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March 15, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:04:57
Edition 197 - Father Malachi Martin

This time - the life and times of the late and remarkable Father Malachi Martin - withBernard Janzen...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, thank you very, very much for all of your emails, your good thoughts and your guest suggestions.
Also, the suggestions for my chest infection.
As we speak, I'm having a chest x-ray in a couple of days and a few other little tests and we're hoping for the best.
But it is something that's been ongoing.
Seems to be getting a bit better now.
The voice is a bit stronger, which is good news.
I'm going to do shout-outs on the next edition or possibly the one after that.
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Please know that I've seen it.
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And you don't get that from the big shows coming out of the big corporations because mostly they just don't have the time, they don't have the people, or maybe they haven't even seen your email anyway.
That's something that I do know does go on.
But that's the difference between us in independent media and them in big for-profit media.
We're going to develop this show.
We have plans for 2015.
As ever, funding is the difficulty because I'd like to do lots of big things and I'd like to take the show on the road, to be perfectly frank.
There's a bit of a reporter in me that's waiting to get out.
You know, for years and years and years I did radio, and some of you will have heard me on various radio stations in the UK.
I was certainly on one big London show, the Chris Tarrant show, for 10 years.
And I was mostly in the studio, but I was never happier than when we were out and about doing a remote broadcast from some far-flung part of the world, or even around London, with a microphone in my hand, talking to real people.
And the older I get, the more I desire to do that, because I think you get a bit of a confidence, or you care a bit less, I think, as you get older.
And so I'd like to do that.
But funding, at the moment, doesn't allow me to take this show away.
I'd like to, for example, go to America and go to Australia or New Zealand to get some stories out of there.
When the money allows, if it ever does, I'm going to do that, because that is one of my great ambitions and aims.
And this show is definitely growing.
I seem to be reaching people just about everywhere.
So thank you very much for all of your support.
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The website, designed, maintained, the wheels of it kept rolling and turning by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
On this edition of the show, I'm going to be talking with somebody who is almost a chronicler over the life and times of one of Art Bell's most controversial and best-known guests.
A man that I was desperate to interview in life and never had the time and wasn't able to get hold of him personally.
And then by the time I was more inclined and more able to do it, the man sadly died.
The man I'm talking about is Father Malachi Martin.
And if you look back over some of Art Bell's archives, you will see that this man is mostly represented as an expert, I guess, on exorcisms and evil, a thing that he was very definitely assured does exist and does need to be fought by real people in this world, that we all need to safeguard ourselves against it, thought he.
He was a credible guest, an Irishman by birth, as all the best Catholic priests, certainly in my childhood in Liverpool, were, and a very controversial figure.
Now, there's lots more to him than I knew, and the man who's chronicled his life and interviewed him many times is a man called Bernard Jansen.
I'm going to get him on in just a second, and we're going to hear, before that, a little clip of one of his many interviews with Father Malachi Martin.
Please know, we'll be doing more of our regular-style unexplained shows, but I really wanted, in the absence of Father Malachi himself, to get a handle on him as a person, his life and times.
So we're going to do that.
First of all, let's hear a clip which Bernard Janssen has kindly allowed me to play from one of his many interviews with Father Malachi Martin.
So he gave Satan the power of tempting man.
But just a word about that.
We must remember this angel has extremely limited intelligence.
He doesn't know what you know by faith, first.
He doesn't know it.
He doesn't know anything about the angelic life.
He doesn't know about the Blessed Sacrament.
He knows it's the nameless one, as Satan is called the Blessed Sacrament.
He doesn't know the future.
He can't predict the future, except I, for instance, can predict the future if I look at the clouds and say, yeah, the rain clouds are going to come.
He has a greater perception of natural things because he's an angel.
He can predict in that sense.
But he doesn't know what's going to happen in 1996 or 2004.
He's extremely limited.
But he is the cleverest liar going because he deals with half truths.
Hard truths.
And most of the information you find people trotting out about Lucifer today is the half lie.
He's broadcast about himself.
And that punishes us because that ruins our possibility of knowing him.
Now, Lucifer, we know too, from the church, was given a certain amount of liberty in the beginning until Christ came.
And once Christ died on the cross, he was bound in chains.
And the church was given a thousand years, it was said, in which to flourish.
We got that thousand years.
And according to all of the fathers, what they teach and the revelations which the church has declared as authentic, that thousand years expired about the 1700s or 1800s.
And we now are in a moment when Satan was loosed.
And again, the voice of revelation and the voice of tradition and the voice of the teachers and the church and the saints and the popes comes in and say, but his loosing was only for 100 years and that freedom of his is coming to an end in our day in the 1990s.
So we have been subject, therefore, to Lucifer's raging freedom to recoup what we lost.
Because remember, in that thousand years between say the year 400 and the year 1400, Christianity spread.
Whole peoples are converted.
Whole of Europe was.
And when they got to Mexico, they converted 8 million in two years.
Remember, It was astounding.
And Christianity did spread.
Even today, Christianity is the biggest religion going.
And the Catholic Church is 18% of the human race.
It's almost 1 billion.
So he lost an awful lot.
A point about that, which we must always remark on, is this.
It is dogmatic that not everybody will be saved.
