Chapter 5

A Motive Emerges

       As we charged in the Introduction, the crime against the Church and the world which we intend to prove in this book involves "a systematic attempt, since the year 1960, to conceal, misrepresent and deny the authenticity of this message — the Message of Fatima—even as its alarming prophecies are being fulfilled before our very eyes."

       But why would men in the highest positions of authority in the Church commit such a crime? As Aristotle observed, in order to understand an action one must look to the motive. That is what we shall do in this chapter.

       To be sure, proving motive is always a difficult business; for one cannot read another man’s mind, much less judge the state of his soul. In arriving at a conclusion as to motive you, like any jury in a merely civil case, can only base your decision on the external actions of the accused, in light of the surrounding circumstances. When a jury finds that a man has murdered his wife for the motive of obtaining insurance money, for example, it makes its finding of motive based on a reasonable inference drawn from the surrounding circumstances. Rarely would the killer in such a case openly admit "I killed her for the insurance." Instead, motive would be inferred from such things as the husband’s recent purchase of a very large insurance policy on the wife.

       Now, no one would accuse a jury of "rash judgment" in inferring from the circumstances that the husband in our hypothetical case harbored the intention of killing his wife for money. In the case of Fatima, too, motive can be deduced from circumstances; it is not "rash judgment" to reach a reasonable conclusion about motive based on what the accused themselves have said and done. Moreover, as we will demonstrate in this case we have the equivalent of an admission as to motive. The accused have been quite explicit about what they approve and what they intend concerning the crime at issue.

A New and Ruinous Orientation of the Church

       As we charged in the Introduction, the motive in this case arises from the recognition by the accused that the Message of Fatima, understood in a traditional Catholic sense, cannot be reconciled with decisions they have taken since the Second Vatican Council to change the entire orientation of the Catholic Church. That is, the Message stands in the way of their effort to do precisely what the future Pope Pius XII foresaw in his moment of supernatural clarity: to remake the Church into an institution oriented toward the world. The currently raging scandal in the Catholic priesthood is only one symptom of this ruinous effort to "update" the Catholic Church. Another way of putting it is that the current condition of the Catholic Church is the result of an unprecedented invasion of the Church by liberalism. We recall once again those prophetic words of Msgr. Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII), uttered in the light of the Message of Fatima:

       I am worried by the Blessed Virgin’s messages to Lucy of Fatima. This persistence of Mary about the dangers which menace the Church is a divine warning against the suicide of altering the Faith, in Her liturgy, Her theology and Her soul. … I hear all around me innovators who wish to dismantle the Sacred Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the Church, reject Her ornaments and make Her feel remorse for Her historical past.

       A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt as Peter doubted. She will be tempted to believe that man has become God. In our churches, Christians will search in vain for the red lamp where God awaits them. Like Mary Magdalene, weeping before the empty tomb, they will ask, "Where have they taken Him?"

       In the Introduction we also noted that this great change of orientation in the Church—in "Her liturgy, Her theology, Her soul", as the future Pope Pius XII put it—was the long-cherished goal of the organized forces that have been plotting against the Church for centuries; the same forces that were at work in Portugal in 1917, but were repelled by the Consecration of that nation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1931. To repel those forces throughout the world was the very reason Heaven itself sent the Mother of God to Fatima to prescribe the Consecration of Russia. Those forces were soon to become the prime weapon of Satan’s long war against the Church. Truly, the outcome of the war against the Church in our time hinges on the battle over fulfillment of the Fatima Message.

       Our presentation of the evidence of the motive in this case—namely, a desire to impose upon the Church a new orientation to the exclusion of the Message of Fatima—requires some considerable historical background, which we will now present. This background will be of interest not only to Catholics, but also to non-Catholics who are seeking to understand what has happened to the Catholic Church since Vatican II.

The Goal of Organized Freemasonry:
To Neutralize and "Instrumentalize" the Catholic Church

       As we have seen with the example of Portugal in 1917, the forces of Masonry (and their Communist fellow travelers) conspired to prevent the Message of Fatima from finding its fulfillment in Portugal. The Message was called a fraud or a childish delusion; the seers themselves were persecuted and even threatened with death. Such was the hatred of these forces for the Catholic Church and the Virgin Mother of God.

