The Inventor Read online

  Unanticipated circumstances would soon bring the great artist out of the fog of time and, for a brief period of friction and discord, into the glare of public scrutiny. Heretofore the subject of scholarly speculations, the remote and once two-dimensional medieval artist would reach beyond the grave, show his face and bare his soul. The chain of events that ensued would shed new light on his generation. It would also say infinitely more about the dissonance of our own age and the one-way journey to the fool’s paradises on which many are embarked.

  A Blueblood and a Commoner

  Man is fated, through evolution and personal initiative, to transit from an artificially imprinted belief in invisible gods and inaccessible spirit forces to the positive stages of existence, with life being its own justification and reward. Some men rise to the challenge. Others get stuck along the way.

  In early January 2008, lured by an irresistible calling and following brilliant seminary studies, 26-year-old Hubert François de Ravaillac, of noble French ancestry, takes the sacred vows and enters the priesthood. He is ordained by Bishop Jean-Marie Touvier at the Eglise Saint-Germain-des-Prés, an 11th century church that rises proud in its austere architectural simplicity in the heart of Paris.

  Outside, on the windswept church esplanade, Gypsies, some with infants at their breast, beg for alms. Defying the cold, jugglers and balladeers seek in the goodwill of passersby a chance for recognition, perhaps fame, or perhaps just enough loose change to pay for a warm meal before dark. Across the street, patrons at Les Deux Magots Café sip hot fragrant espressos in thimble-sized cups and cool pale white wines in fluted glasses. In their chairs had once lingered such rabble-rousers as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Samuel Becket and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley and James Baldwin, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Picasso and Albert Camus, to name a few. Paris the enchantress had seduced them all.

  As these worldly diversions take place in a universe he will forever shun, Hubert François de Ravaillac, prostrate and cross-like on the cold stone floor at the foot of the altar, pledges to consecrate his life to God and his Son Jesus Christ. The oath includes the solemn vow to protect the Church from scandal, at the peril of his own life.

  De Ravaillac is a devout Catholic but pastoral service, he believes, should transcend routine priestly occupations. A blueblood, a hereditary anti-communist and a self-flogging zealot who still blames the Jews for the crucifixion of his Savior, the young priest has ceded his mortal body and consecrated his eternal soul to the Holy Church. His mission, as he sees it, and as his superiors in Paris and Rome have noted with cautious interest, is to help steer Roman Catholicism back to the pinnacles of power and prominence it once enjoyed. To do so quietly and with the greatest efficacy, he joins Opus Dei (God’s Work), a fabulously rich, aggressively right-wing cloak-and-dagger Catholic organization that wields powers infinitely greater than the imaginary ones the Church ascribes to its favorite scapegoats, the Jews, the Freemasons and the Socialists.

  On that same blustery winter morning, Michel Montvert studies the late Chilean painter Roberto Matta’s “psychoanalytic views of the mind,” his esoteric “landscapes of the soul.” Matta, a Socialist, believed art, music and poetry have the power to change the lives of people. Montvert, a humanist in an age of declining humaneness, believes that only when freed from adversity, want and suffocating ideologies will people partake of art’s enticing fruits.

  Unlike de Ravaillac, Montvert comes from a culture where the word God was never uttered -- except as a reflex expletive -- and death or the hereafter had no place at the dinner-table, either in a mystical or existential context. He was never given a religious education, nor deprived of such, and the notion of an invisible, omnipotent creator/arbiter/destroyer seemed ludicrous to him even as a boy. By the time he was old enough to contemplate the enormity of his parents’ suffering, especially during the German occupation of France, their indifference to religion had turned to embittered agnosticism -- his father’s early childhood religious upbringing and his mother’s genteel, pseudo-assimilation into a Christian mainstream notwithstanding. Struck with pancreatic cancer, his mother had endured several months of martyrdom and died convinced that religion is a travesty and a fraud. Heartbroken, his father, a physician, grieved at the fragility of the human body and railed against the staggering imperfection of medical science. He spent the rest of his days in the company of a cantankerous cat mourning his wife and perusing and annotating the Bible -- the Old Testament (he considered the New Testament a crude fantasy) -- not for inspiration or comfort, but to vilify it, to find the contradictions and highlight the aberrations, to poke a wrathful finger at God’s unfathomable cruelty, to denounce man’s limitless propensity for evil.

