Are Dead Sea Scrolls & LSD and free drug "counter culture" two sides of the same medal? I was searching about the Dead Sea Scrolls, in order to understand better them. John Allegro tried in every way to present the Dead Sea Scroll as the smoking gun for which Christendom was a fabricated cult, from the sect of Essenes, among whom he alleged the use of psychoactive substances as mushrooms etc.: ------------------------------------------------
By that time, too, Allegro was understandably weary and disillusioned with the world of professional scholarship. For some time, he had been anxious to leave academia and sustain himself solely as a writer. He was also eager to return to his original chosen field, philology, and had spent some five years working on a book which derived from what he regarded as a major philological breakthrough.
The result of his efforts appeared in 1970 as The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross - the work for which Allegro today is most famous, and for which he is almost universally dismissed.
The argument in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross rests on complicated philological premises which we, like many other commentators, find difficult to accept. That, however, is incidental. Scholars tend all the time to expound their theories based on premises of varying validity, and they are usually, at worst, ignored, not publicly disgraced.
What turned The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross into a scandal were Allegro's conclusions about Jesus. In attempting to establish the source of all religious belief and practice, Allegro asserted that Jesus had never existed in historical reality, was merely an image evoked in the psyche under the influence of an hallucinatory drug, psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms.
In effect, he argued, Christianity, like all other religions, stemmed from a species of psychedelic experience, a ritualistic rite de passage promulgated by an orgiastic magic mushroom cult.
Taken separately, and placed in a different context, Allegro's conclusions would probably not have provoked the storm they did. Certainly reputable scholars before Allegro had questioned, and doubted, the existence of an historical Jesus. Some of them, for that matter, still do, though they are in a minority. And there is little dispute today that drugs - psychedelic and of other kinds -were used to at least some extent among the religions, cults, sects and mystery schools of the ancient Middle East - as indeed they were, and continue to be, across the world.
It is certainly not inconceivable that such substances were known to, and perhaps employed by, lst-century Judaism and early Christianity. One must also remember the climate and atmosphere of the late 1960s. Today, in retrospect, one tends to think in terms of the so-called 'drug culture' - in terms of a facile ersatz mysticism, of Ken Kesey and his 'Merry Pranksters', of Tom Wolfe and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, of hippies thronging the streets of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, staging 'love-ins' and 'be-ins' in Golden Gate Park.
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and
Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near
East is a 1970 book about the linguistics of early Christianity and fertility cults in the Ancient Near East. It was written by John Marco Allegro (1923–1988).[1][2] (......) His claims have often been subject to ridicule and scorn due to Allegro's unconventional theory. As Time magazine put it in an article headed "Jesus as mushroom",
To some biblical scholars in Britain, the new book looked like the
psychedelic ravings of a hippie cultist. To others, it was merely an
outlandish hoax. One described it as reading "like a Semitic
philologist's erotic nightmare."[3]
The Pharmacratic Inquisition 2007 2008 from YouTube Website
John Marco Allegro (born in London 17 February 1923, died 17 February 1988) was a freethinker who challenged orthodox views on the Dead Sea... all Scrolls, the Bible and the history of religion.
After service in the Royal Navy during World War II, Allegro started to train for the Methodist ministry but transferred to a degree in Oriental Studies at the University of Manchester.
In 1953 he was invited to become the first British representative on the international team working on the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls in Jordan.
The following year he was appointed assistant lecturer in Comparative Semitic Philology at Manchester, and held a succession of lectureships there until he resigned in 1970 to become a full-time writer. In 1961 he was made Honorary Adviser on the Dead Sea scrolls to the Jordanian government.
What happened next will no doubt change the course of religious history! Watch this short video and see for yourself. -----------------------------------------------
The Pharmacratic Inquisition DVD - Official Online Edition
Gnostic Media is proud
to present the official online edition of The Pharmacratic
Inquisition 2007. If you enjoyed “Zeitgeist - The Movie”, you will
love this video; the creators of this video are listed as one of the
sources for the Zeitgeist Movie.
The Pharmacratic Inquisition 2007
is a video version of the book, “Astrotheology & Shamanism” by
Jan
Irvin & Andrew Rutajit.
Thousands
of years ago, in the pre monarchic era, sacred plants and other entheogenic substances where politically correct and highly
respected for their ability to bring forth the divine, Yahweh, God,
The Great Spirit, etc., by the many cultures who used them.....etc. etc. etc.
After you click on "Gnostic Media" you get the site which contains an article where the apologizer of Allegro's work on mushrooms as "Christian's true bread", was indeed and agent of CIA:
http://www.gnosticmedia.com/McKenna-Agent Articles NEW MKULTRA DISCOVERY: Terence McKenna admited that he was a “deep background” and “PR” agent (CIA or FBI). August 23, 2013 • 214 Comments
Is it all an attempt by Gnostic Media to appear as "enemy" of CIA, and not a possible emanation of it? Accusing KcKenna to be an agent automatically they claim that the "psychedelic culture" is against CIA - and not an emanation of Intelligence Services and even more dark Gnostic entities. Going back to the Dead Sea Scroll we discover the trace of an hoax:
In 1883, M.H. Shapira, a Jerusalem antiquities dealer, offered to
sell fragments of an ancient manuscript of the biblical book of
Deuteronomy. On examination by leading scholars of the day, the
manuscripts were found to be forgeries. Disgraced and
humiliated, Shapira committed suicide in 1884.
In view of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some
contemporary scholars have suggested that the Shapira fragments
bear at least a surface resemblance to the Qumran manuscripts and
have advocated re-examining their authenticity. Unfortunately,
the Shapira fragments were sold at auction in 1885 and have since
disappeared.
M.H. Shapira's daughter Myriam penned a thinly veiled
fictionalized account of the scandal from the point of view of a
devoted daughter. Serialized in France under the title of "La
petite fille de Jerusalem," it was then translated into English
as "The Little Daughter of Jerusalem" and published in New York
and London.
In "The Shapira Affair," John Allegro, a leading scholar of the
Dead Sea Scrolls and a member of the original scroll team,
examined reproductions of the Shapira fragments in light of their
resemblance to the Qumran documents.
John Marco Allegro The Shapira Affair (Garden City, New York 1965) Printed book. General Collections, Library of Congress.
Myriam Harry La petite fille de Jerusalem La Petite Illustration ([Paris] 1914) Unbound serial. General Collections, Library of Congress.
Myriam Harry The Little Daughter of Jerusalem (New York, 1919) Printed book. General Collections, Library of Congress.