       And so it is with these forces in the world at large today. One need not descend into the fever swamps of conspiracy theory to know that before 1960, the Popes issued more condemnations and warnings about the plotting of the Freemasons and the Communists against the Church than on any other single subject in Church history.

       On this point, one cannot fail to consider the infamous Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita, a Masonic document that mapped out an entire plan for the infiltration and corruption of the Catholic Church in the 20^th Century.¹ While it has become fashionable since the Second Vatican Council to scoff at the existence of such a conspiracy, it must be noted that the secret papers of the Alta Vendita (an Italian secret society), including the Permanent Instruction, fell into the hands of Pope Gregory XVI. The Permanent Instruction was published at the request of Blessed Pope Pius IX by Cardinal Cretineau-Joly in his work The Roman Church and Revolution.² With his brief of approbation of February 25, 1861 (addressed to the author) Pope Pius IX guaranteed the authenticity of the Permanent Instruction and the other Masonic papers, but he did not allow anyone to divulge the true names of the members of the Alta Vendita implicated in the documents. Pope Leo XIII had likewise requested their publication. Both Popes acted, no doubt, in order to prevent such a tragedy from taking place. These great Pontiffs knew that such a calamity was far from impossible. (Pope Pius XII also knew it, as we can see from his prophetic remarks while he was still Vatican Secretary of State.)

       The full text of the Permanent Instruction is also contained in Msgr. George E. Dillon’s book, Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked.³ When Pope Leo XIII was presented with a copy of Msgr. Dillon’s book, he was so impressed that he ordered an Italian version to be completed and published at the Pope’s own expense.⁴

       The Alta Vendita was the highest lodge of the Carbonari, an Italian secret society with links to Freemasonry and which, along with Freemasonry, was condemned by the Catholic Church.⁵ The estimable Catholic historian Father E. Cahill, SJ, who is hardly a "conspiracy nut", states in his work Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement that the Alta Vendita was "commonly supposed to have been at the time the governing center of European Freemasonry."⁶ The Carbonari were most active in Italy and France.

       In his book Athanasius and the Church of Our Time (1974), Bishop Rudolph Graber, another objective and quite unimpeachable authority writing after the Second Vatican Council, quoted a prominent Freemason who declared that "the goal (of Freemasonry) is no longer the destruction of the Church, but to make use of it by infiltrating it."⁷ In other words, since Freemasonry cannot completely obliterate Christ’s Church, it plans not only to eradicate the influence of Catholicism in society, but to use the Church’s structure as an instrument of "renewal," "progress" and "enlightenment"—that is, a means of furthering many of its own principles and goals.

       Discussing the Masonic vision of society and the world, Bishop Graber introduces the concept of synarchy: "What we are faced with here is the sum-total of the secret forces of all the ‘orders’ and schools which have joined together to set up an invisible world government. In the political sense, synarchy aims at the integration of all the financial and social forces which the world government, under socialist leadership naturally, has to support and promote. Catholicism, like all religions, would consequently be absorbed into a universal syncretism. Far from being suppressed, it would be integrated, a course which is already being steered in the principle of fellowship between clerics (of various religions)."

       The strategy advanced in the Permanent Instruction to achieve this aim is astonishing in its audacity and cunning. From the start, the document tells of a process that will take decades to accomplish. Those who drew up the document knew that they would not see its fulfillment. They were inaugurating a work that would be carried on by succeeding generations of the initiated. The Permanent Instruction says, "In our ranks the soldier dies and the struggle goes on."

       The Instruction called for the dissemination of liberal ideas and axioms throughout society and within the institutions of the Catholic Church so that laity, seminarians, clerics and prelates would, over the years, gradually be imbued with progressive principles. In time, this new mentality would be so pervasive that priests would be ordained, bishops consecrated, and Cardinals nominated whose thinking was in step with the modern thought rooted in the "Principles of 1789" (i.e. the principles of Freemasonry which inspired the French Revolution)—namely, pluralism, the equality of all religions, separation of Church and State, unbridled freedom of speech, and so forth.

