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04/25/2005:
"Opus Dei will be in the ascendancy in Pope Benedict XVI's church"
One possibility we need to take seriously now that Cardinal Ratzinger is Pope is that Opus Dei represents the future of the Catholic church. I do not like the prospect because Opusdeistas give me the creeps. This is not an admission to make in polite society, I know, but I have never met a single one who seemed to me straightforward. Perhaps this is because I am a journalist and they have had very bad press. If I meet one professionally, they know, and I know, that we are on different sides. I expect them to tell me as little of the truth as they can get away with and to look smug when they've succeeded.This suspicion has nothing to do with Dan Brown whose books I have never read and never will, unless I end up in hell and find there's nothing else to read. It is not an expression of general anti-Catholic prejudice. Jesuits and Dominicans are men I actively look forward to meeting and am seldom disappointed in. None of my best friends are Catholics, but quite a few of my good friends are, though all are fairly liberal ones who would hate Opus Dei much more than I do. I just do not like secret societies whose members think they have been chosen to do the work of God.
Opus Dei, and the other "movements" as they are known in Catholic jargon, are a twentieth century phenomenon. They are an anti-democratic response to the problem that mass literacy and universal suffrage posed to a hierarchical and authoritarian organisation. The first response of the Vatican was complete condemnation. Democracy, science, liberalism, free thought and even the belief that the church could compromise with these forces were all condemned. They were to be fought in the outside world, and extirpated from within the church. This was the posture of the church when Opus Dei was born, just before the Spanish civil war broke out, and from which it grew.
guardian.co.uk
Weblogs definitely betray the obssessions of their mistresses. I come on both sides from a fairly rabid bunch of anti-Catholic Spaniards, who even before the horrific Civil War which caused so much suffering and death to us, were disgusted by the hypocrisy of the Church. During the war, the priests in our small town blacklisted people suspected of 'collaborating' with the forces of democracy in Spain, and my uncle was arrested and spent years in prison, only to be released into Franco's Spain as a pariah, not allowed to teach, which was his profession. I have another uncle who went to fight at 16 and fell near Madrid, or at least that's what the family heard. He could have survived and been one of the Republican slave/prisoners who built Franco's monstrous monument to the 'glory' of all that useless death. I guess on some level, once a Catholic always a Catholic, because I find myself personally insulted by the appalling hypocrisy and wickedness of the Church. The Opus Dei were Franco's personal priests and John Paul II's mentors. These clowns have NOTHING to say to the world today, having used up their morality long ago. In Africa, they go hand-in-hand with Protestant evangelists spreading the most vicious and constricting version of Christianity ever.
