LSD, CIA Ops, and Utopian Optimists Making Deals With the World, the Flesh, and the Devil

The Tragedy of Vatican II: A Preview

LSD, the CIA, the KGB, the Cold War, the Freemasons, and more. It’s a wild story and a terrible tragedy.

The incredible

Darryl Cooper

began his just-started series on World War II with this observation, calling, as many began to do since Darryl’s infamous interview with Tucker Carlson, the war the load-bearing myth of our present civilization:

The Second World War was the greatest catastrophe in human history. Sixty million people dead. Entire nations destroyed. All sides engaged in the wholesale slaughter of enemy civilian populations. And the nuclear demon unleashed upon the world. It was the war in which the United States and our allies conquered the world, and eighty years after Germany's defeat, the story of the war remains our civilization's most important load-bearing myth. Myths are stories told by the winners to legitimize their victory, but in real history the losers have their own story to tell. This series will explore the deep history of the Second World War through the eyes of the Enemy.¹

World War II and the particular black and white comic book version of it we’ve all grown up with provides the only cultural historical lens used in political arguments today. Every leader the Western establishment doesn’t like is the next Hitler, every peace conference at risk of becoming the next Munich, and everyone who’s not in step with the Western establishment is a neo-Nazi simp.

But the Second Vatican Council is a load-bearing myth for professional Catholicism (and, in an inverse way, for traditionalists) as much today as World War II has become for Western governments and their policies. Both are told as black and white tales of heroes vs. comic book villains. This is, regarding Vatican II, equally true for both liberals and traditionalists. Both sides paint it in black and white terms without understanding the complexity of the characters and the narrative. Too often, we argue over the documents, the liturgical “reform”, the “spirit of Vatican II”, the legitimacy of the papacy of John XXIII, Paul VI, or Francis, or whether Benedict XVI was a modernist without looking at the narrative and understanding the core of all these things, the story itself, why all these things happened.²

The real story is that these were the two greatest catastrophes in human history. Both were tragedies. They didn't have to happen, and they didn't have to end the way they did.

The Narratives of Vatican II

Most of you reading this probably have a negative view of Vatican II. Some of you think it wasn’t a real council. Some of you think it created a false anti-Church through its heresies. Some of you, on the other hand, might think, as guitar-strumming bongo-drum-thumping crowds did in the 70s and 80s, that Vatican II was the glorious new Springtime where the Church finally “came alive.”

If the stated goal of Vatican II, aggiornamento, reviving and updating the Church for the “new” times, was honest, then by all accounts the council and the liturgical reforms appear to have been a failure, as most of you would agree:

Perhaps we cannot attribute all of these negative trends to the council. Perhaps, as those who defend the council argue, things would’ve been worse without it. Perhaps. But at the very least whatever the council did didn’t work.

But more important to me than the settled question of whether Vatican II was a failure and the movements it launched were destructive is the question of why it happened.

Many of you, echoing Dr. Taylor Marshall’s Infiltration and pointing to things like the Alta Vendita, would portray it as the moment that the Modernist, Masonic-affiliated liberals finally got their way in their long-term project of destroying the Church.

Others point to the KGB and communists being the villains but with a similar, destroy the Church, aim, as with Bella Dowd’s claims of thousands of KGB agents infiltrating the seminaries.

Sedevacantists like the Dimond brothers of Most Holy Family Monastery have a similar simple narrative: Cardinal Siri was pushed aside in the conclave of 1958 in favor of Angelo Roncalli (John XXIII), and John called a council to replace the Church with a false-apostasizing counter-Church.

The Complicated Catholic Revolution

I’m conflicted on how to view Vatican II canonically, as to whether it was a “real” council, contained errors rather than merely failing to anathematize them, was purely “pastoral,” whatever that means, rather than “doctrinal.” Church history is messy, I admit. But I take a deep interest in this question as I think the true history was a little different and a little more complicated. We should focus, again, on the broader narrative arc of what happened at the council and what followed it, before addressing these interpretative, more detailed questions.

