Читать книгу The Inventor - W. E. Gutman - Страница 10
ОглавлениеA Blueblood and a Commoner
Man is fated, through evolution and personal initiative, to transit from an artificially imprinted belief in invisible gods and inaccessible spirit forces to the positive stages of existence, with life being its own justification and reward. Some men rise to the challenge. Others get stuck along the way.
In early January 2008, lured by an irresistible calling and following brilliant seminary studies, 26-year-old Hubert François de Ravaillac, of noble French ancestry, takes the sacred vows and enters the priesthood. He is ordained by Bishop Jean-Marie Touvier at the Eglise Saint-Germain-des-Prés, an 11th century church that rises proud in its austere architectural simplicity in the heart of Paris.
Outside, on the windswept church esplanade, Gypsies, some with infants at their breast, beg for alms. Defying the cold, jugglers and balladeers seek in the goodwill of passersby a chance for recognition, perhaps fame, or perhaps just enough loose change to pay for a warm meal before dark. Across the street, patrons at Les Deux Magots Café sip hot fragrant espressos in thimble-sized cups and cool pale white wines in fluted glasses. In their chairs had once lingered such rabble-rousers as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Samuel Becket and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley and James Baldwin, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Picasso and Albert Camus, to name a few. Paris the enchantress had seduced them all.
As these worldly diversions take place in a universe he will forever shun, Hubert François de Ravaillac, prostrate and cross-like on the cold stone floor at the foot of the altar, pledges to consecrate his life to God and his Son Jesus Christ. The oath includes the solemn vow to protect the Church from scandal, at the peril of his own life.
De Ravaillac is a devout Catholic but pastoral service, he believes, should transcend routine priestly occupations. A blueblood, a hereditary anti-communist and a self-flogging zealot who still blames the Jews for the crucifixion of his Savior, the young priest has ceded his mortal body and consecrated his eternal soul to the Holy Church. His mission, as he sees it, and as his superiors in Paris and Rome have noted with cautious interest, is to help steer Roman Catholicism back to the pinnacles of power and prominence it once enjoyed. To do so quietly and with the greatest efficacy, he joins Opus Dei (God’s Work), a fabulously rich, aggressively right-wing cloak-and-dagger Catholic organization that wields powers infinitely greater than the imaginary ones the Church ascribes to its favorite scapegoats, the Jews, the Freemasons and the Socialists.
On that same blustery winter morning, Michel Montvert studies the late Chilean painter Roberto Matta’s “psychoanalytic views of the mind,” his esoteric “landscapes of the soul.” Matta, a Socialist, believed art, music and poetry have the power to change the lives of people. Montvert, a humanist in an age of declining humaneness, believes that only when freed from adversity, want and suffocating ideologies will people partake of art’s enticing fruits.
Unlike de Ravaillac, Montvert comes from a culture where the word God was never uttered -- except as a reflex expletive -- and death or the hereafter had no place at the dinner-table, either in a mystical or existential context. He was never given a religious education, nor deprived of such, and the notion of an invisible, omnipotent creator/arbiter/destroyer seemed ludicrous to him even as a boy. By the time he was old enough to contemplate the enormity of his parents’ suffering, especially during the German occupation of France, their indifference to religion had turned to embittered agnosticism -- his father’s early childhood religious upbringing and his mother’s genteel, pseudo-assimilation into a Christian mainstream notwithstanding. Struck with pancreatic cancer, his mother had endured several months of martyrdom and died convinced that religion is a travesty and a fraud. Heartbroken, his father, a physician, grieved at the fragility of the human body and railed against the staggering imperfection of medical science. He spent the rest of his days in the company of a cantankerous cat mourning his wife and perusing and annotating the Bible -- the Old Testament (he considered the New Testament a crude fantasy) -- not for inspiration or comfort, but to vilify it, to find the contradictions and highlight the aberrations, to poke a wrathful finger at God’s unfathomable cruelty, to denounce man’s limitless propensity for evil.
Montvert and his father had often chatted long into the night about religion, not in pursuit of an ideological abode but as an exercise in pure reasoning. They agreed that the underpinnings of religion -- mysticism, the supernatural, the credo quia absurdum (I believe BECAUSE it is absurd), faith in an invisible entity, the rituals, the taboos, the hellish penalties -- had all been contrived to enslave man, not to liberate him. They acknowledged the simplistic precepts of the “Golden Rule,” or Ethic of Reciprocity, present in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (but probably of more ancient Buddhist provenance) yet pointed at man’s inclination to ignore it, even violate it, in the name of Yahweh, Theos and Allah. They quoted from Hillel the Elder, the 1st century BCE rabbi who summed up the Torah with the command, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor.” They read Luke (6:31), which teaches, “Treat others as you want them to treat you.” Last, they turned to the Koran’s lofty counsel, “No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.”