       Eventually, a Pope would be elected from these ranks who would lead the Church on the path of "enlightenment and renewal". It must be stressed that it was not their aim to place a Freemason on the Chair of Peter. Their goal was to effect an environment that would eventually produce a Pope and a hierarchy won over to the ideas of liberal Catholicism, all the while believing themselves to be faithful Catholics.

       These liberalized Catholic leaders, then, would no longer oppose the modern ideas of the revolution (as had been the consistent practice of the Popes from 1789 until 1958, who unanimously condemned these liberal principles), but would amalgamate or "baptize" them into the Church. The end result would be a Catholic clergy and laity marching under the banner of the "enlightenment", all the while thinking they are marching under the banner of the Apostolic keys.

       No doubt with the Permanent Instruction in mind, in Humanum Genus, Pope Leo XIII called upon Catholic leaders to "tear off the mask from Freemasonry and make plain to all what it really is."⁸ The publication of these documents of the Alta Vendita was a means of "tearing off the mask".

       Lest there be any claim that we have mischaracterized the Permanent Instruction, we now quote from it at considerable length. What follows is not the entire Instruction, but the section that is most pertinent to our proof. The document reads:

       The Pope, whoever he is, will never come to the secret societies; it is up to the secret societies to take the first step toward the Church, with the aim of conquering both of them.

       The task that we are going to undertake is not the work of a day, or of a month, or of a year; it may last several years, perhaps a century; but in our ranks the soldier dies and the struggle goes on.

       We do not intend to win the Popes to our cause, to make them neophytes of our principles, propagators of our ideas. That would be a ridiculous dream; and if events turn out in some way, if Cardinals or prelates, for example, of their own free will or by surprise, should enter into a part of our secrets, this is not at all an incentive for desiring their elevation to the See of Peter. That elevation would ruin us. Ambition alone would have led them to apostasy, the requirements of power would force them to sacrifice us. What we must ask for, what we should look for and wait for, as the Jews wait for the Messiah, is a Pope according to our needs ...

       With that we shall march more securely towards the assault on the Church than with the pamphlets of our brethren in France and even the gold of England. Do you want to know the reason for this? It is that with this, in order to shatter the high rock on which God has built His Church, we no longer need Hannibalian vinegar, or need gunpowder, or even need our arms. We have the little finger of the successor of Peter engaged in the ploy, and this little finger is as good, for this crusade, as all the Urban II’s and all the Saint Bernards in Christendom.

       We have no doubt that we will arrive at this supreme end of our efforts. But when? But how? The unknown is not yet revealed. Nevertheless, as nothing should turn us aside from the plan drawn up, and on the contrary everything should tend to this, as if as early as tomorrow success were going to crown the work that is barely sketched, we wish, in this instruction, which will remain secret for the mere initiates, to give the officials in charge of the supreme Vente some advice that they should instill in all the brethren, in the form of instruction or of a memorandum ...

       Now then, to assure ourselves a Pope of the required dimensions, it is a question first of shaping him ... for this Pope, a generation worthy of the reign we are dreaming of. Leave old people and those of a mature age aside; go to the youth, and if it is possible, even to the children ... You will contrive for yourselves, at little cost, a reputation as good Catholics and pure patriots.

       This reputation will put access to our doctrines into the midst of the young clergy, as well as deeply into the monasteries. In a few years, by the force of things, this young clergy will have overrun all the functions; they will form the sovereign’s council, they will be called to choose a Pontiff who should reign. And this Pontiff, like most of his contemporaries, will be necessarily more or less imbued with the Italian and humanitarian principles that we are going to begin to put into circulation. It is a small grain of black mustard that we are entrusting to the ground; but the sunshine of justice will develop it up to the highest power, and you will see one day what a rich harvest this small seed will produce.

