No Conspiracy Theory: Opus Dei Cardinal “Defends” Francis

This is the man (Prefect of the Commission on the Interpretation of Legislative Texts) who gave us altar girls. His Opus Dei Masters cut a deal with the American bishops: give Opus Dei an unobstructed path and our man will overturn TWO previous rulings on the Canon he will say permits altar girls. Of course, Wojtyla signed on to it - at the urging of his Secretary Dziwisz (an ally of Sodano). The Roman Curia became a snake pit under the Wojtyla Papacy.

That's an interesting quote. I think Opus Dei is very cultish. A visit to the Opus Dei church in Viale Bruno Buozzi in Rome years ago was a real eye-opener. All the other churches in Rome, you just walk in, look around, light a candle, pray, go to Mass, whatever. A friend and I visited the Opus Dei church one afternoon. It was completely locked, barred and bolted. There was a bell at a side door which we rang, and some woman came to the door and we asked to come in and have a look at the church. She just said ‘Inglese?’. We said yes and she said ‘sit please’, so we were taken into this small room and left there for several minutes. Then another woman came in and asked what we wanted. I said that we just wanted to look around the church, and that we didn’t need any assistance. She said ‘Leave your bags here. I have to come with you but we can’t be long, because I have a meeting’. I wondered if she thought we were going to steal the silver! I didn’t particularly want to leave my bag unattended, as it had my wallet etc in. She then whipped us round the church and we saw the founder's tomb (it is a beautiful church) and we had a guided tour at 90 miles an hour before being asked to leave due to her previous engagement. There were only a few people praying silently in the church, so it’s not as if a Mass was about to start. We were escorted out the same way, picked up our bags, and the door firmly locked behind us. It seems they don’t like people just dropping in unannounced and praying before the Blessed Sacrament or whatever. Most odd.

@English Catholic : How many years ago was this? To which address on Bruno Buozzi did you go? When I visited the headquarters of Opus Dei in 1997, after having attended World Youth Day in Paris, Bishop Alvaro del Portillo, the first Prelate of Opus Dei was still very much alive. (Opus Dei was made a personal prelature in 1982.). I visited the tomb of the founder, at Opus Dei HQ (73 Viale Bruno Buozzi?) and was escorted into what I took to be a semi-private oratory, not a public church. Almost all centers of Opus Dei have a residential section, an office section, and a semi-public (==>semi-private) oratory, or chapel. These are not public churches. I do not know if the Prelatic Church of Our Lady of Peace is even a public church now. There is a public church served by the Prelature of Opus Dei, elsewhere in Rome: Visitiamo la nostra chiesa – Parrocchia San Josemaria Escrivà . Some or all of the remains of St. Josemaria Escriva were translated there after his canonization. Opus Dei is not discriminatory against people of modest means. There ARE, however, programs which target various groups. For example, what was the Midtown Achievement Program (I do not know if this name is still used) targeted youth in poor families in Chicago. The immediate purpose was to give the kids additional instruction, after hours, to boost their academic performance in the hopes that they can get into magnet high schools. In the same region, there are personal initiatives that are aimed at kids from well-to-do families. In that case, the purpose is to form the kids in Christian virtue, and keep them from becoming bourgeois. It is very much a base of blind men examining an elephant by touch. If you touch the trunk, leg, or side, you get very different ideas of what the elephant is. So it is that people get very different ideas of how Opus Dei is.