In the early 1950s, Professor Solomon Zeitlin of Dropsie
University in Philadelphia argued strenuously--on philological
grounds--that the antiquity of the Dead Sea Scrolls should be
rejected.Subsequent carbon-14 tests on their linen wrappers
firmly dated the finds to the late Second Temple Period and laid
to rest arguments concerning the antiquity of the scrolls.
Solomon Zeitlin The Dead Sea Scrolls and Modern Scholarship (Philadelphia, 1956) Printed book. Hebraic Section, African and Middle Eastern Division, Library of Congress. http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/deadsea.scrolls.exhibit/Today/lc.rel.mats.today.html
So case closed? Not properly. You know that Radiocarbon test is a question of....faith. In this page, if you have time to read it, you find a solid refutation of the millions/billions old age of earth, and a refutation of the method of radiocarbon as tool to deny a 6000 years old earth:
The average 14C estimated age for all the layers from these three time
periods was approximately 50,000 years. However, using a more realistic
pre-Flood 14C /12C ratio reduces that age to about 5,000 years.
But if even showing a credible age, a test can be also manipulated. If the outcome of a test is very important and involves powers of the darkness of this world, it can be conveniently "corrected" in order to give the desired outcome. Below see the original article:
"......Dr. Zeitlin based his argument on his study of “the internal evidence”
in the scrolls. He pointed out that the spelling of various Hebrew words
and terms which occur in the scrolls did not come into usage among the
Jews until the Middle Ages. He also indicated that the scrolls contained
references to Jewish laws which were not in vogue during the
pre-Christian period but were enacted centuries later. “If one assigned to Shakespeare the authorship of a newly-found
manuscript wherein there were words like Fabian, ‘telephone’,
‘automobile’, ‘New Deal’, and reference was made to laws which were
enacted in the Victorian age, would any student of English literature
regard the manuscript as that of Shakespeare?,” Prof. Zeitlin asked.
“Similar reasoning applies to the Dead Sea Scrolls,” he said......". Prof. Zeitlin Disputes Value of Dead Sea Scrolls for Judaism February 22, 1956 NEW YORK (Feb. 22) http://www.jta.org/1956/02/22/archive/prof-zeitlin-disputes-value-of-dead-sea-scrolls-for-judaism
In the case of the Dead Sea Scroll we can imagine the necessity to send their age very very very back in the past, before Christ, because the present (the fifties of Professor Solomon Zeitlin) were the age when the MK Ultra and Tavistock Institute were cooking the Acid Soup of the "counter-culture" based on LSD and mushrooms, a way to try to destroy the word of God and to attack the remnants of the Christians, especially in USA:
"....George Soros has spent at least $80million to get pot legalized in the US and Uruguay
The billionaire has funneled the money through various organizations across multiple states and Uruguay He reportedly has a road map to attack a handful of states each election cycle in order to eventually force the federal government's hand By Ryan Gorman Published: 22:14 GMT, 3 April 2014 | Updated: 00:11 GMT, 4 April 2014 Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2596471/George-Soros-spent-80million-pot-legalized-US-Uruguay.html#ixzz3w7SW7zEU Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook Pro-marijuana advocates have been backed by billionaire George Soros for years, a new report has revealed. Soros has funneled at least $80million towards legalization since 1994, and has been joined in his efforts by a former insurance executive who openly admitted he often smoked the drug. The billionaire’s money finds its way into local ballot initiatives around the world via the Drug Policy Alliance and the American Civil Liberties Union, according to a Washington Times report detailing his unrivalled support for drug legalization.....".
You have to give a look an article about old info, usually used to prop up the anti-Zionist agit prop front, anyway also here you can find some good info, just select it:
Marijuana is presented as "opposed" to chemical coke and heroin, but this is not all. There are other kind of drugs, which are friend of Marijuana, most of them are true gates for the possession of spirits. They are LSD, mushrooms, etc. Don't get fooled by these "counter cultures", and let be possessed by the only 'substance', the Holy Ghost:
26 But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you. John, 14:26
WikiLeaks
has come into possession of the contents of CIA chief John Brennan’s
email account, the whistle-blowing organization said on Wednesday. A
number of alleged documents have already been published.
Notice also on how Wiki-snake ("Wikileaks" dropping drops of Jesuitical poison) is only the proxy of Catholics In Action, aka "Central Intelligence Agency", the military long arm of the Gnostic Jesuits in the USA and in great part of the world, where C.I.A. substitutes opportunely the Jesuits' Order when necessity requires the discretion - just 5 (five) days before EU & Putin's Russia did murder the entire ruling class of Poland deemed to be an obstacle to the religious Catho-Orthodox unification, Wikileaks, a den of vipers, was used to create a diversive schock in the world with the footage of alleged US military war crimes in Iraq. It cannot be more evident:
"The site stated on its Twitter account on January 8, 2010, that it had a copy of gunsight footage of the incidents,[58] and announced that it would release it by March 21[citation needed].[59]The footage was released during anApril 5press conference at the National Press Club,
and subsequently under a designated website titled "Collateral Murder". ...."
5 April 2010. Only five days after the leak of Wikileaks, you have this:
Above image - The mass-assassination of the entire political ruling class of Poland, in RUSSIA, 10 April 2010 http://smolenskcrash.eu/home
Above excerpt exposing evidence on how Wikileaks has been used to conceal the mass-assassination of Smolensk 2010 "air crash", with a perfect media timing, quoted in:
Which else better words than the one of our Lord, for Wikileaks and the power behind it?
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are as graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not aware of them. Luke, 11:44
Other important links in References Under the article on CIA and Catholicism.
Disclaimer for the following reported article: the article being not inspired by GOD but by an un-godly common secular view of life, of course supports the Jesuits' poisonous narrative for which
the Catholic church used her CIA to persecute the "poor Latin America progressive priests", and to "suppress the Liberation Theology". This is completely false. This narrative comes from the same CIA, as her role was to stir up Catholic hate
against the North America not yet under complete religious control of
the Jesuits, and to present the Catholic clergy as "martyr" of
"Protestant" inspired CIA, in consequence to prepare the ideological
hot-bed of the Ultramontanism in South America, where ONLY the Catholic
clergy (in reason of the "sanctification through martyrdoom") has the
right to say the last word even and just on secular matters of the
society. Just for this reason Hugo Chavez - not controllable secular leader - has been most likely murdered
by the Jesuits through their minion, Fidel Castro: http://avlesbeluskesexposed.blogspot.it/2013/03/just-in-time-for-election-of-new-pope.html
By Martin A. Lee | July/August 1983 Issue Mother Jones
One day in July 1944, as the Second World War raged throughout Europe,
General William “Wild Bill” Donovan was ushered into an ornate chamber
in Vatican City for an audience with Pope Pius XII. Donovan bowed his
head reverently as the pontiff intoned a ceremonial prayer in Latin and
decorated him with the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Sylvester, the
oldest and most prestigious of papal knighthoods. This award has been
given to only 100 other men in history, who “by feat of arms, or
writings, or outstanding deeds, have spread the Faith, and have
safeguarded and championed the Church.”