       In the path that we are laying out for our brethren, there are found great obstacles to conquer, difficulties of more than one kind to master. They will triumph over them by experience and by clearsightedness; but the goal is so splendid that it is important to put all the sails to the wind in order to reach it. You want to revolutionize Italy, look for the Pope whose portrait we have just drawn. You wish to establish the reign of the chosen ones on the throne of the prostitute of Babylon, let the Clergy march under your standard, always believing that they are marching under the banner of the apostolic keys. You intend to make the last vestige of tyrants and the oppressors disappear; lay your snares like Simon Bar-Jona; lay them in the sacristies, the seminaries, and the monasteries rather than at the bottom of the sea: and if you do not hurry, we promise you a catch more miraculous than his. The fisher of fish became the fisher of men; you will bring friends around the apostolic Chair. You will have preached a revolution in tiara and in cope, marching with the cross and the banner, a revolution that will need to be only a little bit urged on to set fire to the four corners of the world.⁹

The Rise of Liberal Catholicism

       As we have noted, the goal of Freemasonry was not to destroy the Church, which the Masons knew was impossible, but to neutralize and instrumentalize the Church—that is, to make the human element of the Church into an instrument for the advance of Freemasonic goals, by inducing the Church’s members to embrace liberal ideas. A liberalized hierarchy would readily lend itself to the work of establishing the Masonic ideal of a new world order (novus ordo seclorum)—a false pan-religious "brotherhood" in which the Church abandons Her claim to be the sole ark of salvation and ceases Her opposition to the forces of the world. The first stage of this process was manifested in the 19th Century, by which time society had become increasingly permeated with the liberal principles of the French Revolution. Even in the mid-1800s this program was already causing great detriment to the Catholic Faith and the Catholic State. The supposedly "kinder and gentler" notions of pluralism, religious indifferentism, a democracy which believes all authority comes from the people, false notions of liberty, interfaith gatherings, separation of Church and State and other novelties were gripping the minds of post-enlightenment Europe, infecting statesmen and churchmen alike.

The Condemnation of Liberal Catholicism

       The Popes of the 19th and early 20th Centuries waged war against these dangerous trends in full battle-dress. With a presence of mind rooted in the uncompromised certitude of Faith, these Popes were not taken in. They knew that evil principles, no matter how honorable they may appear, cannot bear good fruit, and that these were evil principles at their worst, since they were rooted not only in heresy, but apostasy. Like commanding generals who recognize the duty to hold their ground at all cost, these Popes aimed powerful cannons at the errors of the modern world and fired incessantly. The encyclicals were their cannonballs and they never missed their target.

       The most devastating blast came in the form of Blessed Pope Pius IX’s monumental Syllabus of Errors, which he appended to his encyclical Quanta Cura (1864). When the smoke cleared, all involved in the battle were in no doubt as to who was on what side. The line of demarcation had been drawn clearly. In the Syllabus, Blessed Pius IX condemned the principal errors of the modern world, not because they were modern, but because these new ideas were rooted in pantheistic naturalism and, therefore, were incompatible with Catholic doctrine, as well as being destructive to society.

       The teachings in the Syllabus were counter-liberalism, and the principles of liberalism were counter-syllabus. This was clearly recognized by all parties. Father Denis Fahey referred to this showdown as "Pius IX vs. the Pantheistic Deification of Man."¹⁰ Speaking for the other side, the French Freemason Ferdinand Buissont declared likewise, "A school cannot remain neutral between the Syllabus and the Declaration of the Rights of Man."¹¹

       Yet the 19th Century saw a new breed of Catholic who sought a utopian compromise between the two. These men looked for what they believed to be "good" in the principles of 1789 and tried to introduce them into the Church. Many clergymen, infected by the spirit of the age, were caught up in a net that had been "cast into the sacristies and into the seminaries" by Freemasonry. These men came to be known as liberal Catholics. Blessed Pope Pius IX regarded them with absolute horror. He said these "liberal Catholics" were the "worst enemies of the Church". In a letter to the French deputation headed by the Bishop of Nevers on June 18, 1871, Blessed Pius IX declared:

       That which I fear is not the Commune of Paris—no—that which I fear is Liberal Catholicism ... I have said so more than forty times, and I repeat it to you now, through the love that I bear you. The real scourge of France is Liberal Catholicism, which endeavors to unite two principles as repugnant to each other as fire and water.¹²

The Rise of Modernism

       Yet in spite of this, the numbers of liberal Catholics steadily increased. The crisis reached a peak around the turn of the century when the liberalism of 1789 that had been "blowin’ in the wind" swirled into the tornado of modernism. Father Vincent Miceli identified this heresy as such by describing modernism’s "trinity of parents". He wrote: "Its religious ancestor is the Protestant Reformation … its philosophical parent is the Enlightenment … its political pedigree comes from the French Revolution."¹³

       What is meant by "modernism"? Modernism is nothing more or less than a synthesis or combination of all the errors of Liberal Catholicism into a comprehensive philosophical and theological system whose effect is to undermine the integrity of the entire Catholic faith. While a complete examination of the vast modernist system of thought is far beyond the scope of this book, it suffices for our purposes to say that, by various subtle errors, the modernist denies or undermines the divinity and divine revelation of Christ, the founding of the one true Church by Him, and the absolute immutability of Catholic doctrine (which the modernist claims can "evolve" according to changing circumstances). The modernist also embraces and promotes the liberal notions of "free speech," "freedom of conscience," and the error of religious indifferentism, which holds that all religions are more or less good and praiseworthy because they all arise from a so-called "religious sense" in man—an error which, of course, implicitly denies the reality of Original Sin by suggesting that all men can be truly religious and can find salvation in the various religions they invent without need of Baptism, Faith and the sacraments of the Catholic Church.

Saint Pius X Puts Down the Modernist Revolt

       Pope St. Pius X, who ascended to the Papal throne in 1903, recognized modernism as a most deadly plague that must be arrested. St. Pius X waged war on modernism by systematically isolating, defining and condemning its many erroneous propositions. In particular, St. Pius X issued a monumental encyclical against modernism (Pascendi) and a Syllabus of modernist errors (Lamentabili). In his encyclical Pascendi this great Pope wrote: "There is no part of Catholic truth which they leave untouched, none that they do not strive to corrupt." In the same encyclical he called modernism "the synthesis of all heresies," declaring that the most important obligation of the Pope is to insure the purity and integrity of Catholic doctrine, and that if he did nothing, then he would have failed in his essential duty.¹⁴

       But Pope St. Pius X did not stop there. A few years after Pascendi, recognizing that the Modernists had to be crushed before they rose up and caused havoc in the Church, this sainted Pope issued his letter Sacrorum antistitum, which mandated the Anti-Modernist Oath to be sworn by all priests and teachers. He oversaw the purging of modernists from the seminaries and universities and excommunicated the stubborn and unrepentant. St. Pius X knew that nothing less than the very nature of the Church was under attack by the modernists, who in their audacity were now acting openly for the overthrow of Catholic Dogma and Tradition:

       [T]he gravity of the evil is daily growing and must be checked at any cost. We are no longer dealing, as at the beginning, with opponents ‘in sheep’s clothing’, but with open and bare-faced enemies in our very household, who, having made a pact with the chief foes of the Church [i.e. Freemasons, Liberals, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, etc.], are bent on overthrowing the Faith … They want to renovate it as if it were consumed by old age, increase it and adapt it to worldly tastes, progress and comforts, as if it were opposed not just to the frivolity of a few, but to the good of society. … There will never be enough vigilance and firmness on the part of those entrusted with the faithful safekeeping of the sacred deposit of evangelical doctrine and ecclesiastical tradition, in order to oppose these onslaughts against it.¹⁵

       St. Pius X effectively halted the spread of modernism in his day. It is reported, however, that when he was congratulated for eradicating this grave error, Pope St. Pius X immediately responded that despite all his efforts, he had not succeeded in killing this beast, but had only driven it underground. He warned that if Church leaders were not vigilant, it would return in the future more virulent than ever.¹⁶ As we are about to see, St. Pius X’s prediction has come true—with a vengeance.

Modernism Begins to Rise Again

       A little-known drama that unfolded during the reign of Pope Pius XI demonstrates that the underground current of Modernist thought was alive and well in the immediate post-St. Pius X period.

       Father Raymond Dulac relates that at the secret consistory of May 23, 1923, Pope Pius XI questioned the thirty Cardinals of the Curia on the timeliness of summoning an ecumenical council. In attendance were illustrious prelates such as Merry del Val, De Lai, Gasparri, Boggiani and Billot. The Cardinals advised against it. Cardinal Billot warned, "The existence of profound differences in the midst of the episcopacy itself cannot be concealed ... [They] run the risk of giving place to discussions that will be prolonged indefinitely."

       Boggiani recalled the modernist theories from which, he said, a part of the clergy and of the bishops are not exempt. "This mentality can incline certain Fathers to present motions, to introduce methods incompatible with Catholic traditions."

       Billot was even more precise. He expressed his fear of seeing the council "maneuvered" by "the worst enemies of the Church, the Modernists, who are already getting ready, as certain indications show, to bring forth the revolution in the Church, a new 1789."¹⁷

Masonic Predictions of a Modernist
Breakthrough at an Ecumenical Council

       In discouraging the idea of a Council for such reasons, these Cardinals showed themselves more apt at recognizing the "signs of the times" than all the post-Vatican II theologians combined. Yet their caution may have been rooted in something deeper. They may also have been haunted by the writings of the infamous illuminé, the excommunicated Canon Roca (1830-1893) who preached revolution and Church "reform", and who predicted in amazingly precise detail the subversion of the Church that would be brought about by a Council.

       In Athanasius and the Church of Our Time, Bishop Graber quotes Roca’s prediction of a "newly illuminated church" which would be influenced by the "socialism of Jesus".¹⁸ In the mid-19th Century, Roca predicted that "The new church, which might not be able to retain anything of Scholastic doctrine and the original form of the former Church, will nevertheless receive consecration and canonical jurisdiction from Rome." Roca also, amazingly enough, predicted the liturgical "reform" after Vatican II: "[T]he divine cult in the form directed by the liturgy, ceremonial, ritual and regulations of the Roman Church will shortly undergo a transformation at an ecumenical council, which will restore to it the venerable simplicity of the golden age of the Apostles in accordance with the dictates of conscience and modern civilization."

       Roca foretold that through this council will come "a perfect accord between the ideals of modern civilization and the ideal of Christ and His Gospel. This will be the consecration of the New Social Order and the solemn baptism of modern civilization." In other words, this council would usher in the triumph of the Masonic plan for subversion of the Church. Roca also spoke of the future of the Papacy. He wrote "There is a sacrifice in the offing which represents a solemn act of expiation ... The Papacy will fall; it will die under the hallowed knife which the fathers of the last council will forge. The papal caesar is a host [victim] crowned for the sacrifice." Roca enthusiastically predicted nothing short of a "new religion, new dogma, new ritual, new priesthood." He called the new priests "progressists" and speaks of the "suppression" of the soutane [cassock] and the "marriage of priests."¹⁹

       Pointing to the writings of the French heresiarch, Abbé Melinge (who used the pseudonym Dr. Alta), Bishop Graber warned of a revolutionary program of "the replacement of the Roman faith by a ‘pluri-confessional’ pontificate, able to adapt to a polyvalent ecumenism, such as we are seeing established today in the intercelebration of priests and Protestant pastors." (Melinge was referring to certain renegade priests; today, however, the Pope himself conducts joint services, including Vespers, with Protestant "bishops.")²⁰

       Chilling echos of Roca, Melinge and the Alta Vendita are to be found in the words of the Rosicrucian, Dr. Rudolph Steiner who declared in 1910 "We need a council and a Pope to proclaim it."²¹

The Masonic Alliance with Communism

       It must be noted that in their striving toward these goals the Masons were the kin of the Communists, who were plotting alongside them for the overthrow of both Church and State. As Pope Leo XIII observed in Humanum Genus (1884), his monumental encyclical on the threat posed by the Masonic societies: "Yea, this change and overthrow is deliberately planned and put forward by many associations of communists and socialists; and to their undertakings the sect of Freemasons is not hostile, but greatly favors their designs, and holds in common with them their chief opinions."

       As we have since learned from numerous independent witnesses, Communist infiltration of the Church²² began as early as the 1930s. Lenin himself (the very founder of Russian Communism) declared in the 1920’s that he would infiltrate the Catholic Church, particularly the Vatican. The historical evidence on this score was recently summarized in the venerable periodical Christian Order:

       Ex-Communist and celebrated convert Douglas Hyde revealed long ago that in the 1930s the Communist leadership issued a worldwide directive about infiltrating the Catholic Church. While in the early 1950s, Mrs. Bella Dodd was also providing detailed explanations of the Communist subversion of the Church. Speaking as a former high ranking official of the American Communist Party, Mrs. Dodd said: "In the 1930s we put eleven hundred men into the priesthood in order to destroy the Church from within." The idea was for these men to be ordained and progress to positions of influence and authority as Monsignors and Bishops. A dozen years before Vatican II she stated that: "Right now they are in the highest places in the Church"—where they were working to bring about change in order to weaken the Church’s effectiveness against Communism. She also said that these changes would be so drastic that "you will not recognize the Catholic Church."²³

       As Christian Order points out, the existence of a Communist conspiracy to infiltrate the Church has been confirmed abundantly not only by former Communists Dodd and Hyde, but also by Soviet defectors:

       Ex-KGB officer Anatoliy Golitsyn, who defected in 1961 and in 1984 forecast with 94% accuracy all the astonishing developments in the Communist Bloc since that time, confirmed several years ago that this "penetration of the Catholic and other churches is part of the Party’s ‘general line’ [i.e. unchanged policy] in the struggle against religion." In fact, hundreds of files smuggled into the West by former KGB archivist Vassili Mitrokhin and published in 1999 tell a similar tale, about the KGB cultivating the closest possible relationships with ‘progressive’ Catholics and financing their activities. One of the leftist organs identified was the small Italian Catholic press agency Adista, which for decades has promoted every imaginable post-conciliar cause or "reform" and whose Director was named in The Mitrokhin Archive as a paid KGB agent.

       Mrs. Dodd, who converted to the Faith shortly before her death, was legal counsel to the Communist Party of the United States. She gave voluminous testimony on Communist infiltration of Church and state before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in the 1950s. As if to atone for her role in subverting the Church, Dodd delivered a series of lectures at Fordham University and elsewhere during the years leading up to Vatican II. Christian Order recounts the testimony of a monk who attended one of those lectures in the early 1950s:

       I listened to that woman for four hours and she had my hair standing on end. Everything she said has been fulfilled to the letter. You would think she was the world’s greatest prophet, but she was no prophet. She was merely exposing the step-by-step battle plan of Communist subversion of the Catholic Church. She explained that of all the world’s religions, the Catholic Church was the only one feared by the Communists, for it was its only effective opponent. The whole idea was to destroy, not the institution of the Church, but rather the Faith of the people, and even use the institution of the Church, if possible, to destroy the Faith through the promotion of a pseudo-religion: something that resembled Catholicism but was not the real thing. Once the Faith was destroyed, she explained that there would be a guilt complex introduced into the Church. … to label the ‘Church of the past’ as being oppressive, authoritarian, full of prejudices, arrogant in claiming to be the sole possessor of truth, and responsible for the divisions of religious bodies throughout the centuries. This would be necessary in order to shame Church leaders into an ‘openness to the world,’ and to a more flexible attitude toward all religions and philosophies. The Communists would then exploit this openness in order to undermine the Church.²⁴

       Now, if the enemies of the Church were to succeed in their plans, which we have just outlined, we would see these things happening in the Church:

• First, there would be, as Roca predicted, an upheaval at an ecumenical council of such magnitude that the entire world would realize that the Catholic Church had undergone a revolution in line with modern ideas. It would be clear to all that an "updating" of the Church had taken place.
• Second, a new "theology" would be introduced that would tend to contradict previous teachings.
• Third, the Freemasons and Communists themselves would voice their cockle-doodle of triumph, believing that the Catholic Church had finally "seen the light" on such points as pluralism, the secular state, equality of religions, and whatever other compromises had been achieved.
• Fourth, as the result of this subversion, the new orientation of the Church would come to take precedence over the very dogmas and traditions of the Church in Her teaching and practice—including the Message of Fatima, which would have to be "revised" or buried to accommodate the new orientation.

       It now remains for us to demonstrate the extent to which this design for subversion of the Church has come to pass, and how it has given rise to the motive for the grave crime committed: the attempt to nullify the authentic Message of Fatima. By this crime the accused have left the Church and the world exposed to the gravest possible dangers, including the annihilation of various nations and the loss of millions of souls. Truly, this is a crime not only against the Church but against humanity.

Footnotes

1. For a booklet on the connection between the Alta Vendita and the new orientation of the Church since the Council, see John Vennari, The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita (TAN Books and Publishers, 1999).

