A curious neighborhood

The final chapter of Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of The Process Church of The Final Judgement (Feral House, 2009) - THE SCHISM - consists of a letter sent in July 1974 by Process co-founder Robert de Grimston to "All Processeans everywhere," particularly to those who remained followers of his former partner, Mary Ann MacLean. The minutiae of cult politics is of little concern to us here. What has caught our attention however is the mailing address with which de Grimston signs off the missive: 3301 Louisiana Ave. Pkwy., New Orleans, LA.

JFK assassination researchers, particularly those who have focused on the goings on in New Orleans in the early to mid-1960s, will note this address, for it sits between that of David Ferrie's apartment and that of the underground laboratory (or the "mouse house") where Ferrie kept up to 2000 caged mice. Dr. Ed Haslam, author of Dr. Mary's Monkey (Trine Day, 2007/2014), lists these addresses - 3330 and 3225 Louisiana Ave. Pkwy. respectively - as part of a Conspiracy Tour of New Orleans.

The Process Church has long been rumored to be an MI-6 or CIA front, but is there any reason to connect it to operations relating to the development of a cancer virus intended for Fidel Castro? (This was the project Ferrie was pursuing in his "mouse house" as part of Operation Mongoose). Looking at the The Process Church Timeline, we find that the cult had moved to Xtul on the Yucatan peninsula in September 1966. Of Xtul, we read in Miles Williams Mathis's  of the Tate “murders,” "Xtul wasn't and isn't a town. It is just a makeshift CIA ranch on the outskirts of Mérida..." That Merida was an operational center for efforts to overthrow Castro is confirmed in recently declassified CIA documents, of which we read in Una base de la CIA funcionó en Mérida en 1962, that President Adolfo Lopez Mateos had approved CIA operations in Mérida from 1962 to 1965. It may be that the base needed to go "unofficial" after this period, and the Process Church was just the vehicle for doing so. In the aftermath of a hurricane that destroyed much of Xtul, according to the Process timeline, in 1967 "Processeans from Xtul move to New Orleans and start a Chapter on Royal Street in the French Quarter. Mary Ann and Robert move to Louisiana and settle into a house in Slidell," upon which the church "becomes incorporated in Louisiana as The Process Church of the Final Judgment." When the address on Lousiana Ave. Pkwy was first associated with the Process is as yet unclear, however.