Opus Dei and the Republican Party

Say what you will about the best-selling blockbuster, “The Da Vinci Code”” by Dan Brown, and there isn’t much that hasn’t been said. But this badly written, wildly plotted, ponderous mystery about the power struggle between the Priory of Sion (a real secret society with members who included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo and Leonardo Da Vinci) and Opus Dei has had one very positive result. For anyone living in a cave, the Da Vinci Code’s McGuffin is that the Priory of Sion was entrusted with the knowledge of the hiding place of the Roman Catholic Church’s most sacred relic and Opus Dei wants it. And then there’s all that true and not-so-true RCC history and the stuff about Jesus and his beloved disciple who wasn’t a guy. But the very positive upshot is that the people who have read “The Da Vinci Code” want to know more about Opus Dei. And that is a very good thing. Because Opus Dei is a very bad thing. Opus Dei is a Vatican-sanctioned cult. The man who started it in Spain in 1928, Jose Maria Escriba de Balaguer, was a madman and zealot. Pope John Paul II canonized this crazed psychopath on October 6, 2002. Escriba de Balaguer changed his name to Escriva because it sounded classier. JPII put Escriva on a fast-track to sainthood. And now, Joey Ratz has put JPII on the heavenly express to Saintsville. It’s hard to understand what’s up with these guys. They seem to believe that if they say a corrupt nogoodnik is holy, he becomes holy. Yo! Papa Ratz and all you Ratzies-in-training: You Are Not God. But back to Opus Dei. Thanks to people like Dianne DiNicola, Executive Director of ODAN (Opus Dei Awareness Network), the truth about Opus Dei is available to anyone who wants to find it (www.odan.org/). ODAN counsels people who have had negative experiences with Opus Dei. DiNicola’s daughter, Tammy, was a numerary in OD and was freed from the cult by an intervention by David Clark who is a cult expert. (A numerary is a single person who vows celibacy for life and agrees to devote his life to Opus Dei while working in the world.) Dianne and Tammy DiNicola and David Clark were guests on Chris Matthews' Hardball on June 8, 2005 along with Opus Dei priests and devotees. I didn’t see the show but read the transcript. Sometimes a transcript is more powerful than actually seeing the video. It was remarkable to read the words of Tammy DiNicola, who went through the horrors of being in the Opus Dei cult and of her mother who had watched the changes in her daughter because of the cult’s influence, and then to read the words of the Opus Dei flacks who said the DiNicola’s seemed sincere but they were mistaken. Right. And the Holocaust victims were mistaken. There has been a lot of conjecture about prominent Republicans who may be Opus Dei members. And, as you might expect, it’s impossible to find anything substantive to verify the rumors. The people most often said to be Opus Dei members are: Supremes Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, Former FBI Director Louis Freeh, Senator (R-PA) Rick Santorum and Robert Novak. Here is the info I have found: There is no document or hard evidence that Antonin Scalia is a member. However, Scalia’s son is an Opus Dei priest. There is no evidence that Clarence Thomas is a member but the rumor will not die. There is no evidence that Louis Freeh is a member. Louis Freeh’s brother, John, used to be a numerary member. The only thing I could dig up on Rick Santorum is that he attended Escriva’s canonization. And here’s the poop on Robert Novak: Novak was raised in the Jewish faith until he was 13. At the age of 67, in 1998, Novak was converted to Catholicism by an Opus Dei priest named John McCloskey. Fr. McCloskey has made something of a career out of converting high-profile Washington, DC insiders to Opus Dei’s brand of Catholicism (Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback, and economist-commentator Lawrence Kudlow, for instance). In an article by Chris Suellentrop about McCloskey (“The Rev. John McCloskey-The Catholic Church’s K Street Lobbyist”), Tammy DiNicola was quoted saying, “I’ve experienced personally a side to Opus Dei that I wonder whether it comes from the Holy Spirit. I think Opus Dei is a cancer on the Catholic Church.” Fr. John McCloskey and Robert Novak should be very happy together.