I just remembered why that Vatican document calling for global government for the greater good of all hit such a nerve: it reminded me of “Windswept House,” the Malachi Martin novel from the mid-1990s. Any of my readers ever read that book? It was very popular with conservative Catholics when it came out. I started it, but didn’t get very far. I do recall that it was widely discussed at the time in conservative and traditionalist Catholic circles.

The late Malachi Martin (d. 1999) was a fascinating figure. He was a former Jesuit priest, Vatican insider, and, by the end of his life, a somewhat radical Traditionalist who spent time talking with the talk show host Art Bell, speculating about the End of Days. I honestly have no idea how much of his stuff he flat-out invented, how much he embellished, and how much was true. I quit trying to figure that out some time ago, and hadn’t thought about him in years, until just now. About the most neutral thing you could say of him was that he was unreliable. I used to put a lot of stock in his book about exorcism, but now I think it’s simply impossible to know which of his writings were fact, and which were fiction.

“Windswept House” was a roman a clef about the Vatican, in which Martin explored his theories that the Vatican was in the process of being taken over by sinister forces determined to seize control of the Church’s apparatus and put it in the service of what Martin called (after George Bush Sr) the “New World Order” — a globalist government that would ultimately produce the Antichrist. As I recall, Martin believed that some sort of occult ritual had occurred in the Vatican in the 1960s, and that the turmoil in the Church today was a result of that. He believed that a great Apostasy was upon us, and that corrupt and worldly cardinals in the Vatican were moving to subdue the Church and put it at the service of a one-world government that would persecute the real church. I remember at the time thinking how much this vision of Martin’s could be taken out of the pages of fundamentalist Protestant literature — but it was being put out there by a hardcore conservative/traditionalist Catholic.

Any “Windswept House” readers out there? I imagine that with today’s document from the Vatican, which could have been ripped from the pages of “Windswept House,” you might be thinking that Malachi Martin was some sort of prophet. Let us hear from you in the comboxes if you were a “Windswept House” reader or a Malachi Martin fan back in the day, and what you think of that book and the late Fr. Martin nowadays.