Battles with the demonic

Mary O’Regan remembers Malachi Martin

Malachi Martin was born in Kerry in 1921; July 23 marks the 100th year anniversary of his birth. Martin trained as a Jesuit in old Catholic Ireland, and later described the rigors of his seminary days: when he arrived, they confiscated his hair gel and cologne and taught him to obey without question. A firstclass scholar, he became fluent in eight languages and was an expert in Semitic handwriting from the time of Abraham. In his 30s, he became a professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute and acted as Cardinal Augustin Bea's private secretary, a role he held for six years, from 1958 to 1964. During this heady time, Martin said he read the Third Secret of Fatima and came to know the major players who orchestrated the changes which ravaged Mother Church. In an interview with Bernard Jansen, Martin revealed a telling incident when, during the Vatican Council, Cardinal Bea came to Martin's room in some distress. Bea had just overheard Hans Küng saying that, unlike the Protestant rebels of old, he and his cohorts were going to stay inside the Church and change it from within. Martin never shared his reaction to Cardinal Bea's distress, yet the mere fact that he was Bea's close confidante is itself troubling because Bea was an influential ecumenist, and in the encounter with Küng, Bea had realised his folly in accommodating Protestantism. Now he was horrified when he saw that his desire to be accommodating was going to be used to make his own Catholicism unrecognisable from the time before the Council.

Martin and Bea parted ways and in the mid-1960s Martin left the Jesuits, and went to America. In the coming decades, he gave the impression he had always been an arch traditionalist. He became a celebrated author who defended the Traditional Latin Mass.

There is, however, a gap in our understanding of Martin's development as a Traditional Catholic. Martin's past is so mysterious that there was a time when I thought there were two separate authors with the same name because I could not fathom how Martin had written Jesus Now in 1973 and Hostage to the Devil in 1976. I thought they must be two separate people. But no, it was the same Martin who wrote both books. In Jesus Now, Martin is adamant there will be no second coming of Christ and he brags about his closeness to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a man whose books contained, according to the Church, ‘grave doctrinal errors’. Yet, three years after Jesus Now hit the shelves, Martin published Hostage to the Devil, which has a section where he refutes de Chardin.

My contention is that Martin had a conversion between Jesus Now and Hostage to the Devil, and changed from being an admirer of Teilhard de Chardin to being his arch-critic. I believe he wrote himself into Hostage to the Devil as ‘Father David,’ a professor of palaeontology who has allowed himself to be influenced by de Chardin’s constructs of Christ, and who must submit to an exorcism before he can himself perform exorcisms.

Father David must free himself from de Chardin's - and thus, Satan's – influence. He learns that his acceptance of de Chardin's dangerous reduction of the Person of Christ means he does not have sufficient faith to call on the power of Christ to exorcise a young priest.

The first time Father David tries to exorcise the priest, the demon speaking through the young priest taunts him, “You have adopted the Lord of Light, like I have, you old fool! Physician, cure yourself!” When Father David is at a loss how to continue the exorcism, the demon mocks him, “And you were trying to exorcise me?”

Only after Father David rejects de Chardin's heretical teaching that Christ is merely the pinnacle of man's evolution, can he successfully perform the Rite of Exorcism.

To cast Christ as the omega point, He who is the best creation of an evolutionary process, is still to emphasize his humanity over his divinity, and in some ways, this is most deadly for a priest because it is all too easy for a priest to see himself as a man like Christ, but just lower down the scale, when in fact the priest has to invoke Christ's authority as Saviour of all men in order to expel a demon.

If Martin was really writing about himself, he employed some heavy disguise, but as in Father David's case, it would appear that Malachi Martin was cleansed of his infatuation with de Chardin.

Whatever these controversies, I’m a fan of Martin. And perhaps his own conversion came about through battles with the demonic, battles that finally convinced him of the Divinity of Christ as Lord of Lords who has dominion over all.