Women in Argentina claim labor exploitation by Opus Dei

By DÉBORA REY

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Lucia Gimenez, from left, Alicia Torancio, and Beatriz Delgado, former Opus Dei domestic workers, pose for a photo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thursday, Oct. 21, 2021. The women have filed a complaint against Opus Dei to the Vatican for alleged labor exploitation, and abuses of power and of conscience. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)


BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Lucía Giménez still suffers pain in her knees from the years she spent scrubbing floors in the men’s bathroom at the Opus Dei residence in Argentina’s capital for hours without pay.

Giménez, now 56, joined the conservative Catholic group in her native Paraguay at the age of 14 with the promise she would get an education. But instead of math or history, she was trained in cooking, cleaning and other household chores to serve in Opus Dei residences and retirement homes.

For 18 years she washed clothes, scrubbed bathrooms and attended to the group’s needs for 12 hours a day, with breaks only for meals and praying. Despite her hard labor, she says: “I never saw money in my hands.”

Giménez and 41 other women have filed a complaint against Opus Dei to the Vatican for alleged labor exploitation, as well as abuse of power and of conscience. The Argentine and Paraguayan citizens worked for the movement in Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, Italy and Kazakhstan between 1974 and 2015.

Opus Dei — Work of God in Latin — was founded by the Spanish priest Josemaría Escrivá in 1928, and has 90,000 members in 70 countries. The lay group, which was greatly favored by St. John Paul II, who canonized Escrivá in 2002, has a unique status in the church and reports directly to the pope. Most members are laymen and women with secular jobs and families who strive to “sanctify ordinary life.” Other members are priests or celibate lay people.  IT IS A RIGHT WING CONSERVATIVE SECRET SOCIETY WITHIN THE CHURCH

The complaint alleges the women, often minors at the time, labored under “manifestly illegal conditions” that included working without pay for 12 hours-plus without breaks except for food or prayer, no registration in the Social Security system and other violations of basic rights.

The women are demanding financial reparations from Opus Dei and that it acknowledges the abuses and apologizes to them, as well as the punishment of those responsible.

“I was sick of the pain in my knees, of getting down on my knees to do the showers,” Giménez told The Associated Press. “They don’t give you time to think, to criticize and say that you don’t like it. You have to endure because you have to surrender totally to God.”

In a statement to the AP, Opus Dei said it had not been notified of the complaint to the Vatican but has been in contact with the women’s legal representatives to “listen to the problems and find a solution.”

The women in the complaint have one thing in common: humble origins. They were recruited and separated from their families between the ages of 12 and 16. In some cases, like Gimenez’s, they were taken to Opus Dei centers in another country, circumventing immigration controls.


They claim that Opus Dei priests and other members exercised “coercion of conscience” on the women to pressure them to serve and to frighten them with spiritual evils if they didn’t comply with the supposed will of God. They also controlled their relations with the outside world.

Most of the women asked to leave as the physical and psychological demands became intolerable. But when they finally did, they were left without money. Many also said they needed psychological treatment after leaving Opus Dei.

“The hierarchy (of Opus Dei) is aware of these practices,” said Sebastián Sal, the women’s lawyer. “It is an internal policy of Opus Dei. The search for these women is conducted the same way throughout the world. ... It is something institutional.”

The women’s complaint, filed in September with the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, also points to dozens of priests affiliated with Opus Dei for their alleged “intervention, participation and knowledge in the denounced events.”

The allegations in the complaint are similar to those made by members of another conservative Catholic organization also favored by St. John Paul II, the Legion of Christ. The Legion recruited young women to become consecrated members of its lay branch, Regnum Christi, to work in Legion-run schools and other projects.

Those women alleged spiritual and psychological abuse, of being separated from family and being told their discomfort was “God’s will” and that abandoning their vocation would be tantamount to abandoning God.

Pope Francis has been cracking down on 20th-century religious movements after several religious orders and lay groups were accused of sexual and other abuses by their leaders. Opus Dei has so far avoided much of the recent controversy, though there have been cases of individual priests accused of misconduct.

“We do not have any official notification from the Vatican about the existence of a complaint of this type,” Josefina Madariaga, director of Opus Dei’s press office in Argentina, told the AP. She said the women’s lawyer informed the group last year of their complaints about the lack of contributions to Argentina’s social security system.

“If there is a traumatic experience or one that has left them with a wound, we want to honestly listen to them, understand what happened and from there correct what has to be corrected,” she said.

She added that all the people currently “working on site are paid,” adding that some 80 women currently work for Opus Dei in Argentina.

However, she said, “in the 60′s, 70′s, 80′s, 90′s, society as a whole dealt with these issues in a more informal or family way. ... Opus Dei has made the necessary changes and modifications to accompany the law in force today.”

Beatriz Delgado, who worked for Opus Dei for 23 years in Argentina and Uruguay, said she was told “that I had to give my salary to the director and that everyone gave it. ... It was part of giving to God.”

“They convince you with the vocation, with ‘God calls you, God asks this of you, you cannot fail God.’ ... They hooked me with that,” she said.

So far, the Vatican has not ruled on the complaint and it’s not clear if it will. A Vatican spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for information.

If there is no response, the women’s legal representatives say they will initiate criminal proceedings for “human trafficking, reduction to servitude, awareness control and illegitimate deprivation of liberty” against Opus Dei in Argentina and other countries the women worked in.

Argentine law sanctions human trafficking with prison sentences of four to 15 years. The statute of limitations is 12 years after the alleged crime ceases.

“They say, ‘we are going to help poor people,’ but it’s a lie; they don’t help, they keep (the money) for themselves,” Giménez said. “It is very important to achieve some justice.”

 Christianity and the Global Mystical Societies
September 25, 2020




By Tunji Olaopa NIGERIA

It should be clear to my readers by now, that my dimensioned exploration of Christianity in this series is a journey propelled by an intellectual search for meaning on defining issues that tend to create contention in conversations on the Christian faith and the growth of the Church of Christ. And this had entailed exploring domains of knowledge that ordinarily will be considered weird, and this contribution is one of such. And so, I find myself contending with the fact that, at its core, Christianity is a mystical religion. It indeed embodies several mystical elements that gives it an aura of curiosity and awe. It was also one of the bases for its persecution in time past. It was difficult, for instance, for many non-adherents to come to terms with the idea of the trinity, of the three-in-one God, or of the mystery of salvation. It was even more baffling to contemplate the idea of the Holy Communion and what it signifies. The Bible records, in Matthew chapter 26, and verse 26, Jesus instructed to eat the bread and drink the wine as indicators of his body and his blood. Catholics, in taking the Eucharist, believe that the bread and the wine signify the literal body and blood of Christ; the water and wine are transubstantiated when eaten into the body and blood of Jesus.

