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THEIR KINGDOM COME -- INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF OPUS DEI |
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18. Dictators and Jesuits
DURING THE LAST YEARS OF FRANCO, WITH GOVERNMENT IN THE hands of the Opus Dei technocrats, Madrid became an important hub for European investment and political interest in Latin America. This development was encouraged by the Vatican, and supported by the right-wing Christian Democrats in Italy and Spain. The Occident's regard towards Latin America, and particularly Argentina, reflected the interests of the anti-Communist lobby, whether led by the Church or purely secular, to stop the spread of Marxist subversion. To strengthen these forces, partly due to a strategy directed from Rome but also because of the affinity of a common cause, the Masonic movement in Europe became seeded with Conservative Catholics. The principal strategists behind this evolution were Italy's Giulio Andreotti and Spain's foreign minister Gregorio Lopez Bravo. They were supported by the great Vatican door-opener, Umberto Ortolani, his general dogsbody, Lido Gelli, and a Masonic notable, Pio Cabanillas, who was one of the founders of Spain's Alianza Popular. Of the five, Andreotti took precedence in matters of policy, being nearest to the power structures of the Church and the Free World's political systems. Andreotti was the closest layman to Paul VI and he had his admirers in every capital of the Western Alliance. In European councils he befriended Lopez Bravo, with whom he shared -- so he said -- the same religious values. Andreotti had been on an Opus Dei retreat at the Castle of Urio on Lake Como, in northern Italy, and was received at the Villa Tevere by Escriva de Balaguer. Umberto Ortolani, a Roman lawyer, was a secret chamberlain of the Papal Household and a member of the inner council of the Knights of Malta. He was the senior member of the group, and, according to some sources, the illegitimate son of Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro. Andreotti and Gelli were the same age, being born in 1919. Lopez Bravo was their junior by six years. The subversive forces in Argentina had understood the importance of severing the investment pipeline from Europe. They mounted a series of daring attacks against foreign interests, bringing their underground war to the business and financial districts of Buenos Aires. Two of their most chilling successes were the assassinations in broad daylight of financier Francisco Soldatti, dean of the Swiss community and patriarch of the country's richest family, and businessman Giuseppe Valori, through whom most of Italy's heavy investment in Argentina was channelled. Madrid during these years had become a haven for Latin American political refugees. The most prominent was the former Argentine strongman, Juan Domingo Peron, who had invested $250,000 of the loot he had stolen from the Argentine treasury in a luxury villa on the city's northern outskirts which he named the Puerta de Hierro (the Gate of Iron). The larger part of his fortune, including an immense hoard of gold, had been placed under the tutelage of the Spanish government as an unstated condition for his asylum in Spain. Although no greater rogue had appeared on the political scene since his exile in the mid-1950s, Peron's charm and personal prestige paradoxically attracted a certain nostalgia for the 'good times' when Argentine meat and cereals sold well in world markets and the country enjoyed relative stability. The Crusading forces began to view the ageing caudillo of the 'shirtless ones' -- the Argentine workers -- as the key to defeating the leftist guerrillas and restoring political equilibrium to a country that otherwise faced civil war. Opus Dei was active in Argentina during these unstable times. Its first emissaries had arrived in 1950 and by the mid-1960s the institute had recruited 1,000 members throughout the country. General Juan Carlos Ongania was one of them. Ongania's coup in June 1966 was welcomed by the middle-class entrepreneurs, by Peron, and by the trade unions. Peron told journalists who visited him in Madrid, 'I regard this [development] with sympathy, because ... Ongania has ended a period of complete corruption. If the new government acts well it will succeed. It is the last opportunity for Argentina to avoid a situation where civil war is the only way out.' [1] Ongania's four-year dictatorship was described by the American writer Penny Lernoux as 'the forerunner of Argentina's virulently right-wing regimes in the late seventies'. Ongania felt himself 'personally