Opus Dei - Trojan Horse of Liberalism in the Church

[Stone]

OPUS DEI - TROJAN HORSE OF LIBERALISM IN THE CHURCH
PART I
Take from here. Emphasis in the original. Slightly adapted.

“I am a secular priest: priest of Jesus-Christ, who loves passionately the world.” (José María Escriba y Albás, homily delivered at the University of Navarre, Pamplona, October 8 1967)

“He [José Maria] always encouraged you to ‘love the world passionately’ (…) The earth, your Blessed Founder reminds us, is a pathway to heaven…” (Address of John Paul II to members of Opus Dei, January 12, 2002).



“Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world. If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, is the concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life, which is not of the Father, but is of the world.” 1 John 2:15-16

“Adulterers, know you not that the friendship of this world is the enemy of God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of this world, becometh an enemy of God.” James 4:4

Introduction

In the following study I could have written about a plethora of contentious issues around which Opus Dei is associated: financial scandals, their overwhelming desire to gain power and influence over political and financial structures, their love of money, etc But these are secondary – certainly not necessarily trivial – issues, born out of the primary theological problems on which Opus Dei bases its pseudo-Catholic spirituality. The primary heresy of Opus Dei, I believe, over and above that of modernism, is liberalism and its attendant gnosis. On a purely superficial level, they may pronounce their faithful adherence to the dogmas but its liberalism tends to empty the dogmas of any real meaning. Although it is true that there is an inextricable link between modernism and liberalism, in a sense, the spirituality espoused by the “Work” (the commonly used term for “Opus Dei” among its members) is something even more insidious than the phenomenon of modernism (as generally understood in terms of “progression of doctrine”, etc). Modernists often cloak their errors or heresies under an opaque layer of ambiguity, but it is rare to see them hide their true spirit under such a thick layer of “conservatism”: pretensions of being fiercely loyal to the papacy and to the Church’s dogmas, and even occasionally, a faux and deceptive “traditionalism”. The reality is that Opus Dei, like Vatican II, advocates a liberal spirituality that calls for the full reconciliation between the Church with the principles of the Revolution, or in the words of Leo XIII, of attempting to reconcile “Christ and Belial” (Custodi Di Quella Fede, 1892). Therefore, while they outwardly preach a strict adherence to doctrine, with their liberal principles and radically lay-secular mentality they simultaneously undermine that which they claim to profess. Hence, Opus Dei can merely be seen as the (false) “conservative/right” flank in the Hegelian dialectic of the Conciliar Revolution, with the “left” flank comprised of figures like Rahner, Congar, Küng, etc.

The following statement by Tomás Gutiérrez Calzada, one of the heads of Opus Dei in Spain towards the end of the last century, encapsulates the problematic nature Opus Dei in the most concise manner possible; it is both an inadvertent admission of the core spirit which permeates the “Work” and a recognition that their opponents are not working on the basis of heterodoxy but are attacking their openly self-acknowledged liberalism: “we are attacked by the enemies of liberty” [1], or translated into plain English, “we are attacked by the enemies of liberalism”. Put another way, Mr Gutiérrez Calzada was not defending Opus Dei against its opponents on the basis of its orthodoxy (which it cannot claim) but on the basis of a self-acknowledged liberalism, otherwise he would have stated, “we are attacked by enemies of Catholicism”, or “by enemies of orthodoxy, by heretics, etc”. But he said no such thing. Therefore, they themselves are accurately aware of the novelty of their liberal spirit, even of the revolutionary nature of the Work, as we will progressively see over the course of this study. The “liberty” emanating from man’s divine like “human dignity” defended by Opus Dei and attacked by its opponents is the same that was officially promulgated at Vatican II and endorsed by the lodges, communists, and socialists around the world with enthusiastic applause during the course of the pseudo-Council and in the ensuing years. It is the “liberty” of religious freedom proclaimed by Dignitatis Humanae, which is the rightful inheritance of man now elevated to some kind of god-like ontological status, driving “Saint” John Paul II “The Great” – and ardent promoter of the Work – to ceaselessly praise and extoll man’s dignity as he criss-crossed the entire globe, simultaneously as the world’s Catholics continued falling ever further at accelerating speed into the abyss of universal apostasy. Christ the King thus dethroned by the newly emancipated “free” man and the promoters of “liberty” (among which Opus Dei holds a prominent place), Gaudium et Spes 12 could now boldly and confidently proclaim to a post-modern world that, “According to the almost unanimous opinion of believers and unbelievers alike, all things on earth should be related to man as their center and crown.”

In this work, I have used the name for the man known to the world as “Saint Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, Marquis of Peralta” as it appears in his baptismal certificate: José María Escriba y Albás. One would think that José María wanted to hide the fact that he was the carrier of a name of Jewish ancestry. Using his original name, “Escriba” is in part something of a symbolic gesture that demonstrates on the one hand, the duplicitous character of the “Work” and its “Founder”, and on the other, the very real possibility that Opus Dei may be a “Work” of crypto-Jewish origins. At the very least, in its resemblance with Freemasonry and certain gnostic themes of Jewish origin, it is already demonstrating that it is a close sibling to the secret society denounced by Leo XIII in Humanum Genus. In no way are we trying to denounce the Jewish race as such. If we were to do so, we would also have to denounce such eminent saints and mystics as St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and the Ven. María de Jesús de Agreda, author of the spiritual masterpiece, Mystical City of God. Our objection is with the fact that Escriba should have felt it necessary to hide his likely Jewish heritage, something which genuine Jewish converts such as Israel Zolli never felt it necessary to do.

All translations from the French are mine; those in Spanish also except for a couple of cases where I was unable to find the original Spanish text.

Escriba proudly boasted of passionately loving the world, and encouraged his followers to do likewise, a love pointed to by Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II as if it were a sign of virtue, indeed “a pathway to Heaven”.

St Louis Marie-Grignion de Montfort on the other hand asked that in the Mystery of the Crowning with Thorns of the Holy Rosary we humbly ask God through the intercession of the Queen of Heaven for the grace to bear “a great contempt for the world”. These are two irreconcilable spiritualities opposed to each other as much as the Heavenly City is to the Earthly one.

May this work serve to illuminate consciences during these calamitous times, a small contribution for the reinstatement of Christ the King as rightful Lord with dominion over the universe and each individual soul.

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam!

December 8, 2023, Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Patroness of Spain



A Jewish branch of Freemasonry?

“Behold I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves.”  (Matthew 10:16)

Since its earliest beginnings, a cloud of suspicion has hung around the mysterious origins of Opus Dei, never fully explained satisfactorily, and on the orthodoxy of Opus Dei; illustrative of the opaqueness surrounding the “Founder’s” life; even to this day, there are questions on something which should be so clear and straightforward – particularly for a “canonized” “saint”! – as the specific details on the attainment of his theological degrees. [2] October 2, 1928 is the official “date” offered by the official hagiography of the “Work”, i.e. Opus Dei, for when Escriba allegedly received the heavenly inspiration to found Opus Dei. There are signs that a Catholic movement known as “Opus Dei” was not active until the early thirties, but in any case, it was not long before Opus Dei was accused of being a Jewish branch of masonry – such a serious charge is hardly the type of accusation that one would expect to be levelled against a nascent religious movement, and therefore it stands to reason that it must have been a well-founded one. In post-civil war Spain, an investigative military tribunal was set up to fight against the influence of Freemasonry and communism, and proceedings were eventually brought before Opus Dei in 1941 due to signs that, as the author of Opus Judaei recounts, “under the name of Opus Dei a Jewish branch of masonry was hidden.” [3] That Opus Dei was under investigation by a military tribunal against masonry in Franco’s Spain are not merely unfounded rumours spread by the declared enemies of the “Work”, but is even admitted by the “Founder’s” official biographers, such as Salvador Bernal in his work Mons. Escrivá de Balaguer: “They accused Opus Dei of being a ‘Jewish branch’ of the masons, or ‘a Jewish sect in contact with masons.’ ” [4]

There was great opposition among many Spanish Catholics to the Work since its earliest days. Barcelona, perhaps paradoxically, which had just suffered under the extreme anti-religious and atheistic regime of the “Republicans” during the Civil War (and hence celebrated their liberation in 1939 with all the greater fervour), was now converted into one of the most prominent centers where Opus Dei’s purported connection with masonry and the duplicitous nature of the “Father” were denounced before the relevant authorities. [5] According to another of the Escriba’s official biographers, Dominique Le Tourneau, the governor of Barcelona gave the order to have Escriba arrested once he set foot within the area of his jurisdiction. [6] An ambassador friend of Escriba warned him that his own life was in danger should he travel to the region. [7] Even the Carmelite nuns of the city got wind of the duplicity surrounding Escriba and his Work, and the good nuns promptly set about publicly burning the copies they could get hold of Escriba’s 999 maxims known as Camino (“the Way” – his way, not Christ’s, of course). [8] 

Meanwhile in Madrid, according to Bernal, “the gravity of the situation was reaching a climax where associates of the Work were accused of being ‘masons.’ ” [9] One of the oratories which the Work opened in Madrid was said to have been adorned with masonic and Kabbalistic signs. [10] The rumours of Opus Dei’s heterodoxy did not stay confined within Spanish territory but travelled at least as far as the corridors of the Vatican itself: the Dominican Fr Severino Alvarez, Dean of the Faculty of Canon Law at the Angelicum in Rome in 1950 told of the accusations which had been levelled against the Work in the Holy Office itself. [11] The key importance of Camino in Escriba’s spirituality (inseparably united with the cult status of the “Founder”) is demonstrated by the confession of a member, who admitted that, “from the 60’s onward, I saw no other gospel than Camino, and no other prophet than Josemaría Escrivá.” [12] As we will see, none other than Giovanni Battista Montini/Paul VI incorporated Camino in his spiritual life, while Escriba’s right hand man, “Blessed” Álvaro del Portillo admitted after the “Founder’s” death that Camino reflected the modernist spirituality later endorsed at Vatican II.

The well-known obsession of Opus Dei and the “Father” with secrecy makes the sect akin to all secret societies, which, by definition, must zealously guard their secrets and plans of action. Therefore, just in this respect alone, Opus Dei shares an important affinity with Freemasonry, for which, together with its obvious quest to increase its power, money, and influence, have led many to describe the sect as “ecclesiastical freemasonry”. The “Father’s” obsession with secrecy was even admitted by Antonio Pérez, who intimately knew Escriba and was for a time his personal secretary: “The Father was always greatly concerned about maintaining secrecy. This made him apply in these subjects the same strategy as in internal matters, that is, that only a few at the very top were aware of them and negotiated them with those directly responsible.” [13] Camino, the reference work par excellence for Opus Dei members, has numerous references about the necessity to maintain a strict secrecy (e.g. numbers 639, 654, 840, and 970). Daniel Artigues in his 1971 book titled, El Opus Dei en España said regarding the Work’s notorious obsession with secrecy that, “this concern for discretion, as Opus Dei members describe it, this cult for secrecy, as claimed by its adversaries, is one of the essential characteristics of the Work.” [14] The culture of secrecy even reaches the point of not being obliged to tell potential members of their duties once they are incorporated into Opus Dei. According to the “Catechism of the Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei”, 2003 edition, no. 67: “In order for incorporation to be valid, a virtual intention to take up the corresponding duties is sufficient, even if there is no actual forewarning at the moment of incorporation.” [15] Which is to say, at the moment of entering the Work, Opus Dei is under no obligation to tell new members of all their duties and of its spiritual outlook; information which – like in any sect – is instead transmitted little by little dropwise to the new adepts as they progress through their gnostic “illumination” or “initiation” in order to prevent a wholesale initial rejection.

Against the culture of secrecy which surrounds gnostic sects like Opus Dei, the abbé Emmanuel Barbier, in his 1910 work Les Infiltrations Maçonniques dans l’Église (“Masonic Infiltrations Inside the Church”, pp. 249-250) said that the only path available to the genuine Catholic, who is a “son of the light”, even if external circumstances would seem to require it, is a firm repudiation of secrecy:

“The Catholic is a son of the light. Simple common sense indicates that if, under the pretext of moving more freely or surely towards one’s goal, he seeks dark and secret paths, he will fatally find, one day or another, that he walks side by side with the children of darkness at the risk of being led astray by those in a labyrinth of which they alone know its secrets….However, even then, the principle of Catholic action remains unchanged: it is to carry on in clear transparency. Anything else is an illusion….One must be blind not to see that any occult organization is a fertile terrain for infiltrations [of the kind] that we must dread so much.” Emmanuel Barbier further reveals that, according to a note recorded in “Acta S. Sedis” documenting the renewed denunciation against secret societies, particularly Freemasonry and other anti-clerical societies, issued by the Holy Office on 18 May 1884, “the prohibitions of the Church concern all secret societies, regardless of whether or not they require an oath; because they are societies contrary to natural law.” (ibid, p 251)

Another important characteristic of the “Work” which assimilates it to a gnostic sect such as Freemasonry is its tendency towards “elitism”, driving its associates to view themselves as members of a perfect Church of the elect – neo-Jansenists or neo-Calvinists, if you will –, and the more fanatically so the more they are inwardly “illuminated” by the gnostic teachings of the “Father”. At the very least, there is a tendency towards spiritual pride that inclines members of the Work to view their apostolate and their liberal, lay spirituality with an air of superiority and pride over the other charisms and religious orders of the Church; they thus represent the “upper echelon” of the Church joining non-believers around the world in the construction of the “Earthly City” – not the “Catholic City”! Point number 16 in Camino points its readers to set themselves apart from the rest of the “crowd” – which in those days would have been a Catholic majority, this was still 30’s Spain – in a state of prideful superiority, so that they can set their sights on the highest goals: “You – turning towards the mediocre? But if you have been born to be a leader!” Escriba himself seems to have taken this “spiritual” maxim particularly to heart: besides his megalomaniac ambitions for the Work, he himself lobbied at least two times for the “post” of bishop during Pius XII’s papacy, refused both times at least in part due to questions about his psychological state.

The Spanish former numerary María Angustias Moreno, who suffered with heroic patience the unspeakable slander directed by Opus Dei against her for her efforts at unmasking the sect, thus says regarding the gnostic elitism of the Work: “...as soon as one arrives, they inculcate ceaselessly that being in the Work is something marvellous, the best and grandest thing in the world. Something which, as a natural consequence, leads to viewing others from a pedestal: one begins to be illumined on the great mysteries, being chosen among thousands to form part of a perfect body [of believers]; the rest - what a pity! - they remain there below surrounded by the darkness of error...By the fact of being in the Work, one will always be correct....Because the 'Father' is never wrong, and in the Work everything goes through the 'Father'; 'you must pass everything through my mind and my heart', Escrivá told directors numerous times.” [16] The slander suffered by Moreno is such a serious offence revealing the true “face” of Opus Dei that it deserves to be described in some more detail. For writing El Opus Dei – Anexo a una Historia, an exposé of Opus Dei from the perspective of a former numerary, a group of priests which included the vice-postulator for the “beatification” cause of “Saint” “Josemaría Escrivá” (one Don Benito Badrinas Amat), travelled around the country warning a group of former members who had publicly shown their support for Moreno to keep away from her because she was a notorious “lesbian”. In today’s current climate this “charge” might be worn as a badge of honour, but in the Spain of 1977 in which this public campaign of defacement and slander took place, such a charge could easily ruin one's social reputation and prospects for employment. María Angustias describes the exchange that took place when Rafael Moreno, her brother, confronted one of the priests responsible for the public campaign of calumny: “Rafael Moreno intervened by asking whether he [the priest] believed that in the name of God, in order to save or defend any kind of ‘thing’, slander could be justified; to which the priest replied by shrugging his shoulders:…‘it depends…’  ” [17]

In their calumny against María Angustias, were these priests justifying their vile crime and sin on the basis of “el apostolado de la mala lengua», described in Camino 850, a phrase which could be roughly translated as “the apostolate of the insult” or quite simply as, “the apostolate of calumny” (“mala lengua” literally means, “bad tongue”). Escriba in point 850 of Camino says next: “Cuando te vea ya te diré al oído un repertorio.” That is, “Next time I see you I will tell you secretly an entire repertoire.” (Apparently, Escriba thought it important to always have ready at hand the appropriate insult against whomever stood in his way or by whom in his inflated pride he felt offended in some way…) These bad priests could also have interiorly justified their evil actions on the basis of Camino, no. 387, calling his followers to show: “Holy intransigence, holy coercion, and holy shamelessness [desvergüenza]” (An unholy trinity which “St” “Josemaría” describes in the same point as, “The standard of holiness that God asks of us [!].”) 

