THEIR KINGDOM COME -- INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF OPUS DEI

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27. Bishop of Rusado

If Opus Dei is guilty, so is the entire Church.

-- William O'Connor

THE OUTLINE OF A PLOT WAS LAID OUT IN THE RECORDS OF Carboni's phone calls while shadowing Calvi's progress from Trieste to London, which were produced in evidence at the second inquest in London. Obtained from the hotels in which Carboni had stayed, they confirmed he had been in daily contact with Hilary Franco, Rome lawyer Wilfredo Vitalone and the main Vatican switchboard. There seemed no doubt that the orders had come from Rome.

The next breakthrough occurred when lawyers acting for the Calvi family stumbled across criminal proceedings in Trieste involving Silvano Vittor's attempt to sell agent 'Podgora' part of the contents of Calvi's missing briefcase. The undercover agent's real name was Eligio Paoli, and he worked in Trieste for the Guardia di Finanza, and probably SISMI. He was only one of at least four agents working for different Italian agencies who knew details of Calvi's flight. It was Podgora who learned that Sergio Vaccari had been hired to assist in Calvi's murder.

By then Gelli decided he had been behind bars long enough and succeeded in bribing a guard to smuggle him out of prison in a laundry hamper. Within a few days of his escape, a Spanish passport was waiting for him at the home of Ferdinando Mor, the Italian consul general in Geneva and a former P2 member. [1] Days later Gelli left for South America, stopping off in Madrid on the way. In Madrid it is said that he had talks with Gregorio Lopez Bravo. [2]

Following Calvi's death, Francisco Pazienza had assured Clara that she could always turn for help to two of his closest friends in New York, Father Larry Zorza and Alfonso Bove. They were partners in a Brooklyn funeral parlour and Bove also owned two travel agencies in Manhattan. He called once or twice to ask Carlo about transferring funds from Sicily to Nassau. In the course of their conversations, Bove never sought to hide his Mafia connections.

Father Zorza, on the other hand, was required to resign as Archbishop Cheli's aide at the United Nations after his arrest for smuggling stolen paintings into the United States. On the way to his arraignment, he told a US Customs agent, 'I hope this doesn't take long. I have to say Mass at 5 o'clock.' Zorza then explained to the judge that it had all been a mistake. 'I did it sincerely to help somebody, and now I am terribly sorry ... I have learned a lot.' He was given a three-year suspended sentence. Not long afterwards he was again arrested while trying to sell $40,000 worth of tickets for the Broadway hit 'Les Miserables' back to the box office from where they had been stolen. 'My friends never told me the full story about those tickets,' he assured the judge this time. While the judge deliberated on sentencing, Zorza was arrested a third time, on this occasion for his involvement with the second Pizza Connection that imported Sicilian heroin into the United States.

Pazienza himself was arrested in New York on an Italian warrant for his involvement in Banco Ambrosiano's fraudulent bankruptcy. The police nipped him as he was transmitting 'highly valuable information on terrorism and other matters' to American intelligence agents. A US Customs officer testified in his favour, claiming that before becoming involved with Banco Ambrosiano Pazienza had been one of his country's top intelligence operators and that an 'unidentified group of people' wanted him dead.

While being held in New York, Pazienza made some startling revelations that might have had something to do with the threats on his life. He alleged that the Ambrosiano monies advanced to the United Trading family had been intended for various causes of the Vatican. He added that one-third of the money was stolen by middlemen. The names of Gelli, Ortolani and Tassan Din were given in a Dublin affidavit filed by the liquidators of Banco Andino. Another third went into shoring up the IOR's control of Ambrosiano itself. The final third, he asserted, actually went into the Vatican's covert political causes. In each case he was talking about $450 million, more or less.

And what were those 'Vatican causes'? He mentioned Poland's Solidarity movement, of course, and the Irish Republican Army, as well as various groups or dictatorships opposing the spread of Marxism and Liberation Theology in Latin America.

In the reorganization of the Vatican finances that followed, a new five-member supervisory board of lay experts was created for the IOR. Its president was Angelo Caloia, head of the Mediocredito Lombardo bank. The vice-president was Philippe'de Week. The other three were Dr. Jose Angel Sanchez Asiain, former chairman of Banco Bilbao, Thomas Pietzcker, a director of Deutsche Bank, and Thomas Macioce, an American businessman. The new managing director was Giovanni Bodio, also from the Mediocredito Lombardo.

Caloia and Bodio were both associated with Giuseppe Garofano, the onetime chairman of Montedison and top executive at Ferruzzi Finanziaria S.p.A., Italy's second largest private industrial group after Fiat. Garofano, an Opus Dei supernumerary, served with Caloia on the Vatican's Ethics and Finance Committee, until arrested in 1993 in connection with a $94 million political kickback scheme, a substantial amount of the money for which passed through Ferruzzi's account at the IOR, in the name of the 'Saint Serafino Foundation'. Sanchez Asiain was described by Ruiz-Mateos as one of the 'Valises'. He was close to Alvaro del Portillo and a boyhood friend of Javier Echevarria, though Opus Dei denied he was a member.

The time for tidying up had come. With Calvi dead, Ruiz-Mateos discredited and Jaimes Berti out of circulation, the secret machine had triumphed. In Italy an interminable round of litigation linked to the Ambrosiano and P2 affairs (note, no 'IOR' affair), the likes of which the republic had never known, was getting under way and probably would not conclude before the end of the millennium. In Spain, all was quiet on the juridical front, but there were problems in the upper ranks of Opus Homini.

At the same time a restructuring of the Spanish banking industry was set in motion with a proposal by the country's fourth-rated Banco Bilbao to take over the first-rated Banesto. But Banesto's deputy chairman, Lopez Bravo, backed by his friend and investment partner, Ricardo Tejera Magro, and another associate, steel magnate Jose Maria Aristrain Noain, successfully opposed the merger. Instead the smaller Bilbao merged with Banco Vizcaya to become Spain's largest commercial bank, under the name of Banco BilbaoVizcaya, while Banesto slipped to third position, just ahead of Banco Popular Espanol.

Lopez Bravo, according to Professor Sainz Moreno, was going through a crisis of conscience. After more than thirty years as a loyal member, he wanted to leave Opus Dei. 'He had finally understood that Opus Dei was not a spiritual organization but a financial multinational, and he was in profound conflict with Luis Valls,' the professor said. But Lopez Bravo knew many of the Work's darkest secrets. In fact his deception with Opus Dei began soon after his meeting in Madrid with Licio Gelli at the end of August 1983, as the fugitive was on his way to Montevideo. What had Gelli told him? And who else had Gelli seen in Madrid? Both Swiss and French intelligence sources reported that he had met 'friends in Opus Dei'. [3]

Had Gelli spoken of the secrets contained in Calvi's missing briefcase? Or of the murder of Sergio Vaccari? Strangely, the Italian magistrates had been informed that a high-ranking member of Opus Dei from Spain was in London at the time of Calvi's death. In the same vein, it also would have been interesting to know whether Lopez Bravo spoke about his concerns to his closest associates at the time, Ricardo Tejero and Jose Maria Aristrain. Tejero was not known to have any particular Opus Dei ties, but he was one of the few Spanish bankers who dared stand up to Luis Valls.

Whatever the reasons for his disillusionment, on 19 February 1985 Lopez Bravo planned to go to Bilbao on business. He had a first-class reservation aboard the 9 a.m. Air Iberia flight. He arrived at the airport late, carrying only a briefcase, and was the last person to board the aircraft. The Boeing 727 took off from Madrid fifteen minutes behind schedule, with 148 passengers and crew aboard. As the flight made its approach in bad weather towards Bilbao's Sandica Airport it exploded in mid-air and crashed. Everyone aboard perished.

The first reports spoke of an ETA bomb. But the technical commission investigating the crash later found that the aircraft was off course and had struck the television antenna atop Mount Oiz. It was suggested in the press that the pilot had been seen drinking before takeoff. The crash was attributed to pilot error. The strange thing, commented Professor Sainz Moreno, was that of all the victims, Lopez Bravo was the only one for whom no remains were found. 'Not even his Rolex watch,' he said.

Eight minutes after the Iberia flight had departed Madrid, Ricardo Tejero left his apartment and went down to the underground garage where he kept his car, directly opposite the Edificio Beatriz, home of Banco Popular Espanol's Presidencia. As he paused to unlock his car door, two men approached and shot him in the head. The assassins fled undetected. The police affirmed that it was the work of the Madrid Commando of ETA Militar. They apparently based their conclusion on the fact that the assassins had identified themselves to the doorman of the building by producing outdated badges of the Direccion General de Seguiridad. Similar badges had been found among ETA material seized by an anti-terrorist squad in France a few weeks before.

Barcelona's La Vanguardia was the only newspaper to link the two incidents. The Vanguardia reporter who covered the Tejero assassination walked across the street from the garage to the Banco Popular Presidencia hoping to elicit some comment from the bank's chairman. He was told that Luis Valls had left the bank's premises and returned to his apartment on the floor above. When finally the reporter reached the banker, Luis Valls told him, 'Everyone is completely shattered. It could have happened to me.' Luis Valls kept his two sports cars in the same garage.

The third partner in a Basque shipping venture that Lopez Bravo and Tejero had structured was Jose Maria Aristrain. He and his wife were reportedly Opus Dei supernumeraries. [4] But Aristrain was said to have been expelled from the Work because he had left his wife and taken the glamorous Anja Lopez, wife of France's leading composer of operettas, as his mistress. Aristrain survived his two friends by a little more than a year.

He and Anja Lopez spent their last weekend together at the May 1986 Monte Carlo Grand Prix. They chartered a helicopter to take them back to Cannes-Mandelieu airport where Aristrain had his private aircraft waiting. The helicopter, a four-place Squirrel, rounded Cap d'Antibes into the Golfe de Juan and within sight of the Croisette spun out of the air, exploding upon impact with the water. There were no survivors. An investigation was immediately opened by the public prosecutor of Grasse. Eye-witness reports indicated that the crash was consistent with rear-rotor failure, causing the helicopter to spiral into the sea. The rear rotor is the easiest part on a Squirrel to sabotage. Some media reports suggested the ETA was responsible.

Six weeks before the Cannes accident, Roberto Calvi's black briefcase mysteriously reappeared in a Milan television studio. This media scoop was the assiduous work of the Sardinian property developer Flavio Carboni who was now portraying himself as a protector of Vatican interests. Carboni's brand of protection, however, cost money -- a lot of money. Of course he had very high legal bills as well.

After his arrest in Lugano, Carboni was extradited to Italy at the end of October 1982 and while the charges against him were investigated he was transferred to the prison in Parma. He remained under 'preventive custody' in Parma until August 1984, when his detention was changed to house arrest within the precincts of the city. He rented a suite at Parma's Maria Luigia Hotel and, outside of prison walls for the first time in two years, he lost no time in getting down to work.

In May 1984, Carboni's lawyer in Rome, Luigi D'Agostino, had laid the groundwork by contacting a Polish Jesuit who worked for the Vatican. D'Agostino asked Father Casimiro Przydatek to visit Carboni at Parma prison 'for pastoral reasons'. D'Agostino had excellent Vatican connections since he originally helped Carboni set up the meetings with Cardinal Palazzini and Monsignor Hilary Franco. It is interesting that, as far as is known, rather than unveiling his new mission to Hilary Franco, Carboni chose a Polish priest who spoke Italian haltingly.

Carboni told Father Casimiro that he was not in need of a confessor but wished to make known to the Church hierarchy that he had important documents to sell. Carboni did not state it quite that way, but the intent was the same. 'Carboni proposed himself as a defender of the Church. He said he wished to launch an international press campaign that would clear the Vatican's name in the Ambrosiano affair, because he knew where the Calvi documents were hidden. He assured me the documents proved the Vatican's innocence and he could arrange for their purchase,' the Polish priest said. [5]

Back in Rome, Father Casimiro spoke to Bishop Pavel Hnilica, who was his confessor and the real target of Carboni's strategy. Hnilica was portrayed as the Pope's closest adviser on Church affairs in East Europe. Originally from Trnava, in the heart of Catholic Slovakia, he had been ordained as a Jesuit in secret in 1950, at a time when the Czech authorities were actively persecuting priests as traitors. Paul VI elevated him in secret to the non-existent bishopric of Rusado (located in what was Mauritania Caesariensis, today Algeria). After moving to Rome during the height of the Cold War, Hnilica became the head of Pro Fratribus, which smuggled relief funds and bibles behind the Iron Curtain and assisted Catholic refugees.

Hnilica sent Father Virgilio Rotondi, who was also said to have the Pope's ear, to Parma to meet Carboni. Over the next two months Carboni and Rotondi outlined an international campaign, supposedly designed to gain worldwide sympathy for the Vatican, based upon selected documents from Calvi's briefcase. It was codenamed 'Operation S.C.LV.' after the Italian initials for the Vatican city state. But Carboni wanted almost £20 million to set the operation in motion. He said the money was needed to acquire the Calvi documents, as well as to corrupt politicians, journalists, publishers and magistrates. Moreover, he was asking for £6 million up front to cover 'anticipatory expenses and fees'. [6] Rotondi took the proposal back to Hnilica and they consulted their superiors.

The Bishop of Rusado's first contact with Carboni occurred in November 1984, after the terms of his house arrest were altered to permit him to return to his villa in Rome. Hnilica claimed he had received approval from his superiors to explore Carboni's proposal further. As a sign of good intentions, Carboni handed the bishop three letters written to Roberto Calvi in 1980 by the Turin blackmailer Luigi Cavallo, two of which were originals. He told Hnilica that he knew the whereabouts of other documents but to acquire them he needed cash.

While the Cavallo documents reflected poorly on Calvi, they were not material in proving the Vatican's innocence in the Ambrosiano affair. A further meeting was scheduled for early January 1985 with Father Rotondi. At this meeting Carboni provided copies of two letters written by Calvi -- one on 30 May 1982 to Cardinal Palazzini, and the other on 6 June 1982 to Monsignor Hilary Franco -- as well as a somewhat scissored document which began with the words, 'Monsignor Marcinkus Reproaches Me ...' [7] For these three documents, Father Rotondi gave Carboni a cheque for £190,000. [8]

To help convince Hnilica that the deal was legit, Carboni allied himself with an engaging underworld character by the name of Giulio Lena. Carboni told Hnilica that Lena had put up the money to recover part of the Calvi documents. Lena was one of Rome's more innovative narcotics dealers. But the Bishop of Rusado did not know this. On the contrary, he found Lena charming and cultured. To obtain a percentage of the action, Lena actually bought into Carboni's deal, paying him £600,000. This was a heavy burden for Lena, as his own financial situation was far from rosy.

In May 1985, Lena gave Hnilica an undated letter signed by Calvi with the name of the addressee removed, but certainly intended for the person who - like Beelzebub, prince of the underworld -- he believed could cast out the demons. In it he criticized Gelli and Ortolani, calling them agents of the Devil. He said he was convinced that a collapse of the Ambrosiano would cause the collapse of the Vatican, adding:

Since I am abandoned and betrayed by those I regarded as my most reliable allies, I cannot help but remember the operations I undertook on behalf of the representatives of St. Peter's ... I provided financing throughout Latin America for warships and other military equipment to be used to counter the subversive activities of well organized Communist forces. Thanks to these operations, the Church today can boast a new authority in countries like Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Nicaragua... ..

He ended the letter by saying:

I am tired, really tired, too tired ... The limits of my long patience have been largely overreached ... I insist that all the transactions concerning the political and economic expansion of the Church must be reimbursed; I must be repaid the $1,000 million that I furnished at the express wish of the Vatican in favour of Solidarity; I must be reimbursed the monies used to organize financial centres and political power in five South American countries, an amount totalling $175 million; that I be retained on conditions still to be determined as a financial consultant because of my work as a go-between in many East European and Latin American countries; my peace of mind must be restored ... ; that Casaroli, Silvestrini, Marcinkus and Mennini leave me alone! I will attend to the other obligations on my own!!! [9]

After receiving this document, Hnilica issued Carboni two cheques drawn on the IOR for a total of £61,000. In the meantime, as Lena's financial position was causing some concern Carboni suggested he ask Andreotti for a loan. There had already been some prior discussion between Carboni and his brother Andrea about whether some of the documents recovered from Calvi's briefcase should be sent directly to Palazzini and also, through Senator Claudio Vitalone, to Andreotti. [10]

Lena was told that a letter introducing him to Andreotti had been delivered by Sister Sandra Mennini, daughter of IOR director Dr Luigi Mennini. This she later denied. In any event, within a few days of the letter being drafted, Lena received a four-month loan of 400 million lire (£168,000) at the Rome Savings Bank. To cover the loan, on 15 November 1985 Hnilica gave him two IOR cheques which the Bishop signed and left blank, with instructions to hold them until told for what amount they could be cashed. A few weeks later Lena was instructed to fill them out for 600 million lire (£252,000) each and present them for payment twenty days apart. [11]

Lena's joy was short-lived as both cheques were refused. When informed, the Bishop of Rusado was beside himself. He assured Carboni that the cheques were covered and that the IOR was blocking them for political reasons. Carboni accepted this, but demanded that Hnilica replace the cheques, which the bishop did, issuing at the end of March 1986 another twelve cheques drawn on different accounts at different banks for a total of £458,000. When later questioned, Hnilica said that Carboni had told him that 'the famous Calvi briefcase which he had already shown me' would be unveiled to the public on the SPOT TV show. 'Carboni told me that after the broadcast he would be obliged to hand over the briefcase to the Milan magistrates. [12] SPOT was a magazine programme hosted by political commentator Enzo Biagi.

With the Pro Fratribus replacement cheques in hand, Carboni assured Hnilica that the SPOT transmission, to which he was committed, would be a triumph for the Vatican, as it proved that the Vatican had nothing to fear from the ghost of Roberto Calvi. On camera Enzo Biagi introduced the neo-Fascist Senator Giorgio Pisano to his viewers as the person who had uncovered the briefcase. Pisano, who had written a book entitled The Calvi Murder, claimed he had bought it for £20,000 in an after-dark encounter with two unknown individuals. The reason for his interest, he affirmed, was because he wished to put this key piece of evidence into the hands of the authorities. Carboni and Silvano Vittor were present on the set as well to attest that it was the same satchel they had seen in Calvi's possession in London. 'He held onto it like a drowning man clutches a life-saver,' Carboni delicately recalled.

What Calvi's Rome driver had described as a 'bulging, heavier-than- usual' bag appeared empty-cheeked before the cameras. As it was opened -- allegedly for the first time since its disappearance -- the cameras zoomed in to discover its contents. Predictably, it contained no notebook, no agenda, no address book, and no bunches of strongbox keys. It did contain Calvi's driving licence, a Nicaraguan passport in his name and the keys to the Calvi apartment in Milan and the house at Drezzo. It also contained eight documents - not exactly an arsenal of ammunition for God's Banker to use against Beelzebub's demons. The documents were the following:

1. Letter of Calvi to Cardinal Palazzini, dated 30 May 1982

2. Letter of Calvi to Mgr Hilary Franco, dated 6 June 1982

3. Letter of Carboni to Calvi, dated 6 June 1982

4. Undated note: 'Mgr Marcinkus reproaches me ...'

5. Undated memorandum headed: 'Re: Conversation with Roberto Calvi, banker of the Ambrosiano and launderer of dirty money ...'

6. Letter from Luigi Cavallo to Calvi, dated 9 July 1980, 'As you might imagine ...'

7. Letter from Luigi Cavallo to Calvi, 'Among the tribes of Uganda ...'

8. Letter from Luigi Cavallo to Calvi, 'A few days ago I was on holiday by the sea ...'

The prying by state television into a dead man's briefcase for the financial gain and prestige of the show's promoters, with two of the principal conspirators in the banker's disappearance on the set, seemed the height of bad taste. But, after all, it was April Fools' Day 1986. The general public, meanwhile, was unaware of the dealings between Carboni and the Bishop of Rusado. These only came to light two years later following the forced boarding off the Italian coast of a yacht flying a Spanish royal standard. Customs police found on board the yacht 1,800 kilos of Lebanese hashish. The consignee was Dr. Giulio Lena. In charge of the investigation was Rome examining magistrate Dr Mario Almerighi, who obtained a warrant to search Lena's villa in the Alban hills outside of Rome.

Almerighi not only turned up evidence of a major narcotics ring and also the counterfeiting of Central African Republic banknotes but he uncovered Lena's dealings with the Bishop of Rusado. This led the magistrate to search the Pro Fratribus offices. Hnilica at first denied everything, but the evidence was overwhelming. The documents uncovered at Pro Fratribus showed that Hnilica had acted with the knowledge of the highest Vatican authorities, even though the Vatican's financial support had been withdrawn in mid-stream, forcing him to turn instead to underworld loan sharks to raise the funds that Carboni demanded.

Among the evidence sequestered at Pro Fratribus was a SISMI file on Flavio Carboni, 12 Calvi documents, a letter from Hnilica to the Cardinal Secretary of State, Casaroli, explaining his negotiations with Carboni and cashed cheques totalling £1.5 million. But the most condemning item was Cardinal Casaroli's reply to Hnilica in which the Vatican's number-two disclosed he had informed the Pope of the latest developments. Casaroli's letter stated:

Most Reverend Excellency,

I have received and read with great attention your letter of 25 August concerning your efforts with others relative to the problems of the IOR.

Appreciating the importance and gravity of the situation which you set forth, I thought it important before replying to you to inform the Holy Father.

In his name I am able to convey to you the great pain and preoccupation caused by what we learned from your letter. Neither the Holy Father nor the Holy See were aware of the activities that you summarily set forth.

It is first necessary to mention, in order to avoid all misunderstanding, that your efforts were undertaken without any order, authorization or approbation from the Holy See.

Moreover, one cannot deny that the notable economic situation into which the Holy See -- seriously in deficit -- has fallen would render it extremely difficult, in any case, to meet the request formulated by Your Excellency and to be thus relieved, the Holy See as well as yourself, of the burden of the immense indebtedness which you have revealed to us.

Concerning the causes and modalities of your efforts to shed full light on this apparent indebtedness it is, of course, necessary to estimate the legal consequences that your intervention, based on the best of intentions, could encounter.

By this letter I profit from these circumstances to confirm the distinguished esteem which we hold for you before Our Lord.

It was a strange letter for the secretary of state to have written. It attempted to distance the Holy See from Hnilica's endeavours. 'We had no idea ...' But was this posturing for the record, as the secretary of state was worried about the legal consequences of Hnilica's actions? It also inferred that Rotondi's initial cheque for £190,000 had directly come from the Vatican coffers. But more striking was that the letter contained no order to desist, only to proceed with extreme caution, without directly involving the Holy See, and with whatever resources Hnilica himself could mobilize -- and all this with the 'distinguished esteem' of the two highest authorities of the Catholic Church. Casaroli's letter was therefore Hnilica's authorization to proceed, but at his own risk and peril.

Casaroli's letter begged a number of questions:

1. The 'esteem' of the Pope and the secretary of state for the results that Hnilica had already achieved made one wonder what other documents the Bishop of Rusado had acquired from Carboni. Almerighi was fairly certain that for the £1.5 million which the Vatican and Pro Fratribus had already paid, Carboni must have delivered more than Hnilica was willing to admit. 'Hnilica', Almerighi said privately, 'was not telling all the truth.'

2. What happened to the United Trading documents? The secret accounting kept by Calvi for the United Trading family was his first line of defence. The banker had made it clear that only with these documents could he defend himself against the allegations by Marcinkus that he had breached the IOR's trust. An up-to-date accounting for United Trading existed. Carlo Calvi had seen his father working on one. In his testimony, Carlo Calvi said, 'I recall in March 1982 seeing my father in his study at Drezzo working on a 1982 version of those accounts ... These tabulations have never been found, neither in the house at Drezzo, nor the apartment in Milan, or anywhere else. My father always carried these accounts with him. We can suppose that they were with him in his briefcase during his last trip to London ... I remember in fact having seen my father place those tabulations in his briefcase ...' [13]

3. What were the reasons for the IOR's sabotage of Hnilica's initiative? Was it because the IOR's directorate had done a separate deal with Carboni to get hold of the missing accounting documents it wanted? The absence of these documents suggest that the IOR -- by then controlled by Opus Dei, if we can believe Calvi's last words -- had indeed come to a separate arrangement.

4. The moral implications of the Vatican's involvement in these machinations were unsettling. Did the Holy See have such terrible things to hide that it needed to resort to Carboni's services? In Calvi's letter to the Pope of 5 June 1982 he referred to his role in financing arms shipments to Latin American dictatorships, providing financial support to Solidarity and financing other dissident groups in East Europe. Calvi would not have made this claim if he did not have the documentation at hand. What happened to those documents?

5. By leaving Hnilica out in the cold, did the Secretary of State realize he was pushing the Bishop of Rusado into dealing with underworld loan sharks? With Carboni threatening, on 17 March 1987 Pro Fratribus mandated Vittore Pascucci to raise a $10-million six-month loan. Pro Fratribus received an advance of £1.26 million from Pascucci at usurious rates. Pascucci was described by a secret Guardia di Finanza report as the 'dominus' behind Eurotrust Bank Limited of Crocus Hill, capital of the break-away island state of Anguilla, in the Lesser Antilles. Although not licensed to operate abroad, Eurotrust Bank had an office in Rome under the name of Eurotrust S.p.A. Eurotrust Bank was under investigation for alleged laundering of narcodollars on behalf of the Mafia. [14]

6. Most important of all, how much did the Pope know? Were his Opus Dei advisers, the men who handled -- according to Calvi and others -- the Vatican finances, keeping him in the dark? According to Hnilica, the Pope's mail was filtered by the Secretariat of State. Other sources have indicated the Pope was told only what his advisers wanted to tell him.

Hoping to learn some of these answers, Almerighi subpoenaed Monsignor Hilary Franco. He had discovered that Franco's real (baptized) name was Ilario Carmine Franco, born not at all in New York but in Calabria. He questioned Franco for forty-five minutes before giving up. He found the Grade 1 Minor Official (Step 2) of the Roman Curia 'evasive and untruthful'.

Moreover, Opus Dei in Rome had put out another statement by then repeating that the Prelature 'has absolutely no connection with the Calvi affair' and that Hilary Franco 'has never had any contact with Opus Dei, nor with any of its members'. This seemed unlikely, if for no other reason than Franco had been on the staff of the Congregation of the Clergy, to which Alvaro del Portillo was a consultor and Opus Dei's Alberto Cosme do Amaral, Bishop of Leira, a member of the directorate.

