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Heavens above: the sex bomb, Opus Dei and why Benedict
is now the prisoner of the Vatican
By Richard Cottrell
Contributing writer for End the
Lie
The former pope in Fatima, Portugal
in 2010 (Image credit: Catholic Church (England and Wales)/Flickr)
How ironic that a set of backward
creeds which have nothing to do with the apostolic message of Jesus may destroy
the Roman Church. The conception of sex as an original sin flowed from the complicated
personality of Paul of Tarsus, the greatest PR genius in history, who
single-handedly created the Roman Church, the Vatican and the succession of
celibate priests known as popes, the earthly representatives of God incarnate.
Note: the views expressed here are
solely those of the author
Paul may well have been gay, who
knows at this distance in time. He was certainly in permanent neutral gear when
it came to the fumbling business of sex. He was rigorously ascetic and a
dedicated misogynist, which led him to the conclusion that if the minds of men
(note, men) were not diverted by animistic stirrings, they would better
concentrate on the job of building heaven on earth.
That is how we come to the present
disarray in the Vatican. Joseph Ratzinger, 111th Vicar of
Christ was advised early in February by the Holy See’s inner counsels to resign
ahead of huge new claims for compensation arising from abuse by prelates
reaching the courts as a massive, global class action. Moreover as chief executive
of the church, he was told that he might himself prove liable for charges of
complicity and therefore open to arrest. Benedict’s problem, as with his
predecessors, was the dual nature of the Vatican as a cradle of faith and a
recognised state with lay responsibilities.
In 2005 these twin faucets came
together when Benedict was accused directly of personally attempting to
sabotage an abuse case involving three young boys in the Archdiocese of
Houston, Texas. The lawsuit called for his arrest and detention, deterred by
his plea of immunity as a head of state – and perhaps a call George Bush put in
from the White House.
Suffer little children
Ratzinger’s ascent on the Vatican
ladder of promotion is directly connected to both the Sex Bomb and a secretive
internal hard-line Catholic sect known as Opus Dei. In 2001 Pope John Paul II,
thoroughly alarmed at the tsunami of abuse cases reaching the Vatican, shook up
the internal bureaucracy which hitherto examined each claim. So the
German cardinal and former member of the Hitler Youth was placed in charge of a
special and largely secret holy office, with the chief responsibility of
closing down the scandals.
Ratzinger interpreted his brief as
covering up as many cases as possible, given that St.Peter’s Pence had paid
outstanding claims for damages in the area of $30 billion, the tip, as everyone
in the Vatican knew perfectly well, of the true extent of the sickness
afflicting the church. Ratzinger’s chief tactic was wearing down
complainants, many of whom stated they had been directly bullied and threatened
by high church officials. Those who had followed Ratzinger’s rise were not
surprised since they recognised his usual handiwork confronted with abuse cases
in his own homeland.
Ratzinger was fighting on two
fronts, the internal rampant homosexuality among the priestly battalions, and
perverse and evil things in the vestry involving adolescents and younger children.
The argument that the one fuels the other is not automatic. It is no crime to
be gay, yet the stories now coming to the surface demonstrate that Catholic
seminaries are foremost recruiting hostels for same-sex encounters, rather than
training to spread the Gospel.
A few lone voices within the Holy
See counselled Christian atonement, the creation of a dedicated area of the
church administration designated to investigate every claim and reach
appropriate compensation. But this of course also amounts to confession, which
if popular on Sundays among the multitude, is not one of the Roman Church’s
noted leading precepts.
What the butler saw
The fuse which led to the current
eruption beneath the Holy See began with the sensational Vatileaks Affair, early
in 2012. Senior ‘princes of the church’ supported by lower ranks of the clergy
and so-called small fry in the ranks of the bureaucracy leaked highly
embarrassing top secret documents concerning the sex scandals wracking the Holy
See. The affair was decorated with a lively Vatican ‘deep throat’ feeding
the Roman media and the gossip mill with juicy morsels describing rifts,
backbiting and plots revolving around St Peter’s Throne.
The customary patsy duly appeared.
He was the pope’s highly trusted manservant, 40-year-old Paolo Gabriele,
arrested by the papal police on charges of stealing sensitive documents from
the pope’s apartment, thrown into the tiny Vatican state prison, ritually
excoriated, sentenced, then absolved. Rather heavy treatment on the scale meted
out to Galileo for a minor footman who was obviously acting on the commands of
an internal resistance movement arming themselves with compromising secrets.
At the best of times the Vatican is
a seething vipers’ nest of plots and conspiracies. Parallels with the struggles
for control of the former Soviet Politburo are not inapt. The latest bout of
turmoil centred not so much on the incumbent pope as a far wider struggle for
the soul of the church itself, and even the survival of the Catholic religion.
In this scenario Benedict was a pawn, an observer of events and certainly not a
manipulator.
In the wake of Vatileaks, Ratzinger
drifted into brooding isolation, rarely stepping outside his apartment except
when summoned on official duties, his conversation limited to pleasantries
exchanged with the nuns and servants looking after his quarters. A little
over a year from the scandal bursting into the headlines, he was gone, almost
it seemed in a puff of holy smoke. It is quite extraordinary how skilled commentators
and church-watchers – especially in Italy – ignored the seamless connection
which led to the precipitate fall of the Bishop of Rome.
Benedict XVI did not retire because
he was old, infirm, or just exhausted. He was the victim of a brilliantly organised,
long-playing coup d’état, a putsch conducted within the cloisters of the Holy
City by papal strong men associated with the highly secretive and powerful
‘church within a church’ known and feared as Opus Dei – the Work of God.
Who pulled the trigger?
Practically speaking, the
unfortunate Ratzinger himself.