But “others,” “neighbor” and “brother,” they knew, have a parochial meaning that, history has shown, signifies “those of our own kind -- us, not them.”
This paradox had been astutely dissected a year earlier by CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour in God’s Warriors: The Clash Between Piety and Politics. Rebroadcast several times since its first airing, the three-part award-winning documentary offers a disturbing rendering of the three major religions’ penchant for violence in the service of deity. It also lays bare their unceasing effort to manipulate civil society through indoctrination, intimidation, civil disobedience and, all else failing, swift, copious bloodshed.
Carried to its extremes, God’s Warriors had shown, religion is a dangerous eccentricity that will render men insane. Only religious delirium could inspire a Muslim to plot the “honor killing” of his own daughter, or to bomb a disco filled with Jewish youths. Only mystical rapture could lead a self-styled Christian to murder doctors performing legal abortions. Only a Jewish zealot could violate the Torah, slaughter Muslims gathered in prayer in their mosque, torch cars on the Sabbath or assault members of a peaceful Gay Pride parade and threaten violence if the Jerusalem police chief allowed the pageant to proceed.
This is the bare face of religion, Montvert père et fils had concluded. This is how religion transforms societies into citadels of intolerance, incubators in which simmers the hatred of “heretics,” a one-size-fits-all label that describes those who hold different beliefs or who grant themselves the inalienable right to espouse none. Within that conflict rests the unresolved tension between the command to “love one's enemies” and the equally strong injunction to reject and eradicate any alien or divergent dogma, to the death if necessary. In the final analysis, Montvert father and son had reasoned, neither Jew, nor Christian or Muslim knows which of the two commands to follow at any given time. By attacking “heretics” as tools of Satan, religious fanatics seize the rhetorical high ground and shift the focus from embracing one’s fellow man to the escapist option of waging war against an imaginary but prescriptive source of evil.
This catch 22 was the preeminent rationale for a succession of gruesome confrontations: the Crusades, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the Inquisition, the 30-Years War, the centuries-old strife in Northern Ireland, the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts, the Hutu-Tutsi reciprocal slaughter, the Hindu-Moslem-Sikh massacres in India and Kashmir, the bloodbath in Sudan and the cyclic carnage between Shia and Sunni Muslims.
Nor has hatred of “heresy” spared the presumptive self-proclaimed paragon of probity, the United States.
“Behold the proliferating dynasties of Elmer Gantries who are hijacking that nation’s psyche (while rifling through its pockets),” Michel Montvert had told me more than once, “and witness the phalanx of rapt soul-robbers whose stated strategy is to infiltrate and exploit the coercive power of government.”
Montvert was right. Despite its implied but halfhearted tradition of separating church from state, the U.S. never made an honest effort to protect against the intrusion of religion into the body politic. The recent past had seen religion woven more deeply into the fabric of governance than ever before. Although the U.S. Constitution guarantees the non-involvement of government in religion, it has spinelessly failed to hinder religion from muscling in on the affairs of state. Such laissez-faire, absent in modern France, Montvert had warned, could lead to theocratic control.
The fundamental weakness of democracy, my old friend had often protested, is that it tolerates in its very bosom the existence and propagation of undemocratic principles. With the right checks and balances, he had argued, and unrelenting vigilance, despotic ideas could be deflected. All would be lost if those who chip away at the civil liberties that democracy grants them are the very people sworn to protect the nation, by example, against the erosion of treasured constitutional rights.
De Ravaillac, like all the self-anointed moralizers who find a haven in Opus Dei, sees no conflict in a Golden Rule that also makes room for the persecution of “heretics.” His sadomasochism can be traced to a straitlaced upbringing. He owes his iron will -- or is it his fixation with martyrdom -- to a stoic lot, an ancient family with an emblazoned past, now governed by retired French Navy Commander Clovis Godefroy de Ravaillac, his father -- whom Hubert still calls “sir” -- and his mother, Clothilde Dieudonnée de Ravaillac, a woman of exceptional beauty in her youth, now fending off the ravages of sun and tropics with heavy makeup and triple gins and tonic. Hubert, their only offspring (more by accident than choice) quickly learns to manage the lovelessness of his upper crust milieu “like a man,” a lesson further beaten into him with his parents’ consent by Jesuit bullies at the Collège Sainte Croix, where his dormant bisexuality is awakened and indulged.
