What John Paul II knew in 1985: Catholic Sex Abuse

http://www.catholicsexabuse.com/WHAT_THEY_KNEW_IN_1985

17 Years Ago, A Report on Clergy Sex Abuse Warned U.S. Bishops of Trouble Ahead

By Thomas C. Fox
National Catholic ReporterMay 17, 2002

As attorneys across the nation press countless clergy sex abuse cases against the church, two critical questions they most often ask are: “What did the bishop know?” and “When did he know it?” At stake is episcopal culpability. Also at stake in thousands of lawsuits, many filed and many others still being planned, is potentially billions of dollars in payments to victims.

In light of these developments, a 92-page report on clergy sex abuse, distributed to the U.S. bishops in May 1985, warning them of the trouble ahead, has been repeatedly cited by victims’ attorneys as a hard measure of episcopal negligence. The document, reportedly referred to in more than 100 lawsuits, is well known to the bishops.

Among the insights in this document are clear statements that while help can be provided for abusive priests, there is “no hope” for a cure for some of them, that a bishop “should suspend immediately” a priest accused of sexual abuse when “the allegation has any possible merit or truth,” and that “In this sophisticated society a media policy of silence implies either necessary secrecy or cover-up.” It said, “clichés such as ‘no comment’ must be cast away.” [Note that the first two quotations are not from the report, but from an essay by one of its authors, Rev. Michael R. Peterson, written in December 1985 to accompany the report when he sent it to the bishops.]

In some ways this is a story of what might have been or, perhaps, what might have been avoided.

As the bishops prepare for their June meeting in Dallas at which they are expected to formulate their responses to the clergy sex abuse scandal, the names of two priests and an attorney, Fr. Michael Peterson, Dominican Fr. Thomas Doyle and Ray Mouton, are likely to haunt them. These are the names of the men who attempted to warn the bishops in 1985, pleading with them to take firm actions on the sex abuse cases.

The authors maintained that the bishops ignored their recommendations. For their part, the bishops deny that claim.

It was in January 1985 that Peterson, then director of St. Luke Institute in Silver Spring, Md.; Doyle, a canonist at the office of the papal nuncio, or pope’s representative, in Washington D.C.; and Mouton, a civil attorney representing a priest, Fr. Gilbert Gauthe, then charged with pedophilia, began their collaboration. The collaboration continued over five months and resulted in the report, backed with more than 100 pages of supporting evidence. The report covered the civil, canonical, and psychological aspects of priest sexual involvement with children.

When the men turned over their findings to the bishops, it might have seemed extreme to some; today it reads as a prophetic document.

The Catholic church, the three men wrote, faces “extremely serious financial consequences” and “significant injury” to its image as a result of the “sexual molestation of children by clerics, priests, permanent deacons and transient deacons, nonordained religious, lay employees and seminarians.”

At the time the men finished the final draft of the report in June 1985, they noted, more than $100 million in claims had been made against just one diocese as a result of sexual contact between a priest “and a number of minor children.” The report said the settlement for seven cases, including fees and expenses, had exceeded $5 million, and that “the average settlement for each case was nearly $500,000.” It estimated that “total projected losses for the decade” could rise to $1 billion.

The men also warned that television and newspaper reporters — NCR was cited by name — were already on to the story and that the American Bar Association and plaintiff lawyers were “conducting studies ... about this new, developing area of law.”

“The potential exposure to the Catholic church ... is very great,” the report added, recommending that clerics accused of abuse should not be permitted to function “in any priestly capacity.”

High recidivism

While the report stated that treatment could “help rehabilitate clerics so that they may return to active ministry,” the authors conditioned that optimism with a warning that strict conditions and lifelong treatment be imposed. Such treatment, the report said, should include a minimum six-month stay in a treatment facility, six-to-12 months of residence in a halfway house, and continuing treatment in an outpatient setting. “Recidivism is so high with pedophilia ... that all controlled studies have shown that traditional outpatient psychiatric or psychological models alone do not work,” the report said.

The men tried to cajole the bishops into taking action, begging them not to be defensive. “The purpose of this document ... is to educate you as much as we can in our professional capacities and help keep you abreast of developments in this sensitive and devastating area of human behavior,” the report stated. It urged the bishops to abandon their strategy of staying away from the media, warning, “in this sophisticated society, a media policy of silence implies either necessary secrecy or cover up.”

Kristen Lombardi, writing in the Boston Phoenix, quoted Doyle as saying he had high hopes that the U.S. bishops would receive the report well. Doyle thought Boston Cardinal Bernard Law would play a key role. Law at the time headed the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Research and Pastoral Practices. He would be the person to lobby the other bishops to bring the report to life. Doyle had known Law since the late 1960s, Lombardi reported, since the time Law served as bishop of the Springfield-Cape Girardeau diocese in Missouri.

The Boston archbishop, Doyle believed, could be counted on as a sympathetic ear. “I told Bernie, ‘This is our report,’ ” Doyle told Lombardi. “ ‘These are our recommendations. We need to get the conference to study this.’ ” Law “was very supportive,” Doyle said. He pledged to call for a special ad hoc committee to study the problem.

At the June 1985 meeting of the U.S. bishops at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., the bishops were quietly briefed on the report’s contents. But, according to Doyle, the committee headed by Law never followed through on the promise to create the ad hoc committee.

On May 8 of this year, Law appeared in Suffolk County Superior Court to begin a deposition requested by an attorney for 86 people who have brought a civil suit accusing Law of negligence as supervisor of defrocked priest John Geoghan, now serving a 10-year prison sentence for sexual abuse of a child (NCR, Feb. 1).

The deposition proceeding on May 8 included some questions about Law’s relationship with Doyle, but no mention of Doyle’s 1985 report to the bishops. Scheduled to last three days, the deposition was expected to continue May 9, after NCR went to press.

While on May 8 Law admitted to speaking with Doyle during the time the report was being written and distributed to the bishops, he only recalled “in a vague way” Doyle’s concerns about the effectiveness of treatment centers. Furthermore, Law said he did not recall Doyle asking for a committee to help the bishops focus more directly on the clergy sex abuse issue.

Law said that sometime after his conversations with Doyle about issues of clergy sex abuse he put in place a team of psychiatrists to advise the archdiocese on the issue, though he said it was “not because of conversations with Fr. Doyle” that he created the team.

In 1992, Doyle lamented the failure of the bishops to take action on the abuse crisis. “Nothing happened,” he told a group of abuse victims at a gathering in October outside of Chicago. “Why the inaction? Why the denial?”

Doyle responded to his own questions. “To acknowledge the problem in its fullness would open the whole [clerical] system to critique,” he said. “It would weaken the presumed power base and strength of the hierarchy.” That day he characterized the church as having a “closed-in, clerical culture” that attempts to maintain deep distinctions between clergy and laity. “We are somehow different, apart and above the laity,” he added, claiming that this separation had added to the crisis by keeping the clergy aloof from the consequences of their actions on victims and others.

To many of the survivors at the gathering Doyle was one of their last links to the Catholic church. His calls for church reform that year led him to be chosen as recipient of the $10,000 Cavallo Prize for Moral Courage. The award, given by the Cavallo Foundation since 1988, goes to someone who “has chosen to speak out when it would have been far easier to remain silent.” Doyle described the gathering that weekend as “part of a momentous movement,” an awakening to the recognition of a need for “massive reform.”

Jason Berry, a Louisiana-based freelance reporter, first started writing about clergy sex abuse after Fr. Gilbert Gauthe in Lafayette, La., was indicted on charges of having molested 35 children. He covered the Gauthe trial for the National Catholic Reporter, contributed to other NCR investigations on the widening crisis, and wrote a book on the sex abuse issue, Lead Us Not Into Temptation. Along with Doyle, Berry was also at the 1992 conference sponsored by VOCAL (Victims of Clergy Abuse Linkup), a lay network that claimed to be in touch with about 3,000 clergy sexual-abuse victims and their supporters.

In his book, Berry recalled how Doyle first entered the Gauthe case. In the 1970s, Doyle had earned a master’s in theology from Aquinas Institute in Dubuque, Iowa, and a canon law degree from The Catholic University of America in Washington. He was working in the Chicago archdiocese, assisting couples with marriage annulments when, in September 1981, Archbishop Pio Laghi, then the papal representative to the United States, asked him to join the embassy staff in Washington as secretary-canonist.

A few years later, in 1984, several attorneys filed civil suits against the Lafayette diocese on behalf of abused children. One, filed by J. Minos Simon, caught Doyle’s attention because Simon named Pope John Paul II as a defendant. Doyle became disturbed that the U.S. bishops seemed to have little understanding of the magnitude of the matter. So he turned to Peterson for help. Peterson was a psychiatrist and founder of St. Luke Institute, a facility originally designed to assist religious and clergy with alcoholic and chemical dependencies. However, in the years that followed its opening in 1981, St. Luke began to treat clergy involved in sex abuse cases.

It was during the same period that Lafayette attorney F. Ray Mouton Jr. was defending Gauthe. He also sought out Peterson’s assistance, planning a possible insanity defense. Although Mouton eventually discarded that part of his strategy, according to Berry, Peterson felt it beneficial to introduce Mouton to Doyle.“

When I first met Tom Doyle in the Vatican Embassy he knew nothing about pedophilia,” Berry quoted Mouton as saying. “Within a short time he was one of the leading authorities and one of the only two priests I encountered in the country who were unafraid to acknowledge the problem and deal with it honestly. … Tom Doyle always did the right thing. He has never hesitated. And it cost him dearly.”

