"Rome will loose the faith" La Salette - observations by Malachi Martin1

1 September 1996

Dear Friends and Benefactors,

This month, September of 1996, September 19th to be precise, is the 150th anniversary of the great Apparition of the Mother of God to two peasant children at La Salette in the mountains of eastern France in 1846. The so-called Secret of La Salette, made public by Mélanie Calvat in 1858, is the greatest single portrait of modern times given to us from Heaven for now and down to the end of the world. That is to say its importance. Here is the apocalyptic back-drop against which each of us today has to play out the salvation or damnation of his soul. By all means read or re-read the Secret on the flyer enclosed.

Of course there are souls that will smile at the mere mention of the Mother of God appearing in modern times. Surely such superstition is disappearing with the peasants it was good for, they say. But Catholics know firstly that as our religion raises us up into a unique familiarity with Heaven, teaching us to say to God "Our Father" as no other religion teaches (Gal. IV,6; Rom. VIII, 15), so it also brings down Heaven familiarly upon earth, especially our Heavenly Mother, who has appeared in all centuries to bring souls to her Son, especially in dangerous times like ours. And secondly Catholics know that despite fierce and continuing opposition, the Apparition and Secret of La Salette have been fully approved by the competent Church authorities, so that we are in no danger if we take them seriously. On the contrary, the danger consists in making light of them, or denying them.

In fact, the message of La Salette was a gigantic corrective, or up-date of Revelation, in the heart of the last century when churchmen especially were in danger of being seduced by modern "progress", or by the liberalism then really getting under way. The fierce opposition, then as now, came from the liberal churchmen preferring to be up-to-date with the world than with the God from whom that world was and is moving away. As Archbishop Lefebvre said, the Church battle in the 19th and 20th centuries is essentially the same.

That is why it is so important for readers to absorb from the Secret of La Salette the mind of Heaven for our own day. For while, for the good of our souls, much in the Secret remains mysterious, nevertheless much is becoming clear, for instance the famous statement that Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist (column 4). To give flesh and bones to this awful scenario put before us by the Mother of God, let us turn to a modern observer of the Church scene, quite independent of the Society of St. Pius X, Malachi Martin.

Now here is a man that not everybody trusts, for reasons best known to himself, as far as I can tell, and of which God alone is the infallible judge. But if one judges recent sayings and writings of his as they stand (which is how the Holy Office used to bind itself to judge), then surely they can be commended for throwing much light upon our darkling scene. For the set of audio-tapes he issued last year ("The Devastated Vineyard") and the book he published this year ("Windswept House") contain terrible accusations against modern churchmen, but there is no trace of bitterness or anger, hardly even of sadness. The spirit remains Catholic, flowing with "the milk of human kindness".

"The Devastated Vineyard" is a set of three tapes entitled "The Judas Complex", studying the infidelity of the mass of today's bishops; "St. Peter's Successor", examining the question of Pope John-Paul II; and "The Essence of Catholicism", proposing action that ordinary Catholics can take when bishops and Pope are failing to defend their faith.

As for the bishops, Malachi Martin says that with a few praiseworthy exceptions, difficult though it is to admit, a solid block of the Catholic bishops in north America (USA and Canada) no longer believe, they no longer have the Catholic Faith. Otherwise they could not behave as they do. How could they drink back "consecrated" wine like at a cocktail party and forbid people to kneel for Communion, unless they no longer believed in the Real Presence? How could they rejoice in altar-girls, female administrators and female eucharistic ministers unless they had ceased to believe in the male priesthood? How could they fail to resist abortion unless they had come to share the abortionists' view that a foetus is a blob of tissue and not a baby? And so on. The bishops' non-Catholic behaviour is simply explained by their loss of Catholic Faith.

Malachi Martin says this loss of faith goes "way back somewhere". These bishops may even never have had the faith. In any case their access to high office only confirmed their lack of faith. The "Judas complex" is Malachi Martin's name for these bishops' taking sides with the world against Jesus in order to get Jesus to be less demanding and more reasonable. There is now a tight bond between the U. S. Catholic bishops and the U. S. Government, which gives the bishops favours they want. Also the bishops do not want to upset those state officials and officers with whom they go to dinner, play golf, etc. The bishops do not want to be confronted by fellow club members being indignant at, for instance, the pro-lifers calling them baby-murderers, and so on. Also the New World Order has a necessary part for the bishops and Church to play as stabilizers of society, so the bishops are happy to go along with the planned replacement of Christ's priesthood by social worker "priests" who keep people happy, manage the plant and the money and in general make everybody feel good.

So these bishops are far from disappointed, they are delighted by the disappearance of the old out-of-date Church, they persecute true priests and they hate the real Mass with a hatred coming straight from the heart of Satan. When, oh when, asks Malachi Martin, are the "decent conservative Catholics" going to wake up to the fact that the Catholic Church structure is no more, having been snuffed out somewhere between 1965 and 1995?

All of which raises in Malachi Martin's second tape the question of John-Paul II. How can Christ' s own Vicar be happily presiding over such an incredible collapse? Firstly Malachi Martin insists, claiming inside knowledge of John-Paul II's election in 1978, that he really is Pope, and that Catholicism without whoever is Pope is not Catholicism. Nevertheless, John-Paul II' s ecumenism, and disbelief in the necessity of the Catholic Church for eternal salvation, set a very real problem.

