Windswept House: The Winds of Change in the Catholic Church

Pope Benedict XVI with President and Laura Bush

Sources: Chuck Nowlen, “The Devil and Father Kunz: An Easter Tale about Murder, the Catholic Church and the Strange paths of Good and Evil,” Las Vegas Weekly, April 12, 2001, viewable at http://www.chucknowlen.com/kunz.htm.
Thomas Horn, Zenith 2016, (Crane, Missouri: Defender, 2013).
Malachi Martin, Windswept House: A Vatican Novel, (New York: Doubleday, 1996).
Malachi Martin, The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).

Pius XII -- 1939-1958
John XXIII -- 1958-1963
Paul VI -- 1963 --1978
John Paul I -- 1978
John Paul II -- 1978-2005
Benedict XVI -- 2005-(2012) 2013

Francis -- March 13, 20013

Reality that sounds like fiction

It was the team of Thomas Horn and Cris Putnam (more about them in past and future posts) that introduced me to Malachi Martin. He was a conservative Jesuit who, with the pope’s permission, left his order to write about Catholic topics. If you check the index on my blog, you’ll see that I have written about him in earlier posts (e.g., July 5, 2013). His book The Jesuits was enlightening for me. Because I left the Catholic Church when I went to college in 1963, I had only a glimmer of the changes brought to the church by Vatican II (1963-1965). The Jesuits made it clear that V-II threw the Church into turmoil, pitting eager progressives against a solid block of orthodox conservatives who loved the way things were in 1950.

The warm and fuzzy images of black and white TV movies in the 50’s are very appealing, even if they’re not how things really were. The comfortable Catholic culture that I grew up in kept me out of trouble through puberty and young adulthood, but they never taught us to pray and we never owned a Bible. We left our religion at the church steps on Sunday. It didn’t follow us home or to school. Beyond Confraternity of Catholic Doctrine for youth, we didn’t know that such a thing as an adult Bible study existed.

When I became a Protestant Pentecostal in 1965, I learned the theology of how, century by century, the Catholic Church drifted away from biblical concepts. Traditions, visions, liturgy, and proclamations took the place of Scripture: infant baptism; the central authority of a monarchial pope wearing kingly garments and being called Holy Father; the celibate priesthood; the Assumption of Mary; the elitist primacy of the Catholic Church as the only means to salvation; the rise of Mary’s power as a mediator of salvation; the Latin Mass…I could go on. Nevertheless, in the shadow places of my mind there was the image of the godly priest dressed in black, dedicated to guiding the congregation, compassionate, faithful to his vows, able to touch the Almighty, and knowledgeable in the matters of eternity.

Same for most nuns. Of course, some had issues, but most were portrayed as cool people who obeyed bureaucratic and religious restraints until the good business of the Kingdom began to bog down in it, and then they could rise to the rescue in creative ways.

However, when I shared my testimony with priests in the 70’s, I found that many were in the throes of a crisis of faith. They appreciated my story and they loved the book I gave them, The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson. But I still had no clue as to the crisis that was building in the Church and the trauma tearing at the heart of the conservative Catholic. I was much more aware of the Catholic Charismatic renewal. I thought it would renew the whole Church and challenge it to study the Bible and walk in a deeper grace.

Vatican insider Martin changed all that for me with The Jesuits. When the Protestants of the 1500’s and later broke from the Church, it was because they gained access to and understanding of the Bible. Chaos ensued as various groups tried to find their way back to the New Testament Church and the teachings of Paul and Jesus. My personal opinion is that when V-II radically challenged so many cherished Catholic beliefs, the door opened to a mass mutiny against Catholicism as it was in 1950 without substituting a solid biblical basis for continuing on. The way my two aunts put it, “We still consider ourselves to be Catholics, but we don’t attend church anymore. We didn’t leave the church, the church left us.”

The way Martin, a staunch traditionalist, expressed it, corruption began to flood into the church for two reasons. One is that neither Pope Paul VI nor John Paul II corrected rising abuses such as theologians in the seminaries who challenged Catholic dogma and traditions. They chided but did not correct the rise of homosexuality in the seminaries and priesthood, the protection of pedophile priests, the challenge against transubstantiation, the virgin birth of Jesus, and the divinity of Jesus, the Latin American Jesuits and Maryknolls turning Marxist in Latin America, the insults and disrespect flung at the pope and the papacy itself, rumors of wiccan practices in the convents, the increase of Freemasonry in the Vatican, etc.

Fiction that echoes reality?