called' to shape the country's destiny during a religious retreat at an Opus Dei centre shortly before his 1966 coup, and many of the generals and industrialists appointed to his cabinet shared his belief that the 'Christian and military virtues of Spanish knighthood' -- a mix of authoritarian clericalism and enlightened dictatorship would restore mental, cultural, social, and political discipline to Argentina. [2] Ongania's belief in an elite corps of lay people -- professional and military -- called by God to serve the nation was pure Opus Dei dogma. He abolished political parties and purged the universities. Popular discontent with his Conservative ideals began to crystallize towards the end of 1969 with a wave of guerrilla attacks on police stations, army outposts and banks. Ongania's growing inability to cope marked a first failure for authoritarian clericalism in Argentina. In June 1970 General Alejandro Lanusse took power and opened negotiations with Peron's chef de cabinet, Jose Lopez Rega. Known as the Rasputin of the Pampas, or El Brujo (the Wizard), Lopez Rega belonged to a right-wing Christian sect of which relatively little is known. He had made a fortune selling a youth tonic formula in Brazil, and joined Peron's staff in 1966, soon casting a spell over the leader and by the same token charming his wife, Isabelita. She and Lopez Rega began to promote Peron as the only person capable of restoring civil order to Argentina. One of the most dedicated supporters of Peron's return was Giancarlo Elia Valori, younger brother of the assassinated Giuseppe Valori. In 1960, when twenty-three, he had been named a secret chamberlain of the Papal Household, becoming one of Umberto Ortolani's proteges. In the mid-1960s, he was named secretary of the newly formed Institute for International Relations, a more formalized version of the Pinay Group. As such he knew just about every prominent anti-Marxist on three continents. When Peron came to Rome, he stayed at Valori's villa, while conducting his business during the day from the Hotel Excelsior in the Via Veneto. If Peron wanted an introduction to the head of Banco Ambrosiano, Valori arranged it. If he wanted a meeting with the Vatican's secretary of state, Valori saw that it was done. One day Ortolani called Valori to his office and introduced him to Licio Gelli who suggested that Valori should join the P2 Masonic Lodge. Valori did not reply immediately. But when in April 1973 he gave a lecture at the University of Madrid on The Concept of the Christian State, he sent a warmly worded letter to Gelli inviting him to attend. On Peron's next visit to Rome, Valori was not surprised to find Gelli cruising the lobby of the Excelsior. Gelli rushed over and asked to be introduced to the General's personal secretary, Lopez Rega. 'Your excellency,' the suave Gelli said in perfect Spanish, 'they say you are a man of God.' Indeed Lopez Rega believed he spoke directly with the Archangel Gabriel. Gelli charmed Lopez Rega, who he soon initiated into the P2 Lodge. Gelli described Peron as a 'misunderstood genius'. By the early 1970s it was apparent that if the military remained in power, the Argentine state would collapse. Lanusse wanted to hand over to a legally elected president but an existing law prevented Peron from again holding public office. Lopez Rega and Isabelita counselled Peron to nominate one of his more pliant followers, Dr Hector J. Campora, to run for president in his stead, knowing that if Campora won he could change the law and call new elections. Lanusse announced new presidential elections for May 1973 which Campora won easily. Following the script written in Madrid, he repealed the ban against Peron, called new elections for the autumn and resigned. Lopez Rega is said to have requested the support of the Opus Dei technocrats in organizing the strongman's return. Peron was in need of a mountain of cash to bribe the Montoneros guerrillas into acquiescence and cover the costs of the Campora as well as his own presidential campaigns. With Opus Dei's Luis Coronel de Palma as governor of the Banco de Espana, the Villa Tevere strategists would have known that the Spanish government was tutor for the 400 tons of gold that belonged to the Argentine bully boy of the 1950s. The Conservative Right bargained that Peron still retained sufficient charisma to restore order to a country which since his departure had known eleven governments and spiralling inflation. However, the Spanish government's approval was needed for Peron's gold to be placed on the market. According to intelligence sources an arrangement was concluded that required the proceeds of a bullion sale