  Montvert and his father had often chatted long into the night about religion, not in pursuit of an ideological abode but as an exercise in pure reasoning. They agreed that the underpinnings of religion -- mysticism, the supernatural, the credo quia absurdum (I believe BECAUSE it is absurd), faith in an invisible entity, the rituals, the taboos, the hellish penalties -- had all been contrived to enslave man, not to liberate him. They acknowledged the simplistic precepts of the “Golden Rule,” or Ethic of Reciprocity, present in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (but probably of more ancient Buddhist provenance) yet pointed at man’s inclination to ignore it, even violate it, in the name of Yahweh, Theos and Allah. They quoted from Hillel the Elder, the 1st century BCE rabbi who summed up the Torah with the command, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor.” They read Luke (6:31), which teaches, “Treat others as you want them to treat you.” Last, they turned to the Koran’s lofty counsel, “No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.”

  But “others,” “neighbor” and “brother,” they knew, have a parochial meaning that, history has shown, signifies “those of our own kind -- us, not them.”

  This paradox had been astutely dissected a year earlier by CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour in God’s Warriors: The Clash Between Piety and Politics. Rebroadcast several times since its first airing, the three-part award-winning documentary offers a disturbing rendering of the three major religions’ penchant for violence in the service of deity. It also lays bare their unceasing effort to manipulate civil society through indoctrination, intimidation, civil disobedience and, all else failing, swift, copious bloodshed.

  Carried to its extremes, God’s Warriors had shown, religion is a dangerous eccentricity that will render men insane. Only religious delirium could inspire a Muslim to plot the “honor killing” of his own daughter, or to bomb a disco filled with Jewish youths. Only mystical rapture could lead a self-styled Christian to murder doctors performing legal abortions. Only a Jewish zealot could violate the Torah, slaughter Muslims gathered in prayer in their mosque, torch cars on the Sabbath or assault members of a peaceful Gay Pride parade and threaten violence if the Jerusalem police chief allowed the pageant to proceed.

  This is the bare face of religion, Montvert père et fils had concluded. This is how religion transforms societies into citadels of intolerance, incubators in which simmers the hatred of “heretics,” a one-size-fits-all label that describes those who hold different beliefs or who grant themselves the inalienable right to espouse none. Within that conflict rests the unresolved tension between the command to “love one's enemies” and the equally strong injunction to reject and eradicate any alien or divergent dogma, to the death if necessary. In the final analysis, Montvert father and son had reasoned, neither Jew, nor Christian or Muslim knows which of the two commands to follow at any given time. By attacking “heretics” as tools of Satan, religious fanatics seize the rhetorical high ground and shift the focus from embracing one’s fellow man to the escapist option of waging war against an imaginary but prescriptive source of evil.

  This catch 22 was the preeminent rationale for a succession of gruesome confrontations: the Crusades, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the Inquisition, the
30-Years War, the centuries-old strife in Northern Ireland, the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts, the Hutu-Tutsi reciprocal slaughter, the Hindu-Moslem-Sikh massacres in India and Kashmir, the bloodbath in Sudan and the cyclic carnage between Shia and Sunni Muslims.

  Nor has hatred of “heresy” spared the presumptive self-proclaimed paragon of probity, the United States.

  “Behold the proliferating dynasties of Elmer Gantries who are hijacking that nation’s psyche (while rifling through its pockets),” Michel Montvert had told me more than once, “and witness the phalanx of rapt soul-robbers whose stated strategy is to infiltrate and exploit the coercive power of government.”

