Free Keys of This Blood by Malachi Martin Page A

of
Ostpolitik
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    Meanwhile, the threat to the power and authority of the Petrine Office has become so critical that, at least in the view of faithful and important Churchmen who are themselves as steeped as he is in practical and hardnosed experience, somewhere down the slope of papal desuetude and obsolescence John Paul will have to issue what will amount to his Protocol of Salvation. They foresee a day of confrontation when Pope John Paul will stand in front of friends and enemies and recite the words with which Jesus once confronted Simon Peter as the chosen head of his Church, to reassure him that his own weakness would not end in the destruction of that Church: “Simon, Simon, Satan has set out to make you like useless chaff he can blow away. But I have prayed for you that your faith not be extinguished. So, in time, you will return to the true faith. And you will correct your ways. And then you will reinstill faith in your brothers.”
    That day may come suddenly, out of the blue. It may come too late to salvage and restore the faith of millions who have been disillusioned, or to revive the faith of other millions of Roman Catholic apostates. It seems probable, as things are going, that it will come after most who stillretain fidelity to the Pope, to the papacy and to the traditional dogmas and faith of universal Roman Catholicism have been shut out of places of Catholic worship that will, for the most part, be fully occupied by those who retain no such fidelity.
    When that day does arrive, surely not all of John Paul’s friends, nor most of his enemies, will accept the Holy Father’s Protocol of Salvation. Surely, many will walk away from him and his papacy forever. But those who submit and remain will no longer be troubled by the ambitions and the meretricious promises of the many among them who would be little popes. Nor will they be blinded and shriveled by the subsequent glory of the Woman Clothed with the Sun.

I
The
Geopolitics
of Power

One
The Arena
1
“Everything Must Change!”
    On October 14, 1978, a new era began for the Roman Catholic Church and its nearly one billion adherents around the world. And with it, the curtains were raised on the first act of the global competition that would end a thousand years of history as completely as if a nuclear war had been fought. A drama that would leave no regions or nations or individuals as they had been before. A drama that is now well under way and is already determining the very way of life that in every place every nation will live for generations to come.
    On that October day, the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church assembled in the Vatican from around the world for the second time in barely two months. Only in August, they had elected Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice as Pope John Paul I. Still in shock at the sudden—some said suspicious—death of the man now sadly called the “September Pope,” they had convened to settle on a new man from among their contentious and divided ranks who could lead this unique two-thousand-year-old global institution at a time when it seemed in immediate danger of painful self-destruction.
    Before and after any papal Conclave, discretion is normally the watchword for every Cardinal Elector. But, on this day, Joseph Cardinal Malula of Zaire did not care who in St. Peter’s Square might hear his views about what kind of pope the Church must have. A stocky, well-built man with brilliant eyes and expressive mouth, Malula gestured at the Vatican buildings all around him, then struck a sharp blow against one of Bernini’s columns with the flat of his hand. “All that imperial paraphernalia,” he declared, “all that! Everything must change!”
    At 6:18 P.M. on the second day of Conclave, fifty-eight-year-old Karol Cardinal Wojtyla of Krakow emerged on the eighth ballot as the new Pope. Malula reportedly let out a discreet hut audible whoop. He had his wish.
    In fact, he