Fr. Malachi Martin - Bishop & Cardinal?!!

Laramie is an MOG forum member. I’ve enjoyed his blogs for years. He’s worth reading.

https://theweltgeist.substack.com/p/fr-malachi-martin-i-want-to-believe

Fr. Malachi Martin, I Want To Believe You...
...however...
Laramie Hirsch

12/12/25 UPDATE: There is a follow-up post continuing this discussion. You’ll definitely want to read it: Cardinal Malachi Martin: The Evidence Was Right In Front of Us





Fr. Malachi Martin is an important priest to me. He is one of the public figures responsible for my conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. His book Hostage to the Devil and his interviews with Art Bell were very influential and registered on my spiritual compass, informing me that Catholicism was the direction I needed to go. He had a way about him that communicated to the unconverted masses. I think he had a very evangelical kind of spirit about him that spoke to people with a certain kind of instinct. So, I love the guy, and I don’t particularly appreciate his detractors.

When Robert Marro Jr. announced that he was working on his book, Malachi Martin: In the Shadows of the Vatican, I was thrilled. Marro had known Fr. Martin personally. There’s been a lot of talk about Fr. Martin, some of it negative, and Marro said that the personal testimonies in his book should help clarify various misunderstandings and perceived scandals that Martin’s accusers like to bring up.

It is an enjoyable book for me. I pre-ordered it almost a year ago when it appeared on Amazon. So I was looking forward to it with great anticipation.

And to my surprise, there are two claims in this book that are, quite frankly, very shocking. Marro claims that Fr. Martin was made a secret bishop, and later, a secret cardinal. Fr. Martin always had a flair for the dramatic with both his novels and his personal life. So it makes sense. The spirit of Fr. Martin continues ever-on, I suppose.

But can I believe any of this?

Fr. Martin: A Cold War Secret Bishop
Let’s first take a look at what Marro says about Fr. Martin’s confirmation as a bishop, and then consider the outside facts that we can draw from.

The following scene involves Fr. Martin as having been taken prisoner by communist officers who proceed to interrogate him for months on end—a traumatizing ordeal that ultimately led to some of Fr. Martin’s heart problems later in life:

Over the past six weeks, the Czech StB agents tried everything in their toolkit of torture and intimidation to extract a confession from the mute Special Prisoner 23486 but were frustrated at every turn. Czechoslovakia’s post-World War II agents considered themselves a new breed of secret police, dedicated communists in the vanguard of Communism who learned their malign craft from interrogation experts at KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. Grim experts in torture and interrogation, including coarser methods of beatings, sleep deprivation, and the use of psychoactive drugs, they had been singularly unable to break the will of this prisoner. The StB had been alerted to his presence in Prague several weeks earlier when a turncoat priest from the outlawed Czech underground Catholic Church had called them in a fit of resentment and bitterness. The turncoat informed them, “he had just been the subject of an unannounced and intimidating visit by a mysterious stranger from Rome, who claimed to be a bishop sent by none other than Pope Pius XII himself. He was mumbling some nonsense that he was going to excommunicate me.”

In his fit of rage, the turncoat was right, of course. The slight figure cut by the young Jesuit, now in KGB custody and headed for an uncertain fate at best, was consecrated five months earlier as a secret bishop of the Roman Catholic Church by Bishop Domenico Tardini, the Vatican Pro-Secretary of State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, with the express approval of Pope Pius XII. After the brief ceremony in Rome’s Church of the Twelve Holy Apostles, or Santi apostoli as the Italian locals called it, Bishop Tardini, and two weeks later, Pope Pius XII himself, gave the newly consecrated episcopus in pectore, or secret bishop, a direct, almost perfunctory briefing of the situation that awaited the New Bishop Malachi Martin, SJ.
- Robert Marro Jr., Malachi Martin: In the Shadows of the Vatican, pgs 40-41

Okay. So the facts according to this indicate that Fr. Martin was a prisoner of Czech StB agents. A previous paragraph states that he was being held in Lviv in February 1957. The passage I shared here states that Fr. Martin was made a bishop “five months earlier,” sometime in either late August or early September, 1956. We are told he was consecrated by Bishop Domenico Tardini, the Vatican Pro-Secretary of State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs.

