Monday, September 26, 2005
OPUS ANGELORUM OR ENGELWERK
Lee Penn sent in this old and very odd article from the Tablet, May 30, 1998. It's enough to make your eyebrows curl!
A secretive Catholic sect whose members are committed to fighting demons has had an impact on recent crises in Austria, and its attraction is spreading. Its influence is deplorable, according to the editor of the Austrian Catholic weekly Die Furche.
AN organisation known as the Opus Angelorum (OA), or by its German name Engelwerk (literally "Angels’ Work"), has caused feelings to run high among Catholics in recent years, especially in Austria and Germany. While most people have heard of Opus Dei, this other Opus in the Catholic Church, which operates primarily in central Europe, Brazil and India, is as yet relatively unknown.
With its headquarters at the medieval Petersberg Castle in the Tyrol, to which only members or their guests have access, this association, which is sworn to strict secrecy and the rejection of all "modernistic" tendencies in the Church, puts one in mind of Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose. Its members practise an external, over-zealous piety which has brought the Opus Angelorum many conservative sympathisers, but what has caused far greater unease is hidden under the surface: a very peculiar angel-demon doctrine and a way of inducing fear and exercising power.
The Opus Angelorum Handbook lists 243 demons together with 412 angels. One of the former, Schebarschenoth, "sends his rays from the Planet Neptune and works with Adonai Melchim and Naschim, the shot-putter. He is the demon of the Great Chaos, who disrupts laws, confuses heavenly constellations in the universe, prevents children’s bones from developing properly, causes circulation trouble and glandular malfunction".
In another passage we hear of the "magic rectangle which each demon spans over creation and fills with numbers behind which demons stand". Demons, we are told, are able to "radiate through" people, usually "midwives, peasant women, gypsies, errand girls and old and vindictive peasants". Certain animals such as "grey, tortoise-shell and black cats, speckled and black hens, pigs and short-haired dogs, bluebottles, rats and snakes" are particularly receptive to demonic rays.
Although a recent examination of Opus Angelorum scripts shows that they contain a not inconsiderable number of contradictions, there may well be people who are capable of believing all this. But most are inclined to ask what all this has to do with Catholic Christianity.
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