Mario, as we shall call him, was a man of paradoxes. He was a minister of religion, yet he was a clairvoyant. He was a spiritual teacher, yet he was married with children. He was a modern day mystic, yet he was a man you could meet down the street. In 1975 he would found and lead what would become the first Christian denomination to be recognised by the Australian government. And in 1996, four months before his death, he would introduce a brand new expression of the priesthood into this church. All this was enabled

through a numinous experience. We will present to you the picture of a man who created an ‘outer’ organisation - a church, that acted as an umbrella for an ‘inner’ esoteric training school. The church therefore had all the external appearances of orthodoxy, yet underneath it lay the palpable presence of something far deeper.