The Inquisition

by Michael Baigent

  Such an assessment would undoubtedly have commended itself to Pope Pius IX. It might well find favour, too, with Cardinal Ratzinger.

  On 19 September 1846, two peasant children – Mélanie Mathieu, aged fourteen, and Maximin Giraud, aged eleven – were minding livestock on a stony hilltop meadow overlooking the village of La Salette in the French Alps. In a ravine just below they saw a circle of bright light, within which, when they drew closer, they found a beautiful woman wearing a crown and weeping. Over her dress, according to Mélanie, she wore a pinafore which shone ‘more brilliant than several suns put together’, woven not of earthly cloth but of some scintillating otherworldly substance.21 Speaking through her tears, the woman told the children she had important news to confide to them. Unless everyone submitted to God's will, she said, Christ himself might abandon them. And then:

  All the civil governments will have one and the same plan, which will be to abolish and do away with every religious principle, to make way for materialism, atheism, occultism and vice of all kinds.22

  One wonders what two untutored and probably illiterate peasant children might have made of so weighty a pronouncement couched in so sophisticated a vocabulary. Apparently, however, the Virgin gave them no time to reflect, going on to criticise world leaders – including, seemingly, the Pope himself.

  The chiefs, the leaders of the people of God, have neglected prayer and penance, and the devil has bedimmed their intelligence. They have become wandering stars which the old devil will drag with his tail to make them perish.23

  There then followed an apocalyptic prediction:

  God will abandon mankind to itself and will send punishments which will follow one after the other for more than thirty-five years. The society of men is on the eve of the most terrible scourges and of gravest events. Mankind must expect to be ruled with an iron rod and to drink from the chalice of the wrath of God.24

  And the year 1864 was singled out for particularly worrisome notice:

  In the year 1864, Lucifer, together with large numbers of demons, will be unloosed from Hell. They will put an end to faith little by little… Evil books will be abundant on earth.25

  Cardinal Fornari, the Papal Nuncio to France at the time, declared himself ‘terrified’ by these predictions. The Vatican's hierarchy appears to have shared his sentiments, but officially acknowledged and accepted the validity of the Virgin of La Salette in 1851. The revelations were not made public, however, until some time later – which may perhaps explain why, when they were, the Virgin seemed to have been speaking in a voice strikingly similar to Pius IX's. By 1864, the most ‘evil’ books had indeed become abundant. Darwin's Origin of Species had appeared in 1859, Renan's Life of Jesus in 1863, and the compilers of the Index had no shortage of material to keep them occupied. In other respects, 1864 was nasty enough, witnessing as it did the climax of the American Civil War and Bismarck's six-day military triumph over puny Denmark; but one might just as well point to any of a number of other years, shortly before or shortly after, which could make equally plausible claims to demonic intervention. The predicted thirty-five years of ‘punishments’ would have extended until 1881. In that time, traumatic events unquestionably did occur. France was defeated in the Franco-Prussian War and the Second Empire toppled. Germany and Italy were both united. The Papacy was divested of its last vestiges of secular power. But the world survived; and in compensation for his loss of temporal dominion, the Pope acquired infallibility.

  On 11 February 1858, twelve years after her appearance at La Salette, the Virgin made one of her most celebrated appearances - to the young Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes. She identified herself as the ‘Immaculate Conception’ – which was convenient because Pius IX, only four years before, had officially established the Immaculate Conception as dogma, and the manifestation at Lourdes ‘was the first affirmation of a declaration that Mary was conceived without original sin’.26 At Lourdes, however, she seems to have refrained from any dire political pronouncements, confining herself to extolling penitence, the living of a pure life and the use of the rosary as a deterrent to satanic importunities.

