By Michael Coren in the National Post. Coren is a respected Canadian columnist, author, public speaker, radio host and television talk show host.
We face an election conducted through the prism of sensationalist fiction or, to put it another way, the dictatorship of the novel. In this case a bad novel. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has largely been forgotten but its grotesque caricature of Catholic organization Opus Dei has left a cloud of absurd misunderstanding around this group, whose main crime appears to be orthodoxy. For Dan Brown, Opus Dei, Latin for the work of God, signified crazed albino assassins running around France, secret plots, dark intrigue and self-flagellation. In fact, it’s more charity missions in slums, schools, religious retreats for busy people and work for the poor.
But Dan Brown is evidently big in Quebec and, much to the chagrin of the Bloc, so might be the Conservatives. Accordingly, Gilles Duceppe announced that the Tory candidate in Saint-Hubert-Saint-Bruno, Nicole Charbonneau Barron, was an Opus Dei member. Then Raymond Gravel, a Catholic priest and outgoing Bloc MP, opined that, “Social conservatives such as members of Opus Dei may be running for office in order to change policies concerning abortion and same-sex marriage.”
Earth to dotty separatist: It’s not Opus Dei but the Roman Catholic Church that teaches that life begins at conception and that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. You might know that if you weren’t suspended from almost all priestly duties. Indeed it is entirely likely that in a less liberal place than Quebec in the 1980s, this former prostitute who worked in Montreal’s gay leather bars would never have been ordained in the first place.
The more important point is that this is a game of gutter politics being played by frightened politicians. Opus Dei is entirely faithful to Catholic teaching, so if anyone objects to its people standing for office they should really say what they mean — that genuine Catholics are not welcome. That, however, might be too much even for the most ardent followers of the new religion of state secularism.
Opus Dei was founded by Spanish priest Josemaria Escriva in 1928, as a largely lay organization of Roman Catholics with the purpose of sanctifying ordinary work. The holy is within everyday people doing everyday things, wrote the founder, but they need guidance. It is now an international group with houses and followers throughout the world. It has more than 80,000 members, 1,800 of them priests. In Canada there are around 500 members, but the number of followers is dozens of times larger. It is also a Personal Prelature of the Pope, which means it has clout.
Opus Dei is traditional: the sacraments, the Rosary, the adoration of the Virgin Mary and the saints, strict moral discipline. It’s what would have been considered average Catholicism just a few years ago, before “Catholics” such as Duceppe and Gravel came to prominence. It is growing particularly fast in Toronto, with a high school and a male and a female hall of residence catering to university students. Actual membership is not easy and most of its adherents simply go along for evenings of “recollection.” Others, however, commit themselves to celibacy and devote a certain part of their income to Opus Dei.
There have been rumours of extreme right-wing sympathies but this is largely nonsense. Because of the Spanish history of the organization, it is strong in Latin America and, of course, in Spain itself. Some members have supported juntas in Latin America, but they have also faced deportation, torture and murder because of their support for social justice. Opus Dei obviously stands for Church authority and hierarchy and so has sometimes been in conflict with the Liberation Theology of certain Marxist Latin American priests. But then so did Pope John Paul the Great and now Pope Benedict, men who have shown quite extraordinary sympathy toward the victims of fascism and offered contrition for any Church failings in this regard.
No albino killers, no former sex-trade workers and not even any leaders of the Bloc Québécois. Which rather disqualifies Opus Dei from what many see as the Canadian body politic -- one which is clad in fetish leather. It’s not the work of God that’s odd, but political liars who start false fires.
Michael Coren is an author and broadcaster.
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