Alberto Rivera (activist)

Alberto Rivera
Jack T. Chick's rendition of Alberto
Born	(1935-09-19)September 19, 1935 Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain
Died	June 20, 1997(1997-06-20) (aged 61) Broken Arrow, Oklahoma
Resting place	Rose Hill Cemetery in Tulsa, Oklahoma
Known for	Anti-Catholic religious activist

Alberto Magno Romero Rivera (September 19, 1935 – June 20, 1997) was an anti-Catholic religious activist who was the source of many of the conspiracy theories about the Vatican espoused by fundamentalist Christian author Jack Chick.

Chick promised to promote Rivera'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. This claim of his membership in the Jesuit order was never proven to be true.

Biography

Rivera was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain. He 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 and Rivera was not able to provide compelling evidence in support of this claim. 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, alleging that he was a fraud. The two conflicting versions are summarized below.

Rivera's account

According to Rivera,^[3] he was brought into a seminary in 1942 when he was 7. Two years later, as his mother was dying, she saw "ugly creatures" coming at her deathbed, and faced a "Christless eternity" because of her Catholic faith. When visiting his mother's grave, Rivera vowed to find answers to "the truth". After education at an unnamed Catholic seminary, he was sent to destroy various Protestant organizations and discredit Protestant leaders, but Rivera claims that he 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. Rivera claims that the Jesuits then sent him to a "top-secret" psychiatric hospital in Spain to make him embrace the Catholic faith—what Rivera referred to has "recanting his faith." Here he claims that he was "tortured" and given poison until he "nearly" died, eventually being put into an iron lung because his lungs had broken down from the abuse. Rivera was not able to explain why the Jesuit order would place him in an iron lung at this top secret hospital after first trying to murder him. According to Rivera, he was "nearly at death" when he asked Jesus to forgive him and was miraculously healed. Rivera claimed that 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 saved his sister María, a nun, after she nearly died in a convent of some unspecified illness or injury.

Cornerstone's account

According to the Cornerstone exposé,^[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 U.S. in 1967, he claimed to be collecting money for a Spanish college, which never received this money. The details of his religious claims changed over time. For example, in 1964 he claimed that he had left the Catholic Church in July 1952. Rivera later put the date at March 20, 1967 - an almost 15 year discrepancy. Despite this second claim of conversion from Catholicism in March 1967, Rivera he was still promoting Catholicism in a newspaper interview of August that same year. Although supposedly placed involuntarily in the sanatorium where he claimed to have nearly been murdered in 1965 and held there for three months, he gave the date of his release as September 1967. This leaves a period of more than a year unaccounted for in this strange narrative.

The document exhibited by Rivera to prove his status as a Catholic priest was fraudulent. The Catholic Church denies his claim of having been a Jesuit priest, or another claim that he was a bishop. He had only one sister in London. She was not a nun, and she did not live in a convent so the claim that his sister the nun nearly died in a convent in London is certainly problematic. In an employment form dated 1963, Rivera stated he was married to Carmen Lydia Torres, and the couple had two children in the U.S. In his narrative, Rivera also claimed that he was a priest living in Spain in 1963.

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 to have completed these degrees. Rivera allegedly admitted that he had received these degrees from a non accredited entity sometimes referred to as a diploma mill located in the state of Colorado.

Allegations against Catholicism

Rivera claimed that the Jesuit order was 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 (a Catholic). Rivera further claims that the Catholic Church wants to spread homosexuality and abortion notwithstanding the church's stated opposition to gays and to abortions, that the Charismatic Movement which is a non Catholic christian movement is somehow a "front" for the Catholic Church. He further claimed that the Popes are antichrists, and that the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon.^[4] He has also claimed that the Jesuits were the masterminds behind the Medieval Inquisition in the 13th century.^[5] The Jesuits were in fact founded in 1534.^[6]

Allegations that the Church created Islam

Rivera also alleged that Muhammad was manipulated by the Catholic Church to create Islam and destroy the Jews and other groups of Christians. Rivera did not explain how they Church managed to accomplish this. He alleged that muhammed's first wife, Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, was actually a Catholic nun in an Arabian monastery who was told by a bishop to marry him and sow the seeds of what was to become Islam offered no proof of this assertion.^[4] Rivera also alleged that the Vatican staged an apparition at Fatima (named after Muhammed's daughter) to cozy up to Muslims.^[4] He further claims that it also staged the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II using a Muslim as the marksman "to guilt-induce the Muslim world, bringing them still closer to the Catholic faith!",^[4] once again without offering any proof or even any good evidence that this claim was true.

Presence in "Chick Tracts"

Six of Jack Chick's comics feature Rivera specifically: Alberto,^[3] Double Cross, The Godfathers,^[7] The Force, Four Horsemen, and The Prophet.^[8] He also wrote the introduction to Chick's republication of The Secret History of the Jesuits by Edmond Paris.^[9]

Death

According to cemetery records, Rivera is buried in Section Moore (28) L-14 #3 at Rose Hill Cemetery in Tulsa, Oklahoma.^[10][11]

See also

• New World Order (conspiracy theory)
• Jesuit conspiracy theories

References

External links

• "Who Was Alberto Rivera?" ("Chick Tracts: Their Origin and Refutation", part 3) from Catholic Answers