And like all sects of the gnostic variety, not only is the Work concerned with maintaining its affairs and doctrine with a perfect and scrupulous secrecy, it demands of its associates, not merely obedience, but a blind obedience which has nothing to do with the Christian concept and, as the sad experience of sects so often demonstrates, is invariably the source of the worst imaginable abuses: psychological, spiritual, and even occasionally, physical ones. Thus maxim number 941 of Camino reads: “Obedience…, a sure path. – BLINDLY OBEYING the superior…, path of holiness. – Obedience in your apostolate…, the only way: because, in a work of God, the [correct] spirit must be to obey or [otherwise] leave.” Interestingly but not surprisingly, the official English version uses a somewhat softer translation, calling for “unreserved obedience”, while the Spanish is unequivocal in its call to “obedecer ciegamente”, literally, “to obey blindly”. Other points in Camino are designed to engender an attitude of blind, unthinking obedience towards superiors: “That critical spirit…is a great hindrance.” (no. 53)”, and “Who are you, to deny the sound judgment of your superior?” (no. 457)

The Spaniard Mariano Sánchez Covisa wrote a letter in early 1992 titled El caso Escrivá, warning Catholics of good faith within the Work about the true nature of Opus Dei. Significantly, he stated that he was basing his letter on Leo XIII’s call in the encyclical Humanum Genus to unmask the deception of masonry: “It must be known that Opus Dei, which name is an esoteric translation for [the occult practice of] Theurgy, is a secret Jewish branch of masonry, with an enormous economic and financial network, and holding a powerful political influence in Spain as well as abroad…Opus Dei is not a type of masonry, it is masonry.” [18] Salvador Bernal, Escriba’s official biographer recounts the “Father” describing how he overcome the difficulties during his early apostolate in strangely cryptic terms that cannot fail to raise an eyebrow in the reader: “What can a creature that must carry out a mission do, without means, or enough experience, knowledge, virtue, or anything else? He must go to his mother and his father, go to those who have the means, ask friends for help… That is what I did in the spiritual life. But of course, with discipline, carrying the compass.” (Nowhere here does he mention having recourse to God in the midst of whatever difficulties he was facing.) [19]

The somewhat eerie-looking official symbol or emblem of Opus Dei certainly deserves careful scrutiny. First of all, the mere sight of this “crucifix” induces a certain sense of unease with one’s sensus catholicus informing us that something appears amiss with what purports to be a representation of the Christian symbol par excellence. What exactly do we find there? A Christ-less “cross” – really, two intersecting lines in the form of a Latin cross – with a rose at the bottom; one would think we are dealing here with the rose-croix of Rosicrucianism, which also refers to the 18th degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. The rose in the work’s official emblem is not merely some stylistic feature placed there for its aesthetic effect, but is a sign featuring prominently throughout the Work’s visual imagery. The “logo” of Rialp, Opus Dei’s official publishing house is none other than a rose, while the rose also features prominently in the entirely new Marian shrine of Torreciudad, entirely built out of the Work’s own coffers and criticized for the suspected huge squandering of financial resources that its construction involved.

Multiple esoteric meanings can be ascribed to the rose, and at least in the opening discourse of the Zohar, the major text of the Jewish Kabbalah, the rose designates the Shekinah, the female “aspect” of the God-head (Ein-sof), the divine presence itself of the Knesset Yisrael or “the community of Israel”. Certainly, everything points to the Work’s emblem as having to do more with the Kabbalah and the Shekinah than with anything related to Christ’s redemption at the cross. Opus Dei is formally known as the Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei. Upon some investigation one comes upon the surprising – and unsettling – finding that both the reference to “Holy Cross” and “Opus Dei” in the official name despite their ostensible Catholic meanings can also be interpreted in an esoteric-gnostic sense. According to the Jewish historian Cecil Roth, author of Historia de los Marranos (“History of the Marranos”), “Holy Cross” was a code name used by the Marranos (crypto-Jews) to evade persecution: “In Barcelona, if a Marrano said, ‘let us go to the Church of the Holy Cross’, he was referring to the secret synagogue called by that name.” [20] When it comes to “Opus Dei”, the “Work” of alchemy (which has very clear gnostic-Hermetic and Kabbalistic roots) was traditionally known as the magnum opus, the great Work, and what is greater than the “Work of God – the Opus Dei”?

According to the official hagiography, Escriba was inspired to found the “Priestly Society of the Holy Cross” during the celebration of holy Mass, on the date of February 14, 1943. After Mass, he wrote the name for his new society: “Societas Sacerdotalis Sanctae Crucis” eventually constituted for the purpose of ordaining priests for the Prelature of Opus Dei, while drawing on his notebook on the page for February 14, the Feast of St Valentine, its new symbol: a “cross” perfectly circumscribed by a circle. (February 14, 1930, is also coincidentally the “official” date marking the founding of the “women’s” section of Opus Dei.) I believe that we should take careful notice of this date, all the more so considering that the official hagiography which is only loosely concerned with actual facts here takes pains to highlight two points: the date of this alleged “inspiration”, and the “Feast” corresponding to that date, namely, St Valentine. This loose concern with facts is particularly true for the somewhat opaque early beginnings of Opus Dei, so that there is good reason to ascribe a given date of such significance with symbolic rather than factual meaning. Now, if we consider all the strange details of the emblem of Opus Dei (and its official name, “Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei”) which “coincidentally” bear a striking connection to several gnostic or Kabbalistic themes, together with the gnostic character of the Work and its theology, it is difficult to believe that the name Valentinus associated with the given date is purely coincidental. St Valentine is of course the universally known Catholic saint whose feast day is celebrated on February 14. But, as it turns out, the gnostics also celebrate what can be considered their “patron” saint, “Saint” Valentinus – the founder of the important Valentinian Gnostic sect of classical antiquity – on the same day as that for the Catholic St Valentine. It has been argued that the major gnostic systems developed after Valentinian gnosticism in some manner or other represent “offshoots” of the ancient Classical system (in accordingly modified form, evidently); the gnosis of the Silesian Jacob Boehme which ascribes a significant role to Sophia in its gnostic theology probably serves as a good example.

Valentinian theology, moreover, provides an adequate exegesis that accounts for the un-Christian looking “cross” constituting the Work’s emblem, and also accounts for many aspects of Escriba’s opaque theology – particularly that which relates to the Kabbalistic doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum, or coincidence of opposites, of which we will have more to say on later. For the moment, we will simply say that, having read what follows from a “homily” by a modern neo-gnostic “cleric”, Escriba’s heterodox sounding statement in his landmark homily from October 8, 1967, calling on his followers to unite heaven and earth in their hearts, and other scattered statements expressing a similar idea, can finally be clearly interpreted. The “Rev. Steven Marshall” of the Ecclesia Gnostica in his “homily” delivered for the “Day of the Holy Valentinus”, describes the cross as “a particularly apt symbol for the divine marriage.” This is the “divine marriage” of opposites symbolically represented in Valentinian gnosticism by the “bridal chamber” (and which we believe is implicitly taught in John Paul II’s gnosis known as the “Theology of the Body”). Continuing, he describes the importance of the “cross” in the gnostic tradition, particularly as it relates to the doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum:

“Indeed, there are more references to the cross as a holy symbol in the Gnostic literature, a symbol of transcendence and union, than exists in the entire canon of the Bible. The horizontal bar of the cross represents the pairs of opposites in the world, the marriage in the world. The vertical bar of the cross represents the union of the below with the above, the celestial or heavenly marriage of the Gnostic bridechamber. We must perfect the vertical union, before the horizontal union can be truly realized. Through union of the above and the below, the outer and the inner, we can become united with all living souls. As expressed so beautifully in one of our occasional collects, “...until we awaken to our true estate in Thee, and living in unity and concord attain to Thy Gnosis in which there is no division or separateness, but only unity with Thee and through Thee with all other souls.” [21]

For Escriba, the vocation of every man (and not just the Christian) as image and likeness of God is to be Christ himself, “not just another Christ, but Christ Himself”. (Christ is Passing by, no. 104) In this universal call for holiness to live out the divine live in the midst of the world, a call which includes pagans and non-believers (the “People of God” defined according to Vatican II) is the seed for the pan-ecumenist and non-confessional, lay character that defines the Work. This sense of gnostic, universal “divine filiation” is the foundation of its spirituality: “The founder, enriched by this special sense of his divine filiation, infused this truth into every aspect of the Work's spirituality….The reality of one's divine filiation came to inform the entire spirit of Opus Dei and the life of piety of each of its members, leading them to the authentic freedom of the children of God.” [22]

Escriba in a spiritual meditation that he gave in 1963 described that in the midst of the most mundane of circumstances, simply walking through the streets of Madrid on October 16, 1931, he had an experience of spiritual illumination that led to his full understanding of his ontological relationship with God: “When God sent me those blows back in 1931, I didn't understand it… Then suddenly, in the midst of such great bitterness, came the words: ‘You are my son’ (Ps 2:7), you are Christ. And I could only stammer: Abba, Pater! Abba, Pater! Abba! Abba! Abba! Now I see it with new light, like a new discovery... You've led me, Lord, to understand that…to find the Cross is to identify oneself with Christ, to be Christ, and therefore to be a son of God.” [23] 

Therefore, first of all, Escriba associates himself in relationship to Christ, not as alter Christus, but as ipse Christus. Secondly, the “cross” (the gnostic “cross”, that is) is the symbolic representation denoting one’s ontological identification with Christ (that is, an equality relating to the innermost being). That this union with Christ is not merely one of likeness or participation in God’s supernatural life is made clear by Ernst Burkhart and Javier Lopez, the two official theologians of the Work who have written a three volume series titled Vida Cotidiana y Santidad En La Enseñanza de San Josemaría, (“Ordinary Life and Holiness in the Teaching of Saint Josemaría”) outlining the “Father’s” theology in detail. In volume two, the authors cite the modernist Jesuit Émile Mersch to underscore the point we have just made: “The Lord has revealed that between the Incarnate Word and the Christian there is something more than a union of love, even though it is ardent; there is something more than a relation of likeness, no matter how accurate it might be; there is something more than dependence, in spite of the fact that it is complete….There is a physical union, we might say, as long as we do not put this word at the same level as simple natural unions. It is a real union in any case, an ontological union.” [24] 

This is therefore the gnosis revealed in the Work: each and every single man, regardless of whether they accept Christ (cf John 1:12), is ipse Christus, and is accordingly called to sanctify and be sanctified by the world in this capacity. The gnostic “cross” of Opus Dei’s official emblem is the reminder or representation that this ontic status is the rightful inheritance of its members. The circle circumscribing the gnostic “cross” according to one interpretation represents the world, so that the Work’s members are called to act as “Christ” (represented by the “cross”) in the world, a world which equally can be conflated with Christ himself. The ontological separation between the self, the world, and Christ thus becomes blurred and eschatological hopes and aspirations are thus increasingly “immanentized”.

What we can know about the activities of Opus Dei since its early years, but even more importantly, the teachings of the “Founder” and the radically lay, liberal, and modernist spirituality of the Work do absolutely nothing to dispel suspicions of some kind of collaboration between Opus Dei and international Freemasonry. Of the radically liberal spirituality of the Work we will have much more to say later, but for the moment let us see with a very remarkable and revealing example relating to Mario Conde (the Spanish multi-millionaire who presided over the bankruptcy of the important Spanish bank Banesto), what kind of connections Opus Dei sees fit to have with Freemasonry in practice, despite statements here and there by its associates condemning masonry. 

As always, when trying to decipher liberals’ and modernists’ statements, it is imperative to look even more carefully at their actions, which is the most reliable hermeneutic key in order to look past their commonly practiced obfuscation, opaqueness, and ambiguity. In an interview of the Italian journalist Fabio Andriola with the Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy, the lawyer Virgilio Gaito, Andriola asked him: “What are the relations between you [i.e. the Grand Orient] and the so called ‘Catholic masonry’’ ‘I think’, Gaito replied, ‘that Opus Dei has a very vast universal vision… This Mario Conde…[who] today has the honour of appearing in the headlines is a famous representative of Opus Dei and he is also in the board of directors of a certain company whose head is the former Grand Master Di Bernardo.’ ” [25] So from this we know unequivocally that Conde at the time of the interview was a “representative of Opus Dei”, which could in principle mean anything from being a so called “co-operator” to a numerary, while it is very strongly suggested that Conde had some kind of very close relationship with Freemasonry. It must be born in mind that Gaito is here making the Opus Dei – Freemasonry connection relating to a single individual (Mario Conde) in the context of the wider question posed by journalist Gaito on the relations between “Catholic masonry” and Freemasonry (here presumably referring to the Grand Orient). 

This very close relationship between Conde and Freemasonry is further and unequivocally confirmed by the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Spain, Mr Gabaldón, who in a conference from 2012 stated that, “…while the businessman [Conde] is in a latent phase, he continues collaborating with the lodge whenever he can and on many occasions he teaches and gives talks [on masonry] to the brethren that are going to join the association.” Lest any confusion arise about Conde’s current “latent” status within the Lodge, Mr Gabaldón takes care to clarify that it was simply a measure taken during the judicial investigations into Banesto’s corrupt dealings: “When he realized what was coming upon him he decided to ‘descend into sleep-mode’ to avoid this way being expelled from the lodge.” [26]


REFERENCES

1. Opus Judaei –  Jose Maria Escriba, Colombia, by “Alfonso  Carlos de Borbón”, p 133.
2. LOS ESTUDIOS ACADÉMICOS DE SAN JOSEMARÍA ESCRIVÁ Y ALBÁS, Claretianum, vol. XLIX, 2009, Giancarlo Rocca.
3. Opus Judaei, p 132.
4. Mons. Escrivá de Balaguer, Salvador Bernal, p. 280, Rialp publishing house.
5. Opus Judaei, p 132.
6. D. LE TOURNEAU, L’ Opus Dei, P.U.D.F., Paris 1984.
7. Opus Judaei, p 132, note no. 198.
8. Sodalitium, Oct-Nov 1996, “Encore sur L’Opus Dei”, by abbé Curzio Nitoglia, p 58, ref. no. 3.
9. Bernal, p 249.
10. Opus Judaei, p 132.
11. Ibid., p 186.
12. Ibid., p 93.
13. Ibid., p 18.
14. Ibid., p 16.
15. Original Spanish text: “Para que la incorporación sea válida, es suficiente la intención virtual de asumir las obligaciones correspondientes, aunque no haya una advertencia actual en el momento de la incorporación.” Extracted from Lo Que Pasó a Ser el Opus Dei, by “Bruno Devos”, Chapter 11: De La Discreción al Secretismo. Available from https://opus-info.org/index.php/De_la_di...ite_note-6
16.  El Opus Dei, Anexo a una Historia, María Angustias Moreno, p 61.
17.  María Angustias Moreno, La Otra Cara del Opus Dei, Chapter II: “Desprestigio como estilo de defensa” (I).
18.  Opus Judaei, p 145.
19.  SALVADOR BERNAL, Monseñor Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer. Apuntes sobre la vida del Fundador del Opus Dei; Rialp, Madrid 1980, 6ª ed., pp. 199-200. While it is true that the Spanish original “llevando el compás” could also be translated as “keeping the beat” (a phrase sounding oddly out of place in the context, and which in any case suggests someone directing the “beat”), perhaps we are dealing here with the ambiguous duplicity of someone winking his eye to those “in the know”…
20.  Opus Judaei, p 175.
21.  “A Homily for the Day of the Holy Valentinus” by Rev. Steven Marshall: The Mystery of Divine Love http://gnosis.org/ecclesia/homily_Valentinus.htm
22.  Blessed Josemaria Escriva – Founder of Opus Dei, Bulletin, September 1999, New York, pp 6-7.
23.  Ibid, p 7.
24.  Vida Cotidiana y Santidad En La Enseñanza de San Josemaría, Rialp, (2011) Vol. II, p. 85.
25.  Sodalitium, Oct-Nov 1996, “Encore sur L’Opus Dei”, by abbé Curzio Nitoglia, p 58, ref. no. 4.
26.  “Mario Conde sigue dando clases en la masonería”, Diario de León, 18 DE MAYO DE 2012.

[Stone]

OPUS DEI - TROJAN HORSE OF LIBERALISM IN THE CHURCH

PART II -  December 12, 2023

Taken from here. [Emphasis mine]

Escriba y Albás (left), John XXIII and Álvaro del Portillo (right), Escriba's right hand man.

Secularism and liberalism: the twin pillars of the “Work”

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” (Matthew 7:15)

“‘there are heretics who believe in his [Christ’s] divinity, but who completely reject that He should be King in all places. Without doubt they offer Him incense but they refuse to also offer Him gold.’ These kinds of heretics still exist, and they are called liberal Catholics.” [1] (Mons. Henri Delassus citing sermon no. 10 from St Gregory the Great for the feast of the Epiphany.)

