At the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, reporter Janice Flynn in The Observer online said in October 2004, “Students have taken an array of paths through Opus Dei. Some have deepened their spiritual lives. Others have had emotionally distressing experiences. All have been profoundly affected by the influence of Opus Dei while at Notre Dame.”
Writing in the October/November 2004 Washington Monthly, Paul Baumann observed, “Many Catholics in Europe and in the United States regard the movement as politically reactionary, extreme in its spiritual and worldly ambition, and devious. The group’s manner of ‘recruiting,’ especially of college students, has been criticized as overbearing or worse. There is even an organization, the Opus Dei Awareness Network, dedicated to exposing the group’s methods. But Opus Dei has its admirers, who see it as a defender of traditional moral values, especially of the family, as well as a providential source of evangelical enthusiasm, orthodoxy, and unquestioned loyalty to Rome. Chief among those admirers was John Paul II, who presided over the speedy canonization of the movement’s founder. Critics, however, saw Escrivá’s 2002 canonization as a sure sign of the organization’s ill-gotten wealth and malign influence.”
After the death of John Paul II, as 115 cardinals met in conclave to name a successor, Opus Dei members knew there was no guarantee he would treat Opus Dei with the favor Pope John Paul II had bestowed upon it. “Their basic concern is that they might actually end up among the big losers,” said John Allen, correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. But the men and women within Opus Dei insisted its future was secure. A spokesman dismissed the possibility a new pope would turn against it. Opus Dei’s vision of involving laypeople further in the Church, he said, “is part of the DNA of the Church,” and part of the reason for John Paul’s backing. At stake was the influence of an organization that Allen estimated had assets worth $2.8 billion worldwide and $344.4 million in the United States.
New York Newsday staff correspondent Matthew McAllister noted, “If Opus Dei appears murky and alien to the world, that’s partly because some of its practices can come across as throwbacks to the Middle Ages.”
Noting that Opus Dei had flourished under John Paul II, David Yallop, author of In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I, wrote that if Benedict XVI is not a member of Opus Dei, he is everything Opus Dei adherents could wish a Pope to be. One of Benedict XVI’s first acts as pontiff was to go to the tomb of Escrivá, pray, and bless a statue of him. He subsequently granted Opus Dei the status of personal prelature in Benedict’s reign, retaining Opus Dei’s status in which, Yallop noted, one becomes answerable only to the Pope and God.
Critics of Opus Dei also allege that it has connections with right-wing and pro-Nazi movements in Europe. Nothing in the recent history of the papacy has been more controversial than public and secret deals before and after World War II between Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the Vatican.
CHAPTER 9
The Papacy and the Nazis
On September 21, 2006, The Catholic News Agency (CNA) in Rome reported that “documents emerging from the Vatican ’s archives demonstrated that Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, defended anti-Nazi clergy and censured priests who expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.
The CNA said, “German church historian Hubert Wolf told the Associated Press that the recorded minutes of Vatican meetings held in the late 1930s show that the ailing Pope Pius XI greatly relied on Cardinal Pacelli, then Secretary of State, to enforce his Pontificate’s stance against Nazism and Fascism.”
According to Wolf, the Pope (Pius XI) would “just make a blessing and say ‘our secretary of state will find a solution.’”
“The archives, which spanned from 1922 to 1939, may offer answers into a controversy surrounding the cardinal who later became Pope, and who had been accused by some historians of failing to do enough to protect Jews during the Holocaust. The Vatican has insisted that Pius XII used discreet diplomacy that saved thousands of Jews.” Much is known about the relationship between Pope Pius XII and the Nazis, but many believed that the Vatican archives contain documents and other evidence that would prove to be an embarrassment to the Church.
In the Vatican ’s official annals Pius XII, “who died in 1958, is painted as a saintly shepherd who led his flock with great moral courage in difficult times. For many scholars he was at worst the Devil incarnate, ‘Hitler’s Pope,’ and at best a coward who refused to speak out against the extermination of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals in gas chambers, even when he had compelling evidence that it was happening, lest his words attract Nazi aggression.”
In 2006, the British publication The Independent stated, “Month by month, year by year, more evidence emerges from other sources about where the Vatican ’s sympathies lay in the Second World War.” What was known was “that in 1933, as the Vatican representative in Germany, the future Pius XII had agreed to a treaty with Hitler, whose authoritarian tendencies he admired, to close down the Catholic-dominated Center Party, one of National Socialism’s staunchest opponents. This treaty was based on the Vatican ’s 1929 agreement with Mussolini, the Italian fascist leader. On being elected Pope in 1939, Pius XII suppressed a document denouncing Hitler that was titled Mit brennender sorge (With Deep Anxiety) that Pius XI had been writing on his deathbed. Throughout the war, Pius XII made no public condemnation of the Holocaust, except for a single ambiguous sentence in a 26-page Christmas message of 1942.
“Among various disputed accusations made against him were that he had done nothing to protect the Jews of Rome as the Nazis and Italian fascists carted them away to gas chambers… that he forbade monasteries and convents to shelter Jews trying to escape the Nazis; that he allowed the Church to profit from looted goods taken from the Nazis’ victims; and that he turned a blind eye to the assistance given by Catholic religious orders, notably in Croatia, to help Nazi war criminals escape to start new lives in Latin America,” using what was called “the Rat line.”
The Church vigorously denied all these charges, but historians argued that without access to the Vatican ’s wartime archives there could be no independent verification of the Vatican ’s claim that Pius XII was free from the stain of sin.
In 1999, British author John Cornwell’s book, Hitler’s Pope, “alleged that Pius [XII] was seemingly prepared to put up with any Nazi atrocity because he saw Hitler as a good bulwark against the advance across Europe of godless communism from Russia.” He wrote that the future Pope “displayed anti-Semitic tendencies early on, and that his drive to promote papal absolutism inexorably led him to collaboration with fascist leaders. Cornwall convincingly depicted Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli pursuing Vatican diplomatic goals that crippled Germany ’s large Catholic political party, which might otherwise have stymied Hitler’s excesses… Pacelli’s failure to respond forcefully to the Nazis was more than a personal failure, said Cornwell, it was a failure of the papal office itself.”
Apparently to counter Cornwell’s book, the “Church agreed to allow access to a joint panel of six Jewish and Catholic experts, appointed by the Vatican and the International Jewish Committee for Inter-religious Consultation. By July 2001, the Jewish members of the group had resigned, quoting the ‘lack of a positive response’ from the Vatican.”
In 2003, the Vatican announced it would permit “limited examination” of the documents related to Pius XII in the reading rooms of the Secret Vatican Archives and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. “Jewish leaders and scholars expressed considerable disappointment… Pope John Paul II [was determined] to beatify Pius, who according to the Vatican did all he could to save lives, but did not take more public actions for fear of further endangering the Jews and Catholics in the Nazi-occupied countries… The Vatican…maintained it would open the archives once they were put in order, it said the Pope had decided to open the archives ‘to put an end to unjust and ungrateful speculation.’…