Outside of its own doctrinaire circle of followers and fans, Opus Dei has a dappled reputation, mostly bad. Andrew Greeley, the eminent American Catholic priest, sociologist, journalist and best-selling author, has described it as
“a devious, antidemocratic, reactionary, semi-fascist institution, desperately famished for absolute dominion in the Church and quite possibly very close now to having that power.”
Calling the elite group, “authoritarian and power-mad,” Greeley warns that
“Opus Dei is an extremely dangerous organization because it appeals to the love of secrecy and the power lust of certain kinds of religious personalities. It may well be the most powerful group in the Church today. It is capable of doing an enormous amount of harm. It ought to be forced out of the shadows or suppressed.”
Opus Dei has about one million members worldwide. At least 2,000 are ordained priests. With this international cohort of dedicated warriors, Opus Dei has successfully penetrated schools and universities, banks, publishing firms, television and radio stations, ad agencies and film companies. It has been accused of deceptive and aggressive recruitment practices, including “love bombing” -- the deliberate and syrupy show of affection by an individual or group as a tool of conscription or conversion -- and instructing celibate members to form friendships, attend social gatherings and submit written reports on potential converts.
The core precept of Opus Dei is “to help shape the world in a Catholic manner.” Helpers include clergy, captains of industry, high-ranking military officers and government officials. The group “comes surrounded by a political miasma,” the British daily, The Guardian, noted recently. The super-stealthy organization was founded just before the Spanish Civil War and blossomed in the halcyon Catholic days of El Caudillo, fascist dictator Francisco Franco’s “crusade” against the Republican left. When Opus Dei came to prominence in the late 1960s it was because Franco’s cabinet included an inordinate number of Opusdeistas -- too many to be the result of coincidence.
For Father Hubert, whose passion for Christ calls for no less than the repeal of Laïcité -- the scrupulously enforced separation of Church and State in France -- membership in Opus Dei arms him with special and far-reaching powers. But the organization’s militancy, in his opinion, does not quite match his own God-driven longing to cleanse the world of heretics and deliver sinful, rudderless humanity, by force if necessary, into Christ’s loving arms. He seeks and is granted entry into the Knights of Malta, a closed fraternity of the Roman Catholic Church whose upper tier members are fastidiously aristocratic. De Ravaillac, an extremist whose family tree goes back at least 400 years and which includes a reviled regicide, meets or exceeds the Knights’ rigorous standards for admission. They consider him quite a “prize catch.”
The 900-year-old organization was formerly known as the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of the Saints John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta. Modeled after an ancient group of soldier-monks who massacred “infidels,” (Muslims, Jews and Cathars) Knights of Malta, ceremonies and rituals “inculcate lessons of chivalry and courage, and inspire a militant spirit in opposition to all non-Christian ideologies and powers.” With over 10,000 members in 42 countries, the Knights are influential Vatican surrogates with extensive ties to right-wing intelligence networks.
Originally programmed to be ruthless tactical fighters, later adopting a fiercely anti-communist stance, the Knights were instrumental in the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency. They also took part in U.S. global “black” (covert) operations. The founding fathers of the CIA, William “Wild Bill” Donovan and Allen Dulles, the longest-serving CIA director, were Knights, as were many in the CIA hierarchy, including JFK’s director, John McCone and Ronald Reagan’s director, William Casey. McCone helped engineer the 1973 military coup against Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. According to journalist Carl Bernstein, Casey gave Pope John Paul II unparalleled access to CIA intelligence, including data on spy satellites and field operatives.
There is compelling evidence that the Knights of Malta were linked to the “Rat Run,” the post-World War II getaway route used by Nazi top brass and death camp “scientists” from defeated Germany to the Americas. These thugs were issued new identities and special credentials that ensured escape from prosecution for crimes against humanity. One of them, Major General Reinhard Gehlen, a devout Catholic and legendary Cold War spymaster, surrendered to the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps in 1945. Because of his experience and useful contacts in the Soviet Union, he was freed, as were seven of his senior officers, in exchange for their pledge to gather intelligence for the United States. Flown to Washington, Gehlen went to work for Donovan and Dulles, then the Office of Strategic Services station chief in Switzerland. Gehlen handed over the names of several OSS officers who were members of the U.S. Communist Party.