  Montvert was right. Despite its implied but halfhearted tradition of separating church from state, the U.S. never made an honest effort to protect against the intrusion of religion into the body politic. The recent past had seen religion woven more deeply into the fabric of governance than ever before. Although the U.S. Constitution guarantees the non-involvement of government in religion, it has spinelessly failed to hinder religion from muscling in on the affairs of state. Such laissez-faire, absent in modern France, Montvert had warned, could lead to theocratic control.

  The fundamental weakness of democracy, my old friend had often protested, is that it tolerates in its very bosom the existence and propagation of undemocratic principles. With the right checks and balances, he had argued, and unrelenting vigilance, despotic ideas could be deflected. All would be lost if those who chip away at the civil liberties that democracy grants them are the very people sworn to protect the nation, by example, against the erosion of treasured constitutional rights.

  De Ravaillac, like all the self-anointed moralizers who find a haven in Opus Dei, sees no conflict in a Golden Rule that also makes room for the persecution of “heretics.” His sadomasochism can be traced to a straitlaced upbringing. He owes his iron will -- or is it his fixation with martyrdom -- to a stoic lot, an ancient family with an emblazoned past, now governed by retired French Navy Commander Clovis Godefroy de Ravaillac, his father -- whom Hubert still calls “sir” -- and his mother, Clothilde Dieudonnée de Ravaillac, a woman of exceptional beauty in her youth, now fending off the ravages of sun and tropics with heavy makeup and triple gins and tonic. Hubert, their only offspring (more by accident than choice) quickly learns to manage the lovelessness of his upper crust milieu “like a man,” a lesson further beaten into him with his parents’ consent by Jesuit bullies at the Collège Sainte Croix, where his dormant bisexuality is awakened and indulged.

  Outside of its own doctrinaire circle of followers and fans, Opus Dei has a dappled reputation, mostly bad. Andrew Greeley, the eminent American Catholic priest, sociologist, journalist and best-selling author, has described it as

  “a devious, antidemocratic, reactionary, semi-fascist institution, desperately famished for absolute dominion in the Church and quite possibly very close now to having that power.”

  Calling the elite group, “authoritarian and power-mad,” Greeley warns that

  “Opus Dei is an extremely dangerous organization because it appeals to the love of secrecy and the power lust of certain kinds of religious personalities. It may well be the most powerful group in the Church today. It is capable of doing an enormous amount of harm. It ought to be forced out of the shadows or suppressed.”

  Opus Dei has about one million members worldwide. At least 2,000 are ordained priests. With this international cohort of dedicated warriors, Opus Dei has successfully penetrated schools and universities, banks, publishing firms, television and radio stations, ad agencies and film companies. It has been accused of deceptive and aggressive recruitment practices, including “love bombing” -- the deliberate and syrupy show of affection by an individual or group as a tool of conscription or conversion -- and instructing celibate members to form friendships, attend social gatherings and submit written reports on potential converts.

  The core precept of Opus Dei is “to help shape the world in a Catholic manner.” Helpers include clergy, captains of industry, high-ranking military officers and government officials. The group “comes surrounded by a political miasma,” the British daily, The Guardian, noted recently. The super-stealthy organization was founded just before the Spanish Civil War and blossomed in the halcyon Catholic days of El Caudillo, fascist dictator Francisco Franco’s “crusade” against the Republican left. When Opus Dei came to prominence in the late 1960s it was because Franco’s cabinet included an inordinate number of Opusdeistas -- too many to be the result of coincidence.

  For Father Hubert, whose passion for Christ calls for no less than the repeal of Laïcité -- the scrupulously enforced separation of Church and State in France -- membership in Opus Dei arms him with special and far-reaching powers. But the organization’s militancy, in his opinion, does not quite match his own God-driven longing to cleanse the world of heretics and deliver sinful, rudderless humanity, by force if necessary, into Christ’s loving arms. He seeks and is granted entry into the Knights of Malta, a closed fraternity of the Roman Catholic Church whose upper tier members are fastidiously aristocratic. De Ravaillac, an extremist whose family tree goes back at least 400 years and which includes a reviled regicide, meets or exceeds the Knights’ rigorous standards for admission. They consider him quite a “prize catch.”

