Taxil's Vatican Humiliation Hoax

In 1890, an anticlerical journalist (Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pages, under the pen name Leo Taxil) pulled off a 12-year hoax to humiliate the Vatican, involving inventing a cult of satanic Freemasons, paying his typist to play the part of a Luciferian Templar Mistress, and revealing it all to have been a hoax once the Vatican had endorsed it.