Although a papal citation of this sort rarely, if ever, states why a
person is inducted into the “Golden Militia,” there can be no doubt that
Donovan earned his knighthood by virtue of the services he rendered to
the Catholic hierarchy in World War II, during which he served as chief
of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime predecessor to
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 1941, the year before the OSS
was officially constituted, Donovan forged a close alliance with Father
Felix Morlion, founder of a European Catholic intelligence service known
as Pro Deo. When the Germans overran western Europe, Donovan helped
Morlion move his base of operations from Lisbon to New York. From then
on, Pro Deo was financed by Donovan, who believed that such an
expenditure would result in valuable insight into the secret affairs of
the Vatican, then a neutral enclave in the midst of fascist Rome. When
the Allies liberated Rome in 1944, Morlion re-established his spy
network in the Vatican; from there he helped the OSS obtain confidential
reports provided by apostolic delegates in the Far East, which included
information about strategic bombing targets in Japan.
Pope Pius XIIPope Pius’ decoration of Wild Bill Donovan marked the beginning of a
long-standing, intimate relationship between the Vatican and U.S.
intelligence that continues to the present day. For centuries the
Vatican has been a prime target of foreign espionage. One of the world’s
greatest repositories of raw intelligence, it is a spy’s gold mine.
Ecclesiastical, political and economic information filters in every day
from thousands of priests, bishops and papal nuncios, who report
regularly from every corner of the globe to the Office of the Papal
Secretariat. So rich was this source of data that shortly after the war,
the CIA created a special unit in its counterintelligence section to
tap it and monitor developments within the Holy See. But the CIA’s interest in the Catholic church is not limited to
intelligence gathering. The Vatican, with its immense wealth and
political influence, has in recent years become a key force in global
politics, particularly with Catholicism playing such a pivotal role in
Eastern Europe and Latin America. Unbeknownst to most Catholics, the
Vatican, which carefully maintains an apolitical image, not only has a
foreign office and a diplomatic corps, but also has a foreign policy.
And with Polish Communists embracing Catholicism and Latin American
Catholics embracing communism, the U.S. government and particularly the
CIA have recently taken a much greater interest in Vatican foreign
policy. A year-long Mother Jones investigation has revealed a number of
unlikely channels — both overt and covert — which the agency uses to
bring its influence to bear upon that policy. Since World War II, the CIA has:
subsidized a Catholic lay organization that served as the political
slugging arm of the pope and the Vatican throughout the Cold War;
penetrated the American section of one of the wealthiest and most powerful Vatican orders;
passed money to a large number of priests and bishops — some of whom became witting agents in CIA covert operations;
employed undercover operatives to lobby members of the Curia (the
Vatican government) and spy on liberal churchmen on the pope’s staff who
challenged the political assumptions of the United States;
prepared intelligence briefings that accurately predicted the rise of liberation theology; and
collaborated with right-wing Catholic groups to counter the actions of progressive clerics in Latin America.
It was in this last regard that the CIA supported factions within the
Catholic church that were instrumental in promoting and electing the
current pope, John Paul II, whose Polish nationalism and anti-Communist
credentials, they thought, would make him a perfect vehicle for U.S.
foreign policy. John Paul’s recent trip to Nicaragua could not have been
matched by any American’s for the contribution it made to President
Reagan’s Central American initiative. And hopes are high in Washington,
D.C., that the pope’s forth-coming trip to Poland, where 90 percent of
the people are Catholic, will respark the anti-Soviet uprising so vital
to Reagan’s plans for Eastern Europe. Dark Knight of the Soul Every year in late June a bizarre ritual takes place in Rome. Men and
women fly in from all over the world to participate in a ceremony that
has been performed for centuries. Next year, the assembled might find
CIA director William Casey in their midst. And Casey could well be
accompanied by former Secretary of State Alexander Haig. If they make the journey, Casey and Haig will join a gathering of the
world’s Catholic elite on St. John’s Day. Dressed in scarlet uniforms
and black capes, brandishing swords and waving flags emblazoned with the
eight-pointed Maltese cross, these Catholic brothers and sisters will,
in an atmosphere of pomp and circumstance befitting a coronation, swear
allegiance to the defense of the Holy Mother Church. Casey
and Haig are both members of the Knights of Malta, a legendary Vatican
order dating back to the Crusades, when the “warrior monks” served as
the military arm of the Catholic church. The knights, in their
latter-day incarnation as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM),
are a historical anomaly. Although the order has no land mass other than
a small headquarters in Rome, this unique papal entity holds the status
of nation-state. It mints coins, prints stamps, has its own
constitution and issues license plates and passports to an accredited
diplomatic corps. The grand master of the order, Fra Angelo de Mojana di
Cologna, holds a rank in the church equal to a cardinal and is
recognized as a sovereign chief of state by 41 nations with which the
SMOM exchanges ambassadors. But the real power of the order lies with the lay members, who are
active on five continents. Nobility forms the backbone of the SMOM; more
than 40 percent of its 10,000 constituents are related to Europe’s
oldest and most powerful Catholic families. Wealth is a de facto
prerequisite for a knightly candidate, and each must pass through a
rigorous screening. Protestants, Jews, Muslims and divorced or separated
Catholics are ineligible. “The eight-pointed white cross stands out everywhere as a symbol of
charity toward mankind and as a comfort and consolation to the sick and
the poor,” says Cyril Toumanoff, official historian of the SMOM. In
recent years its members have carried on the Hospitaler tradition of the
original knights by supporting international health care and relief
efforts. They proudly offer aid to the needy regardless of race, creed
or religious affiliation. But the needy aided by certain SMOM members in the late ’40s were
some of the 50,000 Nazi war criminals who, with the assistance of the
International Red Cross, were furnished fake Vatican passports and, in
some cases, clerical robes, and were smuggled on Bishop Alois Hudal’s
“underground railroad” to South America. Among those was Klaus Barbie,
the “butcher of Lyons.” In 1948, the SMOM gave one of its highest awards of honor, the Gran
Croci al Merito con Placca, to General Reinhard Gehlen, Adolf Hitler’s
chief anti-Soviet spy. (Only three other people received this award.)
