A global elite who want to control world happenings on the macro and micro scale
International political intrigue
Papal resignation
The dawning of an age of demons
Largescale loss of faith
Population control
A Church riddled with bad actors, including the “lavender mafia”
“Digitalization” of the human mind
Trafficking in fetal tissue and parts, including for non-medical applications
Satanic ritual
“Traditionalists” vs the “reformers”
The Secrets of Fatima
From the wide array of current topics that Windswept House touches upon, it hardly seems possible that it was published in 1996. At that point, sure, people knew that there was trouble in the Roman Catholic Church with homosexual and pedophile priests, and though money was already being paid out to the victims, it wouldn’t be until 2002 or so that it would start to come out as to how wide or deep the problem actually had become. Yet here Malachi Martin writes a book which claims that not only is the problem incredibly widespread, but that the perpetrators are also connected with Satanic worship, but that they’ve organized themselves to destroy the Roman Catholic Church from within. Now, they don’t want to destroy the entire institution – the conspirators salivate over how much “power” the Pope has, and want to grab it for their own use – but they want to corrode the faith to the point where it ceases to be a power for good.
I first heard of Malachi Martin from listening to Coast to Coast AM some evening, probably while cleaning. Normally, the Coast to Coast AM stuff would go in one ear and out the other; lots of very strange stuff, but some of it interesting. However, I was absolutely transfixed by Malachi Martin, and after finding out that he had written a couple of books, I was interested to actually read one of them. It’s just taken me awhile to actually do so, being as it’s been ten years or so since I first had that thought. On the other hand, for someone on a radio interview to be that impressive that I didn’t forget over a decade that I wanted to read one of his books – that’s impressive too!
In any case, Windswept House starts off with a Satanic ritual which takes place in 1963 in South Carolina, and is “connected” through ritual to the Vatican. The story has a brief interlude to 1978, and from there, the story picks up in approximately 1994. Pope John Paul II is pope, though he’s never referred to as “Pope John Paul II”, but rather the “Slavic pope”, as this is a work of fiction, and there are a cadre of very powerful cardinals who are plotting against him as they see the Roman Catholic Church’s place in the world as a vehicle to foster globalism, and they have connections to people in very high positions of power in the secular world, not only in government, but non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other associations as well.
These conspirators do not believe in the absolute Truth of Jesus Christ, and many are Masons, though membership is forbidden in the Roman Catholic Church, many are Satanists, and many simply desire power. They despise the “traditionalists” who believe in God; they see them as obstacles to actually getting anything “useful” done. In the book, as much as the “Slavic Pope” is not overwhelmingly liked by the “traditionalists” for allowing a lot of bad behavior to continue, these “progressives” hate him because he does believe in God and seeks to do His will.
Through a bit of happenstance, a young American priest, probably approaching 40, comes to the attention of the head conspirator, Cardinal Mastroianni. This priest’s name is Christian Gladstone. Mastroianni is fairly lukewarm about Gladstone and probably would not have given the man another thought except that he finds out that Gladstone is from a very rich and powerful family out of Galveston, Texas, and that his brother Paul is climbing the ladder into elite circles within international finance and such. Mastroianni sees this as an opportunity to covertly further his plans.
What he doesn’t expect is that despite Fr. Christian’s background, he’s as “traditionalist” as they come. As Fr. Christian gets pulled further into the affairs of the Vatican through Mastroianni, he remains close with the small contingent of traditionalists within the Vatican, eventually becoming part of a small group whom the Slavic Pope trusts to discuss certain issues with. For all practical purposes, this is how Fr. Christian’s life as a Vatican “double agent” begins.
The book is something like 630 pages long and incredibly dense. It covers approximately two years of time and introduces over 70 characters. It’s well written and very much a political thriller, but without some background with how things work in the Roman Catholic Church, I can see how it could get frustrating.
Besides Martin’s background as a priest in the Vatican, the man has an incredible awareness of different places, both in Europe and the United States, and it’s amazing to see an Irishman understand distances and history of the United States as well as he does. That being said, he puts the Gladstone’s family in Galveston in the 1870s, where they build a mansion – the famous Windswept House – but he doesn’t mention how the house fared in the 1900 hurricane there, where pretty much the entire city was devastated. He goes into detail about the stained glass in the chapel the Gladstones have at the top of the building, but didn’t even mention that it must have been a miracle (or something) that the glass survived. It’s not a huge point, and I don’t know why it irked me as much as it did, but it’s kind of like saying that the house your main character lives in was built in 1868 in Chicago – never mind that most of the city burned down in 1871 and the buildings that survived are well documented. (Yes, I know that there was some part of the city that didn’t burn, but the idea still stands.)
In any case, for all the US places that get mentioned in Windswept House, Chicago is not mentioned once. That is because in the book, Chicago becomes “Centurycity”. Now, the Cardinal in Chicago is probably one of the worst offenders when it comes to trying to use the Church for his own machinations. In the book, the Cardinal of Centurycity is Cardinal Leonardine, but is usually just referred to as “the Cardinal of Centurycity”.
Now, this is one of the areas in the book that really gets, shall we say, kind of weird when placed on top of my experience of living in Chicago during that time. Joseph Cardinal Bernardin was Chicago’s cardinal at this point in history. He was well loved by the media, and somewhere around 1994 or so, he was personally accused of having sexually abused a teenaged boy many years prior. Eventually, the man recanted, and in the next few months, Bernadin would be diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, and I remember Bernardin making some comment about how the two of them were both living under the shadow of death. Bernardin was the first Roman Catholic figure that I had ever paid any attention to, and I was generally impressed by him. He died as I moved away from Chicago the first time, and seeing in a Time or a Newsweek that he had died made me sad and a little homesick.
Bernardin had written a book about dying (The Gift of Peace: Personal Reflections) that he had just finished days before his own death, I borrowed it from the library in 2004 (military library inter-library loan, yay!) and I was so impressed that I once bought the book for friends of mine.
Then, in 2006, I started working for a Catholic organization in Chicago. The office was small, and the people there were all faithful “traditional” Catholics. When I started speaking positively about Bernardin, I got weird looks and such, and then I heard from these people that in their opinion, Bernardin was a terrible cardinal, that he really couldn’t stand the “traditionalists” and put into place a lot of things that actually went against what the Roman Catholic Church teaches. It was certainly interesting to hear this. However, it got deeper than that, they brought up a couple of cases of Chicago priests who had ended up dead under unseemly circumstances, and seemed to think that Bernardin was somehow involved, not that he did anything himself per se, but that he was helping cover things up. It was working for this organization that I was first introduced to the idea that the man who had accused Bernardin all those years ago may have been pressured to recant and that Bernardin himself may not have actually died of pancreatic cancer. I just don’t know.
Martin himself claimed that the book was “faction” – a real story that was fictionalized a little with changed names to serve the purpose of getting the story out. Cardinal Bernardin, for example, couldn’t complain of being characterized as such in the book without drawing attention to the fact that he was characterized as such in the book. However, he did receive criticism in the case of a Chicago murder that he “fictionalized” that if he did have information as to who was involved, he should have shared that with the Chicago police.
It’s interesting, though – in one of the scenes of the book, one of Martin’s “good guys” yells at the Cardinal of Centurycity that the amount of time that he has to repent has grown short. Mind you, some of Cardinal Bernardin’s health problems had already been taking a toll – as much is mentioned in the book – but Bernardin himself died quite soon after the book came out. The second time Martin appeared with Art Bell on “Coast to Coast AM”, in part to promote Windswept House, Bell informs Martin of the passing of Bernardin. Martin does not say a word in disparagement of Bernardin but does throw in that he thinks Bernardin would have liked to have become pope.
Sure, a lot of what Martin writes in the book could have been dismissed as conspiracy theory, and some reviewers even thought the book was anti-Catholic. However, reading the book nearly thirty years later, it’s a little chilling how right Martin was about a lot of things. Martin died in 1999, so he couldn’t have known about the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church would blow up in 2002. He couldn’t have known that, 25 years later, we’d all be walking around with portable computers in our pockets, but he was already calling out the “digitalization of the mind” that would make it harder for people to be able to perceive the mystical. He was talking about the internet becoming people’s go-to for instruction, organizations (the Church, in particular) being run by data and metrics, rather than reaching out to souls with the Truth. He even writes a couple of things about the grizzly business of abortion, fetal “specimens” and the like… I have no doubt that some people knew these things in the 1990s, but back then, one really had to have a lot more “deep” knowledge to know what was going on, and it is interesting how Martin seems to have that and link it to wider happenings, both seen and unseen. Some today might even say that the book is full of “Qanon” conspiracies, but as Martin died some 20 years prior, this is a ridiculous claim.
However, I think that one of the things that shows that Martin did have foresight into what was coming was that one of the main plots of the book was the conspiracy to get the “Slavic Pope” to resign. At the time this was written, the thought of a papal resignation was fairly unthinkable. We see, too, that Pope John Paul II ended up remaining Pope until his death. However, Benedict XVI, another “traditionalist”, became Pope in 2005, and resigned eight years later. (Benedict is depicted in the book as Cardinal Reinvernunft – that is, Cardinal “Pure-reason”). There were certainly rumors back then about it not just being his age and health; that he felt like he had very little control over malevolent forces within the Vatican and resignation was the only choice he had not to be a part of it. This book would certainly support that view, and as there hadn’t been a papal resignation in more than 500 years, it was a shock to many.
The other thing that is uncanny, and I say this not being Catholic, is reading the letters of Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who is former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States and was also very much a Vatican “insider”. He’s become the voice of the “traditionalists” over the past couple of years, especially, and what he’s been speaking and writing about tracks a lot with what Fr. Malachi Martin writes here. (LifeSiteNews follows news involving Archbishop Vigano – their news archive of him can be found here: https://www.lifesitenews.com/tags/tag/archbishop-carlo-maria-vigano/)
I enjoyed this book quite a bit; as much as there’s a lot of bad stuff going on, and as much as the end of the book is somewhat a cliffhanger, it’s also neat to have a book that features good clergy who come across as real people. The character of Fr Christian, for example, wouldn’t be written from a secular perspective, because he’s a man who grew up in the lap of luxury, whose education was excellent, and who decided in purity of heart, so to speak, to become a priest. In that role, he had to fight not to be corrupted or overly discouraged by evil and corruption around that. Moreover, he puts his considerable talent into fighting for the good rather than settling for a comfortable life. I appreciated the “wide context” of the book. I was shocked at how prescient the novel still is, and how it manages not to fall into defeatism. I liked how Martin does incorporate “things unseen” into the tapestry of the book; it’s a really rare quality, and speaks to the Christian mindset.
Unfortunately, Windswept House is out of print. I borrowed a copy from the library, and later found it on archive.org, which can be accessed here: https://archive.org/details/MalachiMartinsWindsweptHouse
Breath of Hallelujah 