Alberto Rivera

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For the Spanish footballer, see Alberto Rivera Pizarro.
Alberto Rivera

Jack Chick's rendition of Alberto
Born 1935
Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain
Died 1997 (aged 61–62)
Broken Arrow, Oklahoma
Burial place Rose Hill Cemetery in Tulsa, Oklahoma
Known for Anti-Catholic religious activist
Religious beliefs Fundamentalist Protestant

Alberto Magno Romero Rivera (born 1935 in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain, died June 20, 1997 in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, in the United States) was an anti-Catholic religious activist who was the source of many of fundamentalist Christian author Jack Chick's stories about the Vatican.

Chick promised to promote Alberto's claims even after he died. Rivera claimed to have been a Jesuit before becoming a Fundamentalist Protestant, and many of the stories Chick published about Rivera involve Jesuit conspiracies.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Rivera is most notable for his claims about his time as a Catholic priest and the inner workings of the Catholic Church. Most of these claims are fiercely disputed by the Catholic Church and others. An exposé by Gary Metz in Cornerstone Magazine [1] as well as another one in Christianity Today[2] questioned many of Rivera's claims about his life and claimed that he was a fraud. The two conflicting versions are summarized below.

[edit] Rivera's account

According to Rivera: After education at a Catholic seminary, he was sent to destroy various Protestant organizations and discredit Protestant leaders, but became disillusioned upon finding that the Vatican was behind Freemasonry and that its reverence of the Virgin Mary was contradicted by the Bible. In 1965, at an Ecumenical Conference in a Guatemalan stadium, he denounced the Catholic Church to an audience of 50,000 people. The Jesuits then sent him to a top-secret sanitorium in Spain to make him recant his faith. Here he was tortured and given drugs until he nearly died, eventually being put into an iron lung because his lungs had broken down from the abuse. Nearly at death, he asked Jesus to forgive him and was miraculously healed. A senior Jesuit attempted to persuade Rivera to return to Catholicism, but instead was himself persuaded to give Rivera the passport and papers he needed to escape Spain. Afterwards he flew to London and rescued his sister María, a nun, after she nearly died in a convent.

[edit] Cornerstone Magazine's account

According to the Cornerstone article[1]: Rivera had a 'history of legal entanglements' including fraud, credit card theft, and writing bad checks. Warrants had been issued for his arrest in New Jersey and Florida, and he was wanted by the Spanish police for 'swindles and cheats'; while in the USA in 1967, he claimed to be collecting money for a Spanish college which never received this money. The details of his claims changed — in 1964 he said he had left the Catholic Church in July 1952, but later put the date at March 20, 1967; despite this, he was still promoting Catholicism in a newspaper interview of August that same year. Although supposedly placed in the sanitorium in 1965 and held there for three months, he gave the date of his release as September 1967, leaving a period of over a year unaccounted for.

The document exhibited by Rivera to prove his status as a Catholic priest was fraudulently obtained and the Catholic Church denies his claims of having been a Jesuit priest or a bishop. He had only one sister in London; she was not called Maria, was not a nun, and did not live in a convent. In an employment form dated 1963 he claimed marriage to Carmen Lydia Torres, and the couple had two children in the USA when his own account had him a celibate priest in Spain.

Cornerstone also questioned Rivera's claim to various degrees including three doctorates (Th.D., D.D., and Ph.D.), reporting that his known chronology did not allow enough time for him to have completed these degrees and that he had admitted to receiving them from a Colorado diploma mill.

[edit] Allegations against Catholicism and Islam

According to Rivera, Jesuits are responsible for the creation of communism, Islam, and Nazism, and causing the World Wars, recession, the Jonestown Massacre, and the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy; he further claims that the Catholic Church wants to spread homosexuality and abortion, that the Charismatic Movement is a front for the Catholic Church, that the Popes are antichrists, that the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon, and that Muhammad was used by the Catholic Church to create Islam and destroy the Jews and other groups of Christians.

[edit] Presence in "Chick Tracts"

Six of Jack Chick's comics feature Rivera specifically: Alberto [3], Double Cross, The Godfathers [4], The Force, Four Horsemen, and The Prophet [5]. Some people dismiss them out of hand, although Chick also printed a series of counterclaims in reply. Chick's comics and tracts were removed from many Christian bookstores on the grounds that his anti-Catholic charges were false and bigoted. Chick then resigned from the Christian Booksellers Association after the CBA began considering whether to expel him. Chick calls Rivera the most godly man he has ever met and claims that the charges against him and Rivera are themselves a plot by the Catholic Church.

[edit] Death

Rivera's last place of residence and place of death, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, were not revealed until after Rivera's death. Chick now[when?] says[citation needed] that Rivera's body was secretly taken out of Oklahoma and buried in an undisclosed location with a private funeral service out of fear that the Jesuits would exhume his corpse and desecrate it.

According to cemetery records[6], Rivera is buried in an unmarked grave at Rose Hill Cemetery in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

A Mass was celebrated at that spot on the eighth anniversary of Rivera's death, June 20, 2005, the purpose of the Mass being to petition God to have mercy on the man's soul. (The location listed as Rivera's grave had been blessed by a local Roman Catholic priest at an earlier date.)[citation needed]

Jim Arrabito, who interviewed Rivera in 1983, believes that he was murdered.[citation needed] Other sources list colorectal cancer as the cause of death.[citation needed]

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Metz, Gary (1981), “The Alberto Story”, Cornerstone 9 (53): 29-31, <http://web.archive.org/web/20051202084221/http://www.cornerstonemag.com/pages/show_page.asp?228> 
  2. ^ “Alberto Rivera: Is He For Real?”, Christianity Today 2 (2), 1981-03-13 
  3. ^ Chick Publications - Alberto
  4. ^ Chick Publications - The Godfathers
  5. ^ Chick Publications - The Prophet
  6. ^ Rose Hill Cemetery records - Tulsa, OK

[edit] External links