A year later, Gehlen was flown back to Germany where he resumed his spy work, this time as a lackey of the U.S. He set up a dummy organization composed of 350 former German intelligence officers. That number eventually grew to 4,000. For many years, the “V-men,” (V-mann or Vertrauensmann -- trusted man) as they were known, were the eyes and ears of the CIA in Western Europe and the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War. Recruited among men who had as little culture, common sense, objectivity or logic as possible, they were used primarily to maintain surveillance of civilian populations in Germany and occupied countries.
Overall, the Gehlen organization’s performance was at best disappointing. One rare successful mission infiltrated some 5,000 anti-communists of Eastern European origin into the Soviet Union and its satellites. These agents were trained at a facility named Oberammergau, site of the yearly staging of one of Hitler’s favorite diversions, the unambiguously anti-Semitic Passion Plays. The organization was severely compromised when it was infiltrated by communist moles -- as were the CIA and the British MI6. One of the double-agents was the illustrious Harold “Kim” Philby, spy-extraordinaire who served the communist cause until his death in Moscow in 1988.
Gehlen employed hundreds of “ex-Nazis,” among them Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s right-hand-man and commander of the Drancy internment camp near Paris. Brunner was responsible for the slaughter of 140,000 Jews. His death has never been confirmed; he was believed to be still alive in 2007. The CIA turned a blind eye and, owing the exigencies of the Cold War, even took part in some of Gehlen’s operations.
Robert Wolfe, historian at the U.S. National Archives wrote that
“U.S. Army intelligence accepted Reinhard Gehlen’s offer to furnish alleged expertise on the Red Army -- and was bilked by the many mass murderers he hired.”
In appreciation for his work, Gehlen, Hitler’s Eastern Front intelligence chief who organized and took part in atrocities against Jews, Gypsies and Slavs, was awarded the Knights of Malta’s highest decoration, the Grand Cross of Merit. [In 1988, the American branch of the Knights of Malta pinned the Grand Cross on Ronald Reagan “for devotion to Christian principles.”] People in Central America still remember Reagan as the man who funneled millions of tax dollars to repressive and often brutal regimes whose U.S.-trained death squads murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
One of the Knights of Malta’s main spheres of influence is Latin America, where fascists and escaped Nazis were given a warm welcome. The late Chilean strongman, General Augusto Pinochet, a CIA-stooge and convicted human rights violator, was a Knight. So is deposed Peruvian dictator, human rights violator and embezzler, Alberto Fujimori, America’s “man in Lima” until his arrest in 2005. So was the late Argentinean president Juan Peron who, recently declassified CIA documents suggest, laundered Nazi gold through the Vatican Bank subsidiary, Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in 1982. The Vatican Bank is widely believed to have channeled covert U.S. funds to Poland’s Solidarity trade union and transferred laundered money from the illegal sale of arms to Iran to the Contras through Banco Ambrosiano.
The scandal, “characterized by pervasive dishonesty and inordinate secrecy,” would prompt Congress to conclude that “a cabal of zealots” (members of Reagan’s cabinet, later the Bush-1 administration) violated the Hughes-Ryan Act and the Boland Amendment by failing to inform congressional intelligence committees about its covert actions in the Middle East and Central America. There are those who wonder to this day why Ronald Reagan wasn’t impeached and George H. W. Bush indicted for their approval of black missions. (Passed in 1974, the Hughes-Ryan Act requires the president of the United States to report all covert operations of the CIA to at least one Congressional committee. The Boland Amendment was a triad to amendments enacted between 1982 and 1984 aimed at limiting U.S. assistance to the CIA-financed Contras in Nicaragua.)
“After World War II,” Roman Catholic writer Penny Lernoux writes in her People of God,
“the Vatican, the OSS, elements of the SS, and various branches of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta joined … to help Nazi war criminals escape….”