In order to understand the core spirit which animates Opus Dei in its action and “apostolate” it is necessary to first understand liberalism. For many – but by no means all – of its activities from an external point of view can appear perfectly orthodox, and these are precisely the ones that tend to draw unsuspecting, perhaps gullible Catholics into the arms of the Work. But it is the intentionally lay, modernist spirit undergirding the Work’s activities as a whole that completely pervert or even invert any pretensions for Catholicity into something utterly alien to a true Christian spirit. The call for Christians to strive for sanctity and perfection is nothing novel; Christ himself makes the call when he states, “Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48) Just in this respect alone Opus Dei reveals its duplicitous character because they are appropriating a call for holiness which is not their own, but in reality goes back to apostolic times and has been repeated ever since in various ways by countless holy souls over the centuries. What is novel and revolutionary is the modernist, liberal spirit permeating the activity of the Work, which it carries out by infiltrating societies and the Church in order to create a lay mentality that runs contrary to the social Kingship of Christ that preceded and was eventually fully endorsed by Vatican II. John Paul II himself connected the spirituality of the “Founder” with the lay spirit or theology which later came to characterize the Conciliar Church. According to Wojtyla in a homily delivered in 1979, Escriba, “from the beginning anticipated the theology of the laity that later came to characterize the Church of the Conciliar and post-Conciliar periods.” [2]

But before delving further into the liberal teachings of the “Founder” and his “Way”, practically expressed in the activities of Opus Dei, let us look more closely at the actual definition of liberalism, and what the pontiffs or other erudite Catholic scholars have had to say against either liberalism or its attendant theological or philosophical progeny. For this end, let us first cite Msgr Henri Delassus, author of La Conjuration Antichrétienne – Le Temple Maçonnique voulant s’élever sur les ruines de l’Église Catholique (“The anti-Christian conspiracy – The Masonic Temple wishing to rise over the ruins of the Catholic Church”). The significance of this work is shown by the de facto endorsement it received by none other than pope St Pius X.

In the introduction there is a congratulatory letter from secretary of state Cardinal Merry del Val in which he writes, “The Holy Father Pius X has received with paternal interest the work titled La Conjuration Antichrétienne…His Holiness congratulates you affectionately for having carried to a good end the composition of this important and thought provoking work, after a long series of studies that equally honour your zeal and your ardent desire of serving the cause of God and the Holy Church…etc” Shortly later he writes something with direct bearing to the discussion that follows, “You show the abyss which is the result of the antagonism between Christian civilization and the so-called civilization which regresses towards paganism. You are so right in maintaining that social renewal will only be able to be accomplished by the proclamation of the rights of God and the Church!” These “rights of God and the Church” – that is, the rights of Christ the King – to rule over all societies and individuals are precisely the ones which liberalism abandons or rejects, which is why it is such a corroding cancer within the Body of Christ.

Msgr Henri Delassus essentially defines liberalism as the effort to reconcile the Church with the principles of the World; opposing principles which in Augustinian terms can be conceived as the antagonism between the City of God – the Catholic Church – with the Earthly City, an antagonism referenced at the beginning of Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical against Freemasonry, Humanum Genus, whose origin St Augustine in the City of God traces back to two different, opposed loves – love of God and love of self: “Catholic liberalism essentially consists in the effort to bring the Church and the World closer together, the Gospel and the Rights of man, in order to reconcile, as Pius IX said in the last of the propositions from the Syllabus, the Church and ‘civilization’, civilization as it has been conceived by Renaissance humanism and as it is desired by Freemasonry.” [3]

To Msgr Delassus, there is something of the Luciferian permeating the spirit of liberalism because it leads to man usurping the rightful place of God, and it is precisely the pride inherent in this error or heresy that will ultimately usher in the “man of sin”: “Liberalism is no ordinary heresy…. It is Satan’s own, personal heresy, because it consists in the creature usurping for its benefit the independence and sovereignty which belong only to God for all eternity, and in the order of time to Our Lord Jesus Christ. One can see from this how modern liberalism differs from everything that preceded it in terms of revolt and sin. It is sin itself [C'est le péché lui-même], the last term and the highest degree of sin. Liberalism calls forth ‘the man of sin’, it prepares the way to the Antichrist.” [4]

Early in this same work, Msgr Delassus had described what this liberalism or reconciliation between the Heavenly and Earthly cities would entail in practice, according to the desires of the liberals and the followers of principles of “modernity”: “It is necessary for the Church to reconcile itself with modern civilization. And the proposed basis for this reconciliation will be…the abandonment of the truth of revelation, an abandonment which would transform Catholicism into a vast, liberal Protestantism in which all men could meet, regardless of their hateful notions of God, his revelation and his commandments. The adherents of modernity say that the Church can only envisage brighter days ahead through this liberalism, thus procuring for itself the honour of entering into the ways of modern civilization and of marching [together] with progress.” [5] These words by Msgr Delassus published in 1910 read like a prophecy of the aggiornamento that would be undertaken by John XXIII fifty-two years later starting in October 1962 when he opened the windows of St Peter’s to the odious stench of liberalism and modernism. It is an aggiornamento with its attendant liberal spirit and lay mentality that had been preceded by the Work starting from its mysterious beginnings in 1928.

The struggle against modernism at the outset was closely intertwined with the fight against liberalism. In some ways, liberalism was even more dangerous than other movements openly hostile to the Church such as communism because liberalism could act under stealth under the guise of Catholic appearances, even of conservative ones. Hence, Pius IX in a letter from 1871 deplored the state of French Catholicism due to the widespread influence of liberalism: “That which I fear is not the [communist/socialist] Commune of Paris—no—that which I fear is Liberal Catholicism….I have said so more than forty times, and I repeat it now, through the love that I bear you. The real scourge of France is Liberal Catholicism, which endeavours to unite two principles as repugnant to each other as fire and water.” [6] These two antagonistic principles were the same two opposing forces previously mentioned at the end of the Syllabus: the Catholic City and modernity or modern “civilization” under the direction of Freemasonry.

St Pius X, in his turn, as patriarch called liberal Catholics, “wolves in sheep’s clothing”, and as pope considered it his duty to “unmask” the disease of liberalism which he believed permeated the greater part of Catholic intellectual life. Our Lord stated unequivocally, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” If both Opus Dei and the Conciliar Church birthed at Vatican II stem from the same liberal “tree” with its attendant spirit and doctrine, they should both infallibly produce the same liberal fruits: principally, ecumenism or an ecumenical “spirit” (the “spirit of Assisi”, John Paul II kissing the Koran, the “ecumenical” or non-confessional character of the Work’s activities, etc) and a masonic inspired notion of a false “liberty” with its accompanying consequences (religious liberty and religious indifferentism, a rapprochement between the Church and the World, intellectual “anarchy”, and so on). Such is indeed the case. Similarly, for Felix Sardà y Sardany in El Liberalismo es Pecado (“Liberalism is a sin”), Catholics are to discern the liberal from the orthodox by judging the tangible results of their actions: “Observe carefully what class of people are the projectors of the affair. Such is the first rule of prudence and common sense. It is based on that maxim of Our Lord: ‘A bad tree cannot bring forth good fruit.’ Liberalism is naturally bound to produce writings, works and deeds impregnated with the spirit of Liberalism, or at least tainted with it.” (Chapter XXXIV)

The stakes in this conflict between the City of God and the liberal principles of the Earthly City are so high that Fr. Denis Fahey in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World contrasted the “pantheistic deification of man” [7] which is the ultimate project of liberalism and the secret societies against  a multitude of anti-liberal citations from Pius IX, in particular his Syllabus, which could be seen as the anti-liberal manifesto of the pope in opposition to the counter-Syllabus program of liberalism. There is no “middle” or “neutral” ground here when it comes to our response to liberalism, we are either on the side of the City of God or with the principles of the Earthly, masonic inspired City, so that depending on our choice, we are either – wittingly or unwittingly – on the side of God or the Devil: “He that is not with me, is against me: and he that gathereth not with me, scattereth.” (Matthew 12:20) Even the masons themselves recognize that in this conflict, one can only choose one side of the two opposing poles, expressed by a famous French Freemason quoted by Fr Fahey who stated, “A school cannot remain neutral between the Syllabus and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.” [8]

Mgr Delassus, with the de facto endorsement of St Pius X, tells us that the essence of liberalism is the reconciliation of the Church with modern “civilization” as it has been conceived by the lodges, and as has been condemned by the Syllabus of Pius IX. Fr. Fahey in turn tells us that modernity is setting up the “pantheistic deification of man”. And yet in affording a global assessment of Vatican II, that monumental gnostic pseudo-Council, Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI, the “great restorer of tradition”), has this to say: “The text [of the Vatican II documents, especially Gaudium et spes] serves as a counter-syllabus and, as such, represents, on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789.” [9] Elsewhere, Ratzinger stated that, “If one is looking for a global diagnosis of the text [of Gaudium et spes], one could say that it (along with the texts on religious liberty and world religions) is a revision of the Syllabus of Pius IX, a kind of counter-Syllabus…” [10] It would have been difficult for Ratzinger to express his thoughts more clearly and explicitly on the significance of Vatican II vis-à-vis modern “civilization”, and we can therefore see that Vatican II together with the Conciliar Church did not indeed remain “neutral between the Syllabus and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.”

While the ostensible project of the liberal theologians at Vatican II was to “Christianize the Revolution”, its ultimate purpose was to “revolutionize the Church” [11], as Msgr Delassus remarks in his previous work, L’Américanisme et la Conjuration Antichrétienne with regards to those desiring to see the Church become reconciled with the Revolution. The essence of the Revolution are its liberal principles: “it is the idea, the spirit, the doctrine, in virtue of which man substitutes in all things his will and passions to the rights of God.” [12]

A “substitution”, we would add, which takes place in the name of Freemasonic “liberty” – the “liberty” so assiduously and ceaselessly defended by Opus Dei and its “Founder”. According to the revolutionaries themselves, “The Revolution is the fight between man and GOD; it is the triumph of man over GOD.” [13] Msgr Delassus saw that the attempt to “Baptise the Revolution” is nothing more than the work of men of weak faith who no longer believe – or perhaps have never believed – that Christ’s faith can overcome the world. The solution against such perfidious intentions is to hold up the banner of Pius IX’s Syllabus higher than ever before, which implicitly and necessarily means opposing Vatican II and those movements such as Opus Dei which serve to buttress this “Catholic” revolution: “Baptising the Revolution! Christianizing the Revolution! This fanciful project could only come to the mind of those who consider their faith too weak to resist the revolutionary spirit [of 1789]. They forget St John’s words, ‘Haec est victoria quae vincit mundum, fides nostra’ [“and this is the victory which overcometh the world, our faith.” 1 John 5:4].” [14]

Msgr Delassus quite prophetically foresaw that if the Church followed the sad experience of the Bourbon monarchy in France which tried to reconcile itself with the Revolution, “the world will never have seen such a catastrophe as that which it will draw upon itself”; a prophecy which was entirely fulfilled to the letter as the sad events of the following century would amply demonstrate. Therefore, he calls upon Catholics to take up the anti-revolutionary principles set out by Pius IX: “The Declaration of the rights of man must be opposed by true Christians with a solemn declaration of the rights of GOD; put another way, to take up the flag of the Syllabus of Pius IX, two times ratified by Leo XIII. Each one of the propositions from the Syllabus opposes a revolutionary principle, a consequence of the Declaration of the rights of man.” Reiterating the importance of the Syllabus as the most effective antidote against the program of liberalism, in 1884 pope Leo XIII had stated to a French bishop that, “The Syllabus is the rule from which the faithful must take the principles of the direction of their thought and of their works in the present difficulties.” [15]

When John XXIII opened the windows of St Peter’s to the stench of modernism and liberalism, therefore, the counter-Church made its irrevocable choice to join sides with the forces of liberalism and Freemasonry in the construction of the Earthly City that will culminate in the ushering of the Antichrist on the world stage. Such is the temerity of the men leading the Conciliar Church to the abyss of apostasy, men who according to Pope Leo XIII crave, “to reconcile the maxims of the Gospel with those of the revolution. These men seek to reconcile Christ and Belial, the Church of God and the state without God” (Custodi Di Quella Fede, December 8, 1892).

All of this should clarify the real revolutionary nature of the liberal lay mentality of Opus Dei, and how this indeed made the Work one of the great precursors to Vatican II, as proudly affirmed by its associates and supporters (among which stand some of the most significant figures at Vatican II, as we will see). Again, to reiterate: it was not the purported “universal call to holiness” addressed by the Work to the world’s Catholics which made it revolutionary, but the radically liberal lay outlook permeating all of its activities which led it to embrace modern “civilization”, an outlook subsequently fully endorsed and promulgated by the magisterium of the Council. Just like with Opus Dei, Vatican II’s purported “universal call to holiness” was a convenient cover for its true revolutionary teachings, to wit, proclaiming to the “People of God” that embraces all creeds their ontological identification with the divine, while abandoning any pretensions of being the unique depository of the Truth outside of which there is no salvation, and accordingly, that it henceforth desired to cooperate willingly and work side by side with the Earthly City in the construction of the City of Man. Such was the proclamation at Vatican II expressed in Gaudium et Spes, no. 3: “Therefore, this sacred synod, proclaiming the noble destiny of man and championing the Godlike seed which has been sown in him, offers to mankind the honest assistance of the Church in fostering that brotherhood of all men which corresponds to this destiny of theirs.”.

Escriba’a ardent love for the world and his radical secular mentality necessarily made him associate the priesthood with an anticlerical mindset. Stated very simply: he abhorred the idea that the Church should supervise the construction of Christian civilization, which is either Christian or is no real civilization at all. In fact, his anticlericalism goes back a long way in his life, and even as a youth before entering the seminary he later confessed of anti-clericalist tendencies. The practical consequences of Escriba’s truly lay spirituality are therefore a firm rejection to any kind of “clericalism”; he went so far in this deluded view that in 1972 to a group gathered who asked him about his lay mentality – as they surely must have been uneased about the doctrinal soundness of such a theological novelty – he replied: “I am anticlerical because I love the priesthood [!].” [16] Therefore, his understanding of the “priesthood” must certainly not have been a Catholic one. Escriba’s landmark homily delivered at the University of Navarra (an Opus Dei “pet project” funded out of its own coffers) on October 8, 1967 is perhaps the best single outline describing the liberal vision to life and the faith offered by the Work. Here, as the quintessential liberal and even, anti-clerical, Escriba describes with horror that it should even cross the mind of a Catholic that he should offer Catholic solutions to the world’s problems, something he goes as far as describing as a perversion [!] of the natural order of things! Here is the relevant text from the homily, where the liberal Christian that eschews the wisdom offered by the Church to solve the world’s ills is offered as the model to imitate for followers of the Work:

“But it never occurs to that [liberal] Christian to think or say that he should go down from the temple to the world to represent the Church, and that his solutions are the Catholic solutions to those problems. This cannot be so, my children! This would be clericalism, official Catholicism, or however you want to call it. In any case, it is to pervert the nature of things. You have to spread everywhere a truly lay [i.e. liberal] mentality…”

French Opus Dei member, Dominique Le Tourneau further confirms our interpretation of the radical liberal message of Escriba outlined in the homily just cited: “For the Founder, the Catholic solution to various problems in the world does not exist.” [17] The implications of this statement, which could be taken as the “official” interpretation of the “Founder’s” own words, is terrifying when its destructive potential is fully considered, both for the faith and even the world at large. In casting aside the Catholic solution in the name of ecumenism or religious indifferentism (implicit or explicit), the door is opened to the false “solutions” offered by the Earthly City, which if imposed on the Church and the world would lead, for the latter to its self-destruction, and for the former to descend into the supreme anarchy and barbarism of a world led by the powers of the counter-Church of Satan.

In practical terms, this means that Opus Dei, despite its outward manifestations of adherence to dogma and “conservatism”, is part of the project to build a non-dogmatic “Church” reorganized without the solid Catholic principles to guide it or that rejects the social Kingship of Christ over men and nations. They thus reject the notion that the only secure foundations for civilization are those that depend on the rule of Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, through the ministry of the Church to bring Christ’s light to the nations. Escriba’s rejection of the notion that the Church and her doctrine should be the basis for re-building civilization (or that it is the only secure foundation over which Civilization can be constructed), contrasts sharply with Pope Leo XIII’s words in Rerum Novarum (1891) which express a perfectly contrary view: “Wherefore, if human society is to be healed, only a return to Christian life and institutions will heal it. In the case of decaying societies it is most correctly prescribed that, if they wish to be regenerated, they must be recalled to their origins…Wherefore, turning away from the original purpose [of Christian civilization] is corruption, while going back to this discovery is recovery.”