Trying to ward off the growing catastrophe they saw coming, Doyle, Mouton and Peterson collaborated quietly for months on the report before taking it to the bishops.

Knowing the bishops were taking up the report, Eugene Kennedy, a psychologist and longtime chronicler of the American church, and I attended the Collegeville meeting. When it became apparent that the bishops were only going to deal with the matter in executive session and after they played down the significance of the report, Kennedy became gloomy. He said at the time that the bishops were missing an historic opportunity. He predicted that the teaching authority of the U.S. bishops was now certain to decline.

No concrete actions

No concrete actions came out of that meeting. Yet the bishops have maintained that they did listen attentively to the report. A recent staff review found that, “with few exceptions,” the issues identified in the report were analyzed for the bishops by their staff and other experts, especially at the Collegeville meeting.

The bishops, however, noted that they turned down the report’s suggestion of a national intervention team (a doctor, a canonist and a lawyer) to respond to complaints in individual dioceses. “Dioceses prefer to respond through their own expert personnel, rather than a national team, due to factual and legal uniqueness of each accusation,” the bishops’ staff report stated. “Media characterizations of the report as a proposal either ignored or summarily rejected by the conference are inaccurate,” they said.

In the months and years that followed Collegeville, Doyle persisted in sounding the alarm. He clearly paid a price. In 1986 he was removed from the embassy; he also lost his teaching position in canon law at Catholic University. By several accounts he became ostracized by the bishops. That’s when he decided to take his ministry into the military where, on the side, he counseled abuse victims.

While Doyle lost favor with the church hierarchy, his former boss, Laghi, did not. He had served as Vatican representative to the United States from 1980 to 1990, the period during which the clergy abuse issue went largely unattended by the church hierarchy. After the completion of that diplomatic tour, he returned to Rome, and Pope John Paul II named him a cardinal in June 1991.

Peterson was another major author of the report. He was a psychiatrist before he entered the priesthood. I first ran into Peterson when I was a freshman at Stanford University in 1963. We frequently bicycled together to St. Ann Chapel, adjacent to the Newman Center in Palo Alto, Calif., several miles from the university campus.

Peterson had grown up as a Mormon and had converted to Catholicism at the age of 19. For years at college he went to daily Mass. He was an intelligent student with a sensitive nature and an irreverent sense of humor, attributes that accompanied him through life.Years passed before I encountered him again, after he had finished his psychiatric degree and entered the priesthood. In the early 1980s he represented a new breed of priests, active in new professional ministries.

On numerous occasions following Collegeville, Peterson shared with me his disappointment that the bishops had not responded forcefully to their report. He, too, saw a dark cloud on the horizon. During those years as director of St. Luke Institute, Peterson also became a controversial figure. He shared with a close circle of friends that he was gay and later that he had contracted the AIDS virus. Peterson died in April 1987 and was buried at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington. The burial Mass drew scores of priests and a half-dozen bishops.

By the time of Peterson’s death, Cardinal James Hickey of Washington had come to rely on Peterson, along with a number of bishops, for advice in handling sex-offending members of the clergy. During the Mass, Hickey praised Peterson’s work at St. Luke Institute, calling him a “brilliant and hard-working priest.”

While Hickey had grown close to Peterson, others in the Catholic hierarchy, including members of the Roman curia, kept their distance. This ambivalence among the church leadership toward St. Luke and Peterson’s work surfaced publicly in 1993 after Pittsburgh Bishop Donald Wuerl tried to oust from his diocese Fr. Anthony Cipolla, who had been accused by a teenage boy of molestation. Cipolla had ties to Mother Angelica’s television ministry.

Following the accusation charges, Wuerl had Cipolla evaluated at St. Luke, where staff found no evidence Cipolla was a pedophile but nevertheless recommended he be kept away from children.

Cipolla appealed to the Vatican Signatura, the church’s highest court. Blasting the St. Luke evaluation, it ruled against Wuerl, telling him to reinstate Cipolla.

The Signatura’s brief, later published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, stated: “St. Luke Institute, a clinic founded by a priest who is openly homosexual and based on a mixed doctrine of Freudian pan-sexualism and behaviorism, is surely not a suitable institution apt to judge rightly about the beliefs and the lifestyle of a Catholic priest.”

Fr. Canice Connors, then president of St. Luke, responded: “Since its foundation in 1981, St. Luke Institute has been grounded in the Christian principles enunciated by Jesus Christ. ... To say that St. Luke Institute is not Christian is like saying a flower can exist without sunlight. At no point in the process of reaching its verdict about Cipolla was the Signatura in touch with any of the members of the staff of St. Luke Institute. Because of that lack of contact, I am deeply disappointed in the process leading to the Signatura’s decision.”

Wuerl persisted, and two years later the Vatican court reversed itself and supported the decision to remove the priest.

It was not until 1993, when they formed the Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse, that the U.S. bishops first tackled the clergy sex abuse issue as a national conference. In the years that followed, the committee developed and discussed with the bishops diocesan resources for assisting victims and families. The committee also issued guidelines for removing priests and for abuse prevention programs.

Pope John Paul II issued his first condemnation of clergy sex abuse in 1993. At the time he announced the formation of a joint study commission to address U.S. bishops’ concerns about canonical problems in dealing with priest abusers. Late in the year, a joint Vatican-U.S. bishops’ study commission issued revised guidelines for removing wayward priests. The pope approved the guidelines, on an experimental basis, in April 1994.

In 1994, according to a bishop’s spokesperson, when the committee asked dioceses to send in their existing policies, 178 of the 188 dioceses responded. Of those, 157 submitted policies, 13 said they did not have a written policy, and eight said they were working on a policy.

The Ad Hoc committee received unwanted attention in early April this year, when its head, Bishop John B. McCormack of Concord, N.H., stepped down from his post after his own handling of priests accused of sex abuse had been called into question. McCormack said his decision was not prompted by the scandal but by his desire to focus on work in New Hampshire. McCormack was replaced by Archbishop Harry J. Flynn of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

The committee’s credibility had earlier been called into question by reports that two of its members had been accused in lawsuits of helping protect priests who molested children.

McCormack was accused in Massachusetts lawsuits of knowing priests were abusing boys and failing to intervene, and of playing a role in shuffling offenders among parishes. Another committee member, Bishop John Gaydos of Jefferson City, Mo., has been accused in a suit of conspiring to cover up molestation by then-Fr. Anthony O’Connell, who resigned in February as bishop of Palm Beach, Fla., after admitting he abused a seminary student in Missouri more than 25 years ago. Gaydos has denied the allegations.

A third bishop on the ad hoc committee, Auxiliary Bishop A. James Quinn of Cleveland, suggested in a 1990 speech that church leaders hide records of abusive priests in the Vatican embassy, which has diplomatic immunity. His comments are being used in a sex abuse lawsuit that names all U.S. bishops as defendants.
(BOLD EMPHASES ADDED)

Tom Fox is NCR publisher (2002).

John Paul II Titanic Ship hit by priest-pedophilia-iceberg

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

The Vatican is finally admitting the iceberg that sunk the John Paul II Titanic Ship. To be more precise, an American Archbishop at the Vatican is beginning to identify the American iceberg that sunk the John Paul II the Great Roman Papal Ship.

As Peter, Paul and Mary used to sing "Oh, when will they ever learn, when will they ever learn."
"The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind."
Indeed, how many more priest-pedophile-victims must come out. 12,000 in American soil alone. http://www.snapnetwork.org/
How many more Diocese must go bankrupt. http://www.bishop-accountability.org/
When will the Pope and the Vatican ever learn?
Oh, when will those self-professed holy men learn?

Let us learn from the Sinking of the Titanic and transpose into it the Catholic soul victims and Captain John Paul II in the helm.

"The largest and finest steamship in the world; on her maiden voyage, loaded with a human freight of over 2,300 souls, she collided with a huge iceberg 600 miles southeast of Halifax, at 11.40 P.M. Sunday April 14, 1912, and sank two and a half hours later, carrying over 1,600 of her passengers and crew with her.

"CAPTAIN E. J. SMITH of the ill-fated giant of the sea; a brave and seasoned commander who was carried to his death with his last and greatest ship.

Dr. Van Dyke's Spiritual Consolation to the Survivors of the Titanic :

The Titanic, greatest of ships, has gone to her ocean grave. What has she left behind her? Think clearly.

She has left debts. Vast sums of money have been lost. Some of them are covered by insurance which will be paid. The rest is gone. All wealth is insecure.

She has left lessons. The risk of running the northern course when it is menaced by icebergs is revealed...

She has left sorrows. Hundreds of human hearts and homes are in mourning for the loss of dear companions and friends. The universal sympathy which is written in every face and heard in every voice proves that man is more than the beasts that perish. It is an evidence of the divine in humanity. Why should we care? There is no reason in the world, unless there is something in us that is different from lime and carbon and phosphorus, something that makes us mortals able to suffer together "For we have all of us an human heart."

But there is more than this harvest of debts, and lessons, and sorrows, in the tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic. There is a great ideal. It is clearly outlined and set before the mind and heart of the modern world, to approve and follow, or to despise and reject.

NUMBER of persons aboard, 2340.

Number of life-boats and rafts, 20.

Capacity of each life-boat, 50 passengers and crew of 8.

Utmost capacity of life-boats and rafts, about 1100.

Number of life-boats wrecked in launching, 4.

Capacity of life-boats safely launched, 928.

Total number of persons taken in life-boats, 711.

Number who died in life-boats, 6.

Total number saved, 705.

Total number of Titanic's company lost, 1635.