The statement also trotted out the, by then, well-worn refrain that Don Mario Lantini, regional vicar for Italy, had 'invited' Calvi's widow by registered letter 'to justify, with full details, the basis on which she made her assertions' that her husband had dealings with Opus Dei. 'He has yet to receive a reply.'

It appeared that Carboni had used the contents of Calvi's briefcase at his convenience, removing from it scores of documents while leaving only those he supposed would further his plan, and inserting others that originally had not been there. It is difficult, for example, to understand why Calvi would carry with him on his last journey documents relating to his alleged treachery against Sindona. Nor would he have wanted to carry with him the document, 'Conversation with Roberto Calvi, banker of the Ambrosiano and launderer of dirty money'.

The presence of such documents in his briefcase when shown on TV logically suited the objectives of Carboni and those who found it expedient to maintain that Calvi was a man of low morals and no credibility - a man who, when he said, 'Opus Dei was in control of the IOR,' was not to be believed. 'The object was to dirty the image of Calvi ... and make him appear as the number-one defrauder of the Vatican bank,' concluded Almerighi. [15]

Almerighi recommended that Carboni, Lena and Hnilica be sent for trial under article 648 of the criminal code. Article 648 concerns the relatively minor offence of dealing in stolen goods, the maximum punishment for which, if found guilty, is a five-year prison sentence. It was not much, but it was a beginning. In March 1993, all three were found guilty, but the verdict was later overturned because of 'faulty legal procedure'.

_______________

Notes:

1. I Ferdinando Mor testimony before the Chamber of Deputies P2 Commission, Vol. CLVII, Doc. XXIII, No. 2 Ter 13, pp. 554-555.

2. Ibid., p. 555.

3. Isabel Domon, 'L'arme qui aurait permis a Gelli de quitter la Suisse', 24 Heures, Lausanne, 21 October 1983.

4. Both Golias (No. 30, Summer 1992. p. 126) and Tiempo (No. 218, 20 July 1986, p. 32) identify Jose Maria Arisrrain Noain as an Opus Dei member.

5. Almerighi Ordinanza, Section 6.2, p. 141.

6. Ibid., Section 9.3, p. 226.

7. Ibid., Section 11.2, p. 283.

8. Ibid., Section 11.2, p. 278n., and Section 11.4, p. 305n.

9. Ibid., Section 1.3, pp. 11-14.

10. Ibid., Section 2.2, p. 29.

11. Ibid., section 12.1, p. 310.

12. Idem.

13. Ibid., section 12.2.2, p. 330.

14. Nucleo Centrale Polizia Tributaria della Guardia di Finanza, VII Gruppo, 1 ͦ Sezione, Report No. 1429, Rome, 12 October 1990.

15. Almerighi Ordinanza, Section 12.2.2, p. 328.

[admin]

28. Moneybag Theology

If we're not guilty, we don't pay.

-- Archbishop Paul Marcinkus

OPUS DEI IS A POOR FAMILY WITH MANY CHILDREN. FOR ANYONE WHO has relations with the Prelature, this theme is repeated with the regularity of monks reciting a mantra. Opus Dei has no money. It refuses to publish a balance sheet, even though one is prepared every three months by the Consulta Tecnica for the prelate bishop and his inner council. In 1992, Opus Dei was so deprived of cash that it requested members invited to attend Escriva de Balaguer's beatification gala for a contribution, in addition to travel costs, of $3,000 each to cover expenses.

One Opus Dei priest in Argentina who received an invitation wished to attend the ceremony so badly that he asked his family in Venezuela to advance the money for him. They sent a cheque to an auxiliary society, as instructed. Overjoyed, the priest planned his travel so that he could stop over in Caracas on his return to see his parents. But the priest's superior said no, that would not be appropriate, and the invitation was withdrawn. Needless to say, the auxiliary society never returned the money, and the family, realizing it would be a hassle to get it back, never bothered to ask. Even if one took the lower estimate of pilgrims who attended the beatification proceedings, a quick calculation at $3,000 a head supposes that Opus Dei took in a minimum of $450 million on the extravaganza, audience with the Pope included.

This was a shining example of Opus Dei's special combination of Capitalist ethos and traditional religion, which it successfully deployed to counter Liberation Theology. The combination might be called Moneybags Theology. It offered strong affirmation that Opus Dei was not exclusively concerned with the salvation of souls but also with big-numbers finance.

Opus Dei is a reflection of its modus operandi, which provides the Prelature with the necessary resources to sustain its expansion. But above all Opus Dei's success was made possible by its unique juridical status. In spite of recent revisions, the Vatican's Codex Iuris remains based on the Gregorian canons of the thirteenth century, when commerce and banking were not highly developed, Johann Gutenberg had not yet invented movable type, and Machiavelli was still two hundred years away from publishing his handbook on human deceit as an instrument of government and diplomacy.

Opus Dei operates in an almost medieval vacuum. Because of the insufficiency of its institutions the Vatican is not equipped to regulate a worldwide conglomerate. Canon law was never designed to govern an organization whose roster of activities is unknown even to a majority of its members. The Vatican's lack of oversight gives Opus Dei unrestrained freedom; its incorporation as an enterprise of pontifical right provides it with the necessary standing to function in other jurisdictions without submitting the sum, or even certain of its parts, to the laws and regulations of those jurisdictions.

This renders Opus Dei as dangerous as it is unique. It is dangerous because it operates as if its members believe God is the chairman of the board, giving it the divine right to insert itself between the laws of nations and the canons of the Church. Rather than a floating diocese, Opus Dei functions like a compact, tenacious mercantile state, with its own councils, foreign policy, finance ministry and state religion, even its own territories -- the dioceses entrusted to its care. All this might seem somewhat quixotic if not for the fact that Opus Dei members have been accused of fraud, designing sophisticated weapons systems, being involved in coups d'etat, consorting with crooks and collaborating with military anti-insurgency operations.

Opus Dei is dangerous because it makes no disclosure, because it is confrontational and because it is an association that includes a high percentage of zealots. Opus Dei's inscribed numeraries, the inner circle, believe they are morally right, doctrinally unassailable and the guardians of the Christian conscience. Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer promised Opus Dei members salvation if they followed his norms and customs. Cronica, the internal publication whose access is forbidden to mere supernumeraries, quotes from Ecclesiasticus (Apocrypha 44:20-21), applying to the Blessed Josemarfa this passage: 'When tested he was found loyal. For this reason, God promised him with an oath that in his descendants the nation would be blessed ...' The reference is, of course, to Abraham, but Cronica is not ashamed to interpret Biblical passages as prophecies of Opus Dei's own destiny. Novices are taught that Opus Dei is God's perfect instrument, sinless and incapable of error, and that they have been called to execute God's Plan and protect the Church.

At the evening reflection in Opus Dei residences the Father's words take precedence. They are more often quoted than the Gospel, which they interpret freely in any event. Thus, on one occasion the Father told his children, 'It is understandable that the Apostle should write: "all things are yours, you are Christ's and Christ is God's" (1 Corinthians 3:22-23). We have here an ascending movement which the Holy Spirit, infused in our hearts, wants to call forth from this world, upwards from the earth to the glory of the Lord.' [1]

Opus Dei is an 'ascending movement'; its members are Christ's soldiers, and everything they do is for the Father's glory. And so for the Father everything is permitted. John Roche stated that when he was at the University of Navarra in 1972, Opus Dei numeraries were still talking about the Matesa scandal, in which $180 million apparently volatilized without trace into the international monetary system, a masterpiece of financial dissimulation. Said Roche, 'Members could see nothing wrong in the misappropriation of this money. They thought it was clever. Opus Dei has very little social or business morality.'

Opus Dei is not above kidnapping members (Raimundo Panikkar), sequestrating them (Marfa del Carmen Tapia, Gregorio Ortega Prado), threatening priests it suspects of activities more political than pastoral (Giuliano Ferrari), bullying members who get out of line or inciting them to lie (Jose Maria Ruiz-Mateos) and misinforming parents of young recruits about the true intentions of the Work (Elizabeth Demichel). Why, therefore, should it be above using other forms of pilleria?

A Catholic International Press Agency editor said he had been informed on 'high authority' -- i.e., Bishop Pierre Mamie -- that when Opus Dei priests went knocking on episcopal doors to ask for letters in favour of Escriva de Balaguer's beatification they made it clear that a positive response would engender Opus Dei's support - in the form of a cheque -- for a worthy diocesan project of the local bishop's choice. Fully one-third of the world episcopacy had no hesitation in providing such a letter.

Opus Dei is a poor family with many children. And yet Opus Dei invested $300,000 to cover the costs of the beatification proceedings, which the postulator general allowed was a bargain. Did this include, one wonders, the contributions to the favourite charities of those bishops who supported the cause of raising Escriva de Balaguer to the altars? Did it also include the costs of the medical assessment that confirmed the miraculous cure of Sister Concepcion Boullon Rubio?

Among the non-paying pilgrims in St Peter's Square for Escriva de Balaguer's beatification were Monsignor Wolfgang Haas, the newly appointed Bishop of Coire, Switzerland's largest diocese, Monsignor Kurt Krenn, whom John Paul II had named Bishop of Sankt Piilten, not far from Vienna, and Monsignor Klaus Kung, Bishop of Feldkirch, also in Austria. Kung is an Opus Dei prelate; Haas and Krenn are so much in favour of the Prelature that they are thought to be associate numeraries. In each case their episcopal appointment provoked a rebellion among parishioners.

When in December 1986 John Paul II first named Klaus Kung, Opus Dei's then regional vicar for Austria, to head the see of Feldkirch, the public outcry was so fierce that the Vatican was forced to suspend the appointment. The Pope waited another two years, hoping that the storm had blown over, before reconfirming Kung's elevation. But when his consecration was held, 5,000 parishioners marched in silence through the streets of Vorarlberg. Nationwide protests occurred in 1991 when Kung's friend and associate Kurt Krenn, who claims he stands 'solidly behind Opus Dei', was named auxiliary bishop of Vienna. Krenn immediately appointed Opus Dei's new regional vicar, Monsignor Ernst Burkhardt, as his chaplain of students.

Krenn was accused of refusing dialogue, of overspending on personal comforts and of maligning opponents. When asked on national television why he didn't resign, he replied: 'If I did, then God Himself would have to resign, as I only represent the truth that God gives us.' Fifteen thousand demonstrators for Krenn's removal gathered in Sankt Polten, carrying banners that said, 'Resign, so God can stay', and 'We want a shepherd, not a dictator'. According to an opinion poll by the weekly News, an estimated 66 per cent of Austrian Catholics believed Krenn should go, and 82 per cent thought his arrogance damaged the Church's standing. [2]

Among New World dioceses none preoccupied john Paul II more than San Salvador. It was here that in 1975 an attempt was made to poison the Liberal Swiss priest Giuliano Ferrari. Five years later -- on 24 March 1980 -- Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by the death squads of Colonel D'Abuisson. Then in December 1981, the parishioners of El Mozote were massacred. In 1989, six Jesuit priests at San Salvador's Catholic University were killed, and in June 1993 the Vicar of the Salvadoran armed forces, Bishop Joaquin Ramos Umana, was shot in the head.

The man picked to succeed Oscar Romero was Arturo Rivera Damas, a Salesian who served as apostolic administrator after Romero's death. In spite of opposition from the Conservatives, who felt he was too left-wing, Rivera Damas was elevated to archbishop in 1983. He was soon characterized by Conservatives as 'a troublesome bishop' because he spoke out for the Church against the abuses of the military. In November 1994, Rivera Damas was called to Rome as john Paul II was about to create thirty new cardinals. Some expected he would be among them. As it turned out, he was not: he suffered a massive heart attack and died instantly. In his last interview the day before, the 'troublesome bishop' let it be known that he had received death threats some months before and that they emanated from 'those groups known as the dinosaurs because they do not accept the peace agreement with the leftist guerrillas'.

When asked by his interviewer if Liberation Theology was dead, Rivera Damas replied, 'The salvation brought by Our Lord includes the concept of liberation from all oppression. This fundamental vision of salvation must always be kept in mind. That is why I believe that this form of theology is not "Over but still has a lot to say.' [3] Ignoring diocesan wishes that Rivera Damas be replaced by his auxiliary, five months later John Paul II named Opus Dei's Fernando Saenz Lacalle, El Salvador's interim military Ordinary, as the new Archbishop of San Salvador.

Underworld dons and certain prelates within the Church, though guided by different theologies, frequently intermingled in a twilight zone where Christian morals and the ethics of power become blurred. We have already seen the case of Archbishop Cheli, co-president of the papal household's council of advisers, whose assistant at the UN was involved in the Pizza Connection affair and who laundered money on the side, while Cheli himself associated with secret service officials. In fact the Calvi case in its ensemble was a good example of this intermingling of power, priests and organized crime. High officials inside the Vatican, it is now known, were informed of the conspiracy against Calvi and still continued to deal with the likes of Flavio Carboni.

The Theology of Organized Crime was all that Francesco Marino Mannoia had ever been taught. The Sacraments of the Black Hand he knew well. He also knew some chemistry, for he was very good at distilling opium base into heroin. He was one of the persons arrested in the first Pizza Connection case in New York in 1985. The Pizza Connection was a Mafia ring that sold Sicilian heroin through pizza shops in the US. Rather than spend the rest of his life in prison, Mannoia turned state's evidence. In July 1991, five Italian magistrates flew to New York to hear what he had to say.

According to Mannoia, the Mafia's 'finance minister' Pippo Calo was told that Calvi had become 'unreliable'. Calo handled liaison between the Mafia and the Camorra, and he was well acquainted with Carboni and Gelli. From that moment the conspiracy coalesced around three men. Gelli was the brains; Carboni the co-ordinator; and Calo provided the brawn. For strategic reasons, Calo felt that London would be safer than Italy for what they had in mind. He ordered Francesco Di Carlo to carry out the task.

To his neighbours in Woking, Surrey, Frank Di Carlo seemed a mild-mannered businessman who commuted daily into London where he ran a small hotel, travel agency and money changing operation near King's Cross. In Sicily, however, he was known as the 'Butcher of Altofonte'. And to Her Majesty's Customs inspectors he represented the biggest prize of 'Operation Devotion', which in May 1985 netted 60 kilograms of pure heroin on the Southampton Docks. In March 1987, Di Carlo was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. Seated in the public gallery during the proceedings was Pippo Bellinghieri, one of Di Carlo's runners and a suspect in the unsolved Sergio Vaccari murder.

After Mannoia's disclosures, Detective Superintendent White of the City of London Police went to see Di Carlo in prison. Di Carlo said he had an iron-clad alibi for the night of Calvi's murder but that he would tell everything he knew about the banker's death if transferred to an Italian prison. A request was made through proper channels. The Italian prison authorities, however, were not interested.

As a result of Mannoia's story Carlo Calvi and his mother decided to hire an international firm of private detectives to investigate further. In New York, Carlo was introduced to Steven Rucker, a senior managing director of Kroll Associates Incorporated, which describes itself as 'a corporate investigation and consulting firm with over 200 employees and nine offices at worldwide locations'. Kroll requested a $1 million deposit. He told Calvi, 'We have a small army of informers walking the streets of London who could be working for you.' Calvi blinked, and reached for his cheque book. Kroll assigned the investigations to Jeffrey M. Katz, a former US Air Force intelligence sergeant. Katz assigned a team of researchers to the project and, ten years after the crime, discovered that evidence in the hands of the police appeared to have been disposed of or mislaid.

Katz assumed that the weak link in the Calvi case was Silvano Vittor. Kroll's informers reported that Vittor was engaged in smuggling arms into Croatia, a country at the edge of the Spiritual Curtain and one of the newest centres of Opus Dei activity. Katz also discovered in the files of Calvi's solicitors a copy of a Swiss hotel registration slip supposedly filled out by Hans Albert Kunz when he checked into the Holiday Inn at Zurich airport to meet with Carboni on 20 June 1982, two days after the Calvi murder.

Hans Albert Kunz had never been extensively interviewed by the police. He knew Ernesto Diotallevi of the Banda della Magliana was believed to do business with arms traffickers in association with Licio Gelli, and to be a consultant to Carboni's company, Sofint, in Rome. His wife had given Anna Calvi, when waiting in Zurich for her father, £14,500 so that she could fly to Washington on the morning that Calvi was found dead.

Although the registration slip was in his name, it obviously had been filled out by someone else. Kunz was born on 14 February 1923. The slip showed a date of birth of 10 December 1923. The signature was not Kunz's. And it gave a London address when Kunz lived on the outskirts of Geneva. The address was 80 Grove Park Road, London SE 9. When Katz checked it out, the family who lived at that address had never heard of a Hans Albert Kunz. Katz discovered another Grove Park Road at Strand-on-the-Green, Chiswick. The house numbers, however, ended at 78. Where 80 should have been was a slipway to the Thames. Strand-on-the-Green was a twenty-minute drive from the Chelsea Cloisters. Katz took a boat from Chiswick downriver under tidal conditions similar to the night of 17 June 1982. Fighting the tide, it took two hours. Calvi was seen leaving the Chelsea Cloisters at about 10 p.m. Allowing an hour for the drive to Chiswick and his transfer to a boat, this would have put him on the scaffolding at Blackfriars within the time frame suggested by the coroner for his death.

Kroll Associates hired Dr Angela Gallop, a former head of the Home Office's Forensic Science Laboratory, to conduct a forensic review of the existing evidence. She was assisted by her associate, Dr Clive Candy, who for many years had been the head scientist at the Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory. They concluded: 'The proposition that Roberto Calvi was murdered seems inescapable.'

A scientific examination of Calvi's clothing and shoes showed that he could not have walked on the scaffolding, as surmised by the police. This implied that he had been brought there in a boat and, already dead, strung up on the scaffolding. The staining on the back of his clothing suggested he had been laid out on a damp surface before being hung from the scaffolding. Dr Gallop also pointed out that the pathologist who performed the first autopsy had 'failed to notice the scratches on Calvi's cheeks'. When these were examined at a second autopsy in Milan, Professor Fornari said they had been made before death, perhaps by the fingernails of the person who slipped the noose rapidly over Calvi's head. Crucial police evidence was unavailable -- the microscopic samples of green paint scraped from the soles of Calvi's shoes. The only paint trace that remained on the shoes those ten years later was not of the same colour as the narrow green band on some of the scaffold poles. In any event, these poles were mostly painted orange and were rusty, which showed no traces on his shoes. From where, then, had the green paint come? The answer will never be known as the remaining traces are too small to be adequately analysed.

The Forensic Access Scientific Investigation into the Death of Roberto Calvi cost the Calvis more than £150,000. It told them that the City of London police had conducted "no proper scientific examination" at the death scene itself. But more to the point, it diplomatically ridiculed the police theory that Calvi, a 62-year-old physically unfit banker taking medication for vertigo had on a suicidal urge discarded his belt and necktie -- never found -- thrown away the key to his hotel room, shaved off his moustache in the middle of the night, filled his pockets with 5.4 kilograms of rocks and stuffed a building brick in the crotch of his pants which supposedly he had picked up on a nearby building site, walked more than 100 metres along Paul's Walk, climbed over a high parapet, descended some three metres on a metal ladder towards a dark and swirling river, jumped a metre-wide gap onto an unstable scaffolding, shimmied along it to the far end, took out three metres of marine rope which he happened to have in his pocket, tied a noose around his neck, slipped the other end of the rope through an eyelet in one of the pole fasteners, then launched himself into the river to die in a most demeaning manner.

To insist that Roberto Calvi had not been murdered defied logic. It also demonstrated a lack of familiarity with the sign language of the Mafia and Italian Freemasonry. Stones in a dead man's pockets is a warning to others that stolen money produces a barren return. A brick in the crotch is the reward for unfaithfulness. The Rome magistrates had tried to locate the sultry Neyde Toscano, a forty-one- year-old Brazilian who was said to have been Calvi's Rome mistress. She was known to have had ties with the Banda della Magliana and the Camorra, having been the former mistress of a Neapolitan underworld boss, Nunzio Guida. But Roberto Calvi was not known as a man who threw money away on entertaining courtesans in Rome's nightclubs. It was possible that the beautiful Miss Toscano had been placed in his arms, or even his bed, with the intention of later blackmailing him, but the police never were able to question her. She disappeared and has never been found.

Carlo and his mother sent a copy of the Forensic Access report to the British home secretary, then Kenneth Clarke. In their covering letter they noted that recent revelations affecting the case indicated a renewed police effort might achieve an important breakthrough. 'We believe that if further official inquiries are now made ... it will be possible to gather enough admissible evidence, even after ten years, to bring the killers to justice.'

Three weeks later the home secretary replied by letter that he had 'no authority to intervene in these matters'. Carlo could not believe Kenneth Clarke's response. If the home secretary had no authority to intervene in police matters, then who did? [4]

Opus Dei has 80,000 members in the world. According to Professor Sainz Moreno, when operating its strategy of discretion in the secular world, it relies upon 'men of trust'. That was the praxis of its Moneybags Theology. In Italy, Opus Dei's 'men of trust' were said to include Giuliano Andreotti, Flaminio Piccoli and Silvio Berlusconi. Cavaliere Berlusconi's publishing house Mondadori -- Italy's largest -- put out a big print-run edition of The Way, his television networks gave prime-time transmission to Opus Dei documentaries and Berlusconi himself was warmly solicited for funds, among them a £20,000 contribution in 1994 for an Opus Dei theological institute for women.

Before Berlusconi became prime minister, Giulio Andreotti had been the Work's strongest political supporter. He prided himself on being the first person to petition Paul VI to have Escriva de Balaguer raised to sainthood. That was in 1975, the year of the Founder's death. Andreotti has said that in his political career spanning four decades he never betrayed his Christian principles. He kept a copy of The Way on his bedside table and he attended Opus Dei's main retreat centre in Italy. He has been friends with three Popes -- Pius XII, Paul VI and John Paul II -- all of whom helped promote his career. He was a minister in thirty Italian governments and seven times prime minister. Andreotti's influence was well known. The Socialist Party leader Bettino Craxi, his arch-opponent in the Chamber of Deputies, dubbed Andreotti the Beelzebub of Italian politics.

Andreotti was certainly Beelzebub as far as Clara Calvi was concerned. The years of stress unbroken, she had developed Parkinson's Disease and was almost unable to walk. Her hands contorted by the effects of the illness, she spent much of each day seated on one of the two giant sofas in her living room, reading the Italian press and digesting every piece of material that in any way related to her husband's death. She had surrounded herself with mementoes of happier times: photos of her and Roberto, and the children, on holidays by the sea, at dinner parties in Milan, Christmas at Drezzo. Her mind never seemed to rest.

The manipulation of political power in Italy through graft and corruption, necessitating a parallel economy dominated by intrigue and double bookkeeping, left the door open for organized criminals to become the partners of politicians in the administrative machinery of the State. For Carlo Calvi, Banco Ambrosiano's demise and his father's death was the first institutionalized manifestation of this trend. If his father had been able to defy the 'occult forces' rather than being consumed by them, Carlo wondered whether the 'Clean Hands' investigations that swept Italy in the early 1990s might not have been brought on ten years earlier.

Certainly it appeared that Andreotti was well acquainted with Italy's bustarella (bribes) syndrome. The 'Clean Hands' investigations uncovered allegations that he had received $1 million to engineer a cover-up of a major loan scam involving Italy's savings loan federation. Two things happened. Mino Pecorelli, publisher of the Rome' scandal sheet OP, informed Andreotti he had proof that the payment was laundered through Carboni's Sofint company and he intended to disclose it in OP's next issue. He never got the chance. On the evening of 20 March 1979 he was found behind the wheel of his car, shot four times in the head.

In 1994 Andreotti's friend and former foreign trade minister, Claudio Vitalone, brother of the lawyer Wilfredo with whom Carboni had been in almost hourly phone contact while shadowing Calvi's flight to London, was charged with ordering Pecorelli's slaying. Accused with him were Mafia bosses Gaetano Badalamenti and Pippo Calo. Andreotti, friend of three popes who claimed never in his long career of public service to have forsaken his Catholic principles, joined them at trial, accused of issuing the contract against Pecorelli. Magistrates in Palermo had already stunned the world by accusing 'Uncle Giulio' of 'protecting, assisting and consorting with the Cosa Nostra' in return for electioneering support that helped maintain the Christian Democrat Party and Andreotti at the apex of Italian political life for more than three decades.

'This is really a blasphemy that has to be erased,' Andreotti told reporters.

Other blasphemies requiring attention included those made by Swiss banker Jurg Heer. He had been credit manager at Rothschild Bank in Zurich, responsible for managing the Bellatrix account until fired by his superiors. Put out by his rough handling, Heer lifted the lid on Pandora's box. He claimed that in 1982 he had received a phone call from Licio Gelli requesting him to fill a suitcase with $5 million in bank notes and hand it over to two men who arrived at the bank in an armour-plated Mercedes. Heer said he later asked for an explanation. 'The money was for the killers of Calvi,' he was told.

Rothschild Bank, it should be remembered, was where $150 million transferred from Banco Ambrosiano's offshore network to Bellatrix, a member of the United Trading family, became side-tracked. Less than 20 per cent of that money was recovered by the Ambrosiano liquidators. Heer's revelation raised an interesting question: were Calvi's killers paid with monies belonging to United Trading?

Heer was questioned by an examining magistrate in Zurich and then disappeared. He was last seen in Madrid around Christmas 1992. He purchased an air ticket for Thailand, where charges against his credit card ended a few months later. Heer's disclosure raised considerable interest among investigators working on the Calvi case. They would like to interview the banker. But there is real concern that he may no longer be alive.

As Ruiz-Mateos had said in London more than ten years before, this was only the beginning of a very long film. The conviction against Carboni, Lena and Hnilica in the Calvi briefcase trial was overturned because of 'faulty legal procedure'. By then Lena, like Toscano and Heer, had gone missing and also was feared dead. Almerighi had been hoping to use all three of them as material witnesses in the newly reopened Calvi murder enquiry. Almerighi notified Gelli, Carboni, Pippo Calo and Frank Di Carlo that they were official suspects, but he was totally dumbfounded when informed that Di Carlo's transfer to an Italian penitentiary was refused by the Italian Prisons Authority for 'not serving the cause of justice'.