There is a destined group whom God has foreseen will cooperate with Him and will be saved.
But it's not a majority of people and it's not all the people, which is an era people are pushing nowadays.
In other words, so the thousand years probably raked in those souls that were to be saved and would cooperate.
And the remnant then has struggled since the 1700s until today.
And I think that if one looks, and we may in these talks, in these tapes, we may touch on the evidence we now have that Satan is having his last stand.
This is his Waterloo, where he's going to kill off, destroy much, scorch Dirt's policy, destroy as much as he can before he finally is shoved down into the abyss again, chained by Michael.
And then the reign of Our Lady and the sacred heart of Jesus will take place.
I'm putting a lot of doctrine and revelation and conclusion into that, but that's the position of Satan.
There's one more thing about Lucifer which we should remember, and it's this.
We have no protection against him of ourselves.
No one can match him on this earth.
No one.
He can deceive anybody.
St. Paul says that he transforms himself into an angel of light.
And therefore, no matter how lofty you think your motive is, no matter how correct you think your doctrine is, you need protection.
So very clearly, a man with a tremendous command of the English language.
A man able to express his points succinctly and clearly and with impact.
And let me tell you, for any of us who communicate for a living, those skills are a great gift.
A series of gifts this man had.
Speaking there with Bernard Jansen, the man who did many interviews with him and in sound certainly is almost a biographer of him and in words.
So let's get to Bernard Janssen, the chronicler of the life and times of Father Malachi Martin.
Bernard, thank you for waiting.
Thank you for allowing me to use that piece of audio and thank you for coming on The Unexplained.
Thank you for having me.
And Bernard, tell me a little bit about yourself.
A couple of people who've been in contact with me have suggested that I talk with you.
And having researched you, I see that you have a more than 20-year familiarity with the work of Malachi Martin.
I don't know of anybody else who appears to have researched him as well as you have.
Well, I first was able to reach him late in 1989, and I proposed that we do a series of interviews on the situation in the Catholic Church and about spiritual topics in general.
He agreed to this, and the first interview was so successful that then he wanted to do more interviews.
So our pattern became that we did interviews every year about, let's say, the topics that were current that year, and usually also about some spiritual topics.
You get to hear about him.
I had read his books, and how I was able to get in contact with him is that some of my friends, before I met Malachi Martin, like I was doing interviewing with some other people about spiritual topics, they were in contact with Malachi Martin, and they were kind enough to give me his phone number.
So as a celebrity, it was kind of difficult to reach him.
I had to maybe phone 10 or 20 times, but eventually I got through, and he agreed to do these interviews, and then we were off.
Okay, now I and people around the world know him best as the exorcist, the man who appeared on the Art Bell show, and also with George Nouri and those people, and that's how I discovered him.
But reading about him, as I have done before this conversation, there is an awful lot more to him than that.
There was an awful lot more to him than that, but I would say that his work as an exorcist was perhaps the primary influence on him.
His book, Hostage to the Devil, was a bestseller.
And the fact that he was an exorcist, I think, colored his view of the world.
Unlike even most clergy, he had direct contact with the supernatural.
And that gave him, I think, a broader understanding of world events, of day-to-day life, and political affairs than what most people had, even clergymen.
I had never heard, before I heard him the first time, and I think the first time I heard him was around about 1996, 1997 on the radio.
I've never heard anybody talk about those matters so connectedly.
He sounded like he was very much a part of it all.
He was, to him, it was reality.
It wasn't the stuff that you saw on X-rated movies.
Oh, no.
And he pointed out that sometimes the Hollywood version of exorcism isn't always entirely accurate.
I did a set of interviews with him on Exorcism, which we entitled The Kingdom of Darkness, and which has been published as a book, in which he lays out essentially what actually does happen with devil possession and exorcism, and often it's a little bit different than the Hollywood version of it.
Okay, I want to talk about that in a moment.
I want to talk a little bit about him, because his background before going to America was fascinating.
I mean, this man was very much a part of the church and found himself at odds With the church, hence his arrival in the U.S. Yes, I think you've correctly analyzed it.
He was working in the Middle East in the 1950s.
Basically, he was a paleographer.
That is the study of ancient handwriting.
The question usually asks about Jesuits is, what field are you in?
And he was in the field of studying ancient handwriting.
And the then Pope John XXIII brought him to Rome because he was ecumenically minded, and he wanted to have some contacts with Muslims and Jews.
And Malachi Martin had that because working in the Middle East on these historical projects, he would have had to have been working with Muslims and Jews.
If you read some of the stuff online about him, and there's an awful lot of material online about him, and some of it I'm quite doubtful about, but some of them imply that he had Jewish blood.
I don't think that was correct.
I think he was of regular Irish stock.
His family was a very big family in Ireland.
In fact, he said that you could throw a stone in the county he came from, I think it was County Kerry, and you would hit a member of one of his family.
I think that his Irish background, it also colored his view of the world as well.
Well, I had one interview with him about that, and the situation between Ireland and England is, of course, much remarked because of the state of play with Northern Ireland.
But I was brought up in Liverpool, where we're all half and half.
We're all half Irish, half English there.
So I always saw both sides of it.
