Alleged affairs
There were two allegations made against Martin of having an affair with a woman:
- Malachi Martin was criticized most notably in the book Clerical Error: A True Story by Robert Blair Kaiser, Time Magazine's former Vatican correspondent. Kaiser, a former Jesuit, accused Martin of having carried on an extramarital affair with his wife during 1964 in Rome, and claimed that Martin fled to the United States as a renegade from the priesthood. Throughout the book, Martin is presented as a liar and fantasist. A friend of Martin's, William H. Kennedy, published an article in the journal Seattle Catholic to dispute Kaiser's allegation and other claims made about Martin after his death. Kennedy points out that Kaiser admits in his book that he was diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia, and cites passages from Kaiser's book which he believes show that Kaiser was writing from a distorted and delusional perspective due to his mental illness. With regard to being a renegade from the priesthood, evidence is cited that suggests that Martin received a special dispensation in order to become a writer, while retaining his status as a priest with limited faculties.
- In her 2008 book Queen of the Oil Club: The Intrepid Wanda Jablonski and the Power of Information, Anna Rubino wrote that Martin had a love affair with oil journalist Wanda Jablonski on a visit to Beirut, Lebanon in the 1950s. The book was published long after the deaths of both Jablonski (1992) and Martin (1999).
Laicization dispute
In 2004, Father Vincent O'Keefe S.J., former Vicar General of the Society of Jesus and a past President of Fordham University, affirmed that Martin had never been laicized. O'Keefe stated that Martin had been released as a religious from all his vows - poverty and obedience - save the vow of chastity. Martin no longer was a Jesuit but remained a (secular) priest during the rest of his life.
The Vatican, on the other hand, has a different view. In a letter the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life states:
"In 1965, Mr. Martin received a dispensation from all privileges and obligations deriving from his vows as a Jesuit and from priestly ordination." [Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, 25 June 1997, Prot. N. 04300/65].
According to the Vatican Martin was not only released from religious vows but also his vows from "priestly ordination" (which means laicisation).
It is claimed that attacks were mounted on Martin in retaliation for his book
The Jesuits, which is hostile to the Jesuit order of which he had formerly been a member. In the book, he accuses the Jesuits of deviating from their original character and mission by embracing Liberation Theology.
Ordination dispute
During a videotaped memorial entitled
Malachi Martin Weeps For His Church, Rama Coomaraswamy, a sedevacantist clergyman, claimed that Martin had told him that he had been secretly ordained a bishop during the reign of Pius XII in order to travel behind the Iron Curtain ordaining priests and bishops for the underground churches of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Coomaraswamy died in 2006.
Alleged authorship
- The book The Pilgrim: Pope Paul VI, The Council and The Church in a time of decision was written by Martin under the pseudonym Michael Serafian. This was confirmed by Martin himself and corroborated independently by Prof. Dr. Hans Küng. Martin related that his choice of surname, Serafian, is due to meeting a carpet dealer in Jerusalem with that name, during the pilgrimage of Paul VI to the Holy Land in January 1964.
- The anonymously written book Complaints against God by One of His Creatures was not written by Martin but by Fr. Andrew Greeley, a liberal priest.
- The pseudonym of Xavier Rynne, used to write more than 20 books on Vatican II, is not that of Martin but of Fr. Francis X. Murphy C.s.s.R..
- The 1966 article Laures et ermitages du désert d'Egypte published in Mélanges de l'Université Saint-Joseph by the hand of M. Martin was written by Maurice Martin, and not Malachi Martin.
Alleged service of Jewish interests
Journalist Joseph Roddy alleged - in a 1966 Look Magazine article about the debate on the Jewish question during the Second Vatican Council - that one and the same person under three different pseudonyms had written or acted on behalf of Jewish interest groups, such as the American Jewish Committee, to influence the outcome of the debates. Roddy wrote that two timely and remunerated 1965 articles were penned under the pseudonym of
F.E. Cartus, one for Harper's Magazine and one for the American Jewish Committee’s influential intellectual periodical Commentary Magazine. Roddy further stated that tidbits of information were leaked to the New York press that detailed Council failings vis a vis the Jews under the pseudonym of
Pushkin. Roddy also stated that these two unidentified persons were one and the same person - a
young cleric-turned-journalist and a
Jesuit of Irish descent working for Cardinal Bea and
who was active in the Biblical Institute - he figuratively named as
Timothy O'Boyle-Fitzharris S.J. in order not to reveal the true identity of his source. Roddy also mentions
The Pilgrim in a footnote to his article.