'There are still people in this country who do not want the killers of Roberto Calvi brought to justice,' Almerighi commented. [5]

But it was Pazienza who pointed out one of the strangest anomalies. He maintained that in 1982, when the Bank of Italy commissioners moved in, Banco Ambrosiano was not bankrupt. 'Banco Ambrosiano may have had liquidity problems, but there was no "black hole". That was bullshit! When placed in liquidation Ambrosiano was still a viable bank. How could a bank that supposedly was bankrupt show a profit one year later of $300 million?' he asked.

Gelli, meanwhile, had given himself up to the Swiss authorities on condition that he be extradited forthwith to Italy, where more than five years later all judgements against him remained under appeal. His return to Italy and Andreotti's eclipse marked the passing of an era. The generation of Cold Warriors to which they belonged had become obsolete and was no longer needed. The Occident was facing a new constellation of forces that required new minds and different faces. As the end of the second millennium approached the words of Andre Malraux seemed more prescient than ever: 'The twenty-first century will be a century of religion or it will be not at all.'

_______________

Notes:

1. Homily given by Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer on the campus of the University of Navarra, 8 October 1967.

2. 'Church Liberals Protest', Associated Press, 22 June 1993.

3. Andrea Tornielli, 'A Troublesome Bishop', 30 Giorni, No. 1, 1995.

4. After more than ten years battling to uncover the truth, the Calvi family was finally forced to give up for lack of money. Their last setback came when Kroll Associates, claiming its investigators were on the edge of an important breakthrough, stopped work on the case for nonpayment of $3,119,972.52 in back fees and expenses.

A year later Kroll sued the Calvis in New York for breach of contract. Kroll requested the court hearings be held in camera due to the 'highly sensitive' nature of the investigations, alleging that Carlo Calvi's disclosures to the author had endangered the life of a confidential source -- identified in the proceedings as 'Mr. X, a UK citizen'. Kroll further asked that the Calvis be enjoined from discussing the investigation or litigation with 'any journalists or other persons associated with the print, television, film, radio or broadcast media, without Kroll's prior consent'. The judge accepted both motions. The judge was not informed, however, that 'Mr. X' had at all times spoken freely with the author and had even asked that his photograph, which he thoughtfully supplied, appear in the book.

In August 1995, the prestigious New York law firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, representing the Calvi family, asked to withdraw from the proceedings. This was granted. The Calvis were requested to appoint new lawyers to represent them. When they failed to respond, Kroll Associates asked for a default judgement in the amount of $3.8 million. This was accorded in May 1996.

When contacted immediately afterwards, Cadwalader's Grant B. Hering refused to discuss why he and the firm had withdrawn, citing client-attorney confidentiality.

5. Within weeks of Romano Prodi's election as Italy's new centre-left premier, the Italian Prisons Authority reversed itself. In June 1996 Francesco Di Carlo was extradited to Italy and began co-operating with the Rome magistrates.

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29. The Polish Operation

A militia old like the gospel and like the gospel new to arise with the divine command to propagate Christian perfection among people of all social classes.

-- Cronica VIII, 1959

AS FAR AS IS KNOWN, POLAND WAS OPUS DEI'S FIRST DEEP-PENETRATION operation. It got under way as Banco Ambrosiano in Milan was beginning to develop its offshore network and increased in momentum after United Trading was formed. It reflected to perfection Escriva de Balaguer's affirmation that Opus Dei was a 'disorganized organization'. By that he did not mean an unstructured organization, for with its praxis manuals, norms and customs, constitutions and codex, Opus Dei was almost stiflingly structured. But in reacting to threats against the Church it remained flexible, mobile, alert.

The architect of Opus Dei's penetration into Eastern Europe was said to have been Laureano Lopez Rodo, who served as Spanish ambassador to Vienna from 1972 to 1974. His strategy predated the founding of Solidarnosc, the Polish free trade union, by seven or eight years. Because of it, the Austrian capital became the most frequently used gateway into Eastern Europe for Opus Dei's milites Christi, and still today Opus Dei maintains an active presence in Vienna, overseen by Monsignor Juan Bautista Torello, its leading psychologist, working alongside political scientist Martin Kastner, member of a wealthy mercantile family, and Dr Ricardo Estarriol Sesera, a foreign correspondent' for Barcelona's La Vanguardia newspaper. Estarriol and Kastner actively attempted to recruit members of the Polish community in exile who gravitated around the Institute for Human Sciences, set up during Lopez Rodo's ambassadorship by two of Karol Wojtyla's closest friends from Cracow, Krzysztof Michalski and Father Josef Tischner. Wojtyla himself made frequent visits to the Austrian capital during the mid-1970s.

Vienna was also well known to Pavel Hnilica, Bishop of Rusado, as it was the western terminus of Pro Fratribus's bible-smuggling route into southern Poland. Hnilica, who in the 1980s enjoyed the Pope's confidence, became to this extent a rival of Opus Dei, when the Prelature began extending its influence inside the papal administration. According to some Vatican-watchers, this may have led to Hnilica's entanglement and later entrapment in Flavio Carboni's devious Operation S.C.LV.

While in the 1960s Poland was nowhere to be seen on Opus Dei's political horizons, by the 1970s and 1980s it loomed large. When John Paul II made his first papal visit to Poland in June 1979 for the 900th anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Stanislaus -- Cracow's first bishop -- he was accompanied by an Opus Dei staff, including his personal secretary, Father Stanislaw Dziwisz. Vanguardia correspondent Estarriol was also in the papal 'entourage, reporting the delirious greeting that more than a million Poles gave the Pope when he arrived there.

Opus Dei's milites Christi brought to Poland the financial means to form a Catholic underground that would act, if not in outright defiance of, at least in parallel to the government. Its objectives were twofold: to create a strong Catholic press; and to put in place a network of intellectuals and professionals -- few would become actual members, but all were considered doctrinally sound -- to lead a national revival. One of these was a young electrician at the state-owned Lenin shipyards in Gdansk, Lech Walesa. But there were others and out of their efforts grew KOR, a Workers' Defence Committee headed by Jacek Kuron. It was provided with a fund, financed by anonymous grants from the West, to assist families of workers imprisoned or thrown out of their jobs by the government. A key person in transmitting their needs to Rome was Estarriol.

By the end of the 1970s, Poland was no longer able to service its $14,000 million bank debt to the West and the economy ground to a virtual standstill. In August 1980 the government ended food subsidies, which raised prices overnight by 40 per cent. In Gdansk, workers occupied the shipyards and formed an illegal strikers' committee that was baptized Solidarnosc. Support for Solidarnosc spread across the country, forcing the government to negotiate the 21-point Gdansk Agreement. Estarriol was there, filing detailed despatches throughout the three-week crisis. He was the first informed when the government accepted to negotiate with Solidarnosc. When the negotiations were interrupted five days later, his paper La Vanguardia ran an exclusive interview with Walesa, and at the end of that August Estarriol reported that the authorities had caved in to the workers' demands. He also revealed that the Church under Cardinal Wyzynski had played a critical role in the final phase of negotiations.

The concessions won in Gdansk for all Polish workers included the right to form free trade unions, elect their own representatives, strike in support of grievances and publish union newspapers free of government control. Solidarnosc immediately planned to launch its own national weekly. But Solidarnosc had no funds, and certainly no printing plant. The capital to buy plant, newsprint and pay salaries had to come from somewhere. Again, Estarriol was said to have relayed Solidarnosc's requirements to Rome.

The Solidarity movement revolutionized Polish politics. But, explained Walesa, 'nothing would have been possible without the election of Papa Wojtyla, his travel to Poland and the continuous, obstinate and smart work of the Church. Without the Church nothing could have happened.' [1] Jerzy Turowicz, who became editor of the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powscechny, one of the country's most influential publications, said that because of John Paul II's visit, 'for the first time the Polish people felt strong.'

When a distraught Walesa visited Rome in January 1981 Estarriol came with him. The Solidarity rank and file was out of control, refusing to obey the central directorate and the Soviets were concerned. Estarriol reported weeks before that Leonid Brezhnev had called a secret meeting of the Warsaw Pact in Moscow. Walesa feared a Soviet move to crush Solidarnosc. He was said to have met senior Opus Central and CIA strategists in Rome. Three weeks later -- on 9 February 1981 -- General Wojciech Jaruzelski assumed control in Warsaw and prepared to tear up the Gdansk Agreement. Solidarity planned a nationwide protest strike that threatened to turn into general insurrection. Brezhnev responded by ordering a Soviet invasion. When the Pope was informed, he called the Kremlin and told Brezhnev that the strike would be shelved if he called off the invasion. A report by 'Department 20' of the East German Ministry of Public Security recorded that 'within an hour, Brezhnev informed the Pope there would be no military intervention'. John Paul II called Cardinal Wyszynski, then gravely ill. Wyszynski summoned Walesa to his bedside and told him he must obey the Pope's order. Without consulting Solidarity's directorate, Walesa cancelled the strike. And so John Paul II was said to have saved Poland from Soviet invasion. [2]

The mood at factories throughout the country turned grim. Uncertain whether they would be able to feed their families or heat their homes during the winter, workers responded by organizing factory sit-ins. With the situation deteriorating, in December 1981 Jaruzelski imposed martial law. Responding to pressure from Moscow, he was determined to force the country back to work and, to show he meant business, overnight he arrested 5,000 Solidarity activists.

Financing Solidarity had initially been undertaken by United Trading through the Banco Ambrosiano's offshore network. But by now it meant in effect subsidizing the entire Polish economy. Opus Dei, therefore, turned to Washington. At about this time the Work was said to be seeking to draw closer to President Reagan's Director of Central Intelligence, William J. Casey. A street-smart Irish-American Catholic from Queens, Casey was one of Reagan's most heeded foreign policy advisers. He had made his mark during the Second World War with the OSS, parachuting agents into Germany. After the war he entered private law practice in New York and had made his first million dollars on Wall Street by the age of 40. This qualified him to become Nixon's head of the Securities & Exchange Commission. Under Reagan, Casey was called upon to co-ordinate Washington's response to the Polish crisis.

Casey's first reaction was to fly to Rome and consult the Pope. He and two other members of Reagan's inner team, Alexander Haig and Vernon Walters, were Knights of the Sovereign Order of Malta, which gave them instant and confidential access to the papal apartments. But when the Polish crisis broke, Casey's moral fitness to head the CIA was being questioned by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and he was unable to leave Washington. He despatched General Walters in his stead. Over the next five months Walters made a dozen visits to the Vatican.

The Walters shuttle prepared the way for a meeting between Reagan and John Paul II that took place on 7 June 1982. The US president agreed to underwrite the Vatican's plan for keeping Solidarity alive. Through Opus Dei, the Church had already spent many millions on the Solidarity cause -- $1,000 million, if you believe Calvi; something less than $450 million, according to Pazienza; or $40 million according to the left-wing American magazine Mother Jones. [3] While President and Pope reviewed the Polish situation, in another corner of the papal apartments Reagan's secretary of state Alexander Haig and national security adviser William Clark were conferring with Cardinal Casaroli and Archbishop Silvestrini on Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

According to Vatican sources, Casey had also intended to attend but at the last moment was confronted with a triple intelligence crisis and had to cancel. On 6 June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. The following day, opposition leader Hissan Habre seized power in Chad, successfully concluding a long-planned CIA operation that ended Qaddafi's influence there. Also the CIA expected Iran to launch an offensive against Baghdad within days that it feared would result in the setting up of a fundamentalist Shiite state in southern Iraq. All three emergencies highlighted the US administration's concern with radical Islam. Consequently, the discussions with Casaroli and Silvestrini focused mainly on how to contain the Islamic threat, though this was never reported.

In addition to the informal agreement over Poland, Reagan's Vatican meeting was important for two other reasons. First, it came about as a result of Opus Dei's growing influence both in Washington and on a policy level inside the Vatican. Opus Dei had played a determining role in shaping the Vatican's reaction on Poland, giving rise to almost Byzantine rivalry and jealousy between Portillo and Casaroli. But the second key point that resulted from the meeting was the realization that while the Pope's attention remained fixed on Poland the emphasis of American foreign policy had tilted towards dealing with radical Islam. To be sure, the last spasms of Soviet imperialism -- the Kremlin's threat to send the Red Army into Poland and its invasion of Afghanistan preoccupied the Reaganites, but they were more concerned with security of the Middle Eastern oilfields should Islamic extremists take over the region.

A Reagan White House aide at the time was Dr Carl A. Anderson, who served as liaison officer for special interest groups -- e.g., Opus Dei -- at the White House. Anderson was an Opus Dei member and as such his apostolate was to attract others in his milieu into the Work. But he was unlikely to have been the only one working inside the Reagan administration, though Opus Dei refuses to provide information on such matters. Nevertheless, with Casey running the CIA, the agency took up the war against Liberation Theology in Latin America like never before. And as Reagan's senior East Europe and Middle Eastern expert, Casey rarely undertook a trip to Europe or the Middle East without first stopping in Rome to exchange views with the Pope. [4]

The change in foreign policy focus was brought on by the downfall of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the US's principal ally in the Persian Gulf, through which 70 per cent of the West's oil passes. The Shah's ouster by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who like the Pope had no armoured divisions, no squadrons of F-4 Phantoms, and no battle fleet, marked a dramatic turning for modern Islam. As long as the Cold War raged, Communism had been the common enemy of the West and most political commentators refused to take the word of the Prophet all that seriously. But they were wrong; a second confirmation of radical Islam's new assertiveness came two years later when another group of fundamentalists, inspired by the same Ayatollah Khomeini, assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and very nearly succeeded in transforming America's second major ally in the region into an Islamic theocracy hostile to the West. This prompted a reformulation of McNamara's domino theory, giving it a radical Islam dynamic. Reagan's advisers feared that if Egypt fell to Islamic extremists, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf kingdoms would soon follow.

Washington's concerns would have been passed on to the Opus Dei establishment at the very least by Carl Anderson, and Opus Central -- with intelligence contacts throughout Europe -- if not already aware of the extremist menace would have begun to react. Indeed it was not long before Estarriol was in Moscow, reporting on Brezhnev's intentions for Afghanistan. In any event, the Spanish ambassador in Moscow, supernumerary Juan Antonio Samaranch, would have kept Opus Dei informed of Soviet preoccupations.

After the Vatican agreement, Casey was said to have been 'positively rejuvenated at the prospect of flooding Poland with expensive equipment and cheap agents. He was delighted to take advice from Cardinal John J. Krol [the Polish-American Archbishop of Philadelphia], and to use priests in Poland to spread subversion.' [5] Others he listened to were New York Cardinal Terence Cooke and the new Apostolic Delegate in Washington, Archbishop (now Cardinal) Pio Laghi, formerly the Vatican's top man in Buenos Aires: all strong Opus Dei supporters. Cooke, moreover, was the Grand Protector and Spiritual Adviser of the Knights of Malta. And in 1977, he had travelled to Poland to discuss Paul VI's succession with the Archbishop of Cracow.

After the Pope's visit to Poland, Opus Dei's milites Christi became active in organizing training courses, conferences and debates among Polish intellectuals. In 1986, it arranged the first student exchange programme between Poland and the West. That summer the Vienna-based European Forum for Students sent 400 students from ten European countries to work on a half-dozen church construction sites. While in Poland, the volunteer workers participated in a series of seminars on the theme of 'Europe 2000 -- A New Image for Man'.

In June 1989, the Polish Communist party was defeated in the country's first free elections since the Second World War. Democracy's return to Poland signalled the death of Communism throughout eastern Europe. A month later, Warsaw re-established diplomatic relations with the Vatican and Opus Dei officially opened a regional vicariat in Warsaw.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Opus Dei quickened its march into Eastern Europe, consolidating with an official presence what previously had been a hidden one. On 15 April 1990, Alvaro del Portillo visited Warsaw. He was met at the airport by his regional vicar, an Argentinian electrical engineer, Esteban Moszoro, who had been ordained in St Peter's by John Paul II eight years before, and by the newly appointed nuncio, Monsignor Joseph Kowalczyk. The next day the Opus Dei prelate bishop met Cardinal Jozef Glemp, the new primate.

By then Gdansk had its own mosque, and authorization was about to be granted for the construction of an Islamic centre and mosque in the north-eastern city of Bialystok, financed by a Saudi grant, to mark the 600th anniversary of the settling of Tartars in the region. About 20,000 of their descendants remained.

Once the target of Ottoman expansion, as the end of the second millennium approached Poland was again a focus of Islamic regard, but for different reasons. With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the Polish capital became the nerve centre of an international bazaar dealing in surplus Soviet arms and the merchants of death did a brisk business selling the cast-off weapons to Allah's troops. The arms were primarily destined for Islamic fundamentalist groups in North Africa, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and Bosnia.

According to author Yvon Le Vaillant, Opus Dei was involved in espionage up to its ears. [6] The Spanish magazine Tiempo, maintained that espionage -- and particularly the 'counter-revolution' branch of Spain's CESID -- was 'the pretty girl of Opus Dei'. [7] Opus Central was therefore well placed to monitor the international arms trade and reportedly at about this time it began to develop corridors of proximity with the more moderate face of Islam.

Shortly after Germany's re-unification, Escriva de Balaguer's sons opened centres in Prague, Brno, Budapest, Riga and Stettin. But the Prelature was particularly concerned with developments in the Balkans where Father Stanislav Crnica established the Work's first centre in Zagreb. The distance between Rome and the Croatian capital is only 535 kilometres. Chaos in the Balkans could flood Italy with refugees, inevitably bringing with them the scars of conflict and promise of increased tension as local resources became overstretched. A shrinking resource base breeds insecurity, and insecurity leads to conflict. The formula had been proven in the Horn of Africa and by the 1990s it was being exported by Iran to the Balkans where all the ingredients existed for a descent into a fundamentalist inferno: three religions with a legacy of mutual hatred eyeing each other, certain that the opening skirmishes of the next Crusade had already begun.

Before the Church can proclaim a new Crusade, the moral guidelines of the Just War doctrine must be met. But the Just War doctrine had not been invoked in the West since the Battle of Lepanto in the sixteenth century. During the Reagan administration, with their own legate in Baghdad and monitors elsewhere in the Arab world, the Pope's 'intransigent hussars' began revamping the Just War doctrine. With the eruption of conflict in the Balkans their efforts became more urgent. But before the doctrine could be invoked, the updated version had to be accepted by the Church hierarchy. After beatification of the Founder and control of the Vatican finances, this became Opus Dei's most pressing objective.

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Notes:

1. Oriana Fallaci, interview with Lech Walesa, Warsaw, 23-24 February 1981.

2. Jonathan Luxmoore, 'The Pope Saved Poland from Soviet Invasion', The Tablet, London, 15 October 1994.

3. Reference to $40 million is made by Martin A. Lee in 'Their Will Be Done', an article appearing in Mother Jones, San Francisco, July 1983.

4. Carl Bernstein, 'Holy Alliance', Time, 24 February 1992, and National Catholic Reporter, 28 February 1992.

5. Peter Hebblethwaite. 'Time's Papal Plot', Tablet, London, 29 February 1992.

6. Le Vaillant, Op. cit., p. 135.

7. Tiempo No. 219, 21 July 1986.

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30. The Moral Debate

Islamic fundamentalism is an aggressive revolutionary movement as militant and violent as the Bolshevik, Fascist and Nazi movements of the past.

-- Professor Amos Perlmutter, American University, Washington, DC

SOON AFTER BEING NAMED HEAD OF THE CIA, BILL CASEY ADOPTED the idea of harnessing radical Islam to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and he convinced the Saudis to bankroll the project. Casey never dreamt that the undisciplined extremists would actually succeed in defeating the Communists, only that they might contain them in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. By involving Islam's fanatic fringe in what he considered a never-ending mission, Casey hoped to distract the fundamentalists from undermining Arab governments that were the West's allies in the region.

As the holder of several papal distinctions, Casey would have shared the Pope's view of Islam, considering it a religion that denies the Divine Revelation. However the wily CIA chief appeared not to have taken into account that, since its founding in the seventh century, Islam has succeeded like no other force known to history in motivating men to kill or be killed in the cause of propagating their faith.

The extremist leaders were only too happy to take advantage of Saudi petrodollars and American logistics to form a strongly motivated army of militants. The Mujahedin-e Islam -- Combatants of Islam -- were so successful in bleeding the Soviets in Afghanistan that they contributed in a major way -- and in their view more so than the Christian Pope -- to the disintegration of the Evil Empire. But once unleashed there was no stopping them. The Evil Empire had gone, but what became known as 'Islam's Floating Army' kept on returning to haunt its creators.

For Christendom one of radical Islam's most dangerous beliefs is that Allah has promised them Europe as Dar al-Islam -- the Land of Islam. They regard the defeat that Charles Martel handed the Moors near Poitiers in 732 as only a temporary setback -- albeit one that has dragged on now for more than 1,200 years. According to the Anglo-Islamic writer Ahmad Thomson, the most radical believe that the forces of Allah are again poised to harvest 'die fruit of the Almighty's promise.

With its 2,000 years of institutional memory, the Vatican would not have forgotten that only 100 years before Charles Martel's victory at Poitiers the old Roman province of Syria was one of the wealthiest corners of Christendom. Its towns and cities possessed magnificent churches and a well-endowed clergy. But its agriculture and industry were increasingly dependent upon migrant labour to perform the more menial tasks, much as in Germany today with its 3.5 million guest workers and their families. The migrant workers around the year 600 were more often than not Arabs. Treated little better than slaves, they became increasingly discontent while realizing as they grew in number that they constituted a social force in their own right.

Then one August day in 636 a ragtag army of 6,000 scimitar-wielding horsemen rode out of the desert to defeat the finest fighting force in the world, a 50,000-strong Byzantine army under Emperor Heraclius, and within a decade Christianity had all but disappeared from the region.

Everything learned about Opus Dei suggests that the question which today most concerns Villa Tevere is whether the West faces a similar fate. Participants at one of its closed-door seminars near Barcelona concluded that 'a parallel exists between the present situation in the Occident and the fall of the Roman Empire, whose citizens were unaware of their own decadence.' [1] Now this was an alarmist, not to say scaremongering conclusion. But it was perfectly in line with Opus Dei's use of the psychology of fear.

For a religious autocracy the Vatican City State supports a surprisingly broad diversity of views. Obedience to the pope is absolute, but one quickly learns that papal absolutism comes in varying degrees and sometimes along differing paths. Once elected, a pope rules until death or until he chooses to resign. The same is true of Opus Dei's prelate bishop. This means that the two strongest religious leaders in the West can develop political strategies over longer periods -- up to ten or twelve years if necessary -- which is a luxury that no elected political leader enjoys. Quite clearly a long-term perspective was necessary to engineer the Roman Curia's acceptance of an updated Just War doctrine. But before it could directly influence Vatican policy, Opus Dei needed to consolidate its power base within the Curia.

Former numeraries stress that part of Opus Dei's modus operandi is to maintain a constant feeling of anxiety among the troops. 'Opus Dei obtains the loyalty of its members not through love, nor through belonging to a close-knit community, but through the element of fear. Fear controls better than love, better than money, better than faith. The fear element and Opus Dei are happy bedfellows,' affirmed Father Felzmann.

Fear for the Church's survival was certainly present at Opus Dei's founding in pre-Civil War Spain. Fear for the Church remained constant throughout the Cold War. With the fall of Communism, the fear factor remained strong in the Work's culture. After John Paul II's election, Opus Dei began attempting to condition the Roman Curia in the same way it conditions its members. By hammering home the notion that the Church is threatened from within as well as from without, Opus Dei convinces members that they are engaged in an ongoing crusade. One observer has described John Paul II's papacy as representing a return to 'Ultramontanism', the extreme Conservative force that dominated the Church at the time of the First Vatican Council. 'The central government of the Church thinks it is still defending a fortress or faith against the besieging forces of barbarism', claimed a religious affairs commentator. [2]

As far as Opus Dei is concerned, history has shown that there is nothing like an external threat for producing a reaction of 'genuine exaltation' that brings believers back to the basics of their faith. Surely every thinking Christian believes that militant Islam must be met by a measured, morally appropriate Christian response. But what constitutes a morally appropriate response? Opus Dei is certainly one of the few agencies actively studying the question. In the final analysis the difference between what is right and what is wrong, between a Just War or just a war, boils down to a question of moral authority. But does Opus Dei possess sufficient moral currency to shape Christendom's response to radical Islam?

As we have seen, Opus Dei's hierarchy has consistently acted as if all means are appropriate. It has been accused of lying, forging documents and employing disinformation, sanitizing its records and using threats and physical coercion. A case in point was that of John Roche who when he sued Opus Dei for a return of funds was confronted with forged documents in court. [3]

Raimundo Panikkar told a Jesuit editor in Zurich that a highly placed member of the Roman Curia had discovered two priests from the Villa Tevere in the archives of his Congregation removing or replacing documents relating to Opus Dei or its Founder.

'In the Congregation of Religious we no longer find certain letters and documents about Opus Dei that we know should be there. In some cases only empty file folders remain,' one Vatican researcher, Dr Giancarlo Rocca, claimed. 'Several times we have found files where the original document has been removed and another substituted in its place ... It is very serious. Their way of writing history is false.'

We have also seen that all members of Opus Dei do not share the same knowledge of the Work's structure. The 1982 Codex Iuris Particularis Operis Dei is not commonly handed out to subordinate members. [4] These constitute an army of professional workers who by their discipline, good appearances and sincere faith can be usefully deployed by the Work in government offices, prison administrations, tax bureaux, the FBI or the French presidency: It has been alleged that numeraries provide an ideal screen for the special 'apostolic tasks' of the Work, as decreed by the central hierarchy and permitted by its internal statutes. [5] Ah, the statutes! Even here there is confusion.

Has the Codex Iuris replaced the much more detailed and still secret 1950 Constitutions? [6] 'The 1950 Constitutions are, of course, no longer in force,' Andrew Soane affirmed. 'They are completely superseded by the 1982 Statutes.' [7] But are they, really? Article 172 of the 1950 Constitutions states: 'These Constitutions are the foundation of our Institute. For this reason they must be considered holy, inviolable and perpetual ...' Moreover, Opus Dei numeraries like John Roche were told that, like the Ten Commandments, the 1950 Constitutions were intended to last in aeternum. Paragraph 2 of the Codex Iuris's Final Dispositions seems to imply this as well. It states:

This Codex, to be made known to all members of Opus Dei, priests and lay people, as well as priests, aggregate and supernumerary, of the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross, enters into force from 8 December 1982. All members remain subject to the same obligations and maintain the same rights existing under the previous juridical regime, unless the prescriptions of this Codex expressly establish otherwise, or unless they are derivatives of norms repealed by the new Statutes.