The cause of the disaster was a collision with an iceberg in latitude 41.46 north, longitude 50.14 west. The Titanic had had repeated warnings of the presence of ice in that part of the course. Two official warnings had been received defining the position of the ice fields. It had been calculated on the Titanic that she would reach the ice fields about 11 o'clock Sunday night. The collision occurred at 11.40. At that time the ship was driving at a speed of 21 to 23 knots, or about 26 miles, an hour.

There had been no details of seamen assigned to each boat.

Some of the boats left the ship without seamen enough to man the oars.

Some of the boats were not more than half full of passengers.

The boats had no provisions, some of them had no water stored, some were without sail equipment or compasses.

In some boats, which carried sails wrapped and bound, there was not a person with a knife to cut the ropes. In some boats the plugs in the bottom had been pulled out and the women passengers were compelled to thrust their hands into the holes to keep the boats from filling and sinking.

The captain, E. J. Smith, admiral of the White Star fleet, went down with his ship.

The Titanic had 1635 souls. The John Paul II Pedophile Priests Army had 12,000 American victim souls (we are still counting, wait for California to explode). The World Trade Center had 5,000 victims. http://jp2m.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_jp2m_archive.html

Which is the worst? Of course, it is the John Paul II Titanic Ship filled with his Pedophile Priests Army!! Even a child can see that. One does not need to be a theological-rocket-scientist to see the plain truth. But those learned men at the Vatican cannot see - with their "open eyes wide shut"! For 26 years the Vatican turned a blind eye on John Paul II's pedophilia-papacy; and now on Benedict XVI's which will be short lived- as his short pedophiliac-eye-sight. Those Pope are suffering from self-inflicted "infallible-papal glucoma". Unbelievable!

Below are some excerpts from a speech of American Archbishop John P. Foley. He should be also busy protesting the canonization of John Paul II who headed his 26 years JPIIPPA - John Paul II Pedophile Priests Army - who abused 12,000 American little boys (and girls). http://jp2m.blogspot.com/2006/08/john-paul-ii-pedophile-priests-jpiipp.html


http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0606610.htm

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The sexual abuse of children by priests is only "the tip of an iceberg" of the wider scope of abuse perpetrated against the world's children, a Vatican official said.

U.S. Archbishop John P. Foley, head of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, said there is "a much wider and even more tragic story of child abuse that takes place, first of all, in the family and then, in many ways, throughout society."

In his speech, released the same day by the Vatican, the archbishop said "the violation of children's rights is one of the contemporary sins crying out to heaven for vengeance."

"The innocence of children should be protected at all costs," he said, adding that "we should all be free to hear their laughter, to watch them at play, and to see them running securely in our streets." Children need to witness Christ's "loving and saving message" through the living example of the "love and self-sacrifice" of their parents, family, neighbors and teachers, he said.

"We must learn from the media how to prevent children from becoming victims of predators in society and even of the very media which report their plight," he said.

John Paul II and the US Bishops waste parishioners' money

John Paul II chose all these men, these podgy Bishops and Cardinals whom he led during his 26 years of pedophiliac-papacy. They are at it again wasting parishioners' money. John Paul II refused to heed the warnings of Fr. Thomas Doyle and it has cost the American Church more than 1.5 Billion dollars. Now they are still wasting the Catholics' money. When will they ever learn?

Editorial: Study wastes parishioners’ money

The Baltimore Examiner Newspaper
The Examiner Nov 15, 2006 10:00 PM

http://www.examiner.com/a-401840~Editorial__Study_wastes_parishioners__money.html

BALTIMORE -

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted unanimously this week at a meeting in Baltimore to support research into why priests molest children. Bishops approved spending $335,000 of parishioners’ donations to explore the “causes and context” of clergy abuse.

“By approving the proposal, bishops are saying we are serious about this; we haven’t retreated from our original position, and we’ll stay on this until we can find the causes that prevent these terrible things from happening,” said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, archbishop emeritus of Washington.

How ridiculous. First and foremost, these “terrible things” happen to be felonies. Are the bishops members of Congress or men of the cloth? The need to understand the situations in which clergy abuse children speaks to a need to justify their crimes and those who aided, abetted and covered up, not root out the criminals.

If the bishops really cared about Catholics, the second thing they should do to priests caught abusing children is kick them out of the church. The first thing they should do is call police.
They should turn criminal priests over to secular authorities instead of abusing the cloak of confidentiality. These crimes are not mere sins that can be absolved by confession. And church authorities learn of the crimes outside the confessional process anyway.

Parishioners do not need to spend more money finding “causes.” Their leaders have wasted enough over the years moving criminals from parish to parish to commit more crimes while paying legal fees and victim lawsuit settlements.

According to an earlier study from John Jay College of Criminal Justice — a division of the City University of New York and the same institution that will conduct the new study — Catholic parishioners and the insurance companies for the dioceses paid nearly $573 million in legal fees, compensation for victims and treatment for both victims and priests from 1950-2002. The church itself has estimated total cost may eventually exceed $1 billion.

It’s hard to understand how this study will help anyone but the church elite. The results will be confidential, meaning that those priests who admit to wrongdoing will be shielded from both their parishioners and legal action. Besides, the earlier John Jay study found that nearly 5,000 priests and deacons abused more than 12,500 minors since 1950. It also provided detailed descriptions on the age and behavioral problems of abusers. What more does the church need to know?

If there is one thing Catholics should have learned by now, it is to go straight to police with any sexual abuse charges if they want justice.

The bishops’ pronouncements this week about the “disordered” sexuality of gays and criticism of United States foreign policy hold no moral authority in light of their tolerance for criminal activity among their ranks.

To regain it they must state publicly their plans to cleanse from the church all molesters and those who shielded them over the years.

What better time than now. The recent reopening of the Basilica of the Assumption — the nation’s first Roman Catholic cathedral —on it’s 200th anniversary gives them a prime opportunity to show that they care for both the church’s structures and the faithful who fill the pews.

John Paul II suppressed the El Salvador Martyrs

http://www.amazon.com/Witnesses-Kingdom-Salvador-Crucified-Peoples/dp/1570754683 - Read excerpts, sample pages, table of contents,etc.

John Paul II travelled around the world but he used the poor people as his props (like an actor and politician) and hardly knew their true conditions. He kissed babies left and right but he ignored the thousands of little boys (and little girls) - 12,000 in America alone -- sodomized by his papal-priests-pedophiles. http://jp2m.blogspot.com/2006/08/john-paul-ii-pedophile-priests-jpiipp.html In El Slavador, he shirked the poor Crucified Peoples and the Jesuits Martyrs who were working for social justice - whose anniversary is November 16.

Below is an excerpt from Jon Sobrino's book that speaks of John Paul II's un-realistic papal attitudes and ignorant perception towards the poor.

Witnesses to the Kingdom: The Martyrs of El Salvador and the Crucified Peoples

Page 141. Important ecclesial events, like a papal visit, are often organized in such a way that they too produce a feeling of unreality. In the Pope’s 1996 visit to El Salvador, it is true that most of the people who attended were poor. But all one could see of their reality was their religious enthusiasm, more or less effectively organized. One didn’t see their poverty, their fears, their discouragement and helplessness, not even their true faith and hope; one didn’t see their reality. As the event was organized, the poor served more as a backdrop than as the reality of the country; in the foreground were minorities that do not represent the reality: the government, legislators and politicians, the rich and powerful, and the Church beside them. The Pope’s visit neither reflected reality nor, to judge from the consequences, had any important effect on it.

On page 140. This applies to the allocutions and homilies of the Pope to the Congregation when he was an "adult-pope’. And that is still a serious problem: humanistas without sarx, factuality without reality (in the world of the poor). To give a few examples: one often gets a feeling of unreality from homilies, documents and messages that do not make central - although they may mention it - the poverty of reality, the injustice and corruption that cause it, and the cover-up that accompanies it. The feeling of unreality comes especially from the lack of commitment to get involved in the conflict, to struggle against injustice and to suffer the consequences. Words, words, words, as J. Comblin calls such messages in the article mentioned above. At another level, one gets the same feeling of unreality from a seminary formation that protects the seminarian from reality; or from the spiritualities and pastoral practices promoted or tolerated by movements that lead the human being into an a-historical transcendence with infantilizing consequences. (From Martyrs of El Salvador. By Jon Sobrino)




The El Salvador Martyrs November 16, 1989

Remembering and Celebrating - Renewing a Commitment to Justice The El Salvador assassination of Six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter, continues to remind us of our mission and offers us inspiration and vision.
Click on photos to see full frame.

As it happened, in 1989:

Photo from video, "A Question of Conscience," ©1990, Icarus/Tamouz Media, Inc.

6 PRIESTS, 2 OTHERS SLAIN IN SAN SALVADOR
SAN SALVADOR, NOV 16, 1989 Six prominent Jesuit priests, including the rector and vice rector of El Salvador's most prestigious university, were killed today along with two other persons at the house were they slept in the capital. Click to read full story.

MARTYRDOM AND MERCY
By Leo J. O'Donovan, S.J. GEORGETOWN, NOV 19, 1989
Before the end of darkness on the morning of Nov. 16, with unspeakable and barbaric cruelty, armed men burst into the Jesuit residence at the University of Central America in San Salvador and shot six Jesuit priests to death. At the same time, the community's cook and her daughter were murdered in their bed. According to reliable reports, several of the priests, my brothers, had their brains torn from their heads. Click to read full story.