There are problems with this, though.

Other than Marro’s testimony here, there is no independent evidence that exists supporting this. Yes, Pope Pius XII didauthorize clandestine bishops in the Eastern Bloc, but none of the Vatican material available to us refers to Fr. Martin at all.

Fr. Martin’s arrest and torture by the Czech StB is likewise unprovable. There is no verifiable StB record, prisoner file, or archival match for a Special Prisoner 23486. Yes, there were secret bishops, and yes, they got caught and tortured in this manner, but none of the Czech archives opened since 1989 show Fr. Martin’s name.

Furthermore, Bishop Tardini left no record of consecrating Fr. Martin. In fact, with what we know, Bishop Tardini wasn’t a bishop until 1958—that’s two years later from when he was supposed to have made Fr. Martin a bishop. From November 1952 until 1958, Tardini was Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs under Pope Pius XII, co-serving as functional Secretary of State with Giovanni Battista Montini.

I WANT to believe this testimony. I WANT to believe the secondhand account of Marro. But is there anything stronger, more reliable out there proving any of this?

Fr. Rama P. Coomaraswamy Said That Fr. Martin Was A Bishop

Bishop (?) Malachi Martin and Fr. Rama Coomaraswamy
The only other references out there I could find attesting to this idea that Fr. Martin was a bishop comes from the testimony of Fr. Rama Coomaraswamy. This Sri Lankan Tamil-born priest was originally a surgeon, psychiatrist, and later a Traditionalist Catholic priest. He did many exorcisms and wrote about Traditional Catholicism. Fr. Coomarasamy was ordained a priest in 1999 by a Thuc bishop, Bishop Jose Gaston-Lopez. The validity of this ordination was challenged by sedevacantist priest, Fr. Anthony Cekada.



con’t

 

Con’t

Apparently, there was a dispute over whether or not Bishop Lopez properly imposed his hands on Fr. Coomaraswamy’s head during the ritual. Coomaraswamy wrote about this ordeal in a letter titled “On the Validity of My Ordination.” In this letter, he reported that his friend, Fr. Martin was present during the ordination—only that Fr. Martin was actually Bishop Martin:

“One problem arose. One of the people present thought Bishop Lopez-Gaston didn’t actually touch my head during the critical part of the rite. I of course cannot bear witness to this as I was too much too involved in the process of ordination to check on such a detail. I however recently looked at the photographs which were taken and offer two as evidence to the contrary.

“However, my close friend and mentor, Bishop Malachi Martin, stated that he wished there to be absolutely no doubt about my ordination. He therefore proceeded to conditionally re-ordain me. Hence it is that I received the graces of Ordination from a double source.”
- “On the Validity of My Ordination”,Rama P. Coomaraswamy, M.D., F.A.C.S. +


Pictures provided by Fr. Rama Coomaraswamy of his ordination into the priesthood by Bp. Lopez-Gaston. Note the presence of Fr. Malachi Martin.
Simply going into “the Thuc line” and other sedevacantist territory raises a host of other issues that we don’t have space for here. Fr. Coomaraswamy, himself, is another topic altogether. It’s all very messy. Yet, here we are with photo documentation. These men believed what they were claiming.

Now, there is one more similar claim that must be addressed.

Cardinal Malachi Martin?
During the Cold War, there was a real, concrete threat that nuclear war would erupt between the Soviet Union and the West. People thought that there was a strong possibility that nuclear weapons would be launched at any moment and transform the world into a dystopian, post-apocalyptic desert. With such conditions in mind, Marro states, the Vatican had an action plan for such a contingency.

