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THEIR KINGDOM COME -- INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF OPUS DEI |
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31. Consolidation
IN MAY 1984 THE PONTIFICAL COMMISSION FOR SOCIAL Communications, the official Vatican media and public relations office, was taken over by a forty-nine-year-old American prelate, Archbishop John Patrick Foley. This marked a final phase in the palace revolution that began in the autumn of 1978. It was one of consolidation that would place Opus Dei at the centre of power, giving its senior policy planners unimpeded access to the papal apartments on the terzo piano of the apostolic palace. Not very much was known in Rome about the bald and pudgy Monsignor Foley. He was portrayed as a media specialist who had been brought from the New World to overhaul the Vatican's communications machinery. A protege of the archly conservative bishop-maker Cardinal Krol, since 1970 Foley had been editor-in-chief of the Standard and Times, Philadelphia's archdiocesan newspaper. In December 1984, Foley stated in an article for the International Catholic Union of the Press that Catholic journalists 'should be like candles, communicating the light of Christ's truth and the warmth of Christ's love, and being consumed in the service of God'. [1] That same month, the Vatican spokesman, Father Romeo Panciroli, a known Opus Dei detractor, was banished from Rome, being assigned a posting in the boondocks of Liberia. He was replaced by Dr. Joaquin Navarro-Valls. By then the Roman Curia was absolutely certain on which side of the Tiber lay the sectarian sympathies of Archbishop Foley. Navarro-Valls's appointment represented a first bit of house cleaning by the dynamic new president of the Commission for Social Communications. The person he had chosen to become emperor of the Sala Stampa -- the Press room -- was the first professional journalist to hold the job, having been, for several years Rome correspondent for the Madrid daily ABC. 'He was presented to his colleagues as a modern Leonardo da Vinci, being a medical doctor and having done his apprenticeship as a bullfighter. But the great breakthrough, we were told, was that Navarro-Valls was the first layman to be director of the Vatican Press Office. What was not revealed was that Navarro-Valls is a member of Opus Dei. So the attempt to palm him off as an "ordinary layman" simply did not wash. No ordinary layman has to report regularly to his "director" (Opus Dei term for superior). And no ordinary layman may go to confession only to an Opus Dei priest ... That Navarro-Valls is personally charming, a vast improvement on Panciroli, and understands deadlines, may be splendid as far as it goes, but it cannot alter the fact that he is unlikely to promote the cause of truth-gathering in the Vatican,' were the prescient words of Peter Hebblethwaite. [2] Alvaro del Portillo was a consultor to the Council for Social Communications. Associate numerary Enrique Planas y Comas, a diocesan priest from Avila, was raised to the rank of honorary prelate to the Holy See and became one of Foley's chief assistants. In June 1988, Foley's Council was reorganized. By order from above, the Sala Stampa was detached from it and made a 'special office' of the Secretariat of State, a significant upgrading. As a result, the Council for Social Communications became primarily responsible for the audio-visual image of the Pope. Foley's star had paled somewhat. On the other hand, the influence of the 'ordinary layman' was on the rise. Navarro-Valls had the Pope's ear, and he was destined to become one of the powerhouses in the Vatican administration with backstairs access to the terzo piano. With these changes, the whole aura of the papacy would be revitalized as John Paul II was increasingly surrounded by professional image-makers. Needless to say, the image-makers were Opusian, having attained the summit of their Apostolate of Public Opinion -- AOP -- by taking in hand the media packaging of the Pope. By the end of the 1980s Opus Dei's AOP specialists were responsible for overseeing the Vatican Radio, l'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican publishing house and were considering adding a fourth pillar to the Holy See's communications outreach programme, a Vatican television network. Foley himself became head of the Filmoteca Vaticana, the official film and video archives, though it was Monsignor Planas y Comas who ran it for him. John Paul II has always been outspoken in his views about the duties of Catholics in defending their faith. In 1976, while still Archbishop of Cracow, he led a procession from the Metropolitan Cathedral into the city's central square, filling it with a sea of worshippers, many more than could fit into the cathedral, in flagrant disobedience of the civil authorities. In the square under pelting rain he delivered the fieriest of the day's quartet of homilies, The Courage to Profess One's Faith, that would be reprinted by Opus Dei in its CRIS series. 