Documents reveal that New York Cardinal Francis Spellman, head of the Knights in the U.S. from the 1940s to the 1960s was directly involved in the 1954 right-wing military coup in Guatemala during which at least 200,000 indigenous Maya were massacred and in which the CIA has acknowledged complicity. [Spellman was also linked to organized crime by his long involvement with Archbishop Paul Macinkus of Chicago, former head of the Vatican Bank, and a suspect in the highly suspicious death of Pope John Paul I a month after his
Guatemala’s reputation as a habitual human rights violator, with “disappearances,” torture and wholesale murder topping the list of crimes, is well earned. Although civilian regimes have been in place since 1986, development of a civil society and democratic institutions continues to limp along, stunted by the legacy of a brutal past and further obstructed by a corrupt and apathetic judicial system disinclined to prosecute human rights violators. Gone amok, trained by the U.S. Army School of the Americas (antiseptically rechristened the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” in 2001) the Guatemalan military, the national police and urban constabularies have repeatedly stained the “Land of Eternal Spring” red with blood.
Who helped bankroll the “Dirty War” in Central America? Benefactors include an oddball assortment of powerful confederates. Among them is Robert Macauley, founder and chairman of AmeriCares, the New Canaan, Connecticut-based disaster relief agency… and the Knights of Malta, the Vatican’s mouthpiece, a patron of the CIA and a regular conduit into the Isthmus. Sympathizers and cheerleaders include the once-presidential hopeful, Pat Buchanan, and W. R. Grace Company head, the late J. Peter Grace, a devout Catholic associated with CIA-assisted coups and known to have tried to scuttle progressive international labor movements. Grace, who once referred to former New York Governor Mario Cuomo as a “homo” and former New York Mayor David Dinkins as a “pinkins,” also had a fondness for Nazis. In 1958, he interceded to facilitate the immigration of Dr. Otto Ambros, one of the developers of Zyklon-B gas, used with deadly efficiency in Nazi extermination camps. Convicted at the Nuremberg trials for mass murder and for supplying slave labor, Ambros was later hired by Grace as a consultant. Other leading players in a scenario scripted by the religious right, U.S. spydom and the military, lay bare the magnitude of their collective agenda. They were all eventually identified and exposed in the press, all the eager instruments of a strategy aimed at destabilizing fledgling democratic regimes and replacing them with docile plutocratic minions willing to underwrite America’s politico-economic objectives while endorsing the Vatican’s unfinished crusade.
What special bonds do Robert Macauley, J. Peter Grace and the Knights of Malta share? They all have close ties to the CIA and profess a strong penchant for ultra-right-wing causes. AmeriCares, whose declared mission is to offer relief worldwide “regardless of race, religion or political persuasion,” became active in Central America in the early 1980s, ferrying donations to U.S.-backed military regimes. It also contributed to and took sides in U.S.-engineered armed conflicts and routinely flew its armada into ideological battlefields directly linked to U.S. strategic interests.
Macauley had a long and intimate relationship with George Herbert Walker Bush -- they were childhood chums –- and he was a frequent guest at the U.S. intelligence apparatus Bush was to head as CIA director. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the former president’s deftly marketed “Thousand Points of Light” which, like all capitalistic solutions to severe socio-economic problems, did nothing to relieve misery in Central America and everything to further bolster the ruling pro-U.S. kleptocrats.
In 1985, disgraced Lt. Col. Oliver North got Unification Church head, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, to fund $350,000 worth of supplies to the Contras. Three years earlier, the U.S. had withheld assistance to Sandinista Nicaragua, which had been devastated by a hurricane. It couldn’t get its planes in fast enough when Violetta Chamorro, whose presidential campaign had been sponsored by the U.S. to the tune of $9 million, defeated the Sandinistas. On 28 February, 1990, barely three days after the election, AmeriCares’ first shipment brought in 23 tons of medical supplies “with love, from the people of the United States to the people of Nicaragua.” Nicaraguan diehard Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo took possession of the first shipment and turned it over to the well-connected Knights of Malta for distribution to a select list of recipients. President H. W. Bush’s youngest son, Marvin, was aboard the next AmeriCares flight that landed days after Chamorro’s inauguration. He was met by a Knights of Malta ambassador -- none other that Roberto Alejos Arzú, whose plantation had served as a CIA training ground for the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, and a man known for his long association with some of Guatemala’s most reactionary elements, including high-ranking clergy and military officers implicated in heinous human rights abuses.
Other prominent figures romped in this large incestuous bed: former CIA chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton; General (and later Secretary of State) Alexander Haig; former Nixon-Ford treasury secretary, William Simon; Reagan’s envoy to the Vatican, William Wilson; and U.S. Senator Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, a “consultant” to Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, who sponsored a bill allowing U.S. Air Force transports to ship goods for AmeriCares, a privilege accorded no other relief organization.
