A Pope of Their Own: El Palmar de Troya and the Palmarian Church by Magnus Lundberg (review)

Dan Brown's last novel, Origin (2017), features a sinister right-wing Spanish schism of the Catholic Church—with a pope of its own—the Palmarian Church, headquartered, and with a massive cathedral, in a tiny Andalusian village known as El Palmar de Troya. The Palmarian Church really exists, but Brown is not famous for his accuracy. In an afterword to the novel, he claims to have researched the Palmarian Church in depth, but he seems to rely on a couple of anticult sources only. He believes that the Church canonized Adolf Hitler (1889–1945): the claim, often repeated, is false, although the Palmarians did canonize the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco (1892–1975). Brown also presents the Palmarian Church as a powerful international network, with considerable political leverage and access to the Spanish royal palace and government. This was never true: in their heyday, the Palmarians had some international presence, now reduced to a few small communities in Ireland and elsewhere, but were largely dismissed as a curiosity in Spain and never had any political power. Today, the Palmarian Church has a few hundred active members, and presenting it as a political threat to contemporary Spain verges on the ridiculous.

Coincidentally, A Pope of Their Own, the first full-length academic study of the Palmarian Church by Swedish historian Magnus Lundberg, was published almost simultaneously with Brown's Origin. Lundberg's book is indispensable for separating fact from fiction about the Palmarians. The Swedish scholar introduces the argument with a long chapter about Marian apparitions, Catholic opposition to the Second Vatican Council, and antipopes—three themes not generally well known outside specialized circles (although Nova Religio devoted its November 2017 issue to Marian apparitions—vol. 21, no. 2).

The Catholic Church has recognized as genuinely supernatural a handful of apparitions of the Virgin Mary, but hundreds among the unrecognized ones still attract a significant number of followers. Some of the latter are "traditionalists," seeking in the apparitions a divine confirmation that the reforms of Vatican II (and now of Pope Francis) are unorthodox and dangerous. Most traditionalists simply pray that the next conclave will elect a more conservative pope, but a few, known as "sedevacantists," believe that the present pope is not a "valid" one and that the Holy See is technically "vacant." And some groups within the sedevacantists recognize alternative popes, who, from the point of view of the Catholic Church, are in fact "antipopes."

This background is necessary to understand the origin of the Palmarian Church. The story starts in 1968, with unrecognized Marian apparitions at El Palmar de Troya. Clemente Domínguez y Gómez (1946–2005), an office clerk working for a Catholic magazine, was not among the first visionaries, but in 1969 he claimed to have received apparitions of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the Italian saintly friar Padre Pio of Pietrelcina (1887–1968). Domínguez' antics looked suspicious to the original visionaries, and this determined a schism in the El Palmar movement. With his friend Manuel Alonso Corral (1934–2011), who had a degree in management and better administrative skills, Domínguez founded what would later became the Palmarian Church.

Lundberg emphasizes the crucial role of renegade Vietnamese Catholic bishop Pierre-Martin Ngô-Dinh Thuc (1897–1984), who in 1975 and 1976 first ordained as priests, and then consecrated as bishops, Domínguez, Corral, and some of their followers, an episode marking the birth of a new religious movement clearly separated from the Roman Catholic Church. At this stage, the movement believed that Paul VI (p. 1963–1978) was a valid Pope, but he was kept prisoner in the Vatican and forced to act as he did by a clique of Freemasons and Communists. When Paul VI died, Domínguez claimed that God himself appointed him as the new Pope with the...