But in one of the interviews that I heard him give, he talked about the nature of hatred and how he'd been brought up to hate the English.
And hatred is something that he had to purge from himself.
Well, he seemed to purge it fairly well because in the interviewing that I did with him, I didn't ever hear him talk negatively about the English, even though that is very often the case among Irish people.
No, well, I mean, look, you know, coming from Liverpool, I grew up with Irish people, so that's very much a part of my life.
So I see it always.
But on this interview, I think it was with Sean Hannity that I listened to on WABC Radio in the US.
He said that one of the things that he'd had to get rid of, get away from, is the idea of hatred, because you cannot follow any kind of path if you have any kind of hate.
Absolutely, and that's not part of the Christian religion.
Okay, so he was connected.
He was very well connected and brought to Rome and given senior positions.
He had a very important position in Rome.
He worked under Cardinal Bea, who was one of the key cardinals at the time of the Second Vatican Council.
And he must have been in a very key position because he was given the privilege of reading what was called the Third Secret of Fatima.
Yes, and this is the one that has been kept under wraps and the one that's been speculated about for all of these years.
That's right.
And he gave away in his interviews with myself and with Art Bell, he gave away as much as he could, but he had been sworn to secrecy, so he couldn't just spell it out word by word.
Now, the secrets of Fatima were some prophecies that were handed down to ordinary people who was one of the seers of the visions of Fatima in 1917.
And there's been a lot written and speculated about these secrets of Fatima.
The third one being the one that is so awful, it is claimed, that it cannot be revealed, or there are reasons why it cannot be unleashed on the world just yet.
Well, Malachi Martin believed that it wasn't just that it was so awful, it was also embarrassing because it spoke about the malfeasance and failings of the higher clergy in the Catholic Church.
And you can see why then the secret would be kept under wraps for that reason.
He believed that the third secret concerned the crisis in the church, and that included at the highest levels.
He had no truck with certain people in the church, did he?
There were people who were not following the true path, and he was very much against that, and he spoke out against it.
Yes, and he believed that his Jesuit order was going kind of on the wrong path.
It had a fourth vow of obedience to the Pope, and he believed that the Jesuit order in the 1960s was actually going against the Pope, let's say with regards, for example, in the area of liberation theology.
And so there was a party in the ways about 1965.
He just felt that his talents could be best used elsewhere, and he did not agree with how the Jesuit order was going.
And so he was released from the Jesuits.
He had permission from Pope Paul VI to do so.
He maintained his vow of chastity, but he was released from his vows of poverty and obedience.
And the interesting thing is, if I've got this right, Bernard, that he was released in that way, but they wanted to keep a connection with him, it seemed.
They wanted him to be allowed to speak on certain subjects.
Well, he did receive a general commission to work in the field of communications.
And he did maintain contact with certain cardinals And certain people in the official church.
It wasn't a clean break in that sense.
But he wasn't afraid of speaking out.
I've got a bit of a quote here from one of his interviews, and he said this in a number of places.
He talked about these people who were not following the true path and didn't believe an awful lot of the teaching, yet they were still priests.
They were still within the church.
And he was asked, well, why is that?
And he said, well, simply because it's a good job.
And what else would these people do?
I remember hearing that when he said it the first time, and I just replayed that on an interview.
That is astonishing, isn't it?
Well, it is astonishing.
I think he believed that I don't know about the majority, but certainly a large portion of the Catholic clergy have kind of fallen into a state of mind that they're not really sure if they really believe that much of what the Catholic Church teaches anymore.
In other words, he painted a picture of a church that has lost its way.
So he had very strong views, and he was by no means afraid of expressing them.
But did he never feel that he was in any way at risk by doing that?
Because we hear all sorts of tales of Skull Duggari within the church.
Pope John Paul I, there are many claims even now that this man did not die in entirely natural circumstances, for example.
Malachi Martin was a man who was very conscious of his mortality.
And he sort of lived on the other side of reality and the supernatural.
So I don't really think he was afraid of what might happen to him.
He was just going to call it as it is, and whatever happened, happened, because he believed that kind of his reward would be in heaven.
Did he have any views?
I'm sure I did hear him talk about John Paul first.
He have any views about that?
He didn't really seem to want to wade into that one.
He seemed to indicate that it was a possibility because I asked that as a question.
He said that he wouldn't really want to attempt such an investigation because he would fear for his kneecaps.
But maybe he felt that to delve too deeply into that would do more harm than good.
The kind of thing that could cause a schism.
Right.
If he pursued that too much.
I'll use a parallel, let's say, from politics.
In 1960, it was not totally clear that the vote had been accurately counted in the state of Illinois.
And it was actually quite close between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.
And there were some people in the Republican Party that wanted Nixon to reopen the question.
And he said he wouldn't want to do that because it might tear apart the country.
So I think that's a reason why Malachi Martin did not really want to dig too much into what may or may not have happened to John Paul I. Let's wind it back to his arrival in the United States, his departure from the church, but his continued connection with it in terms of communications.
His arrival in America is interesting, isn't it?
Because he did all sorts of jobs at the beginning.
Well, it took him a while to establish himself as a writer, but I think he was a very talented man.
God had given him certain gifts, so much so that he was able to function in the higher levels of the Vatican.
