AND ANOTHER THING
Flying monks and green-eyed monsters
PAUL JOHNSON
0 ne of the nastier features of our times is the skilfully mounted smear cam- paign in the media. Among the victims last week were the Duchess of York and Gov- ernor Bill Clinton. But the most vicious and sustained one currently on offer is the effort by certain Catholics to halt the beati- fication of the Venerable Mgr Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, set for 17 May. These are deep waters, Watson, but we must plunge into them.
Saints are a Jewish invention, going back to the Maccabee martyrs. The institution is everything intellectuals hate: populist, democratic, celebrating the eccentricities and extravagances of extreme forms of devotion to God. It was adopted enthusias- tically by the early Christians and most of the saints in the calendar owe their haloes to the common people, voting with their feet by going to shrines and putting their halfpence in the box. They liked, for instance, St Simeon Stylites (390-459) who spent 37 years praying, on a series of ever taller pillars, much of the time with an ulcerated foot 'crawling with maggots'. He spawned hundreds of stylites, many of whom became local saints. The Celtic world abounded in popularly elected saints. There are, for instance, about 300 Irish saints called Coleman. Most of these early saints are very obscure. St Gudwal (6th century) may really have been called God- weld, Gurval or Gallwell. Saints Guerir, Gwinear and Goran may all be one and the same person. We know nothing at all about St Guthlac, other than that he was a total abstainer. No matter. Most if not all of them were holy folk, worth praying to since they carry weight with the Almighty.
From the 12th century a more powerful papacy began to depopularise sanctification and lay down formal procedures before a holy man or woman was admitted to the canon. The process had to take place in Rome and that meant delays and money. Someone whose martyrdom caused an uproar could still, as it were, be swept into heaven by popular acclaim — St Thomas Becket was made a saint in the record time of two years. But from the papacy of Inno- cent 111 (1198-1216) popularity was not enough. Thus Edward II, murdered by hav- ing a red-hot poker thrust up his rectum, was put in a tomb in Gloucester Abbey, which immediately became such a success- ful cult-centre as to give its monks funds to create the Perpendicular style of architec- cure. But he did not make it: a pity, some might say, since he could then have become the patron saint of homosexuals. In gener- al, a cause was and is most likely to succeed under the formal system, if the candidate has the backing of a religious order, a cathedral chapter, a court or a government. But popular clamour, if persistent enough, can still succeed: witness St Bernadette.
Saints are of all temperaments. That is the joy of them. They arouse disgust as well as admiration. Anyone, even an intellectual agnostic, can see the point of St Thomas More (though he was a great flogger of heretics). But who would want to share a cell with the irascible St Jerome, let alone his lion? St Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419) was an outstanding revivalist preacher; others would call him an anti-Semitic rabble-rous- er. St Rose of Lima (1586-1617) bore her frightful sufferings, some self-inflicted, with almost divine heroism; but she can be por- trayed as a sex-starved neurotic. A simple- minded, illiterate man like the 17th-century St Joseph Copertino, known as 'the Flying Monk', can easily be turned into a joke, and Norman Douglas has a lot of fun with him in Old Calabria. But his love of God, the true key to sanctity, was as intense as that generated by the burning intelligence of a St Thomas Aquinas.
Many English Catholics felt it a scandal that four centuries were required to make More a saint. Paul VI began the moderni- sation and speeding-up of the process in 1969 and John Paul II made further reforms in 1983. Escriva's cause, along with hundreds of others, has been the beneficia- ry of these improvements. That is held against him by opponents of Opus Dei. It is said that his cause has been 'specially favoured' by the Pope, 'accelerated' by rule-breaking, and that witnesses and evi- dence hostile to it have been 'suppressed'. There is no truth in these allegations. There are other smears: that Escriva was a supporter of Hitler, that he favoured the 'final solution' and/or was mildly anti- Semitic; that he was a snob, bad-tempered, an intriguer, anti-democratic, a vicious crit- ic of high ecclesiastics; that he became so disgusted with the way the Church was heading that he thought of becoming Greek Orthodox. More falsehoods. Cer- tainly, Escriva was not perfect; nor were the founders of most great orders, such as St Ignatius Loyola and St Dominic. The most widely circulated charge against Escriva seems to be true: that he practised self-flag- ellation. But so, in one form or another lashings, iron-spiked belts, hair-shirts, beds of thorns — did more than half the saints in the calendar. From what I know of him, Escriva looks to me a fairly typical example of the 'administrative' saint, like St Ambrose, or St Charles Borromeo, or indeed St Theresa of Avila.
I am afraid the smear campaign against this venerable man is simply the old story of ecclesiastical jealousy, the same green- eyed monster which once led supporters of York and Canterbury to brawl, literally, over the primacy, the same devil's work which in the 16th century provoked rows over the Far East missions between Fran- ciscans and Dominicans, and between both and the Jesuits, and so lost Japan to Chris- tendom. The Jesuits were once the praeto- rian guard of the Pope: 36,000 strong, devoted, self-assured, sound in faith and scholarship, the true elite of the Church. There are, happily, still thousands of fine Jesuits. But this noble Society has lost its way, its numbers have fallen, its morale, in many places, has collapsed, and some of its members have become more at home con- sorting with Marxists and atheists than doing God's work. Not surprisingly, Opus Dei, with its 75,000 members, clerical and lay, and its superb cohesion and self-disci- pline, not least with its absolute commit- ment to the traditional doctrines of the
Church and its magisterium, has taken the
place of the Jesuits as the pillar of the papacy. A few Jesuits are mightily envious.
Hence the intensity of the campaign against Escriva's cause. It is mean-minded, squalid, mendacious and has more than a whiff of sulphur about it. For that reason alone it will not succeed.
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