This is an unusual declaration, uncommon in law. In as much as the 1982 Codex does not mention any article pertaining to the 1950 Constitutions, it therefore appears to abrogate none of them.

To call Opus Dei a secret society is calumnious, spokesmen for the Prelature maintain. They point to the investigation conducted by the Italian Minister of the Interior in 1986, Dr. Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, who became President of the Republic. After eight months of consideration, Scalfaro, described as a 'rigorous and fundamentalist Catholic' and 'suspected' member of Opus Dei, [8] came to the conclusion that Opus Dei was not a secret association and to support this assertion he quoted from the 1982 Codex Juris. 'These statutes, which the minister [Scalfaro] quoted in detail, were what the critics had claimed to be Opus Dei's secret rules ... However to demonstrate that there was nothing to hide, the prelate of Opus Dei approached the Vatican to have the statutes made public. The Vatican agreed and copies were made available. None of the critics took up the offer to examine them,' an Opus Dei apologist claimed. [9]

According to Vatican sources, Don Alvaro del Portillo did not ask but was ordered by the Secretary of State, Cardinal Casaroli, to provide the parliamentary commission with copies of the statutes to save it from being branded a secret organization, which would have reflected poorly upon the Church. But what Opus Dei spokesmen never mention is that Switzerland's supreme court -- the Swiss Federal Court which sits in Lausanne -- issued a judgement on 19 May 1988 -- two years after Scalfaro's 'investigation' -- in the matter of Verein Internationales Tagungszentrum, an Opus Dei auxiliary society, against the Tages Anzeiger newspaper of Zurich. The judgement characterized Opus Dei as a 'secret association' that operates 'covertly', with a maximum of opacity in its affairs.

The use of threats by the captains of Opus Dei's milites Christi was hardly subtle. Their recruiting practices have been criticized. And their financial dealings, as the record shows us, have been attacked as unethical and underhand.

These, then, were the morals of the men who were preparing the doctrinal instruments needed to rearm Christendom against radical Islam. But to insure the doctrine's acceptance by the Roman Curia, and then by the leaders of the West, they first had to consolidate their power base inside the Vatican.

_______________

Notes:

1. 'Immigration: le Cardinal de Barcelone craint une proliferation des delits en Europe', APIC No. 40, 9 February 1995.

2. Clifford Longley, 'Unfinished business', The Tablet, London, 20 May 1995, p. 622 (emphasis added).

3. After leaving Opus Dei, in 1975 John Roche brought suit in the High Court of London to recover £4,500 be said he had loaned the institute and £25,000 representing that part of his salary paid by the British government into a London account on his behalf during the eleven years he spent as a teacher at Strathmore College in Kenya. Opus Dei maintained that the account had never belonged to Roche but to Opus Dei Registered Trustees, producing supporting documents to this effect and also showing conclusively that no loan had been made. On the basis of these documents, the judge ruled against Roche. Only after the judgment was handed down did Roche realize that some of Opus Dei's evidence had been 'fabricated'. When he threatened an appeal, in October 1982 Opus Dei's solicitors acknowledged that thirteen of the documents purporting to reflect 'the sequence of transactions ... were not written on the dates they bear, but in 1976' -- i.e., after the action was filed. The solicitors proposed an out-of-court settlement if Roche would forgo further litigation and remain silent.

4. The Codex Iuris was published in Latin in Fuenmayor et al., The Canonical Path of Opus Dei, Scepter Publishers, Princeton, 1994 (originally published by Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, 1989), and Pedro Rodriguez et al., Opus Dei in the Church, Four Courts Press, Dublin 1994 (originally published by Edidones Rialp, Madrid, 1993).

5. Dr. Robert Meunier, research physicist, Reflections on Opus Dei, Geneva [unpublished].

6. The Canonical Path of Opus Dei only publishes the first chapter, with its 12 articles, of the 1950 Constitutions, when there are 20 chapters in all with a total of 480 articles.

7. Andrew Soane, 9 November 1994.

8. Massimo Olmi, 'L'Opus Dei a l'assaut du Vatican,' Temoinages Catholiques, Paris, 7 December 1986, p. 9.

9. William J. West, Opus Dei -- Exploding a Myth, Little Hills Press, Crows Nest, Australia 1987, pp. 21-22.

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31. Consolidation

Religious freedom is the cornerstone of all freedoms.

-- John Paul II

IN MAY 1984 THE PONTIFICAL COMMISSION FOR SOCIAL Communications, the official Vatican media and public relations office, was taken over by a forty-nine-year-old American prelate, Archbishop John Patrick Foley. This marked a final phase in the palace revolution that began in the autumn of 1978. It was one of consolidation that would place Opus Dei at the centre of power, giving its senior policy planners unimpeded access to the papal apartments on the terzo piano of the apostolic palace.

Not very much was known in Rome about the bald and pudgy Monsignor Foley. He was portrayed as a media specialist who had been brought from the New World to overhaul the Vatican's communications machinery. A protege of the archly conservative bishop-maker Cardinal Krol, since 1970 Foley had been editor-in-chief of the Standard and Times, Philadelphia's archdiocesan newspaper.

In December 1984, Foley stated in an article for the International Catholic Union of the Press that Catholic journalists 'should be like candles, communicating the light of Christ's truth and the warmth of Christ's love, and being consumed in the service of God'. [1] That same month, the Vatican spokesman, Father Romeo Panciroli, a known Opus Dei detractor, was banished from Rome, being assigned a posting in the boondocks of Liberia. He was replaced by Dr. Joaquin Navarro-Valls. By then the Roman Curia was absolutely certain on which side of the Tiber lay the sectarian sympathies of Archbishop Foley.

Navarro-Valls's appointment represented a first bit of house cleaning by the dynamic new president of the Commission for Social Communications. The person he had chosen to become emperor of the Sala Stampa -- the Press room -- was the first professional journalist to hold the job, having been, for several years Rome correspondent for the Madrid daily ABC.

'He was presented to his colleagues as a modern Leonardo da Vinci, being a medical doctor and having done his apprenticeship as a bullfighter. But the great breakthrough, we were told, was that Navarro-Valls was the first layman to be director of the Vatican Press Office. What was not revealed was that Navarro-Valls is a member of Opus Dei. So the attempt to palm him off as an "ordinary layman" simply did not wash. No ordinary layman has to report regularly to his "director" (Opus Dei term for superior). And no ordinary layman may go to confession only to an Opus Dei priest ... That Navarro-Valls is personally charming, a vast improvement on Panciroli, and understands deadlines, may be splendid as far as it goes, but it cannot alter the fact that he is unlikely to promote the cause of truth-gathering in the Vatican,' were the prescient words of Peter Hebblethwaite. [2]

Alvaro del Portillo was a consultor to the Council for Social Communications. Associate numerary Enrique Planas y Comas, a diocesan priest from Avila, was raised to the rank of honorary prelate to the Holy See and became one of Foley's chief assistants. In June 1988, Foley's Council was reorganized. By order from above, the Sala Stampa was detached from it and made a 'special office' of the Secretariat of State, a significant upgrading. As a result, the Council for Social Communications became primarily responsible for the audio-visual image of the Pope. Foley's star had paled somewhat. On the other hand, the influence of the 'ordinary layman' was on the rise. Navarro-Valls had the Pope's ear, and he was destined to become one of the powerhouses in the Vatican administration with backstairs access to the terzo piano.

With these changes, the whole aura of the papacy would be revitalized as John Paul II was increasingly surrounded by professional image-makers. Needless to say, the image-makers were Opusian, having attained the summit of their Apostolate of Public Opinion -- AOP -- by taking in hand the media packaging of the Pope. By the end of the 1980s Opus Dei's AOP specialists were responsible for overseeing the Vatican Radio, l'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican publishing house and were considering adding a fourth pillar to the Holy See's communications outreach programme, a Vatican television network. Foley himself became head of the Filmoteca Vaticana, the official film and video archives, though it was Monsignor Planas y Comas who ran it for him.

John Paul II has always been outspoken in his views about the duties of Catholics in defending their faith. In 1976, while still Archbishop of Cracow, he led a procession from the Metropolitan Cathedral into the city's central square, filling it with a sea of worshippers, many more than could fit into the cathedral, in flagrant disobedience of the civil authorities. In the square under pelting rain he delivered the fieriest of the day's quartet of homilies, The Courage to Profess One's Faith, that would be reprinted by Opus Dei in its CRIS series. 'The cause of man's spiritual freedom, his freedom of conscience, his religious freedom, is the greatest of human causes,' he said. Five years later Papa Wojtyla developed the same theme, this time for a world audience, in his World Peace Day message, traditionally delivered on the first day of each new year. Christians, he said, were bound under moral law to defend themselves against evil. 'Even as they strive to resist and prevent every form of warfare, Christians have a right and even a duty to protect their existence and freedom by proportionate means against an unjust aggressor,' he explained. [3]

With Communism defeated, Papa Wojtyla turned his attention to Christian rights in the front-line countries with Islam. According to his Opus Dei spokesman, the Pope was alarmed by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the wake of the Second Gulf War. Resistance to UN operations in Somalia was a case in point. In July 1993, he worried that combat missions by US Marines in Mogadishu would fuel a violent reaction from radical Islamists. Within six months of a US helicopter raid in which sixteen Somalis were killed, the Catholic Cathedral in Mogadishu was blown up. Mogadishu's last bishop, Pietro Salvatore Colombo, had been gunned down outside the cathedral in July 1989. Radical Islam's reaction, therefore, was such that Christians could no longer practise their faith in what once had been a European city on the Indian Ocean.

Oppression of Christian rights in front-line countries remains a leading concern of the Vatican as it approaches the Millennium Jubilee, a celebration intended to bear witness before world consciousness that the Christian faith is the only religion capable of revealing the mystery of salvation to all mankind. 'This Good News impels the Church to evangelize,' the Pope told his bishops in Manila. In other words, the Church cannot renounce her duty to proclaim Christ to all peoples. While repeatedly underlining that 'the Church's mission and destiny is to save man, the whole man,' he would also state, 'Evangelization must never be imposed. It involves love and respect for those being evangelized ... Catholics must carefully avoid any suspicion of coercion or devious persuasion.' [4]

There was little Christian love or charity to be found in the Balkans. John Paul II had repeatedly warned that a generalized Balkans conflict could spell disaster for the West. He called for the 'disarming of the aggressor'. He stressed many times that legitimate defence against aggression was a Christian duty. 'In Church teaching, each military aggression is judged morally wrong. Legitimate defence, on the other hand, is admissible and sometimes obligatory,' he said. [5]

An unnamed papal aide -- Navarro-Valls, according to some sources -- added that the Vatican would support 'precise, proportionate and demonstrative' military action in Bosnia to stop aggression. But the official stated that such an intervention would have to respect the Church's teachings on Just War. [6] The Just War label was now launched onto the market, like a 'green label' for natural foods, ecologically sound and biologically pure. The label had been refused to George Bush for Operation Desert Storm, perhaps because it still required the last doctrinal touching up, or perhaps because the Vatican, whose nuncio in Baghdad was solidly Opusian, believed that the Allied reaction to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was not so 'precise' and 'proportionate' as it should have been. [7] In any event, a little more than three years after the Iraqi aggression against its oil-rich neighbour, for the first time since the Crusades of old the Just War doctrine was unveiled for public consumption in an updated form, and placed on display in the spiritual marketplace.

With its emphasis on universal love, Christianity has always struggled with the idea of war. After Constantine the Great embraced the Cross in the fourth century, St Augustine of Hippo (354-430) first elaborated a limited argument in favour of military action. The North African bishop allowed that under certain conditions wars might be waged by command of God. He wrote: 'War should be waged only as a necessity, and waged only that God may by it deliver men from the necessity and preserve them in peace.' Eight hundred years later St Thomas Aquinas put forward his three prerequisites for a Just War:

• Combat must be waged by a competent government or authority;
• The cause must be just;
• There must be a 'right intention' to promote good.

Subsequent theologians have added new notions such as war should be a 'last resort' and that the anticipated good results must outweigh the suffering incurred to win them. Overlaid on these notions was John XXIII's doctrine of 'Avoidance of War'. In 1994, however, the Avoidance of War concept was side-stepped for a reworked formulation of Just War.

The new Catechism published in that year gave a tentative definition of Just War, pending further refinement, which stated: 'All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war. However, as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defence once all peace efforts have failed.' It gave the four moral parameters needed for a conflict to be considered a Just War:

• The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave and certain.
• All other means of putting an end to the aggression must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.
• There must be serious prospects of success.
• The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

The unnamed papal aide -- i.e., Navarro-Valls -- implied that under the redefined doctrine not only was it the right of individual governments to defend their people from unjust aggression, but it was the 'duty' of the international community to intervene, within the limitations of the four parameters, should a people, nation or ethnic minority be unable to guarantee its own freedoms and human rights. Such a broad palette for intervention could just as well be used for protecting the Holy Sepulchre, or the Marian shrine of Medjugorje in western Bosnia, as for the survival of the oppressed. The unnamed aide was not far from hinting that under the Just War doctrine Christian princes who acted as white knights in defence of basic freedoms -- Muslim as well as Christian -- would receive full papal honours and the stamp of moral legitimacy for their military actions.

The new Just War parameters were fashioned against a background of exploding nationalism in the Balkans. In the spring of 1990 both Slovenia (98 per cent Catholic) and Croatia (then 75 per cent Catholic) organized multi-party elections that led a year later to their declaring independence. No sooner had Franjo Tudjman, the new Croatian president, revived the Croatian chequerboard flag that had been a Ustachi (Croatian Fascist) symbol during the Second World War than the Yugoslav federal army invaded the country from bases in Serbia. Croatia at the time had barely enough military equipment to outfit a battalion.

Sandwiched between Croatia and Serbia, Bosnia's 2 million Muslims reacted by unleashing their own nationalist aspirations, rallying to the banner of Alija Izetbegovic, a philosopher recently released from federal prison. Izetbegovic was by no means a fundamentalist. But twenty years before he had written a short treatise concerning the condition of Islam in the world, titled simply An Islamic Declaration. It was credited with renewing interest in the study of Islamic theology in Bosnia, resulting in a Saudi grant that permitted the 1977 opening of an Islamic theology faculty at Sarajevo University.

In the early 1980s, Izetbegovic wrote a more important work, Islam between East and West. In it he presented Islam as a tolerant religion that had been positively influenced by the spiritual values of the West. He described Christianity in flattering terms as 'a near-union of supreme religion and supreme ethics'. [8] Had the Serbs listened to Izetbegovic there might never have been religious warfare in the Balkans, and the rest of Europe would have been spared the shock of finding itself on the brink of a new Crusade. Instead, the Serb leader Siobodan Milosevic threatened to annex both Bosnia and Croatia. With Milosevic arming the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs, the Croatian government established contacts with the Warsaw arms bazaar and with professional arms traffickers in the West, including Silvano Vittor.

The war's first major battle was the siege of the Danubian city of Vukovar, which ended with a Serb victory. Not a building was left standing. David Bourot, a Frenchman who had been arrested in Pristina on charges of spying for the Croatians, described the Serb tactics. 'They systematically attacked churches, hospitals and civilian targets. They waged a war of terror against the civilian population, not against opposing military forces.'

In prison at the time, Bourot watched a programme transmitted by TV-2, a private Belgrade channel, detailing how the Croats were receiving arms shipments supposedly financed by the Vatican. The documentary followed one $3 million transaction filmed in Zagreb by a Croatian who worked for Serbian intelligence. While Bourot was aware that the airwaves were humming with disinformation, he found the documentary convincing.

One of the next Serb targets was Banja Luka in central Bosnia. The ethnic cleansing that began there in April 1992 was described by one UN official as 'a scorched-earth policy to erase any trace of Muslim or Croatian culture in the region.'

During Ottoman rule Banja Luka had been the seat of the Bosnian pashas. It had two sixteenth-century mosques, an Ottoman clock-tower, three other mosques and a Muslim cemetery, all demolished in a single night. Banja Luka's non-Serbs were expelled wholesale. Of the district's forty-seven Catholic churches, within a year only three were left standing.

The early Croatian campaigns against Serb and Muslim were no less brutal. In December 1993 the Croatian authorities announced that Islamic militants were planning an all-out jihad against the West. The warning came after Muslim fundamentalists had slit the throats of twelve Croatian engineers at Chiffa-Habril, 60 kilometres south-west of Algiers. [9]

A few months earlier three Bosno-Muslim soldiers captured by Croats had been turned into human bombs and sent back toward their own lines. One of the doomed men had cried out to his comrades, 'Don't shoot, don't shoot: we are Muslims; as he stumbled up the slope towards the Bosnian trenches above Novi Travnik.

Anti-tank mines had been strapped to the soldier's chest and back. Rope bound his hands to his sides, and wire ran from his torso back towards the Croat positions. His two companions had been identically converted into walking, stumbling bombs. Panic seized the trench defenders. A Bosnian officer ordered his men to open fire: they refused. Then there were three huge explosions. The deputy commander of the Tomasevic Brigade, a crack Croatian unit, later admitted that one of his soldiers, crazed because the remains of his dead brother lay between the lines, had committed this act of human depravity. [10]

The Croatians by then had placed their country under the Pope's protection as Sancho Ramirez of Aragon had done in the eleventh century. The Vatican was the first to recognize Croatia's independence, followed by Germany and the European Community. Diplomatic recognition may have helped end the war in Croatia having by then claimed at least 10,000 civilian lives -- but it permitted the Serbs to turn their attention to Bosnia.

The morally indefensible onslaught against Bosnia by the Serbian Christians -- followers of the Eastern Orthodox rite -- stirred up centuries-old enmities between Muslims and Christians. The Pope, through his Opus Dei spokesman, let it be known that the West could not allow the Serb injustice to stand unopposed. Left unstated but strongly implied was that a Serb victory over the Bosnian Muslims would turn the Islamic world against the West. 'You must understand the reaction of Islam. Because Americans and Europeans do not see religion as a factor in the development of state policy, they overlook the fact that the Islamic world views the West's inaction in Bosnia as Christians letting other Christians oppress Muslims,' one military expert explained. Indeed the Pope's advisers argued that the Serb massacre of Bosnians had to be stopped to prevent militant Islam from transforming the Balkans into a European Afghanistan. This cause was taken up by the Pope and became the Vatican's most pressing foreign policy issue.

As usual, Vatican intelligence in the Balkans was first rate. Its-agents reported that Izetbegovic had carefully prepared his strategy for an independent Muslim state. Already in May 1991 he visited Tehran to develop ties that later would save his fledgling state from being overwhelmed by the militarily superior Serbs. In early 1992 Iran sent $10 million in 'humanitarian' aid through Hungary and Zagreb to Bosnia. Other arms shipments were in the pipeline and two hundred Revolutionary Guards already were present in the country under the guise of military instructors. 'We have two duties: the first is jihad, and the second da'awa -- to spread the call of Islam,' their leader was quoted as saying. [11]

Opus Central, according to one Vatican observer, was convinced that to prevent Iran from expanding its foothold in Europe the Serb aggression in Bosnia had to be rolled back. 'The strategists at Villa Tevere were obsessed with this idea,' he affirmed. But forcing the Serbs to hand back Bosnian territory was not a proposition the political leaders of the Western Alliance were eager to accept. It would take three years of 'obstinate and smart' manoeuvring by the Pope's 'intransigent hussars' to convince them.

_______________

Notes:

1. Hebblethwaite, In the Vatican, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1988, p. 187.

2. Ibid.

3. 'Must Defend Rights, Pope Says', Boston Globe, 22 December 1981.

4. L'Osservatore Romano, Weekly Edition, 25 January 1995, p. 6.

5. 'Pope Warns of Spread of Yugoslav Conflict', Reuters, 12 January 1994.

6. Ibid.

7. On 9 April 1994, the papal nuncio in Baghdad, Opus Dei's Bishop Marian Dies, was transferred to Almaty, becoming nuncio in Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan and Uzbekistan. Shortly after Oles took up his appointment, FBI director Louis J. Freeh announced that the FBI would extend its foreign training programme to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Freeh also announced that the FBI would open offices in the Baltic republics, where Opus Dei's Archbishop Garda Justo Mullor had recently been named papal nuncio and apostolic administrator of the See of Tallin, capital of Estonia. Freeh is reported to be an Opus Dei member, a fact that he has neither denied nor confirmed.

8. Noel Malcolm, Bosnia -- A Short History, Macmillan, London 1994, p. 221.

9. Outraged by the killing of the Croatian technicians, John Paul II said: 'One can only deplore these crimes which ... appear to be expressions of hostility against believers -- Christian believers' [source: 'Pope Says Christians Targeted in Algeria', Reuters, 22 December 1993]. The Chiffa-Habril site was only a few kilometres from the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Atlas, where in 1996 seven monks were abducted and murdered in the same manner. This time a more emotional John Paul II said, 'No one may kill in the name of the Lord.'

10. Anthony Loyd, The Times, 24 November 1993.

11. Andrew Hogg, The Sunday Times (London), 28 June 1993.

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32. The 'Cloak and Crucifix' Brigade

All that the Pope and his men in the media want is social lawlessness resulting in economic collapse in Muslim countries -- as is the situation in Sudan due to the Christian lawlessness -- so as to exploit it under the pretext of the 'only political task of the Church' to evangelize Muslims. The Church needs to give up its love for lawlessness, anarchy and economic ruination as a means to proselytize the victimized people.

-- Saudi Gazette, Riyadh, 13 February 1993

PROPONENTS OF A MIDDLE PATH AMONG THE PAPAL ADVISERS HAD counselled against John Paul II's February 1993 visit to Khartoum. They saw it as a no-win encounter. They argued that the Holy Father's presence in the Sudanese capital would give a degree of legitimacy to one of the sponsors of international terrorism that certainly was not deserved. According to the bishop of El Obeid, Monsignor Macram Gassis, the visit was organized by the pro-Opus Dei nuncio in Khartoum, Archbishop Erwin Josef Ender, against the advice of the Sudanese episcopate. 'He denies it, and he is angry with me for saying so,' Bishop Gassis reported. The other bishops backed Gassis. 'Remember,' they told the Pope on his way through Kampala, 'the hands of the men you will be shaking in Khartoum are covered in blood.'

Opus Dei, on the other hand, regarded Africa, where overpopulation, shrinking resources and ecological degradation were causing insecurity, conflict and migration, as the first battleground in the spiritual wars. From Ceuta to the Cape, Islam was rapidly gaining ground. They believed, therefore, that it was imperative for the most political pope of modern times, the spiritual warrior who defeated Communism, to show the papal colours in Khartoum, from where radical Islam was being exported not only to the rest of Africa but to spiritual hotspots around the world.

When he arrived in the Sudanese capital, John Paul II was already looking ahead to the third millennium, the preparations for which -- the Great Jubilee, as he called it -- provided one of the central themes of his pontificate. It was, he said, an event 'deeply charged with Christological significance'. [1] From his writings it is clear that John Paul II was fascinated by the millennium view contained in the Revelation to John, with its mystical symbolism: the seven bowls of wrath, the judgement of Babylon, the defeat of the beast and the false prophet, and the founding of the new Jerusalem. 'The world needs purification; it needs to be converted,' he said, [2] but for him the only way to salvation was through Christ the Redeemer. 'Islam,' for Papa Wojtyla, 'is not a religion of redemption.' [3]

If the intent of his millennium jubilation was to bring the mystery of Christian salvation to all mankind he was brewing a dangerous formula. The focus of his Great Jubilee was the Holy Land, the common heritage of the three great monotheist religions. But to anyone who lived in the region, it was evident that no devout follower of Islam, nor anyone who holds sacred the teachings of the Talmud, could be expected to treat 'world purification' as defined by John Paul II with anything but hostility.

Indeed none viewed the Pope's formula with greater scorn than the slight, lightly bearded Hassan al-Turabi, who did not give the impression of being a radical. In fact he appeared as a most reasonable man, holding degrees in international law from Khartoum, London and the Sorbonne. A charismatic speaker, he was eloquent in Arabic, and fluent in English and French. Turabi rejected Christian salvation, because he knew that only those who follow the prophet Mohammed can reach the Garden -- the Muslim equivalent to eternal salvation in Paradise.

By admonishing the regime in Khartoum to stop killing Christians, John Paul II was edging closer to his own showdown with Islam. However, the exercise almost backfired. The Sudanese leaders had been poised to show the world, through the offices of the Vatican press corps, that theirs was a tolerant regime after all, having cleaned up the dilapidated Khartoum Cathedral and making a large square nearby available for an open-air papal mass that was attended mostly by refugees from the south who lived precariously in shanty towns around the capital and whose children were threatened daily with forced conversion. [4]

With a population of only 25 million, but covering a huge territory, Sudan's strategic importance in the religious conquest of Africa was undeniable. By wiping out or converting by force the 7 million Christians and animists in the south, the fundamentalist Islamic front that ran the country would be able to drive a wedge into the heart of black Africa, separating the Christian communities in the east from those in the west and leaving them more vulnerable than ever to political assault. Only three factors were holding the Islamic forces back: the resistance of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA); economic chaos in the north; and the hostile natural environment of the south.

Africa's largest country offers an interesting portrait of a radical state. Its per capita GNP is around $55, the world's lowest. Annual inflation runs at about 120 per cent. [5] The chronic famine in a land watered by both the Blue and White Nile is man-made, a weapon of repression and genocide. Foreign debt is so high that servicing it eats up all of Khartoum's foreign exchange earnings. Bashir's answer has been to repress all forms of dissent, banning trade unions and muzzling the press. In its first year in power, the military council executed five times more people than during the whole post-independence period. At Dr. Turabi's insistence, Islamic law -- Shariah -- was re-introduced, first in the north and then extended to the whole country, and the holy war against the south was intensified with the help of Iranian military aid.

This, then, was the regime that the Pope wanted to engage in a constructive dialogue. But it mattered little if he was unsuccessful. In his attempt to reason with the naked face of Islamic fanaticism, he was building reserves of moral currency, showing the world that he had in fact tried -- that his efforts to end aggression against Christians in the south had been ineffectual, one of the parameters required for a Just War. But the Pope's principal interlocutor, Dr Turabi, was for many the most dangerous figure in the Islamic world today. Egyptian officials describe Turabi as 'the anti-Christ' of Islamic renewal. Western intelligence sources claim that he and his chief of staff, Saudi entrepreneur Osama Binladen, are financing Islamic extremists accused of fomenting anti-government unrest in Egypt. In addition, the US State Department alleges that with Iranian support they have set up more than a dozen extremist training camps in Sudan and Iranian weapons are shipped through Khartoum to insurgent groups in Algeria, Egypt, Eritrea and Uganda.

