The
Control the Opus Dei has on the Catholic and Other Media
(1)
A Guest Document –
by Randy Engel
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PURPOSE
It is crucial that readers understand the pervasiveness of
Opus Dei’s voice and point of view in the Catholic and other media -
and that
these influences are rarely, if ever, identified as coming from Opus
Dei.
INTRODUCTION
During the last three decades, using its numeraries or wealthy
supernumeraries or philanthropic cooperators, the Prelature has
established and/or taken over many Catholic media outlets including
- EWTN,
- the National Catholic Register, and
- LifeSiteNews.
Other Opus Dei media outlets that promote Opus Dei agendas include
- Our
Sunday Visitor,
- Catholic Canada,
- Catholic
News Agency (CNA),
and
- ACI Prensa (Spanish)
to name a few.
BACKGROUND
Many Catholics around the world are blissfully unaware that Opus
Dei even exists, but even those who do know about Opus Dei are not
aware of the Prelature’s “charisma” of communications and public
relations. This “charisma” has a great deal to do with Opus Dei’s role
in controlling what they want the world to perceive as the Roman
Catholic Church. A case in point is the well exposed the Viganò
affair (1).
DETAILS
Opus Dei’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome was
established in 1984. It is comprised of four schools of theology, canon
law, philosophy, and Church communications.
Opus Dei’s school of Church communications [School of Social
Institutional Communication] was created in 1996. The program is open
to priests, religious and laymen, including media and public relations
staff from diocesan offices.
Officially speaking, “the school’s programs offer courses in four
key areas: the nature of communication and the
elements upon which it is based; The Church in cultural context; the
theological, philosophical and canonical content of the faith and its
impact on the identity of the Church as an Institution; and
the application of these theories, practices and communication
techniques to institutions of the Church, bearing in mind their
particular identity.”
Some Catholics might ask why the one, holy, catholic and apostolic
Church founded by Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed
Trinity, has need of public relation academicians and prompters when
the only product it is “selling” is the eternal truths of the Catholic
Faith necessary for the salvation of men. However, Opus Dei does
obviously believe that such a high level of professional business and
communications acumen is needed. What this actually means in practice
is very well shown by briefly citing the life and times of Opus Dei’s
most famous numerary and master of interlocution, papal
image-maker and molder of Catholic opinion – Joaquín
Navarro-Valls.
Joaquín
Navarro-Valls (2)
: The Papal Gatekeeper
Like the young Karol Wojtyła, the young Navarro-Valls was a
consummate actor who had a passion for the theater. He became the
second most important man at the Vatican, next to the pope himself,
when Pope John Paul II appointed him head of the Holy See Press Office
in 1984.
Born in November 16, 1936, to an affluent Spanish family,
Navarro-Valls attended the Cartagena German
school in his hometown and later studied medicine and psychiatry at the
University of Granada and University of Barcelona. He also served in
the Spanish military.
According to the Prelature’s official obituary of Navarro-Valls,
published on the day of his death, July 5, 2017, the young man’s first
contact with Opus Dei came when he was a medical student in Granada and
he applied to the Albayzín (Granada) Hall of Residence. He
was
quickly recruited by Opus Dei and became a celibate numerary. Later, at
the direction of Opus Dei, he attended the University of Navarre in
Pamplona, Spain, where the talented and multi-lingual scholar and
physician accumulated two additional degrees in journalism and
communications.
From 1970 to 1975, Navarro-Valls joined Msgr. Josemaría
Escrivá in
Rome to promote the interests of Opus Dei and to enable Navarro-Valls
to gain practical writing and reporting experience as a foreign
correspondent for the Spanish tabloid ABC.
Popular with his fellow journalists, Navarro-Valls was later
elected president of the Foreign Press Association in Rome.
In 1984, Pope John Paul II, who was well acquainted with Opus Dei
from his years in Kraków, appointed psychiatrist/ journalist
Navarro-Valls to head the Vatican Press Office and modernize the
Vatican’s communication vehicles, a task for which the 48-year-old
numerary had long preparation. It was also the same year the pope
bestowed pontifical status upon Holy Cross University.
From that time until the death of John Paul II on April 2, 2005,
Navarro-Valls never strayed from the pope’s side. He accompanied the
pope on all his many travels around the world, including the pontiff’s
vacations. He became the pontiff’s constant companion, confidant and
advisor, and also the gatekeeper of persons given access or refused
access to the Holy Father.
Navarro-Valls’ first book was appropriately titled, Manipulation
in Advertising (1970). When one considers that following
Navarro’s appointment, everything that John Paul II publicly said or
wrote was first filtered through his publicist – well, it’s the stuff
that horror films are made of.
Navarro-Valls’ appointed mission, unfortunately, wasn’t as much
promoting the Catholic faith, as it was in “selling” John Paul II, or
to be more accurate, the public image of John Paul II. In a more honest
and transparent time one would have quipped, “Navarro-Valls not only
made the man, he also made the man a saint.”
Most biographers of John Paul II have assiduously avoided this
particular issue.
They have also avoided what would seem to be another effect of
Navarro-Valls: under John Paul II, Opus Dei quickly rose in power and
influence at the Vatican and Navarro-Valls became a household word
among Catholic families the world over.