Gehlen, who was not a Catholic, was touted as a formidable ally in the
holy crusade against godless Marxism. After the war he and his
well-developed spy apparatus — staffed largely by ex-Nazis — joined the
fledgling CIA. Eventually, hundreds more Nazis ended up on the U.S.
government’s payroll. Among them was Klaus Barbie. “The CIA very early on made a decision that Nazis were more valuable
as allies and agents than as war criminals,” says Victor Marchetti, an
ex-CIA officer who was raised a Catholic. Marchetti is disturbed by the
role of the CIA and his church in perpetuating the Nazi outrage. “It
gets a little crazy,” he said, “when you let one thing [anticommunism]
take over to the extent that you forgive everything else.” The
SMOM had given a different prestigious award in 1946 to another
high-level CIA operative, James Jesus Angleton. “It had to do with
counterintelligence,” Angleton told Mother Jones, when asked why he was
chosen for such a distinction. During World War II, Angleton was head of
the Rome station of the OSS. Later, on his return to Washington, he ran
what was tantamount to the “Vatican desk” for the CIA. According to
Angleton, the agency does not have a Vatican desk. Nor does it have an
Israel desk, for that matter, yet Angleton also covered that area. The
extreme sensitivity associated with Israel and the Vatican required that
work relating to them be buried among Angleton’s counterintelligence
staff, which was well-suited for such assignments. During the early years of the Cold War, Angleton organized an
elaborate spy network that enabled the CIA to obtain intelligence
reports sent to the Vatican by papal nuncios stationed behind the Iron
Curtain and in other “denied” areas. This was, at the time, one of the
few means available to the CIA of penetrating the Eastern Bloc. According to previously classified State Department memoranda,
Angleton recommended that the CIA fund Catholic Action, an Italian lay
organization headed by Luigi Gedda, a prominent right-wing ideologue who
had also been honored by the knights. Gedda was a key operative in an
effort undertaken by the CIA and the Vatican to “barricade the Reds” in
the 1948 Italian elections. Only weeks before the election, it appeared
the Italian Communist party would prevail. The CIA and the Vatican both
feared the Communists might win unless drastic measures were taken. At the behest of Pope Pius XII, Gedda mobilized a huge propaganda
machine. More than 18,000 “civic committees” were formed to get out the
anti-Communist vote. The Christian Democrats scored a decisive victory.
Catholic Action is credited with turning the tables. Catholic Action continued to be a dominant factor in Italian politics
throughout the Cold War. It had great influence on trade unions and
youth groups in Italy-groups that were heavily subsidized by the CIA,
then under the leadership of Alien Dulles. Christian Democratic
politicians and church figures were also among the beneficiaries of the
CIA’s largess, which exceeded $20 million per year in the 1950s. The
agency provided “project money” to numerous priests and bishops, usually
in the form of contributions to their favorite charities. Often, these
prelates were unaware of the true source of these funds. “We would
consider people of this sort as our allies,” recalls Victor Marchetti,
“even though they may not consider themselves in any way allied with
us.” Amazing Grace The American section of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta has
about 1,000 members — including 300 “dames.” They represent the vanguard
of American Catholicism, the point at which the Vatican and the U.S.
ruling elite intersect. “The Knights of Malta comprise what is perhaps
the most exclusive club on earth,” Stephen Birmingharn, the social
historian, has written. “They are more than the Catholic
aristocracy…[they] can pick up a telephone and chat with the pope.” And who are the American Knights? Mother Jones managed to obtain part
of the secret membership list. On it we found some familiar names: Lee
lacocca of Chrysler; Spyros Skouras, the shipping magnate; Robert
Abplanalp, the aerosol tycoon and Nixon confidant; Barren Hilton of the
hotel chain; John Volpe, former U.S. ambassador to Italy; and William
Simon, who served as both treasury secretary and energy czar in the
1970s. At least one former envoy to the Vatican, Robert Wagner (the
ex-mayor of New York), and the current emissary to the Vatican, William
Wilson, are also members of the Knights of Malta. But there is one
institution that stands out as the center of the SMOM in the United
States — W.R. Grace & Company. J. Peter Grace, the company chairman,
is also president of the American section of SMOM. No less than eight
knights, including the chancellor of the order, John D.J. Moore (who was
ambassador to Ireland under Nixon and Ford), are directors of W.R.
Grace. J.
Peter Grace has a long history of involvement with CIA-linked
enterprises, such as Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, which was the
brainchild of General Rein-hard Gehlen. He is also the board chairman of
the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), which has
collaborated with multinational corporations and their client
dictatorships in Latin America to squelch independent trade unions. Up
to $100 million a year of CIA funds were pumped into “trustworthy” labor
organizations such as AIFLD, whose graduates, according to AIFLD
executive director William Doherty, were active in covert operations
that led to the military coup in Brazil in 1964. During the early 1970s,
Francis D. Flanagan, the Grace representative in Washington, D. C., was
a member of ITT’s “Ad Hoc Committee on Chile,” which was instrumental
in planning the overthrow of Salvador Allende. AIFLD’s National Workers’
Con-federation subsequently served as the chief labor mouthpiece for
the Pinochet junta. There are many other knights with CIA connections. Clare Boothe Luce,
for example, the grande dame of American diplomacy, served as a U.S.
ambassador to Italy in the 1950s and is now a member of the President’s
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which oversees covert operations.
William Buckley, Jr., a former CIA operative and the editor of the
National Review, is a member, as is his brother James, a former senator
from New York and now undersecretary of state for security assistance. Targeting the Pope The
American section of the SMOM is one of the main channels of
communication between the CIA and the Vatican. Of course, neither party
will acknowledge this. “The Knights of Malta is an honorific society of
Catholics. That’s all it is. … It has no political function,” asserts
former CIA director William Colby, who declined an invitation to join
the illustrious order. (“I’m a little lower key,” he confessed.) Technically speaking, Colby is correct; the knights do not have an
explicit political function. They would never approach the Vatican with a
message from the CIA. Nor would the Vatican ever openly ally itself
with the political aims of the CIA. “Obviously, this is a dynamite type
of proposition,” explains Victor Marchetti. “I’m sure that in the
clandestine area there was real consideration of how to influence the
Vatican, but you’ll never find a paper trail within the agency
establishing an operational objective. A covert action of this sort is a
very complex and sophisticated sort of thing…How much pressure the CIA
would dare to exert on the Vatican is debatable. It would have to be
done indirectly, on an informal basis.” This is where the American section of the SMOM fits in. “They all
belong to the same club,” says Marchetti. “One happens to be the
director of the CIA, and another is a cardinal. When they get together
and fraternize on a social basis, they exchange ideas and opinions as
private individuals. But how do you separate the private individual from
the professional?” During the 1950s and the early 1960s, relations between the U.S. and
the Vatican were conducted largely through Francis Cardinal Spellman,
the “Grand Protector and Spiritual Advisor” to the SMOM’s American wing.
