Fr. Fiore responds to Fr. Malachi Martin’s NYT Critics…
The New York Times LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 229 West 43rd Street VIA FAX 212.556.3622 New York, NY 10036-3959
To the Editor:
Your obituary (July 30) of my collaborator and friend of almost twenty years, Father Malachi Martin, contained one outright falsehood, a slanderous connotation, and repeated the subjective and erroneous biases of several reviews of his books in the TIMES.
Malachi Martin never left the Catholic priesthood, but was personally dispensed from his vows of poverty and obedience by Paul VI on leaving the Jesuits in 1964. 1 have seen and authenticated his dispensation papers. He did not seek release from his vow of chastity. When he came to New York, Cardinal Cooke gave him priestly faculties, and advised him to find lodging with a family rather than live alone as he initially did.
It was to the Manhattan home of Mrs. Kakia Livanos and her family, whom I know, that he moved. Mrs. Livanos was not his “companion” with that word’s pejorative meaning, but his landlady who provided his rooms, his meals, and the oratory where he said daily Mass.
Lehmann-Haupt’s review of Martin’s The Encounter, quoted in the obituary, assumes knowledge of Martin’s conscience (“hate (of) God”) that is both impossible and implausible. Likewise, Paul Hoffmann’s review of The Jesuits attributed views to Martin that the author neither wrote nor expressed in the years I critiqued and discussed his manuscripts with him. .
Clearly, Malachi Martin made enemies among those who did not share his faith or his devotion to the Church, both of which he knew far better than his critics, who invariably demonstrated their own biases in what they wrote of him.
It is shameful that the Times has used the death of this valiant good priest and brilliant author to heap scorn and scandal upon his memory and accomplishments.
Sincerely,
FATHER CHARLES C. FIORE MonteCristo P.O. Box 295 Lodi, WI 535550295 August 1, 1999
A letter written by Father Malachi Martin addressing the attacks from critics prior to his death
…I am sending you these few lines as my commentary on the abuse and calumnies flung in my direction by certain members of our Roman Catholic Church. Many of my friends and well-wishers have urged me to respond to the abusers and the calumniators; and remember that this abuse and calumnious attack has been going on for over thirty-three years! That is a long time; and I have become a veteran of such oppression, so much so that in a certain sense I know much better than any of my friends and well-wishers how to deal with this sustained harsh treatment.
The basic lesson I have learnt over those thirty-three years is: not allow myself be diverted from fulfilling my mission as a priest and a servant of the Holy See of Peter. This means not merely refusing to pick up the stones thrown at me and returning them on the heads of my abusers. It means principally that I fulfill my duties as a priest—celebrate daily Mass, recite my breviary, fulfill my pastoral obligations to those under my care. It means that I never allow the distortions—doctrinal and other—of these very zealous abusers and calumniators to enter into my optic or cloud my angle of vision. It means, of course, praying for their spiritual welfare—and also that the Holy Spirit grant them some measure of understanding. For understanding is chiefly what lacks to them.
Well over twenty-five years ago, I wrote to my Superior in Rome complaining about a recrudescence of these attacks, and suggesting a certain course of action. He wrote back quoting that passage of John’s Gospel where Christ warns His disciples that the time would come when they would be ostracized and persecuted by people who would do that to them and think they were doing God’s will. “Can’t you suffer, too, for Christ’s sake?” This was my Superior’s answer.
Besides all that, all these years have taught me a few central lessons; you have to have undergone it all to be able to appreciate the principal lesson. Which is: abusers and calumniators are not out to get the truth, to build up, to edify. Their bent is to destroy, to liquidate. Hence, no matter what information you give them, they will not desist; they will use it to further their distrustful ambition. Hence, I found that there was no point in even trying to communicate with them; anything they learned became merely grist for their grindstones of hate.
A second valuable lesson I learned was this: they don’t really matter in the kingdom of God and in the daily warfare between Christ and Lucifer. There are too many Confessions to be heard, too many Masses to be said, too many souls seeking and needing spiritual direction, too many confused priests to be enlightened, too many aberrant bishops to be corralled back into the fold of Christ, too many holy days in honor of Angels and Saints, too many exorcisms of the possessed and the obsessed, too many of the faithful dying and needing Extreme Unction, too many children needing Confirmation—in a word, too many needy ones for any priest to hesitate for one moment and to tarry over the spewings and spittings coming from the unclean mouths, the jealous souls and the erroneous pens of pygmy men who fancy themselves upon a solid rock and who crave to ascend to fame and vanity over the dead bodies and soiled reputations of their victims.
I have always let such people know that I personally have no difficulty in waiting for the final showdown in the presence of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus, as the Just Judge of the living and the dead.
In sum, I have no time to wait—there’s too much work to be done. I know that many of my friends and well-wishers now and again answer some of my attackers. I generally discourage any sustained effort in that direction; the reason? Nothing will ever change the minds of these people—nothing except the grace of God. As I said, I am most willing to wait for God to change their minds. In the meantime, I have far too much to do. I can’t afford to waste time on them.
+Malachi
Fr. Charles Fiore’s Letter to Our Sunday Visitor Re: The late Fr. Malachi Martin
August 19, 1999
OUR SUNDAY VISITOR Letters to the Editor 200 Noll Plaza Huntington, IN 46750
Sirs:
Some years ago, in response to flippant, uninformed and false statements in OSV’s “Pastoral Answers” column about my close friend, author and priest, Malachi Martin, I wrote and telephoned publisher Bob Lockwood. As a result, it was my understanding that OSV would cease taking cheap personal shots at Malachi.
It did, until his death, when it picked up where it previously had left off.
Father Malachi Martin died in New York on July 27. It its August 15 issue, OSV’s “obituary” repeated the falsehood that he “[left] the priesthood in 1964” (he left the Jesuits, but with the explicit dispensation of Paul VI from canonical requirements that a priest must be a cleric, and continued to function as a priest)—something I thought I had made clear to Mr. Lockwood.
OSV’s obit also called him “disillusioned” and “paranoid”—rash judgments on their face that indicate only that its editors engage in defamation and never met or talked with Father Malachi. The issues he wrote about in his 16 books, and the themes he treated were truly unique and grave in the life of the Church. Apparently in OSV’s eyes that is enough to brand him as off-center, when in fact history has proved him right time and time again!
Not content to kick a priest once when he dies, Editor Greg Erlandson takes another swipe at Father Malachi in his August 22 “Welcome to my conspiracy” column.
Erlandson, without so much as a nod to any data, refers to Malachi Martin as a “novelist” (more than half of his books are non-fiction, but so what?) “half-brilliant, half-loon, given to incredible [sic] conspiracy theories [about] Satan-worshiping bishops [and] Masons…destroying the Church.” What does Erlandson make of Pope Paul VI’s 1963 statement that “The smoke of Satan has crept into the very sanctuary of the Church…where it clouds our vision and offends our nostrils”? But then, Montini must have been a nut-case too, huh, Greg?
Erlandson kisses-off my brilliant priest-author-friend and servant of the Church with the superficially profound observation that “the various factions [in the Church] think they are doing God’s will.” Does Erlandson admit the possibility that some of them may be doing just that? Else what of OSV’s output?
Please don’t write my obituary.
Sincerely,
Father Charles C. Fiore MonteCristo P.O. Box 295 Lodi, WI 53555-0295
Anthony Stine (of Return to Tradition) addresses these controversial claims
For a more in-depth look into the various claims, see this article by the same author
Friend Suzanne Pearson Responds To Malachi As A Controversial Figure