Pope John Paul II first clashed with supporters of Liberation Theology during his 1983 visit to Central America. In Managua, he publicly humiliated the Rev. Ernesto Cardenal, a prominent human rights advocate whom he suspended from the priesthood. He paid a courtesy call on Salvadoran President Armando Calderon Sol, a member of the same political party that engineered activist Archbishop Romero’s assassination and masterminded the massacre of 900 men, women and children at El Mozote. He then cavorted with barrel-chested colonels and generals, and granted audiences to high society women sporting low-cut dresses and dripping with diamonds -- instead of kneeling at the grave of six Jesuits slain by U.S.-trained death squads. The Pontiff then “retired” scores of vocal Latin American liberal clerics.
Hastened by papal nepotism strongly biased in favor of diehard bishops, the purge of progressive clergy gained new momentum in Latin America. Tragically, in the most Catholic domain on earth, the “Golden Rule” was subverted by martial attitudes that view the faithful, at best as unruly sheep, at worst as the very enemies of the state. Astute and opportunistic, the Church tapped into the reactionary power base to maintain both doctrinal monopoly and political custody over the masses.
There is a precedent -- and a disquieting parallel. A thousand years ago, bloodhounds of orthodoxy sniffed heresy and the carnage began. People who held unacceptable views were flung into dungeons. Accused of harboring heterodox opinions, they were tortured with inventive cruelty, then killed. Often, before dying, they were forced to confess that they worshipped the devil (translation: they toyed with free thought); indulged in hostile beliefs (translation: they hungered for knowledge); and conspired against the established order (translation: they spoke out against corruption and intellectual turpitude).
This obscene quest, inspired and abetted by successive papal dynasties, was prelude to six “Crusades” during which hundreds of thousands of “infidels” -- Moslems and Jews -- were slaughtered. Religious fervor later fanned nearly four centuries of inquisitorial frenzy that devoured Europe and sent another half a million innocent people to the stake while their possessions, confiscated as “evidence,” fattened the Church’s coffers.
Like Karl Marx, who despised the proletariat, the Church has never fully expiated its disdain of the masses. It steadfastly rejects the notion that people can govern their consciences without its guidance or control. Worse, it denies them the right to manage their political destinies by delivering them to the same reactionary Pharisaic elite that Jesus is said to have rebuked.
Few of Christianity’s rulers, however pious, have lived up to the principles of Jesus, the radical who, if Biblical scribes did not tamper with the original script, is said to have preached compassion, pacifism and egalitarianism. Faced with a choice between Jesus’ ethic and political expediency, Pope John Paul II sadly opted for the latter. He came to Latin America and told the poor that poverty ennobles the soul. He then pompously urged the rich Catholics who finance his reign to reject materialism. He might as well have ordered hyenas to abstain from eating meat. In casting out the good shepherds of Christianity from the fold, John Paul also surrendered the flock to the carnivores.
It was the immorality of historical falsification -- and the baseness of academic dishonesty -- that propelled Montvert, a man with an unyielding respect for truth, on a lifelong campaign to unearth it wherever it may hide. He also transformed a passion for fine art into a medium through which he would later demonstrate that certain forms of human creativity cry out against lies, injustice and absurd beliefs.
His open mutiny against conformity began in high school.
His history teacher, Monsieur Delormel, routinely disregarded the obligatory French secular curriculum and shamelessly injected his personal prejudices and slanted perceptions. Armed with a razor-sharp intellect and a tongue to match, Delormel was a strict disciplinarian, a fount of erudition and a skilled pedagogue who would struggle, for two years, to educate Montvert or, as he had put it, “to deposit something of value inside this untidy, dissolute little brain of yours.”
The broad knowledge Delormel possessed -- he was licensed to teach everything from algebra to zoology -- was often overshadowed by an appalling lack of objectivity. It was his very scholarship that enabled him, wherever he could, to skew history or to rewrite it by opining unabashedly about people long dead or editorializing about events exhaustively recorded in the otherwise unembellished lay French government curriculum.
A royalist, as are all devout French Catholics, Delormel steadfastly extenuated the arrogance and cruelty of French monarchs by insisting that they were, after all, “good Christians.” It is true that kings and queens, when not making war, presiding over orgiastic banquets or fornicating with courtiers and servants alike, spent much time genuflecting in their private gilded chapels on ermine stoles and rich brocades while their vassals lived in squalor, starved and died of consumption. Distant abstractions, the horrors of the Crusades and the Inquisition elicited a kind of nostalgia from Delormel, if not a malicious admiration stripped of all misgivings for the atrocities committed in their name.