6 JESUITS BURIED IN SALVADORAN CHAPEL

SAN SALVADOR, NOV 19, 1989 The remains of six Jesuit priests killed here last week were placed today in a chapel crypt underneath a portrait of slain archbishop Oscar Armulfo Romero amid mounting evidence of a campaign of intimidation against liberal members of the clergy. Click to read full story.

Jesuit Reflections Click here to read the reflections of members of the Jesuit community on the meaning of this anniversary for them.

Company Magazine Click here for special features: "El Salvador: Ten Years Later" November, 1999

Leo O'Donovan, S.J. President of Georgetown University "While we still grieve their loss, the 10th anniversary of the Jesuit assassinations offers an important opportunity to reflect on the enduring legacy of the martyrs." December 16, 1999 The Washington Post. click here.

Higher Standards for Higher Education: The Christian University and Solidarity Dean Brackley, S.J. Universidad Centroamericana "José Simeón Cañas" San Salvador A talk given at Creighton University on October 4, 1999 Click to read the full text.

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by Kevin F. Burke (Editor), Robert Lassalle-Klein (Editor) "The figure of Ignacio Ellacuria, in its tremendous wealth, can be examined from a variety of perspectives..."

Book Description

Father Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J., president of the University of Central America, leading Latin American philosopher, and liberation theologian, was assassinated with five Jesuit companions and two women on November 16, 1989. Love That Produces Hope brings together leading authorities on key aspects of Ellacuría’s thought. The book introduces readers to the groundbreaking life and thought of Ignacio Ellacuría. His biography and writings embody late twentieth-century transformations and tensions that reshaped the life of the Catholic Church among the "crucified peoples" of Central America.

Love That Produces Hope evaluates the significance of Ellacuría’s work, particularly his impact on theology, philosophy, and education. Ellacuría found hope in his faith that God’s grace sustains the tenacious struggle of millions of men, women, and children to nurture those they love in the face of poverty and an uncertain future.

John Paul II and Oscar Arnulfo Romero

Pope John Paul II treated brutta figura Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero and suppressed the Liberation Theology of South America. He was too busy creating a demi-god image for himself and building up the Opus Dei Empire. John Paul II refused to receive and meet with Archbishop Romero at the Vatican when the Monsignor went to Rome to speak for the cause of the poor people of El Salvador. John Paul II did not care about the people of Latin America. He was too busy focusing on communism and the people of Poland. Most of all, he refused to beatify and canonize Romero as a Martyr-saint. He canonized the most questionable saint Josemaria Escriva and closed his papal eyes on Oscar Romero...just like His Holy See was open-eyes-wide-shut on his JPIIPPA John Paul II Pedophile Priests Army.


http://www.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/romero.html


Days before his murder Archbishop Romero told a reporter, "You can tell the people that if they succeed in killing me, that I forgive and bless those who do it.

Hopefully, they will realize they are wasting their time. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people, will never perish."

"The church would betray its own love for God and its fidelity to the gospel if it stopped being . . . a defender of the rights of the poor . . . a humanizer of every legitimate struggle to achieve a more just society . . . that prepares the way for the true reign of God in history."

'While it is clear that our Church has been the victim of persecution during the last three years, it is even more important to observe the reason for the persecution. ...The persecution comes about because of the Church's defense of the poor, for assuming the destiny of the poor."

From a letter to President Carter: "You say that you are Christian. If you are really Christian, please stop sending military aid to the military here, because they use it only to kill my people."

"A church that suffers no persecution but enjoys the privileges and support of the things of the earth - beware! - is not the true church of Jesus Christ. A preaching that does not point out sin is not the preaching of the gospel. A preaching that makes sinners feel good, so that they are secured in their sinful state, betrays the gospel's call."

"When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises."

The voice of this reluctant prophet was silenced in 1980 when he was shot in the heart while saying Mass.

His words and his story continue to speak the Gospel to us today.

Photo by Octavio Duran
-------------
From the News March, 1980 in the Washington Post:

March 26th, 1980 The U.S. Government Reacts. The accusation of direct Cuban involvement came one day after the assassination in El Salvador or Archbishop Oscar Romero, a popular figure and nominee for the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. There was no suggestion that Cubans were involved in the killing of the archbishop.

Romero himself had recently written President Carter asking him not to supply more military aid to the ruling junta until it succeeded in stopping the violence that has racked El Salvador for many months. ...

March 28, 1980 Treadmill of Heroism "Romero had the only uncensored voice in San Salvador, a small radio station. It broadcast the names of people who were missing. It would happen that a man would be taken off and never heard from again, and his family would ask a priest for help in tracing him. These things soon wound up in the archbishop's lap. He wanted answers, why people were arrested and what was happening to them." ...

March 31, 1980 40 Killed at Romero's Funeral As the panicked crowds surged outside, and many rushed into the already packed cathedral, Romero's body was taken to a crypt below the sanctuary and buried.

The archbishop was killed by a gunman Monday night as he was saying a memorial mass for a friend's mother. He died within minutes.

A highly popular and controversial figure and outspoken critic of the military that has long dominated this Central American nation, Romero was looked upon as one of the few people who could keep the violence-ridden society from plunging into all-out civil war. ...


Links to learn more:

Task Force on Central America An excerpt from the book: Oscar Arnulfo Romero: Prophet to the Americas by Margaret Swedish

A Remembrance Salt of the Earth magazine's remembrance of Romero.

The Reluctant Conversion of Oscar Romero Memories of the archbishop from March, 2000, the 20th anniversary of his assassination. Sojourners Magazine. By Carmen Chacon, Salvador Carranza, Juan Macho, Inocencio Alas, Carmen Elena Hernandez, Maria Isabel Figueroa, Jorge Lara-Braud

UN Truth Commission Report on Murder of Romero.

Romero Statue Brief bio and photo of new statue of Romero in Westminster Abby.

Boston College Powerpoint Slide show on life of Romero from Boston College's site on their Romero Scholarship.

Seven Sermons of Oscar Romero Portions of seven Romero homilies - from the Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House in Oklahoma City.

San Romero Online Discussion Bi-lingual reflection and discussion group on Oscar Romero. The forum includes links to Romero websites.

Foundation for Self-Suffiency in Latin America The Foundation for Self-Sufficiency in Central America (FSSCA) works in partnership and solidarity with low-income communities in Central America organized to achieve environmental sustainability, economic self-sufficiency, social justice, and peace.

More Links:

The Jesuit Martyrs of El Salvador

The Four Church Women An excerpt from the book: A Message Too Precious to be Silenced by Margaret Swedish.

El Salvador Extensive materials on El Salvador from the online encyclopedia, Britannica.com.

John Paul II claimed condoms are permeable to virus. WHO found Pope impermeable to logic

Pope claims Condoms are permeable to viruses. WHO finds Pope impermeable to logic.
October 11th, 2003

This entry was originally at http://kingsley.blog-city.com/read/309151.htm
From The Guardian, via MadMan:

The Catholic Church is telling people in countries stricken by Aids not to use condoms because they have tiny holes in them through which the HIV virus can pass - potentially exposing thousands of people to risk.

The church is making the claims across four continents despite a widespread scientific consensus that condoms are impermeable to the HIV virus.

The president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, told the programme: “The Aids virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon. The spermatozoon can easily pass through the ‘net’ that is formed by the condom.

The WHO has condemned the Vatican’s views, saying: “These incorrect statements about condoms and HIV are dangerous when we are facing a global pandemic which has already killed more than 20 million people, and currently affects at least 42 million.”

Of course, this is from the same institution that sentenced people to death for claiming that the Earth was not the center of the universe. They’re a couple of centuries behind, but they keep trying and manage to do enough damage.


7 Responses to “Pope claims Condoms are permeable to viruses. WHO finds Pope impermeable to logic.”

A visitor Says: October 10th, 2003 at 2:37 am

What is equally, if not more disturbing is that people actually belive in the scientific “truths” of the Vatican. Srijith [otherlogs/@/srijith.net]

A visitor Says: October 11th, 2003 at 3:20 am

I aint surprised. These are the same nitwits who still claim that the world was created in 4004BC, and fossils/artifacts were placed to “fool and entrap” scientists into paganism….so of course condoms are permeable (guess theres gonna be whole lot of “immaculate conceptions” now…)
–AshokAshok

A visitor Says: October 11th, 2003 at 4:57 am

Our own Sushma Swaraj believes that “condom-centric” AIDS awareness advertisements promote promiscuity.

But we shouldn’t be too harsh on her. She has a legitimate reason.
She’s had a lobotomy. MadMan

A visitor Says: October 11th, 2003 at 5:38 am
I read about this yesterday. This has to be the most damaging stand taken by the Vatican in modern times.

According to the WHO, latex condoms are the safest means to prevent AIDS and other STDs. What could the church possibly have against saving lives?

I have never understood this dichotomy. On one hand you say God is merciful and forgives, on the other hand you wilfully run down the “different” and condemn them. Why do they have to be so antagonistic to science and technology? Don’t they benefit mankind in the long run?melodrama [melodrama_unleashed@hotmail.com]
Ravages Says: October 11th, 2003 at 6:46 am

Funny thing. And what is more striking is that the Papacy has more sex and violence than any other religious institutions in the world. I know of at-least two real life based stories where a man became Pope by either killing of his enemies, and more often, seducing wifes and daughters of influential people. One so pope (in this fact based fiction book) had his daughter married off to the earlier pope’s son so as to be nominated.

