inauguration. He was met by a Knights of Malta ambassador -- none other that Roberto Alejos Arzú, whose plantation had served as a CIA training ground for the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, and a man known for his long association with some of Guatemala’s most reactionary elements, including high-ranking clergy and military officers implicated in heinous human rights abuses.
Other prominent figures romped in this large incestuous bed: former CIA chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton; General (and later Secretary of State) Alexander Haig; former Nixon-Ford treasury secretary, William Simon; Reagan’s envoy to the Vatican, William Wilson; and U.S. Senator Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, a “consultant” to Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, who sponsored a bill allowing U.S. Air Force transports to ship goods for AmeriCares, a privilege accorded no other relief organization.
Pope John Paul II first clashed with supporters of Liberation Theology during his 1983 visit to Central America. In Managua, he publicly humiliated the Rev. Ernesto Cardenal, a prominent human rights advocate whom he suspended from the priesthood. He paid a courtesy call on Salvadoran President Armando Calderon Sol, a member of the same political party that engineered activist Archbishop Romero’s assassination and masterminded the massacre of 900 men, women and children at El Mozote. He then cavorted with barrel-chested colonels and generals, and granted audiences to high society women sporting low-cut dresses and dripping with diamonds -- instead of kneeling at the grave of six Jesuits slain by U.S.-trained death squads. The Pontiff then “retired” scores of vocal Latin American liberal clerics.
Hastened by papal nepotism strongly biased in favor of diehard bishops, the purge of progressive clergy gained new momentum in Latin America. Tragically, in the most Catholic domain on earth, the “Golden Rule” was subverted by martial attitudes that view the faithful, at best as unruly sheep, at worst as the very enemies of the state. Astute and opportunistic, the Church tapped into the reactionary power base to maintain both doctrinal monopoly and political custody over the masses.
There is a precedent -- and a disquieting parallel. A thousand years ago, bloodhounds of orthodoxy sniffed heresy and the carnage began. People who held unacceptable views were flung into dungeons. Accused of harboring heterodox opinions, they were tortured with inventive cruelty, then killed. Often, before dying, they were forced to confess that they worshipped the devil (translation: they toyed with free thought); indulged in hostile beliefs (translation: they hungered for knowledge); and conspired against the established order (translation: they spoke out against corruption and intellectual turpitude).
This obscene quest, inspired and abetted by successive papal dynasties, was prelude to six “Crusades” during which hundreds of thousands of “infidels” -- Moslems and Jews -- were slaughtered. Religious fervor later fanned nearly four centuries of inquisitorial frenzy that devoured Europe and sent another half a million innocent people to the stake while their possessions, confiscated as “evidence,” fattened the Church’s coffers.
Like Karl Marx, who despised the proletariat, the Church has never fully expiated its disdain of the masses. It steadfastly rejects the notion that people can govern their consciences without its guidance or control. Worse, it denies them the right to manage their political destinies by delivering them to the same reactionary Pharisaic elite that Jesus is said to have rebuked.
Few of Christianity’s rulers, however pious, have lived up to the principles of Jesus, the radical who, if Biblical scribes did not tamper with the original script, is said to have preached compassion, pacifism and egalitarianism. Faced with a choice between Jesus’ ethic and political expediency, Pope John Paul II sadly opted for the latter. He came to Latin America and told the poor that poverty ennobles the soul. He then pompously urged the rich Catholics who finance his reign to reject materialism. He might as well have ordered hyenas to abstain from eating meat. In casting out the good shepherds of Christianity from the fold, John Paul also surrendered the flock to the carnivores.
It was the immorality of historical falsification -- and the baseness of academic dishonesty -- that propelled Montvert, a man with an unyielding respect for truth, on a lifelong campaign to unearth it wherever it may hide. He also transformed a passion for fine art into a medium through which he would later demonstrate that certain forms of human creativity cry out against lies, injustice and absurd beliefs.
His open mutiny against conformity began in high school.
His history teacher, Monsieur Delormel, routinely disregarded the obligatory French secular curriculum and shamelessly injected his personal prejudices and slanted perceptions. Armed with a razor-sharp intellect and a tongue to match, Delormel was a strict disciplinarian, a fount of erudition and a skilled pedagogue who would struggle, for two years, to educate Montvert or, as he had put it, “to deposit something of value inside this untidy, dissolute little brain of yours.”
The broad knowledge Delormel possessed -- he was licensed to teach everything from algebra to zoology -- was often overshadowed by an appalling lack of objectivity. It was his very scholarship that enabled him, wherever he could, to skew history or to rewrite it by opining unabashedly about people long dead or editorializing about events exhaustively recorded in the otherwise unembellished lay French government curriculum.
A royalist, as are all devout French Catholics, Delormel steadfastly extenuated the arrogance and cruelty of French monarchs by insisting that they were, after all, “good Christians.” It is true that kings and queens, when not making war, presiding over orgiastic banquets or fornicating with courtiers and servants alike, spent much time genuflecting in their private gilded chapels on ermine stoles and rich brocades while their vassals lived in squalor, starved and died of consumption. Distant abstractions, the horrors of the Crusades and the Inquisition elicited a kind of nostalgia from Delormel, if not a malicious admiration stripped of all misgivings for the atrocities committed in their name.
Montvert remembered learning about the events that took place on the night of August 23, 1572, better known as the Saint-Bartholomew massacre, during which 3,000 Huguenots were slaughtered in the streets of Paris on orders of her majesty, the unscrupulous but “Very Catholic” Queen of France, Catherine de Medici. News of the slaughter would be cheered by King Philip II, himself busy purging Spain of Protestants, Jews and Moors, and by Pope Gregory XIII who, for lack of more pressing business, reformed the calendar. Reviewing the incident did not seem to evoke in Montvert’s teacher any discernible scruple.
Injecting personal bias into his instructions, Delormel presided over his own kangaroo court. He openly scorned the Huguenot Henri of Navarre, but lavished him with praise when, crowned Henri IV and fearful for his neck, he converted to Catholicism. “Paris is well worth a mass,” the king had sardonically remarked. Praise turned to condemnation when the king, now firmly enthroned, issued the Edict of Nantes, a decree restoring religious and political rights to French Protestants. A few chapters forward, the teacher applauded the edict’s revocation, 87 years later, by the “Sun King,” Louis XIV, the archetype warmongering despot whose conceit was eclipsed only by his lust for ostentation.
Fifty years hence, unaware of or utterly indifferent to the immense suffering his subjects endured, Louis XVI, who spent his reign tinkering with clocks, and his dizzy wife Marie-Antoinette, who plundered the nation’s coffers to keep the court royally entertained, elicited pity and sympathy from Montvert’s teacher.
“They were very pious and joined in prayer several times a day.”
As these enormities were being casually spouted, Montvert would retrieve from the depths of childhood memories Pathé and Fox newsreel footage of priests,
