On 29 June 1972, during the homily for the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, Pope Paul VI uttered a phrase that, sixty years later, still echoes like an open wound: he had the sensation that «through some crack, the smoke of Satan had entered the temple of God». He was not speaking in poetic metaphor. He was referring to doctrinal confusion, doubt, a crisis that was consuming the Church from within. That pope who had closed the Council with hope found himself, barely seven years later, before a landscape he no longer recognised.

There is a book that turns that intuition into a narrative. Its title is Windswept House, by Malachi Martin —an Irish Jesuit priest, doctor in Semitic languages from Louvain, archaeologist of the Dead Sea, secretary to Cardinal Bea during Vatican II, and later an exorcist in New York. It is a novel. But its author maintained until his death in 1999 that it was «based 85% on real events», and that many of its characters had existed, even if he gave them fictional names.

The opening is unforgettable. The year is 1963. In a chapel of the Vatican—and simultaneously in another in the United States, connected by telephone—a ceremony of Lucifer’s enthronement is taking place, attended by cardinals and bishops. Martin recounts it with a liturgical coldness that chills: the inverted blessing, the pentagram, the litanies to the serpent. It is not gratuitous sensationalism. It is the gateway to a thesis: if the smoke of Satan entered the Church, someone opened the window.

From there, the novel unfolds thirty years of conspiracy. A network of prelates, politicians, and financiers—united by Freemasonry, globalist delusion, and submission to evil—works to make the Catholic Church renounce its identity as the Bride of Christ and place itself at the service of a world government. Only one obstacle stands in their way: a Slavic pope, deeply spiritual, besieged within his own Curia and pressured to sign his resignation. For the decisive move, this pope places his trust in a young American priest.

At the heart of the book, the fictional pontiff himself takes up Pope Paul VI’s phrase and makes it his own:

«I recently mentioned to Father Angelo that I have long suspected my predecessor was right when he spoke of the smoke of Satan having penetrated the Church. Today, I am convinced of it.»

This is not a learned allusion: it is the keystone of the entire work. Martin writes from the conviction that the crisis of the contemporary Church is not merely human—lukewarmness, thirst for power, worldliness—but also supernatural. The battle is real and has two fronts. This is his narrative wager and, for many of his readers, his diagnosis as well.

Martin was a debated author, and not a few of his extraliterary claims have been challenged. But as fiction, it works with devastating effectiveness. Those who seek enjoyment will find here a thriller of sustained pace, meticulously documented in its ecclesiastical setting, to be read with the eagerness reserved for the best suspense novels.

It spans 774 pages. Precisely for this reason, it is a summer read: the book that only rest allows one to approach without haste, the one you start in a deck chair and do not put down until evening falls. A summer provides much. It provides, for example, the chance to read in one sitting the most uncomfortable novel ever written about what is happening to the Church from within.

And, upon closing it, to return to the 1972 homily with a new perspective. For the question Pope Paul VI left hanging in the air—through which crack did the smoke enter?—still lacks a comfortable answer. Martin does not provide one. But he poses it with a force that, more than twenty-five years after his death, has not lost a single gram of its relevance.

Windswept House, by Malachi Martin. Crown Editions. Available in bookstores and at Amazon.com.