A visitor Says: October 11th, 2003 at 11:54 am

And apparently, the inside logic behind this attempt at dissuading people from using condoms is that ‘condoms promoto promiscuity’….. If only fidelity and promiscuity were as simple as condom usage…..Charu

A visitor Says: October 11th, 2003 at 12:41 pm

well, I think either god realy does not exist or he is a very funny person! incredulous, the way they have gone about declaring this and I fear that it will be blindly believed to… someone [anon.e.mous@indiatimes.com]

John Paul II King of Pedophilia

http://www.landoverbaptist.org/news0405/popedeath.html

What is a Catamite? Webster's dictionary defines catamite as "the youthful lover of an older man derived from the Latin name Catamus." Catamus was the first Catholic priest, who didn't even wait until the rock of Lord Jesus' tomb was rolled back to get a young boy spread eagle on a altar (a practice that resulted in the early church adopting the name "altar boy.") The first Pope was so impressed with Catamus' ability to bugger young altar boys while never losing his place in scripture during service, that he coined the name for the new church "Catholic," using Catamus' name and the activity for which Catamus had become notorious. The traditions establish by Catamus have become sacred rites of passage for all Catholic priests, often taking 40-50 years to perfect and master. What once was ostensibly a Christian Church has become little more than a excuse for grown men to wear dresses and bugger young boys – with the so-called "church" offering the vocational perk to its priests of often relocating pedophiles to new parishes so that they may "sample some new flavors."

http://www.landoverbaptist.org/news0402/livecounseling.html

John Paul II condemned homosexuality but OKed Sodomy

http://www.landoverbaptist.org/news0900/catholics.html

Of course, priests’ reactions may be different to the passing of this particular pope, since Pope John Paul II recently spoke against homosexuality- outside of the Catholic Church. “I guess it is OK for sodomy to go on inside St. Peters and every parish church from here to Timbuktu until you feel like those folks in Sodom got a raw deal,” dryly observed Mrs. Judy O’Christian, Landover’s diplomatic envoy to the Vatican, “Just not out by the Colosseum where everyone can see it. While some may think the Pope’s condemnation a little timid, we applaud the courage that even that meek message must have taken. I mean, the Pope speaking out against homos is like Nelson Mandela condemning blacks. You just don’t expect folks to turn on their own kind like that.”

John Paul II extinguished fires of Hell - but not the fires of Purgatory

Pope extinguishes the fires of Hell – but not the fires of Purgatory

Rome's recent revival of indulgences is a further demonstration of her shoring-up of the great Purgatory lie. Dr. Ian R.K. Paisley

The 'infallible' Pope, the Antichrist, has been at it again. He evidently discovered on his holidays that Heaven is not the Heaven described by the true Christ: "In my father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you." (John 14:2) He has now made another discovery – that Hell is not the place of the interminable judgement fire of God as described by the true Christ in the Gospels: "Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." (Mark 9:44, 46, 48)

Writing from Rome, June Webber, the correspondent of The Independent, on June 27, 1999, under the title "Pope damns idea of Hell fire", states:

"Forget the flames and devils with pitchforks. A week after telling Roman Catholics that Heaven was not up in the clouds, the Pope said Hell was not a physical place either. Lest sinners think they can get off lightly, though, he said Hell was real, and rather than being convicted by God was something sinners brought on themselves. "Hell is not a punishment imposed externally by God, but the condition resulting from attitudes and actions which people have done in this life. More than a physical place, Hell is the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God," the Pope said at a weekly audience.

However, the Pope has not damned the fires of Purgatory. To the Pope the fires of Purgatory are real, and the only way to escape them is to finance Mother Church, so that masses can be said for the release of the poor souls in Rome's semi-hell, Purgatory.

There is the financing of Rome's exchequer at stake in this matter, and that is the thrice-holy ground to Popery. The false Christ of Rome is quite happy to deny the reality of Heaven and the reality of Hell, but not of Purgatory, which never in Christ's teaching had any reality anyway. Pope Paul would have the world to believe his lie. This is the great delusion of which the Apostle Paul wrote to us:

"For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming: Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie […]" (II Thes. 2:7-11)

The truth about Heaven and Hell must go, but not the lie about Purgatory. Mother Church will still financially bleed the faithful by picturing the tortures of their loved ones in Purgatory and collecting the rich pickings of requiem masses for tormented souls.

Rome's recent revival of indulgences is a further demonstration of her shoring-up of the great Purgatory lie. Reject the lie, put off the Antichrist, and receive the truth of the true Christ. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, thou and thy house" – saved from sin and death by Christ alone.

http://www.ianpaisley.org

John Paul II Church of the Holy Pedophiles

http://www.godhatesfags.com/featured/20050404_pope-john-paul-ii-in-hell.html

Church of the Holy Pedophiles

Where the Mass is celebrated not with bread & wine but with vile sodomite feces ("scat") & semen.

Vatican Intelligence surpasses the CIA + FBI + ad infinitum.

The Pope appoints all bishops, archbishops, cardinals, etc., and he does so knowing most are fags or enablers.

As the final and absolute ruler of all things Catholic, he is solely responsible for every raped child and every sinful, pervert priest.

"And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments." Lk. 16:23.

Image credit of Cardinal Bernard Law - http://jp2m.blogspot.com/2006/10/john-paul-ii-cardinal-bernard-law.htmlcohort in crime of John Paul II: http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/images/blpic-altarboy.htm

John Paul II said: Hell is not God's punishment

http://talk.livedaily.com/showthread.php?t=403947

Robert Fulford's column about Pope John Paul II (The National Post, December 21, 1999)

There's never been anyone like Pope John Paul II, that fierce intellectual with the charisma of a rock star. Old and infirm, slow in speech and step, he nevertheless remains unstoppable. Even his schedule seems superhuman: In the first 17 days of December he gave 25 speeches, long and short, to crowds large and small. But while this public side of him remains astonishing, there's another side, just as surprising, that emerges from his written works. To read a thick sheaf of papal encyclicals and speeches, as I've been doing lately, is to expand and alter one's view of him.

Early in 1979, in his first encyclical, he noted that the Church was preparing for a great jubilee in 2000. He added that in the intervening years he wanted to change the Church by inspiring a new evangelical spirit and renewed ecumenism. After 20 years there's little evidence that those particular hopes have been fulfilled. But something else has happened. John Paul has turned himself into a one-man Church renewal, generating so much energy by his ideas that he and the Church can't be ignored. In the last two decades of the century, this has been one of the great performances on the world stage. As Roman Catholicism finally turns toward the year of bimillennial celebration, the most remarkable fact about that ancient institution is the nature of the man who leads it.

Even if he had done nothing else, global politics would have given him a place in history. When the Soviet empire died, he became the only pope of this millennium who has watched and encouraged the crumbling of the Church's chief worldly enemy. And, unlike many popes, he has made the Vatican bureaucracy his servant rather than his master and manager. He's also the most literary of popes, a sometime poet and playwright for whom the world exists first of all in the form of words.

He must be the most prolific pope ever. He sends out to the world an unceasing torrent of ideas and exhortations, almost instantly available in several languages at http://www.vatican.va./ He will leave a literary record without precedent in the history of religion. Presumably he maintains a platoon of ghost writers, each of them able to hit unerringly the same tone -- solemn, learned, and just slightly tentative.

The words can occasionally be empty sloganeering ("As the family goes, so goes the nation!"), but more often they carry weight and potency. You sense pressure behind the writing, an urgency. The style is often subtle and effective. In one place he speaks of people acting ethically, "according to a free and rightly tuned will." The tuning of the will -- that's a commonplace thought expressed eloquently in uncommon language.

His ideas are sometimes eccentric, an odd quality in a pope. He tends to present Christianity as a series of literary devices, figures of speech. To notice this is not to question his faith but to consider the shape that it takes in his mind. At certain times, reading him is like reading a Protestant literary critic, such as Northrop Frye.

Last July he brought this approach to his discussions of heaven and hell. To the surprise and alarm of many, he casually reconfigured Catholic images of the afterlife. As he spoke about them, on two successive Wednesdays, he managed to make both places sound like poetic imagery rather than "real" sites of divine or satanic reality. He seems to have concluded that, just like the story of Adam and Eve, heaven and hell are metaphors -- or, at most, states of mind. Heaven is the human being's meeting with God, he said. No surprise there. But he added: "Metaphorically speaking, heaven is understood as the dwelling place of God." Metaphorically speaking? For centuries, heaven has existed in the Christian imagination as a real place. True, philosophers, back to Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, have speculated on its metaphorical quality, but who knew that a pope could think and speak this way? But then, John Paul is a philosopher. He loves the rigours of philosophy and sees much of life as a seminar on truth. A week after the talk about heaven, he had more striking news. Hell, he said, is not a punishment imposed by God, despite what everyone has always said. No, it's just an unwise choice that humans make. The images of hell in scripture, he suggested, are taken too literally. Actually, hell is the condition of those who separate themselves from God, "the pain, frustration and emptiness of life without God." Artists trying to follow scripture have depicted hell as a world of fire controlled by devils with pitchforks. The Pope thinks those are metaphors, every one of them.

The Pope has severely criticized postmodern thought, which he sees as a means of dissolving belief in universal truth. A dominant view has emerged in the humanities: We should not think we are working toward the truth, because it doesn't exist; we are all working toward the selection of truths that will be best suited to our own lives. It's a question of values. You have yours, I have mine, and the political bosses of China have theirs.

The Pope vehemently refutes this view: There is universal human truth, he says, and we should all seek it. Truths, if important, don't differ from place to place. "If something is true, then it must be true for all people and at all times." He's a universalist, obviously.

But at the same time, he shows a distinctly postmodern side. He's the first pope for whom multiculturalism has acquired vivid meaning, and the first who has carefully studied what the universities call comparative religion. He may be the first to see Catholic truth as one truth among many, though clearly the superior one.

