Dave Armstrong exposes the falsehood about the life and conversion of “Alberto,” one of the myths created and believed by many evangelicals throughout the continent…
(Includes a letter and a reply from a friend of Alberto)
———–“He is the holiest man I have ever known”———-Jack T. Chick
Alberto Rivera, the supposed Catholic Priest, Bishop, and anti-Catholic hero of Jack Chick’s comic book was exposed as a total fraud by a non-Catholic (evangelical Protestant), Gary Metz, in two articles that appeared in evangelical publications.
1) “The Story of Alberto” in the magazine: Cornerstone, Vol. 9, no. 53, year 1981, pp. 29-31.
2) Christianity Today, March 13, 1981
The Christian Research Institute (CRI), founded by the late Dr. Walter Martin, widely known as the most prominent evangelical specialist on cults, also carried out an exposé on Rivera. Here are some excerpts from the first article mentioned above. Do not forget that what is stated here is the fruit of an investigation carried out and published by Protestants who discovered the falsehood of Alberto Rivera’s testimony:
1.-.The Christian Reformed Church, Zondervan Publications, and the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Church have banned the sale of the “Alberto” comics in their bookstores, deeming them false.
2.- Jack Chick commented that Christian bookstores are being infiltrated by secret Catholic propaganda teams that pressure the owner until he ‘compromises with Rome and pulls Alberto from his store.’
3.- Is “Alberto” a true story? No! It is not. Our intensive investigations reveal his police record, his investment frauds, his bad checks, his contradictory testimony, his fabricated academic record, and his record of family abuse. . . Alberto Rivera, also known as Alberto Romero, has a history of legal troubles. He is involved in a court action in Southern California, charged with fraud.
4.- In 1965, an arrest warrant was issued in Hoboken, New Jersey, for writing bad checks. He also left more than $3,000 in unpaid debts.
5.- In 1969, two arrest warrants were issued against him in DeLand and Ormond Beach, Florida. The first arrest warrant was for the theft of a Bank-Americard credit card. The criminal investigation division of the Bank of America reported that he had charged more than $2,000 to it. The second arrest warrant was for the ‘unauthorized use of an automobile.’ Alberto abandoned the vehicle in Seattle, Washington. From there he moved to Southern California.
6.- The way in which Alberto recounts his conversion is contradictory… In 1964, while working for the Christian Reformed Church, he said he had been converted from Catholicism in July 1952. Later he maintained it was in 1967. . . 3:00 AM on the morning of March 20, 1967.
7.- He says he immediately deserted the Catholic Church. However, five months later, in August 1967, he was still promoting Catholicism and the ecumenical movement in a newspaper interview in his hometown of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands.
8.- Alberto commands great respect from many, making them believe in the numerous academic degrees he claims to hold, which include:
Doctorate in Philosophy Doctorate in Theology
Doctorate in Sociology Doctorate in History
Doctorate in Bible Master’s in Psychology
However, he becomes evasive when asked where he received these degrees. Alberto attended a seminary in Costa Rica (the Latin American Biblical Seminary) with a friend from Las Palmas, but Alberto did not graduate. That friend, the Reverend Plutarco Bonilla (a respected Christian leader in Central America), said that Alberto never finished high school in Las Palmas and that he was at the seminary in the program for non-graduates. The school states in a letter that it was forced to expel Alberto for his constant ‘lying and defiance of the seminary’s authority.’ The known chronology of his life does not allow him the time to have attained the academic standing he claims to hold.
9.- When the Reverend Wishart [Alberto’s former companion and former pastor of the First Baptist Church of San Fernando] pressed Alberto regarding his academic degrees, Alberto admitted having obtained them from a print shop in Colorado. That ended their relationship. Pastor Rasmussen (the Faith Baptist Church of Canoga Park, California) also asked Alberto to submit to a lie detector test that would authenticate some of his claims. Alberto said he would attend: three appointments were made for this, and on all three occasions he failed to show up.
10.- He met his first ‘wife’ in Costa Rica while working with the Methodist church. Rev. Bonilla says that Alberto lived there with a woman in the late 1950s, but that they were not legally married: Alberto said that God had validated his marriage. Alberto later stated on a job application form that he and Carmen Lydia Torres married on November 25, 1963. His son Juan was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in September 1964. . . A supervisor at that time, Rev. Edson Lewis, said that Alberto physically abused Carmen Lydia and Juan. Less than a year after his birth, in July 1965, Juan died in El Paso, Texas, where his parents had fled after writing bad checks in New Jersey. [A new son, Alberto, was born in 1967 or 1968.] It is difficult to determine the whereabouts of the child Alberto today, but Rev. Abrego [Alberto’s former associate and roommate] declared that he was placed in a foster home in Tennessee. . . Alberto and Carmen Lydia had yet another son, Luis Marx, at the beginning of 1969. While they were still in Florida, their hosts declared that Luis Marx was suffering abuse. It is not known what happened to Luis Marx, but when Alberto traveled from Florida to Seattle with the car and the credit card, they no longer had the child with them. What happened to Carmen Lydia after being in Seattle is also unknown, but Alberto remarried in 1977 to Nury Frias, a woman from the Dominican Republic. It is still unknown whether he was legally married to and/or divorced from the other woman. In any case, Rivera’s credibility is extremely damaged upon discovering that he had two sons (Juan and Alberto) in America during the time he claims to have practiced the celibate priesthood in Europe! What does Jack Chick think about this? . . . When he was finally reached by telephone at his residence, he said that he had never known a holier man than Alberto, and that he knows Alberto’s story is true because he ‘prayed about it.’ Jack says he expects his own life to be taken by Jesuit assassins [he is still alive after 17 years].