to be placed in a foundation for furthering social causes (such as forming Peronista ministers) in Argentina. Peron's 400 tons of bullion came very close to equalling the Bank of England's bullion reserves. At then current market rates, it was worth in the neighbourhood of £700 million. In early 1973 it was put on sale in an off-market operation code-named BOR 1345. The seller was not disclosed, but an account used for the transaction was opened at the Swiss Credit Bank branch in Chiasso, on the border with Italy, under the name of VITALITA. The seller's agent, a Chilean businessman living in Madrid, was offering a commission of 10 US cents per ounce to go-betweens. The transfer agent was Professor Vincenzo de Nardo, an Inspector-General of the Italian Finance Ministry. When contacted, De Nardo confirmed that he was connected with the transaction. But he quickly added: 'This operation has nothing to do with my official functions at the Italian Ministry of Finance. It is a private operation and the Italian government is not involved.' He stressed that the origin of the gold was 'quite normal'. It came with a certificate of authenticity. The origin of the certificate, he said (note the certificate, not the gold), was European. When asked whether the merchandise was of South American origin he answered evasively: 'The merchandise is being held by a government. The government did not sequester it. This government will certify to its legality. But this is not a commercial operation of the government concerned; it is of a political nature. A sale on the bullion market did not suit the government in question ... Officially, the seller of the merchandise will be me. When I get a letter of credit from a prime Swiss bank I will send confirmation of the gold's existence. The merchandise will be delivered to a Swiss bank ... I was asked to handle the operation because the government in question did not want to be mentioned in the contract of sale.' Interested parties were requested ,to address a letter from a top-rated bank to the seller's agent or Professor de Nardo at the Italian Ministry of Finance confirming their intention to close the sale. I have no idea what ultimately happened to the gold. Later that autumn bullion prices shot up, as if an unseen but deeply felt market constraint had been removed. And though nothing more was heard of the BOR 1345 transaction, one of the passengers on the plane that carried Juan Peron, Isabelita and Lopez Rega back to Argentina was Licio Gelli. After Peron's triumph in the September 1973 election, the Venerable Master of the P2 Lodge was appointed the honorary Argentine consul in Florence and became one of the government's economic advisers. In June 1974, Escriva de Balaguer flew to Buenos Aires on the second leg of a grand Latin American tour. He stayed at an Opus Dei retreat and made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Lujan, the patroness of Argentina. People came from as far away as Uruguay and Paraguay to see him. For two of his public appearances his sons rented the Coliseo Theatre in the centre of Buenos Aires, and on each occasion more than 5,000 people crowded through the doors. Escriva de Balaguer stayed a month in Buenos Aires, then flew to Chile. Two days later General Peron died. Isabelita became president and Lopez Rega her chief minister. Since the opening of its first centre in 1950, middle-class Chileans had taken to Opus Dei like lemmings in search of spiritual nourishment. Within no time at all, the Work claimed to have 2,000 members and 15,000 co-operators. Chile was reported to be one of Opus Dei's best financed operations in Latin America. One of the first persons sent from Spain was Jose Miguel Ibanez Langlois, a young priest who became Opus Dei's leading Latin American ideologist. Two of his earliest recruits were right-wing activists Jaime Guzman and Alvaro Puga. In the 1960s both Guzman and Puga became editors of El Mercurio, Chile's oldest newspaper. Ibanez Langlois moonlighted as El Mercurio's literary critic. The Vatican had initially supported the Christian Democrat leader, Eduardo Frei, but became uneasy about reports from Ibanez Langlois that Frei was building bridges to the radical trade union movement. Until then, the Vatican had regarded Chile as a possible model for social change in Latin America. While Vatican doubts set in, the Jesuits continued to insist that Frei was the only person capable of stopping Marxism in Chile. This view was not shared by Ibanez Langlois or his politically active recruits. With a Chicago-trained economist Pablo Baraona, they formed a Conservative think tank, the Institute for General