Last year, in the encyclical Faith and Reason, he pointed out that people in all human cultures have asked the same questions: "Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going?" He finds those questions in the texts of Hinduism, in Confucius, Lao-Tze, the Buddha and, for that matter, in Homer, Euripides and Sophocles. He insists that Catholics should look to these writings for wisdom. In answering the great questions, he says, "every people has its own native and seminal wisdom."

That's a postmodern idea. The Church has always tried to teach other races, and on its best days has done so with kindness. It has also learned from the ancient pre-Christian philosophers. But learning about spiritual matters from other races is hardly an ancient habit of the Church. John Paul II also insists that Catholics should learn from India about liberating the spirit "from the shackles of time and space." And they should draw on the wisdom of China, Japan and other Asian countries, as well as "the riches of the traditional cultures of Africa, which are for the most part orally transmitted." All of this, while less arresting than the material about heaven and hell, makes surprising reading.

Pope John Paul defends freedom ("There is no morality without freedom"), but it's a fairly selective freedom. During his time as Pope, priests and professors have been rebuked and replaced for heresy. Yet his own words often stray some distance from orthodoxy. Earlier popes would look with grave suspicion on his views about heaven and hell, and would be baffled by his affection for the ideas of heathens, pagans, etc. It may be that he's decided to allow himself liberties he wouldn't grant others. Can it be that heresy is a privilege reserved for the Pope? Is it possible that the words of a pope are by definition heresy-free? Those are among the more compelling and startling of the questions raised by a reading of his words.

http://www.robertfulford.com//JohnPaul.html

John Paul II Rejects Reality of a Literal Hell

http://www.ovrlnd.com/Cults/poprejectshell.html

POPE JOHN PAUL II REJECTS REALITY OF A LITERAL HELL

During his weekly address to the general audience of 8,500 people at the Vatican on July 28, 1999, Pope John Paul II rejected the reality of a physical, literal hell as a place of eternal fire and torment. Rather, the pope said hell is separation, even in this life, from the joyful communion with God. According to an official Vatican transcript of the pope's speech, Pope John Paul II noted that the Scriptural references to hell and the images portrayed by Scripture are only symbolic and figurative of "the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God. " He added, "Rather than a physical place, hell is the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy." He said hell is "a condition resulting from attitudes and actions which people adopt in this life." Concerning the concept of eternal damnation, the pope said, "Damnation consists precisely in definitive separation from God, freely chosen by the human person, and confirmed with death that seals his choice for ever." The pope also added, "The thought of hell and even less the improper use of biblical images must not create anxiety or despair." Rather, he stated, it is a reminder of the freedom found in Christ.

The Religion News Service reported that a Vatican-approved editorial published several weeks ago in the Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica agrees with the pope's latest pronouncement. The editorial explicitly pronounced, "Hell exists, not as a place but as a state, a way of being of the person who suffers the pain of the deprivation of God" (Los Angeles Times, 7-31-99). The pope said eternal damnation is "not God's work but is actually our own doing." Only a week earlier the pope stated that heaven is neither "an abstraction nor a place in the clouds, but a living, personal relationship of union with the Holy Trinity. "

Such a statement on hell is strikingly similar to that made by Billy Graham several years ago in which he was quoted,

The only thing I could say for sure is that hell means separation from God. We are separated from his light, from his fellowship. That is going to be hell. When it comes to a literal fire, I don't preach it because I'm not sure about it. When the Scripture uses fire concerning hell, that is possibly an illustration of how terrible it's going to be-not fire but something worse, a thirst for God that cannot be quenched. (Time magazine, 1 1-1 5-93)

Both Graham and now the pope completely reject the clear teaching of Scripture regarding the reality of a literal lake of fire that burns throughout all eternity. The author of Hebrews taught that the reality of hell is a vital Bible doctrine (Heb. 6:1, 2). Jude taught that believers are to contend for the faith (doctrine) once delivered unto the saints and that hell is a real, literal place of fire and torment Jude 3, 7). The apostle Paul taught that those who knew not Christ would suffer the vengeance of God which entailed everlasting damnation (2 Thess. 1:8, 9). The apostle John saw that hell was a real place (Rev. 14: 1 0; 20:10-15; 21:8). And, Jesus Christ Himself taught that hell literally exists, that it lasts forever and that those who reject His perfect salvation would spend eternity therein (Matt. 13:41, 42; 18:8, 9; 25:41-46; Luke 16:19-31). Rejection of the Biblical doctrine of hell by the pope and Graham does not nullify the fact that a literal hell truly exists. "Let God be true, but every man a liar" (Rom. 3:3, 4).

John Paul II - Burning in Hell

John Paul II sustained a Papal Altar of Sodomy for more than 26 years where his JPIIPPA John Paul II Pedophile Priests Army thrived. A great millstone was hung around his neck by St. Michael the Archangel in the WYD World Youth Day 2002.

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/False%20Religions/Roman%20Catholicism/pope_burning_in_hell.htm

The death of Pope John Paul II (1920-2005)

April 3rd, 2005

How sad! How tragic! According to the Bible, Pope John Paul II went straight to burn in hell-fire on April 2nd, 2005. Jesus clearly stated in John 3:3...

"Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."

The Pope NEVER spoke of being "born-again." The Pope NEVER made any public profession of faith ALONE in Jesus Christ. On the contrary, Pope John Paul II placed his faith in the traditions and manmade doctrines of the Catholic religion. There is NOTHING in the King James Bible (or the Catholic Bible) about keeping the Seven Sacraments to get to heaven...nothing! There is NOTHING in the Word of God about the Immaculate Conception of Mary. There is NOTHING in the Bible about the Rosary or praying to God through Mary.

There is nothing in the Bible about priests being celibate. Matthew 23:9 outright forbids calling any priest "Father." So why do Catholics do it?...because they are being taught the commandments of men...

"He answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do. And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition." -Mark 7:6-9)

Pope John Paul II was a minister of Satan, a false prophet...

"For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works." -2nd Corinthians 11:13-15
Pope John Paul II will be held responsible at the Great White Throne of Judgment someday for misleading hundreds-of-millions of people with damnable heresies, causing them to burn in hell. I say this with great sorrow because God does not want anyone to perish in hell...

"The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." -2nd Peter 3:9

No one goes to hell unless he or she chooses to go there ("And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life" -John 5:40). All you have to do to go to hell is "nothing." If you don't get born-again, you are automatically going to hell ("He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God." -John 3:18). The Pope made the deadly mistake that so many foolish people make, he ADDED good works to his faith in Christ ("For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast" -Ephesians 2:8,9). Salvation is a gift of God ("For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord" -Romans 6:23). Salvation is free, you CANNOT add works to it; otherwise it is not a gift anymore. Please read my article, Are You Really A Christian. Also please read, Good Works Verses Grace.

FOX News and CNN have been covering the death of the Pope round the clock. I've heard nothing but lies, heresy and ridiculous comments by many famous people.
President George W. Bush: Pope was a "hero for the ages."

President George W. Bush: "A good and faithful servant of God has been called home."

When George W. Bush was running for the office of governor in Texas, he said publicly that a person must accept Jesus Christ as personal Saviour to go to heaven. George Bush has claimed publicly to be a Christian. I can say with confidence that George W. Bush is NO Christian! No true Christian would ever praise the Pope as "a good and faithful servant of God" (not to mention the fact that George W. Bush is also member of the eerie occult groups, Skull and Bones and Bohemian Grove). see www.bushrevealed.com

It's disgusting to hear professed "Christians" like Billy Graham and Robert Schuller praising the Pope. It's hard to believe that Billy Graham was actually once a board member of the Sword of the Lord in Tennessee. Billy Graham is a sell-out and the pioneer of the ecumenical movement.
Bush Sr., Bush Jr., Bill Clinton, Jimmy carter, Nancy Reagan...all praising Pope John Paul II...does anyone believe the Bible anymore? Does anyone care about the TRUTH? Evidently not in The White House.

To be expected, priests from across the world are praising the Pope as the Vicar" of Jesus Christ. Can you show me that in the Bible? No you cannot! No one in the Bible was ever reverenced as "God upon the earth," other than our Lord Jesus Christ (Who in every respect was God Almighty upon the earth, 1st Timothy 3:16). The Pope was a heathen sinner just like anyone else, and he surely was not God's Vicar. The Pope was the Vicar of hell. I say this not to be unkind, but to try to wake you up concerning the TRUTH.

The Catholic religion is also guilty of worshipping the dead. There is NOTHING in the Bible leading us to bow unto a statue of Mary. On the contrary, Exodus 20:4,5 commands us NOT to make unto ourselves ANY graven images, nor to BOW to them. The Catholic religion leads people into idolatry and vain worship, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men (Mark 7:6-9). Catholics worldwide bow in worship to statues of saints, such as Saint Anthony. Now they're talking about making Pope John Paul II a saint. Well, if you want to worship the Pope, then you'll have to look down to the ground because he's burning in hell fire and brimstone according the the bible.

I just heard a Catholic man from Rome say, " The Pope brought us the gospel of Christian hope." The gospel of Christian hope? You've got to be kidding? The Bible declares the gospel of Christ in 1st Corinthians 15:1-4 (The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ). So what's with the Seven Sacraments? Why does the Catholic church claim that they ARE Christ, and that baptism is the door into the Catholic church? These erroneous teachings are manmade doctrines which are nowhere found in the Scriptures.