2. 2nd volume, original edition, 1859, reprinted by Circle of the French Renaissance, Paris 1976; Msgr. Delassus produced these documents again in his work The Anti-Christian Conspiracy, DDB, 1910, Tome III, pp. 1035-1092.

3. Msgr. Dillon, Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked, pp. 51-56, full text of Alta Vendita — Christian Book Club, Palmdale, California.

4. Michael Davies, Pope John’s Council, (Angelus Press, Kansas City, Missouri, 1992) p. 166.

5. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 3, (New York Encyclopedia Press, 1913) pp. 330-331.

6. Rev. E. Cahill, S.J., Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement, (Dublin: Gill, 1959) p. 101.

7. Bishop Graber, Athanasius and the Church of Our Time, (Christian Book Club, Palmdale, California, 1974) p. 39.

8. Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, (TAN Books and Publishers, Rockford, Illinois) para. 31.

9. Msgr. Dillon, Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked, pp. 51-56, full text of Alta Vendita (Christian Book Club, Palmdale, California).

10. Father Denis Fahey, Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, (Regina Publications, Dublin, Ireland, 1939) Chapter VII.

11. Ibid., p. 116.

12. Quoted from The Catholic Doctrine, Father Michael Muller, (Benzinger, 1888) p. 282.

13. Father Vincent Miceli, The Antichrist, (Roman Catholic Books, Harrison, New York, 1981) p. 133.

14. Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis (On the Doctrine of the Modernists), September 8, 1907.

15. Pascendi.

16. Father Vincent Miceli, The Antichrist, cassette lecture, Keep the Faith, Inc. Ramsey, NJ.

17. Raymond Dulac, Episcopal Collegiality at the Second Council of the Vatican, (Paris: Cedre, 1979) pp. 9-10.

18. Athanasius and the Church of Our Time, p. 34.

19. A full account of all of Roca’s quotes printed here is found in Athanasius and the Church of Our Time, pp. 31-40.

20. "Joint Catholic-Lutheran Vespers at Vatican," CWNews.com, November 13, 1999: "Archbishops G.H. Hammar and Jukka Paarma—the Lutheran primates of Sweden and Finland, respectively—and Bishops Anders Arborelius of Stockholm and Czeslaw Kozon of Copenhagen joined with the Holy Father for the Vespers service. Several other Lutheran bishops from the Scandinavian countries were present for the ceremony, including two female bishops."

21. Athanasius and the Church of Our Time, p. 36.

22. See "The Secret Red Plan to Take Over the Catholic Church", published in Red China in 1959. Published in English in The Fatima Crusader, Issue 19, February-April, 1986, p. 6. See also "The Prophecy of Bella Dodd", a Fatima Perspective web column by Chris Ferrara (www.fatima.org/perspective235.asp); this prophecy is also found on pages 47-48 of this book. See also Father Paul Kramer, "The ‘Party Line’ in Relation to Fatima", The Fatima Crusader, Issue 69, Winter 2002, pp. 10ff.

23. "The Greatest Conspiracy", Christian Order, November 2000.

24. Another ex-Communist, Mr. Manning Johnson gave similar testimony. In 1953, to the House Un-American Activities Committee, Manning said: "Once the tactic of infiltration of religious organizations was set by the Kremlin ... The Communists discovered that the destruction of religion could proceed much faster through the infiltration of the Church by Communists operating within the Church itself." He then stated, "This policy of infiltrating seminaries was successful beyond even our Communist expectations." Speaking of the infiltration of religious institutions in general, Manning Johnson further explained, "... the major plot to take over religious organizations was really hatched during that particular period (1935), and the fact that the Communists in headlines in the Daily Worker, can boast of 2,300 Protestant Ministers supporting them is the result of this part that began in the thirties when I was a member of the Communist party." Testimony of Manning Johnson, Investigation of Communist Activities in the New York City Area — Part 7, Hearing Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Third Congress, First Session, July 8, 1953, (Published by the Government Printing Office, Washington, 1953) p. 2214. A collection of quotations from ex-Communists and the infiltration of the Church is found in John Vennari’s "Heaven’s Request for Reparation to the Holy Face of Jesus", Part III, Catholic Family News, August 2001.