One can imagine the shock-effect of this dogma on a cultural context like the ancient Roman society. Under Emperor Diocletian and Galerius, Christians faced enormous persecution, especially during the Great Persecution of 303, when they were accused of cannibalism which the belief in the Eucharist generated. Christianity’s relationship with mysticism and the mystical experience began with Catholicism. One of the sources of the mystical union with God is in the supposed transformation of the Eucharist into the body and the blood of Christ. The mystical is so easy to relate to any religion, given the dynamics of hidden rituals and the relation with the mysterious which is what makes religion essentially what it is. Scriptures, for instance, have often been seen as not having literal meanings. When the Bible says, in Deuteronomy 29:29, that “secret things belong to God,” it alludes to the mystical dimension of scriptures that must be ferret out for understanding.


The Gnostics, of the first century AD, emphasized gnosis—or personal spiritual knowledge and experience of the Divine, over tradition and authority of the Church. This rendering of the idea of the mystical relationship with God brings Christianity very close to Greek philosophy, and especially the emergence and consolidation of Neoplatonism, and the understanding of the beauty of the human contemplation of the Logos or the Word. This is the foundation of the Gospel according to John: In the beginning was the Word. From Clement of Alexandria and his mystical theology, it was a short distance to the development of monasticism and asceticism, the experience in the desert that is supposed to mark a great turning point in the soul’s union with God through the defeat of the self’s demons. While the pre-13th century Christian mysticism denoted Christ as the medium in the union between God and the soul, the 13th century mystical writings, especially of Meister Eckhart, obviated the need for such a medium—God and the soul becomes indistinguishably one in union. This mysticism declared irrelevant the significance of religious life and practices, and rather advocated a radical aloofness that is a precursor to achieving the presence of God.

It is easy to see how Eckhart’s mysticism would serve as heretical to the teaching of the church about the connection between the sacraments the church offers, and salvation. Meister Eckhart was therefore condemned by the Pope in 1329. And the 14th century was the beginning of the Church’s acute reaction, through the Council of Vienne, against mysticism. But by the twentieth century, Christianity’s connection with the mystical has gone beyond the theological to the historical, with regard to several mystical societies that were, rightly or wrongly, regarded as having some intimate relationship with Christianity. Almost everyone is familiar with the Reformed Ogboni Fraternity (ROF) in Nigeria, and the Rosicrucian Order in the West. Both are in some sense connected or seek to be connected with Christianity as a defining brand. Indeed, both emerged from some understanding of what Christianity is and how it could be reformed or integrated with some theological or cultural beliefs. The Ogboni was a renowned traditional secret society in the traditional Yoruba society, and yet the ROF chose that framework as the core of its rehabilitation of African Christianity.

The case of Rosicrucianism is even more instructive. It emerged, in the 17th century, around the figure of a mystic philosopher and doctor, Christian Rosenkreuz (where the Order derived its name, Rosy-cross), and his knowledge of an esoteric order and knowledge, derived from Christian mysticism and even the Judaic Kabbalah. The Rosicrucians believed that the mysteries are what Jesus referred to in Matthew chapter 13 and verse 11 (“…it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven”). Similar to the vision, in Revelation, about the twenty-four elders kneeling before the throne of God, one of the iterations of the vision behind Rosicrucianism is that of twelve enlightened and exalted beings that surround a thirteenth who is Rosenkreuz. The mission of these beings, as well as all those who would accept the Order and its message, is to reform the entire mankind through the unveiling of the inner spiritual capacities which will allow humans to live in altruism.

However, the consciousness of these mystical societies was awakened most shockingly by Dan Brown, and his popular fictions, from the Da Vinci Code to Angels and Demons. From these popular novels, the world seemed to wake up to the reality of other frightening effusion of Christianity like the Illuminati, the Opus Dei, the Freemasons, and the Knights Templar. All these societies are often represented as being the secret custodians of gnostic knowledge about Christianity or certain hidden mysteries in the word of God. And around them have sprung up all manners of conspiracy theories around, for instance, the Holy Grail, the shroud that wrapped Jesus after his death, or a bit of the cross). Their relationship with Christianity is however caught in the conflicting dynamics of history and speculation that is very difficult to unravel.

One fundamental fact about these societies and orders is that they were generated by presumed or real connectedness with Christianity as grand and compelling growing brand. Most of them emerged by reason of historical circumstances or theological dynamics. The Knight Templars, for instance, came into existence mainly as a result of the Crusades which popes and kings in Europe convoke between the 11th and the 13th centuries. The objective of the Crusades was to dislodge Islam from the Holy Land. By the end of the fourteenth century, the Templars’ reputation as a monastic order and a military wing was at an end. While Pope Clement revoked its recognition by the Catholic Church in 1312, it was brutally suppressed by King Philip IV of France. Part of King Philip’s excuse in suppressing the Templars has to do with their secret initiation ceremony, and the distrust it bred. And this led to further conspiracy as to its ancient ties with the establishment of Freemasonry. The same can be said about the Opus Dei. Founded by Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, a Catholic priest, Opus Dei came into existence after the priest claimed to have seen a vision of “opus dei” (or “Work of God”). It grew substantially after it received papal commendation in 1947 and 1950. However, despite the growth and strength of the Order, its papal approval and the canonization of Escriva, Opus Dei has not been able to escape the speculation about its mystical antecedents, and the danger it poses to the Church. Again, its secret recruitment dynamics fueled the rumor about its cult status.