In The Jesuits, Martin blames the Jesuits for betraying their original purpose and for fostering mutiny against the authority of the papacy. In his historical fiction book Windswept House, he turns that around and blames John Paul II (“the Slavic pope”) for betraying the Catholic Church by not correcting what he saw as abuses and travesties.

As I said in my July 5th post, we Protestants can support some of the call for modernization and shifting of dogma. Martin’s point, however, goes far beyond some modernizations. His second allegation as to how the Church became corrupted is that a cabal of Freemason Satanists found their way into the hierarchy. This group deliberately tried to subvert and bankrupt the real church. Their ultimate goal was to turn the throne of Peter over to their Prince (a demon possessed Antichrist) who would rule over the New World Order and a new all-encompassing religion.

Martin contends that Pope John Paul I was murdered by a member of the Vatican court. Genuine conspiracy theories have dogged his death after serving as pope for only 33 days in September, 1978. The suspicion is that he was about to unveil corruption in the Vatican, so he was poisoned. Martin also claims that in 1963 the cabal (also called the Superforce) performed a blasphemous ritual in the Vatican, along with a parallel ritual in South Carolina, with the intent of calling up Lucifer to possess the next pope.

Although Windswept House is fiction, Horn and Putnam reveal that in an interview with John McManus, Martin averred that the ritual was real and that the process was described to him by the woman who was violated in it as a child (Zenith 2016, 395, taken from The New American, June 9, 1997).

Recall, too, that this is the era when an alleged apparition of the Blessed Virgin was declaring that the real Pope Paul VI was locked away in the Vatican as a prisoner; the pope that people saw in public was an actor who had been surgically transformed to take his place. Even though I believe that the Bayside, NY apparition is a manifestation of Lucifer himself, imagine the trauma to Paul VI and John Paul II, both of whom cherished the Blessed Mother and revered her appearance at Fatima. No matter how you look at it, things were in a state of disarray in the upper levels of the Church during that era (see my posts on the rise of Mary).

One of the villains in Windswept House is the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Maestroianni (in real life Cardinal Agostino Casaroli). In the book, fictional Maestroianni was the unequivocal leader of the cabal that murdered PP I. He plots throughout the book to get John Paul II to resign, and if not, to die of not-so-natural causes. It sounds ridiculous. Yet, in 1981 John Paul II was shot two or three times by an assassin named Mehmet Ali Agca. This Turk, who was ultimately pardoned at the request of the pope, claimed that it was Casaroli who put him up to the assassination. (However, in 2013, he claimed that it was the Ayatollah Khomeini. Read more about Agca here.)

To bolster claims of conspiracies and murders in the hierarchy, Martin points to the murder of Fr. Alfred Kunz, another journalist priest who claimed to be on the verge of revelations pertaining to homosexual pedophilia in the Diocese of Springfield, IL. (Zenith 2016, p. 397) Fr. Kunz’s throat was cut by multiple stabs in St. Michael’s church in Dane, Wisconsin in 1998. Read more here. On the Coast to Coast radio program Martin alleged that he had inside information that the crime was committed by Luciferians. The FBI and local police found no firm connection to any group or motive.

From what I have read so far, it would be a stretch to connect Kunz’s murder to Satanists associated with the Catholic Church. In Chuck Nowlen’s article the producer of his radio show infers that yes, eyerolls aside, there is a “nexis” of truth to the claim that there are Satanists entrenched throughout the Church.

In Windswept House, Martin’s protagonist, Fr. Daniel, actually wonders if John Paul II only pretended to be a traditionalist. Perhaps he was part of the conspiracy to prepare the church to help launch the New World Order. He was at the Council, he helped write some of the most damaging articles which opened the doors to the licentiousness free-for-all that led to so many priests who weren’t even Catholics anymore (p. 447). In constant defense of John Paul II is his priestly mentor Fr. Damien. The role of John Paul in the future of the Church is left hanging at the end of the book. His Holiness had been shown a report clarifying the corruption, Satanism, pedophilia, and laxity among the priests, bishops, and cardinals. What would the Holy Father do about it? And would he survive the conspiracies against his person?

We know the end of the story. John Paul II was raised to sainthood, along with Paul VI. John Paul had his own vision of the Virgin Mary in 1981 in which she designated him as “the last Catholic pope of our times” (453, 479, 639; Keys of this Blood, 627, 629). He was one of the popes who officially declared Mary to be the Mediatrix of All Graces. He banned Satanism, homosexuality, and contraception (573), but his letters and words did not sway a goodly portion of the bishops of the Church. They were openly demanding that the power of the church be shared with them and that the infallible, monarchial papacy come to an end. And so it may. Pope Francis seems to agree.