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The Pope Who Revived the Office of the Inquisition An American Catholic Relfects on Papacy of John Paul II - By Jim Connolly

1. Among Wojtila's first actions as Pope was to attack freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech in Catholic universities. Progressive theology, feminist thought, and "liberation theology" were driven from accepted Catholic discourse. Catholic universities in Europe and North America have lost their best scholars in the humanities and have sunk into being miserable intellectual ghettoes with respect to history, philosophy, theology, and related fields.

2. Wojtila revived and strengthened the Office of the Inquisition under the infamous Cardinal Ratziger. The "Holy Office" was near abolition under the two previous pontiffs, but Wojtila wielded the Inquisition as his special shock troops in a relentless campaign to silence all varieties of opinion other than his own. Repression of thought at the level of the diocese and parish became commonplace again after a blessed reprieve in the 1960s and 1970s.

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14. Despite Wojtila's external reputation as some sort of "liberal," Catholics know that Wojtila is the close ally of the extremist and highly secretive Catholic movement known as Opus Dei. Wojtila has welcomed and blessed the practices of Opus Dei, which is a kind of "Church within the Church." He has promoted clergy who are affiliated with Opus Dei to the highest of positions within the Church. Opus Dei members congregate in secret in KKK-like costumes and engage in practices which include wearing hairshirts and self-flagellation. They maintain a network of secret monasteries and houses where young Catholics (especially those from wealthy and prominent families) are taken for intensive indoctrination sessions. Opus Dei members have been reliably reported by deprogrammed former members to favor re-ghettoization of Jews and international military crusades against Islam. US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a key member of Opus Dei in North America. The most likely successor to John Paul II is the ultra reactionary Archbishop of Milan, Dionigi Tettamanzi (known in Italy as the "Beast of Milan") who is reputedly one of the maximum leaders of the secretive cult of Opus Dei.

15. Wojtila methodically purged the College of Cardinals of any creative or free-thinking members, and almost all members of the current College of Cardinals, which will now choose Wojtila's successor, are rightwing clerical robots appointed by Wojtila himself. The Catholic Church is now guaranteed to have a self-perpetuating reactionary leadership for the indefinite future. [...full read at link above]

It happened that Father Escriva, in reaction against the liberal climate of opinion in the University of Madrid, where he had studied after being ordained priest in 1925, had (on 2 October 1928) gathered together a few Catholics in a group which assumed the name Opus Dei. [source: Spain Under Franco, by Max Gallo; page 90]

University life, however, and the general intellectual climate of Spain, suffered gravely from this political and religious pressure. The first generation of the Opus Dei, composed of men of real merit, was by 1943 being replaced by ambitious opportunists seeking to become catedraticos.

Orthodoxy prevailed everywhere; by plundering untranslated foreign works, Spanish scholars built up reputations that were unassailable, since there was no free discussion of ideas.

Students, at their examinations, had to reproduce their teachers' lessons word for word. Praise of Francoism, or of the thirteenth century, considered as the golden age of Western civilization, had to be accepted without argument. Tracts were even distributed in certain universities demanding the restoration of death by fire, as under the Inquisition.

In crucial subjects such as history and philosophy, the systematic distortion of facts was the rule, and whole sectors of these disciplines disappeared or were condemned in the name of Spanish Catholicism and its traditions. The period was one of intellectual asphyxia. [source: Spain Under Franco, Max Gallo; page 134]

As for the children, every morning, with arms outstretched in the Fascist salute, they attended the raising of the colours and sang the Falangist hymn, 'Cara al sol'.

This collaboration between Church and Falange in the educational field, with the Church in an unquestionably privileged position, was presided over by the Minister of National Education, Professor Jose Ibanez Martin, ...[Gallo, page 90]

At the end of September 'patriotic examinations' were held in every faculty; all former fighters on the Nationalist side passed automatically and were welcomed with shouts of Arriba Espana. Now somebody had to begin to teach. There was a shortage of teachers, 60 per cent having been dismissed in the provinces of Asturias, Aragon and Salamanca; indeed, 50 percent of them had been shot! From the two most famous universities, Madrid and Barcelona, almost the entire teaching staff had left Spain. This disatrous situation, however, was propitious to a reorganization of the educational system, the more necessary in that, according to the supporters of the Movimiento [Falange] and according to the Church, teachers in the past had been responsible, through their liberal and atheistic views, for all the misfortunes that Spain had endured.

3. THE EVOLUTION OF OPUS DEI
During the 1930s and 1940s Opus Dei’s founder, José María Escrivá, invited university students to re-Christianize science and Spanish culture, contaminated, in his view, by modern European intellectual trends. Europe and modernity became the fundamental intellectual targets of the victors after the Civil War. This earliest proposal by Escrivá is embodied in his book Camino (The Way) [7] and was carried out in apostolic practice. Thus, Escrivá’s first proselytes were primarily young men with university studies begun, if not completed, who predominantly devoted themselves to the university and competed, at times violently, for chairs and research posts in Spanish higher education.

The prototype of a numerary was an intellectual with good manners. The first Constitution emphasized this one needed by requiring a university degree to join the Work. Women, who were to devote themselves to domestic labors, only needed to possess that set of bourgeois virtues which Escrivá summed up as: "It is enough for them [women] to be discrete" (The Way, # 946 [8]).