Perhaps the most famous of all the global mystical societies is the Illuminati. Unlike the other societies, the Illuminati is the one famous group without a fundamental connection to the Church but to Christianity. However, like others, from the Reformed Ogboni Fraternity to the Opus Dei, the organizational dynamics of the Illuminati is equally shrouded in secrecy. Essentially, like the others too, the original Illuminati recruited Christians and specifically excluded Jews and pagans. Founded in May, 1776 in Bavaria by Adam Weishaupt (hence the society’s original name of the Bavarian Illuminati), the Illuminati’s original objective, paradoxically, was meant to serve the purpose of pushing the boundaries of the Enlightenment ideals, and standing against superstitions, injustices, clerical excesses. Weishaupt was a professor at a university run by Jesuits who waged war against non-clerical members of staff. This was one of his motivations for forming the group. The key to understanding the organizational framework of the Iluminati lies in the fact that Weishaupt modeled his own society on the ranking and grading systems employed by the Freemasons, considered to be the largest secret society in the world. Both are significantly anticlerical, and even though both have been persecuted by the Church, they both draw on Christians and Christian values as major parts of their frameworks.

The critical question this reflection instigates is: why was it possible for Christianity to generate so much mystical and secret societies that flourished under its umbrella or took up its values and ethos (before some were actively suppressed)? One immediate answer, as we hinted at the beginning, is that Christianity itself lends itself to mystical interpretations of its mysteries. Christianity itself is founded on a fundamental dynamic of relationship between humans and God, the ultimate mystery. And this divine relationship is further made complex by series of mysteries, dogmas and sacraments that are meant to facilitate the capacity of humans to achieve oneness with God. We can then conclude that while there is a specific essence of Christianity—a set of minimum spiritual and dogmatic imperatives—no one can adequately monitor the heretical and fundamentalist interpretations that they could be subjected to. The point remains that humans can go to any extent to find God.

*Prof. Tunji Olaopa is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary & Directing Staff, National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, Jos (tolaopa2003@gmail.com tolaopa@isgpp.com.ng)

NOW YOU UNDERSTAND WHY CONSPIRACY THEORIES ARE THE NORM IN NIGERIA AND WEST AFRICA

U$A

DEI efforts are under siege. Here’s what experts say is at stake

Story by By Nicquel Terry Ellis and Catherine Thorbecke, CNN  • 

When the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police set off a wave of racial unrest across the country in 2020, corporate America responded swiftly with renewed and public commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

Major companies created new DEI positions or expanded teams dedicated to DEI and the phrase became a buzzword across the business landscape. Many corporate leaders pledged to hire more people of color, removed branding perceived to be racist and invested in historically Black colleges

At the time, the efforts were largely met with public support, amid a so-called “racial reckoning” that laid bare a slew of systemic inequities in American society, including the workplace.

But nearly four years later, the very public ousting of Harvard’s first Black woman president earlier this week has led to a new firestorm of debate about DEI efforts in corporate America and beyond.

While Claudine Gay’s resignation from Harvard was linked to a plagiarism scandal and ongoing controversy over a congressional hearing on antisemitism last month, her departure inspired some critics to take aim at what they perceive as a broader failing of DEI efforts.

Among the most vocal of these critics pushing back against DEI is billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who in the wake of Gay’s departure posted a 4,000-word opus on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that blasted DEI as “inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.”

Ackman’s lengthy thesis was later retweeted by billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who now owns the social media platform.

“DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on anyone who uses it,” Musk wrote in his post sharing Ackman’s screed on Wednesday. In a follow-up post, the world’s wealthiest person doubled down, adding, “DEI, because it discriminates on the basis of race, gender and many other factors, is not merely immoral, it is also illegal.”

As some of the most powerful business leaders in America level some of the loudest attacks yet against DEI, experts in the field insist that the term is widely misunderstood and unfairly weaponized by critics. They tell CNN DEI was created to build workplaces that more broadly reflect all of America and to foster safer, more inclusive work environments for people of all races, genders, sexual orientations and religious identities.

And they argue that the people fighting these efforts now risk alienating both employees and customers.

When DEI disappears

DEI initiatives in corporate America have long faced skepticism from both sides of the political aisle – with some voices on the left blasting these efforts as corporate window dressing that focuses more on publicity than enacting real change for people of color in the workplace.

Others on the right, meanwhile, have taken aim at these efforts, which they say unfairly disadvantage White workers.

Daniel Oppong, founder of The Courage Collective, a consultancy that advises companies on DEI, said the backlash toward DEI is unsurprising because other efforts to advance social justice in the US have historically been met with resistance.

What’s getting lost in the conversation, Oppong said, is the reason DEI was introduced to corporate America in the first place – because marginalized communities did not always have equal opportunities for jobs or feel a sense of belonging in corporate settings.

“That is the genesis of why some of these programs exist,” he said. “It was an attempt to try to create workplaces where more or all people can thrive.”

Shaun Harper, a USC professor and founder and executive director of the USC Race and Equity Center, said there are many misconceptions about DEI. It wasn’t, as some critics have claimed, created to exclude White people or White men from the workforce, he said.

Harper said many companies with DEI offices offer training that teaches employees how to unlearn stereotypes against certain groups, respect each other’s differences, and hire people of color without overlooking them because of personal bias.

“It’s not all divisive,” he said. “People can learn the skills that are needed to deliver on diversity and inclusion values.”

A pendulum swing

After a DEI hiring spree that began in late 2020, data suggests some businesses are now in fact reversing course on their efforts.

The most recent data on hiring from the job site Indeed shared with CNN Friday illustrates a pendulum swing in postings for DEI-related roles on the site.

After a more than 29% uptick in job postings with DEI in the title or description between November 2020 and November 2021, the data shows a more than 23% decline in the amount of job postings with “DEI” in the title or description between November 2022 and November 2023.

Corporate leaders who dismantle DEI programs risk creating a hostile work environment, Harper said.

“Leaders who are pulling the plug on DEI are doing so without understanding the long-term exposure to harm,” he said. “Doing away with DEI makes companies more – not less – susceptible to lawsuits, to costly levels of turnover among employees, reputational harm not only among employees but also among customers and clients and prospective partners who will refuse to work with a place because it’s such a mess.”

Separate data from the Pew Research Center published last May indicates deep divides in Americans’ attitudes towards DEI at work based on demographic and political lines.

While the Pew data finds that a majority of employed American adults (56%) say focusing on increasing DEI at work is a good thing, it also notes that a relatively small share of workers place a lot of importance on diversity at their workplace. Only about three in 10 respondents say it is extremely or very important to them to work somewhere with a mix of employees of different races and ethnicities or ages, according to Pew.

