were possible. With such a one we shall march more securely to the storming of the Church than with all the little books of our French and English brothers. And why?

‘Because it were useless to seek with these alone to split the Rock upon which God has built the Church. We should not want the vinegar of Hannibal, nor gunpowder, nor even our arms, if we had but the little finger of the successor of Peter engaged in the plot; that little finger will avail us more for our crusade than all the Urbans and St. Bernards for the crusade of Christianity.


‘We trust that we may yet attain this supreme object of our efforts. Little can be done with the old Cardinals and with prelates of decided character. In our magazines, either popular or unpopular, we must find the means to utilise, or ridicule, the power in their hands. A well invented report must be spread with tact amongst good Christian families. Such a Cardinal, for instance, is a miser; such a prelate is licentious. These things will spread rapidly in the cafes, thence to the squares, and one report is sometimes enough to ruin a man.

‘If a prelate arrives in a province from Rome to officiate at some public function, it is necessary at once to become acquainted with his character, his antecedents, his temperament, his defects – especially his defects. Give him a character that must horrify the young people and the women; describe him as cruel, heartless, or bloodthirsty; relate some atrocious transaction which will cause a sensation amongst the people. The foreign newspapers will learn and copy these facts, which they will know how to embellish according to their usual style...’


To be continued...

7.

Apart from the earlier indications, the main purpose of the plot, to gain control of the Papacy, had been brought to light in Florence by an opponent of the secret societies named Simonini, who carried the news of their intention to Pius VII. But the Church could do little more in the way of defence than issue warnings; while the Carbonari, reinforced by the positive declarations uttered by the Alta Vendita, pressed home its attacks.

A few years after that document was issued, Little Tiger addressed the Piedmontese group of the society in the following terms: ‘Catholicism must be destroyed throughout the whole world. Prowl about the Catholic sheepfold and seize the first lamb that presents itself in the required conditions. Go even to the depths of convents. In a few years the young clergy will have, by the force of events, invaded all the functions. They will govern, administer, and judge. They will be called upon to choose the Pontiff who will reign; and the Pontiff, like the greater part of his contemporaries, will be necessarily imbued with the principles which we are about to put into circulation.

‘It is a little grain of mustard which we will place in the earth, but the sun of justice will develop it to become a great power, and you will see one day what a rich harvest that little seed will produce.’

The policy of infiltration had already been put into effect, and Little Tiger was soon claiming that a new breed of priests, talented young men who were likely to rise high in the hierarchy, had been trained to take over and destroy the Church. And that was no empty boast, since in 1824 he was telling Nubius: ‘There are certain members of the clergy, especially in Rome, who have swallowed the bait, hook, line, and sinker.’

The persistence, the thoroughness, and the single-minded purpose of the societies which, then as now, was not to be found outside them, was never in doubt. ‘Let the clergy march under your banner in the belief that they march under the banner of the Apostolic Keys. Do not fear to slip into the religious communities, into the very midst of their flock. Let our agents study with care the personnel of those confraternity men, put them under the pastoral staff of some virtuous priest, well known but credulous and easy to be deceived. Then infiltrate the poison into those chosen hearts; infiltrate it by little doses as if by chance.’

This was soon followed by a confident assessment of the inroads that the societies had already made. ‘In Italy, they count among their numbers more than eight hundred priests, among whom are many professors and prelates as well as some Bishops and Cardinals!’ It was claimed that many of the Spanish clergy were also involved.

But, as Nubius constantly repeated, all interim victories would be hollow until a Pope who was part of their ultimate design was occupying Peter’s Chair. ‘When that is accomplished’, he wrote in 1843, ‘you will have established a revolution led by the tiara and the pluvial (ceremonial) cape; a revolution brought about with little force, but which will strike a flame in the four corners of the world.’