  If Marian apparitions pre-date the events at Fátima, they also post-date them. Since 1917, visions of the Virgin have occurred in Italy, Spain, Ireland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Hungary, Austria, Holland, India, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Russia, the Ukraine, Croatia, Egypt, Venezuela and Mexico. A significant number of these visitations were accompanied by apocalyptic messages. One such occurred on 20 December 1953, to a woman near the village of Dubovytsya in the Ukraine. Appearing during a recitation of the Mass, the Virgin announced that

  disaster is upon us as in the times of Noah. Not by flood but by fire will the destruction come. An immense flood of fire shall destroy nations for sinning before God. Since the beginning of the world there has never been such a fall as there is today. This is the kingdom of Satan. Rome is in danger of being destroyed, the Pope of being killed.27

  The date of this prediction renders it explicable enough. Two years earlier, the Soviet Union had tested its first atomic bomb, and the spectre of nuclear holocaust had established itself as a pervasive shadow brooding over the consciousness of the age. It has never been exorcised. On the contrary, it has since been joined by other, equally terrifying spectres.

  The Cold War, international terrorism, so-called ‘rogue’ states or governments and the impending millennium have all, during the last half century, conduced to a sense of apocalyptic doom. Thus, in 1962, a woman in Spain experienced an apparition of the Virgin who informed her there would be only two Popes after Paul VI – which would make the present pontiff the last.

  On 25 June 1981, a visitation occurred at Medjugorje, in what is now Croatia, which the Vatican is still debating whether or not to authenticate. The day after a fierce thunderstorm, two teenaged shepherdesses witnessed a mysterious light on a nearby hillside. Enclosed within the light was a woman whom the girls promptly took to be the Virgin. Since then, the apparition is reported to have appeared often. Her message, when she vouchsafes one, is frequently ominous: ‘I have come to call the world to conversion for the last time. After this period I will not appear any more on this earth.’28 On one occasion, she exhibited a commendable tolerance: ‘You are not true Christians if you do not respect other religions.’ Unfortunately, she then repudiated any such ecumenical spirit: ‘There is only one mediator between God and man, and it is Jesus Christ.’29 For the most part, however, her messages have been typically apocalyptic: ‘The hour has come when the demon is authorised to act with all his force and power.’30 And, even more urgently: ‘Punishment will come about if the world is not converted. Call all mankind to conversion. Everything depends on your conversion.’31

  The apparition at Medjugorje appeared jealous of other manifestations of herself, inveighing against false visions and warning that ‘many pretend to see Jesus and the Mother of God, and to understand their words, but they are, in fact, lying’.32 The problem for Cardinal Ratzinger and for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is to determine which are indeed to be declared false and which validated. They have more than enough to keep them occupied. By the early 1990s, there had been more than 260 recent apparitions of the Virgin, and that number is constantly increasing.

  The End of the Papacy?

  The prophecies of Fátima and other apparitions of the Virgin are not the only such doom-laden prophecies hanging over the Church. Both Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II are also said to be haunted by the prophecies of St Malachi. Malachi, an Irish monk, was born in Armagh in 1094 and died at Clairvaux in 1148 with St Bernard, his friend, colleague and confidant, at his side. A printed version of his prophecies first appeared in a Church history published in 1559.

  In their image-clotted ambiguity, Malachi's prophecies have more than a little in common with those of Nostradamus. Starting with those of his own era, Malachi lists a total of 112 pontiffs and provides a Latin epigraph which purports to summarise or encap
sulate the character and reign of each. The present Pope, John Paul II, is 111th in the sequence – the penultimate. The motto associated with him is ‘De Labore Solis’ (‘Of the work of the sun’).33

  Like the quatrains of Nostradamus, this can be interpreted to mean whatever one wishes. Certain commentators have endeavoured to see a parallel between John Paul II's extensive travels – more extensive by far than those of any pontiff in history – and the sun's apparent movement around the globe. Without too much difficulty one could devise other interpretations of comparable relevance (or lack thereof). That, however, is not the point. The point, regardless of interpretation, is that the present Pope, according to Malachi, is the next to last.