An ultra-conservative ideologue, Spellman served as the right arm of
Pope Pius XII and was a vocal supporter of U. S. military involvement in
Vietnam. But
relations have not always been smooth, because Vatican policy has not
always pleased American knights. In the early 1960s, Pope John XXIII
took major steps to liberalize the church and to open a dialogue with
the East. By doing so, he shifted papal policy from the strict
anti-Communist line of his predecessor, Pius XII. John XXIII felt that the Vatican had to adopt a more flexible posture
— both socially and politically — if the church was to endure as a
relevant institution. His attempts at rapprochement with the Soviet
Union caught everybody by surprise and sent Vatican watchers at the CIA
into a frenzy. But the agency had to step up its intelligence activity
in the Vatican most cautiously, as the Kennedy ad-ministration was
bending over backward to avoid any overt association with the Holy See.
Kennedy, America’s only Catholic president, was so consumed by the
possibility of a Protestant backlash that he rebuffed the pope’s efforts
to mediate a thaw in East-West relations. Meanwhile Khrushchev, the
supposed atheist, welcomed the pontiffs diplomatic overtures. In May 1963, John McCone, a member of the SMOM and then director of
the CIA, received a memorandum from James Spain, of the agency’s Office
of National Estimates, on the ramifications of Pope John’s policies.
There is “no doubt,” wrote Spain in the recently declassified 15-page
memo, entitled “Change in the Church,” “that vigorous new currents are
flowing in virtually every phase of the church’s thinking and
activities. . . . [this has] resulted in a new approach toward Italian
politics which is permissive rather than positive.” When Spain visited the Vatican, posing as a scholar on a foreign
service grant, he voiced his concerns about major gains made by the
Italian Left in the 1963 election. Many felt the Left’s success was
attributable to Pope John’s conciliatory attitude toward the Communists.
This was the first election in which the Christian Democrats were not
officially endorsed by the Italian Bishops’ Conference. The pope had
insisted upon maintaining a neutral stance so as not to jeopardize his
Soviet initiative. Speaking with officials of the Curia, Spain discovered a great deal
of discontent regarding the direction in which the church was moving.
Some even suggested to him that the pope was “politically naive and
unduly influenced by a handful of ‘liberal’ clerics.” He heard tales
about “the moral and political unreliability of [the pope’s] young
collaborators.” Among those who were particularly concerned by Pope
John’s policies, according to Spain’s report to McCone, were members of
the Roman aristocracy and the papal nobility, who, according to Spain,
had lost many of their traditional privileges when Pius XII died. A Holy Mole John McCone now took a personal as well as professional interest in
the Vatican situation. Thomas Kalamasinas, the station chief in Rome,
was instructed to raise the priority of the Vatican spying operation.
But the CIA ran into a snag when it learned that some of its best
contacts — for example, the conservative prelates who held key posts in
the Extraordinary Affairs Section of the Papal Secretariat, which was
responsible for the implementation of Vatican foreign policy — were shut
out by John XXIII’s tendency to circumvent his own bureaucracy when
dealing with the Russians. The pope evidently feared that his diplomatic
efforts might be sabotaged by some Machiavellian monsignor. Thus, he
pursued his goal outside the normal channels of the Curia. A small group
of trusted collaborators served as couriers for the pope, who rarely
used the telephone to speak with anyone outside the Vatican for fear
that the line might be tapped. When John XXIII died in 1963, CIA analysts prepared a detailed report
predicting that Giovanni Cardinal Montini of Milan would be the next
pope. They were right. But more amazing than the prediction is the fact
that the agency was later able to confirm the identity of John’s
successor in advance of the official announcement. How was the CIA privy
to such information, given the excessive secrecy surrounding the
College of Cardinals during a papal election? Italian intelligence
sources maintained that the CIA bugged the conclave. Time magazine
correspondent Roland Flamini speculates in his book Pope, Premier,
President that the agency may have developed an informant among the
cardinals, who communicated with the CIA through a hidden electronic
transmitter. Giovanni Montini was no stranger to American intelligence. During
World War II, he worked in the Office of the Papal Secretariat and
passed information to a grateful OSS. Later he had a falling out with
Pope Pius XII and was “exiled” to Milan. This news was well-received by
Vatican watchers within the CIA, who had pegged Montini as a “liberal”.
Nevertheless, he remained an important figure in the church, with
extensive religious and political contacts. Every CIA station chief in
Italy made a point of getting to know him, and CIA “project money” was
donated to various orphanages and charities whose principal benefactor
was the archbishop of Milan. When
Montini became pope, taking the name Paul VI, he continued to pursue an
open-door policy with the Soviet Union. Leaders from Eastern Europe
were received on state visits (Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko
had seven meetings with Pope Paul), and many Vatican officials traveled
to Moscow for talks. Toward the end of his papacy, Paul VI let it be
known that he was not averse to a center-left coalition of the Italian
Communist party and the Christian Democrats. This infuriated hard-line
elements within the CIA. In 1976, the Georgetown University Center for
Strategic and International Studies, a conservative think tank,
sponsored a conference on the Communist threat in Italy. Panelists
included former CIA director William Colby (who was station chief in
Rome during the 1950s); Clare Boothe Luce, who was U.S. ambassador to
Rome at the same time; Ray Cline, another ex-CIA official; and John
Connally, then a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board. Their message, which doubtless reached the pope, was
unequivocal: Eurocommunism was a threat to U.S. security, and Marxists
must never be allowed to participate in the Italian government. This was not the first time pressures from outside the Vatican were
exerted on Pope Paul. In 1967, Paul authored a controversial encyclical,
Populorum Progressio, in which he criticized colonial repression and
recommended economic and social remedies that were widely interpreted as
a denunciation of capitalism. Shortly thereafter, an international
group of businessmen asked the Holy Father to “clarify” his economic
views. The delegation included George C. Moore, then chairman of
Citibank. Pope Paul subsequently issued a statement in which he denied
any hostility toward private enterprise. Liberation Theology Classified CIA studies prepared throughout the 1960s with titles such
as “The Catholic Church Reassesses Its Role in Latin America” depicted a
church with a commitment to economic and political reform. The studies
foresaw the emergence of “liberation theology,” which would provide the
theoretical basis for a “people’s church” that would establish itself in
Latin America in the early 1970s. Pope Paul helped fulfill the CIA’s
predictions by appointing socially conscious bishops and by encouraging
church activists who opposed South American military dictatorships.