And so his talents were soon put to use in the field of writing, so he had to do all kinds of jobs at the beginning just to put bread and butter on the table.
But his talents enabled him to kind of climb out of that and become a best-selling writer.
But he wrote a lot, and he always said that there was a backbone of fact in all of it.
Yes, in many cases, he used the genre of fiction where he wouldn't have to actually name names, but he would illustrate the situation in the church through writing about it as if it were fiction.
But everybody who read the books knew what he was talking about and who he was talking about.
I think if you read his very last book, Windswept House, it's very clear that it was meant to be a fairly accurate portrayal of the situation in the church.
He was asked once by U.S. News and World Report how much of the book was accurate, and he said too much, perhaps about 95%.
That's a lot of accuracy.
And what were the sorts of things that he was claiming in the books that were, as we say in the UK, near to the knuckle, that would have been difficult for some people to accept?
Well, I think what would have been difficult for many people to accept was the skullduggery in the Vatican.
One of his high-ranking characters simply, it seems, was put to death through skullduggery.
And that would be very, very difficult for most Catholics in the Priu to accept.
And did he have the view, you knew him, did he have the view that there were people who were supporting him?
And the ones who supported him were the ones who allowed this to go on?
Because I presume if there'd been a general view that we don't want this man to keep talking, there would have been a way to silence him.
Yes, I think he did have certain support.
He was given advice, let's say, by one cardinal, to find himself a family to live with rather than to live on his own.
So, yes, he was in charge in touch with certain People and so, like we had said before in the interview, it's not as if he just kind of cut his ties and became a critic.
He kind of was out of the mainstream of the church, but he was still in it in another way.
And he was also, wasn't he giving mass?
He said mass privately.
He was not in active priesthood in the sense that he had a parish.
But when I was interviewing, one time he showed me the altar where he did say Mass.
So he did say Mass every morning, but it would be privately.
It was not for a congregation.
And his view of the church, it was an old-fashioned view, wasn't it?
It was almost a fundamentalist view.
It was a view that the traditions of the faith had sort of been lost at the time of the Second Vatican Council and afterwards.
And he continued to say the old Latin Mass rather than the New Mass, which had been promulgated under Pope Paul VI.
He said that the traditional Latin Mass had a fuller view of the supernatural than did the New Mass, which he regarded to be as kind of a community-based celebration.
Because for him, it seems to me listening to those old interviews with him and reading about him online, fundamental to everything, and this is what we have to get into because it was so much a part of his life and work, and this is what people have been writing to me about, fundamental to everything was the struggle between good and evil.
Yes, like I said before, his activity as an exorcist really colored his view of things.
What you saw on the surface was not the whole picture, because behind what you saw was a cosmic battle between good and evil.
And he believed that the chains that bind Lucifer had been loosened in modern times.
And that affected much of what happened in the church.
It affected, let's say, the direction that things were going in the world at large, let's say, with an increase of family breakdown.
I think it was the deadpan way that he would say things.
This interview with Sean Hannity that I'd never heard before today that was broadcast in New York in 1988.
He just came out with the line, and he came out with lines to Art Bell like this all the time.
Lucifer is real.
It's just the way that in that Irish accent of his, that Irish-American accent of his, he would almost throw that away.
Lucifer is real.
He was very confident in what he believed.
I countered that, and some of the people that have listened to my interviews have stated that he sounded very confident of what he was seeing.
And I think that comes from actually encountering the supernatural face-to-face when he was doing his exorcisms.
Of which, certainly up until 1988, or 1998 rather, he claimed to have done 500 major ones and thousands upon thousands of minor ones.
Yes, he was very actively involved in that scene.
And for quite some time, you're talking a course of several decades.
And one of the things he said in the interview he did with me on exorcism is that it's generally not a young priest that the church would pick to be an exorcist.
They need a certain experience.
They need a certain stability.
And as well, maybe they don't want to take the risk of you losing a young priest either because it is quite a hazardous occupation.
This is something he talked about.
He talked about people who would casually get involved in this.
Psychologists seem to have a certain amount of disdain for psychologists, but people involved in that area who would blunder into all of this.
And certainly in one instance that he talked about, the person became possessed.
Well, he said it was very dangerous.
You had to be of a very solid character.
Maybe not in his case, but he said that very often exorcists have a reputation for being people that are fairly boring because you have to be of a certain solid character to be able to withstand the heat that one takes when one is involved in these exorcisms.
In the course of the interviews, and you did a number with him, I know, and a number of those are online and I've heard them.
Did he talk about any specific cases that had chilled him?
It seemed that nothing frightened him, but he was left awestruck by a lot of the things he experienced.
But I don't hear fear in the man's voice.
No, I don't think he was fear.
He had a fear of death.
I don't think he had that.
He solidly believed in the promises that the church has about the afterlife.
I think he did have some fears, let's say, about his faults, that so he went regularly to confession.
He was very conscious of the fact that he would die, and he wanted to have a good judgment.
But he was not fearful of losing his life.
No, he did not have that.
And what about specific instances of exorcisms that he was involved in?
How much did he share with you about that?
He did not tend to talk about specifics in that sense.
The book Hostage to the Devil is about five real cases of exorcisms in the city of New York.