  For the 112th pontiff, the last in the sequence, Malachi appends the motto ‘Gloria Olivae’34 – glory, or possibly fame, of the olive, or the olive tree, or the olive tree's wood, from which, perhaps, an episcopal staff might be fashioned. Here again is ample latitude in which would-be interpreters can frolic. But any disposition towards levity would be dispelled, at least for pious Catholics, by the sombre note on which Malachi concludes:

  In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church there will reign Peter the Roman, who will feed his flock among many tribulations; after which the seven-hilled city will be destroyed and the dreadful Judge will judge the people.35

  16

  The Pope as the Problem

  Confronted by the spectre of its own prospective and imminent extinction, the Church today huddles in fear. In the obtuseness with which it seeks refuge in outworn dogma, one can discern an element of desperation – an element of incipient panic verging at times on hysteria. But extinction is only one of many fears that beleaguer the Church today.

  The Church fears the increasing secularisation of Western society and the defection of its congregation in such former strongholds as Ireland, southern Germany, Austria and Spain. It fears the increasing accommodation made for other faiths in multicultural societies like those of Britain, western Europe and the United States. It fears the increasing tendency of psychologically and culturally sophisticated people to seek and find a dimension of spirituality in spheres other than those controlled by the priesthood – spheres such as, for example, the arts. It fears the embryonic pantheism and Hermeticism implicit in environmental concerns, which stress the interconnected nature of reality. It continues to fear the usurpation of its authority by science and by psychology. The Church also fears ecumenical initiatives, as recently reiterated refusals to acknowledge Anglican legitimacy attest; and all Anglican ordinations continue to be regarded in consequence as ‘absolutely null and utterly void’. With the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union, the Church fears a rapprochement between Eastern and Western Christendom which might entail some loss of its own self-arrogated primacy. It even fears the discovery of extra-terrestrial life, and the possibility of a ‘close encounter’ or a ‘first contact’.

  They may not necessarily be fans of Mulder and Scully, but there are some Catholic clerics who seem distinctly nervous about the prospect of aliens arriving on our planet with no awareness of Jesus. Father Corrado Balducci – an official member of the Papal household and the Vatican's acknowledged expert on exorcism, demonology and the Antichrist – was quoted recently as saying he accorded some credence to accounts of ‘alien abductions’:

  It is reasonable to believe and affirm that extra-terrestrials exist. Their existence can no longer be denied, for there is too much evidence for the existence of extra-terrestrials and flying saucers.1

  Not that such a belief in any way conflicted with his official faith. Invoking St Paul's acclamation of Jesus not only as ‘king of the world’, but also as ‘king of the universe’, Father Balducci explained: ‘This means that everything in the universe, including extra-terrestrials and UFOs, are reconcilable with God.’2

  Confronted on the subject by The Times, a spokesman for the Catholic Media Office was somewhat more cautious:

  The fundamental creation message relates to humans here on earth. If aliens are shown to exist, this would not cast doubt on the veracity of the Gospel. But we would have to ask whether the Christian atonement was applicable to them.3

  Pope John Paul II appears to be hedging his bets. According to a report on the front page of the Sunday Times of 14 December 1997, the pontiff has requested a team of astronomers to probe the cosmos for ‘the fingerprints of God’. There is now a Vatican project specifically dedicated to investigating the implications of contact with extra-terrestrial races. At Mount Graham in Arizona, the Vatican maintains its own observatory, staffed by Jesuits. Among the issues they address is whether Jesus's crucifixion might have saved alien races from original sin. According to Father Chris Corbally, the project's deputy director: ‘If civilisation were to be found on other planets and if it were feasible to communicate, then we would want to send missionaries to save them.’4 Father Corbally would appear to be utterly unaware of his own breathtaking arrogance.