Studies, which attracted a following of free-market economists, lawyers, publicists and technocrats. Frei's social programme made US president Richard Nixon see red, and at his insistence the CIA began financing the Institute for General Studies in the hope that it could form a counter-elite to the Christian Democrat party. Even when Frei's government had almost mastered Chile's runaway inflation, Nixon still wanted Frei 'hammered' should he be returned to the presidency in the next elections. The right-wing extremists led by Guzman and Puga fractured the Conservative vote, with the result that Salvador Allende won instead by a narrow margin. The Madrid technocrats were opposed to Allende. The Spanish ambassador in Santiago contacted his American counterpart to see what could be done about the 'smiling doctor', as Allende was sometimes known. A broad section of Chileans regarded Allende's election success as a promise of national renewal, but his radical left wing did not wait to consolidate their position constitutionally. They launched 'People's Power', consisting of Peasant Councils that took over the larger farms and Workers' Assemblies that occupied the factories. Under such conditions, the extreme right was not long in making itself felt. The 'spoiling operation' ordered by the CIA was planned inside the Institute for General Studies and resulted in the September 1973 coup by General Augusto Pinochet. His spokesman was the Institute's co-founder Alvaro Puga. Another Institute director, Herman Cubillos, became Pinochet's foreign minister, and the Institute's co-founder, Pablo Baraona, was minister of the economy. The third Institute co-founder, Jaime Guzman, drafted the new constitution. At least two members of the military junta, Admiral Jose Merino and General Jaime Estrada Leigh, were said to be 'sons' of Escriva de Balaguer. Estrada, who previously headed the Nuclear Energy Commission, became housing minister. Guzman wrote Pinochet's Declaration of Principles which promised to 'cleanse our democratic system of the vices that had facilitated its destruction'. The nation's educational system was taken in hand by three successive Opus Dei ministers, an Opus Dei superintendent of education and an Opus Dei dean of the Catholic University. The Opus Dei technocrats who surrounded Pinochet administered the country very much as their counterparts had done in Spain. Before long, however, a power struggle developed between the technocrats and the military over the activities of Pinochet's secret police, the DINA. Having learned from earlier experiences in Spain and Argentina, the Institute strategists wanted gently to shift Pinochet aside, as the Spanish technocrats had done with Franco. Pinochet became suspicious and fired foreign minister Cubillos. Escriva de Balaguer stayed in Santiago for ten days, visiting the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Lo Vasquez, 100 kilometres from the capital, and then left for Lima. The mayor of Las Condes, a well-to-do suburb of Santiago, had been so enthusiastic about his meeting with the Spanish prelate that he named a street after him. Not long afterwards, Alvaro Puga wrote a book about his campaign to bring down Allende. Titled Dario De Vida de Ud, it was published with a CIA grant [3] and reprinted a collection of Puga's most biting El Mercurio columns during the Allende years. In the foreword, fellow Opusian Enrique Campos Menendez, an El Mercurio editor, pointed out that Puga had accurately predicted key political assassinations, Allende's death, and the date of the military coup. Campos concluded: 'Nobody could have known of these future events, except through magic parapsychology or divine premonition.' [4] Divine premonition was something that the Father had claimed almost forty years before when he foretold the death of the Nationalist bureaucrat who threatened to denounce one of his apostles for treason. As for Puga's brother in the faith, Jaime Guzman, he was convicted but never sentenced for the machine-gun slaying of a former military chief of staff judged too soft on Allende. After his election as senator Guzman was assassinated by Marxist. terrorists and was also honoured with a street named after him. Under John Paul II, Chile's episcopacy was purged of its 'soft' bishops and replaced by Opus Dei prelates. Opus Dei also opened the University of Los Andes in Santiago. Liberation Theology -- a theology that promoted 'a more viable option for the poor of Latin America' -- was not on the syllabus. Liberation Theology had been the brainchild of Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian priest who had become disillusioned by the