But he did change the names to protect identities.
I don't really think he wanted to give that away.
But like I said, the book Hostage to the Devil, those were real cases.
It was not in any way fictional.
And were you involved with him?
You were from The chronology of the interviews that I've seen online, but were you involved with him at the time when he was still doing these?
Oh, yes, he was involved in exorcisms right up to the end of his life.
Was he?
Yes.
And were you ever tempted to go out on one with him?
Did he ever allow you to do that?
Well, I am a layperson.
I don't really consider myself competent in that field, and I was just willing to trust what he had to say on the matter.
It would have been interesting, but he certainly didn't ever invite me to do so.
The word that we used about this, this struggle between good and evil, a struggle very definitely.
He talks and he talked with Art Bell, I remember this distinctly, and with Sean Hannity in the late 1990s interview that I heard.
He talked about a physical presence that was capable of pushing him and shoving him and physically engaging with him.
Yes, and in the interviews that he did with me, he mentioned this as well, that in these exorcisms, quite often you have flying objects, you have physical phenomena.
He stated that the various demons have this power, and that's why it's sort of dangerous just for people to show up at an exorcism as spectators.
He did not encourage that.
Because from the way he talked about it, and as you hinted before, going into this situation is almost like being a civil servant.
You have to go through the motions and the routines, and you have to do everything in the same way every time.
You have to be fully prepared, and you have to go through the routines, and those who blunder into these things pay a price.
Right.
You cannot just blunder into these things.
And also you have to be of a certain mindset that you can withstand kind of the pressures that come upon you when you're doing these exorcisms.
There's a certain strength of character that is required.
Talk to me about his strength of character because you were able to do something that I would have loved to do.
You've sat opposite him, you've looked into his eyes.
Talk to me about the man.
Well, he had the strength of character to kind of propound a view that was not in the zeitgeist of the times of the Catholic Church.
It's not terribly difficult for a layperson to kind of be outside the stream of things in the Catholic Church because we derive, let's say, our income from somewhere else.
But for a priest, that's his whole world.
That's where he gets his income.
That's where all his peers are.
It's very difficult for a priest to swim against the stream.
And yet, Malachi Martin was able to do that and thrive even as a result of that.
So that's what made him a little special.
He stuck to his guns, and he did so in spite of the fact that he believed that the Catholic Church had sort of lost its way.
Whereas the kind of party line since the Second Vatican Council has been that the church is in a state of renewal or regeneration.
What do you think he'd have made of the current Pope?
I think he would say that this Pope is a thisworldly Pope.
He would say that he has not really a sense of the sacred or the supernatural.
He is well-intentioned in that he wants to help the poor.
But the church, he would say, I think has to offer a bit more than that.
He has to offer like a promise of eternal life.
And that doesn't seem to be the focus of this pope.
Nor is this pope one who is going to stand against the zeitgeist of the times.
Yep, he's seen very much as a people's pope and a pope connected with real-life issues like poverty about which he has spoken.
That is correct.
But I think that's one of the dimensions of Catholicism, but it's not the whole thing.
And it's perhaps not even the most important one.
The most important one I think Malachi Martin would have said is that you have to give spiritual meaning for people.
Right.
When I used to listen to him, and I longed to be able to do that interview with him that you got the chance to do and I never will get the chance to do now, I used to admire his, you talked about this strength of character.
I used to admire the strength of character, the conviction that he had, and the fact that whenever Art Bell or whoever it was was doing an interview with him and mentioned a name, somebody who was high up in the church, he said, oh, yes, I know this person.
I'm still in touch with this person, or I studied with this person, or I was in Rome with this person.
He was still connected, wasn't he, right to the end?
Right to the end, he maintained his connections.
Even though he may have not agreed with the current direction of the Vatican, he did maintain his connections to the Vatican, and that gave him a kind of an inside view of what was going on there.
And that's what many listeners of him found very fascinating, that he had this inside view of the Vatican.
And that is fascinating for many people even outside the church.
Like, there are Vaticanologists, just as they were criminologists at the time of the Cold War.
He was very involved with Russia, wasn't he?
I mean, the church wanted him to be involved with Russia.
He was a sort of envoy for a while, wasn't he?
Yes, he was.
And he was very interested in Russia because he believed that salvation would come from the East.
He didn't know why, but he felt that the spiritual regeneration that would happen in Western countries would come From the East.
And there are perhaps now some signs of spiritual stirrings that lend credence to this view.
Can you expand on that?
I can.
Because in the East, the churches are filling up with young people.
Seminaries are full.
This is not the case in Western Europe and America, where churches are emptying and seminaries are emptying and the young people are drifting off.
There is a spiritual regeneration of some kind going on in Russia and in the other Eastern countries such as the Ukraine.
And I think that Malachi Martin foresaw this.
He had a certain gift of prophecy, in my opinion.
He saw this because he was knowledgeable about the message of Fatima, where Our Lady appeared to three children in Portugal in 1917.
And according to this appearance of Our Lady at Fatima, she requested that the Pope, in union with all the bishops, consecrate her immaculate heart to Russia.
And that would be a basis for the regeneration not only of Russia, but of the West.