A member of one of Saudi Arabia's leading merchant families, Osama Binladen answered jihad's call in 1985, spending two years fighting for Allah in Afghanistan. In addition to his own presence on the front lines, he provided travel funds for Arab volunteers from a half-dozen countries who wished to join the mujahedin. 'Not hundreds, but thousands,' Binladen said. With his Iraqi engineer, Mohammed Saad, he blasted tunnels into the Zazi mountains of Afghanistan's Bakhtiar province for mujahedin hospitals and arsenals, then cut a mujahedin trail across the country to within 25 kilometres of Kabul. [6]

Binladen moved to Khartoum in 1991 and his Bin Laden Company is Sudan's largest contractor, building roads and airports for the Bashir regime. He also built a guest house on the outskirts of Khartoum for itinerant veterans of the Afghan conflict and lectures on revolutionary Islam.

It is alleged that Turabi, with Binladen as his banker, stands behind a group of Afghani war veterans known as the Gama'a al-Islamiya (Islamic Group), who organized several assassination attempts against Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his ministers and have begun extending their activities to Europe, with a base in Bosnia and an operations centre in London.

When the Pope visited Khartoum, I was in Dammam, on the Saudi Arabian Gulf coast, studying the after-effects of Saddam Hussein's eco-terrorism. Damage to the Gulf's eco-systems caused by 700 burning oil wells and 11 million barrels of crude floated onto the waters of the Gulf far surpassed earlier predictions. In terms of man-made disasters, nothing quite like it had been experienced before. But the local press made no mention of Saddam's ecological time bomb. Instead it concentrated on what 'that man from Rome' was up to in Khartoum.

The Saudi reaction surprised me. Saudi Arabia, after all, was supposedly the West's strongest ally in the turbulent Middle East. Even bigger than Sudan -- most of it sand -- it sits on top of the world's largest known oil reserves, which earn the royal treasury around $40,000 million a year. The kingdom's 17.5 million people do not know poverty. But under the surface of a brand new industrial infrastructure, with all the gadgetry that the gods of Western technology could possibly bestow, there is unrest, indicating a growing disenchantment with the Saudi royal family and the kingdom's dependence on Western allies.

'The animosity between Islam and the West is a matter of fact,' a Saudi engineer working on the oil clean-up told me. 'Many of us feel it was wrong for the King to have asked the West to defend us. More and more we are convinced that the Gulf War was a Western plot to install a permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia. Otherwise, President Bush would never have left Saddam sitting in Baghdad. The Americans actually need Saddam. They keep him in power so that we feel afraid.

'But then we ask ourselves, with all the money our government spends on armaments -- $16 billion last year -- why do we need the Americans to protect us from Iraq? Many friends in the university feel that King Fahd has allowed Islam's holy land to be defiled by foreign troops,' he said.

A curious kingdom, this Saudi Arabia. Its citizens appear to have everything that rapid modernization can bring, while in reality they lack basic freedom. Civil rights groups are repressed, censorship is stifling, and the Mutawah, the religious police, are everywhere alert, hustling improperly dressed women off the streets and forcing merchants to close their shops during the five daily prayer periods. But if the Saudis themselves enjoy little freedom, the foreigners who live in the kingdom have none. And there are almost 5 million guest workers, technical advisers and scientific experts, fully 3 million of whom are non-Muslim. The non-Muslims are not permitted to practise their religion. There are no churches in Saudi Arabia. Churches are forbidden. In Rome, however, the Saudis financed the construction of one of the largest, most opulent mosques outside the Muslim world. No bibles are permitted in the land of the Prophet either, nor Christmas cards or rosaries, and obviously priests and clergymen are persona non grata. Saudi Arabia has never been visited by a pope. It is one of the few countries where the greatest pilgrim of the century, John Paul II, has not knelt to kiss the soil. Nor would he ever be invited to do so.

And yet I knew from a previous visit that the Vatican has a 'cloak and crucifix' squad of travelling priests who, under the guise of visiting businessmen, bankers or chemical engineers, come to celebrate Mass in secret and administer the sacraments at Catholic homes located in the compounds that in every Saudi city are set aside for foreigners. Never at the same place two Sundays in succession. Always indoors and behind drawn curtains, out of view from informers and above all the Mutawah. The penalty for being caught is arrest and expulsion.

I was unable to ascertain at the time whether the priests who entered Saudi Arabia disguised as engineers, bankers and businessmen -- 'dressed like everyone else, though not like everyone else' -- were men from the Villa Tevere. But for many expatriates in the land of the Prophet their presence provided real comfort. Subsequently I learned that Opus Dei did have 'friends' who passed through the kingdom from time to time. Its milites Christi were indeed an evangelizing force that Arab extremists had reason to fear. In Christendom, Opus Dei had become the equivalent of Islam's Mutawah, solemn guardians of Catholic orthodoxy, the Pope's secret police.

The West did not have long to wait for radical Islam's response to the Pope's nine-hour stopover in Khartoum. A fortnight later an Islamic terrorist group bombed the World Trade Center in New York, killing six people and injuring 1,000. Six of the twelve terrorists were from Sudan and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian cleric who was their spiritual leader, had received his visa to enter the United States in Khartoum. From his headquarters in a Jersey City mosque located over an electrical appliance shop, Abdel Rahman maintained contact with Muslim activists from Brooklyn to St Louis. And as if the twin towers of the World Trade Center were not enough, his followers planned to blow up the United Nations, the FBI's New York headquarters, two commuter tunnels and the George Washington Bridge.

Nor were the Sudanese authorities long in launching a new offensive into the south. It was as if the pontiff's visit had never occurred and the Provincial of the British Jesuits, who had undertaken a fact-finding mission the year before, had been right all along. 'My visit to Khartoum and Port Sudan has done much to convince me that dialogue with an Islamic fundamentalist regime is a lost cause,' stated Father Michael Campbell-Johnston. [7]

The Pope again appealed to the Sudanese leaders to stop their harvest of death. But nothing changed. The Holy Father was informed of Khartoum's response by the bishop of the southern city of Rumbek: 'I have no words to describe the plight of my people other than -- believe me -- it is apocalyptic.' [8] The Vatican's chief representative in the south, Bishop Cesare Mazzolari, later disclosed that four Christians in his diocese had been 'crucified because they refused to reconvert to Islam, a faith they had left twenty years before'. [9]

Whereas most Western liberals view with suspicion anyone who talks about God in public, the followers of Islam consider Allah's word as central to their existence. This has always been so and therefore offers little insight into why the approximately 16 million Muslims in Europe and the 6 million in North America have suddenly become more assertive. But one factor unquestionably was the Shah of Iran's demise.

While he was in exile in France, Khomeini discovered that with the revolution in modern communications he could fuse the temporal and spiritual worlds into an unstoppable alliance that within less than a year had brought about the Shah's downfall. Audio cassettes smuggled into Iran carried the voice of Khomeini directly to the Iranian people, circumventing the Shah's control of the media and undercutting the authority of the literate classes who, except for the clergy, were secular in outlook.

The audio-visual revolution in the service of religious fundamentalism paved the way for Khomeini's return, After fourteen years of exile he was welcomed by a delirious crowd of millions that massed along the route to the cemetery of martyrs, where he proclaimed the formation of an Islamic Republic. Those who opposed him were threatened with the 'punishment of Allah' and in less than two weeks all opposition ceased, enabling him to announce 'Shah Mat!' -- in Persian literally 'the Shah's dead', but also 'Check Mate!'

Khomeini's victory over the Shah, who boasted that under his rule Iran had become the world's seventh military power, changed the course of modern Islam. It provoked a spontaneous movement to re-organize society according to the customs and teachings of the Koran. The roots of Islam's revival spread among the academic and professional elite, and -- like their counterparts in Opus Dei -- they were intent on detaching the wisdom of science from the values of a secularized society in order to promote a social system that was submissive to the one and true God.

It could be said that since Karol Wojtyla had become pope at exactly the same moment the Catholic Church also changed course. Wojtyla's election ended the hesitancies o/the post-Vatican II period. Opus Dei supported the Pope's plan for re-evangelization of the West, which in many respects was similar to the re-Islamization movement. The major difference was that Opus Dei operated its apostolate from the top down, while the Islamic movements worked more generally from the bottom up.

Although their aims are quite different, radical Islamic groups bear similarities to Opus Dei and other Christian fundamentalist organizations in terms of structure and discipline. Committed members live in their own communities according to the precepts of Koranic law. Those qualified for higher employment turn over their earnings to the movement. Many are sent to work in the Persian Gulf or Europe to proselytize, recruit and establish parallel financial structures. Their aim is to destroy the jahiliyya -- an Arabic word describing the period of 'ignorance' and 'barbarism' that existed before the Prophet Mohammed preached in Arabia and has been reapplied to the secular societies of the twentieth century. [10]

For the radicals, jahiliyya was reimposed on the Muslim world by Christian Crusaders and later by Christian missionaries. They regard twentieth century missionaries as modern Crusaders who use physical and spiritual coercion to proselytize with results often 'no less horrific' than the Inquisition. 'We can regretfully say "no less horrific", since Christianity still plays a ruthless and dynamic political role, particularly in Africa,' claimed the Anglo-Islamic writer Ahmad Thomson. [11]

The point is, however, that a more tolerant Islam does exist, one that would have the world believe it is not all that different from early forms of Christianity, and that consequently on both sides of the Spiritual Curtain there is room for conciliation and co-operation. But the cause of conciliation can hardly be helped when a pope affirms that Islam is not a salvic religion. This is certainly not what Islamists believe. According to the Islamic Da'awa Centre in Dammam, Islam has its own formula for salvation and at first glance it would appear to be much less dogmatic: 'Anyone who says: "There is no god but God," and dies holding that belief will enter paradise.' [12]

Nothing very radical about that. It did not mean, however, that Islam and early Christianity matched each other all the way down the line. But there was at least a theological basis for dialogue, and for understanding. Wrong, countered John Paul II. 'The theology ... of Islam is very distant from Christianity.' [13]

All the same, John Paul maintained that the Church remained open to dialogue. And this in spite of the existence of Islamic countries dominated by fundamentalist regimes that seek to destroy Christianity. In these countries, he said, 'Human rights and the principle of religious freedom are unfortunately interpreted in a very one-sided way -- religious freedom comes to mean freedom to impose on all citizens the "true religion". In these countries the situation of Christians is ... terribly disturbing. Fundamentalist attitudes of this nature make reciprocal contacts very difficult.' [14]

RANKS OF ISLAM *
* For countries with Islamic populations of 2 million or more




One of the most troublesome aspects of radical Islam is that in spite of the Koran's special regard for 'People of the Book', which is nevertheless tempered by an underlying suspicion -- 'Neither the Jews nor the Christians will ever be satisfied with you until you follow their sect' [15] -- imams like Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman steadfastly maintain in their preaching that the West is Islam's enemy. According to Abdel Rahman, the Koran 'permits terrorism as among the means to perform Jihad for the sake of Allah, which means to terrorize the enemies of God ... We must be holy terrorists and terrorize the enemies of God.' [16]

The West is becoming increasingly multi-cultural. Both the United States and France have Islamic populations of more than 5 million, while Germany has 3.5 million and Britain 2 million. The day is not far off when France will have her first Muslim-majority cities Metropolitan satellites of the great Umma, with their own police, schools, exorcist imams and Islamic institutions. Already today a visitor sees almost as many North Africans as French in the centre of Grasse, the perfume capital in the Alpes Maritimes, and the Gothic old town of Cardinal Siri's Genoa, where Christopher Columbus's father once tended shop, is now populated by Maghrebian immigrants living under miserable conditions, many without proper papers.

With the longest Mediterranean coastline of any NATO country, Italy is infiltrated by hundreds of illegal immigrants each month. There are 85,000 Muslims in Rome alone. After twenty years in the making, in 1995 the Islamic community in the Eternal City inaugurated their new mosque, not far from the Viale Bruno Buozzi. A polemic had arisen over the height of the minaret. Originally planned for 43 metres, it would have been taller than the dome of St Peter's and had to be scaled down. Then finally, £35 million later -- 75 per cent donated by Saudi Arabia -- the project that 'bestowed a new legitimacy on Islam in Italy' was completed. At which Cardinal Silvio Oddi let fly a string of vicious comments that made Muslims bristle. 'I consider the presence of a mosque, and the attached Islamic Centre, to be an offence to the sacred ground of Rome,' he remarked, [17] forgetting that Vatican II teachings on religious liberty had paved the way for the mosque's coming. Cardinal Oddi, among many others, pointed out that in Saudi Arabia churches were not allowed and people were imprisoned for celebrating Mass.

Among the world's approximately fifty-two Islamic states, Turkey is the only one that remains fully secular and fully democratic. But for how much longer? In 1994 municipal elections the militant Islamic Welfare Party took control of local governments in Ankara, Istanbul and seventy other municipalities. Months later extremists in Istanbul attempted to blow up the city's Orthodox cathedral, seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. This was followed by the passing of a motion in the municipal council -- quickly disavowed after it created a storm -- to tear down the 1,600-year-old Theodosian Walls, stretching almost 30 kilometres from the Golden Horn to the Marmara shore, because they symbolized the bulwark of Christendom in the region. The Welfare Party again triumphed in the December 1995 legislative elections, winning a plurality that did not augur well for the future of democracy in NATO's only Islamic member state.

Christian communities that have existed in south-east Turkey since before the Battle of Manzikert are today threatened with extinction, having been caught in the latest fighting between the Turkish army and Kurdish separatists. Increasing harassment by Islamic fundamentalists, particularly in university centres, has brought about a Christian exodus, so that in all the country only an estimated 80,000 remain. Since the Gulf War, those Turkish Christians who have chosen to remain are no longer permitted to disseminate the Bible or learn traditional liturgical languages.

_______________

Notes:

1. Apostolic Letter Tertio Millennia Adveniente, 31; Rome, 10 November 1994 (emphasis in original).

2. Tertio Millennia Adveniente, 18 & 32.

3. John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Cape, London 1994, p. 92.

4. 'Sudan Forces Christian Youths to Follow Islamic Indoctrination', Associated Press, 8 January 1994.

5. The Economist, The World in Figures, 1995 edition.

6. 'Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace'. The Independent (London), 6 December 1993.

7. Michael Campbell-Johnston, 'Cross and Crescent in Sudan', The Tablet, 1 February 1992.

8. 'Bishop Pleads for Pope's Help', Reuters, 24 May 1994.

9. 'Four Christians crucified in Sudan, says Bishop', Reuters, 5 December 1994.

10. Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God, Polity Press, Cambridge 1994, p. 20.

11. Ahmad Thomson, Blood on the Cross -- Islam in Spain in the Light of Christian Persecution through the Ages, TaHa Publishers, London 1989, p. 346.

12. Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips, The True Religion, Islamic Da'awa and Guidance Centre, Dammam, p. 8.

13. John Paul II, Op. cit., p. 93.

14. Ibid., p. 94.

15. Cf Surah II. 120, the Cow.

16. Gail Appleson, 'Koran Allows Terrorism', Reuters, 2 February 1995.

17. Gabriel Kahn, 'Facing East', Metropolitan, Rome, 9 April 1993.

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33. Africa's Burning

Without peace between religions, there can be no peace at all.

-- Hans Kung

There are places today where Christians fear for their lives as a result of the activities of Islamic extremists.

-- George Leonard Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury

IN MID-MARCH 1994, ALVARO DEL PORTILLO MADE A PILGRIMAGE TO the Holy-Land, where Opus Dei was moving closer to assuming an active role in protecting the Holy sites. He spent a week 'following the footsteps of Jesus Christ. During those days he had pastoral meetings with numerous Christians there whom he encouraged to be promoters of peace ...' [1]

Christianity was endangered in the Holy Land, and that concerned Opus Dei. 'In a world which is witnessing the re-emergence of hitherto dormant religious and ethnic identities, this situation is extraordinary and demands attention,' wrote Said Aburish, a Palestinian Muslim. He believed that 'a Jerusalem without believers in Christ would be more serious than Rome without a pope.' [2]

The latest in a long series of burdens that the Christian community had to endure was Intifada -- the Palestinian rebellion in the territories occupied by Israel. It had brought with it an increase in Islamic extremism, which seemed only natural, but it was a pervasive extremism that made Palestinian Christians fear for their future when the territories -- especially Bethlehem -- came under control of the Palestinian National Authority 'in December 1995. The Jerusalem Post reported 'dozens of cases' of Christian clergy being attacked by Muslims and concern was felt that after the first Palestinian elections Christians in Bethlehem could become 'second-class citizens with no protection for their religious rights'. [3]

That Christianity would be impoverished without a strong presence in the Holy Land was undeniable. Opus Dei seemed to be giving the problem the attention that Aburish suggested was needed when it opened a new centre in Bethlehem. Only 4,000 Christians then remained in Jerusalem and in the whole of the Holy Land there were perhaps not more than 130,000. Property that had been Christian for hundreds of years, including Saint John's Hospice in the Christian quarter of the Old Town, had been expropriated or sold. The imposing Notre Dame of Jerusalem centre (formerly the Notre Dame de France) opposite Jaffa Gate was itself facing seizure for non-payment of taxes. Opus Dei's solution for that centre's financial problems, if accepted, would make the Prelature the dominant Christian organization in the Holy Land.

But these plans were not to be fulfilled under Don Alvaro's prelatureship. After his week-long visit to the Holy Land, on the evening of 21 March 1994 he celebrated Mass for the last time in the Church of the Cenacle and returned to Rome on the following day. That night he died of a heart attack. He was eighty. The vicar general, Don Javier Echevarria, was at his side and took possession of the piece of the True Cross originally worn by the Founder. Within the next twenty-four hours, John Paul II visited the prelatic church of Our Lady of Peace and knelt before the funeral bier of Don Alvaro. This bending of protocol -- a pope only kneels before the earthly remains of a cardinal -- was more than papal esteem for the prelate general of Opus Dei but a sign of fidelity to the organization that had done everything in its power to raise him to Peter's throne. The Pope immediately confirmed Don Javier as the new Prelate and within eight months elevated him to titular Bishop of Cilibia, once a town in the African Limes of North Africa.

Days after thousands of mourners had filled the Basilica of Sant'Eugenio for Don Alvaro's funeral, the first-ever Synod of African Bishops opened in Rome. Vatican communicators said it burst into life amid 'the sound of drums, the singing of hymns, the burning of incense, and the expression of feelings through motions of dance'. More accurately, it opened to bursts of machine-gun fire, rape and looting that erupted in Kigali after the assassination of Rwanda's Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, supposedly by Tutsi rebels.

Cardinal Francis Arinze, a Nigerian convert from the African animism of his parents, described the Synod as an opportunity for 'exchanging gifts' between the Church of Africa and the universal Church. There was little mention of the Church's dialogue with Islam in spite of pre-Synod expressions that this was one of Africa's most urgent needs. Some Vatican observers believed that Arinze had been primed to play down interreligious strife because of the delicate contacts then in progress between the Vatican's AOP specialists and certain Islamic fundamentalist regimes. Cardinal Arinze's pre-Synod message did reveal that the gathering of African bishops 'looks toward the year 2000 when the continent is expected to be divided roughly equally between Christians (48.4 per cent) and Muslims (41.6 per cent)'. The Synod's working paper stated that Islam was an 'important but often difficult partner in dialogue'. [4] But that was all, A curtain of silence descended over the question of Christian-Islamic relations as if intrigues were afoot about which the faithful should not be informed.

Members of the Vatican press corps have expressed dismay that since it came under Opus Dei's domination the public information policy of the Holy See has been one of reducing news that comes out of the Vatican to a level of relative banality. 'This appears to be a conscious policy of Navarro-Valls. The press corps is told nothing meaningful about what is actually taking place inside the closed sessions of the Synods,' complained Father Nikolaus Klein, editor of a Jesuit magazine.

'Press conferences feature participants selected by Navarro-Valls because they have nothing to say. This was especially the case at the Synod of African Bishops,' he noted. His sources told him that relations with Islam were, in spite of official mutism, one of the most seriously debated topics. He found only one person -- Archbishop Henri Teissier of Algiers -- willing to talk of the danger represented by radical Islam. Islamic fundamentalism is 'the gravest problem facing the Church in Africa today'.

The 1994 African Synod closed as it had opened, under the sign of death. In Algiers, a French Marist priest and a Little Sister of the Assumption, who ran a library in the Casbah, were shot dead in broad daylight. Archbishop Teissier called it a 'senseless crime', and said it was 'more important than ever to increase the number of places where Christians and Muslims can meet and get to know and like each other'. His words provoked the anger of the Armed Islamic Group, whose leaders declared him an 'enemy of Islam'.

Navarro-Valls's reasons for not drawing attention to Christian-Islamic strife during the African Synod became discernible in the meeting's closing document. It said the Synod had been concerned that the UN Population Conference -- scheduled for Cairo that September -- was planning to promote unrestricted abortion and contraception. The document, apparently approved by the African bishops, stated: 'We all condemn this individualistic and permissive culture which liberalizes abortion and makes the death of the child simply a matter for the decision of the mother.' Calling the UN's agenda an 'anti-life plan', the bishops appealed to all countries to reject it. Meanwhile, Africa was burning and bleeding.

The undermining of the UN Population Conference demonstrated one area where John Paul II was diametrically opposed to the intentions of Papa Luciani, who had been hoping to work out a common strategy with the UN Population Fund, sponsor of the Cairo conference. It was said that John Paul II -- or his Pro-Life policy-makers -- were prepared to wreck the UN Population Conference unless references to artificial birth control and pregnancy termination were removed from all conference literature.

To defeat the UN's 'anti-life plan' the Vatican strategists had decided it would be smart to form, for this one issue only, a common front with Islamic fundamentalists. But because it is a sovereign city-state, the Vatican is the only representative of a world religion to have permanent status with the United Nations. While this does not give it a seat on the Security Council, its delegates can attend General Assembly sessions, and, by extension, meetings of other UN bodies, such as the UN Population Conference. No Islamic organization enjoys a similar status which meant that in forming its one-time alliance the Vatican would have to deal with those radical Islamic states that shared the same rabid abhorrence of abortion and contraception.

A month before the Cairo conference opened, the Holy See sent an envoy to Tehran to drum up support for its Cairo position. The Iranian deputy foreign minister Mohammed Hashemi Rafsanjani concurred: 'Collaboration between religious governments in support of outlawing abortion is a fine beginning for the conception of collaboration in other fields.' [5]

One week later, the Vatican ambassador to Algeria, Monsignor Edmond Farhat, an Arabic-speaking Lebanese, went to Tripoli to sew up Libya's participation in the fundamentalist alliance. Farhat had already been there a few weeks before with the deputy secretary of state, Monsignor Jean-Louis Tauran, who, in addition to discussing the UN's 'anti-life plan', informed his Libyan hosts that 'the Holy See is against maintaining the UN's economic and political sanctions against Libya'. Navarro-Valls denied, however, that any deal had been struck with either the Iranians or Libyans. Nevertheless both hard-line regimes reaped propaganda benefits from the attention shown them by the papal envoys. The official Libyan news agency, Jana, quoted Archbishop Farhat as stating: 'The dialogue to find a peaceful solution to the Lockerbie crisis is continuing.' He added, 'an identity of views emerged on the UN Conference on Population and Development, and notably as far as concerns the family.' So by linking the controversy over Libya's supposed role in the December 1988 mid-air bombing over Scotland of Pan Am flight 103, in which 270 people were killed, and the UN Population Conference, it was logical to assume that a deal had been struck after all.

On population questions, then, the Vatican made common cause with Islamic extremists. This opportunist plan -- the forming of an alliance of convenience -- Pro-Life insiders affirmed, was the work of Opus Dei, once again demonstrating that the Prelature was capable of directing Vatican policy.

The Cairo strategy was crafted within the Pontifical Council for the Family, assisted by the Pontifical Academy for Life and the John Paul II Institute for the Family. All three were under Opus Dei's influence. The Council for the Family was headed by its ally, Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, and among the Council's consultors were two members of Opus Dei's priestly hierarchy and their close associates, Bishop James Thomas McHugh and Monsignor Carlo Caffarra.

The founding of the Pontifical Academy for Life in February 1994 was made possible by the financial backing of the Prelature and the Knights of Columbus, [6] whose supreme knight, Virgil Chrysostom Dechant, had since the mid-1980s drawn close to Opus Dei. Dechant had hired as the Knights' public information officer senior Opus Dei supernumerary Russell Shaw. As the chief executive officer of the world's largest Catholic fraternal society, with 1.5 million members, Dechant paid himself a princely salary, declaring income of $455,500 in 1991. Most of this, he said, was contributed by the Knights of Columbus insurance operation, which has policies in force totalling more than $20,000 million. Such wealth enabled the Knights to give away in excess of $90 million each year to Catholic causes, including those of Opus Dei. For example, it supported the US Bishops Conference anti-abortion campaign with $3 million annually. In addition to his Academy for Life duties, Dechant is a member of the Pontifical Councils for the Family and for Social Communications, the central directorate of the IOR, and an honorary consultor to the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican City State.

The Academy for Life's directorate is headed by Professor Gonzalo Herranz Rodriguez of the University of Navarra, and among its members are Professor Caffarra and Cristina Vollmer, a French-born countess who was married to Venezuela's ambassador to the Holy See, Dr Alberto J. Vollmer Herrera, both supernumeraries. She headed the World Organisation for the Family which in 1986 organized an international conference to promote family solidarity in Paris under the presidence of Princess Francoise de Bourbon-Lobkowicz and Bernadette Chodron de Courcel, wife of French president Jacques Chirac. Countess Cristina's husband, a lay consultor to the administration of the Holy See's Patrimony, also served on the Pontifical Council for the Family.

The John Paul II Institute for the Family, founded in October 1982 with funding raised by Opus Dei, is headed by Professor Caffarra, with former White House aide Carl Anderson as vice-president and director of the Institute's US campus in Washington, DC. Another member of the Institute's Washington staff is the Knights of Columbus spokesman Russell Shaw.