Pope John Paul the second was the first Pope to ever visit The White House. President George W. Bush was the first president to ever visit the Vatican in Rome. He was the most traveled Pope. Pope John Paul II was also the first non-Italian Pope in 455 years of Pontiff history (he was Polish). Sadly, of the estimated one million Polish people living in Chicago, 98% are said to be Catholic. According to the Bible, 98% of the Catholic people in Chicago are going to hell when they die. Don't get mad at me, get mad at God because He wrote the Bible. You can get mad at me all you want to...my beliefs are based upon the Bible, not the TRADITIONS of some false religion. Show me anywhere in the Bible where you're supposed to go into a confessional booth to confess your most innermost immoral secrets and sins to a priest (just another dirty, rotten sinner). The Bible teaches no such nonsense! We are supposed to confess our sins to Jesus Christ alone (1st John 1:9).

Cardinal Egan of Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York said that Pope John Paul II was "just like Jesus." Egan said that the Pope cared about people, "Just as Jesus did." Egan said that the Pope loved others, "Just like Jesus did"...and on and on. Nothing could be further from the truth, the Pope was nothing like Jesus. Jesus was a very controversial figure in His day, offending people everywhere He went. Why do you think they crucified Him? Jesus was against the hypocritical religious leaders of His day (those who led the masses astray in false religion). Don't you see it? The Pope and the priests are the religious hypocrites (the Pharisees) of our day! Jesus would have roasted them with His preaching, just as He did the phonies back in His day...

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness." -Matthew 23:27

The Pope and cardinals in the Catholic religion adorn themselves in the most expensive of garments, they drink from cups made of pure gold and silver, they assemble in magnificent palaces...while the poor rot in the streets, millions die of starvation, and little children suffer at the hands of their merciless predators. Listen to the words of Jesus...

"But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments, And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi. But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven. Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ." -Matthew 23:5-10

The Catholic religion is of the devil, and it's leaders are the sinister ministers of Satan. The Pope was nothing like my Saviour Jesus Christ...Jesus spoke the TRUTH and made no apologies for it. The Pope never warned anyone about hell-fire. Jesus spoke of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth in hell. Jesus didn't just visit the poor and needy...he actually helped them.

How much money has the Vatican given to world's poorest? Nearly 3,000,000,000 people live on less than $2 a day. The Pope toured all around the world, but what did he do to actually help those people? Nothing! Why is it that the Vatican in Rome is so filthy rich, while the poor stay poor?

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation." -Matthew 23:14
The Catholic religion is a fraud. The Pope is a phony. Pope John Paul II is sadly burning in hell. The doctrines of Vatican II are nothing more than TRADITIONS and MANMADE doctrines. Even the novice Bible student will find this to be true. I am not happy about this, but greatly saddened every day that passes. I wish it were not so. The fact that the Catholic religion is one of the most popular religions on the earth should be a grave warning sign to us. The world is unanimously praising Pope John Paul II (now they're even talking about making him a saint). But what did Jesus say...

"Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets." -Luke 6:26

The next Pope may very well be the false prophet who will accompany the antichrist to rule the New World Order. Earlier today I heard former Secretary of State, Madelyn Albright, say that the Pope had given people the sense that "those who believe in God are united a certain particular way." In other words, "it doesn't matter what you believe." Talk about one-world religion! The devil seeks to consolidate everything to prepare the stage for the antichrist. We are witnessing the formation of the New World Order...which will be composed of a one-world government (a confederate), a one-world religion (ecumenicalism), a one-world economy and money system, and a global police-state. Surely, the return of the Lord Jesus cannot be far away...even so come Lord Jesus!

"It is without question that John Paul II, former head of the Roman Catholic Church, spoke strongly to many of the moral issues of our day, from protecting unborn children and marriage to voicing opposition to stem cell research and human cloning. However, he was a fallible man, like the popes before him, who rejected the authority of Scripture in favor of a religious system based on the doctrines and traditions of men. Christians must not be led into pledging allegiance to the deceased pontiff, but should pray for the Catholic and Protestant people who are far from biblical teachings, and are now leading the effort to embrace ecumenicism." - Michael Marcavage, director of Repent America

John Paul II Miracle healings...hogwash on victims of papal-priests-pedophiles

Miracles of John Paul II. Santo Subito!

Déjà Vu.

Like his twin Saint??Josemaria Maria Escriva, John Paul II had orchestrated his own speedy canonization through the capable hands of his papal clone Benedict XVI http://pope-ratz.blogspot.com/.

John Paul II was a criminal of the Catholic Third Reich -- he was responsible for his JPIIPPA John-Paul-II-Pedophile Priest Army.

What kind of healings is he performing, on cancer patients? How about healing ONE of the victims of his papal pedophile army, the AIDS of the Mystical Body of Christ he left behind?

When he was alive, John Paul II did not try to "save" ONE little boy from his papal army. Today, with the largest millstone hung around his neck, he could NEVER heal any ONE of the 12,000 American little boys (and girls) abused and left behind by his JPIIPPA army.

America, land of the free, do not call this man, the worst papal criminal in history, to be called a "Saint", not in Ameircan lips and not in American soil.

Wake up Benedict XVI, Opus Dei and cohorts of crimes: the prophecy will soon come when the Vatican will be levelled below the sea......to be joined where John Paul II has sunk with his papal millstone tied around his fat papal neck......and where his John Paul II Titanic Ship has sunk into the bottomless pit of Hell!

Santo Subito Satanas 666 Ioanes Pavlvs Secvndo.

John Paul II Culture of Death... on the Unborn

http://www.socialismtoday.org/94/pope.html

IN 1980, THE ban on contraception was reaffirmed by John Paul II: "He saw the issues – contraception, divorce, illicit unions, homosexuality – as a dimension of the ‘culture of death’, against which he taught and preached with increasing vehemence". (p133) This is against the background of the HIV/Aids pandemic. The UN Aids organisation estimated that nearly 40 million people had the disease in 2003, and 3.1 million died. The world’s poorest areas are worst hit.

The pandemic can only be controlled by linking the availability of treatment and prevention with tackling the basic social and economic ills of capitalist society. Health-care infrastructure, education, jobs and raising the status of women are essential. Nonetheless, in the immediate battle against this terrible disease, condoms can play a significant role in halting its spread.

In El Salvador, Catholic leaders in 1998 helped ban abortions, even when necessary to save the life of a woman, and to pass a law requiring condoms to carry warnings that they do not protect against HIV, the virus which causes Aids. In Nicaragua, the cardinal pressured the government into destroying sex education pamphlets because they mentioned abortion. In Philippines, all contraceptives were banned from Manila’s health clinics. In Kenya, a church pamphlet stated that HIV can pass through condoms. In October 2003, the Vatican claimed that "serious scientific studies" backed this view. No scientists supported the claim. It was a deadly lie, the real culture of death.

These positions are linked to the Vatican’s reactionary attitudes to women, applied within the church as well as to society. In May 1994, the pope declared that the church could not ordain women. Ratzinger played the infallibility card to stifle debate.

The paedophile crisis and the gulf between the Vatican’s right-wing fundamentalism and the realities of the modern world have hit the Catholic church hard in the northern hemisphere. From the mid-1960s into the 1990s, 100,000 priests (20,000 in the US) and 200,000 nuns left. The number of priests in England and Wales fell from 7,000 in 1980 to 5,500 in 2000. In 1965, 96% of the French population were Catholic, 45% attending Mass regularly. Today those percentages are 62% and 12%.

The church’s grip on peoples’ lives has been weakened. In Italy, about 85% identify themselves as Catholic. A study by the University of Turin showed that 70% approve of premarital sex, birth control and divorce, and the country has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates. Ireland, Italy, Spain and the US all have majorities in favour of the ordination of women. In Spain, reforms introduced by the government of José Zapatero – such as cutting the church’s role in education and introducing same-sex civil partnerships – have further undermined its influence.

Even Poland is not immune. Hanna Rosin wrote about the pope’s visit in 1995: "This time he was in a new landscape of fast-food restaurants and red-light districts. The audience at Victory Square was distracted, and some reporters swore they heard boos. At one point the pope had to shake his fist like a grade-school teacher to get the crowd to listen. ‘When people were free, it turned out they didn’t go to church,’ said [Monsignor Lorenzo] Albacete the New York theologian. ‘They went to McDonald’s’." (Washington Post, 4 April)

The percentage of Catholics in worldwide Christianity has fallen, from over 50% in 1970 to 42% in 2000. The main loss has been to evangelical Protestantism in Latin America and Africa. Latin America has 4-500 million Catholics, Protestants have increased from two million in 1960 to over 60 million today.

Even so, in 1988, there were 401,930 Catholic priests in the world (404,626 in 1998), with numbers rising in neo-colonial countries. A seismic shift from the ‘first’ to the ‘third’ world is taking place. And it is reflected in the US. With 300,000 Catholics arriving each year, Latinos now make up 40% of US Catholics, challenging Irish domination. In 1965, the US Catholic population was 45.6 million, around 64 million today. The number of priests, however, has fallen from 58,632 to 43,634.

John Paul II and Saint?? Josemaria Escriva

John Paul II canonized and beatified about 1,500 Saints and Blesseds but one person stands out as the most questionable and most controversial saint - Josemaria Escriva, founder of the Opus Dei.

A comprehensive website is ODAN, http://www.odan.org/foundations.htm

This was the letter of protest sent to John Paul II which of course he completely ignored http://www.odan.org/tw_letter_to_pope.htm

One of the weirdest thing about the "Holy Father" of the Opus Dei is the many changes of his name. http://www.odan.org/what_is_opus_dei.htm This is Josemaria Escriva's plastic surgery on his image, the Opus Dei Nip Tuck.

