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THEIR KINGDOM COME -- INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF OPUS DEI |
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30. The Moral Debate
SOON AFTER BEING NAMED HEAD OF THE CIA, BILL CASEY ADOPTED the idea of harnessing radical Islam to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and he convinced the Saudis to bankroll the project. Casey never dreamt that the undisciplined extremists would actually succeed in defeating the Communists, only that they might contain them in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. By involving Islam's fanatic fringe in what he considered a never-ending mission, Casey hoped to distract the fundamentalists from undermining Arab governments that were the West's allies in the region. As the holder of several papal distinctions, Casey would have shared the Pope's view of Islam, considering it a religion that denies the Divine Revelation. However the wily CIA chief appeared not to have taken into account that, since its founding in the seventh century, Islam has succeeded like no other force known to history in motivating men to kill or be killed in the cause of propagating their faith. The extremist leaders were only too happy to take advantage of Saudi petrodollars and American logistics to form a strongly motivated army of militants. The Mujahedin-e Islam -- Combatants of Islam -- were so successful in bleeding the Soviets in Afghanistan that they contributed in a major way -- and in their view more so than the Christian Pope -- to the disintegration of the Evil Empire. But once unleashed there was no stopping them. The Evil Empire had gone, but what became known as 'Islam's Floating Army' kept on returning to haunt its creators. For Christendom one of radical Islam's most dangerous beliefs is that Allah has promised them Europe as Dar al-Islam -- the Land of Islam. They regard the defeat that Charles Martel handed the Moors near Poitiers in 732 as only a temporary setback -- albeit one that has dragged on now for more than 1,200 years. According to the Anglo-Islamic writer Ahmad Thomson, the most radical believe that the forces of Allah are again poised to harvest 'die fruit of the Almighty's promise. With its 2,000 years of institutional memory, the Vatican would not have forgotten that only 100 years before Charles Martel's victory at Poitiers the old Roman province of Syria was one of the wealthiest corners of Christendom. Its towns and cities possessed magnificent churches and a well-endowed clergy. But its agriculture and industry were increasingly dependent upon migrant labour to perform the more menial tasks, much as in Germany today with its 3.5 million guest workers and their families. The migrant workers around the year 600 were more often than not Arabs. Treated little better than slaves, they became increasingly discontent while realizing as they grew in number that they constituted a social force in their own right. Then one August day in 636 a ragtag army of 6,000 scimitar-wielding horsemen rode out of the desert to defeat the finest fighting force in the world, a 50,000-strong Byzantine army under Emperor Heraclius, and within a decade Christianity had all but disappeared from the region. Everything learned about Opus Dei suggests that the question which today most concerns Villa Tevere is whether the West faces a similar fate. Participants at one of its closed-door seminars near Barcelona concluded that 'a parallel exists between the present situation in the Occident and the fall of the Roman Empire, whose citizens were unaware of their own decadence.' [1] Now this was an alarmist, not to say scaremongering conclusion. But it was perfectly in line with Opus Dei's use of the psychology of fear. For a religious autocracy the Vatican City State supports a surprisingly broad diversity of views. Obedience to the pope is absolute, but one quickly learns that papal absolutism comes in varying degrees and sometimes along differing paths. Once elected, a pope rules until death or until he chooses to resign. The same is true of Opus Dei's prelate bishop. This means that the two strongest religious leaders in the West can develop political strategies over longer periods -- up to ten or twelve years if necessary -- which is a luxury that no elected political leader enjoys. Quite clearly a long-term perspective was necessary to engineer the Roman Curia's acceptance of an updated Just War doctrine. But before it could directly influence Vatican policy, Opus Dei needed to consolidate its power base within the Curia. Former numeraries stress that part of Opus Dei's modus operandi is to maintain a constant feeling of anxiety among the troops. 'Opus Dei obtains the loyalty of its members not through love, nor through belonging to a close-knit community, but through the element of fear. Fear controls better than love, better than money, better than faith. The fear element and Opus Dei are happy bedfellows,' affirmed Father Felzmann. Fear for the Church's survival was certainly present at Opus Dei's founding in pre-Civil War Spain. Fear for the Church remained constant throughout the Cold War. With the fall of Communism, the fear factor remained strong in the Work's culture. After John Paul II's election, Opus Dei began attempting to condition the Roman Curia in the same way it conditions its members. By hammering home the notion that the Church is threatened from within as well as from without, Opus Dei convinces members that they are engaged in an ongoing crusade. One observer has described John Paul II's papacy as representing a return to 'Ultramontanism', the extreme Conservative force that dominated the Church at the time of the First Vatican Council. 'The central government of the Church thinks it is still defending a fortress or faith against the besieging forces of barbarism', claimed a religious affairs commentator. [2] As far as Opus Dei is concerned, history has shown that there is nothing like an external threat for producing a reaction of 'genuine exaltation' that brings believers back to the basics of their faith. Surely every thinking Christian believes that militant Islam must be met by a measured, morally appropriate Christian response. But what constitutes a morally appropriate response? Opus Dei is certainly one of the few agencies actively studying the question. In the final analysis the difference between what is right and what is wrong, between a Just War or just a war, boils down to a question of moral authority. But does Opus Dei possess sufficient moral currency to shape Christendom's response to radical Islam? As we have seen, Opus Dei's hierarchy has consistently acted as if all means are appropriate. It has been accused of lying, forging documents and employing disinformation, sanitizing its records and using threats and physical coercion. A case in point was that of John Roche who when he sued Opus Dei for a return of funds was confronted with forged documents in court. [3] Raimundo Panikkar told a Jesuit editor in Zurich that a highly placed member of the Roman Curia had discovered two priests from the Villa Tevere in the archives of his Congregation removing or replacing documents relating to Opus Dei or its Founder. 'In the Congregation of Religious we no longer find certain letters and documents about Opus Dei that we know should be there. In some cases only empty file folders remain,' one Vatican researcher, Dr Giancarlo Rocca, claimed. 'Several times we have found files where the original document has been removed and another substituted in its place ... It is very serious. Their way of writing history is false.' We have also seen that all members of Opus Dei do not share the same knowledge of the Work's structure. The 1982 Codex Iuris Particularis Operis Dei is not commonly handed out to subordinate members. [4] These constitute an army of professional workers who by their discipline, good appearances and sincere faith can be usefully deployed by the Work in government offices, prison administrations, tax bureaux, the FBI or the French presidency: It has been alleged that numeraries provide an ideal screen for the special 'apostolic tasks' of the Work, as decreed by the central hierarchy and permitted by its internal statutes. [5] Ah, the statutes! Even here there is confusion. Has the Codex Iuris replaced the much more detailed and still secret 1950 Constitutions? [6] 'The 1950 Constitutions are, of course, no longer in force,' Andrew Soane affirmed. 'They are completely superseded by the 1982 Statutes.' [7] But are they, really? Article 172 of the 1950 Constitutions states: 'These Constitutions are the foundation of our Institute. For this reason they must be considered holy, inviolable and perpetual ...' Moreover, Opus Dei numeraries like John Roche were told that, like the Ten Commandments, the 1950 Constitutions were intended to last in aeternum. Paragraph 2 of the Codex Iuris's Final Dispositions seems to imply this as well. It states:
This is an unusual declaration, uncommon in law. In as much as the 1982 Codex does not mention any article pertaining to the 1950 Constitutions, it therefore appears to abrogate none of them. To call Opus Dei a secret society is calumnious, spokesmen for the Prelature maintain. They point to the investigation conducted by the Italian Minister of the Interior in 1986, Dr. Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, who became President of the Republic. After eight months of consideration, Scalfaro, described as a 'rigorous and fundamentalist Catholic' and 'suspected' member of Opus Dei, [8] came to the conclusion that Opus Dei was not a secret association and to support this assertion he quoted from the 1982 Codex Juris. 'These statutes, which the minister [Scalfaro] quoted in detail, were what the critics had claimed to be Opus Dei's secret rules ... However to demonstrate that there was nothing to hide, the prelate of Opus Dei approached the Vatican to have the statutes made public. The Vatican agreed and copies were made available. None of the critics took up the offer to examine them,' an Opus Dei apologist claimed. [9] According to Vatican sources, Don Alvaro del Portillo did not ask but was ordered by the Secretary of State, Cardinal Casaroli, to provide the parliamentary commission with copies of the statutes to save it from being branded a secret organization, which would have reflected poorly upon the Church. But what Opus Dei spokesmen never mention is that Switzerland's supreme court -- the Swiss Federal Court which sits in Lausanne -- issued a judgement on 19 May 1988 -- two years after Scalfaro's 'investigation' -- in the matter of Verein Internationales Tagungszentrum, an Opus Dei auxiliary society, against the Tages Anzeiger newspaper of Zurich. The judgement characterized Opus Dei as a 'secret association' that operates 'covertly', with a maximum of opacity in its affairs. The use of threats by the captains of Opus Dei's milites Christi was hardly subtle. Their recruiting practices have been criticized. And their financial dealings, as the record shows us, have been attacked as unethical and underhand. These, then, were the morals of the men who were preparing the doctrinal instruments needed to rearm Christendom against radical Islam. But to insure the doctrine's acceptance by the Roman Curia, and then by the leaders of the West, they first had to consolidate their power base inside the Vatican. _______________ Notes: 1. 'Immigration: le Cardinal de Barcelone craint une proliferation des delits en Europe', APIC No. 40, 9 February 1995. 2. Clifford Longley, 'Unfinished business', The Tablet, London, 20 May 1995, p. 622 (emphasis added). 3. After leaving Opus Dei, in 1975 John Roche brought suit in the High Court of London to recover £4,500 be said he had loaned the institute and £25,000 representing that part of his salary paid by the British government into a London account on his behalf during the eleven years he spent as a teacher at Strathmore College in Kenya. Opus Dei maintained that the account had never belonged to Roche but to Opus Dei Registered Trustees, producing supporting documents to this effect and also showing conclusively that no loan had been made. On the basis of these documents, the judge ruled against Roche. Only after the judgment was handed down did Roche realize that some of Opus Dei's evidence had been 'fabricated'. When he threatened an appeal, in October 1982 Opus Dei's solicitors acknowledged that thirteen of the documents purporting to reflect 'the sequence of transactions ... were not written on the dates they bear, but in 1976' -- i.e., after the action was filed. The solicitors proposed an out-of-court settlement if Roche would forgo further litigation and remain silent. 4. The Codex Iuris was published in Latin in Fuenmayor et al., The Canonical Path of Opus Dei, Scepter Publishers, Princeton, 1994 (originally published by Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, 1989), and Pedro Rodriguez et al., Opus Dei in the Church, Four Courts Press, Dublin 1994 (originally published by Edidones Rialp, Madrid, 1993). 5. Dr. Robert Meunier, research physicist, Reflections on Opus Dei, Geneva [unpublished]. 6. The Canonical Path of Opus Dei only publishes the first chapter, with its 12 articles, of the 1950 Constitutions, when there are 20 chapters in all with a total of 480 articles. 7. Andrew Soane, 9 November 1994. 8. Massimo Olmi, 'L'Opus Dei a l'assaut du Vatican,' Temoinages Catholiques, Paris, 7 December 1986, p. 9. 9. William J. West, Opus Dei -- Exploding a Myth, Little Hills Press, Crows Nest, Australia 1987, pp. 21-22.
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