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THEIR KINGDOM COME -- INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF OPUS DEI |
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32. The 'Cloak and Crucifix' Brigade
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]
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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