The list of inaccuracies and accusations goes on and on, ranging from the trivial to the outrageous. To answer them all would require another hundred pages. Discerning readers of this present book, or of The Secret Worldof Opus Dei, may perhaps have experienced the feeling that he or she had encountered a similar ragbag of charges and vagaries of method somewhere before.
One hundred and fifty years ago Cardinal Newman had to deal with an almost identical catalogue of accusations and array of specious arguments in his role as one of the most distinguished apologists in the English language. The similarities to be found between the efforts of Michael Walsh in his book, and what Cardinal Newman recounts in his 1851 Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, seem almost uncanny. Cardinal Newman too, encountered 'the Prejudiced Man' who 'takes care to mix only in such society as will confirm his views.' His to face were the bitter charges of disgruntled former members of the body he belonged to. Here were the 'newspapers, magazines, reviews, pamphlets'; the anonymous writers; the cases 'given in detail in some manuscript or other, contained somewhere or other'; the parents unhappy with the religious choices made by their grown children; the "proselytising"; the supposed domination by clerics who withheld information from the ordinary faithful; the slurs on the discipline of the Confessional; the innuendo about murder and sexual abuses; the end seeming to justify the means; the peculiarities of architectural and decorative detail.
The polemical techniques are the same: the 'sweeping charges', the 'simple assertion' and the 'imputation.' There is the conviction 'of all manner of crimes on the simple ground of our being notoriously accused of them'; 'the burden of proof ... thrown upon the accused'; the hostile 'assuming the point in debate ... in the very principles with which they set out.' Pilloried is 'the system of judging any body of men by extracts, passages, specimens, and sayings – nay even by their documents, if these are taken by us to be sufficient informants, instead of our studying the living body itself'; and the 'stringing together of certain sentences without any notice of the context.'
Cardinal Newman noted that 'the rhetoric in request' was 'something which will cut a dash, something gaudy and staring, something inflammatory', and the consequent production of 'the prodigious, the enormous, the abominable, the diabolical, the impossible.' It is usual, then as now, to find 'a crime charged ... with such startling vividness and circumstantial finish as to seem to carry its own evidence with it, and to dispense, in the eyes of the public, with the references which in fairness should attend it. The scene is laid ... in the high table-land of Mexico.' (Peru is Michael Walsh's Mexico. It is far enough away to serve the same purpose).
What is the accused to do when faced by an attacker who 'has picked up facts at third or fourth hand, and has got together a crude farrago of ideas, words, and instances, a little truth, a deal of falsehood, a deal of misrepresentation, a deal of nonsense, and a deal of invention'? The author of old deals at length with the virtual impossibility and probable ineffectiveness, as regards public opinion at large, of answering the complex of shifting charges. In all humility he concludes:
'Good is never done except at the expense of those who do it: truth is never enforced except at the sacrifice of its propounders. At least, they expose their inherent imperfections, if they incur no other penalty; for nothing would be done at all, if a man waited to do it so well, that no one could find fault with it.'
It would appear that Michael Walsh's work follows in a long tradition of anti-Catholic and anti-Papal sentiment over centuries, found in certain streams of British life and literature, arguably even approaching the notorious ravings of such as Maria Monk, but focussing the charges on the smaller target of Opus Dei. There is nothing new under the sun. The reader would do well to return to Newman's Lectures for a most perceptive and amusing debunking of the 'arguments' and polemical techniques used in The Secret World of Opus Dei.
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