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THEIR KINGDOM COME -- INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF OPUS DEI |
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19. Death of the Founder
ESCRIVA DE BALAGUER WAS UNABLE TO HIDE HIS ILL HUMOUR OVER Archbishop Giovanni Benelli's efforts to block Opus Dei's transformation into a Personal Prelature. He and Alvaro del Portillo were determined to force the issue. They went ahead with convening an Extraordinary General Congress of Opus Dei members to align the Work's statutes with the new decrees relating to Personal Prelatures following the Second Vatican Council. The Congress had adjourned in September 1970 and a staff of rapporteurs at Opus Central spent the next two years analysing the results. Once set to paper, Escriva de Balaguer asked the secretary of state, Cardinal Villot, to arrange a new audience with the Pope. It took place on 25 June 1973. Paul VI was said on this occasion to have been more receptive. What, then, lay behind this apparent softening of attitudes? The only threatening cloud on the Vatican's horizon at the time was its finances. The costs of running the Curia and maintaining St Peter's in a state of perpetual splendour were escalating. As a result, the Vatican City State began reporting a long series of financial deficits that in the years ahead would bring it to the brink of bankruptcy. There is little doubt, though no actual proof, that at the June 1973 audience Opus Dei's two senior prelates tabled a proposition, which I call the Portillo Option, to assist the Vatican with its financial problems. After first falling upon deaf ears, the Option began to find favour in the papal chambers. According to some sources, a deal was finally struck whereby Opus Dei would be elevated to a personal prelature in return for taking in hand the Vatican finances. A preliminary protocol was said to have been signed, setting out the modalities of the Portillo Option. A copy of it turned up among the papers of an Italian Parliamentary Commission investigating the P2 affair (see Chapter 23), but subsequently disappeared. However the Milan banker Roberto Calvi told his family that he assisted Opus Dei in elaborating such a plan, which included Opus Dei's assuming control of the IOR, the Vatican bank. Indeed it was said that the head of the Vatican bank, Bishop Paul Marcinkus, went to Madrid to discuss aspects of the plan with senior Opus Dei bankers there. Opus Dei denies that any such deal was cut -- i.e., that the Portillo Option never existed. 'The Holy Father was pleased and encouraged our Father to continue with the work of the General Congress,' was all that Don Alvaro reported about the June 1973 audience. [1] For the moment, then, the question 'remained open'. But one thing is certain. Portillo used the interval to move closer to Cardinal Villot. Paul, increasingly ill, deferred more to Villot. Marcinkus also realized he had an ally in Opus Dei and in Cardinal Villot. They all feared Benelli; he overshadowed Villot, wanted Marcinkus sent back to Chicago and his feelings for Opus Dei were well known. Opus Dei's discussions on how to cure the Vatican's financial problems only really began in September 1974, after Escriva de Balaguer and Portillo completed the last leg of their triumphant journey to South America. The timing was significant. Unfortunately for the Vatican, its most trusted financial partner at the time, Michele Sindona, was a major currency speculator. Prior to the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 Sindona had speculated the wrong way on the dollar and when the forward contracts began to unwind, his empire -- wired together by an uncommon system of back-to-back deposits -- collapsed. In September 1974, a ministerial decree placed Sindona's Milan bank in liquidation. The losses were more than $386 million. A month later in New York, Sindona's Franklin National Bank went to the wall, becoming the largest banking failure in U.S. history up to that time. In January 1975, the Swiss authorities closed Finabank in Geneva, in which the Vatican held a 20 per cent interest. Sindona was by then a fugitive from Italian justice. According to Prince Massimo Spada, a former IOR general manager, the Vatican lost $55 million in the crash of Sindona's empire. But Charles de Trenck, the general manager of Finabank, estimated that 'the Vatican's overall loss on investments in the Sindona group ran as high as $240 million.' Whatever the final sum, Paul VI was said to have been devastated. Reticence to accept the Portillo Option began to fade. But the papal advisers insisted on conditions. They wanted the amount of Opus Dei's contribution to be fixed in advance. Any protocol between Opus Dei and the Holy See would remain domiciled in the Vatican's secret archives. According to the missing parliamentary commission document, the Pope -- or was it really Opus Dei? -- insisted on protecting the privileged arrangement between the IOR and Banco Ambrosiano. [2] While negotiations continued, in February 1975, Escriva de Balaguer returned to Venezuela. His visit was another immense success. According to Opus Central, his four public appearances were attended by sixteen thousand people. They came from as far afield as Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and the questions they put to him steamed up 'like bubbles racing to the surface in a boiling kettle'. [3] A different description was given by Caracas lawyer Alberto Jaimes Berti. With a friend, Pedro Jose Lara della Pegna, he went to hear the Founder talk about his career in the service of the Church. Berti said that at the end of an unexceptional speech the audience was invited to ask questions. A long silence followed. Finally Lara della Pegna, the uncle of Cardinal Jose Rosalio Castillo Lara, asked rather innocently whether Opus Dei was really a secret organization as people often claimed. Escriva de Balaguer stared coldly at Lara della Pegna. 'What is your profession?' he asked. 'I am a lawyer,' Lara della Pegna replied. 'Well you must be a third- or fourth-rate lawyer to ask such a silly question,' the Father observed curtly. He then moved into a stinging harangue of Lara della Pegna. His sudden rage created a shock and people started to leave. Seated close by was the rector of the Catholic University of Caracas, Jose Luiz Aguilar Gorrondona. Berti noticed that Aguilar had recorded the speech on a cassette recorder. When Opus Dei learned that the incident had been taped, they pressured Aguilar to relinquish the cassette. The pressure became so intense that finally the rector handed it over, but not before allowing Berti to make a copy. Claimed Berti, 'When Opus Dei realized I had a copy and wouldn't give it to them, they set out to destroy me. But they were patient and waited for the right moment. You know, in the end they almost succeeded.' [4] From Caracas, Escriva de Balaguer went to Guatemala City and stayed a few days with Cardinal Casariego. But the Father did not feel well and cut short his visit, returning to Rome on 23 February 1975. Towards the middle of May he was feeling better again and set off on his last trip to Spain, to view the progress of the basilica at Torreciudad. The following morning, the Municipality of Barbastro conferred upon him the keys to the city, acknowledging him as Barbastro's most famous living son. The Father had finally recouped the family's lost honour. Back in Rome, he visited the new campus of the Roman College of the Holy Cross at Cavabianca. He described it as his 'second folly', the first being the Villa Tevere, and Torreciudad his last. Cavabianca was in the same sumptuous style as Opus Dei's other architectural achievements. Then on Thursday, 26 June 1975, he set off after breakfast with Don Alvaro and Don Javier Echevarria for Castelgandolfo, where he visited the Villa delle Rose. Upon arriving at the centre he went into the oratory and knelt in prayer, as required of every member upon entering and before leaving an Opus Dei house. Afterwards, while talking with his daughters, he again felt unwell and was immediately driven back to the Villa Tevere. He mounted the stairs to his study, then called out to Don Javier for assistance. He collapsed and died before Don Javier could reach him. He was gazing, we are told, at the portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe, given to him during his 1970 visit to Mexico. He was seventy-three years of age. The Father's remains were placed in a mahogany coffin lined with zinc. The municipal medical officer signed the death certificate and gave permission for the body to be laid to rest under the floor of the prelatic church. At six in the afternoon a final Solemn Funeral Mass was celebrated and the coffin, head nearest the altar, was lowered into its tomb, which was covered with a greenish-black slab of marble. The next morning, Saturday, 28 June 1975, six cardinals, a Papal legate -- Archbishop Benelli -- and a host of civil dignitaries, among them Giulio Andreotti, attended a memorial service at Sant' Eugenio, the basilica whose construction Opus Dei had helped finance. Don Alvaro had been at Escriva de Balaguer's side for forty years, thirty of them as the Father's confessor. Together they had built Opus Dei into a disciplined body enjoying world-wide influence. Together they had fended off the attacks of liberal Catholics and attempts from within the Curia to dismantle the Work. Don Alvaro liked to give the impression that he lived in the shadow of the Father. But he was in fact the real architect of Opus Dei's spectacular growth. By then the Work had 60,000 members in eighty countries. For all of them, Don Alvaro now assumed the role and title of the Father. Around his neck the new prelate general wore the piece of the True Cross which the Founder had wanted passed on to each of his successors. On 15 September 1975, Opus Dei's General Congress approved Don Alvaro del Portillo y Diez de Sollano -- to give him his fully reconstructed name -- as the Work's second president general. There was said to have been but one dissenting vote, cast by Don Florencio Sanchez Bella, the regional vicar for Spain. Within the month Don Alvaro banished Sanchez Bella to Mexico, where he became a teacher in one of Opus Dei's local primary schools. General Franco outlived the Founder by another five months. He died in November 1975, and Prince Juan Carlos de Borbon ascended the throne. During the coming year, a coup d'etat in Argentina brought the generals back to power, while in Spain Opus Dei's Banco Atlantico had to be bailed out of trouble by Jose Maria Ruiz-Mateos, a secret Opus Dei member and self-made business phenomenon who had become Spain's richest citizen. As a result of Ruiz-Mateos's financial sacrifice, Opus Dei would be able to mount its assault on the Vatican establishment, assuring that at the close of the second millennium it would attain a position of power in the Church unknown since the Knights Templar. _______________ Notes: 1. Alvaro del Portillo, 'Transformation of Opus Dei into a Personal Prelature', Memo, 23 April 1979, paragraph 10. 2. Jose Maria Bernaldez, 'The Rumasa Affair Soils the Vatican and Opus', Tiempo, Madrid, 1 August 1983. 3. Vazquez de Prada, Op. cit., p. 472. 4. Interview with Dr. Alberto Jaimes Berti, London, 6 December 1993.
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