Taylor Marshall’s concerns about Masonic influence in the Church are right, but are only part of the picture. Bella Dowd is right, but her story is only part of the Church. Traditionalists are right that Vatican II was a revolution, but this too is only part of the picture.

Revolutions, in states as well as in the Church, are like pressure cookers. History is overlapping sine waves of rising forces attempting to force their way past an existing system to become the dominant system.

A revolution occurs when a system of ideas and people holding them who were out of power but still lurking in the shadows briefly gains the upper hand when the ruling power isn’t paying enough attention. It attempts to restructure everything to its benefit temporarily. But the original power center is still there. It resists the newcomers, who are forced to back down slightly and restore something of the prior system in order to regain stability.

We see these patterns in the French Revolution through all its warring factions, into the somewhat counter-revolutionary Napoleon, the ultimate Bourbon restoration, and the aftershocks of 1830, 1848, 1871, and even to this day.

Revolutions, violent as they are, are always clashes of forces moving in different directions, explosive alchemical mixtures that reach places that no one who launched them intended or expected. And they begin under the surface far before anyone can see them coming, and remain as defining “Year 0” and semi-mythic moments long after everyone who participated in them directly has died.

Vatican II was the Catholic Revolution, a story that began long-long before the 1960s and which, as with the current liturgy wars in Charlotte, continues to this day.

Compromising With the World

On one level, for me, the Vatican II story is simple—and age-old. Men in the Church faced the third temptation of Christ in the desert, the temptation to use political power, even for supposedly good ends, and, partially, fell for it:

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And he fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’” Then the devil took him to the holy city, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’” Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’” Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Begone, Satan! for it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’” Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and ministered to him.³

The Church has faced this temptation before, as in its tangling with power in the days of Constantine, Charlemagne, the later Holy Roman Empire in the West, the Byzantine Emperors in the East, and Renaissance Italy.

Sometimes it works well and we get the High Middle Ages, when saintly men in the Church influence the world, and we begin to get a taste of the City of God in the City of Man. But frequently political power, when tangled with, corrupts the Church and the Churchmen who have tangled with it.

The Utopian Vision

The temptation to compromise with the world, to get power and the world’s respect in exchange for compromising with sin and the world is a powerful one, not because the people in the Church who have fallen for it want to destroy the Church, but because even when it goes wrong, those who made compromises often think they did so for good reasons, that their compromises with the City of Man would be means of saving the Church, of boosting its stature, of glorifying it.

Such compromises, as with most sins and sinners, are tragedies, as the people making them don’t think of themselves as villains or as serving satan or worshipping him, but as heroes of God and the Church. These are, as in Goethe’s Faust, what we call Faustian bargains, selling one’s soul in exchange for power, but ones where those making them think they're doing so for the glory of God and the Church. The story is a tragic one where a bunch of well-intentioned people thought they'd build a utopia by making a small compromise—err, Faustian bargain with the world, the flesh, and the devil, specifically that of the United States and its revolutionary ideologies⁴ so recently condemned by Pope Leo XIII in Testem Benevolentiae. But in the political context of the time, Leo XIII’s warnings, forgotten in the height of the Cold War, just twenty years after World War II, they also felt that they had to do what they did.

But as Christ also reminded his disciples, if you live by the sword, you will die by the sword. Men in the Church chose to live by the sword of politics, uniting with a false, modernist ideology, and reaped the consequences.

At the beginning, however, it all seemed to be working. In the excitement of the clown masses, rock concerts, drugs, free love, Woodstocks, and revolution on every level and in every direction, many people were duped into thinking Vatican II was a good idea, just as they were with every other revolution going on in society at the time.

As dazed people woke up from their hangovers, fell out of the Church, and it began to be obvious that things weren’t as rosy in real life as they looked when you were high and on drugs, the utopians who had made the deal couldn’t admit defeat.

