THE POPE OF OPUS DEI

By: Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

After a weeklong Pope-A-Thon, at the conclusion of which the resident White House chimpanzee assured a credulous press corps that he had indeed "felt the spirit" while praying over the body of Pope John Paul II, and that while he believed any True Believer must face "doubt," he himself had no doubt in the existence of Our Heavenly Father and His Son, that "my faith is strong." After watching everything else plummet over the past month while the Theocratic face of modern Republicanism was revealed to an American public that overwhelmingly rejected it, this must be Karl Rove's text for insuring the true-believing sawdust-covered snake-handlers show up at the voting booth next year to keep the Republican train from completely losing its wheels.

While the Catholic Church has been mostly responsible in the past 2,000 years for doing its best to bar the door of human progress with such events as bringing on the thousand-year-long Dark Ages through the exhortations of future-Pope Clement of Alexandria to raise the mob and burn down the heart of paganism - the Library of Alexandria, repository of knowledge that is still being rediscovered two millennia later - or threatening Galileo with death for the sin of saying "it moves," the Church has had some momentary lapses in which it stood on the side of progress (an event that is easily explained by probability theory).

In 1891, the former Italian count Pope Leo XIII released the encyclical "Rerum Novarum" which defended the right of workers to organize unions and achieve a living wage.

In 1906, Father John Augustine Ryan wrote "A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects," followed in 1916 by "Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth." In 1931 - in the depths of a world-wide depression - Pope Pius XI published "Quadragesimo Anno," which put papal infallibility behind the ideas Ryan had presented. The Pope followed this by promoting Ryan to Monsignor.

Unfortunately, despite a truly "world-class" publicity machine, the former Karol Wojtyla - Pope John Paul II - didn't come close to Leo XIII or Pius XI. Rather than promote a John Augustine Ryan, John Paul II publicly excoriated Gustavo Gutierrez on the tarmac of Tegucigalpa Airport upon his arrival in Honduras for the crime of believing in "Liberation Theology," a Catholic social movement in direct line from "Rerum Novarum" and "Quadragesimo Anno." John Paul II was great with words that were mere platitudes, that had no meaning because not only were they not followed by action, they were followed by active repression of anyone in the church who would attempt to bring his words alive.

The truth of John Paul II is that he was the Pope of Opus Dei.

Opus Dei is not the organization described by Dan Brown in his best-selling "Da Vinci Code," but that fact doesn't make them any less-sinister. The organization was founded by Monsignor Escriva, formerly the private confessor to General Francisco Franco. Escriva saw Opus Dei as a group that would promote and defend the extremely conservative clericalist Catholicism that had allied itself with Franco in his Nazi-supported rebellion against the Spanish people in the Civil War, the Catholicism of Pope Pius XII - who had no problem turning a blind eye to the Holocaust.

Opus Dei chose John Paul as the candidate for Pope very early in his career, when Karol Wojtyla was Bishop of Krakow. His conservatism and anti-communism were what attracted them.

Immediately after being elected Pope, John Paul designated Opus Dei a special order directly accountable to him, not to the bishops in the respective countries in which it operated.

This was followed by the naming of Opus Dei member Angelo Sodano as Vatican Secretary of State. During his term as Vatican Ambassador to Chile, Sodano had become a close friend and advisor to General Pinochet - Latin America's carbon copy of Francisco Franco. During the Pope's visit to Chile in 1987, he never, called publicly for liberty or democracy in Chile - which he most certainly did when he visited Cuba and was publicly critical of the Cuban regime. As Vatican Secretary of State, Sodano called liberation theologian Leonardo Boff - one of the most popular priests in Latin America - "a traitor to the Church, the Judas of Christ." This was followed by the Pope's excoriation of the rest of the leaders of Liberation Theology during the Second Latin American Conference, presided over by Opus Dei member Monsignor Alfonso Lopez Trujillo. Through Sodano, John Paul II received reports on the "distressing" Jesuit movements in Latin America from William H. Casey, Director of the CIA.

When Bishop Romero of El Salvador - later assassinated in church by the Salvadoran military death squads sanctioned by John Negroponte, our present "Intelligence Czar" - denounced the brutal repression carried out by the fascist dictatorship in El Salvador, he recorded in his personal diary that the Pope reprimanded him for not being "balanced" in his criticisms of the Salvadorian dictatorship, to whom John Paul referred to as "the legitimate government of El Salvador." As Brazilian Bishop Helder Camara once said, "When I called for the role of the Church to be with the poor, I am called a saint; when I'm asked to do something about the causes of poverty, I am called a communist."

The truth is, John Paul's speeches on the poor were generic and sanctimonious, humanistic in character, without ever touching on the cause of poverty. The Pope was profoundly political. He was always on the side of the powerful throughout the Third World. He never spoke to the political causes of poverty, while he marginalized and ostracized the mass religious movements in Latin America that called for major social reforms in favor of the poor. With Cardinal Ratzinger - the guardian of Church orthodoxy who seems now in charge of naming the next Pope - John Paul II condemned these movements and ordered their leading figures to remain silent.

Instead of pushing a social agenda worldwide as the international media machine would have us believe, Pope John Paul II was a major obstacle to such an agenda by making conservative issues - anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-homosexuality, and others - rather than social problems the center of political debate. Despite his cries for suffering of those afflicted with AIDS, the policies promoted and pursued by John Paul II - such as forcing women whose husbands are infected to have unprotected sex in order to promote his policy against condom use in all circumstances - are as responsible for the spread of the disease throughout the world as was the Church's mass butchery of cats (the only effective predator against urban rats at the time) during the witch hunts of the Middle Ages responsible for bringing on The Black Death that killed one-third of the population of Europe in the twelfth century.

Under John Paul II, Opus Dei founder Father Jose Escriva was made a saint just 27 years after his death, which is one of the fastest sanctification processes in the entire history of the church. In the meantime, Pope John XXIII and Bishop Romero, still wait in line for sainthood.

John Paul II was indeed the thorough traditionalist he has been called. He stood firmly in the priestly tradition of barring the door of progress, of sanctifying the actions of the rulers as opposed to promoting the real needs of his flock.

No wonder George W. Bush found Pope John Paul II "a man I could respect."