Moreover, the survey found 78% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning workers say focusing on DEI at work is a good thing, compared with just 30% of Republican and Republican-leaning workers.

The data also shows American workers have disparate views on how much attention their employers are paying to DEI. About half of the workers (54%) surveyed by Pew said their company or organization pays the right amount of attention to increasing DEI, while 14% say their employer pays too much attention and 15% say their employees pay too little attention.

The political and cultural divide was also reflected in the responses to posts from Ackman and Musk. Mark Cuban, billionaire businessman and minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks, pushed back on Musk’s posts in a thread defending DEI as good for businesses and their workers.

“The loss of DEI-Phobic companies is my gain,” Cuban wrote. “Having a workforce that is diverse and representative of your stakeholders is good for business.”

Cuban is far from alone. Hundreds of C-suite executives in the United States said their organizations remained committed or increased diversity, equity and inclusion efforts since 2022, according to a survey published this month by the employment law firm Littler.

More than half of the executives who answered the survey agreed that backlash toward corporate DEI efforts has increased since the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in June, but 69% said it has not caused their organization to change its approach to DEI efforts.

Still, Harper said the recent backlash against DEI, along with the exodus of people in DEI roles at major companies in the last two years, demonstrates that many diversity commitments in 2020 were short-lived.

“Many companies jumped on the bandwagon at the moment because it was fashionable and en vogue to do so,” Harper said.

Oppong said he feels companies are experiencing “diversity fatigue” because their 2020 initiatives were not sustainable.

“Part of the challenge is that a lot of folks in chief DEI office roles, they were not set up for success in the first place,” he said, adding that colleagues in the field have told him they’ve had to fight for funding for their teams.

“That just shows the surface level investment in the work.”

Still, Oppong said, as the US becomes more diverse, so are the consumers for many major companies.

“The consequence is you’re not going to effectively serve the shifting demographics of the (country) and it reduces your customer base,” he said.

CNN’s Nicole Chavez contributed to this report.

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Opus Dei: Spain under influence of ultra-conservative Catholic movement
SECRET SOCIETY

27/03/2026 - 
12:31 min

The ultra-conservative Catholic organisation Opus Dei was founded a century ago in Spain. Today, it's an international movement with around 90,000 members. In its home country, it has managed to infiltrate all spheres of modern society, from schools to hospitals. Despite serious allegations against it, Opus Dei remains a powerful force in Spain. 

FRANCE 24's Maude Petit-Jové, Mathilde Lopinski, Emile Roger and Sarah Morris report.

BY:

Maude Petit-Jové

Mathilde Lopinski

Sarah MORRIS

Emile Roger

JINGOIST ANTI CHINESE, RACISM FROM THE DROOLING LIPS OF AGENT OF OPUS DEI POMPEO

Chinese students ‘shouldn’t be in our schools spying’, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says

‘We’re taking seriously the threat of students who come here who have connections deeply to the Chinese state,’ politician tells Fox News

US needs to act against the ‘tyrannical regime’ of the Chinese Communist Party, and President Trump is ready to take on that challenge, he says

Linda Lew Published: 29 May, 2020

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the US is ready to respond to the problem of Chinese students engaging in espionage in America. Photo: Reuters

US President Donald Trump is preparing to “take on” the problem of Chinese students engaging in espionage in America, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday.

“We’re taking seriously the threat of students who come here who have connections deeply to the Chinese state,” he said in an interview with Fox News.

“They shouldn’t be here in our schools spying.”

Pompeo was responding to questions about a report published by The New York Times on Thursday that the US was planning to revoke the visas of Chinese students and researchers who have direct links to Chinese universities affiliated to the country’s military.

While he declined to elaborate, Pompeo said Trump would hold a press conference on Friday at which it was likely he would make an announcement on the issue.

“We know we have this challenge,” he said. “President Trump, I am confident, is going to take that on.”

He dismissed suggestions that targeting Chinese students and academics might be seen as racist, but said the US needed to act against the “tyrannical regime” of the Chinese Communist Party, likening the situation to the tense relationship the US had with the former Soviet Union during the Cold War.

At a press conference on Friday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian also referred to a Cold War mentality, accusing the Trump administration of racism and the “political repression” of Chinese students.

Pompeo dismissed suggestions that targeting Chinese students and academics might be seen as racist. Photo: Xinhua

Pompeo’s comments came after a group of three US lawmakers on Wednesday proposed a bill that would effectively bar students from the Chinese mainland from receiving visas to study STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects in America. The restriction would not apply to students from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

“The Chinese Communist Party has long used American universities to conduct espionage on the United States,” said Republican Senator Tom Cotton, one of the sponsors of the bill and a known critic of Beijing.

“What’s worse is that their efforts exploit gaps in current law. It’s time for that to end,” he said. “The Secure Campus Act will protect our national security and maintain the integrity of the American research enterprise.”

The proposed restrictions on Chinese students come amid a spiralling political spat between Washington and Beijing.

Earlier this month, the US imposed 90-day visa limits on mainland Chinese journalists working in America for non-US outlets, while in March, China revoked the press credentials for American journalists from three major US newspapers and declared five US media outlets to be foreign government functionaries.

Both sides’ moves have been criticised for threatening press freedom at a time when objective and independent coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic is critical.

“Beijing has barred Chinese citizens from working for foreign news outlets in China for decades,” Mia Li, a former reporter with the Beijing bureau of The New York Times, said in an article published by Chinese Storytellers, an online newsletter by non-fiction writers.

It was a “deliberate effort to keep the Western press from gaining meaningful access”, she said.

It is astonishing to see the US helping Beijing achieve that very goal while undermining its own values and soft power,” said Li, who is now a research scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Centre.

Additional reporting by Catherine Wong

Abortion Not A Sin

It's Easter.

For just one week, priests in Malta and Gozo will be able to grant forgiveness to sins related to abortion, heresy, apostasy, and schisms.

So Abortion is not a sin but a violation of church doctrine. Glad they cleared that up.

Heresy, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a "theological or religious opinion or doctrine maintained in opposition, or held to be contrary, to the Roman Catholic or Orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church, or, by extension, to that of any church, creed, or religious system, considered as orthodox. By extension, heresy is an opinion or doctrine in philosophy, politics, science, art, etc., at variance with those generally accepted as authoritative."