And the Vatican knew this, the Vatican has been acutely aware of this, and the Vatican clearly used Malachi Martin as a conduit, as a channel to Russia, to the East.
It did do that, but at the same time, it sort of seemed to also want to bury this appearance of Our Lady as well, or at least just deal with the more pleasant parts of it.
Because Rome never did the consecration as was requested by Our Lady at Fatima.
And the revelation of the third secret, will that ever happen?
Will the Vatican ever release it?
Will it ever come out and say, here's what was said?
This is the same thing.
Well, I think there would have to be an admission that perhaps since the Second Vatican Council, the church has kind of been on the wrong path.
And this is a debate that is starting to get stirred up again in the church.
There was an article not that long ago in The Economist, which kind of covered the activities of what are sometimes called the Latin Mass Brigade.
And The Economist seemed to hint that there were people that are promoting the view that maybe the church has been on the wrong path since the Second Vatican Council.
So I don't think that the Third Secret will be fully revealed until there is that kind of admission.
And that's not going to happen under this Pope, at least not right now.
Because, and you're stirring a memory in me of something I heard him say on one of those interviews, because that third secret implies criticism of the church, and that's one of the reasons it's not being released.
You've hit the nail on the head.
Fascinating, really.
We have to talk about the nature of this man's death.
I used to listen to him.
I used to long for his appearances because three hours, four hours would pass.
And I can remember Art Bell saying in the dead of night, are you all right for another hour?
And he'd say, I'm all right, Art.
And off he'd go again.
There would always be more to talk about.
And he would take calls from listeners calmly.
And interestingly, he always had something to say.
He was always patient with the people who would call in.
Very, very, very patient.
Enormous patience, no matter how out there the cause were or no matter how critical the cause were.
My recollection of him was a man who handled everybody with respect.
Well, he had a certain what is called romanita, a certain old world politeness or dignity.
And I think that came from maybe his training as a Jesuit, maybe from his years of experience in Rome.
But yes, he had a certain graciousness about him.
I noticed that when I was with him in a public setting, he was always very gentlemanly in how he spoke with other people and patient with their views and lack of knowledge.
Listening to him always used to take me back.
And I told you that in the family that I come from in Liverpool, we're all sort of connected to both churches, really, in Liverpool, because it's a city of the Protestant faith and the Catholic faith together.
I believe there are a lot of immigration from Ireland, let's say, in the 1800s.
A lot of immigration from Ireland.
I was brought up with a lot of Irish people, and there's Irish blood in my family, too.
So I was lucky enough, I think, to be able to see both sides of it.
But there was that old world charm about him, and he reminded me of many of the priests that I knew when I was younger.
You know, when I first started working on the radio in Liverpool, we had a lot of contact with both churches, actually, but with the Catholic church there and the press officer there.
And, you know, some of these old guys had such dignity about them, I think is the way of putting it.
That was part of their training, and it was part of Malachi Martin's training, and it stayed with them to the end of his life.
And that's what he used to radiate on air.
So I suppose the point that I was getting around to was I heard one of his many contributions to Art Bell's programs, and I was looking forward to another one, and then I didn't hear him anymore.
And it was probably a year or two later that I discovered that the man had died.
But the man died not in, well, he didn't die in suspicious circumstances, but he died in circumstances about which there could be questions.
Yes?
You've hit the nail on the head.
Now, about a year before he died, he suffered a stroke.
It wasn't a serious stroke, but it took him out of commission for a while.
And it took him a little time to recover.
But he made a complete recovery.
And then he was doing an exorcism.
And it was during the time That he was doing this exorcism, that he had a serious fall, and it was under suspicious circumstances.
But because of that fall, I think he was rushed to the hospital, he had a stroke, and it was all downhill from there.
So his death might have been precipitated by some of these physical phenomena that sometimes occur during exorcisms.
I read one thing about him, and again, there's an awful lot on the internet, as you know, Bernard, about him.
But there is a reference to him saying to somebody when he was in hospital very near to the end that he felt something push him, not a person.
That is correct.
And like I said, I think it was one of these physical phenomena that did him in.
That was the triggering cause.
Now, he was in a little bit of a weakened state anyway, because for the last decade of his life, he had had a heart condition.
He had suffered a heart attack, let's say, around 1988.
And for the last 10 years or so of his life, he was a bit frail.
But he was so dedicated that he wouldn't let that stop him.
He kept pushing himself.
But I do remember him talking about the fact that you mustn't weaken.
Art, you mustn't weaken.
Because if you weaken, you'll let it in.
You'll let in whatever's out there.
That's correct.
And of course, if he was in a physically weakened state, I guess you don't have to allow your defenses to drop too far to become prey to those things that you've been holding back for all of those years.
He was in a little bit of a physically weakened state, although it didn't really become apparent when talking to him.
His voice was always very strong and very fast.
He never, in his mind, though, weakened.
And that is perhaps an exorcism even more important, is that you have the strength of mind, and that never wavered.
What he had to say to us seemed to me to be so interesting, so fascinating, and so valuable.
It's one of those situations, isn't it, Bernard, that it's enormously saddening to realize that a voice of that kind has been silenced because nobody else, apart from you chronicling his work, nobody else seems to be talking about him or talking in the way that he talked.
Yes, I think what you're saying is correct.
And there are so many of his listeners that would just eagerly await the annual interview that we would publish each year because everybody would say, what does he have to say about this?
What does he have to say about that?
And they would eagerly await that.
And that voice is no longer there.
And he always had this unique perspective that I think came from the fact that he saw the whole picture.
He saw the supernatural dimension.
And I think that colors everything in our lives.
But I think if I'm an example of one of his listeners, and I listened avidly, as you know, and as I've said to as many of his broadcasts as I could, he actually made me feel better about all of this.
I have always suspected that there is a tussle between good and evil going on.
I've not exactly seen proof, but tangentially, I suppose I have, of entities and bad stuff out there.
I do believe those things exist.
But hearing him talk about this as part of the natural order and how by doing certain things and following the right path, you would come through it.
It would be okay.
I found that reassuring.
And I have a feeling that was part of his appeal.
I think you've hit the nail on the head again.
We had many letters from people saying how much he had helped them because of the fact that his description of the situation in the world, in the church, didn't really make things any better.
But they said now they understood it, and that gave them the strength to get through it.
And he also would always emphasize the old devotions that the church had, the litanies, the rosary, all the rich prayers that the church has available.
And he said that people should make use of those, and that will give them the strength to get through the troubles of day-to-day life and the trials that the church and our society are going through.
Well, I, in common with many people, have not lived a particularly religious life on one side of the spectrum or the other.
But I've tried to do the best I can.
You know, I've tried not to do bad things and I've tried to think the best thoughts that I could.
And I'm guessing those were a couple of the principles that he was espousing.
Well, I think that Malachi Martin almost had a universal appeal.
Many people who weren't necessarily regular churchgoers loved to hear what he had to say.
And people in other religious denominations, Protestants and Orthodox, were very keen to hear what he had to say.
So I think he had almost a universal appeal.
Not everybody who believes in the supernatural, I find, is necessarily a regular churchgoer.
And he has something to offer for these people as well.
There's a lot written about him.
I know I've said that.
This is the third time I've said that to you.
A lot written about him online.
I read in one place today, and again, I doubted it just from my gut.
He is claimed to have broken that vow of chastity, isn't he?
Isn't he claimed to have had an affair?
That is a very common accusation that is used against people whose message is not really welcome.
And I have read many lives of the saints.
There was St. Athanasius in, I think, something like the 300 or 400s, who stood against kind of the Aryan heresy of the time, and he was accused of being a womanizer.
There was St. Gerard Magella, who lived around the 1700s, and he was accused of being a womanizer.
So it's a very common claim.
And you're not having any of it.
I'm not having any of it because what I saw of him during the last decade of his life was almost the life of a saint.
One time, he came very late to one of my interviews, and he has said he was late because he was out buying food for a poor family in New York.
Of course, in New York, there are many.
And I ran into all kinds of instances of little acts of kindness that he performed.
Let's say he would be very patient with, let's say, people off the street who would phone him up and come to him for spiritual advice.
And like we alluded to earlier in our interview, he was very patient with such people.
Does he deserve to be made a saint?
Well, I don't think that the present jurisdiction in Rome is going to do that.
There are certain people that are not going to be made saints because they are not going to really make their critics into being saints.
But that may be a hope that we could keep alive for future generations.
He certainly had the gift of prophecy.
Many of the kind of forecasts that he made have come true, let's say about the resignation of a pope.
I saw all the time the little acts of kindness that he did for others.
I saw the consciousness of his mortality and the fact that he regularly went to confession.
He was concerned about the state of his soul.
These are classic characteristics of people who have been canonized as saints.
But unlikely you think that as things stand in the church that he's going to be in line for that?
He will not be in line for that under the present Pope because he sort of is one of their critics.
And like I said, the Vatican is not going to canonize one of their critics.
One of the things that he said that I've written down in these interviews that I've been listening to, it's amazing how the time passes when you listen to those interviews.
It was just like I used to listen to them live on the radio.
You know, a couple of hours would go and you wouldn't even know it.
One quote from him was, if you lose your faith, you don't know you've lost it.
How fascinating.
In other words, it describes many of the churchmen of today that they're not sure whether they believe in anything anymore, like the traditional teachings and truths of the Catholic Church, yet they still remain pastors.
And I think that is their cross, is that they have lost their faith, but they don't realize that they've lost it, and so they maintain themselves in their positions.
What did he mean to you?
He was, I think ever since I met him, a central person in my life, in my family's life.
We have worked very hard to get his message out to the general public because his message was a unique one that needs to be heard.
And his message has continued on.
It has been an enduring one.
And to this day, people are still buying his books.
They're still interested in what he had to say.
They're still purchasing his interviews from us.
They still are interested in the Art Bell appearances that he made.
So his appeal is an enduring one.
And so he has meant a lot to me because we worked hard to get his message out and we've learned so much from him for ourselves.
It was interesting that in 1998 when he appeared on the radio with Sean Hannity, who was just entering that golden phase of his career then, I think.
I once met Sean Hannity at WABC and the man was, this was in 2000, I met him or 2001.
He was an absolutely huge celebrity as he is now.
But there was a murder case in New York, and I think there was a girl killed and there was a connection with some kind of religious sect.
