Opus Dei
The Irish media are tripping over themselves to get to the one of the juciest stories of the month. The archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Diarmuid Martin, has invited Opus Dei into a Dublin parish. Opus Dei…..!!! Just as the ink begins to dry from Dr. Martin’s last scuffle with the press he goes and does this. The nation is horrified because Kathy Sheridan of The Irish Times is horrified. He has taken these….these people….right from the pages of The daVinci Code and dropped them onto Merrion Road. How dare he…
I can’t believe how many people are willing to judge Opus Dei and the Church because of a fictional Hollywood film. I enjoyed reading The daVinci Code. I enjoyed watching The daVinci Code…, but this is absolutely ridiculous. It is fiction. So many people seem to believe everything the read or watch on big screen. Wait…, when there’s a pro-Church film or book the world turns to cynics and imagines far worse and far more sinister than any possible reality.
I’m not an expert on Opus Dei. I don’t no much about them to be honest and so I don’t feel in a position to write about them. I will say this however, the are recognised and held in high esteem by the Pope and the magisterium. I have always said that for a Catholic to disagree with the magisterium they must at the very least study the issue in question. They must find out as much about it as they can and then come to some conclusion. As Christians however they must resist the temptation to judge is the issue is personified.
From the little I do know of Opus Dei I know that the description of them in The Irish Times as “shot through with obsessive secrecy and elitism” is a tad unfair. I know that the claim that “numeraries are required to practise corporal mortification” is false and that the statement that “it is the only Roman Catholic organisation, other than the Church itself, that believes it was created by God” is also false.
The article rests on these statements and they are null and void. It shocks me that our belovéd Irish Times could have gotten it so wrong. If they were to report negatively on Opus Dei with facts, not notions plucked from Dan Brown fiction, then I would consider them and research further…but what we got last Saturday was not real journalism. It was just a transfer of fiction passed off as news.
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 and is filed under The Church.
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