The Role of the Papacy According to Malachi Martin

or, Yes, the Popes' Goal Always was and Still is to be Your Boss

This is from Malachi Martin’s Book, The Keys of This Blood, pages 373-375. Numbers in parentheses are footnotes.

”You must now realize,” [St. Paul] wrote to the inhabitants of Colossae … that you have become new men on account of the enlightenment you now have about your Creator and his preferred world, in which there is to be no distinction between Jew and non-Jew, Jewish Christian and Gentile Christian, fellow citizen and foreigner, known and unknown people, slave and freeman. For, now, Christ is all of us, and Christ is in all of us.” (1) Paul’s inventory of differences and divisions that separated the people of his day into different and warring systems and groups finds exact parallels in our modern society of nations, states, and peoples. According to Paul, all differences and divisions have been transcended by a new unity.

Nor was Paul speaking in a purely spiritual unity. He was laying down a blueprint for a new society of peoples and nations undivided by nationalism, racial origin, cultural diversity, wealth or poverty, political systems or religious hatred. Nor did he envisage the goal of that society of peoples to be a balance of power maintaining the equilibrium of greater and lesser. In his pregnant phrase, it is full-scale unity in Christ. A georeligion centered and dependent on Christ: This is what Paul presented as the underlying framework for the ideal internationalism. In his context, Paul could have justifiably used that hybrid word “geopolitics,” for he was speaking of a geopoliteia, one truly geopolitical structure for all mankind as one race.

Paul, as often happened, was the intelligent and perceptive formulator of a doctrine that would be taught and propagated to all peoples and nations by another man, Peter the Great Fisherman, and by his successors over in Rome. Despite his obscurity and cruel death, Peter had been given the Keys of authority to teach all men and women, and to establish thus the geopoliteia Paul had announced as God’s plan for all men. That authority was guaranteed by the blood Christ shed. (2) Within the span of some three hundred years and the pontificates of thirty-two successors to Peter as Bishop of Rome and official holder of the Keys of this blood, the initial obscurity of the Holder's office had been shed; Peter's papacy now assumed an increasingly dominant role in the development of nations. The Pauline goal, the Christian geopoliteia, was the goal of that papacy.

It took that papacy and its institutional organization, the Roman Catholic Church, almost the whole of two thousand years to attain, in the concrete order, its status and condition of a georeligion. It took all that time and the ups and downs of 264 pontificates for the political philosophy and goals of that georeligion to be purified and purged of our cultural and civilizational accretions that along the road impeded the development of papal and Roman Catholic geopolitics.

At the close of two thousand years since Paul expressed the worldview of a genuine georeligion, the 263rd successor to the obscure Great Fisherman reigns and governs in Rome as the titular head of that georeligion housed in a genuinely geopolitical structure. For John Paul II is not only the spiritual head of a worldwide corpus of believers but also the chief executive of a sovereign state that is a recognized member of our late-twentieth-century society of states. With a political goal and structure? Yes, with a geopolitical goal and structure. For, in the final analysis, John Paul II as the claimant Vicar of Christ does claim to be the ultimate court of judgment on the society of states as a society.

NOTES

(1) This rather tortured rendition of Colossians 3:9-11 appears to be the author's own. I can't find it anywhere else. The New King James reads: "9 Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old man with his deeds, 10 and have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him, 11 where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ [is] all and in all."

(2) The title of this book is derived from this unique take on the purpose and meaning of Christ's blood.