  Bishop of Rome

  So numerous and pervasive are the modern Church's fears that it lives in a veritable state of siege. But there is one fear in particular that underlies, dictates and conditions all the others – the fear of change. And yet one can argue that precisely through change – and only through change – can the Church hope to ensure for itself a relevant future. In the past, the Church has maintained its own survival by virtue of its preparedness, however reluctant, to adapt to changing circumstances. To continue to survive, it must display a comparable adaptability.

  Throughout the lifetimes of people today, the Church has comprised a single, ostensibly unified, monolithic edifice – a species of autocracy presiding supposedly over its self-defined sphere of ‘spirituality’. This, therefore, is the image the Church enjoys in both our individual and collective psyches. But such images result merely from habits of thought, from a sort of mental inertia. For example, we think of the United States as a single monolithic entity, ‘one nation indivisible’ that seems to have existed from time immemorial. We tend to forget that as recently as 140 years ago, the United States came within a hair's-breadth of fragmenting into two separate nations – and that two and a quarter centuries ago the United States did not exist at all.

  The same principles, the same mental processes, govern our perceptions of the Church. According to Catholic tradition, Jesus turned to Peter and stated that on this rock he would build his Church. According to the same tradition, Peter was the first Pope, the first in an apostolic succession of spiritual leaders extending in an unbroken and uninterrupted continuity from the dawn of the Christian era to the present day. In historical fact, however, such contentions are nonsense. Until the fourth century, the form of ‘Christianity’ we regard as ‘orthodox Catholicism’ was nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it was only one of numerous forms of Christian belief, each vying with the others for theological, social and political supremacy; and only when one of these systems emerged as ‘orthodoxy’ did the others become, by retroactive definition, ‘heresy’.

  Yet even after the Church of Rome had emerged triumphant over other forms of Christian belief, it bore precious little resemblance to the Church we know today. The designation of ‘Pope’ did not exist until the end of the fourth century, when Siricus I (384–99) adopted it for the first time. And until the middle of the fifth century, the Roman Church was the very antithesis of monolithic. In fact, it was wholly decentralised, and the so-called ‘Pope’ was merely the Bishop of Rome, only one of a multitude of bishops. At best, he might be regarded as the proverbial ‘first among equals’, roughly equivalent to a prime minister; and the bishops or patriarchs of such jurisdictions as Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople exercised a comparable authority.

  Even later, when the Papacy did emerge as the centre of the Church's power, its status as such was to a significant degree nominal. At times, it was subject and subordinate to the decisions of Church Councils. Until 1870, its possible accountability to Church Councils could at lea
st be debated, as the controversies of the period between Gallicans and Ultramontanes demonstrate. Only in the years since 1870 – with the Church's loss of secular dominion and the concurrent compensatory promulgation of Papal infallibility – did the monolithic structure we know today begin definitively to coalesce.

  With its rigid adherence to dogma and its wilful obliviousness to the realities of contemporary civilisation, that monolithic structure appears to an increasing number of people no longer adequate. To condemn birth control in an age of overpopulation and proliferating unwanted pregnancies is coming to be seen as ridiculous at best, culpably negligent at worst. To fulminate against contraceptives in the epoch of AID S is being condemned as dangerous folly at best, at worst as criminal irresponsibility. Such criticism is being issued not only by hostile commentators or by detached and disinterested observers. It is also issuing from the Church's faithful themselves, many of whom are caused acute distress and crises of conscience by the conflict provoked within them between the inescapable pressures of the world around them and the church to which they long to remain loyal, but which seems indifferent to their dilemma.

  There are too many spheres in which the Church seems not merely out of touch with the exigencies of the modern world, but in some bizarre state of psychological denial – as if it were pursuing its own agenda with the single-mindedness of a robot, while deliberately, forcibly, doctrinally blinkering itself to the very real needs of its congregation. There are too many instances in which the Church seems to have forgotten that it possesses a congregation – a congregation of human beings, with human failings, human weaknesses and human needs – and adheres with the relentless imperturbability of a machine to a naively idealistic programme of ‘salvation’ that might have been formulated by a computer.