The Vatican and the O.T.O.

by David Livingstone

The goal of the Illuminati is the creation of a New World Order and the eradication of “organized religion.” Before attacking Islam, in what is now called the “War on Terror”, their first victim was the Catholic Church. Ever since the advent of the Italian Carbonari, a subversive Masonic group headed by Giuseppe Mazzini, who is believed to have succeeded Adam Weishaupt as head of the Illuminati, there was a conspiracy to hijack the Vatican and install a Pope of their own. The plot took place through the person of Cardinal Rampolla, a member of the notorious O.T.O. of Aleister Crowley, the godfather of 20th century Satanism. Although Rampolla’s attempt to become Pope was foiled, he initiated a chain of succession that resulted in Vatican II and the current reigning popes, representing the full infiltration of the Catholic Church by Masons and occultists.

The CIA has been intricately connected with the Knights of Malta, the current name of the medieval Knights Hospitallers, who had inherited the domains and wealth of the notorious Knights Templar, who are considered the forefathers of Freemasonry. To this day, the Knights of Malta are a unique papal entity which, although it has no landmass other than a small headquarters in Rome, holds the status of nation-state. It mints coins, prints stamps, has its own constitution and issues passports to an accredited diplomatic corps.

The grand master of the order holds a rank in the church equal to a cardinal and is recognized as a sovereign chief of state by 41 nations. Important known members of the Knights of Malta have included Lee Iacocca, Alexandre de Marenches (the chief of French Intelligence under Giscard d’Estaing, himself a Knight of SMOM), as well as Otto von Hapsburg of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s synarchist Pan-European Union.

The Knights of Malta have been in close relation with Martinism since Cagliotro, and the Illuminati front, the Philadelphes, which by some accounts had been established by Marquis de Chefdebien d’Armissan, a Knight of Malta and member of the Grand Orient and the Amis Reunis.^[1] The OTO also claimed to be a body of initiates in whom were concentrated the wisdom and the knowledge of the various esoteric traditions, including the Knights of Malta and the Martinists. According to Russ Bellant, “Although it poses as a Catholic organization, the Order of St. John of Jerusalem is a Masonic group that claims to be the real Knights of Malta. It’s Grand Master for fifty years until his death several years ago was Charles Pichel, and adviser… to Hitler aide Ernst Hanfstaengl.”^[2]

“The Knights of Malta comprise what is perhaps the most exclusive club on earth,” Stephen Birmingham, the social historian, wrote. “They are more than the Catholic aristocracy…[they] can pick up a telephone and chat with the pope.”^[3] Martin A. Lee, in his article “Their Will Be Done,” stated that the American branch of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) is one of the most important communication channels between the CIA and the Vatican, being able to transfer money in and out of countries to which neither the CIA nor the Vatican has access.^[4]

The American Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (Knights of Malta, SMOM) was founded in 1927. The Knights of Malta, in particular Baron Franz von Papen, played a critical role in Hitler’s rise to power. Von Papen became Chancellor of Germany in 1932 with the support of the Nazis. In June, he ordered the dissolution of the Reichstag, calling for new elections, after which the Nazis emerged as the largest party in the new Reichstag. After a meeting with Hitler, von Papen persuaded President von Hindenberg to offer Hitler the Chancellorship, which he assumed in 1933. Von Papen became his Vice-Chancellor. He was charged with conspiracy to wage aggressive war at the Nuremberg trials but was acquitted, and subsequently offered a generous pension from the first postwar Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer.

As explained by Francoise Hervet, “It is probably safe to say that the several thousand Knights of SMOM, principally in Europe, North, Central, and South America, comprise the largest most consistently powerful and reactionary membership of any organization in the world today.”^[5] In 1934, member John J. Raskob, working closely with Morgan Bank’s John Davis, had been a principal financier in the plot to organize a failed fascist coup in the US. By 1941, Francis Cardinal Spellman was listed as the Grand Protector and Spiritual Advisor of the Order. Spellman worked with Pope Pius XII to help Nazi war criminals escape justice. During his tenure in New York, Spellman’s considerable national influence earned his residence the nickname of “the Powerhouse.” He hosted prominent figures such as Joseph P. Kennedy Sr, Bernard Baruch, David I. Walsh, John William McCormack and numerous other politicians, entertainers and clergymen.

Although Spellman frequently criticized films he perceived to be “immoral” or “indecent,” John Cooney, one of his biographers, cited four interviewees who stated that Spellman was homosexual, and journalist Michelangelo Signorile described Spellman as “one of the most notorious, powerful and sexually voracious homosexuals in the American Catholic Church’s history.”^[6] A biographer of J. Edgar Hoover, Curt Gentry, also maintained that Hoover’s files contained “numerous allegations that Spellman was a very active homosexual.”^[7]

Since 1943, as explained by Frederic Laurent, “the Holy See became the clandestine center of Anglo-American espionage in Italy.”^[8] Knight of Malta and OSS chief William Donovan, had secretly established an intelligence connection with the Vatican as early as 1941, when he evacuated the Dominican Father Felix A. Morlion from Lisbon to New York. Morlion subsequently worked closely with Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI. In 1944, Pope Pius XII decorated Donovan with the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Sylvester, the oldest and most prestigious of papal knighthoods, given to only a hundred other men in history, who “by feat of arms, or writings, or outstanding deeds, have spread the Faith, and have safeguarded and championed the Church.”^[9]

According to Alexis Bugnolo, Pope Paul VI belonged to a network of consecrations that could be traced back to Cardinal Rampolla, whom the OTO claimed as one of its leading members. The Liber LII: Manifesto of the OTO lists as having participated in the assemblies of the OTO, or in more remote times as including among others, Merlin, Orpheus, Dante, Paracelsus, Jakob Boehme, John Dee, Francis Bacon, Andreae and Elias Ashmole. Purported more recent participants included Goethe, Nietzsche, Wagner, Papus, Hargrave Jennings, Karl Kellner, Franz Hartmann and Cardinal Rampolla.

When Leo XIII died in 1903, it was widely expected that Rampolla would be elected pope. His candidacy gained momentum until the last moment when the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph I, imposed the veto Jus exclusivae during the Conclave. Craig Heimbichner, writing in the August 2003 Catholic Family News, states that Monsignor Jouin is said to have intervened personally with Emperor Franz Joseph to ask for the Jus exclusivae to be invoked, having procured some evidence that Cardinal Rampolla had at least a close affinity with the Freemasons.^[10]

Curiously, Rampolla had been secretary of state to Leo XIII, who had issued one the most profound condemnations of Freemasonry, the encyclical Humanum Genus in 1884. Like Pope Pius IX before him, Leo XIII requested the publication of the Alta Vendita, a text purportedly produced by the highest lodge of the Italian Carbonari and written by Giuseppe Mazzini, purported head of the Illuminati order after its founder Adam Weishaupt.

It was first published by Jacques Crétineau-Joly in The Church and the Revolution. The pamphlet was popularized in the English-speaking world by Monsignor George F. Dillon in 1885 with his book The War of Anti-Christ with the Church and Christian Civilization. Astoundingly, the document details a Masonic plot to infiltrate the Catholic Church and ultimately install a Masonic pope. In its 1819 “Permanent Instruction” to its members, the Alta Vendita stated:

Our final end is that of Voltaire and of the French Revolution, the destruction forever of Catholicism and even of the Christian idea… Catholicism has a life much more tenacious than that. It has seen the most implacable, the most terrible adversaries, and it has often had the malignant pleasure of throwing holy water on the tombs of the most enraged… The Pope, whoever he may be, will never come to the secret societies. It is for the secret societies to come first to the Church, in the resolve to conquer the two… The work which we have undertaken is not the work of a day, nor of a month, nor of a year. It may last many years, a century perhaps, but in our ranks the soldier dies and the fight continues… We do not mean to win the Popes to our cause, to make them neophytes of our principles, and propagators of our ideas… That which we ought to demand, that which we should seek and expect, as the Jews expected the Messiah, is a Pope according to our wants.^[11]

The network referred to by Bugnolo, which was first revealed by Dr. Austen Ivereigh in The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope, conspired together to promote the candidacy of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who became the current Pope Francis. Their goal, according to Bugnolo, was the destruction of the Catholic Church. As demonstrated by Bugnolo, the network was a consequence of the conclave that concluded with the election Pope St. Pius X instead of Rampolla. The followers of Rampolla were raised to the dignity of the episcopate and ordained by Pius X, while those of the Pius X by Cardinal Rampolla. In the first case, the co-consecrators were either both or at least in one individual, themselves bishops ordained by Cardinal Rampolla.^[12]

Pope Paul VI continued the Second Vatican Council which he closed in 1965, implementing its numerous reforms, including the easing of the Church’s stance towards Masonry. He surrounded himself with Freemasons, including Secretary of State Cardinal Jean Villot, Pasquale Macchi, who was Pope Paul’s Prelate of Honour and Private Secretary until he was excommunicated for heresy but reinstated by Villot and made a Cardinal, and Cardinal Augustin Bea who was Secretary of State under Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI.^[13]

Cardinal Annibale Bugnini was appointed by Paul VI to create a new liturgy. In a bold reference to the Masonic dictum found on the reverse side of the American dollar bill, the name of his new liturgy was the “Novus Ordo Missae,” Latin for “New Order of Mass.” After the New Order worship service was formulated, Dr. Smith, the Lutheran representative, publicly boasted, “We have finished the work that Martin Luther began.” Bugnini explained his aim as being to redesign the New Mass so as “to strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren, that is, for the Protestants.”^[14]

Bugnini was eventually exiled to Iran by Paul VI due to allegations that he was a Freemason.^[15] But Paul VI himself hinted at a similar allegiance in a speech to the UN assembly in New York, March 6, 1967:

Your vocation is to bring not just some people, but all people together as brothers. Who can fail to see the need and importance of thus gradually coming to the establishment of a ‘world authority’ capable of taking effective action on the juridical and political plane. Delegates to international organization, public officials, gentlemen of the press, teachers and educators, all of you, must realize that you have your part to play in the construction of a New World Order.

This close collaboration between the future Paul VI and the CIA continued after the war through the intermediary James Jesus Angleton, a key member of the Georgetown Set and also a Knight of Malta. Angleton, the long-time chief of Counterintelligence, was the head of the CIA’s Vatican Desk as well as the Israel Desk. Angleton was responsible for liaison with Israel’s Mossad and Shin Bet agencies, crucial relationships that he managed for the remainder of his career. Angleton also become responsible for the Lovestone Empire, the network run for the CIA by Jay Lovestone. A former head of the Communist Party of the United States, later a trade union leader, Lovestone worked with foreign unions using covert funds to construct a worldwide system of anti-communist unions.

When he became head of the organization, Knight of Malta Allen Dulles hired the services of Reinhard Gehlen.^[16] The Knights of Malta gave Gehlen its highest award of honor, the Gran Croci Al Merito Conplacca, in l948. Though Gehlen was not a Catholic, he was awarded the honor because of his efforts in the “crusade against godless Communism.”^[17] Gehlen was subsequently installed by the Americans as the first chief of West Germany’s secret service, the Bundesnachtrichtdienst (BND), under West German Chancellor Adenauer, who had received the Magistral Grand Cross personally from SMOM Grand Master Prince Chigi. In 1950, it was McCloy who had been given the task of appointing a new head of the West German Secret Service. After discussing it with Frank Wisner, he decided on Gehlen.