by W. E. Gutman
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 m
yth 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: