In past centuries the Roman Catholic Church saw Freemasonry as a growing power that had the potential to undermine the supremacy of Rome. Freemasonry itself was little more than a guild of builders until certain Jewish bankers discovered its potential. They began to teach them the principles of the Kabbala (Jewish mysticism) and the education-starved workers were happy to learn what the Church had forbidden. It was not long before they were formed into political cells that were useful in undermining the Church’s traditional teachings and its power.

Though Freemasonry was not exactly secular, it fought Rome by working to secularize the nations and replace Rome’s influence with their own influence. Many of these changes were seen by Protestant leaders as a positive step, because for as long as the Church had been in power, it had executed countless dissenters—including some the Church canonized later. It was thus in their interests as well to reduce Rome’s power. It was only natural to form a loose alliance between the Jews, the Freemasons, and the Protestants. They all had one common enemy-oppressor.

In the 1500’s the corruption in the Church, coupled with the printing press (1450’s) enabled some scholars to bring the Scriptures to the average people in their own languages. This sparked the Protestant Reformation, which Rome was unable to suppress, though it tried desperately through persecution and actual wars.

When England broke away in the 1530’s under King Henry VIII, Protestantism became institutionalized in a rival national religion. Then in 1540 Jesuits were founded as the Pope’s personal army to launch a counter-Reformation against Protestants and Freemasons.

But the Jesuits were ruthless, teaching that the end justified the means. As a secret organization resembling a secret society, they became masters of infiltration. The monarchies of Europe thus had to contend with two powerful organizations that had infiltrated the governments, each pulling the nations in opposite directions. The nations were being torn apart. By the mid-1700’s, the Freemasons began to win the day, and the Jesuits were expelled from country after country. Finally, many of the monarchs demanded that the Pope disband the Jesuits altogether.

Strike One

In 1773 the Pope dissolved the Jesuit Order, fearing that these other nations would set up their own separate national churches, much like England had done in the 1530’s. This embittered the Jesuits, now ex-Jesuits, and they dispersed into other Catholic organizations. Some of them, however, allied with Freemasonry to punish the Church, among which was Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Illuminati in 1776. He successfully penetrated Freemasonry with his highly secretive organization and was able to use Freemasonry and even many Protestants to foment first the American Revolution (1776-1780) and then the French Revolution (1789-1793).

Napoleon then brought the war right to the Pope’s doorstep in 1799 and took him captive to the convent of St. Augustine in Sienna. Three months later the convent was destroyed by an earthquake, and he was moved to a place called “The Lower Regions,” where some said he was at last in his proper place. Symbolically, he was in sheol.

In 1801 Napoleon decided that he needed the Pope and so he allowed him to return to Rome. But it was not until Napoleon’s defeat in 1814 that the Pope was reinstated in a great resurrection of the papacy. The Congress of Vienna returned the Papal States to the Pope’s control in 1815. Malachi Martin says in The Keys of This Blood, p. 532,

“In fact, the ‘Holy See’ as an internationally recognized papal title originated in the agreements of the Vienna Congress.”

This ended the first major phase of conflict.

The Pope reinstated the Jesuit Order, believing that he needed its help to fight freemasonry. What he did not realize was that by this time many Jesuits were also Freemasons or at least allied to them, particularly in America, where cooperation between the two organizations was most striking. This was seen in the building of the new federal city, Washington D.C. in the 1790’s.

Strike Two

Pope Gregory XVI became pope in 1831. It was a time of revolutions in southern Europe. Strangely enough, these were Catholic revolutions, not directed primarily at the popes, but against the idea of the Papal Monarchy. The Catholic people themselves were beginning to envy the Protestant model of freedom of conscience, which was also being promoted by Freemasonry.

Gregory XVI denounced these new freedoms, as R. W. Thompson says in his Footprints of the Jesuits, p. 287,

“The diversity of religious profession he considered the ‘poisoned source’ of ‘that false and absurd, or rather extravagant maxim, that liberty of conscience should be established and guaranteed to each man’… Having denounced liberty of conscience as sinful, and its advocates as guilty of ‘unbridled impudence,’ he, as a necessary consequence, blended with it ‘the liberty of the press,’ which he called ‘the most fatal liberty, an execrable liberty, for which there never can be sufficient horror’.”

Whereas the Protestants actually left the Roman Church, these Catholics remained loyal to the Church, attempting to reform it from the inside. Each year their numbers grew, and “liberalism” spread steadily.

The second great blow to the Papacy came in 1860-1870 when the Pope finally lost the Papal States forever. Pope Pius IX was given freedom of movement, but in the attempt to gain sympathy, he called himself a “prisoner of the Vatican” for the next 70 years.The pope thus lost the ability to burn heretics at the stake—even in Italy and Rome itself. The last Protestant to be burned at the stake was in 1869.

During those years, Freemasonry continued to infiltrate the Roman Church secretively. This was easily done, because the hierarchy was promoted according to their leadership ability or diplomatic skills or education. It had nothing to do with their love of Christ or their love for the people of God. Any Freemason could easily compete on those terms. And once in office, a secret Freemason could bring others with him by promoting them. The goal and the prize was to finally elect a Masonic Pope.

In 1819-1820 the Grand Masters of Freemasonry drew up a plan called Permanent Instruction on how to deal with the Roman Church. Malachi Martin quotes from it in The Keys of This Blood, p. 534,

“Among the many remedies, there is one which we must never forget: . . . the total annihilation of Catholicism and even of Christianity. . . . What we must wait for is a pope suitable for our purposes . . . because, with such a pope, we could effectively crush the Rock on which Christ built his Church . . . . Seek a pope fitting our description . . . . induce the clergy to march under your banner in the belief that they are marching under the papal banner . . . make the younger, secular clergy, and even the religious, receptive to our doctrines. Within a few years, this same younger clergy will, of necessity, occupy responsible positions . . . . Some will be called upon to elect a future pope. This pope, like most of his contemporaries, will be influenced by those . . . humanitarian principles which we are now circulating. . . .”

In 1903 this plan nearly came to fruition when the cardinals actually elected a Masonic pope. Martin tells the story on pages 535, 536 of The Keys of This Blood,

“Following the death of Pope Leo XIII on July 20, 1903, the papal Conclave narrowly avoided fulfilling the dream of the Permanent Instruction and electing Mariano Cardinal Rampolla Del Tindaro—the Vatican Secretary of State and an inducted member of the Masonic Lodge—as Pope and Vicar of Christ. In fact, Rampolla did actually receive the required number of votes. But Jan Cardinal Puzyna of Krakow—which was then part of the Austo- Hungarian Empire—exercised the veto power enjoyed at that moment by His Imperial Master, Franz Josef of Austria. Franz Josef knew of Rampolla’s Masonic identity.

“It took even more voting sessions before the Cardinal Electors chose the sixty-eight-year-old Giuseppe Melchiorre Cardinal Sarto of Venice, who chose the papal name of Pius X.”

The fact that Cardinal Rampolla Del Tindaro was both a Freemason and a Vatican Secretary of State shows how the Roman Church had been infiltrated even a century ago. More than that, the fact that this Freemason had received a majority of votes among the cardinals themselves shows the extent of Freemasonic infiltration. It required a veto from the emperor’s representative to override the majority of cardinals who had voted for him.

Incidentally, Cardinal Sarto of Venice, who became Pope Pius X, was the first Polish Pope. Sarto had been born on June 2, 1835 to a Polish mailman named Giovanni Battista Sarto and his wife, Margherita, a seamstress. Malachi Martin says on pages 535, 536,

“Giovanni had been born Jan Krawiec in Wielkopolska, Poland. When his part of the country fell into Prussia’s hands, Sarto found political asylum in Italy, first in Godero, near Treviso, and finally in Riese, where he earned a ducat a day delivering mail to the townfolk.

“On June 2, 1835, a son was born to the Sartos, and they baptized him, Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto. . . As a young man in 1858 he was ordained a priest. As a middle-aged man in 1884 he became Bishop of Mantua. And as he was getting on a bit in age in 1893 . . . he was nominated cardinal and promoted to the See of Venice.

“On Sarto’s election as Pope, the scramble of high officials in the Austrian Monarchy was almost as comic as it was tragic, as they scurried to destroy all certificates and records that might reveal the Polish origins of Pius X. In accordance with the expressed sentiments, aims and intentions of the Congress of Vienna, nothing as good as a pope could come out of Poland.

“At least one trace of Sarto’s Polish heritage did survive, however, in spite of all efforts to the contrary. The elder Sarto’s original surname, Krawiec, is also the Polish word for ‘tailor.’ That, in fact, was the reason he chose Sarto as his Italian surname; for sarto is the Italian word for ‘tailor.’

The Roman Church has proclaimed John Paul II as being the first Polish pope, when, in fact, he was the second. The Church has usually been dominated by Italian cardinals who wanted popes to be Italian. Now that John Paul II has popularized being Polish, it may be that the Church will soon “discover” the Polish roots of Pius X.

Strike Three

Capturing the Papacy itself did not occur until 1958 with the election of Angelo Roncalli, who took the name Pope John XXIII. On Jan. 25, 1959 Pope John XXIII announced that he would convoke an Ecumenical Council, the 21^st such Council in their history. It convened its first session on Oct. 11, 1962.

Pope John lived only a few months into 1963 and then died. He was replaced by Cardinal Montini as Pope Paul VI, who presided over the rest of the Council until it closed in 1965. Malachi Martin tells us in his book The Jesuits, p. 321,

“As the Council was conducted under Paul VI’s overall direction, not only the periti [theological experts], but just about every element of Council machinery. . . was used to suggest ever more insistently that now finally the Church of Rome had become a parliamentary democracy; that parliamentary democracy was synonymous with Catholic theological truth and Christian virtue; that the old ‘pre-Vatican’ Church government was out forever; and that a new progressive government was in. In this manner were sown the seeds of revolt among the bishops themselves. Only in the eighties would the harvest from that seeding begin to be reaped, when bishops everywhere have begun literally to proclaim doctrine and redefine dogma without even a nod toward Rome.”

Martin tried vigorously to maintain the old traditional Roman Church in the face of the Liberal majority. But it was a losing battle. The very foundations of Roman Catholicism had shifted and cracked. “Renewal” was in the air. A new Catholic Church had begun to emerge that was based upon the description of the Church used some 80 times in the Vatican II documents—“the people of God.” In other words, the Church was no longer the institution itself, but “the people of God,” that is, the congregation. Martin says on page 324,

“The Council was quite clear about what it intended by the use of ‘the people of God.’ All men, the Council said, are called to belong to ‘the people of God’; but only those who are ‘fully incorporated in the society of the Church, who accept her entire system…and are united with her as part of her visible structure and through her with Christ who rules through the Supreme Pontiff and the bishops’ actually belong to and are members of ‘the people of God’…

“In spite of this clear statement, Liberation Theologians have seized on the expression the people of God, and have been enormously successful in giving it a meaning loaded with acrimony against the traditional, hierarchic Church …Quicker than a wink, they were able to proclaim the autonomy and independence of this new ‘people of God’ from the Pope and the Church hierarchy.”

Though Martin denounced this reinterpretation of the phrase, it was actually a biblically correct change, because the Hebrew word kahal and its NT Greek equivalent, ekklesia, both mean “congregation,” not an institution. It was always the congregation that gathered around the tabernacle or went to the temple. It was never the people “going to Church.”

The enormity of this change in defining the Church cannot be underestimated, for it removed from the Papacy and from the Vatican hierarchy itself the right to describe itself as the Church.

With “strike one,” Rome lost France. With “strike two,” Rome lost all temporal power. But with “strike three,” Rome lost its position as “the Church.

The “Smoke of Satan”

Malachi Martin writes about how Pope Paul VI spoke of, “the smoke of Satan which has entered the Sanctuary.” He writes in The Keys of This Blood, p. 632,

“Most frighteningly for John Paul, he had come up against the irremovable presence of a malign strength in his own Vatican and in certain bishops’ chanceries. It was what knowledgeable Churchmen called the ‘superforce.’ Rumors, always difficult to verify, tied its installation to the beginning of Pope Paul VI’s reign in 1963. Indeed, Paul had alluded somberly to ‘the smoke of Satan which has entered the Sanctuary’—an oblique reference to an enthronement ceremony by Satanists in the Vatican. Besides, the incidence of Satanic pedophilia—rites and practices—was already documented among certain bishops and priests as widely dispersed as Turin, in Italy, and South Carolina, in the United States. The cultic acts of Satanic pedophilia are considered by professionals to be the culmination of the Fallen Archangel’s rites.”

Martin says nothing further about this “enthronement ceremony in that book. He leaves it to a later book, Windswept House. This book was written as a historical novel—fiction, not non-fiction—because the material was so volatile. But the bottom line is that certain Satanists among the bishops in the Catholic Church conducted a parallel ceremony during the installment of Pope Paul VI on June 29, 1963. It was done in South Carolina, and by using the telephone, they were able to conduct precise rites at the same time as their counterparts were installing the pope in the Vatican.

The story of Windswept House tells how “Christian,” the main character, was able to search the Vatican archives secretly at night. You may read it for yourself on pages 593-596. Christian finally found the documentation for this “enthronement” buried deep in the archives. Most likely, it is the story of how Martin himself, or perhaps a friend of his, were able to find this documentation:

The List of Vatican Freemasons

The Vatican Bank was embroiled in a huge financial scandal in the late 1970’s involving Bishop Marcinkus, who was running the bank at that time. He was partners with Michele Sindona, a known Mafia figure who worked for the Gambino family. Sindona believed that the best way to rob a bank was to buy one. The law finally caught up with both of them (and others), and an arrest warrant was issued in Italy for the arrest of Paul Marcinkus.

Marcinkus was thus confined to the Vatican, where he was beyond the reach of the Italian government. He finally retired in 1991 in Sun City, Arizona, beyond the reach of the Italian authorities and could not be extradited, because he was a citizen the Sovereign State of Vatican City. As the stories unraveled in the newspapers in the early 1980’s, the Vatican scandal ultimately resulted in the failure of Franklin National Bank and the Savings and Loan failures in America.

The investigations into this scandal finally uncovered the fact that a great number of Vatican officials were members of the Masonic Lodge. Paul Williams writes in his book, The Vatican Exposed, p. 116,

“In 1976 the Bulletin de l’Occident Chretien published a list of alleged Masons with prominent positions within the Roman Catholic Church, along with the dates of their initiation, their Masonic code numbers, and when known, their Masonic names.”

He then proceeds to give us a sampling of those names, 67 of them in all.The final name on Paul Williams’ sample list was the Vatican Secretary of State, Jean Villot, Masonic name “Jeanni” and “Zurigo.” According to David Yallop’s book, In God’s Name, Villot was most responsible for the murder of Pope John Paul I in 1978. The pope was going to expose the corruption in the Vatican Bank and dismiss Cardinal Villot the next morning. He made the mistake of telling Villot of his intentions the night before he died.

Pope John Paul I did not live through the night. His papers disappeared. He was embalmed immediately to cover up the murder. His reign as Pope lasted only 33 days. He was the second pope to be murdered in the Vatican in the 20^th century by his own Secretary of State.

The next Pope to be elected was John Paul II. He made Jean Villot Secretary of the Treasury. In 1983 new Code of Canon Law allowed Catholics to be Freemasons, changing centuries of tradition.

It is clear from Malachi Martin’s writings that he liked Pope John Paul II, but knew that the Pope had resolved to do nothing about the problems. In Windswept House, page 38, he wrote about the day John Paul II was elected:

“ ‘If you accept to be made Pope,’ the senor Cardinal had said that day, ‘you will be the last Pope of these Catholic times… You will preside over a supreme papal endgame. And you will do so at the very moment when the antipapal factions within the Church itself have taken virtual control of its institutions—in the name of the Vatican Council itself. . .

“Even before he walked back into Conclave to accept his election to the papacy, this soon-to-be Pope had determined that the change already effected in his churchly organization was irreversible.”

Actually, at first Pope John Paul II tried to reverse the situation, but after his near assassination in 1981, he felt he could do more good alive than dead. Rather than remain the last prisoner of the Vatican, he embarked upon a new strategy of travel, appealing to the people directly to maintain traditional institutional values. But in a changing world, it was a losing battle. He died April 2, 2005.