They still don’t admit defeat:

They remained utopians, believing that if only we just were to try harder, maybe the revolution would finally succeed in reaching the end of the rainbow, the utopia just around the corner. Pride works that way. And so the utopians, believing themselves to be the heroes of the story, had to crack down on anyone who wasn't onboard with the project, turning the trads into rebels and the situation into a simmer that continues to this day. Much like the Israel/Palestine conflict and Mao's Cultural Revolution rolled into one, but one, where legitimately, everyone from Lefebvre to Paul VI had good intentions.

It was a spiritual battle, too, yes, the smoke of satan entered the Church as even Paul VI admitted, but it was a tragedy as are all the times that we fall to temptation and fall for the devil’s wiles.

But it’s not as simple as the devil infiltrating the Church and having his way completely. Vatican II was factional, multi-faceted, and complicated, as are all human affairs. Evil doesn’t cooperate well. Its hierarchies are inverted, self-centered, and inward-looking. Every demon laughs at all the other demons, believing that he’s secretly ripping all of them off, and deserves to do so because he believes himself the moral hero of the story. But they’re also doing the same thing to him, as with the CIA vs. KGB struggles throughout the period within the Church.

The line between good and evil runs through the heart of many a participant in the council and its aftermath. Its participants are neither entirely archvillains nor entirely heroes. Nearly all the men in the council and the revolution bear some responsibility for what happened, but all were also part of the larger tragic story and influenced by the trends and forces beyond them.

My Future Project

Ok, but how about the details? How was Vatican II a Faustian bargain with the world? What was the bargain? Who made it?

This essay is only a preview. I’m less than a third of the way through the research I want to do on this topic and on the related tragic periods of Church history, the Great Schism and the Reformation that I also hope to study at length one day. My ultimate goal is to produce a book-length set of essays and/or a multi-part audio series on the “Catholic Revolution” and its aftermath through to the present day fights over Pope Leo XIV, modelling the approach that

Darryl Cooper

or

Dan Carlin

do in their history series, focusing on the question of how and why each character in the revolution did what they did. This will be a couple of years off.

We’re all deeply divided over Vatican II. The destruction continues to this day. Healing for the Church from the wreckage inflicted upon it still seems far off. But my goal is to find an off-ramp for everyone's mimetic angst at the “other side” by showing how we came to be where we are today, before we tear apart more of the Church in the process.

I’ve included the resources that I’ve read so far and plan to read soon below, but I’m writing this mostly to get your research suggestions. What resources have you found useful for understanding the lead-up to Vatican II, the council itself, and its aftermath?

A Preview

But to make this more interesting—the story is wild, crazy, and fascinating—after all, let’s go through a few of the wildest, tantalizing details that have to be understood to get the full picture of how Vatican II happened and how it went down:

We’ll look at how John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris (the pink encyclical) worried the CIA so much that they bribed and influenced the next conclave to get it to pick the man they trusted to be anti-communist and pro-U.S. enough, Paul VI.

We’ll look at the context of the Cold War culture in America and Europe, the fears of another world war, and how these impacted people’s minds.

LSD anybody?

Once you know that the Jesuit John Courtney Murray, one of the chief theologians at Vatican II and the chief proponent of the most heterodox ideas therein on religious liberty, was also one of the early experimenters with the drug LSD, a lot of the stuff that happened after the council starts to make a lot more sense.⁵ Once you know that Teilhard de Chardin, also a top liberal influence on the council and thereafter, was also taking psychedelics and encountering “entities” in the desert, the reasons for the negative outcomes become even more perspicuous. Perhaps the clown Masses and equally clowny theology weren’t the product of sober men.

Image is from https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/8/2/article-p143.xml

The US Wanted to Co-Opt Catholicism

We’ll also look at how the United States and its revolutionary ideology continued into the 20th century and how it wanted to co-opt Catholicism to be the new imperial religion for geostrategic reasons. This, combined with John Courtney Murray’s goal to bring Catholicism into imperial power in America, is the centerpiece of the Faustian bargain that was at the core of the compromises made out of the council.⁶

You choose to cooperate with the CIA to take down communism, but now you have a new master, the CIA and USAID. Thus arose the cooperation of the Vatican with the CIA and Freemasonry through the 80s to today in drug-running, the Italian mafia, “Operation Gladio”, coups in Latin America, “Catholic Charities” and its un-Catholic missions, and the “Color Revolutions” that continue to this day.

