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Thursday, November 17, 2005




EMAIL FROM LEE PENN

After reading his story on Opus Dei in the current issue of "SCP Journal" I emailed Lee with a few questions. The following is his reply.

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Carrie, you had asked me for additional info pertaining to Opus Dei.

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Pertaining to OD's position on the US:

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First, this story from the Boston Globe about Fr. John McCloskey, an Opus Dei priest who has brought numbers of prominent Republicans in to the Catholic Church.

Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Magazine / The Crusaders
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2003/11/02/the_crusaders/

McCloskey has a vision of a purified Church and the breakup of the US as a result of the present culture wars.

Key quotes, with bold type added by me:

"There is a glow to the priest when he talks. Something lights him up inside, and its intensity is increased by the mild way he says what he's saying. The words, harsh and unyielding, seem not so much a departure from the mainstream as they do a living refutation that there is any mainstream at all, not one to which the priest has to pay any mind, anyway.

He is talking about a futuristic essay he wrote that rosily describes the aftermath of a "relatively bloodless" civil war that resulted in a Catholic Church purified of all dissent and the religious dismemberment of the United States of America.

"There's two questions there," says the Rev. C. John McCloskey 3d, smiling. He's something of a ringer for Howard Dean -- a comparison he resists, also with a smile -- a little more slender than the presidential candidate, perhaps, but no less fervent. "One is, Do I think it would be better that way? No. Do I think it's possible? Do I think it's possible for someone who believes in the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of life, the sanctity of family, over a period of time to choose to survive with people who think it's OK to kill women and children or for -- quote -- homosexual couples to exist and be recognized?

"No, I don't think that's possible," he says. "I don't know how it's going to work itself out, but I know it's not possible, and my hope and prayer is that it does not end in violence. But, unfortunately, in the past, these types of things have tended to end this way.

"If American Catholics feel that's troubling, let them. I don't feel it's troubling at all."

If it sounds like a call from an Old Testament desert, that's not where the 49-year-old McCloskey operates. He's the priest of the power corridor, right there on K Street in Washington, where you can look out the windows of his Catholic Information Center and see the sharpies flocking on the sidewalk, organizing the complicated subleasing of various parts of the national treasure.

In keeping with his surroundings, McCloskey has lobbied for his vision. He grew up in Washington, D.C., and until the late 1970s was a successful trader with Merrill Lynch. However, in 1981, he joined the priesthood through the ultraconservative Opus Dei Society. He was ordained by Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, an influential Vatican troubleshooter.

Ironically, while he defends traditional prerogatives of the institutional church, McCloskey has discomfited parts of it, including conservative Catholics, as surely as has any renegade Dutch theologian. In 1990, for example, after a stormy five-year tenure at Princeton University, McCloskey was dismissed as an associate chaplain after students and faculty petitioned for his removal. They claimed that McCloskey violated academic freedom by counseling against taking courses taught by professors whom McCloskey deemed "anti-Christian," which McCloskey argued was part of his pastoral role. Advising Catholic parents shopping for a college for their children, he later wrote, "If you encounter words and phrases like 'values,' 'openness,' 'just society,' 'search,' 'diversity,' and 'professional preparation,' move on."

Since returning to Washington to run the Catholic Information Center for Opus Dei, McCloskey has taken his mission onto Meet the Press and to CNN. He's preached it in USA Today and in The New York Times. More famously, he has brought into Catholicism several members of the conservative elite. McCloskey personally baptized Judge Robert Bork, political pundits Robert Novak and Lawrence Kudlow, publisher Alfred Regnery, financier Lewis Lehrman, and US Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, whose baptismal sponsor was another senator, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. In 2000, McCloskey baptized Mark Belnick, the embattled top lawyer at Tyco International, who responded by donating $2 million to a Catholic college and to an antiabortion group.

McCloskey makes no apologies for his role as the apostle to the punditocracy. (One of the volunteers at the Catholic Information Center is Linda Poindexter, a former Episcopal priest and the wife of Iran-contra figure and Bush administration official John Poindexter.) He has written that the Gospel was most successfully preached not to the poor but rather to the educated middle and upper classes.

"I don't talk politics with them," he says. "It just so happens that they're Catholics, and I have to be informed about key issues in order to talk to them, because they're not just issues to these people -- they're a matter of natural law; they're a matter of divine revelation and things of that sort. I don't tell them how to vote on this issue or that issue. Ever. But if it seemed to me to be a moral question as to what the material cooperation with evil is on this bill or the other, I might be able to give them some guidance."

On so many of these issues, McCloskey seems already to have lost. In a March 2002 Gallup Poll, 75 percent of Catholics in the United States favored the possibility of married priests and of women priests. Since 1970, polls of US Catholic women have consistently shown that more than 60 percent reject the Vatican's teachings on artificial birth control. More recently, a Harris Poll found that only 24 percent of American Catholics were opposed to embryonic stem-cell research. Other recent polls indicate that support for legalized abortion among US Catholics tracks closely with that found in the general population. McCloskey has no use for the borrowed language of political polling: He thinks that 52 percent or that 80 percent or that 70 percent should just leave the church, because they've left already.

"There's a name for Catholics who dissent from church teachings," he says. "They're called Protestants.