Malachi Martin begins by guessing why Christ might have chosen Cardinal Wojtyla for his Vicar. He imagines our Lord saying to himself at the Papal election in 1978, "My Church is rotten. But if I put in Cardinal Siri of Genoa as Pope, he will fight the rot so that it will in fact go on longer, whereas if I let in Cardinal Wojtyla, the rot will go faster and I can start re-building sooner". Not that the rot is a good thing, nor that Christ can will evil, but he can will to permit evil for a greater good, and in the meantime all Catholics are entitled, even obliged, to resist the rot as best they can.

Then Malachi Martin discusses at length three weaknesses of Pope John-Paul II: firstly, he is in philosophy not a thomist who goes by the inner reality of things, but a phenomenologist who goes by their outer appearances or relations. Secondly, he is from Poland and suffers from that excessive tolerance or broad-mindedness which down history has been a weakness of Poles. And thirdly he is a geo-politician who dreams and makes dream-trips around the world, while the reins of the government of the Church in Rome are seized by his enemies, now pressuring him fiercely to resign.

In brief, Catholics can expect to suffer much at the hands of such a Pope who will neither vindicate them nor protect their religion. Under him, they can expect no good to come out of Rome, only misdirection and imperfection. However, that does not prevent them from defending their own faith, in fact Malachi Martin says that a whole underground Church is being set up independently of the official bishops or Rome, and I think he is referring to a network alongside of or in addition to the Society of St. Pius X. Which is normal. Abnormally normal, but normal. There is a God, and lies remain lies.

This dark picture of Pope and bishops and Rome, which we know from our Lady of La Salette to be a feature of the end times, is corroborated, even darkened, in Malachi Martin's recent hook, "Windswept House" (published by Doubleday, 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036). To tell harsh truths about the state of the Church in Rome and North America today, he has chosen to write a novel, partly for audience appeal but perhaps mainly for self-protection. If for instance he dared to publish as naked fact all that precise detail of the enthroning of Satan inside the Vatican in 1963 by a double ceremony linking Rome and South Carolina, one wonders how long he might be left to live, and the same might be true for horrendous details of Satanism and the vice against nature he depicts as being rampant among the upper and lower clergy in North America. As it is, he and anybody else can say, "It's only a novel".

But the novel is built around a very real-line straggle for the heart and mind of the "Slavic Pope", between a handful of loyal Catholics on the one side, and on the other side a global conspiracy of Roman prelates and world politicians scheming to incorporate the Catholic Church structure, but not faith, into the New World Order.

There are fascinating pages in the novel on the mentality of these prelates, deciding that if Mother Church can no longer lick the process of History, then they must join it; fascinating debates also between an older priest justifying at all costs the Slavic Pope's failure to defend the Faith, and a younger priest who cannot let the failure pass. Devotion against Doctrine. A debate going on in Malacli Martin' s mind. He has up till now sided with Devotion, whereas the SSPX sides with Doctrine, but in the conclusion of "Wind swept House" is Malachi Martin at last tilting towards Doctrine?

In the third tape of "The Devastated Vineyard", Malachi Martin's solution was still Devotion. After scanning in the first two tapes the collapse of bishops and Pope, he begins his third tape by surveying the collapse of Christian civilization. The nations no longer acknowledge Christ. In no government of the world do Catholics hold sway. The protective walls are broken down. Wild animals prowl and devour. The police, the F.B.I., the military, the State, the big Corporations, now devour the people instead of protecting them. We are lonely, unhappy, and see no light at the end of the tunnel. Wall Street can collapse, the world economy is shaky, all parts of the world are in contention. The ancient civilization is like dead, being replaced by a new way of life which is feckless, rich, dirty, glamorous and self-satisfied.

As for the Catholic Church, it has been undone by the undoing of its devotion, what St. Paul called piety, expressed in devotions. And Malachi Martin has beautiful things to say about those devout practices of Catholics which were the hall-mark of our religion, and which made Heaven and earth so familiar to one another. With their deliberate extinction according to a satanic plan, the Catholic Church and Faith have been extinguished in the people's hearts and minds. For instance, how can a person receive Communion worthily unless he has some devotion to thie Person of Our Lord? Impossible. And that is why, to destroy the Church, a "powerful and dirty alliance" of servants of Satan, inside the Church in Rome and outside, are working together, to silence for instance the Mother of God as she tries to make her voice heard at La Salette, at Fatima, at...

All of which external influences throw an extra obligation upon parents, concludes Malachi Martin, to safeguard their children' s faith. The truth is still out there, and accessible, but to find it, people must want to find it. Parents must search out true priests, the true Mass, the true sacraments. They must believe in that eternity, to prepare for which we have only this life. "This is it!"

Now Catholics who think with the Society of St. Pius X might wish Malachi Martin would draw his conclusions tighter but it takes time for people to realize that the necessary line of defense of the faith is the "extremism" of Archbishop Lefebvre. Meanwhile Malachi Martin must he reaching a range of souls that the Society cannot for the moment reach, and with many truths close to the heart of Our Lady of Salette.

Catholics, beware! The same Devil who sand-trapped so many bishops, priests and laity in mid-19th century, as Our Lady of Salette warned, sand-trapped many more in mid-20th century, along the same lines, and he is prowling about to do the same to ourselves. Bing Crosby Catholicism was deadly for the Faith of tens of millions! We must watch and pray and listen to our Lady, if we wish to save our souls.

Enclosed is a Seminary Continuous Support Fund Card which, if filled out and returned to us, will obtain for you a monthly envelope to facilitate contributions, and will bring you this monthly letter by First class mail. We are always grateful for your support. May God he with you, especially parents and children, through a new school-year.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

+ Richard N. Williamson