11.- When we reached Alberto by telephone, he too refused to be interviewed by us. . . He pleads that any evil before his conversion in 1967 was done under the orders of the Catholic Church, and that any evil since his conversion is a fabrication of the conspirators.
As we have seen, Alberto’s tale is fraudulent, like the tale of John Todd, another protégé of Jack Chick, who said that witches are taking over the world (see issue #48 of Cornerstone). Alberto has cunningly built a fence, a paranoid defense system that makes it hard to pin him down on specific matters. He can always dismiss any accusation as being part of the Jesuit plot.
The fraudulent claims of Alberto Rivera underscore a sad fact: many Protestants have a distorted view of Catholics, just as whites had of blacks at the turn of the century. The black man was characterized as ‘all rhythm and no brains,’ while the Catholic is portrayed as an automaton in the unquestioning bondage of the Church authorities.
In a later issue of Cornerstone magazine (Vol. 10, no. 54), an article responds to Chick” :
Jack T. Chick has published a three-page reply to Gary Metz’s exposé on Alberto Rivera . . . In his letter of March 25, 1981, also signed by Rivera, Chick declares that ‘the systematic destruction of John Todd’s ministry is being repeated by the Vatican to destroy Alberto. (Todd claimed to have been one of the leaders of an international conspiracy of witches to install Jimmy Carter as the Antichrist; Chick promoted Todd’s tale some time ago in his comic book.) Chick accuses Christianity Today magazine and Cornerstone, both of which unmasked John Todd, of continuing the cause of the ‘Antichrist in the Vatican.’ A typical example of Chick’s defense of Alberto: the evidence of Alberto’s academic degrees vanished because the Vatican ‘erased Dr. Rivera’s name from all the directories in schools, seminaries, and colleges’; Rivera’s former associates and acquaintances contradict his tale because they are Vatican spies; the women he was involved with were from ‘the Legion of Mary or the Catholic Youth.’ Thus, with the magic wand of the Vatican conspiracy, Rivera exonerates himself from any evidence that could be brought against him. No doubt a tale can only be covered up with another tale. That is Alberto.
We believe that if Jack Chick really has something to charge Catholics with, he needs to move away from fabrications and find a more reliable source of information.
Chick’s third comic about Rivera, The Godfathers, contains the following false statements, presenting them as if they were solemn truth
Ø The Vatican plans to exterminate the Jews and set up the papal throne in the temple of Jerusalem, where the Pope will reign as God, literally fulfilling the prophecies about the “man of sin” in 2 Thess 2:3-4;
Ø The Vatican financed the Muslim-Israelite war in the 10th century;
Ø Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by Jesuits;
Ø The founders of communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were trained and directed by Jesuit agents;
Ø The Jesuits also trained Leon Trotsky, Lenin, and Joseph Stalin;
Ø Adolf Hitler was installed by the Catholics, while his book Mein Kampf was actually written by a Jesuit priest;
Ø The Vatican was behind World Wars I and II and the Russian Revolution of 1917;
Ø The Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, and the Masons are secretly directed by Jesuit agents;
Ø All the other self-proclaimed international conspiracies (the Illuminati, the Communists, the Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Club of Rome, etc.) were, in fact, created by the Catholic Church as a smokescreen to divert attention away from the Vatican;
Regarding all these tales and fictions, Cornerstone magazine, produced by Protestants, clarifies:
Rivera’s claim to have been a priest, bishop, and intelligence agent for the Roman Catholic Hierarchy has been discussed in previous issues. . . We find that testimony to be a complete lie. . . I am amazed at how Jack Chick can hold such a paranoid view of history; the word ‘Catholicophobia’ immediately forms in my mind. It was because of such propaganda that two earlier Chick comics were banned by the Canadian government last October and referred to as publications within the category of ‘obscene literature.’
Truly, if I believed a secret Jesuit conspiracy existed, I would say that Alberto Rivera is still part of it. His ridiculous accusations have damaged the legitimate cause of Protestant/Catholic relations.
The person who carried out the investigation was an evangelical Protestant named Gary Metz. The article appeared in Christianity Today magazine (founded by Billy Graham and not exactly a Catholic magazine, but a Protestant one) on March 13, 1981.
With all this, “Alberto” and its comics are a genuine fraud that has deceived even the evangelicals themselves.
Author: Dave Armstrong
Translator: Carlos Alberto Martínez.
Source: Defiendetufe.org
P.S. We suggest that our Protestant and evangelical brethren verify testimonies so as not to deceive naive Catholics, and also so as not to deceive their own evangelical brethren who, in their hatred toward the Church of Christ, the Catholic Church, believe anything.