  The 900-year-old organization was formerly known as the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of the Saints John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta. Modeled after an ancient group of soldier-monks who massacred “infidels,” (Muslims, Jews and Cathars) Knights of Malta, ceremonies and rituals “inculcate lessons of chivalry and courage, and inspire a militant spirit in opposition to all non-Christian ideologies and powers.” With over 10,000 members in 42 countries, the Knights are influential Vatican surrogates with extensive ties to right-wing intelligence networks.

  Originally programmed to be ruthless tactical fighters, later adopting a fiercely anti-communist stance, the Knights were instrumental in the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency. They also took part in U.S. global “black” (covert) operations. The founding fathers of the CIA, William “Wild Bill” Donovan and Allen Dulles, the longest-serving CIA director, were Knights, as were many in the CIA hierarchy, including JFK’s director, John McCone and Ronald Reagan’s director, William Casey. McCone helped engineer the 1973 military coup against Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. According to journalist Carl Bernstein, Casey gave Pope John Paul II unparalleled access to CIA intelligence, including data on spy satellites and field operatives.

  There is compelling evidence that the Knights of Malta were linked to the “Rat Run,” the post-World War II getaway route used by Nazi top brass and death camp “scientists” from defeated Germany to the Americas. These thugs were issued new identities and special credentials that ensured escape from prosecution for crimes against humanity. One of them, Major General Reinhard Gehlen, a devout Catholic and legendary Cold War spymaster, surrendered to the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps in 1945. Because of his experience and useful contacts in the Soviet Union, he was freed, as were seven of his senior officers, in exchange for their pledge to gather intelligence for the United States. Flown to Washington, Gehlen went to work for Donovan and Dulles, then the Office of Strategic Services station chief in Switzerland. Gehlen handed over the names of several OSS officers who were members of the U.S. Communist Party.

  A year later, Gehlen was flown back to Germany where he resumed his spy work, this time as a lackey of the U.S. He set up a dummy organization composed of 350 former German intelligence officers. That number eventually grew to 4,000. For many years, the “V-men,” (V-mann or Vertrauensmann -- trusted man) as they were known, were the eyes and ears of the CIA in Western Europe and the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War. Recruited among men who had as little culture, common sense, objectivity or logic as possible, they were used primarily to maintain surveillance of civilian populations in Germany and occupied countries.

  Overall, the
Gehlen organization’s performance was at best disappointing. One rare successful mission infiltrated some 5,000 anti-communists of Eastern European origin into the Soviet Union and its satellites. These agents were trained at a facility named Oberammergau, site of the yearly staging of one of Hitler’s favorite diversions, the unambiguously anti-Semitic Passion Plays. The organization was severely compromised when it was infiltrated by communist moles -- as were the CIA and the British MI6. One of the double-agents was the illustrious Harold “Kim” Philby, spy-extraordinaire who served the communist cause until his death in Moscow in 1988.

  Gehlen employed hundreds of “ex-Nazis,” among them Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s right-hand-man and commander of the Drancy internment camp near Paris. Brunner was responsible for the slaughter of 140,000 Jews. His death has never been confirmed; he was believed to be still alive in 2007. The CIA turned a blind eye and, owing the exigencies of the Cold War, even took part in some of Gehlen’s operations.

  Robert Wolfe, historian at the U.S. National Archives wrote that

  “U.S. Army intelligence accepted Reinhard Gehlen’s offer to furnish alleged expertise on the Red Army -- and was bilked by the many mass murderers he hired.”

  In appreciation for his work, Gehlen, Hitler’s Eastern Front intelligence chief who organized and took part in atrocities against Jews, Gypsies and Slavs, was awarded the Knights of Malta’s highest decoration, the Grand Cross of Merit. [In 1988, the American branch of the Knights of Malta pinned the Grand Cross on Ronald Reagan “for devotion to Christian principles.”] People in Central America still remember Reagan as the man who funneled millions of tax dollars to repressive and often brutal regimes whose U.S.-trained death squads murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.