Cult classic

In Dan Brown’s new thriller, Origin, we are introduced to the Catholic church’s sinister far-right rival — a paranoid worldwide cult dedicated to undermining the reforms of Pope Francis.

This toxic outfit has its own pope, who runs it from his ‘Vatican’ at El Palmar de Troya, on the Andalusian plain; hence its name, the Palmarian Catholic church. Brown describes a ‘soaring Gothic cathedral’ dominated by ‘eight towering spires, each with a triple-tiered bell tower’. Inside, members are required to attend interminable masses and pray to hundreds of freshly created saints, including St Adolf Hitler.

Origin is a clumsily fashioned thriller, even by Brown’s standards, and you might imagine that he invented the Palmarian church. But it’s real. Not only does it have a pope — Peter III, the fourth pontiff since the church separated from Rome in 1978 — but the cathedral at El Palmar de Troya is much as he describes it.

The ceremonies are indeed lavish and the vestments gorgeous. According to Professor Magnus Lundberg of Uppsala University, whose book A Pope of their Own is the only authoritative study of the Palmarians, at the height of the church’s fortunes its many cardinals and bishops ‘kept some of the finest jewellers and embroiderers in Andalusia busy for years’.

This isn’t to say that Brown tells the truth about the Palmarians. They haven’t canonised Hitler. Franco is more their cup of tea. In 2014, a statue of ‘St Francisco Franco’ appeared outside their basilica, but had to be removed because monuments to the Generalissimo are illegal in Spain.

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Their creepiness, however, is not in doubt. On YouTube you can find a video of the first Palmarian pope, Gregory XVII, who died in 2005, experiencing a vision in 2001. He kneels, bowing on the floor of his basilica, surrounded by prelates in towering mitres, some of whom are strikingly handsome young men.