Hostage to the Devil

He was just the most fascinating person I've ever met in my life.

He was Malachi Martin. There is one Malahi Martin.

He drew you in.

Very, very charming.

He was a warrior for God and he still is a warior for God.

He was a great mythomaniac. He was a liar and a scoundrel.

And a cheat.

Good evening. Tonight we have a vey special guest

and it's my true honour and pleasure to have made his acquaintance.

He is considered one of the most knowledgeable experts

on the Vatican in the world.

He is, first of all, a very eminent theologian.

Expert on the Catholic Church, former Jesuit,

and proffessor at the the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Institute.

He is author of national bestsellers Vatican: The Final Conclave,

Hostage To The Devil and The Jesuits.

He is also an exorcist.

Exorcism, that is a healing.

And it's a very horrid healing. But it does heal.

Inside, it is a living hell.

It's a living hell.

The truth is, whether we like it or not,

the Devil does exist.

He is out there, he is our enemy,

and he hates us.

His aim is th destroy our souls.

This is a reality that does exist.

It's not everybody but there are real cases.

That's why the rite of exorcism exists.

If the Church didn't believe it, it wouldn't do it.

It wouldn't even worry about it.

I don't belieive that words teach.

Words don't teach.

Experience teaches.

I think people have to have their own experiences.

I also know that once someone encounters that evil presence,

They know

They know what exists and what doesn't.

There is a lot of scurrilous information out there on the Internet

about Malachi that basically maligns him,

his character as well as himself, his person.

And this is part of setting the record straight.

In addition to being my friend, he was a good and holy man.

I just want to set the record straight on that.

We did not talk an awful lot about his exorcism

except the last one.

I kept asking him not to do it.

And he kept saying,

"I am only going to be an assistant."

Not much chance of that.

An exorcist has to be a very holy priest.

Protected by graces of the Church.

And I think, again, in that last exorcism

that he was involved with,

I still believe that Malachi was the target.

Not that little girl. She was the bait.

Is it the way we saw it in The Exorcist ?

That's a purely fictional account based on no fact.

I've never seen the head turning back 180 degrees.

Perhaps we could begin

by you telling us a bit about yourself,

your background,

and some of the activities that you are currently engagedin.

I think Iam going to bore you but sombody listening to this tape

doesn't know about me so I suppose we should cover the essentials.

I was born in Ireland, in Kerry, 70 years ago.

70 years ago. Don't forget the 70, seven-zero.

I was educated in Ireland and I joined the Jesuits in Ireland,

just before the war began, and then after the war,

having done my philosophy, they sent me to Belgium

for my studies, and then, when I was finished,

they posted me to Rome to the Pontifical Biblical Institute.

That's an institute in the Vatican which trains professors of scripture.

It's fallen on evil days asregards doctrine.

If you were an American Catholic in 1955,

the world would have looked extraordinary to you.

Huge numbers of converts were flowing into the Church.

Church were being built at a huge rate.

Then the Vatican Council took place,

which was to renew and reinvigorate the Church,

which was already growing hugely.

And BANG, within couple of years, it all goes terribly wrong.

Churches are being closed.

Nuns and Priests flocking out of the church.

The religious orders are winding down.

Every social problem which the Catholic Church felt it had already solved

came back to bite it.

The Council was not a boy-scout jamboree.

It was a collection of very human beings

who were involved in a battle for the future of the Church.

They were talking about making the Church more human.

more up-to-date. More modern. More with it.

More of sevices to the world instead of to dominate.

That was a vey exciting time in the history of the Church.

Malachi Martin was of immense in helping me

discover some of those people who were out there making it happen.

Making the revolution happen.

-This was Vatican II? -Vatican II.

1962 to 1965, formented by the popes in question.

And by the cardinals.

The spirit amongst them was, at all cost,

bt all means, let's get with the world.

We've been isolated. Let's modernise everything

And in order to do that, in the Vatican Council,

they jettissoned sacred traditions that had always been traditions

in the Catholic Church back to the time of the first popes.

In the first century.

He was from Ireland.

He was um...

came from quite a large brood of childen

As far as I know, he had only one sister. I may be wrong.

But he had a number of brothers,

all of whom became rather well-read and religious,

Catholic-religious in their own right.

The Martine brothers. And Malachi was no slouch either.

He was following, pretty much in his brothers' tradition.

He was like a young, clerical Indiana Jones,

crawling around caves in the Middle East.

He was one of the original people

who helped decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls.

He spoke multiple languages.

He was always an unswervingly loyal Cathilic.

Loyal to the Papacy. Loyal to our Lady in Christ.

That formed fis belief system down to his core.

He definitely cut a very sexy figure.

At parties, he would be the life of the party.

Telling his dirty jokes.

I became a good detective,

as I was, in fact, a good correspondent for Time magazine.

I got to the bottom of everything.

He had all stories,

some of which even turned out to be true!

Kaiser was a stringer for Time magazine

during Vatican Council II.

Kaiser was very deeply involved with the Jesuits.

The Jesuits had always been afraid

that when Malachi left,

he would just spill the beans about everybody.

Because he knew about everybody in Rome.

So, I think that they decided

that they would get him befoe he could get them.

And all of that came together to fuel Kaiser's means

by which he was able to express the hatred

and do as much damage as he felt he could do to Malachi.

I just got deeper into the character of Malachi Martin.

And so I wrote this book.

It's called Clerical Error .

And the error was not only his error,

but mine in not being alive enough to the reality.

I decided that this was too good a story to pass up

and that only I could tell it,

because only I had the whole story in hand

Only I had the willingness

to dig to the bottom of the story

and get it out there.

And so

I thought it might even make a good movie.

I would probably make a good documentary.

Because it is a fascinating tale.

True or not.

He made it clear that reason why he left the Jesuit order,

in particular was because in the 1960s,

the Jesuits, as with a lot of other organisations back then,

took a vey hardleft turn,

and I asked, I said, "So, you could say that after Vatican II, Mal,

the Jesuits were in left field?"

And he kind of smiled and said, "No, they weren't in left field.

They were outside the baseball stadium."

Pope John said he thought that Malachi should leave Rome.

Not the priesthood but leave Rome.

Because he said,

"If you stay..."

I am saying this on camera, but anyway... "If you stay,

you will become another fat cardinal with another mistress living outside of Rome."

He thought the best way for him to remedy this

from his own perspective

was to get a document from Pope Paul VI

that he called a rescript in Latin.

What that did was release him from two of his three vows as a priest.

It release him from the vow of obedience.

So he could leave the Jesuit order.

And It release him from the vow of poverty,

because he would then be able to make his way

pursuing a secular lifestyle as an author in the West.

The only one of his vows that he kept to and maintained until he died

was his vow of chasity.

He maintained that until his death.

Priests ae human beings, first of all.

Human beings go through all sorts of changes of mood

throughout their lives.

Privacy and the respecting of someone's privacy is absoultely paramount.

Because I know that the relationship between a priest

and his superior includes all sorts of private information.

And I know that priest are frequently given dispensations.

I personally would like to see more evidence

that he was released from two but not from three vows.

i simply would find it unsual

that he had been realeased from two and not from the third.

In 1964, I came over to America and became an American citizen,

and I settle down in New York and I write books here.