Alberto Rivera

"Alberto" is a true and actual account, and I will face a court of law to prove the events actually took place. I hereby challenge anyone who would refute or try to prove the facts and information in this book are untrue. I will defend every statement made regardless of the embarassment it may cause any person or church

Alberto Magno Romero Rivera was a Spanish-American  fraudster and crank, who found a calling as a fundamentalist Christian evangelist and became popular in the extreme anti-Catholic wing of Protestantism.

Life
Alberto was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands. He claims to have been born a Catholic, however an investigative report by Cornerstone Magazine (a Baptist Publication) found that his parents were Protestants. According to his claim he began studying to be a priest at the age of seven. In an interview provided, his older sister revealed that he did not attend parochial school of any kind nor did he graduate High School.

According to his friend Bonilla, he began a common law relationship with his first wife in the 1950s while working with the Methodist church in Costa Rica. On November 25, 1963 he married Carmen Lydia Torres. Their first son Juan was born in Hoboken NY in 1964 while working for the Christian Reformed Church. His supervisor Rev. Edson Lewis indicated that while in New York Rivera was physically abusive to his wife and child. Rivera had to flee New York to El Paso Texas after writing bad checks. Juan died within a year of his birth.

Accreditations
Rivera claimed to have numerous degrees which include N.D., D.D., Th.D., Ph.D, and a masters in physiology. According to Rev. Plutarco Bonilla (a respected Christian leader in Central America ) who had accompanied him from Las Palmas, Alberto enrolled in the Protestant Seminario Biblico Latinoamericano (now Universidad Bíblica Latinoamericana) in San Jose Costa Rica in a program designed for those students who had not graduated High School. He was expelled from the seminary for lying and defiance of authority. He later admitted that he had obtained these degrees from a diploma mill in Colorado.

Claims
Rivera claimed to have been a former Catholic priest, until he learned of the Vatican's plans for world domination. The story goes like this: Alberto Rivera attended Catholic seminary, where the Jesuits trained him to infiltrate Protestant churches to destroy them. He also learned the Vatican was responsible for, among other things, the Nazis, Communism, Freemasonry, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, and the Holocaust, that nuns who got pregnant secretly sacrificed their newborns to Mary, and other bizarre beliefs. Upon learning these things he denounced the Catholic Church in 1966, exposing their nefarious plot in front of 50,000 people in a stadium in Guatemala, and was forcibly placed in a mental institution by the Jesuits for doing so. After near death from abuse in the facility, he became born again, and was miraculously healed in an iron lung. A Jesuit priest tried to convince him to return to Catholicism, but Rivera convinced him otherwise, and the priest gave him documents to escape to London in 1967, to rescue his sister from a convent, also near death from self-flagellation (supposedly practiced in the nunnery), and they fled to the United States.

Unfortunately for Alberto, some not-so-gullible Protestant pastors investigated his claims, and found that he fabricated the whole thing.

The reality
Rivera's claims to have been a Catholic priest and his other claims have been thoroughly disproven. Indeed, those who checked out his claims found instead that he had a long history of swindling, was wanted in Spain on those charges, and, while in the U.S., had collected money for a Spanish college which never received it. Nonetheless, in the U.S. he started a "ministry" called the Antichrist Information Center to expose the Catholic Church. His sister was not a nun, but was working in London as a live-in maid. He also blamed the Vatican for things that happened after he allegedly left the Catholic Church, such as the Jonestown mass suicide.

Comics
Rivera's fraud was popularized by Jack Chick, whose pulp house printed several comic books documenting Rivera's fairy tales. They include:


 * Alberto - The main story.


 * Double Cross - The sequel where Alberto saves his sister from a coven.


 * The Godfathers - Name an atrocity? The Vatican was probably involved.


 * The Force - How Catholicism practices occultism.


 * Four Horsemen - How the Catholic Church fulfills the roles of the titular horsemen in Revelation.


 * The Prophet - The story of how the Vatican established Islam.

Rivera was a King James Only advocate, and claimed all other Bible translations were created by the Jesuits to deceive Protestants or were translated from manuscripts corrupted by the Vatican. He (along with John Todd, who claimed modern translations were funded by the Illuminati) appear to be the sources of Jack Chick's own conversion to King James Onlyism. Rivera and Chick also promoted a conspiracy theory linking the Catholic Church to the creation of Islam.

Chick Publications also continues to defend Rivera's fraud, and claims without proof that everything he said was true.