The Vatican delegation to the Cairo Population Conference was solidly in Opus Dei hands. Its number-three man was Bishop McHugh, whose Pro-Life lobbying in the US is financed by the Knights of Columbus. However McHugh and his two superiors deferred to Joaquin Navarro-Valls, who had set aside his duties as head of the Vatican's Sala Stampa to insure that Rome's directives were followed to the letter in Cairo. McHugh and Navarro-Valls were assisted by the Academy of Life's Cristina Vollmer.

By adopting the Opus Dei's Cairo strategy, the Vatican went against the common position of the Western powers not to deal with states that sponsor international terrorism. For some Catholics, dealing with international renegades seemed a stratagem imagined by the Devil. Navarro-Valls later issued a justification, claiming that at Cairo 'the future of humanity was at stake', which even he might admit was an exaggeration. He denied that the Vatican had been intent on blocking a population-control consensus. 'We were interested in a consensus on the true well-being of men and women, not in a consensus on words and, even less, on slogans,' he said.

The issues dealt with at the Cairo Conference were everyone's concern. It would have been immoral to impose the permissive standards of Western secular societies, particularly in matters of abortion, upon the Third World. Nevertheless acceptable ways of solving the world population crisis have to be found. The world population could burgeon from 5.5 billion in 1995 to 10 billion within twenty years. The UN Population Fund had hoped that from Cairo would emerge a plan to stabilize world population at 7.2 billion by the year 2050. Instead of constructively working towards an acceptable stabilization programme, the Opus Dei-inspired Vatican strategy was negatively geared to do maximum harm. Disgusted US officials qualified the Holy See's manoeuvring as 'the most vehement and concerted diplomatic campaign the Vatican has launched in recent years to influence international policy'. [7]

Opus Dei indirectly boasted its structuring of the Vatican's alliance with radical Islam. While the Cairo Conference was in progress, the Prelature's AOP specialists organized conferences with members of local Islamic communities to affirm support for the joint anti-Cairo line, By being seen publicly to participate in these meetings Opus Dei could hardly be accused of having an anti-Islam bias.

'The Work is not against anyone and will never start a Crusade, however that word is taken, against any religion. Nor would it take part in one. Blessed Josemaria wrote: "A Christian lay outlook ... will enable you to flee from all intolerance, from all fanaticism. To put it in a positive way, it will enable you to live in peace with all your fellow citizens, and to promote this understanding and harmony in all spheres of social life" (Conversations, no. 117). Respect for the dignity and freedom of other persons is fundamental to Opus Dei,' maintained Andrew Soane.

Five months after Cairo, Opus Dei organized a seminar on illegal European immigration at one of its retreat centres outside Barcelona that was closed to the public. The Barcelona seminar supported a view opposed to the one expressed by Andrew Soane. The seminar concluded that the growing rate of Islamic emigration to Europe risked provoking serious social conflict in the years ahead.

'By the year 2000 all major European cities will be multicultural. The traditional European population is ageing, while the immigrants are young and proliferating,' Opus Dei ally Cardinal Ricard Maria Carles, the Archbishop of Barcelona, pointed out. 'Such a demographic rift can only bring instability and strife for future generations,' he added. Therefore it was felt that if these trends continued, a relatively affluent and secularized European society, being capricious and morally bankrupt, would be unable to stand up to a more motivated, spiritually disciplined and determined immigrant population.

'Cardinal Carles drew a parallel between the present situation in Europe and the fall of the Roman empire, whose citizens were unaware of their own decadence. In our day, the Cardinal pointed out, the three Christian values of work, liberty and love have been debased,' a report on the seminar concluded. [8] The Barcelona seminar was clearly concerned with the Islamic threat to Europe and the fact that, being more dynamic, Islam was winning recruits among European Catholics by the hundreds each year. After smothering Christian belief in its historic cradle-lands -- the Middle East and Asia Minor -- Islam was now challenging Christianity in Europe, and in times of a shrinking world economy it was doing not too badly. For the protectors of the Church, these were worrying signs.

If Cairo offered one example of how Opus Dei conducted its AOP, and Barcelona another, yet a third was provided by the Institute for Human Sciences, a think-tank that had been founded in Cracow under Wojtyla's guidance. Later, while Lopez Rodo was Spain's ambassador to Austria, the Institute moved to Vienna. After Wojtyla's election as Pope the Institute began holding regular symposiums at the papal summer palace in Castelgandolfo, chaired by John Paul II himself. In August 1994 the Institute organized its fourth Castelgandolfo symposium. The focus of the three-day meeting was the 'Next Crusade', though it was given the more anonymous title of 'Identity'. The Pope sat slightly apart at a small wooden table, listening intently. He was planning a trip to Croatia, and the Vatican -- in preparation for the Millennium Jubilee -- had just established diplomatic relations with Israel.

The Institute's president, philosopher Krzysztof Michalski, put forward the view that the collapse of the Soviet empire made it necessary 'to search for a new order'. The search implied that one of the West's first priorities was to turn back the wave of Islamic migration. Six months later, NATO's Secretary General Willy Claes confirmed that a strategy to protect Europe from radical Islam had become the Western Alliance's primary concern. Coincidence? Other topics covered were the Islamic world's attitude to its own identity, and also whether Europe would be able to absorb its growing Islamic minorities.

The participants concluded that unless centuries of mutual hostility and misunderstanding were overcome the West's collision with Islam would dominate world relations at the beginning of the third millennium. They noted that it had become fashionable to talk of the Middle East as a 'Crescent of Crisis'. But what if one of the Crescent powers developed a nuclear capacity? What if Algeria turned seriously fundamentalist? According to Rabah Kebir, the exiled Islamic Salvation Front president, Islamic rule in Algeria was inevitable. 'Western nations must understand that, sooner or later, Muslim countries will be governed by Islamists. This is the wish of the people,' Kebir told the French religious daily La Croix. [9] Bosnia's Izetbegovic would have agreed. But neither Kebir nor Izetbegovic were invited to the Castelgandolfo symposium.

John Paul II believed he had made an important step towards a 'Crusade of Understanding' when he spoke out against US policy during the 1991 Gulf War, refusing to accord Operation Desert Storm the Just War label because it did not meet 'the rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy'. He thought his stance had impressed the Islamic world. That seemed doubtful as Islamists continued to regard him as a political agent who -- in the words of his would-be assassin Mehmet Ali Agca -- though 'disguised as a religious leader is the Crusade commander'. [10] The depth of the Islamic hardliners' hatred and mistrust was sadly brought home in December 1994 by the killing of four White Father missionaries -- three French and one Belgian -- in Algeria. In a fax sent to news agencies in Nicosia, the Armed Islamic Group said their killing was part of a campaign 'for the annihilation and physical liquidation of Christian crusaders' in Arab lands. [11]

_______________

Notes:

1. Javier Echevarria, 'A Priest and a Father', L'Osservatore Romano, 24 March 1994.

2. Said K. Aburish, The Forgotten Faithful: Christians of the Holy Land, Quartet Books, 1994.

3. 'Christians fear Muslim takeover', The Tablet, London, 28 October 1995.

4. Cardinal Francis Arinze, 'An Agenda for Africa', The Tablet, 9 April 1994.

5. Jim Hoagland, 'The Pope Sups with Two Devils', The Washington Post, 23 August 1994.

6. Hebblethwaite, The Next Pope, Op. cit., p. 119.

7. Alan Cowell, 'Vatican Finds Sin in Text for UN Population Session', International Herald Tribune, Paris, 9 August 1994.

8. 'Immigration: le Cardinal de Barcelona craint une proliferation des delits en Europe', APIC No. 40, 9 February 1995.

9. La Croix, Paris, 20 January 1995.

10. Brodhead, Frank, and Herman, Edward S., The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection, Sheridan Square, New York 1986, p. 52.

11. Three of the 'crusaders' were aged 69, 70 and 75. They were, respectively, Father Jean-Marie Chevillard, Father Charles Deckers and Father Alain Dieulangard. The fourth victim, Father Christian Chessel, was 36.

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34. The Croatian War Machine

To make war against wars is a just and rightful war.

-- Pope John Paul II

OPUS DEI AND JOHN PAUL II SHARE AN EXTRAORDINARY DEVOTION TO the Virgin Mary. The Prelature has adopted the Pope's motto Totus tuus ('All for you, Mary') as its own. Opus Dei members turn out at all papal appearances waving Totus tuus banners. According to the doctrine of the Virgin, she co-operated in man's redemption by becoming the Mother .of God. Papa Wojtyla believes that she has a major millennium role to play, and that Marian apparitions signify her journey through space and time on a pilgrimage towards the second coming, which marks 'the close of the age' -- i.e., the end of the world. But before the Parousia -- the second coming -- Christ ordered that the Gospel must be preached in ,all nations; 'and then the end will come'. [1]

Mary also had special significance for Rwanda's Hutu rebels, a number of whom were newly converted Muslims. Until the civil war there, Rwanda was regarded as one of Africa's most Christianized countries. Only 10 per cent of its population was Muslim. The Hutus comprised more than 80 per cent of the population, but paradoxically almost half of Rwanda's Catholic clergy was Tutsi.

'This was unbearable to Hutu extremists,' explained Father Octave Ugiras, a Tutsi priest who ran the Christus Centre in Kigali. During the troubles, Hutu militiamen came to the centre and slaughtered seventeen priests and nuns, believing them to have supported the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, which later won the civil war. 'The militiamen told us we had nothing to do with God. They said the Virgin Mary was a Tutsi woman and she had to be killed.' [2] The Hutus then riddled Mary's statue with bullets. During the four weeks that the African Synod sat in Rome, more than 200,000 Rwandans -- including the Archbishop of Kigali, two bishops, 103 priests and 65 nuns -- were slaughtered by the extremists.

Thirteen years before the Rwandan massacres, the Virgin Mary made her first appearance in the Bosnian Croat village of Medjugorje with a plea for peace and reconciliation. Judging by the tragic events that followed, the message was not understood, and yet Medjugorje became the fourth most popular pilgrimage for Christians of all faiths, attracting before the outbreak of war in the Balkans hundreds of thousands of people each year.

In 1986 the Vatican began to show an interest in Medjugorje and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was asked to investigate the 'authenticity' of the apparitions. A rumour swept Medjugorje that the Pope had secretly come to see for himself. When asked in January 1987 by an Italian bishop how to react to the events at Medjugorje, the Pope replied: 'Aren't you aware of the marvellous fruits they are producing?' [3]

A few days later, the Virgin spoke through one of the local mediums of her sadness about what was happening in the world. 'You have allowed Satan to take the upper hand ...' she is quoted as having said. Four years later the region was inflamed in bitter interreligious conflict. With overwhelming superiority in arms, the Serbs dominated the battlefield, carrying out medieval-style warfare that threatened to reduce Sarajevo to cinders and spark the beginning of the Tenth Crusade. One-third of Croatia and nearly three-fourths of Bosnia fell to the Serb aggressors.

The Serbs, it seemed, feared the 'Croat lobby' in Rome more than the Croatian army. The Serb media branded Vatican policy as 'dishonest and untrustworthy'. Belgrade was convinced that the 'obstinate and smart work' of the Holy See -- guided by Opus Dei and the newly appointed nuncio in Zagreb, Archbishop Giulio Einaudi -- enabled Croatia to dote its newly formed national army with an impressive arsenal of modern weaponry. Indeed, Serb sources alleged that Father Stanislav Crnica, the Opus Dei regional vicar in Zagreb, had direct access to President Franjo Tudjman!s office. [4]

Archbishop Einaudi took up his posting six weeks after the Vatican -- on 13 January 1992 -- became the first foreign 'power' to recognize Croatia's independence. He had previously been nuncio in Chile where he had come under the spell of Opus Dei's former regional vicar, Adolfo Rodriguez Vidal, who had been elevated to Bishop of Los Angeles di Chile. During Einaudi's nunciature the number of Opus Dei bishops in Chile rose to four. Einaudi was not only a friend of the Prelature, he saw eye to eye with Regional Vicar Crnica on all important issues.

Belgrade's suspicions of Vatican collusion seemed confirmed when Serb intelligence purloined from the files of the Croatian finance ministry a draft $2,000 million loan agreement which the Vatican had purportedly arranged through the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta. The loan was for 10 years and it carried no interest. Even though the 12-page document was undated and unsigned, the accompanying correspondence -- between the Croatian government and Monsignor Roberto Coppola, who described himself as a Knights of Malta plenipotentiary minister and extraordinary ambassador -- was dated in early October 1990, eight months before Croatia declared independence.

After receiving a copy of the loan agreement, the Serb newspaper Politika charged that the Vatican was assisting the break-up of Yugoslavia. Possibly from a partisan position, Politika reported that Cardinal Franjo Kuharic of Zagreb helped arrange the loan, which had been negotiated on the Croatian side by prime minister Josip Manolic, his deputy Mate Babic, finance minister Hrvoje Sarinic and a councillor at the French finance ministry, Madame Mirjana Zelen-Maksa. [5] But what the Serbs did not realize was that in Zagreb's haste to finance the first arms purchases from abroad it had fallen victim to a hoax.

No mention of 'Monsignor' Coppola appeared in the Vatican yearbook and the Knights of Malta, embarrassed by the unwanted publicity, maintained that the loan document was bogus, part of a confidence trickster's attempt to harvest an up-front commission of $200,000 from the Croatians. The fraud was uncovered in time and the perpetrator -- although he claimed immunity from prosecution by virtue of holding diplomatic passports from several eastern countries -- was said to be in jail in Italy. In fact the Knights of Malta's anti-fraud department, headed by Count Jose Antonio Linati, possessed a lengthy file on Roberto Coppola, an enterprising Neapolitan with a history of past misrepresentations dating back to the 1970s, and had warned the Order's embassies abroad to be on the lookout for the unworthy 'monsignor'.

Politika nonetheless noted that the Vatican financiers had also backed the founding of an embargo-busting cargo airline that operated between the Adriatic port of Split and Malta. It claimed that the money for the airline had been transferred to the Croatians through a Luxembourg bank that formerly had been used in some of the United Trading transactions.

Politika's disclosures apart, the evidence suggests that the Opus Dei network, in contravention of the UN arms embargo imposed in 1991, was instrumental in easing Croatia's task of forging a well-armed, efficient war machine, first by improving Croatia's image in the West so that it escaped international sanctions, and then facilitating its contacts with the Clinton administration. The efforts to arm Croatia began even before the Vatican's recognition of the Tudjman republic.

When the federal Yugoslav forces abandoned their barracks around Zagreb in 1992 they left behind two old Yugoslav Air Force MiGs and a few disabled tanks. By September 1993, the Croats had purchased twenty-eight MiG 21s from surplus stocks in the Czech Republic. The MiGs were transported to Croatia in kit form by truck through Hungary. Zagreb was also successful in obtaining a piece of the American foreign aid pie. Opus Dei's Washington network, which by then extended from the papal nunciature on Massachusetts Avenue to the White House, the FBI and the Pentagon, provided the Croats with the right contacts so that they knew exactly what to ask for and how to formulate their requests. [6] The Serbs were hit with international sanctions, but the Croats, perpetrators of their own depredations in western Bosnia, successfully avoided them.

In a move that perplexed observers, Alvaro del Portillo spent several weeks during the summer of 1993 at the Prelature's Warwick House in Pittsburgh. Its director, numerary John Freeh, was the brother of Louis J. Freeh, since 1993 Clinton's director of the FBI. [7] Officially Bishop Portillo was in Pittsburgh to address prominent local Catholics. But unremarked was that Pittsburgh is the headquarters of the Croatian Fraternal Union of America, a life insurance association with assets of $150 million but also the largest Croat emigrant organization in the world. The Union's national president, Bernard M. Luketich, was so highly viewed by Rome and Washington that he accompanied the official White House delegation that greeted John Paul II on his visit to the United States in 1995. [8]

Opus Dei's operations in Pittsburgh were assisted in the 1980s by an energetic young priest, Father Ron Gillis, who had been recruited while a law student at Boston. Gillis had known the Founder in Rome and witnessed some of his famous tantrums. On one occasion he reported that Escriva de Balaguer started banging chairs about, screaming that he needed more 'saints' -- i.e., new vocations. Gillis told a friend he never wanted to be a priest but the Father convinced him he had a vocation as big as a house. Gillis confided that Opus Dei was attempting to recruit inside the Pentagon and that he himself regularly gave lectures there on 'military ethics'. Soon after, he left Pittsburgh and by 1992, as the Balkans crisis hotted up, he was back in Washington.

In the summer of 1993, plans to arm Croatia in spite of the UN embargo took on greater urgency. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which monitors arms transfers in the region, Croatia created its own armaments industry and refurbished equipment left behind by the Yugoslav army. Other arms were acquired from Ukraine, among them 200 T-55 battle tanks, 400 armoured personnel carriers, 150 heavy artillery pieces, 35 multiple rocket launchers and 45 assault helicopters. But the Croatians lacked basic battlefield management skills.

In January 1994 the Croatian Fraternal Union was instrumental in founding the National Federation of Croatian Americans as a registered lobby in Washington. Luketich had White House contacts at the highest level, extending to Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Anthony Lake, the National Security Adviser. [9] Lake, who describes himself as a 'pragmatic liberal', had served in two previous administrations -- Nixon's and Jimmy Carter's. A former political science professor at Holyoke College in Massachusetts, he had received his PhD from Princeton, where he could have encountered Opus Dei's Father John McCloskey III, an assistant chaplain who left the Princeton chaplaincy in 1990 after creating a firestorm by advising students not to take courses which he deemed doctrinally dangerous.

Two months after the Croatian lobby's formation, Zagreb's defence minister, Gojko Susak, requested Washington's assistance in educating the Croatian general staff 'in military-civilian relations, programming and budgeting'. Susak's extreme Croat nationalism -- he was originally from the region of Mostar -- had caused him to flee Yugoslavia in 1967, settling with two brothers in Ottawa, where he worked in a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Later he bought a pizza parlour and staffed it with Lebanese while putting all his energies into organizing Canadian Croats for the Croatian Fraternal Union of America. In 1991, Brother Susak was listed as president of the board of trustees of the Ottawa chapter, when he returned to Zagreb to beef up Croatia's military punch.

Susak specifically asked the Clinton administration for permission to employ a group of retired US army officers who operated from offices in Alexandria, Virginia, under the name of Military Professional Resources Incorporated. [10] The only problem was the 1991 UN arms embargo imposed on all of Yugoslavia. But this problem faded with John Paul II's visit to Zagreb in September 1994 to celebrate the ninth centenary of the See of Zagreb. Tudjman was said to be ecstatic. He told a press conference that the first papal visit to the Balkans since 1117 signified Vatican backing for Croatia's bid to regain its Serb-held territory 'by war if necessary.'

'The Holy Father is coming as an apostle of peace, the preacher of co-operation and friendship among nations,' he said. 'His arrival ... signifies moral support from the supreme international moral authority for Croatia's demand that it has the right to establish its legal system over its entire territory.' To show Croatia's 'everlasting gratitude' for the Holy See's protection two bootlegged MiG 21 fighters escorted the papal airliner into Croatian airspace and when it landed on Croatian soil church bells pealed throughout the country.

In 1519, Leo X had bestowed on the Croats the title of Antemurale Christianitatis -- the Bulwark of Christianity -- for their defence of Europe against endless hordes from the East. Almost 480 years later, John Paul II was again exhorting the Croats to stand firm for Christendom. Within days of the papal visit, Military Professional Resources (MPRI) received the green light from the US State Department to sign a consulting agreement with the Croatian defence ministry. Clinton, after conferring with his national security adviser, approved the decision. MPRI was no fly-by-night organization. It employed 140 persons and reported an annual turnover in excess of $7.S million. Among those working on the Croatian contract -- nondescriptly referred to as the 'Democratic Transition Assistance Programme' -- were former US Army chief of staff General Carl Vuono, former US Army Europe commander General Crosbie 'Butch' Saint, and former Defence Intelligence Agency chief Lieutenant General Ed Soyster.

'The mission was to convert the eastern-style army they had ... to a western-style army based on democratic principles,' Soyster said. 'We are talking about totally changing a system, converting their eastern-style military to a western one with democratic values and methods.' MPRI's assistance 'has no correlation to anything happening on the battlefield today,' he added. [11] Otherwise stated, MPRI was assisting Croatia to train a professional officers corps. Leading the Croatian programme on the ground was retired Major General Richard B. Griffitts. His 15-strong group was staffed by former Pentagon colonels. The Croats were accorded State Department clearance to attend special courses at US bases and schools.

Under a separate arrangement, retired Major General John Sewall, former deputy director of strategic planning for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spearheaded a State Department effort to improve military co-ordination between the Bosnian and Croatian governments and the Bosnian Croat militia -- in other words, to make the three forces more combat efficient. Sewall took over the job of special adviser to the Bosnian and Croatian militaries from General John Rogers Galvin, the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

Although the Americans denied it, French and British intelligence sources claimed that the Croatians were receiving advanced US computer technology and fire-control systems designed to give them battlefield superiority. This know-how, however, was not passed on to the Bosnians. It seems that by then Lake had counselled Clinton to silently assent to a Tudjman proposal -- put forward in the spring of 1994 -- to allow Iranian arms for Bosnia to transit Croatia. [12] It has since been alleged that by turning a blind eye to the Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia, the Americans permitted Tehran to expand its foothold in the Balkans. But the evidence suggests otherwise. The Iranians already had their foothold. They had been shipping their arms through the Croatian ports of Split and Rijeka since 1993, with Zagreb routinely exacting a 'transit tax' on the 30 to 50-truck convoys before they left the ports for destinations inside Bosnia. Opus Dei's strategists seem to have realized that if Bosnia did not receive a minimum of military aid to defend itself, without permitting Sarajevo an offensive capability that might threaten Croatia -- a proposition that the Bush administration had refused -- Islamic guerrillas would soon be present in the Balkans in uncontrollable numbers and Bosnia would fully become an Iranian client state. At least this way Croatia could exert some control over the weapons flow, thereby guaranteeing Zagreb's military superiority over its beleaguered neighbour.

The plan worked well enough, although it was rendered more complicated than expected by the fact that American military gear was soon being spotted in the battle zone. How did it get there? That mystery remains unsolved. Possibly the Iranians, having some left-over American equipment from the time of the Shah, introduced it in an effort to sour relations between the US and its European allies. The subterfuge almost succeeded, because the French and British governments became unhappy about the apparent violation of the UN embargo. Their peacekeeping contingents reported seeing Bosnian Croat and Muslim soldiers dressed in American battle fatigues and carrying M-16 rifles. UN officials were in fact convinced that the US used NATO patrols enforcing the 'no-fly zone' over Bosnia to shield private contractors sending contraband arms cargoes into Bosnian-held Tuzla airport. They claimed that the deliveries were made at night using just-off-the-ground airdrops, a technique developed when Butch Saint was commander of the US Army in Europe and Sewall was the army's deputy chief of planning.

In spite of allegations that the US was breaking the arms embargo, there was no FBI investigation, even though the British and French brought their embargo-busting evidence to the attention of US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General John Shalikashvili and Richard Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs. It perhaps should be pointed out that FBI director Louis Freeh, appointed by Clinton in July 1993, and his wife Marilyn have been named as supernumerary members and that their two eldest children attended The Heights, Opus Dei's school in Washington. [13]

By July 1995, when John Paul II officially invoked the Just War doctrine to defend Bosnia, it was clear to the Vatican that the Serb aggression risked transforming what had been the world's most secularized Islamic community -- a model for future relations between Christians and Muslims -- into a radical theocracy, not far distant from Rome. If Bosnia turned radically Muslim, the very existence of the Catholic Church in that part of the Balkans would be threatened. Tudjman, therefore, was primed to follow the Vatican's lead. His advisers proposed the opening of peace talks with the Serbs of Krajina, which were predestined to fail, thereby qualifying for application of the Just War doctrine. Meanwhile, the commander of the Croatian armed forces, General Janko Bobetko, and his American advisers put the final touches on Operation Storm. The Serbs helped at the end of July 1995 by overplaying their hand, seizing control of Srebrenica, a UN 'safe zone' in eastern Bosnia, once again turning international opinion against them. In quick succession the UN abandoned Zepa, another Muslim 'safe area', and Sarajevo came under intensified bombardment. Serb General Ratko Mladic then moved his troops against the Muslim enclave of Bihac, where 180,000 Muslims were encircled, in the west of Bosnia.

Four years after the Serbs had set up on Croatian territory the autonomous Republika Srpska Krajina, one supposed that they were solidly dug in and ready for a fight. As part of Greater Serbia, the Krajina Serbs believed they enjoyed the solid backing of Belgrade. The joint attack on Bihac by Bosnian Serbs and those of Krajina provided the pretext for General Bobetko to begin Operation Storm. His streamlined, Americanized army launched a lightning attack against Krajina. Within eighty-four hours Krajina's capital of Knin had fallen and the siege of Bihac was lifted.

As the Croatian war machine started rolling through Krajina, a mortar attack -- supposedly carried out by Serbs -- against Sarajevo killed thirty-seven civilians, bringing almost instant NATO retaliation: in two weeks 3,500 bombing sorties (two-thirds of them by American warplanes) destroyed over 100 strategic targets in Serb-held territory. The Serbs were unable to counter-attack. Within days they had lost more than 3,000 square kilometres of terrain and their routes were clogged with 60,000 new refugees. Bobetko's troops were within shelling distance of Banja Luka when they announced a unilateral ceasefire. Belgrade never budged.

The coincidence of a Croatian blitzkrieg and the NATO bombing forced the Serbs to admit defeat. The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano portrayed the NATO air raids as a warning to the psychopaths of Pale, intended to 'restore hope to the martyred people' of Bosnia. The bombings were not an act of war, the Vatican paper said, but demonstrated 'a determination to protect the rights of those populations, the unfortunate Bosnians -- Croats, Serbs and Muslims -- and all the other ethnic groups dragged into the madness of a lengthy and ferocious war.'

Cardinal Kuharic of Zagreb proclaimed Operation Storm 'a legitimate action of Croatia to liberate her own territory'. When he pointed out that the rebel occupation of Krajina had been illegal, that Knin had rejected Tudjman's offer to negotiate, making military action a necessary last resort, and that the international community was unable to protect the victims of Serb aggression, he was reciting the four prerequisites for receiving a Just War label.