So the first person they called upon to talk about this and the evil involved in this was Malachi Martin.
And he did a long piece with Sean Hannity, which I've just heard for the first time today.
And if you're trolling around YouTube, it's well worth hearing.
Well, very often, if there was something also Vatican-related, the U.S. media would call him up and ask for his take on it.
Even though he was outside the mainstream.
Yes.
And I think there was even a kind of arcane matter of a dispute between Chile and Argentina that nearly resulted in a war, but there was a kind of papal intervention that prevented it, and the news media called upon Malachi Martin to give his take on it.
So a very significant figure.
I've always thought so, Bernard.
When he died, did he have family?
I'm just wondering, he must have had archives and things that he'd written and possessions that he owned.
Who got all of that?
He had family.
Some of them were in America because I've met them.
I think the majority were in Ireland.
I know that Father Paul Wickens inherited some of his vestments.
And Father Paul Wickens was another outsider who had protested against the direction of the diocese that he worked in.
And so the two of them did have a strong relationship.
Father Paul Wickens did Malachi Martin's funeral And did inherit his vestments.
And I do not know where a lot of the other things went.
It seemed to me that his life and times would be the perfect subject.
I don't know whether you'd be horrified by this idea, but the perfect subject of a movie.
Yes, I hope someone will someday do this.
I think he had a very eventful life, and certainly the fact that he was sort of cast out of the Vatican, the fact that he had these exorcisms, the fact that he was a voice in the wilderness would make for a very interesting movie.
And what would your answer be to those people who will say this man was a champion of old-style Catholicism and everything in life and the world and the cosmos has to move on?
He was a force of, well, he was a retrograde force.
What would you say to people who make those kind of claims?
Well, I think that what the old church has to offer has an enduring appeal because now there has been a revival, actually, of the traditional Latin Mass.
And many times, it's not old people showing up, it's young people showing up.
And so these ideas of the sacred, of the supernatural, they are the ideas that are enduring and have kind of there is a need for that.
And so what I would say, if you have an interest in the supernatural, if you have an interest in the sacred, Malachi Martin is the person for you.
And that is something that is enduring.
It's not something that is for one generation.
Whereas I would say that the direction that maybe the church took in the 1960s, that is for that generation.
And in the end, kind of the enduring values that Malachi Martin represented will be with us for some time.
If there are people in the greater New York area where he worked who are having problems with entities, possession, that sort of stuff, are there people who are doing this work that he did now?
There are still exorcists in the Catholic Church, but it sometimes is difficult to get the service of an exorcist because even a lot of the clergymen, even in high places, kind of poo-poo the idea that the devil exists, that evil exists.
Fascinating conversation, Bernard.
Thank you very much for making time to talk with me.
I know that you probably had no idea of who I am and what I do, so it was really good of you to so easily agree to doing this with me.
And I hope it's been a good experience.
And if anybody wants to know about you and your work, where do they go?
Where do they look?
They can go to our website, which is www.triumphcommunications.net, and there they can find our email address.
They can find our phone number.
They can find our mailing address.
And we really do have a rich amount of material of Malachi Martin.
We have published eight books, and we have 22 interviews which are available in C D format.
And I think that even now, 10 years or even more after he has died, his message is still as relevant now as it was then for the soul that is looking for something more than, let's say, what this world has to offer.
Forgive me for asking you this at the very end, and it's fine if you can't just recall it to mind like that.
What was the most profound thing that he said to you, a man who said profound things all the time, but what made the most impact on you?
Well, the line that had the most impact on me was when he was talking about finding the truth, that he said it may be more difficult today than what it was.
But if you work hard at it, you can find it.
And kind of one of the advantages of the Internet, I know there's a lot that isn't good on the Internet, but there's a lot that is.
And so if a person is really searching for the truth, he can find it.
And he can attain his salvation and eternal happiness if he wants to, but he has to work at it.
And that's the line that I think had the greatest impact on me.
Bernard, thank you very much for talking with me.
Thank you very much for having me and giving me the opportunity to talk about what I believe is a great man for Janssen.
And I know that some of the things that have been said will be controversial.
You know, I try not to go down the religious path on the unexplained because anything anybody says about religion or to do with it always elicits controversy.
So I understand that.
But if you can suspend any reaction that you might have that might be adverse to anything that you've heard and just take on board the enormity of this man's life and the things that he did.
As I said at the top of this show, most of us knew Father Malachi Martin as the man who went on and talked about exorcisms and the presence of evil in our real modern suburban world of New York or London or Adelaide or wherever.
And that, I guess, is the way that a lot of us will see him and remember him.
But as you've just heard, there was much more to this man's life.
And sadly, there are a hundred questions that I would like to ask now that I've done this interview, and the only man who can answer them is Father Malachi Martin.
Thank you very much for listening to this show.
Thank you very much for supporting me.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for keeping the website cranking over.
If you want to get in touch with me or make a donation to the show, you can do that via the website www.theunexplained.tv.
And until next we meet here, more great guests coming up.
We'll do some chat outs as well very soon.
Thanks again.
My name is Howard Hughes.
Please stay safe, stay calm and stay in touch.
I'm in London.
This has been The Unexplained and please take care.
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