Note: The author of this article has asked that his name remain anonymous.

The Many Names of Opus Dei’s Founder

But if they ask me what his name is, how shall I answer?

Exodus 3:13

Honors, distinctions, titles: things of air, puffs of pride, lies, nothingness.

Maxim 677, The Way

To understand Opus Dei, one needs to study the Founder.

Alvaro Del Portillo

Baptismal name

Opus Dei’s founder changed his name many times over the course of his life. He was born on January 2, 1902.[1] Four days later, he was baptized in the Cathedral at Barbastro, Spain with the baptismal name recorded among Church records as José María Julian Mariano.[2] “According to the entry in the baptismal register of the Church where he was christened, his surname was spelled Escribá[.]”[3] He was given the same first name as his father, José Escribá; his mother was named María de los Dolores Albás y Blanc.[4]

-

Adding the aristocratic “y Albás”

Some time after his father’s textile business failed in 1915, he studied for the priesthood and was ordained in 1925.[5] Before the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), he began joining “y Albás” to his surname; it appears in the published memento of his first Mass.[6]

In Castilian Spanish, use of the conjunction “y” (“and”) joining father’s and mother’s surnames is associated with aristocratic families.[7] Use of a modified conjunctive surname would not have been socially acceptable by someone not belonging to the aristocracy; since Escribá did not come from an aristocratic family, he may have been subjected to ridicule: as late as the 1960s, Father Escribá rarely experimented publicly with the use of “y Albás”.[8]

From Escribá to the more distinguished Escrivá

On May 24, 1941, Bishop Leopoldo Eijo Garay of Madrid sent a letter that systematically has been cited in Opus Dei literature as the first document written by a member of Church hierarchy in defense of Opus Dei and its founder. [9] In his letter, Bishop Garay refers to the founder, whom he says he knows very well, as Dr. Escribá—three times.[10]

But as early as his school days, José Escribá had “adopted the rather more distinguished version spelled with a “v” rather than a “b,” which in Spanish sounds exactly the same.”[11] His name is spelled Escrivá in the memento of his first Mass.[12] In 1943, when he was 41, Church records were altered on June 20 to memorialize the change: the registry book of the Barbastro Cathedral and the baptismal certificate of José María were annotated to reflect “that the surname Escribá was changed to Escrivá de Balaguer.”[13] None of the official Opus Dei biographies reference this spelling alteration.[14]

Adding the distinguishing “de Balaguer”

On June 16, 1940 [age 38], the Spanish Boletín Oficial del Estado records that Father Escrivá requested of the government that he be permitted to change his “first surname so it will be written Escrivá de Balaguer.”[15] He justified the petition by claiming that “the name Escrivá is common in the east coast and Catalonia, leading to harmful and annoying confusion.”[16]

One of the earliest members of Opus Dei, architect Miguel Fisac, describes reasons why Father Escrivá may have chosen to modify his name. First, Fisac describes that Escrivá may have suffered a childhood trauma as follows:

When he was still a child, his father and a partner had a cloth business in Barbastro, the founder’s birthplace. The firm went bankrupt and the founder was embarrassingly forced to leave.

His father was reduced to the position of simple shop assistant[.][17]

Fisac describes Escrivá’s embarrassment at his father’s failure, and reflects on the likely motivation for Escrivá’s name changes:

I suppose that his interest in giving importance to his surname was related to his childhood trauma which I have mentioned before. Living in close contact with Monsignor Escrivá, it was easy to appreciate the great affection he felt for the aristocracy: Marquises, Counts[,] etc. As some of these personages were related to some of the nuns in the Royal Foundation of Santa Isabel, and he was its rector, whenever the nuns introduced him to any of these aristocrats and they heard his surname was Escrivá, they would at once ask casually, “Escrivá de Romaní?” (a well known aristocratic family). When he answered that he wasn’t, they made their feeling of rejection obvious and deeply upset him. This is not my imagination; I heard Escrivá himself tell how he decided to add the name of the Catalan town where his family possibly originated from: “Balaguer.” This he did. I was present when the documents were gathered for presentation in the Ministry of Justice for approval. [18]

The leader of an organization known for proclaiming to be composed of common Christians claimed that confusion caused by having a common name is annoying.[19] None of the Opus Dei biographies comment on the official 1940 petition for the name change or its justification.[20] And as to the claim of confusion with the names as alleged in the official petition, it has been pointed out that Escrivá de Romaní is not “exactly ‘common in the east coast and Catalonia.’”[21]

From José María to Josemaría

Monsignor Escrivá also modified his first name. From the common José María, he changed it to the original Josemaría. Biographers state, that around 1935 [age 33], “he joined his first two names because his single love for the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph were equally inseparable.”[22] Though there had been many Saint José’s, there had never been a Saint Josemaría.

Doctor Escrivá

For a while, Escrivá tried on the title of Doctor, but eventually he abandoned this adventure. His doctoral degree from the university appears to be surrounded with mystery.[23] Of the alleged doctorate in theology obtained at age 53, nothing is known, not even the topic of the thesis, which was never published.[24]

According to Antonio Perez, one of Escrivá’s principal collaborators, ordained in 1948 and a former Opus Dei general manager, “Father Escrivá was not a great jurist, as we were later led to believe. I even have serious doubts about whether he studied law at all. I never saw his bachelor’s degree, and the way things were in the Work, if he had it, he would have put it in an impressive gold frame. But he might have lost this document, like so many others during the war.”[25]

Monsignor Escrivá

In 1947, Father Escrivá was nominated to be “Prelato Domestico di Sua Santita.” This title conferred the right to be addressed as Monsignor. Official biographers claim that before accepting Father Escrivá hesitated, “since he wanted nothing for himself. If, in the end, he accepted, it was so as not to anger those who had nominated him.”[26]

However, it turns out that the honor had been proposed by one Alvaro del Portillo, then number two man at Opus Dei, we are asked to believe without the knowledge of Father Escrivá. According to biographers, Monsignor Escrivá “rarely wore the showy prelate’s robes, or wore the buckled shoes. He felt the weight of the purple vestments as a hair shirt; but on notable occasions, knowing how much the color entertained his children, he followed the path of good humor.”[27]

On the other hand, according to many who have left Opus Dei, Escrivá was especially fond of luxury, aristocratic refinements, honors, titles and symbols of prestige.[28] One need only visit Opus Dei properties to observe the conspicuous display of wealth.

The Marquis of Peralta

In January 1968, The Official State Bulletin in Madrid published the following Ministry of Justice announcement:

Don José María Escrivá de Balageur y Albás has requested the rehabilitation of the title of Marquis, granted on 12 February 1718 by the Archduke Charles of Austria to Don Tomas de Peralta, the interested party having chosen in grace the distinction of Marquis of Peralta. The provisions of Article 4 of the Decree 4 June 1948 for granting the request having been satisfied, a delay of three months from the publication of this edict exists for any persons wishing to be made known their opposition. Madrid, 24 January 1968.[29]

The notice was signed by the Ministry’s Under Secretary, Alfredo Lopez, an Opus Dei supernumerary.[30]

Opus Dei supporters have maintained that this was not a “puff of pride,” but rather the just exercise of a fundamental right. Monsignor Escrivá insisted that he had not made the request for his own benefit, but that the title was intended to benefit his nephews. He claimed he merely was compensating his family for the sacrifices they had made to permit him to carry out The Work. Official biographers portray it as “a matter of filial piety and justice.”[31]

According to researchers, the Marquisate of Peralta was bestowed upon one of Escrivá‘s more distant ancestors who had been Minister of Justice in Naples following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Monsignor Escrivá had in recent years accepted awards of the Spanish Gold Cross of St. Raymond of Penafort, the Grand Cross of Alfonso X the Wise, the Grand Cross of Isabel the Catholic, and the Cross of Charles III. But to show his modesty, his biographers assure that he never wore them.[32]

[1] http://opusdei.com/.
[2] Hutchison, Robert, Their Kingdom Come: Inside the secret world of Opus Dei, 1999, at p. 20
[3] Walsh, Michael, Opus Dei: An investigation into the secret society struggling for power within the Roman Catholic Church, 1989, at p. 13.
[4] Hutchison, at p. 19.
[5] http://opusdei.com/.
[6] Estruch, Joan, Saints and Schemers: Opus Dei and its paradoxes, 1995, at p. 32.
[7] Id.
[8] [8] Walsh, at p. 14.
[9] Estruch, at p. 32.
[10] Id.
[11] Walsh, at p. 14.
[12] Estruch, at p. 32.
[13] Id.
[14] Id.
[15] Id. at pp. 32-33.
[16] Id. at p. 33.
[17] Opus Dei Awareness Network, Inc., An Interview with Miguel Fisac, 2000, at p. 9.
[18] Opus Dei Awareness Network, Inc., An Interview with Miguel Fisac, 2000, at p. 12.
[19] Estruch, at p. 33.
[20] Id.
[21] Id.
[22] Estruch, at p. 34, citing references.
[23] Id. at p. 35.
[24] Id. at p. 36.
[25] Id. at p. 37, citing references.
[26] Id. at p. 38, citing references.
[27] Id.
[28] Id.
[29] Hutchison at p. 150.
[30] Id.
[31] Id. at p. 151, citing references.
[32] Id. The author goes on to state that after the announcement in the state bulletin that Monsignor Escrivá would adopt the title of Marquis of Peralta, the obvious irony was noted by those unwilling to make excuses for the duality of his message and practice. One joke going around Madrid at the time suggested that “The Way” would be republished as “The Super Highway” by the Marquis of Peralta.