Call this a cold-cut comic, since it's mostly baloney.

Maybe there was going to be a big reveal later, or maybe the next writer was told to take things in another direction, but a lot of this issue would later be recanted, walked back, or retconned; and that's putting aside the stuff we know is lies! From 2001, Uncanny X-Men #400, "Supreme Confessions" Written by Joe Casey; pencils by Cully Hamner, Ashley Wood, Eddie Campbell, Javier Pulido, and Sean Phillips; inks by Scott Hanna.

The X-Men, in their black leather days, are facing the Church of Humanity, a well-equiped racist militia with more overt religious iconography than usual. They had already murdered most of the mutants working the brothel cheekily titled "X-Ranch" but a survivor, Stacy X, was working with the X-Men: here, she's handling a captured bigot's fancy uniform, and gets teleported away by it.

Wolverine was questioning the bigot, a rank-and-file soldier, who spills the Church's dogma, which wastes art by Eddy Campbell and Sean Phillips. It's a lengthy cock-and-bull story that makes golden plates seem plausible: the man that would become the "Supreme Pontiff" was the child of a frontiersman and a native bride, and they dabbled in the occult and summoned a buffalo-headed "beast from a parallel reflection of reality," who would later murder the frontiersman and seduce the bride. The future pontiff would kill the beast, but "his hatred for all things inhuman was born there." Wolvie is dubious, but the story goes on, with the pontiff somehow getting near-cosmic powers during the industrial revolution. Sure.

Also dubious, is the Supreme Pontiff, as he questions Stacy X, who tells of how her life changed when her mutant powers emerged. She seemingly tells it straight, up to the point where Professor X recruits her as one of the original X-Men! Where she did everything Jean had done, including Cyclops, until she was asked to go undercover (figuratively and literally!) at the X-ranch. Stacy later zaps a guard with her pheromone powers, but the X-Men were already arriving to save her, and tear into the Church's goons. Teleporting in, Nightcrawler gets zapped by the Supreme Pontiff, who seems intrigued that he was "a man of the cloth," and the team finds Kurt unconscious, with no memory of what had happened. Later, back at the mansion, Wolverine tries to comfort his friend: "You ain't an X-Man if you ain't dealing with a memory lapse or two..." Kurt almost hopes he never finds out...

...but he would, when this plotline would be wrapped up about two years later in Uncanny #424, under the book's next writer, Chuck Austen. I think most of the Supreme Pontiff's story, and his powers, were revealed to be a hoax, illusions the Church of Humanity forced a mutant captive to cast. This probably wasn't where Casey was going with it--Austen's plot involved installing Nightcrawler as a priest to create a "false rapture" that the Church would then use to take power and wipe out mutants for good. So this wasn't my favorite run of the book, but compared to what was to come, well...