One who commits apostasy is an apostate, or one who apostatises literature, the term typically referred to . In older Westernbaptized Christians who left their faith.

A schismatic is a person who creates or incites schism in an organization or who is a member of a splinter group.

You see in Malta abortion is morally and legally not sanctioned. Yet women will still get abortions regardless of male priests and male law makers. Because making abortion illegal is not only stupid it endangers womens health.

Blindness no excuse for abortion - Health Division

A woman who risks suffering blindness by going through with her pregnancy will not be allowed to carry out an abortion in Malta. This puts Malta in the same league as Poland – a country which was this week found guilty of violating the human rights of a 35-year-old mother, refused an abortion despite warnings that having the baby could make her go blind.

“Abortion in Malta is illegal and is not allowed under any circumstance,” Dr Ray Busuttil, Director General of the Health Division, told MaltaToday when asked whether abortion is allowed in cases where a Maltese mother risks blindness if she proceeds with her pregnancy.
On Tuesday, Polish resident Alicja Tysiac, an unemployed single mother of thee, was awarded EURO 25,000 (LM10,500) in damages by the European Court of Justice.

When Alicja Tysiac became pregnant in February 2000, three eye specialists told her having another baby could put her eyesight at serious risk. But neither the specialists nor her GP would authorise an abortion.

After giving birth later that year, Ms Tysiac suffered a retinal haemorrhage and feared she may go blind. She now wears glasses with thick powerful lenses, but still cannot see objects more than a metre and a half away. As a disabled single mother, she struggles to raise her three children on her meagre state pension.

The Strasbourg court ruled that the mother’s human rights had been violated when she was denied an abortion on therapeutic grounds. But the court ruling will not affect Poland’s strict abortion laws, which some right-wing politicians want to make even stricter.

According to Dr Michael Axiaq, the Nationalist MP and Opus Dei member who chairs the National Ethics Board Committee, in such cases one has to choose between “a lesser of two evils” namely the life of the baby and the disability of the mother. “In such cases, our choice should be that of protecting life.”

But priests don't care for the woman only for the product of her womb. She is still the sinful vessel, the child on the other hand is pure. Even if the woman is raped. The child is holy, the mother a harlot, the rapist; probably a priest.

Thank goodness such religious stupidity is against the law in the EU.

See

Abortion

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abortion, DNA, RNA, sterlitiy, infertility, sex, relgion, Onan, sin, murder, embryo, embryonic, fetus, fetal, Christianity, Catholic, anti-choice, men, mens-sexuality, health, anti-abortion

Bolsonaro's indictment in Brazil stirs conservative Christian supporters' outrage

SÃO PAULO (RNS) — After police indicted 37 individuals, including a Catholic priest, evangelical Christian supporters of the right-wing former president called the investigation an effort by the current president to persecute Brazil's conservatives.

Former President Jair Bolsonaro arrives to speak with the press after being formally charged by the federal police with attempted coup, at the airport in Brasilia, Brazil, Nov. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Eduardo Campos Lima
December 3, 2024
RNS


SÃO PAULO (RNS) — A report released Nov. 26 by Brazil’s federal police details a conspiracy allegedly involving former President Jair Bolsonaro and 36 others to stage a coup to prevent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from taking office in 2023.

The list of 37 indicted individuals, which includes a Roman Catholic priest, was received with outrage by evangelical Christian supporters of the right-wing former president, who have called the police investigation an effort by Lula and members of Brazil’s Supreme Court to persecute conservatives in South America’s most populous nation.

According to the report, after Lula won the presidential election in October 2022, Bolsonaro and close members of his entourage, most of them high-ranking military officers, launched a secret operation with the goal of keeping him as president indefinitely.


Their smartphone messages, disclosed in the 884-page police report, suggest the plan was supported by broad segments of the armed forces, including generals and colonels who were allegedly waiting for Bolsonaro’s green light to take control of the government.

RELATED: Christians represented significant faction of capital rioters in Brazil

A parallel inquiry, which resulted in the detention of five people the previous week, asserted that the conspirators planned to kill Lula, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes using explosives or poison. De Moraes headed the investigation into the attempted coup.

The report said the conspirators divided into groups, each assigned different tasks. One group was in charge of spreading fake news about the electoral system, a campaign Bolsonaro had been carrying out since the previous year, claiming that voting machines had allowed Lula to skew the presidential vote.

Supporters of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro kneel to pray as they storm the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, Brazil, Jan. 8, 2023. Planalto is the official workplace of the president of Brazil. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

The Rev. José Eduardo de Oliveira e Silva, a Catholic priest who is a spiritual adviser to the Brazilian Union of Catholic Jurists, was allegedly assigned to the so-called judicial group, which police say was asked to establish a legal basis for the military intervention, mostly making use of Article 142 of the Brazilian Constitution. The article gives the armed forces responsibility for guaranteeing law and order, often interpreted by the far right as a permission to intervene in a constitutional crisis. In April, the country’s high court ruled that the military’s duties did not include staging a coup.

A vicar in the city of Osasco, outside São Paulo, Silva has connections to the Opus Dei and earned a Ph.D. in moral theology at the organization’s University of the Holy Cross in Rome. He was a close friend of Olavo de Carvalho, an ideologue of Brazil’s far right until his death in 2022.

The report documented several trips Silva took to Brasilia in November and December 2022, where he had contact with some of the alleged conspirators, including Filipe Martins, special adviser to Bolsonaro and a friend of Olavo de Carvalho.

The Rev. José Eduardo de Oliveira e Silva in an Instagram post. (Video screen grab)

Miguel Vidigal, Silva’s attorney and the president of the Catholic jurist group, said in a statement that Silva visited Brasilia and talked to the others named in the indictments as part of his work as a priest, which has included campaigns against abortion.

Vidigal accused the federal police of a fishing expedition and accused the police of violating the confidentiality afforded priests and those he counsels.

With more than 430,000 followers on Instagram, Silva is known for his public opposition to gender theory and abortion. In the run-up to the 2022 election, he hung a Brazilian flag from his pulpit. His social media posts show that he’s close to influential members of the Bolsonarist faction.

In a message to a fellow priest included in the report, Silva said Catholics and evangelicals should pray to give the defense minister and 16 other generals “courage to save Brazil.”