For the first time in history, a malignant geopolitical state actor had the capability, and perhaps the intent, to turn Vatican City State and the rest of the Eternal City into an irradiated nuclear hellscape. Pragmatist that Pope Pius XII was, he foresaw the critical need for the worldwide governance structures of the Roman Church to continue should such destruction occur.

To facilitate the continuity of the Holy See, Malachi said that Pope Pius XII chose twelve cardinals in consultation with his closest advisors, who were already in place in strategic locations worldwide. Malachi described these locations as “the twelve administrative regions,” euphemistically chosen after the Twelve Apostles. These regions would be governed by one of Pius’s chosen cardinals to ensure the continued function of the global Roman Church in the event of nuclear war.

[...]

Malachi said that after his in pectoreelevation to the episcopate during the reign of Pius XII, he was elevated, also in secret, to the rank of cardinal. When I asked why, Malachi told me very matter-of-factly that he was the senior representative of the Servizio Privatofor the United States and Canada.

He explained that the Servizio was a small, elite intelligence service, answerable only to the pope in Rome.

- Robert Marro Jr., Malachi Martin: In the Shadows of the Vatican, pg 76-77

Okay. So if the world got destroyed by nuclear war, there would be essentially twelve new “apostles” with the duty to restart Catholicism, and Fr. Malachi Martin was a senior representative for one of these very apostles, and he was made a cardinal just in case he needed the faculties to help start ordaining new bishops and clergy. Or maybe he, himself, was one of these twelve men? A veritable post-apocalyptic reboot of Christianity, with “Cardinal Martin” leading the way in the United States.

This is a fresh revelation. I have not seen this repeated anywhere else, other than in Robert Marrow Jr.’s book.

Perhaps Fr. Martin was referring to this Servizio Privato—translated “Private Service”—in his 1990 book, Keys of this Blood. Because in that book, too, he discusses a “deep Church” network, designed to enforce a post-Cold War, “Catholic-led” world order. It would be worthwhile to re-read Keys of this Blood again with this latest sensational disclosure in mind.

On the other hand, can we believe this? For someone who doesn’t know Fr./Bp./Cdl. Martin, it’s hard to say and easy to dismiss.

Conclusions
It’s hard to pin down Fr. Malachi Martin. Tracing his biography, trying to authenticate his legitimacy, or verify his stories—it all becomes a wild goose chase down a rabbit hole with lots of red herrings to distract you along the way. And if you mention this topic to the wrong people, you find yourself either barking up the wrong tree or opening a can of worms.

And, after all, Christ’s Church is public and apparent. Apostolic authority is not secret, hidden and esoteric. It is a very visible office and an outward-facing vocation for specially-called men who are ready to sacrifice themselves, if need be. The Church hasn’t survived for two millennia on rumors and intrigue.

Still…there’s a lot of us out here who look up to him with admiration. Art Bell was such a man, for sure. Robert Marro Jr. is clearly another such person. We feel that we have an instinct that’s led us to a good priest who understood us and furthered the cause of Christ. Fr. Martin’s is a cult following, to be sure. But others dismiss us as naïve, gullible people who’re easily fooled. Pending some sort of electrifying new documents attesting to the things revealed here, I don’t think people like me will ever know the full story until our Final Reward.

“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic but creatures of emotion.”
- Dale Carnegie





REMINDER: Don’t forget to check out the today’s latest follow-up article: Cardinal Malachi Martin: The Evidence Was Right In Front of Us

 

https://theweltgeist.substack.com/p/cardinal-malachi-martin-the-evidence



Cardinal Malachi Martin: The Evidence Was Right In Front of Us
A brief follow up to yesterday's post about Malachi Martin: In the Shadows of the Vatican
LARAMIE HIRSCH
DEC 12, 2025


You DO see that, don’t you?
Yesterday, here on The Weltgeist, we took to task some claims that Fr. Malachi Martin was actually not just a priest, but even a cardinal. We dissected those claims a bit, leaving the question open by the end of the article.

