Alberto Magno Rivera Romero (September 19, 1935June 20, 1997) was an anti-Catholic religious activist who was the source of many of the theories about the Vatican espoused by fundamentalist Christian author Jack Chick. Chick promised to promote Rivera's testimony 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 activities. Biography Rivera was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain. He made numerous claims about his time as a Catholic priest and the inner workings of the Catholic Church. Most of these statements are disputed by the Catholic Church and others and Rivera was not able to provide compelling evidence in support his claims. An exposé by Gary Metz in Cornerstone magazine as well as another one in Christianity Today questioned many of Rivera's statements about his life, alleging that he was a fraud. The two conflicting versions are summarized below. Rivera's account According to Rivera, 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 says 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 says 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 as "recanting his faith." Here he says 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. According to Rivera, he was "nearly at death" when he asked Jesus to forgive him and was miraculously healed. Rivera said 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