"As someone who's really a Catholic -- and if you asked me, I'd say I consider myself a Catholic -- it's something that you hope doesn't interfere with your citizenship, but that's reality. What I'm saying is, a lot of Catholics who were totally faithful to the church started to assimilate, but the assimilation was not simply in terms of 'I'm a Catholic, and I'm also an American.' It was also giving in to the Protestant secular ethos of the United States of America."

McCloskey says he speaks to a dwindling band of "the faithful" -- a "righteous remnant," as the theologians call it. If some of that remnant happen to be judges and newspaper columnists and senators and corporate lawyers, McCloskey doesn't judge them for that, not even when he discusses a famous 1996 issue of the conservative Catholic magazine First Things -- one to which Bork, among others, contributed his thoughts. That issue examined, as it said, "possible responses to laws that cannot be obeyed by conscientious citizens ranging from non-compliance . . . to morally justified revolution."

"It embraced," McCloskey says, brighter than the afternoon, "the whole question of the legitimacy of the regime. As a Catholic, what do you obey? What do you not obey? For a serious Catholic who believes in things according to faith, these are serious questions." And he's sure about them, so sure that he sits there and shines, brighter than the day, talking about the godly way things can fall all apart."

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Here is the essay that the Boston Globe writer and McCloskey were discussing:

2030: Looking Backwards

http://www.catholicity.com/mccloskey/articles/2030.html

Here are some key parts of the article:

"As it turns out, those few years in prison and the torture were wonderful for my spiritual life and did not leave me incapacitated at all, not like the confessors of the twentieth century.

I thought I would take a few minutes of your time to give you an overview of the developments in the Church since the last Great Jubilee of the year 2000. After all, as you are only 25, barely of canonical age, you don't have much memory of the events leading up to our present vigorous and healthy state of the Church in the Regional States of North America."

and

"Dissent has disappeared from the theological vocabulary."

and

"Ironically in this year 2030 we are only 10 % of the population, but it is a rock solid fulcrum of which Archimedes would be proud. Upon that fulcrum we can transform the world if we stay the course."

and

"We finally received as a gift from God what had been missing from our ecclesial experience these 250 years in North America -- a strong persecution that was a true purification for our "sick society." The tens of thousands of martyrs and confessors for the Faith in North America were indeed the "seed of the Church" as they were in pre-Edict of Milan Christianity. The final short and relatively bloodless conflict produced our Regional States of North America. The outcome was by no means an ideal solution but it does allow Christians to live in states that recognize the natural law and divine Revelation, the right of free practice of religion, and laws on marriage, family, and life that reflect the primacy of our Faith. With time and the reality of the ever-decreasing population of the states that worship at the altar of "the culture of death," perhaps we will be able to reunite and fulfill the Founding Fathers of the old United States dream to be "a shining city on a hill."

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Here is an article in Crisis Magazine defending the Opus Dei practice of bodily mortification - wearing the cilice and self-flagellation:

Crisis Magazine

http://www.crisismagazine.com/julaug2005/giesler.htm

Key quotes:

"The cilice, a sharp chain worn around the leg, is really a derivation of the ancient hair shirt, which originated in the region of Cilicia in Asia Minor. It was used for many centuries in the medieval and Renaissance Church as a means of purifying the senses, atoning for sin, and winning grace for others. So too was the discipline, a whip of knotted cords applied to the back, imitating Christ's scourging at the pillar."

and

"Despite all this, voluntary mortification has an enduring power for both the body and soul. Self-denial helps a person overcome both psychological and physical weakness, gives him inner energy, helps him grow in virtue, and ultimately leads to salvation. It conquers the insidious demons of softness, pessimism, and lukewarm faith that dominate the lives of so many today.

In contrast to the extremes of sadism or masochism, corporal mortification is grounded in a healthy view of man and the world around him, namely, that all of us are flawed and have sinful tendencies within us. The practice itself dates back to biblical times and finds its greatest _expression in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross"

and

"But corporal mortification isn't confined to Christians. Most religions throughout the centuries have recognized the need for powerful, even bloody sacrifices to appease the divine."

and

"The word 'mortification' comes from the Latin words mortem facere, meaning 'to produce death.' A person who is mortified has accomplished a kind of death in himself to those obstacles separating him from God, and therefore genuine happiness. These barriers include pride, the excessive emphasis on the self or one's own feelings or ideas; laziness, the tendency to do the minimum; and sensuality, the excessive attachment to bodily pleasures, whether food, or drink, or sex. Mortification is the process of 'putting to death' these lower desires and appetites so that the purified man might live."

and the story, after extensive praise of mortification, ends thus:

St. Josemaría Escrivá, who himself suffered many persecutions and misunderstandings, performed heroic mortifications and sacrifices to serve God and help souls. Through it all, he was able to maintain a cheerful and optimistic attitude that inspired those around him. "If things go well, let's rejoice, blessing God, who makes them prosper," he once wrote. "And if they go wrong? Let's rejoice, blessing God, who allows us to share the sweetness of his Cross."

Encouraging words.


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Rev. Michael Giesler is a priest of the prelature of Opus Dei and the chaplain at the Wespine Study Center in St. Louis."

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Lee



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