The Inventor. W. E. Gutman

the notion that people can govern their consciences without its guidance or control. Worse, it denies them the right to manage their political destinies by delivering them to the same reactionary Pharisaic elite that Jesus is said to have rebuked.

      Few of Christianity’s rulers, however pious, have lived up to the principles of Jesus, the radical who, if Biblical scribes did not tamper with the original script, is said to have preached compassion, pacifism and egalitarianism. Faced with a choice between Jesus’ ethic and political expediency, Pope John Paul II sadly opted for the latter. He came to Latin America and told the poor that poverty ennobles the soul. He then pompously urged the rich Catholics who finance his reign to reject materialism. He might as well have ordered hyenas to abstain from eating meat. In casting out the good shepherds of Christianity from the fold, John Paul also surrendered the flock to the carnivores.

      It was the immorality of historical falsification -- and the baseness of academic dishonesty -- that propelled Montvert, a man with an unyielding respect for truth, on a lifelong campaign to unearth it wherever it may hide. He also transformed a passion for fine art into a medium through which he would later demonstrate that certain forms of human creativity cry out against lies, injustice and absurd beliefs.

      His open mutiny against conformity began in high school.

      His history teacher, Monsieur Delormel, routinely disregarded the obligatory French secular curriculum and shamelessly injected his personal prejudices and slanted perceptions. Armed with a razor-sharp intellect and a tongue to match, Delormel was a strict disciplinarian, a fount of erudition and a skilled pedagogue who would struggle, for two years, to educate Montvert or, as he had put it, “to deposit something of value inside this untidy, dissolute little brain of yours.”

      The broad knowledge Delormel possessed -- he was licensed to teach everything from algebra to zoology -- was often overshadowed by an appalling lack of objectivity. It was his very scholarship that enabled him, wherever he could, to skew history or to rewrite it by opining unabashedly about people long dead or editorializing about events exhaustively recorded in the otherwise unembellished lay French government curriculum.

      A royalist, as are all devout French Catholics, Delormel steadfastly extenuated the arrogance and cruelty of French monarchs by insisting that they were, after all, “good Christians.” It is true that kings and queens, when not making war, presiding over orgiastic banquets or fornicating with courtiers and servants alike, spent much time genuflecting in their private gilded chapels on ermine stoles and rich brocades while their vassals lived in squalor, starved and died of consumption. Distant abstractions, the horrors of the Crusades and the Inquisition elicited a kind of nostalgia from Delormel, if not a malicious admiration stripped of all misgivings for the atrocities committed in their name.

      Montvert remembered learning about the events that took place on the night of August 23, 1572, better known as the Saint-Bartholomew massacre, during which 3,000 Huguenots were slaughtered in the streets of Paris on orders of her majesty, the unscrupulous but “Very Catholic” Queen of France, Catherine de Medici. News of the slaughter would be cheered by King Philip II, himself busy purging Spain of Protestants, Jews and Moors, and by Pope Gregory XIII who, for lack of more pressing business, reformed the calendar. Reviewing the incident did not seem to evoke in Montvert’s teacher any discernible scruple.

      Injecting personal bias into his instructions, Delormel presided over his own kangaroo court. He openly scorned the Huguenot Henri of Navarre, but lavished him with praise when, crowned Henri IV and fearful for his neck, he converted to Catholicism. “Paris is well worth a mass,” the king had sardonically remarked. Praise turned to condemnation when the king, now firmly enthroned, issued the Edict of Nantes, a decree restoring religious and political rights to French Protestants. A few chapters forward, the teacher applauded the edict’s revocation, 87 years later, by the “Sun King,” Louis XIV, the archetype warmongering despot whose conceit was eclipsed only by his lust for ostentation.

      Fifty years hence, unaware of or utterly indifferent to the immense suffering his subjects endured, Louis XVI, who spent his reign tinkering with clocks, and his dizzy wife Marie-Antoinette, who plundered the nation’s coffers to keep the court royally entertained, elicited pity and sympathy from Montvert’s teacher.

      “They were very pious and joined in prayer several times a day.”

      As these enormities were being casually spouted, Montvert would retrieve from the depths of childhood memories Pathé and Fox newsreel footage of priests, their eyes turned to heaven sprinkling “holy water” on tanks and cannons and the fuselage of dive bombers so that Christians of one nation could wreak death and destruction upon Christians of another nation with the full blessings of Almighty God.

      “A ‘God’ that takes sides,” Montvert had snickered, “is on nobody’s side.” Delormel had removed him from class for the obligatory ten minute stroll up and down the hallway, a workout designed to “clear the brain.”

      The French Revolution, Monsieur Delormel insisted, was “an outrage masterminded by Jewish financiers, Freemasons, degenerate philosophers and other irreligious libertines.” This characterization, popular among Catholics, the titled and reactionaries, was nowhere to be found in the instruction manual Montvert had been issued -- nor in any history work he had since perused. He had found it amusing that, in reading assigned works by the chief “degenerate” French philosophers, Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, he and his fellow students had been encouraged to parse and emulate their elegant literary style but enjoined from embracing their “amoral teachings.”

      “Imagine a student being told, ‘Write like Hemingway but take care not to espouse his leftist values….’ “Montvert was fond of saying.

      The reign of terror that followed the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 was summarily blasted as a “grotesque act of barbarism against Christian values.” Yes, many innocent heads rolled during the two–year frenzy. But Monsieur Delormel could not bring himself to regard the insurrection as a cathartic spasm against centuries of misery and oppression or as the impetus that would help rid France, for the first time in history, of the yoke of feudalism, a dissolute clergy and a callous absolute monarchy.

      The assassination, in his bathtub, of Jean-Paul Marat, a populist physician, lawyer, journalist and legislator in 1793, was flippantly dismissed as the “extirpation of a Jewish scoundrel by a brave Catholic young woman [Charlotte Corday].” Marat was not Jewish -- his parents were from Sardinia -- but Montvert’s teacher had a quirky sense of humor that did not prevent him from creating myth where none existed.

      Plant doubt among the uninformed and you can make them believe anything.

      In contrast, the beheading of two royal idlers who bankrupted France while they wined, dined, gambled, gathered in prayer, made war and cheered their dogs on helpless foxes, Monsieur Delormel insisted, was murder. Nor would he entertain the notion that revolution, as Montvert perilously argued, is a process, not an incident. Many people tend to judge the French Revolution as a single event rather than a trend whose seeds were sown centuries earlier. The burgeoning concepts of human rights, equality, suffrage and the abolition of monarchy had actually taken root one hundred years before the storming of the Bastille.

      Precocious, inquisitive and innately skeptical, Montvert survived and outgrew Monsieur Delormel’s sinister brand of encoding. It wasn’t until his own son came home one day from school crying, “the teacher said that Jews murdered Jesus,” that he knew that chauvinism and encoding are alive and well, a new generation of freethinkers notwithstanding.

      A student of history and, if he can help it, a history maker, Father Hubert François de Ravaillac is a model Knight. When not discharging his apostolic duties or struggling with his conflicted sexuality with a daily auto-erotic regimen of self-whipping, he studies the newly updated secret Knights of Malta curriculum, Recruitment and Training of