We’ll look at the story from the French Revolution, the Carbonari, Pius XI’s financial troubles, concordat with Italy, and compromises on usury through to the liturgical movement and the revolutionary changes that began with St. Pius X and continued through Bugnini and the destructive liturgical utopians and their opposition, the traditionalists like Archbishops Lefebvre and Thuc, and the tragic breakdown of their relationships with Rome.⁷

We’ll look at the seemingly wild coincidences of Cardinal Dulles being both an influential figure in the Catholic Revolution whilst being the nephew of the CIA founder Allen Dulles, how the assassination attempt on John Paul II was a CIA rather than KGB hit-job, predicated in fact on John Paul II having been cooperating for the CIA but failing to launch the Polish revolution they wanted him to, and how many of the more fringe traditionalist movements around the world happened to be launched by the brother of the U.S backed president of Vietnam.⁸

Oh, and Fr. Patrick Peyton and Bishop Sheen, among others, likely worked for the CIA in some capacity.⁹

We’ll have to look critically at John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Opus Dei, and even many traditionalist movements and their roles in accelerating the revolution, even as they seemed to be slowing it down and bringing stability back into the Church in the 80s and 90s even as the sexual abuse crisis, brought about by the very same revolution, burned beneath the surface.¹⁰

The Tragedy of It All

But I also aim to look sympathetically at many of these same men, showing how and why they came to think what they thought and did what they did.

Vatican II, like World War II, was an epoch-defining moment, but also a tragedy. Its story is almost inseparable from that of the Cold War and World War II, from the story of the U.S. bid for global power and worldwide ideological supremacy. It can’t be separated from the revolutionary upheavals occurring in other facets of society, from the aftermath of the tragedy of World War II, from the long narrative of the Jesuits’ simple-minded ultramontanism and its role in the Church. The Churchmen who launched Vatican II and the U.S. imperialists both believed they were manipulating the other for their ends.

The result is the present world we live in today.

It’s a complex story in the details, but at its core, a simple one, compromising with the world, the flesh, and the devil, and facing the consequences.

The outcome is what you expect when drugged-up utopians try to reimagine everything from the ground up while they're in a dazed stupor. Oh, and did I mention that many of them were homosexuals?

I am not a sedevacantist. I prefer, as I have in many other essays on this publication, to give my “party affiliation”, if I have to pick, as having St. Catherine of Sienna and her battle to purify the Church from within as my model.

Which Side Are You On?

My hope is that, by knowing the story, the narrative arc,¹¹ we can demystify and demythologize Vatican II, seeing it not as the moment the Church was lost, not at the moment where everything changed, not as the moment when the Masons “won” or the KGB “won” or the CIA “won” but, although particularly tragic, just another moment in Church history. We should pity the drugged-up utopians of Vatican II, somberly bemoan the destruction they caused, and begin to move forward with restoration, not out of hatred for the destructive Churchmen or the Church they tried but failed to drive into the ground but out of love for Christ and the Churc, his bride and our mother.

This project will take a couple of years to complete. I’ve never written anything longer than 25 pages, and I’m not good at recording myself when there’s no obvious audience physically present. I have a lot more research to do and a lot of other topics that interest me. But it’s the current medium-term goal and something for which I’d love your suggestions.

---

Sources I’ve Read So Far

• Warren Carroll, The Revolution Against Christendom.

• Warren Carroll, The Crisis of Christendom.

• Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity.

• Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World.

• Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War.

• Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope.

• Brian Burrough, Days of Rage.

• Thomas C. Reeves, The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity.

• Taylor Marshall, Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church From Within.

• Thomas Day, Why Catholics Can’t Sing.