insensitivity and corruption of the so-called Christian Democrats in Latin America who were doing everything possible to enrich themselves with what Gutierrez regarded as the complicity of the Church. To better understand the causes of social oppression, Gutierrez turned towards Marxism, using Marxist analysis while rejecting its ideology to assess the problems of the poor. In 1968 he published his thesis on a new pastoral approach that encouraged 'the efforts of the people to develop their own grass-roots organizations for the ... consolidation of their rights and the search for true justice'. [5] Liberation Theology upheld the right of the poor to think out their own faith and social development. As such, it stood in direct opposition to authoritarian clericalism. Escriva de Balaguer rejected Liberation Theology and his campaign to suppress it became the first major battleground between the Jesuits and Opus Dei. Given his roots, it is hardly any wonder that Escriva de Balaguer believed Liberation Theology was dangerous. In Opus Dei it was taught that the poor must work to improve their earthly lot within existing social structures while preparing through devotion and obedience for eternal salvation. This meant that they should remain meek and hard toiling throughout their lives on earth in order to enjoy the majesty of after-life in Christ's kingdom. Gutierrez described the world of Latin American poor as a universe ruled by injustice to which the 'Church of the Rich' contributed. Nine out of ten Latin Americans were baptized Catholics, but four out of every five were born to die poor. Not only were they deprived of the liberation promised by Christ, they were not even aware of his promise. 'In the final analysis, poverty means lack of food and housing, the inability to attend properly to health and education needs, exploitation of workers, permanent unemployment, lack of respect for human dignity, and unjust limitations placed on personal freedom in the areas of self-expression, politics and religion. Poverty is a situation that destroys people, families, and individuals ... Misery and oppression lead to a cruel, inhuman death, and are therefore contrary to the will of the God,' he wrote. [6] The Jesuit General Pedro Arrupe urged his troops to become more involved with social justice and did not rule out 'a critical collaboration with Marxist-inspired groups and movements'. [7] This placed Arrupe on a direct confrontation course with Opus Dei, whose members were very much part of the 'Church of the Rich'. The first battle was for control of the Catholic universities in Latin America. The flash point was Piura, a rapidly developing industrial city 1,000 kilometres north of Lima. The well-to-do bourgeoisie of Piura wanted a conservative university for their sons and daughters. They claimed the Jesuit-run university in Lima was too far to the left. That the university in Lima had become a hotbed of Liberation Theology could not be denied. The wealthy families around Piura told the papal nuncio that they were willing to finance the kind of university they wanted. Opus Dei backed them and offered to take charge of the project. In the summer of 1966, sociologist Alberto Moncada and another numerary were sent from the University of Navarra to take the project in hand. In Peru, Moncada came face to face with what he described as the 'enormous rift between the teachings of Escriva de Balaguer and the stark realities facing Third World Catholics'. After three years in Piura he quit the Work. 'In addition to controlling universities, what Opus Dei wanted,' Moncada contended, 'was to enter the economic and political superstructure in Latin American countries. In this they were successful in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, while in Peru, where they were trying to organize a coalition of entrepreneurs and high-ranking bureaucrats, it was much harder [because the ruling junta was leftist-oriented] until they persuaded the nuncio to appoint six Opus Dei bishops,' he explained. [8] That Opus Dei was hostile to Liberation Theology and attempted to prevent Catholic progressives from operating in Latin America was first brought to my attention by Father Giuliano Ferrari. In the late 1950s he became a lay assistant to Cardinal Eugene Tisserant until discovering he had a late vocation. He was ordained in 1962, after completing a degree in theology at Tubingen University, where he decided to found an ecclesiastical services organization to assist under-manned dioceses in Latin America. Tisserant encouraged Ferrari and enrolled him in the Pontifical Academy for Ecclesiastics, the Vatican's diplomacy school. At that time the Academy only accepted fifteen candidates a year. Each was given 'a suite with bathroom and a bar stocked with the best duty-free champagnes ... At the Academy it is difficult to accept that Jesus Christ in his original incarnation was merely a carpenter.' [9] Academy graduates are accorded the right to call themselves monsignors. John XXIII's call for priests to go to Latin America gave Father Ferrari the idea of founding the Society of God for Humanity. His plan was to recruit volunteers in the Philippines, which he regarded as a crossroads between east and west. In Manila he ran into his first opposition, coming from an Irish priest, Father Eamon Byrne, who raised so many obstacles that the nuncio told him to return to Rome and report to Archbishop Antonio Samore at the Secretariat of State. The conservative Samore, Ferrari said, virtually controlled the Church in Latin America, and was very close to Opus Dei. He had been nuncio in Bogota before John XXIII brought him back to Rome. But John soon accused him of 'unspeakable manoeuvrings' and would have nothing more to do with him. [10] 'I give the orders around here,' Samore warned Ferrari. 'If you don't obey me, I'll have the Pope excommunicate you!' [11] Ferrari spoke five languages and had a quick mind. He understood the workings of the secular world better than most clerics, having been in business for his own account before going to work for Tisserant. He was full of passion for the Church, and his creative exuberance somehow seemed suited to his scuffed shoes and ruffled cassock. Ferrari's free spirit was certainly the antithesis of Opus Dei's neatly regimented world. As with Samore, Ferrari was not destined to hit it off with the priestly sons of Escriva de Balaguer. After setting up an office in Guayaquil, Ecuador's main port and largest city, to conduct a diocesan census, he flew to Germany to ask Bishop Hengsbach, overseer of Adveniat, for funding. He had been asked to conduct similar surveys in San Salvador and Guatemala City, but neither archiepiscopacy had the money to pay for them. Hengsbach told Ferrari that he would need favourable opinions from two prelates who vetted projects for Adveniat in Latin America. One was a professor at Louvain and the other a doctor of theology in Madrid. He spoke to both but never received a reply. Ferrari concluded that Opus Dei had acquired veto power over Adveniat's disbursements in Latin America. Still hounded by Samore, in January 1969 he moved to San Salvador to begin the census there. He rented a house and hired a servant recommended by the archdiocese. Soon afterwards he started having headaches and his blood pressure rose dangerously. He consulted a doctor who prescribed medicine to stop the headaches, but his blood pressure remained abnormally high. His fingers and ankles swelled and, getting up from table one evening, he was overcome by dizziness and collapsed. He remained partially paralysed for three days. Father Ferrari noticed that each time he left San Salvador on business the symptoms subsided. In June 1969, his house was broken into. The police arrested his servant as an accomplice and held her for three days. She was released for lack of proof, but in any event Ferrari dispensed with her services. Almost immediately his health improved. Two doctors examined him and concluded that he had been ingesting an unknown, odourless, colourless drug -- possibly digitalis, a potent cardiac glycoside: the intention could only have been to provoke heart failure. Ferrari said he suspected the attempted poisoning was the work of Samore's agents, [12] although he had no proof. In December 1969, Father Ferrari moved to Guatemala, a country where, in the 1940s, roughly 98 per cent of the cultivated land had been owned by a mere 140 families and one or two corporations. It was a desperate situation that needed social change. After Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was elected president in 1950 he introduced sweeping land reform, expropriating 400,000 acres of idle banana plantations belonging to the United Fruit Company, and was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup d'etat, thereby saving Guatemala from 'falling into the lap of international Communism'. When Father Ferrari arrived in Guatemala City he found the archdiocese in the hands of smartly starched Opus Dei priests. They had literally taken over the local curia and were running it for Cardinal Mario Casariego. The Cardinal was inflexible in his dislike of 'Marxist-tainted' peasants. He preferred the company of the country's strongman, Colonel Carlos Arana, a former military attache in Washington who slaughtered thousands of 'subversive' Guatemalan peasants. [13] Casariego had become Archbishop of Guatemala City in December 1964. By the late 1960s he was so detested that several hundred priests and laymen petitioned the Guatemalan Congress to have him expelled. [14] But he enjoyed Colonel Arana's protection. When Paul VI made Samore a cardinal and placed him in charge of the first section of the Secretariat of State, it became impossible for Ferrari to continue running the Society of God for Humanity in Latin America. The last of his funds were cut off, and so he decided to cancel the society's charter and return to Rome. And when Cardinal Tisserant died, Ferrari found himself without a protector. He eventually returned to pastoral work in the slums of Guatemala City, but not for long. One day he was summoned to the archdiocese, still in the hands of Opus Dei priests, and told that his work in the favellas was more political than pastoral and therefore he was no longer welcome in Guatemala. He was given a one-way air ticket to Switzerland for the next day. To insure that he didn't miss the flight, two Opus Dei priests picked him up at his lodgings and drove him to the airport. In the car they told him that should he return to Latin America they would learn about it and his life would be in jeopardy. When I met Ferrari for the last time in 1978, he gave me a copy of the book he had written about his Latin American experience and another not authored by him on the Vatican's finances. He wanted me to write about his having been hunted and finally hounded out of Latin America because he supported the Church of the Poor. He said that what he knew about the misuse of Vatican funds in Rome and Latin America would cause a major scandal. I proposed that he gather together some documentation so that we could discuss the project further at our next meeting. But I never heard from him again. Some weeks later, I asked the friend who first brought us together, 'Where's Giuliano?' 'Haven't you heard?' he replied. 'He was found dead in a train between Geneva and Paris.' Father Ferrari, forty-eight, was reported to have died of a massive heart attack. But as far as could be determined, no autopsy was performed -- at least not by the Department of Legal Medicine in Geneva -- and sixteen years later a copy of his death certificate was no longer to be found in the archives of the city and canton of Geneva. Ferrari's death came weeks before the first of the 1978 conclaves. He had been devoted to the Church and deeply concerned by the problems of moral permissiveness, poverty and drug addiction. But also he was aware that in a quarter of a century the population of Latin America had more than doubled from 164 million to 342 million. From what he had seen in San Salvador and Guatemala he was convinced that Capitalism was not going to look after these souls. Who, then, was going to feed them? Opus Dei could only have agreed that moral permissiveness and drug abuse were agents of the Devil. But as far as the sons and daughters of Escriva de Balaguer were concerned, Capitalism remained preferable to Marxism, and Liberation Theology was the invention of Lucifer, who after all was the first revolutionary. Opus Dei's opinions about how to bring social justice to the world had placed it in direct opposition to the Company of Jesus. Over the next few years Jesuit influence would come under increasing attack, undermined in part by an anonymous campaign of pilleria. The battle lines for the next conclaves had already been drawn. The doctrinal Conservatives were aligned against the Progressives, supported by the New Theologians who had found expression in the Church as a result of Vatican II. _______________ Notes: 1. Primera Plana, Buenos Aires, 30 June 1966. 2. Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People, Penguin, New York 1991, p. 160. On p. 305 Lernoux states that Opus Dei organized the retreat. 3. Fred Landis, 'Opus Dei: Secret Order Vies for Power', Covert Action, Washington, Winter 1983. 4. Idem. 5. Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, SCM Press, London, revised version, 1988, p. 68. 6. Gutierrez, Op. cit., pp. xxi-xxii. 7. Eric O. Hanson, The Catholic Church in World Politics, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1990, pp. 88-89. 8. Interview with Alberto Moncada, Madrid, 1 March 1995. 9. Giuliano F.G. Ferrari, Vaticanisme, Perret-Gentil, Geneva 1976, p. 22. 10. Hebblethwaite, John XXIII (Op. cit.), p. 483. 11. Ferrari, Op. cit., p. 89. 12. Ibid., p. 241. 13. Lernoux, Op. cit., pp. 186-187. 14. Ibid., p. 43.
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