At the same time Navarro-Valls continued to “sell” the “holiness”
and “omniscience” of Opus Dei, he retained his
status as a high-level numerary within the inner circle of Opus Dei in
Rome. This meant that Navarro-Valls continued to live at the Villa
Tevere, the headquarters of Opus Dei in the suburbs of Rome, that he
had an Opus Dei confessor, and that he reported on a regular basis to
his assigned “spiritual director,” to whom Navarro-Valls was required
to spill out his guts, in typical Opus Dei fashion, on everything in
his life, including the alleged corruption of the Vatican and Catholic
cardinals and bishops of dioceses around the world. In short, what
Navarro-Valls knew, Opus Dei knew.
I suspect that McCarrick’s name was on the top of a running list
of names of sodomite hierarchy, clergy, and religious that Opus Dei
acquired from its favorite and omnipresent numerary, Navarro-Valls. I
believe this because I knew that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, then
Archbishop of Newark, was a homosexual and a predator of young
seminarians as early as 1987, the year I started investigating leads
for The Rite of Sodomy. If his name went to the top of my
list, it presumably was also on the top of Navarro-Valls’ list.
As far as his professional work as the pope’s spokesman, it
appears that Navarro-Valls played and manipulated the Vatican press
corps as well as Jascha Heifitz played his Stradivarius – that is to
say “exquisitely.” For instance, it is no secret that Navarro-Valls
openly played favorites among the Vatican press corps. As John Allen,
Jr., former Rome correspondent for the liberal National Catholic
Reporter and current editor of CRUX news
service, admits, he was lucky enough to be one of Navarro-Valls’
favorites. But as Allen candidly points out in his biographical
notation of Navarro-Valls on the occasion of the numerary’s death,
“There were some journalists, either because of the size of their
audience or because he trusted them, with whom he would share insider
information, and others whose phone calls and emails he would never
return.”
Out goes Navarro-Valls and in
comes his equivalent: Greg Burke
After his ascent to the Papal throne, Pope Benedict XVI kept
Navarro-Valls on for one-year, at which time the Opus Dei numerary
announced his retirement and was replaced by the Jesuit superior
Reverend Father Federico Lombardi–
the Jesuits being the time-honored enemies of Escrivá and Opus
Dei.
On July 11, 2016, Father Lombardi retired and was succeeded as
director of the Holy See Press Office on August 1, 2016, by American Greg
Burke, an Opus Dei numerary like Navarro-Valls, which means that
Opus Dei was back in the driver’s seat when the Viganò story was
published.
Now the question before us is this: Is Opus Dei used
Archbishop Carlos Viganò to manipulate the Catholic media and
play the
Catholic laity for fools, as Navarro-Valls did, for purposes about
which we know nothing?
In light of this possibility, it is interesting to note that since
the Viganò affair began, a number of secular media sources have
referred to the generic term “conservative forces” as being behind the
initial Viganò exposé and its continuing exposure. But
neither the
secular nor the Catholic press has explicitly identified Opus Dei as
being the primary culprit in this contemporary game of thrones. Is this
because of the effectiveness of Opus Dei’s program to keep itself
hidden?
Former journalist, David Gibson, Director of the Center on
Religion and Culture at Fordham University in New York and a Francis
supporter came the closest to hinting at something like this when he
observed that, “This whole thing was carefully coordinated with
conservative Catholic media and carefully timed.”
Robert Moynihan in his August 26, 2018, Letters (Moynihan
Report) from Rome rules out any suggestion that “Viganò is serving
someone else…” Moynihan says that the former nuncio comes from a
wealthy Milanese family, and is therefore “acting in Prima
Persona – as an independent agent.”
However, Moynihan fails to explain how Viganò, who just a few
weeks ago couldn’t write a literate press release and needed the help
of at least two journalists, Aldo María Valli (3) and Marco Tosatti (4), has somehow managed to
write two more eloquent and informative testimonies (three if we count
the Nienstedt response) with more to come.
Nor has Moynihan explained how Viganò, hiding away at a
secret
location, has managed to get his beautifully timed and technically well
written media releases into world-wide circulation in multiple
languages.
Now if we look at the relatively powerful “new movements” in the
Church including the “conservative” Legionaries of Christ, Regnum
Christi, and Communion and Liberation, as well as Focolare, and the
Neocatechumenal Way, none can compare with Opus Dei in terms of a
world-wide mega-media outreach and control of the Catholic media
especially in the United States, and Rome.
CONCLUSION by The M+G+R Foundation
It is obvious that the Opus Dei essentially controls the Catholic
Media and can easily manipulate many of the lay media outlets. Let's
face it, Opus Dei plays both sides of the spectrum as the latest
revelation of its close relationship with whom should have been their
enemy: Archbishop Oscar Romero, now, Saint Oscar Romero. (5)
For those who have been kept in the fog by the Catholic and lay
media:
Oscar Romero and the Liberation
Theology
have been the arch enemies of the extreme right dictatorships in Latin
America which, in turn, were kept in place - behind the scenes, of
course - by the Opus Dei.
Now, perhaps the reader will better understand what Jesus meant
through the following parable:
But
when the master of the house shall be gone in, and shall shut the door,
you shall begin to stand without, and knock at the door, saying: Lord,
open to us. And he answering, shall say to you: I know you not, whence
you are. Then you shall begin to say: We have eaten and drunk in thy
presence, and thou hast taught in our streets. And he shall say to you:
I know you not, whence you are: depart from me, all ye workers of
iniquity. [Luke 13:25-27]
Those are the words that most Opus Dei
supporters will hear when their time comes.
NOTES
(1) Excerpts from Original
R. Engel's Source
(2) Navarro-Valls
according to himself
(3)
About Aldo Maria Valli
(4) About
Marco Tosatti
(5)
The
intimacy
between Oscar Romero and the Opus Dei
Published on December 18th, 2018
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