After Vatileaks, he appointed an
exclusive commission headed by the hefty Spanish cardinal, Julian Harranz
Casado, formerly president of the internal censors responsible for the purity
of Catholic canon law. He is also a leading light in Opus Dei, which John Paul
II invested as his own ‘personal prelature.’ Opus Dei reflects many
physiognomies of lay-world cults like the Moonies and Scientology, demanding
exceptional levels of purity and mass unquestioning obedience, not excluding
self-mortification and Stasi-like tactics of snooping and prying on worshippers
outside the organisation.
The movement demands absolute
obedience to its inspirational founder, a charismatic Spanish priest called
Escrivá de Balaguer, who started Opus Dei in 1928. This highly equivocal figure
grew to such eminence he was more than once unkindly compared to the truly
ungodly L. Ron Hubbard, patron saint of Scientology. Following his death in
1975, he was, by the customary slothful standards, beatified at lightning pace
once John Paul II was safely on St Peter’s Throne. Seventeen years is breaking
the speed of light in the Vatican.
Yet the elevation was marked by
cantankerous disputes, protests and bouts of fury aimed at the rushed
beatification, the veracity of the essential miraculous cures and the
personality of Escrivá himself, described by his many fulsome critics as venal,
intolerant, harsh towards subordinates, bearing closet pro-Nazi and Francoist
sympathies. With an eye to the future the signs of schism were clearly
apparent.
Opus Dei’s modest accredited
membership – probably about 100,000 worldwide, out of 1.2 billion communicants,
is outweighed in terms of spiritual and political power thanks to its
concentrated Soviet cell-like structure and the intense potency of Spanish
Messianic Catholicism on which the movement draws. Even the Jesuits are
prone to shrink in its shadow.
Harranz Casado is Opus Dei’s own
pope and but for his ripe years (83) might have been a pope in waiting. It was
he who organised the secret off-radar conclaves in safe houses dotted around
Rome that duly raised their man Ratzinger – a fellow traveller of Opus Dei but
not a formal acolyte – to the papacy, at a venerable 76 and therefore likely to
enjoy a conveniently brief reign.
A little over three weeks ago
Harranz Casado came to the papal apartment on an important mission. He brought
with him a bulky secret file containing his findings on the Vatileaks affair
and the subsequent fall-out in terms of church and global politics. Harranz
Casado warned the pope that he might face a subpoena from an ‘important state’
and the argument of immunity might not hold. Better not to let matters travel
that far, for the good of the church. In the event of resigning, then his
immunity might be tested if he stepped outside the Vatican, where he must
remain for his own safety, even as a virtual prisoner.
After his last audience, the now
ex-pope flew to the Vatican’s retreat at Castel Gondolfo in the hills close to
Rome in the safety of a helicopter. The prisoner was now at bay in the castle
of comfort.
The Vatican’s Civil Wars
Schism is the state of normality
within the Vatican. The famous fracas 600 years ago, that saw three popes
tussling for the throne, does offer uncanny clues as to what is happening
today. Once again there are three factions who would have their man as
Pontiff: the traditional conservatives, the largely isolated moderates champing
for change and modernization and Opus Dei, which seeks to return to intensely
spiritual values – and strict discipline in the ranks.
Against that background the mushroom
cloud of the Sex Bomb. The fallout will be toxic. The Roman Catholic consensus
refuses to recognise the singularity of humanity, that we are but clay formed
from sexual passions. Sex becomes a cipher in the poverty of mind, until it
reaches the point where the church cracks apart owning to the sheer vast sum of
its inconsistencies. We are, I suspect, approaching that point now.
Opus Dei is a guerrilla force
working patiently and quietly to seize control of the entire Roman Catholic
Church. Effectively the Polish pope institutionalized conservative forces
within the church, led by his newly invested Praetorian Guard. He was an
extraordinary custodian of the keys of St Peter’s by any standards: the
compassionate humanitarian: gifted international statesman: cheerful consorter
with crooks and hoodlums within the precincts of the Vatican: the first Slav to
head the church. Yet at heart, a doctrinaire conservative who stood firm
against the glaring necessity for urgent reforms.
Harranz Casado is one of two
cardinals with declared affiliations to Opus Dei. The other is a Latin American
rock star, the egregiously self promoting Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne of Peru.
But this greatly understates the strength of Opus Dei sympathizers in the ranks
of the cardinals, potentially important ‘swing voters’ in the forthcoming
conclave. One hot tip is the highly conservative cleric heading the Ghanaian
church, Peter Turkson. Here is a veteran Vatican insider, a mere stripling at
64, profoundly opposed to relaxing the church’s stand against same-sex
relations or melting the celibacy rules and so forth. He could well prove Opus
Dei’s favourite son.
The Vatican’s propensity for civil
wars is an ancient inheritance. The difference in these times is the
fallout from the detonation of the Sex Bomb, which brings the church into
collision with forces and mores of temporal society. That the church’s own
teachings on matters of sex are ignored – glaringly so within the portals of
the institution itself – is patently obvious
A schism will not of course occur
overnight. Rather it will be a slow, painful dissolution, a crumbling of the
pillars, a progressive decline in the power and influence of the church as the
ebbing faithful recoil from the rank odour of the on-going abuse scandals and
the spreading turmoil on the banks of the Tiber. All that Opus Dei and the
conservative ranks in general can preach is more of the same. They will finish
up scrambling in the embers.
Coming next: the Last Schism and the
Fall of the Catholic Church
Note: this article has not been
edited due to time constraints. If you find an error please contact
me.
Richard Cottrell is a writer,
journalist and former European MP (Conservative). His new book Gladio: NATO’s Dagger At The Heart Of
Europe is now available from Progressive Press. You may order it using the link below (or
by clicking here – Gladio, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of
Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis
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