Paul’s gesture toward the Left was, no doubt, a calculated maneuver
directed at the hearts and minds of the Catholic masses. Political
reality demanded the promotion of a palatable Christian alternative,
lest the brethren put their faith in “Saint” Fidel or Che Guevara. At
first, some CIA officials favored Paul’s reformist approach as an
effective antidote to communism, but as time went by a consensus
developed inside the agency that Paul VI had gone too far, that his
strategy would backfire and play into the hands of the Marxist
revolutionaries. As Pope Paul VI grew older, great concern developed within
intelligence circles over who would succeed him. Agency analysts drew up
profiles on leading papal candidates, identifying those who were likely
to be sympathetic to American interests. In 1977, Terence Cardinal
Cooke, the current Grand Protector and Spiritual Advisor of the SMOM,
traveled to Eastern Europe to discuss the matter of choosing a candidate
to succeed Pope Paul. During this sojourn, Cardinal Cooke met
personally with Karol Cardinal Wojtyla of Krakow, who was noted for his
anti-Communist leanings. Cooke’s coalition-building efforts bore fruit
the following year, after Paul’s successor, Pope John Paul I, died,
having served scarcely a month. (There were widespread rumors that he
had been poisoned.) In October 1978, the Vatican’s Sacred College of
Cardinals elected Karol Wojtyla as pontiff. The New Inquisition October
1976. Father Patrick Rice is dragged from his prison cell in Buenos
Aires by members of the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, a
paramilitary police agency. He has already been held incommunicado for
several days and has been beaten ruthlessly. The routine is about to
begin again: electric shock treatment, water torture that makes him feel
as if he is drowning. Throughout the ordeal he hears the screams of
other prisoners. Eventually he is transferred to police headquarters, in
which are passage walls covered with swastikas. “My Christian faith became very real to me,” remembers the priest,
who survived two months of captivity and recovered in a psychiatric
ward. Father Rice is one of the lucky ones. During the past 15 years, 1,500
priests, nuns and bishops have been murdered, imprisoned, tortured or
expelled from Latin America. “Any Christian who defends the poor,” says
Rice, “can expect to be persecuted and mistreated by the security
police.” Only a generation ago, the persecution of the Catholic clergy would
have been unthinkable, for the church had always sided with the
reactionary sectors of society — the wealthy landowners and the
military. But Pope John XXII’s vision of Catholicism as a community of
believers in and of the world sparked major reforms. His policies set
the stage for the historic gathering of Latin American bishops that took
place during the papacy of Paul VI at Medellin, Colombia, in 1968. It
was at this conference that the liberation theology predicted by the CIA
earlier in the decade was born. The bishops called upon the church to
“defend the rights of the oppressed” and recognize a “preferential
option for the poor” in the struggle for social justice. Liberation theology came to life in the form of thousands of
grassroots Christian communities that sprang up throughout Latin
America, where nine out of ten people are Catholic, and eight out of ten
are destitute. Within these groups, religion became less a ritualistic
phenomenon and more an inspiration to clergy and laity attempting to
remove the yoke of oppression from the poor. Some priests even began to
align themselves with the left-wing guerrillas engaged in armed struggle
against U.S.-backed regimes. “The Christian base communities are the
greatest threat to military dictatorships throughout Latin America,”
said Maryknoll Sister Ita Ford in late 1980, three weeks before she, two
other American nuns and Jean Donovan, a lay missionary worker, were
brutally murdered in El Salvador. The CIA was quick to recognize the “subversive” potential of
liberation theology and mounted an extensive campaign to undermine the
new movement. The agency’s strategy, formulated during the late 1960s
and early ’70s, when Richard Helms was director, was to exploit the
polarization between the activist clergy and those who still identified
with the established order (the holdovers from the Cold War era, when
missionaries were routinely employed as agents and informants). Toward
this end, as Penny Lernoux documents in her book Cry of the People, the
CIA used right-wing Catholic organizations in Latin America to harass
outspoken prelates and political reformers. The agency also trained and
financed police agencies responsible for the torture and murder of
bishops, priests and nuns, some of them U.S. citizens.
Archbishop Oscar RomeroIn 1975, the Bolivian Interior Ministry — a publicly acknowledged
subsidiary of the CIA — drew up a master plan for persecuting
progressive clergy. The scheme, dubbed the “Banzer Plan” — after Hugo
Banzer, Bolivia’s right-wing dictator (who retained Klaus Barbie as his
security advisor) — was adopted by ten Latin American governments. The
plan involved compiling dossiers on church activists; censoring and
shutting down progressive Catholic media outlets; planting Communist
literature on church premises; and arresting or expelling undesirable
foreign priests and nuns. The CIA also funded anti-Marxist religious
groups that engaged in a wide range of covert operations, from bombing
churches to overthrowing constitutionally elected governments. The
success of the Banzer Plan was vividly demonstrated in San Salvador in
the late 1970s, when an anonymous group distributed a leaflet that read:
“Be a Patriot! Kill a Priest!” A series of clerical assassinations
followed, culminating in the murder of the progressive and popular
Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. More
recently, the Reagan administration has sharpened its attack on
progressive elements of the church, both at home and abroad. The Santa
Fe Report, prepared for the Council for Inter-American Security and
presented in 1980 to the Republican Platform Committee by a team of
ultraconservative advisors, states that “U.S. foreign policy must begin
to counter (not react against) liberation theology as it is utilized in
Latin America by the ‘liberation theology’ clergy.” In order to garner
support for this policy, the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD),
an interdenominational organization, was established in 1981 with
funding from right-wing institutions, including the Smith ‘Richardson
and Sarah Scaife foundations, both of which have served as CIA financial
conduits. The IRD unleashed a propaganda drive against church activists
at the forefront of domestic opposition to U.S. aid to the government
of El Salvador and other repressive regimes in Latin America. The IRD
campaign has been highly successful, even reaching the pages of Reader’s
Digest, from where it was picked up by 60 Minutes. The Holy Mafia Under Casey, the CIA has continued its attack on progressive elements
within the church. Casey is also a member of the Sovereign Military
Order of Malta. Of
all the groups that are engaged in the U.S.-sponsored campaign against
liberation theology, none has played a more significant role than Opus
Dei (“God’s Work”). A fast-growing Catholic lay society whose political
activities are shrouded in secrecy, Opus Dei was founded in 1928 by Jose
Maria Escriva de Balaguer, a young Spanish priest and lawyer. Escriva
espoused complete obedience to church dogma. Today, there are more than
70,000 members of the order in 87 countries. Only a small percentage are
priests. The rest are mostly middle- and upper-class businessmen,
professionals, military personnel and government officials. Some are
university students. The members contribute regularly to the group’s
financial coffers and are encouraged to practice “holy shrewdness” and
“holy coercion” in an effort to win converts. Much of what is known about Opus Dei comes from ex-members such as
John Roche, a professor at Oxford University in England, who broke his
oath of secrecy after leaving the order. According to Roche,
self-flagellation with whips and spiked chains is a normal part of the
rigid spiritual discipline that Opus Dei imposes on its full-time
members, including college-age recruits of both genders. “Personal
identity suffers a severe battering: some are reduced to shadows of
their former selves, others become severely disturbed,” writes Roche in a
paper called “The Inner World of Opus Dei.” “Internally, it is
totalitarian and imbued with fascist ideas turned to religious purposes,
ideas which were surely drawn from the Spain of its early years. It is
virtually a sect or cult in spirit, a law unto itself, totally
self-centered, grudgingly accepting Roman authority because it still
considers Rome orthodox, and because of the vast pool of recruits
accessible to it as a respected Catholic organization.” In recent years, Opus Dei has emerged internationally as one of the
most powerful and politically committed of the Catholic lay groups.