'The cause of man's spiritual freedom, his freedom of conscience, his religious freedom, is the greatest of human causes,' he said. Five years later Papa Wojtyla developed the same theme, this time for a world audience, in his World Peace Day message, traditionally delivered on the first day of each new year. Christians, he said, were bound under moral law to defend themselves against evil. 'Even as they strive to resist and prevent every form of warfare, Christians have a right and even a duty to protect their existence and freedom by proportionate means against an unjust aggressor,' he explained. [3] With Communism defeated, Papa Wojtyla turned his attention to Christian rights in the front-line countries with Islam. According to his Opus Dei spokesman, the Pope was alarmed by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the wake of the Second Gulf War. Resistance to UN operations in Somalia was a case in point. In July 1993, he worried that combat missions by US Marines in Mogadishu would fuel a violent reaction from radical Islamists. Within six months of a US helicopter raid in which sixteen Somalis were killed, the Catholic Cathedral in Mogadishu was blown up. Mogadishu's last bishop, Pietro Salvatore Colombo, had been gunned down outside the cathedral in July 1989. Radical Islam's reaction, therefore, was such that Christians could no longer practise their faith in what once had been a European city on the Indian Ocean. Oppression of Christian rights in front-line countries remains a leading concern of the Vatican as it approaches the Millennium Jubilee, a celebration intended to bear witness before world consciousness that the Christian faith is the only religion capable of revealing the mystery of salvation to all mankind. 'This Good News impels the Church to evangelize,' the Pope told his bishops in Manila. In other words, the Church cannot renounce her duty to proclaim Christ to all peoples. While repeatedly underlining that 'the Church's mission and destiny is to save man, the whole man,' he would also state, 'Evangelization must never be imposed. It involves love and respect for those being evangelized ... Catholics must carefully avoid any suspicion of coercion or devious persuasion.' [4] There was little Christian love or charity to be found in the Balkans. John Paul II had repeatedly warned that a generalized Balkans conflict could spell disaster for the West. He called for the 'disarming of the aggressor'. He stressed many times that legitimate defence against aggression was a Christian duty. 'In Church teaching, each military aggression is judged morally wrong. Legitimate defence, on the other hand, is admissible and sometimes obligatory,' he said. [5] An unnamed papal aide -- Navarro-Valls, according to some sources -- added that the Vatican would support 'precise, proportionate and demonstrative' military action in Bosnia to stop aggression. But the official stated that such an intervention would have to respect the Church's teachings on Just War. [6] The Just War label was now launched onto the market, like a 'green label' for natural foods, ecologically sound and biologically pure. The label had been refused to George Bush for Operation Desert Storm, perhaps because it still required the last doctrinal touching up, or perhaps because the Vatican, whose nuncio in Baghdad was solidly Opusian, believed that the Allied reaction to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was not so 'precise' and 'proportionate' as it should have been. [7] In any event, a little more than three years after the Iraqi aggression against its oil-rich neighbour, for the first time since the Crusades of old the Just War doctrine was unveiled for public consumption in an updated form, and placed on display in the spiritual marketplace. With its emphasis on universal love, Christianity has always struggled with the idea of war. After Constantine the Great embraced the Cross in the fourth century, St Augustine of Hippo (354-430) first elaborated a limited argument in favour of military action. The North African bishop allowed that under certain conditions wars might be waged by command of God. He wrote: 'War should be waged only as a necessity, and waged only that God may by it deliver men from the necessity and preserve them in peace.' Eight hundred years later St Thomas Aquinas put forward his three prerequisites for a Just War:
Subsequent theologians have added new notions such as war should be a 'last resort' and that the anticipated good results must outweigh the suffering incurred to win them. Overlaid on these notions was John XXIII's doctrine of 'Avoidance of War'. In 1994, however, the Avoidance of War concept was side-stepped for a reworked formulation of Just War. The new Catechism published in that year gave a tentative definition of Just War, pending further refinement, which stated: 'All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war. However, as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defence once all peace efforts have failed.' It gave the four moral parameters needed for a conflict to be considered a Just War:
The unnamed papal aide -- i.e., Navarro-Valls -- implied that under the redefined doctrine not only was it the right of individual governments to defend their people from unjust aggression, but it was the 'duty' of the international community to intervene, within the limitations of the four parameters, should a people, nation or ethnic minority be unable to guarantee its own freedoms and human rights. Such a broad palette for intervention could just as well be used for protecting the Holy Sepulchre, or the Marian shrine of Medjugorje in western Bosnia, as for the survival of the oppressed. The unnamed aide was not far from hinting that under the Just War doctrine Christian princes who acted as white knights in defence of basic freedoms -- Muslim as well as Christian -- would receive full papal honours and the stamp of moral legitimacy for their military actions. The new Just War parameters were fashioned against a background of exploding nationalism in the Balkans. In the spring of 1990 both Slovenia (98 per cent Catholic) and Croatia (then 75 per cent Catholic) organized multi-party elections that led a year later to their declaring independence. No sooner had Franjo Tudjman, the new Croatian president, revived the Croatian chequerboard flag that had been a Ustachi (Croatian Fascist) symbol during the Second World War than the Yugoslav federal army invaded the country from bases in Serbia. Croatia at the time had barely enough military equipment to outfit a battalion. Sandwiched between Croatia and Serbia, Bosnia's 2 million Muslims reacted by unleashing their own nationalist aspirations, rallying to the banner of Alija Izetbegovic, a philosopher recently released from federal prison. Izetbegovic was by no means a fundamentalist. But twenty years before he had written a short treatise concerning the condition of Islam in the world, titled simply An Islamic Declaration. It was credited with renewing interest in the study of Islamic theology in Bosnia, resulting in a Saudi grant that permitted the 1977 opening of an Islamic theology faculty at Sarajevo University. In the early 1980s, Izetbegovic wrote a more important work, Islam between East and West. In it he presented Islam as a tolerant religion that had been positively influenced by the spiritual values of the West. He described Christianity in flattering terms as 'a near-union of supreme religion and supreme ethics'. [8] Had the Serbs listened to Izetbegovic there might never have been religious warfare in the Balkans, and the rest of Europe would have been spared the shock of finding itself on the brink of a new Crusade. Instead, the Serb leader Siobodan Milosevic threatened to annex both Bosnia and Croatia. With Milosevic arming the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs, the Croatian government established contacts with the Warsaw arms bazaar and with professional arms traffickers in the West, including Silvano Vittor. The war's first major battle was the siege of the Danubian city of Vukovar, which ended with a Serb victory. Not a building was left standing. David Bourot, a Frenchman who had been arrested in Pristina on charges of spying for the Croatians, described the Serb tactics. 'They systematically attacked churches, hospitals and civilian targets. They waged a war of terror against the civilian population, not against opposing military forces.' In prison at the time, Bourot watched a programme transmitted by TV-2, a private Belgrade channel, detailing how the Croats were receiving arms shipments supposedly financed by the Vatican. The documentary followed one $3 million transaction filmed in Zagreb by a Croatian who worked for Serbian intelligence. While Bourot was aware that the airwaves were humming with disinformation, he found the documentary convincing. One of the next Serb targets was Banja Luka in central Bosnia. The ethnic cleansing that began there in April 1992 was described by one UN official as 'a scorched-earth policy to erase any trace of Muslim or Croatian culture in the region.' During Ottoman rule Banja Luka had been the seat of the Bosnian pashas. It had two sixteenth-century mosques, an Ottoman clock-tower, three other mosques and a Muslim cemetery, all demolished in a single night. Banja Luka's non-Serbs were expelled wholesale. Of the district's forty-seven Catholic churches, within a year only three were left standing. The early Croatian campaigns against Serb and Muslim were no less brutal. In December 1993 the Croatian authorities announced that Islamic militants were planning an all-out jihad against the West. The warning came after Muslim fundamentalists had slit the throats of twelve Croatian engineers at Chiffa-Habril, 60 kilometres south-west of Algiers. [9] A few months earlier three Bosno-Muslim soldiers captured by Croats had been turned into human bombs and sent back toward their own lines. One of the doomed men had cried out to his comrades, 'Don't shoot, don't shoot: we are Muslims; as he stumbled up the slope towards the Bosnian trenches above Novi Travnik. Anti-tank mines had been strapped