Montvert remembered learning about the events that took place on the night of August 23, 1572, better known as the Saint-Bartholomew massacre, during which 3,000 Huguenots were slaughtered in the streets of Paris on orders of her majesty, the unscrupulous but “Very Catholic” Queen of France, Catherine de Medici. News of the slaughter would be cheered by King Philip II, himself busy purging Spain of Protestants, Jews and Moors, and by Pope Gregory XIII who, for lack of more pressing business, reformed the calendar. Reviewing the incident did not seem to evoke in Montvert’s teacher any discernible scruple.
Injecting personal bias into his instructions, Delormel presided over his own kangaroo court. He openly scorned the Huguenot Henri of Navarre, but lavished him with praise when, crowned Henri IV and fearful for his neck, he converted to Catholicism. “Paris is well worth a mass,” the king had sardonically remarked. Praise turned to condemnation when the king, now firmly enthroned, issued the Edict of Nantes, a decree restoring religious and political rights to French Protestants. A few chapters forward, the teacher applauded the edict’s revocation, 87 years later, by the “Sun King,” Louis XIV, the archetype warmongering despot whose conceit was eclipsed only by his lust for ostentation.
Fifty years hence, unaware of or utterly indifferent to the immense suffering his subjects endured, Louis XVI, who spent his reign tinkering with clocks, and his dizzy wife Marie-Antoinette, who plundered the nation’s coffers to keep the court royally entertained, elicited pity and sympathy from Montvert’s teacher.
“They were very pious and joined in prayer several times a day.”
As these enormities were being casually spouted, Montvert would retrieve from the depths of childhood memories Pathé and Fox newsreel footage of priests, their eyes turned to heaven sprinkling “holy water” on tanks and cannons and the fuselage of dive bombers so that Christians of one nation could wreak death and destruction upon Christians of another nation with the full blessings of Almighty God.
“A ‘God’ that takes sides,” Montvert had snickered, “is on nobody’s side.” Delormel had removed him from class for the obligatory ten minute stroll up and down the hallway, a workout designed to “clear the brain.”
The French Revolution, Monsieur Delormel insisted, was “an outrage masterminded by Jewish financiers, Freemasons, degenerate philosophers and other irreligious libertines.” This characterization, popular among Catholics, the titled and reactionaries, was nowhere to be found in the instruction manual Montvert had been issued -- nor in any history work he had since perused. He had found it amusing that, in reading assigned works by the chief “degenerate” French philosophers, Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, he and his fellow students had been encouraged to parse and emulate their elegant literary style but enjoined from embracing their “amoral teachings.”
“Imagine a student being told, ‘Write like Hemingway but take care not to espouse his leftist values….’ “Montvert was fond of saying.
The reign of terror that followed the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 was summarily blasted as a “grotesque act of barbarism against Christian values.” Yes, many innocent heads rolled during the two–year frenzy. But Monsieur Delormel could not bring himself to regard the insurrection as a cathartic spasm against centuries of misery and oppression or as the impetus that would help rid France, for the first time in history, of the yoke of feudalism, a dissolute clergy and a callous absolute monarchy.
The assassination, in his bathtub, of Jean-Paul Marat, a populist physician, lawyer, journalist and legislator in 1793, was flippantly dismissed as the “extirpation of a Jewish scoundrel by a brave Catholic young woman [Charlotte Corday].” Marat was not Jewish -- his parents were from Sardinia -- but Montvert’s teacher had a quirky sense of humor that did not prevent him from creating myth where none existed.
Plant doubt among the uninformed and you can make them believe anything.
In contrast, the beheading of two royal idlers who bankrupted France while they wined, dined, gambled, gathered in prayer, made war and cheered their dogs on helpless foxes, Monsieur Delormel insisted, was murder. Nor would he entertain the notion that revolution, as Montvert perilously argued, is a process, not an incident. Many people tend to judge the French Revolution as a single event rather than a trend whose seeds were sown centuries earlier. The burgeoning concepts of human rights, equality, suffrage and the abolition of monarchy had actually taken root one hundred years before the storming of the Bastille.
Precocious, inquisitive and innately skeptical, Montvert survived and outgrew Monsieur Delormel’s sinister brand of encoding. It wasn’t until his own son came home one day from school crying, “the teacher said that Jews murdered Jesus,” that he knew that chauvinism and encoding are alive and well, a new generation of freethinkers notwithstanding.