There was a feeling of change in the air, a change that would extend beyond the boundaries of the Church and transform many facets of existence. Little Tiger summed it up hopefully to Nubius in 1846: ‘All feel that the old world is cracking.’ And his finger must have been on the pulse of events, for two years later a highly select body of secret initiates who called themselves the League of Twelve Just Men of the Illuminati, financed Karl Marx to write the Communist Manifesto, and within months Europe was rocking with revolution.

But Nubius did not live long enough to sample whatever benefits might have come about. For activated by rumours, whether true or false, that he was letting his tongue wag too freely, the all-seeing Eye was turned in his direction and Nubius succumbed to a dose of poison.

We of this generation have lived through, and are still encountering, the political and religious aftermaths of a struggle whose causes were hidden from those who witnessed its early stages, just as they are from us who are blindly groping a way through its secondary phases. For its perpetrators, and their operations, are masked by secrecy, a secrecy so continuous, and profound, that it cannot be matched elsewhere.


To be continued...

8. When the French author, Cretineau-Joly, brought the sinister import of the Alta Vendita to the notice of Pope Pius IX (1846-78), who allowed his name to be used as a guarantee of its authority, the event, that should have called for a fanfare of silver trumpets, was drowned by the petty whistling of Parliamentary verbiage and cant. And when Adolphe Cremieux, Minister of Justice, as reported in Les Archives, Paris, in November 1861, voiced the precept that ‘Nationalities must disappear, religion must be suppressed,’ the circles that framed such statements saw that they were never diffused as forecasts of a condition that would clamour for widespread acceptance in less than a century.

Again, a reader of The Times, in Victorian England, would have noted, perhaps with an insular distaste for everything Latin, the disorders that flared from time to time in Spain, Portugal, Naples, and the Papal States. In seeking an explanation, the word ‘dagos’ might have suggested itself. But one thing is certain. He would never have thought that the man who master-minded the turmoil was no less a person than Lord Palmerston, who was the Queen’s Foreign Secretary between the years 1830-51, Prime Minister in 1855, and again in 1859 until his death in 1865.

For behind those Parliamentary titles, he was known to his fellow-conspirators as Grand Patriarch of the Illuminati, and therefore controller of all the sinister complex of secret societies. Glance at some of their political designs – the achievement of a united Italy under the House of Savoy; the annexation of Papal territory; the reconstitution of a Polish State; the deprivation of Austria, and the consequent rise of the German Empire.

Each of those objectives, irrespective of time, was set down on the Illuminati’s agenda. Each has been attained; and Benjamin Disraeli, who knew the whole business of plot and counter-plot, doubtless had Palmerston’s machinations in mind when he said, in 1876: ‘The Governments of this country have to deal, not only with governments, kings, and ministers, but also with secret societies, elements which must be taken into account, which at the last moment can bring all plans to naught, which have agents everywhere, who incite assassinations and can, if necessary, lead a massacre.’

The leaders of the Italian Revolution, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour were the servants of the Eye, while such monarchs of the time as Victor Emmanuel II and Napoleon III also came within its radius.

Throughout the remainder of the century the attack on orthodoxy gathered weight. In 1881 the Prime Minister of France, Leon Gambetta, could openly declare: ‘Clericalism, that is the enemy.’ A more popular orator roared: ‘I spit upon the rotting corpse of the Papacy.’ And the same year provided ample evidence of the hostility that was ready to break out in the most unexpected parts of the continent. For when the body of Pius IX was being transferred from the Vatican basilica to the church of St. Lawrence-outside-the-Walls, the cortège was attacked by a mob armed with cudgels. Amid their shouted obscenities a street battle developed before the body of the dead Pope could be saved from being flung into the Tiber. The authorities, siding with the rioters, took no action.

So in that way, and by many devious routes, the contests of early Christian times, and of the Middle Ages, were being continued. But now the Church’s enemies were shifting their attacks from open warfare to peaceful penetration, which was more in keeping with the spirit of the time.

‘What we have undertaken’, proclaimed the Marquis de Franquerie in the middle of the 19th century, ‘is the corruption of the people by the clergy, and that of the clergy by us, the corruption which leads the way to our digging the Church’s grave.’


To be continued...