• Paul Johnson, Modern Times.

• Garreth Gore: Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy.

• John Gehring, The Francis Effect.

• Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Revolution.

• John T. McGreevey, Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis

• Bp. Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Marcel Lefebvre: The Biography

• Paul Williams, Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia.

• Peter Steinfels, A People Adrift: The Crisis in the Roman Catholic Church in America.

• Michael Davies, Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre: Volume 1

• Michael Davies, Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre: Volume 2

• Daniel Flynn, Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk & the 10 Days that Shook San Francisco

• Henry Sire, The Dictator Pope: The Inside Story of the Francis Papacy

• Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, The Road from Hyperpapalism to Catholicism: Parts I & II

Sources to Read

• Michael Davies, Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre: Volume 3

• Kennedy Hall, Charismania: The Truth About the Charismatic Renewal

• Kennedy Hall, What Happened to the Catholic Church?

• Malcomb Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation

• Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment.

• Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club

• Malachi Martin, Windswept House

• Malachi Martin, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church

• Malachi Martin, The Keys of this Blood

• Malachi Martin, The Jesuits

• John Koehler, Spies in the Vatican

• David Wemhoff, John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and The American Proposition: How the CIA's Doctrinal Warfare Program Changed the Catholic Church

• Ralph Wiltgen, The Rhine Flows Into the Tiber:

• Archbishop Lefebvre, I Accuse the Council.

• Archbishop Lefebvre, Open Letter to Confused Catholics

• Kale Zelden, “Vatican II as a Hyperobject”

• John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition

• Robert Hoey, The Experimental Liturgy Book

• Paris, Edmond. The Secret History of the Jesuits.

• John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews

• Henry Sire, Phoenix from the Ashes

• Yves Chiron, Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy, 2018.

• George Weigel, To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II

• Ralph McInerny, What Went Wrong with Vatican II?

Please let me know any other sources you’ve found useful in the comments

1. MartyrMade #24 - Enemy: The Germans' War, Prologue

2. Kale Zelden also raises this point, but I came up with it independently from thinking about the council.

3. Matthew 4: 1-11

4. The American Revolution is distinct in principles from the French Revolution, but both are revolutionary, liberal ideologies, and are pretty close together in their “Enlightenment” roots and their corrosive impact on Christendom.

5. As described herein, “Psychedelic Christianity: From evangelical hippies and Roman Catholic intellectuals in the sixties to clergy in a Johns Hopkins clinical trial” on how Murray and his Jesuit priory were early LSD users: https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/8/2/article-p143.xml

6. See Paul Williams’ Operation Gladio and David Wemhoff’s John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and The American Proposition: How the CIA's Doctrinal Warfare Program Changed the Catholic Church, or this fascinating interview with Wemhoff:

7. I take issue with Archbishop Lefebvre sending pretty negative cartoons of John Paul II to him, but I can’t find any clear moment where he didn’t seem to be acting, at least from the outside, in the best interest of those who came to rely on him. I think Lefebvre overstepped canonical bounds, clearly, but one could also argue effectively that he was goaded into making any mistakes he made.

8. See the CMRI’s (no endorsement) tribute to Archbishop Thuc: https://cmri.org/articles-on-the-traditional-catholic-faith/reflections-on-the-life-of-archbishop-pierre-martin-ngo-dinh-thuc/

9. Fr. Patrick Peyton’s CIA connections: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-rosary-priest-venerable-patrick-peyton-csc/ and how he helped pull off a 1964 coup in Brazil: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/mayo-born-rosary-priest-helped-cia-bring-about-1964-coup-in-brazil-1.3833013

10. I view John Paul II like the Napoleon to Bugnini's Danton and Paul VI's Marquis de Lafayette against the pre-conciliar Church's Louis XIV. JPII was a revolutionary, yes, but formalized it and slowed it down.

11. Kale Zelden, while a bit more supportive of the council than I would be, also has similar hopes of producing a narrative that gets us beyond the current discourse. Here are two good shows he did on this topic here:

and here: