"GOD'S MESSENGER" AT REST:
FATHER MALACHI MARTIN
July 23, 1921 -- July 27, 1999

A Tribute

By Father Charles C. Fiore

“I came to know Malachi Martin in a totally unexpected but, I now realize, characteristic way. Through a simple kindness.”

In the 1980's, I published and edited a quarterly Catholic Opinion paper, IDEA, INC. So as to build its subscription base quickly, we printed thousands of extra copies of each issue to distribute to potential subscribers whose names we rented from likely lists--an expensive tactic, but one which helped lift our base from near zero to over forty thousand in five years.

After one of our first mailings, I received a handwritten letter from Malachi, who had received the paper, and wrote to praise it and to subscribe. He could have simply sent his subscription, but his warm, personal note was, I learned, typical of him. It was a generosity that I would come to know often from this learned, droll, genius of a man, twelve years my senior, who had by then authored a number of best-selling books (16 at his death; another in progress) that earned him both praise and the growing distrust (and enmity) of many who misunderstood (and feared) but could not contest, his mastery of facts and his knowledge of the Vatican and the dangers to the Church from within and without.

I quickly responded to his note. I had read and re-read most of his books. Shortly after receiving my letter, he phoned, inviting me to have dinner with him the next time I was in Manhattan. It would be the first of many visits, phone calls, faxes and letters over the years. We found we shared common concerns about the Church, the state of its teaching and governance, rejoicing at occasional signs of hope, and redoubling our prayers at the growing evidence of disintegration that, increasingly, came from every sector.

As our relationship grew, he flattered me by asking my comments and suggestions for issues or manuscripts on which he was working. I was no less honored when he asked me to read, correct and annotate the galleys for The Jesuits, The Keys of This Blood, and to provide him with data from my personal experiences which he incorporated in his last book, Windswept House, a novel--a roman `a clef--that he said was eighty per cent factual.

He was marvelous to be with quite apart from the focus of our conversations. With his Irish wit and charming laugh, I joked that our friendship was like the lion and the lamb at table--the former Jesuit (in 1964 he was personally dispensed by Paul VI from his vows of poverty and obedience, but, at his request, retained his vow of chastity) and the (later to be) former Dominican (I voluntarily left the Order of Preachers in 1992 for many of the same reasons he had left the Society).

I know (and cherish) the support and good advice--both spiritual and practical--and the theological insights that he shared with me throughout the years of our friendship, especially his fervent love and devotion to the Blessed Eucharist and Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and to Our Lady of Fatima and her Rosary.

A man of strong piety, he also shared with me the most personal aspects of his Eucharistic faith: practices that, as a priest, I have adopted as my own.

But even in his secular dress his priestliness was always evident. Once walking on East 63rd St. in Manhattan, a cab driver stopped in traffic spotted my Roman collar and shouted, "Hey, Father! How ya doin'?" I waved and said something less-than-memorable, but Malachi said, "Let's talk with him." It took less than a minute (traffic was still at a standstill), and as we approached, the cabbie spotted the plastic string Rosary Malachi had in his hand, and said, "I got one o' them at home, but it broke." Malachi immediately gave him his Rosary (most priests keep a deskful of them). But it was Malachi, not I, who gave his away!

He had an uncanny ability, as those do who are firmly rooted in grace, to recognize the goodness of others (particularly of priests who had not compromised or lost their faith). He helped many whom he said had "been marginalized" by their bishops and brethren because of their fidelity to the magisterium and their vows.

When I spoke, as I often did of my other close friend (I called them my spiritual and theological "crutches") Father Alfred J. Kunz who was brutally murdered in March, 1998 in his parish school in Wisconsin, Malachi expressed the wish to meet or talk with him.

Since Father Kunz had come to know Father Martin through my anecdotes and Malachi's ideas that I shared with him, and, of course, his books, one day while I was on the phone with Malachi and Father Kunz called on another line, I tied the three of us together, introduced them, and quickly left them to their first of many conversations. They spoke often, but unfortunately never met. When Father Kunz was murdered, Malachi was the first person I called, and ever the priest, he stopped working and immediately said his second Mass of the day for our mutual friend. He maintained that Father Kunz's brutal murder was a response to his outspokenness in championing the faith. He knew Kunz well!! They were kindred spirits.

He left the Jesuits, he told me, because during the Council, at which he was present, he saw first-hand the escalating battle between traditionalists and modernists in its sessions and in the dicasteries of the Vatican. With the disintegration of the Society, he realized, he would be constrained in his fight for orthodoxy. And so, he chose to leave.

In 1960 he had waited outside the papal apartments while Cardinal Bea participated in the discussion with John XXIII about revealing the "third secret" of Fatima. He anguished at the words Bea had attributed to the Holy Father who refused to do what Our Lady had requested:"This [message] is not for our time!"

He was careful in speaking about his beloved Society of Jesus, but wrote The Jesuits to explain to the world the failure of those once loyalists of the Church to fulfill their birthright, permitting instead free-rein to some of the most radical destroyers of the faith. He circulated the manuscript of the book to many Jesuits in Europe and the United States before it went to press, and virtually all said it was an accurate portrayal of the disintegration of the largest community of men in the Church (once with 36,000 members worldwide, it has been decimated by two-thirds in 1999). But few of them publicly defended the book after its publication.

Despite his profound disappointment at the deep divisions and leadership lapses of the Society, he was a Jesuit to his innermost being, and I saw how the failures of the Society grieved him deeply (just as moral failures and fatal ineptitude of the Dominicans pain and trouble me; how they have sold their birthright "to preach the Gospel, in season and out" for a mess of irrelevancy--the pollution of the Order's charisms). Even so, Saint Dominic is my spiritual father, as Saint Ignatius was Malachi's.

In his relatively short number of years in Rome, he served the Pope and the Society well. But because he would not compromise to achieve advancement or personal security (the inducement offered by the system to keep one in-line), he left the Society--but not the priesthood--with Paul VI's blessing.

But even then his life was at risk from some who felt he knew too much and feared his zeal for the Church. He was literally tracked from Rome to Paris, and thence to Ireland, where Jesuit friends of his family attempted to convince them that he was mentally ill. He fled to New York to escape them, where--still a priest--for a time he drove a taxi and washed dishes to support himself.

Meanwhile, Jesuits in Rome (I know their names) spread the rumor that he had attempted marriage with the wife of a journalist covering the Council (after meeting him at a dinner party, she had requested Malachi's counsel about her husband's drinking and her unhappy marriage, and she coincidentally left Rome to return home at the same time that Malachi went to Paris). I asked Malachi the first time we met about that and other rumors (that he was no longer a priest, for example, or was an agent of the Israelis or KGB at the Council). With his permission from Paul VI to leave the Society, he was laicized (reduced from the clerical state) but retained his priestly faculties, thus explaining his lay dress).

In New York he was befriended by members of the city's literati. He wrote a column for Bill Buckley's National Review, but for reasons I have forgotten, dropped it. Soon he began writing the articles and books that earned him his reputation for expertise and sagacity, as one with an insider's understanding of the tides and whirlpools of the Vatican.

He knew the Popes from Roncalli to Montini to Wojtyla, and on several occasions met secretly with John Paul II, to whom he gave a copy of Keys of This Blood.

But detractors--most of whom had never met or talked with him, and who got their information from magazine articles and venomous private mailings by a few "super-Catholics" who were as ignorant of theological matters as they were of him--constantly dogged him, in print, on radio talk shows, and in chanceries that willingly spread the worst of the rumors about him. He was, after all, a threat to those who promote the Church's slippery slide from orthodoxy to ecumenical compromise, to acceptance of the "diversity" of heresy and ultimately, the open advocacy of sin, especially in matters of family life (contraception, abortion, assisted suicide, euthanasia) and its ugly relatives--fornication, adultery, masturbation, homosexuality.

In fact, it was Cardinal Cooke of New York who gave Malachi the faculties of the Archdiocese, and urged him, for appearances and his own protection, to live with a family. Unfortunately, the family (not Catholics), while considerate and generous to him in many ways, did not understand his work, and so, garbled his legacy at his death.

His response to the rumors, canards and lies about him was, I thought, at times too piously passive. And I told him so. Perhaps he had dealt with them too long, and was tired of denying them. He told me of a revered Jesuit lay brother he had known, whose victimhood Malachi saw as saintly. But, I reminded him, the obscure Jesuit brother was called by his own unique graces; he was not a public figure whose good name was critical to his livelihood. At my urging, (with his lawyer) Malachi confronted an especially vicious letter solicited by a Midwestern detractor that emanated from a major chancery, clearly with the collusion of its bishop.

A national Catholic weekly more than once mocked him in its Q & A column as a self-promoting "teller of tales." A prominent Jesuit more than once publicly questioned his bona fides until I put the two of them together at a table where his accuser spoke with him for the first time, and became his friend. On EWTN another priest who did not know him, and cannot hold a candle to Malachi's brilliance, in response to a telephoned question curtly dismissed him before millions of viewers.

Because of his best-selling book Hostage to the Devil--still in print in a revised paperbound edition after nearly three decades--he was rightly judged an authority on demonic possession, and came to know most of the dwindling number of exorcists in the United States. Inevitably, he began to assist at exorcisms. I knew when he did so, for he was difficult to contact, and would be exhausted when he returned home, sometimes physically bruised. At the time of the fall that sent him finally to the hospital with intracranial bleeding, he was, I have reason to believe, helping with preliminary arrangements for an exorcism.

Over his New York years he heard many confessions, witnessed marriages, buried the dead, gave convert instructions; and by phone, letters and occasional meetings, counseled hundreds. But he was harried by the inevitable celebrity-seekers--often women--who attempted to insinuate themselves into his life, or, without his knowledge or consent represented themselves as his confidants or collaborators. (In 1998 there were two "Malachi Martin" websites on the Internet, one of which, set up by a woman during Malachi's 1998 hospitalization that claimed to be "the authentic Malachi Martin website," wherein she audaciously announced his support of events at Medjugorje--something he had repeatedly and unequivocally disavowed.)

Unfortunately, the book he was writing at the time of his death (contrary to reports, not a novel) was nowhere near completion. Entitled Primacy: How the Institutional Roman Catholic Church Became a Creature of the New World Order, he knew it might well be his "last hurrah," and he was determined to fight to the end to uphold the rights and prerogatives (indeed, the traditions) of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

The plan of it was to deal with papal primacy, and to analyze the shift--seen in some of the Council documents and John Paul II's writings and recent ecumenical outreaches--indicators of the papacy's changed understanding of its role in recent years, as the first breakdown of papal power in two millennia.

Unfortunately, the book exists only in notes and, as he confided to his close friend and literary agent, Lila Karpf, shortly before his death, "burning inside me." It will not be written, because no one but Malachi, with his unique, inspired vision, could write it.

So much the loss, not only for the many who knew and loved him--as priest, brother, spiritual friend--but also to the hundreds of thousands more who read his books, watched or listened to his television and radio appearances and tapes, and had the good fortune to meet him in his travels. He was among the most loyal of Saint Ignatius' sons, valiant and totally dedicated to the service of Jesus in his Church through the intercession of His Blessed Mother.

Marked from birth, the name his parents gave him at Baptism, Malachi, means "God's messenger." He fulfilled that role. And like the Savior whom he so lovingly followed, he accepted too the scorn of his enemies as part of his personal oblation. May God give him the reward of his labors: messenger, prophet, preacher, priest.

Fr. Charles Fiore's Letter to Our Sunday Visitor
Re: The late Fr. Malachi Martin

August 19, 1999

OUR SUNDAY VISITOR
Letters to the Editor
200 Noll Plaza
Huntington, IN 46750</BR<

Sirs:

Some years ago, in response to flippant, uninformed and false statements in OSV's "Pastoral Answers" column about my close friend, author and priest, Malachi Martin, I wrote and telephoned publisher Bob Lockwood. As a result, it was my understanding that OSV would cease taking cheap personal shots at Malachi.

It did, until his death, when it picked up where it previously had left off.

Father Malachi Martin died in New York on July 27. It its August 15 issue, OSV's "obituary" repeated the falsehood that he "[left] the priesthood in 1964" (he left the Jesuits, but with the explicit dispensation of Paul VI from canonical requirements that a priest must be a cleric, and continued to function as a priest)---something I thought I had made clear to Mr. Lockwood.

OSV's obit also called him "disillusioned" and "paranoid"---rash judgments on their face that indicate only that its editors engage in defamation and never met or talked with Father Malachi. The issues he wrote about in his 16 books, and the themes he treated were truly unique and grave in the life of the Church. Apparently in OSV's eyes that is enough to brand him as off-center, when in fact history has proved him right time and time again!

Not content to kick a priest once when he dies, Editor Greg Erlandson takes another swipe at Father Malachi in his August 22 "Welcome to my conspiracy" column.

Erlandson, without so much as a nod to any data, refers to Malachi Martin as a "novelist" (more than half of his books are non-fiction, but so what?) "half-brilliant, half-loon, given to incredible [sic] conspiracy theories [about] Satan-worshipping bishops [and] Masons...destroying the Church." What does Erlandson make of Pope Paul VI's 1963 statement that "The smoke of Satan has crept into the very sanctuary of the Church...where it clouds our vision and offends our nostrils"? But then, Montini must have been a nut-case too, huh, Greg?

Erlandson kisses-off my brilliant priest-author-friend and servant of the Church with the superficially profound observation that "the various factions [in the Church] think they are doing God's will." Does Erlandson admit the possibility that some of them may be doing just that? Else what of OSV's output?

Please don't write my obituary.

Sincerely,

Father Charles C. Fiore
MonteCristo
P.O. Box 295
Lodi, WI 53555-0295

A letter written by Father Malachi Martin
 addressing the attacks from critics prior to his death

…I am sending you these few lines as my commentary on the abuse and calumnies flung in my direction by certain members of our Roman Catholic Church. Many of my friends and well-wishers have urged me to respond to the abusers and the calumniators; and remember that this abuse and calumnious attack has been going on for over thirty-three years! That is a long time; and I have become a veteran of such oppression, so much so that in a certain sense I know much better than any of my friends and well-wishers how to deal with this sustained harsh treatment.

The basic lesson I have learnt over those thirty-three years is: not allow myself be diverted from fulfilling my mission as a priest and a servant of the Holy See of Peter. This means not merely refusing to pick up the stones thrown at me and returning them on the heads of my abusers. It means principally that I fulfill my duties as a priest—celebrate daily Mass, recite my breviary, fulfill my pastoral obligations to those under my care. It means that I never allow the distortions—doctrinal and other—of these very zealous abusers and calumniators to enter into my optic or cloud my angle of vision. It means, of course, praying for their spiritual welfare—and also that the Holy Spirit grant them some measure of understanding. For understanding is chiefly what lacks to them.

Well over twenty-five years ago, I wrote to my Superior in Rome complaining about a recrudescence of these attacks, and suggesting a certain course of action. He wrote back quoting that passage of John’s Gospel where Christ warns His disciples that the time would come when they would be ostracized and persecuted by people who would do that to them and think they were doing God’s will. “Can’t you suffer, too, for Christ’s sake?” This was my Superior’s answer.

Besides all that, all these years have taught me a few central lessons; you have to have undergone it all to be able to appreciate the principal lesson. Which is: abusers and calumniators are not out to get the truth, to build up, to edify. Their bent is to destroy, to liquidate. Hence, no matter what information you give them, they will not desist; they will use it to further their distrustful ambition. Hence, I found that there was no point in even trying to communicate with them; anything they learned became merely grist for their grindstones of hate.

A second valuable lesson I learned was this: they don’t really matter in the kingdom of God and in the daily warfare between Christ and Lucifer. There are too many Confessions to be heard, too many Masses to be said, too many souls seeking and needing spiritual direction, too many confused priests to be enlightened, too many aberrant bishops to be corralled back into the fold of Christ, too many holydays in honor of Angels and Saints, too many exorcisms of the possessed and the obsessed, too many of the faithful dying and needing Extreme Unction, too many children needing Confirmation—in a word, too many needy ones for any priest to hesitate for one moment and to tarry over the spewings and spittings coming from the unclean mouths, the jealous souls and the erroneous pens of pigmy men who fancy themselves upon a solid rock and who crave to ascend to fame and vanity over the dead bodies and soiled reputations of their victims.

I have always let such people know that I personally have no difficulty in waiting for the final showdown in the presence of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus, as the Just Judge of the living and the dead.

In sum, I have no time to wait—there’s too much work to be done. I know that many of my friends and well-wishers now and again answer some of my attackers. I generally discourage any sustained effort in that direction; the reason? Nothing will ever change the minds of these people—nothing except the grace of God. As I said, I am most willing to wait for God to change their minds. In the meantime, I have far too much to do. I can’t afford to waste time on them.

+Malachi

Fr. Fiore responds to Fr. Malachi Martin's critics..

The New York Times
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
229 West 43d Street VIA FAX
New York, NY 100363959 212,5563622

To the Editor:

Your obituary (July 30) of my collaborator and friend of almost twenty years, Father Malachi Martin, contained one outright falsehood, a slanderous connotation, and repeated the subjective and erroneous biases of several reviews of his books in the TIMES.

Malachi Martin never left the Catholic priesthood, but was personally dispensed from his vows of poverty and obedience by Paul VI on leaving the Jesuits in 1964. 1 have seen and authenticated his dispensation papers. He did not seek release from his vow of chastity. When he came to New York, Cardinal Cooke gave him priestly faculties, and advised him to find lodging with a family rather than live alone as he initially did.

It was to the Manhattan home of Mrs. Kakia Livanos and her family, whom I know, that he moved. Mrs. Livanos was not his "companion" with that word's pejorative meaning, but his landlady who provided his rooms, his meals, and the oratory where he said daily Mass.

Lehmann-Haupt's review of Martin's The Encounter, quoted in the obituary, assumes knowledge of Martin's conscience ("hate (of) God") that is both impossible and implausible. Likewise, Paul Hoffmann's review of The Jesuits attributed views to Martin that the author neither wrote nor expressed in the years I critiqued and discussed his manuscripts with him. .

Clearly, Malachi Martin made enemies among those who did not share his faith or his devotion to the Church, both of which he knew far better than his critics, who invariably demonstrated their own biases in what they wrote of him.

It is shameful that the Times has used the death of this valiant good priest and brilliant author to heap scorn and scandal upon his memory and accomplishments.

Sincerely,

FATHER CHARLES C. FIORE
MonteCristo
P.O. Box 295
Lodi, WI 535550295
August 1, 1999

FR. MALACHI MARTIN'S BOOKS:

 REVEALING THE UNTHINKABLE, PREDICTING FUTURE EVENTS, AND GETTING IT RIGHT EVERY TIME

1969 - The New York Times Book Review said of The Encounter, his first book after his arrival in the United States, that "Malachi Martin has provided enough incendiary concepts to set off a number of blazing controversies." The book, which predicted the crisis into which the world's three great religions had fallen, was ranked by Library Journal as one of its "Thirty Best Books" of 1969, achieved commercial success in hardcover, and was twice published in successful trade paperback editions.

1972 - In the opening lines of Three Popes and the Cardinal, Malachi Martin made the then astounding prediction that "Well before the year 2000, there will no longer be a religious institution recognizable as the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church of today." That prediction, which sent his publisher into near-apoplexy, is now totally vindicated. It also made the lead on Martin's Today Show appearance, produced headlines in lead reviews and feature stories around the country, and produced another bestseller.

1973 - In Jesus Now, Martin revealed the then closely guarded Vatican secret that Pope Paul VI was suffering from a fatal illness, something denied by the Vatican for as long as possible--important practical news for politicos and financiers around the world--but in the end it had to confirm as true. 1976 - In his enduring bestseller, Hostage to the Devil, Malachi Martin produced the classic non-fiction work on demonic possession and exorcism. Though passionately attacked by some on its publication, Hostage to the Devil is now widely hailed and steadily read as the only contemporary work that clearly defines the parameters of exorcism and possession, and sets out a unique, reliable case-history record from the point of view of the possessed and of the exorcist. Said The Chicago Tribune, "It makes The Exorcist as sinister as the tooth fairy."

1978 - In The Final Conclave, for the first time Malachi Martin drew aside what until then had been the impenetrable shroud of secrecy that kept everything about papal Conclaves from view. He took us behind the scenes to witness the holy men and the deal-makers, the politicking and the cynical alliances. He showed us how skilled some churchmen are as powerbrokers dealing in countries and continents, in human lives and liberty. And, as noted in a front-page news story that carried a Vatican dateline in The Washington Post, Martin alone "uncannily predicted" the political alliances which led to the surprising election of John Paul II as Pope--and did so almost a year before the Conclave took place.

1986 - Such is his credibility that even Martin's fiction is taken as true in its essence, and sparks controversy. Said The Wall Street Journal of Martin's sage, Vatican, "Few books are more certain to arouse passionate controversy. The drama in this book is immense, the clash of Good and Evil is savage, the unresolved questions are haunting."

1987 - In his best-selling The Jesuits, Malachi Martin produced what Washington's World Economic Review called "the most chilling and controversial portrait of the Society of Jesus in over 300 years." He detailed the new and alien ideological spirit driving the agenda of that religious Order. He revealed the fabric of initiatives of the Society that infuriated the Jesuits (although many secretly attested to their authenticity). As Father John Hardon, S.J., attested, "The Jesuits is virtually 100% correct."

1990 - In The Keys of This Blood, Martin unfolded the reasoning and the vision that led Pope John Paul II into actions so threatening to some that they nearly cost him his life. The manuscript's reading line (subtitle) was prophetic: "Pope John Paul II versus Russia and the West for Control of the New World Order." His publisher objected (and some still do): "The idea of a New World Order is off the wall!" By the time this book was published, the idea was on the lips of every world leader from Washington to London to Bonn to Moscow.

1996 - Windswept House: A Vatican Novel--his last book--demonstrated again that Malachi Martin's information and his reputation are such that even his fiction is read as eye-opening fact. The book followed hardcover success with over two years of trade paperback sales.

1999 - At the time of his death, Malachi Martin was preparing what might have well been his final work. Entitled Primacy: How the Institutional Roman Catholic Church Became a Creature of the New World Order, it was to be an examination of power and the papacy, and would have analyzed the revolutionary shift in the ancient dogma of primacy--the focus of what many now see as the first breakdown of paper power in two millennia. It was to be a book about the Vatican's political landscape as we approach a new millennium and a new pontificate.

NOTE: Before coming to the United States, Fr. Malachi Martin also wrote the two-volume work, The Scribal Character of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

---FATHER CHARLES C. FIORE