Gigantian Apologetics

I read Windswept House back in the late 90s. It was Traddy catnip. There was even a legend that was passed around that had who the characters in the book responded to in real life. Everyone I knew believed it, after all Malachi Martin, was the former secretary of Cardinal Bea, who was one of the most prominent Cardinals at the time in the Vatican. Martin surely knew. Martin went on the Art Bell "Coast to Coast" show and told everyone he had been shown the 3rd Secret of Fatima, but was sworn to secrecy and could not give details, but warned a coming chastisment was before us. I read his book about the Jesuits, which I found fascinating. Then I read Hostage to the Devil, it was in this book the spawned doubt in my mind about Martin. Some of the details in the book were pornographic and salacious. Something I would not expect from a well trained, "true" priest. See, many of us believed Martin was "persecuted" because he was too Traditional. But after reading "Hostage to the Devil" I thought no holy priest would write such stuff--it was obscene. Then I began to hear accounts from people I trusted about Martin. One was a Traditionalist nun, who happened to be at a dinner with Martin, and was present when he recounted an incident she had first hand experience of. This nun told me and my father that Martin's story was totally sensationalized and grossly unjust. At the party she even had to correct him in front of others because she felt he had gone way across the line. A few years later, at Christendom College, one of my professers who studied at a Jesuit College, relayed how he once asked a Jesuit priest who knew Martin, what he thought of him. This priest relayed a story that Martin personally told him. Essentially, what he relayed was that he was doing some espionage work, and the East German Stasi (secret police) were after him and he had to flee by swimming the Rhine during the winter to escape them. He essentially said this Irish man was the poster boy for blarney. He didn't merely kiss the blarney stone. He swallowed the damn thing.

JUST IN: The SSPX has filed a “preliminary recourse” against the Vatican decree of excommunication Submitted on July 11, in line with Canon 1734 It thus temporarily suspends the Vatican penalty against them: “This request, which constitutes the mandatory preliminary step before the possible introduction of a hierarchical recourse, has the effect of suspending the execution of the decree, in accordance with canon 1353 of the Code of Canon Law.”