More importantly, Operation Storm had momentarily short-circuited radical Islam's call for total jihad, issued after the fall of Srebrenica. Iran's foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati had pledged at a private meeting to give the Bosnian Muslims all the military assistance they needed, forcing more moderate nations like Turkey, Egypt, Malaysia and Jordan, whose troops participated in the UN humanitarian force, to back the Bosnian government openly rather than leave the Iranians to hold Islam's high moral ground.

Backed by its new military might, Croatia was determined to exert a moderating influence over its neighbour and made it clear that imported Islamic extremism would not be tolerated. By then a couple of brigades of non-Bosnian Muslims, numbering about 4,000 fighters qualified by US officers as 'hard-core terrorists', were operating within and sometimes in parallel to the Bosnian government forces.

Although the Dayton peace agreement that followed the Serb defeat called for all foreign fighters to leave Bosnia, defence officials acknowledged there was little hope of persuading them to depart, even in spite of Bosnian affirmations that they would be out of the country within thirty days. 'These guys are mean. They've got to be controlled,' an American adviser to the Bosnian government said. [14]

According to a Sarajevo newspaper, a handful of the volunteers left for Chechnya, where war with the Russians had broken out again. But many simply faded into the snow-covered Hercegovina mountains to prepare for the next round of fighting. They were only too aware that the 1995 Dayton agreement had brought about the de facto partition of Bosnia, and this was not acceptable to them. They called it a betrayal.

Instructors at a 'Martyrs Detachment' training camp in central Bosnia, according to an intercepted report to their headquarters in Tehran, told European recruits that they were engaged 'in a jihad to defend Islam and its sacred principles against a crazed, spiteful Occidental Crusade.' For members of the 'Seekers of Martyrdom' battalion, then, the Tenth Crusade had already begun. A Croatian flag flew over western Bosnia, where the Croatian kuna and not the Bosnian dinar was in use, and those inhabitants who remained considered that part of the country to be solidly Croatian. As further proof, Medjugorje was under the control of the apparently Opus Dei-assisted and Catholic-led Croatian Army.

Zagreb demonstrated its determination to bar imported Islamic extremism from the region when in September 1995 it arrested Sheikh Tala'at Fouad Qassem, a leader in exile of the Gama'a al-Islamiya terrorist organization. Sheikh Tala'at had been foolish enough to cross Croatia on his way to Sarajevo to offer the Bosnian army more mujahedin volunteers. The Croatian authorities claimed they had expelled him, but he and his bodyguard disappeared and were presumed dead.

Days later Gama'a exploded a car bomb in Rijeka, killing the bomber and injuring twenty-nine. A statement faxed to the Reuters news agency announced that Gama'a al-Islamiya had carried out its first terrorist attack against Croatian interests. 'This historic operation is to assure the Croats that the fate of Tala'at Fouad Qassem will not pass without floods of blood running through internal and external Croatian interests,' Gama'a said.

A month later the Croatians answered Gama'a's threat by intercepting and killing the 'Emir of the Mujahedin', Sheikh Anwar Shaaban, and four other Muslim volunteers serving with the Bosnian Third Army Corps. The ongoing hatred and fear prompted one Serb observer to remark that even with 60,000 NATO troops acting as guardians of the Dayton agreement, 'there will be no real peace in Bosnia for a long time to come.' Nevertheless the lull before the next round of fighting enabled the Pope's secret warriors to focus their attention elsewhere along the Spiritual Curtain.

_______________

Notes:

1. Matthew 24:3 and 24:14.

2. Edith M. Lederer, 'The Church and Rwanda', Associated Press. 23 January 1995.

3. Robert Faricy and Lucy Rooney, Medjugorje Journal -- Mary Speaks to the World, McCrimmons, Great Wakening, Essex, 1987, p. 146.

4. According to reports from Zagreb, one of President Tudjman's daughters-in-law -- he has two, Ivana Moric, wife of Dr. Miroslav Tudjman. and Snjezana, wife of Stjepan Tudjman -- is an Opus Dei supernumerary.

5. Radivoje Petrovic, 'The Holy See is providing loans to help Croatia and the break-up of Yugoslavia', Politika, Belgrade, 2 February 1991.

6. The nuncio in Washington, Archbishop Agostino Cacciavillan, began his diplomatic career in 1976 as the nuncio in Kenya, where he first came into contact with Opus Dei's Corps Mobile.

7. John Freeh resigned as a numerary and left Warwick House in 1994 to marry. Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful and it is uncertain whether he remains an Opus Dei member.

8. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 1 October 1995.

9. Zajednicar (Fraremalist), 'the official organ of the Croatian Fraternal Union of America'. reported in its 6 January and 3 February 1993 issues that Mr. Luketich was invited to a private dinner at the Old State House Building in Little Rock with Hillary and Bill Clinton and Al Gore. See also, inter alia, Zajednicar, 7 April 1993, and 'Special Report From Washington' concerning an American-Croatian delegation headed by Mr. Luketich that met at the White House on 27 February 1995 with Anthony Lake and Alexander Vershbow, the NSC's senior adviser for European Affairs, Zajednicar, 8 March 1995.

10. David B. Ottaway, 'US General Plays Down Bosnia Role -- "Non-Lethal Advice" Is All He's Giving', The Washington Post, 28 July 1995.

11. Sean D. Naylor, 'Retired Army General Helps Balkan Militaries to Shape Up', Army Times, Washington, 12 June 1995.

12. James Risen and Doyle McManus, 'Despite his public opposition to lifting embargo, Clinton reportedly let shipments go through', Los Angeles Times, 5 April 1996.

13. The Inspector in Charge of the FBI's Office of Public and Congressional Affairs, John E. Collingwood. stated in reply to the author's queries to the director: 'While 1 cannot answer your specific questions, I do note that you have been "informed" incorrectly by whomever your sources might be.'

14. Dana Priest, 'Foreign Muslims Fighting in Bosnia Considered "Threat" to US Troops" The Washington Post, 30 November 1995 (emphasis added).

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35. Hopeless Dialogue

Both Islam and Christianity are missionary faiths ... Can believers who really believe passionately in their hearts that theirs is a missionary faith which calls people to holiness and truth really be committed to dialogue?

-- Dr Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury

A FORMER HIGH-RANKING OPUS DEI MEMBER IN SPAIN BELIEVES THAT the next Crusade -- the Tenth Crusade -- will be a cybernetic one, not fought with bombs or bullets, or even Middle Eastern oil, but with the latest computer technology and electronic communications. In his view, the words of the Prophet will be drowned in the fantasies of the cyberspace revolution -- a revolution directed and Controlled by the West. When the Muslim masses -- poorly educated, semiliterate and dependent upon what their own media and mullahs tell them -- obtain unrestricted access to Western information, culture and, above all, the Good News of the Gospels, they will be liberated from the bondage of medieval tyranny which now makes them fundamentalist fodder.

This view was to an extent echoed by John Paul II in early 1991 when, in response to a suggestion that development was no longer applicable to a country's state of industrialization but, today, to the strength of its banking sector and, tomorrow, its command of advanced communications systems, he smiled and noted, 'That is the thesis of Opus Dei.' [1]

Radical Islamic leaders are only too aware of the threat to their authority posed by the West's mastery of communications and information-transfer technology. Satellite-beamed TV transmissions expose the true believers to Western materialism and profane images of unveiled women. While laws can restrict individual freedoms, there is no technology that can place the communications genie back in the bottle once it has escaped.

One of the characteristics of a theocratic state is that in order to survive it must rigidly control the basic freedoms of its citizens, enforcing its edicts with spiritual tyranny that denies human rights. Freedom of choice is the enemy of fundamentalism in all its forms. Opus Dei's propagandists tell us that one of Escriva de Balaguer's fundamental concerns was social justice in the world. [2] He maintained that Christians have a duty not only to expose social injustice but to find solutions that better serve mankind -- i.e., their oppressed brothers or sisters 'in nations burdened with totalitarian regimes that are either anti-Christian, atheist or dominated by extreme nationalist fervour'.


CRUSADE FLASHPOINTS

Key to Hotspots

1. Algeria
2. Bosnia
3. Chad
4. Chechnya
5. East Timor
6. Egypt
7. Gaza
8. Horn of Africa
9. Nagorno-Karabakh (Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan)
10. South Philippines 11. Sudan

Islam's Holy Land

Saudi Arabia No churches,
No Christian clergymen,
No bibles.
No religious tracts allowed

Key to Confrontation Points

1. Tadjikistan
2. Ethiopia
3. Eritrea
4. France
5. Iron
6. Istanbul
7. Kenya
8. Kosovo
9. Lebanon
10. Mali
11. Nigeria
12. Niger
13. Pakistan
14. Tanzania
15. Turkey
16. Bradford (UK)
17. Glasgow (UK)
18. Northern Iraq
19. Uganda
20. Zimbabwe

This concern for social justice was said to have led to the founding by Opus Dei of its own human rights non-governmental organization (NGO) in Geneva, with UN Economic and Social Council observer status. Its task was to monitor access to basic education, as enshrined in the Helsinki Human Rights Charter. Nowhere was Opus Dei's name associated with the new NGO so that the Prelature can in no way be accused of stirring up animosity against Islamic states, the primary target of the 'access to education monitoring'. The International Organization for the Development of Free Access to Education is headed by an Opus Dei numerary but its staff includes non-Opus Dei members. One of its undertakings is the publication of a yearly report on the application of the Helsinki Charter in the field of education in all UN member states. In 1995, the Free Access to Education organization received approval from the Geneva authorities to open a summer University of Human Rights.

The Free Access to Education organization is another example of Opus Dei's use of the guile of snakes and innocence of doves. The NGO's concern is not targeted at Catholic countries, to be sure, but primarily the access of Islamic women to equal-rights education. In Afghanistan, Sudan and the Yemen, for example, literacy among women is abysmally low and the local ulema -- the clergy, which is male by definition -- insists on it being kept that way. Opus Dei's Geneva NGO, therefore, is one small way of applying pressure on traditional Islamic countries to become more amenable to change. This carries with it a destabilizing component. It is part of Opus Dei's strategy' for countering Islam -- albeit the 'soft' part, but nevertheless hidden, because Opus Dei does not want to be seen, indeed cannot be seen, as an enemy of Islam.

This segment of Opus Dei's strategy to shake up Islam and make it more open and less aggressive to the ways of the West emerged at the Fourth UN Conference on Women in Beijing in August 1995. Joaquin Navarro-Valls appeared on television at the opening of the conference to inform the world that there was no Vatican alliance with Islam at Beijing. Left unsaid was that it was part of Opus Dei's double-handed strategy to use women's rights to discredit traditional Islam. The need to improve education for women, the connection between poor education and poverty, and the fact that women bear the 'heavier burden' of poverty, were central to the Vatican platform at Beijing.

Faced with the hostility that the obstructionist performance in Cairo had earned it, the Vatican changed tactics. Its Beijing delegation was officially headed by a liberal Harvard law professor, Mary Ann Glendon. But Navarro-Valls was also present, more as a negotiator than spokesman. When some 2,000 of the 4,500 delegates signed a petition asking the UN to withdraw the Holy See's permanent observer status, Navarro-Valls remarked nonchalantly, 'That was already decided in the twelfth century.' The twelfth century was when the Second, Third, German and Emperor's crusades were fought, marking the height of the Crusading movement.

The Vatican negotiators emphasized that the Holy See's views on the role of women were quite different from those of many Muslim countries. But Rome had 'toned down' its approach, according to Navarro-Valls, because it felt the issues were 'peripheral to the main dialogue'. Instead, the Catholic thrust came from the Latin American and Philippine delegations, which, if not actually led by Opus Dei militants, all had strong Opus Dei components. But even this back-door approach risked being counter-productive. A survey conducted by Costa Rica's Arias Peace Foundation found that of the 290 Central American NGOs polled, 71 per cent described Opus Dei as an organization of religious bigots comparable to Islamic fundamentalists, 80 per cent said it did not represent the needs or aspirations of women in their countries, 51 per cent that it kept women in a subordinate position, 78 per cent that it pressured official delegations to the conference to adopt the Opus Dei stance on key issues, especially reproductive rights (e.g., forbidding contraception or the use of condoms, either as a family planning measure or in HIV/AIDS prevention programmes), and 18 per cent felt that its efforts ran counter to freedom of expression. [3]

Nevertheless, there are many Christians who agree with Opus Dei's 'soft' approach. The fact that Opus Dei is known, vaguely, to be doing something to counter radical Islam earns it the sympathy of those who want a stronger Western response to the Prophet's 'crazies'. In general, the concept of Just War as a last resort against unprovoked aggression has been largely accepted by traditionalists and other right-wing groups. The fact that Opus Dei was the principal proponent of a dusted-off Just War doctrine has brought it their admiration.

One of the front-line countries in the Spiritual Wars is the Philippines. With a 1990 population of 65 million, 84 per cent Catholic, the country has a vociferous Muslim minority. Its birth rate is just over 3 per cent, giving it a projected population by the end of the millennium of 90 million. Opus Dei's operations in the Philippines are important and enjoy the full backing of Cardinal Jaime L. Sin, described as the Richelieu of south-east Asia.

The first Opus Dei centre was opened in Manila in 1964, after a number of Filipino students who were recruited into the Work while attending universities in the United States returned home 'with a desire to introduce Opus Dei's apostolic ideals in their country'. Their 'unavoidable duty ... to find Christian solutions to the problems of society' led them to found the Centre for Research & Communication in Manila as an institute of higher studies in business administration and economics. 'By providing at the same time the basic principles of the social teaching of the Church, it seeks to imbue human, economic and social development of the Philippines with a Christian spirit', an Opus Dei publication stated. [4] Such a concept, needless to say, clashes with radical Islam.

The Spiritual Curtain in the Philippines descends somewhere south of the Jintotolo Channel which roughly divides the archipelago in two. During the 1970s about 50,000 persons were killed in sectarian conflict in the south. By the 1980s the government more or less had the situation in hand and the killings receded until 1991, when rival Muslim groups began banding together under a new organization, Abu Sayyaf, which received Libyan and Iranian support. In April 1995, they unleashed their first large-scale operation, an attack on the southern Philippine town of Ipil, on Mindanao Island, that killed 100 people and left the centre of the town of 50,000 in smouldering ruins.

'Abu Sayyaf is doing everything in its power to create a situation where Christians and Muslims will go to war ... as a prelude to setting up an Islamic state in the southern Philippines,' announced the minister of the interior, Rafel Alunan. Abu Sayyaf, he said, was part of a global network radiating from the Middle East, with tentacles extending to the United States and Asia. They have been laying the groundwork in the Philippines for at least four years, as it was an obvious staging point for expanding into other parts of south-east Asia, Alunan added.

'It's a Christian country, the only one in Asia. They have an axe to grind against Christians. These guys are a throwback to the Middle Ages. They want to see the resurgence of the Islamic Empire ... They want theocratic rule,' he said. [5]

Abu Sayyaf, which means 'Father of the Executioner' in Arabic, was founded by Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, a Libyan-educated high-school teacher. It operates throughout the southern Philippines and has kidnapped scores of Catholic priests and missionaries. According to Alunan it is linked to an international fundamentalist organization, Harakat al lslamiya, of which very little is known. Harakat al Islamiya was said to be allied with Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric found guilty of instigating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and to Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, leader of the Manhattan bombers and mastermind of a plot to kill the Pope during his January 1995 visit to Manila. US and Philippine authorities also accused Yousef of carrying out the December 1994 bombing of a Philippine Airlines flight that killed a Japanese passenger and of planning to blow up in quick succession eleven American airliners.

Abu Sayyaf defectors have disclosed that Filipino recruits are sent to Pakistan and Afghanistan for religious and military training. The government claims that Abu Sayyaf has also incorporated elements of Islam's Floating Army into its tanks. A few days after the Ipil attack, Philippine intelligence was informed that four Hamas militants had entered the country to make contact with Abu Sayyaf.

While Abu Sayyaf terrorists were wreaking havoc in Ipil, Muslim delegates from eighty countries gathered in Khartoum to attend a four-day meeting hosted by Dr Hassan al-Turabi's Popular Arab and Islamic Conference. It attracted delegates from the Islamic Salvation Front, the Armed Islamic Group, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Tabligh, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, Gama'a al-Islamiya, the US Nation of Islam and other militant groups. At the outset of the conference, Turabi accused NATO and Western intelligence agencies of 'instigating a new Crusade against Islam and against Islamic revival'.

'The West is trying to extinguish the light of Islam,' Turabi charged. But he had another design in mind. Turabi wants to restore Islam to a central role in world affairs. To do this he needed an Islamic forum that was linked neither to governments nor political persuasions. The Khartoum conference backed' him, voting to create the Islamic Popular Congress, intended to be a Vatican for the Islamic world.

With the Islamic Popular Congress, Turabi argued, the followers of the Prophet would be better equipped 'to defend Islam from Western aggression'. Needless to say, the Saudis and other traditional Islamic powers did not approve, but in the restructured dynamics of the post-Cold War Islamic world leadership was escaping from the royal autocrats of the Arabian peninsula and drifting towards the more radical members of the Central Islamic Axis. This was bad news for the world of salvation.

Once the conference voted in favour of the Islamic Popular Congress, Turabi could afford to talk moderation. The conference's final resolution urged co-operation with Christian fundamentalists, stating that they shared common ground with Islamic conservatives. 'The conference supports ... a dialogue with the West and recommends that Muslims try to start a debate with the Christian world to begin co-operation with people of the faith against the forces of corrupt materialism,' the statement said.

Turabi was more than ever the man to watch in the Islamic world and the priests at the 'parish on the far side of the Tiber' were surely measuring him as a possible counterpart in the West's 'dialogue' with Islam. At an earlier press conference Turabi had gone directly to the heart of what he alleged was the basic malaise. 'There is a need for leading figures in the West to learn about Islam, directly ... The West cannot govern the world. There is no God called "the West",' he said.

'Humanity is very close, the means of communication are great. We should have ... dialogue. Let's talk to each other. One or two languages can serve for that communication, and let everyone contribute his own share, his own culture, to the common stock of human culture.

'My values dictate that I should dialogue even with someone who is hostile to me ... The Koran tells me, "talk to him". My religious model is the Prophet, who created the first state with a written constitution, a state established between Muslims and Jews ... And he invited the Christians and allowed them to pray inside his mosque. So my model, which I call perfect, is such that I'll do my best to talk to him who is hostile to me. If you don't want to talk to me, you'll never speak Arabic, so I will learn English, and learn French, and some German perhaps, and some Italian. He doesn't want to talk to a black man, but I'll talk to him. He doesn't want to share wealth evenly between North and South in the international economic dialogue, but I'll try to share human wealth with him, or freedom ... But, of course, if he commits aggression against me, I'll use force. I'm told in the Koran to respond exactly ...' [6]

Fine, Dr Turabi, but what of the Sudanese record? When in October 1995 the German ambassador Peter Mende sought information from the authorities in Khartoum about the killing of gaoled students who took part in anti-government protests he was threatened with expulsion.

Opus Dei never makes an idle threat; nor would it allow its pope to make one either. When John Paul II told his hosts in Khartoum to cease 'the terrible harvest of suffering' in the south of Sudan or risk the wrath of the God of Abraham he was not expressing a wish but a statement of force. Six months after the Pope's visit to Khartoum, a little-known interdenominational human rights organization -- Christian Solidarity International -- made an entry into the south of the country, not only bringing aid to the decimated Christian and animist communities, but also whipping up political support for south Sudanese autonomy in the neighbouring Christian states, backing a National Democratic Alliance against Khartoum and launching in Western capitals a campaign to promote the autonomist cause. After one visit to the south, Christian Solidarity's Baroness Caroline Cox, a trained nurse, reported that Sudanese troops regularly raided Dinka villages, abducting children and young women to provide labour and sexual services. Some were given Muslim names and forced to attend Koranic schools, while others were sold on the Manyiel slave market in Bahr el Ghazal province.

A new Christian Sudanese newsletter, Light and Hope for Sudan, reported in July 1995 that since the beginning of the ten-year-old civil war, 'nearly 2 million have died, most from starvation and disease, and 5 million have fled their homes'. Khartoum, the newsletter said, was using starvation to facilitate 'its programme of Islamization and Arabization'. The Christian Solidarity mission called for human rights monitors to visit all areas of Sudan. Turabi made it dear that such a proposal was not on his agenda for dialogue. Christian Solidarity had, by then, highlighted the existence in southern Sudan of all the necessary elements for a 'Just War'.

Weeks later the Sudanese rebels, revamped into a disciplined fighting force, launched their first major offensive since the Pope's visit to Khartoum. They wiped out an elite mechanized division, killing or capturing 7,000 government soldiers and seizing all of its equipment. Using tanks for the first time and supported -- Khartoum alleged -- by regular units of the Ugandan and Tanzanian armies, the rebels recaptured most of Western and Eastern Equitoria in spite of attacks by Iranian-piloted helicopter gunships.

Within weeks the morale of the southern forces had been transformed. What had made the difference? I asked John Eibner, Christian Solidarity's Sudan operations director. 'Because they are no longer isolated,' he answered.

Christian Solidarity is an interesting study in operational anonymity. Its origins and resources are untraceable. It claims that its accounts are audited by a recognized auditing firm and that the annual financial statements are available to the public. But this is not the case. The public is shown a skeleton balance sheet that is unsigned and ambiguously labelled. While purporting to be the Christian Solidarity International accounts, it appears to be those of the Swiss branch only -- and gives no indication of the direct source of its funds, only general headings. [7]

Following the October 1994 murder in Algeria of two Spanish religious sisters, the Pope remarked, 'I feel it my duty to remind all men of goodwill that an authentic solution can only be reached by distancing themselves from the abyss of violence, so as to follow instead the way of dialogue ...' [8]

But the Pope had really touched on the bottom line of the spiritual balance sheet when he stated in Crossing the Threshold of Hope -- the royalties from which he pledged to rebuild the destroyed churches of Croatia -- that 'Islam is not a religion of redemption ... Jesus is mentioned, but only as a prophet who prepares for the last prophet, Muhammad.' By affirming his Millennium Jubilee intention of bringing the mystery of Christian salvation to all mankind -- to 'purify the world' through Christian conversion - he sends out a contrary message to Islam that he is not interested in placing his vision of salvation -- his 'genuine religious belief' -- on an equal footing with the teachings of the Koran, which demand total submission to the word of Allah, as interpreted by the Prophet.

A year after the separate calls by John Paul II and Hassan al-Turabi for a dialogue between religions, Islamic jihad had been exported to Croatia, France and Germany, with bombings and terrorist threats. Algeria's outlawed Armed Islamic Group in a message carried on Internet from an address in San Diego, California, boasted that 'with pride and strength our jihad has made military hits in the heart of France ... in its largest cities. Let it be our promise that we will disturb your sleep, and tear [you] up, and Islam will conquer France.'

'We are at war,' declared French interior minister Jean-Louis Debre, after the eighth 1995 bomb attack had spread fear and suspicion. 'It is the war of modern times, and I tell you that the government is determined to win that war and will make no concessions,' he said.

After the German police broke up an Islamic arms network by arresting nine people, Abdelkhadar Sahraoui, supposedly a neutral Algerian businessman living in exile, warned on German TV, 'If we see that you are neo-colonialists, that you want to destroy our people, that you want not partnership but domination in the Mediterranean, then we will fight you.'

Either the Pope and Turabi had not heard the other's call for dialogue or they lacked sincerity. The Iranians, on the other hand, felt no need for dialogue, and this in spite of their opportunistic alliance with the Vatican during the 1994 UN Population Conference. The Iranians had an altogether more straightforward approach. 'Christianity is truly lacking in divine and religious spirituality, and is an arid and useless movement,' Ayatollah Ahmed Jannati, the country's second-ranking religious figure, announced, reflecting the radical mood that transfixed his country. Christianity, he said, had created a centralized power in the person of the Pope, whom all Catholics are obliged to follow. 'Through this system they have maintained that lifeless corpse, while Islam possesses so much spirituality, so much depth, with such strength for administering the world.' [9] As Ayatollah Jannati pointed out, you can't dialogue with a corpse.

With its unbending dogmatism, Opus Dei has been credited by its supporters with putting life back into the Church and accused by others of polarizing the Church. Many Catholics, however, do not want to know about the Curial battles between Progressives and Conservatives, or between the Rome party and the Ostpolitikers. They want to worship in peace and with confidence in their pope. But as the Millennium Jubilee approaches, this may no longer be possible. The 'smart and obstinate' work of the Pope's secret warriors risks bringing about a polarization of religions. It was Turabi who first drew attention to it.

'Islamic renaissance has reminded some Christians who have been oblivious to religion that they have to define themselves in contrast to this phenomenon. They say they are Christians, even if they are not necessarily very religious. But the danger is that some people may try to exploit religion ... for their own economic and political interests, [and) try to mobilize Christianity against the Islamic renaissance. That's why I think we need to communicate.' [10]

_______________

Notes:

1. Le Monde Diplomatique, Paris, January 1995.

2. 'Centre for Research and Communication, Manila', Opus Dei Newsletter No. 9, published by the Office of the Vice-Postulator of Opus Dei in Britain, p. 10.

3. 'Central American Women -- Fundamentalist Bulwark', Inter Press Service, 4 September 1995.

4. Opus Dei Newsletter No. 9, Op. cit., p. 11.

5. Alistair McIntosh, 'Extremists Want Philippine Religious War', Reuters, 8 April 1995.

6. Dr Hassan al-Turabi press conference, Inter-Religious Dialogue Conference, Khartoum, 8-10 October 1994, downloaded from Internet, 'Contemporary Islamic Political Views'. from: Ben.Parker@unep.no.

7. Christian Solidarity International, headquartered in Zurich with antennae in 21 countries, claims to help 'persecuted Christians of any denomination in any country, by prayer, campaigning and practical action'. It has NGO status with the UN in Geneva, and is active in such spiritual hot spots as Nagorno Karabakh, Armenia, Bosnia, Iraq and Pakistan. It claims that 90 to 95 per cent of its income comes from individual donors, the remainder from churches, foundations, businesses and governments. It is headed by a Reform pastor, Dr Hans Jueg Stuckelberger.

8. 'We cannot kill others in the name of God', L'Osservatore Romano, 2 November 1994.

9. 'Christianity dead, says Iran cleric', Reuters, 2 December 1994.

10. Dr Hassan al-Turabi press conference, Khartoum, 8-10 October 1994.

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Epilogue

The relationship between Christianity and Islam is ... one of the great fault lines running between and through civilizations, with recurrent tremors reminding us that destruction can burst forth again where such deep divisions lie beneath the surface crust.