But then this interesting tidbit hit my com box:

Catholic “ordinaries” stay in their lanes. Their ministries and munis (office) have vested authorities/ and in most cases jurisdiction. Father Malachi could never or would never have conducted the Catholic rite of exorcisms without the delegation of an “ordinary” (ie bishop) UNLESS he himself was a n ordinary (ie a bishop. The cardinal proffer seems believable —look at the piping on the cassock in the photo — it is that of a cardinal. These were times of secrecy especially with action by church officials “behind the iron curtain.” Like a (be he excommunicated or not) it seems Malachi was kind of like today’s Vigano. Ministries are typically assigned by those in charge but the munis is incorporated in character until formally denounced. Indeed it is believable that by virtue of the narrative as told to Marrow and (what I recall of) the consistency of such in the Malachi faction narratives (keys of his blood; final conclave; and even Windswept House, that Malachi was indeed a bishop and cardinal. (Permanent Deacon Thomas Baca)

It was a fortunate thing that I elected to use Fr. Coomaraswamy’s photographs in the previous post on this matter. Because the evidence may, perhaps, be staring us right in the face.

In the photo above, we do not see Fr. Malachi Martin dressed as priest. A priest wears a plain black cassock with black piping. However, a bishop wears a cassock with purple/amaranth piping—a color that is sort of reddish-purple. While a cardinal wears scarlet red piping on his cassock.

Consider, for example, this picture of Cardinal Roger Mahony and Archbishop Jose Gomez:


The colors of a cardinal vs the colors of a bishop.
Cardinal Mahony on the left, has striking, clear red colors, while Archbishop Gomes has a sort of reddish-purple color scheme on his outfit. The cardinal wears scarlet to signal his elevated rank, his bond with the Roman Pontiff, and it symbolizes his willingness to shed his own blood for the faith. The Roman purple of the bishop represents his repentance and humility—such as we see when we reflect on Lent or Advent. Purple also used to be a costly dye in the old world, and it signified status and high office. It’s an expression of sobriety and nobility.

In his picture with Fr. Coomaraswami, Fr. Malachi is wearing a cassock with scarlet red buttons and piping. This is what a cardinal wears.

So, from the Coomaraswami photographs, we can at least conclude that at that time when Fr. Coomaraswami was being ordinated as a priest by Bishop Lopez-Gaston, Malachi Martin—and presumably everyone in that room in the photos—carried on with the ordination as Fr. Martin wore the colors of a Vatican cardinal. That is to say: this group of men believed that Fr. Martin was actually Cardinal Martin.

And this photo, of course, only lends even more credence to Robert Marro Jr.’s claims for Malachi Martin’s true status in the Roman Catholic Church.

"In his interviews with Bernard Janzen, Malachi often spoke of the “underground Church,” necessary in a time when massive numbers of the clergy had apostatized from the Faith. He stressed the underground Church is not about secrecy, but about personal fidelity to the timeless truths of Roman Catholicism in prudent hiddenness. The underground Church requires that Catholics remain connected to the truth and their uniquely Catholic “intimacy with the divine,” even in isolation or when external support seems compromised.
- Robert Marro Jr., Malachi Martin: In the Shadows of the Vatican, pg 141

I think that Father Malachi Martin consistently preached that faithful Roman Catholics would be relegated to an “underground Church” because he was already living in it—and apparently helping to set it up for us.

 

This would explain so much, including how Fr. Malachi Martin had so much insider information.

And if true it weighs heavily on whether he may indeed have read the Third Secret of Fatima.

 

And some of the open critics of Fr. Malachi Martin also had or have backgrounds as spooks.

I tend to believe Laramie. He has a good gut instinct for this stuff.

I do NOT trust the Fr. Martin naysayers, in general.

The modern Jesuits hated him. They would do anything to discredit him to preserve their credibility against his tell all book against the Jesuit order.