Salvador Berglar, an ardent promoter of the Work in his work Opus Dei goes as far as describing Escriba's liberalism as offering Opus Dei members some kind of immunity against the much feared ill of clericalism! Here is the text: “This [lay] mentality renders them completely immune against any kind of clericalism: they will not meddle in matters incompatible with their priestly ministry, nor in areas that fall within the free and personal responsibility of the laity.” “The Founder himself, throughout all his life was an example of this lay mentality which he preached with so much intensity and so insistently demanded.” [18]

So great was the “Father’s” aversion to what he perceived to be any kind of “clericalism” that he even felt some disappointment at seeing a select number of his former strictly lay followers become clerics (although, presumably, he would have been consoled at the fact that – as we will see below – the clerical state for him is nothing more than a mere “accident”…):“When on June 25, 1944 three of his spiritual children were the first to be ordained into the priesthood, he simultanously felt – as he said some time later – very happy and very sad: ‘I so love the lay condition of our Work, that I felt a true pain in having them become clerics; but, on the other hand, the need for the priesthood was so clear, that I had to be grateful to God Our Lord that those sons of mine arrived at the altar.’ ” [19]

Escriba’s rejection of what he termed “clericalism” is in fact a rejection of the social Kingship of Christ to rule and govern over all peoples. Writing in 1925, three years before Opus Dei was founded, Pius XI called on the world’s Catholics to embrace the sweet yoke of Christ the King as the solution to the world’s ills, and denounced “the plague of anti-clericalism”, an “evil spirit” long present but now advancing ever more boldly in a nominally Christian world rapidly sliding towards neo-paganism. It is in the middle of this spiritual climate that José María Escriba y Albás founded his Work in 1928:

“If We ordain that the whole Catholic world shall revere Christ as King, We shall minister to the need of the present day, and at the same time provide an excellent remedy for the plague which now infects society. We refer to the plague of anti-clericalism [“laicismo” in Spanish version], its errors and impious activities. This evil spirit, as you are well aware, Venerable Brethren, has not come into being in one day; it has long lurked beneath the surface. The empire of Christ over all nations was rejected. The right which the Church has from Christ himself, to teach mankind, to make laws, to govern peoples in all that pertains to their eternal salvation, that right was denied.” (Pius XI, Quas Primas, no. 24)

Our insistence on Escriba’s obsessive and fanatical concern with fostering a lay mentality within Opus Dei is hardly some phantom we have conjured up out of our mind but is a plain fact proudly attested to by some of his most devoted followers who boast about the liberal and revolutionary character of the Work, such as Bernal who claims that this facet of his spirituality was not merely latent but quite apparent: “Mons. Escrivá de Balaguer was conspicuous for his firm support towards secularism.” [20] Liberty (as understood by the liberals) is the foundation for the secularism or lay mentality preached by the “Father”: “Liberty, my sons, liberty, which is the key for that lay mentality which we all have in Opus Dei.” [21]

For Escriba, there was no distinction within Opus Dei between a layperson and a priest; the lay and priestly states, and their respective vocations are thus conflated, bringing us dangerously close to the Protestant notion of the “priesthood of the faithful”, for in the Work both priests and the laity are equal, and thus Bernal states that it is: “…clear that in the mind of the Founder of Opus Dei, for us the priesthood is a circumstance, an accident, because – within the Work – priests and the laity have the same  vocation.  In Opus Dei we are all equal.” [22]

The French Opus Dei member Le Tourneau in L’Opus Dei describes the stark difference between the Catholic vocation to the religious state and the so called “lay” vocation of Opus Dei, with its secular characteristics that do not conform to any traditional form of spirituality within Catholicism, for either the lay or religious states. By his own admission, the “secular” vocation of Opus Dei has purely and strictly immanent (as opposed to transcendent) origins, so that the so called “vocation” cannot even be deemed to be inspired by God. Le Tourneau’s statement of the Work’s “vocation” emanating from “being in the world” is uncannily reminiscent of the gnostic philosopher Heidegger’s view of man as a purely immanent being-in-the-world. The “new lay spirituality” proposed by “Saint” Jose Maríá Escriba thus represents pure liberalism, naked and unadorned:

“The basic difference between the two [the religious vocation and the “vocation” to Opus Dei] can be expressed as movements in opposite directions. One answers [the call to vocation] from outside the world and moves toward it, bringing its presence toward it. This is the evolution of the religious state. The other is a ‘being in the world’; it starts from being of the world. Such is Opus Dei’s secular spirituality....This is what made Card. Luciani, the future Pope John Paul I, say that while St. Francis de Sales proposed a spirituality for lay people, Msgr. Escriva proposes a new lay spirituality.” [23]

In the spirit of ecumenism and secularism, the “apostolic works” of the purportedly Catholic Opus Dei are not confessional, but like the Sillon denounced by St Pius X, ultimately work for the furtherance of the Earthly City, rather than the Catholic one, the City of God. Bernal describes the manner in which Opus Dei promotes its apostolic works: “These projects – as is known – are a means to a supernatural end. But they are carried out and managed with a lay mentality (...) That is why they are not confessional...” [24] If the projects of the Work are, by their own admission officially non-confessional – that is, not born from Catholic principles and oriented towards exclusively Catholic ends and objectives –, we can rightly ask: what is their ultimate “supernatural end”? Is it perhaps their own contribution towards the construction of the Earthly City that will culminate with the establishment of an ecumenical One World Church? The liberal, pseudo-Christian pretensions of the Sillon and its attempt to construct a “Civilization” without Christ in the center could not have failed to bring it into alignment with the goals of the secret societies, and accordingly, the abbé Emmanuel Barbier in Les Infiltrations Maçonniques dans l’Église from 1910 wrote that, “There is a striking similarity between the hopes of all theosophical sects and those of the Sillon.” (p. 245)

According to the gnostic sects, after the Gospel of Christ comes a new “gospel” that will unite all humanity in universal brotherhood, the Wojtylian “Civilization of Love” ushered in after the “new Pentecost” (John XXIII) experienced at Vatican II: “Afterwards will come our own Gospel: the Gospel of tomorrow, of joyful brotherhood, the spiritualist Gospel.” (Ibid., p 246) For whatever it is worth (although we are not inclined to believe it is a mere coincidence), sillon is the French term that Escriba himself picked up in one of his works using the Spanish equivalent, Surco (that is, “furrow”). This work is an example of the conflation of nature and grace inherent in the spirituality of Opus Dei, of which we will have more to say later. According to Mons. Álvaro del Portillo (Escriba’s right-hand man) in his preface to Surco, “What is revealed in these pages is the very life of the Christian, in which – together with Christ’s steps – the divine and the human are intertwined without any confusion…” The fact that Surco should be promoted by making it freely accessible at a prominent website of the Jewish-“Christian” Neo-Catechumenal Way (endorsed and praised by “Saint” John Paul II as “…an itinerary of Catholic [!] formation…” should be more than enough reason to suspect its orthodoxy. [25]

The “Father’s” own words can be adduced to show that the lay spirit permeates so profoundly everything in Opus Dei that its members do not even need to make an additional effort to conform to the world, since they are already its proud members and participants. The basis for the Work’s natural conformity with the world is the “aggiornamento” which was an inherent part of the spirituality of Opus Dei since its foundation – thus preceding that initiated by John XXIII at the start of Vatican II –, and which Escriba blasphemously ascribes to the inspiration or work of Christ: “God Our Lord – the Founder would say – has updated the Work once and for all [i.e. carried out the 'aggiornamento'], granting it those peculiar lay characteristics, so that IT WILL NEVER NEED TO ADAPT ITSELF TO THE WORLD, BECAUSE ALL OF ITS MEMBERS ARE OF THE WORLD.” [26] And to further highlight the fact that Opus Dei members do not need to adapt to the world, because they are already of the world, Escriba elsewhere states: “...and in no way is it fitting to speak of adapting to the world or to modern society: nobody adapts to what is considered one's own [milieu, i.e. the world]; one is found in one’s own [natural] environment.” [27]

As an ardent liberal, Escriba would also promote a false “liberty” based upon the revolutionary, gnostic principles of 1789 that would be embraced at Vatican II, according to Joseph Ratzinger’s own admission. According to the lay spirituality of the Work and its attendant religious indifferentism, every “path” is an equally acceptable means for constructing a true social order and civilization where peace and harmony can be achieved (or for allowing man to attain to his final supernatural end, namely, union with God): “I am a great lover of liberty and that every individual should follow his own path...” [28]

“Pluralism” is the natural daughter of a liberal notion of “liberty”, and hence was equally embraced by the “Father”. All sects and opinions must therefore coalescence following the ecumenical “spirit of Assisi” in the construction of “Saint” John Paul II’s utopian “civilization of love”, or stated plainly, the Augustianian “Earthly City” with its accompanying “Church of Man”: “Due to the exclusively divine mission of the Work, its spirit is a spirit of liberty, of a love for the personal liberty of all men. And since that love for liberty is sincere and not a mere theoretical statement, we love the necessary consequence of liberty: that is, pluralism. Within Opus Dei pluralism is cherished and loved, not simply tolerated and in no way hindered.” [29]

Ana Sastre, another of the “official” chroniclers of the Work, explains that it was the first association in the Church to fully embrace an ecumenical spirit embracing all men regardless of religious belief: “The Work was thus the first association in the Church that fraternally opened its arms to all men, regardless of creed or [religious] confession.”[30]

Vázquez in El Fundador del Opus Dei (“The Founder of Opus Dei”) describes that the novel ecumenical spirit spearheaded by the Work which incorporated as so called “co-operators” men of any belief or no belief at all was only much later widely accepted (that is, once ecumenism was officially endorsed by the Conciliar Church), and recounts a telling anecdote where Escriba with pride tells the “Holy Father” that the Freemasonic inspired ecumenical spirit of his Work preceded even that which John XXIII was attempting to foist upon the Catholic Church:

“In the pastoral practice of the Church, never before had that unlocking and wide opening of doors been seen which incorporated the souls of its benefactors [of various religions], among whom were Protestants, schismatics, Jews, Muslims, and pagans. Only with the passing of many years and once a new ecumenical current had begun, that bold step that [then] opened him up to much misunderstanding, now flowed naturally through contemporary history: Speaking one day with John XXIII, the Prelate [i.e. Escriba] told him: 'Holy Father, in our Work all men – Catholic or otherwise – have always found a welcoming place: I have not learned ecumenism from Your Holiness.' And the pope smiled, pleased.” [31]

According to Bernal, the “Founder” was such a radical defender of the religious freedom espoused by Dignitatis Humanae at Vatican II, that he once told a Methodist that, “I would give my life a hundred times to defend the liberty of your conscience.” [32] Therefore, Escriba would have given his life a hundred times – not for Christ, for the salvation of souls and their sanctification, or for the Methodist’s conversion to the true faith – but to protect the erroneous and heretical views of a Protestant. Such could be called, indeed, the “apotheosis” of a liberal, ecumenical mind-set, ready to give his very own life in the name of a heretical doctrine inspired by the lodges!

The liberty which Escriba preached so ardently is the “liberty of perdition” which Pius IX denounced, with this phrase quoting St Augustine, and elsewhere in his encyclical Quanta Cura referencing the encyclical Mirari Vos by Gregogy XVI which denounced the liberal errors of his age that were creeping into the minds of ever vaster segments of the Church and society:

“From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an ‘insanity,’ [Mirari Vos], that ‘liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way.’ But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching ‘liberty of perdition.’ [St. Augustine, epistle 105 (166)]”

With his liberal roots and its attendant egalitarian pluralism which places all beliefs and opinions on essentially the same level, so that any religion or philosophy and its political or ideological progeny are as good as any other, the “Father” seemed to preach something akin to intellectual anarchy leaving his followers entirely free to embrace whatever ideas they deemed most to their liking: “Opus Dei is neither on the right nor on the left, or in the center. I, as a priest, try to be with Christ, who on the Cross opened both arms and not only one of them: I take with liberty, from each group that which convinces me, and which makes me have a heart and arms that can embrace all of humanity; and each associate is entirely free to choose the option he wishes…” [33]

It is interesting to note that Escriba claims that Opus Dei is neither on the right nor on the left, and due to its ideological indifferentism, he was correct in this point. However, he further claims that neither is Opus Dei in the stationary center left unmoved by the progressivist movement of history, pointing the path that must be followed by the Christian (for both “right” and “left” are post-Revolutionary constructs) according to Proverbs 4:27: “Decline not to the right hand, nor to the left: turn away thy foot from evil. For the Lord knoweth the ways that are on the right hand: but those are perverse which are on the left hand.” While the Christian only has one Way, Christ, whose narrow and straight path cannot be reduced to the categories of “right” and “left” (which in any case are progressively defined according to the moral and philosophical standards at any given time), in practical terms because of the Work’s ideological anarchy (stemming from its liberalism), it sees no problem embracing both the left and right as a means to suit whatever ends it desires to accomplish. This will go so far as cooperating with communists, as we will see in a later part of this study.

In a conference in Buenos Aires, Escriba stated that while he personally did not meddle in politics, he praised those whose did so regardless of their political or ideological persuasions, thus effectively setting truth and error on the same plane: “…some turn to the right, others to the left, others elsewhere, and no one is mistaken, they are all of good [w]ill.” [34] Here, Escriba, with a mind profusely and hopelessly permeated by the spirit of liberalism, could not help but utter what amounts to be in practical terms the exact opposite of Scripture’s admonition in Proverbs 4:27. His only warning to those immersing themselves in politics was that they should adopt a liberal attitude that leaves open room for all ideological persuasions to freely defend their program: “However: I can and must advise you not to act with personal attacks; to defend your program, without personally offending anyone…” [35]

Therefore, in the name of a false “liberty”, the “Father” was happy to see his followers adopt and defend any political position, including that of socialism of course, despite the fact that Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno (section 120) had condemned Catholic support for socialism in quite blunt terms: “Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.” Regardless of Pius XI’s warning however, the “Father” could not even object to his followers adopting communist principles, (presumably) sans the atheistic aspect – perhaps the sort of “revamped” neo-Bolshevism in vogue in certain circles today –, even though Pope Leo XIII in Quod Apostolici muneris defined communism as “the fatal plague which insinuates itself into the very marrow of human society only to bring about its ruin.”

In many ways the radical liberal and ecumenical mind-set of the Work seems to be like a mirror image of the similar liberal spirit that thoroughly permeated the ideas and teachings of the French Sillon movement firmly denounced by St Pius X in his apostolic letter Notre Charge Apostolique (“Our Apostolic Mandate”), gathering all men of good will in the construction of the Earthly City in an ecumenical spirit of religious indifferentism uncannily similar to that espoused by the Conciliar Church; a utopian anti-Christian vision running contrary to the Gospel, that in the history of the post-Conciliar Church perhaps found its most vigorous and enthusiastic exponent in John Paul II. The striking similarities between some of the key tenets of the Sillon and Opus Dei cannot fail to make one question whether Opus Dei may in fact have been some kind of effort to resurrect the defunct Sillon but this time under a more “conservative” guise strictly in line (in appearance) with Catholic orthodoxy.

The three key aspects with which the Sillon and Opus Dei are in perfect conformity are first, their open acceptance of liberal principles. Secondly, their absolute insistence that their works and activities should have a non-confessional character, that is, as the “Founder” would put it, the strictly “lay” outlook of their apostolate amalgamating people of any religious belief or none, as well as those of any political persuasion. Thirdly, their preaching of “Christian” democracy as the only sound basis for society, and in the liberal context in which this must be framed, is exactly equivalent to the “pluralism” so ardently promoted by the “Father” that essentially places truth and error on the same level, and which in practice means embracing both the right and left, up to an including communists, as we will see in a later part of our study.

There is another crucial link assimilating the Sillon and Opus Dei: their flagrant duplicity. As quoted by the abbé Emmanuel Barbier in his study of the Sillon, Les Idées du Sillon (1905), the arch-liberal Marc Sangnier could go as far as simultaneously stating that he “had no intention of disapproving of the Syllabus, which I have always welcomed…with the greatest respect [!]” without however “disregarding the rights of free thought” (p. 131), in plain English meaning, “the rights” of liberal principles. In reality, as Barbier shows by quoting from Nouvelles Semailles, Sangnier saw the “tenants of the past” – that is, those upholding the principles of the Syllabus of Pius IX – “as obstacles to the reconciliation between the present age and the Church.” (Ibid., p. 129) Even after the liberal heresy of Americanism had been condemned by Leo XIII, the Sillon in its journal defiantly boasted that this would do nothing to turn the Sillon away from its liberal principles, which were the very foundation of the movement and without which its existence and impetus would be meaningless: “Shall our conviction be diminished, after these documents [have been issued], that our duty is to search for the reconciliation between Catholic dogma and all the ideas of the current age, to work for a progressive adaptation of Catholicism towards all those forces carrying our modern world?” (Ibid., p. 129)

The abbé Emmanuel Barbier points out that both Leo XIII and St Pius X (e.g. in his Motu Propio) considered it a point of capital importance that Catholic works and social action should be carried out within a strictly Catholic context, that is, they insisted that they should retain a confessional character – the exact opposite, in fact, of what was so strenuously and insistently preached by the “Father”. (Ibid., p. 164) The pontiffs’ condemnations in this regard amounted to a “negation of the middle ground” that Opus Dei ostensibly takes up as its operating principle. The importance of imbuing works with a Catholic character is in perfect harmony with traditional Catholic social teaching, as Barbier remarks: “The confessional character demanded by the Sovereign Pontiffs for works founded by Catholics is in perfect harmony with their doctrine on the solution to social problems and the remedy which, according to them, must be sought within the sphere of religion, in its wise institutions, in resignation and charity.” (Ibid. p 166) Against such a plain statement clearly expounding perennial Catholic teaching, we are again reminded that this is precisely the teaching frontally rejected and opposed – almost in disgust – by Escriba who stated in his infamous homily from October 8, 1967 that his amounted to “clericalism, official Catholicism, or however you want to call it.”

In an official declaration of the Sillon – which could equally have been stated by Opus Dei – it was stated that: “The Sillon has the right to also proclaim that it does not carry out confessional social works….it does not admit that any kind of confessionalism should be introduced in the unions, it wants them to remain outside of all religious doctrine…” (Ibid., p. 164). As could hardly be otherwise, the arch-liberal Sillon did not escape the influence of gnostic groups and doctrine (we believe the same holds true for Opus Dei). The abbé Barbier, in Infiltrations Maçonniques dans l’Église, mentions the dubious participation of Rosicrucians within meetings organized by the Sillon (Ibid., p. 248).