-- Dr Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury

OPUS DEI'S DRIVE TO DOMINATE THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IS OF a determination not seen since the Counter-Reformation. Because it is so determined, in whatever form the Prelature develops during the years ahead it will not be without friction, both inside and outside the Vatican. This makes its existence a matter of concern to everyone, whether the holder of a Catholic baptismal certificate or a simple pedestrian in the secular city.

Opus Dei is no doubt sincere in its desire to protect the Church. Its members include many dedicated and outstanding people. Its founding principles centred upon a Christian work ethic are laudable. But Opus Dei has been in constant evolution since 1928. Because of the tactics it employs to achieve its goals, including the use of pilleria, and the fact that it is subject to no disclosure and very little oversight, some observers have compared it to 'a Mafia shrouded in white.'

Every signpost indicates that behind the black-stained doors at the Villa Tevere Opus Dei's senior strategists are hard at work, plotting to combat with a 'just and rightful' response what they regard as the deteriorating moral values of society and religious radicalism wherever it threatens their vision of the Church. Former high-ranking members confirm that such a reaction is consistent with the Prelature's philosophy and goals. But the outsider is barred at every turning from learning anything meaningful about Opus Dei's inner intentions. It is therefore essential that the experiences and testimonies of former members be made known as they provide the only available insight of what really goes on in the minds of Escriva de Balaguer's sons and daughters.

Opus Dei is a secret sect that has successfully removed itself from the hierarchic control of the Church. Secrecy is the enemy of an open, democratic society. If Opus Dei is not secretive, as it repeatedly maintains, why does it refuse to publish the quintennial reports on its apostolic work that Article VI of Ut sit requires it to submit to the Pope? The answer: 'Neither Opus Dei nor the Holy See would make public a document prepared for the Pope.' That essentially tells us everything we need to know about Opus Dei's moral authority. Opus Dei defends a just cause but employs unscrupulous methods for achieving its ends.

While Opus Dei might be listed, inter alia, in the Vatican Yearbook, the Catholic Directory for England and Wales, other diocesan directories around the world, and in the telephone directories of the cities where it operates, the fact remains that it covers its workings with an opacity intended to render them inaccessible to public scrutiny. Opus Dei does not want the rest of the world to know what it is doing. Article 190 of the 1950 Constitutions requires that 'whatever is undertaken by members must not be attributed to our Institution, but to God only'. By virtue of Article 190 Opus Dei's role in forging a more aggressive political policy for the Vatican remains shrouded in secrecy.

A higher political profile for the Church apparently brings increased financial dividends in the form of contributions from the faithful, as once again the Holy See was running at the break-even point. This does not mean that the financial insecurity of the 1980s is over, as one financial hiccup would be sufficient to put the Vatican back in the red. But the record shortfall of $87.5 million reported in 1991, which decreased to $3.4 million in 1992, was followed by a small $1.5 million surplus in 1993 (the first since 1981). Another small surplus of $419,000 was posted in 1994. Then a deficit of $22.5 million was at first predicted for 1995, again sending financial shivers through the Curia. But the Vatican later reported that the expected shortfall was wiped out by increased income from investments, mostly bonds and real estate. In other words, one Roman prelate remarked off the record, Opus Dei had again come to the rescue. Another small surplus of $330,000 was predicted for 1996.

Opus Dei ally Cardinal Edmund Szoka, who left the archdiocese of Detroit to take charge of the Vatican's Prefecture for Economic Affairs, confidently stated that the refloating of the Holy See's treasury meant the 'image problem' caused by the Banco Ambrosiano scandal was behind it. But with Andreotti on trial for conspiracy to murder and associating with the Mafia, new revelations were expected that made Szoka's assertion seem less than certain. In any event, vulgarizing the Church's central 'mystery' by linking it to earthly parameters, portraying the Holy See as a multinational enterprise concerned with such things as price/earnings ratios and cash-flow requirements, Cardinal Szoka risked committing the error of 'reductionism', a serious theological offence.

One of the Vatican's largest property holdings outside Italy was the Notre Dame of Jerusalem centre. When faced with a 1995 operating loss, having incurred cumulative deficits of $330 million during the previous decade, [1] the Vatican was forced to divest itself of non-revenue producing properties. Ownership or usufruct of the Jerusalem centre, according to Rome sources, was finally transferred to Opus Dei, thereby wiping out the anticipated 1995 deficit. Assuming control of the huge Notre Dame complex meant that the Prelature had extended its influence to the Via Dolorosa and access to the Holy Sepulchre, where for 2,000 years Christian pilgrims have flocked to touch the tomb of 'the God made flesh'. But officially Opus Dei is not present in Israel, not having registered with the Ministry of Religious Affairs, as its headquarters in the Holy Land remains in Bethlehem, which is under Palestinian control.

Opus Dei's activities in the Holy Land allowed plans for the Millennium Jubilee to proceed with confidence. In September 1995, President Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian national authority called on John Paul II at Castelgandolfo and invited him to celebrate the year 2000 in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. According to the press release issued by Navarro-Valls, Arafat wanted to thank the Pope for the support 'which the Palestinian cause has always received from the Holy See'. [2]

Jerusalem was to be the centrepiece of the Millennium celebrations and Opus Dei wanted to be well implanted there to insure the Pope's safety. But Dr. Turabi, the ayatollahs of Qum, Hezbollah and Hamas were all said to look unfavourably upon the planned millennium visit. Jerusalem was after all Islam's third holiest city and the radical fringe saw no reason for the papal incursion. Confronted with a possible hostile reaction to the Pope's presence in the holy city, the prized goal of every Crusade since the eleventh century, Opus Dei's acquisition of the fortress-like Notre Dame centre seemed like prudent forward planning. It also confirmed Villa Tevere's authority over the Supreme Authority of the Rock.

Opus Dei denies it meddles in Vatican politics. But can it be believed? Perhaps part of the answer -- revealing of the inner nature of the Catholic Church's leading sect -- is contained in two passages from the Prelature's confidential internal publication, Cronica:

• The lesson is clear, crystal clear: all things are lawful for me, but not all things are expedient. [3]
• Dirty clothes are washed at home. The first manifestation of your dedication is not being so cowardly as to go outside the Work to wash the dirty clothes. That is if you want to be saints. If not, you are not needed here.

'All things are lawful for me' explains in six words Opus Dei's arrogance and gives it the writ to interpret legislative texts as it sees fit, or even ignore them altogether. One might imagine that an organization founded by 'divine inspiration' would not have dirty linen. But apparently from time to time Opus Dei does. The strict order that dirty linen must be washed at home illustrates its mania for secrecy. Inevitably, this mania must lead to a collective 'siege mentality' common to many sects. Opus Dei is uncommon in that for half a century it has been developing its apostolate by amassing unprecedented financial power for a religious institution. No other Christian sect has met with such success.

The Cronica affirmations are worth bearing in mind at a time when the reign of the present Pope is coming to an end. Never has the papal succession been so important. There are those within the Curia who believe that if the Catholic Church is to retain significance and not become irrelevant in the twenty-first century, she must again wield power in a temporal as well as a spiritual sense. They support the notion that religion is a missing dimension in the dialogue between peoples and nations. In the end analysis, however, Opus Dei prelates are not open to dialogue because no meaningful dialogue is possible with a group or organization that is convinced it possesses the divine truth and therefore knows all the answers.

On most issues of direct interest to it, Villa Tevere can count on the support of at least sixty cardinals. To insure that the episcopate is favourably disposed towards it, Opus Dei arranged for an 'independent' American foundation -- the Wethersfield Foundation of New York -- to finance scholarships for African bishops to study in Rome. A majority of Catholics live in the Third World, making it a Third World Church, and therefore Opus Dei's move to improve the theological standards of key Third World prelates seemed generous and wise. Interestingly, however, the foundation's cheques were made out not to those who received Opus Dei's invitation but to Prelature's theological institute in Rome, the Ateneo Romano della Santa Croce, thereby insuring that tuition for each of the beneficiaries was paid up front. Nevertheless, the idea was genial, permitting Opus Dei to spiritually wine and dine the Africans at someone else's expense. But behind this seemingly charitable offer was said to lie a more devious plan: having decided that the next pope will in all probability be Spanish, Opus Dei was reportedly looking two popes ahead, when the time might be opportune to elect the first black African pontiff. Just as a Polish pope was needed to defeat the Evil Empire of Communism, so Opus Dei apparently believes that a black pope will be needed to reverse Islam's march in Africa. From today's bishops come tomorrow's cardinals, and Opus Dei was already insuring that those on its list of possible candidates were properly indoctrinated with the true teachings of the Church.

In addition to its influence over the cardinalate (by the end of 1995,122 of the 165 cardinals had been appointed by John Paul II), the following eighteen prelates and nine lay people -- by no means a complete list -- are part of Opus Central's power base inside the Curia:

• Monsignor Joaquin Alonso Pacheco, consultor to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints;
• Dr. Carl A. Anderson, vice-president, John Paul II Institute of the Family;
• Reverend Professor Eduardo Baura, consultor to the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples;
• Reverend Doctor Cormac Burke, member of the college of assessors of the Tribunal of the Roman Rota;
• Monsignor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, professor at the Ateneo Romano della Santa Croce, member of the Pontifical Academy for Life and consultor to the Pontifical Councils for the Family and Pastorale per gli Operatori Sanitaria;
• Archbishop Juan Luis Cipriani, consultor to the Congregation for the Clergy;
• Monsignor Professor Lluis Clavell Ortiz-Repiso, magnifico rettore of the Ateneo Romano della Santa Croce, consultor to the Congregation for Catholic Education and under-secretary for the Pontifical Council on Culture;
• The Honourable Virgil C. Dechant, central director of the IOR, member of the Pontifical councils for the Family and Social Communications, and adviser to the Vatican City State; his wife, Ann, also serves on the Pontifical Council for the Family;
• Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz, capo ufficio, first section, general affairs, Secretariat of State, and personal secretary to the Pope;
• Reverend Professor Jose Escudero Imbert, consultor to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints;
• Monsignor Amadeo de Fuenmayor, consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts;
• Monsignor Ramon Garcia de Haro, consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Family;
• Monsignor Jose Luis Gutierrez Gomez, member of the college of relators at the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts;
• Dr. John M. Haas, president of the International Institute for Culture and a faculty member of the John Paul IT Institute of the Family. Founded in response to John Paul II's call for the re-evangelization of culture, Haas's cultural institute guides groups of prominent intellectuals from Europe and the Americas on tours of Catholic sites in Europe. Its activities are tied in with the International Academy for Philosophy in Liechtenstein and it is used by Opus Dei as a high-level recruiting vehicle;
• Archbishop Julian Herranz Casado, consultor to the Congregation of Bishops, president of the Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts, member of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signature, and co-president with archbishops Cheli and Foley of the Council of Advisers to the Papal Household;
• Reverend Professor Gonzalo Herranz Rodriguez, head of the Bioethics Department at the University of Navarra, president of the directors' council of the Pontifical Academy for Life and consultor to the Congregation for Catholic Education;
• Monsignor Jose Tomas Martin de Agar y Valverde, judge on the Ordinary Tribunal of the Vicariat of Rome;
• Professor Jean-Marie Meyer, a French philosopher, and his wife, Anouk Lejeune, members of the Pontifical Council for the Family (Anouk's mother, Birthe Brinsted Lejeune, widow of Jerome Lejeune, the brilliant bio-geneticist who was lauded by science for his discovery of an extra human chromosome related to mental retardedness, is an honorary member of the Pontifical Academy for Life);
• Euro-MP Alberto Michelini, media consultant to the Vatican;
• Reverend Antonio Miralles, consultor to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and former dean of the theology faculty at the Ateneo Romano della Santa Croce;
• Monsignor Fernando Ocariz, Opus Dei's new vicar general, consultor to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and permanent member of the Pontifical Commission 'Ecclesia Dei', formed in 1988 to bring members of the Econe movement of Archbishop Lefebvre back into the fold;
• Monsignor Enrique Planas y Comas, director of the Filmoteca Vaticana;
• Professor Jose Angel Sanchez Asiain, central director, the IOR;
• Ambassador Alberto Vollmer, consultor to the Administration of the Holy See's Patrimony, and his wife, Countess Cristina Vollmer, members of the Pontifical Council for the Family;
• Monsignor Javier Echevarria, grand chancellor of the Ateneo Romano della Santa Croce and consultor to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. In March 1995 John Paul II appointed him consultor to the Congregation for the Clergy, reinforcing Opus Dei's voice in directing the careers of diocesan priests around the world;
• Another fifty Opus Dei priests carry the honorary titles of chaplain of the Papal Household or prelate of the Holy See.

With less than four years remaining before the great millennium jubilee, the careers of some of the key players in this long-running film of intrigue have been touched by a series of disquieting events. Mother Superior Catalina Serus of the Carmelite convent where Concepcion Boullon Rubio lived claimed that she had no knowledge of Sister Concepcion ever being ill and wondered, therefore, how she could have been miraculously cured by Escriva de Balaguer's intercession. This disclosure cast further serious doubt on the authenticity of the miracle that guaranteed Opus Dei's Founder his beatification and also might tarnish the reputation of the postulator general, Father Flavio Capucci.

In Spain, Opus Dei outcast Jose Maria Ruiz-Mateos formed his own political party dedicated to fighting corruption. He had struck a deep vein of discontent in a country where 22 per cent of the active population was unemployed and 8 million lived below the poverty line. To help his campaign he acquired a Madrid radio station, Radio Liberty, and hosted a daily talk programme called 'The Sting of the Bee'. He also opened an office to investigate scandals that listeners brought to his attention.

Corruption had been the hallmark of Gonzalez's thirteen years of government. A good example was the rise of the political candyman, Antonio Navalon. But even his fortunes took a turn for the worse after he was accused of bribing finance ministry officials with £3 million advanced by the fallen chairman of Banesto, Mario Conde, making him a fugitive from Spanish justice. But at least Navalon was still alive. One of the men he most admired, former justice minister Pia Cabanillas, was said to have disappointed his friends in Opus Dei, bringing God's vengeance upon him. He was photographed in the company of transvestites while attending a session of the European parliament in Strasbourg and accused of belonging to a paedophile network. He died of a heart attack in Madrid on 10 October 1991 and was buried before his son had time to return from the United States for the funeral.

Since then, Opus Dei's replacement for Rumasa, the Grand Tibidabo Company of Barcelona, had to be bailed out of trouble by Alfredo Sanchez Bella. 'I am not a member of Opus Dei; I do not have sufficient merit,' Franco's former tourism minister told El Pais. [4] He owned 18 per cent of Grand Tibidabo, whose chairman, Javier de la Rosa, a financial adviser to King Juan Carlos; was in prison on fraud charges. De la Rosa was the Kuwait Investment Office representative in Spain; his wife, Mercedes Misol, was a supernumerary, but Opus Dei claimed that de la Rosa himself was not a member.

Many believed that de la Rosa, along with another royal adviser, Manuel de Prado, had incurred Opus Dei's wrath. A major contributor to Opusian causes, de la Rosa was said to have disobeyed orders. Manuel de Prado, one-time Grand Tibidabo deputy chairman, had left his supernumerary wife for another woman and was drawn -- unjustly, he insisted -- into the de la Rosa scandal. The investigation of de la Rosa's misdealings led to the disclosure of allegations that he had attempted to bribe the King with a £60 million backhander from the Kuwaitis, seeking a royal nod for American warplanes to use Spanish bases during the Gulf War crisis. It was the first time the King's name had been linked to public scandal. Until the Spanish attorney-general decided to call off his investigation, rumour was rife that Juan Carlos would be forced to abdicate in favour of his son, Prince Felipe. Felipe's sister, the Princess Royal, was married to an Opus Dei supernumerary.

The Madrid daily, Dario 16, reported without citing sources that the Pope was an accomplice of Opus Dei in its money-grabbing schemes:

'Why are you going to Italy?' de la Rosa was asked one day at the Zarzuela Palace.

The Catalan promoter, his eyes watering, lowered his gaze. 'It's a secret ... but I'm financing an Opus Dei hospital for underprivileged children,' he explained confidentially.

In Rome, after discussing the project, the hospital director asked, 'Don Javier, do you want to come with me to the Vatican and see the magnificent work the Japanese are doing in the Sistine Chapel?'

Don Javier accepted. When they arrived at the Vatican, the director said, 'Wait here a moment while I go wash my hands.'

Off he went and, as if by miracle, a few minutes later another door opened and out came John Paul II in person. He walked slowly across the corridor towards Don Javier and in a low voice spoke his name: 'Senor de la Rosa, one thousand pardons, but the ways of the Lord are inscrutable. I can see you are an honourable and compassionate person. In this time of crisis the Church is again threatened with serious problems. I am counting on your help.'

The Holy Father then continued down the corridor ... [5]

Should Papa Wojtyla's reign end before the millennium jubilee, Opus Dei's favourite to succeed him was rumoured to be Cardinal Ricardo Maria Carles of Barcelona. But these plans were upset when, on the basis of allegations made by an Italian hot money dealer, Riccardo Marocco, magistrates in Torre Annunziata, south of Naples, asked the Spanish authorities for permission to question Carles about allegations that he was linked to the laundering of astronomical sums of money through the Vatican bank for a ring of international traffickers. The ring's activities were alleged to include dealing in arms, strategic materials and precious metals. Among the strategic materials was an awesome commodity known as red mercury -- described as 'cherry red and very dangerous' -- used in the manufacture of a new generation of nuclear weapons of extremely high potency. The magistrates in Torre Annunziata were told by the Spanish justice, who had satisfied themselves there was not 'the slightest proof' implicating Carles, that their evidence against the cardinal was not serious.

Seven months later -- in June 1996 -- the investigation suddenly burst into new activity with the arrest on suspicion of twenty people in Italy and the launching of a dozen international warrants. An alleged former paymaster for the CIA in southern Europe, who claimed knowledge of the plot to poison John Paul I, was among those taken into custody. Police searched the home of Licio Gelli, apparently identified by several of the accused as one of the money laundering kingpins. The names of the Banda della Magliana and Camorra resurfaced. The alleged arms trafficking principally involved Croatia. It was claimed that Libya, with a clandestine armaments programme, was among the customers seeking red mercury.

The magistrates maintained their allegation against the Archbishop of Barcelona, claiming that he was suspected of helping launder at least $100 million through the Vatican bank.

The archly conservative Carles, who in the past had criticized Socialist ministers for their corrupt practices, denied he was involved, claiming instead that the allegations were the latest in a series of attacks by the enemies of Liberty against the Church. 'There are important financial interests behind these attacks from people who lose a lot of money when the Church defends ethics, morality and poor countries ... The attacks are levelled at particular cardinals and have subsequently been proved false. Now it is my turn. [6]

The Vatican leapt to his defence, with Navarro-Valls issuing a statement that 'no relations existed between the cardinal, the lOR and persons mentioned in the [Naples) investigation'. [7]

The situation was serious enough for John Paul II personally to intervene in an attempt to absolve his possible successor. He received Carles in a private audience that lasted almost an hour and named him to the governing board of the Holy See's Prefecture for Economic Affairs, under Cardinal Szoka.

'The meeting had great significance,' commented the Madrid daily ABC, 'because of the insidious campaign to which the Catalan prelate was subjected ... The charges are demonstrably absurd and without foundation ...' [8]

By then the Spiritual Wars had reached Geneva, city of Calvin, European headquarters of the United Nations, birthplace of the International Red Cross and now the home of Opus Dei's university of human rights, with the November 1995 slaying by Gama'a al-Islamiya of an Egyptian diplomat in an underground garage. Cairo charged that Ayman Zawahri, head of the militant Islamic hit squads operating from Europe, lived a comfortably financed undercover existence in some Swiss mountain resort. But the Swiss authorities said they were unable to trace his whereabouts.

The FBI, meanwhile, seemed better informed. Headed by Opus Dei supernumerary Louis Freeh, it was investigating the bomb blasts that killed twenty-four Americans and wounded hundreds of others in Saudi Arabia. FBI analysts regarded the bombings as evidence that Islamic fundamentalism was gaining momentum in the Middle East. A group identified as the Islamic Movement for Change warned that all American and British 'Crusader' forces must leave the Muslim holy land or become the targets of a jihad decreed against the Saudi royal family and those associated with it.

Freeh also told a US Senate panel in March 1996 that 'sensitive sources' had informed the FBI that Hamas was raising funds in the US to pay for its suicide bombers. Freeh would not disclose who his 'sensitive sources' were, but one might legitimately ask whether they were related to Opus Dei's intelligence network.

With Felipe Gonzalez's defeat in the 1996 elections, Opus Dei was back in power in Spain under the new prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar. Several of Aznar's Partido Popular friends were Opus Dei members and they 'naturally received cabinet positions. His 'Mister Clean', supernumerary Federico Trillo, an implacable crusader against Socialist corruption, was named leader of the National Assembly. But also Aznar saw to it that senior Opus Dei people or close associates were appointed to key civil service positions. One example was the nomination of Alberto de la Hera as director general of religious affairs at the ministry of justice, which meant he controlled state subsidies to religious organizations as well as government relations with the Church hierarchy. Within weeks, other ministries also fell under the control of Opus-friendly civil servants.

Thus the Catholic Alliance in Europe that Pius XII had dreamed of founding as a bulwark against Communism had finally come about, with the Mediterranean powers of Spain, France, Italy and Croatia aligned through Opus Dei's influence to stem the tide of illegal immigration and co-operate on anti-terrorist measures. But also Opus Dei seemed determined to push through tighter controls on freedom of expression by banning excessive violence and blasphemy from state television networks and lobbying in favour of legislative support for the moral values set forth in John Paul II's encyclical, Veritatis Splendor. Former Spanish foreign minister Marcelino Orega-Aguirre, an Opus Dei member, was appointed to the European Commission in Brussels as the Community's audiovisual watchdog. He immediatelymade known his intention to bring higher moral standards to European programming. [9]

Opus Dei was vigilant in other fields as well. Archbishop Julian Herranz of the Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts ruled, for example, that mufti dress for priests was forbidden under Article 66 of a Congregation of the Clergy code of conduct. Article 66 specified that ordained members of the Church must wear clerical habits. A week later, a ruling by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whose consultors included Opus Dei's new vicar general Fernando Ocariz and his aide, theologian Antonio Miralles, declared that the Pope's ban on the ordination of women was an infallible part of Catholic doctrine and could not be disputed nor changed.

'We are among the most committed defenders of the notion that undebatable truth exists. Doctrine is not debatable,' claimed Monsignor Rolf Thomas, Opus Dei's former prefect of studies, known within the Prelature as II Gran Inquisitor. Seen from the inside by a former Holy Cross priest, Opus Dei's prelates are convinced that they possess the divine truth and by the same measure they are the 'inheritors' of the Templars.

'They feel assured that Opus Dei is no ordinary religious organization, and therefore not subject to the hierarchy of the Church. That same arrogance characterized the Templars -- Christian warriors full of zeal, celibate and virile -- and their determination to remain outside all control pushed them towards material ends. They acquired wealth in spite of their desire to remain poor. Their monastic zeal and obedience slowly transformed them, for extremely complex reasons, into a powerful economic and political force,' affirmed Father Felzmann.

'The Second Psalm was the Templar hymn. Why do the nations conspire, and the peoples plot in vain? Each celibate member of Opus Dei, man or woman, must recite the Second Psalm upon rising every Tuesday. "We are the children of God and we sing the Second Psalm." The Templars and Opus Dei sing the same psalm.

'In Opus Dei you find the same elitism as with the Templars, and this comes, I suppose, from that warrior mentality, from the idea that there is an enemy outside, and from a highly focused esprit de corps. In the long run, those who remain too long in that sort of atmosphere become paranoid. They have delusions of grandeur. They feel superior. They are the best, unique, and, at the same time, they believe there is an enemy stalking them. And so, because they are suspicious, they are reticent to be open and frank with the rest of the world.

'Deus le volt! We are God's chosen. These are not the words of the Founder. They are the words of the current Opus Dei leaders in Rome. I lived with them for four years. They told me with utter conviction, "We have been chosen by God to save the Church." Some of them openly state that in twenty or thirty years Opus Dei will be all that remains of the Church. The whole Church will become Opus Dei because "We have an orthodox vision that is pure, certain, solid, assured of everything. The Founder was chosen by God to save the Church. Therefore God is with us."

'Gott mit uns! Think about it. That was the cry of the German Crusaders.'

The Lord is with us, and the Lord's counsel to kings is repeated weekly, after kissing the floor, by every Opus Dei numerary:

Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the Lord with fear,
with trembling kiss his feet,
lest he be angry, and you perish in the way;
for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him. [10]

_______________

Notes:

1. By comparison, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia announced that his government had spent $18.7 billion developing Islam's two holy cities of Mecca and Medina during the same period. with the result that the Grand Mosque in Mecca could accommodate one million worshippers at one time, vastly more than St. Peter's.

2. The Holy See's Sala Stampa Bulletin No. 319/95, issued on 2 September 1995. Two months later Arafat issued the same invitation to foreign ministers of 26 countries attending the Mediterranean co-operation conference in Barcelona. 'I invite you to participate in this great world religious and historical event -- the second millennium of the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ, peace be upon Him -- and to make Bethlehem a beacon of peace and co-existence of all faiths in the whole world ...' Arafat said.

3. In this editorial, 'The Confession', in Cronica VI, 1962, Escriva de Balaguer was paraphrasing I Corinthians 6:12. Paul is quoting in this passage 'the Lord Jesus Christ'. But as used in Cronica, the reader is left with the impression that the 'me' refers to Escriva de Balaguer himself.

4. El Pais, 17 November 1995.

5. Isabel Duran and Jose Diaz Herrera, 'El Saqueo de Espana', as excerpted in Dario 16, 10 November 1995, pp. 6-14.

6. 'Barcelona cardinal rebuts corruption charges', The Tablet, 18 November 1995.

7. 'El Vaticano defiende la inocencia del Cardinal Carles', El Pais, 10 November 1995, p. 17.

8. 'El Papa recibio ayer en audiencia a monsenor Carles', ABC, Madrid, 21 February 1996.

9. Reseau Voltaire analysis: 'Le dessous des cartes -- Depuis un an l'Opus Dei manipule l'opinion publique pour remettre en cause la liberte d'expression,' Paris, April 1995.

10. Psalms 2.10-11.