Detractors have likened the organization to a “saintly Mafia,” for its
members control a large number of banks and financial institutions,
including Rumasa, the largest conglomerate in Spain’s private sector. In
the latter stages of the Franco regime, ten out of 19 cabinet officers
belonged to or were closely allied with Opus Dei. Despite the active
political role the order plays wherever it exists, Father Malcolm
Kennedy, an American spokesperson for Opus Dei, insists it is
“inconceivable…that Opus Dei leaders in any country would try to
influence political decisions.” The tentacles of “Octopus Dei,” as it is sometimes called, stretch
all the way to the U.S., where David Kennedy, former chairman of
Continental Illinois Bank and treasury secretary under Richard Nixon, is
said to be a “conspicuous friend” of the conservative religious order,
despite the fact that he is a Mormon. Continental Illinois owns shares
of an Opus Dei bank in Barcelona (for more on Kennedy’s links to the
church, see box, page 37). Opus Dei also controls a wide range of media assets (600 newspapers,
52 radio and TV stations, 12 film companies and 38 news agencies) and
sponsors educational and social programs in various countries. These
efforts have been endorsed by members of the American section of the
SMOM such as William Simon (Citicorp) and Francis X. Stankard (Chase
Manhattan Bank), who have spoken at Opus Dei seminars and other
functions of the group. “One of the problems that Opus Dei runs into,” says Sargent Shriver, a
cooperating (not full-time) member of the order and a former Democratic
candidate for vice president, “is that a lot of Catholics join the
organization, and they’re doing this, that and the other thing, and Opus
Dei becomes tainted because of them.” This is particularly true in Latin America. In Chile, for example,
Opus Dei elicited support from Chilean bishops for the overthrow of
President Salvador Allende and worked closely with CIA-funded
organizations such as the Fatherland and Liberty goon squads, which
subsequently merged with DINA, the dreaded Chilean secret police. In
1971, the CIA began financing the Chilean Institute for General Studies
(IGS), which has been described as an Opus Dei think tank. Its members
include lawyers, free-market economists and executives from influential
publications. One of the leading IGS staffers was Hernan Cubillos,
founder of Que Pasa, an Opus Dei magazine, and publisher of El Mercurio,
the largest newspaper in Santiago (and one that was subsidized by the
CIA). After the coup, a number of IGS technocrats became cabinet members
and advisors to the Pinochet junta; Cubillos served as foreign
minister. Opus Dei powerbrokers have gained enormous influence inside the
Vatican since they helped install the current pope. The courting of John
Paul II began when he was still the archbishop of Krakow. He was asked
to speak at Opus Dei colleges and at the group’s international
headquarters in Rome. In an effort to enhance Wojtyla’s image as
papabile, these speeches were printed by Opus Dei in book form and
circulated among members of the Vatican hierarchy. When Karol Wojtyla
became pope, he returned the favor by elevating Opus Dei to the unique
status of a “personal prelature.” Critics of Opus Dei fear that the
pope’s edict will allow its members to elude the authority of local
bishops in special circumstances, thereby strengthening the order’s
tendency to function as a “church within a church.” This was an
important victory for Opus Dei, which had been rebuffed on previous
occasions by both Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI. The decision to upgrade the status of Opus Dei appears to be part of
an over-all strategy to counter the influence of Jesuits and other
progressive clerics active in the liberation theology movement. Pope
John Paul II’s feud with the Jesuits came to a head in October 1981,
when he suspended the order’s constitution and replaced its ailing
superior general, Father Pedro Arrupe, with a Jesuit of his own
choosing. Many Jesuits have caused turmoil in the ‘Vatican by
questioning papal pronouncements on birth control, priestly celibacy,
the barring of women from the priesthood and, most significantly,
clerical involvement in politics. Because it is predominantly a lay
organization, Opus Dei is exempt from these rules. The pope recently
asked leaders of Opus Dei, which thus far has kept out of Communist
countries, to begin operating in Poland. It is rather ironic that John Paul II should chastise priests for
engaging in political activity when he is by far the most overtly
political pope of modern times. A strong patriot, John Paul has even
threatened to fight alongside his countrymen should the Soviets try to
crush the workers’ rebellion in Poland. And his political activism has
not only included well-publicized trips and rhetorical speeches. With
his approval, the Vatican quietly funneled $40 million to Solidarity.