John Grasmeier, moderator of the traditionalist Catholic Internet forum
angelqueen.org, alleged in 2007 that Michael Serafian was the same individual who was identified in 1966 under the pseudonyms of F.E. Cartus, Pushkin and Timothy O'Boyle-Fitzharris S.J. by Joseph Roddy, and concluded that Martin was thus an insider agent for the Jewish community during the Second Vatican Council and therefore a traitor to the church. He based his allegations on documents belonging to the Farrar, Straus & Giroux Collection, archived in the Manuscripts Department of the New York Public Library. These allegations were denied by supporters of Martin, like Catholic author William H. Kennedy and non-Catholic blogger Marnie Tunay. Tunay states that, although the documents that Grasmeier provided to support his claims were interesting - and make a good circumstantial case that Martin was paid to lobby on behalf of Jewish lobby groups during the Council who wished to make their religious interests heard - there is no evidence whatsoever to his allegation that Martin was a spy who leaked confidential information from the Council to those lobby groups.
In his 2007 book
Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, Edward K. Kaplan confirmed that Martin cooperated with the American Jewish Committee during the Council
for a mixture of motives, both lofty and ignoble. He
primarily advised the committee on theological issues, but he also provided logistical intelligence and copies of restricted documents. It is confirmed in the book that Martin used the pseudonyms
Forest and Pushkin. Kaplan further acknowledges that the
kiss and tell book about the internal workings of the Council,
The Pilgrim by Michael Serafian, was requested from Martin by Abraham J. Heschel, who also arranged the book to be published by Roger W. Straus, Jr.'s Farrar, Straus and Giroux printing company. It was published
in the hope that it would influence the deliberations in the council. Once that Martin's identity as author was revealed, it led to protests
and the book had to be removed from circulation at considerable financial loss to the publisher. This led to the end of friendly relations between Martin and Heschel and Straus. Kaplan lastly states that Malachi Martin was the primary source of information for Joseph Roddy in writing his 1966 article for Look Magazine, and that Fr. Timothy O'Boyle-Fitzharris S.J. was in fact Martin. Kaplan judges the Roddy article as
dangerously misleading because of the
credence it gives to the claim that without organised Jewish pressure the council declaration on the Jews would not have been accepted.
Martin explicitly denied he was a spy, along with denying other rumors. Michael Cuneo, in his book
American Exorcism writes that, "Martin told me that he was perplexed, and more than a little annoyed, by the swirl of rumors surrounding his personal life." He quotes Martin as saying:
Look, I've had three heart operations, recently open-heart surgery, and I'm at the point where I'd like to put some of these stories to rest," he said. "I've been accused of everything; speculation on my life is a veritable cottage industry. I'm a lecher, a wife-stealer, and a spy; I'm secretly married with children; I've sexually abused little girls– it's all nothing but fancy.
Alleged Jewish heritage
Rumors appearing on various Catholic or sedevacantist websites and magazines alleged that Malachi Martin had Jewish ancestry on account of ancestral descendancy from Iberian Jews migrating to Ireland and Great-Britain in the 15th century, and alleged him being an Israeli spy because of his first name,
Malachi, after a Hebrew prophet and his extensive travels in the Levant. These allegations were proven without ground by William H. Kennedy in his article
In Defense of Father Malachi Martin. After having made genealogical inquiries with surviving relatives of Martin in Ireland, Kennedy concluded that Martin's father was an Englishman who moved to Ireland and his mother was fully Irish. Fr. Rama Coomasrawamy confirmed this independently.
Alleged photograph
Claims that Martin features as a curial monsignor in full regalia on a prominent 1979 photograph next to Pope John Paul I and his assistant Diego Lorenzi appeared on the Internet. The photograph, published in David Yallop's
In God's Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I as number 28 between pages 120 and 121, shows a 'Monsignor Martin', visibly different from Malachi Martin. This is a case of mistaken identity. The cleric in the photograph was Jacques-Paul Martin, Prefect of the Casa Pontificia between 1969-86.