to the soldier's chest and back. Rope bound his hands to his sides, and wire ran from his torso back towards the Croat positions. His two companions had been identically converted into walking, stumbling bombs. Panic seized the trench defenders. A Bosnian officer ordered his men to open fire: they refused. Then there were three huge explosions. The deputy commander of the Tomasevic Brigade, a crack Croatian unit, later admitted that one of his soldiers, crazed because the remains of his dead brother lay between the lines, had committed this act of human depravity. [10] The Croatians by then had placed their country under the Pope's protection as Sancho Ramirez of Aragon had done in the eleventh century. The Vatican was the first to recognize Croatia's independence, followed by Germany and the European Community. Diplomatic recognition may have helped end the war in Croatia having by then claimed at least 10,000 civilian lives -- but it permitted the Serbs to turn their attention to Bosnia. The morally indefensible onslaught against Bosnia by the Serbian Christians -- followers of the Eastern Orthodox rite -- stirred up centuries-old enmities between Muslims and Christians. The Pope, through his Opus Dei spokesman, let it be known that the West could not allow the Serb injustice to stand unopposed. Left unstated but strongly implied was that a Serb victory over the Bosnian Muslims would turn the Islamic world against the West. 'You must understand the reaction of Islam. Because Americans and Europeans do not see religion as a factor in the development of state policy, they overlook the fact that the Islamic world views the West's inaction in Bosnia as Christians letting other Christians oppress Muslims,' one military expert explained. Indeed the Pope's advisers argued that the Serb massacre of Bosnians had to be stopped to prevent militant Islam from transforming the Balkans into a European Afghanistan. This cause was taken up by the Pope and became the Vatican's most pressing foreign policy issue. As usual, Vatican intelligence in the Balkans was first rate. Its-agents reported that Izetbegovic had carefully prepared his strategy for an independent Muslim state. Already in May 1991 he visited Tehran to develop ties that later would save his fledgling state from being overwhelmed by the militarily superior Serbs. In early 1992 Iran sent $10 million in 'humanitarian' aid through Hungary and Zagreb to Bosnia. Other arms shipments were in the pipeline and two hundred Revolutionary Guards already were present in the country under the guise of military instructors. 'We have two duties: the first is jihad, and the second da'awa -- to spread the call of Islam,' their leader was quoted as saying. [11] Opus Central, according to one Vatican observer, was convinced that to prevent Iran from expanding its foothold in Europe the Serb aggression in Bosnia had to be rolled back. 'The strategists at Villa Tevere were obsessed with this idea,' he affirmed. But forcing the Serbs to hand back Bosnian territory was not a proposition the political leaders of the Western Alliance were eager to accept. It would take three years of 'obstinate and smart' manoeuvring by the Pope's 'intransigent hussars' to convince them. _______________ Notes: 1. Hebblethwaite, In the Vatican, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1988, p. 187. 2. Ibid. 3. 'Must Defend Rights, Pope Says', Boston Globe, 22 December 1981. 4. L'Osservatore Romano, Weekly Edition, 25 January 1995, p. 6. 5. 'Pope Warns of Spread of Yugoslav Conflict', Reuters, 12 January 1994. 6. Ibid. 7. On 9 April 1994, the papal nuncio in Baghdad, Opus Dei's Bishop Marian Dies, was transferred to Almaty, becoming nuncio in Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan and Uzbekistan. Shortly after Oles took up his appointment, FBI director Louis J. Freeh announced that the FBI would extend its foreign training programme to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Freeh also announced that the FBI would open offices in the Baltic republics, where Opus Dei's Archbishop Garda Justo Mullor had recently been named papal nuncio and apostolic administrator of the See of Tallin, capital of Estonia. Freeh is reported to be an Opus Dei member, a fact that he has neither denied nor confirmed. 8. Noel Malcolm, Bosnia -- A Short History, Macmillan, London 1994, p. 221. 9. Outraged by the killing of the Croatian technicians, John Paul II said: 'One can only deplore these crimes which ... appear to be expressions of hostility against believers -- Christian believers' [source: 'Pope Says Christians Targeted in Algeria', Reuters, 22 December 1993]. The Chiffa-Habril site was only a few kilometres from the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Atlas, where in 1996 seven monks were abducted and murdered in the same manner. This time a more emotional John Paul II said, 'No one may kill in the name of the Lord.' 10. Anthony Loyd, The Times, 24 November 1993. 11. Andrew Hogg, The Sunday Times (London), 28 June 1993.
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