Silva had already surrendered his cellphone to the authorities earlier this year in connection with an earlier investigation and was barred from leaving the country.

It’s not clear yet if Bolsonaro, Silva and the other indicted conspirators will be detained. Since the report was released, evangelical Christian leaders allied with the former president have expressed anger and pledged to take to streets if he’s arrested.

“We will react if they maliciously imprison him. There will be a national reaction,” evangelical leader and Congressman Sóstenes Cavalcante told RNS, adding that in Brazil “there’s no legal safety anymore, all that is left is Alexandre de Moraes persecuting conservatives and right-wingers.”

Pastor Aloizio Penido, a prominent Baptist, told RNS that the left “wants to prevent Bolsonaro from getting back to presidency, the same way they did with [U.S. President Donald] Trump.”

“But in the U.S. they failed, because people still breathe the air of democracy there,” he said.

Penido also thinks that it’s only a matter of political persecution of conservatives. “A convicted criminal was ‘de-convicted’ and is now in the presidency,” he said, referring to Lula. “With Bolsonaro they want to do the opposite; they want to condemn an innocent.”

After serving as president from 2003 to 2011, Lula was convicted for bribery crimes in 2017 and imprisoned for 580 days. Sergio Moro, the judge who oversaw his case, later became Bolsonaro’s Justice minister. After suspicions of political intrigue were raised, Lula’s sentences were vacated in 2021, allowing him to run for president in 2022.

Conservative Catholics have registered criticisms of the current investigation on social media, especially lay members of the Charismatic Catholic Renewal and members of ultratraditionalist groups.

A man passes a street vendor’s towels for sale featuring Brazilian presidential candidates Jair Bolsonaro, center, and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in Brasilia, Brazil, Sept. 27, 2022. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

According to Vinicius Borges Gomes, a communications professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais who has studied the Catholic right wing in Brazil, the alleged involvement of a clergyman in the conspiracy is surprising. “The participation of clerics in the diffusion of radical rhetoric has always been evident, but it was not clear yet if priests were actually involved in plans for a coup,” he said.

RELATED: Presidential standoff becomes a holy war in Brazil

But Borges Gomes said the relationship between priests and far-right politicians is in line with a growing closeness between the new right and Catholic leaders around the world. “Many Catholic leaders talk about a ‘spiritual war’ and tell their followers to combat those who they don’t agree with.”

Others said there may be limits to how far Bolsonaro’s evangelical bloc in Congress is willing to go. An aide to the bloc who asked to remain anonymous told RNS, “Many members have a pragmatic relationship with the Lula administration and seek to take advantage of it.”

Ecuador congress backs limited right to abortion in case of rape

Online News EditorFebruary 17, 2022

 

Quito, Feb 17 (EFE).- Ecuador’s National Assembly voted Thursday to allow abortion when a pregnancy is the result of rape, but with restrictions opposed by feminists.

After the original text failed to garner the 70 votes needed to pass, the draft was modified to permit abortion up to the 12th week for most adult women, with an extension to the 18th week for minors and women in rural areas.

President Guillermo Lasso, a political conservative and member of the predominantly lay Catholic organization Opus Dei, has 30 days to either sign the measure into law or veto it.

Lawmakers acted on an April 2021 ruling from Ecuadorian Constitutional Court mandating decriminalization of abortion in cases of rape.

Lasso, who has held that life begins at conception, vowed to respect the court decision.

“Today the congress made a majority decision after a wide, participative, lay and democratic debate about a bill of great importance for the present and future of the girls, adolescents and women of this country,” Assembly speaker Guadalupe Llori said after the legislation passed.

Activists on both sides of the abortion issue gathered outside the capitol early Thursday ahead of the vote.

Some of the abortion-rights protesters sat partially undressed holding up signs describing the plight of women forced to bear children resulting from rape.

“Kelly should be playing with her friends, but she is taking care of her rapist’s son,” read one message. “Paty is 11 years old and needs an emergency caesarian after a pregnancy caused by rape. The doctors say her body is very small and she could die.”

Abortion opponents, meanwhile, insisted that termination should never be permitted.

“Whatever the circumstance of conception, it is a life!,” was the sentiment displayed on a poster carried by members of a group identifying themselves as pro-life residents of Quito.

Feminist campaigner Veronica Vera told Efe before the vote in congress that the National Assembly had already failed women.

Going forward, she said, activists will fill suits in “international and domestic courts for every death of a raped girl or woman, for every woman and girl forced into maternity.” EFE fgg-sm/dr

Gothic becomes Latin America’s go-to genre as writers turn to the dark side

A ghoulish shadow has been cast over Latin American literature.

 Illustration: Vivian Chen/The Guardian


The region used to be almost synonymous with magic realism but recent bestselling fiction draws on a legacy of dictatorship, poverty and sinister folklore


Mat Youkee in Bogotá
@matyoukee
Sun 31 Oct 2021 

A young man follows the bloody trail of his CIA father, through Paraguayan torture chambers and the sites of Andean massacres. An Ecuadorian artist fantasizes about running a scalpel through the tongue of her mute twin. In a Buenos Aires cemetery, teenage fans devour a rock star’s rotting remains.

These grisly scenes – and many more like them – populate the pages of Latin America’s recent bestselling fiction. From the Andes to the Amazon and to the urban sprawl of some of the world’s biggest cities, a ghoulish shadow has been cast over Latin American literature.

It’s a dark departure for a region often synonymous with magical realism. Since the 1967 publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude the region’s writers have often lived in the shadow of Macondo, the novel’s tropical and fantastical Colombian town, decrying the expectation – usually from western editors – that they deploy the “magical realist algorithm” in their work.

Now, a new generation of writers are striking a much darker tone. They take their inspiration from the dictatorships and terrorism of the late 20th century, the poverty and violence of the region’s modern cities and the most sinister elements of the region’s rich but neglected folklore. Macondo has turned macabre.

Mariana Enriquez. Photograph: Martina Bocchio/Awakening/Alamy

“When I read García Márquez he seems like a writer from another time,” said Mariana Enriquez, an Argentinian author whose short story collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker prize. “The continent had another mood. We were young countries and despite decades of poverty and conflict, there was hope, the future seemed bright. I wonder if that optimism’s gone now.”

Even before Latin America became the region hardest hit by the coronavirus, the continent was gripped by a deep malaise. A decade of stunted growth, ecological disasters, rising crime and a return of authoritarian governments of both left and right has fueled major protest movements across the region.

There are many echoes of the 1980s, a formative decade for many of the authors finding success today.

“I remember a sense of dread, a sense of fear,” said Enriquez, who grew up during Argentina’s dictatorship. “We kids knew that the adults weren’t telling us things.”


‘A feeling of deja vu’: author Sergio Ramírez on ex-comrade Ortega and Nicaraguan history repeating

The betrayal of children by their parents and the complex emotional response towards the families of the disappeared are common themes in her writing. Her latest prize-winning novel Our Part of the Night (due in its English translation in 2022) centers on the relationship of a father and son who are exploited as mediums by an occult sect which takes its victims under the cover provided by the junta’s disappearances.

With the return to democracy, the crimes of the period were laid bare in newspapers. “These were my first horror narratives. A generation of children were fed with this kind of narrative once the secret was out,” said Enriquez.

The current mood represents a resurgence – rather than an emergence – of horror fiction in a region long steeped in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft, said the Peruvian novelist Gustavo Faverón Patriau.

“Poe was incredibly influential in Latin America, but the renaissance of the gothic in Peru started with [leftist rebel group] the Shining Path in the 1990s. The guerrillas and the military response generated so many bloody and cruel stories that many writers felt they had to return to the language of the gothic to tell them.”
Relatives of victims killed in a 1980s army massacre in southern Peru carry their coffins during a burial ceremony at the village of Putis in the outskirts of Ayacucho in 2009. Photograph: Reuters/Alamy

His claustrophobic, gory novel Vivir Abajo is an often subterranean voyage across South America, taking in Maoist massacres, CIA torture squads, Nazi scientists and the maddening production of Werner Herzog’s 1982 Peruvian epic Fitzcarraldo.

“While the writers of the Boom often covered dark topics, there was always a utopian impulse behind them,” he said of the generation of Latin American writers who rose to prominence in the 1960s. “Today all that remains is a clear understanding of the idea of human rights. That’s a positive impulse, but – given Latin America’s recent history – it doesn’t help create optimistic novels.”

Samanta Schweblin. Photograph: Steffen Roth/The Observer

And terror has increasingly become the favored genre with which to allegorize the region’s myriad of seemingly intractable social problems. Fever Dream, a novella by the Argentinian author Samantha Schweblin, tackles the ecological hazards of monoculture soya plantations, but it does so with slow-acting poison and soul-swapping rituals.

Even García Márquez’s grandson is writing in the horror genre.

A more daily terror, that of modern city life, is evident in the writing of Monica Ojeda, who grew up in the Ecuadorian coastal city of Guayaquil. Her fiction touches topics such as domestic violence, body dysmorphia, incest and femicide.


Mateo García Elizondo: ‘I get a little bored by having to talk about my grandfather’

“The violence that affected me was the everyday violence of the city,” she said. “Of not being able to go out for fear of being raped or killed. Of having to accompany my friends to clandestine abortion clinics, of not getting taxis for fear of being kidnapped, of not drinking for fear of having something in my drink.” Her latest novel, Jawbone, features a teenage student at an Opus Dei college and a fan of “creepy pasta” internet memes held hostage by her literature teacher.

As with Enriquez, her work often fuses indigenous mythology with the terrors of the modern world, urban myths and the dark web. “I find it fascinating how the ancestral meets with the rabidly modern in our cities and in the Andean páramos [moorland],” she said.

“I was born in a wild city which floods every year bringing in crocodiles, frogs and serpents. A city which receives the ashes of active volcanoes. I’ve survived eruptions and earthquakes, and that’s why I like to say my writing [has a] cardiac [quality].”

Pope Francis and the Battle Over Cultural Terrain

The mainstream media is proclaiming that Pope Francis spoke up for the poor and marginalized. What they aren’t mentioning is that he named the system that’s causing so much suffering around the world.

 

by Gary Olson / April 22nd, 2025

“… [W]e should not be fooled: Much of the organized opposition to Francis has nothing to do with how we care for the divorced and remarried. It is this, his trenchant critique of modern capitalism that keeps money flowing to conservative outlets intent on marginalizing what the pope says.’

— Michael Sean Winters, The National Catholic Reporter, 10/29/17.

So far, we have the still unsubstantiated allegations by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò that Pope Francis covered up sex abuses by the now disgraced Theodore McCarrick, the Cardinal who oversaw Washington, D.C. churches from 2001-2006. Vigano named 32 other senior clerics, all allies of Pope Francis, and called for the pontiff’s resignation.

Although I remain highly skeptical of Vigano’s charges, I’m reluctant to draw any hard conclusions at this juncture. And being neither a Catholic nor a believer, I don’t have an ecclesiastical dog collar in this fight. However, my sense is that this matter is far more serious than a civil war within the Church, and that larger context warrants our attention.

Pope Francis has provoked powerful opponents who are outright bigots regarding what the pope terms “below-the-belt issues,” issues that he believes receive far too much attention by the Church. However, according to biographer Paul Vallely, it was Francis’s shift in emphasis to issues of economic justice that was so “deeply disconcerting to those who sat comfortably atop the hierarchy of the distribution of the world’s wealth.” (P. 405) In response to my written query, Villanova University Professor Massimo Faggioli, an expert on Vatican and global politics, responded, “This is a key issue to understanding the present moment.”

Here, it’s important to note that the pope’s radical political metamorphosis preceded his ascension to the papacy. According to Vallely, it was not until Jorge Mario Bergoglio (the future Pope Francis) was nearing 50 years old that he fully grasped that capitalism was to blame for making and keeping people poor. And it wasn’t a Saul-to-Paul on the road to Damascus moment.

Bergoglio had been elected Procurate of Argentina’s Jesuits in 1987, but it was a rocky tenure, and he later acknowledged making “hundreds of errors,” including a rigid and authoritarian leadership style that was off-putting to his fellow Jesuits. His own journey to a profound personal change began when his superiors in Rome sent him to the Argentine city of Córdoba, a forced exile during which time the Church hierarchy virtually ignored him.

During this period of intense soul-searching and close interaction with ordinary people on the street, he gradually underwent an inner transformation and a radically altered political vision. He returned as an auxiliary bishop and was named Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998. Bergoglio’s actions soon earned him the informal title “Bishop of the Slums,” while his strong social advocacy, which employed the language of Liberation Theology, earned him the intense enmity of Argentina’s most influential economic actors.

Bergoglio became Pope Francis in 2013, the first Jesuit and first non-European to be elected in over 1,200 years. From his first day in office, those who believed he’d follow in the conservative tradition of John Paul II and Benedict were quickly disabused of that notion. From washing the feet of a young female Muslim prisoner to his first visit outside Rome to the “boat people” island of Lampedusa, where he expressed solidarity with illegal African economic refugees, Francis sided with the wretched of the earth. But it was his excoriating, systematic critique of global capitalism and free market fundamentalists when he linked symptoms and cause that alarmed global economic elites:

+In his papal exhortation “Joy of the Gospels,” he wrote “We have to say ‘Thou shalt not kill’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.”

+ He wrote that some people defend “trickle down theories which have never been confirmed by facts…and express crude and naive faith in the goodness of those wielding power.” In his home country, Francis had observed the cruel consequences of IMF policies on the most vulnerable.

+ He described an amoral, throwaway culture where the elderly are deemed “no longer useful” and the poor are “leftovers.”

+ Offshore banking, credit default swaps and derivatives were described as “proximate immorality.”

+ His encyclical, Laudatory si’: On Caring for our Common Home,” named capitalism as a primary cause of climate change and in preparing the document Francis consulted with Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff, the leading theorist of Liberation Theology.

+ Echoing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the pope proclaimed that “Working for a just distribution of the fruits of the earth and human labor is not mere philanthropy. It is a moral obligation. For Christians, the responsibility is even greater. It is a commandment.”

+ Francis directly challenged Washington’s rationale for its war on terrorism by saying that because “the socioeconomic system is unjust at its root, violence and conflict are inevitable.” Further, wars in the Middle East are not about Islam but a consequence of political and economic interests where disenfranchised people turn to desperate measures. He concluded that “Capitalism is terror against all humanity.”

Given the intellectual heft of his argument, the fact that he represents some 1.3 billion Catholics and arguably possesses the world’s foremost moral credentials, the pope’s political enemies were at a disadvantage in fighting ideological battles on his turf. While biding their time, as John Gehring noted in The American Prospect, major Catholic businesspersons threatened to withhold sizable financial donations to the Church. Influential Catholics and publishing outlets set out to discredit the revolutionary pope. For example, the Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore, a Catholic, wrote in Forbes Magazine that Francis had “aligned himself with the far left and has embraced a philosophy that would make people poor and less free.”

To achieve a more decisive impact, the pope’s enemies needed to conjure up an issue or wait for one. Vagano’s allegations about a Vatican cover-up either fell on their laps or were deposited there. If Francis could be smeared over this matter, his moral authority on matters closer to their hearts would be tarnished. And barring a definitive resolution, doubts could be sown as a default strategy.

Emblematic of these efforts is the friendship between Vagano and Timothy Busch, an OPUS DEI member and a right-wing, Catholic lawyer and businessperson from California. The August 27, 2018, issue of The New York Times reported that Busch advised Vagano on the letter prior to its publication. Busch also sits on the Board of Governors that owns the National Catholic Register, one of the first outlets to publish Vagano’s 8,000-word, 11-page letter, entitled “Testimony.” Conservative Catholic journalists acknowledged helping to prepare, edit, and distribute the letter. In the meantime, digital Catholic media hostile to Francis worked overtime to undermine him.

The contrast between Francis and Busch couldn’t be more stark. On the one hand, Francis asserts that the manner in which those who run the financial system are trained favors the “advancement of business leaders who are capable, but greedy and unscrupulous.” On the other hand, the Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, D.C, recently renamed its business school the Tim and Steph Busch School of Business after receiving a gift of $15 million from the Busch Family Foundation. Five other donors brought the total to $47 million. Among them was the Koch Family Foundation, which chipped in an additional $10 million even though Koch readily admits he’s not religious, is pro-choice, and approves of same sex marriage. Busch also persuaded Art Ciocca, CEO emeritus of The Wine Group to ante up another $10 million.

In announcing his gift, Busch said it was to help “show how capitalism and Catholicism can work hand in hand,” and he wrote a complementary op-ed in The Wall Street Journal entitled “Teaching Capitalism to Catholics,” in which he claimed that free markets are buttressed by moral principles taught by the Catholic Church. In a speech to CUA students, as reported in the Catholic Standard, Busch noted that as the only pontifical university in the United States, “We’re the pope’s business school” and later added, “We realized that a professor in a business school can impact 100,000 students in his or his lifetime.” To the influential, conservative Catholic organization, Legatus: Ambassadors for Christ in the Marketplace, Busch told 160 well-heeled members that the business school’s mission is to “impact how students think.” Note: Lest anyone question his motives, Busch said, “The focus of my life is getting myself into heaven and to help others get there.”

Busch, along with Fr. Robert J. Spritzer, S.J., also co-founded the Napa Institute, which promotes a mix of free-market economics and theology. Among its goals is to “continue the work of the Apostles and their successors.” Napa hosts hundreds of wealthy Catholic philanthropists at its annual gathering, where they hear lectures from conservative bishops, philosophers, and theologians. In a September 5, 2018, letter to Napa’s “constituents,” Busch denied any involvement in Vagano’s letter but otherwise has not responded to further requests for comment. He also encouraged “constituents” to attend Napa’s upcoming conference on how to exert layperson influence on the Vatican.

In closing, Antonio Gramsci, the twentieth-century Marxist, explained that culture, class, and politics are inextricably intertwined. Powerful groups seek to influence culture, targeting the human mind as their primary focus. From the outset of his papacy, Francis sought to alter this landscape by vocalizing how capitalism is the primary cause of social injustice. In doing so, he became a marked man. We’re witnessing one site in the larger struggle for cultural terrain —a battle occurring on many levels, including within the Catholic Church.

(This originally appeared in Counterpunch, September 14, 2018.)FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Gary Olson is Professor Emeritus at Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA. Contact: glolson416@gmail.com. Per usual, thanks to Kathleen Kelly, my in-house ed. Read other articles by Gary.