But despite the pontiff’s support for the Polish union — and the issuing
of an encyclical in strong defense of the rights of labor — his
sympathies do not extend to the rights of workers in Vatican City: he
has opposed demands for decent wages by the Vatican’s low-paid
employees, and there have even been rumblings of a possible strike. The New Strategy When John Paul II assumed the papacy nearly five years ago. Catholics
the world over wondered whether he was the right person to lead their
700 million members (the world’s largest religious denomination). He was
a unique choice in many respects: the first non-Italian pope since the
16th century, the first pope from a Communist country and the only
modern-day pope (aside from his short-lived predecessor) with no work
experience in the Curia. John Paul II came to the Vatican during troubled times for
Catholicism. Political upheavals in Poland and Latin America promised to
make the new pope’s job more than that of spiritual leader. Karol
Wojtyla knew that, as did the cardinals who elected him. And the CIA,
which knew that another John XXIII could spell disaster for U.S. foreign
policy, doubtless brought its influence to bear on the election through
Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta. Thus far it seems likely that the
agency is, on balance, fairly pleased with the pope’s performance. John Paul II has shown himself to be an aggressive and wily
statesman. In 1979, during his first trip to Latin America, he drew
enormous and enthusiastic crowds wherever he spoke. Each message was
carefully tailored to each audience. At one stop he would stress
religious discipline and devotion, seemingly at the expense of social
commitment; at the next he would use stronger language than any previous
pope defending the rights of the oppressed. Conservative Vatican
watchers in the CIA undoubtedly blanched when he told 40,000 Mexican
Indians, “You have a right to be respected and not deprived of the
little you have, often by methods that amount to plunder. You have a
right to throw down the barriers of exploitation.” Yet the pope’s deeds often do not reflect his words. Earlier this
year, he gave the cardinal’s red hat to Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, a
Colombian sympathizer with Opus Dei and a staunch opponent of liberation
theology. Inside the Vatican, Lopez Trujillo is considered the protege
of Sebastiano Cardinal Baggio, another Opus Dei ally, who heads the
Pontifical Commission for Latin America (the pope’s main source of
information on events in that region). One of Lopez Trujillo’s closest
aides is Roger Vekemans, a Belgian priest who received as much as $5
million from the CIA during the 1960s, which he in turn gave to
anti-Communist organizations in Chile. Vekemans has also written
articles and books condemning church activists and liberation theology. In October 1982, President Reagan sent his roving ambassador, General
Vernon Walters, a devout Catholic, to confer with John Paul II. The
pope may have wondered why Reagan would select a former deputy director
of the CIA, one who had been involved, both before and after he joined
the agency, in some of its most notorious coups: Iran, 1953; Brazil,
1964; Chile, 1973. More recently, Walters has played a key role in organizing CIA-backed
Nicaraguan exile groups based in Honduras who are seeking to overthrow
the Sandinista government by force. Not surprisingly, the situation in
Latin America was one of the main issues that Walters discussed with the
pope. He also attempted to convince the Holy Father that the American
bishops had erred in drafting their pastoral letter opposing nuclear
weapons. Although John Paul II stood fast on the nuclear question, soon
after Walters left the pope did demand that five priests with official
positions in the Nicaraguan government resign from office. The Split Five
months later, in March 1983, John Paul II himself visited Nicaragua
during an eight-day swing through Central America. Before a large
audience in Managua, he attacked the “people’s church” as “absurd and
dangerous,” implying that the only role the church had in Nicaragua was
to oppose the Sandinistas. Such an outspoken repudiation of liberation
theology, delivered in the only Latin American country that can claim a
revolution with significant Catholic participation, must have been
well-received within the CIA. The pope’s condemnation of the Nicaraguan revolution coincided with a
dramatic increase in border raids from Honduras by CIA-trained exile
groups. But perhaps more damaging than the military actions was the
psychological impact of the pope’s refusing to pray for the souls of
Nicaraguans killed by Somozistas, despite the pleadings of wives and
mothers who wept openly before him. And injury was later added to injury
when the pope did pray for six “suspected subversives” who had been
executed by Guatemala’s Protestant dictator Efrain Rios Montt. Whether
or not it was his intention, John Paul II had, in effect, given his
blessing to the CIA’s campaign to destabilize the Sandinista government. [= a lie. This article is also quite fully permeated by Jesuits' ideological poison. Jesuits wanted to stir hate against Protestants (& Baptists) with a choreographed theatrical farce their Pope had to play, in the role of the "poor Catholic Pope hostage of the Protestant thirsty of power". The farcical blessing of Wojtyla had to arise the suspicion that the Protestants were the true ones guilty. This article is still a marvelous example on how you can be still anti-Baptist and anti-Protestant remaining externally with "anti-Vatican" clothes.] Such developments reaffirm the significance of the Catholic church as
an intelligence priority, and the CIA undoubtedly will continue to
utilize its contacts in the Vatican and in conservative lay orders to
bring its influence to bear on the papal chambers. But the agency
realizes that much has changed since the days when all good Catholics
obediently toed the line of the Vatican hierarchy and Catholic churchmen
at all levels cooperated willingly with American intelligence. The
Catholic church, once a rock-solid monolith, is now in a state of flux.
The new church poses an enormous challenge to the agency. The pontiff is
no longer an absolute monarch. The papacy has become a point of
convergence for a multiplicity of forces, an arena in which competing
ideologies vie for influence. The CIA, accordingly, has gradually
revised its strategy from one of using the church to one of splitting
the church. By encouraging internecine conflict between progressive and
reactionary church elements, it has made a direct assault on John Paul
II’s cherished ideal of a unified church that can speak to and for all
people. For his own part, the pope has attempted to walk a fine line,
acknowledging the need for social reform while expressing disdain for
the grassroots movements that also advocate it. He cannot embrace
progressive Catholic organizations, because they threaten to undermine
papal authority. The mixed signals John Paul II has been sending his
bishops in Latin America (where more than half the world’s Catholics
will reside by the year 2000) are evidence of the dilemma he faces. To
the extent that he denounces injustice and oppression, he risks the
wrath of the CIA. But if he fails to be a sufficient critic of fascist
governments that kill priests and nuns, many of his followers will seek
other roads to salvation. And John Paul II’s dilemma promises to get worse before it gets
better. Despite the best efforts of the CIA, liberation theology is
spreading to countries such as Thailand, South Korea and the
Philippines, where activist priests are also being persecuted by
U.S.-backed dictatorships. As liberation theology spreads throughout the East, it seems certain
that Asian Catholics will soon be repeating the popular South American
aphorism: “When the CIA goes to church, it doesn’t go to pray.”
Pope Francis’ Junta Past: Argentine Journalist on New Pontiff’s Ties to Abduction of Jesuit Priests
Casey
and Haig are both members of the Knights of Malta, a legendary Vatican
order dating back to the Crusades, when the “warrior monks” served as
the military arm of the Catholic church. The knights, in their
latter-day incarnation as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM),
are a historical anomaly. Although the order has no land mass other than
a small headquarters in Rome, this unique papal entity holds the status
of nation-state. It mints coins, prints stamps, has its own
constitution and issues license plates and passports to an accredited
diplomatic corps. The grand master of the order, Fra Angelo de Mojana di
Cologna, holds a rank in the church equal to a cardinal and is
recognized as a sovereign chief of state by 41 nations with which the
SMOM exchanges ambassadors.
J.
Peter Grace has a long history of involvement with CIA-linked
enterprises, such as Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, which was the
brainchild of General Rein-hard Gehlen. He is also the board chairman of
the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), which has
collaborated with multinational corporations and their client
dictatorships in Latin America to squelch independent trade unions. Up
to $100 million a year of CIA funds were pumped into “trustworthy” labor
organizations such as AIFLD, whose graduates, according to AIFLD
executive director William Doherty, were active in covert operations
that led to the military coup in Brazil in 1964. During the early 1970s,
Francis D. Flanagan, the Grace representative in Washington, D. C., was
a member of ITT’s “Ad Hoc Committee on Chile,” which was instrumental
in planning the overthrow of Salvador Allende. AIFLD’s National Workers’
Con-federation subsequently served as the chief labor mouthpiece for
the Pinochet junta.