Barbier further remarks that, “the Catholicism of M. Marc Sangnier adapts to that of M. Joseph Serre, which is in accordance with that of M. Vulliaud, which is explicitly gnostic and theosophist.” (Ibid., p 249) Barbier further mentions the striking similarity between Sangnier’s work La Vie Profond with another work written by an occultist: “Let us especially compare Secret de la Rose-Croix which appeared in the same journal under the signature of the occultist Boué de Villers. It is the same state of mind, the same morbid idealism, the same macabre eroticism... The closeness is striking with regards to the symbolic form and to the theories of chastity and love.” (Ibid., p. 249) (We would also not be surprised to find an uncanny similarity between these gnostic works and John Paul II’s Kabbalah inspired, “Theology of the Body”…) Commenting on Sangnier’s Eveils et Visions, Barbier ends by commenting: “One can say that the author could hardly have written otherwise if he had known the mysteries of the Rose-Croix [i.e. the Rosicrucians] and of martinism, thus preparing his ardent disciples by reading it to be fascinated [by these mysteries].” (Ibid., p. 249)

At the death of the Sillon’s founder, Angelo Roncalli wrote a letter of condolences to his widow praising Mr Sangnier and reminiscing about his fascination for the founder in his youth when he was enthralled by, “the powerful charisma of his words and his spirit”. Perhaps he too was enthralled by Sangnier’s premature and failed attempt – thanks to St Pius X – to spearhead the aggiornamento of French Catholicism with the principles of the Revolution and liberal modernity. Patiently carrying this liberalism deep within his heart for over half a century while skillfully evading charges of heterodoxy or modernism, Roncalli (who viewed the Work with kind eyes) was finally able to bring in the airs of modernity into the Church as he opened the windows of St Peter’s in October 1962.

In Notre Charge Apostolique, St Pius X warned that the Sillon was attempting to, “build its City on a theory contrary to Catholic truth” since it “falsifies the basis and essential notions which regulate social relations in any human society.” As described by St Pius X, the appeal by the Sillon “to the workers of all religions and all sects” bears a striking resemblance to the ecumenical spirit of the Work. In summary, St Pius X warned that the Sillon was part of nothing less than the universal movement towards global apostasy. If the Sillon ultimately proved to be an unsuccessful movement of relatively short duration, the same cannot be said of Opus Dei; what was needed to bring about a successful “Catholic” Revolution based on the same core liberal ideas was to “repackage” them under a thick layer of “conservatism”. The firm, prophetic warning of Pius X against “the theories of the Sillon”, a reiteration of “the doctrines of the Revolution and Liberalism which have been so often condemned” is worth quoting at some length because they can equally be applied to condemn the liberal character of the Work (and also of Vatican II), which attempts to found a New City whose foundations will not be Christ’s Gospel but the neo-pagan, gnostic-Kabbalistic philosophy buttressing the “pantheistic deification of Man”. Finally, in a later installment of our study, we will see that, just like the Sillon, Opus Dei did indeed prove to carry “Socialism in its train”:

“No, Venerable Brethren, We must repeat with the utmost energy in these times of social and intellectual anarchy when everyone takes it upon himself to teach as a teacher and lawmaker – the City cannot be built otherwise than as God has built it; society cannot be setup unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy notions; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants. OMNIA INSTAURARE IN CHRISTO.

(…)

“The Sillon has a praise-worthy concern for human dignity, but it understands human dignity in the manner of some philosophers, of whom the Church does not at all feel proud. The first condition of that dignity [according to these philosophers] is liberty…

(…)

For the construction of the Future [Earthly] City they appealed to the workers of all religions and all sects. These were asked but one thing: to share the same social ideal, to respect all creeds, and to bring with them a certain supply of moral force.

(…)

But stranger still, alarming and saddening at the same time, are the audacity and frivolity of men who call themselves Catholics and dream of re-shaping society under such conditions, and of establishing on earth, over and beyond the pale of the Catholic Church, “the reign of love and justice” with workers coming from everywhere, of all religions and of no religion, with or without beliefs, so long as they forego what might divide them – their religious and philosophical convictions, and so long as they share what unites them – a “generous idealism and moral forces drawn from whence they can”…. What is to come of this collaboration? A mere verbal and chimerical construction in which we shall see, glowing in a jumble, and in seductive confusion, the words Liberty, Justice, Fraternity, Love, Equality, and human exultation, all resting upon an ill-understood human dignity. It will be a tumultuous agitation, sterile for the end proposed, but which will benefit the less Utopian exploiters of the people. Yes, we can truly say that the Sillon, its eyes fixed on a chimera, brings Socialism in its train….[The Sillon ]is now no more than a miserable affluent of the great movement of apostasy being organized in every country for the establishment of a One-World Church which shall have neither dogmas, nor hierarchy, neither discipline for the mind, nor curb for the passions, and which, under the pretext of freedom and human dignity, would bring back to the world (if such a Church could overcome) the reign of legalized cunning and force, and the oppression of the weak, and of all those who toil and suffer.” (St Pius X: Notre Charge Apostolique).

REFERENCES

1.    Msgr. Henri Delassus, La Mission Posthume de sainte Jeanne d'Arc, p. 52. Ed. Ste Jeanne d´Arc, "Les Guillotes", Villegenon. 18260 Vailly-sur-Suldre.
2.    John Paul II, homily at a Mass celebrated on August 19, 1979, L’Osservatore Romano (Spanish edition), 26 Aug 79, p. 11 (423). The original text in Italian was published in Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, II/2, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Rome 1979, p. 142.
3.    Msgr Henri Delassus, La Conjuration antichrétienne (Société Saint-Augustin, Lille, 1910, Part I), pp 243-44.
4.    Ibid., note no.1 (pp 243-44).
5.    Ibid., p 10.
6.    Catholic Progressives in England After Vatican II, Jay P. Corrin, University of Notre Dame Press, 2013, p 65.
7.    The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern Word, Fr Denis Fahey, Browne and Nolan Limited, 1939, Chapter VII: “Pius IX and the Pantheistic Deification of Man”.
8.    The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern Word, Fr Denis Fahey, Browne and Nolan Limited, 1939, Chapter VIII, p. 143.
9.    Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, tr. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1987), 382.
10.  Les Principes de la Theologie Catholique - Esquisse et Materiaux, Paris: Tequi, 1982, p 426.
11.  L’Américanisme et la Conjuration Antichrétienne, Msgr Henri Delassus, Société de Saint-Augustine, 1898, p 382.
12.  L’Américanisme et la Conjuration Antichrétienne, Msgr Henri Delassus, Société de Saint-Augustine, 1898, pp 196-7.
13.  L’Américanisme et la Conjuration Antichrétienne, Msgr Henri Delassus, Société de Saint-Augustine, 1898, p 197.
14.  L’Américanisme et la Conjuration Antichrétienne, Msgr Henri Delassus, Société de Saint-Augustine, 1898, p 383.
15.  Les Idées du Sillon, Abbé Emmanuel Barbier, 1905, p. 128.
16.  SALVADOR BERNAL, Monseñor Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer. Apuntes sobre la vida del Fundador del Opus Dei; Rialp, Madrid 1980, 6ª ed., p 87.
17.  Dominique Le Tourneau, L’Opus Dei, p.41.
18.  Peter Berglar, Opus Dei, p 216.
19.  Ibid., p 218.
20.  Bernal, op. cit., p 86.
21.  “Libertad, hijos míos, libertad, que es la clave de esa mentalidad laical que todos tenemos en el Opus Dei.” (Letter from Jose María Escriba y Albás, 29-IX-1957, cited by A. Cataneo,. Tracce per una spiritualità laicale offerte dall'omelia Amare il mondo appassionatamente, in the journal Annales Theologici 16 (2002)128.)
22.  Bernal, op. cit. p. 152.
23.  D. Le Tourneau, op. cit., p.26.
24.  Bernal, op. cit., p 309.
25.  AAS-82.90,1513-1515, http://www.caminoneocatecumenal.org/bibl.../surco.pdf
26.  El Fundador del Opus Dei, A. Vázquez de Prada, Rialp, p. 352.
27.  Bernal, op. cit., p. 117.
28.  Conversaciones con Mons. Escrivá de Balaguer, Rialp, p. 70.
29.  Conversaciones con Mons. Escrivá de Balaguer, Rialp, p. 127.
30.  Tiempo de Caminar, Ana Sastre, Rialp, p. 610.
31.  Vázquez, op. cit., p. 258.
32.  Bernal, op. cit., p. 297.
33.  Escrivá, Conversaciones, “El Apostolado del Opus Dei en los cinco continentes”, no. 44.
34.  SALVADOR BERNAL, Monseñor Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer. Apuntes sobre la vida del Fundador del Opus Dei; Rialp, Madrid 1980, 6ª ed., pp. 305-306. “…unos van por la derecha, otros por la izquierda, otros por allá, y ninguno desacierta, todos tienen buena voluntad.”
35.  Ibid., “Eso sí: les puedo y les debo aconsejar que no actúen con ataques personales; que defiendan su programa, sin ofender a nadie en la persona…”

[Stone]

OPUS DEI - TROJAN HORSE OF LIBERALISM IN THE CHURCH
Part III - December 13, 2023
Taken from here. [Emphasis mine.]

"Saint" John Paul II praying over the mortal remains of Álvaro del Portillo (Escriba's right hand man), tended over the floor in Jewish fashion.

Work as Means of “Sanctification”


“God, in all that is most living and incarnate in him, is not far away from us, altogether apart from the world we see, touch, hear, smell and taste about us. Rather he awaits us every instant in our action, in the work of the moment. There is a sense in which he is at the tip of my pen, my spade, my brush, my needle-of my heart and of my thought.” 

- Teilhard de Chardin, Le Milieu Divin

In Opus Dei, work is the means towards attaining holiness; the earthly and the material constitute the base matter on which the adept of Escriba’s sect must work through his “sanctification”. The adept must therefore thoroughly immerse and impregnate himself with everything that is of the world if he is ever to achieve his desired end of “sanctity”. Matter and human action – “Work” – attain, supernatural, divine dimensions.

Hence “Saint” John Paul II, in the apostolic brief for the “beatification” of Jose María Escriba y Albás, quoted from Escriba’s infamous landmark homily delivered at the University of Navarra on October 8, 1967 to highlight his supernatural vision of human activity, “Our age needs to give back to matter and to the most trivial occurrences and situations their noble and original meaning. It needs to restore them to the service of the Kingdom of God." It is a supernatural, divine, even arguably pantheistic vision of the world that is proclaimed (at least, implicitly so), so that John Paul II in the brief quotes Escriba exclaiming: “The divine paths of the world have opened up” (Christ is Passing By, 21).

It is a thoroughly materialistic, carnal type of spirituality that as a practical matter relegates the saving power of divine grace to a secondary plane in favour a neo-Pelagian, anthropocentric type of soteriology where man sets himself up as a his own saviour (which incidentally, is one of the defining features of the teachings of the “Craft”, i.e. masonry). It should therefore come as no surprise that Berglar in his book Opus Dei speaks of work as the means of sanctification without even mentioning the important and indispensable role of divine grace: “The only condition (indispensable of course) so that work may be a sanctifying labour that itself sanctifies [the worker] is that it be an honest and decent work.”[/i] [1] Ana Sastre’s statement in Tiempo de Caminar further underscores the importance given by Opus Dei to work with its neo-Pelagian approach towards attaining salvation and holiness: “It [i.e. work] comprises not only the environment in which man lives, but the means and path of sanctity; a sanctifying reality that sanctifies.” [2]

The implicit consequence of such a materialistic view is that the secular world also attains a religious (spiritual) component (or that matter contains the spiritual in potency) which reflects the conflation between nature and grace that is one of the defining features of gnosticism [3]. If Escriba told his followers that they must in effect be “spiritualized” by the world, the pantheist heresiarch Chardin put it in similar but ostensibly opposite terms: for him, the Christian must set about to “spiritualize” the world.

For Chardin, this spiritualization was not a matter, “of superimposing Christ on the world, but of ‘panchristising’ the universe”. [4] “If you follow this path”, Chardin told his correspondent, “you are led…to turning your perspectives upside down.” With this new perspective, no longer is evil considered a “punishment for a fault, but ‘sign and effect’ of progress” (!), while MATTER comes to be considered “THE STUFF OF THE SPIRIT”. Escriba’s and Chardin’s views may appear confusingly contradictory but they are merely the two sides of the same gnostic coin that equally conflate nature and grace since for both of them the “physical” and the “spiritual” (and hence, in some way, grace) are inextricably linked. In fact, Escriba would occasionally speak in distinctly Teilhardian terms, such as his reference to “divinizing” “work” [5], or when he spoke directly of “spiritualizing” “matter” and the most common, vulgar situations in his homily from October 8, 1967. There, he reiterated that the world is the only path of sanctification: “There is no other path, my children: either we learn to find in our ordinary life the Lord, or we will never find him.” Hence, the secluded hermit or religious, strictly separated from the implicitly “divine” or “spiritual” world which surrounds him, forfeits access to this immanent source of holiness.

Escriba’s followers, thoroughly imbued with his Teilhardian vision that recognizes the spiritual in matter, speaks of work in terms strangely – or perhaps, not so surprisingly – reminiscent of terminology used in the alchemical-gnostic “work” – the magnum Opus or “Great Work”, whose stages gradually proceed through the purification of base matter, leading to its final and complete “spiritualization” and perfection. Hence, Salvador Bernal, one of the official hagiographers of the “Founder” states: “Work is therefore the base matter that must be sanctified, the instrument for the sanctification of others.” [6] It is therefore congruent to hear Escriba speak of a, “Christian materialism that is boldly opposed to those materialisms closed off to the spirit.” [7]

While here he may appear to be firmly opposing “materialisms closed off to the spirit”, i.e. atheistic Marxism, the gnostic counter-part to his own “Christian materialism”, as usually happens with all things related to Opus Dei and the “Father”, mere appearances are deceptive: his “Work” will eventually find no compunction with cooperating with communists during the “Founder’s” very own lifetime in a remarkable and revealing case, as we will see in a later part of this study.

It is probably not coincidentally that in a conference in Buenos Aires the “Father” stated that the ultimate goal for the followers of Opus Dei is the same as that of the magnum Opus, conversion of the base “matter” which one encounters in daily life into (metaphorical) “gold”, i.e. the full “spiritualization” and perfection of matter, which in the alchemical “Work” simultaneously represented the “divinization” or perfection of the adept himself: “We have to occupy ourselves with the things of the earth….You and I must touch everything…, but with everything…, one must emulate King Midas: convert it into gold.” [8] Escriba’s “Christian materialism” has another dimension: in its attempt to unite the human with the divine, it ultimately seeks happiness on earth as life’s goal, which in genuinely Calvinist fashion is the ultimate assurance of one’s election. Thus, in Forja, 1005, Escriba says: “I am increasingly persuaded of this: happiness in Heaven is for those who know how to be happy on earth.” As is often typical of Escriba’s warped “spirituality”, this materialistic view is the perfect opposite of the message delivered by Christ in the Gospel: “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world, keepeth it unto life eternal.” (John 12:25).

This “spiritualization” or “perfection” of the world could also be viewed in terms of the Kabbalistic “work” of tikkun olam, the process of “repairing the world” or God’s ontologically flawed creation, consisting of a neo-Pelagian, naturalistic type of effort to bring back perfection both to the self and the world. In a homily given on March 2, 1952, Escriba appeared to allude to the Kabbalistic doctrine of tikkun olam: “ ‘Be imitators of God, as his dearly beloved children,’ [1 John 3:19] cooperating humbly but fervently in the divine purpose of mending what is broken, of saving what is lost, of bringing back order to what sinful man has put out of order, of leading to its goal what has gone astray, of re‑establishing the divine balance of all creation.”

According to Kabbalistic doctrine, man is the perfecting agent in a cosmos disordered after the fall of Adam Kadmon, the pre-cosmic “Adam”. After the fall, man’s principal mission is to bring about a restoration or tikkun of this world. This is a process of naturalistic “redemption” that takes place in the world, and as a necessary consequence through the material, and thus through work. The spiritual element of work and its redemptive value, as in Opus Dei, is thus highlighted. Man is self-sufficient within himself and consequently divine grace is redundant in order to bring about this “redemption”; men of any belief or none can therefore join in this naturalistic path to bring back wholeness and peace to the world. The Manichaean “lifting of the sparks”/tikkun is a process that necessarily takes place in the materiality and corporeality of the world, because as the “Founder” himself stated, “we find that invisible God in the most visible and material things [of the world].” [9] The Work of God – Opus Dei – would thus comprise an elite cadre of Christians called to transform and complete an ontologically deficient world in the name of “Christ” and the Christianity which they usurp.

An article from the opusdei.org site that was later deleted [10] further demonstrates the affinities between Escriba’s “Work” and the Jewish gnostic tradition. An article from January 31, 2002 quotes Rabbi Angel Kreiman, international vice president of the World Council of Synagogues, from his address at a congress convened in Rome on “Josemaría Escrivá”. We feel the article is so illuminating that it deserves to be quoted at some length:

"The Talmudic concept of work, said Kreiman, is that ‘work is not a punishment, but man's duty, a blessing from God that allows us…to be in the image and likeness of God.’ Likewise, the rabbi noted, work was central to the teaching of Josemaria Escriva, who saw it as an original vocation of man and a blessing from God.

According to Kreiman, ‘to meet God within ordinary occupations and serve others through one’s work is one of the principle non-violent battles to be won.’ The rabbi mentioned that in Hebrew ‘the word ‘work’ is also applied to religious worship, taking it to mean adoration as a holy action and in turn work as a holy adoration.’ Similarly, Blessed Escriva ‘never tired of repeating the necessity of transforming every occupation into prayer.’ ‘Many of Josemaria Escriva's concepts call to mind the Talmudic tradition and reveal his profound knowledge of the Jewish world, as well as his passionate love, as he openly repeated, for two Jews, Jesus and Mary,’ said Rabbi Kreiman. ‘Moreover, that which most likens his teachings to Judaism is the vocation of man to serve God through creative work, perfecting creation every day, through perfection of work.’ "

We have briefly sketched some key similarities between Escriba’s and Chardin’s conflation of nature and grace, that is, of the material (or the world and the activity which takes place therein) with the supernatural. It turns out that, upon a deeper investigation for whether Chardin may have influenced Escriba, we found out that the “program” of salvation offered by Opus Dei was already outlined by Teilhard de Chardin in 1927 in one of his most significant works, Le Milieu Divin, “The Divine Milieu”, written between 1926 and 1927 in which he seeks to offer a way for the Christian to “divinize” the ordinary actions of everyday secular life.

Included most prominently in this outline is a call for everyday work to be turned into something akin to a divine prayer and means of sanctification for the worker (which as we have seen, has its roots in the Jewish Talmudic tradition). Once Chardin’s lay spirituality is investigated at greater length, we cannot see any difference in its most significant points between the vision offered by Chardin for the “sanctification” of the ordinary things in life, most particularly work, in Le Milieu Divin, and the purportedly “new” teaching offered by Escriba in his Work. Chardin attempted to publish the work in 1927, but being a heretical work publication was obviously denied by the ecclesiastical censors. One year later, Escriba would experience the “mystical” event that would inspire him to found Opus Dei, and we are not inclined to believe that the closeness of the two dates is a mere coincidence. In fact, we believe there is a very strong likelihood that Escriba quite simply plagiarized the defining spirituality of his Work from Chardin’s radical materialist vision described in Le Milieu Divin. It is not difficult to conceive that he may have obtained a copy of this work then possibly being distributed through underground networks (we know that as far back as Angelo Roncalli’s student days that subversive works were freely distributed around the seminary by their promoters).

Otherwise, if we assume a masonic affiliation for Escriba, he may have had access to the work through the lodges as early as 1927 or 1928. At least, we know from Yves Marsaudon, the 33rd degree Scottish Rite Freemason, author of Ecumenism viewed by a Freemason of Tradition, that the works of Chardin were among the most popular in the masonic lodges. At the very least, if we assume that by 1928 Escriba was unaware of Chardin’s views expressed in Le Milieu Divin, the utterly remarkable closeness between the pseudo-Christian materialist “spirituality” offered in Le Milieu Divinwith that of Opus Dei necessarily means such a modernist mind-set was rampant and flourishing throughout a significant segment of the clergy, so that in no way can it be said that Escriba was the “originator” for this secular spirituality; he was merely the one who brought it by far most successfully to the entire Catholic world. Moreover, it is impossible to believe that such an intellectually mediocre mind as Escriba’s could have come up with anything “new”, and therefore whatever he did come up with must necessarily have originated from ideas already in existence.

In a letter from 14 November 1926, Chardin describes to his correspondent his upcoming writing project which would culminate in his work, Le Milieu Divin, “…I am about to write, in as simple a manner as possible…, my religious point of view, not outlined systematically, but in its practical attitude. Its title is The Divine Milieu, and I try to demonstrate how Christianity can and must fill human life with God, without dehumanizing it…” [11] Quite appropriately given the “Christian” materialistic outlook of Le Milieu Divin, the book’s dedication is, “For those who love the world”, a category of men which would of course also include someone like the secular leaning and anti-clerical Escriba y Albás. Let us analyze more closely the key section in this work found in Part I, aptly titled, “The Divinization of our Activities” and we will see its unmistakable similarity, and we would argue, even identity, with the spirituality of the Work.

Early on in Section 5 (“The Christian Perfection of Human Endeavour”), Chardin starts by outlining the basic idea of sanctification through work in words that could easily have been used by the “Founder” himself: “…God does not deflect our gaze prematurely from the work he himself has given us, since he presents himself to us as attainable through that very work…”

Much like Escriba, Chardin wanted to underscore this fundamental “truth” for achieving sanctity in the clearest and most unequivocal manner possible, and he therefore continues as follows: “We ought to accustom ourselves to this basic truth till we are steeped in it, until it becomes as familiar to us as the perception of shape or the reading of words.” God is immanent in the world in a pantheistic sense – indeed he is incarnate in the world –  and thus all of our actions bring us in direct contact with him. He therefore meets us in all of our activity, in all of our work, so that man’s work and God’s presence could be considered one and the same: “God, in all that is most living and incarnate in him, is not far away from us, altogether apart from the world we see, touch, hear, smell and taste about us. Rather he awaits us every instant in our action, in the work of the moment. There is a sense in which he is at the tip of my pen, my spade, my brush, my needle-of my heart and of my thought.” (The Divine Milieu – An Essay on the Interior Life, Teilhard de Chardin, Harper & Row New York, p 64) The divine power animating man’s actions thus necessarily, “make man's endeavour holy”. (Ibid., p 65) Like the Talmudic conflation of work and prayer, the activity and work of man is thus turned into an ontologically holy action; it is divine because God’s presence necessarily animates it.

In the sub-section which follows, appropriately titled, “The sanctification of human endeavour”, Chardin starts by outlining the problem purportedly faced by the ordinary Christian who views work as an impediment to the spiritual life, after which he goes on to offer the remedy based on his pantheistic-gnostic principles which we believe is crucial for properly grasping the heretical scope of Chardin’s and Escriba’s “theology of work”: “I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that nine out of ten practising Christians feel that man's work is always at the level of a 'spiritual encumbrance'….Then it is impossible, too, to aim at the deep religious life reserved for those who have the leisure to pray or preach all day long.” (Ibid., p 65) Next, he outlines the ontological basis for the thesis of sanctification by work or the ordinary actions of life from a kind of pseudo-Christian materialism with roots on a pantheistic ontology: “To repeat: by virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see [italics in original]. On the contrary, everything is sacred to the men who can distinguish that portion of chosen being which is subject to Christ's drawing power in the process of consummation.” (Ibid., p 66)

According to this pantheistic thesis, through the creation of the universe God quite literally became “incarnate” in all of matter, whether living or inanimate. All of creation therefore attains an ontologically sacred value; accordingly, and following the gnostic paradigm, nature and grace, the profane and the sacred are all utterly conflated. We here briefly note the passage from Gaudium et Spes no. 22 ceaselessly repeated by Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II to justify his teaching of universal salvation, which only properly attains its significance if understood through the same gnostic-pantheistic perspective which undergirds Chardin’s idea of the divinization of matter through Creation and, more particularly, the Incarnation: “For by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man.”

The efforts of our labour, thus divinized, can work towards the attainment of the Kingdom of Heaven, which accordingly attains immanent, rather than eschatological dimensions. “God’s” Kingdom is right here on earth, contrary to Christ’s well known reply to Pilate described in St John’s Gospel that his Kingdom was not of this earth. With this new immanent perspective in mind, it is in fact in the midst of the Augustinian Earthly City where modern man now seeks to be imbued with “God’s” presence and thereby be sanctified: “Try, with God's help, to perceive the connection-even physical and natural-which binds your labour with the building of the kingdom of heaven; try to realise that heaven itself smiles upon you and, through your works, draws you to itself; then, as you leave church for the noisy streets, you will remain with only one feeling, that of continuing to immerse yourself in God.” (Ibid., p 66)

The next passage seems like a programmatic description of the lay spirituality of Opus Dei which could equally have been uttered in similar terms by the “Founder” himself for apologetic purposes: “Why should there not be men vowed to the task of exemplifying, by their lives, the general sanctification of human endeavour? – men whose common religious ideal would be to give a full and conscious explanation of the divine possibilities or demands which any worldly occupation implies – men, in a word, who would devote themselves, in the fields of thought, art, industry, commerce and politics, etc., to carrying out in the sublime spirit these demands…?” (Ibid., p. 67) Man is now to prostrate himself in wonder and awe before a world that is the embodiment of the sacred, in terms of its matter, or the work and all human efforts carried out therein, which now elevated to divine status is ultimately to be worshipped, rather than the transcendent God: “Right from the hands that knead the dough, to those that consecrate it, the great and universal Host should be prepared and handled in a spirit of adoration.” (Ibid., p 67)

Chardin ends this section with a statement expressing his Utopian hopes for humanity: when men finally are awakened to the reality of the divine presence permeating the universe (God’s “Incarnation”), that is, to “the close bond linking all the movements of this world in the single, all-embracing work of the Incarnation”; then finally, the Heavenly and Earthly Cities will undergo their full reconciliation and the citizens of God’s City will fully embrace their “humanity” as members of the Earthly City which is also their rightful inheritance: “When that comes to pass, there will be little to separate life in the cloister from the life of the world. And only then will the action of the children of heaven (at the same time as the action of the children of the world) have attained the intended plenitude of its humanity.” (Ibid., p 67) This last statement is fully in accordance with the “Founder’s” insistence that the priests of the Work should consider themselves as fully present within the world while adopting a fully lay mentality, thus conflating or entirely blurring the distinction between the religious and lay states.

Like all heretics, Escriba twists and distorts Sacred Scripture to accommodate it to his own distorted theology. The particular passage which Escriba uses as the “key” to demonstrate the all-importance of work as a means of sanctification is Genesis 2:15, where man is placed by God, “into the paradise of pleasure, to dress [ut operaretur, i.e. cultivate] it, and to keep it.” Escriba distorts this passage to mean that man was placed in the Garden of Eden quite simply to work, as if that was somehow his ultimate supernatural end or raison d'être. The catechism has always taught, on the other hand, that God did not create “man in order to work” as Escriba maintained but “to know Him, to love Him, to serve Him and thus to obtain happiness in heaven”. Escriba’s glorification of work as an end in itself for which man was created can also be sharply contrasted with St Ignatius of Loyola’s statement that: “Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.” Nowhere is the word “work” or its derivatives found in the Ignatian anthropological conception of man’s end.

The view of man whose essential function or mission in life is that of work is typically Protestant, and perhaps most particularly, finds a strong precedent in the Calvinist tradition. It is a conception that primarily views life and man from a purely immanent, horizontal plane, where the “vertical” component is left increasingly to the subjective sphere, and driven to its ultimate conclusion, ultimately derives in socialism or Marxism.

The Catholic tradition, on the other hand, rather holds the position that while work can have a redemptive value in so far as it can fulfill a penitential function, it has in any case never erected work as an absolute value necessary for salvation, as Opus Dei does. The weak, the infirm, and the disabled unable to work but nevertheless able to offer their sufferings as a sacrifice in reparation for the sins of the world to the Most High are thus bereft of any effective means of sanctification according to the warped spirituality of the Work. Ironically, the “universal call to holiness” preached by Opus Dei turns out to be restricted to a certain segment of humanity: we see that, in reality, the ability to attain “holiness” depends on the utilitarian value that can be extracted from man’s work.

Accordingly, acceptance as a “numerary” – the highest echelon in the three tiered structure within the Work – is dependent on passing a rigorous medical examination, since a potential future member with serious (or not so serious) underlying health problems poses little utilitarian value. While Escriba and Chardin praised work on its own as a means of sanctification, there was little to no reference to the necessity of charity in their theology. That is, as Dom Georges Frenaud states in his study of Chardin’s theology, citing 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 in support of his assertion: “…it is certain that any natural human action merits eternal salvation only in so far as it is governed and motivated by Charity.”

It was Luther who first severed the necessary link between faith and charity for salvation – he was absolutely emphatic about the fact that charity was superfluous for salvation: it was rather the anthropocentric fact of the assertion of “faith” that granted salvation. In Escriba, “faith” in the “Word” is substituted for “faith” in “work”, carried out for its own sake, while tending to place to one side the love of God to which it must be oriented.

We also note that the negation of charity as necessary for salvation is also an absolutely paradigmatic feature of gnosis in any form. Ironically, Opus Dei itself has no problem with being classified as a religious movement with Protestant antecedents. In fact, professor Martin Rhonheimer in his book Transformación del mundo – La Actualidad del Opus Dei, “The Transformation of the World – The Present State of Opus Dei” (published by Rialp, the Work’s official publishing house!) argues that both Lutheranism and Calvinism rediscovered the religious value of the “ordinary” state of life, and that the Protestant “reformers” were the first to rediscover ordinary life and work as a Christian vocation. Wishing to conflate the supernatural, divine calling, with ordinary life, Luther went as far as changing “calling” or “vocation” [klésis] in his rendition of 1 Corinthians 7:20 (“Let every man abide in the same calling [i.e. vocation] in which he was called.”) for “profession”, in the sense of trade or professional work, and therefore concluded that it was not necessary to adopt the religious state or make vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience in order to attain perfection (here again we see a heretic changing Scripture to conform to an unorthodox understanding of work!). Having noted the Protestant conflation between the divine, supernatural calling, and the ordinary “condition” of life expressed in everyday, ordinary work, is it not apparent that there is a similitude here with the standard mind-set of the average Conciliar priest who views his life not as being fundamentally defined by a supernatural vocation but by the regular terms of any “ordinary” profession, including the priests of Opus Dei with their “lay mentality”?

Luther spoke of salvation through faith, by “grasping” or “seizing” the Word, which for him (as expressed in his theologia crucis) was eminently expressed in the form of the “Crucified God”. For Luther, the “revealed God” is this “Crucified God”, but in esoteric terminology this actually represents the “death” or radical emptying (kenosis) of God as he is “incarnated” into the matter of the universe (e.g. as expressed in Chardin’s essay Mon Univers), a kenosis or “death” of the transcendent that culminates in the Incarnation, where God’s a priori “incarnation” with the human race was materially, visibly expressed. Put another way, the “Crucified God” is a gnostic metaphor for the tragic Theogony of the gnostics, since in gnostic terms, God is viewed not as Being but as dynamic becoming who evolves together with the travails of the universe and man as they move towards “unity” and rise towards their spiritualization, so that God is conflated with the world and its processes.

Therefore, the “salvation” that such “faith” offers is world centered: the believer must cling in “faith” to this world that is an image of the “Crucified God”, and such an act of “faith” would therefore involve an ever increasing sense of love for anything related to the material in the world, which from a gnostic perspective is the visible incarnation of Christ himself: labour, human effort and achievements, progress, and so on. This is the “Christian materialism” which Escriba proclaimed himself to be following. Furthermore, Luther rejects the deus absconditus, the “hidden” transcendent, immaterial God, whom he loathes and despises. Luther’s notion of “faith” in the “Word” ultimately reduces down to a “faith” in the revealed “material” “God”, that is, the “Crucified God”, who, as we have seen, is a gnostic metaphor for the ontological presence of God in the innermost being of all Creation.

Drawn to its ultimate conclusion (and not all Protestants, logically, do reach this point of intellectual progression), therefore, the stuff of the cosmos where “God” is impenetrably hidden is the ultimate “object” of worship for the Lutheran. Hence, “faith” is ultimately “faith in the world” – where “God” himself is “incarnate” – and its processes. This is the pantheistic “divine Host” of the World loved passionately by Escriba and before whom Chardin calls Christians and all believers of any religion to kneel in worship and adoration. Now, “divinization” and “sanctification” means engaging and becoming ever more closely united through work and worldly activity with the source of divinity, which is the world itself.

It was Luther who set the theological basis for Nietzsche’s final proclamation that “God is dead” thus initiating a long centuries long process passing prominently through Hegel. With “God” dead in the post-modern world, it only remains for the universe and Man himself as the pinnacle of creation to be worshipped, as set forth in Gaudium et Spes 12: “According to the almost unanimous opinion of believers and unbelievers alike, all things on earth should be related to man as their center and crown.” The abbé Emmanuel Barbier, writing in 1910, had this to say in L’Infiltration Maçonniques dans l’Église with regards to the gnostic understanding of the “Word” and “incarnation” which confirms everything we have said here: “…the Word, the Divinity has manifested, incarnated itself. Creation is the flesh of the Word, it resides within all creatures; all men are therefore gods in the sense that all men participate in the Divinity to a certain extent. God lives in all men with a real moral presence. The Word is equally present in all rational beings, only the degree of this presence varies, while in Christ the measure of this presence was perfect.”  (p. 202)

I would argue that it is in this gnostic sense that the Work’s and Vatican II’s UNIVERSAL call to holiness must be understood if it is to be understood at all (for there is nothing inherently new in the Church’s universal call to fallen humanity towards holiness with the aid of Christ’s grace and as members of his only Church): this is rather a call for the “universal” man – that is, regardless of whatever his beliefs may be – to strip away those outer layers of imperfection that stain his “human dignity” via a naturalistic “theology of work” which drives him to immerse himself in the world’s divine nature, thus leading man towards the “perfection” that will ultimately reveal his innate but latent divinity. That is, the likeness of God which in traditional Catholic theology was lost due to original sin (while God’s image was wounded or disfigured), remains fully present but is merely “veiled” over by the stain of sin in the new Conciliar theology as expressed by John Paul II.

According to the new heretical view, therefore, it is ultimately man that can and does perfect and redeem both the world and himself. This is the divine “Work” of perfection and divinization derived from the gnostic-Kabbalistic tradition expressed in the “alchemical” opus of divinization of matter or in gnostic-Talmudic principles such as tikkun olam, the Manichaean “lifting” of the “divine sparks”, culminating in the Teilhardian “Omega” point and the full unity from plurality of the universe.



REFERENCES

1. Opus Dei, Peter Berglar, Rialp, p. 320.
2. Tiempo de Caminar, Ana Sastre, Rialp, p. 95.
3. As it pertains to the gnostic theology of Teilhard de Chardin, this has been described by Dom Georges Frenaud in Pensée Philosophique et Religieuse du Pere Teilhard de Chardin, and more generally by Fr Julio Meinvielle in De la Cábala al Progresismo as an essential feature of progressivist gnosis
4. Letters to Léontine Zanta, p 114.
5. “Si no tuvierais vida interior, al dedicaros a vuestro trabajo, en lugar de divinizarlo, os podría suceder lo que sucede al hierro, cuando está rojo y se mete en el agua fría: se destempla y se apaga…etc” San Josemaría, Carta 15-X-1948, n. 20, en E. Burkhart, J. López, Vida cotidiana y santidad en la enseñanza de San Josemaría, III, Rialp, Madrid 2013, p. 210.
6. Mons. Escrivá de Balaguer, Salvador Bernal, Rialp, p. 141.
7. Ibid., p 141.
8. SALVADOR BERNAL, Monseñor Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer. Apuntes sobre la vida del Fundador del Opus Dei; Rialp, Madrid 1980, 6ª ed., p. 306.
9. Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer – Apuntes Sobre la Vida del Fundador del Opus Dei, Chapter 3: “La Fundación del Opus Dei”, Section 3. La Santificacíón del Trabajo, Rialp, Salvador Bernal.
10. Deleted article from opusdei.org site recovered via archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/202102260746...php?p=3007
11. La Filosofía de Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alfonso Pérez de Laborda, Ediciones Encuentro, p 2001, p 157.

[Stone]

OPUS DEI - TROJAN HORSE OF LIBERALISM IN THE CHURCH
PART IV - December 14, 2023
Taken from here. [Slightly adapted - emphasis mine.]



"Saint" José María Escriba y Albás

Opus Dei: “Reconciling” the City of God and the City of Man

“Be not conformed to this world; but be reformed in the newness of your mind, that you may prove what is the good, and the acceptable, and the perfect will of God.” Romans 12:2

Escriba conceived the ideal Christian as a member of both the Heavenly and Earthly Cities, an allusion with clear Augustinian overtones particularly given the religious context in which these allusions were made, while in contrast St Augustine in City of God sets up an irreconcilable, radical antagonism between these two Cities – the City of God and the City of the Devil. This amounts to nothing less than an attempt to reconcile the Church with the liberal principles of the Revolution, so often condemned by the pre-Conciliar pontiffs.

Sacred Scripture is filled with references to the fact that we are here on earth as pilgrims on our way to Heaven, and that therefore our “citizenship” is truly there: “But our conversation [i.e. “citizenship”] is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ…” (Philippians 3:20) St Paul calls us as pilgrims here on earth to look up to heaven for our salvation, where Christ the King reigns. In Hebrews 11:13-16, St Paul mentions that the faith of the Patriarchs called them to confess their “status” of pilgrims here on earth while looking to the future divine promises to be fulfilled in Heaven, of which they were truly its citizens: “All these died according to faith, not having received the promises, but beholding them afar off, and saluting them, and confessing that they are pilgrims and strangers on the earth. For they that say these things, do signify that they seek a country. And truly if they had been mindful of that from whence they came out, they had doubtless time to return. But now they desire a better, that is to say, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for he hath prepared for them a city [i.e. the “Heavenly City”].”

Furthermore, St Paul associates the citizen of this world as the earthly man, while that of heaven as one attached to the heavenly things: “As was the earthly man, so also are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven.” (1 Corinthians 15:48) For St Augustine in City of God (XV, 1) Cain, the fratricide, is the founder of the Earthly City (both from an exegetical and literal perspective, cf Genesis 4:17), while his murdered brother Abel belongs to the City of God; they are both therefore types for the reprobate and the predestinate, respectively. Using the exegetical possibilities of the animal-spiritual sequence alluded to in 1 Corinthians 15:46, Augustine comments that Cain, the founder of the Earthly City, represents those tainted by original sin (“evil and carnal”), while Abel is the type for the souls reborn in Christ (“good and spiritual”). While Cain is, “born a citizen of this world (saeculum)”, Abel is “an alien in this world (peregrinus in saeculo)…predestined by grace, chosen by grace, by grace an alien below, by grace a citizen above.” [1] In trying to reconcile the Heavenly and Earthly Cities, Escriba is therefore taking up the project of liberal Catholicism, which as we saw in Part II was described by Pius IX (lamenting the liberal takeover of France) as that, “which endeavours to unite two principles as repugnant to each other as fire and water.”

The apologists of the Work will argue, of course, that Escriba’s insistence that the Christian should be a citizen of the Earthly City (otherwise described by its semantic equivalents, e.g. City of Man) simply means that he is calling on Catholics not to forego their responsibilities in the affairs of the secular world, whether it be in the political, economic, cultural, or any other field where they may have a positive influence. But such an explanation does not hold water, because Catholics – as Catholics, that is as pilgrims in this valley of tears – have always and everywhere been involved in the secular life of the world which surrounds them, and in the Spanish context in which the Work had its beginnings this was certainly also the case (Catholic movements actively attempting to turn the tide of the Revolution in either the political or religious realms were certainly not lacking).

If Escriba felt an urgency to call on the world’s Catholics to be citizens of both Cities, that is simply because, in the sense in which he expressed these ideas, this was a call entirely novel to Catholic ears. That is, if he had expressed his ideas regarding the “City of Man” in any way which could have been construed according to an orthodox understanding already then in circulation, then he would have simply been stating the obvious. But we know that Catholics in the early days of Opus Dei recognized that Escriba was not merely “stating the obvious” because a suspicion of heresy hung over the “Founder” himself since the start, going as far as being denounced before the Holy Office, as we saw in Part I of this study.

Therefore, Escriba’s talk of the two Cities must be understood within the liberal framework of ideas in which he expressed them, and it is through these “lenses” in which his insistence that Christians should also be members of the Earthly City should be understood. Escriba was conjuring up a new, revolutionary thesis of which his followers would later openly boast about, hence his calls for Catholics to take up now what had been condemned before – all of it hidden under a façade of “reactionary”, even “traditional” Catholicism that cunningly masked its revolutionary nature all the more efficaciously. Moreover, particularly in the context of Spanish Catholicism, Escriba would have been keenly aware of the deeply theologically charged nature of the concept of the “two Cities”. In the early stages of the Civil War the Spanish bishop (later Cardinal Primate) Enrique Plá y Deniel wrote a pastoral letters called, Las Dos Ciudades – “The two Cities”. Bishop Plá charged the communist-anarchist republican coalition of being “sons of Cain” – whose spiritual seed also constituted the members of the Earthly City according St Augustine.

In a letter from 1945, Esriba linked membership of both Cities with the priestly and fully lay outlook or mentality that he called on his followers to adopt: “In everything we do we must all of us (priests and lay people) have a truly priestly soul and a fully lay outlook, if we are to understand and use in our personal lives that freedom which we enjoy in the sphere of the Church and in temporal things, considering ourselves at one and the same time citizens of the CITY OF GOD and citizens of the CITY OF MAN.” [2] As Escriba expressed it in his infamous homily delivered at the University of Navarra from October 8, 1967, the locus for the unholy union of the Heavenly and the Earthly Cities in his followers must be the heart itself – the center of our deepest and most intimate desires, hopes, and aspirations: “Across the line of the horizon Heaven and Earth appear to merge. But no, where they truly merge is in your hearts, when you live in a holy manner ordinary life…”

In a letter from 1944 on the occasion of the first priestly ordination, Escriba highlighted the importance of the intimate union between the priestly soul and the lay mentality, calling it the “foundation” of the Work: “I want all of my children, priests and laity, to engrave firmly in your head and in your heart a reality that we cannot consider in any way as something merely external, but that is, on the contrary, the hinge and foundation of our divine vocation.” Escriba was thus drilling into the minds of his adepts that even priests too, were without doubt also members of the same “City of Man” he would allude to one year later. (God forbid his followers should have thought then priests are consecrated souls, set apart from the world for His divine service!) A later letter from 1955 further highlights the all-important link between the priestly and lay outlooks for members of Opus Dei, thus conflating the sacred and the profane similarly to Chardin in Le Milieu Divin as we saw in Part II: “Since the work of Opus Dei is eminently lay, and the priesthood informs the whole of Opus Dei with its spirit; and since the work of lay people and that of priests complement one another and mutually benefit each other, our vocation requires that all members of the Work manifest this intimate union between the two elements in such a way that each is to have a truly priestly soul and a fully lay mentality.” [3]

Christ was certainly not part of the lay “foundation” of the priestly apostolate in Opus Dei, because contrary to Escriba’s insistence that his priests adopt a strictly lay, secular mind-set – that is, that they be of the world, taking up a comfortable place amidst the Earthly City, He said: “If you had been of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you..” (John 15:19) From this we can reasonably argue that, Escriba, the priest passionately infatuated with the world, was spectacularly successful in spreading his apostolate in the post-war Catholic world because he was able to find an ever increasing number of Catholics ready to give an ear to Opus Dei’s priests who they could acclaim as “its own”. That is, priests offering lukewarm faithful (who were at the very least already tainted with modernist and liberal tendencies) a comfortable liberal spirituality that would not require them to be set apart from the world, and who were thus only too happy to join the Conciliar Church in its embrace of the Earthly City, particularly as set out in Gaudium et Spes. Escriba’s tirades against clericalism and his insistence that Christians be citizens of the two Cities seems to have had a long history: as far back as a letter from 1932, we find him denouncing the “clericalism” which purportedly runs roughshod over the legitimate rights of the State. These abuses must be, according to Escriba, corrected by means of “the laity, who feel that they are sons of God and citizens of the two Cities [!].” [4]

To those who have not yet given up on the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction this attempt to reconcile the two radical opposites inherent in the two Cities seems like an absurd, impossible enterprise. In fact, as patently absurd as the attempt to conciliate the Church with the principles of the Revolution, which is to say, the Church with the liberal principles condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX (achieved by the Conciliar Church at Vatican II, according to Joseph Ratzinger), or in sum, to reconcile “Christ and Belial” (Leo XIII, Custodi Di Quella Fede, 1892). The reconciliation of opposites, coincidentia oppositorum, is a typically gnostic-Kabbalistic paradigm that in modern times was expounded at great length by the overtly neo-gnostic and Luciferian “psychologist” Carl Jung (who also took an avid interest in alchemy, incidentally). Following this gnostic-Kabbalistic paradigm, therefore, the Work and the Conciliar Church are working to be reconciled with the liberal principles of modern civilization such as it has been set up by the lodges. As regards the Catholic Church, this is an impossible task, of course, because we have Christ’s promise that the gates of Hell will never prevail over the Church. But the attempt at this reconciliation which Opus Dei and the modernists have been working on tirelessly for decades does not mean, of course, that this could not result in some grotesque parody of the authentic Church being set up by worldly, faithless men masquerading as “conservatives” but thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the world, or quite simply, by flaming liberals and explicit apostates of the Bergoglian variety no longer hiding under the mask of an ostensible orthodoxy.

Accordingly, in his homily from 1967 delivered at the University of Navarra (aptly titled by Opus Dei themselves as “Passionately Loving the World”), José María, viewing himself as both a citizen of the Earthly and Heavenly cities, criticizes those Christians who turn their backs upon the world and its spirit, that is, those whose worldview is still defined by the age old Christian spirit of contemptus mundi memorably expressed by Thomas à Kempis (“This is the highest wisdom: to despise the world and to aspire to the kingdom of Heaven.”):

“When things are seen in this way, the Temple becomes the place par excellence of the Christian life; and being a Christian therefore means going to the temple, participating in the sacred ceremonies, being engrained in an ecclesiastical environment, a sort of segregated environment that presents itself as the antechamber of heaven, while the ordinary world walks its own path. The Christian doctrine, the life of grace, would therefore pass along as if barely touching the busy progression of human history, but without ever meeting it [directly].”

In the same homily, Escriba contrasts this purportedly erroneous view of Christianity (ordinarily associated by modernists as a “medieval mind-set” still attached to the principles of Scholasticism) with that of the laity he wishes to see formed in the Church, represented by the “man who knows that the world – and not only the temple – is the place of his encounter with Christ”, and is therefore someone who “loves that world.” Teilhard de Chardin in Le Milieu Divin similarly expressed concern that those Christians who (according to Escriba) remained in a “segregated environment” might stifle the course of human progress: “There was reason to fear, as we have said, that the introduction of christian perspectives might seriously upset the ordering of human action; that the seeking after, and waiting for, the kingdom of heaven might deflect human activity from its natural tasks, or at least entirely eclipse any interest in them.” [5]

The followers of Opus Dei must eschew anything that smacks too strongly of “clericalism” and have the spirit of the world engrained in their very bones, from which it follows that they must adapt all of their actions and demeanour to worldly standards. In the aforementioned 1967 homily Escriba also said, “NOTHING distinguishes my sons from his fellow citizens” (!). The ideal “Christian” for Escriba therefore should become as if a mirror image of the world which surrounds him, whose liberal values and mentality he will ultimately adopt, either wittingly or unwittingly. Escriba envisages an ideal “Christian” who in his comfortable adaptation to the world cannot possibly be the, “salt of the earth”, and who could neither let his, “light shine before men” so that seeing his good works others may “glorify your Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:13,16). These are the same essential thoughts he had already expressed nearly thirty years before: “We must have a harsh piety, we must speak and act with the words and actions corresponding to an ordinary Christian who remains within the environment that surrounds him. We cannot separate ourselves from the world…. The habits of others must be our own. Let us therefore remove from our exterior [appearances] – in our language, in our conduct – any strange movement, that should make us stand out from the environment in which we must act.” [6]

It was also in his infamous 1967 homily when Escriba publicly manifested his passionate love for the world, “I AM A SECULAR PRIEST: PRIEST OF JESUS CHRIST, WHO LOVES PASSIONATELY THE WORLD.” Vázquez de la Prada in his book El Fundador del Opus Dei [7] highlights this same aspect of the personality of the “Founder”: “He loved the world dearly.” Commenting on Psalm 44, verse 11 (“Hearken, O daughter, and see, and incline thy ear: and forget thy people and thy father's house.”), St Robert Bellarmine says that the latter part of this passage refers to the fact that the Church, which has come out of the world, is to “forget” this world: “'forget thy people and thy father’s house,’ that you may the more freely serve your spouse, and forget the world and the things that belong to it, for the Church has been chosen from the world, and has come out from it; and though it is still in the world, it ought no more belong to it than does its spouse. By the world, is very properly understood the people who love the things of the world, which same world is the mansion of our old father Adam, who was driven into it from paradise. The word ‘forget’ has much point in it, for it implies that we must cease to love the world so entirely and so completely, as if we had totally forgotten that we were ever in it, or that it had any existence.”

Similarly, the Argentinian Fr Julio Meinvielle [8] in La Iglesia y el Mundo Moderno (“The Church and the Modern World”) describes the genuine attitude that the Christian should adopt with respect to the world. In contrast to Escriba’s infatuation with the world, the Church exhorts us to, “despise worldly things and to love heavenly ones: ‘Terrena despicere et amare celestia’…” This rejection of the world, Fr Meinvielle says, “does not allude to an ontological but to a mystical contempt.” That is, the world itself as God’s creation (the ontological aspect, which is good) is not to be despised. The “mystical contempt” for the world refers to the Earthly City with its unholy trinity of allurements traditionally referred to as “the world, the devil, and the flesh.” This is the Earthly City that is ruled by “the god of this world”, that is Satan, who “hath blinded the minds of unbelievers.” (2 Corinthians 4:4). This mystical contempt also refers, because of our fallen human nature, to the spiritual attitude adopted by the citizens of the Heavenly City who are most characteristically defined by, “the love of God, reaching to contempt of self” (City of God, XIV, 28). Meinvielle continues, “But this is a profound and total mystical contempt, as it is explained extensively and wisely by St John of the Cross in ‘The Ascent to Mount Carmel’, where he shows that the active and passive nights of the senses and the spirit imply a total emptying of the soul from any affection to creatures so that they can be filled only by God.”

José María’s passionate love for the world, very interestingly – but not at all surprisingly – finds a remarkable parallel in Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit heresiarch from whom he quite possibly plagiarized his apostolate of “sanctification” through work. In the introduction to Le Milieu Divin, Pierre Leroy, S. J., says: “People who were shocked by him never realised how deep lay the roots of this simultaneous love of God and of the world. ‘Throughout my whole life,’ he wrote, ‘during every moment I have lived, the world has gradually been taking on light and fire for me, until it has come to envelop me in one mass of luminosity, glowing from within… The purple flush of matter fading imperceptibly into the gold of spirit, to be lost finally in the incandescence of a personal universe.’ ” [9] The ontological basis for his ardent love of the world appears to be his pantheistic conflation of the world with Christ, and given the similarity, even identity between Chardin’s and Escriba’s conception of “sanctification” through we work (as we described in Part III of this study), we believe there is good reason to believe this would equally apply to Escriba. Dom Georges Frenaud, in his work Pensée Philosophique et Religieuse du Pere Teilhard de Chardin reports a letter from Chardin to the early Modernist Maurice Blondel where he writes: “Christ must be loved as a World, or rather as the World, that is to say, as the physical centre imposed on everything that must survive from Creation.” [10]

“Saint” José María Escriba y Albás became perhaps the first and only priest in modern history to literally buy a title of nobility (“Marquis of Peralta”) to which he could not make any legitimate claim whatsoever based on his family ancestry. Does this scandalous fact indicate that he actually believed, that above all, the Christian striving for sanctity should despise worldly things and love heavenly ones: Terrena despicere et amare celestia, as the Church exhorts all Christians, or that he was more concerned with accumulating the vain honours and titles granted by the Earthly City? We believe rather that this was the very practical consequence of the radically liberal lay mentality of a proud man who proclaimed before a global audience to loving “passionately” the world, and in practical terms called on his followers to do likewise through his obsessive calls for them to adopt a liberal attitude of openness and reconciliation with the world.

Can Escriba’s embrace of the Earthly City possibly be viewed as a tertium quid for the Christian? According to the Augustinian vision, such a “third” path embracing both Cities is not possible, and thus Johannes van Oort in Jerusalem and Babylon says: “Not once did Augustine mention an independent, neutral area between the two cities, a city of man. But he did repeat emphatically that there are only two cities.” [11] So, although in an ontological sense there are indeed only two cities, in the present world or age (hoc saeculum), they are intermingled and it is only in the last judgment that they will be separated (Matthew 13:30) and their radical anti-thesis will be fully revealed. Further, Augustine uses saeculum in a pejorative sense, and indeed this world is anti-thetical to the future one. [12] While, as has been noted, there is no neutral area between the two cities, nevertheless, Opus Dei (and the adepts of the Conciliar Church) pretend that they can “stand” somewhere in the middle as neutral agents between the City of God and the City of the Devil, engaging in “dialogue” (e.g. ecumenical or political) and “cooperation” with the forces working against the Church and Christ, in the financial, political, cultural, and even pseudo-“scientific” fields.

All of these misguided efforts would be carried towards the construction of the Wojtylian and Utopian “Civilization of Love” without Christ and the Church as its sole foundation. In reality, this embrace of the two Cities is an attempt to “baptize” modern civilization, or put another way, the Revolution, whose daughter it is. And as we noted earlier in Part II, Msgr Delassus in L’Américanisme et la Conjuration Antichrétienne writes that this is nothing else than the work of men of weak faith who do not believe that our faith can indeed “overcome the world” (1 John 5:4), while calling on Christians to take up the banner of Pius IX’s Syllabus as the anti-dote to reverse the course of the Revolutionary principles infiltrating into the Church [13]. It is possible that the Dragon in Revelation 12:17 who stands on the shores of the sea – neither fully in the land (representing the solidity and sure ground of the faith), nor fully in the sea (representing the turbulent forces of the world and its nations working against the Church) is an image of the Dragon who must gather up forces whose origin lies in both Cities (because, as we have pointed out, there is no tertium quid) before he can finally conjure up the Beast rising out of the sea (Revelation 13:1). In other words, this eschatological event will not happen until a pseudo-religious movement arises comprising characteristics of both Cities, which will occur when the consummation of the “marriage” between the Earthly City and a parody or satanic counterfeit of the City of God takes place. The liberal, modernist spirit and gnosis of the post-Conciliar Revolution that seeks to reconcile the City of God and the City of Man, which includes the spirituality of the Work and Vatican II, therefore, appear as key instruments leading up to Revelation 13:1

The sad reality of history clearly demonstrates that compromise with the modern world (that is, the Earthly City) leads to the utter decomposition of Christian civilization. Hence, when Escriba proudly called himself a citizen of the City of God and City of Man, wishing to embrace both poles in an attempt as absurd as trying to square the circle, whether he realized it or not, he was moving Christian civilization precisely towards this rot and decay. The insidious infiltration of Opus Dei in Spanish society during the Franco regime, which initially emerged out of the civil war with a spirit of unprecedented religious fervour not seen perhaps in centuries, is a testament to the “rotting” influence of attempting to reconcile Christian civilization with liberalism. According to María Angustias Moreno in La Otra Cara del Opus Dei, government ministers for Franco’s cabinet – more often than not holding the most important posts – were routinely selected out of the central office of Opus Dei in Madrid and delivered to the Generalísimo for approval. Opus Dei personally took it upon themselves to ensure that the Franco regime faithfully put the Conciliar revolution into practical action, and accordingly, member Laureano López Rodó, who at one point held the important post of minister of foreign affairs in an audience with Franco from December 15, 1965 insisted that: “The reforms demanded by the Conciliar documents is a banner that we cannot allow to be taken away from us.” [14] Let us see what the erudite Fr Meinvielle had to say about the long-lasting influence of Opus Dei in Spain:

“The anti-communist Crusade of ‘36 was the most promising hope [for constructing a Christian state in Europe], where ‘requetés’ [(infantrymen of the traditionalist ‘Carlist’ monarchical movement)] and Falangists opposed with the bravery of lions the judeo-communist advance, stopping then this danger over Western Europe.  But it was then when the Jewish people learned only one lesson: the Hispanic race is invincible only, and only if confronted head-on. It can be betrayed if one succeeds in providing a properly dosed treatment of ‘Christianity and modern world’, with which, under the appearance of apostolate, the viruses against religion and patriotism are inoculated. Such was to be the mission of ‘Opus Dei’ in Franco's Spain. The heroic Spain of ‘36 has been utterly brutalized and debased and, today in the decade of the 70's, has been completely gained over for the Jewish world.” [15]

Perhaps there is no better example which demonstrates the practical outcome of the liberal, non-confessional mentality of the Work than its political action behind the scenes during the last years of the Franco regime. Here we find that the very prominent numerary Rafael Calvo Serer – personally known by the “Founder” – was one of the most significant personalities in the so called “Transición” (“Transition”) which transitioned Spain from a so called “dictatorship” to a liberal-style “constitutional” and “democratic” monarchy entirely founded on the principles of the Revolution. This action led to the formation of the “Junta Democrática”, a conglomeration of political movements and intellectuals looking to take the political initiative in post-Franco Spain, in which the two most influential figures were the leader of the Spanish Communist Party, Santiago Carrillo, and Opus Dei numerary Rafael Calvo Serer. It is not merely that these two figures happened to be “founding” members of the same political movement (and that would have been bad enough), but it is something more than that: they were the two most visible figures actually cooperating in friendly terms towards the same liberal vision for Spain. This cooperation was visibly seen in quite explicit terms for all the world to see on July 29, 1974 at the Intercontinental Hotel in Paris when the “Junta Democrática” was first launched in a press conference. Both Carrillo and Calvo Serer presided over the event as they sat next to each other, thus showing their unity of intention, and were also seen standing next to each other shoulder to shoulder, as can be seen in the photo below:

Santiago Carrillo (left) and Rafael Calvo Serer (right) standing shoulder to shoulder during the presentation of the "Junta Democrática"

To fully understand the sinister significance of these images and this remarkable event one must bear in mind that the Communist onslaught less than forty years earlier during the Civil War had presided over the greatest massacre of Christians in Spain since the Diocletian persecutions, exhibiting a level of hatred towards anything Christian matching anything seen during the Bolshevik revolution, and in some cases perhaps even exceeding it. At least, the fratricidal element in the Spanish Civil war was arguably greater than during its Russian counterpart, which involved an overwhelming Jewish majority in the Bolshevik party structures presiding over the persecution of the Orthodox faithful.

In Spain, it was generally a case of former Catholics overseeing the cruel persecution of their former brethren with a level of hatred reminiscent of the Jacobin persecution of the Catholics of the Vendée. And yet here was a very prominent Opus Dei numerary, during the “Founder’s” own lifetime, actively cooperating with communists whose hands were still drenched in the blood of Spanish Christian martyrs for the liberal self-destruction of Spain. Fr Meinvielle’s assessment of the insidious influence of Opus Dei in Spain was confirmed here – an event that occurred after his death, which according to some occurred under suspicious circumstances –, utterly and completely. Calvo Serer’s actions must necessarily have been carried out with the implicit or explicit blessing of the “Father”, because as past experience had shown such as in the case of numerary priest Raimundo Pannikar, anyone who dared to step “out of line” from the directives issued by Opus Dei was promptly “excommunicated” from the sect.

Escriba could quietly sit back and smile in his office at Opus Dei headquarters in Rome while he let Calvo Serer free reign to work towards the dismemberment of Catholic Spain, all in the name of the holy “liberty” which Escriba purportedly guaranteed his followers in order to engage in whatever political movements they deemed worthwhile. Thus in the name of a liberal Catholicism Opus Dei sees no problem cooperating with those partaking of the Utopian, anti-Christian dreams of modernity, and hence Bernal says that: “Since the Work's beginnings, and not only since the Council, they have tried to practice a liberal ["abierto", i.e. "open"] Catholicism that defends the legitimate freedom of consciences leading to relations of fraternal charity with all men, whether Catholic or not, and to collaborate with everyone, [thereby] taking part in the various noble dreams that move humanity.” [16]

In this 1974 meeting of the “Junta Democrática”, the practical meaning of Opus Dei’s somewhat opaque lay and liberal “theology” was thus demonstrated: Escriba was quite happy to see his Work embrace the most hostile forces of the Earthly City – the Communist party – all under the pretext of working towards the liberalization and “democratization” of Spain after Franco’s death. It was the adulterous “marriage” of a purportedly Catholic movement with the City of the Devil. As we have already pointed out referencing Msgr Delassus, such action is the work of faithless men who do not believe in the power of our faith to overcome the world (1 John 5:4), or perhaps, who simply do not wish that it do so because they are content to be and remain as citizens of the Earthly City themselves. The opaqueness and heterodox colouring of the teachings of Opus Dei, much like those of Vatican II, are best interpreted by carefully scrutinizing their praxis and action; to demonstrate the clear validity of this, even John Paul II later admitted that the apostasy at Assisi in 1986 visibly and tangibly communicated to the Catholic world was the practical consequence of the Conciliar “magisterium”. Similarly, the political meddling of Opus Dei in the last years of the Franco regime and during the post-Franco years which led to the revolutionary transformation of Spain from an officially Catholic country to one where liberalism reigned supreme is the practical consequence of Escriba’s radically liberal, non-confessional lay apostolate.

Opus Dei was therefore one of the main actors moving a Spain that was admittedly in the process of Catholic disintegration – but nevertheless, still retaining for the most part its Catholic essence – towards a country officially constituted on the basis of a lay, liberal political existence. However, Spain, perhaps more than any other nation, due to its history is defined almost ontologically by its Catholicism. Many have argued that once Spain loses the faith which gave it birth, the essence of Spain disappears; what remains is a shell of its former self, a mere political entity known by that name. The Bishop of Salamanca, Enrique Plá y Deniel, author of the pastoral letter, Las Dos Ciudades (30 de septiembre de 1936), “The Two Cities” in support of the nationalist uprising against the forces of anarcho-communism and basing himself on texts from St Robert Bellarmine and Thomas Aquinas had defined the national conflict as a crusade (which was confirmed later by Pius XII). (We note the Augustinian theme of the two Cities which serves as the overarching theme for his arguments.) In the letter, he had described “the communists and anarchists” as “sons of Cain, fratricides of their brothers, envious of those who honour virtue and for that they are murdered and martyred,” and further stating bluntly that “a secular Spain is no longer Spain.” [17] Cardinal Gomá of Toledo, primate of Spain, in his pastoral letter from 23 November (“El Caso de España”) expressed himself in similar terms: “This extremely cruel war is fundamentally a war of principles, of doctrines, one concept of life and society against another, of one civilization against another. It is a war that the Christian and Spanish spirit is carrying out against this other spirit – if it can be called a spirit – which would like to merge all that is human, from the heights of human thinking to the smallest details of daily living, within the mold of Marxist materialism.”

Adolfo Suarez, an Opus Dei member with an insatiable lust for power, presided over the “masonization” of Spain after Franco’s death, beginning with the legalization of the communist party and Freemasonry in 1978, and promptly followed in the following years by the legalization of divorce (this, not merely with the acquiescence, but with the complicity of a modernist hierarchy) and abortion. Fr Meinvielle’s assessment of a Spain in 1973 de facto politically dominated by Opus Dei, still during the era of Franco’s regime, actually fell extremely short of the moral, political, and even (following as a necessary consequence) economic decay that would follow in a few short years.

Today, according to official statistics, less than 60% of Spaniards identify as Catholics, which of course is no indication with regards to how many among that percentage actually believe, let alone practice the real faith. Today, amidst rampant apostasy, a crumbling economy, and widespread corruption – both moral and political – Spain is rushing at break neck speed towards becoming a Venezuelan style, corrupt socialist dictatorship. St Pius X in Notre Charge Apostolique said that the Sillon, which sought to reconcile the Gospel with the Revolution [18], brought “socialism in its train”. The fundamental premise which underlies this statement proved to be prophetically true in the case of Spain: a host of modernist “Catholic” groups endorsing the same liberal principles of the Sillon (“The Neo-Catechumenal Way”, radical Jesuits, etc, but most prominently Opus Dei, of course, largely due to its financial and political weight) and a hierarchy permeated by the modernist spirit of Vatican II have been responsible for spearheading the liberal, revolutionary transformation of Spain from a bastion of Catholicism into a modernist wasteland where Freemasonic principles reign supreme, so that they, just like the Sillon, have indeed brought “socialism” as part of the same liberal “train”.


REFERENCES

1. Augustine’s City of God – A Reader’s Guide, Gerard O’Daly, Oxford University Press, 2020, p 190.
2.  Josemaría Escrivá, Letter of February 2, 1945, no. 1, cited by Jose Luis Illanes, “The Church in the world: the secularity of the members of Opus Dei”, in Opus Dei in the Church, p. 165
3. Letter, March 28, 1955, no. 3. cited in The Canonical Path of Opus Dei, p. 271.
4. “Es preciso, hijos míos, combatir estos dos abusos por medio de seglares, que se sientan y sean hijos de Dios y ciudadanos de las dos Ciudades, etc” (Escriba y Albás, letter from 9-I-1932)
5. Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, p 64.
6. Crecer para adentro: LAS BODAS DE CANÁ (11-VII-1937).
7. Vázquez de la Prada, Opus Dei, Rialp, p. 420.
8. Fr. Julio Meinvielle (1905-1973), author of works such as De Lammenais a Maritain, La Cosmovisión de Teilhard de Chardian, is perhaps best known in the Hispanic world for his important work describing the gnostic influence in progressivism, De La Cábala al Progresismo [“From the Kabbalah to Progressivism”].
9. Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, p 13.
10. Archives de Philos., tom. XXIV, cahier 1, p. 135).” DOM GEORGES FRENAUD, “PENSÉE PHILOSOPHIQUE ET RELIGIEUSE DU PERE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN”.
11. Jerusalem and Babylon – A Study of Augustine’s City of God and the Sources of his Doctrine of the Two Cities, Johannes van Oort, Brill, 1990, p. 151.
12.Ibid, p. 152.
13. L’Américanisme et la Conjuration Antichrétienne, Msgr Henri Delassus, p 383.
14. “Las reformas exigidas por los documentos conciliares es una bandera que no podemos dejarnos arrebatar.” (López Rodó, 1990, 591), Extracted from Santos y Pillos by Joan Estruch.
15. In 1974, the “Dictio” publishing house edited in a single volume three works of Fr Meinvelle: La concepción católica de la política, Los tres pueblos bíblicos en su lucha por la dominación del mundo and El comunismo en la Argentina. The cited segment is found in p. 292 of the mentioned single volume.
16. Opus Dei, Peter Berglar, p. 247.
17. Bishop of Salamanca Enrique Plá y Deniel, pastoral letter Las Dos Ciudades (30 de septiembre de 1936): “los comunistas y anarquistas”…“hijos de Cain, fratricidas de sus hermanos, envidiosos de los que hacen un culto a la virtud y por ello les asesinan y les martirizan”…“una España laica ya no es España.”
18. St Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique: “…leur idéal étant apparenté à celui de la Révolution, ils ne craignent pas de faire entre l’Évangile et la Révolution des rapprochements blasphématoires qui n’ont pas l’excuse d’avoir échappé à quelque improvisation tumultueuse.”