A student of history and, if he can help it, a history maker, Father Hubert François de Ravaillac is a model Knight. When not discharging his apostolic duties or struggling with his conflicted sexuality with a daily auto-erotic regimen of self-whipping, he studies the newly updated secret Knights of Malta curriculum, Recruitment and Training of an Auxiliary Army of God.” Filled with rapture at the thought that he is destined to play a unique role in God’s magnificent scenario, he savors and commits to memory the following gems:
… The war for Christ is a territorial war. The “territory” is the human mind. The more completely captured in its raw state, the sooner it can be led to embrace our sacred doctrines and, in turn, programmed to help spread it. Once the mind has been breached, the “political animal” is defeated; God triumphs and the Church can recapture the leadership and hegemony it once exercised in shaping the World in the Catholic tradition.
… In order to obtain optimal results, Christ’s Soldiers must be among the most devout and obedient Catholics. They must be highly motivated. They must clearly understand the solemn nature and grave consequences of their obligation, and they must steadfastly justify their actions if unmasked or challenged. Sworn to secrecy, under no less a penalty than excommunication and spiritual death, they must be willing to suffer the vicissitudes and discomforts associated with our Holy Struggle, our war against infidels, and they must endure the animosity their mission will engender until we rise victorious.
… Well established citizens -- doctors, attorneys, business tycoons, teachers, journalists, and community leaders, all God-fearing, pious, church-going Catholics, shall be considered prime candidates for recruitment.
… When their participation in what inevitably will appear to be a covert operation is revealed to them they must be eager to proceed and infiltrate their social and professional circles.
… They will in turn receive instruction in techniques of persuasion and control of target individuals and groups. Awareness of and dedication to our noble struggle will be reinforced by –-
Keeping the recruits highly motivated and inspired;
Encouraging the support of segments of society for an insurrection against heresy and for the overthrow and reconstruction of our current system of governance;
Impressing upon them that defeat will result in the adulteration and death of true Christianity, and in persecution;
Campaigning against avant-garde clergy, especially those who preach Liberation Theology, support the ordination of women to the priesthood, advocate the repeal of celibacy and endorse abortion, stem cell research and same-sex unions.
… Conscription will be carried out with due diligence in private consultations with recruiters who do not initially reveal their true identity. Recruits will then be informed that they are already inside the movement and that a change of heart is futile and carries severe penalties.
… Once trained, this legion of Christian soldiers will be charged with infiltrating unions, student groups, peasant organizations, school districts and regional legislative bodies.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
If the verbiage gives off a strange odor of sulfur it’s because it brazenly and tackily plagiarizes a clandestine and rather crude CIA training manual, Psychological Operations in Counterinsurgency Warfare, which was distributed in Nicaragua in the 80s by attaching clusters to balloons and floating them down into the countryside. Drafted in Spanish, the 90-page manual advised U.S.-backed Contra rebels to “kidnap and neutralize selected Nicaraguan government officials,” a directive interpreted by Contra leaders to include assassination. It also suggested blackmailing Nicaraguan citizens into joining the rebel cause.
On February 5, 1984, the House Intelligence Committee concluded that production of the manual by the CIA violated a 1982 law that forbids U.S. personnel from taking part in the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government. Printed in Honduras, about 2,000 copies were distributed in 1983 to guerrillas of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, the largest CIA-funded rebel force. Those attached to balloons were part of a 3,000-booklet edition cheaply printed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Predictably, the House Intelligence Committee’s ruling did not thwart future U.S. political, military and economic forays in Central America or, for that matter, elsewhere around the globe, all spearheaded by the CIA, which American author, Trevor Paglen, characterizes as
“an agency designed to operate outside the law … free to pursue its vision of a new world, to create new geographies, and to keep that world’s details far from the public record.”
At odds with the modern world, Father Hubert believes that Catholic activists have too often struggled between their faith and the misguided or wavering convictions of the flock. Perhaps the enactment of a Catholic sharia (modeled after Islam’s “divine” law) could greatly ease the Army of Christ’s awesome task. Perhaps such sharia could also include a fatwa, or decree, that sanctions, in the name of the Lord, the formation of death squads charged with the ritual execution of heretics and apostates. Spurning the lessons of history, trembling with sacramental fervor, Hubert François de Ravaillac, the descendant of Huguenot King Henry IV’s assassin will be ready if called. After all, he was named in honor of Saint Hubert, the patron saint of hunters.
