Monday, June 26, 2006
LEE PENN’S PROBE OF OPUS DEI – PART II
The current edition of “SCP Journal” which arrived last week contains Part II of Lee’s investigation into the workings of Opus Dei. (Part I is online at the SCP website.)
What is this organization really about? Points made at the end of the article indicate it’s not all that easy to tell. Here, in part, is Lee’s summary:
* Opus Dei is an authoritarian new religious movement in the Roman Catholic Church that offers innovative teachings to the disoriented and spiritually hungry faithful. Its teachings are at variance with the Gospel of Christ—even though the movement’s leaders can quote Scripture chapter and verse.
* Opus Dei’s skewed spiritual foundation has real-world results. Movement leaders and adherents emphasize “discretion,” manipulation, and the quest for temporal power. The bad fruit of the movement (as documented above--favoring policies that would continue the coverup of priestly sex abuse, harboring a Soviet spy, winking at novels that advertise Wicca to youth, media manipulation, financial skullduggery, and the like) manifest the organization’s spirit.
* Nevertheless, Opus Dei power increases in the Catholic Church. While parishes and dioceses crumble, and ancient religious orders dwindle, this “personal prelature” grows, and presents a united front to the churches and to the world. If there is factionalism within Opus Dei, it is not reported outside the movement. The fact that Opus Dei priests have very rarely been accused of molesting youth means that the movement can tell a scandal weary flock to seek safety and purity by following them.
A mystery remains: why have Opus Dei (and other sectarian new ecclesial movements) grown within the Catholic Church, while other Catholic structures imploded so swiftly after 1965?
It may be that the “powers that be” in Rome have made a decision to allow this to occur. A conservative Catholic journalist (editor of Inside the Vatican magazine) explains: “The 20th century ended, for the Catholic Church, on October 6, 2002. It ended precisely 40 years after the opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. It ended on a warm, blue autumn day with John Paul II’s canonization of Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, the founder of Opus Dei, as a saint. …The essential historical purpose and effect of that Council—as it now seems from a vantage point of 40 years—was to prepare the Church for a new world order: the order which is now nearly upon us. …
In short, the authorities in the Catholic Church seem to have given up on the structures that had characterized the Church for almost 2,000 years. The easiest way to move them aside was to neglect them—and to ignore the voluminous pleas that the faithful made to Rome after 1965 to rein in the manifest heresy and vice that spread through the Catholic Church. In their stead, there are to be new institutions for a new, more disciplined Church.
After chaos, there would be a religious New Order.
There is certainly little doubt that we have chaos. The question seems to be was it engineered as chaos magicians would engineer a paradigm shift by courting chaos and then offering their alternative as a solution to the confusion. Lee would seem to believe that it was, and the evidence all around us in our parishes appears to confirm his conclusions. I still hold out one hope of an alternative explanation.
If Pope Leo XIII was correct in interpreting his vision, Satan was given a century to destroy the Church. Infiltration of the structure of the Church may have prompted popes to seek a way to accomplish an end-run around the destruction. If past popes knew that the religious orders and the diocesan priesthood were infiltrated by communists as Bella Dodd describes in SCHOOL OF DARKNESS, it would not be possible for even the pope to salvage the diocesan structure. What choice would there have been but to invent a new one? The New Ecclesial Movements look as though they could be such an invention. With a newly invented structure some mistakes were inevitable, and those mistakes could explain the incidents of a fall from grace. The New Ecclesial Communities did not rely on the priesthood, and thus the corrupted priesthood, if Dodd was correct and the priesthood had been corrupted, would be circumvented.
It is easy for me to see chaos magick in the present confusion, and to claim that the same spirituality that fuels the chaos magicians has also fueled the sexual abuse scandal. Sexual license in both camps encourages that speculation. That can’t be applied to the New Ecclesial Movements, however, despite the evidence of other wrongdoing that Lee and others have presented. While Lee's evidence does not speak well for Opus Dei, he presents no share in the decadent promiscuity that is known as the lavendar mafia. If OD is practicing chaos magick, it is another brand of such entirely…a brand not encountered elsewhere. As Lee points out, OD looks like a refuge from the sexual abuse scandal.
Though its numbers do not indicate it, Opus Dei is an awesomely powerful organization that is political, unlike other organizations within Roman Catholicism. As Lee explains, Escriva and the Franco government in Spain worked together. According to the article, “In 1969, three Opus Dei numeraries and 12 supporters assumed cabinet posts in the Franco government—thus holding 15 of the 18 positions.”
Did power corrupt? Are the OD failures to live Gospel values which Lee points out isolated departures from the mission of the organization--abberations in the midst of unified success in fighting communism--or are they indications of disintegration at the highest levels of OD fostered by a desire to control?
That desire to control seems to be active in the John Paul II flip-flop over “It is as it was”…a comment he either made or did not make, according to OD member and Papal Press Secretary Navarro-Valls in regard to “The Passion of the Christ.” Peggy Noonan was left in the lurch by that flip-flop, and we never were given a plausible explanation of what happened. There have been other similar incidents.
In any case, I finished Lee’s article uncertain of OD and uncertain of the direction of the Church, and with again that nagging sense that we are still being treated as the laity who have no right to know.
